Department of Electrical Engineering Indian Institute of T echnology Bombay 21D070002 aakash.gore@iitb.ac.in Abstract--Knowledge distillation has emerged as a powerful technique for model compression, enabling the transfer of knowledge from large teacher networks to compact student models. However, traditional knowledge distillation methods treat all teacher predictions equally, regardless of the teacher's confidence in those predictions. This paper proposes an uncertainty-aware dual-student knowledge distillation framework that leverages teacher prediction uncertainty to selectively guide student learning. We introduce a peer-learning mechanism where two heterogeneous student architectures, specifically ResNet-18 and MobileNetV2, learn collaboratively from both the teacher network and each other . Experimental results on ImageNet-100 demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance compared to baseline knowledge distillation methods, with ResNet-18 achieving 83.84% top-1 accuracy and MobileNetV2 achieving 81.46% top-1 accuracy, representing improvements of 2.04% and 0.92% respectively over traditional single-student distillation approaches. Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success across various computer vision tasks, but their deployment on resource-constrained devices remains challenging due to high computational and memory requirements. This technique has become increasingly important as the demand for deploying sophisticated machine learning models on edge devices, mobile platforms, and embedded systems continues to grow. Traditional knowledge distillation approaches use a weighted combination of hard labels derived from ground truth annotations and soft labels generated by teacher predictions to train student networks.

Figuring out which objects or concepts words refer to is a central language learning challenge for young children. Most models of this process posit that children learn early object labels from co-occurrences of words and their referents that occur when someone around them talks about an object in the immediate physical environment. But how aligned in time are children's visual and linguistic experiences during everyday learning? To date, answers to this question have been limited by the need for labor-intensive manual annotations of vision-language co-occurrences. Here, we evaluate the use of contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) models to automatically characterize vision-language alignment in egocentric videos taken from the infant perspective in home environments. After validating CLIP alignment scores using human alignment judgments, we apply this metric to a large corpus of infant-perspective videos. We show that idealized aligned moments for learning (e.g., "look at the ball" with a ball present in the child's view) are relatively rare in children's everyday experiences compared to modern machine learning datasets, and highlight variability in alignment both within and across children. These findings suggest that infrequent alignment is a constraint for models describing early word learning and offer a new method for investigating children's multimodal environment.

Generative Recommendation (GR), powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), represents a promising new paradigm for industrial recommender systems. However, their practical application is severely hindered by high inference latency, which makes them infeasible for high-throughput, real-time services and limits their overall business impact. While Speculative Decoding (SD) has been proposed to accelerate the autoregressive generation process, existing implementations introduce new bottlenecks: they typically require separate draft models and model-based verifiers, requiring additional training and increasing the latency overhead. In this paper, we address these challenges with NEZHA, a novel architecture that achieves hyperspeed decoding for GR systems without sacrificing recommendation quality. Specifically, NEZHA integrates a nimble autoregressive draft head directly into the primary model, enabling efficient self-drafting. This design, combined with a specialized input prompt structure, preserves the integrity of sequence-to-sequence generation. Furthermore, to tackle the critical problem of hallucination, a major source of performance degradation, we introduce an efficient, model-free verifier based on a hash set. We demonstrate the effectiveness of NEZHA through extensive experiments on public datasets and have successfully deployed the system on Taobao since October 2025, driving the billion-level advertising revenue and serving hundreds of millions of daily active users.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become valuable intellectual property of model owners, due to the substantial resources required for their development. To protect these assets in the deployed environment, recent research has proposed model usage control mechanisms to ensure models cannot be used without proper authorization. These methods typically lock the utility of the model by embedding an access key into its parameters. However, they often assume static deployment, and largely fail to withstand continual post-deployment model updates, such as fine-tuning or task-specific adaptation. In this paper, we propose ADALOC, to endow key-based model usage control with adaptability during model evolution. It strategically selects a subset of weights as an intrinsic access key, which enables all model updates to be confined to this key throughout the evolution lifecycle. ADALOC enables using the access key to restore the keyed model to the latest authorized states without redistributing the entire network (i.e., adaptation), and frees the model owner from full re-keying after each model update (i.e., lock preservation). We establish a formal foundation to underpin ADALOC, providing crucial bounds such as the errors introduced by updates restricted to the access key. Experiments on standard benchmarks, such as CIFAR-100, Caltech-256, and Flowers-102, and modern architectures, including ResNet, DenseNet, and ConvNeXt, demonstrate that ADALOC achieves high accuracy under significant updates while retaining robust protections. Specifically, authorized usages consistently achieve strong task-specific performance, while unauthorized usage accuracy drops to near-random guessing levels (e.g., 1.01% on CIFAR-100), compared to up to 87.01% without ADALOC. This shows that ADALOC can offer a practical solution for adaptive and protected DNN deployment in evolving real-world scenarios.

Unsupervised visual anomaly detection from multi-view images presents a significant challenge: distinguishing genuine defects from benign appearance variations caused by viewpoint changes. Existing methods, often designed for single-view inputs, treat multiple views as a disconnected set of images, leading to inconsistent feature representations and a high false-positive rate. To address this, we introduce ViewSense-AD (VSAD), a novel framework that learns viewpoint-invariant representations by explicitly modeling geometric consistency across views. At its core is our Multi-View Alignment Module (MVAM), which leverages homography to project and align corresponding feature regions between neighboring views. We integrate MVAM into a View-Align Latent Diffusion Model (VALDM), enabling progressive and multi-stage alignment during the denoising process. This allows the model to build a coherent and holistic understanding of the object's surface from coarse to fine scales. Furthermore, a lightweight Fusion Refiner Module (FRM) enhances the global consistency of the aligned features, suppressing noise and improving discriminative power. Anomaly detection is performed by comparing multi-level features from the diffusion model against a learned memory bank of normal prototypes. Extensive experiments on the challenging RealIAD and MANTA datasets demonstrate that VSAD sets a new state-of-the-art, significantly outperforming existing methods in pixel, view, and sample-level visual anomaly proving its robustness to large viewpoint shifts and complex textures.

In multi-agent systems, explicit cognition of teammates' decision logic serves as a critical factor in facilitating coordination. Communication (i.e., ``\textit{Tell}'') can assist in the cognitive development process by information dissemination, yet it is inevitably subject to real-world constraints such as noise, latency, and attacks. Therefore, building the understanding of teammates' decisions without communication remains challenging. To address this, we propose a novel non-communication MARL framework that realizes the construction of cognition through local observation-based modeling (i.e., \textit{``Think''}). Our framework enables agents to model teammates' \textbf{active inference} process. At first, the proposed method produces three teammate portraits: perception-belief-action. Specifically, we model the teammate's decision process as follows: 1) Perception: observing environments; 2) Belief: forming beliefs; 3) Action: making decisions. Then, we selectively integrate the belief portrait into the decision process based on the accuracy and relevance of the perception portrait. This enables the selection of cooperative teammates and facilitates effective collaboration. Extensive experiments on the SMAC, SMACv2, MPE, and GRF benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our method.

Abstract-- Filter-based visual inertial navigation system (VINS) has attracted mobile-robot researchers for the good balance between accuracy and efficiency, but its limited mapping quality hampers long-term high-accuracy state estimation. T o this end, we first propose a novel filter-based stereo VINS, differing from traditional simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) systems based on 3D map, which performs efficient loop closure constraints with implicit environmental map composed of keyframes and 2D keypoints. Secondly, we proposed a hybrid residual filter framework that combines landmark reprojection and ray constraints to construct a unified Ja-cobian matrix for measurement updates. Finally, considering the degraded environment, we incorporated the camera-IMU extrinsic parameters into visual description to achieve online calibration. Benchmark experiments demonstrate that the proposed SP-VINS achieves high computational efficiency while maintaining long-term high-accuracy localization performance, and is superior to existing state-of-the-art (SOT A) methods.

Large language models (LLMs) have raised hopes for automated end-to-end fact-checking, but prior studies report mixed results. As mainstream chatbots increasingly ship with reasoning capabilities and web search tools -- and millions of users already rely on them for verification -- rigorous evaluation is urgent. We evaluate 15 recent LLMs from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and DeepSeek on more than 6,000 claims fact-checked by PolitiFact, comparing standard models with reasoning- and web-search variants. Standard models perform poorly, reasoning offers minimal benefits, and web search provides only moderate gains, despite fact-checks being available on the web. In contrast, a curated RAG system using PolitiFact summaries improved macro F1 by 233% on average across model variants. These findings suggest that giving models access to curated high-quality context is a promising path for automated fact-checking.

While video-generation-based embodied world models have gained increasing attention, their reliance on large-scale embodied interaction data remains a key bottleneck. The scarcity, difficulty of collection, and high dimensionality of embodied data fundamentally limit the alignment granularity between language and actions and exacerbate the challenge of long-horizon video generation--hindering generative models from achieving a \textit{"GPT moment"} in the embodied domain. There is a naive observation: \textit{the diversity of embodied data far exceeds the relatively small space of possible primitive motions}. Based on this insight, we propose \textbf{Primitive Embodied World Models} (PEWM), which restricts video generation to fixed shorter horizons, our approach \textit{1) enables} fine-grained alignment between linguistic concepts and visual representations of robotic actions, \textit{2) reduces} learning complexity, \textit{3) improves} data efficiency in embodied data collection, and \textit{4) decreases} inference latency. By equipping with a modular Vision-Language Model (VLM) planner and a Start-Goal heatmap Guidance mechanism (SGG), PEWM further enables flexible closed-loop control and supports compositional generalization of primitive-level policies over extended, complex tasks. Our framework leverages the spatiotemporal vision priors in video models and the semantic awareness of VLMs to bridge the gap between fine-grained physical interaction and high-level reasoning, paving the way toward scalable, interpretable, and general-purpose embodied intelligence.

Large language models are evolving from single-turn responders into tool-using agents capable of sustained reasoning and decision-making for deep research. Prevailing systems adopt a linear pipeline of plan to search to write to a report, which suffers from error accumulation and context rot due to the lack of explicit control over both model behavior and context. We introduce RhinoInsight, a deep research framework that adds two control mechanisms to enhance robustness, traceability, and overall quality without parameter updates. First, a Verifiable Checklist module transforms user requirements into traceable and verifiable sub-goals, incorporates human or LLM critics for refinement, and compiles a hierarchical outline to anchor subsequent actions and prevent non-executable planning. Second, an Evidence Audit module structures search content, iteratively updates the outline, and prunes noisy context, while a critic ranks and binds high-quality evidence to drafted content to ensure verifiability and reduce hallucinations. Our experiments demonstrate that RhinoInsight achieves state-of-the-art performance on deep research tasks while remaining competitive on deep search tasks.