Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 228
☆ ARC Is a Vision Problem!
Keya Hu, Ali Cy, Linlu Qiu, Xiaoman Delores Ding, Runqian Wang, Yeyin Eva Zhu, Jacob Andreas, Kaiming He
The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) is designed to promote research on abstract reasoning, a fundamental aspect of human intelligence. Common approaches to ARC treat it as a language-oriented problem, addressed by large language models (LLMs) or recurrent reasoning models. However, although the puzzle-like tasks in ARC are inherently visual, existing research has rarely approached the problem from a vision-centric perspective. In this work, we formulate ARC within a vision paradigm, framing it as an image-to-image translation problem. To incorporate visual priors, we represent the inputs on a "canvas" that can be processed like natural images. It is then natural for us to apply standard vision architectures, such as a vanilla Vision Transformer (ViT), to perform image-to-image mapping. Our model is trained from scratch solely on ARC data and generalizes to unseen tasks through test-time training. Our framework, termed Vision ARC (VARC), achieves 60.4% accuracy on the ARC-1 benchmark, substantially outperforming existing methods that are also trained from scratch. Our results are competitive with those of leading LLMs and close the gap to average human performance.
comment: Technical Report. Project webpage: https://github.com/lillian039/VARC
☆ UniGen-1.5: Enhancing Image Generation and Editing through Reward Unification in Reinforcement Learning
We present UniGen-1.5, a unified multimodal large language model (MLLM) for advanced image understanding, generation and editing. Building upon UniGen, we comprehensively enhance the model architecture and training pipeline to strengthen the image understanding and generation capabilities while unlocking strong image editing ability. Especially, we propose a unified Reinforcement Learning (RL) strategy that improves both image generation and image editing jointly via shared reward models. To further enhance image editing performance, we propose a light Edit Instruction Alignment stage that significantly improves the editing instruction comprehension that is essential for the success of the RL training. Experimental results show that UniGen-1.5 demonstrates competitive understanding and generation performance. Specifically, UniGen-1.5 achieves 0.89 and 4.31 overall scores on GenEval and ImgEdit that surpass the state-of-the-art models such as BAGEL and reaching performance comparable to proprietary models such as GPT-Image-1.
☆ Co-Me: Confidence-Guided Token Merging for Visual Geometric Transformers
We propose Confidence-Guided Token Merging (Co-Me), an acceleration mechanism for visual geometric transformers without retraining or finetuning the base model. Co-Me distilled a light-weight confidence predictor to rank tokens by uncertainty and selectively merge low-confidence ones, effectively reducing computation while maintaining spatial coverage. Compared to similarity-based merging or pruning, the confidence signal in Co-Me reliably indicates regions emphasized by the transformer, enabling substantial acceleration without degrading performance. Co-Me applies seamlessly to various multi-view and streaming visual geometric transformers, achieving speedups that scale with sequence length. When applied to VGGT and MapAnything, Co-Me achieves up to $11.3\times$ and $7.2\times$ speedup, making visual geometric transformers practical for real-time 3D perception and reconstruction.
☆ Vision Large Language Models Are Good Noise Handlers in Engagement Analysis
Engagement recognition in video datasets, unlike traditional image classification tasks, is particularly challenged by subjective labels and noise limiting model performance. To overcome the challenges of subjective and noisy engagement labels, we propose a framework leveraging Vision Large Language Models (VLMs) to refine annotations and guide the training process. Our framework uses a questionnaire to extract behavioral cues and split data into high- and low-reliability subsets. We also introduce a training strategy combining curriculum learning with soft label refinement, gradually incorporating ambiguous samples while adjusting supervision to reflect uncertainty. We demonstrate that classical computer vision models trained on refined high-reliability subsets and enhanced with our curriculum strategy show improvements, highlighting benefits of addressing label subjectivity with VLMs. This method surpasses prior state of the art across engagement benchmarks such as EngageNet (three of six feature settings, maximum improvement of +1.21%), and DREAMS / PAFE with F1 gains of +0.22 / +0.06.
☆ A Neural Field-Based Approach for View Computation & Data Exploration in 3D Urban Environments IEEE
Despite the growing availability of 3D urban datasets, extracting insights remains challenging due to computational bottlenecks and the complexity of interacting with data. In fact, the intricate geometry of 3D urban environments results in high degrees of occlusion and requires extensive manual viewpoint adjustments that make large-scale exploration inefficient. To address this, we propose a view-based approach for 3D data exploration, where a vector field encodes views from the environment. To support this approach, we introduce a neural field-based method that constructs an efficient implicit representation of 3D environments. This representation enables both faster direct queries, which consist of the computation of view assessment indices, and inverse queries, which help avoid occlusion and facilitate the search for views that match desired data patterns. Our approach supports key urban analysis tasks such as visibility assessments, solar exposure evaluation, and assessing the visual impact of new developments. We validate our method through quantitative experiments, case studies informed by real-world urban challenges, and feedback from domain experts. Results show its effectiveness in finding desirable viewpoints, analyzing building facade visibility, and evaluating views from outdoor spaces. Code and data are publicly available at https://urbantk.org/neural-3d.
comment: Accepted at IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. Code and data are publicly available at https://urbantk.org/neural-3d
☆ Zero-shot Synthetic Video Realism Enhancement via Structure-aware Denoising
We propose an approach to enhancing synthetic video realism, which can re-render synthetic videos from a simulator in photorealistic fashion. Our realism enhancement approach is a zero-shot framework that focuses on preserving the multi-level structures from synthetic videos into the enhanced one in both spatial and temporal domains, built upon a diffusion video foundational model without further fine-tuning. Specifically, we incorporate an effective modification to have the generation/denoising process conditioned on estimated structure-aware information from the synthetic video, such as depth maps, semantic maps, and edge maps, by an auxiliary model, rather than extracting the information from a simulator. This guidance ensures that the enhanced videos are consistent with the original synthetic video at both the structural and semantic levels. Our approach is a simple yet general and powerful approach to enhancing synthetic video realism: we show that our approach outperforms existing baselines in structural consistency with the original video while maintaining state-of-the-art photorealism quality in our experiments.
comment: Project Page: https://wyf0824.github.io/Video_Realism_Enhancement/
☆ Diffusion As Self-Distillation: End-to-End Latent Diffusion In One Model
Standard Latent Diffusion Models rely on a complex, three-part architecture consisting of a separate encoder, decoder, and diffusion network, which are trained in multiple stages. This modular design is computationally inefficient, leads to suboptimal performance, and prevents the unification of diffusion with the single-network architectures common in vision foundation models. Our goal is to unify these three components into a single, end-to-end trainable network. We first demonstrate that a naive joint training approach fails catastrophically due to ``latent collapse'', where the diffusion training objective interferes with the network's ability to learn a good latent representation. We identify the root causes of this instability by drawing a novel analogy between diffusion and self-distillation based unsupervised learning method. Based on this insight, we propose Diffusion as Self-Distillation (DSD), a new framework with key modifications to the training objective that stabilize the latent space. This approach enables, for the first time, the stable end-to-end training of a single network that simultaneously learns to encode, decode, and perform diffusion. DSD achieves outstanding performance on the ImageNet $256\times 256$ conditional generation task: FID=13.44/6.38/4.25 with only 42M/118M/205M parameters and 50 training epochs on ImageNet, without using classifier-free-guidance.
comment: Tech Report. 10 pages
☆ FreeSwim: Revisiting Sliding-Window Attention Mechanisms for Training-Free Ultra-High-Resolution Video Generation
The quadratic time and memory complexity of the attention mechanism in modern Transformer based video generators makes end-to-end training for ultra high resolution videos prohibitively expensive. Motivated by this limitation, we introduce a training-free approach that leverages video Diffusion Transformers pretrained at their native scale to synthesize higher resolution videos without any additional training or adaptation. At the core of our method lies an inward sliding window attention mechanism, which originates from a key observation: maintaining each query token's training scale receptive field is crucial for preserving visual fidelity and detail. However, naive local window attention, unfortunately, often leads to repetitive content and exhibits a lack of global coherence in the generated results. To overcome this challenge, we devise a dual-path pipeline that backs up window attention with a novel cross-attention override strategy, enabling the semantic content produced by local attention to be guided by another branch with a full receptive field and, therefore, ensuring holistic consistency. Furthermore, to improve efficiency, we incorporate a cross-attention caching strategy for this branch to avoid the frequent computation of full 3D attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method delivers ultra-high-resolution videos with fine-grained visual details and high efficiency in a training-free paradigm. Meanwhile, it achieves superior performance on VBench, even compared to training-based alternatives, with competitive or improved efficiency. Codes are available at: https://github.com/WillWu111/FreeSwim
comment: 13 pages, 8 figures
☆ Seeing Beyond the Image: ECG and Anatomical Knowledge-Guided Myocardial Scar Segmentation from Late Gadolinium-Enhanced Images
Farheen Ramzan, Yusuf Kiberu, Nikesh Jathanna, Meryem Jabrane, Vicente Grau, Shahnaz Jamil-Copley, Richard H. Clayton, Chen, Chen
Accurate segmentation of myocardial scar from late gadolinium enhanced (LGE) cardiac MRI is essential for evaluating tissue viability, yet remains challenging due to variable contrast and imaging artifacts. Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals provide complementary physiological information, as conduction abnormalities can help localize or suggest scarred myocardial regions. In this work, we propose a novel multimodal framework that integrates ECG-derived electrophysiological information with anatomical priors from the AHA-17 atlas for physiologically consistent LGE-based scar segmentation. As ECGs and LGE-MRIs are not acquired simultaneously, we introduce a Temporal Aware Feature Fusion (TAFF) mechanism that dynamically weights and fuses features based on their acquisition time difference. Our method was evaluated on a clinical dataset and achieved substantial gains over the state-of-the-art image-only baseline (nnU-Net), increasing the average Dice score for scars from 0.6149 to 0.8463 and achieving high performance in both precision (0.9115) and sensitivity (0.9043). These results show that integrating physiological and anatomical knowledge allows the model to "see beyond the image", setting a new direction for robust and physiologically grounded cardiac scar segmentation.
☆ HyMAD: A Hybrid Multi-Activity Detection Approach for Border Surveillance and Monitoring
Seismic sensing has emerged as a promising solution for border surveillance and monitoring; the seismic sensors that are often buried underground are small and cannot be noticed easily, making them difficult for intruders to detect, avoid, or vandalize. This significantly enhances their effectiveness compared to highly visible cameras or fences. However, accurately detecting and distinguishing between overlapping activities that are happening simultaneously, such as human intrusions, animal movements, and vehicle rumbling, remains a major challenge due to the complex and noisy nature of seismic signals. Correctly identifying simultaneous activities is critical because failing to separate them can lead to misclassification, missed detections, and an incomplete understanding of the situation, thereby reducing the reliability of surveillance systems. To tackle this problem, we propose HyMAD (Hybrid Multi-Activity Detection), a deep neural architecture based on spatio-temporal feature fusion. The framework integrates spectral features extracted with SincNet and temporal dependencies modeled by a recurrent neural network (RNN). In addition, HyMAD employs self-attention layers to strengthen intra-modal representations and a cross-modal fusion module to achieve robust multi-label classification of seismic events. e evaluate our approach on a dataset constructed from real-world field recordings collected in the context of border surveillance and monitoring, demonstrating its ability to generalize to complex, simultaneous activity scenarios involving humans, animals, and vehicles. Our method achieves competitive performance and offers a modular framework for extending seismic-based activity recognition in real-world security applications.
comment: Multi-label seismic signal classification using novel attention-based feature fusion. Submitting to cs.CV due to relevance to general pattern recognition and time-frequency (spectrogram) analysis
☆ Attention via Synaptic Plasticity is All You Need: A Biologically Inspired Spiking Neuromorphic Transformer
Attention is the brain's ability to selectively focus on a few specific aspects while ignoring irrelevant ones. This biological principle inspired the attention mechanism in modern Transformers. Transformers now underpin large language models (LLMs) such as GPT, but at the cost of massive training and inference energy, leading to a large carbon footprint. While brain attention emerges from neural circuits, Transformer attention relies on dot-product similarity to weight elements in the input sequence. Neuromorphic computing, especially spiking neural networks (SNNs), offers a brain-inspired path to energy-efficient intelligence. Despite recent work on attention-based spiking Transformers, the core attention layer remains non-neuromorphic. Current spiking attention (i) relies on dot-product or element-wise similarity suited to floating-point operations, not event-driven spikes; (ii) keeps attention matrices that suffer from the von Neumann bottleneck, limiting in-memory computing; and (iii) still diverges from brain-like computation. To address these issues, we propose the Spiking STDP Transformer (S$^{2}$TDPT), a neuromorphic Transformer that implements self-attention through spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP), embedding query--key correlations in synaptic weights. STDP, a core mechanism of memory and learning in the brain and widely studied in neuromorphic devices, naturally enables in-memory computing and supports non-von Neumann hardware. On CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, our model achieves 94.35\% and 78.08\% accuracy with only four timesteps and 0.49 mJ on CIFAR-100, an 88.47\% energy reduction compared to a standard ANN Transformer. Grad-CAM shows that the model attends to semantically relevant regions, enhancing interpretability. Overall, S$^{2}$TDPT illustrates how biologically inspired attention can yield energy-efficient, hardware-friendly, and explainable neuromorphic models.
comment: 21 Pages, 5 Figures, 3 Table
☆ Impact of Image Resolution on Age Estimation with DeepFace and InsightFace
Automatic age estimation is widely used for age verification, where input images often vary considerably in resolution. This study evaluates the effect of image resolution on age estimation accuracy using DeepFace and InsightFace. A total of 1000 images from the IMDB-Clean dataset were processed in seven resolutions, resulting in 7000 test samples. Performance was evaluated using Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Standard Deviation (SD), and Median Absolute Error (MedAE). Based on this study, we conclude that input image resolution has a clear and consistent impact on the accuracy of age estimation in both DeepFace and InsightFace. Both frameworks achieve optimal performance at 224x224 pixels, with an MAE of 10.83 years (DeepFace) and 7.46 years (InsightFace). At low resolutions, MAE increases substantially, while very high resolutions also degrade accuracy. InsightFace is consistently faster than DeepFace across all resolutions.
comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, 7 tables. Evaluation of DeepFace and InsightFace age estimation across seven image resolutions (64 to 1080 px)
☆ Improving segmentation of retinal arteries and veins using cardiac signal in doppler holograms
Marius Dubosc, Yann Fischer, Zacharie Auray, Nicolas Boutry, Edwin Carlinet, Michael Atlan, Thierry Geraud
Doppler holography is an emerging retinal imaging technique that captures the dynamic behavior of blood flow with high temporal resolution, enabling quantitative assessment of retinal hemodynamics. This requires accurate segmentation of retinal arteries and veins, but traditional segmentation methods focus solely on spatial information and overlook the temporal richness of holographic data. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective approach for artery-vein segmentation in temporal Doppler holograms using standard segmentation architectures. By incorporating features derived from a dedicated pulse analysis pipeline, our method allows conventional U-Nets to exploit temporal dynamics and achieve performance comparable to more complex attention- or iteration-based models. These findings demonstrate that time-resolved preprocessing can unlock the full potential of deep learning for Doppler holography, opening new perspectives for quantitative exploration of retinal hemodynamics. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/DigitalHolography/
comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 table. Submitted to ISBI2026
☆ RepAir: A Framework for Airway Segmentation and Discontinuity Correction in CT
John M. Oyer, Ali Namvar, Benjamin A. Hoff, Wassim W. Labaki, Ella A. Kazerooni, Charles R. Hatt, Fernando J. Martinez, MeiLan K. Han, Craig J. Galbán, Sundaresh Ram
Accurate airway segmentation from chest computed tomography (CT) scans is essential for quantitative lung analysis, yet manual annotation is impractical and many automated U-Net-based methods yield disconnected components that hinder reliable biomarker extraction. We present RepAir, a three-stage framework for robust 3D airway segmentation that combines an nnU-Net-based network with anatomically informed topology correction. The segmentation network produces an initial airway mask, after which a skeleton-based algorithm identifies potential discontinuities and proposes reconnections. A 1D convolutional classifier then determines which candidate links correspond to true anatomical branches versus false or obstructed paths. We evaluate RepAir on two distinct datasets: ATM'22, comprising annotated CT scans from predominantly healthy subjects and AeroPath, encompassing annotated scans with severe airway pathology. Across both datasets, RepAir outperforms existing 3D U-Net-based approaches such as Bronchinet and NaviAirway on both voxel-level and topological metrics, and produces more complete and anatomically consistent airway trees while maintaining high segmentation accuracy.
comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, 1 table. Preprint submitted to SSIAI 2026 Conference on November 17, 2025
☆ SLAM-AGS: Slide-Label Aware Multi-Task Pretraining Using Adaptive Gradient Surgery in Computational Cytology
Computational cytology faces two major challenges: i) instance-level labels are unreliable and prohibitively costly to obtain, ii) witness rates are extremely low. We propose SLAM-AGS, a Slide-Label-Aware Multitask pretraining framework that jointly optimizes (i) a weakly supervised similarity objective on slide-negative patches and (ii) a self-supervised contrastive objective on slide-positive patches, yielding stronger performance on downstream tasks. To stabilize learning, we apply Adaptive Gradient Surgery to tackle conflicting task gradients and prevent model collapse. We integrate the pretrained encoder into an attention-based Multiple Instance Learning aggregator for bag-level prediction and attention-guided retrieval of the most abnormal instances in a bag. On a publicly available bone-marrow cytology dataset, with simulated witness rates from 10% down to 0.5%, SLAM-AGS improves bag-level F1-Score and Top 400 positive cell retrieval over other pretraining methods, with the largest gains at low witness rates, showing that resolving gradient interference enables stable pretraining and better performance on downstream tasks. To facilitate reproducibility, we share our complete implementation and evaluation framework as open source: https://github.com/Ace95/SLAM-AGS.
comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, Submitted to ISBI2026
☆ SparseSurf: Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Splatting for Surface Reconstruction AAAI 2026
Recent advances in optimizing Gaussian Splatting for scene geometry have enabled efficient reconstruction of detailed surfaces from images. However, when input views are sparse, such optimization is prone to overfitting, leading to suboptimal reconstruction quality. Existing approaches address this challenge by employing flattened Gaussian primitives to better fit surface geometry, combined with depth regularization to alleviate geometric ambiguities under limited viewpoints. Nevertheless, the increased anisotropy inherent in flattened Gaussians exacerbates overfitting in sparse-view scenarios, hindering accurate surface fitting and degrading novel view synthesis performance. In this paper, we propose \net{}, a method that reconstructs more accurate and detailed surfaces while preserving high-quality novel view rendering. Our key insight is to introduce Stereo Geometry-Texture Alignment, which bridges rendering quality and geometry estimation, thereby jointly enhancing both surface reconstruction and view synthesis. In addition, we present a Pseudo-Feature Enhanced Geometry Consistency that enforces multi-view geometric consistency by incorporating both training and unseen views, effectively mitigating overfitting caused by sparse supervision. Extensive experiments on the DTU, BlendedMVS, and Mip-NeRF360 datasets demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.
comment: Accepted at AAAI 2026. Project page: https://miya-oi.github.io/SparseSurf-project
☆ Enhancing Agentic Autonomous Scientific Discovery with Vision-Language Model Capabilities
We show that multi-agent systems guided by vision-language models (VLMs) improve end-to-end autonomous scientific discovery. By treating plots as verifiable checkpoints, a VLM-as-a-judge evaluates figures against dynamically generated domain-specific rubrics, enabling agents to correct their own errors and steer exploratory data analysis in real-time. Case studies in cosmology and astrochemistry demonstrate recovery from faulty reasoning paths and adaptation to new datasets without human intervention. On a 10-task benchmark for data-driven discovery, VLM-augmented systems achieve pass at 1 scores of 0.7-0.8, compared to 0.2-0.3 for code-only and 0.4-0.5 for code-and-text baselines, while also providing auditable reasoning traces that improve interpretability. Code available here: https://github.com/CMBAgents/cmbagent
☆ Fusing Biomechanical and Spatio-Temporal Features for Fall Prediction: Characterizing and Mitigating the Simulation-to-Reality Gap
Falls are a leading cause of injury and loss of independence among older adults. Vision-based fall prediction systems offer a non-invasive solution to anticipate falls seconds before impact, but their development is hindered by the scarcity of available fall data. Contributing to these efforts, this study proposes the Biomechanical Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (BioST-GCN), a dual-stream model that combines both pose and biomechanical information using a cross-attention fusion mechanism. Our model outperforms the vanilla ST-GCN baseline by 5.32% and 2.91% F1-score on the simulated MCF-UA stunt-actor and MUVIM datasets, respectively. The spatio-temporal attention mechanisms in the ST-GCN stream also provide interpretability by identifying critical joints and temporal phases. However, a critical simulation-reality gap persists. While our model achieves an 89.0% F1-score with full supervision on simulated data, zero-shot generalization to unseen subjects drops to 35.9%. This performance decline is likely due to biases in simulated data, such as `intent-to-fall' cues. For older adults, particularly those with diabetes or frailty, this gap is exacerbated by their unique kinematic profiles. To address this, we propose personalization strategies and advocate for privacy-preserving data pipelines to enable real-world validation. Our findings underscore the urgent need to bridge the gap between simulated and real-world data to develop effective fall prediction systems for vulnerable elderly populations.
☆ 3D-Guided Scalable Flow Matching for Generating Volumetric Tissue Spatial Transcriptomics from Serial Histology
Mohammad Vali Sanian, Arshia Hemmat, Amirhossein Vahidi, Jonas Maaskola, Jimmy Tsz Hang Lee, Stanislaw Makarchuk, Yeliz Demirci, Nana-Jane Chipampe, Omer Bayraktar, Lassi Paavolainen, Mohammad Lotfollahi
A scalable and robust 3D tissue transcriptomics profile can enable a holistic understanding of tissue organization and provide deeper insights into human biology and disease. Most predictive algorithms that infer ST directly from histology treat each section independently and ignore 3D structure, while existing 3D-aware approaches are not generative and do not scale well. We present Holographic Tissue Expression Inpainting and Analysis (HoloTea), a 3D-aware flow-matching framework that imputes spot-level gene expression from H&E while explicitly using information from adjacent sections. Our key idea is to retrieve morphologically corresponding spots on neighboring slides in a shared feature space and fuse this cross section context into a lightweight ControlNet, allowing conditioning to follow anatomical continuity. To better capture the count nature of the data, we introduce a 3D-consistent prior for flow matching that combines a learned zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) prior with a spatial-empirical prior constructed from neighboring sections. A global attention block introduces 3D H&E scaling linearly with the number of spots in the slide, enabling training and inference on large 3D ST datasets. Across three spatial transcriptomics datasets spanning different tissue types and resolutions, HoloTea consistently improves 3D expression accuracy and generalization compared to 2D and 3D baselines. We envision HoloTea advancing the creation of accurate 3D virtual tissues, ultimately accelerating biomarker discovery and deepening our understanding of disease.
comment: 11 pages
☆ XAttn-BMD: Multimodal Deep Learning with Cross-Attention for Femoral Neck Bone Mineral Density Estimation
Yilin Zhang, Leo D. Westbury, Elaine M. Dennison, Nicholas C. Harvey, Nicholas R. Fuggle, Rahman Attar
Poor bone health is a significant public health concern, and low bone mineral density (BMD) leads to an increased fracture risk, a key feature of osteoporosis. We present XAttn-BMD (Cross-Attention BMD), a multimodal deep learning framework that predicts femoral neck BMD from hip X-ray images and structured clinical metadata. It utilizes a novel bidirectional cross-attention mechanism to dynamically integrate image and metadata features for cross-modal mutual reinforcement. A Weighted Smooth L1 loss is tailored to address BMD imbalance and prioritize clinically significant cases. Extensive experiments on the data from the Hertfordshire Cohort Study show that our model outperforms the baseline models in regression generalization and robustness. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of both cross-attention fusion and the customized loss function. Experimental results show that the integration of multimodal data via cross-attention outperforms naive feature concatenation without cross-attention, reducing MSE by 16.7%, MAE by 6.03%, and increasing the R2 score by 16.4%, highlighting the effectiveness of the approach for femoral neck BMD estimation. Furthermore, screening performance was evaluated using binary classification at clinically relevant femoral neck BMD thresholds, demonstrating the model's potential in real-world scenarios.
comment: 11 figures, 10 tables, 38 pages. Submitted to Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (currently with editor)
☆ MRI Embeddings Complement Clinical Predictors for Cognitive Decline Modeling in Alzheimer's Disease Cohorts SP
Accurate modeling of cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease is essential for early stratification and personalized management. While tabular predictors provide robust markers of global risk, their ability to capture subtle brain changes remains limited. In this study, we evaluate the predictive contributions of tabular and imaging-based representations, with a focus on transformer-derived Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) embeddings. We introduce a trajectory-aware labeling strategy based on Dynamic Time Warping clustering to capture heterogeneous patterns of cognitive change, and train a 3D Vision Transformer (ViT) via unsupervised reconstruction on harmonized and augmented MRI data to obtain anatomy-preserving embeddings without progression labels. The pretrained encoder embeddings are subsequently assessed using both traditional machine learning classifiers and deep learning heads, and compared against tabular representations and convolutional network baselines. Results highlight complementary strengths across modalities. Clinical and volumetric features achieved the highest AUCs of around 0.70 for predicting mild and severe progression, underscoring their utility in capturing global decline trajectories. In contrast, MRI embeddings from the ViT model were most effective in distinguishing cognitively stable individuals with an AUC of 0.71. However, all approaches struggled in the heterogeneous moderate group. These findings indicate that clinical features excel in identifying high-risk extremes, whereas transformer-based MRI embeddings are more sensitive to subtle markers of stability, motivating multimodal fusion strategies for AD progression modeling.
comment: Accepted at SPIE - Medical Imaging Conference 2026
☆ CCSD: Cross-Modal Compositional Self-Distillation for Robust Brain Tumor Segmentation with Missing Modalities
The accurate segmentation of brain tumors from multi-modal MRI is critical for clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. While integrating complementary information from various MRI sequences is a common practice, the frequent absence of one or more modalities in real-world clinical settings poses a significant challenge, severely compromising the performance and generalizability of deep learning-based segmentation models. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Cross-Modal Compositional Self-Distillation (CCSD) framework that can flexibly handle arbitrary combinations of input modalities. CCSD adopts a shared-specific encoder-decoder architecture and incorporates two self-distillation strategies: (i) a hierarchical modality self-distillation mechanism that transfers knowledge across modality hierarchies to reduce semantic discrepancies, and (ii) a progressive modality combination distillation approach that enhances robustness to missing modalities by simulating gradual modality dropout during training. Extensive experiments on public brain tumor segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that CCSD achieves state-of-the-art performance across various missing-modality scenarios, with strong generalization and stability.
comment: 9 pages, 5 figures
☆ Deep Learning-Based Regional White Matter Hyperintensity Mapping as a Robust Biomarker for Alzheimer's Disease SP
White matter hyperintensities (WMH) are key imaging markers in cognitive aging, Alzheimer's disease (AD), and related dementias. Although automated methods for WMH segmentation have advanced, most provide only global lesion load and overlook their spatial distribution across distinct white matter regions. We propose a deep learning framework for robust WMH segmentation and localization, evaluated across public datasets and an independent Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) cohort. Our results show that the predicted lesion loads are in line with the reference WMH estimates, confirming the robustness to variations in lesion load, acquisition, and demographics. Beyond accurate segmentation, we quantify WMH load within anatomically defined regions and combine these measures with brain structure volumes to assess diagnostic value. Regional WMH volumes consistently outperform global lesion burden for disease classification, and integration with brain atrophy metrics further improves performance, reaching area under the curve (AUC) values up to 0.97. Several spatially distinct regions, particularly within anterior white matter tracts, are reproducibly associated with diagnostic status, indicating localized vulnerability in AD. These results highlight the added value of regional WMH quantification. Incorporating localized lesion metrics alongside atrophy markers may enhance early diagnosis and stratification in neurodegenerative disorders.
comment: Accepted at SPIE - Medical Imaging Conference 2026
☆ OmniZip: Audio-Guided Dynamic Token Compression for Fast Omnimodal Large Language Models
Omnimodal large language models (OmniLLMs) have attracted increasing research attention of late towards unified audio-video understanding, wherein processing audio-video token sequences creates a significant computational bottleneck, however. Existing token compression methods have yet to accommodate this emerging need of jointly compressing multimodal tokens. To bridge this gap, we present OmniZip, a training-free, audio-guided audio-visual token-compression framework that optimizes multimodal token representation and accelerates inference. Specifically, OmniZip first identifies salient audio tokens, then computes an audio retention score for each time group to capture information density, thereby dynamically guiding video token pruning and preserving cues from audio anchors enhanced by cross-modal similarity. For each time window, OmniZip compresses the video tokens using an interleaved spatio-temporal scheme. Extensive empirical results demonstrate the merits of OmniZip - it achieves 3.42X inference speedup and 1.4X memory reduction over other top-performing counterparts, while maintaining performance with no training.
comment: Code Link: https://github.com/KD-TAO/OmniZip
☆ Explaining Digital Pathology Models via Clustering Activations
We present a clustering-based explainability technique for digital pathology models based on convolutional neural networks. Unlike commonly used methods based on saliency maps, such as occlusion, GradCAM, or relevance propagation, which highlight regions that contribute the most to the prediction for a single slide, our method shows the global behaviour of the model under consideration, while also providing more fine-grained information. The result clusters can be visualised not only to understand the model, but also to increase confidence in its operation, leading to faster adoption in clinical practice. We also evaluate the performance of our technique on an existing model for detecting prostate cancer, demonstrating its usefulness.
☆ ForensicFlow: A Tri-Modal Adaptive Network for Robust Deepfake Detection
Deepfakes generated by advanced GANs and autoencoders severely threaten information integrity and societal stability. Single-stream CNNs fail to capture multi-scale forgery artifacts across spatial, texture, and frequency domains, limiting robustness and generalization. We introduce the ForensicFlow, a tri-modal forensic framework that synergistically fuses RGB, texture, and frequency evidence for video Deepfake detection. The RGB branch (ConvNeXt-tiny) extracts global visual inconsistencies; the texture branch (Swin Transformer-tiny) detects fine-grained blending artifacts; the frequency branch (CNN + SE) identifies periodic spectral noise. Attention-based temporal pooling dynamically prioritizes high-evidence frames, while adaptive attention fusion balances branch contributions.Trained on Celeb-DF (v2) with Focal Loss, ForensicFlow achieves AUC 0.9752, F1-Score 0.9408, and accuracy 0.9208, outperforming single-stream baselines. Ablation validates branch synergy; Grad-CAM confirms forensic focus. This comprehensive feature fusion provides superior resilience against subtle forgeries.
comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. Preprint. Submitted on November 18, 2025
☆ Interaction-Aware 4D Gaussian Splatting for Dynamic Hand-Object Interaction Reconstruction
This paper focuses on a challenging setting of simultaneously modeling geometry and appearance of hand-object interaction scenes without any object priors. We follow the trend of dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting based methods, and address several significant challenges. To model complex hand-object interaction with mutual occlusion and edge blur, we present interaction-aware hand-object Gaussians with newly introduced optimizable parameters aiming to adopt piecewise linear hypothesis for clearer structural representation. Moreover, considering the complementarity and tightness of hand shape and object shape during interaction dynamics, we incorporate hand information into object deformation field, constructing interaction-aware dynamic fields to model flexible motions. To further address difficulties in the optimization process, we propose a progressive strategy that handles dynamic regions and static background step by step. Correspondingly, explicit regularizations are designed to stabilize the hand-object representations for smooth motion transition, physical interaction reality, and coherent lighting. Experiments show that our approach surpasses existing dynamic 3D-GS-based methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance in reconstructing dynamic hand-object interaction.
comment: 11 pages, 6 figures
☆ Learning Compact Latent Space for Representing Neural Signed Distance Functions with High-fidelity Geometry Details AAAI
Neural signed distance functions (SDFs) have been a vital representation to represent 3D shapes or scenes with neural networks. An SDF is an implicit function that can query signed distances at specific coordinates for recovering a 3D surface. Although implicit functions work well on a single shape or scene, they pose obstacles when analyzing multiple SDFs with high-fidelity geometry details, due to the limited information encoded in the latent space for SDFs and the loss of geometry details. To overcome these obstacles, we introduce a method to represent multiple SDFs in a common space, aiming to recover more high-fidelity geometry details with more compact latent representations. Our key idea is to take full advantage of the benefits of generalization-based and overfitting-based learning strategies, which manage to preserve high-fidelity geometry details with compact latent codes. Based on this framework, we also introduce a novel sampling strategy to sample training queries. The sampling can improve the training efficiency and eliminate artifacts caused by the influence of other SDFs. We report numerical and visual evaluations on widely used benchmarks to validate our designs and show advantages over the latest methods in terms of the representative ability and compactness.
comment: Accepted as an Poster paper at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26)
☆ DeCo-VAE: Learning Compact Latents for Video Reconstruction via Decoupled Representation
Existing video Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) generally overlook the similarity between frame contents, leading to redundant latent modeling. In this paper, we propose decoupled VAE (DeCo-VAE) to achieve compact latent representation. Instead of encoding RGB pixels directly, we decompose video content into distinct components via explicit decoupling: keyframe, motion and residual, and learn dedicated latent representation for each. To avoid cross-component interference, we design dedicated encoders for each decoupled component and adopt a shared 3D decoder to maintain spatiotemporal consistency during reconstruction. We further utilize a decoupled adaptation strategy that freezes partial encoders while training the others sequentially, ensuring stable training and accurate learning of both static and dynamic features. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that DeCo-VAE achieves superior video reconstruction performance.
☆ A Generative Data Framework with Authentic Supervision for Underwater Image Restoration and Enhancement IEEE
Underwater image restoration and enhancement are crucial for correcting color distortion and restoring image details, thereby establishing a fundamental basis for subsequent underwater visual tasks. However, current deep learning methodologies in this area are frequently constrained by the scarcity of high-quality paired datasets. Since it is difficult to obtain pristine reference labels in underwater scenes, existing benchmarks often rely on manually selected results from enhancement algorithms, providing debatable reference images that lack globally consistent color and authentic supervision. This limits the model's capabilities in color restoration, image enhancement, and generalization. To overcome this limitation, we propose using in-air natural images as unambiguous reference targets and translating them into underwater-degraded versions, thereby constructing synthetic datasets that provide authentic supervision signals for model learning. Specifically, we establish a generative data framework based on unpaired image-to-image translation, producing a large-scale dataset that covers 6 representative underwater degradation types. The framework constructs synthetic datasets with precise ground-truth labels, which facilitate the learning of an accurate mapping from degraded underwater images to their pristine scene appearances. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments across 6 representative network architectures and 3 independent test sets show that models trained on our synthetic data achieve comparable or superior color restoration and generalization performance to those trained on existing benchmarks. This research provides a reliable and scalable data-driven solution for underwater image restoration and enhancement. The generated dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/yftian2025/SynUIEDatasets.git.
comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication
☆ D-PerceptCT: Deep Perceptual Enhancement for Low-Dose CT Images
Taifour Yousra Nabila, Azeddine Beghdadi, Marie Luong, Zuheng Ming, Habib Zaidi, Faouzi Alaya Cheikh
Low Dose Computed Tomography (LDCT) is widely used as an imaging solution to aid diagnosis and other clinical tasks. However, this comes at the price of a deterioration in image quality due to the low dose of radiation used to reduce the risk of secondary cancer development. While some efficient methods have been proposed to enhance LDCT quality, many overestimate noise and perform excessive smoothing, leading to a loss of critical details. In this paper, we introduce D-PerceptCT, a novel architecture inspired by key principles of the Human Visual System (HVS) to enhance LDCT images. The objective is to guide the model to enhance or preserve perceptually relevant features, thereby providing radiologists with CT images where critical anatomical structures and fine pathological details are perceptu- ally visible. D-PerceptCT consists of two main blocks: 1) a Visual Dual-path Extractor (ViDex), which integrates semantic priors from a pretrained DINOv2 model with local spatial features, allowing the network to incorporate semantic-awareness during enhancement; (2) a Global-Local State-Space block that captures long-range information and multiscale features to preserve the important structures and fine details for diagnosis. In addition, we propose a novel deep perceptual loss, designated as the Deep Perceptual Relevancy Loss Function (DPRLF), which is inspired by human contrast sensitivity, to further emphasize perceptually important features. Extensive experiments on the Mayo2016 dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of D-PerceptCT method for LDCT enhancement, showing better preservation of structural and textural information within LDCT images compared to SOTA methods.
☆ IMSE: Efficient U-Net-based Speech Enhancement using Inception Depthwise Convolution and Amplitude-Aware Linear Attention
Achieving a balance between lightweight design and high performance remains a significant challenge for speech enhancement (SE) tasks on resource-constrained devices. Existing state-of-the-art methods, such as MUSE, have established a strong baseline with only 0.51M parameters by introducing a Multi-path Enhanced Taylor (MET) transformer and Deformable Embedding (DE). However, an in-depth analysis reveals that MUSE still suffers from efficiency bottlenecks: the MET module relies on a complex "approximate-compensate" mechanism to mitigate the limitations of Taylor-expansion-based attention, while the offset calculation for deformable embedding introduces additional computational burden. This paper proposes IMSE, a systematically optimized and ultra-lightweight network. We introduce two core innovations: 1) Replacing the MET module with Amplitude-Aware Linear Attention (MALA). MALA fundamentally rectifies the "amplitude-ignoring" problem in linear attention by explicitly preserving the norm information of query vectors in the attention calculation, achieving efficient global modeling without an auxiliary compensation branch. 2) Replacing the DE module with Inception Depthwise Convolution (IDConv). IDConv borrows the Inception concept, decomposing large-kernel operations into efficient parallel branches (square, horizontal, and vertical strips), thereby capturing spectrogram features with extremely low parameter redundancy. Extensive experiments on the VoiceBank+DEMAND dataset demonstrate that, compared to the MUSE baseline, IMSE significantly reduces the parameter count by 16.8\% (from 0.513M to 0.427M) while achieving competitive performance comparable to the state-of-the-art on the PESQ metric (3.373). This study sets a new benchmark for the trade-off between model size and speech quality in ultra-lightweight speech enhancement.
☆ Parameter Aware Mamba Model for Multi-task Dense Prediction IEEE
Understanding the inter-relations and interactions between tasks is crucial for multi-task dense prediction. Existing methods predominantly utilize convolutional layers and attention mechanisms to explore task-level interactions. In this work, we introduce a novel decoder-based framework, Parameter Aware Mamba Model (PAMM), specifically designed for dense prediction in multi-task learning setting. Distinct from approaches that employ Transformers to model holistic task relationships, PAMM leverages the rich, scalable parameters of state space models to enhance task interconnectivity. It features dual state space parameter experts that integrate and set task-specific parameter priors, capturing the intrinsic properties of each task. This approach not only facilitates precise multi-task interactions but also allows for the global integration of task priors through the structured state space sequence model (S4). Furthermore, we employ the Multi-Directional Hilbert Scanning method to construct multi-angle feature sequences, thereby enhancing the sequence model's perceptual capabilities for 2D data. Extensive experiments on the NYUD-v2 and PASCAL-Context benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our code is available at https://github.com/CQC-gogopro/PAMM.
comment: Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics
☆ Enhancing End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Risk Semantic Distillaion from VLM
The autonomous driving (AD) system has exhibited remarkable performance in complex driving scenarios. However, generalization is still a key limitation for the current system, which refers to the ability to handle unseen scenarios or unfamiliar sensor configurations.Related works have explored the use of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to address few-shot or zero-shot tasks. While promising, these methods introduce a new challenge: the emergence of a hybrid AD system, where two distinct systems are used to plan a trajectory, leading to potential inconsistencies. Alternative research directions have explored Vision-Language-Action (VLA) frameworks that generate control actions from VLM directly. However, these end-to-end solutions demonstrate prohibitive computational demands. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Risk Semantic Distillation (RSD), a novel framework that leverages VLMs to enhance the training of End-to-End (E2E) AD backbones. By providing risk attention for key objects, RSD addresses the issue of generalization. Specifically, we introduce RiskHead, a plug-in module that distills causal risk estimates from Vision-Language Models into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features, yielding interpretable risk-attention maps.This approach allows BEV features to learn richer and more nuanced risk attention representations, which directly enhance the model's ability to handle spatial boundaries and risky objects.By focusing on risk attention, RSD aligns better with human-like driving behavior, which is essential to navigate in complex and dynamic environments. Our experiments on the Bench2Drive benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of RSD in managing complex and unpredictable driving conditions. Due to the enhanced BEV representations enabled by RSD, we observed a significant improvement in both perception and planning capabilities.
☆ Segmentation-Aware Latent Diffusion for Satellite Image Super-Resolution: Enabling Smallholder Farm Boundary Delineation
Aditi Agarwal, Anjali Jain, Nikita Saxena, Ishan Deshpande, Michal Kazmierski, Abigail Annkah, Nadav Sherman, Karthikeyan Shanmugam, Alok Talekar, Vaibhav Rajan
Delineating farm boundaries through segmentation of satellite images is a fundamental step in many agricultural applications. The task is particularly challenging for smallholder farms, where accurate delineation requires the use of high resolution (HR) imagery which are available only at low revisit frequencies (e.g., annually). To support more frequent (sub-) seasonal monitoring, HR images could be combined as references (ref) with low resolution (LR) images -- having higher revisit frequency (e.g., weekly) -- using reference-based super-resolution (Ref-SR) methods. However, current Ref-SR methods optimize perceptual quality and smooth over crucial features needed for downstream tasks, and are unable to meet the large scale-factor requirements for this task. Further, previous two-step approaches of SR followed by segmentation do not effectively utilize diverse satellite sources as inputs. We address these problems through a new approach, $\textbf{SEED-SR}$, which uses a combination of conditional latent diffusion models and large-scale multi-spectral, multi-source geo-spatial foundation models. Our key innovation is to bypass the explicit SR task in the pixel space and instead perform SR in a segmentation-aware latent space. This unique approach enables us to generate segmentation maps at an unprecedented 20$\times$ scale factor, and rigorous experiments on two large, real datasets demonstrate up to $\textbf{25.5}$ and $\textbf{12.9}$ relative improvement in instance and semantic segmentation metrics respectively over approaches based on state-of-the-art Ref-SR methods.
☆ 2D Gaussians Spatial Transport for Point-supervised Density Regression AAAI
This paper introduces Gaussian Spatial Transport (GST), a novel framework that leverages Gaussian splatting to facilitate transport from the probability measure in the image coordinate space to the annotation map. We propose a Gaussian splatting-based method to estimate pixel-annotation correspondence, which is then used to compute a transport plan derived from Bayesian probability. To integrate the resulting transport plan into standard network optimization in typical computer vision tasks, we derive a loss function that measures discrepancy after transport. Extensive experiments on representative computer vision tasks, including crowd counting and landmark detection, validate the effectiveness of our approach. Compared to conventional optimal transport schemes, GST eliminates iterative transport plan computation during training, significantly improving efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/infinite0522/GST.
comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, accepted by AAAI, 2026
☆ Learning Subglacial Bed Topography from Sparse Radar with Physics-Guided Residuals
Accurate subglacial bed topography is essential for ice sheet modeling, yet radar observations are sparse and uneven. We propose a physics-guided residual learning framework that predicts bed thickness residuals over a BedMachine prior and reconstructs bed from the observed surface. A DeepLabV3+ decoder over a standard encoder (e.g.,ResNet-50) is trained with lightweight physics and data terms: multi-scale mass conservation, flow-aligned total variation, Laplacian damping, non-negativity of thickness, a ramped prior-consistency term, and a masked Huber fit to radar picks modulated by a confidence map. To measure real-world generalization, we adopt leakage-safe blockwise hold-outs (vertical/horizontal) with safety buffers and report metrics only on held-out cores. Across two Greenland sub-regions, our approach achieves strong test-core accuracy and high structural fidelity, outperforming U-Net, Attention U-Net, FPN, and a plain CNN. The residual-over-prior design, combined with physics, yields spatially coherent, physically plausible beds suitable for operational mapping under domain shift.
☆ CompEvent: Complex-valued Event-RGB Fusion for Low-light Video Enhancement and Deblurring
Low-light video deblurring poses significant challenges in applications like nighttime surveillance and autonomous driving due to dim lighting and long exposures. While event cameras offer potential solutions with superior low-light sensitivity and high temporal resolution, existing fusion methods typically employ staged strategies, limiting their effectiveness against combined low-light and motion blur degradations. To overcome this, we propose CompEvent, a complex neural network framework enabling holistic full-process fusion of event data and RGB frames for enhanced joint restoration. CompEvent features two core components: 1) Complex Temporal Alignment GRU, which utilizes complex-valued convolutions and processes video and event streams iteratively via GRU to achieve temporal alignment and continuous fusion; and 2) Complex Space-Frequency Learning module, which performs unified complex-valued signal processing in both spatial and frequency domains, facilitating deep fusion through spatial structures and system-level characteristics. By leveraging the holistic representation capability of complex-valued neural networks, CompEvent achieves full-process spatiotemporal fusion, maximizes complementary learning between modalities, and significantly strengthens low-light video deblurring capability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CompEvent outperforms SOTA methods in addressing this challenging task. The code is available at https://github.com/YuXie1/CompEvent.
☆ DIR-TIR: Dialog-Iterative Refinement for Text-to-Image Retrieval
This paper addresses the task of interactive, conversational text-to-image retrieval.
Our DIR-TIR framework progressively refines the target image search through two specialized modules: the Dialog Refiner Module and the Image Refiner Module.
The Dialog Refiner actively queries users to extract essential information and generate increasingly precise descriptions of the target image.
Complementarily, the Image Refiner identifies perceptual gaps between generated images and user intentions, strategically reducing the visual-semantic discrepancy. By leveraging multi-turn dialogues, DIR-TIR provides superior controllability and fault tolerance compared to conventional single-query methods, significantly improving target image hit accuracy.
Comprehensive experiments across diverse image datasets demonstrate our dialogue-based approach substantially outperforms initial-description-only baselines, while the synergistic module integration achieves both higher retrieval precision and enhanced interactive experience.
☆ Agentic Video Intelligence: A Flexible Framework for Advanced Video Exploration and Understanding
Hong Gao, Yiming Bao, Xuezhen Tu, Yutong Xu, Yue Jin, Yiyang Mu, Bin Zhong, Linan Yue, Min-Ling Zhang
Video understanding requires not only visual recognition but also complex reasoning. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities, they typically process videos largely in a single-pass manner with limited support for evidence revisit and iterative refinement. While recently emerging agent-based methods enable long-horizon reasoning, they either depend heavily on expensive proprietary models or require extensive agentic RL training. To overcome these limitations, we propose Agentic Video Intelligence (AVI), a flexible and training-free framework that can mirror human video comprehension through system-level design and optimization. AVI introduces three key innovations: (1) a human-inspired three-phase reasoning process (Retrieve-Perceive-Review) that ensures both sufficient global exploration and focused local analysis, (2) a structured video knowledge base organized through entity graphs, along with multi-granularity integrated tools, constituting the agent's interaction environment, and (3) an open-source model ensemble combining reasoning LLMs with lightweight base CV models and VLM, eliminating dependence on proprietary APIs or RL training. Experiments on LVBench, VideoMME-Long, LongVideoBench, and Charades-STA demonstrate that AVI achieves competitive performance while offering superior interpretability.
☆ Learning to See Through a Baby's Eyes: Early Visual Diets Enable Robust Visual Intelligence in Humans and Machines
Newborns perceive the world with low-acuity, color-degraded, and temporally continuous vision, which gradually sharpens as infants develop. To explore the ecological advantages of such staged "visual diets", we train self-supervised learning (SSL) models on object-centric videos under constraints that simulate infant vision: grayscale-to-color (C), blur-to-sharp (A), and preserved temporal continuity (T)-collectively termed CATDiet. For evaluation, we establish a comprehensive benchmark across ten datasets, covering clean and corrupted image recognition, texture-shape cue conflict tests, silhouette recognition, depth-order classification, and the visual cliff paradigm. All CATDiet variants demonstrate enhanced robustness in object recognition, despite being trained solely on object-centric videos. Remarkably, models also exhibit biologically aligned developmental patterns, including neural plasticity changes mirroring synaptic density in macaque V1 and behaviors resembling infants' visual cliff responses. Building on these insights, CombDiet initializes SSL with CATDiet before standard training while preserving temporal continuity. Trained on object-centric or head-mounted infant videos, CombDiet outperforms standard SSL on both in-domain and out-of-domain object recognition and depth perception. Together, these results suggest that the developmental progression of early infant visual experience offers a powerful reverse-engineering framework for understanding the emergence of robust visual intelligence in machines. All code, data, and models will be publicly released.
☆ Cranio-ID: Graph-Based Craniofacial Identification via Automatic Landmark Annotation in 2D Multi-View X-rays
In forensic craniofacial identification and in many biomedical applications, craniometric landmarks are important. Traditional methods for locating landmarks are time-consuming and require specialized knowledge and expertise. Current methods utilize superimposition and deep learning-based methods that employ automatic annotation of landmarks. However, these methods are not reliable due to insufficient large-scale validation studies. In this paper, we proposed a novel framework Cranio-ID: First, an automatic annotation of landmarks on 2D skulls (which are X-ray scans of faces) with their respective optical images using our trained YOLO-pose models. Second, cross-modal matching by formulating these landmarks into graph representations and then finding semantic correspondence between graphs of these two modalities using cross-attention and optimal transport framework. Our proposed framework is validated on the S2F and CUHK datasets (CUHK dataset resembles with S2F dataset). Extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of our proposed framework, which demonstrates significant improvements in both reliability and accuracy, as well as its effectiveness in cross-domain skull-to-face and sketch-to-face matching in forensic science.
comment: 11 pages, 6 figures
☆ Language as an Anchor: Preserving Relative Visual Geometry for Domain Incremental Learning
A key challenge in Domain Incremental Learning (DIL) is to continually learn under shifting distributions while preserving knowledge from previous domains. Existing methods face a fundamental dilemma. On one hand, projecting all domains into a single unified visual space leads to inter-domain interference and semantic distortion, as large shifts may vary with not only visual appearance but also underlying semantics. On the other hand, isolating domain-specific parameters causes knowledge fragmentation, creating "knowledge islands" that hamper knowledge reuse and exacerbate forgetting. To address this issue, we propose LAVA (Language-Anchored Visual Alignment), a novel DIL framework that replaces direct feature alignment with relative alignment driven by a text-based reference anchor. LAVA guides the visual representations of each incoming domain to preserve a consistent relative geometry, which is defined by mirroring the pairwise semantic similarities between the class names. This anchored geometric structure acts as a bridge across domains, enabling the retrieval of class-aware prior knowledge and facilitating robust feature aggregation. Extensive experiments on standard DIL benchmarks demonstrate that LAVA achieves significant performance improvements over state-of-the-arts. Code is available at https://github.com/ShuyiGeng/LAVA.
☆ Stage Aware Diagnosis of Diabetic Retinopathy via Ordinal Regression
Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) has emerged as a major cause of preventable blindness in recent times. With timely screening and intervention, the condition can be prevented from causing irreversible damage. The work introduces a state-of-the-art Ordinal Regression-based DR Detection framework that uses the APTOS-2019 fundus image dataset. A widely accepted combination of preprocessing methods: Green Channel (GC) Extraction, Noise Masking, and CLAHE, was used to isolate the most relevant features for DR classification. Model performance was evaluated using the Quadratic Weighted Kappa, with a focus on agreement between results and clinical grading. Our Ordinal Regression approach attained a QWK score of 0.8992, setting a new benchmark on the APTOS dataset.
comment: Submitted to Confluence 2026, Amity University
☆ Continuous Vision-Language-Action Co-Learning with Semantic-Physical Alignment for Behavioral Cloning AAAI 2026
Language-conditioned manipulation facilitates human-robot interaction via behavioral cloning (BC), which learns control policies from human demonstrations and serves as a cornerstone of embodied AI. Overcoming compounding errors in sequential action decisions remains a central challenge to improving BC performance. Existing approaches mitigate compounding errors through data augmentation, expressive representation, or temporal abstraction. However, they suffer from physical discontinuities and semantic-physical misalignment, leading to inaccurate action cloning and intermittent execution. In this paper, we present Continuous vision-language-action Co-Learning with Semantic-Physical Alignment (CCoL), a novel BC framework that ensures temporally consistent execution and fine-grained semantic grounding. It generates robust and smooth action execution trajectories through continuous co-learning across vision, language, and proprioceptive inputs (e.g., robot internal states). Meanwhile, we anchor language semantics to visuomotor representations by a bidirectional cross-attention to learn contextual information for action generation, successfully overcoming the problem of semantic-physical misalignment. Extensive experiments show that CCoL achieves an average 8.0% relative improvement across three simulation suites, with up to 19.2% relative gain in human-demonstrated bimanual insertion tasks. Real-world tests on a 7-DoF robot further confirm CCoL's generalization under unseen and noisy object states.
comment: Accepted at AAAI 2026, the Project website is available at https://qhemu.github.io/CCoL/
☆ BEDLAM2.0: Synthetic Humans and Cameras in Motion NeurIPS 2025
Joachim Tesch, Giorgio Becherini, Prerana Achar, Anastasios Yiannakidis, Muhammed Kocabas, Priyanka Patel, Michael J. Black
Inferring 3D human motion from video remains a challenging problem with many applications. While traditional methods estimate the human in image coordinates, many applications require human motion to be estimated in world coordinates. This is particularly challenging when there is both human and camera motion. Progress on this topic has been limited by the lack of rich video data with ground truth human and camera movement. We address this with BEDLAM2.0, a new dataset that goes beyond the popular BEDLAM dataset in important ways. In addition to introducing more diverse and realistic cameras and camera motions, BEDLAM2.0 increases diversity and realism of body shape, motions, clothing, hair, and 3D environments. Additionally, it adds shoes, which were missing in BEDLAM. BEDLAM has become a key resource for training 3D human pose and motion regressors today and we show that BEDLAM2.0 is significantly better, particularly for training methods that estimate humans in world coordinates. We compare state-of-the art methods trained on BEDLAM and BEDLAM2.0, and find that BEDLAM2.0 significantly improves accuracy over BEDLAM. For research purposes, we provide the rendered videos, ground truth body parameters, and camera motions. We also provide the 3D assets to which we have rights and links to those from third parties.
comment: NeurIPS 2025 (Datasets and Benchmarks track, oral). Project website: https://bedlam2.is.tue.mpg.de
☆ Enhancing LLM-based Autonomous Driving with Modular Traffic Light and Sign Recognition
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for decision-making and planning in autonomous driving, showing promising reasoning capabilities and potential to generalize across diverse traffic situations. However, current LLM-based driving agents lack explicit mechanisms to enforce traffic rules and often struggle to reliably detect small, safety-critical objects such as traffic lights and signs. To address this limitation, we introduce TLS-Assist, a modular redundancy layer that augments LLM-based autonomous driving agents with explicit traffic light and sign recognition. TLS-Assist converts detections into structured natural language messages that are injected into the LLM input, enforcing explicit attention to safety-critical cues. The framework is plug-and-play, model-agnostic, and supports both single-view and multi-view camera setups. We evaluate TLS-Assist in a closed-loop setup on the LangAuto benchmark in CARLA. The results demonstrate relative driving performance improvements of up to 14% over LMDrive and 7% over BEVDriver, while consistently reducing traffic light and sign infractions. We publicly release the code and models on https://github.com/iis-esslingen/TLS-Assist.
☆ Cheating Stereo Matching in Full-scale: Physical Adversarial Attack against Binocular Depth Estimation in Autonomous Driving
Though deep neural models adopted to realize the perception of autonomous driving have proven vulnerable to adversarial examples, known attacks often leverage 2D patches and target mostly monocular perception. Therefore, the effectiveness of Physical Adversarial Examples (PAEs) on stereo-based binocular depth estimation remains largely unexplored. To this end, we propose the first texture-enabled physical adversarial attack against stereo matching models in the context of autonomous driving. Our method employs a 3D PAE with global camouflage texture rather than a local 2D patch-based one, ensuring both visual consistency and attack effectiveness across different viewpoints of stereo cameras. To cope with the disparity effect of these cameras, we also propose a new 3D stereo matching rendering module that allows the PAE to be aligned with real-world positions and headings in binocular vision. We further propose a novel merging attack that seamlessly blends the target into the environment through fine-grained PAE optimization. It has significantly enhanced stealth and lethality upon existing hiding attacks that fail to get seamlessly merged into the background. Extensive evaluations show that our PAEs can successfully fool the stereo models into producing erroneous depth information.
☆ A Quantitative Method for Shoulder Presentation Evaluation in Biometric Identity Documents
International standards for biometric identity documents mandate strict compliance with pose requirements, including the square presentation of a subject's shoulders. However, the literature on automated quality assessment offers few quantitative methods for evaluating this specific attribute. This paper proposes a Shoulder Presentation Evaluation (SPE) algorithm to address this gap. The method quantifies shoulder yaw and roll using only the 3D coordinates of two shoulder landmarks provided by common pose estimation frameworks. The algorithm was evaluated on a dataset of 121 portrait images. The resulting SPE scores demonstrated a strong Pearson correlation (r approx. 0.80) with human-assigned labels. An analysis of the metric's filtering performance, using an adapted Error-versus-Discard methodology, confirmed its utility in identifying non-compliant samples. The proposed algorithm is a viable lightweight tool for automated compliance checking in enrolment systems.
comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, conference or journal submission. Course project from DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark
☆ Blur-Robust Detection via Feature Restoration: An End-to-End Framework for Prior-Guided Infrared UAV Target Detection AAAI 2026
Infrared unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) target images often suffer from motion blur degradation caused by rapid sensor movement, significantly reducing contrast between target and background. Generally, detection performance heavily depends on the discriminative feature representation between target and background. Existing methods typically treat deblurring as a preprocessing step focused on visual quality, while neglecting the enhancement of task-relevant features crucial for detection. Improving feature representation for detection under blur conditions remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel Joint Feature-Domain Deblurring and Detection end-to-end framework, dubbed JFD3. We design a dual-branch architecture with shared weights, where the clear branch guides the blurred branch to enhance discriminative feature representation. Specifically, we first introduce a lightweight feature restoration network, where features from the clear branch serve as feature-level supervision to guide the blurred branch, thereby enhancing its distinctive capability for detection. We then propose a frequency structure guidance module that refines the structure prior from the restoration network and integrates it into shallow detection layers to enrich target structural information. Finally, a feature consistency self-supervised loss is imposed between the dual-branch detection backbones, driving the blurred branch to approximate the feature representations of the clear one. Wealso construct a benchmark, named IRBlurUAV, containing 30,000 simulated and 4,118 real infrared UAV target images with diverse motion blur. Extensive experiments on IRBlurUAV demonstrate that JFD3 achieves superior detection performance while maintaining real-time efficiency.
comment: Accepted by AAAI 2026
☆ O3SLM: Open Weight, Open Data, and Open Vocabulary Sketch-Language Model AAAI 2026
While Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, their ability to interpret abstract visual inputs remains limited. Specifically, they struggle to comprehend hand-drawn sketches, a modality that offers an intuitive means of expressing concepts that are difficult to describe textually. We identify the primary bottleneck as the absence of a large-scale dataset that jointly models sketches, photorealistic images, and corresponding natural language instructions. To address this, we present two key contributions: (1) a new, large-scale dataset of image-sketch-instruction triplets designed to facilitate both pretraining and instruction tuning, and (2) O3SLM, an LVLM trained on this dataset. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple sketch-based tasks: (a) object localization, (b) counting, (c) image retrieval i.e., (SBIR and fine-grained SBIR), and (d) visual question answering (VQA); while incorporating the three existing sketch datasets, namely QuickDraw!, Sketchy, and Tu Berlin, along with our generated SketchVCL dataset, show that O3SLM achieves state-of-the-art performance, substantially outperforming existing LVLMs in sketch comprehension and reasoning.
comment: Accepted to AAAI 2026
☆ Clinically-Validated Innovative Mobile Application for Assessing Blinking and Eyelid Movements
Gustavo Adolpho Bonesso, Carlos Marcelo Gurjão de Godoy, Tammy Hentona Osaki, Midori Hentona Osaki, Bárbara Moreira Ribeiro Trindade dos Santos, Regina Célia Coelho
Blinking is a vital physiological process that protects and maintains the health of the ocular surface. Objective assessment of eyelid movements remains challenging due to the complexity, cost, and limited clinical applicability of existing tools. This study presents the clinical validation of Bapp (Blink Application), a mobile application developed using the Flutter framework and integrated with Google ML Kit for on-device, real-time analysis of eyelid movements. The validation occurred using 45 videos from real patients, whose blinks were manually annotated by ophthalmology specialists from the Paulista School of Medicine of the Federal University of Sao Paulo (EPM-UNIFESP) to serve as the ground truth. Bapp's performance was evaluated using standard metrics, including Precision, Recall, and F1-Score, with results demonstrating 98.4% precision, 96.9% recall, and an overall accuracy of 98.3%. These outcomes confirm the reliability of Bapp as a portable, accessible, and objective tool for monitoring both normal and abnormal eyelid movements. The application offers a promising alternative to traditional manual blink counting, supporting continuous ocular health monitoring and postoperative evaluation in clinical environments.
comment: 14 pages, 8 figures
☆ IBGS: Image-Based Gaussian Splatting NeurIPS 2025
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as a fast, high-quality method for novel view synthesis (NVS). However, its use of low-degree spherical harmonics limits its ability to capture spatially varying color and view-dependent effects such as specular highlights. Existing works augment Gaussians with either a global texture map, which struggles with complex scenes, or per-Gaussian texture maps, which introduces high storage overhead. We propose Image-Based Gaussian Splatting, an efficient alternative that leverages high-resolution source images for fine details and view-specific color modeling. Specifically, we model each pixel color as a combination of a base color from standard 3DGS rendering and a learned residual inferred from neighboring training images. This promotes accurate surface alignment and enables rendering images of high-frequency details and accurate view-dependent effects. Experiments on standard NVS benchmarks show that our method significantly outperforms prior Gaussian Splatting approaches in rendering quality, without increasing the storage footprint.
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2025
☆ ARC-Chapter: Structuring Hour-Long Videos into Navigable Chapters and Hierarchical Summaries
The proliferation of hour-long videos (e.g., lectures, podcasts, documentaries) has intensified demand for efficient content structuring. However, existing approaches are constrained by small-scale training with annotations that are typical short and coarse, restricting generalization to nuanced transitions in long videos. We introduce ARC-Chapter, the first large-scale video chaptering model trained on over million-level long video chapters, featuring bilingual, temporally grounded, and hierarchical chapter annotations. To achieve this goal, we curated a bilingual English-Chinese chapter dataset via a structured pipeline that unifies ASR transcripts, scene texts, visual captions into multi-level annotations, from short title to long summaries. We demonstrate clear performance improvements with data scaling, both in data volume and label intensity. Moreover, we design a new evaluation metric termed GRACE, which incorporates many-to-one segment overlaps and semantic similarity, better reflecting real-world chaptering flexibility. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ARC-Chapter establishes a new state-of-the-art by a significant margin, outperforming the previous best by 14.0% in F1 score and 11.3% in SODA score. Moreover, ARC-Chapter shows excellent transferability, improving the state-of-the-art on downstream tasks like dense video captioning on YouCook2.
comment: Project Page: https://arcchapter.github.io/index_en.html
☆ Silhouette-to-Contour Registration: Aligning Intraoral Scan Models with Cephalometric Radiographs
Yiyi Miao, Taoyu Wu, Ji Jiang, Tong Chen, Zhe Tang, Zhengyong Jiang, Angelos Stefanidis, Limin Yu, Jionglong Su
Reliable 3D-2D alignment between intraoral scan (IOS) models and lateral cephalometric radiographs is critical for orthodontic diagnosis, yet conventional intensity-driven registration methods struggle under real clinical conditions, where cephalograms exhibit projective magnification, geometric distortion, low-contrast dental crowns, and acquisition-dependent variation. These factors hinder the stability of appearance-based similarity metrics and often lead to convergence failures or anatomically implausible alignments. To address these limitations, we propose DentalSCR, a pose-stable, contour-guided framework for accurate and interpretable silhouette-to-contour registration. Our method first constructs a U-Midline Dental Axis (UMDA) to establish a unified cross-arch anatomical coordinate system, thereby stabilizing initialization and standardizing projection geometry across cases. Using this reference frame, we generate radiograph-like projections via a surface-based DRR formulation with coronal-axis perspective and Gaussian splatting, which preserves clinical source-object-detector magnification and emphasizes external silhouettes. Registration is then formulated as a 2D similarity transform optimized with a symmetric bidirectional Chamfer distance under a hierarchical coarse-to-fine schedule, enabling both large capture range and subpixel-level contour agreement. We evaluate DentalSCR on 34 expert-annotated clinical cases. Experimental results demonstrate substantial reductions in landmark error-particularly at posterior teeth-tighter dispersion on the lower jaw, and low Chamfer and controlled Hausdorff distances at the curve level. These findings indicate that DentalSCR robustly handles real-world cephalograms and delivers high-fidelity, clinically inspectable 3D--2D alignment, outperforming conventional baselines.
☆ Going Places: Place Recognition in Artificial and Natural Systems
Place recognition, the ability to identify previously visited locations, is critical for both biological navigation and autonomous systems. This review synthesizes findings from robotic systems, animal studies, and human research to explore how different systems encode and recall place. We examine the computational and representational strategies employed across artificial systems, animals, and humans, highlighting convergent solutions such as topological mapping, cue integration, and memory management. Animal systems reveal evolved mechanisms for multimodal navigation and environmental adaptation, while human studies provide unique insights into semantic place concepts, cultural influences, and introspective capabilities. Artificial systems showcase scalable architectures and data-driven models. We propose a unifying set of concepts by which to consider and develop place recognition mechanisms and identify key challenges such as generalization, robustness, and environmental variability. This review aims to foster innovations in artificial localization by connecting future developments in artificial place recognition systems to insights from both animal navigation research and human spatial cognition studies.
☆ ArchMap: Arch-Flattening and Knowledge-Guided Vision Language Model for Tooth Counting and Structured Dental Understanding
Bohan Zhang, Yiyi Miao, Taoyu Wu, Tong Chen, Ji Jiang, Zhuoxiao Li, Zhe Tang, Limin Yu, Jionglong Su
A structured understanding of intraoral 3D scans is essential for digital orthodontics. However, existing deep-learning approaches rely heavily on modality-specific training, large annotated datasets, and controlled scanning conditions, which limit generalization across devices and hinder deployment in real clinical workflows. Moreover, raw intraoral meshes exhibit substantial variation in arch pose, incomplete geometry caused by occlusion or tooth contact, and a lack of texture cues, making unified semantic interpretation highly challenging. To address these limitations, we propose ArchMap, a training-free and knowledge-guided framework for robust structured dental understanding. ArchMap first introduces a geometry-aware arch-flattening module that standardizes raw 3D meshes into spatially aligned, continuity-preserving multi-view projections. We then construct a Dental Knowledge Base (DKB) encoding hierarchical tooth ontology, dentition-stage policies, and clinical semantics to constrain the symbolic reasoning space. We validate ArchMap on 1060 pre-/post-orthodontic cases, demonstrating robust performance in tooth counting, anatomical partitioning, dentition-stage classification, and the identification of clinical conditions such as crowding, missing teeth, prosthetics, and caries. Compared with supervised pipelines and prompted VLM baselines, ArchMap achieves higher accuracy, reduced semantic drift, and superior stability under sparse or artifact-prone conditions. As a fully training-free system, ArchMap demonstrates that combining geometric normalization with ontology-guided multimodal reasoning offers a practical and scalable solution for the structured analysis of 3D intraoral scans in modern digital orthodontics.
☆ Step by Step Network
Scaling up network depth is a fundamental pursuit in neural architecture design, as theory suggests that deeper models offer exponentially greater capability. Benefiting from the residual connections, modern neural networks can scale up to more than one hundred layers and enjoy wide success. However, as networks continue to deepen, current architectures often struggle to realize their theoretical capacity improvements, calling for more advanced designs to further unleash the potential of deeper networks. In this paper, we identify two key barriers that obstruct residual models from scaling deeper: shortcut degradation and limited width. Shortcut degradation hinders deep-layer learning, while the inherent depth-width trade-off imposes limited width. To mitigate these issues, we propose a generalized residual architecture dubbed Step by Step Network (StepsNet) to bridge the gap between theoretical potential and practical performance of deep models. Specifically, we separate features along the channel dimension and let the model learn progressively via stacking blocks with increasing width. The resulting method mitigates the two identified problems and serves as a versatile macro design applicable to various models. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently outperforms residual models across diverse tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and language modeling. These results position StepsNet as a superior generalization of the widely adopted residual architecture.
☆ LSP-YOLO: A Lightweight Single-Stage Network for Sitting Posture Recognition on Embedded Devices
With the rise in sedentary behavior, health problems caused by poor sitting posture have drawn increasing attention. Most existing methods, whether using invasive sensors or computer vision, rely on two-stage pipelines, which result in high intrusiveness, intensive computation, and poor real-time performance on embedded edge devices. Inspired by YOLOv11-Pose, a lightweight single-stage network for sitting posture recognition on embedded edge devices termed LSP-YOLO was proposed. By integrating partial convolution(PConv) and Similarity-Aware Activation Module(SimAM), a lightweight module, Light-C3k2, was designed to reduce computational cost while maintaining feature extraction capability. In the recognition head, keypoints were directly mapped to posture classes through pointwise convolution, and intermediate supervision was employed to enable efficient fusion of pose estimation and classification. Furthermore, a dataset containing 5,000 images across six posture categories was constructed for model training and testing. The smallest trained model, LSP-YOLO-n, achieved 94.2% accuracy and 251 Fps on personal computer(PC) with a model size of only 1.9 MB. Meanwhile, real-time and high-accuracy inference under constrained computational resources was demonstrated on the SV830C + GC030A platform. The proposed approach is characterized by high efficiency, lightweight design and deployability, making it suitable for smart classrooms, rehabilitation, and human-computer interaction applications.
comment: Submitted to Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence (EAAI)
☆ Dental3R: Geometry-Aware Pairing for Intraoral 3D Reconstruction from Sparse-View Photographs
Yiyi Miao, Taoyu Wu, Tong Chen, Ji Jiang, Zhe Tang, Zhengyong Jiang, Angelos Stefanidis, Limin Yu, Jionglong Su
Intraoral 3D reconstruction is fundamental to digital orthodontics, yet conventional methods like intraoral scanning are inaccessible for remote tele-orthodontics, which typically relies on sparse smartphone imagery. While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) shows promise for novel view synthesis, its application to the standard clinical triad of unposed anterior and bilateral buccal photographs is challenging. The large view baselines, inconsistent illumination, and specular surfaces common in intraoral settings can destabilize simultaneous pose and geometry estimation. Furthermore, sparse-view photometric supervision often induces a frequency bias, leading to over-smoothed reconstructions that lose critical diagnostic details. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{Dental3R}, a pose-free, graph-guided pipeline for robust, high-fidelity reconstruction from sparse intraoral photographs. Our method first constructs a Geometry-Aware Pairing Strategy (GAPS) to intelligently select a compact subgraph of high-value image pairs. The GAPS focuses on correspondence matching, thereby improving the stability of the geometry initialization and reducing memory usage. Building on the recovered poses and point cloud, we train the 3DGS model with a wavelet-regularized objective. By enforcing band-limited fidelity using a discrete wavelet transform, our approach preserves fine enamel boundaries and interproximal edges while suppressing high-frequency artifacts. We validate our approach on a large-scale dataset of 950 clinical cases and an additional video-based test set of 195 cases. Experimental results demonstrate that Dental3R effectively handles sparse, unposed inputs and achieves superior novel view synthesis quality for dental occlusion visualization, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.
☆ Iterative Diffusion-Refined Neural Attenuation Fields for Multi-Source Stationary CT Reconstruction: NAF Meets Diffusion Model
Multi-source stationary computed tomography (CT) has recently attracted attention for its ability to achieve rapid image reconstruction, making it suitable for time-sensitive clinical and industrial applications. However, practical systems are often constrained by ultra-sparse-view sampling, which significantly degrades reconstruction quality. Traditional methods struggle under ultra-sparse-view settings, where interpolation becomes inaccurate and the resulting reconstructions are unsatisfactory. To address this challenge, this study proposes Diffusion-Refined Neural Attenuation Fields (Diff-NAF), an iterative framework tailored for multi-source stationary CT under ultra-sparse-view conditions. Diff-NAF combines a Neural Attenuation Field representation with a dual-branch conditional diffusion model. The process begins by training an initial NAF using ultra-sparse-view projections. New projections are then generated through an Angle-Prior Guided Projection Synthesis strategy that exploits inter view priors, and are subsequently refined by a Diffusion-driven Reuse Projection Refinement Module. The refined projections are incorporated as pseudo-labels into the training set for the next iteration. Through iterative refinement, Diff-NAF progressively enhances projection completeness and reconstruction fidelity under ultra-sparse-view conditions, ultimately yielding high-quality CT reconstructions. Experimental results on multiple simulated 3D CT volumes and real projection data demonstrate that Diff-NAF achieves the best performance under ultra-sparse-view conditions.
☆ SAM-Fed: SAM-Guided Federated Semi-Supervised Learning for Medical Image Segmentation
Sahar Nasirihaghighi, Negin Ghamsarian, Yiping Li, Marcel Breeuwer, Raphael Sznitman, Klaus Schoeffmann
Medical image segmentation is clinically important, yet data privacy and the cost of expert annotation limit the availability of labeled data. Federated semi-supervised learning (FSSL) offers a solution but faces two challenges: pseudo-label reliability depends on the strength of local models, and client devices often require compact or heterogeneous architectures due to limited computational resources. These constraints reduce the quality and stability of pseudo-labels, while large models, though more accurate, cannot be trained or used for routine inference on client devices. We propose SAM-Fed, a federated semi-supervised framework that leverages a high-capacity segmentation foundation model to guide lightweight clients during training. SAM-Fed combines dual knowledge distillation with an adaptive agreement mechanism to refine pixel-level supervision. Experiments on skin lesion and polyp segmentation across homogeneous and heterogeneous settings show that SAM-Fed consistently outperforms state-of-the-art FSSL methods.
☆ GEN3D: Generating Domain-Free 3D Scenes from a Single Image
Despite recent advancements in neural 3D reconstruction, the dependence on dense multi-view captures restricts their broader applicability. Additionally, 3D scene generation is vital for advancing embodied AI and world models, which depend on diverse, high-quality scenes for learning and evaluation. In this work, we propose Gen3d, a novel method for generation of high-quality, wide-scope, and generic 3D scenes from a single image. After the initial point cloud is created by lifting the RGBD image, Gen3d maintains and expands its world model. The 3D scene is finalized through optimizing a Gaussian splatting representation. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate the strong generalization capability and superior performance of our method in generating a world model and Synthesizing high-fidelity and consistent novel views.
comment: 5 pages , 2 figures
☆ NeuralBoneReg: A Novel Self-Supervised Method for Robust and Accurate Multi-Modal Bone Surface Registration
Luohong Wu, Matthias Seibold, Nicola A. Cavalcanti, Yunke Ao, Roman Flepp, Aidana Massalimova, Lilian Calvet, Philipp Fürnstahl
In computer- and robot-assisted orthopedic surgery (CAOS), patient-specific surgical plans derived from preoperative imaging define target locations and implant trajectories. During surgery, these plans must be accurately transferred, relying on precise cross-registration between preoperative and intraoperative data. However, substantial modality heterogeneity across imaging modalities makes this registration challenging and error-prone. Robust, automatic, and modality-agnostic bone surface registration is therefore clinically important. We propose NeuralBoneReg, a self-supervised, surface-based framework that registers bone surfaces using 3D point clouds as a modality-agnostic representation. NeuralBoneReg includes two modules: an implicit neural unsigned distance field (UDF) that learns the preoperative bone model, and an MLP-based registration module that performs global initialization and local refinement by generating transformation hypotheses to align the intraoperative point cloud with the neural UDF. Unlike SOTA supervised methods, NeuralBoneReg operates in a self-supervised manner, without requiring inter-subject training data. We evaluated NeuralBoneReg against baseline methods on two publicly available multi-modal datasets: a CT-ultrasound dataset of the fibula and tibia (UltraBones100k) and a CT-RGB-D dataset of spinal vertebrae (SpineDepth). The evaluation also includes a newly introduced CT--ultrasound dataset of cadaveric subjects containing femur and pelvis (UltraBones-Hip), which will be made publicly available. NeuralBoneReg matches or surpasses existing methods across all datasets, achieving mean RRE/RTE of 1.68°/1.86 mm on UltraBones100k, 1.88°/1.89 mm on UltraBones-Hip, and 3.79°/2.45 mm on SpineDepth. These results demonstrate strong generalizability across anatomies and modalities, providing robust and accurate cross-modal alignment for CAOS.
☆ NeuralSSD: A Neural Solver for Signed Distance Surface Reconstruction
We proposed a generalized method, NeuralSSD, for reconstructing a 3D implicit surface from the widely-available point cloud data. NeuralSSD is a solver-based on the neural Galerkin method, aimed at reconstructing higher-quality and accurate surfaces from input point clouds. Implicit method is preferred due to its ability to accurately represent shapes and its robustness in handling topological changes. However, existing parameterizations of implicit fields lack explicit mechanisms to ensure a tight fit between the surface and input data. To address this, we propose a novel energy equation that balances the reliability of point cloud information. Additionally, we introduce a new convolutional network that learns three-dimensional information to achieve superior optimization results. This approach ensures that the reconstructed surface closely adheres to the raw input points and infers valuable inductive biases from point clouds, resulting in a highly accurate and stable surface reconstruction. NeuralSSD is evaluated on a variety of challenging datasets, including the ShapeNet and Matterport datasets, and achieves state-of-the-art results in terms of both surface reconstruction accuracy and generalizability.
comment: Under review
☆ Free Lunch to Meet the Gap: Intermediate Domain Reconstruction for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning
Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CDFSL) endeavors to transfer generalized knowledge from the source domain to target domains using only a minimal amount of training data, which faces a triplet of learning challenges in the meantime, i.e., semantic disjoint, large domain discrepancy, and data scarcity. Different from predominant CDFSL works focused on generalized representations, we make novel attempts to construct Intermediate Domain Proxies (IDP) with source feature embeddings as the codebook and reconstruct the target domain feature with this learned codebook. We then conduct an empirical study to explore the intrinsic attributes from perspectives of visual styles and semantic contents in intermediate domain proxies. Reaping benefits from these attributes of intermediate domains, we develop a fast domain alignment method to use these proxies as learning guidance for target domain feature transformation. With the collaborative learning of intermediate domain reconstruction and target feature transformation, our proposed model is able to surpass the state-of-the-art models by a margin on 8 cross-domain few-shot learning benchmarks.
comment: Accepted to IJCV 2025
☆ Let Language Constrain Geometry: Vision-Language Models as Semantic and Spatial Critics for 3D Generation
Text-to-3D generation has advanced rapidly, yet state-of-the-art models, encompassing both optimization-based and feed-forward architectures, still face two fundamental limitations. First, they struggle with coarse semantic alignment, often failing to capture fine-grained prompt details. Second, they lack robust 3D spatial understanding, leading to geometric inconsistencies and catastrophic failures in part assembly and spatial relationships. To address these challenges, we propose VLM3D, a general framework that repurposes large vision-language models (VLMs) as powerful, differentiable semantic and spatial critics. Our core contribution is a dual-query critic signal derived from the VLM's Yes or No log-odds, which assesses both semantic fidelity and geometric coherence. We demonstrate the generality of this guidance signal across two distinct paradigms: (1) As a reward objective for optimization-based pipelines, VLM3D significantly outperforms existing methods on standard benchmarks. (2) As a test-time guidance module for feed-forward pipelines, it actively steers the iterative sampling process of SOTA native 3D models to correct severe spatial errors. VLM3D establishes a principled and generalizable path to inject the VLM's rich, language-grounded understanding of both semantics and space into diverse 3D generative pipelines.
☆ Gaussian Splatting-based Low-Rank Tensor Representation for Multi-Dimensional Image Recovery
Tensor singular value decomposition (t-SVD) is a promising tool for multi-dimensional image representation, which decomposes a multi-dimensional image into a latent tensor and an accompanying transform matrix. However, two critical limitations of t-SVD methods persist: (1) the approximation of the latent tensor (e.g., tensor factorizations) is coarse and fails to accurately capture spatial local high-frequency information; (2) The transform matrix is composed of fixed basis atoms (e.g., complex exponential atoms in DFT and cosine atoms in DCT) and cannot precisely capture local high-frequency information along the mode-3 fibers. To address these two limitations, we propose a Gaussian Splatting-based Low-rank tensor Representation (GSLR) framework, which compactly and continuously represents multi-dimensional images. Specifically, we leverage tailored 2D Gaussian splatting and 1D Gaussian splatting to generate the latent tensor and transform matrix, respectively. The 2D and 1D Gaussian splatting are indispensable and complementary under this representation framework, which enjoys a powerful representation capability, especially for local high-frequency information. To evaluate the representation ability of the proposed GSLR, we develop an unsupervised GSLR-based multi-dimensional image recovery model. Extensive experiments on multi-dimensional image recovery demonstrate that GSLR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in capturing local high-frequency information.
☆ ManipShield: A Unified Framework for Image Manipulation Detection, Localization and Explanation
Zitong Xu, Huiyu Duan, Xiaoyu Wang, Zhaolin Cai, Kaiwei Zhang, Qiang Hu, Jing Liu, Xiongkuo Min, Guangtao Zhai
With the rapid advancement of generative models, powerful image editing methods now enable diverse and highly realistic image manipulations that far surpass traditional deepfake techniques, posing new challenges for manipulation detection. Existing image manipulation detection and localization (IMDL) benchmarks suffer from limited content diversity, narrow generative-model coverage, and insufficient interpretability, which hinders the generalization and explanation capabilities of current manipulation detection methods. To address these limitations, we introduce \textbf{ManipBench}, a large-scale benchmark for image manipulation detection and localization focusing on AI-edited images. ManipBench contains over 450K manipulated images produced by 25 state-of-the-art image editing models across 12 manipulation categories, among which 100K images are further annotated with bounding boxes, judgment cues, and textual explanations to support interpretable detection. Building upon ManipBench, we propose \textbf{ManipShield}, an all-in-one model based on a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that leverages contrastive LoRA fine-tuning and task-specific decoders to achieve unified image manipulation detection, localization, and explanation. Extensive experiments on ManipBench and several public datasets demonstrate that ManipShield achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits strong generality to unseen manipulation models. Both ManipBench and ManipShield will be released upon publication.
☆ V2VLoc: Robust GNSS-Free Collaborative Perception via LiDAR Localization AAAI2026
Multi-agents rely on accurate poses to share and align observations, enabling a collaborative perception of the environment. However, traditional GNSS-based localization often fails in GNSS-denied environments, making consistent feature alignment difficult in collaboration. To tackle this challenge, we propose a robust GNSS-free collaborative perception framework based on LiDAR localization. Specifically, we propose a lightweight Pose Generator with Confidence (PGC) to estimate compact pose and confidence representations. To alleviate the effects of localization errors, we further develop the Pose-Aware Spatio-Temporal Alignment Transformer (PASTAT), which performs confidence-aware spatial alignment while capturing essential temporal context. Additionally, we present a new simulation dataset, V2VLoc, which can be adapted for both LiDAR localization and collaborative detection tasks. V2VLoc comprises three subsets: Town1Loc, Town4Loc, and V2VDet. Town1Loc and Town4Loc offer multi-traversal sequences for training in localization tasks, whereas V2VDet is specifically intended for the collaborative detection task. Extensive experiments conducted on the V2VLoc dataset demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance under GNSS-denied conditions. We further conduct extended experiments on the real-world V2V4Real dataset to validate the effectiveness and generalizability of PASTAT.
comment: AAAI2026
☆ Enhancing Generalization of Depth Estimation Foundation Model via Weakly-Supervised Adaptation with Regularization AAAI 2026
The emergence of foundation models has substantially advanced zero-shot generalization in monocular depth estimation (MDE), as exemplified by the Depth Anything series. However, given access to some data from downstream tasks, a natural question arises: can the performance of these models be further improved? To this end, we propose WeSTAR, a parameter-efficient framework that performs Weakly supervised Self-Training Adaptation with Regularization, designed to enhance the robustness of MDE foundation models in unseen and diverse domains. We first adopt a dense self-training objective as the primary source of structural self-supervision. To further improve robustness, we introduce semantically-aware hierarchical normalization, which exploits instance-level segmentation maps to perform more stable and multi-scale structural normalization. Beyond dense supervision, we introduce a cost-efficient weak supervision in the form of pairwise ordinal depth annotations to further guide the adaptation process, which enforces informative ordinal constraints to mitigate local topological errors. Finally, a weight regularization loss is employed to anchor the LoRA updates, ensuring training stability and preserving the model's generalizable knowledge. Extensive experiments on both realistic and corrupted out-of-distribution datasets under diverse and challenging scenarios demonstrate that WeSTAR consistently improves generalization and achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of benchmarks.
comment: Accepted by AAAI 2026
☆ Breaking the Passive Learning Trap: An Active Perception Strategy for Human Motion Prediction
Forecasting 3D human motion is an important embodiment of fine-grained understanding and cognition of human behavior by artificial agents. Current approaches excessively rely on implicit network modeling of spatiotemporal relationships and motion characteristics, falling into the passive learning trap that results in redundant and monotonous 3D coordinate information acquisition while lacking actively guided explicit learning mechanisms. To overcome these issues, we propose an Active Perceptual Strategy (APS) for human motion prediction, leveraging quotient space representations to explicitly encode motion properties while introducing auxiliary learning objectives to strengthen spatio-temporal modeling. Specifically, we first design a data perception module that projects poses into the quotient space, decoupling motion geometry from coordinate redundancy. By jointly encoding tangent vectors and Grassmann projections, this module simultaneously achieves geometric dimension reduction, semantic decoupling, and dynamic constraint enforcement for effective motion pose characterization. Furthermore, we introduce a network perception module that actively learns spatio-temporal dependencies through restorative learning. This module deliberately masks specific joints or injects noise to construct auxiliary supervision signals. A dedicated auxiliary learning network is designed to actively adapt and learn from perturbed information. Notably, APS is model agnostic and can be integrated with different prediction models to enhance active perceptual. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves the new state-of-the-art, outperforming existing methods by large margins: 16.3% on H3.6M, 13.9% on CMU Mocap, and 10.1% on 3DPW.
comment: 8 pages, 3 figures
☆ StreamingTalker: Audio-driven 3D Facial Animation with Autoregressive Diffusion Model
Yifan Yang, Zhi Cen, Sida Peng, Xiangwei Chen, Yifu Deng, Xinyu Zhu, Fan Jia, Xiaowei Zhou, Hujun Bao
This paper focuses on the task of speech-driven 3D facial animation, which aims to generate realistic and synchronized facial motions driven by speech inputs.Recent methods have employed audio-conditioned diffusion models for 3D facial animation, achieving impressive results in generating expressive and natural animations.However, these methods process the whole audio sequences in a single pass, which poses two major challenges: they tend to perform poorly when handling audio sequences that exceed the training horizon and will suffer from significant latency when processing long audio inputs. To address these limitations, we propose a novel autoregressive diffusion model that processes input audio in a streaming manner. This design ensures flexibility with varying audio lengths and achieves low latency independent of audio duration. Specifically, we select a limited number of past frames as historical motion context and combine them with the audio input to create a dynamic condition. This condition guides the diffusion process to iteratively generate facial motion frames, enabling real-time synthesis with high-quality results. Additionally, we implemented a real-time interactive demo, highlighting the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. We will release the code at https://zju3dv.github.io/StreamingTalker/.
☆ Measurement-Constrained Sampling for Text-Prompted Blind Face Restoration
Blind face restoration (BFR) may correspond to multiple plausible high-quality (HQ) reconstructions under extremely low-quality (LQ) inputs. However, existing methods typically produce deterministic results, struggling to capture this one-to-many nature. In this paper, we propose a Measurement-Constrained Sampling (MCS) approach that enables diverse LQ face reconstructions conditioned on different textual prompts. Specifically, we formulate BFR as a measurement-constrained generative task by constructing an inverse problem through controlled degradations of coarse restorations, which allows posterior-guided sampling within text-to-image diffusion. Measurement constraints include both Forward Measurement, which ensures results align with input structures, and Reverse Measurement, which produces projection spaces, ensuring that the solution can align with various prompts. Experiments show that our MCS can generate prompt-aligned results and outperforms existing BFR methods. Codes will be released after acceptance.
☆ Orion: A Unified Visual Agent for Multimodal Perception, Advanced Visual Reasoning and Execution
We introduce Orion, a visual agent framework that can take in any modality and generate any modality. Using an agentic framework with multiple tool-calling capabilities, Orion is designed for visual AI tasks and achieves state-of-the-art results. Unlike traditional vision-language models that produce descriptive outputs, Orion orchestrates a suite of specialized computer vision tools, including object detection, keypoint localization, panoptic segmentation, Optical Character Recognition, and geometric analysis, to execute complex multi-step visual workflows. The system achieves competitive performance on MMMU, MMBench, DocVQA, and MMLongBench while extending monolithic vision-language models to production-grade visual intelligence. By combining neural perception with symbolic execution, Orion enables autonomous visual reasoning, marking a transition from passive visual understanding to active, tool-driven visual intelligence.
☆ InstantViR: Real-Time Video Inverse Problem Solver with Distilled Diffusion Prior
Video inverse problems are fundamental to streaming, telepresence, and AR/VR, where high perceptual quality must coexist with tight latency constraints. Diffusion-based priors currently deliver state-of-the-art reconstructions, but existing approaches either adapt image diffusion models with ad hoc temporal regularizers - leading to temporal artifacts - or rely on native video diffusion models whose iterative posterior sampling is far too slow for real-time use. We introduce InstantViR, an amortized inference framework for ultra-fast video reconstruction powered by a pre-trained video diffusion prior. We distill a powerful bidirectional video diffusion model (teacher) into a causal autoregressive student that maps a degraded video directly to its restored version in a single forward pass, inheriting the teacher's strong temporal modeling while completely removing iterative test-time optimization. The distillation is prior-driven: it only requires the teacher diffusion model and known degradation operators, and does not rely on externally paired clean/noisy video data. To further boost throughput, we replace the video-diffusion backbone VAE with a high-efficiency LeanVAE via an innovative teacher-space regularized distillation scheme, enabling low-latency latent-space processing. Across streaming random inpainting, Gaussian deblurring and super-resolution, InstantViR matches or surpasses the reconstruction quality of diffusion-based baselines while running at over 35 FPS on NVIDIA A100 GPUs, achieving up to 100 times speedups over iterative video diffusion solvers. These results show that diffusion-based video reconstruction is compatible with real-time, interactive, editable, streaming scenarios, turning high-quality video restoration into a practical component of modern vision systems.
☆ Multi-Scale Correlation-Aware Transformer for Maritime Vessel Re-Identification
Maritime vessel re-identification (Re-ID) plays a crucial role in advancing maritime monitoring and intelligent situational awareness systems. However, some existing vessel Re-ID methods are directly adapted from pedestrian-focused algorithms, making them ill-suited for mitigating the unique problems present in vessel images, particularly the greater intra-identity variations and more severe missing of local parts, which lead to the emergence of outlier samples within the same identity. To address these challenges, we propose the Multi-scale Correlation-aware Transformer Network (MCFormer), which explicitly models multi-scale correlations across the entire input set to suppress the adverse effects of outlier samples with intra-identity variations or local missing, incorporating two novel modules, the Global Correlation Module (GCM), and the Local Correlation Module (LCM). Specifically, GCM constructs a global similarity affinity matrix across all input images to model global correlations through feature aggregation based on inter-image consistency, rather than solely learning features from individual images as in most existing approaches. Simultaneously, LCM mines and aligns local features of positive samples with contextual similarity to extract local correlations by maintaining a dynamic memory bank, effectively compensating for missing or occluded regions in individual images. To further enhance feature robustness, MCFormer integrates global and local features that have been respectively correlated across multiple scales, effectively capturing latent relationships among image features. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that MCFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance.
☆ Online Data Curation for Object Detection via Marginal Contributions to Dataset-level Average Precision
High-quality data has become a primary driver of progress under scale laws, with curated datasets often outperforming much larger unfiltered ones at lower cost. Online data curation extends this idea by dynamically selecting training samples based on the model's evolving state. While effective in classification and multimodal learning, existing online sampling strategies rarely extend to object detection because of its structural complexity and domain gaps. We introduce DetGain, an online data curation method specifically for object detection that estimates the marginal perturbation of each image to dataset-level Average Precision (AP) based on its prediction quality. By modeling global score distributions, DetGain efficiently estimates the global AP change and computes teacher-student contribution gaps to select informative samples at each iteration. The method is architecture-agnostic and minimally intrusive, enabling straightforward integration into diverse object detection architectures. Experiments on the COCO dataset with multiple representative detectors show consistent improvements in accuracy. DetGain also demonstrates strong robustness under low-quality data and can be effectively combined with knowledge distillation techniques to further enhance performance, highlighting its potential as a general and complementary strategy for data-efficient object detection.
comment: preprint version, under review
☆ MindCross: Fast New Subject Adaptation with Limited Data for Cross-subject Video Reconstruction from Brain Signals AAAI 2026
Reconstructing video from brain signals is an important brain decoding task. Existing brain decoding frameworks are primarily built on a subject-dependent paradigm, which requires large amounts of brain data for each subject. However, the expensive cost of collecting brain-video data causes severe data scarcity. Although some cross-subject methods being introduced, they often overfocus with subject-invariant information while neglecting subject-specific information, resulting in slow fine-tune-based adaptation strategy. To achieve fast and data-efficient new subject adaptation, we propose MindCross, a novel cross-subject framework. MindCross's N specific encoders and one shared encoder are designed to extract subject-specific and subject-invariant information, respectively. Additionally, a Top-K collaboration module is adopted to enhance new subject decoding with the knowledge learned from previous subjects' encoders. Extensive experiments on fMRI/EEG-to-video benchmarks demonstrate MindCross's efficacy and efficiency of cross-subject decoding and new subject adaptation using only one model.
comment: AAAI 2026, 16 pages
☆ Hierarchical Semantic Learning for Multi-Class Aorta Segmentation MICCAI 2024
The aorta, the body's largest artery, is prone to pathologies such as dissection, aneurysm, and atherosclerosis, which often require timely intervention. Minimally invasive repairs involving branch vessels necessitate detailed 3D anatomical analysis. Existing methods often overlook hierarchical anatomical relationships while struggling with severe class imbalance inherent in vascular structures. We address these challenges with a curriculum learning strategy that leverages a novel fractal softmax for hierarchical semantic learning. Inspired by human cognition, our approach progressively learns anatomical constraints by decomposing complex structures from simple to complex components. The curriculum learning framework naturally addresses class imbalance by first establishing robust feature representations for dominant classes before tackling rare but anatomically critical structures, significantly accelerating model convergence in multi-class scenarios. Our two-stage inference strategy achieves up to fivefold acceleration, enhancing clinical practicality. On the validation set at epoch 50, our hierarchical semantic loss improves the Dice score of nnU-Net ResEnc M by 11.65%. The proposed model demonstrates a 5.6% higher Dice score than baselines on the test set. Experimental results show significant improvements in segmentation accuracy and efficiency, making the framework suitable for real-time clinical applications. The implementation code for this challenge entry is publicly available at: https://github.com/PengchengShi1220/AortaSeg24. The code for fractal softmax will be available at https://github.com/PengchengShi1220/fractal-softmax.
comment: Accepted by MICCAI 2024 Workshop AortaSeg
☆ Few-Shot Precise Event Spotting via Unified Multi-Entity Graph and Distillation AAAI
Precise event spotting (PES) aims to recognize fine-grained events at exact moments and has become a key component of sports analytics. This task is particularly challenging due to rapid succession, motion blur, and subtle visual differences. Consequently, most existing methods rely on domain-specific, end-to-end training with large labeled datasets and often struggle in few-shot conditions due to their dependence on pixel- or pose-based inputs alone. However, obtaining large labeled datasets is practically hard. We propose a Unified Multi-Entity Graph Network (UMEG-Net) for few-shot PES. UMEG-Net integrates human skeletons and sport-specific object keypoints into a unified graph and features an efficient spatio-temporal extraction module based on advanced GCN and multi-scale temporal shift. To further enhance performance, we employ multimodal distillation to transfer knowledge from keypoint-based graphs to visual representations. Our approach achieves robust performance with limited labeled data and significantly outperforms baseline models in few-shot settings, providing a scalable and effective solution for few-shot PES. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/LZYAndy/UMEG-Net.
comment: The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2026)
☆ PAVE: An End-to-End Dataset for Production Autonomous Vehicle Evaluation
Most existing autonomous-driving datasets (e.g., KITTI, nuScenes, and the Waymo Perception Dataset), collected by human-driving mode or unidentified driving mode, can only serve as early training for the perception and prediction of autonomous vehicles (AVs). To evaluate the real behavioral safety of AVs controlled in the black box, we present the first end-to-end benchmark dataset collected entirely by autonomous-driving mode in the real world. This dataset contains over 100 hours of naturalistic data from multiple production autonomous-driving vehicle models in the market. We segment the original data into 32,727 key frames, each consisting of four synchronized camera images and high-precision GNSS/IMU data (0.8 cm localization accuracy). For each key frame, 20 Hz vehicle trajectories spanning the past 6 s and future 5 s are provided, along with detailed 2D annotations of surrounding vehicles, pedestrians, traffic lights, and traffic signs. These key frames have rich scenario-level attributes, including driver intent, area type (covering highways, urban roads, and residential areas), lighting (day, night, or dusk), weather (clear or rain), road surface (paved or unpaved), traffic and vulnerable road users (VRU) density, traffic lights, and traffic signs (warning, prohibition, and indication). To evaluate the safety of AVs, we employ an end-to-end motion planning model that predicts vehicle trajectories with an Average Displacement Error (ADE) of 1.4 m on autonomous-driving frames. The dataset continues to expand by over 10 hours of new data weekly, thereby providing a sustainable foundation for research on AV driving behavior analysis and safety evaluation.
☆ GloTok: Global Perspective Tokenizer for Image Reconstruction and Generation
Xuan Zhao, Zhongyu Zhang, Yuge Huang, Yuxi Mi, Guodong Mu, Shouhong Ding, Jun Wang, Rizen Guo, Shuigeng Zhou
Existing state-of-the-art image tokenization methods leverage diverse semantic features from pre-trained vision models for additional supervision, to expand the distribution of latent representations and thereby improve the quality of image reconstruction and generation. These methods employ a locally supervised approach for semantic supervision, which limits the uniformity of semantic distribution. However, VA-VAE proves that a more uniform feature distribution yields better generation performance. In this work, we introduce a Global Perspective Tokenizer (GloTok), which utilizes global relational information to model a more uniform semantic distribution of tokenized features. Specifically, a codebook-wise histogram relation learning method is proposed to transfer the semantics, which are modeled by pre-trained models on the entire dataset, to the semantic codebook. Then, we design a residual learning module that recovers the fine-grained details to minimize the reconstruction error caused by quantization. Through the above design, GloTok delivers more uniformly distributed semantic latent representations, which facilitates the training of autoregressive (AR) models for generating high-quality images without requiring direct access to pre-trained models during the training process. Experiments on the standard ImageNet-1k benchmark clearly show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction performance and generation quality.
☆ UniSER: A Foundation Model for Unified Soft Effects Removal
Jingdong Zhang, Lingzhi Zhang, Qing Liu, Mang Tik Chiu, Connelly Barnes, Yizhou Wang, Haoran You, Xiaoyang Liu, Yuqian Zhou, Zhe Lin, Eli Shechtman, Sohrab Amirghodsi, Xin Li, Wenping Wang, Xiaohang Zhan
Digital images are often degraded by soft effects such as lens flare, haze, shadows, and reflections, which reduce aesthetics even though the underlying pixels remain partially visible. The prevailing works address these degradations in isolation, developing highly specialized, specialist models that lack scalability and fail to exploit the shared underlying essences of these restoration problems. While specialist models are limited, recent large-scale pretrained generalist models offer powerful, text-driven image editing capabilities. while recent general-purpose systems (e.g., GPT-4o, Flux Kontext, Nano Banana) require detailed prompts and often fail to achieve robust removal on these fine-grained tasks or preserve identity of the scene. Leveraging the common essence of soft effects, i.e., semi-transparent occlusions, we introduce a foundational versatile model UniSER, capable of addressing diverse degradations caused by soft effects within a single framework. Our methodology centers on curating a massive 3.8M-pair dataset to ensure robustness and generalization, which includes novel, physically-plausible data to fill critical gaps in public benchmarks, and a tailored training pipeline that fine-tunes a Diffusion Transformer to learn robust restoration priors from this diverse data, integrating fine-grained mask and strength controls. This synergistic approach allows UniSER to significantly outperform both specialist and generalist models, achieving robust, high-fidelity restoration in the wild.
☆ DoGCLR: Dominance-Game Contrastive Learning Network for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition
Existing self-supervised contrastive learning methods for skeleton-based action recognition often process all skeleton regions uniformly, and adopt a first-in-first-out (FIFO) queue to store negative samples, which leads to motion information loss and non-optimal negative sample selection. To address these challenges, this paper proposes Dominance-Game Contrastive Learning network for skeleton-based action Recognition (DoGCLR), a self-supervised framework based on game theory. DoGCLR models the construction of positive and negative samples as a dynamic Dominance Game, where both sample types interact to reach an equilibrium that balances semantic preservation and discriminative strength. Specifically, a spatio-temporal dual weight localization mechanism identifies key motion regions and guides region-wise augmentations to enhance motion diversity while maintaining semantics. In parallel, an entropy-driven dominance strategy manages the memory bank by retaining high entropy (hard) negatives and replacing low-entropy (weak) ones, ensuring consistent exposure to informative contrastive signals. Extensive experiments are conducted on NTU RGB+D and PKU-MMD datasets. On NTU RGB+D 60 X-Sub/X-View, DoGCLR achieves 81.1%/89.4% accuracy, and on NTU RGB+D 120 X-Sub/X-Set, DoGCLR achieves 71.2%/75.5% accuracy, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by 0.1%, 2.7%, 1.1%, and 2.3%, respectively. On PKU-MMD Part I/Part II, DoGCLR performs comparably to the state-of-the-art methods and achieves a 1.9% higher accuracy on Part II, highlighting its strong robustness on more challenging scenarios.
comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, journal
☆ AdaTok: Adaptive Token Compression with Object-Aware Representations for Efficient Multimodal LLMs
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated substantial value in unified text-image understanding and reasoning, primarily by converting images into sequences of patch-level tokens that align with their architectural paradigm. However, patch-level tokenization leads to a quadratic growth in image tokens, burdening MLLMs' understanding and reasoning with enormous computation and memory. Additionally, the traditional patch-wise scanning tokenization workflow misaligns with the human vision cognition system, further leading to hallucination and computational redundancy. To address this issue, we propose an object-level token merging strategy for Adaptive Token compression, revealing the consistency with human vision system. The experiments are conducted on multiple comprehensive benchmarks, which show that our approach averagely, utilizes only 10% tokens while achieving almost 96% of the vanilla model's performance. More extensive experimental results in comparison with relevant works demonstrate the superiority of our method in balancing compression ratio and performance. Our code will be available.
☆ RoboTidy : A 3D Gaussian Splatting Household Tidying Benchmark for Embodied Navigation and Action
Household tidying is an important application area, yet current benchmarks neither model user preferences nor support mobility, and they generalize poorly, making it hard to comprehensively assess integrated language-to-action capabilities. To address this, we propose RoboTidy, a unified benchmark for language-guided household tidying that supports Vision-Language-Action (VLA) and Vision-Language-Navigation (VLN) training and evaluation. RoboTidy provides 500 photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) household scenes (covering 500 objects and containers) with collisions, formulates tidying as an "Action (Object, Container)" list, and supplies 6.4k high-quality manipulation demonstration trajectories and 1.5k naviagtion trajectories to support both few-shot and large-scale training. We also deploy RoboTidy in the real world for object tidying, establishing an end-to-end benchmark for household tidying. RoboTidy offers a scalable platform and bridges a key gap in embodied AI by enabling holistic and realistic evaluation of language-guided robots.
☆ MVI-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Robustness to Misleading Visual Inputs in LVLMs
Evaluating the robustness of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) is essential for their continued development and responsible deployment in real-world applications. However, existing robustness benchmarks typically focus on hallucination or misleading textual inputs, while largely overlooking the equally critical challenge posed by misleading visual inputs in assessing visual understanding. To fill this important gap, we introduce MVI-Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark specially designed for evaluating how Misleading Visual Inputs undermine the robustness of LVLMs. Grounded in fundamental visual primitives, the design of MVI-Bench centers on three hierarchical levels of misleading visual inputs: Visual Concept, Visual Attribute, and Visual Relationship. Using this taxonomy, we curate six representative categories and compile 1,248 expertly annotated VQA instances. To facilitate fine-grained robustness evaluation, we further introduce MVI-Sensitivity, a novel metric that characterizes LVLM robustness at a granular level. Empirical results across 18 state-of-the-art LVLMs uncover pronounced vulnerabilities to misleading visual inputs, and our in-depth analyses on MVI-Bench provide actionable insights that can guide the development of more reliable and robust LVLMs. The benchmark and codebase can be accessed at https://github.com/chenyil6/MVI-Bench.
comment: 16 pages, 8 figures
☆ Learning Representation and Synergy Invariances: A Povable Framework for Generalized Multimodal Face Anti-Spoofing
Xun Lin, Shuai Wang, Yi Yu, Zitong Yu, Jiale Zhou, Yizhong Liu, Xiaochun Cao, Alex Kot, Yefeng Zheng
Multimodal Face Anti-Spoofing (FAS) methods, which integrate multiple visual modalities, often suffer even more severe performance degradation than unimodal FAS when deployed in unseen domains. This is mainly due to two overlooked risks that affect cross-domain multimodal generalization. The first is the modal representation invariant risk, i.e., whether representations remain generalizable under domain shift. We theoretically show that the inherent class asymmetry in FAS (diverse spoofs vs. compact reals) enlarges the upper bound of generalization error, and this effect is further amplified in multimodal settings. The second is the modal synergy invariant risk, where models overfit to domain-specific inter-modal correlations. Such spurious synergy cannot generalize to unseen attacks in target domains, leading to performance drops. To solve these issues, we propose a provable framework, namely Multimodal Representation and Synergy Invariance Learning (RiSe). For representation risk, RiSe introduces Asymmetric Invariant Risk Minimization (AsyIRM), which learns an invariant spherical decision boundary in radial space to fit asymmetric distributions, while preserving domain cues in angular space. For synergy risk, RiSe employs Multimodal Synergy Disentanglement (MMSD), a self-supervised task enhancing intrinsic, generalizable modal features via cross-sample mixing and disentanglement. Theoretical analysis and experiments verify RiSe, which achieves state-of-the-art cross-domain performance.
☆ Wave-Former: Through-Occlusion 3D Reconstruction via Wireless Shape Completion
We present Wave-Former, a novel method capable of high-accuracy 3D shape reconstruction for completely occluded, diverse, everyday objects. This capability can open new applications spanning robotics, augmented reality, and logistics. Our approach leverages millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless signals, which can penetrate common occlusions and reflect off hidden objects. In contrast to past mmWave reconstruction methods, which suffer from limited coverage and high noise, Wave-Former introduces a physics-aware shape completion model capable of inferring full 3D geometry. At the heart of Wave-Former's design is a novel three-stage pipeline which bridges raw wireless signals with recent advancements in vision-based shape completion by incorporating physical properties of mmWave signals. The pipeline proposes candidate geometric surfaces, employs a transformer-based shape completion model designed specifically for mmWave signals, and finally performs entropy-guided surface selection. This enables Wave-Former to be trained using entirely synthetic point-clouds, while demonstrating impressive generalization to real-world data.In head-to-head comparisons with state-of-the-art baselines, Wave-Former raises recall from 54% to 72% while maintaining a high precision of 85%.
☆ iGaussian: Real-Time Camera Pose Estimation via Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting Inversion IROS 2025
Recent trends in SLAM and visual navigation have embraced 3D Gaussians as the preferred scene representation, highlighting the importance of estimating camera poses from a single image using a pre-built Gaussian model. However, existing approaches typically rely on an iterative \textit{render-compare-refine} loop, where candidate views are first rendered using NeRF or Gaussian Splatting, then compared against the target image, and finally, discrepancies are used to update the pose. This multi-round process incurs significant computational overhead, hindering real-time performance in robotics. In this paper, we propose iGaussian, a two-stage feed-forward framework that achieves real-time camera pose estimation through direct 3D Gaussian inversion. Our method first regresses a coarse 6DoF pose using a Gaussian Scene Prior-based Pose Regression Network with spatial uniform sampling and guided attention mechanisms, then refines it through feature matching and multi-model fusion. The key contribution lies in our cross-correlation module that aligns image embeddings with 3D Gaussian attributes without differentiable rendering, coupled with a Weighted Multiview Predictor that fuses features from Multiple strategically sampled viewpoints. Experimental results on the NeRF Synthetic, Mip-NeRF 360, and T\&T+DB datasets demonstrate a significant performance improvement over previous methods, reducing median rotation errors to 0.2° while achieving 2.87 FPS tracking on mobile robots, which is an impressive 10 times speedup compared to optimization-based approaches. Code: https://github.com/pythongod-exe/iGaussian
comment: IROS 2025
☆ SMART: Shot-Aware Multimodal Video Moment Retrieval with Audio-Enhanced MLLM
Video Moment Retrieval is a task in video understanding that aims to localize a specific temporal segment in an untrimmed video based on a natural language query. Despite recent progress in moment retrieval from videos using both traditional techniques and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM), most existing methods still rely on coarse temporal understanding and a single visual modality, limiting performance on complex videos. To address this, we introduce \textit{S}hot-aware \textit{M}ultimodal \textit{A}udio-enhanced \textit{R}etrieval of \textit{T}emporal \textit{S}egments (SMART), an MLLM-based framework that integrates audio cues and leverages shot-level temporal structure. SMART enriches multimodal representations by combining audio and visual features while applying \textbf{Shot-aware Token Compression}, which selectively retains high-information tokens within each shot to reduce redundancy and preserve fine-grained temporal details. We also refine prompt design to better utilize audio-visual cues. Evaluations on Charades-STA and QVHighlights show that SMART achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods, including a 1.61\% increase in R1@0.5 and 2.59\% gain in R1@0.7 on Charades-STA.
☆ Attention Via Convolutional Nearest Neighbors
The shift from Convolutional Neural Networks to Transformers has reshaped computer vision, yet these two architectural families are typically viewed as fundamentally distinct. We argue that convolution and self-attention, despite their apparent differences, can be unified within a single k-nearest neighbor aggregation framework. The critical insight is that both operations are special cases of neighbor selection and aggregation; convolution selects neighbors by spatial proximity, while attention selects by feature similarity, revealing they exist on a continuous spectrum. We introduce Convolutional Nearest Neighbors (ConvNN), a unified framework that formalizes this connection. Crucially, ConvNN serves as a drop-in replacement for convolutional and attention layers, enabling systematic exploration of the intermediate spectrum between these two extremes. We validate the framework's coherence on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 classification tasks across two complementary architectures: (1) Hybrid branching in VGG improves accuracy on both CIFAR datasets by combining spatial-proximity and feature-similarity selection; and (2) ConvNN in ViT outperforms standard attention and other attention variants on both datasets. Extensive ablations on $k$ values and architectural variants reveal that interpolating along this spectrum provides regularization benefits by balancing local and global receptive fields. Our work provides a unifying framework that dissolves the apparent distinction between convolution and attention, with implications for designing more principled and interpretable vision architectures.
☆ Multi-view Phase-aware Pedestrian-Vehicle Incident Reasoning Framework with Vision-Language Models
Pedestrian-vehicle incidents remain a critical urban safety challenge, with pedestrians accounting for over 20% of global traffic fatalities. Although existing video-based systems can detect when incidents occur, they provide little insight into how these events unfold across the distinct cognitive phases of pedestrian behavior. Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong potential for video understanding, but they remain limited in that they typically process videos in isolation, without explicit temporal structuring or multi-view integration. This paper introduces Multi-view Phase-aware Pedestrian-Vehicle Incident Reasoning (MP-PVIR), a unified framework that systematically processes multi-view video streams into structured diagnostic reports through four stages: (1) event-triggered multi-view video acquisition, (2) pedestrian behavior phase segmentation, (3) phase-specific multi-view reasoning, and (4) hierarchical synthesis and diagnostic reasoning. The framework operationalizes behavioral theory by automatically segmenting incidents into cognitive phases, performing synchronized multi-view analysis within each phase, and synthesizing results into causal chains with targeted prevention strategies. Particularly, two specialized VLMs underpin the MP-PVIR pipeline: TG-VLM for behavioral phase segmentation (mIoU = 0.4881) and PhaVR-VLM for phase-aware multi-view analysis, achieving a captioning score of 33.063 and up to 64.70% accuracy on question answering. Finally, a designated large language model is used to generate comprehensive reports detailing scene understanding, behavior interpretation, causal reasoning, and prevention recommendations. Evaluation on the Woven Traffic Safety dataset shows that MP-PVIR effectively translates multi-view video data into actionable insights, advancing AI-driven traffic safety analytics for vehicle-infrastructure cooperative systems.
comment: 23 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables
☆ Coffee: Controllable Diffusion Fine-tuning
Text-to-image diffusion models can generate diverse content with flexible prompts, which makes them well-suited for customization through fine-tuning with a small amount of user-provided data. However, controllable fine-tuning that prevents models from learning undesired concepts present in the fine-tuning data, and from entangling those concepts with user prompts, remains an open challenge. It is crucial for downstream tasks like bias mitigation, preventing malicious adaptation, attribute disentanglement, and generalizable fine-tuning of diffusion policy. We propose Coffee that allows using language to specify undesired concepts to regularize the adaptation process. The crux of our method lies in keeping the embeddings of the user prompt from aligning with undesired concepts. Crucially, Coffee requires no additional training and enables flexible modification of undesired concepts by modifying textual descriptions. We evaluate Coffee by fine-tuning on images associated with user prompts paired with undesired concepts. Experimental results demonstrate that Coffee can prevent text-to-image models from learning specified undesired concepts during fine-tuning and outperforms existing methods. Code will be released upon acceptance.
☆ CascadedViT: Cascaded Chunk-FeedForward and Cascaded Group Attention Vision Transformer
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a range of computer vision tasks; however, their high computational, memory, and energy demands hinder deployment on resource-constrained platforms. In this paper, we propose \emph{Cascaded-ViT (CViT)}, a lightweight and compute-efficient vision transformer architecture featuring a novel feedforward network design called \emph{Cascaded-Chunk Feed Forward Network (CCFFN)}. By splitting input features, CCFFN improves parameter and FLOP efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. Experiments on ImageNet-1K show that our \emph{CViT-XL} model achieves 75.5\% Top-1 accuracy while reducing FLOPs by 15\% and energy consumption by 3.3\% compared to EfficientViT-M5. Across various model sizes, the CViT family consistently exhibits the lowest energy consumption, making it suitable for deployment on battery-constrained devices such as mobile phones and drones. Furthermore, when evaluated using a new metric called \emph{Accuracy-Per-FLOP (APF)}, which quantifies compute efficiency relative to accuracy, CViT models consistently achieve top-ranking efficiency. Particularly, CViT-L is 2.2\% more accurate than EfficientViT-M2 while having comparable APF scores.
☆ $A^2$GC: $A$symmetric $A$ggregation with Geometric Constraints for Locally Aggregated Descriptors
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) aims to match query images against a database using visual cues. State-of-the-art methods aggregate features from deep backbones to form global descriptors. Optimal transport-based aggregation methods reformulate feature-to-cluster assignment as a transport problem, but the standard Sinkhorn algorithm symmetrically treats source and target marginals, limiting effectiveness when image features and cluster centers exhibit substantially different distributions. We propose an asymmetric aggregation VPR method with geometric constraints for locally aggregated descriptors, called $A^2$GC-VPR. Our method employs row-column normalization averaging with separate marginal calibration, enabling asymmetric matching that adapts to distributional discrepancies in visual place recognition. Geometric constraints are incorporated through learnable coordinate embeddings, computing compatibility scores fused with feature similarities, thereby promoting spatially proximal features to the same cluster and enhancing spatial awareness. Experimental results on MSLS, NordLand, and Pittsburgh datasets demonstrate superior performance, validating the effectiveness of our approach in improving matching accuracy and robustness.
comment: 8 pages, 4figures
☆ RTS-Mono: A Real-Time Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation Method for Real-World Deployment
Depth information is crucial for autonomous driving and intelligent robot navigation. The simplicity and flexibility of self-supervised monocular depth estimation are conducive to its role in these fields. However, most existing monocular depth estimation models consume many computing resources. Although some methods have reduced the model's size and improved computing efficiency, the performance deteriorates, seriously hindering the real-world deployment of self-supervised monocular depth estimation models in the real world. To address this problem, we proposed a real-time self-supervised monocular depth estimation method and implemented it in the real world. It is called RTS-Mono, which is a lightweight and efficient encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder is based on Lite-Encoder, and the decoder is designed with a multi-scale sparse fusion framework to minimize redundancy, ensure performance, and improve inference speed. RTS-Mono achieved state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance in high and low resolutions with extremely low parameter counts (3 M) in experiments based on the KITTI dataset. Compared with lightweight methods, RTS-Mono improved Abs Rel and Sq Rel by 5.6% and 9.8% at low resolution and improved Sq Rel and RMSE by 6.1% and 1.9% at high resolution. In real-world deployment experiments, RTS-Mono has extremely high accuracy and can perform real-time inference on Nvidia Jetson Orin at a speed of 49 FPS. Source code is available at https://github.com/ZYCheng777/RTS-Mono.
comment: 14 pages, 10 figures
☆ Text-Driven Reasoning Video Editing via Reinforcement Learning on Digital Twin Representations
Text-driven video editing enables users to modify video content only using text queries. While existing methods can modify video content if explicit descriptions of editing targets with precise spatial locations and temporal boundaries are provided, these requirements become impractical when users attempt to conceptualize edits through implicit queries referencing semantic properties or object relationships. We introduce reasoning video editing, a task where video editing models must interpret implicit queries through multi-hop reasoning to infer editing targets before executing modifications, and a first model attempting to solve this complex task, RIVER (Reasoning-based Implicit Video Editor). RIVER decouples reasoning from generation through digital twin representations of video content that preserve spatial relationships, temporal trajectories, and semantic attributes. A large language model then processes this representation jointly with the implicit query, performing multi-hop reasoning to determine modifications, then outputs structured instructions that guide a diffusion-based editor to execute pixel-level changes. RIVER training uses reinforcement learning with rewards that evaluate reasoning accuracy and generation quality. Finally, we introduce RVEBenchmark, a benchmark of 100 videos with 519 implicit queries spanning three levels and categories of reasoning complexity specifically for reasoning video editing. RIVER demonstrates best performance on the proposed RVEBenchmark and also achieves state-of-the-art performance on two additional video editing benchmarks (VegGIE and FiVE), where it surpasses six baseline methods.
☆ FAPE-IR: Frequency-Aware Planning and Execution Framework for All-in-One Image Restoration
All-in-One Image Restoration (AIO-IR) aims to develop a unified model that can handle multiple degradations under complex conditions. However, existing methods often rely on task-specific designs or latent routing strategies, making it hard to adapt to real-world scenarios with various degradations. We propose FAPE-IR, a Frequency-Aware Planning and Execution framework for image restoration. It uses a frozen Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) as a planner to analyze degraded images and generate concise, frequency-aware restoration plans. These plans guide a LoRA-based Mixture-of-Experts (LoRA-MoE) module within a diffusion-based executor, which dynamically selects high- or low-frequency experts, complemented by frequency features of the input image. To further improve restoration quality and reduce artifacts, we introduce adversarial training and a frequency regularization loss. By coupling semantic planning with frequency-based restoration, FAPE-IR offers a unified and interpretable solution for all-in-one image restoration. Extensive experiments show that FAPE-IR achieves state-of-the-art performance across seven restoration tasks and exhibits strong zero-shot generalization under mixed degradations.
☆ BCE3S: Binary Cross-Entropy Based Tripartite Synergistic Learning for Long-tailed Recognition AAAI-2026
For long-tailed recognition (LTR) tasks, high intra-class compactness and inter-class separability in both head and tail classes, as well as balanced separability among all the classifier vectors, are preferred. The existing LTR methods based on cross-entropy (CE) loss not only struggle to learn features with desirable properties but also couple imbalanced classifier vectors in the denominator of its Softmax, amplifying the imbalance effects in LTR. In this paper, for the LTR, we propose a binary cross-entropy (BCE)-based tripartite synergistic learning, termed BCE3S, which consists of three components: (1) BCE-based joint learning optimizes both the classifier and sample features, which achieves better compactness and separability among features than the CE-based joint learning, by decoupling the metrics between feature and the imbalanced classifier vectors in multiple Sigmoid; (2) BCE-based contrastive learning further improves the intra-class compactness of features; (3) BCE-based uniform learning balances the separability among classifier vectors and interactively enhances the feature properties by combining with the joint learning. The extensive experiments show that the LTR model trained by BCE3S not only achieves higher compactness and separability among sample features, but also balances the classifier's separability, achieving SOTA performance on various long-tailed datasets such as CIFAR10-LT, CIFAR100-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist2018.
comment: [AAAI-2026] code: https://github.com/wakinghours-github/BCE3S
☆ SMGeo: Cross-View Object Geo-Localization with Grid-Level Mixture-of-Experts
Cross-view object Geo-localization aims to precisely pinpoint the same object across large-scale satellite imagery based on drone images. Due to significant differences in viewpoint and scale, coupled with complex background interference, traditional multi-stage "retrieval-matching" pipelines are prone to cumulative errors. To address this, we present SMGeo, a promptable end-to-end transformer-based model for object Geo-localization. This model supports click prompting and can output object Geo-localization in real time when prompted to allow for interactive use. The model employs a fully transformer-based architecture, utilizing a Swin-Transformer for joint feature encoding of both drone and satellite imagery and an anchor-free transformer detection head for coordinate regression. In order to better capture both inter-modal and intra-view dependencies, we introduce a grid-level sparse Mixture-of-Experts (GMoE) into the cross-view encoder, allowing it to adaptively activate specialized experts according to the content, scale and source of each grid. We also employ an anchor-free detection head for coordinate regression, directly predicting object locations via heat-map supervision in the reference images. This approach avoids scale bias and matching complexity introduced by predefined anchor boxes. On the drone-to-satellite task, SMGeo achieves leading performance in accuracy at IoU=0.25 and mIoU metrics (e.g., 87.51%, 62.50%, and 61.45% in the test set, respectively), significantly outperforming representative methods such as DetGeo (61.97%, 57.66%, and 54.05%, respectively). Ablation studies demonstrate complementary gains from shared encoding, query-guided fusion, and grid-level sparse mixture-of-experts.
☆ GCA-ResUNet:Image segmentation in medical images using grouped coordinate attention
Medical image segmentation underpins computer-aided diagnosis and therapy by supporting clinical diagnosis, preoperative planning, and disease monitoring. While U-Net style convolutional neural networks perform well due to their encoder-decoder structures with skip connections, they struggle to capture long-range dependencies. Transformer-based variants address global context but often require heavy computation and large training datasets. This paper proposes GCA-ResUNet, an efficient segmentation network that integrates Grouped Coordinate Attention (GCA) into ResNet-50 residual blocks. GCA uses grouped coordinate modeling to jointly encode global dependencies across channels and spatial locations, strengthening feature representation and boundary delineation while adding minimal parameter and FLOP overhead compared with self-attention. On the Synapse dataset, GCA-ResUNet achieves a Dice score of 86.11%, and on the ACDC dataset, it reaches 92.64%, surpassing several state-of-the-art baselines while maintaining fast inference and favorable computational efficiency. These results indicate that GCA offers a practical way to enhance convolutional architectures with global modeling capability, enabling high-accuracy and resource-efficient medical image segmentation.
☆ Error-Driven Scene Editing for 3D Grounding in Large Language Models
Despite recent progress in 3D-LLMs, they remain limited in accurately grounding language to visual and spatial elements in 3D environments. This limitation stems in part from training data that focuses on language reasoning rather than spatial understanding due to scarce 3D resources, leaving inherent grounding biases unresolved. To address this, we propose 3D scene editing as a key mechanism to generate precise visual counterfactuals that mitigate these biases through fine-grained spatial manipulation, without requiring costly scene reconstruction or large-scale 3D data collection. Furthermore, to make these edits targeted and directly address the specific weaknesses of the model, we introduce DEER-3D, an error-driven framework following a structured "Decompose, Diagnostic Evaluation, Edit, and Re-train" workflow, rather than broadly or randomly augmenting data as in conventional approaches. Specifically, upon identifying a grounding failure of the 3D-LLM, our framework first diagnoses the exact predicate-level error (e.g., attribute or spatial relation). It then executes minimal, predicate-aligned 3D scene edits, such as recoloring or repositioning, to produce targeted counterfactual supervision for iterative model fine-tuning, significantly enhancing grounding accuracy. We evaluate our editing pipeline across multiple benchmarks for 3D grounding and scene understanding tasks, consistently demonstrating improvements across all evaluated datasets through iterative refinement. DEER-3D underscores the effectiveness of targeted, error-driven scene editing in bridging linguistic reasoning capabilities with spatial grounding in 3D LLMs.
comment: Code: https://github.com/zhangyuejoslin/Deer-3D
☆ Automated glenoid bone loss measurement and segmentation in CT scans for pre-operative planning in shoulder instability
Reliable measurement of glenoid bone loss is essential for operative planning in shoulder instability, but current manual and semi-automated methods are time-consuming and often subject to interreader variability. We developed and validated a fully automated deep learning pipeline for measuring glenoid bone loss on three-dimensional computed tomography (CT) scans using a linear-based, en-face view, best-circle method. Shoulder CT images of 91 patients (average age, 40 years; range, 14-89 years; 65 men) were retrospectively collected along with manual labels including glenoid segmentation, landmarks, and bone loss measurements. The multi-stage algorithm has three main stages: (1) segmentation, where we developed a U-Net to automatically segment the glenoid and humerus; (2) anatomical landmark detection, where a second network predicts glenoid rim points; and (3) geometric fitting, where we applied principal component analysis (PCA), projection, and circle fitting to compute the percentage of bone loss. The automated measurements showed strong agreement with consensus readings and exceeded surgeon-to-surgeon consistency (intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) 0.84 vs 0.78), including in low- and high-bone-loss subgroups (ICC 0.71 vs 0.63 and 0.83 vs 0.21, respectively; P < 0.001). For classifying patients into low, medium, and high bone-loss categories, the pipeline achieved a recall of 0.714 for low and 0.857 for high severity, with no low cases misclassified as high or vice versa. These results suggest that our method is a time-efficient and clinically reliable tool for preoperative planning in shoulder instability and for screening patients with substantial glenoid bone loss. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Edenliu1/Auto-Glenoid-Measurement-DL-Pipeline.
☆ Zero-Training Task-Specific Model Synthesis for Few-Shot Medical Image Classification
Deep learning models have achieved remarkable success in medical image analysis but are fundamentally constrained by the requirement for large-scale, meticulously annotated datasets. This dependency on "big data" is a critical bottleneck in the medical domain, where patient data is inherently difficult to acquire and expert annotation is expensive, particularly for rare diseases where samples are scarce by definition. To overcome this fundamental challenge, we propose a novel paradigm: Zero-Training Task-Specific Model Synthesis (ZS-TMS). Instead of adapting a pre-existing model or training a new one, our approach leverages a large-scale, pre-trained generative engine to directly synthesize the entire set of parameters for a task-specific classifier. Our framework, the Semantic-Guided Parameter Synthesizer (SGPS), takes as input minimal, multi-modal task information as little as a single example image (1-shot) and a corresponding clinical text description to directly synthesize the entire set of parameters for a task-specific classifier.
The generative engine interprets these inputs to generate the weights for a lightweight, efficient classifier (e.g., an EfficientNet-V2), which can be deployed for inference immediately without any task-specific training or fine-tuning. We conduct extensive evaluations on challenging few-shot classification benchmarks derived from the ISIC 2018 skin lesion dataset and a custom rare disease dataset. Our results demonstrate that SGPS establishes a new state-of-the-art, significantly outperforming advanced few-shot and zero-shot learning methods, especially in the ultra-low data regimes of 1-shot and 5-shot classification. This work paves the way for the rapid development and deployment of AI-powered diagnostic tools, particularly for the long tail of rare diseases where data is critically limited.
☆ CORE: Compact Object-centric REpresentations as a New Paradigm for Token Merging in LVLMs
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) usually suffer from prohibitive computational and memory costs due to the quadratic growth of visual tokens with image resolution. Existing token compression methods, while varied, often lack a high-level semantic understanding, leading to suboptimal merges, information redundancy, or context loss. To address these limitations, we introduce CORE (Compact Object-centric REpresentations), a new paradigm for visual token compression. CORE leverages an efficient segmentation decoder to generate object masks, which serve as a high-level semantic prior to guide the merging of visual tokens into a compact set of object-centric representations. Furthermore, a novel centroid-guided sorting mechanism restores a coherent spatial order to the merged tokens, preserving vital positional information. Extensive experiments show that CORE not only establishes a new state-of-the-art on six authoritative benchmarks for fixed-rate compression, but also achieves dramatic efficiency gains in adaptive-rate settings. Even under extreme compression, after aggressively retaining with only 2.2% of all visual tokens, CORE still maintains 97.4% of baseline performance. Our work demonstrates the superiority of object-centric representations for efficient and effective LVLM processing.
☆ ELiC: Efficient LiDAR Geometry Compression via Cross-Bit-depth Feature Propagation and Bag-of-Encoders
Hierarchical LiDAR geometry compression encodes voxel occupancies from low to high bit-depths, yet prior methods treat each depth independently and re-estimate local context from coordinates at every level, limiting compression efficiency. We present ELiC, a real-time framework that combines cross-bit-depth feature propagation, a Bag-of-Encoders (BoE) selection scheme, and a Morton-order-preserving hierarchy. Cross-bit-depth propagation reuses features extracted at denser, lower depths to support prediction at sparser, higher depths. BoE selects, per depth, the most suitable coding network from a small pool, adapting capacity to observed occupancy statistics without training a separate model for each level. The Morton hierarchy maintains global Z-order across depth transitions, eliminating per-level sorting and reducing latency. Together these components improve entropy modeling and computation efficiency, yielding state-of-the-art compression at real-time throughput on Ford and SemanticKITTI. Code and models will be released upon publication.
☆ Semantic Context Matters: Improving Conditioning for Autoregressive Models
Recently, autoregressive (AR) models have shown strong potential in image generation, offering better scalability and easier integration with unified multi-modal systems compared to diffusion-based methods. However, extending AR models to general image editing remains challenging due to weak and inefficient conditioning, often leading to poor instruction adherence and visual artifacts. To address this, we propose SCAR, a Semantic-Context-driven method for Autoregressive models. SCAR introduces two key components: Compressed Semantic Prefilling, which encodes high-level semantics into a compact and efficient prefix, and Semantic Alignment Guidance, which aligns the last visual hidden states with target semantics during autoregressive decoding to enhance instruction fidelity. Unlike decoding-stage injection methods, SCAR builds upon the flexibility and generality of vector-quantized-based prefilling while overcoming its semantic limitations and high cost. It generalizes across both next-token and next-set AR paradigms with minimal architectural changes. SCAR achieves superior visual fidelity and semantic alignment on both instruction editing and controllable generation benchmarks, outperforming prior AR-based methods while maintaining controllability. All code will be released.
☆ The CHASM-SWPC Dataset for Coronal Hole Detection & Analysis
Coronal holes (CHs) are low-activity, low-density solar coronal regions with open magnetic field lines (Cranmer 2009). In the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) spectrum, CHs appear as dark patches. Using daily hand-drawn maps from the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), we developed a semi-automated pipeline to digitize the SWPC maps into binary segmentation masks. The resulting masks constitute the CHASM-SWPC dataset, a high-quality dataset to train and test automated CH detection models, which is released with this paper. We developed CHASM (Coronal Hole Annotation using Semi-automatic Methods), a software tool for semi-automatic annotation that enables users to rapidly and accurately annotate SWPC maps. The CHASM tool enabled us to annotate 1,111 CH masks, comprising the CHASM-SWPC-1111 dataset. We then trained multiple CHRONNOS (Coronal Hole RecOgnition Neural Network Over multi-Spectral-data) architecture (Jarolim et al. 2021) neural networks using the CHASM-SWPC dataset and compared their performance. Training the CHRONNOS neural network on these data achieved an accuracy of 0.9805, a True Skill Statistic (TSS) of 0.6807, and an intersection-over-union (IoU) of 0.5668, which is higher than the original pretrained CHRONNOS model Jarolim et al. (2021) achieved an accuracy of 0.9708, a TSS of 0.6749, and an IoU of 0.4805, when evaluated on the CHASM-SWPC-1111 test set.
☆ Saliency-Guided Deep Learning for Bridge Defect Detection in Drone Imagery
Anomaly object detection and classification are one of the main challenging tasks in computer vision and pattern recognition. In this paper, we propose a new method to automatically detect, localize and classify defects in concrete bridge structures using drone imagery. This framework is constituted of two main stages. The first stage uses saliency for defect region proposals where defects often exhibit local discontinuities in the normal surface patterns with regard to their surrounding. The second stage employs a YOLOX-based deep learning detector that operates on saliency-enhanced images obtained by applying bounding-box level brightness augmentation to salient defect regions. Experimental results on standard datasets confirm the performance of our framework and its suitability in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency, which give a huge potential to be implemented in a self-powered inspection system.
☆ Flood-LDM: Generalizable Latent Diffusion Models for rapid and accurate zero-shot High-Resolution Flood Mapping WACV
Sun Han Neo, Sachith Seneviratne, Herath Mudiyanselage Viraj Vidura Herath, Abhishek Saha, Sanka Rasnayaka, Lucy Amanda Marshall
Flood prediction is critical for emergency planning and response to mitigate human and economic losses. Traditional physics-based hydrodynamic models generate high-resolution flood maps using numerical methods requiring fine-grid discretization; which are computationally intensive and impractical for real-time large-scale applications. While recent studies have applied convolutional neural networks for flood map super-resolution with good accuracy and speed, they suffer from limited generalizability to unseen areas. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that leverages latent diffusion models to perform super-resolution on coarse-grid flood maps, with the objective of achieving the accuracy of fine-grid flood maps while significantly reducing inference time. Experimental results demonstrate that latent diffusion models substantially decrease the computational time required to produce high-fidelity flood maps without compromising on accuracy, enabling their use in real-time flood risk management. Moreover, diffusion models exhibit superior generalizability across different physical locations, with transfer learning further accelerating adaptation to new geographic regions. Our approach also incorporates physics-informed inputs, addressing the common limitation of black-box behavior in machine learning, thereby enhancing interpretability. Code is available at https://github.com/neosunhan/flood-diff.
comment: Accepted for publication at the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2026
☆ FashionMAC: Deformation-Free Fashion Image Generation with Fine-Grained Model Appearance Customization
Rong Zhang, Jinxiao Li, Jingnan Wang, Zhiwen Zuo, Jianfeng Dong, Wei Li, Chi Wang, Weiwei Xu, Xun Wang
Garment-centric fashion image generation aims to synthesize realistic and controllable human models dressing a given garment, which has attracted growing interest due to its practical applications in e-commerce. The key challenges of the task lie in two aspects: (1) faithfully preserving the garment details, and (2) gaining fine-grained controllability over the model's appearance. Existing methods typically require performing garment deformation in the generation process, which often leads to garment texture distortions. Also, they fail to control the fine-grained attributes of the generated models, due to the lack of specifically designed mechanisms. To address these issues, we propose FashionMAC, a novel diffusion-based deformation-free framework that achieves high-quality and controllable fashion showcase image generation. The core idea of our framework is to eliminate the need for performing garment deformation and directly outpaint the garment segmented from a dressed person, which enables faithful preservation of the intricate garment details. Moreover, we propose a novel region-adaptive decoupled attention (RADA) mechanism along with a chained mask injection strategy to achieve fine-grained appearance controllability over the synthesized human models. Specifically, RADA adaptively predicts the generated regions for each fine-grained text attribute and enforces the text attribute to focus on the predicted regions by a chained mask injection strategy, significantly enhancing the visual fidelity and the controllability. Extensive experiments validate the superior performance of our framework compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.
☆ Training-free Detection of AI-generated images via Cropping Robustness
AI-generated image detection has become crucial with the rapid advancement of vision-generative models. Instead of training detectors tailored to specific datasets, we study a training-free approach leveraging self-supervised models without requiring prior data knowledge. These models, pre-trained with augmentations like RandomResizedCrop, learn to produce consistent representations across varying resolutions. Motivated by this, we propose WaRPAD, a training-free AI-generated image detection algorithm based on self-supervised models. Since neighborhood pixel differences in images are highly sensitive to resizing operations, WaRPAD first defines a base score function that quantifies the sensitivity of image embeddings to perturbations along high-frequency directions extracted via Haar wavelet decomposition. To simulate robustness against cropping augmentation, we rescale each image to a multiple of the models input size, divide it into smaller patches, and compute the base score for each patch. The final detection score is then obtained by averaging the scores across all patches. We validate WaRPAD on real datasets of diverse resolutions and domains, and images generated by 23 different generative models. Our method consistently achieves competitive performance and demonstrates strong robustness to test-time corruptions. Furthermore, as invariance to RandomResizedCrop is a common training scheme across self-supervised models, we show that WaRPAD is applicable across self-supervised models.
☆ LINGUAL: Language-INtegrated GUidance in Active Learning for Medical Image Segmentation
Although active learning (AL) in segmentation tasks enables experts to annotate selected regions of interest (ROIs) instead of entire images, it remains highly challenging, labor-intensive, and cognitively demanding due to the blurry and ambiguous boundaries commonly observed in medical images. Also, in conventional AL, annotation effort is a function of the ROI- larger regions make the task cognitively easier but incur higher annotation costs, whereas smaller regions demand finer precision and more attention from the expert. In this context, language guidance provides an effective alternative, requiring minimal expert effort while bypassing the cognitively demanding task of precise boundary delineation in segmentation. Towards this goal, we introduce LINGUAL: a framework that receives natural language instructions from an expert, translates them into executable programs through in-context learning, and automatically performs the corresponding sequence of sub-tasks without any human intervention. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LINGUAL in active domain adaptation (ADA) achieving comparable or superior performance to AL baselines while reducing estimated annotation time by approximately 80%.
☆ MRI Plane Orientation Detection using a Context-Aware 2.5D Model
Humans can easily identify anatomical planes (axial, coronal, and sagittal) on a 2D MRI slice, but automated systems struggle with this task. Missing plane orientation metadata can complicate analysis, increase domain shift when merging heterogeneous datasets, and reduce accuracy of diagnostic classifiers. This study develops a classifier that accurately generates plane orientation metadata. We adopt a 2.5D context-aware model that leverages multi-slice information to avoid ambiguity from isolated slices and enable robust feature learning. We train the 2.5D model on both 3D slice sequences and static 2D images. While our 2D reference model achieves 98.74% accuracy, our 2.5D method raises this to 99.49%, reducing errors by 60%, highlighting the importance of 2.5D context. We validate the utility of our generated metadata in a brain tumor detection task. A gated strategy selectively uses metadata-enhanced predictions based on uncertainty scores, boosting accuracy from 97.0% with an image-only model to 98.0%, reducing misdiagnoses by 33.3%. We integrate our plane orientation model into an interactive web application and provide it open-source.
comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables
☆ RISE: Single Static Radar-based Indoor Scene Understanding
Robust and privacy-preserving indoor scene understanding remains a fundamental open problem. While optical sensors such as RGB and LiDAR offer high spatial fidelity, they suffer from severe occlusions and introduce privacy risks in indoor environments. In contrast, millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar preserves privacy and penetrates obstacles, but its inherently low spatial resolution makes reliable geometric reasoning difficult.
We introduce RISE, the first benchmark and system for single-static-radar indoor scene understanding, jointly targeting layout reconstruction and object detection. RISE is built upon the key insight that multipath reflections, traditionally treated as noise, encode rich geometric cues. To exploit this, we propose a Bi-Angular Multipath Enhancement that explicitly models Angle-of-Arrival and Angle-of-Departure to recover secondary (ghost) reflections and reveal invisible structures. On top of these enhanced observations, a simulation-to-reality Hierarchical Diffusion framework transforms fragmented radar responses into complete layout reconstruction and object detection.
Our benchmark contains 50,000 frames collected across 100 real indoor trajectories, forming the first large-scale dataset dedicated to radar-based indoor scene understanding. Extensive experiments show that RISE reduces the Chamfer Distance by 60% (down to 16 cm) compared to the state of the art in layout reconstruction, and delivers the first mmWave-based object detection, achieving 58% IoU. These results establish RISE as a new foundation for geometry-aware and privacy-preserving indoor scene understanding using a single static radar.
☆ CD-DPE: Dual-Prompt Expert Network based on Convolutional Dictionary Feature Decoupling for Multi-Contrast MRI Super-Resolution AAAI 2026
Multi-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) super-resolution intends to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) scans by leveraging structural information present in HR reference images acquired with different contrasts. This technique enhances anatomical detail and soft tissue differentiation, which is vital for early diagnosis and clinical decision-making. However, inherent contrasts disparities between modalities pose fundamental challenges in effectively utilizing reference image textures to guide target image reconstruction, often resulting in suboptimal feature integration. To address this issue, we propose a dual-prompt expert network based on a convolutional dictionary feature decoupling (CD-DPE) strategy for multi-contrast MRI super-resolution. Specifically, we introduce an iterative convolutional dictionary feature decoupling module (CD-FDM) to separate features into cross-contrast and intra-contrast components, thereby reducing redundancy and interference. To fully integrate these features, a novel dual-prompt feature fusion expert module (DP-FFEM) is proposed. This module uses a frequency prompt to guide the selection of relevant reference features for incorporation into the target image, while an adaptive routing prompt determines the optimal method for fusing reference and target features to enhance reconstruction quality. Extensive experiments on public multi-contrast MRI datasets demonstrate that CD-DPE outperforms state-of-the-art methods in reconstructing fine details. Additionally, experiments on unseen datasets demonstrated that CD-DPE exhibits strong generalization capabilities.
comment: Accepted by AAAI 2026
☆ Certified but Fooled! Breaking Certified Defences with Ghost Certificates AAAI
Quoc Viet Vo, Tashreque M. Haq, Paul Montague, Tamas Abraham, Ehsan Abbasnejad, Damith C. Ranasinghe
Certified defenses promise provable robustness guarantees. We study the malicious exploitation of probabilistic certification frameworks to better understand the limits of guarantee provisions. Now, the objective is to not only mislead a classifier, but also manipulate the certification process to generate a robustness guarantee for an adversarial input certificate spoofing. A recent study in ICLR demonstrated that crafting large perturbations can shift inputs far into regions capable of generating a certificate for an incorrect class. Our study investigates if perturbations needed to cause a misclassification and yet coax a certified model into issuing a deceptive, large robustness radius for a target class can still be made small and imperceptible. We explore the idea of region-focused adversarial examples to craft imperceptible perturbations, spoof certificates and achieve certification radii larger than the source class ghost certificates. Extensive evaluations with the ImageNet demonstrate the ability to effectively bypass state-of-the-art certified defenses such as Densepure. Our work underscores the need to better understand the limits of robustness certification methods.
comment: Published as a conference paper at the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26). Code available at: https://github.com/ghostcert/ghostcert
♻ ☆ OG-VLA: Orthographic Image Generation for 3D-Aware Vision-Language Action Model
We introduce OG-VLA, a novel architecture and learning framework that combines the generalization strengths of Vision Language Action models (VLAs) with the robustness of 3D-aware policies. We address the challenge of mapping natural language instructions and one or more RGBD observations to quasi-static robot actions. 3D-aware robot policies achieve state-of-the-art performance on precise robot manipulation tasks, but struggle with generalization to unseen instructions, scenes, and objects. On the other hand, VLAs excel at generalizing across instructions and scenes, but can be sensitive to camera and robot pose variations. We leverage prior knowledge embedded in language and vision foundation models to improve generalization of 3D-aware keyframe policies. OG-VLA unprojects input observations from diverse views into a point cloud which is then rendered from canonical orthographic views, ensuring input view invariance and consistency between input and output spaces. These canonical views are processed with a vision backbone, a Large Language Model (LLM), and an image diffusion model to generate images that encode the next position and orientation of the end-effector on the input scene. Evaluations on the Arnold and Colosseum benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art generalization to unseen environments, with over 40% relative improvements while maintaining robust performance in seen settings. We also show real-world adaption in 3 to 5 demonstrations along with strong generalization. Videos and resources at https://og-vla.github.io/
comment: 13 pages
♻ ☆ LED: Light Enhanced Depth Estimation at Night BMVC 2025
Simon de Moreau, Yasser Almehio, Andrei Bursuc, Hafid El-Idrissi, Bogdan Stanciulescu, Fabien Moutarde
Nighttime camera-based depth estimation is a highly challenging task, especially for autonomous driving applications, where accurate depth perception is essential for ensuring safe navigation. Models trained on daytime data often fail in the absence of precise but costly LiDAR. Even vision foundation models trained on large amounts of data are unreliable in low-light conditions. In this work, we aim to improve the reliability of perception systems at night time. To this end, we introduce Light Enhanced Depth (LED), a novel, cost-effective approach that significantly improves depth estimation in low-light environments by harnessing a pattern projected by high definition headlights available in modern vehicles. LED leads to significant performance boosts across multiple depth-estimation architectures (encoder-decoder, Adabins, DepthFormer, Depth Anything V2) both on synthetic and real datasets. Furthermore, increased performances beyond illuminated areas reveal a holistic enhancement in scene understanding. Finally, we release the Nighttime Synthetic Drive Dataset, a synthetic and photo-realistic nighttime dataset, which comprises 49,990 comprehensively annotated images.
comment: BMVC 2025 (Poster). Code and dataset available on the project page : https://simondemoreau.github.io/LED/ 21 pages, 13 figures
♻ ☆ StrokeFusion: Vector Sketch Generation via Joint Stroke-UDF Encoding and Latent Sequence Diffusion
In the field of sketch generation, raster-format trained models often produce non-stroke artifacts, while vector-format trained models typically lack a holistic understanding of sketches, leading to compromised recognizability. Moreover, existing methods struggle to extract common features from similar elements (e.g., eyes of animals) appearing at varying positions across sketches. To address these challenges, we propose StrokeFusion, a two-stage framework for vector sketch generation. It contains a dual-modal sketch feature learning network that maps strokes into a high-quality latent space. This network decomposes sketches into normalized strokes and jointly encodes stroke sequences with Unsigned Distance Function (UDF) maps, representing sketches as sets of stroke feature vectors. Building upon this representation, our framework exploits a stroke-level latent diffusion model that simultaneously adjusts stroke position, scale, and trajectory during generation. This enables high-fidelity sketch generation while supporting stroke interpolation editing. Extensive experiments on the QuickDraw dataset demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, validating its effectiveness in preserving structural integrity and semantic features. Code and models will be made publicly available upon publication.
♻ ☆ Measuring Train Driver Performance as Key to Approval of Driverless Trains
Points 2.1.4(b), 2.4.2(b) and 2.4.3(b) in Annex I of Implementing Regulation (EU) No. 402/2013 allow a simplified approach for the safety approval of computer vision systems for driverless trains, if they have 'similar' functions and interfaces as the replaced human driver. The human driver is not replaced one-to-one by a technical system - only a limited set of cognitive functions are replaced. However, performance in the most challenging function, obstacle detection, is difficult to quantify due to the deficiency of published measurement results. This article summarizes the data published so far. This article also goes a long way to remedy this situation by providing a new public and anonymized dataset of 711 train driver performance measurements from controlled experiments. The measurements are made for different speeds, obstacle sizes, train protection systems and obstacle color contrasts respectively. The measured values are reaction time and distance to the obstacle. The goal of this paper is an unbiased and exhaustive description of the presented dataset for research, standardization and regulation. The dataset with supplementing information and literature is published on https://data.fid-move.de/de/dataset/atosensedata
comment: 6 pages, 3 figures
♻ ☆ Accuracy is Not Enough: Poisoning Interpretability in Federated Learning via Color Skew
As machine learning models are increasingly deployed in safety-critical domains, visual explanation techniques have become essential tools for supporting transparency. In this work, we reveal a new class of attacks that compromise model interpretability without affecting accuracy. Specifically, we show that small color perturbations applied by adversarial clients in a federated learning setting can shift a model's saliency maps away from semantically meaningful regions while keeping the prediction unchanged. The proposed saliency-aware attack framework, called Chromatic Perturbation Module, systematically crafts adversarial examples by altering the color contrast between foreground and background in a way that disrupts explanation fidelity. These perturbations accumulate across training rounds, poisoning the global model's internal feature attributions in a stealthy and persistent manner. Our findings challenge a common assumption in model auditing that correct predictions imply faithful explanations and demonstrate that interpretability itself can be an attack surface. We evaluate this vulnerability across multiple datasets and show that standard training pipelines are insufficient to detect or mitigate explanation degradation, especially in the federated learning setting, where subtle color perturbations are harder to discern. Our attack reduces peak activation overlap in Grad-CAM explanations by up to 35% while preserving classification accuracy above 96% on all evaluated datasets.
♻ ☆ GMAT: Grounded Multi-Agent Clinical Description Generation for Text Encoder in Vision-Language MIL for Whole Slide Image Classification MICCAI
Ngoc Bui Lam Quang, Nam Le Nguyen Binh, Thanh-Huy Nguyen, Le Thien Phuc Nguyen, Quan Nguyen, Ulas Bagci
Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is the leading approach for whole slide image (WSI) classification, enabling efficient analysis of gigapixel pathology slides. Recent work has introduced vision-language models (VLMs) into MIL pipelines to incorporate medical knowledge through text-based class descriptions rather than simple class names. However, when these methods rely on large language models (LLMs) to generate clinical descriptions or use fixed-length prompts to represent complex pathology concepts, the limited token capacity of VLMs often constrains the expressiveness and richness of the encoded class information. Additionally, descriptions generated solely by LLMs may lack domain grounding and fine-grained medical specificity, leading to suboptimal alignment with visual features. To address these challenges, we propose a vision-language MIL framework with two key contributions: (1) A grounded multi-agent description generation system that leverages curated pathology textbooks and agent specialization (e.g., morphology, spatial context) to produce accurate and diverse clinical descriptions; (2) A text encoding strategy using a list of descriptions rather than a single prompt, capturing fine-grained and complementary clinical signals for better alignment with visual features. Integrated into a VLM-MIL pipeline, our approach shows improved performance over single-prompt class baselines and achieves results comparable to state-of-the-art models, as demonstrated on renal and lung cancer datasets.
comment: Acccepted in MICCAI Workshop 2025
♻ ☆ Real-Time Sign Language to text Translation using Deep Learning: A Comparative study of LSTM and 3D CNN
Madhumati Pol, Anvay Anturkar, Anushka Khot, Ayush Andure, Aniruddha Ghosh, Anvit Magadum, Anvay Bahadur
This study investigates the performance of 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (3D CNNs) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for real-time American Sign Language (ASL) recognition. Though 3D CNNs are good at spatiotemporal feature extraction from video sequences, LSTMs are optimized for modeling temporal dependencies in sequential data. We evaluate both architectures on a dataset containing 1,200 ASL signs across 50 classes, comparing their accuracy, computational efficiency, and latency under similar training conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that 3D CNNs achieve 92.4% recognition accuracy but require 3.2% more processing time per frame compared to LSTMs, which maintain 86.7% accuracy with significantly lower resource consumption. The hybrid 3D CNNLSTM model shows decent performance, which suggests that context-dependent architecture selection is crucial for practical implementation.This project provides professional benchmarks for developing assistive technologies, highlighting trade-offs between recognition precision and real-time operational requirements in edge computing environments.
♻ ☆ MOON: Generative MLLM-based Multimodal Representation Learning for E-commerce Product Understanding WSDM 2026
Daoze Zhang, Zhanheng Nie, Jianyu Liu, Chenghan Fu, Wanxian Guan, Yuan Gao, Jun Song, Pengjie Wang, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng
With the rapid advancement of e-commerce, exploring general representations rather than task-specific ones has attracted increasing research attention. For product understanding, although existing discriminative dual-flow architectures drive progress in this field, they inherently struggle to model the many-to-one alignment between multiple images and texts of products. Therefore, we argue that generative Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) hold significant potential for improving product representation learning. Nevertheless, achieving this goal still remains non-trivial due to several key challenges: the lack of multimodal and aspect-aware modeling modules in typical LLMs; the common presence of background noise in product images; and the absence of a standard benchmark for evaluation. To address these issues, we propose the first generative MLLM-based model named MOON for product representation learning. Our method (1) employs a guided Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) module for targeted modeling of multimodal and aspect-specific product content; (2) effectively detects core semantic regions in product images to mitigate the distraction and interference caused by background noise; and (3) introduces the specialized negative sampling strategy to increase the difficulty and diversity of negative samples. In addition, we release a large-scale multimodal benchmark MBE for various product understanding tasks. Experimentally, our model demonstrates competitive zero-shot performance on both our benchmark and the public dataset, showcasing strong generalization across various downstream tasks, including cross-modal retrieval, product classification, and attribute prediction. Furthermore, the case study and visualization illustrate the effectiveness of MOON for product understanding.
comment: Accepted by WSDM 2026. 11 pages, 9 figures
♻ ☆ MOON Embedding: Multimodal Representation Learning for E-commerce Search Advertising
Chenghan Fu, Daoze Zhang, Yukang Lin, Zhanheng Nie, Xiang Zhang, Jianyu Liu, Yueran Liu, Wanxian Guan, Pengjie Wang, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng
We introduce MOON, our comprehensive set of sustainable iterative practices for multimodal representation learning for e-commerce applications. MOON has already been fully deployed across all stages of Taobao search advertising system, including retrieval, relevance, ranking, and so on. The performance gains are particularly significant on click-through rate (CTR) prediction task, which achieves an overall +20.00% online CTR improvement. Over the past three years, this project has delivered the largest improvement on CTR prediction task and undergone five full-scale iterations. Throughout the exploration and iteration of our MOON, we have accumulated valuable insights and practical experience that we believe will benefit the research community. MOON contains a three-stage training paradigm of "Pretraining, Post-training, and Application", allowing effective integration of multimodal representations with downstream tasks. Notably, to bridge the misalignment between the objectives of multimodal representation learning and downstream training, we define the exchange rate to quantify how effectively improvements in an intermediate metric can translate into downstream gains. Through this analysis, we identify the image-based search recall as a critical intermediate metric guiding the optimization of multimodal models. Over three years and five iterations, MOON has evolved along four critical dimensions: data processing, training strategy, model architecture, and downstream application. The lessons and insights gained through the iterative improvements will also be shared. As part of our exploration into scaling effects in the e-commerce field, we further conduct a systematic study of the scaling laws governing multimodal representation learning, examining multiple factors such as the number of training tokens, negative samples, and the length of user behavior sequences.
comment: 31 pages, 12 figures
♻ ☆ Seeing and Knowing in the Wild: Open-domain Visual Entity Recognition with Large-scale Knowledge Graphs via Contrastive Learning AAAI2026
Hongkuan Zhou, Lavdim Halilaj, Sebastian Monka, Stefan Schmid, Yuqicheng Zhu, Jingcheng Wu, Nadeem Nazer, Steffen Staab
Open-domain visual entity recognition aims to identify and link entities depicted in images to a vast and evolving set of real-world concepts, such as those found in Wikidata. Unlike conventional classification tasks with fixed label sets, it operates under open-set conditions, where most target entities are unseen during training and exhibit long-tail distributions. This makes the task inherently challenging due to limited supervision, high visual ambiguity, and the need for semantic disambiguation. We propose a Knowledge-guided Contrastive Learning (KnowCoL) framework that combines both images and text descriptions into a shared semantic space grounded by structured information from Wikidata. By abstracting visual and textual inputs to a conceptual level, the model leverages entity descriptions, type hierarchies, and relational context to support zero-shot entity recognition. We evaluate our approach on the OVEN benchmark, a large-scale open-domain visual recognition dataset with Wikidata IDs as the label space. Our experiments show that using visual, textual, and structured knowledge greatly improves accuracy, especially for rare and unseen entities. Our smallest model improves the accuracy on unseen entities by 10.5% compared to the state-of-the-art, despite being 35 times smaller.
comment: Accepted by AAAI2026
♻ ☆ Fine-Grained Representation for Lane Topology Reasoning AAAI 2026
Precise modeling of lane topology is essential for autonomous driving, as it directly impacts navigation and control decisions. Existing methods typically represent each lane with a single query and infer topological connectivity based on the similarity between lane queries. However, this kind of design struggles to accurately model complex lane structures, leading to unreliable topology prediction. In this view, we propose a Fine-Grained lane topology reasoning framework (TopoFG). It divides the procedure from bird's-eye-view (BEV) features to topology prediction via fine-grained queries into three phases, i.e., Hierarchical Prior Extractor (HPE), Region-Focused Decoder (RFD), and Robust Boundary-Point Topology Reasoning (RBTR). Specifically, HPE extracts global spatial priors from the BEV mask and local sequential priors from in-lane keypoint sequences to guide subsequent fine-grained query modeling. RFD constructs fine-grained queries by integrating the spatial and sequential priors. It then samples reference points in RoI regions of the mask and applies cross-attention with BEV features to refine the query representations of each lane. RBTR models lane connectivity based on boundary-point query features and further employs a topological denoising strategy to reduce matching ambiguity. By integrating spatial and sequential priors into fine-grained queries and applying a denoising strategy to boundary-point topology reasoning, our method precisely models complex lane structures and delivers trustworthy topology predictions. Extensive experiments on the OpenLane-V2 benchmark demonstrate that TopoFG achieves new state-of-the-art performance, with an OLS of 48.0 on subsetA and 45.4 on subsetB.
comment: Accepted by AAAI 2026
♻ ☆ Logos as a Well-Tempered Pre-train for Sign Language Recognition
This paper examines two aspects of the isolated sign language recognition (ISLR) task. First, although a certain number of datasets is available, the data for individual sign languages is limited. It poses the challenge of cross-language ISLR model training, including transfer learning. Second, similar signs can have different semantic meanings. It leads to ambiguity in dataset labeling and raises the question of the best policy for annotating such signs. To address these issues, this study presents Logos, a novel Russian Sign Language (RSL) dataset, the most extensive available ISLR dataset by the number of signers, one of the most extensive datasets in size and vocabulary, and the largest RSL dataset. It is shown that a model, pre-trained on the Logos dataset can be used as a universal encoder for other language SLR tasks, including few-shot learning. We explore cross-language transfer learning approaches and find that joint training using multiple classification heads benefits accuracy for the target low-resource datasets the most. The key feature of the Logos dataset is explicitly annotated visually similar sign groups. We show that explicitly labeling visually similar signs improves trained model quality as a visual encoder for downstream tasks. Based on the proposed contributions, we outperform current state-of-the-art results for the WLASL dataset and get competitive results for the AUTSL dataset, with a single stream model processing solely RGB video. The source code, dataset, and pre-trained models are publicly available.
♻ ☆ StyleDrive: Towards Driving-Style Aware Benchmarking of End-To-End Autonomous Driving
Personalization, while extensively studied in conventional autonomous driving pipelines, has been largely overlooked in the context of end-to-end autonomous driving (E2EAD), despite its critical role in fostering user trust, safety perception, and real-world adoption. A primary bottleneck is the absence of large-scale real-world datasets that systematically capture driving preferences, severely limiting the development and evaluation of personalized E2EAD models. In this work, we introduce the first large-scale real-world dataset explicitly curated for personalized E2EAD, integrating comprehensive scene topology with rich dynamic context derived from agent dynamics and semantics inferred via a fine-tuned vision-language model (VLM). We propose a hybrid annotation pipeline that combines behavioral analysis, rule-and-distribution-based heuristics, and subjective semantic modeling guided by VLM reasoning, with final refinement through human-in-the-loop verification. Building upon this dataset, we introduce the first standardized benchmark for systematically evaluating personalized E2EAD models. Empirical evaluations on state-of-the-art architectures demonstrate that incorporating personalized driving preferences significantly improves behavioral alignment with human demonstrations.
comment: 25 pages, 7 figures, 5 tables
♻ ☆ Learnable Total Variation with Lambda Mapping for Low-Dose CT Denoising
Although Total Variation (TV) performs well in noise reduction and edge preservation on images, its dependence on the lambda parameter limits its efficiency and makes it difficult to use effectively. In this study, we present a Learnable Total Variation (LTV) framework that couples an unrolled TV solver with a data-driven Lambda Mapping Network (LambdaNet) predicting a per-pixel regularization map. The pipeline is trained end-to-end so that reconstruction and regularization are optimized jointly, yielding spatially adaptive smoothing: strong in homogeneous regions, relaxed near anatomical boundaries. Experiments on the DeepLesion dataset, using a realistic noise model adapted from the LoDoPaB-CT methodology, show consistent gains over classical TV and FBP+U-Net: +2.9 dB PSNR and +6% SSIM on average. LTV provides an interpretable alternative to black-box CNNs and a basis for 3D and data-consistency-driven reconstruction.
♻ ☆ Beyond Flatlands: Unlocking Spatial Intelligence by Decoupling 3D Reasoning from Numerical Regression
Existing Vision Language Models (VLMs) architecturally rooted in "flatland" perception, fundamentally struggle to comprehend real-world 3D spatial intelligence. This failure stems from a dual-bottleneck: input-stage conflict between computationally exorbitant geometric-aware encoders and superficial 2D-only features, and output-stage misalignment where discrete tokenizers are structurally incapable of producing precise, continuous numerical values. To break this impasse, we introduce GEODE (Geometric-Output and Decoupled-Input Engine), a novel architecture that resolves this dual-bottleneck by decoupling 3D reasoning from numerical generation. GEODE augments main VLM with two specialized, plug-and-play modules: Decoupled Rationale Module (DRM) that acts as spatial co-processor, aligning explicit 3D data with 2D visual features via cross-attention and distilling spatial Chain-of-Thought (CoT) logic into injectable Rationale Tokens; and Direct Regression Head (DRH), an "Embedding-as-Value" paradigm which routes specialized control tokens to a lightweight MLP for precise, continuous regression of scalars and 3D bounding boxes. The synergy of these modules allows our 1.5B parameter model to function as a high-level semantic dispatcher, achieving state-of-the-art spatial reasoning performance that rivals 7B+ models.
♻ ☆ Towards Understanding 3D Vision: the Role of Gaussian Curvature
Recent advances in computer vision have predominantly relied on data-driven approaches that leverage deep learning and large-scale datasets. Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success in tasks such as stereo matching and monocular depth reconstruction. However, these methods lack explicit models of 3D geometry that can be directly analyzed, transferred across modalities, or systematically modified for controlled experimentation. We investigate the role of Gaussian curvature in 3D surface modeling. Besides Gaussian curvature being an invariant quantity under change of observers or coordinate systems, we demonstrate using the Middlebury stereo dataset that it offers a sparse and compact description of 3D surfaces. Furthermore, we show a strong correlation between the performance rank of top state-of-the-art stereo and monocular methods and the low total absolute Gaussian curvature. We propose that this property can serve as a geometric prior to improve future 3D reconstruction algorithms.
♻ ☆ CARScenes: Semantic VLM Dataset for Safe Autonomous Driving
CAR-Scenes is a frame-level dataset for autonomous driving that enables training and evaluation of vision-language models (VLMs) for interpretable, scene-level understanding. We annotate 5,192 images drawn from Argoverse 1, Cityscapes, KITTI, and nuScenes using a 28-key category/sub-category knowledge base covering environment, road geometry, background-vehicle behavior, ego-vehicle behavior, vulnerable road users, sensor states, and a discrete severity scale (1-10), totaling 350+ leaf attributes. Labels are produced by a GPT-4o-assisted vision-language pipeline with human-in-the-loop verification; we release the exact prompts, post-processing rules, and per-field baseline model performance. CAR-Scenes also provides attribute co-occurrence graphs and JSONL records that support semantic retrieval, dataset triage, and risk-aware scenario mining across sources. To calibrate task difficulty, we include reproducible, non-benchmark baselines, notably a LoRA-tuned Qwen2-VL-2B with deterministic decoding, evaluated via scalar accuracy, micro-averaged F1 for list attributes, and severity MAE/RMSE on a fixed validation split. We publicly release the annotation and analysis scripts, including graph construction and evaluation scripts, to enable explainable, data-centric workflows for future intelligent vehicles. Dataset: https://github.com/Croquembouche/CAR-Scenes
comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, 7 tables
♻ ☆ Explaining Similarity in Vision-Language Encoders with Weighted Banzhaf Interactions NeurIPS 2025
Hubert Baniecki, Maximilian Muschalik, Fabian Fumagalli, Barbara Hammer, Eyke Hüllermeier, Przemyslaw Biecek
Language-image pre-training (LIP) enables the development of vision-language models capable of zero-shot classification, localization, multimodal retrieval, and semantic understanding. Various explanation methods have been proposed to visualize the importance of input image-text pairs on the model's similarity outputs. However, popular saliency maps are limited by capturing only first-order attributions, overlooking the complex cross-modal interactions intrinsic to such encoders. We introduce faithful interaction explanations of LIP models (FIxLIP) as a unified approach to decomposing the similarity in vision-language encoders. FIxLIP is rooted in game theory, where we analyze how using the weighted Banzhaf interaction index offers greater flexibility and improves computational efficiency over the Shapley interaction quantification framework. From a practical perspective, we propose how to naturally extend explanation evaluation metrics, such as the pointing game and area between the insertion/deletion curves, to second-order interaction explanations. Experiments on the MS COCO and ImageNet-1k benchmarks validate that second-order methods, such as FIxLIP, outperform first-order attribution methods. Beyond delivering high-quality explanations, we demonstrate the utility of FIxLIP in comparing different models, e.g. CLIP vs. SigLIP-2.
comment: NeurIPS 2025. Code: https://github.com/hbaniecki/fixlip
♻ ☆ SlotMatch: Distilling Object-Centric Representations for Unsupervised Video Segmentation
Unsupervised video segmentation is a challenging computer vision task, especially due to the lack of supervisory signals coupled with the complexity of visual scenes. To overcome this challenge, state-of-the-art models based on slot attention often have to rely on large and computationally expensive neural architectures. To this end, we propose a simple knowledge distillation framework that effectively transfers object-centric representations to a lightweight student. The proposed framework, called SlotMatch, aligns corresponding teacher and student slots via the cosine similarity, requiring no additional distillation objectives or auxiliary supervision. The simplicity of SlotMatch is confirmed via theoretical and empirical evidence, both indicating that integrating additional losses is redundant. We conduct experiments on three datasets to compare the state-of-the-art teacher model, SlotContrast, with our distilled student. The results show that our student based on SlotMatch matches and even outperforms its teacher, while using 3.6x less parameters and running up to 2.7x faster. Moreover, our student surpasses all other state-of-the-art unsupervised video segmentation models.
♻ ☆ Sa2VA-i: Improving Sa2VA Results with Consistent Training and Inference
Sa2VA is a recent model for language-guided dense grounding in images and video that achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple segmentation benchmarks and that has become widely popular. However, we found that Sa2VA does not perform according to its full potential for referring video object segmentation tasks. We identify inconsistencies between training and inference procedures as the key factor holding it back. To mitigate this issue, we propose an improved version of Sa2VA, Sa2VA-i, that rectifies these issues and improves the results. In fact, Sa2VA-i sets a new state of the art for multiple video benchmarks and achieves improvements of up to +11.6 J&F on MeViS, +1.4 on Ref-YT-VOS, +3.3 on Ref-DAVIS and +4.1 on ReVOS using the same Sa2VA checkpoints. With our fixes, the Sa2VA-i-1B model even performs on par with the original Sa2VA-26B model on the MeViS benchmark. We hope that this work will show the importance of seemingly trivial implementation details and that it will provide valuable insights for the referring video segmentation field. We provide the code and updated models at https://github.com/kumuji/sa2va-i
♻ ☆ 4D-VLA: Spatiotemporal Vision-Language-Action Pretraining with Cross-Scene Calibration
Jiahui Zhang, Yurui Chen, Yueming Xu, Ze Huang, Yanpeng Zhou, Yu-Jie Yuan, Xinyue Cai, Guowei Huang, Xingyue Quan, Hang Xu, Li Zhang
Leveraging diverse robotic data for pretraining remains a critical challenge. Existing methods typically model the dataset's action distribution using simple observations as inputs. However, these inputs are often incomplete, resulting in a dispersed conditional action distribution-an issue we refer to as coordinate system chaos and state chaos. This inconsistency significantly hampers pretraining efficiency. To address this, we propose 4D-VLA, a novel approach that effectively integrates 4D information into the input to mitigate these sources of chaos. Our model introduces depth and temporal information into visual features with sequential RGB-D inputs, aligning the coordinate systems of the robot and the scene. This alignment endows the model with strong spatiotemporal reasoning capabilities while minimizing training overhead. Additionally, we introduce memory bank sampling, a frame sampling strategy designed to extract informative frames from historical images, further improving effectiveness and efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our pretraining method and architectural components substantially enhance model performance. In both simulated and real-world experiments, our model achieves a significant increase in success rate over OpenVLA. To further assess spatial perception and generalization to novel views, we introduce MV-Bench, a multi-view simulation benchmark. Our model consistently outperforms existing methods, demonstrating stronger spatial understanding and adaptability.
♻ ☆ Benchmarking Deep Learning-Based Object Detection Models on Feature Deficient Astrophotography Imagery Dataset
Object detection models are typically trained on datasets like ImageNet, COCO, and PASCAL VOC, which focus on everyday objects. However, these lack signal sparsity found in non-commercial domains. MobilTelesco, a smartphone-based astrophotography dataset, addresses this by providing sparse night-sky images. We benchmark several detection models on it, highlighting challenges under feature-deficient conditions.
♻ ☆ From Flatland to Space: Teaching Vision-Language Models to Perceive and Reason in 3D
Jiahui Zhang, Yurui Chen, Yanpeng Zhou, Yueming Xu, Ze Huang, Jilin Mei, Junhui Chen, Yu-Jie Yuan, Xinyue Cai, Guowei Huang, Xingyue Quan, Hang Xu, Li Zhang
Recent advances in LVLMs have improved vision-language understanding, but they still struggle with spatial perception, limiting their ability to reason about complex 3D scenes. Unlike previous approaches that incorporate 3D representations into models to improve spatial understanding, we aim to unlock the potential of VLMs by leveraging spatially relevant image data. To this end, we introduce a novel 2D spatial data generation and annotation pipeline built upon scene data with 3D ground-truth. This pipeline enables the creation of a diverse set of spatial tasks, ranging from basic perception tasks to more complex reasoning tasks. Leveraging this pipeline, we construct SPAR-7M, a large-scale dataset generated from thousands of scenes across multiple public datasets. In addition, we introduce SPAR-Bench, a benchmark designed to offer a more comprehensive evaluation of spatial capabilities compared to existing spatial benchmarks, supporting both single-view and multi-view inputs. Training on both SPAR-7M and large-scale 2D datasets enables our models to achieve state-of-the-art performance on 2D spatial benchmarks. Further fine-tuning on 3D task-specific datasets yields competitive results, underscoring the effectiveness of our dataset in enhancing spatial reasoning.
comment: Project page: https://fudan-zvg.github.io/spar
♻ ☆ SpeeDe3DGS: Speedy Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting with Temporal Pruning and Motion Grouping
Dynamic extensions of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieve high-quality reconstructions through neural motion fields, but per-Gaussian neural inference makes these models computationally expensive. Building on DeformableGS, we introduce Speedy Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting (SpeeDe3DGS), which bridges this efficiency-fidelity gap through three complementary modules: Temporal Sensitivity Pruning (TSP) removes low-impact Gaussians via temporally aggregated sensitivity analysis, Temporal Sensitivity Sampling (TSS) perturbs timestamps to suppress floaters and improve temporal coherence, and GroupFlow distills the learned deformation field into shared SE(3) transformations for efficient groupwise motion. On the 50 dynamic scenes in MonoDyGauBench, integrating TSP and TSS into DeformableGS accelerates rendering by 6.78$\times$ on average while maintaining neural-field fidelity and using 10$\times$ fewer primitives. Adding GroupFlow culminates in 13.71$\times$ faster rendering and 2.53$\times$ shorter training, surpassing all baselines in speed while preserving superior image quality.
comment: Project Page: https://speede3dgs.github.io/
♻ ☆ Segmentation-Driven Initialization for Sparse-view 3D Gaussian Splatting
Sparse-view synthesis remains a challenging problem due to the difficulty of recovering accurate geometry and appearance from limited observations. While recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have enabled real-time rendering with competitive quality, existing pipelines often rely on Structure-from-Motion (SfM) for camera pose estimation, an approach that struggles in genuinely sparse-view settings. Moreover, several SfM-free methods replace SfM with multi-view stereo (MVS) models, but generate massive numbers of 3D Gaussians by back-projecting every pixel into 3D space, leading to high memory costs. We propose Segmentation-Driven Initialization for Gaussian Splatting (SDI-GS), a method that mitigates inefficiency by leveraging region-based segmentation to identify and retain only structurally significant regions. This enables selective downsampling of the dense point cloud, preserving scene fidelity while substantially reducing Gaussian count. Experiments across diverse benchmarks show that SDI-GS reduces Gaussian count by up to 50% and achieves comparable or superior rendering quality in PSNR and SSIM, with only marginal degradation in LPIPS. It further enables faster training and lower memory footprint, advancing the practicality of 3DGS for constrained-view scenarios.
♻ ☆ Deep Equilibrium models for Poisson Imaging Inverse problems via Mirror Descent
Deep Equilibrium Models (DEQs) are implicit neural networks with fixed points, which have recently gained attention for learning image regularization functionals, particularly in settings involving Gaussian fidelities, where assumptions on the forward operator ensure contractiveness of standard (proximal) Gradient Descent operators. In this work, we extend the application of DEQs to Poisson inverse problems, where the data fidelity term is more appropriately modeled by the Kullback--Leibler divergence. To this end, we introduce a novel DEQ formulation based on Mirror Descent defined in terms of a tailored non-Euclidean geometry that naturally adapts with the structure of the data term. This enables the learning of neural regularizers within a principled training framework. We derive sufficient conditions and establish refined convergence results based on the Kurdyka--Lojasiewicz framework for subanalytic functions with non-closed domains to guarantee the convergence of the learned reconstruction scheme and propose computational strategies that enable both efficient training and parameter-free inference. Numerical experiments show that our method outperforms traditional model-based approaches and it is comparable to the performance of Bregman Plug-and-Play methods, while mitigating their typical drawbacks, such as time-consuming tuning of hyper-parameters. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/christiandaniele/DEQ-MD.
♻ ☆ DepthVision: Enabling Robust Vision-Language Models with GAN-Based LiDAR-to-RGB Synthesis for Autonomous Driving
Ensuring reliable autonomous operation when visual input is degraded remains a key challenge in intelligent vehicles and robotics. We present DepthVision, a multimodal framework that enables Vision--Language Models (VLMs) to exploit LiDAR data without any architectural changes or retraining. DepthVision synthesizes dense, RGB-like images from sparse LiDAR point clouds using a conditional GAN with an integrated refiner, and feeds these into off-the-shelf VLMs through their standard visual interface. A Luminance-Aware Modality Adaptation (LAMA) module fuses synthesized and real camera images by dynamically weighting each modality based on ambient lighting, compensating for degradation such as darkness or motion blur. This design turns LiDAR into a drop-in visual surrogate when RGB becomes unreliable, effectively extending the operational envelope of existing VLMs. We evaluate DepthVision on real and simulated datasets across multiple VLMs and safety-critical tasks, including vehicle-in-the-loop experiments. The results show substantial improvements in low-light scene understanding over RGB-only baselines while preserving full compatibility with frozen VLM architectures. These findings demonstrate that LiDAR-guided RGB synthesis is a practical pathway for integrating range sensing into modern vision-language systems for autonomous driving.
♻ ☆ Rasterized Steered Mixture of Experts for Efficient 2D Image Regression
The Steered Mixture of Experts regression framework has demonstrated strong performance in image reconstruction, compression, denoising, and super-resolution. However, its high computational cost limits practical applications. This work introduces a rasterization-based optimization strategy that combines the efficiency of rasterized Gaussian kernel rendering with the edge-aware gating mechanism of the Steered Mixture of Experts. The proposed method is designed to accelerate two-dimensional image regression while maintaining the model's inherent sparsity and reconstruction quality. By replacing global iterative optimization with a rasterized formulation, the method achieves significantly faster parameter updates and more memory-efficient model representations. In addition, the proposed framework supports applications such as native super-resolution and image denoising, which are not directly achievable with standard rasterized Gaussian kernel approaches. The combination of fast rasterized optimization with the edge-aware structure of the Steered Mixture of Experts provides a new balance between computational efficiency and reconstruction fidelity for two-dimensional image processing tasks.
♻ ☆ MAVias: Mitigate any Visual Bias
Mitigating biases in computer vision models is an essential step towards the trustworthiness of artificial intelligence models. Existing bias mitigation methods focus on a small set of predefined biases, limiting their applicability in visual datasets where multiple, possibly unknown biases exist. To address this limitation, we introduce MAVias, an open-set bias mitigation approach leveraging foundation models to discover spurious associations between visual attributes and target classes. MAVias first captures a wide variety of visual features in natural language via a foundation image tagging model, and then leverages a large language model to select those visual features defining the target class, resulting in a set of language-coded potential visual biases. We then translate this set of potential biases into vision-language embeddings and introduce an in-processing bias mitigation approach to prevent the model from encoding information related to them. Our experiments on diverse datasets, including CelebA, Waterbirds, ImageNet, and UrbanCars, show that MAVias effectively detects and mitigates a wide range of biases in visual recognition tasks outperforming current state-of-the-art.
♻ ☆ Context-Aware Multimodal Representation Learning for Spatio-Temporally Explicit Environmental Modelling
Julia Peters, Karin Mora, Miguel D. Mahecha, Chaonan Ji, David Montero, Clemens Mosig, Guido Kraemer
Earth observation (EO) foundation models have emerged as an effective approach to derive latent representations of the Earth system from various remote sensing sensors. These models produce embeddings that can be used as analysis-ready datasets, enabling the modelling of ecosystem dynamics without extensive sensor-specific preprocessing. However, existing models typically operate at fixed spatial or temporal scales, limiting their use for ecological analyses that require both fine spatial detail and high temporal fidelity. To overcome these limitations, we propose a representation learning framework that integrates different EO modalities into a unified feature space at high spatio-temporal resolution. We introduce the framework using Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data as representative modalities. Our approach produces a latent space at native 10 m resolution and the temporal frequency of cloud-free Sentinel-2 acquisitions. Each sensor is first modeled independently to capture its sensor-specific characteristics. Their representations are then combined into a shared model. This two-stage design enables modality-specific optimisation and easy extension to new sensors, retaining pretrained encoders while retraining only fusion layers. This enables the model to capture complementary remote sensing data and to preserve coherence across space and time. Qualitative analyses reveal that the learned embeddings exhibit high spatial and semantic consistency across heterogeneous landscapes. Quantitative evaluation in modelling Gross Primary Production reveals that they encode ecologically meaningful patterns and retain sufficient temporal fidelity to support fine-scale analyses. Overall, the proposed framework provides a flexible, analysis-ready representation learning approach for environmental applications requiring diverse spatial and temporal resolutions.
comment: 10 pages (incliding 2 pages of references), 7 figures
♻ ☆ Divide and Merge: Motion and Semantic Learning in End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Perceiving the environment and its changes over time corresponds to two fundamental yet heterogeneous types of information: semantics and motion. Previous end-to-end autonomous driving works represent both types of information in a single feature vector. However, including motion related tasks, such as prediction and planning, impairs detection and tracking performance, a phenomenon known as negative transfer in multi-task learning. To address this issue, we propose Neural-Bayes motion decoding, a novel parallel detection, tracking, and prediction method that separates semantic and motion learning. Specifically, we employ a set of learned motion queries that operate in parallel with detection and tracking queries, sharing a unified set of recursively updated reference points. Moreover, we employ interactive semantic decoding to enhance information exchange in semantic tasks, promoting positive transfer. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset with UniAD and SparseDrive confirm the effectiveness of our divide and merge approach, resulting in performance improvements across perception, prediction, and planning. Our code is available at https://github.com/shenyinzhe/DMAD.
♻ ☆ Mapping Reduced Accessibility to WASH Facilities in Rohingya Refugee Camps With Sub-Meter Imagery
Access to Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) services remains a major public health concern in refugee camps. This study introduces a remote sensing-driven framework to quantify WASH accessibility-specifically to water pumps, latrines, and bathing cubicles-in the Rohingya camps of Cox's Bazar, one of the world's most densely populated displacement settings. Detecting refugee shelters in such emergent camps presents substantial challenges, primarily due to their dense spatial configuration and irregular geometric patterns. Using sub-meter satellite images, we develop a semi-supervised segmentation framework that achieves an F1-score of 76.4% in detecting individual refugee shelters. Applying the framework across multi-year data reveals declining WASH accessibility, driven by rapid refugee population growth and reduced facility availability, rising from 25 people per facility in 2022 to 29.4 in 2025. Gender-disaggregated analysis further shows that women and girls experience reduced accessibility, in scenarios with inadequate safety-related segregation in WASH facilities. These findings suggest the importance of demand-responsive allocation strategies that can identify areas with under-served populations-such as women and girls-and ensure that limited infrastructure serves the greatest number of people in settings with fixed or shrinking budgets. We also discuss the value of high-resolution remote sensing and machine learning to detect inequality and inform equitable resource planning in complex humanitarian environments.
comment: 23 pages, 13 figures, 2 tables
♻ ☆ PALM: A Dataset and Baseline for Learning Multi-subject Hand Prior
Zicong Fan, Edoardo Remelli, David Dimond, Fadime Sener, Liuhao Ge, Bugra Tekin, Cem Keskin, Shreyas Hampali
The ability to grasp objects, signal with gestures, and share emotion through touch all stem from the unique capabilities of human hands. Yet creating high-quality personalized hand avatars from images remains challenging due to complex geometry, appearance, and articulation, particularly under unconstrained lighting and limited views. Progress has also been limited by the lack of datasets that jointly provide accurate 3D geometry, high-resolution multiview imagery, and a diverse population of subjects. To address this, we present PALM, a large-scale dataset comprising 13k high-quality hand scans from 263 subjects and 90k multi-view images, capturing rich variation in skin tone, age, and geometry. To show its utility, we present a baseline PALM-Net, a multi-subject prior over hand geometry and material properties learned via physically based inverse rendering, enabling realistic, relightable single-image hand avatar personalization. PALM's scale and diversity make it a valuable real-world resource for hand modeling and related research.
♻ ☆ Improving Greenland Bed Topography Mapping with Uncertainty-Aware Graph Learning on Sparse Radar Data
Accurate maps of Greenland's subglacial bed are essential for sea-level projections, but radar observations are sparse and uneven. We introduce GraphTopoNet, a graph-learning framework that fuses heterogeneous supervision and explicitly models uncertainty via Monte Carlo dropout. Spatial graphs built from surface observables (elevation, velocity, mass balance) are augmented with gradient features and polynomial trends to capture both local variability and broad structure. To handle data gaps, we employ a hybrid loss that combines confidence-weighted radar supervision with dynamically balanced regularization. Applied to three Greenland subregions, GraphTopoNet outperforms interpolation, convolutional, and graph-based baselines, reducing error by up to 60 percent while preserving fine-scale glacial features. The resulting bed maps improve reliability for operational modeling, supporting agencies engaged in climate forecasting and policy. More broadly, GraphTopoNet shows how graph machine learning can convert sparse, uncertain geophysical observations into actionable knowledge at continental scale.
♻ ☆ RynnEC: Bringing MLLMs into Embodied World
Ronghao Dang, Yuqian Yuan, Yunxuan Mao, Kehan Li, Jiangpin Liu, Zhikai Wang, Xin Li, Fan Wang, Deli Zhao
We introduce RynnEC, a video multimodal large language model designed for embodied cognition. Built upon a general-purpose vision-language foundation model, RynnEC incorporates a region encoder and a mask decoder, enabling flexible region-level video interaction. Despite its compact architecture, RynnEC achieves state-of-the-art performance in object property understanding, object segmentation, and spatial reasoning. Conceptually, it offers a region-centric video paradigm for the brain of embodied agents, providing fine-grained perception of the physical world and enabling more precise interactions. To mitigate the scarcity of annotated 3D datasets, we propose an egocentric video based pipeline for generating embodied cognition data. Furthermore, we introduce RynnEC-Bench, a region-centered benchmark for evaluating embodied cognitive capabilities. We anticipate that RynnEC will advance the development of general-purpose cognitive cores for embodied agents and facilitate generalization across diverse embodied tasks. The code, model checkpoints, and benchmark are available at: https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/RynnEC
comment: The technical report of RynnEC, an embodied cognition MLLM
♻ ☆ SAM2MOT: A Novel Paradigm of Multi-Object Tracking by Segmentation
Inspired by Segment Anything 2, which generalizes segmentation from images to videos, we propose SAM2MOT--a novel segmentation-driven paradigm for multi-object tracking that breaks away from the conventional detection-association framework. In contrast to previous approaches that treat segmentation as auxiliary information, SAM2MOT places it at the heart of the tracking process, systematically tackling challenges like false positives and occlusions. Its effectiveness has been thoroughly validated on major MOT benchmarks. Furthermore, SAM2MOT integrates pre-trained detector, pre-trained segmentor with tracking logic into a zero-shot MOT system that requires no fine-tuning. This significantly reduces dependence on labeled data and paves the way for transitioning MOT research from task-specific solutions to general-purpose systems. Experiments on DanceTrack, UAVDT, and BDD100K show state-of-the-art results. Notably, SAM2MOT outperforms existing methods on DanceTrack by +2.1 HOTA and +4.5 IDF1, highlighting its effectiveness in MOT. Code is available at https://github.com/TripleJoy/SAM2MOT.
♻ ☆ Foundation Models in Medical Imaging: A Review and Outlook
Vivien van Veldhuizen, Vanessa Botha, Chunyao Lu, Melis Erdal Cesur, Kevin Groot Lipman, Edwin D. de Jong, Hugo Horlings, Clárisa I. Sanchez, Cees G. M. Snoek, Lodewyk Wessels, Ritse Mann, Eric Marcus, Jonas Teuwen
Foundation models (FMs) are changing the way medical images are analyzed by learning from large collections of unlabeled data. Instead of relying on manually annotated examples, FMs are pre-trained to learn general-purpose visual features that can later be adapted to specific clinical tasks with little additional supervision. In this review, we examine how FMs are being developed and applied in pathology, radiology, and ophthalmology, drawing on evidence from over 150 studies. We explain the core components of FM pipelines, including model architectures, self-supervised learning methods, and strategies for downstream adaptation. We also review how FMs are being used in each imaging domain and compare design choices across applications. Finally, we discuss key challenges and open questions to guide future research.
♻ ☆ GeoMVD: Geometry-Enhanced Multi-View Generation Model Based on Geometric Information Extraction
Multi-view image generation holds significant application value in computer vision, particularly in domains like 3D reconstruction, virtual reality, and augmented reality. Most existing methods, which rely on extending single images, face notable computational challenges in maintaining cross-view consistency and generating high-resolution outputs. To address these issues, we propose the Geometry-guided Multi-View Diffusion Model, which incorporates mechanisms for extracting multi-view geometric information and adjusting the intensity of geometric features to generate images that are both consistent across views and rich in detail. Specifically, we design a multi-view geometry information extraction module that leverages depth maps, normal maps, and foreground segmentation masks to construct a shared geometric structure, ensuring shape and structural consistency across different views. To enhance consistency and detail restoration during generation, we develop a decoupled geometry-enhanced attention mechanism that strengthens feature focus on key geometric details, thereby improving overall image quality and detail preservation. Furthermore, we apply an adaptive learning strategy that fine-tunes the model to better capture spatial relationships and visual coherence between the generated views, ensuring realistic results. Our model also incorporates an iterative refinement process that progressively improves the output quality through multiple stages of image generation. Finally, a dynamic geometry information intensity adjustment mechanism is proposed to adaptively regulate the influence of geometric data, optimizing overall quality while ensuring the naturalness of generated images. More details can be found on the project page: https://sobeymil.github.io/GeoMVD.com.
♻ ☆ LoG3D: Ultra-High-Resolution 3D Shape Modeling via Local-to-Global Partitioning
Xinran Yang, Shuichang Lai, Jiangjing Lyu, Hongjie Li, Bowen Pan, Yuanqi Li, Jie Guo, Zhengkang Zhou, Yanwen Guo
Generating high-fidelity 3D contents remains a fundamental challenge due to the complexity of representing arbitrary topologies-such as open surfaces and intricate internal structures-while preserving geometric details. Prevailing methods based on signed distance fields (SDFs) are hampered by costly watertight preprocessing and struggle with non-manifold geometries, while point-cloud representations often suffer from sampling artifacts and surface discontinuities. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel 3D variational autoencoder (VAE) framework built upon unsigned distance fields (UDFs)-a more robust and computationally efficient representation that naturally handles complex and incomplete shapes. Our core innovation is a local-to-global (LoG) architecture that processes the UDF by partitioning it into uniform subvolumes, termed UBlocks. This architecture couples 3D convolutions for capturing local detail with sparse transformers for enforcing global coherence. A Pad-Average strategy further ensures smooth transitions at subvolume boundaries during reconstruction. This modular design enables seamless scaling to ultra-high resolutions up to $2048^3$-a regime previously unattainable for 3D VAEs. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in both reconstruction accuracy and generative quality, yielding superior surface smoothness and geometric flexibility.
comment: 11 pages, 6 figures
♻ ☆ SMOL-MapSeg: Show Me One Label as prompt
Historical maps offer valuable insights into changes on Earth's surface but pose challenges for modern segmentation models due to inconsistent visual styles and symbols. While deep learning models such as UNet and pre-trained foundation models perform well in domains like autonomous driving and medical imaging, they struggle with the variability of historical maps, where similar concepts appear in diverse forms. To address this issue, we propose On-Need Declarative (OND) knowledge-based prompting, a method that provides explicit image-label pair prompts to guide models in linking visual patterns with semantic concepts. This enables users to define and segment target concepts on demand, supporting flexible, concept-aware segmentation. Our approach replaces the prompt encoder of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) with the OND prompting mechanism and fine-tunes it on historical maps, creating SMOL-MapSeg (Show Me One Label). Unlike existing SAM-based fine-tuning methods that are class-agnostic or restricted to fixed classes, SMOL-MapSeg supports class-aware segmentation across arbitrary datasets. Experiments show that SMOL-MapSeg accurately segments user-defined classes and substantially outperforms baseline models. Furthermore, it demonstrates strong generalization even with minimal training data, highlighting its potential for scalable and adaptable historical map analysis.
♻ ☆ RelTopo: Multi-Level Relational Modeling for Driving Scene Topology Reasoning
Accurate road topology reasoning is critical for autonomous driving, as it requires both perceiving road elements and understanding how lanes connect to each other (L2L) and to traffic elements (L2T). Existing methods often focus on either perception or L2L reasoning, leaving L2T underexplored and fall short of jointly optimizing perception and reasoning. Moreover, although topology prediction inherently involves relations, relational modeling itself is seldom incorporated into feature extraction or supervision. As humans naturally leverage contextual relationships to recognize road element and infer their connectivity, we posit that relational modeling can likewise benefit both perception and reasoning, and that these two tasks should be mutually enhancing. To this end, we propose RelTopo, a multi-level relational modeling approach that systematically integrates relational cues across three levels: 1) perception-level: a relation-aware lane detector with geometry-biased self-attention and curve-guided cross-attention enriches lane representations; 2) reasoning-level: relation-enhanced topology heads, including a geometry-enhanced L2L head and a cross-view L2T head, enhance topology inference via relational cues; and 3) supervision-level: a contrastive InfoNCE strategy regularizes relational embeddings. This design enables perception and reasoning to be optimized jointly. Extensive experiments on OpenLane-V2 demonstrate that RelTopo significantly improves both detection and topology reasoning, with gains of +3.1 in DET$_l$, +5.3 in TOP$_{ll}$, +4.9 in TOP$_{lt}$, and +4.4 overall in OLS, setting a new state-of-the-art. Code will be released.
comment: Preprint. Under review
♻ ☆ Playmate2: Training-Free Multi-Character Audio-Driven Animation via Diffusion Transformer with Reward Feedback AAAI 2026
Xingpei Ma, Shenneng Huang, Jiaran Cai, Yuansheng Guan, Shen Zheng, Hanfeng Zhao, Qiang Zhang, Shunsi Zhang
Recent advances in diffusion models have significantly improved audio-driven human video generation, surpassing traditional methods in both quality and controllability. However, existing approaches still face challenges in lip-sync accuracy, temporal coherence for long video generation, and multi-character animation. In this work, we propose a diffusion transformer (DiT)-based framework for generating lifelike talking videos of arbitrary length, and introduce a training-free method for multi-character audio-driven animation. First, we employ a LoRA-based training strategy combined with a position shift inference approach, which enables efficient long video generation while preserving the capabilities of the foundation model. Moreover, we combine partial parameter updates with reward feedback to enhance both lip synchronization and natural body motion. Finally, we propose a training-free approach, Mask Classifier-Free Guidance (Mask-CFG), for multi-character animation, which requires no specialized datasets or model modifications and supports audio-driven animation for three or more characters. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, achieving high-quality, temporally coherent, and multi-character audio-driven video generation in a simple, efficient, and cost-effective manner.
comment: AAAI 2026
♻ ☆ Manifold Learning for Hyperspectral Images
Traditional feature extraction and projection techniques, such as Principal Component Analysis, struggle to adequately represent X-Ray Transmission (XRT) Multi-Energy (ME) images, limiting the performance of neural networks in decision-making processes. To address this issue, we propose a method that approximates the dataset topology by constructing adjacency graphs using the Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection. This approach captures nonlinear correlations within the data, significantly improving the performance of machine learning algorithms, particularly in processing Hyperspectral Images (HSI) from X-ray transmission spectroscopy. This technique not only preserves the global structure of the data but also enhances feature separability, leading to more accurate and robust classification results.
♻ ☆ Towards Reliable Human Evaluations in Gesture Generation: Insights from a Community-Driven State-of-the-Art Benchmark
Rajmund Nagy, Hendric Voss, Thanh Hoang-Minh, Mihail Tsakov, Teodor Nikolov, Zeyi Zhang, Tenglong Ao, Sicheng Yang, Shaoli Huang, Yongkang Cheng, M. Hamza Mughal, Rishabh Dabral, Kiran Chhatre, Christian Theobalt, Libin Liu, Stefan Kopp, Rachel McDonnell, Michael Neff, Taras Kucherenko, Youngwoo Yoon, Gustav Eje Henter
We review human evaluation practices in automated, speech-driven 3D gesture generation and find a lack of standardisation and frequent use of flawed experimental setups. This leads to a situation where it is impossible to know how different methods compare, or what the state of the art is. In order to address common shortcomings of evaluation design, and to standardise future user studies in gesture-generation works, we introduce a detailed human evaluation protocol for the widely-used BEAT2 motion-capture dataset. Using this protocol, we conduct large-scale crowdsourced evaluation to rank six recent gesture-generation models -- each trained by its original authors -- across two key evaluation dimensions: motion realism and speech-gesture alignment. Our results provide strong evidence that 1) newer models do not consistently outperform earlier approaches; 2) published claims of high motion realism or speech-gesture alignment may not hold up under rigorous evaluation; and 3) the field must adopt disentangled assessments of motion quality and multimodal alignment for accurate benchmarking in order to make progress. Finally, in order to drive standardisation and enable new evaluation research, we will release five hours of synthetic motion from the benchmarked models; over 750 rendered video stimuli from the user studies -- enabling new evaluations without model reimplementation required -- alongside our open-source rendering script, and the 16,000 pairwise human preference votes collected for our benchmark.
comment: 23 pages, 10 figures. The last two authors made equal contributions
♻ ☆ Geometry Meets Light: Leveraging Geometric Priors for Universal Photometric Stereo under Limited Multi-Illumination Cues AAAI 2026
Universal Photometric Stereo is a promising approach for recovering surface normals without strict lighting assumptions. However, it struggles when multi-illumination cues are unreliable, such as under biased lighting or in shadows or self-occluded regions of complex in-the-wild scenes. We propose GeoUniPS, a universal photometric stereo network that integrates synthetic supervision with high-level geometric priors from large-scale 3D reconstruction models pretrained on massive in-the-wild data. Our key insight is that these 3D reconstruction models serve as visual-geometry foundation models, inherently encoding rich geometric knowledge of real scenes. To leverage this, we design a Light-Geometry Dual-Branch Encoder that extracts both multi-illumination cues and geometric priors from the frozen 3D reconstruction model. We also address the limitations of the conventional orthographic projection assumption by introducing the PS-Perp dataset with realistic perspective projection to enable learning of spatially varying view directions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GeoUniPS delivers state-of-the-arts performance across multiple datasets, both quantitatively and qualitatively, especially in the complex in-the-wild scenes.
comment: Accepted by AAAI 2026 (Oral)
♻ ☆ HCF: Hierarchical Cascade Framework for Distributed Multi-Stage Image Compression AAAI 2026
Distributed multi-stage image compression -- where visual content traverses multiple processing nodes under varying quality requirements -- poses challenges. Progressive methods enable bitstream truncation but underutilize available compute resources; successive compression repeats costly pixel-domain operations and suffers cumulative quality loss and inefficiency; fixed-parameter models lack post-encoding flexibility. In this work, we developed the Hierarchical Cascade Framework (HCF) that achieves high rate-distortion performance and better computational efficiency through direct latent-space transformations across network nodes in distributed multi-stage image compression systems. Under HCF, we introduced policy-driven quantization control to optimize rate-distortion trade-offs, and established the edge quantization principle through differential entropy analysis. The configuration based on this principle demonstrates up to 0.6dB PSNR gains over other configurations. When comprehensively evaluated on the Kodak, CLIC, and CLIC2020-mobile datasets, HCF outperforms successive-compression methods by up to 5.56% BD-Rate in PSNR on CLIC, while saving up to 97.8% FLOPs, 96.5% GPU memory, and 90.0% execution time. It also outperforms state-of-the-art progressive compression methods by up to 12.64% BD-Rate on Kodak and enables retraining-free cross-quality adaptation with 7.13-10.87% BD-Rate reductions on CLIC2020-mobile.
comment: Accepted at AAAI 2026 as a Conference Paper (Oral Presentation)
♻ ☆ Learning few-step posterior samplers by unfolding and distillation of diffusion models
Diffusion models (DMs) have emerged as powerful image priors in Bayesian computational imaging. Two primary strategies have been proposed for leveraging DMs in this context: Plug-and-Play methods, which are zero-shot and highly flexible but rely on approximations; and specialized conditional DMs, which achieve higher accuracy and faster inference for specific tasks through supervised training. In this work, we introduce a novel framework that integrates deep unfolding and model distillation to transform a DM image prior into a few-step conditional model for posterior sampling. A central innovation of our approach is the unfolding of a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm - specifically, the recently proposed LATINO Langevin sampler (Spagnoletti et al., 2025) - representing the first known instance of deep unfolding applied to a Monte Carlo sampling scheme. We demonstrate our proposed unfolded and distilled samplers through extensive experiments and comparisons with the state of the art, where they achieve excellent accuracy and computational efficiency, while retaining the flexibility to adapt to variations in the forward model at inference time.
comment: 34 pages, 18 figures, 11 tables
♻ ☆ MoReFun: Past-Movement Guided Motion Representation Learning for Future Motion Prediction and Understanding
3D human motion prediction aims to generate coherent future motions from observed sequences, yet existing end-to-end regression frameworks often fail to capture complex dynamics and tend to produce temporally inconsistent or static predictions-a limitation rooted in representation shortcutting, where models rely on superficial cues rather than learning meaningful motion structure. We propose a two-stage self-supervised framework that decouples representation learning from prediction. In the pretraining stage, the model performs unified past-future self-reconstruction, reconstructing the past sequence while recovering masked joints in the future sequence under full historical guidance. A velocity-based masking strategy selects highly dynamic joints, forcing the model to focus on informative motion components and internalize the statistical dependencies between past and future states without regression interference. In the fine-tuning stage, the pretrained model predicts the entire future sequence, now treated as fully masked, and is further equipped with a lightweight future-text prediction head for joint optimization of low-level motion prediction and high-level motion understanding. Experiments on Human3.6M, 3DPW, and AMASS show that our method reduces average prediction errors by 8.8% over state-of-the-art methods while achieving competitive future-motion understanding performance compared to LLM-based models. Code is available at: https://github.com/JunyuShi02/MoReFun
♻ ☆ MedGEN-Bench: Contextually entangled benchmark for open-ended multimodal medical generation CVPR 2026
Junjie Yang, Yuhao Yan, Gang Wu, Yuxuan Wang, Ruoyu Liang, Xinjie Jiang, Xiang Wan, Fenglei Fan, Yongquan Zhang, Feiwei Qin, Changmiao Wang
As Vision-Language Models (VLMs) increasingly gain traction in medical applications, clinicians are progressively expecting AI systems not only to generate textual diagnoses but also to produce corresponding medical images that integrate seamlessly into authentic clinical workflows. Despite the growing interest, existing medical visual benchmarks present notable limitations. They often rely on ambiguous queries that lack sufficient relevance to image content, oversimplify complex diagnostic reasoning into closed-ended shortcuts, and adopt a text-centric evaluation paradigm that overlooks the importance of image generation capabilities. To address these challenges, we introduce MedGEN-Bench, a comprehensive multimodal benchmark designed to advance medical AI research. MedGEN-Bench comprises 6,422 expert-validated image-text pairs spanning six imaging modalities, 16 clinical tasks, and 28 subtasks. It is structured into three distinct formats: Visual Question Answering, Image Editing, and Contextual Multimodal Generation. What sets MedGEN-Bench apart is its focus on contextually intertwined instructions that necessitate sophisticated cross-modal reasoning and open-ended generative outputs, moving beyond the constraints of multiple-choice formats. To evaluate the performance of existing systems, we employ a novel three-tier assessment framework that integrates pixel-level metrics, semantic text analysis, and expert-guided clinical relevance scoring. Using this framework, we systematically assess 10 compositional frameworks, 3 unified models, and 5 VLMs.
comment: CVPR 2026 Under Review
♻ ☆ Not All Regions Are Equal: Attention-Guided Perturbation Network for Industrial Anomaly Detection
In unsupervised image anomaly detection, reconstruction methods aim to train models to capture normal patterns comprehensively for normal data reconstruction. Yet, these models sometimes retain unintended reconstruction capacity for anomalous regions during inference, leading to missed detections. To mitigate this issue, existing works perturb normal samples in a sample-agnostic manner, uniformly adding noise across spatial locations before reconstructing the original. Despite promising results, they disregard the fact that foreground locations are inherently more critical for robust reconstruction. Motivated by this, we present a novel reconstruction framework named Attention-Guided Perturbation Network (AGPNet) for industrial anomaly detection. Its core idea is to add perturbations guided by a sample-aware attention mask to improve the learning of invariant normal patterns at important locations. AGPNet consists of two branches, \ie, a reconstruction branch and an auxiliary attention-based perturbation one. The reconstruction branch learns to reconstruct normal samples, while the auxiliary one aims to produce attention masks to guide the noise perturbation process for normal samples. By perturbing more aggressively at those important regions, we encourage the reconstruction branch to learn inherent normal patterns both comprehensively and robustly. Extensive experiments are conducted on several popular benchmarks covering MVTec-AD, VisA, and MVTec-3D, and show that AGPNet consistently obtains leading anomaly detection performance across a variety of setups, including few-shot, one-class, and multi-class ones.
♻ ☆ Region-Wise Correspondence Prediction between Manga Line Art Images
Understanding region-wise correspondences between manga line art images is fundamental for high-level manga processing, supporting downstream tasks such as line art colorization and in-between frame generation. Unlike natural images that contain rich visual cues, manga line art consists only of sparse black-and-white strokes, making it challenging to determine which regions correspond across images. In this work, we introduce a new task: predicting region-wise correspondence between raw manga line art images without any annotations. To address this problem, we propose a Transformer-based framework trained on large-scale, automatically generated region correspondences. The model learns to suppress noisy matches and strengthen consistent structural relationships, resulting in robust patch-level feature alignment within and across images. During inference, our method segments each line art and establishes coherent region-level correspondences through edge-aware clustering and region matching. We construct manually annotated benchmarks for evaluation, and experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate both high patch-level accuracy and strong region-level correspondence performance, achieving 78.4-84.4% region-level accuracy. These results highlight the potential of our method for real-world manga and animation applications.
♻ ☆ Spatial Policy: Guiding Visuomotor Robotic Manipulation with Spatial-Aware Modeling and Reasoning
Yijun Liu, Yuwei Liu, Yuan Meng, Jieheng Zhang, Yuwei Zhou, Ye Li, Jiacheng Jiang, Kangye Ji, Shijia Ge, Zhi Wang, Wenwu Zhu
Vision-centric hierarchical embodied models have demonstrated strong potential. However, existing methods lack spatial awareness capabilities, limiting their effectiveness in bridging visual plans to actionable control in complex environments. To address this problem, we propose Spatial Policy (SP), a unified spatial-aware visuomotor robotic manipulation framework via explicit spatial modeling and reasoning. Specifically, we first design a spatial-conditioned embodied video generation module to model spatially guided predictions through the spatial plan table. Then, we propose a flow-based action prediction module to infer executable actions with coordination. Finally, we propose a spatial reasoning feedback policy to refine the spatial plan table via dual-stage replanning. Extensive experiments show that SP substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving over 33% improvement on Meta-World and over 25% improvement on iTHOR, demonstrating strong effectiveness across 23 embodied control tasks. We additionally evaluate SP in real-world robotic experiments to verify its practical viability. SP enhances the practicality of embodied models for robotic control applications. Code and checkpoints are maintained at https://plantpotatoonmoon.github.io/SpatialPolicy/.
♻ ☆ EventHallusion: Diagnosing Event Hallucinations in Video LLMs
Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made significant progress in the video comprehension field. Despite remarkable content reasoning and instruction following capabilities they demonstrated, the hallucination problem of these VideoLLMs is less explored compared with its counterpart in the image domain. To mitigate this gap, we propose EventHallusion, a novel benchmark that focuses on assessing the VideoLLMs' hallucination toward event, the crux of video analysis. From a hallucination attribution perspective, our EventHallusion benchmark is curated to assess a VideoLLM's susceptibility toward language priors and vision-language biases. On the other hand, we also propose a simple yet effective method, called Temporal Contrastive Decoding (TCD), to tackle the hallucination problems of VideoLLMs. The proposed TCD method rectifies the model's bias toward its priors during the decoding stage by comparing the original video with a modified version, in which temporal cues are disrupted. Through comprehensive evaluation of eight open-source and two closed-source VideoLLMs on the proposed EventHallusion benchmark, we observe that the open-source models suffer significantly from hallucination problems, whereas the closed-source ones perform markedly better. By further equipping open-source VideoLLMs with the proposed TCD approach, evident performance improvements are achieved across most metrics in the EventHallusion benchmark. Our codes and benchmark data are available at https://github.com/Stevetich/EventHallusion.
♻ ☆ Video Compression Commander: Plug-and-Play Inference Acceleration for Video Large Language Models EMNLP 2025
Video large language models (VideoLLM) excel at video understanding, but face efficiency challenges due to the quadratic complexity of abundant visual tokens. Our systematic analysis of token compression methods for VideoLLMs reveals two critical issues: (i) overlooking distinctive visual signals across frames, leading to information loss; (ii) suffering from implementation constraints, causing incompatibility with modern architectures or efficient operators. To address these challenges, we distill three design principles for VideoLLM token compression and propose a plug-and-play inference acceleration framework "Video Compression Commander" (VidCom2). By quantifying each frame's uniqueness, VidCom2 adaptively adjusts compression intensity across frames, effectively preserving essential information while reducing redundancy in video sequences. Extensive experiments across various VideoLLMs and benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance and efficiency of our VidCom2. With only 25% visual tokens, VidCom2 achieves 99.6% of the original performance on LLaVA-OV while reducing 70.8% of the LLM generation latency. Notably, our Frame Compression Adjustment strategy is compatible with other token compression methods to further improve their performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/xuyang-liu16/VidCom2.
comment: EMNLP 2025 main
♻ ☆ Iterative Explainability for Weakly Supervised Segmentation in Medical PE Detection
Pulmonary Embolism (PE) are a leading cause of cardiovascular death. Computed tomographic pulmonary angiography (CTPA) is the gold standard for PE diagnosis, with growing interest in AI-based diagnostic assistance. However, these algorithms are limited by scarce fine-grained annotations of thromboembolic burden. We address this challenge with iExplain, a weakly supervised learning algorithm that transforms coarse image-level annotations into detailed pixel-level PE masks through iterative model explainability. Our approach generates soft segmentation maps used to mask detected regions, enabling the process to repeat and discover additional embolisms that would be missed in a single pass. This iterative refinement effectively captures complete PE regions and detects multiple distinct embolisms. Models trained on these automatically generated annotations achieve excellent PE detection performance, with significant improvements at each iteration. We demonstrate iExplain's effectiveness on the RSPECT augmented dataset, achieving results comparable to strongly supervised methods while outperforming existing weakly supervised methods.
comment: Paper accepted at MICAD2025 Previous title: "Label up: Learning pulmonary embolism segmentation from image level annotation through model explainability"
♻ ☆ Decoupling Scene Perception and Ego Status: A Multi-Context Fusion Approach for Enhanced Generalization in End-to-End Autonomous Driving AAAI 2026
Modular design of planning-oriented autonomous driving has markedly advanced end-to-end systems. However, existing architectures remain constrained by an over-reliance on ego status, hindering generalization and robust scene understanding. We identify the root cause as an inherent design within these architectures that allows ego status to be easily leveraged as a shortcut. Specifically, the premature fusion of ego status in the upstream BEV encoder allows an information flow from this strong prior to dominate the downstream planning module. To address this challenge, we propose AdaptiveAD, an architectural-level solution based on a multi-context fusion strategy. Its core is a dual-branch structure that explicitly decouples scene perception and ego status. One branch performs scene-driven reasoning based on multi-task learning, but with ego status deliberately omitted from the BEV encoder, while the other conducts ego-driven reasoning based solely on the planning task. A scene-aware fusion module then adaptively integrates the complementary decisions from the two branches to form the final planning trajectory. To ensure this decoupling does not compromise multi-task learning, we introduce a path attention mechanism for ego-BEV interaction and add two targeted auxiliary tasks: BEV unidirectional distillation and autoregressive online mapping. Extensive evaluations on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that AdaptiveAD achieves state-of-the-art open-loop planning performance. Crucially, it significantly mitigates the over-reliance on ego status and exhibits impressive generalization capabilities across diverse scenarios.
comment: Accepted to AAAI 2026 (Oral)
♻ ☆ How does My Model Fail? Automatic Identification and Interpretation of Physical Plausibility Failure Modes with Matryoshka Transcoders
Although recent generative models are remarkably capable of producing instruction-following and realistic outputs, they remain prone to notable physical plausibility failures. Though critical in applications, these physical plausibility errors often escape detection by existing evaluation methods. Furthermore, no framework exists for automatically identifying and interpreting specific physical error patterns in natural language, preventing targeted model improvements. We introduce Matryoshka Transcoders, a novel framework for the automatic discovery and interpretation of physical plausibility features in generative models. Our approach extends the Matryoshka representation learning paradigm to transcoder architectures, enabling hierarchical sparse feature learning at multiple granularity levels. By training on intermediate representations from a physical plausibility classifier and leveraging large multimodal models for interpretation, our method identifies diverse physics-related failure modes without manual feature engineering, achieving superior feature relevance and feature accuracy compared to existing approaches. We utilize the discovered visual patterns to establish a benchmark for evaluating physical plausibility in generative models. Our analysis of eight state-of-the-art generative models provides valuable insights into how these models fail to follow physical constraints, paving the way for further model improvements.
♻ ☆ Branch, or Layer? Zeroth-Order Optimization for Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models
Vision-Language Continual Learning (VLCL) has attracted significant research attention for its robust capabilities, and the adoption of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) strategies is enabling these models to achieve competitive performance with substantially reduced resource consumption. However, dominated First-Order (FO) optimization is prone to trap models in suboptimal local minima, especially in limited exploration subspace within PEFT. To overcome this challenge, this paper pioneers a systematic exploration of adopting Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization for PEFT-based VLCL. We first identify the incompatibility of naive full-ZO adoption in VLCL due to optimization process instability. We then investigate the application of ZO optimization from a modality branch-wise to a fine-grained layer-wise across various training units to identify an optimal strategy. Besides, a key theoretical insight reveals that vision modality exhibit higher variance than language counterparts in VLCL during the ZO optimization process, and we propose a modality-aware ZO strategy, which adopts gradient sign normalization in ZO and constrains vision modality perturbation to further improve performance. Benefiting from the adoption of ZO optimization, PEFT-based VLCL fulfills better ability to escape local minima during the optimization process, extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results.
♻ ☆ MoHoBench: Assessing Honesty of Multimodal Large Language Models via Unanswerable Visual Questions AAAI2026
Yanxu Zhu, Shitong Duan, Xiangxu Zhang, Jitao Sang, Peng Zhang, Tun Lu, Xiao Zhou, Jing Yao, Xiaoyuan Yi, Xing Xie
Recently Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved considerable advancements in vision-language tasks, yet produce potentially harmful or untrustworthy content. Despite substantial work investigating the trustworthiness of language models, MMLMs' capability to act honestly, especially when faced with visually unanswerable questions, remains largely underexplored. This work presents the first systematic assessment of honesty behaviors across various MLLMs. We ground honesty in models' response behaviors to unanswerable visual questions, define four representative types of such questions, and construct MoHoBench, a large-scale MMLM honest benchmark, consisting of 12k+ visual question samples, whose quality is guaranteed by multi-stage filtering and human verification. Using MoHoBench, we benchmarked the honesty of 28 popular MMLMs and conducted a comprehensive analysis. Our findings show that: (1) most models fail to appropriately refuse to answer when necessary, and (2) MMLMs' honesty is not solely a language modeling issue, but is deeply influenced by visual information, necessitating the development of dedicated methods for multimodal honesty alignment. Therefore, we implemented initial alignment methods using supervised and preference learning to improve honesty behavior, providing a foundation for future work on trustworthy MLLMs. Our data and code can be found at https://github.com/yanxuzhu/MoHoBench.
comment: AAAI2026 Oral
♻ ☆ LENS: Learning to Segment Anything with Unified Reinforced Reasoning
Lianghui Zhu, Bin Ouyang, Yuxuan Zhang, Tianheng Cheng, Rui Hu, Haocheng Shen, Longjin Ran, Xiaoxin Chen, Li Yu, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang
Text-prompted image segmentation enables fine-grained visual understanding and is critical for applications such as human-computer interaction and robotics. However, existing supervised fine-tuning methods typically ignore explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning at test time, which limits their ability to generalize to unseen prompts and domains. To address this issue, we introduce LENS, a scalable reinforcement-learning framework that jointly optimizes the reasoning process and segmentation in an end-to-end manner. We propose unified reinforcement-learning rewards that span sentence-, box-, and segment-level cues, encouraging the model to generate informative CoT rationales while refining mask quality. Using a publicly available 3-billion-parameter vision-language model, i.e., Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct, LENS achieves an average cIoU of 81.2% on the RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg benchmarks, outperforming the strong fine-tuned method, i.e., GLaMM, by up to 5.6%. These results demonstrate that RL-driven CoT reasoning significantly enhances text-prompted segmentation and offers a practical path toward more generalizable Segment Anything models (SAM). Code is available at https://github.com/hustvl/LENS.
comment: Code is released at https://github.com/hustvl/LENS
♻ ☆ SemCo: Toward Semantic Coherent Visual Relationship Forecasting
Visual Relationship Forecasting (VRF) aims to anticipate relations among objects without observing future visual content. The task relies on capturing and modeling the semantic coherence in object interactions, as it underpins the evolution of events and scenes in videos. However, existing VRF datasets offer limited support for learning such coherence due to noisy annotations in the datasets and weak correlations between different actions and relationship transitions in subject-object pair. Furthermore, existing methods struggle to distinguish similar relationships and overfit to unchanging relationships in consecutive frames. To address these challenges, we present SemCoBench, a benchmark that emphasizes semantic coherence for visual relationship forecasting. Based on action labels and short-term subject-object pairs, SemCoBench decomposes relationship categories and dynamics by cleaning and reorganizing video datasets to ensure predicting semantic coherence in object interactions. In addition, we also present Semantic Coherent Transformer method (SemCoFormer) to model the semantic coherence with a Relationship Augmented Module (RAM) and a Coherence Reasoning Module (CRM). RAM is designed to distinguish similar relationships, and CRM facilitates the model's focus on the dynamics in relationships. The experimental results on SemCoBench demonstrate that modeling the semantic coherence is a key step toward reasonable, fine-grained, and diverse visual relationship forecasting, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of video scenes.
♻ ☆ Availability-aware Sensor Fusion via Unified Canonical Space NeurIPS 2025
Sensor fusion of camera, LiDAR, and 4-dimensional (4D) Radar has brought a significant performance improvement in autonomous driving. However, there still exist fundamental challenges: deeply coupled fusion methods assume continuous sensor availability, making them vulnerable to sensor degradation and failure, whereas sensor-wise cross-attention fusion methods struggle with computational cost and unified feature representation. This paper presents availability-aware sensor fusion (ASF), a novel method that employs unified canonical projection (UCP) to enable consistency in all sensor features for fusion and cross-attention across sensors along patches (CASAP) to enhance robustness of sensor fusion against sensor degradation and failure. As a result, the proposed ASF shows a superior object detection performance to the existing state-of-the-art fusion methods under various weather and sensor degradation (or failure) conditions. Extensive experiments on the K-Radar dataset demonstrate that ASF achieves improvements of 9.7% in AP BEV (87.2%) and 20.1% in AP 3D (73.6%) in object detection at IoU=0.5, while requiring a low computational cost. All codes are available at https://github.com/kaist-avelab/k-radar.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2025
♻ ☆ GAIS: Frame-Level Gated Audio-Visual Integration with Semantic Variance-Scaled Perturbation for Text-Video Retrieval
Text-to-video retrieval requires precise alignment between language and temporally rich audio-video signals. However, existing methods often emphasize visual cues while underutilizing audio semantics or relying on coarse fusion strategies, resulting in suboptimal multimodal representations. We introduce GAIS, a retrieval framework that strengthens multimodal alignment from both representation and regularization perspectives. First, a Frame-level Gated Fusion (FGF) module adaptively integrates audio-visual features under textual guidance, enabling fine-grained temporal selection of informative frames. Second, a Semantic Variance-Scaled Perturbation (SVSP) mechanism regularizes the text embedding space by controlling perturbation magnitude in a semantics-aware manner. These two modules are complementary: FGF minimizes modality gaps through selective fusion, while SVSP improves embedding stability and discrimination. Extensive experiments on MSR-VTT, DiDeMo, LSMDC, and VATEX demonstrate that GAIS consistently outperforms strong baselines across multiple retrieval metrics while maintaining notable computational efficiency.
comment: 13 pages
♻ ☆ Rethinking Saliency Maps: A Cognitive Human Aligned Taxonomy and Evaluation Framework for Explanations
Saliency maps are widely used for visual explanations in deep learning, but a fundamental lack of consensus persists regarding their intended purpose and alignment with diverse user queries. This ambiguity hinders the effective evaluation and practical utility of explanation methods. We address this gap by introducing the Reference-Frame $\times$ Granularity (RFxG) taxonomy, a principled conceptual framework that organizes saliency explanations along two essential axes:Reference-Frame: Distinguishing between pointwise ("Why this prediction?") and contrastive ("Why this and not an alternative?") explanations. Granularity: Ranging from fine-grained class-level (e.g., "Why Husky?") to coarse-grained group-level (e.g., "Why Dog?") interpretations. Using the RFxG lens, we demonstrate critical limitations in existing evaluation metrics, which overwhelmingly prioritize pointwise faithfulness while neglecting contrastive reasoning and semantic granularity. To systematically assess explanation quality across both RFxG dimensions, we propose four novel faithfulness metrics. Our comprehensive evaluation framework applies these metrics to ten state-of-the-art saliency methods, four model architectures, and three datasets. By advocating a shift toward user-intent-driven evaluation, our work provides both the conceptual foundation and the practical tools necessary to develop visual explanations that are not only faithful to the underlying model behavior but are also meaningfully aligned with the complexity of human understanding and inquiry.
♻ ☆ Viper-F1: Fast and Fine-Grained Multimodal Understanding with Cross-Modal State-Space Modulation
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled impressive progress in vision-language understanding, yet their high computational cost limits deployment in resource-constrained scenarios such as robotic manipulation, personal assistants, and smart cameras. Most existing methods rely on Transformer-based cross-attention, whose quadratic complexity hinders efficiency. Moreover, small vision-language models often struggle to precisely capture fine-grained, task-relevant visual regions, leading to degraded performance on fine-grained reasoning tasks that limit their effectiveness in the real world. To address these issues, we introduce Viper-F1, a Hybrid State-Space Vision-Language Model that replaces attention with efficient Liquid State-Space Dynamics. To further enhance visual grounding, we propose a Token-Grid Correlation Module, which computes lightweight correlations between text tokens and image patches and modulates the state-space dynamics via FiLM conditioning. This enables the model to selectively emphasize visual regions relevant to the textual prompt while maintaining linear-time inference. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that Viper-F1 achieves accurate, fine-grained understanding with significantly improved efficiency.
comment: Need to enhance the method and benchmark to be better
♻ ☆ Unlocking the Forgery Detection Potential of Vanilla MLLMs: A Novel Training-Free Pipeline
With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) technologies, including multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and diffusion models, image generation and manipulation have become remarkably effortless. Existing image forgery detection and localization (IFDL) methods often struggle to generalize across diverse datasets and offer limited interpretability. Nowadays, MLLMs demonstrate strong generalization potential across diverse vision-language tasks, and some studies introduce this capability to IFDL via large-scale training. However, such approaches cost considerable computational resources, while failing to reveal the inherent generalization potential of vanilla MLLMs to address this problem. Inspired by this observation, we propose Foresee, a training-free MLLM-based pipeline tailored for image forgery analysis. It eliminates the need for additional training and enables a lightweight inference process, while surpassing existing MLLM-based methods in both tamper localization accuracy and the richness of textual explanations. Foresee employs a type-prior-driven strategy and utilizes a Flexible Feature Detector (FFD) module to specifically handle copy-move manipulations, thereby effectively unleashing the potential of vanilla MLLMs in the forensic domain. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach simultaneously achieves superior localization accuracy and provides more comprehensive textual explanations. Moreover, Foresee exhibits stronger generalization capability, outperforming existing IFDL methods across various tampering types, including copy-move, splicing, removal, local enhancement, deepfake, and AIGC-based editing. The code will be released in the final version.
♻ ☆ YOLO Meets Mixture-of-Experts: Adaptive Expert Routing for Robust Object Detection
This paper presents a novel Mixture-of-Experts framework for object detection, incorporating adaptive routing among multiple YOLOv9-T experts to enable dynamic feature specialization and achieve higher mean Average Precision (mAP) and Average Recall (AR) compared to a single YOLOv9-T model.
comment: 1 figure, 1 table
♻ ☆ Deep Learning and Machine Learning -- Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation: From Theory to Applications
Jintao Ren, Ziqian Bi, Qian Niu, Xinyuan Song, Zekun Jiang, Junyu Liu, Benji Peng, Sen Zhang, Xuanhe Pan, Jinlang Wang, Keyu Chen, Caitlyn Heqi Yin, Pohsun Feng, Yizhu Wen, Tianyang Wang, Silin Chen, Ming Li, Jiawei Xu, Ming Liu
An in-depth exploration of object detection and semantic segmentation is provided, combining theoretical foundations with practical applications. State-of-the-art advancements in machine learning and deep learning are reviewed, focusing on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), YOLO architectures, and transformer-based approaches such as DETR. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques and large language models for enhancing object detection in complex environments is examined. Additionally, a comprehensive analysis of big data processing is presented, with emphasis on model optimization and performance evaluation metrics. By bridging the gap between traditional methods and modern deep learning frameworks, valuable insights are offered for researchers, data scientists, and engineers aiming to apply AI-driven methodologies to large-scale object detection tasks.
comment: 167 pages
♻ ☆ DINO-Detect: A Simple yet Effective Framework for Blur-Robust AI-Generated Image Detection
Jialiang Shen, Jiyang Zheng, Yunqi Xue, Huajie Chen, Yu Yao, Hui Kang, Ruiqi Liu, Helin Gong, Yang Yang, Dadong Wang, Tongliang Liu
With growing concerns over image authenticity and digital safety, the field of AI-generated image (AIGI) detection has progressed rapidly. Yet, most AIGI detectors still struggle under real-world degradations, particularly motion blur, which frequently occurs in handheld photography, fast motion, and compressed video. Such blur distorts fine textures and suppresses high-frequency artifacts, causing severe performance drops in real-world settings. We address this limitation with a blur-robust AIGI detection framework based on teacher-student knowledge distillation. A high-capacity teacher (DINOv3), trained on clean (i.e., sharp) images, provides stable and semantically rich representations that serve as a reference for learning. By freezing the teacher to maintain its generalization ability, we distill its feature and logit responses from sharp images to a student trained on blurred counterparts, enabling the student to produce consistent representations under motion degradation. Extensive experiments benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under both motion-blurred and clean conditions, demonstrating improved generalization and real-world applicability. Source codes will be released at: https://github.com/JiaLiangShen/Dino-Detect-for-blur-robust-AIGC-Detection.
comment: 12 pages, 5 figures
♻ ☆ MicroEvoEval: A Systematic Evaluation Framework for Image-Based Microstructure Evolution Prediction AAAI 2026
Simulating microstructure evolution (MicroEvo) is vital for materials design but demands high numerical accuracy, efficiency, and physical fidelity. Although recent studies on deep learning (DL) offer a promising alternative to traditional solvers, the field lacks standardized benchmarks. Existing studies are flawed due to a lack of comparing specialized MicroEvo DL models with state-of-the-art spatio-temporal architectures, an overemphasis on numerical accuracy over physical fidelity, and a failure to analyze error propagation over time. To address these gaps, we introduce MicroEvoEval, the first comprehensive benchmark for image-based microstructure evolution prediction. We evaluate 14 models, encompassing both domain-specific and general-purpose architectures, across four representative MicroEvo tasks with datasets specifically structured for both short- and long-term assessment. Our multi-faceted evaluation framework goes beyond numerical accuracy and computational cost, incorporating a curated set of structure-preserving metrics to assess physical fidelity. Our extensive evaluations yield several key insights. Notably, we find that modern architectures (e.g., VMamba), not only achieve superior long-term stability and physical fidelity but also operate with an order-of-magnitude greater computational efficiency. The results highlight the necessity of holistic evaluation and identify these modern architectures as a highly promising direction for developing efficient and reliable surrogate models in data-driven materials science.
comment: Accepted by AAAI 2026
♻ ☆ Exploring Convolutional Neural Networks for Rice Grain Classification: An Explainable AI Approach
Muhammad Junaid Asif, Hamza Khan, Rabia Tehseen, Syed Tahir Hussain Rizvi, Mujtaba Asad, Rana Fayyaz Ahmad, Shazia Saqib
Rice is an essential staple food worldwide that is important in promoting international trade, economic growth, and nutrition. Asian countries such as China, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia are notable for their significant contribution to the cultivation and utilization of rice. These nations are also known for cultivating different rice grains, including short and long grains. These sizes are further classified as basmati, jasmine, kainat saila, ipsala, arborio, etc., catering to diverse culinary preferences and cultural traditions. For both local and international trade, inspecting and maintaining the quality of rice grains to satisfy customers and preserve a country's reputation is necessary. Manual quality check and classification is quite a laborious and time-consuming process. It is also highly prone to mistakes. Therefore, an automatic solution must be proposed for the effective and efficient classification of different varieties of rice grains. This research paper presents an automatic framework based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) for classifying different varieties of rice grains. We evaluated the proposed model based on performance metrics such as accuracy, recall, precision, and F1-Score. The CNN model underwent rigorous training and validation, achieving a remarkable accuracy rate and a perfect area under each class's Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve. The confusion matrix analysis confirmed the model's effectiveness in distinguishing between the different rice varieties, indicating minimal misclassifications. Additionally, the integration of explainability techniques such as LIME (Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations) and SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) provided valuable insights into the model's decision-making process, revealing how specific features of the rice grains influenced classification outcomes.
♻ ☆ MonoDream: Monocular Vision-Language Navigation with Panoramic Dreaming
Shuo Wang, Yongcai Wang, Zhaoxin Fan, Yucheng Wang, Maiyue Chen, Kaihui Wang, Zhizhong Su, Wanting Li, Xudong Cai, Yeying Jin, Deying Li
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) tasks often leverage panoramic RGB and depth inputs to provide rich spatial cues for action planning, but these sensors can be costly or less accessible in real-world deployments. Recent approaches based on Vision-Language Action (VLA) models achieve strong results with monocular input, yet they still lag behind methods using panoramic RGB-D information. We present MonoDream, a lightweight VLA framework that enables monocular agents to learn a Unified Navigation Representation (UNR). This shared feature representation jointly aligns navigation-relevant visual semantics (e.g., global layout, depth, and future cues) and language-grounded action intent, enabling more reliable action prediction. MonoDream further introduces Latent Panoramic Dreaming (LPD) tasks to supervise the UNR, which train the model to predict latent features of panoramic RGB and depth observations at both current and future steps based on only monocular input. Experiments on multiple VLN benchmarks show that MonoDream consistently improves monocular navigation performance and significantly narrows the gap with panoramic-based agents.
♻ ☆ Rethinking Token-wise Feature Caching: Accelerating Diffusion Transformers with Dual Feature Caching
Diffusion Transformers (DiT) have become the dominant methods in image and video generation yet still suffer substantial computational costs. As an effective approach for DiT acceleration, feature caching methods are designed to cache the features of DiT in previous timesteps and reuse them in the next timesteps, allowing us to skip the computation in the next timesteps. Among them, token-wise feature caching has been introduced to perform different caching ratios for different tokens in DiTs, aiming to skip the computation for unimportant tokens while still computing the important ones. In this paper, we propose to carefully check the effectiveness in token-wise feature caching with the following two questions: (1) Is it really necessary to compute the so-called "important" tokens in each step? (2) Are so-called important tokens really important? Surprisingly, this paper gives some counter-intuition answers, demonstrating that consistently computing the selected ``important tokens'' in all steps is not necessary. The selection of the so-called ``important tokens'' is often ineffective, and even sometimes shows inferior performance than random selection. Based on these observations, this paper introduces dual feature caching referred to as DuCa, which performs aggressive caching strategy and conservative caching strategy iteratively and selects the tokens for computing randomly. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in DiT, PixArt, FLUX, and OpenSora, demonstrating significant improvements than the previous token-wise feature caching.
♻ ☆ MMaDA-Parallel: Multimodal Large Diffusion Language Models for Thinking-Aware Editing and Generation
Ye Tian, Ling Yang, Jiongfan Yang, Anran Wang, Yu Tian, Jiani Zheng, Haochen Wang, Zhiyang Teng, Zhuochen Wang, Yinjie Wang, Yunhai Tong, Mengdi Wang, Xiangtai Li
While thinking-aware generation aims to improve performance on complex tasks, we identify a critical failure mode where existing sequential, autoregressive approaches can paradoxically degrade performance due to error propagation. To systematically analyze this issue, we propose ParaBench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate both text and image output modalities. Our analysis using ParaBench reveals that this performance degradation is strongly correlated with poor alignment between the generated reasoning and the final image. To resolve this, we propose a parallel multimodal diffusion framework, MMaDA-Parallel, that enables continuous, bidirectional interaction between text and images throughout the entire denoising trajectory. MMaDA-Parallel is trained with supervised finetuning and then further optimized by Parallel Reinforcement Learning (ParaRL), a novel strategy that applies semantic rewards along the trajectory to enforce cross-modal consistency. Experiments validate that our model significantly improves cross-modal alignment and semantic consistency, achieving a 6.9\% improvement in Output Alignment on ParaBench compared to the state-of-the-art model, Bagel, establishing a more robust paradigm for thinking-aware image synthesis. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/tyfeld/MMaDA-Parallel
comment: Project Page: https://tyfeld.github.io/mmadaparellel.github.io/
♻ ☆ UVLM: Benchmarking Video Language Model for Underwater World Understanding AAAI
Recently, the remarkable success of large language models (LLMs) has achieved a profound impact on the field of artificial intelligence. Numerous advanced works based on LLMs have been proposed and applied in various scenarios. Among them, video language models (VidLMs) are particularly widely used. However, existing works primarily focus on terrestrial scenarios, overlooking the highly demanding application needs of underwater observation. To overcome this gap, we introduce UVLM, an under water observation benchmark which is build through a collaborative approach combining human expertise and AI models. To ensure data quality, we have conducted in-depth considerations from multiple perspectives. First, to address the unique challenges of underwater environments, we selected videos that represent typical underwater challenges including light variations, water turbidity, and diverse viewing angles to construct the dataset. Second, to ensure data diversity, the dataset covers a wide range of frame rates, resolutions, 419 classes of marine animals, and various static plants and terrains. Next, for task diversity, we adopted a structured design where observation targets are categorized into two major classes: biological and environmental. Each category includes content observation and change/action observation, totaling 20 distinct task types. Finally, we designed several challenging evaluation metrics to enable quantitative comparison and analysis of different methods. Experiments on two representative VidLMs demonstrate that fine-tuning VidLMs on UVLM significantly improves underwater world understanding while also showing potential for slight improvements on existing in-air VidLM benchmarks, such as VideoMME and Perception text. The dataset and prompt engineering will be released publicly.
comment: 18 pages, 10 figures, 7 tables. Accepted to the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), 2026
♻ ☆ PFAvatar: Pose-Fusion 3D Personalized Avatar Reconstruction from Real-World Outfit-of-the-Day Photos AAAI 2026
Dianbing Xi, Guoyuan An, Jingsen Zhu, Zhijian Liu, Yuan Liu, Ruiyuan Zhang, Jiayuan Lu, Yuchi Huo, Rui Wang
We propose PFAvatar (Pose-Fusion Avatar), a new method that reconstructs high-quality 3D avatars from Outfit of the Day(OOTD) photos, which exhibit diverse poses, occlusions, and complex backgrounds. Our method consists of two stages: (1) fine-tuning a pose-aware diffusion model from few-shot OOTD examples and (2) distilling a 3D avatar represented by a neural radiance field (NeRF). In the first stage, unlike previous methods that segment images into assets (e.g., garments, accessories) for 3D assembly, which is prone to inconsistency, we avoid decomposition and directly model the full-body appearance. By integrating a pre-trained ControlNet for pose estimation and a novel Condition Prior Preservation Loss (CPPL), our method enables end-to-end learning of fine details while mitigating language drift in few-shot training. Our method completes personalization in just 5 minutes, achieving a 48x speed-up compared to previous approaches. In the second stage, we introduce a NeRF-based avatar representation optimized by canonical SMPL-X space sampling and Multi-Resolution 3D-SDS. Compared to mesh-based representations that suffer from resolution-dependent discretization and erroneous occluded geometry, our continuous radiance field can preserve high-frequency textures (e.g., hair) and handle occlusions correctly through transmittance. Experiments demonstrate that PFAvatar outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of reconstruction fidelity, detail preservation, and robustness to occlusions/truncations, advancing practical 3D avatar generation from real-world OOTD albums. In addition, the reconstructed 3D avatar supports downstream applications such as virtual try-on, animation, and human video reenactment, further demonstrating the versatility and practical value of our approach.
comment: Accepted by AAAI 2026
♻ ☆ From Perception to Reasoning: Deep Thinking Empowers Multimodal Large Language Models
With the remarkable success of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in perception tasks, enhancing their complex reasoning capabilities has emerged as a critical research focus. Existing models still suffer from challenges such as opaque reasoning paths and insufficient generalization ability. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, which has demonstrated significant efficacy in language models by enhancing reasoning transparency and output interpretability, holds promise for improving model reasoning capabilities when extended to the multimodal domain. This paper provides a systematic review centered on "Multimodal Chain-of-Thought" (MCoT). First, it analyzes the background and theoretical motivations for its inception from the perspectives of technical evolution and task demands. Then, it introduces mainstream MCoT methods from three aspects: CoT paradigms, the post-training stage, and the inference stage, while also analyzing their underlying mechanisms. Furthermore, the paper summarizes existing evaluation benchmarks and metrics, and discusses the application scenarios of MCoT. Finally, it analyzes the challenges currently facing MCoT and provides an outlook on its future research directions.
comment: Survey; 7 figures, 3 tables, 44 pages
♻ ☆ FastDINOv2: Frequency Based Curriculum Learning Improves Robustness and Training Speed NeurIPS 2025
Large-scale vision foundation models such as DINOv2 boast impressive performances by leveraging massive architectures and training datasets. But numerous scenarios require practitioners to reproduce those pre-training solutions, such as on private data, new modalities, or simply for scientific questioning--which is currently extremely demanding computation-wise. We thus propose a novel pre-training strategy for DINOv2 that simultaneously accelerates convergence--and strengthens robustness to common corruptions as a by-product. Our approach involves a frequency filtering curriculum--low-frequency being seen first--and the Gaussian noise patching augmentation. Applied to a ViT-B/16 backbone trained on ImageNet-1K, while pre-training time and FLOPs are reduced by 1.6x and 2.25x, our method still achieves matching robustness in corruption benchmarks (ImageNet-C) and maintains competitive linear probing performance compared with baseline. This dual benefit of efficiency and robustness makes large-scale self-supervised foundation modeling more attainable, while opening the door to novel exploration around data curriculum and augmentation as means to improve self-supervised learning models robustness. The code is available at https://github.com/KevinZ0217/fast_dinov2
comment: Accepted by 39th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025)
♻ ☆ Uni-Hand: Universal Hand Motion Forecasting in Egocentric Views IROS'25
Junyi Ma, Wentao Bao, Jingyi Xu, Guanzhong Sun, Yu Zheng, Erhang Zhang, Xieyuanli Chen, Hesheng Wang
Forecasting how human hands move in egocentric views is critical for applications like augmented reality and human-robot policy transfer. Recently, several hand trajectory prediction (HTP) methods have been developed to generate future possible hand waypoints, which still suffer from insufficient prediction targets, inherent modality gaps, entangled hand-head motion, and limited validation in downstream tasks. To address these limitations, we present a universal hand motion forecasting framework considering multi-modal input, multi-dimensional and multi-target prediction patterns, and multi-task affordances for downstream applications. We harmonize multiple modalities by vision-language fusion, global context incorporation, and task-aware text embedding injection, to forecast hand waypoints in both 2D and 3D spaces. A novel dual-branch diffusion is proposed to concurrently predict human head and hand movements, capturing their motion synergy in egocentric vision. By introducing target indicators, the prediction model can forecast the specific joint waypoints of the wrist or the fingers, besides the widely studied hand center points. In addition, we enable Uni-Hand to additionally predict hand-object interaction states (contact/separation) to facilitate downstream tasks better. As the first work to incorporate downstream task evaluation in the literature, we build novel benchmarks to assess the real-world applicability of hand motion forecasting algorithms. The experimental results on multiple publicly available datasets and our newly proposed benchmarks demonstrate that Uni-Hand achieves the state-of-the-art performance in multi-dimensional and multi-target hand motion forecasting. Extensive validation in multiple downstream tasks also presents its impressive human-robot policy transfer to enable robotic manipulation, and effective feature enhancement for action anticipation/recognition.
comment: Extended journal version of MMTwin (IROS'25)
♻ ☆ Clone Deterministic 3D Worlds
A world model is an internal model that simulates how the world evolves. Given past observations and actions, it predicts the future physical state of both the embodied agent and its environment. Accurate world models are essential for enabling agents to think, plan, and reason effectively in complex, dynamic settings. However, existing world models often focus on random generation of open worlds, but neglect the need for high-fidelity modeling of deterministic scenarios (such as fixed-map mazes and static space robot navigation). In this work, we take a step toward building a truly accurate world model by addressing a fundamental yet open problem: constructing a model that can fully clone a deterministic 3D world. 1) Through diagnostic experiment, we quantitatively demonstrate that high-fidelity cloning is feasible and the primary bottleneck for long-horizon fidelity is the geometric structure of the latent representation, not the dynamics model itself. 2) Building on this insight, we show that applying temporal contrastive learning principle as a geometric regularization can effectively curate a latent space that better reflects the underlying physical state manifold, demonstrating that contrastive constraints can serve as a powerful inductive bias for stable world modeling; we call this approach Geometrically-Regularized World Models (GRWM). At its core is a lightweight geometric regularization module that can be seamlessly integrated into standard autoencoders, reshaping their latent space to provide a stable foundation for effective dynamics modeling. By focusing on representation quality, GRWM offers a simple yet powerful pipeline for improving world model fidelity.
♻ ☆ MMEdge: Accelerating On-device Multimodal Inference via Pipelined Sensing and Encoding
Real-time multimodal inference on resource-constrained edge devices is essential for applications such as autonomous driving, human-computer interaction, and mobile health. However, prior work often overlooks the tight coupling between sensing dynamics and model execution, as well as the complex inter-modality dependencies. In this paper, we propose MMEdge, an new on-device multi-modal inference framework based on pipelined sensing and encoding. Instead of waiting for complete sensor inputs, MMEdge decomposes the entire inference process into a sequence of fine-grained sensing and encoding units, allowing computation to proceed incrementally as data arrive. MMEdge also introduces a lightweight but effective temporal aggregation module that captures rich temporal dynamics across different pipelined units to maintain accuracy performance. Such pipelined design also opens up opportunities for fine-grained cross-modal optimization and early decision-making during inference. To further enhance system performance under resource variability and input data complexity, MMEdge incorporates an adaptive multimodal configuration optimizer that dynamically selects optimal sensing and model configurations for each modality under latency constraints, and a cross-modal speculative skipping mechanism that bypasses future units of slower modalities when early predictions reach sufficient confidence. We evaluate MMEdge using two public multimodal datasets and deploy it on a real-world unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based multimodal testbed. The results show that MMEdge significantly reduces end-to-end latency while maintaining high task accuracy across various system and data dynamics.
comment: Code available at: https://github.com/HKUST-MINSys-Lab/MMEdge. Accepted by SenSys 2026
♻ ☆ Generalized Denoising Diffusion Codebook Models (gDDCM): Tokenizing images using a pre-trained diffusion model
Recently, the Denoising Diffusion Codebook Models (DDCM) was proposed. DDCM leverages the Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) and replaces the random noise in the backward process with noise sampled from specific sets according to a predefined rule, thereby enabling image compression. However, DDCM cannot be applied to methods other than DDPM. In this paper, we propose the generalized Denoising Diffusion Compression Model (gDDCM), which extends DDCM to mainstream diffusion models and their variants, including DDPM, Score-Based Models, Consistency Models, and Rectified Flow. We evaluate our method on CIFAR-10 and LSUN Bedroom datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach successfully generalizes DDCM to the aforementioned models and achieves improved performance.
comment: in Chinese language
♻ ☆ The Promise of RL for Autoregressive Image Editing
Saba Ahmadi, Rabiul Awal, Ankur Sikarwar, Amirhossein Kazemnejad, Ge Ya Luo, Juan A. Rodriguez, Sai Rajeswar, Siva Reddy, Christopher Pal, Benno Krojer, Aishwarya Agrawal
While image generation techniques are now capable of producing high-quality images that respect prompts which span multiple sentences, the task of text-guided image editing remains a challenge. Even edit requests that consist of only a few words often fail to be executed correctly. We explore three strategies to enhance performance on a wide range of image editing tasks: supervised fine-tuning (SFT), reinforcement learning (RL), and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. In order to study all these components in one consistent framework, we adopt an autoregressive multimodal model that processes textual and visual tokens in a unified manner. We find RL combined with a large multi-modal LLM verifier to be the most effective of these strategies. As a result, we release EARL: Editing with Autoregression and RL, a strong RL-based image editing model that performs competitively on a diverse range of edits compared to strong baselines, despite using much less training data. Thus, EARL pushes the frontier of autoregressive multimodal models on image editing. We release our code, training data, and trained models at https://github.com/mair-lab/EARL.
♻ ☆ Crossing Borders: A Multimodal Challenge for Indian Poetry Translation and Image Generation
Indian poetry, known for its linguistic complexity and deep cultural resonance, has a rich and varied heritage spanning thousands of years. However, its layered meanings, cultural allusions, and sophisticated grammatical constructions often pose challenges for comprehension, especially for non-native speakers or readers unfamiliar with its context and language. Despite its cultural significance, existing works on poetry have largely overlooked Indian language poems. In this paper, we propose the Translation and Image Generation (TAI) framework, leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and Latent Diffusion Models through appropriate prompt tuning. Our framework supports the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of Quality Education (SDG 4) and Reduced Inequalities (SDG 10) by enhancing the accessibility of culturally rich Indian-language poetry to a global audience. It includes (1) a translation module that uses an Odds Ratio Preference Alignment Algorithm to accurately translate morphologically rich poetry into English, and (2) an image generation module that employs a semantic graph to capture tokens, dependencies, and semantic relationships between metaphors and their meanings, to create visually meaningful representations of Indian poems. Our comprehensive experimental evaluation, including both human and quantitative assessments, demonstrates the superiority of TAI Diffusion in poem image generation tasks, outperforming strong baselines. To further address the scarcity of resources for Indian-language poetry, we introduce the Morphologically Rich Indian Language Poems MorphoVerse Dataset, comprising 1,570 poems across 21 low-resource Indian languages. By addressing the gap in poetry translation and visual comprehension, this work aims to broaden accessibility and enrich the reader's experience.
♻ ☆ Subjective and Objective Quality Evaluation of Super-Resolution Enhanced Broadcast Images on a Novel SR-IQA Dataset IEEE
To display low-quality broadcast content on high-resolution screens in full-screen format, the application of Super-Resolution (SR), a key consumer technology, is essential. Recently, SR methods have been developed that not only increase resolution while preserving the original image information but also enhance the perceived quality. However, evaluating the quality of SR images generated from low-quality sources, such as SR-enhanced broadcast content, is challenging due to the need to consider both distortions and improvements. Additionally, assessing SR image quality without original high-quality sources presents another significant challenge. Unfortunately, there has been a dearth of research specifically addressing the Image Quality Assessment (IQA) of SR images under these conditions. In this work, we introduce a new IQA dataset for SR broadcast images in both 2K and 4K resolutions. We conducted a subjective quality evaluation to obtain the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) for these SR images and performed a comprehensive human study to identify the key factors influencing the perceived quality. Finally, we evaluated the performance of existing IQA metrics on our dataset. This study reveals the limitations of current metrics, highlighting the need for a more robust IQA metric that better correlates with the perceived quality of SR images.
comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Access
♻ ☆ Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning with Coalescent Projections and Latent Space Reservation
Despite the progress in cross-domain few-shot learning, a model pre-trained with DINO combined with a prototypical classifier outperforms the latest SOTA methods. A crucial limitation that needs to be overcome is that updating too many parameters of the transformers leads to overfitting due to the scarcity of labeled samples. To address this challenge, we propose a new concept, coalescent projection, as an effective successor to soft prompts. Additionally, we propose a novel pseudo-class generation method, combined with self-supervised transformations, that relies solely on the base domain to prepare the network to encounter unseen samples from different domains. The proposed method exhibits its effectiveness in comprehensive experiments on the extreme domain-shift problem of the BSCD-FSL benchmark. Our code is published at \href{https://github.com/Naeem-Paeedeh/CPLSR}{https://github.com/Naeem-Paeedeh/CPLSR}.
♻ ☆ Equivariant neural networks and equivarification
Equivariant neural networks are a class of neural networks designed to preserve symmetries inherent in the data. In this paper, we introduce a general method for modifying a neural network to enforce equivariance, a process we refer to as equivarification. We further show that group convolutional neural networks (G-CNNs) arise as a special case of our framework.
comment: More explanations and experiments were added; a theoretical comparison with G-CNN was added
♻ ☆ Continual Learning for Image Captioning through Improved Image-Text Alignment
Generating accurate and coherent image captions in a continual learning setting remains a major challenge due to catastrophic forgetting and the difficulty of aligning evolving visual concepts with language over time. In this work, we propose a novel multi-loss framework for continual image captioning that integrates semantic guidance through prompt-based continual learning and contrastive alignment. Built upon a pretrained ViT-GPT-2 backbone, our approach combines standard cross-entropy loss with three additional components: (1) a prompt-based cosine similarity loss that aligns image embeddings with synthetically constructed prompts encoding objects, attributes, and actions; (2) a CLIP-style loss that promotes alignment between image embeddings and target caption embedding; and (3) a language-guided contrastive loss that employs a triplet loss to enhance class-level discriminability between tasks. Notably, our approach introduces no additional overhead at inference time and requires no prompts during caption generation. We find that this approach mitigates catastrophic forgetting, while achieving better semantic caption alignment compared to state-of-the-art methods. The code can be found via the following link: https://github.com/Gepardius/Taetz_Bordelius_Continual_ImageCaptioning.
comment: 11 pages, 3 figures
♻ ☆ AdCare-VLM: Towards a Unified and Pre-aligned Latent Representation for Healthcare Video Understanding NeurIPS 2025
Md Asaduzzaman Jabin, Hanqi Jiang, Yiwei Li, Patrick Kaggwa, Eugene Douglass, Juliet N. Sekandi, Tianming Liu
Chronic diseases, including diabetes, hypertension, asthma, HIV-AIDS, epilepsy, and tuberculosis, necessitate rigorous adherence to medication to avert disease progression, manage symptoms, and decrease mortality rates. Adherence is frequently undermined by factors including patient behavior, caregiver support, elevated medical costs, and insufficient healthcare infrastructure. We propose AdCare-VLM, a specialized LLaVA-based multimodal large vision language model (LVLM) by introducing a unified visual latent space with pre-alignment to facilitate visual question answering (VQA) concerning medication adherence through patient videos. We employ a private dataset comprising 806 custom-annotated tuberculosis (TB) medication monitoring videos, which have been labeled by clinical experts, to fine-tune the model for adherence pattern detection. We present LLM-TB-VQA, a detailed medical adherence VQA dataset that encompasses positive, negative, and ambiguous adherence cases. Our method identifies correlations between visual features, such as the clear visibility of the patient's face, medication, water intake, and the act of ingestion, and their associated medical concepts in captions. This facilitates the integration of aligned visual-linguistic representations and improves multimodal interactions. Experimental results indicate that our method surpasses parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) enabled VLM models, such as LLaVA-V1.5 and Chat-UniVi, with absolute improvements ranging from 3.1% to 3.54% across pre-trained, regular, and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) configurations. Comprehensive ablation studies and attention map visualizations substantiate our approach, enhancing interpretability.
comment: 39th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025) Workshop: 7th International Workshop on Large Scale Holistic Video Understanding: Toward Video Foundation Models
♻ ☆ A Style is Worth One Code: Unlocking Code-to-Style Image Generation with Discrete Style Space
Innovative visual stylization is a cornerstone of artistic creation, yet generating novel and consistent visual styles remains a significant challenge. Existing generative approaches typically rely on lengthy textual prompts, reference images, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning to guide style-aware image generation, but often struggle with style consistency, limited creativity, and complex style representations. In this paper, we affirm that a style is worth one numerical code by introducing the novel task, code-to-style image generation, which produces images with novel, consistent visual styles conditioned solely on a numerical style code. To date, this field has only been primarily explored by the industry (e.g., Midjourney), with no open-source research from the academic community. To fill this gap, we propose CoTyle, the first open-source method for this task. Specifically, we first train a discrete style codebook from a collection of images to extract style embeddings. These embeddings serve as conditions for a text-to-image diffusion model (T2I-DM) to generate stylistic images. Subsequently, we train an autoregressive style generator on the discrete style embeddings to model their distribution, allowing the synthesis of novel style embeddings. During inference, a numerical style code is mapped to a unique style embedding by the style generator, and this embedding guides the T2I-DM to generate images in the corresponding style. Unlike existing methods, our method offers unparalleled simplicity and diversity, unlocking a vast space of reproducible styles from minimal input. Extensive experiments validate that CoTyle effectively turns a numerical code into a style controller, demonstrating a style is worth one code.
comment: Homepage: https://github.com/Kwai-Kolors.github.io/CoTyle Code: https://github.com/Kwai-Kolors/CoTyle Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Kwai-Kolors/CoTyle
♻ ☆ ArtiWorld: LLM-Driven Articulation of 3D Objects in Scenes
Building interactive simulators and scalable robot-learning environments requires a large number of articulated assets. However, most existing 3D assets in simulation are rigid, and manually converting them into articulated objects is extremely labor- and cost-intensive. This raises a natural question: can we automatically identify articulable objects in a scene and convert them into articulated assets directly? In this paper, we present ArtiWorld, a scene-aware pipeline that localizes candidate articulable objects from textual scene descriptions and reconstructs executable URDF models that preserve the original geometry. At the core of this pipeline is Arti4URDF, which leverages 3D point cloud, prior knowledge of a large language model (LLM), and a URDF-oriented prompt design to rapidly convert rigid objects into interactive URDF-based articulated objects while maintaining their 3D shape. We evaluate ArtiWorld at three levels: 3D simulated objects, full 3D simulated scenes, and real-world scan scenes. Across all three settings, our method consistently outperforms existing approaches and achieves state-of-the-art performance, while preserving object geometry and correctly capturing object interactivity to produce usable URDF-based articulated models. This provides a practical path toward building interactive, robot-ready simulation environments directly from existing 3D assets. Code and data will be released.
♻ ☆ Iris: Integrating Language into Diffusion-based Monocular Depth Estimation
Ziyao Zeng, Jingcheng Ni, Daniel Wang, Patrick Rim, Younjoon Chung, Fengyu Yang, Byung-Woo Hong, Alex Wong
Traditional monocular depth estimation suffers from inherent ambiguity and visual nuisances. We demonstrate that language can enhance monocular depth estimation by providing an additional condition (rather than images alone) aligned with plausible 3D scenes, thereby reducing the solution space for depth estimation. This conditional distribution is learned during the text-to-image pre-training of diffusion models. To generate images under various viewpoints and layouts that precisely reflect textual descriptions, the model implicitly models object sizes, shapes, and scales, their spatial relationships, and the overall scene structure. In this paper, Iris, we investigate the benefits of our strategy to integrate text descriptions into training and inference of diffusion-based depth estimation models. We experiment with three different diffusion-based monocular depth estimators (Marigold, Lotus, and E2E-FT) and their variants. By training on HyperSim and Virtual KITTI, and evaluating on NYUv2, KITTI, ETH3D, ScanNet, and DIODE, we find that our strategy improves the overall monocular depth estimation accuracy, especially in small areas. It also improves the model's depth perception of specific regions described in the text. We find that by providing more details in the text, the depth prediction can be iteratively refined. Simultaneously, we find that language can act as a constraint to accelerate the convergence of both training and the inference diffusion trajectory. Code and generated text data will be released upon acceptance.
♻ ☆ Large Language Models and 3D Vision for Intelligent Robotic Perception and Autonomy
With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and robotics, the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) with 3D vision is emerging as a transformative approach to enhancing robotic sensing technologies. This convergence enables machines to perceive, reason and interact with complex environments through natural language and spatial understanding, bridging the gap between linguistic intelligence and spatial perception. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art methodologies, applications and challenges at the intersection of LLMs and 3D vision, with a focus on next-generation robotic sensing technologies. We first introduce the foundational principles of LLMs and 3D data representations, followed by an in-depth examination of 3D sensing technologies critical for robotics. The review then explores key advancements in scene understanding, text-to-3D generation, object grounding and embodied agents, highlighting cutting-edge techniques such as zero-shot 3D segmentation, dynamic scene synthesis and language-guided manipulation. Furthermore, we discuss multimodal LLMs that integrate 3D data with touch, auditory and thermal inputs, enhancing environmental comprehension and robotic decision-making. To support future research, we catalog benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics tailored for 3D-language and vision tasks. Finally, we identify key challenges and future research directions, including adaptive model architectures, enhanced cross-modal alignment and real-time processing capabilities, which pave the way for more intelligent, context-aware and autonomous robotic sensing systems.
comment: 45 pages, 15 figures, MDPI Sensors Journal
♻ ☆ Towards 3D Object-Centric Feature Learning for Semantic Scene Completion AAAI-2026
Vision-based 3D Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) has received growing attention due to its potential in autonomous driving. While most existing approaches follow an ego-centric paradigm by aggregating and diffusing features over the entire scene, they often overlook fine-grained object-level details, leading to semantic and geometric ambiguities, especially in complex environments. To address this limitation, we propose Ocean, an object-centric prediction framework that decomposes the scene into individual object instances to enable more accurate semantic occupancy prediction. Specifically, we first employ a lightweight segmentation model, MobileSAM, to extract instance masks from the input image. Then, we introduce a 3D Semantic Group Attention module that leverages linear attention to aggregate object-centric features in 3D space. To handle segmentation errors and missing instances, we further design a Global Similarity-Guided Attention module that leverages segmentation features for global interaction. Finally, we propose an Instance-aware Local Diffusion module that improves instance features through a generative process and subsequently refines the scene representation in the BEV space. Extensive experiments on the SemanticKITTI and SSCBench-KITTI360 benchmarks demonstrate that Ocean achieves state-of-the-art performance, with mIoU scores of 17.40 and 20.28, respectively.
comment: Accepted to AAAI-2026
♻ ☆ UniVST: A Unified Framework for Training-free Localized Video Style Transfer
This paper presents UniVST, a unified framework for localized video style transfer based on diffusion models. It operates without the need for training, offering a distinct advantage over existing diffusion methods that transfer style across entire videos. The endeavors of this paper comprise: (1) A point-matching mask propagation strategy that leverages the feature maps from the DDIM inversion. This streamlines the model's architecture by obviating the need for tracking models. (2) A training-free AdaIN-guided localized video stylization mechanism that operates at both the latent and attention levels. This balances content fidelity and style richness, mitigating the loss of localized details commonly associated with direct video stylization. (3) A sliding-window consistent smoothing scheme that harnesses optical flow within the pixel representation and refines predicted noise to update the latent space. This significantly enhances temporal consistency and diminishes artifacts in stylized video. Our proposed UniVST has been validated to be superior to existing methods in quantitative and qualitative metrics. It adeptly addresses the challenges of preserving the primary object's style while ensuring temporal consistency and detail preservation. Our code is available at https://github.com/QuanjianSong/UniVST.
comment: Accepted by TPAMI 2025; Project Page: https://quanjiansong.github.io/projects/UniVST
♻ ☆ Towards Prospective Medical Image Reconstruction via Knowledge-Informed Dynamic Optimal Transport
Medical image reconstruction from measurement data is a vital but challenging inverse problem. Deep learning approaches have achieved promising results, but often requires paired measurement and high-quality images, which is typically simulated through a forward model, i.e., retrospective reconstruction. However, training on simulated pairs commonly leads to performance degradation on real prospective data due to the retrospective-to-prospective gap caused by incomplete imaging knowledge in simulation. To address this challenge, this paper introduces imaging Knowledge-Informed Dynamic Optimal Transport (KIDOT), a novel dynamic optimal transport framework with optimality in the sense of preserving consistency with imaging physics in transport, that conceptualizes reconstruction as finding a dynamic transport path. KIDOT learns from unpaired data by modeling reconstruction as a continuous evolution path from measurements to images, guided by an imaging knowledge-informed cost function and transport equation. This dynamic and knowledge-aware approach enhances robustness and better leverages unpaired data while respecting acquisition physics. Theoretically, we demonstrate that KIDOT naturally generalizes dynamic optimal transport, ensuring its mathematical rationale and solution existence. Extensive experiments on MRI and CT reconstruction demonstrate KIDOT's superior performance.
♻ ☆ Vision Transformers with Self-Distilled Registers NeurIPS 2025
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have emerged as the dominant architecture for visual processing tasks, demonstrating excellent scalability with increased training data and model size. However, recent work has identified the emergence of artifact tokens in ViTs that are incongruous with local semantics. These anomalous tokens degrade ViT performance in tasks that require fine-grained localization or structural coherence. An effective mitigation of this issue is the addition of register tokens to ViTs, which implicitly "absorb" the artifact term during training. Given the availability of existing large-scale pre-trained ViTs, in this paper we seek add register tokens to existing models without needing to re-train from scratch, which is infeasible considering their size. Specifically, we propose Post Hoc Registers (PH-Reg), an efficient self-distillation method that integrates registers into an existing ViT without requiring additional labeled data and full retraining. PH-Reg initializes both teacher and student networks from the same pre-trained ViT. The teacher remains frozen and unmodified, while the student is augmented with randomly initialized register tokens. By applying test-time augmentation to the teacher's inputs, we generate denoised dense embeddings free of artifacts, which are then used to optimize only a small subset of unlocked student weights. We show that our approach can effectively reduce the number of artifact tokens, improving the segmentation and depth prediction of the student ViT under zero-shot and linear probing.
comment: NeurIPS 2025 Spotlight. Website: https://github.com/0raiser0/PH-Reg
♻ ☆ CVChess: A Deep Learning Framework for Converting Chessboard Images to Forsyth-Edwards Notation
Chess has experienced a large increase in viewership since the pandemic, driven largely by the accessibility of online learning platforms. However, no equivalent assistance exists for physical chess games, creating a divide between analog and digital chess experiences. This paper presents CVChess, a deep learning framework for converting chessboard images to Forsyth-Edwards Notation (FEN), which is later input into online chess engines to provide you with the best next move. Our approach employs a convolutional neural network (CNN) with residual layers to perform piece recognition from smartphone camera images. The system processes RGB images of a physical chess board through a multistep process: image preprocessing using the Hough Line Transform for edge detection, projective transform to achieve a top-down board alignment, segmentation into 64 individual squares, and piece classification into 13 classes (6 unique white pieces, 6 unique black pieces and an empty square) using the residual CNN. Residual connections help retain low-level visual features while enabling deeper feature extraction, improving accuracy and stability during training. We train and evaluate our model using the Chess Recognition Dataset (ChessReD), containing 10,800 annotated smartphone images captured under diverse lighting conditions and angles. The resulting classifications are encoded as an FEN string, which can be fed into a chess engine to generate the most optimal move
♻ ☆ UNSEEN: Enhancing Dataset Pruning from a Generalization Perspective AAAI 2026
The growing scale of datasets in deep learning has introduced significant computational challenges. Dataset pruning addresses this challenge by constructing a compact but informative coreset from the full dataset with comparable performance. Previous approaches typically establish scoring metrics based on specific criteria to identify representative samples. However, these methods predominantly rely on sample scores obtained from the model's performance during the training (i.e., fitting) phase. As scoring models achieve near-optimal performance on training data, such fitting-centric approaches induce a dense distribution of sample scores within a narrow numerical range. This concentration reduces the distinction between samples and hinders effective selection. To address this challenge, we conduct dataset pruning from the perspective of generalization, i.e., scoring samples based on models not exposed to them during training. We propose a plug-and-play framework, UNSEEN, which can be integrated into existing dataset pruning methods. Additionally, conventional score-based methods are single-step and rely on models trained solely on the complete dataset, providing limited perspective on the importance of samples. To address this limitation, we scale UNSEEN to multi-step scenarios and propose an incremental selection technique through scoring models trained on varying coresets, and optimize the quality of the coreset dynamically. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-1K. Notably, on ImageNet-1K, UNSEEN achieves lossless performance while reducing training data by 30\%.
comment: AAAI 2026, 13 pages, 9 figures, 5 tables
♻ ☆ SF-Loc: A Visual Mapping and Geo-Localization System based on Sparse Visual Structure Frames
For high-level geo-spatial applications and intelligent robotics, accurate global pose information is of crucial importance. Map-aided localization is a universal approach to overcome the limitations of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) in challenging environments. However, current solutions face challenges in terms of mapping flexibility, storage burden and re-localization performance. In this work, we present SF-Loc, a lightweight visual mapping and map-aided localization system, whose core idea is the map representation based on sparse frames with dense but compact depth, termed as visual structure frames. In the mapping phase, multi-sensor dense bundle adjustment (MS-DBA) is applied to construct geo-referenced visual structure frames. The local co-visbility is checked to keep the map sparsity and achieve incremental mapping. In the localization phase, coarse-to-fine vision-based localization is performed, in which multi-frame information and the map distribution are fully integrated. To be specific, the concept of spatially smoothed similarity (SSS) is proposed to overcome the place ambiguity, and pairwise frame matching is applied for efficient and robust pose estimation. Experimental results on the cross-season dataset verify the effectiveness of the system. In complex urban road scenarios, the map size is down to 3 MB per kilometer and stable decimeter-level re-localization can be achieved. The code will be made open-source soon (https://github.com/GREAT-WHU/SF-Loc).
♻ ☆ DeSamba: Decoupled Spectral Adaptive Framework for 3D Multi-Sequence MRI Lesion Classification
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) sequences provide rich spatial and frequency domain information, which is crucial for accurate lesion classification in medical imaging. However, effectively integrating multi-sequence MRI data for robust 3D lesion classification remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose DeSamba (Decoupled Spectral Adaptive Network and Mamba-Based Model), a novel framework designed to extract decoupled representations and adaptively fuse spatial and spectral features for lesion classification. DeSamba introduces a Decoupled Representation Learning Module (DRLM) that decouples features from different MRI sequences through self-reconstruction and cross-reconstruction, and a Spectral Adaptive Modulation Block (SAMB) within the proposed SAMNet, enabling dynamic fusion of spectral and spatial information based on lesion characteristics. We evaluate DeSamba on two clinically relevant 3D datasets. On a six-class spinal metastasis dataset (n=1,448), DeSamba achieves 62.10% Top-1 accuracy, 63.62% F1-score, 87.71% AUC, and 93.55% Top-3 accuracy on an external validation set (n=372), outperforming all state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines. On a spondylitis dataset (n=251) involving a challenging binary classification task, DeSamba achieves 70.00%/64.52% accuracy and 74.75/73.88 AUC on internal and external validation sets, respectively. Ablation studies demonstrate that both DRLM and SAMB significantly contribute to overall performance, with over 10% relative improvement compared to the baseline. Our results highlight the potential of DeSamba as a generalizable and effective solution for 3D lesion classification in multi-sequence medical imaging.
comment: Our manuscript requires further experimental work, and the dataset cannot be made publicly available; therefore, we respectfully request withdrawal of the paper
♻ ☆ Synthetic Geology: Structural Geology Meets Deep Learning
Reconstructing the structural geology and mineral composition of the first few kilometers of the Earth's subsurface from sparse or indirect surface observations remains a long-standing challenge with critical applications in mineral exploration, geohazard assessment, and geotechnical engineering. This inherently ill-posed problem is often addressed by classical geophysical inversion methods, which typically yield a single maximum-likelihood model that fails to capture the full range of plausible geology. The adoption of modern deep learning methods has been limited by the lack of large 3D training datasets. We address this gap with \textit{StructuralGeo}, a geological simulation engine that mimics eons of tectonic, magmatic, and sedimentary processes to generate a virtually limitless supply of realistic synthetic 3D lithological models. Using this dataset, we train both unconditional and conditional generative flow-matching models with a 3D attention U-net architecture. The resulting foundation model can reconstruct multiple plausible 3D scenarios from surface topography and sparse borehole data, depicting structures such as layers, faults, folds, and dikes. By sampling many reconstructions from the same observations, we introduce a probabilistic framework for estimating the size and extent of subsurface features. While the realism of the output is bounded by the fidelity of the training data to true geology, this combination of simulation and generative AI functions offers a flexible prior for probabilistic modeling, regional fine-tuning, and use as an AI-based regularizer in traditional geophysical inversion workflows.
comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, geological simulation code at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15244035, generative AI code at https://github.com/chipnbits/flowtrain_stochastic_interpolation/releases/tag/v1.0.2
♻ ☆ Deploying Rapid Damage Assessments from sUAS Imagery for Disaster Response
This paper presents the first AI/ML system for automating building damage assessment in uncrewed aerial systems (sUAS) imagery to be deployed operationally during federally declared disasters (Hurricanes Debby and Helene). In response to major disasters, sUAS teams are dispatched to collect imagery of the affected areas to assess damage; however, at recent disasters, teams collectively delivered between 47GB and 369GB of imagery per day, representing more imagery than can reasonably be transmitted or interpreted by subject matter experts in the disaster scene, thus delaying response efforts. To alleviate this data avalanche encountered in practice, computer vision and machine learning techniques are necessary. While prior work has been deployed to automatically assess damage in satellite imagery, there is no current state of practice for sUAS-based damage assessment systems, as all known work has been confined to academic settings. This work establishes the state of practice via the development and deployment of models for building damage assessment with sUAS imagery. The model development involved training on the largest known dataset of post-disaster sUAS aerial imagery, containing 21,716 building damage labels, and the operational training of 91 disaster practitioners. The best performing model was deployed during the responses to Hurricanes Debby and Helene, where it assessed a combined 415 buildings in approximately 18 minutes. This work contributes documentation of the actual use of AI/ML for damage assessment during a disaster and lessons learned to the benefit of the AI/ML research and user communities.
comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Accepted - In Press, IAAI'26
♻ ☆ FGM-HD: Boosting Generation Diversity of Fractal Generative Models through Hausdorff Dimension Induction AAAI-26
Improving the diversity of generated results while maintaining high visual quality remains a significant challenge in image generation tasks. Fractal Generative Models (FGMs) are efficient in generating high-quality images, but their inherent self-similarity limits the diversity of output images. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach based on the Hausdorff Dimension (HD), a widely recognized concept in fractal geometry used to quantify structural complexity, which aids in enhancing the diversity of generated outputs. To incorporate HD into FGM, we propose a learnable HD estimation method that predicts HD directly from image embeddings, addressing computational cost concerns. However, simply introducing HD into a hybrid loss is insufficient to enhance diversity in FGMs due to: 1) degradation of image quality, and 2) limited improvement in generation diversity. To this end, during training, we adopt an HD-based loss with a monotonic momentum-driven scheduling strategy to progressively optimize the hyperparameters, obtaining optimal diversity without sacrificing visual quality. Moreover, during inference, we employ HD-guided rejection sampling to select geometrically richer outputs. Extensive experiments on the ImageNet dataset demonstrate that our FGM-HD framework yields a 39\% improvement in output diversity compared to vanilla FGMs, while preserving comparable image quality. To our knowledge, this is the very first work introducing HD into FGM. Our method effectively enhances the diversity of generated outputs while offering a principled theoretical contribution to FGM development.
comment: 12 pages, AAAI-26
♻ ☆ Rethinking Progression of Memory State in Robotic Manipulation: An Object-Centric Perspective AAAI 2026
Nhat Chung, Taisei Hanyu, Toan Nguyen, Huy Le, Frederick Bumgarner, Duy Minh Ho Nguyen, Khoa Vo, Kashu Yamazaki, Chase Rainwater, Tung Kieu, Anh Nguyen, Ngan Le
As embodied agents operate in increasingly complex environments, the ability to perceive, track, and reason about individual object instances over time becomes essential, especially in tasks requiring sequenced interactions with visually similar objects. In these non-Markovian settings, key decision cues are often hidden in object-specific histories rather than the current scene. Without persistent memory of prior interactions (what has been interacted with, where it has been, or how it has changed) visuomotor policies may fail, repeat past actions, or overlook completed ones. To surface this challenge, we introduce LIBERO-Mem, a non-Markovian task suite for stress-testing robotic manipulation under object-level partial observability. It combines short- and long-horizon object tracking with temporally sequenced subgoals, requiring reasoning beyond the current frame. However, vision-language-action (VLA) models often struggle in such settings, with token scaling quickly becoming intractable even for tasks spanning just a few hundred frames. We propose Embodied-SlotSSM, a slot-centric VLA framework built for temporal scalability. It maintains spatio-temporally consistent slot identities and leverages them through two mechanisms: (1) slot-state-space modeling for reconstructing short-term history, and (2) a relational encoder to align the input tokens with action decoding. Together, these components enable temporally grounded, context-aware action prediction. Experiments show Embodied-SlotSSM's baseline performance on LIBERO-Mem and general tasks, offering a scalable solution for non-Markovian reasoning in object-centric robotic policies.
comment: Accepted at AAAI 2026
♻ ☆ STONE: Pioneering the One-to-N Backdoor Threat in 3D Point Cloud
Backdoor attacks pose a critical threat to deep learning, especially in safety-sensitive 3D domains such as autonomous driving and robotics. Despite their potency, existing attacks on 3D point clouds are limited to a static one-to-one paradigm, leaving the more flexible one-to-N backdoor threat largely unexplored and without a theoretical or practical foundation. We address this by introducing STONE (Spherical Trigger One-to-N Backdoor Enabling), the first framework that instantiates this threat through a configurable spherical trigger. Its parameterizable spatial properties create a dynamic key space, enabling a single trigger to control multiple output labels. Theoretically, we ground STONE through Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) analysis, providing the first formal basis for one-to-N mappings in 3D models. Empirically, extensive evaluations show high attack success rate (up to 100\%) with no loss in clean-data accuracy. This work establishes a foundational benchmark for multi-target threats in 3D vision, crucial for securing future intelligent systems.
comment: 15 pages, 4 figures
♻ ☆ Improved Sample Complexity Bounds for Diffusion Model Training
Diffusion models have become the most popular approach to deep generative modeling of images, largely due to their empirical performance and reliability. From a theoretical standpoint, a number of recent works have studied the iteration complexity of sampling, assuming access to an accurate diffusion model. In this work, we focus on understanding the sample complexity of training such a model; how many samples are needed to learn an accurate diffusion model using a sufficiently expressive neural network? Prior work showed bounds polynomial in the dimension, desired Total Variation error, and Wasserstein error. We show an exponential improvement in the dependence on Wasserstein error and depth, along with improved dependencies on other relevant parameters.
comment: Bugfix
♻ ☆ ODE$_t$(ODE$_l$): Shortcutting the Time and the Length in Diffusion and Flow Models for Faster Sampling WACV 2026
Continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) and diffusion models (DMs) generate high-quality data from a noise distribution. However, their sampling process demands multiple iterations to solve an ordinary differential equation (ODE) with high computational complexity. State-of-the-art methods focus on reducing the number of discrete time steps during sampling to improve efficiency. In this work, we explore a complementary direction in which the quality-complexity tradeoff can also be controlled in terms of the neural network length. We achieve this by rewiring the blocks in the transformer-based architecture to solve an inner discretized ODE w.r.t. its depth. Then, we apply a length consistency term during flow matching training, and as a result, the sampling can be performed with an arbitrary number of time steps and transformer blocks. Unlike others, our ODE$_t$(ODE$_l$) approach is solver-agnostic in time dimension and reduces both latency and, importantly, memory usage. CelebA-HQ and ImageNet generation experiments show a latency reduction of up to $2\times$ in the most efficient sampling mode, and FID improvement of up to $2.8$ points for high-quality sampling when applied to prior methods. We open-source our code and checkpoints at github.com/gudovskiy/odelt.
comment: Accepted to WACV 2026. Preprint. Github page: github.com/gudovskiy/odelt
♻ ☆ On the Topological Foundation of Learning and Memory
We propose a formal foundation for cognition rooted in algebraic topology, built on a Homological Parity Principle. This posits that even-dimensional homology represents stable Structure/Context (e.g., generative models), while odd-dimensional homology represents dynamic Flow/Content (e.g., sensory/memory data). Cognition is governed by the Context-Content Uncertainty Principle (CCUP), a dynamical cycle aligning these parities. This framework distinguishes two modes: Inference (waking), where the scaffold predicts the flow (a Context-before-Content process); and Learning (sleep), an inverted Structure-before-Specificity process where memory traces sculpt the scaffold. This parity interpretation unifies cognitive functions like semantic and episodic memory and provides a structural generalization of existing theories, recasting Friston's Free Energy Principle and Tonini's Integrated Information in topological terms.