AI News Archive: May 20, 2026 — Part 16
Sourced from 500+ daily AI sources, scored by relevance.
- TextSculptor: Training and Benchmarking Scene Text Editing
Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and diffusion-based generative models have substantially improved prompt-driven image editing. However, scene text editing remains challenging, as it requires models to precisely modify textual content while preserving visual realism and no...
- SpectralEarth-FM: Bringing Hyperspectral Imagery into Multimodal Earth Observation Pretraining
Earth observation (EO) foundation models (FMs) are increasingly trained on multisensor data, spanning multispectral imagery (MSI), synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and derived geospatial layers, but hyperspectral imagery (HSI) remains underrepresented. Conversely, existing hyperspectral FMs are train...
- One-Step Distillation of Discrete Diffusion Image Generators via Fixed-Point Iteration
Discrete diffusion models excel at visual synthesis but rely on slow, iterative decoding. Existing single-step distillation methods attempt to bypass this bottleneck, either by training auxiliary score networks that effectively double compute, or by introducing specialized parameterizations and mult...
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- Latent Dynamics for Full Body Avatar Animation
Pose-driven full-body avatars built on neural rendering produce high-quality novel views of a captured subject. Yet loose clothing and other dynamic elements deform in ways pose alone cannot explain: the same pose can correspond to many different states, because their motion depends on history, iner...
- Stream3D: Sequential Multi-View 3D Generation via Evidential Memory
View-conditioned 3D generators such as SAM 3D, TRELLIS and Hunyuan3D produce high-quality object reconstructions from a single view, but real-world visual observation often arrives as long monocular streams. Naively applying these generators to each streaming frame independently leads to severe temp...
- StreamGVE: Training-Free Video Editing via Few-Step Streaming Video Generation
Although existing video editing methods are generally feasible, they often require many costly iterations and still struggle to deliver high-quality yet satisfying editing results. We attribute this limitation to the prevalent data-to-data paradigm, which is less compatible with modern generative mo...
- ReMATF: Recurrent Motion-Adaptive Multi-scale Turbulence Mitigation for Dynamic Scenes
Atmospheric turbulence severely degrades video quality by introducing distortions such as geometric warping, blur, and temporal flickering, posing significant challenges to both visual clarity and temporal consistency. Current state-of-the-art methods are based on transformer, 3D architectures and r...
- iTryOn: Mastering Interactive Video Virtual Try-On with Spatial-Semantic Guidance
Video Virtual Try-On (VVT) aims to seamlessly replace a garment on a person in a video with a new one. While existing methods have made significant strides in maintaining temporal consistency, they are predominantly confined to non-interactive scenarios where models merely showcase garments. This li...
- AIGaitor: Privacy-preserving and cloud-free motion analysis for everyone, using edge computing
Motion capture is the gold standard for measuring human movement, but clinical use remains limited by cost, technical complexity, and privacy concerns. AIGaitor is a privacy-preserving, cloud-free motion analysis system that runs markerless monocular motion-capture pipelines and downstream deep-lear...
- PointACT: Vision-Language-Action Models with Multi-Scale Point-Action Interaction
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation by leveraging large pretrained vision-language backbones. However, most existing VLAs rely primarily on 2D visual representations, which limit their ability to reason about fine-grained geometry ...
- Disentangling Generation and Regression in Stochastic Interpolants for Controllable Image Restoration
Recent advances in Image Restoration (IR) have been largely driven by generative methods such as Diffusion Models and Flow Matching, which excel in synthesizing realistic textures while suffering from slow multi-step inference and compromised pixel fidelity. In contrast, classical regression-based I...
- A Non-Reference Diffusion-Based Restoration Framework for Landsat 7 ETM+ SLC-off Imagery in Antarctica
Acquiring usable optical imagery in Antarctica is inherently challenging due to prolonged polar nights and frequent cloud cover. Landsat provides the longest and most continuous optical observations and constitutes one of the most important remote sensing data sources for Antarctic studies. However,...
- OcclusionFormer: Arranging Z-Order for Layout-Grounded Image Generation
Recent layout-to-image models have achieved remarkable progress in spatial controllability. However, they still struggle with inter-object occlusion. When bounding boxes overlap, most existing methods lack explicit occlusion information, which makes the generation in intersection regions inherently ...
- Let EEG Models Learn EEG
High-fidelity EEG generation is critical for alleviating data scarcity and addressing privacy constraints in large-scale neural modeling. Despite recent progress, most existing approaches formulate EEG generation via discrete denoising objectives, which inadequately reflect the inherently continuous...
- DriveMA: Rethinking Language Interfaces in Driving VLAs with One-Step Meta-Actions
Driving Vision-Language-Action Models (Driving VLAs) commonly introduce natural-language reasoning as an intermediate interface for end-to-end planning, but reasoning-centric interfaces face three practical bottlenecks: obtaining high-quality reasoning annotations is difficult, generating and unders...
- SR-Ground: Image Quality Grounding for Super-Resolved Content
Super-Resolution (SR) has advanced rapidly in recent years, with diffusion-based models achieving unprecedented fidelity at the cost of introducing new types of visual artifacts. While existing Image Quality Assessment (IQA) methods provide holistic quality scores, they lack interpretability and fai...
- PGC: Peak-Guided Calibration for Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection
The rapid evolution of generative AI, from GANs to modern diffusion models, has resulted in increasingly subtle discriminative clues. These fine-grained signals are often overshadowed by dominant, high-fidelity image content (e.g., the main subject), limiting the reliability of existing detectors th...
- RankE: End-to-End Post-Training for Discrete Text-to-Image Generation with Decoder Co-Evolution
Discrete autoregressive (AR) text-to-image (T2I) models pair a VQ tokenizer with an AR policy, and current post-training pipelines optimize only the policy while keeping the VQ decoder frozen. Recent diffusion T2I work, exemplified by REPA-E, has shown that the VAE itself constitutes a key alignment...
- Semantic Granularity Navigation in Image Editing
Despite the generative capabilities of diffusion and flow models, real-image editing remains constrained by a persistent trade-off between semantic editability and structural fidelity. We trace a primary cause of this limitation to the implicit coupling of edit progress with model scale in existing ...
- SurgOnAir: Hierarchy-Aware Real-Time Surgical Video Commentary
Understanding surgical workflow in real time is fundamental for intelligent surgical embodiment, where AI systems continuously perceive and respond as surgery proceeds. In the operating room, critical decisions depend on subtle, moment-to-moment changes, such as fine instrument movements and evolvin...
- ROAR-3D: Routing Arbitrary Views for High-Fidelity 3D Generation
Single-image-to-3D generative models can now produce high-quality geometry, yet conditioning on a single view inevitably introduces ambiguity about unseen regions. Multi-view conditioning can reduce this ambiguity, but existing methods either require fixed canonical viewpoints or rely on external re...
- R2AoP: Reliable and Robust Angle of Progression Estimation from Intrapartum Ultrasound
Accurate estimation of the Angle of Progression (AoP) from intrapartum transperineal ultrasound is critical for objective assessment of labor progression, yet remains highly sensitive to imaging noise, boundary ambiguities, and the geometric amplification of local segmentation errors. We propose R2A...
- VDFP: Video Deflickering with Flicker-banding Priors
Capturing digital screens with smartphones frequently induces severe banding due to hardware synchronization mismatches. Existing video restoration methods struggle with these structured, periodic luminance fluctuations, often resulting in residual artifacts or over-smoothed textures. We firstly con...
- EvoStruct: Bridging Evolutionary and Structural Priors for Antibody CDR Design via Protein Language Model Adaptation
Equivariant graph neural network (GNN) methods for antibody complementarity-determining region (CDR) design achieve the highest sequence recovery but suffer from severe vocabulary collapse. The current best GNN methods over-predict very few amino acids, such as tyrosine and glycine, while ignoring f...
- Is Fixing Schema Graphs Necessary? Full-Resolution Graph Structure Learning for Relational Deep Learning
Relational prediction tasks are fundamental in many real-world applications, where data are naturally stored in relational databases (RDBs). Relational Deep Learning (RDL) addresses this problem by modeling RDBs as graphs and applying graph neural networks (GNNs) for end-to-end learning. However, th...
- A Machine Learning Framework for Weighted Least Squares GNSS Positioning based on Activation Functions
Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are widely used to provide position, velocity, and timing (PVT) information for various applications, including transportation, location-based communication services, and intelligent agriculture. In urban canyons, high-rise buildings and narrow streets can ...
- Gaussian Sheaf Neural Networks
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become the de facto standard for learning on relational data. While traditional GNNs' message passing is well suited for vector-valued node features, there are cases in which node features are better represented by probability distributions than real vectors. Concre...
- roto 2.0: The Robot Tactile Olympiad
Tactile-based reinforcement learning (RL) is currently hindered by fragmented research and a focus on over-saturated orientation tasks. We introduce v2 of the Robot Tactile Olympiad (\texttt{roto 2.0}), a GPU-parallelised benchmark designed to standardise tactile-based RL across four distinct roboti...
- Preference-aware Influence-function-based Data Selection Method for Efficient Fine-Tuning
As LLMs continue to scale, improving training efficiency increasingly depends on using data more effectively. Data selection addresses this problem by allocating a limited training budget to samples that best promote a target behavior. Existing methods usually represent the target behavior with a se...
- What Twelve LLM Agent Benchmark Papers Disclose About Themselves: A Pilot Audit and an Open Scoring Schema
We read twelve well-known LLM agent benchmark papers and recorded, dimension by dimension, what each paper actually says about how its evaluation was run. The motivation came from a familiar frustration: two papers will report results on the same benchmark with the same model name and disagree, and ...
- Memorisation, convergence and generalisation in generative models
Generative neural networks learn how to produce highly realistic images from a large, but finite number of examples - or do they simply memorise their training set? To settle this question, Kadkhodaie, Guth, Simoncelli and Mallat (ICLR '24) trained diffusion models independently on disjoint subsets ...
- Optimized Federated Knowledge Distillation with Distributed Neural Architecture Search
Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without centralizing data. However, real-world deployments must simultaneously address statistical heterogeneity across client data (non-IID), system heterogeneity in device capabilities, and communication efficiency. Existing FL approache...
- CRAFT: Conflict-Resolved Aggregation for Federated Training
The aggregation of conflicting client updates remains a fundamental bottleneck in federated learning (FL) under heterogeneous data distributions. Naive averaging can produce a global update that improves the global objective while conflicting with specific clients, causing degradation for those clie...
- A New Framework to Analyse the Distributional Robustness of Deep Neural Networks
Deep neural networks have achieved impressive performance on a variety of tasks, but their brittleness to distributional shifts remains a significant barrier to real-world deployment. In this paper, we propose a framework to analyse and quantify the distributional robustness of neural networks by st...
- FedCoE: Bridging Generalization and Personalization via Federated Coordinated Dual-level MoEs
Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for privacy-preserving distributed learning. However, existing FL methods face a fundamental challenge. Traditional averaging-based approaches suffer from parameter divergence under non-IID conditions, while personalized FL methods overfit ...
- Equilibrium Reasoners: Learning Attractors Enables Scalable Reasoning
Scaling test-time compute by iteratively updating a latent state has emerged as a powerful paradigm for reasoning. Yet the internal mechanisms that enable these iterative models to generalize beyond memorized patterns remain unclear. We hypothesize that generalizable reasoning arises from learning t...
- Velocityformer: Broken-Symmetry-Matched Equivariant Graph Transformers for Cosmological Velocity Reconstruction
Precise measurement of the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect - a probe of the large-scale distribution of baryonic matter, a key observable for cosmological inference - requires accurate reconstruction of galaxy velocities from spectroscopic surveys. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of kSZ me...
- Mitigating Label Bias with Interpretable Rubric Embeddings
Statistical decision algorithms are increasingly deployed in domains where ground-truth labels are hard to obtain, such as hiring, university admissions, and content moderation. In these settings, models are typically trained on historical human evaluations -- for example, using past hiring decision...
- Neural Negative Binomial Regression for Weekly Seismicity Forecasting: Per-Cell Dispersion Estimation and Tail Risk Assessment
Standard approaches to forecasting the weekly number of earthquakes on a spatial grid rely on the Poisson distribution with a single global dispersion assumption. We show that this assumption is systematically violated in seismic data from Central Asia (2010-2024), where a likelihood-ratio test with...
- Adaptive Signal Resuscitation: Channel-wise Post-Pruning Repair for Sparse Vision Networks
One-shot magnitude pruning can cause severe accuracy collapse in the high-sparsity regime, even when the pruning mask preserves the largest weights. We argue that this failure reflects a granularity mismatch in post-pruning repair. Under global magnitude pruning, nearly collapsed channels can coexis...
- Classification of Single and Mixed Partial Discharges under Switching Voltage Using an AWA-CNN Framework
The growing use of fast-switching power electronics has made partial discharge (PD) analysis under switching-voltage excitation increasingly important, yet more challenging than under sinusoidal conditions due to activity concentrated at voltage transitions. This work presents an Amplitude-Width-Are...
- Fast and Stable Triangular Inversion for Delta-Rule Linear Transformers
Linear attention has emerged as a cornerstone for efficient long-context architectures, as evidenced by its integration into state-of-the-art open-source models including Qwen3.5/3.6, Kimi Linear, and RWKV-7. Models that incorporate linear attention layers with the so-called Delta-Rule involve the i...
- A Mechanistic Study of Tabular Foundation Models
Tabular foundation models with different architectures converge in accuracy across a range of classification and regression tasks. This raises questions a leaderboard cannot answer: (i) whether the models execute the same in-context algorithm, (ii) where row, column, and class-permutation invariance...
- Nonparametric Learning and Earning with One-Point Feedback under Nonstationarity
Firms increasingly rely on dynamic pricing to respond to evolving customer demand, yet in many applications they observe only the revenue generated by a single posted price in each period. At the same time, market conditions may shift gradually or abruptly due to changes in customer preferences, com...
- MC-Risk: Multi-Component Risk Fields for Risk Identification and Motion Planning
We present MC-Risk, a planner-aligned, multi-component risk field on a bird's-eye-view grid that yields early, calibrated, and class-aware risk localization. MC-Risk linearly composes three interpretable modules: (i) a motorized-agent field that fuses a black-box multimodal trajectory predictor with...
- Reinforcement Learning for Risk Adaptation via Differentiable CVaR Barrier Functions
Planning through crowded environments under uncertain obstacle motions remains difficult, as stochastic interactions often induce overly conservative behavior or reduced efficiency. To address this challenge, we propose an end-to-end risk adaptation framework for crowd navigation under obstacle-moti...
- LiteViLNet: Lightweight Vision-LiDAR Fusion Network for Efficient Road Segmentation
Road segmentation is a fundamental perception task for autonomous driving and intelligent robotic systems, requiring both high accuracy and real-time inference, especially for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. Existing multi-modal road segmentation methods often rely on heavy transfor...
- Q-SpiRL: Quantum Spiking Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Robot Navigation
Adaptive robot navigation in dynamic environments requires policies that can reach the target reliably while producing efficient and stable trajectories. This paper presents Q-SpiRL, a quantum spiking reinforcement learning framework for obstacle-aware robot navigation. The framework develops and ev...
- Conflict-Aware Additive Guidance for Flow Models under Compositional Rewards
Inference-time guided sampling steers state-of-the-art diffusion and flow models without fine-tuning by interpreting the generation process as a controllable trajectory. This provides a simple and flexible way to inject external constraints (e.g., cost functions or pre-trained verifiers) for control...