AI News Archive: July 20, 2026 — Part 22
Sourced from 500+ daily AI sources, scored by relevance.
- FlowMimic: Mask-free Visual Editing and Generation with Pixel-pair Warped Flow Field for Online Video Editing Data Generation and Modality Mimicry
In line with the prevailing direction of vision research, we explore the integration of both generation and editing capabilities for video and image modalities within a single model. Current approaches to collecting video editing data typically depend on labour-intensive, time-consuming curated proc...
- Three-Body Scattering for Generative Modeling
Modern generative models typically rely on an adversarial critic, a prescribed noise-to-data path, or an autoregressive factorization. Instead, we show that a proper distributional energy can induce sample-level motion and provide direct regression supervision for a one-step generator. Three-Body Sc...
- Certified Training for Convolutional Perturbations
Vision models have been found to be susceptible to perturbations such as motion blur induced at runtime by a shaking camera. This impedes their deployment in critical applications since phenomena such as slightly blurred vision might lead to failures, for example an object detector missing objects. ...
- Plenoptic Condensation: A Novel Approach to Generalized Scene Reconstruction
We present a novel Generalized Scene Reconstruction (GSR) approach called Plenoptic Condensation (PCon). PCon uses a multi-stage reconstruction pipeline, initially converting images into "soupy" scene elements with low (representational) power, then adaptively condensing the "soup" into "structured"...
- Lossless-INR: Lossless Volumetric Implicit Neural Representations
Implicit neural representation (INR) methods provide continuous coordinate-to-value mappings and integrate naturally with direct volume rendering, making them attractive for representing volumetric data. However, existing INR-based approaches for volumetric data are inherently lossy, and even small ...
- Occlusion-Aware Panoptic Segmentation with Joint Position Embedding and Occlusion-Level Attention
Panoptic segmentation in complex scenes remains challenging because of occlusions, yet modern approaches often neglect occlusion modelling. In this paper, we propose \textbf{P}osition \textbf{E}mbedding \textbf{M}odulation with \textbf{O}cclusion-\textbf{L}evel \textbf{A}ttention (PEMOLA), a novel o...
- SciForma: Structure-Faithful Generation of Scientific Diagrams
Structural fidelity is essential to scientific methodology diagrams. To communicate research logic, these diagrams must faithfully render components, directional relations, and textual annotations. Since a single error, such as a reversed arrow or an unreadable equation, can invalidate the entire fi...
- The Label Complexity of Class-Conditional Coverage under Distribution Shift
Standard evaluation of many recognition systems contains distribution shift by construction, since benchmarks place disjoint conditions in the training and test splits. Under such a shift, split conformal prediction keeps marginal coverage near the nominal level while per-class coverage fails silent...
- VGOcc: Learning Visual-Geometric Gaussians for Vision-Centric 3D Driving Occupancy Prediction
Vision-only occupancy prediction requires recovering a semantic 3D occupancy field from calibrated surround-view images, where each view provides observations with ambiguous depth along camera rays. Existing methods have progressed from dense structured representations to sparse Gaussian primitives,...
- QIRF Quantum-Inspired Non-Orthogonal Function-Space Compression for 3D Gaussian Splatting
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieves high-quality real-time rendering by representing a scene with a large collection of anisotropic Gaussian primitives. However, complex scenes often require millions of Gaussians, resulting in substantial storage and rendering costs. Existing compression methods m...
- UniETP: Unifying Environments for Generalizable Embodied Task Planning
This paper focuses on the problem of Embodied Task Planning, where an agent is required to execute a sequence of atomic actions within an interactive environment to complete a user-specified task. Though a variety of simulators and datasets have previously been built for this task, these efforts are...
- Co-addition and Subtraction of Undersampled Images
In astronomical imaging surveys, repeated observations of the same sky patches are taken in order to obtain deeper images and detect new sources. This is the case in the search for many transient phenomena, such as supernovae, gravitational wave (GW) optical counterparts and other cataclysmic variab...
- When 2D Cues Fail: Improving Image Manipulation Localization with Reliable 3D Geometry
Existing image manipulation localization (IML) methods rely heavily on 2D forensic cues, such as low-level artifacts, noise traces, and semantic inconsistencies in the manipulated image. While effective in many cases, these cues become much less discriminative when manipulated regions are well blend...
- Benchmarking NACTI Species Recognition in Long-Tailed Regimes
As with most ``in the wild'' collections of the natural world, the North America Camera Trap Images (NACTI) dataset exhibits long-tailed class imbalance, with the largest class covering over 50% of its 3.7M images. Building on the PyTorch Wildlife model, we systematically evaluate Long-Tail Recognit...
- SAMRI-3D: Adapting SAM2 for 3D MRI Segmentation with Global Volume Tokens
Foundation models such as Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) have transformed natural-image and video segmentation, and recent work has begun adapting them to medical imaging. These adaptations, however, are largely general-purpose models that treat MRI as one modality among many; large-scale, MRI-spec...
- Keyframe-Anchored Identity Preservation for Sequential-Action Video Generation
Identity-preserving text-to-video generation aims to synthesize a video that accurately follows a textual description while maintaining the recognizability of a user-specified subject throughout. The IPVG26 challenge extends this framework from a single holistic prompt to a temporally structured spe...
- MuViSeg: Multi-View Segment Correspondences from Dense Geometry Priors
Classical image correspondence is solved at the level of sparse keypoints or dense pixels, but the systems that consume these matches - object-level mapping, topological navigation, scene-graph maintenance - reason about whole objects. Recent work narrows this gap by matchng directly at the level of...
- Packet-Loss Robust 3D Gaussian Compression via Atomic Packaging and GNN-based Error Concealment
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and recent compression schemes such as HAC++ enable high-fidelity real-time neural rendering, but their bitstreams are fragile under packet loss during network streaming. Existing compression methods often separate correlated anchor attributes into independent streams, s...
- Locality-Aware Density Control for Efficient Gaussian-based Image Representation
2D Gaussian Splatting is an attractive direction for image representation due to its explicit formulation, fast rasterization, and favorable decoding efficiency. The representation quality of this paradigm depends on the proper allocation of Gaussian capacity to the demanding regions. However, exist...
- Consistent Feature Transport for Image Relighting
Image relighting modifies illumination while preserving non-lighting content such as identity and geometry. Existing diffusion-based methods often suffer from unstable illumination changes or inconsistent content preservation under complex lighting, as they lack an explicit mechanism to learn featur...
- PRiSM: Prototype Regularization for Few-Shot VLMs
Training-free few-shot adaptation methods have gained significant attention recently in the context of Vision-language Models (VLMs). Yet, current benchmarks rely on strong assumptions about the statistics of the adaptation data, e.g., class balance. We question these simplifying assumptions and int...
- Toward Optimal Adenovirus Detection Using YOLO26
This study systematically benchmarks different data augmentation setups across YOLO26 model size variants to determine the most effective setup for adenovirus detection in TEM images. The benchmarked setups include NAS, GAS, GMAS and DAS, all evaluated under identical training conditions. The adenov...
- CDIS: Cross-Dimensional Class-Agnostic 3D Instance Segmentation via 2D Mask Tracking and 3D-2D Projection Merging
Class-agnostic 3D instance segmentation is critical for robotic systems operating in unknown environments, enabling perception of previously unseen objects for reliable manipulation and navigation. Existing approaches typically project per-frame 2D instance masks into 3D and merge them, which often ...
- From Sign Language Generation to Humanoid Execution: Vision-Language Guided Retargeting with Collision Mitigation
Recent sign language generation (SLG) systems increasingly output dense 3D body representations, which better preserve full-body kinematics and geometry for downstream embodiment on humanoid robots. However, these generated motions frequently exhibit self-intersections such as hand-hand and hand-tor...
- Patch Policy: Efficient Embodied Control via Dense Visual Representations
Pretrained dense visual features from Vision Transformers (ViTs) are powerful yet have been underutilized in robot learning. Modern robot policies either compress each observation into a single global token, or rely on visual backbones trained from scratch, sacrificing both fine-grained spatial deta...
- Vector Search As Nearest Neighbor Matching: RAG-based Policy Learning in Causal Inference
We propose one-step and two-step methods for policy learning with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We formulate RAG-based action selection under the potential outcome framework. In the two-step method, vector search retrieves action-specific neighboring evidence in an embedding space, the gener...
- FlashRT: Agent Harness for Guiding Agents to Deploy Real-Time Multimodal Applications
Real-time multimodal applications, including voice agents and interactive video generation, compose heterogeneous models into pipelines whose efficient deployment requires application-specific decisions about placement, streaming, and intra-model parallelism. Existing serving systems and auto-parall...
- Sobek: Streaming Equivariant Tensor Product Convolutions
Equivariant graph neural networks repeatedly apply edge-conditioned tensor-product convolutions over graph edges. Conventional implementations materialize edge-specific weights, messages, and adjoints, causing tensor-product workspace and memory traffic to grow rapidly with graph size and operator w...
- FlashPDE: A Drop-in Fused Triton Operator Library for Neural PDE Solvers
Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) solve PDEs by incorporating physical constraints into neural-network training, but large-scale problems are limited by automatic-differentiation memory overhead and inefficient execution of grid-based PDE operators. We present FlashPDE, a drop-in fused operat...
- Remote Awareness of Seafloor Images Collected by AUVs over Low-Bandwidth Communication Links
This paper introduces a method for real-time processing and transmission of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) imagery over low-bandwidth communication links. It leverages artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to identify a set of images that best represent an entire dataset, or automatically fin...
- fSRD: Fuzzy Spectral Region Decomposition -- Automated Multi Operator Koopman Representations via an Adaptive Spectral Learning Architecture
Highly nonlinear chaotic dynamical systems remain difficult to model due to fundamental trade-offs between complexity, expressivity, and data efficiency. Modern machine learning methods achieve strong predictive performance but often rely on a-priori system knowledge or curated data with limited int...
- Information-Based Exploration via Random Features for Reinforcement Learning
Representation learning has enabled classical exploration strategies to be extended to deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), but often makes algorithms more complex and theoretical guarantees harder to establish. We introduce Random Feature Information Gain (RFIG), grounded in Bayesian kernel methods th...
- Aggregate in the Advantage, Not the Ratio: A Canonical-Form Analysis of Cooperative Multi-Agent Policy Optimization
Multi-agent policy optimization, exemplified by PPO-based methods, is a key branch of cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). A central design question is how many neighboring agents\footnote{In this paper, "neighbors" refer not only to physical proximity but also to agents whose acti...
- PRIME: Plasticity Recovery in Multi-Agent Environments for UAV-Assisted Emergency Communication Networks
Most reinforcement learning controllers for these networks assume stationary conditions, and the few that handle change react to the external environment while leaving the network's internal state unexamined. We show that sustained non-stationarity damages this internal state directly: as objectives...
- AutoEncoder-Compressed Parallel Split Learning for Pre-trained Model Fine-Tuning
Distributed Fine-Tuning (DFT) of large-scale Foundation Models (FMs) on resource-constrained edge devices is limited by local compute constraints and communication overhead. Parallel Split Learning (PSL) reduces client-side computation by keeping few model layers on each client and offloading the re...
- Causal Discovery on Irregular Time Series
Causal discovery methods have shown strong performance in temporal systems, but they typically rely on regular and discrete lag structures, limiting their applicability to regularly sampled data. However, many real-world tasks require dealing with irregularly sampled streams of events, such as senso...
- QR Pocket
“Your Smart QR Companion.”
- Unveiling Invariant and Transferable Latent Factors Across Heterogeneous Environments via ATLAS
This paper considers a multi-environment factor model in which high-dimensional covariates are collected from heterogeneous environments, with auxiliary labels available in a subset of these environments. The joint distribution of the covariates may vary across environments, whereas the latent struc...
- EVOLVE: Efficient Learned Volume Compression with Variable-Rate Encoding on a Cross-Domain Database
Large-scale scientific simulations generate volumetric data at rates that far outpace advances in storage and network bandwidth, making effective lossy compression increasingly critical. However, conventional compressors often struggle to preserve fine structural details at high compression ratios (...
- A Continual Validation, Updating, and Decision-Making Framework for Self-Adaptive Digital Twins via Robust Model Predictive Control: A Case Study in Additive Manufacturing
Digital Twins rely on surrogate models to mirror physical systems in real time, yet these models can degrade as operating conditions evolve, a phenomenon known as concept drift. Maintaining surrogate fidelity under drift, particularly when models must also capture aleatoric uncertainty, remains an o...
- Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections for Parameter-Efficient Finetuning
Most parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) methods adapt weights or activations, thus leaving one of the key Transformer components unchanged: residual connections. This paper investigates Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC), a generalisation of residual connections, as a novel PEFT approac...
- ClouDens: Operational Context-Aware Anomaly Detection for Large-scale Cloud System Monitoring
With the rapid growth of cloud computing infrastructures in scale and complexity, network monitoring for Large-scale Cloud Systems (LCSs) has become increasingly challenging, requiring automated and reliable anomaly detection to maintain service availability. Modern LCSs continuously generate teleme...
- COVAriance-Induced Fairness Gap Penalty for Subgroup-Fair Clustering
Fair clustering aims to make cluster assignments independent of sensitive attributes, but this goal becomes challenging when multiple sensitive attributes jointly define many subgroups. In such settings, directly extending existing fair clustering algorithms is computationally expensive or numerical...
- Hardware Mechanisms to Dynamically Throttle AI Performance
As more capable AI models are increasingly integrated into critical computer systems, the lack of control over AI intent motivates safety mechanisms. Existing software safeguards impose only behavioral constraints that can potentially be bypassed by sufficiently intelligent models. While hardware-le...
- SEE: Structure-aware Exploring \& Exploiting for Long-horizon GUI Agent Trajectory Synthesis
Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by vision-language models hold promise for automating real-world mobile tasks. However, progress is limited by the lack of high-coverage, long-horizon interaction trajectories collected from element-rich and rapidly evolving apps. Existing pipelines ofte...
- Adaptive Mamba Neural Operators
Accurately solving partial differential equations (PDEs) on arbitrary geometries and a variety of meshes is an important task in science and engineering applications. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Mamba Neural Operators (AMO), which integrates reproducing kernels for state-space models (SSMs) r...
- DiFA: Inference-Time Forward-Process Alignment for Diffusion Models
The prevailing inference framework for diffusion models formulates generation fundamentally as a problem of numerical integration. This perspective casts the model as an exact estimator, neglecting the inherent statistical uncertainty of the denoising process. In this work, we propose Forward-Proces...
- The Art of Not Forgetting
We introduce CMP (Cognitive Memory Primitive), an architecture that represents inputs as sparse relational codes, stores them in a two-tier competitive memory, and learns entirely through local, gradient-free updates, with no backpropagation anywhere in the network. We use this architecture to test ...
- Value-Aware Prediction for Robust Multi-Agent Coordination Under Communication Loss
Robust multi-agent coordination relies heavily on inter-agent communication, which is frequently disrupted by physical and environmental constraints in real-world deployments. To maintain operation during these intermittent communication failures, agents can employ internal prediction models to esti...
- Optimization of sim-to-real transfer in the humanoid robot NICO
Robotic grasping requires accurate coordination between visual perception, object localization, inverse kinematics, and hand control. However, when movements planned in simulation are executed on a physical robot, the sim-to-real gap can cause small positioning errors that prevent successful graspin...