Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 174
☆ CoCo-IR: Contextual Composed Image Retrieval ECCV 2026
Shengcao Cao, Tanmaya Shekhar Dabral, Zhongli Ding, Madhuri Shanbhogue, Kaifeng Chen, Zhe Li, Mojtaba Seyedhosseini, Yu-Xiong Wang, Liang-Yan Gui
Current instruction-based image retrieval systems are powerful but limited to single-turn interactions, failing to capture the iterative nature of complex, real-world visual searches. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Contextual Composed Image Retrieval (CoCo-IR), a novel task that enables users to progressively refine search results through interactions. We address this new task by proposing a new model based on a Large Multimodal Model (LMM) that functions as a context-aware reasoner for CoCo-IR. Our model interprets the entire interaction history to generate Transformable Image Embeddings (TIE) that evolve across turns. To fuel the model training without expensive human annotations, we develop a fully autonomous, scalable data engine that leverages LMMs to generate high-quality contextual retrieval data, and uses model-guided verification to mine challenging hard negatives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach establishes new state-of-the-art performance: We achieve 39.4 mAP@5 on the challenging single-turn benchmark CIRCO; furthermore, on our new CoCo-IR benchmark, our model maintains robust performance with 44.1 R@1 on 4-turn dialogues, dramatically outperforming existing methods (28.2 4-turn R@1) that fail to handle multi-turn context. Project page: https://CoCo-IR.github.io.
comment: ECCV 2026
☆ Objects as Audio-Visual Modal Sound Fields ECCV 2026
While modern 3D reconstruction excels at modeling object geometry and appearance, it largely ignores the rich acoustic cues revealed through physical interaction. Object impact sounds convey material, stiffness, and structural properties that complement vision, yet existing impact sound modeling approaches either rely on expensive physics-based simulation or require large datasets to generalize in a purely data-driven manner. We introduce Audio-Visual Modal Sound Field (AV-MSF), a novel object-level acoustic representation reconstructed from multi-view images and only a few impact sound recordings. AV-MSF builds on 3D Gaussian Splatting integrated with dense 3D visual feature to provide a strong geometry-aware prior, and represents the impact sound field using compact, physically meaningful modal parameters, enabling robust few-shot reconstruction. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that AV-MSF achieves state-of-the-art impact sound rendering, outperforming both physics-based and data-driven baselines. Furthermore, we demonstrate downstream applications enabled by our representation, including contact localization and object sound editing.
comment: ECCV 2026, Project page: $\href{https://zisenshao.github.io/AV-MSF/}{\text{this https URL}}$
☆ SmartMage: Dynamic Modality Orchestration for 3D Scene Understanding
Understanding 3D scenes is fundamental to embodied intelligence, requiring joint reasoning over heterogeneous information from multiple modalities, including visual and geometric cues. However, the relevance of these modalities often varies across queries. Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) typically rely on fixed modality combinations, overlooking query-dependent modality needs. Such a rigid design can introduce semantic noise from irrelevant modalities while underutilizing more informative ones, leading to wasted computation and diluted reasoning. To address these challenges, this paper proposes SmartMage, a unified MLLM that dynamically orchestrates heterogeneous modalities for semantic-aware 3D scene understanding. Specifically, SmartMage incorporates: (1) a Semantic-guided Modality Adaptive RouTng (SMART) module that selects task-relevant modalities using semantic priors, text-modality alignment, and modality quality; and (2) a Modality-Aware Gating Expert (MAGE) module that leverages modality priors to guide expert activation, fostering adaptive specialization in multimodal reasoning. Empirically, SmartMage achieves state-of-the-art performance across five 3D scene understanding benchmarks, and attains competitive results on RGB-only video understanding benchmarks. In our diagnostic benchmark ScanFacet, tasks are divided into fine-grained semantic categories, enabling analysis of modality combinations preferred by each semantic type. The observed modality-semantic patterns provide further evidence of SmartMage's effectiveness. Project page: https://yuecheong.github.io/SmartMage/.
☆ Predicting Brain Morphometry with MT-GNN: Mesh Evolution in Continuous Time with Graph-Based Metric Tensor Embeddings
Predicting how a subcortical structure's shape will evolve from a few prior scans could support prognosis and clinical-trial enrichment. Existing longitudinal mesh predictors either extrapolate shape trajectories via high-dimensional embeddings or regress vertex deformations directly. We instead predict the surface's intrinsic geometry in continuous time: a single per-structure graph network predicts the future per-vertex first fundamental form (metric tensor) for an arbitrary causal multiple-visit history and an arbitrary prediction horizon, conditioned on a Fourier encoding of the lead time. The predicted metric is decoded into a surface by a differentiable As-Rigid-As-Possible solver, and the model is trained end-to-end on the rigid-aligned vertex error. Training through the reconstruction keeps the decoded prediction a valid surface and consistently improves it. On 14 subcortical structures from the ADNI dataset, the proposed mesh evolution model (MT-GNN) predicts best among the evaluated methods at every horizon ($-2.29\%$ mean vertex error vs. the temporal mean, $p{=}6.1{\times}10^{-5}$, beating it on 14/14 structures), ahead of geodesic shape regression (DCM, $-0.19\%$) and a mesh transformer (TransforMesh, $-0.45\%$; $p{=}1.2{\times}10^{-4}$), with the lead widening as the horizon grows.
☆ OPD-V: Visual On-Policy Self-Distillation with Modality Balance
On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) has become a standard post-training approach for improving visual reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Existing methods draw privileged information from diverse input sources to guide self-distillation. Yet these designs overlook Modality Imbalance, a challenge inherent to MLLM reasoning. When textual information dominates generation, the model cannot fully integrate its multimodal input. Consequently, carefully designed privileged information remains underused, limiting the effectiveness of OPSD. To examine this limitation, we construct a Positive Teacher with the Zoom-In Image and a Negative Teacher with the Mask Image, which exhibit different degrees of Modality Imbalance. Changes in their reasoning correctness and token logits reveal that Modality Balance can itself serve as privileged information. Motivated by this finding, we introduce OPD-V, a visual OPSD paradigm that instantiates such information through the Positive Teacher and Negative Teacher. Positive Modality-Balance Logits Margins define a Modality-Balance Trust Region that selects the on-policy tokens used for self-distillation. Experiments across 6 benchmarks, 4 MLLM backbones, and 5 post-training methods show that OPD-V consistently improves reasoning performance while reducing training cost.
☆ IRIS: A Visual Cortex-Inspired Framework for Analyzing Orientation Selectivity in Vision Transformers
Vision transformers (ViTs) have become the de facto standard for image encoding across many perception tasks. Despite their empirical success, it remains mechanistically unclear how they encode low-level features, given their lack of inductive biases: ViTs process information globally rather than relying on local structure. Biological visual systems, in contrast, build low-level features, such as orientation selectivity in the primary visual cortex, by combining information from small, localized regions of the visual field. These features are general-purpose representations, shared and required across multiple specialized neural pathways, unlike higher-level, task-specific semantic features. This raises the question if such biologically-grounded features arise in ViTs. In this work, we systematically study how orientation selectivity emerges in ViTs by introducing a suite of neuroscience-inspired metrics: representational similarity score (RSS), orientation recruitment score (ORS), and orientation tuning bandwidth to quantify how orientation is encoded in representational geometry and as a function of model depth. Through extensive analysis, we find that: (1) the training paradigm is the strongest determinant of orientation selectivity, with models sharing an objective, peaking at comparable relative depths regardless of scale (2) many units are orientation-selective early in training, with early-to-middle layers recruiting more such units over time, while deeper layers lose selectivity and broaden their tuning toward semantic encoding and (3) our metrics offer a mechanistic heuristic for how many layers to unfreeze for best downstream generalization. Our framework presents a way to track biologically-grounded features during ViT training, probes how desired properties are encoded in transformer representations, and builds a systematic understanding of how ViTs generalize across tasks.
☆ Robust and Efficient Motion Reasoning for Privacy-Aware Classroom Incident Recognition
Can computer vision help make classrooms safer? In this pilot study, we investigate privacy-aware and computationally efficient classroom incident recognition from CCTV-style observations. This setting remains underexplored, with limited benchmarks and few methods designed for the privacy, efficiency, and generalization demands of real-world deployment. We introduce a novel hybrid benchmark combining generative CCTV-style videos with real-world classroom pose data, and propose a lightweight, but robust motion-reasoning framework motivated by the observation that many incidents differ more in motion direction, speed, acceleration, and intensity than in pose alone. To that end, our method first constructs hierarchical kinematic representations of human actions. Our method then distills hierarchical, multi-order kinematic reasoning from a large teacher into a much smaller single-order student, enabling efficient per-person inference while preserving expressive motion understanding. Experiments show that our model outperforms substantially larger baselines at less than one-tenth of their computational cost, while also demonstrating stronger out-of-domain motion reasoning and zero-shot synthetic-to-real generalization. We will publicly release the benchmark, codebase, and supporting tools to facilitate further research in privacy-aware classroom safety.
☆ HexMIL: Hierarchical Attention MIL for Ante-Hoc Explainable Detection of AI-Manipulated CT Volumes
The emergence of medical deepfakes, i.e., medical images manipulated by deep generative models, poses a significant threat to clinical workflows. However, existing detectors suffer from two critical limitations: poor generalization to unseen generative architectures for manipulation detection and lack of interpretability. In this context, we present HexMIL (Hierarchical EXplainable Multiple Instance Learning), a mask-free medical deepfake detector that simultaneously addresses both limitations using only binary volume-level supervision. HexMIL decomposes each CT volume into a two-level hierarchy of patches and slices, aggregated via independent Gated Attention modules whose weights are directly combined into a full-resolution 3D attention volume that localizes the manipulated sub-region without any pixel-level annotation. Unlike post-hoc methods such as Grad-CAM, HexMIL's attention weights constitute the exact forward computation driving the classification decision, providing ante-hoc and structurally faithful spatial attribution. We evaluate HexMIL on M3DSynth and CT-GAN datasets under a rigorous cross-generator generalization protocol, training on a single generative architecture and testing on unseen ones. HexMIL outperforms all baselines by $+9.1$ AUC and $+9.4$ F1 in out-of-domain classification, and achieves the best average IoU and Pointing Game score in localization. Project page: opontorno.github.io/hexmil.
comment: Accepted at ACM Multimedia 2026 (MM '26)
☆ Lesion Detection in CT with Frozen Self-Distilled Features: SALT, a Spatially Adaptive Label-Guided Temperature
Mahmut S. Gokmen, Evan W. Damron, Mitchell A. Klusty, Caroline N. Leach, Emily B. Collier, V. K. Cody Bumgardner
Self-supervised pretraining objectives are spatially uniform: the teacher temperature and the per-patch loss weight are identical everywhere in the image, so a lesion a few patches wide contributes no more to the training signal than the surrounding parenchyma. Prior work biases the views toward annotated regions, which changes what the model sees but adds no pressure on the objective. We instead condition the targets of self-distillation, a method we call SALT (Spatially Adaptive Label-guided Temperature). Weak, box-derived labels, available only during pretraining, define a compact region on the encoder's patch grid, inside which the teacher's softmax temperature is sharpened and the masked-patch loss is up-weighted. The objectives, the masking policy and the centering statistics are otherwise unchanged, and at every downstream use the encoder is a plain feature extractor with no labels and no conditioning. We evaluate by freezing the encoder and training only a lightweight multi-depth CenterNet-style head, detecting lesions in 3D on four CT cohorts, and we isolate the mechanism against a backbone identical in architecture, pretraining data, schedule and label-guided cropping but with no target conditioning. We report patch-level separability, 3D detection stratified by cohort and by lesion size, box quality, and a detector-free probe in which a single frozen patch embedding re-identifies a lesion in a follow-up scan without registration, masks or fine-tuning. Because the conditioning is expressed through a spatial indicator rather than through label semantics, the formulation admits any weak spatial annotation; we instantiate and validate it for lesions.
☆ Bag-of-Visual-Words for Spatial Mapping of Lung Adenocarcinoma Growth Patterns
Spatial mapping of lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) growth patterns across whole slide images (WSIs) requires resolving architectural context at the region level, yet existing methods operate at the individual tile level and produce generic morphological clusters rather than clinically defined pattern maps. We propose a weakly supervised Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) pipeline that learns a visual vocabulary from frozen foundation model embeddings extracted from a small set of annotated regions of interest (ROIs). Pattern prototypes are constructed as mean BoVW histograms of same-label ROIs and used for nearest-prototype classification of sliding-window regions under Jensen--Shannon divergence. The resulting predictions are projected onto the WSI tile grid to produce interpretable spatial pattern maps. We evaluate the method on 87 CPTAC-LUAD patients using three foundation model encoders and multiple vocabulary sizes on two clinically motivated tasks. For tumour/healthy classification, the best configuration achieves a balanced accuracy of $0.974$ with H-Optimus-1, approaching the $0.987$ obtained by a supervised SVM trained on mean-pooled WSI embeddings. For binary histologic grade classification, the BoVW pipeline achieves higher balanced accuracy than the supervised baseline for all encoders, suggesting that ROI-level pattern decomposition preserves grade-relevant heterogeneity that is attenuated by global mean pooling.
comment: 10 pages, 2 figures. Accepted at the 7th International Conference on Medical Imaging and Computer-Aided Diagnosis (MICAD 2026)
☆ HelloWorld: Enabling Socially Interactive Characters in Video World Models
Despite the remarkable recent progress of video world models, social interaction between users and the characters within these worlds remains unsupported. To fill this gap, we present HelloWorld, a video world model that enables social interaction with in-world characters. With a single button press, users can prompt the on-screen character to respond toward the camera, e.g., turning to the viewer, waving, nodding, or speaking a short greeting. To make these interactions natural, we propose a self-distillation pipeline that finetunes the video generation model on data synthesized by itself. Each synthesized clip contains both social interactions and camera motion, allowing the model to learn camera-pose conditioning without degrading interaction quality. At inference, we further introduce a training-free module that determines when the interaction occurs. Upon a button press, it modulates the cross-attention masks of the DiT so that the interaction-related text prompt attends only to the frames within the press window, temporally localizing the character's response. We further build HelloWorldBench, a 400-sample benchmark with three social interaction metrics alongside three conventional metrics, for evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that HelloWorld surpasses a variety of baselines in interaction quality, while maintaining state-of-the-art picture aesthetics and camera-pose following. Project page: https://github.com/AlayaLab/HelloWorld
comment: Project page: https://github.com/AlayaLab/HelloWorld
☆ VQ-VAD: Vector-quantized Motion Representation Learning for Human-centric Video Anomaly Detection
Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) is inherently challenging due to the scarcity of anomalies and the large visual variability in surveillance footage, including changes in lighting, viewpoint, and human appearance. To mitigate visual noise and address privacy concerns, recent work has shifted to pose-based VAD, which focuses on motion dynamics rather than raw video data. However, existing pose-based approaches model human behavior in continuous latent spaces, limiting their ability to learn compact motion patterns necessary for robust behavior analysis. We address this by proposing Vector-Quantized Video Anomaly Detection (VQ-VAD), a novel human-centric anomaly detection framework that learns discrete motion representations. VQ-VAD adapts Vector-Quantized GAN (VQ-GAN), originally developed for image generation, to operate on keypoint sequences and construct a motion codebook of normal behavior. Trained exclusively on normal motion sequences, VQ-VAD detects anomalies by identifying high reconstruction errors when an observed motion sequence cannot be mapped to the learned codebook. We conduct extensive experiments across three complementary evaluation settings, including in-domain, cross-domain, and cross-dataset generalization, on four anomaly detection benchmarks. VQ-VAD achieves strong in-domain accuracy (81.83% on HR-SHT [15]), effective cross-domain transfer from CMU Panoptic [14] (76.69% on HR-SHT [15] without retraining), and competitive cross-dataset robustness. The code base for this work is available at https://github.com/TeCSAR-UNCC/VQ-VAD.
☆ Beyond Reprojection Error: Camera Calibration with 3D Targets
Dennis Ruppel, Hasan Kutlu, Kai A. Neumann, Martin Knuth, Pedro Santos, Andreas Weinmann, Arjan Kuijper
In 3D reconstruction, camera calibration is an essential element for achieving high fidelity and accuracy of the reconstructed geometry. While existing approaches rely upon 2D planar calibration, this work proposes a framework tailored for 3D reconstruction that is based on predicting scene rays, which adds flexibility to the reconstruction pipeline and enables the use of recent advances in camera models. Novel metrics, reconstruction and intersection error, derived from predicted scene rays are employed in combination with a bootstrapping procedure that statistically evaluates different calibration objects and calibration pipelines for both intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters. The results show that the generalized distortion model more faithfully captures physical camera effects and yields an improvement in calibration accuracy. Reprojection error is shown to be a potentially misleading indicator of 3D accuracy, and the proposed ray-based metrics provide a more holistic assessment. An icosahedron calibration target is designed to enrich calibration information for 3D reconstruction together with a ring-feature-based detector. The icosahedral target yields approximately 40% lower mean intersection and more stable calibration across bootstrap trials on synthetic data, while real-data performance demands very tight fabrication tolerances.
comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables. To appear in the proceedings of Computer Graphics International (CGI 2026)
☆ MarsCast: Transfer Learning of AI Weather Foundation Models to Planetary Atmospheres
We investigate the transferability of Earth weather foundation models to planetary atmospheres by adapting the GraphCast graph neural weather forecasting model to Mars. While GraphCast achieves state-of-the-art performance for terrestrial forecasting, its applicability to non-Earth environments remains unexplored. Using the Mars Climate Database (MCD), which provides global atmospheric fields across vertical altitude levels (similar to Earth pressure levels), we evaluate zero-shot and fine-tuned GraphCast predictions of Martian temperature and wind fields. Zero-shot forecasts produce a surprisingly accurate depiction of current conditions but fail to reproduce diurnal variability and rapidly decay toward climatological mean states. To address this limitation, we fine-tune GraphCast using MCD variables and top-of-atmosphere solar radiation forcing while holding humidity constant. Fine-tuning enables rapid learning of Martian thermal variability. Within as few as 10 training epochs, the model begins to capture the diurnal cycle and forecasts up to 10 days reproduce seasonal and vertical temperature structure. Prediction quality improves with training sample size and exhibits sensitivity to seasonal initialization. These results demonstrate that Earth-trained AI weather models can be adapted to simulate Martian atmospheric dynamics, providing a pathway toward rapid planetary weather prediction to support mission operations, dust storm risk mitigation, and future human exploration.
☆ OmniEdit-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Instruction-based Video Editing
Chenxuan Miao, Yutong Feng, Yi Lu, Yunfeng Yan, Donglian Qi, Shiwei Zhang, Yu Liu, Xi Chen, Hengshuang Zhao
Instruction-based video editing (IVE) is an emerging field with broad applications, yet evaluating editing models remains challenging. Existing benchmarks suffer from two major limitations: limited task coverage inherited from image editing, which overlooks video-specific dimensions, and inadequate metrics that fail to measure instruction fidelity, allowing incorrect edits to receive high scores due to strong visual priors from the original video. To address these issues, we introduce a comprehensive and structured benchmark for IVE. Our benchmark decomposes editing tasks into multiple video-specific dimensions, including spatial, temporal, audio, and reference-based editing, extending beyond conventional frame-level evaluation. It also distinguishes explicit and implicit instructions and incorporates reasoning-based scenarios to better reflect real-world requirements. Furthermore, we propose an evaluation framework that assesses editing quality from four complementary dimensions: accuracy, preservation, realism, and consistency, using both human judgments and state-of-the-art vision-language models. To emphasize instruction fidelity, we introduce an accuracy-aware penalty mechanism that conditions other scores on accuracy, preventing visually plausible but incorrect edits from receiving inflated evaluations. Extensive experiments on representative open-source and commercial models show that current IVE models remain far from satisfactory. OmniEdit-Bench provides a comprehensive and reliable testbed for evaluating instruction-based video editing and offers insights into future research directions.
☆ Towards Physics of Multimodal Pretraining: Knowledge Flow, Modality Synergy, Early Unification, and Recipes
Vision offers a critical axis for advancing foundation models, driving a shift towards natively unified multimodal pretraining. Despite this momentum, the design space and the fundamental mechanisms of how modalities interact during unified training remain underexplored. We provide empirical clarity through a systematic exploration of multimodal pretraining. Our controlled experiments on both synthetic and large-scale real-world datasets yield four key insights into the physics of multimodal pretraining: (i) Knowledge Flow: We disentangle how language, visual understanding, and visual generation transfer knowledge across modalities, revealing distinct patterns of influence and asymmetry; (ii) Synergy vs. Competition: We show that data "complexity" largely determines whether modalities are synergistic, identify architectural choices that promote synergy: such as shared attention and normalization with modality-specific feed-forward layers, and find that these behaviors generalize across different visual tokenizer designs; (iii) Early Unification: Unifying modalities from the very early stages and training them jointly is shown to be more effective than late alignment or sequential training. This process uncovers a vision laziness phenomenon, where delayed integration leads models to rely on language priors; (iv) Recipes: We derive efficient pretraining recipes that achieve strong generative performance using only 5% of the compute budget. These core findings are subsequently validated at scale by training multiple 13.5B MoE models on 2T tokens. We hope this study provides a principled foundation for understanding and scaling multimodal pretraining.
comment: Project page: https://junlinhan.github.io/projects/physics_of_mm_pretrain/
☆ Promptable Animal Pose Tracking Across Species ECCV 2026
Animal pose estimation and tracking is important for wildlife monitoring and conservation research, and with limited expert time for labelling automated approaches are imperative. While human pose estimation and tracking has seen rapid progress thanks to large annotated datasets, animal pose remain challenging, due to large morphological and behavioural differences between species and limited annotated data. Existing approaches either optimise generic keypoint localisation from annotated datasets (such as APTv2) with poor generalisation, or track custom keypoints using visual tracking, at the cost of performance. In this paper, we demonstrate that vision foundation models trained on large datasets can be used effectively to track animal pose with limited labelled data. We propose two models, one unsupervised and the other supervised, to track user-selected keypoints in videos. The supervised approach delivers superior tracking accuracy by employing a keypoint prompt encoder to explicitly inject structural priors from a reference frame into feature matching. In parallel, the unsupervised route provides strong cross-species robustness by leveraging diverse foundation-model features for training-free correspondence matching. Extensive evaluation on challenging animal video benchmarks APTv2 and TigDog demonstrates that our framework achieves strong performance while maintaining an effective balance between accuracy and generalisation, offering a practical solution for real-world animal behaviour analysis and conservation applications.
comment: Accepted for presentation at the ECCV 2026 Workshop on CV4Ecology
☆ ContextMaster: Interactive Multi-Shot Video Creation via Fixed-Budget Sparse Context Routing
Xu Guo, Zhengxuan Wei, Xinghui Li, Hanzhuo Huang, Xinyu Liu, Xiangyang Luo, Min Wei, Yiran Zhu, Qiulin Wang, Yulong Xu, Xintao Wang, Pengfei Wan, Qi Fan, Xiangwang Hou
Recent video models increasingly support generation, reference conditioning, and editing within a single model, yet typically expose them as separate operations over fixed inputs. Practical creation unfolds across multiple shots, requiring one model to generate from text, follow a reference, or edit source footage while maintaining shared history. We formalize this setting as interactive multi-shot video creation (IMVC) and introduce ContextMaster, a unified model with a role-aware context representation for these operations. An interactive model must retain access to an expanding history without allowing the context read cost at each denoising step to grow. ContextMaster combines reusable clean context states with fixed budget sparse context routing and uses ConstraintSink to keep task constraints visible. To address the dual challenges of sparse context access and inference with few denoising steps, we propose a two-stage privileged context distillation framework, which transfers full context behavior from a dense teacher through consistency distillation and then refines deployment rollouts with distribution matching. Experiments on the three primitive tasks demonstrate improved task fulfillment and consistency across shots over specialized baselines. User studies further validate flexibly composed workflows, while the model reaches 16 FPS on a single GPU.
comment: Project page: https://guoxu1233.github.io/ContextMaster/
☆ Towards Valid B-Rep Generation: Training-Free Wireframe Anomaly Detection and Repair AAAI 2027
Multi-stage boundary representation (B-Rep) generation leverages intermediate wireframes to synthesize CAD models. However, geometric and topological risks in these wireframes -- such as self-intersections, edge collapses, and disconnected vertices -- can propagate to invalid final B-Reps. Mitigating such failures by retraining large generative models is computationally prohibitive. We propose Wireframe Detection and Repair (WDR), a training-free framework that intervenes at the intermediate wireframe stage to improve downstream B-Rep validity. WDR features a Geometric-Topology Anomaly Detector (GTAD) that combines parallel VLM-based coarse screening with geometric and topological detectors to predict downstream invalidity risk and route generation to dedicated branches. An Energy-Guided Geometric-Topology Repair (EGGTR) module then performs detector-triggered guided regeneration through geometry and topology branches. By scaling test-time computation via Energy-Guided Resampling and training-free guidance for diffusion models, WDR can be integrated into autoregressive and diffusion pipelines without retraining. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in kernel-checked validity while largely retaining the measured diversity and distributional quality of synthesized CAD models. The code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.
comment: AAAI 2027 submission; 9-page main paper plus supplementary material
☆ UG-UMRE: Uncertainty-Guided Modality Augmentation and Distributional Calibration for Unified Multimodal Relation Extraction ACM MM2026
Unified Multimodal Relation Extraction (UMRE) aims to identify intra-modal and cross-modal relations between textual entities and visual objects. However, existing UMRE studies still encounter two critical issues: ignoring inherent aleatoric uncertainty causes noise propagation, and deep-seated heterogeneity between distinct modal distributions hinders alignment. To address these issues, we propose the Uncertainty-Guided UMRE Network (UG-UMRE). Specifically, we design an Uncertainty-Driven Unimodal Augmentation (UDUA) module, which models features as Gaussian distributions based on the Variational Information Bottleneck. By incorporating an uncertainty-aware self-supervised contrastive learning mechanism, UDUA effectively filters out noise while maintaining semantic consistency. Furthermore, we introduce the Joint Aleatoric Uncertainty Alignment (JAUA) module as a global semantic pre-calibration mechanism. JAUA leverages probabilistic distribution consistency to construct a shared latent space, eliminating the distributional gap by synchronizing cross-modal statistical properties, thereby laying a robust foundation for fine-grained interaction. Experiments on three benchmark datasets (UMRE, MORE, and MNRE) demonstrate that UG-UMRE achieves state-of-the-art performance. Further analysis validates the pluggable and effective performance of the proposed UDUA and JAUA modules.
comment: Accepted at ACM MM2026
☆ Unleashing the Potential of Vision-Language Models for Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection
Recent work has shown that a simple linear probe on frozen representations from modern vision foundation models (VFMs) can achieve state-of-the-art AIGI detection performance, substantially outperforming specialized detectors in challenging in-the-wild scenarios. This finding has established DINOv3 as the dominant foundation-model baseline for subsequent improvements. However, we find that the vision-language model Perception Encoder (PE) holds greater potential for AIGI detection, because its language-aligned representation preserves high-level provenance semantics. Specifically, PE exhibits stronger local provenance organization than DINOv3 in its frozen feature space. However, semantic-agnostic linear probing fails to exploit this structure, as PE-Linear still underperforms DINOv3-Linear by 4.1% on In-the-Wild. Based on this observation, we propose Semantic Prototype Calibration (SPC), which constructs category prototypes from forensic semantic information and calibrates them with supervised data. We apply SPC to PE and refer to the resulting detector as PE-SPC. Our analysis shows that this simple design achieves stronger generalization. Across cross-generator, post-processing, and in-the-wild benchmarks, PE-SPC surpasses the previous DINOv3 baseline and achieves new state-of-the-art results.
☆ An active-learning framework for real-time depth perception from monocular vision streams
Biological visual systems can perceive depth from monocular vision flow, continuously integrating temporal visual cues while maintaining a balance between stability and plasticity in dynamic environments. In contrast, artificial perception models deployed on resource-constrained edge devices are typically trained in a static offline manner and remain frozen after deployment, often suffering severe performance degradation under domain shifts. While large-scale models may encode broad knowledge through massive parameter redundancy, lightweight networks face a static optimization dilemma: forcing compact models to learn universal geometric representations is computationally inefficient and often leads to performance saturation. To resolve this issue, an Online Active Learning (OAL) mechanism is introduced to endow compact neural networks with the capability to adapt continuously during operation. A closed-loop Predict-Evaluate-Correct learning paradigm is established to actively select high-confidence, information-rich signals from streaming visual input. Crucially, Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) is employed not merely to prevent catastrophic forgetting, but to enforce Selective Plasticity, preserving parameters that encode globally relevant structural knowledge while allowing local alignment to newly observed environments. Built upon a MobileNetV3-Small backbone, the proposed system achieves approximately a 75% reduction in computational cost while maintaining competitive depth estimation accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that adaptability is not solely determined by model size, but rather by how effectively parameter plasticity is regulated in dynamic environments.
☆ Enhancing Low Back Pain Assessment with Diffusion Models for Lumbar Spine MRI Segmentation
This study introduces a diffusion-based framework for robust and accurate semantic segmentation of lumbar spine MRI scans from patients with low back pain (LBP), regardless of whether the scans are T1- or T2-weighted. We compared with advanced models for segmenting vertebrae, intervertebral discs (IVDs), and spinal canal using the SPIDER dataset. The results showed that SpineSegDiff achieved a segmentation performance comparable to that of the state-of-the-art non-diffusion nnUnet, particularly in improving the identification of degenerated IVDs. In addition, the uncertainty maps generated by our model provide valuable insights for clinical review, enhancing the robustness and reliability of the segmentation results. The potential of diffusion models to enhance the diagnosis and management of LBP through more precise analysis of pathological spine MRI is underscored by our findings.
comment: Maria Monzon and Thomas Iff contributed equally to this work. Published in Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Medical Imaging with Deep Learning (MIDL 2025), PMLR volume 301, pages 1145-1163, 2026
☆ Visual Representation Matters: Exploiting Temporal Differences in Video-to-Audio Generation
Video-to-audio (V2A) generation extends image-to-audio generation (I2A) by introducing consecutive frames that provide essential temporal cues for audio synthesis. However, existing conditional diffusion-based V2A methods typically enhance visual conditioning with additional audio-visual supervision, acoustic structure prediction, or reasoning from large multimodal models, requiring extra networks or strong inductive biases. Inspired by recent advances in visual representation learning, we introduce TD-V2A, which leverages temporal differences (TD) as the key representation that distinguishes V2A from I2A, enriching visual conditioning with minimal architectural modification. We first investigate TD at both the frame and feature levels to identify the most effective representation level at which TD complements visual representations. Based on these findings, we develop a hierarchically continual learning strategy and an annealed temporal differences guidance method to progressively learn and exploit TD information during diffusion training and sampling process, respectively. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that effectively exploiting TD through our proposed framework significantly improves end-to-end V2A generation quality, even outperforming dedicated V2A representations such as contrastive audio-visual pretraining.
☆ When Shared Rollouts Fail in Defensive Driving Evaluation: A NAVSIM Score Basis Audit
Defensive driving scores are useful only when they preserve distinctions between policies that observe surrounding actors and those that do not. Re-simulation benchmarks may use reference-conditioned forgiveness, under which an agent receives credit when the logged human reference fails a compliance channel. When agent and reference share an unstable rollout transformation, this rule can propagate shared reference failures into broad compliance credit.
We audit this risk in NAVSIM v2.2 original scene single-stage scoring. Under the affected documented-stack condition on the audited numerical backend, the route-blind Ignore-All probe and a route-aware actor-blind probe outrank human replay and PDM-Closed over the complete 12,146-token navtest split. A fresh installation following the public specification reproduces rollout divergence on a fixed 32-token diagnostic set. A same-source dependency stack control and an exact-input diagnostic isolate dependency-sensitive numerical behavior in the shared velocity refit. On a 450-token control pool, replacing only the solver eliminates rollout divergence and restores blind-last ordering while keeping forgiveness enabled. Thus, the numerical instability is the direct trigger. Reference-conditioned forgiveness propagates the resulting shared reference failures into compliance credit. We contribute an audit protocol requiring score basis and stack disclosure, blind probes, overwrite reporting, and rollout stability tests before using such scores for defensive driving claims.
comment: 17 pages, 1 figure
☆ STEP-OPD: Rethinking Output Targets and Internal Dynamics in On-Policy Distillation for Diffusion Models
Qingyan Wei, Guangzhao Li, Xiaobing Tu, Yinggui Wang, Xiantao Zhang, Jinkui Ren, Xiaohong Liu, Linfeng Zhang
On-policy distillation (OPD) has become an effective approach for consolidating multiple task-specialized image generation models into a single student. However, existing OPD methods optimize the student mainly to match the teacher's output velocity, making the teacher the upper limit of the optimization objective. While output-level supervision alone leaves the student's blockwise representation evolution underconstrained, which weakens the transfer of capabilities that must be progressively developed across layers. We propose STEP-OPD, an on-policy distillation framework for image generation that extends the student's learning target beyond the teacher and introduces explicit constraints on its internal representation evolution. Instead of treating the teacher as the final target, we use the velocity difference between each task-specific teacher and the shared base model as a direction for further learning and add a scaled version of this difference to the teacher velocity. In addition, we align the direction and magnitude of representation changes between the student and teacher, enabling the student to learn how representations are progressively transformed across network blocks. Experiments on compositional alignment, text rendering, and human preference show that our method consistently improves Standard OPD methods. In particular, it increases the GenEval score of DiffusionOPD from 0.927 to 0.961, while also improving OCR and all preference-based metrics. The resulting unified student surpasses the corresponding single-task teachers across all three capability groups, showing that output extrapolation enables beyond-teacher learning. And representation change alignment provides complementary guidance for the student's internal transformations.
comment: 9 pages, 5 figures
☆ Evaluating the Diagnostic Robustness of Vision-Language Models Under Visual and Textual Perturbations
Standard accuracy metrics for VLMs often mask significant reliability failures in sensitive domains. In this work, we utilize a histopathology-validated brain MRI dataset to systematically assess the diagnostic robustness of four VLM families under evidence-preserving perturbations. By reordering anatomical slices and swapping target label positions, we evaluate whether models maintain consistent predictions when clinical evidence remains invariant. Our results reveal significant vulnerabilities in presentation-order stability, with models exhibiting prediction flips in up to 48.9% of cases under simple sequence reversals. We further identify a textual selection bias, where label reordering triggers inconsistent diagnoses in up to 67.8% of cases despite identical visual inputs. Negative-control tests further reveal diagnostic overcommitment: models generate categorical diagnoses in up to 76.1% of cases after expert-annotated lesion slices are removed. These results demonstrate that high accuracy can overestimate clinical reliability, masking sensitivity to sequential presentation and textual framing that is not captured by aggregate accuracy. Our findings highlight the necessity of stability-based metrics for the deployment of VLMs in safety-critical clinical applications. Our evaluation data and code will be made public upon acceptance.
☆ Training Crossroads for Recurrent Vision Transformers: Recurrence, Neural ODEs, and Deep Supervision
Vision Transformers (ViTs) achieve strong image-recognition performance, but their parameter count grows linearly with depth when each block is independently parameterized. Single-block recurrent ViTs (bViT) remove this growth by repeatedly applying one shared block. Rather than proposing a new architecture, we fix a bViT and provide a controlled empirical characterization of three training and inference regimes under a common CIFAR-100 protocol, asking: (i)~when does recurrence beat independently parameterized depth---at matched FLOPs or at matched parameter memory? (ii)~when a residual recurrent block is trained through an ODE solver, does solver order act as numerical refinement or as an architectural bias? and (iii)~what does robustness beyond the training horizon cost in nominal accuracy? We find that standard ViTs remain preferable when FLOPs are the primary constraint, whereas recurrent ViTs offer a better accuracy--parameter trade-off under memory constraints. Consistent with the standard view of residual networks as Euler discretizations of ODEs, the continuous-time analogue of a residual recurrent block is the state-subtracted vector field $\dot{z}=F_θ(z)-z$; although known in principle, this distinction is easy to violate when the block is wrapped as a black-box vector field, and we qualify the cost at few accuracy points. Because the vector field is learned jointly with the solver, higher-order solvers act as a solver-induced architectural bias rather than a numerical-accuracy improvement, and their gains are not uniform. Finally, stage-wise deep supervision traces an accuracy--robustness frontier: it does not improve nominal accuracy, but degrades gracefully far beyond the training horizon, where naive recurrence collapses to near-random performance.
☆ Persistent Object Narratives for Token-Efficient Video Language Models
Video large language models (Video-LLMs) have made strong progress in open-ended video understanding. However, their visual interfaces remain token-intensive and provide limited explicit structure for linking recurring object evidence across time. We introduce SlotNarrative, a slot-based interface that organizes a video into persistent object narratives represented by compact object-state tokens. Rather than compressing frame-wise features before establishing temporal correspondence, SlotNarrative first groups visual features into object-like slots and then associates recurring observations with clip-level object entries through a lightweight, parameter-free memory that integrates multiple complementary matching cues. Each retained entry is serialized into two token types: an identity token that summarizes persistent object appearance and a set of state tokens that encode segment-level appearance, geometry, visibility, and trajectory information. This design yields an interface of only 144 allocated visual-token positions for a frozen Video-LLM, independent of the number of sampled frames. Across multiple datasets, SlotNarrative achieves a favorable trade-off between accuracy and visual-token count compared with prior compact Video-LLM interfaces. Experimental results establish persistent object narratives as a compact, structured, and temporally organized visual interface for Video-LLMs. Our code will be made publicly available.
☆ Cooking beyond Frames: A Stereo Event Camera Dataset in the Kitchen ECCV 2026
Chengming Feng, Hesam Araghi, Liming Zheng, Julien Dupeyroux, Xucong Zhang, Jan van Gemert, Nergis Tömen
Event cameras, also known as neuromorphic cameras, have gained significant attention in recent years due to their high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, and low power consumption. While many studies and datasets in neuromorphic vision have focused on automotive and drone applications, human-centric daily-life scenarios remain largely underrepresented, despite their importance for developing and benchmarking event-based perception systems. Moreover, the few existing event-based human activity datasets are typically recorded with scripted human actions, limiting their ability to capture natural human behaviors. In this paper, we introduce EventKitchen, a large-scale stereo event camera benchmark dataset of human cooking activities in the kitchen. EventKitchen is egocentrically collected from 10 participants in 13 diverse kitchens, where the participants wear a helmet with multiple sensors and naturally perform cooking activities, without any scripted actions. EventKitchen comprises 5.5 hours of stereo event recordings with synchronized RGB, depth, and IMU data. We provide human annotations for 10,762 action segments and 13,482 bounding boxes. We train baseline models on EventKitchen to perform multiple event-based tasks, including action recognition, object detection, and stereo depth estimation. By capturing natural, real-world human activities, EventKitchen establishes a challenging benchmark for neuromorphic vision beyond autonomous driving.
comment: Accepted at ECCV 2026
☆ Towards a satellite image manipulation and deepfake localization benchmark dataset IEEE
Verifying the authenticity of satellite imagery has become increasingly critical given advances in generative artificial intelligence. Highly realistic synthetic imagery produced for malicious purposes (deepfakes) can have major consequences in the remote sensing domain, where this data is a fundamental source of information for science applications, planning, logistics, and monitoring. The remote sensing community lacks high-quality, fine-grained manipulation datasets suitable for training and evaluating detection and image forensics algorithms. Existing datasets are lacking and those that do exist either provide no ground truth masks for evaluating manipulation localization, or consist of entire images generated by GANs or diffusion models, which are inadequate for measuring localization performance. To address this gap, we describe a preliminary dataset construction process and prototype benchmark dataset for satellite image manipulation detection and localization. The dataset contains 60 images total, with 30 images carefully manipulated using three manipulation types including copy-paste splicing and diffusion model inpainting, and 30 authentic images. Each image is accompanied by a ground-truth mask and acquisition metadata, enabling both pixel-level localization metrics, image metadata studies, and analyses of how manipulation detection performance relates to image collection parameters. We describe the dataset construction process and present this initial release to support further research in image forensics and geospatial deepfake detection. The prototype dataset can be downloaded at https://huggingface.co/datasets/geodf/fmow-fake-small.
comment: Accepted at IEEE IGARSS 2026
☆ RegisterBridgeMM: A Register-Centric Framework for RGB-Infrared Object Detection
RGB-infrared (RGB-IR) object detection benefits from complementary visible and thermal cues, but effective fusion remains challenging under illumination changes, weather variation, and cluttered scenes. Existing RGB-IR fusion methods often trade expressive patch-level interaction for lighter but more constrained adaptation mechanisms. We empirically observe that pretrained register tokens contain both modality-shared and modality-specific information on paired RGB-IR inputs, suggesting that they can serve as a compact substrate for cross-modal communication. Building on this observation, we propose RegisterBridgeMM, a register-mediated fusion framework organized as a three-stage register lifecycle. Aggregate preserves per-modality register summarization inherited from pretraining; Bridge performs bidirectional register-to-patch reading with consensus-residual regulation; and Project translates the resulting register summary into spatially adaptive calibration of patch features. This register pathway avoids dense patch-to-patch cross-modal interaction while preserving the pretrained patch representation. With both backbone streams frozen, RegisterBridgeMM achieves the highest mAP50-95 among the evaluated methods on all four benchmarks: LLVIP, M3FD, DroneVehicle, and FLIR-Aligned.
☆ Global Attention-Fused Image Cropping with Attention-Guided and Global-Aligned Crop Evaluator
Image cropping aims to improve image aesthetics by preserving important content within an appropriately composed region. However, most existing methods focus primarily on salient regions and therefore have limited sensitivity to the global relationships among the main image components. To address this limitation, we propose Global Attention-Fused Image Cropping (GAFIC), which consists of an Attention-Guided Feature Fusion (AGFF) and a Global-Aligned Crop Evaluator (GACE). AGFF aggregates the importance of local regions to construct a global representation that captures both image structure and local details. GACE aligns candidate crop features with this global representation, enabling crop evaluation to remain sensitive to boundary changes. We further combine three ranking losses across multiple scales to obtain accurate and stable crop scores. Extensive experiments on the GAIC and CPC datasets demonstrate that GAFIC outperforms existing image-cropping methods, particularly in terms of accuracy and stability. Unlike pixel-level retargeting methods such as seam carving, inpainting, and diffusion-based synthesis, GAFIC does not synthesize or modify the retained pixels; instead, it selects an aesthetically preferred crop from the source image, making it suitable for scenarios where pixel integrity and efficient batch processing are important. The source code is available at https://github.com/AIVRC/GAFIC.git.
comment: The source code is available at https://github.com/AIVRC/GAFIC.git
☆ When Diffusion Models Forget Who You Are: Identity Preservation in Face Inpainting under Large Occlusions
Face inpainting with diffusion models has recently achieved impressive visual quality, yet preserving identity fidelity under significant occlusion and conflicting text guidance remains a major challenge. To address this issue, we present Reference Semantic Inpainting for Face (ReSem-Face), a cascaded diffusion framework that introduces an explicit identity-conditioned semantic prior for multi-reference face inpainting. Our approach distills representative identity features from multiple references to reconstruct missing semantic regions, which then guide the diffusion process through a multi-stream conditioning architecture. This design provides strong semantic constraints when pixels are absent and stabilizes identity reconstruction while remaining compatible with prompt-driven edits. Experiments on CelebAHQ-IDI-5 and VGGFace2 demonstrate that ReSem-Face yields more reliable identity-preserving completion under severe semantic masks and improves text-controlled editing quality compared with representative baselines.
☆ Rethinking Pixel Mean Flows via Interval Denoiser
Modern diffusion and flow-based models are increasingly moving toward few-step, latent-free generation to bypass the computational overhead of multi-step sampling and the reconstruction bottlenecks of external autoencoders. We propose the Interval Denoiser, a theoretically rigorous framework for latent-free generation. Derived directly from the flow matching ODE, it establishes an exact analytical mapping for intermediate trajectory states. Unlike prior formulations, our prediction is shown to reside on a low-dimensional manifold across any time interval, making the regression tractable for a network operating directly on pixels. Furthermore, by avoiding empirical algebraic substitutions, our formulation correctly isolates the pure time derivative to prevent biased gradient evaluations and ensure exact first-order optimization. By analyzing this objective, we equip our framework with residual clipping and a time-sampling curriculum, enabling effective long-interval training and improving few-step performance. Trained from scratch on ImageNet 256x256, our model achieves an FID of 4.55 in one step (1-NFE) and 3.98 in two steps (2-NFE) without perceptual losses.
☆ StaticSegFormer: An Efficient High-Performance Semantic Segmentation Based on Static Structured Pruning
Structured pruning enhances the efficiency of deep neural networks (DNNs) by eliminating groups of parameters during inference. Previous methods mostly reduce computational complexity (FLOPs), while semantic segmentation performance (mIoU) slightly drops. Accordingly, recent dynamic structured pruning methods aim at reducing the performance drop, while lowering the FLOPs even more. However, on the ADE20K and Cityscapes benchmarks, our study reveals that on a GPU platform such dynamic methods exhibit a surprisingly low frame rate far below a simple static approach, while having comparable results in mIoU and FLOPs. To address this issue, we propose a static structured pruning method for attention layers, that achieves both, a lower FLOPs and a high frame rate [fps] of the SegFormer network, the latter increased by up to 34% relative on the Cityscapes dataset, while having no mIoU performance drop at all. Our so-called StaticSegFormer method is strongest for small encoders and large images.
☆ Segmentation Pre-training for Label-Efficient Lumbar Spine Degeneration Grading MICCAI
Automated assessment of degenerative pathology in the lumbar spine on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) requires access to large-scale datasets of expert-annotated radiological gradings. In contrast, segmentation pseudo-labels can be generated by automated tools at negligible radiologist cost. We examine whether pre-training on segmentation can effectively replace a fraction of the manual grading annotations required for downstream supervision. We pre-train a 3D ResNet encoder to segment the vertebrae, intervertebral discs (IVDs), and the spinal canal, then fine-tune lightweight task-specific grading heads using different proportions of the available training data, ranging from $10\%$ to $100\%$. On a multicentre dataset of ${\sim}2{,}000$ subjects across 11 pathologies, segmentation pre-training, achieving a Dice score of $0.94$ against pseudo-labels, improved the task-averaged (macro) one-vs-rest ROC-AUC at all proportions. With only 20\% of grading labels after pre-training, the method achieved near full-supervision performance, with the largest gains observed for either low-prevalence or spatially grounded pathologies.
comment: The 2nd MICCAI Workshop on Efficient Medical AI (2026)
☆ On the Effectiveness of Adaptation Strategies for VLM-Based Federated Learning in Remote Sensing SP
Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative training of deep learning models across decentralized image archives without requiring data centralization. This paradigm is particularly relevant in remote sensing (RS), where legal regulations, privacy concerns, and bandwidth constraints restrict data sharing. However, the presence of training data heterogeneity across clients (known as non-IID data) can impede convergence and limit the generalization capability of the aggregated global model. To mitigate the adverse effects of training data heterogeneity, vision-language models (VLMs) can be leveraged in FL due to their transferable representations, which have demonstrated robustness under distribution shifts. However, their large parameter size may substantially increase communication overhead and local computational complexity in federated settings. Therefore, it is crucial to select an appropriate VLM adaptation strategy that balances the generalization ability with the communication and computational constraints. To address this issue, in this paper, we present the first comparative study of VLM adaptation strategies for FL in the context of RS image classification. We investigate full fine-tuning, encoder-specific fine-tuning, prompt learning, and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) tuning, and analyze them with respect to three criteria: 1) generalization capability under non-IID data, 2) communication overhead, and 3) local computational complexity. Experiments on BigEarthNet-S2, EuroSAT, RESISC45, and ImageNet reveal distinct trade-offs between task specialization, cross-domain generalization, and efficiency. Based on our findings, we derive a guideline for the selection of an appropriate VLM adaptation strategy in FL for RS image classification under different operational constraints. The code of this work is publicly available at https://git.tu-berlin.de/rsim/FL-RS-VLM.
comment: Accepted at the SPIE Artificial Intelligence and Image and Signal Processing for Remote Sensing, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2026
☆ Embedding Large Language Models into Flow Controls: An Agentic Framework for Adaptive and Trustworthy Automated Cooking
Automated cooking robots have traditionally relied on predefined procedures and rule-based control, ensuring stable execution but offering limited personalization, whereas recent large-model approaches support natural language interaction but often suffer from opaque decision making and unreliable execution in real kitchens. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an agentic framework that systematically decomposes personalized cooking requirements into structured and verifiable control programs rather than directly mapping language to actions. Multiple AI agents collaboratively transform user intents into canonical recipes, workflow programs with explicit flow control, and executable Python code grounded in an atomic action library. The system consists of three tightly coupled stages: offline recipe-to-code generation through multiple agents, online closed-loop execution with supervisory intervention enabled by multimodal perception, and post-run adaptation that updates user preference models for long-term personalization. Real-world experiments on a physical cooking platform demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves reliable task completion, transparent execution logic, and effective anomaly handling across diverse personalized scenarios, validating its practicality for trustworthy automated cooking in real environments.
☆ FUSEP: A Multi-Center Benchmark for Diverse Tasks in Early Pregnancy Fetal Ultrasound Screening
Bin Pu, Jiewen Yang, Liwen Wang, Ying Tan, Guannan He, Xingbo Dong, Qika Lin, Jiarong Guo, Lixian Yang, Zuozhu Liu, Shengli Li, Kenli Li
A large number of infants with congenital anomalies are born each year globally, especially in areas with underdeveloped medical resources. Currently, fetal ultrasound screening is the most common modality for early pregnancy anatomy detection. This modality can detect anomalies earlier and provide opportune treatment advice. However, the lack of an ultrasound dataset on early fetal gestation has slowed down the development of automated assisted diagnosis. In this work, we present a benchmark dataset for Fetal Ultrasound Screening in Early Pregnancy to facilitate intelligent ultrasound examination and assisted diagnosis called FUSEP. Our dataset consists of two ultrasound views recommended by the international guideline, i.e., Crown-rump Length (CRL) and Nuchal Translucency (NT) views in three hospitals, totaling 4,017 ultrasound images, with 45,820 box-level expert-level annotations. Our dataset and baseline present the following three contributions: 1) Our medical experts annotated a total of 14 key anatomical structures in two views using a box-level format; 2) Our data is collected extensively from different sonographers, devices, scanning angles, hospitals, etc; 3) We report the performance of the semi-supervised learning, fully supervised learning, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), and source-free UDA in ultrasound images multi-object detection. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first publicly available dataset and benchmark for fetal early pregnancy ultrasound screening. We believe that FUSEP and benchmark can contribute to the medical community in the development of multiple tasks such as standard plane recognition, quality control on ultrasound images, automated assisted diagnostics in early fetal pregnancy, medical multi-object detection, domain adaptation for object detection, etc.
☆ Explicit Language Memory for Long-Horizon Planning in Vision-Language-Action Models
Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide a unified paradigm for connecting visual perception, language understanding, and robotic control. However, existing VLA models still face major challenges in long-horizon tasks: sparse expert demonstrations constrain cross-task compositional generalization; the non-Markovian nature of long-horizon tasks makes it difficult for policies conditioned only on current observations to maintain temporal consistency; limited closed-loop error correction allows execution errors to accumulate; and end-to-end action fine-tuning may weaken the high-level semantic representations of vision-language model (VLM) backbones. To address these issues, we propose a hierarchical long-horizon VLA architecture with an explicit language-memory module. The central idea is to convert discrete temporal observations into a coherent textual memory sequence with temporal logic. The system is decoupled into a high-level VLM and a low-level VLA: the high-level VLM performs semantic reasoning through a visual question answering training paradigm, while the low-level VLA executes precise continuous control conditioned on subtask instructions and visual observations. The high-level VLM recursively updates both language memory and subtask instructions using the previous memory as a contextual anchor, enabling persistent temporal tracking and dynamic correction during long-horizon execution. We evaluate the proposed method in multiple simulation environments and conduct sim-to-real experiments on a real robotic platform. The results demonstrate that explicit language memory improves the success rate and robustness of VLA models on complex long-horizon tasks while providing an interpretable semantic account of the decision process.
comment: 11 pages, 4 figures
☆ Splat-Based Metal Artifact Reduction in Cone-Beam CT via Compact Attenuation Modeling
X-ray computed tomography (CT) suffers from severe metal artifacts when high-attenuation objects such as dental fillings or orthopedic implants are present. These artifacts originate from the polychromatic nature of X-rays, where attenuation varies strongly with photon energy and material composition, breaking the monochromatic assumption used by conventional reconstruction algorithms. Recent neural rendering approaches attempt to address this mismatch through differentiable polychromatic projection models, but they still struggle with smoothness bias, loss of fine structures, and prohibitive computation when extended to large-scale cone-beam CT. We introduce a splat-based metal artifact reduction framework that incorporates a physically grounded polychromatic forward model into a continuous Gaussian representation for cone-beam CT. Each Gaussian encodes the energy-dependent attenuation of the underlying material using a compact material parameterization, which enables efficient joint optimization of geometric and material properties without relying on a metal mask. This compact attenuation formulation captures the essential variation across biological tissues and metallic implants, allowing our model to explain metal-induced nonlinearity while preserving high-frequency structure. Experiments on simulated and real cone-beam CT scans show that our method converges significantly faster and suppresses metal artifacts more effectively than existing reconstruction and neural field-based approaches.
☆ Trace, Verify, and Correct: A Training-Free Framework for Spatial Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs
Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made substantial progress, their spatial reasoning may still produce intermediate judgments inconsistent with the input image, allowing errors to propagate through the reasoning chain and affect the final answer. Existing methods mainly improve spatial reasoning through training or additional spatial information, without considering whether the reasoning process itself is faithful to the model input. Our study shows that unfaithful reasoning chains significantly reduce final-answer accuracy. To address this issue, we propose a modular and training-free framework for spatial reasoning verification and correction. The framework constructs a Spatial Evidence Graph (SEG), which associates atomic spatial evidence extracted from Chain-of-Thought reasoning with visual entities, spatial relations, source steps, and visual evidence. Spatial Evidence Reliability Assessment (SERA) evaluates the reliability of visual evidence based on object existence, localization, and geometric measurements. The framework then identifies the earliest spatial evidence unit contradicted by reliable visual evidence and guides the original MLLM to revise the subsequent reasoning and final answer. Across 15 model-dataset settings, our method achieves an average accuracy of 68.94%, outperforming the compared baselines by 8.55 percentage points on average. Our code will be open-sourced.
comment: 19 pages, 7 figures
☆ Revisiting Pose Sensitivity in Splat-based Computed Tomography under Sparse-view Reconstruction
X-ray computed tomography (CT) reconstructs volumetric representations of objects from projection images obtained by transmitting X-rays through a target. Recent splat-based tomography, which represents a volume as a continuous distribution of 3D Gaussians, has demonstrated both high reconstruction quality and fast convergence in cone-beam sparse-view CT. However, when deployed in real CT systems with limited and non-uniform view distributions, we observe distinctive streak and strip artifacts that are far more pronounced than in conventional reconstruction methods. Through detailed analysis, we show that these artifacts primarily originate from pose inaccuracies in the acquisition geometry rather than from view sparsity itself. We revisit pose sensitivity in the splatting formulation and derive a stable gradient-based framework that jointly refines geometric parameters during reconstruction. Our study not only identifies how pose perturbations propagate through the differentiable projection operator but also reveals why splat-based CT is particularly vulnerable to geometric misalignment. The resulting formulation remains lightweight and easily integrable into existing pipelines while substantially improving reconstruction fidelity under real-world sparse-view conditions.
☆ Simile Understanding in Text-to-Image Models: An Evaluation Framework
Luecheng Wang, Shintaro Ozaki, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Katsuhiko Hayashi, Jingun Kwon, Manabu Okumura, Taro Watanabe
Similes provide a compact and expressive way to describe visual characteristics in text prompts. Recent text-to-image models (t2i models) can produce visually compelling outputs from simile prompts, yet even frontier models frequently misinterpret the metaphorical vehicle and confuse it with the object. These systematic failures reveal a gap between figurative language and object-level visual grounding in t2i models. To investigate this issue, we propose a scalable evaluation framework for simile understanding. Our framework includes (1) a controlled simile dataset in which metaphorical vehicles are drawn from a predefined set of object-detectable categories and combined with diverse templates, (2) automatic grounding metrics based on YOLO (You Only Look Once) detection, and (3) text encoder layer analysis using Diffusion Lens to track how metaphorical vehicles emerge during generation. Experiments across architecturally diverse t2i models reveal consistent literalization failure patterns. We further discuss potential mitigation strategies for improving simile grounding in t2i models.
comment: Accepted as a full paper at ACM Multimedia 2026
☆ Dense Metric Depth Completion from Sparse Direct Time-of-Flight Sensors
Direct Time-of-Flight (dToF) sensors provide highly accurate metric depth and are more robust than indirect ToF systems in challenging real-world conditions. However, their high manufacturing cost and limited photodiode array size produce depth maps that are extremely sparse, low-resolution, and noisy, making them unsuitable for VR/XR, robotics, and 3D perception tasks that require dense metric depth. Existing monocular and depth completion methods struggle to handle the unique sampling patterns and hardware artifacts of dToF devices, and their performance often deteriorates significantly under severe sparsity or noise. We present a generalizable framework for dense metric depth completion from sparse dToF measurements, capable of operating across diverse sensor types, sparsity levels, and noise conditions. Our model employs a depth-guided dual-branch Vision Transformer encoder that processes RGB images and sparse dToF measurements separately, while a masked joint attention module allows depth tokens to reliably guide image features without being overwritten by them. A lightweight decoder reconstructs dense metric depth efficiently, without diffusion-based or refinement-heavy post-processing. To address the scarcity of paired training data, we introduce a comprehensive dToF simulation pipeline that reproduces the characteristics of flash, sub-VGA flash, and rotating sensors, including hardware-induced degradation, irregular sparsity, and realistic noise distributions. Trained entirely on synthetic data, our model achieves strong zero-shot generalization across 6 datasets and 3 real dToF devices, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches in both accuracy and computational efficiency. This establishes a robust and practical solution for dense metric depth completion from sparse direct ToF sensors. Our code and models are open-sourced. See https://vclab.kaist.ac.kr/cvpr2026p3.
☆ When Prompts Become Pixels: Prompt-Region Grounding for Multimodal Reasoning
Multimodal large language models increasingly reason over screenshots and documents where the task itself may be written in pixels. Yet benchmarks usually place questions in text, leaving it unclear whether models use the same instruction equally well across channels. We introduce Visualized Task Semantics (VTS), a controlled intervention that moves the question into the image while keeping the source problem and answer fixed. Across six MLLMs and four benchmarks, accuracy drops in all 24 model-task pairs, by 17.8 points on average. Models often transcribe the visual question correctly yet fail to use it, exposing a semantic channel gap beyond OCR. To reduce this gap, we present prompt-region grounding, whose core design aligns the question region with typed semantics and recovers its clean representation from a masked view. At matched training cost, our method raises four-benchmark VTS accuracy from 58.0 to 66.3 while preserving accuracy on the original interface, and requires no OCR or region metadata at inference. Reading task-bearing text and grounding it as an instruction for reasoning are distinct capabilities.
☆ A GitOps-Driven Annotation Catalog for Fully Automatic Railway Operations
Martin Köppel, Tobias Cronauer, Zekiye Ilknur-Öz, Sebastian Dubiel, Patrick Naumann, Philipp Neumaier
Automatic train operation (ATO) at grade of automation 3 and above (GoA3-GoA4) requires robust AI-based perception systems capable of reliably detecting obstacles and railway-specific objects under real-world conditions. The effectiveness of these modern artificial intelligence approaches depends heavily on large-scale, high-quality, and highly dynamic annotated datasets. However, managing metadata, maintaining provenance, and tracking the iterative evolution of these annotations impose significant infrastructural and regulatory requirements. Existing monolithic data catalogs often suffer from massive operational overhead, poor integration into developer workflows, and severe documentation drift. This paper introduces an innovative, lightweight GitOps-based architecture for metadata management. By leveraging Data-as-Code principles, Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and Static Site Generation (SSG), the proposed approach establishes a seamless, developer-centric workflow. This ensures an traceability, enforces strict regulatory compliance, and automatically generates a highly performant dataset overview.
☆ Multi-View Face and Gesture Animation with Dynamic Gaussians SC
Creating photorealistic 3D human avatars with realistic upper-body motion remains challenging. Existing approaches either focus on the head and overlook hand gestures, or reconstruct the full body but fail to preserve fine-grained facial fidelity and hand pose accuracy. As a result, current methods struggle to capture the subtle dynamics of facial expressions and hand gestures that are crucial for natural human communication. While methods based on full-body parametric models enable avatar reconstruction from monocular or multi-view inputs, they often lack accurate facial animation and detailed hand articulation. To address these limitations, we propose MVFGA, a novel multi-view-consistent pipeline for generating realistic upper-body avatars. Our approach models the face and hands separately and fuses them with a parametric upper-body mesh model, enabling the capture of fine-grained facial expressions and hand poses for accurate upper-body avatar reconstruction. We then splat 3D Gaussians onto the obtained mesh, enabling high-quality rendering of dynamic avatars from novel viewpoints. Furthermore, we introduce MVFGA-MoCap, a multi-view upper-body motion capture dataset featuring controlled facial expression sequences, diverse hand gestures, and free-form communication. Experiments show that MVFGA generates visually realistic avatars with high-fidelity facial expressions and hand motions, outperforming baselines for upper-body avatar animation. Project page: https://dfki-av.github.io/MVFGA/
comment: Accepted at SCA 2026
☆ YOLOv14:Unified Cross-Domain Real-Time Object Detectionwith Adaptive Multi-View Representation
Real-time object detectors achieve remarkable accuracy under controlled conditions, yet degrade sharply on non-ideal inputs: fisheye distortion, game-rendered characters, aerial viewpoints, and 360° panoramas. We present YOLOv14, aunified detection framework addressing these challenges through four synergisticinnovations. (1) Deformable Area-Attention (D-AAttn) replaces rigid attentiongrids with learned 2D deformation fields, enabling adaptive sampling under geometric distortion. (2) Game2Real Domain Adaptation aligns rendered-game and photographic feature distributions via Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN)and adversarial domain confusion, allowing game characters are detected as realhumans. (3) Multi-View Conditioning injects learned viewpoint embeddings intothe backbone with a cross-view contrastive loss that pulls same-class features fromdifferent perspectives closer. (4) An Adaptive Augmentation Policy automaticallyclassifies each input' scene type and routes to optimal augmentations, while a DynamicScaleRouter learns per-input feature pyramid weights. Together, YOLOv14achieves 49.1 mAP on COCO val2017 at 2.91 ms (T4 GPU), and delivers substantial gains on fisheye (+4.1 mAP), panorama (+6.6 mAP), drone (+6.4 mAP), andgame-character (+26.1 mAP) benchmarks
☆ A Multi-Sensor Dataset for Monitoring the Operational Environment of Rail Vehicles
Claudio Diotallevi, Rodrigo Gudiño, Zaharia Pachalieva, Philipp Neumaier, Patrick Naumann, Erik Bochinski, Volker Eiselein, Martin Köppel
Reliable environment monitoring is essential for the safe and efficient operation of automated railway systems, covering all Grades of Automation (GoA), from partially automated (GoA2) to fully automated operation (GoA4). Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a central role in enabling these systems to detect, classify, and react to potential hazards in real time. The development of such AI-based perception systems requires large volumes of accurately annotated data for training and validation.
Within the Digitale Schiene Deutschland (DSD) program, DB InfraGO AG and understandAI GmbH have developed a comprehensive multi- sensor dataset tailored to the needs of railway environment perception. This dataset contains over 7 million high-quality annotations of both railway-specific and general perception objects, captured under varying operational scenarios. The finalized dataset can now be requested at the DB InfraGO AG and serve as a valuable resource for advancing AI-driven environment monitoring in the railway domain.
☆ Design Choices That Matter: A Functional ANOVA Analysis for Remote Sensing Multi-Label Classification
Benchmarking deep learning (DL) models for multi-label classification (MLC) of remote sensing images (RSI) typically yields rankings that do not generalize beyond the evaluated datasets. In this work, we move beyond rankings by employing functional analysis of variance (fANOVA) to systematically quantify the contributions of individual design choices and their interactions to performance variability. We conduct two empirical analyses covering 48 and 20 DL models, respectively, spanning design choices such as network architecture, fine-tuning strategy, learning strategy, and initialization. By applying fANOVA across seven MLC RSI datasets, we construct dataset meta-representations that capture design-choice sensitivity profiles. Hierarchical clustering of these meta-representations reveals that datasets naturally group according to how they respond to design decisions, with patterns strongly linked to intrinsic dataset properties such as scale, spatial resolution, and label space complexity. Our findings show that for large-scale datasets, fine-tuning strategy and architecture are dominant factors, while in data-limited regimes, initialization becomes decisive. For intermediate regimes, the interaction between architecture and learning strategy governs performance.
comment: To appear at Discovery Science 2026
☆ UniWorld-View: Large-Baseline View Synthesis via Video Diffusion Models
The abundance of casually captured monocular videos and images on social media provides a valuable source for immersive content creation, where generating novel views from such sparse observations can greatly enhance user experiences. However, producing photorealistic and geometrically consistent views with precise camera control remains challenging when input coverage is extremely limited. Reconstruction-based approaches such as NeRF and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) deteriorate severely under sparse inputs and fail to explicitly handle occlusions. Generative methods ease data requirements but still struggle with large-baseline view synthesis due to inaccurate or implicit geometric guidance. To overcome these limitations, we introduce UniWorld-View, a unified framework for controllable large-baseline novel view synthesis from monocular inputs. UniWorld-View integrates explicit 3D guidance with generative diffusion modeling to enable precise camera control and geometrically consistent view generation. The geometric guidance is obtained through an occlusion-aware point cloud rendering strategy that resolves visibility ambiguities and provides accurate priors for diffusion-based synthesis. By coupling this rendering strategy with powerful video diffusion backbones, UniWorld-View achieves high-fidelity novel view generation even under extreme camera motions and wide-baseline changes, and can further provide multi-view videos for downstream dynamic 3DGS reconstruction. Experiments on the WorldScore benchmark and zero-shot NVS benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of UniWorld-View in controllability, geometric consistency, and visual fidelity.
comment: Project Homepage: https://zhouhyocean.github.io/uniworld-view/ Code: https://github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/UniWorld-View
☆ Teaching MLLMs to Say No: Generalized Referring Expression Comprehension via Refusal Calibrated GRPO
We tackle the challenging yet underexplored task of Generalized Referring Expression Comprehension (GREC), which requires a model to localize the object described by a textual expression when it exists (positive sample) and to refuse output when it does not (negative sample). Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at localizing existing objects, they often fail to reject nonexistent ones due to the absence of negative samples during training, producing hallucinated bounding boxes. Existing post-training approaches such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) enhance refusal behavior but usually degrade localization accuracy on positive samples, undermining the model's core competence. To address this, we propose Refusal-Calibrated Group Relative Policy Optimization (RC-GRPO), a calibrated RL strategy that strengthens the refusal ability of MLLMs while preserving localization performance. It enforces "None" outputs in rollouts for valid advantage estimation on negative samples and applies a penalty to prevent over-refusal on positives, achieving a balanced trade-off between accuracy and reliability. A second-stage reasoning reinforcement further consolidates causal understanding and interpretability. Experiments on three GREC benchmarks demonstrate that RC-GRPO attains superior localization accuracy while maintaining strong refusal capability.
☆ MOAT: Model-Agnostic Randomized Transformations for preventing Efficiency Degradation Attacks on ViTs IEEE
To adopt the Vision Transformers (ViTs) in resource-constrained environment, token pruning is widely used to reduce computational cost without impacting accuracy. However, adversaries have developed targeted attacks against said token pruning techniques to undermine such attempts to make ViTs efficient. In this paper, we propose MOAT, a model-agnostic pre-processing defense pipeline that applies a combination of input transformations to protect efficient ViT implementations against adversarial efficiency attacks. MOAT operates directly on the input without requiring modifications to the model architecture or token pruning mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate that, across all evaluated ViT models, MOAT limits GFLOPs degradation under adversarial attacks to within 3.4% of the original unattacked model.
comment: This paper has been accepted for publication at IEEE ISVLSI 2026
☆ SurgNarrator: A Generative Retrieval Framework for Surgical Video Understanding IEEE
Yuqing Feng, Jiawei Ma, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Kun Yuan, Nicolas Padoy, Daniel S. Elson, Anh Nguyen, Stamatia Giannarou, Baoru Huang
Surgical procedures unfold as structured and recurring clinical events, whose real-time understanding via intraoperative surgical videos is critical for intraoperative decision-making and support. However, existing video understanding methods force a trade-off: autoregressive video-language models support comprehensive reasoning but are not practical for time-sensitive clinical applications, whereas contrastive models offer low latency but struggle with complex scene understanding. Recently, generative retrieval has been explored for general-domain video understanding, but transferring it to surgery is not trivial because near-identical visual appearances may indicate semantically distinct events, and the terminology involved is highly surgery-specific. To this end, we propose SurgNarrator, a new generative retrieval framework tailored for surgical video understanding. We construct a well-curated surgery-centric vocabulary from surgical captions to define a clinically meaningful retrieval space. We then adapt the pre-trained Qwen3-VL-Embedding-8B to learn discriminative clinical representations with a temporally-aware contrastive objective. During inference, a hierarchical, procedure-aware retrieval strategy narrows the search space to the relevant procedure type, delivering fast and effective responses. Our method is comprehensively evaluated on twelve benchmarks in a zero-shot setting and achieves consistent performance gains over state-of-the-art baselines, while reducing output-stage latency by more than two orders of magnitude compared with the generative baseline.
comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible
☆ Differential 6-DOF Pose Estimation with Provable First-Order Immunity to Camera Calibration Errors
Accurate six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) motion estimation is essential for robotic manipulation, autonomous systems, and structural displacement monitoring. Conventional 3D-2D methods estimate absolute camera poses independently at each time and recover platform motion through camera-to-platform extrinsics, making them sensitive to extrinsic calibration errors, especially for micromotion. We present a differential pose estimation method that directly recovers platform motion from inter-frame image displacements and known 3D control points. By differencing perspective projection equations, using a depth-invariance approximation, and modeling motion on SE(3), the method avoids independent absolute-pose estimation and supports both monocular and multi-camera systems. We prove that translational extrinsic errors cancel exactly, while rotational errors induce a bounded perturbation determined by calibration error, motion magnitude, and observation geometry. We also derive generic observability conditions, a Cramer-Rao lower bound, and a bias-eliminated consistent estimator, and characterize the validity limits of the approximations. Extensive synthetic and real-world experiments establish a new state of the art for 6-DOF platform micromotion estimation, outperforming representative PnP and generalized-PnP methods in accuracy, calibration robustness, and computational efficiency. With five control points and 0.5-pixel image noise, the monocular solver obtains a combined pitch-yaw rotation RMSE of 10.09 arcsec, a translation RMSE of 3.70 mm, and a runtime of 0.34 ms. The binocular solver achieves a rotation RMSE of 10.58 arcsec, a translation RMSE of 3.91 mm, and a runtime of 0.27 ms. Code will be released upon publication at https://github.com/zyoungszu/pami2026.
comment: 16 pages, 15 figures
☆ MobileWAM: Bridging World Action Models to Mobile Manipulation with Chain-of-Foresight
Zehua Fan, Junjie He, Wenxuan Song, Xi Wang, Wenqi Lyu, Linge Zhao, Fuhao Li, Zihan You, Yifei Yang, Kaiming Xu, Qi Jiang, Yue Jiang, Haoang Li, Cheng Chi, Bailin Li, Yan Wang
World action models (WAMs) built on video generation backbones are a rising recipe for robot learning, yet remain confined to tabletop manipulation. Mobile manipulation demands simultaneous locomotion and whole-body manipulation amid scene-scale dynamics, yet is still dominated by dynamics-blind visual encoders with hand-crafted coordination. We bridge this gap with MobileWAM, a mixture-of-transformers architecture that fuses a pretrained video diffusion transformer with a lightweight action expert through layerwise joint attention, translating internet-scale motion priors into whole-body control. To reconcile the heterogeneous dynamics of moving and manipulating, each feed-forward layer of the action expert becomes a three-expert mixture of shared, locomotion, and manipulation experts, softly routed by the motion intent in the action tokens. To densify supervision, we further propose Chain-of-Foresight (CoF): intermediate representations sequentially predict a chain of future latent chunks, each step conditioned on its predecessor. CoF pairs naturally with our decoupled video--action denoising scheme. At deployment, the WAM serves as a pure current-frame encoder; foresight acts only through gradients, so at inference the foresight chain and video generation are discarded, leaving only policy-level cost. MobileWAM surpasses state-of-the-art mobile manipulation policies on ManiSkill-HAB and fine-tunes to a real ARX Lift2 mobile manipulator across diverse tasks with strong generalization. Code will be released soon.
☆ CSGen: A Multi-Domain Curvilinear Structure Generation Model via Hierarchical Multimodal Diffusion ACM MM 2026
Curvilinear structure analysis is an important and fundamental task in multimedia. However, the controllable generation of images with precise curvilinear structure objects remains an open challenge. To address this, we propose CSGen, a hierarchical multimodal diffusion model that synthesizes high-fidelity images precisely aligned with multiple control conditions. The CSGen is built upon three key innovations: 1) We construct a multi-domain and multimodal dataset, including over 24K samples from 5 domains and 7 different types of annotations, to train the unified generation model. 2) We propose a novel hierarchical progressive control strategy that decouples topology clues from visual context by a phased signal injection, mitigating semantic drift while ensuring the topological integrity of sparse structures. 3) We design a sparsity-aware loss re-weighting mechanism to address the extreme sparsity of curvilinear structures, significantly enhancing the attention on thin and fragile structures during optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CSGen generates images with superior structure accuracy and visual realism, significantly improving downstream segmentation performance while maintaining robustness across diverse prompts. Our results confirm CSGen as a scalable, data-centric paradigm for the analysis of complex curvilinear structures in diverse multimedia applications. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ShanZard/CSGen.
comment: Accepted to ACM MM 2026
☆ Overcoming Statistical Bias in Action-Controllable World Models
Action-conditioned world models aim to predict how visual environments evolve under an agent's actions. Yet future frames are often highly predictable from visual inertia and recurring motion patterns alone. This creates a shortcut: models can fit the data by exploiting statistical biases without making their visible dynamics meaningfully depend on the action. As a result, different actions may produce similar futures, while motion may persist even under zero action. The key question is how to reduce reliance on statistical shortcuts from dominating action-conditioned prediction. We argue that action control requires more than injecting action features; it requires enforcing consistency under counterfactual changes to actions and observations. Based on this insight, we introduce CoCo, a Counterfactual Consistency framework to enhance action controllability through two complementary constraints. Multi-step counterfactual consistency constrains reference, inverse-action, and zero-action rollouts, while action-spatial counterfactual consistency enforces consistent predictions under mirrored scenes and transformed actions. Together, they reduce reliance on statistical shortcuts from substituting for action-dependent dynamics. We further introduce Action Response Consistency (ARC) and Drift Energy (DE) to assess action controllability, together with Mini-SSMB for same-state, multi-action counterfactual evaluation. On Mini-SSMB, our full model achieved ARC_inv of 0.412 and ARC_ref of 0.483, while reducing DE by 17.07% relative to the baseline. On VP2 visual planning, it achieves the highest average success rate among SOTA models, at 73.1%. Experiments on BAIR and RoboNet further show that these gains preserve video prediction quality and transfer across model settings.
☆ DisMix: Order-Aware Mixup for Medical Imaging via Disentangling Ordinal and Non-Ordinal Features
Image mixup is a widely adopted data augmentation strategy, yet it is ill-suited for ordinal classification tasks such as medical disease grading, where labels encode a progression of severity. By indiscriminately blending disease-severity cues (ordinal) with appearance-level variation (non-ordinal), standard mixup produces samples that distort the very ordinal structure that underpins clinical severity grading. We introduce DisMix, an order-aware mixup framework for ordinal classification. DisMix disentangles ordinal and non-ordinal features via a dual-codebook VQ-VAE, allowing each subspace to be mixed independently: ordinal codes are interpolated to produce meaningful intermediate ranks, while non-ordinal codes are varied to introduce appearance diversity without corrupting the ordinal signal. Across four medical imaging datasets, DisMix shows the best aggregate performance among six image mixup baselines paired with six ordinal classifiers and remains effective under data scarcity and clinical grading variability.
☆ YOLO-PVC: 2D-to-3D Consolidation of Slice-wise Detections for Volumetric Liver Tumor Localization in MRI ECCV 2026
Talha Waqas, Mounir Lahlouh, Kawther Taibouni, Mahnoor Waqas, Salar Ahmed, Sébastien Mulé, Yasmina Leroul-Chenoune
Slice-wise 2D object detectors are increasingly applied to volumetric data due to their computational efficiency and scalability, yet they often yield fragmented and unstable predictions along the depth axis. We propose YOLO-PVC, a lightweight and model-agnostic framework for 2D-to-3D consolidation of slice-wise detections. The method enforces depth continuity, aggregates bounding box coordinates using robust percentile statistics, and further refines axial extent through a lightweight MLP-based calibration module. Unlike naïve stacking or averaging strategies, YOLO-PVC explicitly addresses missing detections and outlier slices along the depth dimension. Experiments on 3D liver MRI volumes across three tumor categories demonstrate consistent improvements over multiple aggregation baselines. The heuristic PVC achieves an overall $\mathrm{IoU}_{3D}$ of $0.665$, while the calibrated variant further improves performance to $0.710$, with high planar overlap ($\mathrm{BEV\ IoU} \approx 0.78$). These results demonstrate that structured geometric consolidation provides an effective and practical solution for volumetric liver tumor localization in clinical MRI.
comment: 14 pages, 2 figures, 4 tables. Accepted at AI4M3D Workshop, ECCV 2026 (Spotlight)
☆ Visual Anchoring in Diffusion: Multimodal Zero-Shot Skeleton Action Recognition
Zero-shot Skeleton Action Recognition (ZSAR) remains ambiguous when unseen actions share similar skeleton joint dynamics but differ in objects or scene context. RGB provides these missing cues, yet existing multimodal methods typically maintain independent skeleton and RGB scoring branches and fuse their outputs. Without using unlabeled test data for adaptation or fusion calibration, a fixed fusion weight cannot capture class-pair-dependent modality reliability, while an adaptive rule lacks target-side feedback for deciding which branch should dominate. We bypass this weight-selection problem via the classify-by-generation paradigm, where each class is scored by how accurately a text-conditioned denoiser predicts the noise added to the skeleton feature. This formulation separates the progressively corrupted skeleton from fixed conditioning, allowing RGB and text to jointly condition a single class-scoring function rather than produce independent scores. We instantiate this idea as Multimodal Triplet Diffusion for Skeleton-Text Matching (TDSM-MM), augmenting a text-conditioned denoising Transformer with a non-diffused RGB condition token that serves as a stable visual anchor during skeleton data reconstruction. Our proposed TDSM-MM has been ablated via extensive experiments and achieved the best inductive accuracy on three of four NTU-60/120 splits and surpasses the transductive state-of-the-art on NTU-120 96/24 (i.e., 71.3% vs. 69.1%), without test-time adaptation, suggesting that diffusion-based methods can be a promising direction for zero-shot learning.
☆ DAC-Pose: Dual-Agent Collaborative Framework for Pose-Guided Human Generation
AI agents have emerged as a powerful new paradigm in generative image synthesis, enabling systems to perform complex semantic reasoning rather than passive pixel-level mapping. In pose-guided human generation, conventional methods inevitably produce severe visual artifacts under drastic viewpoint shifts, fundamentally because they lack the cognitive capacity to logically deduce unseen regions and model complex spatial deformations. To bridge this gap, we propose DAC-Pose, a novel agent-driven multimodal framework that reformulates single-view human generation as a collaborative dual-agent system. DAC-Pose integrates two complementary components, namely, the Prior Semantic Reasoning (PSR) agent and the Discrepancy-Aware Visual Encoding (DAVE) agent. Functioning as a cognitive engine, PSR utilizes collaborative reasoning to deduce the fine-grained attributes of unseen regions. Concurrently, acting as a specialized visual perception agent, DAVE quantifies and encodes viewpoint-induced spatial misalignments, continuously feeding robust spatial constraints back into the generative process. This autonomous feedback loop between semantic deduction and visual perception ensures high-fidelity detail synthesis. Extensive experiments on the DeepFashion and Market-1501 benchmarks validate the superiority of our agent-driven paradigm. Notably, DAC-Pose excels in preserving texture alignment and identity consistency under drastic viewpoint changes. The code is available at https://github.com/AIVRC/DAC-Pose.
comment: Code is available at https://github.com/AIVRC/DAC-Pose
☆ HiSC: Hierarchical Spatial Clustering Token Compression for Efficient 3D Scene Understanding ACM MM 2026
3D vision-language models (3D VLMs) enable spatial reasoning over multi-view scenes but suffer from substantial token redundancy due to duplicated observations and large uninformative regions, leading to high computational cost. Although visual token compression has shown promise in accelerating 2D VLMs, it fails to capture the structured nature of 3D scenes and leads to incomplete spatial coverage and loss of fine-grained details. In this paper, we propose \textbf{HiSC}, a training-free framework for hierarchical spatial clustering token compression in 3D VLMs. HiSC lifts token compression from token-level selection to cluster-level processing by organizing tokens into spatially grounded clusters using joint geometric and semantic cues. Specifically, we first introduce a \textbf{spatial graph-based merging (SGraM) strategy} that models cross-view redundancy as spatial connectivity and consolidates physically consistent regions, effectively merging extremely similar redundant tokens prior to LLM inference. We then propose a \textbf{spatial clustering-based pruning (SCluP) paradigm} within LLM inference, which performs hierarchical compression across clusters and within clusters, preserving object instance completeness while retaining fine-grained details for important regions. Extensive experiments on diverse 3D reasoning benchmarks show validate the effectiveness of HiSC, particularly under high visual token pruning ratios. Besides, HiSC achieves over 90\% token reduction with minimal performance degradation. Code is accessible at https://github.com/elecreak/HiSC.
comment: Accepted by ACM MM 2026
☆ TRCoRSurg: Temporal-Relational Co-Reasoning for Surgical Video Triplet Recognition
Understanding complex surgical scenes requires recognizing multiple interdependent entities, such as instruments, actions, and targets, while maintaining their relational consistency across time. Existing surgical triplet recognition methods struggle to jointly model intra-frame label dependencies and inter-frame temporal semantics in a unified manner. To address these limitations, we propose a unified framework that integrates spatial, relational, and temporal cues for robust surgical triplet recognition. Specifically, class-specific spatial priors are first extracted through a multi-scale encoder. These priors are then refined by a Label Correlation Modeling module with multi-scale class activation map-guided relational extraction (MS-CAMRE), enabling the model to capture both static co-occurrence patterns and dynamic contextual dependencies among triplet components. Furthermore, a Bidirectional Temporal-Relational Fusion Attention (BTRFA) module harmonizes temporal and relational representations to achieve coherent temporal reasoning. We also introduce a new evaluation metric, the Triplet Consistency Error Rate (TCER), which quantitatively measures the model's ability to preserve causal and semantic consistency across triplets. Extensive experiments on the CholecT45 and ProstaTD datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving AP_IVT by 5.1 percent and 7.8 percent, respectively. Moreover, according to TCER, our approach achieves relative reductions of more than 36 percent and 25 percent on the two datasets, respectively, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework in temporal-relational co-reasoning.
comment: code: https://github.com/Neesky/TRCoRSurg
☆ COSMO: Consensus-Driven Shift Modulation for Source-Free Domain Adaptation
Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) adapts a source-trained model to an unlabeled target domain without source data, a practical setting under privacy or storage constraints. Yet its self-generated supervision can reinforce source bias under substantial domain shifts. Pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) offer complementary semantic knowledge, but the relative reliability of the source model and VLM varies across target samples. Existing cross-model guidance does not explicitly account for this variation and may overwrite valid source-derived evidence under conflict, a failure we term source-derived evidence forgetting. We formulate VLM-guided SFDA as a sample-wise reliability-allocation problem and propose Consensus-Driven Shift Modulation (COSMO). COSMO replaces expert-to-expert guidance with co-adaptation through an anchored shared consensus. It first forms a sample-specific initial consensus that favors the more concentrated prediction. During adaptation, COSMO re-aggregates both branches' evolving evidence and regulates how far the resulting consensus moves from its initial anchor based on consensus uncertainty and training progress. This keeps the shared supervision anchored yet adaptive. Across four benchmarks, COSMO achieves state-of-the-art performance under matched VLM backbones. Further analyses indicate that it better balances the retention of valid source-derived evidence with the absorption of complementary VLM evidence.
comment: 30 pages, 7 figures
☆ The First EgoCross Challenge at EgoVis 2026: Cross-Domain Egocentric Video Question Answering CVPR26
Yuqian Fu, Tianwen Qian, Yanjun Li, Yu Li, Kunyu Peng, Xu Zheng, Yongqin Xian, Alessio Tonioni, Yanwei Fu, Xiaoling Wang, Danda Paudel, Federico Tombari, Luc Van Gool, Leyi Wu, Yifan Zhao, Jinjie Zhang, Yinchuan Li, Yingcong Chen, Zixu Li, Zhiwei Chen, Zhiheng Fu, Wenbo Wang, Yupeng Hu, Weili Guan, Liqiang Nie, Takuya Murakawa, Toru Tamaki, Yi Wen, Zhenglin Du, Zhengyang Li, Lingling Li, Licheng Jiao, Wenping Ma
EgoCross is a cross-domain egocentric video question answering benchmark designed to evaluate whether multimodal large language models can generalize beyond common daily-life scenarios. The first EgoCross Challenge was hosted at the Third EgoVis Workshop at CVPR 2026 and evaluated models on first-person videos from four target domains: surgery, industrial assembly, extreme sports, and animal perspectives. Each test example consists of an egocentric video clip, a question, and four candidate answers, from which the model must select the correct option. This technical report introduces the challenge task, benchmark resources, and two official Codabench tracks. The Source-Limited Track restricts participants to the official baseline model and a small support set, whereas the Open-Source Track permits broader choices of models and training data under rules that prohibit the manual construction of target-domain training data. In total, the challenge received more than 1,500 submissions from over 130 participants, with 19 teams participating in the Open-Source Track and 38 teams in the Source-Limited Track. We further present the official leaderboard results and summarize the winning solutions from both tracks. We hope that this report will serve as a useful technical reference for advancing cross-domain egocentric video understanding. All resources, including the challenge data, baseline implementation, and code released by the winning teams, are made publicly available.
comment: 1st EgoCross challenge @ EgoVis workshop, CVPR26
☆ MetaVideoAgent: Automated Video-Agent Evolution for Long-Form Video Understanding
Benlei Cui, Ruize Wang, Junjie Li, Jinhao Chen, Longtao Huang, Yinghao Chen, Yuwen Zhai, Jingqun Tang, Ruijian Jia, Weiwei Wu, Pengfei Sun, Haiwen Hong
Long-form video understanding requires locating sparse, question-relevant evidence in long, multimodal videos. Real-world video distributions differ in modality-specific information density, content structure, and evidence patterns, causing fixed video-agent designs to incur redundant processing or fail when mismatched. Extending automated agent evolution from text to video is challenging because full long-video execution makes candidate validation expensive, failures propagate across coupled evidence-processing stages, and complex preprocessing, perception tools, and localization strategies make code-level updates difficult to implement reliably.
We introduce MetaVideoAgent, a framework that automatically evolves a video agent for a target distribution. It profiles information density and evidence requirements from sparsely sampled frames and associated queries to guide initial design, then compresses localized failures into independently executable minimal validation tasks. It constructs evidence-grounded Gold Paths, audits Student trajectories, aggregates recurring failures across samples, and attributes them to responsible modules. A modular agent representation constrains each update to the primary responsible module and its necessary dependencies.
We further introduce VA-EvoBench, covering eight video distributions with separate evolution and held-out splits. With four evolution iterations per distribution, MetaVideoAgent improves every initial agent and raises macro-average accuracy from 38.44% to 51.47%, at an average evolution cost of 3.54M tokens per distribution. The evolved agents outperform the strongest prior fixed-design video agent by 6.39 percentage points while using the fewest tokens and video frames per question among the compared video agents. We will release all code and data to support reproducible research.
comment: 16 pages, 7 figures. Code: https://github.com/Alibaba-VELLDEPTH/MetaVideoAgent
☆ ACA-GS: Adaptive-Capacity Anchored Gaussian Splatting for Compact Dynamic Radiance Fields
Seunghyeon Song, Joo Chan Lee, Chanung Park, Jun Young Jeong, Minseo Lee, Eunbyung Park, Jong Hwan Ko
Recent advances in 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) enable high-fidelity, real-time spatiotemporal rendering, but expose a fundamental trade-off between motion expressiveness and storage efficiency. While anchor-based designs achieve compactness through anchor-level parameter sharing, their rigid uniform parametrization enforces fixed Neural Gaussian counts and feature budgets per anchor. Consequently, insufficient fidelity is addressed by excessive anchor density, rather than lightweight, targeted increases in Neural Gaussian count or feature capacity, resulting in memory waste. To overcome this rigidity, we introduce an adaptive-capacity anchor-based framework that dynamically allocates the representational capacity based on local spatiotemporal demands. Adaptive Anchor Cardinality varies the number of Neural Gaussians per anchor, concentrating primitives in regions of high geometric or motion complexity while suppressing redundancy. In parallel, Adaptive Anchor Feature Masking modulates anchor-level feature channels, assigning rich features to complex regions and lightweight representations to simpler ones. Experiments on MPEG, Panoptic Sports, and N3DV datasets demonstrate substantial storage reduction without degrading visual quality. Notably, on challenging MPEG sequences with complex motion, our method achieves up to 1.5x higher compression than state-of-the-art anchor-based methods while preserving comparable quality.
comment: 9 pages, 8 figures. Accepted to ACM Multimedia 2026
☆ PhysMind: From Video to Executable Worlds for Training-Free Physical Reasoning
Chen Yang, Shenxiang Zeng, Haoyang Zhao, Zhouyuan Xu, Youquan He, Haoyu Li, Mingyi Deng, Jiansheng Fan, Chen Wang
Reliable physical reasoning from video requires understanding how objects move, interact, and respond to interventions. Existing vision-language models (VLMs) often struggle to interpret these dynamics and reason reliably about future and counterfactual outcomes. We introduce PhysMind, a training-free agentic framework that constructs one reusable, question-agnostic executable world per video. PhysMind recovers a temporally consistent dynamic scene through object segmentation, mesh reconstruction, and 6D pose tracking, then fits analytic continuous-time dynamics and latent physical parameters without unrolling a time-stepped simulator. Given a question, it inspects, continues, or edits the world and answers from the resulting trajectories and interactions. Relative to direct chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning with the same VLM, PhysMind improves accuracy by 38.23 points on CLEVRER and 8.08 points on Physion++. On counterfactual questions, it exceeds the strongest evaluated VLM baseline, GPT-5.5, by 19.25 points.
comment: 27 pages, 18 figures. Project page: https://physmind.github.io/
☆ Talk2Sensors: 3D Visual Grounding in Autonomous Driving via Sensor-Adaptive Physical Cue Matching
Runwei Guan, Di Tian, Ningwei Ouyang, Ruixiao Zhang, Shaofeng Liang, Haocheng Zhao, Lianqing Zheng, Xiaokai Bai, Guotao Wang, Daizong Liu, Henghui Ding, Hui Xiong
As a key capability for embodied intelligence, 3D visual grounding (3DVG) has been predominantly studied in indoor scenes with RGB-D or point-cloud inputs, while existing outdoor extensions largely rely on monocular images alone. Both settings fall short of real-world outdoor perception, where heterogeneous sensors capture complementary yet distinct physical properties, such as visual texture, 3D geometry, and object kinematics, that are indispensable for flexible and robust query-adaptive grounding but remain under-exploited. To bridge this gap, we introduce Talk2Sensors, the first multi-sensor 3D visual grounding dataset built upon camera, LiDAR, and 4D radar. It contains 8,682 language instructions and 20,558 referred objects, with diverse prompts explicitly aligned with sensor-specific physical cues. Furthermore, we propose TSFormer, a unified Transformer-based framework for language-guided 3D visual grounding in autonomous driving. TSFormer adopts a coarse-to-fine property-aware fusion strategy: the Language-Routed Property Sampler first performs coarse text-conditioned feature retrieval by modulating sensor sampling weights with query-level linguistic cues, while the subsequent Sparse-Preserving Modality Arbiter module conducts fine-grained modality arbitration and text-guided refinement to determine the precise referred spatial location. This design enables dynamic routing of appearance, geometry, and motion cues according to the semantic requirements of each prompt, preventing dense modalities from overwhelming sparse but critical sensor signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TSFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks: it improves over the strongest baseline by 8.05 mAP on Talk2Sensors, and transfers to the monocular Mono3DRefer benchmark with 53.05\% Acc@0.5.
comment: 14 pages, 12 figures
☆ OutLangSplat: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting for UAV Outdoor Scenes
3D Language Gaussian Splatting embeds open-vocabulary language features into 3D Gaussian Splatting, providing an efficient explicit representation for text-driven 3D scene understanding. However, existing methods are limited to indoor or small-scale scenes, and tend to fail in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) outdoor scenes, where severe occlusions and long distance viewpoints often lead to incorrect semantic activations and missing target responses. In this paper, we present OutLangSplat which adapts language Gaussian representations to UAV outdoor scenes by improving feature representation and aggregation reliability. For the feature representation, a 2D-3D dual-branch representation with region-based alignment and fusion is designed to improve spatial consistency, reducing incomplete target responses and background misactivations. For the feature aggregation, we introduce a training-free contribution and consistency-aware Gaussian feature aggregation strategy that leverages pixel contribution reliability and cross-view semantic consistency to suppress unreliable responses from noisy viewpoints. A new dataset is provided by manually annotating various objects on four real-world public UAV outdoor scene datasets. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first accessible dataset of open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding for UAV outdoor scenes. Quantitative evaluations and ablation studies demonstrate that OutLangSplat outperforms SOTA methods on both open-vocabulary semantic segmentation and instance localization tasks. The datasets and codes will be open-sourced.
comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 7 tables
☆ ColorFD: A Finite-Difference Guided Black-Box Physical Adversarial Attack for Remote Sensing Object Detection
Although deep neural network-based remote sensing object detectors have achieved strong performance, they remain vulnerable to adversarial perturbations. Existing studies mainly focus on digital or white-box settings, whereas black-box physical attacks remain underexplored. These attacks are often constrained by limited physical feasibility and inefficient optimization in high-dimensional search spaces. To address these challenges, this paper proposes ColorFD, a black-box physical attack based on multiple pure-color patches. The patch positions and color parameters are jointly optimized using Differential Evolution (DE). A target-wise fitness and selection mechanism evaluates the attack state of each target and preserves target-specific improvements during evolution. Two guidance strategies further constrain the patch search space. Key-region localization identifies sensitive regions through finite-difference color probing. Common-feature extraction provides category-level spatial priors and avoids repeated localization. Although evaluated on aircraft, the formulation is not inherently restricted to this category. Experiments on YOLOv3u, YOLOv5u, and Faster R-CNN show that ColorFD outperforms the tested black-box patch method across all evaluated detectors and remains competitive with strong white-box baselines. Physical-world experiments further demonstrate that the optimized pure-color patches can be transferred from the digital domain to real imaging conditions.
comment: 13pages,12figures
☆ VoxStruct3D: Structure-Leading Flow Matching for Voxel-Space 3D MRI Synthesis
High-fidelity 3D MRI synthesis requires both globally coherent anatomy and fine-grained voxel-level detail. Although latent diffusion makes volumetric generation tractable, its image autoencoder introduces a reconstruction bottleneck that can limit the fine detail recoverable in the final volume. We present VoxStruct3D, a voxel-space flow-matching framework that directly models full-resolution MRI volumes using a clean-data prediction objective. Its Volumetric Voxel Generator (VVG) combines factorized 3D patch embedding with overlapping upsampling, time-modulated residual refinement, and skip fusion, enabling neighboring tokens to jointly reconstruct shared voxel regions and suppress patch-boundary artifacts. To complement direct voxel-space modeling with an explicit anatomical prior, we further introduce a Structure-First, Image-Follows (SFIF) strategy. A frozen pretrained 3D medical encoder and a StructVAE extract compact structure tokens that preserve dominant anatomy, while a structure-leading schedule keeps their trajectory ahead of the image trajectory. Patch-Aligned RoPE spatially aligns the unequal token grids, and asymmetric attention enforces one-way guidance from structure to image. Experiments on pathological and healthy T1-weighted brain MRI datasets show that VoxStruct3D achieves the strongest overall performance across feature-distribution alignment, sample diversity, and perceptual quality, producing anatomically coherent and visually realistic volumes.
comment: Project page: https://neesky.github.io/VoxStruct3D/
☆ Representing Visual Evidence for Item Difficulty Prediction: Visual Textualization and Image-Native Modeling
Predicting item difficulty from content can provide an initial estimate for newly developed questions before sufficient student responses are available. Existing approaches typically represent the question stem and answer choices as text. When mathematics items contain visual components, a common pipeline first textualizes that evidence and then applies a text predictor. We ask: how should visual evidence be represented for item difficulty prediction? We compare question text alone, visual textualization, which expresses visual evidence in language, and image-native modeling, which retains the original image. Using Eedi items with difficulty calibrated from student responses, we train large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) directly for difficulty regression. Both visual interfaces achieve the lowest point estimates, although the leading systems cannot be reliably ordered. Open-VLM textualization yields lower RMSE point estimates for all evaluated LLMs, while broader adaptation does so for all image-native VLMs. Test-time interventions show dependence on the paired full-item image, but do not isolate the additional visual component. The two visual interfaces also make partially complementary item-level errors and differ substantially in computational workflow. Thus, textualization should not be treated as the only practical interface: image-native modeling is a competitive alternative whose effectiveness depends on how the VLM is adapted.
☆ EgoAfford: Task-Oriented Affordance Grounding via Egocentric Referring Segmentation
Part-level affordance grounding has advanced the localization of functional object regions associated with elemental actions. Extending this capability to complex tasks calls for connecting the semantic roles of participating objects with task-state-aligned visual observations and multi-step planning. We introduce EgoAfford, a benchmark designed to connect these three aspects. Given an egocentric observation and a high-level tabletop task, a model must generate the remaining plan and segment the functional regions of up to three components of the next action: the direct object, instrument, and destination. EgoAfford comprises approximately 15.5k human-verified images from 2,000 generated multi-step scenes, organized as semantically aligned, task-complete image series, together with EgoAfford-Real, 102 manually captured images spanning 26 tasks. We further present EgoLens, a 3B multimodal large language model with role-specific mask decoders, as an in-domain reference model for this joint task. Evaluations of recent referring-segmentation MLLMs, commercial-VLM--SAM2 pipelines, and EgoLens highlight the complementary challenges of next-step inference and action-role-conditioned part grounding. EgoLens establishes strong reference performance on both generated and manually captured observations. Together, EgoAfford and EgoLens provide a foundation for jointly studying perception and planning in multi-step tabletop tasks. Our project page is available at: https://egoafford.github.io
☆ FocusMem: Factorizing Content, Readout, and Trust in Latent GUI Memory
GUI agents must remember both useful experience from earlier tasks and unfinished progress in the current interaction. Latent memory offers a compact solution by compressing multimodal trajectories into a few continuous tokens. Existing methods, however, usually map each trajectory to one fixed memory block and train it mainly through next-action supervision. This creates three practical problems: important details may be lost during compression, the same memory block must serve different decision stages, and irrelevant retrieved trajectories may still mislead the agent. We introduce FocusMem, which separates these responsibilities within a compact latent-memory interface. A role-aware content basis encourages episodic memory to retain reusable experience and working memory to retain task progress. A state-conditioned readout generates a decision-specific view of the same stored evidence, while a lightweight trust gate can suppress memory blocks that appear irrelevant to the current step. All components are trained while the GUI policy remains frozen. Across five GUI-agent benchmarks, FocusMem consistently outperforms a fully matched action-only fixed-memory baseline and prior latent memory adaptations. Further analysis shows that semantic and functional supervision preserve complementary information, state-conditioned readout is more robust as surrounding trajectory context grows, and the trust gate reduces the harm caused by injected irrelevant episodic evidence. These results show that effective latent memory depends not only on compressing past interaction, but also on what is retained, what is exposed, and what is allowed.
comment: 36 pages
☆ Coupled Continuous-Discrete Generation for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution
Scene text image super-resolution (STISR) aims to recover visually plausible appearance while preserving character semantics from degraded inputs. Existing STISR systems often rely on externally generated priors or separate image and text models, resulting in error propagation and costly multi-stage inference. We present DualTSR, a unified framework that formulates STISR as coupled continuous-discrete generation. Conditional flow matching restores continuous image latents, while absorbing-state discrete diffusion reconstructs text tokens. Both processes share a multimodal transformer backbone, allowing the evolving image and text states to interact throughout generation without an external OCR prior at inference. On CTR-TSR, DualTSR achieves the best FID, LPIPS, ACC, and NED among the compared methods at both X2 and X4. On an aligned RealCE subset, it obtains the best FID, ACC, and NED with competitive LPIPS. Compared with DiffTSR at X4, DualTSR improves ACC by 12.78 percentage points while reducing the parameter count from 1.23B to 203M and end-to-end latency from 13.3s to 132ms. These results establish DualTSR as an accurate and efficient method for STISR.
☆ CARVE: Cross-Slice Anisotropic Reallocation of Visual Evidence for Efficient 3D Medical Volume Understanding
Slice-based MLLMs leverage mature 2D encoders by representing 3D volumes as sequences of 2D slices. However, this slice-wise formulation produces thousands of visual tokens that burden the LLM backbone, many of which capture overlapping visual evidence across adjacent slices. To understand how effectively a growing visual token budget improves performance, we perform scaling analyses on two 3D medical VQA benchmarks and find diminishing returns: cost keeps rising while accuracy saturates, and improving in-plane resolution is more effective than adding slices at comparable budgets. The budget should therefore be allocated more selectively rather than simply enlarged, yet most token compression methods are designed for 2D images or videos, where redundancy arises from spatial layout or temporal motion rather than from near-duplicate content along the depth axis. We present CARVE, a training-free framework that compresses visual tokens prior to LLM inference and casts token reduction as budget-constrained 2.5D allocation. CARVE partitions the depth axis into coherent windows and allocates tokens non-uniformly according to normalized cross-slice evidence. Under a shared budget, CARVE builds spatial anchors on representative slices and retrieves locally varying evidence from the full volume, then merges remaining eligible tokens into nearby anchors within each window. Removing roughly 80% of the visual tokens on Hulu-Med-7B, CARVE leads all compression baselines on every AMOS-MM report-generation metric, with 6.2 points higher retention of full-token quality than the strongest baseline, and preserves 98.1% of full-token performance across three VQA benchmarks.
☆ GeoReward: Mitigating Contextual Variable Overestimation in Vision-Language Models for Cross-Market Preference Prediction
Vision-language models excel in many multimodal tasks but remain prone to a subtle yet impactful failure mode: they tend to overestimate dominant visual-textual cues while underestimating sparse but decision-critical contextual variables. This issue, which we term Contextual Variable Overestimation (CVE), becomes particularly evident in real-world applications such as predicting advertisement image preferences across diverse geographic markets. For instance, when a VLM is asked to choose between two product images tailored for different countries, it often defaults to a consistent output, ignoring ground-truth regional variations. This collapse occurs because pervasive high-volume signals, such as product attributes and dense image patches, overwhelm the few but critical tokens that encode market-specific context. To address CVE, we first collect a new multimodal dataset of real advertising creatives and their click-through performance across multiple countries. We then introduce GeoReward, a reward model designed to predict ad image preferences across diverse geographic markets. GeoReward integrates three purpose-built mechanisms: (1) Market-Aware Retrieval Augmentation, (2) Context-Guided Visual Modulation, (3) Selective Sensitivity Loss. Furthermore, we demonstrate how GeoReward can guide the fine-tuning of RL for a VLM to generate background designs for text-to-image models, producing market-aware advertising creatives. Experiments validate that our framework mitigates CVE and outperforms existing baselines. This work not only diagnoses a systematic bias in VLMs toward dominant perceptual features but also delivers a targeted solution for applications where sparse contextual variables govern decision-making.
☆ Privacy-Preserving Action Recognition: Taxonomy, Methods, and Privacy-Utility Trade-offs
Video surveillance in public safety, healthcare, and smart environments has made continuous human monitoring routine, raising real risks to personal identity and appearance. Privacy-preserving action recognition (PPAR) tackles the tension between the utility of video understanding and this exposure, and has drawn fast-growing interest. However, existing surveys remain narrow. Most catalog a single mechanism family, predate recent adversarial and hybrid work, or barely address evaluation. The result is a fragmented literature with incompatible threat models, inconsistent metrics, and no shared evaluation standard. We address this with a PRISMA-guided review of 32 peer-reviewed papers (2018--2026) drawn from 885 screened records. Methods sort into five families, namely adversarial learning (52%), skeleton-based (20%), cryptographic (12%), differential privacy (8%), and hybrid (8%), each with distinct privacy, utility, and efficiency trade-offs. Evaluation is the weak point. Only 10% of papers adopt a formal privacy definition, 65% rely on ad-hoc metrics, and 40% report an inconsistently defined cMAP. The trade-offs are steep. Skeleton methods reach about 85% accuracy but drop appearance, adversarial methods hold near 80% utility at moderate privacy (cMAP 0.9 to 0.3--0.5), and differential privacy often falls below 70%. Harder conditions stay under-tested, with fewer than 15% of papers checking cross-dataset generalization, under 10% testing adaptive attackers, and real-time edge deployment nearly untouched. We contribute a two-dimensional privacy-space taxonomy, a formal threat model, a comparative trade-off analysis, the PPAR Unified Evaluation Protocol, and a roadmap centered on benchmark standardization. With this grounding, we argue PPAR can move from prototypes toward deployment, with lessons extending to face recognition and medical imaging.
☆ DIVE: Dynamic Iterative Visual Evidence Construction for Efficient Vision-Language Models
Visual inputs in vision-language models (VLMs) are often encoded into substantially longer token sequences than text, making visual tokens a major bottleneck for efficient inference. Abundant recent methods address this bottleneck by scoring token importance and pruning low-scoring tokens in a single pass. However, one-shot scoring is insufficient because a token's prompt-relevant usefulness depends on the evidence already retained. Motivated by this insight, we introduce DIVE (Dynamic Iterative Visual Evidence Construction), a training-free framework that recasts visual-token pruning as dynamic evidence construction. DIVE repeatedly selects the remaining token with the highest residual-conditioned score, updates the visual and prompt residuals to discount the evidence already explained, and re-evaluates the remaining tokens. This select-update-re-evaluate process builds a retained set of complementary, prompt-relevant evidence. Experiments across eight image-understanding benchmarks show that DIVE consistently preserves performance across token budgets. With an 88.9% reduction in visual tokens, DIVE retains 98.2% of the uncompressed model's average performance. Code is available at https://github.com/Zhong-Chenchen/DIVE.git.
☆ Not All Redundant Tokens Are Alike: Analyzing Visual Token Pruning through Token Roles ECCV 2026
Vision-language models (VLMs) process an image as a sequence of visual tokens, which creates a substantial computational bottleneck during inference. Recent visual token pruning methods address this issue by removing seemingly redundant tokens, yet it remains unclear how these pruning decisions relate to the functional roles of visual tokens. In this work, we analyze visual token pruning through the lens of token roles identified by EmbedLens. We first show that representative pruning methods exhibit distinct token-role biases, but these biases do not directly correlate with downstream performance. To better understand this behavior, we refine the token-role assignment procedure and evaluate role-protected pruning variants. Our results show that preserving non-alive tokens can sometimes maintain or improve performance, suggesting that tokens with weak direct semantic alignment may still affect model behavior under pruning. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jaykim9870/Not_All_Redundant_Tokens_Are_Alike.
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026 workshop, UniWorld
☆ REZE: Recognition-Based Zero-Shot Extraction for Video Temporal Grounding
Video temporal grounding (VTG) refers to the task of identifying the time interval in a video that corresponds to a given natural-language query. A common zero-shot strategy asks a large vision-language model (VLM) to generate the start and end timestamps directly, so the result depends heavily on the design and training of the model, and grounding accuracy differs widely from one VLM to another. We therefore propose REcognition-based Zero-shot Extraction (REZE), a simple training-free method that splits the video into short clips, asks the model for a clip-level confidence score for the query, and uses a deterministic algorithm to convert the resulting score curve into the output required by the task. Because temporal aggregation is performed outside the model, REZE adapts to different task outputs, from single- and multi-interval moment retrieval to highlight detection. On QVHighlights, REZE improves the best reported training-free moment-retrieval mAP from 38.23 to 40.32, while on highlight detection it reaches 44.18 mAP and 73.41 HIT@1, establishing a new state of the art among training-free methods. Its HIT@1 also outperforms all fully supervised SoTAs on the QVHighlights test split. We evaluate REZE on seven backbones from three model families. On Charades-STA and QVHighlights, it outperforms direct timestamp generation in every available comparison. We further observe that with REZE an earlier-generation model can approach the native performance of a newer model in its family.
comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, 13 tables. Appendices included
☆ EndoVLM: An Endoscopy Vision-Language Pre-training Model via Anatomy-Guided Sparsity and Progressive Alignment
The development of foundation models (FMs) is crucial for advancing endoscopic image analysis. However, existing endoscopy FMs mainly rely on self-supervised learning from uni-modal images or videos, overlooking the rich semantic knowledge contained in clinical reports. Furthermore, effectively leveraging these records is hindered by a fundamental modality gap: structured anatomical descriptions are not naturally mapped to specific frames within the high-redundancy, uncurated visual streams. In this paper, we present EndoVLM, a novel vision-language FM pre-trained on over 348K endoscopic examinations, each pairing a clinical report with its corresponding image collection. An Anatomy-Guided Sparse Pooling mechanism utilizes textual descriptions as queries to drive sparse attention, efficiently aggregating semantically salient frames into anatomy-specific visual representations across redundant image-sets. Next, a Progressive Semantic-Aware Alignment strategy models clinical taxonomy (anatomy and pathological status) via structured soft targets, bridging the gap from global patient-level matching to fine-grained localized alignment. Finally, a Semantic-Concentrated Masked Autoencoder is applied exclusively to these semantic-rich frames, integrating low-level visual precision with robust high-level semantic representation. Extensive experiments across various downstream tasks demonstrate that EndoVLM outperforms existing foundation models and remains competitive with task-specific methods. Remarkably, EndoVLM also exhibits robust zero-shot generalization capabilities, highlighting its potential for broader clinical application.
☆ Beyond Global Routing Aggregation: Phase-Aware Expert Merging for MoE Vision-Language Models
Mixture-of-experts vision-language models (MoE-VLMs) increase model capacity with sparse expert activation, yet deployment requires storing the full expert pool. Training-free expert merging reduces this burden, and many routing-based methods aggregate routing statistics across all tokens to determine merge compatibility. However, MoE-VLM inference is phase-structured: image-context tokens carry visual content, question tokens specify the query, and answer tokens produce the output, with different counts and routing distributions. Because image-context tokens are far more numerous, global aggregation can overemphasize image-context processing and obscure phase-conditioned expert roles, making experts serving different phases appear interchangeable and degrading model performance. We therefore argue that MoE-VLM expert merging should preserve phase-conditioned expert roles, judging compatibility by how experts serve different phases rather than globally aggregated routing statistics. Based on this view, we propose RoleMerge, a training-free method that constructs each expert's Routing Role Profile (RRP) from phase-normalized routing statistics, capturing its relative phase preference. Guided by expert-phase information loss, RoleMerge merges experts with compatible profiles and their corresponding router entries while preserving answer-decoding expert distinctions. Experiments on three models and multiple benchmarks show that RoleMerge preserves more of the full model's performance than alternative expert-merging methods at matched expert-retention ratios, with relative improvements of up to 9.6 percent in six-task macro-average performance. These results validate phase-conditioned expert roles as a more effective basis than global routing aggregation for MoE-VLM expert merging.
comment: 17 pages, 3 figures, 17 tables
☆ TwinIR: Coordinated Invisible Dual-Point Attacks on Online HD Map Construction
Online HD map construction is critical to prediction and planning in autonomous driving. We find that existing physical attacks against online map construction are limited by a cross-boundary compensation effect: after the target boundary is perturbed, another visible boundary may retain sufficient geometric cues for the model to recover the original road geometry. Based on this observation, we propose TwinIR, a new mechanism-guided physical attack methodology for online map construction. TwinIR jointly optimizes attack effectiveness and point sparsity, seeking the minimum number of attack points needed to suppress compensating geometric cues from surrounding boundaries. To reduce the perceptibility of multi-point attacks, TwinIR models camera responses to near-infrared illumination and maps optimized attack points to feasible physical placements, producing camera-visible interference with minimal visible-spectrum changes. Experiments on nuScenes across state-of-the-art online map construction models show that TwinIR reduces mAP by 8.18-8.96 percentage points under RSA and 2.84-5.62 points under ETA, while increasing the unreachable-goal rate by 25-28 points and the unsafe-planned-trajectory rate by 19-20 points over clean inputs. These attacks are also validated on a real-world testbed AV, where TwinIR successfully induces both road straightening and early-turn deformations while remaining inconspicuous in full-color views.
☆ Q-CueGraph: Query-Conditioned Visual Evidence Graphs for Multimodal Reasoning
High-resolution pixels and crop or zoom tools give multimodal large language models the ability to inspect an image, but they do not provide a reliable task-conditioned policy for deciding where to inspect. Q-CueGraph makes this decision explicit. It maps a question and an image representation to budgeted, coordinate-level observations for a frozen reader. Text-rich images use a reusable OCR/layout graph; natural-image search instantiates query-conditioned visual nodes behind the same selection, composition, and budgeting interface. Optional utility refinement learns which candidate crops the frozen reader can use from training-answer correctness, without region-box supervision. With a frozen Qwen2.5-VL-7B reader, Q-CueGraph reaches 0.833 accuracy on V*Bench versus 0.696 for full-image inference from a 19% image-area budget, and reaches 92% of full-image ANLS on InfographicVQA from about half the image area. Across six benchmarks, explicit observation is most valuable when evidence is localizable, the question discriminates its location, and resolution limits full-image reading.
☆ When does training on downscaled images yield the same gradients?
Diffusion transformers deliver strong image generation, but their training cost grows superlinearly with resolution. Recent work justifies training or sampling at reduced resolution on a spectral premise: at high noise, a downscaled latent preserves almost the full surviving signal. Whether a downscaled step also preserves the native training gradient signal, however, has remained unresolved. We reduce how that signal changes under downscaling to two terms: a noise-dependent term governed by the downscale ratio, which decays at high noise as the spectral premise predicts, and a σ-independent floor governed by the target grid's absolute token count, carried by the compute graph itself and removed by no noise level. The measured (route, σ) map corroborates the account and uncovers structure the spectral picture cannot express: on the 1024->768 route, a window (0.65 < σ< 0.95), predicted by no spectral criterion at any tolerance, where the downscaled gradient stays within a small margin of the native one. Training LoRA adapters with downscaled steps restricted to the routes and noise windows the map validates reduces training time by 14.6% at a fixed step budget while remaining near-native in weight space. Code is available at https://github.com/sorryhyun/anima_lora.
☆ Robustness Emerges Early in Training Dynamics, but Is Not Preserved ECCV2026
Robustness to natural corruptions remains a fundamental challenge for deep neural networks. In this paper, we identify a robustness fading phenomenon where shallow layers spontaneously develop robust representations and flat loss landscapes in early training, yet these properties are not preserved during standard convergence. To address this, we propose a framework that performs strategic interventions on training dynamics to stabilize the empirically identified early-emergent robust priors. Our approach includes two parameter-free strategies: Early-Phase Stabilization~(EPS) and Asymmetric Weight Reversion~(AWR), which stabilize or recover robust shallow configurations without modifying the model architecture or introducing learnable parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our framework across various benchmarks and architectures, yielding significant gains in downstream transfer, dynamic adaptation, and diverse computer vision applications.
comment: Accepted by ECCV2026
☆ Season: Spectrum-Aware Orthogonal Gradient Refinement for Transfer-Based Adversarial Attacks
Transfer-based adversarial attacks often transfer poorly across heterogeneous architectures because CNNs favor local textures while Vision Transformers (ViTs) rely on global shapes. We propose Season, a spectrum-aware orthogonal gradient refinement framework for L-infinity transfer attacks against black-box target models on ImageNet, using a white-box surrogate. Season decomposes each update into a low-frequency branch capturing structural cues and a high-frequency branch capturing textures. A low-saliency guidance scheme reallocates high-frequency energy to background regions, preserving foreground structures that ViTs depend on. An orthogonal projection then forces the textural update to lie in the orthogonal complement of the structural direction, mitigating feature interference. As a training-free plug-and-play wrapper, Season enhances eight gradient-stabilization and input-enhancement attacks without modifying their cores. Across eight CNN, ViT, and MLP targets, Season improves transfer success rate by 6.6 percentage points on average and up to 16.0 points over strong baselines under a unified protocol.
comment: 6 pages
☆ ToolArtist: Tool-Using Unified Multimodal Models for Agentic Image Generation
Jiahao Zhao, Xiaomin Yu, Zhongxiang Sun, Fengwei Teng, Chengwei Qin, Xiaobin Hu, Jun Xu, Shuicheng Yan
Text-to-image (T2I) models can produce visually compelling images, yet they remain limited on open-world tasks that require complex semantic understanding, multi-step reasoning, and the integration of external world knowledge. Existing efforts introduce agent capabilities into image generation, but they either prescribe a fixed workflow or place only a subset of the open-world image generation process under agent control. Consequently, reasoning, tool invocation, and image generation are not coordinated by a single policy. We propose ToolArtist, a fully agentic image generation model obtained by post-training a Unified Multimodal Model (UMM). ToolArtist dynamically orchestrates reasoning, external tool use, and native image generation within one unified policy. During Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), we equip a teacher agent with search tools alongside an image-generation tool. We then convert the collected trajectories into a UMM compatible format, where the image-generation tool is concealed while the resulting generated images are retained. During Reinforcement Learning (RL), we develop an agentic RL infrastructure for UMMs and introduce Reason-Act-Draw GRPO (RAD-GRPO), which uses complementary intent and quality rewards to jointly optimize the model. Experiments show that placing the entire open-world image-generation process under an agent policy consistently outperforms approaches with fixed pipelines or only partially agent-controlled components. We release the training data and the complete post-training infrastructure.
☆ OmniRouting: A Semantic-Coupled Multimodal Benchmark for Constraint-Aware Spatial Reasoning in PCB Routing
Taiting Lu, Kaiyuan Lin, Ziwei Dong, Sisong Bei, Haolin Ye, Yuxin Tian, Runze Liu, Mingjia Wang, Jingying Zeng, Hongxing Pan, Kai Zhang, Haoyu Wang, Guoliang Shi, Ling Ma, Yifan Yang, Jiaying Lu, Qi He, Yi-Chao Chen, Sung-Liang Chen, Yincheng Jin, Mahanth Gowda
Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in constraint-aware navigation, maze reasoning, and graph reasoning. However, their ability to reason about complex routing problems under strict geometric, topological, and electrical constraints remains largely unexplored, despite routing being one of the most challenging and critical stages of electronic design automation (EDA). To bridge this gap, we introduce OmniRouting, the first large-scale benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs on printed-circuit-board (PCB) routing reasoning under real-world industrial design-rule, manufacturability, and connectivity constraints. OmniRouting contains 1,681 industrial-grade schematic-coupled PCB designs, including board geometries, routable component placements by human engineers, footprints, pad locations, netlists, stackup information, and routing constraints. The benchmark comprises four tasks: (1) geometric routing reasoning, generating physically valid copper traces, vias, and layer assignments to connect circuit nets within constrained board regions; (2) design-rule-aware routing reasoning, producing routable layouts that satisfy clearance, trace-width, via, obstacle-avoidance, and board-boundary constraints; (3) electrical functionality reasoning, preserving schematic-specified connectivity while reasoning over net names and functional roles to produce electrically correct routing; and (4) tool-augmented agentic routing, leveraging external tools for tasks (1)-(3). Our results reveal substantial limitations of current LMMs in PCB routing, including weak path-planning capabilities, poor adherence to design-rule constraints, and inconsistent preservation of electrical functionality. We will open-source all benchmark data, evaluation code, and tool interfaces to facilitate future research.
☆ UBLLIE: Unified Backlight and Low-Light Image Enhancement
Backlit and low-light images often suffer from severe exposure imbalance or global underexposure, presenting significant challenges for both visual perception and downstream computer vision tasks. In this paper, we propose a unified, unsupervised enhancement framework that addresses both types of degradation without relying on paired ground-truth data. Our approach builds on CLIP-guided prompt learning to semantically supervise enhancement using learned positive and negative textual prompts. To improve the quality of our improvements over prior work, we design a symmetric residual U-Net backbone augmented with an Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling module. This architecture captures multi-scale contextual information, enabling adaptive correction under spatially heterogeneous illumination. During training, the enhancement network is guided by CLIP-based semantic similarity losses and refined via an iterative prompt optimization mechanism. Extensive experiments on both paired and unpaired datasets, including BAID, Backlit300, LOL, and VE-LOL-L, demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised methods in terms of fidelity, perceptual quality, and generalization. Furthermore, our work emphasizes the need for stronger benchmarking protocols for backlit enhancement, a relatively underexplored area. The proposed framework provides a robust, scalable solution for real-world illumination enhancement across diverse lighting conditions.
☆ Predict, Then Retrieve: Cross-Instance Future-State Retrieval from Video Prefixes
We introduce Predictive State Retrieval (PSR), a task in which a model observes a short video prefix and a temporal question about an object's future state, then retrieves instances from other videos or images that depict that state. Unlike action anticipation, which predicts a label, moment retrieval, which localizes an observed event within a video, or video generation, which synthesizes pixels, PSR combines anticipation with cross-instance retrieval across multiple temporal horizons. We construct a benchmark from four datasets with graded, human-validated ground truth, difficulty tiers, and an oracle ceiling. We also propose LFTR, a lightweight retriever with frozen encoders that predicts a question- and horizon-conditioned future latent and matches it in complementary semantic and visual spaces. A ceiling decomposition reveals a clear bottleneck: the true future state is highly retrievable once specified, whereas every predictor we evaluate, including a large multimodal language model with access to the prefix frames, remains far below the oracle. Thus, forecasting rather than perception is the central learnable challenge. LFTR narrows this gap at substantially lower inference cost, and ablations attribute its gains to cross-space fusion and hard-negative training rather than latent rollout. We release the benchmark, code, and evaluation scripts.
comment: Work in progress
☆ Thinking with Anchors: Grounded and Efficient Document Reasoning
Sichen Zhu, Yuchen Zhu, Wenzhuo Xu, Jason Kuen, Wanrong Zhu, Jing Shi, Xuan Shen, Quanyi Wang, Yiwei Wang, Yujun Cai, Bing Shuai, Qin Zhang, Yongxin Chen, Shilong Liu, Molei Tao, Jiuxiang Gu
Existing document understanding benchmarks have largely focused on locating page elements, yet real-world document intelligence requires models to reason jointly about region semantics, spatial relations, and visual structure. We present ADOPD 2026, a reasoning-oriented extension of ADOPD that turns page decomposition into spatially grounded document understanding. ADOPD 2026 enriches page anchors inherited from ADOPD 2024 dataset with human-cleaned captions, semantic tags, and generated chain-of-thought (CoT) traces grounded to document regions. Instead of treating boxes, masks, and tags as independent supervision signals, we cast text blocks, visual entities, semantic labels, bounding boxes, and polygon masks as a shared vocabulary of visual anchors. This representation supports three connected capabilities. First, region-level semantic tagging asks models to identify document element types from both page context and local appearance, revealing long-tail semantic failures that standard layout benchmarks often hide. Second, unified vision-language grounding generates text regions and visual entities together with coordinates or polygonal outlines, transforming detection and segmentation outputs into structured anchors that can be reused by downstream reasoning systems. Third, current state-of-the-art models still struggle with dense counting tasks evaluated on DocCount, a benchmark derived from ADOPD 2026, highlighting the need for the Thinking-with-Anchors pipeline in document semantic understanding. By connecting page decomposition to verifiable visual-anchor reasoning, ADOPD 2026 provides a task framework that moves document understanding beyond localization toward anchor-grounded document intelligence.
☆ Foreseeing the Invisible: Amodal Reconstruction of Leaf Fossil Images
Fossil leaves are rarely preserved whole -- sedimentary rock hides, breaks, and erodes the lamina, yet paleobotany depends on the complete shape and outline of the leaf. We cast the recovery of the missing tissue as amodal reconstruction and present AmodalDINO, a multi-head dense-prediction model that predicts four masks from a single RGB image: visible leaf, amodal complete leaf, amodal main vein, and fine veins. Unlike essentially all prior amodal work, AmodalDINO is given no visible mask. It predicts the visible and amodal regions jointly, so it needs no upstream instance segmenter at runtime. Two simple but effective changes adapt the model to the amodal segmentation task: fully fine-tune a DINOv3 ViT-L/16 at a small learning rate instead of freezing it, and attach auxiliary venation heads alongside the leaf heads. These two changes enable the model to learn the structural shape prior of leaves. Trained only on synthetic leaf fossil images, AmodalDINO reaches 95.0% Dice / 90.5% IoU on the validation set and transfers well to real fossil specimens. Stripped to two heads, the same recipe can run on two benchmark datasets, reaching 85.05 full mIoU / 66.65 occluded mIoU on KINS and 80.90 / 38.15 on COCOA-cls. The model is also practical: by quantizing to 4-bit weights, it runs entirely offline in a browser, matching the original model with an IoU of 0.910. We also add ruler-based calibration to estimate surface area, and a generative visualization of living leaves on local devices.
comment: 12 pages, 10 figures
☆ muSync-GS: Physics-Synchronized Driving Video Synthesis for Weather and Geometric Road Hazards
High-quality driving data are essential for autonomous-driving systems and generative world models. However, rare and safety-critical scenarios involving adverse weather, braking under low tire--road friction, and uneven road geometry are costly and risky to collect at scale. Existing video-generation and 3D Gaussian editing methods can modify weather appearance or road geometry, but typically do not couple these edits with tire--road interaction and vehicle dynamics. As a result, an edited video may retain its original trajectory even when the modified road condition should alter braking, wheel slip, load transfer, and ego-camera motion. We present muSync-GS, a physics-synchronized framework for driving video synthesis under adverse-weather and road-elevation hazards. A precipitation-derived road-surface condition jointly controls road appearance and tire friction, while a shared road-elevation profile drives both visible road-geometry editing and axle excitation. A calibrated vehicle model predicts speed, slip ratio, normal loads, and pitch for constructing the ego-camera trajectory and synchronized physical annotations. On 12 held-out CarSim cases spanning precipitation levels, brake inputs, and road-profile parameters, the model achieves mean case-wise RMSEs of 0.0273 m/s for speed, 0.0590 degrees for pitch, 0.0101 for slip ratio, and 26.61 N for per-wheel normal load. Together with the reconstructed-scene experiments, these results show that muSync-GS accurately reproduces vehicle responses under held-out controls while synchronizing them with controllable scene edits and ego-camera motion.
comment: 42 pages, 14 figures; includes an appendix
☆ Faster-WAM: Efficient Inference-Time Future Conditioning for Robust World Action Models
World Action Models (WAMs) improve robot manipulation by learning how the environment evolves beyond the current observation. However, existing approaches face a fundamental dilemma: Joint-WAMs preserve future-aware representations during inference but incur prohibitive computation costs, while efficient alternatives remove future modeling at inference time and may lose the robustness benefits of temporal reasoning. In this work, we revisit the role of future representations in WAMs and show that inference-time future conditioning is critical for generalization under distribution shifts. This observation motivates Faster-WAM, an efficient future-conditioning WAM that preserves future representations while avoiding expensive video-action interaction. Faster-WAM introduces a sparse future-conditioning framework that computes future representations once and selectively reuses them throughout action denoising. Specifically, we propose SparseMoT to replace ubiquitous layer-wise fusion with selective video-action interaction at a compact subset of network stages, and Interval KV-Fusion to aggregate multi-depth future representations without increasing attention complexity. Experiments demonstrate that Faster-WAM achieves a substantially better performance-efficiency trade-off than existing WAMs. On the out-of-distribution LIBERO-Plus benchmark, Faster-WAM improves success rate from 49.14% to 73.57% compared with Fast-WAM, while running 2.21$\times$ faster than Joint-WAM. It further achieves state-of-the-art performance on LIBERO and RoboTwin 2.0, while demonstrating strong robustness in real-world manipulation.
☆ CofactVLA: Deconfounding Vision-Language-Action Models via Counterfactual Intervention
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have driven significant progress in robotic manipulation, yet they fundamentally struggle with the vision-override phenomenon. Driven by the severe modality imbalance between dense visual streams and sparse linguistic instructions, VLAs frequently fall prey to causal confusion. Instead of treating language as the primary causal driver, the policy entirely bypasses the original instruction by overfitting to spurious visual confounders, such as prominent objects or familiar layouts. To systematically alleviate this bias, we formalize the process of action generation as a Dual-path Deconfounding Graph (DDG) and propose CofactVLA, a novel causal intervention framework. By dynamically constructing a language-masked counterfactual branch within a single forward pass, CofactVLA isolates and neutralizes visual confounders through two synergistic mechanisms. First, Action-Level Orthogonal Projection Guidance (OPG) geometrically projects the factual velocity field away from the counterfactual visual bias during continuous flow matching, extracting the pure semantic intent. Second, Feature-Level Counterfactual Covariance Reduction (CCR) mathematically deconfounds latent representations by penalizing the positive eigenspace of the covariance difference, explicitly suppressing dominant visual shortcuts while preserving the causal language intent. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CofactVLA establishes a new state-of-the-art across diverse simulation benchmarks. Beyond simulation, real-world robot experiments demonstrate the causal efficacy of our method in bridging the generalization gap, yielding a 52.3\% absolute success rate gain under out-of-distribution scenarios.
☆ Free-Lunch Augmentation by Revisiting Diffusion-Based Data Generation for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection
Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection (CDFSOD) aims to transfer knowledge from data-rich upstream generic domains to downstream expert domains using scarce training data, where the significant domain gap and data scarcity make it an unsolved challenge. To address this problem, we revisit a natural yet underexplored approach in CDFSOD: data augmentation, by directly synthesizing data through diffusion models to supplement limited training samples. However, due to large domain gaps, we find that current diffusion methods cannot produce good results, leading to performance even lower than using the original images. To address these limitations, we divide the domain gaps into visual gaps and semantic gaps for separate analysis. For the visual gap, we find that the diffusion model cannot distinguish noise from useful information on expert domains, which can be mitigated by adding weakened noise. For the semantic gap, we find that the background semantics shows much smaller gaps between domains than foreground semantics, and we can bridge this gap by background inpainting. Based on the above analysis, we propose a method (Selective Inpainting with Tailored Noise, SITN) to dynamically take different strategies for downstream data synthesis based on their different gaps from the general domain, including a Generation Module for adding tailored noise and a Selection Module to dynamically select the inpainting regions. Extensive experiments on 6 datasets of CDFSOD and 4 datasets of cross-domain few-shot segmentation (CDFSS) validate that we can synthesize helpful data, achieving new state-of-the-art performance. Our codes is available at https://github.com/zzzzj311-droid/Free-Lunch-SITN
☆ ReGround: Restoring Visual Grounding in Multi-Step Reasoning through Self-Diagnosis and Visual Re-Examination
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often lose visual grounding during multi-step reasoning: as reasoning chains grow longer, later inference steps rely increasingly on language priors rather than image evidence. We identify a consistent benchmark-level signature associated with this degradation: across 2,510 re-examined samples from four benchmarks, attention entropy over image tokens typically decreases during Round 1 and rises again after image re-injection.
However, we find that effective visual re-examination requires two complementary ingredients: image re-injection and targeted self-diagnosis. Without targeted diagnosis, re-examination can even hurt performance, whereas accurate self-diagnosis yields substantial gains -- a swing of several points on key benchmarks, indicating that diagnostic quality is a key factor in whether re-examination helps or hurts in our setting. We present ReGround, a two-stage framework that teaches VLMs to self-diagnose grounding failures and selectively re-examine visual evidence, without architectural modifications or external tools. Through capability bootstrapping, a stronger variant from the same model family provides diagnostic scaffolding only during data construction, while the policy model learns to diagnose autonomously at inference time and retains most of the assisted gains.
Experiments on eight benchmarks across two VLM backbones demonstrate consistent gains, especially on visually intensive multi-step reasoning tasks, while incurring only modest inference overhead relative to tool-augmented baselines. Project page: https://sespoir.github.io/reground-page/ . Code: https://github.com/sespoir/ReGround .
comment: Accepted to ACM Multimedia 2026 (MM '26). 8 pages main text, 4 figures, plus appendix
☆ Image Classification Using CNN-QNN Hybrid Model with Optimized Correlated Features CVPR
We propose a method to optimize the correlation among convolutional neural network (CNN) features that are used as inputs to quantum neural network (QNN) to enhance image classification accuracy. Unlike prior approaches that employ orthogonal decomposition as preprocessing, we intentionally introduce correlated features that are more physically compatible with QNN. This design leverages the QNN's inherent ability to exploit quantum entanglement for representing correlated states-an advantage unavailable to classical neural networks. We hypothesize that aligning feature correlations with the entanglement structure of QNN improves binary classification performance. Based on a mathematical derivation of QNN outputs, Monte Carlo simulations indicate that an average correlation between features of 0.5 yields optimal classification accuracy. To validate this finding, we evaluate a quantum-classical hybrid model on three tasks: CIFAR-10 (automobile vs. truck), Fashion-MNIST (shirt vs. coat), and radar micro-Doppler signatures (robotic dogs vs. non-robots). To regulate feature correlations, we introduce a correlation-regularization term on the outputs of the CNN, driving the off-diagonal entries of the feature correlation matrix toward a target constant. Across all datasets, inducing intermediate correlation consistently improved accuracy compared to low, high, or unregulated correlations, while also reducing classification accuracy variance. These results demonstrate that imposing moderate feature correlations-without modifying the quantum circuit-enhances classification accuracy and stability by aligning feature statistics with the QNN's entanglement structure. This study highlights the potential of QNN to surpass the performance of classical classifiers as more qubits become available.
comment: Accepted by CVPR Findings 2026
☆ Poly-OPD: Heterogeneous Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation for Capability-Selectable Flow Models
Siming Fu, Haojun Xu, Ruizhe He, Zheming Fu, Hualiang Wang, Jie Huang, Xiaoxiao Ma, Mingchen Zhong, Weihu Huang, Xiaoxuan He, Linjiang Huang, Si Liu
Leading open text-to-image models often carry complementary strengths: one may lead on preference-aligned aesthetics while another follows compositional instructions more faithfully. However, differences in their autoencoders and noise schedules make it difficult to transfer these strengths across models. In this paper, we present Poly-OPD, a framework that can consolidate complementary strengths of heterogeneous teachers into a single compact flow-matching student. To bridge the incompatible latent spaces of different teachers, Poly-OPD performs on-policy distillation through a pixel bridge. Each student-generated image is re-encoded by a selected teacher's encoder and refined from a noise level matched by magnitude under the teacher's noise schedule. The resulting target is further matched to the student in frozen DINOv2 space, enabling supervision across incompatible latent spaces. To retain complementary capabilities without cross-teacher interference, Poly-OPD uses a gradient compatibility diagnostic to organize its adapters: attention LoRA modules are shared across teachers, whereas feed-forward adapters remain teacher-specific. During distillation, a gap-aware curriculum devotes more training to compositional categories where the student still falls short of the teacher. As each gap narrows, training shifts toward categories with larger remaining gaps. By distilling FLUX.1-dev and Z-Image into a 2.5B SD3.5-Medium student, Poly-OPD improves GenEval from 67.3 to 73.3, surpassing both larger teachers, and raises DrawBench HPSv3 from 9.34 to 11.35, consolidating both strengths within a switchable model.
☆ iStructTab: Structured Feature Sequencing for Multimodal Learning of Image and Tabular Data ICPR 2026
Al Zadid Sultan Bin Habib, Md Younus Ahamed, Prashnna Gyawali, Gianfranco Doretto, Donald A. Adjeroh
Multimodal learning of images and tabular data is often impaired by ineffective representations, resulting in redundancy, dispersion, and generalization problems. To tackle this challenge, we introduce Graph-Enhanced Descriptor Sequencing (GEDS), a structured feature sequencing algorithm grounded in principles from the Column Permutation Problem (CPP). GEDS refines statistical descriptors of the features through similarity graph-based computations, systematically determining an effective feature sequencing. We incorporate GEDS within an order-aware efficient transformer framework, utilizing order-aware memory tokens that explicitly adhere to the derived feature sequencing via a dedicated loss function. Experimental results across multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that iStructTab effectively minimizes feature dispersion, improving predictive performance and robustness, and highlighting the significance of structured feature sequencing in multimodal learning.
comment: This paper has been accepted for presentation at the 28th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2026) in Lyon, France Code: https://github.com/zadid6pretam/iStructTab PyPI: pip install istructtab
☆ An Analysis and Implementation of Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing
Seam carving is a classical content-aware image resizing operator that modifies the width or height of an image by repeatedly removing (or inserting) seams, i.e., 8-connected monotonic paths of pixels of locally minimal importance. Because seams bend around salient content rather than uniformly scaling or cropping it, the operator preserves vital image structures while discarding (or duplicating) low-energy regions. This article describes a C++ implementation of the operator that follows the original formulation of Avidan and Shamir (2007), including the optional forward-energy criterion subsequently introduced by Rubinstein, Shamir and Avidan (2008). The implementation supports image reduction, image enlargement via ordered seam insertion, multi-pass enlargement for large scale factors, a user-supplied weight mask for object protection and removal, along with dumping of energy maps and visualisation of seams. We detail the algorithm, its parameters and its computational complexity, discuss design choices with respect to the original descriptions, and illustrate the behaviour of the operator on natural images.
comment: one column, 10 pages, 8 figures
☆ Adversarial Attacks for Good: A Survey of Proactive Protection across the Visual Content Lifecycle
Jiaming Zhang, Boyang Chen, Zherui Li, Fuyao Zhang, Xinyu Yan, Hong Xi Tae, Wenwen He, Xuan Wang, Siqi Guo, Junhao Dong, Kun Wang, Hanxun Huang, Yige Li, Xingjun Ma, Yang Cao, Lingjuan Lyu, Wei Yang Bryan Lim
Once visual content enters an AI pipeline, its owner often retains little technical control over how it is used. Legal and regulatory remedies can address misuse, but many technical interventions must be applied earlier, when content is released or accessed. This survey examines the protective paradigm that has grown around this intervention point, which we call \emph{adversarial attacks for good}. Perturbations and structured signals long studied as attacks on learned models are instead applied by data owners, creators, platforms, or auditors to disrupt unauthorized automation or support later accountability. Five research communities have arrived at this inversion largely independently, each addressing a different stage of a visual asset's lifecycle: privacy filters against unwanted recognition at sharing time, unlearnable examples against unauthorized training, generative safeguards against malicious editing or imitation, adversarial CAPTCHAs for access control against automated agents, and provenance mechanisms for post-circulation attribution. Although developed in separate venues with incompatible success criteria, many of these methods exploit persistent gaps between human perception, semantic interpretation, and machine inference, suggesting that the paradigm remains relevant as visual pipelines evolve toward multimodal models and autonomous agents. To make their claims comparable, we evaluate all five families along shared axes of transferability, adaptability, and deployment readiness. Across the lifecycle, we find that most protections are still validated mainly against static or weakly adaptive adversaries, while evidence beyond controlled benchmarks remains scarce. We close by consolidating cross-stage countermeasures and open problems for robust, composable, and deployable owner-side protection.
☆ CLIP-CC-Bench: Evaluating Paragraph-Level Video Descriptions in Video-Language Models SIGIR 2026
Benchmarking video-language models has largely focused on short clips and single-sentence metrics, leaving open whether current systems can generate accurate long-form, paragraph-level descriptions. We introduce CLIP-CC-Bench, an evaluation suite for long-form video description built from 5 hours of movie content segmented into 90-second clips, each paired with an expert-written paragraph-style reference. The evaluation suite employs an ensemble of five state-of-the-art LLM-based embedding models to increase reliability and mitigate single-model bias, and applies two complementary methodologies: (i) coarse-grained semantic matching and (ii) fine-grained semantic matching to compare model-generated descriptions against CLIP-CC-Bench references. Using this framework, we evaluate 17 state-of-the-art video-language models and report both their Borda-aggregated rankings and their average scores on CLIP-CC-Bench. We further quantify the protocol's internal reliability through inter-judge agreement and bootstrap ranking stability. We release standardized evaluation scripts, model outputs, and aggregation tools at https://github.com/Multimodal-Intelligence-Lab/CLIP-CC-Bench to support reproducibility. CLIP-CC-Bench provides a practical evaluation framework for long-form video description, filling a gap left by existing short-clip and QA-only benchmarks.
comment: Accepted and presented at EvalMG 2026, the Second Workshop on Evaluation for Multimodal Generation, co-located with ACM SIGIR 2026
♻ ☆ Endo-NeRF++: Uncertainty-Aware Neural Rendering with Multi-Resolution Hash Encoding for Dynamic Surgical Scene Reconstruction
Reconstructing dynamic surgical scenes is crucial for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery; however, it continues to be difficult because of tissue deformation, occlusions, specular reflections, and restricted viewpoints. In this study, we introduce Endo-NeRF++, a neural rendering framework that accounts for uncertainty in the reconstruction of dynamic surgical scenes. Expanding on EndoNeRF, the suggested approach incorporates multi-resolution hash-grid encoding, temporal feature merging, and uncertainty-informed adaptive sampling to enhance reconstruction accuracy and temporal coherence in deformable endoscopic scenes.The multi-resolution hash-grid representation within the framework effectively captures both coarse and fine anatomical details, while temporal feature blending ensures stable reconstruction during tissue deformation and surgical tool occlusions. Additionally, uncertainty-driven adaptive sampling assigns more samples to uncertain areas to enhance rendering quality and geometric coherence. Experiments on robotic surgical video sequences demonstrate that the proposed uncertainty-guided adaptive sampling improves PSNR by up to 1.22dB (4.3%), increases SSIM by up to 5.3%, and reduces LPIPS by up to 55.1% compared with the EndoNeRF baseline.
♻ ☆ Stabilizing Multi-Attack Adversarial Training via Bandit Optimization ACM MM 2026
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) remain vulnerable to diverse adversarial perturbations, motivating multi-attack adversarial training (AT) for improved robustness. However, existing methods either incur prohibitive overhead by computing all attacks at each iteration, or rely on stochastic sampling over adversarial examples, which may cause excessive parameter drift. To address these issues, we propose Calibrated Adversarial Sampling (CAS), an efficient and stable framework that reformulates multi-attack AT as a multi-armed bandit optimization problem. By sampling a single attack per iteration that dynamically balances exploration and exploitation, CAS significantly reduces training cost while mitigating optimization conflicts across attacks and controlling excessive parameter drifts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAS achieves superior overall robustness at low computational cost, offering a scalable and principled approach to robust generalization against multi-attack settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/1240148048/CAS.
comment: ACM MM 2026
♻ ☆ Deformable Medical Image Registration with KAN-based Implicit Neural Representations
Deformable image registration (DIR) is central to medical image analysis, supporting spatial alignment for longitudinal studies and multi-modal fusion. Learning-based methods such as CNNs and transformers provide rapid inference but often require large training datasets and can underperform classical iterative methods for specific anatomies or modalities. Implicit neural representations (INRs) offer a data-efficient alternative by modeling deformation fields as continuous coordinate-to-displacement mappings, yet their per-pair optimization makes runtime efficiency and robustness to initialization essential. We introduce KAN-IDIR and RandKAN-IDIR, the first Kolmogorov--Arnold network (KAN)-based INR framework for pairwise-optimized, resolution-independent DIR, designed to improve seed stability and resource efficiency without dataset-level training. KANs use learnable activation functions that are well suited to continuous, physically structured deformation fields. RandKAN-IDIR further reduces cost through randomized basis sampling, preserving registration quality with fewer basis functions. We evaluate the methods on lung CT, brain MRI, and cardiac MRI datasets against pairwise INR approaches, dataset-trained deep models, and classical baselines. KAN-IDIR and RandKAN-IDIR achieve the highest accuracy among INR-based methods, with low computational overhead and superior stability across random initializations. RandKAN-IDIR slightly outperforms adaptive basis selection variants while avoiding their additional training-time complexity. This makes the approach practical for reproducible clinical research use. Source code is available at https://github.com/anac0der/KAN-IDIR.
comment: Accepted at Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction
♻ ☆ Foundations of Equivariant Deep Learning: Unifying Graph and Sheaf Neural Networks ICML 2026
Symmetry is everywhere in nature and society. Geometric deep learning builds architectures respecting group symmetries, whereas topological deep learning organizes computation through cells, incidence relations, and local-to-global structure. In this paper, we extend geometric deep learning beyond simple group actions and unify it with topological deep learning. Specifically, we develop order-equivariant neural networks (OENN), which generalize standard graph message passing and sheaf neural networks via the theory of equivariant vector bundles over face posets (or face categories). We (i) characterize all linear order-equivariant maps, (ii) build OENN layers, and (iii) prove universal approximation theorems (UATs) for continuous order-equivariant maps, which are new results even when restricted to sheaf neural networks. We illustrate the framework on graph and sheaf models. Our results can also be seen as extending the known UAT for graph neural networks to a more general setting that subsumes sheaf neural networks as well. In the appendix, we show that OENN can be connected, via the action groupoid Grothendieck construction, to CENN (category-equivariant neural network), which gives the categorical general form of equivariant neural networks, allowing us to leverage categorical symmetry in data (e.g., non-invertible symmetries on multiple objects with compositional relations on those symmetries).
comment: Accepted at ICML 2026 as a spotlight paper with oral presentation
♻ ☆ LiveXiv -- A Multi-Modal Live Benchmark Based on Arxiv Papers Content
Nimrod Shabtay, Felipe Maia Polo, Sivan Doveh, Wei Lin, M. Jehanzeb Mirza, Leshem Choshen, Mikhail Yurochkin, Yuekai Sun, Assaf Arbelle, Leonid Karlinsky, Raja Giryes
The large-scale training of multi-modal models on data scraped from the web has shown outstanding utility in infusing these models with the required world knowledge to perform effectively on multiple downstream tasks. However, one downside of scraping data from the web can be the potential sacrifice of the benchmarks on which the abilities of these models are often evaluated. To safeguard against test data contamination and to truly test the abilities of these foundation models we propose LiveXiv: A scalable evolving live benchmark based on scientific ArXiv papers. LiveXiv accesses domain-specific manuscripts at any given timestamp and proposes to automatically generate visual question-answer pairs (VQA). This is done without any human-in-the-loop, using the multi-modal content in the manuscripts, like graphs, charts, and tables. Moreover, we introduce an efficient evaluation approach that estimates the performance of all models on the evolving benchmark using evaluations of only a subset of models. This significantly reduces the overall evaluation cost. We benchmark multiple open and proprietary Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) on the first version of our benchmark, showing its challenging nature and exposing the models true abilities, avoiding contamination. Lastly, in our commitment to high quality, we have collected and evaluated a manually verified subset. By comparing its overall results to our automatic annotations, we have found that the performance variance is indeed minimal (<2.5%). Our dataset is available online on HuggingFace, and our code will be available here.
♻ ☆ Cardiac MRI Through-Plane Super-Resolution Guided by Reference and Memory MICCAI
Clinical cardiac MRI is commonly acquired with high in-plane resolution but coarse through-plane resolution to reduce scan time and accommodate breath-hold and cardiac-motion constraints, which limits 3D analysis and diagnostic accuracy. We propose STRMSR, a reference- and memory-guided through-plane super-resolution (SR) framework that reconstructs high-resolution (HR) cardiac volumes by leveraging HR reference views acquired from the same subject and intermediate SR results as the memory. Our method uses coarse-to-fine contextual matching to establish robust correspondence between low-resolution target and reference/memory images under spatial misalignment. A learnable patch-wise dynamic feature aggregation module predicts content-adaptive mixture weights for each local patch, effectively fusing dynamic information while suppressing unreliable feature transfers. The intermediate SR results stored in the memory bank ensure slice-to-slice consistency for the super-resolved 3D volume. Experiments on the WHS cardiac MRI dataset under two reference protocols, orthogonal-plane views and long-axis chamber views, demonstrate consistent improvements over baselines at 4x and 8x upsampling factors.Code is available at https://github.com/030108ming/STRMSR
comment: 8 pages, 3 figures 2 tables (accepted In International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) Workshop STACOM, 2026 (oral))
♻ ☆ CLIP-Joint-Detect: End-to-End Joint Training of Object Detectors with Contrastive Vision-Language Supervision
Behnam Raoufi, Hossein Sharify, Mohamad Mahdee Ramezanee, Khosrow Hajsadeghi, Saeed Bagheri Shouraki
Conventional object detectors rely on cross-entropy classification, which can be vulnerable to class imbalance and label noise. We propose CLIP-Joint-Detect, a simple and detector-agnostic framework that integrates CLIP-style contrastive vision-language supervision through end-to-end joint training. A lightweight parallel head projects region or grid features into the CLIP embedding space and aligns them with learnable class-specific text embeddings via InfoNCE contrastive loss and an auxiliary cross-entropy term, while all standard detection losses are optimized simultaneously. The approach applies seamlessly to both two-stage and one-stage architectures. We validate it on Pascal VOC 2007+2012 using Faster R-CNN and on the large-scale MS COCO 2017 benchmark using modern YOLO detectors (YOLOv11), achieving consistent and substantial improvements while preserving real-time inference speed. Extensive experiments and ablations demonstrate that joint optimization with learnable text embeddings markedly enhances closed-set detection performance across diverse architectures and datasets.
comment: 6 pages, 4 figures. Preprint under review
♻ ☆ Label-Free Target-Domain Adaptation for Unconstrained Event-Image Feature Matching via Dual-Stage Distillation ACM MM 2026
Building pixel-level correspondence between event and image data is a fundamental task for multi-sensor systems. However, existing cross-modal matching methods are largely restricted by their reliance on either matching labels or strictly aligned hardware, which limits them to unlabeled and unconstrained real-world scenarios where neither matching ground truth nor prior sensor relationships are available. To address this, we propose a novel two-stage training paradigm. First, we leverage large-scale data to perform label-agnostic distillation pretraining, upgrading optimization objectives with distribution-based and contrastive losses to learn highly generalizable representations. Second, to tackle unlabeled and unconstrained downstream data, we introduce an epipolar-guided self-distillation framework. By utilizing consistency verification to isolate robust matches and incorporating geometric confidence derived from an external epipolar prior, our model can effectively self-evolve directly on target domains without any supervision. Furthermore, we introduce a rigorous cross-modal evaluation benchmark based on TUM-VIE, featuring physically separated cameras with distinct intrinsic parameters and resolutions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both MVSEC and TUM-VIE pose estimation tasks. The source code and benchmark will be made publicly available at https://github.com/ZhonghuaYi/nexus2-official.
comment: Accepted to ACM MM 2026. The source code and benchmark will be made publicly available at https://github.com/ZhonghuaYi/nexus2-official
♻ ☆ HiResNets: Native Full-HD Video Recognition with Foveal Residual Streams
Much of the recent progress in image and video recognition has come at the cost of memory: larger models, increased resolution, and longer temporal contexts. An inevitable component is the quadratic (or larger) growth of memory and compute based on image resolution, which is a property of the grid sampling used in convolutional networks and vision transformers. In this work we study residual networks whose convolutional blocks have logarithmic-square growth instead, enabling them to process very high-resolution video quickly. The key insight is to use a residual architecture's residual stream as a high-resolution buffer, to which convolutional blocks only read and write via log-polar image warp operations. Layers adaptively focus on different parts of each frame, with very high resolution only near the focus point. A complete high-resolution representation is built up in the residual stream, analogous to eye saccades creating a complete picture in biological vision, and a theoretical construction is presented that eliminates the quadratic dependency of the residual stream resolution. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed HiResNets learn to foveate around scenes similarly to human vision, and have superior performance in difficult egocentric video recognition tasks, especially egocentric video with small objects and fine-grained recognition.
♻ ☆ MVTOP: Multi-View Transformer-based Object Pose-Estimation
We present MVTOP, a novel transformer-based method for multi-view rigid object pose estimation. Through an early fusion of the view-specific features, our method can resolve pose ambiguities that would be impossible to solve with a single view or with a post-processing of single-view poses. MVTOP models the multi-view geometry via lines of sight that emanate from the respective camera centers. While the method assumes the camera interior and relative orientations are known for a particular scene, they can vary for each inference. This makes the method versatile. The use of the lines of sight enables MVTOP to correctly predict the correct pose with the merged multi-view information. To show the model's capabilities, we provide a synthetic data set that can only be solved with such holistic multi-view approaches since the poses in the dataset cannot be solved with just one view. Our method outperforms single-view and all existing multi-view approaches on our dataset and achieves competitive results on the YCB-V dataset. To the best of our knowledge, no holistic multi-view method exists that can resolve such pose ambiguities reliably. Our model is end-to-end trainable and does not require any additional data, e.g., depth.
comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, Accepted as Conference paper to VISAPP 2026
♻ ☆ UniHEAR: Unified Heterogeneous-Source Attentive Retrieval for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering ACM MM 2026
Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) requires retrieving entity knowledge from external sources to answer visually grounded questions. Existing retrieval-augmented systems suffer from two critical limitations. First, relying on a single retrieval modality creates a Single-Source Retrieval Bottleneck, missing ground-truth entities that are only accessible through complementary sources. Second, dual-tower pointwise rerankers suffer from Retrieval-Source-Blind Reranking, as they overlook retrieval origins and candidate-level retrieval priors, leading to redundant modality reliance. To address these challenges, we propose UniHEAR, a unified lightweight framework for heterogeneous-source entity retrieval and reranking. UniHEAR constructs a Coarse Retrieval Descriptor for each candidate entity, and introduces Retrieval-Guided Attentive Modality Gating to condition modality attention weights on this descriptor, complemented by Entropy-Weighted Source Fusion of coarse retrieval priors. A hybrid training strategy combining contrastive learning with an auxiliary modality-preserving loss unifies entity-level and section-level retrieval within a single model. Extensive experiments on E-VQA and InfoSeek demonstrate that UniHEAR achieves state-of-the-art retrieval and VQA performance, improving Recall@1 by 6.7 and 1.2 points over the strongest baselines while maintaining a lightweight reranking architecture. Code and model are available at https://github.com/iven-luo/UniHEAR.
comment: Accepted by ACM MM 2026
♻ ☆ Semantic Frame Interpolation IEEE
Generating intermediate video content of varying lengths based on given first and last frames, along with text prompt information, offers significant research and application potential. However, traditional frame interpolation tasks primarily focus on scenarios with a small number of frames, no text control, and minimal differences between the first and last frames. Recent community developers have utilized large video models represented by Wan to endow frame-to-frame capabilities. However, these models can only generate a fixed number of frames and often fail to produce satisfactory results for certain frame lengths, while this setting lacks a clear official definition and a well-established benchmark. In this paper, we first propose a new practical Semantic Frame Interpolation (SFI) task from the perspective of academic definition, which covers the above two settings and supports inference at multiple frame rates. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel SemFi model building upon Wan2.1, which incorporates a Mixture-of-LoRA module to ensure the generation of high-consistency content that aligns with control conditions across various frame length limitations. Furthermore, we propose SFI-300K, the first general-purpose dataset and benchmark specifically designed for SFI. To support this, we collect and process data from the perspective of SFI, carefully designing evaluation metrics and methods to assess the model's performance across multiple dimensions, encompassing image and video, and various aspects, including consistency and diversity. Through extensive experiments on SFI-300K, we demonstrate that our method is particularly well-suited to meet the requirements of the SFI task.
comment: Published in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP), 2026
♻ ☆ Reasoning Dynamics and the Limits of Monitoring Modality Reliance in Vision-Language Models
Recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) offer reasoning capabilities, yet how these unfold and integrate visual and textual information remains unclear. We analyze reasoning dynamics in 18 VLMs covering instruction-tuned and reasoning-trained models from two different model families. We track confidence over Chain-of-Thought (CoT), measure the corrective effect of reasoning, and evaluate the contribution of intermediate reasoning steps. We find that models are prone to answer inertia, in which early commitments to a prediction are reinforced, rather than revised during reasoning steps. While reasoning-trained models show stronger corrective behavior, their gains depend on modality conditions, from text-dominant to vision-only settings. Using controlled interventions with misleading textual cues, we show that models are consistently influenced by these cues even when visual evidence is sufficient, and assess whether this influence is recoverable from CoT. Although this influence can appear in the CoT, its detectability varies across models and depends on what is being monitored. Reasoning-trained models are more likely to explicitly refer to the cues, but their longer and fluent CoTs can still appear visually grounded while actually following textual cues, obscuring modality reliance. In contrast, instruction-tuned models refer to the cues less explicitly, but their shorter traces reveal inconsistencies with the visual input. Taken together, these findings indicate that CoT provides only a partial view of how different modalities drive VLM decisions, with important implications for the transparency and safety of multimodal systems.
comment: Accepted for publication in COLM 2026
♻ ☆ IConFace: Fine-Grained Identity Conditioning for Reference-Aware Face Restoration
Severe face degradation can remove person-specific evidence, making restoration underdetermined. A generative prior may recover a sharp, plausible face yet miss localized traits that persist across images of the same person. Same-identity references supply this missing evidence, while the degraded observation anchors target structure. We propose \textbf{IConFace}, a fine-grained identity-conditioned framework that optionally conditions restoration on up to three same-identity references. Its hybrid concat backbone retains degraded and reference observations as dense visual tokens, preserving localized reference evidence. An identity pathway provides compact multi-reference guidance, while a degraded-structure pathway injects full-field and local-residual memories to reinforce target-aligned structure. We also introduce a human-audited benchmark that measures whether persistent localized identity details survive restoration. IConFace achieves leading reference compatibility, especially under severe degradation, and the highest observed preservation rate on this benchmark. Without references, it achieves leading learned perceptual quality across five blind-restoration benchmarks. Joint reference-based and paired-target evaluations show that reference-supported identity recovery and exact target agreement are complementary.
♻ ☆ Beyond Boundary Frames: Talking-Head Inbetweening via Context-Aware Motion Modeling
Existing talking-head generation methods primarily target open-ended generation rather than bridging two existing video segments. In this paper, we study talking-head inbetweening, a practical editing task that aims to generate realistic intermediate frames under fixed endpoint constraints. Unlike generic video inbetweening, this task requires recovering subtle speech-driven facial dynamics over long temporal gaps, where the boundary frames alone provide insufficient guidance for realistic motion recovery. To address this problem, we propose BBF (Beyond Boundary Frames), a unified context-aware framework for talking-head inbetweening. BBF consists of three complementary components: Endpoint Anchoring for preserving endpoint consistency, Motion Evolution Modeling for capturing plausible temporal transitions from surrounding visual context, and Speech Dynamics Refinement for injecting fine-grained speech-driven facial dynamics from speech audio. A progressive optimization strategy further balances structural consistency and motion refinement during denoising. Extensive experiments on the talking-head benchmarks HDTF and Hallo3 demonstrate that BBF consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. In particular, BBF surpasses the strongest baseline on Hallo3 by 23.3% in FID and 36.5% in FVD. Moreover, BBF demonstrates strong generalization on generic video inbetweening benchmarks.
♻ ☆ Industrial Synthetic Segment Pre-training
Shinichi Mae, Hirokatsu Kataoka, Ryousuke Yamada, Yoshihiro Fukuhara, Risa Shinoda, Christian Rupprecht
Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have made remarkable progress and are increasingly being applied to segmentation tasks in real-world industrial settings. However, VFMs pre-trained on real-image datasets still face several challenges: (1) they do not always perform well on industrial datasets due to significant differences from natural imagery, (2) legal and ethical restrictions, such as limitations on commercial use, constrain extensibility, and (3) building training frameworks under limited computational and data resources remains a critical issue. These challenges raise a fundamental question: can we construct industrial segmentation models without relying on real images or manual annotations? To address this question, we propose the Instance Core Segment Dataset (InsCore), a synthetic data generation framework and the resulting pre-training dataset based on Formula-Driven Supervised Learning (FDSL). InsCore is designed not around the visual appearance or domain of real images, but around the hypothesis that learning to handle complex occlusions during pre-training is a key factor for strong performance in industrial domains. Through experiments across five domains (medical, biomedical, remote sensing, manufacturing, and logistics) we demonstrate that InsCore pre-trained models achieve average mAP scores of 45.2 with the ViTDet backbone and 46.0 with the Swin Transformer backbone, on par with ImageNet-21k supervised pre-training (45.0) while using no real images at all. As a reference point under different input assumptions, prompted SAM with ground-truth bounding boxes attains 45.4 on the same benchmarks. Finally, InsCore consists of only 100k images and 3.2M masks, roughly 1/110 and 1/312 the scale of the SA-1B dataset.
♻ ☆ ArtChart: Faithful Artistic Chart Generation with Integrated Text Rendering
Artistic charts combine data visualization with expressive marks, textures, and typography, but they are difficult for image generators: an output is useful only when its stylization preserves chart geometry, exact in-image text, and the semantic binding between labels and marks. We introduce ArtChart, a framework for faithful artistic chart generation with integrated text rendering. Given a structured chart specification and an artistic prompt, ArtChart first renders a text-free grayscale layout that encodes the target chart geometry, then trains a chart-specific control module to preserve mathematical structure. To address the remaining text and layout errors, we further refine the generation policy through GRPO-based reinforcement learning with OCR-based text rewards, VLM-based layout rewards, and aesthetic rewards. A multi-expert distillation stage reconciles these objectives by distilling single-reward experts into one balanced generation policy. We also construct ArtChart-Bench, a bilingual 2K-prompt benchmark covering four chart types, controlled value distributions, diverse label/value formats, and 15 artistic styles, together with ArtChart-Eval, a six-axis evaluation protocol measuring mathematical logic, text accuracy, text layout, aesthetics, instruction following, and readability. Experiments on ArtChart-Bench show that ArtChart consistently outperforms prompt-only, image-editing, and generic ControlNet baselines, with the largest gains on mathematical fidelity and label-layout binding while maintaining competitive visual quality. These results suggest that artistic chart generation should be evaluated as reliable visual communication rather than as generic stylized image synthesis.
♻ ☆ CORF-GS: Real-Time Wireless Radiance Field Reconstruction via Coupled Optical-RF Gaussian Splatting
Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)-based wireless radiance field (WRF) reconstruction provide an efficient solution for wireless channel modeling. However, existing WRF reconstruction methods rely on pre-collected observations and offline optimization, and thus struggle to provide real-time channel knowledge. To bridge this gap, we propose CORF-GS, a real-time WRF reconstruction framework that processes sequential optical and radio frequency (RF) keyframes. Specifically, CORF-GS constructs a unified Gaussian representation for optical and RF with shared geometry and modality-specific appearance, allowing high-resolution optical images to provide structural priors for WRF reconstruction. When a new keyframe arrives, CORF-GS first employs optical-guided Gaussian sampling to densify the WRF in under-represented regions. Since light and radio waves may respond differently to the same object surfaces due to wavelength mismatch, relying solely on optical guidance may neglect RF-informative areas. Therefore, CORF-GS performs coupled optical-RF optimization to jointly refine the shared Gaussians. Compared with the existing two-stage training pipelines, this prevents WRF from passively adapting to a frozen optical geometry and encourages the shared Gaussians to adapt to both optical structures and RF power distributions. Simulations show that CORF-GS achieves state-of-the-art RF spectrum synthesis quality and reduces the reconstruction time by $6.4\times$ compared with existing WRF methods.
comment: A collection of paper on 3DGS for Wireless Communications can be found at https://github.com/AI4Wireless/3DGS4Wireless
♻ ☆ Perceptual Anchoring: Prototype-Guided Text Calibration for Training-free Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation
Training-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) partitions an image into semantically distinct regions based on arbitrary text descriptions, without learning any additional parameters. However, existing methods typically focus on improving visual representations while treating text embeddings that encode only generic category concepts as fixed classification references. The resulting semantic gap between these generic concepts and the visual representations that capture the specific appearances of target instances often causes incomplete masks and erroneous predictions in non-target regions. Inspired by the symbol-percept correspondence underlying perceptual anchoring, we propose Prototype-Guided Text Calibration (PTC) for training-free OVSS. In the Perceiving stage, PTC selects reliable visual evidence based on initial matching scores to construct category-specific visual prototypes. In the Anchoring stage, PTC uses these prototypes to calibrate their corresponding text embeddings, with the calibration strength adaptively adjusted based on the amount of visual evidence. Consequently, the calibrated text embeddings align more accurately with instance-specific visual representations while preserving generic category semantics and open-vocabulary generalization. Moreover, PTC requires neither additional training nor external models and can serve as a plug-and-play module for existing methods. Extensive experiments across eight benchmarks show that PTC significantly enhances the performance of six representative methods and yields more complete and accurate segmentation results. These results validate PTC as a simple and effective approach to improving visual-text alignment.
comment: 17 pages, 5 figures
♻ ☆ TSM-Pose: Topology-Aware Learning with Semantic Mamba for Category-Level Object Pose Estimation
Jinshuo Liu, Bingtao Ma, Junlin Su, Guanyuan Pan, Beining Wu, Cheng Yang, Jiaxuan Lu, Chenggang Yan, Shuai Wang
Category-level object pose estimation is fundamental for embodied intelligence, yet achieving robust generalization to unseen instances remains challenging. However, existing methods mainly rely on simple feature extraction and aggregation, which struggle to capture category-shared topological structures and conduct semantic keypoint modeling, limiting their generalization. To address these, we propose a \textbf{T}opology-Aware Learning with \textbf{S}emantic \textbf{M}amba for Category-Level \textbf{P}ose Estimation framework (TSM-Pose). Specifically, we introduce a Topology Extractor to capture the global topological representation of the point cloud, which is integrated into local geometry features and enables robust category-level structural representation. Simultaneously, we propose a Mamba-based Global Semantic Aggregator that injects semantics priors into keypoints to enhance their expressiveness and leverages multiple TwinMamba blocks to model long-range dependencies for more effective global feature aggregation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (REAL275, CAMERA25, and HouseCat6D) demonstrate that TSM-Pose outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.
♻ ☆ Leakage-Audited Benchmarking Reveals Limited Evidence for Cross-Subject Auditory-Evoked EEG Vowel Perception Decoding
We tested whether auditory-evoked EEG supports subject-independent five-vowel perception decoding when trial identity, model identity, prediction provenance, and participant-level inference are controlled within a single benchmark. We reconstructed Study 2 event tables from OpenNeuro ds006104 version 1.0.1 and analyzed the consonant-vowel pair task. One-to-one marker-stimulus pairing yielded 3,840 independent trials; control-condition selection and artifact rejection retained 1,094 epochs from 16 participants and 61 EEG channels. Thirteen unique implementations were evaluated using leave-one-subject-out testing, with participant metrics reconstructed from 36,102 trial predictions across 33 complete prediction replicas. Random Forest was numerically highest at 21.474% balanced accuracy (95% participant-bootstrap interval, 19.526-23.482%; chance, 20%), but neither its participant-level tests nor any implementation survived correction across the 13-model family. Deep-model performance was close to chance, and several architectures showed substantial seed-dependent variation and low trial-label agreement. In a separate descriptive sensor-space representation, participant-associated effects accounted for 72.24% of the balanced standardized centroid sum of squares, compared with 2.04% for vowel-associated effects; between-participant same-vowel distances exceeded within-participant across-vowel distances for all 16 participants. An exploratory MDM analysis comprising 9,616 genuine refits across training cohorts of 3-15 participants showed no monotonic performance gain. Within this dataset and protocol, evidence for reliable cross-subject five-vowel decoding is limited. The benchmark provides a reproducible chain from source rows to retained epochs, predictions, participant-level metrics, multiplicity-adjusted inference, and bounded diagnostic analyses.
comment: 19 pages, 7 figures; includes 11-page supplementary material. Associated code, prediction records, source data, and reproducibility materials: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21805983
♻ ☆ Beyond Motion Cues and Structural Sparsity: Revisiting Small Moving Target Detection
Small moving target detection is crucial for many defense applications but remains highly challenging due to low signal-to-noise ratios, ambiguous visual cues, and cluttered backgrounds. In this work, we propose a novel deep learning framework that differs fundamentally from existing approaches, which often rely on target-specific features or motion cues and tend to lack robustness in complex environments. Our key insight is that small target detection and background discrimination are inherently coupled, even cluttered video backgrounds often exhibit strong low-rank structures that can serve as stable priors for detection. We reformulate the task as a tensor-based low-rank and sparse decomposition problem and conduct a theoretical analysis of the background, target, and noise components to guide model design. Building on these insights, we introduce TenRPCANet, a deep neural network that requires minimal assumptions about target characteristics. Specifically, we propose a tokenization strategy that implicitly enforces multi-order tensor low-rank priors through a self-attention mechanism. This mechanism captures both local and non-local self-similarity to model the low-rank background without relying on explicit iterative optimization. In addition, inspired by the sparse component update in tensor RPCA, we design a feature refinement module to enhance target saliency. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two highly distinct and challenging tasks: multi-frame infrared small target detection and space object detection. These results demonstrate both the effectiveness and the generalizability of our approach.
♻ ☆ Evaluation-Verification Reward for Consistent Multi-Reference Image Editing
While recent image editing models have made rapid progress, multi-reference editing remains challenging, particularly in maintaining visual consistency across references and ensuring overall visual harmony. Reinforcement learning has proven highly effective for text-to-image generation and single-image editing, but its extension to multi-reference editing is hindered by the absence of suitable reward models that capture multi-image relational constraints. Moreover, naively using multimodal large language models(MLLMs) as zero-shot evaluators faces a key tension between hallucination-prone long-form reasoning and the limited deductive power of short-form judgments. We address these issues with a Multi-dimensional Evaluation-Verification Reward(EVR). EVR decomposes evaluation into distinct visual criteria; for each criterion, an MLLM Evaluator generates multiple candidate hypotheses, and a Verifier grounds each claim in concrete visual evidence to accept or reject it, producing reliable and fine-grained reward signals. Together with a scalable data pipeline, our method enables RL fine-tuning of off-the-shelf editors without architectural changes. Extensive experiments show substantial gains over the base Qwen-Image-Edit, improving consistency and harmony to match or surpass NanoBanana.
♻ ☆ Oh Deer, How Should I Handle This? Seasonal Priors for Selective Wildlife Annotation and Classification ECCV 2026
Hugo Markoff, Christoph Praschl, Anton Hjalte Jørgensen, Christian Emil Mogensen, Mathias Bech Skadhauge, Sara Beery, Michael Ørsted, David C. Schedl
Fine-grained wildlife classification in aerial imagery is limited not only by model performance, but also by unreliable labels: animals occupy few pixels, key visual cues vary seasonally, and modality-specific evidence can be ambiguous. We study adult-male identification in red deer, where the antler cycle defines predictable windows of reliable evidence for both annotation and prediction. Using 7,295 RGB-only, thermal-only, and matched RGB+thermal crop sets labeled by three annotators, we show that seasonal structure links (I) annotation quality, (II) downstream classification, and (III) selective prediction. Matched RGB+thermal review resolves more samples than either single modality, recovering majority-male labels otherwise missed by RGB or thermal alone, in human based as well as model based classification. Months with high annotator abstention also show lower classifier confidence, and soft seasonal priors mainly benefit the season-limited thermal view. Uncertainty-band abstention further improves covered accuracy up to 98.9%, though at reduced coverage and with deferral that falls disproportionately on males. Overall, a biologically grounded seasonal calendar predicts where annotation and prediction are unreliable, and can guide both annotation protocol design and modality weighting.
comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables. Accepted to the archival (proceedings) track of the CV4Ecology workshop at ECCV 2026
♻ ☆ Exo2EgoPose: Leveraging Exocentric Demonstrations for Vision-Language guided Egocentric 3D Hand Pose Forecasting
Perceiving multimodal cues and forecasting fine-grained actions from an egocentric (Ego) perspective is vital for applications like robot manipulation. However, previous studies either rely mainly on under-informed visual inputs to predict coarse human motions or follow the VRM/VLA paradigm, which suffers from insufficient robot data and the gap between human and robot embodiments. We observe that 3D hand pose naturally serves as a unified representation to bridge human-robot actions. Hence, we investigate an under-explored Vision-Language guided Egocentric 3D Hand Pose Forecasting (VL-EHPF) task, which aims to predict future Ego 3D hand poses from visual observations, a language instruction, and pose states. To overcome the limited field-of-view and highly dynamic motions in the Ego view, we propose a framework dubbed Exo2EgoPose, which innovatively leverages holistic and stable exocentric (Exo) demonstrations as guidance to compensate for partial and dynamic Ego-view cues. Specifically, we introduce a Dual-level Exocentric Reconstruction Module (DERM), which incorporates the paired Exo videos as supervision to reconstruct their video-level and chunked frame-level representations, thereby modeling spatial contexts and temporal dynamics. Then, the Global-to-Local Modulation Module (GLMM) utilizes the reconstructed hierarchical Exo representations for progressive feature refinement via attention mechanisms and adaptive modulation, enabling comprehensive Exo guidance for accurate Ego hand pose forecasting. Extensive experiments on \textit{AssemblyHands}, \textit{Ego-Exo4D}, and our newly constructed \textit{EgoMe-pose} benchmarks show the superiority of our method, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Moreover, it demonstrates an effective human-to-robot transfer capability and yields improvements on the \textit{CALVIN} dataset.
comment: Accepted by ACMMM 2026
♻ ☆ Learning Direct Control Policies with Flow Matching for Autonomous Driving IEEE
Marcello Ceresini, Federico Pirazzoli, Andrea Bertogalli, Lorenzo Cipelli, Filippo D'Addeo, Anthony Dell'Eva, Alessandro Paolo Capasso, Alberto Broggi
We present a flow-matching planner for autonomous driving that directly outputs actionable control trajectories defined by acceleration and curvature profiles. The model is conditioned on a bird's-eye-view (BEV) raster of the surrounding scene and generates control sequences in a small number of Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE) integration steps, enabling low-latency inference suitable for real-time closed-loop re-planning. We train exclusively on urban scenarios (real urban city streets, intersections and roundabouts of the city of Parma, Italy) collected from a 2D traffic simulator with reactive agents, and evaluate in closed-loop on both in-distribution and markedly out-of-distribution environments, including multi-lane highways and unseen urban scenarios. Our results show that the model generalizes reliably to these unseen conditions, maintaining stable closed-loop control and successfully completing scenarios that differ substantially from the training distribution. We attribute this to the BEV representation, which provides a geometry-centric view of the scene that is inherently less sensitive to distributional shifts, and to the flow-matching formulation, which learns a smooth vector field that degrades gracefully under distribution shift. We provide video demonstrations of closed-loop behavior at https://marcelloceresini.github.io/DirectControlFlowMatching.
comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for oral presentation at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC 2026)
♻ ☆ MetaView: Monocular Novel View Synthesis with Scale-Aware Implicit Geometry Priors ECCV 2026
Current visual generation models are capable of producing high-quality content, yet they lack a coherent perception of the spatial structure. Existing generative novel view synthesis methods typically introduce explicit geometry priors, which enforce spatial consistency but inherently restrict generalization in large view changes. In contrast, recent interactive generative methods favor implicit scene modeling, offering greater flexibility at the cost of precise camera control and geometry consistency. In this paper, we propose MetaView, a diffusion-based monocular novel view synthesis framework that enables rendering under large view changes from a single image. Our key insight is to combine implicit geometry modeling with minimal yet essential explicit 3D cues: we incorporate implicit geometry priors from a feed-forward geometry perception network to regularize structure without imposing restrictive reconstruction pipelines, while leveraging metric depth to anchor the generation to a metric scale. This design allows MetaView to achieve both geometry consistency and precise controllability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, under challenging monocular large viewpoint changes, MetaView significantly outperforms existing methods and exhibits superior generalization. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/KlingAIResearch/MetaView.
comment: accepted to ECCV 2026
♻ ☆ WorldMark: A Unified Benchmark Suite for Interactive Video World Models
Xiaojie Xu, Zhengyuan Lin, Kang He, Yukang Feng, Xiaofeng Mao, Yuanyang Yin, Yongtao Ge, Kaipeng Zhang
Unlike text- or image-driven video generation, an interactive world model is driven by actions: the user acts, and the world responds. Two obstacles stand in the way of fair and comprehensive evaluation. First, models take actions in incompatible formats---captions, camera trajectories, action functions---so no shared protocol has been established. Second, while existing benchmarks have advanced world memory and visual quality, action following is reduced to trajectory or direction error, which collapses a whole path into one number: not how quickly the world reacts to a command switch, nor how cleanly it moves along the commanded axis. WorldMark removes both obstacles. Per-model adapters translate a shared WASD-style vocabulary into each model's native control format, so ten heterogeneous models receive semantically identical instructions across 500 standardized cases spanning styles, viewpoints, and difficulty tiers; a new model costs one adapter. On this common ground we characterize action dynamics through a control-systems lens---direction accuracy, direction purity, response latency, and motion stability, each resolved per axis---alongside suites for world memory and visual quality. Together they expose differences existing protocols cannot see: the fastest responders are often the least stable, a trade-off no single action metric captures; per-axis resolution reveals models that follow translation almost perfectly while barely responding to rotation; the model with the best perceptual and aesthetic quality ranks last in translational direction accuracy and latency; and stylized scenes cost every model global consistency while leaving action dynamics largely intact. We will release all data, evaluation code, and model outputs.
♻ ☆ A Human-in-the-Loop Deep Learning Framework for Color Reconstruction of Lenticular Films
Historical lenticular films, such as those created with the Kodacolor process, encode color information in a distinctive spatial format. This structure requires specialized techniques for accurate color reconstruction. While recent signal processing approaches like doLCE and deep learning methods like deep-doLCE have advanced automated color recovery, they often fail with cases such as curved lenticules, low-contrast, or badly captured regions. We propose a human-in-the-loop (HITL) deep learning framework which is designed for color reconstruction in lenticular films. Our approach introduces an editable, vector-based representation of lenticule boundaries, allowing experts to interactively refine boundary positions before color extraction and demosaicing. This decoupled architecture enables targeted corrections and iterative fine-tuning, embedding expert knowledge into the detection model and improving robustness across challenging frames. To preserve image details using information solely present in the original silver emulsion, we merge the reconstructed chrominance with the original film scan's luminance. We evaluate our pipeline on a challenging lenticular film sequence where previous automated approaches fail and the reconstructed colors are not suitable for exhibition. In contrast, our HITL approach successfully produces high-quality, exhibitable color reconstructions with preserved texture. This work is the first to combine expert guidance, editable intermediate representations, and texture-preserving post-processing for lenticular film color reconstruction, advancing the state of the art in this field.
♻ ☆ Human-in-the-Loop Atlas-Based 3D Asset Segmentation for Interactive Content Workflows
Segmenting 3D assets into meaningful regions remains challenging, especially when segmentation criteria are application-dependent and require user control. We present a human-in-the-loop pipeline for generating a segmented 2D parameterized atlas from a 3D model for interactive media, game, and XR content workflows. Our method first selects a compact set of rendered views using a greedy set cover strategy over sampled surface points, and then supports interactive segmentation of these views with SAM~2 and Label Studio. The resulting masks are back-projected onto the model's UV parameterization to produce a unified segmented atlas that supports downstream production tasks such as segment-wise material assignment, style transfer, and semantic labeling. We assess the pipeline through a demonstration-based technical evaluation on eight cultural heritage objects. The results show that the approach can generate usable segmented atlases across diverse geometries while revealing recurring sources of manual correction, particularly fine structures, cavities, and weak appearance boundaries. The code is available at https://github.com/saptarshineil/ai_assisted_atlas_segmentation
♻ ☆ Attention Fusion for Bridge Deck Delamination Detection
Subsurface delaminations in reinforced concrete bridge decks escape conventional visual inspection, and the two principal sensing techniques used to find them are individually incomplete: Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) penetrates deeply but degrades near the surface, while Infrared Thermography (IRT) resolves shallow defects but cannot reach deeper structure. This paper presents a framework for fusing the two modalities through hierarchical attention: temporal self-attention over GPR A-scans, channel-spatial attention over IRT patches, and cross-modal multi-head attention with learnable modality embeddings, coupled with decomposed aleatoric/epistemic uncertainty estimation. Beyond the architecture itself, which is lightweight at approximately 0.53M parameters with a closed-form accounting of where capacity resides, we contribute an elementary formal analysis. Two-token cross-modal attention is shown to be exactly a bank of per-sample learned gates; a gradient-allocation proposition quantifies how class imbalance starves attention parameters of minority-class signal and how loss reweighting trades that starvation for gradient variance; and closed-form metric floors under majority-class collapse anchor a diagnostic divergence between ranking metrics (AUC) and thresholded metrics (F1). The analysis suggests that adaptively weighted fusion, precisely because its feature-selection policy is learned, may be distinctively vulnerable to the severe class imbalance typical of operational bridge decks; establishing whether and when this occurs is deferred to empirical evaluation.
♻ ☆ AffectAgent: Collaborative Multi-Agent Reasoning for Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Emotion Recognition ACM MM 2026
Zeheng Wang, Zitong Yu, Yijie Zhu, Bo Zhao, Haochen Liang, Taorui Wang, Wei Xia, Jiayu Zhang, Zhishu Liu, Hui Ma, Fei Ma, Qi Tian
LLM-based multimodal emotion recognition relies on static parametric memory and often hallucinates when interpreting nuanced affective states. In this paper, given that single-round retrieval-augmented generation is highly susceptible to modal ambiguity and therefore struggles to capture complex affective dependencies across modalities, we introduce AffectAgent, an affect-oriented multi-agent retrieval-augmented generation framework that leverages collaborative decision-making among agents for fine-grained affective understanding. Specifically, AffectAgent comprises three jointly optimized specialized agents, namely a query planner, an evidence filter, and an emotion generator, which collaboratively perform analytical reasoning to retrieve cross-modal samples, assess evidence, and generate predictions. These agents are optimized end-to-end using Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (MAPPO) with a shared affective reward to ensure consistent emotion understanding. Furthermore, we introduce Modality-Balancing Mixture of Experts (MB-MoE) and Retrieval-Augmented Adaptive Fusion (RAAF), where MB-MoE dynamically regulates the contributions of different modalities to mitigate representation mismatch caused by cross-modal heterogeneity, while RAAF enhances semantic completion under missing-modality conditions by incorporating retrieved audiovisual embeddings. Extensive experiments on MER-UniBench demonstrate that AffectAgent achieves superior performance across complex scenarios. Our code will be released at: https://github.com/Wz1h1NG/AffectAgent.
comment: Accepted by ACM MM 2026
♻ ☆ ZoomV: Temporal Zoom-in for Efficient Long Video Understanding
Long video understanding poses a fundamental challenge for large video-language models (LVLMs) due to the overwhelming number of frames and the risk of losing essential context through naive downsampling. Inspired by the way humans watch videos on mobile phones, constantly zooming in on frames of interest, we propose ZoomV, a query-aware temporal zoom-in framework designed for efficient and accurate long video understanding. Specifically, ZoomV operates in three stages: (1) Temporal interests grounding: guided by the query, ZoomV retrieves relevant events and their associated temporal windows as candidates. (2) Event interests spotlighting: within pools of candidate windows, each window is scored through the model itself reflection and filtered accordingly, where higher-confidence windows are more representative. (3) Compact representation: the selected events are encoded and temporally downsampled to preserve critical semantics while significantly reducing redundancy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ZoomV substantially outperforms prior video agent approaches. On temporal grounding, ZoomV unlocks the latent capability of LVLMs, achieving an 11.8% mIoU gain on Charades-STA. Remarkably, ZoomV further boosts accuracy on LVBench by 9.7%, underscoring its effectiveness on long-video benchmarks.
comment: ACMMM 2026
♻ ☆ UniCSG: Unified High-Fidelity Content-Constrained Style-Driven Generation via Staged Semantic and Frequency Disentanglement
Style transfer must match a target style while preserving content semantics. DiT-based diffusion models often suffer from content-style entanglement, leading to reference-content leakage and unstable generation. We present UniCSG, a unified framework for content-constrained, style-driven generation in both text-guided and reference-guided settings. UniCSG employs staged training: (i) a latent-space semantic disentanglement stage that combines low-frequency preprocessing with conditioning corruption to encourage content-style separation, and (ii) a latent-space frequency-aware detail reconstruction stage that refines details via multi-scale frequency supervision. We further incorporate pixel-space reward learning to align latent objectives with perceptual quality after decoding. Experiments demonstrate improved content faithfulness, style alignment, and robustness in both settings.
♻ ☆ Seeking Physics in Diffusion Noise
Do video diffusion models encode signals predictive of physical plausibility? We probe intermediate denoising representations of pretrained Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) and find that physically plausible and implausible videos are partially separable in mid-layer feature space, even at high noise levels. Within-source and perceptual-quality controls suggest that this signal is not fully explained by generator identity or generic visual quality. We distill the signal into a lightweight, backbone-specific physics verifier trained on frozen features and use it in two complementary inference-time mechanisms under a fixed multi-trajectory budget: progressive trajectory selection, which scores trajectories at intermediate checkpoints and prunes weak candidates early, and reward-gradient guidance, which steers surviving trajectories by backpropagating through only the first few DiT blocks. Experiments on PhyGenBench and Physics-IQ across CogVideoX-2B/5B and Wan 2.1-14B show that progressive selection matches verifier-based Best-of-4 on CogVideoX-2B while reducing wall-clock inference time by 37%, whereas reward-gradient guidance substantially improves physical consistency on CogVideoX-5B, all without fine-tuning the video generator.
comment: 15 pages
♻ ☆ Not Truly Multilingual: Script Consistency as a Missing Dimension in VLM Evaluation
Current multilingual evaluations for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) assume a one-to-one mapping between language and orthography, overlooking billions of users of multi-script languages. We introduce PuMVR (Punjabi Multimodal Visual Reasoning), a benchmark of 1,000 strictly parallel image-text instances across Punjabi's three active scripts: Gurmukhi, Shahmukhi, and Roman. Evaluating 10 state-of-the-art VLMs, we expose a substantial and systematic Script Gap. Models frequently solve visual tasks in one script while failing identical tasks in another, with accuracy deltas reaching 16%. Crucially, visual input boosts absolute performance uniformly yet does not close the orthographic gap. Furthermore, cross-script in-context transfer is highly brittle, exposing script-locked knowledge representation. Supported by McNemar tests across all script pairs, our findings demonstrate that current "multilingual" VLMs are not truly multi-script. We propose the Script Consistency Rate (SCR), which falls as low as 24.8% on our benchmark, as a mandatory metric for script-agnostic evaluation to ensure equitable AI access. Data and code are available at: https://github.com/prabhjotschugh/Not-Truly-Multilingual-PuMVR.
♻ ☆ An Enhanced Geometric-Spectral Feature Learning Framework for Airborne Multispectral Point Cloud Classification
Multispectral point cloud (MPC) is composed of 3D spatial-spectral information, which holds tremendous potential for accurate land-cover classification. However, the representation power of classification models is limited by inherent high-dimensional and heterogeneous spatial-spectral information, unbalanced sample distribution, and inter-class spectral similarity of airborne MPCs. We build two MPC datasets and propose an enhanced geometric-spectral feature learning framework based on attentions for airborne MPC classification. A key component in our model is a two-stream feature fusion method with attention mechanisms, which enhances the representation capability of spatial-spectral features from high-dimensional heterogeneous MPCs. The first stream aims to extract position-encoded global spectral features with fusion self-attention, and the second stream comprises a multikernel point convolution and feature aggregation attention to extract spectral-guided geometric features. We then develop a residual attention fusion block to integrate the most informative geometric-spectral features from the two parallel streams. Another important contribution of this work is a joint loss function to improve the learning ability on unbalanced and interclass similar samples. Experimental results on two airborne MPC datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the codes and datasets used in this paper will be made available freely at https://github.com/HITlixian/TGRS_GSFF.
comment: Revised V1
♻ ☆ Chain-of-Visual-Thought: Teaching VLMs to See and Think Better with Continuous Visual Tokens
Yiming Qin, Bomin Wei, Jiaxin Ge, Konstantinos Kallidromitis, Stephanie Fu, Trevor Darrell, XuDong Wang
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at reasoning in linguistic space but struggle with perceptual understanding that requires dense visual perception, e.g., spatial reasoning and geometric awareness. This limitation stems from the fact that current VLMs have limited mechanisms to capture dense visual information across spatial dimensions. We introduce Chain-of-Visual-Thought (COVT), a framework that enables VLMs to reason not only in words but also through continuous visual tokens-compact latent representations that encode rich perceptual cues. Within a small budget of roughly 20 tokens, COVT distills knowledge from lightweight vision experts, capturing complementary properties such as 2D appearance, 3D geometry, spatial layout, and edge structure. During training, the VLM with COVT autoregressively predicts these visual tokens to reconstruct dense supervision signals (e.g., depth, segmentation, edges, and DINO features). At inference, the model reasons directly in the continuous visual token space, preserving efficiency while optionally decoding dense predictions for interpretability. Evaluated across more than ten diverse perception benchmarks, including CV-Bench, MMVP, RealWorldQA, MMStar, WorldMedQA, and HRBench, integrating COVT into strong VLMs such as Qwen2.5-VL and LLaVA consistently improves performance by 3% to 16% and demonstrates that compact continuous visual thinking enables more precise, grounded, and interpretable multimodal intelligence.
comment: Project page: https://wakalsprojectpage.github.io/covt-website/
♻ ☆ MOON3.0: Reasoning-aware Multimodal Representation Learning for E-commerce Product Understanding ACM MM
Junxian Wu, Chenghan Fu, Zhanheng Nie, Daoze Zhang, Bowen Wan, Wanxian Guan, Chuan Yu, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng
With the rapid growth of e-commerce, exploring general representations rather than task-specific ones has attracted increasing attention. Although recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have driven significant progress in product understanding, they are typically employed as feature extractors that implicitly encode product information into global embeddings, thereby limiting their ability to capture fine-grained attributes. Therefore, we argue that leveraging the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs to explicitly model fine-grained product attributes holds significant potential. Nevertheless, achieving this goal remains non-trivial due to several key challenges: (i) long-context reasoning tends to dilute the model's attention to salient information in the raw input; (ii) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) primarily encourages rigid imitation, limiting the exploration of effective reasoning strategies; and (iii) fine-grained details are progressively attenuated during forward propagation. To address these issues, we propose MOON3.0, the first reasoning-aware MLLM-based model for product representation learning. Our method (1) employs a multi-head modality fusion module to adaptively integrate raw signals; (2) incorporates a joint contrastive and reinforcement learning framework to autonomously explore more effective reasoning strategies; and (3) introduces a fine-grained residual enhancement module to progressively preserve local details throughout the network. Additionally, we release a large-scale multimodal e-commerce benchmark MBE3.0. Experimentally, our model demonstrates state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across various downstream tasks on both our benchmark and public datasets.
comment: Accepted by the 34th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), 2026. 10 pages, 6 figures
♻ ☆ NormGuard: Reward-Preserving Norm Constraints in Flow-Matching Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training improves the reward alignment of flow-based generators, but often degrades perceptual quality in ways that are not captured by the reward proxy. We identify a simple structural signature of this drift: across three post-training methods (NFT, AWM, DPO), RL fine-tuning inflates the per-step velocity norm $\|v_θ\|$ by $5\%$ to $15\%$ relative to the reference. A form of norm inflation has been studied in classifier-free guidance (CFG), where rescaling the velocity back to a reference norm at inference time can mitigate the resulting artifacts. However, this inference-time correction does not transfer cleanly to RL: rescaling $v_θ$ to match $\|v_{\text{ref}}\|$ at inference time neither improves reward nor fixes the quality degradation, because the inflation is co-adapted into the model weights. Furthermore, an adjoint sensitivity analysis shows that velocity magnitude rescaling carries no coherent first-order reward signal at the batch level, indicating that suppressing norm inflation is unlikely to remove a consistently reward-carrying component. Since inference-time renormalization fails while norm suppression carries no reward cost, training-time intervention is the appropriate strategy. Together, these findings motivate NormGuard, a hinge penalty that activates only when $\|v_θ\|$ exceeds $\|v_{\text{ref}}\|$ and composes additively with any velocity-local base loss. Across two base models, three post-training methods, and two reward proxies, NormGuard consistently improves MLLM-judged image quality and forensic realism while preserving reward, with gains that amplify under few-step inference and are not explained by early stopping.
♻ ☆ GenTrack: Physical Alignment for Robot-Native Motion Generation and Zero-Shot Humanoid Tracking
General-purpose humanoid trackers can execute diverse references, but their zero-shot coverage depends on large embodied corpora that are costly to extend. Text-to-motion generators offer scalable supervision, yet models trained on human motion or retargeted data inherit a gap between kinematic plausibility and robot executability. Existing one-way pipelines fix either the generated corpus or the reward tracker. We introduce GenTrack, an online generator--tracker framework that alternates execution-grounded, group-relative generator alignment with tracker training on newly generated references; anchoring and rehearsal constrain drift. On Unitree G1, we evaluate GenTrack with ProtoMotions and SONIC backbones across three zero-shot tracking splits including public AMASS and LAFAN benchmarks, and a private out-of-distribution test set of 1,024 prompt-motion pairs in the wild. The online co-training strategy consistently produces generators that output more robot-executable motions with strong semantic alignment, and trackers with markedly broader zero-shot coverage and improved tracking accuracy, especially on out-of-distribution references. These results demonstrate that joint online post-training effectively narrows the executability gap between retargeted references and robot-native motion, advancing zero-shot humanoid control without additional data collection and beyond the limitations of a static reference pool.
♻ ☆ YouTube-Occ: Learning Indoor 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction from YouTube Videos ECCV 2026
3D semantic occupancy prediction is crucial for fine-grained scene understanding, yet its advancement in privacy-sensitive indoor environments is fundamentally hindered by the scarcity of large-scale annotated 3D data. To overcome this limitation, we explore learning indoor 3D semantic occupancy prediction from abundant, uncalibrated in-the-wild internet videos while simultaneously bypassing the extensive manual annotation. Specifically, we introduce \textit{YouTube-Occ}, including an automated data pipeline that leverages 2D and 3D foundation models to process raw web videos, estimating camera geometry, reconstructing scene point clouds, and enriching them with dense semantic pseudo-labels. However, these plausible pseudo-labels fail to yield performance gains under naive supervision. To address this impasse, we further propose a pre-training framework driven by feature distillation with a dual-alignment strategy. Within it, an intra-frame alignment utilizes a voxel-anchored Gaussianization module to align 3D features with corresponding 2D priors, whereas a cross-scene alignment achieves global semantic consistency via class-prototype distillation. Empirically, YouTube-Occ delivers consistent gains across three mainstream architectures on the NYUv2 and Occ-ScanNet benchmarks, especially under limited-data conditions. We will publicly release our code and data, hoping to inspire future research.
comment: Accepted by ECCV 2026
♻ ☆ SEAR: Simple and Efficient Adaptation of Visual Geometric Transformers for Unpaired RGB+Thermal 3D Reconstruction
Foundational feed-forward visual geometry models enable accurate and efficient camera pose estimation and scene reconstruction by learning strong scene priors from massive RGB datasets. However, their effectiveness drops when applied to mixed sensing modalities, such as RGB-thermal (RGB-T) images. We observe that while a visual geometry grounded transformer pretrained on RGB data generalizes well to thermal-only reconstruction, it struggles to align RGB and thermal modalities when processed jointly. To address this, we propose SEAR, a simple yet efficient fine-tuning strategy that adapts a pretrained geometry transformer to multimodal RGB-T inputs. Despite being trained on a relatively small RGB-T dataset, our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods for 3D reconstruction and camera pose estimation, achieving significant improvements over all metrics and delivering higher detail and consistency between modalities with negligible overhead in inference time compared to the original pretrained model. Notably, SEAR enables reliable multimodal pose estimation and reconstruction even under challenging conditions, such as low lighting and dense smoke. We validate our architecture through extensive ablation studies and demonstrate how the model aligns both modalities. Additionally, we introduce a new dataset featuring RGB and thermal sequences captured at different times, viewpoints, and illumination conditions, providing a robust benchmark for future work in multimodal 3D scene reconstruction. Code and models are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.21077295.
♻ ☆ PhyCheck: Fine-Grained Evidence-Grounded Dataset for Physical Law Understanding in Video-LLMs
Embodied intelligence and world models require video understanding systems to go beyond recognizing objects and actions and develop an understanding of physical regularities. However, despite their strong performance on general video understanding tasks, current video-language models still struggle to reliably determine whether an observed event conforms to specific physical laws. Existing benchmarks primarily assess the physical quality of generated videos, providing limited support for systematically evaluating and improving the physical-law understanding of Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs). To address this gap, we introduce PhyCheck, a video question answering dataset organized at two complementary levels of granularity. The coarse-grained subset asks models to determine whether the phenomenon shown in a video conforms to or violates physical laws, while the fine-grained subset further examines whether models can capture physical details responsible for the violation or compliance. We use these subsets as structured supervision to improve physical understanding. In addition, the dataset contains a diagnostic subset with external causal context that reveal hidden factors affecting physical plausibility, assessing whether models can recalibrate their judgments accordingly. Experiments with Fine-tune Qwen2.5-VL show that training with the proposed data substantially improves the understanding of physical-consistency, while evaluations in the diagnostic subset reveal that current models still have difficulty incorporating additional causal conditions into their decisions. These findings highlight the gap between recognizing surface-level inconsistencies and understanding underlying physical mechanisms, and provide a foundation for evaluating and improving physical understanding in Video-LLMs.
comment: 15pages, 4 figures, 4 tables
♻ ☆ CROSS: Cascaded Distillation and Dual-Constraint Grounding for Remote Sensing Referring Segmentation ECCV
Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation (RRSIS) has achieved significant progress through the integration of VLMs and the Segment Anything Model (SAM). However, this progress largely relies on strong pre-trained capabilities, while leaving two fundamental limitations insufficiently addressed: (1) Architectural Weak-Coupling, where the unidirectional flow forces reliance on coarse VLM prompts and wastes SAM's pixel-level structural guidance, causing localization drift; and (2) Object-Centric Semantic Bias, where models overemphasize dominant object semantics while remaining insensitive to spatial reasoning crucial for RRSIS. Motivated by these observations, we propose CROSS, a tightly integrated paradigm for RRSIS. First, we introduce Linguistic-Guided Cascaded Distillation (LGCD) to bridge the architectural gap, which distills SAM's geometric affinities as soft regularizers into VLM intermediate layers, injecting dense structural priors to refine localization. Second, Perspective-Spatial Contrastive Learning (PSCL) imposes cross-anchored constraints by mining mask-filtered deceptive distractors and spatial-linguistic counterfactuals as hard negatives, explicitly shattering semantic shortcuts to enforce genuine logical consistency. Extensive experiments on RRSIS benchmarks demonstrate that CROSS achieves state-of-the-art performance and maintains precise localization even under severe spatial description perturbations, standing as a robust new paradigm for RRSIS.
comment: Accepted at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2026. 20 pages, 6 figures, and 5 tables. Tingzhang Luo and Ruizhong Liu contributed equally. Jianyuan Guo is the corresponding author. Project page: https://clarence-cv.github.io/CROSS/
♻ ☆ Flash-VAED: Plug-and-Play VAE Decoders for Efficient Video Generation ICML 2026
Latent diffusion models have enabled high-quality video synthesis, yet their inference remains costly and time-consuming. As diffusion transformers become increasingly efficient, the latency bottleneck inevitably shifts to VAE decoders. To reduce their latency while maintaining quality, we propose a universal acceleration framework for VAE decoders that preserves full alignment with the original latent distribution. Specifically, we propose (1) an independence-aware channel pruning method to effectively mitigate severe channel redundancy, and (2) a stage-wise dominant operator optimization strategy to address the high inference cost of the widely used causal 3D convolutions in VAE decoders. Based on these innovations, we construct a Flash-VAED family. Moreover, we design a three-phase dynamic distillation framework that efficiently transfers the capabilities of the original VAE decoder to Flash-VAED. Extensive experiments on Wan and LTX-Video VAE decoders demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines in both quality and speed, achieving approximately a 6$\times$ speedup while maintaining the reconstruction performance up to 96.9%. Notably, Flash-VAED accelerates the end-to-end generation pipeline by up to 36% with negligible quality drops on VBench-2.0. Our code is available at https://github.com/Aoko955/Flash-VAED.
comment: Accepted by ICML 2026
♻ ☆ STEAM: A Spatio-TEmporal Alignment Mixture-of-Experts Model with Hierarchical Pre-training for EEG Decoding
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have been widely used in motor rehabilitation, disease diagnosis, and other neural engineering scenarios. However, conventional neural signal decoding algorithms often suffer from limited generalizability and high adaptation costs, motivating recent interest in BCI foundation models. Existing approaches still struggle to jointly achieve general transferability, accurate decoding, and efficient downstream adaptation. We present STEAM, a hierarchical transfer framework that reconciles general-purpose representation learning with paradigm-specific specialization in EEG foundation models. The framework is instantiated as a dual-branch spatio-temporal encoder in which a shared soft mixture-of-experts (SSMoE) module aligns the spatial and temporal branches, allowing complementary representations to exchange information through a compact set of soft slots. Across seven downstream datasets and fourteen evaluation settings, STEAM attains the best average rank among the compared methods at a competitive inference cost measured in FLOPs. Building upon the Stage-I general initialization, the hierarchical pre-training strategy further specializes the model to a target paradigm without retraining from scratch, yielding consistent gains in paradigm-specific decoding accuracy.
♻ ☆ MAPRPose: Mask-Aware Proposal and Amodal Refinement for Multi-Object 6D Pose Estimation
6D object pose estimation in cluttered scenes remains challenging due to severe occlusion and sensor noise. We propose MAPRPose, a two-stage framework that leverages mask-aware correspondences for pose proposal and amodal-driven Region-of-Interest (ROI) prediction for robust refinement. In the Mask-Aware Pose Proposal (MAPP) stage, we lift 2D correspondences into 3D space to establish reliable keypoint matches and generate geometrically consistent pose hypotheses based on correspondence-level scoring, from which the top-$K$ candidates are selected. In the refinement stage, we introduce a tensorized render-and-compare pipeline integrated with an Amodal Mask Prediction and ROI Re-Alignment (AMPR) module. By reconstructing complete object geometry and dynamically adjusting the ROI, AMPR mitigates localization errors and spatial misalignment under heavy occlusion. Furthermore, our GPU-accelerated RGB-XYZ reprojection enables simultaneous refinement of all $N \times B$ pose hypotheses in a single forward pass.
♻ ☆ It's the Decoding Format, Not the Perturbation: Auditing Consistency-Based Selection for Vision-Language Test-Time Scaling
Test-time scaling lifts large language model reasoning by sampling many candidate solutions and selecting among them, yet the same recipe transfers poorly to vision-language models (VLMs): recent work shows that simple majority voting beats selection methods built on the model's own self-verification, apparently because at the selection layer an image-grounded answer and a confident guess from the language prior look the same. A natural fix is to make the selection signal one that cannot be computed without the image. We study Perturbation Grounded Selection (Pgs), a label-free, training-free rule that scores each candidate by whether the model re-derives it under label-preserving perturbations of the input (cropping, background masking, mild photometric or geometric jitter); Pgs recovers majority voting when the perturbation set is empty. The decisive question is not whether Pgs beats chain-of-thought only majority voting, but whether the perturbation term adds anything once decoding format and budget are controlled. We therefore introduce a format-matched control (MatchedCtrl): the same short, no-CoT draws spent on the original image. Across TextVQA, MATH-Vision, MMMU, and ViLP, with a Qwen headline (three-seed means) and LLaVA-OneVision coverage in matched-budget selector tables, Pgs appears to beat plain majority voting by up to +31.8 points on TextVQA (Qwen), but MatchedCtrl tracks or exceeds Pgs within noise on every benchmark, including the vision-required ViLP; no Qwen category shows a significant gain over this control. The stability gap is real and image-dependent (up to +0.48), yet does not predict per-instance wins. The result is negative and diagnostic: perturbation consistency is at best a partial diagnostic of visual dependence and, on its own, not a usable selection signal once format is controlled; gains reported against CoT-only majority voting overstate such methods.
♻ ☆ GROVE: Growing and Reasoning over Temporally Stratified Memory from Streaming Video Experience
Sitong Gong, Caixin Kang, Tianyu Yan, Guo Chen, Bo Zheng, Kaipeng Zhang, Yunzhi Zhuge, Xiang Ruan, Huchuan Lu, Yifei Huang
A wearable assistant should both answer questions about its visual history and recognize when that history is useful to the present situation. Existing video-memory systems primarily support question-conditioned recall, whereas proactive assistants typically use separate memory and control mechanisms. We introduce GROVE, a training-free framework that supports both behaviors with one memory grown causally from a continuous video stream. GROVE retains fine-grained perceptual evidence and incrementally consolidates it into time-stamped moments, coherent episodes, and recurring cross-day patterns. Each stratum is paired with a scale-native retrieval skill for locating an observation, replaying an activity, or traversing long-range regularities. Reactive QA and proactive assistance share this memory and access interface, differing in whether retrieval is initiated by a user query or the current situation. Across multiple benchmarks including the challenging MM-lifelong and EgoServe, GROVE achieves the best results among the compared methods. Controlled ablations show that the temporal strata and their access skills are complementary, with patterns providing the largest benefit when evidence spans multiple days. Code will be available at https://github.com/SitongGong/GROVE.
♻ ☆ MI-CXR: A Benchmark for Longitudinal Reasoning over Multi-Interval Chest X-rays
Longitudinal chest X-ray (CXR) interpretation requires reasoning over disease evolution across multiple patient visits, yet most existing medical VQA benchmarks focus on single images or short-horizon image pairs. We introduce MI-CXR, a benchmark for standardized evaluation of Multi-Interval longitudinal reasoning over multi-visit CXR sequences, without requiring free-form report generation or additional clinical context. MI-CXR comprises five-way multiple-choice questions over five-visit patient timelines and instantiates three complementary task families: Temporal Event Localization, Interval-wise Change Reasoning, and Global Trajectory Summarization, which assess clinically grounded visual reasoning over time. Evaluating 14 state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) shows low overall performance, with an average accuracy of 29.3%, only modestly above random guessing. Using stage-wise diagnostic probing, we find that models often produce locally plausible interval descriptions but fail to enforce temporal constraints or compose evidence into globally consistent decisions over the full timeline. These findings reveal key limitations of current VLMs and establish MI-CXR as a principled benchmark for longitudinal medical reasoning. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/AIDASLab/MI-CXR
comment: 33 pages
♻ ☆ Aligning Fetal Anatomy with Kinematic Tree Log-Euclidean PolyRigid Transforms
Yingcheng Liu, Athena Taymourtash, Yang Liu, Esra Abaci Turk, William M. Wells, Leo Joskowicz, P. Ellen Grant, Polina Golland
Automated analysis of articulated bodies is crucial in medical imaging. Existing surface-based models often ignore internal volumetric structures and rely on deformation methods that lack anatomical consistency guarantees. To address this problem, we introduce a differentiable volumetric body model based on the Skinned Multi-Person Linear (SMPL) formulation, driven by a new Kinematic Tree-based Log-Euclidean PolyRigid (KTPolyRigid) transform. KTPolyRigid resolves Lie algebra ambiguities associated with large, non-local articulated motions, and encourages smooth, bijective volumetric mappings. Evaluated on 53 fetal MRI volumes, KTPolyRigid yields deformation fields with significantly fewer folding artifacts. Furthermore, our framework enables robust groupwise image registration and a label-efficient, template-based segmentation of fetal organs. It provides a robust foundation for standardized volumetric analysis of articulated bodies in medical imaging.
♻ ☆ MODEST: Multi-Optics Depth-of-Field Stereo Dataset
Training and evaluation of state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms for reliable shallow depth of field (DoF) rendering and defocus deblurring remain constrained by a persistent lack of large-scale, full-frame, high fidelity, real-image datasets. Optical effects of shallow DoF and defocus blur depend intimately on camera optical configuration set with focal length and aperture; requiring rigorous evaluation of the models when these parameters systematically change. Further, modern applications such as AR, VR, smartphones, industrial robots, etc. deploy stereo or multi-camera systems. We present MODEST - the first ultra-high-resolution(5472x3648px, 20MP), multi-optics depth of field stereo DSLR dataset that methodically varies focal length and aperture for a series of complex, real-world scenes, capturing the optical realism and complexity of professional camera systems. With 20,000 images across 50 distinct optical configurations, focal length in 28-70mm, aperture in f/22-f/2.8 for multiple stereo viewpoints for 10 scenes; this ultra-high-resolution, full-range optics coverage enables controlled analysis of geometric and optical effects for shallow DoF rendering and defocus deblurring. Each scene is curated to have challenging visual elements: reflective surfaces, transparent glass walls, fine-grained details, point lights, and multi-scale depth illusions. In addition, we provide intrinsics and extrinsics calibration images to support ever-evolving calibration methods. We evaluate several SOTA DoF and defocus deblurring methods and demonstrate failure cases and limitations. Our comprehensive tuning analysis demonstrates how MODEST evaluates sensitivity of the SOTA DoF models for the actual focal configuration of input images. This work attempts to bridge the realism gap between synthetic, low-resolution training data and inference generalization on high-resolution real-camera optics.
comment: Website, dataset and software tools now available for purely non-commercial, academic research purposes. Significant new contributions. Project page: https://modest-dataset.netlify.app/ Huggingface: https://huggingface.co/datasets/independent-vision-lab/MODEST
♻ ☆ v1: Learning to Point Visual Tokens for Multimodal Grounded Reasoning
When thinking with images, humans rarely rely on a single glance: they revisit visual evidence while reasoning. In contrast, most Multimodal Language Models encode an image once to key-value cache and then reason purely in text, making it hard to re-ground intermediate steps. We empirically confirm this: as reasoning chains lengthen, models progressively lose focus on relevant regions. We introduce v1, a lightweight extension for active visual referencing via point-and-copy: the model selects relevant image patches and copies their embeddings back into the reasoning stream. Crucially, our point-and-copy mechanism retrieves patches using their semantic representations as keys, ensuring perceptual evidence remains aligned with the reasoning space. To train this behavior, we build v1g, a dataset of 300K multimodal reasoning traces with interleaved grounding annotations. Across multimodal mathematical reasoning benchmarks, v1 consistently outperforms comparable baselines. We release our code, model, and data.
♻ ☆ AdaCorrection: Adaptive Offset Cache Correction for Accurate Diffusion Transformers
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) achieve state-of-the-art performance in high-fidelity image and video generation but suffer from expensive inference due to their iterative denoising structure. While prior methods accelerate sampling by caching intermediate features, they rely on static reuse schedules or coarse-grained heuristics, which often lead to temporal drift and cache misalignment that significantly degrade generation quality. We introduce \textbf{AdaCorrection}, an adaptive offset cache correction framework that maintains high generation fidelity while enabling efficient cache reuse across Transformer layers during diffusion inference. At each timestep, AdaCorrection estimates cache validity with lightweight spatio-temporal signals and adaptively blends cached and fresh activations. This correction is computed on-the-fly without additional supervision or retraining. Our approach achieves strong generation quality with minimal computational overhead, maintaining near-original FID while providing moderate acceleration. Experiments on image and video diffusion benchmarks show that AdaCorrection consistently improves generation performance. Our code has been integrated into FastCache-xDiT at https://github.com/NoakLiu/FastCache-xDiT.
♻ ☆ Place-it-R1: Unlocking Environment-aware Reasoning Potential of MLLM for Video Object Insertion
Video object insertion is fundamental to video editing, yet existing diffusion methods often produce visually plausible but physically inconsistent results. We present Place-it-R1, an end-to-end framework for physically plausible video object insertion driven by environment-aware MLLM reasoning. Rather than treating reasoning as a generic text prompt, Place-it-R1 uses the MLLM to analyze the target environment, infer object-scene interactions, and determine where an insertion is physically valid. The resulting reasoning is translated into two complementary forms of guidance for video diffusion: semantic guidance that describes the intended physical interaction and spatial guidance that provides a valid insertion region in each frame. To further align generation with local physical realism, we introduce Spatial Direct Preference Optimization, which leverages an MLLM to rank generated candidates, and introduces a region-aware preference objective that explicitly localizes physical-violation penalties to the inserted-object region. Place-it-R1 further offers flexible and standard modes to trade off environment adaptation and scene preservation. Extensive experiments show that Place-it-R1 produces more physically coherent and visually natural insertions than state-of-the-art methods and achieves competitive results against commercial systems.
comment: https://nevsnev.github.io/Place-it-R1/
♻ ☆ HalluScope: Fine-grained Hallucination Diagnosis for Multimodal Large Language Models ACM MM 2026
Although Multimodal Large Language Models have achieved strong performance across a wide range of vision-language tasks, they still suffer from hallucinations, where model outputs become inconsistent with the visual content, textual context, or commonsense knowledge. Existing studies primarily address this problem through coarse-grained detection. However, these approaches often provide insufficient diagnostic information for understanding hallucination types and supporting downstream hallucination mitigation. To bridge this gap, we propose fine-grained hallucination diagnosis for MLLMs, a new unified task that jointly performs hallucination detection, classification, and interpretable explanation generation. We develop an automated data generation pipeline and construct HalluScope-30K, a large-scale diagnostic dataset covering eight sources and five task categories. Based on this dataset, we design a multi-granular joint reward function and train two diagnosis models, HalluScope-4B and HalluScope-8B, which achieve state-of-the-art performance on both the MHALO benchmark and our fine-grained hallucination classification benchmark. Notably, detection and classification are mutually beneficial under joint optimization. Furthermore, diagnosis-driven feedback experiments show that the fine-grained diagnostic explanations produced by our model effectively guide target models to correct their hallucinations, with full diagnosis substantially outperforming all baselines on both Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct and LLaVA-1.5-7B. Our code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/wkinglin/HalluScope.
comment: Accepted to ACM Multimedia 2026 (ACM MM 2026)
♻ ☆ Any3DAvatar: Fast and High-Quality Full-Head 3D Avatar Reconstruction from Single Portrait Image
Reconstructing a complete 3D head from a single portrait remains challenging because existing methods still face a sharp quality-speed trade-off: high-fidelity pipelines often rely on multi-stage processing and per-subject optimization, while fast feed-forward models struggle with complete geometry and fine appearance details. To bridge this gap, we propose Any3DAvatar, a fast and high-quality method for single-image 3D Gaussian head avatar generation, whose fastest setting reconstructs a full head in under one second while preserving high-fidelity geometry and texture. First, we build AnyHead, a unified data suite that combines identity diversity, dense multi-view supervision, and realistic accessories, filling the main gaps of existing head data in coverage, full-head geometry, and complex appearance. Second, rather than sampling unstructured noise, we initialize from a Plücker-aware structured 3D Gaussian scaffold and perform one-step conditional denoising, formulating full-head reconstruction into a single forward pass while retaining high fidelity. Third, we introduce auxiliary view-conditioned appearance supervision on the same latent tokens alongside 3D Gaussian reconstruction, improving novel-view texture details at zero extra inference cost. Experiments show that Any3DAvatar outperforms prior single-image full-head reconstruction methods in rendering fidelity while remaining substantially faster.
♻ ☆ Latent Reward Registers for Diffusion Preference Alignment
Aligning diffusion models with human preferences usually relies on a sparse terminal reward evaluated on the final generated samples, presenting a severe temporal credit-assignment challenge across the multi-step denoising process. We propose Latent Reward Registers, a mechanism that estimates terminal preference directly from intermediate noisy latents by prepending learnable, position-free register tokens to the input sequence of a frozen Diffusion Transformer (DiT). This independent readout mechanism extracts latent reward evidence without altering the generator's hidden states or velocity field. The resulting dense, differentiable reward signal throughout the full denoising process facilitates two alignment strategies. For training, Reward-Gradient On-Policy Distillation (RG-OPD) distills reward-guided updates along on-policy trajectories, bypassing the computationally expensive rollouts of standard policy gradients. For inference, Reward-Guided Sampling (RGS) steers trajectories via magnitude-matched reward gradients without parameter updates. Empirically, at high noise levels (u = 0.8), the registers reach the highest pairwise accuracy among the evaluated latent reward models. Furthermore, RG-OPD outperforms online reinforcement learning baselines while reducing GPU hours by up to 33x, and RGS establishes a new state-of-the-art among training-free methods, strictly enhancing both alignment and perceptual metrics. Code and weights are available at https://github.com/Guanys-dar/latent-reward-register
♻ ☆ StreamSplat: Streaming Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting
Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting enables efficient novel-view synthesis without per-scene optimization, but most existing methods assume a fixed set of context views and process them jointly. This limits their applicability to online scenarios where calibrated views arrive sequentially and the scene must be updated causally. We present \emph{StreamSplat}, a streaming feed-forward 3DGS framework that incrementally maintains a persistent geometry-grounded scene state and decodes it into renderable 3D Gaussians after each input chunk. StreamSplat centers on a \textbf{Voxel-Aligned Causal Cache (VACC)}, which stores historical 3D tokens in a memory-bounded voxel structure so that memory grows with explored scene geometry rather than stream length. To better reuse history during causal prediction, we introduce \textbf{History-Projected Depth Anchoring (HPDA)} to project cached geometry as depth guidance for current cost-volume estimation, and \textbf{Cache-Guided Feature Injection (CGFI)} to inject cached latent evidence into Gaussian-token regression. Experiments on DL3DV, RealEstate10K, and ScanNet show that StreamSplat remains competitive with state-of-the-art feed-forward 3DGS methods under sparse causal inputs, despite not using future views or full-scene context. More importantly, it scales to long input streams with 256, 512, and 1024 views where fixed-view baselines run out of memory, yielding sustained improvements in novel-view synthesis quality as more observations arrive. The code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.
♻ ☆ From Understanding to Erasing: Towards Complete and Stable Video Object Removal
Video object removal aims to erase target objects while reconstructing visually plausible and temporally coherent content. However, target objects often induce shadows, reflections, illumination changes and other effects that extend beyond the provided mask, making conventional mask-conditioned completion prone to visible residuals. We therefore formulate side-effect-aware object removal as an understanding-guided process that integrates object--effect relations, affected-region localization, and context-aware reconstruction. Specifically, we introduce Object-Induced Relation Distillation to transfer token-level object--effect relations from a pretrained vision foundation model to the video diffusion model. We then design Object-aware Framewise Context Cross-Attention to combine target-object semantics with per-frame background context for removal and reconstruction, and propose Attention-guided Region Localization to derive a soft spatial prior over the target object and its affected regions. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves more complete object-and-effect removal and outperforms existing approaches in removal quality, side-effect suppression, and temporal consistency.
comment: Code: https://github.com/WeChatCV/UnderEraser
♻ ☆ MinerU.Chem: A High-Precision System for Optical Chemical Structure and Reaction Recognition
Haote Yang, Jiang Wu, Jingchao Wang, Xingjian Wei, Lixin Ma, Linye Li, Chen Zhu, Xiaolong Wu, Yuheng Lu, Ziran Zhu, Junyuan Gao, Lingli Ge, Yuan Xu, Huijie Ao, QianQian Wu, Dechen Lin, Huaiyu Gu, Lu Chen, Shengxin Lu, ShaSha Wang, Yuanyuan Cao, Zhejia Yu, Ruijie Zhang, Zimai Tian, Jiaxing Sun, Yinfan Wang, Jiahe Song, Chuang Wang, Yubin Wang, Rui Nie, Hao Zheng, Bowen Jiang, Hongbin Lai, Yifan He, Chengjin Liu, Tingting Zhang, Liqun Wei, Lijun Wu, Bin Wang, Yuqiang Li, Guangyu Wang, Wei Li, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Conghui He
In organic chemistry papers and patents, molecular structures, reaction schemes, and experimental conditions are often presented as molecular structure depictions, reaction diagrams, and complex tables or figures. Such information is difficult for general-purpose document parsing systems to directly convert into machine-readable data. This limits data production for organic chemistry knowledge base construction and for AI for Chemistry tasks such as reaction prediction, retrosynthesis, condition recommendation, molecular property prediction, and drug molecule design. This report introduces MinerU-Chem, a document parsing system for organic chemistry literature integrated into the MinerU online platform. Built on top of MinerU's general document parsing pipeline, MinerU-Chem adds five chemistry-specific modules: chemistry relevance filtering, molecular structure detection, molecule identifier extraction, molecular structure recognition, and reaction scheme parsing. Together, these modules convert organic-chemistry-related image regions in documents into a Molecule Summary List and a Reaction Summary List. For molecular structure recognition, MinerU-Chem uses CARBON (Complex Atomic Representation and Bonding Object Notation) as its core representation. CARBON enables recognition results to preserve both the visual layout of the original image and complex chemical semantics, while supporting the export of standard downstream formats such as MolFile and SMILES. On the SMILES-evaluable subset of MolRecBench-Wild (N=2,392), MinerU-Chem's molecular structure recognition module achieves a SMILES exact-match accuracy of 93.02%, outperforming the best evaluated comparison system, GPT-5.6-Sol (74.87%), by 18.15 percentage points. The system has been integrated into the MinerU online platform and is available at https://mineru.net/OpenSourceTools/Extractor .
♻ ☆ SleepVLM: A Rule-Grounded Vision-Language Model for Auditable Sleep Staging
Guifeng Deng, Pan Wang, Mengfan Niu, Jiquan Wang, Shuying Rao, Junyi Xie, Xi'ang Chen, Sha Zhao, Gang Pan, Wanjun Guo, Tao Li, Haiteng Jiang
Sleep staging is essential for sleep assessment and disorder diagnosis. In recent years, automatic sleep staging systems have achieved accuracy approaching that of human experts, but the black-box nature of their predictions hinders clinical adoption. Existing interpretability methods offer partial insight into model behavior, but their outputs still require expert reinterpretation and do not provide a direct basis for auditing individual predictions. To improve trustworthiness, we propose the task of auditable sleep staging. To solve this task, we present SleepVLM, a vision-language model that casts sleep staging as visual reasoning over rendered polysomnography (PSG) waveform images. For each epoch, SleepVLM outputs a stage together with the applicable American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) rules and an auditable rationale. The model is trained using a two-stage framework: Waveform-Perceptual Pre-training followed by Rule-Grounded Supervised Fine-tuning over a mixture of fine-grained and coarse annotations. Experiments on four datasets show that SleepVLM outperforms state-of-the-art methods on average. An automated AASM-feature audit shows broad coverage of stage-defining evidence in the rationales, and independent experts validate their reasoning quality. To facilitate further research, we construct and release MASS-EX, an expert-annotated dataset for rule-grounded sleep staging with AASM rule annotations and expert-written rationales.
♻ ☆ Spectral Integrated Gradients for Coarse-to-Fine Feature Attribution KDD 2026
Integrated Gradients (IG) is a widely adopted feature attribution method that satisfies desirable axiomatic properties. However, the choice of integration path significantly affects the quality of attributions, and the standard straight-line path introduces all input features simultaneously, often accumulating noisy gradients along the way. To address this limitation, we propose Spectral Integrated Gradients, which constructs integration paths based on singular value decomposition (SVD) of the baseline-to-input difference. By progressively activating singular components from largest to smallest, SIG introduces global structure before fine-grained details, naturally following a coarse-to-fine progression. Through extensive evaluation across diverse image classification datasets, we demonstrate that SIG produces cleaner attribution maps with reduced noise and achieves improved quantitative performance compared to existing path-based attribution methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/leekwoon/sig/.
comment: 21 pages, 13 figures, 9 tables. Accepted to ACM KDD 2026; includes appendices
♻ ☆ SCAIL-2: Unifying Controlled Character Animation with End-to-End In-Context Conditioning
Controlled character animation aims to transfer motion from a driving sequence to a reference character. Prior works heavily rely on intermediate representations, such as pose skeletons for motion and masked backgrounds for environment, inevitably resulting in information loss. In this work, we present SCAIL-2, a framework that adopts an end-to-end driving paradigm by directly concatenating latent visual information to the model's input sequence. We enable end-to-end training through a data synthesis pipeline that produces MotionPair-60K, a curated dataset for several character animation subtasks. We unify the subtasks using decoupled conditions to accommodate different driving patterns, facilitated by In-Context Mask Conditioning and Mode-Specific RoPE, which provide soft guidance beyond textual instructions and visual information. To address synthetic discrepancy in detailed regions, we propose Bias-Aware DPO to construct preference items to mitigate the errors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across various character animation tasks. Code, model weights, and a large subset of the dataset are available at: https://teal024.github.io/SCAIL-2/.