General Scene Adaptation for Vision-and-Language Navigation

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) tasks mainly evaluate agents based on one-time execution of individual instructions across multiple environments, aiming to develop agents capable of functioning in any environment in a zero-shot manner. However, real-world navigation robots often operate in persistent environments with relatively consistent physical layouts, visual observations, and language styles from instructors. Such a gap in the task setting presents an opportunity to improve VLN agents by incorporating continuous adaptation to specific environments. To better reflect these real-world conditions, we introduce GSA-VLN, a novel task requiring agents to execute navigation instructions within a specific scene and simultaneously adapt to it for improved performance over time. To evaluate the proposed task, one has to address two challenges in existing VLN datasets: the lack of OOD data, and the limited number and style diversity of instructions for each scene. Therefore, we propose a new dataset, GSA-R2R, which significantly expands the diversity and quantity of environments and instructions for the R2R dataset to evaluate agent adaptability in both ID and OOD contexts. Furthermore, we design a three-stage instruction orchestration pipeline that leverages LLMs to refine speaker-generated instructions and apply role-playing techniques to rephrase instructions into different speaking styles. This is motivated by the observation that each individual user often has consistent signatures or preferences in their instructions. We conducted extensive experiments on GSA-R2R to thoroughly evaluate our dataset and benchmark various methods. Based on our findings, we propose a novel method, GR-DUET, which incorporates memory-based navigation graphs with an environment-specific training strategy, achieving state-of-the-art results on all GSA-R2R splits.

FlashVTG: Feature Layering and Adaptive Score Handling Network for Video Temporal Grounding

Text-guided Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) aims to localize relevant segments in untrimmed videos based on textual descriptions, encompassing two subtasks: Moment Retrieval (MR) and Highlight Detection (HD). Although previous typical methods have achieved commendable results, it is still challenging to retrieve short video moments. This is primarily due to the reliance on sparse and limited decoder queries, which significantly constrain the accuracy of predictions. Furthermore, suboptimal outcomes often arise because previous methods rank predictions based on isolated predictions, neglecting the broader video context. To tackle these issues, we introduce FlashVTG, a framework featuring a Temporal Feature Layering (TFL) module and an Adaptive Score Refinement (ASR) module. The TFL module replaces the traditional decoder structure to capture nuanced video content variations across multiple temporal scales, while the ASR module improves prediction ranking by integrating context from adjacent moments and multi-temporal-scale features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlashVTG achieves state-of-the-art performance on four widely adopted datasets in both MR and HD. Specifically, on the QVHighlights dataset, it boosts mAP by 5.8% for MR and 3.3% for HD. For short-moment retrieval, FlashVTG increases mAP to 125% of previous SOTA performance. All these improvements are made without adding training burdens, underscoring its effectiveness. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zhuo-Cao/FlashVTG.

SuperGSeg: Open-Vocabulary 3D Segmentation with Structured Super-Gaussians

3D Gaussian Splatting has recently gained traction for its efficient training and real-time rendering. While the vanilla Gaussian Splatting representation is mainly designed for view synthesis, more recent works investigated how to extend it with scene understanding and language features. However, existing methods lack a detailed comprehension of scenes, limiting their ability to segment and interpret complex structures. To this end, We introduce SuperGSeg, a novel approach that fosters cohesive, context-aware scene representation by disentangling segmentation and language field distillation. SuperGSeg first employs neural Gaussians to learn instance and hierarchical segmentation features from multi-view images with the aid of off-the-shelf 2D masks. These features are then leveraged to create a sparse set of what we call Super-Gaussians. Super-Gaussians facilitate the distillation of 2D language features into 3D space. Through Super-Gaussians, our method enables high-dimensional language feature rendering without extreme increases in GPU memory. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SuperGSeg outperforms prior works on both open-vocabulary object localization and semantic segmentation tasks.

Unsupervised Training of a Dynamic Context-Aware Deep Denoising Framework for Low-Dose Fluoroscopic Imaging

Fluoroscopy is critical for real-time X-ray visualization in medical imaging. However, low-dose images are compromised by noise, potentially affecting diagnostic accuracy. Noise reduction is crucial for maintaining image quality, especially given such challenges as motion artifacts and the limited availability of clean data in medical imaging. To address these issues, we propose an unsupervised training framework for dynamic context-aware denoising of fluoroscopy image sequences. First, we train the multi-scale recurrent attention U-Net (MSR2AU-Net) without requiring clean data to address the initial noise. Second, we incorporate a knowledge distillation-based uncorrelated noise suppression module and a recursive filtering-based correlated noise suppression module enhanced with motion compensation to further improve motion compensation and achieve superior denoising performance. Finally, we introduce a novel approach by combining these modules with a pixel-wise dynamic object motion cross-fusion matrix, designed to adapt to motion, and an edge-preserving loss for precise detail retention. To validate the proposed method, we conducted extensive numerical experiments on medical image datasets, including 3500 fluoroscopy images from dynamic phantoms (2,400 images for training, 1,100 for testing) and 350 clinical images from a spinal surgery patient. Moreover, we demonstrated the robustness of our approach across different imaging modalities by testing it on the publicly available 2016 Low Dose CT Grand Challenge dataset, using 4,800 images for training and 1,136 for testing. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised algorithms in both visual quality and quantitative evaluation while achieving comparable performance to well-established supervised learning methods across low-dose fluoroscopy and CT imaging.

Tokens on Demand: Token Condensation as Training-free Test-time Adaptation

In this work, we introduce Token Condensation as Adaptation (TCA), a training-free approach designed to mitigate distribution shifts encountered by vision-language models (VLMs) during test-time inference. TCA bridges distribution gaps at the patch level by condensing image tokens that exhibit low attentiveness to the <cls> token. Recognizing the <cls> token may correspond to universal concepts, TCA identifies and tracks the most reliable <cls> tokens that align specifically with target classes from historical data streams. To achieve this, we propose a context token reservoir (CTR), which retains tokens with the lowest uncertainty as ``anchors" to guide the preservation of class-relevant tokens during inference. These anchors, in turn, act as token-level classifiers to correct VLM predictions and improve visual-text alignment. Utilizing anchors sampled from CTR, TCA condenses tokens through two operations: (1) pruning class-irrelevant tokens that consistently rank low across all attention heads to reach cross-head consensus on their irrelevance, and (2) merging the remaining class-ambiguous tokens into representative centers using coreset selection, maintaining linear computational complexity. As the first method to explore token efficiency in test-time adaptation, TCA consistently demonstrates superior performance across cross-dataset and out-of-distribution adaptation tasks, reducing GFLOPs by 12.2% to 48.9% while achieving accuracy improvements up to 21.4% against the strongest baseline without introducing additional parameters.

Learning Partial Differential Equations with Deep Parallel Neural Operators

In recent years, Solving partial differential equations has shifted the focus of traditional neural network studies from finite-dimensional Euclidean spaces to generalized functional spaces in research. A novel methodology is to learn an operator as a means of approximating the mapping between outputs. Currently, researchers have proposed a variety of operator architectures. Nevertheless, the majority of these architectures adopt an iterative update architecture, whereby a single operator is learned from the same function space. In practical physical science problems, the numerical solutions of partial differential equations are complex, and a serial single operator is unable to accurately approximate the intricate mapping between input and output. So, We propose a deep parallel operator model (DPNO) for efficiently and accurately solving partial differential equations. DPNO employs convolutional neural networks to extract local features and map data into distinct latent spaces. Designing a parallel block of double Fourier neural operators to solve the iterative error problem. DPNO approximates complex mappings between inputs and outputs by learning multiple operators in different potential spaces in parallel blocks. DPNO achieved the best performance on five of them, with an average improvement of 10.5\%, and ranked second on one dataset.

TokenBinder: Text-Video Retrieval with One-to-Many Alignment Paradigm

Text-Video Retrieval (TVR) methods typically match query-candidate pairs by aligning text and video features in coarse-grained, fine-grained, or combined (coarse-to-fine) manners. However, these frameworks predominantly employ a one(query)-to-one(candidate) alignment paradigm, which struggles to discern nuanced differences among candidates, leading to frequent mismatches. Inspired by Comparative Judgement in human cognitive science, where decisions are made by directly comparing items rather than evaluating them independently, we propose TokenBinder. This innovative two-stage TVR framework introduces a novel one-to-many coarse-to-fine alignment paradigm, imitating the human cognitive process of identifying specific items within a large collection. Our method employs a Focused-view Fusion Network with a sophisticated cross-attention mechanism, dynamically aligning and comparing features across multiple videos to capture finer nuances and contextual variations. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets confirm that TokenBinder substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate its robustness and the effectiveness of its fine-grained alignment in bridging intra- and inter-modality information gaps in TVR tasks.

EMIT- Event-Based Masked Auto Encoding for Irregular Time Series

Irregular time series, where data points are recorded at uneven intervals, are prevalent in healthcare settings, such as emergency wards where vital signs and laboratory results are captured at varying times. This variability, which reflects critical fluctuations in patient health, is essential for informed clinical decision-making. Existing self-supervised learning research on irregular time series often relies on generic pretext tasks like forecasting, which may not fully utilise the signal provided by irregular time series. There is a significant need for specialised pretext tasks designed for the characteristics of irregular time series to enhance model performance and robustness, especially in scenarios with limited data availability. This paper proposes a novel pretraining framework, EMIT, an event-based masking for irregular time series. EMIT focuses on masking-based reconstruction in the latent space, selecting masking points based on the rate of change in the data. This method preserves the natural variability and timing of measurements while enhancing the model's ability to process irregular intervals without losing essential information. Extensive experiments on the MIMIC-III and PhysioNet Challenge datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our event-based masking strategy. The code has been released at https://github.com/hrishi-ds/EMIT .

General-Kindred Physics-Informed Neural Network to the Solutions of Singularly Perturbed Differential Equations

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have become a promising research direction in the field of solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). Dealing with singular perturbation problems continues to be a difficult challenge in the field of PINN. The solution of singular perturbation problems often exhibits sharp boundary layers and steep gradients, and traditional PINN cannot achieve approximation of boundary layers. In this manuscript, we propose the General-Kindred Physics-Informed Neural Network (GKPINN) for solving Singular Perturbation Differential Equations (SPDEs). This approach utilizes asymptotic analysis to acquire prior knowledge of the boundary layer from the equation and establishes a novel network to assist PINN in approximating the boundary layer. It is compared with traditional PINN by solving examples of one-dimensional, two-dimensional, and time-varying SPDE equations. The research findings underscore the exceptional performance of our novel approach, GKPINN, which delivers a remarkable enhancement in reducing the $L_2$ error by two to four orders of magnitude compared to the established PINN methodology. This significant improvement is accompanied by a substantial acceleration in convergence rates, without compromising the high precision that is critical for our applications. Furthermore, GKPINN still performs well in extreme cases with perturbation parameters of ${1\times10}^{-38}$, demonstrating its excellent generalization ability.

EOL: Transductive Few-Shot Open-Set Recognition by Enhancing Outlier Logits

In Few-Shot Learning (FSL), models are trained to recognise unseen objects from a query set, given a few labelled examples from a support set. In standard FSL, models are evaluated on query instances sampled from the same class distribution of the support set. In this work, we explore the more nuanced and practical challenge of Open-Set Few-Shot Recognition (OSFSL). Unlike standard FSL, OSFSL incorporates unknown classes into the query set, thereby requiring the model not only to classify known classes but also to identify outliers. Building on the groundwork laid by previous studies, we define a novel transductive inference technique that leverages the InfoMax principle to exploit the unlabelled query set. We called our approach the Enhanced Outlier Logit (EOL) method. EOL refines class prototype representations through model calibration, effectively balancing the inlier-outlier ratio. This calibration enhances pseudo-label accuracy for the query set and improves the optimisation objective within the transductive inference process. We provide a comprehensive empirical evaluation demonstrating that EOL consistently surpasses traditional methods, recording performance improvements ranging from approximately $+1.3%$ to $+6.3%$ across a variety of classification and outlier detection metrics and benchmarks, even in the presence of inlier-outlier imbalance.