Deep Learning
Med-VRAgent: A Framework for Medical Visual Reasoning-Enhanced Agents
Guo, Guangfu, Lu, Xiaoqian, Feng, Yue
Visual Language Models (VLMs) achieve promising results in medical reasoning but struggle with hallucinations, vague descriptions, inconsistent logic and poor localization. To address this, we propose a agent framework named Medical Visual Reasoning Agent (\textbf{Med-VRAgent}). The approach is based on Visual Guidance and Self-Reward paradigms and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). By combining the Visual Guidance with tree search, Med-VRAgent improves the medical visual reasoning capabilities of VLMs. We use the trajectories collected by Med-VRAgent as feedback to further improve the performance by fine-tuning the VLMs with the proximal policy optimization (PPO) objective. Experiments on multiple medical VQA benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches.
Adamas: Hadamard Sparse Attention for Efficient Long-Context Inference
Yan, Siyuan, Jiang, Guo-Qing, Zhang, Yuchen, Ma, Xiaoxing, Zhu, Ran, Cao, Chun, Xu, Jingwei
Large language models (LLMs) now support context windows of hundreds of thousands to millions of tokens, enabling applications such as long-document summarization, large-scale code synthesis, multi-document question answering and persistent multi-turn dialogue. However, such extended contexts exacerbate the quadratic cost of self-attention, leading to severe latency in autoregressive decoding. Existing sparse attention methods alleviate these costs but rely on heuristic patterns that struggle to recall critical key-value (KV) pairs for each query, resulting in accuracy degradation. We introduce Adamas, a lightweight yet highly accurate sparse attention mechanism designed for long-context inference. Adamas applies the Hadamard transform, bucketization and 2-bit compression to produce compact representations, and leverages Manhattan-distance estimation for efficient top-k selections. Experiments show that Adamas matches the accuracy of full attention with only a 64-token budget, achieves near-lossless performance at 128, and supports up to 8x higher sparsity than prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods while delivering up to 4.4x self-attention and 1.5x end-to-end speedups on 32K-length sequences. Remarkably, Adamas attains comparable or even lower perplexity than full attention, underscoring its effectiveness in maintaining accuracy under aggressive sparsity.
Heterogeneous Adversarial Play in Interactive Environments
Xu, Manjie, Yang, Xinyi, Zhan, Jiayu, Liang, Wei, Zhang, Chi, Zhu, Yixin
Self-play constitutes a fundamental paradigm for autonomous skill acquisition, whereby agents iteratively enhance their capabilities through self-directed environmental exploration. Conventional self-play frameworks exploit agent symmetry within zero-sum competitive settings, yet this approach proves inadequate for open-ended learning scenarios characterized by inherent asymmetry. Human pedagogical systems exemplify asymmetric instructional frameworks wherein educators systematically construct challenges calibrated to individual learners' developmental trajectories. The principal challenge resides in operationalizing these asymmetric, adaptive pedagogical mechanisms within artificial systems capable of autonomously synthesizing appropriate curricula without predetermined task hierarchies. Here we present Heterogeneous Adversarial Play (HAP), an adversarial Automatic Curriculum Learning framework that formalizes teacher-student interactions as a minimax optimization wherein task-generating instructor and problem-solving learner co-evolve through adversarial dynamics. In contrast to prevailing ACL methodologies that employ static curricula or unidirectional task selection mechanisms, HAP establishes a bidirectional feedback system wherein instructors continuously recalibrate task complexity in response to real-time learner performance metrics. Experimental validation across multi-task learning domains demonstrates that our framework achieves performance parity with SOTA baselines while generating curricula that enhance learning efficacy in both artificial agents and human subjects.
Automated Wicket-Taking Delivery Segmentation and Weakness Detection in Cricket Videos Using OCR-Guided YOLOv8 and Trajectory Modeling
Ferdous, Mst Jannatun, Billah, Masum, Karmoker, Joy, Ameen, Mohd Ruhul, Islam, Akif, Faruqe, Md. Omar
This paper presents an automated system for cricket video analysis that leverages deep learning techniques to extract wicket-taking deliveries, detect cricket balls, and model ball trajectories. The system employs the YOLOv8 architecture for pitch and ball detection, combined with optical character recognition (OCR) for scorecard extraction to identify wicket-taking moments. Through comprehensive image preprocessing, including grayscale transformation, power transformation, and morphological operations, the system achieves robust text extraction from video frames. The pitch detection model achieved 99.5% mean Average Precision at 50% IoU (mAP50) with a precision of 0.999, while the ball detection model using transfer learning attained 99.18% mAP50 with 0.968 precision and 0.978 recall. The system enables trajectory modeling on detected pitches, providing data-driven insights for identifying batting weaknesses. Experimental results on multiple cricket match videos demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach for automated cricket analytics, offering significant potential for coaching and strategic decision-making.
S2AP: Score-space Sharpness Minimization for Adversarial Pruning
Piras, Giorgio, Zhao, Qi, Brau, Fabio, Pintor, Maura, Wressnegger, Christian, Biggio, Battista
Adversarial pruning methods have emerged as a powerful tool for compressing neural networks while preserving robustness against adversarial attacks. These methods typically follow a three-step pipeline: (i) pretrain a robust model, (ii) select a binary mask for weight pruning, and (iii) finetune the pruned model. To select the binary mask, these methods minimize a robust loss by assigning an importance score to each weight, and then keep the weights with the highest scores. However, this score-space optimization can lead to sharp local minima in the robust loss landscape and, in turn, to an unstable mask selection, reducing the robustness of adversarial pruning methods. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel plug-in method for adversarial pruning, termed Score-space Sharpness-aware Adversarial Pruning (S2AP). Through our method, we introduce the concept of score-space sharpness minimization, which operates during the mask search by perturbing importance scores and minimizing the corresponding robust loss. Extensive experiments across various datasets, models, and sparsity levels demonstrate that S2AP effectively minimizes sharpness in score space, stabilizing the mask selection, and ultimately improving the robustness of adversarial pruning methods. Deep neural networks are susceptible to adversarial attacks, which entail optimizing an input perturbation added to the original sample to induce a misclassification (Biggio et al., 2013; Szegedy et al., 2014). Besides robustness against adversarial examples, networks are often required to be compact and suitable for resource-constrained scenarios (Liu & Wang, 2023), where the model's dimension cannot be chosen at hand but requires respecting a given constraint. In this regard, neural network pruning (LeCun et al., 1989) represents a powerful compression method by removing redundant or less impactful parameters according to a desired sparsity rate and, as a result, allowing the preservation of much of the performance of a dense model counterpart (Blalock et al., 2020). Adversarial Pruning (AP) methods aim to fulfill this twofold requirement, thus extending model compression to the adversarial case, by removing parameters less responsible for adversarial robustness drops (Piras et al., 2024).
Biomechanically consistent real-time action recognition for human-robot interaction
Li, Wanchen, Chalabi, Kahina, Maxime, Sabbah, Bousquet, Thomas, Passama, Robin, Ramdani, Sofiane, Cherubini, Andrea, Bonnet, Vincent
This paper presents a novel framework for real-time human action recognition in industrial contexts, using standard 2D cameras. We introduce a complete pipeline for robust and real-time estimation of human joint kinematics, input to a temporally smoothed Transformer-based network, for action recognition. We rely on a new dataset including 11 subjects performing various actions, to evaluate our approach. Unlike most of the literature that relies on joint center positions (JCP) and is offline, ours uses biomechanical prior, eg. joint angles, for fast and robust real-time recognition. Besides, joint angles make the proposed method agnostic to sensor and subject poses as well as to anthropometric differences, and ensure robustness across environments and subjects. Our proposed learning model outperforms the best baseline model, running also in real-time, along various metrics. It achieves 88% accuracy and shows great generalization ability, for subjects not facing the cameras. Finally, we demonstrate the robustness and usefulness of our technique, through an online interaction experiment, with a simulated robot controlled in real-time via the recognized actions.
KoSimpleQA: A Korean Factuality Benchmark with an Analysis of Reasoning LLMs
Ko, Donghyeon, Jin, Yeguk, Chae, Kyubyung, Lee, Byungwook, Jo, Chansong, In, Sookyo, Lee, Jaehong, Kim, Taesup, Kwak, Donghyun
We present $\textbf{Korean SimpleQA (KoSimpleQA)}$, a benchmark for evaluating factuality in large language models (LLMs) with a focus on Korean cultural knowledge. KoSimpleQA is designed to be challenging yet easy to grade, consisting of 1,000 short, fact-seeking questions with unambiguous answers. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation across a diverse set of open-source LLMs of varying sizes that support Korean, and find that even the strongest model generates correct answer only 33.7% of the time, underscoring the challenging nature of KoSimpleQA. Notably, performance rankings on KoSimpleQA differ substantially from those on the English SimpleQA, highlighting the unique value of our dataset. Furthermore, our analysis of reasoning LLMs shows that engaging reasoning capabilities in the factual QA task can both help models better elicit their latent knowledge and improve their ability to abstain when uncertain. KoSimpleQA can be found at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/KoSimpleQA-62EB.
Learning to Flow from Generative Pretext Tasks for Neural Architecture Encoding
Kim, Sunwoo, Hwang, Hyunjin, Shin, Kijung
The performance of a deep learning model on a specific task and dataset depends heavily on its neural architecture, motivating considerable efforts to rapidly and accurately identify architectures suited to the target task and dataset. To achieve this, researchers use machine learning models-typically neural architecture encoders-to predict the performance of a neural architecture. Many state-of-the-art encoders aim to capture information flow within a neural architecture, which reflects how information moves through the forward pass and backpropagation, via a specialized model structure. However, due to their complicated structures, these flow-based encoders are significantly slower to process neural architectures compared to simpler encoders, presenting a notable practical challenge. To address this, we propose FGP, a novel pre-training method for neural architecture encoding that trains an encoder to capture the information flow without requiring specialized model structures. FGP trains an encoder to reconstruct a flow surrogate, our proposed representation of the neural architecture's information flow. Our experiments show that FGP boosts encoder performance by up to 106% in Precision-1%, compared to the same encoder trained solely with supervised learning.
Ensembling Pruned Attention Heads For Uncertainty-Aware Efficient Transformers
Gabetni, Firas, Curci, Giuseppe, Pilzer, Andrea, Roy, Subhankar, Ricci, Elisa, Franchi, Gianni
Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential for deploying deep neural networks in safety-critical settings. Although methods like Deep Ensembles achieve strong UQ performance, their high computational and memory costs hinder scalability to large models. We introduce Hydra Ensembles, an efficient transformer-based ensemble that prunes attention heads to create diverse members and merges them via a new multi-head attention with grouped fully-connected layers. This yields a compact model with inference speed close to a single network, matching or surpassing Deep Ensembles in UQ performance without retraining from scratch. We also provide an in-depth analysis of pruning, showing that naive approaches can harm calibration, whereas Hydra Ensembles preserves robust uncertainty. Experiments on image and text classification tasks, with various architectures, show consistent gains over Deep Ensembles. Remarkably, in zero-shot classification on ImageNet-1k, our approach surpasses state of the art methods, even without requiring additional training.
KrishokBondhu: A Retrieval-Augmented Voice-Based Agricultural Advisory Call Center for Bengali Farmers
Ameen, Mohd Ruhul, Islam, Akif, Aktar, Farjana, Rafat, M. Saifuzzaman
In Bangladesh, many farmers continue to face challenges in accessing timely, expert-level agricultural guidance. This paper presents KrishokBondhu, a voice-enabled, call-centre-integrated advisory platform built on a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, designed specifically for Bengali-speaking farmers. The system aggregates authoritative agricultural handbooks, extension manuals, and NGO publications; applies Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and document-parsing pipelines to digitize and structure the content; and indexes this corpus in a vector database for efficient semantic retrieval. Through a simple phone-based interface, farmers can call the system to receive real-time, context-aware advice: speech-to-text converts the Bengali query, the RAG module retrieves relevant content, a large language model (Gemma 3-4B) generates a context-grounded response, and text-to-speech delivers the answer in natural spoken Bengali. In a pilot evaluation, KrishokBondhu produced high-quality responses for 72.7% of diverse agricultural queries covering crop management, disease control, and cultivation practices. Compared to the KisanQRS benchmark, the system achieved a composite score of 4.53 (vs. 3.13) on a 5-point scale, a 44.7% improvement, with especially large gains in contextual richness (+367%) and completeness (+100.4%), while maintaining comparable relevance and technical specificity. Semantic similarity analysis further revealed a strong correlation between retrieved context and answer quality, emphasizing the importance of grounding generative responses in curated documentation. KrishokBondhu demonstrates the feasibility of integrating call-centre accessibility, multilingual voice interaction, and modern RAG techniques to deliver expert-level agricultural guidance to remote Bangladeshi farmers, paving the way toward a fully AI-driven agricultural advisory ecosystem.