Reading scene text, that is, text appearing in images, has numerous application areas, including assistive technology, search, and e-commerce. Although scene text recognition in English has advanced significantly and is often considered nearly a solved problem, Indian language scene text recognition remains an open challenge. This is due to script diversity, non-standard fonts, and varying writing styles, and, more importantly, the lack of high-quality datasets and open-source models. To address these gaps, we introduce the Bharat Scene Text Dataset (BSTD) - a large-scale and comprehensive benchmark for studying Indian Language Scene Text Recognition. It comprises more than 100K words that span 11 Indian languages and English, sourced from over 6,500 scene images captured across various linguistic regions of India. The dataset is meticulously annotated and supports multiple scene text tasks, including: (i) Scene Text Detection, (ii) Script Identification, (iii) Cropped Word Recognition, and (iv) End-to-End Scene Text Recognition. We evaluated state-of-the-art models originally developed for English by adapting (fine-tuning) them for Indian languages. Our results highlight the challenges and opportunities in Indian language scene text recognition. We believe that this dataset represents a significant step toward advancing research in this domain. All our models and data are open source.

Despite impressive capabilities, LLMs' successes often rely on pattern-matching behaviors, yet these are also linked to OOD generalization failures in compositional tasks. However, behavioral studies commonly employ task setups that allow multiple generalization sources (e.g., algebraic invariances, structural repetition), obscuring a precise and testable account of how well LLMs perform generalization through pattern matching and their limitations. To address this ambiguity, we first formalize pattern matching as functional equivalence, i.e., identifying pairs of subsequences of inputs that consistently lead to identical results when the rest of the input is held constant. Then, we systematically study how decoder-only Transformer and Mamba behave in controlled tasks with compositional structures that isolate this mechanism. Our formalism yields predictive and quantitative insights: (1) Instance-wise success of pattern matching is well predicted by the number of contexts witnessing the relevant functional equivalence. (2) We prove a tight sample complexity bound of learning a two-hop structure by identifying the exponent of the data scaling law for perfect in-domain generalization. Our empirical results align with the theoretical prediction, under 20x parameter scaling and across architectures. (3) Path ambiguity is a structural barrier: when a variable influences the output via multiple paths, models fail to form unified intermediate state representations, impairing accuracy and interpretability. (4) Chain-of-Thought reduces data requirements yet does not resolve path ambiguity. Hence, we provide a predictive, falsifiable boundary for pattern matching and a foundational diagnostic for disentangling mixed generalization mechanisms.

Scaling vision-language-action (VLA) model pre-training requires large volumes of diverse, high-quality manipulation trajectories. Most current data is obtained via human teleoperation, which is expensive and difficult to scale. Reinforcement learning (RL) methods learn useful skills through autonomous exploration, making them a viable approach for generating data. However, standard RL training collapses to a narrow execution pattern, limiting its utility for large-scale pre-training. We propose Discover, Lea rn and Reinforce (DLR), an information-theoretic pattern discovery framework that generates multiple distinct, high-success behavioral patterns for VLA pretraining. Empirically, DLR generates a markedly more diverse trajectory corpus on LIBERO. Specifically, it learns multiple distinct, high-success strategies for the same task where standard RL discovers only one, and hence it covers substantially broader regions of the state-action space. When adapted to unseen downstream task suites, VLA models pretrained on our diverse RL data surpass counterparts trained on equal-sized standard RL datasets. Moreover, DLR exhibits positive data-scaling behavior that single-pattern RL lacks. These results position multi-pattern RL as a practical, scalable data engine for embodied foundation models.

Accurate and efficient registration of whole slide images (WSIs) is essential for high-resolution, nuclei-level analysis in multi-stained tissue slides. We propose a novel coarse-to-fine framework CORE for accurate nuclei-level registration across diverse multimodal whole-slide image (WSI) datasets. The coarse registration stage leverages prompt-based tissue mask extraction to effectively filter out artefacts and non-tissue regions, followed by global alignment using tissue morphology and ac- celerated dense feature matching with a pre-trained feature extractor. From the coarsely aligned slides, nuclei centroids are detected and subjected to fine-grained rigid registration using a custom, shape-aware point-set registration model. Finally, non-rigid alignment at the cellular level is achieved by estimating a non-linear dis- placement field using Coherent Point Drift (CPD). Our approach benefits from automatically generated nuclei that enhance the accuracy of deformable registra- tion and ensure precise nuclei-level correspondence across modalities. The pro- posed model is evaluated on three publicly available WSI registration datasets, and two private datasets. We show that CORE outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in terms of generalisability, precision, and robustness in bright-field and immunofluorescence microscopy WSIs

Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based P300 speller brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) face three main challenges: low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), poor generalization, and time-consuming calibration. We propose SpellerSSL, a framework that combines self-supervised learning (SSL) with P300 aggregation to address these issues. First, we introduce an aggregation strategy to enhance SNR. Second, to achieve generalization in training, we employ a customized 1D U-Net backbone and pretrain the model on both cross-domain and in-domain EEG data. The pretrained model is subsequently fine-tuned with a lightweight ERP-Head classifier for P300 detection, which adapts the learned representations to subject-specific data. Our evaluations on calibration time demonstrate that combining the aggregation strategy with SSL significantly reduces the calibration burden per subject and improves robustness across subjects. Experimental results show that SSL learns effective EEG representations in both in-domain and cross-domain, with in-domain achieving a state-of-the-art character recognition rate of 94% with only 7 repetitions and the highest information transfer rate (ITR) of 21.86 bits/min on the public II-B dataset. Moreover, in-domain SSL with P300 aggregation reduces the required calibration size by 60% while maintaining a comparable character recognition rate. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to apply SSL to P300 spellers, highlighting its potential to improve both efficiency and generalization in speller BCIs and paving the way toward an EEG foundation model for P300 speller BCIs.

Graph neural networks have shown remarkable success in exploiting the spatial and temporal patterns on dynamic graphs. However, existing GNNs exhibit poor generalization ability under distribution shifts, which is inevitable in dynamic scenarios. As dynamic graph generation progresses amid evolving latent non-stationary environments, it is imperative to explore their effects on out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. This paper proposes a novel Evolving Graph Learning framework for OOD generalization (EvoOOD) by environment-aware invariant pattern recognition. Specifically, we first design an environment sequential variational auto-encoder to model environment evolution and infer the underlying environment distribution. Then, we introduce a mechanism for environment-aware invariant pattern recognition, tailored to address environmental diversification through inferred distributions. Finally, we conduct fine-grained causal interventions on individual nodes using a mixture of instantiated environment samples. This approach helps to distinguish spatio-temporal invariant patterns for OOD prediction, especially in non-stationary environments. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of EvoGOOD on both real-world and synthetic dynamic datasets under distribution shifts. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first attempt to study the dynamic graph OOD generalization problem from the environment evolution perspective.

Performance in face and speaker verification is largely driven by margin-based softmax losses such as CosFace and ArcFace. Recently introduced $α$-divergence loss functions offer a compelling alternative, particularly due to their ability to induce sparse solutions (when $α>1$). However, integrating an angular margin-crucial for verification tasks-is not straightforward. We find that this integration can be achieved in at least two distinct ways: via the reference measure (prior probabilities) or via the logits (unnormalized log-likelihoods). In this paper, we explore both pathways, deriving two novel margin-based $α$-divergence losses: Q-Margin (margin in the reference measure) and A3M (margin in the logits). We identify and address a training instability in A3M-caused by sparsity-with a simple yet effective prototype re-initialization strategy. Our methods achieve significant performance gains on the challenging IJB-B and IJB-C face verification benchmarks. We demonstrate similarly strong performance in speaker verification on VoxCeleb. Crucially, our models significantly outperform strong baselines at low false acceptance rates (FAR). This capability is critical for practical high-security applications, such as banking authentication, when minimizing false authentications is paramount. Finally, the sparsity of $α$-divergence-based posteriors enables memory-efficient training, which is crucial for datasets with millions of identities.

In real-world scenarios of image recognition, there exists substantial noise interference. Existing works primarily focus on methods such as adjusting networks or training strategies to address noisy image recognition, and the anti-noise performance has reached a bottleneck. However, little is known about the exploration of anti-interference solutions from a neuronal perspective.This paper proposes an anti-noise neuronal convolution. This convolution mimics the dendritic structure of neurons, integrates the neighborhood interaction computation logic of dendrites into the underlying design of convolutional operations, and simulates the XOR logic preprocessing function of biological dendrites through nonlinear interactions between input features, thereby fundamentally reconstructing the mathematical paradigm of feature extraction. Unlike traditional convolution where noise directly interferes with feature extraction and exerts a significant impact, DDC mitigates the influence of noise by focusing on the interaction of neighborhood information. Experimental results demonstrate that in image classification tasks (using YOLOv11-cls, VGG16, and EfficientNet-B0) and object detection tasks (using YOLOv11, YOLOv8, and YOLOv5), after replacing traditional convolution with the dendritic convolution, the accuracy of the EfficientNet-B0 model on noisy datasets is relatively improved by 11.23%, and the mean Average Precision (mAP) of YOLOv8 is increased by 19.80%. The consistency between the computation method of this convolution and the dendrites of biological neurons enables it to perform significantly better than traditional convolution in complex noisy environments.

The word/phrase pairs in this evaluation dataset are collected from the click data with millions of users in an image search system, thus contain rich semantic relationships.

Abstract: We demonstrate that a generative model for object shapes can achieve state of the art results on challenging scene text recognition tasks, and with orders of magnitude fewer training images than required for competing discriminative methods. In addition to transcribing text from challenging images, our method performs fine-grained instance segmentation of characters. We show that our model is more robust to both affine transformations and non-affine deformations compared to previous approaches.