S. Hirano

Shinnosuke Hirano, Yuiga Wada, Kazuki Matsuda et al.

We focus on the automatic evaluation of image captions in both reference-based and reference-free settings. Existing metrics based on large language models (LLMs) favor their own generations; therefore, the neutrality is in question. Most LLM-free metrics do not suffer from such an issue, whereas they do not always demonstrate high performance. To address these issues, we propose Pearl, an LLM-free supervised metric for image captioning, which is applicable to both reference-based and reference-free settings. We introduce a novel mechanism that learns the representations of image--caption and caption--caption similarities. Furthermore, we construct a human-annotated dataset for image captioning metrics, that comprises approximately 333k human judgments collected from 2,360 annotators across over 75k images. Pearl outperformed other existing LLM-free metrics on the Composite, Flickr8K-Expert, Flickr8K-CF, Nebula, and FOIL datasets in both reference-based and reference-free settings. Our project page is available at https://pearl.kinsta.page/.

Shuitsu Koyama, Kazuki Matsuda, Yuiga Wada et al.

Automatic evaluation of image and video captioning is essential for benchmarking multimodal systems, although standard evaluation metrics show limited alignment with human judgments. Recent approaches using large language models (LLMs), commonly referred to as LLM-as-a-Judge, have improved alignment with human judgments but still suffer from a mismatch between large-vocabulary language modeling and evaluation over a small label set. To address this, we propose Rigel, an automatic evaluation metric for image and video captioning, based on self-distilled score adaptation. The metric employs an evaluation-specific scoring head distilled from a frozen LLM, which captures judgment signals in a task-aligned space without relying on large-vocabulary token sets. We then refine the LLM backbone with human judgment data. To train Rigel, we constructed the Vid-Lepus dataset, which contains 3,338 video clips, 33,380 reference captions, and 5,637 candidate captions. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that Rigel outperforms state-of-the-art metrics, achieving over 10-point improvements on ActivityNet-Fact in the reference-free setting.

Shuntaro Suzuki, Shuitsu Koyama, Shinnosuke Hirano et al.

Photoplethysmography (PPG) plays a crucial role in continuous cardiovascular health monitoring as a non-invasive and cost-effective modality. However, PPG signals are susceptible to motion artifacts and noise, making accurate estimation of vital signs such as arterial blood pressure (ABP) challenging. Existing estimation methods are often restricted to a single-task or environment, limiting their generalizability across diverse PPG decoding scenarios. Moreover, recent general-purpose approaches typically rely on predictions over multi-second intervals, discarding the morphological characteristics of vital signs. To address these challenges, we propose PENGUIN, a generative flow-matching framework that extends deep state space models, enabling fine-grained conditioning on PPG for reconstructing multiple vital signs as continuous waveforms. We evaluate PENGUIN using six real-world PPG datasets across three distinct vital sign reconstruction tasks (electrocardiogram reconstruction, respiratory monitoring, and ABP monitoring). Our method consistently outperformed both task-specific and general-purpose baselines, demonstrating PENGUIN as a general framework for robust vital sign reconstruction from PPG.

Shunya Nagashima, Shuntaro Suzuki, Shuitsu Koyama et al.

Multivariate time series (MTS) forecasting is crucial for decision-making in domains such as weather, energy, and finance. It remains challenging because real-world sequences intertwine slow trends, multi-rate seasonalities, and irregular residuals. Existing methods often rely on rigid, hand-crafted decompositions or generic end-to-end architectures that entangle components and underuse structure shared across variables. To address these limitations, we propose DecompSSM, an end-to-end decomposition framework using three parallel deep state space model branches to capture trend, seasonal, and residual components. The model features adaptive temporal scales via an input-dependent predictor, a refinement module for shared cross-variable context, and an auxiliary loss that enforces reconstruction and orthogonality. Across standard benchmarks (ECL, Weather, ETTm2, and PEMS04), DecompSSM outperformed strong baselines, indicating the effectiveness of combining component-wise deep state space models and global context refinement.

Shinnosuke Hirano, Yuiga Wada, Tsumugi Iida et al.

In this study, we consider the problem of generating visual explanations in visual foundation models. Numerous methods have been proposed for this purpose; however, they often cannot be applied to complex models due to their lack of adaptability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel explanation generation method in visual foundation models that is aimed at both generating explanations and partially updating model parameters to enhance interpretability. Our approach introduces two novel mechanisms: Attention Lattice Adapter (ALA) and Alternating Epoch Architect (AEA). ALA mechanism simplifies the process by eliminating the need for manual layer selection, thus enhancing the model's adaptability and interpretability. Moreover, the AEA mechanism, which updates ALA's parameters every other epoch, effectively addresses the common issue of overly small attention regions. We evaluated our method on two benchmark datasets, CUB-200-2011 and ImageNet-S. Our results showed that our method outperformed the baseline methods in terms of mean intersection over union (IoU), insertion score, deletion score, and insertion-deletion score on both the CUB-200-2011 and ImageNet-S datasets. Notably, our best model achieved a 53.2-point improvement in mean IoU on the CUB-200-2011 dataset compared with the baselines.