1.2SIJan 26
Explaining Synergistic Effects in Social RecommendationsYicong Li, Shan Jin, Qi Liu et al.
In social recommenders, the inherent nonlinearity and opacity of synergistic effects across multiple social networks hinders users from understanding how diverse information is leveraged for recommendations, consequently diminishing explainability. However, existing explainers can only identify the topological information in social networks that significantly influences recommendations, failing to further explain the synergistic effects among this information. Inspired by existing findings that synergistic effects enhance mutual information between inputs and predictions to generate information gain, we extend this discovery to graph data. We quantify graph information gain to identify subgraphs embodying synergistic effects. Based on the theoretical insights, we propose SemExplainer, which explains synergistic effects by identifying subgraphs that embody them. SemExplainer first extracts explanatory subgraphs from multi-view social networks to generate preliminary importance explanations for recommendations. A conditional entropy optimization strategy to maximize information gain is developed, thereby further identifying subgraphs that embody synergistic effects from explanatory subgraphs. Finally, SemExplainer searches for paths from users to recommended items within the synergistic subgraphs to generate explanations for the recommendations. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the superiority of SemExplainer over baseline methods, providing superior explanations of synergistic effects.
5.0CVJan 25
PEAfowl: Perception-Enhanced Multi-View Vision-Language-Action for Bimanual ManipulationQingyu Fan, Zhaoxiang Li, Yi Lu et al.
Bimanual manipulation in cluttered scenes requires policies that remain stable under occlusions, viewpoint and scene variations. Existing vision-language-action models often fail to generalize because (i) multi-view features are fused via view-agnostic token concatenation, yielding weak 3D-consistent spatial understanding, and (ii) language is injected as global conditioning, resulting in coarse instruction grounding. In this paper, we introduce PEAfowl, a perception-enhanced multi-view VLA policy for bimanual manipulation. For spatial reasoning, PEAfowl predicts per-token depth distributions, performs differentiable 3D lifting, and aggregates local cross-view neighbors to form geometrically grounded, cross-view consistent representations. For instruction grounding, we propose to replace global conditioning with a Perceiver-style text-aware readout over frozen CLIP visual features, enabling iterative evidence accumulation. To overcome noisy and incomplete commodity depth without adding inference overhead, we apply training-only depth distillation from a pretrained depth teacher to supervise the depth-distribution head, providing perception front-end with geometry-aware priors. On RoboTwin 2.0 under domain-randomized setting, PEAfowl improves the strongest baseline by 23.0 pp in success rate, and real-robot experiments further demonstrate reliable sim-to-real transfer and consistent improvements from depth distillation. Project website: https://peafowlvla.github.io/.
6.4ROMay 18
SG-CADVLM: A Context-Aware Decoding Powered Vision Language Model for Safety-Critical Scenario GenerationHongyi Zhao, Shuo Wang, Qijie He et al.
Autonomous Vehicle (AV) requires rigorous testing in safety-critical scenarios for safety validation, yet its validation is hindered by the high cost of field testing and the lack of fidelity in current simulations for rare safety-critical events. Crash reports offer rich and authentic specifications of real-world accident dynamics, making them a promising resource for Large Language Models and Vision-Language models to generate high-fidelity scenarios. However, the existing models frequently deviate from actual accident characteristics due to context suppression. To address these limitations, this paper presents SG-CADVLM, a framework integrateing Context-Aware Decoding with multimodal input processing to generate safety-critical scenarios from crash reports. The framework mitigates the hallucination of VLMs while generating road geometry and vehicle trajectories simultaneously. The experimental results demonstrate that SG-CADVLM generates combined critical and high-risk scenarios at a rate of 88.1% compared to 31.2% for the baseline methods, representing a 182% improvement, while producing executable simulations for autonomous vehicle testing.