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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Nov 10, 2026

cs.CV

What Factors Matter for Collection-Level Counting with Human-AI Collaboration?

Seoyun Jeong, Logan Lawrence, Owen L. Martin and 3 more

Many scientific and policy decisions require estimating the total number of target objects across a large image collection. Exhaustive human labeling is often infeasible, while raw model predictions can be biased, especially under domain shift. Recent human-AI estimation methods combine imperfect model predictions with limited human verification to obtain reliable collection-level estimates. However, existing work provides little guidance on how practitioners should choose among models, estimators, and adaptation strategies for a new deployment. We study these choices within a common human-in-the-loop counting framework across 12 tasks spanning biomedical microscopy, ground-level and aerial wildlife surveys, and overhead imagery of urban structures. Our results show that modern multimodal models provide a strong, training-free starting point for many tasks, while fine-tuned detectors become more advantageous at larger labeling budgets and across repeated deployments. Estimation efficiency improves further when model predictions are used to prioritize which units humans label, rather than sampling uniformly. We also find that each model's ranking quality can be estimated with a small pilot set, yielding practical guidance for selecting strategies on new counting tasks. In a field deployment on aerial pronghorn surveys, a task-specific adaptation of these methods meets the survey's $\pm 5\%$ tolerance after reviewing a median of only $3.2\%$ of collected images.

#02Nov 10, 2026

cs.RO

TanCRAFT: Context-Reasoned Anticipatory Feedback for Assembly Tasks

Sassan Mokhtar, Lars Doorenbos, Marius Bock and 4 more

Preventing human error in physical assembly tasks requires assistance systems that can intervene before mistakes are made. This is especially challenging in settings where users are free to choose the construction order and correctness depends on the evolving assembly rather than a fixed next step. We present TanCRAFT, a four-stage real-time predictive assistance system that tracks the scene state, reasons about the current partial assembly, forecasts the near-future motion of manipulated pieces, and intervenes when the predicted placement is incompatible with the target. We instantiate our framework and confirm its effectiveness in a controlled tangram assembly task through offline benchmarks and a within-subject user study. Our findings show that the predictive feedback significantly reduces mistakes relative to unguided and reactive sessions, while yielding the lowest mean perceived workload and shortest mean completion time. Overall, these results demonstrate the value of predictive feedback for error prevention and provide a step toward cost-aware assistance for automation and human-robot workcells.

#03Nov 10, 2026

cs.CV

Continuous 3D Spatial Transcriptomics Reconstruction via Histology-Informed Implicit Neural Representations

Kaito Shiku, Ryoma Bise, Ahtisham Fazeel Abbasi and 4 more

Three-dimensional spatial transcriptomics (3D ST) enables the analysis of gene-expression patterns across tissue depths. However, 3D ST measurements are acquired from discrete 2D tissue sections, which are often sparsely sampled due to high acquisition costs. To address this limitation, we propose a histology-informed multi-task implicit neural representation (HIM-INR) for continuous 3D gene-expression reconstruction from sparse ST observations. HIM-INR jointly reconstructs gene-expression profiles and histological representations using an INR with a shared backbone, leveraging densely sampled histological images as auxiliary spatial supervision. Once trained, HIM-INR predicts gene expression at arbitrary 3D coordinates without requiring histological images. Experiments on two 3D ST datasets demonstrate improved reconstruction over existing methods, particularly as the number of missing ST sections increases.

#04Nov 10, 2026

cs.CV

Sim(3)-TurboReg: Robust and Efficient Scale-Aware Registration via Tri-Scale Consistency

Zijun Zhou, Shaocheng Yan, Zhenjun Zhao and 5 more

Feed-forward 3D foundation models recover geometry at high fidelity, yet inference memory constraints keep them from processing long sequences natively. Current streaming systems work around this limit with sliding-window chunking, which introduces severe monocular scale ambiguity. Resolving this ambiguity requires Sim(3) registration that stays accurate and efficient under outlier contamination. We introduce Sim(3)-TurboReg, which reformulates the compatibility graph construction of TurboReg by replacing absolute distance constraints with a strict Tri-Scale Consistency (TSC) criterion. Our analysis shows that TSC suppresses both mismatching and coordinate-distortion outliers. We integrate the resulting solver into existing streaming systems and obtain high-fidelity, kilometer-scale reconstruction for feed-forward models. On controlled unknown-scale registration at 90% outliers, ours matches RANSAC accuracy with 92.5% lower median latency. In DA3-Streaming on KITTI, ours improves mean ATE RMSE by 22.2% and reduces mean end-to-end time by 16.6%. Code: https://github.com/ivan-zzj/Sim3-TurboReg

#05Nov 10, 2026

cs.CV

A Lightweight Differentiable Method for Real-Time Skin Rendering and Digitization

Mario Marquez-Balduque, Carlos Rodriguez-Pardo, Jorge Lopez-Moreno

Inverse rendering for skin typically relies on offline path tracing to estimate physical properties, which fail to map directly to the approximate shaders utilized in interactive applications, such as game engines. We bridge this gap by directly estimating subsurface scattering parameters tailored for real-time rendering pipelines. We introduce a differentiable Screen-Space Subsurface Scattering (SSSS) framework that enables the joint optimization of spatially varying base textures and scattering distances. To account for local variations in skin thickness, we estimate these parameters across distinct facial regions, generating a blended profile map ready for production runtime engines. Our pipeline utilizes a low-cost, single-light, single-view capture setup designed for accessible and practical appearance acquisition. Optimization is driven by a masked loss function targeting regions where subsurface scattering effects are dominant. We validate our approach on a real-world dataset of $45$ individuals across the Monk Skin Tone Scale, ensuring demographic generalization. Furthermore, we complement this evaluation with synthetic data, a multi-light setup validating our single-light assumption, and a tilted-view configuration confirming angular consistency. Results demonstrate that our method effectively recovers scattering parameters from lightweight inputs, yielding realistic skin appearance directly compatible with standard real-time shaders.