ML Reads

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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Aug 19, 2026

cs.CV

Generalized Audio-Driven Synthesis of Precise Drummer Motion

Álvaro G. Iñesta, Mattia Ryffel, Amit H. Bermano and 2 more

Music-driven character animation enables and enhances transformative applications in entertainment and interactive education. However, synthesizing realistic drumming motion from audio remains challenging due to the inherent tension between high-acceleration dynamics and the need for extreme spatial-temporal precision. Existing approaches, often reliant on motion matching or MIDI input, struggle with generalizing to diverse real-world audio. Moreover, the field lacks standardized evaluation metrics capable of distinguishing precise drumming from noisy motion. In this paper, we introduce a generative diffusion framework featuring a dual-objective loss function that decouples skeletal integrity from drumstick precision, thus enabling centimeter-level stick precision without sacrificing natural body dynamics. Additionally, leveraging our own dataset and data augmentation strategy, the model generalizes to non-curated, in-the-wild audio. To rigorously evaluate performance, we propose two novel metrics: an impact-to-target distance to quantify spatial precision and an audio-motion correlation score to assess temporal alignment. Our quantitative analysis and user studies demonstrate that our system generates high-quality motion that is often indistinguishable from ground-truth performances.

#02Aug 19, 2026

cs.CV

Uncertainty-Aware Art-Historical Dating with Vision-Language Models

Stefanie Schneider, Peter Bell

Museum and archival datasets do not mirror historical artistic production, but materialize the contingent histories of collecting, preservation, cataloging, and digitization. This has direct consequences for interpreting pretrained image representations: they may appear to encode historical time while actually encoding the institutional conditions under which objects become visible as data. We describe this phenomenon as temporal entanglement and investigate it by formulating artwork dating as an uncertainty-aware regression task over frozen image embeddings. We evaluate several pretrained vision models on a temporally controlled Wikidata corpus of artworks. Our results show that these models contain usable temporal information, with Vision-Language Models (VLMs) outperforming purely visual self-supervised baselines. However, a qualitative analysis indicates that this temporal knowledge is shaped by various biases.

#03Aug 19, 2026

cs.CV

EVADE: Evidence-Verified Agentic Diagnosis with Escape

Mohaimenul Azam Khan Raiaan, Nur Mohammad Fahad

Medical vision-language models (VLMs) can achieve high accuracy but remain unreliable: they are systematically overconfident, benefit little from test-time reasoning, and lack the ability to reliably calibrate trust in their own responses. We introduce EVADE (Evidence-Verified Agentic Diagnosis with Escape), an inferential, non-training method that enhances the safety of deploying a single frozen VLM. EVADE responds and, when uncertain, localises the region most diagnostically relevant, re-answers on a zoomed view, and commits only when both the entire image and the zoomed view responses agree; otherwise, it abstains. To directly address verification hallucination in single-model self-checking, our main idea is to verify gate consistency across different image views rather than re-reading the model's own text. Experimental evaluation on VQA-RAD, SLAKE, and PathVQA using Qwen2.5-VL-7B reports that EVADE is the only method that simultaneously improves both calibration and selective risk while maintaining accuracy, reducing expected calibration error (ECE) by up to 45% compared to zero-shot. Chain-of-thought, self-consistency, and self-verification all fail at least one axis. A grounding analysis reports that self-proposed regions perform better at diagnostic structure localisation than centres or random crops. However, a 7B VLM cannot use this localisation to revise answers. Therefore, reliability gains come from the consistency gate and calibrated abstention.

#04Aug 19, 2026

cs.CV

Falcon Perception-HD: High Density Perception via Reinforcement Learning

Sofian Chaybouti, Yasser Dahou, Ngoc Dung Huynh and 2 more

Autoregressive perception models trained to localize visual entities under the open-vocabulary setting are mostly trained using Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with maximum likelihood, yet it optimizes a proxy objective (per-token cross-entropy) that is fundamentally misaligned with perception metrics such as precision and recall. In this paper, we explore post-training reinforcement learning (RL), specifically GRPO, to directly align these models with their evaluation metrics. Building up on the recently introduced Falcon Perception, we design an RL framework that addresses perception-specific challenges: reward design for set-structured outputs and multi-head sampling control. We discover multiple benefits from RL for perception: first, RL unlocks state-of-the-art performance in very dense scenes (up to 500 objects per scene), a regime where most existing systems degrade sharply or collapse; furthermore it fixes common issues in autoregressive perception models like mask repetitions and removes almost entirely the need for NMS and coordinate deduplication, which improve both performance and efficiency and remove the need for hyperparameters tuning; overall, we notice improvements on all levels of difficulties in referring expression segmentation (on PBench and SACO-Gold), and we find an elegant way to preserve the knowledge of whether an object exists or not (as evaluated by MCC) without training on negative samples. We show that a simple reward that penalizes false negatives and positives is sufficient. We develop two hybrid self-annotation pipelines, respectively tailored for difficult referring expressions and very dense scenes, and show their benefits on RL-training. Model weights are released as a Falcon Perception revision~\footnote{https://huggingface.co/tiiuae/Falcon-Perception}. Datasets will be published.

#05Aug 19, 2026

cs.CV

Detecting Backdoors in Object Detection via Pre-NMS Prediction Distribution Shift

Longtian Wang, Zhengyu Zhao, Chenhao Lin and 5 more

Object detection models deployed in safety-critical applications remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks that cause targeted misbehaviors when a hidden trigger is present. Existing detection methods either rely on trigger inversion or exploit architecture-specific assumptions, and critically, representative existing methods fail to generalize reliably to scene-level attacks, where a single trigger induces anomalous behavior across all objects in the scene simultaneously. We present DistScan, a backdoor detection framework based on a simple but previously unexploited observation: backdoor injection systematically shifts a model's pre-NMS prediction class distribution away from its training class frequencies, even on clean inputs without any trigger present. DistScan aggregates intermediate class predictions over a clean validation set and flags a model as backdoored if the resulting distribution deviates significantly from the training class frequencies, requiring no model weight access, no trigger knowledge, and no additional training. Extensive experiments on MS-COCO and PASCAL VOC across two architectures and three scene-level attack scenarios demonstrate that DistScan substantially outperforms existing methods, improving average detection accuracy over the best-performing applicable baseline by 27.32 percentage points.