Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 85
☆ SpaceTimePilot: Generative Rendering of Dynamic Scenes Across Space and Time
Zhening Huang, Hyeonho Jeong, Xuelin Chen, Yulia Gryaditskaya, Tuanfeng Y. Wang, Joan Lasenby, Chun-Hao Huang
We present SpaceTimePilot, a video diffusion model that disentangles space and time for controllable generative rendering. Given a monocular video, SpaceTimePilot can independently alter the camera viewpoint and the motion sequence within the generative process, re-rendering the scene for continuous and arbitrary exploration across space and time. To achieve this, we introduce an effective animation time-embedding mechanism in the diffusion process, allowing explicit control of the output video's motion sequence with respect to that of the source video. As no datasets provide paired videos of the same dynamic scene with continuous temporal variations, we propose a simple yet effective temporal-warping training scheme that repurposes existing multi-view datasets to mimic temporal differences. This strategy effectively supervises the model to learn temporal control and achieve robust space-time disentanglement. To further enhance the precision of dual control, we introduce two additional components: an improved camera-conditioning mechanism that allows altering the camera from the first frame, and CamxTime, the first synthetic space-and-time full-coverage rendering dataset that provides fully free space-time video trajectories within a scene. Joint training on the temporal-warping scheme and the CamxTime dataset yields more precise temporal control. We evaluate SpaceTimePilot on both real-world and synthetic data, demonstrating clear space-time disentanglement and strong results compared to prior work. Project page: https://zheninghuang.github.io/Space-Time-Pilot/ Code: https://github.com/ZheningHuang/spacetimepilot
comment: Project page: https://zheninghuang.github.io/Space-Time-Pilot/ Code: https://github.com/ZheningHuang/spacetimepilot
☆ GaMO: Geometry-aware Multi-view Diffusion Outpainting for Sparse-View 3D Reconstruction
Recent advances in 3D reconstruction have achieved remarkable progress in high-quality scene capture from dense multi-view imagery, yet struggle when input views are limited. Various approaches, including regularization techniques, semantic priors, and geometric constraints, have been implemented to address this challenge. Latest diffusion-based methods have demonstrated substantial improvements by generating novel views from new camera poses to augment training data, surpassing earlier regularization and prior-based techniques. Despite this progress, we identify three critical limitations in these state-of-the-art approaches: inadequate coverage beyond known view peripheries, geometric inconsistencies across generated views, and computationally expensive pipelines. We introduce GaMO (Geometry-aware Multi-view Outpainter), a framework that reformulates sparse-view reconstruction through multi-view outpainting. Instead of generating new viewpoints, GaMO expands the field of view from existing camera poses, which inherently preserves geometric consistency while providing broader scene coverage. Our approach employs multi-view conditioning and geometry-aware denoising strategies in a zero-shot manner without training. Extensive experiments on Replica and ScanNet++ demonstrate state-of-the-art reconstruction quality across 3, 6, and 9 input views, outperforming prior methods in PSNR and LPIPS, while achieving a $25\times$ speedup over SOTA diffusion-based methods with processing time under 10 minutes. Project page: https://yichuanh.github.io/GaMO/
comment: Project page: https://yichuanh.github.io/GaMO/
☆ Edit3r: Instant 3D Scene Editing from Sparse Unposed Images
We present Edit3r, a feed-forward framework that reconstructs and edits 3D scenes in a single pass from unposed, view-inconsistent, instruction-edited images. Unlike prior methods requiring per-scene optimization, Edit3r directly predicts instruction-aligned 3D edits, enabling fast and photorealistic rendering without optimization or pose estimation. A key challenge in training such a model lies in the absence of multi-view consistent edited images for supervision. We address this with (i) a SAM2-based recoloring strategy that generates reliable, cross-view-consistent supervision, and (ii) an asymmetric input strategy that pairs a recolored reference view with raw auxiliary views, encouraging the network to fuse and align disparate observations. At inference, our model effectively handles images edited by 2D methods such as InstructPix2Pix, despite not being exposed to such edits during training. For large-scale quantitative evaluation, we introduce DL3DV-Edit-Bench, a benchmark built on the DL3DV test split, featuring 20 diverse scenes, 4 edit types and 100 edits in total. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative results show that Edit3r achieves superior semantic alignment and enhanced 3D consistency compared to recent baselines, while operating at significantly higher inference speed, making it promising for real-time 3D editing applications.
comment: Project page: https://edit3r.github.io/edit3r/
☆ FineTec: Fine-Grained Action Recognition Under Temporal Corruption via Skeleton Decomposition and Sequence Completion AAAI 2026
Recognizing fine-grained actions from temporally corrupted skeleton sequences remains a significant challenge, particularly in real-world scenarios where online pose estimation often yields substantial missing data. Existing methods often struggle to accurately recover temporal dynamics and fine-grained spatial structures, resulting in the loss of subtle motion cues crucial for distinguishing similar actions. To address this, we propose FineTec, a unified framework for Fine-grained action recognition under Temporal Corruption. FineTec first restores a base skeleton sequence from corrupted input using context-aware completion with diverse temporal masking. Next, a skeleton-based spatial decomposition module partitions the skeleton into five semantic regions, further divides them into dynamic and static subgroups based on motion variance, and generates two augmented skeleton sequences via targeted perturbation. These, along with the base sequence, are then processed by a physics-driven estimation module, which utilizes Lagrangian dynamics to estimate joint accelerations. Finally, both the fused skeleton position sequence and the fused acceleration sequence are jointly fed into a GCN-based action recognition head. Extensive experiments on both coarse-grained (NTU-60, NTU-120) and fine-grained (Gym99, Gym288) benchmarks show that FineTec significantly outperforms previous methods under various levels of temporal corruption. Specifically, FineTec achieves top-1 accuracies of 89.1% and 78.1% on the challenging Gym99-severe and Gym288-severe settings, respectively, demonstrating its robustness and generalizability. Code and datasets could be found at https://smartdianlab.github.io/projects-FineTec/.
comment: Accepted by AAAI 2026
☆ From Inpainting to Editing: A Self-Bootstrapping Framework for Context-Rich Visual Dubbing
Xu He, Haoxian Zhang, Hejia Chen, Changyuan Zheng, Liyang Chen, Songlin Tang, Jiehui Huang, Xiaoqiang Liu, Pengfei Wan, Zhiyong Wu
Audio-driven visual dubbing aims to synchronize a video's lip movements with new speech, but is fundamentally challenged by the lack of ideal training data: paired videos where only a subject's lip movements differ while all other visual conditions are identical. Existing methods circumvent this with a mask-based inpainting paradigm, where an incomplete visual conditioning forces models to simultaneously hallucinate missing content and sync lips, leading to visual artifacts, identity drift, and poor synchronization. In this work, we propose a novel self-bootstrapping framework that reframes visual dubbing from an ill-posed inpainting task into a well-conditioned video-to-video editing problem. Our approach employs a Diffusion Transformer, first as a data generator, to synthesize ideal training data: a lip-altered companion video for each real sample, forming visually aligned video pairs. A DiT-based audio-driven editor is then trained on these pairs end-to-end, leveraging the complete and aligned input video frames to focus solely on precise, audio-driven lip modifications. This complete, frame-aligned input conditioning forms a rich visual context for the editor, providing it with complete identity cues, scene interactions, and continuous spatiotemporal dynamics. Leveraging this rich context fundamentally enables our method to achieve highly accurate lip sync, faithful identity preservation, and exceptional robustness against challenging in-the-wild scenarios. We further introduce a timestep-adaptive multi-phase learning strategy as a necessary component to disentangle conflicting editing objectives across diffusion timesteps, thereby facilitating stable training and yielding enhanced lip synchronization and visual fidelity. Additionally, we propose ContextDubBench, a comprehensive benchmark dataset for robust evaluation in diverse and challenging practical application scenarios.
comment: Project Page https://hjrphoebus.github.io/X-Dub
☆ Generative Classifiers Avoid Shortcut Solutions ICLR 2025
Discriminative approaches to classification often learn shortcuts that hold in-distribution but fail even under minor distribution shift. This failure mode stems from an overreliance on features that are spuriously correlated with the label. We show that generative classifiers, which use class-conditional generative models, can avoid this issue by modeling all features, both core and spurious, instead of mainly spurious ones. These generative classifiers are simple to train, avoiding the need for specialized augmentations, strong regularization, extra hyperparameters, or knowledge of the specific spurious correlations to avoid. We find that diffusion-based and autoregressive generative classifiers achieve state-of-the-art performance on five standard image and text distribution shift benchmarks and reduce the impact of spurious correlations in realistic applications, such as medical or satellite datasets. Finally, we carefully analyze a Gaussian toy setting to understand the inductive biases of generative classifiers, as well as the data properties that determine when generative classifiers outperform discriminative ones.
comment: ICLR 2025. Code: https://github.com/alexlioralexli/generative-classifiers
☆ FoundationSLAM: Unleashing the Power of Depth Foundation Models for End-to-End Dense Visual SLAM
We present FoundationSLAM, a learning-based monocular dense SLAM system that addresses the absence of geometric consistency in previous flow-based approaches for accurate and robust tracking and mapping. Our core idea is to bridge flow estimation with geometric reasoning by leveraging the guidance from foundation depth models. To this end, we first develop a Hybrid Flow Network that produces geometry-aware correspondences, enabling consistent depth and pose inference across diverse keyframes. To enforce global consistency, we propose a Bi-Consistent Bundle Adjustment Layer that jointly optimizes keyframe pose and depth under multi-view constraints. Furthermore, we introduce a Reliability-Aware Refinement mechanism that dynamically adapts the flow update process by distinguishing between reliable and uncertain regions, forming a closed feedback loop between matching and optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FoundationSLAM achieves superior trajectory accuracy and dense reconstruction quality across multiple challenging datasets, while running in real-time at 18 FPS, demonstrating strong generalization to various scenarios and practical applicability of our method.
☆ Bi-C2R: Bidirectional Continual Compatible Representation for Re-indexing Free Lifelong Person Re-identification
Lifelong person Re-IDentification (L-ReID) exploits sequentially collected data to continuously train and update a ReID model, focusing on the overall performance of all data. Its main challenge is to avoid the catastrophic forgetting problem of old knowledge while training on new data. Existing L-ReID methods typically re-extract new features for all historical gallery images for inference after each update, known as "re-indexing". However, historical gallery data typically suffers from direct saving due to the data privacy issue and the high re-indexing costs for large-scale gallery images. As a result, it inevitably leads to incompatible retrieval between query features extracted by the updated model and gallery features extracted by those before the update, greatly impairing the re-identification performance. To tackle the above issue, this paper focuses on a new task called Re-index Free Lifelong person Re-IDentification (RFL-ReID), which requires performing lifelong person re-identification without re-indexing historical gallery images. Therefore, RFL-ReID is more challenging than L-ReID, requiring continuous learning and balancing new and old knowledge in diverse streaming data, and making the features output by the new and old models compatible with each other. To this end, we propose a Bidirectional Continuous Compatible Representation (Bi-C2R) framework to continuously update the gallery features extracted by the old model to perform efficient L-ReID in a compatible manner. We verify our proposed Bi-C2R method through theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, which demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve leading performance on both the introduced RFL-ReID task and the traditional L-ReID task.
☆ PhysTalk: Language-driven Real-time Physics in 3D Gaussian Scenes
Realistic visual simulations are omnipresent, yet their creation requires computing time, rendering, and expert animation knowledge. Open-vocabulary visual effects generation from text inputs emerges as a promising solution that can unlock immense creative potential. However, current pipelines lack both physical realism and effective language interfaces, requiring slow offline optimization. In contrast, PhysTalk takes a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scene as input and translates arbitrary user prompts into real time, physics based, interactive 4D animations. A large language model (LLM) generates executable code that directly modifies 3DGS parameters through lightweight proxies and particle dynamics. Notably, PhysTalk is the first framework to couple 3DGS directly with a physics simulator without relying on time consuming mesh extraction. While remaining open vocabulary, this design enables interactive 3D Gaussian animation via collision aware, physics based manipulation of arbitrary, multi material objects. Finally, PhysTalk is train-free and computationally lightweight: this makes 4D animation broadly accessible and shifts these workflows from a "render and wait" paradigm toward an interactive dialogue with a modern, physics-informed pipeline.
☆ DarkEQA: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Embodied Question Answering in Low-Light Indoor Environments IEEE
Vision Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly adopted as central reasoning modules for embodied agents. Existing benchmarks evaluate their capabilities under ideal, well-lit conditions, yet robust 24/7 operation demands performance under a wide range of visual degradations, including low-light conditions at night or in dark environments--a core necessity that has been largely overlooked. To address this underexplored challenge, we present DarkEQA, an open-source benchmark for evaluating EQA-relevant perceptual primitives under multi-level low-light conditions. DarkEQA isolates the perception bottleneck by evaluating question answering from egocentric observations under controlled degradations, enabling attributable robustness analysis. A key design feature of DarkEQA is its physical fidelity: visual degradations are modeled in linear RAW space, simulating physics-based illumination drop and sensor noise followed by an ISP-inspired rendering pipeline. We demonstrate the utility of DarkEQA by evaluating a wide range of state-of-the-art VLMs and Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) models. Our analysis systematically reveals VLMs' limitations when operating under these challenging visual conditions. Our code and benchmark dataset will be released upon acceptance.
comment: Submitted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
☆ Evaluating the Impact of Compression Techniques on the Robustness of CNNs under Natural Corruptions ICML
Itallo Patrick Castro Alves Da Silva, Emanuel Adler Medeiros Pereira, Erick de Andrade Barboza, Baldoino Fonseca dos Santos Neto, Marcio de Medeiros Ribeiro
Compressed deep learning models are crucial for deploying computer vision systems on resource-constrained devices. However, model compression may affect robustness, especially under natural corruption. Therefore, it is important to consider robustness evaluation while validating computer vision systems. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of compression techniques - quantization, pruning, and weight clustering applied individually and in combination to convolutional neural networks (ResNet-50, VGG-19, and MobileNetV2). Using the CIFAR-10-C and CIFAR 100-C datasets, we analyze the trade-offs between robustness, accuracy, and compression ratio. Our results show that certain compression strategies not only preserve but can also improve robustness, particularly on networks with more complex architectures. Utilizing multiobjective assessment, we determine the best configurations, showing that customized technique combinations produce beneficial multi-objective results. This study provides insights into selecting compression methods for robust and efficient deployment of models in corrupted real-world environments.
comment: Accepted for publication at the 2025 International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA). IEEE Catalog Number: CFP25592-ART
☆ ShowUI-$π$: Flow-based Generative Models as GUI Dexterous Hands
Building intelligent agents capable of dexterous manipulation is essential for achieving human-like automation in both robotics and digital environments. However, existing GUI agents rely on discrete click predictions (x,y), which prohibits free-form, closed-loop trajectories (e.g. dragging a progress bar) that require continuous, on-the-fly perception and adjustment. In this work, we develop ShowUI-$π$, the first flow-based generative model as GUI dexterous hand, featuring the following designs: (i) Unified Discrete-Continuous Actions, integrating discrete clicks and continuous drags within a shared model, enabling flexible adaptation across diverse interaction modes; (ii) Flow-based Action Generation for drag modeling, which predicts incremental cursor adjustments from continuous visual observations via a lightweight action expert, ensuring smooth and stable trajectories; (iii) Drag Training data and Benchmark, where we manually collect and synthesize 20K drag trajectories across five domains (e.g. PowerPoint, Adobe Premiere Pro), and introduce ScreenDrag, a benchmark with comprehensive online and offline evaluation protocols for assessing GUI agents' drag capabilities. Our experiments show that proprietary GUI agents still struggle on ScreenDrag (e.g. Operator scores 13.27, and the best Gemini-2.5-CUA reaches 22.18). In contrast, ShowUI-$π$ achieves 26.98 with only 450M parameters, underscoring both the difficulty of the task and the effectiveness of our approach. We hope this work advances GUI agents toward human-like dexterous control in digital world. The code is available at https://github.com/showlab/showui-pi.
comment: 17 pages, 15 figures
☆ VIPER: Process-aware Evaluation for Generative Video Reasoning
Yifan Li, Yukai Gu, Yingqian Min, Zikang Liu, Yifan Du, Kun Zhou, Min Yang, Wayne Xin Zhao, Minghui Qiu
Recent breakthroughs in video generation have demonstrated an emerging capability termed Chain-of-Frames (CoF) reasoning, where models resolve complex tasks through the generation of continuous frames. While these models show promise for Generative Video Reasoning (GVR), existing evaluation frameworks often rely on single-frame assessments, which can lead to outcome-hacking, where a model reaches a correct conclusion through an erroneous process. To address this, we propose a process-aware evaluation paradigm. We introduce VIPER, a comprehensive benchmark spanning 16 tasks across temporal, structural, symbolic, spatial, physics, and planning reasoning. Furthermore, we propose Process-outcome Consistency (POC@r), a new metric that utilizes VLM-as-Judge with a hierarchical rubric to evaluate both the validity of the intermediate steps and the final result. Our experiments reveal that state-of-the-art video models achieve only about 20% POC@1.0 and exhibit a significant outcome-hacking. We further explore the impact of test-time scaling and sampling robustness, highlighting a substantial gap between current video generation and true generalized visual reasoning. Our benchmark will be publicly released.
comment: Work in progress
☆ ProDM: Synthetic Reality-driven Property-aware Progressive Diffusion Model for Coronary Calcium Motion Correction in Non-gated Chest CT
Xinran Gong, Gorkem Durak, Halil Ertugrul Aktas, Vedat Cicek, Jinkui Hao, Ulas Bagci, Nilay S. Shah, Bo Zhou
Coronary artery calcium (CAC) scoring from chest CT is a well-established tool to stratify and refine clinical cardiovascular disease risk estimation. CAC quantification relies on the accurate delineation of calcified lesions, but is oftentimes affected by artifacts introduced by cardiac and respiratory motion. ECG-gated cardiac CTs substantially reduce motion artifacts, but their use in population screening and routine imaging remains limited due to gating requirements and lack of insurance coverage. Although identification of incidental CAC from non-gated chest CT is increasingly considered for it offers an accessible and widely available alternative, this modality is limited by more severe motion artifacts. We present ProDM (Property-aware Progressive Correction Diffusion Model), a generative diffusion framework that restores motion-free calcified lesions from non-gated CTs. ProDM introduces three key components: (1) a CAC motion simulation data engine that synthesizes realistic non-gated acquisitions with diverse motion trajectories directly from cardiac-gated CTs, enabling supervised training without paired data; (2) a property-aware learning strategy incorporating calcium-specific priors through a differentiable calcium consistency loss to preserve lesion integrity; and (3) a progressive correction scheme that reduces artifacts gradually across diffusion steps to enhance stability and calcium fidelity. Experiments on real patient datasets show that ProDM significantly improves CAC scoring accuracy, spatial lesion fidelity, and risk stratification performance compared with several baselines. A reader study on real non-gated scans further confirms that ProDM suppresses motion artifacts and improves clinical usability. These findings highlight the potential of progressive, property-aware frameworks for reliable CAC quantification from routine chest CT imaging.
comment: 21 pages, 8 figures
☆ CPJ: Explainable Agricultural Pest Diagnosis via Caption-Prompt-Judge with LLM-Judged Refinement
Accurate and interpretable crop disease diagnosis is essential for agricultural decision-making, yet existing methods often rely on costly supervised fine-tuning and perform poorly under domain shifts. We propose Caption--Prompt--Judge (CPJ), a training-free few-shot framework that enhances Agri-Pest VQA through structured, interpretable image captions. CPJ employs large vision-language models to generate multi-angle captions, refined iteratively via an LLM-as-Judge module, which then inform a dual-answer VQA process for both recognition and management responses. Evaluated on CDDMBench, CPJ significantly improves performance: using GPT-5-mini captions, GPT-5-Nano achieves \textbf{+22.7} pp in disease classification and \textbf{+19.5} points in QA score over no-caption baselines. The framework provides transparent, evidence-based reasoning, advancing robust and explainable agricultural diagnosis without fine-tuning. Our code and data are publicly available at: https://github.com/CPJ-Agricultural/CPJ-Agricultural-Diagnosis.
comment: This paper is 6 pages in length and contains 2 figures. Tao Fang (Corresponding Author), Lina Lu (Co-corresponding Author)
☆ HaineiFRDM: Explore Diffusion to Restore Defects in Fast-Movement Films
Existing open-source film restoration methods show limited performance compared to commercial methods due to training with low-quality synthetic data and employing noisy optical flows. In addition, high-resolution films have not been explored by the open-source methods.We propose HaineiFRDM(Film Restoration Diffusion Model), a film restoration framework, to explore diffusion model's powerful content-understanding ability to help human expert better restore indistinguishable film defects.Specifically, we employ a patch-wise training and testing strategy to make restoring high-resolution films on one 24GB-VRAMR GPU possible and design a position-aware Global Prompt and Frame Fusion Modules.Also, we introduce a global-local frequency module to reconstruct consistent textures among different patches. Besides, we firstly restore a low-resolution result and use it as global residual to mitigate blocky artifacts caused by patching process.Furthermore, we construct a film restoration dataset that contains restored real-degraded films and realistic synthetic data.Comprehensive experimental results conclusively demonstrate the superiority of our model in defect restoration ability over existing open-source methods. Code and the dataset will be released.
☆ Semi-Supervised Diversity-Aware Domain Adaptation for 3D Object detection
Bartłomiej Olber, Jakub Winter, Paweł Wawrzyński, Andrii Gamalii, Daniel Górniak, Marcin Łojek, Robert Nowak, Krystian Radlak
3D object detectors are fundamental components of perception systems in autonomous vehicles. While these detectors achieve remarkable performance on standard autonomous driving benchmarks, they often struggle to generalize across different domains - for instance, a model trained in the U.S. may perform poorly in regions like Asia or Europe. This paper presents a novel lidar domain adaptation method based on neuron activation patterns, demonstrating that state-of-the-art performance can be achieved by annotating only a small, representative, and diverse subset of samples from the target domain if they are correctly selected. The proposed approach requires very small annotation budget and, when combined with post-training techniques inspired by continual learning prevent weight drift from the original model. Empirical evaluation shows that the proposed domain adaptation approach outperforms both linear probing and state-of-the-art domain adaptation techniques.
☆ FinMMDocR: Benchmarking Financial Multimodal Reasoning with Scenario Awareness, Document Understanding, and Multi-Step Computation AAAI-26
Zichen Tang, Haihong E, Rongjin Li, Jiacheng Liu, Linwei Jia, Zhuodi Hao, Zhongjun Yang, Yuanze Li, Haolin Tian, Xinyi Hu, Peizhi Zhao, Yuan Liu, Zhengyu Wang, Xianghe Wang, Yiling Huang, Xueyuan Lin, Ruofei Bai, Zijian Xie, Qian Huang, Ruining Cao, Haocheng Gao
We introduce FinMMDocR, a novel bilingual multimodal benchmark for evaluating multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on real-world financial numerical reasoning. Compared to existing benchmarks, our work delivers three major advancements. (1) Scenario Awareness: 57.9% of 1,200 expert-annotated problems incorporate 12 types of implicit financial scenarios (e.g., Portfolio Management), challenging models to perform expert-level reasoning based on assumptions; (2) Document Understanding: 837 Chinese/English documents spanning 9 types (e.g., Company Research) average 50.8 pages with rich visual elements, significantly surpassing existing benchmarks in both breadth and depth of financial documents; (3) Multi-Step Computation: Problems demand 11-step reasoning on average (5.3 extraction + 5.7 calculation steps), with 65.0% requiring cross-page evidence (2.4 pages average). The best-performing MLLM achieves only 58.0% accuracy, and different retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods show significant performance variations on this task. We expect FinMMDocR to drive improvements in MLLMs and reasoning-enhanced methods on complex multimodal reasoning tasks in real-world scenarios.
comment: Accepted by AAAI-26 Main Track
☆ Towards autonomous time-calibration of large quantum-dot devices: Detection, real-time feedback, and noise spectroscopy
Anantha S. Rao, Barnaby van Straaten, Valentin John, Cécile X. Yu, Stefan D. Oosterhout, Lucas Stehouwer, Giordano Scappucci, M. D. Stewart,, Menno Veldhorst, Francesco Borsoi, Justyna P. Zwolak
The performance and scalability of semiconductor quantum-dot (QD) qubits are limited by electrostatic drift and charge noise that shift operating points and destabilize qubit parameters. As systems expand to large one- and two-dimensional arrays, manual recalibration becomes impractical, creating a need for autonomous stabilization frameworks. Here, we introduce a method that uses the full network of charge-transition lines in repeatedly acquired double-quantum-dot charge stability diagrams (CSDs) as a multidimensional probe of the local electrostatic environment. By accurately tracking the motion of selected transitions in time, we detect voltage drifts, identify abrupt charge reconfigurations, and apply compensating updates to maintain stable operating conditions. We demonstrate our approach on a 10-QD device, showing robust stabilization and real-time diagnostic access to dot-specific noise processes. The high acquisition rate of radio-frequency reflectometry CSD measurements also enables time-domain noise spectroscopy, allowing the extraction of noise power spectral densities, the identification of two-level fluctuators, and the analysis of spatial noise correlations across the array. From our analysis, we find that the background noise at 100~$μ$\si{\hertz} is dominated by drift with a power law of $1/f^2$, accompanied by a few dominant two-level fluctuators and an average linear correlation length of $(188 \pm 38)$~\si{\nano\meter} in the device. These capabilities form the basis of a scalable, autonomous calibration and characterization module for QD-based quantum processors, providing essential feedback for long-duration, high-fidelity qubit operations.
comment: 12 pages, 4 figures
☆ OFL-SAM2: Prompt SAM2 with Online Few-shot Learner for Efficient Medical Image Segmentation
The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) has demonstrated remarkable promptable visual segmentation capabilities in video data, showing potential for extension to medical image segmentation (MIS) tasks involving 3D volumes and temporally correlated 2D image sequences. However, adapting SAM2 to MIS presents several challenges, including the need for extensive annotated medical data for fine-tuning and high-quality manual prompts, which are both labor-intensive and require intervention from medical experts. To address these challenges, we introduce OFL-SAM2, a prompt-free SAM2 framework for label-efficient MIS. Our core idea is to leverage limited annotated samples to train a lightweight mapping network that captures medical knowledge and transforms generic image features into target features, thereby providing additional discriminative target representations for each frame and eliminating the need for manual prompts. Crucially, the mapping network supports online parameter update during inference, enhancing the model's generalization across test sequences. Technically, we introduce two key components: (1) an online few-shot learner that trains the mapping network to generate target features using limited data, and (2) an adaptive fusion module that dynamically integrates the target features with the memory-attention features generated by frozen SAM2, leading to accurate and robust target representation. Extensive experiments on three diverse MIS datasets demonstrate that OFL-SAM2 achieves state-of-the-art performance with limited training data.
☆ VLN-MME: Diagnosing MLLMs as Language-guided Visual Navigation agents
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of vision-language tasks. However, their performance as embodied agents, which requires multi-round dialogue spatial reasoning and sequential action prediction, needs further exploration. Our work investigates this potential in the context of Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) by introducing a unified and extensible evaluation framework to probe MLLMs as zero-shot agents by bridging traditional navigation datasets into a standardized benchmark, named VLN-MME. We simplify the evaluation with a highly modular and accessible design. This flexibility streamlines experiments, enabling structured comparisons and component-level ablations across diverse MLLM architectures, agent designs, and navigation tasks. Crucially, enabled by our framework, we observe that enhancing our baseline agent with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and self-reflection leads to an unexpected performance decrease. This suggests MLLMs exhibit poor context awareness in embodied navigation tasks; although they can follow instructions and structure their output, their 3D spatial reasoning fidelity is low. VLN-MME lays the groundwork for systematic evaluation of general-purpose MLLMs in embodied navigation settings and reveals limitations in their sequential decision-making capabilities. We believe these findings offer crucial guidance for MLLM post-training as embodied agents.
☆ CropTrack: A Tracking with Re-Identification Framework for Precision Agriculture
Multiple-object tracking (MOT) in agricultural environments presents major challenges due to repetitive patterns, similar object appearances, sudden illumination changes, and frequent occlusions. Contemporary trackers in this domain rely on the motion of objects rather than appearance for association. Nevertheless, they struggle to maintain object identities when targets undergo frequent and strong occlusions. The high similarity of object appearances makes integrating appearance-based association nontrivial for agricultural scenarios. To solve this problem we propose CropTrack, a novel MOT framework based on the combination of appearance and motion information. CropTrack integrates a reranking-enhanced appearance association, a one-to-many association with appearance-based conflict resolution strategy, and an exponential moving average prototype feature bank to improve appearance-based association. Evaluated on publicly available agricultural MOT datasets, CropTrack demonstrates consistent identity preservation, outperforming traditional motion-based tracking methods. Compared to the state of the art, CropTrack achieves significant gains in identification F1 and association accuracy scores with a lower number of identity switches.
comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, and 3 tables
☆ Video and Language Alignment in 2D Systems for 3D Multi-object Scenes with Multi-Information Derivative-Free Control
Cross-modal systems trained on 2D visual inputs are presented with a dimensional shift when processing 3D scenes. An in-scene camera bridges the dimensionality gap but requires learning a control module. We introduce a new method that improves multivariate mutual information estimates by regret minimisation with derivative-free optimisation. Our algorithm enables off-the-shelf cross-modal systems trained on 2D visual inputs to adapt online to object occlusions and differentiate features. The pairing of expressive measures and value-based optimisation assists control of an in-scene camera to learn directly from the noisy outputs of vision-language models. The resulting pipeline improves performance in cross-modal tasks on multi-object 3D scenes without resorting to pretraining or finetuning.
☆ Nonlinear Noise2Noise for Efficient Monte Carlo Denoiser Training
The Noise2Noise method allows for training machine learning-based denoisers with pairs of input and target images where both the input and target can be noisy. This removes the need for training with clean target images, which can be difficult to obtain. However, Noise2Noise training has a major limitation: nonlinear functions applied to the noisy targets will skew the results. This bias occurs because the nonlinearity makes the expected value of the noisy targets different from the clean target image. Since nonlinear functions are common in image processing, avoiding them limits the types of preprocessing that can be performed on the noisy targets. Our main insight is that certain nonlinear functions can be applied to the noisy targets without adding significant bias to the results. We develop a theoretical framework for analyzing the effects of these nonlinearities, and describe a class of nonlinear functions with minimal bias.
We demonstrate our method on the denoising of high dynamic range (HDR) images produced by Monte Carlo rendering. Noise2Noise training can have trouble with HDR images, where the training process is overwhelmed by outliers and performs poorly. We consider a commonly used method of addressing these training issues: applying a nonlinear tone mapping function to the model output and target images to reduce their dynamic range. This method was previously thought to be incompatible with Noise2Noise training because of the nonlinearities involved. We show that certain combinations of loss functions and tone mapping functions can reduce the effect of outliers while introducing minimal bias. We apply our method to an existing machine learning-based Monte Carlo denoiser, where the original implementation was trained with high-sample count reference images. Our results approach those of the original implementation, but are produced using only noisy training data.
comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables
☆ Projection-based Adversarial Attack using Physics-in-the-Loop Optimization for Monocular Depth Estimation
Deep neural networks (DNNs) remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that cause misclassification when specific perturbations are added to input images. This vulnerability also threatens the reliability of DNN-based monocular depth estimation (MDE) models, making robustness enhancement a critical need in practical applications. To validate the vulnerability of DNN-based MDE models, this study proposes a projection-based adversarial attack method that projects perturbation light onto a target object. The proposed method employs physics-in-the-loop (PITL) optimization -- evaluating candidate solutions in actual environments to account for device specifications and disturbances -- and utilizes a distributed covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy. Experiments confirmed that the proposed method successfully created adversarial examples that lead to depth misestimations, resulting in parts of objects disappearing from the target scene.
☆ Dream2Flow: Bridging Video Generation and Open-World Manipulation with 3D Object Flow
Generative video modeling has emerged as a compelling tool to zero-shot reason about plausible physical interactions for open-world manipulation. Yet, it remains a challenge to translate such human-led motions into the low-level actions demanded by robotic systems. We observe that given an initial image and task instruction, these models excel at synthesizing sensible object motions. Thus, we introduce Dream2Flow, a framework that bridges video generation and robotic control through 3D object flow as an intermediate representation. Our method reconstructs 3D object motions from generated videos and formulates manipulation as object trajectory tracking. By separating the state changes from the actuators that realize those changes, Dream2Flow overcomes the embodiment gap and enables zero-shot guidance from pre-trained video models to manipulate objects of diverse categories-including rigid, articulated, deformable, and granular. Through trajectory optimization or reinforcement learning, Dream2Flow converts reconstructed 3D object flow into executable low-level commands without task-specific demonstrations. Simulation and real-world experiments highlight 3D object flow as a general and scalable interface for adapting video generation models to open-world robotic manipulation. Videos and visualizations are available at https://dream2flow.github.io/.
comment: Project website: https://dream2flow.github.io/
☆ UniC-Lift: Unified 3D Instance Segmentation via Contrastive Learning AAAI 2026
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have advanced novel-view synthesis. Recent methods extend multi-view 2D segmentation to 3D, enabling instance/semantic segmentation for better scene understanding. A key challenge is the inconsistency of 2D instance labels across views, leading to poor 3D predictions. Existing methods use a two-stage approach in which some rely on contrastive learning with hyperparameter-sensitive clustering, while others preprocess labels for consistency. We propose a unified framework that merges these steps, reducing training time and improving performance by introducing a learnable feature embedding for segmentation in Gaussian primitives. This embedding is then efficiently decoded into instance labels through a novel "Embedding-to-Label" process, effectively integrating the optimization. While this unified framework offers substantial benefits, we observed artifacts at the object boundaries. To address the object boundary issues, we propose hard-mining samples along these boundaries. However, directly applying hard mining to the feature embeddings proved unstable. Therefore, we apply a linear layer to the rasterized feature embeddings before calculating the triplet loss, which stabilizes training and significantly improves performance. Our method outperforms baselines qualitatively and quantitatively on the ScanNet, Replica3D, and Messy-Rooms datasets.
comment: Accepted to AAAI 2026. Project Page: https://unic-lift.github.io/
☆ Splatwizard: A Benchmark Toolkit for 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression
Xiang Liu, Yimin Zhou, Jinxiang Wang, Yujun Huang, Shuzhao Xie, Shiyu Qin, Mingyao Hong, Jiawei Li, Yaowei Wang, Zhi Wang, Shu-Tao Xia, Bin Chen
The recent advent of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has marked a significant breakthrough in real-time novel view synthesis. However, the rapid proliferation of 3DGS-based algorithms has created a pressing need for standardized and comprehensive evaluation tools, especially for compression task. Existing benchmarks often lack the specific metrics necessary to holistically assess the unique characteristics of different methods, such as rendering speed, rate distortion trade-offs memory efficiency, and geometric accuracy. To address this gap, we introduce Splatwizard, a unified benchmark toolkit designed specifically for benchmarking 3DGS compression models. Splatwizard provides an easy-to-use framework to implement new 3DGS compression model and utilize state-of-the-art techniques proposed by previous work. Besides, an integrated pipeline that automates the calculation of key performance indicators, including image-based quality metrics, chamfer distance of reconstruct mesh, rendering frame rates, and computational resource consumption is included in the framework as well. Code is available at https://github.com/splatwizard/splatwizard
☆ EchoFoley: Event-Centric Hierarchical Control for Video Grounded Creative Sound Generation
Sound effects build an essential layer of multimodal storytelling, shaping the emotional atmosphere and the narrative semantics of videos. Despite recent advancement in video-text-to-audio (VT2A), the current formulation faces three key limitations: First, an imbalance between visual and textual conditioning that leads to visual dominance; Second, the absence of a concrete definition for fine-grained controllable generation; Third, weak instruction understanding and following, as existing datasets rely on brief categorical tags. To address these limitations, we introduce EchoFoley, a new task designed for video-grounded sound generation with both event level local control and hierarchical semantic control. Our symbolic representation for sounding events specifies when, what, and how each sound is produced within a video or instruction, enabling fine-grained controls like sound generation, insertion, and editing. To support this task, we construct EchoFoley-6k, a large-scale, expert-curated benchmark containing over 6,000 video-instruction-annotation triplets. Building upon this foundation, we propose EchoVidia a sounding-event-centric agentic generation framework with slow-fast thinking strategy. Experiments show that EchoVidia surpasses recent VT2A models by 40.7% in controllability and 12.5% in perceptual quality.
☆ FlowBlending: Stage-Aware Multi-Model Sampling for Fast and High-Fidelity Video Generation
In this work, we show that the impact of model capacity varies across timesteps: it is crucial for the early and late stages but largely negligible during the intermediate stage. Accordingly, we propose FlowBlending, a stage-aware multi-model sampling strategy that employs a large model and a small model at capacity-sensitive stages and intermediate stages, respectively. We further introduce simple criteria to choose stage boundaries and provide a velocity-divergence analysis as an effective proxy for identifying capacity-sensitive regions. Across LTX-Video (2B/13B) and WAN 2.1 (1.3B/14B), FlowBlending achieves up to 1.65x faster inference with 57.35% fewer FLOPs, while maintaining the visual fidelity, temporal coherence, and semantic alignment of the large models. FlowBlending is also compatible with existing sampling-acceleration techniques, enabling up to 2x additional speedup. Project page is available at: https://jibin86.github.io/flowblending_project_page.
comment: Project page: https://jibin86.github.io/flowblending_project_page
☆ Evolving, Not Training: Zero-Shot Reasoning Segmentation via Evolutionary Prompting
Reasoning Segmentation requires models to interpret complex, context-dependent linguistic queries to achieve pixel-level localization. Current dominant approaches rely heavily on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, SFT suffers from catastrophic forgetting and domain dependency, while RL is often hindered by training instability and rigid reliance on predefined reward functions. Although recent training-free methods circumvent these training burdens, they are fundamentally limited by a static inference paradigm. These methods typically rely on a single-pass "generate-then-segment" chain, which suffers from insufficient reasoning depth and lacks the capability to self-correct linguistic hallucinations or spatial misinterpretations. In this paper, we challenge these limitations and propose EVOL-SAM3, a novel zero-shot framework that reformulates reasoning segmentation as an inference-time evolutionary search process. Instead of relying on a fixed prompt, EVOL-SAM3 maintains a population of prompt hypotheses and iteratively refines them through a "Generate-Evaluate-Evolve" loop. We introduce a Visual Arena to assess prompt fitness via reference-free pairwise tournaments, and a Semantic Mutation operator to inject diversity and correct semantic errors. Furthermore, a Heterogeneous Arena module integrates geometric priors with semantic reasoning to ensure robust final selection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EVOL-SAM3 not only substantially outperforms static baselines but also significantly surpasses fully supervised state-of-the-art methods on the challenging ReasonSeg benchmark in a zero-shot setting. The code is available at https://github.com/AHideoKuzeA/Evol-SAM3.
☆ Renormalization Group Guided Tensor Network Structure Search AAAI 2026
Maolin Wang, Bowen Yu, Sheng Zhang, Linjie Mi, Wanyu Wang, Yiqi Wang, Pengyue Jia, Xuetao Wei, Zenglin Xu, Ruocheng Guo, Xiangyu Zhao
Tensor network structure search (TN-SS) aims to automatically discover optimal network topologies and rank configurations for efficient tensor decomposition in high-dimensional data representation. Despite recent advances, existing TN-SS methods face significant limitations in computational tractability, structure adaptivity, and optimization robustness across diverse tensor characteristics. They struggle with three key challenges: single-scale optimization missing multi-scale structures, discrete search spaces hindering smooth structure evolution, and separated structure-parameter optimization causing computational inefficiency. We propose RGTN (Renormalization Group guided Tensor Network search), a physics-inspired framework transforming TN-SS via multi-scale renormalization group flows. Unlike fixed-scale discrete search methods, RGTN uses dynamic scale-transformation for continuous structure evolution across resolutions. Its core innovation includes learnable edge gates for optimization-stage topology modification and intelligent proposals based on physical quantities like node tension measuring local stress and edge information flow quantifying connectivity importance. Starting from low-complexity coarse scales and refining to finer ones, RGTN finds compact structures while escaping local minima via scale-induced perturbations. Extensive experiments on light field data, high-order synthetic tensors, and video completion tasks show RGTN achieves state-of-the-art compression ratios and runs 4-600$\times$ faster than existing methods, validating the effectiveness of our physics-inspired approach.
comment: Accepted to AAAI 2026
☆ From Sequential to Spatial: Reordering Autoregression for Efficient Visual Generation
Inspired by the remarkable success of autoregressive models in language modeling, this paradigm has been widely adopted in visual generation. However, the sequential token-by-token decoding mechanism inherent in traditional autoregressive models leads to low inference efficiency.In this paper, we propose RadAR, an efficient and parallelizable framework designed to accelerate autoregressive visual generation while preserving its representational capacity. Our approach is motivated by the observation that visual tokens exhibit strong local dependencies and spatial correlations with their neighbors--a property not fully exploited in standard raster-scan decoding orders. Specifically, we organize the generation process around a radial topology: an initial token is selected as the starting point, and all other tokens are systematically grouped into multiple concentric rings according to their spatial distances from this center. Generation then proceeds in a ring-wise manner, from inner to outer regions, enabling the parallel prediction of all tokens within the same ring. This design not only preserves the structural locality and spatial coherence of visual scenes but also substantially increases parallelization. Furthermore, to address the risk of inconsistent predictions arising from simultaneous token generation with limited context, we introduce a nested attention mechanism. This mechanism dynamically refines implausible outputs during the forward pass, thereby mitigating error accumulation and preventing model collapse. By integrating radial parallel prediction with dynamic output correction, RadAR significantly improves generation efficiency.
☆ FireRescue: A UAV-Based Dataset and Enhanced YOLO Model for Object Detection in Fire Rescue Scenes
Object detection in fire rescue scenarios is importance for command and decision-making in firefighting operations. However, existing research still suffers from two main limitations. First, current work predominantly focuses on environments such as mountainous or forest areas, while paying insufficient attention to urban rescue scenes, which are more frequent and structurally complex. Second, existing detection systems include a limited number of classes, such as flames and smoke, and lack a comprehensive system covering key targets crucial for command decisions, such as fire trucks and firefighters. To address the above issues, this paper first constructs a new dataset named "FireRescue" for rescue command, which covers multiple rescue scenarios, including urban, mountainous, forest, and water areas, and contains eight key categories such as fire trucks and firefighters, with a total of 15,980 images and 32,000 bounding boxes. Secondly, to tackle the problems of inter-class confusion and missed detection of small targets caused by chaotic scenes, diverse targets, and long-distance shooting, this paper proposes an improved model named FRS-YOLO. On the one hand, the model introduces a plug-and-play multidi-mensional collaborative enhancement attention module, which enhances the discriminative representation of easily confused categories (e.g., fire trucks vs. ordinary trucks) through cross-dimensional feature interaction. On the other hand, it integrates a dynamic feature sampler to strengthen high-response foreground features, thereby mitigating the effects of smoke occlusion and background interference. Experimental results demonstrate that object detection in fire rescue scenarios is highly challenging, and the proposed method effectively improves the detection performance of YOLO series models in this context.
☆ LLHA-Net: A Hierarchical Attention Network for Two-View Correspondence Learning
Establishing the correct correspondence of feature points is a fundamental task in computer vision. However, the presence of numerous outliers among the feature points can significantly affect the matching results, reducing the accuracy and robustness of the process. Furthermore, a challenge arises when dealing with a large proportion of outliers: how to ensure the extraction of high-quality information while reducing errors caused by negative samples. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel method called Layer-by-Layer Hierarchical Attention Network, which enhances the precision of feature point matching in computer vision by addressing the issue of outliers. Our method incorporates stage fusion, hierarchical extraction, and an attention mechanism to improve the network's representation capability by emphasizing the rich semantic information of feature points. Specifically, we introduce a layer-by-layer channel fusion module, which preserves the feature semantic information from each stage and achieves overall fusion, thereby enhancing the representation capability of the feature points. Additionally, we design a hierarchical attention module that adaptively captures and fuses global perception and structural semantic information using an attention mechanism. Finally, we propose two architectures to extract and integrate features, thereby improving the adaptability of our network. We conduct experiments on two public datasets, namely YFCC100M and SUN3D, and the results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art techniques in both outlier removal and camera pose estimation. Source code is available at http://www.linshuyuan.com.
☆ MoniRefer: A Real-world Large-scale Multi-modal Dataset based on Roadside Infrastructure for 3D Visual Grounding
Panquan Yang, Junfei Huang, Zongzhangbao Yin, Yingsong Hu, Anni Xu, Xinyi Luo, Xueqi Sun, Hai Wu, Sheng Ao, Zhaoxing Zhu, Chenglu Wen, Cheng Wang
3D visual grounding aims to localize the object in 3D point cloud scenes that semantically corresponds to given natural language sentences. It is very critical for roadside infrastructure system to interpret natural languages and localize relevant target objects in complex traffic environments. However, most existing datasets and approaches for 3D visual grounding focus on the indoor and outdoor driving scenes, outdoor monitoring scenarios remain unexplored due to scarcity of paired point cloud-text data captured by roadside infrastructure sensors. In this paper, we introduce a novel task of 3D Visual Grounding for Outdoor Monitoring Scenarios, which enables infrastructure-level understanding of traffic scenes beyond the ego-vehicle perspective. To support this task, we construct MoniRefer, the first real-world large-scale multi-modal dataset for roadside-level 3D visual grounding. The dataset consists of about 136,018 objects with 411,128 natural language expressions collected from multiple complex traffic intersections in the real-world environments. To ensure the quality and accuracy of the dataset, we manually verified all linguistic descriptions and 3D labels for objects. Additionally, we also propose a new end-to-end method, named Moni3DVG, which utilizes the rich appearance information provided by images and geometry and optical information from point cloud for multi-modal feature learning and 3D object localization. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on the proposed benchmarks demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our method. Our dataset and code will be released.
comment: 14 pages
☆ Collaborative Low-Rank Adaptation for Pre-Trained Vision Transformers
Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has achieved remarkable success in fine-tuning pre-trained vision transformers for various downstream tasks. Existing studies mainly focus on exploring more parameter-efficient strategies or more effective representation learning schemes. However, these methods either sacrifice fine-tuning performance or introduce excessive trainable parameters, failing to strike a balance between learning performance and parameter efficiency. To address this problem, we propose a novel tuning method named collaborative low-rank adaptation (CLoRA) in this paper. CLoRA consists of base-space sharing and sample-agnostic diversity enhancement (SADE) components. To maintain parameter efficiency while expanding the learning capacity of low-rank modules (LRMs), base-space sharing allows all LRMs to share a set of down/up-projection spaces. In CLoRA, the low-rank matrices obtained from the shared spaces collaboratively construct each LRM. Since the representations extracted by these matrices may contain redundant information, SADE is employed to regularize the similarities among them to encourage diverse representations in the training process. We conduct extensive experiments on widely used image and point cloud datasets to evaluate the performance of CLoRA. Experimental results demonstrate that CLoRA strikes a better balance between learning performance and parameter efficiency, while requiring the fewest GFLOPs for point cloud analysis, compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
comment: 13 tables, 3 figures
☆ 3D Semantic Segmentation for Post-Disaster Assessment IEEE
The increasing frequency of natural disasters poses severe threats to human lives and leads to substantial economic losses. While 3D semantic segmentation is crucial for post-disaster assessment, existing deep learning models lack datasets specifically designed for post-disaster environments. To address this gap, we constructed a specialized 3D dataset using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-captured aerial footage of Hurricane Ian (2022) over affected areas, employing Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and Multi-View Stereo (MVS) techniques to reconstruct 3D point clouds. We evaluated the state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3D semantic segmentation models, Fast Point Transformer (FPT), Point Transformer v3 (PTv3), and OA-CNNs on this dataset, exposing significant limitations in existing methods for disaster-stricken regions. These findings underscore the urgent need for advancements in 3D segmentation techniques and the development of specialized 3D benchmark datasets to improve post-disaster scene understanding and response.
comment: Accepted by the 2025 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS 2025)
☆ SliceLens: Fine-Grained and Grounded Error Slice Discovery for Multi-Instance Vision Tasks
Systematic failures of computer vision models on subsets with coherent visual patterns, known as error slices, pose a critical challenge for robust model evaluation. Existing slice discovery methods are primarily developed for image classification, limiting their applicability to multi-instance tasks such as detection, segmentation, and pose estimation. In real-world scenarios, error slices often arise from corner cases involving complex visual relationships, where existing instance-level approaches lacking fine-grained reasoning struggle to yield meaningful insights. Moreover, current benchmarks are typically tailored to specific algorithms or biased toward image classification, with artificial ground truth that fails to reflect real model failures. To address these limitations, we propose SliceLens, a hypothesis-driven framework that leverages LLMs and VLMs to generate and verify diverse failure hypotheses through grounded visual reasoning, enabling reliable identification of fine-grained and interpretable error slices. We further introduce FeSD (Fine-grained Slice Discovery), the first benchmark specifically designed for evaluating fine-grained error slice discovery across instance-level vision tasks, featuring expert-annotated and carefully refined ground-truth slices with precise grounding to local error regions. Extensive experiments on both existing benchmarks and FeSD demonstrate that SliceLens achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving Precision@10 by 0.42 (0.73 vs. 0.31) on FeSD, and identifies interpretable slices that facilitate actionable model improvements, as validated through model repair experiments.
☆ Improving Few-Shot Change Detection Visual Question Answering via Decision-Ambiguity-guided Reinforcement Fine-Tuning
Change detection visual question answering (CDVQA) requires answering text queries by reasoning about semantic changes in bi-temporal remote sensing images. A straightforward approach is to boost CDVQA performance with generic vision-language models via supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Despite recent progress, we observe that a significant portion of failures do not stem from clearly incorrect predictions, but from decision ambiguity, where the model assigns similar confidence to the correct answer and strong distractors. To formalize this challenge, we define Decision-Ambiguous Samples (DAS) as instances with a small probability margin between the ground-truth answer and the most competitive alternative. We argue that explicitly optimizing DAS is crucial for improving the discriminability and robustness of CDVQA models. To this end, we propose DARFT, a Decision-Ambiguity-guided Reinforcement Fine-Tuning framework that first mines DAS using an SFT-trained reference policy and then applies group-relative policy optimization on the mined subset. By leveraging multi-sample decoding and intra-group relative advantages, DARFT suppresses strong distractors and sharpens decision boundaries without additional supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent gains over SFT baselines, particularly under few-shot settings.
☆ RGBT-Ground Benchmark: Visual Grounding Beyond RGB in Complex Real-World Scenarios
Visual Grounding (VG) aims to localize specific objects in an image according to natural language expressions, serving as a fundamental task in vision-language understanding. However, existing VG benchmarks are mostly derived from datasets collected under clean environments, such as COCO, where scene diversity is limited. Consequently, they fail to reflect the complexity of real-world conditions, such as changes in illumination, weather, etc., that are critical to evaluating model robustness and generalization in safety-critical applications. To address these limitations, we present RGBT-Ground, the first large-scale visual grounding benchmark built for complex real-world scenarios. It consists of spatially aligned RGB and Thermal infrared (TIR) image pairs with high-quality referring expressions, corresponding object bounding boxes, and fine-grained annotations at the scene, environment, and object levels. This benchmark enables comprehensive evaluation and facilitates the study of robust grounding under diverse and challenging conditions. Furthermore, we establish a unified visual grounding framework that supports both uni-modal (RGB or TIR) and multi-modal (RGB-TIR) visual inputs. Based on it, we propose RGBT-VGNet, a simple yet effective baseline for fusing complementary visual modalities to achieve robust grounding. We conduct extensive adaptations to the existing methods on RGBT-Ground. Experimental results show that our proposed RGBT-VGNet significantly outperforms these adapted methods, particularly in nighttime and long-distance scenarios. All resources will be publicly released to promote future research on robust visual grounding in complex real-world environments.
comment: 27pages, 9figures
☆ OCP-LS: An Efficient Algorithm for Visual Localization
This paper proposes a novel second-order optimization algorithm. It aims to address large-scale optimization problems in deep learning because it incorporates the OCP method and appropriately approximating the diagonal elements of the Hessian matrix. Extensive experiments on multiple standard visual localization benchmarks demonstrate the significant superiority of the proposed method. Compared with conventional optimiza tion algorithms, our framework achieves competitive localization accuracy while exhibiting faster convergence, enhanced training stability, and improved robustness to noise interference.
☆ PhyGDPO: Physics-Aware Groupwise Direct Preference Optimization for Physically Consistent Text-to-Video Generation
Yuanhao Cai, Kunpeng Li, Menglin Jia, Jialiang Wang, Junzhe Sun, Feng Liang, Weifeng Chen, Felix Juefei-Xu, Chu Wang, Ali Thabet, Xiaoliang Dai, Xuan Ju, Alan Yuille, Ji Hou
Recent advances in text-to-video (T2V) generation have achieved good visual quality, yet synthesizing videos that faithfully follow physical laws remains an open challenge. Existing methods mainly based on graphics or prompt extension struggle to generalize beyond simple simulated environments or learn implicit physical reasoning. The scarcity of training data with rich physics interactions and phenomena is also a problem. In this paper, we first introduce a Physics-Augmented video data construction Pipeline, PhyAugPipe, that leverages a vision-language model (VLM) with chain-of-thought reasoning to collect a large-scale training dataset, PhyVidGen-135K. Then we formulate a principled Physics-aware Groupwise Direct Preference Optimization, PhyGDPO, framework that builds upon the groupwise Plackett-Luce probabilistic model to capture holistic preferences beyond pairwise comparisons. In PhyGDPO, we design a Physics-Guided Rewarding (PGR) scheme that embeds VLM-based physics rewards to steer optimization toward physical consistency. We also propose a LoRA-Switch Reference (LoRA-SR) scheme that eliminates memory-heavy reference duplication for efficient training. Experiments show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art open-source methods on PhyGenBench and VideoPhy2. Please check our project page at https://caiyuanhao1998.github.io/project/PhyGDPO for more video results. Our code, models, and data will be released at https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/Open-PhyGDPO
☆ Hierarchical Vector-Quantized Latents for Perceptual Low-Resolution Video Compression
The exponential growth of video traffic has placed increasing demands on bandwidth and storage infrastructure, particularly for content delivery networks (CDNs) and edge devices. While traditional video codecs like H.264 and HEVC achieve high compression ratios, they are designed primarily for pixel-domain reconstruction and lack native support for machine learning-centric latent representations, limiting their integration into deep learning pipelines. In this work, we present a Multi-Scale Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (MS-VQ-VAE) designed to generate compact, high-fidelity latent representations of low-resolution video, suitable for efficient storage, transmission, and client-side decoding. Our architecture extends the VQ-VAE-2 framework to a spatiotemporal setting, introducing a two-level hierarchical latent structure built with 3D residual convolutions. The model is lightweight (approximately 18.5M parameters) and optimized for 64x64 resolution video clips, making it appropriate for deployment on edge devices with constrained compute and memory resources. To improve perceptual reconstruction quality, we incorporate a perceptual loss derived from a pre-trained VGG16 network. Trained on the UCF101 dataset using 2-second video clips (32 frames at 16 FPS), on the test set we achieve 25.96 dB PSNR and 0.8375 SSIM. On validation, our model improves over the single-scale baseline by 1.41 dB PSNR and 0.0248 SSIM. The proposed framework is well-suited for scalable video compression in bandwidth-sensitive scenarios, including real-time streaming, mobile video analytics, and CDN-level storage optimization.
comment: 11 pages
♻ ☆ Towards Generalisable Foundation Models for Brain MRI
Foundation models in artificial intelligence (AI) are transforming medical imaging by enabling general-purpose feature learning from large-scale, unlabeled datasets. In this work, we introduce BrainFound, a self-supervised foundation model for brain MRI, built by extending DINO-v2, a vision transformer originally designed for 2D natural images. BrainFound adapts DINO-v2 to model full 3D brain anatomy by incorporating volumetric information from sequential MRI slices, moving beyond conventional single-slice paradigms. It supports both single- and multimodal inputs, enabling a broad range of downstream tasks, including disease detection and image segmentation, while generalising across varied imaging protocols and clinical scenarios. We show that BrainFound consistently outperforms existing self-supervised pretraining strategies and supervised baselines, particularly in label-scarce and multi-contrast settings. By integrating information from diverse 3D MRI modalities (e.g., T1, T2, FLAIR), it enhances diagnostic accuracy and reduces dependency on extensive expert annotations. This flexibility makes BrainFound a scalable and practical solution for 3D neuroimaging pipelines, with significant potential for clinical deployment and research innovation.
♻ ☆ Hybrid Learning: A Novel Combination of Self-Supervised and Supervised Learning for Joint MRI Reconstruction and Denoising in Low-Field MRI
Haoyang Pei, Nikola Janjuvsevic, Renqing Luo, Ding Xia, Xiang Xu, William Moore, Yao Wang, Hersh Chandarana, Li Feng
Deep learning has demonstrated strong potential for MRI reconstruction. However, conventional supervised learning requires high-quality, high-SNR references for network training, which are often difficult or impossible to obtain in different scenarios, particularly in low-field MRI. Self-supervised learning provides an alternative by removing the need for training references, but its reconstruction performance can degrade when the baseline SNR is low. To address these limitations, we propose hybrid learning, a two-stage training framework that integrates self-supervised and supervised learning for joint MRI reconstruction and denoising when only low-SNR training references are available. Hybrid learning is implemented in two sequential stages. In the first stage, self-supervised learning is applied to fully sampled low-SNR data to generate higher-quality pseudo-references. In the second stage, these pseudo-references are used as targets for supervised learning to reconstruct and denoise undersampled noisy data. The proposed technique was evaluated in multiple experiments involving simulated and real low-field MRI in the lung and brain at different field strengths. Hybrid learning consistently improved image quality over both standard self-supervised learning and supervised learning with noisy training references at different acceleration rates, noise levels, and field strengths, achieving higher SSIM and lower NMSE. The hybrid learning approach is effective for both Cartesian and non-Cartesian acquisitions. Hybrid learning provides an effective solution for training deep MRI reconstruction models in the absence of high-SNR references. By improving image quality in low-SNR settings, particularly for low-field MRI, it holds promise for broader clinical adoption of deep learning-based reconstruction methods.
♻ ☆ DAVE: A VLM Vision Encoder for Document Understanding and Web Agents
While Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across multi-modal tasks, their choice of vision encoders presents a fundamental weakness: their low-level features lack the robust structural and spatial information essential for document understanding and web agents. To bridge this gap, we introduce DAVE, a vision encoder purpose-built for VLMs and tailored for these tasks. Our training pipeline is designed to leverage abundant unlabeled data to bypass the need for costly large-scale annotations for document and web images. We begin with a self-supervised pretraining stage on unlabeled images, followed by a supervised autoregressive pretraining stage, where the model learns tasks like parsing and localization from limited, high-quality data. Within the supervised stage, we adopt two strategies to improve our encoder's alignment with both general visual knowledge and diverse document and web agentic tasks: (i) We introduce a novel model-merging scheme, combining encoders trained with different text decoders to ensure broad compatibility with different web agentic architectures. (ii) We use ensemble training to fuse features from pretrained generalist encoders (e.g., SigLIP2) with our own document and web-specific representations. Extensive experiments on classic document tasks, VQAs, web localization, and agent-based benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our approach, establishing DAVE as a strong vision encoder for document and web applications.
♻ ☆ PoseStreamer: A Multi-modal Framework for 6DoF Pose Estimation of Unseen Moving Objects
Six degree of freedom (6DoF) pose estimation for novel objects is a critical task in computer vision, yet it faces significant challenges in high-speed and low-light scenarios where standard RGB cameras suffer from motion blur. While event cameras offer a promising solution due to their high temporal resolution, current 6DoF pose estimation methods typically yield suboptimal performance in high-speed object moving scenarios. To address this gap, we propose PoseStreamer, a robust multi-modal 6DoF pose estimation framework designed specifically on high-speed moving scenarios. Our approach integrates three core components: an Adaptive Pose Memory Queue that utilizes historical orientation cues for temporal consistency, an Object-centric 2D Tracker that provides strong 2D priors to boost 3D center recall, and a Ray Pose Filter for geometric refinement along camera rays. Furthermore, we introduce MoCapCube6D, a novel multi-modal dataset constructed to benchmark performance under rapid motion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PoseStreamer not only achieves superior accuracy in high-speed moving scenarios, but also exhibits strong generalizability as a template-free framework for unseen moving objects.
♻ ☆ ReVision: A Dataset and Baseline VLM for Privacy-Preserving Task-Oriented Visual Instruction Rewriting AACL 2025
Efficient and privacy-preserving multimodal interaction is essential as AR, VR, and modern smartphones with powerful cameras become primary interfaces for human-computer communication. Existing powerful large vision-language models (VLMs) enabling multimodal interaction often rely on cloud-based processing, raising significant concerns about (1) visual privacy by transmitting sensitive vision data to servers, and (2) their limited real-time, on-device usability. This paper explores Visual Instruction Rewriting, a novel approach that transforms multimodal instructions into text-only commands, allowing seamless integration of lightweight on-device instruction rewriter VLMs (250M parameters) with existing conversational AI systems, enhancing vision data privacy. To achieve this, we present a dataset of over 39,000 examples across 14 domains and develop a compact VLM, pretrained on image captioning datasets and fine-tuned for instruction rewriting. Experimental results, evaluated through NLG metrics such as BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE, along with semantic parsing analysis, demonstrate that even a quantized version of the model (<500MB storage footprint) can achieve effective instruction rewriting, thus enabling privacy-focused, multimodal AI applications.
comment: Accepted and to appear in IJCNLP-AACL 2025
♻ ☆ SoulX-LiveTalk: Real-Time Infinite Streaming of Audio-Driven Avatars via Self-Correcting Bidirectional Distillation
Le Shen, Qiao Qian, Tan Yu, Ke Zhou, Tianhang Yu, Yu Zhan, Zhenjie Wang, Ming Tao, Shunshun Yin, Siyuan Liu
Deploying massive diffusion models for real-time, infinite-duration, audio-driven avatar generation presents a significant engineering challenge, primarily due to the conflict between computational load and strict latency constraints. Existing approaches often compromise visual fidelity by enforcing strictly unidirectional attention mechanisms or reducing model capacity. To address this problem, we introduce \textbf{SoulX-LiveTalk}, a 14B-parameter framework optimized for high-fidelity real-time streaming. Diverging from conventional unidirectional paradigms, we use a \textbf{Self-correcting Bidirectional Distillation} strategy that retains bidirectional attention within video chunks. This design preserves critical spatiotemporal correlations, significantly enhancing motion coherence and visual detail. To ensure stability during infinite generation, we incorporate a \textbf{Multi-step Retrospective Self-Correction Mechanism}, enabling the model to autonomously recover from accumulated errors and preventing collapse. Furthermore, we engineered a full-stack inference acceleration suite incorporating hybrid sequence parallelism, Parallel VAE, and kernel-level optimizations. Extensive evaluations confirm that SoulX-LiveTalk is the first 14B-scale system to achieve a \textbf{sub-second start-up latency (0.87s)} while reaching a real-time throughput of \textbf{32 FPS}, setting a new standard for high-fidelity interactive digital human synthesis.
comment: 12 pages, 6 figures
♻ ☆ Effective Online Exam Proctoring by Combining Lightweight Face Detection and Deep Recognition
Online exams conducted via video conferencing platforms such as Zoom have become widespread, yet ensuring exam integrity remains challenging due to the difficulty of monitoring multiple video feeds in real time. We present iExam, an online exam proctoring and analysis system that combines lightweight real-time face detection with deep face recognition for postexam analysis. iExam assists invigilators by monitoring student presence during exams and identifies abnormal behaviors, such as face disappearance, face rotation, and identity substitution, from recorded videos. The system addresses three key challenges: (i)efficient real-time video capture and analysis, (ii) automated student identity labeling using enhanced OCR on dynamic Zoom name tags, and (iii) resource-efficient training and inference on standard teacher devices. Extensive experiments show that iExam achieves 90.4% accuracy in real-time face detection and 98.4% accuracy in post-exam recognition with low overhead, demonstrating its practicality and effectiveness for online exam proctoring.
comment: This is a technical report from Lingnan University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong
♻ ☆ SciceVPR: Stable Cross-Image Correlation Enhanced Model for Visual Place Recognition
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a major challenge for robotics and autonomous systems, with the goal of predicting the location of an image based solely on its visual features. State-of-the-art (SOTA) models extract global descriptors using the powerful foundation model DINOv2 as backbone. These models either explore the cross-image correlation or propose a time-consuming two-stage re-ranking strategy to achieve better performance. However, existing works only utilize the final output of DINOv2, and the current cross-image correlation causes unstable retrieval results. To produce both discriminative and constant global descriptors, this paper proposes stable cross-image correlation enhanced model for VPR called SciceVPR. This model explores the full potential of DINOv2 in providing useful feature representations that implicitly encode valuable contextual knowledge. Specifically, SciceVPR first uses a multi-layer feature fusion module to capture increasingly detailed task-relevant channel and spatial information from the multi-layer output of DINOv2. Secondly, SciceVPR considers the invariant correlation between images within a batch as valuable knowledge to be distilled into the proposed self-enhanced encoder. In this way, SciceVPR can acquire fairly robust global features regardless of domain shifts (e.g., changes in illumination, weather and viewpoint between pictures taken in the same place). Experimental results demonstrate that the base variant, SciceVPR-B, outperforms SOTA one-stage methods with single input on multiple datasets with varying domain conditions. The large variant, SciceVPR-L, performs on par with SOTA two-stage models, scoring over 3% higher in Recall@1 compared to existing models on the challenging Tokyo24/7 dataset. Our code will be released at https://github.com/shuimushan/SciceVPR.
comment: This work has been accepted by Neurocomputing. The final version can be accessed via https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925231225032114
♻ ☆ Explaining Object Detectors via Collective Contribution of Pixels
Visual explanations for object detectors are crucial for enhancing their reliability. Object detectors identify and localize instances by assessing multiple visual features collectively. When generating explanations, overlooking these collective influences in detections may lead to missing compositional cues or capturing spurious correlations. However, existing methods typically focus solely on individual pixel contributions, neglecting the collective contribution of multiple pixels. To address this limitation, we propose a game-theoretic method based on Shapley values and interactions to explicitly capture both individual and collective pixel contributions. Our method provides explanations for both bounding box localization and class determination, highlighting regions crucial for detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method identifies important regions more accurately than state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/tttt-0814/VX-CODE
comment: 11+20 pages, 21 figures, 11 tables. v3: updated version; code is available at: https://github.com/tttt-0814/VX-CODE
♻ ☆ A Novel Compression Framework for YOLOv8: Achieving Real-Time Aerial Object Detection on Edge Devices via Structured Pruning and Channel-Wise Distillation
Efficient deployment of deep learning models for aerial object detection on resource-constrained devices requires significant compression without com-promising performance. In this study, we propose a novel three-stage compression pipeline for the YOLOv8 object detection model, integrating sparsity-aware training, structured channel pruning, and Channel-Wise Knowledge Distillation (CWD). First, sparsity-aware training introduces dynamic sparsity during model optimization, effectively balancing parameter reduction and detection accuracy. Second, we apply structured channel pruning by leveraging batch normalization scaling factors to eliminate redundant channels, significantly reducing model size and computational complexity. Finally, to mitigate the accuracy drop caused by pruning, we employ CWD to transfer knowledge from the original model, using an adjustable temperature and loss weighting scheme tailored for small and medium object detection. Extensive experiments on the VisDrone dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across multiple YOLOv8 variants. For YOLOv8m, our method reduces model parameters from 25.85M to 6.85M (a 73.51% reduction), FLOPs from 49.6G to 13.3G, and MACs from 101G to 34.5G, while reducing AP50 by only 2.7%. The resulting compressed model achieves 47.9 AP50 and boosts inference speed from 26 FPS (YOLOv8m baseline) to 45 FPS, enabling real-time deployment on edge devices. We further apply TensorRT as a lightweight optimization step. While this introduces a minor drop in AP50 (from 47.9 to 47.6), it significantly improves inference speed from 45 to 68 FPS, demonstrating the practicality of our approach for high-throughput, re-source-constrained scenarios.
comment: 28 pages, 11 figures
♻ ☆ OpenGround: Active Cognition-based Reasoning for Open-World 3D Visual Grounding
3D visual grounding aims to locate objects based on natural language descriptions in 3D scenes. Existing methods rely on a pre-defined Object Lookup Table (OLT) to query Visual Language Models (VLMs) for reasoning about object locations, which limits the applications in scenarios with undefined or unforeseen targets. To address this problem, we present OpenGround, a novel zero-shot framework for open-world 3D visual grounding. Central to OpenGround is the Active Cognition-based Reasoning (ACR) module, which is designed to overcome the fundamental limitation of pre-defined OLTs by progressively augmenting the cognitive scope of VLMs. The ACR module performs human-like perception of the target via a cognitive task chain and actively reasons about contextually relevant objects, thereby extending VLM cognition through a dynamically updated OLT. This allows OpenGround to function with both pre-defined and open-world categories. We also propose a new dataset named OpenTarget, which contains over 7000 object-description pairs to evaluate our method in open-world scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OpenGround achieves competitive performance on Nr3D, state-of-the-art on ScanRefer, and delivers a substantial 17.6% improvement on OpenTarget. Project Page at https://why-102.github.io/openground.io/.
comment: 27 pages, 15 figures, 14 tables, Project Page at https://why-102.github.io/openground.io/
♻ ☆ Inference-based GAN Video Generation
Video generation has seen remarkable progress thanks to advancements in generative deep learning. However, generating long sequences remains a significant challenge. Generated videos should not only display coherent and continuous movement but also meaningful movement in successions of scenes. Models such as GANs, VAEs, and Diffusion Networks have been used for generating short video sequences, typically up to 16 frames. In this paper, we first propose a new type of video generator by enabling adversarial-based unconditional video generators with a variational encoder, akin to a VAE-GAN hybrid structure. The proposed model, as in other video deep learning-based processing frameworks, incorporates two processing branches, one for content and another for movement. However, existing models struggle with the temporal scaling of the generated videos. Classical approaches often result in degraded video quality when attempting to increase the generated video length, especially for significantly long sequences. To overcome this limitation, our research study extends the initially proposed VAE-GAN video generation model by employing a novel, memory-efficient approach to generate long videos composed of hundreds or thousands of frames ensuring their temporal continuity, consistency and dynamics. Our approach leverages a Markov chain framework with a recall mechanism, where each state represents a short-length VAE-GAN video generator. This setup enables the sequential connection of generated video sub-sequences, maintaining temporal dependencies and resulting in meaningful long video sequences.
♻ ☆ CritiFusion: Semantic Critique and Spectral Alignment for Faithful Text-to-Image Generation
Recent text-to-image diffusion models have achieved remarkable visual fidelity but often struggle with semantic alignment to complex prompts. We introduce CritiFusion, a novel inference-time framework that integrates a multimodal semantic critique mechanism with frequency-domain refinement to improve text-to-image consistency and detail. The proposed CritiCore module leverages a vision-language model and multiple large language models to enrich the prompt context and produce high-level semantic feedback, guiding the diffusion process to better align generated content with the prompt's intent. Additionally, SpecFusion merges intermediate generation states in the spectral domain, injecting coarse structural information while preserving high-frequency details. No additional model training is required. CritiFusion serves as a plug-in refinement stage compatible with existing diffusion backbones. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that our method notably improves human-aligned metrics of text-to-image correspondence and visual quality. CritiFusion consistently boosts performance on human preference scores and aesthetic evaluations, achieving results on par with state-of-the-art reward optimization approaches. Qualitative results further demonstrate superior detail, realism, and prompt fidelity, indicating the effectiveness of our semantic critique and spectral alignment strategy.
♻ ☆ Zoomer: Adaptive Image Focus Optimization for Black-box MLLM
Jiaxu Qian, Chendong Wang, Yifan Yang, Chaoyun Zhang, Huiqiang Jiang, Xufang Luo, Yu Kang, Qingwei Lin, Anlan Zhang, Shiqi Jiang, Ting Cao, Tianjun Mao, Suman Banerjee, Guyue Liu, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Yuqing Yang, Qi Zhang, Lili Qiu
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) such as GPT-4o, Gemini Pro, and Claude 3.5 have enabled unified reasoning over text and visual inputs, yet they often hallucinate in real world scenarios especially when small objects or fine spatial context are involved. We pinpoint two core causes of this failure: the absence of region-adaptive attention and inflexible token budgets that force uniform downsampling, leading to critical information loss. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Zoomer, a visual prompting framework that delivers token-efficient, detail-preserving image representations for black-box MLLMs. Zoomer integrates (1) a prompt-aware emphasis module to highlight semantically relevant regions, (2) a spatial-preserving orchestration schema to maintain object relationships, and (3) a budget-aware strategy to adaptively allocate tokens between global context and local details. Extensive experiments on nine benchmarks and three commercial MLLMs demonstrate that Zoomer boosts accuracy by up to 27% while cutting image token usage by up to 67%. Our approach establishes a principled methodology for robust, resource-aware multimodal understanding in settings where model internals are inaccessible.
comment: TMLR accepted
♻ ☆ Hybrid Convolution and Vision Transformer NAS Search Space for TinyML Image Classification ECML
Hybrids of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Vision Transformer (ViT) have outperformed pure CNN or ViT architecture. However, since these architectures require large parameters and incur large computational costs, they are unsuitable for tinyML deployment. This paper introduces a new hybrid CNN-ViT search space for Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to find efficient hybrid architectures for image classification. The search space covers hybrid CNN and ViT blocks to learn local and global information, as well as the novel Pooling block of searchable pooling layers for efficient feature map reduction. Experimental results on the CIFAR10 dataset show that our proposed search space can produce hybrid CNN-ViT architectures with superior accuracy and inference speed to ResNet-based tinyML models under tight model size constraints.
comment: Presented at ITEM workshop co-located with ECML PKDD 2024, Vilnius LT
♻ ☆ Chrono: A Simple Blueprint for Representing Time in MLLMs IEEE
The recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) has prompted the extension to the multimodal domain, developing image-text Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) and then video-text models. In this work, we investigate the challenge of contextual and temporal comprehension in video-language models by exploring the task of temporal localization in videos. To address this problem, prior works have developed complex task-specific architectures, novel modules to embed time into MLLMs, or leveraged additional input signals such as video transcripts to best encode contextual and temporal information. We find that most of these efforts are surpassed by a much simpler design. We introduce Chrono, a universal sequence blueprint that can be applied to any image-text pretrained MLLM. In extensive experiments spanning different MLLM architectures and sizes, finetuning and zero-shot settings, we demonstrate new state-of-the-art results in moment retrieval on the widely used benchmarks Charades-STA, QVHighlights, and ActivityNet Captions, as well as in grounded video question answering on NExT-GQA.
comment: Code: https://github.com/sudo-Boris/mr-Blip. Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI). Under review
♻ ☆ IDT: A Physically Grounded Transformer for Feed-Forward Multi-View Intrinsic Decomposition
Intrinsic image decomposition is fundamental for visual understanding, as RGB images entangle material properties, illumination, and view-dependent effects. Recent diffusion-based methods have achieved strong results for single-view intrinsic decomposition; however, extending these approaches to multi-view settings remains challenging, often leading to severe view inconsistency. We propose \textbf{Intrinsic Decomposition Transformer (IDT)}, a feed-forward framework for multi-view intrinsic image decomposition. By leveraging transformer-based attention to jointly reason over multiple input images, IDT produces view-consistent intrinsic factors in a single forward pass, without iterative generative sampling. IDT adopts a physically grounded image formation model that explicitly decomposes images into diffuse reflectance, diffuse shading, and specular shading. This structured factorization separates Lambertian and non-Lambertian light transport, enabling interpretable and controllable decomposition of material and illumination effects across views. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that IDT achieves cleaner diffuse reflectance, more coherent diffuse shading, and better-isolated specular components, while substantially improving multi-view consistency compared to prior intrinsic decomposition methods.
comment: 10 pages 4 figures
♻ ☆ ColaVLA: Leveraging Cognitive Latent Reasoning for Hierarchical Parallel Trajectory Planning in Autonomous Driving
Autonomous driving requires generating safe and reliable trajectories from complex multimodal inputs. Traditional modular pipelines separate perception, prediction, and planning, while recent end-to-end (E2E) systems learn them jointly. Vision-language models (VLMs) further enrich this paradigm by introducing cross-modal priors and commonsense reasoning, yet current VLM-based planners face three key challenges: (i) a mismatch between discrete text reasoning and continuous control, (ii) high latency from autoregressive chain-of-thought decoding, and (iii) inefficient or non-causal planners that limit real-time deployment. We propose ColaVLA, a unified vision-language-action framework that transfers reasoning from text to a unified latent space and couples it with a hierarchical, parallel trajectory decoder. The Cognitive Latent Reasoner compresses scene understanding into compact, decision-oriented meta-action embeddings through ego-adaptive selection and only two VLM forward passes. The Hierarchical Parallel Planner then generates multi-scale, causality-consistent trajectories in a single forward pass. Together, these components preserve the generalization and interpretability of VLMs while enabling efficient, accurate and safe trajectory generation. Experiments on the nuScenes benchmark show that ColaVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance in both open-loop and closed-loop settings with favorable efficiency and robustness.
comment: 11 pages, 4 figures. Project page: https://pqh22.github.io/projects/ColaVLA/index.html
♻ ☆ Reconstructing Hand-Held Objects in 3D from Images and Videos 3DV 2026
Objects manipulated by the hand (i.e., manipulanda) are particularly challenging to reconstruct from Internet videos. Not only does the hand occlude much of the object, but also the object is often only visible in a small number of image pixels. At the same time, two strong anchors emerge in this setting: (1) estimated 3D hands help disambiguate the location and scale of the object, and (2) the set of manipulanda is small relative to all possible objects. With these insights in mind, we present a scalable paradigm for hand-held object reconstruction that builds on recent breakthroughs in large language/vision models and 3D object datasets. Given a monocular RGB video, we aim to reconstruct hand-held object geometry in 3D, over time. In order to obtain the best performing single frame model, we first present MCC-Hand-Object (MCC-HO), which jointly reconstructs hand and object geometry given a single RGB image and inferred 3D hand as inputs. Subsequently, we prompt a text-to-3D generative model using GPT-4(V) to retrieve a 3D object model that matches the object in the image(s); we call this alignment Retrieval-Augmented Reconstruction (RAR). RAR provides unified object geometry across all frames, and the result is rigidly aligned with both the input images and 3D MCC-HO observations in a temporally consistent manner. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on lab and Internet image/video datasets. We make our code and models available on the project website: https://janehwu.github.io/mcc-ho
comment: 3DV 2026, Project page: https://janehwu.github.io/mcc-ho
♻ ☆ Visual Language Hypothesis
We study visual representation learning from a structural and topological perspective. We begin from a single hypothesis: that visual understanding presupposes a semantic language for vision, in which many perceptual observations correspond to a small number of discrete semantic states. Together with widely assumed premises on transferability and abstraction in representation learning, this hypothesis implies that the visual observation space must be organized in a fiber bundle like structure, where nuisance variation populates fibers and semantics correspond to a quotient base space. From this structure we derive two theoretical consequences. First, the semantic quotient X/G is not a submanifold of X and cannot be obtained through smooth deformation alone, semantic invariance requires a non homeomorphic, discriminative target for example, supervision via labels, cross-instance identification, or multimodal alignment that supplies explicit semantic equivalence. Second, we show that approximating the quotient also places structural demands on the model architecture. Semantic abstraction requires not only an external semantic target, but a representation mechanism capable of supporting topology change: an expand and snap process in which the manifold is first geometrically expanded to separate structure and then collapsed to form discrete semantic regions. We emphasize that these results are interpretive rather than prescriptive: the framework provides a topological lens that aligns with empirical regularities observed in large-scale discriminative and multimodal models, and with classical principles in statistical learning theory.
♻ ☆ DiffIR2VR-Zero: Zero-Shot Video Restoration with Diffusion-based Image Restoration Models
Chang-Han Yeh, Hau-Shiang Shiu, Chin-Yang Lin, Zhixiang Wang, Chi-Wei Hsiao, Ting-Hsuan Chen, Yu-Lun Liu
We present DiffIR2VR-Zero, a zero-shot framework that enables any pre-trained image restoration diffusion model to perform high-quality video restoration without additional training. While image diffusion models have shown remarkable restoration capabilities, their direct application to video leads to temporal inconsistencies, and existing video restoration methods require extensive retraining for different degradation types. Our approach addresses these challenges through two key innovations: a hierarchical latent warping strategy that maintains consistency across both keyframes and local frames, and a hybrid token merging mechanism that adaptively combines optical flow and feature matching. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method not only maintains the high-quality restoration of base diffusion models but also achieves superior temporal consistency across diverse datasets and degradation conditions, including challenging scenarios like 8$\times$ super-resolution and severe noise. Importantly, our framework works with any image restoration diffusion model, providing a versatile solution for video enhancement without task-specific training or modifications. Project page: https://jimmycv07.github.io/DiffIR2VR_web/
comment: Project page: https://jimmycv07.github.io/DiffIR2VR_web/
♻ ☆ HIDFlowNet: A Flow-Based Deep Network for Hyperspectral Image Denoising
Hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising is essentially ill-posed since a noisy HSI can be degraded from multiple clean HSIs. However, existing deep learning (DL)-based approaches only restore one clean HSI from the given noisy HSI with a deterministic mapping, thus ignoring the ill-posed issue and always resulting in an over-smoothing problem. Additionally, these DL-based methods often neglect that noise is part of the high-frequency component and their network architectures fail to decouple the learning of low-frequency and high-frequency. To alleviate these issues, this paper proposes a flow-based HSI denoising network (HIDFlowNet) to directly learn the conditional distribution of the clean HSI given the noisy HSI and thus diverse clean HSIs can be sampled from the conditional distribution. Overall, our HIDFlowNet is induced from the generative flow model and is comprised of an invertible decoder and a conditional encoder, which can explicitly decouple the learning of low-frequency and high-frequency information of HSI. Specifically, the invertible decoder is built by staking a succession of invertible conditional blocks (ICBs) to capture the local high-frequency details. The conditional encoder utilizes down-sampling operations to obtain low-resolution images and uses transformers to capture correlations over a long distance so that global low-frequency information can be effectively extracted. Extensive experiments on simulated and real HSI datasets verify that our proposed HIDFlowNet can obtain better or comparable results compared with other state-of-the-art methods.
comment: 29 pages, 8 figures
♻ ☆ SplatSSC: Decoupled Depth-Guided Gaussian Splatting for Semantic Scene Completion AAAI
Monocular 3D Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) is a challenging yet promising task that aims to infer dense geometric and semantic descriptions of a scene from a single image. While recent object-centric paradigms significantly improve efficiency by leveraging flexible 3D Gaussian primitives, they still rely heavily on a large number of randomly initialized primitives, which inevitably leads to 1) inefficient primitive initialization and 2) outlier primitives that introduce erroneous artifacts. In this paper, we propose SplatSSC, a novel framework that resolves these limitations with a depth-guided initialization strategy and a principled Gaussian aggregator. Instead of random initialization, SplatSSC utilizes a dedicated depth branch composed of a Group-wise Multi-scale Fusion (GMF) module, which integrates multi-scale image and depth features to generate a sparse yet representative set of initial Gaussian primitives. To mitigate noise from outlier primitives, we develop the Decoupled Gaussian Aggregator (DGA), which enhances robustness by decomposing geometric and semantic predictions during the Gaussian-to-voxel splatting process. Complemented with a specialized Probability Scale Loss, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Occ-ScanNet dataset, outperforming prior approaches by over 6.3% in IoU and 4.1% in mIoU, while reducing both latency and memory cost by more than 9.3%.
comment: Accepted for oral presentation in The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2026)
♻ ☆ OnlineVPO: Align Video Diffusion Model with Online Video-Centric Preference Optimization
Video diffusion models (VDMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in text-to-video (T2V) generation. Despite their success, VDMs still suffer from degraded image quality and flickering artifacts. To address these issues, some approaches have introduced preference learning to exploit human feedback to enhance the video generation. However, these methods primarily adopt the routine in the image domain without an in-depth investigation into video-specific preference optimization. In this paper, we reexamine the design of the video preference learning from two key aspects: feedback source and feedback tuning methodology, and present OnlineVPO, a more efficient preference learning framework tailored specifically for VDMs. On the feedback source, we found that the image-level reward model commonly used in existing methods fails to provide a human-aligned video preference signal due to the modality gap. In contrast, video quality assessment (VQA) models show superior alignment with human perception of video quality. Building on this insight, we propose leveraging VQA models as a proxy of humans to provide more modality-aligned feedback for VDMs. Regarding the preference tuning methodology, we introduce an online DPO algorithm tailored for VDMs. It not only enjoys the benefits of superior scalability in optimizing videos with higher resolution and longer duration compared with the existing method, but also mitigates the insufficient optimization issue caused by off-policy learning via online preference generation and curriculum preference update designs. Extensive experiments on the open-source video-diffusion model demonstrate OnlineVPO as a simple yet effective and, more importantly, scalable preference learning algorithm for video diffusion models.
♻ ☆ MCITlib: Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning Library and Benchmark
Continual learning enables AI systems to acquire new knowledge while retaining previously learned information. While traditional unimodal methods have made progress, the rise of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) brings new challenges in Multimodal Continual Learning (MCL), where models are expected to address both catastrophic forgetting and cross-modal coordination. To advance research in this area, we present MCITlib, a comprehensive library for Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning. MCITlib currently implements 8 representative algorithms and conducts evaluations on 3 benchmarks under 2 backbone models. The library will be continuously updated to support future developments in MCL. The codebase is released at https://github.com/Ghy0501/MCITlib.
comment: Preprint
♻ ☆ TrimTokenator-LC: Towards Adaptive Visual Token Pruning for Large Multimodal Models with Long Contexts
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have proven effective on various tasks. They typically encode visual inputs into Original Model sequences of tokens, which are then concatenated with textual tokens and jointly processed by the language model. However, the growing number of visual tokens greatly increases inference cost. Visual token pruning has emerged as a promising solution. However, existing methods often overlook scenarios involving long context inputs with multiple images. In this paper, we analyze the challenges of visual token pruning in long context, multi-image settings and introduce an adaptive pruning method tailored for such scenarios. We decompose redundancy into intra-image and inter-image components and quantify them through intra-image diversity and inter-image variation, which jointly guide dynamic budget allocation. Our approach consists of two stages. The intra-image stage allocates each image a content-aware token budget and greedily selects its most representative tokens. The inter-image stage performs global diversity filtering to form a candidate pool and then applies a Pareto selection procedure that balances diversity with text alignment. Extensive experiments show that our approach can reduce up to 80% of visual tokens while maintaining performance in long context settings.
comment: 17 pages
♻ ☆ Controllable Human-centric Keyframe Interpolation with Generative Prior
Existing interpolation methods use pre-trained video diffusion priors to generate intermediate frames between sparsely sampled keyframes. In the absence of 3D geometric guidance, these methods struggle to produce plausible results for complex, articulated human motions and offer limited control over the synthesized dynamics. In this paper, we introduce PoseFuse3D Keyframe Interpolator (PoseFuse3D-KI), a novel framework that integrates 3D human guidance signals into the diffusion process for Controllable Human-centric Keyframe Interpolation (CHKI). To provide rich spatial and structural cues for interpolation, our PoseFuse3D, a 3D-informed control model, features a novel SMPL-X encoder that transforms 3D geometry and shape into the 2D latent conditioning space, alongside a fusion network that integrates these 3D cues with 2D pose embeddings. For evaluation, we build CHKI-Video, a new dataset annotated with both 2D poses and 3D SMPL-X parameters. We show that PoseFuse3D-KI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on CHKI-Video, achieving a 9% improvement in PSNR and a 38% reduction in LPIPS. Comprehensive ablations demonstrate that our PoseFuse3D model improves interpolation fidelity.
comment: Project Page: https://gseancdat.github.io/projects/PoseFuse3D_KI
♻ ☆ ProCache: Constraint-Aware Feature Caching with Selective Computation for Diffusion Transformer Acceleration AAAI 2026
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in generative modeling, yet their high computational cost hinders real-time deployment. While feature caching offers a promising training-free acceleration solution by exploiting temporal redundancy, existing methods suffer from two key limitations: (1) uniform caching intervals fail to align with the non-uniform temporal dynamics of DiT, and (2) naive feature reuse with excessively large caching intervals can lead to severe error accumulation. In this work, we analyze the evolution of DiT features during denoising and reveal that both feature changes and error propagation are highly time- and depth-varying. Motivated by this, we propose ProCache, a training-free dynamic feature caching framework that addresses these issues via two core components: (i) a constraint-aware caching pattern search module that generates non-uniform activation schedules through offline constrained sampling, tailored to the model's temporal characteristics; and (ii) a selective computation module that selectively computes within deep blocks and high-importance tokens for cached segments to mitigate error accumulation with minimal overhead. Extensive experiments on PixArt-alpha and DiT demonstrate that ProCache achieves up to 1.96x and 2.90x acceleration with negligible quality degradation, significantly outperforming prior caching-based methods.
comment: Accepted for poster presentation at AAAI 2026
♻ ☆ TALO: Pushing 3D Vision Foundation Models Towards Globally Consistent Online Reconstruction
3D vision foundation models have shown strong generalization in reconstructing key 3D attributes from uncalibrated images through a single feed-forward pass. However, when deployed in online settings such as driving scenarios, predictions are made over temporal windows, making it non-trivial to maintain consistency across time. Recent strategies align consecutive predictions by solving global transformation, yet our analysis reveals their fundamental limitations in assumption validity, local alignment scope, and robustness under noisy geometry. In this work, we propose a higher-DOF and long-term alignment framework based on Thin Plate Spline, leveraging globally propagated control points to correct spatially varying inconsistencies. In addition, we adopt a point-agnostic submap registration design that is inherently robust to noisy geometry predictions. The proposed framework is fully plug-and-play, compatible with diverse 3D foundation models and camera configurations (e.g., monocular or surround-view). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently yields more coherent geometry and lower trajectory errors across multiple datasets, backbone models, and camera setups, highlighting its robustness and generality. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/Xian-Bei/TALO.
♻ ☆ Detection of AI Deepfake and Fraud in Online Payments Using GAN-Based Models IEEE
This study explores the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to detect AI deepfakes and fraudulent activities in online payment systems. With the growing prevalence of deepfake technology, which can manipulate facial features in images and videos, the potential for fraud in online transactions has escalated. Traditional security systems struggle to identify these sophisticated forms of fraud. This research proposes a novel GAN-based model that enhances online payment security by identifying subtle manipulations in payment images. The model is trained on a dataset consisting of real-world online payment images and deepfake images generated using advanced GAN architectures, such as StyleGAN and DeepFake. The results demonstrate that the proposed model can accurately distinguish between legitimate transactions and deepfakes, achieving a high detection rate above 95%. This approach significantly improves the robustness of payment systems against AI-driven fraud. The paper contributes to the growing field of digital security, offering insights into the application of GANs for fraud detection in financial services. Keywords- Payment Security, Image Recognition, Generative Adversarial Networks, AI Deepfake, Fraudulent Activities
comment: The paper will be published and indexed by IEEE at 2025 8th International Conference on Advanced Algorithms and Control Engineering (ICAACE 2025)
♻ ☆ CoT-PL: Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Meets Pseudo-Labeling for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection
Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) seeks to recognize and localize object categories beyond those seen during training. Recent approaches typically leverage vision-language models (VLMs) to generate pseudo-labels using image-text alignment, allowing detectors to generalize to unseen classes without explicit supervision. However, these methods depend heavily on direct image-text matching, neglecting the intermediate reasoning steps essential for interpreting semantically complex scenes. This results in limited robustness when confronted with crowded or occluded visual contexts. In this paper, we introduce CoT-PL, a new framework that employs structured visual chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning into the pseudo-labeling process. CoT-PL decomposes object understanding into three interpretable steps: (1) region perception even for unseen objects, (2) category recognition via zero-shot reasoning, and (3) background grounding to separate semantically complex objects. Crucially, the third step naturally motivates our contrastive background learning (CBL) that uses the pre-computed background cues as negatives to promote feature disentanglement between objects and background. In this way, CoT reasoning and CBL form an integrated pipeline tailored to robust pseudo-labeling in crowded or occluded scenes. Notably, in these two settings, our novel-class pseudo-label quality achieves relative improvements of 103.4% and 168.4% over the best prior, respectively. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that CoT-PL achieves +7.7 AP50 on open-vocabulary COCO and +2.9 mask AP on LVIS for novel classes, setting a new state of the art. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hchoi256/cotpl.
comment: 28 pages, 13 Figures, 12 Tables
♻ ☆ Collaborative Representation Learning for Alignment of Tactile, Language, and Vision Modalities
Tactile sensing offers rich and complementary information to vision and language, enabling robots to perceive fine-grained object properties. However, existing tactile sensors lack standardization, leading to redundant features that hinder cross-sensor generalization. Moreover, existing methods fail to fully integrate the intermediate communication among tactile, language, and vision modalities. To address this, we propose TLV-CoRe, a CLIP-based Tactile-Language-Vision Collaborative Representation learning method. TLV-CoRe introduces a Sensor-Aware Modulator to unify tactile features across different sensors and employs tactile-irrelevant decoupled learning to disentangle irrelevant tactile features. Additionally, a Unified Bridging Adapter is introduced to enhance tri-modal interaction within the shared representation space. To fairly evaluate the effectiveness of tactile models, we further propose the RSS evaluation framework, focusing on Robustness, Synergy, and Stability across different methods. Experimental results demonstrate that TLV-CoRe significantly improves sensor-agnostic representation learning and cross-modal alignment, offering a new direction for multimodal tactile representation.
♻ ☆ Unsupervised Online 3D Instance Segmentation with Synthetic Sequences and Dynamic Loss
Unsupervised online 3D instance segmentation is a fundamental yet challenging task, as it requires maintaining consistent object identities across LiDAR scans without relying on annotated training data. Existing methods, such as UNIT, have made progress in this direction but remain constrained by limited training diversity, rigid temporal sampling, and heavy dependence on noisy pseudo-labels. We propose a new framework that enriches the training distribution through synthetic point cloud sequence generation, enabling greater diversity without relying on manual labels or simulation engines. To better capture temporal dynamics, our method incorporates a flexible sampling strategy that leverages both adjacent and non-adjacent frames, allowing the model to learn from long-range dependencies as well as short-term variations. In addition, a dynamic-weighting loss emphasizes confident and informative samples, guiding the network toward more robust representations. Through extensive experiments on SemanticKITTI, nuScenes, and PandaSet, our method consistently outperforms UNIT and other unsupervised baselines, achieving higher segmentation accuracy and more robust temporal associations. The code will be publicly available at github.com/Eaphan/SFT3D.
comment: 11 pages, 6 figures
♻ ☆ Hierarchical Context Alignment with Disentangled Geometric and Temporal Modeling for Semantic Occupancy Prediction IEEE
Camera-based 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction (SOP) is crucial for understanding complex 3D scenes from limited 2D image observations. Existing SOP methods typically aggregate contextual features to assist the occupancy representation learning, alleviating issues like occlusion or ambiguity. However, these solutions often face misalignment issues wherein the corresponding features at the same position across different frames may have different semantic meanings during the aggregation process, which leads to unreliable contextual fusion results and an unstable representation learning process. To address this problem, we introduce a new Hierarchical context alignment paradigm for a more accurate SOP (Hi-SOP). Hi-SOP first disentangles the geometric and temporal context for separate alignment, which two branches are then composed to enhance the reliability of SOP. This parsing of the visual input into a local-global alignment hierarchy includes: (I) disentangled geometric and temporal separate alignment, within each leverages depth confidence and camera pose as prior for relevant feature matching respectively; (II) global alignment and composition of the transformed geometric and temporal volumes based on semantics consistency. Our method outperforms SOTAs for semantic scene completion on the SemanticKITTI & NuScenes-Occupancy datasets and LiDAR semantic segmentation on the NuScenes dataset. The project website is available at https://arlo0o.github.io/hisop.github.io/.
comment: IEEE TPAMI 2025
♻ ☆ Model Merging in LLMs, MLLMs, and Beyond: Methods, Theories, Applications and Opportunities
Model merging is an efficient empowerment technique in the machine learning community that does not require the collection of raw training data and does not require expensive computation. As model merging becomes increasingly prevalent across various fields, it is crucial to understand the available model merging techniques comprehensively. However, there is a significant gap in the literature regarding a systematic and thorough review of these techniques. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of model merging methods and theories, their applications in various domains and settings, and future research directions. Specifically, we first propose a new taxonomic approach that exhaustively discusses existing model merging methods. Secondly, we discuss the application of model merging techniques in large language models, multimodal large language models, and more than ten machine learning subfields, including continual learning, multi-task learning, few-shot learning, etc. Finally, we highlight the remaining challenges of model merging and discuss future research directions. A comprehensive list of papers about model merging is available at https://github.com/EnnengYang/Awesome-Model-Merging-Methods-Theories-Applications.
♻ ☆ Space Object Detection using Multi-frame Temporal Trajectory Completion Method
Space objects in Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) present significant detection challenges in optical imaging due to weak signals, complex stellar backgrounds, and environmental interference. In this paper, we enhance high-frequency features of GEO targets while suppressing background noise at the single-frame level through wavelet transform. Building on this, we propose a multi-frame temporal trajectory completion scheme centered on the Hungarian algorithm for globally optimal cross-frame matching. To effectively mitigate missing and false detections, a series of key steps including temporal matching and interpolation completion, temporal-consistency-based noise filtering, and progressive trajectory refinement are designed in the post-processing pipeline. Experimental results on the public SpotGEO dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving an F_1 score of 90.14%.
♻ ☆ evTransFER: A Transfer Learning Framework for Event-based Facial Expression Recognition
Event-based cameras are bio-inspired sensors that asynchronously capture pixel intensity changes with microsecond latency, high temporal resolution, and high dynamic range, providing information on the spatiotemporal dynamics of a scene. We propose evTransFER, a transfer learning-based framework for facial expression recognition using event-based cameras. The main contribution is a feature extractor designed to encode facial spatiotemporal dynamics, built by training an adversarial generative method on facial reconstruction and transferring the encoder weights to the facial expression recognition system. We demonstrate that the proposed transfer learning method improves facial expression recognition compared to training a network from scratch. We propose an architecture that incorporates an LSTM to capture longer-term facial expression dynamics and introduces a new event-based representation called TIE. We evaluated the framework using both the synthetic event-based facial expression database e-CK+ and the real neuromorphic dataset NEFER. On e-CK+, evTransFER achieved a recognition rate of 93.6\%, surpassing state-of-the-art methods. For NEFER, which comprises event sequence with real sensor noise and sparse activity, the proposed transfer learning strategy achieved an accuracy of up to 76.7\%. In both datasets, the outcomes surpassed current methodologies and exceeded results when compared with models trained from scratch.
♻ ☆ Guiding Cross-Modal Representations with MLLM Priors via Preference Alignment NeurIPS 2025
Despite Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP)'s remarkable capability to retrieve content across modalities, a substantial modality gap persists in its feature space. Intriguingly, we discover that off-the-shelf MLLMs (Multimodal Large Language Models) demonstrate powerful inherent modality alignment properties. While recent MLLM-based retrievers with unified architectures partially mitigate this gap, their reliance on coarse modality alignment mechanisms fundamentally limits their potential. In this work, We introduce MAPLE (Modality-Aligned Preference Learning for Embeddings), a novel framework that leverages the fine grained alignment priors inherent in MLLM to guide cross modal representation learning. MAPLE formulates the learning process as reinforcement learning with two key components: (1) Automatic preference data construction using off-the-shelf MLLM, and (2) a new Relative Preference Alignment (RPA) loss, which adapts Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to the embedding learning setting. Experimental results show that our preference-guided alignment achieves substantial gains in fine-grained cross-modal retrieval, underscoring its effectiveness in handling nuanced semantic distinctions.
comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2025
♻ ☆ Few-Shot-Based Modular Image-to-Video Adapter for Diffusion Models
Zhenhao Li, Shaohan Yi, Zheng Liu, Leonartinus Gao, Minh Ngoc Le, Ambrose Ling, Zhuoran Wang, Md Amirul Islam, Zhixiang Chi, Yuanhao Yu
Diffusion models (DMs) have recently achieved impressive photorealism in image and video generation. However, their application to image animation remains limited, even when trained on large-scale datasets. Two primary challenges contribute to this: the high dimensionality of video signals leads to a scarcity of training data, causing DMs to favor memorization over prompt compliance when generating motion; moreover, DMs struggle to generalize to novel motion patterns not present in the training set, and fine-tuning them to learn such patterns, especially using limited training data, is still under-explored. To address these limitations, we propose Modular Image-to-Video Adapter (MIVA), a lightweight sub-network attachable to a pre-trained DM, each designed to capture a single motion pattern and scalable via parallelization. MIVAs can be efficiently trained on approximately ten samples using a single consumer-grade GPU. At inference time, users can specify motion by selecting one or multiple MIVAs, eliminating the need for prompt engineering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MIVA enables more precise motion control while maintaining, or even surpassing, the generation quality of models trained on significantly larger datasets.
comment: GitHub page: https://github.com/yishaohan/MIVA
♻ ☆ DriveLaW:Unifying Planning and Video Generation in a Latent Driving World
Tianze Xia, Yongkang Li, Lijun Zhou, Jingfeng Yao, Kaixin Xiong, Haiyang Sun, Bing Wang, Kun Ma, Guang Chen, Hangjun Ye, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang
World models have become crucial for autonomous driving, as they learn how scenarios evolve over time to address the long-tail challenges of the real world. However, current approaches relegate world models to limited roles: they operate within ostensibly unified architectures that still keep world prediction and motion planning as decoupled processes. To bridge this gap, we propose DriveLaW, a novel paradigm that unifies video generation and motion planning. By directly injecting the latent representation from its video generator into the planner, DriveLaW ensures inherent consistency between high-fidelity future generation and reliable trajectory planning. Specifically, DriveLaW consists of two core components: DriveLaW-Video, our powerful world model that generates high-fidelity forecasting with expressive latent representations, and DriveLaW-Act, a diffusion planner that generates consistent and reliable trajectories from the latent of DriveLaW-Video, with both components optimized by a three-stage progressive training strategy. The power of our unified paradigm is demonstrated by new state-of-the-art results across both tasks. DriveLaW not only advances video prediction significantly, surpassing best-performing work by 33.3% in FID and 1.8% in FVD, but also achieves a new record on the NAVSIM planning benchmark.
comment: 17 pages, 7 figures
♻ ☆ OmniVCus: Feedforward Subject-driven Video Customization with Multimodal Control Conditions NeurIPS 2025
Yuanhao Cai, He Zhang, Xi Chen, Jinbo Xing, Yiwei Hu, Yuqian Zhou, Kai Zhang, Zhifei Zhang, Soo Ye Kim, Tianyu Wang, Yulun Zhang, Xiaokang Yang, Zhe Lin, Alan Yuille
Existing feedforward subject-driven video customization methods mainly study single-subject scenarios due to the difficulty of constructing multi-subject training data pairs. Another challenging problem that how to use the signals such as depth, mask, camera, and text prompts to control and edit the subject in the customized video is still less explored. In this paper, we first propose a data construction pipeline, VideoCus-Factory, to produce training data pairs for multi-subject customization from raw videos without labels and control signals such as depth-to-video and mask-to-video pairs. Based on our constructed data, we develop an Image-Video Transfer Mixed (IVTM) training with image editing data to enable instructive editing for the subject in the customized video. Then we propose a diffusion Transformer framework, OmniVCus, with two embedding mechanisms, Lottery Embedding (LE) and Temporally Aligned Embedding (TAE). LE enables inference with more subjects by using the training subjects to activate more frame embeddings. TAE encourages the generation process to extract guidance from temporally aligned control signals by assigning the same frame embeddings to the control and noise tokens. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Video demos are at our project page: https://caiyuanhao1998.github.io/project/OmniVCus/. Our code, models, data are released at https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/Open-OmniVCus
comment: NeurIPS 2025; A data construction pipeline and a diffusion Transformer framework for controllable subject-driven video customization