ML Reads

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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Oct 22, 2026

cs.LG

A Fix for Softmax and Cross-Entropy

Jonathan T. Barron, Dan Gnanapragasam, Michael Tschannen

Standard implementations of softmax, log-softmax, and cross-entropy have two numerical bugs. The first bug, Softmax Collapse, rounds the target logit's gradient to zero if that one logit is much larger than the others, resulting in gradients that no longer sum to zero. The second bug, Softmax Cancellation, occurs when student logits are close to teacher logits, and produces non-zero gradients even when the student and teacher logits are equal. We present simple implementations of log-softmax, softmax, and cross-entropy that fix both bugs. Our fix eliminates the previously-observed "Slingshot" phenomenon, speeds up grokking with weight decay, prevents accuracy collapse without weight decay, stops student networks from drifting away from the teacher during distillation, and shows that after memorization, logit growth is bounded by an equilibrium between weight decay and Adam's $ε$ hyperparameter.

#02Oct 22, 2026

cs.CV

Gate3DGen: A Pre-processing Model that Selectively Purifies Real-World Images for 3D Generation

Xiaolin Li, Zihao Huang, Fanpeng Meng and 5 more

Single-image 3D generation has achieved high fidelity on curated benchmarks, yet degrades sharply on real-world images with uneven illumination, blur, and occlusions. Purifying such inputs requires deciding when to intervene and preserving the visual cues needed for 3D generation, while leaving clean inputs unchanged. We introduce Gate3DGen, a selective pre-processing model that gates image inputs to existing 3D generators without retraining them. A degradation-aware router bypasses inputs classified as clean and extracts features to guide purification of the remaining inputs. Conditioned on these features, a 3D-oriented one-step purifier purifies degraded inputs with spatial losses that encourage preservation of object identity, contours, and textural cues. To provide paired supervision, we construct a synthetic data engine that renders clean views of 3D assets and synthesises composite degradations. On the synthetic benchmark, the purifier improves image fidelity and downstream 3D geometry in only 2.3s on average, reducing TRELLIS.2 mesh distance by 61.5% relative to degraded inputs. VLM evaluation and human preferences on real photographs further support identity preservation and degradation correction. More demos and code are available at https://supra-3d.github.io/gate3dgen.

#03Oct 22, 2026

cs.CV

UniVOE: A Removal-Driven Framework for Interaction-Aware Universal Video Object Editing

Shuzhou Yang, Lanqing Guo, Lingen Li and 4 more

Video object removal and injection are reciprocal editing operations between object-present and object-absent video states, yet they differ substantially in training difficulty. Removal can be effectively bootstrapped from video inpainting and further adapted to erase object-related interaction effects. Injection, however, requires large-scale paired supervision to model object appearance, dynamics, and scene-dependent effects, while perfectly aligned real-world pairs are difficult to collect and synthetic data lacks sufficient realism and diversity. To address this challenge, we present UniVOE, a removal-driven framework for training both video object removal and injection models. We first train an effect-aware remover by transferring video inpainting priors and finetuning on object-present/object-absent pairs. The trained remover converts real object-present videos into object-absent counterparts, creating large-scale paired supervision for injection. An injection model is trained on these pairs in the reverse direction to recover objects together with their dynamics and interaction effects. Moreover, since pixel-level reconstruction alone cannot adequately capture perceptual realism, we introduce a reward-based post-training method that aligns injection results with human preferences using a proprietary reward model. Experiments against strong open-source and commercial systems demonstrate that UniVOE achieves state-of-the-art performance on both object removal and injection, particularly in challenging interaction-effect cases.

#04Oct 22, 2026

cs.CV

Reading, Writing, Sharing, and Interacting with the World through Video

Shengqiong Wu, Meng Luo, Bobo Li and 5 more

Video foundation models have advanced rapidly in understanding and generating visual sequences, while video world models seek to capture the underlying dynamics of the world they depict. Despite their different objectives, both concern the relationship between video observations and an evolving world. This survey adopts world modeling as a unifying lens for examining these developments. Viewing an observed video as a partial, lossy, and temporally ordered projection of a latent temporal world, we organize the literature around four complementary operations: reading infers world properties from observed video; writing synthesizes video from specified or learned world conditions; sharing integrates understanding and generation through common modeling mechanisms; and interacting predicts and updates world states under actions and evolving observations. This perspective distinguishes temporal coherence in observed or generated sequences from consistency in the underlying world state. Across tasks, representations, models, datasets, and benchmarks, we trace a shift in emphasis from clip-level recognition and perceptual fidelity toward persistent state, controllable evolution, physical and causal validity, and evaluation grounded in interaction and downstream decisions, and we distill the open challenges that follow.

#05Oct 22, 2026

cs.CV

A Unified Framework for Image-to-3D Part Generation via Variable Granularity

Qiwen Gu, Xin Zhou, Xiwu Chen and 3 more

Controllable 3D part generation is pivotal for digital asset creation, yet existing methods lack the flexibility to accommodate diverse user workflows requiring varying levels of control. In this paper, we introduce FlexPart, a unified image-to-3D part generation framework that supports variable-granularity geometric conditions within a single model. By seamlessly integrating heterogeneous inputs, ranging from sparse points to dense bounding boxes and masks, via gated adaptive modulation, FlexPart unlocks a powerful cross-modal synergy. We also propose an asymmetric geometric guidance mechanism that leverages strong spatial priors to align representations across granularities, improving geometric consistency and facilitating inter-task synergy. Under mask conditioning on PartVerseXL, FlexPart reduces Part CD by 16.6% relative to TripoSG + SAM3D and by 10.5% relative to OmniPart, while maintaining competitive whole-mesh quality. The code can be found at https://github.com/Gucci233/FlexPart