#01Oct 20, 2026
cs.AI
From Comparison to Selection: Enhancing Cross-Scale Generalization of Pointer Networks Trained with Reinforcement Learning for Capacitated Drone Delivery Routing
Sofiene Lassoued, Devara Tertia, Stefan Lier and 1 more
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) enable fast, flexible last-mile and emergency delivery, but their routing remains challenging as the number of clients varies. Classical approaches based on mixed-integer programming and heuristics can scale poorly or require problem-specific design, motivating learning-based alternatives. Reinforcement learning is particularly promising, provided a single policy can generalize across problem sizes without retraining. Although attention-based Pointer Networks are inherently size-agnostic, their solution quality degrades under both upscaling and downscaling. Using the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) as a controlled proxy, with fixed capacity reflecting drone payload constraints, we investigate this degradation and identify three contributing factors: shifts in node density, attention dispersion, and dilution of the mean-pooled graph context. We systematically compare architecture-wide, encoder-side, and decoder-side modifications to address these limitations and propose a learned, permutation-invariant graph-context aggregation mechanism, implemented as a weighted average and as Set2Set. Results reveal distinct requirements for transfer in each direction: entropy-based attention scaling reduces the CVRP20-to-CVRP100 performance gap by 1.41 percentage points, while the proposed aggregation methods achieve the largest improvement on the more challenging CVRP100-to-CVRP20 transfer, approximately 0.9 percentage points. Exploiting this complementarity, we introduce an approach selector that chooses the best model for each training-target size pair. The selector reduces cost relative to the reference model across all nine seen train-test pairs and eight of nine pairs involving unseen sizes (CVRP35, CVRP75, and CVRP200), achieving improvements of up to 3.2 percent.
#02Oct 20, 2026
cs.AI
Staged Continual Adaptation of Multimodal Foundation Models for Japanese Financial Documents
Genshin Kakimoto, Atsushi Yanagisawa
Staged post-training of multimodal foundation models chains vision-language alignment, reasoning distillation, and domain tuning, yet how each phase trades capabilities against the others remains under-characterised. Tracking an 8.4B-parameter model from an un-fine-tuned baseline through three training phases on Japanese financial documents (evaluated on five text-input benchmarks), we find the phases interact non-additively: math-only distillation overwrites the financial knowledge acquired earlier even as procedural math skill survives, and the domain phase repairs more than it installs. A skip-phase ablation is best for domain knowledge but forfeits numerical-reasoning gains, so per-phase contributions are not decomposable and the best checkpoint is task-dependent, with implications for checkpoint retention and scheduling rather than added stages.
#03Oct 20, 2026
cs.AI
Physical Operating-Condition-Guided Vision-Language Matching for Cavitation Diagnosis in Industrial Pipeline Systems
Yu Sha, Junqi Tao, Deyu Wang and 4 more
Cavitation diagnosis in industrial pipeline systems is challenging because acoustic responses vary substantially with operating conditions, while similar time-frequency patterns may correspond to different cavitation states. To address this issue, we propose a physical operating-condition-guided vision-language matching (POC-VLM) for cavitation diagnosis. POC-VLM first constructs physical operating-condition-aware semantic descriptions by explicitly incorporating sample-specific operating variables into candidate cavitation texts. A time-frequency-conditioned text adaptation module then dynamically aligns these physical semantics with the observed acoustic response, followed by global-local vision-language matching to capture both holistic and localized discriminative patterns. In parallel, a K-nearest neighbours-based non-parametric physical operating-condition prior estimates the physical plausibility of each candidate state and is fused with the vision-language semantic evidence at the decision level. Experiments on three real-world cavitation datasets show that POC-VLM consistently outperforms representative data-driven, multimodal and domain-specific diagnostic methods. Further analyses verify the complementary roles of vision-language semantic matching and physical operating-condition priors, while demonstrating robust performance under varying sampling rates, noise levels and observation durations.
#04Oct 20, 2026
cs.CV
EndoWorld-JEPA: Motion-Guided Global-Local Latent World Modeling for Endoscopic Video Representation Learning
Jie Wang, Shilong Yang, Tao Zhou and 5 more
Endoscopic video contains state transitions induced by camera displacement, deformable tissue, and instrument interaction, yet existing pre-training methods treat dynamics implicitly. Inspired by action-conditioned joint-embedding predictive world models and by the observation that endoscopic optical flow contains both shared image-plane displacement and localized residual motion, we reformulate passive endoscopic video pre-training as causal motion-guided latent-state prediction. We present EndoWorld-JEPA, to our knowledge the first latent world-model pre-training framework designed for general-purpose endoscopic video representation learning. In place of recorded actions, calibrated poses, or robot kinematics, the model conditions prediction of the next latent state on motion observed up to the current state. Its Optical Motion-guided module separates dominant displacement from residual motion and converts the resulting evidence into an ordered temporal motion condition and spatial local-motion weights. Complementary global and motion-local predictors use these outputs: the temporal condition modulates both latent transitions, whereas the local weights define an auxiliary motion-local state that extends prediction from scene-level evolution to spatially selective dynamics. Patch-wise motion weighting emphasizes localized change while retaining anatomical context, and past-motion-window dropout randomly withholds the complete motion condition to reduce dependence on unreliable motion. This global--local formulation learns predictable visual--motion dynamics in representation space without reconstructing stochastic appearance artifacts. Evaluation shows that a common pre-trained checkpoint achieves strong transfer across four downstream benchmarks, supporting motion-guided global--local latent prediction as an effective pre-training paradigm for endoscopic video.
#05Oct 20, 2026
cs.CV
Manifold Prior Guided Deep Unfolding for Hyperspectral Image Reconstruction
Shuqi Liu, Yingkai Zhang, Lin Gu and 2 more
Hyperspectral Image (HSI) reconstruction has made substantial progress with the deep unfolding framework by decomposing the problem into a projection module and a denoiser module. Nevertheless, existing methods still exhibit limitations of insufficient matching with HSI data. The issues lie in two aspects: 1) the data-consistency projection module applies a fixed gradient descent step while ignoring the spectral content adaptivity of HSI; 2) the denoiser module either suffers from high computational complexity or is limited to the local receptive field, failing to efficiently capture the global spatial-spectral dependencies. In this paper, we propose a deep unfolding framework centered on a two-stage manifold learning strategy to obtain a degradation-free structural prior, which is then strategically injected into both the projection and denoiser modules. In the data-consistency projection, a prior-guided spectral weight mechanism is introduced to adaptively modulate the weight of spectral band. In the denoiser module, a manifold-guided Mamba is proposed to achieve the structure-aware extraction of spatial-spectral features through prior modulation. Quantitative and visual comparisons on synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, while maintaining the structural interpretability of the unfolding framework. The code is available at https://github.com/SqLiu67/MPG-DU.