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

#01Nov 5, 2026

cs.CV

Multimodal Hierarchical Mixture-of-Experts for 3D Medical Vision-Language Modeling

Gizem Mert, Szymon Płotka, Pedro R. A. S. Bassi and 5 more

Medical 3D scans and reports are inherently hierarchical, with diagnostic cues concentrated in specific anatomical regions across multiple levels of organization. Yet, most medical vision-language models ignore this structure and fail to focus on clinically relevant anatomy. We introduce MedHiVE, which combines hierarchical vision-language Soft Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) with contrastive learning to jointly model fine-grained anatomy and global scan context. To our knowledge, MedHiVE is the first framework to route both vision and text tokens through a two-level SMoE hierarchy organized by anatomical scale, coupling this with report-derived anatomy-level contrastive alignment for 3D medical imaging. This replaces the direct region-text alignment of statically pooled features and vision-only hierarchical routing of prior work with dynamic, slot-based cross-modal information flow across anatomical scales. MedHiVE operates via a two-level, learnable token-routing mechanism, where local image and text features are first routed through a local SMoE and then fused by a global SMoE into unified multimodal representations. Contrastive learning aligns both anatomy-level and global vision-language representations in a unified space. Pre-trained on 25,000+ CT scans with anatomical supervision, MedHiVE consistently surpasses 11 state-of-the-art methods across 6 datasets on 3 tasks: segmentation, classification, and detection, demonstrating the importance of hierarchical modeling. The code for MedHiVE is at github.com/szczurek-lab/MedHiVE.

#02Nov 5, 2026

cs.CV

Improving Context-Shift Robustness of Convolutional Networks via Context-Regularized Cross-Entropy

Jinen Setpal, Chaoyue Liu

Image classification models often encounter objects in diverse and unpredictable contexts at test time, which may differ substantially from those seen during training. This phenomenon, termed context shift, exposes a key fragility in neural networks: when models rely on non-causal contextual cues for prediction, shifts in context can lead to significant performance degradation. In this paper, we propose a novel training framework to improve the robustness of convolutional neural networks under context shift. Our approach leverages spatial feature attribution to guide models toward making predictions that rely less on contextual regions and more on object-relevant features. As a first step, recognizing a theoretical limitation of existing feature attribution methods we introduce a new variant, ContrastiveCAMs, which produces more faithful attribution maps of model predictions. Building on ContrastiveCAMs, we further propose Context-Regularized Cross-Entropy (CR-CE), a modification of the standard cross-entropy loss that regularizes the model's attention by suppressing the influence of contextual regions, thereby improving robustness to context shift. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on several medium-to-large scale datasets (Waterbirds, Spawrious, ImageNet/ImageNet-BG, Hard-ImageNet), and report consistent improvements in context-shift robustness.

#03Nov 5, 2026

cs.CV

EgoGeneralist: Unifying Egocentric Action-Video Tasks through Video-Native Modeling

Yanlin Jin, Bowen Yang, Cheng Zhang and 4 more

Modern video models possess strong visual priors, yet do not natively represent human action in metric 3D space. We present EgoGeneralist, which adapts pretrained video generators to unify action-conditioned egocentric video generation, pose estimation, and joint action-video generation. Our role-adaptive action renderer provides video-native representations for multidirectional action-video learning, making metric motion usable as both a spatial control signal and a recoverable generation target. Cross-stream action-video coupling establishes close correspondence between metric motion and visual dynamics through lightweight adaptation while preserving the pretrained visual prior. Together, these designs establish a generalist framework spanning five action-video tasks. Despite adaptation only on controlled laboratory recordings, EgoGeneralist generalizes to diverse unseen scenes and interactions with effective action control and visual quality, bridging pretrained visual knowledge and metric 3D human motion.

#04Nov 5, 2026

cs.RO

Social Humanoid: Socially Responsive Human-Humanoid Interaction

Vongani H. Maluleke, James Ni, Kie Horiuchi and 7 more

Humanoid robots are typically trained as solitary agents, leaving them unable to coordinate physically with human partners who naturally anticipate and adjust to one another. To bridge this gap, we present Social Humanoid, a hierarchical system that generates and executes socially responsive whole-body motion on a 29-DoF Unitree G1 conditioned on a human partner's motion. Its high-level policy performs flexible sequence modeling of human and humanoid motion through a shared tokenized representation, generating reactive humanoid motion and anticipating the partner's motion when they are occluded, while a low-level whole-body tracking controller executes the generated motion on the robot. To train the system, we introduce a two-phase adaptive retargeting procedure that retargets one interaction partner to the robot while morphing the other partner to preserve contact dynamics, reachability, and relative body scale. We apply this procedure across five motion-capture datasets to produce a new Human-Humanoid Interaction (HHI) benchmark of 260 hours of human-humanoid interactions. Our results demonstrate that Social Humanoid produces coordinated, human-aligned behavior across diverse interaction types in simulation and the real world. Project page: https://von31.github.io/social-humanoid/

#05Nov 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/.