#01Nov 8, 2026
cs.CV
Flex-DDCM: Zero-Shot Task-Oriented Image Compression via Diffusion Trajectory Guidance
Yixin Gao, Runsen Feng, Xin Li and 1 more
Recent zero-shot image compression methods exploit the powerful priors of pretrained diffusion models to produce perceptually pleasing reconstructions without compression-specific training. However, image compression serves not only human viewing but also machine analysis, while existing zero-shot codecs have limited flexibility in meeting the diverse reconstruction requirements of these applications. In this paper, we propose Flex-DDCM, a framework for zero-shot task-oriented image compression via diffusion trajectory guidance. Building on Turbo-DDCM, we adapt the coded diffusion trajectory through task-guided noise selection, embedding the effects of task guidance into the compressed representation. Guidance terms can be applied individually or combined, with timestep-dependent strengths controlling their influence throughout denoising. This design enables task adaptation without introducing additional decoding complexity. Experiments demonstrate flexible trade-offs among pixel fidelity, perceptual quality, and downstream task performance, with competitive performance against trained task-oriented codecs and faster decoding than Diff-ICMH.
#02Nov 8, 2026
cs.LG
A Unified Framework for License Plate Identification and Character-Recognition
Saurabh Kumar, Dewant Katare, Prakriti Jain
This paper presents a unified framework for license plate detection and character recognition on low-power edge hardware. The proposed network uses a shared CSP-Darknet and PANet feature encoder with an anchor-free localization head and a RoIAlign-based sequence-recognition branch. Character decoding is performed directly on aligned feature maps, avoiding image-space plate cropping and a second recognition backbone. The model is trained on an AI-assisted dataset of approximately 37,000 manually verified images covering license plate layouts from all 50 United States. The dataset includes variations in illumination, viewpoint, weather, blur, occlusion, and plate design. The framework is converted to an INT8 TensorRT engine and evaluated on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano with 8 GB memory. The INT8 model shows an mAP50 of 97.8% and a full-sequence accuracy of 90.7%. It records 147 FPS at 6.8 ms end-to-end latency, with 315 MB inference memory and 9.4 W average power consumption. Relative to the YOLOv8s+CRNN baseline, the proposed deployment provides a 7.1x throughput increase and a 77.8% reduction in allocated inference memory
#03Nov 8, 2026
cs.LG
Full Fine-Tuning is not the Problem: Why Adam Fails and SGD Succeeds in Few-Shot CLIP Adaptation
Nairouz Mrabah, Ismail Ben Ayed, Eric Granger
Few-shot CLIP adaptation is often treated as a parameterization problem. Full fine-tuning is assumed to overfit, so parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods are preferred. In this paper, we show that this conclusion conflates parameterization with optimization. Across 11 datasets, 3 CLIP backbones, and 5 shot levels, dense full fine-tuning with plain SGD outperforms representative PEFT methods under the reported evaluation protocol, whereas Adam/AdamW collapses. We trace this collapse to unreliable support-set preconditioning. The few-shot second moment systematically underestimates the corresponding full-data statistic, already at initialization. Adam's inverse-square-root normalization converts this error into an oversized adaptive update. Matching Adam's first-step update budget to SGD resolves most of the collapse, whereas numerator-side alignment does not explain the failure. Shampoo and SOAP also fail, so richer preconditioning alone does not resolve the problem. Theory formalizes how few-shot estimation error is amplified into unsafe updates. SGD succeeds because it avoids unreliable preconditioners and stays close to pretrained CLIP. Interpolation probes show low-loss connections along tested directions, and curvature probes show favorable directional curvature. These results identify optimizer-induced preconditioning, not dense full fine-tuning itself, as the main source of failure in few-shot CLIP adaptation.
#04Nov 8, 2026
cs.CV
GenRM-Flow: Generators are Process-aware Reward Models in Flow Matching
Siming Fu, Ruizhe He, Zheming Fu and 7 more
Aligning video generation models with human preference depends critically on the quality of the reward model that scores generated videos. Current video reward models, however, source their reward signal from a model's representational rather than generative capacity: they either repurpose vision-language models as pixel-space scorers, or train auxiliary scoring heads on top of frozen generator features. The generator's actual ability to predict velocities, denoise latents, and produce videos plays no role in scoring its own generations. We argue that this overlooks a structural property of offline preference learning. Any preference optimization objective that approximates an offline preference dataset mathematically targets a strictly defined KL-constrained optimal policy. By isolating the reward term from this analytical solution and mapping the exact generation log-likelihood to its flow-matching surrogate, the empirical reward emerges deterministically as the relative difference in continuous-time velocity-prediction errors. We formalize this equivalence into GenRM-Flow, a framework where a preference-tuned video generator inherently operates as a process-aware reward model directly in the noisy latent space. We further show theoretically that distinct fine-tuning objectives, whether contrastive like DPO and IPO or non-contrastive like RWR, are alternative optimization pathways toward the same optimal policy, each inducing a reward readout from the generator's velocity-prediction errors. Furthermore, the extracted process reward seamlessly substitutes external VLM scorers in FlowAWR. Operating purely on native latent outputs without auxiliary reward networks, this generative reward drives measurable improvements in downstream video generation.
#05Nov 8, 2026
cs.RO
Off-Policy RL with Online Inference Tuning: My Solution to the CoRL 2026 RoboEval Challenge
Ilia Larchenko
The CoRL 2026 RoboEval challenge has eight bimanual tasks, and it ranks a policy not only on whether it succeeds but on how: every stage of the task, done safely, efficiently and with both arms in coordination, scored against human demonstrations. My solution has two parts. The generic part, carried over from my LeHome challenge solution, is off-policy RL on a $π_{0.5}$-based policy that is also its own value function. It is trained with AWR and RECAP on advantages of the exact official score, in a loop where every rollout is at the same time a Thompson-sampling trial of about 20 inference parameters. Out of the box, it took the policy to 0.85 RDS on held-out seeds in two days (and it was still very far from convergence). The competition-specific part adds data that local exploration cannot find: generated demonstrations that reach the full reward, and recovery episodes that start from the policy's own failures. The submitted policy reaches 0.990 RDS on held-out seeds and 0.987 on the official seeds.