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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Nov 10, 2026

cs.CV

Location Matters: Sparse Latent-Variance Attacks for Face Privacy against Diffusion Personalization

Shuting Yang, Shuxin Li, Linyan Dai and 4 more

Text-to-image diffusion models can learn and reproduce an individual's identity from only a few reference photos, creating risks of unauthorized and misleading content generation. Proactive defenses address this risk by adding adversarial perturbations to facial images before release, thereby disrupting identity acquisition during downstream personalization. However, existing methods typically rely on dense $L_\infty$-bounded perturbations, whose accumulated distortions can become visible around facial structures. Recent methods improve protected-image quality, but often at the cost of reduced protection effectiveness. In this paper, we propose Sparse Encoder Attack on Latent Variance (SEAL), a sparse adversarial protection framework that modifies only 5% of the spatial locations in a facial image. SEAL combines a differentiable top-k masking scheme that jointly optimizes perturbation locations and values with a variance-oriented objective over the frozen VAE encoder's latent distribution to disrupt identity-consistent representations. A saliency-guided dispersion penalty further discourages perturbation concentration in perceptually salient facial regions. Experiments on CelebA-HQ and VGGFace2 show that SEAL achieves the best protected-image quality among the compared methods, exceeding 41 dB PSNR with 0.97 SSIM and at most 0.07 LPIPS, while reducing identity similarity to at most 0.15 after diffusion personalization. These results demonstrate that sparse location optimization enables strong identity protection while preserving high visual quality. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Lvxan/SEAL

#02Nov 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.

#03Nov 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

#04Nov 10, 2026

cs.CV

DailyWildfireCAN: A Dataset and Benchmark for Next-Day Wildfire Spread Prediction in Canada

Mahacine Ettahri, Hager Radi Abdelwahed, Toluwaleke Olutayo and 2 more

Wildfires represent a critical ecological and socio-economic challenge in Canada, where vast boreal forests and a warming climate have amplified the frequency and severity of extreme fire seasons. Predicting next-day wildfire spread can support fire management, but requires capturing complex interactions among weather, fuels, and terrain. Deep learning has emerged as a promising approach to learning these relationships from heterogeneous environmental data, yet its development and evaluation depend on representative datasets. Existing deep learning research on wildfire spread relies predominantly on US-focused datasets, leaving Canadian fire environments underrepresented. To address this gap, we present DailyWildfireCAN, a multi-modal, multi-temporal dataset and benchmark for predicting next-day wildfire spread across Canada. The dataset tracks continuous fire progression over multi-day events at a high spatial and temporal resolution of 90-m and 24-hour, respectively. This resolution preserves fine-scale information relevant to fire-edge geometry, local fuel variations, and terrain effects, supporting research toward improved daily wildfire spread forecasting. DailyWildfireCAN covers 2,440 wildfire events across eight fire seasons 2017-2024 and integrates 33 features across diverse modalities, including topography, meteorology, land cover, vegetation and forest structure, human influence indices, and satellite imagery. We establish a comprehensive benchmark comparing mono-temporal and multi-temporal prediction models, accompanied by a multi-dimensional evaluation framework assessing robustness across wildfire characteristics, geographic regions, and temporal conditions, spatial prediction quality, and sensitivity to reference label variations.

#05Nov 10, 2026

cs.RO

Elastic-WAM: Adaptive Spatiotemporal Imagination for Efficient Robot Control

Haitian Li, Tianfu Li, Xuxi Zhao and 8 more

World-Action Models improve robot control by predicting future visual dynamics, but iterative video denoising incurs substantial inference overhead. Recent approaches reduce this cost through partial future denoising, yet typically rely on fixed refinement budgets. Our empirical observations reveal that preferred refinement depths vary across tasks and states, while different future regions exhibit varying relevance to action generation. Motivated by these findings, we propose Elastic-WAM, which adaptively allocates world refinement computation across temporal denoising time and spatial future space. A unified spatiotemporal refinement demand field governs when to stop world refinement, how far to advance each denoising step, and which regions to refresh. We parameterize this field with a shared temporal basis and spatial amplitudes, and learn it through a three-stage action-grounded supervised procedure. At inference, the learned field guides recurrent sparse world refinement to improve task success while reducing inference overhead. Evaluations across diverse simulation benchmarks and real-world long-horizon manipulation demonstrate state-of-the-art control performance with reduced inference latency.