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 10, 2026

cs.LG

HaiRuo: Forecasting Ocean Eddies as Fields and Objects with a Satellite-Altimetry Foundation Model

Xukun Qin, Haochen Sun, Yuyang Tian and 1 more

Mesoscale eddies carry most of the ocean's kinetic energy and move heat, salt and nutrients across basins, yet where an eddy will be two weeks ahead is still read off ocean models with post-hoc tracking heuristics. We introduce HaiRuo, which forecasts eddies as fields and as objects at once: from 30 days of satellite sea-level maps, one forward pass returns 15 days of sea level and geostrophic velocity, daily eddy masks and the trajectory of every eddy alive today. HaiRuo pairs two components with a clear division of labour: (1) HaiRuo-1B, an open-weight 1.05-billion-parameter foundation model pretrained without labels on 24 years of global satellite-altimetry observations, which supplies the 15-day physical fields and masks (+0.14 field skill and +1.1 mIoU points under the same decoder) and further lowers 15-day centre error by 1.2 km frozen (1.35 km over training from scratch); and (2) XuanJi, a Lagrangian object decoder that samples the evolving forecast in each eddy's co-moving polar frame and refines the 15-day path across three look-ahead rounds, removing 2.5 km on HaiRuo-1B (2.9 km with joint fine-tuning) and 2.5-3.3 km via its object attention across six published backbones. Under one pre-registered global evaluation over the whole ocean, HaiRuo improves on fourteen methods on every endpoint (25.2 vs. 30.6 km 15-day centre error, -18%), holding its margin outside the labelled regions and through both phases of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), while reproducing westward drift, 50-60 deg S eastward reversal and poleward cyclone-anticyclone deflection. Over ten days through one fixed tracker, HaiRuo's forecast field cuts the eddy-centre error of WenHai and XiHe by 37-43% (-2.8 km vs. day 0 while they degrade +4.3-8.7 km), and its object trajectories cut pipeline error by 77-78% globally. Open-weight checkpoints, code and project page: https://github.com/xkqin/HaiRuo

#02Nov 10, 2026

cs.CV

AutoThreshold: Joint Confusion-Profile Learning for Adaptive Mask Binarization

Shaokai Wu, Xunchu Zhou, Pinzhi Wang and 5 more

A single validation-tuned threshold can become brittle when dense-score distributions shift. We introduce AutoThreshold, a post-hoc policy that predicts the joint mass of positive and negative pixels over score bins. This target directly parameterizes threshold-indexed confusion counts, avoiding products of independently estimated prevalence and class-conditional rates. Softmax normalization and cumulative decoding yield coherent, monotone confusion profiles; a plug-in decoder then selects a threshold for any $F_β$ objective without retraining the head. Across three independently trained Kvasir pipelines transferred to four polyp datasets, Joint exceeds continuous Otsu by $0.0080 \pm 0.0046$ external macro Dice, with positive gains in 3/3 runs. On the reference pipeline, three head seeds achieve $0.6324 \pm 0.0027$, 0.0085 above Otsu; direct-utility Ridge achieves 0.6342, with the paired difference interval spanning zero. The same Joint checkpoints outperform Otsu for $F_{0.5}$, Dice, and $F_2$. On developmental KITTI Road leave-one-corruption-family-out evaluation, Joint improves over scalar regression by 0.0082 [0.0064, 0.0101], while direct utility is 0.0022 higher. These results establish joint confusion prediction as a useful, metric-retargetable inductive bias, without claiming Bayes-optimal $F_β$ decisions.

#03Nov 10, 2026

cs.RO

One Policy for 100 Household Tasks: Our Solution for the 2026 BEHAVIOR Challenge

Ilia Larchenko, Gleb Zarin, Atindra Nair and 4 more

We describe our solution for the 2026 BEHAVIOR Challenge: 100 long-horizon household tasks in the OmniGibson simulator. We placed 9th on the final leaderboard, the only independent team in the top 10. The core of the solution is a single vision-language-action (VLA) model, one checkpoint for all 100 tasks, built on our 1st-place 2025 solution, which is based on $π_{0.5}$. On the 50 tasks shared with 2025, its Q rises from 0.260 to 0.371; across all 100 tasks it scores 0.392. Our main conclusion from 2025 was that the model was undertrained, so most of the 2026 work went into training the model for longer, optimizing some training parameters, making each training step slightly faster and reducing the gradient noise: a migration from 50 to 100 tasks (semantic stages built from the demonstrations' skill annotations, task and stage embeddings of new tasks warm-started from similar old ones, and a 21-dimensional action space matching the teleoperation controls); variance-reduced multi-sample flow matching with a simple noise-vs-compute model that picks the number of action-expert samples per observation without ablations; and a 200k-step training run, about one pass over the 211M frames of the demonstrations. A cloud evaluation infrastructure keeps a shared record with provenance, episode diagnostics and restorable simulator states, and runs six simulators on one GPU together faster than real time. On top of the learned policy, 14 tasks are routed to a GPT-6 Astra coding agent that controls the robot through observation and motion tools, starting every episode from a frozen copy of its own practice session on training instances. Across these 14 tasks, Astra's mean Q is 0.639, against 0.108 for the learned policy. The public submission included only part of the Astra results and scored 0.446 Q with 27.3% full-task success.

#04Nov 10, 2026

cs.RO

ForeseeDrive: Future-Token Conditioning for Anticipatory Generative Driving

Shaokai Wu, Xunchu Zhou, Pinzhi Wang and 8 more

Generative driving planners can represent diverse ego futures, but a downstream scorer can choose only among sampled candidates; it cannot recover an absent maneuver. We present ForeseeDrive, which turns future scene evolution into a deployable interface for shaping candidate generation. Rather than reconstructing dense future states or scoring a fixed menu, ForeseeDrive derives query-indexed tokens from logged actor motion, occupancy evolution, route interactions, and TTC margins, and predicts the same token space from present context at deployment. The tokens condition trajectory geometry before candidates materialize. A zero-token-gated residual path and candidate-preservation loss limit unnecessary drift, while a TTC-margin guard targets brittle safe-to-unsafe boundary crossings. Under their respective benchmark protocols, ForeseeDrive reaches 89.2 PDMS on NAVSIM navtest, 0.41\,m average L2 and 0.05\% collision rate on nuScenes validation, and a 76.50 driving score on Bench2Drive. Controlled DiffusionDrive/NAVSIM diagnostics show an exact zero-token no-op, a small aligned-over-shuffled selected-PDM advantage under preservation, mixed oracle-best quality, and localized TTC-boundary failures. Together, the benchmark results and bounded mechanism tests support future-conditioned generation as a practical interface for anticipation. Code is included in the supplementary materials.

#05Nov 10, 2026

cs.CV

ViGA-FLAME: Aligning Latent Visual and Geometric Representations for Robust 3D Head Expression Estimation

Wen Hao He, Jiacheng Wu, Jie Chen

Estimating 3D head expression from a single image requires mapping visual appearance to underlying facial geometry. We propose ViGA-FLAME, a two-stage framework that aligns semantic visual features with a structured geometric latent space. First, a Parametric-Geometric Variational Autoencoder (PG-VAE) learns a unified representation of canonical head surfaces and FLAME parameters, supporting both detailed surface reconstruction and interpretable parameter recovery. Supervision on geometry and parameters, together with consistency between the two decoding branches, connects surface detail with parametric structure. Second, a trainable Visual-Geometric Adapter (ViGA) maps features from a pretrained semantic visual encoder into this latent space. Asymmetric attention enables ViGA to align semantic image features from the visual encoder with the structured geometric information represented in the PG-VAE latent space, without altering the original visual stream. By grounding image evidence in this latent prior, ViGA-FLAME enables robust 3D head expression estimation across severe facial deformations and large viewing angles, efficiently improving robustness over competing feed-forward methods.