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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Oct 29, 2026

cs.CV

Fight World Model: Customizable Combat through Visual Interaction Proxies

Jiahua Li, Zixu John, Tom Zhong and 5 more

A playable, programmable game world must maintain persistent state, enforce executable rules, and support extensible gameplay mechanics. Existing video world models can generate plausible combat, yet struggle to keep hit reactions and health updates consistent with game rules. We introduce Fight World Model (FWM), which separates rule-governed combat execution from video rendering. An executable engine maintains state and resolves interactions. A deterministic compiler encodes these outcomes and attempted actions in a spatially and temporally aligned interaction proxy. The proxy aligns action and skill windows, brief hit reactions, and persistent health by fighter identity and timing. These cues can be controlled separately to render interactions under modified rules. Identity-bound references preserve character appearance across side switches. We train FWM on FightWorld Corpus, spanning 52 skill effects, 187 character-appearance variants, and 15 arenas. Without retraining the renderer, FWM supports damage scaling, limited-hit immunity, lifesteal, and multi-stage skill mechanisms beyond the native game. It also allows character and arena customization. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FWM, which outperforms existing game world models in action fidelity, hit reactions, health-state consistency, and character appearance preservation. Our project is available at https://fight-world-model.github.io.

#02Oct 29, 2026

cs.CV

Radiology Guideline-derived Decision Graph for Efficient Clinical Decision Support

Xuewen Zhou, Zhen Chen

Radiological risk stratification and management planning are essential downstream tasks in medical imaging. Automating these tasks is challenging because clinical guideline criteria are distributed across prose, tables, and cross-referenced definitions. We present Guideline-derived Decision Graph (GDGraph), a framework that decouples guideline compilation from case evaluation. During compilation, a large language model partitions guidelines into section-based chunks, extracts local decision subgraphs with linked definitions, and aggregates related branches into an executable decision graph. During inference, a fast System One model answers localized clinical questions while deterministic traversal resolves Boolean logic, turning opaque single-pass predictions into a traceable decision path without task-specific training. Across 347 cases spanning renal cyst, adnexal mass, and thyroid nodule guidelines, GDGraph improves System One accuracy from 57.3% to 90.8%, outperforming retrieval-augmented GPT-4o (80.1%) and graph-guided GPT-4o with chain-of-thought (82.7%) at substantially lower latency and cost. The source code will be available.

#03Oct 29, 2026

cs.CV

InfantNet: A Large Scale Dataset for Infant Body Pose and Shape Estimation

Zhipeng Hui, Jiahao Wang, Xun Dong and 13 more

Infant pose and shape estimation is essential for applications in childcare, developmental monitoring, and medical diagnosis. However, existing methods and datasets are largely designed for adults, and direct transfer to infants fails due to substantial differences in body proportions, articulation limits, and frequent self-occlusion. To address this gap, we introduce InfantNet, the largest real-image infant dataset to date, comprising 108,902 RGB images of infants aged 6-18 months. Each image is annotated with 2D keypoints, and a curated subset of 11,642 images additionally includes 3D pose and shape annotations with full SMIL parameters, verified through multi-view rendering and reprojection-error filtering. We use an iterative annotation pipeline to ensure high fidelity across both 2D and 3D labels. InfantNet establishes a large-scale, comprehensive benchmark for infant 2D keypoint detection and 3D pose-and-shape recovery. Baseline experiments demonstrate that state-of-the-art adult pose estimators do not generalize well to infants, whereas fine-tuning on InfantNet yields a consistent improvement. The gains are even more pronounced for 3D pose and shape estimation, where SMIL-based estimation demonstrates robust performance with accuracy comparable to results reported for SMPL-based models. By releasing the InfantNet dataset and benchmark, we provide a vital resource for advancing infant pose analysis and related healthcare applications.

#04Oct 29, 2026

cs.CV

RFW-A: Agentic Procedural Generation of 400K Articulated Assets over 500 Categories

Yuanbo Lyu, Changjian Pan, Saining Zhang and 19 more

High-quality articulated assets are essential for embodied perception, simulation, and manipulation, yet constructing them at scale remains difficult. Manual annotation and procedural modeling require substantial human effort. Recent agentic systems automate asset construction through program synthesis, but repeat costly reasoning and refinement for every new asset. Our key observation is that assets within a category can share construction logic despite variations in structure and appearance. Agentic synthesis and procedural generation are therefore complementary: agents can construct reusable programs, while procedural execution reuses the resulting logic across many samples. We therefore present RFW-A, which combines the two in a new articulated-asset generation paradigm. Starting from existing articulated programs, RFW-A organizes reusable components and their dependencies into category-level generators. Agents test and refine these generators across sampled configurations and motion states. Once constructed and validated, the generators produce diverse assets through procedural execution with no further model calls or token charges. The estimated API cost of generator authoring averages $10.62, amortizing to $0.05 per asset over 200 assets, versus $1.24 for the sampled per-asset agentic synthesis baseline. Using RFW-A, we built RFW-A-400K, containing over 400K sim-ready articulated assets across more than 500 categories. Experiments show high structural and kinematic validity and stable execution across physics simulators. Beyond asset validity, training with RFW-A-400K improves part-level articulation estimation on seen and unseen categories, while policies trained in simulation with retrieved and program-edited assets transfer zero-shot to real articulated objects.

#05Oct 29, 2026

cs.CV

MetaRefine: Score Refinement with Multi-Level Features for Image Assessment

Chuanzhi Xu, Chengkun Yue, Haolan Guo and 5 more

An image's original dimensions, aspect ratio, and composition provide important cues that can affect its technical and aesthetic quality. Image assessment methods use resizing, cropping, padding, or patch sampling to accommodate different input sizes. However, these operations can alter or obscure original geometric and compositional cues. Existing assessment models also encode rich multi-level visual evidence that can be further extracted and exploited to improve existing models. This motivates us to combine visual evidence with original-image geometry for score refinement without changing the original scoring pipelines. In this paper, we introduce MetaRefine, a metadata-aware score refinement architecture whose lightweight residual heads predict score corrections from geometry, multi-level visual features, and the frozen model's original score. Across 100 configurations on 21 datasets, MetaRefine improves PLCC in 88 configurations and SRCC in 85, with average relative gains of 7.55% and 7.10%, respectively. It reduces MAE in 90 configurations and RMSE in 89, with average relative reductions of 23.27% and 21.93%, respectively. The median parameter overhead is only 1.11%. MetaRefine can further improve state-of-the-art (SOTA) assessment models on multiple benchmarks.