Information Fusion
Conditional Information Bottleneck for Multimodal Fusion: Overcoming Shortcut Learning in Sarcasm Detection
Wang, Yihua, Jia, Qi, Xu, Cong, Chen, Feiyu, Liu, Yuhan, Zhang, Haotian, Jin, Liang, Liu, Lu, Wang, Zhichun
Multimodal sarcasm detection is a complex task that requires distinguishing subtle complementary signals across modalities while filtering out irrelevant information. Many advanced methods rely on learning shortcuts from datasets rather than extracting intended sarcasm-related features. However, our experiments show that shortcut learning impairs the model's generalization in real-world scenarios. Furthermore, we reveal the weaknesses of current modality fusion strategies for multimodal sarcasm detection through systematic experiments, highlighting the necessity of focusing on effective modality fusion for complex emotion recognition. To address these challenges, we construct MUStARD++$^{R}$ by removing shortcut signals from MUStARD++. Then, a Multimodal Conditional Information Bottleneck (MCIB) model is introduced to enable efficient multimodal fusion for sarcasm detection. Experimental results show that the MCIB achieves the best performance without relying on shortcut learning.
MULTIBENCH++: A Unified and Comprehensive Multimodal Fusion Benchmarking Across Specialized Domains
Xue, Leyan, Zhang, Changqing, Xue, Kecheng, Liu, Xiaohong, Wang, Guangyu, Han, Zongbo
Although multimodal fusion has made significant progress, its advancement is severely hindered by the lack of adequate evaluation benchmarks. Current fusion methods are typically evaluated on a small selection of public datasets, a limited scope that inadequately represents the complexity and diversity of real-world scenarios, potentially leading to biased evaluations. This issue presents a twofold challenge. On one hand, models may overfit to the biases of specific datasets, hindering their generalization to broader practical applications. On the other hand, the absence of a unified evaluation standard makes fair and objective comparisons between different fusion methods difficult. Consequently, a truly universal and high-performance fusion model has yet to emerge. To address these challenges, we have developed a large-scale, domain-adaptive benchmark for multimodal evaluation. This benchmark integrates over 30 datasets, encompassing 15 modalities and 20 predictive tasks across key application domains. To complement this, we have also developed an open-source, unified, and automated evaluation pipeline that includes standardized implementations of state-of-the-art models and diverse fusion paradigms. Leveraging this platform, we have conducted large-scale experiments, successfully establishing new performance baselines across multiple tasks. This work provides the academic community with a crucial platform for rigorous and reproducible assessment of multimodal models, aiming to propel the field of multimodal artificial intelligence to new heights.
Target Tracking via LiDAR-RADAR Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Racing
Cellina, Marcello, Corno, Matteo, Savaresi, Sergio Matteo
High Speed multi-vehicle Autonomous Racing will increase the safety and performance of road-going Autonomous Vehicles. Precise vehicle detection and dynamics estimation from a moving platform is a key requirement for planning and executing complex autonomous overtaking maneuvers. To address this requirement, we have developed a Latency-Aware EKF-based Multi Target Tracking algorithm fusing LiDAR and RADAR measurements. The algorithm explots the different sensor characteristics by explicitly integrating the Range Rate in the EKF Measurement Function, as well as a-priori knowledge of the racetrack during state prediction. It can handle Out-Of-Sequence Measurements via Reprocessing using a double State and Measurement Buffer, ensuring sensor delay compensation with no information loss. This algorithm has been implemented on Team PoliMOVE's autonomous racecar, and was proved experimentally by completing a number of fully autonomous overtaking maneuvers at speeds up to 275 km/h.
Grounding Foundational Vision Models with 3D Human Poses for Robust Action Recognition
Babey, Nicholas, Gu, Tiffany, Li, Yiheng, Meo, Cristian, Zhu, Kevin
For embodied agents to effectively understand and interact within the world around them, they require a nuanced comprehension of human actions grounded in physical space. Current action recognition models, often relying on RGB video, learn superficial correlations between patterns and action labels, so they struggle to capture underlying physical interaction dynamics and human poses in complex scenes. We propose a model architecture that grounds action recognition in physical space by fusing two powerful, complementary representations: V-JEPA 2's contextual, predictive world dynamics and CoMotion's explicit, occlusion-tolerant human pose data. Our model is validated on both the InHARD and UCF-19-Y-OCC benchmarks for general action recognition and high-occlusion action recognition, respectively. Our model outperforms three other baselines, especially within complex, occlusive scenes. Our findings emphasize a need for action recognition to be supported by spatial understanding instead of statistical pattern recognition.
Cross-Platform E-Commerce Product Categorization and Recategorization: A Multimodal Hierarchical Classification Approach
Gross, Lotte, Walter, Rebecca, Zoppi, Nicole, Justus, Adrien, Gambetti, Alessandro, Han, Qiwei, Kaiser, Maximilian
This study addresses critical industrial challenges in e-commerce product categorization, namely platform heterogeneity and the structural limitations of existing taxonomies, by developing and deploying a multimodal hierarchical classification framework. Using a dataset of 271,700 products from 40 international fashion e-commerce platforms, we integrate textual features (RoBERTa), visual features (ViT), and joint vision-language representations (CLIP). We investigate fusion strategies, including early, late, and attention-based fusion within a hierarchical architecture enhanced by dynamic masking to ensure taxonomic consistency. Results show that CLIP embeddings combined via an MLP-based late-fusion strategy achieve the highest hierarchical F1 (98.59%), outperforming unimodal baselines. To address shallow or inconsistent categories, we further introduce a self-supervised "product recategorization" pipeline using SimCLR, UMAP, and cascade clustering, which discovered new, fine-grained categories (for example, subtypes of "Shoes") with cluster purities above 86%. Cross-platform experiments reveal a deployment-relevant trade-off: complex late-fusion methods maximize accuracy with diverse training data, while simpler early-fusion methods generalize more effectively to unseen platforms. Finally, we demonstrate the framework's industrial scalability through deployment in EURWEB's commercial transaction intelligence platform via a two-stage inference pipeline, combining a lightweight RoBERTa stage with a GPU-accelerated multimodal stage to balance cost and accuracy.
Graph Learning
Xia, Feng, Peng, Ciyuan, Ren, Jing, Febrinanto, Falih Gozi, Luo, Renqiang, Saikrishna, Vidya, Yu, Shuo, Kong, Xiangjie
Graph learning has rapidly evolved into a critical subfield of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Its development began with early graph-theoretic methods, gaining significant momentum with the advent of graph neural networks (GNNs). Over the past decade, progress in scalable architectures, dynamic graph modeling, multimodal learning, generative AI, explainable AI (XAI), and responsible AI has broadened the applicability of graph learning to various challenging environments. Graph learning is significant due to its ability to model complex, non-Euclidean relationships that traditional machine learning struggles to capture, thus better supporting real-world applications ranging from drug discovery and fraud detection to recommender systems and scientific reasoning. However, challenges like scalability, generalization, heterogeneity, interpretability, and trustworthiness must be addressed to unlock its full potential. This survey provides a comprehensive introduction to graph learning, focusing on key dimensions including scalable, temporal, multimodal, generative, explainable, and responsible graph learning. We review state-of-the-art techniques for efficiently handling large-scale graphs, capturing dynamic temporal dependencies, integrating heterogeneous data modalities, generating novel graph samples, and enhancing interpretability to foster trust and transparency. We also explore ethical considerations, such as privacy and fairness, to ensure responsible deployment of graph learning models. Additionally, we identify and discuss emerging topics, highlighting recent integration of graph learning and other AI paradigms and offering insights into future directions. This survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of graph learning.
Towards Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models by Refining Textual Embeddings
Agrawal, Aakriti, KV, Gouthaman, Aralikatti, Rohith, Jagatap, Gauri, Yuan, Jiaxin, Kamarshi, Vijay, Fanelli, Andrea, Huang, Furong
In this work, we identify an inherent bias in prevailing LVLM architectures toward the language modality, largely resulting from the common practice of simply appending visual embeddings to the input text sequence. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective method that refines textual embeddings by integrating average-pooled visual features. Our approach demonstrably improves visual grounding and significantly reduces hallucinations on established benchmarks. While average pooling offers a straightforward, robust, and efficient means of incorporating visual information, we believe that more sophisticated fusion methods could further enhance visual grounding and cross-modal alignment. Given that the primary focus of this work is to highlight the modality imbalance and its impact on hallucinations -- and to show that refining textual embeddings with visual information mitigates this issue -- we leave exploration of advanced fusion strategies for future work.
Deep Learning Approach to Anomaly Detection in Enterprise ETL Processes with Autoencoders
Chen, Xin, Gadgil, Saili Uday, Gao, Kangning, Hu, Yi, Nie, Cong
An anomaly detection method based on deep autoencoders is proposed to address anomalies that often occur in enterprise-level ETL data streams. The study first analyzes multiple types of anomalies in ETL processes, including delays, missing values, duplicate loading, and sudden abnormal changes, and applies data standardization and feature modeling to ensure stable and usable inputs. In the method design, the encoder-decoder structure compresses high-dimensional inputs into latent representations and reconstructs them, while reconstruction error is used to measure anomaly levels. Regularization constraints are introduced in the latent space to enhance feature sparsity and distribution learning, thereby improving robustness in complex data streams. Systematic analyses under different hyperparameter settings, environmental changes, and data characteristics show that the proposed method achieves superior performance in AUC, ACC, Precision, and Recall. The results demonstrate that the deep autoencoder-based detection mechanism can effectively capture latent distribution patterns in enterprise-level ETL data streams and accurately identify diverse anomalies, providing reliable support for enterprise data processing and intelligent analysis.
SIGMA: Search-Augmented On-Demand Knowledge Integration for Agentic Mathematical Reasoning
Asgarov, Ali, Suleymanov, Umid, Khatri, Aadyant
Solving mathematical reasoning problems requires not only accurate access to relevant knowledge but also careful, multi-step thinking. However, current retrieval-augmented models often rely on a single perspective, follow inflexible search strategies, and struggle to effectively combine information from multiple sources. We introduce SIGMA (Search-Augmented On-Demand Knowledge Integration for AGentic Mathematical reAsoning), a unified framework that orchestrates specialized agents to independently reason, perform targeted searches, and synthesize findings through a moderator mechanism. Each agent generates hypothetical passages to optimize retrieval for its analytic perspective, ensuring knowledge integration is both context-sensitive and computation-efficient. When evaluated on challenging benchmarks such as MATH500, AIME, and PhD-level science QA GPQA, SIGMA consistently outperforms both open- and closed-source systems, achieving an absolute performance improvement of 7.4%. Our results demonstrate that multi-agent, on-demand knowledge integration significantly enhances both reasoning accuracy and efficiency, offering a scalable approach for complex, knowledge-intensive problem-solving. We will release the code upon publication.
A Re-node Self-training Approach for Deep Graph-based Semi-supervised Classification on Multi-view Image Data
Recently, graph-based semi-supervised learning and pseudo-labeling have gained attention due to their effectiveness in reducing the need for extensive data annotations. Pseudo-labeling uses predictions from unlabeled data to improve model training, while graph-based methods are characterized by processing data represented as graphs. However, the lack of clear graph structures in images combined with the complexity of multi-view data limits the efficiency of traditional and existing techniques. Moreover, the integration of graph structures in multi-view data is still a challenge. In this paper, we propose Re-node Self-taught Graph-based Semi-supervised Learning for Multi-view Data (RSGSLM). Our method addresses these challenges by (i) combining linear feature transformation and multi-view graph fusion within a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) framework, (ii) dynamically incorporating pseudo-labels into the GCN loss function to improve classification in multi-view data, and (iii) correcting topological imbalances by adjusting the weights of labeled samples near class boundaries. Additionally, (iv) we introduce an unsupervised smoothing loss applicable to all samples. This combination optimizes performance while maintaining computational efficiency. Experimental results on multi-view benchmark image datasets demonstrate that RSGSLM surpasses existing semi-supervised learning approaches in multi-view contexts.