#01Oct 29, 2026
cs.LG
Uncertainty-aware Feedback Loop Diagnosis: integrating reinforcement learning and conformal prediction for reliable wafer defect classification
Aleksandr Dekhovich, Carlas Smith, Oleg Soloviev
Semiconductor manufacturing is a complex, multi-step process that requires both high precision and low operating costs. Therefore, detecting defects in a high-volume setting is an important component of wafer map analysis for reliable production. However, most state-of-the-art deep learning approaches require a full scan of the surface, which hinders the development of high-throughput inspection systems. To address this problem, we propose Uncertainty-aware Feedback Loop Diagnosis (UFLD), a novel algorithm that employs reinforcement learning for adaptive measurement acquisition and provides a prediction uncertainty level after each step, stopping the process once sufficient information is obtained. Unlike existing methods that rely on ensemble models or auxiliary confidence estimation deep learning models, UFLD utilizes a more parameter-efficient conformal prediction framework to determine the optimal stopping time. The proposed UFLD reduces acquisition time by about $40\%$ and achieves $98.4\%$ inspection accuracy, without requiring an additional learned confidence-estimation network. We validated our approach on the MixedWM38 dataset, demonstrating its advantages over existing adaptive acquisition procedures and standard convolutional neural networks.
#02Oct 29, 2026
cs.CV
Soil Moisture Estimation in Precision Agriculture: A Knowledge Distillation Approach
Mohammed Rakib, Vrinda Nagula, Arunkumar Bagavathi
Accurate soil moisture estimation is critical for precision agriculture, influencing irrigation, fertilization, and harvesting strategies. Traditional methods primarily rely on meteorological and soil property data, while recent approaches incorporate visual modalities such as aerial and geospatial imagery. However, these high-resolution images are expensive and computationally demanding to analyze. In this work, we propose Soil Moisture Distillation (SMD), a Knowledge Distillation (KD)-based multimodal learning framework that leverages unimodal teachers to enhance multimodal soil moisture estimation. SMD surpasses not only traditional multimodal fusion techniques, including MIS-ME, but also outperforms unimodal models, demonstrating the benefits of guided unimodal knowledge transfer. Additionally, we conduct a comparative analysis of soil patches and crop images, showing that crop images provide superior visual cues, leading to improved prediction accuracy. SMD achieves a 2% improvement in MAPE for soil patches and 1.2% for crops over state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of leveraging both meteorological and visual data through knowledge distillation for enhanced soil moisture forecasting.
#03Oct 29, 2026
cs.CV
AVPS-360: A Spatial Audio-Visual Benchmark for Instance Segmentation and Tracking of Sound-Producing Persons
Yifu Sun, Parthasaarathy Sudarsanam, Tuomas Virtanen and 1 more
Audio-visual instance segmentation (AVIS) segments and tracks individual sound-producing objects in videos. Existing benchmarks predominantly use monaural audio, which lacks inter-channel cues for spatially distinguishing concurrent sound sources. We introduce AVPS-360 (Audio-Visual Person Segmentation 360), a spatial audio-visual benchmark bridging AVIS and sound event localisation and detection (SELD). Built upon STARSS23, it pairs first-order Ambisonics audio with synchronised 360° video across 230 recordings totalling 10.5 hours. Recordings average 164.0 seconds. The dataset captures intermittent sound production in real-world interactions dominated by speech, alongside laughter, clapping, and footsteps. It provides 31,678 manually reviewed instance masks linked to source identities and sound-event labels. We also present a baseline that integrates spatial audio with visual features for frame-level segmentation and identity association across frames. Experiments on AVPS-360 show that existing AVIS methods struggle with detection and identity association in long recordings with intermittent sound production, while our baseline substantially improves performance in both aspects.
#04Oct 29, 2026
cs.CV
CrossWeave: Cross-Modal Scene and Instance Retrieval from Sparse 2D-3D Alignment
Aadith Warrier, Gnana Prakash Punnavajhala, Siddharth Tourani and 3 more
Cross-modal scene and instance retrieval aims to retrieve a corresponding 3D environment or object given query 2D images, serving as a foundational mechanism for spatial reasoning in robotics and AR/VR. Existing methods achieve this by learning alignment only at the level of whole scenes or objects, which provides no supervision for the fine-grained local structure within them. In this work, we show that supervision on a set of sparse 2D-3D correspondences, without scene- or instance-level contrastive objectives, is sufficient to train a single model for both scene- and instance-level retrieval. Specifically, we propose $\textbf{CrossWeave}$, a novel framework for cross-modal retrieval that learns sparse patch-point alignment, which alone outperforms existing methods. An optimal transport-based aggregator over the aligned features gives further gains by clustering structurally redundant regions, freeing descriptor capacity for semantically distinct local features. CrossWeave achieves state-of-the-art performance on both scene- and instance-level retrieval on ScanNet and 3RScan with a $\textit{single model}$, whereas existing methods require separate models for each task. Our results suggest that whole-scene encoding is unnecessary for cross-modal retrieval and that sparse local correspondence supervision is a more effective and flexible alternative.
#05Oct 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.