ML Reads

Personal arXiv list

ML papers to read today.

Pick a topic and keep a small daily list of papers worth opening.

Refresh queueDaily mix

Today's queue

5 papers

#01Sep 10, 2026

cs.CV

Single-Stream Multi-Feature Fusion with Temporal Robustness for Gait Emotion Recognition

Shirong Lyu, Silu Quan, Yixuan Ding and 1 more

3D skeleton-based gait emotion recognition faces high annotation costs, data scarcity, and poor generalization on heterogeneous data. This paper proposes SV-GCN, a single-stream multi-feature fusion framework with temporal invariance. We introduce intra-frame relative motion features to eliminate frame-rate sensitivity and embed heterogeneous cues at shallow layers, enabling early fusion without multi-stream complexity. For variable-length sequences, we design a global mask-guided valid-frame spatio-temporal graph convolution module, introducing frame-rate insensitivity for the first time in this domain. On the E-Gait dataset, our method achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art while demonstrating strong generalization across varying sequence lengths and frame rates, offering a viable pathway for pre-training on large-scale skeleton-based action recognition datasets.

#02Sep 10, 2026

cs.CV

Self-Supervised Cardiac Phase Detection via Single-Parameter Latent Orbits

John Bonnici, Matthew Baugh, Aleksandra Kulbaka and 3 more

Accurate identification of end-diastole (ED) and end-systole (ES) in echocardiography underpins the quantification of ventricular function, yet manual selection of these key frames is subjective and introduces clinically significant inter-operator variability. Recent self-supervised methods either prescribe strict periodic trajectories or learn an unconstrained low-dimensional motion subspace from reconstruction or registration objectives. The former offers interpretability but imposes restrictive assumptions on temporal progression, whereas the latter leaves cardiac phase implicit and ED/ES must be recovered through post-hoc geometric processing of the learned trajectory. We translate the physiological observation that cardiac phase is a one-dimensional signal into a prior by constraining the latent motion component to a single-parameter latent orbit, i.e., a global linear trajectory in latent space indexed by a bounded scalar phase variable. Mapping this variable through a sinusoidal nonlinearity yields an oscillatory motion signal with consistent temporal ordering, enabling direct identification of ED and ES from the learned phase signal. This inductive bias allows the model to capture an interpretable representation of the cardiac cycle, while maintaining flexibility to capture irregular heartbeats. Trained on EchoNet-Dynamic without annotations, our minimal single-parameter cardiac phase model learns an effective latent orbit, significantly improves upon the previous state of the art in ED localisation and matches it in ES localisation while using a more constrained representation and fewer training epochs. This demonstrates that a principled physiological inductive bias can match or exceed the performance of more complex representations. Code is available at: https://github.com/BonniciJ/OrbitalEcho/

#03Sep 10, 2026

cs.CV

Logit Refiner: Improving Visual Autoregressive Models via Intra-Scale Dependency Modeling

Meimingwei Li, Stefan Andreas Baumann, Felix Krause and 1 more

Visual Autoregressive Models (VAR) generate images through next-scale prediction, producing all tokens within each scale in parallel. We show that this parallel decoding constitutes a mean-field-style approximation that discards spatial dependencies among same-scale tokens, causing locally incoherent samples regardless of backbone capacity -- a limitation of the decoding rule. Addressing this limitation, we introduce the Logit Refiner, a lightweight autoregressive module that restores intra-scale dependencies by sequentially sampling tokens conditioned on frozen backbone features. Adding only ~10% parameters and less than 5% of the base model's training compute, it plugs into any pretrained VAR checkpoint without retraining. Controlled ablations isolate joint intra-scale sampling -- rather than additional capacity or training -- as the critical ingredient. Across backbones from 310M to 2B parameters on class-conditional ImageNet 256x256, the refiner consistently improves generation quality, enabling a 1.1B-parameter model to surpass one twice its size. The approach further generalizes to text-to-image generation, confirming that the mean-field bottleneck persists across VAR variants and is effectively alleviated by our method. Project page: https://compvis.github.io/logit-refiner/

#04Sep 10, 2026

cs.AI

MindTopo: Can Foundation Models Reason in Topological Space?

Yunfei Ge, Anbang Liu, Qineng Wang and 9 more

Spatial reasoning depends not only on metric properties such as distance, angle, and shape, but also on topological relations that remain invariant under continuous deformation. Cognitive science identifies these relations as foundational to spatial understanding, yet foundation-model evaluations largely focus on metric or viewpoint-dependent relations. We introduce MindTopo, a benchmark of topological intuition across five properties grounded in cognitive science and formal topology: continuity, separation, order, enclosure, and knots. MindTopo evaluates each property at two cognitive levels. Reasoning asks a model to identify topological relations or infer how they change. Planning instantiates a foundation model as a closed-loop agent whose policy selects environment actions. MindTopo contains 11,030 instances across 13 procedurally generated task types with controllable difficulty. We benchmark 14 MLLMs and study agent configurations augmented with image and video generation, including 3 video generative models in planning settings. Every MLLM performs better on reasoning than on planning, and the best-performing model remains far below observed human performance. On Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct, supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning improve reasoning more than planning. Generated observations retain local cues and reach plausible endpoints, but audited rollouts do not reliably follow environment dynamics or preserve topology across transitions. Our website is at https://mind-topo.github.io/

#05Sep 10, 2026

cs.CV

Language-Augmented Semantic Priors for B-Spline Surface Fitting

Yunzhong Lou, Yusheng Luo, Jiahao Li and 2 more

The use of B-splines and Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines surfaces constitutes the mathematical foundation of contemporary computer-aided design (CAD) systems. Despite long-term progress, geometric kernels in traditional CAD still rely heavily on predetermined heuristic initialization for surface fitting and parameterization. Meanwhile, the procedural semantics and design intent encoded in modeling histories are largely ignored during geometry generation. This disconnect creates a gap between high-level design intent and solver-executable geometric configuration, often leading to suboptimal and semantically inconsistent fitting results. To bridge this gap, we introduce LASP, a Language-Augmented Semantic Priors framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to infer structured, solver-usable B-spline priors from procedural modeling histories. Rather than modifying the geometric kernel itself, LASP operates as a semantic reasoning layer above existing solvers. It first translates modeling histories into rich textual descriptions that capture design intent, geometric context, and functional relationships, and then uses a fine-tuned LLM to predict structured B-spline prior parameters. LASP is trained through a two-stage scheme that combines local geometric regularities with long-range contextual dependencies, producing priors that are both interpretable and semantically coherent. This approach furnishes inductive signals that direct the conventional B-spline fitting process toward solutions that more accurately encapsulate the intended design objectives and demonstrate heightened semantic coherence. Compared to traditional machine learning schemes, the experiments demonstrate that language-driven reasoning can serve as a powerful inductive bias for geometric solving, establishing a new paradigm of language-guided geometric optimization in modern CAD systems.