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Holistic Parallel Supervision for Expressive Speech to Speech Translation

arXiv:2611.06010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Expressiveness is central to speech-to-speech translation (S2ST), yet existing datasets rarely align source and target speech jointly in content, prosody, timing, and speaker identity. Consequently, current systems often rely on indirect conditioning or transfer mechanisms. To obtain this supervision, we introduce a training-data construction strategy that combines professional dubbing, which provides human-performed correspondence in content, prosody, and timing, with multilingual voice conversion to reduce speaker mismatch. We evaluate this supervision using existing expressive S2ST systems and DirectS2ST, an end-to-end method developed in this work that predicts the complete target-speech representation directly from source speech. Experiments on English-German and English-Spanish show that holistic parallel supervision improves expressive realization across all evaluated systems. DirectS2ST exhibits the largest gains in content, prosody, timing, speaker similarity, and human-rated expressiveness. To our knowledge, this work provides the first systematic investigation of holistic parallel supervision for expressive S2ST.

Fencing a Postgres primary that might still be alive

Promoting a standby doesn't stop the old Postgres primary from taking writes. Here's how the control plane behind ClickHouse Managed Postgres fences it on bare metal, AWS and GCP, and why the design is fail-open.

CHROMA-MILL: Joint Low-Light Enhancement and White Balance under Colored Illumination

arXiv:2611.04092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Capturing an image in a low-light environment produces a weak, noisy sensor signal. Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) aims to restore it. Auto white balance (AWB) is also required for every image, and the same noisy signal degrades its ability to infer the scene illuminant. LLIE is typically performed first, followed by AWB, but this strategy remains largely unexamined because existing low-light datasets span a narrow range of illuminants and lack illuminant ground truth for evaluating AWB. We address this with CHROMA-MILL, a RAW dataset of 50 scenes captured with a DSLR and smartphone under four calibrated illuminants at eleven intensity levels. Because light is additive, we blend these captures in the linear RAW domain to synthesize physically valid illuminant mixtures with exact chromaticity ground truth. Benchmarking on this data, we find joint correction is best, and introduce CTI-Retinexformer, which supervises an illumination map, a chromaticity prediction, and an illumination-invariant scene embedding, outperforming the best cascade by 0.7 dB PSNR$_L$ and 1.1 $\Delta E_{00}$.

SSPE: Robust Sequential Staypoint Extraction in Degraded Trajectory Data

arXiv:2611.03737v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Extracting semantically meaningful staypoints from raw trajectory streams is a foundational prerequisite for mobility analytics. However, real-world trajectory data is frequently degraded by severe spatial noise and protracted temporal dropouts. Classic threshold-based extraction methods, such as the widely adopted sliding-window algorithm, are highly sensitive to these anomalies, routinely fracturing continuous stationary episodes into disjointed fragments. To overcome this limitation, we propose the Sequential Staypoint Extraction (SSPE) algorithm. SSPE employs a resilient, state-driven architecture that replaces static spatial anchors with a dynamic centroid and introduces an $n$-step lookahead heuristic to structurally tolerate transient coordinate drift. Concurrently, it utilizes temporal bridging mechanisms to prevent artificial fragmentation during prolonged signal loss. Since optimal extraction parameters vary significantly across datasets, we further introduce a fully unsupervised, consensus-based parameter estimation framework. This framework derives baseline statistical scales directly from the raw trajectory data and identifies the optimal parameter configuration by maximizing structural agreement, thereby eliminating the reliance on annotated ground truth. We evaluate SSPE on the ExtraSensory dataset, a real-world mobility corpus with manually verified ground-truth staypoints, against the sliding-window implementation of Trackintel, one of the most widely adopted extraction baselines in the field. Empirical results demonstrate that SSPE achieves superior accuracy, yielding higher F1-scores while simultaneously improving computational efficiency over this standard.

What Is This Memory Useful For? Measuring Task-Conditioned Utility in Long-Term Agent Memory

arXiv:2611.03930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A stored experience may answer one future question and offer little help with another. We measure this task-conditioned utility rather than assigning each memory a single importance score. A task-blind writer stores a memory without seeing the later task; a frozen reader then answers that task with and without the memory, using identical filler. A cost ledger records the resources used to form, store and expose the memory. On single-call factual-recall tasks built from LongMemEval-V2 web-agent memories, the same memory helps more when it contains information needed for the answer. Its mean paired reward gain on these answer-bearing task pairs exceeds that on matched-control pairs by $+0.33$ (95% interval $+0.21$ to $+0.46$). The tested task-blind summaries and structured records yield smaller gains than Raw, including at fixed total context; a budget sweep is consistent with retention of answer-bearing content contributing to the difference. The bearing--control contrast remains positive in a new session with randomized memory position and under a second reader, although individual memory--task labels change. Generic retrieval performs above chance but misses most screen-defined answer-bearing memories. The factual-recall gains do not extend to the tested software-engineering and scientific-coding benchmarks, where even raw memories have no measurable effect. We provide a public, versioned Conditional Memory Utility Dataset of paired measurements and costs. The practical takeaway is to evaluate memory compression by the task utility it preserves alongside its costs. Task-conditioned measurements make this comparison possible; their stability must also be checked.

What Constitutes Food Similarity? Visual Representations and Retrieval in Indian Cuisine

arXiv:2610.37867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Food similarity underlies retrieval, recommendation, substitution, and other food computing tasks, yet food representations are typically evaluated by identity preservation. We ask what happens to food similarity beyond identity: how different visual representations organize foods into relational neighborhoods, what culinary relationships these neighborhoods reveal or obscure, and how consistently these structures emerge across representations. Indian cuisine provides a challenging setting in which visually similar foods may have different culinary identities, while foods within a culinary family can vary substantially in appearance. Using an expanded Khana dataset and seven pretrained visual representations spanning convolutional, transforme

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Structured Maps for Landmark-Based Route Instructions with LLMs

arXiv:2610.36582v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To generate landmark-based route instructions, models must understand both map geometry and human landmark preferences. Although large language models (LLMs) show great abilities in language tasks, the best way to structure map data for these models is not yet established. This paper proposes a structured text representation for landmark selection tasks in route navigation, utilizing SVG format to encode spatial features. The structured text maintains a geometric connection with rendered map images, allowing language models to directly access spatial and semantic data. Using a new dataset created from human-written route descriptions and OpenStreetMap data, we evaluate models on two tasks: landmark selection at turns and around destinations.

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