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5 papers

#01Oct 29, 2026

cs.CV

SonoWorld4D: From One Video to a 4D Audio-Visual Scene via Diffusion Synchronization

Derong Jin, Xiyi Chen, Ming C. Lin and 1 more

Recent progress in visual scene generation has extended beyond static 3D scenes toward the more challenging problem of generating dynamic 4D scenes from minimal input. However, sound, despite being intrinsically coupled with dynamic objects and events, remains largely unmodeled in prior work. We introduce Video-to-4DAVScene, a new task that turns a video into an explorable, time-varying 4D audio-visual scene, and present the SonoWorld4D framework for this task. Given a monocular video, our method generates a 360 static background, reconstructs explicit motion trajectories of dynamic, sound-emitting foreground objects, and synthesizes a physically-grounded sound field consistent across multiple sources through dual-space audio diffusion synchronization. The resulting 4D scene supports real-time novel-view visual and spatial audio rendering. Evaluation on real-world dynamic scenes and a user study demonstrates SonoWorld4D generates 4D audio-visual scenes with perceptually realistic, physically grounded spatial audio consistent with scene geometry and visual content.

#02Oct 29, 2026

physics.ao-ph

From extreme weather to agricultural consequences with agentic AI

Minghan Yu, Mengyu Dai, Yixin Wen and 1 more

Extreme weather is forecast days ahead, yet its consequences for agriculture remain hard to predict: a forecast says where a storm will strike, not which crops will suffer or how much is at risk, and the records that could tell span many sources. We present WxCrop, the first agent that judges agricultural hazards from physically interpretable weather indices examined by causal analysis, and the first that combines weather and agricultural information to predict crop loss reliably for past and forecast dates. We demonstrate it in Florida on hurricanes, freezes and dry heat, with a loss model calibrated on insurance records for each, and the same procedure extends to other hazards and areas. Three checks show reliability: the hurricane index detects recorded cyclone days with an AUC of 0.98, recorded losses in held-out years are reproduced to within 2%, and independent production records confirm the county rankings (rank correlation 0.63). Users ask the agent for each crop group's loss as a fraction of expected season value, every number sourced, so that governments, growers and scientists respond to agricultural disasters quickly.

#03Oct 29, 2026

cs.CV

Luggage re-identification: A study of strategies towards a real-world application

Quentin Dhôte, Romaric Audigier

Luggage re-identification (ReID) is a critical task in video surveillance for forensics, security or border management (suspicious or abandoned luggage recognition), as well as luggage management (lost luggage recovery). It enables the association of observations of the same luggage across disjoint camera views in complex environments such as airports, train stations and border crossing. While existing approaches primarily focus on appearance-based cropped image matching under relatively clean conditions, real-world scenarios are characterized by frequent occlusions, cluttered background and crowded scenes which significantly degrade performance. Yet, strategies leveraging the complementarity of multiple shots and views from different video streams is overlooked. In this paper, we study strategies for an end-to-end pipeline that operates from multiple video streams to detect and re-identify luggage. We evaluate different variants on a benchmark dataset acquired in real-world environments to address the questions of selecting and merging different views and shots of the same luggage as well as training on different environment datasets for an overall ReID performance improvement in practical applications.

#04Oct 29, 2026

cs.LG

Rethinking Neural Thickets Without Weight Perturbations

Nicolas Dufour, Elouan Gardès, Amil Dravid and 2 more

The Neural Thickets hypothesis posits that pretrained language models lie in dense neighborhoods of task-specific experts in weight space, which random Gaussian perturbations can uncover. We reproduce the reported gains, but show that they do not require this geometric explanation. Perturbing a single decoder block already recovers much of the improvement, while keeping the model entirely frozen and adding a random bias to its output logits matches or exceeds full-weight perturbations on most reasoning tasks. This suggests an alternative explanation based on output diversity, validation-based selection, and voting. We formalize this view as Perturb-Select-Vote (PSV), a general procedure that generates perturbed predictors, selects high-performing members on a small validation set, and aggregates their predictions. This interpretation connects Neural Thickets to established inference-time methods, including sampling, self-consistency, and verifier-guided selection. A first-order analysis further shows that small weight perturbations act primarily through their induced logit shifts. We extend this analysis to vision, where logit PSV substantially improves performance under domain shift, including on Earth observation, while full-weight perturbations provide little additional benefit. Together, these results suggest that the gains attributed to nearby weight-space experts can instead be obtained through output diversity, selection, and voting. Logit PSV realizes these benefits with a fully frozen model, providing a simple, training-free alternative to full-weight perturbation ensembles across language and vision.

#05Oct 29, 2026

cs.LG

Propose-Filter-Release: Scaling Noise to Typical Sensitivity via Private Filtering

Moshe Shenfeld, Eliad Tsfadia, Katrina Ligett

An estimator can be accurate and stable on typical data, yet sensitive to a few possible records. Differentially private mechanisms commonly scale their noise to the worst-case influence of a single record, which lets these records dictate the noise even when the remaining data would allow far less. Removing them first would restore the smaller scale, but the removal must itself be private. We introduce \emph{propose-filter-release} (PFR), which, by privately filtering its input, turns a mechanism that protects the addition or removal of a typical record, one that fits the remaining data, into one that is differentially private in the standard sense, on every input. Using our novel filtering step, PFR requires only a concave friendliness score, which measures how well a record fits a dataset, and a release mechanism that is friendly-DP, that is, private when the changed record fits the remaining data. For every such score and release mechanism, it guarantees differential privacy under public conditions on the number of records, so it is a general privacy primitive, comparable to propose-test-release, and FriendlyCore can be viewed as one of its implementations. We illustrate the generality of PFR by instantiating it for scalar statistics, principal subspace estimation, the KL divergence of user histograms, the effective resistances of a graph, and treatment-rule selection.