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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Aug 24, 2026

cs.CV

Predicting Multiple Clinical Outcomes Related to Functional Recovery and Social Isolation Among Older Adults After Lower-Limb Fracture or Hip Replacement

Santosh Ray, Pratik K. Mishra, Ali Abedi and 3 more

Older adults recovering after lower-limb fracture or hip replacement may experience complex recovery trajectories. Most of the time, these clinical aspects are studied in isolation, masking their joint impact on recovery. This study used the MAISON-LLF dataset, which contains multimodal sensor and clinical assessment data from 18 older adults recovering in the community after lower-limb fracture or hip replacement. Participants were monitored for up to eight weeks, corresponding to a maximum of 1,008 participant-days of sensor monitoring. Forty-six daily features were extracted from indoor motion, acceleration, step count, heart rate, out-of-home mobility, and sleep data. Five clinical outcomes were assessed every two weeks: the Social Isolation Scale, Oxford Hip Score, Oxford Knee Score, Timed Up and Go test, and 30-second Chair Stand test. We utilize an inherent relationship between multi-modal sensor data and different clinical scores and formulate it as a multi-output regression problem. We tested various machine learning and deep learning single- and multi-output regression algorithms to predict these scores simultaneously. The results showed that predicting clinical scores jointly was better than separately. The tabular DL multi-output regressor, NODE, gave a remarkable performance of MSE=3.96 and MAE=1.02 in comparison to other multi- and single-output regressors. The SHAP feature analysis further showed the importance of including multimodal sensors to provide a good estimate of patients' recovery trajectory. This work may support the simultaneous assessment of functional recovery and social engagement among community-dwelling older adults and ultimately help improve their care and quality of life.

#02Aug 24, 2026

cs.CV

Spotter: Efficient Urban Visual Localization via Geo-Referenced Facade Landmarks in GPS-Degraded Environments

Antoni Valls, Jordi Sanchez-Riera

Accurate visual localization on robotic and wearable platforms remains challenging in dense urban environments. Existing methodologies typically rely on GPS for absolute positioning, yet GPS signals frequently degrade in urban canyons due to multipath propagation. Consequently, standard solutions like visual odometry suffer from unmitigated drift over time, while map-matching techniques struggle to acquire the reliable GPS priors they need, on top of being too computationally heavy for real-time edge execution. To address these limitations, we propose Spotter, a robuts and real-time visual localization framework that uses building facades as a reliable source of global geo-reference, while retaining the capability to integrate GPS signals when available. In an offline stage, Spotter processes Google Street View panoramas by semantically segmenting facades and pairing multi-view stereo depth with cartographic data to build a compact metric database. At runtime, query images are matched via a cascaded retrieval and geometric verification pipeline to recover fine-grained global camera localization. We benchmark Spotter on a newly collected dataset of pedestrian sequences acquired with wearable smart glasses across several districts of Barcelona. Experimental results show that Spotter outperforms odometry-based baselines and achieves localization accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art map-based methods while operating at significantly higher frame rates.

#03Aug 24, 2026

cs.CV

Investigating Relational Reasoning in VLMs

Adhithya Laxman Ravi Shankar Geetha, Aulia Kharis Rakhmasari, Haleema Ramzan and 1 more

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieve strong performance in visual reasoning tasks, but it remains unclear whether they understand visual relations, or simply employ shortcuts such as language cues or priors. To investigate this, we use the Qwen3-VL-4B (Bai et al., 2025), a modern VLM, to decode how visual information is encoded across depths. For this, we propose a synthetic dataset of simple geometric shapes for controlled analysis, along with queries crafted to precisely test language cues. Furthermore, the dataset is modified to test causal reliance on visual evidence. Our results show that current VLMs combine genuine visual reasoning with shortcut strategies primarily rooted in language cues.

#04Aug 24, 2026

cs.CV

E2S-Pruner: Progressive Two-Stage Evidence Fusion for Visual Token Pruning in Vision-Language Models

Taoyu Qian, Qi Wang, Daqian Shi and 3 more

Vision-language models typically encode an image into hundreds of visual tokens, incurring substantial inference latency and GPU memory overhead. Existing pruning methods largely rely on attention scores and directly aggregate outputs across attention heads and network layers, making it difficult to characterize evidential uncertainty and conflict. We propose E2S-Pruner, a progressive two-stage evidence-fusion framework for visual token pruning that requires no auxiliary model, trainable parameters, or fine-tuning. In the first stage, E2S-Pruner treats each attention head as an independent evidence source, estimates its reliability from evidence clarity and inter-head consistency, and represents each visual token using three states: important, unimportant, and uncertain. In the second stage, Dempster--Shafer evidence theory is used to quantify inter-layer conflict and fuse complementary evidence from multiple network layers. We further introduce a spatial novelty constraint that promotes coverage of distinct image regions and prevents the retained tokens from concentrating in a few locally salient areas. On LLaVA-1.5-7B, E2S-Pruner retains 98.0%, 96.8%, and 90.6% of the aggregate performance when the average numbers of retained visual tokens are 192, 128, and 64, respectively, while improving throughput by 1.96x and 2.09x under the 128-token and 64-token settings. Experiments on Qwen2-VL-7B further demonstrate cross-model generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/taoyu-qian/E2S-Pruner.git.

#05Aug 24, 2026

cs.CV

What Memory Composition Does Not Tell Us About Anomaly Detection

Joongwon Chae, Runming Wang, Peiwu Qin

Memory-based anomaly detectors store nominal training patches and score test patches against this memory. A patch selected for coverage therefore becomes a nor- mal reference without a separate check that geometric rarity makes it safe to trust. We probe this coupling with sparse training contamination. Under fixed representa- tions and memory budgets, we compare random, medoid, local, and global coverage selectors. We then use CLEANCON, an out-of-bag cross-image support gate that changes candidate-image eligibility while fixing the representation, absolute mem- ory size, builder, and inference rule. Global coverage strongly over-represents sparse contamination. CLEANCON reduces final-memory contamination to approx- imately zero and increases category-macro P-AP in all 12 matched comparisons. Yet along a retention sweep, the lowest-contamination memory does not attain the highest P-AP; performance continues to improve while contamination rises. Mem- ory contamination therefore does not order the resulting memories by P-AP