Deep Learning
LiDAR-BIND-T: Improved and Temporally Consistent Sensor Modality Translation and Fusion for Robotic Applications
Balemans, Niels, Anwar, Ali, Steckel, Jan, Mercelis, Siegfried
This paper extends LiDAR-BIND, a modular multi-modal fusion framework that binds heterogeneous sensors (radar, sonar) to a LiDAR-defined latent space, with mechanisms that explicitly enforce temporal consistency. We introduce three contributions: (i) temporal embedding similarity that aligns consecutive latent representations, (ii) a motion-aligned transformation loss that matches displacement between predictions and ground truth LiDAR, and (iii) windowed temporal fusion using a specialised temporal module. We further update the model architecture to better preserve spatial structure. Evaluations on radar/sonar-to-LiDAR translation demonstrate improved temporal and spatial coherence, yielding lower absolute trajectory error and better occupancy map accuracy in Cartographer-based SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping). We propose different metrics based on the Frรฉchet Video Motion Distance (FVMD) and a correlation-peak distance metric providing practical temporal quality indicators to evaluate SLAM performance. The proposed temporal LiDAR-BIND, or LiDAR-BIND-T, maintains modular modality fusion while substantially enhancing temporal stability, resulting in improved robustness and performance for downstream SLAM.
BEDTime: A Unified Benchmark for Automatically Describing Time Series
Sen, Medhasweta, Gottesman, Zachary, Qiu, Jiaxing, Bruss, C. Bayan, Nguyen, Nam, Hartvigsen, Tom
Recent works propose complex multi-modal models that handle both time series and language, ultimately claiming high performance on complex tasks like time series reasoning and cross-modal question-answering. However, they skip evaluations of simple and important foundational tasks, which complex models should reliably master. They also lack direct, head-to-head comparisons with other popular approaches. So we ask a simple question: Can recent models even produce generic visual descriptions of time series data? In response, we propose three new tasks, posing that successful multi-modal models should be able to recognize, differentiate, and generate language descriptions of time series. We then create BEDTime, the first benchmark dataset to assess models on each task, comprising four datasets reformatted for these tasks across multiple modalities. Using BEDTime, we evaluate 13 state-of-the-art models, and find that (1) surprisingly, dedicated time series foundation models severely underperform, despite being designed for similar tasks, (2) vision-language models are quite capable, (3) language-only methods perform worst, despite many lauding their potential, and (4) all approaches are clearly fragile to a range of realistic robustness tests, indicating avenues for future work.
Object Detection with Multimodal Large Vision-Language Models: An In-depth Review
Sapkota, Ranjan, Karkee, Manoj
The fusion of language and vision in large vision-language models (LVLMs) has revolutionized deep learning-based object detection by enhancing adaptability, contextual reasoning, and generalization beyond traditional architectures. This in-depth review presents a structured exploration of the state-of-the-art in LVLMs, systematically organized through a three-step research review process. First, we discuss the functioning of vision language models (VLMs) for object detection, describing how these models harness natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) techniques to revolutionize object detection and localization. We then explain the architectural innovations, training paradigms, and output flexibility of recent LVLMs for object detection, highlighting how they achieve advanced contextual understanding for object detection. The review thoroughly examines the approaches used in integration of visual and textual information, demonstrating the progress made in object detection using VLMs that facilitate more sophisticated object detection and localization strategies. This review presents comprehensive visualizations demonstrating LVLMs' effectiveness in diverse scenarios including localization and segmentation, and then compares their real-time performance, adaptability, and complexity to traditional deep learning systems. Based on the review, its is expected that LVLMs will soon meet or surpass the performance of conventional methods in object detection. The review also identifies a few major limitations of the current LVLM modes, proposes solutions to address those challenges, and presents a clear roadmap for the future advancement in this field. We conclude, based on this study, that the recent advancement in LVLMs have made and will continue to make a transformative impact on object detection and robotic applications in the future.
Speculating LLMs' Chinese Training Data Pollution from Their Tokens
Zhang, Qingjie, Wang, Di, Qian, Haoting, Yan, Liu, Zhang, Tianwei, Xu, Ke, Li, Qi, Huang, Minlie, Li, Hewu, Qiu, Han
Tokens are basic elements in the datasets for LLM training. It is well-known that many tokens representing Chinese phrases in the vocabulary of GPT (4o/4o-mini/o1/o3/4.5/4.1/o4-mini) are indicating contents like pornography or online gambling. Based on this observation, our goal is to locate Polluted Chinese (PoC) tokens in LLMs and study the relationship between PoC tokens' existence and training data. (1) We give a formal definition and taxonomy of PoC tokens based on the GPT's vocabulary. (2) We build a PoC token detector via fine-tuning an LLM to label PoC tokens in vocabularies by considering each token's both semantics and related contents from the search engines. (3) We study the speculation on the training data pollution via PoC tokens' appearances (token ID). Experiments on GPT and other 23 LLMs indicate that tokens widely exist while GPT's vocabulary behaves the worst: more than 23% long Chinese tokens (i.e., a token with more than two Chinese characters) are either porn or online gambling. We validate the accuracy of our speculation method on famous pre-training datasets like C4 and Pile. Then, considering GPT-4o, we speculate that the ratio of "Yui Hatano" related webpages in GPT-4o's training data is around 0.5%.
GraphCogent: Mitigating LLMs' Working Memory Constraints via Multi-Agent Collaboration in Complex Graph Understanding
Wang, Rongzheng, Liang, Shuang, Chen, Qizhi, Huang, Yihong, Li, Muquan, Ma, Yizhuo, Zhang, Dongyang, Qin, Ke, Leung, Man-Fai
Large language models (LLMs) show promising performance on small-scale graph reasoning tasks but fail when handling real-world graphs with complex queries. This phenomenon arises from LLMs' working memory constraints, which result in their inability to retain long-range graph topology over extended contexts while sustaining coherent multi-step reasoning. However, real-world graphs are often structurally complex, such as Web, Transportation, Social, and Citation networks. To address these limitations, we propose GraphCogent, a collaborative agent framework inspired by human Working Memory Model that decomposes graph reasoning into specialized cognitive processes: sense, buffer, and execute. The framework consists of three modules: Sensory Module standardizes diverse graph text representations via subgraph sampling, Buffer Module integrates and indexes graph data across multiple formats, and Execution Module combines tool calling and tool creation for efficient reasoning. We also introduce Graph4real, a comprehensive benchmark that contains four domains of real-world graphs (Web, Transportation, Social, and Citation) to evaluate LLMs' graph reasoning capabilities. Our Graph4real covers 21 different graph reasoning tasks, categorized into three types (Structural Querying, Algorithmic Reasoning, and Predictive Modeling tasks), with graph scales up to 10 times larger than existing benchmarks. Experiments show that Llama3.1-8B based GraphCogent achieves a 50% improvement over massive-scale LLMs like DeepSeek-R1 (671B). Compared to state-of-the-art agent-based baseline, our framework outperforms by 20% in accuracy while reducing token usage by 80% for in-toolset tasks and 30% for out-toolset tasks. Code will be available after review.
Projected Coupled Diffusion for Test-Time Constrained Joint Generation
Luan, Hao, Goh, Yi Xian, Ng, See-Kiong, Ling, Chun Kai
Modifications to test-time sampling have emerged as an important extension to diffusion algorithms, with the goal of biasing the generative process to achieve a given objective without having to retrain the entire diffusion model. However, generating jointly correlated samples from multiple pre-trained diffusion models while simultaneously enforcing task-specific constraints without costly retraining has remained challenging. To this end, we propose Projected Coupled Diffusion (PCD), a novel test-time framework for constrained joint generation. PCD introduces a coupled guidance term into the generative dynamics to encourage coordination between diffusion models and incorporates a projection step at each diffusion step to enforce hard constraints. Empirically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of PCD in application scenarios of image-pair generation, object manipulation, and multi-robot motion planning. Our results show improved coupling effects and guaranteed constraint satisfaction without incurring excessive computational costs.
The DNA of nuclear models: How AI predicts nuclear masses
Richardson, Kate A., Trifinopoulos, Sokratis, Williams, Mike
Recently, many AI-based tools have shown promising results on this task, some achieving precision that surpasses the best physics models. However, the utility of these AI models remains in question given that predictions are only useful where measurements do not exist, which inherently requires extrapolation away from the training (and testing) samples. Since AI models are largely black boxes, the reliability of such an extrapolation is difficult to assess. For example, we find that (and explain why) the most important dimensions of its internal representation form a double helix, where the analog of the hydrogen bonds in DNA here link the number of protons and neutrons found in the most stable nucleus of each isotopic chain. Remarkably, the improvement of the AI model over symbolic ones can almost entirely be attributed to an observation made by Jaffe in 1969 based on the structure of most known nuclear ground states. The end result is a fully interpretable data-driven model of nuclear masses based on physics deduced by AI. Atomic nuclei consist of Z protons and N neutrons bound together by the strong nuclear force. Notably, many open problems in nuclear and (astro)particle physics are limited by a lack of precise knowledge of nuclear masses, either directly or indirectly via other quantities which require them as inputs. Experimentally, precise measurements have been made for the masses of (quasi)stable nuclei [9]; however, measurements of highly unstable nuclei are currently challenging, and thus, must be predicted using some combination of tractable theoretical calculations, e.g. using phenomeno-logical potentials, and empirical observations of other nuclei. Despite achieving an impressive level of precision, even the best such model is not sufficient to solve many open problems, e.g., r-process nucleosynthesis [10-12].
From Source to Target: Leveraging Transfer Learning for Predictive Process Monitoring in Organizations
Weinzierl, Sven, Zilker, Sandra, Liessmann, Annina, Kรคppel, Martin, Wang, Weixin, Matzner, Martin
Event logs reflect the behavior of business processes that are mapped in organizational information systems. Predictive process monitoring (PPM) transforms these data into value by creating process-related predictions that provide the insights required for proactive interventions at process runtime. Existing PPM techniques require sufficient amounts of event data or other relevant resources that might not be readily available, which prevents some organizations from utilizing PPM. The transfer learning-based PPM technique presented in this paper allows organizations without suitable event data or other relevant resources to implement PPM for effective decision support. This technique is instantiated in both a real-life intra- and an inter-organizational use case, based on which numerical experiments are performed using event logs for IT service management processes. The results of the experiments suggest that knowledge of one business process can be transferred to a similar business process in the same or a different organization to enable effective PPM in the target context. The proposed technique allows organizations to benefit from transfer learning in intra- and inter-organizational settings by transferring resources such as pre-trained models within and across organizational boundaries.
K-Dense Analyst: Towards Fully Automated Scientific Analysis
Li, Orion, Agarwal, Vinayak, Zhou, Summer, Gopinath, Ashwin, Kassis, Timothy
The complexity of modern bioinformatics analysis has created a critical gap between data generation and developing scientific insights. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in scientific reasoning, they remain fundamentally limited when dealing with real-world analytical workflows that demand iterative computation, tool integration and rigorous validation. We introduce K-Dense Analyst, a hierarchical multi-agent system that achieves autonomous bioinformatics analysis through a dual-loop architecture. K-Dense Analyst, part of the broader K-Dense platform, couples planning with validated execution using specialized agents to decompose complex objectives into executable, verifiable tasks within secure computational environments. On BixBench, a comprehensive benchmark for open-ended biological analysis, K-Dense Analyst achieves 29.2% accuracy, surpassing the best-performing language model (GPT-5) by 6.3 percentage points, representing nearly 27% improvement over what is widely considered the most powerful LLM available. Remarkably, K-Dense Analyst achieves this performance using Gemini 2.5 Pro, which attains only 18.3% accuracy when used directly, demonstrating that our architectural innovations unlock capabilities far beyond the underlying model's baseline performance. Our insights demonstrate that autonomous scientific reasoning requires more than enhanced language models, it demands purpose-built systems that can bridge the gap between high-level scientific objectives and low-level computational execution. These results represent a significant advance toward fully autonomous computational biologists capable of accelerating discovery across the life sciences.
FoundBioNet: A Foundation-Based Model for IDH Genotyping of Glioma from Multi-Parametric MRI
Farahani, Somayeh, Hejazi, Marjaneh, Di Ieva, Antonio, Liu, Sidong
Accurate, noninvasive detection of isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) mutation is essential for effective glioma management. Traditional methods rely on invasive tissue sampling, which may fail to capture a tumor's spatial heterogeneity. While deep learning models have shown promise in molecular profiling, their performance is often limited by scarce annotated data. In contrast, foundation deep learning models offer a more generalizable approach for glioma imaging biomarkers. We propose a Foundation-based Biomarker Network (FoundBioNet) that utilizes a SWIN-UNETR-based architecture to noninvasively predict IDH mutation status from multi-parametric MRI. Two key modules are incorporated: Tumor-Aware Feature Encoding (TAFE) for extracting multi-scale, tumor-focused features, and Cross-Modality Differential (CMD) for highlighting subtle T2-FLAIR mismatch signals associated with IDH mutation. The model was trained and validated on a diverse, multi-center cohort of 1705 glioma patients from six public datasets. Our model achieved AUCs of 90.58%, 88.08%, 65.41%, and 80.31% on independent test sets from EGD, TCGA, Ivy GAP, RHUH, and UPenn, consistently outperforming baseline approaches (p <= 0.05). Ablation studies confirmed that both the TAFE and CMD modules are essential for improving predictive accuracy. By integrating large-scale pretraining and task-specific fine-tuning, FoundBioNet enables generalizable glioma characterization. This approach enhances diagnostic accuracy and interpretability, with the potential to enable more personalized patient care.