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5 papers

#01Oct 29, 2026

cs.RO

SymAnt: Grounding Long-Horizon Action Anticipation with Adaptable Symbolic Priors

Fnu Aryan, Yaqi Xie, Joseph Campbell and 6 more

As robots and intelligent systems increasingly interact with humans, they must anticipate long sequences of future actions from only brief observations. While purely neural models typically require extensive observations to predict future actions and remain difficult to interpret and adjust, symbolic priors offer a structured alternative. To this end, we introduce SymAnt, a novel neuro-symbolic approach that unifies the expressiveness of neural networks with the structured reasoning of scene and knowledge graphs. Given a short video, SymAnt performs a joint-search over both graphs to construct a symbolic context, enabling unified reasoning over spatial relationships, object attributes, affordances, and associated actions. This symbolic context serves as a prior for an iterative refinement process that progressively generates and improves the sequence of future actions. By grounding predictions in symbolic context, SymAnt anticipates long-horizon actions from short observation windows in a parameter-efficient manner, while enabling users to directly edit the underlying knowledge to adjust predictions without further training. Through our experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of SymAnt, particularly when only short observation contexts are available, across five diverse datasets: Breakfast, 50 Salads, EPIC-KITCHENS, EGTEA Gaze+, and Assembly101.

#02Oct 29, 2026

cs.CV

A Unified Benchmark for Aerial-Enhanced Autonomous Driving: The KITScenes Aerial Dataset

Daniel Lengerer, Richard Schwarzkopf, Jonas Merkert and 8 more

Aerial imagery provides complementary spatial context for autonomous driving by exposing road structure beyond the immediate perception range of onboard sensors. Yet map construction from aerial imagery, aerial-assisted online HD mapping, and cross-view localization are typically studied on separate data and benchmarks. We introduce KITScenes Aerial, an extension of the KITScenes Multimodal dataset that augments synchronized onboard sensor data, vehicle poses, and rich Lanelet2 map annotations with spatially associated aerial imagery and higher-resolution neural representations, providing a common basis for a variety of research tasks. Our mapping evaluation focuses on all 53 KITScenes map classes across different model designs, spatial ranges, and aerial resolutions, while retaining compatibility with the widely used three-class setting. Representative baselines show that aerial context is particularly beneficial for fine-grained and extended-range mapping, more than doubling 53-class mAP at the larger mapping extent. Higher-resolution aerial imagery yields a further 4.3 mAP (+24 %) improvement, with gains extending to challenging map elements such as traffic lights. We additionally evaluate cross-view localization under geographically disjoint conditions, where an adapted fine-grained feature-matching baseline achieves a mean translation error of 5.13 m. KITScenes Aerial thus enables unified study of aerial and ground-level information across complementary mapping and localization tasks. Project page: https://kitscenes.com/aerial

#03Oct 29, 2026

cs.CV

Difficulty Calibration Across Time for Membership Inference in Diffusion Models

Michael Joseph, Yedid Hoshen

Modern diffusion models are trained on massive datasets that often include copyrighted or private images. Membership inference attacks (MIAs) address this by testing whether a given image was in a model's training set. The standard approach scores an image by its reconstruction loss and flags low-loss images as members. This often fails because some images are simply easier to reconstruct than others, so a simple unseen image can score a lower loss than a complex training image. Difficulty calibration separates memorization from how difficult an image is to begin with. We show how to calibrate along two axes of time: training time and diffusion time. First, across training time, we introduce Reference-Model Calibration (RMC), which compares a fine-tuned model's loss against an earlier checkpoint. This cleanly isolates newly memorized data and gives near-perfect auditing, even without text captions. Since earlier checkpoints are not always available, we next present Temporal Self-Calibration (TSC), which calibrates across diffusion time using only a single model. Our key observation is that an image's difficulty persists across noise levels, whereas memorization is localized in time. By comparing the loss at a target timestep against neighboring timesteps from the same model, TSC attenuates image difficulty using the model's own trajectory. Empirically, our methods beat the state of the art by a wide margin, and unlike most existing attacks, generalize across different model parameterizations such as $x$-, $v$-, and $ε$-prediction models. Code is available at https://github.com/MichaelJoseph777/TSC.

#04Oct 29, 2026

cs.CV

Accurate MRI-free PET Quantification and Reliability Assessment via CT-to-MRI Synthesis and Conformal Prediction

Jungwoo Seo, Seung Yun Choi, Kun Ho Lee and 3 more

Standardized uptake value ratio (SUVR) quantification of amyloid PET commonly relies on a subject-specific T1-weighted MRI, yet a usable MRI is not always available. We therefore combined CT-to-MRI synthesis with conformal prediction for MRI-free PET quantification with reliability assessment. A slice-consistent Brownian Bridge Diffusion Model was strengthened with multi-dataset training and data-source conditioning to enrich the anatomical prior learned from MRI, and with expanded multi-slice CT context to exploit the through-plane continuity of subject-specific anatomy in CT. Synthetic MRI was used for FreeSurfer-based anatomical parcellation and PET quantification, while deep-ensemble uncertainty was calibrated with conformal prediction to estimate a plausible range for the corresponding real MRI-based SUVR. On $^{11}$C-PiB PET from OASIS-3, the proposed method achieved the highest synthesis and parcellation fidelity among the compared methods. Mean cortical SUVR from the proposed synthetic MRI agreed closely with the real MRI-based reference (MAE $0.016 \pm 0.015$, Pearson $r = 0.9987$) and yielded the same amyloid-positivity classification as the real MRI in all 87 test subjects at the prespecified cut-off. Conformal prediction achieved empirical coverage close to the prespecified levels, and at 90% target coverage, 85 of 87 subjects had prediction intervals that supported an unambiguous amyloid-positivity decision. Zero-shot evaluation on an independent external cohort showed that the proposed CT-to-MRI model could support PET quantification without retraining, although conformal calibration required target-cohort recalibration to recover the intended coverage. These findings support CT-to-MRI-based MRI-free PET quantification as a promising approach for providing accurate SUVR measurements and an explicit assessment of their reliability.

#05Oct 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.