AI News Archive: May 19, 2026 — Part 18
Sourced from 500+ daily AI sources, scored by relevance.
- Stitched Value Model for Diffusion Alignment
For practical use, diffusion- or flow-based generative models must be aligned with task-specific rewards, such as prompt fidelity or aesthetic preference. That alignment is challenging because the reward is defined for clean output images, but the alignment procedure requires value function estimate...
- Synergistic Foundation Models for Semi-Supervised Fetal Cardiac Ultrasound Analysis: SAM-Med2D Boundary Refinement and DINOv3 Semantic Enhancement
We present a semi-supervised framework for joint segmentation and classification of fetal cardiac ultrasound images. Built upon the EchoCare multi-task backbone, our method integrates SAM-Med2D for boundary refinement and leverages DINOv3 to enhance pseudo-label quality. We introduce view-specific h...
- Depth2Pose: A Pose-Based Benchmark for Monocular Depth Estimation without Ground-Truth Depth
Monocular depth estimation has improved significantly in recent years, driven by increasingly powerful models and large-scale training data. Predicted depth is increasingly used as an input signal for downstream tasks such as Structure-from-Motion (SfM), visual localization, and SLAM. However, monoc...
- Mechanisms of Object Localization in Vision-Language Models
Visually-grounded language models (VLMs) are highly effective in linking visual and textual information, yet they often struggle with basic classification and localization tasks. While classification mechanisms have been studied more extensively, the processes that support object localization remain...
- When Does Model Collapse Occur in Structured Interactive Learning?
The proliferation of generative artificial intelligence has given rise to an interactive learning environment, where model parameters are continuously updated using not only data generated by natural processes, but also synthetic outputs produced by other models. This paradigm introduces two major c...
- TrajTok: Adaptive Spatial Tokenization for Trajectory Representation Learning
Learning generalizable trajectory representations from raw GPS traces remains difficult because the data is continuous, noisy, and irregularly sampled. Spatial tokenization is also challenging: fine grids yield sparse cells with weak embeddings, while coarse grids merge heterogeneous movement patter...
- Optimal Representation Size: High-Dimensional Analysis of Pretraining and Linear Probing
Learning to generalise from limited data is a fundamental challenge for both artificial and biological systems. A common strategy is to extract reusable structure from abundant unlabelled data, enabling efficient adaptation to new tasks from limited labelled data. This two-stage paradigm is now stan...
- Fine-Tuning Without Forgetting via Loss-Adaptive Learning Rates
Fine-tuning large language models on new data improves task performance but degrades capabilities learned during pretraining, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. Existing methods mitigate this by modifying the fine-tuning objective to suppress high-loss tokens or sequences, but these toke...
- Your Neighbors Know: Leveraging Local Neighborhoods for Backdoor Detection in Decentralized Learning
Decentralized learning (DL) is an emerging machine learning paradigm where nodes collaboratively train models without a central server. However, the collaborative nature of DL makes it vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where a model is taught to behave normally on standard inputs while executing hidde...
- Exploiting Non-Negativity in DAG Structure Learning
This work addresses the problem of learning directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from nodal observations generated by a linear structural equation model. DAG learning is a central task in signal processing, machine learning, and causal inference, but it remains challenging because acyclicity is a global c...
- Variance-Reduced Manifold Sampling via Polynomial-Maximization Density Estimation
Uniform sampling on implicitly defined manifolds is a core primitive in motion planning, constrained simulation, and probabilistic machine learning. MASEM addresses this problem by entropy-maximizing resampling, but its resampling weights depend on a local k-nearest-neighbour density estimate whose ...
- JAXenstein: Accelerated Benchmarking for First-Person Environments
The progression of reinforcement learning algorithms have been driven by challenging benchmarks. The rate in which a researcher can iterate on a problem setting directly impacts the speed of algorithm development. Modern machine learning has produced tools that allow for fast and scalable algorithm ...
- Hierarchical Contrastive Learning for Multi-Domain Protein-Ligand Binding
Predicting protein-ligand binding affinity remains intractable for multi-domain proteins, where inter-domain dynamics govern molecular recognition. Existing geometric deep learning methods typically treat proteins as monolithic static graphs, suffering from rigid-body assumptions and aleatoric noise...
- Auditing Privacy in Multi-Tenant RAG under Account Collusion
Multi-tenant retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) services advertise per-account differential privacy as the operative leakage boundary: each account's queries are guaranteed to satisfy $(\varepsilon_{\text{acc}}, δ_{\text{acc}})$-DP with respect to the index. We identify same-index multi-account co...
- Multi-axis Analysis of Image Manipulation Localization
Advanced image editing software enables easy creation of highly convincing image manipulations, which has been made even more accessible in recent years due to advances in generative AI. Manipulated images, while often harmless, could spread misinformation, create false narratives, and influence peo...
- SAGE: Scalable Automatic Gating Ensemble for Confident Negative Harvesting in Fraud Detection
Music streaming fraud, where bad actors artificially inflate stream counts to manipulate chart rankings and royalty payments, poses a significant threat to streaming services and legitimate content creators. Traditional fraud detection approaches struggle with a critical challenge: many legitimate e...
- Goal-Oriented Lower-Tail Calibration of Gaussian Processes for Bayesian Optimization
Bayesian optimization (BO) selects evaluation points for expensive black-box objectives using Gaussian process (GP) predictive distributions. Kernel choice and hyperparameter selection can lead to miscalibrated predictive distributions and an inappropriate exploration-exploitation trade-off. For min...
- Optimizing Computational-Statistical Runtime for Wasserstein Distance Estimation
Squared Wasserstein distance is a frequently used tool to measure discrepancy between probability distributions. This distance is typically computed between empirical measures of size $n$ from two underlying random samples. Unfortunately, even in lower dimensional Euclidean space problems $\left( d ...
- Towards Distillation Guarantees under Algorithmic Alignment for Combinatorial Optimization
Distillation transfers knowledge from a large model trained on broad data to a smaller, more efficient model suitable for deployment. In structured prediction settings, prior knowledge about the task can guide the choice of a target architecture that is algorithmically aligned with the underlying pr...
- Tail Annealing for Heavy-Tailed Flow Matching
Standard generative models struggle with heavy-tailed data: Lipschitz architectures cannot produce power-law tails from Gaussian noise, and interpolating between heavy-tailed data and Gaussians is ill-posed. We propose a simple fix: apply the soft-log transform $φ(x) = \mathrm{sign}(x) \cdot \log(1 ...
- Active Context Selection Improves Simple Regret in Contextual Bandits
We study the contextual multi-armed bandit problem with a finite context space (a.k.a. subpopulations), where the learner recommends a best action for each context and is evaluated by context-weighted simple regret. Our guarantees are worst-case over the reward distributions, while remaining instanc...
- When Critics Disagree: Adaptive Reward Poisoning Attacks in RIS-Aided Wireless Control System
Reward-poisoning attacks present a significant risk to learning-based wireless control systems. Given this, we propose a Disagreement-Guided Reward Poisoning (DGRP) adaptive attack on a Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) agent. In a Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) environment assisted by Reconfigurable Intellige...
- D$^3$-Subsidy: Online and Sequential Driver Subsidy Decision-Making for Large-Scale Ride-Hailing Market
Ride-hailing platforms like DiDi Chuxing operate in highly dynamic environments where balancing driver supply and passenger demand is critical. Although driver-side subsidies serve as a primary lever to align these forces and improve key KPIs like completed rides (\texttt{Rides}) and gross merchandi...
- CAMERA: Adapting to Semantic Camouflage in Unsupervised Text-Attributed Graph Fraud Detection
Text-attributed graph fraud detection (TAGFD) plays a critical role in preventing fraudulent activities on online social and e-commerce platforms. However, to evade detection, fraudsters continuously evolve their camouflaging strategies by deliberately mimicking textual responses of benign users, th...
- Take It or Leave It: Intent-Controlled Partial Optimal Transport
While optimal transport (OT) enforces a rigid constraint by requiring two measures to be matched exactly, partial optimal transport relaxes this requirement by allowing mass to remain unmatched through a global budget, scalar rebate, or uniform rejection rule. However, many applications call for mor...
- Training-Free Bayesian Filtering with Generative Emulators
Bayesian filtering is a well-known problem that aims to estimate plausible states of a dynamical system from observations. Among existing approaches to solve this problem, particle filters are theoretically exact for non-linear dynamics and observations, but suffer from poor scalability in high dime...
- Beyond Binary Success: A Diagnostic Meta-Evaluation Framework for Fine-Grained Manipulation
Fine-grained manipulation marks a regime where global scene context no longer suffices, and success hinges on the tight coupling of local attribute grounding, high-fidelity spatial perception, and constraint-respecting motor execution. However, current embodied AI benchmarks collapse these capacitie...
- Normative Networks for Source Separation via Local Plasticity and Dendritic Computation
Blind source separation (BSS) is a natural framework for studying how latent causes may be recovered from sensory mixtures, but deriving online and biologically plausible algorithms for structured (i.e., constrained to known domains) and potentially correlated sources remains challenging. Recent wor...
- Learning Orthonormal Bases for Function Spaces
Infinite-dimensional orthonormal basis expansions play a central role in representing and computing with function spaces due to their favorable linear algebraic properties. However, common bases such as Fourier or wavelets are fixed and do not adapt to the structure of a given problem or dataset. In...
- RoHIL: Robust Human-in-the-Loop Robotic Reinforcement Learning Against Illumination Variations
Human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning systems achieve near-perfect success on the workstation where they are trained, but collapse when the same robot is moved to a workstation a few meters away due to shifts in the visual input distribution caused by new lamp positions and window light. Re-colle...
- Beyond Action Residuals: Real-World Robot Policy Steering via Bottleneck Latent Reinforcement Learning
Pretrained imitation policies have become a strong foundation for robot manipulation, but they often require online improvement to overcome execution errors, limited dataset coverage, and deployment mismatch. A central question is therefore how reinforcement learning (RL) should adapt policies after...
- Trajectory Planning and Control near the Limits: an Open Experimental Benchmark on the RoboRacer Platform
We present a modular framework to benchmark new and existing methods for trajectory planning and control in high-acceleration maneuvers that push autonomous driving to the limits. Our framework includes time-optimal raceline generation, online time-optimal velocity replanning, geometric path trackin...
- Beyond Imitation: Learning Safe End-to-End Autonomous Driving from Hard Negatives
Existing imitation learning methods for end-to-end autonomous driving predominantly learn from successful demonstrations by minimizing geometric deviations from expert trajectories. This paradigm implicitly assumes that spatial proximity implies behavioral safety, leading to a critical objective mis...
- D-CLING: Prior-Preserving Depth-Conditioned Fine-Tuning for Navigation Foundation Models
Navigation Foundation Models (NFMs) trained on large cross-embodied datasets have demonstrated powerful generalizability in various scenarios. Adopting in-domain fine-tuning for an NFM efficiently calibrates the visuomotor policy, promising further improvement even in a novel scenario. However, the ...
- HEAT: Heterogeneous End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Trajectory-Guided World Models
End-to-end autonomous driving has emerged as a compelling alternative to traditional modular pipelines by directly mapping raw sensor data to driving actions. While recent approaches achieve strong performance on single-domain datasets, their performance degrades significantly when trained jointly a...
- Implicit Action Chunking for Smooth Continuous Control
Reinforcement learning often produces high-frequency oscillatory control signals that undermine the safety and stability required for physical deployment. Explicit action chunking addresses this by predicting fixed-horizon trajectories but scales the policy output dimension proportionally with the h...
- SafeAlign-VLA: A Negative-Enhanced Safe Alignment Framework for Risk-Aware Autonomous Driving
End-to-end autonomous driving systems excel in common scenarios but struggle with safety-critical long-tail cases. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are promising due to their strong reasoning capabilities. However, most VLA-based approaches rely on positive expert demonstrations, rarely exploitin...
- ARC-RL: A Reinforcement Learning Playground Inspired by ARC Raiders
Reinforcement learning for legged locomotion has matured into a stack of multi-component reward functions and physics-engine benchmarks whose morphologies are uniformly derived from real commercial hardware. Game NPCs, however, are bound by stylistic constraints absent from sim-to-real robotics and ...
- Sampling-Based Safe Reinforcement Learning
Safe exploration remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), limiting the deployment of RL agents in the real world. We propose Sampling-Based Safe Reinforcement Learning (SBSRL), a model-based RL algorithm that maintains safety throughout the learning process by enforcing constr...
- Domain-Adaptive Communication-Rate Optimization for Sim-to-Real Humanoid-Robot Wireless XR Teleoperation
Wireless extended reality (XR) teleoperation provides embodied interaction capability for collecting humanoid robot demonstrations, but the large-scale adoption is restricted by the overhead of high-frequency motion transmission. This paper develops a system framework that integrates sampling, trans...
- Graph Neural Planning and Predictive Control for Multi-Robot Communication-Constrained Unlabeled Motion Planning
The multi-robot unlabeled motion planning problem of concurrently assigning robots to goals and generating safe trajectories is central in many collaborative tasks. Recent Graph Neural Network methods offer scalable decentralized solutions but rely on simplified dynamics and simulation environments,...
- Aerial Inspection Behaviors via RL-based Quadrotor Control for Under-canopy Forest Environments
This paper addresses the problem of using a deep Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based low-level Quadrotor controller within an autonomous Quadrotor navigation stack for aerial inspection missions in under-canopy forest environments. Specifically, the article presents an end-to-end (mapping states to RP...
- KIO-planner: Attention-Guided Single-Stage Motion Planning with Dual Mapping for UAV Navigation
Autonomous UAV flight in confined, wall-dense environments requires low-latency and reliable motion planning under strict safety constraints. Traditional optimization-based planners suffer from mapping latency and easily fall into local minima when navigating through dense structural obstacles. Mean...
- RoVLA: Multi-Consistency Constraints for Robust Vision-Language-Action Models
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong performance on embodied manipulation, yet they remain brittle under visual observation changes, paraphrased language instructions, and compounded perturbations. This limitation suggests that existing methods still rely heavily on shallow correlat...
- FlyMirage: A Fully Automated Generation Pipeline for Diverse and Scalable UAV Flight Data via Generative World Model
In the field of Vision-Language Navigation (VLN), aerial datasets remain limited in their ability to combine scale, diversity, and realism, often relying on either costly real-world scenes or visually limited simulations. To address these challenges, we introduce FlyMirage, a highly scalable and ful...
- MCNav: Memory-Aware Dynamic Cognitive Map for Zero-shot Goal-oriented Navigation
Navigating to instance-level targets in complex environments is a challenging problem. Many existing zero-shot methods achieve strong performance by modeling the entire environment and leveraging large language models for scene understanding. However, such strategies primarily focus on exploring new...
- PAPO-VLA: Planning-Aware Policy Optimization for Vision-Language-Action Models
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show promising ability in language-guided robotic tasks. However, making VLA policies reliable remains challenging, because a manipulation task is completed through closed-loop interaction, where each action affects subsequent execution. To analyze this problem, w...
- Learning-Accelerated Optimization-based Trajectory Planning for Cooperative Aerial-Ground Handover Missions
This paper presents a learning-augmented trajectory planning framework for cooperative unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) handover missions. While centralized trajectory optimization ensures dynamic feasibility and task optimality, its high computational cost limits real...
- CANINE: Coaching Visually Impaired Users for Interactive Navigation with a Robot Guide Dog
Robot guide dogs offer navigation assistance that greatly expands the independent mobility of the visually impaired, but their effective use requires subtle human-robot coordination that is difficult for users to learn from generic verbal instructions. To tackle this challenge, we present CANINE, an...
- Neuromorphic Control of a Flapping-Wing Robot on Resource-Constrained Hardware
Flapping-Wing Micro Aerial Vehicles (FWMAVs) provide exceptional maneuverability and aerodynamic efficiency but pose significant challenges for onboard control due to nonlinear dynamics and stringent Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) constraints, as exemplified by a butterfly-inspired robot less than 3...