Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 202
☆ Gen4P: Video Generators are 4D Perceivers
We introduce Gen4P, a unified framework for recovering 4D geometry and motion from monocular video. We show that a pretrained video generator can be repurposed into a feed-forward 4D perceiver without iterative denoising. Building on on-demand querying, Gen4P processes clean video latents in a single encoder pass and predicts the requested 4D attributes through a lightweight cross-attention decoder. The on-demand query formulation enables flexible spatial sampling, and our proposed continuous-time queries further provide temporal flexibility. To strengthen geometric knowledge, we propose a straightforward plug-in solution by incorporating a pretrained video-depth LoRA as a frozen geometry prior, improving overall performance without adding extra trainable parameters. Gen4P achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on tasks of 3D point tracking, video depth and camera pose estimation. Qualitative results on in-the-wild videos illustrate its capability of tracking complex motion while maintaining the delicate structure. Together, these results demonstrate the potential of video generative pretraining for unified 4D perception. See https://gen4p.github.io for more visual results.
comment: Project page: https://gen4p.github.io/
☆ Which Tokens to Merge? Diffusion Dynamics for Efficient Image Generation NeurIPS 2026
Token merging has emerged as an effective training-free strategy for accelerating diffusion models by reducing redundant token computation while minimizing generation degradation. A key challenge is determining which tokens can be safely merged and which should be preserved for subsequent computation. Existing method addresses this by preserving prompt-aligned foreground regions, thereby protecting semantically relevant structures. However, this text-relevance criterion overlooks background objects, local details that are not explicitly mentioned in the prompt, leading to degraded structural coherence. In this work, we propose Dynamics-aware Token Merging (DaTMe), a training-free framework that grounds token merging in the underlying diffusion dynamics. Our key insight is that token importance should reflect whether a token remains unresolved during denoising and whether it carries structural information. To this end, DaTMe constructs a dynamics- aware importance map from the Tweedie denoised estimate. The map combines a temporal signal, measuring inter-step changes in the predicted clean image, with a structural signal, capturing local high-frequency content such as boundaries and fine details. Using this map, DaTMe adaptively assigns tokens into merging roles under a given compression ratio: important tokens are preserved as anchors, while tokens that are both temporally stabilized and structurally homogeneous are selected as safe merge candidates. Experiments on PixArt-a and FLUX demonstrate that DaTMe maintains visual fidelity across the entire image, highlighting diffusion dynamics as an effective token-level merging decision in efficient generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/SeungJuCha/DaTMe.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. Code: https://github.com/SeungJuCha/DaTMe
☆ SoftCache: Adaptive Step Size Caching for Diffusion Transformers
Diffusion and flow models generate a sample over iterative steps, each a full pass through a large network, and that pass dominates generation cost. Training-free caching accelerates them by reusing activations from recent evaluations instead of recomputing them. Dynamic caching methods decide when to refresh by accumulating a cheap probe of the network input into a staleness signal and spending a fresh evaluation once it crosses a threshold. They perform hard caching: the signal is a binary switch between refresh and reuse, and every step, fresh or cached, advances by the prescribed step size. We observe that the signal carries much more than this switch. How far it sits below the threshold, its headroom, predicts the error induced by reuse. We propose SoftCache, which performs soft caching: instead of a binary switch, the headroom sets how far each cached step goes. Where the headroom is large, the sampler jumps past several scheduled nodes, and as a refresh nears, its steps shrink back toward the original step. These adaptive jumps may land between the scheduled nodes, taking the sampler off its fixed grid. SoftCache requires no training and adds no per-backbone settings: on FLUX for images and on HunyuanVideo and Wan2.1 for video, at speedups from $3.5\times$ to $6.9\times$, it is ahead of every baseline on all four fidelity metrics.
comment: Project page: https://malnick.net/softcache
☆ T2-z: Test-Time Optimization of Environment Latents for Robotic World Models
Chenyuan Zhou, Yining Hong, Huang Huang, Yunfan Jiang, Wenlong Huang, David Held, Vitor Campagnolo Guizilini, Yue Wang, Li Fei-Fei, Jiajun Wu, Leonidas Guibas, Yejin Choi
Predicting how the world responds to an action requires more than what can be seen: robots must account for environmental factors that are neither directly observable nor explicitly specified, from physical properties such as friction and mass to human-defined environmental rules. We introduce T2-Z for test-time optimization of environment latents, which augments a robotic world model with a learnable environment latent to condition world predictions. This compact latent captures underlying environmental variation without supervision of what environmental factors exist or what values they take. During training, T2-Z alternates between two stages: a world-model optimization stage that fixes the latents and learns general action-conditioned dynamics across environments; and an environment-latent optimization stage that freezes the world model and optimizes the conditioning latents, allowing latent structure to emerge purely through world prediction. At test time, the world model remains frozen and a newly initialized environment latent is optimized from one or more test-time interactions, adapting the model to previously unseen environmental configurations. Across 7 simulated settings and 4 real-world robotic tasks, T2-Z reduces object prediction error metric from 15.20 to 7.00 and raises action success from 33.73% to 72.96%. Its emergent latents capture structured representations of individual and compounded factors across diverse visual scenes. Ablations further show that T2-Z can efficiently infer environment latents from as little as a single test-time interaction trajectory.
☆ Perceive, Predict, and Plan: a Unified World Action Model for Egocentric Dexterous Manipulation
Zirui Wu, Chen Guo, Tianjian Jiang, Zeren Jiang, Zeming Li, Lingchen Yang, Longteng Duan, Ying Xue, Handi Yin, Shenyuan Gao, Martin R. Oswald, Jun Zhang, Ping Tan, Jie Song
We introduce P$^{3}$-WAM, a unified world action model for egocentric dexterous manipulation that learns 3D perception, action-conditioned prediction, and goal-directed planning through three complementary modes: Perceive, which reconstructs articulated hand motion and camera trajectories from video; Predict, which generates visual futures under prescribed actions; and Plan, which jointly generates action trajectories and their anticipated visual consequences conditioned on an initial image, a language instruction, and an optional visual goal. Our model integrates a compact, structured 3D action representation into a pretrained video diffusion transformer through a mixture-of-transformers architecture with shared base weights, modality-specific adaptation, and bidirectional visual-action attention. Randomized modality visibility lets video and 3D actions serve as either conditioning context or prediction targets across the three modes. Experiments show that unified training improves all three capabilities over single-mode training, including gains in planning quality under a vision-language model evaluation. Through unified training, our model outperforms specialized baselines on 3D hand reconstruction and action-conditioned video prediction across four datasets, while producing goal-directed manipulation videos with stronger instruction adherence and action progression than video-generation baselines. Project Page: https://p3-wam.pages.dev/
☆ Grounding Generative Verification in 3D Content 3DV
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and 3D generation have expanded 3D understanding and synthesis. However, beyond visual fidelity, task-specific correctness grounded in 3D evidence remains a major challenge. We argue that building reliable 3D systems requires not only stronger generation and reasoning, but also verification feedback that identifies unmet requirements and explains their violations, allowing systems to reflect on and refine their outputs. Such feedback must integrate multi-view observations and distinguish genuine inconsistencies from projection-dependent appearances. We make three contributions. First, we introduce 3DVerifierBench, a benchmark spanning 10 tasks that evaluates decisions, rejection explanations, and responses to controlled changes in specifications and candidates. A human study reveals a 21.6 percentage-point gap between humans and the strongest tested model, GPT-6 Astra, while explanation-aware analysis exposes weaknesses in rejection reliability. Second, we analyze verification across fine-grained factual categories, exposing errors in values and target binding. We develop a scalable pipeline combining multi-view fact extraction, controlled 3D editing, and native annotations to produce 14,126 training examples with contradiction explanations and linked counterfactuals. Third, we examine how verification could support 3D generation through candidate selection and recursive refinement. In human-labeled sixteen-candidate pools, oracle selection improves complete factual success from 26.7% to 90.0%. In a separate eight-input study, human-guided recursive refinement satisfies all seven requirements for every input, compared with three under parallel Oracle@8. Together, our benchmark, analysis, and data pipeline establish a foundation for models to reflect on 3D content through reliable verification feedback.
comment: 35 pages, 6 figures. Project page: https://ai-yeslab.github.io/3DVerifier-page/
☆ DK-VLM: Geometry as Position for Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models
Han Su, Meng Tian, Tianyu Huang, Mingyu Gao, Lennox Wei, Dongxu Li, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Xiaohe Wu, Wangmeng Zuo
Vision-language models still struggle to understand 3D spatial relations across views and update spatial judgments as the observer moves. A common approach fuses 3D reconstruction features into visual tokens, but aligning these features with pretrained semantic representations remains challenging under limited spatial supervision. We propose DK-VLM with Dual-Kernel Attention, which computes attention from both a visual token's input position and its geometric position in the scene. A semantic kernel retains the pretrained model's native attention and positional encoding, while a separate geometric kernel uses estimated 3D points and camera poses to directly modulate attention through point displacements and relative view transformations. Then, a learned gate fuses their outputs. Geometry thus enters attention as position rather than as fused reconstruction features. We further introduce Reference-Frame Composition (RC) supervision to train the model to update its reference frame across successive judgments. It provides stepwise turn and heading targets derived from verified single-step annotations. Among the compared methods, DK-VLM-8B achieves the highest average score across six spatial benchmarks and the highest overall scores on VSI-Bench (74.33) and ReVSI-32 (58.28). RC supervision further improves multi-step spatial reasoning, while the full model preserves general video understanding. Project page: https://sumuru789.github.io/DK-VLM-website/.
comment: Project page: https://sumuru789.github.io/DK-VLM-website/
☆ SUPRA-TEX: 3D Generation with Super-Aligned Texture
Single image 3D generation aims to dress a given 3D mesh with relightable materials while faithfully preserving the visual details of a reference image. Existing methods either introduce artifacts when fusing inconsistent multi-view predictions or struggle to preserve fine details through implicit image-feature conditioning. To resolve these challenges, we introduce SUPRA-Tex, built on the principle of decoupling visible-material estimation, surface alignment, and observation-guided 3D completion. This division of labor allows the 3D generator, trained on limited 3D data, to focus its capacity on preserving visible evidence and completing unobserved surfaces. Specifically, we first train an MLLM-based image editing model to predict lighting-separated PBR maps in the reference view. We then project these maps onto the visible surface and encode them with the pretrained material VAE encoder into native observation latents that share the generation target's latent space. An interleaved flow transformer holds these latents as fixed, read-only anchors while alternating unobserved-region and full-surface updates to generate complete material latents. This design achieves super-alignment with the reference, delivering What You See Is What You Get fidelity on visible regions and coherent completion on unobserved surfaces. Trained solely on public datasets, SUPRA-Tex achieves SOTA performance in both geometry-conditioned texturing and end-to-end asset generation, matching or even exceeding leading commercial systems on in-the-wild images. Project page: https://supra-3d.github.io/supratex/
comment: Project page: https://supra-3d.github.io/supratex/
☆ Speculative Forcing for Efficient Autoregressive Video Generation
Few-step autoregressive video generators enable streaming generation, yet they run every token through the final denoising step, regardless of how much refinement it needs. We find this uniform computation is often unnecessary: many tokens already closely match their eventual full-step outputs in the initial steps, while others require refinement until the end. We introduce Speculative Forcing, a framework that treats intermediate clean estimates as drafts and predicts when individual tokens can be safely accepted early. Once accepted, a token is frozen as its final output and undergoes no further denoising, while its cached keys and values remain available as context for the remaining tokens. We explore two alternative verifier designs: a training-free one based on similarity to clean content and stability across steps, and a learned one that reads the frozen generator's intermediate features to estimate each token's remaining gap to its full-step output. Across short-video, long-video, and world generation, Speculative Forcing preserves the quality of full-step sampling while substantially reducing computation. On LongLive, it matches the four-step generator with ~1.7 denoising steps per token, running over 1.5x faster at 41.7 and 37.8 fps. On Lingbot-World 2.0, where camera motion continually changes the visible content, it maintains quality with ~2.5 denoising steps per token and runs 1.35x faster at 24.5 fps.
☆ GeoState: Learning View-Decoupled Geometry States for 3D World Modeling
Recent 3D world models increasingly use features from geometry foundation models (GFMs) as predictive world states, benefiting from their rich geometric priors. However, the view dependence of these features entangles scene dynamics with camera-induced variation, making the resulting state evolution harder to predict. We propose GeoState, a view-decoupled geometry representation for predictive 3D world modeling that separates scene-state evolution from camera-dependent observation. Specifically, a scene tokenizer aggregates multi-view GFM features into a view-decoupled scene state, which a geometry decoder queries using camera rays. An autoregressive world model then predicts future scene states, while camera motion is modeled separately. The predicted states can therefore be decoded under either predicted or externally specified cameras, while retaining a single context-derived scale throughout the rollout without per-frame scale alignment. Experiments show that GeoState outperforms prior 3D world models on Waymo, supports geometrically consistent cross-view querying, and generalizes zero-shot to KITTI and nuScenes. Project page: https://hongchang-liu.github.io/GeoState-project-page/
☆ 3DCodeVerse: Exploring 3D Worlds as Code
Yipeng Gao, Ziyao Zeng, Jinfa Huang, Yijiang Li, Haolin Xiong, Wang Qin, Xinlei Yu, Youheng Yao, Jie Zhang, Kun-Yu Lin, Rong Liu, Yinyuan Zhao, Yajie Zhao, Meiqi Guo, Jiebo Luo, Lei Shu, Yunhao Ge, Xinyu Hu, Laurent Itti
We introduce 3DCodeVerse, a research ecosystem that enables coding agents to create editable and verifiable 3D content at scale. 3DCodeVerse comprises large-scale, high-quality datasets of executable 3D code, a coding harness for spatial reasoning and automated verification, and practical guidance for 3D coding. First, we construct 3DCodeVerse-2M, a large-scale curated dataset of standalone 3D executable code. We build this corpus by collecting open-source data, converting specialized representations, and generating new programs with coding agents. Each program is packaged with the source files and associated assets required for execution in its declared environment, along with available descriptions and verification records. Second, we develop the 3DCodeVerse Harness, a multi-agent directed acyclic graph framework for generating and refining 3D content. It uses execution checks, spatial measurements, and visual feedback to automatically evaluate and revise generated programs without human feedback during generation. Third, we conduct systematic empirical studies of 3D coding, establishing baselines with fine-tuned open models and deriving practical guidance through component-level analyses of our harness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning on our dataset significantly improves the 3D coding capabilities of open-source models. Notably, our 3DCodeVerse harness achieves a 90% win rate against Claude Design (3D Object) in pairwise human evaluations, when both are utilized by Claude Opus 5.5.
comment: Project Page: https://3dcodeverse.com/
☆ ACEdit: Stable Multi-Turn Image Editing via Asymmetric Conditioning
Image editing models produce impressive results for individual edits, but their quality often deteriorates over multiple editing turns. Each editing turn introduces small distribution shifts that accumulate over successive edits, creating a gap between the input distributions encountered during the editor's original training and multi-turn inference. We introduce a training scheme that makes multi-turn image editing stable under this accumulating distribution shift. A key is to force the editor to operate on its own outputs from previous editing turns during training, bringing the principle of Self-Forcing to image editing. The main challenge is that self-generated editing trajectories deviate from ground-truth trajectories, making direct supervision unreliable. We address this challenge through a distillation objective that leverages a teacher image editor to provide a reliable training signal when the model operates on its own previous outputs. We introduce an asymmetric conditioning scheme: while the student performs edits sequentially on its own outputs, the teacher remains anchored to the original clean image and receives a compound editing instruction. Experiments show substantially reduced degradation over long multi-turn sequences while maintaining editing quality and instruction adherence.
comment: Project page: https://saradorfman1.github.io/ACEdit/
☆ Dense4D: Pixel-Level 4D Human Correspondence
Reconstructing human motion in 4D requires identifying the same surface points through articulation, deformation and changes in visibility. We introduce Dense4D, to our knowledge the first feed-forward model dedicated to dense 4D correspondence across the body, clothing and hair from a set of monocular RGB images, without a body template. Trained specifically for human geometry, Dense4D jointly processes person-centred crops with known image-to-crop transforms to predict Human Point Maps (HPMs) and depth for each image. An HPM assigns each person pixel the 3D position of its observed surface point at a common reference time. These maps support amodal correspondence: points hidden in the reference image can be localised from observations in other frames. Matching HPM coordinates across crops establishes correspondence without predicting camera poses or large scene displacements; per-image depth then lifts the matches into 3D tracks. Experiments on real people demonstrate substantially higher tracking accuracy and closer agreement with scanned surfaces than the evaluated baselines. Points from different frames assemble into coherent human geometry in the reference pose, providing visible evidence of consistent dense correspondence through articulation and clothing deformation. Additional qualitative results, videos, and an interactive viewer are available at https://alpguler.com/dense4d.
☆ AVC-Reward: Event-Centric Audio-Video Consistency Evaluation
Yuruo Wu, Kaihang Pan, Kai Shen, Jiacheng Li, Shuyuan Tu, Jisheng Dang, Li Tuoyu, Juncheng Li, Siliang Tang
As joint audio-video generation models become more capable, they can generate audio-visual scenes exhibiting three forms of complexity: multi-event composition, multi-layer audio mixture, and asymmetric cross-modal relations. However, current evaluations largely reuse metrics from earlier simple and unidirectional tasks. They typically evaluate an audio-video clip as a whole and rely on simple predefined relations, making them unsuitable for these increasingly complex scenes. We propose an event-centric evaluation framework that disentangles audio and visual events at the event level, analyzes each event independently, cross-validates relations across modalities, and aggregates the judgments into a coarse-to-fine, three-level consistency metric. The metric assesses global narrative harmony, event-level temporal synchronization, and fine-grained attribute alignment, providing a general formulation for audio-video consistency evaluation across diverse generation settings and cross-modal relations. We instantiate the metric as AVC-Reward, a trainable audio-video reward model. To evaluate the agreement between automatic judgments and human perception across generation paradigms and relation complexities, we construct AVC-Benchmark, which is primarily built from diverse positive and negative samples generated by various types of audio-video generation models. AVC-Reward achieves state-of-the-art alignment with human judgment among automatic methods, provides interpretable rationales that localize failures, and improves the audio-video consistency of a joint generation model when used as an online reinforcement-learning signal. Project page: https://tsuki0512.github.io/AVC-Reward.github.io/
☆ Not Just a Subject: Capturing Adaptive Scene-Specific Variance for Visual Storytelling ACCV 2026
Recent advancements in diffusion models have significantly improved text-to-image generation, enabling their application to visual storytelling, where coherent image sequences are generated from narrative prompts. However, existing methods primarily focus on identity preservation and often fail to adapt to diverse scene variations, resulting in semantic misalignment and structural inflexibility. We propose EOS-Story, a training-free framework that harmonizes identity consistency with scene-specific adaptation across text and vision spaces. In the text space, we decouple the narrative into identity and scene sub-prompts to prevent information dilution, but this leaves the scene without access to appearance cues. To bridge this gap, we introduce Cross-Contextual Bridging, which softly injects a phrase-level appearance residual into the scene's embedding. In the vision space, we find that scale mismatch between identity and scene subjects causes a few identity tokens to be repeatedly transferred, producing structural artifacts. We address this with Adaptive Identity Preservation, which anchors identity features at the scene-specific scale (Identity Anchoring) and integrates them via Identity-Aware Self-Attention. To evaluate performance under varied spatial compositions, we extend the Consistory+ benchmark with diverse framing scenarios (Consistory+_+). Extensive experiments show that EOS-Story achieves competitive or superior performance on both benchmarks.
comment: Accepted at ACCV 2026. Code: https://github.com/SeungJuCha/EOS-Story
☆ Velox: Spatial Memory Makes World Models Efficient
Video world models turn actions and camera motion into long visual rollouts, making video a natural interface for interactive simulation. Such interaction requires responsive generation, yet coherent rollouts must retain visual memory of what has already been generated. Chunked video diffusion models usually keep this context in growing KV caches, so later chunks become progressively slower. To address this bottleneck, we introduce Velox, a training-free attention router for region-level context selection using frustum slab correspondences from streaming geometry. Velox represents historical blocks as camera frustum slabs with depth intervals and obtains current-block depth through recency-priority multiwarp. For well-covered regions, frustum slab overlap softly modulates each layer's model-derived block importance. Uncovered regions retain the model-derived route without geometric bias. The fixed token-block granularity matches FlashAttention-style tiled execution and reduces the attention term that grows with rollout length. Frustum slab construction runs asynchronously with denoising on the same H200. At chunk 48, Velox accelerates attention by $4.36\times$ and denoising by $2.43\times$. On the full 158-case WBench navigation split, it remains within 0.15 API-free average points of dense LingBot-Fast-Cam. Please see our project page at https://velox-world.com/velox/ for more details.
☆ ARC-SORT: Adaptive, Robust, Compensated Multi-Object Tracking with Interacting Multiple Models
Multi-object tracking in sports broadcasts is hard for two reasons: athletes move fast and change direction abruptly, and the camera pans and zooms at the same time. We present ARC-SORT (Adaptive, Robust, Compensated SORT), a tracking-by-detection tracker that trains nothing and runs in real time. Its design rule: the tracker measures its own uncertainty, and that measurement decides how it acts. An Interacting Multiple Model (IMM) Kalman filter gives every track a predictive covariance, and we turn it into a per-track search region: the less reliable the motion prediction, the larger the region in which a detection may match (uncertainty-adaptive Expansion IoU, EIoU). On identical inputs, this continuous coupling is what matters: the same covariance used as a hard Mahalanobis gate hurts at every threshold we swept, and richer covariance summaries add nothing measurable. When two tracks cross, the assignment cost itself reports whether the decision was close. ARC-SORT keeps such pairs under review and applies at most one corrective identity swap once post-crossing appearance evidence shows the first decision was wrong; this adds +1.0 HOTA (higher order tracking accuracy) on both the SportsMOT and DanceTrack test sets at under a millisecond per frame. For players who leave the frame for seconds, motion extrapolation carries no information, so our offline re-identification drops the usual motion gate and links tracklets by appearance alone. ARC-SORT reaches 81.82 HOTA on the SportsMOT test set with the fewest identity switches of the 69 leaderboard entries as of August 2026 and tied-third multi-object tracking accuracy (MOTA, 97.09), and 62.1 HOTA on DanceTrack test with the same association settings. On Deep-EIoU's public detections and embeddings it reaches 80.31 HOTA, +3.1 over Deep-EIoU. It runs at about 50 frames per second on a laptop RTX 3060 GPU. Code will be released.
comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 13 tables; supplementary material included as appendix; qualitative video as ancillary file
☆ Grounded Human-Attributed Description and Activity Recognition in Videos
Jay N. Paranjape, Jurijs Nazarovs, Rohan Sarkar, Yue Guo, Lipeng Ke, Sankar Venkataraman, Vishal M. Patel, Nataraj Jammalamadaka
Understanding characteristics and activities of individuals in complex multi-person environments is crucial for real-world applications. However, existing datasets often simplify this problem to grounded group activity recognition, single-person activity recognition, or close-set activity recognition, thus limiting the generalizability of models trained on these datasets. In this work, we introduce the task of Grounded Human-Attributed Description and Activity Recognition (GHADAR), which involves describing the characteristics and activity descriptions of \textbf{every} person in a video, provided the location of the person in the video, which is more practical for real-world applications. To facilitate this, we introduce a new dataset derived from AVA-Actions by generating open-set captions for the person description and activity. In addition, we propose a novel method to effectively utilize the information contained in grounding during training by constraining the cross-attention masks during training in VLMs to improve performance for this task. Our experiments show that our method outperforms SOTA VLMs on this task. Finally, we demonstrate the limitations of existing evaluation metrics, which are overly reliant on human-annotations and exact text-text matching. As an added video-based evaluation, we propose a holistic VLM-based evaluation schema that compares concepts {\em directly} between the video and the generated predictions. Thus, in this work, we develop a complete framework for GHADAR, including a dataset, a novel method and an evaluation schema, thereby establishing a strong foundation for future research in this domain.
☆ Routing Policy Optimization for Online Diffusion Reinforcement Learning
Qiuhong Shen, Yiding Yang, Yuxin Zhang, Xinwei Huang, Minxuan Lin, Bo Liu, Hao Kang, Haotian Yang, Yizhi Wang, Chongyang Ma, Xinchao Wang
Reinforcement learning can align visual generators with reward signals beyond their pretraining objectives, but existing score-function methods typically introduce stochasticity by perturbing the reverse denoising trajectory, leading to costly rollout-based optimization. We instead ask whether stochastic exploration can be introduced inside the generator while preserving its original sampler. Routing Policy Optimization (RPO) answers this question by turning attention routing into a stochastic exploration action. At a few selected denoising levels, each query block keeps its own block and samples further key blocks in proportion to the generator's native attention mass, or keeps dense attention. The sampled route perturbs the velocity of that transition, and a Gaussian likelihood around the dense velocity scores the perturbation with a score-function objective. RPO further uses a controlled two-rollout estimator: two rollouts share the same prompt, initial latent, routed denoising levels, and dense anchor layers, differing only in their sampled attention routes. Their reward difference provides an advantage signal for the routed transitions. Because the likelihood differentiates the dense velocity itself, the learned updates remain effective after routing is removed. At inference, RPO restores dense attention and retains the original deterministic sampler. Experiments on text-to-image and text-to-video generation show that RPO improves generation quality while achieving nearly 4x higher training efficiency than Flow-GRPO-style methods. Please see our project page at https://velox-world.com/rpo for visual results.
☆ MJev-Spatial: System One Spatial Intelligence via Native Attention Matching
Luozheng Qin, Yuhan Zhu, Changhai Zhou, Qian Qiao, Jun Gao, Yuhua Zhou, Harry Zhang, Xiangyu Zeng, Yuxuan Liu, Kaijie Chen, Andrew Chen, Pony Ma
Spatial intelligence lets an agent perceive and act in the physical world, and many of its judgments must be made at interaction rates: which spatial relation holds, how far an object is, or where to place it. Vision-language models (VLMs) produce these answers by free-form text generation, paying for autoregressive decoding and answer parsing even though the output space is compact: one of a few options, a scalar, or a 2D point. In light of this, we introduce MJev-Spatial, a System 1 multimodal decision model that tackles all three types of spatial understanding tasks within a unified classification framework. Specifically, MJev-Spatial treats each candidate as a class and scores it using the backbone's pretrained query and key projections, without adding parameters. The candidates are the given options for choice tasks, or value bins and image regions refined through coarse-to-fine classification for numerical and point prediction, respectively. At inference, each classification decision takes a single forward pass and generates no answer tokens. To train on heterogeneous spatial data efficiently, we supervise all coarse-to-fine stages jointly with teacher forcing in one forward pass, and combine this with length-aware global batching and cross-GPU load balancing, raising training throughput by 30.8% over the original batching strategy. Built on Qwen3.5-4B and trained on 12.3M question-answer pairs converted from existing spatial datasets, MJev-Spatial achieves the highest overall score (65.64%) among eight tested models, ranks first on seven of twelve benchmarks, and outperforms its unmodified autoregressive base model on all twelve, while running 2.5 times faster than the fastest autoregressive baseline and 5.6 times faster than the base model.
comment: 37 pages, 7 figures, 27 tables. Code: https://github.com/Fr0zenCrane/MJev-Spatial
☆ Unsupervised Clustering of Public Transport Vehicles Using Deep Morphological Features and Color Histograms
Surveillance cameras along urban roads produce large volumes of unlabeled video that could support the monitoring of public transport, but grouping the observed vehicles into meaningful categories without manual annotation remains challenging, since buses from different routes often share the same body structure and differ mainly in their color schemes. This study presents an unsupervised clustering methodology for public transport vehicles that combines morphological features extracted with a frozen DINOv2 Vision Transformer and handcrafted HSV color histograms through weighted early fusion, followed by UMAP projection and K-Means clustering. The method was evaluated on 7,972 bus images extracted from about 1,460 hours of video of an arterial road in Mexico City, with the goal of isolating the buses of the city's public bus network (RTP) without supervision. With a fusion of 65\% morphological and 35\% color features, the pipeline produced 14 clusters that separate distinct routes and vehicle types, and it increased the precision of the target cluster with respect to morphological features alone. These results show that color complements self-supervised features for route-level clustering, provided that it does not dominate the representation.
comment: Conference paper: under review
☆ Beyond Pairwise Repulsion: Collective Diversity via Determinant Maximization in Diffusion Sampling ACCV 2026
Strong guidance in text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models concentrates sampling toward high-density modes of the conditional distribution, collapsing independently sampled noise vectors onto nearly identical visual prototypes. This limits utility for tasks that demand distributional breadth, most critically synthetic data augmentation. Diversity, however, is a collective property of the whole batch: a set can preserve every pairwise distance yet still collapse onto a low-dimensional subspace. Existing sum-of-pairwise noise-optimization and repulsion objectives respond only weakly to this higher-order failure. We propose DetNO (Determinant Noise Optimization), which formulates diverse generation as RKHS volume maximization on the initial noise, maximizing the log-determinant of an RBF Gram matrix over one-step Tweedie predictions. This set-level functional equals the squared batch volume; its repulsion is strongest when the batch is most collapsed and self-attenuates as diversity is achieved. An anchor-based fidelity term keeps the optimized noises near plausible regions, and Lagrangian relaxation gives a two-term objective with a single hyperparameter $λ$ governing the diversity-quality trade-off, without training or sampler modification. Across three backbones (SD1.5, SDXL, SD3), DetNO achieves leading intra-batch diversity in VendiScore and Mean Self-Similarity, and a downstream few-shot classification experiment confirms that broader mode coverage brings statistically significant accuracy gains for synthetic data augmentation in the low-shot regime. Fixing the pipeline and varying only the batch objective, both RBF-based aggregators outperform InfoNCE, and the log-determinant attains the best downstream accuracy on both benchmarks. Its diversity advantage over InfoNCE widens as the batch grows. Code is available at https://github.com/mobled37/DetNO.
comment: ACCV 2026, oral presentation
☆ SCOPE: Semantic Bounded Credit Optimization for Prompt Engineering in Text-to-image Generation SC
Reinforcement learning (RL) enables language models to improve text-to-image (T2I) generation by rewriting prompts for a frozen image generator. Existing methods typically apply a single signal derived from the image to individual subword tokens, although objects, counts, attributes, and relations form coherent semantic spans. We propose SCOPE, an objective based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) that aligns update weighting with this structure. The rewriter jointly generates an enhanced prompt and its semantic partition. SCOPE pools shifts in policy log probabilities within each span to derive a shared coefficient for its token losses while retaining a single advantage for each completion. It requires neither separate span rewards nor additional image renders. Across Qwen-Image, SD3, and FLUX.1-dev, SCOPE achieves average relative gains over vanilla GRPO of 9.48% on GeneVal and 7.62% on T2I-CompBench. Ablation studies show that both semantic boundaries and pooling within spans contribute to these gains, supporting semantic structure as a practical inductive bias for prompt engineering with RL.
comment: Code: https://github.com/MAC-AutoML/SCOPE
☆ FPG-Seg: Annotation-free Retinal Vessel Topology Segmentation
State-of-the art approaches to retinal vessel segmentation typically require extensive annotations, a highly time-consuming process, reliant on clinical expertise. We present FPG-Seg, an annotation-free pipeline for retinal vessel segmentation combining classical vesselness filtering, Bayesian deep learning and topology-aware graph reconstruction to segment retinal vessel topology without manual labels. Tested across four widely used benchmark datasets for retinal vessel segmentation, FPG-Seg attains a clDice of $0.74{-}0.78$, representing $86{-}98\%$ of the performance of an equivalent fully-supervised baseline, despite using no manual annotations for training or hyperparameter tuning. As part of this work, we also provide, to our knowledge, the first performance benchmark of an annotation-free vessel segmentation method on FIVES.
☆ Denoising Textures is a Different Ballgame Altogether!
Saptarshi Mandal, Oindrila Haldar, Chirayata Bhattacharya, Chandra Sekhar Seelamantula, Zhiwei Xu, Thrasyvoulos N. Pappas, Gaurav Sharma
The human brain effortlessly deciphers colors and textures from visual stimuli and reconstructs the world around us, yet preserving such details remains challenging in image denoising. While significant progress has been made in generic image denoising, the problem of texture denoising has remained relatively under-explored. Fine details, such as intricate patterns and repetitive structures, often suffer from over-smoothing even in deep learning based approaches for denoising. In this paper, we analyze the behavior of state-of-the-art (SOTA) denoisers on texture datasets and show that performance improvements are possible only by fine-tuning the denoisers on the texture datasets. Surprisingly, fine-tuning on texture datasets result in the models catastrophically forgetting the original dataset. These findings highlight the need for specialized treatment of textures in denoising. Since denoising quality directly impacts downstream tasks such as generative modelling, we argue that dedicated texture aware denoisers are essential for faithful texture reconstruction and synthesis.
☆ MMSearch-OPD: Easy Made Hard, Hard Made Learnable for Long-Horizon Multimodal Search Agents
Huanyao Zhang, Jiepeng Zhou, Jiaye Lin, Ontai Tang, Jingtian Hao, Mugeng Liu, Ru Peng, Lang Mei, Xiaohan Yu, Liyan Liu, Chong Chen, Wentao Zhang
Multimodal deep search is moving from short queries to long-horizon investigations that continually acquire evidence. However, training such agents remains constrained by limited challenging training questions and insufficient process feedback.
We introduce MMSearch-OPD, combining controllable data refinement with joint reinforcement learning (RL) and on-policy distillation (OPD). Our Refine pipeline performs targeted expansion of reasoning chains derived from existing simple multimodal questions. Parameterized transformations control search depth and cross-modal evidence requirements while reusing existing image--question pairs. For training, answer rewards and lightweight behavior penalties guide RL, while the reward gap modulates token-level teacher guidance on imperfect student trajectories. An exponentially decaying distillation coefficient reduces teacher dependence as training proceeds.
Experiments show gains from data refinement and further improvements from joint training after SFT, indicating stronger long-horizon multimodal deep search capabilities.
☆ OS-Helix: Unifying GUI Interaction and Code Execution in Native Computer-Using Agents
Bowen Yang, Kaiming Jin, Zichen Ding, Zhenyu Wu, Zehao Li, Zhoumianze Liu, Kanzhi Cheng, Fangzhi Xu, Yanan Sun, Qiushi Sun, Yu Qiao
Real desktop automation is neither purely visual nor purely programmatic. Agents must understand user-facing interfaces while efficiently manipulating files, scripts, and system state. However, native GUI/code coordination cannot be obtained by prompt-level tool composition. In our preliminary experiments, naively adding a code tool degrades a GUI agent, revealing that GUI/code routing must be internalized through training on high-quality hybrid data. We present OS-Helix, an end-to-end trained multimodal computer-using agent that unifies GUI actions and code execution in one action space. To construct the required supervision, we introduce application-artifact composition, pairing desktop applications with authentic file artifacts to instantiate executable Ubuntu states, and a decoupled instruction/evaluator generation pipeline that produces environment-grounded tasks whose final states can be verified regardless of the solution modality. We cold-start the policy with SFT on filtered hybrid data and further improve it through online RL in live desktop environments. For RL, we propose Step-balanced GSPO, which aggregates importance weight by action step rather than raw assistant tokens to prevent long code actions from dominating heterogeneous-action optimization. On OSWorld-Verified, OS-Helix-27B and OS-Helix-35B-A3B achieve relative improvements of 35.0% and 33.7% over their matched Qwen3.5 hybrid baselines, while OS-Helix-27B-RL further improves by 42.9% to reach 66.44% success. Ablations provide evidence consistent with contributions from learned GUI/code coordination, scalable verifiable supervision, and action step balanced optimization, while demonstrating cross-platform transfer on WindowsAgentArena. Our project homepage is at https://os-copilot.github.io/OS-Helix/.
comment: Project page: https://os-copilot.github.io/OS-Helix/
☆ WaveLLM: Wavelet-Domain LLM Entropy Modeling for Lossless Image Compression
Lossless image compression fundamentally relies on accurate entropy modeling, driving a recent shift toward large language model (LLM)-based methods. However, existing approaches mainly emphasize the modeling capacity of LLMs while directly serializing images into pixel or residual sequences, leaving heterogeneous signal patterns entangled within a single prediction stream. In this paper, we argue that effective entropy modeling depends not only on model capacity, but also on the predictability of the input representation. Motivated by this insight, we propose WaveLLM, a wavelet-domain LLM-based entropy model for lossless image compression. By decomposing an image into multi-level wavelet subbands, WaveLLM converts a heterogeneous prediction problem into a set of more structured and statistically homogeneous subproblems that are more amenable to autoregressive probability estimation. To bridge numerical coding symbols with the LLM's native text token space, we introduce a dedicated numerical interface featuring value embeddings and a coefficient prediction head. Furthermore, a task-adaptive prompting strategy is designed to enable a single shared model to adapt to diverse subbands within a unified framework. Built on Llama-3.2-3B with LoRA adaptation, WaveLLM achieves 2.51, 2.24, and 2.27 bpsp on Kodak, CLIC.pro, and DIV2K, respectively, outperforming the PixelCNN-based codec using the same wavelet transform by 0.43, 0.36, and 0.46 bpsp, and surpassing recent LLM-based lossless compressors on all three benchmarks.
comment: Accepted at ACM Multimedia 2026 (MM '26). 10 pages, 6 figures
☆ How Much Physics Can Vision Learn from Audio? Probing and Distilling Damping Structure NeurIPS 2026
Physical understanding is crucial for decision making, yet vision models struggle to infer properties such as damping that govern how materials behave. Audio encodes such properties directly, because an object's acoustic response to impact reveals its damping through measurable decay. We probe frozen encoders for the quality factor $Q$, a dimensionless measure of how many oscillations an object completes before its ring dies away, and report how well each embedding orders impacts by $Q$ using the Spearman rank correlation $ρ$, for which $ρ=1$ is a perfect ordering and $ρ=0$ an unrelated one. Audio embeddings reach $ρ=0.73$ and retain most of that advantage on materials withheld from training, while a single video frame taken at the moment of impact, encoded by CLIP, supports only $ρ=0.28$. Having established where the signal lives, we ask how much of that gap vision can recover. We distill a frozen audio teacher into a frozen CLIP backbone through a trained projection head and find that this recovers a useful fraction of the audio advantage. Because pooled correlations on this task are dominated in practice by category identity, we also evaluate under a leave-one-material-out protocol in which the held-out material is withheld from the projection head as well as the probe. Distillation with a four-frame input improves the correlation there from 0.234 to 0.338 (+0.053 over the matched four-frame baseline, 14 of 17 materials), a gain that no category-level strategy can produce. Widening the visual input to four frames spanning the impact supplies half of that improvement at no acoustic cost, which indicates that part of what a single frame misses is visible dynamics.
comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, 7 tables. Accepted at two NeurIPS 2026 workshops: Representations for the Physical Sciences (RPS) and Physical Understanding for Decision-Making (PhysUnderstand)
☆ Skill-Decoupled On-Policy Expert Distillation for Unified Vision-Language Models
Reinforcement learning (RL) can elicit specialized visual capabilities in vision-language models (VLMs), yet jointly optimizing heterogeneous objectives often introduces cross-capability gradient conflicts. Training experts independently mitigates this interference, but direct reward optimization may entangle specialized knowledge with reward-hacking biases. This paper proposes Skill-Decoupled On-Policy Expert Distillation (SCOPED), which trains capability-specific experts and extracts explicit skills through reward-guided reflection. During on-policy distillation, these skills guide expert supervision while remaining unavailable to the unified student, encouraging it to internalize procedural knowledge without explicit skills at inference time. Across eight multimodal benchmarks, SCOPED consistently outperforms the backbone and mixed-capability RL, demonstrating the effectiveness of skill-decoupled on-policy expert distillation for integrating independently acquired capabilities. Further analyses reveal interference during joint capability optimization and suggest that skill augmentation promotes more consistent expert trajectories, greater attention to task-relevant visual evidence, and better preservation of specialized expertise in the unified student. All code and data are available at https://github.com/NEUIR/SCOPED.
☆ FutureLift: Lifting Trajectory Proposals into Bidirectional Future Graphs for Motion Forecasting WACV 2027
Accurate motion prediction is critical for safe autonomous driving, yet even strong forecasters leave residual errors in their multimodal proposals. Existing refiners compress complete proposals or update their segments sequentially, preventing the full proposed future from serving as explicit relational context for correction. We introduce FutureLift, a backbone-agnostic refiner that represents each multimodal proposal as a heterogeneous future graph, with spatially grounded temporal nodes connected to agent histories, map elements, alternative modes, and, for joint prediction, other agents future trajectories. Bidirectional temporal edges allow later evidence to revise earlier segments in a single pass, and the updated nodes predict residual coordinate and confidence corrections. Requiring only proposals, scores, and scene context, FutureLift provides a common refinement interface for structurally different forecasting backbones. On Argoverse2 and the Waymo Open Motion Dataset, it consistently improves frozen proposals and outperforms native and specialized refiners across marginal and joint forecasting. On the WOMD motion-prediction leaderboard, FutureLift ranks first in minADE (0.5049m) and minFDE (0.9942m) among the compared standard-input methods, without LiDAR or ensembling, while achieving a competitive 0.4874 Soft mAP.
comment: Accepted for presentation at WACV 2027
☆ TRACE: Topology-Aware Reconnection via Prediction-Adaptive Connectivity Enforcement for Thin-Structure Segmentation WACV 2027
Thin, elongated structures are particularly sensitive to connectivity errors, as even a few local segmentation mistakes can disrupt otherwise continuous paths. Existing skeleton-based objectives typically supervise fixed centerline locations and do not account for alternative local routes that may restore connectivity. We propose TRACE, a topology-aware, prediction-adaptive objective that uses a target skeleton to define required local connections. For each connection, TRACE identifies the easiest valid reconnection under the current prediction and jointly supervises its bottleneck with the corresponding skeleton point. The supervision thus adapts to the evolving prediction rather than remaining fixed to the centerline. We further introduce a topology-aware skeleton carrier that preserves both foreground and class-specific topology, enabling reliable definition of these connections. Extensive experiments across six 2D and 3D benchmarks show that TRACE improves connectivity and topology while maintaining strong segmentation accuracy with low training overhead. Code will be released upon acceptance.
comment: Accepted to WACV 2027
☆ OpenGCUA: Toward a Fully Open Stack for Generalist Computer Use
Hanzhang Zhou, Long Li, Quyu Kong, Lei Wang, Panrong Tong, Long Chen, Tianyu Xia, Gongjie Zhang, Xu Zhang, Chen Liu, Jianan Zhang, Chenglin Cai, Zhengwen Zeng, Steven Hoi, Yue Wang
Computer use has reached a turning point: the focus is expanding from GUI-only interaction to systems that complete tasks on users' computers through visual and programmatic interfaces. We define a generalist computer-use agent (GCUA) as a system in which the model chooses how to observe, act, and organize its work across visual and programmatic interfaces. Yet frontier implementations, such as GPT-6 Astra's computer-use system, remain largely closed, limiting systematic study of their design. We introduce Open Generalist CUA (OpenGCUA), an ongoing project to develop and open the full stack for GCUAs with the community. This report presents the first release of OpenGCUA. Code execution is a key feature of our agent design: it lets intermediate results determine subsequent operations and enables models to apply their existing programming capabilities directly to computer interaction. We also propose harness-to-model decision transfer, moving selected observations and task-state decisions from fixed harness rules to the model. On OSWorld-v2, our full configuration improves task scores across all eight evaluated models, including GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5, raising mean partial score by +19.6 points and reducing reported steps per task by an average of 53.0% relative to batched GUI-only execution. We release our implementation and prompts, evaluation trajectories from all eight models, and preliminary versions of a real-device harness and a cross-device SDK. The harness addresses real-device challenges not fully captured by benchmarks, while the SDK provides a common programming interface across computers, mobiles and browsers. Across four real macOS tasks under our real-device harness, selected Qwen3.8-Max runs use 19.4 times as many reported reasoning tokens as GPT-6 Astra, highlighting substantial differences between models in real-device execution efficiency.
☆ EVA-Cap: Optimizing Audiovisual Video Captioning via Event-Centric Alignment NeurIPS 2026
Recent advances in Omni Language Models (OLMs) provide a unified solution for audiovisual video captioning. Nevertheless, existing approaches predominantly treat captioning as an unstructured text generation process, neglecting the inherent semantic structure of videos and leading to suboptimal fine-grained audiovisual alignment. To bridge this gap, we propose EVA-Cap, a novel framework that decomposes captions into atomic audiovisual events and transforms unstructured text supervision into event-centric alignment. We train EVA-Cap via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on a self-curated dataset, EVA-Data, which is built with event-centric quality control. During the GRPO phase, the model is explicitly optimized against three event-centric alignment targets: global event completeness, intra-event attribution, and inter-event synchronization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EVA-Cap significantly outperforms existing methods in event-centric evaluation (e.g., +9.0% average gain on ChronusAV), while achieving competitive performance on general audiovisual captioning benchmarks (e.g., +3.3% on WorldSense).
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. Code will be released at https://github.com/OPPO-Mente-Lab/EVA-Cap
☆ LAMP: Layerwise Adaptive Mixing of Predictors for Training-Free Few-Shot Vision-Language Adaptation
Few-shot adaptation often relies on an encoder's final global representation, leaving complementary information in intermediate layers underused. Combining these features is challenging because their dimensions can differ and their usefulness varies across tasks. We propose LAMP, Layerwise Adaptive Mixing of Predictors, a training-free framework that combines global and regional information from multiple encoder layers. A single forward pass per view supplies all descriptors. Global and support-calibrated regional kernel predictors independently fit the same label residuals. Labeled validation data select their mixture in class-score space, preserving native feature dimensions without learned projections. LAMP-F further adapts text-anchored class prototypes, using a cached response to update the fixed-kernel residual predictions exactly. Experiments cover eleven datasets and ViT and ResNet backbones. LAMP achieves state-of-the-art mean accuracy among the compared published training-free ResNet-50 methods at 4, 8, and 16 shots, reaching 78.73% at 16 shots. Averaged across five support budgets, LAMP improves over a paired global-feature-only baseline by 1.14 and 1.59 percentage points on ViT-B/16 and ResNet-50; LAMP-F raises these gains to 1.96 and 2.54 points. LAMP-F reaches 16-shot accuracies of 83.57% and 79.10%, respectively. Controlled experiments identify multi-layer integration as the main source of improvement and examine pooling, calibration, validation labels, and computational cost. These findings show that combining layer-specific predictions can exploit complementary features from frozen encoders to improve few-shot classification.
☆ REKI: Registering Knowledge in VLAs
We introduce REKI, a 2.4B vision-language-action model (VLA) pretrained exclusively on public data that sets a new Pareto frontier between performance and model size: on LIBERO-Plus, RoboTwin Clean2Rand and RoboCasa365, it is outperformed only by models about twice its size. REKI consists of a vision-language model (VLM) followed by a flow-matching action expert, and is pretrained on a curated mixture of public robot, egocentric human and vision-language data. Additionally, we endow it with a memory that gives the policy access to its recent past at negligible cost: a few register tokens in the action expert summarise the output of the VLM at each frame and persist in the expert's cache. This memory improves success in simulation and on real robots, and makes oscillations between poses about four times rarer. REKI uses a simple model design and training paradigm, and is optimised to be efficient at training and inference. We release the full code across data curation, training, inference and evaluation, deployment, and all pretrained and finetuned model weights: https://github.com/kyutai-labs/reki.
☆ Motion- and Gravity-Aware Feedforward 3D Reconstruction
Feed-forward transformer models have recently achieved strong performance in multi-view 3D reconstruction, but they still rely primarily on appearance-based attention and often struggle in dynamic scenes with weak geometric cues. In this work, we introduce a motion- and gravity-aware framework under the Learning Using Privileged Information (LUPI) paradigm. During training, residual optical flow and gravity direction are provided as privileged signals to guide geometric representation learning; during inference, the model uses standard visual inputs only.
We integrate these priors into transformer backbones with lightweight architectural changes, preserving feed-forward efficiency. Experiments on standard benchmarks show consistent gains in reconstruction accuracy and robustness, especially in scenes with dynamic objects, ambiguous structure, and challenging camera motion. Our analysis further shows that the optimal injection stage is backbone-dependent: middle-layer integration is generally preferable for VGGT, while late-stage integration is more effective for π3. These results suggest that LUPI offers a practical way to inject motion and physical priors into feed-forward 3D reconstruction without increasing test-time complexity.
☆ FALCON: FPGA-Accelerated Latency-Certifiable Occupancy Networks for Camera-Based Autonomous Driving WACV 2027
A perception system that must brake for a pedestrian does not need a low average latency. It must deliver an answer before the deadline on every frame, the worst case included. Commodity edge accelerators optimize the mean through dynamic scheduling, OS jitter, thermal throttling, and contention, so their per-frame latency can be measured but not bounded. We build FALCON, a camera-based 3D occupancy front-end on the AMD Kria KR260, an embedded FPGA drawing 4.3 W idle and up to 6.6 W under inference, and make the latency guarantee layered and explicit: programmable-logic (PL) compute is cycle-bounded analytically; inference is a measured envelope over 100k-frame traces; and a watchdog enforces output delivery, publishing the previous output flagged stale when a frame is late. The deadline runs use a fixed-work proxy of six ResNet-50 DPU inferences per frame, not the full occupancy network: across three 100k-frame enforced runs, all 300k proxy frames delivered an output within the 100 ms deadline plus at most 10.2 ms, the worst of the three runs. The full six-camera FlashOcc pipeline composes to about 1.3 s per frame on the board and is not yet a 10 Hz system. The two operations the DPU cannot run, a view-transform gather and a bilinear resize, become fixed-trip-count PL IPs numerically matched to their software references. On the full Occ3D-nuScenes validation set the board reaches mIoU 29.88, 92.8% of an FP32 baseline the DPU cannot run. On a ResNet-50 probe over 100k frames the KR260 tail stays within 1.5 times its median (2.0 times for the six-inference proxy), where Jetson Orin reaches 4.4 times and the worst datacenter GPU run (NVIDIA L4) 23.6 times. The deployment recipe, HLS sources, and raw timing traces are released.
comment: Accepted to WACV 2027 (Applications track). 10 pages
☆ SCCL-DT: Semantic-Conflict-Aware Contrastive Learning with Dual-Rule Teacher Distillation for Zero-Shot Chest X-Ray Diagnosis
Contrastive vision-language pre-training supports zero-shot chest X-ray diagnosis, but standard objectives treat every off-diagonal image-report pair in a batch as a negative. In radiology, recurring findings across patients mean that instance mismatch need not imply semantic incompatibility, creating false-negative supervision that we term a semantic conflict. A training-trace audit shows that pair-observations selected by the online mask used during training are enriched for report-derived finding agreement, although this proxy analysis does not establish clinical equivalence. Fixed thresholds can become miscalibrated as similarity distributions evolve, while soft reweighting leaves residual repulsive gradients. We therefore propose Semantic-Conflict-Aware Contrastive Learning (SCCL), which tracks modality-specific similarity distributions with exponential-moving-average (EMA) statistics, derives adaptive thresholds, and hard-masks flagged candidates before softmax normalization. Inclusive (OR) and consensus (AND) rules define two SCCL teachers, whose bidirectional cross-modal rankings are consolidated through standard distillation into a single deployable student, SCCL-DT. Across five public chest X-ray benchmarks, SCCL-DT achieves a mean zero-shot AUC of $0.850$, compared with $0.837$ for the strongest evaluated baseline in our comparison. Code will be made publicly available soon.
comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, includes supplementary material
☆ Beyond the Dominant Label: Recovering Coexisting Lesion Evidence with Multiple Instance Learning
Whole-slide images may contain coexisting lesions, yet weak supervision typically provides only the most severe diagnosis. We formulate this setting as dominant-label multiple instance learning, where the observed label is the maximum-severity element of a latent lesion set. Standard multiclass MIL treats it as a complete one-hot description and therefore suppresses lower-severity evidence whenever it co-occurs with a dominant lesion. We propose DomSet-MIL, a label-aware framework that aligns the annotation mechanism across bag and instance levels. Dominant-Label Censored Likelihood models the reported diagnosis without declaring unreported lesions absent. Severity-Ordered Residual Routing assigns patch evidence from high to low severity and preserves residual support for secondary findings, while top-$q$ pooling links local routing scores to bag prediction. Experiments across natural and controlled settings show that DomSet-MIL achieves state-of-the-art performance in dominant-label prediction while more effectively recovering latent coexisting-lesion evidence. These findings demonstrate that modeling the dominant-label mechanism can improve diagnostic prediction without sacrificing clinically meaningful secondary findings.
comment: 7 pages, 2 figures
☆ Pathology foundation models for training-free case retrieval in salivary gland tumors
In pathology, pattern recognition relies on a frame of reference built through extensive training and experience, which may still fall short when encountering rare cancer subtypes. Archives of previously diagnosed tumors often contain relevant precedents, yet identifying the most relevant cases remains challenging. Here we explore whether content-based retrieval with current pathology foundation models facilitates rare cancer diagnostics without any task-specific training. Pathologists can query a digitized archive using a region of interest (ROI) from a whole slide image (WSI) and retrieve morphologically similar cases, along with their ICD-O codes and corresponding WSIs. The ROI can be selected manually or automatically using a gated attention-based multiple instance learning model. We evaluate our approach by leave-one-case-out on an imbalanced dataset of 137 salivary gland tumor cases spanning 12 ICD-O morphology categories, comparing four pathology foundation models (Atlas2, Atlas2-B, Atlas2-S, and UNI2h). Top-1/3/5 retrieval was 62.5%/76.7%/81.3% for Atlas2, 50.2/66.6/72.9% for UNI2h, 52.3%/71.5%/77.6% for Atlas2-B and 54.4/65.2/73.7% for Atlas2-S. Macro-averaged F1 ranged from 69.0% for the smallest model Atlas2-S to 76.6% for the largest model Atlas2 across the five classes with at least ten cases. Our modified Chamfer similarity separated correct from incorrect matches among the Top-5 more reliably for Atlas2 (AUC 0.754) than for Atlas2-B (0.679, p = 0.020) and Atlas2-S (0.653, p = 0.003), but not UNI2h (0.697, p = 0.196). Requiring no additional training or manual annotation, this approach makes departmental archives searchable with pathology foundation models, providing a low-barrier route to case-based differential diagnosis and extending the individual frame of reference to the collective experience of the department.
☆ Retrofitting Recurrent Vision-Language Models from Pretrained Backbones
Recent work shows that depth recurrence can be retrofitted into pretrained language models. In this work, we adapt this paradigm for visual understanding, using depth recurrence to reduce the parameter footprint of a pretrained vision-language model (VLM). To this end, we prune layers from the language backbone of the VLM and loop over a subset of the remaining layers. At each step of the loop, a linear adapter merges the block's output with the token representations from the preceding layers and projects the fused representation back into the block. As the pruning impacts the original model performance, we propose a three-stage recovery training: first, we leverage a language-only pretraining to recover the performance of the language backbone, followed by an alignment of the vision-language projector, and a full fine-tuning of the model via visual instruction tuning. In the first and the last stage, we distill the outputs of the pretrained non-recurrent model into the recurrent model, which further improves the recovery. We evaluate the proposed approach on the TinyLLaVA-1.4B backbone without introducing any new vision-language data during retrofitting. Our experiments demonstrate that the retrofitted recurrent model outperforms the unpruned baseline trained with the same recovery data while storing 23.3% fewer language parameters. We further show that the proposed retrofitting recurrence outperforms the setup of converting a recurrent LM into a VLM on the same data. Additionally, our ablations show how design choices, such as the adapter between recurrences and a larger recurrent block, lead to the improved performance of our approach. Finally, we find that our proposed model gains on reasoning-oriented benchmarks, whereas its performance on basic visual understanding benchmarks remains on par with the baseline.
comment: Project page: https://madhavesdios.github.io/recurrent-vlms
☆ Memory as Weights: Internalizing Long-Term History for Streaming Videos
Streaming vision-language models (VLMs) must continuously integrate information from the past while remaining responsive to current observations and user queries. Existing memory mechanisms typically compress, retrieve, or cache historical observations and reintroduce them into the input context, forcing historical memory and current observations to compete for limited context. We propose MaLoW, a streaming memory framework that instead internalizes historical context into evolving lightweight parameter updates. MaLoW uses a recurrent HyperNetwork to incrementally consolidate incoming video observations into fixed-size LoRA weights, allowing historical information to be carried forward without revisiting the full video stream. In doing so, MaLoW represents history as weights, while keeping the current observation as input. To support training, we further construct MaLoW-Instruct, a large-scale streaming video dataset containing 381K question-answer pairs over 56K videos. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that MaLoW achieves strong performance on OVO-Bench, StreamingBench, and StreamArena. On the backward split of OVO-Bench, MaLoW outperforms prior memory approaches by 3.9% to 11.8% across different video backbones while incurring only modest latency overhead. Beyond streaming video understanding, MaLoW also generalizes to vision-language-action models, improving the action success rate on Simpler WidowX by 9.3%.
☆ FeaTok: Feature-Loss Tokenization for Image Generation
Zhang Xiaofeng, Samuel Lavoie, Nicolas Beltran-Velez, Jianhao Yuan, Felix Friedrich, Jakob Verbeek, Aaron Courville, Michal Drozdzal, Adriana Romero-Soriano
Discrete image generators learn the distribution of tokens produced by an image tokenizer. These token representations should be easy for generators to model, not merely enable faithful image reconstruction. Yet these tokenizers are commonly trained to reconstruct pixels, which prioritizes low-level fidelity and may disrupt representation structure useful for generation. Motivated by feature-predictive self-supervised learning, we introduce feature-loss tokenization (FeaTok), which trains discrete tokens by reconstructing pretrained features rather than pixels. Ablations across SigLIP, SigLIP2, DINOv2, and DINOv3 show better generative performance with FeaTok. In class-conditional generation, FeaTok advances the quality-compute Pareto frontier, reducing gFDr6 at 256x256 by up to 29 percent over the strongest discrete baselines and outperforming the strongest unguided continuous baseline (RAEv2) with 38 times less sampling compute. FeaTok also achieves higher human-preference reward-model scores than prior art without reward-based training and surpasses continuous and discrete text-conditional baselines on three benchmarks with only 500 fine-tuning updates after pre-training.
☆ When Models Misread Ink: Auditing VLMs for Arabic Calligraphy Recognition NeurIPS 2026
Arabic calligraphy is a high-stakes cultural visual domain for Muslim communities, yet VLM evaluations rarely test its fine-grained script traditions. We audit 12 VLMs on a cleaned 1,195-image six-way benchmark using numeric, visual-cue, and Diwani-first prompts. In this closed-set setting, the best numeric-prompt accuracy is 60.9% for closed/API models and 47.2% for open-weight models. The main failure is default-label collapse: every numeric run is dominated by a single label taking 33-63% of predictions, against an 18.8% majority-class baseline. For 8 of 12 models the default is Thuluth; GPT-4o labels 52.9% of all images as Thuluth although it is only 18.1% of the set. Prompting helps unevenly: visual cues move accuracy by more than 10 points for some models but hurt others, and foregrounding Diwani often relocates the default rather than removing it. Arabic calligraphy recognition is therefore a compact, culturally grounded stress test for VLM robustness and for measuring which visual traditions become legible to automated systems.
comment: 9 pages, including references and appendix. Accepted for poster presentation at the Muslims in Machine Learning (MusIML) Workshop at NeurIPS 2026. Code: https://github.com/NiazTahi/When-Models-Misread-Ink
☆ Visual Sanad: Auditing Vision-Language Models for False Acceptance of Qur'anic Citations NeurIPS 2026
Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to interpret religious, educational, and culturally sensitive visual content, yet their reliability on citation verification remains underexplored. We introduce Visual Sanad, a controlled benchmark for testing whether VLMs falsely accept incorrect Qur'anic verse attributions when the same quote-reference pair is rendered under different visual framings. The benchmark contains 2,400 rendered images built from 100 English Qur'an verses, four factual states per verse, and six visual conditions ranging from plain text to decorative and authority-framed layouts. All quote-reference pairs were source-checked and human-audited before rendering. Across 24 full model-prompt runs, we observe a sharp capability split. Proprietary API-served VLMs range from near-perfect citation verification to moderate false acceptance, whereas recent open-weight VLMs often show weak discrimination and default to VALID on most images. De-biased prompting can reduce false acceptance, but often by shifting the decision threshold toward INVALID rather than by producing strong citation discrimination. Visual Sanad therefore exposes a culturally grounded multimodal factuality failure: fluent VLMs may treat displayed religious citations as self-authenticating unless they have strong citation-verification ability.
comment: 9 pages, including references and appendix. Accepted for poster presentation at the Muslims in Machine Learning (MusIML) Workshop at NeurIPS 2026. Code: https://github.com/NiazTahi/Visual-Sanad
☆ Data-Efficient ConvNeXt Pretraining for High-Resolution Sentinel-1 GRD SAR Representation Learning SP
Labeled Sentinel-1 Ground Range Detected (S1GRD) datasets remain scarce, limiting supervised deep learning for land-surface remote sensing, while self-supervised pretraining for this domain has been dominated by Vision Transformer (ViT)-based masked image modeling requiring substantial data and compute. We propose SparK-SAR, a sparse convolutional masked pretraining framework built on SparK and ConvNeXt, designed to exploit convolutional inductive biases for S1GRD imagery under constrained compute. SparK-SAR makes three core technical contributions: (i) ConvNeXt-RS, a domain-adapted encoder that halves the stem stride (4x to 2x) to produce 14x14 feature maps at stride 16x, providing 4x more spatial tokens at identical parameter count; (ii) a lightweight ConvNeXt-512 reconstruction decoder with PixelShuffle upsampling that reduces pretraining VRAM by 7.5-8.5% per GPU relative to a UNet-128 baseline while matching its accuracy; and (iii) an empirical characterization of FP16 mixed-precision pretraining instability in the standard SparK UNet-768 decoder on S1GRD data, complemented by a finding that finetuning with layer-wise learning rate decay (LLRD) improves downstream performance of pretrained encoders. On four Copernicus-Bench S1GRD tasks, our finetuned 27.8M-parameter ConvNeXt-RS encoder improves over a non-pretrained baseline by +4.7, +5.0, +5.8, and +1.4 pp on EuroSAT-S1, BigEarthNet-S1, DFC2020-S1, and Flood-S1 respectively, and outperforms the Copernicus-FM ViT (139M parameters, frozen) on three of four tasks at roughly 5x fewer parameters. A pretraining data-scaling study reveals task-dependent data efficiency: classification saturates with as little as 10-25% of the SSL4EO-S12 v1.1 corpus, while dense prediction continues to improve significantly up to 25-50%. The study also includes a CKA representation analysis and a geographic de-collision experiment.
comment: 30 pages, 9 figures. Extends a preliminary paper to be presented at SPIE Asia Pacific Remote Sensing 2026
☆ VesperMUSE: Multi-Modal Fusion Vision Transformer for Image Semantic Segmentation Under Diverse Light Conditions
Semantic segmentation is critical for the reliable navigation and scene understanding of autonomous systems, yet its performance degrades severely in low-light environments due to noise, artifacts, colour distortion, and the loss of structural details. To address this challenge, this work introduces VesperMUSE, a unified multi-modal framework designed to achieve robust image semantic segmentation across diverse illumination conditions. The architecture addresses the light deficiency problem on multiple levels: proposing a novel physics-informed synthetic low-light adaptation algorithm, approaching Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) through a thermal-guided paradigm, and finally aiming to recover the intrinsic scene details for semantic segmentation through a multi-modal fusion approach. Following enhancement, the framework dynamically integrates the primary RGB features with auxiliary thermal representations and surface normal maps highlighting geometric discontinuities and material boundaries. At the core of this integration is a highly scalable, modality-agnostic self-attention mechanism that extracts both global context and fine local features from an arbitrary number of auxiliary inputs. By combining and projecting these hierarchical multi-modal representations into a unified component, the attention module allows the network to selectively attend to relevant cross-modal cues without requiring any architectural modifications when different sensor configurations are used. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that VesperMUSE successfully recovers missing visual cues, providing a flexible, state-of-the-art (SOTA) solution for machine perception in extreme and unstructured real-world environments.
comment: A dissertation submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
☆ GRID-Planner: Graph-Structured Relational Reward Shaping for Diffusion Planning
Autonomous driving planning requires selecting trajectories that remain safe, rule-compliant, and comfortable under complex multi-agent interactions, yet robust closed-loop decision making in planning-critical scenes remains challenging. Existing diffusion- and RL-based planners often rely on generic rewards and use relational structure mainly for representation, limiting how planning-critical rollouts shape policy improvement. We present GRID-Planner, a graph--reward integrated diffusion planning framework that aligns generative planning with structured relational signals. Specifically, GRID-Planner combines graph-aware importance weighting, a time-indexed relational reward surrogate, and an advantage-weighted diffusion objective with on-policy self-distillation, forming a rollout-return-advantage-update loop without explicit likelihoods. Experiments on nuPlan and interPlan show that, compared with the diffusion-only baseline, GRID-Planner reduces collision rate, lane deviation, and jerk by 35.8\%, 60.8\%, and 27.4\%, respectively, and improves the planning score by 3.4\%. Project website: https://github.com/yangzhaojason/GRID-Planner.
☆ P2TPO: Structure-Aligned Page-to-Token Credit Assignment for Full-Page Document Parsing
End-to-end full-page document parsing must preserve the content and structure of heterogeneous elements, yet otherwise accurate outputs can contain local errors and omissions. A single page-level advantage does not explicitly identify which elements differ in quality across sampled outputs or where their errors occur. We introduce Page-to-Token Policy Optimization (P2TPO), a structure-aligned credit-assignment framework that operates on full-page policy trajectories. Reference-element alignment first associates block-level quality contrasts with generated spans. Unified Anchor Pricing (UAP) incorporates matched and missing element outcomes and provides feedback relative to a fixed quality ceiling when sampled outputs receive identical but imperfect scores for a reference element. Within matched blocks, Span Credit Redistribution (SCR) redistributes existing block credit according to aligned correct and erroneous spans, using boundary proxies for within-block omissions while preserving the total block-derived advantage across its tokens. Under a fixed-weight additive page utility, we show that element-indexed contrasts retain local quality differences that page-level aggregation can cancel out. In the main experimental comparison, P2TPO outperforms all evaluated policy optimization baselines in seed-averaged scores on each of the six document parsing benchmarks. Additional experiments demonstrate gains across model scales and initializations.
comment: 34 pages, 9 figures, including appendices
☆ Following Delegation Traces to Study Human Oversight in Interaction with Multimodal AI
As multimodal AI systems are becoming our everyday thought partners, the shift towards studying how users transfer control to these systems becomes especially urgent. In this paper, we report an overview of findings from an online study with n=56 AI-literate participants and 392 Video Question Answering trials. After inspecting each multimodal AI response, participants rated task-specific trust and selected one of three intended policies for an analogous future task: reject AI assistance, use it with verification, or delegate fully to the AI. Within participants, post-interaction trust strongly predicted the user's delegation choices (OR=14.97, 95% CI [7.14,31.37]). Trust and delegation nevertheless remained distinct. Verification was the dominant policy and often co-occurred with high trust. Delegation also increased with task order after adjustment for momentary and participant-level trust (OR=1.22, 95% CI [1.02,1.45]), indicating an experience-related component that self-reported trust ratings alone could not capture. These findings motivate a shift from intended delegation to a non-intrusive observation of how delegation is enacted in collaborative human-AI tasks. We therefore conclude by proposing enacted delegation traces as a methodological framework for future studies of multimodal and agentic AI use.
☆ Flow-CLIP: Image-Conditioned Residual Scoring for CompositionalImage-Text Matching
Vision--language pre-training has enabled substantial progress in image--text retrieval and zero-shot recognition by learning transferable cross-modal representations. However, sentence-level alignment remains insufficient for compositional matching, where captions can describe the same objects and attributes while differing in how these elements are bound. To address this limitation, we propose Flow-CLIP, which refines global image-text alignment through image-conditioned changes in token--patch evidence. Global Compatibility Calibration (GCC) learns a sentence-level similarity metric, while Image-Conditioned Evidence Refinement (ICER) incorporates visual patch context into token queries and uses the resulting change in local matching evidence to adjust the global score. We further introduce Cross-Image Margin Ranking (CIMR), which compares the same positive--negative caption pair across matched and mismatched images, encouraging a larger ranking margin when the image supports the correct description. Experiments on compositional matching and attribute--object binding benchmarks show that Flow-CLIP improves binding accuracy over pretrained CLIP and learned global alignment through local evidence refinement, while cross-image ranking supervision mitigates reliance on language priors. Code will be released at link.
☆ BridgeAfford: Bridging Query-Target Gap for Generalizable 3D Affordance Grounding
Language-guided 3D affordance grounding aims to localize functional regions on 3D objects according to interaction intents. However, existing methods exhibit poor generalization to unseen objects. One challenge is the query-target gap: a semantic discrepancy between query features encoding interaction intents and target-region features, leading to inaccurate grounding. End-to-end training favors query representations tailored to seen objects, limiting their compatibility with shifted target-region features on unseen objects. To address this issue, we propose BridgeAfford, a framework that reduces the query-target semantic gap from two complementary perspectives. First, Interaction Region Alignment (IRA) promotes cross-object alignment among geometrically similar interaction regions during training. This enables structures on unseen objects that resemble previously observed ones to produce representations similar to those learned during training, facilitating target-region recognition. Second, Visual Evidence Aggregation (VEA) leverages a 2D affordance model to refine the attention distribution and guide the query toward the correct region, yielding more target-aware queries. Extensive experiments on the LASO and PIAD datasets demonstrate that BridgeAfford outperforms existing methods, particularly on unseen objects, highlighting its robust generalization ability.
☆ Seeing is Believing: Benchmarking and Mitigating the Interference of Language Priors on Visual Perception in MLLMs
Language priors in MLLMs can override visual evidence, impairing visual perception. Existing benchmarks assume shared priors across models and rely solely on accuracy. However, cross-model prior agreement falls below 80%, and over 15% of items can be answered correctly without any image, causing accuracy to overestimate prior resistance. To address these limitations, we introduce ViSiP-Bench, a benchmark grounded in rare-but-real scenarios across six prior categories, with a model-aware dynamic prior induction protocol and three metrics that more precisely and continuously measure prior resistance than accuracy alone. Evaluating 24 models reveals that prior adherence is pervasive, does not improve with scale, and larger models tend to either strongly override their priors or firmly adhere to them. We therefore propose MAPS, which identifies each model's strongest priors and fine-tunes on factually grounded knowledge to soften excessive prior reliance without disrupting general capabilities.
☆ SurgStreamer: proactive, request-driven monitoring of surgical video streams with structured state and a reusable reasoning layer
Surgical teams could benefit from assistants that watch the video for requested events, such as "tell me when the clip applier appears during Calot triangle dissection", and answer questions about what has already happened. We formalise this task as request-driven event detection with exact semantics and causal alert decisions, and present SurgStreamer. It separates procedure-specific perception, which maps the 1-FPS stream to a structured state over tools, actions and phases, from procedure-agnostic reasoning, which evaluates a formal monitoring condition over this state and an event memory, either with exact rules or with a small controller that addresses entities through pointers rather than names. We evaluate this monitoring core with gold conditions. On a pre-registered, sealed test set of 12 laparoscopic cholecystectomies, SurgStreamer reached a macro event-F1 of 0.598 over full procedures. On identical 75-s windows with only the window available to every method, it scored 0.677. The tested configurations of the streaming vision-language model OneStreamer-4B, including ones fine-tuned on SurgStreamer's state or on video with an adapted vision encoder, scored at most 0.540 (Holm-adjusted p <= 0.012). At three external centres, re-training only perception raised performance on held-out procedures from 0.239 to 0.470. On a new procedure, pituitary surgery, controller weights trained on cholecystectomy matched an in-domain controller on oracle state (0.947 vs 0.938). On predicted state they missed the pre-registered non-inferiority margin (-0.024 [-0.040, -0.008]) unless the alert thresholds were re-calibrated. The results support separating perception from reasoning and point to perception under distribution shift as the main limitation.
☆ Anvil: Scaling Embodied Spatial Intelligence through Knowledge Recirculation
Weilin Ruan, Bohan Zhou, Jinghao Li, Yangkai Wei, Wenqian Li, Peiran Dong, Yingjie Xu, Leyi Wu, Haojian Huang, Binghui Xie, Han Yang, Kaiwen Zhou, Yinchuan Li, Ying-Cong Chen, James Cheng
Embodied spatial intelligence requires more than visual recognition: models must localize entities, reason about their relations, and express this knowledge in action-relevant forms. Yet joint training can conflate the knowledge needed at different stages because supervision is fragmented across incompatible geometric and semantic outputs. We introduce Anvil, a unified framework for data generation, training, and benchmarking for embodied spatial intelligence. (1) Anvil-Gen is a heterogeneous data flywheel that combines form-specific generation, cross-stage consistency verification, and failure-driven recollection across 11 Ground--Relation--Act forms. (2) Anvil-Ben provides scene-aligned supervision for learning diverse embodied spatial capabilities and scene-linked assessments that distinguish stage competence from error propagation. (3) Anvil-MOPD is a 9B student that consolidates heterogeneous spatial knowledge through distillation from specialist teachers. Semantic-first-fault routing targets teacher supervision to the student's earliest decisive failure, while stage normalization controls the loss scale across native outputs of different lengths. We construct 5.8M source-grounded records spanning 160K images, reserving 580K spatial records for held-out evaluation and using the remaining 5.22M records for training. On average across seven public benchmarks, Anvil-MOPD outperforms Qwen3.5-9B and RynnBrain-8B by 9.29 and 11.03 percentage points, respectively, while reaching 80.67% on VABench-Point. Controlled studies support targeted coverage, selective transfer, and feedback-guided repair as complementary framework components.
comment: 28 pages, 7 figures
☆ From Sketch to Scene: Relightable Garment Reconstruction from Marked Sketches
Sketching is one of the most natural ways for people to express visual ideas. Unlike the text prompts that most generative systems rely on today, a sketch captures spatial structure and intent directly, including where a designer wants highlights and shadows to appear. Yet current sketch-to-3D pipelines have no input for that intent: they bake the drawn shading into the texture as dark paint, and the light cannot be moved. We propose a system that transforms a rough garment sketch, marked with sparse annotations (a star for a highlight and a moon for a shadow), and a short text prompt describing the texture, into a textured 3D mesh with an explicit directional light, as a scene that can be relit and edited after generation. The two symbols are the most frequent proposals in an elicitation study with art students. From the marked sketch the system predicts the scene's directional light and, separately, a displacement field that bends the surface so that the moon-marked regions fall into shadow under that light, rather than being painted dark in the texture.
comment: 11 pages, 5 figures. Ahmet Neçirvan Doğan and Eren Acar Başaran contributed equally
☆ Seeing Both the Forest and the Trees: Reusing Holistic 3D Priors for Part-Decomposed Generation NeurIPS 2026
Generating 3D assets with explicit parts requires two properties at once: geometric detail inside each part and structural coherence across the whole object. Recent image-conditioned 3D generation models adopt a structured 3D representation that anchors tokens to explicit spatial positions, capturing both properties, but their output remains a single fused mesh. We ask how a part-decomposed generation model can inherit both properties of these holistic priors, and answer with STRUCTPARTS, a framework whose core technical contribution is a dual-frame coordinate interleaving mechanism: each shape latent is interpreted under both a part-local and an object-global reference frame, and processed through a global-local inter-leaved transformer that simultaneously reuses the prior's geometric detail at the part scale and its structural coherence at the whole-object scale. As its structural input, STRUCTPARTS uses a segmented mesh scaffold, a coarse mesh paired with a face-level segmentation mask kept entirely within the prior's native 3D representation. With only lightweight finetuning, both intra-part detail and inter-part coherence emerge from the same pretrained weights. On PartObjaverse-Tiny, STRUCTPARTS matches or surpasses prior part-decomposed models at a fraction of their training cost, while naturally supporting part-mesh refinement and part-level editing.
comment: NeurIPS 2026, project page: https://zhao-yiqun.github.io/structparts/
☆ Temporal Periodic Image Registration with Implicit Neural Representations MICCAI 2025
Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have recently gained popularity for their ability to model functions using simple and lightweight networks. These methods have also proven effective in deformable image registration. In this work, we extend INRs for deformable image registration to the domain of temporal image registration, focusing on periodic temporal image sequences. Our approach, Temporal-IDIR, optimizes a single INR to model deformations across all frames in a temporal image sequence simultaneously, allowing for self-regularization through its own deformation predictions. To achieve this, we introduce a temporal consistency loss that penalizes discrepancies between direct source-to-target transformations and those traversing intermediate frames. We evaluate our framework on the DIR-LAB dataset, using the target registration error (TRE) between annotated and moved landmarks as the metric. Here, we achieve a TRE of 1.03 mm, outperforming other INR-based registration methods. Additionally, our framework supports smooth interpolation between time frames by estimating deformations between the given input frames. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/MMLowes/Temporal_INR.
comment: Published at MLMI@MICCAI 2025
☆ From Adults to Children: Benchmarking Foundation Models for Chest X-Ray Classification under Domain Shift WACV 2027
Foundation models have shown significant potential across diverse fields and have been applied to medical imaging, but their robustness across patient populations remains unclear. In this work, we investigate foundation models' ability to generalize from adult to pediatric chest X-ray classification. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first benchmark to compare multiple foundation models under a common adult-to-pediatric evaluation setting while also analyzing the effect of adaptation depth. We harmonize VinDr-CXR and PediCXR into a five-label classification task and evaluate six foundation models and two CNN baselines. All models are adapted using adult data only and tested in both the in-domain and pediatric domains using linear probing, partial fine-tuning, and full fine-tuning. The benchmark reveals a clear and consistent trend: all models suffer a substantial performance degradation when transferred from adult to pediatric data, with drops exceeding 10 percentage points. While Macro-AUROC values reach approximately 92% on the adult test set, performance decreases to around 78% on the pediatric domain. Another important finding is that increasing the depth of adaptation does not significantly improve cross-population generalization. Moreover, strong in-domain performance does not translate into better performance on pediatric data.
comment: Accepted at WACV 2027
☆ Teaching DINOv3 About Partial 3D Geometry: A Self-Supervised Geometry-Aware Approach
Viktoria Ehm, Dongliang Cao, Riccardo Marin, Daniel Scholz, Weikang Wang, Florian Bernard, Daniel Cremers
Partial shape matching is a crucial yet underexplored problem in 3D vision, with significant relevance to real-world scenarios where shapes are often only partially observed. Existing feature descriptors face difficulties in this setting, as traditional representations either struggle with the boundaries of partial shapes or heavily depend on the shape's spatial position. While existing approaches have employed DINO features for partial shape matching, these features are not inherently suited for handling partial observations. In this work, we propose a method to refine DINO features using LoRA-based self-supervised learning, enabling the generation of feature descriptors that are robust to partiality. Our features substantially improve performance on partial shape matching compared to traditional or vision foundation features. Additionally, when integrated into existing partial shape matching pipelines, we achieve state-of-the-art results on partial shape matching and left-right prediction benchmarks.
☆ Single-stage joint diffusion of sky images and clear-sky index for ultra-short-term irradiance forecasting: what the frame-to-irradiance stage discards
Sky-image irradiance forecasting is dominated by a two-stage design: a video-prediction model forecasts future sky frames, and a separately trained regressor maps those frames to irradiance. We propose a single-stage alternative that co-denoises the future sky-image and clear-sky-index sequences in one diffusion process, with an irradiance head that reads a denoised preview of the future sky rather than the noised diffusion state. The forecaster needs no regression stage and runs from sky images and deterministic covariates alone, with no measured irradiance at its input --- the situation at a site with a camera but no pyranometer. On 2023 SIRTA data the model reaches a pooled RMSE of $104.1$~W\,m$^{-2}$ and a skill score of $+0.34$ on the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) against smart persistence, higher than any of twelve baseline configurations, and retains that skill when retrained on 2021--2022. On the model's own generated frames, a separately trained regressor reaches $150.6$~W\,m$^{-2}$ against the joint head's $104.1$: roughly $46$~W\,m$^{-2}$ that joint training recovers and a cascade discards. Point accuracy is competitive but not best: a deterministic network that also reads measured irradiance attains $97.6$~W\,m$^{-2}$. The model's CRPS skill leads that network's in every sky-condition tertile, by $0.26$ to $0.30$.
☆ MedPAO-VL: Interpretable and Protocol-Compliant Agent for Structured Radiology Report Generation ECCV
Shrish Shrinath Vaidya, Gowthamaan Palani, Minmini Selvam, Gokulraja Srinivasaraja, Ganapathy Krishnamurthi
Despite the remarkable generalization capabilities of Large Language Models, generating clinically accurate and structured radiology reports from medical images remains a significant challenge. Current end-to-end approaches function as black boxes, prone to factual hallucinations and generating ungrounded findings. This lack of reliability and failure to adhere to domain-specific structuring protocols, fundamentally limits their clinical utility. We present MedPAO-VL, a multimodal agent that shifts the paradigm from monolithic generation to explainable, iterative, protocol-compliant structured report generation. Unlike deterministic models, our plan-act-observe loop functions as a goal-oriented agent: it first perceives the Chest X-Ray through an explainable vision module designed to capture inherent diagnostic uncertainty, then iteratively refines the generated report by observing semantic discrepancies and self-correcting its generation for better alignment with visually detected clinical findings. Evaluation of our framework demonstrates that this agentic reasoning improves clinical correctness and completeness, achieving an expert-rated accuracy score of 3.5/5 and a structural score of 4.3/5. By prioritizing pathology specific explainability and iterative refinement over opaque end-to-end mapping, MedPAO-VL offers a transparent and clinically viable alternative for automated structured radiology report generation.
comment: The paper has been accepted at ECCV BISCUIT Workshop, 2026
☆ NICE Toolbox: Nonverbal Interpersonal Communication Exploration Toolbox
Aleksandr Evgrashin, Carolin Schmitt, Timo Lübbing, Ashutosh Jha, Buket Naz Zeren, Sophie K. Bauer, Johannes Kopf-Beck, Anton K. G. Marx, Anamaria Semm, Gökce Ergün, Senya Polikovsky
Understanding human communication is a long-standing goal in psychological research. People express themselves through many verbal and nonverbal channels: posture, gesture, gaze, facial expression, and speech. Measurement and annotation of these signals has traditionally required time-consuming manual work by trained human labellers. The Nonverbal Interpersonal Communication Exploration (NICE) Toolbox is a free, open-source Python framework that automatically measures these signals by combining existing state-of-the-art computer vision and speech-processing methods into a single software package. It includes support for multi-camera systems, interchangeable detection algorithms, 2D and 3D visualization of detector outputs, evaluation on the user's custom data, and export to third-party software. With the release of this tool, we aim to make data exploration of interpersonal communication signals scalable, reproducible, and accessible for psychological research.
comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. Code: https://github.com/OSLabTools/nicetoolbox. Submitted to the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS)
☆ Learning to Think and Explore in 3D World
We study how vision-language models (VLMs) can learn to think and actively explore in 3D space. Instead of providing multi-view images, videos, or 3D representations to the model, we preserve the native visual encoding of VLMs, i.e., a single image, one at a time, just like humans, and treat the 3D representation only as an environment with which the model can interact through actions (e.g., move left) and observations (rendered images). Each rollout begins from an initial first-person view and a visual question. The model can then iteratively reason, navigate, and reorient its viewpoint before committing to a final answer. Following an initial trajectory-supervised finetuning, we apply reinforcement learning (RL) with rewards driven primarily by final-answer correctness. Crucially, RL provides no direct supervision over which viewpoints the model should visit or which exploration actions it should take. Instead, the model must learn an effective exploration policy solely from the extent to which its interactions improve performance. Across six 3D benchmarks, our model ACT3D achieves an average accuracy of 53.2% that improves its base Qwen model by 22.0% and surpasses proprietary Gemini 3.6 Flash. ACT3D also outperforms existing open-source 3D methods while using 50-70% fewer input frames, and generalizes to unseen domains with an average improvement of 5.9% over its supervised initialization. Further analysis reveals adaptive, question-conditioned exploration. Performance gains over the base model increase from 0.6% on questions answerable from the initial view to 16.3% on those requiring extensive exploration. ACT3D searches for occluded targets, avoids unnecessary exploration, and acquires complementary viewpoints for spatial comparisons. These findings demonstrate that outcome-based RL enables VLMs not only to reason over visual evidence, but also to learn when and how to acquire it.
☆ DINO-FIL: Multi-Layer Transformer Fusion for Generative Inpainting Forgery Localization
We propose DINO-FIL, a transformer-based framework for pixel-level localization of generative image forgeries. The method leverages multi-layer representations from a pretrained DINOv3 ViT-H+/16 encoder combined with a lightweight fusion decoder to capture both semantic structure and fine-grained texture inconsistencies introduced by image editing. By aggregating intermediate transformer features across depths, the model improves sensitivity to subtle, spatially localized artifacts that are often missed by standard single-layer approaches. We evaluate DINO-FIL in a cross-dataset setting, training on B-Free and testing on Beyond the Brush, CocoGlide, TGIF, and SAGI-D. The model achieves strong generalization, outperforming existing baselines on average and on four of five evaluated datasets, while maintaining a high true negative rate on pristine images.
☆ FuseAdapt: Parameter-Efficient Multimodal Fusion for Semantic Segmentation with Missing Modalities NeurIPS 2026
Multi-modal semantic segmentation benefits from complementary sensors, but this benefit is fragile when some modalities are degraded or missing at test time. Many existing methods rely on dedicated fusion modules or multi-branch cross-modal encoders, and the fusion often becomes unreliable when modalities are absent, leading to substantial performance drops. We propose \textbf{FuseAdapt}, a parameter-efficient framework that performs fusion within the adaptation space of a frozen vision foundation model (VFM), exploring whether VFM priors can serve as an effective shared backbone for multi-modal segmentation. Instead of attaching a standalone fusion network, FuseAdapt assigns each modality a lightweight adaptation branch and performs \emph{adaptation-space fusion} by keeping Q/V low-rank adaptation private to each modality and routing only FFN low-rank residual activations across modalities inside the frozen backbone. The pretrained VFM remains fixed while modality-specific corrections and explicit cross-modal interaction are learned through the adaptation paths. To handle missing modalities, we further introduce \textbf{Predictive Modality Modeling (PMM)}, a direct representation-level objective for cross-modal redundancy. During training, PMM masks a target modality and predicts its embedding from the visible ones, supervised by a teacher target computed under full-modality input. PMM is used only during training and adds no inference-time overhead. Across three multi-modal segmentation benchmarks (MCubeS, DELIVER, MUSES), FuseAdapt consistently improves both modality-complete and modality-incomplete segmentation with a small trainable budget, yielding up to +3.01 mIoU under full modalities and +12.56 mIoU under missing modalities over prior state-of-the-art. Project page: https://devinxzhang.github.io/FuseAdapt-Page/.
comment: 25 pages, 6 figures, 19 tables. Accepted to NeurIPS 2026
☆ Beyond Generation: Using Multimodal LLMs as Detectors of LLM-Generated Deepfake Facial Images
As image generation models become increasingly capable of producing highly realistic content, traditional forensic techniques are struggling to keep up. This paper investigates whether MLLMs can instead be used as a form of forensic analysis by identifying synthetic media. Specifically, the study aims to determine whether these models detect fake images by recognising physical inconsistencies, or whether they rely on digital artefacts such as embedded watermarks.Six MLLMs: GPT-4o, GPT-5, GPT-5.2, Gemini 2.5, Gemini 3, and Seed 1.6, are benchmarked using a dataset of 400 images. Fifty images are authentic photographs, while the remaining 350 are generated using seven leading image models: Gemini 3, Gemini 2.5, Flux.2 Pro, GPT-Image-1, GPT-Image-1.5, Seedream 4.0, and Seedream 4.5. The evaluation is structured in three stages: single-image classification, pairwise comparison, and a focused "self-detection" experiment on Gemini. Several MLLMs achieved a high detection accuracy, with GPT-5.2 reaching a peak of 97.9% in the pairwise experiment, against specific generators and an overall mean pairwise accuracy of 82.5% by identifying structural or physical inconsistencies within images. However, results from the self-detection experiment indicate that the presence of invisible SynthID watermarks leads to a 10% reduction in Gemini's detection accuracy compared to the clean control group. One possible explanation is that SynthID embedding reduces some of the visible artefacts the models rely on for detection.These results imply that MLLMs can detect structural artefacts without relying on watermarks, but performance varies substantially across model generations. The findings from comparison C5 also suggest that SynthID embedding may suppress some of the structural artefacts used during detection.
☆ Beyond Source Prompts: Towards Visually Grounded AI-Generated Video Quality Assessment
Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence have accelerated video generation technologies. However, AI-generated videos (AIGVs) remain susceptible to various distortions, highlighting the need for dedicated video quality assessment methods. Content semantics play an important role in AIGV quality assessment, with source prompts typically used as textual references. However, these prompts may not accurately reflect the generated video content, resulting in a discrepancy between the intended textual description and the generated result. To address this limitation, this paper proposes VGCap, an AIGV quality assessment framework guided by visually grounded captions that align better with generated content. Specifically, we introduce two forms of captions: a global caption obtained by minimally revising the source prompt based on multi-frame visual evidence, and prompt-independent segment captions that describe localized temporal content. Together, these captions provide complementary textual evidence for assessing spatial quality, temporal quality, and text-video alignment. Experimental results on the LGVQ and FETV datasets show that VGCap outperforms representative baselines across all three dimensions. Further ablation studies on caption sources and temporal components confirm the effectiveness of visually grounded captions for each quality dimension, while highlighting the benefits of segment-level features for temporal quality prediction. The source of VGCap will be available at https://github.com/lolo123-123/VGCap.
☆ The Dormant Spiking Neuron: A State-Driven Mechanism for Efficient Spiking Neural Networks NeurIPS 2026
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a compelling pathway toward energy-efficient artificial intelligence, fundamentally anchored in presynaptic input-driven sparsity. However, a substantial yet chronically overlooked source of computational overhead persists: the continuous subthreshold dynamics of postsynaptic neurons. Quantitative analysis reveals that up to 44% of neurons in an ImageNet-trained ResNet-18 model reside in a deeply inhibited state, imposing a persistent computational burden despite having a negligible probability of firing. To address this inefficiency, the Dormant Spiking Neuron (DSN) model is introduced. By incorporating a state-driven dynamic gate, the DSN allows a neuron to enter a dormant state when its membrane potential falls below a predefined negative threshold, dynamically pruning redundant computations at the instance level. Crucially, this dormancy mechanism is directly integrated into the neuronal dynamics and trained end-to-end via backpropagation through time using surrogate gradients, enabling the network to actively learn a robust dormancy policy that adaptively preserves critical information flow. Extensive experiments across static and neuromorphic datasets demonstrate that the DSN framework consistently reduces computational energy by 40% to over 70%. Notably, on the large-scale ImageNet dataset, the DSN outperforms state-of-the-art static pruning techniques at comparable reported cost reductions and simultaneously improves the corresponding baseline SNN accuracy by 1.34%. By establishing a trainable, state-driven sparsity paradigm orthogonal to conventional input-driven methods, the DSN unlocks synergistic efficiency gains, presenting an effective approach for advancing neuromorphic computing.
comment: NeurIPS 2026 Accepted
☆ International Multi-Centre Validation of Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Precise Discrimination between Normal and Abnormal Retinal Development
Zhanhan Tu, Nikhil Reddy, Helen J. Kuht, Ha-Jun Yoon, Gail D. E. Maconachie, Ravi Purohit, Prateek Pani, Line Kessel, Jinu Han, Jing Jin, Shui-Hua Wang, Karthik Bharadwaj, Viral Sheth, Michael Hisaund, Rebecca J. McLean, George Garratt, Chetan Kantibhai Patel, Kanmin Xue, Callum Hunt, Zisen Zhou, Ian De Silva, Seema Teli, Sonal Shah, Vanessa Rodwell, Aarti Patel, Irene Gottlob, Yu-Dong Zhang, Zedong Zheng, Girish Varma, Mervyn G. Thomas
Arrested retinal development can cause childhood visual impairment, but grading optical coherence tomography scans is difficult to standardise across devices and centres. We developed and evaluated an unsupervised domain adaptation model to classify normal and abnormal retinal development across different OCT systems. This retrospective multicentre study used OCT scans from five centres in four countries and the UK Biobank. Data covered four OCT devices, including table mounted and handheld systems. A ResNet50 based Domain Adversarial Neural Network was trained using labelled images from a source device and unlabelled images from a target device. We evaluated six source to target pairings and compared model performance with seven clinician graders. A separate Heidelberg Spectralis dataset was reserved for external evaluation. Across validation sets, accuracy ranged from 87.75% to 96.06%, sensitivity from 88.68% to 98.38%, and specificity from 78.00% to 98.02%. The best performing model, adapted from TM OCT1 to HH OCT1, achieved 96.06% accuracy and an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.994, with a 95% confidence interval from 0.981 to 0.999. Several models also maintained discrimination on the unseen Heidelberg device. Unsupervised domain adaptation enabled OCT classification across devices without labelled target device data. The approach may support more consistent assessment of retinal development and large scale analysis of existing imaging datasets.
comment: Submitted to Nature Medicine. 38 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables. Supplementary material includes 3 figures and 3 tables
☆ Mixture of Multi-Sequence Feature Difference for Contrast-Enhanced MRI Synthesis ACCV 2026
Contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (CE-MRI) is crucial for accurately diagnosing and segmenting brain tumors. However, the acquisition of CE-MRI requires injecting contrast agents, which poses potential health risks and increases scan costs. Here, we propose a CE-MRI synthesis method from non-contrast sequences, reducing both risk and cost. Unlike existing methods that rely on channel-wise concatenation to fuse multi-sequence information for synthesis, we introduce a Mixture of Feature Difference (MoFD) module. The proposed module uses a dynamic weighting strategy to adaptively select and aggregate informative features from both individual source sequences and explicit differences among them. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms baselines in terms of image fidelity and perceptual quality on the UCSF-PDGM and UPenn-GBM datasets. Our method successfully reconstructs tumor regions and achieves segmentation performance comparable to that obtained with real CE-MRI. Our ablation studies show that although adversarial learning improves perceptual quality, a regression-based variant of our method achieves higher structural fidelity.
comment: ACCV 2026
☆ Bridging the Markerless Tracking Validation Gap: Intraoperative X-ray Workflow Integration MICCAI 2026
Markerless intraoperative tracking of spinal anatomy via RGB-D sensors is a promising alternative to invasive bone-anchored fiducials, yet no existing clinical dataset provides independent subsurface ground truth for validating these methods. We address this gap with a clinically viable pipeline that derives per-vertebra 6-DoF pose from routine intraoperative C-arm fluoroscopy, co-registered to the RGB-D camera frame through a multimodal fiducial array detectable in both imaging modalities. Critically, the pipeline requires no additional radiation, instrumentation, or deviation from standard surgical workflows, relying solely on the fluoroscopic images already acquired during routine level checks. A calibrated transform chain links the vertebral pose recovered via multi-view 2D-3D CT-to-fluoroscopy registration to the RGB-D coordinate frame, enabling direct comparison of any markerless registration estimate against a subsurface reference. Ex vivo validation against optically tracked ovine vertebrae confirms end-to-end accuracy of 2.06 +- 0.29 mm and 3.35 +- 0.93 degrees, sufficient to serve as independent ground truth for methods with substantially larger errors. We demonstrate the pipeline's utility by evaluating two markerless registration strategies on clinical data spanning 11 vertebrae across 1,500 frames from three surgical sequences: the first such evaluation against an independent subsurface reference in a clinical setting. The proposed framework provides reusable infrastructure for benchmarking emerging markerless tracking methods on real surgical data.
comment: This version was submitted to MICCAI 2026 for review, see journal reference for published version
☆ Edit4D: Editable 4D Scene Generation with Textual Control
We introduce Edit4D, an editable text-to-4D scene generation framework that constructs 4D scenes from separate background and dynamic character representations. Recent advances in generative models have enabled text-driven dynamic scene synthesis, but editable 4D scene generation remains challenging due to the need to preserve spatial geometry and temporal dynamics. Existing approaches typically generate holistic scene videos, where the background and dynamic characters are coupled, making object-level editing and flexible camera control difficult. Edit4D addresses these limitations through a stage-specific generation pipeline. Given a user instruction, Edit4D first decomposes it into stage-specific prompts for background, dynamic character, and scene-character composition. Using these prompts, we synthesize multi-view scene images with text-to-image and camera-conditioned generative priors and reconstruct a background 3D Gaussian splatting representation. We then generate a character image, animate it with an image-conditioned video prior, reconstruct a 4D mesh, and bind Gaussian primitives to obtain a character representation. Finally, both components are composed through text-guided segmentation and contact-aware optimization. A global scene refinement is then performed to improve harmonization and rendering consistency. By integrating stage-specific components, Edit4D enables controllable camera motion, flexible object-level editing, and the practical construction of editable 4D scenes. Project page: https://chanwo0kim.github.io/Edit4D/
comment: 21 pages, 16 figures. Project page: https://chanwo0kim.github.io/Edit4D/
☆ FusionAudit: Pathway-Conditioned Robustness Auditing for Native Multimodal Models NeurIPS 2026
As vision-language models (VLMs) transition from frozen-encoder pipelines to native multimodal architectures, the visual channel increasingly serves as both a perceptual input and a carrier of rendered text that competes with user prompts. Current single-attack, pixel-centric evaluations fail to capture this complexity: they collapse distinct visual attack surfaces into a single scalar and ignore how architectural shifts alter vulnerability. We introduce PaRMA, an evidence-based auditing framework that defines pathway-conditioned risk over two primary image-level interventions: pixel perturbation and rendered-text insertion. Instead of arbitrary attack enumeration, PaRMA uses pathway-specific diagnostics to expose architecture-specific blind spots. Notably, we uncover a see-but-not-deceived signature where native VLMs attend heavily to typographic overlays but visually reject them, and we identify an objective mismatch between encoder-level and answer-level attacks in deep-fusion models. To exploit these findings, we instantiate FusionAudit, introducing two diagnostic-motivated attacks: MANTIS (margin-aware pixel perturbation) and Nat-Evid (host-congruent semantic insertion). Evaluating 18 open-weight VLMs across a novel nativeness taxonomy, we demonstrate that legacy single-attack rankings (e.g., PGD) are unstable for native models. Our diagnostic-driven attacks substantially raise the estimated residual risk, showing that PaRMA provides a falsifiable, evidence-driven auditing methodology for uncovering vulnerabilities missed by standard benchmarks.
comment: NeurIPS 2026
☆ Digital Typhoon Dataset V3: Benchmarking for Multi-spectral Extension and Analyzing Systematic Bias in Intensity Regression
This paper presents the Digital Typhoon Dataset V3, a new version of the longest typhoon satellite image dataset spanning nearly 50 years, designed to benchmark machine learning models on long-term spatio-temporal data. The latest addition to Dataset V3 is multispectral satellite data, enabling multi-channel models. We investigate data-splitting strategies and present benchmarking results for the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Experimental results show that, under the current dataset construction and experimental setting, multi-channel inputs do not clearly outperform single-channel inputs for pressure regression. Among the evaluated model architectures, image types, and spectral channels, ResNet-18, full-resolution images, and Channel 1 generally provide the best single-channel performance for pressure regression. Performance also differs between the WP and AU datasets by regression target, with lower RMSE on WP for pressure regression and on AU for wind regression. These results highlight the importance of considering dataset-specific and task-specific characteristics when interpreting benchmark performance. Additionally, we analyzed systematic bias in intensity regression, which leads to underestimation of intensity for strong typhoons. We tested imbalance-aware weighting strategies, including inverse-density weighting inspired by BalancedMSE, and showed that these approaches are not sufficient to remove the bias. The dataset is publicly available at http://agora.ex.nii.ac.jp/digital-typhoon/dataset/ and https://github.com/kitamoto-lab/digital-typhoon/.
comment: 23 pages, 6 figures, dataset paper
☆ SCMerge: Spatial-Consistency-Aware Token Pair Merging for Efficient Semantic Segmentation
Vision Transformer architectures have showcased impressive performance on semantic segmentation, yet their quadratic attention complexity hinders practical applications. Recent works have focused on merging tokens to reduce sequence length and thus improve transformer efficiency. However, existing token merging methods primarily rely on feature similarity to identify similar tokens, overlooking spatial consistency, which may introduce segmentation errors in semantic segmentation. In this work, we propose SCMerge, a training-free token merging method that jointly considers feature similarity and spatial consistency in pairing similar tokens. The pairwise tokens are then merged within the encoder, and the resulting token sequences are reconstructed onto the original patch grid after decoding. The proposed method is flexible and can be plugged into existing vision Transformer-based semantic segmentation pipelines. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets ADE20K, Pascal Context, and Cityscapes show that SCMerge consistently achieves a better trade-off between segmentation accuracy and efficiency than baseline methods.
comment: 10 pages, 4 figures
☆ DIAL: Dynamic and Informed Adjustment of the Native Stochastic Law for Reliable Weather Ensembles
Ensemble weather forecasts can look reliable in global averages while hiding too little spread in some cases and too much in others. These errors vary across variables, spatial scales, lead times, and weather states. Adapting randomness during forecasting can correct these errors, but training fixes stochastic behavior beforehand and output calibration acts afterward. Inference guidance also acts during forecasting, but typically scores ensemble members separately rather than the ensemble as a whole. Reliability feedback arrives at the end, and tracing it backward through many chaotic forecast steps is expensive and unstable. We therefore introduce Dynamic and Informed Adjustment of the Native Stochastic Law (DIAL), which controls a frozen model's native stochasticity. DIAL learns from past forecasts to predict whether each variable and scale needs more or less spread. As a forecast develops, it estimates how possible noise changes will affect later forecast accuracy and reliability. It combines these predictions to make small noise updates at each step. This loop avoids retraining the weather model and full backpropagation through the forecast. We evaluate DIAL on FourCastNet 3 (FCN3) using later ERA5 years unseen during training. DIAL provides better scale-resolved reliability than learned postprocessing and reward-based control baselines. Relative to the unmodified Native FCN3 reference, DIAL achieves an 8.27% improvement in the primary multiscale continuous ranked probability score (CRPS).
comment: 17 pages, 5 figures, including appendix
☆ Spurious Attention Heads in Vision Transformers: Mechanistic Identification of Annotation-Driven Bias in Medical Chest X-Ray Analysis
Vision Transformers deployed in medical imaging exploit spurious correlations, yet the internal mechanisms remain unidentified and impossible to fix. We apply mechanistic interpretability to locate one such mechanism in ViT-Base 16: a single attention head (L8H10) that functions as a dedicated annotation-reader on chest X-rays, attending to corner text rather than lung pathology in 62% of 200 COVID-19 images. Causal validation via inpainting confirms annotation content rather than luminance or edge density drives the behaviour, increasing lung attention 1.52 times upon removal in affected images ($p{<}0.0001$). The finding replicates across NIH ChestX-ray14 (79%), DeiT-Base (88%), and ViT-Large 16 (80%), establishing spurious annotation-attending heads as a consistent property of ViT-family architectures across two datasets and three architectures. Full fine-tuning does not suppress the behaviour and may entrench it: 98.4% of spurious images remain spurious and the spurious rate rises marginally, as the shortcut is reinforced rather than removed. Critically, single-head ablation produces $p{=}0.340$ and multi-head ablation of all three identified carriers produces $p{=}0.532$, meaning a causally verified annotation-reading circuit is completely invisible to output-level evaluation. Mechanistic auditing finds what behavioural testing cannot.
comment: 8 pages, 8 figures
☆ Anchor3DGS: Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting with Compact Anchor-Based Representation NeurIPS 2026
Recent feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods have enabled effective multi-view 3D reconstruction by predicting Gaussian primitives in a single forward pass. However, existing approaches predominantly adopt a pixel-aligned paradigm that predicts one Gaussian per input pixel, coupling the Gaussian count to the input resolution and number of views. This also leads to redundant primitives in textureless regions and insufficient coverage in geometrically complex areas. We present Anchor3DGS, a pose-free feed-forward 3DGS framework that replaces pixel-aligned prediction with a compact anchor-based representation. Guided by information entropy, our method places a set of 3D anchors in the scene, concentrating them in regions of higher visual complexity while maintaining broad spatial coverage. Each anchor performs occlusion-aware aggregation of multi-view image features, exchanges information with other anchors, and is decoded into a set of local Gaussians. A lightweight feature enhancement module further refines the coarse RGB output from Gaussian splatting and improves rendering fidelity. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that our Anchor3DGS achieves state-of-the-art novel view synthesis quality while only using an order of magnitude fewer Gaussian primitives.
comment: NeurIPS 2026
☆ Training-Free Target-Aware Refinement of 3D Gaussian Language Map
Sibaek Lee, Kyeongsu Kang, Seongbo Ha, Yewon Jeon, Joonyeol Choi, Daegeol Ko, Jaehyuk Hur, Taemin Choi, Minsu Kim, Hyungjoo Ahn, Wonsok Yoo, Hyeonwoo Yu
Distilling vision-language features into 3D Gaussian Splatting yields a language map that can be queried with arbitrary text. In deployment, however, a small set of user-specified targets must be reliably located, which current distilled maps often miss, while open-vocabulary queryability for other words must remain intact. We propose a training-free, target-aware refinement of an already-distilled language map. Guided by a text-promptable segmenter, the visual embedding inside each detected target region is blended with the target text embedding, a convex combination whose coefficient sets the amount of injected prior, while non-target regions are left untouched. Injecting too much overwrites appearance cues and general queryability, so we seek, for each target, the smallest coefficient that still lets it win, and we obtain every coefficient in closed form, leaving no hyperparameters to tune. We further identify a failure mode of injection in language-goal localization. Text embeddings share a common component, and injecting them makes the standard cosine read-out query-agnostic, which a centering step in the read-out removes. Across three benchmarks, the refinement consistently improves open-vocabulary segmentation, roughly doubling the base mIoU on Replica, and localizes language goals more reliably than the base map. It also transfers as a plug-in to off-the-shelf field-based and object-level language maps and supports a real-world demonstration in which a legged robot navigates to natural-language goals. Project page and code: https://lab-of-ai-and-robotics.github.io/target-aware-langmap/
comment: 8 pages, 6 figures. Project page: https://lab-of-ai-and-robotics.github.io/target-aware-langmap/
☆ A Decision-Aware Evaluation Protocol for Uncertainty in Medical Image Segmentation
Medical segmentation uncertainty is often evaluated with calibration error or pixel-level error-detection scores, but these metrics do not show whether uncertainty improves downstream review decisions. We propose a decision-aware evaluation protocol that separates uncertainty estimation from deferral policy and evaluates their combination under fixed review budgets: which pixels, regions, or images should be accepted, and which should be reviewed. The protocol reports fixed-budget error reduction, risk-coverage behaviour, region-level review proxies, structural failure modes, probability-derived baselines, and sensitivity to review assumptions. We instantiate it across retinal vessel, skin lesion, and polyp segmentation with multiple backbones and uncertainty estimators. Under matched inference budgets and canonical multi-layer MC Dropout, test-time augmentation (TTA) gives a stronger error-detection signal across matched MC--TTA comparisons, including architecture and dropout-placement checks. However, estimator rankings are not universal. For example, probability-derived scores remain competitive, deep ensembles can outperform TTA, learned deferral helps mainly when the base estimator is weak, and rankings can change with review unit, uncertainty target, correction assumptions, and cost model. Structural and second-observer analyses further show that boundary and thin-structure failures are partly tied to annotation ambiguity. These findings support evaluating uncertainty as an estimator-policy-review configuration, not as a standalone score map. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Uncertainity-in-Medical-Image-Segmentation/README.md
☆ Hear, Localize, and Reason: Spatially Aware Scene Understanding for Audio-Visual LLMs NeurIPS 2026
Audio-visual large language models (AV-LLMs) have made strong progress in multimodal understanding, yet most treat audio as monaural semantic content, limiting their ability to reason about where sounds originate and how they relate to the visual scene. Recent spatial audio-visual studies address parts of this problem, but often focus on specific abilities, such as spatial correspondence or direction and distance reasoning. In this work, we introduce HLR-AVSceneQA, a comprehensive benchmark with a hear-localize-reason hierarchy that evaluates whether models can recognize what is heard, localize sound sources in egocentric and allocentric views, and use these localized sources to reason about how they relate to the visual scene. We further introduce HLR-LLM, which augments a strong audio-visual foundation model with a binaural spatial audio branch alongside its monaural semantic audio pathway. We train HLR-LLM with a curriculum that incorporates final-stage chain-of-thought supervision for multi-step spatial reasoning. Experiments show that existing AV-LLMs remain limited in spatial grounding and relational reasoning, while HLR-LLM substantially improves spatial audio-visual scene understanding without compromising semantic audio-visual perception.
comment: NeurIPS 2026; Project page: https://hlrllm.github.io/
☆ MYOPIA: Understanding the Limits of Tree-Based Reasoning in Vision-Language Models
Decision trees can make vision-language model (VLM) classification interpretable by replacing a single prediction with a sequence of root-to-leaf questions. However, the accuracy cost of this greedy, non-backtracking procedure remains unclear. We introduce \textbf{MYOPIA}, a benchmark comprising four LLM-generated, human-refined decision trees for GTSRB, MNIST, CIFAR-10, and MSCOCO, together with matched prompts, diagnostic protocols, and an evaluation harness. Across GPT-4o, Qwen-VL Max, and LLaMA-3.2 11B Vision, tree traversal underperforms zero-shot prompting in all 12 dataset--model pairs; paired bootstrap analyses consistently favor zero-shot. Our diagnostics characterize interacting failure modes associated with this gap. Models often recall tree-encoded class attributes more accurately than they ground the same attributes in images: the mean label--image accuracy gaps are 9.5, 13.8, and 12.6 points for GPT-4o, Qwen-VL Max, and LLaMA, respectively. Incorrect local decisions then irreversibly exclude the correct class, while answer extraction introduces additional model-dependent loss. A node-level audit of the four trees finds that split entropy is weakly but consistently associated with lower node accuracy, whereas depth, branching factor, and within-node grounding differences are less stable. \textbf{MYOPIA} therefore provides a framework for diagnosing hierarchical visual classification and motivates testing tree designs that prioritize perceptual answerability and recovery from early errors. Code is available at https://github.com/islammesabah/VLM_Classification.
☆ Decoupled Safety Control: A Safety-Control Algorithm for Training-Free Safety Guidance NeurIPS 2026
Diffusion models achieve strong performance in text-to-image generation, but they can still produce unsafe content. Training-free safety guidance offers a practical inference-time alternative that intervenes during sampling without modifying model weights. However, many existing safeguards still rely on a coupled safety-control chain. In this chain, the same unsafe condition simultaneously specifies what should be avoided, indicates the current unsafe signal, constructs the intervention, and determines when that intervention remains active. This coupling can work when unsafe factors are explicit, but becomes less reliable once harmful and benign semantics are entangled in the current generation state, often leaving residual unsafe content or unnecessarily degrading benign-generation quality or prompt fidelity. We address this problem with Decoupled Safety Control (DSC), a plug-in safety-control algorithm for training-free safety guidance. DSC reformulates training-free safety guidance as an explicit state-dependent control process, so the executed intervention is determined from the current generation state rather than inherited directly from a single unsafe condition. Experiments on standard safety benchmarks show that DSC improves representative latent- and text-space safeguards, achieving stronger unsafe-content suppression while preserving benign-generation quality and maintaining efficient inference.
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2026
☆ Rethinking Classifier-Free Guidance for TI2I Flow Matching
Andreas Floros, Elena Koritska, Teofilo de Campos, Christoph Vogel, Chu-Tak Li, Anuj Sharma, Alexandros Neophytou
We study Text-and-Image-to-Image (TI2I) flow matching methods for controllable image editing. In a broader generative modeling context, Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) is established as a key component responsible for high quality outputs. However, we argue that its role in TI2I modeling is poorly understood. Specifically, we make the surprising observation that the CFG mechanism is implicitly harmful for editing in the noisy phase of flow modeling, hindering instruction following and controllability. We propose a simple correction in the early flow steps, enabling a richer alignment-preservation tradeoff at no extra cost. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated on both pixel-space and latent TI2I flows.
☆ FilterFusion: Prior-Guided Adaptive Filter Fusion for Efficient Video Denoising SP 2026
Real-world video denoising for communication systems must handle mixed degradations such as sensor noise, compression artifacts, and motion-induced inconsistency while remaining deployable under tight latency budgets. Purely deep models often achieve high accuracy but come with significant computational cost, whereas classical filters are robust and efficient but insufficiently adaptive. We present FilterFusion, a prior-guided multi-frame denoising framework that combines temporally-aware learned features with an interpretable bank of denoising branches. The model predicts a low-cost guidance signal and uses it to adaptively mix a compact set of denoising responses at the original resolution. The lightweight design uses only 109K parameters and explicitly injects temporal variance and spatial variance cues into the low-resolution controller. On CRVD (real sensor noise), it reaches 34.72 dB PSNR and 0.9330 SSIM with only 0.18 GFLOPs (network-only). Because the filter-bank operations are simple and regular (Gaussian blur, median, weighted sum), a straightforward compiled C implementation of the synthesis path achieves 17.9ms per frame (55.9 FPS) on a single CPU thread at 1080p---exceeding real-time and 122--252 times faster than lightweight CNN baselines that require over 2 seconds per frame. The results demonstrate a strong quality-efficiency-speed trade-off and a practical route to real-time denoising through low-resolution control and explicit filter-based synthesis.
comment: Accepted by MMSP 2026
☆ GRASE: Geometry-native Real-to-sim Agentic Scene Modeling from Video
Real-to-sim conversion aims to turn a captured video of a real environment into an editable 3D scene while preserving the geometry and layout of what was observed. Existing methods often follow a one-pass, loosely coupled paradigm: each stage receives only limited feedback from previous stages, allowing errors to propagate without reliable correction and leaving the final scene inconsistent. We present GRASE, an agentic framework that closes this loop by treating the captured multi-view video observations as a standing reference throughout scene modeling. Instead of committing to intermediate estimates, GRASE revises its current hypothesis whenever rendered evidence disagrees with the capture, overcoming the fixed intermediate assumptions of conventional pipelines. Specifically, GRASE first fits the architectural shell and its openings from depth and multi-view cues. An agent then places generated assets in a shared coordinate frame while checking their spatial relationships. Finally, each asset's geometry and placement are refined iteratively to improve agreement across the observed views. By coupling these steps through feedback, GRASE localizes structural discrepancies and revises only the responsible components, while preserving cross-view consistency. The resulting 3D scenes are faithful to the input, consistent across views, and suitable for simulations. In our experiments, GRASE substantially outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, including a direct real-to-sim conversion using GPT6-Astra.
☆ AI-Driven Disaster Response and Displacement Monitoring
Noora Al-Emadi, Muhammad Imran, Yin Yang, Ingmar Weber, Fabjan Lashi, Gaia Rigodanza, Ivana Hajzmanova, Ferda Ofli
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) has demonstrated its potential across a wide range of humanitarian tasks, offering scalable and data-driven solutions to some of the world's most pressing challenges. For instance, in addressing climate change, AI-powered models are being used for faster and more accurate global weather forecasting, control and design of renewable energy, and monitoring deforestation. Machine learning algorithms analyze satellite imagery and socioeconomic data to predict poverty and promote sustainable development. AI has also transformed disaster response and conflict monitoring, providing innovative solutions for assessing damage and urgent needs and tracking displacement.
☆ Cross-Prompt Inference Mitigates Rare-Class Suppression in Imbalanced VLM Finetuning
When a vision-language model is finetuned on class-imbalanced data, rare-class recall can fall well below the model's own zero-shot performance. In this regime, we uncover a surprising matched-prompt penalty whereby the standard choice of reusing the descriptive finetuning prompt at inference can yield lower rare-class recall than using a different descriptive prompt. We call this inference-time strategy cross-prompt inference. We evaluate diverse VLMs across six datasets and find that cross-prompt inference consistently recovers rare-class recall, with varying trade-offs in frequent-class recall. The effect reflects a train-eval prompt interaction rather than prompt quality alone, and does not arise with non-descriptive prompt changes. It is strongest when imbalance and visual confusability produce substantial rare-class suppression, and is weak or absent when such suppression does not occur. Using Tuning Contribution (TuCo), which decomposes a model's computation into pretrained and finetuning parts, we find that cross-prompt inference reduces reliance on finetuning-induced computation and shifts the model toward its pretrained component. Reducing that finetuning contribution also substantially reduces the cross-prompt advantage. These results show that rare-class knowledge suppressed by imbalanced finetuning can remain accessible under a different inference prompt.
☆ Can Visual Generation Expand What Unified Multimodal Models Know?
Unified multimodal models (UMMs) receive image-generation supervision that exposes them to visual information not fully documented in text. Can learning to generate images expand what pretrained models know? We introduce Knowledge Transfer Probing (KTP), a controlled protocol that supplies new knowledge through image-generation training and tests its accessibility through text-only question answering. Across seven knowledge categories and three UMMs, we observe direct but uneven transfer from visual supervision to language. Motivated by these observations, we successively introduce Textual Alignment and Interleaved Image--Text Alignment, which connect generation and answering through shared knowledge and interleaved responses, respectively. Guidance on selected entities can improve knowledge access on other entities without QA supervision, with additional gains from interleaved alignment. Further analysis shows that knowledge correctly reproduced in images is often more accessible through text, although substantial gaps remain between the two forms of access. These findings support visual generation as a source of knowledge beyond textual supervision, and motivate joint investigation of training data design and model architecture to make this knowledge more broadly accessible.
☆ CarryOn: A Dual-Loop Harness for Personalized and Reliable Robot Assistance
Zixuan Wang, Yuqi Liu, Yuxin Chen, Sengqiao Yang, Jinhui Ye, Pengguang Chen, Changsheng Lu, Shu Liu, Bei Yu, Jiaya Jia
While generalist vision-language-action (VLA) models have enabled diverse open-world manipulation, real-world robotic assistance requires two critical capabilities they currently lack: personalization and reliable execution. First, executing an instruction like "make me a sandwich" requires grounding subtask decomposition in persistent user preferences rather than relying on a single generic solution. Second, reliable deployment demands explainable safety assurance that proactively prevents hazards and gracefully recovers from occasional physical failures. To address these gaps, we present CarryOn, a dual-loop harness designed to augment a frozen VLA policy. The planning loop maintains persistent user-level and scene-level context that is continually grounded against new observations and revised through interaction, enabling personalized task selection and execution grounding across conversations and changing scenes. The execution loop actively supervises policy rollouts, shielding actions from predicted hazardous contact. When execution fails, the system invokes reusable control-based recovery skills that restore task progress and are refined through reflection on earlier failures. On a real robot and in simulation, CarryOn dispatches preference-consistent subtasks across users and scenes, reduces the violation rate of an already safety-finetuned VLA from 52.6% to 6.1%, and increases recovery success from 13% to 80% when refined skills are reused.
comment: Project page: https://vincent2311.github.io/Projects/CarryOn/
☆ Full-Duplex Interaction with Speech, Expressions and Gestures
Human face-to-face conversation requires coordinating speech, gestures and expressions across both speaking and listening. We present ELLSA 2, an end-to-end full-duplex dialogue model that jointly optimizes speech interaction and streaming gesture-expression generation. An autoregressive, chunk-wise synthesizer combines pretrained acoustic features with distinct listening and speaking hidden states from the dialogue backbone and speech synthesizer, enabling continuous non-verbal generation even when the model is verbally silent. To translate dialogue understanding into vivid semantic gestures, we introduce contextual semantic calls and template guidance, separating whether to invoke an available semantic gesture from how to realize it. We also establish a curated data and evaluation pipeline for dialog-aware co-speech gesture generation and investigate reference-based multimodal large language models (MLLMs) as automatic judges. Experiments show that ELLSA 2 remains highly competitive with open-source full-duplex speech interaction models and outperforms cascaded baselines across dialog-aware gesture and expression metrics. Semantic template guidance further significantly improves semantic gesture quality. Strong system-level correlations with human judgments support these reference-based scores as useful preliminary metrics for full-duplex and semantic gesture assessment. Together, these results advance dialogue modeling from spoken responses toward coordinated multimodal interaction.
comment: 37 pages, 5 figures
☆ PET Quantification-Preserving Registration for Longitudinal Whole-Body PSMA PET/CT
We adapt the diffeomorphic coarse-to-fine LapIRN architecture for longitudinal whole-body PSMA PET/CT registration in the Learn2Reg 2026 PSMAReg challenge. The method combines affine pre-registration, multi-modal deformable registration, and test-time instance optimization. We further introduce PET biomarker preservation losses for metabolic tumor volume (MTV) and total lesion glycolysis (TLG), including Jacobian-based constraints, and a per-structure rigidity regularization for skeletal structures. The submitted configuration achieved 81.0% DSC and 6.17 mm HD95, with MTV and TLG errors of 3.3% and 3.3%, respectively, on our evaluation protocol. Code is available at https://github.com/koegl/psmareg.
☆ X-Fly: Learning to Reach and Stop in Full-Chunk Aerial Vision-Language Navigation
Aerial vision-language navigation (VLN) agents built on large vision-language models are expensive to query. Executing a complete predicted action chunk before replanning amortizes this cost, reducing model inference from 195 to 42 ms per executed waypoint for our policy. It also moves the states at which the policy is queried away from expert demonstrations, which supervise neither recovery from these states nor termination at the learner's own arrival. On OpenFly test-seen, no-stop failures account for 47.78% of full-chunk behavior cloning (BC) outcomes. We present X-Fly, a staged training framework for full-chunk aerial VLN. Recovery DAgger labels learner-visited decision states with smooth chunks that reconnect to future expert segments and with STOP at the first in-region state. Flow-GRPO then jointly refines the chunked flow controller and a Bernoulli STOP policy from same-task closed-loop outcomes, supplemented by outcome-verified stopping supervision. With eight controls per decision, X-Fly reaches 74.18% SR on test-seen and 51.73% on test-unseen, compared with 16.45% and 18.43% for full-chunk BC and 32.04% and 29.46% for DreamFly.
comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables. Project page: https://juliusju572.github.io/x-fly/
☆ RLDF: A Region-Level Deepfake Dataset and Benchmark for Partial-Face Manipulation Detection
Existing deepfake detection models are built upon manipu- lated images that are tampered with either exclusively fully swapped or fully synthesised faces, which leads us to an open question: Can off-the-shelf deepfake models detect manipulation effectively while tampering is confined to a local facial sub-region? To fill this gap, we introduce RLDF (Region-Level Deepfake), the first dataset for region-level deepfake evaluation. Employing the proposed region-aware partial swap synthesis model, we generate over 2M par- tial face-swap images by using eight face-swapping meth- ods. Altogether, we considered seven face regions, among which there are four discrete regions (eye, nose, mouth and eyebrow) and four composite facial regions (eye and nose; eye, nose and mouth; eye, nose, mouth and eye- brow; and full face). In addition, we define three evalu- ation protocols and benchmark 12 state-of-the-art detectors across the five popular standard cross-dataset evaluations, DF40, and the proposed RLDF, providing a comprehen- sive audit of where and why existing detectors underper- formed. Our evaluation reveals that existing detectors fail to generalize consistently across partial facial regions, re- sulting in an overall drop of 10.5% AUC and 10% accu- racy under region-level evaluation. Further, we propose a mask-guided cross-attention model as a baseline approach that can effectively detect region-level manipulation. The proposed dataset, code, and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/RLDF-Dataset/RLDF.
☆ ManiFusion: Unlocking the High-Throughput Generation via Superposition in Manifold Space
Diffusion models achieve high-quality image generation but remain computationally expensive due to iterative denoising across many timesteps. Existing acceleration methods mainly reduce per-sample latency, but gains along this axis are becoming saturated. We instead explore an orthogonal throughput-oriented direction by processing multiple samples within a single denoising evaluation. To this end, we propose ManiFusion, a backbone-agnostic framework for multi-sample generation through fused-space computation. ManiFusion jointly processes multiple samples by fusing them before the denoising backbone and separating them afterward through unfusion. We provide a geometric perspective on how multiple samples can share a fused representation while retaining the information needed to guide their individual generation trajectories. To better align fusion allocation with denoising stages, ManiFusion uses Trajectory-Fusion Scheduling (TFS), which dynamically adjusts fusion factors throughout sampling. ManiFusion generalizes across diffusion families, including both U-Net and transformer backbones in pixel and latent spaces. We further show that ManiFusion composes with existing acceleration methods and reaches throughput regimes unattainable by prior approaches with minimal quality degradation.
☆ Where, How, and When: Query-Guided Grounding for Video Understanding
Understanding video content requires reasoning at multiple levels of granularity, from identifying objects to interpreting their interactions and localizing when specific actions occur. This thesis studies three query-guided grounding tasks that answer where key objects are (object-level grounding), how they interact (relationship-level grounding), and when specific moments occur (moment-level grounding). For object-level grounding, we present QDETRv, a query-guided extension of the Detection Transformer for one-shot localization of unseen objects in videos, which combines query-context fusion, a memory module for temporal consistency, and unsupervised pretraining on synthetic object trajectories. We further propose the Temporal Object-Aware Vision Transformer (TOViT) for few-shot video object detection, which builds on a language-aligned open-set vision encoder and propagates high-confidence object features across frames. For relationship-level grounding, we introduce few-shot referring relationships in videos: given a (subject, predicate, object) query and a few support videos sharing the predicate, the entities are localized by optimizing a T-partite random field using a meta-learned relation network with query-conditioned translational embeddings, Global Semantic Aggregation, Local Localization Aggregation, and belief-propagation-based message passing. For moment-level grounding, we propose the Moment Alignment Transformer (MATR) for video-to-video moment retrieval, which uses dual-stage Dynamic Time Warping for pre- and post-fusion alignment, learnable queries for boundary prediction, and self-supervised pretraining with temporal augmentations; MATR also extends to text-to-video moment retrieval with performance comparable to, or better than, the state of the art. These contributions advance query-guided video understanding across spatial, relational, and temporal grounding.
☆ CLAD: Keypoint Matching Using Global Line Correspondences
Traditional keypoint descriptors, such as SIFT (Scale-Invariant Feature Transform) and ORB (Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF), are computed from local image patches. They may be unreliable in scenes with repetitive patterns or weak textures, where patches at different locations can look similar. We propose the Contextual Line-Assisted Descriptor (CLAD), a keypoint matching method that addresses this problem by using global geometric context from line correspondences. CLAD represents each keypoint with a vector whose elements indicate its proximity to matched lines. It can therefore use the keypoint's spatial relationships to the lines in the scene. We use HOME (Hough-space One-dimensional Matching of Extrema) to detect both clear and weak linear structures and to establish enough line-to-keypoint associations to represent this context. Evaluations on the TUM RGB-D SLAM dataset and outdoor video sequences show that CLAD provides geometrically consistent matches that complement those obtained with traditional local descriptors. In repetitive scenes, where local descriptors may not distinguish similar patches, CLAD uses global structure to improve matching reliability. The method is computationally lightweight and practical to implement.
comment: 5 pages, 2 figures
☆ Perception or Reasoning? Diagnosing and Tackling Reinforcement Learning Bottlenecks in VLMs
Reinforcement learning has brought strong gains to language model reasoning, but its improvements on visual tasks remain less consistent. One difficulty is that visual task failures can arise from different sources: the same benchmark may be limited by perception for one model and by reasoning for another. We introduce Perception and Reasoning Attribution (PARA), which measures the remaining perceptual and reasoning headroom of each model--benchmark pair by comparing how many current errors are recovered with more accurate visual information versus a stronger reasoner. Across 4 vision-language models and 17 multimodal benchmarks, PARA broadly agrees with the expected characteristics of existing benchmarks while revealing substantial model-specific variation. More importantly, it shows that RL gains become smaller as perceptual headroom increases, but larger when reasoning explains more of the recoverable errors, suggesting that current RL exploits reasoning headroom more effectively than perceptual headroom. Motivated by this gap, we analyze how existing RL objectives affect visual perception and find that reward- and token-level signals influence visual attention only indirectly. We therefore propose GRAD, a group-relative attention distillation objective that uses the best rollout in each group to directly guide the visual attention of weaker rollouts. GRAD consistently improves performance across two model scales and seven benchmarks, and further complements existing RL methods.
☆ SATOR: Backpropagation-Free 3D Test-Time Adaptation via Sample-Adaptive Token Routing WACV 2027
Test-time adaptation (TTA) mitigates the performance degradation of source-pretrained models on unlabeled test data under distribution shifts. Recent backpropagation-free token-purging methods address 3D point cloud distribution shifts by filtering unreliable tokens. However, their reliance on predefined purge-size candidates requires multiple forward passes per sample and increases inference cost. We propose SATOR (Sample-Adaptive TOken Routing), a source-free and backpropagation-free 3D TTA framework that eliminates this search by deriving both the partitioning threshold and routing decision directly from each sample. SATOR computes token abnormality scores from complementary attention and geometric relation graphs. It then derives a sample-specific partition into retained and pruned tokens via Otsu-based separability, without evaluating candidate sizes. Keep-ratio-calibrated routing then selects the pruned prediction only when its entropy, penalized by the keep ratio, is lower than that of the original prediction. Experiments on ModelNet40-C, ScanObjectNN-C, and ShapeNet-C demonstrate that SATOR achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on three 3D corruption benchmarks.
comment: Accepted by WACV 2027
☆ CoDeFont: One-Shot Font Generation via Multi-Scale Factor-Specific Representation Learning
One-shot Font Generation (OFG) aims to synthesize a target glyph by transferring the stylistic characteristics of a single reference glyph while preserving the structure of the target character. However, accurately capturing font style from a single reference image remains challenging due to the limited stylistic information available in a single glyph, and this challenge is further amplified for complex scripts. We propose CoDeFont, a script-agnostic OFG framework that addresses this challenge through multi-level style-content factorization and progressive style-content reconciliation. CoDeFont independently aggregates complementary style and structural information across multiple spatial levels to obtain factor-specific representations, while a contrastive objective explicitly encourages separation between style and content embeddings. During reconstruction, the disentangled representations are progressively injected through multi-level style conditioning, enabling stylistic information to be incorporated at different decoding resolutions while preserving the underlying glyph structure. We evaluate CoDeFont on structurally distinct Bengali and Latin scripts across seen and unseen font styles. Extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses demonstrate consistent improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods, highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed framework for OFG across diverse writing systems.
comment: 10 pages, 6 figures
☆ L2GSSL: Label-Efficient Local-to-Global Self-Supervised Learning for Volumetric Healthcare Data IEEE
Healthcare institutions routinely accumulate high-dimensional computed tomography (CT) volumes, but only a fraction can be annotated by experts. We present L2GSSL, a local-to-global self-supervised learning framework that leverages unlabeled volumes by decomposing pretraining into intra-slice and inter-slice representation spaces. A slice encoder learns view-invariant local features, and a global encoder aggregates the resulting tokens to model volumetric context. The stop-gradient isolates the local space from the global objective, while slice-wise execution and a three-phase schedule support training under constrained GPU memory. On LIDC-IDRI lung nodule malignancy classification, L2GSSL reaches $0.9229$ AUROC with only $10\%$ of the labels and $0.9377$ with $25\%$, exceeding the volume-level VICReg by $0.0229$ and $0.0294$, respectively. With all labels, the strongest supervised baseline exceeds L2GSSL by only $0.0044$ AUROC, consistent with self-supervised pretraining providing its greatest value when annotations are limited. Without adaptation to the external LNDb cohort, a model fine-tuned on $25\%$ of LIDC-IDRI obtains $0.8138$ AUROC and $0.7589$ AUPRC, improving over the strongest evaluated self-supervised baseline by $0.1130$ and $0.0954$. Experiments across data sources, thoracic and abdominal anatomy, downstream tasks, and two backbones examine healthcare-data variety, while lesion-slice masking shows that the predictions depend on lesion-bearing content.
comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, 10 tables. Under review at IEEE BigData 2026
☆ When Should a Low-Light Pipeline Generate? Auditable Risk Control for Selective Generative Enhancement
Generative low-light enhancers recover plausible texture but may hallucinate structure; restoration networks preserve structure but can leave regions under-enhanced, and neither advantage is spatially uniform. Therefore, we formulate selective generative enhancement as a decision problem: determine where overriding a frozen base expert is beneficial and refuse to switch when the evidence is insufficient. We propose VetoNet, an auditable regional routing framework centered on a certified veto. It first measures the complementary strengths and routing direction of a frozen restoration generative pair, then predicts the utility of regional overrides from deployment-available signals alone and admits an override only when a distribution-free harm-budget certificate says the perceptual (LPIPS) risk budget allows it. Experiments across multiple expert pairs and domains show that VetoNet adapts its routing behavior to the strength and reliability of the available evidence. When expert complementarity is sufficiently predictable, it achieves statistically significant certified gains; when the relative strengths of the experts change, it correspondingly reverses the routing direction; and when routing evidence is weak or affected by cross-domain shift, it conservatively vetoes switching.
☆ Semantic Latent Alignment for Flow Matching with Invertible Bi-Lipschitz Adapters
Pretrained latent spaces trade compression, reconstruction, and the learnability of the coordinates a downstream generator has to work in, which complicates adapting these spaces to different domains or tasks: continued training is expensive, and without a new alignment objective it often fails to improve downstream generation. We instead leave the encoder and decoder fixed and change only the coordinates between them, using an invertible bi-Lipschitz adapter aligned offline to a semantic teacher and frozen during class-conditional flow matching. Invertibility preserves compatibility with the pretrained autoencoder, while the bi-Lipschitz constraint limits how far alignment can distort its latent geometry. This provides a simple way to improve semantic organization while retaining the compression and reconstruction properties of the original latent space. On two medical imaging datasets, constrained latent adaptation improves feature metrics, seed stability and counterfactual edit strength, while remaining competitive on downstream classification. In contrast, unconstrained adaptation can become highly anisotropic and sensitive despite remaining invertible, highlighting the importance of controlling geometric distortion. Our results suggest that carefully constrained post-hoc adaptation offers a parameter-efficient and tuning-free alternative to jointly modifying the representation during generative training.
comment: 17 pages, 5 figures
☆ DocPilot: Interactive Agent Orchestration and Training for Long Visual Document Understanding
Multimodal long-document question answering requires models to seek sparse evidence across pages and modalities, understand heterogeneous document content, and reason over the collected evidence. Even advanced vision-language models (VLMs) can overlook sparse evidence and struggle with cross-modal reasoning in a single pass. Existing document agents further introduce multi-step interaction, but some still rely on predefined workflows or coarse-grained actions, limiting the flexibility and granularity of document reasoning. We introduce DocPilot, an agentic document framework that supports expressive orchestration and makes complex document solving learnable by small language models (SLMs). DocPilot orchestrates evidence seeking through page-level navigation and fine-grained evidence localization, and integrates local visual inspection, code-based numerical reasoning, and cross-modal reasoning for multimodal understanding. To transfer these capabilities to small models, we propose curriculum-based agentic training that progresses from single-ability learning to adaptive orchestration through supervision from data-grounded reasoning traces and executable interaction trajectories. Across MMLongBench-Doc, DocBench, FinRAGBench-V, and MADQA, DocPilot achieves strong gains with frontier VLM backbones, while DocPilot-4B delivers competitive performance against substantially larger models, demonstrating strong effectiveness and generalization across diverse long-document reasoning settings. The code is available at https://github.com/HKUSTDial/DocPilot.
comment: 25 pages, 13 figures, 9 tables
☆ CertEx: Exact Visual Retrieval at Scale by Certified Exclusion
Exact $k$-nearest-neighbor (kNN) search over image descriptors and embeddings underlies visual retrieval, near-duplicate detection, the evaluation of learned representations, and increasingly the memory of LLM agents. However, exhaustive search computes every distance at full precision, whereas approximate indexes return recall below one. We observe that exact search only needs a proof that each excluded vector cannot be a neighbor. Because such a proof only has to be conservative, it can be checked in low precision, much as the retina examines the whole scene at low resolution. We call this principle certified exclusion and realize it in an exact kNN method for GPUs, which we call \certex. Specifically, \certex\ stores a lower-bounding projection of each vector in half precision and folds a rounding certificate into the same tensor-core dot product, so that only the few vectors that the test keeps need exact distances. We prove that \certex\ returns the exact kNN of every query. On sixteen datasets with up to 100M vectors, \certex\ is exact for every query at 7.1$\times$ to 18.0$\times$ the throughput of the fastest cuVS search on one H100 and outperforms quantized and graph indexes whenever every query must be exact.
☆ AdaLoop: Thinking with the Vision Encoder
Most vision-language models (VLMs) treat the vision encoder as a static feature extractor: it encodes an image once, independently of the question, and leaves subsequent reasoning to the language model. Yet different questions may require different visual operations and processing depths. We present AdaLoop, a framework for question-conditioned visual recurrence in VLMs. AdaLoop adapts visual computation to the question and reuses the encoder's transformations across multiple iterations, with the pretrained vision weights frozen. We also introduce VisRO, a procedural dataset and generation pipeline for training and evaluating vision-centric reasoning. On six VisRO tasks, AdaLoop outperforms standard fine-tuning and question-conditioned single-pass baselines with matched training data and optimizer updates. These gains hold across three VLM families on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution examples. Our findings suggest that pretrained vision encoders can contribute to reasoning through task-directed, iterative visual computation.
☆ CoViG: Coarsened Vision GNN for Image Classification
Although Graph Neural Networks are widely used in various domains, they remained mostly unexplored in computer vision. Convolutional Neural Networks and Vision Transformers were leading the field, until the quite recent introduction of Vision Graphs (ViG) that treat images as a set of nodes and apply graph convolution on their k-NN graphs. ViGs show impressive accuracy on image classification but their computational cost remains relatively high. Inspired by optimization methods for GNNs, we present CoViG, a novel approach combining graph coarsening and ViGs. Our method introduces an additional MinCUT pooling step within the Grapher component of intermediate ViG blocks. By simplifying the intermediate graphs and thus decreasing the number of nodes of specific blocks, our approach considerably reduces the computational cost of ViG during inference. We evaluated our approach on ImageNet with several ViG architectures, and we obtained accuracies equivalent to the original ViG models with only about 51\% of FLOPs.
☆ ZoomCap: Evidence-Routed Visual Zooming for Recoverable Visual Information Transfer
Detailed captions transfer visual information into vision-language model supervision, but quality is easily conflated with length: long single-pass outputs still miss small objects, text, and spatial relations or promote uncertain observations into confident claims. We formulate fine-grained captioning as recoverable visual information transfer, in which a teacher acquires missing evidence under a finite observation budget and converts it into reusable supervision. ZoomCap uses a draft caption to route conditional knowledge retrieval, OCR-sensitive reading, coverage-gap recovery, and adaptive visual zooming, allocating deeper crops only to the most complex eligible region, deriving spatial relations from grounded geometry, and fusing non-duplicate evidence. We also introduce FactCycle, which scores caption-derived atomic claims on two blind anchors--source image (truthfulness) and reconstruction (realizability)--separating fabrication from generator loss claim by claim; human and multi-judge comparisons complement this fact-level view. Against Qwen3.5-397B-A17B captions, ZoomCap achieves an 81.9% human tie-adjusted preference score with a teacher over 10x smaller, and FactCycle counts 52.4 transferred claims per image vs. 31.5 for ScaleCap. The evidence also transfers: in continual pre-training, ZoomCap-450K improves the 11-benchmark average by 1.31-2.38 points over the strongest competing corpus and Ling-Tiny-VL-v3 gains 1.4 points on a production document/OCR monitor suite (1.5 on perception) at 60B tokens; in medical pre-training, 2.64M ZoomCap-captioned images improve five VQA benchmarks by 3.04 points (vs. 1.76 for same-image Gemini-3.1-Pro captions).
comment: 21 pages, 10 figures, 11 tables; technical report. ZoomCap-450K is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/MasterHow/ZoomCap-450K
☆ Loud and Clear: Making Visual Evidence Count in Multimodal Document RAG
Multimodal document retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has focused largely on retrieval, yet its answers depend on how well a vision-language model reads the retrieved pages. We find that evidence in retrieved pages remains underused even when the correct pages are retrieved. On SciEGQA oracle pages, five prior methods give the generator 0.7K to 2.7K visual tokens per query on average under a common image processor, yet raising the page-only budget from 1K to 32K improves accuracy by 15.22 points. At a fixed 16K budget, adding ground-truth crops improves accuracy by 3.75 points over page-only input. We study what the generator needs from retrieved pages through two requirements: Loud, making full use of visual token capacity, and Clear, refining the page so that its evidence becomes prominent. For Loud, increasing either the visual token budget or visual fidelity, the image resolution those tokens preserve, improves accuracy with the other held fixed, and full-page scaling outperforms repetition and tiling at matched budgets. For Clear, suppressing surrounding content improves accuracy without enlarging selected regions, and adding OCR of these regions to page images outperforms either input alone. We implement both as Loud and Clear (LoC), which combines higher-resolution pages with OCR from query-relevant regions without ground-truth annotations or additional training. LoC outperforms eight prior methods on SciEGQA, ViDoRe-v3, and MMLongBench-Doc, improving over the strongest, ColQwen3, by 8.88, 3.09, and 4.22 points with the same retriever and generator. It also outperforms its page-only variant under the same visual token budget. These results locate a bottleneck beyond retrieval: how the retrieved pages are given to the generator.
☆ VLA-$Δ$: Learning Physical State Transition for Vision-Language-Action Models
Vision-language-action (VLA) models transfer semantic knowledge acquired through vision-language pretraining to robot control, achieving strong performance across various benchmarks. However, most VLAs directly map observations to demonstrated actions without explicit supervision of intermediate physical state changes, making them prone to overfitting observation-action correspondences. Some methods introduce intermediate reasoning or future-state prediction in language, visual, or latent spaces to guide action generation, but do not explicitly supervise the physical state transition itself. We therefore propose VLA-$Δ$, a general framework that uses physical changes between current and future states as explicit learning targets. To support this objective, we construct a large-scale pretraining dataset and derive physical state-transition annotations covering task-relevant semantics and visual motion changes, providing more direct supervision for continuous action generation. During inference, the model generates actions directly from current observations without additional inference overhead. VLA-$Δ$ achieves performance competitive with the state of the art on LIBERO and RoboTwin, and outperforms $π_{0.5}$ in real-robot experiments. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZJU-OmniAI/VLA-Delta
comment: 24 pages, 8 figures, 9 tables, including appendices. Code: https://github.com/ZJU-OmniAI/VLA-Delta
☆ Dusting the Phantom: Gaussian Allocation for Fading Dynamic Content
Minhyeok Roh, Minseo Lee, Jun Young Jeong, Byeonghyeon Lee, Lucas Yunkyu Lee, Jaesik Park, Eunbyung Park
Dynamic Gaussian representations have made high-quality, real-time volumetric video increasingly practical, yet challenging motion can still break their reconstruction: small fast-moving objects may disappear, and fine textures in highly dynamic regions are often lost. In particular, simply training longer or using more Gaussians may still fail to recover small, fast-moving objects. We argue that the key bottleneck is not representational capacity itself, but where and when Gaussian primitives are allocated. Existing allocation strategies rely on current Gaussian locations and often overlook the spatiotemporal destinations of relocated Gaussians. To address these limitations, we introduce two complementary strategies. First, Seed Injection identifies under-reconstructed dynamic regions using temporal appearance changes and reconstruction errors, and initializes new Gaussians at geometrically plausible 3D locations through multi-view observations, independent of existing Gaussian locations. Second, Temporal Biased Relocation uses time-resolved optimization signals to guide the spatiotemporal placement of relocated Gaussians. Both strategies maintain a fixed Gaussian budget without modifying the underlying representation. Experiments across multiple dynamic-scene datasets demonstrate improved reconstruction quality, particularly in highly dynamic regions, recovering small, rapidly moving objects and fine-grained appearance details.
comment: 21 pages, 14 figures. Project page: https://minhyeok2001.github.io/Dusting-the-Phantom/
☆ GeoPano: Towards Geometrically Accurate 3D Reconstruction from a Single Panorama
Jing OU, Zidong Cao, Liaoyuan Fan, Zhuoxiao Li, Shuai Zhang, Yinrui Ren, Dongli Wu, Haoang Li, Hui Xiong, Wufan Zhao
Panoramic 3D reconstruction enables the holistic recovery of complete 360 $^\circ$ scene geometry, offering significant benefits for robotics and AR/VR applications. However, directly estimating geometry from ERP images is inherently challenged by spherical distortions. To reduce spherical projection distortions, a common strategy is to decompose panoramas into distortion-free perspective views, but independently processing these views often introduces cross-view geometric inconsistencies. To address these challenges, we introduce GeoPano, a feed-forward framework for single-view panoramic 3D reconstruction that recovers a geometrically accurate and consistent point cloud from a single panorama. Our approach is driven by two key innovations: First, we propose a panoramic-aware attention aggregator, featuring a streamlined attention architecture equipped with a novel Pano-Attention mechanism, which explicitly exploits the intrinsic spherical geometry of the panorama to guide cross-view interactions, thereby suppressing geometric inconsistencies. Furthermore, we formulate a hybrid supervision strategy to jointly enforce fine-grained local details in perspective space and global structural coherence in spherical space. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous SOTA approaches in reconstruction accuracy, geometric consistency, and visual fidelity.
☆ ReState: Noise-Level-Aware State Correction for Training-Free Object Removal in Few-Step Diffusion Models
Training-free object removal commonly redirects self-attention away from the target region, but on few-step distilled diffusion models this often leaves object-shaped residuals. We identify a temporal mismatch: a structured prediction forms inside the mask at the first forward, and the short trajectory offers few later chances to revise it, while attention rerouting acts mainly in later steps. Across four distilled backbones, magnitude-matched single-forward interventions show that background-directed state correction affects the final result more than attention rerouting. We therefore propose ReState, which corrects the masked clean prediction toward background evidence retrieved from the input using a noise-level-aware weight that vanishes at the final forward. ReState retains object-excluding attention as a complementary constraint and adds no denoiser evaluations. Across two paired benchmarks and two few-step backbones, ReState achieves the best masked PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS among training-free methods, improving PSNR by 3.17 dB on average over the strongest baseline. On OBER-Test, it also outperforms the 50-step attention-forcing reference on all three metrics at 6.7x lower latency. The same configuration transfers to two additional distilled backbones without retuning. Project page: https://tdrlee.github.io/ReState
comment: 32 pages, 8 figures
☆ Mallea: Building, Steering, and Memorizing Worlds with Coding Agent
Code world models represent world dynamics through explicit state and executable rules. We investigate how to coordinate object representations, behavioral revisions, and visual memory within this formulation. We present Mallea, a system for building, steering, and memorizing worlds from text. A coding agent infers object interaction requirements from the prompt and jointly plans object structure, properties, and rules, favoring compact representations that support those requirements. The world evolves under the planned rules; optional user actions steer it, while text requests can edit properties or extend capabilities with unaffected state preserved. Object texture memory retains reusable appearance only for whitebox-defined objects and adapts it as those objects change. The program advances world state, while a generative renderer combines current structure with remembered appearance. By organizing construction, intervention, and memory around the same objects, Mallea conditions subsequent observations on the latest state and compatible appearance. Project page: https://lxycopper.github.io/Mallea.
☆ LICOA: Learning Instruction-Conditioned Optical Actions for Mobile Spatial Augmented Reality
Spatial augmented reality (SAR) augments physical environments with projected content, but most systems assume that the projector pose, target region, or motion path has been fixed or specified. We instead make projected light an embodied action: given a language instruction and current visual observations, a system must decide how to move and where and at what scale to place the projection. We introduce LICOA to realize this capability. Its differential-drive chassis provides room-scale approach and repositioning, while a steerable mirror with two degrees of freedom (2DoF) and projection scale provide rapid local control of the beam. A shared interface maps synchronized external and onboard RGB cameras with robot control state to physical optical actions across pretrained action models. Because instruction-conditioned optical action lacks dedicated training data and a common evaluation protocol, we construct a matched simulation embodiment and a corpus with 150 tasks and 7,500 rendered episodes, then evaluate models trained only on this corpus in previously unseen real-world environments. Across 480 complete closed-loop real-world execution trials (rollouts) on 12 tasks, the best adapted action model achieves a 57.50% success rate and 40.64% success weighted by path length, compared with 8.33% and 5.15% for the same architecture trained from scratch. A further 150 real-world ablation rollouts support the need for both camera views and coordinated control of the chassis and mirror. These results establish a physical platform, shared perception and optical action interface, corpus, and real-world evaluation protocol for treating projected light as an embodied action.
comment: 17 pages, 8 figures
☆ TRACER: A Multimodal Harness for Patient Care in Hospitals
Zane Durante, Paul Tang, Keshigeyan Chandrasegaran, Amit Kaushal, Shrinidhi Kowshika Lakshmikanth, Feolu Kolawole, Yu Jun Zheng, Yifan Geng, Shobhit Agarwal, Kevin Schulman, Juan Carlos Niebles, Ehsan Adeli, Arnold Milstein, Li Fei-Fei
Continuous video and clinical records provide complementary information for understanding how patient behavior evolves over a hospital stay. A central challenge is how to represent behavior across the entire stay while preserving access to fine-grained visual and clinical evidence. We introduce TRACER, a training-free multimodal harness that constructs minute-level action records from video and combines them with clinical records into hourly reports. The harness equips an LLM agent with tools to query this hierarchy, inspect relevant video, and retrieve clinical records. To evaluate TRACER, we construct two benchmarks. The first contains 397 annotated one-minute clips spanning 15 atomic actions; the second poses 144 clinician-informed multiple-choice questions, grounded in 264 hours of video and clinical records from two ICU patients. TRACER achieves up to 84.8% accuracy for action detection and 61.0% QA accuracy versus 49.3% for the strongest baseline using the same backbone. Across 280 patients spanning approximately 60,000 camera-hours, TRACER identifies significantly less purposeful activity in patients with a positive delirium assessment during their stay than in those without (p < 0.0001). Our results show that combining continuous video with clinical records can support understanding of patient behavior over time and across patient cohorts without training on protected health data.
comment: 37 pages, 4 figures. Code: https://github.com/zanedurante/tracer-harness
☆ Do VLAs Really Follow Instructions? Diagnosing How-Level Instruction Following in Vision-Language-Action Models
Vision-language-action (VLA) models are expected to follow instructions like their language backbones, yet prior work has focused on What-level instructions that specify the task rather than How-level instructions that specify how to carry it out. Through our diagnoses, we find that How-level instructions do not help current VLAs and lower task success. We hypothesize that pairing each training episode with a single instruction limits How-level instruction following, and show that training with segment-level enriched instructions makes actions respond to such instructions without consistently raising task success. To measure How-level instruction following beyond standard benchmarks, we introduce SIMPLER-IN, where success requires conditions given only in the instruction. It shows that the gained responsiveness does not extend to demanding or out-of-distribution How-level instructions. How-level instruction following thus remains an open challenge.
comment: Preprint
☆ FocusOPD: Structure-Guided On-Policy Distillation for Diffusion Models
Multi-teacher on-policy distillation enables rectified-flow models with diffusion-transformer architectures to combine task-specific capabilities within a single student. However, matching model outputs does not guarantee that their internal representations are aligned, and it remains unclear where and when additional feature supervision is most useful. We analyze the teacher-student feature mismatch across Transformer blocks and denoising timesteps, and find that the mismatch is concentrated in deeper Transformer blocks during early denoising and persists after OPD distillation, indicating ineffective distillation. Motivated by this observation, we introduce FocusOPD, which augments the base OPD objective with token-wise directional feature alignment restricted to deep layers and early denoising steps. Across two rectified-flow backbones and multiple OPD objectives, FocusOPD improves capability transfer in compositional generation, text rendering, and preference-based evaluation. On the primary benchmark, it improves over DiffusionOPD from 0.953 to 0.967 on GenEval, from 23.797 to 23.944 on PickScore, and from 6.052 to 6.199 on LAION-Aesthetic. Ablations show that selective deep and early supervision is more effective and efficient than alignment over the full network and trajectory.
☆ A large-scale climate-aware satellite image dataset for domain adaptive land-cover semantic segmentation
A few well-annotated datasets for land-cover semantic segmentation have recently been introduced to advance the field of earth observation technologies. However, these datasets overlook the significant diversity among geographic areas with different climates, which can greatly impact and diversify land cover. Consequently, this leads to a domain gap in remote sensing images and severe performance degradation of the segmentation models. To enhance land-cover semantic segmentation with improved generalization ability, we conducted the first investigation into the impact of climate on this task. In this paper, we present a unique large-scale Climate-Aware Satellite Images Dataset (CASID) specifically designed for domain adaptive land-cover semantic segmentation. It consists of 980 satellite images with a size of 5000 x 5000 pixels, collected from 30 different regions around Asia, covering over 24,500 square kilometers. These images are gathered from four distinct climate zones, namely temperate monsoon, subtropical monsoon, tropical monsoon, and tropical rainforest. It includes four sub-datasets/domains, each representing one of the aforementioned climate zones. This characteristic makes CASID the first climate-aware land-cover semantic segmentation dataset with multiple domains. Additionally, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the samples from the four climate zones, emphasizing differences in global image features, image texture, category distribution, spectral value, and object shape. These analyses offer valuable insights for subsequent research in this field. Moreover, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the latest semantic segmentation and unsupervised domain adaptation methods on the CASID dataset. These results serve as a robust baseline for future research endeavors. Our dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Linwei-Chen/CASID.
☆ DLOSAC: Joint Spatial-Geometric Image Estimation via Delaunay-Guided Local Optimization RANSAC IROS 2026
Reliable image geometric estimation from noisy matching points is typically addressed using RANSAC, often combined with local optimization to refine inliers and model parameters. However, existing paradigms are predominantly residual-centric; even heuristic attempts to enforce spatial uniformity suffer from a sequential, two-stage nature that inherently decouples distribution optimization from geometric refinement, preventing an effective trade-off. In this paper, we propose DLOSAC, a local optimization framework that jointly incorporates both geometric consistency and spatial distribution information. We begin by constructing a Delaunay triangulation over candidate inliers to explicitly encode neighborhood topology. The geometric module introduces an edge-based consistency metric to evaluate geometric errors, while the spatial module derives distribution descriptors from triangle areas and edge attributes to quantify the clustering of inliers. Finally, we combine edge-based geometric constraints, spatial distribution regularization, and traditional point-level geometric constraints to improve the quality of geometric parameters. Extensive experiments on six publicly available real-world datasets, covering three types of geometric estimation tasks, achieve state-of-the-art performance.
comment: Accepted at the 2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2026)
☆ SpaceCache: Intermediate Feature Reuse for Efficient Semantic Segmentation on Point Cloud Streams
Point-cloud streams are central to autonomous driving and robotics, yet existing segmentation networks process every frame from scratch, although consecutive frames largely overlap. We observe that the intermediate features of point-cloud transformers remain semantically consistent across frames for the same spatial region, especially in deep stages. Building on this, we present SpaceCache, a training-free feature cache that reuses these features across frames. Tokens of previously observed regions skip a sequence of transformer blocks and take their cached features, only the remaining tokens are computed, and the full token layout is restored for dense prediction. Lightweight cache management keeps reused features reliable by limiting each entry's age and evicting low-confidence entries. Unlike token merging, SpaceCache selects tokens at negligible cost and runs its cache operations once per encoder stage. On both outdoor and indoor benchmarks, such as nuScenes, Waymo, and ScanNet, with two transformer backbones of Utonia and LitePT-B, SpaceCache achieves up to 1.65x speedup with less than 1-point mIoU drop and consistently outperforms token-merging methods.
☆ UltraDiff: Transferring High-Fidelity Priors to Compressed Latent Spaces for High-Resolution Image Generation
Jingjing Ren, Haitian Zheng, Haoyu Chen, Connelly Barnes, Zhifei Zhang, Yuqian Zhou, Zhe Lin, Lei Zhu
High-resolution synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) faces a fundamental trade-off between computational cost and generative fidelity. This trade off is largely governed by the latent compression factor f (e.g. f8 denotes f=8 and f32 f=32). While aggressive compression (f32) significantly improves efficiency, it suffers from severe information loss and ambiguity compared to standard f8 models. We propose UltraDiff, a framework that reformulates this challenge as joint latent diffusion learning followed by marginal score distillation. We introduce MixTeacher, a dual branch DiT that models the joint f8-f32 distribution, utilizing shared attention to resolve the ambiguity of the compressed space with high fidelity f8 priors. Crucially, we propose vector field distillation in the native f32 space. Theoretically, this compels the student to learn the conditional expectation of the teacher trajectory, effectively filtering out compression artifacts. Across the evaluated 1K to 4K settings, UltraDiff approaches f8 level quality while preserving f32 efficiency. With 20 sampling steps on a single A100 GPU, it generates a 2K image in 6.2 seconds over 40 times faster than our f8 baseline.
☆ ControlFlow3D: Distilling Multi-View Knowledge into Latent Flow Matching for Point Cloud Upsampling NeurIPS 2026
Point cloud upsampling is essential for 3D applications but remains challenging due to sparse, under-constrained observations. Multi-view images can resolve geometric ambiguity, but existing multi-modal methods do not fully exploit visual cues. We propose ControlFlow3D, a framework that distills knowledge from pretrained foundation models into a lightweight generation network during training, enabling strong performance without multi-view images available at test time. Specifically, our method performs conditional flow matching in a structured latent space defined by a frozen 3D encoder. Multi-view image tokens and 3D latent tokens are jointly clustered into shared prototypes via unsupervised soft KMeans; the resulting prototypes guide the flow trajectory through velocity control and are aligned by a consistency loss that progressively transfers image knowledge into the base network. A Mamba-based geometry decoder then maps latent features to dense coordinates with linear complexity. We also construct ShapeNetPU, a 35K-object multi-modal benchmark that is 31 times larger than prior datasets. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and its strong generalization capability.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026
☆ Monotone Piecewise-Linear Harmonization of Multitemporal Multispectral Surface Reflectance With Unsupervised Deep Multiview Pseudoinvariant Features Learning
Surface reflectance products derived from optical satellite may exhibit systematic inconsistencies across acquisition dates, because atmospheric correction is generally performed independently for each image. Such residual biases distort the temporal behavior of invariant ground targets and reduce the reliability of multitemporal surface reflectance analysis. This study proposes Deep Multitemporal Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis (DeepMGCCA), an unsupervised deep multiview pseudoinvariant feature learning framework that integrates Deep Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis (GCCA) with Multivariate Alteration Detection (MAD) to identify deep-pseudoinvariant features (DIFs) for the removal of surface reflectance biases across multitemporal satellite observations. Unlike conventional MAD-based approaches that rely on linear GCCA, the proposed framework replaces date-specific linear projections with a shared convolutional encoder. The framework learns deep invariant features (DIFs) directly from pixel-weighted canonical variates via iterative reweighting strategy, while a reconstruction regularizer preserves surface reflectance information and prevents degenerate collapse from suppressing genuine temporal variability. Experiments were conducted on four annual Landsat-8/9 and Sentinel-2 acquisitions across four regions of interest (ROIs) to evaluate four DIF-based harmonization transforms. A monotone piecewise-linear transform derived from DIFs quantiles consistently achieved the largest bias reduction, lowering the between-date spectral angle by up to 2.54 and RMSE by 0.015, and raising PSNR by up to 4.04~dB. These findings demonstrate the potential of deep invariant feature learning for multitemporal surface reflectance bias removal while highlighting the importance of preserving physically meaningful temporal and spectral information during nonlinear representation learning.
comment: 15 pages, 5 figures
☆ VisualTrust: Video Reasoning under On-Screen Claim Framing
On-screen text can describe what a video shows, or it can frame what the video is supposed to mean. Current benchmarks treat both alike, testing whether a model can read the text rather than whether it should trust it. We study claim deference, multimodal large language models' tendency to let an on-screen claim override conflicting visual evidence. We introduce VisualTrust, a counterfactual benchmark with 5,063 cases across 14 claim-fact classes. Each case pairs a question with three versions of the same video: one with no claim, one with an accurate claim, and one with a misleading claim that alters a single grounded fact. The option the misleading claim supports is the trap answer. Across seven open-weight and four proprietary models, mean accuracy falls from 90.1% without a claim to 51.9% with a misleading claim. Among initially correct responses, 42.8% flip to the trap answer and only 0.6% become other errors. Strong no-claim accuracy does not ensure resistance. We also introduce DEAR (Decoupled Evidence Arbitration and Reading), a training-free agent for video question answering that separates evidence arbitration from reading. An independent check reports conflicting evidence, a selector weighs it without a fixed modality priority and blinds what it withholds, and the reader answers from the resulting video in a fresh context. On 500 videos across three proprietary models, DEAR raises accuracy under misleading claims from 47.2--64.0% to 81.8--85.2% and reduces trap-answer selection from 34.4--50.8% to 11.6--15.0%, while preserving no-claim accuracy.
comment: 25 pages, 7 figures. Project repository: https://github.com/huachao0124/VisualTrust
☆ Trajectory Prediction Method for person under WSN with Hierarchical Envelope Adversarial Domain Adaptation
Pedestrian trajectory prediction holds significant applications across autonomous driving, intelligent surveillance, and smart cities. However, the complexity and unpredictability of pedestrian interactions make this task a persistent challenge. Current models face two common limitations: 1) Consider only a single type of social coupling. This introduces redundant interactions. More critically, it fails to account for the varying nature of trajectory coupled across different scenarios and between different pedestrians. Consequently, models cannot deeply adapt to diverse scenes. 2) Inadequate domain shift handling. Although very few methods address domain shift, they rely on statistical criterion-based domain distribution alignment. Such approaches exhibit strong dependency on predefined statistical metrics. This leads to significant limitations in complex and dynamic environments. To address these problems, a Hierarchical Envelope Adversarial Domain Adaptation with Loosely-Tightly coupled model (HEADA-LTCTPM) is proposed. First, an envelope sample construction mechanism was proposed. It constructs envelope samples and extends them into graph structures. Secondly, an adversarial domain adaptation module was proposed. This integrates both local and global domain adaptation strategies. It dynamically adapts to diverse coupled relationships across scenarios. These innovations collectively enhance prediction accuracy and robustness. In the experimental section, two representative public datasets were employed for validation and comprehensive comparisons with six relevant baseline algorithms were conducted. Results demonstrate that our model achieves significantly higher accuracy compared to existing methods, with the ADE and FDE metrics reduced by 17.6% and 19.1% respectively. The time overhead meets practical requirements, which verifies the effectiveness of our key innovations.
comment: 24 pages, 7 figures
☆ Sparse Attention for Video Generation Acceleration via Growing Sparsity and Reduced Search
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) dominate video generation but suffer from high inference cost due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Sparse attention mitigates this by skipping unnecessary computation in the attention matrix, but existing methods apply a fixed sparsity ratio throughout denoising and struggle to accurately determine which computations to skip. To address these limitations, we analyze attention dynamics through attention entropy and mean attention distance, and find that attention becomes increasingly concentrated across denoising steps. We further observe that blocks selected early continue to capture a large fraction of the total attention weight at later steps. These findings suggest two acceleration opportunities: the sparsity ratio should grow as denoising progresses, and earlier search results can be reused to reduce the search space. Based on these findings, we propose Growing Sparsity and Reduced Search (GSRS), a training-free framework that retains more computation early and progressively reduces it later, while restricting subsequent searches to an early candidate set to reduce search overhead. GSRS adopts Top-p selection for adaptive sparsity control, supported by a precise evaluation scheme that computes exact attention weights within the FlashAttention computation at negligible overhead. Experiments on HunyuanVideo and Wan 2.1 validate that GSRS achieves 1.55$\times$--2.21$\times$ speedup while maintaining generation quality comparable to full attention.
☆ ResStreamGS: Residual-Sensitive Dual-Stream Gaussian Splatting for Mobile Volumetric Video Streaming
Real-time mobile volumetric video enables immersive free-viewpoint experiences, but delivering high-quality 3D content under constrained bandwidth and computation remains challenging. Recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) systems, such as V$^3$, enable efficient mobile streaming by encoding time-varying Gaussian attributes with commodity video codecs and hardware decoding. However, existing pipelines treat all Gaussians as frame-varying signals, which is poorly suited to full-scene content where large portions remain temporally stable. Our empirical study shows that frame-wise adaptation and video coding of all Gaussians cause quality degradation in complex full-scene content, particularly in temporally stable regions. To address this issue, we propose ResStreamGS, a residual-sensitive dual-stream framework that processes Gaussians according to their temporal behavior. ResStreamGS identifies residual-sensitive primitives through lightweight probe adaptation and reuses stable Gaussians within each Group of Pictures (GOP). Stable Gaussians are transmitted once per GOP, while only residual-sensitive Gaussians remain in the frame-wise hardware-decodable video stream. Experiments on complex full-scene volumetric videos show that ResStreamGS improves post-codec PSNR by 7.51--8.35~dB over a controlled V$^3$-style all-Gaussians baseline, reduces amortized payload by up to 56.5%, and achieves 30.883~FPS on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G platform.
comment: 11 pages,9 figures
☆ Spectral-Spatial Interpretation NeurIPS 2026
Post-hoc image explanations usually show where a model looks using spatial heatmaps or indicate which channels matter using global channel scores. These separate views are limiting for multispectral data because channel relevance is often spatially localized and physically meaningful. We introduce Spectral-Spatial Interpretation (SSI), a full-grid attribution method over position-channel players (g,c). For each spatial position, SSI fixes the observed surrounding context, defines a conditional game over the channels at that position, and applies the Shapley value to this local game. The result is a full spectral-spatial attribution matrix rather than a single heatmap or a global channel ranking. SSI has a clear local interpretation. It satisfies Shapley fairness within each position, and aggregating its channel attributions exactly recovers the position-level contextual contrast obtained by replacing that position with the baseline. SSI also differs from context-averaged Owen-style hierarchical accounting, which uses the same position-channel grouping but averages over external spatial coalitions. On HLS Burn Scar, SSI outperforms an MC-Owen estimator across retained attribution metrics while using only about 6% of its evaluation budget. Across CUB-200, EuroSAT, and HLS Burn Scar under both per-channel mean and zero baselines, SSI achieves the best joint deletion and insertion AUC over dense, flat, and rank-1 baselines, yields the strongest spectral hit rates and channel deletion, and leads spatial localization on both annotated datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/AtheavenMa/Spectral-Spatial-Interpretation.
comment: 24 pages, 4 figures. Accepted at NeurIPS 2026 (Poster)
☆ Can World and Action Modeling Benefit Each Other under Unified Causal Training?
Yue Su, Bokai Lin, Xinkai Wang, Chubin Zhang, Xiangnan Wu, Kuan Zhang, Weiyang Jin, Jiwen Yu, Yiming Li, Cewu Lu, Lixin Yang, Xihui Liu
World and action modeling are closely related, yet their reciprocal benefits under unified causal training remain unclear. We introduce OneWM, a simple framework for unified causal training that treats actions as both conditions for world prediction and targets for policy learning within a shared video-action architecture. Using this framework, we investigate whether learning forward dynamics conditioned on specified actions improves action learning, and whether learning to generate actions in turn improves action-conditioned world modeling. We use LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and RoboCasa365 as embodied testbeds to evaluate both policy learning and world modeling, complemented by real-world policy experiments. Learning the visual consequences of specified actions improves policy performance and generalization across changing scenes. In turn, action learning improves multi-view world-prediction fidelity under the same architecture. Together, these results answer both questions positively, supporting reciprocal benefits between world modeling and action generation under unified causal training.
comment: Project page: https://selen-suyue.github.io/OneWMNet
☆ RoboCloth: A Large-Scale Real Cloth Material Dataset for Neural Reflectance Reconstruction
We present RoboCloth, a dataset of 500 real cloth materials captured under flexible, calibrated camera and lighting configurations, where both are robotically controlled during acquisition. Each material is imaged in approximately 580 high-dynamic range frames spanning a wide view-light hemisphere; camera poses are refined via structure-from-motion and aligned to the robot frame, yielding per-material sparse surface geometry and structured per-point reflectance observations ready for neural material training. We demonstrate the value of this data through a two-stage neural reconstruction pipeline: Stage 1 trains a shared MLP decoder on our corpus to learn cloth material priors; Stage 2 then freezes the decoder and fits a dense 2048x2048 latent texture to each target material. Evaluating on held-out materials from our own dataset and on the independent UBO2014 benchmark, we show that a decoder trained on our captures outperforms decoders trained on existing measured reflectance datasets and analytic PBR fitting, transferring to unseen acquisition systems without modification. The dataset, calibration files, observation tensors, and train/test splits are released under CC BY 4.0 on the Hugging Face Hub.
comment: Project page: https://theialab.github.io/robocloth/ ; Code: https://github.com/theialab/robocloth ; Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/theialab/RoboCloth . 16 pages including supplementary material
☆ SIEVE: Overcoming Topological Obstruction in Equivariant Self-Supervised Learning NeurIPS
We identify a theoretical incompatibility between 3D point cloud masked autoencoding and SE(3)-equivariant networks. We prove that standard masking triggers a topological collapse, effectively forcing the model to hallucinate orientation without a reference frame. To resolve this, we introduce SIEVE (Scalar Invariant Extraction Via Equivariance), an SE(3)-equivariant self-supervised framework that compresses point cloud geometry into invariant scalar embeddings. At its core is the spherical projection mask, which preserves global pose while obfuscating local semantics, sidestepping the obstruction by construction. Experiments confirm that SIEVE circumvents the predicted collapse where constant and noise masks fail. On downstream point cloud tasks, the resulting embeddings improve over coordinate-based baselines and hand-crafted geometric descriptors, with the largest gains on generalization to unseen shape categories.
comment: The Fortieth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2026
☆ RoPE-Flow: Monocular Vision-based Robot Pose Estimation via 2D Graph-Conditioned 3D Flow Matching
Liangjing Shao, Wanhao Liu, Zhiwei Fang, Rulin Zhou, Quanlu Zhang, Changjing Liu, Beilei Cui, Yiming Huang, Hongliang Ren
Camera-to-robot pose estimation from a monocular image is significant for vision-based robot navigation and control. However, recovering 3D structural features from 2D observations remains a challenging task. Existing camera-to-robot pose estimation methods either rely on time-consuming iterative rendering or involve sophisticated 2D-3D registration which suffers from projection ambiguity, accumulated errors for distal joints and imbalanced learning for different joints. In this work, we propose RoPE-Flow, an end-to-end flow matching-based framework for camera-to-robot pose estimation. From the predicted 2D heatmaps, we propose a Keypoint-centered Feature Extractor to obtain positional features along with contextual representations from keypoints-centered multi-scale patches. Moreover, we introduce Graph-guided Condition Generator, which embeds a learnable adjacency map to generate condition for flow matching based on correlation among keypoints. Besides, we introduce Bone Length Loss and Ray-Depth Loss for topological consistency and scale stability, with joint-wise weighting to mitigate varied prediction difficulty across joints. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods for pose estimation across different types of robots with mutiple cameras. Besides, we establish a novel cross-scene benchmark to demonstrate the outstanding performance of RoPE-Flow on zero-shot cross-scene robot pose estimation. Meanwhile, animated visualizations are shown on the website: ropeflow.netlify.app
comment: 19 pages, 13 figures. Under Review
♻ ☆ EmbodiedMidtrain: Bridging the Gap between Vision-Language Models and Vision-Language-Action Models via Mid-training
Yiyang Du, Zhanqiu Guo, Haochen Zhang, Annabella Macaluso, Xin Ye, Liu Ren, Yonatan Bisk, Chenyan Xiong
Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) inherit their visual and linguistic capabilities from Vision-Language Models (VLMs), yet most VLAs are built from off-the-shelf VLMs that are not adapted to the embodied domain, limiting their downstream performance. In this work, we propose EmbodiedMidtrain to bridge the gap between VLMs and VLAs. We first characterize the data distribution gap between them, showing that VLA data occupy compact regions that are largely separated from the broader VLM distribution, while the degree of alignment varies substantially both across and within VLM data sources. Then, we build a mid-training data engine that leverages a lightweight learnable proximity estimator to select the most VLA-aligned candidates from a large VLM pool, and produce EmbodiedMidtrain-1M, a VLM dataset that we further use to mid-train the VLM before downstream VLA fine-tuning. Experiments on both simulated robot manipulation benchmarks and real-world tasks show consistent VLA performance gains over off-the-shelf checkpoints across VLM backbones and VLA action heads. These gains extend to downstream tasks not used to guide data selection. Further analysis reveals that mid-training provides a stronger initialization for VLA fine-tuning, with gains emerging from the earliest steps and widening throughout training. Moreover, the data engine captures both dataset-level and sample-level alignment signals, favoring spatial reasoning over text-centric tasks while preserving the diversity of the VLM data. We will release all code, data and models for future research.
♻ ☆ Visual Contrastive Self-Distillation
On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) removes the external teacher required by on-policy distillation (OPD), but still needs asymmetric information between teacher and student so that the self-teacher provides a stronger learning signal. Existing methods create this asymmetry through privileged answers or visual evidence. We ask whether both can be removed, yielding a simpler form of OPSD driven purely by input conditioning. We propose Visual Contrastive Self-Distillation, namely VCSD, which converts image-content removal into an on-policy self-distillation signal. At each student-generated response prefix, the EMA teacher produces two next-token distributions under the same prompt and prefix: one conditioned on the original image and the other on a content-erased control. Their token-wise log-probability difference highlights candidates whose likelihood is specifically increased by the instance-level visual content. We use this contrast to sharpen the teacher's original-image distribution within its plausible support, and distill the resulting full-distribution target into the student. On ViRL39K, VCSD consistently outperforms matched OPSD across Qwen3-VL and Qwen3.5 models. It improves the seven-benchmark aggregate from 72.51% to 76.26% on Qwen3-VL-8B and from 74.97% to 79.24% on Qwen3.5-9B, with gains at all six evaluated scales. VCSD requires no external teacher, privileged answers, visual evidence signals, reasoning traces, or additional inference-time cost.
comment: 22 pages, 7 figures, 8 tables. Project page: https://joliang17.github.io/VisualCSD/
♻ ☆ InverFill: One-Step Inversion for Enhanced Few-Step Diffusion Inpainting CVPR'26
Duc Vu, Kien Nguyen, Ngan Nguyen, Trong-Tung Nguyen, Phong Nguyen, Khoi Nguyen, Cuong Pham, Anh Tran
Recent diffusion-based models achieve photorealism in image inpainting but require many sampling steps, limiting practical use. Few-step text-to-image models offer faster generation, but naively applying them to inpainting yields poor harmonization and artifacts between the background and inpainted region. We trace this cause to random Gaussian noise initialization, which under low function evaluations causes semantic misalignment and reduced fidelity. To overcome this, we propose InverFill, a one-step inversion method tailored for inpainting that injects semantic information from the input masked image into the initial noise, enabling high-fidelity few-step inpainting. Instead of training inpainting models, InverFill leverages few-step text-to-image models in a blended sampling pipeline with semantically aligned noise as input, significantly improving vanilla blended sampling and even matching specialized inpainting models at low NFEs. Moreover, InverFill does not require real-image supervision and only adds minimal inference overhead. Extensive experiments show that InverFill consistently boosts baseline few-step models, improving image quality and text coherence without costly retraining or heavy iterative optimization.
comment: Accepted to CVPR'26 (Main Conference)
♻ ☆ ZeST: A VLM-based Zero-Shot Traversability Navigation for Unknown Environments
Advances in robotics and autonomous navigation systems hinge on the ability to predict terrain traversability accurately. Traditional methods for generating datasets to train these prediction models often involve putting robots into potentially hazardous environments, posing risks to equipment and safety. To solve this problem, we present ZeST, a novel approach that treats repeated VLM outputs as stochastic measurements and fuses them into an uncertainty-aware posterior. Our approach not only performs zero-shot traversability and mitigates the risks associated with real-world data collection but also accelerates the development of advanced navigation systems, offering a cost-effective and scalable solution. To support our findings, we present navigation results, in both controlled indoor and unstructured outdoor environments. As shown in the experiments, ZeST provides safer navigation with a 90-100% success rate while no baseline exceeds 60%, and keeps complete success under query latencies up to 3.6s.
♻ ☆ WHTMix: Efficient Stereo Depth Estimation via Walsh-Hadamard Token Mixing
Stereo depth estimation for driving, robotics and augmented reality must run at high resolution under tight latency budgets, yet in transformer-based matchers the global self-attention that aggregates scene context grows quadratically with the number of pixels and comes to dominate runtime. We show that the joint self-attention stage of a stereo transformer, whose role is to spread context across both views, can be replaced by a data-independent Walsh-Hadamard token mixer that mixes tokens globally in the transform domain at log-linear cost, while the data-dependent cross-attention that performs left-right correspondence is retained. On synthetic driving data the mixer matches the attention baseline in end-point error while reducing model compute by a factor of 2.46 and single-image inference latency by a factor of 2.65. A complexity analysis shows the benefit is governed by the ratio of sequence length to channel width, which explains why high-resolution stereo matching is a particularly favorable setting and why classification transformers are not; we confirm this token-to-channel scaling on non-stereo long-sequence benchmarks. Furthermore, we introduce a hybrid log-disparity loss function designed to up-weight small-disparity pixels corresponding to long-range objects. This approach reduces the error on distant objects without incurring any additional computational overhead.
♻ ☆ The Last Remote Sensing Model Built by Humans? Casting Any Earth Observation Task as Recursive Self-Improvement
Sijie Zhao, Zeqi Zhou, Heli Qi, Xuanchao Fu, Zhuo Zheng, Junshi Xia, Junjue Wang, Weihao Xuan, Naoto Yokoya
Earth observation (EO) models are still built by hand. For each new task, experts design a training recipe and tune it against a benchmark. We show that this loop can be handed to an agent. Any verifiable task can be cast as a harness and a verifier, where the harness defines what the agent may use and the verifier defines what counts as success. Every EO task can be made verifiable, through labeled benchmarks, independent sensors, physical models or the repeated observation of the same place. Given only these two components, a general-purpose coding agent builds the EO model and improves it recursively on its own outputs. Settings long treated as separate research problems, from learning with a handful of labels to adapting across domains, become choices of harness and verifier. On six EO benchmarks spanning optical, SAR and multispectral time-series imagery, with outputs that range from land-cover maps and ship instances to canopy heights and answers about large images, agent-built models surpass the state of the art on every one, and on land-cover mapping, they do so from 11% of the training labels. This establishes a new paradigm for EO, in which people design harnesses and verifiers and agents build the models, so EO models improve as agents do.
comment: Ongoing project
♻ ☆ TRAC: Trajectory-aware Reuse and Adaptive Correction for Efficient Autoregressive Video Generation
Autoregressive (AR) video generation enables scalable long-video synthesis by sequentially generating fixed-length chunks, but incurs substantial computational cost from repeated denoising and attention over growing historical contexts. Recent cache reuse methods exploit temporal redundancy to reduce this cost, yet are mainly designed for single-trajectory generation, making them less suitable for sequentially coupled AR trajectories where approximation errors can accumulate and propagate across chunks. To address this challenge, we propose TRAC, a Trajectory-aware Reuse and Adaptive Correction framework for efficient and robust AR video generation. TRAC integrates three complementary components: (1) Robust Cumulative Scheduling (RCS), which selects cache reuse schedules by accounting for cumulative rollout errors and their variation across chunks and prompts; (2) Autoregressive Trajectory-aware Guidance Scheduling (ATGS), which coordinates classifier-free guidance refreshes along the global AR trajectory; and (3) Spectral Structure Correction (SSC), which adaptively restores low-frequency structural information to mitigate long-term error accumulation. By combining these innovations, TRAC substantially improves the efficiency-quality trade-off of AR video generation. For example, on VBench with SkyReels-V2, it achieves a 6.03x speedup over the vanilla model with only ~0.6% VBench score degradation, while consistently outperforming existing AR acceleration methods in both latency and generation quality. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/yolosjxhhhhhh/trac.
♻ ☆ Deep Learning-based Semantic Segmentation of Dental Radiographs: Comparative Evaluation of PSPNet, DeepLabv3, UNet, and UNet++
Accurate and efficient analysis of dental radiographs has become increasingly important for disease diagnosis and clinical decision making. In particular, dental radiographs segmentation plays a critical role as it is challenging due to several reasons, such as low contrast, noise in the images, variations in the image quality, etc. Previous studies have primarily addressed these challenges using convolutional neural networks (CNN)-based models. However, direct comparison of these segmentation models is still challenging due to the variations among the experimental settings. Therefore, we mainly compared four segmentation models, including Pyramid Scene Parsing Network (PSPNet), DeepLabV3, UNet, and UNet++, through a fair, controlled experimentation setting under varying conditions such as image sizes and batch sizes. For this, we used 1269 dental radiography images, and prior to training, we implemented a series of preprocessing techniques. To assess the models, we used several metrics, including Dice coefficient (DICE), Intersection over Union (IoU), accuracy, precision, training and validation losses. According to our results, UNet++ demonstrated the highest IoU score of 0.6719, and a DICE value of 0.7869, showing superior results in terms of segmentation, specifically when configured with an image size of 300x300 and a batch size of 16. In addition, we also explored the effect of image resolutions and batch sizes on model performance and accuracy under different architectures. Therefore, this study provides insights into the strengths of different segmentation models and the potential of deep learning-based semantic segmentation methods for improving automated dental radiograph analysis.
comment: 11 pages
♻ ☆ A Diagnostic Study of World-Space Human Recovery Under High Camera Dynamics
Monocular world-space human recovery methods excel on current benchmarks, but these rarely include fast camera motion. We introduce the K-Pop stress test, broadcast dance videos that combine fast, large camera motion with dense multi-person choreography. Leading methods produce plausible per-frame meshes on these videos, yet their world-space trajectories drift far from the performers' stage positions. Through a systematic diagnosis, we show that the camera and human estimates each remain self-consistent, and that the drift appears when they are combined at mismatched scales. Each is recovered at its own scale, so a mismatch between the two can turn camera motion into human drift that grows with camera displacement and becomes severe in broadcast dance videos. We derive a closed-form correction that estimates this mismatch and applies one scale to all performers, removing the drift while keeping their relative positions in one shared world frame. It requires no retraining and works with existing backends. Combined with physical constraints, the correction yields stable world-space reconstruction for choreography modeling, scene editing, data generation, and virtual reshooting. Project page: https://chien90190.github.io/worldhmr-fastcam-website/
comment: Project page: https://chien90190.github.io/worldhmr-fastcam-website/
♻ ☆ Every View Counts: View-Consistent Panoptic Quality for Multi-view Panoptic Segmentation
Multi-view panoptic segmentation assigns a semantic class and a scene-level instance ID to every pixel of an unordered set of images, and recent feed-forward 3D models predict these labels for the input views in a single forward pass. Their predictions, however, have been evaluated with the scene-level PQ (PQ^scene) borrowed from per-scene optimization methods, typically on rendered held-out views. PQ^scene tiles all views of a scene into a single image, so that a missed appearance or a change of ID lowers the score of the matched pair only in proportion to its area. We propose View-Consistent Panoptic Quality (VC-PQ), which extends PQ from a single image to a set of input views, counts equally every view in which an instance is visible, and penalizes a prediction that is not visible in the same views as its ground truth. A decomposition of VC-PQ attributes the score a method loses to mask accuracy, view consistency, and the matching threshold. A single additional parameter recovers the area weighting of tiling for comparison. Under a fixed evaluation protocol on ScanNet++ and ScanNetv2, recent feed-forward methods are evaluated with VC-PQ and PQ^scene, and the decomposition shows where each of them loses its score. Controlled perturbations of the ground truth show that VC-PQ responds to the number of views in which an instance is missed or changes ID, whereas PQ^scene responds to their area. The aim of this work is to make view consistency part of the evaluation of multi-view panoptic segmentation, with VC-PQ reported alongside PQ^scene. The evaluation code and the input sets of the protocol are available at https://github.com/Renem24/vcpq.
comment: 23 pages, 8 figures. Under review. Youngmin Lee and Byungha Ko contributed equally
♻ ☆ ICON decomposition: Multivariate concept auditing reveals shortcuts that neural networks rely on
Roshan Prakash Rane, Marco Simnacher, Manuel Pfeuffer, Marc-Andre Schulz, Nys Tjade Siegel, Maximilian Dreyer, Frederik Pahde, Wojciech Samek, Sonja Greven, Kerstin Ritter
Deep neural networks often exploit spurious associations, a failure known as shortcut learning. Before deployment, models should therefore be audited for reliance on concepts such as acquisition artifacts and patient demographics. Current methods, including linear probes and concept activation vectors, measure concept reliance by asking whether each concept is decodable from a layer. We show that this framing is misleading: decodability reflects not only concept reliance but also correlations among concepts and the outcome in the auditing dataset. We reframe shortcut auditing as a decomposition of the variance of intermediary representations with Independent Canonical cONcepts (ICON). ICON quantifies the share of a layer's variance explained by each concept conditional on all other concepts and the outcome, and also reports the variance left unexplained. Because ICON explanations are comparable across layers, their trajectories distinguish concepts that drive predictions from those that are merely encoded in the representations. In simulated data with ground truth, ICON recovers concept importance more accurately than seven baselines. In skin-cancer and neuroimaging applications, it separates learned shortcuts from merely correlated concepts, which we confirm with independent validation checks.
comment: 44 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables. Includes Extended Data (7 figures, 2 tables). Code: https://github.com/RoshanRane/ICON_decomposition
♻ ☆ UniFGVC: Universal Training-Free Few-Shot Fine-Grained Vision Classification via Attribute-Aware Multimodal Retrieval IEEE
Few-shot fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) aims to discriminate between subtly different categories with very limited data. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) exhibit strong capabilities in both fine-grained visual understanding and open-world category recognition, directly fine-tuning them on few-shot FGVC tasks typically leads to overfitting on sparse samples, which erodes their valuable open-world knowledge and compromises generalization. To fundamentally overcome this limitation, we present UniFGVC, a universal training-free framework that shifts the paradigm from parameter fine-tuning to training-free retrieval-based inference. UniFGVC reframes few-shot FGVC as a multimodal retrieval problem using predefined category templates. Its core is the Category-Discriminative Visual Captioner (CDV-Captioner), an attribute-aware module designed to leverage MLLM for generating structured textual descriptions that explicitly pinpoint discriminative visual attributes between similar classes. By integrating chain-of-thought reasoning and visual references, CDV-Captioner mitigates hallucination and maximizes the discriminative power of textual captions, thereby converting images into attribute-enriched image-description pairs. Subsequently, utilizing arbitrary pre-trained visual and textual encoders in a plug-and-play manner, UniFGVC extracts features from both modalities and computes their similarity with all category templates for recognition. Extensive experiments on 12 FGVC datasets demonstrate UniFGVC's universal compatibility and consistent superiority. It not only outperforms existing few-shot CLIP-based methods but also surpasses several fully-supervised MLLM-based approaches, confirming the general advantage of the proposed retrieval paradigm.
comment: Accepted by IEEE TMM
♻ ☆ HonestFace: Towards Honest Face Restoration with One-Step Diffusion Model ACM MM 2026
Face restoration has achieved significant advancements through the years of development. However, maintaining high fidelity and authenticity while avoiding artifacts remains challenging, especially in extreme degradation scenarios. This highlights the need for models that are more ``honest'' in their reconstruction from low-quality inputs, accurately reflecting original characteristics. In this work, we propose HonestFace, a novel approach for honest face restoration with identity consistency and realistic textures. To achieve this, HonestFace incorporates several key components. First, we propose an identity embedder to effectively capture and preserve crucial identity features from both the low-quality input and multiple reference faces. Second, a masked face alignment method is presented to enhance fine-grained details and textural authenticity. Furthermore, we present a new real-world reference-based face restoration dataset, \textbf{MultiRefCeleb-Test}, with multiple high-quality references and low-quality inputs. Leveraging these contributions within a one-step diffusion model framework, HonestFace delivers excellent restoration results in terms of facial fidelity and realism. Experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior performance in both visual quality and quantitative assessments. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/jkwang28/HonestFace .
comment: Published at ACM MM 2026
♻ ☆ Imaging-anchored multiomics in cardiovascular disease: integrating cardiac imaging, bulk, single-cell, and spatial transcriptomics
Minh H. N. Le, Thanh-Huy Nguyen, Tao Li, Bao Quang Gia Le, Han H. Huynh, Monika Raj, Carl Yang, Min Xu, Tuan Vinh, Nguyen Quoc Khanh Le
Cardiovascular disease arises from interactions between inherited risk, molecular programmes, and tissue-scale remodelling that are observed clinically through imaging. Cardiac MRI (CMR), computed tomography (CT), and echocardiography are integral to routine cardiovascular care, while bulk RNA sequencing, single-cell RNA sequencing, and spatial transcriptomics are providing increasingly detailed molecular characterization of cardiac tissue. Yet, these imaging and molecular data are still analysed in largely separate pipelines. This review examines joint representations that link cardiac imaging phenotypes to transcriptomic and spatially resolved molecular states. An imaging-anchored perspective is adopted in which echocardiography, CMR, and CT define a spatial phenotype of the heart, and bulk, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics provide cell-type- and location-specific molecular context. We define the representation requirements of each modality, compare multimodal fusion strategies, and synthesize integrative pipelines for radiogenomics, spatial alignment, and image-based gene-expression prediction, together with their validation requirements, limitations, and failure modes. Spatial multiomic maps of human myocardium and atherosclerotic plaque, together with single-cell, spatial, and multimodal medical foundation models, are advancing imaging-anchored multiomics; however, cost, scalability, and tissue availability remain substantial barriers to large-scale cardiovascular translation.
comment: 23 pages, 4 figures, 5 tables. Review article
♻ ☆ Dynamic Video Generation: Shaping Video Generation Across Time and Space
Shikang Zheng, Jingkai Huang, Jiacheng Liu, Guantao Chen, Lixuan, Yuqi Lin, Peiliang Cai, Linfeng Zhang
Diffusion models have achieved impressive performance in video generation, but their iterative denoising process remains computationally expensive due to the large number of tokens processed at each timestep. Recently, progressive resolution sampling has emerged as a promising acceleration approach by reducing latent resolution in early stages. However, scaling this idea to video generation remains challenging, as the additional temporal dimension introduces diverse spatio-temporal demands across different videos, and compressing only a single dimension often leads to limited acceleration or degraded quality. Therefore, we propose DVG, a Dynamic Video Generation framework that jointly allocates computation across time and space, automatically selecting content-aware acceleration strategies without manual tuning or retraining. DVG achieves near-lossless acceleration across models and tasks, reaching up to 7 times speedup on HunyuanVideo and HunyuanVideo-1.5, and 18 times when combined with distillation, demonstrating its potential as a key component in today's large-scale efficient video generation systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/DarrenZheng303/DVG .
♻ ☆ Active Visual Perception: Opportunities and Challenges
Active visual perception enables an intelligent system to improve perception by controlling how visual evidence is acquired. However, differences in how active perception is defined and evaluated make approaches difficult to compare across tasks. This review clarifies the field's functional scope by distinguishing active observation acquisition from processing fixed inputs. It then organizes representative literature around four questions about what evidence the task requires, which actions can obtain it, how candidate observations should be valued, and how the next sensing action should be selected and executed. New observations update the perceptual state and guide subsequent decisions, forming a closed loop. To evaluate the benefits of active perception, the review examines datasets, interactive environments, physical platforms, and baseline comparisons, and develops an evaluation framework linking improvements in visual evidence to downstream task outcomes while accounting for acquisition costs and risks. The analysis concludes that predicted observation value does not guarantee that useful evidence can be acquired through feasible actions, while task success alone cannot establish the benefit of active observation selection. Further progress requires reliable value estimation and planning over longer decision sequences under physical and resource constraints. It also requires grounding semantic reasoning in acquired evidence and maintaining effective collaboration under imperfect communication, with these capabilities verified through reproducible evaluation of the complete perception and action loop.
♻ ☆ EPIC-Bench: A Perception-Centric Benchmark for Fine-Grained Embodied Visual Grounding in Vision-Language Models
Haozhe Shan, Xiancong Ren, Han Dong, Yingji Zhang, Haoyuan Shi, Jiayu Hu, Qinfan Zhang, Yi Zhang, Yong Dai, Bin Shen, Lizhen Qu, Zenglin Xu, Xiaozhu Ju
While large vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly adopted as the perceptual backbone for embodied agents, their fundamental vision-language grounding (VLG) capability in embodied scenarios remains unexplored. We present \textbf{EPIC-Bench}, \textbf{E}mbodied \textbf{P}ercept\textbf{I}on Ben\textbf{C}hmark, a fine-grained grounding benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the VLG capabilities of VLMs in real-world embodied environments. EPIC-Bench comprises 6.6k meticulously human-annotated tuples (Image, Text, Mask) spanning three core stages of the embodied interaction pipeline: Target Localization, Navigation, and Manipulation. With 23 fine-grained tasks, multi-dimensional settings and evaluation over 80 leading VLMs, EPIC-Bench provides a diagnostic analysis.
♻ ☆ PLSP (Pre-hoc Liminal Space Profiling): OOD Prediction over Detection -- An Anticipatory Approach for Machine Learning Model Reliability
Out-of-Distribution (OOD) data poses a significant threat to machine learning models, often leading to model failure during deployment. All existing OOD detection methods are post-hoc, relying on evaluation metrics such as accuracy and AUC-ROC during inference to indirectly assess the model's response to OOD data by measuring deviations. In contrast to existing approaches, the proposed work shifts the paradigm from OOD detection to OOD prediction by proposing a pre-hoc anticipatory framework called PLSP for OOD prediction. We make several key contributions: (a) a dataset-independent metric called the CREDibility Score (CREDS) is proposed for OOD prediction; (b) credibility curves are introduced to study the maximum credibility a model can attain; and (c) credibility heat maps (and volume under surface) are introduced to characterize pre-hoc model behavior across different datasets. This work provides a novel perspective on signal processing under distributional shifts. Experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that the proposed metric serves as a valuable measure for improving the robustness of machine learning models toward OOD prediction.
comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, 5 tables. Accepted at EUSIPCO 2026. v2: Added funding acknowledgment, copyright notice, and corrected affiliation for first author
♻ ☆ LVMT: Video Mask Transformer for Long-term Video Segmentation WACV 2027
Existing online video segmentation methods struggle to track objects in long, complex videos with long-term occlusions. We hypothesize that this limitation is caused by (i) the inability of their temporal propagation mechanism to adaptively select the object information that is propagated across time, and (ii) their inability to be trained on long videos due to memory requirements and vanishing gradients. To address the first limitation, we propose to use a lightweight GRU-based temporal propagation module that can learn to select which information it keeps in memory and propagates across time. Second, to allow training on long videos, we introduce Truncated Query Propagation (TQP), a training strategy in which the model processes a video in chunks of frames, where information about tracked objects is propagated between chunks but backpropagation is only conducted in individual chunks, enabling longer temporal supervision without out-of-memory issues, inference overhead, or vanishing gradients. The resulting model is called the Long-term Video Mask Transformer (LVMT). Extensive experiments on six benchmarks show that LVMT sets a new state of the art across a range of video segmentation tasks, while retaining the speed of the highly efficient model it is based on, making it 10X faster than the prior state of the art. Code: https://github.com/tue-mps/lvmt
comment: WACV 2027, Source code: https://github.com/tue-mps/lvmt
♻ ☆ A Multimodal Emotion Recognition System: Integrating Facial Expressions, Body Movement, Speech, and Spoken Language
Psychological evaluation relies on clinicians' observation and interpretation of a patient's emotional expression, which is susceptible to subjectivity, bias, fatigue, and inconsistency. This paper presents a multimodal emotion recognition system designed to support, rather than replace, the evaluator. The system combines facial expression recognition, speech emotion recognition, text-based emotion recognition of transcribed speech, and body movement analysis, and fuses their outputs into an emotional profile of class probabilities that is presented to the evaluator together with the overall prediction. Although the unimodal models achieve high accuracy on their benchmark test sets, a remote user study with 52 participants expressing seven emotional states shows that their accuracy falls to between 82.97% and 87.64% under realistic conditions, with individual emotional states recognised in as few as 48.08% of cases. Under the same conditions, the multimodal system achieves an accuracy of 96.43%, significantly higher than every single-modality component ($p < 10^{-4}$), with no emotional state below 92.31%. These results indicate that strong benchmark performance of a single channel does not transfer to realistic use, and that multimodal fusion provides the robustness required of a tool that supports psychological evaluation.
comment: v2: Models revised to correct issues in the original implementation and results updated accordingly; text revised and restructured, architecture figures added, fusion stage formalised, references updated. 8 pages, 4 figures, 8 tables
♻ ☆ Can MLLMs Read the Room? A Multimodal Benchmark for Assessing Deception in Multi-Party Social Interactions EMNLP 2026
Despite their advanced reasoning capabilities, state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still lack a core component of human intelligence: the ability to "read the room" and assess deception in complex social interactions. To rigorously evaluate this limitation, we introduce Multimodal Interactive Deception Assessment (MIDA), a new task and multimodal dataset comprising synchronized video and text with verifiable ground-truth labels for every statement. We benchmark 12 state-of-the-art open- and closed-source MLLMs and identify a substantial performance gap: even powerful models such as GPT-4o struggle to reliably distinguish truthful statements from deceptive ones. Our analysis shows that current models have difficulty grounding language in multimodal social cues and modeling what others know, believe, or intend. To address these limitations, we propose a Social Chain-of-Thought (SoCoT) reasoning pipeline and a Dynamic Social Epistemic Memory (DSEM) module. Experimental results show that structured epistemic memory consistently improves deception assessment, while multimodal social-cue reasoning remains a challenging and important direction for future research.
comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2026
♻ ☆ LoopWAM: Closed-Loop Generalist Policy Improvement from Deployment Rollouts
Wenxuan Guo, Yingping Liang, Zhaoguo Wang, Ziyuan Li, Angyuan Ma, Zhenyu Wu, Chengkun Wang, Bingyao Yu, Ze Chen, Borui Zhang, Xiuwei Xu, Meng Zhang, Erjin Zhou, Jiwen Lu
Scaling expert demonstrations alone does not enable generalist robot policies to improve from deployment. Real-world rollouts contain successes, suboptimal behavior, and failures: imitating every recorded action can reinforce poor behavior, while filtering out failures discards evidence of physical interactions and their consequences. We introduce LoopWAM, a closed-loop world-action model that learns directly from this full quality spectrum, using rollouts from both itself and other deployed policies. Source-dependent noise sampling unifies behavior learning and action-conditioned world modeling, while quality steering and quality-weighted supervision retain full video supervision across qualities and regulate action imitation. Video and action tokens interact throughout parallel denoising, allowing learned consequences to inform action generation directly. On RoboChallenge Table30-V2, three deployment-and-training rounds raise success from 23.67% to 43.33%, a 19.7-percentage-point gain, with a final score of 56.80. LoopWAM also achieves 94.5% average success on RoboTwin 2.0 and 49.5% overall success on RoboCasa365 without additional embodied pretraining, obtaining the best overall results among the compared methods across all three benchmarks. On challenging shirt folding task, two rounds of deployment-driven improvement after single-task post-training raise success from 13.20% to 55.56%. These results demonstrate closed-loop improvement from mixed-quality experience under both multi-task learning and single-task post-training. Project page: https://loop-wam.github.io/
comment: Project page: https://loop-wam.github.io/
♻ ☆ FlatClip: Reusing Image Foundation Models for fMRI Representation Learning via Cortical Flatmaps NeurIPS 2026
Can the spatial organization of cortical activity help transfer frozen image representations to fMRI prediction? We introduce FlatClip, which renders cortical activity as anatomy-linked flatmaps and extracts features with a frozen SigLIP2 encoder. Only a lightweight downstream probe is trained, without fMRI-specific encoder pretraining or fine-tuning. Across four resting-state benchmarks, FlatClip outperforms the evaluated ROI-level baselines on HCP and ADNI, but is weaker on PPMI and below the strongest voxel-level models overall. On NSD visual-fMRI decoding, restricting inputs to visual or NSD-provided task-active cortex improves recognition over whole-cortex inputs. Spatial perturbations reduce performance with both retrained and fixed readouts, and anatomy-linked arrangements outperform cortical-pixel permutations across three colormaps. Together, these results demonstrate a practical route for reusing image-pretrained features in fMRI and highlight cortical arrangement and input-region selection as important design choices. Code is available at https://github.com/OneMore1/FlatClip.
comment: NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ MiCo: Mutual Information Coverage Optimization through Semantic Erasure Modeling for Efficient MLLM Inference
Tinghao Wang, Yichen Guo, Qizhe Zhang, Yuan Zhang, Weimin Ouyang, Rui Huang, Jiajun Cao, Sixiang Chen, Hao Jiang, Jixian Wu, Zheng Lu, Bofan Zhu, Renyuan Li, Shanghang Zhang
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in multimodal understanding, but processing large numbers of visual tokens results in high computational costs. While many methods have been proposed to reduce the number of visual tokens, most of them rely on heuristics and are prone to discarding substantial visual information during pruning, leading to degradation in model performance. In this work, by using a semantic erasure model, we derive a general mutual information coverage objective from task log-loss and propose MiCo, a training-free two-stage pruning method. MiCo first uses visual signals to select a representative candidate pool before visual tokens enter the language model, then performs task-aware subset selection within it. At each stage, suitable observable proxies instantiate the derived objective as a monotone submodular coverage function, which MiCo greedily optimizes under the token budget. MiCo is evaluated on diverse MLLMs ranging from 7B to 13B parameters across a broad range of image and video benchmarks spanning general visual reasoning, fine-grained OCR and grounding, hallucination detection, and long-video understanding. MiCo consistently achieves the best performance across nearly all evaluated models under all pruning ratios. On LLaVA-NEXT-13B, MiCo uses only 5.6% visual tokens, retains 97.5% of baseline performance, and achieves a 3.8-fold inference speedup. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MiCo and our mutual information coverage objective for visual token pruning. Our code is available at https://github.com/MAX-7237/MiCo.
comment: 48 pages, 28 tables, 17 figures
♻ ☆ VDE Bench: Evaluating The Capability of Image Editing Models to Modify Visual Documents
Hongzhu Yi, Yujia Yang, Yuanxiang Wang, Tong Li, Zhenyu Guan, Tianyu Zong, Jiahuan Chen, Chenxi Bao, Tiankun Yang, Haopeng Jin, Yixuan Yuan, Xinming Wang, Tao Yu, Ruilin Gao, Ruiwen Tao, Haijin Liang, Jin Ma, Jinwen Luo, Yeshani, Xinyu Zuo, Jungang Xu
Image editing models can modify visual content through natural language, but editing dense documents requires precise local changes amid tightly coupled text, tables, and layout. We introduce VDE Bench, an evaluation resource for studying instruction-guided editing of Chinese and English document images. VDE Bench contains 3,506 instruction-guided image editing samples, including 1,578 text-region edits and 1,928 table-region edits. The benchmark pairs editing instructions and reference images with annotated editing regions and structured OCR outputs. Its evaluation protocol combines region-level and full-page measurements to assess textual correctness, structural fidelity, and visual content preservation. By focusing on the interaction between local edits and their surrounding document context, VDE Bench complements existing visual text editing benchmarks and provides a resource for diagnosing document-specific editing failures.
♻ ☆ RSIgen: Reciprocal Self-Improvement for Agentic Visual Generation
Agentic visual generation produces experience that can improve the native understanding (agent) and generation roles of a unified multimodal backbone, but task success alone does not determine which role should learn. Generator updates can also make the agent's action supervision stale. We introduce RSIgen, a task-centric reciprocal self-improvement framework linking learning allocation, supervision refresh, and recursive curriculum construction. Dynamic Responsibility Routing (DRR) uses matched interventions on evidence, inputs, and supported actions to select learning recipients and construct compatible training targets. After generator learning, RSIgen re-evaluates the relative utility of tested actions with branch inputs held fixed to refresh agent supervision; the retained roles then construct the next curriculum. Across BAGEL, Qwen-Image, and Wan-Image-7B, RSIgen improves AgentGen-Bench Full Overall9 by 3.2--3.3 points over a three-cycle SearchGen adaptation with action costs. Wan controls support allocation gains at matched role-level training exposure, refresh gains at a matched adaptation budget, and benefits from updated curriculum sources while recipients continue learning. In blind evaluation on 200 real-user requests, pooled tie-adjusted preference scores against the same baseline reach 70.0% for task completion and 64.9% for visual quality.
♻ ☆ Imagine Before You Predict: Interleaved Latent Visual Reasoning for Video Event Prediction EMNLP 2026
Video event prediction (VEP) requires models to infer unobserved future states from partial video evidence. Existing video MLLMs usually verbalize intermediate future reasoning in text space: once visual evidence is verbalized, fine-grained motion, geometry, and interaction cues can be lost, leading to plausible but visually ungrounded hallucinations. We introduce Future-L1, an interleaved latent visual reasoning framework that lets an MLLM alternate between language tokens and continuous latent visual spans during autoregressive decoding. To train this capability, we construct Future-L1-50K by selecting examples where future visual hints help prediction and align latent states to future-frame embeddings, then further optimize sampled latent trajectories with LA-DAPO, a latent-aware RL objective with outcome-contrastive and temporal-diversity rewards. Future-L1 achieves new state-of-the-art results on both benchmarks: on FutureBench, it improves Qwen3-VL-8B from 61.0 to 85.4 and exceeds the previous best Video-CoE by 10.4 points; on TwiFF-Bench, it improves the average score from 2.44 to 3.04. These results suggest that future-oriented video reasoning benefits from preserving intermediate visual semantics in latent space rather than translating every reasoning step into text.
comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2026 Main Conference. Code: https://github.com/OpenGVLab/Future-L1
♻ ☆ SR-Prominence: A Crowdsourced Protocol and Dataset Suite for Perceptually-Weighted Super-Resolution Artifact Evaluation NeurIPS 2026
Ivan Molodetskikh, Kirill Malyshev, Mark Mirgaleev, Nikita Zagainov, Evgeney Bogatyrev, Dmitriy Vatolin
Modern image super-resolution methods generate detailed, visually appealing results, but they often introduce visual artifacts: unnatural patterns and texture distortions that degrade perceived quality. These defects vary widely in perceptual impact--some are barely noticeable, while others are highly disturbing--yet existing detection methods treat them equally. We propose artifact prominence as an evaluative target, defined as the fraction of viewers who judge a highlighted region to contain a noticeable artifact. We design a crowdsourced annotation protocol and construct SR-Prominence, a dataset suite containing 3,935 artifact masks from DeSRA, Open Images, Urban100, and a realistic no-ground-truth Urban100-HR setting, annotated with prominence. Re-annotating DeSRA reveals that 48.2% of its in-lab binary artifacts are not noticed by a majority of viewers. Across the suite, we audit SR artifact detectors, image-quality metrics, and SR methods. We find that classical full-reference metrics, especially SSIM and DISTS, provide surprisingly strong localized prominence signals, whereas no-reference IQA methods and specialized artifact detectors often fail to generalize across datasets and reference settings. SR-Prominence is released with an objective scoring protocol that allows new metrics to be benchmarked on our suite without further crowdsourcing. Together, the data and protocols enable SR artifact evaluation to move from binary defect presence toward perceptual impact. SR-Prominence is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/imolodetskikh/sr-artifact-prominence.
comment: accepted to NeurIPS 2026 Evaluations and Datasets track
♻ ☆ DuplexBridge: Coordinating Understanding and Generation for Unified Image Editing
Complex image editing requires faithful task interpretation and accurate execution, but a failed edit does not reveal which responsibility failed. We present DuplexBridge, which uses a unified model's own understanding capability to enhance prompts for its own generation capability, without an external understanding module. A source-grounded bridge specifies targets, final-state changes, and preservation constraints. Understanding is supervised on fidelity to the original request without observing the generated image; generation is supervised on execution of the condition it actually receives. Reciprocal trust checks selectively admit global task feedback to each role while retaining independently valid local supervision. We introduce CE-Bench, a 1,200-task benchmark measuring joint satisfaction of task-derived change and preservation requirements. Across three model configurations, the full system improves complete compliance over direct editors by 21.75-25.75 percentage points, with gains also observed on KRIS-Bench, RISEBench, ImgEdit, and GEdit-Bench. From a common supervised Wan-Image initialization, gated joint training reaches 77.08% complete compliance, compared with 70.92% without gates and 75.00% when generation-local supervision instead checks the original task with both gates retained. These results support distinct local responsibilities and selective shared feedback for joint understanding-generation adaptation.
♻ ☆ Neural Visual Decoding via Cognitive guided Adaptive Blurring and Information Constrained Alignment
EEG-based visual decoding aims to establish a mapping between neural signals and visual semantics. However, it remains constrained by the dual challenges of severe information granularity mismatch and the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of EEG signals. Existing approaches typically treat visual features as static, ignoring the dynamic selectivity of human vision and the frequency specificity of neural oscillations. To bridge this gap, we propose CAIA, a Cognitive-guided Adaptive blurring with Information-Constrained Alignment framework for Neural-Visual decoding. On the visual side, it simulates selective attention to adaptively reduce redundancy. Meanwhile, on the EEG side, it combines neural oscillation priors with an information-bottleneck-inspired spectral sparsity regularizer to enhance SNR. Specifically, we devise a cognitive-dynamics-based adaptive blurring mechanism that dynamically integrates center-biased and saliency-guided visual cues via cross-modal attention. Furthermore, we introduce a distribution-aware boundary calibration loss to robustly rectify alignment bias caused by outlier samples. Moreover, a cognitively guided information-screening method is proposed to select task-relevant EEG oscillations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAIA improves both subject-dependent and subject-independent average Top-1 and Top-5 accuracy in zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval, significantly outperforming prior methods. Our work validates that optimizing visual information density to match neural granularity offers a more interpretable and robust pathway for neural decoding.
♻ ☆ V-GIFT: Boosting Visual Instruction Tuning with Self-Supervised Guidance NeurIPS 2026
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) perform well on many vision-language tasks but often struggle with vision-centric problems that require fine-grained visual perception. Recent evidence suggests that this limitation arises not from weak visual representations, but from under-utilization of visual information during instruction tuning, where many tasks can be partially solved using language priors alone. We propose a simple and lightweight approach that augments visual instruction tuning with a small number of visually grounded self-supervised tasks expressed as natural language instructions. By reformulating classical self-supervised pretext tasks, such as rotation prediction, color matching, and cross-view correspondence, as image-instruction-response triplets, we introduce supervision that cannot be solved without relying on visual evidence. Our approach requires no human annotations, no architectural modifications, and no additional training stages. Across multiple models, training regimes, and benchmarks, injecting only a small fraction (3-10%) of such visually grounded instructions consistently improves performance on vision-centric evaluations. Our findings highlight instruction tuning with visually grounded SSL tasks as a powerful lever for improving visual perception in MLLMs through simple adjustments to the training data distribution. Code available at: https://github.com/sirkosophia/V-GIFT
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ ME-VLM: A Unified VLM for Embodied Cognition and Agent Coordination
Physical AI requires models to ground visual and linguistic understanding in real-world environments while accounting for environmental constraints and execution feedback. We introduce MachEmbodied-VLM (ME-VLM), a unified vision-language model with two variants, 4B and 35B-A3B, that brings together embodied cognition and multimodal agent capabilities. Our work emphasizes physical perception and spatiotemporal reasoning, together with planning, interaction, and outcome assessment in both digital and physical environments. We construct training data spanning embodied and multimodal agent tasks, including execution observations and feedback to support outcome assessment and decision refinement. The training pipeline comprises embodied capability injection, separate reinforcement learning of embodied and multimodal-agent experts, and multi-teacher on-policy distillation that consolidates their complementary capabilities into a single model. Experiments show competitive performance on both embodied and agent benchmarks, as well as on autonomous-driving and embodied-navigation tasks. For edge deployment, visual token compression, W4A8 quantization, and hardware-software co-optimization enable on-device inference of the 4B variant on the M100, reducing prefill latency from 400 ms to 188 ms.
Project Page: https://machembodied.com/ME-Brain/ME-VLM.html Code Repository: https://github.com/MachEmbodied/ME-VLM
♻ ☆ TwinPrune: Density-Aware Two-Phase Token Pruning for Vision-Language Models
We propose a unified spatial-density signal to score token importance for both inference phases: bipartite merge for prefill and KV eviction for decode, yielding measurable gains in each stage. To isolate the two phases, we split benchmarks by scoring logic. Prefill probes (MMBench, POPE, ScienceQA) evaluate only the first decoded token; their accuracy reflects prefill logits argmax before any decode KV eviction. Full-pipeline probes (TextVQA, DocVQA, MM-Vet) assess the complete generated sequence and capture both phases. We identify a critical evaluation pitfall: decode pruning claims validated solely on prefill probes measure prefill quality, not decode performance. Experiments show discarding all visual KV during decode barely affects prefill-probe accuracy but degrades TextVQA and MM-Vet drastically; this insensitivity stems from the scoring rule, not compression intensity. Evaluated on seven model variants (InternVL-3.5, Qwen3-VL, LLaVA-1.5) and three full-pipeline benchmarks, our method achieves a three-way Pareto frontier across compute, memory and accuracy. Density-based prefill compression maintains strong accuracy, scales linearly with visual token count, and delivers 100x faster token selection at high resolution. For decode, density top-k KV eviction consistently outperforms strong baselines H2O, SnapKV and StreamingLLM on TextVQA and MM-Vet across three retention ratios. At 0.125 keep ratio on TextVQA, it surpasses H2O by 9.6 points; InternVL-3.5 models (2B to 38B) maintain a 7 to 10 point advantage. Compression scales favorably with model size: every measured 8B to 38B model transition reduces accuracy loss instead of worsening it. We suggest MM-Vet or DocVQA as mandatory full-pipeline validation for any decode-phase claims. Our code is available at https://github.com/Kai-Liu001/TwinPrune
comment: Our code is availabel at https://github.com/Kai-Liu001/TwinPrune
♻ ☆ Does Peer Observation Help? Vision-Sharing Collaboration for Vision-Language Navigation ACCV 2026
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) systems are fundamentally constrained by partial observability, as an agent can only accumulate knowledge from locations it has personally visited. As multiple robots increasingly coexist in shared environments, a natural question arises: can agents navigating the same space benefit from each other's observations? In this work, we introduce Co-VLN, a minimalist, model-agnostic framework for systematically investigating whether and how peer observations from concurrently navigating agents can benefit VLN. When independently navigating agents identify common traversed locations, they exchange structured perceptual memory, effectively expanding each agent's receptive field at no additional exploration cost. We validate our framework on the R2R benchmark under two representative paradigms (the learning-based DUET and the zero-shot MapGPT), and conduct extensive analytical experiments to systematically reveal the underlying dynamics of peer observation sharing in VLN. Results demonstrate that vision-sharing enabled model yields substantial performance improvements across both paradigms, establishing a strong foundation for future research in collaborative embodied navigation.
comment: ACCV 2026
♻ ☆ Diffusion Probe: Generated Image Result Prediction Using CNN Probes CVPR 2026
Benlei Cui, Bukun Huang, Zhizeng Ye, Xuemei Dong, Tuo Chen, Hui Xue, Dingkang Yang, Longtao Huang, Jingqun Tang, Haiwen Hong
Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models lack an efficient mechanism for early quality assessment, leading to costly trial-and-error in multi-generation scenarios such as prompt iteration, agent-based generation, and flow-grpo. We reveal a strong correlation between early diffusion cross-attention distributions and final image quality. Based on this finding, we introduce Diffusion Probe, a framework that leverages internal cross-attention maps as predictive signals. We design a lightweight predictor that maps statistical properties of early-stage cross-attention extracted from initial denoising steps to the final image's overall quality. This enables accurate forecasting of image quality across diverse evaluation metrics long before full synthesis is complete. We validate Diffusion Probe across a wide range of settings. On multiple T2I models, across early denoising windows, resolutions, and quality metrics, it achieves strong correlation (PCC > 0.7) and high classification performance (AUC-ROC > 0.9). Its reliability translates into practical gains. By enabling early quality-aware decisions in workflows such as prompt optimization, seed selection, and accelerated RL training, the probe supports more targeted sampling and avoids computation on low-potential generations. This reduces computational overhead while improving final output quality. Diffusion Probe is model-agnostic, efficient, and broadly applicable, offering a practical solution for improving T2I generation efficiency through early quality prediction. Code: https://github.com/Alibaba-VELLDEPTH/DiffusionProbe
comment: Accepted at CVPR 2026. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 35926-35935. 17 pages, 10 figures, and 7 tables
♻ ☆ Thinking with Images as Continuous Actions: Numerical Visual Chain-of-Thought NeurIPS 2026
Recent MLLMs increasingly rely on visual chain-of-thought to perform region-grounded reasoning over images. However, existing approaches ground regions via either textified coordinates (causing modality mismatch and semantic fragmentation) or fixed-granularity patches that both limit precise region selection and often require non-trivial architectural changes. In this paper, we propose Numerical Visual Chain-of-Thought (NV-CoT), a framework that enables MLLMs to reason over images using continuous numerical coordinates. NV-CoT expands the MLLM action space from discrete vocabulary tokens to a continuous Euclidean space, allowing models to directly generate bounding-box coordinates as actions with only minimal architectural modification. The framework supports both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. In particular, we replace categorical token policies with a Gaussian (or Laplace) policy over coordinates and introduce stochasticity via reparameterized sampling, making NV-CoT fully compatible with GRPO-style policy optimization. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks against 11 representative visual reasoning baselines demonstrate that NV-CoT significantly improves localization precision and final answer accuracy, while also accelerating training convergence, validating the effectiveness of continuous-action visual reasoning in MLLMs. Project page: https://kesenzhao.github.io/NV-CoT/
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026, Oral (Top 0.4%)
♻ ☆ Beyond Entropy: Self-Diagnostic Multi-Role Token Optimization for Video Reasoning
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has substantially advanced multimodal reasoning, yet it remains fundamentally limited by ambiguous token-level credit assignment. While high-entropy token heuristics encourage possibility exploration, naively extending them to video reasoning tends to induce lengthy reasoning, as the model becomes overly reliant on high-entropy visual activations. Alternative approaches that rely on counterfactual-based visual token localization for credit assignment also tend to over-prioritize visual exploration at the expense of decisive reasoning cues for answer derivation, thereby exacerbating the interference from spurious visual nuances. Moreover, these methods employ static counterfactual strategies that fail to co-evolve with the policy during training. In this paper, we introduce DyCPO, a co-evolutionary framework that jointly optimizes reliable token selection and adaptive counterfactual intervention. It constructs a multi-role dependence metric to balance visual exploration and answer-relevance mining in token-wise contrastive learning, while suppressing exploration-only filler tokens and spurious visual noise. Rather than relying on static counterfactual priors, DyCPO dynamically derives counterfactual signals from the model's own successful and failed rollouts, enabling self-diagnostic analysis and co-evolution of the optimization objective with the policy. Extensive experiments on complex video reasoning and general video understanding benchmarks demonstrate consistent performance improvements, establishing DyCPO as a robust token-level credit assignment paradigm for multimodal reinforcement learning.
comment: 19 pages, 6 figures, under review
♻ ☆ Fine-grained Human Motion Understanding with Language Models WACV 2027
Fine-grained motion understanding requires knowing not only which poses occur, but also when they occur. Existing motion-language models either compress motion clips or concatenate pose features without retaining the timing of each pose, making action duration and temporal scale ambiguous under temporal subsampling. We introduce FiGMo, an LLM-based model that represents motion as timestamp-grounded skeletal poses, supporting reasoning over action order and duration. A unified pose encoder applies this representation to both 2D and 3D skeletons, including poses detected from real videos, while RGB can optionally provide contextual information. To reason over timestamped pose sequences, the model must understand both individual body configurations and how they change over time. As existing data provides limited pose-level grounding, we construct the required pose-to-motion supervision. Controlled experiments show that timestamps improve temporal localization and preserve physical timing under subsampling, while the constructed supervision drives the main performance gains. FiGMo achieves state-of-the-art results across motion question answering, dense motion captioning, and action recognition with detected poses. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Thomas-Markhorst/FiGMo
comment: Accepted at WACV 2027
♻ ☆ Filling Before Advancing: Capability-Gap-Driven Post-Training for Scenario-Specialized Remote Sensing MLLMs
Remote sensing multimodal large language models (RS-MLLMs) have advanced aerial-image understanding, but scenario specialization remains constrained by scarce high-quality supervision and incomplete capability coverage. We propose filling before advancing (FBA), a capability-gap-driven post-training route that develops prerequisite capabilities before scenario-specific adaptation. For coastal harbor understanding, we construct CPRS (Coastal-Port Remote Sensing), a three-layer dataset covering RGB, SAR, PAN, and NIR imagery. FBA organizes supervision into RS semantic anchoring, multi-source bridging, and evidence-grounded scenario tuning. We also introduce HarborEval, an eight-track benchmark assessing perception, spatial understanding, robustness, and generation. Using the same final-task supervision pool, FBA raises the HarborEval score from 57.95 to 70.29 on LLaVA-v1.5 and from 81.09 to 83.37 on Qwen3-VL compared with Direct-SFT. It also outperforms collapsed training and leads the evaluated comparisons on harbor-related VRSBench and RSVQA subsets and expert-scored OpenEval. Stage-wise and supervision-replacement analyses examine the contributions of the supervision roles. A lightweight urban instantiation further supports cross-scenario applicability, with the proposed stage order achieving stronger overall performance than the tested alternatives. Project resources and release updates are available at https://github.com/Z0ngL1ng/filling-before-advancing.
♻ ☆ Learning to Pose Problems: Reasoning-Driven and Solver-Adaptive Data Synthesis
Yongxian Wei, Yilin Zhao, Li Shen, Zixuan Hu, Xinrui Chen, Runxi Cheng, Sinan Du, Hao Yu, Dian Li, Chun Yuan
Data synthesis for training large reasoning models offers a scalable alternative to limited, human-curated datasets, enabling the creation of high-quality data. However, existing approaches face several challenges: (i) indiscriminate generation that ignores the solver's ability and yields low-value problems, or reliance on complex data pipelines to balance problem difficulty; and (ii) a lack of reasoning in problem generation, leading to shallow problem variants. In this paper, we develop a problem generator that reasons explicitly to plan problem directions before synthesis and adapts difficulty to the solver's ability. We recover problem-design CoT from human-authored multi-part questions, using later subquestions as targets to infer the design rationale. These traces initialize the generator, which is then optimized with a seed-conditioned reward based on solver answer consistency. The reward guides difficulty adjustment relative to each seed while favoring problems near the solver's competence boundary. Across 10 mathematical and general reasoning benchmarks, our method outperforms seed-only training by 2.69 and 3.39 percentage points after one and three rounds, respectively. The framework also extends to vision-language models. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/WalkerWorldPeace/Reasoning-Synthesis.
♻ ☆ Auditing Metrics for Synthetic Data Utility: A Cross-Domain Study of Appearance and Geometry
We propose SADGE, a quantitative similarity metric that predicts the performance of synthetic image datasets for common computer vision tasks without downstream model training. Estimating whether a synthetic dataset will lead to a model that performs well on real-world data remains a bottleneck in model development. Existing evaluation metrics (e.g., PSNR, FID, CLIP) primarily measure semantic alignment between real and synthetic images (Appearance Similarity Score). Less commonly, structural similarity between images is considered to assess the domain gap (Geometric Similarity Score). However, to the best of our knowledge there exists no studies that evaluate which similarity metric is the best downstream predictor for a given synthetic dataset. In this paper, we show over a wide variety of different synthetic datasets and downstream tasks that neither appearance nor geometry alone can reliably predict downstream performance; rather, it is their non-linear interplay that dictates synthetic data utility. Specifically, we measure how commonly used Appearance and Geometric Similarity metrics computed between synthetic and real images correlate with downstream performance in object detection, semantic segmentation, and pose estimation. Across five public synthetic-to-real benchmark families and 15 dataset-level variants (79k image pairs), SADGE achieves the strongest association with downstream transfer performance under both linear and rank-based criteria, reaching Pearson r=0.88 and Spearman rho=0.77. We compute for each combination of geometry-based methods and appearance-based approaches SADGE scores across all benchmark families. The best configuration is obtained by fusing DINOv3 appearance similarity with MASt3R geometric consistency through a constrained bilinear interaction, outperforming both the strongest geometry-only baseline and the strongest appearance-only baseline .
♻ ☆ Towards Accurate State Estimation: Motion Dynamics Kalman Filter for 3D Multi-Object Tracking
Robust 3D state estimation in multi-object tracking is crucial for object localization in self-driving vehicles. Misalignment between the Kalman filter (KF) motion model and an object's motion can cause state drift, particularly in distant and occlusion cases. The static motion model assumption in the conventional KF is widely used in 3D MOT due to its low latency; however, its estimation accuracy degrades as the object's motion disaligns with the chosen model due to traffic. Although recent work introduces a multimodel KF that runs multiple motion models simultaneously to improve state robustness, it incurs significant computational overhead, so many studies still favor the constant-motion KF to maintain efficiency. This work addresses this trade-off by introducing a motion dynamics Kalman filter (MD-KF) that accounts for motion variation through temporal modeling of object motion and adaptively scales the contribution of the motion components in the motion model to correct state-prediction drift caused by this variation, while maintaining computational efficiency by retaining a single-model structure. Evaluations on KITTI and the Waymo Open Dataset, complemented by vehicle experiments, show that MD-KF achieves tracking performance comparable to multimodel KF with an average 1.72x speedup, while outperforming it in handling highly distant and prolonged occluded objects.
♻ ☆ ReText: Text Boosts Generalization in Image-Based Person Re-identification WACV 2027
Generalizable image-based person re-identification (Re-ID) aims to recognize individuals across cameras in unseen domains without retraining. While visual features are sensitive to domain shifts, natural language descriptions remain consistent across domains, regardless of lighting changes and other biases. Since well-known multi-camera datasets lack textual descriptions, we update them with captions through a fine-tuned Vision-Language Model (VLM). We propose ReText, a novel method trained with textual supervision to enrich visual features with semantic cues. Besides, inspired by recent findings showing that incorporating single-camera data into training improves generalization, we also adopt this strategy. However, in contrast to such prior works, we exploit not only visual information but also the textual annotations naturally accompanying these samples. Finally, during training, ReText jointly optimizes three tasks: (1) Re-ID, (2) image-text matching, and (3) image reconstruction guided by text. Experiments demonstrate that ReText achieves strong generalization and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on cross-domain Re-ID benchmarks. The expanded multi-camera datasets and VLM weights are publicly available at https://github.com/timmzak/ReText.
comment: Accepted by WACV 2027
♻ ☆ HIMMEL: Hierarchical Interleaved Multi-stream Motion Encoding for Long Video Understanding NeurIPS 2026
Haopeng Jin, Wenlong Zhao, Tao Yu, Tiankun Yang, Zhenyu Guan, ShiQuan Dong, Yujia Yang, Shani Ye, Chubin Chen, Hongzhu Yi, Jinwen Luo
Long video understanding with multimodal language models suffers from three compounding bottlenecks: heavy decode cost to obtain dense RGB frames, token growth with frame count, and weak motion perception under sparse keyframe sampling. Existing remedies either prune visual tokens after decoding, which leaves the expensive RGB pipeline untouched, or they discretise codec motion vectors with a generative tokeniser, which couples motion modelling to a heavy pre-training stage. In this paper we present HIMMEL, a hierarchical video-language framework that allocates semantic and motion capacity along separate paths. A small set of sparse semantic anchor frames is routed to the expensive host ViT to ground object identity and scene layout, while the far denser inter-frame intervals are encoded by a lightweight compressed-domain tri-stream adapter that distils motion evidence from motion-vector maps, residual maps, and an I-frame context branch into aligned motion tokens. These tokens are injected into the LLM via a differentiable placeholder mechanism, after a dedicated Stage 1 contrastive alignment that places the motion representation in a geometry compatible with the frozen visual backbone. We further show that an InfoNCE alignment objective beats MSE regression by +1.5 pp. On Video-MME, HIMMEL surpasses the dense 32-frame baseline by +2.3 pp (61.2 to 63.5%) while using 3.6 times fewer context tokens and running end-to-end in 1.03 s per question instead of 2.75 s. Switching to a stronger Qwen3-VL-8B host pushes HIMMEL to 64.9%, narrowing the gap to much larger proprietary systems while keeping inference on a single NVIDIA H20 GPU. Extensive ablations across stream composition, motion-encoder family, fusion mode, alignment objective, anchor count, LoRA rank, and video duration confirm that the full tri-stream contributes to the observed gains, and that the benefit grows with video length.
comment: NeurIPS 2026 Main. Code: https://github.com/Sunbeam23333/HIMMEL
♻ ☆ MID: Mask-Image Distributional Divergence for Evaluating Medical Image Segmentation
Vincenzo Marcianò, Xiaoming Zhang, Gianluca Guglielmo, Michela Antonelli, Sebastien Ourselin, Maria A. Zuluaga
Current evaluation protocols for medical image segmentation remain largely anchored in sample-wise comparisons, e.g., Dice and Hausdorff distance, which require each prediction to be paired with a ground-truth mask. Yet two limitations arise in practice: they are inapplicable when predictions are made on unlabeled data; and even when annotations are available, they cannot assess whether a collection of predictions matches the distributional structure of the ground-truth population. We introduce MID (Mask-Image Distributional Divergence), a distribution-level evaluation metric for medical image segmentation. MID builds upon the observation that segmentation quality is a property of the joint image-mask distribution: a mask may be anatomically plausible in isolation yet incorrect for the image it accompanies. MID compares the joint distribution of images and masks between a reference set and a set of predictions, without requiring sample-wise correspondence. This captures both mask realism and image-mask consistency. We evaluate MID across 13 publicly available datasets spanning CT, MRI, and MRA. Under anatomically realistic corruptions across 56 organ groups, MID tracks mean Dice and Hausdorff distance without per-sample ground-truth pairing. MID also detects distributional shifts across modalities and anatomies, identifies image-mask misalignment through controlled shuffling experiments, and produces reliable model rankings across real segmentation models. Official implementation available at github.com/erc-caravel/pytorch-mid
♻ ☆ FADRA: Frequency-Aware Diffusion with Residual Adaptation for Video Face Restoration
Video face restoration (VFR) aims to recover high-quality and temporally consistent facial details from severely degraded video sequences; however, existing methods still struggle to balance spatial fidelity and temporal coherence under complex degradations. To address this, we propose FADRA, a frequency-aware diffusion framework with iterative residual adaptation specifically tailored for robust VFR. We first leverage the strong temporal consistency of a pre-trained text-to-video diffusion model and introduce lightweight LoRA adapters together with a Low-Quality (LQ) Pixel-Alignment Feature Fusion module to efficiently adapt the frozen generative prior to the VFR task. To further adapt the frozen diffusion backbone to the downstream VFR task beyond LoRA-based adaptation, we introduce a Repeated Residual Adaptation Head (RRAH) for step-wise residual refinement after the diffusion backbone. To make this refinement explicitly guided by the degraded observation, RRAH further takes the LQ latent together with the current velocity prediction as input, allowing the model to repeatedly revisit LQ cues and predict residual updates at each flow-matching step. This LQ-guided repeated residual adaptation helps recover fine facial details while preserving the inherent temporal priors of the pre-trained model. Furthermore, to ensure the structural integrity of perceptually important details, we introduce a Frequency-Aware Loss that provides explicit supervision across multiple spectral bands, emphasizing visually sensitive frequency components that are crucial for perceptual quality and prone to temporal jittering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FADRA recovers better facial structures and produces more temporally consistent videos than state-of-the-art methods, leading to clear gains in both quantitative metrics and visual perception. Our project page is available.
♻ ☆ PanoDiff-SR: Synthesizing Dental Panoramic Radiographs using Diffusion and Super-resolution
Interest in generating realistic synthetic medical images has grown in recent years. Such datasets can mitigate the scarcity of public data for artificial intelligence research and support education. Work on synthesizing dental panoramic radiographs (PRs) has so far relied almost exclusively on generative adversarial networks (GANs), and three limitations recur: the synthesized field of view is often restricted to a cropped dentoalveolar region rather than a complete PR; observer studies of GAN-generated PRs report that clinicians still identify synthetic images with accuracies of roughly 78-82%, implying persistent visible giveaways; and adversarial training remains sensitive to instability and mode collapse. Generating a full-size PR directly at diagnostic resolution with a diffusion model is an alternative, but sampling at that resolution is costly. We therefore present PanoDiff-SR, an end-to-end two-stage pipeline developed and evaluated specifically for panoramic radiography: a denoising diffusion implicit model (PanoDiff) generates a low-resolution (LR) seed PR ($256\times128$), which a fine-tuned hybrid attention transformer (HAT) super-resolution (SR) stage upscales to a high-resolution (HR) PR of $1024\times512$. Decoupling the expensive generative step from the resolution step yields complete, full-arch PRs at diagnostic resolution on a single 47 GB GPU. The Fréchet inception distance between 7243 real and synthetic HR images is 40.5. Inception scores were 2.68, 2.38, 2.90 and 2.98 for real HR, synthetic HR, real LR and synthetic LR images, respectively. Six clinical experts, each evaluating 100 synthetic and 100 real PRs under a time limit, distinguished real from synthetic images with an average accuracy of 68.5% (50% corresponds to random guessing), substantially closer to chance than reported for GAN-based studies. Project page: https://s4nyam.github.io/panodiff/
comment: 28 pages, 19 figures, 11 tables. Project page: https://s4nyam.github.io/panodiff/ Code: https://github.com/s4nyam/PanoDiff
♻ ☆ RUSplatting: Robust 3D Gaussian Splatting for Sparse-View Underwater Scene Reconstruction BMVC 2025
Reconstructing high-fidelity underwater scenes remains a challenging task due to light absorption, scattering, and limited visibility inherent in aquatic environments. This paper presents an enhanced Gaussian Splatting-based framework that improves both the visual quality and geometric accuracy of deep underwater rendering. We propose decoupled learning for RGB channels, guided by the physics of underwater attenuation, to enable more accurate colour restoration. To address sparse-view limitations and improve view consistency, we introduce a frame interpolation strategy with a novel adaptive weighting scheme. Additionally, we introduce a new loss function aimed at reducing noise while preserving edges, which is essential for deep-sea content. We also release a newly collected dataset, Submerged3D, captured specifically in deep-sea environments. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods with PSNR gains up to 1.90dB, delivering superior perceptual quality and robustness, and offering promising directions for marine robotics and underwater visual analytics. The code of RUSplatting is available at https://github.com/theflash987/RUSplatting and the dataset Submerged3D can be downloaded at https://zenodo.org/records/15482420.
comment: Accepted by BMVC 2025
♻ ☆ The First Assessment of PhiSat-2 Imagery for Monocular Building Height Estimation
PhiSat-2 provides multispectral observations at a 4.75m spatial resolution across geographically diverse scenes, offering a new source of remote sensing imagery for monocular building-height estimation. To comprehensively assess its utility, this study introduces the PhiSat-2--Height Dataset (PHDataset) and the Two-Stream Ordinal Network (TSONet). PHDataset integrates global PhiSat-2 imagery with open building-height references and contains 9475 co-registered patch pairs from 26 cities worldwide. In TSONet, multiscale decoupled height representation (MDHR) separates adaptive bin generation from spatial assignment, while footprint-conditioned height reconstruction (FCHR) incorporates footprint guidance at feature and reconstruction levels. Under city-disjoint evaluation, TSONet reduces building RMSE and MAE by 3.64% and 4.49%, respectively, relative to the most accurate comparison method originally designed for building-height estimation, while maintaining similar height-derived footprint IoU. Ablations support the combined design for height accuracy and footprint consistency. PhiSat-2 reduces building RMSE by 3.73% and 6.05% relative to the evaluated Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8 configurations, respectively, with all seven bands providing the lowest building-height errors among its tested band subsets. LiDAR-based testing supports PHDataset-style supervision in a held-out city, while selected patch comparisons show finer urban height patterns than coarser global products. These findings highlight the value of PhiSat-2 spatial-spectral information for urban building height mapping, with PHDataset and TSONet providing a foundation for further development.
♻ ☆ LCPNet: Latent Consistent Proximal Unfolding Network for Infrared Small Target Detection
Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) aims to identify long distance small targets from complex infrared backgrounds, and is a fundamental task in remote sensing. Deep learning methods have improved IRSTD by learning discriminative image-to-mask mappings, but such feed-forward designs often underuse physical decomposition structure between targets and backgrounds. Deep unfolding methods partially address this issue by embedding model-driven iterations into neural networks, yet existing designs still operate mainly in image domain and use updates and memory mechanisms that are not fully coupled with underlying optimization process. To address these limitations, we propose Latent Consistent Proximal unfolding network (LCPNet). First, we verify that low-rank prior remains valid in latent representations and perform unfolding in this space, preserving physical constraint while avoiding repeated compression of intermediate states. Second, we derive a Latent Consistent Proximal (LCP) solver that evolves each latent variable from its previous state rather than reconstructing through an indirect residual, and stabilizes small target updates through task-adaptive normalization and gain control. Third, we introduce Shared Optimization Memory (SOM), a common historical state shared by all decomposition variables to provide coordinated guidance across unfolding stages. Extensive experiments on four public benchmarks demonstrate that LCPNet achieves accurate and robust detection with low false-alarm rates, together with competitive efficiency among high-accuracy deep unfolding methods. Model and code are available at Model and code are available at https://github.com/Tianfang-Zhang/LCPNet.
♻ ☆ Strip Convolution and Direction-Aware Exclusion Loss for Oriented Ship Detection
Oriented ship detection in very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing imagery remains challenging due to elongated hull geometry and dense target distributions in complex port scenes. Existing methods typically address geometric representation and duplicate suppression separately. To jointly tackle these issues, we propose an oriented ship detector with two complementary components. The C3k2_Strip module employs orthogonal strip convolutions to better capture elongated hull structures, while the Class-Aware Direction-Aware Exclusion Loss (CA-DAEL) suppresses redundant predictions using class, direction, and confidence cues. Experiments on HRSC2016 and DIOR-R achieve 78.45% and 53.71% mAP50:95, respectively, with only 2.91M parameters. On HRSC2016, the proposed method improves mAP50:95 by 6.32 percentage points over the YOLOv11-OBB baseline, demonstrating its effectiveness for accurate oriented ship detection.
comment: 17 pages, 6 figures. Submitted to International Journal of Remote Sensing
♻ ☆ IKMo: Image-Keyframed Motion Generation with Trajectory-Pose Conditioned Motion Diffusion Model ICME 2026
While text-to-motion generation is mainstream, integrating explicit spatial constraints has become a standard solution for precise animation. Existing state-of-the-art models are tailored for professional workflows, effectively processing high-quality, pre-aligned 3D inputs via unified conditioning mechanisms. However, this strictly aligned setting restricts accessibility for general users who rely on unaligned, in-the-wild 2D reference images. This accessible scenario introduces a fundamental conflict: heterogeneous geometric constraints, where user-defined global trajectories clash with local image-derived poses. To resolve this coordinate mismatch, we propose TPMDM, a diffusion model featuring a decoupled parallel control strategy that explicitly isolates and aligns these divergent signals. Furthermore, we introduce IKMo, a holistic framework that synergizes TPMDM with a VLM-powered multi-agent system. By bridging the semantic-geometric gap, IKMo translates user-friendly inputs into explicit motion constraints to drive the diffusion backbone. Experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML demonstrate that our method establishes a new state-of-the-art in the task of generating motions under heterogeneous trajectory and keyframe pose constraints.
comment: 6 pages; accepted to ICME 2026 (Spotlight). Camera-ready version with updated author list and abstract
♻ ☆ SceneReVis: A Self-Reflective Vision-Grounded Framework for 3D Indoor Scene Synthesis via Multi-Turn RL
Current one-pass 3D scene synthesis methods often suffer from spatial hallucinations, such as collisions, due to a lack of deliberative reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce SceneReVis, a vision-grounded self-reflection framework that employs an iterative "diagnose-and-act" loop to explicitly intercept and resolve spatial conflicts using multi-modal feedback. To support this step-wise paradigm, we construct SceneChain-12k, a large-scale dataset of causal construction trajectories derived through a novel reverse engineering pipeline. We further propose a two-stage training recipe that transitions from Supervised Fine-Tuning to Agentic Reinforcement Learning, evolving the model into an active spatial planner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SceneReVis achieves state-of-the-art performance in high-fidelity generation and goal-oriented optimization, with improved transfer to underrepresented room categories in the dataset and promising potential for extension to out-of-distribution room types.
comment: 9 pages; accepted to ACM Multimedia 2026 (Oral). Updated to the camera-ready version
♻ ☆ Risk-Routed Implicit Boundary Refinement for Robust Ultrasound Image Segmentation
Jingguo Qu, Xinyang Han, Xiang Wang, Yuqi Yang, Tonghuan Xiao, Sheng Ning, Jing Qin, Ann Dorothy King, Winnie Chiu-Wing Chu, Jing Cai, Michael Ying
Accurate boundary delineation in medical ultrasound (US) images remains challenging because of speckle noise, low contrast, acoustic shadowing, and acquisition variability. We propose Risk-routed Implicit Boundary Refinement (RIBR), a compact framework that refines convolutional segmentation through spatially weighted implicit residuals. A coordinate-conditioned implicit branch uses regional features to predict logit corrections, and a learned gate controls their contribution using predictive uncertainty and local appearance. Geometry- and speckle-aware regularization provides contour supervision and discourages probability fluctuations away from boundaries. We compare RIBR with ten baselines on nine datasets covering lymph nodes, breast lesions, thyroid nodules, and prostate, including four external lymph-node and breast cohorts. Across three seeds, RIBR achieves the best overall dataset macro-average among the evaluated configurations, with $76.67{\pm}0.42\%$ Dice and a 95th-percentile Hausdorff distance (HD95) of $29.55{\pm}0.55$ pixels on the resized evaluation grid. It obtains the lowest HD95 on all nine datasets, with task-dependent Dice rankings. These results support controlled implicit residual refinement for boundary-sensitive US segmentation. Source code is available at https://github.com/jinggqu/ribr.
♻ ☆ Order Matters: Competition-Guided Query Ordering for RNN-Based Object Detection NeurIPS 2026
DETR-style detectors use one-to-one bipartite matching during training to assign object queries to ground-truth objects, enabling end-to-end set prediction without non-maximum suppression (NMS). However, without an explicit de-duplication procedure, multiple queries can still produce highly similar hypotheses for the same object, making training unstable and predictions less decisive. Inspired by the sequential ordering of NMS, we propose DETRNN, a plug-and-play module that turns unordered object queries into a competition-aware sequence for recurrent refinement. DETRNN builds an explicit confidence-and-similarity based order from prior predictions, then refines queries with an RNN along this order to model competition inside the decoder. This ordered recurrent refinement reduces redundant predictions, stabilizes optimization, and improves final detection accuracy. Experiments on multiple DETR-style detectors show consistent gains with comparable efficiency. Code repository: https://github.com/nigelwoo2008-coder/DETRNN.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ Text-to-Image Synthesis: A Decade Survey
Text-to-image synthesis (T2I) focuses on generating high-quality images from textual descriptions In this survey, we review 490 papers on T2I spanning the past decade, with representative advances covered through 2026. We start by briefly introducing how GANs, autoregressive models, and diffusion models have been used for image generation, and we additionally examine the shared components whose evolution has driven recent progress. Building on this foundation, we discuss the development of these models for T2I and organize cutting-edge research by problem rather than by chronology alone, covering controllability, personalized and identity-preserving generation, instruction-based image editing, preference alignment and post-training with human and AI feedback, efficiency, safety, and consistency in content and spatial relationships. We further review unified multimodal understanding-and-generation models, summarize the datasets and evaluation metrics commonly used in T2I research, and provide a comparative discussion of the three paradigms together with their respective trade-offs. Finally, we discuss the potential applications of T2I within AIGC, along with the challenges and forward-looking research opportunities in this field.
comment: In this survey, we review over 490 recent works on T2I
♻ ☆ Beyond Sparse Captions: Aligning Slide-Level Text and Patch-Level Vision in Pathology
Daniel Shao, Dongmin Bang, Luca L. Weishaupt, Sophia J. Wagner, Nic G. Reitsam, Ming Y. Lu, Long P. Le, Richard J. Chen, Faisal Mahmood
Contrastive vision-language (VL) pretraining in computational pathology has generally relied on curated image-caption datasets sourced from social media, educational videos, and research publications. These corpora are sparse relative to the diversity of tissue morphology and difficult to scale further, as pathologists do not routinely produce descriptive captions in clinical practice. We propose to instead leverage slide-level pathology reports which can be generated during routine diagnostic workflows in a scalable manner. A key challenge in this weakly-supervised setting is that pathology reports describe macroscopic, diagnostic findings while patch-level visual features describe microscopic findings. We introduce Locked Image Multiple Instance PreTraining (LIMIT), which addresses this gap by freezing a pretrained vision encoder and fine-tuning only the text encoder: report embeddings serve as cross-attention queries over bags of patch features, producing report-conditioned slide representations optimized via InfoNCE. Using LIMIT, we establish CONCH-Z, which aligns the text encoder of CONCH v1.5 to 335k clinical reports. Evaluated across 22 tasks spanning patch-level classification, tumor detection, and slide-level subtyping, CONCH-Z establishes state-of-the-art zero-shot performance over VL encoders trained on curated caption datasets, while simultaneously closing the gap with slide-level foundation models trained with substantially more parameters and compute. The code and model is available at https://github.com/mahmoodlab/LIMIT.
comment: Neurips 2026 Spotlight
♻ ☆ AI Knows Where You Are: Exposure, Bias, and Inference in Multimodal Geolocation with KoreaGEO
Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled accurate image-based geolocation, raising serious concerns about location privacy risks in everyday social media posts. Yet, a systematic evaluation of such risks is still lacking: existing benchmarks show coarse granularity, linguistic bias, and a neglect of multimodal privacy risks. To address these gaps, we introduce KoreaGEO, the first fine-grained, multimodal, and privacy-aware benchmark for geolocation, built on Korean street views. The benchmark covers four socio-spatial clusters and nine place types with rich contextual annotations and two captioning styles that simulate real-world privacy exposure. To evaluate mainstream VLMs, we design a three-path protocol spanning image-only, functional-caption, and high-risk-caption inputs, enabling systematic analysis of localization accuracy, spatial bias, and reasoning behavior. Results show that input modality exerts a stronger influence on localization precision and privacy exposure than model scale or architecture, with high-risk captions substantially boosting accuracy. Moreover, they highlight structural prediction biases toward core cities.
♻ ☆ LiFR v2: Completion-Augmented Event Propagation for High-Rate Dense Prediction
Tao Wan, Xiaoshan Wu, Yifei Yu, Bo Wang, Xiaoyang Lyu, Muxin Liu, Aoxuan Pan, Zhongrui Wang, Xiaojuan Qi
High-rate dense perception in dynamic environments is limited by the low update rate of RGB cameras, as rapid scene changes can occur between frames. Event cameras offer temporally dense but spatially sparse measurements, complementary to spatially dense RGB observations. Direct fusion cannot fully exploit this complementarity, while event-guided propagation fails on newly appearing or disoccluded regions without valid RGB support. We present LiFR v2, a unified propagation-completion-memory framework for causal anytime and streaming dense prediction from an RGB keyframe and events. LiFR v2 introduces an Event-Guided Completion Module (EGCM) to recover task-relevant representations where propagation is unsupported, and a History Retrieval Module (HRM) to reuse completed representations across successive queries. The framework supports semantic segmentation, monocular depth estimation, and multi-task dense prediction, and we further introduce SHF-Emerge to evaluate rapid object emergence and disocclusion. LiFR v2 achieves 74.37% mIoU on DSEC and 56.13% on SHF-Emerge, improving LiFR-Seg by 1.85 percentage points on the latter, while reducing SHF-Emerge depth RMSE from 1.564 m to 1.118 m over the propagation baseline. It also exceeds 100 FPS for both segmentation and depth, demonstrating accurate and efficient high-rate perception beyond RGB frame rates.
comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, 6 tables
♻ ☆ MIRAGE: Stealthy Visual Prompt Injection for Vulnerability Detection in Web Agents
Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based web agents provide practical, high-precision solutions for visual browser automation; however, they inherently expand the attack surface, introducing novel vision-based vulnerabilities. Existing adversarial evaluations targeting these agents frequently rely on permissive threat models and visually conspicuous artifacts. In this paper, we investigate a constrained vulnerability detection setting: a trusted web platform where the evaluator acts solely as an unprivileged third party, such as a merchant or advertiser, controlling only a semantically legitimate, spatially constrained region, such as an ad slot, a sponsored card, or a localized widget. Operating under these realistic constraints, we propose MIRAGE, a novel visual indirect prompt injection framework for targeted next-action hijacking. Our approach leverages diffusion models to generate perceptually benign adversarial images strictly confined to the attacker-controlled boundaries permitted by the trusted service provider. To maximize attack efficacy within such a restrictive setting, we introduce a robust optimization technique combining curvature-aware adversarial diffusion guidance with sparse, dark-pixel residual perturbations. Comprehensive evaluations against prominent MLLM web agent frameworks, specifically SeeAct and OpenClaw, empirically demonstrate the potency, realism, and stealth of our proposed MIRAGE.
♻ ☆ InstantFusion: A Shared Latent Interface for Heterogeneous Image Generators
Diffusion/flow models have emerged as the de facto paradigms for image generation, giving rise to a diverse family of modern generators with increasingly heterogeneous architectures and representations. Despite their remarkable generation capabilities, the cross-model alignment of latent representations and the consistency of their underlying denoising dynamics remain underexplored. In this work, we uncover an intriguing cross-model compatibility: independently trained generators exhibit similar latent spatial organization, while directly handing off intermediate states between unaligned models can still preserve coarse visual content. Motivated by these observations, we propose InstantFusion, a lightweight shared latent interface that connects the denoising trajectories of heterogeneous image generators. Specifically, to enable flexible cross-model state translation, model-specific Latent AutoEncoders (LAEs) are introduced to project intermediate states from different generators into a shared latent space and decode them into the latent space of a target generator. This shared space is constrained by two complementary objectives: aligning intermediate states derived from the same image at matched noise levels and synchronizing their corresponding local denoising velocities. Once trained, InstantFusion allows denoising to seamlessly transition across frozen generators without requiring a dedicated mapping for every model pair. The versatility of InstantFusion is demonstrated across acceleration, multi-preference composition, cross-architecture on-policy distillation, and cross-model composition, achieving competitive performance across these diverse settings.
comment: 26 pages, 20 figures
♻ ☆ MorphoBranch: A Fine-Structure-Preserving Workbench for Morphometric Analysis of Branched Cellular Structures
Background and Objectives: Fluorescence-labeled cellular arbors provide readouts of neuronal and microglial morphology, but fine and weakly labeled processes are prone to fragmentation and false connections that bias skeleton-based measurements. We present MorphoBranch, a fine-structure-preserving, human-reviewable workbench for morphometry of branched cellular structures. Methods: MorphoBranch combines a deterministic Morphometry Engine with an LLM-assisted Refinement Engine. The Mor- phometry Engine implements an image-to-graph workflow integrating multiscale structural evidence extraction, hysteresis segmen- tation, evidence-constrained skeleton refinement, and graph-based morphometry. The Refinement Engine maps natural-language requests to registered actions for parameter adjustment, preview execution, metric reporting, and unsupported-request handling, while image processing and quantitative computation remain deterministic and reviewable. Results: MorphoBranch was evaluated on two public neuronal axon datasets, AxonMIP and AxonStack, and the in-house Cell- Morph dataset of microglial fluorescence images. It achieved the highest Skeleton F1 and clDice and the lowest length-estimation error among the evaluated methods on all three datasets, while also achieving the highest Dice and IoU on AxonMIP and Axon- Stack. Across 150 natural-language tasks, the Refinement Engine achieved a 94.0% end-to-end success rate. Conclusions: These results demonstrate that MorphoBranch provides a reproducible, human-reviewable workflow for mor- phometric analysis of branched cellular structures. It supports fine-structure-preserving quantification across neuronal axon and microglial fluorescence images while maintaining inspectable and reproducible analysis workflows.
comment: 12 pages, 9 figures
♻ ☆ Frame Evidence:A Benchmark for Reference Frames and Visual Evidence in Multi-Image Spatial Reasoning
Chunxi Luo, Qishuai Ding, Xingchen Peng, Hengwei Ye, Ke Zhang, Wenxin Lian, Tianyi Lu, Chunlong Yu, Zhenya Lin
A spatial answer depends on the reference frame specified in language and its supporting visual evidence. Item accuracy alone obscures whether correctness persists when either changes. We introduce Frame Evidence, a benchmark of 320 matched triplets and 960 Chinese multiple-choice questions from captured and rendered scenes. One family compares three grounded reference frames over fixed images. The other pairs image deletion annotated as insufficient with answer-preserving addition. Joint metrics require correct answers across all three frames and paired evidence variants. Across 20 configurations on 288 held-out questions, GPT three-shot reaches 50.00\% item accuracy, but the best three-frame group accuracy is 5/48 (10.42\%), reached by GPT two-shot. Few-shot prompting and task-specific adaptation improve item accuracy without consistently improving joint correctness. Input controls show where images support matched success, while repeated executions reveal answer instability beneath similar scores.
♻ ☆ EV-JEPA: Elastic V-JEPA for Any Device and Cross-Device Inference
Anxhelo Diko, Jieyu Lin, Stefano Ambrogio, Ziyun Li, Mahmoud Assran, Théo Moutakanni, Barbara De Salvo, Chiao Liu
Foundation models like V-JEPA are increasingly deployed across a heterogeneous edge-cloud continuum spanning smart glasses, phones, robots, and servers. Yet, they are typically trained as rigid, fixed-capacity networks bound to one device, supporting neither reconfigurable compute budgets nor collaborative execution. Existing approaches address only one axis at a time: slimmable and NAS-based methods provide width elasticity but assume single-device inference, whereas split-computing methods enable cross-device collaboration only for fixed partitions and static capacities. We introduce Elastic V-JEPA (EV-JEPA), a single model trained once and deployable everywhere along the continuum. Its width is reconfigurable, and it is natively partitionable across heterogeneous devices. At its core is Transition-Aware Triplet Training (T3). At each step we pick a narrow and a wide width, and train three paths: each width alone, plus a hybrid path that runs the early layers narrow and the rest wide. The hybrid switch point is where one device hands off to another, so the same weights learn both single-device and cross-device execution. Across various benchmarks, EV-JEPA falls within 1 accuracy point of independently trained baselines while improving over previous elastic training approaches by up to 11 accuracy points. Narrow-to-wide cross-device hybrid execution recovers to within 1.1 points of the highest-capacity standalone model and supports many-to-one, any-to-any, and variable-split configurations. Finally, we show that the elastic principle extends beyond the backbone to an elastic token compression mechanism that exposes controllable trade-offs among on-device computation, latency, and accuracy.
♻ ☆ RoboAtlas: Contextual Active SLAM
Alexander Schperberg, Shivam K. Panda, Abraham P. Vinod, Bhagawan Rokaha, M. K. Jawed, Stefano Di Cairano
We present RoboAtlas, a contextual Active SLAM framework that adaptively balances geometric exploration and semantic reasoning using a scalable 3D semantic mapping system, OpenRoboVox. RoboAtlas integrates frontier exploration, global semantic-map reasoning, and egocentric VLM-based reasoning through a contextual multi-armed bandit that transitions from exploration to semantically guided navigation as scene understanding improves. We evaluate the system in simulation and on a Unitree Go2 robot in large-scale real-world environments exceeding 1800 m2 with approx. 30k mapped semantic instances, achieving a 100% task success rate. On the GOAT-Bench "Val Unseen" benchmark, RoboAtlas achieves state-of-the-art performance with highest reported success rate (SR) of 90.6%, using GPT-4o, improving over the strongest prior baseline by 17.8 percentage points in SR. Using the much smaller Qwen2.5-VL-7B model, it still achieves 88.8% SR, outperforming all baselines using GPT-4o in SR, and revealing the importance of the information gained by our semantic mapping framework over simply replacing the underlying foundation model. The results demonstrate that grounding foundation models with large-scale 3D semantic maps enables robust and efficient contextual Active SLAM.
comment: Alexander Schperberg and Shivam K. Panda made equal contribution
♻ ☆ Spectrum Matching: a Unified Perspective for Superior Diffusability in Latent Diffusion
Mang Ning, Mingxiao Li, Le Zhang, Lanmiao Liu, Matthew B. Blaschko, Albert Ali Salah, Itir Onal Ertugrul
In this paper, we study the diffusability (learnability) of variational autoencoders (VAEs) in latent diffusion. We first derive distribution-free bounds on the maximum achievable reduction in pixel-space denoising loss. Under a power-law power spectral density (PSD), these bounds establish an ordering between sufficiently separated frequencies, with larger achievable reductions at lower frequencies. Motivated by this analysis and measurements of a trained pixel diffusion model, we seek to make low-frequency denoising gains useful for generating perceptually meaningful semantic content in latent diffusion. We propose the Spectrum Matching Hypothesis: latents with superior diffusability should (i) follow a flattened power-law PSD (Encoding Spectrum Matching, ESM) and (ii) preserve frequency-to-frequency semantic correspondence through the decoder (Decoding Spectrum Matching, DSM). In practice, we apply ESM by matching the PSD between images and latents, and DSM via shared spectral masking with frequency-aligned reconstruction. Importantly, Spectrum Matching clarifies prior observations of over-noisy or over-smoothed latents and provides a unified spectral interpretation of prior methods, including VA-VAE and EQ-VAE. Experiments suggest that Spectrum Matching yields superior diffusion generation on CelebA and ImageNet datasets, and outperforms prior approaches. Finally, we extend the spectral view to representation alignment (REPA): we show that the directional spectral energy of the target representation is crucial for REPA, and propose a DoG-based method to further improve the performance of REPA. Our code is available at https://github.com/forever208/SpectrumMatching.
comment: we release multiVAE repo, which supports vanilla SD-VAE, EQ-VAE, VA-VAE and our DSM-AE
♻ ☆ KoViDoRe: A Benchmark for Korean Visual Document Retrieval
Recent advances in multimodal retrieval have improved the ability to retrieve information from visually rich documents such as PDFs and reports. However, existing benchmarks remain largely centered on English and provide limited coverage of Korean visual documents with complex structures. Furthermore, most existing Korean resources primarily evaluate single-page retrieval, failing to capture realistic scenarios that require evidence aggregation across multiple pages. To address these gaps, we introduce KoViDoRe, a benchmark for Korean visual document retrieval. The dataset is constructed from publicly available Korean documents with diverse layouts, including tables, figures, and multi-column structures. We develop a multi-stage data curation pipeline consisting of structured document parsing, synthetic query generation using both summary-based and context-based strategies, and relevance mapping with human verification. Using KoViDoRe, we evaluate a wide range of multimodal retrieval models and observe that current models struggle to effectively handle Korean visual document retrieval, particularly in settings involving structured content and diverse query types. Motivated by this finding, we further curate a large-scale training dataset, Ko-VDR Train Public, to support the development of retrieval models tailored to Korean visual documents. Together, KoViDoRe and Ko-VDR Train Public provide a unified benchmark and training resource for Korean visual document retrieval.
comment: v2: title updated