Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 200
☆ Text-to-Image Generative Modeling Without Language Pretraining
Keshigeyan Chandrasegaran, Yue Zhao, Armin W. Thomas, Ehsan Adeli, Jiajun Wu, Juan Carlos Niebles, Li Fei-Fei, Michael Poli
Modern text-to-image (T2I) systems use internet-scale language pretraining for text-conditioned image generation. We ask whether language pretraining is necessary for strong T2I generation. We introduce Halcyon, a family of early-fusion multimodal autoregressive models pretrained entirely from scratch on GPIC, a dataset of 100M image-text pairs. Halcyon-0.52B outperforms LlamaGen-XL/8 (48.0 vs. 63.3 gFD) with 18.2$\times$ less pretraining compute. Further, Halcyon-1.6B outperforms JiT-T2I-XXL/8++ (35.3 vs. 41.0 gFD) with 275$\times$ less pretraining compute. Controlled experiments show that text-only pretraining does not improve T2I generation. Halcyon also learns image captioning by replacing caption dropout with I2T supervision, maintaining competitive T2I generation quality under the same pretraining budget. We show that strong T2I systems can be trained from scratch without internet-scale language pretraining. Code and models are available at https://cs.stanford.edu/~keshik/halcyon
comment: 27 pages; Project website: https://cs.stanford.edu/~keshik/halcyon
☆ OpenVLHarness: Real World Visual Agentic Tool-Use with Multimodal Memory
Yu Zhou, Cheng-Fu Yang, Rui Sun, Di Wu, Sibo Peng, Mingyang Zhang, Zhen Yang, Ruiyi Zhang, Nanyun Peng, Zhe Gan, Kai-Wei Chang
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress on visual reasoning, yet many tasks require evidence that is difficult to obtain through internal reasoning alone: our controlled study on 22 benchmarks shows that simply increasing the inference budget of the base model yields only modest gains. Such tasks demand grounded perception, external knowledge, and numerical measurements obtained through heterogeneous tools, whose outputs must be made interpretable to the model and retained across reasoning steps. We introduce OpenVLHarness, a multimodal reasoning harness organized around a capability layer and persistent multimodal memory. The capability layer combines task-level tool interfaces with evidence rendering, providing consistent access to heterogeneous backends and converting their outputs into model-readable observations. Persistent multimodal memory retains the corresponding images, structured data, and web references as addressable artifacts throughout each query. A coding interface executes generated programs over stored data, enabling computations that combine results from multiple tools. Together, these mechanisms support an iterative process of acquiring, inspecting, and composing multimodal evidence. Evaluated on 22 benchmarks with eight open and proprietary backbones, OpenVLHarness improves average scores by 9.7-12.6 points over matched no-tool baselines, including +11.2 with Qwen3-VL-8B, +9.7 with Kimi K3, and +9.9 with GPT-6 Astra. With GPT-6 Luna at medium reasoning effort, OpenVLHarness outperforms the base model, Codex, and Visual Sketchpad at maximum effort by 7.7-8.5 points while incurring at most 37% of their model-token cost.
☆ Can It Actually Work? Synthesizing Functional CAD Mechanisms
While LLM agents can generate visually plausible CAD assemblies, these designs often fail to fulfill their intended physical functions. We study functional CAD design, a setting where agents interpret underspecified requests to construct and iteratively revise mechanisms that satisfy functional requirements in physical simulation. Verifying these requirements is nontrivial: different candidate mechanisms may realize the same function through entirely different components, controls, and operating sequences. To bridge this gap, we propose FunCAD-Harness, a framework that translates abstract requirements into candidate-specific physical tests and uses simulation feedback to guide design revisions. To systematically evaluate this capability, we introduce FunCADBench, a benchmark spanning 46 mechanism families with interdependent and multi-step operations. Experiments across frontier LLM agents show that FunCAD-Harness exposes subtle mechanical failures invisible to visual inspection, substantially improving functional success rates over standard simulation-augmented baselines. Ultimately, our work marks a step toward CAD agents capable of translating human intent into working mechanisms.
comment: 45 pages, 16 figures, project page: https://thegenlab.ai/funcad/
☆ Reinforcement Learning with Visually Attributable On-Policy Self-Distillation
Multimodal reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) provides reliable task-level supervision, yet offers limited guidance for localizing errors in visual reasoning. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) complements this supervision with dense token-level corrections from a privileged teacher equipped with an evidence-centered visual view. However, the resulting corrections may conflate visual evidence with non-visual shifts induced by linguistic priors, response style, or the privileged view itself. We formalize this phenomenon as privileged-correction contamination: a token-level correction is contaminated when its update direction cannot be consistently attributed to the privileged visual evidence. Directly distilling contaminated corrections may therefore reinforce erroneous token-level updates. To address this issue, we propose reinforcement learning with visually attributable on-policy self-distillation, an evidence-consistent paradigm that augments task-level RLVR supervision with privileged token-level corrections grounded in visual evidence. We instantiate this paradigm with Visual-Attribution Gating (VAG), which uses the verifier-derived advantage as the optimization anchor and validates each privileged correction against the contrast between evidence-present and evidence-degraded teacher views. By admitting only corrections directionally supported by this visual contrast, VAG preserves visually grounded guidance while suppressing inconsistent residuals. Experiments across six visual reasoning benchmarks show that VAG consistently outperforms GRPO and OPSD methods, establishing new state-of-the-art average performance.
☆ VideoMaMa++: Temporally Consistent Video Matting via Preserve-and-Refine Token NeurIPS 2026
Diffusion-based video matting has recently emerged as a leading approach, leveraging video diffusion priors from internet-scale pretraining to achieve strong zero-shot generalization from limited synthetic data. However, the heavy compute of these diffusion backbones limits inference to a short chunk of just 6 to 24 frames, so even ordinary videos span multiple chunks. Because each chunk is matted independently from coarse mask guidance, existing methods fail to maintain consistency across chunk boundaries, producing flickering edges and discontinuous transparency. We address this with a mask-guided diffusion-matting framework built on two ideas. The RGB and mask conditioning are represented as separate token streams that interact through full spatio-temporal self-attention, letting the model adaptively combine fine RGB texture with coarse mask layout rather than committing to a fixed channel-wise fusion. On top of this, we propose a novel pair of learnable embeddings, the preserve token and the refine token, that act as a per-frame conditioning interface and enable a sliding-window inference scheme in which already-generated mattes are propagated across chunk boundaries for local temporal consistency, complemented by a globally shared reference anchor at every chunk to prevent error accumulation in long sequences without any additional training. Across standard video matting benchmarks and in-the-wild long footage, our framework outperforms prior diffusion-based methods in both fine-detail accuracy and temporal consistency, and uniquely maintains consistency across chunk boundaries on long videos.
comment: NeurIPS 2026. Project page: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/VideoMaMa-PlusPlus/ Code: https://github.com/cvlab-kaist/VideoMaMa-PlusPlus
☆ Ropedia W0: Scaling Loco-Manipulation World Models across Embodiments with Human Experience
Tianqi Liu, Hanfei Zhao, Qifeng Liang, Hui En Pang, Jiarui Xu, Sayang Mu, Penghao Qiu, YingSheng Zhang, Jun Wang, Ziang Cao, Mingze Sun, Yukang Cao, Fangzhou Hong, Zhaoxi Chen, Ziwei Liu
World models enable embodied agents to anticipate action consequences, yet jointly modeling locomotion and manipulation across diverse embodiments remains challenging due to heterogeneous action spaces and limited multimodal supervision. We present Ropedia W0, the first egocentric loco-manipulation world foundation model spanning humans and robots with diverse embodiments. We curate Xp-Data, comprising 10k hours of egocentric human data and 3k hours of robot data with unified multimodal annotations and systematic quality control. A unified kinematic representation encodes locomotion through camera poses and manipulation through projected skeletons, with robot skeletons combining embodiment-specific forward kinematics with extensive manual keypoint annotation and correction. We also introduce Xp-Teleop, a long-horizon loco-manipulation benchmark based on high-quality dexterous humanoid teleoperation data. Evaluations demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across five cross-embodiment benchmarks (DreamDojo, $Ψ_0$, $ω$-HOME, Xp-Teleop, and AgiBot) and on held-out human egocentric video, from zero-shot inference to few-shot and full-data post-training. Scaling human pre-training data improves performance on both human and robot evaluations. After distillation, our model supports real-time, minute-long rollouts, enabling live VR interaction. Applications in policy evaluation, model-based planning, and world-action modeling further demonstrate the model's utility for embodied decision-making.
comment: Project page: https://ropedia.github.io/ropedia-w0/ ; Code: https://github.com/Ropedia/ropedia-w0
☆ InfiniDream: Open-Ended Photorealistic 3D Worlds Through Procedural Generation
Procedural generation plays a key role in synthetic data creation and game development, offering greater controllability, editability, and diversity than static mesh representations. However, VLM-based code generation often produces relatively simple 3D assets, while sophisticated photorealistic procedural systems require extensive manual development. Existing VLM-guided procedural methods remain largely constrained by predefined factories and APIs, limiting their ability to create novel asset types. We introduce InfiniDream, a VLM-driven framework for open-ended procedural 3D world generation. First, we propose Symbolically Constrained Asset Generation, which leverages existing procedural algorithms to create novel, photorealistic assets while preserving editability and seed-based diversity. Second, we develop an end-to-end text-to-world pipeline that combines semantic scene planning with Deterministic Frustum-Guided Grid Placement to construct large-scale 3D worlds with precise object placement, procedural population, and animation. Extensive evaluations on 100 object and 20 scene generation tasks demonstrate improvements across four perceptual metrics. Diversity analysis, ablation studies, and human preference evaluations further validate the effectiveness of our framework. Project page: https://yichuanh.github.io/infinidream-page/
comment: Project page: https://yichuanh.github.io/infinidream-page/
☆ Manga2Animate: An Agentic Framework for Faithful Manga Animation with Script and Storyboard Planning
Adapting existing manga into coherent animation that stays faithful to the source is a valuable yet challenging task. Existing methods either access the manga mainly through text, losing its characters and art style, or feed manga pages directly into video generation models, which misinterpret the manga's structure and produce incorrect storylines. In this paper, we propose Manga2Animate, a multi-agent framework that grounds every stage of generation in the source manga. We decompose the task into two intermediate representations, an animation script and a visual storyboard. Each representation is produced by a creator agent and reviewed against the source panels by a paired reviewer agent. We tailor representation-specific selection and dual-level feedback to progressively refine both before synthesizing the final animation. Extensive experiments and a user study demonstrate that Manga2Animate produces animations more faithful to the source manga and more consistent across shots than state-of-the-art approaches. Project page: https://annchenn.github.io/Manga2Animate/
comment: Project page: https://annchenn.github.io/Manga2Animate/
☆ GenOlympiad: Benchmarking Frontier Image Models at Their Capability Boundaries
Text-to-image models have made tremendous progress and can produce high-quality images. However, a question which would be asked in any other discipline is where the frontier models fall short. We introduce GenOlympiad, a benchmark which provides the most challenging text prompts from nine capability axes for stress-testing frontier text-to-image models. The assessed capabilities include generating large quantities, performing deep reasoning, ensuring hard physical consistency, following complex rules and so on. The prompts are designed such that prompt alignment is visually verifiable (e.g., counting) instead of relying on subjectiveness (e.g., style). Based on this, we develop an automated evaluation framework which decomposes the prompt into easy and hard questions, and for most hard questions, draws help lines to ground evidence for accurate grading. We evaluate 20+ strong text-to-image models, including Nano Banana Pro, GPT-Image-2.5, Seedream-5.0 and so on. We report that even the best-performing T2I model (Nano Banana Pro) only achieves a strict score of 23.9 out of 100 and that coding models such as GPT-6 Astra have higher prompt alignment scores (but not as visually pleasing). We also derive insights in model evolution, alignment with Elo scores, and effectiveness of our grounding-based evaluation protocol. Code is available at https://github.com/GenOlympiad/GenOlympiad and the project page is at https://genolympiad.github.io/
comment: 30 pages, 16 figures, 6 tables
☆ Where is Physical RSI capability from? An Observational Scaling Law of LLM-as-policy
Zekai Li, Jiayi Yu, Jinlu Zhang, Luyang Niu, Zekun Qi, Jun Zheng, Xuchuan Chen, Dairu Liu, Yintianrun Zhang, He Wang, Li Yi
In this paper, we systematically investigate the mechanisms, scaling behavior, and generalization of physical Recursive self-improvement. We introduce PhysRSI-eval to quantify physical RSI through a five-axis metric: First-Attempt Performance, Efficiency, Success, Budget and Improvement from failure. Different VLMs are evaluated on 18 manipulation tasks under a fixed interaction budget. The analysis of experimental results motivates the Physical Barrel Hypothesis: different capabilities may constrain different parts of improvement. The five-axis metrics also distinguish systems with close public benchmark averages and show that high scores need not come with early or efficient gains. We study observational scaling from two perspectives: predicting the relative performance of VLM agents from their public capabilities, and forecasting later progress from early physical feedback. Together, these analyses ask how quickly and how far an agent can improve. Moreover, we conduct workspace interventions and then analyze what improvement leaves behind. Removing history reduces late-round success, frozen workspaces remain useful on unseen layouts, and three cross-task cases achieve success earlier. The results suggest that scene-specific adaptation and reusable experience can coexist.
comment: Tech Report
☆ SpecKCast: Spectral Kalman Forecasting for Diffusion Acceleration
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) achieve high-fidelity image and video generation, but they suffer from substantial inference costs due to repeated transformer evaluations across many denoising steps. Feature caching reduces this cost by reusing features across denoising steps. Recent forecasting methods extend this idea by extrapolating features to skipped steps instead of reusing them. However, existing forecasting methods extrapolate the features they predict uniformly, even though the spatial-frequency components of these features change most at different stages of denoising. They also overlook that denoising progresses nonuniformly, so equal step intervals can correspond to very different amounts of change. These mismatches amplify forecast errors as more steps are skipped, limiting the achievable acceleration. We propose SpecKCast, a training-free method that forecasts the model output in the frequency domain. SpecKCast applies a 2D discrete cosine transform (DCT) to the output and tracks each coefficient with a lightweight Kalman filter along a band-specific time coordinate derived from the noise schedule. The filter tracks each coefficient's value and rate of change, and the transformer is evaluated only when the filter's forecast uncertainty exceeds a threshold. Experiments on FLUX.1-dev, Qwen-Image, Wan2.1-14B, and HunyuanVideo show that SpecKCast achieves a better trade-off between acceleration and fidelity than existing caching and forecasting methods, reaching up to 6x speedup with less than 0.05 GiB of additional memory.
comment: 34 pages, 19 figures
☆ RefCraft: Benchmarking Visual-Reference-Conditioned Agentic Generation through Web Development
Yuchi Wang, Rongyao Fang, Weihao Yu, Xilin Wei, Tiancheng Gu, Dingkang Yang, Hang Zhang, Dayiheng Liu, Hongsheng Li, Shuai Bai
Beyond basic tool use and coding skills, effectively incorporating visual references into agentic generation is equally essential for applying AI agents to real-world productivity tasks. We study this crucial capability through webpage development, a practical and readily evaluable setting in which existing benchmarks remain largely idealized: they typically focus on reconstructing visual targets or generating webpages from textual instructions alone, overlooking the more common workflow of developing from visual examples. Specifically, we introduce RefCraft, a benchmark comprising 300 realistic multimodal webpage-development tasks that combine natural-language instructions with screenshots from one to five reference webpages. Agents must selectively interpret and utilize these references while rendering, visually inspecting, and iteratively refining their outputs. We evaluate the resulting open-ended artifacts using independently verifiable keypoints and complementary programmatic and VLM judges. Across nine frontier (M)LLMs, the strongest system achieves an overall score of only 52.12 out of 100, revealing that visual-reference-conditioned agentic generation remains a substantial challenge for current models in practical webpage-development settings.
comment: Project page: https://wangyuchi369.github.io/refcraft/
☆ Open-Form Geometric Style Transfer
A geometric style learned from one family of shapes is typically applied to new shapes from the same family. We consider a more challenging setting: learning the geometric design language of a stylized Latin alphabet and applying it to new forms, from Greek glyphs to entirely different structures such as human poses. We introduce Open-Form Geometric Style Transfer, where the forms to which a learned geometric style can be applied are not restricted to the shape family in which that style was observed. This setting is deceptively challenging: the difficulty is not merely learning a style, but learning the style without learning the shape family in which it was observed. We represent target forms by structural sketches and disentangle structural adherence from style realization using a Geometry LoRA and a style-specific LoRA. Critically, open-form transfer requires the Geometry LoRA to be universal. To achieve this, we devise a geometry-enrichment strategy that constructs a large and purposefully diverse collection of synthetic structural sketches spanning a broad range of unfamiliar geometries. Our experiments and ablations demonstrate the importance of both disentanglement and this universal geometry prior, enabling geometric styles learned from glyphs, pictograms, and other shape families to be transferred to substantially different, unseen forms.
☆ Real-Time Radar Semantic and Panoptic Scene Understanding
Santosh Parit, Julia Hindel, Rohit Mohan, Georgi Pramatarov, Paul Newman, Daniele De Martini, Abhinav Valada
Robust scene understanding under varying environmental conditions is essential for safe autonomous driving. While cameras and LiDAR degrade in adverse weather and poor lighting, Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) spinning radar provides dependable 360° perception at extended ranges with minimal compute cost. However, real-time FMCW radar scene understanding is challenging due to complex signal returns, limited temporal resolution, and scarce annotated datasets. We introduce StreamRPS, a novel framework for streaming FMCW radar panoptic segmentation, comprising an automated label-generation pipeline via LiDAR scene completion and a real-time streaming network for semantic and panoptic segmentation. Our encoder-decoder streaming architecture comprises a radar-specific hierarchical Transformer encoder and task-specific decoders for semantic or panoptic prediction. Our encoder introduces a stem to capture range-dependent signatures, anisotropic patch embeddings to preserve angular resolution, and axial polar attention to separately model the periodic azimuth and bounded range axes. We further introduce azimuth roll rotation augmentation to simulate ego-vehicle rotation during training. Comprehensive experiments on the SAX and BOREAS datasets validate both our auto-labeling methodology and streaming segmentation network against established baselines. We outperform the strongest baseline by at least 1.4pp while processing sectors at over 400 FPS in a 4-sector streaming setting. We additionally provide manual annotations for 100 SAX radar scans, enabling independent evaluation of the entire framework.
☆ PICA-WAM: Visual Perturbation Invariance via Cross-Appearance Self-Alignment in World Action Models
World Action Models (WAMs) jointly predict future video and generate actions, yet remain sensitive to task-irrelevant visual perturbations, i.e., changes in visual appearance that should not affect robot behavior. We identify a gap in conventional WAM training: video prediction encourages representations to preserve appearance information, while action generation does not explicitly enforce invariance to task-irrelevant appearance. Data augmentation exposes WAMs to such perturbations but does not require perturbed and nominal observations to produce consistent action representations, and alignment with external pretrained features does not guarantee the desired invariance. To address this gap, we propose PICA-WAM, a self-supervised training framework that casts perturbation invariance as an auxiliary cross-appearance self-alignment task for WAMs. An exponential-moving-average (EMA) teacher processes the nominal observation to provide a deeper-layer target, while the online WAM processes a perturbed observation and aligns its shallower-layer action representation to this target through a lightweight projection head. Across four strong WAMs evaluated on RoboTwin 2.0, LIBERO-Plus, EBench, and a real robot, PICA-WAM consistently improves robustness under visual perturbations, preserves nominal performance in simulation, and raises the real robot success rate. PICA-WAM further reduces the sensitivity of video features to task-irrelevant appearance and its propagation into actions, as shown by paired layer-wise diagnostics. Code: https://github.com/YudeZou/PICA-WAM-release
☆ State World Models: Execute the Rules, Generate the Pixels
Existing world models can generate action-conditioned video from a single image. Many focus on camera movement, allowing users to explore the generated scene. However, navigation alone does not ensure that an action follows persistent rules when its outcome depends on state that is invisible in the current frame. We present Stateful Harness, a framework that separates world evolution from video rendering to support stateful and rule-governed interaction. It maintains an evolving world state under specified rules, renders each resulting event with a frozen video model, and uses the generated clip to update the world state for the next turn. At each turn, the harness resolves the action selected by the user and compiles the resulting event into an instruction, while a preview clip from an editable 3D scene provides spatial and camera guidance. To evaluate rule compliance, we build WorldState-Bench, a benchmark of 50 counterfactual twin pairs that share an initial frame and action but differ in hidden state and required outcome. Under rule-only prompting, the best of the 11 evaluated video backends produces the required endings for both cases in 32% of pairs. For MiniMax-H3, specifying the required endings raises this rate from 32% to 64%, while the full harness reaches 92% with the same frozen model. These results support separating rule execution from video rendering for world interactions with hidden state.
☆ What Language Adds, and at What Cost: Four Controlled Probes of Pathology Vision-Language Models
Vision--language models (VLMs) promise to make computational pathology queryable and able to draft reports, but how much language adds beyond the vision backbone is unclear, because almost every system is evaluated by its developers on test sets of their own choosing. We grade published evidence by how it was produced and test four claims with controlled probes that reuse released checkpoints and public data, varying one input at a time. Report text adds prognostic signal: adding a frozen embedding of the stage-redacted report to a slide embedding raises the pooled C-index by 0.019 for progression-free interval and by 0.016 for overall survival across 1{,}633 TCGA patients, and restoring the stage statement adds nothing. Prompts add no measurable accuracy at inference: with features and pooling fixed, zero-shot classification is statistically indistinguishable from a supervised linear probe for lung and renal cancer subtyping. Slide-level question answering is barely grounded: SlideChat answers 74.82\% of SlideBench-VQA(TCGA) items correctly with the slide and 74.41\% without it, whereas its language backbone alone reaches 43.52\%. Paraphrasing leaves accuracy unchanged but flips 8--23\% of answers. Self-reported gains from agentic navigation and few-shot language priors cannot yet be attributed to language. Language thus adds real but narrow value, and we propose minimum controls that would expose these failure modes in future evaluations.
☆ Mise-en-Video: Fine-Grained 3D Control for Multi-Shot Video Generation
Yingshuang Zou, Xiaoyu Shi, Yawen Luo, Ziang Li, Qinghe Wang, Mengfei Li, Chengfeng Zhao, Xintao Wang, Pengfei Wan, Kun Gai, Yuan Liu
Recent advances in text-to-video generation have enabled high-fidelity single-shot synthesis, yet practical storytelling creation requires multi-shot videos with both strong inter-shot consistency and fine-grained controllability. Existing multi-shot video generation approaches achieve strong consistency but still fall short in controllability. In this paper, we propose Mise-en-Video (MeV), a highly controllable multi-shot video generation framework that allows video creators to conduct staging the multi-shot in the 3D space and then generate the corresponding multi-shot video. To achieve this, our framework combines a hierarchical attention mechanism for multi-level narrative consistency with 3D-aware layout guidance for precise, per-shot spatial control. To support training and evaluation, we develop standardized annotation pipelines and construct a 160K-video dataset with hierarchical multi-shot texts and oriented 3D bounding boxes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MeV consistently outperforms strong baselines in video quality, inter-shot consistency, and subject-level controllability.
☆ V-JEPA Hand: Simple, Accurate and Fast 3D Hand and Camera Trajectory Recovery from Egocentric Videos
Egocentric video supports diverse applications, including robot learning, augmented reality, and human activity understanding. Recovering metric 3D hand trajectories from such video requires estimating both hand motion and camera egomotion to express the hands in a consistent reference frame. Many existing pipelines recover hand and camera motion in separate stages, combining hand detection, hand reconstruction, camera tracking, and trajectory refinement. We present V-JEPA Hand, a simple feed-forward video model that jointly reconstructs bilateral hand motion and camera motion from egocentric clips. It uses a self-supervised V-JEPA 2.1 encoder to extract spatio-temporal features from full-frame video and a query-based predictor to decode these features into per-frame hand poses, hand presence, and camera motion. We use the predicted camera motion to express the hand trajectories in a common world frame. The model accepts known focal lengths or predicts them when unavailable. It reconstructs each clip in a single forward pass. We train both components end to end in a single stage on a mixture of diverse pseudo-labelled videos and high-precision 3D annotations. A single model achieves the lowest coverage-aware mean per-joint position error (MPJPE) among comparable baselines on ARCTIC, HOT3D, and EgoStandard. It also yields lower world-frame trajectory errors than the compared SLAM-based pipelines. Ablations support the benefits of video pretraining, temporal context, and mixed supervision. V-JEPA Hand achieves a forward-pass throughput of 93.4 FPS on a single RTX A6000. Project page: https://qft-333.github.io/V-JEPA-Hand-Page/.
☆ Beyond Omni: A Unified MLLM for Embodied Sensory Understanding
Shiyun Xiong, Dongming Wu, Peiwen Sun, Bokang Yang, Jiaxu Wang, Xiaolou Sun, Mingxing Wen, Xiangyu Yue
Recent embodied systems increasingly build on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for their pretrained understanding and reasoning capabilities, but their perception of the physical world remains largely limited to basic modalities such as vision and audio. However, broadening MLLMs to more diverse sensory modalities from the physical environment is challenging: their representations are often weakly connected to the MLLM and vary substantially in structure and statistics, while their interpretation still requires shared high-level understanding and reasoning. We therefore propose Unisense, a unified embodied MLLM framework that supports diverse physical sensory modalities within a shared multimodal architecture. Unisense follows a two-stage training process: (i) aligning sensory representations with language to establish a language-accessible interface; and (ii) tuning modality-specific experts within the shared LLM to provide specialized processing for different sensory modalities. To support broad sensory learning, we curate Unisense-1M, a large-scale embodied sensory training corpus comprising 1M samples across 8 sensory modalities. We further evaluate Unisense on 12 benchmarks spanning depth, point cloud, IMU, tactile, thermal, radar, motion, and smell understanding. Across these heterogeneous sensing tasks, Unisense achieves strong performance and outperforms both generalist and specialized models on most benchmarks, demonstrating the potential of pretrained MLLMs as unified models for embodied sensory understanding.
☆ CheckDistill: Adaptive Checklist Distillation for Efficient Distributional Reward Modeling in Image Editing
Reinforcement learning for instruction-guided image editing requires reward models that provide reliable, accurate, and efficient feedback. Direct scalar prediction compresses multidimensional editing preferences, whereas generative evaluators can expose their judgment through explicit reasoning. However, broad scoring criteria do not specify all instance-dependent editing and preservation constraints, and generating long reasoning trajectories is costly for online optimization. We introduce CheckDistill, a pointwise reward modeling framework that internalizes instruction-adaptive checklists. We decompose each editing condition into atomic, independently verifiable requirements and construct four-dimensional scoring labels together with structured verification evidence. After supervised score initialization, a privileged teacher conditions on checklists, item-level judgments, and dimension-level rationales to supervise the student's own scoring trajectories. A reliability-weighted on-policy self-distillation objective adjusts supervision at score tokens according to agreement between the teacher's expected scores and reference labels, while retaining candidate probability weights in a truncated token support. The deployed student directly predicts four score distributions without checklist inputs or explicit reasoning and aggregates their expectations into a scalar reward. CheckDistill achieves aggregate accuracies of 72.30%, 56.67% and 82.90% on MMRB2, MER-Bench and EditReward-Bench, respectively, exceeding the compared open-source baselines on all three metrics.
comment: 31 pages
☆ CAVA: Complementary-Label-Aware Data Valuation
Complementary-label learning (CLL) trains a classifier from labels that name a class an instance does not belong to. Such labels are cheap to collect from crowdworkers or vision-language models (VLMs), making them attractive for large-scale annotation. However, both sources can mistakenly assign the true class as the complementary label. Such annotation errors are particularly harmful in CLL because the model is explicitly trained to suppress the correct answer. Optimal transport (OT) data valuation identifies harmful samples by comparing training data with a clean validation set, but transferring it directly to CLL creates a semantic mismatch: label $c$ means not class $c$ in the training but class $c$ in the validation. We show that this makes the OT label groups noisy mixtures whose behavior depends on the noise rate. The transferred score is informative only at sufficiently high noise, becomes uninformative at the crossover rate $1/M$ for $M$ classes, and reverses below it, where practical CLL annotation typically operates. We propose CAVA, which introduces a complementary label cost and a label margin that isolates the contribution of each complementary label to the transport potential. The margin keeps a consistent direction across noise rates, detects diagonal noise with a parameter-free threshold of closed-form precision, and allows detected samples to be recycled as ordinary-label supervision. On synthetic and human-annotated benchmarks, CAVA separates diagonal noise almost perfectly where directly transferred OT valuation performs worse than random. With only a fraction of the clean validation data, it also improves every CLL objective we evaluate, showing that OT-based valuation becomes reliable once the semantics of complementary supervision are modeled explicitly.
comment: 39 pages, 18 figures
☆ PlanarCityLoc: Breaking Silhouette Ambiguity in LoD Aerial Localization via 3D Planes WACV 2027
Oussema Dhaouadi, Shao Jie Hu-Chen, Jakob Gollreiter, Samir Jusufi, Nikolas Rieger, Caroline Wendlandt, Christian Wender, Jingfeng Mao, Guangming Wang, Zuria Bauer, Marc Pollefeys, Daniel Cremers, Olaf Wysocki
Aerial visual localization is crucial for autonomous drone navigation in urban environments where GNSS signals are often degraded. Lightweight textureless Level-of-Detail (LoD) city models provide a geometric map alternative to textured assets. Existing silhouette-based methods rely on image-space alignment, which can leave different camera poses indistinguishable and favor incorrect poses when segmentation errors distort the building outlines. We present PlanarCityLoc, which moves beyond silhouette overlap by leveraging the planar geometry of building facades and roofs. Following geometry-aware initialization, we match image-side planar patches to LoD model planes and use the resulting 3D-to-2D correspondences to refine pose with Perspective-n-Point (PnP). The framework uses off-the-shelf geometry and segmentation models without dataset-specific training or fine-tuning. Experiments on UAVD4L-LoDv2 and Swiss-EPFLv2 achieve state-of-the-art localization recall among the evaluated off-the-shelf LoD-based methods. By grounding image-space alignment in 3D planes, PlanarCityLoc enables more accurate aerial localization with lightweight, textureless city maps.
comment: WACV 2027 - Project page: https://tum-vision.github.io/PlanarCityLoc/
☆ A Flexible ROI Analysis Tool for Spatially Consistent Vegetation Index Extraction from Turfgrass Imagery
Time-series multispectral imaging is widely used to assess turfgrass condition; however, extracting plot-level vegetation index (VI) values remains labor-intensive when camera positions vary between acquisitions and automated plot tracking is unreliable. We developed an open-source software tool comprising (i) a graphical user interface (GUI) for the interactive placement of orientation-adjustable regions of interest (ROIs) with $N$-way subdivision to match plot geometry and (ii) a batch-processing script that computes plot-level mean VI values from single-band floating-point rasters and exports measurements and ROI coordinates in JSON format for reuse. Saved coordinates can be reapplied to measure NDVI, NDRE, and SAVI from identical pixel regions within a single time point without re-delineating ROIs. In a demonstration using rail-mounted multispectral turfgrass imagery (18 images), plot-level mean values were extracted in a single session, with coordinates reused directly for NDRE and SAVI rasters. The system reads non-georeferenced pixel-coordinate rasters natively, does not require GIS expertise, and supports reproducible VI quantification where static sensor deployment is impractical.
comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables
☆ PVBench: Quantifying Physical Plausibility in Video Generation with Object-Level Physical Measurements
Kaiwei Chen, Moran Li, Zhenye Gan, Yabiao Wang, Chengjie Wang, Kexin Zhang, Yong Liu, Jiangning Zhang
Recent video generation models produce visually compelling outputs, yet their physical plausibility remains poorly measured. Physical plausibility asks whether generated objects obey geometry, kinematics, dynamics, and conservation laws. Existing benchmarks rely on coarse visual-language model judgments or target embodied world models rather than video generation itself. We introduce PVBench, a physical video benchmark that quantitatively measures the plausibility of generated videos across 46 dimensions organized into seven domains, spanning: i) instruction and semantic fidelity, ii) behavioral and causal consistency, iii) perceptual and temporal quality, iv) geometric and spatial consistency, v) material properties and field states, vi) kinematic and spatiotemporal persistence, vii) and mechanical plausibility with conservation laws. PVBench comprises 600 carefully crafted prompts, of which 30% involve physical embodied agents such as robot arms, humanoids, quadrupeds, and multi-agent systems. For challenging physically tractable dimensions, it pairs each with specialized vision models that derive verifiable, physically grounded measurements, such as object-level 6D pose, metric scale, surface normals, kinematics, and numerical conservation-law residuals. It thus avoids relying solely on subjective scoring, while supporting both text-to-video and image-to-video generation. Finally, we validate the agreement between automatic metrics and human judgments through human evaluation. Meanwhile, we evaluate mainstream open-source and closed-source models and present several insights. By releasing the benchmark, prompts, and calibration protocol, we aim to foster physically grounded video generation.
☆ Foundation Model Driven Optical Flow NeurIPS 2026
We investigate how frozen pretrained visual and depth representations support dense optical flow when coupled with a supervised matching network. Building on TTSFlow, this paper studies Dense Prediction Transformer (DPT) feature decoding and one coarse-to-fine refinement stage. Our method fuses features from frozen DINOv2 and Depth Anything V2 models and estimates optical flow through a trainable transformer-based matching pipeline. After optical-flow training on FlyingChairs and FlyingThings3D, it achieves 2.37 endpoint error (EPE) on the Sintel training split, Final pass, compared with 2.52 for the FlowSeek (T) configuration reported here. Our RoCo-Spring 2026 entry, RoCo-29.VSAI, obtains a robustness-balanced score of 1.1038, Spring EPE of 1.411, and RobustSpring proxy EPE of 4.739, with a lower balanced score than seven of the twelve listed reference baselines. These results characterize the complete pipeline, which reuses frozen foundation backbones and performs one refinement stage. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/Visual-and-Spatial-AI-Lab/FFlow}
comment: 19-pages, 5 figures, 16 tables. Accepted for publication at 40th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026). Workshop: RoCo-Spring: The Robust Correspondence Challenge
☆ BrushOff: Stroke-Based Re-rendering as a Watermark Removal Attack on Painting
Invisible watermarks are used to mark who owns a painting. We show that a simple attack removes the most robust one we test. The attack redraws the watermarked painting with brush strokes, using a pretrained stroke-based renderer. We call this attack BrushOff. It needs no training, no knowledge of the watermark, and no generative model. We test four watermarks on 500 paintings from five styles. VINE, a recent watermark built to survive image editing, survives all 14 conventional distortions we test, with at least 97.8% detection. Repainting lowers its detection to 1.8%, while the output keeps a no-reference quality score close to that of the clean paintings. Diffusion regeneration can also remove VINE, but at the same removal level it moves the image twice as far from the painting in DreamSim distance, and it changes what the painting shows. Because the renderer draws a countable number of strokes, we can control the attack strength step by step. Finally, we test what kind of signal survives. A simple probe that stores bits in the relative brightness of neighboring regions survives repainting, while a probe that uses absolute brightness does not. The same probe fails under diffusion regeneration, while VINE fails under repainting. Robustness to these two attacks is therefore a separate property, and benchmarks should test both.
comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables
☆ From Short Clips to Real-Time Streams: Identity-Aware Supervision and Context-Efficient Generation for Video Face Swapping
Zekai Luo, Yuwei Liang, Ruiqi Ma, Haoyu Huang, Xuehao Wang, Huanyi Zheng, Mingyu Liu, Linhao Zhong, Chenchen Jing, Yuling Xi, Hao Chen
Video face swapping transfers the reference identity to a target video while preserving its other attributes and motion. Despite recent progress in reference-guided flow-based methods, jointly achieving faithful identity transfer, high fidelity, and real-time generation over long video streams remains challenging. To address this challenge, we rethink the task-specific structure of reference-guided video face swapping. First, face swapping changes only identity while preserving most visual content, yet flow-matching supervision is weakly sensitive to these changes. We therefore develop Joint Rec-ID Loss, which balances explicit identity supervision and latent reconstruction according to the noise level. Second, the target video already provides non-edited attributes and temporal dynamics, enabling generation with fewer spatial tokens and shorter temporal contexts through Face-RoI Generation and Short-Context Rollout Training. By integrating these designs, we propose StreamingSwap, a reference-guided flow-matching framework for real-time streaming video face swapping. We also introduce HumanFaceVid, comprising 1,000 hours of cinematic training data and evaluation sets of 200 short and 200 long videos. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive identity transfer and visual quality at 20 FPS on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU, with stable generation over videos up to 10 minutes long. Project webpage: https://aim-uofa.github.io/StreamingSwap/
comment: Project webpage: https://aim-uofa.github.io/StreamingSwap/
☆ CaptionFuse: Training-Free Composed Product Retrieval Via VLM Intent Captioning and Weighted Embedding Fusion
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) retrieves products matching a reference image modified by natural language---a core capability for eCommerce search. Existing training-free methods fuse CLIP embeddings via arithmetic, but we identify a fundamental limitation: user text modifications are attribute-sparse---a user who types ``make it red with shorter sleeves'' specifies what to change but not what to keep (the floral pattern, the V-neck, the fit-and-flare silhouette). We introduce language-space fusion: a Vision-Language Model (VLM) jointly interprets the reference image and modification to generate a visually grounded product-title caption---e.g., ``Red floral fit-and-flare dress with short sleeves and V-neck''---that fills in the missing attributes from the image. Our method, CaptionFuse, requires no task-specific training and is model-agnostic. A controlled experiment confirms that attribute content--- not linguistic style---drives the gains: imperative and descriptive captions with identical attributes achieve equal R@10, while both outperform raw modifications by +6.5 points.
☆ SpatialScout: Can VLM Agents Actively Explore and Map 3D Scenes?
Zhaoxi Zhang, Hao Liang, Linxuan Wu, Yiming Wu, Yifu Yuan, Kun Liang, Chenming Tang, Meiyi Qiang, Wentao Zhang, Weikang Li
Spatial intelligence requires agents to actively acquire visual evidence and integrate observations into a coherent representation of the three-dimensional world. Yet spatial question answering offers limited evidence of whether models can construct accurate metric maps through autonomous exploration. We introduce SpatialScout, a benchmark for evaluating vision-language model (VLM) agents on active object-level 3D mapping. SpatialScout comprises 80 diverse indoor scenes containing 3,140 target objects. Given an object inventory, RGB observations, camera calibration, and camera poses, agents control a camera to explore each scene and estimate object centers in a shared coordinate frame. The task requires coordinating viewpoint selection, cross-view association, geometric estimation, and map revision under bounded interaction budgets. Evaluation jointly measures localization accuracy and target coverage through object-scale overlap scores that penalize missing predictions. Experiments with frontier VLMs reveal substantial limitations: the strongest evaluated model, Claude Opus 5.5, achieves a mean overlap score of 41.71%, with 47.23% of targets exceeding an intersection-over-union (IoU) threshold of 0.5 and only 3.25% exceeding 0.9. These results reveal a substantial gap between recovering coarse object layouts and constructing complete, precise metric maps. SpatialScout provides a quantitative testbed for developing agents that build reliable 3D spatial representations through active perception. Code is available at https://github.com/JesseZZZZZ/SpatialScout.
☆ Dual-Scale Condition-Shift Editing for Robust Real-World Image Demoiréing
Shiyang Zhou, Haijin Zeng, Congpei Qiu, Zhengcen Li, Ping Chen, Xiangming Wang, Zheng Li, Yongyong Chen, Jingyong Su
Robust demoiréing of screen-recaptured images remains challenging: moiré varies in frequency, color, and spatial support across display-camera pairs and capture conditions. Dedicated restoration networks trained on finite paired data struggle with this diversity, especially when low-frequency color banding and high-frequency stripes co-occur. We present DemoiréEdit, a content-preserving editing framework that adapts the natural-image prior of a pretrained flow-matching editor to demoiréing. First, an endpoint-supervised training objective supplements velocity matching with pixel, perceptual, and frequency-domain restoration losses. Second, a dual-scale condition-shift strategy performs global correction at low resolution, then refines the image at full resolution by shifting the denoising condition from the first-stage output to the original input for detail recovery. We also introduce DailyMoiré130, a benchmark of challenging moiré in everyday screen photography, comprising 130 smartphone captures across diverse displays with low-frequency color banding, fine high-frequency stripes, and mixed-frequency interference. On the challenging DailyMoiré130 benchmark, our method achieves the lowest residual moiré area and receives 71.3% overall-quality preference in a blind Best-of-7 study with 31 participants. We also evaluate on paired FHDMi/UHDM, reducing residual moiré confidence by 47.1%/9.3% and increasing MUSIQ by 4.3%/2.0% over the best baseline for each metric.
☆ EgoXperience: Learning World-Grounded Egocentric Representations from Human Experience
Xinhao Ji, Hui En Pang, Hao Li, Kairui Hu, Jiner Wang, Mingze Sun, Ziang Cao, Yalun Dai, Thang Luu, Qin Ma, Hongyi Chen, Yukang Cao, Fangzhou Hong, Zhaoxi Chen, Ziwei Liu
Reconstructing human activity from egocentric video requires more than recovering individual 3D components: the observer's motion, surrounding geometry, and hand-object interactions must fit together in a consistent world. Achieving this coherence requires both joint reconstruction and aligned supervision, yet existing methods and datasets offer limited support for either. We present EgoXperience, a full-stack paradigm that addresses these needs through data collection, automatic annotation, unified modeling, and benchmarking. Central to EgoXperience is an automatic annotation engine, EgoX-Engine, that couples geometrically verified object tracking with SLAM-based world alignment, yielding consistent supervision for the camera, scene, hands, and objects. This yields EgoX-Data-6M, a 50-hour dataset of task-driven manipulation and locomotion within and across indoor and outdoor environments, with second-level task captions. We carefully select one hour across these activity categories as EgoX-Bench to evaluate joint reconstruction. To translate this supervision into reconstruction, we introduce EgoX, trained with EgoX-Data-6M and complementary annotations from additional public datasets. Given monocular egocentric video and first-frame object masks, our model achieves joint metric reconstruction of the camera, scene, hands, and objects in a shared world coordinate frame with a single forward pass. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across scene estimation and world-space hand-object pose recovery. Against the strongest evaluated baselines, EgoX reduces camera, hand, and depth errors by 68.9%, 65.6%, and 42.9%, and improves object pose scores by 28.0%.
☆ Scaling Vision Foundation Models for Toxicologic Pathology
Jessica Loo, Theodoros Pissas, Byunghak Kang, Vincent A. Ella, Xiaoyan Zhang, Kevin Sweeney, Walter Georgescu, Prateek Katiyar, Julie Boisclair, Holger Hoefling
Here, we present TOX-FM, a family of non-clinical PFMs trained on large-scale diverse histopathology datasets of over one million whole slide images consisting of over 60 organs across six animal species from over 14,000 toxicology studies across six decades. We introduce a comprehensive benchmark of 18 non-clinical downstream tasks, incorporate an established benchmark of 9 clinical downstream tasks, and evaluate TOX-FM against state-of-the-art clinical PFMs across both non-clinical and clinical domains. Notably, we explore open questions surrounding domain-specific training and cross-domain generalization, offering insights into the opportunities and challenges of applying PFMs in the non-clinical domain.
☆ Drive2Gauss: FeedForward 4D Gaussian Reconstruction from Multimodal Generative Driving Videos
Tong Zhao, Zhiyuan Han, Lin Chen, Bowen Xie, Yunxi Qiao, Bohan Li, Weiqing Xiao, Gen Li, Shu Han, Xuyang Dai, Cheng Bi, Hao Zhao, Chaojian Li
Generating reusable driving environments requires both controllable future observations and an explicit representation that supports rendering from different viewpoints, yet existing methods still recover explicit scenes from generated RGB videos through optimization for each sequence. To overcome these limitations, we present Drive2Gauss, a feedforward framework that converts jointly generated RGB, metric depth, and dynamic flow into dynamic 4D Gaussian scenes. A Multimodal Video Generator predicts the three modalities from reference multiview images and future control signals. Furthermore, we introduce a Gaussian Query Decoder that uses depth to initialize sparse 3D queries and flow to associate the queries across time, and integrates appearance information through spatiotemporal feature aggregation and iterative query refinement. The reconstruction stage operates in a single feedforward pass without optimization for each scene. Extensive results on nuScenes demonstrate that our approach attains an FID of 6.38 and an FVD of 12.43 for future RGB generation, a PSNR of 29.91 dB when reconstructing its generated observations, and supports both direct rendering under lateral camera shifts and downstream video fixing. Code and more visualizations are available at https://zttt04. github.io/Drive2Gauss_page/.
☆ DenseHap: Dense Hand Haptic Estimation from Monocular Images
As dexterous robotic manipulation advances, scalable annotations of human hand-object interactions are becoming increasingly important. Furthermore, previous hand contact estimation methods suffered from issues such as dorsal-side misclassifications and insufficient precision, while lacking a unified framework for integrating multiple hand to environment interaction modalities, including distance fields, contact thresholds, and pressure. To address that, we present DenseHap, a unified end-to-end approach to estimate hand distance field recognition, comprehensive hand contact detection, hand pressure analysis, and hand reconstruction from a single monocular image. By incorporating three distinctly defined heads, along with a pretrained 3D reconstructed skeleton and an enhanced dataset, DenseHap outperforms previous state of the art models on four evaluation datasets, improving the F1 score by 8.5 percentage points (a 16% relative improvement) on untrained datasets and by 3 percentage points (5% relative improvement) on in-distribution datasets. Furthermore, DenseHap has effectively improved short-range hand estimate and pressure evaluation. Code and models will be publicly available upon the paper's acceptance.
☆ PrismWAM: Decoupling State Representations in World Action Models
Tianyu Xin, Wanqi Zhong, Bowen Hu, Zhangchi Guo, Lijie Wang, Yiming Wang, Haoran Liao, Heyang Yu, Xiaoyu Tian, Zhiding Yu, Yiming Li
World Action Models (WAMs) typically represent the world through latent embeddings from pretrained video models, which entangle heterogeneous aspects of the world, from how it looks (e.g., texture and color) to how it is physically configured (e.g., occupancy and pose). This raises an underexplored question: $\textbf{what should constitute the state of a WAM?}$ We argue that the world state should separate how the world appears from how the world evolves under action: the former captures semantic context, while the latter is governed by physical state. To this end, we propose $\textbf{PrismWAM}$, which decouples physics from semantics while jointly modeling state and action. PrismWAM factorizes an embodied task into a $\mathrm{Semantic\ Planning}\rightarrow\mathrm{Physical\ Rollout}\rightarrow\mathrm{Executable\ Action}$ pipeline: given only the initial RGB observation, semantic planning learns to predict the final goal image, while physical rollout predicts the fine-grained evolution toward this goal in depth space; executable actions are then generated from the depth rollout. Without any embodied action pretraining or additional data augmentation, PrismWAM achieves strong manipulation performance in both simulation and the real world. Notably, PrismWAM even surpasses a broad range of models with large-scale embodied action pretraining (e.g., OpenWAM-$α$). More broadly, we reframe World Action Models from modeling how the world looks to how it responds to action, paving the way for action-centric world models grounded in occupancy, flow, tactile sensing, proprioception, and beyond.
comment: Project Page: https://prism-wam.github.io/
☆ MRI Reconstruction Risk Estimation from Inference Dynamics
Iterative MRI reconstructors produce intermediate estimates before returning a final image. We study these inference trajectories as a model-internal representation of realized reconstruction risk, measured by log-NMSE. Model-native states are projected to magnitude images, summarized by a fixed 16-dimensional descriptor, and mapped to risk using a source-trained ridge readout. Across three reconstruction backbones, trajectory features are strongly predictive of reconstruction risk on held-out source data. Under zero-shot target shift, their behavior is backbone-dependent, exhibiting both preserved positive association and readout reversal. Conditional analyses show that trajectory information can remain associated with error beyond an initialization-only predictor. A prefix analysis further shows that useful trajectory information can emerge before reconstruction completes. Repeated-mask and low-shot calibration studies indicate that trajectories primarily encode persistent case difficulty, while their orientation and calibration can change under domain shift.
☆ Holi-World: Building Holistic World Intelligence from Human-Ego Experience
Hao Li, Xiyuan Zheng, Yuanyuan Gao, Yalun Dai, Xinhao Ji, Xuan-Li Chen, Jing Zhao, Fangzhou Hong, Zhaoxi Chen, Ziwei Liu
Human egocentric experience offers a rich foundation for learning how the world is organized and how it changes through interaction. Realizing this potential at scale requires turning growing volumes of recordings into learning resources that connect scene structure, object semantics, and interaction histories across viewpoints and time, while reducing dependence on costly manual annotation. We introduce HOLI-WORLD, an integrated ecosystem connecting experience capture, world representation, automated data construction, model learning, and independent evaluation. To sup- port learning at scale, HOLIWORLD-Foundry combines complementary static and dynamic perception to automatically construct world records that connect persistent scene structure and evolving object states with interaction histories and supporting observations. HOLIWORLD-Data organizes these records from approximately 100 self-collected scenes into grounded learning resources, including approximately 80K QA pairs used to train HOLIWORLD-VL-4B. Independent human annotations of heldout recordings form HOLIWORLD-Bench, supporting evaluation of both annotation quality and learned spatial and temporal understanding. Experiments on ScanNet, ScanNet++, Aria Digital Twin, and HOLIWORLD-Bench demonstrate strong performance in static perception and dynamic tracking, while training on HOLIWORLD-Data substantially improves HOLIWORLD-VL-4B's spatial and temporal reasoning on HOLI- WORLD-Bench and EgoDynamic4D. HOLIWORLD provides a practical foundation for expanding learning resources from the continuous flow of human experience and advancing machine understanding of the dynamic world.
comment: https://ropedia.github.io/holi-world
☆ Small Average Error, Wide Individual Error: General-Purpose LLMs Estimating Energy Intake from Meal Photos in a Feeding Trial
Photo-based estimation of food energy could ease dietary assessment, and general-purpose multimodal large language models (LLMs) make such estimates easy to obtain. Most evaluations use one photo taken before eating and compare with energy served, while dietary assessment needs energy eaten. We evaluated six models from two vendors (Claude Haiku, Sonnet and Opus 5.5; GPT-6 luna, 6.1 sol and 6 astra) on 802 meals from ACETADA, a controlled feeding trial with weighed intake, with the before photo only, before and after photos in separate calls (subtraction), or both photos in one request. Three results ran against intuition. Subtraction under-estimated intake for five of six models, because the models still report hundreds of kilocalories for a nearly empty tray. Scaling the before-only estimate by the average share eaten (0.87) matched much of the gain from the after photo; beyond that constant, the second photo lowered meal-level error by only 2.2 to 3.4 points, mainly in meals with food left. With one photo, two models had a near-zero intake bias only because they under-estimated the served energy and ignored uneaten food. In ablations, adding the after photo improved accuracy under both prompt formats for five models, while prompt effects varied across models. Over 148 feeding days, three models kept the 90% confidence interval of their mean error within a pre-set 10% margin, but no model reached the pre-set 30% limits of agreement. Protein was under-estimated by every model, most in protein-dense meals; repeated calls changed error by at most 1.4 points; a high reasoning effort helped only the smallest model (4.2 points) and changed the others by less than 1 point. A low average bias is not evidence of accurate individual intake estimation; such estimates should support, not replace, assessment by a dietitian.
comment: 20 pages, 1 figure, 12 tables. Code, prompts, pre-registration and per-meal outputs: https://github.com/xtea/llm-intake-validation
☆ Interpretable Face Contrast Modeling for Smartphone Portrait Rendering WACV 2027
The quality of smartphone portrait photography has become increasingly important to both manufacturers and users. Recent devices use complex computational pipelines to improve facial rendering under varied lighting. These pipelines vary widely across manufacturers, so the same portrait can look noticeably different across smartphones. These differences affect multiple aspects of facial appearance, making perceptual preference difficult to characterize with a single measure. To address this, we propose an interpretable framework that decomposes face contrast into three components: overall facial tonal separation, eye-region contrast, and micro-contrast of fine skin details. We formulate dedicated metrics for each component and validate them via pairwise human judgments, demonstrating that our approach correlates more closely with human contrast perception than traditional contrast measures. To support this analysis, we introduce a realistic mannequin-based dataset designed for systematic facial contrast evaluation, comprising 508 full-resolution captures from 29 smartphones under diverse lighting, with region-specific masks and extensive pairwise perceptual annotations. As a downstream analysis, we show that combining the three component-wise metrics provides a meaningful basis for modeling balanced facial contrast preference in a controlled setting, and we present a preliminary evaluation on a smaller real-portrait dataset indicating that insights derived from the mannequin study can extend to real images. Our work provides a controlled first step toward defining and evaluating face contrast in portrait imaging.
comment: Accepted at WACV 2027. 37 pages, 37 figures, including references and supplementary material
☆ PDNet: Exploring Pruning and Distillation for Real-Time Worker Activity Recognition in Industrial Assembly
In this work, we address real-time fine-grained human activity recognition (HAR) in industrial assembly and introduce PDNet, a new framework that jointly exploits structured pruning and knowledge distillation for 3D convolutional networks. We start by training a 3D-CNN backbone in a supervised manner. Then, PDNet applies channel-wise structured pruning to obtain a more compact network. In the third step, our method is optimized using knowledge distillation from the large unpruned teacher to recover accuracy lost due to pruning. On the challenging MECCANO dataset with an X3D-M backbone, the pruned model without distillation reaches a Top-1 accuracy of 25.54 %, while PDNet raises this to 39.46 %, with only 6.90 MB model size and 3.78 GFLOPs. These results show that distillation within PDNet is highly effective in restoring pruned model performance and highlight its high potential for resource-constrained HAR in industrial assembly.
comment: Published by SciTePress. ISBN 978-989-758-804-4
☆ 3D Diffusion Models for Medical Imaging
Generative deep learning methods such as Variational Autoencoders, Generative Adversarial Networks or Diffusion Models have achieved remarkable results in image synthesis. In particular, Diffusion Models have demonstrated superior image fidelity and sample diversity compared to other approaches on standard benchmarks, while also offering more flexible training dynamics as evidenced both in natural image domains and in medical applications. In medical imaging including Computed Tomography, Magnetic Resonance Imaging or Positron Emission Tomography, such models have various important use-cases including data augmentation, domain transfer, image reconstruction, inpainting, image augmentation and artifact correction. Further, generated images can be conditioned on patient characteristics, medical reports, segmentation masks or other images. Specific challenges arise due to the 3D volumetric nature of medical images, which translate to substantial demands in terms of memory, compute, and training data. This article provides a comparative overview of 3D Diffusion Models which have been developed for medical images, with a focus on current performance, limitations, and an outlook for future work.
comment: 27 pages, accepted for publication in Informatics in Medicine Unlocked
☆ YUTELA: A Scalable Edge Cloud AIoT System for Multi-Site Video Anomaly Detection with Scene Specific Adaptation
Building upon our previous Ancilia framework, this work presents \emph{YUTELA}, an edge--server--cloud AIoT system for long-term, multi-site video anomaly detection. YUTELA replaces workstation-based on-site processing with NVIDIA Jetson Thor edge devices and redesigns the multi-camera pipeline through camera batching and redistribution, shared memory, reduced inter-stage data transfer, task integration, and TensorRT-accelerated inference. It maintains a separate anomaly model per camera, retrained on a centralized GPU server once enough recent pseudo-normal data are collected, with updated weights returned to the edge. With eight cameras, TensorRT increases throughput from 14.17 to 29.94 FPS under normal density, and the optimized edge node exceeds the throughput of the workstation-based Ancilia system in seven of nine workload settings, reaching up to 2.03 times its throughput at extreme density. This gain comes at the cost of higher latency under lighter loads with four or eight streams. YUTELA was then operated continuously for 170 hours at four public sites using 31 existing CCTV cameras. The deployment shows that runtime load is driven by scene activity and input frame rate rather than by camera count, and that retraining frequency varies by about three times across sites. The 101 automatically triggered training events occupied only about 6.6\% of a single GPU, indicating that one global node can support adaptation for tens of sites. Mean end-to-end alert latency ranged from 6.8 to 15.4~s depending on site traffic and anomaly type. These results show that YUTELA enables practical multi-camera edge processing with low-cost, camera-specific adaptation across heterogeneous sites.
☆ Progressive multi-scale tumor-state memory for incomplete multimodal brain tumor segmentation
Brain tumor segmentation uses complementary magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequences, but some sequences may be unavailable in practice. Their absence changes the information available for segmenting different tumor regions. Fusion methods can support different input subsets. However, fusion at several scales does not by itself specify how tumor evidence is retained and updated to guide fusion at later stages. We propose a progressive multi-scale tumor-state memory network (PMTM) for segmentation from any non-empty subset of T1ce, T1, FLAIR, and T2. PMTM maintains a compact state for the current subject across the encoder stages. At each stage, we use assignment maps to pool spatial features into ordered evidence vectors for each available modality. We average these vectors across the available modalities, and a learned gate combines this evidence with the previous state. The up- dated state guides residual fusion at that stage and is used in the state update at the next stage. A modality-token mixer also models interactions among the available modalities at each stage. We apply semantic supervision to the assignment maps at all four stages. We evaluate PMTM on BraTS2018, BraTS2020, and BraTS2023 GLI across all 15 non-empty modality subsets. Averaged over the three tumor regions and the 15 subsets, PMTM achieves Dice scores of 75.31%, 77.54%, and 80.47% on BraTS2018, BraTS2020, and BraTS2023 GLI, respectively. These scores are higher than those of RobustSeg, RFNet, and mmFormer in our experiments on each dataset. Component ablations and internal state analysis are performed on BraTS2020.
☆ When Guidance Becomes a Guard: Early Interception of Unsafe Inputs in Text-to-Image Generation
Text-to-image diffusion models can produce unsafe content, while output filtering intervenes only after synthesis. We investigate whether native generation signals enable early detection of unsafe and adversarial inputs. We find that classifier-free guidance exposes strong safety signals in conditional responses, accessible through compact statistics and linear readouts. Based on this finding, we propose Conditional Semantic Trajectory Interception (CSTI), which aggregates activation contrasts between conditional and unconditional responses at early checkpoints for calibrated risk detection. CSTI fits concept-specific detectors using canonical concept and safe examples, without attack samples, intermediate image decoding, or generator modification. Across five generators, four adversarial attack collections, and two general NSFW datasets, CSTI achieves the strongest overall performance among six baselines at a matched 5% FPR. Early interception reduces generation latency by over 60% on intercepted paths. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of native conditional responses for early safety interception.
☆ Long-form Video-to-Text Summarization using Recursive Language Models
While VideoLLMs have made significant progress in understanding short video benchmarks, they often struggle to summarize long-form ones. This is mainly due to performance degradation caused by long-context prompts, the inherent difficulty of preserving temporal continuity and a lack of semantically rich concepts in event descriptions. To tackle these issues, this paper introduces the first recursive Video Language Summarization Model (RVLSM) designed for video processing and tailored to long-form video-to-text summarization. RVLSM recursively decomposes videos into semantically coherent segments and delegates chunk-level reasoning to VideoLLM sub-models and external tools. It employs (1) Semantic Temporal Decomposition (STD), which preserves temporal coherence and continuity through a scene-aware chunking strategy that dynamically partitions videos according to semantic boundaries, and (2) Adaptive Multimodal Tool Calling (AMTC), which ensures semantic richness of the summary via a routing mechanism that selectively invokes auxiliary modules such as action recognition, optical character recognition, automatic speech recognition, and object detection. Experiments on the VideoXum and MixTyVSum benchmarks show that RVLSM consistently improves over zero-shot VideoLLM baselines across multiple model settings and performance metrics, and is competitive with a state-of-the-art fine-tuned model for video-to-text summarization. Importantly, the named entities in the RVLSM's summaries align more closely with those detected in the ground-truth summaries than those detected by baseline and state-of-the-art methods, confirming the saliency of the event descriptions it generates.
comment: Paper currently under review
☆ Policy-Adaptive Credit Assignment for Spatial Reasoning with Verifiable Rewards
Image-based spatial reasoning requires perception, decomposition, and inference, but the stage that limits accuracy can change during training. Answer-level rewards neither localize failures to individual stages nor provide discriminative group-relative feedback when all rollouts receive the same reward. Process supervision provides intermediate feedback, but fixed weights cannot adapt reward allocation to these changing bottlenecks. To address this gap, we propose CALIPER, an adaptive process-reward framework supported by SpatialTrace, a corpus of stage-decomposed spatial reasoning traces. CALIPER jointly estimates the associations between stage-wise reference coverage and answer correctness through within-group ridge regression, using these associations as utility proxies to gradually update reward weights. The resulting process reward supervises all rollout groups, including uniformly failing ones. Because utility estimates can become unreliable when answer-discriminative groups are scarce, a closed-loop harness monitors estimator reliability and validation performance to guide checkpoint rollback, rollout diversification, and early stopping. Extensive experiments across eight benchmarks and three backbones show that CALIPER achieves the highest mean under both one-shot and harness training, with consistent gains over fixed allocation across RL optimizers. Further analyses confirm the benefits of adaptive reward allocation and harness control, with favorable scaling in model/data size.
comment: 27 pages, 8 figures, 11 tables
☆ LaMER: Language-Conditioned Multi-Expert Routing for Weakly Supervised Referring Expression Comprehension
Yu Yu Chang, Tzu-Hsuan Weng, Youssef Mohamed Amin, Mohaned Ahmed Elsayed, Hung-Hsuan Chen, Min-Te Sun, Sherine Shawky
Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) localizes the image region described by a natural language expression, underpinning applications such as autonomous navigation, human-robot interaction, and medical image analysis. Under weak supervision, REC is challenged by the visual-linguistic semantic gap and the difficulty of inferring region-text correspondences from coarse image-level signals alone. Moreover, no single visual encoder captures all complementary properties---semantic alignment, fine-grained texture, and boundary awareness---while naively fusing multiple pretrained encoders yields heterogeneous, hard-to-reconcile representations. We propose LaMER, a weakly supervised REC framework that dynamically aggregates four frozen expert encoders through a language-conditioned Cross-Modal Routing Fusion module, adapting expert selection to each referring expression without instance-level bounding-box supervision. A Cell-Text Matching Head with Negative Anchor Augmentation, trained with a multi-objective loss combining contrastive, reconstruction, alignment, and load-balancing terms, further stabilizes optimization. LaMER achieves 77.67\%, 62.81\%, and 69.49\% Acc@IoU\(\geq 0.5\) on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg, surpassing DViN and WeakMCN by up to 16.49 and 14.49 points, with ablations validating each component.
☆ One Fact, Many Places: Redundant Evidence in Long Visual Documents Breaks Single-Gold Evaluation of Retrieval, Citation and Attribution
Document understanding is increasingly judged on where an answer comes from, scored against annotated gold locations as if each fact lived in one place. In long visual documents, a fact often lives in several places: a chart value is restated in the text, a key figure reappears in the summary. We ask how often such copies occur in standard benchmarks and what they do to evaluation. We annotate 420 questions from MMLongBench-Doc and MMDocRAG with the locations that independently establish each required fact, checked by two independent reviewers. Copies are common and often cross-modal: 19.5% of MMLongBench-Doc test questions have a strict copy outside the gold, and in 28% of MMDocRAG questions a non-gold candidate alone supplies a required fact. Single-gold scoring then fails in three predictable ways. A retriever that finds a copy is scored as a miss: page recall@1 of text and visual retrievers is underestimated by 13-24 points on questions with a cross-page copy. A model that cites a copy is scored as citing wrongly: crediting equivalent evidence reverses 11% of pairwise orderings among 65 competitive MMDocRAG systems. Masking the gold region leaves the fact available elsewhere: with a copy in the input, 41-56% of correct answers across four models survive it yet fail once every annotated instance is masked. Set-level masking with automatically found copies closes 78% of the gap to masking every annotated instance at matched granularity (three models); an unverified key-string rule lowers survival at least as far but masks three times the area. We release the annotations and redundancy-aware metrics.
comment: 18 pages, 5 figures; includes supplementary material. Code, data and editable figure sources provided as ancillary files
☆ From Legacy to Contemporary: Scalable Color Modernization for Long Video
Bringing legacy video back to contemporary screens does not necessarily make it look contemporary. Earlier imaging pipelines often leave color casts, muted chroma, weak con- trast, and tonal imbalance, while correcting these character- istics still relies heavily on expert colorists and scales poorly to long, multi-shot videos. We formulate long video color modernization, a task that updates the chromatic and tonal appearance of legacy color footage while preserving scene content and coherence across frames and shots. We introduce a scalable, training-free framework that jointly modernizes grids of temporally adjacent keyframes using a pretrained text-guided image editing model, producing coherent con- temporary references without paired supervision. Compact shot-specific color transforms then propagate these adjust- ments throughout each shot, preserving spatial structure and temporal stability. We conduct a multidimensional evaluation on diverse legacy videos spanning five decades. We combine a human evaluation of perceived modernness with quantita- tive measures of content fidelity, temporal stability, percep- tual quality, and efficiency, and introduce Source-Weighted Inter-shot Grade Consistency (SW-IGC) to assess grade co- herence across shots. On our evaluation set, our frame- work achieves the highest perceived modernness while re- maining competitive across complementary measures, open- ing a path toward the systematic study of long video color modernization. Code is available at https://github.com/jiwoomood/ Video_Color_Modernization.git
comment: Preprint
☆ HGASurv: Hierarchical Granularity-Aware Integration for Multimodal Survival Prediction
Objective: Multimodal survival prediction jointly analyzes histopathological whole-slide images (WSIs), genomic profiles, and clinical variables to stratify patients by risk. However, existing approaches often inadequately account for granularity differences across modalities, particularly in spatial organization and feature dimensionality. To address these challenges, we propose HGASurv, which introduces a hierarchical WSI encoding module and a clinical-guided graph propagation module for granularity-aware multimodal integration. Methods: The hierarchical WSI encoding module maps WSI patch features onto a spatial grid using their original coordinates and applies parallel convolutions to construct representations at patch, local-neighborhood, and regional scales. Genomic signature embeddings then query these scale-specific WSI representations through cross-modal co-attention, producing signature-conditioned morphological features. The clinical-guided graph propagation module uses clinical variables to define patient-similarity edges and propagates fused image-genomic node embeddings with graph attention, integrating clinical information through topology rather than feature concatenation. Results: Across three TCGA cohorts, HGASurv achieved the strongest overall C-index performance, with ablation studies supporting the complementary contributions of the hierarchical WSI encoding and clinical-guided graph propagation modules. Conclusion and Significance: By introducing hierarchical WSI encoding and clinical-guided graph propagation, HGASurv unifies multi-scale pathology representation with topology-based clinical integration in a hierarchical granularity-aware framework. This design shows that matching representation and integration mechanisms to modality-specific granularity improves multimodal survival prediction.
comment: Preprint
☆ TriScore: Post-Hoc Out-of-Distribution Detection with Energy, Boundary Probes, and Transform Consistency
Post-hoc out-of-distribution detection usually relies on a single signal extracted from a frozen classifier, such as confidence, energy, features, or gradients. This dependence becomes fragile under classifier-level adversarial shift, where the shift can preserve the detector's chosen cue while changing the model's decision behavior. We investigate whether this failure mode can be mitigated by combining complementary detection criteria instead of selecting a single score. We introduce TriScore, a post-hoc OOD detector that combines three ID-calibrated signals from the same frozen backbone: an energy prior, a boundary-fragility score, and a transform-consistency score. These signals are standardized on ID validation data and fused by an input-dependent ID-residual gate, requiring no OOD labels, auxiliary model, training, or stored feature bank. Across four ImageNet-scale backbones, TriScore achieves the best mean AUROC among 15 post-hoc baselines under a non-adaptive adversarial-shift protocol, while remaining competitive on standard OOD benchmarks. Ablations show that the gains come from combining complementary cues rather than optimizing a single detector signal. These results support multi-criterion post-hoc detection as a practical route toward more robust OOD detection under classifier-level shift. The source code is publicly available at github.com/gursoyege/TriScore.
☆ MCDA: Multi-View Graph Contrastive Learning with Dynamic Topology Augmentation for Functional MRI Analysis
Resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) is a vital non-invasive tool for diagnosing brain disorders and uncovering pathological mechanisms. However, existing graph contrastive learning (GCL) methods often underexploit augmentation histories across training epochs and the relationships among different augmented views. In this paper, we introduce a topology-guided Multi-view graph Contrastive learning framework with Dynamic graph topology Augmentation (MCDA) for fMRI analysis. Unlike traditional GCL that uses fixed noise or edge-dropping, MCDA employs a Dynamic Augmentation Update (DAU) module that iteratively refines the augmented topology. Specifically, we incorporate self-aware and cross-sample augmentation strategies to simultaneously capture individual-specific functional signatures and inter-subject heterogeneity. We then design a topology-guided multi-view graph contrastive learning scheme that explores interrelationships not only between the original network and its augmented views, but also across different augmented views to maximize structural information preservation. We characterize the score-level optimization directions and establish a lower bound for the contrastive objective. The framework combines classification and contrastive losses for brain disorder diagnosis and examines discriminative functional connectivity patterns as potential biomarkers. Experiments on two public rs-fMRI datasets comprising 1,236 subjects demonstrate that MCDA outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The code has been made publicly available at: \url{https://github.com/goodcodingagoodboy/MCDA}.
comment: 14 pages, 8 figures
☆ CARNet: End-to-End Coupled Association-Recognition Network for Fine-Grained Multi-Drone Collaborative Detection
Multi-drone collaborative detection aims to enhance target recognition by leveraging complementary observations from overlapping aerial viewpoints. Existing approaches typically follow a two-stage pipeline that first establishes cross-view correspondences and then performs fusion-based recognition. However, this decomposition suffers from inconsistent optimization objectives, redundant pairwise modeling, and irreversible error propagation, where incorrect associations inevitably undermine subsequent recognition performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Coupled Association-Recognition Network (CARNet), a unified framework that jointly optimizes cross-view target association and recognition fusion through a shared target-pair representation. To improve association reliability in densely populated scenes with visually similar targets, CARNet explicitly incorporates spatial cues into pairwise relation modeling. Moreover, we introduce two complementary causal-inspired intervention strategies: the first enhances cross-view association by emphasizing appearance-confusing pairs, while the second bolsters the robustness of fusion-based recognition by learning stable multi-view representations under incomplete visual evidence. In addition, we present MDMT-CD, a fine-grained extension of the MDMT dataset that enriches the original vehicle annotations with detailed category labels, providing the first benchmark specifically designed for multi-drone collaborative vehicle detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CARNet consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. The MDMT-CD dataset and source code will be available at https://github.com/bigdreaming11/CARNet.
☆ From Cause to Effect: Generating Intermediate Event Chains in Videos EMNLP 2026
Video-Language Models (VLMs) excel at visual recognition but struggle with causal reasoning. Current evaluations are flawed: multiple-choice QA allows shortcuts, and open-ended QA lacks robust automatic evaluation. We introduce Causal Chain Generation (CCG), a novel task where models have to generate the sequence of intermediate events connecting a cause and an effect. This structured setup demands genuine reasoning and enables reliable automatic scoring. We accompany this task with two complementary metrics: SODA-Embedding, which measures the semantic matching of a generated chain against a reference, and Causal-QA, which probes the chain's causal coherence by asking whether it contains the specific causal facts needed to reconstruct the narrative. We provide two test sets: SF20K-CC, a manually annotated diagnostic on 20 short films, and CMD-CC, a movie clip benchmark derived from audio descriptions. Our analysis reveals that state-of-the-art VLMs struggle with narrative causality understanding, frequently hallucinating or omitting key events. To address this, we fine-tune VLMs with GRPO using a composite reward that combines a format reward, SODA-Embedding, and Causal-QA accuracy, demonstrating substantial improvements over strong baselines.
comment: Accepted at EMNLP 2026. Project page: https://ridouaneg.github.io/ccg
☆ TIM: Temporal Decoupling with Iterative Mutual-Refinement Model for Longitudinal Radiology Report Generation CVPR 2026
Automatic radiology report generation (RRG) aims to translate medical images into diagnostic text, reducing radiologists' workload and standardizing clinical documentation. Nonetheless, existing approaches mainly focus on single-timepoint analysis and fail to capture temporal disease evolution across longitudinal examinations. While recent longitudinal RRG (LRRG) approaches incorporate historical data, they often combine images from different time points within a single representation space, leading to blurred semantics and inconsistent temporal reasoning. In this work, we propose a Temporal Decoupling with Iterative Mutual-Refinement Model (TIM), a two-stage framework that explicitly decouples spatial pathology from temporal progression and iteratively refines reports through mutual feedback. Stage I performs temporal-decoupled representation learning, separating temporal evolution patterns from disease-specific features and generating radiology reports for both prior and current studies. Stage II introduces a mutual report refinement mechanism that identifies diagnostic inconsistencies within prior reports and iteratively rectifies both prior and current reports through error-sensitive feedback. Experiments on the Longitudinal-MIMIC dataset demonstrate that TIM surpasses existing single-image and longitudinal baselines, achieving new state-of-the-art performance across both language and clinical metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/yihengd/TIM.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026
☆ Dynamics-Aware Sparse Attention for Efficient Autoregressive Video Diffusion NeurIPS 2026
Yuanyu He, Zhuokun Chen, Yefei He, Zhiwei Tang, Jiasheng Tang, Yinghao Yu, Jianfei Cai, Bohan Zhuang
Autoregressive Diffusion Transformers have emerged as a powerful paradigm for long video generation. However, they are often constrained by prohibitive computational overhead and substantial memory footprints. This inefficiency arises from dense computation mechanisms that allocate uniform processing resources across all spatiotemporal regions, failing to leverage the inherent temporal redundancy of video where motion is typically confined to sparse areas. In this paper, we propose Dynamics-Aware Sparse Attention (DASA), a unified framework that shifts from dense computation to sparse, motion-driven generation to eliminate both storage and computational redundancies. Inspired by video codec principles, our approach explicitly decouples video content into dynamic and static regions. To mitigate memory bottlenecks, we selectively compress the historical KV cache by retaining only dynamic features within the generated chunk. Furthermore, to reduce computational overhead, we employ a region-level computation allocation strategy based on localized dynamics. Additionally, a dynamics-guided distillation method is introduced to enhance performance via a lightweight distillation training process. Experiments on VBench demonstrate that our approach accelerates autoregressive video generation by 2.16x, while preserving high visual fidelity.
comment: NeurIPS 2026, Project page: https://yuanyu0.github.io/DASA/
☆ XGLASS: X-Ray, Gaze and Language Assisted Slice Sequencing for CT Volumes WACV 2027
Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve remarkable performance on 2D medical images, such as X-rays or pathology images, while 3D VLMs that directly process CT/MRI volumes lag behind due to limited 3D training data and the predominance of 2D foundation architectures. To leverage powerful 2D VLMs for analyzing medical volumes, which contain hundreds of slices, it is therefore necessary to focus only on those few slices, which are diagnostically relevant. To enable such a prioritization, we propose XGLASS, a method that transfers medical expertise from 2D X-rays to 3D CT for task-aware slice prioritization. XGLASS uses disease-conditioned importance maps derived from language-aligned radiologist gaze on X-rays and spatially aligns them with coronal CT projections, bringing gaze priors and CT content into a shared 2D representation. The fused gaze-prior/CT projection is then used to predict a disease-specific ordering of axial slices, prioritizing diagnostically relevant slices. XGLASS significantly improves budgeted retrieval over 2D and 3D-native baselines, achieving a top-10 hit rate up to 75.9% for the best-performing disease. In practice, this means that after inspecting only the top 10 slices (4.17% of a 240-slice scan), XGLASS identifies a diagnostically relevant slice in more than 75% of cases. For downstream slice-wise finding classification, an XGLASS-selected 30-slice candidate set reduces model calls by 87.5% while improving F1 by 11.3 percentage points over all-slice inference, 4.2 points over the strongest 2D selector, and remains competitive with 3D-native selectors while requiring up to 130.8 times less time and 10.9 times less GPU memory per finding, supporting its use as a lightweight preselector for volumetric CT analysis. The code and pretrained checkpoint are available on https://github.com/michaelgloeckler/XGLASS.
comment: Accepted at WACV 2027. 24 pages, including references and supplementary material. Code and checkpoint: https://github.com/michaelgloeckler/XGLASS
☆ RECAP: Reciprocal Sparse Attention and Hierarchical Caching for Efficient Video Diffusion
Diffusion transformers generate high-quality videos but remain computationally expensive. Sparse attention and temporal caching reduce computation within and across denoising steps, respectively, offering a natural composition. However, predictions produced with sparse attention become sources for temporal reuse, coupling their errors along the sampling trajectory. We observe that improving the accuracy of these sources recovers fidelity without changing the reuse schedule, and that sparsification errors remain directionally aligned across nearby steps, suggesting that correction information can be shared rather than recomputed. These observations motivate RECAP, a training-free method that couples sparse attention with hierarchical caching through reciprocal correction, adaptively coordinated by online error feedback. Cached dense refinement corrects omitted interactions in current sparse estimates, while fresh sparse statistics track input changes and regulate the aging correction. The resulting predictions then renew the sources for whole-step prediction reuse, allowing prediction history to advance between dense refreshes. We evaluate RECAP on multiple video diffusion models against sparse-attention methods, caching methods, and their direct compositions. On HunyuanVideo at 720p 5-second generation, RECAP achieves a 3.05x speedup and outperforms all tested direct compositions in both fidelity and inference speed.
comment: Code is available at https://github.com/lyraxtg/RECAP
☆ SAR2Net: Learning Spatially Anchored Representations for Retrieval-Guided Cross-Stain Alignment CVPR 2026
Achieving spatial alignment between whole-slide images(WSIs) across stains is essential for integrating morphology and molecular information, yet it remains challenging due to extreme resolution, tissue fragmentation, and large nonlinear deformations. Conventional registration pipelines depend on global pre-alignment and spatial consistency, which often collapse under such distortions. We present SAR2Net, a framework that learns spatially anchored representations and reformulates cross-stain alignment as a region-level feature retrieval problem. Instead of estimating explicit transformations, SAR2Net learns pointwise representations encoding the relative spatial relationships to tissue landmarks. Given landmarks and arbitrary coordinates, it predicts spatially anchored features that serve as deformation-invariant descriptors of tissue topology. A twostage retrieval framework then establishes correspondences between slides, even when global alignment is infeasible. Experiments on biopsy-oriented HE-IHC datasets show that SAR2Net achieves robust region-level alignment under severe tissue distortions, outperforming previous methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Shentl/SAR2Net.
comment: 10 pages, CVPR 2026
☆ RoAR-VAE: Improving Latent Diffusability through Robust Prediction
An effective visual tokenizer must preserve image fidelity while producing latents that downstream diffusion models can learn efficiently. Prior work improves latent diffusability through semantic alignment or joint tokenizer--diffusion training. Revisiting REPA-E, a representative approach, we find that removing its diffusion objective and dedicated generative blocks while retaining semantic prediction from corrupted latents yields comparable downstream generation performance under a matched setting. This observation motivates a general principle of robust prediction: generation-relevant information should remain recoverable from corrupted latents. We instantiate this principle with two complementary objectives. RobustAlign predicts pretrained semantic features from corrupted latents to preserve high-level structure, while RobustRecon reconstructs the clean image to retain fine-grained spatial and appearance information. Together, they form Robust Alignment and Reconstruction VAE (RoAR-VAE). Our analysis suggests that robust prediction improves diffusability by making useful information more accessible in high-variance latent directions, which diffusion models tend to learn earlier. Empirically, RoAR-VAE improves average generation benchmark performance by 2.19 points over the strongest baseline tokenizer under the same training budget, while improving small-text reconstruction accuracy by 16.93 percentage points over FLUX.1-VAE. These results demonstrate that RoAR-VAE achieves a favorable balance between reconstruction fidelity and downstream generative learnability.
comment: Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/RoAR_VAE
☆ ExMR: Extremity Motion Refinement for Monocular Human Motion Capture 3DV 2026
Detailed hand and foot articulation is important for animation and motion analysis, yet remains challenging to recover from monocular video. Recent expressive video methods infer hand articulation from shared whole-body representations. Our conference work suggests that this underexploits local evidence: the Foot Motion Refinement (FootMR) module refines ankle rotations from foot keypoints, improving reconstruction even when the initial estimator receives the same keypoints. We extend this principle to hands with the Hand Motion Refinement (HandMR) module. Because 2D finger keypoints are often missing or unreliable, HandMR combines image features of a pretrained hand reconstruction model with initial arm and hand rotations to refine elbows, wrists, and fingers. We integrate FootMR and HandMR into ExMR (Extremity Motion Refinement), a system for reconstructing 3D body, hand, and foot motion from monocular video. An initial temporal estimator predicts whole-body motion, after which both refiners revisit local evidence to predict residual joint rotations. Experiments on ARCTIC, MOYO, RICH, and MOOF show that ExMR outperforms state-of-the-art methods in hand and foot reconstruction, reducing hand per-vertex error and ankle joint angle error on MOYO by 19% and 18%, respectively, relative to the strongest competitor. Code will be made available for research purposes. Project page: https://twehrbein.github.io/exmr-website/
comment: Extended version of the 3DV 2026 paper "Improving 3D Foot Motion Reconstruction in Markerless Monocular Human Motion Capture". 17 pages main paper + 4 pages supplementary material. Project page and video: https://twehrbein.github.io/exmr-website/
☆ Focused Omni-Modal GUI Agents
Fuyao Zhang, Wenwen He, Jiaming Zhang, Yurong Hao, Xuan Wang, Guowei Guan, Che Wang, Longtao Huang, Wei Yang Bryan Lim
Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents increasingly act over streaming omni-modal observations spanning screenshots, audio, video, interaction history, and device states. However, exposing this complete context uniformly at every step ignores that relevance is transient and sparse: the signal determining one action can become clutter at the next. Because executed actions feed back into the context, these errors compound into Sequential Distraction, driving the agent into irreversible trajectory drift. We formulate the underlying requirement as Focused Perception: a representation that is step-adaptive, action-sufficient, and non-intrusive. We realize this in FocusGUI, a lightweight adapter that dynamically prioritizes multimodal channels against a step-specific decision reference. Instead of uniformly processing all inputs, it compresses the most relevant evidence into a compact latent and subtly injects it into the frozen decoder's embeddings, guiding the model's attention without altering its native parameter space. FocusGUI trains from action supervision alone, requiring neither modality-relevance labels nor backbone fine-tuning. Across four omni-modal backbones, it raises overall Type Match by +33.2 and Exact Match by 3.0 times over the frozen backbone on average, and Type Match by +30.1 over the strongest existing enhancement method.
☆ GeoEdit: Adversarial De-Evidencing for Silent Geoprivacy Protection via Image Editing
Recent efforts have demonstrated the strong capabilities of Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) in geographic reasoning. By jointly analyzing subtle visual cues, these models can infer the locations of photos, thus enabling doxing even by non-expert adversaries. Existing defense methods struggle to balance the shareability of photos with effective protection, and often fail to sufficiently disrupt the implicit geo-evidence chains embedded in scene semantics. To this end, we propose GeoEdit, an adversarial de-evidencing framework for silent geoprivacy protection via image editing. Specifically, we apply minimal edits to high-risk evidence anchors in the image, thereby disrupting the underlying spatial reasoning chains while preserving overall scene semantics. We identify these anchors by combining structured knowledge with adversarially discovered geographic cues. To further navigate the large editing action space, we adopt a learnable policy to iteratively refine editing decisions, distilling successful trajectories into transferable natural-language insights for consistent and efficient editing. Evaluated on LifePhotoBench, GeoEdit achieves strong protection against 6 mainstream MLRMs, outperforming visual perturbation baselines by over 0.59 in image fidelity.
☆ Wan-Alpha++: Animating a Single RGBA Asset into Controllable Transparent Video Effects
Haotian Dong, Xin Wang, Wenjing Wang, Chen Li, Jing Lyu, Yan Tina Luximon, Ping Li, Wanchao Su, Ke Xu, Di Lin
RGBA video generation is essential for creating compositable visual assets in filmmaking, game development, and digital content production. However, generating high-quality RGB appearance alongside temporally coherent transparency remains a significant challenge. Existing text-to-RGBA video methods often entangle RGB and alpha distributions and offer limited control over the precise appearance of a target asset. In addition, incorporating image conditioning typically suffers from the emergence-disappearance effects, which fail existing first-frame or first-and-last-frame conditions due to their fully transparent boundary frames. To address these issues, we present Wan-Alpha++, a unified framework that brings controllable RGBA video generation to both text- and image-to-video diffusion backbones through a shared RGBA latent space, extending our conference version Wan-Alpha from the text-conditioned setting to image-conditioned generation with an interior reference frame. Our method first learns shiftable RGB-alpha distributions while preserving the pretrained RGB prior. Specifically, we introduce a transparency-aware bidirectional diffusion objective to produce distinguishable RGBA latent representations, and a transparency-guided mean sampler that shifts the noise distribution to improve transparency generation and enable spatial controllability. Building upon this RGBA generation prior, we introduce temporal phase reparameterization for image-conditioned effect generation. By cyclically transforming a zero-positive-zero alpha pattern into a positive-zero-positive pattern, it relocates visible content to both temporal boundaries, facilitating effective appearance conditioning with limited RGBA data.
comment: 17 pages, 13 figures
☆ HP-PnP-Flow: Hybrid Time Scheduling and Projection for Plug-and-Play Image Restoration via Flow Matching
Image restoration is a fundamental inverse problem that seeks to recover high-quality images from degraded observations. Plug-and-Play (PnP) methods provide a flexible framework for integrating pretrained denoisers into iterative reconstruction, whereas flow matching offers an efficient generative modeling approach based on continuous-time ODE dynamics. Very recently, Martin et al.\ (ICLR, 2025) developed a PnP-Flow method, which integrates the PnP framework with flow matching through a time-dependent denoiser constructed from a pretrained flow matching model.By incorporating a different time schedule and an additional pixel-space projection operator, this paper proposes a novel efficient PnP-Flow algorithm (HP-PnP-Flow) that enjoys rigorous convergence guarantees under mild assumptions, without imposing restrictive conditions on iterates required by the aforementioned work. Numerical experiments on CelebA and AFHQ-Cat demonstrate that the newly proposed HP-PnP-Flow algorithm significantly outperforms PnP-Flow on several restoration tasks such as denoising, deblurring, super-resolution, random inpainting, and box inpainting. Notably, our algorithm achieves comparable or better reconstruction quality with substantially fewer iterations, reducing the iteration count from $500$ to $100$ for deblurring and super-resolution on AFHQ-Cat.
☆ Learning Goal-Conditioned Subgoals through Frozen Hierarchical World Models
Hierarchical world models plan over long horizons by passing predicted states from a coarse model to a lower-level controller. Choosing these states can be expensive: the upper-level planner repeatedly differentiates through candidate macro-action trajectories. We replace this search with a lightweight goal-conditioned network trained through the frozen high-level predictor. The network supplies a conditioning vector, while the predictor generates the next latent waypoint. Training uses hindsight goals and state-prediction losses on offline trajectories, without search-solution targets or macro-action labels. Inference retains an autoregressive high-level rollout, but requires no high-level candidate optimization. We evaluate this approach on the shared-latent HWM checkpoints distributed with H-JEPA, using three backbone seeds and three head initializations per backbone. With a common evaluation protocol, mean success is 70.4% on Cube, 48.7% on Push-T, 100.0% on FourRoom, and 71.1% on Visual AntMaze. The method improves over the corresponding HWM search baseline on three environments and has the same mean on Push-T. Dedicated measurements on an NVIDIA L40S give 1.28-4.39x end-to-end speedups for batched evaluation. Ablations identify state-adaptive conditioning as a consistent contributor, while predictor-mediated subgoals and unrestricted conditions have environment-dependent benefits.
☆ TriTD: Tri-Partite Trajectory-Distribution Distillation for Real-Time Autoregressive Video Generation
Jia Li, Xurui Peng, Haowei Zhu, Tianyu Zhao, Jiexi Wang, Youwei Zheng, Yuxi Ren, Xinglong Wu, Xing Wang, Hayden Kwok-Hay So
Autoregressive (AR) video diffusion has emerged as a leading paradigm for efficient video generation, yet its practical deployment remains bottlenecked by the trade-off between generation quality and inference efficiency. We attribute this bottleneck to three error sources in AR rollouts: the base model error, the train-inference distribution mismatch, and the upstream error propagation. Building on this decomposition, we derive closed-form upper bounds on the per-step and cumulative errors, providing a principled basis for jointly optimizing generation quality and inference efficiency. Guided by this analysis, we propose TriTD, a Tri-Partite Trajectory-Distribution co-optimized distillation framework with three complementary modules. First, for ODE initialization, we adopt a Next-Node Trajectory Distillation (NTD) objective, which shortens the supervision horizon and admits a lower regression-error floor. Second, we introduce Chunk-Graded Noising (CGN), a monotonically non-decreasing per-chunk noising schedule that helps narrow the expected train-inference noise mismatch and removes redundant KV-cache updates, yielding substantial speedups at no quality cost. Third, we propose Orthogonal-Parallel DMD (OP-DMD), a distribution-matching loss that retains the original DMD supervision while introducing an additional regression constraint in the orthogonal subspace to suppress off-axis drift, improving both training stability and final generation quality. Extensive experiments show that TriTD consistently surpasses existing baselines in visual quality while reaching a real-time throughput of 26.8 FPS on a single H100 GPU, delivering a balanced quality-efficiency solution for interactive streaming video generation.
comment: 21 pages, 8 figures
☆ Optimal Multi-Kernel Combination for Online Multi-Label Classification
Multi-label classification is particularly challenging in streaming scenarios, where data arrives sequentially. Online kernel methods offer a promising solution. However, prevailing methods rely on a single preselected kernel, making them prone to suboptimal choices since the global data distribution is unknown in advance in online settings. Although the recent method, Online Kernel Selection for Online Multi-label Classification (OKS-OMC), enables data-driven kernel selection, it fails to fully harness the complementary information from multiple kernels and encounters the curse of kernelization. To address these limitations, this paper introduces a novel online multi-kernel combination method for large-scale multi-label classification. First, an efficient and robust online single-kernel multi-label method is designed. Second, learning an optimal convex combination of multiple multi-label kernel classifiers is formalized as a structural risk minimization problem. An improved alternating optimization procedure is developed, in which the combination coefficients are updated by directly minimizing the objective function, while each kernel classifier is updated by minimizing a surrogate upper bound. This procedure decouples the learning of kernel classifiers from combination coefficients, allowing independent classifier updates via our single-kernel method and accelerating convergence to high-quality solutions. Our multi-kernel method is proven to asymptotically converge to the optimal fixed convex combination of the best fixed single-kernel models chosen in hindsight. Ablation studies confirm that our method's components outperform their counterparts in OKS-OMC. Comprehensive evaluations across 11 datasets and seven metrics demonstrate our method's overall superiority over existing online multi-label methods.
comment: This manuscript has been submitted to Pattern Recognition for consideration and is presently under review
☆ PnP-Transformer: A Neural Pose Solver for 6D Object Pose Estimation ECCV 2026
We present PnP-Transformer, a neural pose solver designed as an iterative-free, differentiable alternative to classical PnP-RANSAC algorithms. PnP-Transformer regresses the 6D object pose by processing predicted semi-dense 2D-3D correspondence fields alongside confidence scores, while mapping geometric inputs into a continuous latent space. To evaluate its practical utility, we integrate PnP-Transformer into a zero-shot 6D pose estimation pipeline, where the correspondence module and pose solver are trained separately. PnP-Transformer achieves a 41.2% mean AR score with low latency (0.46 s/obj) on seven core BOP benchmark datasets, surpassing all prior baselines (such as RayPose with 39.1% AR) but one (Co-op with 58.4% AR). When the pose solver is replaced with EPnP-RANSAC (similar to Co-op) while keeping the correspondence module unchanged, the RANSAC alternative outperforms PnP-Transformer on six of the seven datasets by reaching 52.2% mean AR at a cost of an additional 60 ms per object, revealing an accuracy-latency trade-off. Code and pretrained models are available: https://github.com/ebylmz/pnp-transformer
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026 R6D Workshop
☆ How Robust Are Prognostic Radiomic Features? Comparing Selection Techniques on Pooled Glioblastoma Cohorts
Yannick Sodonougbo, Marlene Schnieders, Alexia Rizoudis, Santiago Cepeda, Frank Kramer, Dominik Müller
Radiomic survival studies in glioblastoma report heterogeneous prognostic features, but how much of this stems from the methodology itself is rarely examined. We analysed the association of 463 radiomic, anatomical and clinical features from pre-treatment MRI with overall survival in 705 IDH-wildtype glioblastoma patients from three public cohorts, using three techniques: a log-rank test after median split, univariate Cox regression (both Benjamini-Hochberg corrected) and an XGBoost regressor interpreted with SHAP. The log-rank test selected 99 features, Cox regression 72 and SHAP its top 20; five were selected by all three: age, a peritumoural T2 texture feature, the number of connected peritumoural mask components and two image-level intensity maxima. The two survival tests shared 51 features, about half of the SHAP top 20 were also selected by either test, and where selections overlapped, effect directions agreed. Many selections were PyRadiomics diagnostic descriptors that are not restricted to tumour voxels. Analytical pipeline choices, including ranking method, pre-filtering and descriptor handling, can substantially influence which features appear prognostic.
comment: 7 pages, 1 figure
☆ GeoNaviDiff: Transferring Disentangled Semantic Controls to Diffusion Features via Local Riemannian Navigation
Disentangled real-image manipulation requires factor-specific semantic control while preserving image fidelity and non-target content. StyleSpace $S$ provides interpretable controls but is limited by GAN inversion, whereas diffusion models offer stronger image realization without an explicit factorized control basis. We introduce GeoNaviDiff, an unsupervised cross-space framework that transfers disentangled StyleSpace interventions to local Riemannian trajectories in diffusion $h$-space. GeoNaviDiff constructs reconstruction-decoupled supervision by extracting a spherical Log-map tangent from a matched StyleGAN reconstruction-edit pair and parallel-transporting it to the real-image diffusion state. A shared, factor-conditioned Navigator predicts this tangent at inference, while norm-preserving geodesic realization and source-anchored rollout stabilize the reverse process without edited references or factor-specific models. Experiments across multiple datasets show that GeoNaviDiff outperforms the compared methods in fidelity, factor selectivity, edit locality, and trajectory smoothness.
☆ RGB--Event Object Detection Across Operating Frequencies via Reliability-Supervised Routing and Asymmetric-Resolution Fusion
Autonomous vehicles must detect objects faster than a frame camera delivers images. Event cameras record brightness changes with microsecond resolution, so RGB--event detectors can decide between frames, at an operating frequency, the rate of decisions, far above the frame rate. As this rate rises, each decision receives a sparser event window, and the reliability of the events relative to the frame varies over the scene and over time. Existing detectors weight the sensors per sample and encode the frame at the reduced event resolution. Reliability-supervised routing assigns a fusion weight to every location and supervises it with targets from the losses of two single-modality classifiers used only in training, moving loss-based supervision of fusion weights from whole samples to individual locations. Asymmetric-resolution fusion lets the frame carry the decision where the events fail: it encodes the frame at native resolution and pools every feature level onto the event grid, reusing all pretrained weights. On the DSEC-Det dataset, routing halves the accuracy loss from 20 to 180 Hz, from 6.3 to 3.1 mAP, and lowers it in every seed. The resulting detector, ERA-Det, sets a new state of the art at 63.2 mAP, 3.7 mAP above FlexEvent, leads at every operating frequency, and at 180 Hz is more accurate than FlexEvent at 20 Hz. On two DAVIS346 datasets, the router lowers the frame weight at night and in low light and raises it when the events vanish. ERA-Det upgrades released FlexEvent weights in 5,000 iterations on one GPU.
☆ Context-Aware Topological Distillation Graph Network for Asymmetric EEG-Eye Movement Emotion Recognition
EEG-eye movement emotion recognition can support mental-health monitoring and adaptive interfaces, but most fusion models treat the two signals as parallel features, classify each window alone and degrade when eye data are lost. We propose the Context-Aware Topological Distillation Graph Network (CTD-GNet), in which EEG features form the nodes of an electrode graph, and eye movements and preceding windows modulate its edges, nodes and readout, the edges through electrode-specific prompts. Bidirectional distillation of the graph, node relations and predictions couples this multimodal teacher with a single-window EEG student, improving the teacher and aligning the two graphs 35-fold. In leave-one-subject-out tests on SEED and SEED-IV against 17 baselines, CTD-GNet has the highest mean accuracy, 84.91% and 76.17%, significantly above 9 and 6 of 13 eye-based baselines after Holm correction, the smallest cross-subject spread among multimodal models and the highest worst-subject accuracy. It is the most accurate model at every rate of missing eye data on SEED-IV, keeps 66.1% on SEED without eye data, more than any EEG-only model, and stays 9.3 and 11.9 points above all single-window fusion models under eye-movement noise of one standard deviation. On film clips unseen in training, it leads on SEED with 77.1%.
☆ DeOverlay: A Benchmark and Source-Anchored Flow for Video Overlay Removal
Video overlay removal aims to recover scenes obscured by subtitles, titles, and logos while preserving surrounding content. Existing methods use temporal propagation or source-conditioned generation, but can leave residual overlays and distort scene structure when useful source information is obscured. We propose DeOverlay, a source-anchored flow model that reconstructs the clean video from the source latent with fixed source guidance. Specifically, we train a shared velocity network along paired source-to-clean paths using region-weighted flow matching, enabling successive cor- rections from intermediate states. To select local source cues, we develop visibility-normalized temporal aggregation that excludes masked positions and averages the remaining observations. Global source context and edit-region embeddings complement these cues through additive condi- tioning, retaining a single video-token sequence. To evaluate scene recovery across diverse overlay conditions, we introduce DVTE-Bench, comprising 1,631 paired videos across eight text-overlay categories, with OCR-screened clean targets, frame-aligned pixel masks, and a common evaluation protocol. Experiments on the complete release show that DeOverlay outperforms four baselines on all five reconstruction and perceptual metrics, reducing Mask LPIPS and Mask VFID by 58.3% and 70.3%, respectively, relative to the strongest evaluated baseline. Additional qualitative examples demonstrate the removal of graphic logos and stickers. We will make the complete benchmark, evaluation code, and test outputs availabl. Project page:https://yahooo-m.github.io/DVTE-Bench/
☆ Toolkit for Facial Deidentification IEEE
Esteban Leiva-Montenegro, Matthieu Pillot, Manfred Gonzalez-Hernandez, Vitomir Struc, Peter Peer, Blaž Meden
This work presents a novel open-source toolkit designed for the evaluation of face deidentification techniques with available evaluation models. The framework provides a complete evaluation pipeline, including preprocessing, deidentification, and performance assessment, based on data utility, image quality, and identity protection metrics. It supports a variety of datasets, enabling researchers to easily benchmark new deidentification techniques. Results show the effectiveness of some techniques on maintaining privacy while preserving image utility. The toolkit is aimed at unifying future research by providing a standard evaluation framework for privacy-enhancing technologies in facial biometrics. Implementation is available at github.com/blazm/deid-toolkit.
comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables. This work was presented as a poster at the 6th IEEE International Conference on BioInspired Processing (BIP 2024), poster session, Liberia, Costa Rica, December 4-6, 2024
☆ DCR-TSF: Dual-Level Compositional Reasoning with Triadic Spherical Fusion for Training-Free Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval ACCV 2026
Zero-shot composed image retrieval (ZS-CIR) aims to retrieve a target image that reflects an intended textual modification while maintaining semantic consistency with a reference image. Existing training-free ZS-CIR methods typically rely on fine-grained generated target descriptions, which often overemphasize reference-specific visual details and lead to appearance-biased retrieval. Moreover, since these descriptions are generated through multimodal large language models (MLLMs), the direct influence of the original image-text query can be weakened in the final retrieval representation. In this paper, we propose DCR-TSF, a training-free ZS-CIR framework that combines Dual-level Compositional Reasoning (DCR) and Triadic Spherical Fusion (TSF). DCR generates fine- and coarse-grained descriptions from the reference image and modification text, capturing complementary target-side semantics across different granularities. To preserve the original image-text query information, TSF constructs a composed-query anchor by spherically interpolating the reference image feature and modification text feature, and fuses it with the fine- and coarse-grained representations using a weighted Karcher mean on the unit hypersphere. The resulting final query representation balances detailed visual evidence, high-level semantic abstraction, and direct preservation of the original composed query. Extensive experiments on CIRCO, CIRR, and Fashion-IQ demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance among training-free methods.
comment: Accepted to ACCV 2026. 14 pages, 6 figures, 6 tables
☆ Not All Similarity Is Leakage: Distribution-Aware Identity Leakage Assessment in Synthetic Face Datasets
Paweł Borsukiewicz, Daniele Lunghi, Wendkûuni C. Ouédraogo, Fadi Boutros, Jacques Klein, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé
Synthetic data provides the means for more ethical and less biased facial recognition. Nonetheless, the limitations of generative models and the conditioning process they rely on pose a risk of identity leakage, resulting in synthetic samples that are overly similar to those seen in a generator's training set, mitigating privacy benefits. In this work, we show that previously proposed approaches are affected by two key limitations: high classifier dependence and a tendency to identify leakage with respect to real datasets that were not used in training. To address these shortcomings, we propose a novel metric called Scaled Overlap (SO), which adapts a non-parametric data-copying test for facial recognition and extends it to the identity level. By leveraging a multi-model setup that compensates for errors in individual classifiers, it provides insights into the true strength of identity leakage. Our analysis identifies leaking datasets (CemiFace, SFace2, IDNet) with the most acute leakage introduced by generative model conditioning in CemiFace, demonstrates that real datasets do not contribute equally to generator training, and shows that the majority of synthetic images are drawn from multiple identities rather than relying on a single identity. Ultimately, our study provides new insights into the quality of synthetic datasets and gives more reliable techniques to help the community ensure the trustworthiness of synthetic data.
☆ Risk Decomposition for Hallucination-Aware Video Sampling
Despite achieving high visual fidelity, video models still suffer from physical hallucinations, limiting their reliability as world simulators. Existing methods leverage model-internal or external signals to improve physical plausibility, but their roles and limitations require a unified explanation. We propose a two-dimensional physical-hallucination risk framework that defines low-density sampling risk and high-density drifting risk. The first risk captures generations assigned low likelihood by the video model, for example, a ball suddenly teleporting despite the model favoring continuous motion, while the second risk captures physical inconsistencies in high-likelihood generations, for example, a ball bouncing progressively higher without additional energy. Our analysis explains how model-internal signals steer sampling toward higher-density regions of the learned distribution to address low-density sampling risk. However, higher model likelihood does not guarantee physical plausibility, motivating external guidance to address high-density drifting risk. Based on this framework, we develop Hallucination-Aware Sampler (HA-Sampler), which applies external physical guidance within latent refinement to generate physically plausible videos, and HA-Scorer, which derives a likelihood-based signal from the generator itself for evaluating generated videos using continuous normalizing flow (CNF), with coarse ODE integration and finite-difference divergence estimates. Experiments on Physics-IQ and VideoPhy benchmarks support our theoretical analysis and demonstrate that our methods outperform the compared sampling and scoring SOTA baselines.
☆ PhysSkin++: Real-Time and Generalizable Physics-Based Animation via Self-Supervised Neural Skinning
Yuanhang Lei, Baofei Liu, Xingxuan Li, Tao Cheng, Zixuan Wang, Boming Zhao, Yujun Shen, Siyuan Huang, Ruizhen Hu, Peter Yichen Chen, Hujun Bao, Zhaopeng Cui
Generalizing real-time physics-based animation across diverse 3D shapes and spatial discretizations remains challenging. In this paper, we introduce PhysSkin++, a physics-informed framework that learns continuous neural skinning fields from static geometries to construct compact deformation subspaces. Specifically, we propose a Neural Skinning Fields Autoencoder that predicts shape-dependent deformation subspaces without per-object network training. To learn these subspaces without simulation trajectories, we develop a Physics-Informed Self-Supervised Learning strategy that combines skinning-field normalization with conflict-aware gradient correction, stabilizing joint optimization under physical and orthogonality constraints. The learned representation supports efficient reduced dynamics with user control and contact interactions, together with direct animation binding to meshes, point clouds, and 3D Gaussians. For prescribed rig animation, we further introduce a self-supervised complementarity objective to learn complementary elastic responses without enforcing complementarity constraints at runtime. Experiments demonstrate cross-shape generalization of the learned skinning fields, real-time reduced simulation, and applications to controllable, collision-aware, and rig-complementary animation.
comment: Project Page: https://zju3dv.github.io/PhysSkin_plus/
☆ Learning the Dose Manifold: A Latent Diffusion Framework for Volumetric Dose Prediction in Automated Radiotherapy Treatment Planning
J. Boyer-Chammard, R. Vauclin, M. C. Biston, P. Maury, M. Gau, S. Stathakis, V. Grégoire, N. Paragios, E. Deutsch, N. Komodakis
Automated treatment planning (ATP) aims to reduce the unwarranted inter-planner variability of manual planning, while improving treatment quality and efficiency. Most ATP pipelines rely on the prediction of the achievable three-dimensional dose distribution for a given anatomy and the subsequent optimization of machine parameters to reproduce it. Diffusion-based methods are largely slice-wise due to the high dimensionality of radiotherapy data, and assume a one-to-one mapping between anatomy and optimal dose despite the multi-objective nature of treatment planning. They are evaluated on their ability to match reference doses and rarely on their integration in ATP frameworks. We present LaDose, a latent diffusion framework for fully volumetric dose prediction. An autoencoder learned on dose distributions, trained so that perturbed latents decode to plausible doses, compresses dose maps 128-fold and enables 3D diffusion on a single GPU. Prescription values are represented as exact scalar vectors that bypass the image encoder, avoiding resampling and latent compression. Multiscale classifier-free guidance allows for the modulation of clinical trade-offs at inference, without retraining or additional labeled data. On 900 clinically delivered head-and-neck volumetric modulated arc therapy plans from five centers, LaDose reached a median absolute error of 1.18 Gy (1.4--1.8\% of the prescription) and was the only one of six frameworks free of systematic bias with respect to the reference distribution. Guidance scales acted predictably on target coverage and organ-at-risk sparing. Integrated with direct aperture optimization, the pipeline generated plans in 15.2 minutes; in a blinded review, senior clinicians rated 14 of 15 plans acceptable without editing.
comment: 27 pages, 7 figures plus graphical abstract
☆ Procedural Exposure Bias in Skill-Augmented Language Model Agents
External skills provide language-model agents with reusable procedural knowledge, yet how models use such knowledge after it is supplied remains poorly understood. We identify Procedural Exposure Bias (PEB), the tendency of language models to increasingly favor an action as its associated procedural pattern is repeatedly exposed in a skill, even when the interaction state and action relevance remain unchanged. We find that PEB strongly depends on how procedural knowledge is represented: presenting the same content visually substantially attenuates exposure-induced shifts in action preference relative to textual presentation. Further analysis shows that this attenuation primarily arises from visual encoding rather than structured layout. Although repeated procedural signals remain recoverable from Visual representations, they exert a weaker influence on downstream action prediction, distinguishing signal accessibility from its use as action evidence. This effect also extends to executable action selection, where increasing exposure more strongly favors the corresponding action under Text than Visual. Layer-wise analyses show that exposure-dependent action evidence becomes more pronounced toward the model output, with stronger evidence under Text, while activation interventions reveal architecture-specific roles of internal components in transmitting or counteracting the preference shift. Complete-agent evaluations across ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, and WebShop further show that Visual skills achieve higher macro-average task success than Text skills for all four evaluated models. These findings establish skill representation as an important factor governing how procedural knowledge is translated into agent decisions. All code is available at https://github.com/NEUIR/Vis-Skill.
comment: 26 pages, 12 figures, 8 tables
☆ AVTime: Reinforcing Dense Audio-Visual Captions with Bidirectional Alignment
Dense temporal audio-visual captioning is important for multimodal video understanding and generation. However, prior work is constrained by three main limitations: (1) the lack of a dataset combining high temporal resolution, longer videos, and bidirectional alignment between time and events; (2) the reliance of most existing RL methods on checklists; and (3) the lack of a benchmark that bidirectionally evaluates event semantic correctness and temporal accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose: (1) AVTime-50K, a high-quality 50K-scale dataset with temporally precise, semantically accurate captions and longer videos; (2) AVTime, a state-of-the-art model optimized with a novel Bidirectional Temporal-Semantic Alignment (BiTSA) reward that imposes explicit bidirectional constraints between time and events; and (3) AVTime-Bench, a specialized benchmark that introduces a novel bidirectional evaluation of temporal accuracy and semantic correctness. Our code, models, and datasets are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/Apryle/avtime.
☆ After the Federation: Benchmarking Knowledge Portability to Heterogeneous Newcomers
Once historical clients become unavailable, a federation must serve newcomers through the artifact it leaves behind. How much of its knowledge remains useful in an architecture chosen afterward? We introduce FEDNBO, a seven-dataset benchmark that separates knowledge supply, policy identification, and private-model compilation under disjoint data roles. Controlled studies expose inflated oracle gains, architecture-dependent transfer reversals, and a gap between teacher accuracy and private-model utility. Ordinary public-response distillation provides a competitive reference without public task labels or newcomer samples: gains over strengthened local training are 23.52 and 16.62 percentage points on 300 CelebA identities and 300 FedEMNIST writers, respectively. In a complete-pipeline FedEMNIST comparison, this reference reaches 97.13% accuracy with 12.4 seconds of compilation per architecture, versus 97.03% and 67.5 seconds for a HeteroFedTTA reconstruction at the same epoch budget. Equal-count public-input interventions extend support sensitivity to trainable visual backbones. Together, these results establish an auditable benchmark and a strong reference for evaluating the utility, cost and reliability of post-federation knowledge transfer.
comment: 9 pages
☆ TamedFlow: Trajectory-Aware Distillation\\for Teacher-Assisted Diffusion Sampling
Shuaiqi Cheng, Jiahao Zhang, Boyuan Gu, Siyu You, Yuxi Chen, Haiying Xu, Zexin Lu, Huiyu Zhou, Xuming Hu
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) deliver high-fidelity image and video generation, but inference requires many sequential model evaluations. Two acceleration strategies are increasingly important: model compression makes each evaluation cheaper, while adaptive inference avoids selected teacher computation through reuse, forecasting, or speculative execution. Their combination, however, is brittle: directly applying the evaluated adaptive methods to a compressed student can degrade quality, an observed failure mode we call the \textbf{Combination Gap}. We link this gap to a mismatch between pointwise distillation and short-horizon execution: a student trained at teacher states need not remain reliable when its own predictions are chained. We propose \textbf{TamedFlow}, which trains a compressed DiT for this deployed role through cross-architecture feature alignment, a near-identity Velocity Alignment Head, and randomized rollout supervision. At inference, a lightweight Learnable Trajectory Estimator routes completed drafts: accepted drafts bypass the teacher, while rejected drafts roll back and receive one teacher rescue step. Distilling DiT-XL/2 into DiT-B/2, TamedFlow reaches FID $2.58$ at $2.25\times$ measured speedup over DDIM-50 on ImageNet $256\times256$. Ablations support trajectory supervision, and routing controls favor LTE over random decisions at nearly matched latency. Evaluations on ImageNet $512\times512$, MS-COCO, and Latte/FaceForensics extend the empirical scope.
☆ FrameGRPO: Incentivizing Video Reasoning via Multi-Frame Rollouts and Temporal Credit
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, particularly Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has improved video reasoning in multimodal large language models. However, standard video GRPO varies only linguistic trajectories while conditioning every rollout in a group on the same sampled frames, which can produce homogeneous rewards and weaken group-relative learning when the shared visual evidence is insufficient or distracting. We propose \textbf{FrameGRPO}, a simple and effective reinforcement-learning framework that requires neither auxiliary networks nor changes to the model architecture. Specifically, FrameGRPO combines two lightweight components: (1) \textbf{Multi-Frame Rollouts}, which use only uniform temporal subsampling of a single maximal-frame decode to construct aligned views that diversify visual evidence and reasoning trajectories; and (2) \textbf{Gated Temporal Efficiency Credit}, which selectively reinforces a correct lower-ratio trajectory when all rollouts in a fixed full-ratio reference subset fail, without imposing an unconditional preference for fewer frames. Extensive experiments across diverse video understanding and reasoning benchmarks demonstrate robust overall improvements over standard GRPO, highlighting temporal-view diversification as an effective mechanism for exploration and credit assignment in video MLLMs.
☆ Curvature as a Baseline: Monocular Pose Measurement of Cylindrical Objects with Dual Colour Stripe Markers
Thin cylindrical objects offer little space for planar markers. We propose a dual-colour-stripe marker that uses the known curvature of an object to improve pose measurement with a single camera. The boundary between two colours provides a long centre line, while dots and printed edges supply features at different depths. We analyse how this depth separation improves the estimation of rotation about the cylinder axis, or roll. For a camera-facing marker at 15 cm, the Cramér-Rao lower bound on roll standard deviation is 2.00°for a flat marker, 0.38°for a single curved marker and 0.21°for a wrap-around marker. Monte Carlo roll RMS errors are within about 10% of the corresponding standard-deviation bounds. A first-order relation connects the sagitta of the curved marker to the roll sensitivity provided by a stereo baseline. The analytical and simulation results explain how curvature improves monocular measurement and provide a basis for designing marker geometry.
☆ TempoMoE: Identifying and Steering Fast-Slow Thinking Experts for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning
Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) reasoning models rely on long chain-of-thought (CoT) for complex tasks, yet often overthink easy inputs, increasing token cost and latency, and sometimes degrading accuracy. Existing methods optimize reasoning length during training or impose external control at inference, but leave the underlying reasoning mechanism a black box. We find that fast and slow thinking exhibit distinct expert-routing patterns: holding the input fixed and varying only the prompted reasoning tempo produces stable routing shifts. Suppressing slow-thinking experts shortens the reasoning chain, whereas suppressing fast-thinking experts lengthens it, providing causal evidence that these experts influence reasoning depth. Based on this finding, we propose TempoMoE, a training-free, two-stage framework. It identifies fast- and slow-thinking experts via tempo-contrastive routing analysis and redistributes routing weights within the original top-k set according to sample difficulty. It amplifies fast-thinking experts and suppresses slow-thinking experts on easy inputs and reverses this adjustment on hard ones, enabling difficulty-adaptive control over reasoning depth. We evaluate TempoMoE on Kimi-VL, Qwen3-VL, and ERNIE-4.5-VL across six benchmarks. Compared with Vanilla, TempoMoE consistently improves accuracy while reducing output tokens, with accuracy gains of up to 2.6 points and token reductions of up to 35.4%.
comment: 11 pages, 3 figures
☆ On the Benefits of Uncertainty Estimation for Species Classification: A Case Study on Optimizing Expert re-Annotation
Automated identification of diatoms from microscopic images is a cornerstone of large-scale freshwater biomonitoring, yet the high diversity of species and strong class imbalance pose significant challenges for reliable classification. In this study, we develop a ResNet-18 baseline for a 759-class diatom dataset and investigate how calibrated confidence estimates support selective classification to reduce expert workload without sacrificing taxonomic integrity. While the initial model exhibits overconfidence with an Expected Calibration Error (ECE) of 0.117, post-hoc temperature scaling (T = 2.12) dramatically improves reliability, lowering the ECE to 0.055.By leveraging these calibrated probabilities within a triage framework, we demonstrate that a Selective Macro-F1 score of 99.01% can be maintained at 66.2% coverage (rejection threshold $τ$ = 0.934). Qualitative analysis reveals that the system effectively functions as an intelligent filter, consistently deferring rare taxa-such as AAMB and AASI-and ambiguous morphologies for expert review. Our findings, supported by the torch-uncertainty framework, highlight the potential of simple calibration techniques to make automated diatom identification practical and robust, prioritizing the preservation of rare species metrics essential for ecological assessment. To support reproducibility, our code, environment specifications, and calibration results are available anonymously at https://anonymous.4open. science/r/greenprwksp-B53D/README.
☆ Token-Set Choice Confounds POPE: A Systematic Audit of Yes/No Extraction in VLM Hallucination Evaluation NeurIPS 2026
We set out to reproduce a recent hallucination-mitigation result on the POPE benchmark. The LLaVA-1.5-7B baseline we measured, 82.21 F1 on the adversarial split, sat 1.21 to 8.67 points above the adversarial baselines we planned to compare against (81.00, 79.30, and 73.54). We looked at the evaluation code and found a readout choice that moves F1 on its own. A two-token logit readout decides yes versus no by comparing two vocabulary IDs, 3582 ("yes") and 1217 ("no"). Across 9,000 greedy-decode questions spanning all three splits, neither ID is generated even once. The model emits " Yes" (token 3869) and " No" (token 1939), because SentencePiece prepends a space byte after the prompt suffix "ASSISTANT:". Read with an eight-token lookup that covers the space-prefixed surface forms, LLaVA-1.5-7B scores F1 0.8221, 0.8498, and 0.8713 on the adversarial, popular, and random splits. That 6.13-point adversarial shift exceeds the adversarial gain reported by five of the six papers we surveyed. None of them states its readout, and our reference ran under 4-bit NF4 quantization, so we cannot say how much of any reported gain a matched evaluation would keep. That comparison stays unresolved until readout and precision are matched. On the fixed baseline we run nine inference-time corrections of our own (none beat it) and dissect why the adversarial split resists logit-level intervention. In a 3,000-question probe, wrong predictions draw more image attention than correct ones (Cohen's $d=-0.46$, $p=1.4\times10^{-24}$), the opposite of what grounding-based corrections assume. A four-readout audit across four further VLMs from three tokenizer families confirms the confound is protocol-level, not model-specific: porting the LLaVA-1.5 IDs verbatim drops F1 to 0.00 on the two disjoint-vocabulary models, whereas a tokenizer-derived readout holds between 0.80 and 0.92.
comment: Accepted at the VLM4RWD workshop, NeurIPS 2026 (poster). 21 pages, 10 figures. Code: https://github.com/Kesav2k04/ugaa-research
☆ HORIA: 4D Human and Object Reconstruction from a Monocular Video with Interaction-Aware Re-Rendering
Joint 4D reconstruction of a human and object from a monocular video is essential for understanding how people interact with their environment. While recent methods have made noticeable progress, capturing such human-object interactions remains difficult due to two main challenges. First, a video typically contains composite semantic context spanning multiple interaction phases, making it difficult to track the temporal changes of the interaction in the reconstruction. Second, under human-object occlusion, a single-view observation contains incomplete visual information about the interaction, resulting in geometrically inconsistent reconstructions. To address these challenges, we introduce HORIA, built upon two core designs. First, we decompose the entire input video into temporally grounded and semantically distinct interaction phases with motion-aware captioning, obtaining a specific text description for each phase. Second, conditioned on these text descriptions of the interaction, we propose an interaction-aware re-rendering that compensates for the limited single-view observation. Specifically, we render the initially reconstructed 4D human and object from novel viewpoints and refine the renderings with a text-to-video diffusion prior, which provides auxiliary novel-view supervision beyond single-view cues. As a result, our framework produces temporally coherent and accurate 4D reconstructions under diverse interaction scenarios, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
comment: 17 pages including the supplementary material
☆ OmniGround: Strengthening Omni-Modal Temporal Grounding via Attention-Consistency Training
Omni-modal large language models can jointly understand video, audio, and text, yet they remain weak at temporal grounding, a capability essential for real-world audio-visual applications. To understand this limitation, we look beyond final predictions and examine the model's internal temporal evidence. We identify a temporal generation gap: the internal attention of the model localizes the target moment more accurately than the timestamps it generates. To close this gap, we propose TACG (Temporal Attention-Consistency Grounding), a post-training method that treats internal attention as a reliable temporal pivot and aligns it with both the model prediction and the ground-truth annotation through attention-consistency training. We further build a 580K-sample training dataset by reconstructing temporal QA from dense audio-visual annotations and organizing general omni-modal instruction data. Using TACG and this training dataset, we train OmniGround, a general-purpose omni-modal model with stronger temporal grounding capability, without injecting any additional temporal cues. OmniGround reaches state-of-the-art omni-modal temporal grounding, including 37.5 mIoU on LongVALE and 35.7 mIoU on UnAV-100, while staying competitive on both general audio-visual understanding and vision-only grounding.
☆ CondenseVLA: Learnable History Condensation for Efficient Multi-Frame VLA NeurIPS 2026
Robot manipulation often depends on short-term cues - such as brief contacts, temporary occlusions, and intermediate object states - that are ambiguous in a single frame and can only be resolved by integrating observations over time. However, injecting historical information solely by enlarging the history window is computationally costly and frequently yields limited gains due to substantial redundancy and task-agnostic, inflexible sampling of observations. We propose CondenseVLA, a multi-frame VLA policy with a learnable decoder-side history condensation module for using short-term visual context in action decoding. Given a sequence of cached per-frame features from the VLM backbone, CondenseVLA distills observation history into a fixed set of slot tokens using learnable queries and multi-head cross-attention. Simple auxiliary regularization penalizes overlap among slot attention maps and decorrelates slot embeddings, encouraging complementary attention and reducing slot redundancy. Across the evaluated tasks, CondenseVLA improves Simpler-WidowX success from 58.7% to 69.8% (+11.1 percentage points), achieves 97.2% on LIBERO, and reaches 52.8% on real-world tasks. It achieves 21.6% success on memory-dependent RMBench tasks. These results support selective condensation of bounded recent visual evidence for action decoding, while harder multi-observation tasks expose the limits of a finite history window. Project page: https://github.com/FeiyangHong/CondenseVLA
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. 39 pages, including supplementary material and the NeurIPS paper checklist. Project page: https://github.com/FeiyangHong/CondenseVLA
☆ MIRA: A Multimodal Illustrated Deep Research Agent for Controllable Reports
Hongrui Wu, Kaiwen Tuo, Congcong Wang, Gen Li, Shuai Dong, Xinlei Yu, Yuqi Xu, Haowen Hou, Zelin Peng, Jiaqi Wang
Deep research agents are increasingly capable of searching the open web and synthesizing evidence, yet they remain poorly suited to controllable report generation in multimodal deep research. This task requires agents to handle interleaved textual and visual inputs, gather multimodal evidence through multi-step web search, and deliver comprehensive illustrated reports under user-specified requirements. Existing systems face two limitations. During reasoning, they often underuse images discovered along the search trajectory; during generation, they tend to produce fixed-form answers with limited control over report granularity, multimodal composition, and evidence grounding. We introduce MIRA, a Multimodal Illustrated Deep Research Agent for controllable reports. MIRA integrates textual and visual evidence throughout research and writing. At its core, MIRA-Harness translates user requirements into generation contracts and connects four stages: evidence collection, report submission, feedback-driven revision, and final delivery. Building on this harness, MIRA-Data constructs high-quality multi-hop multimodal research trajectories, and we post-train foundation models to operate within the workflow. Using Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, MIRA achieves state-of-the-art performance among open agents on 7 representative, established multimodal-search and deep-research-agent benchmarks, while producing user-aligned illustrated reports with traceable textual and visual evidence.
comment: 33 pages, 8 figures, 9 tables
☆ SAPO: Self-Supervised Attention Policy Optimization for Improving Temporal Video Grounding in Vision-Language Models
Video vision-language models (VLMs) have strong semantic understanding, yet remain unreliable at precise temporal grounding. Existing gains from explicitly aligning video frames with absolute time suggest that VLMs may already encode accurate temporal locations internally but lose precision when expressing them as timestamps. Our analysis across four VLMs and two grounding datasets confirms this hypothesis: attention intervals outperform predicted intervals on approximately 66% of valid examples. We term this discrepancy the temporal generation gap. Because precise temporal annotations are expensive, this finding motivates closing the gap to improve temporal grounding using only unlabeled video-query pairs. We propose Self-Supervised Attention Policy Optimization (SAPO), which uses internal temporal attention as self-supervision for Group Relative Policy Optimization and applies a ground-truth-free criterion to select high-value samples. SAPO consistently improves temporal grounding across multiple datasets and models spanning weak to strong initial grounding ability. Relative mIoU gains reach 33.7% on Qwen2.5-VL-3B and 5.4% on the strong Time-R1-7B. The improvements transfer across datasets while preserving general video understanding.
☆ LEAP: Accelerating ODE-based Diffusion Sampling with Optimal Linear Leaps
Diffusion models primarily rely on general-purpose ODE-based numerical methods for training-free accelerated sampling, but performance degrades with coarse time discretization. In this paper, we propose optimal linear leaps (LEAP), a specialized method grounded in theoretical and empirical investigations of sampling trajectory geometry. Built upon low-dimensionality and cross-trajectory consistency, LEAP formulates a supervised least-squares optimization problem within the local trajectory subspace, achieving a precise approximation of future states without model evaluations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LEAP outperforms previous methods across diverse modalities, including text-to-image (Stable Diffusion 3.5, FLUX.1-dev) and image-to-3D (TRELLIS.2) generation. Furthermore, LEAP can be seamlessly integrated into existing solver-based methods, offering a plug-and-play enhancement for modern diffusion models. Code is available at https://github.com/zju-pi/LEAP.
☆ Multi-scale Fusion of Fast Vision Mamba and Foundation Model Features for Patch-Level Gleason Grading in Computational Pathology MICCAI 2026
Automated Gleason grading of prostate whole slide images (WSIs) enables faster and more consistent cancer risk stratification. However, it remains a challenging task due to the subtle morphological differences between grades, the severe class imbalance arising from rare patterns, and the diagnostic features that span multiple spatial scales. Pathology foundation models (FMs) extract strong patch representations but often operate at a single-scale, which limits spatial context and disproportionately affects classes that depend on broader context. The challenge of fusing multiple scales and complementary models, with minimal data and computational resources, remains unresolved. We propose a multi-scale classifier built on state-space models. Our method combines two complementary feature sources: a frozen foundation model, and a lightweight FastVim, pre-trained on ImageNet and distilled from the foundation model, that reads the raw image crops. At each scale, a Mamba model encodes the features from both sources with linear-time spatial context, and a jointly trained head fuses the encoded representations into one prediction. On the PANDA dataset, our method reaches macro F1 of 0.894 and Gleason 5 F1 of 0.802 under 5-fold cross-validation, a 12% and 21% relative improvement over the best single-scale model. A controlled study over 5 foundation models, 5 base classifiers and 3 scales confirms that the gain holds across encoders, with larger improvements observed at smaller scales.
comment: 13 pages, 4 figures and 4 tables (including supplementary), Accepted to COMPAYL workshop MICCAI 2026, Comments are welcome!
☆ Out-of-Distribution Detection in Continual Learning NeurIPS 2026
Out-of-distribution detection in continual learning (OOD-CL) is highly challenging, as it requires (i) learning a sequence of tasks without catastrophic forgetting, and (ii) identifying unknown samples (OOD) without access to known (in-distribution (ID)) data from past tasks, where standard confidence-based OOD scores tend to degrade. Existing methods largely rely on a rehearsal buffer of past data or assume closed-world settings, limiting their scalability and reliability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel OOD detection framework for rehearsal-free continual learning, inspired by Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN), which mitigate catastrophic forgetting via their inherent local neuroplasticity. To better leverage KAN in OOD-CL, we introduce a task-adaptive classifier architecture, TA-KAN, which mitigates recency bias and enhances ID--OOD separability through task-specific control of activation locality. Furthermore, we propose a geometry-guided OOD score that complements TA-KAN classifier confidence without relying on past ID data. Our method significantly improves OOD detection while maintaining strong ID classification performance, achieving state-of-the-art results in OOD-CL.
comment: Accepted at the 40th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026)
☆ Rethinking Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Splatting: A Few-Shot Learning Perspective on Overfitting Prevention SIGGRAPH
Sparse-view novel view synthesis (NVS) is essential for AR/VR and real-time communication applications, yet remains challenging when reconstructing 3D scenes from limited viewpoints. While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) excels in dense-view scenarios, it suffers from overfitting and geometry degradation under sparse inputs. Current approaches often tackle these problems from a local perspective, addressing either data quality or training regularization individually, lacking a unified and interpretable framework for systematic improvement.
We introduce a new perspective that reframes sparse-view 3DGS from a few-shot learning viewpoint, treating each Gaussian primitive as a neuron and leveraging deep learning regularization techniques. Under this unified framework, our approach generates more effective supervision from scarce observations through two strategies: (1) data-related supervision enrichment via optical flow-guided pseudo-view synthesis and joint camera-scene optimization; and (2) training-time regularization via motion-aware dropout and early stopping, which suppress overfitting while preserving dynamic-scene stability. Extensive experiments on the SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 volumetric video challenge sparse-view dataset demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art optimization-based and feed-forward baselines. Our system won first place in the sparse-view track of the SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 challenge.
comment: 5 pages, 5 figures. First-place solution in the sparse-view track of the SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 Volumetric Video Challenge
☆ Vision-Language-Delta-Action: Learning Compact Deltas as Actionable Transition Interfaces for Robotic Manipulation
Robotic manipulation is not merely observation-to-action generation, but the realization of task-specified state changes in the physical world. Existing vision-language-action (VLA) methods directly learn observation-to-action mappings, imposing a substantial learning burden due to the gap between semantic understanding and action execution. Although world-action models (WAMs) improve control through future prediction, modeling complete future states wastes capacity on static appearance and action-irrelevant changes. We propose Vision-Language-Delta-Action (VLDA), a paradigm that reformulates full future prediction as compact actionable transition modeling. Its core is a compact Delta variable that captures latent world-state changes, serving as an interface between vision-language understanding and action generation. VLDA learns Delta through a unified objective composed of the Local Transition Filter (LT-Filter) and Global Transition Anchor (GT-Anchor). LT-Filter captures task-relevant manipulation-centric changes while suppressing static reconstruction biases. GT-Anchor provides coarse future-level regularization to preserve the overall direction of state changes. Delta-Driven Action Refinement (DDAR) further grounds Delta in the action manifold and injects it as a structured seed to guide action denoising. We implement VLDA within LoongForge, an open-source training framework for large-scale foundation and embodied models, using its modular and distributed infrastructure for unified two-stage optimization. Experiments show that VLDA improves long-horizon consistency, robustness, and generalization, validating actionable Delta as an alternative to direct action prediction and full future-state modeling.
comment: 37 pages, including appendix. Code framework: https://github.com/baidu-baige/LoongForge/tree/master/cookbook/loongforge-vlda
☆ ActionRoPE: action as coordinates for spatially consistent control in planar-camera game world models
Game world models have made rapid progress toward real-time interactive generation. Yet action control is still predominantly implemented as feature conditioning, leaving the model to learn from training data how each action should move the visual world. This formulation is poorly matched to a broad class of planar-camera worlds, such as top-down and isometric games. In these worlds, player motion induces a geometrically well-defined planar camera displacement. We observe that the key to spatially consistent control in such worlds is to represent the effect of each action directly in world coordinates. To this end, we introduce ActionRoPE, a parameter-free action interface that converts action-driven camera displacement into world-coordinate rotary positions. As a result, tokens corresponding to the same world location retain the same positional address across time. These world coordinates further expose a spatial asymmetry in generation: regions covered by the initial observation are geometrically known, while newly revealed regions remain to be synthesized. We therefore propose Coordinate-Conditioned Noise Scheduling (CNS), which assigns token-wise denoising schedules according to this known-new structure. It allows observed regions to stabilize earlier, while new content is generated with reference to them. Compared with four representative action-conditioning mechanisms, our approach follows the commanded motion more faithfully and reduces the revisit drift by 66% over the strongest baseline. The same interface transfers across video backbones from 1.3B to 33B parameters and to out-of-distribution scenes. Project Page: https://teawhite.cn/ActionRoPE/
comment: Project Page: https://teawhite.cn/ActionRoPE/
☆ Auditing Semantic and Relational Reliability in Open-Vocabulary Human-Object Interaction Evaluation WACV 2027
Open-vocabulary human-object interaction detectors describe interactions in free text, and this creates a problem for evaluation. Category scoring rejects valid paraphrases, while semantic similarity scoring can reward predictions that name the wrong action or reverse the roles of the participants. We present a diagnostic protocol that holds every prediction fixed and scores it under five views, namely official category evaluation, an identity control, lexical normalization, graded semantic credit, and strict propositional equivalence. Comparing these views separates the effect of the matching engine from the effect of semantic credit. The protocol pairs controlled transformations that preserve or break meaning with a blinded audit of natural predictions, and we derive consistency checks that link mean credit, invalid acceptance, and transformation counts. Applied to six systems on HICO-DET, the views disagree on which system leads. GEN-VLKT leads under official evaluation, SL-HOI leads under SHOE, and GEN-VLKT leads again under strict equivalence. Semantic gains range from 1.6 to 20.3 mAP, and AgentHOI keeps less than half of its gain once equivalence is enforced. We recommend that semantic scores be reported together with relational validity and paired uncertainty, so that recovered credit is not read as better interaction understanding.
comment: Under review at WACV 2027
☆ SWIFT: Self-guided Weak-to-strong dIFfusion models via Target extrapolation
Training high-quality diffusion models is computationally expensive, and inference-time guidance often adds further sampling cost. In this work, we introduce Swift, a simple yet effective self-guided training method that uses a frozen weak denoiser to improve a stronger model without adding inference overhead. For each noisy input, Swift extrapolates the clean regression target away from the weak denoiser's prediction, amplifying components that remain underfit. The weak guide can be an early training checkpoint, requires no backpropagation during main-model training, and is discarded afterward. The resulting model retains the original sampler and supports both conditional and unconditional generation without label dropout or an unconditional branch. We explain this mechanism through a spectral analysis of finite-time population gradient flow in an RKHS. With an early-stopped weak guide, we prove that a nonempty range of extrapolation strengths yields strictly lower posterior-mean error than matched standard training, despite shifting the regression target away from the posterior mean. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-256 demonstrate improvements across model scales and representations. In one ImageNet-256 configuration, Swift surpasses the baseline's best FID using roughly half the total training compute, including guide preparation and training overhead. On RAEv2, it achieves FID 1.15 without inference-time guidance and 0.99 with guidance. These results establish target extrapolation as an effective approach to weak-to-strong diffusion training with efficient single-model inference.
comment: 38 pages, including appendices
☆ Hihaze: One-Step Diffusion for High-Resolution Real-World Image Dehazing
Diffusion models have recently achieved encouraging results in real-world image dehazing. However, restoring high-resolution images remains challenging due to spatially non-uniform haze and inconsistent predictions across local patches. To address these issues, we propose Hihaze, a one-step diffusion framework for high-resolution real-world dehazing. Hihaze adopts two haze-aware modulation modules: attentive skip compensation (ASC) and a spatial degradation adapter (SDA). ASC selectively transfers reliable encoder information to the variational autoencoder (VAE) decoder, preserving structural details while suppressing haze-degraded features. SDA extracts multi-scale spatial degradation representations and injects them into the U-Net to guide restoration according to local haze variations. Furthermore, we design a training-free global-guided patch fusion (GPF) method. It uses a global prediction to align patch appearance and downweight unreliable predictions, followed by structure-guided detail compensation. Notably, this training-free design also makes GPF a plug-and-play module for other dehazing models. Experiments across four real-world benchmarks show that Hihaze surpasses state-of-the-art approaches in both visual quality and inference speed. Specifically, it delivers PSNR improvements of 3.62~dB on Dense-Haze and 3.69~dB on NH-HAZE compared with the strongest baselines. Code: https://github.com/zhengchen1999/Hihaze.
comment: Code is available at: https://github.com/zhengchen1999/Hihaze
☆ Do We Need Learned Targets? Classical Gradients as Supervision for 2D Gaussian Initialization
Learning-based Gaussian image initializers can require costly supervision obtained by per-image optimization. We investigate whether the Pseudo-PPM targets used by Instant GaussianImage can be replaced by classical image gradients. Our framework uses normalized Sobel maps in two tracks. A training-free analytic initializer combines probability boosting, parallel grid-based sampling, and geometric processing, producing initial parameters in 0.32 seconds on average. A neural initializer is trained on DIV2K with online Sobel supervision, which removes offline target optimization and allows training to scale to 10,000 LSDIR images without additional preprocessing. Both tracks achieve competitive long-budget reconstruction on Kodak and DIV2K. Under domain shift, the DIV2K-trained neural initializer surpasses Instant-GI on Manga109 from 500 fitting iterations onward (by 1.40 dB at 5K iterations), and training on LSDIR increases this margin to 1.85 dB. On Kvasir-SEG, the training-free analytic initializer exceeds Instant-GI at every reported budget. A controlled pipeline-time comparison yields an estimated $4.9\times$ reduction for DIV2K. These results establish inexpensive analytic targets as a practical alternative to optimization-derived supervision for scalable Gaussian initialization.
comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 8 tables, preprint
☆ UniJev: Separating Accuracy from Calibration in Trimodal System One Decision Models
Jianing Wang, Youwen Jian, Derong Wang, Jinyang Yu, Qingyi Si, Chuanyu Qin, Yanghua Xiao, Hongcheng Guo
System One models produce probabilistic judgments that software can consume directly, making reliable confidence as important as answer accuracy. Yet joint training across text, images, and video remains underexplored, and the contributions of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning for calibrated decisions (RLCD) are difficult to separate. We introduce UniJev, a trimodal framework that scores candidate answers with a shared head under joint supervised training across text, images, and video. Supervised decision models improve accuracy over their backbone readouts across all three modalities, while the existing RLCD algorithms change accuracy little and have inconsistent effects on visual calibration across recipes. These findings motivate a separate supervised objective for confidence calibration. We introduce Cora (Confidence--Outcome Reliability Alignment), which groups current predictions by confidence and optimizes each prediction's confidence toward the empirical accuracy of its bin. At both 2B and 9B, Cora lowers image and video expected calibration error (ECE) while preserving accuracy, without a reinforcement stage. We release our code at https://github.com/wjnwjnwj/UniJev.
comment: 21pages, 8figures
☆ See the Future, Classify the Present: Stochastic Latent World Modeling for Hyperspectral Images
Hyperspectral image classification (HSIC) relies on static spatial-spectral representations learned from labeled samples, limiting its ability to model structured dependencies in the latent representation space. To address this limitation, this work proposes Stochastic Latent World Modeling (LWM), a trajectory-based representation-learning framework that enriches classification through stochastic latent-state prediction. Given a hyperspectral patch, LWM tokenizes and encodes spectral and spatial information separately using dedicated transformer branches, then fuses their outputs into a unified representation. This representation is further organized into an environment state that captures center, neighborhood, spectral, and global contextual information. A stochastic latent transition module then predicts multiple future latent states through Gaussian parameterization and reparameterization, with recurrent refinement used to model dependencies across successive states. The resulting latent trajectory is adaptively aggregated by a rollout planner to construct a planned representation, which is integrated with the base representation for final classification. By extending static spatial-spectral encoding with stochastic multi-step latent-state modeling, LWM enables the classifier to exploit structured dependencies in the representation space and provides richer features for HSIC. Across five benchmark datasets, LWM achieves overall accuracies ranging from 89.21% to 99.52%, demonstrating consistent classification performance under limited-label settings.
comment: 18 pages, 11 figures
☆ VHA: VQA-based Hallucination Assessment for Generative Image Super-Resolution
Generative image super-resolution produces visually realistic high-resolution images, but may also introduce hallucinations by adding unsupported content or altering existing details. Because existing super-resolution metrics fail to measure whether generated details remain grounded in the reference image, we present a hallucination assessment technique based on bidirectional visual question answering (VQA), which we term VQA-based Hallucination Assessment (VHA). The proposed approach uses a vision-language model (VLM) to determine whether the semantic content and low-level visual evidence in a super-resolved image are supported by its ground-truth counterpart. To this end, it constructs question--answer pairs from each image and evaluates them on both images. Discrepancies between the resulting scores in both directions reveal missing or altered ground-truth information and unsupported additions. However, obtaining these scores requires computationally expensive VLM inference. We therefore develop VHA+, a learned, lightweight model that directly predicts VHA scores from ground-truth and super-resolved image pairs. We construct a hallucination benchmark, VHA-bench, through a human study and show that both VHA and VHA+ correlate highly with human judgments of hallucination. The code, benchmark, and model weights are available at https://github.com/dhryougit/Hallucination-Assessment
comment: Project page: https://dhryougit.github.io/Hallucination-Assessment-pages/
☆ MAPS: A Multi-Agent Personalized Script-Driven Video Advertising System Enhanced by Reinforcement Learning
With the rapid growth of online video consumption, video advertising has become a dominant component of digital advertising. Most personalized video advertising systems follow a retrieval-based paradigm, which matches ad content with user preferences in a feature space and recommends the most similar candidates. However, since the candidate creatives are pre-produced, this paradigm limits the granularity of personalization and leads to performance disparities across diverse user groups. To address this limitation, we propose a multi-agent personalized script-driven video advertising system (MAPS). We design four collaborative agents that form a closed-loop pipeline of user profile modeling, script generation, video synthesis, and feedback-driven iterative refinement. To train the Scripter Agent, we develop a reinforcement learning framework equipped with a multi-dimensional reward function, which steers the agent toward producing scripts that simultaneously align with user content preferences and target product information. Extensive offline experiments on representative datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves encouraging performance in generating and integrating personalized creatives. Online A/B experiments in a specific scenario in the Kuaishou advertising system show that MAPS improves CTR by 2.87%, CVR by 2.74%, and ARPU by 9.85% over the generative baseline.
☆ Functional Cross-layer Experts Routing for One-step Diffusion Distillation
One-step distillation compresses diffusion trajectories into a single forward evaluation, yet how internal capacity should be structured within that remaining pass remains largely unexplored. In this setting, identical parameters must simultaneously preserve general generative priors and resolve prompt-specific details without iterative refinement. We formalize this challenge as functional allocation. Our analysis reveals that decoupling representations is beneficial only when expert interference outweighs shared transfer, favoring an always-active shared backbone augmented with conditionally routed residuals over standard isolated MoE architectures. We propose DeMoE, which pairs a persistent shared expert with conditionally routed expert slices across image FFNs, trained under a one-step distribution-matching objective with executed-route supervision. On one-step FLUX.2-4B generation, DeMoE achieves a GenEval score of 0.8220 while activating only 80.5% of the image-FFN width, substantially outperforming dense one-step baselines, matching the 50-step teacher overall, and surpassing it on complex composition and counting. Across COCO-10K, DeMoE establishes state-of-the-art fidelity and diversity among single-step models, demonstrating that structured internal computation reallocation provides a superior compression paradigm for diffusion models. Code is available at https://github.com/toffeecat/demoe-ttt-router.
☆ Think Densely, Act Sparsely: Latent Expert Cognitive Chains for Vision-Language-Action Autonomous Driving NeurIPS 2026
Autonomous driving fundamentally demands dense understanding of visual, semantic, and geometric information, yet existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically trained with sparse supervision such as language instructions or trajectory signals. This direct mapping from dense visual observations to sparse representations forces the model to compress or even discard critical scene information essential for safe driving. We argue that this limitation does not stem from insufficient model capacity, but from the lack of explicit mechanisms that encourage the formation of dense world representations in the latent space. In this spirit, we propose a novel paradigm for driving intelligence, Think Densely, Act Sparsely, and instantiate it with an efficient and interpretable framework, LECDrive (Latent Expert Cognitive Chains for Vision-Language-Action autonomous Driving). The core idea is to mimic the hierarchical perception process of humans by embedding a progressive chain of latent expert cognition within the VLA model. Concretely, we inject a compact set of task-specific latent tokens as carriers, enabling the model to internalize dense knowledge from foundational vision models, including visual representations (DINOv3), semantic structures (SAM3), and spatial geometry (DepthAnything3), while maintaining efficient inference. This interdependent cognitive chain follows a curriculum learning principle, where supervision is progressively structured from representation to semantics and geometry. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LECDrive consistently improves the performance of base VLMs across multiple autonomous driving benchmarks, covering key tasks such as object perception, state prediction, and trajectory planning. These findings suggest that constructing dense world models through structured latent expert chains is a promising direction for VLA-based autonomous driving.
comment: NeurIPS 2026
☆ LEVI: Benchmarking Visual Identity Fidelity with Verifiable Low-Entropy Constructs
Modern generative models can produce visually plausible images while violating exact identity constraints. Evaluating such failures requires distinguishing violations of the requested identity from permissible variation in appearance. We introduce Low-Entropy Visual Identity (LEVI), which characterizes visual identities determined by compact facts and explicit rules. The low-entropy requirement concerns identity uncertainty, while appearance may remain diverse. We formulate identity fidelity in terms of the probability that a conditional image distribution assigns to the identities permitted by the prompt. Visual Identity Spaces (VIS) formalize this distinction by specifying admissible identity values and which different realizations express the same identity. Building on this formulation, we develop Verifiable Visual Grammar (VVG), a declarative language whose typed primitives and compositional constraints describe identity-bearing structures. Using this grammar, we build a benchmark for image generation. It assesses each output against the task's identity requirements, drawing evidence from the final pixels. The curated benchmark contains 1,375 tasks spanning 120 base identity spaces across six domains. Among ten evaluated model configurations, the highest whole-task pass rate is 58.69%. These results reveal a persistent gap between visually plausible images and faithful realization of their specified identities. Project page (forthcoming): https://maxiao0234.github.io/LEVI/.
comment: 24 pages, including supplementary material
☆ Multi-View Structural Representations for Physically-Consistent TeX Generation
Infrared and visible images provide complementary cues for low-light image generation, and physics-based methods can better exploit this complementarity. However, existing physics-based methods still rely heavily on paired data. To address these limitations, we propose Multi-View Routing Mixture-of-Experts (MVR-MoE), a framework for physically consistent TeX generation that learns multi-view structural representations. MVR-MoE mines intrinsic structural cues from infrared and visible images to organize them into multi-view representations, while the proposed multi-view hyper connections expand the feature space and preserve both shared evidence and modality-specific details. A hierarchical routing mechanism further regulates feature utilization at both the structural-view level and the expert level, enabling adaptive exploitation of heterogeneous cues. The predicted temperature, emissivity, and texture maps are constrained by the Stefan-Boltzmann law to ensure physically consistent. Extensive experiments on challenging datasets demonstrate that MVR-MoE achieves superior robustness and discriminability while remaining lightweight.
☆ BitFlat: Error-Localized Bitstream Design for Robust Diffusion Image Compression
Zero-shot diffusion image compression based on reverse channel coding achieves high perceptual quality at low bitrates without retraining, yet its bitstream remains vulnerable to bit flips. Prior work has shown that a joint combinatorial representation can amplify a single bit flip into substitutions of multiple atoms and that indexing each atom independently confines this error propagation. However, independent indexing reduces the number of atoms that fit within the bit budget and gives the decoder no indication of which atoms are corrupted. To address these issues, we propose BitFlat, a training-free error-localizing bitstream framework with two components. Blockwise Locality Alignment (BLA) decomposes the globally coupled atom selection at each diffusion step into independent selection units, each describing one signed atom from a dedicated codebook with a fixed-width field, so that any bit error affects only the unit in which it occurs. Reliability-Aware Diffusion Control (RADC) uses the bits saved by BLA to impose structured valid-codeword constraints within each field and converts the decoding state of each field into a binary reliability gate, which turns detected corrupted atoms into erasures at known positions and excludes them from noise synthesis. BitFlat requires neither target residuals nor additional network forward passes and leaves the diffusion model unchanged. Experiments on Kodak, DIV2K, and CLIC2020 show that BitFlat outperforms conventional, learned, and diffusion-based codecs at bit error rates from $10^{-4}$ to $10^{-2}$ and, even with $26.7\%$ fewer bits, surpasses Robust Turbo-DDCM.
☆ RxGS: Relightable Gaussian Stylization via BRDF Decomposition
Reference-based 3D scene stylization transfers the appearance of a reference image onto a reconstructed 3D scene while preserving scene geometry. Recent methods perform this transfer by optimizing the appearance representation of neural scene models including Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). These methods optimize an RGB appearance representation, in which a single per-point colour combines the effects of material reflectance, environment illumination, together with the shading it produces, and the viewing direction. When stylization modifies this combined colour, the illumination effects present during stylization are baked into the stored appearance, so the stylized scene cannot be rendered under different illumination. To address this limitation, we present RxGS, a relightable 3D scene stylization framework built on a Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF)-aware 3D Gaussian representation. Rather than modifying a per-point RGB colour, RxGS optimizes only the diffuse albedo field recovered by inverse rendering, while leaving roughness, metallicity, surface normals, and the estimated environment lighting unchanged. As a result, the stylized scene keeps all the components a physically-based renderer needs other than the edited albedo, and can therefore still be relit. RxGS optimizes the albedo field using a nearest-neighbour feature matching loss together with a spatial smoothness prior over Gaussian centres. We evaluate the method using a Geometry Consistency Cost (GCC) based on optical-flow warping error. RxGS achieves the lowest GCC on all evaluated NeRF-Synthetic scenes and remains competitive on real-captured scenes, while additionally supporting relightable stylization, which existing reference-based 3D scene stylization methods do not provide.
☆ Frechet Forcing: Training Long-Horizon Streaming World Models from Short Clips
Streaming video world models generate the future chunk by chunk, conditioned on their own past and a stream of actions. Trained on short clips, they drift once a rollout exceeds the training horizon, as prediction errors re-enter the context and compound. A common remedy is to train the model on its own rollouts via distribution matching distillation (DMD). For action-conditioned world models, the teacher becomes a bottleneck: an external video model is agnostic to the actions, whereas the model's own pretrained network drifts in the same manner as the student. We observe that a long rollout need not match a teacher, provided it remains a realistic continuation of its own scene that follows the commanded actions. Realism and scene fidelity can be measured against real-data statistics, which remain valid at any horizon, while action following is preserved by the model's conditional generation loss. We propose Fréchet Forcing, which fine-tunes a world model together with its deployed multi-step sampler under three constraints. Generative anchoring applies the flow-matching loss after a self-generated history ending on real data. Context fidelity, a Fréchet distance (FD) on latent statistics of the free rollout centred on each clip's own ground truth, keeps every rollout faithful to its scene. Reality matching, an FD to real frames in a frozen perceptual space, keeps the generated frames realistic. Because all three targets are derived from short real clips without comparing a rollout against a long recorded future, training requires no teacher, no online critic and no long videos. Fine-tuning MiniWorld-1B, pretrained on 253-frame clips, for at most 36 GPU-hours on 381-frame clips yields rollouts that remain stable beyond 4,000 frames and continue to follow their actions in both robot manipulation and camera-controlled exploration.
☆ SpaRV: Sparse Radiance Voxels for Scalable Geometrically Consistent LiDAR-Visual Mapping and Rendering
Jianheng Liu, Yunfei Wan, Fangming Cheng, Xiangyu Hong, Zuhao Zou, Haotian Li, Longji Yin, Chunran Zheng, Jiarong Lin, Fu Zhang
Robotic simulation, navigation, and inspection need photorealistic and geometrically accurate maps. Radiance fields achieve photorealism, but building them from robot data raises three challenges. A robot's trajectory serves its task, not reconstruction, so images from few viewpoints leave the geometry under-constrained. Residual errors in camera poses and intrinsics blur the map. The map's GPU memory grows with scene size, which limits its level of detail in large scenes. We present \textbf{SpaRV}, a \textbf{Spa}rse \textbf{R}adiance \textbf{V}oxel map rendered by differentiable ray marching, which lets irregular LiDAR scans supervise it alongside images. LiDAR depth and occupancy anchor the under-constrained geometry, and normal and smoothness regularizers keep it smooth between LiDAR points. To correct camera errors, SpaRV alternates map training with photometric optimization of the camera poses and focal lengths. To bound GPU memory in training and rendering, SpaRV holds one submap at a time at full resolution and the rest at coarser octree levels. Experiments show that SpaRV keeps the geometry consistent away from the captured trajectory and sharpens textures by optimizing the camera parameters. On one 24\,GB GPU, SpaRV reconstructs a university campus captured in 63{,}582 images and simulates other cameras and LiDARs. Our code will be released at \url{https://github.com/hku-mars/SpaRV}.
☆ PoSTCache: From Forecasting to Postdictive Smoothing for Revisable Diffusion Caching
Diffusion and flow matching models achieve impressive visual generation quality but remain computationally expensive due to iterative sampling. Caching-based acceleration provides a practical training-free solution by reusing or predicting intermediate features. However, existing methods largely enforce a forward-only information flow: approximations produced for skipped model evaluations are immediately committed to the sampling trajectory and cannot benefit from feedback generated by later full-computation steps. We propose \textbf{PoSTCache} (\emph{Postdictive Smoothing Trajectory Cache}), a training-free and plug-and-play framework that reformulates diffusion caching as revisable trajectory inference. PoSTCache first uses an existing caching strategy to construct forward proposals for skipped steps. At a later full-computation step, the discrepancy between the refreshed prediction and its forward proposal yields a correction signal, which PoSTCache propagates backward to refine and reintegrate the preceding predictions. Viewing full-computation steps as sources of corrective feedback also changes how they should be selected. We therefore introduce the Posterior Variance Reduction (PVR) strategy, which estimates cross-timestep dependencies from offline denoising trajectories and selects anchors according to their expected reduction in surrogate trajectory uncertainty rather than local approximation error alone. Experiments on representative image and video generation models show that PoSTCache consistently improves the quality--efficiency trade-off over representative caching methods.
comment: 37 pages, 13 figures
☆ FluidGen: Physics-Aware Fluid Video Generation via Motion-Guided Post-Training
Yang Zheng, Zizhang Li, Boyang Deng, Jan Ackermann, Lei Shu, Yinghao Xu, Jiajun Wu, Gordon Wetzstein, Leonidas Guibas
Video generation models produce visually compelling motion but systematically fail on fluid phenomena, including smoke, fire, and explosion debris, where outputs lack coherent vortical structure and collapse to bland dynamics that violate the physics of real fluids. Classical solvers achieve high physical fidelity but require detailed 3D scenes and carefully tuned parameters, making them impractical for in-the-wild imagery and video generation. We address this gap by injecting a data-driven fluid prior into a pre-trained video model, trained on a mixture of high-fidelity Houdini simulation data with paired velocity-field ground truth and curated in-the-wild fluid video data for appearance diversity. The core of our approach is a dual stream architecture that predicts per-frame velocity fields alongside RGB, supervised by simulation ground truth. This auxiliary signal regularizes generation toward physically consistent motion and exposes an interpretable physical quantity that we further leverage as a reward for velocity-aware direct preference optimization. Our model produces substantially more realistic fluid dynamics sequences than strong video baselines and optimization-based methods. Project page: https://y-zheng18.github.io/FluidGen/
comment: Project page: https://y-zheng18.github.io/FluidGen/
☆ InteractAgent: Agentic Human Motion Interaction with Memory-Augmented Reflection
Long-horizon human-scene interaction requires coordinated spatial reasoning, physical feasibility, and the ability to recover from compounding execution errors. Text-driven motion models are largely scene-agnostic and lack closed-loop correction, while geometry-conditioned approaches depend on paired scene-motion training or explicit 3D preprocessing that limits generalization to novel layouts and open-vocabulary goals. We present InteractAgent, an agentic multimodal LLM system for long-horizon human-scene interaction that plans, executes, observes, and reflects in a closed loop, using a single MLLM as both planner and evaluator and a frozen MotionLLM as the executor. InteractAgent integrates Online Observation for step-wise recovery decisions (continue/redo/replan) and Memory-Augmented Reflection for multi-round plan refinement with adaptive stopping. On UniHSI, InteractAgent improves task success and reduces penetration compared with training-free baselines. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/InteractAgent.
☆ Negation without Confusion: Decomposing Bias and Recomposing Style in Text Embeddings for Negation-aware Image Generation
Negation-aware image generation remains challenging for text-to-image diffusion models, which often struggle with negation due to implicit linguistic biases that are deeply entangled within text representations. As a result, bias-aligned semantics frequently dominate over intended negative constraints. To overcome this limitation, we propose a simple training-free method of Decompose and Recompose text embedding (Dero), which constructs a semantic-preserving subspace and a bias subspace using auxiliary prompts and performs semantic disentanglement based on bidirectional SVD. By decomposing entangled representations and selectively recomposing disentangled semantic components, Dero realigns text representations toward intended negation semantics while restoring residual stylistic features to preserve semantic fidelity and image quality. As a model-agnostic inference-time framework operating solely on text representations, Dero can be seamlessly applied to diverse diffusion architectures, including both U-Net and DiT based models. Extensive experiments on both object- and concept-level negation demonstrate consistent improvements in negation-aware image generation, achieving stronger text-image alignment, better semantic fidelity, and higher human preference scores.
☆ Visual Memory and Textual Alignment for Cross-Modal Few-Shot Segmentation
Few-shot segmentation (FSS) aims to segment target objects with limited annotated examples. Recent studies have begun to explore large foundation models to improve generalization for this task. In particular, SAM 3 provides strong visual representations and supports text-guided segmentation. However, its performance remains limited in specialized domains, where semantic prompts and visual representations are often poorly aligned. To address this challenge, we propose ViTA-SAM, a framework built upon SAM 3 that integrates visual memory and textual features through cross-modal alignment. Specifically, we construct a visual memory module that encodes support features together with their corresponding masks, providing support-aware visual guidance for query prediction. In parallel, we leverage the text encoder of SAM 3 to extract semantic features as complementary priors. To bridge the gap between semantic and visual representations, we introduce a cross-modal alignment module that conditions textual features on memory-enhanced visual representations, yielding more consistent and visually grounded predictions. In addition, we propose a pseudo-label refinement strategy that updates the memory with predicted query masks, enabling query-adaptive representation learning. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that ViTA-SAM achieves the best overall performance among the compared methods, outperforming the strongest competing method by over 5% in average mIoU.
☆ ACorD: Adaptive Correspondence Discovery for Medical Image Registration
Medical image registration is a fundamental task for aligning anatomical structures across images. Exhaustively searching for point-wise correspondences is prohibitively expensive in both computation and memory, particularly for high-resolution 3D medical images. Most recent learning-based methods directly predict correspondences in a coarse-to-fine manner, but often propagate intermediate estimates across scales without explicitly weighting correspondence evidence, which can allow coarse-scale errors to persist during refinement. To address these challenges, we propose ACorD, an adaptive correspondence discovery framework designed to mitigate error propagation with an attention-guided process. ACorD first predicts multiple potential correspondence candidates through Correlation-guided Cross-scale Offset Prediction (CCOP), which combines correlation maps as spatial matching priors with cross-scale features as global deformation context. Then, Multi-Head Deformable Aggregation (MHDA) aggregates these candidate correspondences using attention, producing a learned, non-uniform weighting over competing matches rather than treating them equally. The multi-head design further captures complementary deformation patterns, ensuring both global alignment and local precision. By integrating adaptive offset prediction with selective, attention-based aggregation of correspondence evidence, ACorD enables accurate deformation refinement. Extensive experiments on four public medical registration benchmarks demonstrate that adaptive correspondence discovery within a multi-scale refinement framework improves registration robustness across diverse anatomical structures.
☆ TNVD-SC: Diagnosing Scan Context Failures in Forests with Terrain-Normalized Vertical Distributions
Long-term LiDAR place recognition in forests is difficult because repetitive vegetation and uneven terrain create severe structural aliasing. We diagnose Scan Context (SC) by separating candidate retrieval from fine matching: on the standardized TreeLoc++ Wild-Places protocol, a TNVD support key places a valid location in the top-25 set for approximately 99% of queries, while conventional SC matching on those candidates reaches only 61.84% mean R@1. With an identical raw-SC candidate set, terrain normalization improves max-height cells by only 1.21 points but vertical-distribution cells by 19.72 points. These observations motivate Terrain-Normalized Vertical Distribution Scan Context (TNVD-SC), which preserves the SC ring-sector topology while encoding terrain-relative vertical probability distributions. Under the standardized TreeLoc++ protocol, TNVD-SC reaches 91.83% mean R@1 and attains the highest R@1 mean and R@1 stability among the compared methods, while TreeLoc++ remains stronger in mean MR, MF1, and AUC. The unchanged method reaches 85.14% mean R@1 on the four-session CVTNet-style NCLT evaluation. A lossless count-coded implementation with exact hierarchical Jensen-Shannon search reduces descriptor payload by 3.86x and compute latency by 23.8% without changing the audited retrieval outputs.
comment: 8 pages, 5 figures
☆ Clean Forcing: Drift-Resistant Autoregressive Video Diffusion with a Frozen Base
Autoregressive (AR) video diffusion models generate streaming video of arbitrary length by conditioning each new chunk of frames on those already generated. However, they suffer from exposure bias, where a model trained on clean context must continue from its own imperfect outputs, and errors compound until quality collapses within seconds (drift). Existing methods either require cluster-scale base retraining, apply training-free inference corrections with inconsistent results, or train frozen-base correctors for sampling and cache errors. We instead find that drift is largely deterministic and therefore learnable, as holding the noisy state fixed while varying only the history reveals a counterfactual velocity gap that is ~95% systematic across noise seeds. Based on this observation, we introduce Clean Forcing, which trains a 5.9M-parameter LoRA corrector on the frozen base model to regress this gap, with a closed-loop stage that adds DAgger-style aggregation and a drift-contraction objective to expose the corrector to its own rollouts. Because the clean histories can be the base model's own single-shot generations, training needs no real videos, and the merged corrector adds no inference cost. In 50 s text-to-video generation, Clean Forcing reduces Δ-drift from +11.3 to +1.65 without real video and to -0.16 with 40 real clips, improving on the best published result of +3.57 with over 150x less data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Clean Forcing outperforms prior methods in aesthetic quality and data efficiency with reduced drift for long-horizon video generation.
comment: Project page: https://clean-forcing.github.io/
☆ Confidence-Guided Pseudo-Label Refinement for Unsupervised Cross-Domain Person Re-Identification
Unsupervised cross-domain person re-identification remains challenging because domain shifts generate noisy pseudo labels that are reinforced during iterative adaptation. Existing clustering-based methods often rely on limited reliability cues or global confidence criteria and may impose hard identity supervision on ambiguous target samples. To address these limitations, we propose CGPLR, a confidence-guided pseudo-label refinement framework for unsupervised domain-adaptive person re-identification. CGPLR estimates sample-level reliability by jointly modeling centroid compatibility, local neighborhood consistency, separation from the strongest competing cluster and temporal assignment stability. The resulting confidence distribution is used to derive cluster-adaptive upper and lower thresholds for a three-way selective decision. Reliable assignments are preserved, recoverable samples are reassigned only when an alternative cluster receives sufficient geometric and neighborhood support and highly ambiguous samples are deferred from hard identity supervision. The learning objective adapts to these decisions through confidence-weighted supervision for preserved samples, cautious corrected-label weighting for reassigned samples and label-free representation consistency for deferred samples. CGPLR achieves 76.4% Rank-1 accuracy and 47.6% mean average precision (mAP) on Market-1501 to MSMT17, and 95.1% Rank-1 accuracy and 87.7% mAP on MSMT17 to Market-1501, demonstrating effective reliability-aware selective adaptation. The code is available at https://github.com/Sundas058/CGPLR.
☆ Where Do the Gaussians Go? Foreground Attraction for Camera-Based Weakly Supervised 3D Occupancy
Camera-based 3D semantic occupancy models can be trained without 3D labels by rendering their predictions into the images and supervising them with 2D pseudo labels. In sparse Gaussian representations trained this way, Gaussian positions are learned only through pixel-wise rendering losses, which we hypothesize give small foreground objects little weight. In trained GaussianFlowOcc models, the Gaussian density on foreground voxels is on average only 1.62 times that on background voxels. We propose a training-only foreground attraction loss that back-projects foreground pseudo-label pixels with pseudo depth and pulls nearby Gaussians toward these 3D points, favoring Gaussians that already predict the target class; the inference network is unchanged. On Occ3D-nuScenes, the loss raises this concentration to 2.40 over three seeds. Over three seeds, the mean foreground IoU increases from 6.29 to 6.96 and is higher for each seed, whereas the change in mean mIoU (13.53 to 13.82) is within the seed-to-seed variation of the baseline. Single-run ablations further indicate that pseudo-label targets outperform targets placed at ground-truth voxels and that acting on the Gaussian positions alone is not sufficient, and a single-seed test shows that the model degrades less when fewer Gaussians are kept at inference.
comment: 7 pages, 3 figures
☆ Recurrent Vision Transformers for Event-Based Spacecraft Pose Estimation Under Slow Relative Motions
Vision-based object pose estimation is vital for conducting spacecraft rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO). Recent research has demonstrated the robustness of event cameras against the harsh lighting conditions that often occur in orbit, thanks to the extremely high dynamic range of event sensors. However, event-based spacecraft pose estimation (EBSPE) suffers when the relative motion between the chaser and target is slow, since the event rate drops significantly, leading to data with low signal-to-noise ratio. Unfortunately, for safety reasons, real RPO trajectories often involve slow relative motions (e.g., down to 1 mm/s), and operating under low illumination exacerbates the problem. Addressing slow relative motions is thus crucial to raise the practicality of EBSPE. To this end, we propose using recurrent vision transformers (RVT) for EBSPE. The key idea is to exploit recurrent memory to capture longer-term information across sparse event streams, and to learn the temporal attention span from full trajectories rather than fixing the time window. We developed an RVT-based heatmap regressor to produce 2D-3D correspondences for pose estimation, which was validated on real event data collected under slow relative motions representative of RPO trajectories. Results indicate the superior pose estimation accuracy and stability of our RVT-based method, relative to previous per-event-frame-based or fixed-time-window EBSPE methods.
☆ CheXFuse: Guided Differential Joint Attention Fusion for Robust Multimodal Chest X-Ray Classification in Data-Scarce Medical Settings IEEE
A central challenge in multimodal learning is how to fuse modalities that differ substantially in predictive strength. When one modality provides a much stronger representation than another, indiscriminate cross-modal interaction can introduce weak, redundant, or unstable signals, limiting or even degrading performance relative to the strongest unimodal representation. To address this problem, we propose CheXFuse, a multimodal fusion framework based on Guided Differential Joint Attention (GuDJA). CheXFuse combines image and text token representations within a joint multimodal sequence, where learned token guidance emphasizes informative representations and differential attention reduces less useful attention responses. We evaluate CheXFuse on the Indiana University (IU) Chest X-ray dataset, using binary (normal vs. abnormal) classification as the downstream task. Experiments are conducted under both original-report and masked-report settings, with the latter serving as a controlled stress test under reduced textual informativeness. CheXFuse with GuDJA achieves the strongest mean overall performance across the evaluated baselines and ablations, reaching 95.73% accuracy, 95.79% F1-score, 96.54% recall, and 95.28% sensitivity at 95% specificity (Sens@95Spec) with original reports, and 95.58%, 95.60%, 95.60%, and 94.34%, respectively, under masked reports. These results suggest that GuDJA provides a promising fusion strategy under asymmetric or partially reduced modality informativeness.
comment: IEEE ICDM DMBIH 2026
♻ ☆ How Well Do Vision-Language Models Understand Movies? EMNLP 2026
Emmanouil Zaranis, António Farinhas, Saul Santos, Beatriz Canaverde, Miguel Moura Ramos, Aditya K Surikuchi, André Viveiros, Baohao Liao, Elena Bueno-Benito, Nithin Sivakumaran, Pavlo Vasylenko, Shoubin Yu, Sonal Sannigrahi, Wafaa Mohammed, Ben Peters, Danae Sánchez Villegas, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Giuseppe Attanasio, Jaehong Yoon, Stella Frank, Alessandro Suglia, Chrysoula Zerva, Desmond Elliott, Mariella Dimiccoli, Mohit Bansal, Oswald Lanz, Raffaella Bernardi, Raquel Fernández, Sandro Pezzelle, Vlad Niculae, André F. T. Martins
Vision-language models (VLMs) can increasingly handle extended contexts and answer questions about long videos--but can they understand the narrative structure of movies as humans do? To investigate this question, we introduce MF$^2$ (Movie Facts and Fibs), a fully manually curated benchmark designed to evaluate whether models can identify, recall, and comprehend information central to the movie's storyline, using both the visual and textual modalities. MF$^2$ includes over 50 open-licensed movies, each paired with manually constructed sets of claim pairs: one true claim (fact) and one plausible but false (fib), totaling over 850 pairs. Our analysis across 20 open-source and 2 proprietary models reveals a substantial gap relative to human performance. While subtitles provide a strong signal for narrative understanding, other textual sources (e.g., synopses) are less informative. In contrast, when visual information is distributed across the entire movie and jointly embedded with subtitles, models struggle to identify and effectively use the relevant content. However, when the visual input is restricted to claim-relevant visual content, models improve significantly, indicating substantial room for improvement in processing large multimodal contexts and distinguishing relevant from irrelevant information. Overall, our findings highlight persistent challenges in multimodal narrative understanding for current VLMs. We release our data and code to support further research in this direction.
comment: EMNLP 2026
♻ ☆ Vision-language models see more about agriculture than they report, and test-time scaling remains bounded by parametric knowledge WACV
Vision-language models (VLMs) show promise for agricultural diagnosis but fail unpredictably in zero-shot settings. We test whether this stems from poor visual features or an inability to verbalize what the model already perceives, using a benchmark spanning classification and detection drawn from 118 AgML classification and 54 detection datasets. Linear probing shows agricultural features are linearly separable in frozen VLM vision towers, with Gemma-4-31B's encoder reaching F1-macro of 0.60--0.78 across tasks and approaching the vision-only DINOv3 backbone, indicating the bottleneck lies downstream of perception. We then test whether test-time scaling, an iterative in-context skill-memory loop, can close this gap without updating weights. Gains are modest and inconsistent. Skill-memory improves classification accuracy by up to 3.1 points on three of four tasks while regressing on species, with gains concentrated on classes seen during optimization and unseen classes regressing. Detection F1 is effectively unchanged (0.412 to 0.421), though an oracle filtering condition reaches 0.432 F1, revealing real headroom unconstrained prompting fails to surface. These results indicate VLMs see more agricultural features than they report, but test-time scaling alone fails to surface that hidden parametric knowledge, motivating agentic approaches grounded in external, retrievable knowledge.
comment: Submitted to HARVEST-Vision Workshop (WACV Workshops 2026)
♻ ☆ ICON decomposition: Multivariate concept auditing reveals shortcuts that neural networks rely on
Roshan Prakash Rane, Marco Simnacher, Manuel Pfeuffer, Marc-Andre Schulz, Nys Tjade Siegel, Maximilian Dreyer, Frederik Pahde, Wojciech Samek, Sonja Greven, Kerstin Ritter
Deep neural networks often exploit spurious associations, a failure known as shortcut learning. Before deployment, models should therefore be audited for reliance on concepts such as acquisition artifacts and patient demographics. Current methods, including linear probes and concept activation vectors, measure concept reliance by asking whether each concept is decodable from a layer. We show that this framing is misleading: decodability reflects not only concept reliance but also correlations among concepts and the outcome in the auditing dataset. We reframe shortcut auditing as a decomposition of the variance of intermediary representations with Independent Canonical cONcepts (ICON). ICON quantifies the share of a layer's variance explained by each concept conditional on all other concepts and the outcome, and also reports the variance left unexplained. Because ICON explanations are comparable across layers, their trajectories distinguish concepts that drive predictions from those that are merely encoded in the representations. In simulated data with ground truth, ICON recovers concept importance more accurately than seven baselines. In skin-cancer and neuroimaging applications, it separates learned shortcuts from merely correlated concepts, which we confirm with independent validation checks.
comment: 44 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables. Includes Extended Data (7 figures, 2 tables). Code: https://github.com/RoshanRane/ICON_decomposition
♻ ☆ Deep Learning-based Semantic Segmentation of Dental Radiographs: Comparative Evaluation of PSPNet, DeepLabv3, UNet, and UNet++
Accurate and efficient analysis of dental radiographs has become increasingly important for disease diagnosis and clinical decision making. In particular, dental radiographs segmentation plays a critical role as it is challenging due to several reasons, such as low contrast, noise in the images, variations in the image quality, etc. Previous studies have primarily addressed these challenges using convolutional neural networks (CNN)-based models. However, direct comparison of these segmentation models is still challenging due to the variations among the experimental settings. Therefore, we mainly compared four segmentation models, including Pyramid Scene Parsing Network (PSPNet), DeepLabV3, UNet, and UNet++, through a fair, controlled experimentation setting under varying conditions such as image sizes and batch sizes. For this, we used 1269 dental radiography images, and prior to training, we implemented a series of preprocessing techniques. To assess the models, we used several metrics, including Dice coefficient (DICE), Intersection over Union (IoU), accuracy, precision, training and validation losses. According to our results, UNet++ demonstrated the highest IoU score of 0.6719, and a DICE value of 0.7869, showing superior results in terms of segmentation, specifically when configured with an image size of 300x300 and a batch size of 16. In addition, we also explored the effect of image resolutions and batch sizes on model performance and accuracy under different architectures. Therefore, this study provides insights into the strengths of different segmentation models and the potential of deep learning-based semantic segmentation methods for improving automated dental radiograph analysis.
comment: 11 pages
♻ ☆ TestDG: Test-time Domain Generalization for Continual Test-time Adaptation
This paper studies continual test-time adaptation (CTTA), the task of adapting a model to constantly changing unseen domains in testing while preserving previously learned knowledge. Existing CTTA methods mostly focus on adaptation to the current test domain only, overlooking generalization to arbitrary test domains a model may face in the future. To tackle this limitation, we present a novel online test-time domain generalization framework for CTTA, dubbed TestDG. TestDG aims to learn features invariant to both current and previous test domains on the fly during testing, improving the potential for effective generalization to future domains. To this end, we propose a new model architecture and a test-time adaptation strategy dedicated to learning domain-invariant features, along with prototype selection and update mechanisms for effectively managing information from previous test domains. TestDG achieved state of the art on three of four public CTTA benchmarks and performed on par with the best prior method on ImageNet-C. Moreover, it showed superior generalization to unseen test domains.
comment: Accepted to TMLR
♻ ☆ PDB: Not All Drivers Are the Same -- A Personalized Dataset for Understanding Driving Behavior
Chuheng Wei, Ziye Qin, Siyan Li, Ziyan Zhang, Xuanpeng Zhao, Amr Abdelraouf, Rohit Gupta, Kyungtae Han, Ziran Wang, Matthew J. Barth, Guoyuan Wu
Driving behavior varies across individuals, yet most existing driving datasets do not preserve driver identity or control for factors that may affect driving style. We introduce the Personalized Driving Behavior (PDB) dataset, a multimodal dataset collected from 9 drivers using the same vehicle and route under comparable conditions. PDB includes data from a 128-line LiDAR, external and driver-facing cameras, GNSS, IMU, CAN-bus signals, and heart-rate measurements, with 111,060 frames of LiDAR point cloud data and more than 1.33 million images. Based on these recordings, we construct PDB-Traj, a personalized trajectory prediction benchmark with 1,309 10-second trajectory segments sampled at 10 Hz. Each segment includes the ego trajectory, surrounding-agent trajectories, and driver identity. We further introduce Gated Selective Personalization (Gate-SP), a driver-aware baseline that selectively incorporates driver identity into trajectory prediction. Experiments on PDB-Traj provide reference results for personalized motion forecasting and show that driver information can improve prediction when applied selectively. PDB and PDB-Traj provide a benchmark for studying driver-specific behavior and personalized trajectory prediction.
♻ ☆ Has GPT-6-Astra Achieved Embodied Intelligence?
SenseNova, Joint Research Team, Zhongang Cai, Ziang Cao, Tailai Chen, Han Chong Chua, Linjun Dai, Hanming Deng, Hokin Deng, Haiwen Diao, Chenjing Ding, Weichen Fan, Xiao Fu, Zerui Gong, Chenyang Gu, Zexin He, Zhi Hou, Bo Li, Qinyue Li, Quanzhou Li, Xiaowan Li, Zhichao Liao, Dahua Lin, Zilong Lin, Bo Liu, Chunxiao Liu, Pengfei Liu, Tianqi Liu, Ziwei Liu, Chen Change Loy, Lewei Lu, Jiapeng Luo, Yuexiao Ma, Liang Pan, Xingang Pan, Oscar Qian, Ziyi Shang, Yuyao Shao, Dawei Su, Dacheng Tao, Qingyi Tao, Quan Wang, Ruisi Wang, Xiaogang Wang, Ziyi Wang, Beichen Wen, Donghao Wu, Jiaxu Wu, Silei Wu, Xiaoming Wu, Zhonghua Wu, Hongcan Xiao, Weiye Xu, Atsushi Yamashita, Lei Yang, Zhe Yang, Baiqiao Yin, Wanqi Yin, Hanfei Zhao, Tianbo Zhong, Long Zhuo, Jing Zuo
GPT-6-Astra demonstrates a level of competence in robotic manipulation and navigation that challenges the conventional paradigm of building specialized models for individual tasks and embodiments. In this report, we ask not only how capable GPT-6-Astra is, but what its capabilities imply for the field. First, we probe the limits of standalone GPT-6-Astra. We conduct a large-scale evaluation across 12 representative benchmarks spanning tabletop manipulation, humanoids, mobile platforms, and dexterous hands. Under a unified protocol that allows in-context learning (ICL) from training-set demonstrations and substantially increases the number of execution steps, GPT-6-Astra achieves unprecedented performance (Fig. 1). Future research may focus on improving 1) the generality of ICL 2) cost and execution time, 3) physical-state verification, 4) recovery from irreversible failures, and 5) long-horizon preservation of progress. Second, we study the agentic harness for embodied control. We identify that close-loop coordination between a high-level "System 2" reasoner (i.e., GPT-6-Astra) and a low-level "System 1" controller (e.g., π0.5) is costly but effective. Third, we examine GPT-6-Astra on real-world deployment. Our experiments on 8 robot configurations reveal substantial gaps: 1) robot demonstrations required for ICL are expensive to collect, and 2) it is implausible to trade longer execution for higher success rates with physical constraints. Fourth, we envision the next generation of embodied benchmarks. We develop a prototype that 1) derives tasks from real-world needs, 2) provides no in-domain demonstrations, and 3) judges agents on a world clock that keeps running while they deliberate. Taken together, our results suggest that GPT-6-Astra has largely crossed the threshold of embodied competence, but not yet that of practical embodied intelligence.
comment: Homepage: https://sensenova.ai/has-gpt-6-astra-achieved-embodied-intelligence. Authors are ordered alphabetically by their surnames
♻ ☆ Learning to Think and Explore in 3D World
We study how vision-language models (VLMs) can learn to think and actively explore in 3D space. Instead of providing multi-view images, videos, or 3D representations to the model, we preserve the native visual encoding of VLMs, i.e., a single image, one at a time, just like humans, and treat the 3D representation only as an environment with which the model can interact through actions (e.g., move left) and observations (rendered images). Each rollout begins from an initial first-person view and a visual question. The model can then iteratively reason, navigate, and reorient its viewpoint before committing to a final answer. Following an initial trajectory-supervised finetuning, we apply reinforcement learning (RL) with rewards driven primarily by final-answer correctness. Crucially, RL provides no direct supervision over which viewpoints the model should visit or which exploration actions it should take. Instead, the model must learn an effective exploration policy solely from the extent to which its interactions improve performance. Across six 3D benchmarks, our model ACT3D achieves an average accuracy of 53.2% that improves its base Qwen model by 22.0% and surpasses proprietary Gemini 3.6 Flash. ACT3D also outperforms existing open-source 3D methods while using 50-70% fewer input frames, and generalizes to unseen domains with an average improvement of 5.9% over its supervised initialization. Further analysis reveals adaptive, question-conditioned exploration. Performance gains over the base model increase from 0.6% on questions answerable from the initial view to 16.3% on those requiring extensive exploration. ACT3D searches for occluded targets, avoids unnecessary exploration, and acquires complementary viewpoints for spatial comparisons. These findings demonstrate that outcome-based RL enables VLMs not only to reason over visual evidence, but also to learn when and how to acquire it.
comment: Project page: https://williamium3000.github.io/act3d/
♻ ☆ Visual Text Compression as Measure Transport NeurIPS2026
Visual text compression (VTC) promises efficient long-context processing by rendering text into an image and re-encoding it with a vision-language model, often producing $3$--$20\times$ fewer decoder tokens than subword tokenization. Yet token savings do not translate predictably into downstream utility: on some tasks the visual path matches or exceeds the text path, on others it collapses, and the compression ratio itself does not predict which regime will occur. The missing quantity is therefore not another summary of efficiency, but a principled measure of task-relevant information loss induced by visual encoding. We address this problem by formulating VTC in the language of measure transport. Treating text and visual tokens as empirical probability measures, we show that the ViT patch encoder induces a push-forward map whose transport cost decomposes into a precision cost from within-patch aggregation and a coverage cost from cross-patch fragmentation. Both terms are estimable from downstream-label-free probes. This formulation yields two operational consequences: a downstream-label-free routing criterion that selects whether to use the visual path for a given input or benchmark instance, and a transport-informed foveation mechanism that re-encodes high-cost regions at higher resolution. Across $24$ NLP datasets at Qwen3-4B, our label-free rule matches the per-dataset oracle on $17/24$ datasets ($70.8\%$), and improves the average task score by $+3.3\%$ with $-10.3\%$ average tokens relative to a pure-LLM.
comment: This paper is accpeted by NeurIPS2026
♻ ☆ OLiVES: An Outdoor Low-Light Video Benchmark for Enhancement and Segmentation
Low-light video processing remains an underexplored problem in computer vision, primarily due to the scarcity of high-quality ground-truth data. Existing public datasets exhibit several limitations, including restricted motion diversity, limited scene coverage, weak degradations, reliance on auxiliary modalities such as event data, and misalignment between low-light inputs and ground truth. Furthermore, current datasets typically address either low-light enhancement or scene understanding, whereas these tasks should be considered jointly. We introduce \textbf{OLiVES}, a benchmark dataset for outdoor low-light videos with dynamic scenes, designed to support both low-light video enhancement (LLVE) and video object segmentation (VOS). The dataset addresses key content gaps by incorporating a diverse range of natural textures, animals, occlusions, dynamic activities, and close-up scenes. To the best of our knowledge, OLiVES is the first outdoor low-light video dataset captured using professional cinema-grade cameras. It provides over 25,000 aligned normal- and low-light frame pairs, along with over 46,000 VOS annotations. We benchmark state-of-the-art LLVE and VOS methods on OLiVES and show that training on it improves performance on both tasks. The OLiVES project page is available at: https://anonymous-OLiVES.github.io/.
♻ ☆ CTFS : Collaborative Teacher Framework for Forward-Looking Sonar Image Semantic Segmentation with Extremely Limited Labels CVPR 2026
As one of the most important underwater sensing technologies, forward-looking sonar exhibits unique imaging characteristics. Sonar images are often affected by severe speckle noise, low texture contrast, acoustic shadows, and geometric distortions. These factors make it difficult for traditional teacher-student frameworks to achieve satisfactory performance in sonar semantic segmentation tasks under extremely limited labeled data conditions. To address this issue, we propose a Collaborative Teacher Semantic Segmentation Framework for forward-looking sonar images. This framework introduces a multi-teacher collaborative mechanism composed of one general teacher and multiple sonar-specific teachers. By adopting a multi-teacher alternating guidance strategy, the student model can learn general semantic representations while simultaneously capturing the unique characteristics of sonar images, thereby achieving more comprehensive and robust feature modeling. Considering the challenges of sonar images, which can lead teachers to generate a large number of noisy pseudo-labels, we further design a cross-teacher reliability assessment mechanism. This mechanism dynamically quantifies the reliability of pseudo-labels by evaluating the consistency and stability of predictions across multiple views and multiple teachers, thereby mitigating the negative impact caused by noisy pseudo-labels. Notably, on the FLSMD dataset, when only 2% of the data is labeled, our method achieves a 5.08% improvement in mIoU compared to other state-of-the-art approaches.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026 Finding. Code: https://github.com/pingggg516/CTFS
♻ ☆ Evaluating Deep Learning and Traditional Approaches Used in Source Camera Identification
Identifying the device that captured a digital image is a central task in image forensics, made more urgent by pervasive smartphone photography and the rise of AI-generated imagery. This paper compares three source camera identification (SCI) approaches - Photo Response Non-Uniformity (PRNU) analysis, JPEG compression artifact analysis, and a convolutional neural network (CNN) - on images from four smartphone devices (Xiaomi Redmi Note 10S, Samsung Galaxy S24, iPhone 13 Pro Max, and iPhone 17 Pro). For each method, discriminative features are extracted (DCT coefficient statistics for JPEG artifacts, denoised noise residuals for PRNU, and learned convolutional features for the CNN) and classified with an SVM (JPEG, PRNU) or trained end-to-end (CNN), using an identical fixed, stratified 70/30 train-test split for direct comparability. The DCT/JPEG-artifact-inspired classifier achieves the highest accuracy (0.90), followed by the PRNU-inspired method (0.71), while the CNN baseline reaches only 0.29. Under this experimental configuration, the DCT/statistical and PRNU-inspired approaches outperform the evaluated CNN baseline. The results motivate evaluation on larger, format-balanced datasets and investigation of hybrid or learned approaches under more robust validation protocols.
comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Version submitted to SIDe'26 (International Conference on Secure and Intelligent Digital Ecosystems) (Astana, Oct 2026) before peer review. The paper was accepted and will appear in the Springer STEAM-H series; the accepted version uses repeated cross-validation and reports updated results
♻ ☆ TriFold: Folding irregular 3D Gaussians into structured latents for 3D Scene Generation
Recent progress in 3D generation has motivated growing interest in compact generative representations of complex 3D scenes. For native 3D Gaussian scenes, however, learning such representations remains challenging due to widely varying primitive counts, nonuniform spatial density, and differences in geometry and appearance even among spatially neighboring primitives. In this work, we introduce TriFold, a native 3D Gaussian VAE that encodes Gaussian scenes into a fixed-layout triplane latent and jointly reconstructs their geometry and appearance. The key insight is to impose structural regularity on the latent space while preserving the spatial adaptivity of the underlying Gaussians. During encoding, we use cell-wise learned queries to aggregate projected Gaussians into multiple slots per cell, reducing the information loss caused by single-feature pooling. During decoding, occupancy prediction identifies active regions, where query-based set prediction and candidate selection reconstruct local Gaussian sets with spatially varying primitive counts. Building on this representation, we train a latent flow-matching model for conditional scene-level 3DGS generation, enabling point-cloud-conditioned synthesis and single-image-conditioned amodal generation. Experiments demonstrate that TriFold achieves high-fidelity reconstruction and generation from a single image that provides only a partial observation of the scene, validating its effectiveness for native 3D Gaussian representation learning. https://fantasy-amap.github.io/TriFold
comment: 30pages, Project page: https://fantasy-amap.github.io/TriFold
♻ ☆ LLM-Driven Autonomous Vehicles Can Inherit Human Driver Biases in Pedestrian Yielding: Results and Implications From a New Benchmark
Public trust in Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) may depend not only on technical success but also on the fairness of their decision making. While a recent trend in AV research involves using general purpose "common sense" models to guide AV decision making, the degree to which these inherit human biases in driving is still understudied. Given that psychology studies have shown human driver biases exist, such as lower pedestrian-yielding rates to Black pedestrians in the US, we argue that analyses of model bias should also be part of AV evaluation. Concretely, in this paper we propose two new bias testing methodologies for Large Language Models (LLMs) and Visual-Language Models (VLMs), "All Else Being Equal" tests and "Self-Consistency" tests, and a new benchmark (FairYield) to assess bias in pedestrian-yielding decisions. Our findings show that the yielding decisions of both LLMs and VLMs can be influenced by models' predictions of pedestrian gender, ethnicity, religion, disability, age, skin tone, and socio-economic status. While the type and degree of bias is different from model to model, we highlight common patterns, and raise questions about the "common sense" model paradigm, particularly the need to either revise the paradigm or address issues of downstream bias.
♻ ☆ CoLVR: Enhancing Exploratory Latent Visual Reasoning via Contrastive Optimization NeurIPS 2026
Due to the potential for exploratory reasoning of Latent Visual Reasoning, recent works tend to enable MLLMs (Multimodal Large Language Models) to perform visual reasoning by propagating continuous hidden states instead of decoding intermediate steps into discrete tokens. However, existing works typically rely on hard alignment objectives to force latent representations to match predefined visual features, thereby severely limiting the exploratory of latent reasoning process. To address this problem, we propose CoLVR (Contrastive Optimization for Latent Visual Reasoning). To obtain a more exploratory visual reasoning, CoLVR introduces a latent contrastive training framework. Firstly, CoLVR learns diverse and exploratory representations with a latent contrastive objective guided by angle-based perturbation, which expands the semantic latent space and avoids over-constrained embedding. Then, CoLVR employs a latent trajectory contrastive reward for RL (Reinforcement Learning) post-training to enable fine-grained optimization of latent visual reasoning process and thus fostering diverse reasoning behaviors. Experiments demonstrate that CoLVR significantly enhances the exploratory capability of latent representations, achieving average improvements of 5.83% on VSP and 8.00% on Jigsaw, while also outperforming existing latent models on out of domain benchmarks, with a 3.40% gain on MMStar. The data, codes, and models are released at https://github.com/Oscar-dzy/CoLVR.
comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2026. 17 pages, 10 figures, 9 tables
♻ ☆ RoboCloth: A Large-Scale Real Cloth Material Dataset for Neural Reflectance Reconstruction
We present RoboCloth, a dataset of 500 real cloth materials captured under flexible, calibrated camera and lighting configurations, where both are robotically controlled during acquisition. Each material is imaged in approximately 580 high-dynamic range frames spanning a wide view-light hemisphere; camera poses are refined via structure-from-motion and aligned to the robot frame, yielding per-material sparse surface geometry and structured per-point reflectance observations ready for neural material training. We demonstrate the value of this data through a two-stage neural reconstruction pipeline: Stage 1 trains a shared MLP decoder on our corpus to learn cloth material priors; Stage 2 then freezes the decoder and fits a dense 2048x2048 latent texture to each target material. Evaluating on held-out materials from our own dataset and on the independent UBO2014 benchmark, we show that a decoder trained on our captures outperforms decoders trained on existing measured reflectance datasets and analytic PBR fitting, transferring to unseen acquisition systems without modification. The dataset, calibration files, observation tensors, and train/test splits are released under CC BY 4.0 on the Hugging Face Hub.
comment: 16 pages. Project page: https://theialab.github.io/robocloth/
♻ ☆ Any 3D Scene is Worth 1K Tokens: 3D-Grounded Representation for Scene Generation at Scale NeurIPS 2026
Dongxu Wei, Qi Xu, Zhiqi Li, Hangning Zhou, Cong Qiu, Hailong Qin, Mu Yang, Zhaopeng Cui, Peidong Liu
Scene-level 3D generation has long been dominated by 2D multi-view or video diffusion models. Typically, these 2D-based approaches perform scene generation in a 2D latent space, which introduces two fundamental issues: (i) representing 3D scenes via 2D views leads to significant representation redundancy, and (ii) latent space rooted in 2D inherently limits the spatial consistency of the generated scenes. In this paper, we propose to perform 3D scene generation directly within a high-dimensional implicit 3D latent space derived from powerful 2D foundation models (e.g., DINOv2, SigLIP2, DA3). Then we tame diffusion transformers to perform diffusion modeling directly in the 3D latent space, enabling 3D-grounded scene generation. In our experiments, we not only demonstrate the advantages of our method over 2D-based approaches in terms of efficiency and spatial consistency, but also comprehensively analyze the impact of 3D latent representation on 3D scene generation performance. Furthermore, we validate the favorable scalability of our method with respect to representation and model capacity.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. Code has been released. Project Page: https://wswdx.github.io/3DRAE
♻ ☆ GROW$^2$: Grounding Which and Where for Robot Tool Use
Can the robot use a plate to cut a cake if no knife is available? Tool use greatly expands robot capabilities, but to use tools creatively beyond their intended functions, the robot faces the challenge of $\textit{open-world affordance grounding}$: select an open-category object to act as a tool and localize its specific region of action. To this end, we introduce GROW$^2$ (GROunding Which and Where), which leverages object parts as a natural abstraction to split the grounding process hierarchically into semantic and geometric levels, thus bypassing the need for data-heavy, end-to-end training. Semantically, GROW$^2$ harnesses the commonsense reasoning of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to parse a natural-language task instruction, select a suitable object as the tool, and identify task-relevant parts on the tool and the target object. Geometrically, vision foundation models then ground the selected parts into precise 3D regions from a single RGB-D image. Experiments on established benchmarks show that GROW$^2$ outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on affordance prediction benchmarks. Further, it achieves zero-shot generalization over open-category objects and outperforms baselines in both simulated and real-world robot tool use experiments.
comment: CoRL 2026
♻ ☆ Robust and Efficient Finetuning of Vision Foundation Models via Implicit Ensembling
Robust finetuning of foundation models seeks to improve out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization during in-distribution (ID) adaptation. We revisit Mixout, a stochastic regularizer that intermittently replaces finetuned parameters with a reference anchor, and study its effectiveness for robust finetuning of vision foundation models. We reinterpret Mixout as a single-run, weight-sharing implicit ensemble and analyze its expected OOD error through a bias-variance-covariance-locality (BVCL) lens. This perspective reveals three key factors that govern the ID-OOD trade-off: the choice of masking anchor, the mask resampling frequency, and mask sparsity. Guided by this analysis, we propose GMixout, which generalizes Mixout in three ways. First, it explicitly controls the masking period through a resampling-frequency hyperparameter. Second, it replaces the fixed pretrained anchor with an exponential moving average snapshot that adapts throughout training. Third, it uses sparse kernels to update only a small subset of parameters at each iteration, introducing no inference-time overhead and enabling large-model finetuning on consumer-grade GPUs. Experiments across five vision benchmarks show that GMixout consistently outperforms Mixout, Model Soups, and strong parameter-efficient finetuning baselines under both covariate shift and class imbalance.
comment: 32 pages, 9 figures, Neurips 2026
♻ ☆ MergeSurv: Merging-Based Continual Learning for Survival Analysis on Whole-Slide Images
Survival analysis on Whole Slide Images (WSIs) is important in computational pathology for prognosis estimation and treatment planning. However, existing survival models are typically trained independently for each cancer cohort, making continual adaptation computationally expensive for gigapixel-scale WSIs. In this study, we propose MergeSurv, a merging-based continual learning framework for WSI survival analysis. A pathology vision-language foundation model is independently fine-tuned on each task, and the learned parameters are sequentially merged into a unified model without storing previous training data. We further investigate two inference strategies: One-for-All (OFA) and Voting-Expert Aggregation (VEA). Experiments on four TCGA cohorts demonstrate that MergeSurv outperforms naive fine-tuning as well as representative regularization-based and rehearsal-based continual learning methods, while effectively reducing catastrophic forgetting. The results suggest that model merging is a promising direction for scalable and privacy-preserving continual learning in computational pathology.
comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, 1 table
♻ ☆ VLA-Pro: Cross-Task Procedural Memory Transfer for Vision-Language-Action Models NeurIPS 2026
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation, yet they still struggle to generalize to unseen tasks that necessitate transferring relevant experience across objects, scenes, and action patterns. This paper proposes VLA-Pro, a plug-and-play framework designed to enhance cross-task generalization by storing task-relevant procedural memories at training time and transferring these memories during inference. Specifically, VLA-Pro stores task-specific LoRA adapters as parameterized procedural memories during training. At inference time, VLA-Pro retrieves relevant procedural memories based on the current multi-modal context and dynamically fuses these memories for generating the current action chunk. Experiments on RoboTwin, RLBench, and real-world manipulation tasks show that VLA-Pro consistently improves cross-task generalization across multiple backbones, achieving up to a 207% relative improvement in simulation and increasing real-world success rate from 5.8% to 65.0%. These results suggest that procedural memory retrieval and adaptation provide an effective mechanism for transferring manipulation experience to novel tasks while preserving modularity and execution stability.
comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2026 (Poster)
♻ ☆ ECGWmark: Deep Watermarking for Electrocardiogram Signals
Wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings pass through multiple networks and systems before automated interpretation, making patient metadata vulnerable to loss. Digital watermarking embeds this metadata directly into the signal. However, conventional ECG watermarking methods fail under temporal desynchronization, and waveform similarity does not guarantee downstream diagnostic preservation. This article presents ECGWmark, a deep watermarking framework for single-lead ECG. A fully convolutional generator embeds the payload without signal quantization, a detector decodes the message frame by frame and verifies watermark presence, and a frozen arrhythmia classifier penalizes changes that would alter diagnostic predictions. To bridge the gap between bit accuracy and whole-message recovery, payloads are protected by extended Hamming codes, validation-selected interleaving, and soft-decision decoding. On the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database, ECGWmark maintains over 90\% bit accuracy under time shifts of 10 to 50 samples, where transform baselines fall to chance level. With the coding layer, the protected 16-bit payload achieves 99.86\% exact recovery on clean segments and sustains over 90\% recovery under time shifts, 10\% sample deletion, and 10\% packet loss. Inter-patient evaluation confirms improved ventricular-beat sensitivity with preserved macro-F1. Requiring only 0.56 million parameters and about 15~ms per segment on a desktop CPU, ECGWmark highlights the need to assess physiological watermarking through whole-message recovery and diagnostic consistency.
comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, 4 tables
♻ ☆ ZipSplat: Fewer Gaussians, Better Splats
Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstructs scenes from images in seconds. Pixel-aligned methods keep every Gaussian grounded in an observation, but produce redundant, potentially misaligned Gaussians across views. Token-based methods instead aggregate all views into a fixed set of learned tokens but lack explicit observation support and use a fixed reconstruction budget. We introduce ZipSplat, a method that predicts a compact, observation-grounded scene representation whose size is set at inference. It derives each scene token from an image patch rather than a learned query, and decodes it into freely placed 3D Gaussians. Tokens across views are merged into a compact set whose size is adjustable at inference. However, without geometric supervision, decoded Gaussians can drift from their source patch, and merging can mix tokens from different surfaces. We therefore introduce two geometric losses to ground and shape this representation. A cone loss ties each token's Gaussians to its source patch, and GeoCE aligns token similarity with 3D proximity so that tokens observing the same surface merge together. Building on these observation--geometry associations, we further introduce TokenBA, a token-level bundle adjustment that refines scene tokens and camera poses in a few seconds. ZipSplat requires neither camera poses nor intrinsics, yet outperforms pixel-aligned and token-based baselines on DL3DV and RealEstate10K, even those given ground-truth cameras. It further generalizes zero-shot to Mip-NeRF360 and ScanNet++. Our project page is at https://veichta.com/zipsplat.
♻ ☆ Omni-RS: Unifying Multi-Task Understanding and Generation in Remote Sensing
Pan Yin, Shuai Yang, Yuanhao Liu, Datao Tang, Jialin Li, Hao Wang, Pei Liu, Kaiyu Li, Cong Zhao, Xiangyong Cao
Practical remote sensing applications often require both understanding and generation capabilities for the same geographic scene. However, most existing methods address either understanding or generation in isolation, while existing unified remote sensing models' generative ability is limited to text-to-image. To bridge this gap, we propose Omni-RS, a unified framework supporting four remote sensing understanding tasks and five generation tasks. Specifically, we introduce the "Scene-Guided Two-Stage Training" strategy, which first adapts a multimodal large language model to remote sensing understanding and then uses its hidden states to guide a diffusion transformer for image generation. To enable joint learning across diverse generation tasks, we construct UniGen, a unified multi-task generation dataset, by organizing heterogeneous remote sensing data into a unified format. Furthermore, we introduce "Detailed Visual Conditioning", which uses visual conditions encoded by a VAE to guide the generation process, thereby supporting additional generation tasks that require reference images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Omni-RS performs exceptionally well in understanding tasks and has achieved outstanding results in a variety of generative tasks.
♻ ☆ UniW(A)M: A Unified Mixture-of-Experts Framework for World and World-Action Models
Jingbo Xu, Jianjie Fang, Zhuohang Li, Zihao Song, Zhaolu Wang, Xvyuan Liu, Xin Zhang, Haisheng Su, Yinzhou Tang, Chen Gao, Wei Wu, Yong Li
World models (WMs) and world-action models (WAMs) focus on future world prediction and executable action generation, respectively. Although these models learn shared physical dynamics and interaction semantics from embodied trajectories, they are typically trained in isolation, which restricts knowledge reuse between prediction and control. The central challenge is therefore to develop a unified learning framework that shares these dynamics while preserving the distinct modeling capabilities required by each paradigm.
We propose UniW(A)M, a mixture-of-experts world-(action) model built upon diffusion Transformers that unifies action-conditioned world modeling and diverse WAM variants. Shared experts capture common dynamics, while atomic capability experts are reused across interfaces so that each interface keeps its own conditional pathway. At deployment, a plug-in adaptive interface router (PAIR) learns from a small subset of target-task chunk scenarios to select a suitable WAM interface for each execution chunk, balancing task success and execution efficiency while keeping the backbone frozen.
We evaluate UniW(A)M on LIBERO, RoboTwin 2.0, and three real-world manipulation tasks, where it achieves 88.3% average real-world success versus 76.7% for the strongest baseline. On WorldArena, it leads action-conditioned world modeling on all three tasks. AC-WM co-training contributes to action generation on every action interface and PAIR raises OOD success from 63.3% to 76.7%.
comment: 34 pages, 19 figures, 15 tables
♻ ☆ Streaming Multi-Track Timeline Control for 3D Human Motion Generation
Text-driven human motion generation has advanced substantially, yet most methods assume instructions are available before synthesis. Interactive applications require responding to new instructions while continuing ongoing actions, such as answering a phone while walking. Existing approaches address streaming generation or simultaneous composition without explicitly combining streaming instruction arrival with independently timed, overlapping actions. We introduce streaming multi-track timeline control and propose TimelineControl to incorporate new instructions alongside ongoing actions. Interval-aware conditioning preserves instruction timing, while causal part-structured representations and part-aware denoising coordinate concurrent actions across body regions. We also construct TimelineMotion, a dataset with overlapping instruction intervals and body-part annotations. Experiments on TimelineMotion and MTT demonstrate improved semantic alignment and temporal adherence over evaluated streaming baselines, including models retrained on the same data. Ablations and human evaluations validate our design, complemented by spatial conditioning and humanoid execution demonstrations. Our code, data and models will become publicly available.
comment: Project page: https://mael-zys.github.io/TimelineControl/
♻ ☆ GaussTrap: Stealthy Backdoor Attacks on 3D Gaussian Splatting for Targeted Scene Misperception
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for real-time scene representation and novel view synthesis, gaining traction in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and AR/VR systems. However, the security vulnerabilities of 3DGS remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study of backdoor threats in 3DGS pipelines. We uncover an inherent security vulnerability in the adaptive density control mechanism of 3DGS, originally designed for detailed reconstruction, which enables attackers to induce localized gaussian proliferation, effectively embedding malicious backdoors into the scene geometry while remaining invisible from other viewpoints. To expose this threat, we propose GaussTrap, a novel stealthy poisoning framework tailored for 3DGS. GaussTrap operates in three stages (adversarial injection, geometric stabilization, and global fidelity restoration) to embed imperceptible yet adversarial Gaussian components into the reconstruction. It ensures consistent poisoning effects at specific viewpoints while preserving photorealism in benign views, thereby achieving high attack efficacy with low detectability. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that GaussTrap reliably induces targeted visual corruption under trigger conditions while maintaining high rendering fidelity elsewhere, highlighting a critical security blind spot in modern 3D rendering systems. The code is available at https://github.com/acang425/GaussTrap.
♻ ☆ Caption Bottleneck Models ECCV 2026
Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) provide interpretability by routing predictions through a layer of human-understandable concepts. However, defining an optimal concept set for a specific dataset remains an open challenge. Existing approaches rely on expensive expert annotations or LLM-generated lists based solely on class names. Even "open-vocabulary" variants typically depend on static concept sets, which restrict discovery and introduce label bias. Furthermore, traditional CBMs often suffer from information leakage, where unmodeled visual features bypass the bottleneck and compromise the integrity of the explanations. To overcome these limitations, we propose Caption Bottleneck Models (CaBM), a framework that circumvents the need for predefined concept sets by replacing rigid concept layers with free-form natural language. By representing images via LMM-generated captions and training a classifier strictly on this text, CaBM ensures a leakage-free architecture by construction. Additionally, by analyzing the text classifier post-training, CaBM autonomously discovers high-quality, dataset-specific concepts. Our results across fine- and coarse-grained benchmarks demonstrate that CaBM achieves competitive accuracy while preserving interpretability without the constraints of external dictionaries or manual labeling.
comment: ECCV 2026. Code: https://github.com/bariscagliyan/CaptionBottleneckModels
♻ ☆ Adaptive Forensic Feature Refinement via Intrinsic Importance Perception
With the rapid development of generative models and multimodal content editing technologies, the key challenge in synthetic image detection (SID) lies in cross-distribution generalization to unknown generation sources. Visual foundation models (VFM), which acquire rich visual priors through large scale image-text alignment pretraining, have become a promising approach to improving SID generalization. However, existing VFM-based methods remain coarse-grained in their adaptation strategies. They typically either directly use the final layer representations of VFM or simply fuse multi layer features, lacking explicit modeling of the optimal representational hierarchy for transferable forgery cues. Although fine-tuning VFM can enhance task adaptation, it may also damage the cross-modal pretrained structure that supports open-set generalization. To address this task specific tension, we reformulate VFM adaptation for SID as a joint optimization problem: it is necessary both to identify the critical representational layer that is more suitable for carrying forgery discriminative information and to constrain the disturbance caused by task knowledge injection to the pretrained structure. Based on this, we propose I2P, an SID framework centered on intrinsic importance perception. I2P first adaptively identifies the critical layer representations that are most discriminative for SID, and then constrains task-driven parameter updates within a low sensitivity parameter subspace, thereby improving task specificity while preserving the transferable structure of pretrained representations as much as possible. We conduct systematic experiments and ablation analyses on multiple cross-domain benchmarks, and the results show that I2P achieves stable and competitive generalization performance.
♻ ☆ Memory Forcing: Attendable Mid-Horizon History for Streaming Video Generation
Autoregressive video diffusion enables causal video streaming without a bidirectional pass over the full clip, but existing few-step systems usually retain only the opening and most recent frames in a fixed-size KV cache. Once an event leaves this window, later frames can no longer attend to it, a failure we term mid-horizon forgetting. We present Memory Forcing, a few-step streaming method that preserves this missing history without increasing the cache size. Its Archive \& Working Banks partition the cache into sink, archive, and working regions, retaining diverse intermediate events alongside recent motion under fixed memory. Because absolute temporal indices drift outside the training range, Bank-aware RoPE reassigns indices at attention time so each bank remains distinguishable. At 1.3B, Memory Forcing leads on longer clips, shows the smallest drop from 5s to 60s among methods reporting all four lengths, and preserves subjects and scenes through leave-and-return. The same design scales to Wan2.2 5B, producing more physically plausible, realistic, and dynamic videos and, to our knowledge, the first public 5B model on this forcing line.
♻ ☆ When Seeing Is Not Believing -- A Benchmark for Search-Grounded Video Misinformation Detection EMNLP 2026
Tao Yu, Yujia Yang, Shenghua Chai, Jinshuai Zhang, Haopeng Jin, Hao Wang, Minghui Zhang, Zhongtian Luo, Yuchen Long, Xinlong Chen, Jiabing Yang, Zhaolu Kang, Yuxuan Zhou, Zhengyu Man, Xinming Wang, Hongzhu Yi, Zheqi He, Xi Yang, Yan Huang, Liang Wang
Video misinformation increasingly operates at the semantic and evidential level: authentic footage may be selectively edited, temporally reordered, spliced across sources, or augmented with AI-generated content to construct false narratives. Such evidence-dependent manipulations cannot be reliably verified from the input video alone, because the missing, reordered, replaced, or recontextualized evidence lies outside the video itself. We introduce \textbf{EVID-Bench}, a benchmark for search-grounded video misinformation detection, where a system must search the open web for related videos and identify what information is false through cross-video comparison. EVID-Bench comprises 222 videos spanning 9 manipulation types across 3 categories: AI generation, single-source editing, and multi-source editing. All samples are verified to be undetectable by frontier models through visual inspection alone. We evaluate nine frontier multimodal models using a retrieval-augmented verification baseline. The best system achieves only 61.43\% point-level accuracy and 43.24\% video-level accuracy, while AI-generated manipulations remain especially challenging. Error analysis reveals recurring challenges: models fixate on irrelevant anchors, misattribute synthetic content to editorial splicing, and terminate search prematurely before fully explaining the manipulation.
comment: EMNLP 2026 Findings, 57 pages, 7 figures
♻ ☆ VLX-Go: Robust Embodied Tracking through Multi-Stage Learning and On-Policy Refinement
Embodied visual tracking requires a robot to identify a designated target from visual observations and control its own motion to follow that target through an environment. Following an isolated person is a comparatively simple demonstration of embodied visual tracking, but following the intended person among distractors remains challenging. Existing methods exhibit a substantial drop in success from single-target to distractor tracking, motivating a focus on the shared spaces that person-following robots must navigate. We present VLX-GO, a vision-language waypoint policy built around the hypothesis that visual and language representations should be aligned before tracking-specific motion is learned. The policy combines complementary frozen visual encoders, multiscale temporal context, a transformer backbone, and a lightweight head for robot-centric waypoint prediction. Its training progresses through vision--language alignment, multimodal reasoning mid-training, and tracking specialization on 19,532 oracle episodes. Compared with 41.54% distractor-tracking success for our earlier OmTrackVLA model, the complete multi-stage recipe achieves 55.80%. We then explore on-policy refinement using filtered oracle labels for states visited by the policy. This preliminary study adds 2.42 percentage points of distractor-tracking success, reaching 58.22%, while reducing collision rate by 1.99 pts. The final policy records the highest distractor- and ambiguous-tracking success rates among the compared methods. These results support staged multimodal learning as a promising direction for tracking among distractors and motivate further study of on-policy refinement for person following in shared spaces. Code is available at https://github.com/om-ai-lab/VLX-Go.
comment: tech report
♻ ☆ OmniEgoCap: Device-Agnostic Sequence-Level Egocentric Motion Reconstruction NeurIPS 2026
Commercial egocentric devices capture human behavior in everyday settings, yet full-body motion reconstruction must generalize across diverse cameras and mountings. This is challenging because head trajectories under-determine body motion, while hand observations are intermittent and camera-dependent: a hand may disappear simply because it has left the camera's field of view. Existing methods treat such absences as missing data, relying on fixed visibility regimes or post-hoc optimization, and fail to generalize across devices. We present OmniEgoCap, a sequence-level diffusion framework for device-agnostic egocentric full-body motion reconstruction. Our key insight is that egocentric videos contain sequence-level evidence about both the wearer and the camera-induced visibility structure, enabling OmniEgoCap to infer consistent body shape and coherent motion from sparse head and hand cues. To prevent overfitting to a single camera setup, we further introduce geometry-aware visibility augmentation, which synthesizes visibility patterns from realistic variations in camera geometry. We also present OmniEgoDB, the first mocap benchmark that pairs ground-truth motion with recordings from multiple consumer egocentric devices. Experiments on synthetic, real-device, and in-the-wild settings demonstrate superior motion reconstruction, robust cross-device generalization, and coherent in-the-wild results.
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2026. Project Page: https://kyungwoncho.github.io/OmniEgoCap/
♻ ☆ Xiaomi-Lens-0 Technical Report
Pei Fu, Yike Liu, Yue Sun, Hanmo Wang, Xiuwen Xi, Ruoceng Zhang, Shaojie Zhang, Tingwei Huang, Chao Jiang, Hang Li, Bingrui Liu, Zhenbo Luo, Heng Qu, Changjian Xu, Ming Xu, Jian Luan
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) answer questions about whole images well, yet they still struggle with fine-grained region understanding. A key reason is that text-only supervision never specifies which regions support an answer. To close this gap, we present Xiaomi-Lens-0, a 4B MLLM built on Qwen3.5 that predicts masks from its own visual representations. Specifically, a lightweight decoder combines vision-encoder patch features with the language model's mask-token states, termed visual latents, so that mask supervision reaches the shared backbone without an additional segmentation encoder. Because each latent decodes to a mask, the model can interleave reasoning with region-specific latents and thus think with visual latents, while grounded reasoning traces supervise the intermediate regions referenced during chain-of-thought. As a result, across all eight RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg splits, Xiaomi-Lens-0 gains 5.6 points on average over Qwen3.5 in referring comprehension and achieves the highest segmentation cIoU among compared models. Moreover, it surpasses Qwen3.5 across all perception benchmarks.
Homepage: https://seerray-lab.github.io/Xiaomi-Lens-0
♻ ☆ On the Value of Cross-Modal Misalignment in Multimodal Representation Learning
Yichao Cai, Yuhang Liu, Erdun Gao, Tianjiao Jiang, Zhen Zhang, Anton van den Hengel, Javen Qinfeng Shi
Multimodal representation learning, exemplified by multimodal contrastive learning (MMCL) using image-text pairs, aims to learn powerful representations by aligning cues across modalities. This approach relies on the core assumption that the exemplar image-text pairs constitute two representations of an identical concept. However, recent research has revealed that real-world datasets often exhibit \emph{cross-modal misalignment}. There are two distinct viewpoints on how to address this issue: one suggests mitigating the misalignment, and the other leveraging it. We seek here to reconcile these seemingly opposing perspectives and to provide a practical guide for practitioners. Using latent variable models, we thus formalize cross-modal misalignment by introducing two specific mechanisms: \emph{selection bias}, where some semantic variables are absent in the text, and \emph{perturbation bias}, where semantic variables are altered---both leading to misalignment in data pairs. Our theoretical analysis shows that, under suitable assumptions, population global minimizers of an alignment--entropy surrogate yield representations that depend only on the semantic variables unaffected by selection and perturbation biases and locally identify this subset almost surely. Extensive empirical studies on synthetic data and real image-text datasets further examine how cross-modal misalignment shapes semantic predictability and downstream performance, shedding light on its nuanced impact on multimodal representation learning.
comment: v8: Corrected global to local block-identifiability (a.s.); see Appx. D.2
♻ ☆ WeLike2Party! In-Context Motion Transfer for Multi-Human Image Animation
Human image animation aims to transfer motion from a driving video to subjects in a reference image. Despite remarkable progress in video generation, achieving high-fidelity animation of multiple interacting subjects remains a challenge. Many existing approaches rely on explicit motion representations such as 2D skeletons or parametric body meshes and struggle to preserve identity-motion binding under inter-person occlusion. To address this limitation, we propose WeLike2Party, a multi-human animation framework built on direct in-context video conditioning without explicit pose or mesh extraction at inference. We further introduce Reference Asymmetric RoPE Conditioning to preserve fine-grained appearance details, and Identity Binding Supervision to associate each reference identity with its intended motion trajectory. To support cross-identity training, we construct MotionTwin, a large-scale synthetic dataset comprising 14.4K cross-identity video pairs with shared subject and camera motions, totaling 84.3 hours of photorealistic video. We additionally present MotionTwin-Bench, a cross-identity benchmark specifically designed to evaluate subject-level visual fidelity and identity-motion binding. Extensive experiments on MotionTwin-Bench and real-world videos demonstrate that WeLike2Party outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods in subject-level visual fidelity, identity-motion binding, and overall perceptual quality, particularly in multi-person interactions with substantial occlusion.
♻ ☆ Mono-Hydra++: Real-Time Monocular Scene Graph Construction with Multi-Task Learning for 3D Indoor Mapping SP
Autonomous agile robots need more than metric geometry: they must understand objects, rooms, places, and spatial relations for search, inspection, exploration, and human-robot interaction. Conventional metric maps support localization and collision avoidance, but do not provide this semantic and relational structure. 3D scene graphs address this gap by connecting geometry with object-level and room-level understanding. Building such representations on agile platforms remains difficult because aerial and lightweight robots operate under strict payload, power, and compute limits, making RGB-D cameras and LiDAR sensors impractical for many onboard settings. We present Mono-Hydra++, a real-time monocular RGB plus IMU pipeline for indoor metric-semantic mapping and hierarchical 3D scene graph construction. The system combines M2H-MX, a DINOv3-based multi-task model for depth and semantics, with a deep-feature visual-inertial odometry front end, sparse predicted depth constraints in the VIO-derived pose graph, semantic masking for dynamic regions, and pose-aware temporal alignment before volumetric fusion in the Mono-Hydra backend. On the Go-SLAM ScanNet evaluation subset, Mono-Hydra++ achieves 1.6\% lower average trajectory error than the strongest RGB-D baseline in our comparison, while using only monocular RGB plus IMU input. On calibrated 7-Scenes, it improves average ATE by 29.8\% over the strongest competing calibrated baseline. We further validate Mono-Hydra++ in a real ITC building deployment using RealSense RGB plus IMU and demonstrate embedded feasibility by deploying the ONNX/TensorRT FP16 M2H-MX-L perception model at 25.53 FPS on a Jetson Orin NX 16GB. These results show that Mono-Hydra++ can provide real-time metric-semantic mapping and scene graph construction for resource-constrained robotic platforms without relying on active depth sensors.
comment: Submitted to ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. 50 pages, figures and tables included. Code: https://github.com/BavanthaU/mono-hydra-pp.git
♻ ☆ SlotMatch: Distilling Object-Centric Representations for Unsupervised Video Segmentation WACV 2027
Unsupervised video segmentation is a challenging computer vision task, especially due to the lack of supervisory signals coupled with the complexity of visual scenes. To overcome this challenge, state-of-the-art models based on slot attention often have to rely on large and computationally expensive neural architectures. To this end, we propose a simple knowledge distillation framework that effectively transfers object-centric representations to a lightweight student. The proposed framework, called SlotMatch, aligns corresponding teacher and student slots via the cosine similarity, requiring no additional distillation objectives or auxiliary supervision. Unlike other distillation losses, our cosine-based distillation of slots enforces alignment of slot directions (which typically encode relational structure and semantic similarity), while ignoring their norms (which may encode confidence overestimation and dataset-specific scale artifacts). The simplicity of SlotMatch is supported by theoretical and empirical evidence, both indicating that integrating additional losses may be suboptimal. We conduct experiments on three datasets to compare state-of-the-art models, including our SlotContrast teacher, with our distilled student. The results show that our student based on SlotMatch matches and even outperforms its teacher, while using 3.6x fewer parameters and running up to 2.7x faster. Moreover, our student surpasses all other state-of-the-art unsupervised video segmentation models. We release our code at https://github.com/dianagrigore/SlotMatch.
comment: Accepted at WACV 2027
♻ ☆ Seeing Together: Multi-Robot Cooperative Egocentric Spatial Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models NeurIPS 2026
Kunyu Peng, Zhikun Zhou, Kailun Yang, Di Wen, Ruiping Liu, Yufan Chen, Junwei Zheng, Hao Shi, Yi Zhou, M. Saquib Sarfraz, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made substantial progress in egocentric video understanding, but their ability to reason cooperatively from multiple embodied viewpoints remains largely unexplored. We study this problem through multi-robot cooperative dynamic spatial reasoning, where a model must answer spatial, temporal, visibility, and coordination questions by integrating synchronized egocentric videos from a team of moving robots. To support this setting, we introduce CoopSR, the first benchmark for this task, together with EgoTeam, a multi-robot egocentric QA dataset. EgoTeam contains 114,227 QA pairs spanning 19 question types, four difficulty tiers, and three team sizes in Habitat and iGibson, along with a real-world test set of around 2,326 QAs collected using two quadruped robots. We further propose SG-CoR (Spectral and Geometry-Aware Cooperative Reasoner), an MLLM framework for fine-grained cooperative spatial reasoning. SG-CoR combines dynamics-aware multi-robot frame sampling, spectral- and geometric-guided view fusion, and geometry- and motion-informed prompt distillation, enabling the model to benefit from privileged robot-pose supervision during training while requiring only egocentric videos at test time. Across 22 MLLM baselines, SG-CoR consistently improves cooperative reasoning, outperforming the strongest fine-tuned baseline by +3.87% on Habitat and +7.12% on iGibson. It also shows stronger generalization to unseen team sizes and real-world robot tests. Code can be found at https://github.com/KPeng9510/seeing-together.git.
comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ FedSocket: Recipient-Executable Knowledge Exchange for Heterogeneous Multimodal Federated Learning
Federated knowledge must remain usable by recipients with different modalities, private architectures, and tasks. We present FedSocket, which makes recipient execution a design requirement of the exchanged model. A shared Q combines recipient-computable inputs, task-owned outputs, and ownership-aware aggregation, connecting heterogeneous private models through a common prediction interface. Private models teach local Q copies; the returned Q supports local learning and Joint inference, with only Q parameters and counts exchanged. Across six datasets, FedSocket improves missing-modality recipient accuracy over Local by 14.44 and 15.51 percentage points on MELD and UCF-51. Under matched inference capacity, Joint exceeds independent ensembles by 11.06 points in UCF-51 accuracy and 4.87 points in mean bidirectional Flickr30k R@1. Joint also improves over Q alone on all four heterogeneous endpoints, demonstrating the value of combining local and exchanged predictions. Teacher controls, sharing-path interventions, and component factorials identify the roles of supervision, sharing, and deployment. FedSocket makes exchanged knowledge directly usable from federated training to recipient inference.
comment: 17 figures
♻ ☆ Metric Depth Estimation from Arbitrarily Degraded Low-Resolution Depth Prompts NeurIPS 2026
We propose AdaDS, an Adaptive Diffusion Sampling framework for prompted metric depth estimation, which estimates high-resolution metric depth from an image and an arbitrarily degraded low-resolution depth prompt. This setting is commonly studied as depth super-resolution, where existing methods typically regress depth directly without an explicit prior over high-quality depth, and thus often produce artifacts under severe or unseen degradations. In contrast, AdaDS exploits the contraction property of Gaussian smoothing: as noise accumulates in the forward diffusion process, the noisy distributions of degraded prompts and their high-quality counterparts converge toward an isotropic Gaussian prior, while the prompt content is gradually erased. Accordingly, AdaDS refines the prompt and estimates its uncertainty to adaptively select a starting timestep, and injects learned noise to place the intermediate sample in a high-density region of the depth distribution learned by a pre-trained diffusion model. Denoising from this sample yields high-quality depth with fine-grained details and corrects residual errors, even under imperfect prompt refinement. Experiments on real-world and synthetic benchmarks demonstrate its superior zero-shot generalization and robustness to diverse degradations.
comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ Omni-Interactive Universal Embedder NeurIPS 2026
Wei-Yao Wang, Kazuya Tateishi, Shuyang Cui, Christian Simon, Takashi Shibuya, Shusuke Takahashi, Yuki Mitsufuji
Multimodal representation learning has been shifting from traditional two-tower architectures to large language model (LLM)-based embedders due to their strong instruction-following capabilities. Despite this progress, existing approaches primarily focus on language and image modalities, which also remain the dominant modalities for user-conditioned interactions in current embedders. In this paper, we propose the first Omni-Interactive Universal Embedder (OmniUE), which not only learns a unified embedding space across text, video, and audio by leveraging intermediate-layer representations from dedicated learnable tokens, but also supports omni-interactive querying, enabling users to provide inputs in the form of text, visual regions of interest, and audio spans. Within OmniUE, visual and audio segmenters process diverse user interactions and integrate them with an omni-LLM to produce user-conditioned any-to-any embeddings via context aggregation. To evaluate OmniUE's omni-interactive capabilities, we introduce OmniCHOIR, benchmarking models for omni-interactive compositional audio retrieval based on the given text, video, and audio as well as unimodal or multimodal interaction prompts. OmniUE consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines across diverse modalities, with average improvements of 10.4% on textual-interactive video benchmarks (MMEB-v2-video), 1.0% on audio tasks (MAEB), 83.1% on visual-interactive benchmarks (SCaR), and 21.9% on our omni-interactive OmniCHOIR benchmark. We believe that jointly advancing omni-modal representation learning and omni-interactive querying paves the way toward universal embedders. Project page: https://wywywang.github.io/omniue-demo/.
comment: NeurIPS 2026. Project page: https://wywywang.github.io/omniue-demo/
♻ ☆ Do Satellites See Commuters? A Critical Benchmark of Vision Foundation Models SP
Satellite foundation models offer a globally available alternative to census data for commuting origin-destination (OD) generation, yet no study has systematically compared encoder paradigms within a single downstream pipeline. We ablate four satellite vision encoders: language-supervised (RemoteCLIP), self-supervised (DINOv3), and geographically grounded (SatCLIP, AlphaEarth) within an identical WeDAN graph diffusion framework across 1,925 US counties, 325 UK districts, and 14 global cities under five random seeds. Three main findings emerge. First, language-supervised features achieve the strongest in-distribution performance (RemoteCLIP CPC 0.602), while geographically grounded encoders transfer more reliably zero-shot: AlphaEarth improves CPC by 33% over RemoteCLIP on UK districts. Second, pretraining corpus scale alone is insufficient: DINOv3, trained on a substantially larger satellite corpus, underperforms RemoteCLIP by 0.091 CPC in-distribution and collapses to CPC 0.022 globally. Third, no encoder transfers usefully to global cities (best CPC 0.122 for RemoteCLIP, 0.022 for DINOv3), confirming cross-continental OD generation remains an open problem. We additionally clarify the semantics of the census noise parameter $η$, whose ordering reverses under cross-continental evaluation, a distinction critical to correctly interpreting prior results. Our code is available at: https://github.com/cruiseresearchgroup/satellites-see-commuters.
comment: Accepted to SIGSPATIAL 2026
♻ ☆ SF-Mamba: Rethinking State Space Model for Vision ICML2026
Visual Mamba models have recently emerged as alternatives to Vision Transformers (ViTs), which suffer from quadratic complexity. While the recurrent scanning mechanism of Mamba offers computational efficiency, it inherently limits non-causal interactions between image patches. Prior works have attempted to address this limitation through various multi-scan strategies; however, these approaches suffer from inefficiencies due to suboptimal scan designs and frequent data rearrangement. Moreover, Mamba exhibits relatively slow computational speed under short token lengths, commonly used in visual tasks. In pursuit of a truly efficient vision encoder, we rethink the scan operation for vision and the computational efficiency of Mamba. To this end, we propose SF-Mamba, a novel visual Mamba with two key proposals: auxiliary patch \textbf{swapping} for encoding bidirectional information flow under an unidirectional scan and batch \textbf{folding} with periodic state reset for advanced GPU parallelism. Extensive experiments on image classification, object detection, and instance and semantic segmentation consistently demonstrate that our proposed SF-Mamba significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while improving throughput across different model sizes. The source code is available at: https://github.com/sony/SF-Mamba.
comment: Accepted to ICML2026. Code: https://github.com/sony/SF-Mamba
♻ ☆ From GAN-Based Models to GPT-5: A Taxonomy-Guided Study of Human Performance in Detecting Deepfake Face Images IEEE
Zhiqing Guo, Lixin Jia, Luning Sun, Xiaowei Chen, Guofeng Yu, Liejun Wang, Gaobo Yang, David Stillwell, Thorsten Holz, Shujun Li
Generative models for deepfakes have rapidly evolved from GAN-based architectures to diffusion models and multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, empirical research on human performance in detecting deepfake face images has not kept pace. It remains unclear if (and how) detection performance varies across generative models and whether model-specific training improves detection more effectively than general-purpose training. In this paper, we propose the \emph{Deepfake Face Artifact Taxonomy} (DFAT), a cross-model taxonomy of human-recognizable visual artifacts in deepfake face images, based on which we build both general-purpose and model-specific training materials. Through an online experiment ($n = 524$), we examined human performance in detecting deepfake face images and evaluated training efficacy across five representative generative models: three GAN-based, one diffusion-based, and one MLLM (GPT-5). Our results show that participants' detection accuracy was strongly model-dependent and that images generated by more recent and advanced models were not necessarily harder to detect. After training, participants achieved significant performance gains across most conditions, and their improvement varied by model. Notably, model-specific training generally yielded greater numerical gains than general-purpose training. In a five-month follow-up test ($n = 342$), we observed no significant decline in detection accuracy and no significant increase in perceived stress. Overall, our findings provide actionable insights for designing effective, sustainable, and targeted training programs to counter the growing threat posed by deepfakes.
comment: Accepted by IEEE S&P 2027
♻ ☆ Token-Budget Distillation: Transferring Full-Token Semantics to Compressed Video Vision-Language Models ACM MM 2026
Adapting video vision-language models (VLMs) is computationally expensive because video inputs produce a large number of visual tokens, making both fine-tuning and inference costly. Although visual token compression can reduce this overhead, direct adaptation on compressed inputs often causes semantic drift and noticeable performance degradation. We present Token-Budget Distillation (TBD), a parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework for adapting video VLMs under a fixed token budget. TBD freezes the pretrained backbone, updates only LoRA adapters, and integrates FlashVID-based visual token compression into the video pathway. To preserve full-token semantics under compression, TBD employs a dual-path teacher-student design, where a full-token teacher provides stable supervision and a compressed student is optimized with task loss, answer-region KL distillation, GT-anchored margin distillation, and reliability-aware KD control. This design enables the student to recover the semantic behavior of the full-token model while remaining efficient under aggressive token reduction. We evaluate TBD on three video VLM backbones, including LLaVA-Video, LLaVA-OneVision, and Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct, across four video understanding benchmarks. TBD consistently outperforms compression-only baselines under both moderate and aggressive compression. On LLaVA-Video at retention ratio R = 10 percent, TBD preserves 97.0 percent of the Vanilla model's average accuracy; on LLaVA-OneVision at R = 10 percent, it achieves an average score of 58.4 and matches 100.0 percent relative accuracy.
comment: ACM MM 2026. Code is available at https://github.com/Seele77/TBD
♻ ☆ ContraFM-S2O: Flow Matching-Based One-step SAR-to-Optical Image Translation Model with Contrastive Learning
In recent years, diffusion models and GAN-based models have become the mainstream approaches for SAR-to-optical image translation, owing to their advantages, such as high-quality generation and stable training. However, they have shortcomings such as high inference latency and the generated optical images suffer from low detail fidelity, often resulting in blurred edges and loss of fine textures. Thus, we propose ContraFM-S2O, which is a flow matching-based model for SAR-to-optical image translation. Unlike conventional diffusion models, ContraFM-S2O learns to predict the velocity field in training and solves ODE instead of SDE during inference to improve the sampling efficiency. In addition, ContraFM-S2O replaces instantaneous velocity with average velocity along the interpolation path to realize one-step SAR-to-optical image translation and uses contrastive learning to improve the quality of the generated optical images. Experiments show our model achieves state-of-the-art on SAR2Opt and QXS datasets, outperforming baselines, and reduces inference latency via one-step generation.
♻ ☆ OncoReg: Medical Image Registration for Oncological Challenges
Wiebke Heyer, Yannic Elser, Lennart Berkel, Xinrui Song, Xuanang Xu, Pingkun Yan, Xi Jia, Jinming Duan, Zi Li, Tony C. W. Mok, Bowen Li, Tim Hable, Christian Staackmann, Christoph Großbröhmer, Lasse Hansen, Alessa Hering, Malte M. Sieren, Mattias P. Heinrich
In modern cancer research, the vast volume of medical data generated is often underutilised due to challenges related to patient privacy. The OncoReg Challenge addresses this issue by enabling researchers to develop and validate image registration methods through a two-phase framework that ensures patient privacy while fostering the development of more generalisable AI models. Phase one involves working with a publicly available dataset, while phase two focuses on training models on a private dataset within secure hospital networks. OncoReg builds upon the foundation established by the Learn2Reg Challenge by incorporating the registration of interventional cone-beam computed tomography with standard planning fan-beam CT images in radiotherapy. Accurate image registration is crucial in oncology, particularly for dynamic treatment adjustments in image-guided radiotherapy, where precise alignment is necessary to minimise radiation exposure to healthy tissues while effectively targeting tumours. This work details the methodology and data behind the OncoReg Challenge and provides a comprehensive analysis of the competition entries and results. Findings reveal that feature extraction plays a pivotal role in this registration task. A new method emerging from this challenge demonstrated its versatility, while established approaches continue to perform comparably to newer techniques. Both deep learning and classical approaches still play significant roles in image registration, with the combination of methods, particularly in feature extraction, proving most effective.
comment: Accepted for publication at the Journal of Machine Learning for Biomedical Imaging (MELBA) https://melba-journal.org/2026:029
♻ ☆ Not Another Text Benchmark: Putting the "Visual" Back in Visual Question Answering for Large Video Models
Rwiddhi Chakraborty, Yinong Oliver Wang, Cheng Zhang, Fan Bai, Zhuoran Yu, Michael Kampffmeyer, Yong Jae Lee, Fernando De la Torre, Robert Jenssen
Large video models have exhibited impressive performance on a wide range of visual question answering tasks, owing to the rise of powerful, pretrained text and vision encoders. The usefulness of such models have also been demonstrated on a wide range of benchmarks, with an important caveat - the dominant approach in these benchmarks evaluates multiple choice reasoning via text options. This is a natural way to test text-based reasoning in these models, and has led to significant insights regarding model behavior in the community. In this work, we ask a different question - what happens when the evaluation modality is visual, rather than text? We introduce three new vision-centric evaluation benchmarks in temporal frame retrieval, video future prediction, and causal memory distortion, all designed around evaluating visual understanding capabilities in large video models. Our approach complements the existing approaches to evaluate video understanding in frontier models. We show that current frontier models exhibit significant weakness when attempting to reason through visual queries, rather than text. We conclude with an extended analysis section that provides pointers for future improvements in visual understanding for large video models.
♻ ☆ LLM as a Tool, Not an Agent: Code-Mined Tree Transformations for Neural Architecture Search
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) aims to automatically discover high-performing deep neural network (DNN) architectures. However, conventional algorithm-driven NAS relies on carefully hand-crafted search spaces to ensure executability, which restricts open-ended exploration. Recent coding-based agentic approaches using large language models (LLMs) reduce manual design, but current LLMs struggle to reliably generate complex, valid architectures, and their proposals are often biased toward a narrow set of patterns observed in their training data. To bridge reliable algorithmic search with powerful LLM assistance, we propose LLMasTool, a hierarchical tree-based NAS framework for stable and open-ended model evolution. Our method automatically extracts reusable modules from arbitrary source code and represents full architectures as hierarchical trees, enabling evolution through reliable tree transformations rather than code generation. At each evolution step, coarse-level planning is governed by a diversity-guided algorithm that leverages Bayesian modeling to improve exploration efficiency, while the LLM resolves the remaining degrees of freedom to ensure a meaningful evolutionary trajectory and an executable generated architecture. With this formulation, instead of fully agentic LLM approaches, our method explores diverse directions beyond the inherent biases in the LLM. Our method improves over existing NAS methods by 0.69, 1.83, and 2.68 points on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet16-120, demonstrating its effectiveness.
comment: 58 pages
♻ ☆ Distill the Visual Evidence, Not Just the Answer: Cross-World On-Policy Distillation for Vision-Language Models
A central goal of vision-language model (VLM) distillation is to transfer both the teacher's language capabilities and its visual understanding. However, existing methods primarily supervise the student's output, leaving visual understanding implicit. Our analysis reveals that a student can match the teacher's answer without relying on the same visual evidence, raising the question: how can we ensure the student responds to the visual information that actually determines the answer? To this end, we propose \textbf{Cross-World On-Policy Distillation (CW-OPD)}, which explicitly supervises the student's response to changes in visual evidence. For each example, CW-OPD constructs two visual worlds that share the question and scene context but differ in answer-critical evidence, yielding different answers. We perform on-policy distillation in both worlds and distill the teacher's cross-world belief transition, encouraging the student to match not only \emph{what} the teacher predicts but also \emph{why} its prediction changes with the evidence. A gradient analysis shows that this term is invariant to errors shared by both worlds and supplies a corrective signal invisible to endpoint matching alone. In this way, CW-OPD makes reliance on the relevant visual evidence an explicit distillation target rather than an implicit consequence of output matching. To diagnose whether a model truly grounds its answers in visual evidence, we introduce CWBench, which measures cross-world consistency via Cross-World Pair Accuracy (CWPA). Experiments on Qwen3.5-4B show that CW-OPD outperforms the strongest baseline by \textbf{1.2} points on average, and the 4B student exceeds DeepSeek-V4.1 (552B) by \textbf{22.4} CWPA points on CWBench. Code is released in https://github.com/baokou-fw2/CWAD.
comment: This withdrawal is requested because the current preprint was submitted in error using an incorrect journal template, resulting in significant formatting inconsistencies. The authors intend to correct the template and resubmit a properly formatted version. We apologize for any inconvenience.
♻ ☆ Fundus-R1: Training a Fundus-Reading MLLM on Public Data
Yuchuan Deng, Qijie Wei, Kaiheng Qian, Jiazhen Liu, Bangxiang Lan, Qingwei Shen, Jianfeng Dong, Weihong Yu, Xirong Li
Fundus imaging such as CFP, OCT and UWF is crucial for the early detection of retinal anomalies and diseases. Fundus image understanding, due to its knowledge-intensive nature, poses a challenging vision-language task. An emerging approach to addressing the task is to post-train a generic multimodal large language model (MLLM), either by supervised finetuning (SFT) or by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), on a considerable amount of in-house samples paired with high-quality clinical reports. However, these valuable samples are not publicly accessible, which not only hinders reproducibility but also practically limits research to few players. To overcome the barrier, we make a novel attempt to train a reasoning-enhanced fundus-reading MLLM, which we term Fundus-R1, using exclusively public datasets, wherein over 94\% of the data are annotated with only image-level labels. Our technical contributions are two-fold. First, we propose a RAG-based method for composing image-specific, knowledge-aware reasoning traces. Such auto-generated traces link visual findings identified by a generic MLLM to the image labels in terms of ophthalmic knowledge. Second, we enhance RLVR with a process reward that encourages self-consistency of the generated reasoning trace in each rollout. Extensive experiments on three fundus-reading benchmarks, i.e., FunBench, Omni-Fundus and GMAI-Fundus, show that Fundus-R1 clearly outperforms multiple baselines, including its generic counterpart (Qwen2.5-VL) and a stronger edition post-trained without using the generated traces. This work paves the way for training powerful fundus-reading MLLMs with publicly available data.
♻ ☆ SELECT: Semantic Erasure Boundary Construction with Sibling Exclusive Counterfactuals
Concept erasure aims to suppress undesirable concepts in text-to-image diffusion models while preserving their generative capabilities. Existing methods often redirect target concepts toward predefined semantic anchors, but the influence of anchor selection on the scope of concept erasure remains insufficiently understood. Through causal tracing, we reveal that concepts with more dispersed causal effects tend to exhibit higher anchor sensitivity and lower erasure robustness. Controlled anchor interventions demonstrate that anchor selection affects target suppression and collateral damage to surrounding semantic concepts. These findings motivate us to formulate anchor selection as semantic erasure boundary construction. We propose SELECT (Selective Erasure via Local Exclusive Counterfactual Targets), a plug-and-play framework based on Sibling Exclusive Concepts (SECs), which are semantically close to the target but mutually exclusive in its defining attributes. SELECT jointly constructs a counterfactual redirection endpoint and a local retention set to balance target suppression and semantic preservation. SELECT filters candidates using contextual activation, and uses semantic coherence to identify context compatible redirection endpoints, while the remaining SECs serve as local preservation constraints. Experiments on object, celebrity, artist-style, and NSFW erasure show that SELECT strengthens target suppression over fixed general anchors and achieves suppression-preservation trade-offs, while reducing concept re-emergence and erosion.
♻ ☆ CrossPortrait: Cross-Species Portrait Animation via Adversarial Motion Alignment
Gezhong Pan, Zhe Li, Yunfan Tao, Yongheng Zhao, Shiqi Zhou, Juyong Zhang, Xiaosong Jia, Yanyong Zhang, Shuquan Ye, Shaofeng Zhang
Cross-species portrait animation, which aims to animate a source portrait of species A using a driving video of species B, is particularly challenging due to substantial anatomical differences in facial structures across species. Previous works typically fine-tune human portrait animation models on animal video datasets but often suffer from driving-species leakage. To address this, we propose CrossPortrait, a novel framework for expressive cross-species portrait animation, supporting diverse scenarios including human-to-animal, animal-to-human and cross-species animal-to-animal (e.g. cat-to-dog) animation. Specifically, we decompose the portrait motion into rigid head poses and expression keypoints. To accommodate species-specific facial structures while facilitating cross-species expression alignment, we introduce a species-routed expression encoder that incorporates species-specific LoRAs into a unified expression encoder. Furthermore, we introduce expression-level adversarial domain adaptation (Ex-ADA) to suppress driving-species-specific information in the expression latents, thereby mitigating species leakage and promoting a shared expression space across species. Extensive experiments show that our method enables expressive and identity-preserving portrait animation across diverse species and outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches.
comment: Project page: https://pangezhong.github.io/CrossPortrait/
♻ ☆ Early Semantic Grounding in Image Editing Models for Zero-Shot Referring Image Segmentation NeurIPS 2026
Instruction-based image editing (IIE) models have recently demonstrated strong capability in modifying specific image regions according to natural language instructions, which implicitly requires identifying where an edit should be applied. This indicates that such models inherently perform language-conditioned visual semantic grounding. In this work, we investigate whether this implicit grounding can be leveraged for zero-shot referring image segmentation (RIS), a task that requires pixel-level localization of objects described by natural language expressions. Through systematic analysis, we reveal that strong foreground-background separability is already present in the internal representations of these models at the earliest denoising timestep, well before any visible image transformation occurs. Building on this insight, we propose a training-free framework that repurposes pretrained image editing models for RIS by exploiting their intermediate representations. Our approach decomposes localization into two complementary components: attention-based spatial priors that estimate where to focus, and feature-based semantic discrimination that determines what to segment. By leveraging feature-space separability, the framework produces accurate segmentation masks using only a single denoising step, without requiring full image synthesis. Extensive experiments on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance over existing zero-shot baselines. Project page: \url{https://jessie459.github.io/EarlySemanticGrounding/}.
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ Adaptive Dual-Teacher Distillation with Subnetwork Rectification for Bridging Semantic Gaps in Black-Box Domain Adaptation IEEE
Assuming that neither source data nor source model parameters are accessible, black-box domain adaptation (BBDA) represents a highly practical yet challenging setting, where transferable knowledge is limited to the predictions of a black-box source model. Existing approaches exploit such knowledge via pseudo-label refinement or by leveraging vision-language models (ViLs), but they often fail to reconcile the inherent discrepancy between task-specific knowledge from black-box models and language-aligned semantic priors of ViLs, resulting in suboptimal integration and degraded adaptation performance. To address this challenge, we propose adaptive Dual-Teacher Distillation with Subnetwork Rectification (DDSR), a framework that explicitly reconciles these complementary yet inconsistent knowledge sources. DDSR employs an adaptive prediction fusion strategy to integrate predictions from the black-box source model and a ViL, generating reliable pseudo-labels for the target domain. A subnetwork-based regularization mechanism mitigates overfitting to noisy supervision by enforcing output consistency and gradient divergency. Furthermore, progressively improved target predictions iteratively refine both pseudo-labels and ViL prompts, enhancing semantic alignment. Finally, class-wise prototypes are used to further optimize target predictions via self-training. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that DDSR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including those with access to source data or source model parameters.
comment: Accepted by IEEE TCSVT 2026
♻ ☆ Bootstrapping Video Interaction Generation with Synthetic State Transitions IJCAI 2026
While recent video generative models can synthesize high-fidelity videos, they struggle to portray plausible physical interactions and the resulting state transitions, a critical bottleneck for applications in robotics and VR/AR. To address this, we introduce a framework to generate a scalable synthetic dataset of controllable interactions. Our pipeline leverages a structured taxonomy and state-of-the-art image editing models to create explicit `start' and `end' state images, which serve as visual anchors for the interaction. To generate a seamless video utilizing these anchors, we propose State-Guided Sampling (SGS), a novel sampling technique that mitigates artifacts common in naive conditional generation. Furthermore, we develop and validate a new automated evaluation system that aligns with human judgments to ensure data quality. Experiments show that fine-tuning a base model on our dataset significantly enhances its ability to generate plausible interactions.
comment: IJCAI 2026
♻ ☆ Extending Reconstruction: Reconstruction-to-Vector Diffusion for Hyperspectral Anomaly Detection
While Hyperspectral Anomaly Detection (HAD) excels at identifying sparse targets in complex scenes, existing models remain trapped in a scalar "reconstruction-as-endpoint" paradigm. This reliance on ambiguous scalar residuals consistently triggers sub-pixel anomaly vanishing during spatial downsampling, alongside severe confirmation bias when unpurified anomalies corrupt training weights. In this paper, we propose Reconstruction-to-Vector Diffusion (R2VD), which fundamentally redefines reconstruction as a manifold purification origin to establish a novel residual-guided generative dynamics paradigm. Our framework introduces a four-stage pipeline: (1) a Physical Prior Extraction (PPE) stage that mitigates early confirmation bias via dual-stream statistical guidance; (2) a Guided Manifold Purification (GMP) stage utilizing an OmniContext Autoencoder (OCA) to extract purified residual maps while preserving fragile sub-pixel topologies; (3) a Residual Score Modeling (RSM) stage where a Diffusion Transformer (DiT), guarded by a Physical Spectral Firewall (PSF), effectively isolates cross-spectral leakage; and (4) a Vector Dynamics Inference (VDI) stage that robustly decouples targets from backgrounds by evaluating high-dimensional vector interference patterns instead of conventional scalar errors. Comprehensive evaluations on eight datasets confirm that R2VD establishes a new state-of-the-art, delivering exceptional target detectability and background suppression. The code is available at https://github.com/Bondojijun/R2VD.
♻ ☆ VISTA: Test-Time Compositional Alignment for Visual Autoregressive Generation
Visual autoregressive (VAR) models offer fast, high-quality text-to-image generation but still fail at attribute binding and spatial relations. Existing VAR test-time methods search sampled trajectories or apply generic logit guidance but do not directly optimize compositional constraints; gradient-based diffusion methods do not transfer to stateful, discrete, multi-resolution VAR sampling. We introduce $\textbf{VISTA}$ ($\textbf{Vi}$sual Autoregressive $\textbf{S}$emantic $\textbf{T}$est-time $\textbf{A}$lignment), the first gradient-based test-time framework for compositional alignment in next-scale autoregressive image generation. Built on Infinity, VISTA optimizes intermediate representations through the frozen transformer without parameter updates or training. It stabilizes optimization across scales and exposes a common interface into which any differentiable constraint on cross-attention can be plugged. Across two benchmarks and model scales, VISTA improves every targeted category, raising the mean by nearly 20% on a 2B backbone and almost 6% on an 8B backbone, especially on spatial relations. In human evaluation, VISTA wins 83% of decisive compositionality comparisons by plurality vote, with no significant preference in perceived quality; independently, ImageReward scores its outputs 20% higher. VISTA enables the 2B model to surpass a backbone four times its size, showing much of the compositional gap is recoverable at test time.
♻ ☆ Gradient-Free Noise Optimization for Reward Alignment in Generative Models
Existing reward alignment methods for diffusion and flow models rely on multi-step stochastic trajectories, making them difficult to extend to deterministic generators. A natural alternative is noise-space optimization, but existing approaches require backpropagation through the generator and reward pipeline, limiting applicability to differentiable settings. To address this, here we present ZeNO (Zeroth-order Noise Optimization), a gradient-free framework that formulates noise optimization as a path-integral control problem, estimable from zeroth-order reward evaluations. When instantiated with an Ornstein--Uhlenbeck reference process and a one-step receding horizon, the repeated update connects to Langevin dynamics targeting a reward-tilted distribution. ZeNO enables effective inference-time scaling and demonstrates strong performance across diverse generators and reward functions, including a protein structure generation task where backpropagation is infeasible.
♻ ☆ FracEvent: Event-Camera Simulation via Fractional-Relaxation Pixel Dynamics WACV 2027
Langyi Chen, Chuanzhi Xu, Haoxian Zhou, Pengfei Ye, Ziyu Luo, Haodong Chen, Qiang Qu, Xiaoming Chen, Weidong Cai
Event cameras asynchronously report brightness changes with microsecond-level temporal resolution, but real event data remain difficult to collect at scale because specialized sensors, careful synchronization, and task-specific annotations are required. Event-camera simulation is therefore important to event-based vision tasks. Most practical simulators build on contrast-threshold event generation, some with additional filtering, stochastic noise, or calibrated sensor parameters. While effective, such formulations can simplify the temporal structure produced by a pixel's recent response history. We introduce FracEvent, a physics-inspired sensor-side simulator with compact fractional-relaxation voltage dynamics. Given a log-intensity trajectory, FracEvent combines fast and slow response modes, emits ON/OFF events by localizing threshold crossings on the continuous voltage trajectory, and updates the event reference while retaining the mode states. This retained state links residual response to later event timing. We evaluate FracEvent through direct event-stream comparison and downstream transfer on image reconstruction and optical flow estimation. Across multiple datasets, FracEvent achieves leading results on multiple metrics in both evaluations, showing its practical value for event-camera simulation. Project page: https://bonaparte233.github.io/FracEvent/
comment: Accepted to WACV 2027. 25 pages including supplementary material
♻ ☆ End-to-End Radar and Communication Modulation Recognition with Neuromorphic Computing
Although deep learning-based methods can achieve high accuracy in automatic modulation recognition (AMR) tasks, their high computational cost makes it difficult to strike a balance between accuracy and power consumption, thereby limiting their application on resource-constrained platforms. Neuromorphic architectures that perform spike-driven inference with modest energy budgets have recently been explored for vision and timeseries tasks. Motivated by these works, we propose EMRFormer, a novel end-to-end spiking nerural network (SNN) architecture that applies spike-driven transformer to the constraints of neuromorphic hardware for AMR. The model incorporates an adaptive spike encoder and Integer Leaky Integrate-and-Fire neurons to mitigate the degradation of effective information and enhance SNN representational capacity. By integrating spike-separable Convolution Neural Networks (SSCNN) into Spike-Driven Transformers (SpikeFormer), EMRFormer effectively extracts multi-scale temporal features from the raw IQ waveforms. We validate our approach across various mainstream datasets, the experimental results show that EMRFormer achieves state-of-the-art interms of accuracy, outperforming all the baselines. Furthermore, the model maintains strong performance in low signal-to-noise(SNR) environments and reduces theoretical energy consumption by over 90%. Finally, we evaluate our model on a KA200 neuromorphic chip. The results show that our model achieves up to 5 times reduction in power compared to running on a 3090 GPU or an Orin NX. This work demonstrates a promising pathway for AMR on resource-constrained devices.
♻ ☆ Reverberation: Learning the Latencies Before Forecasting Trajectories
Bridging the past to the future, connecting agents both spatially and temporally, lies at the core of the trajectory prediction task. Despite great efforts, it remains challenging to explicitly learn and predict latencies, i.e., response intervals or temporal delays with which agents respond to various trajectory-changing events and adjust their future paths, whether on their own or interactively. Different agents may exhibit distinct latency preferences for noticing, processing, and reacting to a specific trajectory-changing event. The lack of consideration of such latencies may undermine the temporal continuity of forecasting systems, leading to implausible or unintended trajectories. Inspired by reverberation in acoustics, we propose a new reverberation transform and the corresponding Reverberation (Rev for short) trajectory prediction model, which predicts both individual latency preferences and their stochastic variations accordingly, by using two explicit and learnable reverberation kernels, enabling latency-conditioned and controllable trajectory prediction under both non-interactive and social latencies. Experiments on multiple datasets, whether of pedestrians or vehicles, demonstrate that Rev achieves competitive accuracy while revealing interpretable latency dynamics across agents and scenarios. Qualitative analyses further verify the properties of the reverberation transform, highlighting its potential as a general latency modeling approach.
♻ ☆ Post-Training Frontier Text-to-Image Models by Composing Preference and Rubric Rewards
Recent text-to-image generation models have achieved remarkable visual quality, but improving them through post-training remains challenging because no single reward signal captures the full range of human preference. In this work, we develop a simple and effective post-training recipe for open-domain text-to-image generation based on the composition of complementary reward signals. Our reward system consists of two main components: a preference reward, trained on large-scale human preference data using a Bradley-Terry objective to capture overall human aesthetic and perceptual preferences, and rubric-based rewards, which explicitly evaluate prompt faithfulness and other desirable properties while providing safeguards against reward hacking. A key challenge is how to combine these heterogeneous reward signals. We show that a naive weighted average leads to suboptimal optimization behavior, and propose a simple reward composition strategy that more effectively balances preference optimization with rubric satisfaction. In the Arena text-to-image leaderboard (https://arena.ai/), our RL-trained Flux2dev achieves an Elo rating 69 points above the base model, and our post-trained Ideogram-4 surpasses every open-source model on the leaderboard, reaching an Elo of 1223.5. (Claims of state-of-the-art performance are based on the Arena leaderboard snapshot as of September 4, 2026.) Our results suggest that effective rewards for frontier generative-model training require broad coverage of user intent and robustness to exploitation under optimization. To support reproducible research, we release Arena-T2I-Training, a 1K subset of training data that recovers some gains of full-scale training, providing a resource that we hope will facilitate future work on post-training for text-to-image models.
♻ ☆ LUMIN: Lifecycle-Utility-aware and Metadata-Informed Network for Visual Anomaly Detection
Industrial anomaly detection faces two engineering bottlenecks: memory bank construction latency and inference efficiency. Traditional sampling algorithms (Farthest Point Sampling, K-Means, etc.) rely on numerous backbone forward passes and iterative distance computations, with construction times ranging from minutes to hours; heavy computation components such as multi-scale feature extraction struggle to meet the millisecond-level real-time requirements of production lines. This paper focuses on sampling efficiency and inference optimization for industrial deployment with two core contributions: (1) PSP (Plugin Sampler Pipeline)---a four-stage adaptive memory bank sampling pipeline based on 18-dimensional pixel metadata and five complementary visual plugins. PSP completes all sampling with zero backbone forward passes; coarse filtering is sub-second numerical sorting, and metadata extraction is a one-time offline cost. PSP supports progressive deployment and incremental updates. (2) Two engineering optimization strategies---parallel memory bank similarity computation (reducing inference memory and latency by over 95\%) and stratified pixel sampling for large-scale evaluation (reducing computation time by 20$\times$ while keeping metrics stable). As a vehicle for validation, we introduce LUMIN (Lightweight Universal Manufacturing Inspection Network) with extreme segmentation-head compression, systematically exploring the accuracy-efficiency frontier against strong baselines. Experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that PSP matches state-of-the-art sampling accuracy at near-random construction cost (341$\times$ faster than FPS), while inference optimizations reduce evaluation time by 20$\times$ with negligible accuracy loss.
comment: 25 pages, 5 figures
♻ ☆ SatFix: Absolute Visual Localization of UAVs in Satellite Maps from a Single Oblique Image
We study absolute metric UAV localization within a provided geo-referenced satellite region, recovering continuous map position and viewing heading from a single oblique image or a short multi-view clip. Existing cross-view geo-localization methods retrieve the most similar satellite tile from a gallery and report Recall@K, but retrieval depends on gallery sampling, provides no heading estimate, and returns a tile index rather than a continuous coordinate. We propose SatFix, a feed-forward UAV--satellite localization framework built on VGGT-$Ω$. Satellite-grid features act as queries that aggregate UAV visual evidence, and two lightweight heads regress a 3-DoF pose in the satellite-map frame: continuous 2D position and heading. SatFix requires no explicit 3D map, rendered bird's-eye image, auxiliary sensor, or test-time pose alignment. A single model supports both single- and multi-view inputs, with trajectory constraints used during multi-view training. For metric evaluation, we introduce University-Metric, where satellite imagery is re-collected over a region up to 10.7$\times$ longer on a side (about 114$\times$ the ground area) than the original University-1652 tiles, with continuous position and heading labels for the original UAV tours. With one UAV view, SatFix localizes 52.08% of test frames within 50 m and 17.34% within 10 m, with median position and heading errors of 45.66 m and $20.81^\circ$, respectively. Inference takes under 0.1 s per single-view query on an NVIDIA RTX 4090. With nine UAV views, the median position error falls to 21.96 m and the median heading error to $8.73^\circ$. Compared with a fine-tuned VGGT-$Ω$ baseline, SatFix reduces median position error by 34.0% and nine-view median heading error from $25.43^\circ$ to $8.73^\circ$.
comment: Satellite images at multiple resolutions are available at: https://1drv.ms/u/c/758af5fc520c81c5/IQCjvHc3iiq6SJDpYipcIv5vAc-NmHMPCAwSTBnrA1vhM5U?e=YSX1lZ UAV images can be downloaded from the original University-1652 dataset
♻ ☆ SIGMA: Semantic-Difference Instruction-Grounding Mask Annotator for Text-Driven Image Manipulation Localization NeurIPS 2026
Peiyu Zhuang, Jianquan Yang, Haodong Li, Zhuoying Cai, Ruitao Xie, Jishen Zeng, Baoying Chen, Jiwu Huang, Xiaochun Cao
Text-driven image editing has advanced rapidly, but reliably localizing these manipulations requires image manipulation localization (IML) models trained on large pixel-annotated datasets, and there is still no low-cost way to obtain such training data at scale. We observe that these data already exist in disguise: public editing datasets contain millions of structurally identical $\textit{(original, edited)}$ pairs to IML training samples, lacking only pixel-level masks. Recovering these masks automatically is non-trivial: pixel differencing is overwhelmed by diffusion-induced perturbations across all pixels, and instruction-only grounding localizes only what the prompt describes, missing unintended editor side-effects. We propose $\textbf{SIGMA}$ ($\textbf{S}$emantic-difference $\textbf{I}$nstruction-$\textbf{G}$rounding $\textbf{M}$ask $\textbf{A}$nnotator), which performs semantic-feature differencing in a vision foundation backbone and injects an instruction-derived spatial prior into this visual stream via bidirectional cross-modal refinement, amplifying the difference signal at intended-edit regions when the editor faithfully realizes user intent. SIGMA is trained in two complementary stages: Stage I supervises on inpainting masks and Stage II closes the diffusion-domain shift via VAE-roundtrip noise calibration, EMA self-training, and an edit-noise disentanglement loss. SIGMA outperforms existing automatic mask generators on five benchmarks ($\textbf{+12.20\%}$ F1, $\textbf{+11.16\%}$ IoU). When applied to public editing corpora, it produces a $\sim$1.1M IML training set that improves four diverse detectors by $\textbf{+20.98\%}$ F1 across five datasets, turning previously unused editing data into a model-agnostic supervisory resource for IML. For reproducibility, our project page is available at \url{https://zhuangpeiyu.github.io/projects/SIGMA/}.
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2026(Spotlight)
♻ ☆ From Scientific Crop Imagery to Agronomic Reasoning: A Multimodal LLM Benchmark for Plant Phenotyping
Yu Wu, Guangzeng Han, Ibra Niang Niang, Francia Ravelombola, Maiara Oliveira, Jason Davis, Dong Chen, Feng Lin, Xiaolei Huang
High-throughput, effective and comprehensive phenotyping is a critical prerequisite for crop improvement. While phenotypic analysis was traditionally performed manually, recent advances in multimodal foundation models, especially in vision-language models, have offered new opportunities for automated plant phenotyping. However, plant science remains particularly challenging for general-purpose VLMs because it requires domain-specific knowledge, fine-grained visual interpretation, and complex agronomic reasoning. We introduce PlantXpert, an evidence-grounded multimodal reasoning benchmark for plant phenotyping across four major crops: soybean, cotton, rice, and corn. Our benchmark provides a structured and reproducible framework for agronomic adaptation of VLMs, and enables controlled comparison between base models and their domain-adapted counterparts. We constructed a dataset comprising 545 digital images and 4,351 benchmark samples spanning key agronomic domains including disease, pest control, weed management and yield. The benchmark can assess diverse capabilities including visual expertise, quantitative reasoning, and multi-step agronomic reasoning. We trained and evaluated a total of 11 state-of-the-art VLMs. Fine-tuning on our dataset improves overall accuracy for all models, with many achieving around 70% accuracy, and improvements on 9 of 11 remaining statistically significant after Holm correction. We also identify diminishing returns from model scaling, uneven performance across crop subsets, and persistent weaknesses in quantitative reasoning and specialized image analysis. These limitations show that general multimodal competence alone is insufficient for reliable agronomic reasoning and demonstrate the value of domain-specific adaptation. We hope PlantXpert can serve as a foundation for advancing evidence-grounded multimodal reasoning in plant science.
comment: In review
♻ ☆ Virtual Encoders in Multimodal Transformers ACCV 2026
Multimodal language models traditionally rely on dedicated perceptual encoders to construct task-usable representations. More integrated architectures have recently emerged, which instead expose the shared transformer to lightly projected patches, audio frames, or discrete visual tokens. Where does this encoding happen when such representations are not provided? We find that the transformer can internalize this missing computation, constructing task-usable perceptual representations within its own early-to-middle layers before the downstream language model. We call this computational structure a Virtual Encoder. Across linear probing, similarities to perceptual encoders, and causal analyses, we identify signatures of this structure in models that receive perceptual tokens without continuous encoder-derived features. These analyses also suggest that the boundary between perception and language processing need not coincide within an architectural module. Instead, encoder-like computation can emerge as a functional regime within a shared transformer, providing a new perspective for understanding where and how multimodal models process perception.
comment: Accepted at ACCV 2026 Workshop on Subspaces
♻ ☆ Why VLMs Miss Small Objects, and When Zooming In Is Safe
Vision-language models (VLMs) often miss small objects in large images. We ask three questions: what limits them, which of these limits better models can remove, and whether the classical way of handling large images, local decomposition, still has a future. We answer them with a theory built on two quantities of the image interface: S, the number of visual tokens across an object's side, and L, the content a call must cover. The limits: a W x H image sent whole within N tokens gives an object of side m at most m*sqrt(N/(WH)) tokens per side. Doubling the token budget N therefore raises the largest S a whole image can reach by only 41%, and seeing an image at the S an object needs costs at least order S^2 tokens whatever the model. If recognition improves gradually with S, any search strategy, zoom agents included, obeys a recall-cost frontier. What better models can change: the S an object needs and how much one call can carry, measured in bits per object found; the coverage cost remains. Decomposition: yes. Assuming only that more tokens per object and less content per call do not hurt on average, splitting an image cannot lower expected recall if no view zooms out relative to the whole image and views overlap by one object. Neither part can be dropped; we bound the cost of every such decomposition, and a simple rule approaches the bound as the image grows. We test the theory in about 177,000 requests on 797 images. On controlled images, none of 40 orderings predicted for 8 VLMs is violated. Checked after the fact on drawings, floor plans, natural and synthetic images, 61 of 89 implied orderings hold significantly and 4 fail, all for OpenAI models given more pixels than their default path. On construction drawings the rule never significantly lowered recall relative to the whole image and raised it by up to 0.28. Code and data: https://github.com/shijunzhe/vlm-small-objects
♻ ☆ CMFDFormer: Transformer-based Copy-Move Forgery Detection with Continual Learning
Copy-move forgery detection aims at detecting duplicated regions in a suspected forged image, and deep learning based copy-move forgery detection methods are in the ascendant. These deep learning based methods heavily rely on synthetic training data, and the performance will degrade when facing new tasks. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-style copy-move forgery detection network named as CMFDFormer, and provide a novel PCSD (Pooled Cube and Strip Distillation) continual learning framework to help CMFDFormer handle new tasks. CMFDFormer consists of a MiT (Mix Transformer) backbone network and a PHD (Pluggable Hybrid Decoder) mask prediction network. The MiT backbone network is a Transformer-style network which is adopted on the basis of comprehensive analyses with CNN-style and MLP-style backbones. The PHD network is constructed based on self-correlation computation, hierarchical feature integration, a multi-scale cycle fully-connected block and a mask reconstruction block. The PHD network is applicable to feature extractors of different styles for hierarchical multi-scale information extraction, achieving comparable performance. Last but not least, we propose a PCSD continual learning framework to improve the forgery detectability and avoid catastrophic forgetting when handling new tasks. Our continual learning framework restricts intermediate features from the PHD network, and takes advantage of both cube pooling and strip pooling. Extensive experiments on publicly available datasets demonstrate the good performance of CMFDFormer and the effectiveness of the PCSD continual learning framework.
comment: The method has been further improved and additional experiments have been added. As the revised version differs substantially from this version, this version is therefore withdrawn.