Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 220
☆ OmniRoam: World Wandering via Long-Horizon Panoramic Video Generation
Yuheng Liu, Xin Lin, Xinke Li, Baihan Yang, Chen Wang, Kalyan Sunkavalli, Yannick Hold-Geoffroy, Hao Tan, Kai Zhang, Xiaohui Xie, Zifan Shi, Yiwei Hu
Modeling scenes using video generation models has garnered growing research interest in recent years. However, most existing approaches rely on perspective video models that synthesize only limited observations of a scene, leading to issues of completeness and global consistency. We propose OmniRoam, a controllable panoramic video generation framework that exploits the rich per-frame scene coverage and inherent long-term spatial and temporal consistency of panoramic representation, enabling long-horizon scene wandering. Our framework begins with a preview stage, where a trajectory-controlled video generation model creates a quick overview of the scene from a given input image or video. Then, in the refine stage, this video is temporally extended and spatially upsampled to produce long-range, high-resolution videos, thus enabling high-fidelity world wandering. To train our model, we introduce two panoramic video datasets that incorporate both synthetic and real-world captured videos. Experiments show that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality, controllability, and long-term scene consistency, both qualitatively and quantitatively. We further showcase several extensions of this framework, including real-time video generation and 3D reconstruction. Code is available at https://github.com/yuhengliu02/OmniRoam.
comment: Code is available at https://github.com/yuhengliu02/OmniRoam
☆ Video Models Reason Early: Exploiting Plan Commitment for Maze Solving
Video diffusion models exhibit emergent reasoning capabilities like solving mazes and puzzles, yet little is understood about how they reason during generation. We take a first step towards understanding this and study the internal planning dynamics of video models using 2D maze solving as a controlled testbed. Our investigations reveal two findings. Our first finding is early plan commitment: video diffusion models commit to a high-level motion plan within the first few denoising steps, after which further denoising alters visual details but not the underlying trajectory. Our second finding is that path length, not obstacle density, is the dominant predictor of maze difficulty, with a sharp failure threshold at 12 steps. This means video models can only reason over long mazes by chaining together multiple sequential generations. To demonstrate the practical benefits of our findings, we introduce Chaining with Early Planning, or ChEaP, which only spends compute on seeds with promising early plans and chains them together to tackle complex mazes. This improves accuracy from 7% to 67% on long-horizon mazes and by 2.5x overall on hard tasks in Frozen Lake and VR-Bench across Wan2.2-14B and HunyuanVideo-1.5. Our analysis reveals that current video models possess deeper reasoning capabilities than previously recognized, which can be elicited more reliably with better inference-time scaling.
☆ Benchmarking PhD-Level Coding in 3D Geometric Computer Vision CVPR 2026
AI-assisted coding has rapidly reshaped software practice and research workflows, yet today's models still struggle to produce correct code for complex 3D geometric vision. If models could reliably write such code, the research of our community would change substantially. To measure progress toward that goal, we introduce GeoCodeBench, a PhD-level benchmark that evaluates coding for 3D vision. Each problem is a fill-in-the-function implementation task curated from representative papers at recent venues: we first let a tool propose candidate functions from official repositories, then perform careful human screening to select core 3D geometric components. For every target, we generate diverse, edge-case unit tests, enabling fully automatic, reproducible scoring. We evaluate eight representative open- and closed-source models to reflect the current ecosystem. The best model, GPT-5, attains only 36.6% pass rate, revealing a large gap between current capabilities and dependable 3D scientific coding. GeoCodeBench organizes tasks into a two-level hierarchy: General 3D capability (geometric transformations and mechanics/optics formulation) and Research capability (novel algorithm implementation and geometric logic routing). Scores are positively correlated across these axes, but research-oriented tasks are markedly harder. Context ablations further show that "more paper text" is not always better: cutting off at the Method section statistically outperforms full-paper inputs, highlighting unresolved challenges in long-context scientific comprehension. Together, these findings position GeoCodeBench as a rigorous testbed for advancing from generic coding to trustworthy 3D geometric vision coding.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026; Project page: https://geocodebench.github.io/
☆ Conditional Polarization Guidance for Camouflaged Object Detection
Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to identify targets that are highly blended with their backgrounds. Recent works have shown that the optical characteristics of polarization cues play a significant role in improving camouflaged object detection. However, most existing polarization-based approaches depend on complex visual encoders and fusion mechanisms, leading to increased model complexity and computational overhead, while failing to fully explore how polarization can explicitly guide hierarchical RGB representation learning. To address these limitations, we propose CPGNet, an asymmetric RGB-polarization framework that introduces a conditional polarization guidance mechanism to explicitly regulate RGB feature learning for camouflaged object detection. Specifically, we design a lightweight polarization interaction module that jointly models these complementary cues and generates reliable polarization guidance in a unified manner. Unlike conventional feature fusion strategies, the proposed conditional guidance mechanism dynamically modulates RGB features using polarization priors, enabling the network to focus on subtle discrepancies between camouflaged objects and their backgrounds. Furthermore, we introduce a polarization edge-guided frequency refinement strategy that enhances high-frequency components under polarization constraints, effectively breaking camouflage patterns. Finally, we develop an iterative feedback decoder to perform coarse-to-fine feature calibration and progressively refine camouflage prediction. Extensive experiments on polarization datasets across multiple tasks, along with evaluations on non-polarization datasets, demonstrate that CPGNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, 4 tables
☆ SurgNavAR: An Augmented Reality Surgical Navigation Framework for Optical See-Through Head Mounted Displays IEEE
Abdullah Thabit, Mohamed Benmahdjoub, Rafiuddin Jinabade, Hizirwan S. Salim, Marie-Lise C. van Veelen, Mark G. van Vledder, Eppo B. Wolvius, Theo van Walsum
Augmented reality (AR) devices with head mounted displays (HMDs) facilitate the direct superimposition of 3D preoperative imaging data onto the patient during surgery. To use an HMD-AR device as a stand-alone surgical navigation system, the device should be able to locate the patient and surgical instruments, align preoperative imaging data with the patient, and visualize navigation data in real time during surgery. Whereas some of the technologies required for this are known, integration in such devices is cumbersome and requires specific knowledge and expertise, hampering scientific progress in this field. This work therefore aims to present and evaluate an integrated HMD-based AR surgical navigation framework that is adaptable to diverse surgical applications. The framework tracks 2D patterns as reference markers attached to the patient and surgical instruments. It allows for the calibration of surgical tools using pivot and reference-based calibration techniques. It enables image-to-patient registration using point-based matching and manual positioning. The integrated functionalities of the framework are evaluated on two HMD devices, the HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap 2, with two surgical use cases being evaluated in a phantom setup: AR-guided needle insertion and rib fracture localization. The framework was able to achieve a mean tooltip calibration accuracy of 1 mm, a registration accuracy of 3 mm, and a targeting accuracy below 5 mm on the two surgical use cases. The framework presents an easy-to-use configurable tool for HMD-based AR surgical navigation, which can be extended and adapted to many surgical applications. The framework is publicly available at https://github.com/abdullahthabit/SurgNavAR.
comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication
☆ Trimodal Deep Learning for Glioma Survival Prediction: A Feasibility Study Integrating Histopathology, Gene Expression, and MRI IEEE
Multimodal deep learning has improved prognostic accuracy for brain tumours by integrating histopathology and genomic data, yet the contribution of volumetric MRI within unified survival frameworks remains unexplored. This pilot study extends a bimodal framework by incorporating Fluid Attenuated Inversion Recovery (FLAIR) MRI from BraTS2021 as a third modality. Using the TCGA-GBMLGG cohort (664 patients), we evaluate three unimodal models, nine bimodal configurations, and three trimodal configurations across early, late, and joint fusion strategies. In this small cohort setting, trimodal early fusion achieves an exploratory Composite Score (CS = 0.854), with a controlled $Δ$CS of +0.011 over the bimodal baseline on identical patients, though this difference is not statistically significant (p = 0.250, permutation test). MRI achieves reasonable unimodal discrimination (CS = 0.755) but does not substantially improve bimodal pairs, while providing measurable uplift in the three-way combination. All MRI containing experiments are constrained to 19 test patients, yielding wide bootstrap confidence intervals (e.g. [0.400,1.000]) that preclude definitive conclusions. These findings provide preliminary evidence that a third imaging modality may add prognostic value even with limited sample sizes, and that additional modalities require sufficient multimodal context to contribute effectively.
comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, submitted to the IEEE CBMS 2026 conference, still waiting for notification
☆ Learning Structural-Functional Brain Representations through Multi-Scale Adaptive Graph Attention for Cognitive Insight IEEE
Understanding how brain structure and function interact is key to explaining intelligence yet modeling them jointly is challenging as the structural and functional connectome capture complementary aspects of organization. We introduced Multi-scale Adaptive Graph Network (MAGNet), a Transformer-style graph neural network framework that adaptively learns structure-function interactions. MAGNet leverages source-based morphometry from structural MRI to extract inter-regional morphological features and fuses them with functional network connectivity from resting-state fMRI. A hybrid graph integrates direct and indirect pathways, while local-global attention refines connectivity importance and a joint loss simultaneously enforces cross-modal coherence and optimizes the prediction objective end-to-end. On the ABCD dataset, MAGNet outperformed relevant baselines, demonstrating effective multimodal integration for advancing our understanding of cognitive function.
comment: Preprint version of the paper accepted to the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2026). This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published version will appear in IEEE Xplore
☆ Scaling Video Pretraining for Surgical Foundation Models
Sicheng Lu, Zikai Xiao, Jianhui Wei, Danyu Sun, Qi Lu, Keli Hu, Yang Feng, Jian Wu, Zongxin Yang, Zuozhu Liu
Surgical video understanding is essential for computer-assisted interventions, yet existing surgical foundation models remain constrained by limited data scale, procedural diversity, and inconsistent evaluation, often lacking a reproducible training pipeline. We propose SurgRec, a scalable and reproducible pretraining recipe for surgical video understanding, instantiated with two variants: SurgRec-MAE and SurgRec-JEPA. We curate a large multi-source corpus of 10,535 videos and 214.5M frames spanning endoscopy, laparoscopy, cataract, and robotic surgery. Building on this corpus, we develop a unified pretraining pipeline with balanced sampling and standardize a reproducible benchmark across 16 downstream datasets and four clinical domains with consistent data splits. Across extensive comparisons against SSL baselines and vision-language models, SurgRec consistently achieves superior performance across downstream datasets. In contrast, VLMs prove unreliable for fine-grained temporal recognition, exhibiting both performance gaps and sensitivity to prompt phrasing. Our work provides a reproducible, scalable foundation for the community to build more general surgical video models. All code, models, and data will be publicly released.
☆ SurgTEMP: Temporal-Aware Surgical Video Question Answering with Text-guided Visual Memory for Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy
Shi Li, Vinkle Srivastav, Nicolas Chanel, Saurav Sharma, Nabani Banik, Lorenzo Arboit, Kun Yuan, Pietro Mascagni, Nicolas Padoy
Surgical procedures are inherently complex and risky, requiring extensive expertise and constant focus to well navigate evolving intraoperative scenes. Computer-assisted systems such as surgical visual question answering (VQA) offer promises for education and intraoperative support. Current surgical VQA research largely focuses on static frame analysis, overlooking rich temporal semantics. Surgical video question answering is further challenged by low visual contrast, its highly knowledge-driven nature, diverse analytical needs spanning scattered temporal windows, and the hierarchy from basic perception to high-level intraoperative assessment. To address these challenges, we propose SurgTEMP, a multimodal LLM framework featuring (i) a query-guided token selection module that builds hierarchical visual memory (spatial and temporal memory banks) and (ii) a Surgical Competency Progression (SCP) training scheme. Together, these components enable effective modeling of variable-length surgical videos while preserving procedure-relevant cues and temporal coherence, and better support diverse downstream assessment tasks. To support model development, we introduce CholeVidQA-32K, a surgical video question answering dataset comprising 32K open-ended QA pairs and 3,855 video segments (approximately 128 h total) from laparoscopic cholecystectomy. The dataset is organized into a three-level hierarchy -- Perception, Assessment, and Reasoning -- spanning 11 tasks from instrument/action/anatomy perception to Critical View of Safety (CVS), intraoperative difficulty, skill proficiency, and adverse event assessment. In comprehensive evaluations against state-of-the-art open-source multimodal and video LLMs (fine-tuned and zero-shot), SurgTEMP achieves substantial performance improvements, advancing the state of video-based surgical VQA.
comment: 29 pages, 14 figures, 9 tables
☆ NeuroBRIDGE: Behavior-Conditioned Koopman Dynamics with Riemannian Alignment for Early Substance Use Initiation Prediction from Longitudinal Functional Connectome IEEE
Early identification of adolescents at risk for substance use initiation (SUI) is vital yet difficult, as most predictors treat connectivity as static or cross-sectional and miss how brain networks change over time and with behavior. We proposed NeuroBRIDGE (Behavior conditioned RIemannian Koopman Dynamics on lonGitudinal connEctomes), a novel graph neural network-based framework that aligns longitudinal functional connectome in a Riemannian tangent space and couples dual-time attention with behavioral-conditioned Koopman dynamics to capture temporal change. Evaluated on ABCD, NeuroBRIDGE improved future SUI prediction over relevant baselines while offering interpretable insights into neural pathways, refining our understanding of neurodevelopmental risk and informing targeted prevention.
comment: Preprint version of the paper accepted to the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2026). This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published version will appear in IEEE Xplore
☆ Detecting Unknown Objects via Energy-based Separation for Open World Object Detection CVPR 2026
In this work, we tackle the problem of Open World Object Detection (OWOD). This challenging scenario requires the detector to incrementally learn to classify known objects without forgetting while identifying unknown objects without supervision. Previous OWOD methods have enhanced the unknown discovery process and employed memory replay to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. However, since existing methods heavily rely on the detector's known class predictions for detecting unknown objects, they struggle to effectively learn and recognize unknown object representations. Moreover, while memory replay mitigates forgetting of old classes, it often sacrifices the knowledge of newly learned classes. To resolve these limitations, we propose DEUS (Detecting Unknowns via energy-based Separation), a novel framework that addresses the challenges of Open World Object Detection. DEUS consists of Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF)-Subspace Unknown Separation (EUS) and an Energy-based Known Distinction (EKD) loss. EUS leverages ETF-based geometric properties to create orthogonal subspaces, enabling cleaner separation between known and unknown object representations. Unlike prior energy-based approaches that consider only the known space, EUS utilizes energies from both spaces to better capture distinct patterns of unknown objects. Furthermore, EKD loss enforces the separation between previous and current classifiers, thus minimizing knowledge interference between previous and newly learned classes during memory replay. We thoroughly validate DEUS on OWOD benchmarks, demonstrating outstanding performance improvements in unknown detection while maintaining competitive known class performance.
comment: 8 pages, Accepted at CVPR 2026
☆ EC-Bench: Enumeration and Counting Benchmark for Ultra-Long Videos
Fumihiko Tsuchiya, Taiki Miyanishi, Mahiro Ukai, Nakamasa Inoue, Shuhei Kurita, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo
Counting in long videos remains a fundamental yet underexplored challenge in computer vision. Real-world recordings often span tens of minutes or longer and contain sparse, diverse events, making long-range temporal reasoning particularly difficult. However, most existing video counting benchmarks focus on short clips and evaluate only the final numerical answer, providing little insight into what should be counted or whether models consistently identify relevant instances across time. We introduce EC-Bench, a benchmark that jointly evaluates enumeration, counting, and temporal evidence grounding in long-form videos. EC-Bench contains 152 videos longer than 30 minutes and 1,699 queries paired with explicit evidence spans. Across 22 multimodal large language models (MLLMs), the best model achieves only 29.98% accuracy on Enumeration and 23.74% on Counting, while human performance reaches 78.57% and 82.97%, respectively. Our analysis reveals strong relationships between enumeration accuracy, temporal grounding, and counting performance. These results highlight fundamental limitations of current MLLMs and establish EC-Bench as a challenging benchmark for long-form quantitative video reasoning.
comment: The first two authors are equally contributed. The data and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/matsuolab/EC-Bench
☆ Better than Average: Spatially-Aware Aggregation of Segmentation Uncertainty Improves Downstream Performance CVPR 2026
Vanessa Emanuela Guarino, Claudia Winklmayr, Jannik Franzen, Josef Lorenz Rumberger, Manuel Pfeuffer, Sonja Greven, Klaus Maier-Hein, Carsten T. Lüth, Christoph Karg, Dagmar Kainmueller
Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is crucial for ensuring the reliability of automated image segmentations in safety-critical domains like biomedical image analysis or autonomous driving. In segmentation, UQ generates pixel-wise uncertainty scores that must be aggregated into image-level scores for downstream tasks like Out-of-Distribution (OoD) or failure detection. Despite routine use of aggregation strategies, their properties and impact on downstream task performance have not yet been comprehensively studied. Global Average is the default choice, yet it does not account for spatial and structural features of segmentation uncertainty. Alternatives like patch-, class- and threshold-based strategies exist, but lack systematic comparison, leading to inconsistent reporting and unclear best practices. We address this gap by (1) formally analyzing properties, limitations, and pitfalls of common strategies; (2) proposing novel strategies that incorporate spatial uncertainty structure and (3) benchmarking their performance on OoD and failure detection across ten datasets that vary in image geometry and structure. We find that aggregators leveraging spatial structure yield stronger performance in both downstream tasks studied. However, the performance of individual aggregators depends heavily on dataset characteristics, so we (4) propose a meta-aggregator that integrates multiple aggregators and performs robustly across datasets.
comment: 27 pages, 13 figures, 6 tables. Accepted at CVPR 2026 (The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026)
☆ Gloria: Consistent Character Video Generation via Content Anchors CVPR2026
Digital characters are central to modern media, yet generating character videos with long-duration, consistent multi-view appearance and expressive identity remains challenging. Existing approaches either provide insufficient context to preserve identity or leverage non-character-centric information as the memory, leading to suboptimal consistency. Recognizing that character video generation inherently resembles an outside-looking-in scenario. In this work, we propose representing the character visual attributes through a compact set of anchor frames. This design provides stable references for consistency, while reference-based video generation inherently faces challenges of copy-pasting and multi-reference conflicts. To address these, we introduce two mechanisms: Superset Content Anchoring, providing intra- and extra-training clip cues to prevent duplication, and RoPE as Weak Condition, encoding positional offsets to distinguish multiple anchors. Furthermore, we construct a scalable pipeline to extract these anchors from massive videos. Experiments show our method generates high-quality character videos exceeding 10 minutes, and achieves expressive identity and appearance consistency across views, surpassing existing methods.
comment: Accepted by CVPR2026 Main, project: https://yyvhang.github.io/Gloria_Page/
☆ End-to-End Image Compression with Segmentation Guided Dual Coding for Wind Turbines
Transferring large volumes of high-resolution images during wind turbine inspections introduces a bottleneck in assessing and detecting severe defects. Efficient coding must preserve high fidelity in blade regions while aggressively compressing the background. In this work, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework that jointly performs segmentation and dual-mode (lossy and lossless) compression. The segmentation module accurately identifies the blade region, after which our region-of-interest (ROI) compressor encodes it at superior quality compared to the rest of the image. Unlike conventional ROI schemes that merely allocate more bits to salient areas, our framework integrates: (i) a robust segmentation network (BU-Netv2+P) with a CRF-regularized loss for precise blade localization, (ii) a hyperprior-based autoencoder optimized for lossy compression, and (iii) an extended bits-back coder with hierarchical models for fully lossless blade reconstruction. Furthermore, our ROI framework removes the sequential dependency in bits-back coding by reusing background-coded bits, enabling parallelized and efficient dual-mode compression. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully integrated learning-based ROI codec combining segmentation, lossy, and lossless compression, ensuring that subsequent defect detection is not compromised. Experiments on a large-scale wind turbine dataset demonstrate superior compression performance and efficiency, offering a practical solution for automated inspections.
comment: Accepted to TNNLS 2026
☆ Abstraction in Style
Artistic styles often embed abstraction beyond surface appearance, involving deliberate reinterpretation of structure rather than mere changes in texture or color. Conventional style transfer methods typically preserve the input geometry and therefore struggle to capture this deeper abstraction behavior, especially for illustrative and nonphotorealistic styles. In this work, we introduce Abstraction in Style (AiS), a generative framework that separates structural abstraction from visual stylization. Given a target image and a small set of style exemplars, AiS first derives an intermediate abstraction proxy that reinterprets the target's structure in accordance with the abstraction logic exhibited by the style. The proxy captures semantic structure while relaxing geometric fidelity, enabling subsequent stylization to operate on an abstracted representation rather than the original image. In a second stage, the abstraction proxy is rendered to produce the final stylized output, preserving visual coherence with the reference style. Both stages are implemented using a shared image space analogy, enabling transformations to be learned from visual exemplars without explicit geometric supervision. By decoupling abstraction from appearance and treating abstraction as an explicit, transferable process, AiS supports a wider range of stylistic transformations, improves controllability, and enables more expressive stylization.
comment: siggraph 2026 conditionally accepted paper
☆ Training deep learning based dynamic MR image reconstruction using synthetic fractals
Anirudh Raman, Olivier Jaubert, Mark Wrobel, Tina Yao, Ruaraidh Campbell, Rebecca Baker, Ruta Virsinskaite, Daniel Knight, Michael Quail, Jennifer Steeden, Vivek Muthurangu
Purpose: To investigate whether synthetically generated fractal data can be used to train deep learning (DL) models for dynamic MRI reconstruction, thereby avoiding the privacy, licensing, and availability limitations associated with cardiac MR training datasets. Methods: A training dataset was generated using quaternion Julia fractals to produce 2D+time images. Multi-coil MRI acquisition was simulated to generate paired fully sampled and radially undersampled k-space data. A 3D UNet deep artefact suppression model was trained using these fractal data (F-DL) and compared with an identical model trained on cardiac MRI data (CMR-DL). Both models were evaluated on prospectively acquired radial real-time cardiac MRI from 10 patients. Reconstructions were compared against compressed sensing(CS) and low-rank deep image prior (LR-DIP). All reconstrctuions were ranked for image quality, while ventricular volumes and ejection fraction were compared with reference breath-hold cine MRI. Results: There was no significant difference in qualitative ranking between F-DL and CMR-DL (p=0.9), while both outperformed CS and LR-DIP (p<0.001). Ventricular volumes and function derived from F-DL were similar to CMR-DL, showing no significant bias and accptable limits of agreement compared to reference cine imaging. However, LR-DIP had a signifcant bias (p=0.016) and wider lmits of agreement. Conclusion: DL models trained using synthetic fractal data can reconstruct real-time cardiac MRI with image quality and clinical measurements comparable to models trained on true cardiac MRI data. Fractal training data provide an open, scalable alternative to clinical datasets and may enable development of more generalisable DL reconstruction models for dynamic MRI.
☆ Diffusion-Based Feature Denoising with NNMF for Robust handwritten digit multi-class classification
This work presents a robust multi-class classification framework for handwritten digits that combines diffusion-driven feature denoising with a hybrid feature representation. Inspired by our previous work on brain tumor classification, the proposed approach operates in a feature space to improve the robustness to noise and adversarial attacks. First, the input images are converted into tight, interpretable exemplification using Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NNMF). In parallel, special deep features are extracted using a computational neural network (CNN). These integral features are combined into a united hybrid representation. To improve robustness, a step diffusion operation is used in the feature space by gradually adding Gaussian noise. A feature denoiser network is trained to reverse this operation and rebuild clean representations from tilted inputs. The courteous features are then applied for multi-class classification. The suggested method is evaluated in both baseline and adversarial settings using AutoAttack. The experimental outcome present that the diffusion-based hybrid model is both effective and robust, the CNN baseline models outperforming while maintain powerful classification performance. These results explain the activity of feature-level diffusion defense for reliable multi-class handwritten digit classification.
☆ Less Is More? Selective Visual Attention to High-Importance Regions for Multimodal Radiology Summarization
Mst. Fahmida Sultana Naznin, Adnan Ibney Faruq, Mushfiqur Rahman, Niloy Kumar Mondal, Md. Mehedi Hasan Shawon, Md Rakibul Hasan
Automated radiology report summarization aims to distill verbose findings into concise clinical impressions, but existing multimodal models often struggle with visual noise and fail to meaningfully improve over strong text-only baselines in the FINDINGS $\to$ IMPRESSION transformation. We challenge two prevailing assumptions: (1) that more visual input is always better, and (2) that multimodal models add limited value when findings already contain rich image-derived detail. Through controlled ablations on MIMIC-CXR benchmark, we show that selectively focusing on pathology-relevant visual patches rather than full images yields substantially better performance. We introduce ViTAS, Visual-Text Attention Summarizer, a multi-stage pipeline that combines ensemble-guided MedSAM2 lung segmentation, bidirectional cross-attention for multi-view fusion, Shapley-guided adaptive patch clustering, and hierarchical visual tokenization feeding a ViT. ViTAS achieves SOTA results with 29.25% BLEU-4 and 69.83% ROUGE-L, improved factual alignment in qualitative analysis, and the highest expert-rated human evaluation scores. Our findings demonstrate that less but more relevant visual input is not only sufficient but superior for multimodal radiology summarization.
☆ DIAL: Decoupling Intent and Action via Latent World Modeling for End-to-End VLA
The development of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models has been significantly accelerated by pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, most existing end-to-end VLAs treat the VLM primarily as a multimodal encoder, directly mapping vision-language features to low-level actions. This paradigm underutilizes the VLM's potential in high-level decision making and introduces training instability, frequently degrading its rich semantic representations. To address these limitations, we introduce DIAL, a framework bridging high-level decision making and low-level motor execution through a differentiable latent intent bottleneck. Specifically, a VLM-based System-2 performs latent world modeling by synthesizing latent visual foresight within the VLM's native feature space; this foresight explicitly encodes intent and serves as the structural bottleneck. A lightweight System-1 policy then decodes this predicted intent together with the current observation into precise robot actions via latent inverse dynamics. To ensure optimization stability, we employ a two-stage training paradigm: a decoupled warmup phase where System-2 learns to predict latent futures while System-1 learns motor control under ground-truth future guidance within a unified feature space, followed by seamless end-to-end joint optimization. This enables action-aware gradients to refine the VLM backbone in a controlled manner, preserving pre-trained knowledge. Extensive experiments on the RoboCasa GR1 Tabletop benchmark show that DIAL establishes a new state-of-the-art, achieving superior performance with 10x fewer demonstrations than prior methods. Furthermore, by leveraging heterogeneous human demonstrations, DIAL learns physically grounded manipulation priors and exhibits robust zero-shot generalization to unseen objects and novel configurations during real-world deployment on a humanoid robot.
comment: Project page: https://xpeng-robotics.github.io/dial
☆ Toward Generalizable Whole Brain Representations with High-Resolution Light-Sheet Data CVPR 2026
Unprecedented visual details of biological structures are being revealed by subcellular-resolution whole-brain 3D microscopy data, enabled by recent advances in intact tissue processing and light-sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM). These volumetric data offer rich morphological and spatial cellular information, however, the lack of scalable data processing and analysis methods tailored to these petabyte-scale data poses a substantial challenge for accurate interpretation. Further, existing models for visual tasks such as object detection and classification struggle to generalize to this type of data. To accelerate the development of suitable methods and foundational models, we present CANVAS, a comprehensive set of high-resolution whole mouse brain LSFM benchmark data, encompassing six neuronal and immune cell-type markers, along with cell annotations and a leaderboard. We also demonstrate challenges in generalization of baseline models built on existing architectures, especially due to the heterogeneity in cellular morphology across phenotypes and anatomical locations in the brain. To the best of our knowledge, CANVAS is the first and largest LSFM benchmark that captures intact mouse brain tissue at subcellular level, and includes extensive annotations of cells throughout the brain.
comment: 21 pages, 12 figures. Accepted at CVPR 2026
☆ AutoFormBench: Benchmark Dataset for Automating Form Understanding
Automated processing of structured documents such as government forms, healthcare records, and enterprise invoices remains a persistent challenge due to the high degree of layout variability encountered in real-world settings. This paper introduces AutoFormBench, a benchmark dataset of 407 annotated real-world forms spanning government, healthcare, and enterprise domains, designed to train and evaluate form element detection models. We present a systematic comparison of classical OpenCV approaches and four YOLO architectures (YOLOv8, YOLOv11, YOLOv26-s, and YOLOv26-l) for localizing and classifying fillable form elements. specifically checkboxes, input lines, and text boxes across diverse PDF document types. YOLOv11 demonstrates consistently superior performance in both F1 score and Jaccard accuracy across all element classes and tolerance levels.
comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables
☆ SceneTeract: Agentic Functional Affordances and VLM Grounding in 3D Scenes
Léopold Maillard, Francis Engelmann, Tom Durand, Boxiao Pan, Yang You, Or Litany, Leonidas Guibas, Maks Ovsjanikov
Embodied AI depends on interactive 3D environments that support meaningful activities for diverse users, yet assessing their functional affordances remains a core challenge. We introduce SceneTeract, a framework that verifies 3D scene functionality under agent-specific constraints. Our core contribution is a grounded verification engine that couples high-level semantic reasoning with low-level geometric checks. SceneTeract decomposes complex activities into sequences of atomic actions and validates each step against accessibility requirements (e.g., reachability, clearance, and navigability) conditioned on an embodied agent profile, using explicit physical and geometric simulations. We deploy SceneTeract to perform an in-depth evaluation of (i) synthetic indoor environments, uncovering frequent functional failures that prevent basic interactions, and (ii) the ability of frontier Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to reason about and predict functional affordances, revealing systematic mismatches between semantic confidence and physical feasibility even for the strongest current models. Finally, we leverage SceneTeract as a reward engine for VLM post-training, enabling scalable distillation of geometric constraints into reasoning models. We release the SceneTeract verification suite and data to bridge perception and physical reality in embodied 3D scene understanding.
comment: Project page: https://sceneteract.github.io/
☆ Multi-Feature Fusion Approach for Generative AI Images Detection IEEE
The rapid evolution of Generative AI (GenAI) models has led to synthetic images of unprecedented realism, challenging traditional methods for distinguishing them from natural photographs. While existing detectors often rely on single-feature spaces, such as statistical regularities, semantic embeddings, or texture patterns, these approaches tend to lack robustness when confronted with diverse and evolving generative models. In this work, we investigate and systematically evaluate a multi-feature fusion framework that combines complementary cues from three distinct spaces: (1) Mean Subtracted Contrast Normalized (MSCN) features capturing low-level statistical deviations; (2) CLIP embeddings encoding high-level semantic coherence; and (3) Multi-scale Local Binary Patterns (MLBP) characterizing mid-level texture anomalies. Through extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets covering a wide range of generative models, we show that individual feature spaces exhibit significant performance variability across different generators. Crucially, the fusion of all three representations yields superior and more consistent performance, particularly in a challenging mixed-model scenario. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, the proposed framework yields consistently improved performance across all evaluated datasets. Overall, this work highlights the importance of hybrid representations for robust GenAI image detection and provides a principled framework for integrating complementary visual cues.
comment: This work has been submitted to IEEE Transactions for possible publication
☆ MAPLE: Multi-Path Adaptive Propagation with Level-Aware Embeddings for Hierarchical Multi-Label Image Classification
Hierarchical multi-label classification (HMLC) is essential for modeling structured label dependencies in remote sensing. Yet existing approaches struggle in multi-path settings, where images may activate multiple taxonomic branches, leading to underuse of hierarchical information. We propose MAPLE (Multi-Path Adaptive Propagation with Level-Aware Embeddings), a framework that integrates (i) hierarchical semantic initialization from graph-aware textual descriptions, (ii) graph-based structure encoding via graph convolutional networks (GCNs), and (iii) adaptive multi-modal fusion that dynamically balances semantic priors and visual evidence. An adaptive level-aware objective automatically selects appropriate losses per hierarchy level. Evaluations on CORINE-aligned remote sensing datasets (AID, DFC-15, and MLRSNet) show consistent improvements of up to +42% in few-shot regimes while adding only 2.6% parameter overhead, demonstrating that MAPLE effectively and efficiently models hierarchical semantics for Earth observation (EO).
comment: REO: Advances in Representation Learning for Earth Observation, accepted workshow paper at EurIPS
☆ From Skeletons to Semantics: Design and Deployment of a Hybrid Edge-Based Action Detection System for Public Safety IEEE
Public spaces such as transport hubs, city centres, and event venues require timely and reliable detection of potentially violent behaviour to support public safety. While automated video analysis has made significant progress, practical deployment remains constrained by latency, privacy, and resource limitations, particularly under edge-computing conditions. This paper presents the design and demonstrator-based deployment of a hybrid edge-based action detection system that combines skeleton-based motion analysis with vision-language models for semantic scene interpretation. Skeleton-based processing enables continuous, privacy-aware monitoring with low computational overhead, while vision-language models provide contextual understanding and zero-shot reasoning capabilities for complex and previously unseen situations. Rather than proposing new recognition models, the contribution focuses on a system-level comparison of both paradigms under realistic edge constraints. The system is implemented on a GPU-enabled edge device and evaluated with respect to latency, resource usage, and operational trade-offs using a demonstrator-based setup. The results highlight the complementary strengths and limitations of motioncentric and semantic approaches and motivate a hybrid architecture that selectively augments fast skeletonbased detection with higher-level semantic reasoning. The presented system provides a practical foundation for privacy-aware, real-time video analysis in public safety applications.
comment: Preprint version of a manuscript currently under review at IEEE Access
☆ Beyond Ground-Truth: Leveraging Image Quality Priors for Real-World Image Restoration CVPR
Fengyang Xiao, Peng Hu, Lei Xu, XingE Guo, Guanyi Qin, Yuqi Shen, Chengyu Fang, Rihan Zhang, Chunming He, Sina Farsiu
Real-world image restoration aims to restore high-quality (HQ) images from degraded low-quality (LQ) inputs captured under uncontrolled conditions. Existing methods typically depend on ground-truth (GT) supervision, assuming that GT provides perfect reference quality. However, GT can still contain images with inconsistent perceptual fidelity, causing models to converge to the average quality level of the training data rather than achieving the highest perceptual quality attainable. To address these problems, we propose a novel framework, termed IQPIR, that introduces an Image Quality Prior (IQP)-extracted from pre-trained No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) models-to guide the restoration process toward perceptually optimal outputs explicitly. Our approach synergistically integrates IQP with a learned codebook prior through three key mechanisms: (1) a quality-conditioned Transformer, where NR-IQA-derived scores serve as conditioning signals to steer the predicted representation toward maximal perceptual quality. This design provides a plug-and-play enhancement compatible with existing restoration architectures without structural modification; and (2) a dual-branch codebook structure, which disentangles common and HQ-specific features, ensuring a comprehensive representation of both generic structural information and quality-sensitive attributes; and (3) a discrete representation-based quality optimization strategy, which mitigates over-optimization effects commonly observed in continuous latent spaces. Extensive experiments on real-world image restoration demonstrate that our method not only surpasses cutting-edge methods but also serves as a generalizable quality-guided enhancement strategy for existing methods. The code is available.
comment: Accepted by CVPR
☆ TSHA: A Benchmark for Visual Language Models in Trustworthy Safety Hazard Assessment Scenarios
Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have accelerated their application to indoor safety hazards assessment. However, existing benchmarks suffer from three fundamental limitations: (1) heavy reliance on synthetic datasets constructed via simulation software, creating a significant domain gap with real-world environments; (2) oversimplified safety tasks with artificial constraints on hazard and scene types, thereby limiting model generalization; and (3) absence of rigorous evaluation protocols to thoroughly assess model capabilities in complex home safety scenarios. To address these challenges, we introduce TSHA (\textbf{T}rustworthy \textbf{S}afety \textbf{H}azards \textbf{A}ssessment), a comprehensive benchmark comprising 81,809 carefully curated training samples drawn from four complementary sources: existing indoor datasets, internet images, AIGC images, and newly captured images. This benchmark set also includes a highly challenging test set with 1707 samples, comprising not only a carefully selected subset from the training distribution but also newly added videos and panoramic images containing multiple safety hazards, used to evaluate the model's robustness in complex safety scenarios. Extensive experiments on 23 popular VLMs demonstrate that current VLMs lack robust capabilities for safety hazard assessment. Importantly, models trained on the TSHA training set not only achieve a significant performance improvement of up to +18.3 points on the TSHA test set but also exhibit enhanced generalizability across other benchmarks, underscoring the substantial contribution and importance of the TSHA benchmark.
☆ SHIFT: Stochastic Hidden-Trajectory Deflection for Removing Diffusion-based Watermark
Diffusion-based watermarking methods embed verifiable marks by manipulating the initial noise or the reverse diffusion trajectory. However, these methods share a critical assumption: verification can succeed only if the diffusion trajectory can be faithfully reconstructed. This reliance on trajectory recovery constitutes a fundamental and exploitable vulnerability. We propose $\underline{\mathbf{S}}$tochastic $\underline{\mathbf{Hi}}$dden-Trajectory De$\underline{\mathbf{f}}$lec$\underline{\mathbf{t}}$ion ($\mathbf{SHIFT}$), a training-free attack that exploits this common weakness across diverse watermarking paradigms. SHIFT leverages stochastic diffusion resampling to deflect the generative trajectory in latent space, making the reconstructed image statistically decoupled from the original watermark-embedded trajectory while preserving strong visual quality and semantic consistency. Extensive experiments on nine representative watermarking methods spanning noise-space, frequency-domain, and optimization-based paradigms show that SHIFT achieves 95%--100% attack success rates with nearly no loss in semantic quality, without requiring any watermark-specific knowledge or model retraining.
☆ GRVS: a Generalizable and Recurrent Approach to Monocular Dynamic View Synthesis CVPR
Thomas Tanay, Mohammed Brahimi, Michal Nazarczuk, Qingwen Zhang, Sibi Catley-Chandar, Arthur Moreau, Zhensong Zhang, Eduardo Pérez-Pellitero
Synthesizing novel views from monocular videos of dynamic scenes remains a challenging problem. Scene-specific methods that optimize 4D representations with explicit motion priors often break down in highly dynamic regions where multi-view information is hard to exploit. Diffusion-based approaches that integrate camera control into large pre-trained models can produce visually plausible videos but frequently suffer from geometric inconsistencies across both static and dynamic areas. Both families of methods also require substantial computational resources. Building on the success of generalizable models for static novel view synthesis, we adapt the framework to dynamic inputs and propose a new model with two key components: (1) a recurrent loop that enables unbounded and asynchronous mapping between input and target videos and (2) an efficient use of plane sweeps over dynamic inputs to disentangle camera and scene motion, and achieve fine-grained, six-degrees-of-freedom camera controls. We train and evaluate our model on the UCSD dataset and on Kubric-4D-dyn, a new monocular dynamic dataset featuring longer, higher resolution sequences with more complex scene dynamics than existing alternatives. Our model outperforms four Gaussian Splatting-based scene-specific approaches, as well as two diffusion-based approaches in reconstructing fine-grained geometric details across both static and dynamic regions.
comment: CVPR Findings 2026
☆ Leveraging Synthetic Data for Enhancing Egocentric Hand-Object Interaction Detection
In this work, we explore the role of synthetic data in improving the detection of Hand-Object Interactions from egocentric images. Through extensive experimentation and comparative analysis on VISOR, EgoHOS, and ENIGMA-51 datasets, our findings demonstrate the potential of synthetic data to significantly improve HOI detection, particularly when real labeled data are scarce or unavailable. By using synthetic data and only 10% of the real labeled data, we achieve improvements in Overall AP over models trained exclusively on real data, with gains of +5.67% on VISOR, +8.24% on EgoHOS, and +11.69% on ENIGMA-51. Furthermore, we systematically study how aligning synthetic data to specific real-world benchmarks with respect to objects, grasps, and environments, showing that the effectiveness of synthetic data consistently improves with better synthetic-real alignment. As a result of this work, we release a new data generation pipeline and the new HOI-Synth benchmark, which augments existing datasets with synthetic images of hand-object interaction. These data are automatically annotated with hand-object contact states, bounding boxes, and pixel-wise segmentation masks. All data, code, and tools for synthetic data generation are available at: https://fpv-iplab.github.io/HOI-Synth/.
☆ Compressive sensing inspired self-supervised single-pixel imaging
Single-pixel imaging (SPI) is a promising imaging modality with distinctive advantages in strongly perturbed environments. Existing SPI methods lack physical sparsity constraints and overlook the integration of local and global features, leading to severe noise vulnerability, structural distortions and blurred details. To address these limitations, we propose SISTA-Net, a compressive sensing-inspired self-supervised method for single-pixel imaging. SISTA-Net unfolds the Iterative Shrinkage-Thresholding Algorithm (ISTA) into an interpretable network consisting of a data fidelity module and a proximal mapping module. The fidelity module adopts a hybrid CNN-Visual State Space Model (VSSM) architecture to integrate local and global feature modeling, enhancing reconstruction integrity and fidelity. We leverage deep nonlinear networks as adaptive sparse transforms combined with a learnable soft-thresholding operator to impose explicit physical sparsity in the latent domain, enabling noise suppression and robustness to interference even at extremely low sampling rates. Extensive experiments on multiple simulation scenarios demonstrate that SISTA-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 2.6 dB in PSNR. Real-world far-field underwater tests yield a 3.4 dB average PSNR improvement, validating its robust anti-interference capability.
comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, 2 algorithms, 2 tables, journal paper
☆ FED-Bench: A Cross-Granular Benchmark for Disentangled Evaluation of Facial Expression Editing
Fengjian Xue, Xuecheng Wu, Heli Sun, Yunyun Shi, Shi Chen, Liangyu Fu, Jinheng Xie, Dingkang Yang, Hao Wang, Junxiao Xue, Liang He
Facial expression image editing requires fine-grained control to strictly preserve human identity and background while precisely manipulating expression. However, existing editing benchmarks primarily focus on general scenarios, lacking high-quality facial images and corresponding editing instructions. Furthermore, current evaluation metrics exhibit systemic biases in this task, often favoring lazy editing or overfit editing. To bridge these gaps, we propose FED-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark featuring rigorous testing and an accurate evaluation suite. First, we carefully construct a benchmark of 747 triplets through a cascaded and scalable pipeline, each comprising an original image, an editing instruction, and a ground-truth image for precise evaluation. Second, we introduce FED-Score, a cross-granularity evaluation protocol that disentangles assessment into three dimensions: Alignment for verifying instruction following, Fidelity for testing image quality and identity preservation, and Relative Expression Gain for quantifying the magnitude of expression changes, effectively mitigating the aforementioned evaluation biases. Third, we benchmark 18 image editing models, revealing that current approaches struggle to simultaneously achieve high fidelity and accurate expression manipulation, with fine-grained instruction following identified as the primary bottleneck. Finally, leveraging the scalable characteristic of introduced benchmark engine, we provide a 20k+ in-the-wild facial training set and demonstrate its effectiveness by fine-tuning a baseline model that achieves significant performance gains. Our benchmark and related code will be made publicly open soon.
☆ Exploring the Impact of Skin Color on Skin Lesion Segmentation
Kuniko Paxton, Medina Kapo, Amila Akagić, Koorosh Aslansefat, Dhavalkumar Thakker, Yiannis Papadopoulos
Skin cancer, particularly melanoma, remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality, making early detection critical. AI-driven dermatology systems often rely on skin lesion segmentation as a preprocessing step to delineate the lesion from surrounding skin and support downstream analysis. While fairness concerns regarding skin tone have been widely studied for lesion classification, the influence of skin tone on the segmentation stage remains under-quantified and is frequently assessed using coarse, discrete skin tone categories. In this work, we evaluate three strong segmentation architectures (UNet, DeepLabV3 with a ResNet50 backbone, and DINOv2) on two public dermoscopic datasets (HAM10000 and ISIC2017) and introduce a continuous pigment or contrast analysis that treats pixel-wise ITA values as distributions. Using Wasserstein distances between within-image distributions for skin-only, lesion-only, and whole-image regions, we quantify lesion skin contrast and relate it to segmentation performance across multiple metrics. Within the range represented in these datasets, global skin tone metrics (Fitzpatrick grouping or mean ITA) show weak association with segmentation quality. In contrast, low lesion-skin contrast is consistently associated with larger segmentation errors in models, indicating that boundary ambiguity and low contrast are key drivers of failure. These findings suggest that fairness improvements in dermoscopic segmentation should prioritize robust handling of low-contrast lesions, and the distribution-based pigment measures provide a more informative audit signal than discrete skin-tone categories.
☆ SkeletonContext: Skeleton-side Context Prompt Learning for Zero-Shot Skeleton-based Action Recognition CVPR 2026
Ning Wang, Tieyue Wu, Naeha Sharif, Farid Boussaid, Guangming Zhu, Lin Mei, Mohammed Bennamoun, zhang liang
Zero-shot skeleton-based action recognition aims to recognize unseen actions by transferring knowledge from seen categories through semantic descriptions. Most existing methods typically align skeleton features with textual embeddings within a shared latent space. However, the absence of contextual cues, such as objects involved in the action, introduces an inherent gap between skeleton and semantic representations, making it difficult to distinguish visually similar actions. To address this, we propose SkeletonContext, a prompt-based framework that enriches skeletal motion representations with language-driven contextual semantics. Specifically, we introduce a Cross-Modal Context Prompt Module, which leverages a pretrained language model to reconstruct masked contextual prompts under guidance derived from LLMs. This design effectively transfers linguistic context to the skeleton encoder for instance-level semantic grounding and improved cross-modal alignment. In addition, a Key-Part Decoupling Module is incorporated to decouple motion-relevant joint features, ensuring robust action understanding even in the absence of explicit object interactions. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SkeletonContext achieves state-of-the-art performance under both conventional and generalized zero-shot settings, validating its effectiveness in reasoning about context and distinguishing fine-grained, visually similar actions.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026
☆ A Comprehensive Information-Decomposition Analysis of Large Vision-Language Models ICLR 2026
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) achieve impressive performance, yet their internal decision-making processes remain opaque, making it difficult to determine if the success stems from true multimodal fusion or from reliance on unimodal priors. To address this attribution gap, we introduce a novel framework using partial information decomposition (PID) to quantitatively measure the "information spectrum" of LVLMs -- decomposing a model's decision-relevant information into redundant, unique, and synergistic components. By adapting a scalable estimator to modern LVLM outputs, our model-agnostic pipeline profiles 26 LVLMs on four datasets across three dimensions -- breadth (cross-model & cross-task), depth (layer-wise information dynamics), and time (learning dynamics across training). Our analysis reveals two key results: (i) two task regimes (synergy-driven vs. knowledge-driven) and (ii) two stable, contrasting family-level strategies (fusion-centric vs. language-centric). We also uncover a consistent three-phase pattern in layer-wise processing and identify visual instruction tuning as the key stage where fusion is learned. Together, these contributions provide a quantitative lens beyond accuracy-only evaluation and offer insights for analyzing and designing the next generation of LVLMs. Code and data are available at https://github.com/RiiShin/pid-lvlm-analysis .
comment: Accepted at ICLR 2026. Project page: https://riishin.github.io/pid-lvlm-iclr26/
☆ Clinical DVH metrics as a loss function for 3D dose prediction in head and neck radiotherapy
Purpose: Deep-learning-based three-dimensional (3D) dose prediction is widely used in automated radiotherapy workflows. However, most existing models are trained with voxel-wise regression losses, which are poorly aligned with clinical plan evaluation criteria based on dose-volume histogram (DVH) metrics. This study aims to develop a clinically guided loss formulation that directly optimizes clinically used DVH metrics while remaining computationally efficient for head and neck (H\&N) dose prediction.
Methods: We propose a clinical DVH metric loss (CDM loss) that incorporates differentiable \textit{D-metrics} and surrogate \textit{V-metrics}, together with a lossless bit-mask region-of-interest (ROI) encoding to improve training efficiency. The method was evaluated on 174 H\&N patients using a temporal split (137 training, 37 testing).
Results: Compared with MAE- and DVH-curve based losses, CDM loss substantially improved target coverage and satisfied all clinical constraints. Using a standard 3D U-Net, the PTV Score was reduced from 1.544 (MAE) to 0.491 (MAE + CDM), while OAR sparing remained comparable. Bit-mask encoding reduced training time by 83\% and lowered GPU memory usage.
Conclusion: Directly optimizing clinically used DVH metrics enables 3D dose predictions that are better aligned with clinical treatment planning criteria than conventional voxel-wise or DVH-curve-based supervision. The proposed CDM loss, combined with efficient ROI bit-mask encoding, provides a practical and scalable framework for H\&N dose prediction.
comment: 19 pages
☆ CoRe-DA: Contrastive Regression for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Surgical Skill Assessment
Dimitrios Anastasiou, Razvan Caramalau, Jialang Xu, Runlong He, Freweini Tesfai, Matthew Boal, Nader Francis, Danail Stoyanov, Evangelos B. Mazomenos
Vision-based surgical skill assessment (SSA) enables objective and scalable evaluation of operative performance. Progress in this field is constrained by the high cost and time demands for manual annotation of quantitative skill scores, as well as the poor generalization of existing regression models to new surgical tasks and environments. Meanwhile, appreciable volumes of unlabeled video data are now available, motivating the development of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods for SSA. We introduce the first benchmark for UDA in SSA regression, spanning four datasets across dry-lab and clinical settings as well as open and robotic surgery. We evaluate eight representative models under challenging domain shifts and propose CoRe-DA, a novel contrastive regression-based adaptation framework. Our method learns domain-invariant representations through relative-score supervision and target-domain self-training. Comprehensive experiments across two UDA settings show that CoRe-DA is superior to state-of-the-art methods, achieving Spearman Correlation Coefficients of 0.46 and 0.41 on dry-lab and clinical target datasets, respectively, without using any labeled target data for training. Overall, CoRe-DA enables scalable SSA with reliable cross-domain generalization, where existing methods underperform. Our code and datasets will be released at https://github.com/anastadimi/CoRe-DA.
☆ CutClaw: Agentic Hours-Long Video Editing via Music Synchronization
Editing the video content with audio alignment forms a digital human-made art in current social media. However, the time-consuming and repetitive nature of manual video editing has long been a challenge for filmmakers and professional content creators alike. In this paper, we introduce CutClaw, an autonomous multi-agent framework designed to edit hours-long raw footage into meaningful short videos that leverages the capabilities of multiple Multimodal Language Models~(MLLMs) as an agent system. It produces videos with synchronized music, followed by instructions, and a visually appealing appearance. In detail, our approach begins by employing a hierarchical multimodal decomposition that captures both fine-grained details and global structures across visual and audio footage. Then, to ensure narrative consistency, a Playwriter Agent orchestrates the whole storytelling flow and structures the long-term narrative, anchoring visual scenes to musical shifts. Finally, to construct a short edited video, Editor and Reviewer Agents collaboratively optimize the final cut via selecting fine-grained visual content based on rigorous aesthetic and semantic criteria. We conduct detailed experiments to demonstrate that CutClaw significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in generating high-quality, rhythm-aligned videos. The code is available at: https://github.com/GVCLab/CutClaw.
comment: Project Code: https://github.com/GVCLab/CutClaw
☆ STRADAViT: Towards a Foundational Model for Radio Astronomy through Self-Supervised Transfer
Next-generation radio astronomy surveys are producing millions of resolved sources, but robust morphology analysis remains difficult across heterogeneous telescopes and imaging pipelines. We present STRADAViT, a self-supervised Vision Transformer continued-pretraining framework for transferable radio astronomy image encoders. STRADAViT combines a mixed-survey pretraining dataset, radio astronomy-aware view generation, and controlled continued pretraining through reconstruction-only, contrastive-only, and two-stage branches. Pretraining uses 512x512 radio astronomy cutouts from MeerKAT, ASKAP, LOFAR/LoTSS, and SKA data. We evaluate transfer with linear probing and fine-tuning on three morphology benchmarks: MiraBest, LoTSS DR2, and Radio Galaxy Zoo. Relative to the initialization used for continued pretraining, the best two-stage STRADAViT models improve Macro-F1 in all reported linear-probe settings and in most fine-tuning settings, with the largest gain on RGZ DR1. Relative to strong DINOv2 baselines, gains are selective but remain positive on LoTSS DR2 and RGZ DR1 under linear probing, and on MiraBest and RGZ DR1 under fine-tuning. A targeted DINOv2-initialized HCL ablation further shows that the adaptation recipe is not specific to a single starting point. The released STRADAViT checkpoint remains the preferred model because it offers competitive transfer at lower token count and downstream cost than the DINOv2-based alternative. These results show that radio astronomy-aware view generation and staged continued pretraining provide a stronger starting point than out-of-the-box Vision Transformers for radio astronomy transfer.
comment: 19 pages
☆ Not All Frames Are Equal: Complexity-Aware Masked Motion Generation via Motion Spectral Descriptors
Masked generative models have become a strong paradigm for text-to-motion synthesis, but they still treat motion frames too uniformly during masking, attention, and decoding. This is a poor match for motion, where local dynamic complexity varies sharply over time. We show that current masked motion generators degrade disproportionately on dynamically complex motions, and that frame-wise generation error is strongly correlated with motion dynamics. Motivated by this mismatch, we introduce the Motion Spectral Descriptor (MSD), a simple and parameter-free measure of local dynamic complexity computed from the short-time spectrum of motion velocity. Unlike learned difficulty predictors, MSD is deterministic, interpretable, and derived directly from the motion signal itself. We use MSD to make masked motion generation complexity-aware. In particular, MSD guides content-focused masking during training, provides a spectral similarity prior for self-attention, and can additionally modulate token-level sampling during iterative decoding. Built on top of masked motion generators, our method, DynMask, improves motion generation most clearly on dynamically complex motions while also yielding stronger overall FID on HumanML3D and KIT-ML. These results suggest that respecting local motion complexity is a useful design principle for masked motion generation. Project page: https://xiangyue-zhang.github.io/DynMask
☆ MacTok: Robust Continuous Tokenization for Image Generation
Hengyu Zeng, Xin Gao, Guanghao Li, Yuxiang Yan, Jiaoyang Ruan, Junpeng Ma, Haoyu Albert Wang, Jian Pu
Continuous image tokenizers enable efficient visual generation, and those based on variational frameworks can learn smooth, structured latent representations through KL regularization. Yet this often leads to posterior collapse when using fewer tokens, where the encoder fails to encode informative features into the compressed latent space. To address this, we introduce \textbf{MacTok}, a \textbf{M}asked \textbf{A}ugmenting 1D \textbf{C}ontinuous \textbf{Tok}enizer that leverages image masking and representation alignment to prevent collapse while learning compact and robust representations. MacTok applies both random masking to regularize latent learning and DINO-guided semantic masking to emphasize informative regions in images, forcing the model to encode robust semantics from incomplete visual evidence. Combined with global and local representation alignment, MacTok preserves rich discriminative information in a highly compressed 1D latent space, requiring only 64 or 128 tokens. On ImageNet, MacTok achieves a competitive gFID of 1.44 at 256$\times$256 and a state-of-the-art 1.52 at 512$\times$512 with SiT-XL, while reducing token usage by up to 64$\times$. These results confirm that masking and semantic guidance together prevent posterior collapse and achieve efficient, high-fidelity tokenization.
☆ Self-Supervised Federated Learning under Data Heterogeneity for Label-Scarce Diatom Classification
Label-scarce visual classification under decentralized and heterogeneous data is a fundamental challenge in pattern recognition, especially when sites exhibit partially overlapping class sets. While self-supervised federated learning (SSFL) offers a promising solution, existing studies commonly assume the same data heterogeneity pattern throughout pre-training and fine-tuning. Moreover, current partitioning schemes often fail to generate pure partially class-disjoint data settings, limiting controllable simulation of real-world label-space heterogeneity. In this work, we introduce SSFL for diatom classification as a representative real-world instance and systematically investigate stage-specific data heterogeneity. We study cross-site variation in unlabeled data volume during pre-training and label-space misalignment during downstream fine-tuning. To study the latter in a controllable setting, we propose PreDi, a partitioning scheme that disentangles label-space heterogeneity into two orthogonal dimensions, namely class Prevalence and class-set size Disparity, enabling separate analysis of their effects. Guided by the resulting insights, we further propose PreP-WFL (Prevalence-based Personalized Weighted Federated Learning) to adaptively strengthen rare-class representations in low-prevalence scenarios. Extensive experiments show that SSFL consistently outperforms local-only training under both homogeneous and heterogeneous settings. The pronounced heterogeneity in unlabeled data volume is associated with improved representation pre-training, whereas under label-space heterogeneity, prevalence dominates performance and disparity has a smaller effect. PreP-WFL effectively mitigates this degradation, with gains increasing as prevalence decreases. These findings provide a mechanistic basis for characterizing label-space heterogeneity in decentralized recognition systems.
comment: 22 pages, 9 figures
☆ Storing Less, Finding More: How Novelty Filtering Improves Cross-Modal Retrieval on Edge Cameras
Always-on edge cameras generate continuous video streams where redundant frames degrade cross-modal retrieval by crowding correct results out of top-k search. This paper presents a streaming retrieval architecture: an on-device epsilon-net filter retains only semantically novel frames, building a denoised embedding index; a cross-modal adapter and cloud re-ranker compensate for the compact encoder's weak alignment. A single-pass streaming filter outperforms offline alternatives (k-means, farthest-point, uniform, random) across eight vision-language models (8M-632M) on two egocentric datasets (AEA, EPIC-KITCHENS). Combined, the architecture reaches 45.6% Hit@5 on held-out data using an 8M on-device encoder at an estimated 2.7 mW.
comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 5 tables; supplementary video included as ancillary file
☆ BigEarthNet.txt: A Large-Scale Multi-Sensor Image-Text Dataset and Benchmark for Earth Observation
Johann-Ludwig Herzog, Mathis Jürgen Adler, Leonard Hackel, Yan Shu, Angelos Zavras, Ioannis Papoutsis, Paolo Rota, Begüm Demir
Vision-langugage models (VLMs) have shown strong performance in computer vision (CV), yet their performance on remote sensing (RS) data remains limited due to the lack of large-scale, multi-sensor RS image-text datasets with diverse textual annotations. Existing datasets predominantly include aerial Red-Green-Blue imagery, with short or weakly grounded captions, and provide limited diversity in annotation types. To address this limitation, we introduce BigEarthNet.txt, a large-scale, multi-sensor image-text dataset designed to advance instruction-driven image-text learning in Earth observation across multiple tasks. BigEarthNet.txt contains 464044 co-registered Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar and Sentinel-2 multispectral images with 9.6M text annotations, including: i) geographically anchored captions describing land-use/land-cover (LULC) classes, their spatial relations, and environmental context; ii) visual question answering pairs relevant for different tasks; and iii) referring expression detection instructions for bounding box prediction. Through a comparative statistical analysis, we demonstrate that BigEarthNet.txt surpasses existing RS image-text datasets in textual richness and annotation type variety. We further establish a manually-verified benchmark split to evaluate VLMs in RS and CV. The results show the limitations of these models on tasks that involve complex LULC classes, whereas fine-tuning using BigEarthNet.txt results in consistent performance gains across all considered tasks.
comment: For details, see https://txt.bigearth.net
☆ Unify-Agent: A Unified Multimodal Agent for World-Grounded Image Synthesis
Shuang Chen, Quanxin Shou, Hangting Chen, Yucheng Zhou, Kaituo Feng, Wenbo Hu, Yi-Fan Zhang, Yunlong Lin, Wenxuan Huang, Mingyang Song, Dasen Dai, Bolin Jiang, Manyuan Zhang, Shi-Xue Zhang, Zhengkai Jiang, Lucas Wang, Zhao Zhong, Yu Cheng, Nanyun Peng
Unified multimodal models provide a natural and promising architecture for understanding diverse and complex real-world knowledge while generating high-quality images. However, they still rely primarily on frozen parametric knowledge, which makes them struggle with real-world image generation involving long-tail and knowledge-intensive concepts. Inspired by the broad success of agents on real-world tasks, we explore agentic modeling to address this limitation. Specifically, we present Unify-Agent, a unified multimodal agent for world-grounded image synthesis, which reframes image generation as an agentic pipeline consisting of prompt understanding, multimodal evidence searching, grounded recaptioning, and final synthesis. To train our model, we construct a tailored multimodal data pipeline and curate 143K high-quality agent trajectories for world-grounded image synthesis, enabling effective supervision over the full agentic generation process. We further introduce FactIP, a benchmark covering 12 categories of culturally significant and long-tail factual concepts that explicitly requires external knowledge grounding. Extensive experiments show that our proposed Unify-Agent substantially improves over its base unified model across diverse benchmarks and real world generation tasks, while approaching the world knowledge capabilities of the strongest closed-source models. As an early exploration of agent-based modeling for world-grounded image synthesis, our work highlights the value of tightly coupling reasoning, searching, and generation for reliable open-world agentic image synthesis.
comment: Project Page: https://github.com/shawn0728/Unify-Agent
☆ Video-Oasis: Rethinking Evaluation of Video Understanding
Geuntaek Lim, Minho Shim, Sungjune Park, Jaeyun Lee, Inwoong Lee, Taeoh Kim, Dongyoon Wee, Yukyung Choi
The inherent complexity of video understanding makes it difficult to attribute whether performance gains stem from visual perception, linguistic reasoning, or knowledge priors. While many benchmarks have emerged to assess high-level reasoning, the essential criteria that constitute video understanding remain largely overlooked. Instead of introducing yet another benchmark, we take a step back to re-examine the current landscape of video understanding. In this work, we provide Video-Oasis, a sustainable diagnostic suite designed to systematically evaluate existing evaluations and distill spatio-temporal challenges for video understanding. Our analysis reveals two critical findings: (1) 54% of existing benchmark samples are solvable without visual input or temporal context, and (2) on the remaining samples, state-of-the-art models exhibit performance barely exceeding random guessing. To bridge this gap, we investigate which algorithmic design choices contribute to robust video understanding, providing practical guidelines for future research. We hope our work serves as a standard guideline for benchmark construction and the rigorous evaluation of architecture development. Code is available at https://github.com/sejong-rcv/Video-Oasis.
☆ FlowID : Enhancing Forensic Identification with Latent Flow-Matching Models
Every day, many people die under violent circumstances, whether from crimes, war, migration, or climate disasters. Medico-legal and law enforcement institutions document many portraits of the deceased for evidence, but cannot immediately carry out identification on them. While traditional image editing tools can process these photos for public release, the workflow is lengthy and produces suboptimal results. In this work, we leverage advances in image generation models, which can now produce photorealistic human portraits, to introduce FlowID, an identity-preserving facial reconstruction method. Our approach combines single-image fine-tuning, which adapts the generative model to out-of-distribution injured faces, with attention-based masking that localizes edits to damaged regions while preserving identity-critical features. Together, these components enable the removal of artifacts from violent death while retaining sufficient identity information to support identification. To evaluate our method, we introduce InjuredFaces, a novel benchmark for identity-preserving facial reconstruction under severe facial damage. Beyond serving as an evaluation tool for this work, InjuredFaces provides a standardized resource for the community to study and compare methods addressing facial reconstruction in extreme conditions. Experimental results show that FlowID outperforms state-of-the-art open-source methods while maintaining low memory requirements, making it suitable for local deployment without compromising data privacy.
☆ Emotion Diffusion Classifier with Adaptive Margin Discrepancy Training for Facial Expression Recognition
Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is essential for human-machine interaction, as it enables machines to interpret human emotions and internal states from facial affective behaviors. Although deep learning has significantly advanced FER performance, most existing deep-learning-based FER methods rely heavily on discriminative classifiers for fast predictions. These models tend to learn shortcuts and are vulnerable to even minor distribution shifts. To address this issue, we adopt a conditional generative diffusion model and introduce the Emotion Diffusion Classifier (EmoDC) for FER, which demonstrates enhanced adversarial robustness. However, retraining EmoDC using standard strategies fails to penalize incorrect categorical descriptions, leading to suboptimal recognition performance. To improve EmoDC, we propose margin-based discrepancy training, which encourages accurate predictions when conditioned on correct categorical descriptions and penalizes predictions conditioned on mismatched ones. This method enforces a minimum margin between noise-prediction errors for correct and incorrect categories, thereby enhancing the model's discriminative capability. Nevertheless, using a fixed margin fails to account for the varying difficulty of noise prediction across different images, limiting its effectiveness. To overcome this limitation, we propose Adaptive Margin Discrepancy Training (AMDiT), which dynamically adjusts the margin for each sample. Extensive experiments show that AMDiT significantly improves the accuracy of EmoDC over the Base model with standard denoising diffusion training on the RAF-DB basic subset, the RAF-DB compound subset, SFEW-2.0, and AffectNet, in 100-step evaluations. Additionally, EmoDC outperforms state-of-the-art discriminative classifiers in terms of robustness against noise and blur.
☆ Generating Key Postures of Bharatanatyam Adavus with Pose Estimation
Preserving intangible cultural dances rooted in centuries of tradition and governed by strict structural and symbolic rules presents unique challenges in the digital era. Among these, Bharatanatyam, a classical Indian dance form, stands out for its emphasis on codified adavus and precise key postures. Accurately generating these postures is crucial not only for maintaining anatomical and stylistic integrity, but also for enabling effective documentation, analysis, and transmission to broader global audiences through digital means. We propose a pose-aware generative framework integrated with a pose estimation module, guided by keypoint-based loss and pose consistency constraints. These supervisory signals ensure anatomical accuracy and stylistic integrity in the synthesized outputs. We evaluate four configurations: standard conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN), cGAN with pose supervision, conditional diffusion, and conditional diffusion with pose supervision. Each model is conditioned on key posture class labels and optimized to maintain geometric structure. In both cGAN and conditional diffusion settings, the integrated pose guidance aligns generated poses with ground-truth keypoint structures, promoting cultural fidelity. Our results demonstrate that incorporating pose supervision significantly enhances the quality, realism, and authenticity of generated Bharatanatyam postures. This framework provides a scalable approach for the digital preservation, education, and dissemination of traditional dance forms, enabling high-fidelity generation without compromising cultural precision. Code is available at https://github.com/jagidsh/Generating-Key-Postures-of-Bharatanatyam-Adavus-with-Pose-Estimation.
comment: Published in ICVGIP, 2025
☆ Quantization with Unified Adaptive Distillation to enable multi-LoRA based one-for-all Generative Vision Models on edge CVPR 2026
Sowmya Vajrala, Aakash Parmar, Prasanna R, Sravanth Kodavanti, Manjunath Arveti, Srinivas Soumitri Miriyala, Ashok Senapati
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) features such as image editing, object removal, and prompt-guided image transformation are increasingly integrated into mobile applications. However, deploying Large Vision Models (LVMs) for such tasks on resource-constrained devices remains challenging due to their high memory and compute requirements. While Low-Rank Adapters (LoRAs) enable parameter-efficient task adaptation, existing Mobile deployment pipelines typically compile separate model binaries for each LoRA + a copy of the foundation model, resulting in redundant storage and increased runtime overhead. In this work, we present a unified framework for enabling multi-task GenAI inference on edge devices using a single shared model. Our key idea is to treat LoRA weights as runtime inputs rather than embedding them into the compiled model graph, allowing dynamic task switching at runtime without recompilation. Then, to support efficient on-device execution, we introduce QUAD (Quantization with Unified Adaptive Distillation), a quantizationaware training strategy that aligns multiple LoRA adapters under a shared quantization profile. We implement the proposed system with a lightweight runtime stack compatible with mobile NPUs and evaluate it across multiple chipsets. Experimental results demonstrate up to 6x and 4x reduction in memory footprint and latency improvements, respectively, while maintaining high visual quality across multiple GenAI tasks.
comment: Accepted at the Mobile AI Workshop, CVPR 2026
☆ Transmittance-Guided Structure-Texture Decomposition for Nighttime Image Dehazing
Nighttime images captured under hazy conditions suffer from severe quality degradation, including low visibility, color distortion, and reduced contrast, caused by the combined effects of atmospheric scattering, absorption by suspended particles, and non-uniform illumination from artificial light sources. While existing nighttime dehazing methods have achieved partial success, they typically address only a subset of these issues, such as glow suppression or brightness enhancement, without jointly tackling the full spectrum of degradation factors. In this paper, we propose a two-stage nighttime image dehazing framework that integrates transmittance correction with structure-texture layered optimization. In the first stage, we introduce a novel transmittance correction method that establishes boundary-constrained initial transmittance maps and subsequently applies region-adaptive compensation and normalization based on whether image regions correspond to light source areas. A quadratic Gaussian filtering scheme operating in the YUV color space is employed to estimate the spatially varying atmospheric light map. The corrected transmittance map and atmospheric light map are then used in conjunction with an improved nighttime imaging model to produce the initial dehazed image. In the second stage, we propose a STAR-YUV decomposition model that separates the dehazed image into structure and texture layers within the YUV color space. Gamma correction and MSRCR-based color restoration are applied to the structure layer for illumination compensation and color bias correction, while Laplacian-of-Gaussian filtering is applied to the texture layer for detail enhancement. A novel two-phase fusion strategy, comprising nonlinear Retinex-based fusion of the enhanced layers followed by linear blending with the initial dehazing result, yields the final output.
☆ All-in-One Augmented Reality Guided Head and Neck Tumor Resection
Yue Yang, Matthieu Chabanas, Carrie Reale, Annie Benson, Jason Slagle, Matthew Weinger, Michael Topf, Jie Ying Wu
Positive margins are common in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, yet intraoperative re-resection is often imprecise because margin locations are typically communicated verbally from pathology. We present an all-in-one augmented reality (AR) system that relocalizes positive margins from a resected specimen to the resection bed and visualizes them in situ using HoloLens 2 depth sensing and fully automated markerless surface registration. In a silicone phantom study with six medical trainees, markerless registration achieved target registration errors comparable to a marker-based baseline (median 1.8 mm vs. 1.7 mm; maximum < 4 mm). In a margin relocalization task, AR guidance reduced error from verbal guidance (median 14.2 mm) to a few millimeters (median 3.2 mm), with all AR localizations within 5 mm error. These results support the feasibility of markerless AR margin guidance for more precise intraoperative re-excision.
☆ VecAttention: Vector-wise Sparse Attention for Accelerating Long Context Inference CVPR 2026
Long-context video understanding and generation pose a significant computational challenge for Transformer-based video models due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. While existing sparse attention methods employ coarse-grained patterns to improve efficiency, they typically incur redundant computation and suboptimal performance. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose \textbf{VecAttention}, a novel framework of vector-wise sparse attention that achieves superior accuracy-efficiency trade-offs for video models. We observe that video attention maps exhibit a strong vertical-vector sparse pattern, and further demonstrate that this vertical-vector pattern offers consistently better accuracy-sparsity trade-offs compared with existing coarse-grained sparse patterns. Based on this observation, VecAttention dynamically selects and processes only informative vertical vectors through a lightweight important-vector selection that minimizes memory access overhead and an optimized kernel of vector sparse attention. Comprehensive evaluations on video understanding (VideoMME, LongVideoBench, and VCRBench) and generation (VBench) tasks show that VecAttention delivers a 2.65$\times$ speedup over full attention and a 1.83$\times$ speedup over state-of-the-art sparse attention methods, with comparable accuracy to full attention. Our code is available at https://github.com/anminliu/VecAttention.
comment: Accepted at CVPR 2026
☆ Square Superpixel Generation and Representation Learning via Granular Ball Computing
Superpixels provide a compact region-based representation that preserves object boundaries and local structures, and have therefore been widely used in a variety of vision tasks to reduce computational cost. However, most existing superpixel algorithms produce irregularly shaped regions, which are not well aligned with regular operators such as convolutions. Consequently, superpixels are often treated as an offline preprocessing step, limiting parallel implementation and hindering end-to-end optimization within deep learning pipelines. Motivated by the adaptive representation and coverage property of granular-ball computing, we develop a square superpixel generation approach. Specifically, we approximate superpixels using multi-scale square blocks to avoid the computational and implementation difficulties induced by irregular shapes, enabling efficient parallel processing and learnable feature extraction. For each block, a purity score is computed based on pixel-intensity similarity, and high-quality blocks are selected accordingly. The resulting square superpixels can be readily integrated as graph nodes in graph neural networks (GNNs) or as tokens in Vision Transformers (ViTs), facilitating multi-scale information aggregation and structured visual representation. Experimental results on downstream tasks demonstrate consistent performance improvements, validating the effectiveness of the proposed method.
☆ FedDBP: Enhancing Federated Prototype Learning with Dual-Branch Features and Personalized Global Fusion
Federated prototype learning (FPL), as a solution to heterogeneous federated learning (HFL), effectively alleviates the challenges of data and model heterogeneity.However, existing FPL methods fail to balance the fidelity and discriminability of the feature, and are limited by a single global prototype. In this paper, we propose FedDBP, a novel FPL method to address the above issues. On the client-side, we design a Dual-Branch feature projector that employs L2 alignment and contrastive learning simultaneously, thereby ensuring both the fidelity and discriminability of local features. On the server-side, we introduce a Personalized global prototype fusion approach that leverages Fisher information to identify the important channels of local prototypes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of FedDBP over ten existing advanced methods.
☆ Few-shot Writer Adaptation via Multimodal In-Context Learning
While state-of-the-art Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) models perform well on standard benchmarks, they frequently struggle with writers exhibiting highly specific styles that are underrepresented in the training data. To handle unseen and atypical writers, writer adaptation techniques personalize HTR models to individual handwriting styles. Leading writer adaptation methods require either offline fine-tuning or parameter updates at inference time, both involving gradient computation and backpropagation, which increase computational costs and demand careful hyperparameter tuning. In this work, we propose a novel context-driven HTR framework3 inspired by multimodal in-context learning, enabling inference-time writer adaptation using only a few examples from the target writer without any parameter updates. We further demonstrate the impact of context length, design a compact 8M-parameter CNN-Transformer that enables few-shot in-context adaptation, and show that combining context-driven and standard OCR training strategies leads to complementary improvements. Experiments on IAM and RIMES validate our approach with Character Error Rates of 3.92% and 2.34%, respectively, surpassing all writer-independent HTR models without requiring any parameter updates at inference time.
☆ NeoNet: An End-to-End 3D MRI-Based Deep Learning Framework for Non-Invasive Prediction of Perineural Invasion via Generation-Driven Classification AAAI 2026
Youngung Han, Minkyung Cha, Kyeonghun Kim, Induk Um, Myeongbin Sho, Joo Young Bae, Jaewon Jung, Jung Hyeok Park, Seojun Lee, Nam-Joon Kim, Woo Kyoung Jeong, Won Jae Lee, Pa Hong, Ken Ying-Kai Liao, Hyuk-Jae Lee
Minimizing invasive diagnostic procedures to reduce the risk of patient injury and infection is a central goal in medical imaging. And yet, noninvasive diagnosis of perineural invasion (PNI), a critical prognostic factor involving infiltration of tumor cells along the surrounding nerve, still remains challenging, due to the lack of clear and consistent imaging criteria criteria for identifying PNI. To address this challenge, we present NeoNet, an integrated end-to-end 3D deep learning framework for PNI prediction in cholangiocarcinoma that does not rely on predefined image features. NeoNet integrates three modules: (1) NeoSeg, utilizing a Tumor-Localized ROI Crop (TLCR) algorithm; (2) NeoGen, a 3D Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) with ControlNet, conditioned on anatomical masks to generate synthetic image patches, specifically balancing the dataset to a 1:1 ratio; and (3) NeoCls, the final prediction module. For NeoCls, we developed the PNI-Attention Network (PattenNet), which uses the frozen LDM encoder and specialized 3D Dual Attention Blocks (DAB) designed to detect subtle intensity variations and spatial patterns indicative of PNI. In 5-fold cross-validation, NeoNet outperformed baseline 3D models and achieved the highest performance with a maximum AUC of 0.7903.
comment: 15 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for oral presentation at W3PHIAI Workshop, AAAI 2026
☆ EarthEmbeddingExplorer: A Web Application for Cross-Modal Retrieval of Global Satellite Images ICLR 2026
While the Earth observation community has witnessed a surge in high-impact foundation models and global Earth embedding datasets, a significant barrier remains in translating these academic assets into freely accessible tools. This tutorial introduces EarthEmbeddingExplorer, an interactive web application designed to bridge this gap, transforming static research artifacts into dynamic, practical workflows for discovery. We will provide a comprehensive hands-on guide to the system, detailing its cloud-native software architecture, demonstrating cross-modal queries (natural language, visual, and geolocation), and showcasing how to derive scientific insights from retrieval results. By democratizing access to precomputed Earth embeddings, this tutorial empowers researchers to seamlessly transition from state-of-the-art models and data archives to real-world application and analysis. The web application is available at https://modelscope.ai/studios/Major-TOM/EarthEmbeddingExplorer.
comment: ICLR 2026 Workshop ML4RS Tutorial Track (oral)
☆ Polyhedral Unmixing: Bridging Semantic Segmentation with Hyperspectral Unmixing via Polyhedral-Cone Partitioning
Semantic segmentation and hyperspectral unmixing are two central problems in spectral image analysis. The former assigns each pixel a discrete label corresponding to its material class, whereas the latter estimates pure material spectra, called endmembers, and, for each pixel, a vector representing material abundances in the observed scene. Despite their complementarity, these two problems are usually addressed independently. This paper aims to bridge these two lines of work by formally showing that, under the linear mixing model, pixel classification by dominant materials induces polyhedral-cone regions in the spectral space. We leverage this fundamental property to propose a direct segmentation-to-unmixing pipeline that performs blind hyperspectral unmixing from any semantic segmentation by constructing a polyhedral-cone partition of the space that best fits the labeled pixels. Signed distances from pixels to the estimated regions are then computed, linearly transformed via a change of basis in the distance space, and projected onto the probability simplex, yielding an initial abundance estimate. This estimate is used to extract endmembers and recover final abundances via matrix pseudo-inversion. Because the segmentation method can be freely chosen, the user gains explicit control over the unmixing process, while the rest of the pipeline remains essentially deterministic and lightweight. Beyond improving interpretability, experiments on three real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach when associated with appropriate clustering algorithms, and show consistent improvements over recent deep and non-deep state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/antoine-bottenmuller/polyhedral-unmixing
☆ SeGPruner: Semantic-Geometric Visual Token Pruner for 3D Question Answering
Vision-language models (VLMs) have been widely adopted for 3D question answering (3D QA). In typical pipelines, visual tokens extracted from multiple viewpoints are concatenated with language tokens and jointly processed by a large language model (LLM) for inference. However, aggregating multi-view observations inevitably introduces severe token redundancy, leading to an overly large visual token set that significantly hinders inference efficiency under constrained token budgets. Visual token pruning has emerged as a prevalent strategy to address this issue. Nevertheless, most existing pruners are primarily tailored to 2D inputs or rely on indirect geometric cues, which limits their ability to explicitly retain semantically critical objects and maintain sufficient spatial coverage for robust 3D reasoning. In this paper, we propose SeGPruner, a semantic-aware and geometry-guided token reduction framework for efficient 3D QA with multi-view images. Specifically, SeGPruner first preserves semantically salient tokens through an attention-based importance module (Saliency-aware Token Selector), ensuring that object-critical evidence is retained. It then complements these tokens with spatially diverse ones via a geometry-guided selector (Geometry-aware Token Diversifier), which jointly considers semantic relevance and 3D geometric distance. This cooperation between saliency preservation and geometry-guided diversification balances object-level evidence and global scene coverage under aggressive token reduction. Extensive experiments on ScanQA and OpenEQA demonstrate that SeGPruner substantially improves inference efficiency, reducing the visual token budget by 91% and inference latency by 86%, while maintaining competitive performance in 3D reasoning tasks.
☆ Seeing the Evidence, Missing the Answer: Tool-Guided Vision-Language Models on Visual Illusions CVPR 2026
Vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit a systematic bias when confronted with classic optical illusions: they overwhelmingly predict the illusion as "real" regardless of whether the image has been counterfactually modified. We present a tool-guided inference framework for the DataCV 2026 Challenge (Tasks I and II) that addresses this failure mode without any model training. An off-the-shelf vision-language model is given access to a small set of generic image manipulation tools: line drawing, region cropping, side-by-side comparison, and channel isolation, together with an illusion-type-routing system prompt that prescribes which tools to invoke for each perceptual question category. Critically, every tool call produces a new, immutable image resource appended to a persistent registry, so the model can reference and compose any prior annotated view throughout its reasoning chain. Rather than hard-coding illusion-specific modules, this generic-tool-plus-routing design yields strong cross-structural generalization: performance remained consistent from the validation set to a test set containing structurally unfamiliar illusion variants (e.g., Mach Bands rotated from vertical to horizontal stacking). We further report three empirical observations that we believe warrant additional investigation: (i) a strong positive-detection bias likely rooted in imbalanced illusion training data, (ii) a striking dissociation between pixel-accurate spatial reasoning and logical inference over self-generated annotations, and (iii) pronounced sensitivity to image compression artifacts that compounds false positives.
comment: CVPR 2026 DataCV Workshop, code: https://github.com/Davidxswang/cvpr_2026_datacv_submission
☆ A2BFR: Attribute-Aware Blind Face Restoration
Blind face restoration (BFR) aims to recover high-quality facial images from degraded inputs, yet its inherently ill-posed nature leads to ambiguous and uncontrollable solutions. Recent diffusion-based BFR methods improve perceptual quality but remain uncontrollable, whereas text-guided face editing enables attribute manipulation without reliable restoration. To address these issues, we propose A$^2$BFR, an attribute-aware blind face restoration framework that unifies high-fidelity reconstruction with prompt-controllable generation. Built upon a Diffusion Transformer backbone with unified image-text cross-modal attention, A$^2$BFR jointly conditions the denoising trajectory on both degraded inputs and textual prompts. To inject semantic priors, we introduce attribute-aware learning, which supervises denoising latents using facial attribute embeddings extracted by an attribute-aware encoder. To further enhance prompt controllability, we introduce semantic dual-training, which leverages the pairwise attribute variations in our newly curated AttrFace-90K dataset to enforce attribute discrimination while preserving fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that A$^2$BFR achieves state-of-the-art performance in both restoration fidelity and instruction adherence, outperforming diffusion-based BFR baselines by -0.0467 LPIPS and +52.58% attribute accuracy, while enabling fine-grained, prompt-controllable restoration even under severe degradations.
☆ Multimodal Models Meet Presentation Attack Detection on ID Documents
The integration of multimodal models into Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) for ID Documents represents a significant advancement in biometric security. Traditional PAD systems rely solely on visual features, which often fail to detect sophisticated spoofing attacks. This study explores the combination of visual and textual modalities by utilizing pre-trained multimodal models, such as Paligemma, Llava, and Qwen, to enhance the detection of presentation attacks on ID Documents. This approach merges deep visual embeddings with contextual metadata (e.g., document type, issuer, and date). However, experimental results indicate that these models struggle to accurately detect PAD on ID Documents.
☆ RAAP: Retrieval-Augmented Affordance Prediction with Cross-Image Action Alignment ICRA 2026
Understanding object affordances is essential for enabling robots to perform purposeful and fine-grained interactions in diverse and unstructured environments. However, existing approaches either rely on retrieval, which is fragile due to sparsity and coverage gaps, or on large-scale models, which frequently mislocalize contact points and mispredict post-contact actions when applied to unseen categories, thereby hindering robust generalization. We introduce Retrieval-Augmented Affordance Prediction (RAAP), a framework that unifies affordance retrieval with alignment-based learning. By decoupling static contact localization and dynamic action direction, RAAP transfers contact points via dense correspondence and predicts action directions through a retrieval-augmented alignment model that consolidates multiple references with dual-weighted attention. Trained on compact subsets of DROID and HOI4D with as few as tens of samples per task, RAAP achieves consistent performance across unseen objects and categories, and enables zero-shot robotic manipulation in both simulation and the real world. Project website: https://github.com/SEU-VIPGroup/RAAP.
comment: Accepted to ICRA 2026
☆ Adversarial Prompt Injection Attack on Multimodal Large Language Models
Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, their instruction-following behavior leaves them vulnerable to prompt injection attacks. Existing prompt injection methods predominantly rely on textual prompts or perceptible visual prompts that are observable by human users. In this work, we study imperceptible visual prompt injection against powerful closed-source MLLMs, where adversarial instructions are embedded in the visual modality. Our method adaptively embeds the malicious prompt into the input image via a bounded text overlay to provide semantic guidance. Meanwhile, the imperceptible visual perturbation is iteratively optimized to align the feature representation of the attacked image with those of the malicious visual and textual targets at both coarse- and fine-grained levels. Specifically, the visual target is instantiated as a text-rendered image and progressively refined during optimization to more faithfully represent the desired semantics and improve transferability. Extensive experiments on two multimodal understanding tasks across multiple closed-source MLLMs demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to existing methods.
☆ Native-Domain Cross-Attention for Camera-LiDAR Extrinsic Calibration Under Large Initial Perturbations
Accurate camera-LiDAR fusion relies on precise extrinsic calibration, which fundamentally depends on establishing reliable cross-modal correspondences under potentially large misalignments. Existing learning-based methods typically project LiDAR points into depth maps for feature fusion, which distorts 3D geometry and degrades performance when the extrinsic initialization is far from the ground truth. To address this issue, we propose an extrinsic-aware cross-attention framework that directly aligns image patches and LiDAR point groups in their native domains. The proposed attention mechanism explicitly injects extrinsic parameter hypotheses into the correspondence modeling process, enabling geometry-consistent cross-modal interaction without relying on projected 2D depth maps. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and nuScenes benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both accuracy and robustness. Under large extrinsic perturbations, our approach achieves accurate calibration in 88% of KITTI cases and 99% of nuScenes cases, substantially surpassing the second-best baseline. We have open sourced our code on https://github.com/gitouni/ProjFusion to benefit the community.
comment: 8 pages, 3 figures
☆ AGFT: Alignment-Guided Fine-Tuning for Zero-Shot Adversarial Robustness of Vision-Language Models CVPR 2026
Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit strong zero-shot generalization but remain vulnerable to adversarial perturbations. Existing classification-guided adversarial fine-tuning methods often disrupt pre-trained cross-modal alignment, weakening visual-textual correspondence and degrading zero-shot performance. In this paper, we propose an Alignment-Guided Fine-Tuning (AGFT) framework that enhances zero-shot adversarial robustness while preserving the cross-modal semantic structure. Unlike label-based methods that rely on hard labels and fail to maintain the relative relationships between image and text, AGFT leverages the probabilistic predictions of the original model for text-guided adversarial training, which aligns adversarial visual features with textual embeddings via soft alignment distributions, improving zero-shot adversarial robustness. To address structural discrepancies introduced by fine-tuning, we introduce a distribution consistency calibration mechanism that adjusts the robust model output to match a temperature-scaled version of the pre-trained model predictions. Extensive experiments across multiple zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate that AGFT outperforms state-of-the-art methods while significantly improving zero-shot adversarial robustness.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026; Code is available at \url{https://github.com/YuboCui/AGFT}
☆ Hallucination-aware intermediate representation edit in large vision-language models
Large Vision-Language Models have demonstrated exceptional performance in multimodal reasoning and complex scene understanding. However, these models still face significant hallucination issues, where outputs contradict visual facts. Recent research on hallucination mitigation has focused on retraining methods and Contrastive Decoding (CD) methods. While both methods perform well, retraining methods require substantial training resources, and CD methods introduce dual inference overhead. These factors hinder their practical applicability. To address the above issue, we propose a framework for dynamically detecting hallucination representations and performing hallucination-eliminating edits on these representations. With minimal additional computational cost, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on existing benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, highlighting its efficient and robust hallucination elimination capability and its powerful controllability over hallucinations. Code is available at https://github.com/ASGO-MM/HIRE
☆ AA-Splat: Anti-Aliased Feed-forward Gaussian Splatting
Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (FF-3DGS) emerges as a fast and robust solution for sparse-view 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis (NVS). However, existing FF-3DGS methods are built on incorrect screen-space dilation filters, causing severe rendering artifacts when rendering at out-of-distribution sampling rates. We firstly propose an FF-3DGS model, called AA-Splat, to enable robust anti-aliased rendering at any resolution. AA-Splat utilizes an opacity-balanced band-limiting (OBBL) design, which combines two components: a 3D band-limiting post-filter integrates multi-view maximal frequency bounds into the feed-forward reconstruction pipeline, effectively band-limiting the resulting 3D scene representations and eliminating degenerate Gaussians; an Opacity Balancing (OB) to seamlessly integrate all pixel-aligned Gaussian primitives into the rendering process, compensating for the increased overlap between expanded Gaussian primitives. AA-Splat demonstrates drastic improvements with average 5.4$\sim$7.5dB PSNR gains on NVS performance over a state-of-the-art (SOTA) baseline, DepthSplat, at all resolutions, between $4\times$ and $1/4\times$. Code will be made available.
comment: Please visit our project page at https://kaist-viclab.github.io/aasplat-site/
☆ Extend3D: Town-Scale 3D Generation CVPR 2026
In this paper, we propose Extend3D, a training-free pipeline for 3D scene generation from a single image, built upon an object-centric 3D generative model. To overcome the limitations of fixed-size latent spaces in object-centric models for representing wide scenes, we extend the latent space in the $x$ and $y$ directions. Then, by dividing the extended latent space into overlapping patches, we apply the object-centric 3D generative model to each patch and couple them at each time step. Since patch-wise 3D generation with image conditioning requires strict spatial alignment between image and latent patches, we initialize the scene using a point cloud prior from a monocular depth estimator and iteratively refine occluded regions through SDEdit. We discovered that treating the incompleteness of 3D structure as noise during 3D refinement enables 3D completion via a concept, which we term under-noising. Furthermore, to address the sub-optimality of object-centric models for sub-scene generation, we optimize the extended latent during denoising, ensuring that the denoising trajectories remain consistent with the sub-scene dynamics. To this end, we introduce 3D-aware optimization objectives for improved geometric structure and texture fidelity. We demonstrate that our method yields better results than prior methods, as evidenced by human preference and quantitative experiments.
comment: CVPR 2026, Project Page: http://seungwoo-yoon.github.io/extend3d-page
☆ PromptForge-350k: A Large-Scale Dataset and Contrastive Framework for Prompt-Based AI Image Forgery Localization
The rapid democratization of prompt-based AI image editing has recently exacerbated the risks associated with malicious content fabrication and misinformation. However, forgery localization methods targeting these emerging editing techniques remain significantly under-explored. To bridge this gap, we first introduce a fully automated mask annotating framework that leverages keypoint alignment and semantic space similarity to generate precise ground-truth masks for edited regions. Based on this framework, we construct PromptForge-350k, a large-scale forgery localization dataset covering four state-of-the-art prompt-based AI image editing models, thereby mitigating the data scarcity in this domain. Furthermore, we propose ICL-Net, an effective forgery localization network featuring a triple-stream backbone and intra-image contrastive learning. This design enables the model to capture highly robust and generalizable forensic features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves an IoU of 62.5% on PromptForge-350k, outperforming SOTA methods by 5.1%. Additionally, it exhibits strong robustness against common degradations with an IoU drop of less than 1%, and shows promising generalization capabilities on unseen editing models, achieving an average IoU of 41.5%.
☆ Assessing Multimodal Chronic Wound Embeddings with Expert Triplet Agreement
Fabian Kabus, Julia Hindel, Jelena Bratulić, Meropi Karakioulaki, Ayush Gupta, Cristina Has, Thomas Brox, Abhinav Valada, Harald Binder
Recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa (RDEB) is a rare genetic skin disorder for which clinicians greatly benefit from finding similar cases using images and clinical text. However, off-the-shelf foundation models do not reliably capture clinically meaningful features for this heterogeneous, long-tail disease, and structured measurement of agreement with experts is challenging. To address these gaps, we propose evaluating embedding spaces with expert ordinal comparisons (triplet judgments), which are fast to collect and encode implicit clinical similarity knowledge. We further introduce TriDerm, a multimodal framework that learns interpretable wound representations from small cohorts by integrating wound imagery, boundary masks, and expert reports. On the vision side, TriDerm adapts visual foundation models to RDEB using wound-level attention pooling and non-contrastive representation learning. For text, we prompt large language models with comparison queries and recover medically meaningful representations via soft ordinal embeddings (SOE). We show that visual and textual modalities capture complementary aspects of wound phenotype, and that fusing both modalities yields 73.5% agreement with experts, outperforming the best off-the-shelf single-modality foundation model by over 5.6 percentage points. We make the expert annotation tool, model code and representative dataset samples publicly available.
☆ StereoVGGT: A Training-Free Visual Geometry Transformer for Stereo Vision
Driven by the advancement of 3D devices, stereo vision tasks including stereo matching and stereo conversion have emerged as a critical research frontier. Contemporary stereo vision backbones typically rely on either monocular depth estimation (MDE) models or visual foundation models (VFMs). Crucially, these models are predominantly pretrained without explicit supervision of camera poses. Given that such geometric knowledge is indispensable for stereo vision, the absence of explicit spatial constraints constitutes a significant performance bottleneck for existing architectures. Recognizing that the Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) operates as a foundation model pretrained on extensive 3D priors, including camera poses, we investigate its potential as a robust backbone for stereo vision tasks. Nevertheless, empirical results indicate that its direct application to stereo vision yields suboptimal performance. We observe that VGGT suffers from a more significant degradation of geometric details during feature extraction. Such characteristics conflict with the requirements of binocular stereo vision, thereby constraining its efficacy for relative tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose StereoVGGT, a feature backbone specifically tailored for stereo vision. By leveraging the frozen VGGT and introducing a training-free feature adjustment pipeline, we mitigate geometric degradation and harness the latent camera calibration knowledge embedded within the model. StereoVGGT-based stereo matching network achieved the $1^{st}$ rank among all published methods on the KITTI benchmark, validating that StereoVGGT serves as a highly effective backbone for stereo vision.
☆ Uncertainty-Aware Trajectory Prediction: A Unified Framework Harnessing Positional and Semantic Uncertainties
Trajectory prediction seeks to forecast the future motion of dynamic entities, such as vehicles and pedestrians, given a temporal horizon of historical movement data and environmental context. A central challenge in this domain is the inherent uncertainty in real-time maps, arising from two primary sources: (1) positional inaccuracies due to sensor limitations or environmental occlusions, and (2) semantic errors stemming from misinterpretations of scene context. To address these challenges, we propose a novel unified framework that jointly models positional and semantic uncertainties and explicitly integrates them into the trajectory prediction pipeline. Our approach employs a dual-head architecture to independently estimate semantic and positional predictions in a dual-pass manner, deriving prediction variances as uncertainty indicators in an end-to-end fashion. These uncertainties are subsequently fused with the semantic and positional predictions to enhance the robustness of trajectory forecasts. We evaluate our uncertainty-aware framework on the nuScenes real-world driving dataset, conducting extensive experiments across four map estimation methods and two trajectory prediction baselines. Results verify that our method (1) effectively quantifies map uncertainties through both positional and semantic dimensions, and (2) consistently improves the performance of existing trajectory prediction models across multiple metrics, including minimum Average Displacement Error (minADE), minimum Final Displacement Error (minFDE), and Miss Rate (MR). Code will available at https://github.com/JT-Sun/UATP.
comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables
☆ CIPHER: Counterfeit Image Pattern High-level Examination via Representation
Kyeonghun Kim, Youngung Han, Seoyoung Ju, Yeonju Jean, YooHyun Kim, Minseo Choi, SuYeon Lim, Kyungtae Park, Seungwoo Baek, Sieun Hyeon, Nam-Joon Kim, Hyuk-Jae Lee
The rapid progress of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and diffusion models has enabled the creation of synthetic faces that are increasingly difficult to distinguish from real images. This progress, however, has also amplified the risks of misinformation, fraud, and identity abuse, underscoring the urgent need for detectors that remain robust across diverse generative models. In this work, we introduce Counterfeit Image Pattern High-level Examination via Representation(CIPHER), a deepfake detection framework that systematically reuses and fine-tunes discriminators originally trained for image generation. By extracting scale-adaptive features from ProGAN discriminators and temporal-consistency features from diffusion models, CIPHER captures generation-agnostic artifacts that conventional detectors often overlook. Through extensive experiments across nine state-of-the-art generative models, CIPHER demonstrates superior cross-model detection performance, achieving up to 74.33% F1-score and outperforming existing ViT-based detectors by over 30% in F1-score on average. Notably, our approach maintains robust performance on challenging datasets where baseline methods fail, with up to 88% F1-score on CIFAKE compared to near-zero performance from conventional detectors. These results validate the effectiveness of discriminator reuse and cross-model fine-tuning, establishing CIPHER as a promising approach toward building more generalizable and robust deepfake detection systems in an era of rapidly evolving generative technologies.
comment: 6 pages, 2 figures. Accepted at IEEE-Asia 2025
☆ FOSCU: Feasibility of Synthetic MRI Generation via Duo-Diffusion Models for Enhancement of 3D U-Nets in Hepatic Segmentation IEEE
Youngung Han, Kyeonghun Kim, Seoyoung Ju, Yeonju Jean, Minkyung Cha, Seohyoung Park, Hyeonseok Jung, Nam-Joon Kim, Woo Kyoung Jeong, Ken Ying-Kai Liao, Hyuk-Jae Lee
Medical image segmentation faces fundamental challenges including restricted access, costly annotation, and data shortage to clinical datasets through Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS). These systemic barriers significantly impede the development of robust segmentation algorithms. To address these challenges, we propose FOSCU, which integrates Duo-Diffusion, a 3D latent diffusion model with ControlNet that simultaneously generates high-resolution, anatomically realistic synthetic MRI volumes and corresponding segmentation labels, and an enhanced 3D U-Net training pipeline. Duo-Diffusion employs segmentation-conditioned diffusion to ensure spatial consistency and precise anatomical detail in the generated data. Experimental evaluation on 720 abdominal MRI scans shows that models trained with combined real and synthetic data yield a mean Dice score gain of 0.67% over those using only real data, and achieve a 36.4% reduction in Fréchet Inception Distance (FID), reflecting enhanced image fidelity.
comment: 10 pages, 5 figures. Accepted at IEEE APCCAS 2025
☆ Beyond Corner Patches: Semantics-Aware Backdoor Attack in Federated Learning
Backdoor attacks on federated learning (FL) are most often evaluated with synthetic corner patches or out-of-distribution (OOD) patterns that are unlikely to arise in practice. In this paper, we revisit the backdoor threat to standard FL (a single global model) under a more realistic setting where triggers must be semantically meaningful, in-distribution, and visually plausible. We propose SABLE, a Semantics-Aware Backdoor for LEarning in federated settings, which constructs natural, content-consistent triggers (e.g., semantic attribute changes such as sunglasses) and optimizes an aggregation-aware malicious objective with feature separation and parameter regularization to keep attacker updates close to benign ones. We instantiate SABLE on CelebA hair-color classification and the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark (GTSRB), poisoning only a small, interpretable subset of each malicious client's local data while otherwise following the standard FL protocol. Across heterogeneous client partitions and multiple aggregation rules (FedAvg, Trimmed Mean, MultiKrum, and FLAME), our semantics-driven triggers achieve high targeted attack success rates while preserving benign test accuracy. These results show that semantics-aligned backdoors remain a potent and practical threat in federated learning, and that robustness claims based solely on synthetic patch triggers can be overly optimistic.
☆ HSFM: Hard-Set-Guided Feature-Space Meta-Learning for Robust Classification under Spurious Correlations
Deep neural networks often rely on spurious features to make predictions, which makes them brittle under distribution shift and on samples where the spurious correlation does not hold (e.g., minority-group examples). Recent studies have shown that, even in such settings, the feature extractor of an Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM)-trained model can learn rich and informative representations, and that much of the failure may be attributed to the classifier head. In particular, retraining a lightweight head while keeping the backbone frozen can substantially improve performance on shifted distributions and minority groups. Motivated by this observation, we propose a bilevel meta-learning method that performs augmentation directly in feature space to improve spurious correlation handling in the classifier head. Our method learns support-side feature edits such that, after a small number of inner-loop updates on the edited features, the classifier achieves lower loss on hard examples and improved worst-group performance. By operating at the backbone output rather than in pixel space or through end-to-end optimization, the method is highly efficient and stable, requiring only a few minutes of training on a single GPU. We further validate our method with CLIP-based visualizations, showing that the learned feature-space updates induce semantically meaningful shifts aligned with spurious attributes.
☆ Self-Consistency for LLM-Based Motion Trajectory Generation and Verification CVPR 2026
Self-consistency has proven to be an effective technique for improving LLM performance on natural language reasoning tasks in a lightweight, unsupervised manner. In this work, we study how to adapt self-consistency to visual domains. Specifically, we consider the generation and verification of LLM-produced motion graphics trajectories. Given a prompt (e.g., "Move the circle in a spiral path"), we first sample diverse motion trajectories from an LLM, and then identify groups of consistent trajectories via clustering. Our key insight is to model the family of shapes associated with a prompt as a prototype trajectory paired with a group of geometric transformations (e.g., rigid, similarity, and affine). Two trajectories can then be considered consistent if one can be transformed into the other under the warps allowable by the transformation group. We propose an algorithm that automatically recovers a shape family, using hierarchical relationships between a set of candidate transformation groups. Our approach improves the accuracy of LLM-based trajectory generation by 4-6%. We further extend our method to support verification, observing 11% precision gains over VLM baselines. Our code and dataset are available at https://majiaju.io/trajectory-self-consistency .
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026
☆ MotionScale: Reconstructing Appearance, Geometry, and Motion of Dynamic Scenes with Scalable 4D Gaussian Splatting CVPR 2026
Realistic reconstruction of dynamic 4D scenes from monocular videos is essential for understanding the physical world. Despite recent progress in neural rendering, existing methods often struggle to recover accurate 3D geometry and temporally consistent motion in complex environments. To address these challenges, we propose MotionScale, a 4D Gaussian Splatting framework that scales efficiently to large scenes and extended sequences while maintaining high-fidelity structural and motion coherence. At the core of our approach is a scalable motion field parameterized by cluster-centric basis transformations that adaptively expand to capture diverse and evolving motion patterns. To ensure robust reconstruction over long durations, we introduce a progressive optimization strategy comprising two decoupled propagation stages: 1) A background extension stage that adapts to newly visible regions, refines camera poses, and explicitly models transient shadows; 2) A foreground propagation stage that enforces motion consistency through a specialized three-stage refinement process. Extensive experiments on challenging real-world benchmarks demonstrate that MotionScale significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both reconstruction quality and temporal stability. Project page: https://hrzhou2.github.io/motion-scale-web/.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026
☆ GazeCLIP: Gaze-Guided CLIP with Adaptive-Enhanced Fine-Grained Language Prompt for Deepfake Attribution and Detection
Current deepfake attribution or deepfake detection works tend to exhibit poor generalization to novel generative methods due to the limited exploration in visual modalities alone. They tend to assess the attribution or detection performance of models on unseen advanced generators, coarsely, and fail to consider the synergy of the two tasks. To this end, we propose a novel gaze-guided CLIP with adaptive-enhanced fine-grained language prompts for fine-grained deepfake attribution and detection (DFAD). Specifically, we conduct a novel and fine-grained benchmark to evaluate the DFAD performance of networks on novel generators like diffusion and flow models. Additionally, we introduce a gaze-aware model based on CLIP, which is devised to enhance the generalization to unseen face forgery attacks. Built upon the novel observation that there are significant distribution differences between pristine and forged gaze vectors, and the preservation of the target gaze in facial images generated by GAN and diffusion varies significantly, we design a visual perception encoder to employ the inherent gaze differences to mine global forgery embeddings across appearance and gaze domains. We propose a gaze-aware image encoder (GIE) that fuses forgery gaze prompts extracted via a gaze encoder with common forged image embeddings to capture general attribution patterns, allowing features to be transformed into a more stable and common DFAD feature space. We build a language refinement encoder (LRE) to generate dynamically enhanced language embeddings via an adaptive-enhanced word selector for precise vision-language matching. Extensive experiments on our benchmark show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art by 6.56% ACC and 5.32% AUC in average performance under the attribution and detection settings, respectively. Codes will be available on GitHub.
☆ MELT: Improve Composed Image Retrieval via the Modification Frequentation-Rarity Balance Network ICASSP 2026
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) uses a reference image and a modification text as a query to retrieve a target image satisfying the requirement of ``modifying the reference image according to the text instructions''. However, existing CIR methods face two limitations: (1) frequency bias leading to ``Rare Sample Neglect'', and (2) susceptibility of similarity scores to interference from hard negative samples and noise. To address these limitations, we confront two key challenges: asymmetric rare semantic localization and robust similarity estimation under hard negative samples. To solve these challenges, we propose the Modification frEquentation-rarity baLance neTwork MELT. MELT assigns increased attention to rare modification semantics in multimodal contexts while applying diffusion-based denoising to hard negative samples with high similarity scores, enhancing multimodal fusion and matching. Extensive experiments on two CIR benchmarks validate the superior performance of MELT. Codes are available at https://github.com/luckylittlezhi/MELT.
comment: Accepted by ICASSP 2026
☆ PRISM: A Multi-View Multi-Capability Retail Video Dataset for Embodied Vision-Language Models
Amirreza Rouhi, Parikshit Sakurikar, Satya Sai Reddy, Narsimha Menga, Anirudh Govil, Sri Harsha Chittajallu, Rajat Aggarwal, Anoop Namboodiri, Sashi Reddi
A critical gap exists between the general-purpose visual understanding of state-of-the-art physical AI models and the specialized perceptual demands of structured real-world deployment environments. We present PRISM, a 270K-sample multi-view video supervised fine-tuning (SFT) corpus for embodied vision-language-models (VLMs) in real-world retail environments. PRISM is motivated by a simple observation - physical AI systems fail not because of poor visual recognition, but because they do not understand space, physical dynamics and embodied action well enough to operate reliably in the world. To this end, PRISM is grounded in a novel three-dimensional knowledge ontology that spans spatial knowledge, temporal and physical knowledge, and embodied action knowledge. It covers 20+ capability probes across four evaluation dimensions - Embodied Reasoning (ER), Common Sense (CS), Spatial Perception (SP), and Intuitive Physics (IP), and to our knowledge, PRISM is the first dataset to instantiate all three knowledge dimensions within a single real-world deployment domain. The corpus captures data from egocentric, exocentric and 360° viewpoints across five supermarket locations and includes open-ended, chain-of-thought, and multiple-choice supervision. At 4 fps, PRISM spans approximately 11.8M video frames and approximately 730M tokens, placing it among the largest domain-specific video SFT corpora. Fine-tuning on PRISM reduces the error rate across all 20+ probes by 66.6% over the pre-trained baseline, with significant gains in embodied action understanding where the accuracy improves by 36.4%. Our results suggest that ontology-structured, domain specific SFT can meaningfully strengthen embodied VLMs for real-world settings. The PRISM dataset and more details are available at https://dreamvu.ai/prism
☆ MaskAdapt: Learning Flexible Motion Adaptation via Mask-Invariant Prior for Physics-Based Characters CVPR 2026
We present MaskAdapt, a framework for flexible motion adaptation in physics-based humanoid control. The framework follows a two-stage residual learning paradigm. In the first stage, we train a mask-invariant base policy using stochastic body-part masking and a regularization term that enforces consistent action distributions across masking conditions. This yields a robust motion prior that remains stable under missing observations, anticipating later adaptation in those regions. In the second stage, a residual policy is trained atop the frozen base controller to modify only the targeted body parts while preserving the original behaviors elsewhere. We demonstrate the versatility of this design through two applications: (i) motion composition, where varying masks enable multi-part adaptation within a single sequence, and (ii) text-driven partial goal tracking, where designated body parts follow kinematic targets provided by a pre-trained text-conditioned autoregressive motion generator. Through experiments, MaskAdapt demonstrates strong robustness and adaptability, producing diverse behaviors under masked observations and delivering superior targeted motion adaptation compared to prior work.
comment: CVPR 2026
☆ ConInfer: Context-Aware Inference for Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Remote Sensing Segmentation
Training-free open-vocabulary remote sensing segmentation (OVRSS), empowered by vision-language models, has emerged as a promising paradigm for achieving category-agnostic semantic understanding in remote sensing imagery. Existing approaches mainly focus on enhancing feature representations or mitigating modality discrepancies to improve patch-level prediction accuracy. However, such independent prediction schemes are fundamentally misaligned with the intrinsic characteristics of remote sensing data. In real-world applications, remote sensing scenes are typically large-scale and exhibit strong spatial as well as semantic correlations, making isolated patch-wise predictions insufficient for accurate segmentation. To address this limitation, we propose ConInfer, a context-aware inference framework for OVRSS that performs joint prediction across multiple spatial units while explicitly modeling their inter-unit semantic dependencies. By incorporating global contextual cues, our method significantly enhances segmentation consistency, robustness, and generalization in complex remote sensing environments. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently surpasses state-of-the-art per-pixel VLM-based baselines such as SegEarth-OV, achieving average improvements of 2.80% and 6.13% on open-vocabulary semantic segmentation and object extraction tasks, respectively. The implementation code is available at: https://github.com/Dog-Yang/ConInfer
☆ Unbiased Model Prediction Without Using Protected Attribute Information
The problem of bias persists in the deep learning community as models continue to provide disparate performance across different demographic subgroups. Therefore, several algorithms have been proposed to improve the fairness of deep models. However, a majority of these algorithms utilize the protected attribute information for bias mitigation, which severely limits their application in real-world scenarios. To address this concern, we have proposed a novel algorithm, termed as \textbf{Non-Protected Attribute-based Debiasing (NPAD)} algorithm for bias mitigation, that does not require the protected attribute information. The proposed NPAD algorithm utilizes the auxiliary information provided by the non-protected attributes to optimize the model for bias mitigation. Further, two different loss functions, \textbf{Debiasing via Attribute Cluster Loss (DACL)} and \textbf{Filter Redundancy Loss (FRL)} have been proposed to optimize the model for fairness goals. Multiple experiments are performed on the LFWA and CelebA datasets for facial attribute prediction, and a significant reduction in bias across different gender and age subgroups is observed.
☆ Omni-NegCLIP: Enhancing CLIP with Front-Layer Contrastive Fine-Tuning for Comprehensive Negation Understanding
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities across a wide range of multimodal tasks. However, recent studies have shown that VLMs, such as CLIP, perform poorly in understanding negation expressions, which are common in natural language. In this work, we propose Omni-NegCLIP, a fine-tuned CLIP model that improves CLIP's understanding of two types of negation, namely presence-based negation and absence-based negation, which correspond to negated expressions of objects that are actually present in an image and those that may plausibly exist in an image but are in fact absent, respectively, by modifying CLIP's original InfoNCE contrastive loss. Specifically, we design a presence-based contrastive objective that pulls image embeddings closer to their original caption embeddings while pushing them away from the corresponding presence-based negated caption embeddings, and an absence-based contrastive objective that aligns image embeddings with both original and absence-based negated caption embeddings while maintaining a semantic distinction between the two text embeddings. Based on our observation that the front transformer layers of CLIP text encoder have stronger learning ability for negated text than the later layers, we fine-tune the front transformer layers of the CLIP text encoder at each training step using the combined contrastive objective. Experimental results show that, compared with pretrained CLIP, Omni-NegCLIP improves performance on presence-based negation and absence-based negation tasks by up to 52.65% and 12.50%, respectively, without sacrificing general capability in image-text retrieval and even improving it by up to 19.62%. Compared with prior works, Omni-NegCLIP demonstrates a more comprehensive ability to understand multiple types of negation tasks.
☆ Scaling the Long Video Understanding of Multimodal Large Language Models via Visual Memory Mechanism CVPR 2026
Long video understanding is a key challenge that plagues the advancement of \emph{Multimodal Large language Models} (MLLMs). In this paper, we study this problem from the perspective of visual memory mechanism, and proposed a novel and training-free approach, termed \emph{Flexible Memory} (\textbf{FlexMem}). In principle, FlexMem aims to mimic human behavior of video watching, \emph{i.e.}, continually watching video content and recalling the most relevant memory fragments to answer the question. In this way, FlexMem can help MLLMs achieve video understanding of infinite lengths, unlike previous methods that process all video information at once and have input upper-limit. Concretely, FlexMem first consider the visual KV caches as the memory sources, and realize the effective memory transfer and writing via a dual-pathway compression design. Afterwards, FlexMem also explores different memory reading strategies for the diverse video understanding tasks, including the popular streaming one. To validate FlexMem, we apply it to two popular video-MLLMs, and conduct extensive experiments on five long video and one streaming video task. The experimental results show that on \textbf{a single 3090 GPU}, our FlexMem can achieve obvious improvements than existing efficient video understanding methods and process more than \textbf{1k frames}, which also helps the base MLLMs achieve comparable or even better performance than SOTA MLLMs on some benchmarks, \emph{e.g.} , GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5 Pro.
comment: CVPR 2026
☆ Monocular Building Height Estimation from PhiSat-2 Imagery: Dataset and Method
Monocular building height estimation from optical imagery is important for urban morphology characterization but remains challenging due to ambiguous height cues, large inter-city variations in building morphology, and the long-tailed distribution of building heights. PhiSat-2 is a promising open-access data source for this task because of its global coverage, 4.75 m spatial resolution, and seven-band spectral observations, yet its potential has not been systematically evaluated. To address this gap, we construct a PhiSat-2-Height dataset (PHDataset) and propose a Two-Stream Ordinal Network (TSONet). PHDataset contains 9,475 co-registered image-label patch pairs from 26 cities worldwide. TSONet jointly models footprint segmentation and height estimation, and introduces a Cross-Stream Exchange Module (CSEM) and a Feature-Enhanced Bin Refinement (FEBR) module for footprint-aware feature interaction and ordinal height refinement. Experiments on PHDataset show that TSONet achieves the best overall performance, reducing MAE and RMSE by 13.2% and 9.7%, and improving IoU and F1-score by 14.0% and 10.1% over the strongest competing results. Ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of CSEM, FEBR, and the joint use of ordinal regression and footprint assistance. Additional analyses indicate that PhiSat-2 benefits monocular building height estimation through its balanced combination of building-relevant spatial detail and multispectral observations. Overall, this study confirms the potential of PhiSat-2 for monocular building height estimation and provides a dedicated dataset and an effective method for future research.
☆ Diffusion Mental Averages CVPR 2026
Can a diffusion model produce its own "mental average" of a concept-one that is as sharp and realistic as a typical sample? We introduce Diffusion Mental Averages (DMA), a model-centric answer to this question. While prior methods aim to average image collections, they produce blurry results when applied to diffusion samples from the same prompt. These data-centric techniques operate outside the model, ignoring the generative process. In contrast, DMA averages within the diffusion model's semantic space, as discovered by recent studies. Since this space evolves across timesteps and lacks a direct decoder, we cast averaging as trajectory alignment: optimize multiple noise latents so their denoising trajectories progressively converge toward shared coarse-to-fine semantics, yielding a single sharp prototype. We extend our approach to multimodal concepts (e.g., dogs with many breeds) by clustering samples in semantically-rich spaces such as CLIP and applying Textual Inversion or LoRA to bridge CLIP clusters into diffusion space. This is, to our knowledge, the first approach that delivers consistent, realistic averages, even for abstract concepts, serving as a concrete visual summary and a lens into model biases and concept representation.
comment: CVPR 2026. Project page: https://diffusion-mental-averages.github.io/
☆ M2H-MX: Multi-Task Dense Visual Perception for Real-Time Monocular Spatial Understanding
Monocular cameras are attractive for robotic perception due to their low cost and ease of deployment, yet achieving reliable real-time spatial understanding from a single image stream remains challenging. While recent multi-task dense prediction models have improved per-pixel depth and semantic estimation, translating these advances into stable monocular mapping systems is still non-trivial.
This paper presents M2H-MX, a real-time multi-task perception model for monocular spatial understanding. The model preserves multi-scale feature representations while introducing register-gated global context and controlled cross-task interaction in a lightweight decoder, enabling depth and semantic predictions to reinforce each other under strict latency constraints. Its outputs integrate directly into an unmodified monocular SLAM pipeline through a compact perception-to-mapping interface.
We evaluate both dense prediction accuracy and in-the-loop system performance. On NYUDv2, M2H-MX-L achieves state-of-the-art results, improving semantic mIoU by 6.6% and reducing depth RMSE by 9.4% over representative multi-task baselines. When deployed in a real-time monocular mapping system on ScanNet, M2H-MX reduces average trajectory error by 60.7% compared to a strong monocular SLAM baseline while producing cleaner metric-semantic maps. These results demonstrate that modern multi-task dense prediction can be reliably deployed for real-time monocular spatial perception in robotic systems.
comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables. Preprint under review
☆ CCDNet: Learning to Detect Camouflage against Distractors in Infrared Small Target Detection
Infrared target detection (IRSTD) tasks have critical applications in areas like wilderness rescue and maritime search. However, detecting infrared targets is challenging due to their low contrast and tendency to blend into complex backgrounds, effectively camouflaging themselves. Additionally, other objects with similar features (distractors) can cause false alarms, further degrading detection performance. To address these issues, we propose a novel \textbf{C}amouflage-aware \textbf{C}ounter-\textbf{D}istraction \textbf{Net}work (CCDNet) in this paper. We design a backbone with Weighted Multi-branch Perceptrons (WMPs), which aggregates self-conditioned multi-level features to accurately represent the target and background. Based on these rich features, we then propose a novel Aggregation-and-Refinement Fusion Neck (ARFN) to refine structures/semantics from shallow/deep features maps, and bidirectionally reconstruct the relations between the targets and the backgrounds, highlighting the targets while suppressing the complex backgrounds to improve detection accuracy. Furthermore, we present a new Contrastive-aided Distractor Discriminator (CaDD), enforcing adaptive similarity computation both locally and globally between the real targets and the backgrounds to more precisely discriminate distractors, so as to reduce the false alarm rate. Extensive experiments on infrared image datasets confirm that CCDNet outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.
☆ SyriSign: A Parallel Corpus for Arabic Text to Syrian Arabic Sign Language Translation
Sign language is the primary approach of communication for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) community. While there are numerous benchmarks for high-resource sign languages, low-resource languages like Arabic remain underrepresented. Currently, there is no publicly available dataset for Syrian Arabic Sign Language (SyArSL). To overcome this gap, we introduce SyriSign, a dataset comprising 1500 video samples across 150 unique lexical signs, designed for text-to-SyArSL translation tasks. This work aims to reduce communication barriers in Syria, as most news are delivered in spoken or written Arabic, which is often inaccessible to the deaf community. We evaluated SyriSign using three deep learning architectures: MotionCLIP for semantic motion generation, T2M-GPT for text-conditioned motion synthesis, and SignCLIP for bilingual embedding alignment. Experimental results indicate that while generative approaches show strong potential for sign representation, the limited dataset size constrains generalization performance. We will release SyriSign publicly, hoping it serves as an initial benchmark.
☆ Xuanwu: Evolving General Multimodal Models into an Industrial-Grade Foundation for Content Ecosystems
In recent years, multimodal large models have continued to improve on general benchmarks. However, in real-world content moderation and adversarial settings, mainstream models still suffer from degraded generalization and catastrophic forgetting because of limited fine-grained visual perception and insufficient modeling of long-tail noise. In this paper, we present Xuanwu VL-2B as a case study of how general multimodal models can be developed into an industrial-grade foundation model for content ecosystems. The model adopts a compact InternViT-300M + MLP + Qwen3 1.7B architecture, balancing fine-grained visual perception, language-semantic alignment, and deployment cost within an approximately 2B-parameter budget. To balance business specialization with the retention of general capabilities, we developed a data iteration and curation mechanism and trained the model through a progressive three-stage pipeline: pre-training, mid-training, and post-training. Ablation studies and offline business evaluations show that Xuanwu VL-2B achieves an average score of 67.90 across seven OpenCompass multimodal metrics (vs. 64.27 for InternVL 3.5 2B), an average recall of 94.38% over seven independent business moderation tasks, and a weighted overall recall of 82.82% on policy-violating text in challenging adversarial OCR scenarios, outperforming Gemini-2.5-Pro (76.72%). These results show that, under a limited parameter budget, Xuanwu VL-2B achieves a practical balance among business alignment, visual perception, general capability retention, and deployment cost.
comment: 41 pages, 10 figures
☆ LightHarmony3D: Harmonizing Illumination and Shadows for Object Insertion in 3D Gaussian Splatting
Tianyu Huang, Zhenyang Ren, Zhenchen Wan, Jiyang Zheng, Wenjie Wang, Runnan Chen, Mingming Gong, Tongliang Liu
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables high-fidelity reconstruction of scene geometry and appearance. Building on this capability, inserting external mesh objects into reconstructed 3DGS scenes enables interactive editing and content augmentation for immersive applications such as AR/VR, virtual staging, and digital content creation. However, achieving physically consistent lighting and shadows for mesh insertion remains challenging, as it requires accurate scene illumination estimation and multi-view consistent rendering. To address this challenge, we present LightHarmony3D, a novel framework for illumination-consistent mesh insertion in 3DGS scenes. Central to our approach is our proposed generative module that predicts a full 360° HDR environment map at the insertion location via a single forward pass. By leveraging generative priors instead of iterative optimization, our method efficiently captures dominant scene illumination and enables physically grounded shading and shadows for inserted meshes while maintaining multi-view coherence. Furthermore, we introduce the first dedicated benchmark for mesh insertion in 3DGS, providing a standardized evaluation framework for assessing lighting consistency and photorealism. Extensive experiments across multiple real-world reconstruction datasets demonstrate that LightHarmony3D achieves state-of-the-art realism and multi-view consistency.
☆ Multi-Layered Memory Architectures for LLM Agents: An Experimental Evaluation of Long-Term Context Retention
Long-horizon dialogue systems suffer from semanticdrift and unstable memory retention across extended sessions. This paper presents a Multi-Layer Memory Framework that decomposes dialogue history into working, episodic, and semantic layers with adaptive retrieval gating and retention regularization. The architecture controls cross-session drift while maintaining bounded context growth and computational efficiency. Experiments on LOCOMO, LOCCO, and LoCoMo show improved performance, achieving 46.85 Success Rate, 0.618 overall F1 with 0.594 multi-hop F1, and 56.90% six-period retention while reducing false memory rate to 5.1% and context usage to 58.40%. Results confirm enhanced long-term retention and reasoning stability under constrained context budgets.
☆ Developing Adaptive Context Compression Techniques for Large Language Models (LLMs) in Long-Running Interactions
Large Language Models (LLMs) often experience performance degradation during long-running interactions due to increasing context length, memory saturation, and computational overhead. This paper presents an adaptive context compression framework that integrates importance-aware memory selection, coherence-sensitive filtering, and dynamic budget allocation to retain essential conversational information while controlling context growth. The approach is evaluated on LOCOMO, LOCCO, and LongBench benchmarks to assess answer quality, retrieval accuracy, coherence preservation, and efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves consistent improvements in conversational stability and retrieval performance while reducing token usage and inference latency compared with existing memory and compression-based approaches. These findings indicate that adaptive context compression provides an effective balance between long-term memory preservation and computational efficiency in persistent LLM interactions
☆ 3D Architect: An Automated Approach to Three-Dimensional Modeling
The aim of our paper is to render an object in 3-dimension using a set of its orthographic views. Corner detector (Harris Detector) is applied on the input views to obtain control points. These control points are projected perpendicular to respective views, in order to construct an envelope. A set of points describing the object in 3-dimension, are obtained from the intersection of these mutually perpendicular envelopes. These set of points are used to regenerate the surfaces of the object using computational geometry. At the end, the object in 3-dimension is rendered using OpenGL
☆ SLVMEval: Synthetic Meta Evaluation Benchmark for Text-to-Long Video Generation CVPR 2026
This paper proposes the synthetic long-video meta-evaluation (SLVMEval), a benchmark for meta-evaluating text-to-video (T2V) evaluation systems. The proposed SLVMEval benchmark focuses on assessing these systems on videos of up to 10,486 s (approximately 3 h). The benchmark targets a fundamental requirement, namely, whether the systems can accurately assess video quality in settings that are easy for humans to assess. We adopt a pairwise comparison-based meta-evaluation framework. Building on dense video-captioning datasets, we synthetically degrade source videos to create controlled "high-quality versus low-quality" pairs across 10 distinct aspects. Then, we employ crowdsourcing to filter and retain only those pairs in which the degradation is clearly perceptible, thereby establishing an effective final testbed. Using this testbed, we assess the reliability of existing evaluation systems in ranking these pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that human evaluators can identify the better long video with 84.7%-96.8% accuracy, and in nine of the 10 aspects, the accuracy of these systems falls short of human assessment, revealing weaknesses in text-to-long-video evaluation.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026
☆ Hierarchical Visual Relocalization with Nearest View Synthesis from Feature Gaussian Splatting CVPR 2026
Visual relocalization is a fundamental task in the field of 3D computer vision, estimating a camera's pose when it revisits a previously known scene. While point-based hierarchical relocalization methods have shown strong scalability and efficiency, they are often limited by sparse image observations and weak feature matching. In this work, we propose SplatHLoc, a novel hierarchical visual relocalization framework that uses Feature Gaussian Splatting as the scene representation. To address the sparsity of database images, we propose an adaptive viewpoint retrieval method that synthesizes virtual candidates with viewpoints more closely aligned with the query, thereby improving the accuracy of initial pose estimation. For feature matching, we observe that Gaussian-rendered features and those extracted directly from images exhibit different strengths across the two-stage matching process: the former performs better in the coarse stage, while the latter proves more effective in the fine stage. Therefore, we introduce a hybrid feature matching strategy, enabling more accurate and efficient pose estimation. Extensive experiments on both indoor and outdoor datasets show that SplatHLoc enhances the robustness of visual relocalization, setting a new state-of-the-art.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026
☆ Retinal Malady Classification using AI: A novel ViT-SVM combination architecture
Macular Holes, Central serous retinopathy and Diabetic Retinopathy are one of the most widespread maladies of the eyes responsible for either partial or complete vision loss, thus making it clear that early detection of the mentioned defects is detrimental for the well-being of the patient. This study intends to introduce the application of Vision Transformer and Support Vector Machine based hybrid architecture (ViT-SVM) and analyse its performance to classify the optical coherence topography (OCT) Scans with the intention to automate the early detection of these retinal defects.
☆ Predicting Neuromodulation Outcome for Parkinson's Disease with Generative Virtual Brain Model
Siyuan Du, Siyi Li, Shuwei Bai, Ang Li, Haolin Li, Mingqing Xiao, Yang Pan, Dongsheng Li, Weidi Xie, Yanfeng Wang, Ya Zhang, Chencheng Zhang, Jiangchao Yao
Parkinson's disease (PD) affects over ten million people worldwide. Although temporal interference (TI) and deep brain stimulation (DBS) are promising therapies, inter-individual variability limits empirical treatment selection, increasing non-negligible surgical risk and cost. Previous explorations either resort to limited statistical biomarkers that are insufficient to characterize variability, or employ AI-driven methods which is prone to overfitting and opacity. We bridge this gap with a pretraining-finetuning framework to predict outcomes directly from resting-state fMRI. Critically, a generative virtual brain foundation model, pretrained on a collective dataset (2707 subjects, 5621 sessions) to capture universal disorder patterns, was finetuned on PD cohorts receiving TI (n=51) or DBS (n=55) to yield individualized virtual brains with high fidelity to empirical functional connectivity (r=0.935). By constructing counterfactual estimations between pathological and healthy neural states within these personalized models, we predicted clinical responses (TI: AUPR=0.853; DBS: AUPR=0.915), substantially outperforming baselines. External and prospective validations (n=14, n=11) highlight the feasibility of clinical translation. Moreover, our framework provides state-dependent regional patterns linked to response, offering hypothesis-generating mechanistic insights.
☆ Segmentation of Gray Matters and White Matters from Brain MRI data
Accurate segmentation of brain tissues such as gray matter and white matter from magnetic resonance imaging is essential for studying brain anatomy, diagnosing neurological disorders, and monitoring disease progression. Traditional methods, such as FSL FAST, produce tissue probability maps but often require task-specific adjustments and face challenges with diverse imaging conditions. Recent foundation models, such as MedSAM, offer a prompt-based approach that leverages large-scale pretraining. In this paper, we propose a modified MedSAM model designed for multi-class brain tissue segmentation. Our preprocessing pipeline includes skull stripping with FSL BET, tissue probability mapping with FSL FAST, and converting these into 2D axial, sagittal, coronal slices with multi-class labels (background, gray matter, and white matter). We extend MedSAM's mask decoder to three classes, freezing the pre-trained image encoder and fine-tuning the prompt encoder and decoder. Experiments on the IXI dataset achieve Dice scores up to 0.8751. This work demonstrates that foundation models like MedSAM can be adapted for multi-class medical image segmentation with minimal architectural modifications. Our findings suggest that such models can be extended to more diverse medical imaging scenarios in future work.
☆ CT-to-X-ray Distillation Under Tiny Paired Cohorts: An Evidence-Bounded Reproducible Pilot Study
Chest X-ray and computed tomography (CT) provide complementary views of thoracic disease, yet most computer-aided diagnosis models are trained and deployed within a single imaging modality. The concrete question studied here is narrower and deployment-oriented: on a patient-level paired chest cohort, can CT act as training-only supervision for a binary disease versus non-disease X-ray classifier without requiring CT at inference time? We study this setting as a cross-modality teacher--student distillation problem and use JDCNet as an executable pilot scaffold rather than as a validated superior architecture. On the original patient-level paired split from a public paired chest imaging cohort, a stripped-down plain cross-modal logit-KD control attains the highest mean result on the four-image validation subset (0.875 accuracy and 0.714 macro-F1), whereas the full module-augmented JDCNet variant remains at 0.750 accuracy and 0.429 macro-F1. To test whether that ranking is a split artifact, we additionally run eight patient-level Monte Carlo resamples with same-case comparisons, stronger mechanism controls based on attention transfer and feature hints, and imbalance-sensitive analyses. Under this resampled protocol, late fusion attains the highest mean accuracy (0.885), same-modality distillation attains the highest mean macro-F1 (0.554) and balanced accuracy (0.660), the plain cross-modal control drops to 0.500 mean balanced accuracy, and neither attention transfer nor feature hints recover a robust cross-modality advantage. The contribution of this study is therefore not a validated CT-to-X-ray architecture, but a reproducible and evidence-bounded pilot protocol that makes the exact task definition, failure modes, ranking instability, and the minimum requirements for future credible CT-to-X-ray transfer claims explicit.
☆ LatentPilot: Scene-Aware Vision-and-Language Navigation by Dreaming Ahead with Latent Visual Reasoning
Existing vision-and-language navigation (VLN) models primarily reason over past and current visual observations, while largely ignoring the future visual dynamics induced by actions. As a result, they often lack an effective understanding of the causal relationship between actions and how the visual world changes, limiting robust decision-making. Humans, in contrast, can imagine the near future by leveraging action-dynamics causality, which improves both environmental understanding and navigation choices. Inspired by this capability, we propose LatentPilot, a new paradigm that exploits future observations during training as a valuable data source to learn action-conditioned visual dynamics, while requiring no access to future frames at inference. Concretely, we propose a flywheel-style training mechanism that iteratively collects on-policy trajectories and retrains the model to better match the agent's behavior distribution, with an expert takeover triggered when the agent deviates excessively. LatentPilot further learns visual latent tokens without explicit supervision; these latent tokens attend globally in a continuous latent space and are carried across steps, serving as both the current output and the next input, thereby enabling the agent to dream ahead and reason about how actions will affect subsequent observations. Experiments on R2R-CE, RxR-CE, and R2R-PE benchmarks achieve new SOTA results, and real-robot tests across diverse environments demonstrate LatentPilot's superior understanding of environment-action dynamics in scene. Project page:https://abdd.top/latentpilot/
comment: Project page:https://abdd.top/latentpilot/
☆ SparseDriveV2: Scoring is All You Need for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
End-to-end multi-modal planning has been widely adopted to model the uncertainty of driving behavior, typically by scoring candidate trajectories and selecting the optimal one. Existing approaches generally fall into two categories: scoring a large static trajectory vocabulary, or scoring a small set of dynamically generated proposals. While static vocabularies often suffer from coarse discretization of the action space, dynamic proposals provide finer-grained precision and have shown stronger empirical performance on existing benchmarks. However, it remains unclear whether dynamic generation is fundamentally necessary, or whether static vocabularies can already achieve comparable performance when they are sufficiently dense to cover the action space. In this work, we start with a systematic scaling study of Hydra-MDP, a representative scoring-based method, revealing that performance consistently improves as trajectory anchors become denser, without exhibiting saturation before computational constraints are reached. Motivated by this observation, we propose SparseDriveV2 to push the performance boundary of scoring-based planning through two complementary innovations: (1) a scalable vocabulary representation with a factorized structure that decomposes trajectories into geometric paths and velocity profiles, enabling combinatorial coverage of the action space, and (2) a scalable scoring strategy with coarse factorized scoring over paths and velocity profiles followed by fine-grained scoring on a small set of composed trajectories. By combining these two techniques, SparseDriveV2 achieves 92.0 PDMS and 90.1 EPDMS on NAVSIM, with 89.15 Driving Score and 70.00 Success Rate on Bench2Drive with a lightweight ResNet-34 as backbone. Code and model are released at https://github.com/swc-17/SparseDriveV2.
☆ Dual-Imbalance Continual Learning for Real-World Food Recognition CVPR 2026
Visual food recognition in real-world dietary logging scenarios naturally exhibits severe data imbalance, where a small number of food categories appear frequently while many others occur rarely, resulting in long-tailed class distributions. In practice, food recognition systems often operate in a continual learning setting, where new categories are introduced sequentially over time. However, existing studies typically assume that each incremental step introduces a similar number of new food classes, which rarely happens in real world where the number of newly observed categories can vary significantly across steps, leading to highly uneven learning dynamics. As a result, continual food recognition exhibits a dual imbalance: imbalanced samples within each food class and imbalanced numbers of new food classes to learn at each incremental learning step. In this work, we introduce DIME, a Dual-Imbalance-aware Adapter Merging framework for continual food recognition. DIME learns lightweight adapters for each task using parameter-efficient fine-tuning and progressively integrates them through a class-count guided spectral merging strategy. A rank-wise threshold modulation mechanism further stabilizes the merging process by preserving dominant knowledge while allowing adaptive updates. The resulting model maintains a single merged adapter for inference, enabling efficient deployment without accumulating task-specific modules. Experiments on realistic long-tailed food benchmarks under our step-imbalanced setup show that the proposed method consistently improves by more than 3% over the strongest existing continual learning baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaoyanzhang1/DIME.
comment: Accepted to 3rd MetaFood at CVPR 2026. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaoyanzhang1/DIME
☆ Schrödinger's Seed: Purr-fect Initialization for an Impurr-fect Universe
Context. Random seed selection in deep learning is often arbitrary -- conventionally fixed to values such as 42, a number with no known feline endorsement. Aims. We propose that cats, as liminal beings with a historically ambiguous relationship to quantum mechanics, are better suited to this task than random integers. Methods. We construct a cat-driven seed generator inspired by the first Friedmann equation, and test it by mapping 21 domestic cats' physical properties -- mass, coat pattern, eye colour, and name entropy -- via a Monte ``Catlo'' sampling procedure. Results. Cat-driven seeds achieve a mean accuracy of 92.58%, outperforming the baseline seed of 42 by $\sim$2.5%. Cats from astrophysicist households perform marginally better, suggesting cosmic insight may be contagious. Conclusions. The Universe responds better to cats than to arbitrary integers. Whether cats are aware of this remains unknown.
comment: 3 pages, 1 figure, 21 cats
☆ Enhancing Box and Block Test with Computer Vision for Post-Stroke Upper Extremity Motor Evaluation
Standard clinical assessments of upper-extremity motor function after stroke either rely on ordinal scoring, which lacks sensitivity, or time-based task metrics, which do not capture movement quality. In this work, we present a computer vision-based framework for analysis of upper-extremity movement during the Box and Block Test (BBT) through world-aligned joint angles of fingers, arm, and trunk without depth sensors or calibration objects. We apply this framework to a dataset of 136 BBT recordings collected from 48 healthy individuals and 7 individuals post stroke. Using unsupervised dimensionality reduction of joint-angle features, we analyze movement patterns without relying on expert clinical labels. The resulting embeddings show separation between healthy movement patterns and stroke-related movement deviations. Importantly, some patients with the same BBT scores can be separated with different postural patterns. These results show that world-aligned joint angles can capture meaningful information of upper-extremity functions beyond standard time-based BBT scores, with no effort from the clinician other than monocular video recordings of the patient using a phone or camera. This work highlights the potential of a camera-based, calibration-free framework to measure movement quality in clinical assessments without changing the widely adopted clinical routine.
comment: Submitted to EMBC 2026
☆ TrajectoryMover: Generative Movement of Object Trajectories in Videos
Kiran Chhatre, Hyeonho Jeong, Yulia Gryaditskaya, Christopher E. Peters, Chun-Hao Paul Huang, Paul Guerrero
Generative video editing has enabled several intuitive editing operations for short video clips that would previously have been difficult to achieve, especially for non-expert editors. Existing methods focus on prescribing an object's 3D or 2D motion trajectory in a video, or on altering the appearance of an object or a scene, while preserving both the video's plausibility and identity. Yet a method to move an object's 3D motion trajectory in a video, i.e., moving an object while preserving its relative 3D motion, is currently still missing. The main challenge lies in obtaining paired video data for this scenario. Previous methods typically rely on clever data generation approaches to construct plausible paired data from unpaired videos, but this approach fails if one of the videos in a pair can not easily be constructed from the other. Instead, we introduce TrajectoryAtlas, a new data generation pipeline for large-scale synthetic paired video data and a video generator TrajectoryMover fine-tuned with this data. We show that this successfully enables generative movement of object trajectories. Project page: https://chhatrekiran.github.io/trajectorymover
comment: 24 pages, 8 figures. Project page: https://chhatrekiran.github.io/trajectorymover
☆ HCLSM: Hierarchical Causal Latent State Machines for Object-Centric World Modeling
World models that predict future states from video remain limited by flat latent representations that entangle objects, ignore causal structure, and collapse temporal dynamics into a single scale. We present HCLSM, a world model architecture that operates on three interconnected principles: object-centric decomposition via slot attention with spatial broadcast decoding, hierarchical temporal dynamics through a three-level engine combining selective state space models for continuous physics, sparse transformers for discrete events, and compressed transformers for abstract goals, and causal structure learning through graph neural network interaction patterns. HCLSM introduces a two-stage training protocol where spatial reconstruction forces slot specialization before dynamics prediction begins. We train a 68M-parameter model on the PushT robotic manipulation benchmark from the Open X-Embodiment dataset, achieving 0.008 MSE next-state prediction loss with emerging spatial decomposition (SBD loss: 0.0075) and learned event boundaries. A custom Triton kernel for the SSM scan delivers 38x speedup over sequential PyTorch. The full system spans 8,478 lines of Python across 51 modules with 171 unit tests. Code: https://github.com/rightnow-ai/hclsm
comment: 10 pages, 3 tables, 4 figures, 1 algorithm. Code: https://github.com/rightnow-ai/hclsm
☆ WorldFlow3D: Flowing Through 3D Distributions for Unbounded World Generation
Unbounded 3D world generation is emerging as a foundational task for scene modeling in computer vision, graphics, and robotics. In this work, we present WorldFlow3D, a novel method capable of generating unbounded 3D worlds. Building upon a foundational property of flow matching - namely, defining a path of transport between two data distributions - we model 3D generation more generally as a problem of flowing through 3D data distributions, not limited to conditional denoising. We find that our latent-free flow approach generates causal and accurate 3D structure, and can use this as an intermediate distribution to guide the generation of more complex structure and high-quality texture - all while converging more rapidly than existing methods. We enable controllability over generated scenes with vectorized scene layout conditions for geometric structure control and visual texture control through scene attributes. We confirm the effectiveness of WorldFlow3D on both real outdoor driving scenes and synthetic indoor scenes, validating cross-domain generalizability and high-quality generation on real data distributions. We confirm favorable scene generation fidelity over approaches in all tested settings for unbounded scene generation. For more, see https://light.princeton.edu/worldflow3d.
♻ ☆ Efficient Universal Perception Encoder
Chenchen Zhu, Saksham Suri, Cijo Jose, Maxime Oquab, Marc Szafraniec, Wei Wen, Yunyang Xiong, Patrick Labatut, Piotr Bojanowski, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Vikas Chandra
Running AI models on smart edge devices can unlock versatile user experiences, but presents challenges due to limited compute and the need to handle multiple tasks simultaneously. This requires a vision encoder with small size but powerful and versatile representations. We present our method, Efficient Universal Perception Encoder (EUPE), which offers both inference efficiency and universally good representations for diverse downstream tasks. We achieve this by distilling from multiple domain-expert foundation vision encoders. Unlike previous agglomerative methods that directly scale down from multiple teachers to an efficient encoder, we demonstrate the importance of first scaling up to a large proxy teacher and then scaling down from this single teacher. Experiments show that EUPE achieves on-par or better performance than individual domain experts of the same size on diverse task domains and also outperforms previous agglomerative encoders. We release the full family of EUPE models and the code to foster future research.
comment: Code: https://github.com/facebookresearch/EUPE; Model: https://huggingface.co/collections/facebook/eupe
♻ ☆ Gaze Authentication: Factors Influencing Authentication Performance
This paper examines the key factors that influence the performance of state-of-the-art gaze-based authentication. Experiments were conducted on a large-scale, in-house dataset comprising 8,849 subjects collected with Meta Quest Pro equivalent hardware running a video oculography-driven gaze estimation pipeline at 72~Hz. State of the neural network architecture was employed to study the influence of the following factors on authentication performance: eye tracking signal quality, various aspects of eye tracking calibration, and simple filtering on estimated raw gaze. This report provides performance results and their analysis.
comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, 10 tables
♻ ☆ GenOL: Generating Diverse Examples for Name-only Online Learning
Online learning methods often rely on supervised data. However, under data distribution shifts, such as in continual learning (CL), where continuously arriving online data streams incorporate new concepts (e.g., classes), real-time manual annotation is impractical due to its costs and latency, which hinder real-time adaptation. To alleviate this, 'name-only' setup has been proposed, requiring only the name of concepts, not the supervised samples. A recent approach tackles this setup by supplementing data with web-scraped images, but such data often suffers from issues of data imbalance, noise, and copyright. To overcome the limitations of both human supervision and webly supervision, we propose GenOL using generative models for name-only training. But naive application of generative models results in limited diversity of generated data. Here, we enhance (i) intra-diversity, the diversity of images generated by a single model, by proposing a diverse prompt generation method that generates diverse text prompts for text-to-image models, and (ii) inter-diversity, the diversity of images generated by multiple generative models, by introducing an ensemble strategy that selects minimally overlapping samples. We empirically validate that the proposed \frameworkname outperforms prior arts, even a model trained with fully supervised data by large margins, in various tasks, including image recognition and multi-modal visual reasoning.
comment: TMLR 2025
♻ ☆ MathGen: Revealing the Illusion of Mathematical Competence through Text-to-Image Generation
Ruiyao Liu, Hui Shen, Ping Zhang, Yunta Hsieh, Yifan Zhang, Jing Xu, Sicheng Chen, Junchen Li, Jiawei Lu, Jianing Ma, Jiaqi Mo, Qi Han, Zhen Zhang, Zhongwei Wan, Jing Xiong, Xin Wang, Ziyuan Liu, Hangrui Cao, Ngai Wong
Modern generative models have demonstrated the ability to solve challenging mathematical problems. In many real-world settings, however, mathematical solutions must be expressed visually through diagrams, plots, geometric constructions, and structured symbolic layouts, where correctness depends on precise visual composition. This naturally raises the question of whether generative models can still do so when the answer must be rendered visually rather than written in text? To study this problem, we introduce MathGen, a rigorous benchmark of 900 problems spanning seven core domains, each paired with an executable verifier under a Script-as-a-Judge protocol for deterministic and objective evaluation. Experiments on representative open-source and proprietary text-to-image models show that mathematical fidelity remains a major bottleneck: even the best closed-source model reaches only 42.0% overall accuracy, while open-source models achieve just ~ 1-11%, often near 0% on structured tasks. Overall, current T2I models remain far from competent at even elementary mathematical visual generation.
♻ ☆ ReDiPrune: Relevance-Diversity Pre-Projection Token Pruning for Efficient Multimodal LLMs
Recent multimodal large language models are computationally expensive because Transformers must process a large number of visual tokens. We present ReDiPrune, a training-free token pruning method applied before the vision-language projector, where visual features remain rich and discriminative. Unlike post-projection pruning methods that operate on compressed representations, ReDiPrune selects informative tokens directly from vision encoder outputs, preserving fine-grained spatial and semantic cues. Each token is scored by a lightweight rule that jointly consider text-conditioned relevance and max-min diversity, ensuring the selected tokens are both query-relevant and non-redundant. ReDiPrune is fully plug-and-play, requiring no retraining or architectural modifications, and can be seamlessly inserted between the encoder and projector. Across four video and five image benchmarks, it consistently improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off. For example, on EgoSchema with LLaVA-NeXT-Video-7B, retaining only 15% of visual tokens yields a +2.0% absolute accuracy gain while reducing computation by more than $6\times$ in TFLOPs. Code is available at https://github.com/UA-CVML/ReDiPrune.
♻ ☆ DiffusionVL: Translating Any Autoregressive Models into Diffusion Vision Language Models
Diffusion-based decoding has recently emerged as an appealing alternative to autoregressive (AR) generation, offering the potential to update multiple tokens in parallel and reduce latency. However, diffusion vision language models (dVLMs) still lag significantly behind mainstream autoregressive vision language models. This is due to the scarcity and weaker performance of base diffusion language models (dLLMs) compared with their autoregressive counterparts. This raises a natural question: Can we build high-performing dVLMs directly from existing powerful AR models, without relying on dLLMs? We propose DiffusionVL, a family of dVLMs obtained by translating pretrained AR models into the diffusion paradigm via an efficient diffusion finetuning procedure that changes the training objective and decoding process while keeping the backbone architecture intact. Through an efficient diffusion finetuning strategy, we successfully adapt AR pretrained models into the diffusion paradigm. This approach yields two key observations: (1) The paradigm shift from AR-based multimodal models to diffusion is remarkably effective. (2) Direct conversion of an AR language model to a dVLM is also feasible, achieving performance comparable to that of the same AR model finetuned with standard autoregressive visual instruction tuning. To enable practical open-ended generation, we further integrate block decoding, which supports arbitrary-length outputs and KV-cache reuse for faster inference. Our experiments demonstrate that despite training with less than 5% of the data required by prior methods, DiffusionVL achieves a comprehensive performance improvement, with a 34.4% gain on the MMMU-Pro (vision) benchmark and 37.5% gain on the MME (Cog.) benchmark, alongside a 2x inference speedup. The model and code are released at https://github.com/hustvl/DiffusionVL.
comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, conference or other essential info
♻ ☆ LPNSR: Prior-Enhanced Diffusion Image Super-Resolution via LR-Guided Noise Prediction
Diffusion-based image super-resolution (SR), which aims to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images from corresponding low-resolution (LR) observations, faces a fundamental trade-off between inference efficiency and reconstruction quality. The state-of-the-art residual-shifting diffusion framework achieves efficient 4-step inference, yet suffers from severe performance degradation in compact sampling trajectories. This is mainly attributed to two core limitations: the inherent suboptimality of unconstrained random Gaussian noise in intermediate steps, which leads to error accumulation and insufficient LR prior guidance, and the initialization bias caused by naive bicubic upsampling. In this paper, we propose LPNSR, a prior-enhanced efficient diffusion framework to address these issues. We first mathematically derive the closed-form analytical solution of the optimal intermediate noise for the residual-shifting diffusion paradigm, and accordingly design an LR-guided multi-input-aware noise predictor to replace random Gaussian noise, embedding LR structural priors into the reverse process while fully preserving the framework's core efficient residual-shifting mechanism. We further mitigate initial bias with a high-quality pre-upsampling network to optimize the diffusion starting point. With a compact 4-step trajectory, LPNSR can be optimized in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LPNSR achieves state-of-the-art perceptual performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets, without relying on any large-scale text-to-image priors. The source code of our method can be found at https://github.com/Faze-Hsw/LPNSR.
♻ ☆ Unsupervised Modular Adaptive Region Growing and RegionMix Classification for Wind Turbine Segmentation WACV 2026
Reliable operation of wind turbines requires frequent inspections, as even minor surface damages can degrade aerodynamic performance, reduce energy output, and accelerate blade wear. Central to automating these inspections is the accurate segmentation of turbine blades from visual data. This task is traditionally addressed through dense, pixel-wise deep learning models. However, such methods demand extensive annotated datasets, posing scalability challenges. In this work, we introduce an annotation-efficient segmentation approach that reframes the pixel-level task into a binary region classification problem. Image regions are generated using a fully unsupervised, interpretable Modular Adaptive Region Growing technique, guided by image-specific Adaptive Thresholding and enhanced by a Region Merging process that consolidates fragmented areas into coherent segments. To improve generalization and classification robustness, we introduce RegionMix, an augmentation strategy that synthesizes new training samples by combining distinct regions. Our framework demonstrates state-of-the-art segmentation accuracy and strong cross-site generalization by consistently segmenting turbine blades across distinct windfarms.
comment: Accepted to WACV 2026
♻ ☆ SceneDiff: A Benchmark and Method for Multiview Object Change Detection
We investigate the problem of identifying objects that have been added, removed, or moved between a pair of captures (images or videos) of the same scene at different times. Accurately identifying verifiable changes is extremely challenging -- some objects may appear to be missing because they are occluded or out of frame, while others may appear different due to large viewpoint changes. To study this problem, we introduce the SceneDiff Benchmark, the first multiview change detection dataset for scenes captured along different camera trajectories, comprising 350 diverse video pairs with dense object instance-level annotations. We also introduce the SceneDiff algorithm, a training-free approach that solves for image poses, segments images into objects, and compares them using semantic and geometric features. By building on pretrained models, SceneDiff generalizes across domains without retraining and naturally improves as the underlying models advance. Experiments on multiview and two-view benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches by large margins (53.0\% and 30.6\% relative AP improvements). Project page: https://yuqunw.github.io/SceneDiff
♻ ☆ SIMPACT: Simulation-Enabled Action Planning using Vision-Language Models CVPR 2026
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit remarkable common-sense and semantic reasoning capabilities. However, they lack a grounded understanding of physical dynamics. This limitation arises from training VLMs on static internet-scale visual-language data that contain no causal interactions or action-conditioned changes. Consequently, it remains challenging to leverage VLMs for fine-grained robotic manipulation tasks that require physical understanding, reasoning, and corresponding action planning. To overcome this, we present SIMPACT, a test-time, SIMulation-enabled ACTion Planning framework that equips VLMs with physical reasoning through simulation-in-the-loop world modeling, without requiring any additional training. From a single RGB-D observation, SIMPACT efficiently constructs physics simulations, enabling the VLM to propose informed actions, observe simulated rollouts, and iteratively refine its reasoning. By integrating language reasoning with physics prediction, our simulation-enabled VLM can understand contact dynamics and action outcomes in a physically grounded way. Our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on five challenging, real-world rigid-body and deformable manipulation tasks that require fine-grained physical reasoning, outperforming existing general-purpose robotic manipulation models. Our results demonstrate that embedding physics understanding via efficient simulation into VLM reasoning at test time offers a promising path towards generalizable embodied intelligence. Project webpage can be found at https://simpact-bot.github.io
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026; camera-ready version
♻ ☆ ReCALL: Recalibrating Capability Degradation for MLLM-based Composed Image Retrieval CVPR 2026
Tianyu Yang, Chenwei He, Xiangzhao Hao, Tianyue Wang, Jiarui Guo, Haiyun Guo, Leigang Qu, Jinqiao Wang, Tat-Seng Chua
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve target images based on a hybrid query comprising a reference image and a modification text. Early dual-tower Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle with cross-modality compositional reasoning required for this task. While adapting generative Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for retrieval offers a promising direction, we identify that this strategy overlooks a fundamental issue: compressing a generative MLLM into a single-embedding discriminative retriever triggers a paradigm conflict, which leads to Capability Degradation - the deterioration of native fine-grained reasoning after retrieval adaptation. To address this challenge, we propose ReCALL, a model-agnostic framework that follows a diagnose-generate-refine pipeline: First, we diagnose cognitive blind spots of the retriever via self-guided informative instance mining. Next, we generate corrective instructions and triplets by prompting the foundation MLLM and conduct quality control with VQA-based consistency filtering. Finally, we refine the retriever through continual training on these triplets with a grouped contrastive scheme, thereby internalizing fine-grained visual-semantic distinctions and realigning the discriminative embedding space of retriever with intrinsic compositional reasoning within the MLLM. Extensive experiments on CIRR and FashionIQ show that ReCALL consistently recalibrates degraded capabilities and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/RemRico/Recall.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026
♻ ☆ TransFIRA: Transfer Learning for Face Image Recognizability Assessment
Face recognition in unconstrained environments such as surveillance, video, and web imagery must contend with extreme variation in pose, blur, illumination, and occlusion, where conventional visual quality metrics fail to predict whether inputs are truly recognizable to the deployed encoder. Existing FIQA methods typically rely on visual heuristics, curated annotations, or computationally intensive generative pipelines, leaving their predictions detached from the encoder's decision geometry. We introduce TransFIRA (Transfer Learning for Face Image Recognizability Assessment), a lightweight and annotation-free framework that grounds recognizability directly in embedding space. TransFIRA delivers three advances: (i) a definition of recognizability via class-center similarity (CCS) and class-center angular separation (CCAS), yielding the first natural, decision-boundary-aligned criterion for filtering and weighting; (ii) a recognizability-informed aggregation strategy that achieves state-of-the-art verification accuracy on BRIAR and IJB-C while nearly doubling correlation with true recognizability, all without external labels, heuristics, or backbone-specific training; and (iii) new extensions beyond faces, including encoder-grounded explainability that reveals how degradations and subject-specific factors affect recognizability, and the first method for body recognizability assessment. Experiments confirm state-of-the-art results on faces, strong performance on body recognition, and robustness under cross-dataset shifts and out-of-distribution evaluation. Together, these contributions establish TransFIRA as a unified, geometry-driven framework for recognizability assessment that is encoder-specific, accurate, interpretable, and extensible across modalities, significantly advancing FIQA in accuracy, explainability, and scope.
comment: Project Page: https://transfira.github.io/
♻ ☆ LG-HCC: Local Geometry-Aware Hierarchical Context Compression for 3D Gaussian Splatting
Although 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables high-fidelity real-time rendering, its prohibitive storage overhead severely hinders practical deployment. Recent anchor-based 3DGS compression schemes reduce gaussina redundancy through ome advanced context models. However, overlook explicit geometric dependencies, leading to structural degradation and suboptimal rate-distortion performance. In this paper, we propose LG-HCC, a geometry-aware 3DGS compression framework that incorporates inter-anchor geometric correlations into anchor pruning and entropy coding for compact representation. Specifically, we introduce an Neighborhood-Aware Anchor Pruning (NAAP) strategy, which evaluates anchor importance via weighted neighborhood feature aggregation and merges redundant anchors into salient neighbors, yielding a compact yet geometry-consistent anchor set. Building upon this optimized structure, we further develop a hierarchical entropy coding scheme, in which coarse-to-fine priors are exploited through a lightweight Geometry-Guided Convolution (GG-Conv) operator to enable spatially adaptive context modeling and rate-distortion optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LG-HCC effectively resolves the structure preservation bottleneck, maintaining superior geometric integrity and rendering fidelity over state-of-the-art anchor-based compression approaches.
comment: 10
♻ ☆ CLIP-AUTT: Test-Time Personalization with Action Unit Prompting for Fine-Grained Video Emotion Recognition
Muhammad Osama Zeeshan, Masoumeh Sharafi, Benoît Savary, Alessandro Lameiras Koerich, Marco Pedersoli, Eric Granger
Personalization in emotion recognition (ER) is essential for an accurate interpretation of subtle and subject-specific expressive patterns. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP demonstrate strong potential for leveraging joint image-text representations in ER. However, CLIP-based methods either depend on CLIP's contrastive pretraining or on LLMs to generate descriptive text prompts, which are noisy, computationally expensive, and fail to capture fine-grained expressions, leading to degraded performance. In this work, we leverage Action Units (AUs) as structured textual prompts within CLIP to model fine-grained facial expressions. AUs encode the subtle muscle activations underlying expressions, providing localized and interpretable semantic cues for more robust ER. We introduce CLIP-AU, a lightweight AU-guided temporal learning method that integrates interpretable AU semantics into CLIP. It learns generic, subject-agnostic representations by aligning AU prompts with facial dynamics, enabling fine-grained ER without CLIP fine-tuning or LLM-generated text supervision. Although CLIP-AU models fine-grained AU semantics, it does not adapt to subject-specific variability in subtle expressions. To address this limitation, we propose CLIP-AUTT, a video-based test-time personalization method that dynamically adapts AU prompts to videos from unseen subjects. By combining entropy-guided temporal window selection with prompt tuning, CLIP-AUTT enables subject-specific adaptation while preserving temporal consistency. Our extensive experiments on three challenging video-based subtle ER datasets, BioVid, StressID, and BAH, indicate that CLIP-AU and CLIP-AUTT outperform state-of-the-art CLIP-based FER and TTA methods, achieving robust and personalized subtle ER. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/osamazeeshan/CLIP-AUTT.
♻ ☆ LatentFM: A Latent Flow Matching Approach for Generative Medical Image Segmentation
Generative models have achieved remarkable progress with the emergence of flow matching (FM). It has demonstrated strong generative capabilities and attracted significant attention as a simulation-free flow-based framework capable of learning exact data densities. Motivated by these advances, we propose LatentFM, a flow-based model operating in the latent space for medical image segmentation. To model the data distribution, we first design two variational autoencoders (VAEs) to encode both medical images and their corresponding masks into a lower-dimensional latent space. We then estimate a conditional velocity field that guides the flow based on the input image. By sampling multiple latent representations, our method synthesizes diverse segmentation outputs whose pixel-wise variance reliably captures the underlying data distribution, enabling both highly accurate and uncertainty-aware predictions. Furthermore, we generate confidence maps that quantify the model certainty, providing clinicians with richer information for deeper analysis. We conduct experiments on two datasets, ISIC-2018 and CVC-Clinic, and compare our method with several prior baselines, including both deterministic and generative approach models. Through comprehensive evaluations, both qualitative and quantitative results show that our approach achieves superior segmentation accuracy while remaining highly efficient in the latent space.
♻ ☆ InfiniteVL: Synergizing Linear and Sparse Attention for Highly-Efficient, Unlimited-Input Vision-Language Models
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly tasked with ultra-long multimodal understanding. While linear architectures offer constant computation and memory footprints, they often struggle with high-frequency visual perception compared to standard Transformers. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{InfiniteVL}. We first develop a hybrid base model called \textbf{InfiniteVL-Base} that interleaves a small fraction of Full Attention layers with Gated DeltaNet. Empowered by a tailored distillation and fine-tuning strategy, InfiniteVL-Base matches the fundamental multimodal performance of equivalent Transformers while achieving a \textbf{1.7$\times$} decoding speedup. However, the quadratic complexity of the retained Full Attention inevitably becomes an efficiency bottleneck when scaling to ultra long context. To break this barrier, we propose a novel Long-Sequence Architectural Fine-Tuning strategy that seamlessly transforms the dense attention into vision-specific sparse mechanisms. This yields two specialized variants: \textbf{InfiniteVL-Offline} for offline retrieval and \textbf{InfiniteVL-Online} for online streaming. By eliminating the computation explosion of global attention without sacrificing high-frequency visual recall, InfiniteVL-Offline achieves Transformer-level length generalization with a \textbf{5x} prefill acceleration at 256K context. Concurrently, InfiniteVL-Online delivers robust streaming perception with a constant memory footprint and a real-time throughput of \textbf{25} FPS. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hustvl/InfiniteVL.
comment: 20 pages, 8 figures, conference or other essential info
♻ ☆ ResAdapt: Adaptive Resolution for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning
Huanxuan Liao, Zhongtao Jiang, Yupu Hao, Yuqiao Tan, Shizhu He, Ben Wang, Jun Zhao, Kun Xu, Kang Liu
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve stronger visual understanding by scaling input fidelity, yet the resulting visual token growth makes jointly sustaining high spatial resolution and long temporal context prohibitive. We argue that the bottleneck lies not in how post-encoding representations are compressed but in the volume of pixels the encoder receives, and address it with ResAdapt, an Input-side adaptation framework that learns how much visual budget each frame should receive before encoding. ResAdapt couples a lightweight Allocator with an unchanged MLLM backbone, so the backbone retains its native visual-token interface while receiving an operator-transformed input. We formulate allocation as a contextual bandit and train the Allocator with Cost-Aware Policy Optimization (CAPO), which converts sparse rollout feedback into a stable accuracy-cost learning signal. Across budget-controlled video QA, temporal grounding, and image reasoning tasks, ResAdapt improves low-budget operating points and often lies on or near the efficiency-accuracy frontier, with the clearest gains on reasoning-intensive benchmarks under aggressive compression. Notably, ResAdapt supports up to 16x more frames at the same visual budget while delivering over 15% performance gain. Code is available at https://github.com/Xnhyacinth/ResAdapt.
comment: work in progress
♻ ☆ DFM-VLA: Iterative Action Refinement for Robot Manipulation via Discrete Flow Matching
Vision--Language--Action (VLA) models that encode actions using a discrete tokenization scheme are increasingly adopted for robotic manipulation, but existing decoding paradigms remain fundamentally limited. Whether actions are decoded sequentially by autoregressive VLAs or in parallel by discrete diffusion VLAs, once a token is generated, it is typically fixed and cannot be revised in subsequent iterations, so early token errors cannot be effectively corrected later. We propose DFM-VLA, a discrete flow matching VLA for iterative refinement of action tokens. DFM-VLA~models a token-level probability velocity field that dynamically updates the full action sequence across refinement iterations. We investigate two ways to construct the velocity field: an auxiliary velocity-head formulation and an action-embedding-guided formulation. Our framework further adopts a two-stage decoding strategy with an iterative refinement stage followed by deterministic validation for stable convergence. Extensive experiments on CALVIN, LIBERO, and real-world manipulation tasks show that DFM-VLA consistently outperforms strong autoregressive, discrete diffusion, and continuous diffusion baselines in manipulation performance while retaining high inference efficiency. In particular, DFM-VLA achieves an average success length of 4.44 on CALVIN and an average success rate of 95.7\% on LIBERO, highlighting the value of action refinement via discrete flow matching for robotic manipulation. Our project is available https://chris1220313648.github.io/DFM-VLA/
♻ ☆ Understanding vs. Generation: Navigating Optimization Dilemma in Multimodal Models ICLR2026
Current research in multimodal models faces a key challenge where enhancing generative capabilities often comes at the expense of understanding, and vice versa. We analyzed this trade-off and identify the primary cause might be the potential conflict between generation and understanding, which creates a competitive dynamic within the model. To address this, we propose the Reason-Reflect-Refine (R3) framework. This innovative algorithm re-frames the single-step generation task into a multi-step process of "generate-understand-regenerate". By explicitly leveraging the model's understanding capability during generation, we successfully mitigate the optimization dilemma, achieved stronger generation results and improved understanding ability which are related to the generation process. This offers valuable insights for designing next-generation unified multimodal models. Code is available at https://github.com/sen-ye/R3.
comment: Accepted to ICLR2026
♻ ☆ Benchmarking Physics-Informed Time-Series Models for Operational Global Station Weather Forecasting
The development of Time-Series Forecasting (TSF) models is often constrained by the lack of comprehensive datasets, especially in Global Station Weather Forecasting (GSWF), where existing datasets are small, temporally short, and spatially sparse. To address this, we introduce WEATHER-5K, a large-scale observational weather dataset that better reflects real-world conditions, supporting improved model training and evaluation. While recent TSF methods perform well on benchmarks, they lag behind operational Numerical Weather Prediction systems in capturing complex weather dynamics and extreme events. We propose PhysicsFormer, a physics-informed forecasting model combining a dynamic core with a Transformer residual to predict future weather states. Physical consistency is enforced via pressure-wind alignment and energy-aware smoothness losses, ensuring plausible dynamics while capturing complex temporal patterns. We benchmark PhysicsFormer and other TSF models against operational systems across several weather variables, extreme event prediction, and model complexity, providing a comprehensive assessment of the gap between academic TSF models and operational forecasting. The dataset and benchmark implementation are available at: https://github.com/taohan10200/WEATHER-5K.
comment: 34 pages, 20 figures
♻ ☆ $R_\text{dm}$: Re-conceptualizing Distribution Matching as a Reward for Diffusion Distillation
Diffusion models achieve state-of-the-art generative performance but are fundamentally bottlenecked by their slow, iterative sampling process. While diffusion distillation techniques enable high-fidelity, few-step generation, traditional objectives often restrict the student's performance by anchoring it solely to the teacher. Recent approaches have attempted to break this ceiling by integrating Reinforcement Learning (RL), typically through a simple summation of distillation and RL objectives. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm by re-conceptualizing distribution matching as a reward, denoted as $R_\text{dm}$. This unified perspective bridges the algorithmic gap between Diffusion Matching Distillation (DMD) and RL, providing several primary benefits. (1) Enhanced Optimization Stability: We introduce Group Normalized Distribution Matching (GNDM), which adapts standard RL group normalization to stabilize $R_\text{dm}$ estimation. By leveraging group-mean statistics, GNDM establishes a more robust and effective optimization direction. (2) Seamless Reward Integration: Our reward-centric formulation inherently supports adaptive weighting mechanisms, allowing for the fluid combination of DMD with external reward models. (3) Improved Sampling Efficiency: By aligning with RL principles, the framework readily incorporates Importance Sampling (IS), leading to a significant boost in sampling efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GNDM outperforms vanilla DMD, reducing the FID by 1.87. Furthermore, our multi-reward variant, GNDMR, surpasses existing baselines by striking an optimal balance between aesthetic quality and fidelity, achieving a peak HPS of 30.37 and a low FID-SD of 12.21. Ultimately, $R_\text{dm}$ provides a flexible, stable, and efficient framework for real-time, high-fidelity synthesis. Codes are coming soon.
♻ ☆ Noise-adapted Neural Operator for Robust Non-Line-of-Sight Imaging
This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible. Computational imaging, especially non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging, the extraction of information from obscured or hidden scenes is achieved through the utilization of indirect light signals resulting from multiple reflections or scattering. The inherently weak nature of these signals, coupled with their susceptibility to noise, necessitates the integration of physical processes to ensure accurate reconstruction. This paper presents a parameterized inverse problem framework tailored for large-scale linear problems in 3D imaging reconstruction. Initially, a noise estimation module is employed to adaptively assess the noise levels present in transient data. Subsequently, a parameterized neural operator is developed to approximate the inverse mapping, facilitating end-to-end rapid image reconstruction. Our 3D image reconstruction framework, grounded in operator learning, is constructed through deep algorithm unfolding, which not only provides commendable model interpretability but also enables dynamic adaptation to varying noise levels in the acquired data, thereby ensuring consistently robust and accurate reconstruction outcomes. Furthermore, we introduce a novel method for the fusion of global and local spatiotemporal data features. By integrating structural and detailed information, this method significantly enhances both accuracy and robustness. Comprehensive numerical experiments conducted on both simulated and real datasets substantiate the efficacy of the proposed method. It demonstrates remarkable performance with fast scanning data and sparse illumination point data, offering a viable solution for NLOS imaging in complex scenarios.
♻ ☆ DeepCoT: Deep Continual Transformers for Real-Time Inference on Data Streams
Transformer-based models have dramatically increased their size and parameter count to tackle increasingly complex tasks. At the same time, there is a growing demand for high performance, low-latency inference on devices with limited resources. In particular, stream data inference is typically performed over a sliding temporal window, leading to highly redundant computations. While the recent Continual Transformers started addressing this issue, they can be effectively used only in shallow models, which limits their scope and generalization power. In this paper, we propose the Deep Continual Transformer (DeepCoT), a redundancy-free encoder attention mechanism that can be applied over existing deep encoder architectures with minimal changes. In our experiments over audio, video, and text streams, we show that DeepCoTs retain comparative performance to their non-continual baselines while offering a linear computational cost for all Transformer layers, which reduces up to two orders of magnitude in the running time compared to previous efficient models.
comment: 15 pages, 5 figures
♻ ☆ From Plausibility to Verifiability: Risk-Controlled Generative OCR for Vision-Language Models
Modern vision-language models (VLMs) can act as generative OCR engines, yet open-ended decoding can expose rare but consequential failures. We identify a core deployment misalignment in generative OCR. Autoregressive decoding favors semantic plausibility, whereas OCR requires outputs that are visually grounded and geometrically verifiable. This mismatch produces severe errors, especially over-generation and unsupported substitutions, creating deployment risk even when benchmark accuracy remains high. We therefore formulate frozen VLM OCR as a selective accept/abstain problem and propose a model-agnostic Geometric Risk Controller. The controller probes multiple structured views of the same input, applies lightweight structural screening, and accepts a transcription only when cross-view consensus and stability satisfy predefined criteria, yielding a small family of operating points. Experiments on frozen VLM backbones and standard OCR benchmarks show consistent reductions in extreme-error risk and catastrophic over-generation at predictable coverage costs. Reliable deployment of generative OCR with frozen VLMs benefits from explicit system-level risk control rather than unconstrained generation.
comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables
♻ ☆ The Prism Hypothesis: Harmonizing Semantic and Pixel Representations via Unified Autoencoding
Deep representations across modalities are inherently intertwined. In this paper, we systematically analyze the spectral characteristics of various semantic and pixel encoders. Interestingly, our study uncovers a highly inspiring and rarely explored correspondence between an encoder's feature spectrum and its functional role: semantic encoders primarily capture low-frequency components that encode abstract meaning, whereas pixel encoders additionally retain high-frequency information that conveys fine-grained detail. This heuristic finding offers a unifying perspective that ties encoder behavior to its underlying spectral structure. We define it as the Prism Hypothesis, where each data modality can be viewed as a projection of the natural world onto a shared feature spectrum, just like the prism. Building on this insight, we propose Unified Autoencoding (UAE), a model that harmonizes semantic structure and pixel details via an innovative frequency-band modulator, enabling their seamless coexistence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UAE effectively unifies semantic abstraction and pixel-level fidelity within a single latent space, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, we show that UAE can be directly applied to pixel-space modeling, significantly improving both FID and IS over the vanilla JIT baseline. Our code is avaliable at: https://github.com/WeichenFan/UAE.
comment: Code link: https://github.com/WeichenFan/UAE
♻ ☆ EagleNet: Energy-Aware Fine-Grained Relationship Learning Network for Text-Video Retrieval CVPR 2026
Text-video retrieval tasks have seen significant improvements due to the recent development of large-scale vision-language pre-trained models. Traditional methods primarily focus on video representations or cross-modal alignment, while recent works shift toward enriching text expressiveness to better match the rich semantics in videos. However, these methods use only interactions between text and frames/video, and ignore rich interactions among the internal frames within a video, so the final expanded text cannot capture frame contextual information, leading to disparities between text and video. In response, we introduce Energy-Aware Fine-Grained Relationship Learning Network (EagleNet) to generate accurate and context-aware enriched text embeddings. Specifically, the proposed Fine-Grained Relationship Learning mechanism (FRL) first constructs a text-frame graph by the generated text candidates and frames, then learns relationships among texts and frames, which are finally used to aggregate text candidates into an enriched text embedding that incorporates frame contextual information. To further improve fine-grained relationship learning in FRL, we design Energy-Aware Matching (EAM) to model the energy of text-frame interactions and thus accurately capture the distribution of real text-video pairs. Moreover, for more effective cross-modal alignment and stable training, we replace the conventional softmax-based contrastive loss with the sigmoid loss. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superiority of EagleNet across MSRVTT, DiDeMo, MSVD, and VATEX. Codes are available at https://github.com/draym28/EagleNet.
comment: Accepted at CVPR 2026
♻ ☆ SleepVLM: Explainable and Rule-Grounded Sleep Staging via a Vision-Language Model
While automated sleep staging has achieved expert-level accuracy, its clinical adoption is hindered by a lack of auditable reasoning. We introduce SleepVLM, a rule-grounded vision-language model (VLM) designed to stage sleep from multi-channel polysomnography (PSG) waveform images while generating clinician-readable rationales based on American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) scoring criteria. Utilizing waveform-perceptual pre-training and rule-grounded supervised fine-tuning, SleepVLM achieved Cohen's kappa scores of 0.767 on an held out test set (MASS-SS1) and 0.743 on an external cohort (ZUAMHCS), matching state-of-the-art performance. Expert evaluations further validated the quality of the model's reasoning, with mean scores exceeding 4.0/5.0 for factual accuracy, evidence comprehensiveness, and logical coherence. By coupling competitive performance with transparent, rule-based explanations, SleepVLM may improve the trustworthiness and auditability of automated sleep staging in clinical workflows. To facilitate further research in interpretable sleep medicine, we release MASS-EX, a novel expert-annotated dataset.
comment: Under review
♻ ☆ Improving Liver Disease Diagnosis with SNNDeep: A Custom Spiking Neural Network Using Diverse Learning Algorithms
Purpose: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have recently gained attention as energy-efficient, biologically plausible alternatives to conventional deep learning models. Their application in high-stakes biomedical imaging remains almost entirely unexplored. Methods: This study introduces SNNDeep, the first tailored SNN specifically optimized for binary classification of liver health status from computed tomography (CT) features. To ensure clinical relevance and broad generalizability, the model was developed and evaluated using the Task03\Liver dataset from the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD), a standardized benchmark widely used for assessing performance across diverse medical imaging tasks. We benchmark three fundamentally different learning algorithms, namely Surrogate Gradient Learning, the Tempotron rule, and Bio-Inspired Active Learning across three architectural variants: a fully customized low-level model built from scratch, and two implementations using leading SNN frameworks, i.e., snnTorch and SpikingJelly. Hyperparameter optimization was performed using Optuna. Results: Our results demonstrate that the custom-built SNNDeep consistently outperforms framework-based implementations, achieving a maximum validation accuracy of 98.35%, superior adaptability across learning rules, and significantly reduced training overhead. Conclusion:This study provides the first empirical evidence that low-level, highly tunable SNNs can surpass standard frameworks in medical imaging, especially in data-limited, temporally constrained diagnostic settings, thereby opening a new pathway for neuro-inspired AI in precision medicine.
♻ ☆ Universal Skeleton Understanding via Differentiable Rendering and MLLMs
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit strong visual-language reasoning, yet remain confined to their native modalities and cannot directly process structured, non-visual data such as human skeletons. Existing methods either compress skeleton dynamics into lossy feature vectors for text alignment, or quantize motion into discrete tokens that generalize poorly across heterogeneous skeleton formats. We present SkeletonLLM, which achieves universal skeleton understanding by translating arbitrary skeleton sequences into the MLLM's native visual modality. At its core is DrAction, a differentiable, format-agnostic renderer that converts skeletal kinematics into compact image sequences. Because the pipeline is end-to-end differentiable, MLLM gradients can directly guide the rendering to produce task-informative visual tokens. To further enhance reasoning capabilities, we introduce a cooperative training strategy: Causal Reasoning Distillation transfers structured, step-by-step reasoning from a teacher model, while Discriminative Finetuning sharpens decision boundaries between confusable actions. SkeletonLLM demonstrates strong generalization on diverse tasks including recognition, captioning, reasoning, and cross-format transfer -- suggesting a viable path for applying MLLMs to non-native modalities. Code will be released upon acceptance.
comment: 32 pages, 15 figures
♻ ☆ SafeDrive: Fine-Grained Safety Reasoning for End-to-End Driving in a Sparse World CVPR 2026
The end-to-end (E2E) paradigm, which maps sensor inputs directly to driving decisions, has recently attracted significant attention due to its unified modeling capability and scalability. However, ensuring safety in this unified framework remains one of the most critical challenges. In this work, we propose SafeDrive, an E2E planning framework designed to perform explicit and interpretable safety reasoning through a trajectory-conditioned Sparse World Model. SafeDrive comprises two complementary networks: the Sparse World Network (SWNet) and the Fine-grained Reasoning Network (FRNet). SWNet constructs trajectory-conditioned sparse worlds that simulate the future behaviors of critical dynamic agents and road entities, providing interaction-centric representations for downstream reasoning. FRNet then evaluates agent-specific collision risks and temporal adherence to drivable regions, enabling precise identification of safety-critical events across future timesteps. SafeDrive achieves state-of-the-art performance on both open-loop and closed-loop benchmarks. On NAVSIM, it records a PDMS of 91.6 and an EPDMS of 87.5, with only 61 collisions out of 12,146 scenarios (0.5%). On Bench2Drive, SafeDrive attains a 66.8% driving score.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026, 19 pages, 9 figures
♻ ☆ A Provable Energy-Guided Test-Time Defense Boosting Adversarial Robustness of Large Vision-Language Models CVPR
Despite the rapid progress in multimodal models and Large Visual-Language Models (LVLM), they remain highly susceptible to adversarial perturbations, raising serious concerns about their reliability in real-world use. While adversarial training has become the leading paradigm for building models that are robust to adversarial attacks, Test-Time Transformations (TTT) have emerged as a promising strategy to boost robustness at inference. In light of this, we propose Energy-Guided Test-Time Transformation (ET3), a lightweight, training-free defense that enhances the robustness by minimizing the energy of the input samples. Our method is grounded in a theory that proves our transformation succeeds in classification under reasonable assumptions. We present extensive experiments demonstrating that ET3 provides a strong defense for classifiers, zero-shot classification with CLIP, and also for boosting the robustness of LVLMs in tasks such as Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering. Code is available at github.com/OmnAI-Lab/Energy-Guided-Test-Time-Defense .
comment: Accepted at the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2026, Main Conference
♻ ☆ Detection of Adversarial Attacks in Robotic Perception
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) achieve strong performance in semantic segmentation for robotic perception but remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, threatening safety-critical applications. While robustness has been studied for image classification, semantic segmentation in robotic contexts requires specialized architectures and detection strategies.
comment: 9 pages, 6 figures. Accepted and presented at STE 2025, Transilvania University of Brasov, Romania
♻ ☆ VIGiA: Instructional Video Guidance via Dialogue Reasoning and Retrieval EACL 2026
We introduce VIGiA, a novel multimodal dialogue model designed to understand and reason over complex, multi-step instructional video action plans. Unlike prior work which focuses mainly on text-only guidance, or treats vision and language in isolation, VIGiA supports grounded, plan-aware dialogue that requires reasoning over visual inputs, instructional plans, and interleaved user interactions. To this end, VIGiA incorporates two key capabilities: (1) multimodal plan reasoning, enabling the model to align uni- and multimodal queries with the current task plan and respond accurately; and (2) plan-based retrieval, allowing it to retrieve relevant plan steps in either textual or visual representations. Experiments were done on a novel dataset with rich Instructional Video Dialogues aligned with Cooking and DIY plans. Our evaluation shows that VIGiA outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on all tasks in a conversational plan guidance setting, reaching over 90\% accuracy on plan-aware VQA.
comment: Published at EACL 2026 Findings
♻ ☆ Hardware-Algorithm Co-Optimization of Early-Exit Neural Networks for Multi-Core Edge Accelerators
Deployment of dynamic neural networks on edge accelerators requires careful consideration of hardware constraints beyond conventional complexity metrics such as Multiply-Accumulate operations. In Early-Exiting Neural Networks (EENN), exit placement, quantization level, and hardware workload mapping interact in non-trivial ways, influencing memory traffic, accelerator utilization, and ultimately energy-latency trade-offs. These interactions remain insufficiently understood in existing Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approaches, which typically rely on proxy metrics or hardware-in-the-loop evaluation. This work presents a hardware-algorithm co-design framework for EENN that explicitly models the interplay between quantization, exit configuration, and multi-core accelerator mapping. Using analytical design space exploration, we characterize how small architectural variations can induce disproportionate changes in hardware efficiency due to tensor dimension alignment and dataflow effects. Building on this analysis, we formulate EENN deployment as a constrained multi-objective optimization problem balancing accuracy, energy-latency product, exit overhead, and dynamic inference behavior. Experimental results on CIFAR-10 demonstrate that the proposed framework identifies architectures achieving over 50\% reduction in energy-latency product compared to static baselines under 8-bit quantization. The results highlight the importance of deployment-aware co-design for dynamic inference on heterogeneous edge platforms.
♻ ☆ GERD: Geometric event response data generation
Event-based vision sensors offer high time resolution, high dynamic range, and low power consumption, yet event-based vision models lag behind conventional frame-based vision methods. We argue that this gap is partly due to the lack of principled study of the transformation groups that govern event-based visual streams. Motivated by the role that geometric and group-theoretic methods have played in advancing computer vision, we present GERD: a simulator for generating event-based recordings of objects under precisely controlled affine, Galilean, and temporal scaling transformations. By providing ground-truth transformations at each timestep, GERD enables hypothesis-driven and controlled studies of geometric properties that are otherwise impossible to isolate in real-world datasets. The simulator supports three noise models and sub-pixel motion as a complement to real sensor datasets. We demonstrate its use in training and evaluating models with geometric guarantees and release GERD as an open tool available at github.com/ncskth/gerd
♻ ☆ SVBench: Evaluation of Video Generation Models on Social Reasoning
Recent text-to-video generation models have made remarkable progress in visual realism, motion fidelity, and text-video alignment, yet they still struggle to produce socially coherent behavior. Unlike humans, who readily infer intentions, beliefs, emotions, and social norms from brief visual cues, current models often generate literal scenes without capturing the underlying causal and psychological dynamics. To systematically assess this limitation, we introduce the first benchmark for social reasoning in video generation. Grounded in developmental and social psychology, the benchmark covers thirty classic social cognition paradigms spanning seven core dimensions: mental-state inference, goal-directed action, joint attention, social coordination, prosocial behavior, social norms, and multi-agent strategy. To operationalize these paradigms, we build a fully training-free agent-based pipeline that distills the reasoning structure of each paradigm, synthesizes diverse video-ready scenarios, enforces conceptual neutrality and difficulty control through cue-based critique, and evaluates generated videos with a high-capacity VLM judge along five interpretable dimensions of social reasoning. Using this framework, we conduct the first large-scale evaluation of seven state-of-the-art video generation systems. Results show a clear gap between surface-level plausibility and deeper social reasoning, suggesting that current models remain limited in their ability to generate socially grounded behavior. https://github.com/Gloria2tt/SVBench-Evaluation
comment: 10pages
♻ ☆ StreetTree: A Large-Scale Global Benchmark for Fine-Grained Tree Species Classification
The fine grained classification of street trees is a crucial task for urban planning, streetscape management, and the assessment of urban ecosystem services. However, progress in this field has been hindered by the lack of large scale, geographically diverse, and publicly available benchmark datasets specifically designed for street trees. To address this critical gap, we introduce StreetTree, the world's first large scale benchmark dataset dedicated to fine grained street tree classification. The dataset contains over 12 million images covering more than 8,300 common street tree species, collected from urban streetscapes across 133 countries spanning five continents, and supplemented with expert verified observational data. StreetTree poses challenges for pretrained vision models under complex urban environments including high inter species visual similarity, long tailed natural distributions, significant intra class variations caused by seasonal changes, and diverse imaging conditions such as lighting, occlusions from buildings, and varying camera angles. In addition, we provide a hierarchical taxonomy (order, family, genus, and species) to support research in hierarchical classification and representation learning. Through extensive experiments with various vision models, we establish solid baselines and reveal the limitations of existing methods in handling such real world complexities. We believe that StreetTree will serve as a key resource for driving new advancements at the intersection of computer vision and urban science.
♻ ☆ CreatiDesign: A Unified Multi-Conditional Diffusion Transformer for Creative Graphic Design ICLR 2026
Hui Zhang, Dexiang Hong, Maoke Yang, Yutao Cheng, Zhao Zhang, Weidong Chen, Jie Shao, Xinglong Wu, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
Graphic design plays a vital role in visual communication across advertising, marketing, and multimedia entertainment. Prior work has explored automated graphic design generation using diffusion models, aiming to streamline creative workflows and democratize design capabilities. However, complex graphic design scenarios require accurately adhering to design intent specified by multiple heterogeneous user-provided elements (\eg images, layouts, and texts), which pose multi-condition control challenges for existing methods. Specifically, previous single-condition control models demonstrate effectiveness only within their specialized domains but fail to generalize to other conditions, while existing multi-condition methods often lack fine-grained control over each sub-condition and compromise overall compositional harmony. To address these limitations, we introduce CreatiDesign, a systematic solution for automated graphic design covering both model architecture and dataset construction. First, we design a unified multi-condition driven architecture that enables flexible and precise integration of heterogeneous design elements with minimal architectural modifications to the base diffusion model. Furthermore, to ensure that each condition precisely controls its designated image region and to avoid interference between conditions, we propose a multimodal attention mask mechanism. Additionally, we develop a fully automated pipeline for constructing graphic design datasets, and introduce a new dataset with 400K samples featuring multi-condition annotations, along with a comprehensive benchmark. Experimental results show that CreatiDesign outperforms existing models by a clear margin in faithfully adhering to user intent.
comment: Accepted by ICLR 2026
♻ ☆ Generative AI Enables Structural Brain Network Construction from fMRI via Symmetric Diffusion Learning
Mapping from functional connectivity (FC) to structural connectivity (SC) can facilitate multimodal brain network fusion and discover potential biomarkers for clinical implications. However, it is challenging to directly bridge the reliable non-linear mapping relations between SC and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In this paper, a novel symmetric diffusive generative adversarial network-based fMRI-to-SC (DiffGAN-F2S) model is proposed to predict SC from brain fMRI in a unified framework. To be specific, the proposed DiffGAN-F2S leverages denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) and adversarial learning to efficiently generate symmetric and high-fidelity SC through a few steps from fMRI. By designing the dual-channel multi-head spatial attention (DMSA) and graph convolutional modules, the symmetric graph generator first captures global relations among direct and indirect connected brain regions, then models the local brain region interactions. It can uncover the complex mapping relations between fMRI and symmetric structural connectivity. Furthermore, the spatially connected consistency loss is devised to constrain the generator to preserve global-local topological information for accurate symmetric SC prediction. Testing on the public Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset, the proposed model can effectively generate empirical SC-preserved connectivity from four-dimensional imaging data and shows superior performance in SC prediction compared with other related models. Furthermore, the proposed model can identify the vast majority of important brain regions and connections derived from the empirical method, providing an alternative way to fuse multimodal brain networks and analyze clinical brain disease.
comment: 12 pages
♻ ☆ "It's trained by non-disabled people": Evaluating How Image Quality Affects Product Captioning with Vision-Language Models
Kapil Garg, Xinru Tang, Jimin Heo, Dwayne R. Morgan, Darren Gergle, Erik B. Sudderth, Anne Marie Piper
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly used by blind and low-vision (BLV) people to identify and understand products in their everyday lives, such as food, personal care items, and household goods. Despite their prevalence, we lack an empirical understanding of how common image quality issues--such as blur, misframing, and rotation--affect the accuracy of VLM-generated captions and whether the resulting captions meet BLV people's information needs. Based on a survey of 86 BLV participants, we develop an annotated dataset of 1,859 product images from BLV people to systematically evaluate how image quality issues affect VLM-generated captions. While the best VLM achieves 98% accuracy on images with no quality issues, accuracy drops to 75% overall when quality issues are present, worsening considerably as issues compound. We discuss the need for model evaluations that center on disabled people's experiences throughout the process and offer concrete recommendations for HCI and ML researchers to make VLMs more reliable for BLV people.
comment: Published at CHI 2026; Honorable Mention for Best Paper (Top 5%). Dataset available at: https://github.com/Accessibility-Research-Collective-UCI/image-quality-vlm-chi26
♻ ☆ TUGS: Physics-based Compact Representation of Underwater Scenes by Tensorized Gaussian
Underwater 3D scene reconstruction is crucial for multimedia applications in adverse environments, such as underwater robotic perception and navigation. However, the complexity of interactions between light propagation, water medium, and object surfaces poses significant difficulties for existing methods in accurately simulating their interplay. Additionally, expensive training and rendering costs limit their practical application. Therefore, we propose Tensorized Underwater Gaussian Splatting (TUGS), a compact underwater 3D representation based on physical modeling of complex underwater light fields. TUGS includes a physics-based underwater Adaptive Medium Estimation (AME) module, enabling accurate simulation of both light attenuation and backscatter effects in underwater environments, and introduces Tensorized Densification Strategies (TDS) to efficiently refine the tensorized representation during optimization. TUGS is able to render high-quality underwater images with faster rendering speeds and less memory usage. Extensive experiments on real-world underwater datasets have demonstrated that TUGS can efficiently achieve superior reconstruction quality using a limited number of parameters. The code is available at https://liamlian0727.github.io/TUGS
♻ ☆ Early Exiting Predictive Coding Neural Networks for Edge AI
The Internet of Things is transforming various fields, with sensors increasingly embedded in wearables, smart buildings, and connected equipment. While deep learning enables valuable insights from IoT data, conventional models are too computationally demanding for resource-limited edge devices. Moreover, privacy concerns and real-time processing needs make local computation a necessity over cloud-based solutions. Inspired by the brain's energy efficiency, we propose a shallow bidirectional predictive coding network with early exiting, dynamically halting computations once a performance threshold is met. This reduces the memory footprint and computational overhead while maintaining high accuracy. We validate our approach using the CIFAR-10 dataset. Our model achieves performance comparable to deep networks with significantly fewer parameters and lower computational complexity, demonstrating the potential of biologically inspired architectures for efficient edge AI.
♻ ☆ SGS-Intrinsic: Semantic-Invariant Gaussian Splatting for Sparse-View Indoor Inverse Rendering CVPR2026
We present SGS-Intrinsic, an indoor inverse rendering framework that works well for sparse-view images. Unlike existing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) based methods that focus on object-centric reconstruction and fail to work under sparse view settings, our method allows to achieve high-quality geometry reconstruction and accurate disentanglement of material and illumination. The core idea is to construct a dense and geometry-consistent Gaussian semantic field guided by semantic and geometric priors, providing a reliable foundation for subsequent inverse rendering. Building upon this, we perform material-illumination disentanglement by combining a hybrid illumination model and material prior to effectively capture illumination-material interactions. To mitigate the impact of cast shadows and enhance the robustness of material recovery, we introduce illumination-invariant material constraint together with a deshadowing model. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method consistently improves both reconstruction fidelity and inverse rendering quality over existing 3DGS-based inverse rendering approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/GrumpySloths/SGS_Intrinsic.github.io.
comment: CVPR2026
♻ ☆ Multi-Modal Representation Learning via Semi-Supervised Rate Reduction for Generalized Category Discovery CVPR 2026
Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to identify both known and unknown categories, with only partial labels given for the known categories, posing a challenging open-set recognition problem. State-of-the-art approaches for GCD task are usually built on multi-modality representation learning, which is heavily dependent upon inter-modality alignment. However, few of them cast a proper intra-modality alignment to generate a desired underlying structure of representation distributions. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective multi-modal representation learning framework for GCD via Semi-Supervised Rate Reduction, called SSR$^2$-GCD, to learn cross-modality representations with desired structural properties based on emphasizing to properly align intra-modality relationships. Moreover, to boost knowledge transfer, we integrate prompt candidates by leveraging the inter-modal alignment offered by Vision Language Models. We conduct extensive experiments on generic and fine-grained benchmark datasets demonstrating superior performance of our approach.
comment: 15 pages, accepted by CVPR 2026
♻ ☆ Streaming 4D Visual Geometry Transformer
Perceiving and reconstructing 3D geometry from videos is a fundamental yet challenging computer vision task. To facilitate interactive and low-latency applications, we propose a streaming visual geometry transformer that shares a similar philosophy with autoregressive large language models. We explore a simple and efficient design and employ a causal transformer architecture to process the input sequence in an online manner. We use temporal causal attention and cache the historical keys and values as implicit memory to enable efficient streaming long-term 3D reconstruction. This design can handle low-latency 3D reconstruction by incrementally integrating historical information while maintaining high-quality spatial consistency. For efficient training, we propose to distill knowledge from the dense bidirectional visual geometry grounded transformer (VGGT) to our causal model. For inference, our model supports the migration of optimized efficient attention operators (e.g., FlashAttention) from large language models. Extensive experiments on various 3D geometry perception benchmarks demonstrate that our model enhances inference speed in online scenarios while maintaining competitive performance, thereby facilitating scalable and interactive 3D vision systems. Code is available at: https://github.com/wzzheng/StreamVGGT.
comment: Code is available at: https://github.com/wzzheng/StreamVGGT
♻ ☆ Modeling Spatiotemporal Neural Frames for High Resolution Brain Dynamic CVPR 2026
Capturing dynamic spatiotemporal neural activity is essential for understanding large-scale brain mechanisms. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provides high-resolution cortical representations that form a strong basis for characterizing fine-grained brain activity patterns. The high acquisition cost of fMRI limits large-scale applications, therefore making high-quality fMRI reconstruction a crucial task. Electroencephalography (EEG) offers millisecond-level temporal cues that complement fMRI. Leveraging this complementarity, we present an EEG-conditioned framework for reconstructing dynamic fMRI as continuous neural sequences with high spatial fidelity and strong temporal coherence at the cortical-vertex level. To address sampling irregularities common in real fMRI acquisitions, we incorporate a null-space intermediate-frame reconstruction, enabling measurement-consistent completion of arbitrary intermediate frames and improving sequence continuity and practical applicability. Experiments on the CineBrain dataset demonstrate superior voxel-wise reconstruction quality and robust temporal consistency across whole-brain and functionally specific regions. The reconstructed fMRI also preserves essential functional information, supporting downstream visual decoding tasks. This work provides a new pathway for estimating high-resolution fMRI dynamics from EEG and advances multimodal neuroimaging toward more dynamic brain activity modeling.
comment: CVPR 2026
♻ ☆ Towards Policy-Adaptive Image Guardrail: Benchmark and Method
Accurate rejection of sensitive or harmful visual content, i.e., harmful image guardrail, is critical in many application scenarios. This task must continuously adapt to the evolving safety policies and content across various domains and over time. However, traditional classifiers, confined to fixed categories, require frequent retraining when new policies are introduced. Vision-language models (VLMs) offer a more adaptable and generalizable foundation for dynamic safety guardrails. Despite this potential, existing VLM-based safeguarding methods are typically trained and evaluated under only a fixed safety policy. We find that these models are heavily overfitted to the seen policy, fail to generalize to unseen policies, and even lose the basic instruction-following ability and general knowledge. To address this issue, in this paper we make two key contributions. First, we benchmark the cross-policy generalization performance of existing VLMs with SafeEditBench, a new evaluation suite. SafeEditBench leverages image-editing models to convert unsafe images into safe counterparts, producing policy-aligned datasets where each safe-unsafe image pair remains visually similar except for localized regions violating specific safety rules. Human annotators then provide accurate safe/unsafe labels under five distinct policies, enabling fine-grained assessment of policy-aware generalization. Second, we introduce SafeGuard-VL, a reinforcement learning-based method with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for robust unsafe-image guardrails. Instead of relying solely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) under fixed policies, SafeGuard-VL explicitly optimizes the model with policy-grounded rewards, promoting verifiable adaptation across evolving policies. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our method for unsafe image guardrails across various policies.
♻ ☆ Can We Build a Monolithic Model for Fake Image Detection? SICA: Semantic-Induced Constrained Adaptation for Unified-Yet-Discriminative Artifact Feature Space Reconstruction
Bo Du, Xiaochen Ma, Xuekang Zhu, Zhe Yang, Chaogun Niu, Mingqi Fang, Zhenming Wang, Jingjing Liu, Jian Liu, Ji-Zhe Zhou
Fake Image Detection (FID), aiming at unified detection across four image forensic subdomains, is critical in real-world forensic scenarios. Compared with ensemble approaches, monolithic FID models are theoretically more promising, but to date, consistently yield inferior performance in practice. In this work, by discovering the ``heterogeneous phenomenon'', which is the intrinsic distinctness of artifacts across subdomains, we diagnose the cause of this underperformance for the first time: the collapse of the artifact feature space driven by such phenomenon. The core challenge for developing a practical monolithic FID model thus boils down to the ``unified-yet-discriminative" reconstruction of the artifact feature space. To address this paradoxical challenge, we hypothesize that high-level semantics can serve as a structural prior for the reconstruction, and further propose Semantic-Induced Constrained Adaptation (SICA), the first monolithic FID paradigm. Extensive experiments on our OpenMMSec dataset demonstrate that SICA outperforms 15 state-of-the-art methods and reconstructs the target unified-yet-discriminative artifact feature space in a near-orthogonal manner, thus firmly validating our hypothesis. The code and dataset are available at:https: //github.com/scu-zjz/SICA_OpenMMSec.
♻ ☆ Super-Resolved Canopy Height Mapping from Sentinel-2 Time Series Using LiDAR HD Reference Data across Metropolitan France
Fine-scale forest monitoring is essential for understanding canopy structure and its dynamics, which are key indicators of carbon stocks, biodiversity, and forest health. Deep learning is particularly effective for this task, as it integrates spectral, temporal, and spatial signals that jointly reflect the canopy structure. To address this need, we introduce THREASURE-Net, a novel end-to-end framework for Tree Height Regression And Super-Resolution. The model is trained on Sentinel-2 time series using reference height metrics derived from LiDAR HD data at multiple spatial resolutions over Metropolitan France to produce annual height maps. We evaluate three model variants, producing tree-height predictions at 2.5 m, 5 m, and 10 m resolution. THREASURE-Net does not rely on any pretrained model nor on reference very high resolution optical imagery to train its super-resolution module; instead, it learns solely from LiDAR-derived height information. Our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods based on Sentinel data and is competitive with methods based on very high resolution imagery. It can be deployed to generate high-precision annual canopy-height maps, achieving mean absolute errors of 2.63 m, 2.70 m, and 2.88 m at 2.5 m, 5 m, and 10 m resolution, respectively. These results highlight the potential of THREASURE-Net for scalable and cost-effective structural monitoring of temperate forests using only freely available satellite data. The source code for THREASURE-Net is available at: https://github.com/Global-Earth-Observation/threasure-net.
♻ ☆ Unified Multimodal Models as Auto-Encoders
Zhiyuan Yan, Kaiqing Lin, Zongjian Li, Junyan Ye, Hui Han, Haochen Wang, Zhendong Wang, Bin Lin, Hao Li, Xinyan Xiao, Jingdong Wang, Haifeng Wang, Li Yuan
Image-to-text (I2T) understanding and text-to-image (T2I) generation are two fundamental, important yet traditionally isolated multimodal tasks. Despite their intrinsic connection, existing approaches typically optimize them independently, missing the opportunity for mutual enhancement. In this paper, we argue that the both tasks can be connected under a shared Auto-Encoder perspective, where text serves as the intermediate latent representation bridging the two directions - encoding images into textual semantics (I2T) and decoding text back into images (T2I). Our key insight is that if the encoder truly "understands" the image, it should capture all essential structure, and if the decoder truly "understands" the text, it should recover that structure faithfully. Building upon this principle, we propose Unified-GRPO, a post-training method based on reinforcement learning that jointly optimizes both modules through reconstructive rewards, maximizing the semantic consistency between the input and the generated images. Under this reconstruction objective, the encoder is encouraged to extract as much accurate and comprehensive semantic information from the input image to maximize reconstruction quality, while the decoder is simultaneously optimized to generate conditioned on the encoder's prior, enabling a self-evolving improvement. Empirically, we find that using text as the intermediate representation and training under a reconstructive RL paradigm effectively benefits both I2T and T2I. The I2T module gains stronger fine-grained visual perception, such as small-object recognition, grounding, etc, while its dense embeddings and language priors, in turn, provide richer semantic signals that improve T2I fidelity and complex instruction following. These results demonstrate that the reconstructive RL establishes a mutually reinforcing cross-modal synergy within the auto-encoding framework.
♻ ☆ BST: Badminton Stroke-type Transformer for Skeleton-based Action Recognition in Racket Sports CVPR
Badminton, known for having the fastest ball speeds among all sports, presents significant challenges to the field of computer vision, including player identification, court line detection, shuttlecock trajectory tracking, and player stroke-type classification. In this paper, we introduce a novel video clipping strategy to extract frames of each player's racket swing in a badminton broadcast match. These clipped frames are then processed by three existing models: one for Human Pose Estimation to obtain human skeletal joints, another for shuttlecock trajectory tracking, and the other for court line detection to determine player positions on the court. Leveraging these data as inputs, we propose Badminton Stroke-type Transformer (BST) to classify player stroke-types in singles. To the best of our knowledge, experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on the largest publicly available badminton video dataset (ShuttleSet), another badminton dataset (BadmintonDB), and a tennis dataset (TenniSet). These results suggest that effectively leveraging ball trajectory is a promising direction for action recognition in racket sports.
comment: Accepted by CVPRW 2026 - 12th CVsports
♻ ☆ TruckDrive: Long-Range Autonomous Highway Driving Dataset
Safe highway autonomy for heavy trucks remains an open and unsolved challenge: due to long braking distances, scene understanding of hundreds of meters is required for anticipatory planning and to allow safe braking margins. However, existing driving datasets primarily cover urban scenes, with perception effectively limited to short ranges of only up to 100 meters. To address this gap, we introduce TruckDrive, a highway-scale multimodal driving dataset, captured with a sensor suite purpose-built for long range sensing: seven long-range FMCW LiDARs measuring range and radial velocity, three high-resolution short-range LiDARs, eleven 8MP surround cameras with varying focal lengths and ten 4D FMCW radars. The dataset offers 475 thousands samples with 165 thousands densely annotated frames for driving perception benchmarking up to 1,000 meters for 2D detection and 400 meters for 3D detection, depth estimation, tracking, planning and end to end driving over 20 seconds sequences at highway speeds. We find that state-of-the-art autonomous driving models do not generalize to ranges beyond 150 meters, with drops between 31% and 99% in 3D perception tasks, exposing a systematic long-range gap that current architectures and training signals cannot close.
♻ ☆ Human-level 3D shape perception emerges from multi-view learning
Humans can infer the three-dimensional structure of objects from two-dimensional visual inputs. Modeling this ability has been a longstanding goal for the science and engineering of visual intelligence, yet decades of computational methods have fallen short of human performance. Here we develop a modeling framework that predicts human 3D shape inferences for arbitrary objects, directly from experimental stimuli. We achieve this with a novel class of neural networks trained using a visual-spatial objective over naturalistic sensory data; given a set of images taken from different locations within a natural scene, these models learn to predict spatial information related to these images, such as camera location and visual depth, without relying on any object-related inductive biases. Notably, these visual-spatial signals are analogous to sensory cues readily available to humans. We design a zero-shot evaluation approach to determine the performance of these 'multi-view' models on a well established 3D perception task, then compare model and human behavior. Our modeling framework is the first to match human accuracy on 3D shape inferences, even without task-specific training or fine-tuning. Remarkably, independent readouts of model responses predict fine-grained measures of human behavior, including error patterns and reaction times, revealing a natural correspondence between model dynamics and human perception. Taken together, our findings indicate that human-level 3D perception can emerge from a simple, scalable learning objective over naturalistic visual-spatial data. Code, images, and human data needed to reproduce all analyses can be found at https://tzler.github.io/human_multiview/
comment: Project page: https://tzler.github.io/human_multiview Code: https://github.com/tzler/human_multiview Huggingface dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/tzler/MOCHI
♻ ☆ ANVIL: Accelerator-Native Video Interpolation via Codec Motion Vector Priors IEEE
Real-time 30-to-60 fps video frame interpolation on mobile neural processing units (NPUs) requires each synthesized frame within 33.3 ms. We show that mainstream flow-based video frame interpolation faces three structural deployment barriers on mobile NPUs: spatial sampling operators exceed the frame budget or lack hardware support, iterative flow refinement collapses under 8-bit integer post-training quantization, and memory-bound operators dominate the inference graph. ANVIL addresses these barriers by reusing motion vectors from the H.264/AVC decoder to prealign input frames, removing learned optical flow, spatial sampling, and iterative accumulation from the accelerator graph. The remaining residual is refined by a convolution-dominated network composed almost entirely of compute-bound operators. On a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 device, ANVIL achieves 12.8 ms 1080p inference at 8-bit integer precision; an open-source Android player sustains 28.4 ms median end-to-end latency over 30-minute continuous playback. Per-operator causal analysis identifies quantized accumulation on recurrent flow states as a key mechanism behind integer quantization failure in iterative methods. The current design targets H.264/AVC playback with decoder-exposed motion vectors.
comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, 10 tables. Submitted to IEEE TCSVT. v2: revised ablation studies, compressed text, expanded abstract abbreviations. Code: https://github.com/NihilDigit/anvil
♻ ☆ ReAG: Reasoning-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering CVPR 2026
Alberto Compagnoni, Marco Morini, Sara Sarto, Federico Cocchi, Davide Caffagni, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in jointly understanding text, images, and videos, often evaluated via Visual Question Answering (VQA). However, even state-of-the-art MLLMs struggle with domain-specific or knowledge-intensive queries, where relevant information is underrepresented in pre-training data. Knowledge-based VQA (KB-VQA) addresses this by retrieving external documents to condition answer generation, but current retrieval-augmented approaches suffer from low precision, noisy passages, and limited reasoning. To address this, we propose ReAG, a novel Reasoning-Augmented Multimodal RAG approach that combines coarse- and fine-grained retrieval with a critic model that filters irrelevant passages, ensuring high-quality additional context. The model follows a multi-stage training strategy leveraging reinforcement learning to enhance reasoning over retrieved content, while supervised fine-tuning serves only as a cold start. Extensive experiments on Encyclopedic-VQA and InfoSeek demonstrate that ReAG significantly outperforms prior methods, improving answer accuracy and providing interpretable reasoning grounded in retrieved evidence.
comment: CVPR 2026 - Project page: https://aimagelab.github.io/ReAG/
♻ ☆ Granular Ball Guided Stable Latent Domain Discovery for Domain-General Crowd Counting
Single-source domain generalization for crowd counting is highly challenging because a single labeled source domain may contain heterogeneous latent domains, while unseen target domains often exhibit severe distribution shifts. A central issue is stable latent domain discovery: directly performing flat clustering on evolving sample-level latent features is easily disturbed by feature noise, outliers, and representation drift, leading to unreliable pseudo-domain assignments and weakened domain-structured learning. To address this problem, we propose a granular ball guided stable latent domain discovery framework for domain-general crowd counting. The proposed method first groups samples into compact local granular balls and then clusters granular ball centers as representatives to infer pseudo-domains, thereby converting direct sample-level clustering into a hierarchical representative-based clustering process. This design produces more stable and semantically consistent pseudo-domain assignments. On top of the discovered latent domains, we develop a two-branch learning framework that improves transferable semantic representations via semantic codebook re-encoding and captures domain-specific appearance variations through a style branch, thereby alleviating semantic--style entanglement under domain shifts. Extensive experiments on ShanghaiTech A/B, UCF\_QNRF, and NWPU-Crowd under a strict no-adaptation protocol verify the effectiveness of the proposed method and show strong generalization ability, especially in transfer settings with large domain gaps.
♻ ☆ Image Segmentation via Divisive Normalization: dealing with environmental diversity
Pablo Hernández-Cámara, Jorge Vila-Tomás, Paula Dauden-Oliver, Nuria Alabau-Bosque, Valero Laparra, Jesús Malo
Autonomous driving is a challenging scenario for image segmentation due to the presence of uncontrolled environmental conditions and the eventually catastrophic consequences of failures. Previous work suggested that a biologically motivated computation, the so-called Divisive Normalization, could be useful to deal with image variability, but its effects have not been systematically studied over different data sources and environmental factors. Here we put segmentation U-nets augmented with Divisive Normalization to work far from training conditions to find where this adaptation is more critical. We categorize the scenes according to their radiance level and dynamic range (day/night), and according to their achromatic/chromatic contrasts. We also consider video game (synthetic) images to broaden the range of environments. We check the performance in the extreme percentiles of such categorization. Then, we push the limits further by artificially modifying the images in perceptually/environmentally relevant dimensions: luminance, contrasts and spectral radiance. Results show that neural networks with Divisive Normalization get better results in all the scenarios and their performance remains more stable with regard to the considered environmental factors and nature of the source. Finally, we explain the improvements in segmentation performance in two ways: (1) by quantifying the invariance of the responses that incorporate Divisive Normalization, and (2) by illustrating the adaptive nonlinearity of the different layers that depends on the local activity.
♻ ☆ ALADIN:Attribute-Language Distillation Network for Person Re-Identification
Recent vision-language models such as CLIP provide strong cross-modal alignment, but current CLIP-guided ReID pipelines rely on global features and fixed prompts. This limits their ability to capture fine-grained attribute cues and adapt to diverse appearances. We propose ALADIN, an attribute-language distillation network that distills knowledge from a frozen CLIP teacher to a lightweight ReID student. ALADIN introduces fine-grained attribute-local alignment to establish adaptive text-visual correspondence and robust representation learning. A Scene-Aware Prompt Generator produces image-specific soft prompts to facilitate adaptive alignment. Attribute-local distillation enforces consistency between textual attributes and local visual features, significantly enhancing robustness under occlusions. Furthermore, we employ cross-modal contrastive and relation distillation to preserve the inherent structural relationships among attributes. To provide precise supervision, we leverage Multimodal LLMs to generate structured attribute descriptions, which are then converted into localized attention maps via CLIP. At inference, only the student is used. Experiments on Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID, and MSMT17 show improvements over CNN-, Transformer-, and CLIP-based methods, with better generalization and interpretability.
comment: 14pages, 3figures, 7charts
♻ ☆ Image-Specific Adaptation of Transformer Encoders for Compute-Efficient Segmentation WACV 2026
Vision transformer based models bring significant improvements for image segmentation tasks. Although these architectures offer powerful capabilities irrespective of specific segmentation tasks, their use of computational resources can be taxing on deployed devices. One way to overcome this challenge is by adapting the computation level to the specific needs of the input image rather than the current one-size-fits-all approach. To this end, we introduce ECO-M2F or EffiCient TransfOrmer Encoders for Mask2Former-style models. Noting that the encoder module of M2F-style models incur high resource-intensive computations, ECO-M2F provides a strategy to self-select the number of hidden layers in the encoder, conditioned on the input image. To enable this self-selection ability for providing a balance between performance and computational efficiency, we present a three step recipe. The first step is to train the parent architecture to enable early exiting from the encoder. The second step is to create an derived dataset of the ideal number of encoder layers required for each training example. The third step is to use the aforementioned derived dataset to train a gating network that predicts the number of encoder layers to be used, conditioned on the input image. Additionally, to change the computational-accuracy tradeoff, only steps two and three need to be repeated which significantly reduces retraining time. Experiments on the public datasets show that the proposed approach reduces expected encoder computational cost while maintaining performance, adapts to various user compute resources, is flexible in architecture configurations, and can be extended beyond the segmentation task to object detection.
comment: Accepted at WACV 2026 WVAQ
♻ ☆ ArtLLM: Generating Articulated Assets via 3D LLM CVPR 2026
Creating interactive digital environments for gaming, robotics, and simulation relies on articulated 3D objects whose functionality emerges from their part geometry and kinematic structure. However, existing approaches remain fundamentally limited: optimization-based reconstruction methods require slow, per-object joint fitting and typically handle only simple, single-joint objects, while retrieval-based methods assemble parts from a fixed library, leading to repetitive geometry and poor generalization. To address these challenges, we introduce ArtLLM, a novel framework for generating high-quality articulated assets directly from complete 3D meshes. At its core is a 3D multimodal large language model trained on a large-scale articulation dataset curated from both existing articulation datasets and procedurally generated objects. Unlike prior work, ArtLLM autoregressively predicts a variable number of parts and joints, inferring their kinematic structure in a unified manner from the object's point cloud. This articulation-aware layout then conditions a 3D generative model to synthesize high-fidelity part geometries. Experiments on the PartNet-Mobility dataset show that ArtLLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both part layout accuracy and joint prediction, while generalizing robustly to real-world objects. Finally, we demonstrate its utility in constructing digital twins, highlighting its potential for scalable robot learning.
comment: CVPR 2026. Project page: https://authoritywang.github.io/artllm/
♻ ☆ PartNeXt: A Next-Generation Dataset for Fine-Grained and Hierarchical 3D Part Understanding NeurIPS 2025
Understanding objects at the level of their constituent parts is fundamental to advancing computer vision, graphics, and robotics. While datasets like PartNet have driven progress in 3D part understanding, their reliance on untextured geometries and expert-dependent annotation limits scalability and usability. We introduce PartNeXt, a next-generation dataset addressing these gaps with over 23,000 high-quality, textured 3D models annotated with fine-grained, hierarchical part labels across 50 categories. We benchmark PartNeXt on two tasks: (1) class-agnostic part segmentation, where state-of-the-art methods (e.g., PartField, SAMPart3D) struggle with fine-grained and leaf-level parts, and (2) 3D part-centric question answering, a new benchmark for 3D-LLMs that reveals significant gaps in open-vocabulary part grounding. Additionally, training Point-SAM on PartNeXt yields substantial gains over PartNet, underscoring the dataset's superior quality and diversity. By combining scalable annotation, texture-aware labels, and multi-task evaluation, PartNeXt opens new avenues for research in structured 3D understanding.
comment: NeurIPS 2025 DB Track. Project page: https://authoritywang.github.io/partnext
♻ ☆ Fast SceneScript: Fast and Accurate Language-Based 3D Scene Understanding via Multi-Token Prediction CVPR 2026
Recent perception-generalist approaches based on language models have achieved state-of-the-art results across diverse tasks, including 3D scene layout estimation and 3D object detection, via unified architecture and interface. However, these approaches rely on autoregressive next-token prediction, which is inherently slow. In this work, we introduce Fast SceneScript, a novel structured language model for accurate and efficient 3D scene understanding. Our method employs multi-token prediction (MTP) to reduce the number of autoregressive iterations and significantly accelerate inference. While MTP improves speed, unreliable token predictions can significantly reduce accuracy. To filter out unreliable tokens, we adapt self-speculative decoding (SSD) for structured language models and introduce confidence-guided decoding (CGD) with an improved scoring mechanism for token reliability. Furthermore, we design a parameter-efficient mechanism that reduces the parameter overhead of MTP. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that Fast SceneScript can generate up to 9 tokens per decoder inference step without compromising accuracy, while adding only $\sim7.5\%$ additional parameters.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026
♻ ☆ Fine-grained Image Quality Assessment for Perceptual Image Restoration AAAI2026
Recent years have witnessed remarkable achievements in perceptual image restoration (IR), creating an urgent demand for accurate image quality assessment (IQA), which is essential for both performance comparison and algorithm optimization. Unfortunately, the existing IQA metrics exhibit inherent weakness for IR task, particularly when distinguishing fine-grained quality differences among restored images. To address this dilemma, we contribute the first-of-its-kind fine-grained image quality assessment dataset for image restoration, termed FGRestore, comprising 18,408 restored images across six common IR tasks. Beyond conventional scalar quality scores, FGRestore was also annotated with 30,886 fine-grained pairwise preferences. Based on FGRestore, a comprehensive benchmark was conducted on the existing IQA metrics, which reveal significant inconsistencies between score-based IQA evaluations and the fine-grained restoration quality. Motivated by these findings, we further propose FGResQ, a new IQA model specifically designed for image restoration, which features both coarse-grained score regression and fine-grained quality ranking. Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate that FGResQ significantly outperforms state-of-the-art IQA metrics. Codes and model weights have been released in https://sxfly99.github.io/FGResQ-Home.
comment: Accepted by AAAI2026
♻ ☆ JoyStreamer: Unlocking Highly Expressive Avatars via Harmonized Text-Audio Conditioning
Ruikui Wang, Jinheng Feng, Lang Tian, Huaishao Luo, Chaochao Li, Liangbo Zhou, Huan Zhang, Youzheng Wu, Xiaodong He
Existing video avatar models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in scenarios such as talking, public speaking, and singing. However, the majority of these methods exhibit limited alignment with respect to text instructions, particularly when the prompts involve complex elements including large full-body movement, dynamic camera trajectory, background transitions, or human-object interactions. To break out this limitation, we present JoyAvatar, a framework capable of generating long duration avatar videos, featuring two key technical innovations. Firstly, we introduce a twin-teacher enhanced training algorithm that enables the model to transfer inherent text-controllability from the foundation model while simultaneously learning audio-visual synchronization. Secondly, during training, we dynamically modulate the strength of multi-modal conditions (e.g., audio and text) based on the distinct denoising timestep, aiming to mitigate conflicts between the heterogeneous conditioning signals. These two key designs serve to substantially expand the avatar model's capacity to generate natural, temporally coherent full-body motions and dynamic camera movements as well as preserve the basic avatar capabilities, such as accurate lip-sync and identity consistency. GSB evaluation results demonstrate that our JoyStreamer model outperforms the state-of-the-art models such as Omnihuman-1.5 and KlingAvatar 2.0. Moreover, our approach enables complex applications including multi-person dialogues and non-human subjects role-playing. Some video samples are provided on https://joystreamer.github.io/.
♻ ☆ GUIDE: Resolving Domain Bias in GUI Agents through Real-Time Web Video Retrieval and Plug-and-Play Annotation
Large vision-language models have endowed GUI agents with strong general capabilities for interface understanding and interaction. However, due to insufficient exposure to domain-specific software operation data during training, these agents exhibit significant domain bias - they lack familiarity with the specific operation workflows (planning) and UI element layouts (grounding) of particular applications, limiting their real-world task performance. In this paper, we present GUIDE (GUI Unbiasing via Instructional-Video Driven Expertise), a training-free, plug-and-play framework that resolves GUI agent domain bias by autonomously acquiring domain-specific expertise from web tutorial videos through a retrieval-augmented automated annotation pipeline. GUIDE introduces two key innovations. First, a subtitle-driven Video-RAG pipeline unlocks video semantics through subtitle analysis, performing progressive three-stage retrieval - domain classification, topic extraction, and relevance matching - to identify task-relevant tutorial videos. Second, a fully automated annotation pipeline built on an inverse dynamics paradigm feeds consecutive keyframes enhanced with UI element detection into VLMs, inferring the required planning and grounding knowledge that are injected into the agent's corresponding modules to address both manifestations of domain bias. Extensive experiments on OSWorld demonstrate GUIDE's generality as a plug-and-play component for both multi-agent systems and single-model agents. It consistently yields over 5% improvements and reduces execution steps - without modifying any model parameters or architecture - validating GUIDE as an architecture-agnostic enhancement to bridge GUI agent domain bias.
comment: 28 pages, 8 figures, 7 tables
♻ ☆ Towards Foundation Models for 3D Scene Understanding: Instance-Aware Self-Supervised Learning for Point Clouds CVPR2026
Recent advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) for point clouds have substantially improved 3D scene understanding without human annotations. Existing approaches emphasize semantic awareness by enforcing feature consistency across augmented views or by masked scene modeling. However, the resulting representations transfer poorly to instance localization, and often require full finetuning for strong performance. Instance awareness is a fundamental component of 3D perception, thus bridging this gap is crucial for progressing toward true 3D foundation models that support all downstream tasks on 3D data. In this work, we introduce PointINS, an instance-oriented self-supervised framework that enriches point cloud representations through geometry-aware learning. PointINS employs an orthogonal offset branch to jointly learn high-level semantic understanding and geometric reasoning, yielding instance awareness. We identify two consistent properties essential for robust instance localization and formulate them as complementary regularization strategies, Offset Distribution Regularization (ODR), which aligns predicted offsets with empirically observed geometric priors, and Spatial Clustering Regularization (SCR), which enforces local coherence by regularizing offsets with pseudo-instance masks. Through extensive experiments across five datasets, PointINS achieves on average +3.5% mAP improvement for indoor instance segmentation and +4.1% PQ gain for outdoor panoptic segmentation, paving the way for scalable 3D foundation models.
comment: The paper was accepted by CVPR2026
♻ ☆ Text-guided Fine-Grained Video Anomaly Understanding CVPR 2026
Subtle abnormal events in videos often manifest as weak spatio-temporal cues that are easily overlooked by conventional anomaly detection systems. Existing video anomaly detection approaches typically provide coarse binary anomaly decisions without interpretable evidence, while large vision-language models (LVLMs) can produce textual judgments but lack precise localization of subtle visual signals. To address this gap, we propose Text-guided Fine-Grained Video Anomaly Understanding T-VAU, a framework that grounds subtle anomaly evidence into multimodal reasoning. Specifically, we introduce an Anomaly Heatmap Decoder (AHD) that performs visual-textual feature alignment to extract pixel-level spatio-temporal anomaly heatmaps from intermediate visual representations. We further design a Region-aware Anomaly Encoder (RAE) that converts these heatmaps into structured prompt embeddings, enabling the LVLM to perform anomaly detection, localization, and semantic explanation in a unified reasoning pipeline. To support fine-grained supervision, we construct a target-level fine-grained video-text anomaly dataset derived from ShanghaiTech and UBnormal with detailed annotations of object appearance, localization, and motion trajectories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that T-VAU significantly improves anomaly localization and textual reasoning performance on both benchmarks, achieving strong results in BLEU-4 metrics and Yes/No decision accuracy while providing interpretable pixel-level spatio-temporal evidence for anomaly understanding. The code will be available at https://github.com/momiji-bit/T-VAU.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026 SVC Workshop
♻ ☆ JoyStreamer-Flash: Real-time and Infinite Audio-Driven Avatar Generation with Autoregressive Diffusion
Chaochao Li, Ruikui Wang, Liangbo Zhou, Jinheng Feng, Huaishao Luo, Huan Zhang, Youzheng Wu, Xiaodong He
Existing DiT-based audio-driven avatar generation methods have achieved considerable progress, yet their broader application is constrained by limitations such as high computational overhead and the inability to synthesize long-duration videos. Autoregressive methods address this problem by applying block-wise autoregressive diffusion methods. However, these methods suffer from the problem of error accumulation and quality degradation. To address this, we propose JoyStreamer-Flash, an audio-driven autoregressive model capable of real-time inference and infinite-length video generation with the following contributions: (1) Progressive Step Bootstrapping (PSB), which allocates more denoising steps to initial frames to stabilize generation and reduce error accumulation; (2) Motion Condition Injection (MCI), enhancing temporal coherence by injecting noise-corrupted previous frames as motion condition; and (3) Unbounded RoPE via Cache-Resetting (URCR), enabling infinite-length generation through dynamic positional encoding. Our 1.3B-parameter causal model achieves 16 FPS on a single GPU and achieves competitive results in visual quality, temporal consistency, and lip synchronization.
♻ ☆ A Novel Camera-to-Robot Calibration Method for Vision-Based Floor Measurements SP
A novel hand-eye calibration method for ground-observing mobile robots is proposed. While cameras on mobile robots are common, they are rarely used for ground-observing measurement tasks. Laser trackers are increasingly used in robotics for precise localization. A referencing plate is designed to combine the two measurement modalities of laser-tracker 3D metrology and camera-based 2D imaging. It incorporates reflector nests for pose acquisition using a laser tracker and a camera calibration target that is observed by the robot-mounted camera. The procedure comprises estimating the plate pose, the plate-camera pose, and the robot pose, followed by computing the robot-camera transformation. Experiments indicate sub-millimeter repeatability.
comment: 8 pages; accepted for publication in the ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
♻ ☆ JaWildText: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Models on Japanese Scene Text Understanding
Japanese scene text poses challenges that multilingual benchmarks often fail to capture, including mixed scripts, frequent vertical writing, and a character inventory far larger than the Latin alphabet. Although Japanese is included in several multilingual benchmarks, these resources do not adequately capture the language-specific complexities. Meanwhile, existing Japanese visual text datasets have primarily focused on scanned documents, leaving in-the-wild scene text underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce JaWildText, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs) on Japanese scene text understanding. JaWildText contains 3,241 instances from 2,961 images newly captured in Japan, with 1.12 million annotated characters spanning 3,643 unique character types. It comprises three complementary tasks that vary in visual organization, output format, and writing style: (i) Dense Scene Text Visual Question Answering (STVQA), which requires reasoning over multiple pieces of visual text evidence; (ii) Receipt Key Information Extraction (KIE), which tests layout-aware structured extraction from mobile-captured receipts; and (iii) Handwriting OCR, which evaluates page-level transcription across various media and writing directions. We evaluate 14 open-weight VLMs and find that the best model achieves an average score of 0.64 across the three tasks. Error analyses show recognition remains the dominant bottleneck, especially for kanji. JaWildText enables fine-grained, script-aware diagnosis of Japanese scene text capabilities, and will be released with evaluation code.
comment: 18 pages
♻ ☆ Know-Show: Benchmarking Video-Language Models on Spatio-Temporal Grounded Reasoning
Large Video-Language Models (Video-LMs) have achieved impressive progress in multimodal understanding, yet their reasoning remains weakly grounded in space and time. We present Know-Show, a new benchmark designed to evaluate spatio-temporal grounded reasoning, the ability of a model to reason about actions and their semantics while simultaneously grounding its inferences in visual and temporal evidence. Know-Show unifies reasoning and localization within a single evaluation framework consisting of five complementary scenarios across spatial (person, object, person-object, and hand-object) and temporal dimensions. Built from Charades, Action Genome, and Ego4D with 2.5K high-quality human-authored questions, the benchmark exposes significant gaps between current Video-LMs and human reasoning. To bridge this gap, we propose GRAM, a training-free plug-in that augments Video-LMs with fine-grained grounded reasoning through attention-based video token selection and explicit timestamp encoding. Extensive experiments across open and closed Video-LMs (e.g., Qwen, VideoR1, Gemini, and GPT-4o) reveal that existing models struggle to "show what they know" and vice versa. Know-Show establishes a unified standard for assessing grounded reasoning in video-language understanding and provides insights toward developing interpretable and reliable multimodal reasoning systems. We have released the dataset at https://github.com/LUNAProject22/Know-Show, and the code will be released in the same repository.
♻ ☆ Med-CMR: A Fine-Grained Benchmark Integrating Visual Evidence and Clinical Logic for Medical Complex Multimodal Reasoning
Haozhen Gong, Xiaozhong Ji, Yuansen Liu, Wenbin Wu, Xiaoxiao Yan, Jingjing Liu, Kai Wu, Jiazhen Pan, Bailiang Jian, Jiangning Zhang, Xiaobin Hu, Hongwei Bran Li
MLLMs MLLMs are beginning to appear in clinical workflows, but their ability to perform complex medical reasoning remains unclear. We present Med-CMR, a fine-grained Medical Complex Multimodal Reasoning benchmark. Med-CMR distinguishes from existing counterparts by three core features: 1) Systematic capability decomposition, splitting medical multimodal reasoning into fine-grained visual understanding and multi-step reasoning to enable targeted evaluation; 2) Challenging task design, with visual understanding across three key dimensions (small-object detection, fine-detail discrimination, spatial understanding) and reasoning covering four clinically relevant scenarios (temporal prediction, causal reasoning, long-tail generalization, multi-source integration); 3) Broad, high-quality data coverage, comprising 20,653 Visual Question Answering (VQA) pairs spanning 11 organ systems and 12 imaging modalities, validated via a rigorous two-stage (human expert + model-assisted) review to ensure clinical authenticity. We evaluate 18 state-of-the-art MLLMs with Med-CMR, revealing GPT-5 as the top-performing commercial model: 57.81 accuracy on multiple-choice questions (MCQs) and a 48.70 open-ended score, outperforming Gemini 2.5 Pro (49.87 MCQ accuracy, 45.98 open-ended score) and leading open-source model Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B (49.34 MCQ accuracy, 42.62 open-ended score). However, specialized medical MLLMs do not reliably outperform strong general models, and long-tail generalization emerges as the dominant failure mode. Med-CMR thus provides a stress test for visual-reasoning integration and rare-case robustness in medical MLLMs, and a rigorous yardstick for future clinical systems.
♻ ☆ ProFashion: Prototype-guided Fashion Video Generation with Multiple Reference Images CVPR
Fashion video generation aims to synthesize temporally consistent videos from reference images of a designated character. Despite significant progress, existing diffusion-based methods only support a single reference image as input, severely limiting their capability to generate view-consistent fashion videos, especially when there are different patterns on the clothes from different perspectives. Moreover, the widely adopted motion module does not sufficiently model human body movement, leading to sub-optimal spatiotemporal consistency. To address these issues, we propose ProFashion, a fashion video generation framework leveraging multiple reference images to achieve improved view consistency and temporal coherency. To effectively leverage features from multiple reference images while maintaining a reasonable computational cost, we devise a Pose-aware Prototype Aggregator, which selects and aggregates global and fine-grained reference features according to pose information to form frame-wise prototypes, which serve as guidance in the denoising process. To further enhance motion consistency, we introduce a Flow-enhanced Prototype Instantiator, which exploits the human keypoint motion flow to guide an extra spatiotemporal attention process in the denoiser. To demonstrate the effectiveness of ProFashion, we extensively evaluate our method on the MRFashion-7K dataset we collected from the Internet. ProFashion also outperforms previous methods on the UBC Fashion dataset.
comment: CVPRW 2026
♻ ☆ EMMA: Concept Erasure Benchmark with Comprehensive Semantic Metrics and Diverse Categories CVPR 2026
The widespread adoption of text-to-image (T2I) generation has raised concerns about privacy, bias, and copyright violations. Concept erasure techniques offer a promising solution by selectively removing undesired concepts from pre-trained models without requiring full retraining. However, these methods are often evaluated on a limited set of concepts, relying on overly simplistic and direct prompts. To test the boundaries of concept erasure techniques, and assess whether they truly remove targeted concepts from model representations, we introduce EMMA, a benchmark that evaluates five key dimensions of concept erasure over 13 metrics. EMMA goes beyond standard metrics like image quality and time efficiency, testing robustness under challenging conditions, including indirect descriptions, visually similar non-target concepts, and potential gender and ethnicity bias, providing a socially aware analysis of method behavior. Using EMMA, we analyze five concept erasure methods across five domains (objects, celebrities, art styles, NSFW, and copyright). Our results show that existing methods struggle with implicit prompts (i.e., generating the erased concept when it is indirectly referenced) and visually similar non-target concepts (i.e., failing to generate non-target concepts resembling the erased one), while some amplify gender and ethnicity bias compared to the original model. Code and prompts are available at https://github.com/lobsterlulu/EMMA.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026
♻ ☆ MVGGT: Multimodal Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer for Multiview 3D Referring Expression Segmentation CVPR 2026
Most existing 3D referring expression segmentation (3DRES) methods rely on dense, high-quality point clouds, while real-world agents such as robots and mobile phones operate with only a few sparse RGB views and strict latency constraints. We introduce Multi-view 3D Referring Expression Segmentation (MV-3DRES), where the model must recover scene structure and segment the referred object directly from sparse multi-view images. Traditional two-stage pipelines, which first reconstruct a point cloud and then perform segmentation, often yield low-quality geometry, produce coarse or degraded target regions, and run slowly. We propose the Multimodal Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (MVGGT), an efficient end-to-end framework that integrates language information into sparse-view geometric reasoning through a dual-branch design. Training in this setting exposes a critical optimization barrier, termed Foreground Gradient Dilution (FGD), where sparse 3D signals lead to weak supervision. To resolve this, we introduce Per-view No-target Suppression Optimization (PVSO), which provides stronger and more balanced gradients across views, enabling stable and efficient learning. To support consistent evaluation, we build MVRefer, a benchmark that defines standardized settings and metrics for MV-3DRES. Experiments show that MVGGT establishes the first strong baseline and achieves both high accuracy and fast inference, outperforming existing alternatives. The code is available at https://mvggt.github.io/.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026; Project Website: https://mvggt.github.io/
♻ ☆ PRS-Med: Position Reasoning Segmentation in Medical Imaging
Prompt-based medical image segmentation has rapidly emerged, yet existing methods rely on explicit prompts like bounding boxes and struggle to reason about the spatial relationships essential for clinical diagnosis. While general-domain models attempt complex coordinate regression, these approaches often lack the structured reliability required for medical applications. In this work, we introduce PRS-Med, a unified framework that adopts an elegant, clinical-first approach to position reasoning segmentation. By utilizing a medical vision-language model integrated with a segmentation decoder, PRS-Med mimics the structured "search patterns" used by radiologists to identify pathologies within specific anatomical zones. To support this robust reasoning, we present the Medical Position Reasoning Segmentation (PosMed) dataset, comprising 116,000 expert-validated, spatially grounded question-answer pairs across six imaging modalities. Unlike previous brittle attempts at spatial reasoning, PosMed leverages a scalable, deterministic pipeline validated by board-certified radiologists to ensure clinical accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our zone-based reasoning not only improves segmentation accuracy (mean Dice improvements up to +31.2\%) but also provides a high-confidence interpretability layer that outperforms state-of-the-art complex reasoning models. By prioritizing functional reliability over unnecessary technical complexity, PRS-Med offers a practical and scalable baseline for the next generation of intelligent medical assistants.
♻ ☆ When Rubrics Fail: Error Enumeration as Reward in Reference-Free RL Post-Training for Virtual Try-On
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) and Rubrics as Rewards (RaR) have driven strong gains in domains with clear correctness signals and even in subjective domains by synthesizing evaluation criteria from ideal reference answers. But many real-world tasks admit multiple valid outputs and lack the single ideal answer that rubric generation depends on. We identify this reference-free setting as a gap in current post-training methods and propose Implicit Error Counting (IEC) to fill it. Instead of checking what a response gets right against a rubric, IEC enumerates what it gets wrong, applying severity-weighted scores across task-relevant axes and converting them into calibrated per-aspect rewards. We show that naïve explicit enumeration is too noisy for stable optimization, and that two design choices: implicit score emission and group calibration are necessary to make error counting a reliable reward. As a case study, we validate IEC on virtual try-on (VTO), a domain that is simultaneously too constrained for holistic scoring and too permissive for rubric-based evaluation: subtle garment errors are unacceptable, yet many output variations are correct. We introduce Cascaded Error Counting (CEC) as an evaluation metric, which tracks human preferences well (60% top-1 vs. 30% others), and curate Mismatch-DressCode (MDressBench), a benchmark with maximal attribute mismatch to stress-test reward designs. On MDressBench, IEC outperforms RaR across all metrics (CEC: 5.31 vs. 5.60 on flat references; 5.20 vs. 5.53 on non-flat). On VITON-HD and DressCode, IEC matches or surpasses six baselines on 6 of 8 perceptual metrics. These results suggest that when ideal answers are unavailable, counting errors provide a stronger signal than constructing rubrics.
♻ ☆ Align Your Query: Representation Alignment for Multimodality Medical Object Detection
Medical object detection suffers when a single detector is trained on mixed medical modalities (e.g., CXR, CT, MRI) due to heterogeneous statistics and disjoint representation spaces. To address this challenge, we turn to representation alignment, an approach that has proven effective for bringing features from different sources into a shared space. Specifically, we target the representations of DETR-style object queries and propose a simple, detector-agnostic framework to align them with modality context. First, we define modality tokens: compact, text-derived embeddings encoding imaging modality that are lightweight and require no extra annotations. We integrate the modality tokens into the detection process via Multimodality Context Attention (MoCA), mixing object-query representations via self-attention to propagate modality context within the query set. This preserves DETR-style architectures and adds negligible latency while injecting modality cues into object queries. We further introduce QueryREPA, a short pretraining stage that aligns query representations to their modality tokens using a task-specific contrastive objective with modality-balanced batches. Together, MoCA and QueryREPA produce modality-aware, class-faithful queries that transfer effectively to downstream training. Across diverse modalities trained altogether, the proposed approach consistently improves AP with minimal overhead and no architectural modifications, offering a practical path toward robust multimodality medical object detection.
comment: Project page: https://araseo.github.io/alignyourquery/
♻ ☆ EgoReasoner: Learning Egocentric 4D Reasoning via Task-Adaptive Structured Thinking
Fangrui Zhu, Yunfeng Xi, Jianmo Ni, Mu Cai, Boqing Gong, Long Zhao, Chen Qu, Ian Miao, Yi Li, Cheng Zhong, Huaizu Jiang, Shwetak Patel
Egocentric video understanding is inherently complex due to the dynamic 4D nature of the environment, where camera motion and object displacements necessitate a continuous re-evaluation of spatial relations. In this work, we target a suite of under-explored egocentric 4D reasoning tasks, including fixture interaction counting, viewpoint-relative fixture location, object movement itinerary tracking, and stationary object localization, that require fundamentally different cognitive operations: spatial anchoring, temporal tracking, and duration reasoning. We observe that these structural differences make task-agnostic approaches insufficient: generic Chain-of-Thought methods lack task-appropriate reasoning primitives, and uniform reinforcement learning actively destabilizes performance on spatial tasks. To address this, we propose EgoReasoner, a two-stage framework that aligns both the reasoning scaffold and the reward signal to each task's cognitive structure. In the first stage, Task-Adaptive Thinking Templates guide the synthesis of structured CoT traces that teach the model to reason adaptively across task types via supervised fine-tuning. In the second stage, task-aware reward functions verify entity grounding, temporal alignment, and task-adaptive logical consistency, selectively strengthening each reasoning pathway via reinforcement fine-tuning with GRPO. Our 3B-parameter model, trained on only 16K samples, achieves 37.5% average accuracy on the challenging HD-EPIC benchmark, surpassing Qwen2.5-VL-7B (25.7%) by over 10 points.
comment: preprint
♻ ☆ Points-to-3D: Structure-Aware 3D Generation with Point Cloud Priors CVPR 2026
Recent progress in 3D generation has been driven largely by models conditioned on images or text, while readily available 3D priors are still underused. In many real-world scenarios, the visible-region point cloud are easy to obtain from active sensors such as LiDAR or from feed-forward predictors like VGGT, offering explicit geometric constraints that current methods fail to exploit. In this work, we introduce Points-to-3D, a diffusion-based framework that leverages point cloud priors for geometry-controllable 3D asset and scene generation. Built on a latent 3D diffusion model TRELLIS, Points-to-3D first replaces pure-noise sparse structure latent initialization with a point cloud priors tailored input formulation.A structure inpainting network, trained within the TRELLIS framework on task-specific data designed to learn global structural inpainting, is then used for inference with a staged sampling strategy (structural inpainting followed by boundary refinement), completing the global geometry while preserving the visible regions of the input priors. In practice, Points-to-3D can take either accurate point-cloud priors or VGGT-estimated point clouds from single images as input. Experiments on both objects and scene scenarios consistently demonstrate superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of rendering quality and geometric fidelity, highlighting the effectiveness of explicitly embedding point-cloud priors for achieving more accurate and structurally controllable 3D generation. Project page: https://jiatongxia.github.io/points2-3D/
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026
♻ ☆ Stronger Normalization-Free Transformers CVPR 2026
Although normalization layers have long been viewed as indispensable components of deep learning architectures, the recent introduction of Dynamic Tanh (DyT) has demonstrated that alternatives are possible. The point-wise function DyT constrains extreme values for stable convergence and reaches normalization-level performance; this work seeks further for function designs that can surpass it. We first study how the intrinsic properties of point-wise functions influence training and performance. Building on these findings, we conduct a large-scale search for a more effective function design. Through this exploration, we introduce $\mathrm{Derf}(x) = \mathrm{erf}(αx + s)$, where $\mathrm{erf}(x)$ is the rescaled Gaussian cumulative distribution function, and identify it as the most performant design. Derf outperforms LayerNorm, RMSNorm, and DyT across a wide range of domains, including visual recognition and generation, speech representation, and DNA sequence modeling. Our analysis also suggests that the performance gains of Derf largely stem from its improved generalization rather than stronger fitting capacity. Its simplicity and stronger performance make Derf a practical choice for normalization-free Transformer architectures.
comment: Published in CVPR 2026
♻ ☆ How to Train Your Long-Context Visual Document Model
We present the first comprehensive, large-scale study of training long-context vision language models up to 344K context, targeting long-document visual question answering with measured transfer to long-context text. While several such strong are open-weight, namely Qwen3 VL and GLM 4.5/6V, their training recipes and data pipelines are not reproducible. We systematically study continued pretraining, supervised finetuning, and preference optimization for 24B and 32B parameter models, backed by extensive LC evaluations and ablations to bridge this gap, and achieve state-of-the-art performance on MMLongBenchDoc for both parameter scales. In addition to this, our key findings include: (i) training on context lengths that match evaluation context lengths outperforms training on longer contexts, (ii) training and evaluating with page indices provides a simple, high-impact boost to long-document performance, (iii) our synthetic data pipelines enable self-improvement via continued pretraining and supervised finetuning, and (iv) we extend the known text-to-visual long context transfer to the reverse, showing that visual long context training transfers to long-context text performance. We also release MMLBD-C, a manually corrected version of MMLongBenchDoc to reduce erroneous and low quality examples in the benchmark.
♻ ☆ Do VLMs Perceive or Recall? Probing Visual Perception vs. Memory with Classic Visual Illusions
Xiaoxiao Sun, Mingyang Li, Kun Yuan, Min Woo Sun, Mark Endo, Shengguang Wu, Changlin Li, Yuhui Zhang, Zeyu Wang, Serena Yeung-Levy
Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often answer classic visual illusions "correctly" on original images, yet persist with the same responses when illusion factors are inverted, even though the visual change is obvious to humans. This raises a fundamental question: do VLMs perceive visual changes or merely recall memorized patterns? While several studies have noted this phenomenon, the underlying causes remain unclear. To move from observations to systematic understanding, this paper introduces VI-Probe, a controllable visual-illusion framework with graded perturbations and matched visual controls (without illusion inducer) that disentangles visually grounded perception from language-driven recall. Unlike prior work that focuses on averaged accuracy, we measure stability and sensitivity using Polarity-Flip Consistency, Template Fixation Index, and an illusion multiplier normalized against matched controls. Experiments across different families reveal that response persistence arises from heterogeneous causes rather than a single mechanism. For instance, GPT-5 exhibits memory override, Claude-Opus-4.1 shows perception-memory competition, while Qwen variants suggest visual-processing limits. Our findings challenge single-cause views and motivate probing-based evaluation that measures both knowledge and sensitivity to controlled visual change. Data and code are available at https://sites.google.com/view/vi-probe/
comment: 26 pages, 31 figures, 13 tables. Project Page: https://sites.google.com/view/vi-probe/
♻ ☆ Seeing Isn't Orienting: A Cognitively Grounded Benchmark Reveals Systematic Orientation Failures in MLLMs Supplementary
Nazia Tasnim, Keanu Nichols, Yuting Yan, Nicholas Ikechukwu, Elva Zou, Deepti Ghadiyaram, Bryan A. Plummer
Object orientation understanding represents a fundamental challenge in visual perception critical for applications like robotic manipulation and augmented reality. Current vision-language benchmarks fail to isolate this capability, often conflating it with positional relationships and general scene understanding. We introduce DORI (Discriminative Orientation Reasoning Intelligence), a comprehensive benchmark establishing object orientation perception as a primary evaluation target. DORI assesses four dimensions of orientation comprehension: frontal alignment, rotational transformations, relative directional relationships, and canonical orientation understanding. Through carefully curated tasks from 11 datasets spanning 67 object categories across synthetic and real-world scenarios, DORI provides insights on how multi-modal systems understand object orientations. Our evaluation of 15 state-of-the-art vision-language models reveals critical limitations: even the best models achieve only 54.2% accuracy on coarse tasks and 33.0% on granular orientation judgments, with performance deteriorating for tasks requiring reference frame shifts or compound rotations. These findings demonstrate the need for dedicated orientation representation mechanisms, as models show systematic inability to perform precise angular estimations, track orientation changes across viewpoints, and understand compound rotations - suggesting limitations in their internal 3D spatial representations. As the first diagnostic framework specifically designed for orientation awareness in multimodal systems, DORI offers implications for improving robotic control, 3D scene reconstruction, and human-AI interaction in physical environments. DORI data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/appledora/DORI-Benchmark
comment: Previously this version appeared as arXiv:2603.11410 which was submitted as a new work by accident
♻ ☆ Rethinking Token Pruning for Historical Screenshots in GUI Visual Agents: Semantic, Spatial, and Temporal Perspectives
In recent years, GUI visual agents built upon Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong potential in navigation tasks. However, high-resolution GUI screenshots produce a large number of visual tokens, making the direct preservation of complete historical information computationally expensive. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on token pruning for historical screenshots in GUI scenarios and distill three practical insights that are crucial for designing effective pruning strategies. First, we observe that GUI screenshots exhibit a distinctive foreground-background semantic composition. To probe this property, we apply a simple edge-based separation to partition screenshots into foreground and background regions. Surprisingly, we find that, contrary to the common assumption that background areas have little semantic value, they effectively capture interface-state transitions, thereby providing auxiliary cues for GUI reasoning. Second, compared with carefully designed pruning strategies, random pruning possesses an inherent advantage in preserving spatial structure, enabling better performance under the same computational budget. Finally, we observe that GUI Agents exhibit a recency effect similar to human cognition: by allocating larger token budgets to more recent screenshots and heavily compressing distant ones, we can significantly reduce computational cost while maintaining nearly unchanged performance. These findings offer new insights and practical guidance for the design of efficient GUI visual agents.
comment: 1.There are missing authors and unresolved disputes regarding the author order in the current manuscript. 2.The experimental section lacks detailed experimental data and complete reproducible information, which prevents readers from replicating the work reliably. I need to conduct further experiments and supplement comprehensive data to ensure academic rigor
♻ ☆ We'll Fix it in Post: Improving Text-to-Video Generation with Neuro-Symbolic Feedback
Current text-to-video (T2V) generation models are increasingly popular due to their ability to produce coherent videos from textual prompts. However, these models often struggle to generate semantically and temporally consistent videos when dealing with longer, more complex prompts involving multiple objects or sequential events. Additionally, the high computational costs associated with training or fine-tuning make direct improvements impractical. To overcome these limitations, we introduce NeuS-E, a novel zero-training video refinement pipeline that leverages neuro-symbolic feedback to automatically enhance video generation, achieving superior alignment with the prompts. Our approach first derives the neuro-symbolic feedback by analyzing a formal video representation and pinpoints semantically inconsistent events, objects, and their corresponding frames. This feedback then guides targeted edits to the original video. Extensive empirical evaluations on both open-source and proprietary T2V models demonstrate that NeuS-E significantly enhances temporal and logical alignment across diverse prompts by almost 40%
♻ ☆ MindCube: Spatial Mental Modeling from Limited Views
Qineng Wang, Baiqiao Yin, Pingyue Zhang, Jianshu Zhang, Kangrui Wang, Zihan Wang, Jieyu Zhang, Keshigeyan Chandrasegaran, Han Liu, Ranjay Krishna, Saining Xie, Jiajun Wu, Li Fei-Fei, Manling Li
Can Vision-Language Models (VLMs) imagine the full scene from just a few views, like humans do? Humans form spatial mental models naturally, internal representations of unseen space, to reason about layout, perspective, and motion. Our MindCube benchmark with 21,154 questions across 3,268 images exposes this critical gap, where existing VLMs exhibit near-random performance. Using MindCube, we systematically evaluate how well VLMs build robust spatial mental models through representing positions (cognitive mapping), orientations (perspective-taking), and dynamics (mental simulation for "what-if" movements). We then explore three approaches to help approximate spatial mental models in VLMs, focusing on incorporating unseen intermediate views, natural language reasoning chains, and cognitive maps. The significant improvement comes from a synergistic approach, "map-then-reason", that jointly trains the model to first generate a cognitive map and then reason upon it. By training models to reason over these internal maps, we boosted accuracy from 37.8% to 57.8% (+20.0%). Adding reinforcement learning pushed performance even further to 61.3% (+23.5%). Our key insight is that such scaffolding of spatial mental models, actively constructing and utilizing internal structured spatial representations with flexible reasoning processes, significantly improves understanding of unobservable space.
comment: The latest version includes an expanded discussion of scaffolding, along with updated data statistics and experimental results
♻ ☆ RAD-LAD: Rule and Language Grounded Autonomous Driving in Real-Time
We present LAD, a real-time language--action planner with an interruptible architecture that produces a motion plan in a single forward pass (~20 Hz) or generates textual reasoning alongside a motion plan (~10 Hz). LAD is fast enough for real-time closed-loop deployment, achieving ~3x lower latency than prior driving language models while setting a new learning-based state of the art on nuPlan Test14-Hard and InterPlan. We also introduce RAD, a rule-based planner designed to address structural limitations of PDM-Closed. RAD achieves state-of-the-art performance among rule-based planners on nuPlan Test14-Hard and InterPlan. Finally, we show that combining RAD and LAD enables hybrid planning that captures the strengths of both approaches. This hybrid system demonstrates that rules and learning provide complementary capabilities: rules support reliable maneuvering, while language enables adaptive and explainable decision-making.
♻ ☆ SecAgent: Efficient Mobile GUI Agent with Semantic Context
Yiping Xie, Song Chen, Jingxuan Xing, Wei Jiang, Zekun Zhu, Yingyao Wang, Pi Bu, Jun Song, Yuning Jiang, Bo Zheng
Mobile Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by multimodal large language models have demonstrated promising capabilities in automating complex smartphone tasks. However, existing approaches face two critical limitations: the scarcity of high-quality multilingual datasets, particularly for non-English ecosystems, and inefficient history representation methods. To address these challenges, we present SecAgent, an efficient mobile GUI agent at 3B scale. We first construct a human-verified Chinese mobile GUI dataset with 18k grounding samples and 121k navigation steps across 44 applications, along with a Chinese navigation benchmark featuring multi-choice action annotations. Building upon this dataset, we propose a semantic context mechanism that distills history screenshots and actions into concise, natural language summaries, significantly reducing computational costs while preserving task-relevant information. Through supervised and reinforcement fine-tuning, SecAgent outperforms similar-scale baselines and achieves performance comparable to 7B-8B models on our and public navigation benchmarks. Our dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/alibabagroup/CMGUI.
♻ ☆ AutoWeather4D: Autonomous Driving Video Weather Conversion via G-Buffer Dual-Pass Editing
Generative video models have significantly advanced the photorealistic synthesis of adverse weather for autonomous driving; however, they consistently demand massive datasets to learn rare weather scenarios. While 3D-aware editing methods alleviate these data constraints by augmenting existing video footage, they are fundamentally bottlenecked by costly per-scene optimization and suffer from inherent geometric and illumination entanglement. In this work, we introduce AutoWeather4D, a feed-forward 3D-aware weather editing framework designed to explicitly decouple geometry and illumination. At the core of our approach is a G-buffer Dual-pass Editing mechanism. The Geometry Pass leverages explicit structural foundations to enable surface-anchored physical interactions, while the Light Pass analytically resolves light transport, accumulating the contributions of local illuminants into the global illumination to enable dynamic 3D local relighting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AutoWeather4D achieves comparable photorealism and structural consistency to generative baselines while enabling fine-grained parametric physical control, serving as a practical data engine for autonomous driving.
♻ ☆ EarthBridge: A Solution for 4th Multi-modal Aerial View Image Challenge Translation Track CVPR
Cross-modal image-to-image translation among Electro-Optical (EO), Infrared (IR), and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors is essential for comprehensive multi-modal aerial-view analysis. However, translating between these modalities is notoriously difficult due to their distinct electromagnetic signatures and geometric characteristics. This paper presents \textbf{EarthBridge}, a high-fidelity translation framework developed for the 4th Multi-modal Aerial View Image Challenge -- Translation (MAVIC-T). We explore two distinct methodologies: \textbf{Diffusion Bridge Implicit Models (DBIM)}, which we generalize using non-Markovian bridge processes for high-quality deterministic sampling, and \textbf{Contrastive Unpaired Translation (CUT)}, which utilizes contrastive learning for structural consistency. Our EarthBridge framework employs a channel-concatenated UNet denoiser trained with Karras-weighted bridge scalings and a specialized "booting noise" initialization to handle the inherent ambiguity in cross-modal mappings. We evaluate these methods across all four challenge tasks (SAR$\rightarrow$EO, SAR$\rightarrow$RGB, SAR$\rightarrow$IR, RGB$\rightarrow$IR), achieving superior spatial detail and spectral accuracy. Our solution achieved a composite score of 0.38, securing the second position on the MAVIC-T leaderboard. Code is available at https://github.com/Bili-Sakura/EarthBridge-Preview.
comment: accepted by CVPRW 2026
♻ ☆ Enhancing Eye Feature Estimation from Event Data Streams through Adaptive Inference State Space Modeling
Viet Dung Nguyen, Mobina Ghorbaninejad, Chengyi Ma, Reynold Bailey, Gabriel J. Diaz, Alexander Fix, Ryan J. Suess, Alexander Ororbia
Eye feature extraction from event-based data streams can be performed efficiently and with low energy consumption, offering great utility to real-world eye tracking pipelines. However, few eye feature extractors are designed to handle sudden changes in event density caused by the changes between gaze behaviors that vary in their kinematics, leading to degraded prediction performance. In this work, we address this problem by introducing the adaptive inference state space model (AISSM), a novel architecture for feature extraction that is capable of dynamically adjusting the relative weight placed on current versus recent information. This relative weighting is determined via estimates of the signal-to-noise ratio and event density produced by a complementary dynamic confidence network. Lastly, we craft and evaluate a novel learning technique that improves training efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that the AISSM system outperforms state-of-the-art models for event-based eye feature extraction.
comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 1 tables, accepted to ETRA 2026
♻ ☆ SceneExpander: Expanding 3D Scenes with Free-Form Inserted Views
World building with 3D scene representations is increasingly important for content creation, simulation, and interactive experiences, yet real workflows are inherently iterative: creators must repeatedly extend an existing scene under user control. Motivated by this research gap, we study 3D scene expansion in a user-centric workflow: starting from a real scene captured by multi-view images, we extend its coverage by inserting an additional view synthesized by a generative model. Unlike simple object editing or style transfer in a fixed scene, the inserted view is often 3D-misaligned with the original reconstruction, introducing geometry shifts, hallucinated content, or view-dependent artifacts that break global multi-view consistency. To address the challenge, we propose SceneExpander, which applies test-time adaptation to a parametric feed-forward 3D reconstruction model with two complementary distillation signals: anchor distillation stabilizes the original scene by distilling geometric cues from the captured views, while inserted-view self-distillation preserves observation-supported predictions yet adapts latent geometry and appearance to accommodate the misaligned inserted view. Experiments on ETH scenes and online data demonstrate improved expansion behavior and reconstruction quality under misalignment.
♻ ☆ AVA-Bench: Atomic Visual Ability Benchmark for Vision Foundation Models CVPR 2026
The rise of vision foundation models (VFMs) calls for systematic evaluation. A common approach pairs VFMs with large language models (LLMs) as general-purpose heads, followed by evaluation on broad Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmarks. However, this protocol has two key blind spots: (i) the instruction tuning data may not align with VQA test distributions, meaning a wrong prediction can stem from such data mismatch rather than a VFM' visual shortcomings; (ii) VQA benchmarks often require multiple visual abilities, making it hard to tell whether errors stem from lacking all required abilities or just a single critical one. To address these gaps, we introduce AVA-Bench, the first benchmark that explicitly disentangles 14 Atomic Visual Abilities (AVAs) -- foundational skills like localization, depth estimation, and spatial understanding that collectively support complex visual reasoning tasks. By decoupling AVAs and matching training and test distributions within each, AVA-Bench pinpoints exactly where a VFM excels or falters. Applying AVA-Bench to leading VFMs thus reveals distinctive "ability fingerprints," turning VFM selection from educated guesswork into principled engineering. Notably, we find that a 0.5B LLM yields similar VFM rankings as a 7B LLM while cutting GPU hours by 8x, enabling more efficient evaluation. By offering a comprehensive and transparent benchmark, we hope AVA-Bench lays the foundation for the next generation of VFMs.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026. The first two authors contribute equally
♻ ☆ Catalyst4D: High-Fidelity 3D-to-4D Scene Editing via Dynamic Propagation
Recent advances in 3D scene editing using NeRF and 3DGS enable high-quality static scene editing. In contrast, dynamic scene editing remains challenging, as methods that directly extend 2D diffusion models to 4D often produce motion artifacts, temporal flickering, and inconsistent style propagation. We introduce Catalyst4D, a framework that transfers high-quality 3D edits to dynamic 4D Gaussian scenes while maintaining spatial and temporal coherence. At its core, Anchor-based Motion Guidance (AMG) builds a set of structurally stable and spatially representative anchors from both original and edited Gaussians. These anchors serve as robust region-level references, and their correspondences are established via optimal transport to enable consistent deformation propagation without cross-region interference or motion drift. Complementarily, Color Uncertainty-guided Appearance Refinement (CUAR) preserves temporal appearance consistency by estimating per-Gaussian color uncertainty and selectively refining regions prone to occlusion-induced artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Catalyst4D achieves temporally stable, high-fidelity dynamic scene editing and outperforms existing methods in both visual quality and motion coherence.
comment: https://junliao2025.github.io/Catalyst4D-ProjectPage/
♻ ☆ MetricHMSR:Metric Human Mesh and Scene Recovery from Monocular Images
We introduce MetricHMSR, a novel framework for recovering metric human meshes and 3D scenes from a single monocular image. Existing methods struggle to recover metric scale due to monocular scale ambiguity and weak-perspective camera assumptions. Moreover, their fully coupled feature representations make it difficult to disentangle local pose from global translation, often requiring multi-stage pipelines that introduce accumulated errors. To address these challenges, we propose MetricHMR (Metric Human Mesh Recovery), which incorporates a bounding camera ray map representation to provide explicit metric cues for human reconstruction,together with a Human Mixture-of-Experts (HumanMoE) that dynamically routes image features to specialized experts, enabling the disentangled perception of local human pose and global metric position. Leveraging the recovered metric human as a geometric anchor, we further refine monocular metric depth estimation to achieve more accurate 3D alignment between humans and scenes.Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both human mesh recovery and metric human-scene reconstruction. Project Page: https://Metaverse-AI-Lab-THU.github.io/MetricHMSR.
♻ ☆ Source-Only Cross-Weather LiDAR via Geometry-Aware Point Drop ICRA 2026
Adverse weather conditions, such as rain, snow, and fog, severely degrade LiDAR semantic segmentation by introducing refraction, scattering, and point dropouts that compromise geometric integrity. While prior approaches ranging from weather simulation and mixing-based augmentation to domain randomization and regularization enhance robustness, they frequently overlook structural vulnerabilities inherent to object boundaries, corners, and highly sparse regions. To address this limitation, we propose a Light Geometry-Aware Adapter. This module aligns azimuths and applies horizontal circular padding to preserve neighbor continuity across the 0 deg-360 deg wrap-around boundary. Using a local-window K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) search, it aggregates nearby points and computes lightweight local statistics, compressing them into compact geometry-aware cues. During training, these cues facilitate region-aware regularization, which effectively stabilizes predictions in structurally fragile areas. The proposed adapter is designed to be plug-and-play, complements existing augmentation techniques, and operates exclusively during training, incurring negligible inference overhead. Operating under a rigorous source-only cross-weather paradigm wherein models are trained on SemanticKITTI and evaluated on SemanticSTF without target-domain labels or fine-tuning, our adapter achieves a +3.4 mIoU improvement over strong data-centric augmentation baselines. Furthermore, it demonstrates performance comparable to advanced class-centric regularization methods. These findings highlight that geometry-driven regularization constitutes a critical pathway toward achieving highly robust, all-weather LiDAR segmentation.
comment: Accepted by ICRA 2026
♻ ☆ X-World: Controllable Ego-Centric Multi-Camera World Models for Scalable End-to-End Driving
Chaoda Zheng, Sean Li, Jinhao Deng, Zhennan Wang, Shijia Chen, Liqiang Xiao, Ziheng Chi, Hongbin Lin, Kangjie Chen, Boyang Wang, Yu Zhang, Xianming Liu
Scalable and reliable evaluation is increasingly critical in the end-to-end era of autonomous driving, where vision--language--action (VLA) policies directly map raw sensor streams to driving actions. Yet, current evaluation pipelines still rely heavily on real-world road testing, which is costly, biased toward limited scenario coverage, and difficult to reproduce. These challenges motivate a real-world simulator that can generate realistic future observations under proposed actions, while remaining controllable and stable over long horizons. We present X-World, an action-conditioned multi-camera generative world model that simulates future observations directly in video space. Given synchronized multi-view camera history and a future action sequence, X-World generates future multi-camera video streams that follow the commanded actions. To ensure reproducible and editable scene rollouts, X-World further supports optional controls over dynamic traffic agents and static road elements, and retains a text-prompt interface for appearance-level control (e.g., weather and time of day). Beyond world simulation, X-World also enables video style transfer by conditioning on appearance prompts while preserving the underlying action and scene dynamics. At the core of X-World is a multi-view latent video generator designed to explicitly encourage cross-view geometric consistency and temporal coherence under diverse control signals. Experiments show that X-World achieves high-quality multi-view video generation with (i) strong view consistency across cameras, (ii) stable temporal dynamics over long rollouts, and (iii) high controllability with strict action following and faithful adherence to optional scene controls. These properties make X-World a practical foundation for scalable and reproducible evaluation.
comment: Technical Report
♻ ☆ Guiding a Diffusion Transformer with the Internal Dynamics of Itself CVPR 2026
The diffusion model presents a powerful ability to capture the entire (conditional) data distribution. However, due to the lack of sufficient training and data to learn to cover low-probability areas, the model will be penalized for failing to generate high-quality images corresponding to these areas. To achieve better generation quality, guidance strategies such as classifier free guidance (CFG) can guide the samples to the high-probability areas during the sampling stage. However, the standard CFG often leads to over-simplified or distorted samples. On the other hand, the alternative line of guiding diffusion model with its bad version is limited by carefully designed degradation strategies, extra training and additional sampling steps. In this paper, we proposed a simple yet effective strategy Internal Guidance (IG), which introduces an auxiliary supervision on the intermediate layer during training process and extrapolates the intermediate and deep layer's outputs to obtain generative results during sampling process. This simple strategy yields significant improvements in both training efficiency and generation quality on various baselines. On ImageNet 256x256, SiT-XL/2+IG achieves FID=5.31 and FID=1.75 at 80 and 800 epochs. More impressively, LightningDiT-XL/1+IG achieves FID=1.34 which achieves a large margin between all of these methods. Combined with CFG, LightningDiT-XL/1+IG achieves the current state-of-the-art FID of 1.19.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026. Project Page: https://zhouxingyu13.github.io/Internal-Guidance/
♻ ☆ Domain-Guided YOLO26 with Composite BCE-Dice-Lovász Loss for Multi-Class Fetal Head Ultrasound Segmentation
Segmenting fetal head structures from prenatal ultrasound remains a practical bottleneck in obstetric imaging. The current state-of-the-art baseline, proposed alongside the published dataset, adapts the Segment Anything Model with per-class Dice and Lovász losses but still depends on bounding-box prompts at test time. We build a prompt-free pipeline on top of YOLO26-Seg that jointly detects and segments three structures, Brain, Cavum Septi Pellucidi (CSP), and Lateral Ventricles (LV), in a single forward pass. Three modifications are central to our approach: (i) a composite BCE-Dice-Lovász segmentation loss with inverse-frequency class weighting, injected into the YOLO26 training loop via runtime monkey-patching; (ii) domain-guided copy-paste augmentation that transplants minority-class structures while respecting their anatomical location relative to the brain boundary; and (iii) inter-patient stratified splitting to prevent data leakage. On 575 held-out test images, the composite loss variant reaches a mean Dice coefficient of 0.9253, exceeding the baseline (0.9012) by 2.68 percentage points, despite reporting over three foreground classes only, whereas the baseline's reported mean includes the easy background class. We further ablate each component and discuss annotation-quality and class-imbalance effects on CSP and LV performance.
♻ ☆ AIBench: Evaluating Visual-Logical Consistency in Academic Illustration Generation
Zhaohe Liao, Kaixun Jiang, Zhihang Liu, Yujie Wei, Junqiu Yu, Quanhao Li, Hong-Tao Yu, Pandeng Li, Yuzheng Wang, Zhen Xing, Shiwei Zhang, Chen-Wei Xie, Yun Zheng, Xihui Liu
Although image generation has boosted various applications via its rapid evolution, whether the state-of-the-art models are able to produce ready-to-use academic illustrations for papers is still largely unexplored. Directly comparing or evaluating the illustration with VLM is native but requires oracle multi-modal understanding ability, which is unreliable for long and complex texts and illustrations. To address this, we propose AIBench, the first benchmark using VQA for evaluating logic correctness of the academic illustrations and VLMs for assessing aesthetics. In detail, we designed four levels of questions proposed from a logic diagram summarized from the method part of the paper, which query whether the generated illustration aligns with the paper on different scales. Our VQA-based approach raises more accurate and detailed evaluations on visual-logical consistency while relying less on the ability of the judger VLM. With our high-quality AIBench, we conduct extensive experiments and conclude that the performance gap between models on this task is significantly larger than general ones, reflecting their various complex reasoning and high-density generation ability. Further, the logic and aesthetics are hard to optimize simultaneously as in handcrafted illustrations. Additional experiments further state that test-time scaling on both abilities significantly boosts the performance on this task.
♻ ☆ Multi-Level Knowledge Distillation and Dynamic Self-Supervised Learning for Continual Learning CVPR 2024
Class-incremental with repetition (CIR), where previously trained classes repeatedly introduced in future tasks, is a more realistic scenario than the traditional class incremental setup, which assumes that each task contains unseen classes. CIR assumes that we can easily access abundant unlabeled data from external sources, such as the Internet. Therefore, we propose two components that efficiently use the unlabeled data to ensure the high stability and the plasticity of models trained in CIR setup. First, we introduce multi-level knowledge distillation (MLKD) that distills knowledge from multiple previous models across multiple perspectives, including features and logits, so the model can maintain much various previous knowledge. Moreover, we implement dynamic self-supervised loss (SSL) to utilize the unlabeled data that accelerates the learning of new classes, while dynamic weighting of SSL keeps the focus of training to the primary task. Both of our proposed components significantly improve the performance in CIR setup, achieving 2nd place in the CVPR 5th CLVISION Challenge.
comment: 2nd Place in Class-Incremental with Repetition (CIR) using Unlabeled Data Challenge at 5th CLVISION workshop, CVPR 2024
♻ ☆ TTA-DAME: Test-Time Adaptation with Domain Augmentation and Model Ensemble for Dynamic Driving Conditions ICCV 2023
Test-time Adaptation (TTA) poses a challenge, requiring models to dynamically adapt and perform optimally on shifting target domains. This task is particularly emphasized in real-world driving scenes, where weather domain shifts occur frequently. To address such dynamic changes, our proposed method, TTA-DAME, leverages source domain data augmentation into target domains. Additionally, we introduce a domain discriminator and a specialized domain detector to mitigate drastic domain shifts, especially from daytime to nighttime conditions. To further improve adaptability, we train multiple detectors and consolidate their predictions through Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS). Our empirical validation demonstrates the effectiveness of our method, showing significant performance enhancements on the SHIFT Benchmark.
comment: 1st Place in Continual Test-time Adaptation for Object Detection Challenge at VCL Workshop, ICCV 2023
♻ ☆ Neuro-Cognitive Reward Modeling for Human-Centered Autonomous Vehicle Control
Recent advancements in computer vision have accelerated the development of autonomous driving. Despite these advancements, training machines to drive in a way that aligns with human expectations remains a significant challenge. Human factors are still essential, as humans possess a sophisticated cognitive system capable of rapidly interpreting scene information and making accurate decisions. Aligning machine with human intent has been explored with Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). Conventional RLHF methods rely on collecting human preference data by manually ranking generated outputs, which is time-consuming and indirect. In this work, we propose an electroencephalography (EEG)-guided decision-making framework to incorporate human cognitive insights without behaviour response interruption into reinforcement learning (RL) for autonomous driving. We collected EEG signals from 20 participants in a realistic driving simulator and analyzed event-related potentials (ERP) in response to sudden environmental changes. Our proposed framework employs a neural network to predict the strength of ERP based on the cognitive information from visual scene information. Moreover, we explore the integration of such cognitive information into the reward signal of the RL algorithm. Experimental results show that our framework can improve the collision avoidance ability of the RL algorithm, highlighting the potential of neuro-cognitive feedback in enhancing autonomous driving systems. Our project page is: https://alex95gogo.github.io/Cognitive-Reward/.
♻ ☆ AGILE: Hand-Object Interaction Reconstruction from Video via Agentic Generation
Jin-Chuan Shi, Binhong Ye, Tao Liu, Xiaoyang Liu, Yangjinhui Xu, Junzhe He, Zeju Li, Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen
Reconstructing dynamic hand-object interactions from monocular videos is critical for dexterous manipulation data collection and creating realistic digital twins for robotics and VR. However, current methods face two prohibitive barriers: (1) reliance on neural rendering often yields fragmented, non-simulation-ready geometries under heavy occlusion, and (2) dependence on brittle Structure-from-Motion (SfM) initialization leads to frequent failures on in-the-wild footage. To overcome these limitations, we introduce AGILE, a robust framework that shifts the paradigm from reconstruction to agentic generation for interaction learning. First, we employ an agentic pipeline where a Vision-Language Model (VLM) guides a generative model to synthesize a complete, watertight object mesh with high-fidelity texture, independent of video occlusions. Second, bypassing fragile SfM entirely, we propose a robust anchor-and-track strategy. We initialize the object pose at a single interaction onset frame using a foundation model and propagate it temporally by leveraging the strong visual similarity between our generated asset and video observations. Finally, a contact-aware optimization integrates semantic, geometric, and interaction stability constraints to enforce physical plausibility. Extensive experiments on HO3D, DexYCB, and in-the-wild videos reveal that AGILE outperforms baselines in global geometric accuracy while demonstrating exceptional robustness on challenging sequences where prior art frequently collapses. By prioritizing physical validity, our method produces simulation-ready assets validated via real-to-sim retargeting for robotic applications.
comment: 11 pages
♻ ☆ HyperAlign: Hypernetwork for Efficient Test-Time Alignment of Diffusion Models
Diffusion model alignment aims to bridge the gap between generated outputs and human preferences by enhancing both semantic consistency with textual prompts and overall visual quality. Existing alignment methods face a challenging trade-off: test-time approaches enable input-specific adaptability but introduce significant computational overhead and tend to under-optimize, while fine-tuning approaches risk reward over-optimization and loss of generation diversity. To bridge this gap, we propose HyperAlign, a framework that trains a hypernetwork for efficient and effective test-time alignment. Instead of modifying latent states directly, HyperAlign dynamically generates input-and-state-conditioned low-rank adaptation weights to modulate the denoising trajectory toward target rewards. We introduce multiple HyperAlign variants of varying granularity to balance alignment quality and computational efficiency. The hypernetwork is optimized with a reward objective regularized by preference data to mitigate reward hacking. We evaluate HyperAlign across multiple generative paradigms, including Stable Diffusion and FLUX, where it significantly outperforms existing alignment methods in semantic consistency and visual quality.
♻ ☆ HieraMamba: Video Temporal Grounding via Hierarchical Anchor-Mamba Pooling CVPR 2026
Video temporal grounding, the task of localizing the start and end times of a natural language query in untrimmed video, requires capturing both global context and fine-grained temporal detail. This challenge is particularly pronounced in long videos, where existing methods often compromise temporal fidelity by over-downsampling or relying on fixed windows. We present HieraMamba, a hierarchical architecture that preserves temporal structure and semantic richness across scales. At its core are Anchor-MambaPooling (AMP) blocks, which utilize Mamba's selective scanning to produce compact anchor tokens that summarize video content at multiple granularities. Two complementary objectives, anchor-conditioned and segment-pooled contrastive losses, encourage anchors to retain local detail while remaining globally discriminative. HieraMamba sets a new state-of-the-art on Ego4D-NLQ, MAD, and TACoS, demonstrating precise, temporally faithful localization in long, untrimmed videos.
comment: CVPR 2026. Project Page: https://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/hieramamba/