#01Oct 23, 2026
cs.AI
IGG: A Benchmark for Interactive GUI Grounding under Visibility Constraints
Kyeongseon Kim, Jiyeon Son, Tae-Hyun Oh
GUI grounding benchmarks ask whether an agent can localize a target that is already visible in a static screenshot. Real interfaces often violate this assumption: a target may be off-screen, appear only after a state change or hover, remain occluded, or become actionable after a delay. This leaves the ability to recover target visibility unevaluated. To measure this reveal step, we introduce Interactive GUI Grounding (IGG), a benchmark in which an agent must first make the target visible through interaction and then click it. IGG contains 601 tasks across 16 controllable GUI environments and seven visibility-constraint sub-types, with a compact action space of scrolling, moving, dragging, waiting, and clicking. In our human study, participants achieve 94.6% accuracy, while GPT-5.5 reaches 79.4% and the strongest evaluated open-source VLM reaches only 31.6%. To identify the source of this gap, we conduct two controlled interventions. Telling Qwen3-VL which interaction to perform raises its accuracy only from 30.8% to 33.9%, whereas performing the interaction for the model raises it to 81.9%. The bottleneck is executing the reveal interaction, not recognizing the target once it is exposed. We further show that this capability is learnable, demonstrating that visibility recovery can be strengthened consistently across model families.
#02Oct 23, 2026
cs.CV
Hair Segmentation and Skin Characterization on Macroscopic Dermatological Images for Laser Treatment Parameterization
Alex Navarro Navarro, Marc Arriaga Hidalgo, Carlos Moreno Rubio and 2 more
Current light-based devices, such as laser hair removal, intense pulsed light (IPL), vascular laser therapy, and dermatologic phototherapy, are widely used in clinical dermatology but rely heavily on subjective manual parameterization or uncalibrated point-based colorimeters. To overcome these limitations, this work presents a unified system for hair segmentation and skin characterization in macroscopic dermatological images. Unlike most existing literature that relies on dermoscopic datasets captured under highly controlled conditions, our approach is specifically designed for macroscopic images that replicate real clinical laser treatments. The proposed pipeline integrates a custom-trained variant of the YOLOv9 deep learning architecture for instance segmentation and classical image processing within a single workflow to extract objective skin and hair parameters such as phototype, hair density, color, and thickness. A color calibration stage using spectrophotometric measurements ensures accurate feature estimation regardless of illumination conditions. Experimental results show competitive segmentation metrics (mAP@50 $\approx$ 0.80) on a custom dataset featuring short, shaved hairs, typical of pre-treatment scenarios. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed pipeline in providing the objective, foundational skin and hair features required for future automated laser parameterization, paving the way for its extension to broader light-based medical therapies.
#03Oct 23, 2026
cs.CV
Reuse, Don't Retrain: Efficient, Modality-Versatile Geospatial Foundation Models through Feature Distillation
Mario Hamon, Pierre Adorni, Minh-Tan Pham
Geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs) are costly to pretrain, yet model families often repeat this process across backbone scales and sensing modalities. We investigate feature distillation as a more efficient way to reuse existing representations. First, we distill frozen CROMA and TerraMind teachers into smaller Vision Transformers through patch-level feature matching. Across nine PANGAEA tasks, distilled TerraMind Tiny, Small, and Base outperform their scale-matched released counterparts by 2.76, 3.02, and 1.87 mean IoU points, respectively; each also matches or exceeds the next-larger released model. Distilled CROMA-Base gains 2.05 points. TerraMind-Base required only 43 A6000 GPU-hours, approximately 0.5\% of the reported cost of independent pretraining. Second, we introduce TEDI, an unpaired multi-expert approach combining TerraMind for multispectral imagery and DINOv3 for high-resolution RGB. Separate patch embeddings route unpaired inputs into a shared Transformer trunk, removing the need for co-registered data. TEDI-Large achieves the highest single-model mean in our PANGAEA-9 comparison (62.51 mIoU), outperforming both teachers overall while retaining their modality-specific strengths. TEDI-Base reaches 61.75 mIoU with 72\% fewer parameters. These results show that distillation improves the GeoFM accuracy-compute frontier while consolidating complementary experts into a single versatile backbone.
#04Oct 23, 2026
cs.LG
Principled Nonlinear Concept Erasure and Steering
Idan Simai, Shauli Ravfogel, Uri Shaham
Learned representations often encode sensitive attributes, such as gender or race, that may be undesirable or unsafe to retain. Concept erasure aims to remove this information while preserving task-relevant content. Existing methods remain incomplete: linear methods provide guarantees only against linear probes, while nonlinear methods achieve stronger empirical erasure but lack formal guarantees and often sacrifice utility. In this work, we introduce a principled conditional autoencoder framework for nonlinear concept erasure. We follow the principle that erasure should remove only the sensitive attribute and nothing else, and we show that, under the stated assumptions, perfect reconstruction together with population-level independence is sufficient for perfect nonlinear guardedness, with preservation guarantees in the imperfect-reconstruction regime. Empirically, we attain a superior utility-erasure trade-off across multiple datasets, sensitive attributes, and language models, surpassing even the supervised variants of competing methods despite using no target-task labels, while being simpler to optimize and converging substantially faster. Beyond erasure, our framework yields concept conversion (representation steering) as a by-product: by changing only the target concept at inference time, it produces representations corresponding to different concept values - at no additional training cost - a capability no prior erasure method provides, and on which we likewise demonstrate strong empirical performance.
#05Oct 23, 2026
cs.CL
Analysing Austrian Parliamentary Speeches by Predicting Party Affiliations
Sarah Sulollari, Vanja Karan, Benjamin Roth
This paper examines speech characteristics of the Austrian National Council members (CMs). We introduce analysis methodology based on a fine-tuned BERT-Model which assigns to every speech a probability distribution over Austrian parties. These are then aggregated at the speaker and party level. We perform an extensive evaluation to ensure the quality of the generated distributions prior to further analysis. Instead of considering mis-assignments of predicted parties as a performance issue, we leverage them to derive insights about the CMs and political developments. Our findings show that parties that govern together become more similar in their speech characteristics, while, analogously, parties that are in opposition move further away from governing parties. Moreover, CMs who switch party usually adapt their speech characteristics only after the switch occurs. Finally, we publicly release a data set containing party affiliation predictions for the speeches of the Austrian National Council from 1996 to 2018.