Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 131
☆ Appearance Pointers -- Multimodal Region Control of Diffusion Transformers
Controllable image generation remains challenging for creative professionals, who often require precise regional control over materials, object identities, and spatial arrangements that cannot be reliably achieved through text prompting alone. Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) can natively ingest heterogeneous tokens stemming from texts and images, but they lack mechanisms for determining where and how these tokens should influence the output. We introduce appearance pointers, compact tokens that guide DiTs toward the correct appearance cues at the correct spatial locations by aligning text or image inputs with user-specified masks. Appearance pointers are produced by a region correspondence network and refined through a spatial aggregation mechanism, enabling the model to handle multiple regional descriptions without significantly increasing token load. Our approach introduces the first modality-agnostic interface for localized multimodal control in a DiT without retraining the base model from scratch. Across a range of metrics, our single model reaches or surpasses the performance of modality-specific state of the art methods, offering a simple and extensible path toward precise, region-aware, multimodal guidance in generative image synthesis.
comment: 38 Pages, Preprint with supplement
☆ Masked Visual Actions for Unified World Modeling
Hadi Alzayer, Wenlong Huang, Haonan Chen, Christopher Luey, Lvmin Zhang, Maneesh Agrawala, Gordon Wetzstein, Li Fei-Fei, Yilun Du, Jiajun Wu, Jia-Bin Huang
Video models absorb rich priors over how the visual world moves, interacts, and responds to contact, making them promising substrates for robotic world modeling. The central challenge is how to communicate action to such models in a form aligned with the visual space in which they learned these interaction priors, yet still grounded in physical manipulation. We introduce Masked Visual Actions, a pixel-space control interface that expresses action as a partially revealed trajectory of an arbitrary entity in a video. Revealing robot motion makes the model act as a forward dynamics model that predicts the scene's response to low-level robot actions, while revealing desired object motion makes the same model recover robot behavior consistent with that outcome. Finetuned with only 15 hours of masked examples from real videos and simulation, a single checkpoint achieves strong visual fidelity and controllability across diverse scenes and multiple embodiments. In downstream manipulation settings, the model produces imagined rollouts whose outcomes correlate with real-world execution for policy evaluation, improves decision making by ranking candidate futures in model-based planning, and supports inverse modeling by synthesizing robot motion from desired object motion.
comment: Project webpage: https://masked-visual-actions.github.io
☆ ExpertVerse: A General-Purpose Benchmark for Expert-Level Reasoning in Knowledge-Intensive Visual Synthesis
Recent advances in multimodal generative models have enabled instruction-based image generation to move beyond semantic manipulation to knowledge-driven visual reasoning. However, these methods focus on explicit commonsense reasoning, shallow causal understanding, and direct knowledge recall, failing at knowledge-intensive generation. We develop \textbf{ExpertVerse}, a capability-centric benchmark to evaluate generative models via knowledge-intensive lens. ExpertVerse stratifies reasoning generation across an orthogonal taxonomy of \textit{9 cognitive capabilities} and \textit{8 expert disciplines}, yielding \textit{58 sub-disciplines}. We curate 1,611 expert-annotated instances covering single-image editing, multi-image composition, and text-to-image generation. We further develop an automated workflow to produce \textbf{ExpertVerse-100K}, a large-scale dataset with reasoning traces and knowledge-anchored rationale annotations. Based on this, we train \textbf{KnowThinker} with RL fine-tuning, a VLM reasoning engine with world knowledge that jointly generates thinking processes and refined instructions. Towards the cross-modal credit misalignment and multi-objective gradient conflicts in multi-reward optimization, we propose a tailored Bootstrapped Pareto Policy Optimization (BPPO), which synergizes Bootstrapping Reward Rectification (BRR) and Conflict-Aware Pareto Advantage Fusion (CPAF). Extensive results of both open-source and proprietary models exposes critical reasoning deficits, highlighting imperative for knowledge-intensive benchmarks towards next-generation visual generation.
☆ OmniReasoner: Thinking with Long Audio-Video via Native Tool Use
Yu Chen, Caorui Li, Ziyu Xiong, Yidong Wang, Mingqi Gao, Shuman Liu, Biao Liu, Chunfeng Yang, Anxiang Zeng, Haibo Zhang, Chaofan Chen
Long audio-video reasoning is difficult for omnimodal LLMs because the decisive evidence is often sparse, cross-modal, and too expensive to preserve with uniformly high-fidelity inputs. We introduce OmniReasoner, a tool-use post-training framework for Thinking with Long Audio-Video: omni-modal LLMs learn, via supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, to decide whether and where to call a zoom-in tool before answering. OmniReasoner first builds a low-cost global preview of the full stream and then, when needed, calls the zoom-in tool with a requested temporal interval for higher-fidelity visual and audio inspection before answering. Because the model observes different sampling granularities before and after this call -- a sparse global preview and a denser local clip -- we introduce TimeAnchor, which keeps the tool's temporal argument valid and round-trip-consistent across these granularities, rather than tied to frame indices from a particular sampling rate. To make this tool-use behavior trainable without expensive manual interval annotation, we build a Temporal Augmented Data Engine that synthesizes tool-use post-training trajectories by video editing and composition. Experiments across omnimodal and video benchmarks show that OmniReasoner improves both answer accuracy and temporal grounding while concentrating high-fidelity computation on informative regions. Code is available at https://github.com/RockyChen0205/OmniReasoner.
☆ ROMS-IMLE: A Minimalist Approach to Competitive Single-Step Generative Modelling
Generative models have undergone many generations of evolution, from VAEs/GANs to diffusion/flow matching. Along the way, the underlying techniques have become more complicated and various beliefs about what drives strong empirical performance have taken hold. Due to the success of diffusion models and flow matching, one of the more common beliefs is the importance of transforming the noise distribution to the data distribution gradually through many small transformations. We ask whether this is truly necessary, and take a minimalist approach to designing a competitive generative model. We start with the bare-bones essentials, namely just a training objective and a model. We purposefully make both simple. For the training objective, we choose Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (IMLE), and eschew more complicated alternatives such as variational inference, adversarial training and numerical integration. For the model, we eschew transformers and instead choose a moderately sized convolutional network. Then we judiciously added elements that are truly essential, which surprisingly do not include iterative denoising. The result is a single-step parameter-efficient generative model that produces high quality samples at fast speed: it achieves an FID of 2.56 on ImageNet 256 and simultaneously attains good precision and recall.
☆ InstructMixup: Instruction-Guided Salient Patch Editing for Robust Data Augmentation
In image and video technologies, data augmentation is widely used to improve the generalization of deep visual models, and mixup-based strategies that interpolate between samples have become the dominant approach. However, computing informative mixing regions adds substantial overhead, and blending content across different images frequently disrupts the semantic integrity of the resulting sample. We propose \our{}, a data augmentation method that constructs challenging yet label-consistent training samples entirely within a single visual sample. \our{} first extracts multi-scale salient patches from the sample using a lightweight saliency detector, refines each patch with an instruction-guided generative model, and blends the edited patch back into the non-salient regions of the same sample; because the generative edits are computed once and cached offline, this step adds negligible training cost. To further diversify the learned representation, \our{} injects self-similar fractal structure into the same salient regions at an adaptive ratio, so each training sample carries both fractal and non-fractal structure. We derive a second-order approximation of the resulting vicinal risk, showing that the method simultaneously enforces invariance to the generative edit and suppresses curvature along the perturbed salient directions, and we verify both predictions empirically. We evaluate on small to large backbones for instance Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Vision Transformers (ViTs) and Vision-Language Foundational Models (VLMs) across seven benchmarks covering coarse- and fine-grained classification, robustness to corruption and occlusion, calibration, and transfer and self-supervised learning, InstructMixup outperforms nine competing augmentation methods, surpassing the strongest baseline across all benchmarks.
☆ ERank in Latent Space as an Image-Complexity and Richness Measure
We propose the effective rank (ERank) of the channel covariance of an image's deep feature map as a per-sample, label-free measure of visual richness, computed from a single forward pass through a frozen pretrained encoder. ERank counts how many decorrelated channel directions an image activates, and we characterize its properties, including its behavior under noise. Empirically, ERank orders images from plain to visually rich, correlates with codec bitrate, sharpness, and edge density, and correlates with human complexity annotations on IC9600 with $r = 0.72$. As a data-selection criterion, removing low-ERank samples improves super-resolution and removing high-ERank samples improves OCR, in both pretraining and finetuning, while selection does not help classification, segmentation, or denoising. ERank is thus a cheap richness signal, useful exactly when task difficulty is governed by input richness.
☆ From Distances to Trajectories: Real-Time Signed Distance Function Mapping and Distance-Accelerated Motion Planning for UAVs
Jason Stanley, Zhirui Dai, Qihao Qian, Tzu-Chin Ho, Tianxing Fan, Siddharth Saha, Christopher Barngrover, Ki Myung Brian Lee, Nikolay Atanasov
Autonomous flight in cluttered environments requires a robot to build a geometric map of its surroundings and plan safe, dynamically feasible trajectories, all onboard and in real time. Conventional approaches treat mapping and planning as separate stages and often rely on binary occupancy for collision checking. We argue that these two stages should be co-designed around a single representation: a signed distance function (SDF). By encoding distance to the nearest obstacle, an SDF provides richer information for planning and trajectory optimization than occupancy alone. We develop an Octree REsidual Network (OREN) that pairs an explicit octree prior with an implicit neural residual to reconstruct SDFs online from point cloud observations with the efficiency of volumetric methods and the accuracy and differentiability of neural methods. In tandem, we develop Bubble$^\star$, a search-based planner that exploits the distance information to grow maximal collision-free balls, which we call bubbles, with formal guarantees of termination, completeness, and failure detection. Planning over a graph of bubbles significantly reduces collision checks compared to a grid-based A$^\star$ search and returns a bubble sequence that forms a safe corridor for trajectory optimization. We demonstrate the integrated OREN-Bubble$^\star$ approach onboard a quadrotor, navigating unseen indoor environments in real time under tight compute constraints. OREN improves SDF estimation by $22$% compared to baselines, while Bubble$^\star$ finds trajectories spanning $\approx 90$ m through a cluttered environment in $1$-$3$ sec., whereas baselines take up to $10$ sec. in the same environment.
comment: 25 pages, 10 figures, 5 tables
☆ No Training, Better Flights: Test-Time Scaled VLMs for UAV Navigation
Test-time scaling offers a promising method to improve the inference performance of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) without additional training. Existing approaches to vision-language navigation (VLN) for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) typically relies on a single inference pass, which can falter in complex environments by producing suboptimal or unsafe trajectories. In this paper, we explore a simple and effective approach to apply test-time scaling to VLN for UAV. We enhance navigation reasoning through an iterative refinement process that requires no extra model training, guiding the model to re-evaluate its initial navigation plan for better accuracy and safety. Our method first prompts the model to generate multiple parallel candidates and then performs a self-correction step, achieving deeper and more robust planning without changing the underlying model. To further strengthen decision-making, we design a multi-criteria scoring function to evaluate the refined candidates based on safety, goal alignment, and forward-progress. This simple yet powerful combination enables a frozen UAV navigation VLMs to self-correct and generate more accurate and reliable flight plans, achieving SOTA performance in this task.
☆ PathAgentBench: Benchmarking Evidence-Seeking Vision-Language Models on Whole-Slide Pathology Image
Dankai Liao, Tianyi Zhang, Yufeng Wu, Xinyue Zhang, Qiaochu Xue, Zeyu Liu, Dachun Zhao, Linghan Cai, Yueming Jin
Whole-slide image (WSI) diagnosis requires identifying diagnostically relevant regions, examining them across magnifications, and integrating multi-scale evidence. However, most existing pathology benchmarks evaluate models on pre-cropped patches or pre-extracted slide features, leaving their ability to acquire evidence directly from gigapixel WSIs largely untested. We introduce PathAgentBench, a benchmark for evaluating evidence-seeking vision-language models (VLMs) across four complementary capabilities: image-to-text matching for evidence interpretation, text-to-image retrieval for evidence verification, diagnostic-region localization for evidence acquisition, and multi-scale reasoning for evidence integration. The benchmark is organized as a diagnostic tree that links nested regions across magnifications with scale-specific findings and path-level diagnoses. It contains 1,822 TCGA WSIs and 17,135 diagnostic paths annotated by ten board-certified pathologists. An additional private cohort of 190 breast cancer WSIs with detailed annotations is used to evaluate autonomous whole-slide exploration. We evaluate 20 general-purpose, medical, and pathology-specialized models. Leading open-weight models achieve over 93% accuracy in multi-scale reasoning and over 50% accuracy in both cross-modal matching tasks. In contrast, diagnostic-region localization remains challenging: the best text-guided mean intersection-over-union is below 0.09, underperforming a simple center-based heuristic. During autonomous exploration, the unconditional hit rate decreases from 0.522 at low magnification to 0.185 at intermediate magnification and 0.020 at high magnification. These results reveal a pronounced gap between reasoning over curated evidence and acquiring that evidence directly from WSIs. PathAgentBench provides a unified framework for measuring and improving evidence-seeking pathology models.
☆ MeetingToM: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs on Theory-of-Mind Reasoning in Multi-Party Meetings
Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to infer other's beliefs, intentions, and states of knowledge, is central to social interaction, yet remains challenging for current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), especially in multi-party meetings where cues are distributed across speech and behavior. Existing multimodal ToM benchmarks mainly focus on video-grounded question answering over overt, externally verifiable signals, and provide limited coverage of latent social states and group dynamics. We introduce MeetingToM, a benchmark for complex social behavior reasoning in naturalistic multi-party meetings. MeetingToM targets meeting-specific phenomena such as \textbf{pseudo-consensus}, where apparent agreement masks private dissent under social pressure. The benchmark is hierarchically organized to evaluate ToM at increasing levels of social granularity, including (i) subject-level mental state prediction, (ii) dyadic-level addressee understanding, and (iii) group-level consensus reasoning. We provide a unified evaluation protocol and conduct systematic analyses of representative MLLMs, revealing persistent limitations in integrating non-verbal cues, inferring hidden attitudes, and distinguishing genuine consensus from pseudo-consensus. Our results highlight key challenges and establish MeetingToM as a testbed for advancing meeting-grounded ToM in multimodal models.
☆ IGGT4D: Streaming 4D Instance-Grounded Geometry Transformer
Zhengyu Zou, Hao Li, Kuixuan Jiao, Liu Liu, Tingyang Xiao, Xiaolin Zhou, Fangzhou Hong, Zhizhong Su, Dingwen Zhang, Ziwei Liu
Real-world spatial intelligence requires agents to understand scenes from continuous video streams, where objects move, persist, disappear, and reappear over time. While recent spatial foundation models have enabled generalizable feed-forward 3D reconstruction, most streaming methods remain geometry-centric and lack temporally consistent object-level understanding. Meanwhile, existing semantic reconstruction and 3D-aware vision-language methods largely rely on externally extracted 2D semantic cues or loosely coupled geometry inputs, limiting unified geometry-instance learning in long dynamic scenes. In this paper, we propose IGGT4D, a streaming instance-grounded geometry Transformer for online 4D scene understanding. IGGT4D processes video frames sequentially, reuses historical context through causal spatial-temporal modeling, and incrementally updates a unified representation of camera motion, geometry, and object identity. This enables long-sequence feed-forward reconstruction with geometry-instance consistency in dynamic environments. To address the lack of high-quality 4D supervision, we further construct InsScene4D-147K, a large-scale dataset spanning real/synthetic and static/dynamic scenes, with RGB images, depth, poses, and temporally consistent instance masks generated by an automated geometry-guided annotation pipeline. Experiments on 3D reconstruction, pose estimation, instance spatial tracking, and open-vocabulary segmentation demonstrate that IGGT4D outperforms existing streaming baselines while maintaining scalable online inference for long dynamic sequences.
comment: Project Page: https://iggt4d.github.io
☆ Anatomy-Aware 3D Mesh Refinement of Pericardium Segmentations on Computed Tomography
Andreas W. Aspe, Jonas Jalili Loft, Michael Huy Cuong Pham, Andreas Ohrt Johansen, Jørgen Tobias Kühl, Klaus Fuglsang Kofoed, Kristine Aavild Sørensen, Rasmus R. Paulsen, Josefine Vilsbøll Sundgaard
Accurate delineation of the pericardium in a cardiac CT scan is essential for quantifying epicardial adipose tissue, yet it remains one of the most challenging structures to segment due to its poor contrast boundaries. Instead of solely relying on image gradients, our framework leverages the anatomical context of surrounding anatomical structures to guide the segmentation. This work introduces a novel 3D iterative mesh refinement framework that balances anatomical and geometric forces derived from inherent anatomical rules to refine an initial, possibly ambiguous, segmentation into a high-precision, anatomically plausible result. Designed as a model-agnostic post-processing step, our method uses a 3D vector field to iteratively push the vertices to the correct anatomical locations. Evaluating the refinement on both a high-resolution in-house dataset and a coarse, sparsely annotated open-source dataset, our method consistently improves all volumetric, surface, and anatomical metrics. The framework demonstrates greater improvement when applied to weaker initial segmentations, highlighting its potential for improving segmentations for out-of-domain models and in limited-training-data scenarios. The method is formulated as a gradient-based, GPU-accelerated framework that can be easily extended to other anatomical use cases.
comment: This preprint has not undergone peer review (when applicable) or any post-submission improvements or corrections. The Version of Record of this contribution is published in the proceedings for MIUA 2026
☆ Cognitive Dual-Process Planning for Autonomous Driving with Structured Scene Knowledge and Verifiable Reasoning-Action Consistency
High-level planning for autonomous driving is a knowledge-intensive engineering decision task that requires accurate scene understanding, timely inference, and internally consistent action selection. Vision-language models (VLMs) can make intermediate reasoning explicit, but their use in deployed planners is constrained by costly structured supervision, unnecessary reasoning in routine scenes, and possible inconsistencies between generated rationales and driving actions. We present a cognitive dual-process planning framework that represents planning-relevant scene knowledge in a machine-parsable structured chain-of-thought (S-CoT) schema. An automated data engine integrates perception foundation models, critical-path filtering, and an expert VLM to generate S-CoT supervision without manual annotation of individual rationales. A lightweight visual Arbiter estimates scene complexity from multilevel vision-encoder features before language decoding and routes each input to either fast meta-action prediction or slow structured reasoning. For slow-path outputs, a deterministic rule-based validator checks whether the parsed S-CoT fields are consistent with the final meta-action and provides verifiable rewards for Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). In a 195-scene manual audit, the generated annotations achieve 91.8\% CoT accuracy and a 98.5\% Logical Consistency Score (LCS). On 574 manually verified NAVSIM test samples, the planner achieves 80.14\% planning accuracy and 97.20\% LCS while reducing average latency by 17.39\% relative to applying slow reasoning to every scene. Evaluation on external long-tail subsets further identifies conditions under which routing and planning performance degrade. Together, these results show how explicit scene knowledge can be operationalized through adaptive reasoning and rule-based verification to support high-level VLM planning decisions.
comment: 12 pages, 7 figures. Zhongyao Yang and Haoyu Li contributed equally to this work
☆ ABot-World-0: Infinite Interactive World Rollout on a Single Desktop GPU
Fan Jiang, Zhaoxu Sun, Mengchao Wang, Ziyu Zhu, Chiyu Wang, Yunpeng Zhang, Wenlin Liu, Yun Wang, Xue Zheng, Rui Sun, Junfeng Ni, Hongyu Pan, Zhongxu Sun, Fei Yu, Zengye Ge, Mengmeng Du, Nianfei Fan, Mingchao Sun, Yu Liu, Yongchang, Yanqing Zhu, Jiahang Wang, Ning Ying, Yuze Xuan, Di Yang, Zhicheng Liu, Zhe Gao, Tingbing Xu, Jiacheng Sui, Wenjin Yang, Junnan Lai, Shufeng Liu, Yuan Liu, Zheng Zhou, Yingliang Peng, Dawei Cao, Kaifeng Sheng, Yuxiang Cai, Fei Lu, Mu Xu, Ning Guo
We present ABot-World-0, an action-conditioned video world model for real-time, long-horizon closed-loop interaction, supported by a multi-source data infrastructure spanning AAA games, simulation engines, and internet videos to learn controllable world dynamics. WorldExplorer performs agent-driven collection guided by training feedback, while a unified pipeline applies 14 deterministic quality checks, VLM-based assessment, and synchronized action and text annotation. We progressively distill a bidirectional action-conditioned teacher into a causal student through teacher forcing and ODE distillation, and introduce LongForcing to align long student self-rollouts with an extended-horizon teacher, mitigating accumulated distribution shift and autoregressive drift. Raw keyboard actions provide a unified control interface for scene roaming and third-person character interaction, while reference-character memory provides persistent appearance cues for identity consistency during third-person rollouts. For deployment, we co-design a streaming inference stack with a lightweight VAE decoder, efficient attention, memory-aware scheduling, and low-bit DiT inference. Across optimized low-bit configurations, ABot-World-0 streams 720P video at up to 16 FPS on a single NVIDIA RTX 5090 desktop GPU, with 1.2s action-to-first-frame latency and approximately 19GiB peak VRAM. Experiments on WorldRoamBench and extended interactive rollouts demonstrate competitive controllability and coherent long-horizon world evolution.
☆ Point Ladder Tuning: Parameter-Efficient Hierarchical Adaptation for 3D Point Cloud Understanding ECCV 2026
Fine-tuning pre-trained point-cloud backbones typically updates all parameters, resulting in substantial computation and memory overhead. More importantly, modern point backbones rely on aggressive tokenization and downsampling, which yields compact global tokens but irreversibly discards fine-grained local geometry, an inherent bottleneck for parameter-efficient adaptation. Consequently, existing PEFT methods that operate only on these coarsened tokens can modulate global semantics but struggle to recover the missing multi-scale locality. We present Point Ladder Tuning (PLT), a locality-aware PEFT framework that performs hierarchical, instance-conditioned adaptation while keeping the backbone frozen. PLT forms a lightweight closed loop: (i) a Hierarchical Ladder Network (HLN) constructs a multi-resolution local feature pyramid directly from raw points; (ii) a Local-Global Fusion (LGF) aligns and fuses local pyramids with intermediate backbone semantics; and (iii) a Dynamic Prompt Generator produces instance-aware multi-scale prompts to modulate the frozen backbone effectively. For dense prediction, we further introduce a lightweight segmentation head that progressively upsamples fused features and leverages backbone priors to refine fine structures. Extensive experiments on classification and dense prediction show that PLT consistently surpasses prior PEFT baselines with minimal tunable parameters. PLT achieves state-of-the-art performance using only 2.71% trainable parameters for classification and 7.69% for dense prediction, and scales favorably to larger backbones, requiring merely 0.36% parameters on PointGPT-L. The code is released at https://github.com/JunLinChang/ECCV2026-PLT.
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026. Code: https://github.com/JunLinChang/ECCV2026-PLT
☆ Sarus: Privacy-Preserving Multi-Vendor Perception Fusion via Homomorphic Encryption
Cooperative perception enables autonomous vehicles (AVs) to improve situational awareness by aggregating detection outputs from multiple agents and sensing platforms, often via a shared fusion service in multi-vendor deployments. However, sharing such outputs at inference time exposes proprietary model behavior and sensitive environmental information, creating significant privacy and security concerns. In this paper, we present Sarus, a privacy-preserving framework for multi-vendor perception fusion via homomorphic encryption (HE), enabling aggregation without revealing individual vendor outputs. Each vendor encodes detections as compact Gaussian moment vectors over a shared spatial lattice and transmits encrypted payloads to a fusion server, which aggregates them directly in the encrypted domain. The fused result is then decrypted and reconstructed into final detections through class-wise bin merging.
We analyze the computational complexity, showing linear scaling for vendor payload construction and $O(BV)$ server-side fusion with the number of occupied bins $B$ and vendors $V$, while postprocessing scales as $O(B + \sum_{c\in \mathcal{C}} B_c^2)$, where $\mathcal{C}$ denotes the set of object classes and $B_c$ is the number of occupied bins for class $c$. Experiments demonstrate linear scaling in practice with only a bounded constant-factor overhead from HE, with decryption dominating postprocessing cost. Experiments on the KITTI dataset using camera (YOLOv8) and LiDAR (PointPillars, PV-RCNN) detectors show that Sarus improves scene-level coverage by effectively aggregating complementary detections, particularly in distance-dependent regimes where individual modalities degrade. These results indicate that privacy-preserving multi-vendor perception fusion is feasible for real-time deployment when statistical compression and spatial sparsity are jointly exploited.
☆ Text Template Tokens Are Implicit Semantic Registers in Diffusion Transformers
Maohua Li, Qirui Li, Yanke Zhou, Yiduo Li, Zhaosheng Chi, Chao Xu, Cuifeng Shen, Yixuan Xu, Hanlin Tang, Kan Liu, Tao Lan, Lin Qu, Shao-Qun Zhang
Text-to-image diffusion transformers (DiTs) jointly process text and image tokens, yet their internal computation during denoising remains poorly understood. We introduce a causal interpretability framework for modern large-scale DiTs that combines attention decomposition with targeted interventions across token spans, heads, and layers. Using it to separate prompt-content tokens from structural template tokens, we find that the structural tokens carry little prompt-specific information at the encoder output. Yet surprisingly, they emerge as dominant image-to-text attention sinks and causally maintain object identity inside the DiT, acting as implicit semantic registers. We show that they acquire this identity indirectly, with prompt semantics first injected into the image latents and then read back into the template tokens rather than transferred directly from the prompt tokens. Inspired by the above findings, we design a training-free pruning rule for DiTs. Heads that attend most strongly to prompt tokens are dispensable, and pruning them removes $20\%$ of attention FLOPs with only a $1.4$-point drop on GenEval. We further reveal how generative computation in DiTs is organized across heads and depth, separating semantic routing from visual synthesis and progressing from identity formation to propagation and refinement. Our work not only reveals that the tokens encoding semantics at input need not be those that maintain it during generation, but also provides a causal view of internal mechanisms in DiTs.
☆ Latent Riemannian Flow Matching for Geometry-Grounded 3D Foundation Models
Geometric foundation models, such as the Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT), provide strong 3D priors from unposed images. However, such models operate purely in a feed-forward, deterministic regime, \ie~they cannot generate plausible geometry beyond what the input views directly support. Generative models for 3D scenes, on the other hand, must rely on strong geometric priors to produce coherent outputs from sparse inputs. We bridge these two paradigms by performing flow matching directly in VGGT's latent space, leveraging its learned 3D priors without committing to any explicit downstream representation such as Gaussians, meshes, or video-VAE latents. This requires respecting the latent geometry: VGGT tokens occupy a product of high-dimensional hyperspheres on which standard Euclidean flow matching fails. We address this with a Riemannian Flow Matching framework defined on a product manifold of four hyperspheres, aligned with VGGT's multi-scale encoder, which keeps generated tokens on the valid data manifold required by the frozen decoding heads. On RealEstate10K, ScanNet++ and ETH3D, our method achieves strong performance against recent scene generation baselines in both per-view appearance and aggregated 3D geometry, establishing latent-space flow matching on geometric foundation models as a viable paradigm for 3D generation. The project page can be found $\href{https://lisaweijler.github.io/geometry-grounded-rfm/}{\text{here}}$.
☆ CR-Refiner: An Object-Centric Optimal Transport Reranker for Edit-Conditioned 3D Scene Retrieval
Edit-conditioned 3D scene retrieval pairs a reference 3D room with a natural-language modification and retrieves rooms from a corpus that satisfy the edit. Three lines of prior work each fall short on this task. 2D composed image retrieval reasons over pixel-level edits and has no primitive for 3D object sets. 3D foundation encoders embed individual objects but cannot compose at the scene level. 3D scene-grounding methods localize references inside a static scene rather than rank modified rooms across a corpus. We present CR-Refiner, a training-free reranker that wraps any base retriever's top-K candidates with three components. A frozen LLM parses the edit into a structured query entity, and each candidate is scored by an unbalanced optimal-transport problem over a 1xG cost matrix coupling category, style, material, and geometry. The unbalanced solver lets the single-entity query drop mass on irrelevant objects, modelling the asymmetry directly. An axis-conditional structural prior adds size-keyword cues for geometric edits and subject-anchor direction cues for spatial edits. An LLM verifier refines the top three candidates with continuous confidence. Because no benchmark evaluates compositional matching over 3D object sets, we additionally release 3D-CER, 4,963 edit-conditioned queries over a 23,381-room indoor corpus across five edit axes, with multi-positive ground truth, CIRR-style hard subsets, and zero-target adversarials. Across three qualitatively distinct base retrievers, CR-Refiner consistently improves hard-subset R@1 and mAP@10 on every edit axis.
☆ GATE-3D: Geometry-Aware Test-time Adaptive Reranking for Open-Set 3D Shape Retrieval
Large pretrained vision models have substantially improved appearance-based 3D shape retrieval, but they still confuse shapes that look similar while differing in geometry. Although geometry-aware features can reduce these errors, naive fusion of geometry and appearance may hurt retrieval when the two modalities are already well aligned. We propose GATE-3D, a lightweight query-adaptive reranking method that incorporates geometry without retraining the retrieval backbone. For each query, GATE-3D predicts how much a geometry-aware score should adjust the appearance-based ranking using features that capture disagreement between the two modalities. This selective design lets geometry contribute where it helps and stay silent where it would hurt. Experiments on three open-set 3D retrieval benchmarks show that GATE-3D improves over appearance-only retrieval and is more robust than always-on fusion. On the primary benchmark, it improves mAP@10 by 2.00 points over appearance-only retrieval (p=0.041); it also improves leave-one-category-out generalization and reduces geometric false positives by 10.8%. GATE-3D achieves competitive zero-shot results against DAC-based baselines. We further find that simple linear routing is more effective than a small MLP in the low-data regime, suggesting that cross-modal disagreement features matter more than model capacity for adaptive routing.
☆ FlexiAvatar: Unified 3D Gaussian Human Avatars Under Arbitrary Body Visibility ECCV 2026
Yihalem Yimolal Tiruneh, Muhammad Salman Ali, Uyoung Jeong, Muneeb A. Khan, MD Khalequzzaman Chowdhury Sayem, Allanur Bayramgeldiyev, Binod Bhattarai, Seungryul Baek
Reconstructing animatable 3D human avatars from monocular video is a fundamental problem in computer vision with broad applications in AR/VR and digital content creation. Existing approaches typically couple parametric body models with neural rendering or 3D Gaussian splatting and optimize all body regions jointly from short videos, which often degrades fidelity in the visible areas. To overcome this limitation, we introduce FlexiAvatar, a unified framework that explicitly optimizes only the visible body regions, effectively eliminating artifacts arising from unobserved limbs. Our method integrates occlusion-robust SMPL-X tracking with part-specific residual refinement to capture high-frequency geometric and appearance details. To complete entirely unseen regions (e.g., back views), we leverage a diffusion-based approach to generate texture consistent with the observed appearance. Experiments on full-body (NeuMan, ZJU-MoCap, WildAvatar), upper/half-body (talk-show clips), and head-only (INSTA) inputs show that FlexiAvatar delivers consistently higher reconstruction quality, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by an average PSNR improvement of approximately 3% across datasets. Finally, by restricting optimization to observed regions, our method reduces the effective number of Gaussians that must be optimized and rendered, leading to reduced runtime and memory overhead in partial-visibility scenarios.
comment: Accepted in ECCV 2026
☆ Advancing Multimodal Fusion on Heterogeneous Medical Data with Hybrid Geometry Attention KDD
Joy Dhar, Manish Kumar Pandey, Nayyar Zaidi, Chen Chen, Maryam Haghighat, Ferdous Sohel, Puneet Goyal
Multimodal fusion learning (MFL) has shown great potential in the medical domain, where we are faced with disparate data modalities such as imaging, clinical records, and omics. However, existing MFL strategies face several major challenges. First, they struggle to capture complex cross-modal interactions effectively, which in turn limits performance improvements. Second, they incur high computational costs, restricting their applicability in resource-constrained healthcare AI applications. Finally, they are often designed and evaluated for narrow, fixed modality configurations (e.g., imaging-only, or specific pairs such as image and omics), which limits evidence of their adaptability and generalizability to broader collections of heterogeneous medical modalities. To address these challenges, we propose a novel MFL framework - Cascaded Unified Representation Learning for Efficient Fusion Network (CURE) - a lightweight and scalable framework that progressively integrates various modalities through a novel efficient Hybrid Geometry Aware Fusion layer (HyFuse), where each HyFuse layer is sequentially learned for each modality, making the framework adaptable and generalizable. Within HyFuse, an efficient residual convolution module captures rich multi-scale features to ensure cost-effective learning, while a hybrid-space aware attention mixer learns coarse-to-fine structural cues to better preserve cross-modal relationships. Complementary learnable late-fusion and shared information refinement modules are then employed to learn robust modality-order-invariant shared representations, which in turn yields consistent performance improvements. Extensive evaluations on 16 public datasets show that CURE outperforms leading multimodal fusion methods, boosting performance by up to 3.97% and lowering computational costs by up to 87.8%, ensuring more effective and reliable predictions.
comment: ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2026)
☆ Wavefront Parallelization for Efficient Learned Image Compression SP 2026
Autoregressive context models are foundational for learned image compression,but they suffer from slow serial inference. Existing acceleration methods such as checkerboard context require architectural changes and retraining, thus are inapplicable to pre-trained models. We propose a completely training-free inference-time acceleration algorithm inspired by wavefront parallelism in video coding standards. Our method reorganizes inference into an optimal ``staggered'' wavefront order, minimizing sequential steps while maintaining exact autoregressive dependencies. Experimental results show our approach accelerates pre-trained autoregressive models (e.g., Cheng et al.) by more than $13\times$ while preserving the original rate-distortion performance. We also demonstrate that faster decoding is possible by trading off precise context dependencies. Source code will be available at https://github.com/tokkiwa/compressai-wavefront.
comment: Accepted by MMSP 2026
☆ Context-structured Video Anomaly Detection with Large Vision-Language Models
Training video anomaly detectors is challenging due to the difficulty and cost of annotating diverse and rare abnormal events. Although recent large vision-language models enable training-free inference, existing approaches mostly rely on holistic inference over sampled video and may miss context-specific anomaly cues. In this paper, we present CSI-VAD, a training-free video anomaly detector that identifies abnormal events across diverse contexts. The key idea is to decompose each video into three distinct contexts (environment, objects, time) and perform context-specific inference in separate branches. Because we ground anomaly judgments solely in context-specific visual cues, we do not require predefined text prompts describing abnormal events or dataset-specific tuning. Experiments on UCF-Crime and UBnormal show that CSI-VAD consistently improves over the direct holistic baseline and achieves competitive performance against existing methods, showing the advantage of structured context decomposition for training-free video anomaly detection.
comment: Accepted at AVSS 2026
☆ Delineate Anything v2: A Global Foundation Model for Field Delineation
Mykola Lavreniuk, Nataliia Kussul, Andrii Shelestov, Yevhenii Salii, Volodymyr Kuzin, Charlotte Julia Li-Xing Wang, Zoltan Szantoi
Accurate agricultural field boundary delineation at large scale is a foundational task for food security, supply chain transparency, and carbon accounting. While vision foundation models like SAM show remarkable zero-shot capabilities, they frequently fail in geospatial domains due to topological complexity, cropland texturing patterns, and a lack of physical scale awareness. In this work, we introduce Delineate Anything v2, a globally scalable foundation model designed specifically for wide-area field boundary mapping. We construct FBIS-73M, a 73-million-instance multi-resolution dataset spanning 61 countries. To address the pervasive issue of multi-field administrative parcel merging, we introduce a resolution-specific data curation pipeline that leverages topological image-space adaptation to homogenize merged parcels and strengthen weak physical boundaries. Furthermore, we establish a novel, manually curated evaluation benchmark covering 100 countries to assess independent zero-shot generalization. Our results show that Delineate Anything v2 surpasses the current state-of-the-art, including the Delineate Anything framework, by 0.284 mAP@0.5 (+103.3% relative gain), while maintaining execution speeds suitable for rapid national- and global-scale deployment, as demonstrated by nationwide mapping of Ukraine (603,000 km^2) in 5.4 hours on a consumer-grade workstation. Code, pre-trained weights, the FBIS-73M dataset, and ready-to-use national-scale vector boundary products are publicly available at https://github.com/Lavreniuk/Delineate-Anything.
☆ Mage-Flow: An Efficient Native-Resolution Foundation Model for Image Generation and Editing
Xinjie Zhang, Peng Zhang, Shicheng Zheng, Jinghao Guo, Zhaoyang Jia, Yifei Shen, Xun Guo, Yuxuan Luo, Jiahao Li, Wenxuan Xie, Fanyi Pu, Xiaoyi Zhang, Kaichen Zhang, Zongyu Guo, Tianci Bi, Dongnan Gui, Zhening Liu, Zimo Wen, Zihan Zheng, Senqiao Yang, Xiao Li, Jinglu Wang, Bin Li, Yan Lu
Large-scale visual generators are increasingly capable but costly to train, fine-tune, and deploy. We introduce Mage-Flow, a compact 4B-scale generative stack for efficient text-to-image generation and instruction-based image editing. The stack is built from two co-designed components: Mage-VAE, a lightweight high-fidelity latent tokenizer, and a Native-Resolution Multimodal Diffusion Transformer trained with rectified flow matching. Mage-VAE uses one-step diffusion-style encoding and decoding with anchor-latent regularization, preserving the reconstruction quality of strong public VAEs while reducing tokenization cost by more than an order of magnitude. Together with native-resolution packing and stack-level CUDA kernel fusion, the stack supports flexible-resolution training and improves end-to-end training throughput by about $2.5\times$. Built on this foundation, we develop a complete model family with Base, RL-aligned, and Turbo variants for both generation and editing. Diffusion-NFT improves prompt following, text rendering, aesthetic quality, and editing fidelity, while few-step distillation with adversarial perceptual guidance produces 4-step Turbo models for low-latency inference. Despite its compact scale, Mage-Flow and Mage-Flow-Edit achieves competitive performance across standard generation and editing benchmarks. More importantly, the Turbo variants make high-resolution generation and editing practical for interactive use: at $1024^2$ resolution on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU, Mage-Flow-Turbo generates an image in 0.59s, and Mage-Flow-Edit-Turbo edits an image in 1.02s, while maintaining a small memory footprint. These results show that careful tokenizer--backbone--system co-design can deliver strong high-resolution generation and editing within an efficient 4B model family.
☆ Now You See the Hate: Adaptive View Retrieval for Hidden Hateful Illusions
Hateful optical illusions expose a serious gap in current multimodal safety systems. On original-view hateful illusions, previous work shows that six moderation classifiers achieve at most 20.9 to 24.5% accuracy and nine state-of-the-art VLMs remain at or below 10.2% with illusion-aware prompting, leaving most hidden hate undetected. We formulate hidden hateful illusion detection as a perceptual retrieval problem and propose Adaptive View Retrieval. This retrieve-and-calibrate framework assembles a complementary view bank for the image and hidden-message templates, adaptively selects which views to trust, retrieves hidden-message identities, and calibrates whether the recovered evidence is harmful. On HatefulIllusion with a frozen CLIP encoder, Adaptive View Retrieval reaches 93.2% balanced accuracy on the held-out test split. It substantially outperforms original-view baselines and fixed single-transform filters across hate slangs, hate symbols, and visibility levels. The same design also surpasses official fine-tuned CLIP baselines, matches or exceeds human performance on IllusionMNIST, IllusionFashionMNIST, and IllusionAnimals, and outperforms zoom-out preprocessing on HC-Bench under the SemVink protocol. Together, these results show that robust multimodal moderation requires recovering hidden meaning before deciding whether it is harmful.
☆ Contrastive On-Policy Distillation
On-policy Distillation (OPD) supervises a student model on trajectories sampled from its own policy by minimizing the divergence between the output distributions of the teacher and student at each token position, thereby providing dense token-level supervision. Although existing OPD methods have demonstrated strong performance in improving the reasoning ability of student models, their objectives fundamentally rely on token-level distribution matching. Consequently, they lack an explicit signal for comparing a token's relative compatibility across reasoning modes and thus do not directly model preferences between these modes. To address this limitation, we propose COPD, a contrastive OPD framework. Specifically, for each token generated by the student model, a frozen teacher model scores the same student state under two contrasting instructions that elicit light and heavy reasoning. The difference between the resulting log probabilities serves as a token-level advantage signal to guide the OPD update. Rather than merely imitating a single teacher distribution, COPD directly encourages the student model to learn more concise and efficient reasoning strategies. We conduct experiments on nine multimodal benchmarks covering both reasoning and understanding tasks. The results show that COPD substantially reduces reasoning length without compromising model performance and consistently improves efficiency across different tasks and model scales. Furthermore, the contrastive formulation can be seamlessly integrated into the On-policy Self-distillation (OPSD) framework, where self-contrastive supervision is constructed without an additional teacher model, thereby enabling the model to distill itself toward lightweight reasoning.
comment: Work in progress. 15 pages, 4 figures
☆ Gaze-DETR: Top-Down Guidance Through Priority Maps for Infrared Weak-Small UAV Detection with DETR
Infrared small target detection (ISTD) remains challenging because tiny, low-contrast targets are easily overwhelmed by clutter, noise, or occlusion. Conventional single-frame and multi-frame detectors rely on bounding-box supervision, which specifies final target locations but offers little explicit guidance for prioritizing candidate regions or preserving weak-target evidence before localization. Task-driven visual search offers such guidance: top-down goals and visual evidence jointly form a spatial priority map that ranks candidate locations. Building on this principle, we propose Gaze-DETR, a bio-inspired detector that learns an internal priority map before localization. First, a priority head predicts a normalized priority map from image features. Second, Residual Priority-Guided Feature Modulation (RPFM) enhances high-priority responses while retaining multi-scale features. Finally, Priority-Guided Anchor Query Injection (PAQI) converts high-priority locations into decoder anchor queries. We train the priority head using three supervision schemes: box-derived Gaussian maps; real-gaze maps constructed from fixation-density maps; and transferred pseudo-gaze maps learned from gaze--box relations in paired annotations and applied to Anti-UAV410 training boxes. To support the latter two schemes, we construct TIR-UAV120-Gaze with paired detection and task-driven eye-tracking annotations. On TIR-UAV120-Gaze, Gaze-DETR achieves 85.76 mAP$_{50}$ and 88.77 F1 with box-derived supervision, and 86.18 mAP$_{50}$ and 89.00 F1 with real-gaze supervision. On Anti-UAV410, it achieves 87.06 mAP$_{50}$ and 90.90 F1 with box-derived supervision, and 87.08 mAP$_{50}$ and 90.43 F1 with transferred pseudo-gaze supervision. These results show that explicit spatial-priority learning provides pre-localization guidance complementary to bounding-box supervision across annotation settings and costs.
comment: Code: https://github.com/nliu-25/Gaze-DETR-Top-Down-Guidance-Through-Priority-Maps-for-Infrared-Weak-Small-UAV-Detection-with-DETR
☆ FilmWorld: Agentic Novel-to-Film Generation through Dynamic Cinematic World Modeling
Translating novels into films poses a grand challenge for generative artificial intelligence, requiring conversion of abstract literary prose into long-form, multi-scene visual narratives. While current video generation models excel at short, single-scene clips within narrow temporal and spatial contexts, novel-to-film generation operates in a more complex regime, demanding long-duration content across diverse scenes with dynamically evolving entity states. To address this, we formalize novel-to-film generation as dynamic cinematic world modeling, decomposed into two phases: construction, which grounds abstract, underspecified literary narratives into concrete, stateful, and persistent world entities; and evolution, which governs how these entities dynamically update under plot progression to maintain causal consistency across scenes. We propose FilmWorld, an end-to-end agentic system where two groups of specialized agents collaborate to instantiate these phases. Construction-side agents perform narrative structured translation, world entity state modeling with visual anchoring, and state-driven shot planning, progressively projecting literary language into a cinematic blueprint. Evolution-side agents perform state-anchored visual generation, cross-shot dynamic state propagation, and closed-loop state verification to maintain causal consistency and visual coherence. To address the evaluation gap in long-form generation, we introduce FilmEval, a systematic evaluation framework that couples a difficulty-graded benchmark of 15 representative novels with an automated protocol of nine objective metrics spanning three dimensions: cinematic presentation, film consistency, and novel fidelity. Experiments demonstrate that FilmWorld consistently outperforms state-of-the-art video generation agent systems, with particularly pronounced improvements in narrative fidelity and cross-scene consistency.
comment: Project Page: https://filmworld-ai.github.io
☆ CoGoal3D: Collaborative 3D Object Detection with 3D-Aware Fusion and Refinement ECCV 2026
V2X collaborative object detection features overcoming the limitations of single-vehicle systems by aggregating environmental features from multiple collaborative agents. However, existing mainstream V2X perception methods mainly focus on 2D BEV object detection. When 3D detection task is concerned, inferior results are obtained because they ignore the 3D spatial misalignment caused by differing height and attitude among the collaborators. In this paper, we propose a novel collaborative 3D object detection framework called CoGoal3D, which extracts and refines the 3D feature gradually in a two-stage pipeline. In the first stage, a multiscale 3D-aware global fusion module is designed to mitigate the 3D spatial misalignment. The resulting proposals are then refined in the second stage with an auxiliary task of 3D point reconstruction. An effective multi-agent collaborative data augmentation strategy is further proposed to enrich the training data while minimizing information loss. Extensive experiments on public real-world datasets demonstrate that our CoGoal3D achieves new state-of-the-art performance, with 3D AP@0.7 improvements of 10.86%, 10.34%, and 10.18% on the DAIR-V2X, V2V4Real, and V2X-Real datasets, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/Megalo-f/CoGoal3D.
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026. 17 pages, 8 figures, 6 tables. Code: https://github.com/Megalo-f/CoGoal3D
☆ IMMoE: Incomplete Multi-View Anomaly Detection via Mixture of View Experts Fusion ECCV 2026
Existing Multi-view Anomaly Detection (MAD) methods assume that all views are completely available and model each view separately. However, in real industrial scenarios, information in the view may be missing due to faults such as occlusion, which leads to the performance degradation of existing methods due to the lack of a multi-view consistency prior. To address this, we explored a more challenging task: Incomplete Multi-View Anomaly Detection (IMVAD), in which some areas of each view were masked. We proposed a pipeline for automatically generating the IMVAD dataset and generated the \textbf{RIMAD} dataset based on the Real-IAD dataset through this pipeline. In addition, in order to effectively utilize the information of multiple views in the absence of view information, we propose \textbf{IMMoE}, which consists of two key modules: (1) Multi-View Expert Fusion (MVEF) effectively fuses multi-view information through a multi-view expert network and guides the reconstruction of a single view; (2) Local Anomaly Enhancement Encoder (LAEE) effectively prevents the model from overfitting the mask region by applying dropout to local features. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the RIMAD and Real-IAD datasets, especially on RIMAD, we have increased the pixel-level and image-level metrics by 11.8\% and 2.8\%, respectively. Our source code is available at https://github.com/HULEI7/IMMoE
comment: Accepted by ECCV 2026
☆ Mitigating Modality and Language-Style Gaps for Zero-Shot Video Moment Retrieval ECCV 2026
Zero-shot video moment retrieval aims to overcome the limitations of traditional approaches that require large-scale datasets annotated with text and its relevant temporal spans. Despite advances in pre-trained vision-language models and multimodal large language models, existing ZMR methods still heavily depend on query-to-video content similarity, making them vulnerable to modality and language-style gaps. These gaps lead to unreliable span proposals and unstable moment retrieval results. To address this issue, we propose Self-Similarity-based Moment Proposal and Scoring that instead exploits intrinsic relationships within videos, enabling robust span generation and scoring. By deriving self-similarity only from the video content, we circumvent the noisy and mismatched patterns of query-frame or query-caption similarities, thereby mitigating both modality and language-style gaps. Furthermore, we introduce a query-aware MLLM-based reasoning stage to further sharpen alignment between text and video. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Self-SiMS achieves state-of-the-art performance across ZMR benchmarks.
comment: ECCV 2026 (* These authors contributed equally.)
☆ Learning Semantic-Robust Change Detection via Semantic-Invariant Self-Distillation ECCV2026
Change detection aims to identify semantic changes between remote sensing images. However, features from models are easily disturbed by non-semantic variations, such as illumination, shadows, and atmospheric changes, leading to false alarms and limited generalization in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose \textbf{SCDistill}, a framework for learning semantic-robust change detection via semantic-invariant self-distillation. First, to strengthen semantic consistency, we introduce a semantic-invariant self-distillation strategy that learns semantic robustness from perturbed yet semantically consistent data, empowering the change detector to extract disturbance-resistant features and achieve more reliable and accurate semantic change identification. Second, to expand paired data with non-semantic variations, we design a diffusion-based perturbation simulation pipeline that synthesizes complex environmental changes, enabling the model to explicitly learn to distinguish semantic changes from appearance-level fluctuations and reduce false alarms caused by non-semantic disturbances. These components promote robustness from data and representation perspectives, leading to synergistic performance gains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCDistill achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple semantic change detection benchmarks and exhibits strong generalization to binary change detection and change captioning tasks. Code is accessible at https://github.com/elecreak/SCDistill.
comment: Accepted by ECCV2026
☆ Benchmarking Deep Learning Approaches for AEC Engineering Drawing Layout Detection and Information Extraction
Tianyang Huang, Alessio Lombardi, Ahmed Elnagar, Ahmed Zalouk, George Paul, Sepehr Najjarpour, Arvid Sigurdsson, Khalid Ismail, Mohamed Ragab, Edlira Vakaj
Information Extraction (IE) from Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) drawings remains hindered by manual inefficiency, while Layout Detection, a vital 'middleware' organizing graphical and textual hierarchies, is underexplored. General document layout models, optimized for text-centric content, lack validation on engineering drawings. This study constructs a custom AEC-specific layouts dataset and benchmarks five deep learning architectures. RF-DETR achieves state-of-the-art performance with an $mAP_{50}$ of 0.949, while the Vision-Language Model Qwen3-VL attains a leading F1-score of 0.911. Conversely, models pre-trained on general document datasets suffer from "domain interference", causing performance degradation. This establishes a robust technical foundation for automated IE in AEC.
comment: 2026 European Conference of Computing in Construction (EC3 2026), 8 pages
☆ SWITi: Quantifying and Reducing Tiling Artifacts with Sliding Window Inner Tiling
SWITi is a test-time method for reducing artifacts in tiled predictions, particularly for neural networks that learn posterior distributions from which solutions are sampled at inference time. Tiled predictions are unavoidable for large image data, and artifacts arise whenever tiles are smaller than a network's receptive field and when tiles are independent posterior samples. SWITi averages overlapping sliding-window predictions, so discrepancies between neighboring samples are spread across shifted tile positions rather than accumulating at fixed seam coordinates. For posterior models, SWITi uses no more tile samples than an MMSE estimate requires and therefore incurs no additional forward passes. Additionally, we introduce two reference-free metrics, the Fraction of Rejected Tests (FRT) and Artifact Severity (ASV), for detecting and quantifying tiling artifacts from a per-tile permutation test that compares the distribution of pixel gradients across tile seams against the surrounding image content. On pre-trained and published image splitting models across three fluorescence microscopy datasets in 2D and 3D, we show that SWITi substantially attenuates stitching seams while also improving reconstruction fidelity and resolution. Since tiling artifacts in posterior predictions can easily be mistaken for biological structures or for boundaries between biological structures, removing or reducing them using SWITi will improve the downstream processing of large image predictions, which is particularly relevant for biomedical data.
☆ DobicVLM: Aligning Chest X-Ray Report Generation with Clinically-Grounded Programmatic Rewards via Group Relative Policy Optimization
Thanni Adewuyi, Angelica Obayi, Andem Aniekan, Samuel Okoko, Angel Ezendu, Ephraim Usani, Ademide Animasaun, Philip Chibundu, Christian Maurice, Mary Donald Essien, Oluwaseun Odunsi, Oluwasegun Oguntuase, Abiodun Adereni
Medical imaging is a cornerstone of diagnostics, yet automated chest X-ray report generation struggles with structural adherence, anatomical completeness, and semantic faithfulness. We introduce DobicVLM, a vision-language model combining supervised fine-tuning on MedGemma-4B with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and clinically-grounded programmatic rewards. Our approach uses interpretable, rule-based reward components; structural verification, anatomical checklist, semantic similarity, and length constraints to enforce clinical standards without neural reward models. Trained on 1,000 de-identified image-report pairs from a private clinical dataset (with ethics approval and compliance to local regulations), DobicVLM is evaluated via blinded expert review on 69 held-out cases. DobicVLM outperforms Gemini 2.5 Flash across the majority of criteria, achieving the highest impression accuracy (27.2%) and medical terminology (86.5%) compared to both Gemini 2.5 Flash and MedGemma 4B baselines, with minor trade-offs in completeness and referrals. This demonstrates GRPO's value for transparent alignment in resource-limited settings. Keywords: Vision-Language Models, Radiology Report Generation, Reinforcement Learning, Medical AI, GRPO
☆ Dual Adversarial Fine-tuning for Enhancing Robustness of Large Vision Language Model
While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), represented by LLaVA and GPT-4V, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, their visual inputs remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, posing significant security risks. Existing defense methods predominantly target single-task scenarios (e.g., zero-shot classification) and consequently lack generalizability across various multimodal tasks. To address this limitation, we propose a dual adversarial fine-tuning framework that jointly optimizes visual and semantic supervision signals from two modalities, enhancing model robustness while generalizing across multiple downstream tasks. The proposed framework comprises two core components, i.e., $\textbf{Visual}$ supervision branch and $\textbf{Semantic}$ supervision branch. The former branch leverages features from clean images, extracted via a frozen original vision encoder, to guide adversarial robustness while the latter incorporates caption-image alignment as a contextual signal to preserve semantic coherence under attack. Moreover, our method achieves cross-task robustness by simply replacing the CLIP vision encoder in the original model, with no need of separate task-specific retraining or architecture modifications.Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art method in adversarial robustness evaluation across zero-shot classification, image captioning, and visual question answering (VQA) tasks.
☆ NGPS: GPS-Denied Aerial Geo-Localization and 2.5D Reconstruction via Deep Satellite Image Matching and Multi-Rate Sensor Fusion IEEE
We present NGPS (Next-Generation Positioning System), a visual geo-localization framework for high-altitude UAVs that provides GPS-free absolute positioning by matching down-facing images to georeferenced satellite imagery with deep features. The system combines (1) adaptive confidence-weighted UKF fusion, where NGPS covariance is modulated by RANSAC inlier ratio, reprojection error, and match confidence; (2) velocity-predictive kernel extraction, using VIO velocity to predict the satellite search region; and (3) an asynchronous multi-rate temporal priority queue that interleaves absolute position (1-2 Hz), VIO (10-20 Hz), and IMU (100-200 Hz) updates in chronological order. Globally optimized poses from VINS pose-graph optimization, anchored by NGPS corrections, further enable real-time 2.5D georeferenced orthomosaic reconstruction. On five flight sequences (60-150 m AGL), NGPS achieves 2.94 m position RMSE, with worst-case ATE 6.04 m at 150 m AGL and 2 m/s, yielding a 3.5x improvement over standalone monocular VIO. The system runs in real time on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX. Part of the implementation is open-sourced at https://github.com/snktshrma/ngps_flight.
comment: 9 pages (8-page paper + IEEE copyright/citation cover page), 6 figures. Accepted to IEEE/RSJ IROS 2026
☆ Learning Explicit Physical Parameter Control and Benchmarking for Video Generation
Yanxun Li, Hao Wen, Bingze Song, Jiashu Zhu, Aiming Hao, Chubin Chen, Jintao Chen, Jiahong Wu, Xiangxiang Chu, Miao Wang
Recent advances in image-to-video generation have improved visual realism, making physically grounded and controllable dynamics an important step toward future world simulation.
Current models often generate plausible motion, but it is not reliably governed by explicit physical causes, and instance-level constraints can leak or become entangled in multi-object interactions.
We attribute this gap to two missing pieces: large-scale, fine-grained physical parameterization, and model designs that correctly bind physical attributes to instances and emphasize dynamics over appearance.
To bridge this gap, we introduce PhyParam-Dataset, an interaction-centric collection of 130K physically simulated videos with dense physical parameterization, including force vectors, object material properties, and environmental constants across five representative rigid-body motion types.
Built on this data, we present PhyParam, a physics-guided image-to-video diffusion model that conditions on object-level forces, masses, friction, restitution, and scene-level gravity via a lightweight physical-attention routing mechanism, and further improves motion learning with semantic-structural feature-space supervision.
We also establish PhyParam-Bench, a benchmark for physical-law consistency in image-to-video generation, with a multi-level protocol evaluating temporal dynamics, spatial stability, and semantic--physical alignment. Experiments show that PhyParam improves physical consistency while maintaining high visual fidelity, advancing explicit rigid-body physical-parameter control for image-to-video generation.
We will publicly release the dataset, benchmark, and code to support future research.
comment: 23 pages, 11 figures
☆ TAP-RAG: Task-Aware Policy Control for Long-Document Multimodal Question Answering
Long-document multimodal question answering requires more than retrieving relevant chunks from a large document. Different queries require different evidence behavior. Existing multimodal RAG systems improve evidence access through text chunks, page images, graph links, or heterogeneous document elements, but they often apply a largely query-agnostic evidence-use strategy. We present TAP-RAG, a task-aware policy-controlled RAG framework for long-document multimodal QA. TAP-RAG contains a main controller, the Task-Aware Policy Controller (TAPC), and two policy-guided evidence executors: Task-Aware Query-Guided Flow Diffusion (TA-QFD) and Task-Aware Visual Enhancement (TAVE). For each query, TAPC predicts the task prior, estimates visual/local/global evidence signals, and produces an executable policy. TA-QFD then expands textual and structural evidence over the multimodal document graph, while TAVE selectively inspects page images when visual or layout evidence is needed. A guarded synthesis stage fuses text, visual, and structural evidence and abstains when support is insufficient. On DocBench and MMLongBench-Doc, TAP-RAG achieves the best overall accuracy among the compared systems, improving over a matched multimodal-RAG baseline by +9.1 points (61.1 to 70.2) and +4.5 points (42.2 to 46.7), respectively.
comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, 9 tables
☆ SynGallery: A Synthetic Gallery of Real Paintings for Instance-Level Artwork Recognition
Instance-level artwork recognition requires matching a handheld visitor photograph to a specific work in a large museum collection. This is challenging because painting datasets typically provide clean catalog images for training, while test queries are captured under oblique viewpoints, gallery lighting, reflections, frames, and other scene-level variations. We present SynGallery, a synthetic gallery dataset for artwork retrieval that addresses this gap without collecting additional real photographs. Starting from catalog images of real paintings, we place each artwork into a procedurally generated 3D gallery scene and render it from multiple viewpoints under varied geometric and appearance conditions, while preserving the exact identity of the original work. The resulting dataset contains 24,490 rendered views of 4,898 paintings from the Met benchmark. We show that these synthetic views provide a stronger training signal than the corresponding studio photographs. At the same number of training data points, training only on SynGallery improves art painting recognition from 67.18 to 73.47 GAP$^-$. When added to the full Met training set, SynGallery improves the published benchmark protocol from 35.97 to 38.48 GAP. Ablation experiments show that the gain comes primarily from geometric viewpoint variation rather than photographic realism: blur, sensor noise, and image compression consistently reduce performance.
☆ Local Label-Informed Feature Transfer for Generating Ground-Truth Medical Images: A Comparison of GAN- and Diffusion-Based Approaches IEEE
Rick Wilming, Irem Ozseker, Luca Matteo Cornils, Ahcène Boubekki, Benedict Clark, Danny Panknin, Stefan Haufe
Validating Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods in medical imaging requires ground-truth data with known locations of informative features. However, current approaches rely on expert annotations, which are prone to labeling errors, or on hand-crafted artificial perturbations superimposed onto healthy images to mimic lesions or malignant features, which lack clinical realism. We present Local Label-Informed Feature Transfer (LLIFT), a framework for generating semi-synthetic brain magnetic resonance images with realistic lesions placed in user-controlled regions, which does not require pixel-level lesion annotations during training. We implement LLIFT with two generative paradigms: LLIFT-GAN, a custom GAN that learns pathological features from binary class labels alone, and LLIFT-DM, a diffusion-based inpainting pipeline conditioned on bounding-box masks via ControlNet. Both approaches are evaluated on brain magnetic resonance imaging data derived from the Human Connectome Project. In evaluations, both achieve Fréchet Inception Distance scores, with respect to the real pathological distribution, that are comparable to the inter-class reference between healthy and pathological images in the given dataset. Furthermore, qualitative inspection confirms the realism of lesion structures. The resulting benchmark datasets provide spatially controlled ground truth data for evaluating XAI methods in medical imaging.
comment: 6 pages, submitted to IEEE MetroXRAINE 2026
☆ Wave2Body: Rethinking mmWave Human Pose Estimation as Radar-to-Body Token Translation
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar enables privacy-friendly human sensing, but its sparse point clouds are physical measurements of view-dependent electromagnetic reflections and only indirectly characterize body articulation. Recovering a complete 3D pose from such partial, geometry-dependent observations is therefore under-constrained. Existing methods directly regress joint coordinates from paired radar-pose data, relying on the same limited paired supervision to learn radar perception, human-body structure, and their alignment. This coupling can encourage dataset-specific shortcuts under ambiguous radar observations. We propose Wave2Body, a radar-to-body token translation framework that decouples these learning targets using a self-supervised mmWave tokenizer, a pretrained compositional body tokenizer that defines the output space, and a lightweight translator between them. Experiments on M4Human and mmBody show that Wave2Body achieves stronger cross-domain generalization than previous methods while incurring much lower computational costs for training and inference. All the code and experiment results are publicly available at https://github.com/Galaxywalk/Wave2Body.
☆ Reliability-Aware 3D Geometric Injection for Universal Person Re-identification ECCV 2026
Universal person re-identification (ReID) aims to retrieve pedestrian identities across diverse real-world scenarios, including severe occlusions, clothing changes, and cross-modality shifts, within a unified model. However, existing 2D representations fundamentally struggle with spatial ambiguities due to a lack of depth and topological awareness, while naively introducing monocular 3D priors often causes severe negative transfer due to geometric estimation noise under extreme visual degradation. To safely harness the clothing-invariant and canonical structural properties of 3D geometry, we propose UniGeo, a Universal Monocular 3D-Enhanced ReID framework driven by a Consistency-Aware Reliability Gate and Dual-Stream Residual Fusion. Specifically, the processing of 3D information is strategically decoupled into geometric extraction and dynamic utilization. To provide pure structural compensation, we project monocular 3D parameters into kinematic joint representations, explicitly capturing instance-level geometric topology to resolve appearance-based ambiguities. To robustly incorporate these cues without perturbing the reliable 2D feature space, we isolate the 3D prior as a late-stage structural residual; modulated by the consistency-aware gate, this mechanism adaptively filters geometric noise and enables controlled fallback to the pure 2D baseline. Extensive experiments show that our method improves challenging, structure-sensitive scenarios while preserving competitive performance on clean domains. Code is available at https://github.com/BohanSu/UniGeo.
comment: Accepted at ECCV 2026
☆ Think Sparse, Predict Dense: Continuous Thought Machines for Image Super-Resolution
Continuous Thought Machines introduce an internal temporal dimension in which neuron-level histories and synchronization-derived representations evolve over a sequence of thought ticks. Extending this mechanism to dense visual prediction is non-trivial, because tasks such as image super-resolution require spatial evidence to remain available at every output location rather than being compressed into a single global representation. In the proposed window-level use of CTM, the thought dynamics produce a compact summary representation for each local window. DQ-CTM transforms this compact thought representation into window-aligned dense queries through a structured low-rank, parameter-efficient compact-to-dense query mechanism. Each position within a window receives its own query, while shared thought dynamics progressively refine the dense representation across ticks. In its super-resolution instantiation, termed ThinkSR, encoded feature maps are partitioned into local visual windows without token pooling, restored to the original feature field after shared refinement, and decoded into a high-resolution image. Preliminary experiments under a fixed four-tick training horizon reveal a progressive reconstruction trajectory. PSNR-Y increases from 28.1045 dB at $T=0$ to 30.2817 dB at $T=4$, while PSNR-RGB increases from 26.6271 dB to 28.7781 dB and the mean $\ell_1$ error decreases from 0.034602 to 0.023545. All 100 evaluated images improve from $T=1$ to $T=4$. These initial results establish the feasibility of sparse latent thought for dense spatial reconstruction and motivate broader continuous-thought architectures for dense vision.
comment: 8 pages, 6 figures
☆ OPD-IAD: From Language Judgment to Industrial Anomaly Detection via On-Policy Self-Distillation
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have recently shown strong potential for industrial anomaly detection (IAD) by providing image-level anomaly judgments and interpretable defect reasoning. However, current LVLM-based IAD methods still struggle to produce precise pixel-level anomaly maps from generated language judgments. We aim to achieve precise pixel-level localization while using language as guidance rather than letting it dominate the visual response. Specifically, we propose \textbf{OPD-IAD}, an evidence-privileged dense on-policy self-distillation framework for LVLM-based IAD. OPD-IAD distills privileged defect evidence onto the model's own on-policy judgment trajectory, enabling the final generated judgment to be learned under dense supervision rather than treated only as a textual answer. The resulting judgment serves as a semantic condition for dense anomaly perception. To turn this condition into dense visual evidence, we introduce \textbf{Language-guided Visual Anchoring}, which uses a judgment reforward to re-encode the image and question under the final-judgment condition into semantic anchors and contrasts them with dense visual features through a contrastive heatmap head to generate anomaly maps. The language judgment therefore provides compact semantic guidance, while dense visual features remain the basis for pixel-level scoring, allowing language to guide anomaly localization without letting language quality directly dictate the pixel-level response. Extensive experiments show that OPD-IAD achieves the best overall performance among LVLM-based IAD methods, leading on most image-level, pixel-level, and QA metrics.
☆ Open-Vocabulary Gaze Object Prediction: Benchmark and Method
Gaze Object Prediction (GOP) aims to localize and recognize the objects humans attend to, a task crucial for understanding human-centric interactions. However, existing methods are typically trained under a closed-vocabulary paradigm with a fixed label space and evaluated on scene-specific datasets, limiting their applicability to real-world scenarios where gaze targets often follow a long-tail distribution or belong to unseen categories. To address this gap, we introduce Diverse Scenes for Gaze object prediction (DiSG), a benchmark containing 86 in-the-wild categories that facilitates the evaluation of Open-Vocabulary GOP (OVGOP). Building on DiSG, we propose a framework that leverages text-driven object discovery to localize potential gaze candidates, with a gaze-guided selection module to pinpoint the intended target from the candidate objects. Furthermore, to better capture semantic knowledge across diverse in-the-wild categories, we introduce Gradient-Informed Selection Tuning (GIST) to selectively update parameters most relevant to a given class vocabulary. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model performs effectively in open-vocabulary settings and also outperforms existing methods in the conventional closed-vocabulary setting. The benchmark and code is available at https://github.com/sensniu/ovgop.
comment: Accepted at ACM Multimedia 2026
☆ In-Context Learning for Wound Classification with Small Multimodal Language Models
Wound image classification is often treated as a task-specific supervised learning problem, requiring substantial amounts of manually labelled data and retraining when the label space or deployment setting changes. This study evaluated whether small multimodal language models (SMLMs) can provide a training-free alternative for wound classification through retrieval-based in-context learning (ICL). Experiments used two public wound-image datasets: the Kaggle wound dataset (1469 images, 10 classes) and the Medetec dataset (560 images, 9 classes). Eleven SMLMs from the Qwen 3.5, Ministral 3, and Gemma 4 families were evaluated under zero-shot prompting and few-shot prompting with random support examples, embedding-based k-nearest-neighbour (kNN) retrieval, and kNN retrieval followed by maximal marginal relevance reranking (MMR). Retrieval-only weighted-kNN controls, support-set reduction experiments, and support-context size sweeps were used to assess the effects of retrieval, model scale, and prompt length. Query-conditioned ICL consistently outperformed zero-shot and random few-shot prompting. On the Kaggle dataset, the best result was achieved by Qwen 3.5 27B with kNN+MMR, reaching 0.872 accuracy and 0.871 F1 score. On Medetec, Qwen 3.5 27B with kNN+MMR reached 0.678 accuracy and 0.670 F1. Larger models exceeded matched weighted-kNN controls, indicating use of retrieved examples beyond nearest-neighbour voting. Retrieval-based ICL degraded modestly under support-set reduction, and most gains saturated with 8-10 support images. Retrieval-based ICL allows SMLMs to perform adaptable wound image classification without task-specific retraining. Compact retrieved contexts may support practical and privacy-conscious deployment, although performance remains dependent on model scale, retrieval strategy, and dataset difficulty.
☆ ZeroSplat: Generalized Referring Segmentation in 3D Gaussian Splatting ECCV 2026
Recent advancements in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have enabled language-guided scene understanding. However, existing Referring 3D Gaussian Splatting (R3DGS) methods are fundamentally restricted to single-target queries. To reflect the ambiguity of real-world instructions, we introduce the Generalized Referring 3D Gaussian Splatting Segmentation (GR3DGS) task, which requires dynamically segmenting an arbitrary number of targets (0, 1, or $N$). To facilitate comprehensive evaluation of this new task, we construct two new benchmarks: GR-LERF and GR-ScanNet. Crucially, existing R3DGS paradigms exhibit fundamental technical bottlenecks that severely limit their performance on the GR3DGS task: they lack intrinsic 3D point-level understanding by operating merely on 2D rendered pixels, and they incur prohibitive computational overhead by requiring per-scene optimization to embed heavy semantic features. To dismantle these bottlenecks, we propose ZeroSplat, a novel training-free and zero-feature framework. ZeroSplat lifts 2D Vision-Language Model (VLM) priors into 3D space through robust multi-view geometric constraints. This strategy enables intrinsic point-level understanding without incurring any additional feature storage. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ZeroSplat significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across generalized and single-target scenarios while maintaining exceptional efficiency. Project Page: https://inkmind-ai.github.io/ZeroSplat
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026
☆ UVFaceFusion: Fast Multi-view Topologically Consistent Face Reconstruction in the Wild via UV-space Neural Fusion
Reconstructing high-fidelity facial geometry with an assigned topology is essential for digital avatar creation and animation, yet existing automated methods often trade off geometric fidelity and in-the-wild generalization. We present UVFaceFusion, a feed-forward framework for multi-view, fixed-topology face reconstruction from daily images. Our key idea is to replace heuristic topological optimization with learnable neural fusion in a canonical UV space. Given multi-view images, we first obtain dense point maps and facial UV correspondences of each view using VGGT and Pixel3DMM, respectively. Then, the view-specific point maps are lifted into the canonical UV domain and fused with a novel mask-aware neural fusion network. The network predicts a complete UV-space point map, from which a fixed-topology mesh is directly sampled. Although trained only on Ava-256, UVFaceFusion generalizes well to multiple public benchmarks and in-the-wild captures, benefiting from its canonical UV-space geometry-to-geometry fusion that reduces dependence on dataset-specific appearance and capture conditions. Experiments on various benchmarks show that UVFaceFusion achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction accuracy while reconstructing a mesh from 16 input views in less than 3 seconds on a single RTX 4090. Code is available at https://github.com/grignarder/UVFaceFusion.
☆ STS-NET: Spatio-Temporal Stress Network for Self-Supervised Crop Stress Detection using Satellite Image Time Series
Early and accurate detection of crop stress is essential to improve agricultural productivity and ensure global food security. However, collecting a large labeled crop stress dataset is a challenging task. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel spatial-temporal stress network (STS-NET), built on a self-supervised 3D-convolutional autoencoder (3D-CAE), designed to utilize Satellite Image Time Series (SITS) data for crop stress detection. STS-NET exploits four vegetation indices: Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (GNDVI), Red-Edge Chlorophyll Index (RECI) and Normalized Difference Red-Edge Index (NDRE) obtained from high resolution Planetscope imagery to capture spatiotemporal stress patterns. The model is trained on our BSPT (Barnala Spatial-Temporal) dataset and evaluated on a real-world sugarcane dataset collected over a year from a 2.5-acre test plot located in Lakhimpur-Kheri (LK) district in Uttar Pradesh in India. STS-NET achieved a precision of 97. 98\% for water stress, 85.08\% for nitrogen stress, and 83.47\% for combined stress. The results demonstrate the potential of STS-NET in effectively detecting stress in sugarcane crops with minimal reliance on labeled data. Furthermore, STS-NET can serve as a robust feature extractor for simpler models.
comment: 5 pages
☆ Moving Alphabet: A Controlled Study of Training Data for Text-to-Video Generation
Text-to-video generation has advanced significantly over the past five years through scaling of model size, data, and compute. Unlike model architecture, training data is often underexplored. Real-world data curation is complex and non-trivial, involving clip selection from raw videos and captioning to create video-text pairs for learning text-to-video mappings. We study how data distribution and caption quality impact text-to-video models. To enable controlled experiments, we introduce Moving Alphabet, a procedural testbed that renders letters with varying fonts, colors, sizes, and positions, moving in different directions and speeds against a black background. This design allows precise control over data distribution and caption quality by corrupting ground-truth metadata. Our experiments yield three findings: a) a diverse and balanced distribution of video content and duration is critical for generalization; b) caption quality significantly affects both model performance and training efficiency, suggesting that text-to-video models are bounded by video understanding capabilities; and c) classifier-free guidance and fine-tuning on high-quality data provide partial recovery from models trained on corrupted captions, but cannot fully compensate for poor pre-training data. We believe these insights can inform the development of large-scale text-to-video models, and we advocate for greater attention to the science of pre-training data.
☆ Image Editing Models are Numerical Solvers
We investigate whether a pretrained generative image-editing model can provide a common interface for numerical simulation. Physical inputs and solutions are rendered as images, while scalar quantities such as material properties, diffusivity, and loading parameters enter through lightweight adapters. Using established numerical and analytic solvers for supervision, we apply the same architecture and training protocol to heterogeneous elliptic equations, forced heat and Burgers evolution, complex Ginzburg-Landau dynamics, two-dimensional Navier-Stokes prediction, potential flow, elasticity, eikonal travel time, phase-field fracture, and entropic optimal transport. The results show that a pretrained image model can represent diverse static and time-dependent physical mappings, including unstable and shock-like behavior, when each task is expressed through a suitable visual encoding. This work is a capability study rather than an attempt to surpass specialized solvers. It also identifies fundamental constraints: image and latent representations complicate numerical range selection and direct enforcement of governing equations or invariants, while a failed Kuramoto-Sivashinsky experiment indicates that representation errors prevent meaningful long-horizon simulation of chaotic systems.
☆ CGMap: A Geospatially Aware Deep Learning Framework for Crop Gap Mapping Using UAV
In India, crop germination is primarily monitored by visual inspection and manual counting, which are prone to errors, despite their crucial role in determining eventual yield potential. This paper highlights a deep learning based pipeline which uses object detection methods and drone imagery to assess and provide a precise count of sugarcane germination in fields. The approch uses a pre-trained AI model to find germinated plant sampling and identify gaps, also known as ``bald spots'', which restricts field productivity. The techniques used here relies on the YOLOV8 architecture, which was trained on a carefully selected dataset of UAV photos taken in various agroclimatic zones of India. Here, we bring upon a novel orientation-normalization technique that uses minimum Spanning Trees (MST) to account for variations in planting geometry, allowing for dependable row and column extraction across a variety of field layouts. By converting detected seedlings into spatial point clouds, emergence gaps can be inferred from the anticipated spacing between plants. A geospatial germination map exported in Well-Known Text (WKT) format is the end result, and it can be easily incorporated into GIS platforms used by sugar mills and agronomists to direct transplant initiatives. Timely interventions based on the insights provided by the algorithm can significantly increase yield, resulting in higher profits. Hence, support proper allocation of resources, avoid wastage, and enhance long-term sustainability.
comment: 15 pages
☆ Privileged Lesion-Context Relational Distillation for Mask-Free Skin Lesion Classification
Accurate skin lesion classification can benefit from lesion segmentation masks, but requiring masks or an auxiliary segmentation model during inference reduces clinical practicality and increases computational complexity. This work introduces Privileged Lesion-Context Relational Distillation (PLCRD), a teacher-student framework that exploits lesion masks exclusively during training while preserving image-only inference. The privileged teacher jointly analyzes the original dermoscopic image and its mask-guided lesion region to learn lesion-specific and contextual diagnostic representations. An image-only student is then trained through complementary knowledge-transfer mechanisms that convey the teacher's diagnostic distribution, lesion-focused attention, inter-lesion relational geometry, and lesion-context structure. PLCRD decomposes deep representations into lesion and contextual embeddings and transfers their relational organization through inter-lesion similarity alignment, lesion-context affinity matching, separation regularization, and class-aware relational learning. This formulation avoids direct feature matching between heterogeneous teacher and student architectures and enables the student to internalize mask-informed diagnostic structure without accessing masks at deployment. The framework was evaluated on HAM10000 using lesion-disjoint data partitioning and externally validated on ISIC 2018 without retraining. PLCRD achieved a lesion-level macro-F1 of 0.773 +/- 0.018, balanced accuracy of 0.764 +/- 0.023, and macro-AUROC of 0.976 +/- 0.002 on HAM10000, together with a macro-F1 of 0.732 +/- 0.008 on ISIC 2018. The results indicate that privileged lesion annotations can be transformed into transferable relational knowledge, yielding a practical and interpretable approach to mask-free skin lesion classification.
comment: Manuscript submitted for consideration. The paper presents a mask-free skin lesion classification framework evaluated on HAM10000 and externally validated on ISIC 2018
☆ GLID: Gated Local Intrinsic Dimension Repairs the Blind Spots of Face-Forgery Detectors
Fine-tuned foundation-model detectors dominate face-forgery benchmarks, yet they stay blind to generator families absent from training. We present GLID, a detector that repairs this blind spot with geometry instead of data. GLID treats the patch tokens of a single image as a sample from a manifold and estimates their local intrinsic dimension (LID) at several depths of a frozen vision transformer. This 12-dimensional, training-free signal enters a fine-tuned detector through a confidence gate whose strength is calibrated purely in-distribution. On a 16-axis cross-generator benchmark, GLID reaches 0.805 mean AUC, first among retrained state-of-the-art baselines and never significantly behind the strongest of them on any axis. It lifts the generation axes by +0.084 AUC while moving reenactment by only -0.005. Two empirical laws explain the design. First, forged faces bend the token manifold at family-specific depths: GAN artifacts peak at the last layer, diffusion artifacts peak mid-network, and the pattern survives four backbones, three dimension estimators, and non-face imagery. Second, fine-tuning absorbs auxiliary gains exactly where training data covers: injecting 1% target-family images erases a +0.100 gain, so geometric signals matter precisely where data is unavailable. The deterministic signal also cuts the cross-seed spread of accuracy 5.5x. Code, preregistered analysis gates, and per-image scores accompany the paper.
comment: 21 pages, 16 figures
☆ Cross-Modal UAV Object Tracking: State-Aware Representation Learning and A Unified Benchmark
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) object tracking has emerged as a popular research field with broad practical applications. Modern UAVs are increasingly equipped with both visible light and thermal infrared sensors. However, due to constraints in communication bandwidth, computational resources and power consumption, current systems often activate one modality and switch between modalities to maintain robust tracking in complex scenarios. Such modality switch inevitably leads to significant appearance change and sudden spatial shift, posing great challenges for existing tracking algorithms. To handle this problem, we propose a novel State-Aware Representation Learning Approach called SARLA, which perceives the inconsistent modality states of current frame with template and last frame in the target representations to adapt to the sudden changes in both appearance and position, for robust cross-modal object tracking. In particular, we propose the Modality State Aware Representation Module (MSARM) and Spatial State Aware Representation Module (SSARM). MSARM guides the model to learn appearance correlation, bridging the modality gap, while SSARM models cross-frame spatial correlation to mitigate sudden spatial shift impacts. In addition, we design a spatial shift prediction loss to further handle the effects of spatial variation caused by modality switch. To promote the development of this research field, we establish a large-scale video benchmark called CM-UOT, which consists of 1079 cross-modal sequences with an average video length greater than 621 frames and encompasses over 671K frames in total. Extensive experiments on CM-UOT dataset demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed SARLA against 20 excellent tracking methods. The source code, datasets, and evaluation protocols associated with this work are publicly available at: https://github.com/hongsmile365/sarla-.
☆ Bounding Boxes to Improve Small Language Model Performance on Vision-Based Grading Tasks
The deployment of Small Language Models (SLMs) in educational settings offers significant advantages in terms of privacy, cost, and scalability. However, SLMs often struggle with complex vision-based tasks, such as grading handwritten student exams, due to the high computational cost of processing large images and the visual distractions present on a full page. In this paper, we investigate whether cropping student responses using bounding boxes can improve the accuracy and computational efficiency of SLMs on a short-answer grading task. Using a dataset of scanned handwritten responses from the 2025 Australian Physics Olympiad, we evaluate the performance of several models ranging from 4B to 72B parameters under varying conditions of Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting and image cropping. Our results demonstrate that using bounding boxes significantly improves grading accuracy and reduces computational cost (FLOPs) across models. We conclude that bounding boxes are a crucial pre-processing step for deploying SLMs in large-scale, vision-based educational assessments.
comment: Accepted for 1st Workshop on Small Language Models for Education (SLM4ED '26) at AIED 2026
☆ Posterior Samplings are Missing Modalities Generators for Medical Image Translation ECCV 26
Magnetic resonance imaging comes in various modality contrasts that provide complementary anatomical and pathological information. Complete multimodal acquisitions are often unavailable due to time and protocol constraints. This leads to real-world datasets with missing modalities, where conventional medical image translation methods are typically limited to fixed source-target settings or require retraining for each observed source-target pair. We propose a unified framework that formulates missing-modality generation as a linear inverse problem under a joint distribution and solves it via posterior sampling with a flow matching model. By learning a joint prior over the complete modality set, our method can reconstruct arbitrary missing modalities at inference time by guiding the sampling trajectory to enforce measurement consistency with observed modalities. We further mitigate inter-modality error propagation in multi-target generation by adopting a many-to-one sampling strategy. Experiments on BraTS and IXI datasets show that our method achieves the best performance over baselines across most missing-modality scenarios. In downstream tumor segmentation, synthesized images from our method result in higher segmentation performance, indicating better preservation of clinically relevant structures.
comment: ECCV 26
☆ Weakly Supervised Pathology-Informed Representation Learning for PET-Based Content Retrieval of Intra-Tumour Heterogeneity
Rajat Vashistha, Sandra Brosda, Lauren G. Aoude, Christine Jestin Hannan, James M. Lonie, Jessica Ng, Andrew Nathanson, Ellie Vloedmans, Caroline Cooper, Andrew P. Barbour, Viktor Vegh
We propose a weakly supervised 18FFDG PET representation-learning framework for content based medical image retrieval, using H&E derived information during training while preserving PET-only inference. The proposed method was designed to use H&E derived information during training while maintaining PET only inference. A teacher student training strategy was used to learn the PET tumour derived voxel representations, from which global and hotspot conditioned embeddings were generated along with maps of intra tumour heterogeneity in our oesophegeal cancer test case. A progressive ablation strategy was used to evaluate the contribution of different supervision mechanisms. Retrieval performance was assessed across cross-validation folds using metrics including mean average precision, normalised discounted cumulative gain and mean reciprocal rank. Additional analyses evaluated ablation performance, hotspot faithfulness through perturbation/deletion experiments, prototype-specific PET uptake behaviour and indirect patient level concordance between learned PET prototype classes and selected histomic features. Progressive introduction of pathology informed supervision and hotspot modelling improved PET retrieval performance compared with global PET representations and conventional PET baselines. Across the ablation ladder, PET hotspot conditioned representations consistently provided stronger retrieval than global embeddings, indicating that focusing on informative tumour subregions improved sensitivity to intra tumour heterogeneity. Histopathology concordance further showed that the learned classes were not simply high uptake PET regions; instead, they demonstrated distinct heterogeneity in 18F FDG uptake.
☆ SkyEV: RGB-Event UAV detection and tracking dataset and baseline
Detecting UAVs in air spaces has become increasingly important due to UAVs widespread availability and easy usage. However, due to their small size, they are typically difficult to detect at a sufficient range. For the training of optimized detection algorithms, datasets have been published, covering optical sensing methods ranging from infrared to regular RGB to event-sensor-based. However, these datasets often fail to reflect realistic counter-UAV scenarios, lacking critical factors such as camera ego-motion, extremely small target scales, and diverse lens configurations, and introduce compression artefacts on the frame images. To address this gap, we introduce SkyEV, an open-source dataset featuring highly synchronized uncompressed RGB and event-based data. SkyEV distinguishes itself by capturing complex real-world conditions, including significant camera motion and varied optical setups, which are essential for testing the fundamental trade-off between Field of View and detection range. Furthermore, we provide a unified data loader and establish an experimental baseline using a multi-modal architecture, demonstrating the dataset's efficacy in detecting challenging, small-scale targets.
☆ Continual Video-MLLM Adaptation over Evolving Domains ACM MM 2026
Video multimodal large language models have shown strong capability in video understanding, yet their adaptation to sequentially evolving domains remains underexplored. In real-world deployments, video data often arrives continuously from heterogeneous domains, requiring the model to acquire new domain-specific knowledge without overwriting previously learned capabilities. Existing continual learning methods typically rely on shared adaptation spaces, which can induce severe cross-domain interference and catastrophic forgetting. We propose Distribution-Aware Expert Routing, a parameter-efficient framework for continual Video-MLLM adaptation over evolving domains. DAER maintains domain-isolated lightweight experts while keeping the pretrained Video-MLLM backbone frozen, thereby decoupling domain-specific adaptation from the general multimodal knowledge of the pretrained model. To enable fine-grained specialization, we introduce an intra-domain distribution-aware routing mechanism that matches each input to expert-level prototype reservoirs using MMD. To address the absence of task identities at inference time, we further propose an inter-domain routing mechanism that performs prototype matching in a discriminative subspace for robust domain identification. In addition, we introduce adaptive domain merging to improve parameter scalability and adopt a two-stage optimization strategy to stabilize expert specialization during continual learning. We evaluate DAER by curating a domain-incremental benchmark built from ten VidQA datasets covering diverse visual environments and reasoning demands. Experiments on two strong Video-MLLM backbones show that DAER consistently outperforms prior methods.
comment: Accepted to ACM MM 2026
☆ Confidence-Gated Vision-Only Heading Alignment for UAV-UGV Cooperative Systems
Vision-based heading prediction is useful for UAV--UGV cooperation, but accurate prediction alone does not guarantee that every predicted heading should be issued directly as a control command. This paper investigates the decision problem of when and how a fixed vision-based heading predictor should be trusted for command issuance. A lightweight confidence-gated framework is proposed in which execution decisions are made using two interpretable reliability proxies derived from the perception stream: bounding-box area as a visibility-related proxy and short-window variation in predicted heading as a stability-related proxy. During low-confidence intervals, the framework compares the baseline freeze-HOLD policy with a bounded-blend fallback that updates the issued command conservatively. The method is evaluated on a real UAV--UGV dataset under clean and perturbed conditions. The results show that confidence gating creates a clear trade-off among execution rate, executed-frame accuracy, issued-command accuracy, and smoothness. The results further show that sparse execution can cause severe stale-command error under the baseline freeze-HOLD policy, whereas the bounded-blend fallback substantially improves command-level behavior under the same gate decisions. These findings highlight that reliable perception-driven autonomy depends not only on prediction accuracy, but also on decision-aware command issuance during low-confidence
☆ Generative World Renderer at the Speed of Play
Generative world renderer AlayaRenderer receives structured world states exported from physics engines and synthesizes RGB frames. Unlike models that generate frames from text/control-hints prompts, AlayaRenderer preserves scene structure without altering the underlying world dynamics. This demonstrates an alternative path toward interactive world modeling and user-controllable play. However, the original AlayaRenderer is too computationally expensive for real-time deployment. This technical report introduces AlayaRenderer-Flash, a real-time-oriented generative forward world renderer that pushes AlayaRenderer from 0.56 FPS to 31.54 FPS, reaching the speed of play. AlayaRenderer-Flash reformulates the original renderer as a few-step autoregressive streaming model and introduces lightweight distilled codecs for efficient latent encoding and frame reconstruction. It retains the teacher model's G-buffer and text-prompt interfaces while enabling continuous rendering over input streams of unbounded length. We evaluate AlayaRenderer-Flash on G-buffer streams across content preservation, temporal consistency, cross-window stability, prompt controllability, and runtime efficiency. Our results show that AlayaRenderer-Flash substantially reduces inference cost while preserving the core rendering capabilities of the teacher model. By integrating AlayaRenderer-Flash with a physics engine, we build a fully playable generative world running at 30 FPS.
comment: Project page: https://alaya-renderer-flash.alayalab.ai/
☆ Decoupled Pipeline with Proposal Reranking and Score Fusion for Positive-Unlabeled Marine Species Detection
The FathomNetCLEF 2026 competition combines underwater object detection and fine-grained marine species classification under a positive-unlabeled evaluation setting. The provided training labels are sparse, while the hidden test set is out-of-distribution relative to the training imagery, creating both annotation incompleteness and source-shift challenges. We describe DS@GT ARC's multi-stage system developed for this setting while keeping model training restricted to the data provided by the competition. The final private-leaderboard model uses a frozen Megalodon YOLOv8x detector as a class-agnostic proposal generator, combines global and tiled inference with tile-edge filtering, classifies expanded proposal crops with a LoRA-finetuned DINOv3 ViT-H classifier, and ranks predictions using weighted geometric fusion of detector and classifier confidence. This system placed 12th out of 102 teams. A closely related variant added a locally trained TTN-inspired validity head as a light reranking signal, improving public-leaderboard and proxy-evaluation performance but slightly reducing private-leaderboard performance. Across experiments, the strongest lesson was that train-derived validation and detector-only metrics were not reliable enough for model selection. Instead, we used proxy datasets only for validation and comparison, and combined those signals with leaderboard feedback and targeted ablations. These experiments showed that reserving proposal recall, avoiding over-aggressive filtering, and improving downstream ranking were more effective than fine-tuning the detector or directly training on noisy pseudo-labels. Code: https://github.com/dsgt-arc/fathomnetclef-2026.
☆ Attributes Should Come from Images, Not Class Names: Distribution-Conditioned Attribute Selection for Vision-Language Models
A popular route to interpretable zero-shot classification asks a large language model (LLM) to describe each class name and prompts CLIP with the resulting descriptors. We show that these descriptors carry little visual evidence of their own: removing the class name from the prompt collapses ImageNet accuracy from 59.5% to 15.5%. The diagnosis is that the descriptors are conditioned on the label rather than on the images, so they describe the concept in general and mislead exactly when the data shifts; an LLM insists that strawberries are red, but every strawberry in ImageNet-Sketch is a colorless line drawing. We therefore select attributes from the target image collection instead: we score a large attribute pool against the images in CLIP's joint embedding space and keep the top-scoring attributes per class. Selected this way, class-name-free attribute prompts reach 23.8% on ImageNet (against 15.5% for LLM descriptors), the gain holds on four shifted ImageNet variants, and reselecting from the LLM's own pool isolates the selection mechanism as the cause. With one image per class, the selected attributes outperform the prompt-tuning method CoOp by 3 points while fitting in under a minute instead of 14 hours, with no learned soft prompt to obscure the decision. Because the attribute set is chosen by the data, it doubles as a readable summary of a dataset, which we use to describe distribution shift in words.
☆ Dual-Edged Homogeneous-Modality Similarity: Towards Visible-Infrared Modality-Incomplete Person Re-Identification with Modality Adaptive Matching
Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification (VI-ReID) operates under a closed-world assumption, where queries and galleries are from heterogeneous modalities. However, in open-world scenarios, both sets are likely to contain homogeneous and heterogeneous modality images. A query may consist of visible-only, infrared-only, or mixed-modality images, while galleries present multi-modal images over long-term collection. Under these conditions, VI-ReID methods, built on a heterogeneous-modality retrieval paradigm, suffer from three trustworthiness challenges: matching conflicts due to high homogeneous-modality similarity, interference from modality uncertainty, and robustness degradation induced by unknown modality combinations. They fail to meet the requirements of trustworthy visual recognition in reliability, consistency, and dynamic adaptability. To address these challenges, we formalize the Visible-Infrared Modality-Incomplete Re-Identification (VIMI-ReID) task. We reorganize existing datasets to construct the SYSU-VIMI and RegDB-VIMI benchmarks. The unpredictable modality combinations and inherent similarity of homogeneous-modality samples in VIMI-ReID cause a significant performance drop in existing VI-ReID methods. We propose the Modality Adaptive Matching Transformer (MAMT). It employs a Divergence Transformer Module (DTM) and a Shared Transformer Module (STM) to extract modality-specific and modality-shared features, respectively. Guided by a divergence loss, the DTM enriches modality-specific features with modality-style information to enhance discriminability within the same modality. A Modality Adaptive Matching Module (MAM) dynamically fuses features according to the query-gallery modality relationship, enabling stable matching under arbitrary and uncertain modality conditions. Extensive experiments on the VIMI benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and adaptability of MAMT.
comment: 18 pages, 7 figures
☆ Cross-Dataset Generalization in Breast MRI Tumor Classification via Class-Wise Dataset Mixing
Breast MRI is highly sensitive for detecting breast tumors, but exams contain many slices and require substantial reading time. Deep learning models often perform well on internal splits but can fail across institutions because of domain shift and dataset-origin bias. We study this failure mode for binary breast MRI tumor classification. EfficientNet-B3 and WaveViT-Small are trained using Duke Breast Cancer MRI and fastMRI, and evaluated only on the independent multi-center MAMA-MIA cohort. In a deliberately confounded setup, where label is perfectly correlated with dataset origin, external accuracy is near chance (0.5048--0.5265), despite very high recall. We then construct a mixed training set in which each class contains samples from both Duke and fastMRI, while preserving patient-level splitting, augmentation, and leakage controls. On MAMA-MIA, dataset mixing improves accuracy/F1 to 0.8463/0.8625 for WaveViT-Small and 0.8884/0.8994 for EfficientNet-B3. These results show that controlling dataset-origin bias is important for reliable breast MRI classification.
comment: CBMS 2026
☆ MissingBench-Verified: Probing Vision-Language Models' Inability to Detect Missing Object Parts ECCV 2026
Vision Language Models (VLMs) are well known for hallucinating non-existent objects in images. Objects with missing parts present a unique challenge for VLMs, stemming from both real-world knowledge bias and the scarcity of such images in training data. We present MissingBench-Verified, a benchmark designed to evaluate a specific and practically relevant scenario: when vision-language models fail to recognize that an essential component of an object has been removed. Across ten leading models, we observe consistent and significant failure rates that persist even when external tool evidence explicitly contradicts the model's visual perception. We further ask whether granting models access to image processing tools (e.g., cropping, contrast adjustment) enables autonomous inspection to resolve these failures. We find that existing mitigation strategies, including tool-assisted verification, autonomous visual reasoning, longer reasoning durations, and fine-tuning on an easier dataset, provide negligible improvement, indicating that this failure mode cannot be addressed through current prompting or post-hoc correction techniques. Our findings highlight a fundamental limitation of current VLM for inspection and monitoring tasks and underscore the need for architectural or training-level interventions that enable models to override internal expectations when confronted with contradictory evidence.
comment: Submitted to the ECCV 2026 Workshop on Explainable Computer Vision (eXCV). 11 pages, 4 figures
☆ DeforM: Reasoning-Guided Physics-Aware Video Generation via Spatial-Temporal Masking
Video generation models achieve high visual quality but often struggle to generate physics-aware videos. Unlike rigid-body motion, which can be described by explicit trajectories or formulas, complex deformation dynamics remain challenging to synthesize. We observe that a lack of physical reasoning for localizing dynamic areas allows irrelevant regions to dilute the model's attention, leading to generation failure. In this paper, we propose DeforM, a reasoning-guided image-to-video generation framework that directs the model's focus toward physics-critical regions. To reason about and localize these critical regions, we introduce a VLM-guided physical reasoning module, DeforM-Reason, to identify target objects and generate spatial-temporal masks. For physical guidance, we develop two alternative strategies: DeforM-Free for training-free mechanism analysis and DeforM-Injection as a powerful training-based generator. Experimental results demonstrate that DeforM improves the realism of generated deformation scenarios, outperforming baseline models in both visual quality and physical consistency.
☆ Fluid-SDF: Ultra-Lightweight and Editable Implicit Shape Representation via Differentiable Primitives
Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have become the standard for continuous 2D shape modeling, but they suffer from black-box uneditability, vulnerability to noise, and high parameter counts that severely hinder deployment on edge devices. We introduce Fluid-SDF, a highly compressed, differentiable Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) framework that models shapes using explicit geometric primitives blended via a smooth minimum function. By replacing traditional multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) with a parameterized primitive engine, Fluid-SDF reconstructs complex, non-convex topologies using strictly under 100 parameters, achieving comparable or superior intersection-over-union (mIoU) to standard neural baselines. Furthermore, we demonstrate that Fluid-SDF acts as a powerful geometric prior, inherently resisting high-frequency dataset noise where capacity-matched neural networks catastrophically overfit. Finally, unlike standard INRs, Fluid-SDF's explicit parameter space allows for direct, zero-shot user editing of local and global shape features without retraining. By bypassing expensive on-device gradient updates entirely, Fluid-SDF is uniquely suited for mobile AI, augmented reality, and resource-constrained embedded environments
comment: 6 pages, 5 figures
☆ Deep Learning Estimation of Sex, Age, Height, and Weight from CT-derived Digitally Reconstructed Radiographs
Tomohiro Kikuchi, Kohei Yamamoto, Yukihiro Nomura, Yosuke Yamagishi, Takeharu Yoshikawa, Toshiaki Akashi, Jun Kamohara, Hiroyuki Fujii, Harushi Mori
Purpose: To develop and validate a deep learning ensemble for estimating adult sex, age, height, and weight from coronal digitally reconstructed radiographs (DRRs) generated from diagnostic CT. Materials and Methods: This retrospective study included 128,621 CT examinations from 80,004 adults at nine institutions in Japan. Three multitask models-ConvNeXt-Base, ViT-Base/16, and MaxViT-Base-were fine-tuned using coronal DRRs and combined by weighted averaging. Data were split by institution into training (114,147 examinations; seven institutions), tuning (4,305; one institution), and test (10,169; one institution) sets; generalizability was assessed on two non-Japanese datasets. Accuracy and mean absolute error (MAE) were used to evaluate sex classification and age, height, and weight regression, respectively. Body surface area (BSA)-corrected heart and liver volume trends were compared using true versus estimated height and weight. Results: In the test set (median age, 69.9 years; 4,899 of 10,169 [48.2%] male), overall sex-classification accuracy was 0.997 (95% CI, 0.996-0.998), and MAEs were 3.57 years (3.51-3.63), 2.59 cm (2.54-2.64), and 3.40 kg (3.34-3.47) for age, height, and weight, respectively. In examinations covering the chest through pelvis, accuracy was 1.000, and MAEs were 3.15 years, 2.28 cm, and 3.18 kg, respectively. BSA calculated from estimated values reproduced age-related heart and liver volume trends obtained using true values. On non-Japanese datasets, height error increased but was reduced by continued fine-tuning. Conclusion: The ensemble estimated adult sex, age, height, and weight from CT-derived DRRs, with generally lower errors in examinations with broader anatomical coverage.
comment: Code: https://github.com/jichi-labo/DRRBiometricsPredictor
☆ Seeing Before Generating: Object Perception Enhances Single-View 3D Reconstruction
The relationship between object perception and reconstruction is well established in human vision, yet remains underexplored in computer vision. In this paper, we demonstrate that learnt object perception can significantly enhance 3D reconstruction. Focusing on the challenging task of single-view 3D object reconstruction, we propose a method that leverages perceptual signals extracted from pretrained perception models capturing semantic and geometric information to drive the reconstruction of an object from its single image. Our approach is model-agnostic and can be integrated into various reconstruction methods in a plug-and-play manner. Experiments with two state-of-the-art single-view 3D reconstruction pipelines in a benchmark dataset show consistent and substantial improvements achieved by our method, validating the effectiveness of incorporating perception into generation. We provide in-depth analysis of various aspects of our method and its application. Our project page is at https://ynhuhuynh.github.io/perception-3d/.
☆ Norm or Direction? Decoding Vision Mambas for High-Resolution Vision
Vision Mamba models replace quadratic self-attention with linear complexity selective state space models (SSMs), emerging as efficient visual backbones. However, MambaOut demonstrates that a Gated CNN block can match or exceed VMamba on image classification, questioning the necessity of SSMs for vision. This raises a fundamental question: do VMamba and MambaOut encode visual information differently at the representation level? To investigate, we apply cross model centered kernel alignment (CKA) analysis and find that VMamba's final stage blocks form representations distinctly different from both MambaOut and its own preceding blocks. We therefore focus on the final block features, decomposing each spatial token into magnitude and direction. MambaOut concentrates class-discriminative information in high-norm foreground tokens that align with Grad-CAM attribution. VMamba, by contrast, produces high-norm tokens predominantly in background regions, misaligned with Grad-CAM, yet preserves discriminative signals primarily in token directions. These observations reveal that the two models rely on different encoding strategies. We connect this difference to high-resolution classification and semantic segmentation. VMamba distributes logit support broadly across object regions, whereas MambaOut relies on sparse dominant tokens, a strategy that becomes less stable as token counts grow. Under full fine-tuning for segmentation, VMamba consistently outperforms MambaOut. These results suggest that VMamba's advantage in dense prediction stems not merely from the SSM mechanism or sequence length, but from how semantic evidence is organized across token magnitude, direction. Ultimately, we conclude that token magnitude and directional structure serve as critical axes for improving visual backbones, particularly under dense supervision.
♻ ☆ The JEPA Predictor: A Transferable Operator for Occluded Feature Completion
Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) train a predictor jointly with their encoder, but downstream deployment discards the predictor and reads features from the encoder alone. The predictor is, by construction, a learned operator from visible-context features to features at masked positions, the structure a partial-view classifier needs. We show that this operator is portable across encoder families. We first establish that, at heavy mask, retaining the frozen predictor on a JEPA encoder substantially closes the accuracy gap against the strongest non-JEPA discriminative baselines. We then bolt the frozen predictors of I-JEPA and V-JEPA 2 onto four non-JEPA hosts (CLIP, DINOv3, DINOv2, MAE) through a single linear projection between feature spaces, fit in closed form on 500 ImageNet-1k images. Across both ImageNet-9 and Stanford Dogs and across three mask fractions, the lift over each host's masked-encoder baseline grows monotonically with the mask fraction K in every host-donor pair. CLIP paired with the I-JEPA predictor recovers most of the accuracy that masking removed on ImageNet-9 at heavy occlusion, and lifts fine-grained Stanford Dogs from 15.9% to 52.1% (+36 pp). The mechanism is identifiable: the projection pays a fixed cost on visible patches and the predictor provides a growing benefit on masked patches; the benefit dominates the heavy-occlusion regime. At low K on fine-grained classification the projection cost exceeds the benefit, defining the boundary where the linear bridge breaks down. The frozen JEPA predictor functions as a portable operator for occluded feature completion across encoder families, requiring no retraining of either model while fitting matched linear probes per mask fraction.
comment: There are some major mistakes in the paper that we need internal review before we resubmit this paper
♻ ☆ AIM-CoT: Active Information-driven Multimodal Chain-of-Thought for Vision-Language Reasoning ACL 2026
Interleaved-Modal Chain-of-Thought (I-MCoT) advances vision-language reasoning, such as Visual Question Answering (VQA). This paradigm integrates specially selected visual evidence from the input image into the context of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), enabling them to ground their reasoning logic in these details. Accordingly, the efficacy of an I-MCoT framework relies on identifying what to see (evidence selection) and when to see it (triggering of insertions). However, existing methods fall short in both aspects. First, for selection, they rely on attention signals, which are unreliable -- particularly under severe granularity imbalance between the brief textual query and the informative image. Second, for triggering, they adopt static triggers, which fail to capture the VLMs' dynamic needs for visual evidence. To this end, we propose a novel I-MCoT framework, Active Information-driven Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought (AIM-CoT), which aims to improve both evidence selection and insertion triggering via: (1) Context-enhanced Attention-map Generation (CAG) to mitigate granularity imbalance via textual context enhancement; (2) Active Visual Probing (AVP) to proactively select the most informative evidence via an information foraging process; and (3) Dynamic Attention-shift Trigger (DAT) to precisely activate insertions when VLM's attention shifts from text to visual context. Experiments across three benchmarks and four backbones demonstrate AIM-CoT's consistent superiority. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AIMCoT.
comment: Accepted by ACL 2026 Main Conference. 30 pages, 6 figures
♻ ☆ Read or Ignore? A Unified Benchmark for Typographic-Attack Robustness and Text Recognition in Vision-Language Models ECCV 2026
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) are vulnerable to typographic attacks, where misleading text inserted into an image can override visual understanding. However, existing evaluation protocols and defenses are largely focused on object recognition and do not consider text-reading capability. This is a critical oversight: real-world scenarios often require both recognizing objects and reading scene text (e.g., recognizing pedestrians while reading traffic signs), where simply ignoring all text for robustness is unacceptable in practice. To address this gap, we introduce a novel task, Read-or-Ignore VQA (RIO-VQA), which jointly evaluates both requirements: models must decide, from context, when to read scene text and when to ignore inserted distractor text. To evaluate this capability, we present RIO-Bench, a same-scene counterfactual benchmark that holds the scene fixed while varying only question intent (object vs. text) and text condition (clean vs. attack), enabling direct comparisons of model behaviors with reduced confounding factors. Using RIO-Bench, we highlight a trade-off: representative defenses developed in object-centric settings can achieve robustness by suppressing text sensitivity, at the cost of text-reading performance (i.e., "ignoring" text). Motivated by this trade-off, we provide a data-driven defense baseline that improves both requirements on RIO-Bench, complementing prior text-ignoring baselines. Overall, this work highlights a fundamental misalignment between the current object-centric robustness scope and real-world multimodal requirements, providing a principled path toward reliable LVLMs.
comment: Accepted at ECCV 2026. The project page is available at: https://turingmotors.github.io/rio-vqa/
♻ ☆ EAR-Net: Pursuing End-to-End Absolute Rotations from Multi-View Images
Absolute rotation estimation is an important topic in 3D computer vision. Existing works in literature generally employ a multi-stage (at least two-stage) estimation strategy where multiple independent operations (feature matching, two-view rotation estimation, and rotation averaging) are implemented sequentially. However, such a multi-stage strategy inevitably leads to the accumulation of the errors caused by each involved operation, and degrades its final estimation on global rotations accordingly. To address this problem, we propose an End-to-end method for estimating Absolution Rotations from multi-view images based on deep neural Networks, called EAR-Net. The proposed EAR-Net consists of an epipolar confidence graph construction module and a confidence-aware rotation averaging module. The epipolar confidence graph construction module is explored to simultaneously predict pairwise relative rotations among the input images and their corresponding confidences, resulting in a weighted graph (called epipolar confidence graph). Based on this graph, the confidence-aware rotation averaging module, which is differentiable, is explored to predict the absolute rotations. Thanks to the introduced confidences of the relative rotations, the proposed EAR-Net could effectively handle outlier cases. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate that EAR-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in terms of accuracy and speed.
♻ ☆ Aligned Stable Inpainting: Mitigating Unwanted Object Insertion and Preserving Color Consistency
Generative image inpainting can produce realistic results even with large, irregular masks, but existing methods still suffer from two common problems: (1) Unwanted object insertion: hallucinate artifacts that do not match the surrounding context. (2) Color inconsistency: noticeable color shifts that lead to smeared textures. We analyze the causes of these issues and propose Aligned Stable inpainting with UnKnown Areas prior (ASUKA), a post-hoc framework for pre-trained inpainting models. To reduce unwanted object insertion, we use reconstruction-based priors to guide the generative model, suppressing hallucinated objects while preserving generative flexibility. To address color inconsistency, we design a specialized VAE decoder that formulates latent-to-image decoding as a local harmonization task. We implement ASUKA on both U-Net-based and DiT-based inpainting models with lightweight modifications. Experiments on Places2 and MISATO, our proposed benchmark, show that ASUKA effectively suppresses object hallucination and improves color consistency, outperforming existing diffusion- and rectified flow-based inpainting methods. The dataset, models, and code will be released on GitHub.
comment: Update: more exps and analysis
♻ ☆ ScaleMoGen: Autoregressive Next-Scale Prediction for Human Motion Generation ECCV 2026
We present ScaleMoGen, a scale-wise autoregressive framework for text-driven human motion generation. Unlike conventional autoregressive approaches that rely on standard next-token prediction, ScaleMoGen frames motion generation as a coarse-to-fine process. We quantize 3D motions into compositional discrete tokens across multiple skeletal-emporal scales of increasing granularity, learning to generate motion by autoregressively predicting next-scale token maps. To maintain structural integrity, our motion tokenizers and quantizers are explicitly designed so that discrete tokens at every scale strictly preserve the skeletal hierarchy. Additionally, we employ bitwise quantization and prediction, which efficiently scale up the tokenizer vocabulary to preserve motion details and stabilize optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ScaleMoGen achieves state-of-the-art performance, establishing an FID of 0.030 (vs. 0.045 for MoMask) on HumanML3D and a CLIP Score of 0.693 (vs. 0.685 for MoMask++) on the SnapMoGen dataset. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our skeletal-temporal multi-scale representation naturally facilitates training-free, text-guided motion editing.
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026. Project page: https://inwoohwang.me/ScaleMoGen
♻ ☆ Generalized Least Squares Kernelized Tensor Factorization
Recovering incomplete multidimensional tensor-structured data is a fundamental task in many real-world applications. Smoothness-constrained low-rank tensor factorization effectively captures global and long-range correlations, but often struggles to characterize short-scale, high-frequency, or locally varying structures. We propose GLSKF, a complementary Generalized Least Squares Kernelized Tensor Factorization framework, for multidimensional spatiotemporal data completion. GLSKF additively integrates a covariance-regularized low-rank global component with an explicitly modeled locally correlated residual component under a GLS objective, enabling effective modeling of both global dependencies and localized variations. A covariance norm regularizer encodes spatiotemporal dependencies in both components: structured covariances are imposed on the latent factor columns to enforce smoothness in the global factorization, whereas compactly supported sparse kernels are used to model local correlations in the residual. We develop an alternating least squares algorithm with blockwise linear-system updates that exploit the Kronecker structure of the covariance matrices under missing data and facilitate fast conjugate gradient solves. Additional computational gains are obtained by exploiting the sparsity and Toeplitz structure of the local residual covariance matrices for efficient matrix-vector multiplications. We evaluate GLSKF on four real-world multidimensional data-completion tasks: traffic speed imputation, color image completion, digital video recovery, and MRI data reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that GLSKF achieves superior reconstruction performance and favorable scalability across a range of tensor completion tasks, supporting its broad applicability to multidimensional data completion.
♻ ☆ Semantic Richness or Geometric Reasoning? The Fragility of VLM's Visual Invariance
This work investigates the fundamental fragility of state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) under basic geometric transformations. While modern VLMs excel at semantic tasks such as recognizing objects in canonical orientations and describing complex scenes, they exhibit systematic failures at a more fundamental level: lack of robust spatial invariance and equivariance required to reliably determine object identity under simple rotations, scaling, and identity transformations. We demonstrate this limitation through a systematic evaluation across diverse visual domains, including symbolic sketches, natural photographs, and abstract art. Performance drops sharply as semantic content becomes sparse, and this behavior is observed across architectures, model capacities, and prompting strategies. Overall, our results reveal a systematic gap between semantic understanding and spatial reasoning in current VLMs, highlighting the need for stronger geometric grounding in future multimodal systems.
♻ ☆ IBoxCLA: Towards Robust Box-supervised Segmentation of Polyp via Improved Box-dice and Contrastive Latent-anchors
Box-supervised polyp segmentation attracts increasing attention for its cost-effective potential. Existing solutions often rely on learning-free methods or pretrained models to laboriously generate pseudo masks, triggering Dice constraint subsequently. In this paper, we found that a model guided by the simplest box-filled masks can accurately predict polyp locations/sizes, but suffers from shape collapsing. In response, we propose two innovative learning fashions, Improved Box-dice (IBox) and Contrastive Latent-Anchors (CLA), and combine them to train a robust box-supervised model IBoxCLA. The core idea behind IBoxCLA is to decouple the learning of location/size and shape, allowing for focused constraints on each of them. Specifically, IBox transforms the segmentation map into a proxy map using shape decoupling and confusion-region swapping sequentially. Within the proxy map, shapes are disentangled, while locations/sizes are encoded as box-like responses. By constraining the proxy map instead of the raw prediction, the box-filled mask can well supervise IBoxCLA without misleading its shape learning. Furthermore, CLA contributes to shape learning by generating two types of latent anchors, which are learned and updated using momentum and segmented polyps to steadily represent polyp and background features. The latent anchors facilitate IBoxCLA to capture discriminative features within and outside boxes in a contrastive manner, yielding clearer boundaries. We benchmark IBoxCLA on five public polyp datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the competitive performance of IBoxCLA compared to recent fully-supervised polyp segmentation methods, and its superiority over other box-supervised state-of-the-arts with a relative increase of overall mDice and mIoU by at least 6.5% and 7.5%, respectively.
♻ ☆ When Visual Evidence is Ambiguous: Pareidolia as a Diagnostic Probe for Vision Models
When visual evidence is ambiguous, vision models must decide how to interpret face-like patterns. Face pareidolia, the perception of faces in non-face objects, provides a controlled probe of such decisions. We introduce a diagnostic framework that analyzes detection, localization, uncertainty and bias across class, difficulty and emotion. We evaluate six models spanning four representational regimes: vision-language models (VLMs; CLIP-B/32, CLIP-L/14, LLaVA-1.5-7B), pure vision classification (ViT), object detection (YOLOv8), and face detection (RetinaFace). Our results reveal that uncertainty and bias are decoupled: low uncertainty can signal either safe suppression, as in detectors, or extreme over-interpretation, as in VLMs. VLMs exhibit semantic overactivation, systematically interpreting ambiguous non-human regions as Human, with LLaVA over-calling on 73% of non-human pareidolic images, especially for negative emotions. ViT instead follows an uncertainty-as-abstention strategy, remaining diffuse yet largely unbiased. Detection-based models achieve low bias through conservative priors that suppress pareidolia responses even when localization is controlled. Together, these results show that behavior under ambiguity is governed more by representation than thresholds, establishing face pareidolia as a diagnostic of semantic robustness and a source of ambiguity-aware hard negatives for vision models. Code will be released upon publication.
♻ ☆ Vidu S1: A Real-Time Interactive Video Generation Model
Jintao Zhang, Kai Jiang, Jintao Chen, Xu Wang, Yang Luo, Yuji Wang, Dechuang Chen, Jungang Li, Chengyang Ye, Marco Chen, Hongzhou Zhu, Min Zhao, Yuxuan Jiang, Zhengkun Huang, Chendong Xiang, Kaiwen Zheng, Haoxu Wang, Xiaohang Wang, Qi Jia, Xin Chen, Yimin Chen, Youhe Jiang, Fangcheng Fu, Zhijie Deng, Fan Bao, Jianfei Chen, Jun Zhu
We introduce Vidu S1, a real-time interactive video generation model supporting voice control of digital characters. Users can control video generation content at any moment through voice instructions. Vidu S1 supports infinite-length real-time video generation without blurring, drift, or visual distortion. Built with TurboDiffusion and TurboServe, Vidu S1 outputs 540p real-time videos at up to 42 FPS on regular consumer GPUs. Users can upload custom images of real people, anime, and pets, and choose different voice tones for personalized experiences. Experiments show that Vidu S1 achieves the best performance across all test metrics while fully meeting real-time inference requirements. A playable online demo is available at https://vidu.com/vidu-stream.
♻ ☆ Survival of the Cheapest: Cost-Aware Hardware Adaptation for Adversarial Robustness
Deploying adversarially robust machine learning systems requires continuous trade-offs between robustness, cost, and latency. We present an autonomic decision-support framework providing a quantitative foundation for adaptive hardware selection and hyper-parameter tuning in cloud-native deep learning. The framework applies accelerated failure time (AFT) models to quantify the effect of hardware choice, batch size, epochs, and validation accuracy on model survival time. This framework can be naturally integrated into an autonomic control loop (monitor--analyse--plan--execute, MAPE-K), where system metrics such as cost, robustness, and latency are continuously evaluated and used to adapt model configurations and hardware selection. Experiments across three GPU architectures confirm the framework is both sound and cost-effective: the Nvidia L4 yields a 20% increase in adversarial survival time while costing 75% less than the V100, demonstrating that expensive hardware does not necessarily improve robustness. The analysis further reveals that model inference latency is a stronger predictor of adversarial robustness than training time or hardware configuration.
♻ ☆ Internet-of-Things Architectures for Secure Cyber-Physical Spaces: the VISOR Experience Report
Jessica De Pascale, Giuseppe Cascavilla, Mirella Sangiovanni, Damian A. Tamburri, Willem-Jan van den Heuvel
Internet of things (IoT) technologies are becoming a more and more widespread part of civilian life in common urban spaces, which are rapidly turning into cyber-physical spaces. Simultaneously, the fear of terrorism and crime in such public spaces is ever-increasing. Due to the resulting increased demand for security, video-based IoT surveillance systems have become an important area for research. Considering the large number of devices involved in the illicit recognition task, we conducted a field study in a Dutch Easter music festival in a national interest project called VISOR to select the most appropriate device configuration in terms of performance and results. We iteratively architected solutions for the security of cyber-physical spaces using IoT devices. We tested the performance of multiple federated devices encompassing drones, closed-circuit television, smart phone cameras, and smart glasses to detect real-case scenarios of potentially malicious activities such as mosh-pits and pick-pocketing. Our results pave the way to select optimal IoT architecture configurations -- i.e., a mix of CCTV, drones, smart glasses, and camera phones in our case -- to make safer cyber-physical spaces' a reality.
♻ ☆ Why Do Vision Language Models Struggle To Recognize Human Emotions? ECCV
Understanding emotions is a fundamental ability for intelligent systems to be able to interact with humans. Vision-language models (VLMs) have made tremendous progress in the last few years for many visual tasks, potentially offering a promising solution for understanding emotions. However, it is surprising that even the most sophisticated contemporary VLMs struggle to recognize human emotions or to outperform even specialized vision-only classifiers. In this paper we ask the question 'Why do VLMs struggle to recognize human emotions?', and observe that the inherently continuous and dynamic task of facial expression recognition (DFER) exposes two critical VLM vulnerabilities. First, emotion datasets are naturally long-tailed, and the web-scale data used to pre-train VLMs exacerbates this head-class bias, causing them to systematically collapse rare, under-represented emotions into common categories. We propose alternative sampling strategies that prevent favoring common concepts. Second, temporal information is critical for understanding emotions. However, VLMs are unable to represent temporal information over dense frame sequences, as they are limited by context size and the number of tokens that can fit in memory, which poses a clear challenge for emotion recognition. We demonstrate that the sparse temporal sampling strategy used in VLMs is inherently misaligned with the fleeting nature of micro-expressions (0.25-0.5 seconds), which are often the most critical affective signal. As a diagnostic probe, we propose a multi-stage context enrichment strategy that utilizes the information from 'in-between' frames by first converting them into natural language summaries. This enriched textual context is provided as input to the VLM alongside sparse keyframes, preventing attentional dilution from excessive visual data while preserving the emotional trajectory.
comment: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2026
♻ ☆ MeanFlowNFT: Bringing Forward-Process RL to Average-Velocity Generators
MeanFlow generators achieve fast few-step sampling by predicting average velocities over time intervals, making them attractive for efficient generation. Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a powerful way to align diffusion and flow models with human preferences and task-specific objectives. In particular, DiffusionNFT offers an efficient forward-process RL framework that does not require reverse-process trajectories or likelihood estimation. However, applying such RL methods to MeanFlow remains underexplored. DiffusionNFT optimizes instantaneous velocities, whereas MeanFlow samples with average velocities. To bridge this gap, we introduce MeanFlowNFT. Inspired by the MeanFlow identity, which bridges average and instantaneous velocities, we construct an induced instantaneous-velocity predictor. We apply the DiffusionNFT objective to this predictor, making reward optimization well-defined for MeanFlow. Sampling remains based on the average velocity, preserving MeanFlow's fast few-step generation. We further prove that MeanFlowNFT inherits DiffusionNFT's strict policy-improvement guarantee. Experiments on image and video generation show that MeanFlowNFT consistently improves baselines. Moreover, it outperforms prior state-of-the-art RL-tuned few-step generators on most metrics ($6$ of $8$ on SD3.5-M), and can even surpass multi-step RL-tuned diffusion while using only a few sampling steps. For instance, on Wan 2.1, $4$-step MeanFlowNFT reaches a VBench score of $84.33$, surpassing $50$-step LongCat-Video RL ($82.57$).
comment: Project Page: https://harahan.github.io/meanflownft-project-page/, GitHub: https://github.com/Harahan/MeanFlowNFT, Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/Harahan/MeanFlowNFT, Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Harahan/meanflownft-fewstep-generation
♻ ☆ MoGe-3: Fine-Detail Monocular Geometry Estimation with Self-Guided Sparse Volumetric Refinement
Monocular geometry estimation has recently achieved impressive performance across diverse scenes. However, state-of-the-art models still face notable distortion in local 3D structure, especially in fine details, like thin structures and small objects. We attribute this limitation to an architectural mismatch: most current models decode 3D geometry within a 2D parameterization, where feature interactions are governed by image-plane proximity rather than true 3D spatial relationships. This inadvertently mixes features from geometrically distant surfaces, resulting in over-smoothed geometry particularly around thin or elongated structure. In this paper, we propose MoGe-3, a fine-detail monocular geometry estimation model with Self-Guided Sparse 3D Refinement (SSR) that lifts monocular geometry modeling from 2D image space to 3D space for high-fidelity metric-scale point maps. MoGe-3 lifts the coarse point map from a foundation base model onto a sparse voxel shell and refines it via SSR. The SSR employs sparse convolutions that aggregate features based on 3D spatial locality, avoiding feature mixing across depth discontinuities. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate that MoGe-3 significantly outperforms existing approaches in recovering fine detailed 3D geometry across both quantitative metrics and qualitative visualizations. Project page: https://qft-333.github.io/moge3page/
♻ ☆ Look Again Before You Abstain:Budgeted Conformal Evidence Acquisition for Reliable Vision-Language Model
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) hallucinate: they assert visual details that the image does not support. A principled remedy is selective prediction with a distribution-free guarantee-verify each claim and abstain when the claim is not grounded, so that the hallucination rate among asserted claims is provably bounded. We show, however, that this guarantee is bought at a brutal price: to keep the hallucination rate below $5\%$ on a balanced object-existence benchmark, a state-of-the-art conformal filter must abstain on more than $80\%$ of claims. We argue that abstention is wasteful when more visual evidence is cheaply available, and introduce Budgeted Conformal Evidence Acquisition (BCEA), which replaces the binary answer/abstain decision with a three-way choice: answer, abstain, or acquire additional visual evidence by re-examining the image (zooming, cropping, or applying a claim-specific intervention) under a bounded
♻ ☆ Great X: A Unified Multi-Modal Simulator Bridging the Sim2Real Gap for 6G
Large-scale, precisely synchronized multi-modal datasets are critical for data-driven sixth-generation (6G) wireless research, yet real-world collection remains costly and difficult. Existing multi-platform simulators often suffer from timing misalignment, limited modality support, and simplified scene and material modeling, which reduce fidelity and enlarge the simulation-to-reality (Sim2Real) gap. We propose Great-X, a unified single-engine simulator implemented in Unreal Engine. Great-X integrates native ray tracing with co-located visual and electromagnetic material properties on shared 3D meshes, enabling pixel-level consistency between radio and visual outputs. A deterministic fixed-step clock and synchronous buffering provide frame-accurate alignment across CSI, RGB, depth, LiDAR, radar, and event data. Based on this framework, we construct Great-MCD, containing over three million synchronized samples across urban and rural environments, day and night conditions, multiple UAV types, and diverse trajectories. Experiments show that Great-X generates channel impulse responses consistent with real measurements and provides transferable data for wireless positioning and CSI feedback, outperforming existing simulators and measured-data baselines in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings.
♻ ☆ Kontinuous Kontext: Continuous Strength Control for Instruction-based Image Editing CVPR 2026
Instruction-based image editing offers a powerful and intuitive way to manipulate images through natural language. Yet, relying solely on text instructions limits fine-grained control over the extent of edits. We introduce Kontinuous Kontext, an instruction-driven editing model that provides a new dimension of control over edit strength, enabling users to adjust edits gradually from no change to a fully realized result in a smooth and continuous manner. Kontinuous Kontext extends a state-of-the-art image editing model to accept an additional input, a scalar edit strength which is then paired with the edit instruction, enabling explicit control over the extent of the edit. To inject this scalar information, we train a lightweight projector network that maps the input scalar and the edit instruction to coefficients in the model's modulation space. For training our model, we synthesize a diverse dataset of image-edit-instruction-strength quadruplets using existing generative models, followed by a filtering stage to ensure quality and consistency. Kontinuous Kontext provides a unified approach for fine-grained control over edit strength for instruction driven editing from subtle to strong across diverse operations such as stylization, attribute, material, background, and shape changes, without requiring attribute-specific training.
comment: Project Page: https://snap-research.github.io/kontinuouskontext/, Accepted at CVPR 2026
♻ ☆ FedS2R: One-Shot Federated Domain Generalization for Synthetic-to-Real Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving IEEE
Federated domain generalization has shown promising progress in image classification by enabling collaborative training across multiple clients without sharing raw data. However, its potential in the semantic segmentation of autonomous driving remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose FedS2R, the first one-shot federated domain generalization framework for synthetic-to-real semantic segmentation in autonomous driving. FedS2R comprises two components: an inconsistency-driven data augmentation strategy that generates images for unstable classes, and a multi-client knowledge distillation scheme with feature fusion that distills a global model from multiple client models. Experiments on five real-world datasets, Cityscapes, BDD100K, Mapillary, IDD, and ACDC, show that the global model significantly outperforms individual client models and is only 2 mIoU points behind the model trained with simultaneous access to all client data. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of FedS2R in synthetic-to-real semantic segmentation for autonomous driving under federated learning
comment: Accepted by IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV) 2026
♻ ☆ Recursive ArUco Markers: A Scalable Fiducial Marker Design for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Landing Pads
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) increasingly rely on visual fiducial markers for autonomous navigation and precision landing. However, standard markers suffer from limited operational ranges, becoming undetectable when the camera is either too far or too close. While recursive and fractal markers have been proposed to address this issue, existing approaches either require the marker's center to remain visible, making them vulnerable to occlusion, or are limited in their recursion depth and placement. We propose a novel Recursive ArUco marker design. Our method allows any standard fiducial marker to be transformed into a recursive marker with an arbitrary depth. By employing a modified bit-sampling strategy during detection, we embed complete markers within both the black and white bits of the parent marker. This approach guarantees unlimited recursion depth and robust detection even with partial occlusion, as it does not rely on the marker's center being visible. Furthermore, by maintaining a single, unique identifier across all recursive scales, our proposal provides an extensive dictionary of multiple unique landing pads. This capability allows fleets of UAVs to operate simultaneously, with each drone landing at its designated location -- a feature not supported by existing Fractal and Harco markers due to their structural and dictionary constraints.
♻ ☆ It Depends on the Dataset: When a Brain-Encoding Model's Predicted Responses Beat Their Visual Backbone for Video Memorability
Brain-encoding foundation models predict fMRI responses to video, audio, and text well enough to win the Algonauts 2025 challenge. We ask whether their predicted responses, obtained with no scanner, are a useful feature lens for a downstream human-behavior task: forecasting the memorability of short videos. We project each clip into TRIBE v2's predicted cortical space and forecast short-term memorability with ridge regression, against a matched control: the model's own V-JEPA2 visual backbone taken before the brain projection. The answer is dataset-dependent, and cleanly so. Within Memento10k the backbone wins (Spearman 0.594 vs 0.544 for the brain projection); within VideoMem the brain projection wins (0.415 vs 0.368, delta +0.047, 95% CI [+0.009, +0.088]). Both within-dataset gaps have bootstrap intervals excluding zero, in opposite directions. Cross-dataset transfer inherits the split: trained on Memento10k and tested on VideoMem the brain projection beats the backbone (+0.076), while the reverse loses heavily (-0.311). Each representation transfers best onto the dataset it already fits better. The VideoMem advantage is not a sample-size artifact (it survives matched training size and a PCA-then-ridge pipeline) and not mere compression of the backbone (a compressed or heavily regularized backbone tops out below the brain projection, which also beats a transfer-tuned backbone, +0.053). So predicted-brain features carry a small but real memorability signal the backbone misses on one dataset and not the other: not a domain-general prior, but a dataset-specific representation. A vision-orthogonal component (partial Spearman 0.19, permutation p=2.5e-4) localizes to ventral occipito-temporal cortex. Analysis code is released; the datasets and the predicted-response arrays derived from them are not redistributed, because the VideoMem licence forbids it without prior written approval.
comment: 10 pages, 3 figures. v2: corrects the data-availability statement (the predicted-response arrays are not redistributable under the VideoMem licence), adds the code repository link, and adds the dataset citation required by the VideoMem licence
♻ ☆ Test-Time Registers as Global Priors for Tokenized Image Generation
Attention-based models often develop attention sinks, where a small number of tokens repeatedly attract attention and accumulate unusually large activations. In vision transformers, these outliers are closely related to registers, which have been diagnostically linked to global, low-frequency image structure. Existing work has largely studied registers through interpretability analyses and linear probes, leaving open whether they can be operationalized as plug-and-play signals for generation without retraining. We revisit this question in tokenized image generation. Using OpenCLIP and DINOv2 on ImageNet, we find that test-time register features exhibit stronger low-frequency concentration than both [CLS] readouts and patch-mean features, and show a consistent (albeit moderate) correlation with pixel-space DCT low-frequency energy. Motivated by these diagnostics, we introduce RegToken, a training-free procedure that converts register structure into a small set of global prior tokens by (i) NFN-based layer localization, (ii) TokenRank-guided subspace extraction, and (iii) a projection-and-conservation update on the register subspace. Inserted into a frozen compact 1D token generation pipeline, RegToken improves ImageNet generation and alignment metrics (e.g., FID-5k 20.5 to 20.1, SigLIP 3.6 to 3.9) without modifying pretrained weights, and accelerates test-time optimization (Steps@$τ$ 74 to 52). Overall, our results suggest that structures often viewed as attention artifacts can be repurposed as lightweight global priors for tokenized generation.
comment: 39 pages, 10 figures
♻ ☆ Training-Free Semantic-Edge Response Decoding of SAM3 for Cross-Domain Infrastructure Crack Segmentation
Cross-project crack segmentation is hindered by variations in materials, imaging conditions, crack morphology, and background interference. Text-promptable foundation models reduce task-specific training, but SAM3's final region proposals may suppress, truncate, or distort weak and fragmented cracks. We propose \textbf{S}emantic-\textbf{E}dge \textbf{R}esponse \textbf{D}ecoding (\textbf{SERD}), a training-free method that replaces the proposal interface with the internal language-conditioned response. SERD normalizes this dense response, calibrates it using a fixed Sobel structural prior, and applies a single threshold to generate the crack mask. SAM3 remains frozen, with no target-domain annotation, auxiliary prompting network, or test-time optimization. When CamCrack789 is used only for threshold selection, SERD achieves 58.00\% average Crack IoU on five unseen datasets, compared with 54.33\% for native SAM3. Across six rotated source-domain settings, SERD obtains 60.23\% mean target-domain IoU and 67.18\% Boundary F1, exceeding SAM3 by 3.27 and 2.70 percentage points. Regional, structural, foreground-area, robustness, and latency analyses show that direct response decoding recovers substantial crack evidence lost during proposal formation, while structural calibration improves precision and boundary localization. The results demonstrate that internal-response decoding provides a simple and transferable interface for cross-domain infrastructure crack segmentation. \textit{Code is available at: \href{https://github.com/xauat-liushipeng/SERD}{GitHub}}.
♻ ☆ ViMax: Agentic Video Generation
Long-form video generation requires systematic narrative planning and visual consistency that current short-clip methods cannot provide. Existing methods generate isolated sequences without narrative structure and lack mechanisms for maintaining character and environmental consistency across scenes. We present ViMax, an agentic video generation framework that addresses video creation through coordinated multi-agent collaboration where specialized components negotiate narrative decisions, visual continuity, and production quality. Our framework employs a hierarchical narrative engine with retrieval-augmented generation for global story coherence and a dependency-aware visual consistency mechanism that tracks character and environmental states across temporal boundaries, while VLM-guided agents continuously monitor and refine both narrative coherence and visual fidelity. The framework enables coordinated agent collaboration to generate extended narrative content. This maintains both storytelling integrity and visual coherence across multi-scene timelines.
comment: 20 pages, 13 figures
♻ ☆ Guide, Think, Act: Interactive Embodied Reasoning in Vision-Language-Action Models
Yiran Ling, Qing Lian, Jinghang Li, Qing Jiang, Tianming Zhang, Xiaoke Jiang, Chuanxiu Liu, Jie Liu, Lei Zhang
In this paper, we propose GTA-VLA(Guide, Think, Act), an interactive Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework that enables spatially steerable embodied reasoning by allowing users to guide robot policies with explicit visual cues. Existing VLA models learn a direct "Sense-to-Act" mapping from multimodal observations to robot actions. While effective within the training distribution, such tightly coupled policies are brittle under out-of-domain (OOD) shifts and difficult to correct when failures occur. Although recent embodied Chain-of-Thought (CoT) approaches expose intermediate reasoning, they still lack a mechanism for incorporating human spatial guidance, limiting their ability to resolve visual ambiguities or recover from mistakes. To address this gap, our framework allows users to optionally guide the policy with spatial priors, such as affordance points, boxes, and traces, which the subsequent reasoning process can directly condition on. Based on these inputs, the model generates a unified spatial-visual Chain-of-Thought that integrates external guidance with internal task planning, aligning human visual intent with autonomous decision-making. For practical deployment, we further couple the reasoning module with a lightweight reactive action head for efficient action execution. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. On the in-domain SimplerEnv WidowX benchmark, our framework achieves a state-of-the-art 81.2% success rate. Under OOD visual shifts and spatial ambiguities, a single visual interaction substantially improves task success over existing methods, highlighting the value of interactive reasoning for failure recovery in embodied control. More details of the project can be found here: https://github.com/FutianLabs/GTA-VLA.
♻ ☆ PAVXploreRL: Physical-Action-Visual World Model Reinforcement Learning with Action Exploration
Action-conditioned world models are a key component of embodied AI, serving as scalable policy evaluators that reduce reliance on expensive real-world rollouts. To accurately capture diverse action-induced dynamics, such models should satisfy three key objectives-Physical Plausibility (P), Action Adherence (A), and Visual Fidelity (V), collectively referred to as PAV-while remaining robust to both in-distribution (ID) expert demonstrations and out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. However, existing methods primarily rely on ID action-video pairs and pixel-level reconstruction losses, which do not explicitly optimize PAV objectives and generalize poorly beyond expert data. To address this, we propose PAVXploreRL, a reinforcement learning framework built on a pretrained latent world model that explicitly optimizes PAV objectives through reward-driven training. To improve action generalization, our method jointly leverages ID trajectories and noise-driven OOD action exploration, without paired video supervision. Experiments show that PAVXploreRL consistently outperforms pretrained baselines, achieving a 5.6% average gain across benchmarks and producing higher-quality PAV properties. As a policy evaluator, it also yields more reliable performance estimates and reduces the overestimation bias of prior expert-only world models such as Ctrl-World. Code: https://github.com/Social-AI-Studio/PAVXploreRL
comment: 9 pages, 5 figures
♻ ☆ TaskTok: Delving into Task Tokens for Task-driven Image Restoration ECCV 2026
While traditional image restoration focuses on perceptual quality, Task-Driven Image Restoration (TDIR) aims to maximize the performance of downstream high-level vision tasks. Recent approaches leveraging generative priors have shown promise for TDIR; however, they typically suffer from computational inefficiency and potential semantic alteration by indiscriminately updating all latent tokens. In this paper, we posit that not all visual information is equally important for machine perception. Through an analysis of the latent token space, we observe that task-relevant cues are unevenly distributed across the token sequence, exhibiting index-wise specialization. This suggests that selectively refining a subset of tokens can be sufficient for task-driven objectives. Leveraging this insight, we propose TaskTok, a novel framework that selectively restores only task-relevant tokens via a learnable token switch and a lightweight token refinement module. Extensive experiments across image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection demonstrate that TaskTok significantly enhances task performance with high computational efficiency. The source code is available at https://github.com/jimmy9704/TaskTok
comment: ECCV 2026
♻ ☆ Brewing Stronger Features: Dual-Teacher Distillation for Multispectral Earth Observation CVPR 2026
Foundation models are transforming Earth Observation (EO), yet the diversity of EO sensors and modalities makes a single universal model unrealistic. Multiple specialized EO foundation models (EOFMs) will likely coexist, making efficient knowledge transfer across modalities essential. Most existing EO pretraining relies on masked image modeling, which emphasizes local reconstruction but provides limited control over global semantic structure. To address this, we propose a dual-teacher contrastive distillation framework for multispectral imagery that aligns the student's pretraining objective with the contrastive self-distillation paradigm of modern optical vision foundation models (VFMs). Our approach combines a multispectral teacher with an optical VFM teacher, enabling coherent cross-modal representation learning. Experiments across diverse optical and multispectral benchmarks show that our model adapts to multispectral data without compromising performance on optical-only inputs, achieving state-of-the-art results in both settings, with an average improvement of 3.64 percentage points in semantic segmentation, 1.2 in change detection, and 1.31 in classification tasks. This demonstrates that contrastive distillation provides a principled and efficient approach to scalable representation learning across heterogeneous EO data sources. Project page: \textcolor{magenta}{https://wolfilip.github.io/DEO/}.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026 as Highlight
♻ ☆ Trusted Multi-View Deep Learning Classification of Fetal Congenital Heart Disease with Feature-level and Decision-level Fusion
Congenital heart disease (CHD) refers to the abnormal anatomical structure caused by the abnormal development of the heart and great vessels during embryonic development. Traditional diagnostics often fail to achieve high accuracy and efficiency, especially given the complexity of cardiac anatomy. This study presents a specialized multi-view deep learning framework for CHD binary classification using echocardiographic images. A large-scale CHD dataset, including five views, was used to train the model, enabling it to integrate multi-angle image data. The framework utilizes advanced feature extraction and attention mechanisms to improve diagnostic precision and reliability. An uncertainty-based decision-making component is also integrated to handle low-quality images, enhancing diagnostic outcomes. Experimental results show that this method achieves top-tier performance on our dataset and provides a robust tool for early CHD detection, underscoring its potential for clinical use. The dataset and source code will be released upon paper acceptance.
♻ ☆ GH-ESD: Grounded Hypothesis-Driven Error Slice Discovery for Instance-Level Vision Tasks ECCV2026
Systematic failures of vision models on semantically coherent subsets, known as error slices, reveal limitations in robustness and evaluation. Existing slice discovery approaches largely model slices as clusters in representation space or combinations of predefined attributes. While effective for image-level classification, such formulations are insufficient for instance-level tasks such as object detection and segmentation, where failures often arise from contextual relational and spatially grounded visual patterns. We propose GH-ESD (Grounded Hypothesis-Driven Error Slice Discovery), a generate and verify framework that reformulates slice discovery as grounded hypothesis generation and statistical verification. GH-ESD constructs relational failure hypotheses using LLM priors and grounded visual evidence, discovers hypothesis slices at the instance level via Vision Language Models, and verifies them through statistical trend analysis over instance-level errors. We also introduce GESD (Grounded Error Slice Dataset), a new benchmark for instance-level error slice discovery, providing expert-defined and spatially grounded slices derived from detection and segmentation failures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GH-ESD consistently outperforms baselines, improving Precision@10 by 0.10 (0.73 vs. 0.63) on the GESD benchmark for detection tasks, while also supporting segmentation scenarios. GH-ESD identifies interpretable slices that facilitate actionable model improvements.
comment: Accepted by ECCV2026
♻ ☆ Team RAS in 11th ABAW Competition: Multimodal Ambivalence Recognition Approach
Elena Ryumina, Maxim Markitantov, Alexandr Axyonov, Fedor Shchetinin, Timur Abdulkadirov, Dmitry Ryumin, Alexey Karpov
Automatic recognition of ambivalence and hesitancy is challenging because these states may be expressed through inconsistent linguistic, acoustic, facial, and contextual patterns, while top-performing systems often rely on computationally expensive ensembles. We present a single text-centered multimodal approach for video-level ambivalence and hesitancy recognition for the 11th Affective & Behavior Analysis in-the-Wild (ABAW) Challenge. The proposed approach combines linguistic, acoustic, facial, and scene features using text-centered multimodal fusion model. Text Residual Fusion treats text as the anchor modality and applies gated residual adjustments based on the other modalities. Experiments on the Behavioural Ambivalence/Hesitancy (BAH) corpus confirm that text is the strongest unimodal modality. The Text Residual Fusion model achieves an average Macro F1-score (MF1) of 75.14% across the Development and Public Test subsets. On the Private Test subset, it reaches an MF1 of 78.24%, outperforming the text model by 4.03%. These results demonstrate that complementary multimodal information can improve recognition performance without requiring a large model ensemble.
comment: 10 pages, 2 figures
♻ ☆ PC-Seg: Progressive Cross-View Consistency for 3D OCT Segmentation from Sparse 2D Annotations MICCAI 2026
Tsubasa Konno, Takahiro Ninomiya, Yukun Zhou, Koichi Ito, Siegfried K. Wagner, Yiqun Lin, Pearse A. Keane, Toru Nakazawa, Takafumi Aoki
Volumetric segmentation of optical coherence tomography (OCT) images is essential for diagnosing ocular diseases but requires labor-intensive voxel-wise annotations. While semi-supervised learning (SSL) can reduce annotation costs, most existing methods process data slice by slice and fail to exploit the inherent 3D spatial context. We propose PC-Seg, a progressive cross-view consistency framework that learns high-accuracy 3D segmentation models from sparse 2D annotations. Unlike conventional multi-view approaches, PC-Seg uses a single 2D model to learn cross-view consistency from standard B-scans and orthogonal slices, thereby generating reliable volumetric pseudo-labels. These pseudo-labels are then distilled into a 3D model, followed by a co-training stage in which the 2D and 3D models mutually refine each other through ensemble pseudo-labeling. Experiments on the MSHC and Duke DME datasets demonstrate that PC-Seg achieves accuracy comparable to fully supervised learning while using labels for only about 0.7% of the training data, outperforming state-of-the-art semi-supervised and retinal layer segmentation methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/gsisaoki/pc-seg-official.
comment: Accepted at MICCAI 2026
♻ ☆ FE-MCFormer: a novel time-frequency interpretable architecture for machinery fault diagnosis under strong noise environments
Interpretable fault diagnosis (FD) plays a critical role in industrial manufacturing, as it improves human-machine understanding and operational efficiency. However, harsh operating environments often introduce strong background interference or noise, which weakens the discriminative capability and interpretability of existing FD methods. To address this issue, this paper proposes FE-MCFormer, a time-frequency fusion framework for robust and time-frequency interpretable fault diagnosis under strong noise conditions. A frequency adaptive learning layer (FALL) is developed to perform learnable spectral reconstruction, which explicitly suppresses noise-dominated frequency responses while preserving fault-sensitive harmonic structures. Furthermore, a multiscale time-frequency fusion (MSTFF) architecture is designed to jointly capture localized impulsive characteristics and structured global spectral interactions. Extensive experiments on a rolling bearing dataset and a real-world centrifugal compressor dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves stable and interpretable diagnostic performance under severe noise environments down to -10 dB SNR. The results indicate that FE-MCFormer provides an effective framework for turbomachinery fault diagnosis in complex noisy environments.
♻ ☆ Beyond Post-Quantization: Native Hash Learning with a Dedicated HASH Token
Efficient large-scale image retrieval requires compact representations that preserve semantic similarity under fast Hamming-space search. Deep hashing is appealing, but most existing CNN- and ViT-based methods still follow a post-quantization paradigm, where continuous visual features are first learned and binary codes are then produced by a terminal hash projection or binarization operation. This late code generation creates a feature-to-code discrepancy between the continuously optimized representation space and the discrete Hamming space used for retrieval. To address this limitation, we propose HashViT, a Vision Transformer framework for native hash token learning. Instead of treating hashing as a terminal readout, HashViT introduces a dedicated HASH token that serves as a persistent, hash-oriented retrieval state inside the transformer. The HASH token is structurally decomposed into a Hash Register for direct binary code generation and a Semantic Workspace for preserving auxiliary continuous semantics. To enable effective workspace-to-register interaction, we further design a lightweight Hash Refinement Adapter that progressively refines the Hash Register across transformer layers. As a result, binary-oriented representations are formed through token evolution within the backbone, rather than being abruptly induced by an output-level projection. HashViT is optimized with a unified objective that combines learnable semantic center supervision, class-token similarity distillation, and quantization regularization, encouraging the HASH token to encode semantically structured and compact binary representations. Extensive experiments on three widely used benchmarks demonstrate that HashViT achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive retrieval performance while preserving the efficiency of compact Hamming codes. Code is available at https://github.com/Xinze919/HashViT.
♻ ☆ Occlusion-Aware Panoptic Segmentation with Joint Position Embedding and Occlusion-Level Attention IEEE
Panoptic segmentation in complex scenes remains challenging because of occlusions, yet modern approaches often neglect occlusion modelling. In this paper, we propose Position Embedding Modulation with Occlusion Level Attention (PEMOLA), a novel occlusion-aware module that can be seamlessly integrated into transformer-based panoptic segmentation. To obtain occlusion cues, we train an occlusion classifier on the COCO-OLAC dataset. The classifier derives the occlusion-level attention, which serves as spatial guidance, while the occlusion labels are encoded into a learnable embedding to produce channel-wise weights. Through joint modulation, PEMOLA elegantly introduces the occlusion priors into the position embedding, thereby improving the occlusion modelling. We further annotate the Cityscapes dataset with occlusion levels, termed Cityscapes Occlusion Labels for All Computer Vision Tasks (Cityscapes-OLAC), following the same labelling protocol as COCO-OLAC, to evaluate the cross-dataset generalisation ability of PEMOLA. Extensive experiments on COCO-OLAC and Cityscapes-OLAC demonstrate that PEMOLA consistently improves panoptic segmentation quality while introducing minimal computational overhead. These results highlight the importance of occlusion modelling, where incorporating occlusion-level attention helps deliver robust panoptic segmentation under occlusion. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/wenbo-wei/PEMOLA.
comment: Accepted at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME 2026)
♻ ☆ SUPER Module for Detail-Sensitive and Cost-Efficient U-Net Variant Decoders
Skip-connected U-Net variants are widely used for dense inverse problems, yet their decoders commonly recover resolution through spatial upscaling, which can blur or distort fine structures. Wavelet transforms provide an explicit perfect-reconstruction path, but prior wavelet networks often couple this property to wavelet-specific architectures or fixed output representations. We propose Selectively Suppressed Perfect Reconstruction (SUPER), a wavelet-domain decoder formulation that replaces unstructured spatial refinement with bounded frequency suppression. In its idealized equal-channel form, SUPER reduces to exact reconstruction when the suppression term is zero; in practical U-Net decoders, it provides a projected-subspace reconstruction fallback with learnable task-specific suppression. The resulting SUPER Module is a structurally plug-in decoder block: it replaces the upsampling/refinement stage of an existing U-Net-like decoder, while leaving the encoder and task head unchanged. We evaluate SUPER on monocular depth estimation, thin-crack segmentation, and smartphone image denoising. On iDisc depth estimation, SUPER improves the host model's edge AUC from 26.59% to 34.45% while reducing decoder MACs from 12.69G to 4.36G. On FACS-Net crack segmentation, SUPER improves average IoU and the extreme 0-2px crack regime. On SIDD denoising, where high-frequency enhancement is less directly rewarded, SUPER preserves PSNR/SSIM while reducing decoder MACs by 66.6%. These results support SUPER as a practical wavelet-domain suppression module for improving the observed detail-cost trade-off of U-Net-like decoders.
♻ ☆ OF$^3$GS: On-the-Fly Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting from Unposed Images
Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables efficient and high-fidelity novel view synthesis (NVS) from offline image sequences. However, achieving on-the-fly NVS from unposed images remains challenging: the system must reconstruct renderable 3D Gaussians as images arrive, without access to future observations. Although online feed-forward geometry methods have been developed for causal depth and point-cloud recovery, directly adapting them to NVS often leads to severe rendering artifacts because Gaussian-based rendering demands stricter multi-view consistency in primitive scale and pose-geometry alignment. Even minor deviations can accumulate under causal inference and visibly degrade rendering quality. To this end, we propose OF$^3$GS, a feed-forward framework for efficient and high-quality on-the-fly NVS from sparse-view unposed images under causal constraints. We introduce two mechanisms for causal geometric stability: a Decoupled Intrinsic Recovery Head that mitigates cumulative camera-intrinsic bias and scene-scale jitter, and Dynamic Point Refinement Offsets that relax rigid unprojection to compensate for coupled pose-depth drift. Extensive experiments show that OF$^3$GS outperforms online baselines and approaches offline feed-forward 3DGS methods under comparable sparse-input settings. It also remains memory-feasible with denser inputs. Homepage: https://richardchen225.github.io/of3gs/
♻ ☆ Timeripple: Accelerating vDiTs by Understanding the Spatio-Temporal Correlations in Latent Space
Wenxuan Miao, Yulin Sun, Aiyue Chen, Jing Lin, Yiwu Yao, Yiming Gan, Jieru Zhao, Jingwen Leng, Minyi Guo, Yu Feng
The recent surge in video generation has shown the growing demand for high-quality video synthesis using large vision models. Existing video generation models are predominantly based on the video diffusion transformer (vDiT), however, they suffer from substantial inference delay due to self-attention. While prior studies have focused on reducing redundant computations in self-attention, they often overlook the inherent spatio-temporal correlations in video streams and directly leverage sparsity patterns from large language models to reduce attention computations.
In this work, we take a principled approach to accelerate self-attention in vDiTs by leveraging the spatio-temporal correlations in the latent space. We show that the attention patterns within vDiT are primarily due to the dominant spatial and temporal correlations at the token channel level. Based on this insight, we propose a lightweight and adaptive reuse strategy that approximates attention computations by reusing partial attention scores of spatially or temporally correlated tokens along individual channels. We demonstrate that our method achieves significantly higher computational savings (85\%) compared to state-of-the-art techniques over 4 vDiTs, while preserving almost identical video quality ($<$0.06\% loss on VBench).
♻ ☆ Lifting Embodied World Models for Planning and Control ECCV2026
World models of embodied agents predict future observations conditioned on an action taken by the agent. For complex embodiments, action spaces are high-dimensional and difficult to specify: for example, precisely controlling a human agent requires specifying the motion of each joint. This makes the world model hard to control and expensive to plan with as search-based methods like CEM scale poorly with action dimensionality. To address this issue, we train a lightweight policy that maps high-level actions to sequences of low-level joint actions. Composing this policy with the frozen world model produces a lifted world model that predicts a sequence of future observations from a single high-level action. We instantiate this framework for a human-like embodiment, defining the high-level action space as a small set of 2D waypoints annotated on the current observation frame, each specifying a near-term goal position for a leaf joint (pelvis, head, hands). Waypoints are low-dimensional, visually interpretable, and easy to specify manually or to search over. We show that the lifted world model substantially outperforms searching directly in low-level joint space ($3.8\times$ lower mean joint error to the goal pose), while remaining more compute-efficient and generalizing to environments unseen by the policy.
comment: Accepted to ECCV2026. Edited policy masking
♻ ☆ Denoising Monte Carlo Renders with Diffusion Models
Physically-based renderings contain Monte Carlo noise, with variance that increases as the number of rays per pixel decreases. This noise, while zero-mean for good modern renderers, can have heavy tails (most notably, for scenes containing specular or refractive objects). Learned methods for restoring low fidelity renders are highly developed, because suppressing render noise means one can save compute and use fast renders with few rays per pixel. We demonstrate that a diffusion model can denoise low fidelity renders successfully. Furthermore, our method can be conditioned on a variety of natural render information, and this conditioning helps performance. Quantitative experiments show that our method is competitive with SOTA across a range of sampling rates. Qualitative examination of the reconstructions suggests that the image prior applied by a diffusion method strongly favors reconstructions that are like real images -- so have straight shadow boundaries, curved specularities and no fireflies.
comment: Code here: https://github.com/vibe007/denoising-monte-carlo-renders-with-diffusion-models 25 pages, 18 figures, 2 tables
♻ ☆ Pain in 3D: Generating Controllable Synthetic Faces for Automated Pain Assessment
Automated pain assessment from facial expressions is crucial for non-communicative patient. Progress has been limited by two challenges: (i) existing datasets exhibit severe demographic and label imbalance due to ethical constraints, and (ii) current generative models cannot precisely control facial action units (AUs), facial structure, or clinically validated pain levels. We introduce 3DPain, a large-scale synthetic dataset designed to overcome data scarcity in automated pain assessment. Comprising 82,500 frames across 2,500 unique identities, 3DPain offers extensive heterogeneity in facial pain responses across demographic groups balanced by age, gender, and ethnicity. Our three-stage framework samples diverse 3D meshes, textures them with diffusion models, and applies AU-driven face rigging to synthesize multi-view faces with paired neutral/pain images, facial action units, PSPI scores, and pain-region heatmaps. We further introduce ViTPain, a Vision Transformer based framework leveraging cross-attention with a neutral reference face to achieve identityaware pain estimation. Together, 3DPain and ViTPain establish a controllable, diverse, and clinically grounded foundation for generalizable automated pain assessment.
♻ ☆ Soft-TransFormers for Continual Learning
Inspired by the Well-initialized Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (WLTH), we introduce Soft-TransFormers (Soft-TF), a continual learning framework that adapts a frozen pre-trained Transformer through task-specific soft subnetworks: real-valued multiplicative masks over the query, key, value, and output projections of selected self-attention layers. The masks are initialized at one, so optimization starts exactly at the pre-trained solution, and mask-space gradient descent is intrinsically biased toward modulating the backbone's dominant pathways; we prove that, under standard convex-Lipschitz assumptions, both the convergence rate and the parameter drift of mask-only fine-tuning are controlled by the distance from the pre-trained weights to a task-optimal configuration. This bounded drift yields two properties. Since the backbone and per-task masks are never overwritten, forgetting is structurally eliminated. And since every task subnetwork stays near the shared pre-trained solution, a wrong mask still evaluates a near-generalist function, so task-inference errors are largely harmless and class-incremental accuracy is decoupled from task-inference reliability. As a plug-in, Soft-TF couples with L2P, DualPrompt, HiDe-Prompt, and NoRGa, selecting masks by task-key matching, an entropy-gradient criterion, or a learned task-identity classifier. Across class-incremental learning benchmarks -- Split-CIFAR100, Split-ImageNet-R, CUB-200, and 5-Datasets -- Soft-TF consistently outperforms prompt-based, adapter-based, and LoRA-style baselines at comparable trainable-parameter budgets, while keeping inference cost identical to the unmodified backbone.
♻ ☆ MATANet: A Multi-context Attention and Taxonomy-Aware Network for Fine-Grained Underwater Recognition of Marine Species
Accurate fine-grained recognition of marine organisms is important for scalable biodiversity monitoring and ecological assessment using underwater imagery. However, existing methods mainly focus on target appearance and make limited use of surrounding environmental cues and biological taxonomy. We propose the Multi-Context Attention and Taxonomy-Aware Network (MATANet) for region-of-interest (ROI)-guided marine organism recognition. MATANet contains two complementary components. The Multi-Context Environmental Attention Module uses the ROI representation as a query to aggregate spatial patch features from ROI-centered contextual views at multiple scales, enabling target-conditioned modeling of the surrounding environment. Level-wise auxiliary classifiers further incorporate higher taxonomic ranks during training, encouraging hierarchically consistent representations without changing the finest-label prediction space or inference procedure. On the official FathomNet 2025 Private test split, MATANet achieves a hierarchical distance of 1.570 with the base backbone and 1.423 with the large backbone, substantially outperforming the strongest benchmark value of 2.603. On FishCLEF2015, MATANet achieves an accuracy of 0.793 and a hierarchical distance of 1.120, outperforming the strongest benchmark values of 0.766 and 1.327, respectively. Ablation studies show that surrounding scene information provides complementary evidence beyond repeated multi-scale observations of the target and that target-conditioned aggregation outperforms direct multi-view concatenation. Additional experiments on FAIR1M v2.0 examine the applicability of the proposed design beyond underwater imagery. In post-detection evaluation, MATANet improves fine-grained classification accuracy on matched detector-generated ROIs from 0.828 to 0.959 supporting its engineering applicability to automated marine monitoring.
♻ ☆ WHU-PCPR: A cross-platform heterogeneous point cloud dataset for place recognition in complex urban scenes
Point Cloud-based Place Recognition (PCPR) demonstrates considerable potential in applications such as autonomous driving, robot localization and navigation, and map update. In practical applications, point clouds used for place recognition are often acquired from different platforms and LiDARs across varying scene. However, existing PCPR datasets lack diversity in scenes, platforms, and sensors, which limits the effective development of related research. To address this gap, we establish WHU-PCPR, a cross-platform heterogeneous point cloud dataset designed for place recognition. The dataset differentiates itself from existing datasets through its distinctive characteristics: 1) cross-platform heterogeneous point clouds: collected from survey-grade vehicle-mounted Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) systems and low-cost Portable helmet-mounted Laser Scanning (PLS) systems, each equipped with distinct mechanical and solid-state LiDAR sensors. 2) Complex localization scenes: encompassing real-time and long-term changes in both urban and campus road scenes. 3) Large-scale spatial coverage: featuring 82.3 km of trajectory over a 60-month period and an unrepeated route of approximately 30 km. Based on WHU-PCPR, we conduct extensive evaluation and in-depth analysis of several representative PCPR methods, and provide a concise discussion of key challenges and future research directions. The dataset and benchmark code are available at https://github.com/zouxianghong/WHU-PCPR.
♻ ☆ Zero-Shot DINOv3-Based Image Matching via Many-to-Many Association
We explore zero-shot image matching based on DINOv3 features. These general-purpose features are semantically rich yet geometrically ambiguous -- the nearest neighbor in feature space is often a false geometric match -- so the conventional one-to-one association paradigm is prone to discarding true correspondences. We instead retain many-to-many associations and cast the ensuing estimation as maximum-likelihood inference. This formulation reveals the existing robust mechanism for many-to-many association as a zeroth-order approximation to the otherwise intractable likelihood, and yields a novel mechanism with faster evaluation and finer granularity. We condense these theoretical findings into a two-stage LO-RANSAC algorithm which, combined with careful layer selection and positional bias correction for DINOv3 features, forms a zero-shot pipeline that degrades gracefully under background variation and across RGB-thermal pairs, where specialized baselines collapse under domain shift. Code released at https://github.com/LIAS-CUHKSZ/Zero-Shot-DINOv3-Image-Matching.
comment: 14 pages, 10 figures
♻ ☆ MVGD-Net: A Novel Motion-aware Video Glass Surface Detection Method AAAI
Glass surface ubiquitous in both daily life and professional environments presents a potential threat to vision-based systems, such as robot and drone navigation. To solve this challenge, most recent studies have shown significant interest in Video Glass Surface Detection (VGSD). We observe that objects in the reflection (or transmission) layer appear farther from the glass surfaces. Consequently, in video motion scenarios, the notable reflected (or transmitted) objects on the glass surface move slower than objects in non-glass regions within the same spatial plane, and this motion inconsistency can effectively reveal the presence of glass surfaces. Based on this observation, we propose a novel network, named MVGD-Net, for detecting glass surfaces in videos by leveraging motion inconsistency cues. Our MVGD-Net features three novel modules: the Cross-scale Multimodal Fusion Module (CMFM) that integrates extracted spatial features and estimated optical flow maps, the History Guided Attention Module (HGAM) and Temporal Cross Attention Module (TCAM), both of which further enhances temporal features. A Temporal-Spatial Decoder (TSD) is also introduced to fuse the spatial and temporal features for generating the glass region mask. Furthermore, for learning our network, we also propose a large-scale dataset, which comprises 312 diverse glass scenarios with a total of 19,268 frames. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MVGD-Net outperforms relevant state-of-the-art methods.
comment: This paper has been accepted by the 40th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26). It contians 9 pages, 11 figures
♻ ☆ HOMIE: Human-object Centric Video Personalization via Multimodal Intelligent Enhancement
Yiyang Cai, Nan Chen, Rongchang Xie, Junwen Pan, Chunyang Jiang, Cheng Chen, Wen Zhou, Zhenbang Sun, Wei Xue, Wenhan Luo, Yike Guo
Human-object centric video personalization (HOCVP) is a core task within subject-driven video generation. However, existing methods suffer from two key limitations. First, most approaches focusing on inter-subject personalization still struggle to strike a balance between high subject fidelity and accurate interaction patterns between humans and diverse objects, especially when objects represent abstract concepts such as logos. Second, while intra-subject references (e.g., OCR maps, multi-view inputs) are expected to enhance subject fidelity, most existing works lack mechanisms to understand such latent correspondence. To address both challenges, we propose HOMIE, an HOCVP framework that tackles both inter- and intra-subject input settings in a unified manner. Compared to previous approaches, HOMIE proposes a better MLLM integration strategy to extract knowledge of reference-level relationships without compromising the controllability of text encoders or incurring costly re-alignment. Specifically, we introduce global multimodal guidance within self-attention to better align MLLM-derived semantic features with VAE tokens. Furthermore, we propose modality-reference embedding to differentiate tokens from MLLM features and VAE tokens and associate intra-subject reference image tokens. Extensive experiments validate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across various HOCVP tasks. Project Page: https://yiyangcai.github.io/homie-page.github.io/
comment: 28 pages, 14 figures
♻ ☆ Glass Surface Detection: Leveraging Reflection Dynamics in Flash/No-flash Imagery
Tao Yan, Zeyu Wang, Hao Huang, Yiwei Lu, Ke Xu, Chunping Ge, Yinghui Wang, Xiaojun Chang, Rynson W. H. Lau
Glass surfaces are ubiquitous in daily life, typically appearing colorless, transparent, and lacking distinctive features. These characteristics make glass surface detection a challenging computer vision task. Existing glass surface detection methods always rely on boundary cues (e.g., window and door frames) or reflection cues to locate glass surfaces, but they fail to fully exploit the intrinsic properties of the glass itself for accurate localization. We observed that in most real-world scenes, the illumination intensity in front of the glass surface differs from that behind it, which results in variations in the reflections visible on the glass surface. Specifically, when standing on the brighter side of the glass and applying a flash towards the darker side, existing reflections on the glass surface tend to disappear. Conversely, while standing on the darker side and applying a flash towards the brighter side, distinct reflections will appear on the glass surface. Based on this phenomenon, we propose NFGlassNet, a novel method for glass surface detection that leverages the reflection dynamics present in flash/no-flash imagery. Specifically, we propose a Reflection Contrast Mining Module (RCMM) for extracting reflections, and a Reflection Guided Attention Module (RGAM) for fusing features from reflection and glass surface for accurate glass surface detection. For learning our network, we also construct a dataset consisting of 3.3K no-flash and flash image pairs captured from various scenes with corresponding ground truth annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Our code, model, and dataset will be available upon acceptance of the manuscript.
comment: 18 pages, 17 figures
♻ ☆ T2T-VICL: Cross-Task Visual In-Context Learning via Implicit Text-Driven VLMs
Visual in-context learning (VICL) solves visual tasks by conditioning on a few input-output demonstrations without any model training. Recent advances in large vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promising VICL capability when the demonstration pair and the query belong to the same vision task, but real use cases often provide mismatched examples, making it unclear whether a VLM should imitate the demonstrated transformation or infer a new one from the query. This raises a fundamental question: Can VLMs perform cross-task VICL where demonstration and query differ? In the paper, we study this cross-task VICL setting and propose T2T-VICL, a collaborative prompt-transfer framework, which converts mismatched visual demonstrations into implicit textual guidance without explicitly naming the tasks. To do so, a large teacher VLM first generates structured descriptions of visual changes and task differences between task pairs, from which we construct a dataset of diverse implicit cross-task relations. We then distill this capability into a lightweight student VLM that produces content-dependent prompts from a task-A demonstration pair and a task-B query. The generated prompt is used to guide a frozen image-editing VLM, and a score-based inference strategy is introduced to rank multiple candidates. Experiments on 12 low-level vision tasks and over 20 evaluated cross-task pairs show that T2T-VICL consistently improves task-aware alignment over fixed prompting and often also improves image fidelity, revealing both the potential and limits of cross-task VICL. Our code is available on GitHub.
comment: 22 pages, 6 figures, under submission
♻ ☆ CNS-Edit++: Category-Agnostic 3D Editing with Coupled Neural Shape Representation
This paper presents a latent-space 3D shape editing framework built upon a coupled neural shape (CNS) representation and a neural feature volume optimization. This work extends CNS-Edit, built on Coupled Neural Shape optimization, to CNS-Edit++, by generalizing the category-specific coupled representation to category-agnostic 3D shape editing with foundation models. The Coupled Neural Shape (CNS) representation couples a global latent code that captures high-level shape semantics with a 3D neural feature volume that provides spatial context for local shape manipulation. Then we formulate a coupled neural shape optimization procedure that co-optimizes these two components subject to a given editing operation. Our framework can be instantiated on both the category-specific 3D inversion model and category-agnostic 3D foundation models. We provide various shape editing operators, including copy, resize, delete, mix, point-wise drag, and region-wise drag, each of which is formulated as an objective to guide the CNS optimization. To preserve regions outside the editing area, we further introduce two complementary region-wise control mechanisms, i.e., KV-cache replacement and latent feature regularization. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations across different 3D generative models demonstrate the strong capabilities of our approach over state-of-the-art solutions.
♻ ☆ Artificial Intelligence for Mathematical Reasoning: An Integrated Survey of Language Models, Neuro-symbolic Systems, and Verified Discovery
Mathematical reasoning has long served as a stringent test of machine intelligence; over the past decade, it has moved from a niche problem within NLP to one of the most consequential AI frontiers. This survey provides a unified account of the field's evolution, from early rule-based math word problem (MWP) solvers and template-driven geometry systems, through neural expression generation and LLM prompting, to contemporary reasoning models, multi-agent systems, neuro-symbolic theorem provers, and verified discovery workflows. We organize the landscape along four axes: (i) informal reasoning over text and diagrams, spanning MWP solving, multimodal geometry, and VLMs; (ii) formal reasoning in proof assistants, including autoformalization, tactic prediction, compiler-guided repair, and proof search; (iii) mathematical discovery, where systems propose constructions, improve bounds, or assist attacks on open problems; and (iv) the inference and training-time techniques, including CoT prompting, tool use, process reward models, and RLVR, that increasingly connect generation with verification. We catalog major benchmarks across grade-school arithmetic, competition mathematics, geometry, formal proving, multimodal and multilingual reasoning, and expert evaluation, and we examine benchmark saturation, contamination, reporting mismatches, and the distinction between pass@1, majority voting, and verifier-assisted pass@$k$. We critically assess failure modes: brittleness under perturbation, reward hacking, multimodal grounding failures, fragile formalization, and the energy cost of reasoning-scale inference. Drawing on recent perspectives from working mathematicians, we identify future directions centered on verified-discovery workflows, reasoning efficiency, and infrastructure to make AI-assisted formalization broadly usable. Companion materials: https://github.com/Starscream-11813/awesome-AI4Math.
comment: Under review, 47 pages, 14 figures, 22 tables
♻ ☆ Strength-Parity Ensembling with Parameter-Isolated Experts for Multi-Task Affect Recognition
Leading entries on the multi-task track of the 11th ABAW challenge rely on heavy ensembling, yet which member is worth adding to an already strong ensemble is rarely made explicit. We study this question for joint valence-arousal estimation, 8-way expression recognition, and 12-way action-unit detection from a single unconstrained face, under partial, long-tailed labels and a rule that forbids pretraining on Aff-Wild2. Building on a shared affect-latent that marginalizes the missing labels across two affect-supervised backbones, we propose a strength-parity rule: an added member lowers the ensemble error only when it is both decorrelated from the current members and a near-peer of them in individual accuracy. The rule exposes a concrete obstacle, as on a single backbone re-seeding and even distinct fine-tuning curricula re-converge to a prediction correlation of 0.98 and add no diversity. Parameter-isolation removes it: confining each adaptation to a disjoint low-rank subspace of a shared backbone yields experts that stay decorrelated at 0.91 while remaining near-peers, the strongest of them an AffectNet-adapted expert. The resulting system raises the overall validation score to 1.6949, against the organizers ConvNeXt-with-MixAugment baseline of 0.45; with per-AU calibration and by pooling the shared-latent heads valence-arousal byproduct as a further near-peer, the strongest configuration reaches 1.7259. Source code are available at https://github.com/cprl-team/MTL-ABAW-11th.
♻ ☆ RubricRL: Simple Generalizable Rewards for Text-to-Image Generation
Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a promising approach for aligning text-to-image generative models with human preferences. A key challenge, however, lies in designing effective and interpretable rewards. Existing methods often rely on either composite metrics (e.g., CLIP, OCR, and realism scores) with fixed weights or a single scalar reward distilled from human preference models, which can limit interpretability and flexibility. We propose RubricRL, a simple and general framework for rubric-based reward design that offers greater interpretability, composability, and user control. Instead of using a black-box scalar signal, RubricRL dynamically constructs a structured rubric for each prompt--a decomposable checklist of fine-grained visual criteria such as object correctness, attribute accuracy, OCR fidelity, and realism--tailored to the input text. Each criterion is independently evaluated by a multimodal judge (e.g., o4-mini), and a prompt-adaptive weighting mechanism emphasizes the most relevant dimensions. This design not only produces interpretable and modular supervision signals for policy optimization (e.g., GRPO or PPO), but also enables users to directly adjust which aspects to reward or penalize. Experiments with an autoregressive text-to-image model demonstrate that RubricRL improves prompt faithfulness, visual detail, and generalizability, while offering a flexible and extensible foundation for interpretable RL alignment across text-to-image architectures.
♻ ☆ Glyce: Glyph-vectors for Chinese Character Representations NeurIPS 2019
Yuxian Meng, Wei Wu, Fei Wang, Xiaoya Li, Ping Nie, Fan Yin, Muyu Li, Guoyin Wang, Qinghong Han, Xiaofei Sun, Jiwei Li
It is intuitive that NLP tasks for logographic languages like Chinese should benefit from the use of the glyph information in those languages. However, due to the lack of rich pictographic evidence in glyphs and the weak generalization ability of standard computer vision models on character data, an effective way to utilize the glyph information remains to be found. In this paper, we address this gap by presenting Glyce, the glyph-vectors for Chinese character representations. We make three major innovations: (1) We use historical Chinese scripts (e.g., bronzeware script, seal script, traditional Chinese, etc) to enrich the pictographic evidence in characters; (2) We design CNN structures (called tianzege-CNN) tailored to Chinese character image processing; and (3) We use image-classification as an auxiliary task in a multi-task learning setup to increase the model's ability to generalize. We show that glyph-based models are able to consistently outperform word/char ID-based models in a wide range of Chinese NLP tasks. We are able to set new state-of-the-art results for a variety of Chinese NLP tasks, including tagging (NER, CWS, POS), sentence pair classification, single sentence classification tasks, dependency parsing, and semantic role labeling. For example, the proposed model achieves an F1 score of 80.6 on the OntoNotes dataset of NER, +1.5 over BERT; it achieves an almost perfect accuracy of 99.8\% on the Fudan corpus for text classification. Code found at https://github.com/ShannonAI/glyce.
comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2019