Dynamic Quantization Error Propagation in Encoder-Decoder ASR Quantization

Running Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models on memory-constrained edge devices requires efficient compression. While layer-wise post-training quantization is effective, it suffers from error accumulation, especially in encoder-decoder architectures. Existing solutions like Quantization Error Propagation (QEP) are suboptimal for ASR due to the model's heterogeneity, processing acoustic features in the encoder while generating text in the decoder. To address this, we propose Fine-grained Alpha for Dynamic Quantization Error Propagation (FADE), which adaptively controls the trade-off between cross-layer error correction and local quantization. Experiments show that FADE significantly improves stability by reducing performance variance across runs, while simultaneously surpassing baselines in mean WER.

Sparse3DPR: Training-Free 3D Hierarchical Scene Parsing and Task-Adaptive Subgraph Reasoning from Sparse RGB Views

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been explored widely for 3D scene understanding. Among them, training-free approaches are gaining attention for their flexibility and generalization over training-based methods. However, they typically struggle with accuracy and efficiency in practical deployment. To address the problems, we propose Sparse3DPR, a novel training-free framework for open-ended scene understanding, which leverages the reasoning capabilities of pre-trained LLMs and requires only sparse-view RGB inputs. Specifically, we introduce a hierarchical plane-enhanced scene graph that supports open vocabulary and adopts dominant planar structures as spatial anchors, which enables clearer reasoning chains and more reliable high-level inferences. Furthermore, we design a task-adaptive subgraph extraction method to filter query-irrelevant information dynamically, reducing contextual noise and improving 3D scene reasoning efficiency and accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of Sparse3DPR, which achieves a 28.7% EM@1 improvement and a 78.2% speedup compared with ConceptGraphs on the Space3D-Bench. Moreover, Sparse3DPR obtains comparable performance to training-based methods on ScanQA, with additional real-world experiments confirming its robustness and generalization capability.

An Entity Linking Agent for Question Answering

Some Question Answering (QA) systems rely on knowledge bases (KBs) to provide accurate answers. Entity Linking (EL) plays a critical role in linking natural language mentions to KB entries. However, most existing EL methods are designed for long contexts and do not perform well on short, ambiguous user questions in QA tasks. We propose an entity linking agent for QA, based on a Large Language Model that simulates human cognitive workflows. The agent actively identifies entity mentions, retrieves candidate entities, and makes decision. To verify the effectiveness of our agent, we conduct two experiments: tool-based entity linking and QA task evaluation. The results confirm the robustness and effectiveness of our agent.

TSDASeg: A Two-Stage Model with Direct Alignment for Interactive Point Cloud Segmentation

The rapid advancement of 3D vision-language models (VLMs) has spurred significant interest in interactive point cloud processing tasks, particularly for real-world applications. However, existing methods often underperform in point-level tasks, such as segmentation, due to missing direct 3D-text alignment, limiting their ability to link local 3D features with textual context. To solve this problem, we propose TSDASeg, a Two-Stage model coupled with a Direct cross-modal Alignment module and memory module for interactive point cloud Segmentation. We introduce the direct cross-modal alignment module to establish explicit alignment between 3D point clouds and textual/2D image data. Within the memory module, we employ multiple dedicated memory banks to separately store text features, visual features, and their cross-modal correspondence mappings. These memory banks are dynamically leveraged through self-attention and cross-attention mechanisms to update scene-specific features based on prior stored data, effectively addressing inconsistencies in interactive segmentation results across diverse scenarios. Experiments conducted on multiple 3D instruction, reference, and semantic segmentation datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

SuperPlace: The Renaissance of Classical Feature Aggregation for Visual Place Recognition in the Era of Foundation Models

Recent visual place recognition (VPR) approaches have leveraged foundation models (FM) and introduced novel aggregation techniques. However, these methods have failed to fully exploit key concepts of FM, such as the effective utilization of extensive training sets, and they have overlooked the potential of classical aggregation methods, such as GeM and NetVLAD. Building on these insights, we revive classical feature aggregation methods and develop more fundamental VPR models, collectively termed SuperPlace. First, we introduce a supervised label alignment method that enables training across various VPR datasets within a unified framework. Second, we propose G$^2$M, a compact feature aggregation method utilizing two GeMs, where one GeM learns the principal components of feature maps along the channel dimension and calibrates the output of the other. Third, we propose the secondary fine-tuning (FT$^2$) strategy for NetVLAD-Linear (NVL). NetVLAD first learns feature vectors in a high-dimensional space and then compresses them into a lower-dimensional space via a single linear layer. Extensive experiments highlight our contributions and demonstrate the superiority of SuperPlace. Specifically, G$^2$M achieves promising results with only one-tenth of the feature dimensions compared to recent methods. Moreover, NVL-FT$^2$ ranks first on the MSLS leaderboard.

EmbodiedPlace: Learning Mixture-of-Features with Embodied Constraints for Visual Place Recognition

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a scene-oriented image retrieval problem in computer vision in which re-ranking based on local features is commonly employed to improve performance. In robotics, VPR is also referred to as Loop Closure Detection, which emphasizes spatial-temporal verification within a sequence. However, designing local features specifically for VPR is impractical, and relying on motion sequences imposes limitations. Inspired by these observations, we propose a novel, simple re-ranking method that refines global features through a Mixture-of-Features (MoF) approach under embodied constraints. First, we analyze the practical feasibility of embodied constraints in VPR and categorize them according to existing datasets, which include GPS tags, sequential timestamps, local feature matching, and self-similarity matrices. We then propose a learning-based MoF weight-computation approach, utilizing a multi-metric loss function. Experiments demonstrate that our method improves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on public datasets with minimal additional computational overhead. For instance, with only 25 KB of additional parameters and a processing time of 10 microseconds per frame, our method achieves a 0.9\% improvement over a DINOv2-based baseline performance on the Pitts-30k test set.

SoftHGNN: Soft Hypergraph Neural Networks for General Visual Recognition

Visual recognition relies on understanding both the semantics of image tokens and the complex interactions among them. Mainstream self-attention methods, while effective at modeling global pair-wise relations, fail to capture high-order associations inherent in real-world scenes and often suffer from redundant computation. Hypergraphs extend conventional graphs by modeling high-order interactions and offer a promising framework for addressing these limitations. However, existing hypergraph neural networks typically rely on static and hard hyperedge assignments, leading to excessive and redundant hyperedges with hard binary vertex memberships that overlook the continuity of visual semantics. To overcome these issues, we present Soft Hypergraph Neural Networks (SoftHGNNs), which extend the methodology of hypergraph computation, to make it truly efficient and versatile in visual recognition tasks. Our framework introduces the concept of soft hyperedges, where each vertex is associated with hyperedges via continuous participation weights rather than hard binary assignments. This dynamic and differentiable association is achieved by using the learnable hyperedge prototype. Through similarity measurements between token features and the prototype, the model generates semantically rich soft hyperedges. SoftHGNN then aggregates messages over soft hyperedges to capture high-order semantics. To further enhance efficiency when scaling up the number of soft hyperedges, we incorporate a sparse hyperedge selection mechanism that activates only the top-k important hyperedges, along with a load-balancing regularizer to ensure balanced hyperedge utilization. Experimental results across three tasks on five datasets demonstrate that SoftHGNN efficiently captures high-order associations in visual scenes, achieving significant performance improvements.

Reinforcing Question Answering Agents with Minimalist Policy Gradient Optimization

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable versatility, due to the lack of factual knowledge, their application to Question Answering (QA) tasks remains hindered by hallucination. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation mitigates these issues by integrating external knowledge, existing approaches rely heavily on in-context learning, whose performance is constrained by the fundamental reasoning capabilities of LLMs. In this paper, we propose Mujica, a Multi-hop Joint Intelligence for Complex Question Answering, comprising a planner that decomposes questions into a directed acyclic graph of subquestions and a worker that resolves questions via retrieval and reasoning. Additionally, we introduce MyGO (Minimalist policy Gradient Optimization), a novel reinforcement learning method that replaces traditional policy gradient updates with Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) by sampling trajectories from an asymptotically optimal policy. MyGO eliminates the need for gradient rescaling and reference models, ensuring stable and efficient training. Empirical results across multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of Mujica-MyGO in enhancing multi-hop QA performance for various LLMs, offering a scalable and resource-efficient solution for complex QA tasks.

FinSage: A Multi-aspect RAG System for Financial Filings Question Answering

Leveraging large language models in real-world settings often entails a need to utilize domain-specific data and tools in order to follow the complex regulations that need to be followed for acceptable use. Within financial sectors, modern enterprises increasingly rely on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems to address complex compliance requirements in financial document workflows. However, existing solutions struggle to account for the inherent heterogeneity of data (e.g., text, tables, diagrams) and evolving nature of regulatory standards used in financial filings, leading to compromised accuracy in critical information extraction. We propose the FinSage framework as a solution, utilizing a multi-aspect RAG framework tailored for regulatory compliance analysis in multi-modal financial documents. FinSage introduces three innovative components: (1) a multi-modal pre-processing pipeline that unifies diverse data formats and generates chunk-level metadata summaries, (2) a multi-path sparse-dense retrieval system augmented with query expansion (HyDE) and metadata-aware semantic search, and (3) a domain-specialized re-ranking module fine-tuned via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to prioritize compliance-critical content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FinSage achieves an impressive recall of 92.51% on 75 expert-curated questions derived from surpasses the best baseline method on the FinanceBench question answering datasets by 24.06% in accuracy. Moreover, FinSage has been successfully deployed as financial question-answering agent in online meetings, where it has already served more than 1,200 people.

DGOcc: Depth-aware Global Query-based Network for Monocular 3D Occupancy Prediction

Monocular 3D occupancy prediction, aiming to predict the occupancy and semantics within interesting regions of 3D scenes from only 2D images, has garnered increasing attention recently for its vital role in 3D scene understanding. Predicting the 3D occupancy of large-scale outdoor scenes from 2D images is ill-posed and resource-intensive. In this paper, we present \textbf{DGOcc}, a \textbf{D}epth-aware \textbf{G}lobal query-based network for monocular 3D \textbf{Occ}upancy prediction. We first explore prior depth maps to extract depth context features that provide explicit geometric information for the occupancy network. Then, in order to fully exploit the depth context features, we propose a Global Query-based (GQ) Module. The cooperation of attention mechanisms and scale-aware operations facilitates the feature interaction between images and 3D voxels. Moreover, a Hierarchical Supervision Strategy (HSS) is designed to avoid upsampling the high-dimension 3D voxel features to full resolution, which mitigates GPU memory utilization and time cost. Extensive experiments on SemanticKITTI and SSCBench-KITTI-360 datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the best performance on monocular semantic occupancy prediction while reducing GPU and time overhead.