Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 169
☆ A Unified Framework for Image-to-3D Part Generation via Variable Granularity NeurIPS 2026
Controllable 3D part generation is pivotal for digital asset creation, yet existing methods lack the flexibility to accommodate diverse user workflows requiring varying levels of control. In this paper, we introduce FlexPart, a unified image-to-3D part generation framework that supports variable-granularity geometric conditions within a single model. By seamlessly integrating heterogeneous inputs, ranging from sparse points to dense bounding boxes and masks, via gated adaptive modulation, FlexPart unlocks a powerful cross-modal synergy. We also propose an asymmetric geometric guidance mechanism that leverages strong spatial priors to align representations across granularities, improving geometric consistency and facilitating inter-task synergy. Under mask conditioning on PartVerseXL, FlexPart reduces Part CD by 16.6% relative to TripoSG + SAM3D and by 10.5% relative to OmniPart, while maintaining competitive whole-mesh quality. The code can be found at https://github.com/Gucci233/FlexPart
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. Code: https://github.com/Gucci233/FlexPart
☆ Sensorimotor Alignment: A Platonic Proxy for Embodied Policy Success
Robotic foundation models are typically evaluated through costly closed-loop rollouts, which motivates cheap offline proxies for model capability. The Platonic Representation Hypothesis (PRH) suggests that as representations improve, different modalities such as vision and language converge toward a shared statistical model of reality. We ask whether motion trajectories form another such modality: as embodied models become more capable, should their sensory representations converge toward the structure of physical motion? To examine this, we propose Sensorimotor Alignment ($S^2$), a training-free offline metric that measures how well a model's sensory representation aligns with the geometry of physical motion. We find that $S^2$ correlates positively with downstream robot task success across embodied model families, making it a low-cost offline proxy for prioritizing models before closed-loop evaluation. $S^2$ can also identify promising vision-language model (VLM) backbones even before costly fine-tuning into vision-language-action models (VLAs). Beyond this correlation, $S^2$ offers representation-level explanations for phenomena observed in VLAs and world action models (WAMs). With $S^2$, we extend PRH to embodied models and make sensorimotor alignment empirically measurable, offering insight into why an embodied model succeeds beyond its closed-loop success rate.
comment: 28 pages. Project page and code available at https://yunfeixie233.github.io/s2/
☆ Reading, Writing, Sharing, and Interacting with the World through Video
Video foundation models have advanced rapidly in understanding and generating visual sequences, while video world models seek to capture the underlying dynamics of the world they depict. Despite their different objectives, both concern the relationship between video observations and an evolving world. This survey adopts world modeling as a unifying lens for examining these developments. Viewing an observed video as a partial, lossy, and temporally ordered projection of a latent temporal world, we organize the literature around four complementary operations: reading infers world properties from observed video; writing synthesizes video from specified or learned world conditions; sharing integrates understanding and generation through common modeling mechanisms; and interacting predicts and updates world states under actions and evolving observations. This perspective distinguishes temporal coherence in observed or generated sequences from consistency in the underlying world state. Across tasks, representations, models, datasets, and benchmarks, we trace a shift in emphasis from clip-level recognition and perceptual fidelity toward persistent state, controllable evolution, physical and causal validity, and evaluation grounded in interaction and downstream decisions, and we distill the open challenges that follow.
comment: 102 pages, 17 figures, 19 tables. Project page: https://vid-gen.github.io/video-world-model-survey
☆ SpectralCanary: Embarrassingly Simple Low-Frequency Traces for T2I Dataset-Use Auditing NeurIPS 2026
Sy-Tuyen Ho, Anirudh Satheesh, Soham Chawathe, Huy Nghiem, Yongkyun Lee, Andrew Adams Schoen, Furong Huang
Auditing whether a text-to-image (T2I) model was fine-tuned on a particular image collection is difficult: a model can absorb collection-level visual characteristics without reproducing training images. Proactive dataset-use auditing plants a shared signal in a dataset before release, then later checks whether that signal appears in a suspect model's generated outputs. Existing approaches often trade off verifiability, fidelity, robustness, and deployability. We introduce $\textbf{SpectralCanary}$, which uses a smooth low-pass mask to blend a fixed canary image into every collection image while leaving captions unchanged and requiring neither auxiliary generation nor per-image optimization. A lightweight verifier detects the transferred signal in suspect-model outputs. Across eight tests on the Pokemon dataset and three realistic data transformations, spanning two architectures families, SpectralCanary achieves the highest average per-generation TPR@$1\%$ FPR ($91.1\%$) and fixed threshold model-level accuracy using 30 generations ($94.8\%$) among the evaluated methods. Across five datasets spanning artistic, medical, satellite, and fashion domains with SD3.5, SpectralCanary averages $92.4\%$ per-generation TPR@$1\%$ FPR while preserving the released images (SSIM $0.989$, LPIPS $0.022$) with a near-zero mean change FID (mean $Δ$FID $0.05$) across datasets. Matched-energy ablations on Pokemon and ROCOv2 support our design choice, low-frequency placement transfers more reliably compared to mid/high-frequency placement. Under the evaluated adaptive attacks, the most effective removal requires aggressive modification and incurs more than $25$ $Δ$FID points. These results identify low-frequency visual signals as effective carriers for collection-level T2I audit traces.
comment: NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on Attributing Model Behavior at Scale
☆ BrickWright: Agentic Creation of Physically Feasible Brick Builds
Ava Pun, Kevin Dai, Sally Chen, Maxwell Jones, Ruixuan Liu, Kangle Deng, Changliu Liu, Maneesh Agrawala, Deva Ramanan, Jun-Yan Zhu
Frontier coding agents are becoming increasingly adept at 3D modeling. Yet, they still face challenges when building objects meant to be assembled in the physical world, often creating invalid assemblies with floating, colliding, or disconnected parts. We argue that providing agents with tools for assembling builds and verifying their physical feasibility is sufficient for them to produce physically valid assemblies that still adhere to input prompts. Focusing on the domain of LEGO brick builds, we present BrickWright, a framework for generating physically feasible brick builds from text or image prompts using pre-trained agents, where a build is physically feasible if it uses only real parts, has no colliding or floating parts, and forms a connected structure if possible. BrickWright guides agents to create builds by writing code with BrickLayer, a Python toolkit with two main components: an ergonomic brick assembly API that halves inference cost compared to working in raw LDraw, and a validator that provides feedback on physical feasibility. Whereas baseline agents achieve physical validity rates ranging from only 9% (GPT-6 Luna) to 69% (GPT-6 Astra), BrickWright-guided agents achieve 100% validity on a sample of 512 prompts, while improving prompt adherence for lightweight agents and maintaining it for stronger agents. Additionally, they outperform specialized models on the text-to-brick task. Code is available on our project page: https://avalovelace1.github.io/brickwright/
☆ Gate3DGen: A Pre-processing Model that Selectively Purifies Real-World Images for 3D Generation
Single-image 3D generation has achieved high fidelity on curated benchmarks, yet degrades sharply on real-world images with uneven illumination, blur, and occlusions. Purifying such inputs requires deciding when to intervene and preserving the visual cues needed for 3D generation, while leaving clean inputs unchanged. We introduce Gate3DGen, a selective pre-processing model that gates image inputs to existing 3D generators without retraining them. A degradation-aware router bypasses inputs classified as clean and extracts features to guide purification of the remaining inputs. Conditioned on these features, a 3D-oriented one-step purifier purifies degraded inputs with spatial losses that encourage preservation of object identity, contours, and textural cues. To provide paired supervision, we construct a synthetic data engine that renders clean views of 3D assets and synthesises composite degradations. On the synthetic benchmark, the purifier improves image fidelity and downstream 3D geometry in only 2.3s on average, reducing TRELLIS.2 mesh distance by 61.5% relative to degraded inputs. VLM evaluation and human preferences on real photographs further support identity preservation and degradation correction. More demos and code are available at https://supra-3d.github.io/gate3dgen.
comment: Project page: https://supra-3d.github.io/gate3dgen
☆ OmniRay: Camera-Agnostic Monocular 3D Reconstruction with Composite Ray Fields
Monocular models recover 3D geometry from a single image in one pass, but most assume a pinhole camera and produce distorted geometry on the wide-angle imagery produced by fisheye and panoramic lenses. Camera-aware models remove this assumption by predicting a per-pixel ray field. However, they represent different camera geometries using a single fixed basis to capture both the overall camera projection and its finer variations. We argue that camera geometry can be viewed as having a hierarchy of complexity for representing rays. We present OmniRay, a feed-forward model whose Ray Module is composed of three components: a monotone radial base that captures radially symmetric structure, a spherical-harmonic residual for smooth deviations from it, and a free-form residual for remaining local variation. These components are composed as successive rotations on the sphere, allowing the representation to accommodate diverse camera geometries. Given a single image, OmniRay predicts a ray direction and an up-to-scale radial distance for every pixel, from which a 3D point cloud is recovered without needing camera information at inference time. Extensive experiments across different camera configurations demonstrate that OmniRay establishes a new state-of-the-art in camera-agnostic monocular 3D reconstruction.
comment: Project page: https://nam1410.github.io/omniray/
☆ GigaBench: Benchmarking Learnable Representations for Gigapixel Image Compression and Super-Resolution WACV2027
Learnable Representations (LRs) can fit parametric families of functions to diverse kinds of signals. These emergent neural-native data formats are gathering interest in the scientific community due to their compactness, resolution-agnosticism and amenability to direct neural processing. On the other hand, gigapixel images are becoming increasingly widespread across a variety of scientific, cultural, and industrial domains. In this paper, we present GigaBench, the first benchmark and experimental evaluation focused on deploying LRs with gigapixel imagery. GigaBench includes images collected, acquired, and synthetically rendered across diverse domains, and addresses image compression and super-resolution. We adapt a representative set of LRs, spanning Implicit, Hybrid, and Explicit methods, so as to operate reliably at the gigapixel scale on consumer hardware. Through systematic evaluation across reconstruction quality, model size, compression and inference times, we identify consistent trends across methods and suggest actionable guidance for future investigation.
comment: Project page at https://matteofusconi.github.io/GigaBench Accepted at WACV2027
☆ UniVOE: A Removal-Driven Framework for Interaction-Aware Universal Video Object Editing
Video object removal and injection are reciprocal editing operations between object-present and object-absent video states, yet they differ substantially in training difficulty. Removal can be effectively bootstrapped from video inpainting and further adapted to erase object-related interaction effects. Injection, however, requires large-scale paired supervision to model object appearance, dynamics, and scene-dependent effects, while perfectly aligned real-world pairs are difficult to collect and synthetic data lacks sufficient realism and diversity. To address this challenge, we present UniVOE, a removal-driven framework for training both video object removal and injection models. We first train an effect-aware remover by transferring video inpainting priors and finetuning on object-present/object-absent pairs. The trained remover converts real object-present videos into object-absent counterparts, creating large-scale paired supervision for injection. An injection model is trained on these pairs in the reverse direction to recover objects together with their dynamics and interaction effects. Moreover, since pixel-level reconstruction alone cannot adequately capture perceptual realism, we introduce a reward-based post-training method that aligns injection results with human preferences using a proprietary reward model. Experiments against strong open-source and commercial systems demonstrate that UniVOE achieves state-of-the-art performance on both object removal and injection, particularly in challenging interaction-effect cases.
☆ WorldForge V2: Eliciting Camera-Trajectory Alignment in Video Diffusion Models
Video diffusion models have learned rich 3D/4D priors, making them promising for scene generation and video re-rendering. However, their use in spatial tasks is limited by imprecise camera control, spatial and temporal inconsistencies, and entangled camera motion with scene dynamics. Existing approaches, such as task-specific fine-tuning and post-process warping, often introduce visual artifacts, generalize poorly, or incur high computational costs. We propose WorldForge V2 to achieve accurate camera control while preserving the generative capabilities of pretrained video models. We first develop a training-free guidance framework using warped references to iteratively refine generation along a target camera path. Optical-flow analysis identifies motion-related latent channels for selective guidance, helping separate motion control from appearance. A dual-path strategy further compares guided and unguided predictions to correct artifacts from imperfect references. Together, these components guide viewpoint changes while preserving scene appearance and object motion. To reduce refinement costs, v-cache approximates the correction using the preceding denoising prediction, avoiding an additional model evaluation. We further extend motion localization from latent channels to network blocks and introduce Trajectory LoRA, which concentrates adaptation on blocks most responsive to trajectory guidance. A two-stage training strategy teaches these adapters to denoise the states encountered during guided generation, using limited supervision effectively. This enables reliable camera control with very little training data, with a single training scene already supporting generalization to unseen scenes. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations across multiple datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art generation quality and trajectory accuracy in camera-controlled video generation.
☆ HiP3R: Hierarchical Pose Graphs for Long-Horizon 3D Reconstruction
Feed-forward models accurately estimate camera motion and 3D geometry from short video windows. However, computational and memory costs prevent direct inference on sequences containing thousands of frames. Long videos must therefore be processed as overlapping chunks. This division produces independent local reconstructions with inconsistent coordinate frames and duplicate estimates of shared cameras. Achieving global consistency requires propagating constraints from adjacent overlaps and distant revisits across the sequence. This requirement naturally motivates pose graph optimization. However, the choice of graph level creates a trade-off. Chunk-level graphs efficiently resolve scale drift and close large loops. Yet, their rigid transformations cannot correct internal errors or conflicting frame predictions. Conversely, frame-level optimization offers local flexibility, but scaling it globally is computationally expensive and can break metric scale. HiP3R resolves this trade-off using a hierarchical pose graph. HiP3R first optimizes a robust chunk-level $\mathrm{Sim}(3)$ graph to establish the global layout and scale. It then holds this layout fixed and estimates one shared $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ camera per frame, turning overlapping window predictions into a single trajectory. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of HiP3R in improving camera trajectories and 3D reconstruction. Our method applies to both chunk-based and streaming backends without additional training or fine-tuning. The codes are available at https://kkakkkka.github.io/HiP3R.
comment: Technical Report
☆ F2G-Pose: Geometry-Aware Foundation Feature Lifting for Direct RGB-D Category-Level Object Pose Estimation NeurIPS 2026
This paper studies category-level RGB-D object pose estimation, which recovers an object's 3D rotation and translation without instance-specific CAD models or reference views. This task is highly ambiguous due to intra-class variations, symmetries, and partial observations. Current solutions struggle to balance reliability and efficiency: methods based on intermediate structures are prone to error propagation, while diffusion models suffer from high inference latency and complex post-hoc candidate extraction. To address this, we present F2G-Pose, a real-time direct, single-pass framework that predicts category-level pose, metric size, and camera-frame completed shape from a single RGB-D observation in one feed-forward pass. F2G-Pose lifts dense visual foundation features to partial point clouds, encodes local geometry with DGCNN tokenization, and integrates object-level structure with a Mixture-of-Experts Transformer. Joint size prediction and camera-frame shape completion encourage metric consistency through dense geometric supervision. With its task-specific network trained only on pose-annotated synthetic SOPE data and its frozen RADIO backbone externally pretrained, F2G-Pose achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on SOPE and ROPE while running at 28 FPS for pose-only inference, and further demonstrates strong camera-frame geometry on HouseCat6D and real-object transfer on HANDAL. Analyses of latency, robustness, shape completion, and GenPose++ candidate behavior further demonstrate the efficiency and reliability of F2G-Pose, with real-world manipulation experiments demonstrating deployment potential under segmented RGB-D inputs. The project page, code, and pretrained models are made available at https://jrryzh.github.io/F2G-Pose/.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. 22 pages, including the complete technical appendix
☆ Beyond Best-of-$k$: Prior-Consistent DAPS for Ambiguous Nonlinear Inverse Problems
Diffusion models have become strong priors for solving inverse problems. However, nonlinear inverse problems such as phase retrieval remain challenging when multiple measurement-consistent solutions are distinguishable only by the prior; we call such measurements ambiguous. Existing diffusion-based samplers rely on local approximations during reconstruction. For an ambiguous measurement, these approximations can allow measurement guidance to favor a measurement-consistent mode that is close to a prior-supported mode but is itself not supported by the prior. Evaluation often masks this type of failure by reporting the best-of-$k$ runs, where the best is selected by comparison to the ground truth. We introduce Prior-Consistent DAPS (PC-DAPS), a variant of Decoupled Annealing Posterior Sampling (DAPS) designed to address this failure case by maintaining multiple candidate solutions within a single sampling run. As annealing noise decreases, PC-DAPS prunes and replaces weaker candidates according to their prior consistency, without any ground-truth access. PC-DAPS reduces the incidence of prior-inconsistent samples and improves sample quality on nonlinear inverse problems while preserving sample quality and diversity on linear inverse problems.
☆ CellTrack-Bench: Microscopic Cell Tracking Benchmark for Vision-Language Models
Large language models have shown outstanding performance on text-first tasks such as coding, math, and writing. Recent efforts are shifting models' training to include scientific problems that often live in highly specialized domains beyond text, such as protein structure and biological images. However, in these scenarios, their general-purpose accuracy compared with specialized algorithms remains in question. One such domain is cell tracking, which requires spatiotemporal awareness of cell dynamics. To evaluate this, we created a new benchmark, CellTrack-Bench, which assesses Vision-Language Models' (VLMs) cell-tracking-related performance against specialized trackers. The full benchmark draws from 15 standard cell-tracking datasets across four imaging modalities and comprises 1,537 problems corresponding to 9,041 cell-linking decisions. We selected a hard subset requiring greater reasoning effort by identifying failures shared across distinct algorithmic trackers. With this proposed dataset, we: (i) evaluated different environment harnesses for VLMs; (ii) benchmarked 9 frontier closed-source models and 13 open-weight models; and (iii) provided a detailed analysis of their failure modes. Code, the stored model outputs, and a pipeline that regenerates the benchmark from the source datasets are available at https://github.com/royerlab/celltrack-bench.
☆ Squaring-the-Sphere: Distortion-Free and Seamless Panorama Generation via CubeAtlas
Generating 360-degree panoramas requires both local perspective fidelity and global spherical continuity. Existing representations face a trade-off: equirectangular projection (ERP) enables seamless panorama modeling but suffers from severe distortion and a domain gap to pre-trained image generators, whereas cubemaps preserve perspective geometry but often produce inconsistent faces and visible seams. We present Squaring-the-Sphere, a panoramic image generation framework built on a novel representation CubeAtlas, which unfolds all cubemap faces into a single compact canvas. By arranging orientation-aligned, rotated polar regions alongside the equatorial faces, this representation preserves the perspective geometry of cubemaps while organizing the cross-face relationships required for seamless panorama assembly. It further enables a pretrained diffusion transformer to model the complete panorama jointly in a single pass, without altering the backbone architecture or positional encoding. While CubeAtlas has a token count comparable to ERP, its structured layout makes many dense attention interactions unnecessary. We therefore introduce a layout-aware sparse attention mask that preserves the interactions required for panorama continuity while removing geometrically irrelevant token pairs. As a result, CubeAtlas achieves better quality than ERP modeling with lower attention computation. Furthermore, we introduce a training-free super-resolution technique and a fusion scheme that enhance fine details in distortion-free perspective space before achieving the final ERP panorama. Experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that our method improves geometric fidelity, cross-view consistency, and high-resolution visual quality over previous methods.
☆ LACToS: Local Anomaly Detection via Conditional Typicality of Superpixels
Local anomaly detection is the task of identifying spatially confined anomalous or out-of-distribution (OOD) regions within an otherwise in-distribution (ID) image. Most existing methods are designed for a specific context, with a strong focus on industrial defect detection, where they achieve excellent performance on well-established benchmarks. However, we observe that these methods can exhibit significant performance drops in other contexts, especially when the inlier distribution is multimodal. To account for this inlier complexity, we propose LACToS, a principled local OOD detection method based on statistical typicality and made tractable through two innovations: (i) grouping pixels into superpixels and (ii) using a computationally efficient proxy to estimate typicality. We evaluate LACToS across three diverse applications spanning medical imaging, human faces, and X-ray security screening. LACToS performs more robustly than prior methods across these benchmarks. The code is released here: https://github.com/voilalab/LACToS.
☆ Diffusion-Based Synthesis of Complete 3D Biparametric Prostate MRI MICCAI
Synthetic biparametric MRI (bpMRI) may help alleviate the limited availability of large and representative prostate MRI datasets for deep learning applications. In this work, we present a conditional 3D diffusion framework for anatomy-conditioned synthesis of complete prostate bpMRI from anatomical masks. The framework supports sequential synthesis, in which T2w and diffusion modalities are generated by separately trained models, and joint synthesis, in which all bpMRI modalities are generated simultaneously within a single model. Five configurations were trained using PI-CAI, FastMRI Prostate, and PROSTATEx datasets to investigate different conditioning schemes, target modalities, and synthesis strategies. Evaluation using distribution-based metrics, paired-image similarity, and qualitative assessment demonstrated the feasibility of both synthesis pathways. Joint synthesis achieved competitive distributional fidelity while generating complete bpMRI, whereas direct synthesis of ADC and computed high-b-value DWI outperformed their derivation from synthetic diffusion-weighted images.
comment: Presented at the 6th Deep Generative Models Workshop (DGM4MICCAI), MICCAI 2026
☆ Evaluation of Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Software Ensembles for Hippocampal Segmentation
Gabriel Oliveira-Stahl, Anna Schroder, James Moggridge, Hamza A. Salhab, Caroline Micallef, Josephine Barnes, M. Jorge Cardoso, Carole H. Sudre, Matthew Grech-Sollars
Accurate hippocampal segmentation can be a useful tool for diagnosing and monitoring neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's disease and epilepsy. While numerous automated segmentation methods exist, their clinical adoption remains limited. Reliable uncertainty assessment can enhance trust and facilitate clinical translation. This study evaluates ensembles of five heterogeneous hippocampal segmentation methods - InnerEye, ASHS, FastSurfer, HippoSeg, and FreeSurfer - across two dementia datasets and one epilepsy dataset. The sub-ensemble containing InnerEye, FastSurfer, and HippoSeg emerged as both accurate and efficient, highlighting the feasibility of balancing computational cost and performance. Additionally, ensemble-derived uncertainty quantification with sample variance, mutual information, and predictive entropy is shown to reduce inaccurate segmentations by flagging low-confidence cases, potentially providing a mechanism for automatically escalating ambiguous cases for expert assessment. Lastly, this study explores the downstream clinical utility of ensemble-derived uncertainty, finding a significant correlation with motion artefact severity and a modest contribution to Alzheimer's disease classification.
comment: Accepted for publication at the Journal of Machine Learning for Biomedical Imaging (MELBA) https://melba-journal.org/2026:030
☆ AgentVQA: A Unified Benchmark for Agentic Visual Understanding
Vision-language models (VLMs) can perform a broad range of tasks across diverse settings, yet their performance in agentic contexts remains poorly understood. Although online evaluations in simulators and real-world environments are essential for measuring interactive agent performance, they are costly and challenging to scale. Complementary offline VQA benchmarks can enable faster and more reliable comparisons across agentic domains, yet existing benchmarks remain limited and fragmented. To address this gap, we introduce AgentVQA, an offline benchmark for evaluating VLMs on realistic agentic scenarios across five agent domains: Web Agents, Robotics, Egocentric Videos, Games, and Spatial Planning. We build AgentVQA by manually selecting 1000 challenging, real-world agent examples from 23 source datasets and adapting them for reliable offline evaluation. The resulting benchmark preserves realistic scenarios from interactive environments across diverse domains, and its model rankings track those from corresponding online evaluations. Across the 22 evaluated models, the best achieves only 58.5% accuracy. Our cross-domain analysis shows that errors are driven primarily by failures to ground and maintain accurate representations of the current and evolving visual state, including localizing relevant UI elements, interpreting motion, tracking state changes over time, and inferring 3D spatial relationships, rather than by task misinterpretation or downstream logical reasoning.
comment: Project page: https://zlab-princeton.github.io/AgentVQA
☆ Self-Supervised Multibeam Sonar Restoration via Coherent Forward Modeling
Multibeam imaging sonar produces intensity images degraded by coherent speckle and system-induced blur, while clean reflectivity targets are rarely available. Existing despeckling methods often rely on simplified intensity-domain noise models, synthetic clean targets, or blind-spot self-supervision, and typically do not jointly model deblurring and speckle suppression.
We propose a physics-consistent self-supervised framework for joint despeckling and deblurring of multibeam imaging sonar. A stochastic coherent image-formation model yields a conditional-mean forward operator that relates latent scene reflectivity to expected intensity through the squared magnitude of the system point spread function. We then use registered multi-frame sonar sequences to train without clean ground truth images, showing that, under an idealized inter-frame conditional-mean condition, the expected paired loss equals the corresponding forward-prediction loss up to a network-independent constant. To stabilize the ill-conditioned inverse problem, we further adapt robust equivariant imaging using stochastic coherent simulation and introduce a paired forward prediction error metric for ground-truth-free evaluation. Experiments on two real multibeam sonar datasets demonstrate a favourable balance between forward-prediction agreement, homogeneous-region speckle suppression, and preservation of visible structural boundaries compared with representative baselines.
comment: 16 pages, 8 figures, includes supplementary material
☆ MoG-VLM: Efficient Video Anomaly Detection through Motion-Guided Vision-Language Models BMVC 2026
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong potential for video anomaly detection, but dense frame-level inference makes them impractical for real-time deployment. Existing acceleration commonly relies on uniform sampling, which ignores content dynamics and can either waste computation on static segments or miss localized anomalies. We propose MoG-VLM a motion-adaptive anomaly detection framework that leverages motion purely as a lightweight control signal to decide when VLM inference is necessary. To this end, we introduce Temporal Gradient Magnitude (TGM) which performs content-aware sampling to concentrate computation on informative regions while avoiding redundant processing. We further introduce a hierarchical dual-stream design in which dense multi-frame VLM reasoning is activated only around frames with elevated anomaly likelihood, via anchor-triggered context-window expansion with early termination. A fusion module then reconciles these instantaneous semantic cues with temporal action dynamics. Across four benchmarks, our method achieves 91.91%, 84.30%, 87.88%, and 78.96% AUC-ROC on XD-Violence, UCF-Crime, MSAD, and ShanghaiTech, respectively, establishing new state of the art on three benchmarks under the zero-shot, training-free setting. On XD-Violence, we improve over the previous best result by +0.57% while delivering a 1.31x inference speedup. These results demonstrate that content-aware allocation of VLM capacity, processing fewer frames more intelligently rather than all frames uniformly, is a more effective axis of progress than uniformly densifying VLM inference across frames. Code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/kdawoud91/MoG-VLM.
comment: Accepted at BMVC 2026. Includes supplementary material
☆ Ask About the Right Moment: Training-Free Object Identity Reasoning for Video-Language Models
Many questions about a video concern one physical object. Where does the ball end up after the cups are shuffled? Which card is the queen? How often was the mug covered? Video-language models (Video-LMs) recognise such objects in single frames but do not keep them apart over time. On real shell-game videos, open models from 8B to 235B parameters, their thinking variants, a reinforcement-learned tool agent and three training-free tool agents all stay within ten points of chance. We separate semantic identity binding from temporal identity maintenance. An object's identity should be fixed at a moment when the evidence for it is visible, and carried afterwards by a tracker. \emph{Track, Then Bind} implements this principle without training. A promptable video tracker follows every candidate object and draws it with a track number. A frozen vision-language model answers a static question about the identifying evidence, which binds the target to a track. The answer is then derived from the tracked state in text, without asking the model to reinterpret the original video during read-out. A single configuration covers all benchmarks. With Qwen3-VL-32B it solves both VET-Bench tasks, where a fine-tuned trajectory model reaches 92\% and 90\% and the same VLM voting over 16 samples stays at 30--32\%. It answers 55.4\% of the hardest Perception Test cup games, where the best published model answers 41.5\%, and, using track-derived timelines, 48.6\% of TOC-Bench questions, against 37.1\% for the same model answering directly. Drawing the same tracks on the video and asking the question directly falls 12--19 points short of the agent on real cup games.
☆ AnyGameRenderer: Entity-Consistent Generative Rendering Across Games and an Entity-Level Benchmark
AI coding agents can now build small playable games in minutes, but the results usually look like programmer art: gray blockouts, colored geometric primitives, and flat semantic blobs. We present AnyGameRenderer, a video-to-video generative renderer that turns such footage into high-quality visuals with characters, motion detail, and effects. Throughout, it keeps the layout, camera, and every entity's position and timing intact.
Our AnyGameRenderer generalizes across a wide range of genres that agents build, such as tower defense, auto-battlers, top-down survivors, turn-based battles, kart racing, and crowd runners.
AnyGameRenderer takes plain video as its game-state input, with no complex representations such as engine G-buffers, per-object class labels, or low-poly proxies. Gray blockouts, colored primitives, semantic maps, and wireframes all work as input.
It also preserves entity correspondence: group counts stay correct, and entities appear and disappear on the right frame.
We implement AnyGameRenderer by LoRA fine-tuning MiniMax-H3 ref2va, a 33B reference-video-conditioned video generation model. Training uses $\sim$10k paired clips from three sources: (i) multi-stream rendering data from 38 agent-made games exported from GEAR, an AI game-creation tool; (ii) two-stream rendering data from Unreal Engine, with programmatically controlled crowds, count changes, and entity scales; and (iii) real gameplay recordings, with pairs reconstructed via 3D-box detection.
To evaluate the entity correspondence, we propose an entity-level benchmark of 59 held-out cases with 753 entities, scored against ground-truth boxes. Compared with the base model, AnyGameRenderer better preserves entity correspondence: temporal match rises from 50.9\% to 62.9\%, missed count changes fall from 34.7\% to 21.3\%, and fewer entities are hallucinated or left unrendered.
☆ MixPT: Point Transformer with Interleaved Window and Global Attention
Point cloud transformers aim to capture detailed local geometry and relationships across a scene at a manageable computational cost. Two common approaches are window attention and global attention. They differ in how they enable scene-wide interaction, which refers to information exchange among tokens across a scene. Window attention reduces computational cost by restricting self-attention to groups of tokens called windows; in serialized designs, each window contains a fixed number of consecutive tokens from a spatially ordered sequence. Because each block only directly connects tokens within the same window, information exchange across windows relies on changes in window membership across blocks and hierarchical pooling. Global attention, in contrast, directly connects all tokens within a scene, but computing attention over all token pairs can be costly when the number of tokens is large. To balance computational cost and scene-wide interaction, we introduce MixPT, a point transformer that uses a mix of window and global attention blocks in an interleaved schedule, while retaining a single fixed serialization pattern for its window blocks. For scenes with a large number of tokens, MixPT applies global attention to spatially pooled tokens and returns residual updates to the original-resolution stream. Across indoor and outdoor benchmarks, MixPT achieves competitive accuracy with lower latency than representative window and global attention baselines. We further demonstrate the feasibility of scaling the attention stage in depth by repeating the interleaved pattern of window and global attention blocks.
comment: 23 pages, 14 figures, 12 tables. Project page: https://minkyunseo.github.io/MixPT/
☆ A Sparse Topometric Graph for Scalable Cross-Session Indoor Navigation
A conventional embodied agent in an indoor environment builds a map by accumulating noisy real-world measurements and results from heavy inference to guide navigation. While the detailed measurements may differ due to scene changes or sensor settings, the unique topological structure of navigable passages or the connectivity between rooms may provide training-free guidance that complements local observations. We propose a sparse topometric graph as an efficient structural representation for robust indoor navigation, alleviating the need for fine-grained matching, which is computationally expensive, memory-intensive, and prone to real-world variations. The map consists of nodes that encode local 3D geometry and distance-weighted edges that capture traversable connectivity. A learned graph-matching network finds consistent subgraph structures across sessions by considering both node-level geometric descriptors and neighborhood connectivity. The holistic contextual matching is robust to local ambiguities caused by weak distinctiveness or repetitive structure, and establishes stable correspondences despite local scene changes, different sensor modalities, or limited spatial overlap. We analyze the practicality of the graph through cross-session point-goal navigation, where a goal specified in a prior reference map must be reached from an unknown initial pose in a later session. Experiments show that our method achieves the highest success rates (77.1% on Gibson and 40.0% under 3D-FRONT scene changes), while reducing memory by more than two orders of magnitude compared to point-level representations. The proposed approach further supports cross-session alignment and goal-directed navigation with strong scalability and robust real-world transfer.
☆ A Task-Centric Survey of Long-Document Visual Question Answering: Taxonomy, Evolution, and Future Directions
Yufei Tong, Guanjie Cheng, Tianle Wu, Leilei Zhang, Hang Zheng, Peihan Wu, Jianwei Yin, Shuiguang Deng
Visual document understanding is essential for acquiring knowledge from visually rich documents and is attracting growing research interest. Existing surveys emphasize architectures or technical approaches, with limited attention to how task bottlenecks shape technical choices and research priorities. We present a task-centric survey that decomposes long-document visual question answering (VQA) into four components: document parsing, evidence organization and retrieval, generator organization and learning, and evaluation. For each, we develop a fine-grained taxonomy and trace motivations, technical responses, and cross-component connections. We focus on explicit retrieval while covering direct reading. Our temporal analysis traces expanding priorities from multimodal content understanding to sufficient, high-fidelity evidence acquisition and sustained evidence management. We outline future directions in evidence sufficiency, verifiable and correctable understanding, and budget-aware coordination, with an outlook on continual document understanding.
comment: 26 pages, 9 figures, 6 tables
☆ WeVisOne-VL: Unified Visual Perception from Objects to Pixels
Existing vision-language models (VLMs) remain unreliable for fine-grained visual perception. In this report, we present WeVisOne-VL (WeChat Vision All-in-One), a powerful VLM that unifies object-level and pixel-level perception through structured next-token prediction. It supports multiple visual tasks including object detection, referring localization, counting, OCR, segmentation, and matting, enabling localization at any user-specific granularity, from points and boxes to masks and alpha mattes. Architecturally, we integrate a lightweight pixel decoder into the VLM via a special token to generate instance-level pixel outputs. We train the model with a three-stage curriculum SFT followed by mixed-task RL. Across over 30 benchmarks, WeVisOne-VL demonstrates leading performance on both object-level and pixel-level tasks, while maintaining robust rejection for object-absent queries. By releasing WeVisOne-VL to the open-source community, we hope to advance VLMs from broad visual understanding toward truly reliable perception systems for real-world deployment.
☆ MVLoMa: Multi-View Local Feature Matching with Any Geometry Foundation Model
Local feature matching is typically formulated for image pairs, although structure-from-motion and visual localization commonly match one reference image against many retrieved or covisible neighbours. Applying a pairwise matcher independently to these centre-neighbour edges duplicates reference-side computation and prevents the matcher from exploiting complementary multi-view geometric evidence from the remaining observations. To address these limitations, we introduce MVLoMa, a sparse star-graph matcher that extends LoMa from image pairs to multiple views. MVLoMa first uses a frozen multi-view geometry model to jointly describe all images in a star, then injects the resulting cross-view geometric context into local descriptors. It then matches the centre image to all neighbours in a single forward pass through per-view self-attention and bidirectional centre-neighbour cross-attention. For supervision, we derive positive correspondences only from depth-valid, mutually visible dense warps and explicitly penalize high-confidence matches that violate epipolar geometry. On 25-view star graphs from HyperSim, ScanNet++, Mip-NeRF 360, and Tanks and Temples, MVLoMa obtains the best macro-average relative-pose AUC among the compared methods at all three thresholds (58.65/85.41/90.99). Its matcher is 2.20 times faster than sequential evaluation of the 24 centre-neighbour edges. The same design supports four tested frozen geometry encoders -- DA3, $π^3$, VGGT, and VGGT-$Ω$ -- with DA3-Giant performing best on all reported encoder-ablation metrics. Controlled ablations further isolate the effects of geometry-aware descriptors, visibility filtering, geometric negative supervision, and joint multi-view inference.
comment: Project Page:https://kosmoresearch.github.io/MVLoMa/
☆ Stream4D: Streaming 4D Reconstruction with Training-free Motion Decoupling via Causal KV-Cache Attention
4D scene reconstruction requires robust handling of dynamic objects, yet existing streaming methods commonly assume static scenes, leading to pose drift and ghosting artifacts over long sequences. We introduce Stream4D, a training-free, motion-decoupled streaming reconstruction framework that can be directly integrated into causal Transformer backbones (e.g., StreamVGGT, Stream3R). Our key observation is that causal attention implicitly encodes rich temporal motion cues within the KV cache. We adaptively aggregate these cues from multiple attention layers and across temporal windows, and fuse them with depth priors to handle challenging cases such as occlusions and textureless regions, producing precise dynamic masks that decouple static and dynamic regions. We then apply a soft key masking scheme that leverages these dynamic masks to suppress interference from dynamic regions in causal attention, thereby improving camera pose estimation accuracy. Stream4D inherits the efficiency of causal attention and remains compatible with existing streaming architectures. On diverse dynamic-scene benchmarks, Stream4D significantly improves camera pose estimation and static-scene reconstruction quality, yields reliable dynamic masks, and effectively mitigates long-sequence ghosting.
comment: 10 pages, 8 figures. Accepted to ACM Multimedia 2026
☆ Data-Driven Vision-Language Models for Remote Sensing: A Survey
Yue Zhou, Shujun Zhao, Xue Yang, Ruigang Li, Tianwen Zhang, Mengcheng Lan, Chaofeng Chen, Lingfei Ma, Hongjie He, Jonathan Li
During the deep learning era, innovations in remote sensing (RS) vision models primarily focused on optimizing network architectures for specific tasks and conducting end-to-end training. However, with the advent of the Vision-Language Models (VLMs) era, constrained by substantial computational resource demands, the mainstream research paradigm has shifted towards adapting general-purpose VLMs using RS vertical domain data for fine-tuning, rather than modifying their core architectures. This transition marks a change in the innovation pathway from model-centric to data-centric. Despite the increasing importance of data, the academic community still lacks a systematic, data-centric survey to guide researchers in constructing high-quality RS vision-language datasets for various application scenarios and in conducting effective model fine-tuning and performance evaluation based on these datasets. To address this gap, this paper presents a systematic review of the development status of RS datasets tailored for VLMs. It further provides a comprehensive practical guide for RS researchers in the large model era, covering the entire pipeline from data construction to fine-tuning and evaluation. This paper aims to encourage the academic community to build more diverse and higher-quality vision-language datasets for specialized RS sub-fields. Ultimately, the goal is to converge these efforts into a comprehensive RS vision-language corpus that offers extensive task coverage and a wide geographical distribution, thereby laying a solid data foundation for advancing towards general artificial intelligence in RS.
comment: 44 pages, 15 figures
☆ PiHand: Latent Hand-Object Interaction Priors for Physics-Based Policy Learning
Synthesizing physically grounded dexterous hand-object interactions is important for VR/AR, gaming, and robotics, yet remains challenging because subtle contact dynamics, diverse object geometries, and target trajectories must be jointly respected while maintaining natural grasps. Existing methods either track mocap trajectories with limited transfer to novel objects, or rely on hand-only generative priors that fail to capture coupled hand-object motion, sacrificing contact fidelity and sample efficiency. To tackle these challenges, we introduce PiHand, a Physically grounded Interaction-aware Hand motion synthesis framework. PiHand first trains expert policies that track mocap demonstrations in simulation, distills them into a unified hand-object interaction prior using a goal-conditioned VAE, and finally solve diverse dexterous manipulation tasks through bounded residual exploration in its latent space. With only a single reward and no complex curriculum training, this yields general tabletop manipulation policies that generalize to unseen objects and trajectories on GRAB and DexYCB. The same prior transfers to object catching and bimanual handover, two tasks that are rarely seen in its training data. Across all tasks, PiHand consistently outperforms baselines in all metrics. We will release the processed data and model checkpoints.
comment: Project page: https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/PiHand/
☆ RecallGS: Geometry-Grounded Recall for Online Semantic Gaussian Splatting
Online semantic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables open-vocabulary scene understanding from streaming observations. However, existing methods recover geometric context missing from image-derived semantic features using an additionally learned 3D network, incurring extra training and runtime overhead. We observe that such geometric-semantic evidence may already exist in the agent's observation history and can be retrieved rather than learned. Based on this insight, we introduce RecallGS (Geometry-Grounded Recall for Online Semantic Gaussian Splatting), a lightweight, training-free mechanism that treats past observations as a non-parametric geometric-semantic prior. RecallGS follows a recall-ground-fuse pipeline: CLIP retrieves relevant observations, alpha-compositing weights identify geometrically supported views, and aggregate their semantic features over each Gaussian's rendered footprint. On ScanNet and ScanNet++, RecallGS achieves strong semantic segmentation performance at 2.48 FPS, demonstrating that geometric-semantic context can be effectively recovered from observation history without an additional learned 3D branch.
☆ Retrieval-Augmented Online Textual Memory for Episodic Memory Video Question Answering
Long egocentric videos pose a central challenge for multimodal language models: the visual stream must be compressed into a memory representation that can be searched efficiently while still preserving the evidence needed for question answering. Building on an online textual-memory framework in which first-person videos are converted into temporally grounded captions, this work systematically studies the role of retrieval in episodic-memory video question answering. We evaluate how different retrieval units, query formulations, context budgets, and reranking strategies affect multiple-choice answering on QAEgo4D-Closed, isolating retrieval as the main variable while keeping the underlying generated memory fixed.
Our best configuration, Parent, matches fine-grained caption subchunks, then provides their full parent captions to the reasoner. It achieves 56.4 % accuracy, matching strong full-memory and retrieval baselines while exposing only a small fraction of the textual memory at question time. More importantly, our analysis shows that better temporal coverage does not necessarily translate into better answers: increasing the retrieval budget improves temporal Hit@K and Recall@K, but can reduce accuracy by introducing visually plausible distractors and uncertain caption evidence. These findings suggest that retrieval-augmented egocentric memory should not be optimized only for evidence recall, but also for the reliability, specificity, and answer-discriminative value of the retrieved context. The study motivates more structured episodic memories that move beyond raw caption retrieval toward evidence-aware representations for long-form egocentric reasoning.
☆ ReCoG: Relational Concept Graph for Training-Free Personalization
Training-free personalization adapts a frozen vision-language model (VLM) to recognize user-defined concepts from only a few exemplars by retrieving concept entries at inference time. While recent retriever-based methods enrich each concept with descriptive evidence, they largely treat concepts in isolation, so the retrieved information can be plausible yet non-discriminative, especially when the personalized concept set contains highly confusable, fine-grained categories. We argue that personalization is inherently relational: correct recognition depends on the specific distinctions between a concept and its nearest alternatives. To this end, we propose ReCoG, a Relational Concept Graph for retrieval-augmented personalization. ReCoG represents concepts as nodes and augments them with directed edges that explicitly capture discriminative cues between concept pairs, elicited by a frozen VLM during database construction. At inference, ReCoG retrieves a shortlist and resolves ambiguity via explicit pairwise comparisons conditioned on the corresponding relational edges, selecting the concept that consistently wins against competing candidates. We also introduce FINGER benchmark to test personalized recognition on confusable concept sets. Across FINGER, ReCoG substantially outperforms prior methods, with the largest gains in the most confusable regimes. ReCoG also achieves consistently best performance on established personalization benchmarks including captioning and VQA, confirming that relational evidence is broadly beneficial beyond fine-grained settings. Project Page: https://csy-98.github.io/ReCoG/
☆ Reinforcing intra-operative tumour localisation with weak supervision from pre-operative appearances
Limited tumour visibility on intra-operative images complicates surgical navigation, including liver hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) targeting on computed tomography (CT) imaging. This makes labelled datasets difficult to curate for deep learning, and transferring pre-operative delineations through registration remains challenging due to intra-operative deformation and lack of paired pre- and intra-operative data. We propose to transfer tumour appearances learned from pre-operative magnetic resonance (MR) images to guide localisation on intra-operative CT through weak supervision. A classifier is trained to classify tumour presence on pre-operative images. This is applied to windows on intra-operative images, and despite the domain gap, it assigns higher tumour-presence probabilities on average to tumour-containing windows. These weak cross-domain signals guide a reinforcement learning agent to localise tumours on intra-operative images. We compare direct transfer, few-shot adaptation and synthetic transfer (trained using unpaired MR and CT), which translates CT into synthetic MR before localisation. On an external HCC cohort, synthetic transfer outperformed other tested methods and CT-only baselines. Our framework enables cross-modality tumour localisation without paired MR-CT training images.
☆ Lightweight Frame Compensation for Real-Time Polyp Segmentation under Frame Skipping
Real-time polyp segmentation in computer-assisted colonoscopy is hampered by the difficulty of deploying high-accuracy models under strict latency budgets. Frame skipping, which performs inference every K frames and reuses or interpolates the rest, improves throughput but introduces motion blur and lesion misalignment that degrade temporal consistency. To close this gap, we propose the Lightweight Frame Compensator (LFC), a 77K-parameter plug-and-play module inserted before a frozen segmentation backbone. Operating on a three-frame window, LFC fuses consecutive frames via spatio-temporal attention into a single compensated frame, and is trained only on pseudo-labels generated by a differently seeded model, without any expert annotation. Experiments on three polyp video benchmarks show that LFC recovers most of the accuracy degraded by direct frame skipping and, in several settings, reaches the accuracy of frame-by-frame inference, while retaining a 2.05X--2.55X throughput gain. We further evaluate the temporal stability of three backbones spanning CNN, pyramid Transformer, and global-attention Transformer architectures, revealing a spectrum of sensitivity to frame skipping that arises from how locally or globally each architecture aggregates misaligned input. The compensation gain of LFC follows this spectrum: it is largest for high-capacity Transformer backbones, which achieve the best static accuracy but suffer the most under skip-frame inference. LFC thus offers a lightweight, pluggable, and deployment-friendly route to real-time polyp segmentation.
comment: 15 pages, 1 figure
☆ GLOW-FM: Efficient Generative Low-Light Image Enhancement with One-Step Latent Flow Matching WACV 2027
Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) aims to recover well-exposed and perceptually faithful images from severely degraded observations. Recent diffusion-based generative methods achieve strong perceptual quality by leveraging powerful image priors, but their iterative sampling incurs substantial computational cost, limiting practical deployment. Despite recent efficiency gains in generative LLIE, high-quality enhancement with a single function evaluation and low overall computation remains challenging, particularly under diverse real-world low-light conditions. We introduce GLOW-FM, a one-step latent flow-matching framework for efficient generative LLIE. GLOW-FM performs conditional transport in the latent space of a frozen Tiny-VAE and leverages Terminal Velocity Matching (TVM) to enable enhancement with a single function evaluation. Matched comparisons with alternative one-step objectives support TVM as an effective design choice, and, to the best of our knowledge, this is its first adaptation to image restoration and specifically to LLIE. Extensive experiments on challenging real-world benchmarks demonstrate that GLOW-FM achieves competitive image quality and state-of-the-art cross-dataset generalization while requiring only a single function evaluation and 34 GFLOPs for the small variant. These findings highlight the potential of GLOW-FM to bring generative LLIE closer to practical deployment through single-step inference and compact latent modeling. Code will be made publicly available upon publication.
comment: WACV 2027
☆ Moving Regions, Not Moving Objects: Segmenting What Actually Moves under Camera Motion
Moving object segmentation is conventionally formulated at the sequence and object level, marking an entire instance as moving once it moves anywhere in a video. Recent instantaneous formulations distinguish moving from stationary intervals, but still generate masks at the object level through frozen segmentation foundation models. Because the mask is derived from an instance-level proposal, motion is typically attributed to the entire instance rather than localized to the regions that actually move. Moreover, such instance-level predictions can produce masks even when no part of the instance is actually moving, revealing a more fundamental issue: motion is not an intrinsic property of an instance; it can only be determined by comparing at least two frames. Building on this premise, we introduce MoRSe, which jointly interprets two frames to predict a moving-region mask, distinguishing actual scene motion from apparent motion induced by the camera. A single RGB encoder replaces multi-stage foundation stacks, so no optical flow, point tracks, or separate mask generator is needed at inference. We release MoRSe-5K, a benchmark of 42 sequences with Static, Dynamic-Static, and Dynamic settings designed to evaluate the model's ability to distinguish and localize moving and stationary regions under different camera and scene motion conditions. MoRSe outperforms both specialized moving object segmentation methods and dense 4D reconstruction methods with motion-thresholded predictions, while producing the fewest false positives on sequences where nothing moves.
comment: Project page and video demonstrations: https://kosmoresearch.github.io/MoRSe/
☆ A Visual Grounding Benchmark for Retinal OCT with Multimodal Large Language Models
Ronald Fecso, José Morano, Botond Fazekas, Paul Widmann-Sedlnitzky, Dorota Himel, Laetita Hinterhuber, Virginia Mares, Andreas Pollreisz, Hrvoje Bogunović
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can answer clinical questions about medical images, but trustworthy use requires visual grounding: models should localize the pathology they report rather than rely on spurious shortcuts. Whether MLLMs can visually ground clinical findings in retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT), the most widely used imaging modality in ophthalmology, remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce RetinaGroundBench, the first benchmark for biomarker visual grounding in retinal OCT. It comprises 815 B-scans exhaustively annotated by ophthalmologists with 4,537 bounding boxes covering 13 biomarkers across 8 diseases. Because MLLMs often fragment a single lesion into multiple partial predictions, we propose AggIoU, a metric that evaluates whether the union of overlapping predicted boxes covers the annotated region. Across 27 open-source MLLMs (0.8-38B parameters), we find that visual grounding remains largely unsolved: the best general-purpose model achieves a macro F1 of just 23.7%, with consistently low recall, despite reaching up to 73% balanced accuracy on biomarker presence questions. To narrow this gap, we developed RetGrounder, an MLLM fine-tuned using an OCT-specific strategy integrating grounding and textual information. Despite its relatively small size (8B), RetGrounder improves grounding F1 to 33.9%, a 43% relative improvement. Our benchmark provides a reference point for measuring progress in the field of OCT diagnosis with MLLMs.
comment: Under review at npj digital medicine
☆ Inside-JEPA: From Prediction to Relational Grounding in Latent World Models
Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) learn world models in latent space, enabling efficient planning but leaving their states opaque. We introduce Inside-JEPA, which places relational channels for ordered entity pairs inside the JEPA latent state and shows that an inverse-dynamics loss can ground these channels without relation labels when its head reads them, either alone or as part of the full state. On Something-Something V2, latent prediction alone performs no better than a random relation head, while inverse-dynamics supervision that recovers actions from channel changes improves relational AUROC by .065-.103 across ten settings with annotated boxes, by .081 on RH20T robot episodes with held-out tasks, and by .050-.061 across five relations using off-the-shelf detection and tracking. An inverse head on entity latents decodes actions more accurately but barely improves relational grounding; shuffled labels, two label-free objectives, and action labels on only 5% of the pairs also fail to ground the channels. Given an action, predicted relational changes approach the quality of observed future relations (AUROC .599 vs .621). For one-step relational goals, a supervised readout of the 16 channels ranks the correct action among the top five of 65 in 43% of cases, compared with 24% for prediction-only latents and 17% for a frequency prior.
☆ RaSFNet: Ray-aligned and Scan-aware Fusion Network for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation
LiDAR point cloud semantic segmentation is a fundamental component of 3D perception for autonomous driving and robotics. Projection-based methods map 3D point clouds into 2D representations for feature extraction using 2D networks. However, aggregating multiple points during projection can obscure geometric differences within each frustum, while local feature extraction limits the modeling of spatial relationships across scanning regions. Moreover, proximity in the projected representation does not necessarily imply proximity in 3D space, and interactions between point and projected features may mix features from different ranges, reducing semantic discriminability. To address these challenges, we propose the Ray-aligned and Scan-aware Fusion Network (RaSFNet), which incorporates point cloud geometry and LiDAR scanning characteristics into projection-based semantic segmentation. Specifically, the Ray-Aligned Geometric Distribution Encoding (RAGDE) module characterizes point distributions within each frustum using a ray-aligned coordinate system. To model spatial context, a Scan-Topology-Aware Mamba (STAM) block organizes frustum features according to the LiDAR azimuth sampling pattern and captures long-range dependencies across scanning regions. In addition, a Range-Constrained Point-Frustum Fusion (RCPFF) mechanism uses shared range information to guide feature exchange between point and frustum representations while maintaining spatial correspondence. RaSFNet achieves mIoU scores of 70.2% and 77.7% on the SemanticKITTI and nuScenes validation sets, respectively, indicating competitive segmentation performance compared with the evaluated methods.
☆ Memory before Goal: Role of Pre-History Memory for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation IEEE
Humanoid loco-manipulation in dynamic scenes is non-Markovian: cues vanish as objects change or are hidden, or leave the view as the robot turns and walks, yet whole-body vision-language-action (VLA) policies see only the present. We present WholeBodyMem, an object-guided perceptual memory that keeps the pre-history of object events seen before the robot acts on its goal. SAM3 tracks the task objects, and their events causally select key frames within an adaptive budget, which the action expert reads by cross-attention together with object tokens encoding appearance, geometry and time. We also contribute HuMeGo, a humanoid memory benchmark with six simulated and six real-world Unitree G1 tasks. Keeping the right frames rather than more frames, WholeBodyMem surpasses memoryless and uniform-memory baselines, raising its base policy's success from 29.1% to 72.6% in simulation and from 36.7% to 88.3% on the real robot, while also improving the standard SIMPLE tasks (70.2% to 86.9%).
comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 5 tables. Submitted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L). Project page: https://memory-before-goal.github.io
☆ HiSTEVE 1.0: Harnessing Human-Interface VLA Agents for Open-World Games
Building virtual embodied agents that operate in open-ended games like human players is a long-standing goal requiring both long-horizon autonomy and reliable native-interface control. As a procedurally generated open world, Minecraft provides a natural testbed for studying the integration of these capabilities. Existing agents typically provide either native visuomotor control without long-horizon autonomy or high-level planning executed through environment APIs or predefined skills. To bridge this gap, we propose HiSTEVE, a hierarchical VLA agent with a capability-aware agent harness. At the orchestration level, we equip the harness with structured memory for tracking progress and a VLM planner for selecting subtasks within the VLA's capabilities. To reliably determine subtask completion, we further introduce a policy-coupled task completion state detector that conditions on VLA policy context to signal candidate completion. At the control level, a single VLA executes all subtasks with vision-only perception and native keyboard-and-mouse actions. To mitigate interference between heterogeneous GUI and non-GUI interactions, we introduce regime-specific RMSNorm branches and separate mouse-movement token embeddings. We also train the VLA through world knowledge injection, imitation learning, and reinforcement learning with environment feedback to improve reliability and recovery. HiSTEVE achieves state-of-the-art atomic-task performance, scoring 85.0% on MineStudio Bench and a 37.4% average success rate on OpenHA, while also completing long-horizon tasks such as crafting an iron pickaxe from scratch like human players.
☆ Beyond Watching and Searching: Benchmarking Agents for Video-centered Deep Research Reports
Deep research agents synthesize open-web evidence into long reports, but current benchmarks do not evaluate research centered on a source video. We introduce Video-Centered Deep Research Report Generation. Given a video and user request, an agent identifies research questions, retrieves external multimodal evidence, and produces an interactive report linked to relevant video moments. This task has direct practical value because it helps users locate relevant moments, verify claims, reproduce demonstrated procedures, and make informed decisions from video content. We present a skill-based workflow and OmniDR-Bench for this task. For evaluation, we propose Omni Atomic Rubric Trees (Omni-ARTs). Each tree contains three dimensions, 23 shared directions, and task-specific atomic binary criteria. The directions test audiovisual grounding, multimodal evidence use, and interactive presentation. Audited Rubric Construction (ARC) builds these trees through independent evidence collection, automated checks, behavioral calibration, and iterative human review. OmniDR-Bench contains 50 Chinese and English tasks across 19 realworld subcategories. It includes 6,414 criteria. Across 18 agent configurations, the best system scores 63.3 out of 100. Current agents still need broader content coverage, stronger causal and logical analysis across modalities, and more accurate citation support. We further analyze models, harnesses, skill configurations, video categories, and research trajectories. The code and data are released at https://github.com/marinero4972/OmniDR-Bench.
☆ WildFakeToolBench: Benchmarking AI-Generated Image Detectors with Web-Sourced Image Processing
As AI generated images are getting popular these days, discussions on such generations are widely existed in current public forums, software repositories, and photography tutorials. Moreover, with the help of LLM-assisted code translation, malicious actors can adopt such information to evade detectors without specialized knowledge or local GPU execution of the resulting tools. To evaluate such risks, we introduce \textsc{WildFakeToolBench}, a benchmark suite of $156$ executable image-processing tools derived from $220$ public sources across $142$ domains. Each tool retains its source evidence and passes syntax, execution, and output-distortion checks without using feedback from the evaluated detectors. On $105$ generated images from five generators, we evaluate six state-of-the-art detectors with images processed by the tools in our collected bench to assess their effectiveness against such in-the-wild risks. The strongest individual tools achieve attack success rates of $25.25\%$--$100\%$ across detectors, exceeding the strongest of six selected image-processing baselines for each detector. Evaluating subsets of an eight-tool pool yields worst-case coverage above $80\%$ for every detector. Effectiveness is sparse and detector-specific: high coverage across candidates does not imply reliable one-shot evasion. These findings not only highlight the potential of such web-sourced risks, but also show the potential on establishing AI-image detector robustness evaluation framework based on those in-the-wild information.
☆ Navigating human-robot interaction challenges in private and residential aged care homes
David Ahmedt-Aristizabal, Mohammad Ali Armin, Akila Pemasiri, Harshala Gammulle, Tharindu Fernando, David Silvera-Tawil, Simon Denman
This chapter explores how robotic systems and ambient intelligence can enhance care for older adults in residential aged care (RAC) homes and private homes. Although these settings differ, we frame both as extreme and challenging environments for human-robot interaction (HRI), characterised by cluttered and dynamic layouts, diverse resident needs, and limited on-site technical support. We review embodied and non-embodied systems that assist with daily living, safety monitoring, and social engagement, highlighting hybrid deployments where robots complement fixed and wearable sensors. To ensure these technologies are usable and effective, design considerations consider the cognitive, physical, and social needs of older adults. Interaction design prioritises accessibility for older adults with low digital literacy, using robust but simple voice interfaces, small sets of non-verbal cues, accessible screen-based companions, and safe object handovers. Privacy, trust, and acceptability are addressed via practical strategies such as on-device inference, data minimisation, visible consent controls, and transparent data handling aligned with emerging artificial intelligence (AI) and privacy regulation. Evaluation emphasises real-world metrics including false alarms per day, time to recover from faults, staff workload, and long-term system reliability. We close by outlining open research challenges and future directions for scalable, regulation-ready deployments that support aging with dignity, safety, and independence.
comment: Author-accepted manuscript of a book chapter published online in Elsevier's Reference Module in Materials Science and Materials Engineering (2026). Scheduled for inclusion in Comprehensive Robotics for Extreme and Challenging Environments (June 2027)
☆ RankAlign: Vision-Language Representation Alignment via Rank Transformation NeurIPS 2026
While the Platonic Representation Hypothesis posits that vision and language models converge toward compatible latent geometries, recovering class-level correspondences between unpaired modalities without cross-modal supervision remains challenging. Existing relational matching methods compare within-modality similarity kernels directly, although the same semantic structure may be represented through different numerical parameterizations across modalities. We propose RankAlign, a rank-based normalization strategy for class-level unpaired vision-language matching. RankAlign transforms each within-modality similarity kernel into an ordinal relational representation before permutation matching, while leaving the correspondence space and matching solver unchanged. The resulting representation is invariant to strictly increasing reparameterizations of similarity values while preserving the ordinal structure used for matching. We provide exact-recovery and stability guarantees that characterize correspondence recovery under both exact and partial ordinal agreement. Experiments across diverse frozen vision and language encoders and multiple datasets demonstrate improved and more stable class-level correspondence recovery, including under label corruption and domain shift.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026
☆ GM-GReFEL: Geometry-Guided Spatiotemporal State-Space Learning for Robust Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition
Recognizing facial expressions in unconstrained video suffers from two coupled problems: self-attention grows quadratically in cost with clip length, and crowdsourced labels are noisy. We present GM-GReFEL, a spatiotemporal state-space network with a geometry-aware decision stage. Its Modulated GroupMamba backbone replaces a spatiotemporal Vision Transformer. Six channel groups are scanned separately, four over the frame plane and two over time, so the cost grows linearly with sequence length ($\mathcal{O}(N)$); after each layer, a Channel Affinity Modulation gate mixes the groups again. On top of the backbone, a GReFEL reliability module turns the normalized entropy of each prediction into a mixing weight between the classifier output and a vote from trainable geometric anchors, so that facial geometry counts for more when the network is unsure. The model is initialized by static-to-dynamic weight transfer and trained with a Triple Loss. In five-fold cross-validation, the best fold scores 66.57\%/76.46\% UAR/WAR on DFEW, 0.3 points or less below the strongest compared method, and 45.66\%/62.27\% on MAFW, ahead of all compared methods; on FERV39k the mean over five splits, 42.30\%/52.66\%, is competitive. The five-fold means are 64.07\%/74.54\% on DFEW, on par with recent large pre-trained models, and 38.90\%/54.37\% on MAFW, below the best of them. A paired $t$-test on DFEW indicates a modest benefit of temporal modeling (+1.61 UAR points, one-sided $p=0.031$). Attention stays on plausible facial regions, and latency is close to a ViT-B/16 baseline (47.4 vs.\ 46.8 ms per clip). Code: https://github.com/ardiytama/GroupMamba-DFER.
☆ Pos4CHD: A Positive-Free Mask-Guided Counterfactual Synthesis Framework for Fetal Congenital Heart Defect Analysis IEEE
The scarcity of positive cases remains a major bottleneck in developing automated diagnostic systems for fetal Congenital Heart Defects~(CHDs), particularly for rare subtypes. Although normal cases are accessible with effort, positive cases are hard to collect due to low incidence rates and privacy concerns, causing severe class imbalance or absence of positive training samples. Existing works resort to synthesizing positives with conditional generative models, but they are task-specific and require positive training samples, hindering application for fetal CHDs. To this end, we propose a positive-free mask-guided counterfactual generation framework for fetal echocardiography, namely Pos4CHD, which enables realistic, high-quality synthesis of pseudo-positive samples from semantic masks, with only normal samples at hand. Technically, we first develop FE-Gen, a mask-guided generative model tailored for fetal heart ultrasound synthesis that mitigates histogram drift and enhances image-mask spatial alignment. Building on FE-Gen, Pos4CHD employs a mask-to-image generation paradigm for CHD synthesis. It first manipulates semantic masks to simulate fetal-heart structural anomalies and then renders anatomically consistent images. Extensive experiments on in-house datasets, together with expert evaluations, demonstrate the visual fidelity~($-12.97$ FID) and anatomical consistency~($+3.96\%$ DSC) of synthesized images. Further validations across diverse real-world CHD diagnosis tasks exhibit promising results and consistent increments, including zero-shot classification~(achieving $93.25\%$ ACC on EbA and $72.92\%$ ACC on TAPVC), lesion detection~($+6.95\%$ mAP50 on VSD), and anatomy segmentation~($+10.49\%$ DSC on fetal heart) compared with baselines. Codes and models are publicly available on \href{https://github.com/DREAMXFAR/Pos4CHD}{GitHub}.
comment: Submitted to IEEE TMI, under review
☆ WildDepth-v2: A Synchronized RGB--LiDAR--Radar Dataset and Benchmark for Metric Depth, Motion, and Tracking of Wildlife
Muhammad Aamir, Sangyun Shin, Naoya Muramatsu, Matthew Wijers, Amir Patel, Andrew Loveridge, Andrew Markham
Measuring animal distance and motion in metric units underpins abundance estimation, morphometrics, and movement ecology, yet monocular video lacks metric scale and wildlife datasets lack metric ground truth. We present WildDepth 2, extending the synchronized RGB-LiDAR WildDepth dataset in three directions. (i) Imaging radar: 37 RGB-LiDAR-4D-radar sequences (19,716 frames) with per-point Doppler velocity and a measured error budget, to our knowledge the first imaging-radar wildlife recordings. (ii) Benchmarking: a frozen, checksummed hidden test set for RGB-only distance estimation and RGB+sparse-LiDAR depth completion, evaluated separately on animal and background pixels. (iii) Motion and tracking: metric 3D trajectories obtained by lifting 2D tracks using LiDAR, radar, or monocular depth. Across 48,723 animal frames, object-level radar calibration improves monocular depth over scene-level LiDAR calibration without requiring LiDAR at inference (AbsRel 0.120 vs. 0.198), although animal-level LiDAR remains more accurate (0.052). Across 431 tracks, once-per-track radar scaling reduces 3D position error four-fold (2.20 to 0.58 m) and distance-sampling detection-function bias from -13% to -2%, matching once-per-track LiDAR calibration. Transferring radar Doppler onto LiDAR produces motion masks 3.7 times denser than radar alone at 72% precision, reduces moving-animal LiDAR accumulation error by 37%, and estimates radial speed (r = 0.60), albeit with approximately 50% underestimation.
☆ Through a PRISM, Clearly: Step-Sequence Reasoning for Mistake Recognition in Procedural Videos
Procedural mistake recognition requires identifying deviations from valid multi-step activities. We study post-completion recognition from videos with benchmark-provided step boundaries. We introduce PRISM (Procedural mistake Recognition via Interpretable Semantic Modeling), which grounds video segments in language and maps their descriptions to procedural states using a lightweight hidden Markov model trained on correct executions. Reference alignment and semantic checks identify errors in step content and order. To support evaluation across heterogeneous benchmarks, we map dataset-specific annotations to four edit-based error types: insertion, deletion, substitution, and transposition. Across three benchmarks, we compare gold and VLM-generated descriptions in raw, semantic-role, and action-object forms. Decoder controls show consistent gains from the trained local decoder over nearest-candidate matching, with additional, dataset-dependent benefits from sequence decoding. Semantic role labeling improves Any-F1 in all six matched grounded comparisons, although the gains vary across datasets and do not translate into uniform improvements under separate configuration selection. These results establish language grounding as an effective interface for explicit procedural mistake reasoning and characterize the contributions of representation and decoding.
☆ Where Do Long Captions Fail? Position-Aware Diagnosis and Reinforcement Learning for Detailed Image Captioning NeurIPS 2026
Yuanze Hu, Zhichao Yang, Junwei Jing, Xin Yang, Wenxuan Liu, Tinghai Zhang, Jia Fu, Hongzhi Zhang, Xiangyu Wu, Ruiming Tang, Tingting Gao, Han Li
Detailed image captioning is usually framed as an amount problem: a model should mention more visual facts while avoiding hallucination. However, autoregressive VLMs generate captions as ordered sequences, and later generations may be produced under weaker or noisier visual grounding. We therefore argue that long-form captioning should be studied not only by what facts are mentioned, but also by where they appear. We introduce a position-aware rubric representation that decomposes dense human references into atomic visual claims, verifies generated captions against those claims, and induces a quartile-wise composition of supported, hallucinated, and generic content. This lens reveals two qualitatively different failures in long captions: models tend to produce unsupported specificity in the middle, while the final portion often escapes into vague, non-evidential language rather than simply accumulating more hallucination. A same-reference human control does not exhibit these patterns; additional human audits examine the visual validity of the induced labels. Motivated by this diagnosis, we propose PAGER (Position-Aware Grounded Evidence Reinforcement), a GRPO training objective with separate signals for supported fine-grained middle evidence, evidence-bearing tail continuation, claim coverage, and content-aware length control. The result is a closed loop: the same ordered claim representation identifies where long captions fail and supplies the position-specific reward needed to repair those failures. Experiments on detailed-caption benchmarks show that PAGER improves position-wise grounding and pairwise caption preference while preserving competitive global caption quality.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. 38 pages, 3 figures; includes references, appendices, and the paper checklist
☆ DRAFT: Decoding and Reconstructing 3D Room Layouts from fMRI and Camera Trajectories
While functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) decoders reconstruct images and 3D objects, recovering the metric geometry of rooms from a moving viewpoint remains an open challenge. We introduce, to our knowledge for the first time, the task of reconstructing 3D layouts of held-out scenes using only the known camera trajectories and the fMRI signals of participants watching indoor walkthroughs, without any visual frames. The task is hard because of the temporal mismatch between rapid visual changes and blurred fMRI signals. Our method, DRAFT (Decoding and Reconstructing 3D room lAyouts from fMRI and Trajectories), extracts a compact layout representation from the early visual cortex and fuses this neural code with the geometric free space derived from camera motion. To evaluate it, we propose layout r, the Pearson correlation between predicted and ray-cast log depths. On ten held-out scenes (20 participants), DRAFT reaches a layout r of 0.480, outperforming the camera path alone (0.446) and seven fMRI decoders (at most 0.429). DRAFT also works as a plug-in that improves all seven decoders without retraining, raising their layout r from 0.171-0.429 to 0.487-0.493. Brain activity and camera motion can thus recover the metric layout of unseen rooms, a first step toward reconstructing the 3D spaces people see.
comment: 42 pages, 7 figures, 18 tables
☆ I$^2$-KAN: Interpretable Intra- and Inter-Modal Multi-Pathway Representation Learning for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis
Xiaoting Xie, Feng Qiao, Xianwei Zhang, Hailong Chen, Kaiwen Zheng, Joemon M. Jose, Xuri Ge, Yujun Li
Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) aims to infer sentiment by integrating linguistic, acoustic, and visual information. However, many fusion methods integrate modality-specific representations and cross-modal interactions into joint representations, making it difficult to determine whether predictive utility arises from a modality itself or from its interactions with others. More fundamentally, a modality's standalone predictive utility may not faithfully reflect its interaction-conditioned predictive utility. To address this issue, we propose I$^2$-KAN, an interpretable multi-pathway framework that explicitly maintains intra-modal and pairwise inter-modal information in separate structural pathways. Each pathway is refined by a Task-Decoupled Linear-Gated Denoising Bottleneck (TDL-GDB) to learn compact and task-relevant representations, followed by structured Kolmogorov-Arnold Network fusion that retains explicit pathway associations and supports multi-level interpretation. Extensive experiments on CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI, and CH-SIMS v2 demonstrate strong overall performance. Ablation and interpretability analyses consistently show across the three benchmarks that low standalone predictive utility does not necessarily imply low interaction-conditioned predictive utility: a modality that appears weak in isolation can remain informative through pairwise interactions. These findings highlight the interaction-dependent nature of multimodal utility and suggest that modality utility should be characterized from both standalone and interaction-conditioned perspectives.
☆ A General-Purpose Dual-Path Interaction Framework for Multi-View Medical Image Segmentation: Alleviating Data Volume Dependency in Small-Sample Regimes
Shuhuan Wang, Yuanyuan Cui, Pengju Wang, Huimin Guo, Ling Yue, Yin Gu, Yanchao Zhang, Wei Feng, Yunhe Liu, Wei Qian, Mingjun Xu, Shuang Liu, He Ma
The performance of medical image segmentation depends on a large amount of annotated data, and most segmentation models experience a significant drop in performance in low-sample-size scenarios. Existing semi-supervised and weakly supervised methods rely on specific network architectures, while traditional multi-view-assisted segmentation methods require strictly paired samples, which limits their clinical applications. To address these issues, we propose DPIF, a general-purpose plug-and-play dual-path interaction framework compatible with arbitrary encoder-decoder segmentation networks, which leverages cross-view anatomical complementarity to reduce annotation reliance. DPIF first performs Sinkhorn optimal transport-based cross-view distribution alignment to establish global semantic correspondence without sample-level pairing. It then adopts conditional mutual information-guided feature decoupling to enable bidirectional knowledge transfer only within the shared semantic space, suppressing view-specific noise. Finally, persistent homology-based topological regularization encodes anatomical invariants as unsupervised priors to mitigate overfitting. Experiments were conducted using 24 baseline models on a private multicenter echocardiography dataset and two public datasets. The results show that DPIF-enhanced models outperform single-view baseline models when trained on comparable amounts of data. Notably, most dual-path variants trained on 40\% - 60\% of the data achieve performance comparable to that of single-view models trained on the full dataset. This demonstrates that DPIF provides a general-purpose and scalable solution for data-scarce multi-view medical image segmentation problems.
comment: 20 pages, 5 figures
☆ ResGVC: Residual Coding for High-fidelity Generative Video Compression
Generative video compression (GVC) methods usually employ decoder-side diffusion models to denoise reconstructed signals based on generative priors. Besides, most of these methods perform denoising in latent space rather than directly in pixel domain. In this paper, we propose ResGVC, a residual coding framework for GVC that guides denoising toward original pictures by transmitting residual signals. ResGVC first encodes the original pictures within a learned video codec, and then decomposes the distortion between the codec reconstruction and the original pictures into a sequence of residual segments, where each residual segment is acquired at each denoising step. Residual segments can further be compressed by a novel residual codec with a diffusion transformer as an entropy model. Unlike prior methods, ResGVC introduces explicit source constraints throughout denoising rather than relying on decoder-side generation alone. The diffusion-based entropy model also enables more effective distribution modeling capability based on the powerful generative priors. Moreover, denoising directly in pixel space avoids the irreversible information loss caused by latent representation bottlenecks. Experimental results show that, compared with the previous state-of-the-art method, ResGVC achieves 63.7% and 83.8% BD-rate reductions in terms of LPIPS and PSNR, respectively, while also delivering superior visual quality.
☆ Revisiting Distribution Matching for State-to-Vision Policy Distillation in Laparoscopic Robotic Manipulation
End-to-end control policies trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL) have emerged as an alternative to conventional surgical robotic control approaches, with recent studies exploring state-based policies trained on privileged state observations. However, such approaches rely on precise physical states that are difficult to obtain reliably in surgical environments. Vision-based RL provides an alternative by learning manipulation policies directly from RGB observations, avoiding explicit state estimation and manually engineered perception pipelines while enabling policies to acquire task-relevant visual representations. Nevertheless, obtaining vision-based policies via pure RL methods for surgical manipulation remains challenging. Thus, imitation learning (IL) becomes another solution, yet it requires a large number of expert demonstrations, which are difficult to obtain in minimally invasive surgery. In this work, we propose a framework for state-to-vision policy distillation in laparoscopic robotic manipulation. Specifically, a state-based policy with privileged observations is employed as the teacher, and a vision-based policy learns from RGB observations and robot proprioceptive information, which requires less expert demonstrations than IL and introduces superior performance than RL methods. We conduct extensive experiments on various surgical manipulation tasks in the simulated environment. Experimental results show that, in the context of laparoscopic robotic manipulation, training vision-based policies with general-purpose RL methods is challenging, whereas our proposed state-to-vision policy distillation leads to more consistent and stable performance across tasks.
comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables
☆ Diagnostic Loss: Asymmetric Supervision for Radiology Report Generation
Ignacy Kolton, Wenxuan Li, Zongwei Zhou, Jarosław B. Ćwikła, Arkadiusz Sitek, Pedro R. A. S. Bassi, Szymon Płotka
Automated radiology report generation requires models to do more than produce fluent clinical narratives: they must explicitly state supported diagnoses while avoiding unsupported ones. However, existing medical vision-language models (MedVLMs) are typically trained with token-level maximum likelihood objectives, which prioritize text agreement over diagnostically critical terms. As a result, models can miss key diagnoses and introduce wrong ones. We identify this as an objective misalignment between conventional language modeling and the asymmetric diagnostic requirements of radiology reporting. To encode these requirements, we introduce Diagnostic Loss (DLoss), a differentiable, architecture-agnostic objective that operates directly on decoder token probabilities. DLoss separately aggregates probability mass over vocabularies associated with diagnoses supported by the reference report and with unsupported alternatives. Using asymmetric pooling across token positions in the report, it encourages supported diagnoses to receive sufficient probability in at least one position while suppressing spurious probability spikes for unsupported diagnoses across all positions during training. The loss can be applied to existing 3D MedVLMs without modifying their vision backbones, language decoders, or inference procedures, and introduces no additional inference-time computation. We train and evaluate DLoss on 50,000 abdominal CT scans across several 3D MedVLM architectures on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution report-generation benchmarks. Across these settings, DLoss improves diagnostic faithfulness while maintaining competitive performance on conventional language-generation metrics, showing the value of asymmetric sequence-level supervision for radiology report generation. The code for DLoss is available at https://github.com/gmum/DLoss.
comment: 26 pages, 6 figures, 7 tables. Code available at https://github.com/gmum/DLoss
☆ GraphCAD: Geometry-Aware Diffusion on Edge-Adjacency Graphs for CAD Generation
Generative modeling for Computer-Aided Design (CAD) remains fundamentally challenged by the need to capture the intricate interplay between discrete topological connectivity and precise spatial geometry inherent in Boundary Representations (B-reps). Existing generative approaches largely formulate CAD construction as a sequence modeling problem, but consequently lack an explicit topological inductive bias. In this work, we present GraphCAD, a geometry-aware generative framework that centers modeling on the Edge-Adjacency Graph (EAG), a novel graph-based CAD representation tailored for generative tasks. GraphCAD adopts a hybrid graph diffusion formulation to jointly model the discrete and continuous components of EAG and introduces a geometry-aware denoising mechanism that renders node attributes into spatial point sets. These point sets are encoded by an SE(3)-equivariant backbone and fused into the node representations, thereby grounding the generative process in physical geometry. To support this study, we construct EAGBench, a large-scale dataset of engineering CAD models. Extensive experiments show that GraphCAD can generate complex CAD models with more than 50 faces and achieves state-of-the-art performance in geometric fidelity and distributional alignment compared with sequence-based baselines.
☆ Bound-Conditioned Latent Inference for Progressive Image Compression NeurIPS 2026
Progressive image compression reconstructs images from prefixes of a single bitstream and therefore involves sequential latent inference under partial observations. Existing trit-plane codecs mainly treat decoded trits as discrete symbols for probability prediction, without fully exploiting their role as interval constraints on the underlying continuous latents. We propose bound-conditioned latent inference (BLI), a framework that reformulates progressive trit-plane coding as sequential latent inference under shrinking interval constraints. At each coding step, the trits decoded so far define lower and upper bounds for each latent element. BLI uses the center and width of these bounds, together with hyperprior information shared by the encoder and decoder, to jointly refine the Gaussian parameters $(μ,σ)$ for entropy modeling and the latent estimate $\hat{y}$ for reconstruction. As additional trits are decoded, the feasible intervals shrink monotonically, yielding tighter constraints for the next inference step and enabling flexible in-plane refinement schedules. Experiments on Kodak, CLIC, and JPEG-AI show that BLI achieves state-of-the-art rate-distortion performance among progressive image codecs, reducing BD-rate by $17.78\%$ over DPICT and by $7.96\%$ over CTC on Kodak, while replacing CTC's plane-specific predictors with a shared model that uses about $5.3\times$ fewer parameters and achieves lower latency than CTC.
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2026
☆ Attention-guided classification and tumor localization of combined hepatocellular-cholangiocarcinoma
Xiaowen Liang, Hélène Cazier, Aurélie Beaufrère, Miguel Albuquerque, Valérie Paradis, Cédric Wemmert
Combined hepatocellular-cholangiocarcinomas (cHCC-CCA) are a type of cancer that share components of two other primary liver cancers: hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and cholangiocarcinoma (CCA). Accurate diagnosis of cHCC-CCA, of which the behavior may resemble that of either HCC or CCA, remains a challenge due to strong intratumoral heterogeneity. Since the prognoses differ between liver cancer types, it is necessary to improve their morphological characterization and recognition in order to accurately identify cHCC-CCA. In this work, we use whole slide images (WSIs) of the two main types of liver cancer (HCC and CCA) and cHCC-CCA, stained with Hematoxylin-Eosin-Safran (HES), to train a classification model that can distinguish between these subtypes and provides a potential solution for localizing different types of tumors in the combined liver cancer images.
☆ GateFormer: Forecast-Space Decomposition for Intra-Hour Solar Irradiance Prediction from Sky Images
Sub-hourly dispatch, balancing, and storage control increasingly depend on forecasts that anticipate rapid variability in solar generation. Accurate sky-image-based irradiance forecasting requires a combination of visual cloud dynamics with recent irradiance state while adapting to different short-term irradiance-change regimes. To address this, we introduce GateFormer, a GHI-conditioned dual-decoder ViT for intra-hour global horizontal irradiance (GHI) forecasting through forecast-space decomposition. GateFormer embeds observed GHI into the visual token stream, allowing interaction with sky-image patch features through self-attention. From this shared representation, a Trajectory Head predicts future GHI sequence, while a Delta Head predicts final-horizon change from the latest observed GHI. The two final-horizon forecasts are adaptively weighted in prediction space, with magnitude- and direction-supervision targeting the remaining error. On the NREL-TSI benchmark, GateFormer attains 125.01 W/m^2 RMSE at +30 min, improving over a state-of-the-art transformer baseline by 9.6% under paired-timestamp evaluation. Across NREL-TSI, Chilbolton, and SIRTA, GateFormer achieves the lowest final-horizon RMSE among the evaluated baselines, with forecast skill of 22.97-28.86% relative to smart persistence. Component ablations show adaptive weighting outperforms both individual decoders and fixed averaging, distinguishing GateFormer from conventional forecast combination, while the supervised correction further reduces RMSE by 1.68 W/m^2 and MAE by 4.86 W/m^2. Ramp-regime diagnostics show larger gains during operationally important positive ramps, reducing RMSE by 26.27 W/m^2. These results identify forecast-space decomposition as an alternative forecasting formulation, with potential relevance to other multimodal short-horizon forecasting tasks and deployment using only sky images and measured GHI.
☆ Vision Transformers for Estimating Irradiance Using Data Scarce Sky Images
Accurate estimation of diffuse horizontal irradiance (DHI) is critical for optimising photovoltaic system performance and energy forecasting yet remains challenging in regions lacking comprehensive ground-based instrumentation. Recent advancements using Vision Transformers (ViTs) trained on extensive sky image datasets have shown promise in replacing costly irradiance measurement equipment, but the scarcity of long-term, high-quality sky imagery significantly restricts practical implementation. Addressing this critical gap, this study proposes a novel dual-framework approach designed for data-scarce scenarios. First, calculated atmospheric parameters, including extraterrestrial irradiance and cyclic time encodings, are integrated to represent sky conditions without utilising any instrumentation. Next, a sequential pipeline initially predicts synthetic global horizontal irradiance (GHI) and uses it as a feature, to refine DHI estimation. Finally, a dual-parallel architecture simultaneously processes raw and overlay-enhanced fisheye sky images. Overlays are generated through unsupervised, physics-informed cloud segmentation to highlight dynamic sky features. Empirical validation is performed using data from the Chilbolton Observatory, chosen for its temperate climate and frequent cloud variability. To simulate data-scarce conditions, models are trained on a single month (e.g., January) and evaluated across a temporally disjoint, full-year test set. Under this setup, the sequential and dual-parallel frameworks achieve RMSE values within 2-3 W/m^2 and 1-6 W/m^2, respectively, of a state-of-the-art ViT trained on the complete dataset. By combining physics-informed modelling with unsupervised segmentation, the proposed method provides a scalable and cost-effective solution for DHI estimation, advancing solar resource assessment in data-constrained environments.
☆ ICGF-CXRMate: Image-Conditioned Clinical Context Compression and Gated Fusion for Chest X-ray Report Generation
Auxiliary patient data can improve chest X-ray report generation, but directly concatenating heterogeneous clinical information with visual tokens produces long, variable-length decoder prompts and may expose the model to redundant or image-irrelevant context. We propose ICGF-CXRMate, an image-conditioned clinical context compression and gated fusion framework. Learnable queries are first conditioned on the current chest X-ray representations and then attend to the patient-data sequence, compressing it into a fixed number of clinical context tokens. Gated cross-attention selectively integrates these tokens into the visual stream, while the compressed tokens are retained in the decoder prompt as a direct clinical pathway. Experiments on linked MIMIC-CXR and MIMIC-IV-ED examinations show that ICGF-CXRMate improves report quality while reducing the average prompt length. In Stage~2, it improves RadGraph-F1 from 24.00 to 28.86, CXR-BERT similarity from 56.86 to 62.80, and BLEU-4 from 5.14 to 7.96 compared with CXRMate-ED, while reducing the average prompt length from 373.89 to 288.37 tokens, corresponding to a 22.9\% reduction. After self-critical sequence training, ICGF-CXRMate outperforms CXRMate-ED on six of eight report-quality metrics in Stage~3. Ablation studies confirm the complementary contributions of image-conditioned compression, gated fusion, and direct retention of the compressed clinical tokens.
☆ Making MLLM Latents Matter: Factor-Aware Predictive Learning for Cinematic Video Generation
Songlin Yang, Zhe Wang, Xiaotong Zhao, Xi Wang, Ran Zhang, Shuai Li, Taiyi Wu, Songlian Li, Eric Liu, Alan Zhao, Anyi Rao
Cinematic video generation requires both temporal inference from limited inputs (i.e., sparse rather than frame-by-frame guidance) and factor-aware control of character, scene, action, and camera. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer useful priors for both capabilities, but their representations are not automatically actionable for video generation: a Video Diffusion Transformer (DiT) may bypass them through native conditioning pathways, and using them does not ensure either factor-aware control or generation-compatible temporal prediction. We propose Factor-Aware Predictive Learning (FAPL), which establishes effective MLLM latent use as a shared prerequisite and then targets the two capabilities with complementary learning signals. First, latent-only generator grounding trains the DiT with a frozen MLLM and connector, strengthening the DiT's use of MLLM latents for generation. Second, for factor-aware control, paired videos specify a target-factor change and non-target preservation, and factor-span replacement trains the DiT to realize this relationship in its output. Third, for temporal inference, text-only and text-plus-complete-video observations share a video target, and the trained DiT is then frozen while the MLLM and connector are optimized through it. This final stage trains limited-input representations for generation while retaining complete-observation reconstruction as a complementary training mode. Extensive experiments demonstrate our consistently better performance on three cinematic video generation tasks (i.e., sparse-to-video, factor-aware editing, and multi-shot generation) over baselines and validate FAPL's contributions to MLLM feature use, temporal control, and factor coordination.
☆ Watch and Learn: Teaching Visual In-Context Learning by Removing Textual Shortcuts
Vision-language models (VLMs) struggle with in context learning compared to their textual counterparts. Our preliminary study shows that VLMs rely on textual shortcuts and underutilize the visual demonstrations. We therefore hypothesize that VLMs are insufficiently trained to perform visual in-context learning (vICL). To this end, we construct MIME, a task-agnostic vICL training set without textual shortcuts. We ensure the instruction does not state the rule linking the demonstration images to their answers, so the model must infer it from the visual demonstrations. Fine-tuning on MIME improves vICL accuracy by 8.1 to 18.0 points across three VLMs, preserves single-image performance, and improves multi-image and text only in-context learning. In contrast, stating the rule in the training data sharply reduces this gain. We further propose DTAD (Demonstration Text Attention Dropout), which randomly withholds demonstration labels during training so that the VLM must infer the rule from the demonstration images. While achieving comparable vICL accuracy to fine-tuning on MIME, DTAD yields more consistent attention to the demonstration images. On TrueMICL, Qwen3-VL-8B trained on MIME matches frontier models such as Claude Opus 5, and surpasses them with DTAD. Finally, adding MIME to the instruction-tuning mix of LLaVA 1.5 13B more than doubles its vICL accuracy without hurting single-image abilities, whereas a same-size multi-image set improves it only slightly. These results suggest that vICL data should be a standard component of VLM training.
☆ Hierarchical Fine-Grained Cross-Modal Alignment via Dynamic Granularity Discovery and Optimal Transport
Fine-grained image-text retrieval requires a model not only to assess global semantic consistency between an image and a text, but also to model visual evidence for local textual semantics, including objects, attributes, quantities, actions, and relations, so as to distinguish semantically similar candidates. Existing methods commonly use fixed image patches, detected regions, or text tokens as the basic matching units and then aggregate local interactions through max pooling, cross attention, or similarity accumulation. Such strategies remain limited in semantic unit construction and global matching consistency. This paper proposes a hierarchical fine-grained cross-modal alignment framework, termed HFCMA. The framework progressively transforms low-level patch and token representations into adaptive visual regions and textual phrases, and then performs structured region-phrase matching within a global retrieval scoring process. Specifically, HFCMA first adopts dynamic granularity discovery (DGD) to aggregate raw patches and tokens into semantically compact visual regions and textual phrases. It then formulates region-phrase matching as an entropy-regularized optimal transport problem, thereby estimating a structured alignment matrix under global marginal constraints. To reduce background noise and local semantic drift, HFCMA further introduces background debiasing, textual importance weighting, and prototype consistency regularization. Experiments on Flickr30K and MS-COCO show that HFCMA effectively combines dynamic semantic unit construction with OT-based structured matching under a dual-encoder retrieval framework. The resulting fine-grained score provides structured local alignment information for candidate ranking and improves the discrimination of subtle semantic differences.
comment: 8 figures, 6 tables. Code available at https://github.com/sungkites/HFCMA
☆ H-2DGS: Height-Field Gaussian Splatting for Sharp and Deformable Neurosurgical Surface Reconstruction
Neurosurgical navigation commonly presents magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as 2D slices, making it difficult to relate the anatomy in those slices to the cortical surface observed through the surgical microscope. We seek a common 3D visualization that combines a photorealistic reconstruction of the exposed cortex during tumor surgery with whole-brain MRI context and diffusion tractography pathways. This requires the reconstructed cortex to form a clear boundary around the brain anatomy rather than a diffuse volume that obscures internal structures. Conventional 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) can reproduce observed views but, under limited surgical view coverage, may distribute opacity through a thick and geometrically ambiguous band. We introduce height-field 2D Gaussian Splatting (H-2DGS), a three-stage pipeline that concentrates a robust 3DGS reconstruction, fuses its depth into a shared truncated signed distance field (TSDF) surface, and represents that surface with curved, surface-oriented Gaussian primitives. Separate height, color, and opacity bases provide local geometry and appearance, while a neighbor-transition objective coordinates overlapping patches. The explicit surface further supports postoperative alignment: MRI-derived depth deforms the reconstruction, and tracked-color supervision with alternating optimization preserves its appearance. Across five real neurosurgical cases, H-2DGS gives low multi-view depth inconsistency, a compact 7.97MB representation, and interactive rendering at 29--42ms per frame. The resulting sharp, deformable surface integrates clearly with tractography and MRI anatomy, including a postoperative resection cavity.
☆ Query-Time Calibration of CLIP Features for Open-Vocabulary 3D Segmentation
Lifting vision-language features such as CLIP into 3D Gaussian reconstructions enables open-vocabulary segmentation through natural-language queries. Although CLIP represents a broad range of semantic concepts, the lifted features of individual scenes can exhibit strong directional concentration, while raw cosine similarity does not account for the scene-specific feature distribution. We show that substantial segmentation gains can be obtained by changing how a fixed lifted feature field is compared with text. Our method partially subtracts a shared scene direction from visual features and text prototypes and whitens text prototypes using a fixed reference vocabulary of generic terms. It then uses soft clustering for multiclass prediction and CSLS with a relevance margin against the reference vocabulary for single-query prediction. Beyond reducing directional concentration, scene centering improves class-relative feature separation in every evaluated scene. Across seven lifting methods and four datasets, the resulting query-time calibration consistently improves mean intersection over union in both multiclass and single-query segmentation. These gains require no retraining, source-image re-encoding, or feature re-lifting, demonstrating the value of scene-conditioned comparison for making better use of existing lifted representations.
☆ When Annotation Patterns Are Learned: Skin-Tone Dependence in Dermatology Concepts
Concept bottleneck models (CBMs) let clinicians inspect and correct skin disease diagnoses through clinical concepts, but only if the concept annotations are reliable. We therefore audit the reliability of SkinCon, a widely used dermatology concept dataset, across skin tones. Within the same disease and with near duplicates removed, erythema is annotated far less often on dark than on light skin, with an odds ratio of 0.17. In contrast, hyperpigmentation and hypopigmentation are annotated more often, with odds ratios of 6.2 and 4.5, respectively. We refer to this pattern as tone-dependent concept annotation. An evidential concept model trained on these annotations learns the same pattern and reproduces it on unseen images. Such a model may agree with potential erythema omissions rather than contradict them. Consistent with this, three label error detectors underperform a disease-only baseline at finding erythema that dermatologist captions mention but SkinCon labels as absent. The three detectors are based on confident learning, training dynamics, and the model's own evidential uncertainty. Concept annotations should thus be audited within each subgroup before explanations built on them can be trusted.
☆ HimmBO: High-Dimensional Interactive Model-Merging Bayesian Optimization for Image Generation
Fine-tuning has become a common way to customize text-to-image models, leading to community collections of over 100K lightweight adapters. Adapters sharing a base model can be merged with continuous coefficients. This turns a large collection into a high-dimensional continuous design space, which recent work explores interactively using preferential Bayesian optimization (PBO). However, existing approaches are limited to a few dozen preselected adapters and require expensive image generation in every interaction round. We introduce HimmBO, a two-stage method that scales preference-driven adapter merging to much larger collections while reducing image-generation cost. Its screening stage recovers the active adapter set through level-set estimation over pre-generated images, requiring no image generation. The refinement stage then optimizes merge coefficients in the recovered low-dimensional subspace. Both stages use a style-aware kernel, allowing preference information to transfer between visually similar adapters. In simulated-user image-matching experiments, HimmBO achieves higher final similarity than all comparisons while reaching a given similarity with under one tenth of the image generations required by prior work. Its performance remains stable as the collection grows to 1080 adapters, while competing methods degrade substantially.
☆ Verus-Insight: Towards Explainable Artifact Detection in AI-Generated Videos
Zhuoran Zhang, Yang Shi, Qixun Wang, Tengfei Liu, Yuqi Tang, Xuanyu Zhu, Yizhuo Jia, Jingyun Hua, Shixuan Liu, Xianghua Ying, Haotian Wang, Yuanxing Zhang, Pengfei Wan, Wenjing Yang
Recent advances in video generation have made synthetic videos increasingly realistic, placing greater demands on reliable AI-generated video detection. Existing artifact-based detectors typically identify generation artifacts as evidence for source prediction, yet they may either fail to recognize subtle artifacts or reach the correct source decision without faithfully identifying the evidence underlying it. In this work, we systematically investigate how to design and train effective artifact detectors and formulate artifact detection as a structured process comprising three complementary capabilities: Inspection Planning, which determines what should be examined; Evidence Verification, which verifies whether the inspected content exhibits genuine generation artifacts; and Evidence Aggregation, which integrates the verified evidence into the final source decision. Building on this formulation, we introduce Verus-Insight, trained with human-anchored full-process supervision and progressive capability training to strengthen both fine-grained artifact detection and video-level detection. We further introduce Verus-Bench, a benchmark with fine-grained human annotations of perceptible artifacts for evaluating artifact detection. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that Verus-Insight achieves strong performance in both fine-grained artifact analysis and AI-generated video detection, with substantial gains in recovering human-perceived artifacts. Further analyses reveal that the three capabilities are complementary yet distinct, and that Verus-Insight more reliably converts relevant inspection targets into supported artifact evidence without increasing spurious artifact claims.
comment: 35 pages
☆ Cross-Spectral Feature Fusion for Multispectral Document Binarization
Historical document binarization remains challenging when faded ink, bleed-through, and background degradation exhibit wavelength-dependent behavior across visible and near-infrared observations. This study investigates whether adaptive cross-spectral feature fusion and targeted structural guidance can improve multispectral document binarization beyond fixed fusion and generic attention mechanisms.
Four registered SMADI bands at 500, 600, 700, and 1000 nm are processed using a multi-branch conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN). Visible, NIR, and structural feature streams are fused at encoder depth L = 3 using spatial- and channel-wise softmax gating, while auxiliary edge maps derived from selected VIS-NIR band pairs provide targeted structural guidance. Nine controlled fusion and structural configurations are evaluated using five-fold document-level cross-validation, DIBCO-standard metrics, and Holm-corrected statistical testing.
The F3 + NIR edge-guided configuration provides the strongest overall performance among the evaluated models, achieving mean F1 = 0.7916, p-FM = 0.8044, and IoU = 0.6654. Relative to the fixed Mid AVG baseline, it improves F1 by 0.0269, p-FM by 0.0360, and IoU by 0.0321, with all three gains remaining statistically significant after Holm correction. Mean NRM and DRD are also reduced, although these reductions are not statistically significant after correction.
Targeted cross-spectral structural guidance provides an effective mechanism for regulating intermediate multispectral fusion, improving primary foreground-overlap performance while retaining the complete four-band observation.
☆ Direct Forcing: A Single-Stage Training Recipe for Few-Step Autoregressive Text-to-Video Generation
Few-step autoregressive video generation enables low-latency streaming, yet prevailing training pipelines separate causal adaptation from distribution matching. Recent representation-based text-to-video methods retain this separation by starting from ODE-initialized checkpoints, even when the target distribution is defined directly by reference videos. We introduce Direct Forcing, a single-stage framework that uses reference videos both as paired examples of how a history continues and as a target population for self-generated rollouts. Causal Continuation Alignment learns paired spatiotemporal correspondence under reference histories, while Rollout Distribution Matching uses maximum mean discrepancy to align the representation distributions of self-generated and reference videos. Together, these complementary signals allow a pretrained video model to learn causal continuation and the target video distribution in a single training stage. Dynamic Gradient Balancing adapts the relative gradient contributions of continuation alignment and distribution matching during training. Starting from bidirectional Wan2.1-1.3B, Direct Forcing learns a four-step autoregressive generator in 250 updates without a separate initialization stage or online diffusion-score supervision, achieving 84.63 VBench Total and 86.01 Quality. Ablation studies further demonstrate the benefits of dynamic gradient balancing and reveal distinct representation preferences: deeper features benefit continuation alignment, whereas intermediate features yield better performance for rollout distribution matching.
☆ CAVC: Convergence-Adaptive Audio-Visual Cache for Modality-Asymmetric Diffusion Generation
Diffusion-based audio-visual generation methods typically perform joint denoising of audio and video latents throughout the entire sampling trajectory, repeatedly executing modality-specific denoising branches and cross-modal attention at every timestep. However, we observe that such uniform joint computation is not always necessary. The key is a modality-asymmetric recoverability: audio-side drift introduced by mid-stage caching can be substantially reduced by only a few terminal joint denoising steps, whereas video-side degradation caused by caching leads to persistent loss of motion and temporal details. This asymmetry suggests that inference acceleration should selectively cache recoverable audio-side computation while preserving full video refinement. Motivated by this observation, we propose \textbf{Convergence-Adaptive Audio-Visual Cache (CAVC)}, a training-free modality-asymmetric caching framework. CAVC adopts a sandwich-structured computation allocation: after detecting that audio denoiser outputs enter a cache-tolerant regime, it caches and reuses the audio denoiser output to bypass audio denoising and cross-modal attention in the middle stage, while the video branch continues independent spatio-temporal refinement; a few joint steps are then restored at the end to reduce accumulated cross-modal drift and improve synchronization. Experiments across multiple public benchmarks demonstrate that CAVC achieves 1.10--1.35x wall-clock acceleration, improves several visual dynamics and temporal statistics, and maintains competitive audio fidelity and audio-visual alignment.
☆ RECAP: Looking Once Is Not Enough for Vision-Language Reasoning NeurIPS 2026
Zhaolu Kang, Tailong Luo, Chenxin Li, Yingjie He, Zhenyu Yu, Fengyu Zhou, Jiachen Qian, Lei Wei, Shuang Chen, Jiachen Li, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Rongchao Zhang, Zhengtao Yao, Hoi Leong Lee, Guansu Wang, Kaiyue Zhou
Long chain-of-thought reasoning improves vision-language models (VLMs), but it also exposes a temporal grounding failure: as generation unfolds, models may drift from image evidence while reinforcement learning still provides only a final-answer reward. We study this gap through visual revisit, a temporally localized reactivation of image evidence during reasoning. Across three VLM backbones, revisit peaks are predictive of correctness and causally linked to performance: masking them degrades accuracy more than masking non-peaks, while injecting revisit-like peaks into failed rollouts partially restores correct answers. Control analyses show that this signal is not explained by raw attention strength, uncertainty, logit margin, or hidden-state norm. We propose RECAP, a GRPO-compatible training method that turns detached revisit traces into a credit-assignment signal. RECAP uses revisit-conditioned advantage estimation, dynamic discounting, and gated value prediction to propagate final rewards through visually important reasoning steps, without extra rewards, additional rollouts, or inference-time changes. Across Qwen2.5-VL-7B, InternVL3-8B, and LLaVA-OV-7B, RECAP consistently improves over GRPO and VPPO, yielding $+6.1$--$+6.5$ HallusionBench gains over the SFT base while preserving reasoning and text-only performance. Results on larger LoRA-tuned models, Chinese zero-shot benchmarks, visual perturbations, and human evaluation further demonstrate robust improvements in image-grounded reasoning.
comment: NeurIPS 2026
☆ One Evaluation Is Enough: Inversion-Free Image Editing with Trajectory Correction
Real-image editing commonly relies on inversion and iterative sampling, while efficient one-step editors often stabilize a large update by estimating and averaging editing fields at multiple noise levels. We ask a stricter question: is a single temporal field evaluation sufficient for reliable inversion-free editing? Our answer rests on a previously underused duality in a variance-preserving (VP) one-step model: one source-target query at a shared noisy state simultaneously determines a local angular semantic tangent and a clean endpoint displacement. We integrate the tangent over the analytically known remaining VP angle to obtain a nominal one-step transport, and use the endpoint displacement to correct its long-horizon extrapolation through a constrained projection. This transport-first, correction-second construction yields Endpoint-Calibrated Transport (ECT), a closed-form, training-free editor requiring only one noise level, two text conditions packed into one denoiser batch, and one latent update. ECT requires no image inversion, trajectory integration, second temporal observation, or iterative optimization, and can be directly applied to pretrained epsilon-prediction VP one-step generators. Across the reported benchmark settings, ECT delivers stable gains in editing quality within an extremely short editing time.
☆ Loop to Look Better: Learning Adaptive Depth for Question-Guided Perception in Vision-Language Models
Visual perception should be iterative and task-directed, with representations refined in response to the question and the need for further processing. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) increasingly support extended reasoning, their visual tokens are still typically acquired in a single, task-agnostic encoder pass. This creates an evidence-acquisition bottleneck: models may reason longer without refining the visual evidence needed to answer the question. We propose LoopLook, a lightweight encoder-side recurrent perception framework that equips pretrained VLMs with adaptive visual depth. LoopLook recurrently revisits a middle-to-late window of the vision encoder, injecting question representations at each loop to guide visual refinement. A learned stopping mechanism adaptively determines the recurrent depth, while a token-wise Mixture-of-Looks (MoL) combines representations from different loops, allowing each visual token to selectively integrate information acquired across recurrent steps. Across four backbones and eight benchmarks, LoopLook consistently improves performance over the baseline, yielding gains of up to 8.6% on MMStar and 8.1% on HallusionBench. Our analysis shows that LoopLook progressively refines visual attention and adaptively allocates depth according to task difficulty. It also better preserves task-relevant visual information under reduced input resolution, while increasing time to first token (TTFT) by only 5.1-6.5%. By bringing recurrence from reasoning back into perception, LoopLook transforms visual perception from a one-shot glimpse into an adaptive process of recurrent refinement.
☆ DRILL: Training World Models to Improve Policies, Not Predict Pixels NeurIPS 2026
Zhaolu Kang, Tailong Luo, Lei Wei, Guangyuan Dong, Sihan Liu, Yingjie He, Siheng Wang, Shuaibo Li, Rongchao Zhang, Zhen Tian, Richeng Xuan, Zhichao Hu
World models are increasingly used to reduce environment interaction when post-training vision-language-action (VLA) policies with reinforcement learning. Yet they are typically trained to predict pixels one step ahead, even though their role here is not merely to render visually faithful videos but to produce learning signals from imagined rollouts that improve the policy. We show that this mismatch is substantial: lower pixel MSE can produce worse policy gradients, and a world model trained for policy utility can yield better downstream policies despite 17% higher pixel MSE on the next frame. We propose the Downstream-Return Imagination Learning Loop (DRILL), a bilevel framework that updates the world model to maximize the policy's return after an inner GRPO update on imagined rollouts. DRILL has two instantiations. DRILL-VWI is a closed-form surrogate, requiring no additional simulator rollouts, that reweights prediction errors by policy visitation, the group-relative GRPO advantage, and model confidence. DRILL-IMG is a full meta-gradient method that differentiates through the inner update using truncated Hessian-vector products. We show that DRILL-VWI recovers the local one-step component of the DRILL-IMG meta-gradient under score-compatibility and small-residual assumptions. Across five manipulation simulators and two VLA backbones, DRILL-IMG raises mean success rate by 13.1 points over WMPO and 7.9 points over RLVR-World, and complements RLVR pretraining rather than competing with it. More broadly, we believe video world models for VLA reinforcement learning can be productively trained by the policy gradients they produce, not only by pixel-level prediction.
comment: NeurIPS 2026
☆ WovenAnchor Matcher: Specialized Intra- and Inter-Image Context Modeling for Feature Matching
Semi-dense local feature matching commonly aggregates contextual information before coarse-to-fine correspondence estimation. However, intra-image and inter-image aggregation serve different roles: the former should propagate spatial evidence within each image while retaining structured two-dimensional dependencies, whereas the latter should gather information from plausible corresponding regions while limiting noise from unrelated locations. We propose WovenAnchor Matcher (WAM), a semi-dense matching framework based on role-specialized context aggregation. WAM introduces two complementary operators. WovenMamba performs intra-image aggregation through horizontal-then-vertical state-space propagation, allowing vertical updates to operate on horizontally contextualized features and thereby encouraging a structured two-dimensional receptive-field bias. AnchorCrossAttention performs inter-image aggregation by using cross-attention to gather context from plausible corresponding regions across the image pair. It performs this exchange over local representative anchors that aggregate feature evidence within each window. On MegaDepth, WAM achieves 66.1 pose AUC@5$^\circ$, improving on the JamMa baseline by 2.0 AUC points under the same evaluation setup. Ablations show that removing or replacing either specialized component reduces accuracy, providing evidence that intra-image propagation and inter-image retrieval benefit from role-specific aggregation designs. Code and pretrained weights are available at https://github.com/mmaiLab/WovenAnchorMatcher.
comment: 34 pages, 18 figures
☆ DeXplicit: Making Physical State Explicit in Dexterous Manipulation World Models
Before acting on an object, a robot needs to anticipate how its hand motion will change the physical world and what the resulting scene will look like. Existing approaches typically entangle action-conditioned dynamics, camera motion, and visual synthesis within a video generation model, or represent dynamics as point trajectories without explicit object structure. We introduce DeXplicit, a dexterous manipulation world model that instead predicts how the world evolves explicitly in metric 3D before rendering its visual consequences. Given an initial scene and a future hand trajectory, a lightweight 3D dynamics network predicts object-centric motion and deformation, providing structured and geometrically grounded future world states. These predictions then serve as a strong scaffold for video generation: appearance is transported through the predicted 3D motion and projected into future views, allowing the renderer to focus on completing uncertain and newly visible content rather than implicitly learning world dynamics from pixels. This explicit-3D-first decomposition also enables efficient causal generation, requiring only two denoising steps per block while conditioning on generated history.
Across HOT3D, OakInk2, and PhysTwin, DeXplicit reduces moved-point error by 27-40% relative to PointWorld and improves object fidelity IoU+ by 47% on HOT3D under a shared renderer. Our design with two-step causal generation achieves a 57x speedup from our 14B bi-directional configuration in video synthesis.
comment: Project page: https://dexplicit.github.io
☆ Evaluation of Front-End Feature Matching for Lunar Visual SLAM IEEE
Lunar rovers will primarily rely on cameras for localization until navigation satellite services are deployed, and will continue to need them afterwards for relative navigation, hazard detection, and surface operations. Visual odometry (VO) and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) mostly estimate motion by matching features between frames. However, feature matchers are developed on urban, indoor and driving scenes, planetary studies compare them on orbital registration or within complete SLAM systems, and real lunar imagery with reference poses is scarce, so matching between rover frames on low-texture, harshly lit terrain, and its effect on VO, has not been compared. We benchmark eleven classical and learned detector-matcher combinations on nine synthetic, lunar-testbed, and terrestrial-analogue datasets, and a feature tracker, scoring pairwise pose accuracy against baseline and the trajectory error of the resulting VO. Under a common rotation-only metric, the SuperPoint pairings outperform SIFT with ratio-tested FLANN matching on both lunar testbeds and one analogue site, with smaller or unresolved differences on synthetic data. When rotation and translation direction are scored jointly, this SIFT pairing exceeds both SuperPoint pairings on four synthetic datasets, so synthetic results alone do not establish relative performance on real rover imagery. In stereo VO, the SuperPoint pairings are not consistently more accurate than SIFT, but only they keep tracking on all eight sequential datasets. Pairings with classical detectors depend on lighting while SuperPoint changes little: a low spotlight makes them more accurate than diffuse light on the same testbed views, consistent with more contrast and detected keypoints. SuperPoint with LightGlue is the fastest learned combination (16 ms per frame), and DINOv2 retrieval proposals still need geometric verification.
comment: 16 pages, 8 figures, 5 tables. Submitted to the 2027 IEEE Aerospace Conference
☆ FilmFlow: Agentic System for 3D Virtual Film Cinematography
Complex camera motion is central to visual storytelling, yet translating cinematographic intent into controllable, executable camera trajectories remains challenging. We introduce FilmFlow, an agentic framework that converts natural-language instructions or reference videos into explicit camera trajectories for dynamic 3D environments. To generate these trajectories, a Director agent constructs executable camera plans by composing high-level motions from concurrent atomic operations that jointly control translation, rotation, and framing. The Director is supported by three specialized agents: an Interpreter that extracts scene-grounded cinematographic intent, a Scout that selects initial viewpoints, and a Critic that evaluates rendered results and provides visual feedback for iterative plan refinement. We also introduce CinemaBench, comprising 150 Blender scenes from self-created and licensed sources, with five camera instructions per scene for 750 text-directed tasks and 60 reference videos associated with a subset of scenes. CinemaBench supports evaluation of both text-directed camera generation and video reference-directed camera generation. Across a diverse set of evaluated baselines, FilmFlow achieves the strongest benchmark performance and the highest user preference, demonstrating effective spatial reasoning, temporal coordination, and visual composition for executable 3D cinematography.
☆ Where Did the Light Come From? Diagnosing Cast-Shadow Reasoning in VLMs and Borrowing the Missing Shadow Prior from Image Generation Models WACV2027
Ryugo Morita, Shunsuke Kitada, Stanislav Frolov, Brian Bernhard Moser, Ko Watanabe, Riku Takahashi, Jinjia Zhou, Andreas Dengel
Shadows are observable consequences of latent physical causes, arising from the interaction between illumination, object geometry, and scene structure. A model that understands shadows should be able not only to read a shadow's direction, but also to infer where a shadow should fall when it is absent, and to judge whether a shadow is physically consistent with the scene. We introduce ShadowBench, built from real photographs, which poses these three questions to vision-language models (VLMs). From each scene, we build a correct-shadow, a shadow-removed, and a human-annotated wrong-direction state. Evaluating 19 open VLMs (2B to 78B) and frontier proprietary models, we find that VLMs read a visible shadow's direction well above chance and improve with scale, yet infer the absent direction only weakly and fall to chance at judging physical consistency even under a bias-free two-alternative test that removes the yes-bias of single-image naturalness questions. Only Gemini-3.1-pro exceeds chance on validity, and even then only modestly and far below humans. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) does not help. The missing ingredient is not reasoning but knowledge that image generation models (IGMs) already hold. Routing a VLM through an IGM lifts its inference well above its direct attempt and helps it flag the wrong-direction shadows it otherwise accepts. Cast-shadow direction is a single facet of illumination understanding, but the sharp gap it reveals between VLMs and IGMs suggests image-generation or reconstruction objectives as a route toward illumination-aware VLMs.
comment: Accepted to WACV2027
☆ SmolVLA-MoE: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts for Efficient Multi-Task Robotic Manipulation IROS2027
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promising results in multi-task robotic manipulation by leveraging visual and language understanding for action generation. However, existing lightweight VLA models employ a single dense action expert to handle all tasks, which limits their multi-task capability under constrained computational budgets. To address this issue, we propose SmolVLA-MoE, a novel framework that introduces sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) into the FFN layers of the action expert in VLA models. SmolVLA-MoE replaces dense FFN layers with multiple parallel expert FFNs and a token-level router, enabling each token to adaptively select the most suitable expert for action generation. We further introduce a shared expert with a tunable weight parameter to balance the inheritance of pre-trained capabilities and task-specific expert specialization. Through sparse activation, SmolVLA-MoE activates only a single expert FFN during inference, with a total activated parameter count of approximately 500M including the frozen VLM backbone, while benefiting from approximately 800M total stored parameters. We evaluate our method on four task suites of the LIBERO benchmark. SmolVLA-MoE achieves an average success rate of 84.25%, outperforming SmolVLA (82.75%) and OpenVLA-7B (76.5%), while maintaining comparable inference efficiency. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/dudu435/smolvla-moe.
comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables; conference paper prepared for IROS2027
☆ Learning from Next-Frame Prediction: Towards Unified and Scalable Visual Representation Learning
Video provides a natural source of supervision: what happens next serves as a learning signal for visual world modeling. Yet masked video pretraining focuses on recovering missing content from surrounding context rather than predicting the future from the past. Autoregressive methods instead predict forward one token at a time, but have yet to match joint-embedding methods in representation quality. This gap motivates us to revisit the granularity and space of future prediction. In this work, we introduce VANE, a self-supervised visual pretraining framework built on next-frame prediction in embedding space. A causal encoder summarizes past observations for a state predictor that infers the representation of the entire next frame, making temporal evolution the primary learning signal. This prediction is carried out in a fixed embedding space provided by a frozen semantic tokenizer, emphasizing scene content and structure. To retain fine-grained spatial detail alongside semantic content, a lightweight auxiliary generative decoder reconstructs future-frame patches conditioned on the predicted representations. To unify visual modeling across images and videos, we construct a local-to-global crop sequence for still images, allowing the same encoder to predict newly revealed regions from earlier crops under the same objective. Experiments show that VANE improves with model and data scaling, achieving SOTA on most anticipation, recognition, and dense perception benchmarks among unified encoders. Especially on EPIC-KITCHENS-100 action anticipation, it surpasses V-JEPA 2.1 by 7.1 points in mean-class recall@5. These results demonstrate that next-frame prediction in embedding space is effective and scalable for visual world modeling.
☆ PhyEvolve: Multi-Agent State-Evolution Planning for Physics-Aware Video Generation
Recent advances in text-to-video generation have substantially improved visual fidelity, yet existing models still struggle to understand the physical evolution implicit in user prompts, making it difficult to generate videos with continuous physical state evolution. Here, we propose PhyEvolve, a multi-agent framework that enhances natural-language prompts through structured state-evolution planning. PhyEvolve consists of three agents: a Director, a Physical Evolver, and a Composer. Given a user prompt and an optional first frame, the Director grounds the scene and disentangles physical events from observation changes. The Physical Evolver uses scene evidence to identify physical mechanisms then constructs causally linked state transitions that unfold throughout the video, whether visible or not. The Composer utilizes these transitions to enhance the original prompts. Without retraining or model modification, PhyEvolve works directly with existing generators through prompt replacement. Extensive experiments on four major benchmarks show that PhyEvolve achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the cutting-edge prior agentic baseline by 7.9 percentage points on average. These results demonstrate that explicit causal state-evolution planning improves physical consistency and state continuity in generated videos through natural-language prompt enhancement.
☆ ParaLin++: Accelerating Parallel Diffusion Integrator via Intrinsic Partially Linear Structure
Training-free few-step samplers are often described as nearly quality-lossless under conventional FID/CLIP-style evaluation. It remains unclear whether that conclusion transfers to more realistic and complex generation-quality benchmarks. We first systematize the quality metrics used to evaluate training-free sampling acceleration for diffusion and flow-matching models.
We find that representative training-free step-shortening methods often remain nearly lossless under FID/CLIP-class metrics, yet can suffer substantial quality degradation when evaluated with semantic-composition, dense-instruction, and long-text-rendering benchmarks such as GenEval, DPG-Bench, and LongTextBench. Parallel sampling is a notable exception: by retaining the full-step discretization and removing only the solver's temporal dependency, it can preserve near-lossless quality while accelerating sampling. Building on this observation, we propose \textit{ParaLin++}, a step-parity parallel sampler that preserves the full-step discretization while accelerating the solver iterations. Experiments across Stable Diffusion-v2, LSUN Church, FLUX.1-dev, and Ming-Flash-Omni 2.0 show that ParaLin++ preserves the full-step Euler quality profile at $2.6\times$--$4.8\times$, $1.68\times$ on FLUX, and $1.21\times$ on Ming. Project page: https://paralinplus.github.io/.
☆ LoRA Superposition across Pretrained Models
Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is usually tied to the pretrained backbone on which it is learned. We ask whether LoRAs trained independently for the same task on different pretrained backbones can be summed and applied unchanged to all contributing backbones. We call this construction LoRA superposition. Across seven ViT-B/16 CLIP backbones and eight image-classification tasks, the exact sum improves all 56 backbone-task pairs and achieves a mean accuracy gain of 30.21 percentage points over the unadapted backbone. The exact sum achieves a mean accuracy only 0.28 percentage points below that of individually trained solo LoRAs. In contrast, a leave-one-model-out (LOMO) sum produces a mean gain of only 0.06 percentage points over the unadapted backbones. Backbone-specific solo LoRAs are nearly orthogonal in parameter space, while pairwise cross-backbone responses are strongly concentrated on the diagonal. These results support a component-wise non-interference hypothesis, under which the frozen backbone acts as an implicit selector of its own component without explicit routing or cross-model alignment.
comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables
☆ Zero-Shot Domain Generalization via Domain Prompt Learning
Domain generalization (DG) aims to improve
the generalization of the model to any unseen domains. Targeting this goal, existing DG methods mainly focus on learning domain-invariant features or prompts from the given source domains. However, these methods rely on source-domain data, and collecting and annotating large-scale single- or multi-source datasets is often infeasible, limiting the practical applicability of DG. To tackle this challenge, we propose {\underline{Do}}main \underline{P}rompt Learning (DoP), a method built on a large vision-language model (e.g., CLIP) for zero-shot domain generalization, which recognizes unseen classes in unseen target domains without access to source-domain data. DoP essentially learns the target domain knowledge via prompt both in text and visual modalities to overcome the domain shift in text-visual modalities under the test-time adaptation formulation. Specifically, DoP first takes text domain learning (TDL) to simulate various distribution shifts by learning diverse style tokens implicitly in the text space with inter-style diversity loss and intra-style consistency loss. Subsequently, DoP employs visual domain learning (VDL) to further refine the target-domain-relevant style token generated by TDL by making use of the test visual data with self-supervised learning. Extensive experiments on popular DG benchmark datasets (e.g., PACS, VLCS, OfficeHome, and DomainNet) and ImageNet show that our DoP consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art DG approaches. Codes are available at: https://github.com/shiming-chen/DoP.
comment: Accepted to IJCV
☆ AgentDreamer: Agentic 3D Motion Reasoning for Text-Controllable Physics Simulation
We propose AgentDreamer, an agent-guided optimization framework that aligns text instructions with simulated motion through explicit 3D motion planning. Given a text instruction and scene geometry, an off-the-shelf agent translates the instruction into a structured semantic motion prior, specifying what should move, in which direction, and in what temporal order. The agent represents this prior using parametric functions over a series of temporal chunks, yielding dense 3D trajectories. We then optimize the parameters of a differentiable MPM simulator such that its rollout best matches the prior while remaining constrained by the scene dynamics. This allows the agent to provide semantic guidance from language, while the simulator grounds it in physically feasible motion. We further introduce Motion-IG, an information-theoretic metric for text-motion alignment based on masked text recovery. By comparing the likelihood of recovering masked motion-related content with and without the simulated motion, Motion-IG measures the information contributed by the motion beyond that available from the remaining text and scene context. Experiments show that AgentDreamer improves text alignment over video-based guidance, producing simulations that more closely follow the requested physical behavior.
comment: Project page: https://cv.snu.ac.kr/research/AgentDreamer
☆ Class-Grounded Batik Captioning under Scarce Text Annotation: Label Retention and Source-Specific Error Propagation
Class labels offer compact supervision for describing cultural-heritage images when expert text annotations are scarce. We investigate a batik-captioning cascade that integrates a LoRA-adapted DINOv2 classifier with Qwen2.5-VL-7B, adapted using LoRA and loaded in 4-bit NF4. A $3\times2$ evaluation combines three captioner conditions with two inference prompts to examine adaptation and predicted-class injection. Across 150 caption-evaluation images, all three injected conditions achieve a ground-truth class-label mention rate of 0.9067. The classifier's separate test yields 96.10% pooled accuracy, with 98.33% on 300 public-source images and 75.76% on 33 local images. Supported-class macro-F1 and balanced accuracy on the local subset are 0.8493 and 0.8302, respectively. The classifier and captioner use separate partitions, and their training--evaluation overlap remains unquantified. Differences in label semantics and training support also affect interpretation of the source-specific accuracy gap. Reference-based caption metrics and image--text compatibility scores produce different model rankings. Qualitative examples show both retention of correctly predicted identities and propagation of classification errors into fluent descriptions. These findings characterize how class conditioning preserves label information and transfers upstream errors into batik captions under scarce text annotation.
☆ Residual Calibration via Local Feature-Space Refinement NeurIPS 2026
Deep neural networks often struggle to provide reliable confidence estimates, making post-hoc calibration essential for reliable decision-making. Existing post-hoc methods largely rely on score-based transformations, which improve marginal calibration but often fail to capture spatially varying miscalibration in local regions of the learned feature space. To address this gap, we propose Local Adaptive Probability Estimation (LAPE), a post-hoc residual calibration framework. Specifically, LAPE treats the global calibrator output as a stable anchor and refines the individual prediction by leveraging non-parametric local evidence from neighboring calibration samples. As a plug-and-play refinement module, LAPE effectively utilizes the information about feature-space geometry and can reuse the calibration data that are used to construct the global calibrator. Furthermore, we extend LAPE to the setting with multi-view inputs through Cascade Feature Augmentation Fusion (CFAF). Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed methods can improve the calibration quality of various existing baselines and remain efficient and robust across different settings.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026
☆ One-shot federated unsupervised domain adaptation with Smoothed Knowledge Distillation and teacher refinement
Federated unsupervised domain adaptation (FUDA) addresses the challenge of adapting models to an unlabeled target domain using decentralized source domains while preserving data privacy. However, existing FUDA methods typically require multiple communication rounds, rely on complex aggregation strategies, and often struggle with noisy pseudo labels and inconsistent source knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose SKD-ETR, a novel one-shot FUDA framework that combines Smoothed Knowledge Distillation (SKD) and Exponential moving average-based Teacher Refinement (ETR). SKD trains a student model on the target domain using smoothed soft pseudo labels generated by the ensemble of source models. This reduces overconfidence, mitigates noise, and improves robustness. ETR further refines each source model by interpolating its parameters toward the student via exponential moving average (EMA), thereby transferring target-domain knowledge back to the teachers. This bidirectional refinement enhances pseudo-label quality and student generalization without additional communication overhead. SKD-ETR eliminates complex aggregation by initializing the student model randomly and performing a single-round distillation process. Extensive experiments on OfficeHome, Office-Caltech, and DomainNet demonstrate that SKD-ETR achieves competitive performance while being communication- and computation-efficient, and robust under noisy supervision. The code for this paper is available at https://github.com/A-Abedi/SKD_ETR.
comment: Published in Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 167, 113946 (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.engappai.2026.113946. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0952197626002277 and Code is available at: https://github.com/A-Abedi/SKD_ETR
☆ Asking Less, Adapting Better: Feedback-Efficient Test-Time Adaptation for Vision-and-Language Navigation
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires agents to follow instructions and navigate to target locations. However, current VLN agents often suffer severe performance degradation in unseen environments due to distribution shifts. Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) offers a promising paradigm to bridge this gap, yet existing methods that rely on unsupervised entropy minimization can propagate errors through the trajectory, causing cascading failures in navigation. Recent methods mitigate this by incorporating human feedback, but they apply trajectory-level supervision uniformly across all steps without localizing the actions is truly informative, leading to inefficient feedback utilization and mismatched optimization granularity. To address these limitations, we propose FETA, a Feedback-Efficient Test-Time Adaptation method that improves both feedback efficiency and optimization reliability. To reduce unnecessary human interventions, we introduce a hierarchical sample selection strategy to localize informative samples. Specifically, we first filter trajectories whose normalized policy entropy exhibits large fluctuations. Within each selected trajectory, we further select the critical action via an entropy-gradient saliency criterion and query a single binary feedback on its correctness. A discrepancy-aware entropy optimization objective then updates the policy only at the queried step, with adaptive scaling that assigns larger relative weights to samples with greater prediction-feedback discrepancy. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that FETA achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer human interventions, while remaining robust under noisy feedback and continual adaptation settings.
☆ CODI: Improving Self-Supervised Vision Transformers with Cross Distillation
Self-supervised Vision Transformers learn strong image-level representations, but their patch-level representations can be unreliable for dense prediction. We study this mismatch and find that the class token concentrates global semantics on a small number of representative patches, while dense prediction errors often occur on low-attention regions. We provide a local gradient analysis showing that, along the [CLS] attention readout, image-level self-distillation gradients are weighted by [CLS]-to-patch attention mass. To provide masked patches with global semantics without changing the architecture, we propose Cross Distillation (CODI), which mixes a small amount of the teacher class-token distribution into each teacher patch-token target. CODI gives every masked patch an attention-independent semantic correction while preserving the standard self-distillation architecture. Experiments on dense and image-level benchmarks show that CODI improves both dense and image-level performance under aligned pretraining settings. Code is available at https://github.com/EldercatSAM/CODI.
comment: 35 pages, 11 figures, 14 tables
☆ FedBST: Bilateral Self-Training for Unsupervised Federated Classification ICME 2026
Unsupervised federated learning with Vision-Language Models (e.g., CLIP) offers a promising solution for label-free classification, yet its performance often degrades under severe non-IID shifts. A pioneering method, FedCoPL, typically relies on self-training strategies that exclusively prioritize high-confidence predictions for pseudo-labeling. However, this selective approach neglects the information of ambiguous samples (often referred to as ``waist" samples), leading to the underutilization of data and biased decision boundaries. To address this limitation, we propose FedBST, a bilateral self-training framework that effectively exploits both high-confidence and ambiguous data. Specifically, for local optimization, we introduce uncertainty-aware confidence penalization (UACP). UACP targets ambiguous samples by penalizing overconfident predictions to implicitly promote higher uncertainty, thereby preventing erroneous pseudo-labeling. At inference, we employ a visual-text ensemble strategy. This approach aggregates uncertainty-aware local visual prototypes and ensembles them with textual prototypes, achieving lightweight adaptation to local distributions via prototype-based calibration. Experiments demonstrate that FedBST achieves consistent improvements over existing methods with standard federated aggregation protocols.
comment: ICME 2026
☆ Refining Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation via Regional Semantics and Visual Prototypes ICASSP 2026
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has shown superior performance in the image-level open-vocabulary classification task, benefiting from its powerful alignment of visual features and text embeddings. However, dense prediction tasks require models to perform pixel-level predictions, necessitating modifications to CLIP for region-text alignment. In this paper, we adjust the attention layers within the vanilla visual encoder of CLIP. With a novel attention calculation method for selective attention features, the model retains more regional semantic information. To further mitigate the negative impact of the modality gap, we introduce additional visual prototypes to refine the original predictor solely based on text embeddings. Specifically, patch features with confident predictions are selected to form an additional auxiliary memory-based classifier for more accurate prediction. We further integrate an optimizable feature extractor with an exponential moving average updating strategy to enhance prediction quality. Extensive experiments on $5$ semantic segmentation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
comment: ICASSP 2026
☆ GSHeadRelight: Fast Relightability for 3D Gaussian Head Synthesis
Relighting and novel view synthesis of human portraits are essential in applications such as portrait photography, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR). Despite recent progress, 3D-aware portrait relighting remains challenging due to the demands for photorealistic rendering, real-time performance, and generalization to unseen subjects. Existing works either rely on supervision from limited and expensive light stage captured data or produce suboptimal results. Moreover, many works are based on generative NeRFs, which suffer from poor 3D consistency and low real-time performance. We resort to recent progress on generative 3D Gaussians and design a lighting model based on a unified neural radiance transfer representation, which responds linearly to incident light. Using only in-the-wild images, our method achieves state-of-the-art relighting results and a significantly faster rendering speed ($\times12$) compared to previous 3D-aware portrait relighting research. Project page: http://www.geometrylearning.com/GSHeadRelight/.
☆ KinoUAV: A Benchmark for Safe and Stable UAV Vision-Language Navigation with Kinodynamic Modeling
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have recently emerged as important remote sensing platforms, and UAV navigation has shown great potential in remote sensing applications. However, existing methods do not explicitly incorporate kinodynamic modeling or safety distances into trajectory generation, resulting in high absolute yaw rates, frequent collisions, and low navigation success rates, which limit safety and motion stability. To address this challenge, we introduce KinoUAV, a kinodynamic benchmark comprising a dataset and KinoUAV-Agent. First, we develop a hierarchical kinodynamic trajectory generation pipeline that drives UAV through acceleration actions. It uses waypoint chains from global planning and generates trajectories segment by segment under velocity, acceleration, and jerk constraints, reducing oscillations and improving trajectory stability. Furthermore, we introduce directional free-space distance (DFD) labels into the constructed dataset to describe the available clearance for safe motion decisions. The proposed KinoUAV-Agent predicts DFDs and uses them to generate safe actions, decoupling perception from action decision-making. This design enables autonomous obstacle avoidance and improves navigation safety. The benchmark incorporates the proposed Cruise-Seek task, in which the UAV first enters the target region and then searches for the target, reducing the difficulty of target search and improving navigation success. Experiments on KinoUAV show that KinoUAV-Agent outperforms existing methods, achieving the highest success rate while maintaining lower absolute yaw rates and collision rates. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of kinodynamic modeling for safe and stable UAV navigation.
☆ Visual Grounding First, Multimodal In-context Learning Follows NeurIPS 2026
Minhyuk Seo, Minjae Lee, Chaeeun Lee, Wei Lin, Muhammad Jehanzeb Mirza, Tinne Tuytelaars, Jonghyun Choi
LLMs have shown strong in-context learning (ICL) capability, but extending it to Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) remains challenging. Prior multimodal ICL methods often rely on ICL-specific datasets for additional training or task vector extraction, which can improve performance on the same ICL benchmark used for adaptation. However, they do not generalize well to other benchmarks and often induce forgetting in previously well-solved tasks. For this reason, we identify 'visual grounding' as the key bottleneck in multimodal ICL; MLLMs often fail to attend to task-relevant visual evidence in demonstrations, instead over-relying on textual cues and producing hallucinated outputs. To address this, we propose ProCoRe to enhance visual grounding through contrastive reinforcement learning on multimodal contrastive data for improving multimodal ICL. ProCoRe generates captions for contrastive image pairs, decomposes them into propositions, and optimizes contrastive rewards that encourage alignment with corresponding images while discouraging mismatched ones. Despite never seeing ICL-formatted training examples, ProCoRe improves average multimodal ICL classification accuracy by 5.6% and captioning ROUGE-L by 13.8% over the off-the-shelf Qwen-VL-3-8B model, outperforming ICL-data-dependent state of the arts across benchmarks. Finally, we introduce PICL, a personalized multimodal ICL captioning benchmark that tests whether MLLMs genuinely understand visual demonstrations rather than relying on pre-trained semantic priors.
comment: NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ MMVistaReason: Toward Open-Data and Post-Training Recipes for Multimodal Reasoning
Juekai Lin, Honglin Lin, Yuqian Yuan, Xiaolong Wu, Jie Cao, Liang Liang, Yunqi Cao, Yun Zhu, Wenqiao Zhang, Lijun Wu
Open multimodal reasoning models have benefited from large-scale reasoning supervision, yet reliable post-training remains challenging due to uneven data quality, inefficient supervision construction, imbalanced difficulty, and cross-domain interference. We introduce MMVistaReason (MVR), an open-data post-training recipe with three components: (1) broader capability coverage across complementary Analytical and Real-World reasoning groups, emphasizing structured reasoning versus visual perception and spatial grounding; (2) efficient SFT and RL data construction, standardizing heterogeneous open data through staged cleaning and annotation, combining difficulty-aware cascaded teacher distillation with answer-likelihood-based trajectory selection to construct MVR-SFT-528K, and applying scale-specific frontier filtering for MVR-RL-63K; and (3) specialize-then-integrate training, which trains complementary RL experts and consolidates their capabilities through multi-teacher on-policy distillation (MOPD). Our analyses reveal a capacity-dependent interaction between supervision difficulty, trajectory quality, and model capacity: smaller students benefit more from selected supervision, while larger students are robust to trajectory variation and mixed-domain interference. Mixed-domain RL introduces benchmark-level negative transfer, whereas MOPD provides consistent capability integration, with the preferred KL direction varying across model scales. Across 15 multimodal benchmarks, MVR-4B achieves an average score of 72.8, outperforming Qwen3.5-9B (Instruct) and MMFineReason-8B while using about 70% fewer samples than MMFineReason. Scaling to 9B improves the average to 74.4, surpassing Qwen3.5-35B-A3B (Instruct). Overall, MMVistaReason demonstrates that systematic open-data construction and capacity-aware post-training provide a practical and scalable path toward reliable multimodal reasoning.
♻ ☆ ORSIFlow: Saliency-Guided Rectified Flow for Optical Remote Sensing Salient Object Detection ICME
Optical Remote Sensing Image Salient Object Detection (ORSI-SOD) remains challenging due to complex backgrounds, low contrast, irregular object shapes, and large variations in object scale. Existing discriminative methods directly regress saliency maps, while recent diffusion-based generative approaches suffer from stochastic sampling and high computational cost. In this paper, we propose ORSIFlow, a saliency-guided rectified flow framework that reformulates ORSI-SOD as a deterministic latent flow generation problem. ORSIFlow performs saliency mask generation in a compact latent space constructed by a frozen variational autoencoder, enabling efficient inference with only a few steps. To enhance saliency awareness, we design a Salient Feature Discriminator for global semantic discrimination and a Salient Feature Calibrator for precise boundary refinement. Extensive experiments on multiple public benchmarks show that ORSIFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly improved efficiency.
comment: 2026 ICME Spotlight
♻ ☆ Distribution-Calibrated Candidate Selection for Personalized Text-to-Image Generation
Subject-driven personalized text-to-image systems commonly generate multiple candidates but return a single output, yet the selection stage is rarely evaluated as an explicit system component. Identity-only selection may overemphasize reference similarity at the expense of prompt alignment and output diversity. We propose distribution-calibrated candidate selection (DCAL), a training-free sequential selector for a predefined ordered prompt set that jointly scores calibrated identity, text alignment, and cross-prompt novelty. All selectors operate on identical pre-generated K=4 candidate pools for all 30 DreamBooth subjects using a fixed LoRA-adapted generator. Relative to the fixed-seed Random-of-4 control, DCAL yields higher 1-LPIPS, CLIP-I, DINO-I, and CLIP-T for 22, 25, 28, and 22 of the 30 subjects, respectively. Compared with identity-only selection, DCAL improves CLIP-T (0.3264 versus 0.3179), CLIP diversity (0.2444 versus 0.2368), and DINO diversity (0.3286 versus 0.3170), while CLIP-I and DINO-I decrease from 0.8250 to 0.8204 and from 0.7560 to 0.7453. Compared with identity-text scoring, prompt-wise novelty calibration increases CLIP-T from 0.3253 to 0.3264 and CLIP diversity from 0.2366 to 0.2444. We further formalize finite-pool Pareto and perturbation-stability properties and analyze inference complexity.
comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, 4 tables
♻ ☆ AA-ViT: Anatomically Aware Vision Transformer with Structural and Frequency Guidance for Contrast Enhanced Brain MRI Synthesis
Talha Meraj, Tom Flannery, Charlie Cummins, Matt Townend, Thomas C Booth, Peter Crossley, Michael McCann, Ian Overton, Saritha Unnikrishnan
Accurate tumour localization and diagnosis is a critical component of clinical care for brain cancers. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is the most commonly used imaging modality due to its superior soft-tissue contrast. However, standard MRI often exhibits limited contrast and imaging artifacts, which necessitates the use of contrast agents to enhance lesion visibility. The administration of chemical contrast agents is not always feasible and may be contraindicated in patients with renal impairment or other health conditions. As a result, developing accurate and non-invasive contrast enhanced MRI (CEMRI) synthesis methods has clinical importance. In recent years, numerous approaches for CEMRI synthesis have been proposed, predominantly relying on generative artificial intelligence models. While these methods demonstrate promising performance, their dependence on implicit feature learning often limits their ability to preserve anatomical boundaries and tumour-specific fine structures. To address these challenges, we propose an anatomically aware frequency-and-structure-guided vision transformer (AA-ViT), for CEMRI synthesis using pre-contrast MRI modalities (T1, T2, and FLAIR). Experiments on the BraTS 2021 dataset demonstrate that the proposed method preserves anatomical and lesion boundaries, achieving higher PSNR and SSIM than state-of-the-art approaches. Clinical evaluation by three neuroradiologists and a neurosurgeon on 19 randomly selected cases across diverse gliomas yielded a mean score of 3.94/5, providing preliminary clinical validation rarely seen in prior studies. Synthetic post-contrast scans from our model could lower scanning costs, shorten imaging time, and avoid the potential risks of using gadolinium-based contrast agents.
comment: Submitted version; accepted at MIUA 2026, final version in LNCS
♻ ☆ Training-free Acceleration for Blind Compressed Image Restoration via Activation-Calibrated Singular Value Decomposition IEEE
Transformer-based models achieve strong performance on blind compressed image restoration (CIR) under unknown compression settings, but their densely stacked projection operators make deployment costly. We study training-free acceleration for such models through an empirical, operator-level analysis. Specifically, we profile where computation is concentrated, characterize channel-wise activation distributions under compressed inputs, and examine the singular-value decay of representative projection weights. These measurements identify the recurring projections in the attention, feed-forward, convolutional, and prompt-conditioning pathways as effective low-rank replacement targets that preserve the original inference graph. They further establish truncated SVD (TSVD) as a principled training-free baseline for blind CIR and reveal why a uniform low-rank objective is mismatched to the channel-imbalanced feature distributions of compressed images. Accordingly, we formulate Activation-Calibrated Singular Value Decomposition (ASVD) for this restoration setting, deriving low-rank factors entirely offline from pretrained weights and lightweight activation statistics gathered from only a few compressed calibration images. By weighting the decomposition with channel-wise activation magnitudes, our ASVD assigns larger penalties to errors on more active channels, requiring neither retraining nor online calibration and leaving the restoration pipeline intact. When instantiated on PromptCIR at rank 64, ASVD consistently improves PSNR-B over TSVD across four standard benchmarks under identical parameter and MAC budgets. At this operating point, the factorized model cuts parameters by 59% (34.75M to 14.34M) and computation by 16.1% (258.79 to 217.16 GMACs for a 256 x 256 input), enabling acceleration without retraining.
comment: 11 pages. Accepted for publication in IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems
♻ ☆ Deficit-Driven Stratified Acquisition for Building STRATA-S12: An Open SAR-Optical Corpus for Self-Supervised Learning
Building a co-registered SAR-optical corpus for self-supervised Earth Observation is above all an acquisition problem, yet the main multi-modal datasets are collected opportunistically, with no per-stratum quota control, so the regions and seasons that cloud cover hits hardest end up under-sampled. We present Deficit-Driven Stratified Acquisition (DDSA), an algorithm that casts the construction of a Sentinel-1/Sentinel-2 corpus as a constrained maximum-coverage problem over a land-cover-driven, hemisphere-corrected (class x season x region) stratification of target countries on all six inhabited continents, and solves it online: acquisition is ordered by marginal gain against a per-stratum deficit that the quality gates and a visual review of every accepted pair keep updating during the run. Three results follow from measuring the algorithm on its own product. First, stratum balance is a property of the deficit-driven ordering rather than of run length: replayed over all 2,928,370 real acquisition attempts, failures included, it populates all 192 strata within 0.05% of the attempts, against 4.03% for uniform round-robin effort and 20.5% for a random order. Second, whether a rejected attempt can be recovered is better predicted by how long its cause persists than by the type of defect: cloud rejections are recovered at eta = 18.8% against 41.4% for nodata, consistent with clouds persisting through a season. Third, the repair loop supplies 39.5% of the released pairs at no measurable quality cost, with 89.8% surviving manual review, but it adds yield rather than balance. The quality guarantee has a price: 2,928,370 acquisition attempts produced 740,746 released pairs. We release the corpus, STRATA-S12, with per-pair metadata sidecars aligned with the STAC and PDS4 standards and the FAIR principles, and a pre-registered linear probe confirms it is fit for self-supervised pre-training.
comment: v3: substantially revised. The ordering analysis is now a replay over all 2,928,370 real acquisition attempts (deficit-driven vs. round-robin vs. random ordering); related work and the corpus comparison table were revised and corrected against the original sources; radiometric conventions are documented; withdrawal and rejection ledgers are now publicly available. 59 pages, 12 figures, 9 tables
♻ ☆ Multilevel Stochastic Plug-and-Play for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction
Sparse-view computed tomography (SVCT) reduces radiation exposure and acquisition time, but the limited number of projection views makes the reconstruction problem severely ill-posed and leads to streak artifacts when analytical methods are used. Plug-and-Play (PnP) methods combine data fidelity with learned image priors, while stochastic PnP methods use re-noising to reduce the mismatch between denoiser training inputs and reconstruction iterates. However, these methods often require many iterations, which limits their practical efficiency. In this work, we propose Multilevel Stochastic Plug-and-Play (ML-SPnP), a multilevel (ML) stochastic PnP method for SVCT reconstruction formulated on wavelet multiresolution analysis (MRA) approximation spaces. The method combines coarse-to-fine initialization with a finite sequence of multilevel corrections using resolution-specific denoisers. Under suitable assumptions, the fine-level iterations following the finite multilevel phase inherit the convergence guarantees of the underlying stochastic PnP algorithm. Experiments on two CT datasets with 20-50 projection views show that ML-SPnP achieves reconstruction quality comparable to the evaluated stochastic PnP methods, while generally requiring less reconstruction time. These results support multilevel acceleration as an effective strategy for reducing the computational cost of stochastic PnP reconstruction. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/antoinedepaepe/ml-spnp.
comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables
♻ ☆ WorldCast: Exploring Intelligent Visual Generation in World State Prediction
Wenhao Yan, Haodong Li, Xiaotong Li, Yaxin Luo, Zhengrong Yue, Jialv Zou, Xu Huang, Haojin Yang, Nan Jia, Yan Feng, Peng Pei, Xunliang Cai
Humans interpret multimodal observations of the world and forecast how it will evolve. Recent multimodal generative systems have demonstrated similar capabilities: they can integrate multimodal context and synthesize visual outputs that depict changes in the world. To characterize this emerging trajectory, we organize model capabilities into a four-level hierarchy and discover that higher-level tasks remain relatively underexplored despite model progress. To bridge this gap, we explore model performance on multi-step world state prediction, a high-level task that requires models to forecast successive future world states from multimodal observations and diverse references. Such a task requires models to possess entangled understanding and generation capabilities, as well as extensive world knowledge to translate human action sequences, physical transformations, and abstract visual reasoning into coherent visual outputs. We introduce WorldCast, a benchmark comprising 320 manually designed cases across eight categories, and evaluate 12 representative models. The conducted experiments yield three key insights: (a) advances in frontier models are rapidly pushing the boundaries of intelligent world modeling, with the GPT-Image-2.5 System scoring 72.8 and demonstrating early-stage visual state prediction capabilities on real-world tasks; (b) WorldCast reveals substantial gaps between models: even Nano Banana Pro reaches only 42.8 and the best open-source model scores 20.1, with deficits in handling complex context, entangled references, and reasoning-heavy tasks; (c) strong generative models effectively draw on the capabilities of their underlying language models. These findings highlight the need for multimodal generative models that are capable of dynamic planning and reasoning while also being deeply unified to faithfully simulate real-world states.
comment: Project Page: https://teal024.github.io/WorldCast
♻ ☆ PACT: End-to-End Learning of Human Pose, Contacts, and Forces from Video
Rikhat Akizhanov, Yangsong Zhang, Nikolai Kaliazin, Peter Wolf, Yoshihiko Nakamura, Pascal Fua, Fabio Pizzati, Ivan Laptev
Human motion, environmental contacts, and interaction forces are governed by common physical laws, yet existing approaches typically separate visual pose reconstruction from contact and force estimation. This separation limits joint reasoning and can propagate errors between stages. We introduce PACT, an end-to-end model that jointly learns to estimate human pose, contacts and contact forces from monocular video. Our approach augments a human reconstruction foundation model with learnable contact-force tokens and a temporal transformer that integrates visual features with world-space motion. Joint prediction heads refine human poses and estimate contacts and forces, while physics-based supervision encourages consistency between the reconstructed motion and interaction forces. To address the scarcity of force annotations, we develop a data annotation pipeline that combines contact labeling with physics-based motion and force optimization, producing training supervision from synthetic and real-world videos. We also introduce a real-world climbing benchmark ForceWall with climbing videos and corresponding ground-truth contact forces obtained from the force sensors. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art contact and force estimation, outperforming staged reconstruction approaches and generalizing to interactions beyond the training distribution. These results support end-to-end joint learning as an effective approach to recovering human motion and physical interactions from video.
comment: Project page: https://rihat99.github.io/PACT/
♻ ☆ Eddeep: a deep-learning framework for fast eddy-current distortion correction in diffusion MRI
Antoine Legouhy, Ross Callaghan, Yuchuan Qiao, Whitney Stee, Philippe Peigneux, Hojjat Azadbakht, Hui Zhang
Diffusion MRI (dMRI) relies on diffusion-weighted echo-planar imaging, which is highly susceptible to eddy-current-induced geometric distortions. These distortions vary across diffusion volumes according to gradient strength and direction, causing between-volume misalignment that can bias downstream microstructural analyses. Current state-of-the-art correction methods, such as FSL Eddy, achieve high-quality correction through iterative prediction-correction schemes but are computationally expensive. We propose Eddeep, a deep-learning framework for fast eddy-current distortion correction in dMRI. Eddeep decomposes the problem into two stages. First, a supervised image translation network standardises the appearance of diffusion-weighted and b=0 images, removing contrast differences that hinder reliable registration. Second, an unsupervised registration network estimates both eddy-current distortion and between-volume head motion parameters under a physics-constrained quadratic distortion model, enabling correction in a single forward pass. The method was trained on UK Biobank data and evaluated on both in-domain (UK Biobank) and out-of-domain (Memodyn) datasets. Across a range of complementary metrics, including between-volume jitter, diffusion kurtosis imaging residuals, signal irregularity, and mutual information, Eddeep achieved correction quality comparable to that of FSL Eddy while substantially reducing inference time. These results demonstrate that deep learning can provide accurate and efficient eddy-current distortion correction without relying on iterative optimisation, supporting the development of faster diffusion MRI processing pipelines for large-scale studies and clinical deployment. The code is available at: https://github.com/CIG-UCL/eddeep.
comment: Associated GitHub repo: https://github.com/CIG-UCL/eddeep
♻ ☆ Perceive, Interact, Reason: Building Tool-Augmented Visual Agents for Spatial Reasoning NeurIPS 2026
While recent vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong multimodal understanding, they remain limited in spatial reasoning tasks that require active evidence acquisition and multi-step visual interaction. This limitation suggests that relying solely on implicit visual representations from vision encoders is insufficient for recovering fine-grained spatial evidence. We introduce PERception-Interaction-reason Agent (PERIA), a tool-augmented visual agent for spatial reasoning tasks across map reasoning, visual probing, and vision reconstruction. PERIA uses two lightweight tool families: vision perception tools for exposing textual, symbolic, and spatial evidence, and vision interaction tools for manipulating visual context, tracing paths, and verifying spatial relations. To train PERIA, we develop a unified recipe that combines supervised tool-use trajectory synthesis, composite rewards, and Observation-Relaxed Group-in-Group Policy Optimization (OR-GIGPO) for effective multi-tool behavior. Experiments on 13 benchmarks from 8 datasets show that PERIA-8B improves over the Qwen3-8B backbone by 10.0 percentage points on in-distribution benchmarks and 4.4 percentage points on out-of-distribution benchmarks, while outperforming previous state-of-the-art baselines of similar size by 6.9--14.8 percentage points. It also achieves performance comparable to much larger models such as Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Thinking and GPT-5, demonstrating the effectiveness of PERIA in enhancing spatial reasoning capabilities.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. Camera-ready version with additional experiments, analyses, and clarified methodology. 38 pages, including appendices and checklist
♻ ☆ CountZES: Counting via Zero-Shot Exemplar Discovery and Selection
Zero-shot object counting (ZOC) aims to count instances of unseen categories using only a class name. Existing exemplar-based methods discover candidate exemplars through random image patches or open-vocabulary detector proposals. However, random patch sampling often yields poorly delineated instances, while detector-based discovery may produce multi-instance regions and, in dense scenes, provide only a few or even no suitable single-instance candidates. Thus, exemplar selection is constrained by candidate quality and coverage, while counting itself remains highly sensitive to exemplar choice. To this end, we propose CountZES, an inference-only framework that jointly addresses candidate discovery and exemplar selection through density-guided candidate generation and complementary exemplar-selection mechanisms. Starting from a text-grounded anchor, CountZES progressively discovers and refines visual exemplars through three stages: Detection-Anchored Exemplar (DAE), Density-Guided Exemplar (DGE), and Feature-Consensus Exemplar (FCE). DAE establishes a reliable single-instance anchor, DGE leverages density responses to expand candidate discovery beyond the detector-constrained pool and select a statistically consistent exemplar, and FCE promotes representativeness through feature-level consensus. Together, they yield complementary exemplars balancing semantic grounding, count consistency, and feature representativeness. CountZES requires no ZOC-specific optimization and adopts a modular design that supports different pretrained components. Extensive evaluations across natural, aerial, and medical domains demonstrate strong cross-domain generalization and superior performance among inference-only ZOC methods.
♻ ☆ DetoxAI: a Python Toolkit for Debiasing Deep Learning Models in Computer Vision ECML
While machine learning fairness has made significant progress in recent years, most existing solutions focus on tabular data and are poorly suited for vision-based classification tasks, which rely heavily on deep learning. To bridge this gap, we introduce DetoxAI, an open-source Python library for improving fairness in deep learning vision classifiers through post-hoc debiasing. DetoxAI implements state-of-the-art debiasing algorithms, fairness metrics, and visualization tools. It supports debiasing via interventions in internal representations and includes attribution-based visualization tools and quantitative algorithmic fairness metrics to show how bias is mitigated. This paper presents the motivation, design, and use cases of DetoxAI, demonstrating its tangible value to engineers and researchers.
comment: Published at ECML PKDD 2025, Demo Track
♻ ☆ VGGT-Bridge: Beyond Sequential Pose Graphs via Coarse-Stride Skip Edges ACCV 2026
Feed-forward visual geometry transformers such as VGGT reconstruct dense 3D structure from images in a single forward pass, simplifying multi-view 3D reconstruction. However, their quadratic attention complexity makes them difficult to scale to long sequences with thousands of frames. Chunk-and-align frameworks address this by splitting a long sequence into overlapping chunks and stitching their local reconstructions into a pose graph. Yet existing methods connect only sequentially adjacent chunks, so small per-frame errors accumulate along the chain into large-scale drift. To move beyond sequential edges, we propose VGGT-Bridge, which adds long-range skip edges that directly constrain non-adjacent chunks without retraining. By running VGGT on sparsely sampled coarse chunks, each coarse chunk bridges distant fine chunks into a single direct constraint. We further turn VGGT's first-frame scale bias into a drift correction by feeding selected coarse chunks in reverse, and a loop-aware policy keeps this reversal compatible with existing loop closures. VGGT-Bridge reduces ATE by 28.3% on KITTI Odometry, 18.8% on Virtual KITTI, and 10.0% on Waymo Open over the SwiftVGGT baseline, achieving the best performance among all chunk-and-align methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/BeCow5X5/VGGT-Bridge.
comment: Accepted to ACCV 2026
♻ ☆ Dior: Drawing the Light of Image via Material-Decoupled Illumination Representation
Controllable image relighting is an important problem in image editing, and hand-drawn scribbles provide an intuitive interface for specifying the desired illumination. However, existing methods do not establish a consistent and effective mapping between scribble inputs and relighting results, limiting their ability to control illumination intensity, chromaticity, and complex spatial distributions. We address this limitation by introducing a material-decoupled illumination representation, termed the Lumi Map, which establishes an explicit mapping between user scribbles and the resulting illumination, thereby improving both relighting accuracy and controllability. Specifically, we use a renderer to synthesize source image-Lumi Map-relit image triplets and train the model to predict the target relighting result conditioned on the Lumi Map. To mitigate the domain gap introduced by synthetic data, we further perform reconstruction training on real relighting pairs, improving the model's generalization to real-world images. Finally, we present Dior-Light, an image relighting method controlled by hand-drawn strokes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in relighting accuracy and enables effective control over illumination intensity and chromaticity on in-the-wild images.
♻ ☆ Measuring Model Robustness via Fisher Information: Spectral Bounds, Theoretical Guarantees, and Practical Algorithms
The robustness of deep neural networks is crucial for safety-critical deployments, yet existing evaluation methods are often attack-dependent and lack interpretability. We propose a principled, attack-agnostic robustness metric based on the spectral norm of the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM), which quantifies the worst-case sensitivity of the model's output distribution to input perturbations. Theoretically, we establish that the FIM equals the variance of the input Jacobian and derive closed-form spectral bounds for common architectures, including VGG, ResNet, DenseNet, and Transformer, providing the first theoretical robustness ranking. To enable scalable evaluation, we develop efficient algorithms, including power iteration and Hutchinson-based estimation, that support both white-box and black-box settings. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets, including CIFAR, ImageNet, and medical images, and across multiple architectures show a strong correlation between our metric and adversarial vulnerability. Our framework serves as an interpretable diagnostic tool that complements attack-based evaluations, offering insights into architectural sensitivity and guiding the design of more robust models. Code is available at: https://github.com/franz-chang/SRP/.
comment: 35 pages, 1 figure
♻ ☆ MOTe error: A decomposable framework for evaluating Document Layout Analysis models
Document Layout Analysis (DLA) is a machine vision task that parses a page into meaningful elements, and is a critical stage in Document Understanding (DU). DLA models are usually evaluated with IoU-based metrics such as the F1. However, these metrics are designed for images that are 2D projections of 3D space, not for the natively 2D imagery of printed media. We show both theoretically and empirically that the F1 suffers from two critical failures in the context of DU. These failures are granularity sensitivity, which can lead to F1 collapse even with perfect text extraction; and low semantic competence, which can result in high F1 scores that mask substantial parsing-induced character errors. To remedy these failures we introduce: the Structural Semantic Unit (SSU), a relational labelling approach that shifts the focus from the physical to the semantic structure of the content; and Missing, Overlap, Trespass, and Excess (MOTe) error, a decomposable metric for measuring page parsing error. MOTe correlates more strongly with parsing-induced Character Error Rates (CER) than the F1 (|$ρ$| = 0.82 vs 0.54). MOTe also yields idealised upper and lower bounds on CER that hold in 99% and 82% of model predictions respectively. The lower bound can act as a direct proxy for CER with an $R^2=0.84$. We found that given two models MOTe picks the one that would produce the lowest CER 86% of the time, outperforming pixel-level Dice (77%) and F1 (68%). Finally, we release a Python library for applying MOTe in DLA projects.
comment: 8835 words, 10 Figures, 18 Tables,
♻ ☆ Fast and Compact Graph Cuts for the Boykov-Kolmogorov Algorithm IEEE
Christian Møller Mikkelstrup, Anders Bjorholm Dahl, Philip Bille, Vedrana Andersen Dahl, Inge Li Gørtz
Computing a minimum $s$-$t$ cut in a graph is a solution to a wide range of computer vision problems and is often done using the Boykov-Kolmogorov (BK) algorithm. In this paper, we revisit the BK algorithm from both a theoretical and practical point of view. We improve the analysis of the time complexity of the BK algorithm to $O(mn|C|)$ and propose a new algorithm, the fast BK (fBK) algorithm, with a time complexity of $O(m|C|)$, where $m$, $n$, and $|C|$ are the number of edges, the number of vertices, and the capacity of the cut, respectively. We additionally propose a compact graph representation that allows our implementations of the BK and fBK algorithms to find a minimum $s$-$t$ cut in a graph with up to $10^9$ vertices and $10^{10}$ edges on a machine with 128 GB of memory. We denote these as $\texttt{cBK}$ and $\texttt{fcBK}$, respectively. Despite $\texttt{fcBK}$ having the better worst-case guarantee, we find $\texttt{cBK}$ to be the fastest available implementation within the family of BK algorithms when evaluating on a comprehensive set of benchmark datasets, highlighting the importance of memory-efficient implementations. We make our implementations publicly available for further research and implementation development within minimum $s$-$t$ cut algorithms.
comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, submitted to the IEEE for possible publication
♻ ☆ A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Automatic Speech Recognition Bias in Newcastle English
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are widely used in everyday communication, education, healthcare, and industry, yet their performance remains uneven across speakers, particularly when dialectal variation diverges from the mainstream accents represented in training data. This study investigates ASR bias through a sociolinguistic analysis of Newcastle English, a regional variety of North-East England that has been shown to challenge current speech recognition technologies. Using spontaneous speech from the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE), we evaluate the output of a state-of-the-art commercial ASR system and conduct a fine-grained analysis of more than 3,000 transcription errors. Errors are classified by linguistic domain and examined in relation to social variables including gender, age, and socioeconomic status. In addition, an acoustic case study of selected vowel features demonstrates how gradient phonetic variation contributes directly to misrecognition.
The results show that phonological variation accounts for the majority of errors, with recurrent failures linked to dialect-specific features like vowel quality and glottalisation, as well as local vocabulary and non-standard grammatical forms. Error rates also vary across social groups, with higher error frequencies observed for men and for speakers at the extremes of the age spectrum. These findings indicate that ASR errors are not random but socially patterned and can be explained from a sociolinguistic perspective. Thus, the study demonstrates the importance of incorporating sociolinguistic expertise into the evaluation and development of speech technologies and argues that more equitable ASR systems require explicit attention to dialectal variation and community-based speech data.
comment: 60 pages, 12 figures
♻ ☆ Pathways of Visual Information Flow in Vision-Language Models
We study how visual information is routed in vision-language models (VLMs). Using causal patching on controlled synthetic and natural datasets, we find that models rely on two distinct pathways to solve visual tasks: A direct pathway, where visual information is retained in image token representations and read out by the final token at later layers, and a text-mediated pathway, where visual information is first transferred to the query tokens and then read out by the final token. Across three visual tasks, we show that pathway selection is task-dependent, and that data distribution and prompt design can also modulate which pathway is used to solve the image-based query. Moreover, using attention knockouts and corrupted-input patching, we find that these pathways are flexible, under certain interventions, models can rely on the text-mediated pathway as a fallback when the usual pathway is ablated. This behavior unifies findings in prior work and shows that ablation-based interventions can reveal what models could do rather than what they normally do. Together, our results provide a mechanistic characterization of visual information flow in VLMs and highlight the flexibility of their internal mechanisms under intervention.
♻ ☆ AlignDrive: Aligned Lateral-Longitudinal Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving NeurIPS 2026
Practical autonomous driving requires models that generalize by reasoning through spatial-temporal possibilities to exclude unsafe outcomes. While state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods use parallel planning architectures, they fail to explicitly couple speed decisions with agent behavior along the driving path, leading to suboptimal coordination. To address this, we propose a cascaded framework that transforms longitudinal planning from an independent prediction task into a path-conditioned reasoning process. On the model side, we introduce an anchor-based regression design that conditions longitudinal prediction on the lateral drive path, and reformulate longitudinal planning as 1D displacement prediction along the path. This reduces geometric uncertainty and sharpens the model's focus on interaction-driven dynamics. On the data side, we introduce a planning-oriented data augmentation strategy that simulates rare safety-critical events by programmatically inserting agents and relabeling longitudinal targets to enforce collision avoidance. Evaluated on the challenging Bench2Drive benchmark, our method achieves SOTA performance with a driving score of 89.07 and a success rate of 73.18%, demonstrating significantly improved coordination and safety. Further evaluation on Fail2Drive confirms strong generalization to rare edge cases where parallel formulations typically fail. Project page:https://yanhaowu.github.io/AlignDrive/.
comment: NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ Rethinking LLM-Guided Visual Question Answering: Does Deeper Knowledge Integration Really Help?
Some questions about an image need commonsense or factual knowledge that its pixels do not contain. Large Language Models (LLMs) can supply this knowledge to Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems, but the depth at which their guidance should enter a vision-language model remains unclear. We prompt the 70-billion-parameter Llama~3.3 model to describe, for each question, the visual concepts to focus on, the distractors to ignore and the external facts needed. We inject this guidance into a frozen Vision Transformer (ViT) paired with an instruction-tuned Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer (T5) in two ways: decision-level late fusion and attention-matrix injection. On the Outside Knowledge VQA (OK-VQA) benchmark, and contrary to the common view that deeper is better, the shallow route wins: late fusion reaches 39.4% exact match, +10.0 points above an unguided baseline, while attention injection reaches only 31.8% under data-scarce fine-tuning. An LLM paraphrasing pipeline also enlarges the training set more than tenfold. The results suggest that integration depth should be matched to the data regime.
comment: 13 pages, 6 figures. Accepted at ADCIS 2026
♻ ☆ From Articles to Canopies: Knowledge-Driven Pseudo-Labelling for Tree Species Classification using LLM Experts
Michał Romaszewski, Dominik Kopeć, Michał Cholewa, Katarzyna Kołodziej, Przemysław Głomb, Jan Niedzielko, Jakub Charyton, Justyna Wylazłowska, Anna Jarocińska
Hyperspectral tree species classification is challenging due to limited and imbalanced class labels, spectral mixing (overlapping light signatures from multiple species), and ecological heterogeneity (variability among ecological systems). Addressing these challenges requires methods that integrate biological and structural characteristics of vegetation, such as canopy architecture and interspecific interactions, rather than relying solely on spectral signatures. This paper presents a biologically informed, semi-supervised deep learning method that integrates multi-sensor Earth observation data, specifically hyperspectral imaging (HSI) and airborne laser scanning (ALS), with expert, ecological knowledge. The approach relies on biologically inspired pseudo-labelling over a precomputed canopy graph, yielding improved classification with a lightweight classifier. In addition, ecological priors are constructed using an LLM-assisted, citation-constrained workflow and encoded as a cohabitation matrix with likelihoods of species occurring together. These priors are incorporated into the pseudo-labelling strategy, effectively introducing expert knowledge into the model. Experiments on two real-world forest datasets showed macro-F1 improvements of 6.01 and 4.85 percentage points over the strongest classical HSI--ALS reference pipelines.
♻ ☆ Automatic Fine-grained Segmentation-assisted Report Generation
Frederic Jonske, Constantin Seibold, Osman Alperen Koras, Fin Bahnsen, Marie Bauer, Amin Dada, Hamza Kalisch, Anton Schily, Jens Kleesiek
Reliable end-to-end clinical report generation has been a longstanding goal of medical ML research. The end goal for this process is to alleviate radiologists' workloads and provide second opinions to clinicians or patients. Thus, a necessary prerequisite for report generation models is a strong general performance and some type of innate grounding capability, to convince clinicians or patients of the veracity of the generated reports. In this paper, we present ASaRG (\textbf{A}utomatic \textbf{S}egmentation-\textbf{a}ssisted \textbf{R}eport \textbf{G}eneration), an extension of the popular LLaVA architecture that aims to tackle both of these problems. ASaRG proposes to fuse intermediate features and fine-grained segmentation maps created by specialist radiological models into LLaVA's multi-modal projection layer via simple concatenation. With a small number of added parameters, our approach achieves a +0.89\% performance gain ($p=0.012$) in CE F1 score compared to the LLaVA baseline when using only intermediate features, and +2.77\% performance gain ($p<0.001$) when adding a combination of intermediate features and fine-grained segmentation maps. Compared with COMG and ORID, two other report generation methods that utilize segmentations, the performance gain amounts to 6.98\% and 6.28\% in F1 score, respectively. ASaRG is not mutually exclusive with other changes made to the LLaVA architecture, potentially allowing our method to be combined with other advances in the field. Finally, the use of an arbitrary number of segmentations as part of the input demonstrably allows tracing elements of the report to the corresponding segmentation maps and verifying the groundedness of assessments. Our code will be made publicly available at a later date.
comment: v2, revised after reviewer comments
♻ ☆ No Pose, No Problem in 4D: Feed-Forward Dynamic Gaussians from Unposed Multi-View Videos NeurIPS-2026
Recent feed-forward 3D gaussian splatting methods have made dramatic progress on individual aspects of 3D scene reconstruction, but no existing method jointly addresses dynamic content, multi-view input, and unknown camera poses in a single feed-forward pass. Methods that handle dynamics either require accurate camera poses or accept only monocular input; pose-free multi-view methods address only static scenes; and per-scene optimization methods bridge some of these gaps but at minutes-to-hours cost per scene. We introduce NoPo4D, the first feed-forward system that addresses this empty quadrant. Building on a pretrained geometry backbone and recent 4D Gaussian frameworks, NoPo4D introduces a velocity decomposition that splits Gaussian motion into per-pixel image-plane shifts and depth changes, allowing direct supervision from pseudo ground-truth optical flow on the 2D component. This sidesteps both the differentiable rendering that couples prior posed methods to pose accuracy and the 3D motion ground truth that prior pose-free methods require. The system is rounded out by a bidirectional motion encoder for cross-view and cross-frame feature aggregation, and view-dependent opacity that mitigates cross-view and cross-timestep Gaussian misalignments. On four multi-view dynamic benchmarks, NoPo4D consistently outperforms prior feed-forward baselines, and with an optional post-optimization stage surpasses per-scene optimization methods, while running orders of magnitude faster.
comment: https://bralani.github.io/nopo4d_html/ Camera ready version of NeurIPS-2026
♻ ☆ BRIDGE: Background Routing and Isolated Discrete Gating for Coarse-Mask Local Editing
Coarse-mask local editing must preserve the background while allowing new content to depart from the mask contour. Existing mask-conditioned editors often entangle these goals and treat the coarse mask as a shape prior. We introduce BRIDGE, a dual-path architecture with a full-canvas Main Path, a local Subject Path, and a learned binary gate that routes subject-token positional embeddings between subject-centric and background-anchored coordinates. On Qwen-Image-Edit-2511, BRIDGE keeps the mask outside the DiT backbone and trains both targets with independent noise. On BRIDGE-Bench, it achieves 0.503 local SigLIP2-T, 0.902 DINO, and 0.175 DreamSim, outperforming ACE++ and FLUX.1-Fill in local precision. We then instantiate BRIDGE on FLUX.2 [klein] 9B Base with full-transformer training and subject-reference conditioning. Dense BBox supervision preserves Sub-image quality; optional mask-cropped inference removes out-of-mask Sub tokens, tightening user support without training a sparse model that overfits the mask silhouette. On supported ICE-Bench tasks, FLUX.2 BRIDGE averages 0.5941 over four local edits and 0.6254 over subject-guided edits, leading the compared open-source models on the latter. Across Qwen and FLUX.2, BRIDGE separates support localization from subject geometry and improves local generation while preserving the surrounding scene. Code is available at https://github.com/XIONGPEILIN/BRIDGE
comment: 45 pages, 18 figures
♻ ☆ Interpreting vision transformers via residual replacement model
How do vision transformers (ViTs) represent and process the world? This paper addresses this long-standing question through the first systematic analysis of 6.6K features across all layers, extracted via sparse autoencoders, and by introducing the residual replacement model, which replaces ViT computations with interpretable features in the residual stream. Our analysis reveals not only a feature evolution from low-level patterns to high-level semantics, but also how ViTs encode curves and spatial positions through specialized feature types. The residual replacement model scalably produces a faithful yet parsimonious circuit for human-scale interpretability by significantly simplifying the original computations. As a result, this framework enables intuitive understanding of ViT mechanisms. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our framework in debiasing spurious correlations.
♻ ☆ Few-shot Classification as Multi-instance Verification: Effective Backbone-agnostic Transfer across Domains
We investigate cross-domain few-shot learning under the constraint that fine-tuning of backbones (i.e., feature extractors) is impossible or infeasible---a scenario that is increasingly common in practical use cases---and show how representing few-shot classification as a series of multiple instance verification (MIV) tasks enables competitive classification performance using the static embeddings produced by frozen, "black-box" backbones. More specifically, based on this novel representation, we introduce a new approach to few-shot domain adaptation named the "MIV-head": a classification head that is backbone-agnostic and computationally efficient. We show that the core components of the MIV-head, when trained on few-shot data from a target domain, collectively yield strong performance on test data from that domain. Importantly, they do so without fine-tuning the backbone, requiring only the "meta-testing" phase. In experiments under various settings on an extension of the Meta-Dataset benchmark for cross-domain few-shot image classification, using representative off-the-shelf convolutional neural network and vision transformer backbones pretrained on ImageNet1K, we demonstrate that the MIV-head achieves highly competitive accuracy when compared to state-of-the-art "adapter" (or "partial fine-tuning") methods applied to the same backbones, while incurring substantially lower adaptation cost. Moreover, compared to our approach, well-known "classification head" approaches achieve a substantially lower level of accuracy. We share our code at: https://github.com/xxweka/MIV-head.
comment: Accepted by MLJ (Springer)
♻ ☆ SpatialMem: Metric-Aligned Long-Horizon Video Memory for Language Grounding and QA
Xinyi Zheng, Yunze Liu, Chi-Hao Wu, Fan Zhang, Hao Zheng, Wenqi Zhou, Walterio W. Mayol-Cuevas, Junxiao Shen
SpatialMem is a memory-based system which integrates 3D geometry, semantics, and language with one another in one combined, queryable representation. Starting with casually recorded egocentric RGB video, SpatialMem recreates metrically scaled interior scenes, recognizes structural 3D anchors (walls, doors, windows) as the first-layer scaffold, and associates open-vocabulary object nodes with evidence patches, visual embeddings, and two-layer descriptions to 3D coordinates, enabling spatial-relation reasoning, language-directed retrieval, and QA without special sensors. We test at scale on public benchmarks. On VSI-Bench ($288$ videos, $5{,}130$ questions) SpatialMem scores $37.5$ overall with RGB alone, and its margin is precisely where a metric memory should earn it (room size $41.4$ vs.\ $24.4$ with a same-size frame model). On the episodic-memory task of OpenEQA ($953$ questions) the memory serialised to text is lower than the blind control, but as evidence-frame retrieval it recovers frame-level accuracy, matching uniform sampling at an equal eight-frame budget and pulling ahead as the budget tightens, with every answer grounded in linked 3D evidence. On $12$ ScanNet scenes evaluated using instance-level official annotations, the anchor-first hierarchy assigns the retrieved object to the proper structural parent where open-vocabulary 3D scene graphs essentially cannot ($0.24$ compared to $0.01$ with matched input), a capability difference instead of an overall win. The queryable index has a cost of $14$\,KB per scene without the linked evidence frames, and we make available the suites, memories and code.
♻ ☆ ReactiveBFM: Reactive Closed-Loop Motion Planning Towards Universal Humanoid Whole-Body Control
Xiao Chen, Weishuai Zeng, Xiaojie Niu, Zirui Wang, Jianan Li, Huayi Wang, Furui Xu, Jiahe Chen, Weixiang Zhong, Lihe Ding, Kailin Li, Jiangmiao Pang, Tai Wang, Tianfan Xue, Jingbo Wang
While current Behavior Foundation Models (BFMs) provide robust control priors for humanoids, they only execute pre-defined reference motions. As a result, they are vulnerable to environmental shifts and incapable of reactive whole-body coordination. Naively cascading them with generative motion planners fails to achieve true reactivity, as inevitable tracking discrepancies induce fatal cumulative exposure bias. To bridge this gap, we propose ReactiveBFM, a real-time closed-loop planning-control framework. At its core, we effectively mitigate exposure bias via a scheduled prefix sampling curriculum, forcing the generative planner to actively learn error-recovery behaviors from imperfect physical states rather than ground-truth trajectories. Systematically, to reconcile the severe latency mismatch between auto-regressive planning and high-frequency tracking, we introduce an asynchronous replanning mechanism. Combined with trajectory chunking to temporally ensemble spatial references, our system guarantees spatio-temporally fluid execution without physical jitter. Deployed on the Unitree G1 humanoid, ReactiveBFM demonstrates unprecedented physical agility across a vast repertoire of text-conditioned closed-loop motions. Notably, ReactiveBFM achieves zero-shot moving target reaching, showcasing intricate whole-body coordination and on-the-fly replanning. In sim-to-sim benchmarking under severe perturbations, ReactiveBFM achieves a 93.1% success rate, significantly outperforming cascaded open-loop baselines by 28.6%.
comment: Accepted by CoRL 2026. Project page: https://xiao-chen.tech/reactivebfm/
♻ ☆ TrajCFG: Token-Wise Classifier-Free Guidance via Denoising Trajectory Feedback
Jingyu Liu, Hao Jiang, Yikang Ding, Huafeng Shi, Xu Yang, Xiaoqiang Liu, Guoxin Zhang, Pengfei Wan, Kun Gai
Classifier-free guidance (CFG) typically applies a shared scale to all latent tokens, although their velocity predictions evolve differently during sampling. We introduce Trajectory-Adaptive Classifier-Free Guidance (TrajCFG), a training-free method for flow-matching models that adapts token-wise guidance using historical changes in guided velocity direction. TrajCFG maps this feedback to bounded scales, assigning stronger guidance to larger directional changes and weaker guidance to more consistent directions. It combines adjacent-step and interval-normalized longer-span feedback, reusing standard CFG predictions without additional model evaluations. Controlled diagnostics and ablations examine the roles of directional feedback, token-wise allocation, and history-span fusion. Experiments on text-to-video, image-to-video, text-to-audio-video, text-to-image, and image-to-3D generation show improvements over base samplers across multiple backbones. For text-to-video generation, TrajCFG improves VBench Total scores by 0.30-0.75 points over the strongest evaluated baseline on each of three backbones. These results support historical directional feedback as a broadly applicable signal for fine-grained guidance allocation. The project page is available at https://jyliu-98.github.io/trajcfg-project-page/.
comment: 22 pages. Project page: https://jyliu-98.github.io/trajcfg-project-page/
♻ ☆ MotionHalluc: Diagnosing Kinematic Hallucinations in Fine-Grained Motion Reasoning
Motion instruction generation in cross-video comparison aims to produce corrective feedback that describes the differences between a query and a reference motion. However, existing models often generate instructions that exhibit motion hallucinations, failing to reflect actual kinematic differences between paired videos. To systematically investigate these hallucinations, we introduce MotionHalluc, a dedicated benchmark for evaluating motion hallucinations in paired-video comparison. MotionHalluc comprises 1540 fine-grained questions over 553 video pairs, evaluating hallucinations along three core dimensions: (1)directional hallucination, (2)attributional hallucination, and (3)temporal hallucination. Extensive evaluations of state-of-the-art large multimodal models demonstrate high susceptibility to these hallucinations. Furthermore, we provide Perceive-Parse-Verify (PPV) as a training-free measurements extraction and verification baseline that converts candidate instructions into executable measurement queries and supplies kinematic measurements at inference time. Our results show that this simple measurements injection yields an average 10.6% performance gain across models, suggesting that motion reasoning with explicit quantitative measurements is a key factor in reducing hallucinations in cross-video comparison. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Leocoding0971/MotionHalluc.
♻ ☆ AutoExpert: Automating 3D LiDAR Annotation from Expert-Crafted Guidelines NeurIPS 2026
The contemporary paradigm of scaling data annotation, crucial for developing machine learning solutions, is to hire ordinary human annotators and instruct them with expert-crafted guidelines to label data. This paradigm is laborious, tedious, and costly, motivating us to study an open problem, auto-annotation with expert-crafted guidelines (dubbed AutoExpert). We develop benchmarks by redesigning the evaluation protocol and re-annotating data with nuScenes and PandaSet, two 3D detection datasets for autonomous driving research that provide expert-crafted annotation guidelines. Their guidelines define 18 and 25 object classes, respectively, using nuanced language descriptions and a few visual examples. Following the guidelines that require using 3D cuboids to label LiDAR data, AutoExpert requires algorithms to learn on few-shot labeled images and texts to perform the task of 3D detection on LiDAR data. Apparently, the challenges of AutoExpert lie in the data-modality and task discrepancy. Nevertheless, public foundation models (FMs) serve as promising tools to tackle these challenges. To address AutoExpert, we adopt a conceptually simple pipeline consisting of three components: (1) 2D object detection and segmentation in RGB images, (2) lifting 2D detections into 3D using known sensor poses, and (3) 3D cuboids generation for the 2D detections. Within this pipeline, we enhance and evaluate a variety of methods such as open-vocabulary detectors, few-shot detectors, and self-supervised learned detectors. We also develop novel techniques, leading to refined components that boost 3D detection mAP from 12.1 to 25.4 on the AutoExpert-nuScenes benchmark.
comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2026. Code and benchmark: https://github.com/cc50121/AutoExpert-3D-benchmark
♻ ☆ EdgeCrafter: Compact ViTs for Edge Dense Prediction via Task-Specialized Distillation
Longfei Liu, Yongjie Hou, Yang Li, Qirui Wang, Youyang Sha, Yongjun Yu, Yinzhi Wang, Peizhe Ru, Xuanlong Yu, Xi Shen
Deploying high-performance dense prediction models on resource-constrained edge devices remains challenging due to strict computation and memory budgets. In practice, lightweight systems for object detection, instance segmentation, and pose estimation are still dominated by CNN-based architectures such as YOLO, while compact Vision Transformers (ViTs) often struggle to achieve comparable accuracy-efficiency trade-offs, even with large-scale pretraining. We argue that this gap arises primarily from insufficient task-specific representation learning in small-scale ViTs, rather than from an inherent mismatch between ViTs and edge dense prediction. To address this issue, we introduce EdgeCrafter, a unified compact ViT framework for edge dense prediction centered on ECDet, a detection model built on a distilled compact backbone and an edge-friendly encoder-decoder design. The resulting detection-distilled representation transfers directly to instance segmentation and human pose estimation through lightweight task-specific prediction modules. Without using task annotations beyond COCO, ECDet-S achieves 51.7 box AP with fewer than 10M parameters, while ECInsSeg-X and ECPose-X reach 48.4 mask AP and 74.8 keypoint AP, respectively. As a complementary but more compute-intensive setting, Objects365 detection pretraining consistently improves performance across all scales, with the X variants reaching 59.9 box AP, 49.8 mask AP, and 75.9 keypoint AP. These results show that compact ViTs, when combined with task-specialized distillation and edge-aware design, can be a practical and competitive solution for edge dense prediction. Code is available at: https://intellindust-ai-lab.github.io/projects/EdgeCrafter
comment: Accepted by TMLR 2026. The Objects365 pre-training results have also been updated. Code is available at: https://intellindust-ai-lab.github.io/projects/EdgeCrafter
♻ ☆ Place-it-R1: Unlocking Environment-aware Reasoning Potential of MLLM for Video Object Insertion
Video object insertion is fundamental to video editing, yet existing diffusion methods often produce visually plausible but physically inconsistent results. We present Place-it-R1, an end-to-end framework for physically plausible video object insertion driven by environment-aware MLLM reasoning. Rather than treating reasoning as a generic text prompt, Place-it-R1 uses the MLLM to analyze the target environment, infer object-scene interactions, and determine where an insertion is physically valid. The resulting reasoning is translated into two complementary forms of guidance for video diffusion: semantic guidance that describes the intended physical interaction and spatial guidance that provides a valid insertion region in each frame. To further align generation with local physical realism, we introduce Spatial Direct Preference Optimization, which leverages an MLLM to rank generated candidates, and introduces a region-aware preference objective that explicitly localizes physical-violation penalties to the inserted-object region. Place-it-R1 further offers flexible and standard modes to trade off environment adaptation and scene preservation. Extensive experiments show that Place-it-R1 produces more physically coherent and visually natural insertions than state-of-the-art methods and achieves competitive results against commercial systems.
comment: https://nevsnev.github.io/Place-it-R1/
♻ ☆ Why DiT Models Underperform as Representation Learners without Long Skip Connections
Diffusion feature, i.e., intermediate activations extracted from diffusion model backbones, has emerged as a promising approach for unifying generation and vision understanding (discrimination). Despite the advancement of diffusion backbones into Diffusion Transformers (DiT), it has been found in previous literature that DiT models tend to yield weaker features despite their stronger generation capability. This poses a threat to good generation-understanding unification. In this work, we show via controlled from-scratch training that long skip connections (LSCs) affect feature quality: a DiT with LSCs can produce better features. Furthermore, through detailed diagnosis, we reveal the mechanism causing this effect. Specifically, the input to a diffusion backbone contains both the latent image and the diffusion noise, where the diffusion noise, though appearing in the form of noises, actually reflects the information of the diffusion trajectory. To make the final prediction of a noisy variable ($v$ or $ε$), the diffusion backbone needs both signals. However, carrying both signals through the main backbone effectively "pollutes" the image signal with noises, leading to poor feature quality. In comparison, LSCs can shortcut diffusion noises directly to where they are needed, leaving much weaker noise signals in the main backbone, thus improving feature quality. To name the broader impact, this reveals that LSCs are not a mere trick but closely related to the diffusion objective. The code is at https://github.com/Darkbblue/dit-lsc.
♻ ☆ Disentangled Sparse Representations for Concept-Separated Diffusion Unlearning NeurIPS 2026
Unlearning specific concepts in text-to-image diffusion models has become increasingly important for preventing undesirable content generation. Among prior approaches, sparse autoencoder (SAE)-based methods have attracted attention due to their ability to suppress target concepts through lightweight manipulation of latent features, without modifying model parameters. However, SAEs trained primarily for sparse reconstruction do not explicitly enforce concept-wise separation, allowing semantically related concepts to share latent features. To address this, we propose SAEParate, which explicitly separates semantically overlapping concepts in the SAE latent space through concept-aware contrastive learning, supported by cross-attention-guided spatial aggregation that emphasizes concept-relevant regions. In addition, we enhance the encoder with a nonlinear transformation to increase its expressive capacity under this separation objective, enabling more concept-discriminative latent representations. Experiments on UnlearnCanvas demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with particularly strong gains in joint style-object unlearning, a challenging setting where existing methods suffer from severe interference between target and non-target concepts.
comment: 53 pages, 25 figures. Accepted at NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ SpatialScout: Can VLM Agents Actively Explore and Map 3D Scenes?
Zhaoxi Zhang, Hao Liang, Linxuan Wu, Yiming Xu, Yifu Yuan, Kun Liang, Chenming Tang, Meiyi Qiang, Wentao Zhang, Weikang Li
Spatial intelligence requires agents to actively acquire visual evidence and integrate observations into a coherent representation of the three-dimensional world. Yet spatial question answering offers limited evidence of whether models can construct accurate metric maps through autonomous exploration. We introduce SpatialScout, a benchmark for evaluating vision-language model (VLM) agents on active object-level 3D mapping. SpatialScout comprises 80 diverse indoor scenes containing 3,140 target objects. Given an object inventory, RGB observations, camera calibration, and camera poses, agents control a camera to explore each scene and estimate object centers in a shared coordinate frame. The task requires coordinating viewpoint selection, cross-view association, geometric estimation, and map revision under bounded interaction budgets. Evaluation jointly measures localization accuracy and target coverage through object-scale overlap scores that penalize missing predictions. Experiments with frontier VLMs reveal substantial limitations: the strongest evaluated model, Claude Opus 5.5, achieves a mean overlap score of 41.71%, with 47.23% of targets exceeding an intersection-over-union (IoU) threshold of 0.5 and only 3.25% exceeding 0.9. These results reveal a substantial gap between recovering coarse object layouts and constructing complete, precise metric maps. SpatialScout provides a quantitative testbed for developing agents that build reliable 3D spatial representations through active perception. Code is available at https://github.com/JesseZZZZZ/SpatialScout.
♻ ☆ WildAIGC-Bench: Can AI Image Detectors Handle the Wild? A Benchmark of Generated and Edited Images in Online Circulation
AI-generated images linked to news events and online claims can mislead audiences, enable fraud, or cause public controversy. We introduce WildAIGC-Bench, built through recurring collection across news websites, fact-checking sources, and related social media content. The pipeline combines broad coverage, timely updates, and human-verified labels through scheduled discovery, automatic screening and preliminary annotation, and human review of image-specific evidence. The benchmark contains 407 verified AI-generated or edited images, each accompanied by a source webpage link and an evidence summary. Images retain the conditions encountered online, including compression, screenshots, and recapture. Evaluation of dedicated visual detectors, multimodal large language models, and a simple Perception Encoder baseline reveals substantial recall gaps relative to existing benchmarks. WildAIGC-Bench provides both a practical detection challenge and a basis for continued data expansion and source-based verification. The dataset is released at https://github.com/YuZijian/WildAIGC-Bench.
comment: 19 pages, including references and supplementary appendix
♻ ☆ A Study of the Limits of Collaborative DCT-Based Image Denoising via Interpretable Neural Networks
Image denoising remains a fundamental problem in image restoration, with applications in photography, biomedical, and scientific imaging. Modern deep neural networks achieve strong performance by learning powerful image priors, but often rely on large black-box models with limited interpretability. In contrast, DCT-based sliding-window and collaborative filtering methods such as BM3D offer clear algorithmic structure, but depend on handcrafted and non-differentiable operations. This work studies how far such structured collaborative filtering principles can be pushed when reformulated as trainable models. We introduce DeepBM3D, a compact fully differentiable architecture that combines non-local patch grouping, DCT-domain filtering, and multi-stage refinement within a BM3D-inspired pipeline. Lightweight convolutional feature extractors guide patch grouping, while filtering is performed through learned Wiener weights in the DCT domain. Experiments show that DeepBM3D improves over classical and hybrid baselines, remains competitive with FFDNet at low and moderate noise levels, and performs particularly well on repetitive textures.
comment: Preprint submitted to Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision (JMIV). 17 pages, 11 figures. Supported by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 under grant PID2021-125711OB-I00, and by the Spanish Ministry of Universities under grant FPU24/02805
♻ ☆ ProCLIP: Progressive Vision-Language Alignment via LLM-based Embedder NeurIPS'26
Xiaoxing Hu, Kaicheng Yang, Ziyang Gong, Qi Ming, Zonghao Guo, Yu Tian, Xiang An, Ziyong Feng, Xue Yang
The original CLIP text encoder is limited by a maximum input length of 77 tokens, which hampers its ability to effectively process long texts and perform fine-grained semantic understanding. In addition, the CLIP text encoder lacks support for multilingual inputs. All these limitations significantly restrict its applicability across a broader range of tasks. Recent studies have attempted to replace the CLIP text encoder with an LLM-based embedder to enhance its ability in processing long texts, multilingual understanding, and fine-grained semantic comprehension. However, because the representation spaces of LLMs and the vision-language space of CLIP are pretrained independently without alignment priors, direct alignment using contrastive learning can disrupt the intrinsic vision-language alignment in the CLIP image encoder, leading to an underutilization of the knowledge acquired during pre-training. To address this challenge, we propose ProCLIP, a curriculum learning-based progressive vision-language alignment framework to effectively align the CLIP image encoder with an LLM-based embedder. Specifically, ProCLIP first distills knowledge from CLIP's text encoder into the LLM-based embedder to leverage CLIP's rich pretrained knowledge while establishing initial alignment between the LLM embedder and CLIP image encoder. Subsequently, ProCLIP further aligns the CLIP image encoder with the LLM-based embedder through image-text contrastive tuning, employing self-distillation regularization to avoid overfitting. To achieve a more effective alignment, instance semantic alignment loss and embedding structure alignment loss are employed during representation inheritance and contrastive tuning. The Code is available at https://github.com/VisionXLab/ProCLIP.
comment: NeurIPS'26 Camera Ready
♻ ☆ PortraitAes: Intent-Conditioned Structured Portrait Aesthetic Assessment
Junzhou Xie, Haozhong Xiong, Xunyun Tian, Kaile Du, Tianchen Yu, Qiang Li, Wei Liu, Jiaming Liu, Ruihua Huang, Yang Shi, Guangcan Liu
Portrait aesthetic assessment assigns comparable scores according to how effectively human-centered images fulfill their photographic intent. These scores support data filtering, candidate selection, and preference modeling in image-generation pipelines. Existing methods typically predict a single aesthetic score or use general-purpose MLLMs without conditioning on photographic intent. This omission matters because the same blur, pose, lighting, or framing choice may serve one photographic intent but undermine another. These models thus learn context-agnostic aesthetic priors and yield inconsistent, inaccurate, misleading judgments for portraits with distinct photographic objectives. We introduce PortraitAes-Bench, an 11K-scale benchmark that decomposes this task into intent-conditioned subjudgments. Expert-authored rubrics define nine photographic intents, six first-level dimensions, and 22 secondary criteria. They support a structured pipeline for intent routing, specialist assessment, verification, and score fusion. Following this structure, we train PortraitAes with multi-task supervision. We then improve score comparability through Gaussian score calibration and within-dimension cross-image ranking. On the standard benchmark, PortraitAes achieves a Pearson correlation of 0.924 and a Spearman rank correlation of 0.934. On the hard-case set, its Pearson correlation is 0.829 and its Spearman rank correlation is 0.795. Across both sets, PortraitAes outperforms the evaluated general-purpose MLLMs and specialized aesthetic baselines.
♻ ☆ Do VLAs Really Follow Instructions? Diagnosing How-Level Instruction Following in Vision-Language-Action Models
Vision-language-action (VLA) models are expected to follow instructions like their language backbones, yet prior work has focused on What-level instructions that specify the task rather than How-level instructions that specify how to carry it out. Through our diagnoses, we find that How-level instructions do not help current VLAs and lower task success. We hypothesize that pairing each training episode with a single instruction limits How-level instruction following, and show that training with segment-level enriched instructions makes actions respond to such instructions without consistently raising task success. To measure How-level instruction following beyond standard benchmarks, we introduce SIMPLER-IN, where success requires conditions given only in the instruction. It shows that the gained responsiveness does not extend to demanding or out-of-distribution How-level instructions. How-level instruction following thus remains an open challenge.
comment: Preprint
♻ ☆ SGLDet: Spectral-aware Global-Local Dynamic Modeling for Multispectral Aerial Object Detection
Multispectral aerial object detection aims to exploit spectral-spatial cues to address object detection challenges in complex aerial scenes. Existing methods mainly focus on spectral-spatial decoupling and object-aware spectral-spatial fusion to improve spectral utilization. However, two critical issues remain underexplored: 1) severe foreground-background imbalance caused by large scene coverage hinders reliable object recognition; 2) aerial objects exhibit substantial local variations in scale, orientation, and structure, which hinder accurate localization. To address these issues, we propose SGLDet, a spectral-aware global-local dynamic modeling framework for multispectral aerial object detection, which is motivated by the observation that object semantics are jointly determined by global spectral consistency and scene context, while precise localization requires dynamic feature modulation conditioned on the input spectral and spatial properties. To realize these properties, SGLDet consists of three coordinated components: a Spectral-driven Global Dynamic Modeling module that aggregates spectrally related features across the scene via similarity-guided sparse matching; a Multi-scale Global Context Integration module that constructs a compact scene memory for scene-guided contextual reasoning; and a Spectral-aware Input-dependent Calibration Aggregation module that performs expert-kernel aggregation with scene-guided spectral-spatial calibration to enable adaptive local feature modulation. Extensive experiments on MODA, HOD3K, and DroneVehicle demonstrate that SGLDet achieves superior performance with competitive computational cost. Code is available at https://github.com/Riiluo/SGLDet.
comment: 13 pages
♻ ☆ MEgoVista: Multi-view Ego-aware Motion Estimation for Metric 4D Hands and Head in the Wild
Jiangong Xiao, Chao Ma, Zhihao Zhang, Yifei Dong, Zhouyi Jin, Zhiwen Hou, Haoyi Wang, Junle Yu, Amu Zheng, Chen Wang, Kaishu Lin, Hanwen Shi, Shiyun Zhang, Renquan Wan, Jingmei Jin, Xuan Hu, Weihuang Chen, Hongbin Sun, Jinli Suo, Maoqing Li, Li Liu, Maoqing Yao
Learning manipulation from human video requires high-fidelity hand-motion reconstruction in metric units. Today's metric hand labels come from studio rigs and instrumented headsets, and both are confined in the same two ways: neither leaves a prepared setting, and neither is checked against an independent reference. Unconstrained head-worn recording promises the opposite trade-off, scaling with the number of people wearing a device. We therefore introduce MEgoVista, an offline pipeline that turns a single unprepared MEgo View recording into metric two-hand and head motion in one gravity-aligned world frame. Three properties set it apart from existing egocentric reconstruction systems: first, it reconstructs in settings studio volumes and tabletop rigs cannot reach, settling hand ownership at detection so bystander hands stay out of the wearer's trajectory; second, it takes its metric gauge from calibrated stereo rather than a monocular prior, installing scale at initialisation so policies receive physical units, not arbitrary coordinates; third, both outputs are scored inside a motion-capture volume against independent Chingmu optical capture, under a protocol that audits its own reference and charges what a method declines to predict. MEgoVista is offered as a measured route from egocentric video to metric hand supervision, one that widens where such labels can be gathered. To bridge the gap between lab validation and industrial-scale data annotation, we further introduce MEgoDeploy, a production-grade GPU stack that fully preserves reconstruction fidelity while achieving a 14.05x end-to-end throughput speedup, scaling the generation of metric 4D pseudo-labels for embodied foundation models.
comment: 16 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables
♻ ☆ PosterHarness: Turning Scientific Poster Generation into an Auditable Instruction-Following Benchmark
Text-rich image models can now design poster-scale layouts, but we lack ways to measure whether they honor scientific communication contracts: legible labels, prescribed aspect ratios, and -- above all -- abstaining from fabricated scientific figures. We present POSTERHARNESS, an auditable harness reframing poster generation as measurable instruction-following tasks, with a pilot benchmark and failure taxonomy. POSTERHARNESS uses a placeholder-first contract to separate two jobs models otherwise conflate. The model performs visual-summary design: typography, reading path, color, and background -- but never draws data-bearing figures. Every figure region must be an empty labeled placeholder; a deterministic compositor inserts real source-paper figures at detected coordinates. This makes properties measurable: placeholder count and ID accuracy, blankness, aspect-ratio compliance, abstention from synthesized graphics, public-text hygiene, and source-figure provenance -- with failures logged as explicit rejections, not hidden in plausible-looking output. We instantiate the harness on 12 papers (6 HEP, 6 AI/ML-adjacent) and report three findings. (i) A counterfactual probe shows the placeholder contract drives VLM-counted synthesized figures from 34 to 0 across three papers. (ii) A failure taxonomy identifies blocking contracts: placeholder geometry, placeholder QA, template critic, and public text. (iii) Comparison with Paper2Poster shows a trade-off: PosterHarness yields higher-resolution artifacts, lower white-canvas fraction, and stronger VLM visual preference; the deterministic baseline retains slightly more PosterQuiz-style information and runs faster. We report this as regime characterization, not a superiority claim. All artifacts, prompts, manifests, and audit scripts are released as a reusable evaluation component.
♻ ☆ S$^3$E-Det: A Strict Spatial-Spectral Equivariant Detector for Multispectral Object Detection
Multispectral object detection requires detectors to exploit material-dependent spectral responses while maintaining consistent localization under geometric variations. Existing MOD detectors learn discriminative spectral representations, yet lack a unified mechanism that preserves spectral order, adapts spectral-context fusion across pyramid levels, and regulates geometric responses under rotation. To address these limitations, we propose S$^3$E-Det, a strict spatial-spectral equivariant detector that couples ordered spectral modeling with transformation-consistent prediction. Spectral Order-aware Sampling Calibration (SOSC) imposes local order constraints on input-derived spectral features through first-order variation, while Common-Differential Equivariant Fusion (CDEF) adapts spectral-context aggregation across pyramid levels. A compact Geometric Alignment Head (GAH) reconciles invariant and equivariant output properties within a unified prediction stage. Across MODA, HOD3K, and DroneVehicle, S$^3$E-Det combines high detection accuracy with a compact parameter footprint and reduced rotation-induced variation. Code is available at https://github.com/Riiluo/S3E-Det.
comment: 12 pages
♻ ☆ Decoupling candidate dual AGN from chance superpositions in the GOTHIC survey via a deep-learning framework
Bhavesh Mukheja, Snehanshu Saha, Anwesh Bhattacharya, Mousumi Das, Françoise Combes, Sudhanshu Barway
Dual active galactic nuclei (DAGN) mark a critical phase in the evolution of merging galaxies and the pairing of supermassive black holes, yet they remain difficult to identify in large imaging surveys because of projection effects and limited spatial resolution. Compact foreground stars and unresolved substructure can mimic dual nuclei through chance superposition, complicating automated detection. We revisit the 46,061 galaxies flagged but rejected as DAGN candidates by the GOTHIC pipeline, primarily because the two nuclei fell within the SDSS fibre aperture or exceeded its separation threshold. We train a supervised deep-learning framework based on the YOLOv11 oriented-bounding-box architecture on annotated SDSS imaging to separate genuine dual nuclei from foreground stellar contaminants and other spurious alignments. The final model attains a validation precision of 0.919, recall of 0.905, and $F_1$ of 0.912, and yields 29,605 dual-nucleus candidates after removing star-dominated and blended detections. Structured visual inspection indicates that $54.5$--$62\%$ are consistent with genuine dual nuclei, implying $\sim(1.4$--$1.8)\times10^{4}$ plausible systems. Cross-calibrating the YOLO separation against the deterministic GOTHIC centroid measurement and restricting to the compact regime ($d \le 6.87''$) gives a conservative subset of $\sim 13{,}672$ candidates, reaching calibrated separations of $\sim 0.56''$. Spectroscopy of the most compact ($\le 1$~kpc) systems shows spectra dominated by stellar absorption, with no resolved double-peaked emission, so confirmation requires higher-resolution follow-up. The catalogue is a statistically refined list of candidates, not confirmed DAGN. Nonetheless, deep-learning detection substantially reduces contamination and expands the plausible DAGN census.
comment: Submitted to MNRAS. Supplementary Material merged in the main text
♻ ☆ Beyond Legibility: Benchmarking Visual Text Rendering and In-Place Editing in Unified Video Generation
A video can exhibit convincing motion and photorealism yet fail immediately when visual text collapses. Unlike generic scene content, visual text is unforgiving in video generation: minor stroke corruption, temporal instability, or editing errors instantly break legibility and realism. Existing benchmarks overlook this challenge by treating text as incidental or using static OCR metrics that ignore temporal dynamics. We introduce VidScribe, a unified diagnostic benchmark spanning four generation regimes: writing from language (T2V), transferring text identity from a reference (R2V), sustaining text under dynamics (I2V), and localized text editing (V2V). VidScribe contains 803 human-verified samples across a 12-axis conditionally orthogonal factor space covering Intrinsic Text Properties, Physical Imaging Conditions, and Temporal Behavior. For reliable evaluation, we build a track-grounded, gated suite with 11 shared metrics and 2 task-specific probes under strict measurability conditions. Benchmarking 11 commercial and open-source systems shows that video text capability is non-monolithic, with content recognition decoupled from stroke-level glyph correctness. Performance is highly task-asymmetric: I2V sustains text most reliably, whereas V2V editing is the primary bottleneck. Counter-intuitively, degradation concentrates on a small subset of text-centric structural and temporal factors rather than adverse imaging conditions. Further probes show that visual references improve glyph and typographic fidelity rather than content accuracy, while localized editing fails to isolate target text without corrupting undeclared source text. Beyond evaluation, VidScribe also provides an actionable training signal, where benchmark-aligned preference optimization measurably improves visual text generation. https://huggingface.co/datasets/Vicky0720/VidScribe.
♻ ☆ UniField++: A Unified Agentic Framework with Loop Reasoning for MRI Field-Strength Enhancement
Yiyang Lin, Chenhui Wang, Tianliang Yao, Pengli Zhu, Shuaibo Li, Zijun Sun, Yiming Deng, Yixuan Yuan
MRI field-strength enhancement seeks to combine the accessibility of low-field scanners with the image quality of high-field scanners. Yet, existing methods remain prone to anatomical hallucinations, as uniform processing leaves difficult brain regions insufficiently examined and scarce paired data limit their learning of how tissue contrast and anatomical visibility change across field strengths. To address these challenges, we propose UniField++, a two-agent framework that unifies enhancement tasks across multiple field-strength transitions, including 64mT-to-3T and 3T-to-7T. Unified learning allows both the VLM-based planner and the flow-matching-based enhancer to draw on field-dependent image characteristics observed across tasks, rather than relying on a single transition. Trained with radiologists' annotations of hallucination-prone regions and corresponding correction plans, the planner predicts regional risk and formulates targeted restoration strategies. Guided by these plans, the enhancer performs loop reasoning along the flow-matching trajectory, repeatedly processing high-risk regions for additional refinement. Together, cross-transition learning and risk-guided refinement support anatomically faithful enhancement across field strengths. Across the evaluated tasks, UniField++ improves PSNR by an average of 2.74 dB and SSIM by 14.05 percentage points over comparison methods, with corresponding gains of 3.97 dB and 13.92 percentage points over the ablation baseline. It also maintains enhancement quality on an external cohort with an unseen field strength and improves downstream whole-brain segmentation Macro Dice by an average of 0.1457 over the original low-field images. Code is available at https://github.com/CUHK-AIM-Group/UniField_plusplus.
comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 8 tables
♻ ☆ Provably Contractive and High-Quality Denoisers for Convergent Restoration
Image restoration, the recovery of clean images from degraded measurements, has applications in various domains like surveillance, defense, and medical imaging. While modern convolutional and attention-based networks achieve strong restoration quality, they typically lack explicit stability guarantees under small input perturbations. In this work, we develop provably contractive denoiser networks with global Lipschitz constant smaller than one. Our design composes proximal layers obtained from unfolding techniques, with Lipschitz-controlled convolutional refinements. By contractivity, the proposed denoiser guarantees that input perturbations of strength $\|δ\|\leq \varepsilon$ induce at most $\varepsilon$ change at the output, whereas strong unconstrained baselines such as DnCNN and Restormer can exhibit larger deviations under the same perturbations. On image denoising, our model substantially improves over prior provably 1-Lipschitz / contractive baselines and narrows the gap to strong unconstrained denoisers. In addition, when used as a prior in Plug-and-Play restoration, the proposed denoiser yields provable convergence and strong empirical performance. Overall, our results show that strict Lipschitz control need not preclude practically competitive restoration quality, and suggest that stable, verifiable restoration models can be achieved without a severe loss in performance. Codes and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/SHUBHI1553/Contractive-Denoisers
♻ ☆ CertEx: Exact Visual Retrieval at Scale by Certified Exclusion
Exact $k$-nearest-neighbor (kNN) search over image descriptors and embeddings underlies visual retrieval, near-duplicate detection, the evaluation of learned representations, and increasingly the memory of LLM agents. However, exhaustive search computes every distance at full precision, whereas approximate indexes return recall below one. We observe that exact search only needs a proof that each excluded vector cannot be a neighbor. Because such a proof only has to be conservative, it can be checked in low precision, much as the retina examines the whole scene at low resolution. We call this principle certified exclusion and realize it in an exact kNN method for GPUs, which we call CertEx. Specifically, CertEx stores a lower-bounding projection of each vector in half precision and folds a rounding certificate into the same tensor-core dot product, so that only the few vectors that the test keeps need exact distances. We prove that CertEx returns the exact kNN of every query. On sixteen datasets with up to 100M vectors, CertEx is exact for every query at 7.1$\times$ to 18.0$\times$ the throughput of the fastest cuVS search on one H100 (8.8$\times$ to 11.8$\times$ on an A100) and outperforms quantized and graph indexes whenever every query must be exact.
comment: 17 pages, 9 figures
♻ ☆ Visual Evidence Under Cross-Examination: Evaluating and Controlling Decision-Level Evidence Use in Vision-Language Models
Vision-language models increasingly reason through crops, regions, and tool-produced observations. Yet an observation can influence the answer without benefiting the candidate it supports. We study candidate-bound visual contribution: valid evidence should help, invalidating its supporting relation should remove its additional effect, and valid rebinding should redirect that effect to the newly supported candidate. We introduce CROSS-Bench, a benchmark of 28,000 decision problems, with matched invalidation and rebinding tests on a dedicated evaluation subset. Our RIVET interface preserves evidence identity and uncertainty, composes a candidate-conditioned response, and separately controls its strength. Shared-evidence experiments show that task accuracy and evidence ownership can diverge. Under matched capacity and training, RIVET increases normalized effect transfer from 0.512 to 0.651 where clean evidence has a positive effect. The advantage persists on common evaluation examples and across repeated decision-layer fits. With evidence predicted from raw inputs, RIVET improves CROSS-Bench accuracy by an average of 5.70 pp across four frozen backbones, relative to the same models without auxiliary evidence. These results separate the utility of visual evidence from the candidate-specific destination of its effect.
♻ ☆ How to Teach Large Multimodal Models New Skills ECCV 2026
How can we teach large multimodal models (LMMs) new skills without erasing prior abilities? We study sequential fine-tuning on five target skills while monitoring general ability on eight held-out benchmarks across three model families. Surprisingly, we find that performance lost on held-out tasks after fine-tuning on one skill can partly recover when the model is subsequently tuned on a different skill. We trace this behavior to a measurable shift in the output token distribution, manifested through a simple counting-bias probe that shows the shift co-varies with forgetting. Guided by this insight, we identify two simple, robust tuning recipes that learn strongly while limiting drift: (i) updating only the self-attention projection layers (SA Proj., $Δ$ learning +24.9 / $Δ$ held-out forgetting -0.6), and (ii) updating only the MLP Gate&Up while freezing the Down projection (+30.5 / -2.1). Both substantially outperform full-LLM tuning (+31.8 / -23.3) in the learning-forgetting trade-off. We also compare against common forgetting mitigation methods: Learning without Forgetting (LwF), LoRA, Mixture-of-Experts, and weight-space interpolation (WiSE-FT), and find that our selective tuning recipes match or exceed their learning-stability balance while remaining simpler, requiring no replay, auxiliary parameters, or per-stage tuning. These results hold across LLaVA-OneVision, LLaVA-NeXT, and Qwen2.5-VL, confirming that the key to teaching LMMs new skills without forgetting lies in controlling output distribution shift by choosing which components to tune. Code will be made available.
comment: ECCV 2026 Spotlight. Code is available at https://github.com/jessemelpolio/LMM_CL
♻ ☆ ArtSeek: Deep artwork understanding via multimodal in-context reasoning and late interaction retrieval WACV 2027
Analyzing digitized artworks requires both visual interpretation and deep artistic, contextual, and historical knowledge. We introduce ArtSeek, a multimodal framework for art analysis that combines multimodal large language models with retrieval-augmented generation. Unlike prior work, our pipeline relies only on image input, so it applies to artworks without links to Wikidata or Wikipedia, common in most digitized collections. ArtSeek integrates three components: a late-interaction multimodal retrieval module, a contrastive multitask network predicting artist, genre, style, media, and tags, and an agentic reasoning strategy enabled through in-context examples. Central to this approach is WikiFragments, a dataset of image-text fragments extracted from the entire English Wikipedia to support knowledge-grounded multimodal reasoning. Our multimodal query encoding raises retrieval NDCG@5 from 33.9 to 44.9 over encoding the full image-text query, and fixed-budget token pooling keeps late-interaction search practical over millions of fragments at under 7% of the cost of full multi-vector retrieval. ArtSeek sets a new state of the art in artwork attribute classification, with +8.4% F1 in style classification over GraphCLIP, and gains +7.1 BLEU@1 on ArtPedia captioning. On five knowledge-grounded question answering benchmarks graded by an LLM judge from a different model family, retrieval helps where the answer is documented in our index or lies inside the classifier's label space (+0.19 mean correctness on two of them) and is neutral where it is not; what separates the two regimes is how much of a benchmark our knowledge base covers. The gain transfers to two non-Qwen backbones (+0.22 to +0.28). A blind human study and a qualitative analysis of successes and failures corroborate this picture and expose where retrieval still misleads. Data and code: https://cilab.di.uniba.it/artseek/
comment: Accepted at WACV 2027. 28 pages (10 main + 18 supplementary)
♻ ☆ Perceive, Predict, and Plan: a Unified World Action Model for Egocentric Dexterous Manipulation
Zirui Wu, Chen Guo, Tianjian Jiang, Zeren Jiang, Zeming Li, Lingchen Yang, Longteng Duan, Ying Xue, Handi Yin, Shenyuan Gao, Martin R. Oswald, Jun Zhang, Ping Tan, Jie Song
We introduce P$^{3}$-WAM, a unified world action model for egocentric dexterous manipulation that learns 3D perception, action-conditioned prediction, and goal-directed planning through three complementary modes: Perceive, which reconstructs articulated hand motion and camera trajectories from video; Predict, which generates visual futures under prescribed actions; and Plan, which jointly generates action trajectories and their anticipated visual consequences conditioned on an initial image, a language instruction, and an optional visual goal. Our model integrates a compact, structured 3D action representation into a pretrained video diffusion transformer through a mixture-of-transformers architecture with shared base weights, modality-specific adaptation, and bidirectional visual-action attention. Randomized modality visibility lets video and 3D actions serve as either conditioning context or prediction targets across the three modes. Experiments show that unified training improves all three capabilities over single-mode training, including gains in planning quality under a vision-language model evaluation. Through unified training, our model outperforms specialized baselines on 3D hand reconstruction and action-conditioned video prediction across four datasets, while producing goal-directed manipulation videos with stronger instruction adherence and action progression than video-generation baselines. Project Page: https://p3-wam.pages.dev/
♻ ☆ FiRe: Fine-grained Multimodal Reasoning for Enhanced Image Generation NeurIPS 2026
With the rapid progress of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), unified MLLMs that jointly perform image understanding and generation have advanced significantly. However, despite the inherent reasoning capabilities of unified MLLMs for self-reflection and self-refinement, their use in text-to-image generation remains largely underexplored. Meanwhile, existing multimodal reasoning-based image generation methods mostly rely on prompt augmentation or holistic image-text alignment judgments, without fine-grained reflection and refinement of detailed prompt attributes, leading to limited fine-grained control. To address this limitation, we propose FiRe, a Fine-grained Multimodal Reasoning method for enhanced image generation by MLLM. In specific, FiRe performs a fine-grained multi-step reasoning by first decomposing the prompt into key visual requirements and then self-judging their satisfaction in the generated image, followed by localized refinement according to self-generated precise feedback. In addition, to further strengthen the MLLM's multimodal reasoning ability, we introduce FiRe-GRPO, a reinforcement learning method tailored to FiRe. Since standard Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) suffers from sparse, outcome-based rewards in multi-step reasoning, we formulate our reasoning process as a step-level decision-making problem, design step-specific rewards, and compute step-level advantages for granular credit assignment within GRPO. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FiRe consistently outperforms competitive text-to-image baselines, including existing reasoning-based methods, with particularly substantial gains on compositional text-to-image benchmarks. Our project page is available at https://ku-agi.github.io/FiRe/
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ OpenMAP-HIE: Pathology Informed Score-based Diffusion Model for Unsupervised Neonatal Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy Lesion Segmentation
Accurate localization of neonatal hypoxic--ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) lesions on apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) images is clinically important but is limited by scarce expert annotations and substantial variation in lesion appearance. We propose OpenMAP-HIE, a pathology-informed score-based diffusion model for unsupervised HIE lesion localization without voxel-wise lesion supervision. A denoising diffusion model learns the healthy neonatal ADC distribution, while a ControlNet-based conditional branch preserves patient-specific anatomy. At inference, anomaly evidence is derived directly from differences between conditional and unconditioned noise predictions at independently evaluated diffusion noise levels, avoiding dependence on a final pseudo-healthy reconstruction or sequential reverse-diffusion chain. Based on the characteristic ADC reduction associated with acute HIE, only discrepancies consistent with the expected pathological direction are retained and aggregated across noise levels using a geometric mean. Spatial mean filtering further suppresses isolated responses. The framework was evaluated on the BONBID-HIE dataset. The ADC-only method achieved a Dice score of $0.283\pm0.244$, average precision of $0.505$, Hausdorff distance of $25.45\pm15.63$ mm, mean average surface distance of $9.40\pm8.49$ mm, and normalized surface distance of $0.355\pm0.236$, providing the best overlap and surface-distance performance among the evaluated unsupervised methods and Dice performance comparable to supervised ADC-only models. Optional population-derived ADC $Z$-map refinement further increased Dice to $0.602\pm0.269$. These findings support pathology-informed score discrepancies as a useful signal for neonatal HIE lesion localization, while highlighting remaining challenges in detecting small and low-contrast lesions.
comment: 22 pages, 4 figures, 9 tables
♻ ☆ PACE: Plan, Attend, Check, and Emit for Training-Free Response Timing in Streaming Video Understanding
Streaming video understanding requires a model to decide not only what to answer but also when to answer. Evidence arrives progressively, and recent benchmarks identify premature responses, issued before the queried event has concluded, as a recurring failure mode. Existing approaches often learn response timing through additional training, while training-free alternatives typically rely on scalar gating signals that do not explicitly represent when an answer becomes final. We organize chunk-wise streaming errors into three patterns: sampling variation can make an answer unstable, a stable answer may lack support in the observed video, or an answer may be supported by the current evidence while the event remains unfinished. We propose PACE (Plan, Attend, Check, and Emit), a training-free framework designed around these three failure modes. Given a question, PACE drafts a plan specifying what to observe and what will signal completion. As the stream unfolds, it invokes an off-the-shelf video LLM at informative moments, evaluates each draft for stability, grounding in its cited frames, and completion, and records verified observations in an event ledger. Experiments on ProactiveVideoQA and OVO-Bench Forward show that PACE improves over the official protocols by up to 5.9 average PAUC points and 6.2 average accuracy points across proprietary and open-source backbones, yielding state-of-the-art performance.
comment: Accepted at MMM 2027
♻ ☆ OACap: Caption-Guided Active Observation for Detailed Video Captioning
Unlike question answering, where a query specifies a perceptual target, open-ended detailed captioning must determine what evidence to acquire and how to integrate it into a coherent global description. We propose Observation-Adaptive Video Captioner (OACap), a caption-centered agent that turns unsupported or missing information into targeted observation requests, uses spatiotemporal tools to acquire evidence, and iteratively verifies and revises the caption. OACap captions consistently improve performance across general video-understanding benchmarks using a fixed text-only reader. To better diagnose the information they preserve, we introduce Factual-Semantic Captioning Bench (FSCap-Bench). Its Core-Support Factuality Score (CSFS) combines claim precision with importance-aware fact coverage and responds as expected to four controlled perturbation types on 93.0-98.3% of valid caption pairs. Its Cross-Modal Semantic Round-Trip Score (CSRS) measures semantic preservation through a video-caption-video-caption round trip by matching atomic facts from source and recovered captions. Together, they connect downstream textual-memory utility with factual and semantic preservation.
comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables. Technical report
♻ ☆ Hybrid-PCGC: Hybrid Point Cloud Geometry Compression Bridging Generalization-based Model and Implicit Neural Representation
Efficient point cloud geometry compression (PCGC) is essential for 3D sensing applications such as autonomous driving and digital twins. Hybrid methods combine the generalization of learned models with the adaptability of Implicit Neural Representations (INRs), but existing schemes often use complex architectures, rigid update strategies, and post-training weight compression, limiting adaptation efficiency and increasing bitstream overhead. This paper proposes Hybrid-PCGC, which formulates hybrid compression as a joint geometry-and-model bitrate allocation problem and optimizes instance-specific weight offsets as rate-constrained transmitted variables. It separates dataset-agnostic prior modeling from instance-specific adaptation through four components: a Frozen General Module (FGM), a Dual Trainable Adaptive Module (DTAM), an Adaptive Scope Controller (ASC), and a Supervised Offset Compression Module (SOCM). FGM captures global geometric regularities, while the parameter-efficient DTAM adapts to individual point clouds. ASC selects the update scope based on coding difficulty, and SOCM jointly optimizes and compresses weight offsets through differentiable entropy supervision during training. Experiments show that Hybrid-PCGC balances fidelity and bitrate, reducing bitrate by 13.96% and 16.33% over G-PCC on lossless and lossy benchmarks, respectively, and saving up to 12.33% bitrate over the state-of-the-art hybrid method on challenging dense point clouds.
comment: 8 pages, 10 figures
♻ ☆ Auto-Director: Leveraging Multi-Agent Collaboration for Autonomous Video Editing
Autonomous video editing from open-world resources remains a challenging problem in multimedia content creation. Retrieval-based methods are constrained by fixed source material and lack creative flexibility, while generative models struggle with long-horizon coherence and often diverge from user intent. Both paradigms fail to replicate the structured, multi-stage reasoning that underlies professional post-production. To address these limitations, we present Auto-Director, a tool-augmented multi-agent framework that mirrors professional editorial workflows: a Planning Agent decomposes abstract topics into fact-grounded scripts via retrieval-augmented planning; a Material Agent indexes open-world footage through shot segmentation and visual tagging; an Editor Agent assembles semantically aligned clips with MLLM-driven spatial adaptation; and a Critic Agent governs an iterative Reflect-and-Revise loop that checks scene-level alignment and pacing. To rigorously evaluate this new paradigm, we introduce VEdit-Bench, a benchmark of 100 expert-curated topics with human-annotated Golden Scripts and a five-dimensional metric suite covering Narrative Logic, Factual Accuracy, Semantic Alignment, Compositional Quality, and Stylistic Cohesion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Auto-Director significantly outperforms baseline methods in both automated metrics and human evaluation, effectively bridging the gap between amateurs and professional-grade video production.
comment: Accepted at MMM 2027
♻ ☆ JointLight: Human-Centric Video Relighting with Asynchronous RGB-Irradiance Joint Modeling
Understanding and modeling light transport in human-centric scenes is a longstanding challenge. While recent progress in diffusion models has boosted research in relighting, precise illumination control still lags, primarily due to the scarcity of diverse, high-quality, precisely labeled video relighting datasets. Existing end-to-end relighting approaches model light transport implicitly through neural networks, which substantially complicates controllability. In contrast, some works resort to path-traced irradiance cues as an explicit blueprint for light transport. However, such constructed irradiance cues are prone to artifacts and hinder generative quality when directly used as control signals. With the key observation that noise corruption removes high-frequency artifacts and preserves low-frequency light transport, we introduce an asynchronous joint-modeling paradigm that facilitates fine-grained illumination control. During two-stage training, we force the model to jointly denoise RGB and ground-truth irradiance frames with separate timesteps scheduling. A domain matching strategy is applied to the second stage to bridge the domain gap between irradiance cues and ground-truth irradiance maps. At inference time, we introduce an asynchronous hijacked generation pipeline that facilitates flexible illumination control. For training data, we develop a multi-illumination high-quality synthetic video dataset with paired irradiance maps using a powerful game engine. Trained exclusively on this dataset, our model exhibits robust generalization to real- world scenarios and outperforms prior approaches in both lighting fidelity and generative quality. Project page: http://www.geometrylearning.com/JointLight/
♻ ☆ DailyBench: A Unified Benchmark for AI-Generated and Manipulated Images from Modern Generative Models
Xin Jiang, Hao Tang, Junyao Gao, Zijie Yang, Meiqi Cao, Fei Shen, Dongming Zhang, Zechao Li, Yongdong Zhang
Recent advances in generative models have shifted AI-generated image detection from identifying easily distinguishable, fully synthetic images to identifying highly realistic content generated by both modern generation and manipulation pipelines. However, existing detection benchmarks are often built with outdated generative models and primarily emphasize full-image synthesis, creating a growing mismatch between benchmark data and the images encountered in real-world generation and editing scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce DailyBench, a high-quality unified benchmark for evaluating whether AI-generated image detectors can generalize across both modern full-image synthesis and object-level manipulation. DailyBench contains two complementary subsets: FakeBench, which includes high-quality images synthesized by recent open-source and commercial generative models, and ManipulationBench, which introduces challenging object-level edits applied to real images using advanced image-conditional models. This design makes DailyBench a realistic testbed for studying both generator-level generalization and manipulation-aware detection under subtle local edits. Experiments on DailyBench reveal substantial robustness gaps in current detectors: methods reporting 91-96% balanced accuracy on GenImage drop to 52-79% on FakeBench and 43-67% on ManipulationBench. These results show that existing detectors remain poorly generalized to realistic synthesis and manipulation, highlighting DailyBench as a rigorous testbed for developing robust and manipulation-aware AI-generated image detection methods. The project is available at https://dailybench.github.io/
comment: Errors for AP metric have been fixed; please refer to the latest submitted version
♻ ☆ Rethinking Underwater Image Enhancement: Learning through Text-Guided Degradation Curriculum
Hongri Tian, Wenxue Li, Tian Ye, Sixiang Chen, Zongxian Su, Lujia Wang, Xianying Wang, Xinhu Zheng, Gang Hua, Lei Zhu
Existing paired clean-degraded datasets have advanced learning-based underwater image enhancement, but they remain either limited in scale or difficult to acquire, and still fail to adequately cover the diverse degradations encountered in real-world underwater environments. Such scarce and insufficient data ultimately restrict the generalization of underwater image enhancement models, highlighting the need for realistic and controllable degradation modeling to better capture real underwater conditions and improve enhancement robustness. To this end, we propose a unified degradation-aware training framework for the underwater image enhancement task. A Text-Conditioned Degradation Augmentation Pipeline uses a text-guided diffusion model to synthesize diverse and semantically consistent degraded samples, providing paired data to support the subsequent curriculum learning strategy. The proposed Progressive Degradation Curriculum organizes training across multiple attributes and difficulty levels to promote balanced learning, and a Transmission-Guided One-Step Diffusion Model leverages this progressive process to better address the wide range of degradation severity and restoration ambiguity in underwater images. Extensive experiments on multiple underwater benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method achieves superior performance. Our code and models will be released upon the publication of this work.
♻ ☆ Can We Change "Stroke Size" to Simplify Flow Matching?
Deep-learning-based image generation models are useful but difficult to train. Across the different time steps along a generative path, high-noise states present distinct optimization and prediction challenges. Inspired by the varying stroke sizes used in human painting, we hypothesize that applying rough strokes early and fine strokes late can simplify flow-matching image generation. We develop MultiStroke, which progressively varies the spatial granularity of the clean-signal component in both the evolving state and velocity regression target while leaving the Gaussian component uncoarsened. A lightweight corrector aligns adjacent roughness levels during sampling. On ImageNet-1K, MultiStroke reduces FID by $22.5\%$ relative to a matched flow-matching baseline, despite the limited corrector capacity. Code is available at https://github.com/DaChengRuoQue/MultiStroke-Code. A quick video explanation is available at https://dachengruoque.github.io/MultiStroke-Web/.
♻ ☆ An Attribute-Based Measure of Video Complexity
Aditya Sarkar, Yi Li, Zihao Wang, Hao Yuan, Sai Vidyaranya Nuthalapati, Aashu Singh, Jiacheng Cheng, Ang Li, Shlok Kumar Mishra, David Jacobs, Nuno Vasconcelos
A new framework for the estimation of the complexity posed by video-question pairs to video-LLMs, Video Attribute-Based Complexity (VideoABC), is proposed. Video complexity is defined as the probability of failure of a video-LLM for a given video-question pair. VideoABC is a non-parametric complexity measure, using a reference video dataset and a pre-defined vocabulary of video attributes informative of complexity, e.g. the scene complexity or the speed of the video event relevant to the question. In a training phase, reference videos are projected into the space of these attributes, which is then quantized. The expected ABC of each quantization cell is then computed. Given a new video and its projection into the attribute space, complexity is estimated by the expected ABC of the associated quantization cell. To enable the use of VideoABC with small reference video datasets, two quantizers are combined: a k-means quantizer that enables accurate complexity estimates for samples in the distribution of the reference dataset and a universal lattice quantizer that guarantees generalization to out-of-distribution samples. A synthetic video generation procedure, inspired by target-distractor manipulations of psychophysics studies, is proposed to populate the cells of the lattice quantizer during training, enabling the computation of their expected ABCs. Experimental results show that VideoABC is effective even with very low-dimensional attribute representations, substantially outperforming approaches like 'video-LLM as judge' with much less complexity. Finally, the explainable nature of the VideoABC score, in terms of well-defined attributes, is shown to provide insights on how the attribute composition of benchmarks affects their complexity.
♻ ☆ Noise-Started One-Step Real-World Super-Resolution via LR-Conditioned SplitMeanFlow and GAN Refinement
Pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have shown strong potential for real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR), owing to their noise-started generation process that enables realistic texture synthesis and captures the one-to-many nature of super-resolution. However, diffusion-based Real-ISR methods still face a fundamental efficiency-quality trade-off. Multi-step methods generate high-quality results by iteratively denoising random Gaussian noise under LR conditioning, but suffer from slow sampling. Recent one-step methods greatly improve efficiency, yet they typically replace noise-started generation with direct LR-to-HR restoration, which weakens stochasticity and limits realistic detail synthesis. To address this issue, we propose SMFSR, a noise-started one-step Real-ISR framework via LR-conditioned SplitMeanFlow and GAN refinement. SMFSR preserves the random-noise starting point of diffusion models and learns a direct noise-to-HR mapping conditioned on the LR image. To this end, Interval Splitting Consistency distills the multi-step generative trajectory into a single average-velocity prediction, enabling efficient one-step generation. To compensate for the reduced opportunity for progressive refinement, we further introduce a GAN refinement stage, where a DINOv3-based discriminator enhances realistic texture synthesis and variational score distillation aligns the generated outputs with the natural image distribution under a frozen diffusion teacher. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SMFSR achieves state-of-the-art perceptual quality among one-step diffusion-based Real-ISR methods while retaining fast single-step inference.