Affordance is crucial for intelligent robots in the context of object manipulation. In this paper, we argue that affordance should be task-/instruction-dependent, which is overlooked by many previous works. That is, different instructions can lead to different manipulation regions and directions even for the same object. According to this observation, we present a new dataset comprising fifteen thousand object-instruction-affordance triplets. All scenes in the dataset are from an egocentric viewpoint, designed to approximate the perspective of a human-like robot. Furthermore, we investigate how to enable large multimodal models (LMMs) to serve as affordance predictors by implementing a ``search against verifiers'' pipeline. An LMM is asked to progressively predict affordances, with the output at each step being verified by itself during the iterative process, imitating a reasoning process. Experiments show that our method not only unlocks new instruction-oriented affordance prediction capabilities, but also achieves outstanding performance broadly.

While powerful, large language models (LLMs) present significant fine-tuning challenges due to their size. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods like LoRA provide solutions, yet suffer from critical optimizer inefficiencies; notably basis redundancy in LoRA's $B$ matrix when using AdamW, which fundamentally limits performance. We address this by optimizing the $B$ matrix on the Stiefel manifold, imposing explicit orthogonality constraints that achieve near-perfect orthogonality and full effective rank. This geometric approach dramatically enhances parameter efficiency and representational capacity. Our Stiefel optimizer consistently outperforms AdamW across benchmarks with both LoRA and DoRA, demonstrating that geometric constraints are the key to unlocking LoRA's full potential for effective LLM fine-tuning.

Visual speech recognition (VSR) systems decode spoken words from an input sequence using only the video data. Practical applications of such systems include medical assistance as well as human-machine interactions. A VSR system is typically employed in a complementary role in cases where the audio is corrupt or not available. In order to accurately predict the spoken words, these architectures often rely on deep neural networks in order to extract meaningful representations from the input sequence. While deep architectures achieve impressive recognition performance, relying on such models incurs significant computation costs which translates into increased resource demands in terms of hardware requirements and results in limited applicability in real-world scenarios where resources might be constrained. This factor prevents wider adoption and deployment of speech recognition systems in more practical applications. In this work, we aim to alleviate this issue by developing architectures for VSR that have low hardware costs. Following the standard two-network design paradigm, where one network handles visual feature extraction and another one utilizes the extracted features to classify the entire sequence, we develop lightweight end-to-end architectures by first benchmarking e fficient models from the image classification literature, and then adopting lightweight block designs in a temporal convolution network backbone. We create several unified models with low resource requirements but strong recognition performance. Experiments on the largest public database for English words demonstrate the e ff ectiveness and practicality of our developed models. Code and trained models will be made publicly available.

The rapid advancement of generative models has led to a growing prevalence of highly realistic AI-generated images, posing significant challenges for digital forensics and content authentication. Conventional detection methods mainly rely on deep learning models that extract global features, which often overlook subtle structural inconsistencies and demand substantial computational resources. To address these limitations, we propose a hybrid detection framework that combines a fine-tuned Vision Transformer (ViT) with a novel edge-based image processing module. The edge-based module computes variance from edge-difference maps generated before and after smoothing, exploiting the observation that AI-generated images typically exhibit smoother textures, weaker edges, and reduced noise compared to real images. When applied as a post-processing step on ViT predictions, this module enhances sensitivity to fine-grained structural cues while maintaining computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on the CIFAKE, Artistic, and Custom Curated datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves superior detection performance across all benchmarks, attaining 97.75% accuracy and a 97.77% F1-score on CIFAKE, surpassing widely adopted state-of-the-art models. These results establish the proposed method as a lightweight, interpretable, and effective solution for both still images and video frames, making it highly suitable for real-world applications in automated content verification and digital forensics.

Accurate spectrum prediction is crucial for dynamic spectrum access (DSA) and resource allocation. However, due to the unique characteristics of spectrum data, existing methods based on the time or frequency domain often struggle to separate predictable patterns from noise. To address this, we propose the Spectral Fractional Filtering and Prediction (SFFP) framework. SFFP first employs an adaptive fractional Fourier transform (FrFT) module to transform spectrum data into a suitable fractional Fourier domain, enhancing the separability of predictable trends from noise. Subsequently, an adaptive Filter module selectively suppresses noise while preserving critical predictive features within this domain. Finally, a prediction module, leveraging a complex-valued neural network, learns and forecasts these filtered trend components. Experiments on real-world spectrum data show that the SFFP outperforms leading spectrum and general forecasting methods.

With the rise of Speech Large Language Models (SpeechLLMs), two dominant approaches have emerged for speech processing: discrete tokens and continuous features. Each approach has demonstrated strong capabilities in audio-related processing tasks. However, the performance gap between these two paradigms has not been thoroughly explored. To address this gap, we present a fair comparison of self-supervised learning (SSL)-based discrete and continuous features under the same experimental settings. We evaluate their performance across six spoken language understanding-related tasks using both small and large-scale LLMs (Qwen1.5-0.5B and Llama3.1-8B). We further conduct in-depth analyses, including efficient comparison, SSL layer analysis, LLM layer analysis, and robustness comparison. Our findings reveal that continuous features generally outperform discrete tokens in various tasks. Each speech processing method exhibits distinct characteristics and patterns in how it learns and processes speech information. We hope our results will provide valuable insights to advance spoken language understanding in SpeechLLMs.

In this study, we introduce a novel method called group-wise \textbf{VI}sual token \textbf{S}election and \textbf{A}ggregation (VISA) to address the issue of inefficient inference stemming from excessive visual tokens in multimoal large language models (MLLMs). Compared with previous token pruning approaches, our method can preserve more visual information while compressing visual tokens. We first propose a graph-based visual token aggregation (VTA) module. VTA treats each visual token as a node, forming a graph based on semantic similarity among visual tokens. It then aggregates information from removed tokens into kept tokens based on this graph, producing a more compact visual token representation. Additionally, we introduce a group-wise token selection strategy (GTS) to divide visual tokens into kept and removed ones, guided by text tokens from the final layers of each group. This strategy progressively aggregates visual information, enhancing the stability of the visual information extraction process. We conduct comprehensive experiments on LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-NeXT, and Video-LLaVA across various benchmarks to validate the efficacy of VISA. Our method consistently outperforms previous methods, achieving a superior trade-off between model performance and inference speed. The code is available at https://github.com/mobiushy/VISA.

Introducing MARK, the Multi-stAge Reasoning frameworK for cultural value survey response simulation, designed to enhance the accuracy, steerability, and interpretability of large language models in this task. The system is inspired by the type dynamics theory in the MBTI psychological framework for personality research. It effectively predicts and utilizes human demographic information for simulation: life-situational stress analysis, group-level personality prediction, and self-weighted cognitive imitation. Experiments on the World Values Survey show that MARK outperforms existing baselines by 10% accuracy and reduces the divergence between model predictions and human preferences. This highlights the potential of our framework to improve zero-shot personalization and help social scientists interpret model predictions.

W e propose DiffAug a novel framework that combines text-guided diffusion-based generation with automatic segmentation validation to address this challenge. Our proposed approach uses latent diffusion models conditioned on medical text descriptions and spatial masks to synthesize abnormalities via inpainting on normal images. Generated samples undergo dynamic quality validation through a latent-space segmentation network that ensures accurate localization while enabling single-step inference. The text prompts, derived from medical literature, guide the generation of diverse abnormality types without requiring manual annotation. Our validation mechanism filters synthetic samples based on spatial accuracy, maintaining quality while operating efficiently through direct latent estimation. Evaluated on three medical imaging benchmarks (CVC-ClinicDB, Kvasir-SEG, REFUGE2), our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance with 8-10% Dice improvements over baselines and reduces false negative rates by up to 28% for challenging cases like small polyps and flat lesions critical for early detection in screening applications.

-- During raw - data acquisition in CT imaging, diverse factors can degrade the co llected sinograms, with un-dersampling and noise leading to severe artifacts and noise in reconstructed images and compromising diagnostic accuracy. Conventional correction methods rely on manually designed algorithms or fixed empirical parameters, but thes e approaches often lack generalizability across heterogeneous artifact types. To address these limitations, we propose UniSino, a foundation model for universal CT sino-gram standardization. Unlike existing foundational models that operate in image domain, UniSino directly standardizes dat a in the projection domain, which enables stronger generalization across diverse undersampling scenarios. Its training framework incorporates the physical characteristics of sinograms, enhancing generalization and enabling robust performance across mul tiple subtasks spanning four benchmark datasets. T he code is available at: https://github.com/yqx7150/UniSino . In CT imaging, the sinogram represents the raw pr ojection data before image reconstruction . However, in practical clinical data acquisition, raw sinogram data are frequently degraded by a multitude of factors -- including hardware limitations, environmental variability, and patient - induced factor s -- resulting in complex and heterogeneous data corruption [2]. Without effective preprocessing, such imperfections are readily amplified through the reconstruction process, which lead to severe image artifacts [3], including detector - induced ring patterns [4], beam ha rdening from metal implants [5], geometric distortions from miscalibration [6], and motion - induced inconsistencies [7, 8]. These artifacts not only degrade visual quality but critically compromise diagnostic reliability.