Pixel2Catch: Multi-Agent Sim-to-Real Transfer for Agile Manipulation with a Single RGB Camera

To catch a thrown object, a robot must be able to perceive the object's motion and generate control actions in a timely manner. Rather than explicitly estimating the object's 3D position, this work focuses on a novel approach that recognizes object motion using pixel-level visual information extracted from a single RGB image. Such visual cues capture changes in the object's position and scale, allowing the policy to reason about the object's motion. Furthermore, to achieve stable learning in a high-DoF system composed of a robot arm equipped with a multi-fingered hand, we design a heterogeneous multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that defines the arm and hand as independent agents with distinct roles. Each agent is trained cooperatively using role-specific observations and rewards, and the learned policies are successfully transferred from simulation to the real world.

Modality Collapse as Mismatched Decoding: Information-Theoretic Limits of Multimodal LLMs

Multimodal LLMs can process speech and images, but they cannot hear a speaker's voice or see an object's texture. We show this is not a failure of encoding: speaker identity, emotion, and visual attributes survive through every LLM layer (3--55$\times$ above chance in linear probes), yet removing 64--71% of modality-specific variance improves decoder loss. The decoder has no learned use for these directions; their presence is noise. We formalize this as a mismatched decoder problem: a decoder trained on text can only extract information along text-aligned directions. Accessible information is bounded by the Generalized Mutual Information (GMI), with degradation scaling with distributional distance and decoder sensitivity. The bound is a property of the decoder's scoring rule, not of any particular architecture; it applies whether non-text inputs arrive through a learned projection, a discrete codebook, or no explicit adapter at all. We validate this across five models spanning speech and vision. A controlled experiment (two Prismatic VLMs differing only in encoder text-alignment) confirms the bottleneck is the decoder's scoring rule, not the encoder or projection. A LoRA intervention demonstrates the fix: training with an emotion objective improves emotion accessibility ($+$7.5%) without affecting other attributes, confirming that the training objective determines what becomes accessible.

MoDora: Tree-Based Semi-Structured Document Analysis System

Semi-structured documents integrate diverse interleaved data elements (e.g., tables, charts, hierarchical paragraphs) arranged in various and often irregular layouts. These documents are widely observed across domains and account for a large portion of real-world data. However, existing methods struggle to support natural language question answering over these documents due to three main technical challenges: (1) The elements extracted by techniques like OCR are often fragmented and stripped of their original semantic context, making them inadequate for analysis. (2) Existing approaches lack effective representations to capture hierarchical structures within documents (e.g., associating tables with nested chapter titles) and to preserve layout-specific distinctions (e.g., differentiating sidebars from main content). (3) Answering questions often requires retrieving and aligning relevant information scattered across multiple regions or pages, such as linking a descriptive paragraph to table cells located elsewhere in the document. To address these issues, we propose MoDora, an LLM-powered system for semi-structured document analysis. First, we adopt a local-alignment aggregation strategy to convert OCR-parsed elements into layout-aware components, and conduct type-specific information extraction for components with hierarchical titles or non-text elements. Second, we design the Component-Correlation Tree (CCTree) to hierarchically organize components, explicitly modeling inter-component relations and layout distinctions through a bottom-up cascade summarization process. Finally, we propose a question-type-aware retrieval strategy that supports (1) layout-based grid partitioning for location-based retrieval and (2) LLM-guided pruning for semantic-based retrieval. Experiments show MoDora outperforms baselines by 5.97%-61.07% in accuracy. The code is at https://github.com/weAIDB/MoDora.

Velocity and stroke rate reconstruction of canoe sprint team boats based on panned and zoomed video recordings

Pacing strategies, defined by velocity and stroke rate profiles, are essential for peak performance in canoe sprint. While GPS is the gold standard for analysis, its limited availability necessitates automated video-based solutions. This paper presents an extended framework for reconstructing performance metrics from panned and zoomed video recordings across all sprint disciplines (K1-K4, C1-C2) and distances (200m-500m). Our method utilizes YOLOv8 for buoy and athlete detection, leveraging the known buoy grid to estimate homographies. We generalized the estimation of the boat position by means of learning a boat-specific athlete offset using a U-net based boat tip calibration. Further, we implement a robust tracking scheme using optical flow to adapt to multi-athlete boat types. Finally, we introduce methods to extract stroke rate information from either pose estimations or the athlete bounding boxes themselves. Evaluation against GPS data from elite competitions yields a velocity RRMSE of 0.020 +- 0.011 (rho = 0.956) and a stroke rate RRMSE of 0.022 +- 0.024 (rho = 0.932). The methods provide coaches with highly accurate, automated feedback without requiring on-boat sensors or manual annotation.

Scattering Transform for Auditory Attention Decoding

The use of hearing aids will increase in the coming years due to demographic change. One open problem that remains to be solved by a new generation of hearing aids is the cocktail party problem. A possible solution is electroencephalography-based auditory attention decoding. This has been the subject of several studies in recent years, which have in common that they use the same preprocessing methods in most cases. In this work, in order to achieve an advantage, the use of a scattering transform is proposed as an alternative to these preprocessing methods. The two-layer scattering transform is compared with a regular filterbank, the synchrosqueezing short-time Fourier transform and the common preprocessing. To demonstrate the performance, the known and the proposed preprocessing methods are compared for different classification tasks on two widely used datasets, provided by the KU Leuven (KUL) and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). Both established and new neural-network-based models, CNNs, LSTMs, and recent Transformer/graph-based models are used for classification. Various evaluation strategies were compared, with a focus on the task of classifying speakers who are unknown from the training. We show that the two-layer scattering transform can significantly improve the performance for subject-related conditions, especially on the KUL dataset. However, on the DTU dataset, this only applies to some of the models, or when larger amounts of training data are provided, as in 10-fold cross-validation. This suggests that the scattering transform is capable of extracting additional relevant information.

Doubly Adaptive Channel and Spatial Attention for Semantic Image Communication by IoT Devices

Internet of Things (IoT) networks face significant challenges such as limited communication bandwidth, constrained computational and energy resources, and highly dynamic wireless channel conditions. Utilization of deep neural networks (DNNs) combined with semantic communication has emerged as a promising paradigm to address these limitations. Deep joint source-channel coding (DJSCC) has recently been proposed to enable semantic communication of images. Building upon the original DJSCC formulation, low-complexity attention-style architectures has been added to the DNNs for further performance enhancement. As a main hurdle, training these DNNs separately for various signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) will amount to excessive storage or communication overhead, which can not be maintained by small IoT devices. SNR Adaptive DJSCC (ADJSCC), has been proposed to train the DNNs once but feed the current SNR as part of the data to the channel-wise attention mechanism. We improve upon ADJSCC by a simultaneous utilization of doubly adaptive channel-wise and spatial attention modules at both transmitter and receiver. These modules dynamically adjust to varying channel conditions and spatial feature importance, enabling robust and efficient feature extraction and semantic information recovery. Simulation results corroborate that our proposed doubly adaptive DJSCC (DA-DJSCC) significantly improves upon ADJSCC in several performance criteria, while incurring a mild increase in complexity. These facts render DA-DJSCC a desirable choice for semantic communication in performance demanding but low-complexity IoT networks.

Quality-Aware Robust Multi-View Clustering for Heterogeneous Observation Noise

Deep multi-view clustering has achieved remarkable progress but remains vulnerable to complex noise in real-world applications. Existing noisy robust methods predominantly rely on a simplified binary assumption, treating data as either perfectly clean or completely corrupted. This overlooks the prevalent existence of heterogeneous observation noise, where contamination intensity varies continuously across data. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel framework termed Quality-Aware Robust Multi-View Clustering (QARMVC). Specifically, QARMVC employs an information bottleneck mechanism to extract intrinsic semantics for view reconstruction. Leveraging the insight that noise disrupts semantic integrity and impedes reconstruction, we utilize the resulting reconstruction discrepancy to precisely quantify fine-grained contamination intensity and derive instance-level quality scores. These scores are integrated into a hierarchical learning strategy: at the feature level, a quality-weighted contrastive objective is designed to adaptively suppress the propagation of noise; at the fusion level, a high-quality global consensus is constructed via quality-weighted aggregation, which is subsequently utilized to align and rectify local views via mutual information maximization. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that QARMVC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, particularly in scenarios with heterogeneous noise intensities.

UniScale: Unified Scale-Aware 3D Reconstruction for Multi-View Understanding via Prior Injection for Robotic Perception

We present UniScale, a unified, scale-aware multi-view 3D reconstruction framework for robotic applications that flexibly integrates geometric priors through a modular, semantically informed design. In vision-based robotic navigation, the accurate extraction of environmental structure from raw image sequences is critical for downstream tasks. UniScale addresses this challenge with a single feed-forward network that jointly estimates camera intrinsics and extrinsics, scale-invariant depth and point maps, and the metric scale of a scene from multi-view images, while optionally incorporating auxiliary geometric priors when available. By combining global contextual reasoning with camera-aware feature representations, UniScale is able to recover the metric-scale of the scene. In robotic settings where camera intrinsics are known, they can be easily incorporated to improve performance, with additional gains obtained when camera poses are also available. This co-design enables robust, metric-aware 3D reconstruction within a single unified model. Importantly, UniScale does not require training from scratch, and leverages world priors exhibited in pre-existing models without geometric encoding strategies, making it particularly suitable for resource-constrained robotic teams. We evaluate UniScale on multiple benchmarks, demonstrating strong generalization and consistent performance across diverse environments. We will release our implementation upon acceptance.

DocDjinn: Controllable Synthetic Document Generation with VLMs and Handwriting Diffusion

Effective document intelligence models rely on large amounts of annotated training data. However, procuring sufficient and high-quality data poses significant challenges due to the labor-intensive and costly nature of data acquisition. Additionally, leveraging language models to annotate real documents raises concerns about data privacy. Synthetic document generation has emerged as a promising, privacy-preserving alternative. We propose DocDjinn, a novel framework for controllable synthetic document generation using Vision-Language Models (VLMs) that produces annotated documents from unlabeled seed samples. Our approach generates visually plausible and semantically consistent synthetic documents that follow the distribution of an existing source dataset through clustering-based seed selection with parametrized sampling. By enriching documents with realistic diffusion-based handwriting and contextual visual elements via semantic-visual decoupling, we generate diverse, high-quality annotated synthetic documents. We evaluate across eleven benchmarks spanning key information extraction, question answering, document classification, and document layout analysis. To our knowledge, this is the first work demonstrating that VLMs can generate faithful annotated document datasets at scale from unlabeled seeds that can effectively enrich or approximate real, manually annotated data for diverse document understanding tasks. We show that with only 100 real training samples, our framework achieves on average $87\%$ of the performance of the full real-world dataset. We publicly release our code and 140k+ synthetic document samples.

An automatic counting algorithm for the quantification and uncertainty analysis of the number of microglial cells trainable in small and heterogeneous datasets

Counting immunopositive cells on biological tissues generally requires either manual annotation or (when available) automatic rough systems, for scanning signal surface and intensity in whole slide imaging. In this work, we tackle the problem of counting microglial cells in lumbar spinal cord cross-sections of rats by omitting cell detection and focusing only on the counting task. Manual cell counting is, however, a time-consuming task and additionally entails extensive personnel training. The classic automatic color-based methods roughly inform about the total labeled area and intensity (protein quantification) but do not specifically provide information on cell number. Since the images to be analyzed have a high resolution but a huge amount of pixels contain just noise or artifacts, we first perform a pre-processing generating several filtered images {(providing a tailored, efficient feature extraction)}. Then, we design an automatic kernel counter that is a non-parametric and non-linear method. The proposed scheme can be easily trained in small datasets since, in its basic version, it relies only on one hyper-parameter. However, being non-parametric and non-linear, the proposed algorithm is flexible enough to express all the information contained in rich and heterogeneous datasets as well (providing the maximum overfit if required). Furthermore, the proposed kernel counter also provides uncertainty estimation of the given prediction, and can directly tackle the case of receiving several expert opinions over the same image. Different numerical experiments with artificial and real datasets show very promising results. Related Matlab code is also provided.