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5 papers

#01Nov 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.

#02Nov 5, 2026

cs.CV

ManimCode: Learning Visual Self-Correction for Educational Animation

Zhengyang Liang, Lizi Liao

Manim supports precise, programmatic video generation, but a successfully rendered educational animation can still have visual defects, missing explanations, or incorrect content. Rendering does not directly identify the code changes needed to correct these visual failures, so feedback-driven revision is needed. Existing agentic frameworks use iterative rendering and revision but typically rely on large models, often proprietary. Existing Manim datasets primarily contain final programs and often lack quality verification and the trajectories of feedback and revisions needed to learn this refinement process. We introduce ManimData and ManimCode, a data and training framework for feedback-driven educational animation generation. We construct ManimData through a render-guided pipeline that iteratively generates, executes, reviews, and revises Manim programs with retrieved API documentation. Its 24,034 render-verified, quality-filtered records preserve intermediate programs, execution errors, visual critiques, and corrective revisions. We use role-conditioned supervised fine-tuning on these trajectories to train ManimCode, a single 4B model, to write, review, and revise animation programs. To improve correction of errors that differ from those in the collected trajectories, we then train the Reviser with reinforcement learning on self-generated states, using rendering outcomes and reference-free quality feedback. ManimCode achieves 96.6% and 97.0% render success on ManimData-test and ManimBench, compared with 52.6% and 82.0% for the untrained 4B model under the same inference setup, while also improving video quality scores from 2.48 to 2.94 and from 3.00 to 3.44. Integrating ManimCode into two long-form educational video generation systems increases completed videos from 19/117 to 107/117 and from 53/239 to 239/239, alongside improvements in educational effectiveness and visual quality.

#03Nov 5, 2026

cs.LG

FewStepRL: Fine-tuning Few-step Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning

Haitao Lin, Minsi Ren, Yang Li and 4 more

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard post-training method for diffusion models, but most RL objectives roll out the current policy at every iteration, and with a many-step sampler these rollouts typically dominate the cost of training. Few-step models cut this cost, yet they model an average velocity over an interval, whereas existing RL objectives are built for an instantaneous velocity with a many-step sampler. We adapt RL objectives to few-step models systematically in three phases, namely a transformation, a decomposition and an adaptation. The transformation to $x$-space expresses each objective we consider through a common policy prediction, at the clean end by default and at an explicitly marked level for transition or flow-map objectives, so that objectives stated over densities, velocities or rewards become comparable. The decomposition writes the gradient of each of these objectives as the sum of a self-regression toward a reference and a reward augmentation, so that a method reduces, at the gradient level, to a choice of anchors and weights. The adaptation computes each anchor from a few-step model at the end of its transport or along its tangent, with the instantaneous velocity recovered from the network itself or from an auxiliary network. This yields few-step versions of FlowGRPO, AWM, DiffusionNFT, DiffusionOPSD and ReFL in one modular codebase. In our experiments, reward-gradient-based methods are the most effective when the reward is differentiable and its gradient is affordable; otherwise DiffusionNFT-style methods generally reach high rewards in relatively few iterations despite a sometimes higher per-iteration cost. Extra inference steps show no systematic aggregate benefit in our experiments, although selected outputs visibly improve with two to four times as many sampling steps as in training.

#04Nov 5, 2026

cs.AI

The Geometry of Simulated Perspectives: Dissociating Representation and Behaviour in a Multimodal Language Model

Mathis Immertreu, Fitim Abdullahu, Thomas Kinfe and 4 more

Multimodal language models can simulate different observers, yet it remains unclear how assigned perspectives reshape their internal representations and whether these changes govern their judgements. Here, we investigate the representational geometry of persona-conditioned visual interestingness in Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct. Across 100 images and 53 prompting conditions, we systematically vary persona content and the linguistic framing used to introduce it, while recording behavioural ratings and layer-wise hidden states. We observe a systematic reorganisation of representational geometry across processing depth: early layers primarily encode image identity, whereas persona-specific structures emerge in later layers. Strikingly, prompt framing reshapes internal representations more strongly than persona identity, whereas persona content has a greater impact on behavioural judgements. This dissociation is further illustrated by minimal identity statements that alter representations even without changing responses. These findings demonstrate that representational distance does not necessarily reflect behavioural relevance. More broadly, they reveal how simulated perspectives emerge as distinct structures within the representational space of artificial cognitive systems, highlighting a fundamental distinction between the geometry of internal representations and their functional consequences.

#05Nov 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/