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Backpropagation-Free Test-Time Adaptation via Probabilistic Gaussian Alignment
Test-time adaptation (TTA) enhances the zero-shot robustness under distribution shifts by leveraging unlabeled test data during inference. Despite notable advances, several challenges still limit its broader applicability. First, most methods rely on backpropagation or iterative optimization, which limits scalability and hinders real-time deployment. Second, they lack explicit modeling of class-conditional feature distributions. This modeling is crucial for producing reliable decision boundaries and calibrated predictions, but it remains underexplored due to the lack of both source data and supervision at test time.
TimeEmb: ALightweight Static-Dynamic Disentanglement Framework for Time Series Forecasting
Temporal non-stationarity, the phenomenon that time series distributions change over time, poses fundamental challenges to reliable time series forecasting. Intuitively, the complex time series can be decomposed into two factors, i.e., timeinvariant and time-varying components, which indicate static and dynamic patterns, respectively. Nonetheless, existing methods often conflate the time-varying and time-invariant components, and jointly learn the combined long-term patterns and short-term fluctuations, leading to suboptimal performance facing distribution shifts. To address this issue, we initiatively propose a lightweight static-dynamic decomposition framework, TimeEmb, for time series forecasting. TimeEmb innovatively separates time series into two complementary components: (1) time-invariant component, captured by a novel global embedding module that learns persistent representations across time series, and (2) time-varying component, processed by an efficient frequency-domain filtering mechanism inspired by full-spectrum analysis in signal processing. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that TimeEmb outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and requires fewer computational resources. We conduct comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analyses to verify the efficacy of static-dynamic disentanglement. This lightweight framework can also improve existing time-series forecasting methods with simple integration.
Visual Anagrams Reveal Hidden Differences in Holistic Shape Processing Across Vision Models
Humans are able to recognize objects based on both local texture cues and the configuration of object parts, yet contemporary vision models primarily harvest local texture cues, yielding brittle, non-compositional features. Work on shape-vstexture bias has pitted shape and texture representations in opposition, measuring shape relative to texture, ignoring the possibility that models (and humans) can simultaneously rely on both types of cues, and obscuring the absolute quality of both types of representation. We therefore recast shape evaluation as a matter of absolute configural competence, operationalized by the Configural Shape Score (CSS), which (i) measures the ability to recognize both images in Object-Anagram pairs that preserve local texture while permuting global part arrangement to depict different object categories. Across 86 convolutional, transformer, and hybrid models, CSS (ii) uncovers a broad spectrum of configural sensitivity with fully selfsupervised and language-aligned transformers - exemplified by DINOv2, SigLIP2 and EVA-CLIP - occupying the top end of the CSS spectrum. Mechanistic probes reveal that (iii) high-CSS networks depend on long-range interactions: radiuscontrolled attention masks abolish performance showing a distinctive U-shaped integration profile, and representational-similarity analyses expose a mid-depth transition from local to global coding. ABagNet control, whose receptive fields straddle patch seams, remains at chance (iv), ruling out any "border-hacking" strategies. Finally, (v) we show that configural shape score also predicts other shapedependent evals (e.g.,foreground bias, spectral and noise robustness). Overall, we propose that the path toward truly robust, generalizable, and human-like vision systems may not lie in forcing an artificial choice between shape and texture, but rather in architectural and learning frameworks that seamlessly integrate both local-texture and global configural shape. 1
MuRating: AHigh Quality Data Selecting Approach to Multilingual Large Language Model Pretraining
Data quality is a critical driver of large language model performance, yet existing model-based selection methods focus almost exclusively on English, neglecting other languages that are essential in the training mix for multilingual LLMs. We introduce MuRating, a scalable framework that transfers high-quality English dataquality signals into a multilingual autorater, capable of handling 17 languages. MuRating aggregates multiple English autoraters via pairwise comparisons to learn unified document quality scores, then projects these judgments through translation to train a multilingual evaluator on monolingual, cross-lingual, and parallel text pairs. Applied to web data, MuRating selects balanced subsets of English and multilingual content to pretrain LLaMA-architecture models of 1.2B and 7B parameters. Compared to strong baselines, including QuRater, FineWeb2HQ, AskLLM, DCLM, our approach increases average accuracy on both English benchmarks and multilingual evaluations. Extensive analyses further validate that pairwise training provides greater stability and robustness than pointwise scoring, underscoring the effectiveness of MuRating as a general multilingual data-selection framework.
VideoHallu: Evaluating and Mitigating Multi-modal Hallucinations on Synthetic Video Understanding
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in video understanding tasks. Yet, a key question remains: do they comprehend visual information, or merely learn superficial mappings between visual and textual patterns? Understanding visual cues, particularly those related to physics and common sense, is crucial for AI systems interacting with the physical world. However, existing VLM evaluations primarily rely on positivecontrol tests using real-world videos that resemble training distributions. While VLMs perform well on such benchmarks, it is unclear whether they grasp underlying visual and contextual signals or simply exploit visual-language correlations. To fill this gap, we propose incorporating negative-control tests, i.e., videos depicting physically impossible or logically inconsistent scenarios, and evaluating whether models can recognize these violations.
From Sequence to Structure: Uncovering Substructure Reasoning in Transformers
Recent studies suggest that large language models (LLMs) possess the capability to solve graph reasoning tasks. Notably, even when graph structures are embedded within textual descriptions, LLMs can still effectively answer related questions. This raises a fundamental question: How can a decoder-only Transformer architecture understand underlying graph structures? To address this, we start with the substructure extraction task, interpreting the inner mechanisms inside the transformers and analyzing the impact of the input queries.
The UK Will Scan Asylum-Seekers' Faces for Age Checks--Despite Knowing the Tech Is Flawed
The UK Will Scan Asylum-Seekers' Faces for Age Checks--Despite Knowing the Tech Is Flawed Age verification is consuming the internet . From social media bans in Australia to porn restrictions in half of US states, for many having to prove their age to access websites is becoming an everyday requirement . But one of the key technologies underpinning many of these age checks is about to seep into the offline world--with potentially life-changing consequences for people having their age predicted by AI. Starting next year, the British government is planning to introduce facial age estimation--where AI scans your face and suggests how old you are --to help determine the age of asylum seekers arriving at the United Kingdom's border. The move is believed to be the first time that a so-called facial age estimation (FAE) system has been used in this way.
Supplementary Materials AGMMU: AComprehensive Agricultural Multimodal Understanding Benchmark Aruna Gauba1,2,5 Irene Pi1,3,5 Yunze Man1,4,5 Ziqi Pang1,4,5 Vikram S. Adve1,4,5 Yu-Xiong Wang1,4,5
Our evaluation and analysis are conducted mainly on the group of models listed in Table 2 in the13 main paper. We have chosen models such that they cover most of the popular and best-performing14 methods used by recent multimodal understanding work. In this part, we discuss all the models we15 have used in our experiments and explain their evaluation details, the public checkpoints we have16 chosen, and display the prompts we used to adapt the model to our datasets.17 During evaluation, we chose to follow the standard prompt provided by the authors whenever possi-18 ble for multiple-choice and short-answer questions. When the prompt is not provided for the model,19 we select a custom prompt that is created through several iterations of prompt engineering to select20 the one that produces the most effective results. The images are always included as the prefix.21 We used three proprietary models in our evaluation: GPT-o4-mini [1], Gem-22 ini 1.5 Pro [9], and Claude 3 Haiku [10]. Below we note the model API version used for evaluation.23 GPT-o4-mini: May 13-15, 2025.24 Cambrian-1 is a recent state-of-the-art model that excels at visual-centric tasks.27 This model explores combinations of vision encoders, text and image integration techniques, and28 instruction tuning strategies. We use the official implementation and checkpoint1 with a LLaMA3-29 8B-Instruct LLM backbone model in our evaluation.30 InternVL scales up the vision foundation model while aligning it with the back-31 bone LLM, and is trained on web-scale image-text data to achieve strong performance across a vari-32 ety of vision-centric tasks. We use the official implementation and checkpoint2 with the InternViT-33 300M-448px vision backbone and Internlm2.5-7B-chat LLaMA-3.2 is the first collection of multimodal large language model from the35 LLaMA family that was previously text-only. The integration of vision involves utilizing cross-36 attention layers and a pre-trained vision encoder that feeds directly into the text-processor. The37 model follows a commonly used training recipe that includes pretraining on noisy image-text pairs38 and then high-quality knowledge enhanced pairs. Notably, the language-model parameters were39 frozen during the training of alignment of image and text to retain strong text-only capabilities. We40 use the official implementation and checkpoint3 that uses a LLaMA-3.1 text-only language backbone41 in our evaluation. When evaluating the model, we choose to use a custom prompt since no standard42 prompt is provided.43