#01Oct 23, 2026
astro-ph.SR
ARENA: Active Region attENtion Aggregation for interpretable solar flare prediction
Luis Bauer, Annalena Kofler, Andrés Asensio Ramos and 3 more
Predicting solar flares is a challenging space-weather forecasting problem with potentially significant impacts on Earth's upper atmosphere, including disruptions to radio communications. We propose Active Region attENtion Aggregation (ARENA), a neural network architecture that predicts solar flares from a variable number of active-region cutouts while learning to identify the region most relevant to the prediction. ARENA is trained using multiple-instance learning under weak supervision, requiring only a flare/no-flare label for the observation and no labels specifying the flare origin. The learned attention mechanism therefore provides a means of localizing the active region driving the prediction without explicit origin annotations. ARENA achieves a heidke skill score of 0.45 which is comparable to other flare prediction approaches. These results demonstrate that active-region-based aggregation can provide an efficient and interpretable approach to solar flare prediction. The code is available at https://github.com/LuisBauer22/ARENA.
#02Oct 23, 2026
physics.optics
Computational imaging through turbid, bubbly and flowing water near the telescope
Alexander Ingold, Sabina D. Menon, Aadhi Umamageswaran and 4 more
Cameras in the surf zone or behind ship wakes look through turbid, bubbly, moving water close to the lens, yet restoration networks are usually scored only on displayed images. We introduce a measured dataset of a telescope viewing displayed images and physical objects through a 25~mm water layer 45~mm in front of its objective, under seven combinations of flow, bubbles and turbidity, with clear-water recordings as a second reference. Because the suspension scatters light far outside the 1.3\textdegree{} field of view, turbidity mainly removes contrast, 4.4- to 4.8-fold on a Siemens star. Restoring the mean of eight frames improves structural similarity (SSIM) by 0.032 over a single frame, and learned fusion of the frames adds little. One raw frame supports five-category recognition (96.8\%) as well as restored images. Adding synthetic training pairs leaves display-image scores unchanged but raises the correlation of a restored Siemens star with its clear-water recording from below 0.5 to above 0.9. These networks also improve ordinary underwater photographs without retraining, where training on measured pairs alone fails. Scoring against the digital source or a clear-water recording reverses the ranking of raw and restored images. These results support a simple pipeline: average the frames, classify raw frames directly, and restore with networks trained on measured and synthetic pairs.
#03Oct 23, 2026
cs.AI
Closing the Modality Gap via Simplex-Constrained Representations
Shubham Gupta, Siva Reddy, Perouz Taslakian and 2 more
While multimodal contrastive models like CLIP and CLAP successfully learn shared representations, their embeddings typically exhibit a persistent \emph{modality gap}. We propose addressing this separation through a purely geometric approach: changing the embedding domain from the unit sphere, $S^{d-1}$, to the probability simplex, $Δ^{d-1}$. Although both manifolds share the same intrinsic dimension, the simplex acts as a structural prior; its nonnegative, unit-mass constraints serve as a cross-modal calibration that forces both modalities to ground themselves in the same coordinate system. By attaching lightweight softmax adapters and using Total Variation similarity, we reduce the centroid $\ell_2$ gap by 97--99\% across five multimodal retrieval benchmarks. This confirms that simplicial geometry induces genuine semantic alignment, matching or exceeding the retrieval performance of standard unconstrained models.
#04Oct 23, 2026
cs.CV
MiD-VLM: Detecting and Grounding Global Semantic Misinformation in Image-Caption Pairs
Tarunya Prasad, Bharatesh Chakravarthi
Semantic misinformation can arise when an authentic image is paired with a caption that changes or distorts its narrative. Because the image itself may contain no visible signs of manipulation, methods designed to detect pixel-level artifacts can miss these misleading image-caption pairs. We study this problem using DGM4+, a dataset designed to evaluate the detection of global scene and semantic inconsistencies. We propose a multimodal model that combines image-text representations from SigLIP with visual scene features from DINOv2 through a projection MLP, and adapts Qwen2-VL-7B using LoRA. The model jointly predicts whether an image-caption pair is authentic, identifies the manipulation type, and grounds the misleading caption tokens. On the DGM4+ validation split, the model achieves an F1 score of $0.9679$ for binary authenticity classification. These results suggest that parameter-efficient adaptation of vision-language models is promising for detecting semantic inconsistencies, while also motivating further work on precise token-level grounding.
#05Oct 23, 2026
cs.CV
EditJev: System One Routing for Image Editing Models
Zhile Guan, Xu Jiang, Yule Duan and 4 more
Instruction-based image editing models exhibit pronounced sample-specific performance variation: different models can produce substantially different results for the same source image and editing instruction, and the best-performing model often varies across requests. These models also differ substantially in inference latency, making fixed-model deployment inefficient. We therefore study image editing model routing, which dynamically selects an editor from a candidate pool given an input image and editing instruction. We introduce EditJev, a System One routing model that directly predicts sample-level preference scores over candidate image editing models in a single forward pass. A lightweight preference head on a vision-language backbone produces a fixed-dimensional score vector without autoregressive model-name generation or response parsing. To train EditJev, we construct pairwise preferences from offline candidate outputs and optimize a pairwise ranking objective to learn relative model suitability. At inference time, EditJev combines the predicted preference scores with model-level speed scores to balance editing quality and generation latency. Experiments on ImgEdit and GEdit-En show that EditJev improves aggregate quality over the strongest fixed editor, from 4.540 to 4.592 and from 8.194 to 8.255, respectively, while reducing estimated end-to-end latency by 60.8% and 31.7%. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of direct, structured model routing for efficient image editing.