Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 151
☆ StateFlow: Building, Evolving, and Accessing 3D World States for Previsualization
Yuyang Yin, Zixiang Li, Longxuan Deng, Hongkai Li, Shifang Zhao, Junnan Liu, Weirong Huang, Mengyu Wang, Tianxiao Fu, Yikai Wang, Peng-Shuai Wang, Xiaojie Jin, Yao Zhao, Yunchao Wei
Previsualization is an intermediate layer between ideas and production in film, games, architecture, and urban design. It lets creators iteratively refine scenes, actions, cameras, and spatial-temporal dynamics. Yet existing generative methods rely on simple prompts to jointly control all of these factors through one-shot image or video synthesis, offering weak controllability and limited support for iterative editing. Fundamentally, a world comprises multiple elements with geometry, appearance, and other attributes, together with cameras. Different frames are produced through local modifications or recombinations of this shared state, which is otherwise largely reused. Therefore, we argue that the missing component is an explicit and persistent working state. To address this, we present StateFlow, a state-centric framework for generative previsualization. Rather than generating videos in one shot, StateFlow uses an editable 3D world to organize scene structure, evolution, and cameras, while off-the-shelf video models enhance visual quality when higher fidelity is desired. This world is maintained as a persistent structured 3D state of scene elements and camera configurations, serving as the core working representation for previsualization. Built on this insight, StateFlow has three stages to construct, evolve, and access the world state. State construction lifts generated 2D content into a coherent 3D world through prior-guided, conflict-aware dual-view initialization, while State evolution translates user intent into structured state transitions while preserving world memory, avoiding full-scene regeneration for each edit. State access uses render-feedback reflection to refine camera plans into visually feasible trajectories, avoiding reliance on VLM semantics alone. Experiments show that StateFlow produces high-quality 3D worlds for video creation and game-like prototyping.
comment: Project Page: https://yuyangyin.github.io/StateFlow
☆ AVA-Encoder: Towards Agent-Native Video Representation Learning
Chuyue Li, Jinpeng Yu, Haozhe Wang, Tian Xueyun, Zhijing Zhang, Bingnan Li, Shuqi Gu, Kan Ren, Jiaming Liu, Ruihua Hua
Creative agents still lack an effective way to learn from high-quality human films, limiting their ability to produce cinematic-grade videos. A key challenge is the absence of a structured video representation that is both faithful to film content and directly usable for agentic reasoning and manipulation. To address the challenge, we propose the Agentic Video Auto-Encoder (AVA-Encoder), a framework for learning agent-native video representations via agentic auto-encoding.
AVA-Encoder transforms a video into a knowledge graph (KG) representation and then reconstructs it back into video. Its hierarchy and state nodes store structured text, while a linked asset layer holds generated images, audio, and video. Typed edges preserve the relations between these text descriptions and assets in a form that agents can easily understand, query, and edit. The video reconstruction differences drive a textual-gradient optimization framework, which expresses evaluation feedback as natural-language update directions for Data-Independent Encoding Policy Pseudo-Training in the outer loop and optional Data-Dependent KG Representation Refinement in the test-time inner loop.
Extensive experiments show that AVA-Encoder improves by 20.7 percentage points over the strongest external baseline. In the controlled policy-only setting, its pseudo-trained shot-level Agentic Video Encoder policy also outperforms a carefully human-tuned policy while using 74.3% fewer system-prompt tokens. We release the complete AVA-Encoder framework, a reliable agentic video reconstruction benchmark, and the first dataset of high-quality film KG representations.
☆ DreamFly: Causal Memory and Receding-Horizon Diffusion Planning for Aerial Vision-Language Navigation
Aerial vision-language navigation (VLN) requires an embodied agent to integrate visual evidence over time, plan future actions, and determine when it has reached a navigation goal under partial observability. Although recent VLA models offer a promising perception-to-action paradigm, adapting them to aerial navigation remains challenging due to limited historical context, short planning horizons, and unreliable implicit termination. To address these challenges, we propose DreamFly, a diffusion-based aerial VLN framework built on Dream-VLA. DreamFly introduces a causally aligned historical memory that augments the current visual representation using only observations preceding the current decision step, enabling temporal reasoning without future information leakage. We further formulate navigation as receding-horizon diffusion planning, where the policy predicts a $K$-step action chunk but executes only the first action before replanning. This plan-$K$, execute-one strategy uses future actions as auxiliary planning targets while preserving closed-loop visual feedback. Finally, LiteStop estimates the stop probability directly from action logits at the initial all-mask state, decoupling explicit termination from action generation. Experiments on the OpenFly benchmark demonstrate consistent improvements in seen and unseen environments. DreamFly achieves 32.04%/29.46% SR and 28.22%/23.54% SPL on the test-seen/test-unseen splits, respectively, outperforming all compared methods on both metrics while attaining the lowest navigation error. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of jointly modeling historical context, future action structure, and explicit termination for aerial VLN.
comment: 24 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables
☆ Class Activation Mapping in Explainable Computer Vision: A Method-Centered Review of CNN, Transformer, and Foundation-Model-Era Visual Explanations
Class activation mapping (CAM) is one of the most widely used visual explanation families in explainable artificial intelligence. Its purpose is intuitive: it converts internal model evidence into a heatmap that highlights the image regions, convolutional channels, tokens, or patches that support a target class or concept. Since the first CAM formulation in 2016, the field has moved far beyond global-average-pooled CNN classifiers. CAM-style methods now include gradient-based post-hoc explanations, gradient-free score and ablation methods, high-resolution upscaling, weakly supervised localization and segmentation, transformer token attribution, causal and debiasing methods, and foundation-model-era approaches that use CLIP, DINO, SAM, or feature-distribution comparisons. This review synthesizes a strict corpus of 57 method-centered papers published from 2016 onward. The paper develops a taxonomy that separates methods by attribution mechanism, architectural dependence, and evaluation objective. It then reviews gradient-based CAMs, recent and hybrid CAM-style methods, and model-based or architecture-aware methods. Across the corpus, the main trend is clear: the field is shifting from explaining one class score in one low-resolution CNN layer toward comparative, multi-layer, probabilistic, token-aware, and foundation-model-aware explanations. At the same time, evaluation remains fragmented. Faithfulness, localization, robustness, computational cost, and human trust are often measured with different protocols. The review therefore emphasizes not only what each method contributes, but also which gap it leaves open and which later methods attempt to close that gap.
☆ Beyond Trial-and-Error: Agentic Optimization for Image-to-Video Adherence
Modern black-box Image-to-Video (I2V) models offer powerful capabilities in automated content creation, yet their lack of fine-grained control and reliability presents significant challenges in professional workflows. Their inherent stochasticity causes minor variations in textual prompts or hyperparameters to yield drastically different outputs often necessitating inefficient, brute-force trial-and-error processes. To address these limitations, we introduce the ``Agentic Self-Improvement" framework, which reframes video synthesis into a closed-loop, goal-directed optimization. Our framework systematically navigates the generation parameter space using a novel two-stage approach. In the first stage, an iterative prompt optimization loop uses a multimodal Large Language Model (mLLM) to refine the input prompt. This refinement implements two automated evaluations: Davidsonian Scene Graph (DSG) queries ensure semantic adherence, and Common Mistake Questions (CMQ) for artifact detection. At the second stage, we use Bayesian optimization to efficiently co-optimize stochastic seeds and CFG scales. This search is guided by a suite of quality metrics, including the novel Video-Text Adherence (VTA) score derived from the DSG and CMQ evaluations. Our framework significantly outperforms unguided search methods: in human preference studies, videos generated via our agentic approach were strongly preferred over baseline outputs, achieving win rates up to 69\%. This work provides a practical and extensible methodology for enhancing the predictability and control of state-of-the-art video generation models, moving the field beyond speculative curiosities toward reliable, production-ready tools.
☆ Curvature-Aware Zeroth-Order Optimization for Memory-Efficient Test-Time Adaptation CVPR 2026
Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to enhance the cross-domain performance of pre-trained models by adapting to unlabeled test data. While most existing TTA methods rely on backpropagation (BP) for finetuning, BP-free methods such as zeroth-order (ZO) methods are more desired in practical on-device scenarios. ZO methods rely only on forward computation, which can largely reduce the complexity and memory overhead of on-device deployment. However, ZO methods suffer from much higher variance compared with first-order methods in estimating the gradient. To address this, we propose an improved ZO method to substantially boost the performance of ZO optimization based TTA. First, we provide an observation to reveal the persistent low-rank Hessian structure of the loss during the adaptation process. Based on this insight, we then propose a loss-landscape curvature-aware zeroth-order (CAZO) method, which leverages a sliding-average estimation of the diagonal Hessian to construct a covariance matrix for anisotropic perturbation sampling. CAZO operates by freezing pretrained weights and optimizing minimal adapter parameters via forward-only passes based gradient estimation, which can substantially reduce the memory overhead compared to BP-based methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAZO significantly outperforms existing TTA methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance while maintaining an excellent balance between accuracy and memory efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/Hollyming/CAZO.
comment: Published in CVPR 2026
☆ XYZFlow:Scaling Multi dimensional Shortcut Flows for Efficient Generative Modeling
High-fidelity image generation faces a trade-off between speed and quality. Diffusion models produce strong visuals but require costly iterative sampling. Existing efficient methods mainly distill pretrained models into few-step samplers, a challenging process that depends heavily on teacher-model quality. In this paper, we introduce XYZFlow, a framework that rethinks efficient generation through multidimensional scaling of flow matching. Unlike single-step mappings, XYZFlow enhances expressivity by making probability paths more identifiable and learnable through structured multidimensional conditioning. We view autoregressive modeling as implicit flow straightening, where richer context reduces trajectory ambiguity. XYZFlow realizes this idea through two orthogonal dimensions: temporal scaling, which uses non-Markovian conditioning on the full denoising history; and spatial scaling, enabled by Next Shortcut Prediction, which sequentially generates patches using preceding patches' denoising trajectories as priors. Experiments show that XYZFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance, with 7.2-8.5X teacher speedups and competitive FID, while Next Shortcut Prediction delivers superior quality-latency trade-offs over model scaling or step reduction.
☆ A Neighborhood Attention Transformer Network for Enhanced 3D Segmentation of the Left Anterior Descending Artery
Rafi Ibn Sultan, Chengyin Li, Yiannos Demetriou, Ahmed I. Ghanem, Joshua P. Kim, Justine Cunningham, Hassan Bagher-Ebadian, Dongxiao Zhu, Kundan S. Thind
Background: Accurate segmentation of the Left Anterior Descending (LAD) artery in 3D free-breathing, non-contrast CT is critical for cardiac dose sparing in thoracic radiotherapy. The LAD is extremely small, has poor soft-tissue contrast, and varies substantially across patients; even manual contours show limited inter-observer agreement, underscoring the ambiguity of the vessel boundaries. Purpose: To develop a transformer-based framework that improves LAD delineation in low-contrast, imbalanced CT through local-global context modeling and uncertainty-guided optimization. Methods: We propose NA-UNETR, a 3D transformer-based segmentation model whose Neighborhood Attention (NA) and Dilated NA (DiNA) blocks jointly capture fine structural detail and long-range context. Given the scarcity of annotated LAD data, the model is pretrained on 1,000 CTA volumes of general coronary anatomy and fine-tuned with LoRA-based parameter-efficient adaptation on 20 free-breathing institutional CT scans. A composite Dice-Focal and Hausdorff loss, dynamically balanced via homoscedastic uncertainty, improves overlap and boundary accuracy. Results: NA-UNETR reached 45.64% Dice, 38.16 mm HD95, and 10.01 mm ASD, improving Dice by 3.10 percentage points over nnU-Net and reducing HD95 by 2.96 mm relative to Swin UNETR, with the strongest boundary accuracy among all models and improved centerline stability. On ImageCAS it achieved 79.49% Dice, 8.89 mm HD95, and 1.02 mm ASD. Ablations confirmed that residual blocks, variable kernels, and uncertainty-weighted loss each contributed. Conclusions: NA-UNETR balances local precision and global context for thin, low-contrast LAD structures, offering a computationally efficient framework for substructure-level cardiac segmentation in radiotherapy planning.
comment: Acceteed by Medical Physics 2026
☆ Diagram-MMU: A Multi-Modal Benchmark for Scientific Diagrams
Weihao Bo, Shan Zhang, Yanpeng Sun, Jie Liu, Yongke Yao, Jinhao Du, Wei He, Kai Zou, Zechao Li, Jingdong Wang
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been growing the capability for scientific writing and collaboration. For example, OpenAI Prism is a free workspace for scientific writing and collaboration. One important feature in Prism is turning scientific diagrams directly into LaTeX TikZ code. In this paper, we build a benchmark, Diagram-MMU, a multi-modal benchmark designed to assess MLLMs' ability for scientific diagram parsing and understanding. Diagram-MMU features 3.7k curated diagrams and 18.3k human-validated questions across six domains. It evaluates MLLMs on three tasks common in vibe writing workspaces: diagram-to-code parsing, diagram-to-code editing, and diagram question answering, alongside agentic settings per task. The evaluation of 12 MLLMs reveals that diagram-to-code tasks are more challenging than diagram question answering: models can reason well over diagrams but struggle to parse and edit them, underscoring the need for methods to enhance MLLMs' capability in diagram-to-code generation. Under agentic settings, most models improve parsing and editing performance but degrade on question answering, while Claude-4.6 Opus consistently improves across all three tasks. Project Page: https://vi-ocean.github.io/projects/diagram-mmu.
☆ Automated Borehole Core Analysis with Report-Derived Weak Labels and Supervised Crack Segmentation
Borehole archives commonly contain core tray photographs and corresponding digital log reports, but no native pixel-level crack annotations. We investigate two complementary approaches for extracting defect-spacing information from these archives. First, structured spacing categories recovered from the report text layer provide weak interval-level labels for classification. A DINO encoder trained on unlabeled core crops supplies domain-specific representations, and a manually verified subset is used to identify label inconsistencies. Second, we manually annotate 5,087 extracted core-row images and evaluate fully supervised crack-segmentation models. Our gated U-Net combines PiDiNet edge maps with Mask R-CNN masks through a learned spatial gating mechanism. This configuration achieves an F1 score of 0.860 and a crack-class IoU of 0.754, the highest result among the evaluated segmentation configurations. Deterministic post-processing converts predicted crack locations into defect-spacing categories. Separate rule-based branches estimate core-relative bedding angles and lithological color descriptors; their predictions agree with log-report references on 75.4% and 84.7% of 1,200 evaluated images, respectively. Because these references are extracted from existing reports, the reported values measure agreement with recorded geological observations rather than independent physical accuracy. The resulting framework combines report-derived weak supervision for spacing classification with fully supervised segmentation for image-based crack localization.
comment: 18 pages, 12 figures
☆ HAMP-LIC: Hessian-Aware Mixed-Precision Post-Training Quantization for Learned Image Compression
Use this plain-text version for the arXiv abstract field: Learned image compression (LIC) models achieve strong rate-distortion performance but are hindered by high computational complexity and encoding-decoding mismatches across heterogeneous hardware platforms. Uniform fixed-precision quantization alleviates these issues but suffers severe quality degradation at low bit widths because it ignores differences in the quantization sensitivities of individual layers. To enable efficient and accurate low-bit deployment of pretrained LIC models, we propose HAMP-LIC, a Hessian-aware mixed-precision post-training quantization (PTQ) framework with a four-stage optimization strategy. First, block-wise sensitivity is estimated from the Hessian trace to capture second-order importance. Second, a task-aware refinement module adjusts these sensitivities by jointly considering quantization distortion and rate-distortion performance. Third, guided by the refined sensitivity profile, bit widths are allocated under a global model-size constraint to balance efficiency and reconstruction quality. Finally, block-wise reconstruction using a small calibration set further suppresses quantization error. Experiments on representative LIC models, including Minnen2018 and Cheng2020, demonstrate that HAMP-LIC achieves up to 4.85x model compression with as little as 0.59% BD-rate loss. It consistently outperforms existing fixed- and mixed-precision PTQ methods across multiple datasets while completely eliminating cross-platform encoding-decoding errors.
comment: Learned image compression, post-training quantization, mixed-precision quantization, Hessian-based sensitivity analysis, model compression
☆ ScaleVid: Geometry-Aware Video Object Scaling with Mesh-Free Inference
Geometry-aware video object scaling aims to anisotropically resize the object along object-centric axes while preserving geometric plausibility, temporal coherence, and background consistency. Existing text-guided methods mainly operate in the 2D image plane, while depth-guided approaches provide coarse control and mesh-based methods require costly 3D reconstruction. We present a progressive two-stage training framework that decouples geometry-aware foreground transformation from background preservation and realistic video composition, without mesh-pixel alignment and explicit 3D reconstruction at inference. In both stages, geometrically perturbed pseudo-sources are constructed from real videos, while the original complete videos are retained as reconstruction targets. The first stage uses planar transformations to learn robust foreground-background composition, whereas the second introduces object-centric 3D deformation guidance for geometry-aware scaling. This pseudo-source reconstruction formulation enables real-video synthesis without paired real-world scaling targets. We construct complementary paired-geometry and real-background benchmarks and further evaluate on in-the-wild videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior geometric consistency, foreground fidelity, and background preservation, together with faster and more practical inference than methods requiring explicit 3D reconstruction.
☆ Few-Shot Ordinal Learning for Day-Wise Freshness Estimation with Hyperspectral Fish Images
Non-destructive food quality assessment has increasingly benefited from hyperspectral imaging (HSI), which captures spectral signatures linked to biochemical changes during storage. Estimating day-wise freshness, however, remains challenging owing to strong inter-fillet variability and scarce labelled data per product. All existing deep learning approaches for HSI-based freshness prediction operate under full supervision, requiring densely annotated training sets that are costly to obtain at the individual-product level. We introduce, to the best of our knowledge, the first few-shot learning framework for HSI-based food quality estimation. Each fillet defines a distinct episodic task, and a CORAL-style ordinal prediction head captures the ranked nature of freshness progression through cumulative threshold modelling. Biologically grounded monotonicity and embedding smoothness constraints further guide predictions toward plausible trajectories. On a 16-day salmon HSI dataset under a strict unseen-fillet protocol, our method achieves a mean absolute error of 1.58 days and 2-day accuracy of 72.3% with only three labelled days per fillet, substantially outperforming scalar regression and label-distribution baselines under an identical unseen-fillet protocol.
comment: Accepted at EUSIPCO'2026
☆ Domain-Aware Lightweight Spectral-Grouped Convolutions for Hyperspectral Fish Freshness Classification BMVC'2026
Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) offers nondestructive assessment of fish freshness by detecting biochemical alterations across spectral bands. However, conventional deep learning approaches do not fully address the particular characteristics of HSI data, such as spectral dominance over spatial textures, ordinal label structure, and a small number of training samples. We propose SGNet (Spectral-Grouped Network), a lightweight architecture that separates spectral and spatial feature extraction using grouped convolutions and a depthwise spatial pathway. A dual attention mechanism that couples channel-wise squeeze-and-excitation with spatial gating adaptively highlights informative features. SGNet achieves 97.8% classification accuracy and 0.64 days mean absolute error (MAE) with just 4.75M parameters when tested on our newly developed 16-day refrigerator-stored salmon fillet dataset. Ablation studies validate the contribution of each component, while comparisons demonstrate a five- to eighteen-fold parameter reduction relative to ResNet-50 and Vision Transformers. Our findings indicate that domain-aware design supports precise, real-time freshness prediction for industrial implementation.
comment: Accepted at BMVC'2026
☆ SCOUT: Unlocking Enhanced Spatial Reasoning via Structured Chain-of-Thought and Multi-Objective Process Reward
Existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibits a critical bottleneck in robust spatial reasoning. Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim to close this gap with verifiable outcomes, yet they suffer from poor credit assignment across intermediate reasoning steps. Concurrently, structured reasoning approaches overlook the critical depth perception necessary for comprehensive 3D understanding. To address these challenges, we propose SCOUT (Structured Chain-Of-Thought Utilizing Process-Supervised RL Training). Specifically, we design a structured Chain-of-Thought (CoT) framework that explicitly models 3D environmental perception to ensure robust spatial understanding and reasoning. Furthermore, we introduce a novel RL algorithm featuring multi-objective process rewards and a tailored advantage estimation method, facilitating fine-grained credit assignment across distinct segments of the reasoning trajectory. To support our framework, we develop SCOUT-24k, a structured spatial reasoning CoT dataset synthesized through a customized pipeline. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that SCOUT-3B improves upon baseline models by 16.85% and 6.3% on general spatial benchmarks and complex spatial reasoning tasks respectively. Notably, our larger SCOUT-7B even outperforms GPT-4o by a margin of 4.28%. Moreover, despite being trained exclusively on single image, SCOUT-7B exhibits robust out-of-domain generalization to multi-image and video scenarios. These empirical results render SCOUT as a critical step towards next generation of spatially-aware VLMs.
comment: 26 pages, 5 figures
☆ Generation as Auxiliary Supervision: Enhancing Visual Understanding at Zero Inference Overhead via Decoupled Embedding Prediction
While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, visual understanding and generation are typically treated as divergent objectives. Existing unified frameworks often rely on discrete visual tokenization or diffusion objectives whose generative targets differ from the continuous representations consumed by visual understanding models, making direct transfer to enhance existing pretrained MLLMs non-trivial. In this work, we present GAS, a generation-guided training framework that reinterprets visual generation as auxiliary supervision for representation learning. Concretely, GAS adapts Next Embedding Prediction (NEP) as a cross-modal generation paradigm within a decoupled Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture. By maintaining a shared lower trunk and parallel upper layers, GAS lets generation losses enrich the shared visual pathway with finer spatial precision and stronger visual retention while shielding the upper understanding layers from direct generation gradients. To maximize this synergy, we further construct highly correlated generation tasks that demand deep cognitive grounding rather than generic synthesis alone. Across model scales and training stages, GAS improves aggregate multimodal understanding, with its most reliable gains on perception and spatial comprehension. Crucially, because the auxiliary generation branch is discarded after training, these gains incur zero inference overhead. Extensive controlled comparisons and representation-level analyses further clarify when and why generation-guided training benefits understanding, and demonstrate the feasibility of generation-guided training as a practical route to stronger multimodal understanding.
☆ GeoFlow: Efficient Driving Video Generation via Geometry-Aligned Priors ECCV 2026
Generative models like Diffusion Models and Flow Matching have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in synthesizing high-fidelity driving videos, but are severely constrained by high inference latency due to the requirement of extensive sampling steps. We argue that this inefficiency stems from the prevailing reliance on a standard Gaussian source distribution, where consecutive frames are initialized as independent Gaussian noise. This paradigm disregards the rich spatiotemporal correlations inherent in driving videos, compelling the model to regenerate deterministic scene structures existing in previous frames from noise, which is both computationally redundant and prone to geometric inconsistency. To address this problem, we propose GeoFlow, a novel framework designed to achieve efficient driving video generation by harnessing explicit geometric priors. Instead of sampling from standard Gaussian noise, we leverage multi-view geometry and spatially-adaptive noise injection to construct a Geometry-Aligned Prior (GAP) distribution as starting point. This initialization bridges the gap between source distribution and data distribution, yielding a significantly straighter and shorter sampling trajectory. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GeoFlow can achieve remarkable efficiency of both training and inference: merely several hours of fine-tuning on baseline models can significantly boost few-step generation quality, while fully converged training drastically reduces number of inference steps required for state-of-the-art video generation.
comment: Accepted at ECCV 2026
☆ M-Net: Integrating Spectral Features and Physical Field Operators into Deep Learning for Medical Image Segmentation
Purpose: Deep learning-based medical image segmentation has achieved remarkable success, yet purely data-driven approaches often fail to exploit the rich mathematical structure inherent in medical images. We investigate whether explicit mathematical inductive biases, specifically matrix spectral analysis and vector calculus operators, can enhance segmentation beyond data-driven learning alone. Methods: We propose M-Net (Math-Augmented Network), which integrates three complementary mathematical priors into U-Net: (1) continuous spectral features derived from the condition number of centered local pixel matrices, providing a differentiable measure of texture ill-conditioning; (2) physical field operators (divergence and a discrete curl-like boundary irregularity operator) computed from image gradient fields, capturing focal intensity extrema and edge non-smoothness; and (3) a Math-Attention Gate (MAG) that adaptively fuses mathematical features with CNN-extracted deep features at skip connections. Results: Experiments on three benchmarks (LiTS, KiTS, and BraTS) show that M-Net achieves Dice scores of 78.42%, 76.15%, and 83.67%, outperforming baseline U-Net by 12.37%, 3.52%, and 5.55% on liver, kidney, and brain tumor segmentation, respectively. Ablations reveal that the condition-number feature contributes a 2.14% gain over binary invertibility features, while MAG adds 1.45% over simple concatenation. Conclusion: M-Net establishes that mathematical inductive biases provide effective complementary information for medical image segmentation. The continuous condition-number feature offers superior gradient information over discrete alternatives, and MAG preserves these priors throughout the network. This work opens avenues for integrating linear algebra and vector calculus into deep architectures for medical imaging.
☆ HSTGFormer: Hyper Spatial-Temporal Graph Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation BMVC 2026
Transformer-based methods have achieved strong performance in monocular 3D human pose estimation, but most existing approaches organise spatial and temporal reasoning as separate stages, which may weaken unified spatial-temporal interdependencies inherent in human motion and compress frame-level structural information before temporal modelling. In this paper, we propose HSTGFormer, a graph-enhanced Transformer framework that reformulates spatial-temporal reasoning as localised coupled graph aggregation over joint-time nodes. Specifically, HSTGFormer introduces a Hyper Spatial-Temporal Graph (HSTG), which decomposes global spatial-temporal reasoning into local spatial-temporal receptive fields around individual joint-time nodes by extending per-frame skeleton graphs into temporal neighbourhoods, thereby enabling structure-aware coupled reasoning while preserving local structural motion information. It further incorporates an Adaptive Dual-Scale Temporal Graph (ADSTG) to capture joint-specific temporal dependencies over complementary short- and long-range windows. A lightweight node-wise fusion module further adaptively integrates the two graph representations for each joint-time node. Experiments on Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP show that HSTGFormer achieves strong accuracy with high computational efficiency.
comment: Accepted to BMVC 2026, full paper
☆ GenFAR: A generalized representation of brain structure, derived from 49,246 multi-cohort MRIs via deep learning
Vishnu M. Bashyam, Guray Erus, Junhao Wen, Pratik Chaudhari, Randa Melhem, Sindhuja Govindarajan Tirumalai, Gareth Harman, Yong Fan, Colin L. Masters, Paul Maruff, Sterling C. Johnson, Jurgen Fripp, Duygu Tosun, John C. Morris, Daniel S. Marcus, Pamela LaMontagne, Tammie Benzinger, Susan R. Heckbert, Mark Espeland, Marilyn S. Albert, Andrew J. Saykin, Paul M. Thompson, Timothy J. Hohman, Susan M. Resnick, R. Nick Bryan, Murat Bilgel, Yang An, David A. Wolk, Li Shen, Haochang Shou, Ilya M. Nasrallah, Christos Davatzikos
Deep learning models for neuroimaging have largely been developed for individual tasks, limiting knowledge transfer across applications. Here we introduce GenFAR, a modular deep learning framework that learns general, clinically informed features from brain MRIs. We trained this modular architecture on 49,246 individuals across 11 cohorts, using 17 diverse classification and regression tasks spanning cognition, clinical, diagnosis, demographics, and biomarkers. This yields aggregated, focused feature sets that capture rich, clinically- and biologically-relevant brain representations. We developed a sequential learning approach where tasks progressively build on previously learned representations. Through an analysis of 5,000 task sequences, we identified an optimal sequence length of six tasks and introduced a Donor Score metric to quantify each task's contribution to downstream performance. This analysis revealed five consistently strong donor tasks (Age, AD/MCI, MMSE, Hypertension, Hyperlipidemia) that formed the base of our sequential model. We demonstrated the utility of our learned representation, in various tasks beyond those included in the training set, to serve as the foundation for specialized secondary predictors. We further showed that using the learned feature representation can substantially increase the sample efficiency of secondary deep learning training tasks and models, as well as improve their accuracy.
☆ Map-Det3D: Metric Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction Prior for Multi-view 3D Object Detection from Streaming Inputs ECCV 2026
Yung-Hsu Yang, Luigi Piccinelli, Samuel Rota Bulò, Sunghwan Hong, Denis Rozumny, Johannes Schönberger, Zuria Bauer, Hermann Blum, Peter Kontschieder, Marc Pollefeys
Metric 3D object detection is a core capability for embodied agents, yet most reliable systems lean on depth sensors, trading away cost, power, and integration simplicity. This motivates monocular 3D detection, which avoids additional constraints, yet it faces a major obstacle: from a single image, depth, and especially absolute scale, are underconstrained. As a result, the prevailing pattern of detecting in 2D and then predicting 3D attributes is often brittle, since modest range errors can dominate 3D localization, and the learned scale prior can fail when cameras, motion, or environments undergo domain shifts. To address this, we propose Map-Det3D, an online multi-view 3D object detection model that brings detection directly into a 3D space reconstructed from RGB. We map a short temporal window into multiple views and repurpose a feed-forward metric 3D reconstruction model as our geometric backbone while tuning its object-aware capabilities. Building on this representation, Map-Det3D directly predicts boxes in metric 3D space, without the widely used 2D-to-3D lifting. Experiments across different benchmarks show that this design supports strong online performance and robust transfer without adaptation, suggesting that training reconstruction priors for detection is a practical route to stable metric 3D detection from monocular video. Code and models are available at https://royyang0714.github.io/Map-Det3D.
comment: ECCV 2026
☆ TGRHuman: Text-Guided Realistic 3D Human Generation via Diffusion Renderer
Realistic 3D human generation plays a crucial role in many graphics applications. However, current methods still struggle to generate high-quality human geometry and texture while maintaining 3D consistency and inference efficiency. In this work, we address these limitations by introducing TGRHuman, a novel approach for generating realistic 3D humans from text. Our method decouples geometry and texture generation to alleviate the issues commonly encountered in NeRF-based methods. Instead of relying on slow, implicit score-distillation-based optimization, we directly use explicit multi-view observation generation and optimization for efficient 3D synthesis. For geometry generation, we propose a high-resolution generative module for multi-view normals together with a geometry-carving strategy that preserves view consistency and supports loose clothing. For texture generation, we produce spatially consistent RGB observations from densely sampled surrounding views using a carefully designed texture-prior acquisition strategy and a diffusion renderer, enabling detailed human texture synthesis. Experiments show that our method can generate high-quality and consistent 3D human geometry and texture efficiently. TGRHuman outperforms existing text-to-3D human methods in both geometry and texture quality.
☆ Context Blindness in DPO: Mitigating Object Hallucination in MLLMs via Context-Calibrated Preference Optimization ECCV2026
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress, yet they still exhibit object hallucination, generating plausible but incorrect descriptions that are inconsistent with the visual input. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) mitigates this by training models to prefer non-hallucinated responses over hallucinated ones, and recent efforts further enrich the preference data with relevant context. However, it remains unclear whether DPO actually leverages such context. To investigate this, we propose Contextual Preference Gain (CPG), a simple metric that measures how much a model's preference strengthens when relevant context is provided. We find that higher CPG consistently corresponds to lower hallucination, yet standard DPO and its variants exhibit only limited CPG, indicating that they underutilize contextual information and thus remain prone to hallucination. To address this, we propose Context-Calibrated DPO (C$^2$-DPO), which directly maximizes CPG while preserving the original preference ordering. Across multiple benchmarks, C$^2$-DPO substantially reduces hallucination without compromising general reasoning, relatively reducing the Object HalBench hallucination rate of Qwen2-VL-Instruct-2B by 36%. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/C2-DPO
comment: Accepted at ECCV2026
☆ Understanding Why Foundation Models Work for Diffusion-Generated Image Detection
Vision foundation models have recently emerged as powerful feature extractors for detecting AI-generated images, achieving strong generalization across generators and robustness to common image degradations. However, the reason behind their effectiveness is poorly understood. In this work, we investigate what cues are exploited by foundation-model-based detectors to distinguish real images from diffusion-generated ones. To this end, we design an ad hoc analysis protocol based on DDIM inversion. Given a real image we generate a sequence of synthetic copies by changing the depth of DDIM inversion. Even though most copies are semantically identical to the real reference, the detector score varies significantly across them due to subtle traces introduced by the diffusion synthesis, showing that its decision is not primarily driven by semantic failures. Through a frequency-swapping analysis, we further reveal that the discriminative cues exploited by the detectors are mainly localized in the low-to-mid frequency range, rather than only in the high-frequency range, as is the case for artifacts commonly associated with generative models. Finally, a latent-space analysis shows that regenerated images exhibit reduced variance and effective dimensionality, indicating that diffusion models do not fully reproduce the variability of real data. Overall, our results suggest that foundation-model-based detectors succeed by capturing non-semantic low-to-mid frequency distributional discrepancies between real and diffusion-generated images. These findings provide new insight into the robustness and generalization of such detectors and suggest directions for more interpretable forensic methods.
☆ Autonomous Telerehabilitation via Skeletal Motion Prediction and Joint-Level Performance Assessment IEEE
Autonomous rehabilitation systems must not only recognize human motion but also provide structured feedback to support users without continuous therapist supervision. This paper presents a telerehabilitation pipeline that integrates skeleton-based exercise quality assessment and short-term motion prediction into a two-module system operating on marker-free RGB video. A self-attentive Bidirectional LSTM performs exercise quality classification using MMD-NCA metric learning, while a graph-based motion prediction module computes per-joint position errors between predicted and observed poses, generating spatially localized deviation signals. Each module is evaluated independently on established benchmarks: the classifier achieves 96.45% mean-class accuracy on squat sequences from the PROZIS dataset, and the adopted STARS predictor achieves a mean MPJPE of 75.8 mm at 560 ms on Human3.6M, outperforming graph and recurrent baselines across all prediction horizons. The framework is designed for eventual deployment in assistive robotics and home-based rehabilitation contexts; end-to-end integration and clinical validation are important directions for future work. By combining motion recognition and prediction in a single system, this work contributes a step toward autonomous, feedback-driven telerehabilitation, for more accessible and scalable rehabilitation solutions.
comment: Accepted at IEEE RO-MAN2026
☆ SCOPE-Router: Cost-Aware Open-Set VLM Routing for Execution-Oriented Tasks
Tao Yu, Yifei Qu, Zhiqing Cui, Pengfei Zhou, Zhongtian Luo, Yujia Yang, Shenghua Chai, Haopeng Jin, Zhenghao Zhang, Xinming Wang, Hongzhu Yi, Wangbo Zhao, Zhenglin Wan, Yan Huang, Yeshani, Jinwen Luo, Yang You
Model routing aims to select the most suitable model from a candidate pool for each query, balancing quality and cost. Existing VLM routing research is limited to traditional VQA evaluation, lacks systematic calibration optimization for open-set scenarios, and employs training objectives that dilute multi-positive signals via softmax normalization without incorporating cost. We address these limitations with three contributions: (1)VLM-ExecRouterBench, the first execution-oriented VLM routing benchmark covering Code, Agentic, and Search domains with 11 candidate models spanning nearly two orders of magnitude in pricing; (2)SCOPE-Router, a dual-tower router that matches queries to model behavior profiles constructed via hybrid calibration (random/diagnostic/diversity sampling), enabling new models to join routing without retraining; (3)CRM+RCCR, an architecture-agnostic cost-aware objective that encodes cost preference into continuous relevance targets through per-pair independent scoring, eliminating multi-positive dilution while regularizing queries with similar routing preferences to be closer in the routing space. Empirically, SCOPE-Router achieves the best Rank Score on all three benchmarks, surpassing the runner-up by 1.84 points under OOD settings and by 6.75 points under doubly OOD open-set evaluation. When applied to four diverse routers, CRM+RCCR improves Rank Score by 1.25--6.21 points.
☆ HandEdit: A Unified Benchmark for Egocentric Human-to-Robot Dexterous Hand Image Editing
Zhenjie Yang, Xingyu Jiao, Guopeng Zhong, Shuzhe Yang, Shi Che, Chao Wu, Chenyu Jiang, Dongjie Zhang, Yideng Zhang, Zheng Zhang, Muyun Jiang, Haisheng Su, Shuang Jin, Donghang Zhang, Chao Yang, Li Chen, Hongyang Li, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang, Xiaosong Jia, Junchi Yan
Robotic manipulation with dexterous hands is a cornerstone of Embodied AI, yet its progress is stifled by the high cost of collecting embodiment-aware teleoperation data. While abundant egocentric videos of human hands offer a scalable alternative, the profound discrepancies in appearance, articulation, and camera viewpoints between human and robotic data raise significant challenges for co-training. Though existing general image-editing models demonstrate strong capabilities, they lack necessary embodiment-specific priors to fully bridge this gap. In this work, we present HandEdit, a unified large-scale embodiment-aware image-editing dataset and benchmark specifically designed to transform human hands and arms into various dexterous robotic embodiments within egocentric frames. HandEdit comprises over 200M editing instances derived from five diverse source datasets, covering 26 distinct URDFs, including 13 hand-only and 13 hand-arm configurations. Alongside the dataset, we establish a unified benchmark protocol with two tracks: Hand-only and Hand-Arm, supporting URDF-conditioned evaluation. We conduct extensive evaluations of 11 representative image-editing baselines using a multi-dimensional metric suite, including generic similarity metrics, VLM-based judgment, and embodiment-aware metrics. HandEdit serves as a critical resource at the intersection of image editing and robotics: it advances embodiment-aware editing models while enabling scalable dexterous robotic learning from abundant human video data, paving the way for more generalizable Embodied AI.
comment: Technical Report. Project Page: https://handedit.github.io/
☆ Avatar-Forever: Decoupled Parallel Training for High-Quality Real-Time Infinite Avatars
Existing streaming video systems often rely on sequential, distillation-centered training pipelines to enable few-step long-video generation. However, this paradigm suffers from two limitations. First, failures or distribution shifts introduced in earlier stages affect later optimization, complicating the training process to converge. Second, the distillation-centric objective favours short-term generation but is prone to quality degradation when autoregressive errors accumulate over long rollouts. We propose Avatar-Forever, a decoupled parallel training framework for high-quality real-time infinite interactive avatars. Instead of coupling generation efficiency and long-horizon robustness under a sequential distillation pipeline, we treat them as two independent capabilities that can be trained in parallel. One branch performs full-parameter distillation to train an efficient generator with high visual quality, while another trains a lightweight long-horizon adapter via Recovery-oriented Rollout Training (RRT), which improves generation robustness under long-horizon inference conditions. Our decoupled parallel training design simplifies the overall training process and avoids unnecessary objective conflicts between few-step generation and long-horizon adaptation. We further introduce ForeverCache, a chunk-wise feature caching mechanism to substantially reduce redundant history computation during streaming inference. Built upon a 22B video foundation model, Avatar-Forever supports unbounded audio-driven avatar generation while maintaining identity consistency, motion coherence, and visual fidelity, enabling an end-to-end throughput of high-resolution 768x512 videos at 27.2 FPS on a single H100 GPU and providing a practical path toward stable digital humans.
☆ RA-ClipScore: Making Generative Model Evaluation More Interpretable
Generative models can produce images nearly indistinguishable from real data, yet rigorous and interpretable evaluation remains challenging. Conventional metrics such as FID provide only scalar scores with limited diagnostic insight. Widely adopted CLIP-based metrics enable semantic evaluation beyond simple training class labels, but inherit limitations from CLIP's training paradigm that restrict attribute-wise analysis. We propose RA-CLIPScore, a novel metric that mitigates these issues and extends CLIP-based evaluation to spatial distribution alignment, measuring whether generated objects adhere to the positional priors found in the training data. RA-CLIPScore introduces dual prompts to decouple competing attributes and leverages local patch tokens to capture fine-grained regional semantics. We evaluate image generative models on their ability to match both attribute and spatial distributions of the training data. Extensive experiments show that RA-CLIPScore provides more robust and interpretable evaluations than prior methods, particularly under distribution misalignment or partially irrelevant textual attributes. We further demonstrate how it reveals spatial biases in generative models. User evaluations confirm that Regional Single Attribute Divergence based on our RA-CLIPScore aligns more closely with human perception of visual diversity than existing semantic metrics.
☆ Look What the Probes Dragged In! Real-World Chest X-ray Shortcuts in MedCLIP MICCAI 2026
Vision-language models, such as contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP)-based approaches, have reached state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in medical artificial intelligence. However, recent work reveals that CLIP-based models remain vulnerable to shortcuts. We investigate how real-world shortcuts manifest across different layers of the medical CLIP-based model, MedCLIP, and its vision encoder, a frozen ResNet-50. We attach 17 linear classification probes to the intermediate layers of the ResNet-50 and train them on three different dataset configurations and targets: NIH-CXR14 (pneumothorax) and PadChest (cardiomegaly and pneumothorax). This setup allows us to observe model behaviour during evaluation using subgroup-based calibration and layer-wise confidence curves. We find that the final linear probes achieve a high AUROC but poor calibration in the models. The layer-wise confidence analyses suggest that shortcuts emerge at different depths. Patterns consistent with localised shortcuts, such as drains, appear at later layers, while patterns consistent with diffuse shortcuts, such as scanner-specific noise patterns, emerge earlier, aligning with previous work. Finally, we conduct a manual analysis of the images, which reveals data quality issues in both NIH-CXR14 and PadChest. Our findings underscore that even SOTA models remain vulnerable to shortcuts, and the need for high-quality and well-annotated datasets to draw solid conclusions. Code can be found on our GitHub: https://github.com/nikodice4/MedCLIP_shortcuts.
comment: 11 pages, 3 figure, poster presentation at the joint FAIMI, BRIDGE, and EPIMI workshop at MICCAI 2026 (Strasbourg, France) conference
☆ Better Slots, Better Worlds: Representation Quality & Robustness in Object-Centric World Models
Learning world models from offline trajectories enables agents to accomplish different tasks through planning. Object-centric (OC) representations, which decompose a scene into a set of slots that bind to its objects, have been proposed as an inductive bias for world models that are more sample-efficient and generalize better. Yet prior object-centric world models (OCWMs) take the slot encoder as given and evaluate only in-distribution, leaving open whether the object-centric bias actually delivers for planning and what within the OCWM drives it. We conduct a controlled study of OCWMs for visual model-predictive control along two axes: object-centric representation quality and generalization under distribution shift relative to scene-centric models. We find that (i) planning success correlates positively with unsupervised slot-quality metrics (FG-ARI, mBO), though the gains saturate at high slot quality; (ii) with well-bound slots, the auxiliary proprioception inputs and masking inductive bias that prior methods relied on become unnecessary; and (iii) under unseen distribution shifts, the OCWM with well-bound slots is more robust overall than the end-to-end trained scene-centric LeWM, while DINO-WM, built on similar frozen pretrained features, remains competitive -- pointing to pretrained features as a key contributor to robustness.
comment: Published at Model-Based RL in the Era of Generative World Models Workshop at RLC 2026
☆ Draw This First
We invert the typical formulation of sketch generation: instead of drawing strokes in order, we predict a 2D field that defines the order in which strokes are drawn. We use a pretrained latent flow-matching transformer to supply the image prior to predict an intermediate representation, while training the VAE's decoder to predict the order field, stroke mask, and stroke segmentation. We vectorize the predicted segmentation into polylines and sort them by the field, producing an ordered vector sketch. Our model can predict an ordered vector sketch from a text description or derender an image into ordered vectors; for either, it follows text instructions specifying the order of drawing.
☆ Do Not Forget the Obvious - RISC: A Risk-Informed Slice-Coverage Protocol for Safe Autonomous Driving ECCV 2026
Aggregate metrics may not fully reflect performance in insufficiently examined high-risk driving conditions. We propose RISC (Risk-Informed Slice Coverage), a practical protocol for risk-guided stress testing and coverage-qualified evaluation. Risk-guided stress testing directs a finite audit budget toward risk-relevant sub-datasets, called risk slices, while coverage-qualified evaluation reports results together with explicit statements about which slices are sufficiently or insufficiently covered. The protocol translates safety concerns into machine-readable risk slices, uses lightweight signals to tag candidate data, selects a compact audit set by risk, and qualifies the results using coverage evidence. An LLM can optionally support this process by surfacing relevant but potentially overlooked conditions during test planning, thereby helping engineers not to forget the obvious. RISC is model-agnostic and can be applied to perception modules, driving models, and other autonomous-driving subsystems. We instantiate the protocol for monocular pedestrian perception using 1,000 frames from the Zenseact Open Dataset, image statistics, and a YOLO-based detector proxy. In this proof-of-concept study, risk-guided selection increases critical failure discovery from 34.0% under random sampling to 98.5%. RISC provides a lightweight, assurance-oriented evaluation layer that complements scenario categorization, coverage assessment, and broader testing-and-verification workflows.
comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, 5 tables. Accepted at the ECCV 2026 Workshop on Safe and Defensive Autonomous Driving (SDAD). Non-archival workshop paper
☆ Predicting Functions, Not Features: KANs with Function-Space Joint-Embedding Predictive Learning for Medical Image Segmentation
Kolmogorov--Arnold Networks (KANs) introduce explicit functional representations by parameterizing each network edge as a learnable univariate function. However, existing KAN-based segmentation models optimize edge functions only through objectives defined after edge aggregation, leaving individual functions without an explicit pre-aggregation learning target. To address this limitation, we propose Function-Space Joint-Embedding Predictive Learning (FS-JEPA) for medical image segmentation. Our FS-JEPA framework moves predictive learning into the pre-aggregation function space of KANs. A masked online branch predicts structured signatures of sampled KAN edge functions generated by a full-context exponential moving average target branch, while shared edge indices preserve correspondence between predictions and targets. Rather than predicting an isolated edge response, we represent each sampled edge function using a multi-radius signature composed of function evaluations around its input anchor. This structured representation captures local functional variations that cannot be characterized by a single response and provides a more informative predictive target. The function-space objective is jointly optimized with the segmentation loss during training, while the predictive branch is removed at inference. Experiments on five medical image segmentation benchmarks show that our FS-JEPA achieves the best average Dice and outperforms the strongest competing KAN-based method by +2.25 percentage points.
comment: 9 pages, 5 figures
☆ Localizing to Debias: A Patch-Level Benchmark and Baseline for Weakly Supervised Spatial Anomaly Detection ECCV 2026
Despite growing interest in weakly supervised video anomaly detection (WSVAD), current methods struggle to bridge the gap between coarse temporal supervision and fine-grained spatial reasoning. A key obstacle is the tendency of temporal detectors to latch onto background and scene-level cues rather than truly discriminative anomaly evidence. This background bias raises ethical concerns: models may inadvertently associate anomalies with societal or environmental context rather than authentic crime-related cues. Without spatial grounding, such biases remain hidden and unauditable. To address this, we propose SST-WSVADL, a sparse spatio-temporal framework that bridges temporal anomaly detection with fine-grained spatial localization. Rather than processing all spatial regions indiscriminately, SST-WSVADL progressively focuses on the most anomaly-relevant spatio-temporal regions through dynamic sparsification, naturally suppressing background dominant content while preserving discriminative evidence. The temporal and spatial branches are coupled end-to-end via motion-aware regularization that guides sparsification toward dynamically informative regions, without relying on external detectors or vision-language prompts. We publicly release frame-level spatial annotations and a method-agnostic evaluation protocol for three public datasets: UCF-Crime, XD-Violence, and MSAD. These resources enable the community to audit spatial biases in WSVAD predictions, supporting progress toward more ethical and accountable anomaly detection. Experiments demonstrate that SST-WSVADL is competitive with prior methods across benchmarks while enabling localization and patch-level auditability of scene bias, providing a reproducible foundation for interpretability-oriented evaluation of WSVAD models.
comment: ECCV 2026 FAILED Workshop
☆ How Far from Clinical Deployment? Evaluating the Complete Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Pipeline in Medical Imaging
Deploying unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) in clinical practice requires choosing which algorithm to use and which of its trained models to ship. However, the deployment (target) domain is unlabeled, so models cannot be evaluated directly on it, leaving it unclear which to select. We address this by evaluating the complete UDA pipeline, considering both adaptation and label-free selection together. Our study covers eleven clinically relevant cross-domain scenarios from nine medical imaging datasets, with ten UDA algorithms and 13 label-free selection methods (validators), evaluating over 80,000 trained models in total. By this, we find that a capable adapted model usually exists, but identifying it without target labels is difficult: the validator-selected models leave a large and structural target performance gap to the best available one, with no evaluated validator consistently reliable. Towards closing it, we explore two strategies, ensembling and a small target-labeling budget; both narrow this gap but do not close it entirely. Overall, deployable UDA depends on the complete pipeline; addressing the less explored selection step could bring much of current UDA closer to clinical use.
☆ LoSA: Near-Lossless Sparse Attention for Training-Free Video Diffusion Acceleration
Video diffusion transformers are costly to sample: every denoising step applies self-attention over a long 3D token sequence, a quadratic cost that dominates as resolution and duration grow. Sparse attention reduces this cost without retraining, but existing methods pursue aggressive sparsity, where further speedup costs disproportionately more attention fidelity. We target the opposite end of this trade-off: fix near-lossless fidelity by construction, and remove as much computation as this constraint permits. Two observations make this regime practical: roughly 40% of block interactions can be removed while retaining 99% of the attention mass, and the high-mass support remains stable across denoising steps. We propose LoSA, a training-free sparse-attention method that fixes a retained-mass threshold of 99% rather than a sparsity ratio: it measures exact block attention masses at one early dense step, keeps, for each head and query block, the smallest key/value block set meeting the threshold, and reuses the frozen block indices for all remaining steps. On Wan2.1-1.3B, LoSA alone gives a $1.36\times$ speedup with a 0.06-point VBench Overall drop. The benefit is largest under composition: combined with feature caching, LoSA reaches a $3.2\times$ speedup on HunyuanVideo at a 0.02-point drop, versus 0.32 points for the strongest sparse baseline at comparable speed. Across three video diffusion transformers and speedups up to $3.2\times$, LoSA consistently achieves the best training-free speed-quality trade-off.
☆ Dual-Model Sentiment Analysis of Consumer Reviews in the Retail Coffee Sector Using Machine Learning and Deep Learning Approaches
Consumer reviews play an important role in shaping brand perception and business strategies, particularly in service-driven industries such as retail coffee. This study presents a comparative sentiment analysis framework for Starbucks customer reviews using classical machine learning and deep learning approaches. The dataset, collected from ConsumerAffairs, contains more than 700 reviews and was analyzed through preprocessing and exploratory data analysis to identify temporal and geographic patterns. Sentiment labels were generated by binarizing star ratings, with ratings of 4 and 5 classified as positive and ratings of 1 to 3 as negative. The resulting dataset was substantially imbalanced toward negative sentiment. Five machine learning classifiers, including Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree, Random Forest, and Naive Bayes, were evaluated alongside five deep learning models: LSTM, RNN, Bidirectional LSTM, GRU, and CNN. Model performance was assessed using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. SVM achieved the highest accuracy among the machine learning models at 91.0 percent, while Bidirectional LSTM showed the strongest performance among the deep learning models and demonstrated good generalization on unseen data. The findings also show that class imbalance negatively affected positive sentiment recall across several models. Overall, this study provides a comparative evaluation of machine learning and deep learning approaches for real-world consumer sentiment analysis and highlights the importance of appropriate model selection and preprocessing for customer experience analytics in the retail coffee sector.
comment: 10 Pages, 11 Figures, 3 Tables
☆ Remote Sensing and Machine Learning-Based Analysis of Land Use and Vegetation Change in Dhaka District, Bangladesh
Rapid urbanization in Dhaka District, Bangladesh has triggered substantial alterations in land use and environmental conditions, necessitating systematic monitoring for informed urban planning and ecological sustainability. This study employs remote sensing data and machine learning techniques to analyze spatiotemporal changes in land cover and vegetation dynamics between 2019 and 2024. High-resolution satellite imagery from Sentinel-2 MSI and Landsat 8 was utilized to classify land cover types and compute spectral indices including the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI), and Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI). A supervised machine learning approach incorporating Decision Tree, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and Random Forest classifiers was applied using labeled geospatial training points within Google Earth Engine. Accuracy assessments were conducted using confusion matrices and kappa statistics. Results indicate a 59.5% increase in urban built-up areas and a significant decline in vegetation (-8.46%) and water bodies (-7.77%) over the five-year period. Land conversion from vegetated and aquatic areas to urban infrastructure was identified as a dominant trend. Among the models, Random Forest demonstrated the highest classification accuracy. These findings underscore the growing environmental pressures driven by unregulated urban expansion in Dhaka. The study highlights the potential of remote sensing and machine learning tools in providing timely, actionable data to support sustainable urban development, land-use regulation, and ecosystem conservation policies.
comment: 16 Pages, 8 Figures, 9 Tables
☆ A Remote Approach to Cashew Orchard Detection: Leveraging Active Learning with Satellite Imagery in Guinea-Bissau
Cashew production is a widespread economic activity in Guinea-Bissau, as well as other countries in West Africa. However, unregulated cashew production can be directly associated with increasing regionwide deforestation rates, biodiversity losses, and a fragile economic structure. There is no nationwide database for listing or georeferencing cashew orchards, so there is a clear need to remotely map their locations. In recent years, multiple methods for detecting orchards have been developed, though they have only been applied on a regional level. This work expands regional analyses to a nationwide scale. It develops a scalable and cost-effective remote approach, based on Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, using Machine Learning techniques to detect cashew orchards automatically. Margin-based Active Learning techniques were employed to develop an optimal training set in terms of the number of points and their informativeness, leading to a cashew map with 94.0% balanced accuracy obtained entirely off-site. We created two datasets and a 2021 cashew map with 10m spatial resolution that are openly accessible through GitHub. The results demonstrate the possibility of a broader cashew orchard mapping, creating a new stepping stone for this environmental application.
comment: 29 pages, 12 figures
☆ Auditing Frame-Level AUC in Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection: Granularity, Resolution, and Scene Bias ECCV 2026
Frame-level area under the ROC curve (AUC) is the dominant evaluation metric for weakly supervised video anomaly detection (WSVAD). Its standard form measures whether an anomalous frame outranks a normal frame drawn from anywhere in the test set. We refer to this comparison as pooled AUC, since it aggregates frame pairs across test videos regardless of source. Pooled AUC therefore credits both event localization and differences between video sources. We audit this protocol on UCF-Crime across recent state-of-the-art models spanning different backbone families. Holding each model's frame scores fixed, we read them under three pairing granularities: global, per anomaly category, and within each video, then repeat the same three-granularity readout on zero-shot scores computed from the models' internal representations. We assess ranking reliability with a paired video bootstrap. Three findings follow. First, pooled AUC does not reliably predict within-video anomaly localization: models with similar pooled scores exhibit large localization differences and rank reversals under stricter granularities. Second, at the benchmark's test-split size, pooled AUC lacks the resolution to support state-of-the-art margins reported in the field. Within each backbone family, it resolves no comparison at those margins, while within-video AUC resolves several over identical predictions. Learned representations further reveal that within-video anomaly structure and detector localization are decoupled. Third, on normal footage alone, every model we examine separates videos by recording properties, such as resolution and color encoding, indicating that scene sensitivity is shared across the setting rather than specific to any architecture. We publicly release a granularity-aware protocol computable from existing predictions and scene-factor annotations for UCF-Crime.
comment: ECCV 2026 ET Workshop
☆ Evaluating and Calibrating Diffusion Model-derived Uncertainty for Quantitative MRI Mapping MICCAI 2026
Quantitative MRI (qMRI) provides standardised tissue parameter maps, but the reliability of deep learning-based qMRI mapping methods is often not explicitly characterised. In this work we systematically evaluate uncertainty maps for quantitative MRI derived from multiple inferences of a data-consistent diffusion model-based qMRI framework. Evaluation on synthetic test data assessed error-awareness, high-error detection, selective prediction, and Gaussian interval calibration. Diffusion model-derived uncertainty was positively associated with the mapping error, while risk-coverage analysis showed that excluding high-uncertainty voxels reduced the retained error. However, the raw uncertainty was poorly calibrated for quantitative interval interpretation. Calibration was substantially improved using a post-hoc procedure combining prediction-value-dependent bias correction with scalar uncertainty scaling. Qualitative evaluation on a healthy volunteer showed spatially meaningful uncertainty patterns. These results indicate that diffusion model-derived uncertainty is informative for reliability assessment and selective prediction, but requires calibration for quantitative interval interpretation.
comment: 11 pages, 6 figures. Accepted at the MICCAI 2026 Workshop on Uncertainty for Safe Utilization of Machine Learning in Medical Imaging (UNSURE 2026)
☆ Surfsvr: 2D Surface Priors as 3D Geometric Regularizers for Sparse Voxel Reconstruction
Yan Di, Chengxi Li, Yaoxing Wang, Mengge Liu, Zhigang Li, Ruida Zhang, Mingyang Li, Pengyuan Wang, Shan Gao, Xiangyang Ji
Sparse voxel reconstruction offers an efficient representation for high-fidelity 3D modeling, yet its geometry is commonly optimized from local photometric evidence and discrete visibility statistics. This often leads to fragmented surfaces, excessive subdivision, and floating artifacts, particularly in weakly textured or sparsely observed regions. We introduce SurfSVR, a novel sparse voxel reconstruction paradigm that treats 2D surface priors as explicit 3D geometric regularizers. Instead of directly lifting noisy pixel-wise depth predictions, SurfSVR first organizes each image into coherent surface regions by jointly reasoning over appearance, monocular depth, normals and cross-view geometry. Each region is then represented by an adaptively selected planar or quadratic surface model based on fitting reliability and geometric complexity, while cross-model agreement distinguishes reliable geometry from ambiguous predictions. These structured 2D priors are lifted into 3D and integrated throughout the reconstruction pipeline. They guide surface-adaptive voxel subdivision, provide region-level depth and normal supervision during optimization, enhance geometrically reliable sparse-observed surfaces in voxel pruning, and suppress off-surface floaters during post-refinement training. This unified design converts semantic and geometric coherence in image space into persistent structural constraints in 3D. Extensive experiments on 3 public benchmarks demonstrate that SurfSVR consistently improves sparse voxel reconstruction across scenes with substantially different visibility and geometry characteristics, achieving state-of-the-art reconstruction quality. Codes and models will be released soon.
☆ Dual Anchors, Do It Better: Hierarchical Group Merging for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection CVPR 2026
Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) aims to identify anomalies in unseen domains, a setting that is particularly critical for industrial and medical applications where domain shifts are prevalent. However, most CLIP-based ZSAD methods anchor semantics solely on the text modality, making performance highly sensitive to prompt design and leading to weak visual grounding. To mitigate these limitations, we propose a Dual-Anchor framework that complements conventional text anchors with hierarchical image anchors constructed via a top-down grouping mechanism. This mechanism progressively aggregates local-to-global image features to form normal and abnormal group tokens, which serve as image anchors and act as gating signals in a Group-Gated Token Refiner to enhance the global representation. The refined image anchors are then fused with text prompts to construct dynamic state prompts. By jointly reinforcing visual and textual semantics, our framework stabilizes image-text alignment, reduces prompt dependency, and achieves strong generalization across 8 industrial and 6 medical benchmarks.
comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables. Accepted to CVPR 2026 Findings
☆ Seed2GS: Camera-Free, Training-Free Object Extraction from 3D Gaussian Scenes via a Single Reference-View Grounding
Zongjian Ding, Yudong Gao, Jiale Liu, Xinglin Yu, Junxing Ren, Dong Wei, Yajing Chen, Shan Huang, Mingjun Cheng, Min Li
Extracting a target object from a pre-built 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scene enables interactive 3D editing. Existing methods either train for tens of minutes per scene, sacrifice accuracy, or require original reconstruction cameras that pre-built assets may not include. We present Seed2GS, which achieves the highest reported LERF-MASK accuracy without original reconstruction cameras or scene-specific representation training. Its key insight is to separate target identity from 3D coverage. QD-SAM3 selects one reliable reference mask from several open-vocabulary candidates, fixing identity once. Seed lift and visibility-adaptive virtual orbits then expose the object from new viewpoints, while tracking propagates the seed without repeated detection. Because the scene remains frozen, these masks supervise only one temporary foreground logit per Gaussian. On LERF-MASK, Seed2GS reaches 92.1% mean intersection over union (mIoU) with a measured compute-only latency of 9.3 seconds, 3.7 points above the strongest scene-trained baseline and 7.6 points above the closest camera-free baseline. With one fixed test reference per scene, the complete pipeline retains 91.1% mIoU; replacing its predicted seed with a ground-truth mask improves mIoU by only 0.72 points. On 3D-OVS, Seed2GS reaches 95.7% mIoU.
☆ HarmoniDPO: Video-guided Audio Generation via Preference-Optimized Diffusion
Video-to-audio (V2A) generation faces significant challenges in achieving precise temporal synchronization and high perceptual quality due to the complex, ambiguous relationship between visual and auditory cues. Existing methods typically compress video inputs into single feature representations, leading to significant loss of temporal dynamics and fine-grained visual information. These approaches also rely on reconstruction-based training objectives that poorly correlate with human perceptual judgments of audio quality and appropriateness. We propose HarmoniDPO, a novel framework that integrates preference-based optimization into diffusion-based V2A generation to address these limitations. (1) Our approach leverages a dual video representation: combining global context with frame-wise features to preserve temporal dynamics and semantic detail. (2) Inspired by reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), HarmoniDPO employs online Direct Preference Optimization (online-DPO) to fine-tune a diffusion-based V2A model from preference judgments, enhancing perceptual quality and alignment. (3) Additionally, we introduce Dual-scale Diffusion Search (DDS), a test time scaling algorithm that adaptively optimizes output fidelity during inference. Experiments demonstrate that HarmoniDPO outperforms state-of-the-art methods in audio-video synchronization and subjective audio quality, offering a robust solution for generating realistic, human-preferred audio from video.
comment: 31 pages
☆ Do You See What You Draw? A Semantic Closed-Loop Framework for Holistic Evaluation of Unified Multimodal Models
As Large Vision-Language Models increasingly aim to integrate visual generation and understanding within a single parameter space, evaluating such structural unification in a cohesive manner remains a critical challenge. Current evaluation protocols predominantly treat generative and discriminative capabilities as separate tasks, leaving a gap in system-level evaluation for unified multimodal models (UMMs). In this work, we propose Self-Generative-Understanding (SGU), a novel, annotation-free evaluation framework that probes the integrated capabilities of unified models through a semantic closed-loop challenge. Without requiring new annotations, SGU leverages the dual understanding-and-generation abilities of UMMs by asking them to first perceive an image and produce a textual description, subsequently reconstruct a visual context based on that description, and finally perform reasoning over the self-generated output. This pipeline provides a zero-cost testbed that yields an integrated performance score specifically tailored for evaluating UMMs as unified systems. Extensive experiments show that even high-performing UMMs often struggle to reason over their own generated contexts, revealing limitations that are not captured by separate evaluations of understanding or generation alone. Our work provides a complementary holistic evaluation framework and offers a foundation for benchmarking the development of next-generation unified multimodal models.
comment: 21 pages, 8 figures, 12 tables
☆ CoQui: A Coordinate-Conditioned Quantum Implicit Generative Adversarial Network for End-to-End Image Generation
Xue Yang, Rigui Zhou, ShiZheng Jia, Dax Enshan Koh, Siong Thye Goh, Young-Wook Cho, YaoChong Li, Xuezhi Ma, Hongyu Chen, Xin Wang
Quantum generative adversarial networks (QGANs) have attracted increasing attention for image generation using parameterized quantum circuits. Existing amplitude-based approaches face two key limitations: pixel locations are typically encoded by computational-basis indices or address qubits, causing quantum resources to grow with image resolution; meanwhile, jointly decoding many pixels from normalized quantum states introduces probability competition among pixels and limits precise pixel-wise control. To address these issues, we reformulate quantum image generation as coordinate-conditioned implicit function learning. Our method takes spatial coordinates and latent variables as inputs, uses a classical embedding network to generate input-dependent circuit parameters, and evaluates a variational quantum circuit at each coordinate. Pixel intensities are directly obtained from the expectation value of a dedicated color qubit, and a complete image is generated by querying all spatial coordinates. This design decouples image resolution from address-qubit requirements and avoids shared probability-normalization constraints across pixels. We further design a specialized variational quantum circuit to provide structural inductive bias for coordinate-conditioned generation. Simulated experiments on two benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms FRQI-based generation and PQWGAN in visual and quantitative quality while using fewer qubits, and also achieves better generation quality than the corresponding classical baseline.
☆ Warping Earth Observations for better ice labeling in the Marginal Marginal Ice Zone ECCV
Multimodal satellite imagery provides complementary information for Earth Observation, but accurately combining heterogeneous sensors remains challenging in dynamic environments. Fast-changing regions, such as the Antarctic marginal ice zone, cannot fully exploit multimodal information from different satellite sensors because surface features move between image acquisitions. This spatial and temporal mismatch challenges effective perceptual grounding, violating the assumption of pixel-level correspondence that underpins most multimodal reasoning and downstream classification pipelines. Antarctic sea ice provides a challenging benchmark due to the rapid, heterogeneous drift of individual ice floes and the differing responses of sea ice to radar, visible and thermal sensing modalities. Accurate, dense supervision of sea ice remains scarce because generating pixel-wise labels requires time-consuming expert interpretation of noisy data, leading to historical reliance on coarse-resolution maritime ice charts for model training. This paper presents a novel architecture based on mutual information warping to align multi-satellite (Sentinel-1 and MODIS platforms) multimodal (visible, thermal, radar) satellite scenes. To demonstrate the approach, we introduce a sparse expert-labeled dataset of 2,088 pixel-wise annotations (7,046 expert point classifications) located at the ice-water margin interface across 43 scenes. Our results demonstrate that spatially grounding and aligning modalities prior to segmentation improves classification accuracy, and enables accurate, dense sea ice segmentation from sparse point-wise supervision.
comment: ECCV Workshop paper; BEAM 2
☆ Two-Stage Deformable-Convolutional Inverse Design of Nanophotonic Absorbers from Optical Spectra
Data-driven inverse design enables efficient generation of nanophotonic structures with prescribed optical responses, but spectrum-to-geometry mapping remains challenging due to non-uniqueness and fine geometric features. This work presents a two-stage deformable-convolutional framework for reconstructing metal--insulator--metal resonator geometries from 80-dimensional absorption spectra. The spectrum is projected to a $150\times4\times4$ latent representation and decoded into a $64\times64$ resonator mask. Training combines supervised reconstruction with least-squares adversarial refinement initialized from the best supervised checkpoint. A three-run ablation compares deformable convolution with plain convolution, involution, Dynamic Conv, and ODConv under the same architecture. The proposed model achieves $20.79\pm0.31$~dB PSNR and $0.8501\pm0.0082$ SSIM, improving over plain convolution by 2.16~dB and 0.0831, respectively. It further achieves Dice $0.9623\pm0.0027$, IoU $0.9342\pm0.0038$, and boundary F-score $0.9550\pm0.0027$. Spectral consistency evaluated using a frozen forward surrogate yields RMSE $0.0805\pm0.0013$ and $R^2=0.7923\pm0.0065$. Learned offsets show stronger adaptive sampling at coarse and intermediate decoder stages. Overall, deformable sampling with supervised initialization and adversarial refinement improves spectrum-conditioned geometry reconstruction.
☆ LookBack: Where and How to Score LVLM Responses via Visual Reference Usage
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) integrate visual perception with language generation, enabling responses that span image understanding and complex reasoning. However, LVLMs do not just inherit the text-level hallucinations; they also hallucinate against the image, producing fluent responses ungrounded in what they see. This makes LVLM response scoring inherently harder, and our diagnostics show that existing confidence-based metrics adopted from LLMs are insufficient for LVLMs. Specifically, removing the input image barely changes confidence-based selection, suggesting that output-space confidence primarily captures textual plausibility rather than agreement with the image. To address this gap, we propose LookBack, a training-free LVLM response scoring method that augments token likelihood with visual lookback score, a lightweight measure of how strongly each response token refers to image tokens. Across four benchmarks and three models, LookBack consistently improves Best-of-$N$ selection over existing baselines with negligible additional overhead.
comment: 19 pages, 10 figures. Code: https://github.com/bscho333/LookBack
☆ BoltNet: An Ultra-Lightweight Convolutional Network for On-Device Plant Species Identification ECCV 2026
Automated plant species identification from citizen-science imagery is an established, demanding fine-grained recognition problem: large taxonomic label spaces, visually similar species, and long-tailed observations require real model capacity, while field use constrains memory, latency, and power. Model size is only part of the deployment cost: intermediate activations held in memory during inference and platformdependent execution behavior matter too, so compact recognition must be assessed on target hardware rather than through complexity metrics alone. We present BoltNet, an ultra-lightweight fully convolutional architecture combining a Spatial Redistribution Bottleneck and Logit PreSampling to improve the tradeoff between predictive performance and model size in high-cardinality classification, and report the AccuracyCompression Tradeoff as a complementary diagnostic. On Pl@ntNet300K, BoltNet reaches 0.682 F1-score with 341K parameters (1.37 MB), the highest F1-score among evaluated models below 2 MB and close to substantially larger convolutional backbones. Model-only measurements on a Raspberry Pi 5, Jetson Orin Nano, and Hailo-8 characterize execution across CPU, GPU, and NPU platforms, where BoltNet is the most consistently efficient model, with the best FPS/W on the GPU and NPU and second-best on the CPU. Results on AIDERv2 and CLRS provide secondary evidence of transfer across environmental image-classification tasks. Code available at: https://codeberg.org/danielrossi/BoltNet
comment: Accepted at the CVPPA (Computer Vision Problems in Plant Phenotyping and Agriculture) workshop, ECCV 2026. 17 pages, 2 figures
☆ GeoBridge: Decoupled Semantic Conditioning for Generative Image Geolocalization
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced image geolocalization mainly by improving how they reason about geographic cues. How that reasoning isdecoded into coordinates, however, has lagged behind. Predicting a place name for a geocoding API is discrete and lossy: it ignores image evidence and collapses multi-granular semantics into a coarse lookup. We argue that the bottleneck has shifted from what a model reasons to how that reasoning is represented for a continuous, geometry-aware decoder. We present GeoBridge, a role-decoupled conditioning mechanism that connects a frozen semantic MLLM to a frozen Riemannian flow-matching head that generates coordinates on the sphere. The central obstacle is arole conflict: supervising the condition with discrete semantic labels biases its representation toward class-discriminative geometry, at odds with the smooth manifold the generative head requires. GeoBridge keeps the semantic supervision decoupled from the condition interface: a separate projection forms the continuous condition the frozen head expects, injecting geographic priors without disturbing the spherical decoder. On IM2GPS3K, GeoBridge reaches 38.67/52.89/70.37 at the 25/200/750 km thresholds, improving over a place-name-to-API pipeline and reasoning-augmented direct prediction at these precision-relevant scales. GeoBridge is a decode-side algorithmic contribution, orthogonal and complementary to chain-of-thought reasoning. Code will be made publicly available.
☆ Distractor-Aware Video Object Segmentation
Semi-supervised video object segmentation is a challenging task that aims to segment a target throughout a video sequence given an initial mask at the first frame. Discriminative approaches have demonstrated competitive performance on this task at a sensible complexity. These approaches typically formulate the problem as a one-versus-one classification between the target and the background. However, in reality, a video sequence usually encompasses a target, background, and possibly other distracting objects. Those objects increase the risk of introducing false positives, especially if they share visual similarities with the target. Therefore, it is more effective to separate distractors from the background, and handle them independently.
We propose a one-versus-many scheme to address this situation by separating distractors into their own class. This separation allows imposing special attention to challenging regions that are most likely to degrade the performance. We demonstrate the prominence of this formulation by modifying the learning-what-to-learn (LWL) method to be distractor-aware. Our proposed approach sets a new state-of-the-art on the DAVIS 2017 val dataset, and improves over the baseline on the DAVIS 2017 test-dev benchmark by 4.6 percentage points.
comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables. Author's accepted manuscript, DAGM GCPR 2021
☆ TD-VAD: Breaking Visual Dependence in Video Anomaly Detection with Text-Driven Learning ICML2026
Visual data is typically a prerequisite for training existing video anomaly detection (VAD) methods. However, obtaining sufficient annotated anomaly data for training is challenging and not scalable due to the rarity of anomaly data and the wide variety of abnormal events. In this work, we advocate that the effectiveness of treating texts as video sequences for the VAD model and propose a novel Text-Driven Video Anomaly Detection (TD-VAD) approach to break visual dependence. In contrast to the anomaly video data, text descriptions of abnormal events are easy to collect, and their class labels can be directly derived. Specifically, our method utilizes video-like text descriptions with temporal characteristics generated by LLM to train a VAD model, without any reliance on target-domain anomaly data. To capture the long- and short-range temporal logic of events, we design the event evolution causal attention module to model contextual dependencies across time. During inference, considering the domain gap between the texts and video sequences, we use the frozen CLIP encoder to extract embeddings of video frames to align the text modality while retaining crucial visual information. Comprehensive experiments on two large-scale VAD datasets, XD-Violence and UCF-Crime, demonstrate that our method outperforms prior one-class and unsupervised VAD methods by a large margin.
comment: Accepted to ICML2026
☆ Learning with Bilevel-Minimax Optimization for Efficient and Reliable Transfer Attacks ECCV 2026
Transfer-based adversarial attacks craft adversarial examples using surrogate models to mislead black-box victim models. Beyond perturbation generation, transferability is fundamentally governed by the coupling of initialization, surrogate adaptation, and gradient dynamics. We revisit this challenge from a bilevel-minimax perspective and propose BMAT (Bilevel-Minimax Adversarial Transfer). The bilevel formulation captures the dependency between initialization and perturbation, while the inner minimax problem promotes surrogate robustness for cross-architecture generalization. Algorithmically, we develop an integrated bottom-up solver that combines a Soft Weight Modulator and an Implicit Gradient Approximator to enable ternary coupling among initialization, surrogate adaptation, and perturbation optimization. We further provide theoretical insights into the optimization dynamics of the proposed bilevel-minimax framework. Extensive experiments on classification and segmentation benchmarks show that BMAT outperforms more than 10 strong baselines across more than 30 victim models, improving both intra- and cross-architecture transfer and yielding up to a 2x reduction in mIoU. Code is available at https://github.com/callous-youth/BMAT.
comment: Accepted by ECCV 2026. 21 pages in total. Code available at https://github.com/callous-youth/BMAT
☆ Can Vision Models Read the Radar Display? On the Feasibility of Radar Imagery for Air Traffic Complexity Estimation
Air traffic controllers perceive traffic complexity through the radar display, suggesting that a computer vision model operating on the same imagery may provide a natural architecture for modeling controller-perceived complexity; however, whether radar imagery is a viable input format for deep learning vision models remains unclear. Unlike natural images, radar images are extremely sparse and self-similar, consisting primarily of a black background and a few visually identical aircraft blobs, while small changes in aircraft positions can substantially alter sector-level complexity. To test whether a vision model can capture these operationally important differences, we encode each traffic situation as a position image supplemented by five channels representing aircraft state variables, including heading, speed, and altitude, and train a Vision Transformer (ViT) to regress four intrinsic complexity components derived from pairwise geometric relations among aircraft. The model achieves $R^2 > 0.96$ for all four components, and a one-aircraft-removal perturbation study shows that its response changes proportionally to how much the removed aircraft contributed to sector complexity rather than treating every removal as equivalent. These results demonstrate that, despite its atypical visual characteristics, radar imagery is a viable input format for air traffic complexity modeling.
comment: 12 pages, 6 figures. Submitted to Elsevier
☆ CoDiR: Confidence-Guided Diffusion Refinement for Semi-Supervised Histopathology Segmentation MICCAI
Hoai Nhan Pham, Dang-Nguyen Bui, Le-Van Thai, Thanh-Hiep Vo, Lan Anh Dinh Thi, Tien Dat Nguyen, Duy-Dong Nguyen, Ngoc Lam Quang Bui, Tam Tran, Zhi Huang
Semi-supervised histopathology segmentation is challenging due to scarce annotations and unreliable pseudo-labels in ambiguous gland regions. To address this problem, we propose Confidence-Guided Diffusion Refinement (CoDiR), a semi-supervised framework that combines a Mean Teacher segmentation model with diffusion-based pseudo-label refinement. Given an unlabeled image, the teacher first produces a soft prediction, and only low-confidence regions are refined by a conditional diffusion model trained to capture plausible mask structures from labeled data. The refined mask is then fused with reliable teacher predictions and used to train the student with confidence weighting and consistency regularization. On the GlaS and CRAG datasets CoDiR reaches 88.09\% and 89.83\% mDice with 10\% labeled data, and 89.19\% and 90.29\% mDice with 20\%, matching or exceeding the strongest published method on seven of the eight benchmark metrics. Ablations attribute the largest single contribution to the refinement module, which adds +6.36\% mDice over the Mean Teacher baseline. The implementation code is publicly available at: https://github.com/vongla345/codir
comment: Accepted to the MICCAI COMPAYL Workshop 2026 (11 pages, 2 figures, 6 tables)
☆ PolarSym: Polar Geometry-aware Attention for CAD Floorplan Parsing
CAD plan parsing is a fundamental task in Building Information Modeling (BIM), aiming to automatically extract architectural elements including walls, doors, windows, and furniture from 2D engineering drawings. Existing Transformer-based methods capture global semantic dependencies via self-attention, yet they infer spatial relationships merely from semantic features without explicitly characterizing the intrinsic geometric symmetry of building layouts. Such methods tend to produce mismatched correspondences in long-range matching and complex symmetric spatial layouts. To tackle this limitation, we propose PolarSym, a polar-coordinate geometry-aware attention framework for CAD plan parsing. The framework decouples geometric relationships of buildings into two complementary components, direction and distance, which are modeled independently. Structural consistency is strengthened by directional constraints, while long-range symmetric correspondences are built with distance constraints. A dynamic gating mechanism is adopted to synergistically fuse the two geometric information branches while maintaining the vanilla Transformer architecture. This design boosts geometric modeling capacity with negligible extra computation. Experiments on a public CAD plan parsing dataset show that PolarSym surpasses the reproduced SymPoint V2 baseline by 1.73% PQ, 1.54% RQ and 4.31% mIoU under identical training settings. PolarSym also converges faster and yields more stable optimization. Ablation experiments verify the complementary effects of direction and distance modeling. Our results reveal that PolarSym improves the geometric awareness of Transformers at low computational cost, offering an effective geometric modeling paradigm for CAD plan parsing.
comment: 16 pages, 7 figures
☆ Anti-Shortcut Distillation via Temporal Negative Knowledge Transfer
Knowledge distillation (KD) trains a compact student by attracting it towards a converged teacher. It is silent about which directions the teacher itself learned to suppress: repulsive and bias-aware objectives exist, but none exploits the teacher's own trajectory to identify what the student should avoid. We observe that the missing signal is already encoded in the teacher's optimization trajectory: features that an early-stage teacher emphasizes but that a converged teacher attenuates are precisely the shortcut directions worth pushing the student away from. We instantiate this observation as \textbf{A}nti-\textbf{S}hortcut \textbf{D}istillation (ASD), a push--pull KD framework that treats the converged teacher $\Tfinal$ as a positive semantic anchor and an early-checkpoint teacher $\Tearly$ as a temporal negative reference. ASD couples two losses: a temporal contrastive loss ($\Ltc$) that places the early-teacher feature as a same-sample negative against in-batch and memory-bank final-teacher features in an InfoNCE objective; and a shortcut suppression loss ($\Lss$) that penalizes student projection onto the top eigenvectors of $\E[\Dh\Dh^{\top}]$, the uncentered second-moment matrix of early-to-final feature displacements. Across 13 teacher--student pairs on CIFAR-100, ImageNet-100, and TinyImageNet, ASD attains the highest clean top-1 accuracy on more than 10 pairs and outperforms standard KD on 12. On CIFAR-100-C corruption robustness, ASD obtains the lowest mean Corruption Error ($86.1$\,mCE) on the most challenging cross-architecture pair (WRN-40-2$\to$ShuffleNet-V2). Mechanistic diagnostics confirm the intended geometry: the ASD student is systematically anti-aligned with the shortcut direction, while its projection onto the robust subspace is substantially larger ($0.45$ vs.\ $0.12$).
comment: 17 pages, 3 figures, 21 pages supplementary material
☆ VOLA: Improving Open-World Driving by VLM-Based Semantic Attribute Prediction
Driving in the real world is open-world: a car may encounter a fallen mattress, a deer, or other objects outside its training data. Naming them is not enough. The system must know how to treat each region: can it drive over it, and how severe would a collision be? We therefore shift scene perception from category labels to dense action-relevant attributes, where each pixel is labeled by how it should affect motion rather than by object name. We instantiate this general formulation with two ordered attributes: 7-rank drivability and 5-rank vulnerability. We read Qwen3.5 image-token hidden states directly as a spatial semantic representation. A lightweight boundary-aware decoder then turns this coarse token grid into sharp full-resolution attribute maps. The whole process requires neither autoregressive text generation nor an external mask model such as SAM. We train on dense attribute labels built in CARLA and test transfer to real scenes and to novel obstacles never seen in training. We compare with vision-only segmenters trained on the same attributes and prompted VLM segmenters. Our model matches strong vision-only segmenters on familiar categories and improves transfer to real open-world anomalies, reaching 69.4% mean vulnerability-rank recall versus 57.1% for the best vision-only baseline and 53.9% for the best prompted VLM baseline. These results show that VLM image tokens provide useful semantic cues for transferring driving attributes to objects outside the training vocabulary.
comment: 16 pages, 8 figures
☆ Achieving Near-Zero-Overhead Multi-Model Hierarchical Classification in Real-Time Detection Pipelines
Edge-deployed vision systems in target recognition, surveillance, autonomous vehicles, and drone domains require hierarchical inference pipelines where a detection model identifies objects of interest and downstream classifiers provide fine-grained attribute analysis. Running all models on the GPU creates a serial bottleneck that limits real-time throughput as pipeline stages grow. Modern edge SoCs pair GPUs with dedicated neural accelerators (NPUs, DLAs) capable of concurrent execution, yet deploying custom models on these accelerators remains impractical due to strict operator constraints, quantization incompatibilities, and an undocumented end-to-end pipeline. We target NVIDIA Jetson DLA cores as the representative platform. We present a five-step methodology for zero GPU fallback DLA INT8 deployment of classification backbones, comprising architecture adaptation, manual dynamic range workaround to rescue TensorRT's implicit quantization (recovering 94.0% accuracy from implicit quantization's 75%) for rapid pipeline validation before explicit quantization, quantization-aware training, ONNX graph surgery for DLA compilation, and a concurrent GPU-detection/DLA-classification inference pipeline. We document nine engineering constraints with root-cause analysis and generalizable solutions. Validation on a dual-head person attribute classifier running on DLA alongside a GPU object detector on a Jetson Orin NX demonstrates near-zero pipeline overhead (12.5 vs. 13.3~FPS detector-only at 1080p), with dual-DLA scaling at no additional cost. The methodology is backbone-agnostic and generalizes to any detection-classification edge pipeline.
comment: 14 pages, 17 figures, 5 tables. Submitted to Journal of Real-Time Image Processing
☆ ProBAG: Prototype-Guided Boundary-Aware Graph Diffusion for Weakly Supervised Histopathology Segmentation MICCAI
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation enables histopathology tissue segmentation from image-level annotations, avoiding costly pixel-level labeling by expert pathologists. However, CAM-based methods often localize only highly discriminative regions and remain unreliable near tissue interfaces. We propose ProBAG, a stage-1 pseudo-mask generator that combines dataset-specific visual prototypes with pathology-aligned CONCH text prototypes over multi-scale frozen UNI features. ProBAG introduces two complementary mechanisms: class-wise power recalibration that reshapes inter-class competition while preserving the total foreground activation mass at each pixel, and one-step graph diffusion in which feature affinities are penalized by a late-transformer attention-context discrepancy used as a soft structural boundary cue. The resulting stage-1 pseudo-masks require neither CRF nor an external segmentation model; for complete two-stage comparison, they additionally supervise a downstream Phikon-FPN segmenter. Experiments on BCSS-WSSS and LUAD-HistoSeg show consistent gains over recent WSSS approaches, while ablations indicate that pathology-aligned text semantics provide the largest improvement and graph refinement provides a smaller complementary gain. The code is available at: https://github.com/wterrr/WSSS
comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, 4 tables. Accepted by MICCAI Workshop (COMPAYL) 2026
☆ A comparison of CNN architectures for Alzheimer's disease detection in single-view MRI scans SP
Alzheimer's disease is a leading cause of death with no cure. Therefore, early detection is critical to slow progression and preserve quality of life. Diagnosis relies on medical history, cognitive tests, physical exams, and MRI brain scans, making deep learning suitable for Alzheimer's classification. This work proposes a benchmark that evaluates ten different convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures (including ResNet, DenseNet, MobileNet, EfficientNet, and VGG family models) under the same held-out test split protocol. A two-stage transfer learning and full fine-tuning pipeline is introduced to perform training using a class-balanced subset (3,900 images) derived from the OASIS medical imaging dataset, comprising 86,437 single-view MRI brain scans labeled into four classifications of Alzheimer's disease: Non-Demented, Very Mild Dementia, Mild Dementia, and Moderate Dementia. The best results were achieved by VGG16, with a 0.9637 validation accuracy and a 0.9533 test accuracy score. A key finding documented in this work is the difficulty of classifying the transition from Non-Demented to Very Mild Demented stages, observed consistently across all ten architectures.
comment: Accepted at SPIE Optics + Photonics 2026 for oral presentation. 14 pages, 7 figures, 8 tables
☆ Automated binary classification of hazelnut X-ray images: A deep-learning benchmark for quality assessment
Giancarlo Sportelli, Nicola Belcari, Roberta Pace, Umberto Bernardo, Sharmin Sultana, Alessandra Toncelli, Matteo Giaccone
Non-destructive X-ray imaging can reveal internal hazelnut defects that are difficult to detect by external inspection alone; however, automated interpretation remains challenging because of subtle radiographic differences among classes, marked class imbalance, and limited annotated data. Here, we present a benchmark for binary hazelnut quality classification (healthy versus defective) based on 799 segmented single-kernel X-ray images (224 x 224 pixels, grayscale), grouped into 101 acquisition units. Seven single-model configurations and ten probability-aggregation ensembles were evaluated using a group-wise split-rotation protocol across five data splits generated using different random seeds. Decision thresholds were selected on the validation set, and performance was assessed deterministically on validation and test sets. Under the expert-reassessed annotation condition, the average-probability ensemble of the binary cross-entropy-trained convolutional neural network and frozen Swin Transformer achieved the highest mean balanced accuracy (86.3% +/- 1.8%, five seeds), with several other ensembles providing comparable performance. Across methods, substantial split-to-split variability was observed, indicating that multi-split evaluation is essential for reliable model comparison at this dataset scale. Expert reassessment of ambiguous samples improved the performance of all 17 evaluated methods by 2.8-8.1 percentage points, while having only a limited effect on cross-split variance. The results highlight both the potential of deep learning for automated X-ray-based hazelnut quality assessment and the importance of rigorous evaluation and label curation in small, imbalanced agricultural imaging datasets.
comment: 26 pages (including 5 pages of supplementary material), 4 figures, 5 tables. Dataset available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21739932
☆ UniSwap: Streaming Audio-Visual Identity Swapping for Talking Videos
Yuxuan Zhang, Haozhong Xiong, Jiayi Song, Jinpeng Yu, Yang Shi, Jiaming Liu, Ruihua Huang, Liwei Wang
Talking-video character replacement requires coordinated transfer of appearance and voice while preserving the source motion, scene, linguistic content, and audio-video timing. Existing methods use separately optimized models for the two modalities, making audio-visual consistency difficult to enforce. We present UniSwap, the first framework for streaming joint audio-visual identity replacement in talking videos. Given a source video, a reference image, and a reference voice clip, UniSwap transfers the reference appearance and vocal timbre within a single audio-visual diffusion transformer while preserving the source content and dynamics. To address the scarcity of aligned cross-identity training pairs, we introduce a swap-and-reconstruct pipeline that removes visual and vocal identity from real clips and uses the original clips as reconstruction targets. Starting from a bidirectional backbone, we progressively adapt the model through In-context Pretraining for joint replacement, Conditional Streaming Adaptation for block-causal KV-cached generation, and Efficient Self-forcing DMD for mitigating exposure bias and reducing sampling from 30 to 3 denoising steps per block. Efficient Multi-LoRA Switching enables the three DMD roles to share a single frozen backbone. Feature-RoPE Decomposition keeps cached positions within the training range, supporting stable long-form inference. Experiments demonstrate strong audio-visual synchronization, competitive identity preservation, efficient streaming, and stable long-form generation.
☆ Dual Modality Prompted Diffusion Priors for Zero Shot Hyperspectral Pansharpening
Hyperspectral pansharpening aims to reconstruct a high resolution hyperspectral (HRHS) image from a panchromatic (PAN) image and a low resolution hyperspectral (LRHS) image while preserving both spatial details and spectral fidelity. Recent diffusion based methods exploit pretrained image priors by generating a low dimensional representation and subsequently mapping it to the hyperspectral domain. However, the observed panchromatic and hyperspectral images are typically imposed only through external reconstruction objectives, limiting their direct interaction with the diffusion prior. To address this issue, we propose dual-modality image-prompted diffusion model (DIDM) for zero shot hyperspectral pansharpening. DIDM encodes the low resolution hyperspectral and panchromatic observations into spectral and spatial prompt tokens, respectively, and injects them into intermediate features of a frozen remote sensing diffusion model through cross attention, allowing complementary spectral and spatial information to directly guide diffusion feature evolution. In addition, we introduce a panchromatic guided weighted pixel aware total variation regularizer that combines low resolution hyperspectral degradation fidelity and panchromatic response fidelity with gradient adaptive structural regularization, thereby preserving structural discontinuities while suppressing spurious variations in homogeneous regions. Extensive experiments on Pavia, Chikusei, and Houston under reduced resolution protocols show that DIDM achieves the best performance across all evaluated metrics, while full resolution evaluation on FR1 yields the highest HQNR among the compared methods. These results demonstrate that internal dual modality prompting and panchromatic guided structural regularization provide an effective balance between spatial detail enhancement and spectral preservation.
☆ Making Every Step Count: Spatio-Temporal Information Allocation for Imaging Inverse Problems
Flow-based generative models have emerged as powerful image priors for training-free inverse problem solving, capturing coherent semantics and fine-grained structure. Despite these strengths, existing flow-based inverse solvers primarily focus on the design of individual updates, largely overlooking spatio-temporal information allocation under a fixed number of function evaluations (NFEs). Temporally, insufficient early exploration can trap the flow trajectory in an incorrect semantic basin, whereas excessive allocation of NFEs to early stages leaves little budget for late-stage refinement. Spatially, data consistency provides direct constraints only within observed regions, whereas the recovery of missing regions relies mainly on the generative prior. To address these two issues, we introduce two complementary and training-free components, i.e., Spectrum-Adaptive Scheduling (SAS) and Measurement-Prioritized Attention (MPA). For temporal allocation, SAS distributes the available NFEs over flow time according to the degradation spectrum and logSNR geometry, thus better balancing semantic exploration and detail refinement. For spatial propagation, MPA exploits data-prior conflicts to guide information toward weakly constrained regions, thereby enhancing semantic and structural fidelity. Extensive experiments on standard image inverse problems, e.g., super-resolution, motion deblurring, and inpainting, demonstrate that the proposed components can be integrated into existing flow-based inverse solvers in a plug-and-play manner without retraining or additional flow-model evaluations, and can also significantly improve the restoration quality of existing solvers.
☆ LiveAnimate: Stable Long-Form Streaming Human Animation in Real-Time
Yuxuan Zhang, Haozhong Xiong, Yubo Huang, Jiayi Song, Jinpeng Yu, Haofan Wang, Jiaming Liu, Ruihua Huang, Liwei Wang
Pose-driven human animation synthesizes a video of a target person from a single reference image and a driving pose stream. Real-time generation is essential for interactive applications such as live streaming, telepresence, and virtual avatars, yet diffusion-based systems require minutes to hours per clip, precluding responsive interaction. We present LiveAnimate, to our knowledge the first animation system to combine real-time streaming with stable long-form generation at billion scale, built on a 14B-parameter video Diffusion Transformer (DiT). A two-stage training pipeline first adapts a pretrained bidirectional DiT into a block-causal autoregressive generator through Reference-Anchored Teacher-Forcing Adaptation, and then reduces the sampling budget to three steps through Block-wise Self-Forcing Distillation. To preserve appearance over extended streams, we introduce Pose-Retrieval Sink Attention (PR-Sink), a bounded KV-cache mechanism combining a Static Sink that permanently anchors the first generated block, a Dynamic Sink that holds a pose-retrieved historical block, and a three-slot Rolling Window. When a pose recurs, PR-Sink restores the relevant appearance context without retaining the entire sequence, so memory and per-block latency remain constant regardless of stream duration. Together with Ulysses sequence parallelism and operator fusion, these designs enable 19.63\,FPS streaming inference on two NVIDIA H100 GPUs. On a three-minute benchmark, LiveAnimate maintains nearly constant perceptual quality and identity from the first 30 seconds to the final minute (IQA 4.047 vs.\ 4.026), while prior systems degrade substantially or require hours of offline computation for the same rollout. These results establish a new operating point in quality, latency, and duration for interactive full-body animation.
☆ JieZi: A Large-Scale Expert-Audited Dataset and Benchmark for Ancient Chinese Character Exegesis
The scholarly exegesis of ancient Chinese characters demands integrating visual observation, linguistic analysis, and historical context. However, existing computational approaches focus narrowly on subtasks such as character recognition and retrieval, lacking the structured datasets and benchmarks required for comprehensive scholarly analysis. To address this limitation, we introduce Ancient Chinese Character Exegesis (ACCE), a vision-language question answering (VQA) task that models the scholarly exegesis process. ACCE is organized into four progressive levels: basic character identification, glyph-form analysis, meaning exegesis, and diachronic evolution analysis. To support this task, we construct two complementary resources. JieZi-Dataset is the first large-scale, expert-audited VQA training dataset for ACCE, comprising over 500K QA pairs. It is constructed via a pipeline that reduces factual errors by constraining generation with expert-designed templates and source-text references. Human verification is further applied at each key stage to ensure scholarly accuracy. JieZi-Bench is an evaluation benchmark aligned with the exegesis process, constructed and verified by human experts to ensure evaluation reliability. It consists of four levels with reference answers curated from authoritative lexicographic works held separate from the training data. Experiments on multimodal large language models show that current models perform well on basic identification but struggle with glyph analysis, semantic reasoning, and diachronic understanding. Fine-tuning on JieZi-Dataset substantially improves performance across all four levels. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Ran00w/JieZi.
comment: 19 pages, 13 figures. Accepted to the Dataset Track of ACM Multimedia 2026 for oral presentation
☆ Advancing MLLM-based UAV Image Understanding and Reasoning: A Benchmark and a Training-Free Multi-Agent System
Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based UAV aerial image understanding and reasoning is essential for aerial intelligence yet poses distinct challenges arising from extreme scale variation, arbitrary camera orientations, and high object density. Despite growing interest, existing evaluations remain fragmented across individual datasets and narrow tasks, leaving a critical gap in unified assessment of UAV understanding and reasoning capabilities. To fill this gap, we construct UAVQA-Bench, a benchmark of 1,500 human-annotated QA pairs drawn from 13 public UAV datasets, covering 6 capability dimensions and 16 tasks in both multiple-choice and visual grounding formats. Systematic evaluation of a broad range of open-source and closed-source MLLMs as well as agent-based systems on UAVQA-Bench identifies three key failure modes: domain-toolset mismatch, unchecked error propagation, and static reasoning. Motivated by these findings, we propose UAV-MAS, a training-free multi-agent system for MLLM-based UAV aerial image understanding and reasoning, comprising a Domain-Specific Perception Engine (DSPE) that routes queries to task-appropriate visual tools, a Context-Aware Iterative Refinement module (CAIR) that validates intermediate reasoning to curb error accumulation, and a Difficulty-Aware Adaptive Search mechanism (DAAS) that adjusts search depth to question difficulty. UAV-MAS with a 32B open-source MLLM achieves 77.0% overall accuracy on UAVQA-Bench, surpassing Gemini 3 Pro by 4.0\%, while the 8B variant improves 8.7\% over its base model.
☆ STAR: A Spatial-Topology Aware Routing Framework for Generalizable 3D Scene Understanding
Constructing a unified 3D scene understanding model has long been hindered by the topological discrepancies across sensor modalities. While applying the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture is a flexible approach for multi-domain 3D understanding, we observe that conventional feature-only MoE routers may underrepresent local sampling topology under semantic supervision, making expert allocation difficult when semantic consistency coexists with geometric heterogeneity. To overcome this challenge, we propose STAR (Spatial-Topology Aware Routing Framework). Specifically, we introduce a multi-attribute self-supervised pre-training branch, covering topological and textural variations, to anchor cross-domain structural priors. Building upon this, we design a domain-aware expert branch with two mechanisms: Domain-Spatial-Guided Routing (DSR), which captures local topological variations from spatial context, and Entropy-controlled Dynamic Allocation (EDA), which adjusts the number of activated experts according to routing uncertainty. Together, these branches combine stable cross-domain representation learning with adaptive expert allocation. Extensive experiments across various tasks, encompassing both indoor and outdoor scenes, demonstrate the effectiveness of STAR. It achieves 80.1% mIoU on the ScanNet validation set and 77.2% mIoU on S3DIS, consistently improving over strong baselines. Code is available at our project page (https://xmw666.github.io/STAR/).
comment: The third author is the corresponding author
☆ Boundary-Enhanced Segmentation of Pig Point Clouds in Commercial Housing Environments
Zhankang Xu, Fei Shi, Xiangyu Qi, Zhaoyang Wang, Mengxin Guo, Yikai Fan, Simon X. Yang, Qifeng Li, Weihong Ma
In real pigsty environments, pig point clouds often come into close contact with background structures, resulting in blurred target boundaries, local adhesion, and background mis-segmentation. This reduces the accuracy of subsequent point cloud completion and body size measurement. To address these challenges, this study proposes a pig point cloud segmentation method based on boundary feature analysis. The proposed method adopts Octree Transformer as the backbone network and integrates local geometric details with global semantic context through octree convolution, self-attention encoding, and multi-scale feature fusion. Furthermore, soft-distance boundary pseudo-labels are generated to provide continuous boundary supervision, and a bidirectional cross-boundary semantic module is designed to enable explicit interaction between boundary and semantic features. Experiments conducted on a comprehensive dataset demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms various state-of-the-art models in terms of segmentation accuracy, mean intersection over union, and boundary delineation. The results indicate that the method effectively alleviates boundary adhesion, providing reliable point cloud inputs for downstream precision livestock farming tasks.
comment: 24 pages,9 figures, 5 tables
☆ EGM-Det: Entropy-Guided Multimodal Adaptive Fusion for UAV RGB-IR Object Detection
Joint use of RGB and infrared (IR) imagery can improve UAV-view object detection, but most existing methods fuse multimodal features with static or fixed weights and therefore overlook spatially varying modality reliability. We propose EGM-Det, an entropy-guided multimodal adaptive fusion framework for RGB-IR object detection. EGM-Det employs a dual-stream architecture to preserve modality-specific representations and introduces an Entropy Offset Gate Fusion module for adaptive multi-scale fusion. The module derives shallow entropy priors from input intensity, local entropy, and cross-modal discrepancy, and uses them to guide local offset alignment and spatial-channel gated fusion. It therefore selectively aggregates reliable RGB and infrared cues instead of uniformly combining heterogeneous features. We further introduce cross-modal distillation to regularize the learned fusion gates and reduce fusion degradation. Each student branch extracts complementary knowledge from the cross-modality teacher branch matched to the main branch, while entropy-adaptive supervision emphasizes uncertain modality decisions. Experiments on DroneVehicle, LLVIP, and VEDAI demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across all three benchmarks; in particular, EGM-Det outperforms prior approaches by more than 10 percentage points on VEDAI.
comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables
☆ Learning from Multimodal Pseudo-Labels for Robust Open-Vocabulary Instance and Panoptic Segmentation
This work addresses the challenge of open-vocabulary instance segmentation (OVIS) and open-set panoptic segmentation (OSPS), which aim to recognize both predefined and unseen object categories without exhaustive human annotations. Existing methods often suffer from noisy pseudo-masks, limited visual-textual grounding, and difficulty handling synonyms or out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. To overcome these challenges, we propose a multimodal framework that leverages pre-trained vision-language models for automatic pseudo-label generation, CLIP-guided synonym filtering, and GPT-based caption reconstruction. In our target-vocabulary-assisted pseudo-labeling setting, the framework first constructs pseudo segmentation masks, descriptive captions, and semantically aligned synonym sets using Grounded SAM, LLaVA, and CLIP, providing multimodal supervision without manual annotation. We then enhance visual-textual alignment through three complementary training objectives: an extended grounding loss that incorporates visually grounded synonyms, a semantic consistency loss, and a generative caption reconstruction loss. Extensive experiments on the COCO dataset demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches under this protocol, achieving substantial improvements on both OVIS and OSPS benchmarks.
comment: 14 pages
☆ Zero-OVCD: Bridging Training-Free Foundation Models and Pseudo-Label Learning for Open-Vocabulary Change Detection
Open-vocabulary change detection (OVCD) enables the identification of user-specified land-cover changes in bitemporal remote sensing images, but existing training-free pipelines remain vulnerable to inaccurate candidate masks, ambiguous semantic assignments, and accumulated inference errors. To address these issues, we propose Zero-OVCD, a two-stage framework that requires no pixel-level annotations from the target domain. In the first stage, high-quality change pseudo-labels are generated through complementary candidate-mask refinement, multiscale semantic similarity fusion with margin-based reliability filtering, and response-guided mask correction and completion. These components jointly suppress noisy candidates, enhance mask-level semantic discrimination, and recover missed change regions. In the second stage, a change detector is trained using the generated pseudo-labels, while checkpoint voting and high-agreement sample selection are introduced to mitigate residual pseudo-label noise. On LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, and S2Looking, Stage I achieves F1 scores of 86.25%, 85.82%, and 50.48%, while Stage II further improves them to 88.65%, 88.85%, and 57.96%, respectively. On SECOND, the macro-average F1 across six category-wise one-vs-rest tasks increases from 47.91% to 50.92%. These results demonstrate that bridging training-free foundation-model inference with noise-aware pseudo-label learning provides an effective solution for open-vocabulary change detection without target-domain pixel-level annotations. Code will be available at https://github.com/1321663019/Zero-OVCD.
comment: 10 figures, 9 tables
☆ Motion-as-Prompt: Enhancing Motion Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models via Motion-Guided Cross-Frame Visual Prompting
Motion-centric video reasoning is fundamental to interactive applications such as robotic manipulation and autonomous navigation. However, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) typically process videos through sparse uniform sampling to control visual-token and attention costs. This strategy may discard critical transitions between sampled frames, limiting reasoning about object movement, collisions, and causal interactions. To mitigate this issue, we propose Motion-as-Prompt (MaP), a track-guided cross-frame visual prompting framework. MaP recovers dense point trajectories, selects motion-informative frames, and marks the trajectories accumulated between consecutive sampled frames directly onto the visual inputs, making otherwise hidden displacement, direction changes, and interactions observable to frozen MLLMs. Experiments on CLEVRER and Something-Something-v2 show that MaP consistently improves average motion-reasoning accuracy, yielding gains of 4.2% and 8.9% for GPT-5.5, respectively. Notably, these improvements are obtained without degrading non-motion understanding, highlighting the robustness of MaP. These results demonstrate that MaP provides a simple and effective solution for enhancing motion-centric video reasoning without model training or architectural modification. Project page:https://github.com/SunVictor23/MaP.
☆ Hybrid-LUT: Channel-Aware Hybrid Lookup Table and Filtering for Efficient Image Denoising ECCV2026
Lookup table (LUT)-based image denoising methods have attracted increasing attention due to their high efficiency and hardware-friendly properties. However, existing RGB-LUT approaches require three identical LUTs to process RGB channels in parallel, resulting in large on-chip SRAM consumption. A simple alternative is to apply LUT processing only to the luminance (Y) channel in the YUV color space to reduce memory usage. However, this naive strategy leads to degraded restoration quality, since ignoring the chrominance (UV) channels introduces color distortion and residual artifacts. In this work, we propose Hybrid-LUT, a YUV-based asymmetric channel-processing framework that combines LUT and filtering in a unified design. Specifically, a multi-band LUT branch with pixel-level weight fusion is applied to the Y channel to recover fine textures, while lightweight filtering is used for the UV channels to maintain color consistency. This design reduces LUT storage by two-thirds compared with RGB-LUT methods while maintaining the same runtime throughput. Extensive experiments show that Hybrid-LUT achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across multiple benchmarks with only 421 KB of storage. In particular, our method surpasses existing LUT-based denoising approaches by at least 0.63 dB CPSNR on real-world datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness for image denoising on resource-constrained edge devices. The project is available at https://github.com/Ai-ZL/Hybrid-LUT .
comment: Accepted by ECCV2026
☆ Cloak of Invisibility: Real-Time Privacy-Preserving Volumetric Video Streaming
Volumetric video streaming turns privacy into a 3D, multi-view problem. Unlike ordinary video, where sensitive content can often be redacted frame by frame, RGB-D volumetric pipelines capture people, rooms, and personal objects from multiple cameras and fuse them into a shared 3D representation. A private object missed in one view, or only partially removed before fusion, can therefore reappear in the reconstructed scene. This creates a privacy challenge for 3D telepresence, education, entertainment, and immersive applications: private content should be removed before raw visual and geometric data leave the camera side, while the public part of the scene should remain useful for real-time reconstruction. Existing volumetric streaming systems mainly optimize reconstruction, data movement, and latency, while privacy-preserving vision methods are designed for single-camera, single-frame images and do not directly address calibrated multi-view RGB-D fusion. We present InViStream, a real-time "privacy-from-source" system designed for this setting. InViStream addresses three challenges in volumetric capture: private objects may appear differently across views, RGB masking alone can leave geometric privacy leakage in depth, and public/private instances of the same class must be separated consistently before cloud-side fusion. To address these challenges, InViStream combines object detection with depth-aware masking, propagates public/private decisions across calibrated views, and fuses only sanitized point clouds. We evaluate InViStream on synthetic and real RGB-D scenes, including offices, conference rooms, living rooms, and settings with multiple public and private people and objects. InViStream achieves synthetic Dice/Recall of 0.799/0.891 and real Dice/Recall of 0.792/0.908, with synthetic SSIM above 0.98 and real-time streaming above 30 FPS.
☆ Robustness of AI-Art Detectors under Generator Shift
Text-to-image generative models have advanced rapidly, with modern Diffusion Transformer architectures producing images that are increasingly difficult to distinguish from human-created artwork. This development has raised significant concerns regarding copyright protection, misinformation, fraud, impersonation, and the authenticity of digital content. Most AI-art detectors are trained and evaluated on the same generator family, leaving robustness to newer architectures underexplored. In this chapter, we analyze generator shift based on a Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium (SD3.5m) artwork dataset spanning ten art styles through reverse prompting of held-out human artwork samples. Five detectors are trained on U-Net-based latent diffusion artwork and evaluated in a zero-shot cross-generator setting on the SD3.5m dataset. Deep learning models perform strongly in-distribution but degrade under generator shift, misclassifying many SD3.5m images as human while human false positives remain low. The CLIP ViT-L/14 model performs best overall, while Grad-CAM analysis reveals weaker and more diffuse activation on false negatives. These findings highlight a generalization gap in current AI-art detectors and motivate the development of detectors as one component of a layered defense that remains reliable across rapidly evolving generative architectures.
comment: To appear as a chapter in the book "Artificial Intelligence for Cyber Defense in Emerging Threats", to be published by Springer by early 2027
☆ Transferable Above-Ground Biomass (AGB) Estimation Model from Multi-Sensor Data with Sparse Field Calibration
Spatially continuous quantification of forest above-ground biomass (AGB) is what makes carbon accounting credible and mitigation strategies actionable. While field inventories provide high localized accuracy, they are spatially sparse; conversely, spaceborne LiDAR from the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) offers broad biomass samples but lacks spatial continuity and systematic underestimation of high-biomass forests. This paper presents an operational framework centered on a single globally trained convolutional neural network (CNN) that is seamlessly adapted to each new landscape through a lightweight empirical field-calibration workflow. The global model combines optical (Sentinel-2), C-band SAR (Sentinel-1), L-band SAR (ALOS-2 PALSAR-2), and terrain (DEM) data. It is trained once against GEDI Level-4A biomass reference data spanning multiple regions and both wet and dry seasons so that it learns the persistent woody-structure rather than a single-date appearance. To avoid retraining for every landscape, the framework applies a small number of local field plots to fit a scale-and-bias correction that aligns the global prediction with ground truth in each region. The pipeline harmonizes sensor data onto a shared 10 m grid, derives vegetation indices and polarimetric ratios, computes per-band normalization stats, and trains the CNN with a hybrid log-domain SmoothL1 with RMSE loss for skewed biomass distribution. On held-out validation the global GEDI-based model achieved R^2 approximately 0.78 and RMSE approximately 22 Mg/ha. A subsequent field calibration combining Random Forest fine-tuning under a 10-fold cross-validation eliminates localized regional biases. This improves local validation performance to R^2 approximately 0.82 and reduces RMSE to approximately 15 Mg/ha, outperforming both the uncalibrated global model and the ESA CCI Biomass product against field plots.
☆ CAM-Guided Saliency Cutout and Image-Based Malware Classification
Dropout regularization is commonly used to reduce overfitting by removing parts of a neural network during training. For Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), cutouts serve a somewhat analogous purpose. Cutouts can be implemented as data augmentation: the original training image is retained, and additional copies are created with regions removed. In this chapter, we test whether cutout placement can be improved by using High-Resolution Class Activation Mapping (HiResCAM). We compare four controlled training conditions: no cutout, standard random cutout, low-saliency cutout, and high-saliency cutout. We experiment using grayscale malware images from the RawMal-TF dataset (17 families with~1,000 samples per family), and for comparison to natural images, we experiment with the well-known CIFAR-100 dataset. All experiments are based on ResNet18 with~100 training epochs. For the cutout experiments, we test cutout areas of~5\%, 10\%, 20\%, and~30\%, and we consider~$M\in\{4,8}$ augmented copies per original training image. The RawMal-TF results are slightly worse for all three cutout cases (random, high and low saliency) as compared to no cutouts. In contrast, our CIFAR-100 experimental results improve slightly under low-saliency cutout. These results suggest that the value of saliency-guided cutout is domain dependent, and that malware images should not be treated as equivalent to natural images.
comment: To appear as a chapter in the book "Artificial Intelligence for Cyber Defense in Emerging Threats", to be published by Springer by early 2027
☆ Generative Video Compression Based on Hierarchical Referencing
Diffusion-based generative video compression has emerged as a promising paradigm to improve perceptual quality, where latent frames are required to be encoded efficiently while serving as denoising conditions. However, existing methods neither carefully design reference and quality structures during latent coding nor account for the impact of frame-level quality variation on denoising procedure, which limits coding efficiency and aggravates artifact propagation during generative reconstruction. In this paper, we propose GVCHR, Generative Video Compression based on Hierarchical Referencing. The key idea is to organize latent frames hierarchically, where the selected high-quality references benefit both latent coding and generative reconstruction. In latent coding, GVCHR couples a hierarchical reference structure with a hierarchical quality structure, assigning more bits to lower-layer frames that are reused more frequently as references. Built on this design, we introduce Hierarchical Temporal Context Mining to exploits complementary short- and long-term temporal context for effective latent coding. In generative reconstruction, the coding-side hierarchy is incorporated into a Hierarchical Attentive Adapter which is attached to a video diffusion transformer. This adapter uses hierarchical attention to restrict each latent frame to attend only to the same- or lower-layer references, thereby reducing artifact propagation during denoising. Experiments validate GVCHR on multiple benchmarks. Compared with the previous state-of-the-art method, GVCHR achieves 50.5% and 54.0% BD-rate gains in terms of LPIPS and DISTS, respectively, while also delivering clearly improved visual quality.
☆ KANResDiff: Learning Local Residual Diffusion via Kolmogorov-Arnold Network for Ambiguous Medical Image Segmentation MICCAI 2026
Fanding Li, Chenglin Wang, Xiangyu Li, Xingyu Qiu, Xinghua Ma, Xiangming Yin, Haiyang Li, Suyu Dong, Wei Wang, Kuanquan Wang, Gongning Luo, Shuo Li
Ambiguous medical image segmentation aims to provide a series of diverse but plausible segmentation hypotheses. However, existing methods introduce stochasticity in a fixed and pre-defined manner, failing to form a progressive semantic modeling process. To address these challenges, we propose KANResDiff to learn local residual diffusion with Kolmogorov-Arnold Network, thereby assigning distinct roles across stages for ambiguity modeling. Specifically, we propose Independent Time Encoding that offers spline-based time embeddings instead of linear ones from MLPs, which enhances the independence across inference stages and assigns progressive semantic roles to different stages. We propose Residual Schrodinger Bridge that injects deterministic residual prior with learnable weights by constructing local Schrodinger Bridge instead of following manually settings, achieving a flexible deterministic-stochastic interaction and stage-aware ambiguity modeling thanks to local optimal diffusion path. Extensive experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that KANResDiff achieves SOTA performance on GED and HM-IoU, with maximum improvements of 16.8% and 7.7%, respectively, while maintaining competitive performance on the MDM metric. Source code is available at https://github.com/PerceptionComputingLab/KANResDiff.
comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, MICCAI 2026 conference paper
☆ MBA: Multimodal Benchmark and Agents for Real-World Business Ideation
Agentic systems powered by large language models (LLMs) have opened new opportunities for business ideation. Yet existing approaches remain confined to a text-only paradigm, despite the inherently multimodal nature of real-world contexts. We thus introduce MBA-Bench, the first multimodal benchmark for training and evaluating business ideation agents, comprising 30K samples across six domains, each domain characterized by distinct visual cues not fully conveyed by text alone. Concretely, we automatically caption images and employ GPT-4o to generate five reference ideas for each of three business questions through retrieval query generation, market evidence retrieval, and evidence-augmented synthesis. Following prior work, we evaluate agents across six business-oriented criteria using MLLM-as-a-Judge. To consider settings where criteria are hidden or disclosed, we present MBA-b and MBA-k for blind and known, respectively. We train both with two novel reward objectives---creativity and feasibility---while MBA-k further optimizes the six disclosed criteria for eight in total. Both are trained via LoRA-based supervised fine-tuning followed by group relative policy optimization with these setting-specific rewards. For extensive experiments on MBA-Bench, we set up two baselines accommodating either captions only or multimodal inputs, with the latter nearing closed-source performance on several metrics. MBA-b and MBA-k outperform caption baselines by 63.9% and 77.1%, and multimodal baselines by 25.6% and 35.8%, respectively.
comment: Project page: https://hchoi256.github.io/projects/mba/; Code: https://github.com/hchoi256/MBA
☆ Topology-Aware Query Selection for Surgical Instrument Instance Segmentation
Accurate foreground masks can still form an incorrect surgical-instrument instance set: duplicate, fragmented, merged, missed, or empty-frame predictions may preserve favorable pixel overlap while violating object identity and count. Final query selection is therefore a relational, variable-cardinality problem rather than a collection of independent candidate decisions. We evaluate topology-aware query selection, which represents the nonempty candidates of a fixed Mask2Former as a complete graph, learns relational candidate and pair representations, predicts set cardinality, and solves an exact structured subset problem. The formal comparison is the complete relational path versus a node-feature-matched path; it evaluates the combined effect of pairwise geometry, message passing, and the additional relational-path capacity, not an isolated component. On the sealed 22-case source test, all three discovery seeds supported instance-set performance improvement with segmentation fidelity and predefined technical-safety preservation: instance F1 increased by 0.0504--0.0612 and positive-frame set-failure rate decreased by 0.0848--0.1060. Direct ROBUST-MIPS transfer reproduced the complete result in all three seeds. Endoscapes supported only one of three seeds and therefore did not establish stable direct transfer. Taken together, the results support a bounded conclusion: the evaluated complete path improved coherent instance-set construction from fixed Mask2Former candidates in specified native-instance contracts, while stable cross-domain transfer and component-specific effects remain unestablished.
comment: Preprint. Main manuscript and supplementary material included. Code and reproducibility materials: https://github.com/yqjyzzz/structured-instance-set-selection
☆ How Can Driving World Models Do Counterfactual Prediction?
Driving world models are often interpreted as counterfactual simulators for observed driving episodes: given a factual driving log, they are asked what would have happened under an alternative ego action. In this paper, we identify a fundamental mismatch between this goal and direct action-conditioned prediction. The direct prediction uses the shared history and the alternative action but not the factual continuation observed after that history. It can therefore generate a plausible future without preserving what actually happened in this episode. We formalize this gap using the causal recipe of abduction, action, and prediction and study it in a setting with a short time horizon, where the alternative ego action does not alter how surrounding agents evolve. To make the gap measurable, we construct a controlled simulation benchmark with factual outcomes and matched counterfactual outcomes. Across two representative world models, direct predictions fail to match the counterfactual ground truth, supporting our analysis. As a constructive check of this analysis, we introduce a deliberately simple, training-free pipeline that moves observed evidence into the counterfactual view and lets the frozen model complete what remains unknown. Even this simple construction raises the overall recovered fraction substantially and reduces perceptual distance to the matched counterfactual on both models. We hope this work draws attention to this gap and motivates better counterfactual prediction methods for driving world models.
☆ ProtoHGF-Net: Prototype HyperGraph Fusion with Intra-modal Calibration for RGBT Object Detection ACM MM 2026
Xiangqi Chen, Xiuling Zhang, Chengzhuan Yang, Li Zhao, Dawei Zhang, Yanchao Wang, Liyuan Chen, Hua Wang, Hao Peng, Zhonglong Zheng
RGB-Thermal (RGBT) object detection enables robust perception in complex scenes by leveraging the complementary strengths of visible textures and thermal cues. However, existing methods mainly rely on dense cross-modal interactions over full-resolution features, which inevitably introduce background interference and hinder the learning of target-relevant representations. In this paper, we propose the Prototype HyperGraph Fusion Network (ProtoHGF-Net), a novel framework that redefines cross-modal fusion as prototype-level semantic interaction rather than the dense cross-modal interaction paradigm. Specifically, we design Prototype HyperGraph Fusion to perform cross-modal interaction in a compact prototype-level semantic space. This design enables more selective fusion among target-relevant prototypes. To support this prototype-level fusion, we propose Teacher-Mask Calibration Distillation, which calibrates modality features before fusion using modality-specific teachers and target-aware masks. This strategy suppresses backgrou- nd-dominant responses and produces more target-focused features. Extensive experiments on DroneVehicle, DVTOD, and FLIR demonstrate that ProtoHGF-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance with 85.9\% $mAP_{50}$, 88.2\% $mAP_{50}$, and 79.1\% $mAP_{50}$, respectively. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/ZiMo-Chen/ProtoHGF}{GitHub}.
comment: Accepted to ACM MM 2026
☆ A Hybrid Framework of Vision Transformer and Gated Recurrent Unit for Detection of Mosquito Diseases
Danial Sharifrazi, Saadat Behzadi, Nouman Javed, Roohallah Alizadehsani, Prasad N. Paradkar, Asim Bhatti
Identifying dengue virus-infected mosquitoes from control mosquitoes is a major challenge in analyzing mosquito locomotion behavior due to the small size and complexity of the video background. Conventional AI methods are often unable to extract accurate features from video frames and produce erroneous features. In this study, a three-step framework is introduced: first, mosquitoes are identified and the background is removed using the YOLO 11M model, then visual features are extracted using the Vision Transformer (ViT), and finally the videos are classified with a convolutional GRU (ConvGRU) classifier. A comparative analysis of different models, including Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and their convolutional versions showed that the ConvGRU model achieved the best performance; it achieved 88.88% accuracy, 84.45% precision, 82.82% recall, and 82.81% F1 score. These results demonstrate that combining convolutional models with sequence-based networks, especially in the ConvGRU model, allows the simultaneous extraction of precise spatial features and long-term temporal dependencies from mosquito movements. Finally, the proposed framework provides a reliable solution for analyzing mosquito behavior in complex environments.
☆ Dialogue-Aware Video-to-Music Generation Using Public Domain Film Collections
Video-to-music generation has drawn growing interest for its role in conveying the emotion of visual media, including film. Progress in the field, however, is hampered by a reproducibility gap: models are often trained on crawled corpora referenced through YouTube URLs that may be deleted, with the underlying data often difficult and time-consuming to retrieve. To address this, we introduce the Open Screen Soundtrack Library version 2 (OSSL-v2), a self-hosted corpus of 34,343 video clips totaling 246.4 hours, sourced from public-domain films. Unlike crawled corpora, OSSL-v2 is reproducible (i.e., not subject to link rot) and copyright-conscious, yet still large enough to train functional video-to-music models. We then use this film-domain corpus to study dialogue as a conditioning signal for video-to-music generation, motivated by the close temporal coupling between film music and on-screen speech. Specifically, we augment existing models' video cross-attention with a time axis and modulate it frame-by-frame with the dialogue track. Evaluated on both public-domain and commercial films, our approach shows improvement over the state-of-the-art baselines. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/McAuley-Lab/OSSL-v2.
☆ Hand Visibility Detector: Per-Keypoint Visibility Estimation for Hands
Hand Pose Estimation (HPE) is a fundamental technology for various applications such as AR/VR and robotics. In these applications, the visibility of each hand joint in the image is crucial for assessing the reliability of estimation results under occlusion. However, most existing HPE methods output joint positions without explicitly indicating their visibility. Although some methods account for occlusion or visibility, visibility estimation has mainly been used as an auxiliary signal for improving pose estimation. To our knowledge, per-joint hand visibility estimation has not been systematically studied as a standalone task. In this work, we propose Hand Visibility Detector, a model for estimating the visibility of individual hand joints, and present the first systematic investigation of visibility estimation as an independent task. We show that leveraging the prior knowledge of HPE models pretrained on large-scale data as a backbone yields high performance in this task. We further demonstrate the utility of Hand Visibility Detector on a downstream task of 3D hand pose annotation via multi-view triangulation of 2D keypoints, showing that visibility-weighted triangulation reduces reprojection error. Our method is released as a ready-to-use package, and the code and demo are available at https://github.com/ryhara/hand_visibility_detector .
comment: Code: https://github.com/ryhara/hand_visibility_detector
☆ Measuring Browser Webcam Gaze Honestly: A Capture-Clock Methodology and Open Reference Implementation MICCAI 2026
Browser-based webcam gaze trackers are increasingly used for crowd-scale data collection and in clinical settings where lab eye trackers are impractical, but the reported latency numbers may not represent real world functionality. The common practice of timestamping each gaze sample when it is emitted, rather than when its source frame was captured, makes the measured inference latency read about $0\,$ms no matter how slow the engine really is. We show how to measure it honestly, recovering a per-frame capture clock from the browser's \texttt{re\-quest\-Video\-Frame\-Call\-back} (rVFC) API (\texttt{captureTime} where the browser exposes it for local camera streams, else \texttt{presentationTime}, in which case every recovered latency is a verifiable lower bound): exact source-frame pairing through a per-frame queue for engines that expose their inference pipeline, and a further lower bound for engines that do not, such as WebGazer. We release an open TypeScript implementation and benchmark harness, demonstrated on two interchangeable engines: WebGazer and a new FaceMesh+KRR pipeline.
comment: Accepted at DEMI 2026 (MICCAI 2026 Workshop on Data Engineering in Medical Imaging). Final version to appear in Springer LNCS
☆ Alignment of Similarity-Transformed Images Based on Fourier--Mellin Transform Using Auxiliary Function Method SC 2026
This paper proposes an algorithm for estimating the similarity transformation, namely translation, scale, and rotation, between two images with subpixel accuracy. Image registration is a fundamental technique for aligning images acquired under different viewpoints and imaging conditions, and a representative approach based on maximizing discrete cross-correlation is the Fourier--Mellin registration. However, the Fourier--Mellin approach often fails to achieve sufficient alignment accuracy when subpixel-level estimation is required. The proposed method integrates (i) scale-and-rotation estimation from the Fourier magnitude spectrum in a log-polar representation and (ii) maximization of phase-only correlation based on the auxiliary function method. This integration enables a two-stage estimation procedure: it first estimates scale and rotation without being affected by translation, and then estimates translation with subpixel precision in the spatial domain using the corrected image pair. A simulation experiment on image pairs subjected to random similarity transformations demonstrates that the proposed method reduces estimation errors in scale, rotation, and translation compared with Fourier--Mellin-based registration methods using discrete cross-correlation.
comment: Accepted to APSIPA ASC 2026. 6 pages, 4 figures
☆ Repurposing RGB-based Foundation Model for Depth Estimation on Thermal Images Using Hierarchical Supervision IROS 2026
Depth estimation from thermal images is highly valuable for robotic applications in adverse conditions, such as nighttime and rainy weather. Recent studies have sought to transfer knowledge from RGB-based foundation models to thermal modalities, yet the rich hierarchical representations these models encode remain underutilized. To address this limitation, we propose RGB-HS, a novel framework for thermal-image depth estimation that leverages hierarchical supervision from an RGB-based foundation model. Specifically, we first replace the baseline thermal encoder with a foundational model and introduce a parallel RGB branch that also employs a foundational model as an encoder of the same architecture, taking RGB images as input. The alignment is then performed across multiple levels between the tokens of the two encoders, allowing the thermal student branch to capture both structural precision and semantic abstraction from the RGB teacher branch. Furthermore, we introduce verification to refine the alignment process by weighting tokens from the RGB branch based on RGB image quality. Extensive experiments on the popular benchmark demonstrate that RGB-HS achieves competitive performance and more effectively exploits the representational capacity of RGB-based foundation models for depth estimation on thermal images.
comment: Accepted in IROS 2026
☆ From Synthesis to Removal: Physics-Grounded Reflection Simulation and Diffusion-Based Video Dereflection
Videos captured through glass often contain reflections that degrade visual quality and interfere with downstream vision tasks. Although single-image reflection removal has been extensively studied, video reflection removal remains largely underexplored due to the lack of paired video data, temporally coherent removal models, and dedicated evaluation benchmarks. We present a closed-loop framework that unifies physics-grounded reflection simulation, diffusion-based video dereflection, and benchmark evaluation. Our S2R-Synthesis pipeline generates paired reflected and reflection-free videos by performing physics-grounded augmentation in the structure space and rendering realistic reflected videos with a trained video diffusion renderer; the augmentation models key glass-related effects including roughness-induced blur, thickness-induced ghosting, and reflectance variation. Based on the synthesized data, we introduce S2R-Removal, the first diffusion-based video reflection removal model, which adapts a pretrained video diffusion prior through reflection-aware latent adaptation and one-step pixel-geometric refinement, recovering the clean transmission in a single denoising step. We further build S2R-Bench, the first benchmark for video reflection removal, supporting both full-reference evaluation and real-world human perceptual assessment. Experiments on S2R-Bench and multiple public image benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and faster inference than even non-diffusion baselines, and validate the effectiveness of S2R-Synthesis. Project page: https://codingwzp.github.io/VideoDereflection_S2R.
comment: Project page: https://codingwzp.github.io/VideoDereflection_S2R
☆ Boundary-Continuous Cross-Camera RGB Mapping via Hue-Split Model Trees SC 2026
We propose a hue-split model-tree method for boundary-continuous cross-camera RGB mapping. Cross-camera RGB mapping aims to produce consistent color representations across cameras whose recorded RGB values differ due to sensor spectral sensitivities and image-signal processing pipelines. A common chart-based remedy is to estimate a single global affine color correction matrix (CCM), but such a global model cannot capture hue-specific discrepancies between cameras. To capture that behavior, we recursively partitions the source-camera color space along a scalar hue coordinate and builds an model tree that stores an affine CCM at every node. For fitting the node CCMs, we utilize a log-domain error objective. To prevent false contours that arise from hard hue splits, we further introduce a boundary-continuous formulation in which the prediction is obtained by blending the log-domain outputs of all node CCMs along the root-to-leaf path. The path-wise blending weights are optimized under a simplex constraint using both a chart-pair fitting loss and an explicit continuity regularizer defined on deterministic boundary prototype pairs placed just on either side of each learned hue threshold. We conducted an experiment on a Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II to Canon EOS 20D mapping using the Middlebury Registered Color Checker dataset. The results show that hue splitting substantially reduces log-RMSE over a single global affine CCM and that the proposed path blending with boundary prototype regularization simultaneously improves accuracy and suppresses chromaticity gaps at the learned hue thresholds across two illuminants and multiple exposure conditions.
comment: Accepted to APSIPA ASC 2026. 6 pages, 4 figures
☆ Through Van Gogh's Eyes: Global Style Transfer with Diffusion Mod ECCV 2026
Artistic image synthesis aims to recreate the expressive visual identity of a target artist, yet existing methods often fail to capture an artist's global style. Conventional style transfer methods transfer the style of one or a few reference artworks to a content image in a One-to-One manner, making them effective for artwork-level stylization but limited in representing the broader stylistic distribution of an artist. Text-to-image diffusion models conditioned on artist names, such as '~ in Van Gogh style', offer greater flexibility, but they often suffer from text-induced bias and reproduce patterns from only a few iconic works. To address these limitations, we introduce Global Style Transfer (GST), an artistic image synthesis paradigm, in a Many-to-One manner, that aggregates multiple artworks from a target artist and transfers their shared global style to a single content image. For GST, we propose Global Style Guidance (GSG), which learns a residual global style offset in the intermediate feature space, or h-space, of a diffusion model under a fixed prompt. By learning artist-level style semantics purely from visual statistics, GSG mitigates text-dependent artistic bias. We further propose Content Alignment Guidance (CAG), a training-free perceptual guidance mechanism that preserves the semantic structure of the content image while allowing artist-specific geometric deformation. Experiments on WikiArt demonstrate that GST achieves superior stylistic fidelity, content preservation, and output diversity compared to existing style transfer and diffusion-based artistic synthesis methods.
comment: Published at ECCV 2026
☆ Generative Semantic Segmentation via an Observable Semantic-Image Interface and Hierarchical Generator Evidence Alignment
Generative semantic segmentation exposes structured predictions as images, but direct color decoding is susceptible to color drift and boundary mixing, whereas latent-feature decoders that predict a separate output distribution may relegate the rendered image to an intermediate visualization. We present Semantic Prism, a conditional semantic-image generation-and-refinement framework with deterministic inference. A diffusion-distilled one-step generator renders a semantic RGB image; per-pixel distances from the rendered colors to a fixed class-color codebook define an explicit probabilistic interface. Hierarchical Generator Evidence Alignment spatially aligns multi-level generator features and uses a zero-initialized output projection to predict an additive residual in the interface logit space, retaining the image-defined interface as the reference for the final distribution. The interface and refined distributions further enable Contextual Interface--Hierarchy Disagreement (C-IHD), a fixed readout for ranking remaining pixel errors without an auxiliary predictor or additional forward pass. On the 500-image Cityscapes validation set, Semantic Prism achieves 72.07% mean intersection over union, 11.39 mIoU points above direct-interface decoding, with 0.41% expected calibration error. Matched-capacity ablations over three seeds support the benefit of jointly aligned multi-level evidence. A separately trained model attains 62.22% mIoU on BDD100K, while the Cityscapes-trained model reaches 46.89\% mIoU under source-frozen transfer to the Adverse Conditions Dataset with Correspondences, without target-domain adaptation. Across all three datasets, C-IHD consistently improves the area under the precision--recall curve for pixel-error ranking over maximum softmax probability on the same segmentation predictions; on ACDC, it raises AUPR from 0.6580 to 0.7557.
comment: 15 pages, 4 figures
☆ CT-$Δ$Bench: A Benchmark for Longitudinal 3D Medical Imaging Difference Reporting with Vision-Language Models
In medical imaging, the clinical value of Computed Tomography (CT) lies not only in depicting current disease status, but crucially in enabling longitudinal comparison of serial scans to determine disease evolution, a process that underpins response assessment, recurrence detection, and ongoing patient management. Yet, despite this central role of temporal comparison in clinical decision-making, existing medical foundation models remain largely confined to single-study understanding, leaving temporally grounded cross-examination insufficiently addressed. To address this gap, we study longitudinal imaging difference reporting, a task in which a model takes two temporally separated scans from the same patient and generates a clinically meaningful report describing interval changes between them. We introduce CT-$Δ$Bench, a dedicated benchmark for this task with patient-level splitting to prevent information leakage. To better evaluate this task beyond surface-level text similarity, we further develop change-aware metrics specifically designed to capture clinically meaningful longitudinal changes, and conduct an independent physician validation to assess the reliability of the synthesized references and event extraction pipeline. We also compare direct paired-CT reasoning with an indirect two-stage pipeline that first generates single-timepoint reports and then performs textual differencing. Finally, we propose DeltaMed, a baseline model for direct paired-CT difference reporting, and train it on the benchmark training set. Together, these contributions lay the groundwork for temporally aware medical foundation models that better reflect real-world longitudinal clinical reasoning.
comment: Accepted by COLM 2026
☆ New Orthogonal Multiwavelet Filters Derived by Matrix Spectral Factorization
The paper considers the construction of two new orthogonal multiwavelets with supercompact support by using the Fast Bauer's method for matrix spectral factorization on the matrix product filter of the orthogonal CL multiwavelet filter. The new multiwavelets possess orthogonality, symmetry/antisymmetry, and one of them provides better coding and smoothness than other supercompact multiwavelets.
The performance of the new multiwavelet filters in subband-based edge detection, grayscale and color image compression and 1D and 2D signal denoising is compared with the GHM, SA4, CL, Integer Haar and Alpert multifilters. The comparative analysis shows that new multiwavelets can provides better human visual measures, SSIM and MS-SSIM in image compression and denoising applications.
comment: 48 pages, 10 figures, 20 tables, Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, 118057, 2026
♻ ☆ 3D Scene Generation: A Survey
3D scene generation seeks to synthesize spatially structured, semantically meaningful, and photorealistic environments for applications such as immersive media, robotics, autonomous driving, and embodied AI. Early methods based on procedural rules offered scalability but limited diversity. Recent advances in deep generative models (e.g., GANs, diffusion models) and 3D representations (e.g., NeRF, 3D Gaussians) have enabled the learning of real-world scene distributions, improving fidelity, diversity, and view consistency. Recent advances like diffusion models bridge 3D scene synthesis and photorealism by reframing generation as image or video synthesis problems. This survey provides a systematic overview of state-of-the-art approaches, organizing them into four paradigms: procedural generation, neural 3D-based generation, image-based generation, and video-based generation. We analyze their technical foundations, trade-offs, and representative results, and review commonly used datasets, evaluation protocols, and downstream applications. We conclude by discussing key challenges in generation capacity, 3D representation, data and annotations, and evaluation, and outline promising directions including higher fidelity, physics-aware and interactive generation, and unified perception-generation models. This review organizes recent advances in 3D scene generation and highlights promising directions at the intersection of generative AI, 3D vision, and embodied intelligence. To track ongoing developments, we maintain an up-to-date project page: https://github.com/hzxie/Awesome-3D-Scene-Generation.
comment: Accepted by IJCV. Project Page: https://github.com/hzxie/Awesome-3D-Scene-Generation
♻ ☆ Latent-Centroid Steering: Single-Pass Classifier-Free Guidance for Command-Aligned Autonomous Driving IROS 2026
Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving, enabling agents to map multimodal inputs and high-level navigation instructions directly to executable trajectories. However, in practice, these models exhibit a persistent command-following gap: predicted trajectories often show weak sensitivity to navigation commands, resulting in incorrect behavior at critical decision points. We identify this issue as a form of conditional policy collapse, where regression-based training under multimodal trajectory distributions encourages the model to rely on dominant visual priors while marginalizing the language-conditioned signal. To address this issue, we introduce a principled formulation of classifier-free guidance (CFG) for regression-based vision-language driving. We show that CFG can be interpreted as isolating the instruction-induced residual in the action space by contrasting conditional and unconditional predictions, thereby explicitly amplifying the effect of the navigation command at inference time. However, a standard two-pass CFG introduces prohibitive latency for real-time control and produces noisy instance-level guidance directions. Building on a mean-shift interpretation of CFG, we propose Latent-Centroid Steering (LCS), a single-pass guidance mechanism that replaces instance-level residuals with class-level latent shifts. By projecting conditional representations toward precomputed command-specific centroids, LCS performs class-level latent steering based on cluster geometry that is both more stable and computationally efficient. We demonstrate that LCS reduces inference latency by approximately 50% while achieving stronger command adherence and improved driving performance on both closed-loop (Bench2Drive) and open-loop (nuScenes) benchmarks. Code will be released.
comment: IROS 2026
♻ ☆ 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
♻ ☆ COLORA: Efficient Fine-Tuning for Convolutional Models with a Study Case on Optical Coherence Tomography Image Classification
We introduce \textbf{CoLoRA} (Convolutional Low-Rank Adaptation), a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method for convolutional neural networks (CNNs). CoLoRA extends LoRA to convolutional layers by decomposing kernel updates into lightweight depthwise and pointwise components. This design reduces the number of trainable convolutional-update parameters by over 80\% compared with full convolutional fine-tuning, while allowing the learned updates to be merged into the pretrained convolutional kernels, thereby preserving the original model size and inference complexity. Experiments on MedMNIST datasets, particularly OCTMNISTv2, demonstrate that CoLoRA applied to VGG16 and ResNet50 achieves competitive classification performance while substantially reducing the number of trainable parameters. Comparisons with transfer learning, adapters, BitFit, and convolutional LoRA variants further characterize the trade-offs among predictive performance, trainable parameters, and training cost. Additional experiments on CIFAR-100 and Cats vs. Dogs provide preliminary evidence that the proposed adaptation strategy also transfers to non-medical image-classification tasks. Peak GPU-memory measurements further show that parameter efficiency does not translate directly into proportional training-memory savings, with memory consumption depending strongly on the placement of the adapted convolutional layers. Overall, CoLoRA provides a parameter-efficient and deployment-efficient alternative to full fine-tuning for convolutional models.
comment: 15 pages, 13 figures
♻ ☆ SCoPE: Sightline-Coordinate Positional Encoding for Video Diffusion Transformers
Video diffusion transformers address their tokens by position on the pixel-time grid: an address in the tensor, not in the world. The address we would want, the world point a token depicts, lies on a surface not yet generated, while its camera ray is fixed once the user specifies a trajectory. SCoPE therefore treats the ray as a second positional coordinate, and camera control becomes a property of the coordinate system, not an added module. The ray is added to the pretrained attention's queries and keys, and the score gains a term that reads the two rays alone. Its canonical form, the reciprocal product of line geometry, measures how nearly two lines of sight meet. Normalize-Gate-Inject makes a single encoding trainable across metric and up-to-scale pose sources. The retrofit keeps RoPE bit-exact, starts from the unchanged pretrained DiT, and adds under 0.1/% new parameters. On Wan2.2 at 5B and 14B under matched data and budget, SCoPE improves every camera-controllability and fidelity metric, leads all closed-loop revisit metrics, and shows widening margins with model size. At 14B, rotation error falls 29/% and FVD 43/% below the strongest baseline.
comment: Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/scope/
♻ ☆ ForgeryVCR: Visual-Centric Reasoning via Efficient Forensic Tools in MLLMs for Image Forgery Detection and Localization
Youqi Wang, Shen Chen, Haowei Wang, Rongxuan Peng, Taiping Yao, Shunquan Tan, Changsheng Chen, Bin Li, Shouhong Ding
Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for image forgery detection and localization predominantly operate under a text-centric Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm. However, forcing these models to textually characterize imperceptible low-level tampering traces inevitably leads to hallucinations, as linguistic modalities are insufficient to capture such fine-grained pixel-level inconsistencies. To overcome this, we propose ForgeryVCR, a framework that incorporates a forensic toolbox to materialize imperceptible traces into explicit visual intermediates via Visual-Centric Reasoning. To enable efficient tool utilization, we introduce a Strategic Tool Learning post-training paradigm, encompassing gain-driven trajectory construction for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and subsequent Reinforcement Learning (RL) optimization guided by a tool utility reward. This paradigm empowers the MLLM to act as a proactive decision-maker, learning to spontaneously invoke multi-view reasoning paths including local zoom-in for fine-grained inspection and the analysis of invisible inconsistencies in compression history, noise residuals, and frequency domains. Extensive experiments reveal that ForgeryVCR achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both detection and localization tasks, demonstrating superior generalization and robustness with minimal tool redundancy. The code is available at https://github.com/youqiwong/ForgeryVCR.
♻ ☆ Ranking vs. Assignment: The Metric Mismatch in Multi-View Object Association BMVC 2026
Multi-view object association is an important computer vision problem that underlies many multi-camera perception tasks. While this task is naturally formulated as a constrained one-to-one matching problem, recent works heavily rely on pairwise ranking metrics like AP and FPR-95 for model evaluation. We highlight a fundamental mismatch between these metrics and the actual assignment objective. Theoretically, we show that AP and FPR-95 can be imperfect even when the assignment is already correct, and that Sinkhorn-based normalization can make them perfect. Conversely, optimal pairwise ranking can still lead to incorrect assignments. We validate this mismatch in practice by using our Sinkhorn-based normalization as a controlled post-processing stress test. We show that optimizing just a few post-processing parameters significantly boosts AP and FPR-95 without corresponding improvements in assignment-level metrics such as ACC and IPAA.
comment: Accepted by BMVC 2026
♻ ☆ Multilingual OCR-Aware Fine-Tuning and Prompt-Guided Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models
Optical character recognition (OCR) and multilingual scene-text understanding remain challenging for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), particularly in real-world images containing small or degraded text, cluttered layouts, occlusion, handwriting, and complex typography. We present an OCR-aware multilingual post-training framework that improves visual-text grounding in a general-purpose MLLM without requiring an external OCR engine, OCR-extracted text, or text bounding boxes at inference time. The framework combines large-scale multilingual OCR supervision, approximately 5M additional multilingual training samples, controlled synthetic OCR generation and in-image text translation, LoRA-based supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and lightweight OCR-oriented Chain-of-Thought prompting. On a held-out real-world multilingual OCR benchmark, OCR-SFT improves OCR completeness from 71.3 to 84.6, reduces hallucination rate from 18.3\% to 5.5\%, and improves translation BLEU-1 from 52.3 to 80.2, with substantial hallucination reductions under blur and rotation. Evaluation on public benchmarks further shows gains on OCR-intensive tasks while largely preserving broader multimodal capabilities; ablations show that SFT provides the primary improvement, with prompting offering smaller complementary gains. These results demonstrate that data-centric OCR-aware post-training provides a practical and scalable approach to improving multilingual visual-text grounding in general-purpose MLLMs.
♻ ☆ A dataset of high-resolution plantar pressures for gait analysis across varying footwear and walking speeds
Robyn Larracy, Angkoon Phinyomark, Ala Salehi, Eve MacDonald, Saeed Kazemi, Shikder Shafiul Bashar, Aaron Tabor, Erik Scheme
Gait refers to the patterns of limb movement generated during walking, which are unique to each individual due to both physical and behavioral traits. Walking patterns have been widely studied in biometrics, biomechanics, sports, and rehabilitation. While traditional methods rely on video and motion capture, advances in plantar pressure sensing technology now offer deeper insights into gait. However, underfoot pressures during walking remain underexplored due to the lack of large, publicly accessible datasets. To address this, we introduce the UNB StepUP-P150 dataset: a footStep database for gait analysis and recognition using Underfoot Pressure, including data from 150 individuals. This dataset comprises high-resolution plantar pressure data (4 sensors per cm-squared) collected using a 1.2m by 3.6m pressure-sensing walkway. It contains over 200,000 footsteps from participants walking with various speeds (preferred, slow-to-stop, fast, and slow) and footwear conditions (barefoot, standard shoes, and two personal shoes), supporting advancements in biometric gait recognition and presenting new research opportunities in biomechanics and deep learning. UNB StepUP-P150 establishes a new benchmark for plantar pressure-based gait analysis and recognition.
♻ ☆ Understanding Knowledge Transfer Mechanism in Heterogeneous MLLM Fusion: A Simple Linear Approach
Training-free fusion of heterogeneous multimodal large language models (MLLMs) provides a direct route for cross-scale capability transfer, yet improvements in aggregate performance do not reveal what a smaller model actually inherits. Existing studies are largely designed and evaluated on limited task sets or aggregate metrics; as evaluation expands to broader task collections, whether different capabilities can transfer across scales remains poorly understood. To investigate this question, we introduce Cross-Scale Directional Parameter Injection (CDPI), a simple linear probe to analyze cross-scale knowledge transfer during heterogeneous fusion. A local theoretical analysis indicates that knowledge transfer selectivity is determined at first order by capability-dependent responses to a shared injection direction, while second-order curvature effects constrain the effective transfer regime. Across four Qwen3-VL model pairs and twelve multimodal benchmarks, our experiments reveal a consistent pattern of selectivity: gains concentrate on reasoning, particularly high-level reasoning, whereas perception performance remains close to that of the original target model. Component-wise ablations further show that high-level reasoning gains arise primarily from the language model, while ratio analysis finds that positive selective transfer occurs mainly in the small-ratio regime. These findings recast cross-scale heterogeneous MLLM fusion as selective language-side reasoning transfer within a narrow, low-interference regime, rather than broad capability inheritance.
comment: 17 pages, 6 figures; includes supplementary material. Revised presentation and terminology; results unchanged
♻ ☆ Significance and Stability Analysis of Genotype-Environment Interaction using GxEStat
Genotype-environment (GxE) interactions can influence the performance of genotypes across diverse environments, limiting the reliability of genotype evaluation and selection in breeding programs. In-depth analysis of GxE interactions is therefore essential for understanding how genetic advantages or defects are expressed under varying environmental conditions and for identifying superior and stable genotypes. This study presents an integrated computational framework for GxE analysis that combines significance and stability evaluation within a unified analytical workflow. The framework incorporates the mixed effect modeling to quantify the significance of environment, genotype, and GxE effects, together with multiple stability analysis approaches for characterizing genotype adaptability, environmental representativeness, and performance consistency across environments. To support reproducible statistical analysis, we develop GxEStat, an interactive R platform that automates model construction, parameter estimation, statistical inference, and graphical visualization. GxEStat substantially improves analytical efficiency, reproducibility, and accessibility for multi-environment trial analysis. Applications to real breeding datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for practical breeding research. Codes are available at https://github.com/mason-ching/GxEStat.
♻ ☆ UniGround: Universal 3D Visual Grounding via Training-Free Scene Parsing
Jiaxi Zhang, Yunheng Wang, Wei Lu, Taowen Wang, Shuning Zhang, Yixiao Feng, Junzhe Xu, Shunwang Sun, Weisheng Xu, Yuetong Fang, Renjing Xu
3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) localizes objects from natural-language descriptions in 3D scenes and is fundamental to embodied AI applications. Although foundation models enable open-vocabulary reasoning, they typically rely on pre-generated candidates, creating two sequential bottlenecks. The \emph{candidate bottleneck} occurs when dataset-specific 3D proposal models miss, fragment, or incorrectly group targets under distribution shifts, excluding them from VLM reasoning. The \emph{evidence bottleneck} stems from incomplete visual evidence: global renderings preserve spatial context but obscure object details, whereas candidate-centric views capture local appearance but lack global context. To address these bottlenecks, we propose UniGround, a zero-shot 3DVG framework that addresses both bottlenecks through Global Candidate Filtering and Contextual Precision Grounding. Global Candidate Filtering constructs topology-consistent, class-agnostic candidates from 3D topology and multi-view semantic cues, without dataset-trained 3D detectors, task-specific proposal supervision, or predefined box and category priors. Contextual Precision Grounding jointly reasons over global spatial context and candidate-centric visual evidence, followed by closed-loop consistency verification for reliable target identification. UniGround achieves 46.1\%/34.1\% Acc@0.25/0.5 on ScanRefer and 28.7\% Acc@0.25 on the evaluated ARKitScenes subset of EmbodiedScan. Further experiments demonstrate competitive grounding without dataset-specific 3D priors, cross-dataset generalization to unseen indoor scenes, and robustness to real-world reconstruction noise and practical domain shifts.
comment: 30 pages,9 figures,11 tables
♻ ☆ CORE-3D: Context-aware Open-vocabulary Retrieval by Embeddings in 3D
Object retrieval from a scene has become a new trend of research due to its numerous applications. Recent approaches achieve zero-shot, open-vocabulary 3D semantic mapping by assigning embedding vectors to 2D class-agnostic masks generated via vision-language models (VLMs) and projecting these into 3D. However, these methods often produce fragmented masks and inaccurate semantic assignments due to the direct use of raw masks, limiting their effectiveness in complex environments. To address this, we leverage SemanticSAM with progressive granularity refinement to generate more accurate and numerous object-level masks, mitigating the over-segmentation commonly observed in mask generation models such as vanilla SAM, and improving downstream 3D semantic segmentation. To further enhance semantic context, we employ a context-aware CLIP encoding strategy that integrates multiple contextual views of each mask using empirically determined weighting, providing much richer visual context. We evaluate our approach on multiple 3D scene understanding tasks, including 3D semantic segmentation and object retrieval from language queries, across several benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements over existing methods, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach.
♻ ☆ WBMM: Windowed Batch Matrix Multiplication for Efficient Large Receptive Field Convolution ICML 2026
Large kernel depthwise convolutions achieve strong performance but suffer from significant degradation as kernel size grows due to irregular memory access from gather-based computation; while Large Kernel Acceleration (LKA) helps on small feature maps, it becomes counterproductive on large feature maps, even slower than non-accelerated implementations. We propose Windowed Batch Matrix Multiplication (WBMM), which partitions input into contiguous windows and indexes a compact relative position bias table to construct weight matrices, enabling regular memory access via batched matrix multiplication. This yields a unique property: WBMM's throughput improves with larger windows, opposite to depthwise convolutions that degrade with larger kernels. Operator-level benchmarks show WBMM with 14x14 windows outperforms 5x5 depthwise convolution baselines in speed while providing a 7.8x larger per-layer receptive field. Combined with inter-block cross-window communication and hierarchical window reparameterization, WBMM achieves comparable or higher accuracy on ImageNet-1K, COCO, and ADE20K with 1.31-1.88x training speedup, and demonstrates consistent advantages across GPU, CPU, and edge devices without requiring specialized acceleration kernels. Our code is available at https://github.com/wansong-s/WBMM.
comment: 23 pages, 4 figures. Accepted as a Spotlight paper at ICML 2026. Code available at https://github.com/wansong-s/WBMM
♻ ☆ Un-EVIMO: Unsupervised Event-Based Independent Motion Segmentation
Event cameras are a novel type of biologically inspired vision sensor known for their high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, and low power consumption. Because of these properties, they are well-suited for processing fast motions that require rapid reactions. Although event cameras have recently shown competitive performance in unsupervised optical flow estimation, performance in detecting independently moving objects (IMOs) is lacking behind, although event-based methods would be suited for this task based on their low latency and HDR properties. Previous approaches to event-based IMO segmentation have been heavily dependent on labeled data. However, biological vision systems have developed the ability to avoid moving objects through daily tasks without being given explicit labels. In this work, we propose the first event framework that generates IMO pseudo-labels using geometric constraints. Due to its unsupervised nature, our method can handle an arbitrary number of not predetermined objects and is easily scalable to datasets where expensive IMO labels are not readily available. We evaluate our approach on the EVIMO dataset and show that it performs competitively with supervised methods, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
comment: European Conference on Computer Vision 2024
♻ ☆ OpenVE-3M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Instruction-Guided Video Editing ECCV'26
The quality and diversity of instruction-based image editing datasets are continuously increasing, yet large-scale, high-quality datasets for instruction-based video editing remain scarce. To address this gap, we introduce OpenVE-3M, an open-source, large-scale, and high-quality dataset for instruction-based video editing. It comprises two primary categories: spatially-aligned edits (Global Style, Background Change, Local Change, Local Remove, Local Add, and Subtitles Edit) and non-spatially-aligned edits (Camera Multi-Shot Edit and Creative Edit). All edit types are generated via a meticulously designed data pipeline with rigorous quality filtering. OpenVE-3M surpasses existing open-source datasets in terms of scale, diversity of edit types, instruction length, and overall quality. Furthermore, to address the lack of a unified benchmark in the field, we construct OpenVE-Bench, containing 431 video-edit pairs that cover a diverse range of editing tasks with three key metrics highly aligned with human judgment. We present OpenVE-Edit, a 5B model trained on our dataset that demonstrates remarkable efficiency and effectiveness by setting a new state-of-the-art on OpenVE-Bench, outperforming all prior open-source models including a 14B baseline. Project page is at https://lewandofskee.github.io/projects/OpenVE.
comment: Accepted by ECCV'26. Project page: https://lewandofskee.github.io/projects/OpenVE
♻ ☆ Algorithmic statistics of retinal images
Loan Huynh, Ronald Zambrano, Layton Aho, Fabio Lavinsky, Gadi Wollstein, Joel S. Schuman, Andrew R. Cohen
There has been a tremendous amount of image processing and machine learning research to measure and classify disease progression from live optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging of the retina. The images considered here are large, complex, three-dimensional (3-D) and difficult to visualize effectively. Many current supervised machine learning approaches, \emph{e.g.} neural networks, are non-metric meaning that any features or measurements generated can introduce systematic distortion that may be correlated with underlying non-meaningful physiological differences. Here we present a metric learning approach using the normalized compression distance (NCD) combined with anisotropic structure-enhancing filters to quantify and visualize the principal differences among a collection of 3-D retinal images. We validate the NCD-measured structural differences between pairs of images against the physician-measured change in visual field function, achieving a prediction error of $\sim$ 0.5 dB, more accurate than non-metric deep learning approaches. The normalized compression vectors (NCV) are proposed as a feature set measuring visual differences among a collection of 3-D microscopy images. The utility of the NCV for visualizing and measuring patterns of change is demonstrated for a human with moderate non-progressing glaucoma and for a non-human primate model using intraocular pressure setting manipulation. We conclude with a brief simulation of non-metric embedding features, \emph{e.g.} from neural networks, introducing class-correlated statistical distortion.
♻ ☆ WLC: Weber-Inspired Local Contrast Metric for Low-Altitude Image Fusion
Infrared and visible image fusion is a pivotal technology in low-altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) reconnaissance missions, enabling robust target detection and tracking by integrating thermal saliency with environmental textures. However, the advancement of fusion algorithms is hindered by a critical evaluation bottleneck. In this paper, we identify a systematic failure in traditional no-reference metrics (specifically Statistics-based and Gradient-based metrics) within complex low-light environments, termed as ``Noise Trap''. It is mathematically proven that these metrics are positively correlated with high-frequency sensor noise, paradoxically assigning higher scores to degraded images and misguiding algorithm optimization. To resolve this dilemma, this paper proposes the Weber-inspired Local Contrast (WLC) metric. Grounded in the psychophysical principle of Weber's Law, WLC shifts the evaluation paradigm from global statistical distribution to local semantic contrast. By leveraging infrared priors, it effectively decouples target saliency from global background noise. Extensive experiments on the DroneVehicle dataset demonstrate that WLC exhibits high ``Semantic Discriminability'' in distinguishing thermal targets from background clutter. Furthermore, it achieves remarkable computational efficiency, thus, establishing itself as a reliable and real-time standard for intelligent UAV systems
♻ ☆ MuseVLA: An Adaptive Multimodal Sensing Vision-Language-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation
Xingyuming Liu, Ruichun Ma, Heyu Guo, Qixiu Li, Qingwen Yang, Lin Luo, Shiqi Jiang, Chenren Xu, Jiaolong Yang, Baining Guo
Humans naturally leverage diverse sensing modalities to interact with the physical world, while most Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for robotics rely solely on RGB observations. This limits their ability to perceive physical properties that are difficult or impossible to infer from RGB cameras, such as temperature, sound, or radar response. We present MuseVLA, an adaptive multimodal sensing VLA model that integrates novel sensors as on-demand tools for robotic manipulation. Given a task instruction and visual context, MuseVLA first generates a sensor token and target description that select the sensing modality to invoke and what to attend to, analogous to a tool call with arguments. It then converts the selected sensor measurement into a grounded sensor image, a unified intermediate representation that encodes heterogeneous readings for multimodal fusion and action generation. This design decouples sensor-specific processing from the VLA backbone, enabling efficient integration of diverse modalities. To reduce the need for expensive multisensory robot datasets, we further introduce a data synthesis pipeline that augments existing RGB video datasets with grounded sensor images, enabling generalization to unseen sensor-guided tasks. We evaluate MuseVLA on a real-world robot across challenging dexterous hand manipulation tasks that require multimodal sensing inputs, including temperature-guided pick-and-place, audio-driven object search, and radar-assisted hidden object retrieval. MuseVLA achieves 80.6% success rate on average, outperforming RGB-only and multisensory VLA baselines significantly, and exhibits strong zero-shot capabilities on unseen tasks. Code, model and dataset are available at https://github.com/microsoft/MuseVLA.
♻ ☆ Multi-Agent Embodied Autonomous Driving: From V2X Information Exchange to Shared World Models
Autonomous driving is shifting from isolated vehicle intelligence toward multi-agent embodied systems that share perception, infer intent, and coordinate action under uncertainty. This survey examines this transition through the lens of Shared World Models (SWMs): predictive cross-agent representations maintained across vehicles, infrastructure, and other traffic participants. We review approximately 400 publications covering vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, collaborative perception, inter-agent cognition, cooperative planning, end-to-end cooperative driving, and simulation and data engines for closed-loop validation. The organizing question is how exchanged observations become aligned state, intent-aware interaction, and coordinated downstream action. Across the surveyed literature, evaluation remains concentrated in simulation, curated benchmarks, and offline protocols. Foundation-model-based coordination also lacks verifiable real-time safety guarantees in open traffic. These gaps motivate key research priorities for multi-agent embodied autonomous driving (MAEAD): verifiable shared-state maintenance, robust intent and plan alignment, and safe coordinated action under communication and computing constraints in real-world deployment. We maintain an open-source project to continuously track the latest developments at https://github.com/dl-m9/Multi-Agent-Embodied-Autonomous-Driving.
♻ ☆ Pixel-Space Diffusion Transformers
Renye Yan, Jikang Cheng, You Wu, Ling Liang, Wei Peng, Athanasios V. Vasilakos, Qingyu Zhao, Yu Zhang, Yimao Cai, Kilian M. Pohl, Guoying Zhao
Latent diffusion models (LDMs) enable efficient high-resolution image synthesis by denoising in a VAE-compressed latent space. However, fixed visual tokenizers can discard fine textures and structural details, while separate representation and diffusion training creates a mismatch between reconstruction and generation objectives. These limitations have renewed interest in pixel-space diffusion, which models raw pixels directly, removes the VAE bottleneck, and supports end-to-end optimization. This formulation better matches the demands of high-fidelity generation but introduces challenges in high-dimensional modeling, including noise scheduling, loss weighting, token efficiency, and scalable architecture design. Pixel-space modeling also offers a promising basis for unified multimodal systems: raw pixels, text, and task conditions can be represented in a shared token space and jointly processed by a single Transformer, narrowing the gap between visual understanding and generation. This paper reviews Pixel-Space Diffusion Transformers (pDiTs) from the perspectives of model architecture, continuous generative mechanisms, and unified multimodal modeling. We summarize representative methods, identify key technical challenges, and discuss future directions toward high-fidelity, end-to-end vision foundation models that integrate generation and understanding.
♻ ☆ LoDA: A Level of Detection Aware Method and a Multimodal Sensing Benchmark for Object Level Change Detection
High-definition 3D LiDAR maps are important for autonomous driving and smart-city services, which require reliable detection of object-level changes in multi-temporal urban LiDAR to keep digital maps aligned with the physical world. Existing approaches from raster height differencing to depth image and point-cloud networks often remain tile-based and threshold-driven, yielding per-point scores without explicit detection limits or consistent object-level labels. We propose an object-level 3D change-detection pipeline that integrates detection-limit-aware registration, geometry-driven object proxies with rule-based semantic and instance segmentation, and displacement cues in height, volume, and surface-normal direction to assign five change labels with confidence. By decoupling registration, geometry, and semantics, the pipeline propagates pose uncertainty into spatially varying detection limits, stabilizes cross-epoch correspondences, and suppresses false changes caused by residual misalignment and density variation. We also present LoDA, a level-of-detection (LoD) aware benchmark for the Subiaco district with fused multi-temporal vehicle-LiDAR maps constructed with LiDAR, GNSS, and IMU support, semantic instances, and object-level annotations. On this benchmark, our method achieves 95.0% accuracy, 90.8% macro F1, and 83.0% macro IoU, exceeding the best baseline by 8.7 IoU points and 4.4 F1 points. On the public Urb3DCD-V2 benchmark evaluated under the official point-wise protocol, it reaches 96.81% mean accuracy and 89.52% mean change IoU, improving over the strongest reported baselines by 1.36 points in mAcc and 3.18 points in mIoUch.
♻ ☆ VANE: Reliable Test-Time Training for Vision-Language-Action Models via Future Visual Representation Prediction
Test-time training (TTT) offers a lightweight way to adapt vision--language--action (VLA) policies from unlabeled deployment streams, but it remains difficult to use reliably in closed-loop manipulation. A shared adaptation space can mix incompatible task corrections, while an online update can alter subsequent actions before its consequences are known. We introduce a reliable TTT framework for VLA policies (VANE). VANE conditions prompt adaptation on the current vision--language context and learns from the future visual consequences of executed actions. Candidate updates are isolated from the live policy, evaluated on subsequent observations, and committed only when supported by future evidence, making adaptation selective and reversible. On SimplerEnv WidowX, VANE improves average success by $3.2$ percentage points over the corresponding TTT baseline. Results on Google Robot further show that deployment-time gains remain task- and embodiment-dependent. Together, these results demonstrate a constrained, evidence-based approach to adapting VLA policies during interaction.
♻ ☆ Self-Supervised Weighted Image Guided Quantitative MRI Super-Resolution
Alireza Samadifardheris, Dirk H. J. Poot, Florian Wiesinger, Stefan Klein, Juan A. Hernandez-Tamames
Object: To present and evaluate Self-supervised Weighted Image Guided quantitative MRI Super-Resolution (SWIG qMRI SR), a physics-informed framework recovering high-resolution (HR) qMRI from a rapid low-resolution (LR) acquisition guided by routine weighted images (wMRI), without HR training targets.
Materials and Methods: A CNN matches acquired wMRI to images synthesized from predicted maps through forward signal models, while anchoring those maps to the acquired LR qMRI. Training and ablation used synthetic data (n = 27); cross-sequence generalizability was tested in three volunteers scanned with silent 3D MuPa-ZTE at 1 and 5min, with clinical T1w/T2w guides.
Results: In synthetic data, dual-guide SR reduced the T1 high-frequency error norm 45.4% below baseline; removing the LR qMRI anchor raised gray-matter T1 error from 63 to 110ms. In vivo, super-resolved 1-min maps synthesized T1w images (SSIM 0.93, PSNR 27.3dB) surpassing synthesis from 5-min maps (SSIM 0.83), and improved synthesis of T2-FLAIR, never used as a guide (SSIM 0.69 to 0.75).
Discussion: HR detail was recovered without HR supervision, and the network transferred across a different qMRI sequence. Because the guides are already acquired, adding a 1-min qMRI scan to a standard exam offers a practical route to routine clinical qMRI integration.
comment: This work has been submitted to Magnetic Resonance Materials in Physics, Biology and Medicine for possible publication
♻ ☆ LiDAR-based 3D Change Detection at City Scale
Hezam Albaqami, Haitian Wang, Xinyu Wang, Muhammad Ibrahim, Zainy M. Malakan, Abdullah M. Algamdi, Mohammed H. Alghamdi, Ajmal Mian
High-definition 3D city maps enable city planning and change detection, which is essential for municipal compliance, map maintenance, and asset monitoring, including both built structures and urban greenery. Conventional Digital Surface Model (DSM) and image differencing are sensitive to vertical bias and viewpoint mismatch, while original point cloud or voxel models require large memory, assume perfect alignment, and degrade thin structures. We propose an uncertainty-aware, object-centric method for city-scale LiDAR-based change detection. Our method aligns data from different time periods using multi-resolution Normal Distributions Transform (NDT) and a point-to-plane Iterative Closest Point (ICP) method, normalizes elevation, and computes a per-point level of detection from registration covariance and surface roughness to calibrate change decisions. Geometry-based associations are refined by semantic and instance segmentation and optimized using class-constrained bipartite assignment with augmented dummies to handle split-merge cases. Tiled processing bounds memory and preserves narrow ground changes, while instance-level decisions integrate overlap, displacement, and volumetric differences under local detection gating. We perform experiments on the city of Subiaco, Western Australia, using datasets captured in 2023 and 2025. Our method achieves 95.3% accuracy, 90.8% macro F1, and 82.9% macro IoU, improving over the strongest baseline, Triplet KPConv, by 0.3, 0.6, and 1.1 percentage points, respectively.
♻ ☆ P2MFDS: A Privacy-Preserving Multimodal Fall Detection System for Elderly People in Bathroom Environments IEEE
By 2050, people aged 65 and over are projected to make up 16% of the global population. As aging is closely associated with increased fall risk, particularly in wet and confined environments such as bathrooms where over 80% of falls occur. Although recent research has increasingly focused on non-intrusive, privacy-preserving approaches that do not rely on wearable devices or video-based monitoring, these efforts have not fully overcome the limitations of existing unimodal systems (e.g., WiFi-, infrared-, or mmWave-based), which are prone to reduced accuracy in complex environments. These limitations stem from fundamental constraints in unimodal sensing, including system bias and environmental interference, such as multipath fading in WiFi-based systems and drastic temperature changes in infrared-based methods. To address these challenges, we propose a Privacy-Preserving Multimodal Fall Detection System for Elderly People in Bathroom Environments. First, we develop a sensor evaluation framework to select and fuse millimeter-wave radar with 3D vibration sensing, and use it to construct and preprocess a large-scale, privacy-preserving multimodal dataset in real bathroom settings, which will be released upon publication. Second, we introduce P2MFDS, a dual-stream network combining a CNN-BiLSTM-Attention branch for radar motion dynamics with a multi-scale CNN-SEBlock-Self-Attention branch for vibration impact detection. By uniting macro- and micro-scale features, P2MFDS delivers significant gains in accuracy and recall over state-of-the-art approaches.
comment: Accepted to appear in the 2025 IEEE International Workshop on AIoT and Smart Systems (AIoTSys'25)
♻ ☆ Omni-Persona: Systematic Benchmarking and Improving Omnimodal Personalization
While multimodal large language models have advanced across text, image, and audio, personalization research has remained primarily vision-language, with unified omnimodal benchmarking that jointly covers text, image, and audio still limited, and lacking the methodological rigor to account for absent-persona scenarios or systematic grounding studies. We introduce Omni-Persona, the first comprehensive benchmark for omnimodal personalization. We formalize the task as cross-modal routing over the Persona Modality Graph, encompassing 4 task groups and 18 fine-grained tasks across ~750 items. To rigorously diagnose grounding behavior, we propose Calibrated Accuracy (Cal), which jointly evaluates correct grounding and appropriate abstention, incorporating absent-persona queries within a unified evaluation framework. On our dedicated experiments, three diagnostic findings emerge: (i) recent open-weight models show a consistent audio-vs-visual grounding gap that RLVR partially narrows via dense rule-based supervision; (ii) recall score and parameter scale are incomplete diagnostics, since strong recall can coexist with absent-persona hallucination and larger models do not always achieve higher Cal, exposing calibration as a separate evaluation axis; and (iii) SFT is limited by the scalability of ground-truth annotation. RLVR improves recall but not calibrated abstention under our reward design, leaving Cal at or below the base model. Omni-Persona thus serves as a diagnostic framework that surfaces the pitfalls of omnimodal personalization, guiding future post-training and reward design.
comment: Project Page: https://github.com/oyt9306/Omni-Persona
♻ ☆ Optimization-Guided Diffusion for Interactive Scene Generation
Shihao Li, Naisheng Ye, Tianyu Li, Kashyap Chitta, Tuo An, Peng Su, Boyang Wang, Haiou Liu, Chen Lv, Hongyang Li
Realistic and diverse multi-agent driving scenes are crucial for evaluating autonomous vehicles, but safety-critical events which are essential for this task are rare and underrepresented in driving datasets. Data-driven scene generation offers a low-cost alternative by synthesizing complex traffic behaviors from existing driving logs. However, existing models often lack controllability or yield samples that violate physical or social constraints, limiting their usability. We present OMEGA, an optimization-guided, training-free framework that enforces structural consistency and interaction awareness during diffusion-based sampling from a scene generation model. OMEGA re-anchors each reverse diffusion step via constrained optimization, steering the generation towards physically plausible and behaviorally coherent trajectories. Building on this framework, we formulate ego-attacker interactions as a game-theoretic optimization in the distribution space, approximating Nash equilibria to generate realistic, safety-critical adversarial scenarios. Experiments on nuPlan and Waymo show that OMEGA improves generation realism, consistency, and controllability, increasing the ratio of physically and behaviorally valid scenes from 32.35% to 72.27% for free exploration capabilities, and from 11% to 80% for controllability-focused generation. Our approach can also generate $5\times$ more near-collision frames with a time-to-collision under three seconds while maintaining the overall scene realism.
♻ ☆ Quantization-Aware Neuromorphic Architecture for Skin Lesion Classification on Resource-Constrained Devices
On-device skin lesion analysis is constrained by the compute and energy cost of conventional CNN inference and by the need for lightweight calibration under clinical data shift. Neuromorphic processors provide event-driven sparse computation, but practical deployment is often limited by CNN-to-SNN conversion failures, including unsupported operators, quantization distortion, and accuracy degradation under class imbalance. We propose QANA, a quantization-aware CNN backbone within an end-to-end pipeline for conversion-stable neuromorphic execution. QANA improves conversion robustness by bounding intermediate activations, aligning normalization with low-bit quantization, and replacing conversion-fragile components with spike-compatible transformations. Efficient representation is achieved through Ghost-based feature generation, spatially-aware efficient channel attention, and squeeze-and-excitation modules whose operations can be quantized, folded, or lowered into integer graph operations. The quantized projection head produces SNN-ready logits and supports lightweight readout calibration without full retraining or data offloading. On HAM10000, QANA achieves 91.6% Top-1 accuracy and 91.0% macro F1, improving the strongest converted SNN baseline by 3.5 points in accuracy and 12.1 points in macro F1. On a clinical dataset, QANA achieves 90.8% Top-1 accuracy and 81.7% macro F1, improving the strongest baseline by 3.2 points in accuracy and 3.6 points in macro F1. On BrainChip Akida, QANA runs in 1.5 ms with 1.7 mJ per image, outperforming the strongest size-matched Akida baseline by 4.1 points in accuracy, 10.0 points in macro F1, 21.1% in latency, and 22.7% in energy.
♻ ☆ A Simple Efficiency Incremental Learning Framework via Vision-Language Model with Nonlinear Multi-Adapters
Incremental Learning (IL) aims to learn new tasks while preserving previously acquired knowledge. Integrating the zero-shot learning capabilities of pre-trained vision-language models into IL methods has marked a significant advancement. However, these methods face three primary challenges: (1) the need for improved training efficiency; (2) reliance on a memory bank to store previous data; and (3) the necessity of a strong backbone to augment the model's capabilities. In this paper, we propose SimE, a Simple and Efficient framework that employs a vision-language model with adapters designed specifically for the IL task. We report a remarkable phenomenon: there is a nonlinear correlation between the number of adaptive adapter connections and the model's IL capabilities. While increasing adapter connections between transformer blocks improves model performance, adding more adaptive connections within transformer blocks during smaller incremental steps does not enhance, and may even degrade the model's IL ability. Extensive experimental results show that SimE surpasses traditional methods by 9.6% on TinyImageNet and outperforms other CLIP-based methods by 5.3% on CIFAR-100. Furthermore, we conduct a systematic study to enhance the utilization of the zero-shot capabilities of CLIP. We suggest replacing SimE's encoder with a CLIP model trained on larger datasets (e.g., LAION2B) and stronger architectures (e.g., ViT-L/14).
♻ ☆ Towards foundation-style models for energy-frontier heterogeneous neutrino detectors via self-supervised pre-training
Accelerator-based neutrino physics is entering an energy-frontier regime in which interactions reach the TeV scale and produce exceptionally dense, overlapping detector signatures. In this regime, event interpretation becomes impractical for conventional reconstruction approaches, particularly when labelled data are scarce and the analysis spans diverse downstream objectives. We present a sparse ViT framework for learning reusable representations from heterogeneous detector data. Self-supervised pre-training combines masked autoencoder reconstruction with relational voxel-level objectives for hierarchy, ghost and particle identification, and the resulting shared encoder is then jointly fine-tuned across classification and regression tasks. Evaluated on simulated events from the proposed FASERCal concept at the LHC, we find that pre-training consistently improves neutrino flavour and charm-quark identification, momentum regression, and vertex reconstruction over training from scratch, with the addition of relational objectives yielding further gains in the most topologically complex channels. Interpretability analyses further show that pre-training yields a more structured latent space, while detector-subsystem ablations recover physically plausible channel-dependent roles for the heterogeneous inputs. A data-efficiency study shows that, with roughly $10^3$ labelled events, the pre-trained encoder already matches the flavour-classification performance of a randomly initialised model trained on an order of magnitude more data. The learned representations also transfer effectively to publicly available benchmarks spanning different detector technologies and energy scales, matching or exceeding published baselines. These results support self-supervised pre-training on multimodal detector data as a scalable route towards reusable representations for neutrino and particle-detector analysis.
comment: 18 pages, 6 figures
♻ ☆ Vision-Reasoning-Guided Occlusion Removal from Light Fields
Occlusion-robust scene recovery remains a major challenge in computational imaging, particularly where dense vegetation severely limits visibility. We propose a visionreasoning-guided light field occlusion removal framework combining light field integration (LFI) with vision-language model (VLM) semantic reasoning. Multi-view observations are first integrated via LFI to suppress foreground occlusions, producing an initial visibility-enhanced representation, a VLM then acts as a conditional semantic prior to restore degraded structures and fine details. A multi-sample fusion strategy aggregates multiple generated hypotheses to improve consistency and reduce hallucination. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets show state-of-the-art performance, achieving the highest average SSIM across four synthetic benchmark scenes (4-Syn) and strong generalization across structured and unstructured acquisition settings, with applicability to search-and-rescue and exploratory robotic navigation.
♻ ☆ TC-Padé: Trajectory-Consistent Padé Approximation for Diffusion Acceleration CVPR 2026
Benlei Cui, Shaoxuan He, Bukun Huang, Zhizeng Ye, Yunyun Sun, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Yang Yang, Jingqun Tang, Zhou Zhao, Haiwen Hong
Despite achieving state-of-the-art generation quality, diffusion models are hindered by the substantial computational burden of their iterative sampling process. While feature caching techniques achieve effective acceleration at higher step counts (e.g., 50 steps), they exhibit critical limitations in the practical low-step regime of 20-30 steps. As the interval between steps increases, polynomial-based extrapolators like TaylorSeer suffer from error accumulation and trajectory drift. Meanwhile, conventional caching strategies often overlook the distinct dynamical properties of different denoising phases. To address these challenges, we propose Trajectory-Consistent Padé approximation, a feature prediction framework grounded in Padé approximation. By modeling feature evolution through rational functions, our approach captures asymptotic and transitional behaviors more accurately than Taylor-based methods. To enable stable and trajectory-consistent sampling under reduced step counts, TC-Padé incorporates (1) adaptive coefficient modulation that leverages historical cached residuals to detect subtle trajectory transitions, and (2) step-aware prediction strategies tailored to the distinct dynamics of early, mid, and late sampling stages. Extensive experiments on DiT-XL/2, FLUX.1-dev, and Wan2.1 across both image and video generation demonstrate the effectiveness of TC-Padé. For instance, TC-Padé achieves 2.88x acceleration on FLUX.1-dev and 1.72x on Wan2.1 while maintaining high quality across FID, CLIP, Aesthetic, and VBench-2.0 metrics, substantially outperforming existing feature caching methods.
comment: CVPR 2026
♻ ☆ A method for tissue-mask supported whole-body image registration in the UK Biobank
The UK Biobank is a large-scale study collecting imaging and non-imaging health data. Robust and accurate inter-subject image registration of these whole-body MR images would enable their spatial standardization, and region/voxel-wise correlation analysis of non-imaging data with image-derived parameters.
We propose a sex-stratified inter-subject whole-body MR image registration approach that uses subcutaneous adipose tissue- and muscle-masks from the state-of-the-art VIBESegmentator method to augment intensity-based graph-cut registration. The proposed mask-supported method was evaluated on 4000 subjects by comparisons to an intensity-only method as well as two other methods, uniGradICON and MIRTK.
The evaluation included Jacobian Determinant (JD) folding frequency, Dice scores, and voxel-wise label error frequency. MRSegmentator and TotalSegmentator were also used for independent Dice score evaluations. Additionally, voxel-wise correlation between age and both fat content and tissue volume was studied to exemplify the usefulness for medical research. The proposed method showed lower frequency of JD folding when compared to the intensity-based method. The mask-supported method exhibited a mean Dice score of 0.77 / 0.74 when evaluated on the VIBESegmentator masks for males / females, respectively. In comparison to the intensity-only method, the mean values were 6 pp higher for both sexes, and the label error frequency decreased in most regions. These differences were 9pp / 8pp against uniGradICON and 12pp / 13pp against MIRTK. The proposed method showed higher mean Dice scores in comparison to the other methods when evaluated on MRSegmentator and TotalSegmentator. The age-correlation maps were less noisy and showed higher anatomical alignment.
In conclusion, the image registration method using two tissue masks improves whole-body registration of UK Biobank images.
♻ ☆ 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.
♻ ☆ Diffusion Probe: Generated Image Result Prediction Using CNN Probes CVPR 2026
Benlei Cui, Bukun Huang, Zhizeng Ye, Xuemei Dong, Tuo Chen, Hui Xue, Dingkang Yang, Longtao Huang, Jingqun Tang, Haiwen Hong
Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models lack an efficient mechanism for early quality assessment, leading to costly trial-and-error in multi-generation scenarios such as prompt iteration, agent-based generation, and flow-grpo. We reveal a strong correlation between early diffusion cross-attention distributions and final image quality. Based on this finding, we introduce Diffusion Probe, a framework that leverages internal cross-attention maps as predictive signals. We design a lightweight predictor that maps statistical properties of early-stage cross-attention extracted from initial denoising steps to the final image's overall quality. This enables accurate forecasting of image quality across diverse evaluation metrics long before full synthesis is complete. We validate Diffusion Probe across a wide range of settings. On multiple T2I models, across early denoising windows, resolutions, and quality metrics, it achieves strong correlation (PCC > 0.7) and high classification performance (AUC-ROC > 0.9). Its reliability translates into practical gains. By enabling early quality-aware decisions in workflows such as prompt optimization, seed selection, and accelerated RL training, the probe supports more targeted sampling and avoids computation on low-potential generations. This reduces computational overhead while improving final output quality.Diffusion Probe is model-agnostic, efficient, and broadly applicable, offering a practical solution for improving T2I generation efficiency through early quality prediction.
comment: CVPR 2026
♻ ☆ MicroAUNet: Boundary-Enhanced Multi-scale Fusion with Knowledge Distillation for Colonoscopy Polyp Image Segmentation ECCV 2026
Early and accurate segmentation of colorectal polyps is critical for reducing colorectal cancer mortality, which has been extensively explored by academia and industry. However, current deep learning-based polyp segmentation models either compromise clinical decision-making by providing ambiguous polyp margins in segmentation outputs or rely on heavy architectures with high computational complexity, resulting in insufficient inference speeds for real-time colorectal endoscopic applications. To address this problem, we propose MicroAUNet, a lightweight attention-based segmentation network, which synergistically combines depthwise-separable dilated convolutions with a single-path, parameter-shared channel-spatial attention block to effectively strengthen multi-scale boundary features. On the basis of it, a progressive two-stage knowledge-distillation scheme is introduced to transfer semantic and boundary cues from a high-capacity teacher. Extensive experiments on benchmarks also demonstrate the state-of-the-art accuracy under extremely low model complexity, indicating that MicroAUNet is suitable for real-time clinical polyp segmentation. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/JeremyXSC/MicroAUNet.
comment: Accepted to MedVidU @ ECCV 2026
♻ ☆ Hyper-FSAD: Training-Free and Language-Free Few-Shot Anomaly Detection via Sparse Hyper Matching
Few-shot anomaly detection (FSAD) is particularly valuable when only a few normal images are available in a new target domain, while anomalous cases are rare, diverse, and difficult to enumerate in advance. However, existing methods often still require task-specific fitting or language prompts, and their patch-level retrieval commonly relies on brittle nearest-neighbor or fixed Top-$p$ rules. We propose \textbf{Hyper-FSAD}, a training-free and language-free framework that performs support-only inference with a frozen visual encoder. We formulate FSAD as support-only scoring in frozen feature space and establish the selective stability of sparse retrieval and sufficient conditions for normal--anomaly separation. Guided by this analysis, \textbf{Sparse Hyper Matching} uses \textit{sparsemax} to adaptively select support patches for each query patch, exactly suppressing below-threshold distractors without a manually specified retrieval hyperparameter. \textbf{Dual-Branch Image Scoring} further combines local reconstruction discrepancies with support-conditioned global deviation. Across four industrial and two medical benchmarks, Hyper-FSAD achieves the best overall performance across the 1/2/4-shot settings, while requiring only 52.6\,ms per image and 0.89\,GB GPU memory. The code will be released.
♻ ☆ simpleposter: A simple baseline for product poster generation CVPR 2026
Benlei Cui, Fangao Zeng, Weitao Jiang, Yuwen Zhai, Haiwen Hong, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Wenxiang Shang, Pipei Huang
Product poster generation poses distinct challenges beyond general poster design, requiring both faithful preservation of product appearance and precise control over dense, multi-line text layouts. Prior methods typically adopt inpainting frameworks augmented with auxiliary modules such as ControlNet and OCR encoders. However, these approaches introduce architectural complexity and computational overhead while still suffering from text errors and subject extension artifacts. We present SimplePoster, a simple yet effective inpainting-based framework that achieves faithful subject preservation and accurate, position-controllable text rendering without external controllers. Our approach builds on two observations: (1) full-parameter fine-tuning of the base model effectively suppresses subject extension, outperforming ControlNet-based alternatives; and (2) a zero-cost character-level position encoding enables geometry-aware text generation without dedicated layout modules. Experiments show that SimplePoster achieves a $98.7\%$ subject preservation rate, compared to $55.2\%$ for SeedEdit 3.0 and $85.3\%$ for PosterMaker, while also improving text rendering accuracy. Code, models, benchmark and a part of training data will be available at https://github.com/Alibaba-YuFeng/SIMPLEPOSTER
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026
♻ ☆ CausalSplat: Towards Comprehensive Hierarchical Reasoning in 3D Gaussian Splatting ACM MM 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 ACM MM 2026
♻ ☆ SportD: How do VLMs physically strategize?
Jasin Cekinmez, Addison J. Wu, Haotian Xia, Kyumin Andrew Shim, Anay Putty, Jinglin Xiao, Zhuohan Liu, Leo Liu, Weining Shen
Vision-language models (VLMs) can describe a scene, but can they act well within one? We study whether VLMs can make sound strategic decisions, using soccer as an objective testbed with quantifiably-valued actions. We introduce SportD, a dataset and evaluation consisting of 1415 decision scenarios across professional men's and women's soccer games, where a VLM observes the seconds before a decision and chooses the next action. Models only select the optimal action around 30% of the time, even less frequently than humans do. Furthermore, they exhibit a clear preference for safer actions, favoring lower-variance, lower-value choices that also make less physical progress toward goal. Frontier VLMs are better at estimating whether an action will succeed, placing the highest-success-probability action among their top choices in 83-92% of cases. Yet VLMs systematically conflate likelihood with value, assigning higher value to actions that are more likely to succeed (Spearman corr. 0.30 to +0.52), despite no such relationship in the ground truth (Spearman corr. -0.08). The conservatism therefore reflects a mis-calibration of value. SportD opens a new direction for rigorously evaluating physical strategic decision-making in VLMs, showing that careful decomposition of their choices can reveal the mechanisms underlying systematic biases such as risk aversion.
♻ ☆ SCAR-GS: Spatial Context Attention for Residuals in Progressive Gaussian Splatting
Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting have allowed for real-time, high-fidelity novel view synthesis. Nonetheless, these models have significant storage requirements for large and medium-sized scenes, hindering their deployment over cloud and streaming services. Some of the most recent progressive compression techniques for these models rely on progressive masking and scalar quantization techniques to reduce the bitrate of Gaussian attributes using spatial context models. While effective, scalar quantization may not optimally capture the correlations of high-dimensional feature vectors, which can potentially limit the rate-distortion performance.
In this work, we introduce a novel progressive codec for 3D Gaussian Splatting that replaces traditional methods with a more powerful Residual Vector Quantization approach to compress the primitive features. Our key contribution is an auto-regressive entropy model, guided by a multi-resolution hash grid, that accurately predicts the conditional probability of each successive transmitted index, allowing for coarse and refinement layers to be compressed with high efficiency.
♻ ☆ RankByGene: Gene-Guided Histopathology Representation Learning Through Cross-Modal Ranking Consistency
Wentao Huang, Meilong Xu, Xiaoling Hu, Shahira Abousamra, Aniruddha Ganguly, Saarthak Kapse, Alisa Yurovsky, Prateek Prasanna, Tahsin Kurc, Joel Saltz, Michael L. Miller, Chao Chen
Spatial transcriptomics (ST) provides essential spatial context by mapping gene expression within tissue, enabling detailed study of cellular heterogeneity and tissue organization. However, aligning ST data with histology images poses challenges due to inherent spatial distortions and modality-specific variations. Existing methods largely rely on direct alignment, which often fails to capture complex cross-modal relationships. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework that aligns gene and image features using a ranking-based alignment loss, preserving relative similarity across modalities and enabling robust multi-scale alignment. To further enhance the alignment's stability, we employ self-supervised knowledge distillation with a teacher-student network architecture, which serves as an intra-modal stability regularizer that prevents image-representation drift during cross-modal alignment. Extensive experiments on seven public datasets that encompass gene expression prediction, slide-level classification, and survival analysis demonstrate the efficacy of our method, showing improved alignment and predictive performance over existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/winston52/RankByGene.
comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, accepted by TMI'26
♻ ☆ Ego-OSCAR: Egocentric Open source Stereo CAptuRe System
Gunjan Paul, Senthil Palanisamy, Satpal Singh Rathore, Pratyush Kumar Patnaik, Shubhanshu Khatana, Abhishek Anand
We present Ego-OSCAR, an open-hardware, low-cost, head-mounted stereo-inertial capture device for egocentric data collection in the wild. EgoOSCAR pairs a hardware-synchronized global-shutter stereo camera with a 6- axis IMU, an embedded Linux SBC for on-device video encoding, and a realtime microcontroller for user feedback and watchdog functions. The complete bill of materials is under USD 200 per unit, using only commercially available components and 3D-printed parts. Alongside the device, we release a complete software stack (hardware-accelerated recording pipeline, IMU sampling daemon, time-synchronization tooling, and watchdog firmware) and roughly 550 hours of egocentric stereo video per camera with synchronized IMU, collected by a distributed contributor network across everyday indoor environments. The release is annotated rather than raw: free-form action captions cover essentially the entire recorded timeline with an open vocabulary, and per-frame 3D hand reconstructions ship alongside per-session stereo calibration. Ego-OSCAR does not aim to match the per-unit fidelity of research-grade systems such as Project Aria; it aims to be the cheapest defensible substrate for crowdsourced egocentric capture, and to lower the activation energy for any team that wants to collect egocentric data at scale. All hardware designs, software, and the dataset are open-sourced
♻ ☆ ReXrank: A Public Leaderboard for AI-Powered Radiology Report Generation
Xiaoman Zhang, Hong-Yu Zhou, Xiaoli Yang, Oishi Banerjee, Julián N. Acosta, Mohammed Baharoon, Josh Miller, Ouwen Huang, Pranav Rajpurkar
AI-driven models have demonstrated significant potential in automating radiology report generation for chest X-rays. However, there is no standardized benchmark for objectively evaluating their performance. To address this, we present ReXrank, https://rexrank.ai, a public leaderboard and challenge for assessing AI-powered radiology report generation. Our framework incorporates ReXGradient, the largest test dataset consisting of 10,000 studies, and three public datasets (MIMIC-CXR, IU-Xray, CheXpert Plus) for report generation assessment. ReXrank employs 8 evaluation metrics and separately assesses models capable of generating only findings sections and those providing both findings and impressions sections. By providing this standardized evaluation framework, ReXrank enables meaningful comparisons of model performance and offers crucial insights into their robustness across diverse clinical settings. Beyond its current focus on chest X-rays, ReXrank's framework sets the stage for comprehensive evaluation of automated reporting across the full spectrum of medical imaging.
♻ ☆ Rethinking Medical Landmark Localization with Prototype Learning-based Progressive Offset Correction MICCAI
Accurate landmark localization in medical images is a fundamental step for quantitative clinical measurement and downstream analysis. Existing localization methods have advanced, among which multi-stage refinement is a superior solution. Although this strategy mitigates the anatomical ambiguity inherent in single-stage global predictions, its high computational cost limits practical applicability. In this work, we propose a parameter-economic model, PPOC-LL, which leverages Prototype learning-based Progressive Offset Correction for Landmark Localization. Our contribution is three-fold. First, to drive coarse-to-fine landmark optimization, we introduce a multi-scale dynamic perception strategy for patch-level feature pyramid modeling. Second, to effectively handle anatomically similar patterns, we design a similarity-driven prototype learning mechanism that captures informative local semantics for robust offset prediction. Last, to stabilize the model learning and improve the overall performance, we incorporate a novel error-aware reliability regularization via tolerance-based balancing. We collected a large validation cohort, including two public and one private datasets spanning X-ray and ultrasound modalities, covering cephalometric, symphysis-fetal head, and fetal heart landmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PPOC-LL achieves satisfactory performance with a favorable trade-off between accuracy and model complexity.
comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables. Accepted by MICCAI MLMI 2026
♻ ☆ Soft-Attention Improves Skin Cancer Classification Performance
In clinical applications, neural networks must focus on and highlight the most important parts of an input image. Soft-Attention mechanism enables a neural network toachieve this goal. This paper investigates the effectiveness of Soft-Attention in deep neural architectures. The central aim of Soft-Attention is to boost the value of important features and suppress the noise-inducing features. We compare the performance of VGG, ResNet, InceptionResNetv2 and DenseNet architectures with and without the Soft-Attention mechanism, while classifying skin lesions. The original network when coupled with Soft-Attention outperforms the baseline[16] by 4.7% while achieving a precision of 93.7% on HAM10000 dataset [25]. Additionally, Soft-Attention coupling improves the sensitivity score by 3.8% compared to baseline[31] and achieves 91.6% on ISIC-2017 dataset [2]. The code is publicly available at github.
comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables
♻ ☆ EchoCache: Energy-Guided Cross-Modal Caching for Efficient Audio-Driven Video Generation ACM MM 2026
Jiayu Chen, Xiaoyu Wu, Rongshan Gao, Maoliang Li, Zihao Zheng, Xinhao Sun, Hailong Zou, Guojie Luo, Xiang Chen
Audio-driven video generation (A2V) has achieved promising progress in synthesizing temporally coherent and audio-visually aligned videos, yet its inference remains expensive due to the iterative denoising process of diffusion models. Existing caching methods mainly exploit temporal redundancy in visual features while overlooking the cross-modal alignment of A2V, where audio drives visual generation with highly non-uniform temporal importance. In this paper, we identify two levels of misalignment in existing A2V caching methods: temporal-semantic and computation-storage misalignment. To address them, we propose EchoCache, an energy-guided cross-modal caching framework for efficient A2V generation. EchoCache leverages audio time-frequency energy as a saliency anchor to guide latent-level cache updates and further introduces a dynamic timestep-latent caching mechanism with quantized cache management for joint efficiency and memory optimization. Extensive experiments on mainstream A2V models show that EchoCache consistently improves the latency-quality trade-off while preserving generation quality and audio-visual consistency. In particular, on Wan2.2-S2V over the EMTD benchmark, EchoCache achieves a 2.46x speedup with the best overall performance. Code is available at https://github.com/IF-LAB-PKU/EchoCache.
comment: EchoCache is honored to be accepted by ACM MM 2026
♻ ☆ 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/
♻ ☆ CalibAnyView: Beyond Single-View Camera Calibration in the Wild
Boying Li, Cheng Zhang, Weirong Chen, Guyuan Chen, Daniel Cremers, Jianfei Cai, Ian Reid, Hamid Rezatofighi
Camera calibration is fundamental to reliable geometric perception, yet classical approaches rely on dedicated targets, successful reconstruction, or dense view coverage, which casually captured imagery rarely satisfies. Recent learning-based single-image methods lift these requirements by exploiting visual cues, and extend calibration beyond intrinsics to gravity estimation. Yet in the common multi-view case, they predict each view independently and combine the estimates only afterwards, lacking full use of cross-view consistency. We bridge this gap with CalibAnyView, a framework that unifies single- and sparse multi-view calibration by enforcing that consistency inside the network: a transformer with cross-view attention predicts camera-model-agnostic perspective fields, followed by a multi-view optimization that fuses them into shared intrinsics and per-view gravity directions, covering camera models from pinhole to severely distorted lenses. To support this, we construct a large-scale in-the-wild multi-view video dataset spanning diverse camera models, dynamic scenes, realistic motion trajectories, and heterogeneous lens distortions. Extensive experiments show that CalibAnyView outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both sparse multi-view and single-view settings spanning pinhole to distorted optics.
comment: 27 pages, 21 figures
♻ ☆ Dual Distribution Estimation for Zero-shot Noisy Test-Time Adaptation with VLMs ECCV2026
While test-time adaptation (TTA) empowers vision-language models to adapt without costly retraining, it remains highly vulnerable to out-of-distribution (OOD) outliers prevalent in real-world applications. This discrepancy motivates Noisy TTA (NTTA), an online task to filter noisy OOD samples on the fly while maximizing in-distribution (ID) classification accuracy. Existing zero-shot NTTA approaches typically rely on test-time discriminative training, leading to overconfident misclassifications and significantly degraded inference efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework named Dual Distribution Estimation (DDE), shifting the zero-shot NTTA paradigm from instance-level learning to training-free Gaussian distribution modeling. DDE incorporates two novel modules: Positive Feature Distribution Estimation (PFDE) and Negative Label Distribution Estimation (NLDE). PFDE explicitly models class-wise inclusion and exclusion Gaussian distributions to formulate a calibrated contrastive score, robustly enhancing ID accuracy. In parallel, NLDE improves OOD identification by explicitly modeling the negative label distribution to mine highly discriminative labels, effectively mitigating spurious correlations. Extensive experiments show that on the large-scale ImageNet benchmark, DDE achieves an improvement of 3.70\% in harmonic mean accuracy and reduces the FPR95 for OOD detection by 6.20\%, while ensuring highly scalable and efficient online inference. Furthermore, DDE is zero-shot and training-free, demonstrating remarkable robustness in data-scarce scenarios. Codes are available at https://github.com/ZhuWenjie98/DDE.
comment: Accepted by ECCV2026. Project Page:https://zhuwenjie98.github.io/DDE-project-page/