Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 190
☆ AdvFD: Boosting Visual Generation via Adversarial Fr'echet Distance Loss
Fréchet distance has recently emerged as an effective distribution-level objective for generator post-training, complementing the conventional sample-level diffusion and flow-matching losses. However, directly optimizing Fréchet objectives can cause Fréchet hacking. The target metrics keep improving, but visual quality and Fréchet alignment in other feature spaces may stagnate or deteriorate. We attribute this failure to the static pretrained feature spaces used by existing Fréchet losses. These feature spaces provide incomplete and fixed views of the differences between real and generated distributions. To address this limitation, we propose Adversarial Fréchet Distance (AdvFD), which complements the static representation targets in FD-Loss with a calibrated adversarially learned representation. AdvFD augments the original static Fréchet objective with a learnable representation that adversarially maximizes the Fréchet discrepancy between real and generated samples, while the generator minimizes the same discrepancy in the resulting adaptive feature space. To prevent the adversarial representation from trivially increasing the objective through feature amplification, we further introduce real-feature whitening, which normalizes its scale and covariance geometry and stabilizes the min--max optimization. Extensive experiments show that AdvFD consistently improves one-step generator post-training across both JiT and pMF backbones and across different model scales.
comment: Project Page: https://gasaiyu.github.io/AdvFD-page/
☆ Surgical WAM: A World-Action Model for Data-Efficient Surgical Robot Learning
Learning reliable surgical manipulation policies is bottlenecked by the scarcity of action-labeled demonstrations: teleoperated surgical robot (e.g., dVRK) trajectories with synchronized kinematics are costly to collect, while surgical tasks demand precise contact handling, long-horizon reasoning, and bimanual coordination. Endoscopic video is comparatively inexpensive and abundant relative to synchronized video--kinematics trajectories, and a natural way to exploit it is to learn world models of surgical scenes. However, existing surgical world models use video primarily for simulation or policy evaluation, and rarely translate the learned dynamics into closed-loop control. This gap raises our central question: under a fixed budget of action-labeled demonstrations, does action-free video pretraining improve closed-loop surgical manipulation? To answer it, we introduce the Surgical World-Action Model (Surgical WAM), a unified generative model built on Cosmos Policy that jointly predicts future endoscopic observations and executable surgical robot action chunks. Surgical WAM first learns surgical visual dynamics from action-free video and is then fine-tuned on the fixed action-labeled budget; at deployment, it acts as a closed-loop, receding-horizon controller that executes a short prefix of each predicted action chunk and replans from the resulting observation. On a suite of four simulated surgical manipulation tasks, video pretraining improves the average success rate from 63.5% to 77.8%, including an absolute gain of 20 percentage points on PegTransfer, with the largest improvements on contact-rich and bimanual tasks. These results demonstrate that action-free video provides transferable visual dynamics priors for learning surgical robot control with limited action supervision, positioning data-efficient video pretraining as a practical path toward scaling up surgical robot learning.
☆ Capturing Uncertainty in Human Motion for Representation Learning in Soccer
This paper presents a self-supervised representation learning framework for understanding 3D skeleton-based human motion in soccer, using future motion prediction as the learning objective. Since human motion is inherently uncertain, accounting for multiple plausible futures is essential for capturing the underlying motion dynamics and learning effective representations. To this end, we introduce a conditioning module for motion prediction that models a probabilistic distribution over discretized future motions in 3D Euclidean space, learning multimodality with explicit supervision from future trajectories. Experiments on large-scale soccer player tracking data show that our approach substantially improves motion prediction accuracy. Moreover, the learned representations effectively transfer to multiple soccer downstream applications, demonstrating strong cross-task generalization.
☆ VidForensics-M1: Meta-Detection Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Temporal Grounding for AI-Generated Video Forensics
Bowei Liu, Zheng Lu, Yuhan Bian, Xinchen Zhang, Xingming Shui, Yuesheng Huang, Xuhuan Li, Zihao Liu, Yifan Yang, Jun Zhou, Xiu Li
Recent advances in video generation models have significantly improved the realism of synthetic videos, blurring the boundary between generated and authentic content and raising concerns about misinformation. Existing MLLM-based detectors mainly rely on supervised fine-tuning or label-level reinforcement learning, where coarse supervision limits generalization to unseen scenarios and emerging video generators. To overcome these limitations, we are the first to introduce \textbf{meta-detection} into AI-generated video detection, enabling reliable forgery detection by jointly optimizing predicted labels and supporting evidence within reinforcement learning. This paradigm requires reliable evidence signals and effective mechanisms to integrate them into label-level optimization. Textual rationales provide semantic descriptions of forgery artifacts, but their generation and verification depend on external models, making supervision vulnerable to hallucinations and semantic biases. In contrast, temporal grounding provides more objective and verifiable evidence, as manipulated intervals can be precisely controlled during forgery construction. Based on this insight, we propose an automated data construction pipeline that generates paired real-fake videos by replacing temporal segments with boundary-frame-conditioned video generation models. Furthermore, we introduce \textbf{Evidence-Guided Reward Redistribution}, which performs evidence-aware credit assignment by redistributing rewards among label-correct responses according to evidence quality. This preserves reliable label supervision while encouraging detectors to acquire fine-grained and verifiable forgery localization capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \textbf{VidForensics-M1} effectively leverages verifiable temporal evidence to achieve robust and generalizable AI-generated video detection.
comment: 27 pages, 15 figures
☆ Test-Time Self-Evolving GUI Visual Grounding via Reflection-Guided On-Policy Self-Distillation
GUI Visual Grounding is a fundamental capability for GUI agents. Existing models typically freeze their parameters after deployment, limiting their ability to adapt to unseen interfaces. Although recent methods attempt to adapt models via test-time reinforcement learning, they cannot reflect upon failed exploration. To overcome this, we propose a Test-Time Self-Evolving framework that enables models to improve after deployment without human-annotated ground truth. It constructs a closed-loop of Exploration, Evaluation, Reflection, and Internalization. Specifically, the agent first explores unseen interfaces by predicting grounding coordinates for given instructions. To evaluate these explorations, we introduce an MLLM-based Reflector to assess the generated results and provide the corresponding reasoning reflections. To internalize reflection knowledge into the model weights, we propose Reflection-Guided On-Policy Self-Distillation, which translates high-level reasoning into dense token-level supervision via a conditioned self-teacher. Furthermore, we design a Contrastive Calibration method to prevent incorrect auto-regressive prefixes from corrupting the supervisory signals during failed explorations. Extensive experiments across six benchmarks demonstrate our framework's effectiveness, achieving an average accuracy improvement of 7.4% over the base model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to successfully exploit on-policy self-distillation for test-time adaptation in GUI visual grounding. By filling the gap in post-deployment adaptation, our framework completes the self-evolving capability of GUI agents. The code will be released.
☆ MultiModal Code-Switching: Interleaving Visual Objects into Language for Explicit Object-Level Alignment
Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) predominantly rely on image-text pairs for modality alignment pretraining, mapping global image representations to long textual descriptions. However, this image-level alignment suffers from referential ambiguity: models struggle to infer the correspondences between multiple visual objects and textual entities from the global representation, leading to data inefficiency and suboptimal semantic grounding. To address this, we propose MultiModal Code-Switching (MMCS), a novel pretraining paradigm that provides explicit object-level supervision. Inspired by the linguistic phenomenon of code-switching, MMCS interleaves vision and language by replacing textual entities with their corresponding visual objects, enforcing local vision-language grounding. We further develop a scalable data synthesis pipeline to generate a pretraining dataset of 773K samples with accurate object-entity correspondences. Experiments show that MMCS is highly data-efficient: with only 50K samples, it matches or surpasses models trained on 600K image-text pairs. Furthermore, MMCS consistently improves visual grounding and perception capabilities across varying model scales.
☆ CausalSplat: Towards Comprehensive Hierarchical Reasoning in 3D Gaussian Splatting ECCV 2026
While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has advanced open vocabulary scene understanding, existing methods remain confined to explicit queries. They struggle to interpret implicit intents, complex spatial constraints, and commonsense reasoning required for practical embodied interactions. To address this gap, we introduce the task of reasoning 3D Gaussian segmentation and construct two benchmarks, Causal-LERF and Causal-ScanNet. These benchmarks systematically evaluate commonsense, spatial, affordance, and counterfactual reasoning. Evaluations reveal that current state of the art methods perform poorly on these reasoning challenges. Therefore, we propose CausalSplat, a framework that integrates vision-language models with 3D scene graphs to disentangle explicit structural perception from implicit logical inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CausalSplat achieves state of the art performance on our reasoning benchmarks while showing strong generalizability on standard referring and open vocabulary 3D segmentation tasks. Project Page: https://jiayuding031020.github.io/CausalSplat
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026
☆ PRMU: A Corpus-Free Benchmark for Person-Centric Knowledge Unlearning in Multimodal Large Language Models
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in storing and recalling rich person-related knowledge, raising increasing concerns about reliable knowledge removal. However, existing machine unlearning approaches for MLLMs typically assume access to original forget and retain corpora, which are often unavailable in realistic deletion scenarios. To address this limitation, we introduce PRMU, a benchmark for evaluating corpus-free multimodal unlearning under realistic person-centric deletion requests. PRMU focuses on naturally acquired person-related knowledge and evaluates whether models can remove target knowledge while preserving related knowledge through diverse textual and visual probes, including adversarial evaluation and fine-grained locality analysis. To facilitate research in this setting, we further introduce Similarity-Gated Projection Editing (SGPE), a lightweight corpus-free unlearning baseline with knowledge displacement, protected parameter-space editing, and locality-aware multimodal control. Extensive experiments on representative MLLMs reveal that existing unlearning methods often suffer from unfavorable forgetting-locality trade-offs, with significant locality degradation under aggressive forgetting settings, and remain vulnerable to multimodal knowledge reactivation. Meanwhile, SGPE provides a competitive trade-off between target forgetting, locality preservation, and general multimodal utility. We hope PRMU can facilitate future research toward realistic and scalable multimodal machine unlearning. Code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/2231122/PRMU.
☆ SAR2Agri: Learning SAR Intensity Representations for Agricultural Monitoring
Agricultural monitoring faces unique challenges, arising from the landscape's complex temporal, phenological, and climate dynamics, yet monitoring them is critical for ensuring food security. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites offer all-weather day-night imaging capability supporting key monitoring tasks including crop type mapping, yield prediction and phenological event detection. Existing multimodal remote sensing foundation models including TerraMind and CopernicusFM learn SAR representations by grounding them in optical imagery using joint encoding and contrastive learning techniques, while SAR-specific foundation models such as SAR-JEPA, SARMAE, and SAR-W-MixMAE primarily focus on target detection, flood mapping, and land cover classification applications. Recent work has introduced phenology inspired temporal pretext tasks with optical imagery which has shown strong performance on agricultural downstream tasks. In this work, we propose the first self-supervised learning pipeline focused on using only SAR intensity imagery for agricultural applications. We improve the temporal pretext tasks through masking and curriculum learning to enhance the pretraining pipeline's ability to capture phenological features from SAR. On the SICKLE benchmark, our final model achieves 84.9% IoU on crop type mapping, outperforming optical baselines (by 15.3 pt) and existing SAR baselines (by 2.2 pt), demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed pipeline for pretraining SAR intensity encoders for agricultural monitoring.
☆ Is There Really a Camouflaged Object? Towards Realistic Camouflaged Object Detection
Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to segment objects that are visually concealed in their surroundings and has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, most existing COD methods are developed under a closed-world assumption, where each input image is assumed to contain a camouflaged object. This assumption ignores realistic scenarios with pure backgrounds or non-camouflaged objects, causing existing models to produce severe false positives when deployed in open-world environments. To address this limitation, we propose OPC16K, a large-scale benchmark for realistic COD. OPC16K contains 16,245 images from 14 sources and is carefully organized into camouflaged-object images, pure background images, and non-camouflaged-object images, enabling comprehensive evaluation of both segmentation quality and negative-sample rejection. Based on this benchmark, we further propose OPCNet, a presence-aware camouflage network that reformulates COD from a pure segmentation task into a joint problem of object localization and camouflage existence reasoning. Specifically, OPCNet introduces hierarchical existence reasoning to distinguish CO, BG, and NOCOD scenarios, similarity-aware camouflage relation modeling to capture foreground-background camouflage cues, and existence-aware feature refinement to regulate segmentation features with existence predictions. Extensive experiments on OPC16K demonstrate that OPCNet achieves superior performance under the proposed realistic COD evaluation protocol, significantly reducing false positives on negative samples while maintaining accurate camouflaged-object segmentation. Code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/2231122/OPCOD.
☆ AlbumentationsX: One Augmentation Pipeline for Images and Related Annotations
Augmentation can corrupt a training example when an image and its annotations receive different random changes. A crop must use the same coordinates for the image, mask, boxes, keypoints, stereo views, video frames, or volume. Code paths that choose these values separately can silently misalign the data.
AlbumentationsX keeps the transform list, probabilities, annotation settings, and random seed in one Compose object. Each call chooses random values once and applies them to every supported part of the training example. The library keeps each object's mask, box, and label together and lets projects add their own transforms. It can also save the pipeline definition, show what happened in one call, and run that call again.
The examples place Compose after files have been decoded into arrays and before PyTorch groups examples into a batch. AlbumentationsX executes the declared transforms. Practitioners still decide whether a flip, crop, color change, or other operation preserves the correct label for their task.
comment: 8 pages, 1 figure. Source code: https://github.com/albumentations-team/AlbumentationsX
☆ Every Packet Counts: Dispersing Information for Loss-Resilient Learned Image Compression
Learned image compression (LIC) has achieved impressive rate-distortion performance. However, existing methods remain highly vulnerable to packet loss, a common challenge in satellite and emergency communications. This vulnerability stems from non-uniform information distribution at the packetization stage and sequential decoding dependencies at the entropy coding stage. We propose an end-to-end loss-resilient image compression scheme that addresses both. Before packetization, we introduce an Inter-Channel Redistribution (ICR) mechanism to redistribute channel energy, preventing critical information concentrating in a small subset of channels. Then, an Interleaved Channel Grouping (ICG) strategy partitions latent channels in a strided manner to disperse information across packets, with each packet kept within constrained sizes. To limit cascading errors from lost packets, we adopt a two-layer dual-branch autoregressive structure to shorten the dependency chain. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing approaches in both reconstruction quality and stability. At 20% packet loss, it achieves an average PSNR gain of 1.84 dB over LossResilientLIC while reducing PSNR variance by an order of magnitude. Notably, trained under uniform random loss only, our model generalizes to bursty loss modeled by the Gilbert-Elliott channel, outperforming methods explicitly trained for such conditions.
comment: 16 pages, 12 figures, 8 tables. Joint first authors: Yuhang Wei and Chuqin Zhou. Corresponding author: Guo Lu. To appear in Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM '26), November 10-14, 2026, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
☆ Cross-View Feature Matching: Survey, Benchmarking, and Foundation-Model Perspectives
Cross-view feature matching aims to establish reliable correspondences across images with large viewpoint variations. Over the past decade, the field has evolved from task-specific models toward increasingly unified and generalizable correspondence models, with recent progress further driven by the emergence of vision foundation models (VFMs). Despite these advances, existing studies remain highly diverse in their problem formulations, model architectures, training paradigms, and evaluation protocols, making it difficult to obtain a unified understanding of the field. In this survey, we present a unified review of cross-view feature matching. We first introduce a structured taxonomy covering feature extraction, single-type feature matcher, multi-type feature matcher, VFMs based methods, training strategy and robust estimation, providing a coherent framework for analysis and comparison. We further examine recent advances, distilling key design principles and highlighting the shift toward unified and generalizable correspondence models. We also provide a unified experimental benchmarking of representative state-of-the-art methods under consistent protocols, enabling fair and comprehensive performance comparisons. In addition, we discuss open challenges and future directions, including efficiency, robustness under extreme conditions, and cross-domain generalization. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive and structured reference for understanding the evolution, current landscape, and future development of cross-view feature matching in the era of vision foundation models.
comment: This manuscript goes beyond a conventional survey. It proposes a new taxonomy for cross-view feature matching, provides extensive benchmarking under unified datasets and protocols, and offers original analysis from the perspective of vision foundation models. These contributions provide substantive methodological synthesis, empirical findings, and new research insights
☆ Learning Gaussian Structure: Intervention-Guided Density Control for Feed-Forward Driving Reconstruction
Feed-forward Gaussian reconstruction has recently emerged as an efficient approach for driving scene reconstruction. However, prevailing LiDAR-based methods preserve the initial correspondence between observed points and Gaussian primitives, treating the initialized primitive set as the final representation. Unlike optimization-based 3DGS, these methods cannot accumulate gradients during training to determine how the scenes representation should be densified. Meanwhile, the shared sparse backbone only fuses observations from different timestamps implicitly, without explicitly aggregating cross-time evidence for individual primitives. In this paper, we present Learning Gaussian Structure (LGS), a framework that enhances both Gaussian structure and primitive attributes. Our key observation is that changes in local gradient responses induced by a prune or add intervention reveal whether the corresponding structural adjustment benefits reconstruction. Based on this observation, our Gaussian Densify Policy learns a Densify Map comprising Prune and Addition Scores from controlled interventions, and directly adjusts the Gaussian structure during inference. We further develop a compact Cross-Time Point Query that explicitly retrieves and aggregates neighboring features from Gaussian primitives at other timestamps for reliable attribute prediction. Extensive experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset and PandaSet demonstrate that LGS consistently outperforms existing methods.
☆ Foundation Model-Enabled Efficient Data Sampling (FEEDS): A label-efficient training strategy for pan-cancer, multi-tracer PET/CT datasets
Biratal Raj Wagle, Bashirul Azam Biswas, Grant Chau, Matthew E. Maeder, Muhammad Azeem Arshad, Michael S. Leapman, James B. Yu, Indrani Bhattacharya
Automated lesion segmentation in whole-body PET/CT imaging can assist clinicians with cancer detection, staging, and treatment planning across radiotracers and cancer types. However, training lesion segmentation models that capture variations in lesion size, distribution, and appearance requires large annotated datasets, whose creation is both time- and expertise-intensive. As a result, models trained on limited labeled PET/CT data often lack the accuracy and generalizability needed for clinical use. We present FEEDS (Foundation model-Enabled Efficient Data Sampling), a label- and compute-efficient learning strategy that uses vision foundation model embeddings to select the most informative and diverse unlabeled cases for expert annotation. Unlike unsupervised, semi-supervised, and active learning approaches, FEEDS is a one-step training paradigm requiring only a limited, representative training set, making it label- and compute-efficient. We train and validate FEEDS using the AutoPET-III dataset. We test its accuracy and generalizability on three held-out sets: AutoPET-III, DeepPSMA, and an internal Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center dataset. We evaluate clinical utility at the voxel, lesion, and anatomic region level to assess performance in high-risk areas and treatment planning utility. FEEDS outperforms random-sampling-based labeling, pseudolabel-based semi-supervised learning, and training with limited labeled data alone. It generalizes across all three test sets, FDG and PSMA tracers, and multiple diseases, matching fully-labeled (100\%) training performance with 70\% less annotation burden. FEEDS addresses the challenge of label scarcity in an automatic lesion segmentation framework by providing a practical approach for constructing representative and diverse annotation queues from large, unannotated clinical repositories.
comment: Code is publicly available on https://github.com/Image-and-Multimodal-Data-Analytics/FEEDS
☆ Static in Frames, Dynamic in Events: Rethinking Features in Event Cameras as Motion Cues
Event cameras capture intensity changes asynchronously with high temporal resolution, requiring novel preprocessing methods for downstream tasks. Unlike static intensity snapshots, event data inherently encode information about scene dynamics and object motion, meaning that features derived from events can exhibit behaviors with no direct analogue in frame-based vision. In this paper, we analyze two features used in event-based corner detection---the eigenvalues of the structure tensor and the spatiotemporal density values---and show that they are \emph{motion cues}. We hypothesize that these features, combined with local geometric information, can enhance motion estimation tasks. To validate this, we first theoretically analyze how the eigenvalues of the structure tensor at moving corner points relate to the direction of motion. We then design controlled experiments on a synthetic dataset, confirming that extending local geometric features with eigenvalues and density values provides complementary motion information and is robust to texture and shot noise. Finally, we integrate the proposed features into a state-of-the-art event-based optical flow network and evaluate on the real-world DSEC benchmark, where the added features consistently improve accuracy, with the largest gains in data-scarce scenarios and for lower-capacity models. The code for this paper can be found at: \href{https://github.com/hesamaraghi/static-in-frames-dynamic-in-events}{https://github.com/hesamaraghi/static-in-frames-dynamic-in-events}.
☆ CapProbe: Evaluating Detailed Image Captions via Full-Scene Dense Question Answering
Evaluating detailed image captions from Vision-Language Models (VLMs) requires going beyond surface-level semantic similarity. Reference-based metrics (e.g., CIDEr and SPICE) and LLM-as-scorer protocols struggle to verify dense factual claims, while existing QA-based alternatives generally offer lower probe density, narrower domain coverage, or no explicit alignment between individual questions and segmented image regions. We introduce CapProbe, a full-scene dense QA benchmark that turns detailed caption evaluation into region-aligned factual checking. Each image is decomposed into coarse semantic regions covering both foreground and background elements; for every retained region, we generate multiple-choice questions spanning 10 semantic categories, forming a dense checklist of probed visual facts. Guided by a two-tier taxonomy of 37 L1 domains and 219 L2 sub-domains, CapProbe comprises 346 images, 1,868 regions, and 25,650 questions, averaging 74 QA pairs per image. A language judge answers from the caption alone; an Uncertain option and Effective Accuracy provide a judge-dependent proxy for distinguishing unanswered probes from incorrectly resolved ones, while density-based metrics penalize verbose yet uninformative captions. The protocol is cost-effective: by converting unconstrained scalar scoring into structured MCQ reading, it reduces open-ended scoring bias while remaining judge-conditioned and yields relatively stable model rankings under a fixed reader. Experiments on 13 VLMs show large Coverage gaps across models, a clear competency-efficiency trade-off, and failure modes that sparse or overlap-based evaluation often misses. The benchmark data, annotations, and evaluation code will be released soon.
☆ Entropy-Centric Explainable AI for Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a powerful approach to solving complex problems in critical domains. Many concerns arise regarding the decision-making process of its models, mainly due to deep neural networks outperforming their peers at the cost of ambiguity in feature extraction and prediction. Consequently, in critical domains such as remote sensing, where high-resolution imagery must be analyzed using black-box models, the lack of transparency limits trust in these models and, thus, their adoption. In light of this reality, explaining and understanding the complex decision-making process of AI models has become essential. Explainable AI (XAI) aims to bridge this gap by providing insights into how and why certain decisions are made. While significant progress has been achieved in explaining image classification tasks, image segmentation still offers considerable room for improvement. In this context, this paper proposes an entropy-centric XAI method for semantic segmentation. Moreover, a new XAI evaluation methodology is proposed to efficiently measure the relevance of the regions highlighted by the proposed XAI method. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed XAI method compared with recently adapted XAI methods for semantic segmentation.
☆ A Comparative Evaluation of Deep Learning Object Detection Models on a Real-World Multi-Plant Dataset from Africa
Ismail Ismail Tijjani, Sunusi Muhammad Ibrahim, Amina Ibrahim Khaleel, Lanre Olusegun Akinola, Fatima Isa Jibrin, Muhammad Bashir Aliyu, Abdullahi Abdussalam Dalhat, Abdullahi Suiudeen
The application of computer vision in agriculture has shown significant potential for improving crop monitoring and precision farming. However, many existing approaches rely on controlled datasets that do not adequately represent realworld farming conditions, particularly in underrepresented regions such as Africa. This study presents a comparative evaluation of six object detection models YOLOv5, YOLOv8, YOLO11, YOLO26, Faster R-CNN, and RT-DETR using a real-world dataset, AgriAISeg 1 , collected manually from Nigerian farms. AgriAISeg comprises 3,382 images of sesame, cabbage, and tomato crops captured under varying environmental conditions, including changes in illumination, occlusion, and viewing perspectives. Models were trained, and performance was assessed using precision, recall, mAP@0.5, and mAP@0.5:0.95. The results show that RT-DETR achieved the highest overall performance with a precision of 0.768 and mAP@0.5:0.95 of 0.624, while YOLOv8 and YOLO11 also demonstrated strong and consistent performance. In contrast, Faster R-CNN recorded significantly lower accuracy, with an overall mAP@0.5 of 0.466, indicating reduced effectiveness under complex field conditions. In addition, YOLO-based models exhibited superior training efficiency compared to Faster R-CNN.These findings demonstrate that modern one-stage and transformer-based detectors provide more reliable and efficient solutions for plant detection in realworld agricultural environments.
☆ HUI360: A 360° Egocentric Dataset and Baselines for Human-Robot Interaction Anticipation
As robots increasingly operate in human-populated environments, anticipating human intentions is essential for enabling proactive and socially aware behavior. Automatic anticipation of human-robot interactions is thus emerging as a crucial perception challenge for embodied agents. To this end, we introduce HUI360, the largest dataset for human-robot interaction anticipation in the wild and its set of baselines. The dataset was collected from a mobile robot, in the wild, over multiple days within a 3-month period, and in several environments, capturing natural, spontaneous behaviors from both passersby and users, and encompassing a diverse range of individuals. This variety enables evaluating and improving the generalization capabilities of interaction anticipation models. We designed a pipeline and share code for automatic interaction annotation in arbitrary 360-degree equirectangular videos, along with interfaces for manual refinement. Using this pipeline, we release the HUI360 open set of 1M pre-processed annotations, including detailed 2D poses, facial keypoints, and segmentation masks, obtained using state-of-the-art computer vision methods and manually curated to ensure high-quality tracking and interaction annotation. Additionally, we release the raw panoptic 360-degree images captured from the robot's egocentric viewpoint (on demand, for research purpose only in compliance with GDPR). Finally, we establish benchmark baselines for interaction anticipation, including the first cross-dataset evaluations for this task: to this end, we also release 6M annotations for another existing in-the-wild outdoor dataset collected from a mobile robot (SSUP-HRI). Dataset and code can be found at https://hucebot.github.io/hui360.
☆ 3D Weighted Geometric Graph Neural Networks for Sheep Facial Pain Assessment
Deep learning systems perform mainly within the 2D for a single image domain and take the face as a single-dimension representation, losing sight of the 3D anatomy of sheep and cross-landmark spatial relationships that are intrinsic to the clinically proven Sheep Pain Facial Expression Scale (SPFES). This paper presents the \textbf{3D Sheep Pain Facial Expression System (3D-SPFES)}, a novel, monocular depth-aware geometric graph neural network system that integrates each SPFES facial landmark, such as the ears, eyes, and nose, into 3D Euclidean space estimated from a single RGB camera by using VideoDepthAnything, thus preventing the need for specialized depth hardware. Each landmark node includes a feature vector containing its 3D spatial coordinates, estimated surface normal, and facial attribute class embedding. Edges linked to nodes are assigned weights based on an aggregate metric that combines both Euclidean distance and surface co-planarity in a 3D space. A Weighted Geometric Graph Neural Network (WG-GNN) studies this graph using $\mathcal{K} = 3$ geometry-aware message-passing layers enhanced by a scaled dot-product attention method that selectively enhances anatomically relevant inter-landmark messages. The resultant node embeddings are combined into $\mathcal{O} = 3$ pain-level clusters and integrated into a Normalized Pain Score (NPS) within the range of $[0, 100%]$ a confidence-weighted, SPFES-derived scoring method.
☆ Multi-Level Evidence Aggregation for Robust Facial Phenotype Retrieval in Rare Genetic Disorder Prioritization
AI-assisted facial phenotyping supports rare genetic disorder prioritization by retrieving visually similar diagnosed cases from facial image reference databases such as the GestaltMatcher Database (GMDB). Existing GestaltMatcher-based retrieval frameworks compare each test image with individual gallery images in a facial phenotype embedding space. However, this pointwise formulation does not fully exploit available evidence, because patients may have multiple images and disorders may be represented by multiple diagnosed gallery patients.
We propose an inference-time multi-level evidence aggregation framework that improves facial phenotype retrieval without modifying the underlying GestaltMatcher-Arc encoder. The framework combines embedding-level patient aggregation of multiple images from the same individual, patient-weighted disorder centroids, and hybrid individual-centroid scoring to integrate test-patient observations, disorder-level gallery evidence, and local nearest-neighbor evidence.
We evaluated the approach on GMDB v1.1.4 across disorders represented during training (GMDB-Freq), unseen disorders (GMDB-Rare), and multi-image patient subsets, using a unified gallery containing both GMDB-Freq and GMDB-Rare disorders. Multi-level evidence aggregation improved mean per-disorder top-$N$ retrieval accuracy across all evaluation subsets. Top-1 accuracy increased from 38.52% to 48.82% on GMDB-Freq and from 19.38% to 23.79% on GMDB-Rare. On multi-image subsets, top-1 accuracy increased from 46.12% to 60.94% on GMDB-Multi-Freq and from 18.54% to 26.71% on GMDB-Multi-Rare.
These findings show that inference-time aggregation can improve next-generation facial phenotype retrieval without retraining the encoder, supporting a shift from isolated single-image matching toward multi-level aggregation of patient and disorder evidence for rare-disorder prioritization.
comment: including supplementary notes: 32 pages, 16 figures. Preprint submitted to journal for peer-review
☆ When Visual Signals Mislead: A Mechanistic Study of Attribute Hallucination in Vision-Language Models
Attribute hallucination---where vision-language models (VLMs) correctly identify an object but mischaracterize its properties---is prevalent yet mechanistically poorly understood. The dominant explanation, language-prior dominance, has motivated prior-suppression methods, but this explanation has not been directly tested at the attribute level. We present VISOR (Visual-Operational Remediation), a unified framework that couples null-image-based diagnosis with routed remediation. Its VSNR diagnostic decomposes each prediction into a visual logit signal and a language-prior signal. Across 10,791 negative-ground-truth samples from three VLM families and three attribute types, the visual signal strongly predicts false positives, whereas the language-prior signal is near chance. VISOR uses this diagnosis to separate two failure modes: low-margin but directionally correct visual signals in color/state attributes, and low-SNR or misaligned visual signals in material attributes. The same diagnosis routes each query to the appropriate operator: calibration for threshold-placement errors, abstention for training-free low-SNR handling, or targeted visual adaptation for material failures that prior suppression cannot correct. Across Qwen, InternVL, and LLaVA, VISOR reduces attribute false positives without relying on the prior-dominance assumption.
☆ R4DSG: Relative 4D Scene Graph Memory for Object-Centric Question Answering in Long Egocentric Video
Long-horizon egocentric video is a rich substrate for wearable AI assistants, but object-centric questions such as where an item was moved, when it last changed state, or why it was relocated remain difficult because caption- and transcript-based memories rarely preserve persistent object identity or structured spatial change. Existing long-video QA methods mainly emphasize temporal grounding and clip retrieval, while prior 3D scene-graph methods typically assume stronger geometry than free-motion wearable RGB video provides, including point clouds, RGB-D input, posed views, sparse reconstruction, or reconstructed scenes. R4DSG introduces a relative 4D scene graph memory for long egocentric video. Instead of storing raw graph sequences, R4DSG converts video into compact queryable memory entries indexed by time, place, persistent objects, anchor-relative change, and local interaction context. The main idea is to separate stable anchors from dynamic objects, maintain persistent object identity across frames, and represent object state through anchor-relative transitions rather than a globally aligned world model. Built on recent RGB-only advances in promptable video segmentation, temporal propagation, and relative 3D lifting, the method produces a retrieval-ready memory directly usable for long-horizon question answering. Evaluation on a 255-question object-related subset from EgoLifeQA shows, under question-only retrieval, a 6.7-point overall gain over EgoRAG-Text and a 12.5-point gain on when questions, which highlights the value of temporally organized object memory. These results position relative 4D scene graphs as a practical memory substrate for wearable assistants, AR systems, and embodied multimedia agents. GitHub Page: https://dualtransparency.github.io/R4DSG/.
comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, ACM Multimedia 2026, egocentric video; 3D scene graph; temporal memory; graph retrieval; object-state reasoning; multimodal question answering
☆ Watching Synthetic Videos: Aligning Cross-modal Representations with Visual Synthesis for Zero-shot Video Captioning
Text-only training is a popular paradigm in zero-shot video captioning, where the video distribution is not available to the model during training, leading to a cross-modal gap between the training (text-only) and the inference (video-only). Previous works attempt to bridge the gap through simple linear transformations. However, the inherent gap between text and video makes cross-modal representation space alignment insufficient, resulting in inaccurate sentences. To address this issue, we propose a novel zero-shot video captioning framework (WSV) consisting of two training stages, which first generates corresponding synthetic video latent representations via a pretrained text-to-video generation model. To strengthen the fidelity of the latent representations, we propose a polisher capable of bridging the gap between real and synthetic video distributions. Subsequently, we design a prompter that conditions GPT-2 on the polished latent representations to generate the captions in the second training stage. During inference, an input video is encoded by a pretrained 3D Causal VAE and then fed directly into the prompter, which in turn guides GPT-2 to produce the final caption. Experimental results conducted on MSVD, MSR-VTT, and VATEX datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves scores of 52 and 95.7 on the B@4 and CIDEr metrics, respectively.
☆ HNDiff: Haze-Noise Diffusion for Image Dehazing ECCV 2026
Existing diffusion-based methods have recently made significant progress in image dehazing. However, they typically neglect the physics of haze formation and reconstruct clean images from pure Gaussian noise, thereby limiting their restoration potential. To address this issue, we propose Haze-Noise Diffusion (HNDiff), a novel diffusion framework that embeds the atmospheric scattering model as an inductive bias. By grounding diffusion in physical principles, HNDiff ensures that the restoration aligns more closely with underlying mechanisms of haze formation. In its forward process, we introduce joint haze-noise diffusion with a haze-aware noise scheduler, which progressively adds both haze and noise to an image. Essentially, the scheduler adapts noise levels according to haze density, meaning that regions with heavier haze receive stronger noise injection to encourage content generation, while clearer regions receive lighter noise to better preserve details, which directly links the forward degradation process with the physics of haze. In the reverse process, we then derive a physically consistent dehazing-denoising process that simultaneously removes haze and noise to restore a clean image in a manner aligned with the forward degradation process. To further enhance practicality, we propose Latent HNDiff, which compiles clean latent priors that can be seamlessly integrated into existing dehazing networks to boost performance. Extensive experiments show that our work significantly improves leading dehazing backbones and achieves state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets. The project page is available at https://jin-ting-he.github.io/HNDiff .
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026. Project Page: https://jin-ting-he.github.io/HNDiff
☆ Putting Registers to Work: Task Registers for Token Pruning in Vision Transformers
Token-pruning policies are usually designed for a single recognition pipeline, but pretrained Vision Transformers are reused across tasks with different spatial demands. We ask which parts of a pruning policy transfer across image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. For each pipeline, controlled probes freeze the no-pruning checkpoint and apply a series of parameter-free reduction criteria at one eligible layer at a time without retraining. The probes reveal three differences: segmentation and detection rank the criteria differently, classification is especially sensitive to attention-based pruning in the earliest layers, and the dense tasks prefer opposite recovery endpoints. These findings motivate Task-Adaptive Pruning (TAP). Existing register tokens serve as task-agnostic storage for feature artifacts. TAP instead introduces one task register per task and activates only the current one. Its evolving state ranks tokens, distributes an exact removal budget over depth, and sets the recovery scale for dense features. At a final keep rate of $ρ=0.5$, our jointly adapted model, TAP-J, reaches $47.0$ mIoU at $1.30\times$ encoder throughput on ADE20K and $53.7$ box AP at $1.32\times$ encoder throughput on COCO while remaining competitive on ImageNet-1K.
comment: 24 pages, 9 figures. Includes supplementary material
☆ PEAK: Precise and Persistent Concept Erasure via k-Sparse Autoencoders
Erasing concepts from large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models has become increasingly crucial due to the growing concerns over copyright infringement, privacy violations, and offensive content. Existing approaches struggle to achieve both precise and persistent concept erasure: inaccurate localization of concept-related representations may cause unintended semantic interference, while incomplete removal of the underlying concept knowledge allows adversarial recovery. To address this dilemma, we propose PEAK, a \textbf{\textit{precise}} and \textbf{\textit{persistent}} concept erasure framework via k-Sparse Autoencoders (kSAEs). PEAK first trains a kSAE on internal activations of the diffusion denoising network to decompose dense representations into interpretable sparse features. By contrasting sparse activations induced by target and non-target prompts, PEAK identifies a compact set of target-specific features according to both activation strength and frequency. These localized features are then used for parameter optimization, where PEAK selectively suppresses target-related activations while preserving complementary non-target ones towards the original model. This feature-guided optimization embeds concept erasure directly into diffusion parameters, eliminating the need for additional inference-time intervention and facilitating effective persistence against adversarial attacks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PEAK achieves effective and robust concept erasure. On the I2P benchmark, PEAK reduces NudeNet detections from 582 to 6, lowers the average attack success rate (ASR) from 96.52\% to 5.63\%, and preserves general generation quality on MS-COCO with a near-zero KID. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/manmanTAT/PEAK
☆ ThinkAfford: Affordance-Centric Reasoning for Fine-Grained 3D Grounding in Cluttered Scenes
Task-driven 3D affordance grounding aims to localize the functional region in a cluttered 3D scene that enables an action specified by a natural-language instruction. Existing methods either predict 3D masks directly or construct them by selecting and fusing intermediate 2D/3D regions. However, they remain vulnerable to two intertwined failure modes: the predicted or selected regions may miss the target interaction area or have unsuitable granularity, while language grounding may confuse visually similar alternatives under relational instructions. To this end, we introduce ThinkAfford, which decouples high-recall affordance proposal generation from instruction-grounded reasoning. Specifically, the Affordance Proposal Generation module first uses learnable affordance prompts and multi-level visual features to predict interaction-conditioned heatmaps, extracting a variable number of fine-grained proposals without parsed object or part names as segmentation prompts. Visual-Prompted Affordance Reasoning then reasons over labeled proposal overlays using the full instruction, returning identifiers in a structured "think-then-answer" response. Moreover, Group Relative Policy Optimization uses proposal-level rewards from lifted 3D overlap to align VPAR selection with final 3D grounding. On the SceneFun3D validation split, ThinkAfford achieves 10.69% AP50 and 25.46% AP25 under the official evaluator, outperforming comparable 3D open-vocabulary and vision-language-model-based 2D-to-3D baselines. Module-level diagnostics further show that APG attains 77.5% recall at 25% intersection-over-union, while GRPO-trained VPAR achieves 72.1% selection accuracy on APG-covered queries, compared with 63.4% under supervised fine-tuning.
comment: 8 pages, 6 figures
☆ A Dataset and Benchmark for Optical Music Recognition of String Quartet Scores
Optical music recognition (OMR) transcribes music scores into digital formats. While the field has advanced significantly on monophonic and piano-form scores, multi-part score transcription remains underexplored, largely due to the absence of a suitable dataset. We introduce OpenScore String Quartet for Optical Music Recognition (OSSQ-OMR), the first dataset dedicated to multi-part OMR. Built on the OpenScore String Quartet corpus, OSSQ-OMR pairs digitally encoded scores with their original scanned editions from IMSLP, with all images visually aligned to their transcriptions. The dataset is released with score images at system and staff levels, and paired transcriptions in three encoding formats: Extended Linearized MusicXML (LMXE), **kern, and ABC. In total, OSSQ-OMR contains 24,544 system images and 98,172 staff images drawn from 116 string quartet scores. We accompany the dataset with a benchmark protocol and baseline results from two representative OMR models, evaluated across four random score-level splits with mutually exclusive test sets. Baselines reach OMR-NED as low as 3.6% on synthetic and 5.9% on scanned inputs; results reveal substantial effects of encoding and segmentation choices, with the LSTM-based baseline degrading on scanned inputs roughly 2.6 times less than the Transformer-based baseline.
comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, 5 tables. Accepted at the ISMIR 2026
☆ CARE: Confidence-Aware Reasoning for Reliable Medical VQA MICCAI 2026
Yuetian Du, Yucheng Wang, Zhenyuan Chen, Luyuan Chen, Rongyu Zhang, Jinjian Zhang, Wei Zhou, Zhijie Xu, Ming Kong, Zhan Zhou, Jie Liu, Qiang Zhu
Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) has enabled medical Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to produce Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning for visual question answering, yet these models suffer from $\textit{confidence miscalibration}$---a systematic gap between expressed certainty and actual diagnostic accuracy that undermines clinical trust. We propose $\textbf{CARE}$, a $\textbf{C}$onfidence-$\textbf{A}$ware medical $\textbf{RE}$asoning framework that jointly optimizes accuracy and calibration through a dual-stage pipeline. First, a scalable Medical-CoT synthesis provides structured cold-start data for Supervised Fine-Tuning. Second, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a novel $\textbf{Confidence-Aware Reward (CAR)}$ mechanism ties the model's confidence to diagnostic correctness within the reward signal. Across three Medical VQA benchmarks, $\textbf{CARE}$ achieves the highest diagnostic accuracy while obtaining the lowest Expected Calibration Error and Hallucination Rate, establishing a foundation for trustworthy clinical decision support. Our code is available at https://github.com/anotherbricki/CARE.
comment: Accepted by MICCAI 2026
☆ Once Poisoned, Arbitrarily Controlled: A Programmable Backdoor in VLMs
Existing vision-language model (VLM) backdoors are usually treated as static vulnerabilities: one-to-one and N-to-N attacks bind one or more triggers to a finite set of targets before victim training. This assumption substantially underestimates the threat. We show that a single poisoning phase can implant a programmable backdoor into a VLM, allowing an attacker to choose previously unseen target-caption semantics at inference time and synthesize corresponding stealthy triggers on demand. Unlike fixed-mapping attacks, the proposed any-to-any caption-control paradigm decouples post-training target selection from poisoning, enabling dynamic control of target captions without retraining the VLM. Our method has two components. First, a heuristic poisoning strategy exposes the model to diverse trigger-caption pairs, encouraging it to learn a general trigger-as-instruction rule rather than memorize a specific backdoor pattern. Second, a feature-space trigger steganography method maps any attacker-specified target caption to a stealthy visual trigger, implemented as either a norm-controlled perturbation or a non-semantic patch. Once inserted into arbitrary images, these triggers cause the poisoned VLM to generate outputs semantically aligned with the chosen target caption, even when the target was unseen during poisoning. Extensive experiments show that our attack achieves high any-to-any caption-control success rates, preserves clean model utility, and remains effective under several classical backdoor defenses.
☆ Evidence-Grounded Trustworthy Multimodal Reasoning and Evaluation Benchmark in Complex Urban Scenes
Zhaoyang Wei, Bowen Jiang, Xumeng Han, Jiashu Li, Xuehui Yu, Yuling Liu, Guorong Li, Zhenjun Han, Jianbin Jiao
While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive performance in benign scenarios, their cognitive reliability deteriorates significantly in complex scenes under adverse conditions. In these settings, models often rely on implicit inference without sufficient visual evidence, leading to a disconnect between perception and reasoning. Meanwhile, existing outcome-oriented benchmarks evaluate only final predictions and fail to diagnose failures in the underlying reasoning process. To address this gap, the authors propose AD2-Bench, which introduces a Hierarchical Visual Diagnosis framework that decomposes reasoning into a structured Chain of Evidence (CoE). This fine-grained diagnosis reveals that robust multimodal reasoning fundamentally depends on accurate evidence acquisition. Building on this perspective, the authors formulate reasoning from a probabilistic viewpoint and identify two primary causes of reasoning failure: Spatial Ambiguity, where models fail to distinguish target objects from background clutter, resulting in localization errors; and Semantic Uncertainty, where degraded visual features lead to incorrect semantic interpretation, resulting in understanding errors. To overcome these evidence deficiencies, they further propose Evidence-grounded Visual Reasoning (EGVOR), which replaces implicit reasoning with the explicit generation of Evidence Atoms - structured spatial-semantic triplets that enforce tight alignment between localization and semantic understanding. The model is trained through a hierarchical curriculum that progresses from reflective supervision construction to reinforcement learning, where reducing reasoning variance is explicitly rewarded. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EGVOR substantially improves reasoning stability under adverse conditions, providing a more robust framework for trustworthy multimodal cognition.
comment: Accepted by IJCV
☆ Multiple Scale Latents for Learned Image Compression ICIP 2026
Most learned image compression systems rely on a single latent representation combined with a hyperprior, which limits their ability to efficiently capture image structure across spatial scales. In this work, we propose a hierarchical latent representation to improve the efficiency of the entropy model. By using multiple latents at different scales, each with its own entropy model, we better capture the spatial structure of the latent representation. Our experiments show that this approach achieves a 17.9% BD-rate reduction over VVC on Kodak, demonstrating the effectiveness of multi-scale latent representations. Furthermore, the approach is orthogonal to other advances in learned image compression, making it a versatile addition to existing methods.
comment: Accepted at ICIP 2026
☆ StreamFlow: Dynamic Memory Flows for Streaming Video Understanding
Streaming video understanding requires multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to preserve relevant evidence from continuously evolving streams under strict causality and bounded memory. Yet existing paradigms remain limited: model-based methods require intrusive backbone updates, while memory-based methods expend substantial visual-encoding computation on temporally redundant content and rely on rigid access to visual history. To address these limitations, we introduce StreamFlow, an efficient visual memory framework that enables dynamic, on-demand access to historical visual information. StreamFlow combines a lightweight, dynamics-aware mid-term memory that filters temporal redundancy before visual encoding with a latent long-term memory that consolidates historical video content into visual latents accessible to subsequent reasoning. During generation, an attention-guided retrieval mechanism injects relevant visual latents when the model's reliance on visual evidence weakens. StreamFlow achieves state-of-the-art streaming video understanding performance, reaching 67.73% overall accuracy on StreamingBench, while also delivering strong performance on offline long-video benchmarks. Relative to the vanilla setting, it improves the visual attention score (VAS) by 59.1% while reducing end-to-end latency and peak memory by 50.4% and 21.1%, respectively, enabling more visually grounded and efficient reasoning.
☆ Mixture-of-Experts-based Entropy Model for Learned Image Compression ICIP 2026
Learned image compression has seen significant progress in recent years with the development of end-to-end learned models that achieve better compression efficiency than state-of-the-art conventional methods. Recently, Mixture of Experts (MoE) approaches have seen promising results in NLP and computer vision tasks. In this paper, we introduce the MoE approach to learned image compression. We propose a MoE-based Entropy model (MoEE) for learned image compression, allowing the model to selectively activate only the subset of parameters required for the input image. Our model achieves a BD-Rate improvement over VVC of -16.85% on the Kodak dataset.
comment: Accepted at ICIP 2026
☆ GS-CPE: Unified 6-Degree-of-Freedom Camera Pose Estimation via 3D Gaussian Splatting IROS 2026
Despite substantial progress in visual localization, from scene coordinate regression to direct camera pose regression, achieving both robust generalization and high accuracy remain challenging. This study introduces GS-CPE (Gaussian Splatting based Camera Pose Estimation), a coarse-to-fine framework for 6-DoF camera pose estimation that unifies geometry-based coarse pose estimation with robust 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) warping based pose refinement. GS-CPE first estimates a coarse pose via retrieval-guided geometric pose estimation on a 3DGS scene representation, then refines it by minimizing a visibility aware masked RGB warping objective in a multi-scale optimization framework, with adaptive re-rendering. Extensive experiments on indoor and outdoor benchmarks including 7Scenes, Cambridge Landmarks, FAST-LIVO2 datasets, and a custom dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming in both accuracy and generalization.
comment: 8 pages, accepted at IROS 2026
☆ SafeCA: Safe Cross-Attention Localization and Regulation for Text-to-Video Jailbreak Defense
Text-to-Video (T2V) generative models are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks in real-world deployment, leading them to produce harmful or inappropriate content. Existing defense approaches mainly rely on input filtering or reconstruction, which not only incur high computational latency but also tend to distort semantics. To address these issues, we experimentally and systematically analyze the differences between clean and jailbreak samples in the cross-attention feature space, revealing for the first time a cumulative separation effect and a progressively increasing trend of linear separability between the two during the diffusion process. Based on this insight, we propose SafeCA, a feature-level defense mechanism for safe cross-attention localization and regularization. Firstly, we identify key defensive regions and values through attention stability analysis using cross-attention features collected from clean prompts within a single inference. Secondly, SafeCA mitigates anomalous activations via attention masking with energy normalization and introduces a lightweight semantic-space adapter to redirect abnormal semantic flows. Furthermore, we detect and suppress potentially malicious tokens by back-propagating feature anomaly signals to the input cue words, thereby enhancing the deployability of the defense in commercial models. Experimental results show that SafeCA reduces the jailbreak success rate by about 20% on mainstream T2V models, adds almost no inference overhead (+0.1s), and maintains good text-video semantic consistency. Overall, SafeCA provides an architecture-level, deployable protection paradigm for T2V generation models.
comment: 10 pages, 4 figures
☆ Temporally Grounded Compositional Camera Motion Understanding via Geometric Knowledge Distillation
Dazhao Du, Shiyan Du, Jian Liu, Yongjian Yu, Bohai Gu, Tao Han, Hualuo Liu, Eric Liu, Yujia Zhang, Xi Chen, Song Guo
Understanding camera motion is fundamental to video perception, with applications in spatial intelligence and controllable video generation. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) provide a natural interface for this task, but existing work typically assigns one or more labels to an entire clip. Such clip-level recognition overlooks two defining properties of real camera motion: it can change within a shot, and multiple movements can occur simultaneously. We therefore formulate camera-motion understanding as temporally grounded, compositional recognition, which requires a model to localize motion-consistent intervals and identify every movement active within each interval. We introduce CamChoreo, a benchmark of 4,229 real single-shot clips with expert-annotated temporal segments. Its annotations use a compact vocabulary of 20 direction-aware labels, and nearly half of the segments contain compound camera motion, with multiple movement primitives active simultaneously. Recognizing such fine-grained, compositional motion is hard for current MLLMs, whose visual encoders emphasize semantic content rather than the geometric evidence on which camera motion depends. Directly injecting features from a frozen 3D foundation model addresses this gap, but requires running the expensive geometry model on every input; we refer to this baseline as CamInject. We instead propose CamDistill, which distills the same geometric knowledge into lightweight camera tokens during training and removes the 3D model at inference. CamDistill matches the accuracy of direct feature injection without running the 3D teacher at inference. Together, CamChoreo and CamDistill advance camera-motion understanding from clip-level labeling to temporally grounded, compositional recognition. Project page: https://ddz16.github.io/cammotion.github.io/.
☆ Order Matters: LVLMs as Judges for Temporal Reasoning in Image Sequences
As generative multimedia evolves from static image synthesis to complex, interleaved visual narratives, a foundational bottleneck has emerged: the judgment crisis. While human perception naturally synthesizes the temporal and logical flow of a story, automated evaluation systems remain largely "blind" to sequential continuity, often failing to distinguish between a coherent narrative and a semantically shuffled or contradictory sequence. This work identifies a critical structural gap in current multimodal evaluation paradigms, arguing that the reliance on Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) as judges is fundamentally limited by architectural biases. Our analysis reveals a profound performance dichotomy: while models may appear competent in isolated pointwise scoring, they suffer a catastrophic collapse when required to perform pairwise discrimination of temporal order. We demonstrate that this is not merely a data-scarcity issue but a structural one. Through a series of diagnostic probes, we uncover systematic positional asymmetries, specifically primacy and recency effects, where a model's judgment of a story is significantly influenced by the placement of a frame, often more than by its semantic consistency. These biases, potentially rooted in causal masking and rotary embeddings, suggest that current transformer-based judges are inherently ill-equipped for long-form visual reasoning. By exposing these blind spots, we challenge the multimedia community to move beyond snapshot-centric metrics and instead pioneer Temporally-Aware Evaluation paradigms that treat visual sequences as unified logical structures rather than unordered collections of frames.
comment: 34 pages, camera-ready
☆ VIDS-Seg: Towards Reliable Uncertainty Quantification in Pediatric Cardiac Ultrasound Segmentation
Reliable clinical deployment of machine learning requires models that know when they are likely to fail, particularly for subgroups underrepresented in training data. A common case is pediatric care, where models trained on adult cohorts can silently under-perform on children with no indication that something has gone wrong. As retraining with labeled pediatric data is often infeasible, detecting such failures at inference time is a critical clinical need. Building on the VIDS (Variational Inference under Distribution Shifts) framework, we introduce VIDS-Seg, which applies amortized variational inference over a lightweight prediction head to make this adaptive, OOD-aware prior tractable for dense image segmentation. We evaluate VIDS-Seg on left ventricular segmentation in echocardiography, a setting where pediatric anatomy differs systematically from the adult population most segmentation models are trained on, training on an adult cohort (EchoNet-Dynamic) and evaluating zero-shot on a pediatric cohort (EchoNet-Pediatric). Across all age strata, VIDS-Seg matches competitive baselines in segmentation accuracy while producing substantially higher spatial correspondence between predicted uncertainty and segmentation error, an advantage that persists even after applying temperature scaling to all baselines. Downstream, it yields more accurate and stable ejection fraction estimates and more reliable detection of cardiac malfunction in the infant subgroup. Our results indicate that OOD-aware uncertainty quantification can serve as a practical safety layer for deployed segmentation models, enabling detection of silent failures in underrepresented subgroups without retraining or additional labeled data.
☆ Sensor-Informed Per-Point Covariance for Structured-Light 3D Imaging
Per-point uncertainty models are important in structured-light 3D reconstruction for probabilistic registration, fusion, and quality assessment. In practice, however, point-cloud covariances are often modeled as isotropic constants or inferred from local surface geometry and therefore do not explicitly reflect the measurement process. This is a limitation in fringe projection profilometry (FPP), where phase noise propagates through calibrated reconstruction and produces strongly anisotropic 3D uncertainty. This paper presents a sensor-informed first-order method for constructing a per-point 3 x 3 covariance field from experimentally measured phase precision and calibrated phase-to-depth and phase-to-3D mappings. The formulation separates a rank-1 phase-induced covariance from an effective full-rank completion obtained by incorporating fitted lateral image-space perturbation scales. Repeated-plane experiments under fixed imaging conditions show close alignment of the dominant covariance direction with the viewing ray, and consistency between the dominant phase-induced uncertainty scale and scalar depth uncertainty. In G-ICP registration, the proposed covariance substantially improves over a constant isotropic model while providing a sensor-derived uncertainty representation complementary to conventional geometry-based covariances.
☆ GESTO: Human-Centric Spatio-Temporal Memory for Reasoning in Dynamic Scenes
Ermanno Bartoli, Buwei He, Dennis Rotondi, Sebastian Koch, Federico Tombari, Kai O. Arras, Patric Jensfelt, Yixi Cai, Iolanda Leite
Robots operating in human environments need memories that capture not only what objects exist and where, but also how people use them over time and how individual interactions compose into goal-directed activities. Existing 4D scene graphs preserve object and place histories but omit activity structure, whereas activity representations are either not grounded in persistent 3D scenes or rely on externally provided event boundaries and object associations. We present GESTO (Grounded Event and Spatio-Temporal memOry), a spatio-temporal memory that couples a persistent 4D scene graph with a two-level hierarchy of atomic human--object interactions and goal-driven events. From an RGB-D observation stream, GESTO automatically extracts timestamped interactions, grounds them to persistent scene entities, groups them into events, and uses event context to refine uncertain object associations. A relation-aware tool-calling agent queries the resulting memory for activity-centric spatio-temporal reasoning. We evaluate GESTO on the reproducible text, binary, and time categories of an existing benchmark, together with 40 new Space2Event and Event2Space queries. GESTO achieves scores of 0.71, 0.75, and 0.70 on the standard categories, approaching a method supplied with ground-truth event and object grounding, while substantially outperforming the same reasoning framework when these inputs are removed. It further achieves 0.73 and 0.75 on Space2Event and Event2Space queries. Ablations show that hierarchical event structure and context-aware grounding refinement provide complementary benefits, supporting activity-grounded hierarchical memory for retrospective reasoning in dynamic human environments.
☆ ConfTriage: A Calibration-Aware LLM Triage Framework for Pulmonary Nodule Malignancy with Selective Specialist Deferral
Pulmonary nodule malignancy prediction typically depends on image-trained specialist deep learning (DL) models that require substantial annotated imaging data and task-specific training. We investigate whether a generalist large language model (LLM), reading only a faithful natural-language rendering of standard nodule attributes, can serve as a calibrated triage layer. We propose ConfTriage, a confidence-calibrated method built on three pillars: language as the modality, calibration as the safety mechanism, and a selective specialist DL backstop for low-confidence cases. We prove two guarantees: a finite-sample combined-error bound yielding an explicit per-threshold operational certificate, and an oracle inequality showing that excess risk over the Bayes-optimal deferral classifier is controlled by the L1 calibration error of the LLM probability. A controlled seven-way input ablation across five frontier LLMs on LIDC-IDRI shows that natural-language descriptions dominate the diagnostic signal, while low-level image statistics are essentially diagnostically vacuous. ConfTriage achieved an F1 score of 88.22% and an AUC of 0.92, resolving 76.5% of cases using zero-shot LLM inference alone and referring only uncertain cases to the specialist DL backstop. These results demonstrate that clinically meaningful diagnostic information can be captured through structured radiological descriptions and leveraged by calibrated LLMs for selective referral. The framework suggests a practical pathway for combining generalist LLM prediction with specialist AI models in medical decision-support systems. Source code is publicly available at https://github.com/rabiul-ai/ConfTriage.
comment: 14 pages, 8 figures. Currently under review
☆ NullEdit: Stealthy Image Protection via VLM Condition Redirection
Modern image editors combine vision-language models (VLMs) with diffusion transformer backbones to modify a single reference image according to instructions without fine-tuning. This capability also enables unauthorized manipulation of publicly released images. Existing inference-time defenses either invalidate edits through conspicuous corruption, thereby exposing the protection, or allow them to proceed with identity or reference content drift, thereby failing to prevent the editing behavior itself. We instead target a stealthy and harmless no-op in which the requested edit is suppressed, the output remains natural and source-preserving without conspicuous artifacts or identity replacement, and harmful semantics requested by malicious instructions are absent. We propose NullEdit, which targets the VLM representation jointly formed from the reference image and instruction before it conditions the downstream DiT backbone. Using normal-edit and no-edit anchors, NullEdit redirects this representation, while cross-prompt gradient averaging transfers protection to held out instructions. Across Step1X-Edit and Qwen-Image-Edit on CelebA-HQ and VGGFace2, NullEdit reduces the EditReward IF score by 0.813 on average relative to the SOTA baseline while preserving subject identity and source content.
comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables
☆ Multi-View Relational Distillation for Spatial Reasoning with Vision-Language Models
Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong image and video understanding, yet their visual-spatial representations remain geometrically fragile, leading to failures in spatial reasoning needed for embodied AI, robotics, and autonomous driving. Prior approaches to geometry grounding either fine-tune VLMs on spatial question answering, which can perpetuate spurious visual representations, or fuse features from large geometry-grounded vision models, which substantially increases model size at inference. Knowledge distillation from geometry-grounded vision models offers an alternative, but directly matching multi-view teacher features can disrupt the pretrained alignment between visual and textual representations, degrading object- and language-semantic capabilities. We propose multi-view relational distillation (MVRD), which distills patch-wise cosine similarities across views instead of the teacher features themselves. These relations encode geometric correspondences adequate for spatial understanding, while leaving the student representation underdetermined, allowing it to remain close to its pretrained vision- language space. Across representative VLMs, MVRD improves visual-spatial reasoning, outperforming supervised fine-tuning and feature distillation while approaching feature fusion methods with considerably fewer added parameters and lower latency. We show that MVRD makes visual representations more geometric while retaining language alignment, and generalizes to 3D scene understanding tasks such as object grounding, dense captioning, and question answering.
☆ Flex-$π$: A Multi-Stream World-Action Model with Compute Flexibility
World-action models (WAMs) predict the future to act better, but nearly all of them predict only RGB latents, trained purely for pixel reconstruction, with no explicit signal for the 3D geometry or object semantics manipulation needs. We find a surprising free lunch: the same frozen video-generation VAE that encodes RGB also encodes 3D pointmaps almost losslessly, with no pointmap-specific training at all. This lets us supervise Flex-$π$, a 6B-parameter WAM, on 3D geometry and object-centric DINO semantics alongside RGB, at no cost in new sensors, new pre-training, or inference latency. Every visual signal is projected into this shared latent space and denoised jointly with actions inside a Mixture-of-Transformers backbone; per-stream dropout with cross-modality forcing then lets a single trained checkpoint run on any subset of these streams, from a fast action-only mode to full joint generation. The result is a policy that is exceptionally demonstration-efficient and generalizes well, beating the strongest baselines by up to 2-7$\times$ on dexterous, precise, real-world bimanual manipulation tasks both in and out of distribution, all while running faster than $π_{0.5}$. Our project website: https://flex-pi.github.io/
comment: Project page: https://flex-pi.github.io/
☆ The GENEA Challenge 2026: A Large-Scale Disentangled Evaluation of Speech-Driven Gesture Generation on the Seamless Interaction Dataset
Rajmund Nagy, Silvia Arellano García, Hendric Voss, Mihail Tsakov, Taras Kucherenko, Youngwoo Yoon, Gustav Eje Henter
This preprint presents the results of the fourth GENEA Challenge, a large-scale human evaluation of five speech-driven gesture-generation systems trained by participating teams on the Seamless Interaction dataset of dyadic conversations. As in the 2023 GENEA Challenge, we used a disentangled evaluation methodology to assess motion quality and speech alignment without confounding between the two, and performed a dyadic mismatching study to isolate the effect of listening and reacting to the interlocutor. We additionally introduce a new semantic gesture-generation task and a text-mismatching evaluation methodology using the Grounded Gestures subset of the data. In total, we ran four large-scale user studies, collecting over 23,000 votes from 869 test-takers.
In the motion-realism study, the dataset's filtered segments had substantially higher motion quality than all challenge submissions (68-95% pairwise winrate). In the speech-alignment study, the motion-capture segments provided a conceptual ceiling at 62% alignment score, with the top submission significantly behind at 32% and the rest only slightly above the 0% expected of an input-independent system. In the dyadic study, motion capture again set the ceiling at 65% appropriateness score, but no submission scored substantially above chance, indicating that the systems could not yet respond to the interlocutor. Finally, the semantic mismatching evaluation found highly expressive gestures in the dataset (test-takers identified the matching transcript 79% of the time), yet almost all submissions failed to generate semantically expressive motion, with the best achieving only an 8% appropriateness score.
The collected votes and outputs will be made publicly available at https://genea-workshop.github.io/2026/challenge/ to facilitate reproducibility and further research.
comment: 15 pages, 14 figures. Preprint
☆ PolyLayout: Hierarchical VLM-Guided Layout Generation Beyond Rectangular Rooms
Yutong Jiang, Zahra Atashgahi, Carlos Soto Garcia Delgado, Ruben Brokkelkamp, Davide Zanutto, Efşan Sökmen, Shahin Shahkarami
Generating physically plausible 3D room layouts is essential for home furnishing retail, enabling customers to visualize products in their own homes and confidently make purchasing decisions. However, a gap exists between academic research and real-world application: existing solutions primarily focus on algorithmic strategies for furniture placement, largely neglecting the non-rectangular geometries and strict door/window constraints prevalent in real homes. To bridge the gap, we introduce a hybrid, hierarchical framework tailored for retail, specifically designed to support scalable spatial planning applications. Our system decouples generation into three stages: (1) functional furniture clustering and fine-grained intra-zone placement; (2) macro-routing guided by a vision-language model (VLM) to anchor both these clustered zones and any remaining standalone furniture within diverse polygonal boundaries; and (3) rule-based optimization for collision-free micro-arrangements that respect architectural constraints. We evaluate our system on production-scale catalogs and a representative set of irregular real-world topologies. Our results show that our approach attains the highest perceptual plausibility while maintaining good geometric compliance at relatively low latency, and extends to irregular boundaries that existing methods do not natively support.
☆ UniProbe: A Learnable Token-Level Hallucination Detector for Large VLMs using Multi-Structural Internal Representations
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) achieve impressive visual reasoning and dialogue capabilities, yet frequently hallucinate content unsupported by the visual input. Effective mitigation requires token-level localization, enabling targeted intervention without discarding the entire response. Existing detectors require expensive full-model fine-tuning, rely on external verifiers that ignore the model's generation process, or reduce internal signals to isolated features and hand-crafted statistics, discarding spatial, sequential, and relational structure. We introduce \textbf{UniProbe}, a lightweight, unified, learnable detector that models a frozen LVLM's heterogeneous computational trace from a single forward pass. UniProbe constructs a directed graph over image patches, query tokens, and generated tokens, with attention weights encoding their relations. It processes this trace with alternating structure-aware modules: a GNN for relational evidence, a ViT for 2-D visual geometry, and a GRU for response order. Interleaving them allows spatial, relational, and sequential evidence to interact throughout the detector. We further develop a streaming variant for hallucination-aware decoding, which detects and resamples hallucinated tokens during generation, and a self-adaptation strategy aligning the detector with the LVLM's own generations. Across diverse LVLM backbones, UniProbe achieves state-of-the-art token-level and object-hallucination detection. During decoding, it reduces object hallucinations by up to 55\% at $1.06\times$ the latency of standard generation.
comment: Project Page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/par/uniprobe/
☆ MIRA: Medical Image Reflection for Agentic Diagnosis
Shengzhi Wang, Jun Yang, Kai Wu, Xiaozhong Ji, Yiwen Ye, Ziyang Chen, Mingliang Xiong, Wen Fang, Mingqing Liu, Mengyuan Xu, Miaoxuan Shan, Caiyan Liu, Bin He, Qingwen Liu
Medical visual agents can use tools to inspect images and retrieve external knowledge, but indiscriminate tool use may introduce noisy or misleading evidence. Reliable diagnosis therefore requires not only acquiring additional observations, but also verifying whether tool actions are necessary and whether the resulting evidence supports the current hypothesis. We introduce MIRA (Medical Image Reflection for Agentic Diagnosis), a medical visual diagnostic framework for autonomous evidence search and reflective verification. MIRA dynamically invokes image-processing operations, including zooming, grounding, pointing, rotation, and measurement, as well as web search, while evaluating the relevance and consistency of the acquired evidence. We develop MIRA through a two-stage training strategy. First, a tool-augmented Monte Carlo Tree Search data engine explores diverse diagnostic hypotheses and jointly verifies visual grounding accuracy and semantic consistency to construct supervised fine-tuning trajectories. Second, reinforcement learning further improves decision-making through online reflective principle evolution: failure cases are distilled into candidate principles, and only principles that improve held-out rollout rewards are retained. Across nine medical visual reasoning benchmarks, MIRA achieves an average score of 64.73, improving its Qwen3-VL-8B backbone by 7.44 points. It also increases useful tool-use judgments from 56.2% to 73.8% and reduces harmful judgments from 8.9% to 1.6%. Qualitative analyses show that MIRA can re-examine evidence, correct premature conclusions, and adapt its tool-use strategy. Project page: https://MIRA-VL.github.io/
☆ Neural Introspection Gating for Adaptive KV-Cache Reuse in Vision-Language-Action Models IROS 2026
Vision-Language-Action(VLA) models map camera images and language instructions directly to motor commands through a single autoregressive transformer. In real-time control, they still spend substantial compute recomputing key-value(KV) representations for visual tokens that barely change across neighboring frames. Recent work such as VLA-Cache reduces that cost by reusing KV states for visually static patches, but its policy relies only on observation-space heuristics and does not account for the model's own uncertainty. We propose Gated VLA-Cache, a lightweight, training-free extension that augments visual-similarity caching with neural introspection. The method monitors the logit margin between the top two predicted action tokens, a zero-cost confidence signal available during decoding. When the margin drops below a threshold, the cache is invalidated and a full recompute is triggered. Evaluated on four LIBERO benchmark suites with both OpenVLA and OpenVLA-OFT, Gated VLA-Cache improves reliability when blind caching hurts. On LIBERO-Goal and LIBERO-Long, it recovers over 100% of the lost accuracy while retaining 80% of the compute savings.
comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, Accepted in IROS 2026. Project Page: https://zjw4321.github.io/neural-introspection-gating-page/
☆ Modelling Geographic Atrophy Progression using Implicit Neural Representations MICCAI 2026
Simone Sarrocco, Paul Friedrich, Florentin Bieder, Christina Bornberg, Philippe Valmaggia, Peter Maloca, Philippe Cattin
Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) is the major cause of blindness in the Western world. Its late dry phase is characterised by irreversible atrophic areas, namely Geographic Atrophy (GA). Longitudinal Fundus Autofluorescence (FAF) image acquisitions are currently the main tool for assessing lesion growth over time at the image level. However, due to its highly individualised progression, the evolution of late AMD remains poorly understood. In this work, we propose using Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) to model GA progression at the individual level in a low-data setting. Our approach generates both FAF and GA segmentation at both past and future time points. Among the comparison models, our method achieves competitive segmentation quality across different scenarios, yielding the lowest Mean Absolute Error (MAE) for the GA lesion area and the highest DICE score, without sacrificing FAF image quality. The code is available at https://github.com/SimoneSarrocco/ga-progression-with-inrs.
comment: Accepted at MICCAI 2026 Off-Grid Workshop
☆ Fast and Memory-Efficient Wavelet Convolutions via I/O-Aware Reformulation
Wavelet convolution (WTConv) has emerged as an increasingly popular drop-in replacement for standard convolutions, expanding a network's receptive field exponentially with the number of decomposition levels while keeping the parameter count linear. However, its reference implementation is severely memory-bound due to excessive data movement through high-bandwidth memory (HBM). We develop an I/O model of WTConv to characterize this bottleneck and use it to guide three algebraic reformulations: (1) recomputing the inexpensive Haar analysis butterfly on chip, (2) collapsing the multi-level synthesis cascade into a single closed-form pass indexed by output-coordinate bits, and (3) folding learned per-channel scales into the convolution weights. Together, these reformulations enable an I/O-aware fused implementation that substantially reduces HBM traffic. We evaluate the WTConvNeXt configuration across decomposition levels and a broad range of tensor shapes. Despite performing comparable arithmetic, the reference WTConv is substantially slower than the depthwise convolution it replaces. Our reformulation reduces modeled HBM traffic by approximately $2.55\times$, yielding up to a $4.35\times$ training speedup over the reference while roughly halving peak memory usage. Thus, our reformulation preserves the benefits of WTConv while substantially reducing its execution time and memory footprint, removing the systems overhead that previously limited its practical efficiency.
☆ BPG: Balancing Plasticity and Generalization for Domain Incremental Learning
Qiang Wang, Songlin Dong, Shaokun Wang, Jizhou Han, Xiang Song, Chenhao Ding, Yuhang He, Yihong Gong
Deep neural networks excel in various tasks but struggle to generalize across evolving data distributions, leading to significant performance degradation under domain shifts. Domain incremental learning (DIL) addresses this challenge by enabling models to continuously adapt while retaining prior knowledge. Among existing DIL approaches, the parameter-isolation paradigm achieves state-of-the-art performance. However, these methods often adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to adapt to new domains, resulting in either insufficient learning capacity or redundant parameters. In this work, we propose BPG, a unified framework that addresses both challenges through two complementary components: BPG-Adapter, which dynamically determines each domain's adapter hidden dimension based on domain-specific feature separability, and BPG-Inference, a soft domain mixture strategy that integrates multiple domain-specific models at test time, mitigating domain ID misselection. Experimental results on DomainNet, CDDB, and CORe50 demonstrate that BPG consistently outperforms uniform adapter-based approaches and hard domain selection strategies, achieving state-of-the-art average accuracy while reducing forgetting to as low as 0.22% on DomainNet.
☆ Evaluating Semantic and Spatial Guidance for Foundation Model Segmentation of Small-Scale PV in Remote Sensing Imagery
Roni Blushtein-Livnon, Tal Svoray, Osher Rafaeli, Michael Dorman, Itay Fischhendler, Havazelet Yahel, Emir Galilee
Spatio-temporal PV data are essential for understanding adoption processes in off-grid regions, yet such data remain largely unavailable. Automated segmentation of remote sensing (RS) imagery offers a promising solution; yet, residential PV systems remain challenging targets because of their small size and sparse distribution, resulting in severe target-background imbalance. Vision-language foundation models (FMs) provide a data-efficient paradigm through prompt-based semantic and spatial guidance, but the relative contribution of different prompt types remains unclear. We systematically evaluate SAM3 for small-scale PV segmentation in RS imagery by comparing textual, geometric, and hybrid prompting, under varying supervision levels, training strategies, spatial resolutions, and imaging conditions. Multi-temporal aerial imagery from a large off-grid rural region serves as a study site, with findings validated across three additional datasets. Prompting strategy emerged as the dominant factor governing model behavior. Textual prompting consistently produced the lowest performance and showed the greatest sensitivity to supervision and imaging conditions. In contrast, spatial guidance substantially improved both segmentation accuracy and robustness. Hybrid prompting achieved the highest accuracy and stability, indicating that semantic and spatial guidance provide complementary information. Most performance gains were achieved with only a few hundred annotated samples, demonstrating strong data efficiency. Transfer learning had limited overall impact, with only modest improvements observed for textual prompting under limited supervision. Overall, our findings establish prompting strategy as a key determinant of SAM3 adaptation, robustness, and generalization, highlighting the potential of promptable FMs for scalable PV mapping in data-constrained off-grid regions.
☆ Beyond Fixed Luminance: Towards Panchromatic and Orthochromatic Image Colorization ECCV 2026
Most image colorization systems operate in $Lab$ space by predicting chroma ($ab$) while preserving an input-derived luminance channel ($L$). While effective on standard benchmarks, this fixed-luminance design restricts brightness changes and becomes unreliable when grayscale formation deviates from natural-image luminance, as in historical orthochromatic photography. We propose a luminance-agnostic colorization framework that formulates colorization as full-RGB image editing using a foundation image-editing model. To bridge modern panchromatic and historical orthochromatic conditions, we introduce a mixed grayscale objective that trains the model under both standard luminance grayscale and a red-insensitive grayscale formation. Experiments on COCO, ImageNet, and a multi-instance benchmark show that our method is competitive on standard grayscale inputs and substantially more robust under orthochromatic inputs, with qualitative comparisons and a human study indicating fewer visible color artifacts.
comment: Accepted at ECCV 2026
☆ E$^3$mo-Bench: A Scalable Benchmark for Multimodal Evoked and Expressed Emotion Understanding via Bayesian Pairwise Alignment
Understanding both expressed and evoked emotions is critical for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to achieve comprehensive affect-aware interactions. However, existing benchmarks typically examine expressed and evoked emotions in isolation or are constrained to coarse-grained and incomplete affective characterizations. To bridge this gap, we introduce E$^3$mo-Bench, a scalable benchmark comprising $12{,}314$ question-answer pairs across $2{,}524$ videos with predefined affective perspectives. It evaluates evoked and expressed emotion understanding via $3$ complementary tasks: emotion perception, open-vocabulary recognition, and valence-arousal-dominance (VAD) assessment. To efficiently scale reliable continuous annotations, we propose Bayesian Pairwise Alignment, which aggregates sparse, low-burden pairwise judgments into anchor-referenced VAD estimates. Furthermore, we develop E$^3$mo-Score, a training-free agent that aggregates complementary judgments from a five-model committee to improve VAD estimation. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our framework and expose a pronounced performance skew between evoked and expressed emotion paradigms. These findings, coupled with MLLMs' persistent deficits in fine-grained recognition and dimensional assessment, chart a clear course for advancing multimodal emotional intelligence.
☆ MVTrack: Ultrafast Appearance-Free Moving Object Tracking from Compressed Bitstreams ECCV2026
Deploying modern video trackers at scale is bottlenecked by the computational cost of RGB-based object detectors. To this end, we present MVTrack, an ultrafast tracker for moving objects that operates directly on H.264 bitstreams. MVTrack combines MVDet, a lightweight detector for motion vector fields, with MVLink, a minimalist kinematic association module. On VIRAT, MVTrack outperforms YOLO26n while using 60$\times$ fewer parameters, requiring 40$\times$ fewer FLOPs, and reducing CPU latency by 8.6$\times$. These results demonstrate that compressed video data alone can enable accurate and scalable surveillance tracking, thereby bypassing the need for pixel reconstruction.
comment: This paper has been accepted to the 2nd workshop on Low-Level Vision Frontiers with Generative AI, Preference Optimization, Agentic Systems and World Models (LoViF) at ECCV2026
☆ Compositional Benchmark Synthesis for Hierarchical Human Action Recognition
Recognizing human behavior across levels of abstraction, from atomic actions to long-horizon intentions, requires data annotated along a semantic hierarchy. Large corpora provide isolated, atomically labeled clips without temporal composition, whereas recorded composite-activity corpora offer shallow, domain-narrow, fixedhierarchies. A benchmark-generation and evaluation frameworkis proposed that synthesizes a four-level hierarchical-intention benchmark, spanning actions, activities, low-level intentions (LLIs), and high-level intentions (HLIs), from a flat single-label action corpus while retaining real pre-extracted features at the action level. Episodes are assembled by a transition model under a subject-consistency constraint, and a coverage-aware sampler reduces the subject usage Gini from 0.566 to 0.248. Synthesizing such a benchmark raises a circular-supervision risk that recorded datasets avoid: if the rules generating the episodes also govern the evaluation, models can succeed by recovering the generator rather than through genuine reasoning. Validity is addressed by design, holding sequence-generation rules disjoint from the first-order-logic rules used at evaluation. The instantiation yields 15,002 episodes. Four reference baselines from different model families characterize difficulty, not as recognition methods. A compositional held-out gap of 0.13 to 0.17 macro-F1 appears across all baselines, including a graph-aware model that recognizes best yet does not close the gap, indicating a structural property of the benchmark rather than a model artifact. A logic-free baseline still violates the held-out semantic rules above their intrinsic data rate, and the order-destroying control changes macro-F1 within seed variation, serving as a generator-consistency check. Theontology, transition model, and generator are released so the benchmark can beregenerated and extended.
☆ FADE: From Passive Verification to Active Discovery in Counterfactual Video Understanding
Counterfactual video understanding evaluates whether models grasp physical and commonsense regularities. However, existing multiple-choice question (MCQ) benchmarks inadvertently leak target events through their questions and candidate options. This reduces the core challenge from active discovery to text-guided verification. In this paper, we present FADE, an effective training framework for counterfactual discovery and explanation. Our method is built on an evidence-first, two-stage training paradigm. First, evidence-internalized supervised fine-tuning grounds the model's predictions in decisive visual anomalies. Second, we apply a fading-anchor reinforcement learning strategy that progressively removes textual guidance, compelling the model to independently discover and explain evidence. To rigorously evaluate this capability, we also introduce an effective pipeline that converts existing MCQ datasets into aligned MCQ, open-ended question answering (OQA), and captioning tasks without requiring additional data curation. Our simple approach yields strong results. Using Qwen3-VL-8B as the baseline, FADE achieves state-of-the-art strict paired scores across all three tasks on DualityVidQA-test and IPV-Bench, outperforming GPT-5.6. In specific, when transitioning from constrained MCQs to unconstrained OQA and captioning, our model demonstrates remarkable robustness. Its performance retention is 90.4% and 67.4% on DualityVidQA-test-substantially higher than the 48.1% and 30.7% retained by GPT-5.6. We hope this simple framework can serve as a solid baseline for future research in unconstrained counterfactual video understanding.
☆ Where To Look? : Causal Tracing of Vision Encoders in VLM
Vision-language models can describe an image with remarkable accuracy, yet a more fundamental question remains unanswered: what visual information actually drives their answers? In this work, we investigate this question through causal tracing, and we observe that highly causal vision tokens often lie outside the target region. Extending the analysis to larger vision-language models reveals a similar pattern across models and corruption settings, suggesting that strong multimodal performance does not necessarily imply spatially localized causal representations. We further investigate: can these models preserve visual structure when appearance cues are removed? and find that visual cues are exploited to understand visual structures. Together, our experiments expose a gap between seeing, using, and reasoning over visual structure, and provide a causal framework for studying how visual information is transformed, preserved, and ultimately used by modern vision-language models.
comment: 10 Pages, 6 figures
☆ Embodied Multimodal Grounding for Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation via Semantic 3D Gaussian Splatting
Embodied mobile manipulation requires language, visual observations, three-dimensional scene structure, and action feasibility to be aligned before execution. We study open-vocabulary target grounding with few-shot manipulation in local household workspaces and present an embodied multimodal grounding framework that integrates active multi-view Semantic 3D Gaussian Splatting (Semantic-3DGS), reachability-aware base positioning, and a diffusion-based vision-language-action policy. A task-driven local Semantic-3DGS serves as a shared interface across active sensing, language-conditioned 3D localization, obstacle-aware scene reasoning, base preparation, and semantic conditioning of the action model. To preserve pretrained action priors, the 3D semantic cues are injected only into the late action-expert blocks. In expanded 50-trial real-robot evaluations against representative vision-language-action (VLA) approaches, the full system achieves 60% long-horizon success compared with 40% for PointVLA and 28% for DexVLA, and reaches 74% success in heavily cluttered manipulation compared with 52% for the single-view variant and 46% for PointVLA. It also maintains 75% success under a 75 cm height shift and eliminates photo-induced false grasps. These results indicate that explicit, refreshable 3D semantic grounding can improve robustness under clutter, occlusion, viewpoint variation, and embodiment constraints.
comment: 9 pages, 11 figures. Accepted to ACM Multimedia 2026 (MM '26)
☆ Beyond Pixels: From Video Priors to 4D Worlds
4D generation synthesizes dynamic 3D scenes from conditions such as text or images. Existing methods either reconstruct generated RGB videos with a separate 4D model or adapt a particular video generator to predict geometry directly. The former suffers from distribution mismatch and error propagation, whereas the latter ties 4D prediction to a specific generator and may require retraining when the generator or conditioning regime changes. We ask whether the final denoised latents of video models that share a variational autoencoder (VAE) can instead provide a reusable interface to explicit 4D prediction. Building on this insight, we introduce direct latent-to-4D generation and instantiate it as Latent-to-4D, which bypasses RGB by aligning a video latent with the token grid of a pretrained 4D decoder and refining it through frame-wise and global spatiotemporal attention. Trained on roughly 1K existing reconstruction clips, a single checkpoint transfers unchanged across multiple video diffusion transformers within the same VAE family. On Text4D-200 and I4D-200, Latent-to-4D surpasses matched same-latent Wan+4RC cascades in projection-based DINO-F1 by 2.88--3.45 and 5.81 points, respectively, while also being preferred by human raters for geometry, temporal stability, and overall quality.
comment: Project page: https://hayd-zju.github.io/Beyond-Pixels
☆ Rethinking LLM Verification: Evidence Structure, Uncertainty, and Selective Refinement EMNLP 2026
Uma Ranjan, Kunal Tilaganji, Aditya Koul, Anurag Mahipal, Dashpreet Singh, Hriday Rana, Manan Jain, Sidharth Gupta, Ajo Babu George, Vineeth Balasubramanian, Nagarajan Natarajan, Amit Sharma
Large language models (LLMs) often rely on shortcuts rather than systematic reasoning, raising safety concerns in medical applications. Allowing models to abstain when uncertain improves reliability but introduces a coverage accuracy tradeoff. We propose a two-stage framework for medical hypothesis verification in multiple-choice settings that manages this tradeoff through targeted ontology grounding, applied only when the model abstains. We show that abstention is not random but reflects genuine uncertainty, with abstained predictions associated with lower confidence. Across two frontier models (GPT-5.5, accessed via the Azure OpenAI API, and DeepSeek-R1), the proposed framework improves question-level accuracy by 9.6 percentage points (82.9% to 92.5%) and hypothesis-level accuracy by 4.2 percentage points (92.0% to 96.2%). Our experiments conducted on MedReason and MedQA show that abstention can be repurposed as a control signal for selective reasoning refinement, achieving knowledge-graph-level performance without explicit knowledge graph construction.
comment: Findings Track at the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2026)
☆ InterPruner: Interactive Structured Pruning via Taylor-Implicit Criterion and Language-Prior Modulator for Multimodal Object Detection
Qi Ming, Zihan Yang, Shaoguang Huang, Si Sun, Hanqing Zhang, Nanqing Liu, Jiahui Lv, Juan Fang, Aleksandra Pizurica
Multimodal object detection proves effective in remote sensing, especially the RGB-Infrared paradigm. The parallel feature extractors provide rich multimodal information for robust detection, yet introduce substantial channel redundancy and computational overhead. Existing pruning methods can reduce channel redundancy, but they are designed for unimodal backbones, overlooking cross-modal interactions and dynamic scene-wise redundancy. In this paper, we propose InterPruner, the first interactive structured channel pruning framework for RGB-infrared object detectors. Specifically, we first derive a Taylor-Implicit Criterion(TIC) to quantify channel importance via high-order Taylor expansion and the implicit function theorem. Then, a Modality Interaction Redundancy Analyzer (MIRA) identifies redundant channels via mutual compensability assessment. Finally, a Scene-Prior Channel Anchor (SPCA) uses language priors as semantic anchors to measure channel-scene relevance for dynamic channel importance estimation. Cross-modality channel pruning for RGB-Infrared detection is yet unexplored. Extensive experiments on RGB-infrared object detection dataset demonstrate that InterPruner maintains high performance with negligible degradation. Specifically, it even achieves a 0.6% mAP increase on the FLIR dataset when pruning 50% of the channels. Code will be available on GitHub to facilitate future work.
☆ Grid-Preserving Knowledge Distillation: Transferring Convolutional Inductive Bias to Vision Transformers under Data Scarcity
Vision Transformers underperform convolutional networks when training data is scarce, and distilling convolutional inductive biases from a CNN teacher is an effective remedy that leaves the deployed model unchanged. General-purpose feature distillation, however, transfers little in this setting. The pooling, flattening, and logit-space projections it inherits from CNN to CNN pipelines discard the spatial grid in which locality and translation equivariance are encoded, and unlike a convolutional student, a ViT cannot rebuild that structure on its own. In this paper, we propose iBKD, a distillation framework that preserves the grid along the entire transfer path. Its core module, the Inductive Bias Attention Module, aggregates every student layer onto the teacher grid with learned weights, sharpens structural cues with channel and deformable spatial attention, and injects them through convolutional cross-attention that operates between grids rather than between token sets. The module is used only during training, so the deployed model is an unmodified ViT with no inference overhead. Across seven Transformer backbones and six data-scarce benchmarks, iBKD outperforms both locality-guidance methods and general knowledge distillation baselines, and its margin widens as training data shrinks.
☆ Ex-Omni-2D: Expressive Omni-Modal Dialogue Models with Native Visual Presence
Omni-modal dialogue models can understand multimodal inputs and synthesize spoken replies, yet their responses remain visually disembodied. We introduce \textbf{Ex-Omni-2D}, an omni-modal dialogue framework that generates a coordinated response comprising text, personalized speech, and reference-conditioned video. Given a multimodal query, reference image, and reference audio, the model predicts a structured \textit{Visual Thought Plan} (VTP) describing scene, emotion, and motion, followed by response text and native multi-codebook speech units. These units form a shared acoustic-temporal interface: they are decoded into speech and aligned online with video frames. This interface enables the response and avatar pathways to be learned from heterogeneous speech, dialogue, and avatar-video data, avoiding the need for large-scale query--text--speech--video supervision. A full-sequence Video Generator serves as the primary Teacher. For efficient incremental generation, we further distill it into a few-step block-causal \emph{Streaming Student} whose Prefix Streaming mechanism carries a clean latent across consecutive chunks to reduce cumulative late-chunk degradation. With four-step inference, the complete four-GPU pipeline achieves an end-to-end RTF of 1.293 at $400\times720$/$720\times400$, providing a practical quality--efficiency operating point.
☆ Compact Feed-Forward 3D Gaussians via Saliency-Guided Primitive Merging
3D scene reconstruction, modeling, and rendering are highly relevant for numerous tasks, and 3D Gaussian splatting has become a standard choice in this context. Its feed-forward variants provide fast reconstruction from sparse input views but often produce per-pixel primitives, leading to highly redundant and thus inefficient representations. We present a structure-aware merging pipeline that takes per-pixel primitives from any feed-forward method and consolidates them into a compact, content-adaptive Gaussian set while largely retaining visual quality at just $\frac{1}{20}^\text{th}$ of the Gaussians of a per-pixel method. We group spatially coherent Gaussians of similar appearance into variable-size clusters via adaptive superpixel segmentation guided by a saliency map, which allocates fine segments to textured regions and coarse segments to homogeneous areas. We compress each cluster into a compact latent representation through a learned encoder, then match and consolidate representations across views based on geometric overlap and feature similarity via a learned merger. A level-of-detail decoder then produces the final Gaussians at a controllable resolution, enabling a flexible quality-efficiency trade-off at inference. As a post-processing module, the pipeline is backbone-agnostic, leveraging the strengths of existing feed-forward methods. This leads to better and more robust quality than achieved by previous approaches that target a reduction in primitive count, while providing a highly compact representation, that can be rendered efficiently.
☆ Self-Geometry: GT-Free and Plug-and-Play Test-Time Adaptation for Geometrically Consistent 3D Vision Foundation Models
Recent Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) predict depth, camera pose, and pointmap in a single forward pass without per-scene optimization, achieving strong generalization. However, enforcing explicit multi-view geometric consistency, e.g., through bundle adjustment, is computationally costly and is thus not imposed during VFM pretraining, so such inconsistency can arise. To address this, implicit self-consistency derived from model outputs (e.g., pointmaps, features), though enforced at test-time in prior work, delivers inherently limited performance gain, especially on scenes where the pretrained VFM is highly inaccurate. In contrast to this implicit signal, we propose Self-Geometry, a plug-and-play test-time adaptation pipeline that directly imposes explicit multi-view geometric constraints using 2D pixel correspondences as pseudo ground-truth. Our proposed Self-Geometry consists of Geometric Disentanglement Optimization, which combines Multi-View Consistency and Epipolar Consistency losses with Gradient Disentanglement to prevent gradient conflict; Frame Angular-Neighbor, a view sampler based on SO(3) geodesic distances for lightly imposing these constraints; and Lightweight TTA, which adapts VFMs via LoRA. Our method achieves consistent improvements in both pose and geometry estimation across six VFMs (VGGT, $π^3$, DA3-Giant/Large/Base/Small) and four benchmarks (7Scenes, ETH3D, ScanNet++, HiRoom).
comment: Project page: https://cmlab-korea.github.io/Self-Geometry/
☆ MMArt A Multi-Perspective Multimodal Dataset for Visual Art Understanding
Shuai Wang, Wangyuan Ding, Yixian Shen, Jia-Hong Huang, Stevan Rudinac, Monika Kackovic, Nachoem Wijnberg, Marcel Worring
Recent vision-language models demonstrate impressive general visual understanding, yet their art interpretation remains shallow: they describe surface content but struggle with formal analysis, grounded historical interpretation, or affective characterization. We argue this is not only a model but also a dataset limitation. Existing art datasets are single perspective resources, where no dataset provides narrative, formal, emotional, and historical perspectives simultaneously for the same artworks. We introduce MMArt, a large-scale dataset of 74,234 WikiArt paintings, each annotated with four independently annotated perspectives plus a harmonized unified caption, produced by specialized vision-language models or human annotation and validated through complementary quality evaluations. Two complementarity analyses establish that perspectives encode genuinely distinct information. A generative analysis shows that formal analysis descriptions best preserve compositional style, and historical descriptions carry strong affective signal in reconstructed images. A discriminative retrieval analysis reveals task-asymmetry: narrative descriptions drive retrieval (R@1 = 44.0%), while formal descriptions, strongest for reconstruction, are nearly nondiscriminative at retrieval scale (R@1 = 7.8%). Leave-one-out analysis further confirms that historical descriptions are the least replaceable perspective across both tasks. Together, the two analyses establish that no single perspective suffices for all tasks, directly motivating MMArt multi-perspective design. The dataset, code, and additional information are available at https://shuaiwang97.github.io/MMArt/.
☆ Embedding Rotation Invariance for Provable Multi-Oriented Scene Text Recognition
Multi-oriented text is ubiquitous in real-world scenes and remains a major challenge for scene text recognition (STR). Existing rotation-aware methods explicitly estimate text orientation. However, due to the lack of theoretical guarantees, they are prone to error accumulation, increased computational cost, and strong reliance on data. In this work, we incorporate rotation invariance into the STR framework to address these limitations. Specifically, we adopt an encoder-decoder architecture, embedding rotation equivariance in the encoder and rotation invariance in the decoder to construct a fully rotation-invariant network. On the decoder side, we first identify and prove the rotation-invariant property of the cross-attention mechanism and use it to formulate a rotation-invariant text decoder that maps visual features to output text in a rotation-invariant manner. On the encoder side, we propose a rotation-equivariant local-global extraction network that integrates deep equivariant convolutions with self-attention, enabling rotation-equivariant feature extraction while modeling inter-character dependencies and preserving fine-grained visual details. By integrating the encoder and decoder, we obtain an end-to-end Rotation-Invariant Scene Text Recognition network (RISTER). RISTER provides rotation invariance with theoretical guarantees, enhancing robustness on multi-oriented samples without introducing additional inference computation or relying on data-driven orientation correction. Experiments show that RISTER achieves state-of-the-art performance on both standard and multi-oriented benchmarks, surpassing the second-best model by 4.0 percent in accuracy on the general multi-oriented dataset.
☆ Visual Geometry Foundation-Aware Gaussians for Single-Frame Surround-View Driving Reconstruction
Junhong Lin, Jinlong Wang, Xianda Guo, Yanlun Peng, Wei Zheng, Guoqing Liu, Hanli Wang, Tiesong Zhao, Wei Gao
Single-frame surround-view reconstruction faces severe geometric instability and rendering artifacts due to minimal inter-camera overlap. While existing methods rely on complex decoders or auxiliary cues, they remain bottlenecked by the weak geometric capacity of upstream features. We argue that leveraging pretrained visual geometry priors strengthens upstream representations and alleviates the geometric ambiguity in sparse surround views. To this end, we propose VGGD, a visual geometry foundation-aware 3D Gaussian Splatting framework for feed-forward surround-view driving reconstruction, which shifts geometric modeling to the frontend and adapts foundation priors to the driving camera setting. First, VGGD leverages VGGT to provide transferable multi-view geometric prior tokens. Next, we introduce a Dual-Path Neck to decouple geometry-consistent and appearance-aware representations, improving appearance completion in weakly observed regions. We further apply Scale Warmup to stabilize early geometry learning and suppress scale drift under ego-pose changes. Finally, we use a hybrid pixel--volume Gaussian decoder to produce a renderable 3D Gaussian scene for novel-view synthesis. Experiments on the nuScenes single-frame benchmark show that VGGD achieves the best overall rendering quality among the compared methods and improves relative geometric consistency.
☆ Bridging Severe Cross-Modal Misalignment: End-to-End Visible-Infrared Object Detection via Explicit Feature-Domain Affine Registration
Qi Ming, Yuyang Wang, Mingjing Zhao, Yifan Xiao, Zhixin Guo, Zhiqiang Zhou, Peng Sun, Juan Fang, Fuqiang Yang, Xudong Zhao
Visible-infrared object detection relies on complementary RGB and thermal cues, but its performance is often degraded by cross-modal spatial misalignment. Most existing methods rely on implicit feature adaptation to handle weakly misaligned scenarios, while large-offset geometric discrepancies remain insufficiently addressed. In this paper, we propose a Joint Feature-domain Registration and Detection network (JFRDet), an end-to-end visible-infrared oriented object detector tailored for severely cross-modal geometric discrepancies. JFRDet introduces a Cross-Modal Affine Alignment (CMAA) module to estimate an image-level affine transformation for explicit multi-level feature alignment. Note that illumination changes directly affect the reliability of RGB cues, an Illumination-Guided Complementary Fusion (IGCF) module adaptively exploits modality reliability under varying illumination conditions for cross-modal fusion. Then, an Alignment Quality-Consistency Gating (AQCG) strategy stabilizes joint optimization by modulating detection supervision according to alignment reliability and gradient consistency. We further construct DroneVehicle Misaligned (DVMA), a benchmark for evaluating visible-infrared oriented object detection under severe cross-modal geometric misalignment. The proposed JFRDet achieves 69.7\% $\mathrm{mAP}_{50}$ on DVMA, which represents state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. The code and dataset will be available on GitHub.
☆ Chartography: A Benchmark for Professional Chart Understanding ECCV 2026
Professionals across medicine, engineering, finance, manufacturing, and the sciences often make consequential decisions from charts. Existing chart benchmarks do not sufficiently measure this ability: they are dominated by bar, line, and pie formats, rely on shorter reasoning chains, and are nearing saturation, with frontier models already scoring 80-90%. We introduce Chartography, a benchmark of 100 tasks that pair charts drawn from professional practice, in domain-specific formats that standard chart benchmarks rarely include, with questions written by professionals who read these charts for a living and independently verified by three additional experts. In an evaluation of 30 frontier-model configurations (20 scored trials per task), the best configuration reaches only 45.0% mean pass@1; the remainder span 9.0-39.5%. Failures concentrate in visual perception: models can miss nuanced features, misread values along sparsely labeled axes, mishandle projected 3D geometry, and violate domain conventions encoded in the chart. We release all tasks, images, provenance metadata, and evaluation code.
comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables. Accepted at the 2nd Workshop on Benchmarking Evidence-Aligned Multimodal Reasoning (BEAM 2), ECCV 2026
☆ VERDICT: Training-Free Step-Wise Verification of Multimodal Reasoning via Disagreement-Aware Consensus
Rohit Sinha, Kunal Tilaganji, Tanuja Ganu, Nagarajan Natarajan, Amit Sharma, Vineeth Balasubramanian
Multimodal large language models often generate reasoning chains containing subtle errors that lead to incorrect answers. Current verification approaches have notable limitations. Existing approaches either require expensive labelled supervision with inconsistent cross-task performance or aggregate scores from multiple sources by simple aggregations, missing a key insight: when these scores disagree, that disagreement itself carries important information about whether a reasoning step is truly valid or not. We formalise this as a coupled scoring problem among disparate, frozen verifiers, interpretable as a coordination game with a unique closed-form equilibrium where agreement signals valid steps while disagreement reveals instability. Towards this end, we propose a training-free domain-agnostic step-wise verification approach we call VERDICT: VERification via Disagreement-Informed Coupled Thresholding. To our knowledge, VERDICT is the first training-free verifier that makes the structure of cross-modal disagreement explicit and actionable. It computes consensus scores through a closed-form solution, enabling both disagreement-aware filtering and stability-conscious ranking of reasoning steps. Evaluated across six benchmarks, \method consistently improves over the base model by up to +5.95%, and performs competitively with domain-specific critics that demand extensive supervision, demonstrating that cross-modal agreement provides robust verification signals without task-specific adaptation and Training-Free Verification
comment: European Conference on Computer Vision 2026
☆ Cross-View Sequential Visual Localization with Spatio-Temporal Context Modeling for Autonomous Driving
Continuous and reliable localization is essential for autonomous driving. Cross-view visual localization matches ground images with satellite maps, providing complementary localization cues for pipelines that depend on Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals and high-definition (HD) maps. Most existing cross-view visual localization methods process each frame independently, leaving temporal information underused and limiting accuracy under dynamic occlusion, illumination variation, and repetitive textures. This study proposes a temporal-context-enhanced framework for cross-view sequence visual localization. The proposed recurrent cross-frame module aggregates historical context from the previous state to enhance the coarse ground feature of each current frame. These enhanced features facilitate satellite candidate-region classification, while hierarchical fine-grained features enable precise local offset estimation. On the CVIS dataset, the proposed method reduces mean localization error from 3.80 m to 1.57 m and increases R@1 m from 8.14% to 40.22%. Direct transfer to KITTI-CVL achieves a mean error of 2.61 m, with target-domain fine-tuning further reducing the mean error to 2.27 m. Zero-shot field experiments on a real-world vehicle achieve a mean error of 2.84 m and R@5 m of 96.86%. These results demonstrate that temporal context enhancement significantly improves cross-view localization accuracy and supports robust deployment on public benchmarks and real-world roads.
☆ Retrieval-Augmented Vision Foundation Models for Robust Leukemia Cell Classification across Multiple Microscopy Datasets SP
Leukemia cell image classification is challenged by real-world domain shifts from acquisition, staining, illumination, and site protocols, causing single-dataset models to generalize poorly in real clinical scenarios. This work presents a robust framework for leukemia classification across multiple heterogeneous datasets using a two-stage pipeline with a pretrained vision foundation model. Stage 1 performs binary classification (leukemia vs. non-leukemia) and is trained using 122,167 single-cell images. Stage 2 is conditionally applied to Stage 1 positives to perform subtype classification into Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) and Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML), trained using 69,400 single-cell images. Labels are harmonized across five heterogeneous datasets to enable cross-dataset training, and performance is evaluated on a held-out dataset protocol to assess domain-shift generalization. Within this pipeline, three encoders are benchmarked (DinoBloom, pretrained on single-cell images; BiomedCLIP, pretrained on biomedical data; and CLIP as a general-purpose model) under linear probing, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), and a Retrieval-Augmented Classification (RAC) module that retrieves the top-k most similar cell images to provide cytomorphological grounding. The objective is to quantify how much domain-specific pretraining contributes to performance under domain shift, and whether cost-effective adaptation and retrieval can be a viable alternative to expensive domain-specialized pretraining. The held-out protocol additionally serves as a diagnostic tool, revealing when classification performance is attributable to dataset-specific artifacts rather than to cytomorphological features.
comment: Accepted at SPIE Optics + Photonics 2026 for oral presentation. 23 pages, 12 figures, 9 tables
☆ PolypVision: A Three-Stage Hierarchical Deep Learning Framework for Classification and Segmentation of Colorectal Polyps
Hamidreza Bolhasani, Hamidreza Rastad, Amir Mohammad Akbari, Mohammad Tashakoripour, Parnian Asadollahi, Ata Khodami, Mojgan Forootan
Colorectal cancer (CRC) remains one of the leading causes of cancer-related mortality worldwide, predominantly arising from precancerous polyps. Accurate detection, segmentation, and endoscopic and histological classification of colorectal polyps are crucial for timely clinical intervention. In this study, we present PolypVision, a three-stage hierarchical deep learning framework that sequentially performs: (Stage 1) binary classification of polyps as adenomatous or hyperplastic, with simultaneous Paris and JNet classification, using EfficientNetV2-M with Focal Loss; (Stage 2) polyp segmentation with recommended resection method using a UNet++ decoder with the Stage 1 backbone as encoder, optimized with Dice and BCE losses; and (Stage 3) adenoma subtype classification (tubular, tubulovillous, villous) using EfficientNetV2-M with transfer learning from Stage 2. Evaluated on three public datasets -- PolypGen, Kvasir-SEG, and CVC-ClinicDB -- PolypVision achieves an AUC of approximately 0.99 for frame classification and a detection mAP@50 of 94.4% on Kvasir-SEG, outperforming or matching state-of-the-art methods. Gradient-weighted Class Activation Maps (Grad-CAM) confirm that the model attends to clinically relevant lesion features. The framework is device-independent, operating across diverse endoscopic imaging systems without hardware-specific adaptation. These results demonstrate that a hierarchical, transfer-learning-driven pipeline with task-specific loss functions offers a robust, device-independent, and clinically meaningful approach to automated colorectal polyp analysis. PolypVision is freely available as a web application at https://polypvision.com, a DataBioX initiative, with a free usage tier open to all users.
☆ Precise Top-Layer Fabric Segmentation for Fabric Destacking with Edge- and Shape-Aware Deep Networks IEEE
Wenbo Dong, Dipankar Bhattacharya, Akinari Kobayashi, Akira Seino, Fuyuki Tokuda, Xuzhao Huang, Kai Tang, Norman C. Tien, Kazuhiro Kosuge
Fabric destacking requires precise segmentation of the topmost fabric layer, a task complicated by subtle fabric boundaries and high visual similarity between fabric layers. Existing semantic and edge-based segmentation approaches often struggle with these complexities, limiting the performance of robotic manipulation for different tasks. In this work, a novel segmentation training architecture tailored for top-layer fabric segmentation in stacked fabrics is proposed. The method extends the classical encoder-decoder framework by introducing two specialized branches - an edge-aware branch and a shape-aware branch - that are used to supervise the backbone network for better tuning. The edge-aware branch enhances boundary delineation, while the shape-aware branch guides the network to capture and align the overall fabric shape with reference masks derived from Computer Aided Design (CAD) models. Experiments on a real-world fabric dataset demonstrate that the training approach outperforms established baselines, verifying the effectiveness of the multi-branch design through both quantitative results and ablation studies.
comment: 7 pages, 3 figures. Published in IEEE ICMA 2025. Author's accepted manuscript. Code: https://github.com/bhattner143/top-layer-fab-seg
☆ DistilVDR: A Compact End-to-End Visual Document Retriever via Dual-Student Distillation
Visual document retrieval (VDR) is dominated by multi-billion-parameter models that are slow to index at full corpus scale and expensive to serve. Prior compression routes either train a smaller multi-vector encoder from scratch or distil only the query side; neither yields a compact single-vector retriever end-to-end. We present DistilVDR, a 524M end-to-end VDR system distilled bilaterally from a single 8B vision-language teacher under a pointwise cosine alignment loss. All supervision comes from the frozen teacher's embedding space, which was itself trained with relevance supervision, so the student objective needs no relevance labels, negative sampling, or contrastive term. We match VDR's text-query and image-document input asymmetry with an asymmetric encoder-only student that concentrates visual capacity on the document side and keeps the query side at 70M parameters. We release two variants that share the same encoders and training and differ only in the document encoder's visual-tile budget: DistilVDR-HiRes attains 61.74 average NDCG@5 on ViDoRe v1+v2+v3 (86.9% of the 8B teacher) and leads every reproduced sub-1B baseline on the high-resolution-sensitive v3 benchmark, while DistilVDR-Fast attains 59.98 at a 3 times smaller visual-token budget. Both variants store one million documents in a 15.6 times smaller index than the strongest sub-1B multi-vector baseline and index the corpus an order of magnitude faster. The code is available at https://github.com/Ryenhails/NanoVDR.
comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, 8 tables
☆ MedUP: Awakening Unified Understanding and Perception in Medical Vision-Language Models
Yuan Wang, Hualiang Wang, Yixin Chen, Songtao Jiang, Shujian Gao, Jiaming Lin, Siming Fu, Jian Wu, Zuozhu Liu
Medical Vision-Language Models (Med-VLMs) excel at verbalizing visual content, yet precise visual perception, segmentation, and grounding remain challenging. Existing approaches either verbalize regions as coordinate strings or rely on external modules that decouple perception from understanding, creating representation gaps for region-language alignment. We present MedUP, a Med-VLM that natively unifies perception and understanding within a shared token space. At its core lies UniMedTok, a region tokenizer that encodes masks as discrete tokens in the LLM vocabulary, enabling the model to seamlessly interleave mask tokens with text. We curate UniMed-Train, a 1.84M-instance corpus spanning text-guided segmentation, region-grounded understanding, medical VQA and CoT-based segmentation, and introduce UniMed-Bench for unified evaluation. Extensive experiments show that MedUP outperforms native, agentic, and dual-decoder Med-VLMs across all tasks while remaining competitive with specialist segmentors, demonstrating the strong potential of unified understanding and perception modeling.
comment: 10 pages, 6 figures
☆ InSight-doc: Agentic Visual Perception for Long-Document Understanding
Long-document understanding often requires reasoning over many visually rich pages, making inference costly and prone to context rot. In this work, we propose InSight-doc, an agentic visual perception framework that treats visual resolution as an adaptive reasoning-time resource. InSight-doc starts from low resolution and selectively zooms into high-resolution regions for finer evidence, without relying on any external retriever. To train such an agent, we construct an active-perception corpus of 17.9K high-quality SFT examples with region-level zoom-in trajectories, accompanied by 19.2K hard RL examples. Through SFT+RL, InSight-doc-8B improves the baseline by 4.3--16.4 accuracy points over document VQA benchmarks. On long documents, it reduces hallucination by more than 40% and inference latency by 41%--68% while maintaining an accuracy lead. Our code, datasets, and model are released at https://github.com/m-Just/InSight-doc .
☆ Gaussian Sculpting: End-to-End Controllable Surface Reconstruction via Field Optimization
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently enabled real-time novel view synthesis with impressive quality. However, it struggles to recover accurate surfaces under limited viewpoints and due to the inherent irregularity of Gaussian primitives. The resulting geometric errors are notoriously difficult to correct manually. To address these issues, we propose Gaussian Sculpting, a fully differentiable end-to-end framework for high-quality surface reconstruction. Our key insight is to anchor Gaussians onto an evolving differentiable surface, allowing them to guide signed distance field (SDF) optimization instead of extracting the surface only during post-processing. To enable stable gradient isolation during joint optimization, we design a bi-level training strategy in which the outer loop optimizes the geometry represented by the SDF, while the inner loop updates the Gaussians with the geometry fixed. We further impose constraints on Gaussian parameters to ensure consistency with the underlying surface, thereby improving both geometric and appearance fidelity during optimization. In addition, we introduce a multi-resolution subdivision scheme based on octree-like partitioning to preserve fine details while reducing memory consumption. Experiments on object-level scenes demonstrate that our method effectively removes redundant surfaces, recovers missing structures caused by limited viewpoints, and achieves strong reconstruction quality even at relatively low resolutions.
☆ BooST: Bridging Semantics and Motions for Efficient Skill Transfer
Skill abstraction---the process of learning reusable and temporally extended behaviors---has emerged as a key paradigm for improving sample efficiency and generalization in robot learning. For efficient skill transfer to real robots, learned skills must generalize across tasks and domains, remain robust to visual and dynamic perturbations, and be efficient enough for practical deployment. However, existing methods typically satisfy only a subset of these properties, as they capture either high-level semantic intent (what) or low-level motion dynamics (how). This incomplete skill transfer yields weak priors for policy learning, thereby demanding substantial in-domain data for downstream adaptation. To address these challenges, we introduce BooST, a two-stage framework that explicitly bridges semantics and motions to satisfy all three desiderata. BooST first leverages a cross-modal VQ-VAE to capture both semantic intent and motion dynamics, yielding a unified skill representation. It then distills this representation into a lightweight policy for efficient downstream adaptation to new tasks. Extensive experiments across simulation and real-robot settings demonstrate that BooST achieves superior few-shot adaptation, cross-domain skill transfer, and robustness to dynamic visual distractors, while maintaining a lightweight yet expressive design suitable for real-world deployment.
comment: Project page: https://boost-robots.github.io/
☆ Rethinking Data Efficiency in Industrial Dense Prediction: Pretraining Coherence, Not Inductive Bias, Determines ViTs Low-Data Advantage
Vision Transformers (ViTs) are widely believed to require more labeled data than CNNs for industrial dense prediction. Through controlled experiments on four industrial datasets, we show that the data-efficiency gap stems from pretraining incoherence, which refers to the statistical mismatch between ImageNet-pretrained ViT backbones and COCO-pretrained CNN necks, rather than from inherent self-attention deficits. We characterize the cross-architecture feature gap and propose a lightweight AlignBlock family for pyramid-level feature recalibration. Our core finding empirically identifies a data-efficiency frontier: for domain-proximal scenes with >= 200 samples, Swin-Graft surpasses YOLOv11x (terminal 703-shot: 0.973 vs 0.956 mAP@50); for domain-distant scenes, CNNs retain advantage (hook 141-shot: 0.900 vs 0.600 mAP@50). Grafted neck weights yield up to 2.5x the mAP of a randomly initialized neck.
comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, 17 tables. This paper targets industrial defect detection via vision transformer and CNN alignment grafting
☆ $π$-SUB: A Physics-Informed Synthetic Underwater Benchmark Dataset for Underwater Image Enhancement
This paper presents $π$-SUB, a physics-informed framework for generating synthetic underwater benchmark datasets that bridges the synthetic-to-real gap for Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE). The proposed framework extends the classical underwater image formation model by incorporating depth-dependent downwelling irradiance, biologically resolved absorption, and environmental scattering across all ten Jerlov water types, together with independently controllable residual phenomena. Using this framework, the $π$-SUB dataset consists of paired synthetic underwater-reference images spanning shallow-to-deep and coastal-to-oceanic environments. Extensive simulation studies have been carried out to evaluate $π$-SUB along two criteria namely hyper-realism and generalizability. For hyper-realism, $π$-SUB attains a global Frechet Inception Distance (FID) that is 46% lower than Syrea. For generalizability, four state-of-the-art UIE architectures (FUnIE-GAN, Pix2Pix, PUIE-Net, and Phaseformer) are used for comparative evaluation of $π$-SUB. These models were independently trained on six datasets including one real and five synthetic datasets and tested on six real-world benchmarks datasets. Across four UIE architectures and six real benchmark datasets, $π$-SUB improves UIQM by 4.18% over PHISWID (next best) and 9.46% over Syrea (next best), while reducing NIQE by 48.78% and 23.98%, respectively. These results establish $π$-SUB as a hyper-realistic and generalizable benchmark for developing the next generation of underwater image enhancement methods. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/airl-iisc/pi-SUB
comment: 13 pages
☆ A HamNoSys-Guided Dataset and Baselines for Fine-Grained Isolated Handshape Recognition in Sign Language
Purpose: Fine-grained handshape recognition supports computational sign-language transcription, recognition, and translation, but broad, phonetically defined visual inventories with signer-aware evaluation remain limited. This work introduces a benchmark grounded in the language-independent Hamburg Notation System (HamNoSys). Methods: A balanced dataset of 144,000 RGB images was collected from 15 participants for 160 handshape classes defined by the official HamNoSys 4 Handshapes Chart. ResNet-18 and ViT-B/16 were evaluated as appearance-based models, while a graph convolutional network and XGBoost were evaluated from hand landmarks. Both a class-stratified subject-dependent split and a 15-fold leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) protocol were used. The same model families were additionally assessed on LSWH100 and ASL Fingerspelling Dataset A for external context. Results: The subject-dependent benchmarks established reproducible reference performance across all four model families, whereas LOSO evaluation exposed a substantial reduction when recognition was required to generalise to unseen participants. On ASL Fingerspelling Dataset A, mean LOSO top-1 accuracy ranged from 82.20% to 87.40%. Conclusion: The documented acquisition, curation, and complementary evaluation protocols pro-vide a reproducible resource for fine-grained isolated-handshape research and for developing more accessible sign-language technologies.
☆ Iterative Erasure Count Is Not an Affine-Invariant Concept Dimension
How many directions does a neural representation use to encode a concept? A common answer repeatedly erases probe directions and reports the stopping count or cumulative removed rank. We show that both quantities can change under an information-preserving invertible reparameterization, so neither is intrinsically a concept dimension. We distinguish model-defined population quantities (generating dimension, sufficient linear dimension, and minimum guarding rank) from procedure-defined quantities such as stopping count and cumulative edit rank. In a population Gaussian construction, an invertible shear preserves the prediction problem and all three quantities, yet changes the cumulative Euclidean erasure count from one to two. The separation holds for Moore--Penrose ordinary least squares and every finite nonnegative ridge weight. For a two-output full-QR procedure matching our motivating video analysis, cumulative edit rank similarly changes from two to the ambient dimension four. Conversely, the complete cumulative metric-QR trajectory is affine-equivariant when its positive-definite metric, probe, regularizer, and tie-breaking are transported consistently; exact covariance is one corollary, not a canonical semantic metric. In a known-rank finite-sample Adam/QR calibration, identity mixing stops after one accepted update in all 20 large-sample runs, whereas each tested shear $a\in\{.5,.75,1,1.25,2\}$ accepts at least two updates in all 20 runs. Controlled reparameterizations of frozen V-JEPA2 features preserve rank-zero predictions yet alter later Euclidean trajectories under practical optimization. These visual contact experiments are stress tests, not estimates of contact dimension. Iterative erasure therefore returns a procedure-relative estimand jointly determined by representation geometry and the full measurement procedure, not a semantic dimension by itself.
comment: 15 pages, 3 figures. Code and results included as ancillary files. Tingan Jin, Shuhang Dong, and Haosong Li contributed equally
☆ Flow Straight to Reality: Perceptually Consistent Flow Matching for Efficient Image Restoration ECCV 2026
Image restoration is fundamentally constrained by the tradeoff between distortion and perception: minimizing pixel-wise error yields over-smoothed results, whereas optimizing for perceptual realism often introduces structural deviations. Recent approaches attempt to balance this tradeoff via posterior sampling or multi-stage generative pipelines, yet remain computationally expensive and architecturally complex. To overcome these limitations, we propose PCFlow (Perceptually Consistent Flow Matching), a unified framework that directly parameterizes a continuous transport from degraded observations to clean targets, jointly optimizing distortion and perceptual quality. While its latent consistency flow objective drives stable and efficient few-step inference, a Latent Consistency Perceptual Loss (LCPL) imposes semantic constraints directly on the guiding velocity field, steering the dynamics toward visually sharp data manifolds. Furthermore, recognizing the inherent conflict between structural and perceptual consistencies, we integrate a conflict-free gradient projection strategy to stabilize the multi-objective optimization landscape. Combined with lightweight, convolution-only backbone, PCFlow achieves competitive performance across diverse restoration tasks at a fraction of traditional computational costs.
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026. Code is available at https://github.com/aiimaginglab/PCFlow
☆ Dynamic Context Adapters: Efficiently Infusing History into Vision-and-Language Models
Historical context integration presents a fundamental challenge for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in sequential decision-making tasks. Current VLMs process visual inputs independently, which creates critical limitations for downstream applications that require temporal understanding. Direct incorporation of historical frames into Transformer inputs produces quadratic attention complexity and excessive memory consumption. Existing approaches suffer from significant drawbacks: computational inflation or substantial information loss through temporal compression. To address these challenges, we introduce Dynamic Context Adapter (DCA), a novel context injection approach for pretrained VLMs. Our method employs fixed-size, dynamically compressed memory to preserve historical semantics without frame concatenation. DCA bridges static VLMs and recurrent policies and enables memory capabilities in pretrained models while maintaining computational efficiency. DCA achieves over $25\%$ reduction in attention FLOPs and $13\%$ memory savings while improving performance on long-horizon tasks.
☆ Rethinking Text-Based Image Retrieval in Specific Domain
Driven by the rapid advancement of vision-language representation learning, Text-based Image Retrieval (TBIR) has made notable progress. However, existing benchmarks are predominantly constructed on an exclusive single-match assumption between query and images. While effective in general scenarios, this assumption fails to reflect practical system performance in specific domains (e.g., surveillance), where a single query often corresponds to multiple relevant candidate images. To address this limitation, we design a Domain-Specific Multi-Match Text-based Image Retrieval (DSMM-TBIR) data engine. Leveraging this engine, we construct Security Multi-Match TBIR (SecMM-TBIR), a benchmark comprising 50k surveillance images with 200 comprehensive queries. Furthermore, we observe that vanilla contrastive learning in specific domains suffers from severe false negatives, forcing the model to push apart semantically similar pairs and thus degrading retrieval performance. We propose the Semantic-Aware Fine-Tuning (SAFT) framework to address semantic compression in specific domains, which incorporates Semantic-Aware Soft-Label Supervision (SASS) and Intra-modal Structural Distillation (ISD) to establish a promising paradigm for domain-specific TBIR tasks. Experiments across diverse CLIP-like models demonstrate that SAFT yields an average mAP@20 gain of 7.8 points on SecMM-TBIR over standard image-text contrastive (ITC) fine-tuning, while also improving general-domain performance. The entire benchmark will be released to facilitate further research.
comment: 13 pages
☆ Unlocking the Power of Medical Tabular Data via Semantic-Aware Multimodal Pre-training
Yingsheng Liu, Haiming Li, Jingmin Zhu, Jiajun Sun, Victoria Mar, Monika Janda, H. Peter Soyer, Zongyuan Ge, Zhen Yu
While vision-language models dominate medical representation learning, unstructured text lacks the dense, quantitative diagnostic phenotypes inherent in structured clinical tables. However, existing multimodal pre-training methods underutilize this potential due to semantic-agnostic designs that treat tabular inputs as flat vectors and employ unstable continuous regression objectives. To overcome this, we propose a novel semantic-aware framework explicitly modeling the intrinsic two-dimensional structure of tabular data. First, addressing the inter-feature hierarchy of varying diagnostic importance, we introduce Importance-Aware Adaptive Masking to construct a label-free curriculum prioritizing salient features. Second, addressing the intra-feature continuity-discreteness duality, we propose a Soft-Label Discretized Module that replaces unstable numerical regression with stable distribution matching, thereby mathematically preserving ordinal relationships. Extensive experiments across large-scale dermatology (SLICE-3D, HOP) and ophthalmology (EyePACS) datasets establish a new state-of-the-art (SOTA), demonstrating exceptional robustness and cross-domain generalizability.
comment: INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MEDICAL IMAGE COMPUTING AND COMPUTER ASSISTED INTERVENTION (ORAL presentation)
☆ SparSTAR: Sparse Attention for SpaceTime AutoRegressive Video Synthesis
InfinityStar extends visual autoregressive generation to video through a sequence of image and clip pyramids. Its changing scale and cross-clip context, however, leave late-scale attention costly and make sparse patterns reused from diffusion or image VAR models unreliable. We introduce SparSTAR, a training-free block-sparse attention method tailored to this setting. At each expensive scale and attention head, SparSTAR scores contiguous key blocks from the current query and key activations, retains required conditioning context, and executes the selected blocks through a forward-only sparse path. We analyze cross-scale consistency within a clip, pattern persistence across clip boundaries, and quality degradation as reuse spans increasingly distant scales. Across these analyses, important key blocks shift, showing that recomputing block selection at each target scale is more reliable than reusing a transferred mask. On 720p text-to-video and image-to-video generation, SparSTAR preserves every token and refinement scale while providing about a 1.6x end-to-end speedup and maintaining VBench and paired-output reconstruction fidelity close to dense InfinityStar.
☆ SafeCap: Improving LVLM Safety with Image Captioning Reinforcement Learning
Caoyuan Ma, Wenpu Liu, Weichu Xie, Tian Gu, Shilei Zhao, Lingxi Min, Shuai Dong, Yuqi Xu, Ji Zhao, Ziyue Wang, Wenzheng Chang, Taiqiang Wu, Yongfu Zhu, Wenqi Shao, Yinqiang Zheng
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that exploit visual inputs to bypass safety alignment inherited from their language backbones. We propose SafeCap, a reinforcement-learning framework that aligns LVLMs through learned self-captioning. SafeCap trains a policy model to first generate a safety-relevant image caption and then produce a final answer; the caption is further optimized by whether it enables a frozen LLM to reach a safety-aligned decision. This caption-mediated objective encourages the policy to expose visual cues relevant to safe response generation rather than relying solely on direct refusal supervision. Across five multimodal safety benchmarks and six vision-utility benchmarks, SafeCap substantially improves aggregate safety performance under its intended DirectCap protocol, with gains of 3.7-19.0 points in safety average across four model settings while maintaining comparable or improved vision utility. Under controlled comparisons on matched backbones and data, SafeCap outperforms safety SFT, DPO, and SafeGRPO, demonstrating the effectiveness of caption-mediated reinforcement learning for multimodal safety alignment.
comment: 16pages, 4 figures. Preprint. Project page: https://safe-vlm.github.io/SafeCap/ ; code: https://github.com/Safe-VLM/SafeCap
☆ Towards Color-Faithful Low-Light Image Enhancement via Adaptive Color Debiasing and Saturation Rectification
Low-light imaging often introduces color bias caused by the low signal-to-noise ratio and the image formation process. Although recent low-light image enhancement methods have achieved strong brightness recovery, faithful color restoration remains challenging, manifesting as overall color bias together with local under- and over-saturation. To address this issue, we propose CAGE, a cylindrical color correction framework with adaptive color debiasing and gamut-harmonized saturation rectification for color-faithful low-light image enhancement. We first introduce AdaLAB, a cylindrical adaptive LAB color space that provides a decoupled and image-specific basis for uniform color correction. Building on this color space, we further develop AdaCCT, an adaptive cylindrical color transform with forward and inverse transforms for the conversion between RGB and AdaLAB color space, as well as necessary color debiasing and saturation rectification. The forward transform suppresses embedded color bias before backbone enhancement by reorganizing the chromatic distribution through chromatic-plane shifting and scaling, while the inverse transform achieves faithful saturation rectification through out-of-gamut lightness compensation. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that CAGE achieves more faithful color restoration, specifically reduces color bias and saturation abnormality, and delivers better overall visual quality across different low-light enhancement backbones. The code is available at https://yangzhichen763.github.io/CAGE/.
comment: Accepted by ACMMMM 2026
☆ RadFusion: Towards Threshold-Controllable Radiology Report Generation
Automated radiology report generation is advancing rapidly in response to the shortage of radiologists, yet unlike a perception model, existing generation models offer no control over the sensitivity-specificity trade-off of their diagnostic content. Such control is essential because clinical scenarios diverge: emergency triage prioritizes sensitivity to reduce missed findings, whereas confirmatory interpretation emphasizes specificity to limit unnecessary interventions. A single fixed report can neither adapt to these scenarios nor support the ROC-based validation widely expected for regulatory clearance. We introduce RadFusion, a framework that equips report generation with threshold controllability. Our method fuses a multi-label classifier, which provides per-disease confidence scores, with a VQA-based report generator, which describes medical findings in detail; an LLM then rewrites the report so that its stated diagnoses follow the classifier's decisions at the selected threshold while staying grounded in the generator's descriptions. On MIMIC-CXR, the performance of RadFusion conforms to the classifier's ROC curve: sweeping the threshold and mapping the reports back to class labels reproduces the classifier's validated ROC performance. This conformance makes generated reports quantitatively evaluable through ROC analysis, strengthening the case for regulatory clearance, and enables operating-point selection that matches report behavior to clinical context. Moreover, combining the two model types improves diagnostic accuracy over uncontrolled generation: sensitivity increases by 6.9% at matched specificity, and specificity by 20.7% at matched sensitivity. These results show that RadFusion makes report generation clinically adaptable, quantitatively verifiable, and diagnostically more reliable.
☆ DSAR: Dual-Stream Autoregressive Modeling of Temporal Cloth Dynamics for Photorealistic Animatable Avatars ECCV 2026
Creating photorealistic and temporally coherent animatable human avatars from RGB videos remains challenging. Current methods struggle to capture realistic cloth dynamics, producing over-smoothed appearance or severe artifacts on out-of-distribution poses. This limitation stems from a fundamental oversight: existing approaches neglect the temporal causality inherent in cloth physics, where current states emerge from previous states through temporal evolution rather than instantaneous skeletal configurations alone. Without explicit modeling of this causal structure, networks learn pose-appearance correlations instead of motion evolution, leading to poor generalization. We introduce a dual-stream autoregressive framework that explicitly models both observable geometric information and implicit internal state. The geometric stream propagates surface displacement from the previous frame, while the state stream fuses current features with historical states retrieved from a memory bank. Motion-adaptive aggregation handles spatially-varying dynamics, and adaptive regularization balances smoothness with flexibility. Experiments on challenging datasets demonstrate significant improvements in rendering quality, temporal consistency, and generalization to motion patterns beyond training distributions, validating that dual-stream temporal modeling enables realistic cloth dynamics.
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026. 25 pages, 7 figures, including supplementary material
☆ SapiensID 2.0: Aligning Human Recognition Foundation Models with Human Perception
While foundation models have significantly advanced human recognition across diverse modalities, they predominantly rely on static, geometric feature extraction. This approach fundamentally diverges from human perception. Consequently, current models often suffer from "semantic blindness," overfitting to transient noise while failing to leverage invariant soft biometrics, and struggle to capture temporal motion signatures. To bridge this gap, we propose SapiensID 2.0, a human recognition framework enriched with both semantic and temporal awareness. To overcome the lack of soft-biometric annotations, we transfer zero-shot semantic knowledge from Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) into a discriminative embedding space. We resolve the dimensional mismatch between these spaces using Invariant Trait Alignment (ITA) to distill core persistent traits, and Transient Noise Disentanglement (TND) to decouple artifacts like clothing. Furthermore, we design a Kinematic Semantic Attention Head (K-SAH) that extends spatial attention across temporal windows. By tracking semantic patches over time, K-SAH captures rich kinematic signatures without requiring large-scale video datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SapiensID 2.0 achieves state-of-the-art performance across image- and video-based person re-identification and gait recognition, while maintaining robust face recognition capabilities.
☆ When Vision Becomes Text: Visual Token Pruning via Cross-Modal Residual Guidance in VLMs
Abundant visual information strengthens vision-language model (VLM) perception, yet massive visual tokens raise inference costs. Existing visual token pruning methods rely on similarity-based guidance, which exploits pairwise text-vision and vision-vision token correlations for compression. However, such methods only capture local layer-level signals and overlook the whole inference process in VLM. In this paper, we revisit VLM inference and present a new efficient guidance scheme that complements similarity-based guidance. In particular, we identify a key observation: as LLM layers deepen, text tokens continuously aggregate visual information via self-attention and progressively absorb partial visual content into textual representations. To quantify this phenomenon, we propose Cross Modal Absorption (CMA) from a geometric representation perspective to measure how much visual information is absorbed by text, revealing that more visual tokens in deeper layers can be approximately explained by the text subspace. We accordingly propose Cross Modal Residual (CMR). It projects visual tokens onto the text subspace via Tikhonov regularized least squares and exploits reconstruction residuals to quantify visual information that cannot be explained by text. Finally, based on CMR, we present SIEVE, a training-free visual token compression method that combines CMR, text-attention relevance, and residual-space diversity to retain task-relevant and complementary tokens. Experiments on diverse VLM architectures verify the effectiveness of SIEVE. For instance, on LLaVA-NeXT-7B, SIEVE keeps only $11.1\%$ of visual tokens while preserving $97.5\%$ of the original average performance, achieving $3.62\times$ prefill speedup, $2.49\times$ end-to-end speedup, and a $6.02\times$ KV-cache reduction.
☆ Bridging Event Streams and DiT: Event-Guided Video Frame Interpolation
Guixu Lin, Yuyang Yu, Xiang Ji, Linyao Chen, Zhengwei Yin, Mengshun Hu, Mingdeng Cao, Shengfeng He, Yinqiang Zheng
Latent diffusion models have recently advanced video frame interpolation by synthesizing intermediate frames between input images. However, handling large temporal gaps and complex motion remains challenging, often resulting in motion blur, structural distortions, and temporal inconsistencies. Event cameras provide high-temporal-resolution motion cues that are well suited for bridging these gaps and improving interpolation quality. To exploit this advantage without training an event-assisted model from scratch, we propose an adapter-based framework that incorporates event-derived cues into a pre-trained image-to-video diffusion model with minimal architectural changes. Specifically, our method leverages Image Warped Events (IWEs) and bidirectional sparse optical flow to provide spatially and temporally aligned guidance during generation. By injecting these event-guided structural and motion cues into the diffusion process, our approach reduces interpolation artifacts and improves both reconstruction fidelity and temporal coherence. Experimental results on real and synthetic benchmarks show that our method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. The project page is at https://joseph-lin-tech.github.io/BridgeEventDiT-VFI/.
comment: https://joseph-lin-tech.github.io/BridgeEventDiT-VFI/
☆ FUSE: Frame-Unified Stress Estimation from Facial Video IEEE
Automatic stress detection from facial video offers a practical path to non-intrusive affect monitoring, yet existing video-based approaches commonly decompose full recordings into short temporal windows before classification. This design introduces additional choices regarding window length, overlap, and aggregation, while limiting direct analysis of temporal information across the entire recording. In this study, we present FUSE (Frame-Unified Stress Estimation), a facial-video stress detection framework that processes complete recordings as a single input without temporal windowing or external segmentation. The name reflects the defining operation of the method: rather than dividing a recording into short clips, all frames are fused into one unified two-dimensional representation from which the stress state is estimated. This unification is realized by folding the temporal dimension into the channel dimension of the spatial representation, and the resulting high-dimensional input is processed using a unified asymmetric-attention architecture. At a temporal stride of t = 1, FUSE retains the full 120-second recording as one input, corresponding to 3,600 frames at 30 fps. Experiments on a 58-subject stress dataset using a stratified subject-level protocol evaluate seven temporal-stride configurations, ranging from full-frame input to sparse subsampling. FUSE achieves the highest test accuracy of 69.44% at t = 15, while the full-frame configuration remains competitive at 69.03%. Across the stride range, computational cost varies from 12.48 to 348.78 GFLOPs, showing the trade-off between temporal density and efficiency. These results demonstrate that temporal windowing is not required for effective facial-video stress detection in this setting, and that complete-recording inference can be achieved within a single unified architecture.
comment: The paper has been accepted at: IEEE | 2026 9th International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (PRAI 2026)
☆ Stream Forcing: Constructing Unified Training Trajectory for Robust Streaming Video Generation
Yueting Zhu, Yuehao Song, Kaicheng Zhang, Bao Tang, Shaoyu Chen, Qian Zhang, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang
Streaming video generation holds strong potential for world modeling, where future frames must be inferred online sequentially to form a continuous video stream. However, streaming video diffusion models introduce a fundamental train-inference mismatch: inference follows a specialized denoising order, whereas advanced training strategies typically require diverse noise-level configurations. To address this trade-off between train-inference consistency and training coverage, we reformulate the video diffusion sampling as a frame-indexed stochastic process over noise levels. Within this stochastic process space, we construct a continuous training trajectory along which the sampling schedule progressively evolves from independent sampling to inference-consistent sampling. We further introduce a joint calibration algorithm and a temporal correlative sampling algorithm to ensure trajectory smoothness and cross-frame correlation. Building on these designs, we propose Stream Forcing, a unified training framework for streaming video generation that balances training sufficiency and inference efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Stream Forcing significantly improves generation quality with a 36.6% FVD improvement on the UCF-101 benchmark. Furthermore, our method facilitates robust zero-shot extrapolation to long-horizon video generation with a 27.9% FVD improvement on the UCF-101 benchmark.
comment: 15 pages,6 figures
☆ MammoMix: Leveraging Mixture of Experts for Robust Mammogram Breast Detection
Breast lesion detection in mammography remains a challenging task due to variations in image quality, lesion appearance, and population demographics across datasets. While current object detectors such as YOLO and DETR achieve strong results on individual datasets, their performance often degrades when trained on or applied across heterogeneous sources. To address this, we propose MammoMix, a novel framework based on Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm for robust and generalizable lesion detection. In MammoMix, each expert model is trained on a specific domain, allowing it to specialize in distinct characteristics of its source data. A gating mechanism adaptively weighs contributions from each expert based on input image, combining their outputs to enable domain-adaptive inference. To improve reliability, we further incorporate a calibration module, MoCAE, which adjusts confidence scores to reflect true predictive uncertainty. We evaluate MammoMix on 3 public mammography datasets: CSAW, DDSM, and DMID, covering diverse clinical settings. Results show that MammoMix outperforms baseline detectors in both average precision and reliability, particularly on datasets with greater variability. Our findings demonstrate that expert specialization and calibrated ensemble fusion significantly enhance model generalization and robustness. MammoMix offers a promising step toward dependable AI-assisted breast cancer screening across real-world clinical domains.
comment: Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2025
☆ DynaPPI: A Large-scale Dynamic Protein Dataset for AI-driven Advances in Protein Interactomics NeurIPS 2025
Diffusion models have been widely explored in protein backbone generation due to their powerful generation capabilities.However, in today's AI-driven biological research, predicting the structure of unknown multi-chain protein aggregates (called "complexes" in biology) remains an unsolved challenge.This is because existing static or dynamic protein datasets focus solely on static snapshots or single-entity trajectories, neglecting the dynamic process of multiple monomers forming complexes.To alleviate this dilemma, we present DynaPPI, a dynamic protein dataset comprising molecular dynamics (MD) trajectories of protein complex formation from dissociated chains to the bound state, as a pivotal resource to bridge the gap between static structural biology and the inherently temporal nature of dynamic molecular interactions.Benefiting from this dataset, diffusion models can explicitly learn the dynamic binding trajectories of known complexes and accurately predict the structures of unknown complexes based on their diverse generative properties, thereby further catalyzing AI-driven structural biology and protein interactomics.
comment: 9 pages, 1 figure, 39th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025) Workshop: AI4Science
☆ Lesion-Aware Adaptive Fourier Neural Operator for CT-to-PSMA PET Synthesis in Prostate Cancer
Rashmi Bhaskara, Waleed M. Almutairi, Matthew Gopaulchan, Maram Musaad Alqurashi, Francis Asamoah, Alex Ocana, Clinton D. Bahler, Oluwaseyi M. Oderinde
Deep learning models that synthesize PET from CT or MRI can reduce patient dose and scanner demand, but are typically optimized with global losses such as L1 or mean squared error (MSE) that treat all voxels similarly. In whole-body PSMA-PET, tumor voxels occupy only a small fraction of the volume, yet carry the clinically relevant activity signal; as a result, models can achieve high structural similarity index measure (SSIM) and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) while still underestimating lesion activity or failing to preserve tumor-specific structure. Radiomics provides biologically meaningful descriptors of tumor intensity and texture, but direct radiomics conditioning is time-consuming because it requires feature extraction from delineated lesion regions. We propose LAFNO, a Lesion-Aware Adaptive Fourier Neural Operator for CT-to-PSMA-PET synthesis that replaces high-dimensional radiomics conditioning with two efficient CT-derived proxy channels. Motivated by radiomics analysis of PSMA-avid tumor core and peritumoral regions, LAFNO uses a contrast proxy for local density variation and a disorder proxy for local texture heterogeneity, both injected into the model bottleneck. LAFNO combines whole-volume reconstruction with lesion-level total lesion activity (TLA), tumor-core contrast, and peritumoral supervision. We evaluated LAFNO against four baseline architectures on the TCIA PSMA-PET-CT-Lesions dataset. LAFNO remained competitive on whole-volume image quality, achieving SSIM of 0.960 and 0.938 for 18F- and 68Ga-PSMA, respectively, while reducing per-patient TLA error to 48.3% and 64.0% for 18F- and 68Ga-PSMA, respectively, and achieving the highest tumor-core radiomics reproducibility across all feature classes for both tracers. Peritumoral reproducibility remained tracer-dependent, indicating that biological fidelity in synthetic PSMA-PET remains challenging.
☆ GeoSeg-OV: Bridging Geospatial Gaps with Structural Guidance for Open-Vocabulary Remote Sensing Segmentation
Ruizhong Liu, Tingzhang Luo, Zaiyan Zhang, Jundong Chen, Hongruixuan Chen, Shaoguang Huang, Hongyan Zhang
Open-vocabulary remote sensing segmentation has recently emerged as a promising paradigm that enables pixel-level recognition of arbitrary categories specified by natural language, including classes unseen during training. However, geospatial domain shifts caused by heterogeneous regions, spatial resolutions, and acquisition platforms weaken visual-text matching and limit cross-dataset generalization. Recent attempts have begun to incorporate auxiliary vision foundation models (VFMs), typically coupling their features with text embeddings as additional matching evidence. However, this strategy may introduce inconsistent matching signals while leaving the structure-sensitive representations of VFMs insufficiently exploited. We therefore propose GeoSeg-OV, which decouples auxiliary VFM features from visual-text matching and repurposes them as structural guidance for cost aggregation and decoding. GeoSeg-OV constructs an orientation-robust cost volume from multi-rotation CLIP features, while a frozen VFM extracts multi-scale structure-sensitive features in parallel. We propose Structure-Guided Aggregation (SGA), which integrates cost tokens and CLIP semantic guidance with VFM-derived pairwise structural biases for coherent spatial propagation, followed by text-conditioned class-wise reasoning. We further introduce Cost-Aware Decoding (CAD) to adaptively refine and fuse multi-scale semantic and structural guidance based on the current decoder context. On the global High-Resolution Land Cover (HRLC) benchmark spanning seven datasets across six continents, GeoSeg-OV outperforms the state-of-the-art by +2.5 and +2.7 average mIoU under two training settings. A large-scale zero-shot case study further demonstrates its generalization across geographic domains and category systems without target-domain annotations or retraining.
comment: Code and benchmark: https://github.com/zzaiyan/GeoSeg-OV
☆ DriveVLA-M0: Failure-Aware Memory Augmentation for Autonomous Driving
Zebin Xing, Yupeng Zheng, Qiang Chen, Linbo Wang, Yichen Zhang, Pengxuan Yang, Junli Wang, Deheng Qian, Xiaoqing Ye, Junyu Han, Yifeng Pan, Qichao Zhang, Dongbin Zhao
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving by enabling unified reasoning across perception, language, and planning. However, existing approaches lack mechanisms to exploit past failures or adapt to distribution shifts, causing the model to persistently underperform on similar scenarios where it has previously failed. In this paper, we propose DriveVLA-M0, a retrieval-augmented VLA with failure-aware latent memory. We construct a latent memory pool that stores failure cases along with their structure scene representations and expert trajectory labels, and design a dedicated Retrieve Model that decouples static road structure and dynamic agent interactions to enable structurally grounded retrieval. At inference time, retrieved cases are injected into the model via a lightweight decoupled LoRA-based test-time training (TTT) mechanism, allowing targeted and scenario-specific correction without modifying the backbone. Extensive experiments on NAVSIMv1 and NAVSIMv2 benchmark demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms prior methods, achieving 94.1 PDMS on Navtest and 47.0 EPDMS on Navhard with only 26.44 ms TTT backward latency overhead. Furthermore, we show that DriveVLA-M0 scales effectively with additional memory, enabling training-free performance gains through memory expansion. The code is available at https://github.com/ZebinX/DriveVLA-M0.
☆ A second-order theory of texture for depth from focus ECCV 2026
We present a theory of textured appearance of optically rough surfaces based on wave optics, emphasizing the role of texture for passive depth from focus. Our theory shows that even surfaces that traditional computer vision would consider textureless can produce textured appearance, due to subjective speckle from surface microgeometry. We analyze the properties of this second-order texture, and show that we can enhance its contrast under natural ambient lighting by simply using a narrowband spectral filter. Doing so results in dramatic improvements in passive depth reconstruction of seemingly textureless scenes, as we demonstrate through extensive theory, simulations, and real-world experiments.
comment: ECCV 2026, project website: https://imaging.cs.cmu.edu/second-order-texture/
☆ FormStruct-Bench:A Hierarchical and Diagnostic Benchmark for Table-Form Document Structure Recognition
Transforming table-form documents into machine-processable records requires recovering not only their visible content but also the multilevel structure that organizes it. However, existing benchmarks evaluate either holistic document outputs or conventional table grids, and their aggregate scores provide little insight into where structural failures occur. We introduce FormStruct-Bench, a hierarchical and diagnostic benchmark that evaluates table-form document structure recognition at both the document level and progressively finer component levels, allowing aggregate performance to be traced back to specific structural failure modes. To construct auditable ground truth at scale, we annotate 70 reusable templates and expand them into 7,000 verified instances through a provenance-preserving Director--Artist--Verifier pipeline; all 1,100 instances in the template-disjoint test set additionally receive human review. Our evaluation protocol uses five primary metrics and three structure-specific diagnostics across page, schema, and component levels, together with slices over difficulty, structural constraints, and visual degradation. Across 14 API-hosted and locally deployable systems plus two SFT variants, the best document-level score reaches 83.85%, whereas the best reported fine-grained structural score remains below 18%. These results reveal a pronounced gap between reading document content and recovering the hierarchy and regional organization required for reliable table-form understanding.
☆ Share First, Route What Remains: A Unified Framework for Token-Adaptive MoE Computation
Mixture-of-experts (MoE) models have recently moved beyond routing a fixed number of complete experts. Shared-expert designs preserve reusable knowledge, fine-grained methods vary computation within experts, and dynamic routers adapt the number of active experts. Yet these decisions are usually made independently, overlooking a basic dependency: extracting reusable computation changes both what remains and how much expert capacity the remainder needs. We study this dependency by decomposing sparsely upcycled feed-forward experts into key-value channels. Co-activated experts align at a subset of value positions; removing these positions changes expert preference; and greater shared coverage is associated with lower residual expert demand. These observations lead to one principle: share first, then route what remains. We instantiate it in UniF-MoE, a unified framework for token-adaptive MoE computation. Each expert is partitioned into aligned blocks. A shared-demand score sets the shared block count and pathway weight, key prototypes select the shared content, and the complementary demand determines the residual expert count through cumulative routing mass. A Gram regularizer separates and normalizes router embeddings, promoting diverse routing directions, sparse expert overlap, and a simple routing geometry. Experiments on DomainBed and GLUE show that this unified design improves predictive performance over representative static and dynamic MoEs while reducing activated computation, inference latency, and memory. Code is available at https://github.com/existence0420/UniF-MoE.
comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, and 7 tables; includes supplementary material. Code is available at https://github.com/existence0420/UniF-MoE
☆ Towards Unified Dynamic Face Landmark Detection
Although advancements in face landmark detection (FLD) methods continue to push performance boundaries, they overlook two major functional limitations: (1) different network parameters need to be trained independently for each ``$N$-point'' benchmark dataset, and (2) a model trained on an ``$N$-point'' dataset reliably outputs only the $N$ landmarks. In our work, we first conceptualize Face Part-Anchored Landmark Positions (FPALPs), wherein each landmark is treated as a progression value between zero (start) and one (end) along a face part's contour. Every landmark can be expressed in the FPALP format, irrespective of its source dataset, hence unlocking the ability to unify all ``$N$-point'' datasets into a single dataset. Secondly, we represent each landmark with an FPALP-based query, refine it progressively with a cross-modality decoder, and predict its coordinates based on the final representation. Our approach, called Unified Dynamic FLD, embodies these two design choices and streamlines the landmark detection pipeline by enabling (1) a single model to learn on any number of ``$N$-point'' datasets, and (2) yield any number of specific landmark predictions by loading the designated landmark queries at runtime. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets show that our method delivers these benefits while remaining competitive with, and in several cases outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods.
comment: 9 pages, 6 figures in Main Paper. 13 pages, 3 figures in Appendix
☆ CasDeblurGS: Cascaded 2D-to-3D Multi-View Consistency for 3D Gaussian Splatting from Two Blurry Images ECCV 2026
Free-viewpoint 3D scene media is increasingly important for immersive applications, yet practical capture often suffers from severe view sparsity and motion blur. Although neural rendering has advanced sparse-view synthesis, existing blur-aware methods typically require substantial multi-view redundancy, accurate camera poses, or costly per-scene optimization. We address a stringent yet practical setting: reconstructing a coherent 3D scene from only two motion-blurred images with known intrinsics, without input-view poses, auxiliary sharp images, or per-scene test-time optimization. To this end, we propose CasDeblurGS, a cascaded framework that progressively recovers reliable cross-view information from local 2D correspondences to global 3D guidance. Stage 1 constructs locally reliable guidance through occlusion-aware correspondence filtering, while Stage 2 aggregates the intermediate restorations into a provisional pose-free 3D Gaussian representation whose input-view re-renders provide dense global guidance for final restoration. The resulting views enable a more coherent 3D representation and higher-quality novel-view synthesis. Experiments on real-world and synthetic Deblur-NeRF scenes show consistent gains over strong baselines, improving PSNR by 1.19 dB and 2.11 dB, respectively. Progressive ablations, cross-view correspondence visualization, and camera reprojection analysis further demonstrate improvements in both rendering quality and multi-view geometric consistency.
comment: Accepted to the ECCV 2026 MUSTCV Workshop. Project page: https://haeyun-choi.github.io/Cascaded2D3D_page/
☆ ENCORE: Efficient Noise Context-Aware Representation for Low-Dose CT Denoising
While deep learning-based denoising has become widely adopted in low-dose CT, conventional models use generic architectures designed for natural images, failing to account for non-stationary and spatially correlated CT noise characteristics. To address this, we propose an Efficient Noise COntext-aware REpresentation (ENCORE) framework that explicitly leverages CT noise characteristics and anatomical features. First, we reformulate the noise synthesis procedure based on a realistic noise distribution beyond the conventional Gaussian approximation, establishing a rigorous foundation for training pair generation. Next, we extract local noise power and correlation contexts to guide the denoising process. To fully leverage the potential of noise context, we propose a FlyingConv module, which adaptively changes convolution weights for each local image region. Notably, our approach demonstrates substantial gains in both denoising quality and computational efficiency. Furthermore, manipulating the intensity of the noise context maps at inference time enables zero-shot conditional denoising, allowing for dynamic control over the output image texture. The entire pipeline is available at https://github.com/minwoo-yu/ENCORE.git
♻ ☆ OpenVisTool: An Open Recipe for Synthesizing Instructive Visual Tool-Use Trajectories
Changhao Xiang, Shilin Zhang, Zheng Ma, Kanzhi Cheng, Ruize Ma, Yi Feng, Jianbing Zhang, Zhi Wang, Zhen Wu, Xinyu Dai, Lewei Lu
Visual tool use has emerged as a fundamental capability for multimodal agents to actively acquire evidence beyond a fixed image encoding. The prevailing recipe learns this capability from teacher-generated trajectories filtered for answer correctness, implicitly assuming that every successful demonstration provides effective supervision. We argue this assumption is flawed: a strong teacher often reaches the correct answer without needing its tool calls, and imitating such trajectories teaches a student that tool calls accompany correct answers, not that tool observations ground them. We present OpenVisTool, an open framework for constructing instructive visual tool-use trajectories that provide effective supervision for tool learning. The key insight is that a trajectory should be retained only if its answer is correct (outcome validity) and its tool observations causally contribute to that answer (causal utility). The framework operates in three stages: difficulty screening to select queries that are not reliably answerable without tools, domain-specific trajectory synthesis to elicit coherent tool-use trajectories, and supervision verification to jointly test both conditions. Rather than encouraging models to imitate tool calls, the resulting supervision teaches when and how visual evidence should be acquired. Using this framework, we construct OpenVisTool-42K, a dataset spanning five visual reasoning domains, together with OpenVisTool-Bench, a benchmark covering the same domains. Across four backbones (4B-27B), fine-tuning on OpenVisTool-42K consistently improves visual tool-use performance and yields gains on two out-of-distribution benchmarks; the larger models approach leading closed-source systems. The evidence suggests that effective visual tool use is learned from causally grounded supervision rather than tool-calling patterns.
♻ ☆ 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 and extending geometric deep learning from groups of symmetries to categories of transformations.
comment: Accepted at ICML 2026 as a spotlight paper with oral presentation
♻ ☆ MuSS: A Large-Scale Dataset and Cinematic Narrative Benchmark for Multi-Shot Subject-to-Video Generation
Haojie Zhang, Di Wu, Bingyan Liu, Linjie Zhong, Yuancheng Wei, Xingsong Ye, Nanqing Liu, Yaling Liang
While video foundation models excel at single-shot generation, real-world cinematic storytelling inherently relies on complex multi-shot sequencing. Further progress is constrained by the absence of datasets that address three core challenges: authentic narrative logic, spatiotemporal text-video alignment conflicts, and the "copy-paste" dilemma prevalent in Subject-to-Video (S2V) generation. To bridge this gap, we introduce MuSS, a large-scale, dual-track dataset tailored for multi-shot video and S2V generation. Sourced from over 3,000 movies, MuSS explicitly supports both complex montage transitions and subject-centric narratives. To construct this dataset, we pioneer a progressive captioning pipeline that eliminates contextual conflicts by ensuring local shot-level accuracy before enforcing global narrative coherence. Crucially, we implement a cross-shot matching mechanism to fundamentally eradicate the S2V copy-paste shortcut. Alongside the dataset, we propose the Cinematic Narrative Benchmark, featuring a visual-logic-driven paradigm and a novel Anti-Copy-Paste Variance (ACP-Var) metric to rigorously assess continuous storytelling and 3D structural consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while current baselines struggle with continuous narrative logic or degenerate into trivial 2D sticker generators, our MuSS-augmented model achieves state-of-the-art narrative effectiveness and cross-shot identity preservation.
comment: 17 pages, 9 figues
♻ ☆ Progressive Semantic Communication for Efficient Edge-Cloud Vision-Language Models IEEE
Deploying Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on edge devices remains challenging due to their substantial computational and memory demands, which exceed the capabilities of resource-constrained embedded platforms. Conversely, fully offloading inference to the cloud is often impractical in bandwidth-limited environments, where transmitting raw visual data introduces substantial latency overhead. While recent edge-cloud collaborative architectures attempt to partition VLM workloads across devices, they typically rely on transmitting fixed-size representations, lacking adaptability to dynamic network conditions and failing to fully exploit semantic redundancy. In this paper, we propose a progressive semantic communication framework for edge-cloud VLM inference, using a Meta AutoEncoder that compresses visual tokens into adaptive, progressively refinable representations, enabling plug-and-play deployment with off-the-shelf VLMs without additional fine-tuning. This design allows flexible transmission at different information levels, providing a controllable trade-off between communication cost and semantic fidelity. We implement a full end-to-end edge-cloud system comprising an embedded NXP i.MX95 platform and a GPU server, communicating over bandwidth-constrained networks. Experimental results show that, at 1 Mbps uplink, the proposed progressive scheme significantly reduces network latency compared to full-edge and full-cloud solutions, while maintaining high semantic consistency even under high compression. The implementation code will be released upon publication at https://github.com/open-ep/ProSemComVLM.
comment: Accepted for publication in the 2026 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM). Extended version with additional figures and appendices
♻ ☆ Multimodal Ambivalence and Hesitancy Recognition via Cross-Attention and Gated Fusion
We present a multimodal framework for Ambivalence/Hesitancy (A/H) recognition in video, developed for the ABAW11 challenge at ECCV 2026. The proposed approach fuses textual, acoustic, and visual modalities extracted from the BAH dataset using three pretrained encoders: F2LLM-v2-0.6B for transcripts (1024-d), WavLM-Large for audio (1024-d), and VideoMAE V2 for facial video (768-d). We first establish comprehensive unimodal baselines using classical classifiers (MLP, Random Forest, GBDT), each optimized via Optuna, and obtain a best unimodal Macro F1 of \textbf{0.6659} on the test set using text features alone -- substantially outperforming the zero-shot Video-LLaVA baseline (Macro F1: 0.2827). Building on these baselines, we propose a multimodal fusion architecture that combines bidirectional cross-attention across all three modalities with a Gated Multimodal Unit (GMU), with both architectural and optimization hyperparameters selected through a 50-trial Optuna search. This model achieves a Macro F1 of \textbf{0.7394} on the validation set, a relative improvement of 11.0\% over the best unimodal baseline, confirming that explicit cross-modal interaction captures complementary cues that no single modality provides in isolation. Final predictions on the official, unlabeled private test set are generated using this model and submitted according to the challenge protocol. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/yassineouzar/IUSD_AH/
♻ ☆ Imaginative Generative AI: Crossing the Entropy Wall into Worlds Beyond Imitation
Generative AI models are primarily designed to imitate the data distribution, an objective that neither corrects diversity lost by a learned generator nor defines how generation should extend beyond the diversity of the data itself. We introduce Imaginative Generative AI (IGA), a framework that makes diversity part of the target-distribution design problem: among distributions close to a reference, IGA selects one whose spectral diversity reaches a prescribed level. Diversity is measured by the von Neumann entropy of the generated distribution's kernel covariance operator in a fixed representation space, providing a reference-free representation-guided measure of how broadly probability mass occupies embedding directions. The spectral entropy of the population data distribution defines an Entropy Wall. Below the wall, IGA performs diversity repair, recovering variation that a learned generator has lost while remaining within the diversity level of the data. Beyond the wall, the data distribution itself becomes infeasible, and IGA deliberately departs from it to produce distributions with greater representation-relative spectral diversity, an operational notion of imaginative generation. These regimes form a single regularization path from imitation to imagination and define an i.i.d. target distribution at each prescribed diversity level. We develop the theory of this entropy-constrained projection and show that, under a KL anchor to a pretrained generator, the optimum satisfies a self-consistent exponential-tilt relation. This characterization leads to IGA Guidance, a retraining-free inference-time method for score-based and diffusion models, including DDPM and DDIM samplers. Experiments on synthetic and vision benchmarks demonstrate diversity repair below the Entropy Wall and controlled spectral extrapolation beyond it.
♻ ☆ Native Multi-Dimensional Subquadratic Operators via Input Dependent Long Convolutions
David R. Wessels, Farhad Ramezanghorbani, Alireza Moradzadeh, David W. Romero, Olivia Viessmann, Maksim Zhdanov, John St. John, Ken Janik, David M Knigge, Yucheng Tang, Erik J Bekkers, Saee Gopal Paliwal
Subquadratic alternatives to attention require compromises when applied to multi-dimensional data: standard convolutions lack global receptive fields and input dependency, while recurrent models require rasterizing data such as images, volumes, and partial differential equation (PDE) into an ad-hoc $1\rm D$ scan order that violates their spatial structure. We introduce \textit{HyenaND}, a subquadratic, global, input-dependent operator that acts directly on the native geometry of multidimensional data through convolutions with implicitly parametrized global, input-dependent multi-dimensional convolutional kernels. Our CUDA implementation, \texttt{nSubQ}, fuses the FFT-convolution path to turn HyenaND's $\mathcal{O}(L \log L)$ scaling into wall-clock speedups. Across long-context genomics, computer vision, medical imaging, and PDE modeling, pure HyenaND stacks match the accuracy of strong attention baselines, while hybrid configurations that interleave HyenaND and attention layers outperform both pure attention and strong recurrence-based hybrids.
♻ ☆ PinpointQA: A Benchmark for Small Object-Centric Spatial Understanding in Indoor Videos ECCV 2026
Reliable embodied interaction in indoor environments requires agents to precisely localize small everyday objects from visual observations. Yet this fundamental capability remains challenging for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), particularly when spatial understanding must be performed from indoor videos. Existing benchmarks study video spatial intelligence and embodied reasoning, but do not directly evaluate whether a model can localize a small target object and express its position with sufficient precision. We introduce PinpointQA, a benchmark built from ScanNet++ and ScanNet200. It contains 1,024 scenes and 10,094 QA pairs across four progressively challenging tasks: Target Presence Verification, Nearest Reference Identification, Fine-Grained Spatial Description, and Structured Spatial Prediction. Ground-truth annotations are constructed from intermediate spatial representations derived from aligned 3D geometry and instance-level annotations, while evaluated models receive only sampled RGB video frames. Evaluations of representative MLLMs reveal a consistent performance decline across the task progression, with structured spatial prediction remaining particularly challenging, while supervised fine-tuning substantially improves performance. By isolating the spatial grounding capabilities that precede downstream embodied interaction, PinpointQA serves as both a diagnostic benchmark and an effective training resource. The project page is available at https://rainchowz.github.io/PinpointQA/.
comment: Accepted at the ECCV 2026 Workshop on Embodied Multimodal Reasoning in Physical Environments (EMR)
♻ ☆ Grounded Post-Training with Hard Examples for Reducing Hallucination in Multimodal Large Language Models
Hallucination remains a fundamental challenge in vision-language models (VLMs), where autoregressive generation may produce linguistically plausible yet physically inconsistent or visually ungrounded responses due to likelihood maximization under joint probabilistic modeling.
We propose a stage-wise preference optimization framework for hallucination reduction through targeted multimodal data construction. Rather than directly optimizing on generic instruction-following data, our approach progressively constructs hallucination-focused preference pairs near known failure boundaries. The framework emphasizes ambiguous spatial orientation, object relationships, OCR uncertainty, and adversarial false-premise training. Hallucinated negatives are generated through minimally perturbed yet visually inconsistent alternatives, enabling Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to better separate grounded reasoning from plausible hallucination.
Experiments on open-source benchmarks and real-world multimodal evaluation scenarios demonstrate improved grounding consistency, reduced hallucination, and more informative grounded responses. Cross-model qualitative evaluation further shows that the proposed multimodal LLM DPO framework produces more visually grounded responses than several frontier proprietary VLMs, such as in ambiguous spatial reasoning and adversarial false-premise settings. The results suggest that hallucination may arise not only from limited model capacity, but also from inherent tendencies of autoregressive probabilistic generation to favor linguistically plausible continuations under weak visual grounding. Future work may explore physical consistency modeling, uncertainty-aware multimodal reasoning, and architectural alternatives beyond standard autoregressive decoding.
♻ ☆ Covert Visual Prompt Injection against Commercial Multimodal Large Language Models
Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, their instruction-following behavior leaves them vulnerable to prompt injection attacks. Existing prompt injection methods predominantly rely on textual prompts or perceptible visual prompts that are observable by human users. In this work, we study imperceptible visual prompt injection against powerful closed-source MLLMs, where adversarial instructions are embedded in the visual modality. Our method adaptively embeds the malicious prompt into the input image via a bounded text overlay to provide semantic guidance. Meanwhile, the imperceptible visual perturbation is iteratively optimized to align the feature representation of the attacked image with those of the malicious visual and textual targets at both coarse- and fine-grained levels. Specifically, the visual target is instantiated as a text-rendered image and progressively refined during optimization to more faithfully represent the desired semantics and improve transferability. Extensive experiments on two multimodal understanding tasks across multiple closed-source MLLMs demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to existing methods.
♻ ☆ HQ-DM: Single Hadamard Transformation-Based Quantization-Aware Training for Low-Bit Diffusion Models
Diffusion models have demonstrated significant applications in the field of image generation. However, their high computational and memory costs pose challenges for deployment. Model quantization has emerged as a promising solution to reduce storage overhead and accelerate inference. Nevertheless, existing quantization methods for diffusion models struggle to mitigate outliers in activation matrices during inference, leading to substantial performance degradation under low-bit quantization scenarios. To address this, we propose HQ-DM, a novel Quantization-Aware Training framework that applies Single Hadamard Transformation to activation matrices. This approach effectively reduces activation outliers while preserving model performance under quantization. Compared to traditional Double Hadamard Transformation, our proposed scheme offers distinct advantages by seamlessly supporting INT convolution operations while preventing the amplification of weight outliers. For conditional generation on the ImageNet 256x256 dataset using the LDM-4 model, our W4A4 and W4A3 quantization schemes improve the Inception Score by 12.8% and 467.73%, respectively, over the existing state-of-the-art method.
♻ ☆ Hunyuan3D-Buffalo 1.0: A Unified Multimodal Model for Scalable 3D Generation, Understanding, and Editing
Junliang Ye, Kenkun Liu, Guocun Wang, Yang Li, Yansong Qu, Chunshi Wang, Jingwei Xu, Yunhan Yang, Zibo Zhao, Jiachen Xu, Jiaao Yu, Lifu Wang, Zhihao Liang, Zhuo Chen, Chunchao Guo
Recent advances in image generation have demonstrated the potential of unified multimodal models that integrate understanding, generation, and editing. However, unified 3D modeling remains constrained by scarce multimodal data, particularly the lack of large-scale and geometrically consistent editing data. To address this limitation, we propose Hunyuan3D-Buffalo 1.0, a unified framework supporting 3D understanding, text-to-3D generation, instruction-guided 3D editing, and text-grounded part generation within a single architecture. To enable scalable training, we construct an 87M-scale 3D multimodal corpus, comprising 25M understanding samples, 50M text-to-3D pairs, and 12M editing pairs generated using Nano3D-v2. Architecturally, the framework combines Hunyuan3D-VLM for semantic, structural, and spatial understanding with Hunyuan3D DiT for high-fidelity 3D synthesis. The VLM provides multimodal semantic conditions for generation, while editing and part generation additionally condition the diffusion process on the source object representation to preserve its overall structure and unedited regions. Extensive experiments show that Hunyuan3D-Buffalo 1.0 achieves state-of-the-art or leading performance on text-to-3D generation and 3D editing benchmarks, while exhibiting strong understanding and part-generation capabilities. Our analysis further shows that both generation and understanding improve editing, demonstrating the effectiveness of unified 3D multimodal training. Project Page: https://tencent-hunyuan.github.io/Hunyuan3D-Buffalo1.0/
comment: Project Page: https://tencent-hunyuan.github.io/Hunyuan3D-Buffalo1.0
♻ ☆ Emergent Neural Network Mechanisms for Generalization to Objects in Novel Orientations
Avi Cooper, Xavier Boix, Daniel Harari, Spandan Madan, Hanspeter Pfister, Tomotake Sasaki, Pawan Sinha
The capability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to recognize objects in orientations outside the distribution of the training data is not well understood. We present evidence that DNNs are capable of generalizing to objects in novel orientations by disseminating orientation-invariance obtained from familiar objects seen from many viewpoints. This capability strengthens when training the DNN with an increasing number of familiar objects, but only in orientations that involve 2D rotations of familiar orientations. We show that this dissemination is achieved via neurons tuned to common features between familiar and unfamiliar objects. These results implicate brain-like neural mechanisms for generalization.
♻ ☆ WaveInst: A Frequency-Domain Enhanced Network for Fine-Grained Thin Tree Trunk Extraction in Forest Scenes IEEE
Analyzing tree morphology, particularly trunk and branch extraction, is valuable for genetic breeding and forestry management. Existing image-based deep learning methods tend to misidentify overlapping trunks as a single trunk when structural discontinuities occur due to front-back overlap, while low contrast between trunk textures and the background further complicates segmentation. Moreover, limited juvenile tree data, coupled with substantial variations in trunk diameter across growth stages, restricts model performance in extracting thin trunks and branches. Based on this, we propose an instance segmentation network leveraging frequency-domain features, WaveInst. Its core is a Frequency-domain Feature Compensation branch, consisting of Discrete Wavelet Transform block and High-Frequency Enhancement block. The former performs high- and low-frequency decomposition and aggregates high-frequency responses along multiple directions, while the latter further refines the high-frequency features through multi-path processing. An Adaptive Gated Fusion Module is then applied to effectively integrate spatial-domain convolutional features with frequency-domain representations, allowing the decoder to utilize embedded frequency-domain features to enhance its fine-grained detail representation. We conduct experiments on public datasets including SynthTree43k, CaneTree100, and UrbanStreet, as well as PoplarDataset, which contains both mature and juvenile poplar trees. On the public datasets, WaveInst demonstrates strong performance and stable robustness across diverse scenarios. On PoplarDataset, it achieves a mean average precision of 53.1 for mature and 29.1 for juvenile, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods on juvenile by 6.6 points, demonstrating its effectiveness in extracting thin tree trunk.
comment: 18 pages, 16 figures, published in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
♻ ☆ FoR-SALE: Frame of Reference-guided Spatial Adjustment in LLM-based Diffusion Editing
Current text-to-image generation models, even state-of-the-art models, exhibit a significant performance gap when spatial expressions are described from non-camera perspectives. To address this limitation, we propose Frame of Reference-guided Spatial Adjustment in LLM-based Diffusion Editing (FoR-SALE), an extension of the Self-correcting LLM-controlled Diffusion (SLD). FoR-SALE first evaluates the alignment between a given text and an initially generated image, and then refines the image based on the expressed FoR in the spatial description. It employs vision modules to extract the spatial configuration of the generated image and simultaneously maps the spatial expression to a corresponding camera perspective. This unified perspective enables direct evaluation of alignment between language and vision. When misalignment is detected, the required editing operations are generated and applied. FoR-SALE introduces novel latent-space operations to adjust the facing direction and depth of generated images. We evaluate FoR-SALE on three benchmarks designed to assess spatial understanding with FoR: FoR-LMD, FoREST, and FoREST-G, with the latter providing diagnostic subsets covering multi-object scenes, expanded relation types, and naturalized prompts to test the generality of our framework. Our framework improves the performance of SOTA T2I models by up to 7.0 pp using only a single round of correction.
comment: Published in COLM 2026. 10 main pages, 4 tables, 4 figures
♻ ☆ 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))
♻ ☆ LGFNet: A CTC-Guided Local-Global Fusion Framework for Single-Channel Sleep Staging
Sleep staging remains challenging due to long-range temporal dependencies, ambiguous stage transitions-particularly in N1-and substantial distribution shifts across subjects, sampling rates, and EEG montages. These difficulties are further amplified in single-channel, low-latency scenarios required by wearable and real-world applications. To address these issues, we propose LGFNet, a CTC-guided sequence-to-sequence framework for robust sleep staging. LGFNet introduces a Local-Global Fusion encoder that jointly models fine-grained temporal dynamics and long-range sleep structure, overcoming the limitations of conventional serial hybrid architectures. A CTC-Attention joint training paradigm is adopted to unify temporal alignment with context-dependent modeling, enabling more accurate recognition of stage boundaries and transitions. Furthermore, a three-stage decoding strategy is devised, leveraging CTC-guided decoding and Viterbi-based smoothing to reduce error accumulation and enforce physiological consistency. Extensive cross-dataset evaluations on five public benchmarks demonstrate that LGFNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art single-channel methods. In particular, on Sleep-EDF-78, LGFNet surpasses DMIN by +1.27% accuracy, +1.74% macro-F1, and +1.93% kappa, with pronounced gains on N1 and transition segments, highlighting its robustness and strong generalization across diverse sampling rates, montages, and recording environments.
♻ ☆ SceneNAT: Masked Generative Modeling for Language-Guided Indoor Scene Synthesis
We present SceneNAT, a masked non-autoregressive Transformer for 3D indoor scene synthesis from natural language instructions. It generates complete scenes in a few parallel decoding passes, improving both quality and efficiency over prior methods. SceneNAT is trained via masked modeling over fully discretized representations of both semantic and spatial attributes. By applying a masking strategy at both the attribute level and the instance level, the model can better capture intra-object and inter-object structure. To boost relational reasoning, SceneNAT employs a relational reasoning module (RRM) that captures implicit spatial constraints. By formulating relation modeling as a set prediction task, it extracts structure-aware features to guide the layout generation without explicit sequential parsing. Extensive experiments on 3D-FRONT show that SceneNAT outperforms state-of-the-art autoregressive and diffusion baselines in both semantic compliance and spatial arrangement accuracy while using substantially lower computational cost, enabling high-throughput generation of diverse scenes at scale.
comment: Under review. Project page: https://scenenat.github.io
♻ ☆ Exploring Decoupled Spatio-Temporal Consistency Learning and Self-Prompting Evolution for Self-Supervised Tracking
The success of visual tracking has been largely driven by datasets with manual box annotations. However, these box annotations require tremendous human effort, limiting the scale and diversity of existing tracking datasets. In this work, we present a novel high-performance Self-Supervised Tracking model named SSTrack++, designed to eliminate the need of box annotations. Specifically, we design an effective weak-to-strong self-supervised training framework that aims to narrow the feature distribution gap between labeled and unlabeled frames. Building upon this framework, a decoupled spatio-temporal consistency training strategy is introduced to capture rich target information across timestamps by leveraging global spatial localization and local temporal association. Then, a self-prompting evolution module is designed to jointly mine the target appearance evolution at both the feature and decision levels, enabling more robust adaptation to complex and diverse unlabeled tracking scenarios. Furthermore, an instance contrastive loss is formulated to learn instance-level correspondences from a multi-view perspective, providing robust instance-level supervision without any additional annotations. This new design paradigm enables SSTrack++ to not only learn a generalizable tracking representation in a low-annotation self-supervised manner, but also makes it possible to simulate realistic appearance and motion variations of target instances in real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments on ten benchmark datasets demonstrate that SSTrack++ surpasses SOTA self-supervised tracking methods, achieving an improvement of more than 25.8%, 21.4%, and 15.8% in AUC (AO) score on the GOT10K, LaSOT, TrackingNet datasets, respectively, thereby significantly narrowing the performance gap with fully supervised trackers. Code is available at https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/SSTrack.
comment: IJCV 2026
♻ ☆ Linguistically-Aligned and Visually-Grounded Preference Optimization for Clinically-Augmented Medical Report Generation ECCV 2026
Despite significant advances in Medical Report Generation (MRG), the reliability remains constrained by the prevalence of factual errors. While Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a promising post-training paradigm to enhance the performance of Supervised Fine-Tuned (SFT) MRG models, existing DPO-based MRG methods typically adopt a naive preference construction that directly pairs model-generated reports with ground truth reports. This strategy inadvertently entangles critical clinical findings with clinically irrelevant linguistic characteristics, and fundamentally lacks explicit vision-language alignment. To address these challenges, we propose DPO-Clin, a novel post-training framework that focuses preference optimization on clinical findings and cross-modal alignment. First, we introduce the Entity-level Clinical Diagnostic (ECD) module to perform a precise entity-level factual diagnosis. ECD guides the generation of linguistically-aligned report preference pairs, isolating clinical discrepancies from linguistic variations. Second, to achieve fine-grained cross-modal alignment, we develop M2DPO, a retrieval-augmented multi-modal DPO variant that enforces textual preference inversion triggered by visual context switches. Third, we locate correct yet highly uncertain predicted entities and apply counterfactual modifications to construct targeted preference data for latent risk mitigation, thereby further enhancing the model reliability. Extensive experiments on two public chest X-ray datasets (MIMIC-CXR and IU X-Ray) and an in-house endoscopy dataset demonstrate that DPO-Clin significantly improves the SFT baselines on clinical-aware metrics. Furthermore, it achieves superior performance over existing DPO-based MRG methods, exhibiting robust generalizability across distinct baseline architectures and diverse medical imaging modalities.
comment: Accepted by ECCV 2026
♻ ☆ Meshy T2: Fast Native Mesh Generation with Flow Matching
Jiale Xu, Rendong Liang, Yuhao Long, Siyuan Shen, Zangyueyang Xian, Xiaofei Wu, Zeyi Xu, Yuanming Hu
Polygonal meshes are the standard surface representation of modern 3D pipelines, and generating high-quality meshes with artist-style topology is essential for film, gaming, and interactive 3D applications. Mainstream approaches serialize a mesh into a token sequence and decode it autoregressively, which is slow at inference and sensitive to error accumulation, making them impractical for interactive asset creation. We present Meshy T2, a fast native mesh generation framework built on flow matching. At its core is a vertex-set mesh VAE that encodes a mesh into one continuous latent token per vertex and decodes vertices, edge connectivity, and face winding order in a single pass, preserving high-precision geometry and artist-authored topology without vertex quantization or welding. Generation proceeds as a coarse-to-fine cascade of two flow-matching models: an image-conditioned voxel flow first sketches the overall shape as a coarse occupancy scaffold, and a mesh flow then populates the scaffold with per-vertex latent tokens, conditioned on the image, the scaffold, and a requested vertex budget. This design delivers three practical capabilities: interactive generation speed through parallel flow-based synthesis; effective face-count control through the requested vertex budget; and native support for multi-part assets, whose components emerge directly from the generated connectivity. In our experiments, Meshy T2 achieves state-of-the-art geometric fidelity and completes end-to-end image-to-mesh generation within a median of 6 seconds, over an order of magnitude faster than autoregressive baselines. Code and weights will be available at https://github.com/meshy-dev/meshy-t2.
♻ ☆ The Calibrated Deepfake Trust Score (CDTS): Competence-Coupled Trust Degradation Across Deepfake Detectors
In moderation, provenance, and verification pipelines a deepfake detector's output probability is read as a degree of trust, so its calibration matters as much as raw accuracy. We reframe deepfake detection as a calibrated, self-auditing trust instrument, the Calibrated Deepfake Trust Score (CDTS), and identify what governs its trustworthiness. Our central finding is a competence-trust coupling with a sharp division: the raw score's miscalibration tracks discriminative competence almost perfectly (r = -0.98, -0.98, -0.95 across two convolutional networks and a CLIP vision transformer), and a calibrator deployed without target labels fails with competence just as tightly (r = -0.98 on the primary detector, for isotonic, Platt, and beta calibrators alike). Given target labels, by contrast, any well-specified calibrator repairs any detector, including inverted ones: in-domain calibratability is not competence-limited, and the trust failure is a distribution-shift phenomenon concentrated exactly on the low-competence generators that motivate deployment. Explanation faithfulness rises and falls on the same competence axis. We reach this conclusion after uncovering, and correcting, a tie-handling degeneracy in the standard equal-mass expected-calibration-error (ECE) estimator that fabricates strong spurious competence-calibration coupling on tie-heavy calibrated scores; the same degeneracy invalidates calibration-equity gaps we previously reported, a caution for fairness auditing. Competence is trackable without labels: batch predictive entropy flags generators with high deployed calibration error at ROC-AUC 0.99, and routing source-batches on label-free competence beats confidence-based routing precisely in the low-competence regimes the coupling identifies, while confidence regains the advantage where competence is high. Trust scoring must be competence-aware; CDTS is the mechanism.
comment: 30 pages, 13 figures, 12 tables. v2: substantial correction. v1's central negative claim was an artifact of a tie-handling degeneracy in stable-sort equal-mass ECE (cf. Pernot, arXiv:2306.05180). Corrected: raw and transferred competence-trust coupling r ~ -0.98; in-domain calibratability is not competence-limited; equity gaps do not survive
♻ ☆ TransitReID: Transit OD Data Collection with Occlusion-Resistant Dynamic Passenger Re-Identification
Transit Origin-Destination (OD) data are fundamental for optimizing public transit services, yet current collection methods, such as manual surveys, Bluetooth/WiFi tracking, and Automated Passenger Counters, are often costly, device-dependent, or unable to support individual-level matching. Meanwhile, onboard surveillance cameras already deployed on most transit vehicles provide an underutilized opportunity for automated OD data collection. Leveraging this, we present TransitReID, a framework for individual-level and occlusion-resistant passenger re-identification (ReID) tailored to transit environments. TransitReID introduces three key components: (1) an occlusion- and viewpoint-robust ReID algorithm that integrates a variational autoencoder-guided region-attention mechanism with selective feature pooling to emphasize visible and discriminative body regions; (2) a Hierarchical Storage and Dynamic Matching (HSDM) mechanism that adapts static ReID matching to dynamic bus operations while balancing accuracy, memory, and speed; and (3) a multi-threaded edge implementation that enables near real-time OD estimation while preserving privacy through local data processing. We also construct a new Transit ReID dataset with over 17,000 images captured from real bus front/rear cameras under diverse occlusion and viewpoint conditions. Experimental results show that TransitReID achieves state-of-the-art ReID performance, attaining 88.3% R-1 accuracy on the proposed transit ReID dataset and sustaining 80-90% OD estimation accuracy in both simulations and real-world operation, with deployment supported on NVIDIA Jetson edge devices. This work provides an algorithmic and system-level foundation for scalable, privacy-preserving automated transit OD collection.
♻ ☆ Hybrid Token Compression for Vision-Language Models CVPR 2026
Vision-language models (VLMs) rely on hundreds of visual tokens, leading to high computational and memory costs. Existing compression methods face a trade-off: continuous compression can weaken high-level semantics, while discrete quantization may lose fine-grained appearance details. We introduce HTC-VLM, a hybrid visual token compression framework that disentangles semantics and appearance through two complementary pathways. A continuous pathway preserves detailed ViT patch features, while a discrete pathway provides semantic anchors using MGVQ quantization represented by four tokens. The two pathways are fused into a 580-token hybrid sequence and compressed into a single token using a disentanglement attention mask and a bottleneck. Under the same one-token output budget, HTC-VLM achieves 87.2% average performance retention across seven benchmarks (GQA, VQAv2, MMBench, MME, POPE, SEED-Bench, and ScienceQA-Image), outperforming the leading continuous baseline at 81.0%. Attention analysis shows that the compressed token prioritizes discrete anchors, supporting their role as semantic guidance. We further study token-budget scaling, cross-architecture generalization, inference efficiency, robustness to codebook and masking variations, and the information-theoretic properties of the hybrid bottleneck. These results show that combining continuous appearance features with discrete semantic anchors enables effective extreme visual token compression for efficient VLMs.
comment: Accepted at CVPR 2026. Code available at https://github.com/jushengzhang/HybridToken-VLM
♻ ☆ Towards Geometry-Grounded Dense Semantic Matching with VGGT Priors ECCV 2026
Semantic matching aims to establish pixel-level correspondences between instances of the same category and represents a fundamental task in computer vision. Existing approaches suffer from two limitations: (i) Geometric Ambiguity: Their reliance on 2D foundation model features (e.g., Stable Diffusion, DINO) often fails to disambiguate symmetric structures, requiring extra fine-tuning yet lacking generalization; (ii) Nearest-Neighbor Rule: Their pixel-wise matching ignores cross-image invisibility and neglects manifold preservation. These challenges call for geometry-aware pixel descriptors and holistic dense correspondence mechanisms. Inspired by recent advances in 3D geometric foundation models, we turn to VGGT, which provides geometry-grounded features and holistic dense matching capabilities well aligned with these needs. However, directly transferring VGGT is challenging, as it was originally designed for geometry matching within cross views of a single instance, misaligned with cross-instance semantic matching, and further hindered by the scarcity of dense semantic annotations. To address this, we propose an approach that (i) retains VGGT's intrinsic strengths by reusing early feature stages, fine-tuning later ones, and adding a semantic head for bidirectional correspondences; and (ii) adapts VGGT to the semantic matching scenario under data scarcity through cycle-consistent training strategy, synthetic data augmentation, and progressive training recipe with aliasing artifact mitigation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior geometry awareness, matching reliability, and manifold preservation, outperforming previous baselines.
comment: ECCV 2026
♻ ☆ VDC-Agent: When Video Detailed Captioners Evolve Themselves via Agentic Self-Reflection ECCV 2026
Existing Video Detailed Captioning (VDC) methods predominantly rely on costly human annotations or distillation from powerful proprietary models, creating a dependency on external supervision. In this paper, we propose VDC-Agent, an autonomous self-evolving framework that empowers a single Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to generate and refine high-quality captions through principle-guided self-reflection. To overcome the inference latency inherent in iterative refinement, we further propose to internalize this reflective capability into the model. Specifically, we construct VDC-Agent-19K, a preference dataset derived from the agent's self-scored trajectories, and introduce a Curriculum Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) strategy. This strategy leverages the quality gap between generated candidates to progressively align the model from easy to hard samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VDC-Agent achieves state-of-the-art performance on VDC and DREAM-1K benchmarks, generating captions with superior detail and faithfulness. Crucially, our internalization strategy retains the inference efficiency of the base model while significantly enhancing its generalization capabilities, as validated by both quantitative metrics and human evaluation.
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026. Project Page: https://vdcagent.github.io
♻ ☆ Evolving Layer-Specific Scalar Functions for Hardware-Aware Transformer Adaptation
Vision Transformers (ViTs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on challenging vision tasks, but their deployment on edge devices is severely hindered by the computational complexity and global reduction bottleneck imposed by layer normalization. Recent methods attempt to bypass this by replacing normalization layers with hardware-friendly scalar approximations. However, these homogeneous replacements do not optimally fit to all layers' behaviour and rely on expensive model retraining. In this work, we propose a highly efficient, hardware-aware framework that utilizes genetic programming (GP) to evolve heterogeneous, layer-specific scalar functions directly from pre-trained weights. Coupled with a novel post-training re-alignment strategy, our approach eliminates the need to retrain models from scratch entirely. Our evolved expressions accurately approximate the target normalization behaviours, capturing $90\%$ of the variance ($R^2$) compared to only $70.2\%$ for homogeneous baselines, allowing our modified architecture to recover $84.32\%$ Top-1 ImageNet-1K accuracy in only 20 epochs. By preserving this performance while eliminating the global reduction bottleneck, our approach achieves a strict reduction in both arithmetic complexity and off-chip memory traffic compared to standard LayerNorm, removing a primary barrier to the efficient deployment of ViTs on edge accelerators.
comment: 8 pages, 7 figures. v2: updated GP method (FLOP-based complexity, knee-point selection) and re-run results
♻ ☆ TASE: Truncation-Aware Semantic Embeddings for 3D Scene Understanding and Editing
High-fidelity semantic 3D scene representations are crucial for numerous applications, including robotics, autonomous driving, and simulation. Beyond this, the ability to edit such representations enables developers to adapt these applications more easily to specific target scenarios. Current approaches provide limited support for controllable editing. We introduce TASE, a method that projects pretrained 2D semantic features into a truncation-aware embedding space to enable flexible 3D scene editing. Our method explicitly optimizes a feature space in which progressively reducing feature channels yields increasingly abstract semantic representations, while retaining more channels preserves fine-grained detail. Additionally, we improve multi-view consistency of the features using a scale- and translation-equivariance loss. The resulting truncation-aware embedding space enables text-driven edits to 3D scenes, providing explicit control over how strongly edits adhere to the original scene content and allowing more substantial modifications than prior methods. Moreover, we propose a finetuning stage for the editing diffusion model to mitigate artifacts caused by geometric changes. Experimental results demonstrate competitive performance in 3D scene editing, substantially outperforming prior methods on edits involving large geometric modifications.
comment: Code: https://github.com/boschresearch/TASE
♻ ☆ A Combined Feature-Based Framework for Disguise and Spoofing Detection in Face Recognition Systems
Face recognition systems face two distinct, commonly-separated failure modes: spoofing, where an impostor presents a photograph or video of an authorized user, and disguise, where a legitimate user is rejected because their appearance differs from their enrolled template due to accessories, facial hair, illumination, or pose. This paper proposes and compares five combined feature-extraction and classification pipelines that address both problems within a single framework: PM (PCA and Minimum Euclidean Distance, MED), LPM (Local Binary Patterns with PCA and MED), HPM (Histogram of Oriented Gradients with PCA and MED), SM (Speeded-Up Robust Features with MED), and HM (Harris corner features with MED). Each pipeline follows a common two-phase process comprising pre-processing, feature extraction, feature filtering, and classification. The methods were trained on 115 subjects drawn from the FEI, Disguised Faces Database, and NUAA databases and evaluated on six test conditions covering mixed appearances, frontal faces, dark illumination, left- and right-turned poses, and photo-spoofing attempts. The HOG-based pipeline (HPM) achieved the most consistent performance across conditions, with 94.59% accuracy on mixed-appearance disguise, 81.5-93.2% across pose and illumination variants, and 91.67% on spoofing, while the LBP-based pipeline (LPM) achieved the second-highest spoofing-detection accuracy (93.2%), behind PM (96.67%), but weaker robustness to pose change. These results reveal a measurable trade-off between spoof sensitivity and disguise robustness among classical feature representations, motivating the deep-learning and cross-database extensions discussed in the concluding sections.
comment: 5 pages, 3 figures
♻ ☆ OccAnyScene: Towards Unified Indoor-Outdoor 3D Occupancy Prediction
Junjie Liu, Wanshui Gan, Zitong Dai, Guiping Cao, Yan Li, Ke Chen, Dongmei Jiang, Xiangyuan Lan, Jianguo Zhang
3D occupancy prediction is fundamental to scene understanding, yet existing 3D semantic occupancy methods are typically specialized to fixed scene types and occupancy protocols. We introduce Cross-Scene 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction, a new task setting which requires a single model to handle heterogeneous indoor and outdoor scenes with varying cameras, spatial ranges, voxel specifications, and semantic taxonomies. This setting poses a fundamental challenge: achieving metric-consistent yet scene-adaptive image-to-3D lifting across varying camera configurations and scene scales. To address this challenge, we propose OccAnyScene, a pixel-frustum-centered Gaussian framework built upon a pretrained depth foundation model. Specifically, the framework employs Pixel-Aligned Frustum Feature Aggregation to construct a camera-aware frustum query for each feature pixel, and Frustum-Parameterized Gaussian Construction to decode each query into multiple Gaussians whose positions and sizes are constrained by the predicted pixel depth and corresponding frustum geometry. OccAnyScene sets new state-of-the-art results, achieving 59.92% mIoU on the indoor Occ-ScanNet and 23.06% mIoU on the outdoor SurroundOcc-nuScenes.
comment: Corrected a typo in the title; manuscript unchanged
♻ ☆ Investigating Adversarial Robustness of Multi-modal Large Language Models
Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve strong performance on vision-language tasks, but incorporating visual inputs through a vision encoder (e.g., CLIP) substantially expands the attack surface, making these models vulnerable to visual adversarial perturbations. Prior defenses typically preserve compatibility with pretrained MLLMs by enforcing strict alignment to CLIP's original embedding space during adversarial fine-tuning; while practical, this constraint fundamentally limits achievable robustness. We present a systematic investigation of adversarial robustness in MLLMs. We first introduce a diagnostic CLIP-alignment protocol that predicts, prior to full MLLM training, which robust vision encoders will transfer effectively to the multimodal setting, revealing that large-scale multimodal adversarial pretraining, rather than unimodal scale alone, is the critical factor for strong robustness transfer. Integrating such encoders into MLLMs via end-to-end multimodal training yields average gains of 28 CIDEr points on captioning and 11.7% VQA accuracy under strong adversarial attacks compared to constrained plug-and-play baselines. We further show that adversarial training applied directly to a standard non-robust MLLM degrades both clean and adversarial performance, establishing robust visual representations as a strict prerequisite, while end-to-end adversarial training from a robust backbone delivers additional gains of 1.9 CIDEr points and 4.3% VQA accuracy. Beyond training-time defenses, lightweight test-time visual stochastic transformations serve as an effective black-box defense for non-robust MLLMs, elevating adversarial performance from near-zero to levels comparable with robust models. Finally, we show that our robust models substantially reduce toxic generation under white-box visual jailbreak attacks. Code and pretrained weights will be released publicly.
♻ ☆ Beyond False Stability: High-Noise Drift Gating for Test-Time Adversarial Defenses in Vision-Language Models
Vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP show strong zero-shot generalization but remain highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Adversarial training improves robustness but is computationally expensive, motivating test-time defenses. Recent approaches exploit how CLIP's visual representations respond to stochastic perturbations: aggregating predictions across noisy views, constructing Gaussian noise-averaged anchors and interpolating features toward them, or applying counter-perturbations. These strategies improve robustness but often degrade clean accuracy, yielding an unfavorable clean-robust trade-off. We revisit stochastic test-time defenses and identify an underexplored noise-regime transition in CLIP's representation space. Prior work explored perturbations mainly in the weak-noise regime, where adversarial examples can appear unusually stable (false stability). Our analysis shows this reverses as perturbation strength grows: beyond the weak-noise regime, adversarial representations become markedly more unstable than clean ones, giving a clearer separation signal. The transition is consistent across uniform and Gaussian noise, photometric and geometric transforms, datasets, and diverse attacks. It largely disappears in adversarially trained models, suggesting it is tied to the fragile local-basin geometry of adversarial representations in non-robust CLIP. We propose a training-free, plug-in drift-gated mechanism that uses high-noise feature drift as a lightweight gating signal to trigger existing test-time defenses only when adversarial-like instability is detected. Across 13 datasets it consistently improves the clean-robust trade-off. On eight fine-grained datasets, mean clean+adversarial accuracy rises from 65.7% to 71.4% for counterattack defenses and 68.4% to 73.2% for noise-anchoring; on ImageNet and four shifted variants, from 56.1% to 66.2% and 62.1% to 67.6%.
♻ ☆ What DINO saw: ALiBi positional encoding reduces positional bias in Vision Transformers
Moritz Pawlowsky, Antonis Vamvakeros, Alexander Weiss, Anja Bielefeld, Samuel J. Cooper, Ronan Docherty
Vision transformers (ViTs) - especially feature foundation models like DINOv2 - learn rich representations useful for many downstream tasks. However, architectural choices (such as positional encoding) can lead to these models displaying positional biases and artefacts independent of semantic content. This makes zero-shot adaption difficult in fields like material science, where images are often cross-sections of homogeneous microstructure (i.e. having no preferred direction). In this work, we investigate the positional bias in ViTs via linear probing, finding it present across a range of objectives and positional encodings, and subsequently reduce it by finetuning models to use ALiBi relative positional encoding. We demonstrate that these models retain desirable general semantics and their unbiased features can be used successfully in trainable segmentation of complex microscopy images.
♻ ☆ Easy3D-Labels: Supervising Semantic Occupancy Estimation with 3D Pseudo-Labels for Automotive Perception IEEE
In perception for automated vehicles, safety is critical not only for the driver but also for other agents in the scene, particularly vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists. Previous representation methods, such as Bird's Eye View, collapse vertical information, leading to ambiguity in 3D object localisation and limiting accurate understanding of the environment for downstream tasks such as motion planning and scene forecasting. In contrast, semantic occupancy provides a full 3D representation of the surroundings, addressing these limitations. Unlike supervised methods that rely on manually annotated data, self-supervised approaches use 2D pseudo-labels, improving scalability by reducing the need for labour-intensive annotation. Consequently, such models employ techniques such as novel view synthesis, cross-view rendering, and depth estimation to allow for model supervision against the 2D labels. However, such approaches often incur high computational and memory costs during training, especially for novel view synthesis. To address these issues, we propose Easy3D-Labels, which are 3D pseudo-ground-truth labels generated using Grounded-SAM and Metric3Dv2, with temporal aggregation for densification, permitting supervision directly in 3D space. Easy3D-Labels can be readily integrated into existing models to provide model supervision, yielding substantial performance gains, with mIoU increasing by 45% and RayIoU by 49% when applied to OccNeRF on the Occ3D-nuScenes dataset. Additionally, we introduce EasyOcc, a streamlined model trained solely on these 3D pseudo-labels, avoiding the need for complex rendering strategies and achieving 15.7 mIoU on Occ3D-nuScenes. Easy3D-Labels improve scene understanding by reducing object duplication and enhancing depth estimation accuracy, as reflected by improvements in the RayIoU metric.
comment: Accepted at IEEE OJVT
♻ ☆ TEASR: Training-Efficient Any-Step Diffusion Transformer for Real-World Image Super-Resolution ECCV26
Diffusion models excel in Real-World Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR) due to their powerful generative priors but suffer from slow iterative sampling. Although existing one-step distillation methods accelerate inference, they typically require auxiliary teacher models that inflate training memory and restrict scalability to large-scale architectures. Furthermore, these fixed-step models lack the flexibility to trade off speed for quality. In this paper, we propose TEASR, a training-efficient any-step diffusion framework for Real-ISR that enables both one-step and multi-step restoration within a unified model. Our key idea is to perform self-adversarial distillation within a single diffusion model, eliminating the need for auxiliary teachers or discriminators. Specifically, we propose a timestep-aware rectification strategy that stabilizes one-step generation across noise levels. These two designs further enables the distillation of 20B-parameter diffusion models on a single GPU, significantly improving training efficiency. Moreover, we introduce a dual-branch diffusion transformer with decoupled timestep condition to separate the current noise state and the denoising target to enhance sampling quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TEASR supports seamless any-step sampling and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple datasets.
comment: Accepted by ECCV26
♻ ☆ Exploring Adversarial Robustness and Safety Alignment in Multilingual Multi-Modal Large Language Models
Multimodal Large Language Models integrate visual perception into language reasoning, introducing a continuous attack surface susceptible to adversarial attacks. Prior work on MLLM robustness has focused largely on English-centric tasks, leaving multilingual behaviour unexplored. We address this gap through a systematic study of adversarial robustness and multimodal safety across 12 diverse languages, evaluating open-source MLLMs that acquire multilingual capability through instruction tuning. Gradient-based attacks reveal a transferable multilingual vulnerability: adversarial images optimized in one language continue to induce failure in others, demonstrating strong cross-lingual transferability. Multilingual safety further varies with how effectively a model retrieves or interprets harmful instructions. When harmful intent is issued through text, languages with stronger linguistic grounding more often elicit misuse-enabling responses, while weaker languages produce fewer unsafe outputs. When embedded in the image as typographic content, English scripts are reliably recognised and followed, whereas non-English scripts are rarely parsed by the vision encoder. Lower-resource languages may therefore appear safer, but this is an artefact of comprehension and visual-grounding failures rather than genuine alignment, a phenomenon we term safety-by-failure. In contrast, MLLMs that build multilingual capability throughout their training stages rather than only at instruction tuning, such as Qwen3-VL, exhibit genuine cross-lingual safety, maintaining active refusal across languages rather than masking comprehension failure. Shallow multilingual adaptation, such as fine-tuning on translated instruction data, may produce surface-level understanding that creates illusory safety in low-resource languages; deeper integration across training stages leads to genuine multilingual safety alignment.
♻ ☆ Sekai2: From World Exploration to Interactive World Modeling
Video world models must capture how scenes evolve over time and across viewpoints. Training them for long-horizon generation and camera control therefore benefits from long videos paired with camera trajectories and temporally grounded semantics. Existing corpora rarely offer the three together: large-scale web video provides broad visual diversity but no trajectories or time-aligned text, while pose-annotated datasets are typically short-range or reconstruction-oriented. We introduce Sekai2, a multi-source real-world video dataset that carries the world-exploration footage of Sekai toward interactive world modeling. The release contains 128,892 clips totaling 2,826 hours from 10,428 source videos across 113 countries or regions, and is deliberately weighted toward sustained observation: under a common 120-second decomposition, 43,594 segments reach the full two minutes and account for 51.4% of all footage. Every clip includes a released camera trajectory and hierarchical annotations disentangling subject motion, environment dynamics, static scene content, and camera behavior, resulting in 649,597 temporally grounded segments. Crucially, we further introduce 982 panoramic sequences captured along non-linear trajectories with loops and revisits. These revisits provide repeated observations of the same locations across time and viewpoints, offering essential supervision for learning persistent scene representations, long-term spatial memory, and geometrically consistent world models. Corpus-scale analyses demonstrate complete pose-and-caption coverage, broad geographic and semantic diversity, varied camera trajectories, and highly non-redundant temporal descriptions. Together, these properties make Sekai2 a scalable resource for long-horizon video generation, camera-controllable synthesis, and interactive world-model pre-training.
comment: Sekai2 dataset technical report. Developed at Alaya Lab
♻ ☆ Flow-Based Generative Modeling for Optimizing Sampling Policies in Compressed Sensing Applications
Numerous modern applications in signal processing and medical imaging necessitate acquiring high-dimensional signals under tight resource constraints. Traditional sampling theory suggests that accurate signal reconstruction requires a number of measurements proportional to the signal's ambient dimension, a requirement often too expensive or impractical. Compressed sensing challenges this notion by demonstrating that sparse signals can be recovered with fewer measurements, provided the measurement operator meets certain conditions. This proof-of-concept study presents a task-aware flow-based generative framework -- a reformulation of the conventional Flow Matching training paradigm with a flow model trained to optimize subsampling in compressed sensing applications. We establish the fundamental feasibility of the proposed framework of learning subsampling masks that substantially enhance the performance of compressed sensing for image classification, image reconstruction, and MRI acceleration. For the image reconstruction task, our method demonstrated state-of-the-art performance, achieving Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio of 25.17 dB at the subsampling rate of 5\% on the CelebA dataset and 29.24 dB when reconstructing $8\times$ accelerated MRI measurements (fastMRI dataset) with the minimal computational overhead. These results highlight the effectiveness of task-conditioning within generative flow models and reveal a promising direction for representation learning strategies. Overall, the proposed framework offers a unified, flexible approach to designing data- and task-driven sensing schemes that can be potentially adapted to a broad range of inverse problems.
♻ ☆ Do Protective Perturbations Really Protect Portrait Privacy under Real-world Image Transformations?
Ruiqing Sun, Xingshan Yao, Zhijing Wu, Tian Lan, Chenhao Cui, Huiyang Zhao, Jialing Shi, Chen Yang, Xianling Mao
Proactive defense methods protect portrait images from unauthorized editing or talking face generation (TFG) by introducing pixel-level protective perturbations, and have attracted increasing attention for privacy protection. In real-world use, images inevitably undergo sequences of benign operations during display and dissemination, such as resizing and color compression, which directly alter pixel values. Existing studies and robustness defenses mainly examine individual transformations in isolation, while sequentially composed transformations remain underexplored. To address this gap, we systematically evaluate whether representative proactive defenses against unauthorized image editing using GANs and diffusion models, as well as talking face generation, remain effective under sequential image transformations. The evaluated methods span general-purpose and portrait-specific defenses and are assessed qualitatively and quantitatively. Experimental results show that pixel-level perturbation-based defenses struggle to withstand sequences of common image transformations, posing a risk of failure in real-world applications. To further demonstrate that this vulnerability can be exploited at low cost, we introduce Transformation-Induced Purification via Region-wise Super-Resolution (TIP-RSR), a simple training-free framework combining sequential image transformations with off-the-shelf restoration models. TIP-RSR efficiently purifies protective perturbations while preserving image fidelity and requiring substantially less computation than diffusion-based purification methods. These findings expose a practical vulnerability in current proactive portrait defenses and highlight the need to account for sequential real-world transformations when designing future protection mechanisms. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Richen7418/TIP-RSR.
♻ ☆ DAEP: Difficulty-Aware Evidence Planning for Medical Video Corpus Temporal Answer Grounding NLPCC 2026
We describe DAEP, team BIGC's submission to NLPCC 2026 Shared Task 1 Track 3: Difficulty-Aware Temporal Answer Grounding in Video Corpus (DA-TAGVC). The task requires retrieving the target video from 50 candidates and localizing the answer-supporting span. DAEP ranks videos with subtitle, visual, and procedural-context evidence, expands high-scoring anchors into temporal spans, and reranks spans for final output. Its main design is to convert the task-provided simple/complex input label into an inference-time evidence plan controlling modality weights, Top-K aggregation, boundary threshold, expansion length, and reranking strength. In the official evaluation, BIGC ranks first among ten systems with an Average score of 0.2728. Validation ablations show that visual evidence, procedural context, and difficulty-aware planning improve ranking quality, with the largest gain on complex questions.
comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, 5 tables, accepted by NLPCC 2026 Shared Task Track 3
♻ ☆ Dissect and Prune: Enhancing Robustness in AI-Generated Image Detection ICML 2026
While existing AI-generated image detectors report high performance, we identify that this is largely driven by a critical prediction asymmetry: a bias toward the real class that severely limits sensitivity to generated content, especially under standard post-processing operations such as compression and resizing. We hypothesize that this stems from the model's reliance on spurious features, distracting signals that obscure true generative artifacts. To address this, we propose DEAR (Dissect and Prune), which leverages inpainted images to identify and prune these interfering components. Specifically, we find that features strongly aligned to either inpainted or non-inpainted regions are less robust to post-processing. By measuring the alignment between channel activations and inpaint masks, DEAR removes features at both extremes, retaining only those that capture genuine generative artifacts. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances robustness against unseen generators and post-processing, effectively mitigating the prediction asymmetry. Our code is available at https://github.com/dahyedahye/dear.
comment: Accepted to ICML 2026. 26 pages, 9 figures, 9 tables. Includes appendix
♻ ☆ DIMOS: Disentangling Instance-level Moving Object Segmentation
Moving instance segmentation (MIS) attracts increasing attention due to its broad applications in traffic surveillance, autonomous driving, and animal tracking. Event cameras record asynchronous brightness changes, providing high temporal resolution and dynamic range, which makes them highly sensitive to motion information. By fusing event and image features, motion cues from events can complement spatial details from images, enhancing the performance of MIS. However, current multimodal MIS methods still struggle to segment small moving instances, as event cameras often yield sparse features under limited resolution. Moreover, event features entangle appearance attributes with motion cues, which further restricts effective cross-modal fusion. To address these challenges, we first propose a dual-disentangling feature extraction framework that separates and extracts appearance and motion information within both image and event modalities, thereby improving feature density. Subsequently, a multi-granularity cross-modal alignment is introduced to align distributionally and semantically consistent features across modalities, enabling more effective fusion with rich spatial and temporal details. The experiment results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in multimodal MIS, especially for small instances under challenging conditions such as fast motion and low-light settings.
♻ ☆ ZeroPur: Succinct Training-Free Adversarial Purification IEEE
Adversarial purification is a kind of defense technique that can defend against various unseen adversarial attacks without modifying the victim classifier. Existing methods often depend on external generative models or cooperation between auxiliary functions and victim classifiers. However, retraining generative models, auxiliary functions, or victim classifiers relies on the domain of the fine-tuned dataset and is computation-consuming. In this work, we suppose that adversarial images are outliers of the natural image manifold, and the purification process can be considered as returning them to this manifold. Following this assumption, we present a simple adversarial purification method without further training to purify adversarial images, called ZeroPur. ZeroPur contains two steps: given an adversarial example, Guided Shift obtains the shifted embedding of the adversarial example by the guidance of its blurred counterparts; after that, Adaptive Projection constructs a directional vector by this shifted embedding to provide momentum, projecting adversarial images onto the manifold adaptively. ZeroPur is independent of external models and requires no retraining of victim classifiers or auxiliary functions, relying solely on victim classifiers themselves to achieve purification. Extensive experiments on three datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-1K) using various classifier architectures (ResNet, WideResNet) demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art robust performance. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/erhul/ZeroPur.
comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP) 2026
♻ ☆ SuperQuadricOcc: Real-Time Self-Supervised Semantic Occupancy Estimation with Superquadric Volume Rendering WACV 2027
Seamie Hayes, Alexandre Boulch, Andrei Bursuc, Reenu Mohandas, Ganesh Sistu, Tim Brophy, Ciaran Eising
Self-supervision for semantic occupancy estimation is appealing as it removes the labour-intensive manual annotation, thus allowing one to scale to larger autonomous driving datasets. Superquadrics offer an expressive shape family very suitable for this task, yet their deployment in a self-supervised setting has been hindered by the lack of efficient rendering methods to bridge the 3D scene representation with 2D training pseudo-labels. To address this, we introduce SuperQuadricOcc, the first self-supervised occupancy model to leverage superquadrics for scene representation. To overcome the rendering limitation, we propose a real-time volume renderer that preserves the fidelity of the superquadric shape during rendering. It relies on spatial superquadric-voxel indexing, restricting each ray sample to query only nearby superquadrics, thereby greatly reducing memory usage and computational cost. Using drastically fewer primitives than prior Gaussian-based methods, SuperQuadricOcc achieves state-of-the-art RayIoU on Occ3D-nuScenes with real-time inference and a substantially reduced memory footprint, while also outperforming Gaussian-based baselines on downstream occupancy forecasting and trajectory estimation.
comment: Accepted at WACV 2027
♻ ☆ SimWAM: A Simple World Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Zongchuang Zhao, Xin Zhou, Tianyang Xu, Zhengyang Sun, Kaixuan Zhou, Honglin Li, Dingkang Liang, Xiang Bai
World-Action Models (WAMs) improve end-to-end autonomous driving by transferring video dynamics priors to action prediction, but existing methods incur costly test-time future imagination. We present SimWAM, a simple yet effective WAM that leverages future-video prediction as a training-time supervision signal. It co-trains a pretrained video expert and a lightweight action expert with joint flow matching. An isolated attention mask keeps action prediction independent of future frames, allowing trajectory prediction without explicit future-frame generation at inference. Since the two experts share no parameters and interact only through a unified attention interface, the video backbone could be replaced and the action expert scaled independently without modifying the learning objective or inference pipeline. We further apply reinforcement learning to optimize a compositional driving reward beyond trajectory imitation. Our SimWAM achieves 91.5 PDMS on NAVSIM, surpasses state-of-the-art WAM-based planners with substantially lower latency, and transfers zero-shot to nuScenes. These results position SimWAM as a simple yet solid baseline that could readily benefit from advances in video generation for efficient autonomous driving. The code and model weights are available at https://github.com/H-EmbodVis/SimWAM/.
comment: The code and model weights are available at https://github.com/H-EmbodVis/SimWAM/
♻ ☆ R2AoP: Reliable and Robust Angle of Progression Estimation from Intrapartum Ultrasound MICCAI
Yuanhan Wang, Yifei Chen, Beining Wu, Mingxuan Liu, Xiaotian Hu, Chunbo Jiang, Yijin Li, Changmiao Wang, Feiwei Qin, Qiyuan Tian
Accurate estimation of the Angle of Progression (AoP) from intrapartum transperineal ultrasound is critical for objective assessment of labor progression, yet remains highly sensitive to imaging noise, boundary ambiguities, and the geometric amplification of local segmentation errors. We propose R2AoP, a reliable and robust AoP estimation framework that integrates structurally informed segmentation and confidence-guided geometric modeling to achieve stable and reproducible measurements. A three-branch local-structure-enhanced backbone improves the delineation of the pubic symphysis (PS) and fetal head (FH), while confidence-weighted contour fitting explicitly suppresses the influence of unreliable boundary points in AoP computation. To further improve performance under heterogeneous acquisition conditions, we introduce a lightweight geometry-reliable test-time adaptation strategy as an auxiliary component, enabling stable inference without target annotations. Extensive evaluations on multi-center benchmarks demonstrate consistent reductions in AoP error and boundary metrics compared with state-of-the-art AoP methods. Our source code is available at https://github.com/baiyou1234/R2AoP.
comment: 11pages,4 figures,Accepted by MICCAI PIPPI Workshop 2026
♻ ☆ AnyAct: Towards Human Reenactment of Character Motion From Video
We study the problem of directly deriving an initial human reenactment from a monocular video of a non-human character. Our goal is not to reconstruct the source character itself but to reinterpret its motion as a plausible and editable human performance for downstream animation authoring. This task is challenging because existing video-based motion capture methods are largely restricted to human-centric structural spaces, while motion retargeting methods typically require structured 3D source motions and known source topologies. Our key insight is that sparse local articulated motion cues can preserve essential dynamics across large structural differences, providing a stable bridge from character video to human reenactment. Based on this observation, we propose AnyAct, which formulates character-video-driven human reenactment as conditional human motion generation from transferable sparse local 2D articulated motion. To make this practical, we introduce three key designs: human-motion-only supervision via augmented 3D-to-2D projection, progressive 3D-to-2D training to alleviate conditioning ambiguity, and global-local motion decoupling for reliable local motion control. We further construct a benchmark primarily covering diverse non-human character videos. Experiments on the benchmark show that AnyAct produces high-fidelity initial human reenactments that preserve the essential dynamics of the characters in reference videos, and further ablation studies validate the effectiveness of its core designs.
comment: 12 pages
♻ ☆ MultiView-Bench: A Diagnostic Benchmark for World-Centric Multi-View Integration in VLMs
Recent benchmarks for VLMs largely assess single- or limited-view perception, leaving untested the core cognitive ability to integrate observations across viewpoints into a coherent, world-centric (allocentric) 3D mental model. We introduce MultiView-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark expressly designed to evaluate multi-view integration for holistic 3D scene comprehension. Unlike existing datasets that focus on pixel-level mapping or camera-relative navigation, MultiView-Bench requires models to decouple object positioning from transient perspectives and ground them in a fixed global coordinate system. This capability serves as a prerequisite for VLMs before being deployed for downstream tasks such as mechanical part assembly. Our systematic evaluation of frontier VLMs reveals consistent failure modes: strong performance on 2D planar relations from a single image, but marked difficulty with 3D spatial relations and with aggregating information across views. We further identify biases in VLMs, such as struggles with unconventional axis directions and sensitivity to object colorways and texture variations. Acknowledging these limitations, we propose ViewNavigator, which uses active viewpoint selection and evidence fusion to improve four base models by 12.3--20.0 percentage points under a six-image cap matching the fixed-view baseline; budget-extended gains are model-dependent and reach 27 percentage points for GPT-5.
♻ ☆ GridVAD: Open-Set Video Anomaly Detection via Spatial Reasoning over Stratified Frame Grids ECCV 2026
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are powerful open-set reasoners, yet their direct use as anomaly detectors in video surveillance is fragile: without calibrated anomaly priors, they alternate between missed detections and hallucinated false alarms. We argue the problem is not the VLM itself but how it is used. VLMs should function as anomaly proposers, generating open-set candidate descriptions that are then grounded and tracked by purpose-built spatial and temporal modules. We instantiate this propose-ground-propagate principle in GridVAD, a training-free pipeline that produces pixel-level anomaly masks without any domain-specific training. A VLM reasons over stratified grid representations of video clips to generate natural-language anomaly proposals. Self-Consistency Consolidation (SCC) filters hallucinations by retaining only proposals that recur across multiple independent samplings. Grounding DINO anchors each surviving proposal to a bounding box, and SAM2 propagates it as a dense mask through the anomaly interval. The per-clip model budget is fixed at M+1 calls regardless of video length, where M can be set according to the proposals needed. On UCSD Ped2, GridVAD achieves the highest Pixel-AUROC (77.59) among all compared methods, surpassing even the partially fine-tuned TAO (75.11) and outperforms other zero-shot approaches on object-level RBDC by over 5x. Ablations reveal that SCC provides a controllable precision-recall tradeoff: filtering improves all pixel level metrics at a modest cost in object-level recall. Efficiency experiments show GridVAD is 2.7x more call-efficient than uniform per-frame VLM querying while additionally producing dense segmentation masks.Code and qualitative video results are available at https://gridvad.github.io.
comment: Accepted at the Large-scale Video Object Segmentation (LVOS) Workshop in conjunction with ECCV 2026
♻ ☆ Where Is the Bee? Detecting Tiny Pollinators with a Single Collaborative-Head Transformer ECCV 2026
The CVPPA@ECCV 2026 BuzzSpot Challenge asks us to detect bees, bumblebees, hoverflies, and moths in 1920x1080 field keyframes. Its annotations carry 2 difficulties: the median box occupies 0.16% of a frame, and bees account for 80% of the labels. To cope with the small boxes, we compare 10 recorded detector configurations on held-out keyframes; plain Co-DINO with a Swin-L backbone has the highest mAP in this comparison, so we select it. Training then addresses the bee dominance in 2 ways: fine-tuning on a crop-mosaic pool in which the combined annotation share of the 3 rare classes rises from 19.9% to 55.1%, and a class-weighted simplex equiangular tight frame (ETF) loss that pulls the projected states of matched decoder queries toward fixed class directions. The full schedule spans 12+3+2 epochs. Without inference-time ensembling or test-time augmentation, we rank first on FinalTest at 0.5062 mAP@[.5:.95].
comment: The 1st rank method's paper at CVPPA@ECCV 2026 BuzzSpot Challenge
♻ ☆ GranQ: Efficient Channel-wise Quantization via Vectorized Pre-Scaling for Zero-Shot QAT
Zero-shot quantization (ZSQ) enables neural network compression without original training data, making it a promising solution for restricted data access scenarios. To compensate for the lack of data, recent ZSQ methods typically rely on synthetic inputs generated from the full-precision model. However, these synthetic inputs often lead to activation distortion, especially under low-bit settings. To mitigate this, existing methods typically employ per-channel scaling, but they still struggle due to the severe computational overhead during the accumulation process. To overcome this critical bottleneck, we propose GranQ, a novel activation quantization framework that introduces an efficient pre-scaling strategy. Unlike conventional channel-wise methods that repeatedly perform scaling operations during accumulation, GranQ applies scaling factors in a pre-scaling step through fully vectorized computation, eliminating runtime scaling overhead. This design enables GranQ to maintain fine-grained quantization accuracy while significantly reducing computational burden, particularly in low-bit quantization settings. Extensive experiments under quantization-aware training (QAT) settings demonstrate that GranQ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art ZSQ methods across CIFAR and ImageNet. In particular, our method achieves up to 5.45% higher accuracy in the 3-bit setting on CIFAR-100 and even surpasses the full-precision baseline on CIFAR-10.
comment: Accepted at ACM SAC 2026
♻ ☆ LaViT: Aligning Latent Visual Thoughts for Multi-modal Reasoning
Linquan Wu, Tianxiang Jiang, Yifei Dong, Haoyu Yang, Fengji Zhang, Shichaang Meng, Ai Xuan, Linqi Song, Jacky Keung
Current multimodal latent reasoning often relies on external supervision (e.g., auxiliary images), ignoring intrinsic visual attention dynamics. In this work, we identify a critical Perception Gap in distillation: student models frequently mimic a teacher's textual output while attending to fundamentally divergent visual regions, effectively relying on language priors rather than grounded perception. To bridge this, we propose LaViT, a framework that aligns latent visual thoughts rather than static embeddings. LaViT compels the student to autoregressively reconstruct the teacher's visual semantics and attention trajectories prior to text generation, employing a curriculum sensory gating mechanism to prevent shortcut learning. Extensive experiments show that LaViT significantly enhances visual grounding, achieving up to +16.9% gains on complex reasoning tasks and enabling a compact 3B model to outperform larger open-source variants and proprietary models like GPT-4o.
♻ ☆ HSSBench: Benchmarking Humanities and Social Sciences Ability for Multimodal Large Language Models ICLR 2026
Zhaolu Kang, Junhao Gong, Jiaxu Yan, Wanke Xia, Yian Wang, Ziwen Wang, Huaxuan Ding, Zhuo Cheng, Wenhao Cao, Zhiyuan Feng, Siqi He, Shannan Yan, Junzhe Chen, Xiaomin He, Chaoya Jiang, Wei Ye, Kaidong Yu, Xuelong Li
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential to advance a broad range of domains. However, current benchmarks for evaluating MLLMs primarily emphasize general knowledge and vertical step-by-step reasoning typical of STEM disciplines, while overlooking the distinct needs and potential of the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS). Tasks in the HSS domain require more horizontal, interdisciplinary thinking and a deep integration of knowledge across related fields, which presents unique challenges for MLLMs, particularly in linking abstract concepts with corresponding visual representations. Addressing this gap, we present HSSBench, a dedicated benchmark designed to assess the capabilities of MLLMs on HSS tasks in multiple languages, including the six official languages of the United Nations. We also introduce a novel data generation pipeline tailored for HSS scenarios, in which multiple domain experts and automated agents collaborate to generate and iteratively refine each sample. HSSBench contains over 13,000 meticulously designed samples, covering six key categories. We benchmark more than 20 mainstream MLLMs on HSSBench and demonstrate that it poses significant challenges even for state-of-the-art models. We hope that this benchmark will inspire further research into enhancing the cross-disciplinary reasoning abilities of MLLMs, especially their capacity to internalize and connect knowledge across fields.
comment: ICLR 2026 (OpenReview: https://openreview.net/forum?id=iQsKotob31)
♻ ☆ Ablation-Corrected Evaluation of Attribution Maps in Echocardiographic Ejection-Fraction Models
Attribution maps for echocardiographic ejection-fraction models are evaluated by their overlap with an expert left-ventricular annotation, compared against a chance level that is computed from an area ratio rather than measured. We measure it. Two architectures trained on the same task attain overlap at 3.55 and 4.20 times measured chance, an eighteen percent difference a reader would take as the size of the gap between them. It is not. Replacing the annotated ventricle with a composition-matched surrogate changes one model's prediction six times more than replacing an equal-area control region and the other's twice, a factor of three; on sixty-two percent of cases for the second, neither the ventricle nor the attributed region moves the prediction at all. The reliability of this measurement, from two independent intervention batches, is 0.90 to 0.98. Overlap does not track the difference: scored against an ablation-derived label of which cases the model depends on the ventricle for, it reaches an area under the curve of 0.52 and 0.67. The design of the ablation also determines its answer, since ablating only the two annotated frames leaves the ventricle indistinguishable from a control region while ablating across all frames does not. A pediatric cohort reproduces all of these. We give the measured chance level, the symmetric-ablation protocol, the reliability estimate, and the ablation-prediction score as things to report alongside overlap.
comment: 12 pages, 4 figures. v2: the chance level is now measured rather than computed, which corrects the ratios reported in v1. Adds a composition-matched ablation with an equal-area control, a reliability estimate for it, an ablation-derived score to report alongside overlap, seed repetition, and pediatric validation
♻ ☆ Concept Labels Are Not Enough: Rethinking Concept Bottleneck Models through Representation Integrity
Although deep neural networks achieve strong predictive performance, their internal reasoning often remains difficult to inspect and control. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) address this opacity by factoring predictions through human-understandable concepts, thereby enabling concept-level inspection and intervention. However, CBMs remain vulnerable to concept shift and information leakage, while existing evaluations neither reveal how the internal features supporting each concept are organized nor identify the representation-level deficiency associated with these failures. We argue that this missing property is concept integrity: concept support should form a semantically coherent and non-fragmented functional group. To characterize this property, we propose group coherence (GC) and concept coverage (CC) as integrity components and aggregate them into the concept integrity score (CIS). We further introduce Concept Integrity Regularization (CIR) to encourage coherent and separated groups of concept-supporting filters. Our latent decoupled concept bottleneck model (LDCBM) applies CIR without requiring region annotations. Across three datasets, CIS rankings differ from rankings by concept and task accuracy, supporting concept integrity as a complementary representation-level criterion. Moreover, with only 10\% of concept labels, LDCBM retains approximately 93\% of its full-label task performance. Background-masking and concept-intervention further associate stronger integrity profiles with lower sensitivity to nuisance context and more responsive concept correction.
♻ ☆ Fine-grained CLIP fine-tuning with self-annotated region alignment
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has been shown to have limitations in its fine-grained dense feature representation, due to its pre-training focusing on matching the whole image to a text description. Considering the large data and computational burden in pre-training a vision-language model from scratch, a series of works aim to enhance the fine-grained ability of CLIP through a fine-tuning scheme. However, existing works suffer from a variety of limitations: additional region annotations are usually required, which limits the semantic diversity due to the predefined categories and leads to a large effort to process the training data; and they usually sacrifice CLIP's original ability for global visual representation. To bypass these limitations, we propose SFF-CLIP (Self-annotated Fine-grained Fine-tuning for CLIP), which only uses image-text pairs as input to boost the fine-grained representation ability in the CLIP fine-tuning, while maintaining the global visual-semantic consistency. Concretely, a run-time region-phrase alignment scheme is designed, which obtains concept phrases from the input sentence, and aligns them with corresponding extracted region-based features using text-specific heat maps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SFF-CLIP leads to significant performance improvements on fine-grained dense feature representation, as well as maintaining the performance of the original CLIP on image-level tasks. Code will be released later.
♻ ☆ DreamOmni3: Scribble-based Editing and Generation
Bin Xia, Bohao Peng, Jiyang Liu, Sitong Wu, Jingyao Li, Junjia Huang, Xu Zhao, Yitong Wang, Ruihang Chu, Bei Yu, Jiaya Jia
Recently unified generation and editing models have achieved remarkable success with their impressive performance. These models rely mainly on text prompts for instruction-based editing and generation, but language often fails to capture users intended edit locations and fine-grained visual details. To this end, we propose two tasks: scribble-based editing and generation, that enables more flexible creation on graphical user interface (GUI) combining user textual, images, and freehand sketches. We introduce DreamOmni3, tackling two challenges: data creation and framework design. Our data synthesis pipeline includes two parts: scribble-based editing and generation. For scribble-based editing, we define four tasks: scribble and instruction-based editing, scribble and multimodal instruction-based editing, image fusion, and doodle editing. Based on DreamOmni2 dataset, we extract editable regions and overlay hand-drawn boxes, circles, doodles or cropped image to construct training data. For scribble-based generation, we define three tasks: scribble and instruction-based generation, scribble and multimodal instruction-based generation, and doodle generation, following similar data creation pipelines. For the framework, instead of using binary masks, which struggle with complex edits involving multiple scribbles, images, and instructions, we propose a joint input scheme that feeds both the original and scribbled source images into the model, using different colors to distinguish regions and simplify processing. By applying the same index and position encodings to both images, the model can precisely localize scribbled regions while maintaining accurate editing. Finally, we establish comprehensive benchmarks for these tasks to promote further research. Experimental results demonstrate that DreamOmni3 achieves outstanding performance, and models and code will be publicly released.
♻ ☆ HSMLA: Hierarchical Softmax Multi-scale Linear Attention for Efficient Vision Transformers
Vision transformers face significant computational overheads in high-resolution dense prediction due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Linear attention offers efficiency but sacrifices local context modeling. We propose \textbf{HSMLA (Hierarchical Softmax Multi-scale Linear Attention)}, which combines ReLU-based linear attention for global context, selective softmax refinement for critical local features, and multi-scale token representations via depthwise convolutions. HSMLA achieves superior accuracy-efficiency trade-offs: up to $4.2\times$ inference-time speedup across dense prediction tasks, $87.3%$ Dice with $3.2\times$ speedup on CT organ segmentation, and $94.2%$ AUC with $4.1\times$ speedup on pathology WSI.
♻ ☆ EventCoT: Event-centric Video Chain-of-thought for Reasoning Temporal Localization
Reasoning temporal localization (RTL) requires a model to generate an answer that itself contains the time interval supporting it, coupling high-level reasoning with temporal grounding in a single response. To tackle this challenge, we propose the first event-centric video chain-of-thought framework, dubbed EventCoT. EventCoT first performs event-centric tokenization, converting the video into compact event tokens that enable efficient identification of question-relevant events. It then reasons within these events to generate the answer, grounding the time interval via embedding matching that aligns placeholder tokens with visual embeddings. EventCoT achieves state-of-the-art results on ActivityNet-RTL while using substantially fewer visual tokens than previous work, and attains strong zero-shot results on the grounded video question answering benchmark ReXTime. Our code will be released for research purposes.
comment: 27 pages, 11 figures, 19 tables. Co-corresponding authors: Dongkeun Kim and Suha Kwak
♻ ☆ HoloQ-VLA: Uniform W4A4 Quantization of Vision-Language-Action Models
Xinyu Wang, Mingze Li, Sicheng Lyu, Dongxiu Liu, Kaicheng Yang, Ziyu Zhao, Yufei Cui, Xiao-Wen Chang, Peng Lu
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models unify perception, reasoning, and control in a single policy, but their multi-billion-parameter backbones and diffusion-based action heads make on-device deployment prohibitively expensive. Low-bit post-training quantization (PTQ) is the natural remedy, yet the diffusion action head that emits continuous control signals is highly sensitive to it: a few weight and activation outliers are enough to destabilize the head, so prior work leaves it at full precision or falls back to mixed-precision schemes, and uniformly quantizing the whole model to low bit-width remains an open challenge. We present HoloQ-VLA, the first training-free PTQ framework that compresses both the language backbone and the entire diffusion action head to uniform W4A4 precision without mixed-precision allocation. Instead of trading weight quality against activation quality, HoloQ-VLA targets the two outlier sources with complementary transforms: a weight-adapted rotation composed with an activation-dispersing Hadamard transform, together with per-step scaling that absorbs the dynamic-range drift exhibited by the action head across denoising steps. On LIBERO, HoloQ-VLA compresses Pi-0.5 and GR00T-N1.5 to W4A4 with 98.0% and 87.8% task success rates, matching or exceeding their FP16 references of 97.1% and 87.0%, while reducing the static memory footprint by 74.2%. Real-world manipulation experiments further demonstrate that HoloQ-VLA maintains smooth and accurate control across diverse real-world scenarios.
♻ ☆ Learning in ImaginationLand: Omnidirectional Policies through 3D Generative Models (OP-Gen)
Recent 3D generative models, which are capable of generating full object shapes from just a few images, now open up new opportunities in robotics. In this work, we show that 3D generative models can be used to augment a dataset from a single real-world demonstration, after which an omnidirectional policy can be learned within this imagined dataset. We found that this enables a robot to perform a task when initialised from states very far from those observed during the demonstration, including starting from the opposite side of the object relative to the real-world demonstration, significantly reducing the number of demonstrations required for policy learning. Through several real-world experiments across tasks such as grasping objects, opening a drawer, and placing trash into a bin, we study these omnidirectional policies by investigating the effect of various design choices on policy behaviour, and we show superior performance to recent baselines which use alternative methods for data augmentation.
comment: Project webpage with robot videos: https://www.robot-learning.uk/op-gen
♻ ☆ FARCLUSS: Fuzzy Adaptive Rebalancing and Contrastive Uncertainty Learning for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SSSS) faces persistent challenges in effectively leveraging unlabeled data, such as ineffective utilization of pseudo-labels, exacerbation of class imbalance biases, and neglect of prediction uncertainty. Current approaches often discard uncertain regions through strict thresholding favouring dominant classes. To address these limitations, we introduce a holistic framework that transforms uncertainty into a learning asset through four principal components: (1) fuzzy pseudo-labeling, which preserves soft class distributions from top-K predictions to enrich supervision; (2) uncertainty-aware dynamic weighting, that modulate pixel-wise contributions via entropy-based reliability scores; (3) adaptive class rebalancing, which dynamically adjust losses to counteract long-tailed class distributions; and (4) lightweight contrastive regularization, that encourage compact and discriminative feature embeddings. Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches, achieving significant improvements in the segmentation of under-represented classes and ambiguous regions.
comment: Accepted in Neural Networks (Elsevier), article 109494. 15 pages, 7 figures
♻ ☆ On-Policy Distillation with Best-of-N Teacher Rollout Selection
On-policy distillation (OPD), which supervises a student on its own sampled trajectories, has emerged as a data-efficient post-training method for improving reasoning while avoiding the reward dependence of reinforcement learning and the catastrophic forgetting often observed in standard supervised fine-tuning. However, standard OPD typically computes teacher supervision under noisy student-generated contexts and often relies on a single stochastic teacher rollout per prompt. As a result, the supervision signal can be high-variance: the sampled teacher trajectory can be incorrect, uninformative, or poorly matched to the student's current reasoning behavior. To address this limitation, we propose BRTS, a Best-of-N Rollout Teacher Selection framework for on-policy distillation. BRTS augments standard student-context OPD with a teacher-context supervision branch constructed from the curated teacher trajectory. Rather than distilling from the first sampled teacher rollout, BRTS samples a small pool of teacher trajectories and selects the auxiliary trajectory using a simple priority rule: correctness first, student alignment second. When multiple correct teacher trajectories are available, BRTS chooses the one most aligned with the student's current behavior; when unconditioned teacher samples fail on harder prompts, it invokes a ground-truth-conditioned recovery step to elicit a natural derivation. The selected trajectory is then used to provide reliable teacher-context supervision inside the OPD loop, augmented with an auxiliary loss on the teacher trajectory. Experiments on AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and AMC 2023 show that BRTS improves over standard OPD on challenging reasoning benchmarks, with the largest gains on harder datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/BWGZK-keke/BRTS.
comment: 10 pages, 5 figures
♻ ☆ Introspective Attention Modulation for Safe Text-to-Image Generation ECCV 2026
State-of-the-art flow based text-to-image (T2I) models exhibit remarkable generative abilities but remain vulnerable to producing unsafe content. Prior safety efforts range from concept erasure and prompt filtering to classifier-based gating. However, simple techniques like parameter efficient adaptations of the models easily bypass such guardrails. We introduce a unique principled approach that achieves safety by regulating the model's attention dynamics through inference-time introspection, exhibiting intrinsic robustness. Our method analyzes and rebalances attention activations throughout image synthesis, steering generations away from unsafe concepts while preserving semantic alignment. This introspective control ensures safety of deployed models. Across standard and adversarial safety benchmarks, our approach achieves remarkable safety scores while maintaining or even improving alignment and perceptual quality. Our results reveal that attention-space regulation offers a considerably more promising path to safer diffusion transformer based image generation than the existing concept erasing mechanism.Our code can be accessed at https://basim-azam.github.io/iam/
comment: Accepted at ECCV 2026. 20 pages, 7 figures. Project page: https://basim-azam.github.io/iam/
♻ ☆ SynBoost: A Synergistic Framework for Fast Sampling of Diffusion Models
Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in visual generation. However, their iterative sampling mechanism results in slow inference speeds. While reducing sampling steps offers an intuitive acceleration strategy, it introduces significant discretization error. Existing fast samplers have made substantial progress in mitigating this error through high-order solvers, yet further optimization appears constrained. This limitation prompts a critical question: can sampling efficiency be advanced beyond current paradigms?
In this work, we re-examine the composition of sampling errors and identify two distinct components: the well-studied discretization error and the under-explored approximation error. By implementing a dual-error disentanglement strategy, we elucidate the dynamic interplay between these error types across sampling steps. Building on this empirical analysis, we propose SynBoost, a unified and training-free acceleration framework that simultaneously addresses both error sources to minimize total sampling error. Concretely, it mitigates approximation error by blending the current noise estimation with a more accurate prediction from a larger timestep.
SynBoost seamlessly integrates with existing samplers, substantially enhancing their speed and output quality, particularly in regimes with extremely few steps. We validate our framework through extensive experiments across unconditional and conditional generation tasks, encompassing both pixel-space and latent-space DPMs.
♻ ☆ Token-Based Detection of Spurious Correlations in Vision Transformers
Solha Kang, Esla Timothy Anzaku, Wesley De Neve, Arnout Van Messem, Joris Vankerschaver, Francois Rameau, Utku Ozbulak
Due to their powerful feature association capabilities, neural network-based computer vision models have the ability to detect and exploit unintended patterns within the data, potentially leading to correct predictions based on incorrect or unintended but statistically relevant signals. These clues may vary from simple color aberrations to small pieces of text within the image. In situations where these unintended signals align with the predictive task, models can mistakenly link these features with the task and rely on them for making predictions. This phenomenon is referred to as spurious correlations, where patterns appear to be associated with the task but are actually coincidental. As a result, detection and mitigation of spurious correlations have become crucial tasks for building trustworthy, reliable, and generalizable machine learning models. In this work, we present a token-based diagnostic pipeline that applies leave-one-out token removal to detect spurious correlations in vision transformers. The proposed approach quantifies a model's reliance on non-core visual cues through complementary measures that capture both aggregate and localized spurious effects at the token level. Using both supervised and self-supervised trained models, we present large-scale experiments on the ImageNet dataset demonstrating the ability of the proposed method to identify spurious correlations. We also find that, even if the same architecture is used, the training methodology has a substantial impact on the model's reliance on spurious correlations. Furthermore, we show that for certain ImageNet classes, many images exhibit strong reliance on non-core visual cues across multiple models, and we discuss common sources of such signals (e.g., watermarks and background artifacts). Lastly, we present a case study investigating spurious signals in invasive breast mass classification.
comment: Accepted for publication in Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)
♻ ☆ SafeNexus: Discovering and Steering Modality-Universal Safety Neurons in MLLMs
Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising safety performance, extending them to Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exposes a significant gap between expanded multimodal capabilities and existing safety mechanisms. Current defenses remain predominantly confined to specific modal settings, thereby limiting their robustness against broader cross-modal threats. To bridge this gap, we introduce SafeNexus, a cross-modal safety alignment framework that adopts a dedicated neuron-level intervention strategy. First, we formulate a neuron localization paradigm that identifies functionally specialized neurons by characterizing intermediate-layer activation patterns and quantifying their functional salience through importance scoring. Building upon this paradigm, we exploit contrastive data to identify modality-bound safety neurons (BS-Neurons), and validate their role in regulating safety behavior within each modality via targeted suppression. Further cross-modal analysis defines modality-universal safety neurons (US-Neurons) as the shared subset of BS-Neurons identified across individual modalities, serving as the core for defending against harmful cross-modal attacks. We observe that suppressing these neurons substantially degrades safety performance across modalities, while leaving overall utility largely unaffected. Building on these insights, we propose two safety alignment strategies: activation-level safety amplifier and safety neuron calibrator. The proposed strategies enhance model safety through two distinct routes: the former amplifies the activation magnitudes of US-Neurons, while the latter selectively calibrates them via targeted fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms prevailing state-of-the-art approaches on safety benchmarks spanning diverse modality combinations, while effectively preserving utility.
♻ ☆ Logit Lens Supervision for Patch-Level Explanations in Vision-Language Models
Modern autoregressive Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can generate fluent answers while their visual-token representations become weakly tied to the image regions from which they originate. This limits patch-level explainability: a visual token should remain interpretable as the image patch it represents. We study this issue through Logit Lens maps, obtained by projecting each visual-token embedding through the LLM vocabulary head to measure how strongly each image patch is associated with a queried textual concept, such as "cat". We introduce Logit Lens Loss (LLL), a lightweight auxiliary objective that preserves localized visual semantics by directly aligning object-related visual tokens with the vocabulary concepts describing their image regions. LLL requires no architectural modification, mask decoder, or large-scale retraining. We evaluate LLL through both explanation quality and downstream performance. Across LLaVA-v1.5-7B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B, LLL yields sharper object confidence maps, improves grounding and hallucination metrics, transfers to zero-shot pointing, and preserves VQA performance.
♻ ☆ Majorization-Guided Test-Time Adaptation for Vision-Language Models under Modality-Specific Shift ACM MM 2026
Vision--language models can face asymmetric visual and textual shifts at deployment. These shifts expose a multimodal failure mode in which an unreliable branch remains overconfident, dominates fusion, and causes entropy-based test-time adaptation to sharpen an incorrect prediction. We model this behavior as doubly stochastic posterior mixing and cast adaptation as constrained de-mixing. Majorization-Guided Multimodal Test-Time Adaptation (MG-MTTA) freezes both encoders and updates only a lightweight fusion module. Running-anchor consistency estimates relative branch drift, while cross-modal conflict regulates modality dominance before entropy sharpening. The analysis gives sufficient conditions for entropy reduction to preserve the clean decision and an explicit threshold at which a biased modality reverses the fused ranking. Across visual, textual, and joint shifts, MG-MTTA improves ImageNet top-1 accuracy from 57.97\% to 66.51\% under textual shift and from 21.68\% to 26.27\% under joint shift, while reducing wrong-more-confident failures. The largest gains occur under textual and joint shifts, where the two branches differ more in reliability. Project page: https://mg-mtta.github.io/.
comment: Accepted by ACM MM 2026
♻ ☆ Bootstrapping Vision-Language Model for Hysteroscopic Surgical Scene Segmentation
Jun Huang, Meiyi Chen, Zijie Yue, Yuhang Xiao, Fang Li, Hanli Wang, Xiaowen Tong, Yi Guo, Miaojing Shi
Hysteroscopic surgical scene segmentation plays a pivotal role in understanding the hysteroscopic intraoperative environment as well as computer-assisted intervention. However, this task presents unique challenges due to the high morphological similarity among different lesions and the presence of artifacts such as specular reflections, motion blur, and fluid occlusions in surgical videos. In this work, we propose the first vision-language model (VLM)-based hysteroscopic surgical scene segmentation method, which performs pixel-wise localization for fifteen representative categories in hysteroscopic surgical scenes. Our VLM-hyster has a segmentation backbone that utilizes the pretrained image encoder for robust visual feature extraction, coupled with a transformer-based decoder for dense prediction. Moreover, we design category-specific text prompts and incorporate a masked distillation branch to filter out visual features with low correlation to the text prompts, enabling the model to focus more effectively on category-specific image regions and thereby enhancing segmentation performance. We collect a large multicentric hysteroscopic surgical scene dataset, containing 4,020 high-resolution images with detailed mask annotations, for model training and evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that VLM-hyster substantially outperforms state-of-the-art AI models. Furthermore, extensive assessments by gynecologists, as well as multicentre and prospective validations, demonstrate VLM-hyster's robustness and generalizability. The results suggest that VLM-hyster earns considerable potential in enabling AI-assisted localization of surgical instruments and lesions in hysteroscopic surgeries. Code is available at https://github.com/viscom-tongji/VLM-hyster.
comment: Accept by Biomedical Signal Processing and Control
♻ ☆ UniScale: Arbitrary-Scale Industrial Anomaly Generation ECCV2026
Industrial anomaly inspection faces a major challenge due to the lack of real-world anomaly samples. While generative models are used to create anomaly data, existing methods still struggle when handling small-scale anomalies. This failure occurs because extreme downsampling in diffusion models causes the information of small anomalies to be lost in the latent space. To address this, we introduce UniScale, a unified training and inference framework for high-fidelity industrial anomaly generation across arbitrary scales. During training, we introduce an Error-Suppressed Multi-Scale Training (EMT) strategy, which enables the model to learn the rich location-aware textures of anomalies, while suppressing upsampling-induced interpolation errors in texture acquisition, ensuring the model is capable of learning small-scale anomalies, while remaining effective for regular scale anomalies. For inference, we propose Generation-then-Fusion Denoising. It decouples anomaly generation from background integration, preventing small anomalies from being overwhelmed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art competitors in both anomaly generation quality and downstream detection performance. It achieves a relative IS(a) improvement of 45.86% (from 1.81 to 2.64) on VisA and 37.70% (from 1.22 to 1.68) on MVTec AD 2, while also improving the downstream pixel-level IoU by 4.22% on VisA and AUROC by 6.55% on MVTec AD 2. Code is available at https://github.com/HUST-SLOW/UniScale.
comment: Accepted at ECCV2026
♻ ☆ DeCo: Zero-Shot Industrial Anomaly Generation through Decoupling and Recoupling ECCV2026
Industrial anomaly inspection is severely hindered by the scarcity of real anomalous data. Zero-shot industrial anomaly generation addresses this by generating anomalies on specific products without requiring any of their real anomalous images. However, existing methods suffer from two critical limitations, i.e., inaccurate anomaly information acquisition and uncontrolled anomaly-product fusion. To overcome these challenges, we propose DeCo, which decouples the anomaly structure from its source product, and explicitly recouples it with the normal textures of the target product. During anomaly information acquisition, Dual-Routing Flow (DR-Flow) binds the texture-invariant anomaly structure to an abnormal token, while a parallel constraint, Product-Invariant Flow (PI-Flow), prevents the abnormal token from binding the source product. During anomaly-product fusion, we propose a hybrid injection to recouple the acquired anomaly structure with the target product, and Product Compatibility Correction (PCC) to compensate for the incompatibility between the acquired anomaly structure and the product. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeCo establishes a new state-of-the-art. Training downstream detection models on our generated data yields massive pixel AP improvements of 5.1% on MVTec AD and 8.2% on VisA. Code is available at https://github.com/HUST-SLOW/DeCo.
comment: Accepted at ECCV2026
♻ ☆ Checkup2Action: A Multimodal Clinical Check-up Report Dataset for Patient-Oriented Action Card Generation
Sike Xiang, Shuang Chen, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Jialin Yu, Yijia Sun, Philip Torr, Amir Atapour-Abarghouei
Routine clinical check-up reports combine laboratory measurements, physiological assessments, imaging findings and visually structured information, but rarely tell patients what to do next. Translating them into follow-up actions requires models to connect evidence across pages, tables and modalities, identify clinically relevant issues and communicate next steps without unsupported diagnostic or treatment claims. Yet this report-to-action capability remains poorly benchmarked. We introduce \textbf{C2A}, a dataset and benchmark for generating structured \textit{Action Cards} from multimodal check-up reports, together with \textbf{Checkup2Action}, a constrained workflow for the task. C2A contains 2,000 de-identified real-world reports covering physical examinations, laboratory tests, cardiovascular assessments and imaging evidence. Each card specifies one issue, its priority, recommended department, follow-up window, patient-facing explanation and questions for clinicians. Our evaluation measures issue coverage and precision, priority consistency, department and timing accuracy, action complexity, usefulness, readability and safety. Experiments across general-purpose and medical large language models show that no model performs best on every dimension. Clinical experts judged 84\% of evaluated outputs fully reasonable and effective. Removing safety constraints increased problem recall from 0.527 to 0.825, but produced more diagnostic overstatement. C2A therefore supports systematic study of the balance between coverage, actionable guidance and safe patient communication.
♻ ☆ Attention Without Grounding: Causal Evaluation of Visual Explanations in Medical VLMs
Attention and saliency heatmaps are widely used to explain medical Vision-Language Model (VLM) outputs on chest X-rays, yet whether they truly highlight the image evidence driving predictions has not been causally tested. We audit faithfulness via overlap with radiologist bounding boxes on PadChest (n=637), attribution mass within radiologist masks on CheXlocalize (n=643), and 16x16 patch-occlusion maps that record which regions, when hidden, change the answer. We study three MedGemma-4B variants, cross-family probes on LLaVA-RAD and Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct, and the specialist CheXagent-2-3b, with two CXR-trained classifiers (DenseNet121, ResNet50) as positive controls. A heatmap is faithful only if the model uses the image and attention concentrates on regions whose occlusion alters the prediction. No evaluated VLM meets both criteria. MedGemma and Qwen3-VL use the image, but attention anti-correlates with patch-occlusion importance (rho < 0 with 95% bootstrap CIs below zero). LLaVA-RAD's attention correlates positively, but the model is almost text-only (99.1% text-only agreement, near-zero causal mass), so correlation ties two near-zero signals. Attention also misses annotated anatomy: overlap with true regions never beats shifted or random controls, and no method places more than 22% of its mass inside radiologist masks. The two CXR classifiers pass all metrics, indicating the failure is specific to VLM heatmaps, not the evaluation. These heatmaps are visually reassuring but not faithful; clinical explanations require controlled localization metrics and causal perturbation, not visual inspection alone.
comment: iMIMIC Workshop 2026
♻ ☆ EliSeg: Verified Target Construction for Report-Grounded Abnormality Segmentation
Radiology reports describe clinical observations but do not specify executable segmentation targets. They may contain present, negated, prior,uncertain, or irrelevant findings, while multiple valid abnormalities may coexist. Existing segmentation methods largely bypass this ambiguity by receiving a target identity or spatial prompt before inference, which acts as a hidden target oracle. We study report-grounded abnormality segmentation, where a model must determine target eligibility, cardinality, and finding-to-mask correspondence directly from an unfiltered report before delineating the corresponding regions. We propose \textbf{EliSeg}, an atcor--verify--revise framework that integrates target construction with mask generation. A grammar-constrained Actor proposes target slots and masks, an independent text-only Verifier reconstructs the eligible finding inventory, and Revision selectively re-executes the shared Actor when their target structures disagree. EliSeg requires no predefined target identity, finding prompt, point, or bounding box. Experiments on MIMIC-CXR-ILS show that EliSeg consistently outperforms direct segmentation methods and extract-then-segment cascades across findings, while effectively suppressing masks for ineligible report mentions. Ablation studies confirm the complementary roles of verification and revision, and evaluation on CheXlocalize demonstrates effective transfer of the EliSeg to an external dataset.Code is available at https://github.com/Maybach-dream/EliSeg.
comment: Minor revision: fixed author metadata rendering in the arXiv HTML version
♻ ☆ TimePre: Bridging Accuracy, Efficiency, and Stability in Probabilistic Time-Series Forecasting
Lingyu Jiang, Lingyu Xu, Peiran Li, Dengzhe Hou, Qianwen Ge, Dingyi Zhuang, Shuo Xing, Wenjing Chen, Xiangbo Gao, Ting-Hsuan Chen, Xueying Zhan, Xin Zhang, Ziming Zhang, Zhengzhong Tu, Michael Zielewski, Kazunori Yamada, Fangzhou Lin
We propose TimePre, a simple framework that unifies the efficiency of Multilayer Perceptron (MLP)-based models with the distributional flexibility of Multiple Choice Learning (MCL) for Probabilistic Time-Series Forecasting (PTSF). Stabilized Instance Normalization (SIN), the core of TimePre, is a normalization layer that explicitly addresses the trade-off among accuracy, efficiency, and stability. SIN stabilizes the hybrid architecture by correcting channel-wise statistical shifts, thereby resolving the catastrophic hypothesis collapse. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that TimePre achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy on key probabilistic metrics. Critically, TimePre achieves inference speeds that are orders of magnitude faster than sampling-based models, and is more stable than prior MCL approaches.
comment: 25 pages, 6 figures, 16 tables