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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Nov 5, 2026

cs.CV

4D Point Splatting for mmWave Radar Micro-Doppler Differentiable Rendering

Adnan Armouti, Guanyue Qian, Rajalakshmi Nandakumar

Millimeter-wave radar resolves the micrometer displacements of a moving body as micro-Doppler, enabling gait, gesture, activity, pose and vital-sign sensing. Each task relies on a downstream model trained on real data, yet radar datasets lag orders of magnitude behind vision and language. Brute-force collection will not close that gap, and existing synthesis methods (forward-only simulators, learned generators and static-scene inverse renderers) cannot fit a real capture of a moving body, leaving a sim2real gap. We present 4D Point Splatting (4DPS), a physics-based differentiable renderer that fits an explicit moving scene to a real capture. Using the synchronized camera to initialize the room and body, we represent the scene as oriented points carrying material, normal and velocity, and splat each point into range and Doppler bins. Our output is the raw complex return a real radar records, so we apply the same signal processing on the rendered data to obtain any representation for training any SOTA downstream model. We fit 235 sequences on HuPR and 100 on RT-Pose, two datasets with different radars. Our reconstructions set the state of the art, with median correlations of 0.940 and 0.830 on range-azimuth, 0.829 and 0.695 on range-Doppler, and 0.988 and 0.966 on micro-Doppler. Our renders also set the state of the art in downstream sim2real gap. On RT-Pose, a pose model trained on them reaches 21.9 cm MPJPE on real data, against 16.7 cm for real training and 127.6 cm for the RF-Genesis baseline, where both the rendered- and real-trained models learn nearly the same features. Our custom CUDA kernels fit a sequence in 5.7 minutes on HuPR and 12.9 on RT-Pose on one H100, making dataset-scale inverse rendering of mmWave radar possible for the first time. This work can enable synthetic data generation for any human-centered downstream task and model, and scene editing for data augmentation.

#02Nov 5, 2026

cs.CV

ProQuant: Progressive Quantization-aware Training for Edge MLLMs

Yufei Xue, Yushi Huang, Jiawei Shao and 5 more

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) with impressive perception and understanding capabilities will enable a range of downstream applications. However, their substantial computational and memory requirements hinder the real-world implementation, particularly for resource-constrained edge devices. Quantization has emerged as an effective solution for deploying large models. While post-training quantization (PTQ) successfully retains the performance at moderate bit-width (e.g., W8A8), it suffers from severe performance degradation under low-bit quantization (e.g., W4A8), especially for small-scale models that are more suitable for edge deployment. In this paper, we propose ProQuant, a novel weight-activation quantization-aware training (QAT) framework tailored for low-bit MLLMs. First, to align the limited finetuning dataset distribution with the pretrained dataset distribution, we propose a self-relabeling (SRL) scheme to resample the responses of the open-source multimodal dataset. Second, we are the first to take a decoupled view of multi-modal (MM) understanding and language modeling abilities. We propose a progressive block activation (PBA) mechanism to prioritize the MM understanding recovery. We also introduce a vision-sensitive factor $\vecτ$ that effectively identifies the MM-critical layers. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks, covering models with 2B-8B parameters, show that ProQuant significantly outperforms existing methods. For example, our W4A8 Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct improves average accuracy by impressively 6.6% and achieves performance comparable to full precision counterparts with only approximately 1% performance drop. Code is available at https://github.com/yufeixue-ai/ProQuant/.

#03Nov 5, 2026

cs.CV

DART: Domain-Agnostic Residual Transfer for Generalist Anomaly Detection

Muhammad Aqeel, Maham Nazir, Marco Cristani and 1 more

Generalist Anomaly Detection (GAD) aims to detect anomalies in unseen domains using only a few reference samples. Recent normal-abnormal guided methods improve this setting by exploiting abnormal references, but their residuals often mix transferable anomaly cues with domain-specific appearance factors such as texture, geometry, and acquisition conditions. This residual domain entanglement limits cross-domain transfer and may produce spurious activations on novel domains. We propose DART, a plug-in framework for normal-abnormal guided GAD that learns to separate residuals into anomaly-relevant and domain-specific components. DART combines a Residual Disentanglement Module, which preserves anomaly-discriminative information while suppressing domain information, with Cross-Domain Meta-Training, which forms episodes across source domains to make the separation effective. The method is architecture-agnostic and can be inserted between residual computation and the detection head of existing GAD pipelines. Experiments on MVTec AD, VisA, and BraTS show consistent improvements over multiple base methods, with the largest gains under stronger domain shifts. https://github.com/aqeeelmirza/DART

#04Nov 5, 2026

cs.CV

Edge-Assisted Crowdsensing for Explainable Cyclist Safety Perception

Hongsen Cao, Chia-Yen Chiang, Mona Jaber and 2 more

Cyclist fatality rates remain high despite policy support for active travel, and autonomous vehicles add complexity to mixed traffic. Neither crash statistics nor multi-model detection pipelines scale to continuous monitoring of perceived safety along a route. We present an edge-assisted crowdsensing system: handlebar cameras supply street-level frames, a vision-language model (VLM) turns each frame into structured traffic attributes through a single prompt, and an explainable boosting machine (EBM) combines them with OpenStreetMap road infrastructure and on-bike kinematics to predict a crowdsourced 1-9 safety score. Extraction belongs at the network edge: the fastest self-hosted model needs 2.49 s per frame and scoring takes 0.4 ms on a CPU. On 1,362 annotated frames from two London routes, the EBM regressor reaches 72.2 percent binary accuracy and a mean absolute error of 1.011 under five-fold cross-validation. It is within one accuracy point of black-box ensembles. Its per-feature shape functions give exact attribution: physical lane separation is worth +0.97 rating points, a painted lane +0.70 and a construction site -0.65. Planners can therefore price an infrastructure change in rating points, and the results enter cost-benefit analysis directly. We also report inter-annotator agreement (alpha = 0.4695), an attribute audit, and a sensitivity analysis linking attribute error to accuracy. With re-encoding, a 20 s sampling interval serves 1,000 riders at 54 Mbit/s at a cost of 1.4 accuracy points, making continuous monitoring practical.

#05Nov 5, 2026

cs.RO

VisionSIM: Beyond Idealized Sensors - A Multi-Modal Simulator for Robot Perception

Sacha Jungerman, Kaustubh Sadekar, Avery Gump and 6 more

Robotic perception increasingly relies on heterogeneous sensor suites combining cameras with emerging modalities (event, SPAD, iToF/dToF, and thermal). Yet existing simulators idealize these sensors, hiding critical modality-specific failure modes that limit real-world deployment. We present VisionSIM, a unified, physically grounded simulation platform that elevates sensor realism to a first-class concern by modeling the raw physical measurement process for diverse conventional and emerging modalities. We expose fine-grained control over physical sensor parameters, reproducing failure modes overlooked by general-purpose simulators: pileup and glare for LiDAR; phase wrapping, saturation, and motion artifacts for iToF; refractory drops for event cameras; and history-dependent emission for thermal cameras. This enables principled cross-modality comparison on identical scenes and trajectories. We release the platform and a large indoor dataset with synchronized raw measurements and rich ground-truth annotations.