AI News Archive: May 19, 2026 — Part 28
Sourced from 500+ daily AI sources, scored by relevance.
- PollyReach
Give your agent a real number and voice to make calls.
- AffectVerse: Emotional World Models for Multimodal Affective Computing
Humans infer emotions by integrating observed multimodal cues with expectations about how affective states may unfold. Existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs), however, often treat emotion recognition as static fusion over complete audiovisual-text inputs, leaving affective dynamics implic...
- WoundFormer: Multi-Scale Spatial Feature Fusion for Multi-Class Wound Tissue Segmentation
Chronic wounds such as diabetic foot ulcers and pressure injuries require accurate tissue-level assessment to guide treatment planning and monitor healing progression. While deep learning methods have advanced automated wound analysis, most existing approaches focus on binary segmentation and inadeq...
- Landscape-Awareness for Geometric View Diffusion Model
Accurate camera viewpoint estimation under sparse-view conditions remains challenging, particularly in two-view scenarios. Recent approaches leverage diffusion models such as Zero123 to synthesize novel views conditioned on relative viewpoint, showing promising results when repurposed for viewpoint ...
- Eyes on VLM: Benchmarking Gaze Following and Social Gaze Prediction in Vision Language Models
Vision-language models (VLMs) have rapidly evolved into general-purpose multimodal reasoners with strong zero-shot generalization. In this context, VLMs could greatly benefit the analysis of human gaze and attention, a central task in human behavior understanding that requires reasoning about the ph...
- LaCoVL-FER: Landmark-Guided Contrastive Learning Network with Vision-Language Enhancement for Facial Expression Recognition
Facial Expression Recognition (FER) in the wild is still challenging due to uncontrolled variations in pose, occlusion, and illumination. Most existing attention-based methods primarily rely on visual appearance cues, suffering from attention redundancy and instability, which limits their performanc...
- PiG-Avatar: Hierarchical Neural-Field-Guided Gaussian Avatars
Existing Gaussian avatar methods typically parameterize geometry on a body-template surface, which entangles the avatar's representation space with the template's deformation space and limits the capture of layered, off-body, and non-rigid clothing geometry. We present PiG-Avatar, which addresses th...
- MSAVBench: Towards Comprehensive and Reliable Evaluation of Multi-Shot Audio-Video Generation
Video generation is rapidly evolving from single-shot synthesis to complex multi-shot audio-video (MSAV) narratives to meet real-world demands. However, evaluating such frontier models remains a fundamental challenge. Existing benchmarks are limited in scope and data diversity, and rely on rigid eva...
- TideGS: Scalable Training of Over One Billion 3D Gaussian Splatting Primitives via Out-of-Core Optimization
Training 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) at billion-primitive scale is fundamentally memory-bound: each Gaussian primitive carries a large attribute vector, and the aggregate parameter table quickly exceeds GPU capacity, limiting prior systems to tens of millions of Gaussians on commodity single-GPU ha...
- PixVerve: Advancing Native UHR Image Generation to 100MP with a Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset
Text-to-Image (T2I) models have recently seen notable progress around 1K and 2K resolution. With the extreme desire for better visual experience and the rapid development of imaging technology, the demand for Ultra-High-Resolution (UHR) image generation has grown significantly. However, UHR image ge...
- Spatially Prompted Visual Trajectory Prediction for Egocentric Manipulation
Robotic manipulation is often specified through language instructions or task identifiers, yet cluttered environments with similar objects are better handled by spatially indicating what to move and where to place it. Addressing the vision-centric challenge of object and goal specification, we prese...
- OP2GS: Object-Aware 3D Gaussian Splatting with Dual-Opacity Primitives
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provides an explicit and efficient scene representation, but its primitives lack inherent object-level identity, hindering downstream tasks such as open-vocabulary scene understanding. Existing methods typically address this by either distilling high-dimensional feature ...
- CogOmniControl: Reasoning-Driven Controllable Video Generation via Creative Intent Cognition
Recent diffusion models achieve strong photorealism and fluency in video generation, yet remain fragile under abstract, sparse or complex conditions, leading to poor performance in professional production workflows such as storyboard sketches and clay render conditions. Existing video generation mod...
- RECIPE: Procedural Planning via Grounding in Instructional Video
Visual planning asks a model to generate the remaining steps of a procedure in natural language given a partial video context and a goal. Progress on this task is bottlenecked by annotation: clean labeled datasets are small, domain-narrow, and encode a single execution trajectory per example, even t...
- SphericalDreamer: Generating Navigable Immersive 3D Worlds with Panorama Fusion
The generation of immersive and navigable 3D environments is increasingly prevalent with the growing adoption of virtual reality and 3D content. However, recent methods face a fundamental limitation: they cannot produce 3D worlds that simultaneously (i) are navigable over long-range spatial extents ...
- Feed-Forward Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Aerial Views
Reconstructing large-scale urban scenes from sparse aerial views is a crucial yet challenging task. Due to biased top-down and shallow-oblique camera poses, sparse aerial captures exhibit strong evidence imbalance: roofs and open regions are repeatedly observed, while facades, distant buildings, and...
- Motion
A video agent for tasteful motion design
- GoTTA be Diverse: Rethinking Memory Policies for Test-Time Adaptation
Test-time adaptation (TTA) enables a pre-trained model to adapt online to an unlabeled test stream under distribution shift. While most TTA research focuses on the adaptation objective, practical streams also depend critically on the memory used to select which test samples drive adaptation. Existin...
- GLUT: 3D Gaussian Lookup Table for Continuous Color Transformation
3D Lookup Tables (3D LUTs) are widely used for color mapping, but their grid-based representation requires discretizing the RGB space, leading to a capacity-memory trade-off that becomes prohibitive when storing large numbers of LUTs. Recent approaches adopt implicit neural representations to improv...
- Structural Energy Guidance for View-Consistent Text-to-3D Generation
Text-to-3D generation based on diffusion models often suffers from the Janus problem, leading to inconsistent geometry across viewpoints. This work identifies viewpoint bias in 2D diffusion priors as the main cause and proposes Structural Energy-Guided Sampling (SEGS), a training-free and plug-and-p...
- Structured Layout Priors for Robust Out-of-Distribution Visual Document Understanding
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) parse documents end-to-end but frequently break down on layouts unlike those seen in training. We attribute this to a two-hop bottleneck: before the decoder can extract content (Hop 2), it must first classify and localize the enclosing layout entity (Hop 1), and when th...
- When Preference Labels Fall Short: Aligning Diffusion Models from Real Data
Preference alignment aims to guide generative models by learning from comparisons between preferred and non-preferred samples. In practice, most existing approaches rely on preference pairs constructed from model-generated images. Such supervision is inherently relative and can be ambiguous when bot...
- 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...