ML Reads

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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Nov 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.

#02Nov 5, 2026

cs.CV

OraRefer: Segmentation-Guided Multi-Photograph Fusion for Oral Cancer Screening with Guaranteed Patient-Level Sensitivity

Rupam Mukherjee, Mehakdeep Singh, Shirin Dasgupta and 1 more

Oral cancer and the oral potentially malignant disorders (OPMD) that can precede it are visible on the oral mucosa, which makes smartphone photographs a promising tool for screening. Deep learning models for this task classify individual photographs. However, screening refers patients, not photographs: a patient is usually photographed several times, and the referral decision must miss no more than a set share of patients with disease. We propose OraRefer, a patient-level screening model that reads each photograph with a segmentation-guided foundation model that conditions its class decision on the predicted lesion, combines all photographs of a patient with risk factors, and refers through a threshold with a finite-sample sensitivity guarantee. The model localizes the mouth itself, so inference needs no annotation. On 3000 photographs of 714 patients, patient-level fusion reaches an AUROC of 0.919 and outperforms attention-based multiple-instance learning. At a 90% sensitivity target, OraRefer detects 95% of patients with OPMD or cancer and misses 3 of 61 patients with cancer, at a specificity of 0.610. Because the threshold is calibrated without retraining, each clinic can set its own guaranteed operating point on a local calibration sample.

#03Nov 5, 2026

cs.CV

InstantHand: Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting for Animatable Hand Avatar Reconstruction from a Single Image

Chanho Kim, Muhammad Salman Ali, Kyeonghwan Gwak and 4 more

Hand avatar reconstruction typically relies on multi-view capture or per-subject optimization, limiting its scalability. We introduce InstantHand, a feed-forward framework that constructs an animatable 3D Gaussian hand avatar from a single image using off-the-shelf MANO, camera, and mask estimates, without test-time optimization. Image-averaged losses provide insufficient supervision for alpha leakage, which thickens thin finger contours. To address this issue, we propose a Soft Alpha Band regularizer that concentrates supervision on silhouette boundaries. Furthermore, colors regressed from image features can drift toward a learned prior even in observed regions. Our Reliability-gated Appearance Transfer preserves observed appearance by transferring source colors according to each Gaussian's rendering contribution, while completing unobserved regions using the learned prior conditioned on global source identity. InstantHand constructs an avatar in 2.84 seconds and renders at 161 FPS, matching per-subject-optimized baselines on InterHand2.6M and remaining competitive in zero-shot evaluation on HanCo.

#04Nov 5, 2026

cs.RO

T3R: Training-Free Two-Stage Token Refinement Towards Efficient and Robust VLA Models

Mohammed Hassan, Zhenyang Chen, Zheng Wang and 5 more

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable end-to-end robot control, but inference is increasingly expensive. Each decision processes hundreds of visual tokens, often across multiple cameras, leading to substantial computation while allowing irrelevant background content to distract action prediction under distribution shift. We argue that these issues stem from two complementary forms of redundancy: many visual tokens are spatially irrelevant, while attention over the remaining tokens is often misallocated. Based on this observation, we propose T3R, a Training-Free Two-Stage Token Refinement framework. In the first stage, segmentation-guided token pruning removes irrelevant visual patches to reduce computation and eliminate distracting context. In the second stage, saliency-guided attention biasing reallocates attention toward action-critical visual regions and language instructions within the retained tokens. Together, pruning produces a cleaner candidate set, while attention biasing further emphasizes the most decision-relevant evidence, yielding a better accuracy-efficiency frontier than either stage alone. On LIBERO-Spatial, T3R removes 85% of scene-camera visual tokens while essentially matching the unpruned success rate, and improves success by up to 7 percentage points under out-of-distribution object-placement perturbations. The timing comparison attributes 7.8 ms per inference call to pruning and attention-bias application. As input resolution increases, LLM-forward profiling shows up to a 3.3x speedup over the unpruned baseline. Evaluations across LIBERO, SIMPLER, and RoboTwin with three VLA backbones show the strongest accuracy-efficiency benefits in multi-camera settings. These results demonstrate that training-free token refinement is a practical approach to efficient and robust VLA inference.

#05Nov 5, 2026

cs.RO

MOMASPLAT: Dynamic Novel-View Demonstration Augmentation for Mobile Manipulation

Sateesh Kumar, Arnav Balaji, Arpit Bahety and 3 more

Visuomotor policies trained through imitation learning are highly sensitive to changes in camera viewpoint. This is particularly problematic for mobile manipulation (MoMa), where robots rarely execute manipulation from the exact same base pose used during demonstration collection due to navigation uncertainty, localization drift, and environmental constraints. Recent approaches use novel-view synthesis (NVS) to augment demonstrations with unseen viewpoints, but they assume static scenes and therefore fail to re-render the manipulated object during the post-contact interaction phase, leaving the most critical parts of the demonstration unaugmented. We present MOMASPLAT, a novel-view demonstration augmentation framework for mobile manipulation that synthesizes full manipulation trajectories from unseen robot base poses, including dynamic object interactions. Our key insight is that standard MoMa data collection naturally provides the multiview observations needed to reconstruct both the static scene and the manipulated object in 3D. MOMASPLAT combines 3D Gaussian Splatting, feed-forward 3D foundation models, and kinematics-based action retargeting to separately reconstruct the scene and manipulated object, render them from novel viewpoints, and generate geometrically consistent synthetic demonstrations paired with transformed actions. We evaluate MOMASPLAT on five real-world mobile manipulation tasks involving both rigid and articulated objects across three scenes, and validate the fidelity of its synthesized demonstrations against ground truth in simulation. MOMASPLAT substantially improves robustness to unseen base poses, more than doubling the average success rate of the strongest baseline and maintaining non-trivial success at large base displacements where all baselines fail, while reducing the need for largescale real-world data collection.