CVApr 7
Purify-then-Align: Towards Robust Human Sensing under Modality Missing with Knowledge Distillation from Noisy Multimodal TeacherPengcheng Weng, Yanyu Qian, Yangxin Xu et al.
Robust multimodal human sensing must overcome the critical challenge of missing modalities. Two principal barriers are the Representation Gap between heterogeneous data and the Contamination Effect from low-quality modalities. These barriers are causally linked, as the corruption introduced by contamination fundamentally impedes the reduction of representation disparities. In this paper, we propose PTA, a novel "Purify-then-Align" framework that solves this causal dependency through a synergistic integration of meta-learning and knowledge diffusion. To purify the knowledge source, PTA first employs a meta-learning-driven weighting mechanism that dynamically learns to down-weight the influence of noisy, low-contributing modalities. Subsequently, to align different modalities, PTA introduces a diffusion-based knowledge distillation paradigm in which an information-rich clean teacher, formed from this purified consensus, refines the features of each student modality. The ultimate payoff of this "Purify-then-Align" strategy is the creation of exceptionally powerful single-modality encoders imbued with cross-modal knowledge. Comprehensive experiments on the large-scale MM-Fi and XRF55 datasets, under pronounced Representation Gap and Contamination Effect, demonstrate that PTA achieves state-of-the-art performance and significantly improves the robustness of single-modality models in diverse missing-modality scenarios.
CLMar 17
DynHD: Hallucination Detection for Diffusion Large Language Models via Denoising Dynamics Deviation LearningYanyu Qian, Yue Tan, Yixin Liu et al.
Diffusion large language models (D-LLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to auto-regressive models due to their iterative refinement capabilities. However, hallucinations remain a critical issue that hinders their reliability. To detect hallucination responses from model outputs, token-level uncertainty (e.g., entropy) has been widely used as an effective signal to indicate potential factual errors. Nevertheless, the fixed-length generation paradigm of D-LLMs implies that tokens contribute unevenly to hallucination detection, with only a small subset providing meaningful signals. Moreover, the evolution trend of uncertainty throughout the diffusion process can also provide important signals, highlighting the necessity of modeling its denoising dynamics for hallucination detection. In this paper, we propose DynHD that bridge these gaps from both spatial (token sequence) and temporal (denoising dynamics) perspectives. To address the information density imbalance across tokens, we propose a semantic-aware evidence construction module that extracts hallucination-indicative signals by filtering out non-informative tokens and emphasizing semantically meaningful ones. To model denoising dynamics for hallucination detection, we introduce a reference evidence generator that learns the expected evolution trajectory of uncertainty evidence, along with a deviation-based hallucination detector that makes predictions by measuring the discrepancy between the observed and reference trajectories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DynHD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while achieving higher efficiency across multiple benchmarks and backbone models.
AIMay 21
Claw AI Lab: An Autonomous Multi-Agent Research TeamFan Wu, Cheng Chen, Zhenshan Tan et al.
We present Claw AI Lab, a lab-native autonomous research platform that advances automated research from a hidden prompt-to-paper pipeline into an interactive AI laboratory. Rather than centering the system around a single agent or a fixed serial workflow, we allow users to instantiate a full research team from one prompt, with customizable roles, collaborative workflows, real-time monitoring, artifact inspection, and rollback/resume control through a unified dashboard. The platform also supports distinct research modes for exploration, multi-agent discussion, and reproduction, making autonomous research substantially more steerable and laboratory-like in practice. A key practical contribution of Claw AI Lab lies in its Claw-Code Harness, which connects local codebases, datasets, and checkpoints to runnable experiments and feeds execution artifacts back into the research loop. As a result, the harness improves not only execution integration, but also experimental completion and result integrity: experiments are easier to inspect, iterate on, and faithfully transfer into final papers, reducing common failure modes such as partial runs and malformed result reporting. In our internal evaluation on five AI research case studies, using AutoResearchClaw as the baseline, Claw AI Lab is consistently preferred by AI expert judges on idea novelty, experiment completeness, and paper presentation quality. We view Claw AI Lab as an early step toward a new paradigm: autonomous research as usable, interactive, and reliability-aware scientific infrastructure.
CVJan 29
When Gradient Optimization Is Not Enough: $\dagger$ Dispersive and Anchoring Geometric Regularizer for Multimodal LearningZixuan Xia, Hao Wang, Pengcheng Weng et al.
Multimodal learning aims to integrate complementary information from heterogeneous modalities, yet strong optimization alone does not guaranty well-structured representations. Even under carefully balanced training schemes, multimodal models often exhibit geometric pathologies, including intra-modal representation collapse and sample-level cross-modal inconsistency, which degrade both unimodal robustness and multimodal fusion. We identify representation geometry as a missing control axis in multimodal learning and propose \regName, a lightweight geometry-aware regularization framework. \regName enforces two complementary constraints on intermediate embeddings: an intra-modal dispersive regularization that promotes representation diversity, and an inter-modal anchoring regularization that bounds sample-level cross-modal drift without rigid alignment. The proposed regularizer is plug-and-play, requires no architectural modifications, and is compatible with various training paradigms. Extensive experiments across multiple multimodal benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in both multimodal and unimodal performance, showing that explicitly regulating representation geometry effectively mitigates modality trade-offs.
CVApr 2
COMPASS: Complete Multimodal Fusion via Proxy Tokens and Shared Spaces for Ubiquitous SensingHao Wang, Yanyu Qian, Pengcheng Weng et al.
Missing modalities remain a major challenge for multimodal sensing, because most existing methods adapt the fusion process to the observed subset by dropping absent branches, using subset-specific fusion, or reconstructing missing features. As a result, the fusion head often receives an input structure different from the one seen during training, leading to incomplete fusion and degraded cross-modal interaction. We propose COMPASS, a missing-modality fusion framework built on the principle of fusion completeness: the fusion head always receives a fixed N-slot multimodal input, with one token per modality slot. For each missing modality, COMPASS synthesizes a target-specific proxy token from the observed modalities using pairwise source-to-target generators in a shared latent space, and aggregates them into a single replacement token. To make these proxies both representation-compatible and task-informative, we combine proxy alignment, shared-space regularization, and per-proxy discriminative supervision. Experiments on XRF55, MM-Fi, and OctoNet under diverse single- and multiple-missing settings show that COMPASS outperforms prior methods on the large majority of scenarios. Our results suggest that preserving a modality-complete fusion interface is a simple and effective design principle for robust multimodal sensing.