Decoupled Hierarchical Distillation for Multimodal Emotion Recognition

Human multimodal emotion recognition (MER) seeks to infer human emotions by integrating information from language, visual, and acoustic modalities. Although existing MER approaches have achieved promising results, they still struggle with inherent multimodal heterogeneities and varying contributions from different modalities. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework, Decoupled Hierarchical Multimodal Distillation (DHMD). DHMD decouples each modality's features into modality-irrelevant (homogeneous) and modality-exclusive (heterogeneous) components using a self-regression mechanism. The framework employs a two-stage knowledge distillation (KD) strategy: (1) coarse-grained KD via a Graph Distillation Unit (GD-Unit) in each decoupled feature space, where a dynamic graph facilitates adaptive distillation among modalities, and (2) fine-grained KD through a cross-modal dictionary matching mechanism, which aligns semantic granularities across modalities to produce more discriminative MER representations. This hierarchical distillation approach enables flexible knowledge transfer and effectively improves cross-modal feature alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that DHMD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art MER methods, achieving 1.3\%/2.4\% (ACC$_7$), 1.3\%/1.9\% (ACC$_2$) and 1.9\%/1.8\% (F1) relative improvement on CMU-MOSI/CMU-MOSEI dataset, respectively. Meanwhile, visualization results reveal that both the graph edges and dictionary activations in DHMD exhibit meaningful distribution patterns across modality-irrelevant/-exclusive feature spaces.

Modular Safety Guardrails Are Necessary for Foundation-Model-Enabled Robots in the Real World

The integration of foundation models (FMs) into robotics has accelerated real-world deployment, while introducing new safety challenges arising from open-ended semantic reasoning and embodied physical action. These challenges require safety notions beyond physical constraint satisfaction. In this paper, we characterize FM-enabled robot safety along three dimensions: action safety (physical feasibility and constraint compliance), decision safety (semantic and contextual appropriateness), and human-centered safety (conformance to human intent, norms, and expectations). We argue that existing approaches, including static verification, monolithic controllers, and end-to-end learned policies, are insufficient in settings where tasks, environments, and human expectations are open-ended, long-tailed, and subject to adaptation over time. To address this gap, we propose modular safety guardrails, consisting of monitoring (evaluation) and intervention layers, as an architectural foundation for comprehensive safety across the autonomy stack. Beyond modularity, we highlight possible cross-layer co-design opportunities through representation alignment and conservatism allocation to enable faster, less conservative, and more effective safety enforcement. We call on the community to explore richer guardrail modules and principled co-design strategies to advance safe real-world physical AI deployment.

BlockRR: A Unified Framework of RR-type Algorithms for Label Differential Privacy

In this paper, we introduce BlockRR, a novel and unified randomized-response mechanism for label differential privacy. This framework generalizes existed RR-type mechanisms as special cases under specific parameter settings, which eliminates the need for separate, case-by-case analysis. Theoretically, we prove that BlockRR satisfies $ε$-label DP. We also design a partition method for BlockRR based on a weight matrix derived from label prior information; the parallel composition principle ensures that the composition of two such mechanisms remains $ε$-label DP. Empirically, we evaluate BlockRR on two variants of CIFAR-10 with varying degrees of class imbalance. Results show that in the high-privacy and moderate-privacy regimes ($ε\leq 3.0$), our propsed method gets a better balance between test accuaracy and the average of per-class accuracy. In the low-privacy regime ($ε\geq 4.0$), all methods reduce BlockRR to standard RR without additional performance loss.

ForeDiffusion: Foresight-Conditioned Diffusion Policy via Future View Construction for Robot Manipulation

Diffusion strategies have advanced visual motor control by progressively denoising high-dimensional action sequences, providing a promising method for robot manipulation. However, as task complexity increases, the success rate of existing baseline models decreases considerably. Analysis indicates that current diffusion strategies are confronted with two limitations. First, these strategies only rely on short-term observations as conditions. Second, the training objective remains limited to a single denoising loss, which leads to error accumulation and causes grasping deviations. To address these limitations, this paper proposes Foresight-Conditioned Diffusion (ForeDiffusion), by injecting the predicted future view representation into the diffusion process. As a result, the policy is guided to be forward-looking, enabling it to correct trajectory deviations. Following this design, ForeDiffusion employs a dual loss mechanism, combining the traditional denoising loss and the consistency loss of future observations, to achieve the unified optimization. Extensive evaluation on the Adroit suite and the MetaWorld benchmark demonstrates that ForeDiffusion achieves an average success rate of 80% for the overall task, significantly outperforming the existing mainstream diffusion methods by 23% in complex tasks, while maintaining more stable performance across the entire tasks.

Can a Unimodal Language Agent Provide Preferences to Tune a Multimodal Vision-Language Model?

To explore a more scalable path for adding multimodal capabilities to existing LLMs, this paper addresses a fundamental question: Can a unimodal LLM, relying solely on text, reason about its own informational needs and provide effective feedback to optimize a multimodal model? To answer this, we propose a method that enables a language agent to give feedback to a vision-language model (VLM) to adapt text generation to the agent's preferences. Our results from different experiments affirm this hypothesis, showing that LLM preference feedback significantly enhances VLM descriptions. Using our proposed method, we find that the VLM can generate multimodal scene descriptions to help the LLM better understand multimodal context, leading to improvements of maximum 13% in absolute accuracy compared to the baseline multimodal approach. Furthermore, a human study validated our AI-driven feedback, showing a 64.6% preference alignment rate between the LLM's choices and human judgments. Extensive experiments provide insights on how and why the method works and its limitations.

A Comparative Study of Traditional Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Large Language Models for Mental Health Forecasting using Smartphone Sensing Data

Smartphone sensing offers an unobtrusive and scalable way to track daily behaviors linked to mental health, capturing changes in sleep, mobility, and phone use that often precede symptoms of stress, anxiety, or depression. While most prior studies focus on detection that responds to existing conditions, forecasting mental health enables proactive support through Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive benchmarking study comparing traditional machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and large language model (LLM) approaches for mental health forecasting using the College Experience Sensing (CES) dataset, the most extensive longitudinal dataset of college student mental health to date. We systematically evaluate models across temporal windows, feature granularities, personalization strategies, and class imbalance handling. Our results show that DL models, particularly Transformer (Macro-F1 = 0.58), achieve the best overall performance, while LLMs show strength in contextual reasoning but weaker temporal modeling. Personalization substantially improves forecasts of severe mental health states. By revealing how different modeling approaches interpret phone sensing behavioral data over time, this work lays the groundwork for next-generation, adaptive, and human-centered mental health technologies that can advance both research and real-world well-being.

From Muscle to Text with MyoText: sEMG to Text via Finger Classification and Transformer-Based Decoding

Surface electromyography (sEMG) provides a direct neural interface for decoding muscle activity and offers a promising foundation for keyboard-free text input in wearable and mixed-reality systems. Previous sEMG-to-text studies mainly focused on recognizing letters directly from sEMG signals, forming an important first step toward translating muscle activity into text. Building on this foundation, we present MyoText, a hierarchical framework that decodes sEMG signals to text through physiologically grounded intermediate stages. MyoText first classifies finger activations from multichannel sEMG using a CNN-BiLSTM-Attention model, applies ergonomic typing priors to infer letters, and reconstructs full sentences with a fine-tuned T5 transformer. This modular design mirrors the natural hierarchy of typing, linking muscle intent to language output and reducing the search space for decoding. Evaluated on 30 users from the emg2qwerty dataset, MyoText outperforms baselines by achieving 85.4% finger-classification accuracy, 5.4% character error rate (CER), and 6.5% word error rate (WER). Beyond accuracy gains, this methodology establishes a principled pathway from neuromuscular signals to text, providing a blueprint for virtual and augmented-reality typing interfaces that operate entirely without physical keyboards. By integrating ergonomic structure with transformer-based linguistic reasoning, MyoText advances the feasibility of seamless, wearable neural input for future ubiquitous computing environments.

HEEGNet: Hyperbolic Embeddings for EEG

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces facilitate direct communication with a computer, enabling promising applications in human-computer interactions. However, their utility is currently limited because EEG decoding often suffers from poor generalization due to distribution shifts across domains (e.g., subjects). Learning robust representations that capture underlying task-relevant information would mitigate these shifts and improve generalization. One promising approach is to exploit the underlying hierarchical structure in EEG, as recent studies suggest that hierarchical cognitive processes, such as visual processing, can be encoded in EEG. While many decoding methods still rely on Euclidean embeddings, recent work has begun exploring hyperbolic geometry for EEG. Hyperbolic spaces, regarded as the continuous analogue of tree structures, provide a natural geometry for representing hierarchical data. In this study, we first empirically demonstrate that EEG data exhibit hyperbolicity and show that hyperbolic embeddings improve generalization. Motivated by these findings, we propose HEEGNet, a hybrid hyperbolic network architecture to capture the hierarchical structure in EEG and learn domain-invariant hyperbolic embeddings. To this end, HEEGNet combines both Euclidean and hyperbolic encoders and employs a novel coarse-to-fine domain adaptation strategy. Extensive experiments on multiple public EEG datasets, covering visual evoked potentials, emotion recognition, and intracranial EEG, demonstrate that HEEGNet achieves state-of-the-art performance.

EEG-DLite: Dataset Distillation for Efficient Large EEG Model Training

Large-scale EEG foundation models have shown strong generalization across a range of downstream tasks, but their training remains resource-intensive due to the volume and variable quality of EEG data. In this work, we introduce EEG-DLite, a data distillation framework that enables more efficient pre-training by selectively removing noisy and redundant samples from large EEG datasets. EEG-DLite begins by encoding EEG segments into compact latent representations using a self-supervised autoencoder, allowing sample selection to be performed efficiently and with reduced sensitivity to noise. Based on these representations, EEG-DLite filters out outliers and minimizes redundancy, resulting in a smaller yet informative subset that retains the diversity essential for effective foundation model training. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that training on only 5 percent of a 2,500-hour dataset curated with EEG-DLite yields performance comparable to, and in some cases better than, training on the full dataset across multiple downstream tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of pre-training data distillation in the context of EEG foundation models. EEG-DLite provides a scalable and practical path toward more effective and efficient physiological foundation modeling. The code is available at https://github.com/t170815518/EEG-DLite.

GFT: Graph Feature Tuning for Efficient Point Cloud Analysis

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) significantly reduces computational and memory costs by updating only a small subset of the model's parameters, enabling faster adaptation to new tasks with minimal loss in performance. Previous studies have introduced PEFTs tailored for point cloud data, as general approaches are suboptimal. To further reduce the number of trainable parameters, we propose a point-cloud-specific PEFT, termed Graph Features Tuning (GFT), which learns a dynamic graph from initial tokenized inputs of the transformer using a lightweight graph convolution network and passes these graph features to deeper layers via skip connections and efficient cross-attention modules. Extensive experiments on object classification and segmentation tasks show that GFT operates in the same domain, rivalling existing methods, while reducing the trainable parameters. Code is at https://github.com/manishdhakal/GFT.