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Although normalization layers have long been viewed as indispensable components of deep learning architectures, the recent introduction of Dynamic Tanh (DyT) has demonstrated that alternatives are possible. The point-wise function DyT constrains extreme values for stable convergence and reaches normalization-level performance; this work seeks further for function designs that can surpass it. We first study how the intrinsic properties of point-wise functions influence training and performance. Building on these findings, we conduct a large-scale search for a more effective function design. Through this exploration, we introduce \mathrm Derf (x) = \mathrm erf (\alpha x + s), where \mathrm erf (x) is the rescaled Gaussian cumulative distribution function, and identify it as the most performant design. Derf outperforms LayerNorm, RMSNorm, and DyT across a wide range of domains, including visual recognition and generation, speech representation, and DNA sequence modeling. Our analysis also suggests that the performance gains of Derf largely stem from its improved generalization rather than stronger fitting capacity. Its simplicity and stronger performance make Derf a practical choice for normalization-free Transformer architectures.

Hierarchical image recognition aims to predict labels across a semantic taxonomy, typically assuming fine-grained annotations for every image. However, real-world supervision may appear at any level: a distant bird may only be labeled as "Bird", while a clear image allows "Bald eagle". To reflect this reality, we introduce free-grained hierarchical recognition, where training labels can appear at any level of a taxonomy, requiring consistent predictions under partial and mixed supervision. We construct benchmark datasets with varying label granularity and show that existing hierarchical methods degrade significantly in this setting. To address this, we propose simple yet effective approaches that leverage 1) semantic guidance from vision-language models and 2) visual structure through semi-supervised learning. Finally, we study free-grained inference, where the model adaptively selects prediction depth, enabling reliable coarse predictions when fine-grained ones are uncertain. Together, our task, datasets, and methods provide a practical step toward hierarchical recognition in real-world scenarios.

Inspired by how humans communicate spatial information, language-guided geo-localization has gained significant traction for its intuitive and practical value. Despite this progress, most methods still rely on a static, one-shot retrieval paradigm, which fails to handle the ambiguity and incompleteness inherent in real-world natural language descriptions. We propose a paradigm shift to reasoning retrieval and introduce Dialogue Place Recognition (DlgPR), which casts localization as an interactive, dialogue-driven reasoning process. To support this new task, we present DlgQuest-Cities, the first large-scale dialogue-based benchmark for place recognition, and a unified reasoning framework that couples a cross-modal multi-level retriever with an intelligent questioner, DQ-pilot. DQ-pilot is trained in a curriculum: supervised fine-tuning on a curated DQ-cities-20k subset followed by reinforcement refinement on a harder DQ-cities-10k split via GRPO. Two task-aligned metrics guide learning: a Discriminative Difficulty Index (DDI) for curriculum sampling and a Positional Retrieval Gain (PRG) reward that directly measures retrieval improvement induced by a question. Experiments show this reasoning-based approach significantly outperforms baselines. The code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

Event-based Action Recognition (EAR) provides a promising pathway for understanding dynamic behaviors under challenging conditions. Recent progress in vision-language models has introduced a cross-modal learning paradigm into EAR, enabling models to associate event streams with textual semantics for enhancing conceptual understanding. However, existing methods typically overlook the intrinsic polarity-driven motion cues that are fundamental to event data, leading to suboptimal spatiotemporal representations. To address this limitation, we propose a POlarity Knowledge Enhanced framework (POKER), which explicitly incorporates event polarity-aware motion knowledge across visual and textual modalities.POKER consists of two synergistic components: Polarity Motion Capturer (PMC) and Polarity Motion Reasoner (PMR). Specifically, PMC decouples positive and negative polarities to capture polarity-sensitive motion cues, while PMR semantically analyzes polarity-induced motion dynamics via large language models. Through the polarity alignment, POKER couples semantic reasoning with visual dynamics, achieving more discriminative representations. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that POKER enhances performance across diverse event representations.

Although industrial inspection systems should be capable of recognizing unprecedented defects, most existing approaches operate under a closed-set assumption, which prevents them from detecting novel anomalies. While visual prompting offers a scalable alternative for industrial inspection, existing methods often suffer from prompt embedding collapse due to high intra-class variance and subtle inter-class differences. To resolve this, we propose UniSpector, which shifts the focus from naive prompt-to-region matching to the principled design of a semantically structured and transferable prompt topology. UniSpector employs the Spatial-Spectral Prompt Encoder to extract orientation-invariant, fine-grained representations; these serve as a solid basis for the Contrastive Prompt Encoder to explicitly regularize the prompt space into a semantically organized angular manifold. Additionally, Prompt-guided Query Selection generates adaptive object queries aligned with the prompt. We introduce Inspect Anything, the first benchmark for visual-prompt-based open-set defect localization, where UniSpector significantly outperforms baselines by at least 19.7% and 15.8% in AP50b and AP50m, respectively. These results show that our method enable a scalable, retraining-free inspection paradigm for continuously evolving industrial environments, while offering critical insights into the design of generic visual prompting.

Micro-expression Recognition (MER) is challenging due to the subtle motion. Existing methods heavily rely on the onset/apex pair to capture the most discriminative motion clues. This paradigm struggles with labor-intensive apex annotation and effective utilization of data. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm for MER that eliminates the need for expensive apex annotations while effectively capturing subtle motion dynamics. Our key insight is that frames within the sequence exhibit spatially consistent and intensity varied motion cues relative to the onset frame. Motivated by this, our method treats each sequence as a set of multiple onset/near-median motion instances. To fully exploit weaker motion information conveyed by these varied instances, our framework introduces an Instance Region Consistency (IRC) module that enforces visual attention consistency on similar facial activation regions across different instances within the same set. Furthermore, we present a Multi-Region Discovery (MRD) module with self-supervised learning to expand attention on more subtle activation regions which are typically neglected. Extensive experiments on four public micro-expression datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods without using any apex frame annotations.

Gait recognition enables non-intrusive, privacy-preserving identification but suffers in uncontrolled environments due to illumination and motion sensitivity in conventional cameras. In this work, we explore gait recognition using event cameras, which offer microsecond temporal resolution and high dynamic range, naturally capturing robust dynamic cues and suppressing static noise. Existing event-based approaches typically aggregate event streams into event images over long time windows, thereby discarding fine-grained motion dynamics critical for gait recognition. Therefore, we propose EventGait, an end-to-end dual-stream framework that separately models motion and shape while preserving the advantages of events. Our dynamic stream leverages a Mixture of Spiking Experts (MoSE) with diverse neuron constants for robust dynamic perception across complex motion and illumination scenes, while the static stream learns dense shape representations via Cross-modal Structural Alignment (CroSA) with large vision foundation models. To address the absence of large-scale event-based gait datasets, we introduce a synthesis pipeline and release two new benchmarks: SUSTech1K-E and CCGR-Mini-E. Extensive experiments have shown that event-based gait recognition not only achieves results comparable to camera-based gait recognition under normal conditions but also significantly outperforms it in low-light scenarios. Our approach sets a new state of the art on both synthesized and real-world event-based gait benchmarks, highlighting the robustness and potential of event-driven gait analysis. The code and datasets are released at https://github.com/QUEAHREN/EventGait.

Table structure recognition in document AI faces significant challenges due to layout inconsistencies, merged cells, and complex nested structures, which is further exacerbated by the scarcity of large, diverse annotated datasets. In this paper, we present PIX-TAB (Efficient PIXel-Precise TABle Structure Recognition Approach) that provides exact, pixel-level structure using a small, lightweight model that can run on-device. The approach is language-agnostic, as it allows adding support for a new languages simply by replacing the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) model without modifying to the core structure recognition model. Key innovations include: position-aware pixel-precise tokens for deterministic cell reconstruction; speculative decoding for faster sequence generation, and training-only box supervision to stabilize spatial grounding; region-based image segmentation. To mitigate data scarcity we propose a pipeline for generating a large synthetic table dataset. Experimental results validate each component. To address the limitations of existing evaluation methods we introduce TEDS_ struct100 and TEDS_ 100 metrics. Speculative decoding approach significantly improves recognition speed while maintaining accuracy. Finally, the combined techniques enable a mobile-optimized model that is more than three times faster than the full-size version.

Large-scale and categorical-balanced text data is essential for training effective Scene Text Recognition (STR) models, which is hard to achieve when collecting real data. Synthetic data offers a cost-effective and perfectly labeled alternative. However, its performance often lags behind, revealing a significant domain gap between real and current synthetic data. In this work, we systematically analyze mainstream rendering-based synthetic datasets and identify their key limitations: insufficient diversity in corpus, font, and layout, which restricts their realism in complex scenarios. To address these issues, we introduce UnionST, a strong data engine synthesizes text covering a union of challenging samples and better aligns with the complexity observed in the wild. We then construct UnionST-S, a large-scale synthetic dataset with improved simulations in challenging scenarios. Furthermore, we develop a self-evolution learning (SEL) framework for effective real data annotation. Experiments show that models trained on UnionST-S achieve significant improvements over existing synthetic datasets. They even surpass real-data performance in certain scenarios. Moreover, when using SEL, the trained models achieve competitive performance by only seeing 9% of real data labels. Code is available at https://github.com/YesianRohn/UnionST.

Vocabulary-free fine-grained image recognition aims to distinguish visually similar categories within a meta-class without a fixed, human-defined label set. Existing solutions for this problem remain limited by either the usage of a large and rigid list of vocabularies or by the dependency on complex pipelines with fragile heuristics where errors propagate across stages. Meanwhile, the ability of recent large multi-modal models (LMMs) equipped with explicit or implicit reasoning to comprehend visual-language data, decompose problems, retrieve latent knowledge, and self-correct suggests a more principled and effective alternative. Building on these capabilities, we propose FiNDR (Fine-grained Name Discovery via Reasoning), the first reasoning-augmented LMM-based framework for vocabulary-free fine-grained recognition. The system oper- ates in three automated steps: (i) a reasoning-enabled LMM generates descriptive candidate labels for each image; (ii) a vision-language model filters and ranks these candidates to form a coherent class set; and (iii) the verified names instantiate a lightweight multi-modal classifier used at inference time. Extensive experiments on popular fine-grained classification benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art per- formance under the vocabulary-free setting, with a significant relative margin of up to 18.8% over previous ap- proaches. Remarkably, the proposed method surpasses zero-shot baselines that exploit pre-defined ground-truth names, challenging the assumption that human-curated vo- cabularies define an upper bound. Ablations further confirm that advanced prompting techniques and built-in rea- soning mechanisms significantly enhance naming quality. Additionally, we show that carefully engineered prompts enable open-source LMMs to match proprietary counter- parts. These findings establish reasoning-augmented LMMs as an effective foundation for scalable, fully automated, open-world fine-grained visual recognition. The source code and relevant prompting guidelines will be released.

Orthodontic treatment hinges on tooth alignment, which significantly affects occlusal function, facial aesthetics, and patients' quality of life. Current deep learning approaches often predict transformation matrices for the misaligned tooth point cloud via point-to-point geometric constraints to achieve tooth alignment, ignoring the clinically specific distributions exhibited in these matrices. To address this, we introduce a new automatic tooth alignment method named TAlignDiff, which is assisted by diffusion-based transformation learning. TAlignDiff comprises two main components: a primary point cloud-based regression network (PRN) and a diffusion-based transformation matrix denoising module (DTMD). Geometry-constrained losses supervise PRN learning for point cloud-level alignment. DTMD, as an auxiliary module, learns the latent distribution of matrices from clinical data. We integrate point cloud-based transformation regression and diffusion-based transformation modeling into a unified framework, allowing bidirectional feedback between geometric constraints and diffusion refinement. We validate our method on a challenge dataset from clinical practice and an extra orthodontic dataset. Its efficacy was confirmed through effective ablation studies and comparative analyses, highlighting its potential for application in orthodontic treatment.

Handwritten mathematical expression recognition is hindered by a fundamental misalignment between the dual representations of LaTeX formulas: the symbolic text and the rendered visual image. This discrepancy means that textually distinct LaTeX sequences can produce visually identical outputs, while minor textual errors can cause catastrophic rendering failures. As a result, text-level reward mechanisms cannot perfectly assess the quality of model predictions, failing to effectively guide the model towards optimal performance during training. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the Image Matching Score (IMS), a lightweight yet effective reward based on the structural edit distance of column-wise image projections, which robustly quantifies the visual fidelity between rendered formulas. Leveraging IMS, we then propose Image-Matching driven Policy Optimization (IMPO), a training framework built upon Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). This approach facilitates stable policy learning directly from our sequence-level visual reward, notably without the need for a separate value function network. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IMPO yields consistent performance gains across various backbone models on the challenging CROHME, HME100K, and M2E datasets. Our framework establishes new state-of-the-art results, improving the Expression Recognition Rate by an average of 1.1% and up to 1.37% over strong prior methods.

Surface electromyography (sEMG) signal-based activity recognition has attracted increasing research attention in recent years. To develop accurate sEMG signal-based activity recognizers, numerous approaches have been proposed. Some studies focus on designing larger and more expressive model architectures to enhance the representational capacity of sEMG signals, while others aim to enrich model priors through large-scale pretraining, thereby improving recognition performance. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable generalization and reasoning capabilities in natural language processing, whose implicit knowledge, learned from extensive linguistic descriptions of actions, opens new possibilities for interpreting sEMG signals and inferring activity intentions. Motivated by this, we propose LLM-sEMG, a novel framework that leverages LLMs as sEMG activity recognizers. Within this framework, we design a language-oriented mapping mechanism that converts continuous sEMG sequences into "sEMG language," integrating several strategies to further facilitate the signal-to-language mapping process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves highly accurate sEMG signal-based activity recognition using large language models.

In recent years, the gait parsing sequence has become increasingly popular due to its higher information entropy than the binary silhouette and the keypoint-based skeleton. However, existing parsing-based gait recognition methods have not fully explored the complex, non-linear relationships between features at different positions, semantic, and temporal dynamics levels, i.e., higher-order correlations. To unleash the power of parsing between human body parts and temporal dynamics, this paper proposes a novel hypergraph-based gait recognition framework, named HyperGait. The HyperGait contains a global head and two elaborately-designed modules. In particular, the Spatial Hypergraph Convolutional Module (SHCM) and the Temporal Hypergraph Convolutional Module (THCM) are designed to explore the high-order spatial-level and temporal-level features, respectively.The SHCM extracts fine-grained relationships between human body parts through the hypergraph.The THCM performs the high-order temporal information between temporally related human body parts.Comprehensive experiments on two large-scale gait datasets, i.e., Gait3D and SUSTech1K, show the superior performance of our proposed HyperGait.In highly challenging real-world scenarios, with only parsing as input, our HyperGait achieves the Rank-1 accuracy of 80.5% on the Gait3D dataset.

Long-tailed image classification remains a long-standing challenge, as real-world data typically follow highly imbalanced distributions where a few head classes dominate and many tail classes contain only limited samples. This imbalance biases feature learning toward head categories and leads to significant degradation on rare classes. Although recent studies have proposed re-sampling, re-weighting, and decoupled learning strategies, the improvement on the most underrepresented classes still remains marginal compared with overall accuracy. In this work, we present a confusion-centric perspective for long-tailed recognition that explicitly focuses on worst-class generalization. We first establish a new theoretical framework of class-specific error analysis, which shows that the worst-class error can be tightly upper-bounded by the spectral norm of the frequency-weighted confusion matrix and a model-dependent complexity term. Guided by this insight, we propose the Confusion-Aware Spectral Regularizer (CAR) that minimizes the spectral norm of the confusion matrix during training to reduce inter-class confusion and enhance tail-class generalization. To enable stable and efficient optimization, CAR integrates a Differentiable Confusion Matrix Surrogate and an EMA-based Confusion Estimator to maintain smooth and low-variance estimates across mini-batches. Extensive experiments across multiple long-tailed benchmarks demonstrates that CAR substantially improves both worst-class accuracy and overall performance. When combined with ConCutMix augmentation, CAR consistently surpasses exisiting state-of-the-art long-tailed learning methods under both the training-from-scratch setting (by 2.37% 4.83%) and the fine-tuning-from-pretrained setting (by 2.42% 4.17%) across ImageNet-LT, CIFAR100-LT, and iNaturalist datasets.

Facial expression recognition (FER) in the wild is severely hampered by label noise and annotation ambiguity. Existing methods, including sample selection, label ensembling, and consistency regularization, primarily rely on ordinary label supervision and offer limited control over non-target predictions, leading to spurious activations and overfitting to noisy labels. To address this limitation, we propose a novel learning framework, named Complementary Label Exchange Learning (CLEX), to enhance robustness by exchanging knowledge from non-target predictions across augmented views. Specifically, CLEX comprises three synergistic components. First, Stochastic Non-Target Logit Exchange randomly swaps a subset of non-target logits between original and augmented views to couple error-prone predictions, creating robust consistency constraints. Second, Scale-Invariant Logit Normalization eliminates magnitude artifacts through Lp-norm normalization, ensuring that regularization operates over geometrically meaningful directions rather than being dominated by arbitrary scales. Third, Complementary Suppression Loss selectively penalizes spurious activations over a randomly retained subset of non-target classes, avoiding the uniform shrinkage that hampers discriminative learning. To further stabilize training, we incorporate attention consistency regularization that enforces spatial alignment between augmented views, while retaining auxiliary cross-entropy to preserve semantic localization capability. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark FER datasets (RAF-DB, FERPlus, and AffectNet) demonstrate that CLEX consistently outperforms existing robust FER learning approaches.

Real-world visual recognition faces the fundamental challenge of long-tailed distributions. While state-of-the-art methods often employ multi-expert models to address different frequency categories, we find that the mutual knowledge distillation used in these models enhances collaboration at the cost of introducing two critical limitations: indiscriminate knowledge transfer leads to bias propagation, where a single expert's error can spread and contaminate others, and error consolidation, where mutual reinforcement of incorrect predictions solidifies erroneous consensus. To overcome these issues, we propose Trust-calibrated Collaborative Learning (TCL). Our framework introduces the trustworthy knowledge orchestration module, which enables reliable distillation and precise collaboration through a knowledge quality gate that blocks erroneous information and a tail-class compensation mechanism that alleviates knowledge scarcity for tail categories. Furthermore, we design a consensus error calibration module that suppresses consensus high-confidence negative classes to correct collective misjudgments and steer optimization in the right direction. Extensive experiments on five long-tailed benchmarks demonstrate that TCL achieves the best performance, raising Top-1 accuracy on CIFAR100-LT to 58.7%, a gain of 2.4% over previous SOTA methods.

Open-domain visual entity recognition (VER) seeks to associate images with entities in encyclopedic knowledge bases such as Wikipedia. Recent generative methods tailored for VER demonstrate strong performance but incur high computational costs, limiting their scalability and practical deployment. In this work, we revisit the contrastive paradigm for VER and introduce WikiCLIP, a simple yet effective framework that establishes a strong and efficient baseline for open-domain VER. WikiCLIP leverages large language model embeddings as knowledge-rich entity representations and enhances them with a Vision-Guided Knowledge Adaptor (VGKA) that aligns textual semantics with visual cues at the patch level. To further encourage fine-grained discrimination, a Hard Negative Synthesis Mechanism generates visually similar but semantically distinct negatives during training. Experimental results on popular open-domain VER benchmarks, such as OVEN, demonstrate that WikiCLIP significantly outperforms strong baselines. Specifically, WikiCLIP achieves a 16% improvement on the challenging OVEN unseen set, while reducing inference latency by nearly 100 times compared with the leading generative model, AutoVER. The project page is available at https://artanic30.github.io/project_pages/WikiCLIP/.

Automatically extracting chemical structures from documents is essential for the large-scale analysis of the literature in chemistry. Automatic pipelines have been developed to recognize molecules represented either in figures or in text independently. However, methods for recognizing chemical structures from multimodal descriptions (Markush structures) lag behind in precision and cannot be used for automatic large-scale processing. In this work, we present MarkushGrapher-2, an end-to-end approach for the multimodal recognition of chemical structures in documents. First, our method employs a dedicated OCR model to extract text from chemical images. Second, the text, image, and layout information are jointly encoded through a Vision-Text-Layout encoder and an Optical Chemical Structure Recognition vision encoder. Finally, the resulting encodings are effectively fused through a two-stage training strategy and used to auto-regressively generate a representation of the Markush structure. To address the lack of training data, we introduce an automatic pipeline for constructing a large-scale dataset of real-world Markush structures. In addition, we present IP5-M, a large manually-annotated benchmark of real-world Markush structures, designed to advance research on this challenging task. Extensive experiments show that our approach substantially outperforms state-of-the-art models in multimodal Markush structure recognition, while maintaining strong performance in molecule structure recognition. Code, models, and datasets will be released publicly.