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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Aug 28, 2026

cs.CV

Texture Image Classification Using DWT AlexNet Feature Fusion and Deep Neural Networks

Arun D. Kulkarni

Texture image classification plays a significant role in computer vision applications, including industrial inspection, medical image analysis, remote sensing, and object recognition. Handcrafted features can capture local texture characteristics but may have limited capability to represent complex visual patterns. In contrast, deep learning models automatically learn discriminative representations but may not fully exploit the multiscale spatial-frequency information inherent in texture images. This paper proposes a hybrid feature fusion framework, termed DWT_AlexNet_DNN, which combines Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) features with deep features extracted using AlexNet for texture image classification.

#02Aug 28, 2026

cs.CV

Semantic Head Specialization Guides Hybrid ViT Attention for Multimodal LLMs

Chenhong He, Lei Li, Shicheng Li and 5 more

Hybrid attention dominates frontier LLMs, yet Vision Transformers (ViTs) in multimodal LLMs lack a satisfactory hybrid design, with no consensus on why certain attention patterns work better. To fill this gap, we study ViT attention heads and find they differentiate into object- and background-specialist roles, a pattern most pronounced under full attention; we call this Semantic Head Specialization (SHS). We propose SHS-Index to quantify this specialization, show that it distinguishes full-attention from chunk-window ViTs, and find that it strongly tracks downstream benchmark performance. We then identify three structural factors that shape SHS---window interaction, token serialization, and local softmax allocation---and use them as design principles for hybrid attention. Guided by these factors, we design Ariadne Attention, a hybrid that matches full attention on 22 image and video tasks at 6.5x less attention compute. Our findings establish head specialization as a measurable property for diagnosing and designing principled hybrid ViT attention at the multimodal-LLM scale.

#03Aug 28, 2026

cs.CV

Abstract4D: A Large-Scale Dataset and Framework for Understanding the Visual Language of Abstract Art

Haowei Zhang, Yuanpei Zhao, Ji-Zhe Zhou and 1 more

Artificial intelligence can classify artistic styles and synthesize images, but it still lacks a model of the visual language that gives art meaning. Abstract painting minimizes object semantics and foregrounds structural cues, making it an ideal testbed for computational perception. We introduce \textbf{Abstract4D}, the largest dataset of abstract paintings to date: more than 120,000 images paired with rich metadata and multi-dimensional prompts that capture each work's perceptual attributes---\textit{form, color, texture, and composition}. Annotations are produced by a hybrid human--VLM pipeline for quality and consistency. Using Abstract4D, we (i) analyze the semantic structure of abstract art through large-scale embedding visualization, uncovering how perceptual relationships organize artistic meaning, and (ii) establish benchmark tasks for classification, cross-modal retrieval, and text-to-image generation to evaluate how AI models perceive and reproduce abstract visual language. Together, these analyses demonstrate how Abstract4D enables both exploration and quantitative assessment of AI's ability to represent and interpret abstract art.

#04Aug 28, 2026

cs.CV

How Far Can 5,500 Hours of Driving Take You? A Scaling Law Analysis of Video Diffusion Models

Victor Besnier, Anh-Quan Cao, Elias Ramzi and 5 more

Video generation for autonomous driving cannot follow the web-scale route: driving data is expensive to collect, bound by privacy requirements, and cannot be scraped at will, so models must make the most of a fixed corpus. We present a systematic scaling-law study of video diffusion models trained from scratch on driving data: a family of models from 1M to 9B parameters, trained at different exposures on up to 5,500 hours of driving. Validation loss follows consistent power laws in both model size and training exposure, answering the questions that shape a training budget: whether compute is better spent on longer training or on a larger model, and whether more data is needed. Loss improves much faster with training exposure than with model size, making longer training the most effective way to improve a fixed model under limited compute. However, larger models continue to achieve lower asymptotic loss, so compute-optimal scaling still favors increasing model size when sufficient compute and data are available. Guided by these laws, we train a 9B-parameter model, to our knowledge the largest video diffusion model trained from scratch on driving data: it sets a new open-source state of the art for driving video generation, as measured on nuScenes. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/valeoai/VATIX. NATIX is separately releasing the underlying driving data in stages.

#05Aug 28, 2026

cs.CV

GeBDA: Building Damage Assessment as Text-Based Sequence Prediction

Olivier Dietrich, Krishna Sapkota, Konrad Schindler and 1 more

Conventionally, Building Damage Assessment (BDA) is tackled either with dedicated network architectures or by fine-tuning geospatial image foundation models. In this work, we ask whether a general-purpose Vision-Language Model (VLM) can localize buildings and grade their damage through autoregressive sequence generation alone. We cast BDA as predicting a variable-length set of bounding boxes, each specified by its coordinates and a damage label. Our preliminary implementation, based on the open Gemma model, achieves promising damage mapping results from only bi-temporal satellite images and a suitable text prompt.