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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Nov 12, 2026

cs.CV

TTB: Test-time Baking for Efficient Rendering of Decoder-only View Synthesis Models

Chin-Yang Lin, Ryo Hachiuma, Jaesung Choe and 6 more

Decoder-only Large View Synthesis Models (LVSMs) with KV-cache have recently achieved state-of-the-art quality by regressing novel views from neural networks without reconstructing 3D geometry, while Test-Time Training (TTT) layers save computation but sacrifice quality. We propose Test-Time Baking (TTB), a strategy that learns to bake global scene information from cross-view attention into a lightweight MLP, enabling fast and high-fidelity novel-view decoding. The first key is to repurpose the fast-weight MLP of TTT to learn the cross-view attention mapping explicitly from its input-output pairs, rather than replacing attention entirely, achieving the same rendering efficiency as TTT while delivering substantially higher quality. The second key addresses a modality misalignment between context prefilling and novel-view rendering: we disentangle context tokens into camera-only context rendering tokens to serve as TTB input, and context ground-truth tokens with image content to serve as the TTB mapping target, ensuring the baked MLPs are relieved of the modality generalization challenge between context and novel-view processing. Our method achieves up to **23x** rendering speedup with quality on par with the state-of-the-art across several benchmarks. Project page: https://test-time-baking.github.io

#02Nov 12, 2026

cs.CV

A Disease-specific Retinal Aging Biomarker for Predicting Progression to Late Age-related Macular Degeneration

Hexin Dong, Benjamin Hou, Puzhen Wu and 4 more

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a leading cause of irreversible vision loss in older adults. While chronological age is a primary risk factor, it inadequately reflects individual variations in retinal aging, limiting effective AMD risk stratification and timely intervention. Here, we propose and validate fundus-based AMD age (FAA), which quantifies disease-specific retinal aging in AMD and captures accelerated AMD-related retinal aging, thereby improving prognostic precision over chronological age. Trained on 36,782 images from 2,192 participants in the Age-Related Eye Disease Study (AREDS) dataset and validated across AREDS and AREDS2 cohorts, our model demonstrates significant improvements over traditional chronological age-based approaches. Specifically, integrating the proposed FAA into Cox proportional-hazards models significantly enhances prediction performance. FAA improved the C-index from 0.836 to 0.888 and reduced the 5-year Brier score from 0.050 to 0.046 in AREDS, with consistent gains observed in AREDS2 (C-index 0.715 to 0.756; 2-year Brier 0.078 to 0.076). FAA showed improved prognostic performance across the two datasets and under different phenotype definitions (reading center-defined vs. specialist-defined grading), supporting its potential utility for AMD risk stratification. These findings highlight the advantage of incorporating FAA into AMD risk prediction frameworks, supporting further evaluation of FAA for AMD risk stratification.

#03Nov 12, 2026

cs.CV

Predicting Ethanol Drinking Status from Nonhuman Primate Liver Histology: A Proof of Concept for Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning in Few-Shot Vision-Language Modeling

Amirmohammad Mohammadi, Rupak Khadka, Kathleen A. Grant and 2 more

Combining vision-language models (VLMs) with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) offers a promising approach to few-shot whole-slide image (WSI) classification in computational pathology. This study evaluates this approach for predicting ethanol drinking status from nonhuman primate liver histology. Adapters are evaluated against non-PEFT configurations on a subset of the Monkey Alcohol Tissue Research Resource (MATRR). All evaluated PEFT configurations achieve higher mean balanced accuracy than the non-PEFT baselines. For example, in the four-shot setting, attention-based multiple instance learning (ABMIL) alone achieves 43.5% mean balanced accuracy, compared with 78.1% after adding an adapter. Qualitative attention analysis shows that textual pathway adaptations produce localized attention heatmaps, while visual pathway adaptations produce more diffuse ones. A pathologist's review identified similar histological features across adaptations.

#04Nov 12, 2026

cs.CV

MALNISI-Infused Graph Construction and Weighted Contrastive Loss based GAT for Unsupervised Representation Learning in HSI

Soumi Sarkar, Subhadip Boral, Sarbani Palit and 1 more

Hyperspectral images (HSI) possess discriminating spectral characteristics with respect to land utilization due to high-dimensional information. Recently, unsupervised representation learning using graph neural networks has unveiled these utilization-specific complex spectral relations. This article has three main contributions. First, it proposes an index, the Mean Absolute Local Neighborhood Inverse Spectral Index (MALNISI), which measures the similarity between two pixels based on their neighborhood information. The index is used to construct a weighted adjacency matrix, giving the HSI a graph structure. Second, it proposes an upgraded Graph Attention Network that learns compact latent representations of hyperspectral data from the constructed graph. In this network, an enhanced multi-head attention mechanism incorporates the MALNISI weights as an auxiliary feature to emphasize learned attention between neighboring pixels. To alleviate over-smoothing and preserve fine-grained spectral details, the architecture integrates residual connections, skip projections, and feature normalization, which together enhance representation capability, stabilize learning, and accelerate convergence. Third, it proposes a weighted contrastive loss function that incorporates neighborhood-aware MALNISI between connected pixels, encouraging strongly connected pixels in the high-dimensional space to remain close in the latent space, and weakly connected pixels to stay apart. The resulting discriminative low-dimensional embeddings are then clustered using spectral clustering. Experimental analysis on six benchmark HSI datasets demonstrates the efficiency and necessity of the three aforementioned contributions, and the comparative study highlights superior performance over fourteen state-of-the-art approaches.

#05Nov 12, 2026

cs.CV

Consensus Capture in Reference-Based UAV Video Stabilization: A Benchmark on Dynamic Urban Scenes

Robert Fonod, Nikolas Geroliminis

Reference-frame stabilization registers every frame of a hovering-drone video onto one reference frame, keeping object positions comparable. The registration pipelines it relies on are selected on feature-matching benchmarks in which only the camera moves. Over a busy intersection, vehicles moving together supply mutually consistent correspondences that can draw the robust homography estimate toward their motion: consensus capture, which inlier statistics cannot flag. A two-part benchmark measures it and the object masking meant to prevent it. A static protocol scores ten pipelines under exactly known homographies on 4K aerial frames, tuned on a site-disjoint split at a matched resolution and feature budget. A dynamic protocol scores them at an offline and a real-time budget on hovers selected from the video alone to span the amount and coherence of moving foreground, plus a stationary control. It measures background alignment, object position error and the share of a moving group's displacement an estimate follows, against a pseudo-ground-truth reference audited with manually annotated ground control points, which also score every candidate. On static scenes, tuned AKAZE, RootSIFT, SIFT and BRISK lead, retuning the matcher thresholds raises the mean average accuracy (mAA) by at most 0.0062, and masking costs less than 0.005. Unmasked ORB is captured on 28 of 304 real-time dynamic pairs and on 6 offline; its real-time captured estimates have a median corner error of 18.8 px yet typical inlier counts and ratios. Masking removes capture for every pipeline and leaves the leading pipelines unchanged. Code, data and results are released.