Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 150
☆ VBVR-Pro: A Scalable and Verifiable Suite for Native Visual Reasoning
Junxiang Xu, Ruisi Wang, Fanyi Pu, Maijunxian Wang, Ran Ji, Tongxi Zhou, Chenyang Gu, Jing Zuo, Hongcan Xiao, Yimeng Geng, Wanqi Yin, Wei Chen, Oscar Qian, Zhengan Yan, Ziqi Huang, Haiwen Diao, Liang Pan, Bo Li, Xiangyu Fan, Dezhi Luo, Fengyuan Yu, Zehong Zhao, Qingying Gao, Tinghui Zhu, Yilan Zhang, Jingqi Tong, Pinyuan Feng, Zhengze Jiang, Letian Wang, Ziyu Guo, Renrui Zhang, Jieneng Chen, Sonia Joseph, Constantin Venhoff, Saman Motamed, Mengyue Yang, Chandra Sripada, Alan Yuille, Philip Torr, Lvmin Zhang, Vikash Kumar, Daniel Khashabi, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Raphaël Millière, Vincent C. Müller, Anyi Rao, Quan Wang, Ziwei Liu, Dahua Lin, Lei Yang, Hokin Deng, Zhongang Cai
Native visual reasoning treats visual generation as the medium of reasoning itself: visual states (i.e. images and videos) are not merely inputs to be understood or outputs to be rendered, but first-class substrates for problem solving beyond language. Yet progress remains bottlenecked by the lack of scalable training tasks, reliable feedback, and controlled comparisons across generative substrates. In this work, we introduce VBVR-Pro, a closed-loop testbed that makes native visual reasoning through generation trainable, verifiable, optimizable, and experimentally controllable. 1) Task scaling. VBVR-Pro turns visual reasoning into a controlled task space of 300 procedurally generated tasks. Models trained on VBVR-Pro show strong transfer beyond the proposed suite across seven external visual reasoning benchmarks such as RISE-Video, MME-CoF-Pro, and BabyVision. 2) Verifiable rewards. VBVR-Pro provides verifiable reward scorers for task-grounded evaluation. Through a systematic study of leading MLLMs as judges, we identify recurring failure modes of the prevalent VLM-as-a-judge paradigm. In contrast, the proposed scorers are grounded in deterministic, task-specific rules, achieve fine-grained alignment with human judgments. Importantly, they serve as reliable reward signals for large-scale multi-task reinforcement learning and demonstrate stronger post-RL performance across visual reasoning tasks. 3) Mechanism study. VBVR-Pro enables controlled modality studies across more than 30 image, video, and interleaved generators. Our analysis shows that video generation remains strongest for tasks requiring persistent spatiotemporal state tracking, while interleaved generation provides a compute-efficient alternative. Critically, ablations and probing suggest the presence of vision-native trajectories that are crucial to visual reasoning. We release all data, models, scorers, and code.
comment: Homepage: https://video-reason.com/
☆ Zero-WAM: In-Context World-Action Modeling from Human Videos for Open-Ended Task Generalization
Jiaming Zhou, Qihang Zhang, Gangwei Xu, Cunxin Fan, Yujie Zhao, Ruilin Wang, Yiming Luo, Shuai Yang, Xing Zhu, Yujun Shen, Junwei Liang, Yinghao Xu
Zero-shot cross-task generalization, where a policy must execute manipulation tasks never seen during training, remains a central challenge in robot learning. In large language models, a novel task can be performed simply by specifying it in the context, without any parameter update. This form of in-context learning (ICL) turns generalization into a problem of task specification. To achieve cross-task generalization, we bring this paradigm to robotic manipulation, and argue that the natural task specification for manipulation is a human video: unlike language, it provides rich visual cues about the intended task evolution. We present Zero-WAM, a causal video-action model that executes unseen tasks by following in-context human video guidance. To address the scarcity of task-rich paired human-robot data, we propose an automatic pipeline that converts task-sampled robot trajectories into semantically matched human videos, yielding HumanGen, a dataset of 74.2K human-robot ICL pairs across 8.6K tasks. For model training, we further introduce an in-context future chunk prediction (IFP) objective that suppresses shortcuts learned from seen tasks and forces the policy to draw task information from the video prompt. On seven unseen tasks in RoboTwin 2.0 simulation, Zero-WAM achieves a 47.0% average success rate, an absolute improvement of 29.5 percentage points over the strongest video-action baseline. In real-world evaluations, it follows human video guidance to generalize to unseen task configurations involving multi-object scenes, long-horizon manipulation, and fine-grained insertion.
comment: https://robbyant-research.github.io/Zero-WAM/
☆ RefVideo-6M: A Reliable Reference-Based Dataset for Instructional Video Editing
Bojia Zi, Xiaoyan Yang, Yu Zhou, Ruijie Sun, Lihan Zhang, Bin Liang, Kam-Fai Wong, Haibin Huang, Chi Zhang, Xuelong Li
Recent advances in video editing have been largely driven by large-scale instruction-based datasets. However, existing datasets still suffer from two critical limitations. First, target videos are commonly produced by automatic editing models, which may introduce visible artifacts and unreliable supervision signals. Second, most public datasets rely primarily on textual instructions, while lacking visual references that are crucial for precise, identity-preserving, and controllable editing. To address these limitations, we introduce RefVideo-6M, a large-scale reference-guided editing dataset containing 5 million video editing samples and 1 million image editing samples. To ensure reliable supervision, our dataset uses a construction pipeline that treats artifact-free real videos as editing targets and generates quality-filtered input conditions with multiple editing experts. In addition, it provides approximately 6 million visual references, covering diverse reference types and editing scenarios, thereby enabling models to learn fine-grained visual correspondence beyond text-only instructions. Based on RefVideo-6M, we further train a reference-guided video editing model, Ref-MoT, to evaluate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RefVideo-6M provides substantially more reliable supervision than existing datasets and enables the training of powerful editing models with improved visual quality, controllability, and reference consistency. The open-source dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/RefVideo6M/RefVideo6M.
☆ A Visual Dependence-Aware Framework for Multimodal Unsupervised Continual Post-Training
Kaichen Li, Zhilin Zhu, Jianhao Huang, Zhengqin Lai, Baochen Xiong, Zibo Shao, Yaguang Song, Linhui Xiao, Xiaoshan Yang, Changsheng Xu
In this paper, we explore a novel task of Multimodal Unsupervised Continual Post-Training (MU-CPT), enabling deployed MLLMs to continually evolve from streaming unlabeled data. Existing unsupervised post-training methods for MLLMs typically optimize target tokens uniformly, overlooking their heterogeneous visual dependence (VD). However, we reveal that token-level VD is crucial for MU-CPT. Specifically, its structural distortion serves as an indicator of cross-modal catastrophic forgetting, and its inherent heterogeneity acts as a compass to guide new-task learning. Leveraging this property, we propose a Visual Dependence-Aware (VDA) framework with two main components. First, Visually Constrained Optimal Transport (VC-OT) formulates the VD structural distortion of old-task VD during new-task learning as an optimal transport problem to mitigate cross-modal forgetting. By designing a region-aware ground cost and a dependence-stratified transport penalty, it prevents global shifts in visual focus while strictly prohibiting visual reliance from degenerating into language bias. Second, Visually Modulated Adaptation (VMA) exploits VD heterogeneity to emphasize visually grounded new-task learning, promoting new-task plasticity. Together, our method simultaneously maintains old-task stability and new-task plasticity during challenging MU-CPT. Extensive experiments under our MU-CPT setting validate the effectiveness of VDA.
☆ MyoMechanix: Biomechanically-Grounded Compositional Skilled Activity Understanding and Coaching
Hao Yin, Paritosh Parmar, Lijun Gu, Lin Xu, Tianxiao Guo, Xiujin Liu, Tianyou Zheng, Yang Zhang, Weiwei Fu
Existing action quality assessment (AQA) datasets and methods rely primarily on visual inputs such as RGB and pose, overlooking physiological dynamics such as muscle mechanics and often modeling actions as monolithic patterns. These limitations hinder fine-grained, biomechanically grounded feedback. We introduce MyoMechanix, a multimodal ecosystem for weight-loaded actions that aligns motion with muscle activity. Expert-annotated, it contains 7,500+ samples of 20 actions from 38 subjects, with synchronized multiview RGB video, 3D pose, sEMG, and additional physiological signals, forming the largest multimodal AQA benchmark to date. We further construct the Fitness Knowledge Graph (FKG), which organizes expert annotations into structured relationships among actions, phases, key steps, errors, and corrective feedback, enabling compositional scoring and interpretable assessment. Building on these representations, we develop CUBIST (Compositional Ontological Reasoning Engine), which performs decomposition-analysis-recomposition for fine-grained error attribution and feedback generation. We also establish MyoMechanix-AQA, MyoMechanix-VideoQA, and a novel MyoMechanix-Video2EMG task. Experiments show that multimodal sensing and structured representations improve performance, interpretability, and error attribution, with CUBIST achieving state-of-the-art results; VideoQA enhances language-grounded action understanding; and Video2EMG suggests video-based alternatives to costly EMG sensing. MyoMechanix advances skilled activity understanding toward biomechanically grounded, multimodal, and compositional reasoning for Physical AI applications in fitness, rehabilitation, healthcare, and machine learning. Project page: https://haoyin116.github.io/MyoMechanix/
☆ PlanSightRAG: A Visual-First Multimodal RAG for Automating Question Answering and Compliance Checking for Civil Standard Plans
Civil infrastructure compliance checking has long relied on engineers manually reading legacy 2D plans; however, OCR-based automation strips away the geometry and layout essential for interpreting these plans. We present a Visual-First Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework called PlanSightRAG. It indexes and reasons directly over plan imagery, integrates a ColNomic-3B multi-vector retrieval, an agentic Planner-Retriever-Auditor-Synthesizer, and MaxSim heatmaps as an evidence trail. We introduce a 4,056-pair benchmark from five state Departments of Transportation (DOT) standard plans (1,898 pages). PlanSightRAG achieves 91.47% Recall@5 on zero-shot retrieval, while on a held-out Michigan DOT corpus, it achieves 91.40%. On synthetic, parametrically-generated compliance drawings, our Qwen2.5-VL-72B pipeline reaches 100% verdict accuracy only when supplied a pre-resolved rule threshold, a controlled ceiling that a non-VLM OCR baseline already reaches at 76.4%. Finally, we demonstrate autonomous visual rule-grounding by extracting numeric limits directly from a specification corpus without any human-supplied rules.
comment: 32 pages, 9 figures, 25 tables. Preprint submitted to Automation in Construction
☆ ICON Decomposition: Multivariate Concept-Level Explanations of Deep Representations for Model Auditing
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 in their training data, a failure known as shortcut learning. Concept-based explainability methods screen for shortcuts by testing whether concepts such as a patient's sex or scanner settings can be decoded from a network layer. Because each concept is evaluated in isolation, these methods can mistake correlations between concepts as evidence that the model uses them. We introduce ICON decomposition, which instead quantifies how much of a layer's variance each concept explains after accounting for all other concepts and the outcome. On synthetic data with known ground truth, ICON recovers concept importance more accurately than seven alternative baseline methods. On skin-lesion and brain-imaging models, it isolates the concepts on which a model genuinely relies, quantifies the representation unexplained by any of the supplied concepts, and yields sparse explanations that we validate by retraining and out-of-distribution testing.
comment: 44 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables. Includes Extended Data (7 figures, 2 tables). Code: https://github.com/RoshanRane/ICON_decomposition
☆ StreamPI: Streaming Multimodal Temporal Modeling for Vision-Language-Action Models
Zhe Liu, Jinghua Hou, Yuxiang Lu, Zhenya Yang, Xianzhe Fan, Junwei Luo, Junyi Li, Ruihua Han, Zhi Hou, Hengshuang Zhao
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated effectiveness in robot manipulation, yet state-of-the-art models such as pi0.5 operate under a single-frame paradigm, limiting their ability to retain past observations and develop precise spatial perception. In this paper, we propose StreamPI, a streaming multimodal temporal modeling framework that equips single-frame VLA with temporal reasoning capability without introducing any additional parameters. One core design is instruction-anchored temporal modeling. It treats each (visual observation, language instruction) pair as an atomic temporal unit: bidirectional attention within each pair enables cross-modal fusion, while causal attention across pairs preserves autoregressive streaming inference. This ensures the language instruction serves as a persistent semantic anchor throughout task execution. To bridge the gap between synchronous training and asynchronous real-robot deployment, we introduce a andom-interval streaming training strategy: a proper inter-frame interval (e.g., every 3 frames) enables faster and smoother action execution. Beyond this, randomizing the interval further improves robustness to frame-timing perturbations, supporting asynchronous deployment in practice. Furthermore, by leveraging the length extrapolation capability of the LLM backbone, StreamPI seamlessly inherits pretrained single-frame weights and supports flexible single-frame and multi-frame inference. Experiments on real-robot tasks spanning memory-dependent and precise perception scenarios, as well as the simulation benchmark LIBERO, demonstrate that StreamPI outperforms pi0.5 across diverse tasks.
☆ UltraPIPS: Improving model perception in B-mode ultrasound with foundation models MICCAI
In medical imaging, it is common to use learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS) to compare images semantically in feature space. Although backbones pretrained on natural images are widely used for LPIPS computation, B-mode ultrasound images possess distinct speckle patterns and acoustic-specific image statistics that are fundamentally different from natural images and even from other images in radiology. Consequently, we propose that domain-specific models are needed to measure perceptual similarity in ultrasound data, a finding which is not necessarily the case for other imaging modalities. We compare LPIPS metrics across downstream tasks like classification, segmentation and reconstruction using natural image, medical generalist and ultrasound backbone models and show that selection of LPIPS backbone is a non-trivial design choice. In particular, the ultrasound backbone models were more correlated with downstream performance of supervised models than classical and natural image models, and optimization of the LPIPS loss with an ultrasound backbone achieved a strong balance between reconstruction quality and realism. Our code is available at https://github.com/talg2324/UltraPIPS and introduces the UltraPIPS library, a set of LPIPS metrics based on the open-source foundation models analyzed in this paper.
comment: MICCAI ASMUS 2026
☆ Uncertainty-Guided Latent Diffusion Models for Faithful Super Resolution ICIP 2026
The perception-distortion trade-off poses a fundamental challenge in single-image super-resolution (SR). Although diffusion-based SR methods excel at generating perceptually realistic images, achieving high fidelity remains a key limitation. Recent advances in diffusion-based SR have shown promise in improving fidelity, but these methods often compromise perceptual quality due to their high reliance on a high-fidelity image. To address this, we introduce UGDiff, a novel diffusion guidance paradigm designed to further improve the perception-distortion balance. In particular, we first estimate the reconstruction uncertainty of the latent features corresponding to a high-fidelity image. This uncertainty is then used to guide the diffusion process to selectively restore high-frequency details in high-uncertainty regions, while preserving fidelity elsewhere. Furthermore, our guidance method adaptively identifies the high-uncertainty regions by considering not only the estimated uncertainty but also the posterior variance of the diffusion sampler at each timestep. This relaxes the reliance on the high-fidelity image in the later stages of sampling, thereby achieving a better perception-distortion balance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art diffusion-based SR methods.
comment: ICIP 2026
☆ FRAME: separating sampling variation from representational cause in medical imaging fairness
Subgroup performance differences are the standard evidence for fairness bias in medical imaging, and the usual response removes the demographic information that a model encodes. Here we introduce Fair-model Reference And Mechanism Evaluation (FRAME), a two-step framework for auditing such a claim. The first step derives a fair-model reference, the distribution of the difference under exact fairness at the observed subgroup sizes. In the second step, we test the remainder with two operators in representation space. One operator cannot change a within-group ranking by construction. Across 702,206 images and 36 encoders, the reference accounts for a median 41% of the reported race difference and 22% of the age difference. Injecting demographic decodability leaves the remainder unchanged, while entangling the group with the disease direction raises the race difference from 0.077 to 0.118. No intervention we tested changes the remainder more than a change of random seed does. Those interventions reduce a difference at the operating point and leave the within-group ranking difference at a median of 0.000. Applied to 89 differences in 9 published studies across 6 medical imaging modalities, the reference accounts for a median 25% of a rate difference and 70% of a difference in the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. Image-text pretraining instead raises worst-group performance by about 0.05. Applying FRAME before choosing an intervention could distinguish differences that need a mechanistic explanation from differences compatible with sampling variation at the current cohort sizes.
☆ PANDA - Prototype-Anchored Alignment for Partially Unpaired Multimodal Learning, with Applications to Alzheimers MRI and TCGA Pathology
Sheethal Bhat, Mahfuzur Rahman Chowdhury, Paula Andrea Perez-Toro, Stephan Wunderlich, Rose Dawn Bharat, Siming Bayer, Andreas Maier
Multimodal medical prediction often faces incomplete pairing: auxiliary modalities with complementary signal are available for only a subset of subjects (or none) and cannot be assumed at deployment. We introduce PANDA (Prototype Anchored Data Alignment), a two-stage framework that transfers auxiliary information to a primary-modality model without auxiliary inputs at inference. Stage 1 learns a shared embedding from the paired subset and estimates class prototypes from auxiliary modalities; Stage 2 trains the primary encoder on all subjects using cross-entropy plus alignment to the frozen prototypes. Because supervision is defined at the class-prototype level, PANDA accommodates arbitrary pairing rates, including zero subject overlap. We evaluate PANDA on two applications. On a 1,021-subject multi-scanner ADNI cohort, we perform AD/CN classification with three auxiliary modalities at distinct pairing rates: tabular scores (44.8%), FDG-PET (18.7%), and external handwriting kinematics (0% overlap). Relative to the same-backbone MRI-only baseline, PANDA attains AUC 0.868 +-0.020 (+7.9pp) and reduces 1.5T CN false positives by 24.3pp; on a fully trainable Conv5-FC3 backbone it reaches AUC 0.893 (best overall). A pairing-rate ablation shows that the joint anchor remains within seed noise from 75% to 5% pairing. On TCGA-Lung survival prediction from whole-slide images with RNA-seq as auxiliary data, PANDA improves over WSI-only on 2-year OS (AUC +3.5pp) and Cox PH (C-index +9.0pts) and outperforms full-fusion training, which underperforms WSI-only, while requiring no RNA at inference; wide confidence intervals on this smaller cohort keep the gains below conventional significance. Overall, PANDA provides a deployment-oriented mechanism for leveraging incomplete auxiliary modalities to improve primary-modality prediction.
☆ Less Contouring, More Accuracy: Lesion-Guided ROI Deep Learning for Ovarian Ultrasound Classification
Mehran Ahmad, Ali Abbasian Ardakani, Afshin Mohammadi, Alisa Mohebbi, Gernot Kronreif, Sepideh Hatamikia
Ovarian lesion classification using transvaginal ultrasound remains challenging due to overlapping imaging characteristics and the dependence on expert interpretation. This study investigates whether lesion-guided region-of-interest (ROI) deep learning can achieve competitive diagnostic performance while reducing the annotation burden associated with pixel-level lesion segmentation. Two publicly available ovarian ultrasound datasets were evaluated: the Multi-Modality Ovarian Tumor Ultrasound (MMOTU) dataset for eight-class classification and the Ovarian Ultrasound Dataset (OUD) for binary classification. Four strategies were compared under a unified framework: global image-based deep learning, lesion-guided ROI-based deep learning, lesion contour-based deep learning, and contour-based radiomics with machine learning classifiers. Four deep learning architectures, MaxViT-Tiny, Swin Transformer, EfficientNet-B7, and ResNet18, were evaluated. Radiomics models were developed using support vector machine, k-nearest neighbors, and artificial neural network classifiers, with ANOVA-based feature selection applied for the lower-sample OUD dataset. The lesion-guided ROI strategy achieved the strongest overall performance, with MaxViT-Tiny obtaining 93.10% accuracy and an AUC of 0.99 on MMOTU and 97.56% accuracy and an AUC of 0.99 on OUD. The contour-based approach achieved comparable accuracy but required substantially higher annotation effort. These findings demonstrate that lesion-guided ROI deep learning provides an effective balance between diagnostic performance and annotation efficiency, offering a practical approach for scalable AI-assisted ovarian ultrasound analysis
comment: Submitted as a research article. The manuscript contains figures, tables, and supplementary material
☆ 4DGS-WAM: Bridging Past and Future with an Object-Centric World Action Model based on 4D Gaussian Splatting
Current world action models (WAMs) typically operate on 2D visual data. These models can achieve exceptional visual quality, but they lack explicit spatial structure for individual objects and repeatedly process redundant background content. Although point clouds can represent the world in 3D space, they can be difficult to align and accumulate across viewpoints. In this paper, we leverage an explicit 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) representation that separately models dynamic objects and the static background of a scene. For dynamic objects, we use a policy model to predict future actor actions and a world model to predict transformations of their observed Gaussian splats. The static background need not be regenerated for future states, as much of it has already been observed in past frames. This forms an object-centric world action model, which we name 4DGS-WAM. It lifts 2D observations into a persistent 4D representation so that previously observed static content can be reused during future prediction. Future-state extrapolation can then focus on modeling the evolution of dynamic objects. Experiments on KITTI-MOT evaluate short-horizon prediction and past reconstruction.
comment: This is a work in progress
☆ Auditable CT Phenotyping Through Report-derived Radiological Observations
Riga Wu, Walter Witschey, Yicheng Li, Felix Barajas Ordonez, Keno K. Bressem, Lisa C. Adams, Gary E. Weissman, Li Shen, Christos Davatzikos, Eduardo Barbosa, Daniel Truhn, Tianyu Han
Medical image foundation models can predict clinical phenotypes from computed tomography (CT), but strong performance leaves open whether they read disease-specific findings or shortcuts that correlate with the diagnosis. We tested this in 221 electronic-health-record (EHR) phenotypes using Auditable CT phenotyping (ACT), built on report-derived radiological observations. We trained ACT on 38,317 patients, mined 376,194 observations and evaluated it in 25,183 held-out patients. ACT exceeded five vision-language baselines on zero-shot annotation, and CT-CLIP across 221 phenotypes from unseen CT pulmonary angiography, both under zero-shot scoring (0.651 versus 0.572) and under linear probing (0.709 versus 0.662). Reading each probe exposes what accuracy conceals: only 97 observations occupy the 221 rank-1 positions, and one phrase describing aortic and coronary calcification ranks first for 20 phenotypes, including osteoporosis, urinary tract infection and major depressive disorder. Restricting the bank to clinician-specified evidence redirects those probes onto phenotype-related observations in 86 phenotypes at no accuracy cost (0.751 versus 0.741). Accurate CT-based EHR phenotyping can therefore rest on observations that are not valid evidence for the coded phenotype and that ACT can identify and intervene on.
☆ TAU-Agent: An Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Traffic Anomaly Understanding
Yuqiang Lin, Yan Shi, Sam Lockyer, Harish Tayyar Madabushi, Adrian Evans, Wenbin Li, Yinhai Wang, Nic Zhang
Traffic Anomaly Understanding (TAU) requires models and systems to detect, reason about, and explain anomalous events in transportation videos. To address this challenge, we propose TAU-Agent, an agentic retrieval-augmented framework for traffic anomaly understanding. Given a task query, a central retrieval agent orchestrates two visual perception tools, namely a Video Captioning Tool and an Open-Vocabulary Tracking Tool, to retrieve and select query-relevant evidence, including captions, temporal intervals, and object trajectories. The selected evidence, together with sampled video frames and the input query, is provided to a supervised fine-tuned vision-language model for final reasoning and answer generation. We evaluate TAU-Agent on both the in-domain and the out-of-domain benchmarks from the AI City Challenge 2026. TAU-Agent achieves scores of 0.6779 on Track 3, 0.3998 on Track 7, and 67.9275 on Track 8, ranking second, twelfth, and fifth, respectively. Code is available at: https://github.com/siri-rouser/TAU-Agent.
☆ When Composition Doesn't Add Up: Humans Identifying Defects in AI-Generated Images IEEE
*Chulin Zhao and Ruoqi Hu contributed equally to this work.
State-of-the-art text-to-image (T2I) models exhibit pronounced and systematic defects when prompts involve intricate compositional factors such as multiple entities and multiple attributes. In this paper, we investigate how humans identify such defects. Specifically, we manually select 651 reference images from the four categories of people, hand, object, and scene that exhibit complex compositional characteristics, from which prompts emphasizing compositional factors are derived by manually editing ChatGPT-generated prompts. We then feed the prompts into three selected T2I models to generate AI images and conduct a comprehensive subjective study to identify their defects. For each image, 29 participants provide multi-label assessments specifying defect types and locations. The study yields the compositional AI-generated image defect (CO-AID) dataset, including reference images, prompts, AI-generated images, and information on defect locations and types. Experimental results show that training a deep model on CO-AID can both predict defects in AI-generated images and optimize AI image generation, demonstrating its usability and effectiveness. The database and supplementary materials are available at: https://github.com/Future-IQA/CO-AID .
comment: 6 pages, accepted at IEEE MMSP 2026
☆ Controlling for Omitted Variable Bias in Deep Neural Networks
Control variables are widely used in statistical modelling to account for omitted variable bias of known confounders. However, they have largely been underexplored in deep learning. This is surprising, given that deep learning models encode image-inferable covariates, such as demographic variables, into their predictions when these covariates are correlated with the outcome---a form of omitted variable bias referred to as 'shortcut learning'. While many existing confound-control or fairness methods try to restrict the correlation of such covariates with model predictions, we show that this fails to correct for omitted variable bias. We therefore propose a control variable approach for deep learning models, based on generalised additive modelling of the effects of model inputs and covariates. As flexible additive models can suffer from concurvity, we introduce an estimation procedure that refits the final layer of a pre-trained network to include covariate effects, using cross-fitting with ridge penalisation. We show how these effects can be orthogonalised with respect to covariates to exclude their mediated effects and that model predictions can be marginalised over the covariate distribution to control for their effect. This yields unbiased, interpretable predictions and offers flexibility to model the desired effects depending on the scientific or fairness objective. We verify our approach using simulated images, and demonstrate consistent estimation of true effects. Existing methods either require more data or fail to recover the true effects. We apply our method to real neuroimaging data with experimentally induced confounding, where it recovers prediction performance to near the level of a model trained on unconfounded data. Code is available at https://github.com/mpff/cocodeel.
comment: 28 pages, 14 figures. Code at https://github.com/mpff/cocodeel
☆ Code World Model: Coding Agent as World Brain
World models aim to simulate how complex environments evolve under actions and events, yet existing video-based world models primarily learn dynamics from visual observations, which reveal outcomes rather than the underlying knowledge, rules, and mechanisms governing world evolution. This makes it difficult to maintain persistent consequences and support coherent, open-ended evolution. We introduce Code World Model, a framework that separates world evolution from visual realization by combining the reasoning and coding capabilities of language models with the generative priors of video models. A coding agent serves as the world brain, reasoning about events and their consequences and generating executable code to maintain persistent world state and perform rule-consistent evolution. To connect executable state with visual generation, we introduce a proxy representation that encodes frame-wise spatiotemporal constraints and is compiled into a proxy video, which conditions a video model to render high-fidelity visual observations. We further develop data pipelines for constructing aligned proxy-observation pairs from gameplay and real-world videos. After fine-tuning on paired gameplay data, MiniMax-H3 follows proxy-based spatiotemporal specifications from simple interactive worlds built by the coding agent while preserving rich visual details and dynamics. These results demonstrate the potential of combining code for persistent world evolution with video models for flexible visual realization, providing a new path toward open-ended world models.
comment: Project Page: https://buaacyw.github.io/cwm/
☆ Visual General Intelligence: A White Paper
Hirokatsu Kataoka, Yoshihiro Fukuhara, Yonglong Tian, Shangzhe Wu, Oishi Deb, Ryousuke Yamada, Christian Rupprecht, Jianyuan Wang, Kohsuke Ide, Koichi Namekata, Xianzheng Ma, Yiming Chen, Robert Geirhos, Aditi Raghunathan, Yuki M. Asano, Deva Ramanan, David Fouhey, Andrew J. Davison, Yilun Du, Jiajun Wu, Zhuang Liu
This paper reconsiders intelligence from a vision-centered perspective and examines whether intelligence emerging from visual experience and learning may provide a pathway toward AGI. In the language domain, beginning with the introduction of the Transformer architecture, the GPT series has demonstrated transfer to unseen tasks through autoregressive language modeling on web-scale text combined with aggressive scaling. This raises a natural question, namely, what capabilities and forms of intelligence can emerge from visual modalities such as images, videos, and geometry? In this paper, we discuss whether visual intelligence can serve as a pathway toward AGI, referred to in this paper as visual general intelligence (VGI), by bringing together contributors from diverse standpoints and affiliations. Our aim is not to offer a single definition of visual intelligence, but to clarify the principles that computer vision should pursue in the AGI era, the visual input modalities, the benchmarks, the learning paradigms, and the relationship between vision, when taken as the core, and other modalities such as language.
☆ Embedding NDRE Trajectories into Contrastive Learning for Label-Free, Physiology-Aware Crop-Stress Staging and DSS Outputs
Timely detection of crop stress is critical for sustaining yields under increasing drought frequency, yet conventional vegetation index thresholds or image-based clustering often fail to capture stress progression, limiting their value for farm decision-making. To address this gap, we present EigenCL, a physiology-guided contrastive learning framework that stages crop stress from Sentinel-2 NDRE trajectories, with the goal of providing interpretable and transferable stress diagnostics for decision support systems (DSS). EigenCL was trained on 10,000 maize NDRE patches from drought-affected Iowa fields in 2020 and tested on Nebraska fields in 2023 without retraining, with validation incorporating soil-moisture records, U.S. Drought Monitor maps, and county-level yield statistics. The model produced four physiologically coherent stress clusters (Healthy, Mild, Moderate, Severe), significantly outperforming baselines including K-Means, SimCLR, ProtoCLR, and an ablation model (Silhouette = 0.748, DBI = 0.35, CHI = 49,624). Clusters aligned with maize growth stages, with severe stress peaking around tasseling-silking (VT-R1), a stage known to drive yield loss; moreover, EigenCL clusters correlated with soil moisture at 0-14-day lags (rho up to 0.72) and matched yield anomalies in drought-affected counties. By embedding NDRE trajectory dynamics into contrastive learning, EigenCL enables early stress alerts and interpretable DSS outputs (e.g., heatmaps, scouting priorities, regional risk indices), extending beyond single-date NDRE thresholds and supporting scalable monitoring for climate-smart agronomy.
☆ Do Vision-Language Models Agree on the Affective Qualities of Shape? A Cross-Model Audit for Generative Design Interfaces
Generative design interfaces increasingly expose semantic controls that let users steer output with concepts such as "more elegant" or "more minimalist," typically encoded by a vision-language model (VLM). A practical question is whether state-of-the-art VLMs represent objects consistently in terms of the same concept. We audit 6 VLMs by ranking untextured 3D objects along Kansei adjective pairs, where Kansei describes affective impressions of product form, with each axis defined as the difference between the text representations of its two poles. Geometric pairs serve as positive controls, and pairs of unrelated adjectives establish an empirical null. Across 10 categories of ShapeNet database, affective axes converge above the null (mean pairwise rank correlation 0.36 vs. 0.14) but below the geometric ceiling (0.44). The agreement between models is partial and highly uneven: on the three axes shared by all categories, mean convergence ranges from 0.21 for bookshelves to 0.51 for jars. Convergence depends primarily on whether a category's representational variation aligns with the semantic direction being evaluated, rather than simply on how much the objects vary in shape overall. Cross-model convergence does not imply agreement with human judgments. Based on our findings, we implement a UI prototype that shows how the audit can inform which Kansei descriptors to expose as controls for a given object class and which to withhold.
comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 7 tables
☆ LUTSeg: A Longitudinal Multi-Expert Dataset for Ulcer Tissue Segmentation MICCAI 2026
Karen Sanchez, Carlos Hinojosa, Albert A. Ávila, Andrea C. Riano-Rojas, Diego H. Romero, Jenny C. Páez, Martina Llinás, Bernard Ghanem
Quantifying wound tissue composition is essential for monitoring chronic ulcer progression and guiding treatment decisions. However, pixel-level annotations are costly, and multi-tissue wound datasets remain scarce, particularly for neglected diseases such as leprosy. We introduce LUTSeg, a longitudinal chronic ulcer dataset comprising 141 images from 39 patients with wound masks and five tissue categories annotated by five expert clinicians, including a multi-expert gold-standard subset for inter-rater agreement analysis. To establish an initial benchmark for LUTSeg, we further propose TiSage, a semi-supervised tissue segmentation framework that integrates multi-scale semantic priors from a frozen medical vision-language model within a teacher-student architecture. We evaluate TiSage on LUTSeg and DFUTissue, showing improvements over supervised and semi-supervised baselines in most low-label settings. Code & data: https://github.com/carlosh93/TiSage
comment: Published at ISIC in MICCAI 2026
☆ Learning Late, Guiding Early: Timestep-Decoupled Semantic Guidance for Fair Face Generation
Demographic imbalance in synthetic face generation can propagate to downstream face recognition systems, making fairness an important consideration when diffusion models are used for data generation. Existing fairness-aware generation approaches often require model retraining, architectural modifications, or repeated guidance throughout the reverse diffusion process. In this work, we introduce Semantic Boundary Predictor (SBP), an inference-time framework that performs demographic guidance through a one-shot intervention during reverse denoising. Our approach is motivated by the observation that latent representations at different diffusion timesteps play distinct semantic roles: late-stage latents provide stronger demographic separability, whereas early-stage latents offer greater flexibility for semantic intervention. SBP leverages this timestep decoupling by learning linear semantic boundaries from late-stage latent representations while applying them only once at the initial noisy latent, allowing the remainder of the reverse denoising process to proceed unchanged. The method requires neither retraining nor fine-tuning of the underlying Latent Diffusion Model and operates without external balanced datasets. Experiments on CelebA-HQ demonstrate substantial improvements in demographic fairness, reducing fairness disparity by 98% for gender, 95% for binary race, and 15% for four-class race, while maintaining perceptual image quality across demographic groups. Owing to its one-shot inference strategy and model-agnostic design, SBP introduces only a small computational overhead and can be readily integrated with existing pre-trained latent diffusion models.
☆ Precipitation Downscaling Using Foundation Model-Conditioned Diffusion
Victor Nascimento Ribeiro, Jorge Guevara, Jorge Sebastian Moraga, Chris Lucas, Natalie Lord, Andrew Taylor, Edward Lockhart, Will Trojak, Johannes Schmude, Anne Jones
High-resolution precipitation fields are essential for hydrological impact assessment, yet global climate model outputs are too coarse and biased for direct use. AI-based statistical downscaling with diffusion models offers a promising approach, but the mechanism by which large-scale atmospheric predictors condition generation remains largely unexplored. We investigate three conditioning strategies for a denoising diffusion probabilistic model applied to daily precipitation downscaling: channel concatenation of upsampled coarse predictors, cross-attention conditioning with a learned convolutional encoder, and cross-attention conditioning with the frozen encoder of the pretrained Prithvi WxC weather foundation model. All strategies are evaluated against an unconditioned baseline under identical conditions using probabilistic, distributional, spectral, and extreme-event metrics for the Colorado River Basin. Concatenation conditioning achieves the lowest point-wise CRPS and MSE, but tends to produce over-smoothed fields that suppress high-intensity events. In contrast, cross-attention conditioning provides substantially better distributional realism and modest improvements in spectral fidelity. Improvements are greatest for extremes: the Prithvi-WxC conditioned model retains over half of >100mm/day events, although estimates are uncertain due to limited samples. When trained on the full dataset, the learned convolutional model performs similarly to the foundation model-conditioned approach while requiring lower computational resources. However, the Prithvi-WxC-conditioned model achieves comparable performance with only five years of training data. These results indicate that cross-attention conditioning offers advantages over simple concatenation for probabilistic precipitation downscaling, and that pre-trained foundation model representations may offer benefits in data-limited settings.
☆ DEFUSE: Generalizable Backdoor Defense for Self-Supervised Encoders with Generative Priors
Self-supervised learning (SSL) encoders are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, posing threats to both visual SSL encoders and vision-language encoders. Existing defenses are typically designed for only one of these paradigms and rely on restrictive assumptions such as access to uninfected in-distribution data or precomputed pseudo-labels, which are difficult to satisfy in practice. To address these limitations, we propose DEFUSE, a generalizable backdoor detection framework for SSL encoders. Inspired by Bayesian posterior inference, we reformulate backdoor detection as a representation-conditioned image likelihood estimation problem parameterized by a conditional diffusion generative model. Uninfected representations tend to yield semantically consistent reconstructions, whereas backdoored ones are more likely to be mapped to the attacker's target class or semantically meaningless images, deviating from the original semantics and thereby exposing the backdoor. However, we find that the exact likelihood is intractable, because highly abstracted representations discard the low-level information necessary for pixel-faithful reconstruction. We therefore relax the objective to semantic reconstruction and evaluate it in a well-separated representation space provided by a reference encoder. Rather than training from scratch, we fine-tune a pretrained diffusion model, leveraging its generative prior to map data onto the natural image manifold while preserving semantic content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DEFUSE substantially outperforms existing detectors across diverse attack settings, generalizing to both visual SSL and vision-language encoders. Notably, our method greatly reduces the reliance on prior knowledge about the victim encoder or the attack strategy. The source code is available at https://github.com/jsrdcht/DEFUSE .
comment: Accepted at ACM Multimedia 2026
☆ THA-Flow Generative Model: Prosthesis Geometry Prediction from Preoperative CT
Preoperative planning for total hip arthroplasty (THA) is commonly framed as selecting a single prosthesis configuration and placement for a patient's osseous anatomy. In practice, however, the same anatomy may admit several clinically reasonable solutions, making planning inherently a one-to-many problem that is better represented by a conditional probability distribution. We present THA-Flow, a conditional flow-matching model that generates three-dimensional prosthesis geometry directly from preoperative CT. Separate AutoencoderKL models compress preoperative bone anatomy and prosthesis geometry, while a three-dimensional UNet learns a rectified flow from Gaussian noise to the prosthesis latent space under spatial bone conditioning and optional structured prosthesis parameters. The retrospective cohort comprised 1,355 hips from 1,149 patients undergoing primary THA. Following rigid registration of postoperative CT to preoperative CT, the actual postoperative prostheses were transformed independently according to the pelvic and femoral registrations and represented as a dual-channel truncated signed distance field. The prosthesis autoencoder achieved a peak signal-to-noise ratio of 47.11 dB and a structural similarity index of 0.9964 on the validation set. Complete acetabular and femoral geometries were generated across seven major stem models representing 93.4% of the cohort. Repeated bone-conditioned sampling preserved component position, alignment, and the principal bone-prosthesis interfaces while allowing limited local geometric variation. To our knowledge, THA-Flow represents the first application of generative AI to three-dimensional surgical planning for THA.
comment: 17 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables
☆ Socialized Detector Learning: Trajectory-Guided and Reciprocal Distillation for Heterogeneous Object Detectors
Object detection knowledge is fragmented across independently trained, heterogeneous detectors with complementary category supports. In socialized learning, this knowledge resides in a society, and learning aims to evolve the society collectively through exchange. However, aggregation-based socialization does not explicitly plan transfer order, whereas progressive multi-teacher distillation considers order but remains a one-way student enhancement in a shared category space. Building on Socialized Learning, we formulate Socialized Detector Learning (SDL) for heterogeneous, category-specialized object detectors and propose Trajectory-Guided and Reciprocal Distillation (TGRD).TGRD estimates directed operational Inter-Detector Transfer Difficulty (IDTD) from held-out feature-alignment residuals, precomputes a fixed score table, and greedily constructs a carrier trajectory. Along the trajectory, knowledge is progressively consolidated into a union-category carrier and then returned to experts through reciprocal transfer. A conditional proxy-certificate analysis shows that, under stated assumptions, the progressive certificate is no larger than an aggregated-target counterpart. On MS COCO with four heterogeneous experts and two carrier initializations, final carriers outperform epoch-matched simultaneous aggregation controls by 2.6 AP in both settings. Reciprocal detectors attain 20.8--28.4 AP on previously unsupported categories while remaining within 1.3 AP of original expert-specific performance. These results support order-aware progressive consolidation followed by reciprocal transfer as a viable mechanism for detector-society evolution.
comment: 12 pages; supplementary material included
☆ FlowMoDL: Model-Based Deep Learning with Conjugate-Gradient Data Consistency for Highly Accelerated 4D Flow MRI Reconstruction
Tristan Gottwald, Michelle Bruch, Mubashir-Ul Hassan, Fatma Alickovic, Milan Kloiber, Daniel Tenbrinck, Torsten Panholzer, Melanie Schaller, Jana Hutter
We present FlowMoDL, an unrolled neural network for highly accelerated 4D flow MRI reconstruction that directly optimizes for both anatomical magnitude and phase-derived velocity accuracy. Building on the MoDL framework, FlowMoDL alternates a learned (3+1)D spatiotemporal denoiser with conjugate-gradient data-consistency updates based on the SENSE forward model. A novel dual-pathway conditioning scheme adapts the denoiser features and data-consistency weighting, enabling a single model to handle varying acceleration factors ($10\times$ to $50\times$). To ensure physiological accuracy, the network is trained using a deep-supervision composite loss that explicitly penalizes velocity magnitude and angular errors, stabilized by a curriculum schedule. We evaluate FlowMoDL on the multi-center CMRx4DFlow dataset against classical and deep-learning baselines (CG-SENSE, MoDL, FlowVN, and FlowMRI-Net). A key advantage of FlowMoDL is its superior gradient step efficiency. When evaluated under an equivalent, limited budget of gradient steps, competing flow-specific networks degrade significantly. In contrast, FlowMoDL robustly converges and strictly outperforms all competitors across all acceleration factors in magnitude SSIM, nRMSE, relative velocity error, and angular error, successfully recovering sharp structural details and temporally coherent velocity fields.
☆ Steer the Sampling, Not the Kernel Grid: Geometry-Guided Sampling Operator for Volumetric Segmentation MICCAI 2026
Accurate 3D segmentation is central to quantitative lesion assessment and anatomy mapping for clinical planning and follow-up. Thin, elongated, and fine anatomical/pathological structures (e.g., vessels) are a particularly challenging case: a one-voxel boundary error can disconnect a branch and change clinically relevant topology. In encoder-decoder networks (e.g., U-Net), repeated downsampling and fixed-grid convolution blur or alias fine structures and weaken orientation cues, so early mistakes propagate across scales. We propose a geometry-guided local operator that steers where features are sampled, rather than deforming convolutional kernels, under a single formulation for both feature refinement (stride 1) and resolution reduction (stride > 1). At each voxel, it predicts a local orientation and bounded step sizes, samples symmetrically along these directions, and transforms paired samples into compact geometric and boundary cues with lightweight mixing; a cross-scale consensus aligns encoder and decoder features at skip connections to reduce geometric mismatch. Replacing all stride 1 and stride 2 operators in a 3D U-Net yields consistent improvements on BraTS, MSD Hepatic Vessel, and TDSC-ABUS, with notably better boundary metrics (e.g., BraTS Dice 86.1 to 88.9, HD95 7.1 to 6.2; TDSC-ABUS HD95 39.1 to 27.8) while reducing parameters from 2.3M to 0.8M. We further demonstrate that the operator can be integrated into other backbones (e.g., nnU-Net, Swin-UNETR, and MedNeXt) without changing their macro-architectures while providing consistent performance gains.
comment: Accepted at MICCAI 2026
☆ Label-Free Foundational Model Selection for Medical Image Classification under Distribution Shift via Pseudo Label Discrepancy MICCAI 2026
Foundation models are increasingly deployed for medical image analysis. However, under the inter-institutional distribution shift typical of deployment, their performance varies widely and cannot be known without target-domain labels, which are rarely available. This leaves a practical question unresolved: given several candidate foundational models and labeled-data from a source domain, which one to deploy in an unlabeled target domain? We propose a label-free selection criterion built on SUDO, a framework for evaluating clinical AI systems without ground-truth annotations. SUDO partitions the unlabeled target data by predicted probability and, for each region, measures a pseudo-label discrepancy reflecting class contamination; aggregated across regions, this yields a score (AURCC) requiring neither target annotation nor fine-tuning. We show that AURCC can be used to rank a variety of vision-language models (BioMedCLIP, CXR-CLIP, CheXzero, MedCLIP, MedImageInsight, CLIP) on chest X-ray classification across three inter-hospital shift scenarios, under zero-shot and MLP-probe regimes. The AURCC ranking recovers the ground-truth ranking with Spearman rho up to 0.943 (p<0.05). Against the natural baseline of ranking by held-out source accuracy, AURCC is competitive when the labeled source is large and yields a more accurate ranking once it is small; the regime of interest in resource-constrained settings.
comment: Accepted at MIRASOL Workshop, MICCAI 2026. 10 pages, 3 figures
☆ TDFNet: Tri-projection Deformable Fusion Network for Panoramic Salient Object Detection
Recent years have witnessed the growing potential of panoramic salient object detection in robotic vision, virtual reality, and related applications. However, projecting spherical scenes onto 2D planes inevitably introduces geometric distortions, which fundamentally limit the effectiveness of existing projection-based methods. Specifically, Equirectangular Projection (ERP) suffers from severe polar stretching distortions, while cube map projection introduces discontinuities across cube-face boundaries, resulting in degraded feature discriminability and compromised geometric consistency. To address these limitations, we propose TDFNet, the first Tri-projection Deformable Fusion Network for panoramic salient object detection, exploiting complementary projection representations to alleviate geometric distortions and improve detection performance.Specifically, we design a cross-projection deformable attention (CDA) module that leverages spatial correspondences between different projections to construct geometry-aware sampling locations, guiding deformable attention for cross-projection contextual aggregation and enhancing robustness against projection-induced deformations. Furthermore, we introduce a latitude-guided fusion module, which utilizes spherical latitude priors to construct geometric confidence weights for adaptively balancing ERP and CMP features. Meanwhile, LGF incorporates distortion-reduced semantic references from Tangent Projection to achieve cross-projection feature refinement and spatial alignment.By constructing a three-branch encoding architecture based on ERP, CMP, and Tangent Projection, TDFNet simultaneously preserves global spatial continuity, local geometric details, and fine-grained boundary information.
☆ Learning from waste: Machine Learning for health risk prediction and computer vision-based sorting in Ghana
The inappropriate disposal of solid waste remains a significant public health and environmental concern worldwide, including in Ghana. Poor sanitation and improper waste management practices contribute to substantial economic costs and avoidable deaths annually. In 2022, a field study in Atonsu, Kumasi, Ghana, reported a community-perceived relationship between household waste disposal and illness patterns, but only through descriptive analysis without quantitative validation. This study extends that investigation using two data-driven approaches. First, a Random Forest classifier was developed to predict illness categories using waste disposal practices and demographic survey data. On a held-out group of respondents who reported illness (N=69), the model obtained a macro F1 score of 0.63, with disposal method emerging as the most important substantive predictor of illness type. Second, a MobileNetV2 image classification model enabled automated waste sorting via visual recognition, achieving 88.2% accuracy and a macro F1 score of 0.87 on the test set (N=415). The vision-based approach offers an affordable, camera-driven alternative to complex multi-sensor systems, making it highly suitable for resource-constrained settings. Taken together, the findings provide quantitative evidence for a community health relationship previously documented only qualitatively. They demonstrate the potential for automated waste-sorting in low-resource environments. Importantly, the results illustrate that technological performance alone does not guarantee public health improvements; effective institutional support and implementation are equally necessary.
comment: 16 pages, 3 figures
☆ Moving Beyond More Views: Redundancy-Aware Ego-Exo Fusion for Proficiency Estimation ECCV 2026
EgoExo proficiency estimation aims to assess action quality by integrating fine-grained motion cues from egocentric (1st-person) views with spatial context from multiple exocentric (3rd-person) views. Simply adding more exocentric views degrades EgoExo performance, as redundant or noisy perspectives dilute useful motion cues. Our analysis identifies two key causes: (1) Multiview redundancy - From the data perspective, certain views provide limited or noisy information, diluting discriminative cues; (2) Overfitting - From the feature perspective, conventional fusion increases representational complexity, causing the model to memorise view-specific patterns rather than learn generalisable representations. To address these issues, we propose two complementary modules: AdaMVS, which adaptively identifies and fuses the most informative view tokens under weak supervision from the data perspective, and VIB-GB, which combines Gradient Blending and Variational Information Bottleneck regularisation from the feature perspective to compress redundant signals and suppress overfitting during training. Experiments on EgoExo-4D and EgoExo-Fitness demonstrate that our method learns both which view to look at and how to fuse them, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Our source code is available at https://github.com/dx199771/AdaMVS
comment: Accepted by ECCV 2026
☆ InteractGesture: Progressive Chunk Guidance for Continuous Streaming Co-Speech Gesture Control ECCV 2026
Ekkasit Pinyoanuntapong, Ajinkya Deogade, Paul Streli, Wenjing Zhang, Joanna Materzynska, Pu Wang, Vittorio Ferrari, Jie Shen
Co-speech gesture generation has made significant progress toward realistic full-body motion from speaker audio, yet existing models lack fine-grained spatial controllability of individual joints. To address this, we introduce \emph{InteractGesture}, a model-agnostic, inference-time method for spatially controllable gesture generation. \emph{InteractGesture} guides target latent estimates of a diffusion sampler through a differentiable RVQ-VAE decoder, backpropagating spatial control gradients to adjust motion latents during sampling. A primary challenge in streaming co-speech generation is chunk-wise dependency: standard sequential inference freezes prior chunks, preventing spatial constraints in future chunks from adjusting preceding trajectories and causing boundary inconsistencies. To overcome this limitation, we propose \emph{Progressive Chunk Guidance}, a chunk-window strategy that maintains an active set of editable chunk latents with staggered delays, enabling spatial constraints to propagate gradients backward across chunk boundaries during streaming generation. Experiments on the BEAT2 dataset show that \emph{InteractGesture} improves multi-joint spatial control while preserving overall gesture quality. Furthermore, our approach supports diverse applications, including sparse joint positioning, dense joint trajectory control, and directional pointing. Our project page is available at https://exitudio.github.io/interactgesture-page .
comment: ECCV 2026 Workshop - Interactive Social Avatars
☆ MIMONet: Multi-scale Input and Multi-scale Output Network for Salient Object Detection
The existing methods for saliency detection task focus on the application of multi-level features, aiming to take advantage of the respective strengths of high- and low-level features. However, because the inputs of these models are single-size images, their multi-level features have difficulty in learning the knowledge of size variations of salient objects. Object-scale variation learning has great potential for detecting multi-scale objects, which has not been fully explored by existing methods. To improve the recognition ability of a model for objects with different sizes, we are inspired by the image pyramid to propose a Multi-scale Input and Multi-scale Output Network (MIMONet). In MIMONet, we extract multi-level features for three images with different resolutions to form three encoder branches, and information will be exchanged between the branches. The advantage of this approach is that the features of one branch can learn the knowledge of target size variation from the features of the other two branches. In addition, we design a Multi-scale Perception (MSP) module, in which the input feature layer is divided into several sub-layers with different resolutions. Capturing the multi-level structure information of the objects in these sub-layers can make the objects more fully perceived. For network training, we propose a Joint Saliency Loss (JSL), which can constrain multiple saliency maps output by the network to identify the same foreground objects, and induce their boundaries to be preserved clearly. Experimental results show that MIMONet has stronger detection capabilities and harvests better evaluation scores on multiple datasets compared to existing models. The code of our model will be released.
☆ LongVU-TTT: Causal Test-Time Training for Visual Resampling in Long Video Understanding
Long-video MLLMs must model temporal change before a limited visual-token budget removes most frame evidence. We introduce LongVU-TTT, which inserts a convolutional Test-Time Training (TTT) resampler with causal fast-weight updates between the vision encoder and the LLM. Its grouped 2D fast weights adapt to each video and contextualize frame features before compression, while a hybrid uniform-and-change-aware selector retains explicit visual evidence for downstream reasoning. Under controlled conditions, TTT-Conv improves over TTT-MLP by up to +2.12 and bidirectional Mamba2 by up to +3.04 on MLVU, and it is stronger than attention- and fixed-state recurrent resamplers across three benchmarks. Analysis shows that the fast weights behave as a temporal aggregation state rather than a reliable long-horizon episodic memory: their benefit attenuates as evidence becomes more distant, motivating explicit frame retention. LongVU-TTT processes up to 512 frames before reducing them to 128 LLM frames and achieves competitive performance across five video understanding benchmarks.
☆ Difficulty-Aware Sample Allocation for Adaptive Data Augmentation in Semantic Segmentation
Data augmentation is a standard component of modern semantic segmentation pipelines, but most augmentation techniques allocate transformations uniformly across training samples or adapt to a single difficulty signal such as loss. This ignores the fact that segmentation difficulty is multi-factorial, since ambiguous predictions, persistent optimization errors, rare classes, and complex object boundaries can each make a sample informative in different ways. This paper introduces Difficulty-Aware Sample Allocation (DASA), an architecture-agnostic framework that assigns stronger augmentation to samples estimated to be more difficult. DASA combines prediction ambiguity, training loss, class rarity, and boundary complexity into a normalized difficulty score, then maps that score to sample-specific augmentation strength during iterative training. Experiments on Oxford-IIIT Pet and binary Pascal VOC segmentation with U-Net, DeepLabV3, and SegFormer-B0 show that DASA improves over standard training and is competitive with or stronger than single-signal adaptive baselines. On Oxford-IIIT Pet, DASA improves DeepLabV3 from 0.633 to 0.740 mIoU. On binary Pascal VOC, DASA obtains the best foreground IoU for all three evaluated architectures. These results attest to the value of multi-factor difficulty estimation as a practical mechanism for directing augmentation where it is most useful.
comment: 18
☆ Skeleton-based Zero-Shot Spatio-Temporal Action Localization via Weakly-Supervised Pretraining
We propose a novel pretraining strategy for skeleton-based zero-shot spatio-temporal action localization to estimate unseen actions for person instances while overcoming high annotation costs for training via new target actions and pretraining using large-scale action scenery datasets. Specifically, our approach, termed Skeleton-Language feature Pooling Switching, introduces a weakly-supervised vision-language pretraining mechanism. This mechanism transitions pooling kernels from pretraining, which aggregates skeleton features at the video level and aligns them with each video's known action text embeddings, to the inference phase that computes instance-level features without training via target actions. Furthermore, we propose Scene-Mixed Discriminative Contrastive Learning to distinguish actions at the instance level within the combined scene through the MIL framework. Our experiments on four public spatio-temporal action localization and classification datasets demonstrate that the proposed method effectively addresses annotation limitations.
comment: 13 pages, 6 figures
☆ Unsupervised Anatomical Feature Learning via Diffusion Models: Enhanced Medical Image Segmentation with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models
Acquiring pixel-level annotations for medical image segmentation is a severe bottleneck. Traditional U-Net architectures, while effective, learn local texture patterns and lack awareness of global anatomical structures, leading to boundary delineation failures in low-data regimes. This research paper proposes utilizing unsupervised Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) to extract anatomical features. We train a DDPM on 21 unlabeled abdominal CT scans to learn structural representations, transferring the encoder weights to a downstream segmentation task evaluated on the BTCV multi-organ dataset. Diffusion pretraining significantly improved liver segmentation: Dice increased from $0.75\pm0.36$ to $0.93\pm0.16$ ($p < 5.33\times10^{-26}$, 0.529 Cohen's d), Average Surface Distance (ASD) decreased by 66%, and 95th-percentile Hausdorff Distance (HD95) reduced by 45%. For kidney segmentation, Dice improved from $0.90\pm0.19$ to $0.95\pm0.10$ ($p < 4.01\times10^{-11}$). Multi-organ pooled performance showed a 68% variance reduction and a 74% improvement in boundary precision (Dice $0.95\pm0.07$). Crucially, frozen encoder models retained > 80% of fine-tuned performance without exposure to segmentation labels, proving the existence of learned anatomical priors. In low-data scenarios, diffusion-pretrained models maintained robust performance with only 50% (Dice: 0.92 liver, 0.94 kidney), 25%, and even 10% (Dice: 0.89 liver, 0.71 kidney) of labeled data. Using unlabeled images for diffusion-based pretraining successfully embeds robust anatomical features prior to human supervision, transforming U-Nets into anatomy-aware systems.
comment: 15 pages, 5 figures. Submitted for peer review
☆ CloSeR: Unified Relational Distillation from Closed-Set Teachers for Category Discovery ECCV 2026
Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) is an intriguing open-world problem that has garnered increasing attention: given partially labelled data, the goal is to correctly recognize known classes while discovering coherent novel categories from unlabelled samples. Recent GCD methods typically adapt foundation models by jointly optimizing supervised classification and unsupervised discovery objectives on mixed labelled and unlabelled data. While effective, this coupled training can entangle closed-set recognition and open-set discovery, leading to objective conflict and biased predictions, and may disturb the semantic geometry of pretrained representations under limited labels and noisy pseudo-labels. We propose CloSeR, a simple plug-and-play framework that injects Closed-Set Relational knowledge into GCD training. CloSeR first builds a domain-adapted closed-set teacher by tuning lightweight block-wise adapters on labelled known-class data while keeping the foundation model backbone frozen, thereby preserving pretrained priors at low training cost. It then transfers the teacher's knowledge to downstream GCD via Unified Relational Distillation (URD), which distills complementary global sample-to-prototype relations to anchor known-class semantics and local sample-to-sample relations to preserve neighborhood structure, using separate feature pathways to reduce optimization interference. CloSeR is head-agnostic and readily integrates with both parametric and non-parametric GCD methods. Extensive experiments with DINO and DINOv2 backbones on six benchmarks (CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet-100, CUB, Stanford-Cars, and FGVC-Aircraft) show consistent gains over GCD baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/closer/
comment: Accepted as a conference paper at ECCV 2026
☆ Deep Learning Segmentation of Diffusion-Weighted MRI Acute Ischaemic Stroke: A Pragmatic Evaluation Across Three Datasets
Atle Bjørnerud, Till Schellhorn, Thor H. Skattør, Terje Nome, Jon André Ottesen, Anne Hege Aamodt, Bradley J MacIntosh
Objective: Diffusion-weighted MRI (DWI-MRI) is the gold standard for visualizing and quantifying acute ischaemic stroke (AIS). Although deep learning methods can accurately segment AIS lesions, the optimal image inputs and model architecture remain uncertain. We evaluated whether accurate AIS lesion segmentation can be achieved using a pragmatic deep learning approach with minimal preprocessing and clinically feasible inference times.
Materials and Methods: Self-configured nnU-Net models were trained on 1,744 DWI cases from local, national, and open-access datasets and tested on 436 cases. Four experimental conditions were evaluated using five-fold cross-validation: with or without brain extraction and using either DWI alone or DWI plus apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) images as inputs. Two architectures were compared: the baseline nnU-Net (base) and a residual encoder nnU-Net (ResEnc). Performance was benchmarked against the DeepISLES ensemble model from the 2022 ISLES challenge.
Results: In the test set (n=436), the base model achieved a median (IQR) Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 0.84 (0.19). For the base model, only two of six pairwise comparisons between input configurations showed significant differences. ResEnc produced small but significant improvements in DSC compared with the base model for DWI, DWI+brain extraction, and DWI+ADC inputs (all p<0.02), but not for DWI+ADC+brain extraction (p>0.50). The base model significantly outperformed DeepISLES, particularly in patients with smaller infarct volumes (signed-rank test, p<0.01).
Conclusions: A baseline nnU-Net trained on DWI alone, without preprocessing, enabled fast and accurate AIS lesion segmentation. This streamlined approach may facilitate clinical research and support acute stroke imaging workflows
comment: 19 pages, 8 figure and 4 tables
☆ Towards Purified Multi-Label Test-Time Adaptation of Vision-Language Models ECCV 2026
Yiwen Liang, Hui Chen, Yizhe Xiong, Mengyao Lyu, Yuhan Cao, Zijia Lin, Shuaicheng Niu, Sicheng Zhao, Jungong Han, Guiguang Ding
Test-time adaptation (TTA) has been widely explored in single-label recognition, effectively mitigating distribution shifts, especially when combined with vision-language models. However, real-world images often contain multiple objects, while the more practical multi-label test-time adaptation (MLTTA) has received little attention so far. Recent cache-based TTA methods have shown promising efficiency and effectiveness, yet directly extending them to multi-label scenarios suffers from a one-to-many mapping problem: a shared global representation entangling co-occurring objects is stored as class-wise cache prototypes, inducing dominant-label bias and compromised cache calibration. While introducing region-level cues helps isolate class-specific evidence, such regional evidence can also be unreliable under distribution shifts, making its identification and utilization non-trivial. To address these issues, we introduce PuRF, a novel PuRiFication-driven cache-based method for multi-label test-time adaptation of vision-language models. Specifically, PuRF first performs region purification to identify reliable regions, providing comprehensive regional cues for multi-label recognition and enabling fine-grained alignment. Based on these purified regions, PuRF conducts cache purification to enhance cache representation and adaptability, where episodic purification builds a discriminative region-based cache, and temporal refreshing further promotes long-term cache adaptability. Experiments demonstrate that PuRF consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving a notable 4.05% mAP improvement on ViT-B/32 across five datasets.
comment: Accepted by ECCV 2026
☆ Diffusion Transformers for Roof Graph Synthesis and Reconstruction ICPR 2026
We present RoofDiT, a generative framework for 2D roof graph synthesis and reconstruction. Roofs are compactly described as planar graphs of junctions and structural edges, but existing methods often rely on fixed geometric rules or direct reconstruction objectives. RoofDiT instead models roof structures directly as vertex-edge graphs and learns a conditional generative prior over their geometry and connectivity. Our framework follows a two-stage design: a diffusion transformer generates roof vertices, and an edge prediction module infers the corresponding graph topology. To improve geometric fidelity, RoofDiT combines relative geometry-aware attention with footprint and aerial-image conditioning, while using an alignment regularizer to encourage common horizontal, vertical, and diagonal roof patterns. The same model supports unconditional generation, footprint-conditioned synthesis, and image-guided reconstruction by changing the conditioning signal. Experiments show improved graph generation quality over a diffusion baseline, favorable performance against a straight-skeleton prior in the footprint-conditioned setting, and the highest edge F1 among compared methods for image-guided reconstruction.
comment: Pre-review manuscript. Accepted at the ICPR 2026 Workshop on Pattern Recognition in Remote Sensing (PRRS)
☆ MAMA-FLUX.2: Image-to-Image Synthesis of Post-Contrast Breast DCE-MRI for the MAMA-SYNTH Challenge
Dynamic contrast-enhanced breast MRI is central to cancer diagnosis and monitoring, but requires gadolinium-based contrast agents. In this work, we address pre-to-post contrast breast MRI synthesis for the MAMA-SYNTH challenge. We propose MAMA-FLUX.2, a conditional latent flow-matching approach based on FLUX.2-Klein-4B. The pre-contrast image is encoded as spatial conditioning, while the model predicts the flow field associated with the post-contrast target latent. To adapt the pretrained model efficiently, we use LoRA fine-tuning and introduce a regional training objective combining global flow matching, tumor-region supervision, and stable foreground regularization. We further investigate LoRA rank, intensity windowing, and regional loss weights on axial slices, prioritizing clinically relevant tumor-focused metrics. Our ablation study shows that moderate tumor and stable-foreground weighting improves the trade-off between image fidelity and tumor-region accuracy. The final model achieves the best overall balance with LoRA rank/$α=64/64$, $\mathrm{MHA}_{\max}=25$, $λ_{\mathrm{tumor}}=0.25$, and $λ_{\mathrm{stable}}=0.1$. These results demonstrate that compact pretrained rectified-flow transformers can be adapted for contrast-enhanced MRI synthesis using parameter-efficient fine-tuning and task-aware regional losses.
comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, 1 table
☆ SeVeR: Selective Visual Exposure and Retrieval for 3D Medical Image Question Answering
Yaojun Hu, Danyang Tu, Yang Liu, Jiajin Zhang, Wei Fang, Zhiqiang Liu, Chunlai Dong, Yingda Xia, Haochao Ying, Jian Wu, Ling Zhang
Volumetric medical VQA requires reasoning over long and redundant 3D visual token sequences, especially in multi-sequence MRI where complementary modalities provide diverse diagnostic cues but expose the decoder to many repeated anatomical regions. To investigate reasoning under multi-sequence visual redundancy, we first introduce BreMRIs-VQA, a clinically curated breast MRI benchmark with 1.19M QA pairs from 71.0K sequences and 12.9K patients, covering both free-text and multiple-choice questions. We further propose SeVeR, a selective visual exposure framework that compresses dense volumes into modality-wise prototypes and retrieves complementary multi-level evidence with change-aware gated attention during decoding, trained with a marginal-utility self-consistency objective that suppresses unhelpful retrieval. Experiments on BreMRIs-VQA and public benchmarks show that SeVeR improves both discriminative and generative performance while exposing substantially fewer visual tokens.
☆ Plans You Can Check: Verifier-Grounded Learning of an Open-Weight Planner for Executable Video-Editing EMNLP '26
Haoyu Wang, Cheng Feng, Liuyang Bian, Ruiyang Huang, Lei Wei, Yafei Wen, Xiaoxin Chen, Xiaoying Tang
Practical video editing is not only pixel generation: an editor must turn a brief, a clip pool, music metadata, and hard constraints into an executable timeline. We study this decision layer as \emph{executable video-editing planning} and introduce RefineCut, which, unlike workflow systems that wrap a prompted frontier model, trains a compact open-weight planner for it. The planner edits a typed timeline through structured patches covering clip selection, trimming, ordering, transitions, and duration and music alignment; a deterministic verifier applies each patch and checks it against an explicit constraint ledger. Because editing has no single ground-truth repair, we do not imitate teachers directly: RefineCut replays every multi-teacher branch through the verifier and keeps verifier-best repairs as supervision. A second stage, RefineCut-Evo, lets the student score its own repairs with the verifier and a task rubric and trains on high-margin preference pairs, so the final $8$B planner runs in a closed verifier loop with no teacher calls at inference. On RefineCut-Bench ($3{,}578$ tasks, $7{,}971$ captioned clips, $499$ music tracks, explicit ledgers), verifier-replayed distillation lifts the planner from $0.620$ to $0.858$ on the protocol-specific Video-Editing Score and RefineCut-Evo reaches $0.924$; the gain transfers to Llama-3.1-8B and GLM-4-9B, and in the same closed loop the $8$B planner matches or exceeds its frontier teachers. Code and RefineCut-Bench are publicly released; see the Data Availability statement.
comment: Accepted to the Main Conference of EMNLP '26
☆ On the Separation of Human and AI-Generated Images in CLIP Embedding Space
We identify a previously unreported phenomenon in CLIP representations: human and AI-generated paintings spontaneously separate along the dominant principal directions of their joint embedding distribution, without any supervised objective designed to distinguish the two classes. Rather than exploiting this phenomenon for detection, our objective is to interpret it: we seek to identify the visual information underlying the separation and to trace it back from the embedding space to the image domain. We pursue this objective through a progressive investigation combining interpretable image representations with gradient-based inversion, used systematically as an experimental probe of the relationships identified in feature space. Robustness experiments and increasingly expressive statistical descriptors progressively rule out several intuitive explanations based on global image properties and simple local statistics, and point instead to distributed multiscale image structure. Multiscale scattering provides the most informative interpretable representation considered, but offers only a partial account of the phenomenon.
Direct inversion provides a complementary and striking observation: substantial displacements along the dominant CLIP directions can be induced by image perturbations that remain nearly imperceptible to human observers, showing that the directions involved in the separation are highly sensitive to image variations with very low perceptual salience for humans. Taken together, these results reveal a significant difference between the visual evidence reflected in CLIP representations and that readily accessible to human perception, raising broader questions about the relationship between artificial and human vision and, ultimately, between artificial and human aesthetic judgment.
☆ When Should a Network Emit Geometry, and When Should It Detect It? Readout, Reconciliation, and Representation in Floorplan Vectorization
A network trained to recover the walls, openings, and rooms of a rasterized floorplan can produce its output in two ways: by emitting the geometry as an autoregressive coordinate sequence, or by detecting it on dense junction and centerline heatmaps and assembling a graph. We compare the two readouts on the same trained network. On real scans (CubiCasa5K) detection is better on every wall measure (+2.7 wall F1 at tolerance 0.05, +5.1 at 0.015; paired bootstrap intervals exclude zero), and reading an opening heatmap the decoder never used raises opening F1 by 2.6x without retraining. Within real scans the readout's advantage grows with plan size and reverses on small plans; on clean vector renders sequence decoding is better by 5 to 8 points where its training covered the render style, while under full domain shift the readout, given calibrated thresholds, stays ahead; neither ink density nor plan size explains the reversal. With matched data and recipe, a room-centric system with a reconciliation step and a wall-first sequence model reach comparable wall quality, so the output representation matters less than is usually assumed. A prior from the other family helps at the output but not at the input: deterministic fusion of the two outputs raises wall F1 by 7 points, whereas conditioning one model on the other's output gives no gain in three forms, including two ground-truth-content controls. We also provide an edit-cost metric that scores a draft by the human work needed to correct it, corrected CubiCasa5K annotations, and ResPlan-FP, a CC BY 4.0 benchmark of 16,998 plans with frozen splits and three baseline tracks. Code, the benchmark, and the corrected annotations are available at https://github.com/Cyprinus12138/fpvec-lab
comment: 21 pages, 4 figures. Code and benchmark: https://github.com/Cyprinus12138/fpvec-lab
☆ A Dual-Transformer for Multi-Camera View Recommendation
Multi-camera systems are foundational to modern media production, and multi-camera editing is a critical task. This involves the proper selection of the appropriate camera view at each moment. In this paper, we propose a novel Dual-Transformer architecture with Cross-Attention that heavily outperformed the current SOTA models over the TVMCE dataset (TV Shows Multicamera Editing dataset). Our model decouples these tasks: (1) a dedicated temporal encoder first processes the sequence of past frames to build a rich memory of the recent history, and (2) the candidate camera views then act as queries to this memory via a cross-attention module, allowing each candidate to independently interrogate the historical context and find the most relevant information for its own evaluation.
Our approach achieved 56.60% Precision@0.5, representing a substantial improvement over the prior best result of 37.16%. We further conducted an ablation study exploring the use of lightweight backbone architectures, where the SwinV2 backbone yielded the best performance, achieving 69.65% Precision@0.5.
Using this best-performing configuration, we then investigated the feasibility of adapting the model to replicate the editing style of a specific human editor. To this end, we fine-tuned the model using varying proportions of the initial segment of a target video. Our results demonstrate that even with only 20% of the video used for fine-tuning, the model exhibited measurable improvements in Precision@0.5, indicating strong potential for data-efficient personalization of editing style adapted to each individual TV show or producer.
☆ V-Rubrics: Visual Faithfulness via Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning
Shulin Tian, Minglun Li, Yuhao Dong, Hao Ding, Jiarui Yao, Haiwen Diao, Jingkang Yang, Hongyuan Zhu, Ziwei Liu
Vision-language models can produce fluent answers that are insufficiently grounded in the visual evidence: a single unsupported object, chart value, or intermediate inference can undermine an otherwise plausible response. We argue that this is a credit-assignment failure in multimodal post-training. Scalar outcome rewards indicate whether an answer is acceptable, but do not identify which visual facts are grounded, which reasoning steps are valid, or which instruction constraints are missed. We introduce Visual Rubrics-Based Reinforcement Learning, which decomposes reference responses into atomic propositions and scores generated answers along Visual Faithfulness (VF), Reasoning Consistency (RC), and Instruction Following (IF). The resulting rubric items provide structured partial credit and localize rubric credit when supporting evidence spans are available. We first obtain an SFT checkpoint by fine-tuning Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct on the public OpenMMReasoner-SFT-874K corpus, adapting OpenMMReasoner's cold-start data recipe. We construct V-Rubrics 50K, a 50,248-example training set from 17 visually grounded sources, by applying rule-based filters before deriving example difficulty from rejection-sampling scores and then annotating every example with Gemini-3-Pro under the same structured prompt and protocol. We train our model based on the same SFT checkpoint using component-wise, prefix-localized rubric credit. Experiments show that our rubricbased GRPO improves over both the shared SFT baseline and answer-only GRPO, with the largest gains on knowledge-oriented and visually grounded reasoning benchmarks. The results show rubrics as a useful reward abstraction for visual post-training.
comment: Proj page: https://shulin16.github.io/v-rubrics/
☆ MLLMCLIP: Feature-Level Distillation of MLLM for Robust Vision-Language Representations EMNLP 2026
Pretrained vision-language models such as CLIP excel at zero-shot recognition but often fail at compositionality, particularly attribute-object and relational structures. Recent studies mitigate this issue by augmenting training with synthetic hard negatives generated by a cascade of large language models and text-to-image models, which incurs substantial pipeline overhead. We instead propose MLLMCLIP, a heterogeneous distillation framework that transfers multimodal knowledge directly from a generative Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) teacher into a discriminative CLIP student, bypassing synthetic data entirely. To bridge the architectural mismatch between the two paradigms, we introduce an attention-based per-layer token selection and a CKA-based distillation loss. Compared to prior CLIP-enhancement methods, MLLMCLIP achieves state-of-the-art compositional accuracy while delivering consistent gains on standard zero-shot classification and image-text retrieval, showing that feature-level distillation strengthens both compositional and general vision-language representation capability.
comment: EMNLP 2026 Main Conference
☆ CrossMambaTuning: Synergistic Spatial and Cross-Layer Adaptation for Machine Vision Compression ACM MM26
To reduce deployment cost and retraining overhead, adapting pretrained learned image compression (LIC) models to downstream machine vision tasks has attracted growing attention. However, existing methods typically insert fine-tuning modules independently into frozen backbones, lacking explicit mechanisms for cross-layer coordination. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework named CrossMambaTuning, which integrates State Space Models with cross-layer interaction mechanisms for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Specifically, we design an efficient Mamba adapter equipped with task-specific prompts and multi-scale branching to precisely capture both local features and global dependencies. Furthermore, we introduce a Scale-Invariant Cross-Layer Adapter (SICA) utilizing a parameter-sharing strategy to fuse task information across different scales and reduce redundancy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CrossMambaTuning achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on multiple machine vision tasks, reducing parameter overhead by 72\% compared to SOTA methods. Code is available at https://github.com/rsr1123/CrossMambaTuning.
comment: Accepted by ACM MM26
☆ AdaVDR: Adaptive Tool Use and Reflection for Video Deep Research
Xintong Zhang, Xiaomeng Fan, Shilin Yan, Ekko He, Zicheng Liu, Zijian Zou, Guannan Zhang, Yuwei Wu, Zhi Gao, Hongwei Xue
Video deep research answers complex questions by jointly understanding video content and retrieving external knowledge from the open Web. However, diverse questions and videos require different tool-use strategies, and inappropriate tool calls can produce incorrect results. Uncertain grounding and retrieval also make unnecessary interactions costly and error-prone, increasing latency and reasoning errors. To address these challenges, we propose AdaVDR, an adaptive video deep research agent with adaptive tool invocation and reflection. AdaVDR selects tools according to the task and its capabilities, and backtracks only when unreliable intermediate results require correction. To enable these capabilities, we develop a video deep research data construction pipeline. We first discover retrieval-relevant events and entities in diverse videos and acquire detailed information through grounding and external retrieval to construct high-quality QA pairs. For each QA, task-specific prompts organize the information acquisition process into a tool-use trajectory, allowing different question and video types to follow different grounding and retrieval strategies. We further introduce model-conditioned tool necessity filtering, which evaluates tool calls against the target model's video understanding and internal knowledge, removing tools or tool chains the model can bypass. This yields trajectories tailored to the target model's video understanding capability and knowledge. Using this pipeline, we construct training data and VDR-EE, a benchmark covering entity-centric and event-centric questions. We perform supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning with a redundancy-aware reward to strengthen adaptive tool invocation and reflection. Experiments show that our method performs best among the evaluated open-source models on VDR-EE and substantially improves over its base models on VideoDR.
☆ CropCop: An Auditable 120-Class Plant-Health Model from Benchmark Reconstruction to a Quantised Runtime Artifact
A plant-health score can appear precise while resting on duplicated image families, a long-tailed label space, or a runtime file that was never evaluated. We present CropCop, a closed-set recognition system spanning 120 operational plant-health classes and an evidence chain from corpus reconstruction to direct execution of the final quantised artifact. Starting from 117,546 audited images, we rejected the inherited partition after confirming 3,233 duplicate relationships across split boundaries and froze a 109,107-image benchmark with zero crossings among the audited trusted leakage groups and a 151.7 largest-to-smallest class ratio. A fully fine-tuned DINOv3 ConvNeXt-Tiny reference achieved 98.51% accuracy and 96.87% macro-F1 on the locked internal test. A compact MobileNetV4 Conv-Medium derivative achieved 98.46% accuracy and 96.27% macro-F1 without being presented as evidence for a new distillation method. Validation-only post-training quantisation selected dynamic activations with per-channel weights, and the final 22.60 MiB ExecuTorch/XNNPACK PTE achieved 98.46% accuracy and 96.23% macro-F1 when executed directly. Only six of 16,363 top-1 decisions changed between the converted INT8 graph and the PTE, while paired analysis showed a modest class-balanced loss; an exploratory post hoc fruit-label slice localized a larger recall decline than aggregate accuracy revealed. CropCop establishes strong leakage-controlled internal recognition and software-runtime fidelity; it does not establish performance on unseen farms, camera pipelines, or physical Android hardware.
comment: 25 pages, 6 figures, and 15 tables. Includes benchmark-audit, model-retention, runtime-fidelity, and reproducibility appendices
☆ Video-IFBench: Evaluating Instruction Following of Multimodal LLMs in Video Understanding Scenarios
Hongbo Liu, Peixian Chen, Sihan Liu, Peiyuan Zhang, Kai Zou, Dian Zheng, Xiaoxing Hu, Yuhao Dong, Mengdan Zhang, Yunhang Shen, Haoyu Cao, Wei Liu, Weibo Gu, Xing Sun, Shengjie Zhao
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance in video understanding. However, their ability to follow instructions in this domain remains under-explored. Real-world video understanding requires models not only to interpret video content correctly, but also to satisfy diverse user-specified constraints. Existing benchmarks focus primarily on task accuracy rather than instruction adherence, leaving this capability insufficiently evaluated. To address this gap, we introduce Video-IFBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating instruction following in video understanding, where models must satisfy diverse user-specified constraints, including those grounded in visual and audio content. We develop an instruction taxonomy with four templates, including single-task, multi-task, selection, and nested instructions, covering 32 task types and 39 manually designed constraint categories spanning both semantic and format requirements. To reduce annotation cost, we build a semi-automatic data construction pipeline that combines MLLMs, programmatic processing, and human verification, resulting in 1.5K samples. We conduct a large-scale evaluation of more than 20 recent MLLMs and show that video instruction following remains challenging for current models, especially for instructions with many constraints, semantic constraints, or complex conditional structures that require selecting the correct branch or path based on video content. We hope our work will facilitate future research on instruction following in video understanding scenarios.
☆ Asymmetric Cross-Modal Fine-Grained Visual Categorization: ACF-Net and the BirdPro Benchmark
Audio-visual cross-modal Fine-Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC) aims to identify fine-grained categories by jointly leveraging visual and auditory information. However, FGVC under asymmetric cross-modal scenarios has received limited attention, where paired video and audio are not strictly synchronized and may not even correspond to the same individual or moment. Such weak and ambiguous cross-modal correspondence poses substantial challenges to effective representation learning and modality alignment. To address these issues, we propose ACF-Net, a novel optical flow-guided framework for asymmetric audio-visual fine-grained learning. ACF-Net consists of two key modules: Optical Flow-Guided Motion (OFGM) and Asymmetric CrossModal Adaptive Fusion (ACAF). OFGM captures motion-sensitive visual cues and suppresses irrelevant background interference, thereby enhancing discriminative dynamic representations in videos. ACAF estimates modality reliability under weakly matched audio-video pairs and performs uncertainty-aware adaptive fusion to improve category-level recognition robustness. To support research on asymmetric cross-modal FGVC, we further construct BirdPro, a new bird-oriented audio-visual benchmark, since existing datasets often lack large-scale category-level audio-video associations under non-strict temporal and instance correspondence. BirdPro contains 1,919 audio recordings and 11,965 videos covering 194 bird species. Extensive experiments show that ACF-Net achieves the best results compared with representative baseline methods, outperforming the strongest baselines by 2.97% and 1.92% in the fused and mismatched settings, respectively.
comment: Accepted by the 9th Chinese Conference on Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision (PRCV 2026). 15 pages, 5 figures
☆ OpenVeinNet: Robust Open-Set Finger Vein Verification with Dynamic Snake Convolution and Graph Learning IEEE
Finger vein verification is a promising biometric modality for secure authentication because vascular patterns are internal, difficult to observe externally, and relatively resistant to presentation attacks. However, reliable verification remains challenging in open-set settings, where test identities are unseen during training and non-enrolled probes must be rejected at inference. This paper presents OpenVeinNet, a finger vein verification framework designed for cross-dataset and open-set evaluation. The proposed model combines Dynamic Snake Convolution with graph-based feature modelling. Dynamic Snake Convolution extracts local curvilinear and tubular vein structures using adaptive sampling, while the graph convolutional backbone models long-range topological relationships between vein regions. To improve the discriminative quality of the embedding space, we introduce a Centroid Angular Hybrid Loss, which jointly encourages intra-class compactness and inter-class angular separation for cosinesimilaritybased verification. Experiments are conducted on five public finger vein datasets: FV-300, MMCBNU, FV-USM, PolyU, and VERA. The method is evaluated using leaveonedatasetout training under both enrolmentbased unknownrejection and fullsubject verification protocols, and is compared with handcrafted and recent deep learning-based baselines. The results show that OpenVeinNet achieves strong cross-dataset generalisation, consistently low equal error rates, and competitive true accept rates at fixed false accept rate operating points. Ablation studies further confirm the individual and combined contributions of adaptive tubular feature extraction, graph-based relational modelling, and the proposed loss function. These findings indicate that explicitly modelling local vein geometry, global vascular relationships, and angularly compact embeddings is effective for openset finger vein verification.
comment: preprint: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science (T-BIOM)
☆ Pose-Anchored Optical Flow for Low-Latency Human Action Anticipation in Human-Robot Teaming IEEE
Human-robot interaction (HRI) requires robots to interpret human actions early in their execution in order to respond safely, efficiently, and naturally. However, many existing approaches to human action recognition rely either on sparse skeletal representations, which lack fine-grained motion cues, or dense optical flow, which can be computationally expensive for low-latency perception pipelines. In this paper, we propose PoseOFF, a pose-anchored optical flow representation that captures local motion information around human joints to support earlier human intent understanding. By conditioning motion feature extraction on human pose, PoseOFF encodes localised motion dynamics at semantically meaningful body locations, forming a structured motion representation that is explicitly aligned with human kinematics. We evaluate PoseOFF across multiple benchmark datasets and backbone architectures for action anticipation, demonstrating consistent improvements in recognition accuracy, particularly at early observation ratios. Our results show that PoseOFF enables models to achieve comparable or improved performance while observing less of the action sequence, highlighting its effectiveness for early prediction. Importantly, these gains are achieved without requiring full-frame motion processing, making the approach practical for real-time and resource-constrained settings. These findings suggest that pose-centred motion representations such as PoseOFF can enhance the ability of interactive robot systems to infer human actions earlier, supporting more responsive and anticipatory behaviour in human-robot interaction scenarios.
comment: Presented at the 35th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2026) in Kitakyushu, Japan
☆ SMART: MLLM-guided Temporal Alignment for Unifying Sign Language Recognition and Spotting
Continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) aims to recognize gloss sequences from unsegmented sign videos under weak sequence-level supervision. However, existing methods rely on sentence-level gloss annotations, providing limited temporal and semantic guidance for fine-grained representation learning. Conventional video-text alignment also requires large batch sizes, making it inefficient for memory-intensive sign language video training. In this work, we propose SMART, an MLLM-guided temporal alignment framework for joint sign recognition and spotting. SMART uses MLLMgenerated motion descriptions as auxiliary semantic cues and performs stable videotext alignment under small-batch training. To improve temporal representation learning, we introduce a Multi-Scale Temporal Adapter that models temporal interactions during transformer encoding. For dense temporal localization, SMART incorporates CSFormer, a CSLR-guided spotting module that injects recognition-derived gloss evidence into a boundary-aware spotting network. This unified framework enables CSLR features to benefit spotting, while spotting supervision complements weak CTC-based recognition. Experiments on four sign language benchmarks, including PHOENIX14-T, CSL-Daily, Large-scale KSL, and Disaster and Safety KSL datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of SMART across both recognition and spotting tasks.
☆ Semi-Supervised Adaptation of Vision-Language Models for Image Classification
Mohamed L. Mekhalfi, Mohamad M. Al Rahhal, Yakoub Bazi, Salah E. Khenfer, Mingdeng Shi, Hua Zou, Mansour Zuair
Vision-language models like CLIP have shown sig- nificant potential in handling natural images, yet their perfor- mance is often limited by the distinct characteristics of satellite imagery. While parameter-efficient adaptation techniques exist, their efficacy is frequently limited by the scarcity of annotated samples. In this letter, we propose Self-Evolutionary CLIP (SE- CLIP), a semi-supervised framework designed for recursive label mining in scene classification. The approach follows a dual-phase pipeline, where an initial warm-up on a few annotated seeds is followed by a recursive discovery phase that iteratively identifies high-confidence samples from unlabeled pools. To maintain the integrity of the evolving support set, we employ a class-balanced selection strategy that prevents the model from being dominated by easily learned categories. Results on the UCM and NWPU benchmarks indicate that SE-CLIP significantly outperforms existing semi-supervised approaches. The framework provides a viable solution for adapting VLMs to the remote sensing domain with minimal human intervention.
☆ Gaussian Splatting Underwater: A Controlled Cross-Regime Study
The underwater environment is challenging for 3D reconstruction, because particles suspended in the water scatter and diffuse light, turbidity varies, absorption depends on wavelength, and illumination is rarely uniform. Methods based on Gaussian splatting have generally been developed for conditions that allow good image quality, and have primarily been tested on relatively shallow water. This paper examines how well Gaussian splatting performs across publicly available underwater datasets representing different degrees of turbidity, loss of illumination, and colour attenuation, together with an industrial survey. Five systems with public code are run under one protocol, with shared poses, initialisation, budget, and evaluator, to establish their relative advantages, disadvantages, and limitations. What these methods can do turns out to depend more on the setup than on the architecture. Water clarity binds upstream of rendering, since structure-from-motion registers 99.5 \% of frames in clear water and 0.0 \% at 12 NTU. Illumination geometry decides whether a medium model helps at all: under an artificial light that moves with the camera, medium-blind splatting beats both medium-aware systems. On the survey the benchmark's photometric leader comes last, beaten on geometry by a restoration pre-pass in front of vanilla 3DGS---and none of it is visible in the scores the field reports. Scene builds, per-run configurations, and evaluation code are released at https://github.com/olayasturias/uw3dgs
☆ DeCO: Discriminative Evidence Composition for Fine-Grained Dataset Distillation
Chuixuan Fan, Guang Li, Shijie Wang, Dongzhan Zhou, Baoli Sun, Takahiro Ogawa, Miki Haseyama, Zhihui Wang
Dataset distillation compresses a large training set into a compact synthetic set while preserving its downstream utility. However, existing methods primarily preserve global image statistics and may overlook the localized evidence essential for fine-grained visual classification (FGVC), such as object parts, subtle textures, and region-specific structures. We formulate fine-grained dataset distillation as budgeted discriminative-evidence preservation and propose Discriminative Evidence Composition (DeCO). DeCO uses attention rollout from a pretrained TransFG teacher to identify informative patches, applies spatial diversification to reduce redundant coverage, and organizes the resulting regions into class-wise evidence banks. Multiple same-class regions are then packed into compact grid-composed images. The teacher is used only for dataset construction, whereas downstream students are trained with standard hard-label supervision without teacher logits. Experiments on CUB-200-2011, FGVC-Aircraft, and Stanford Cars show that DeCO consistently outperforms representative coreset and dataset-distillation baselines under different IPC budgets.
☆ 4DStreamCtrl: Interactive Video Generation with Online 4D Control
Generative video models now synthesize footage nearly indistinguishable from reality. Their promise as interactive tools hinges on fine-grained control of how objects and the camera move over time, yet each existing approach captures only part of this: camera-parameter methods steer the viewpoint but cannot move objects, 2D-trajectory methods act in the image plane and ignore depth and occlusion, and recent 3D methods add geometry but run only offline at a fixed length. In particular, none combines 3D-consistent control of both camera and objects with real-time, streaming generation. Here we show that camera motion, object trajectories, and depth can be unified into a single 3D point-track representation, from which one model performs joint camera and object control, depth editing, and motion transfer in a single forward pass. To learn this interface at scale, we mine in-the-wild video for 3D motion supervision, yielding OpenVidHD-Motion3D, and encode it with a lightweight Geometric Motion Head that plugs into a pretrained video diffusion model. Because this encoder is temporally separable, we distill the model into a causal streaming student that generates arbitrarily long video in four denoising steps at memory independent of length. This unified design surpasses prior camera-only, 2D, and offline-3D methods in motion-control precision while covering modalities they address only in isolation. 4DStreamCtrl runs at 20 FPS on a single high-end GPU for 480p video and stays temporally coherent over hundreds of frames, enabling, to our knowledge, interactive 4D-controllable streaming generation for the first time. More broadly, grounding generation in explicit 3D geometry with efficient causal inference points toward interactive world models with closed-loop spatiotemporal control, from controllable simulators to real-time visual imagination for embodied agents.
comment: 23 pages
☆ PAGS: Autofocusing Photoacoustic Tomography via Speed-of-Sound-Adaptive Gaussian Splatting
Photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) combines optical absorption contrast with acoustic detection for high-resolution deep-tissue imaging. A persistent challenge is that unknown speed-of-sound (SoS) heterogeneity changes acoustic time-of-flight, causing defocusing artifacts when reconstruction assumes a uniform SoS. Existing SoS-adaptive methods either rely on calibrated acoustic priors or optimize dense physical medium models, which becomes expensive and difficult to scale in 3D. We propose PAGS, a differentiable framework for blind autofocusing PACT via speed-of-sound-adaptive Gaussian splatting. PAGS represents the initial pressure field with sparse Gaussian photoacoustic (PA) sources and replaces explicit medium recovery with a compact anisotropic path-averaged SoS (ASoS) field parameterized by spherical harmonic probes. This latent propagation field directly controls source-to-transducer arrival-time alignment, while an analytic Gaussian acoustic projection maps the source representation to transducer signals efficiently. The resulting closed-loop signal-domain optimization jointly updates the Gaussian PA source parameters and the ASoS field from measured data, without calibrated SoS priors. Experiments on simulated and physical phantom data demonstrate improved reconstruction sharpness under heterogeneous acoustic media, robustness to sparse-view sampling, and computational benefits from the analytic Gaussian projection.
comment: 13 pages, 6 figures
☆ Automatic weld seam segmentation for industrial quality control: a comparison of RGB and polarimetric imaging with CNN and transformer architectures
Visual inspection of welded assemblies remains one of the least automated stages in many industrial production processes, still depending largely on the experience of human operators and thus subject to inter-operator variability; the manufacturing of special-purpose machinery cabins, the setting of this study, is one representative case. This work evaluates the feasibility of automatic weld seam segmentation from RGB and polarimetric imagery, comparing controlled laboratory acquisitions with images captured under real, uncontrolled conditions. Convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures and transformer-based architectures are benchmarked under a unified, threshold-independent protocol, training each CNN with three random seeds to separate genuine effects from seed noise. In controlled RGB conditions, CNN models reach a mean mask mAP50 of up to 0.87, but drop to 0.22-0.48 under uncontrolled acquisition, showing that the acquisition setup is a first-order component of the inspection system. Polarimetric imaging with alignment-preserving geometric augmentation localizes previously unseen welds with a mean mask mAP50 up to 0.93: on par with, rather than ahead of, the best controlled-RGB result, but reaching that accuracy on uncontrolled RGB without requiring acquisition control. The clearest architectural finding concerns viewpoint robustness. In-distribution, transformers and CNNs are broadly comparable; but under a test-time viewpoint shift, the transformer models, and RF-DETR in particular, retain high accuracy while every CNN collapses. The gap holds across three seeds and a resolution-matched control, pointing to architecture rather than training resolution. Within the CNN family, capacity brings no reliable in-distribution gain once seed variance is accounted for: small CNNs suffice for fixed viewpoints, transformers for variable ones.
☆ VGA-BenchV2: An Expanded Unified Benchmark and Multi-Model Framework for Evaluating Video Aesthetics and Generation Quality IJCAI 2026
Longteng Jiang, DanDan Zheng, Qianqian Qiao, Heng Huang, Huaye Wang, Yihang Bo, Bao Peng, Jingdong Chen, Jun Zhou, Xin Jin
We introduce VGA-BenchV2, an extended human-aligned benchmark and optimization framework for jointly evaluating and improving video generation quality and aesthetic value. Built upon VGA-Bench, VGA-BenchV2 preserves the original fine-grained taxonomy with two primary dimensions-Aesthetic and Generation-and 52 sub-dimensions. Guided by this taxonomy, we curate 1,016 diverse prompts and collect over 60,000 videos generated by 12 mainstream video generation models. More importantly, VGA-BenchV2 substantially expands human-labeled supervision by adding 36,000 task-level annotations, including 16,200 for aesthetic quality, 13,200 for aesthetic tagging, and 6,600 for generation quality, corresponding to 13.46x, 11.15x, and 1.55x scale-ups over VGA-Bench, respectively. Leveraging this enlarged annotation corpus, we develop a hybrid evaluator architecture consisting of VAQA-Net for continuous aesthetic scoring and two Qwen-based Large Vision-Language Model evaluators, VTag-Net and VGQA-Net, for aesthetic tagging and generation quality assessment. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong alignment with human judgments across diverse generation models. Beyond evaluation, VGA-BenchV2 further introduces an evaluation-to-optimization pipeline, where the learned aesthetic evaluator serves as a reward model for reinforcement learning-based generator fine-tuning. This closes the loop from benchmark construction and human supervision to automated evaluation and model optimization, enabling video generators to improve not only in realism but also in aesthetic quality and human preference alignment. Resources are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/BestiVictoryLab/VGA-Bench.
comment: IJCAI 2026
☆ Saliency-Depth Conditioning for Zero-Shot Segmentation of Communication-Tower Components in Cluttered UAV Imagery
Fine-grained segmentation of communication-tower components in UAV imagery is essential for automated inspection, yet task-specific models are hard to develop due to limited instance-level annotations. Zero-shot segmentation models offer a promising alternative, but in cluttered scenes, visually similar background structures interfere with component localization, causing missed instances and false positives. We propose a model-agnostic saliency-depth foreground-conditioning strategy combining appearance-based saliency with monocular relative depth to construct a coarse tower prior and suppress irrelevant content. We integrate this module with Grounded-SAM and SAM 3, yielding SD-Grounded-SAM and SD-SAM 3. SD-Grounded-SAM further applies geometric and depth-aware box refinement before mask generation, while SD-SAM 3 relies on SAM 3's internal setup. On TOW-300, a dataset of 340 communication-tower UAV images, our strategy improves both baselines: SD-SAM 3 achieves the strongest instance-segmentation performance, while SD-Grounded-SAM produces fewer false positives. Ablations confirm complementary gains from saliency, depth, and box refinement, improving robustness in cluttered scenes.
☆ Bootstrapping a 4D LiDAR Annotation Tool from Video Foundation Models ECCV 2026
Progress in 4D LiDAR segmentation is bottlenecked by data. Assigning temporally consistent labels across sparse point cloud sequences is costly and hard to scale, and every new task or domain tends to demand fresh dense annotation. This motivates a simple question of whether high-quality LiDAR training data can be produced automatically, without any human labeling. To this end, we introduce LiDAR-SAM2, a framework that turns a 2D video foundation model, SAM2, into a scalable source of supervision for the 4D LiDAR domain. On the data side, it automatically generates temporally coherent LiDAR-level labels from SAM2 video masks through multi-view projection and spatio-temporal aggregation. On the modeling side, a tailored modality interface and a two-stage learning objective adapt SAM2's video segmentation kernel to spatio-temporal LiDAR structure, so that a single click per object yields a consistent mask track across the sequence. Trained with no human LiDAR annotation, LiDAR-SAM2 produces semantic and panoptic labels on SemanticKITTI that approach the quality of full human annotation from only a few points, and models trained on these labels approach the performance of full ground-truth supervision. This positions LiDAR-SAM2 as a scalable labeling tool that substantially reduces the annotation burden for 3D and 4D scene understanding.
comment: ECCV 2026 Workshop
☆ AdaptiveEmbed: Sample-Adaptive Multi-Vector Representation for Multimodal Retrieval
Xinze Liu, Lei Yang, Dayan Wu, Hengjie Zhu, Zihao Zhang, Hanqi Wu, Tianzhu Hu, Peng Fu, Zheng Lin, Weiping Wang
Multi-vector representations have emerged as an effective paradigm for multimodal retrieval, representing each sample with multiple complementary embeddings to capture fine-grained cross-modal information. However, existing approaches typically employ a fixed representation capacity, assigning the same number of vectors to all samples regardless of their individual retrieval demands. Such a fixed-capacity formulation overlooks the fact that different samples may require different amounts of representation capacity for effective retrieval. In this work, we introduce \emph{Sample-Adaptive Multi-Vector Representation} (SAMVR), a new problem setting for multimodal retrieval that studies how multi-vector representation capacity can be allocated at the sample level. Under SAMVR, each sample is represented by a \emph{content-adaptive embedding set} (CAES), whose capacity is determined according to the sample-specific retrieval utility of additional representation vectors. To instantiate SAMVR, we propose \emph{AdaptiveEmbed}, a unified framework for learning sample-adaptive multi-vector representations. AdaptiveEmbed learns structured multi-vector representations through \emph{Multi-Group Contrastive Learning} (MGCL) with the symmetric \emph{set-to-set similarity} (SetSim), and further employs \emph{Utility Policy Optimization} (UPO) to determine sample-specific representation capacity via \emph{Marginal Utility Allocation} (MUA). Experiments across multimodal retrieval benchmarks involving image, text, video, and audio show that sample-adaptive capacity allocation achieves overall better retrieval performance than fixed-capacity multi-vector representations, validating the effectiveness of SAMVR for multimodal retrieval. These results establish SAMVR as a viable formulation for adaptive capacity allocation in multi-vector multimodal retrieval.
☆ Token-Oriented Semantic Communication with Pretrained Vision Transformers
Token communications realize the semantic communication principle at the granularity of transformer tokens, providing a promising direction for client--server collaborative inference in resource-constrained edge systems. However, directly transmitting token embeddings presents two practical challenges: substantial communication cost and limited interoperability across model-specific token embedding spaces. To address these challenges, we propose a \emph{token-oriented} semantic communication framework. In this framework, token-level task relevance determines which compressed image latents are transmitted, enabling token-granular transmission without directly transmitting token embeddings. The framework is modular, coordinating three pretrained components---a lightweight client-side vision transformer (ViT), a learned image compression (LIC) model, and a large server-side ViT---without end-to-end training. The key enabler is the one-to-one spatial alignment between ViT patch tokens and the LIC latent vectors, which allows token-level task relevance to directly determine which latent vectors are transmitted. Building on this alignment, token-aligned LIC selectively transmits task-relevant latents, layer-selective attention rollout estimates token relevance from a selected range of attention layers in a single forward pass, and surrogate token substitution adapts the frozen server model by optimizing a single learnable token. Experiments on ImageNet show that the proposed framework achieves a more favorable rate--accuracy trade-off than recent semantic communication schemes, hand-crafted codecs, and task-agnostic LIC models.
☆ PIVOT: A Multi-Trajectory Dataset and Testbed for Pose, Intrinsics, and Novel Viewpoint Evaluation in Real-World 3D Reconstruction
Neural radiance fields (NeRFs), 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), and related novel-view synthesis methods are commonly evaluated under capture and reconstruction conditions cleaner than those encountered by robots, drones, and autonomous systems. Benchmarks often rely on reconstruction-friendly trajectories, optimized camera poses and intrinsics, and held-out views sampled from trajectories represented during training. These assumptions can obscure performance with measured poses, reusable camera calibration, and structurally different camera paths.
We introduce PIVOT (Pose, Intrinsics and Viewpoint Oriented Testbed), a multi-trajectory dataset, processing pipeline, and evaluation framework for independently studying these factors. PIVOT captures each scene using diverse camera trajectories and retains, where available, both sensor-derived measured poses and COLMAP-optimized poses, together with calibrated and optimized camera intrinsics. It defines three benchmark families: (1) seen versus unseen trajectory novel-view generalization, (2) measured versus optimized pose sensitivity, and (3) calibrated versus optimized intrinsics sensitivity. We also introduce a directed pose-space Chamfer distance to quantify how well training poses cover an evaluation trajectory.
PIVOT v1 contains five real-world scenes captured with a DJI Mini 4 Pro and provides an open processing and Nerfstudio-based evaluation toolchain. Benchmark results show a consistent quality gap between held-out views on represented trajectories and unseen trajectories, as well as substantial sensitivity to pose source and camera intrinsics.
☆ Efficient Training with Foresight: Multi-Token Auxiliary Supervision for Autoregressive Image Generation ACM MM 2026
Autoregressive (AR) image generation has shown strong potential for scalable high-fidelity synthesis by modeling images as discrete token sequences. However, traditional next token prediction (NTP) continues to suffer from sparse and myopic supervision, insufficiently discriminative representations, and high training cost caused by dense computation over the full token sequence. To address these issues, we propose multi-token autoregressive (MTAR), a unified training framework that improves autoregressive image generation from three aspects: prediction objectives, representation regularization, and training efficiency. Specifically, MTAR introduces multi-token prediction (MTP) to alleviate the sparsity and myopia of traditional NTP by imposing joint supervision on multiple future tokens; employs token-level contrastive regularization (TCR) to explicitly enhance the separability of sampled token representations and thereby improve representation discriminability; and incorporates semantic dropping (SD) as a semantics-aware training acceleration strategy to reduce redundant computation on low-information tokens while preserving informative learning signals. All three components are applied only during training and introduce no additional overhead during autoregressive inference. On ImageNet, MTAR achieves a better balance between generation quality and training efficiency. Compared with LlamaGen, MTAR achieves up to 0.95 lower FID and 39\% faster training. Moreover, even with only 1/3 of the training iterations, it still attains performance comparable to or better than the baseline, substantially reducing training time.
comment: Accepted by ACM Multimedia 2026 (ACM MM 2026)
☆ GGSS: Geodesic-Gated Spherical Steering for Inference-Time Debiasing of Generative Vision-Language Models EMNLP 2026
Generative vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used in human-centered settings, yet they can produce demographically biased outputs even when images differ only in controlled attributes such as perceived race or gender. However, existing inference-time debiasers were largely designed for static embeddings or CLIP-like models rather than generative VLMs. We propose GGSS---Geodesic-Gated Spherical Steering---a norm-preserving intervention that discovers a counterfactual bias subspace on the unit hypersphere, steers visual tokens along geodesic arcs, and uses an adaptive gate to focus correction on tokens that carry stronger demographic signal. We evaluate four generative VLMs against ten adapted inference-time debiasing baselines and prompt-based mitigation under a single operating-point protocol across categorical, pairwise, and occupation-gender bias tests, while also measuring general visual-language capability. GGSS achieves the lowest average bias on all four models, significant on three of four backbones under paired permutation tests, while preserving MMStar accuracy within +/- 0.6 p.p. of the unsteered baseline. Code is available at https://github.com/dukesun99/GGSS.
comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2026
☆ Capacity Overflow: A Blind Spot for Backdoor Attacks in Vision MoE ECCV2026
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become a prevalent paradigm for scaling Vision Transformers efficiently. To ensure computational scalability and prevent expert overload, Vision MoE architectures employ a capacity-bounded token dispatch mechanism, where each expert's processing budget depends on the inference batch size. This work identifies this batch-dependent behavior as an overlooked attack surface, and proposes a stealthy supply-chain backdoor attack that exploits this property through a three-phase framework. First, we inject a backdoor into an early MoE layer. Second, we train a neutralizer in a deeper MoE layer that suppresses the backdoor under normal capacity. Third, we configure a batch-adaptive capacity factor that preserves high capacity for small batches while reducing it for large batches, naturally disabling the neutralizer via token overflow at deployment-scale batch sizes. The attack remains in dormant mode during small-batch security audits and enters activation mode during large-batch deployment. Experiments on V-MoE and Swin-MoE across ImageNet-100 and GTSRB demonstrate activation-mode attack success rates of 76-87% with dormant-mode ASR below 9%, while evading Neural Cleanse, STRIP, Fine-Pruning, and Activation Clustering. Our findings reveal a fundamental security risk arising from batch-dependent execution in scalable Vision MoE architectures.
comment: 17 pages, 3 figures, ECCV2026
☆ RSFusionDet: Underwater RGB-Sonar Multimodal Object Detection
Underwater unimodal object detection faces many challenges in sensor imaging, such as optical images limited by underwater noise and visible distance, and sonar images limited by less object structural information. While, optical images have rich object structural information, and sonar images are less affected by underwater noise and have a longer visible distance. Optical (RGB modality) and sonar (Sonar modality) images have complementary information underwater. In this paper, we create an RGB-Sonar multimodal object detection dataset, \textbf{R}GB-\textbf{S}onar \textbf{Fusion} (RSFusion) and propose evaluation metrics for the benchmark. And we propose the \textbf{R}GB-\textbf{S}onar \textbf{Fusion} \textbf{Det}ector (RSFusionDet) with a new RGB-Sonar multimodal object detection result expression for RGB-Sonar multimodal object detection. We analyze the features of RGB and Sonar modal information, and design a Cross-Attention Fusion (CAFusion) module to fuse RGB-Sonar spatial misalignment features and Object Matching Head (OMHead) with Loss (OMLoss) to match identical objects in RGB-Sonar modalities. Our RSFusionDet achieves 76.4/48.6 AP (RGB/Sonar) for object detection and 83.4 \(\text{F1-Score}_{match}\) for object matching, on RSFusion, which outperforms other object detection models. Compared with the DINO baseline, our method improves by 0.7/1.4 AP (RGB/Sonar) while simultaneously providing reliable cross-modal object matching. The code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/LEFTeyex/RSFusionDet.
comment: 18 pages, 13 figures, 18 tables
☆ FlashNormal: Detailed Surface Normal Estimation from Flash and No-Flash Images IEEE
High-quality surface normal estimation is preferred for detailed surface shape recovery and image editing. Existing single image-based methods, though being a practical setup, often struggle to recover fine surface details and are sensitive to inherent shape-reflectance ambiguity. While photometric stereo achieves high-fidelity surface normal estimation from images under varying lights, its applicability is strictly limited by requiring a multi-illumination capture setup. To this end, we propose FlashNormal, a diffusion-based surface normal estimator from flash/no-flash image pairs. While retaining high practicability on modern smartphones, our proposal takes advantage of flash-induced shading variations, and leverages curvature-guided detail enhancement strategy, improving surface detail recovery and mitigating shape-reflectance ambiguity effectively. To evaluate our proposed method, we further present EvalFlash, the first real-world flash/no-flash evaluation dataset containing 20 objects aligned with ground-truth surface normals for quantitative benchmarking. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FlashNormal over state-of-the-art single image-based methods and show a significant out-performance over flash/no-flash-based normal estimation method on EvalFlash.
comment: (c) 2026 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works
☆ Where to Look Matters: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Long-Video Understanding
Vision-language models (VLMs) have made substantial progress in long-video understanding, with standard backbone models typically answering questions from frames sampled across the full video. However, as videos become longer, the full-video context inevitably contains more question-irrelevant temporal content, which can distract the model from the evidence needed to answer a specific question. We empirically find that focusing the visual input on short annotated clue intervals containing question-relevant evidence consistently improves prediction accuracy across model scales compared with using the corresponding full videos, while requiring fewer input frames. Based on this finding, we introduce Clue-OPSD, a clue-privileged on-policy self-distillation framework for long-video understanding. During training, a full-video student learns from a self-teacher conditioned on the corresponding clue interval by aligning their next-token distributions along student-generated trajectories. Clue-OPSD thus uses clue intervals as privileged supervision without relying on ground-truth answer labels, while requiring no clue annotations or additional modules at inference time. Extensive experiments across multiple long-video understanding benchmarks and Qwen3.5 model scales demonstrate consistent improvements over the corresponding backbone models and strong performance against supervised post-training baselines.
comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, 5 tables
☆ CoRE: Weakly Supervised Coarse-to-Fine Risk Evidence Learning in Driving Videos
Perceived risk in driving evolves over time and may be supported by specific scene entities, yet supervision is typically limited to coarse video-level judgments. Learning \emph{when} supporting evidence emerges and \emph{which entities} support a risk predictor would ordinarily require costly temporal- and entity-level annotations. We introduce \textbf{CoRE}, a weakly supervised coarse-to-fine framework that learns fine-grained prediction support from coarse video supervision. CoRE first trains a video-level predictor and then freezes it. Structured interventions over candidate temporal regions or entity tracks measure how each candidate changes the coarse prediction, producing graded prediction-effect targets. These targets are distilled into a student that directly predicts temporal and entity support from the original video, without requiring interventions at inference. We evaluate this learning principle across three complementary settings: RISEE tests perceived-risk support from subjective clip-level judgments without temporal or entity-level risk annotations; DoTA provides independent temporal event annotations for evaluating weakly supervised traffic-anomaly localization; and UCF-Crime tests whether the same coarse-to-fine mechanism extends to a standard non-driving anomaly-detection benchmark. Across these settings, CoRE learns informative fine-grained support from coarse supervision, with strong temporal localization on DoTA and competitive performance on UCF-Crime. These results show that coarse video predictions can provide useful supervision for recovering the fine-grained evidence supporting them, without requiring corresponding fine-grained labels.
☆ GraftSR: Grafting Authentic Textures for Real-World Image Super-Resolution via Identical-Instance Guidance
Diffusion-based real-world image super-resolution (SR) achieves impressive perceptual quality but inherently suffers from severe texture hallucination. To overcome this limitation, we propose GraftSR, a texture-reference-guided generative SR framework that leverages reference images of the identical instance to anchor the restoration of authentic textures. However, severe spatial misalignment between low-quality inputs and their references poses significant challenges, often leading to ambiguous transfer targets and background feature leakage. To address these issues, GraftSR employs a novel dual-mask reference guidance mechanism that systematically decouples the cross-view texture injection process. By explicitly isolating what authentic textures to extract from the reference and precisely localizing where to apply them within the target, GraftSR achieves robust texture transfer without relying on brittle spatial alignment. Furthermore, to bridge the critical gap in appropriate training data, we construct TexRefSR-141K, the first large-scale dataset providing high-quality reference tuples equipped with complementary spatial masks. Extensive experiments on our newly established benchmark, TexRefSR-Eval, demonstrate that GraftSR sets a new state-of-the-art. Notably, it reduces LPIPS by 20.2\% over top-performing baselines, achieving superior reference-faithful restoration.
comment: 15 pages, 12 figures
☆ Not All Attention Heads Contribute to Critical Visual Token Selection: Head-Aware Pruning Matters More
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have exhibited impressive performance across diverse visual scenarios. However, this success comes at the cost of explosive growth in visual tokens, which imposes substantial memory and computational overhead during inference, ultimately increasing latency. To improve VLM inference efficiency, a typical class of visual token pruning methods estimates token importance by aggregating attention scores across all heads in the pruning layer of the Large Language Model (LLM) backbone and prunes tokens based on aggregated scores. However, in this paper, we reveal a compelling phenomenon: the capability to pinpoint critical visual tokens is concentrated within a small fraction of heads. Aggregation exclusively on these heads can improve task performance. Inspired by this observation, we propose ProViP, a training-free progressive visual token pruning framework. ProViP first removes redundant visual tokens based on the embedding similarity of input tokens before reasoning of the LLM backbone, and then further prunes tokens during reasoning via head-aware pruning. Experiments demonstrate that ProViP delivers outstanding task performance and inference efficiency. For instance, when applied to LLaVA-1.5-7B, ProViP retains 95.9% of the original performance and achieves 1.62x inference speedup under an 88.9% pruning ratio.
☆ V-Link: Recovering Lost Visual Representations in Action DiT for Vision-Language-Action Models
Yehao Lu, Jiarui Yang, Yuning Su, Yufeng Xie, Yu Zhong, Yazhou Zhang, Haiyu Lan, Kaixiang Lu, Peiwen Lin, Chuang Wang, Zequn Qin, Enyu Li, Xi Li
Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide a scalable path toward generalist robotic manipulation by integrating visual perception, language understanding, and continuous action control. However, we reveal a critical limitation of VLA architectures: the action expert has limited access to the 3D geometric and 2D semantic information available in VLM features. This accessibility gap weakens perceptual grounding and limits performance on fine-grained robotic manipulation. To address this issue, we propose V-Link, which explicitly recovers visual representations during the vision-language (VL) to action (A) feature transfer. Specifically, V-Link learns complementary Spatial and Semantic Query representations within the VLM and injects them into Action DiT through asymmetric pathways. Semantic Queries complement the original VLM image tokens, whereas Spatial Queries provide dedicated geometric conditioning for spatially grounded action generation. Across LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin 2.0, our V-Link improves the average success rate over base model GR00T N1.6 by +1.9%, +31.2%, and +18.8%, respectively. On the AGIBOT A3 Ultra, V-Link further achieves gains of +20% and +24% on two real-world humanoid tasks.
☆ MulVec: Fine-Grained Role-Aware Matching for Training-Free Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval
Zihao Zhang, Dayan Wu, Xinze Liu, Hengjie Zhu, Yiliang Zhu, Ding Wang, Peng Fu, Zheng Lin, Weiping Wang
Training-free zero-shot composed image retrieval finds a target image in a gallery from a reference image and a text edit without learning from task-specific image triplets. Existing methods typically describe the target as a whole and match this description with a global image representation. This global matching can mix different semantic cues and lose fine- grained details. We propose MULVEC, a role-aware method whose compiler produces a structured query record that is mapped to four retrieval roles: Global describes the full target, Desired states what should appear, Preserve states what should remain, and Forbidden states what should disappear. Frozen encoders map the query to one target description vector and role-specific probe vectors, while each candidate is represented by one global visual vector and a bank of local visual vectors. The retrieval roles then use this shared evidence for their respective purposes, and a fixed weighted sum of their scores ranks the entire gallery in a single retrieval pass. Across CIRCO, CIRR, and FashionIQ and three backbone scales, MULVEC improves CIRCO mAP@5 by up to 23.0% over the strongest compared method and gives the best CIRR and FashionIQ results in our comparison.
☆ WAVE: Reversing the Guidance Hierarchy for Coarse-to-Fine Guided Depth Super-Resolution
Guided depth super-resolution (GDSR) typically extracts RGB guidance features through convolutional hierarchies, inheriting their fine-to-coarse bias. Thus, low-level spatial cues surface in early layers, leaving the deeper layers to suppress those that do not correspond to true depth boundaries, which risks artifacts and blurred edges. The same fine-to-coarse bias persists in semantics-based methods that consume low-level tokens early and global tokens late. We present WAVE, which introduces a multi-level discrete wavelet transform (ML-DWT) as an explicit and interpretable feature-control mechanism, enabling a coarse-to-fine reconstruction by consuming sub-bands and semantic tokens in reverse of their generation order. WAVE further exploits these sub-bands to treat high- and low-frequency content separately, filtering at its source the misleading RGB color and texture cues that often lead to blurred boundaries and artifacts, offering an intuitive alternative to the suppression learned implicitly by an opaque network. WAVE separates structure and detail reconstruction into dedicated modules that: i) model interactions within and across wavelet sub-bands, depth features, and semantic priors, ii) apply semantic gating to the high-frequency bands, and iii) fuse modalities through an invertible coupling mechanism that prevents collapse onto a single modality. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that WAVE matches or outperforms existing methods, with the largest gains at high upsampling factors, where low-resolution depth contains the least structure.
☆ PointRL: Learning Point-Level Vision-Language Grounding from Verifiable Annotation Evidence
Vision-language models (VLMs) increasingly rely on point coordinates as a compact and executable interface for visual grounding in GUI interaction, robotic manipulation, and interactive visual systems. However, learning reliable pointing behavior remains difficult because the supervision space is inherently non-unique: many coordinates may be valid within the same target region, while multi-instance instructions require target coverage, count consistency, and duplicate suppression. This work presents PointRL, a verifiable reinforcement learning framework that learns point-level grounding from existing heterogeneous annotation evidence. PointRL converts bounding boxes, masks, and instance labels into pointing instructions, while retaining their target supports, instance membership, and set constraints as hidden verifier evidence, i.e., annotations kept outside the prompt and used by a deterministic checker to score predictions. The proposed reward evaluates parseability, point validity, instance coverage, cardinality consistency, and redundant or missing predictions. On PointArena, PointRL improves the overall accuracy of Qwen3.5-4B from 56.11% to 65.58%. Further evaluations on RoboSpatial, BLINK, and Ref-Adv show same-backbone gains on the evaluated external benchmarks, suggesting that verifiable point-level feedback may benefit spatial grounding in these settings.
☆ OpenCVL: An Open, Diverse, and Large-Scale Dataset for Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization
Fine-grained Cross-View Localization (CVL) estimates the precise position and orientation of a ground-level image by aligning it with geo-referenced aerial imagery, offering a scalable alternative to Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) in challenging urban environments. Existing datasets rely on data collected with high-end sensor suites, which inherently limit image diversity and scalability. While in-the-wild images are abundant, their noisy geo-tags make them unsuitable for reliable evaluation. To bridge this gap, we introduce OpenCVL, a large-scale, diverse, and open dataset containing 617,388 ground-aerial image pairs spanning 41 cities across four European countries. All images are sourced from permissive platforms, ensuring long-term accessibility and supporting open and reproducible research. The training set combines images captured with high-end sensors with diverse in-the-wild imagery. We further develop a data curation framework that filters and corrects pose annotations to construct reliable in-the-wild evaluation data. In addition, OpenCVL includes dedicated cross-area and snowy test sets to assess generalization and robustness. Experiments with a state-of-the-art CVL model on OpenCVL show that incorporating noisy in-the-wild data consistently improves performance on clean test sets, suggesting a promising direction for scaling CVL with diverse real-world imagery.
☆ Hierarchical MoE for Multi-Modal ILD Diagnosis
Alec K. Peltekian, Gorkem Durak, Halil Ertugrul Aktas, Carrie Lynn Richardson, Mary Carns, Kathleen Aren, GR Scott Budinger, Anthony J. Esposito, Alexander Misharin, Alok Nidhi Choudhary, Ankit Agrawal, Ulas Bagci
Mixture-of-experts (MoE) models combine specialized predictors under learned routing, offering a principled mechanism for leveraging heterogeneity in medical data. We present a hierarchical multimodal MoE for interstitial lung disease (ILD) classification that integrates a frozen, pre-trained imaging expert with structured electronic health records (EHR) via two-stage gating. A modality-level gate assigns patient-specific weights to imaging and EHR predictions, while a sub-gating module decomposes the EHR branch into clinically defined feature groups with learned, group-specific contributions. This design preserves stable imaging representations while enabling input-dependent clinical weighting and explicit EHR specialization. Under strict patient-level cross-validation, the model achieved the highest mean AUC among the evaluated methods (0.8750 +- 0.0443), compared with 0.8646 for imaging-only REN and 0.7685 for SwinUNETR. The framework extends interpretability across anatomical regions, imaging--EHR utilization, and clinically defined EHR feature groups.
comment: 11 pages, 2 figures
☆ What Do Medical Vision-Language Models Learn in Radiology? Transfer, Alignment, and Source-Proxy Leakage Under Distribution Shift
Medical vision-language models (VLMs) can appear reliable in-domain while failing when acquisition domain, paired supervision, or evaluation protocol changes. We study this failure mode as a representation-level blind spot relevant to epistemic intelligence, without claiming a formal estimator of epistemic uncertainty. Using NIH ChestXray14 and CheXpert, we first isolate source-only cross-dataset visual transfer from unsupervised domain-adaptation diagnostics. Using PadChest and OpenI, we then evaluate multimodal alignment under strict pair-index retrieval and quantify metadata-derived source-proxy information retained in frozen embeddings. Self-supervised visual initialization improves NIH-to-CheXpert transfer over supervised ImageNet initialization in matched ResNet-18 comparisons, whereas adversarial adaptation is useful only in a narrow regime and becomes unstable as adversarial pressure increases. Multimodal exact-pair retrieval remains low under external OpenI stress testing, and source-proxy information remains recoverable from learned representations. Qualitative nearest-neighbor and Grad-CAM analyses show clinically plausible cross-dataset structure and thoracic attention patterns in many cases, while device-heavy and false-positive cases remain ambiguous. Auxiliary architecture checks are task-dependent and do not support a universal backbone ranking. Overall, the study shows that apparent competence under a single protocol can conceal transfer, alignment, and shortcut-related failure modes, motivating stress-tested evaluation of medical VLMs under distribution shift.
♻ ☆ MMEmb-R1: Reasoning-Enhanced Multimodal Embedding with Pair-Aware Selection and Adaptive Control EMNLP 2026
Yuchi Wang, Dingkang Yang, Haiyang Yu, Weikang Bian, Jiefeng Long, Xiao Liang, Chao Feng, Hongsheng Li
MLLMs have been successfully applied to multimodal embedding tasks, yet their generative reasoning capabilities remain underutilized. Directly incorporating chain-of-thought reasoning into embedding learning introduces two fundamental challenges. First, structural misalignment between instance-level reasoning and pairwise contrastive supervision may lead to shortcut behavior, where the model merely learns the superficial format of reasoning. Second, reasoning is not universally beneficial for embedding tasks. Enforcing reasoning for all inputs may introduce unnecessary computation and latency, and can even obscure salient semantic signals for simple cases. To address these issues, we propose MMEmb-R1, an adaptive reasoning-based multimodal embedding framework. We formulate reasoning as a latent variable and introduce pair-aware reasoning selection that employs counterfactual intervention to identify reasoning paths beneficial for query-target alignment. Furthermore, we adopt reinforcement learning to selectively invoke reasoning only when necessary. Experiments on the MMEB-V2 benchmark demonstrate that our model achieves a score of 71.2 with only 4B parameters, establishing a new state-of-the-art while significantly reducing reasoning overhead and inference latency.
comment: EMNLP 2026 Main
♻ ☆ FlowMimic: Mask-free Visual Editing and Generation with Pixel-pair Warped Flow Field for Online Video Editing Data Generation and Modality Mimicry
In line with the prevailing direction of vision research, we explore the integration of both generation and editing capabilities for video and image modalities within a single model. Current approaches to collecting video editing data typically depend on labour-intensive, time-consuming curated procedures--involving object mask annotation, the use of error-introducing pair synthesis via I2V model and ControlNet-like guidance, and VLM-based quality filtering or refinement--and demonstrate limited task scalability. As a result, the diversity of editing tasks remains substantially narrower than that available for image editing models. We develop a pixel-pair temporal warped flow field that can directly generate corresponding video editing samples in real time from image editing samples, and we demonstrate across multiple levels of video editing tasks that a model can learn video editing using only such data. We regard the image modality as a particular form of the video modality. Accordingly, we design a modality mimic generation loss and a modality mimic editing loss to relatively align the capabilities--and thereby the output distributions--of the two modalities through mutual imitation. Moreover, language-based visual editing entails the comprehension of the editing instruction and the reference visual content, the localization of the region corresponding to that instruction within the reference visual contents, and the modification of that region alone. Existing approaches predominantly rely on external aids, such as fine-tuning an additional MLLM or explicitly supplying a mask sequence as auxiliary input during inference. In contrast, we aspire for the model to internalize this capability. To that end, we introduce sense-related tasks--for instance, referring expression segmentation--along with corresponding editing-region-aware latent-level loss and attention-level loss.
comment: Due to file size constraints, the figures in the arXiv file have been heavily lossy-compressed. Please visit the uncompressed file at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/FlowMimic/Uncompressed/blob/main/main.pdf
♻ ☆ Beyond Visual Memory: Mechanistic Diagnostics of Latent Visual Reasoning
Jiawei Guo, Yu Chen, Xiang Wang, Shuai Li, Xinpei Zhao, Huaxing Liu, Shuai Dong, Feifei Zhai, Yu Zhou
Recent latent visual reasoning methods achieve substantial gains by inserting continuous latent tokens into multimodal language models. These gains are commonly attributed to the tokens encoding visual evidence; recent analyses, however, reveal a paradox: the tokens are loosely tied to the image and contribute little to the answer. Critically, these analyses treat latent tokens as a single unit, obscuring the source of the gains. We therefore decompose latent tokens into three testable components: latent slots, boundary markers, and format, and develop a state-of-the-art method as a probe under favorable conditions. Across six method-stage settings and four perception-heavy benchmarks, latent slots fail every prediction of the visual-memory account. Strikingly, retaining only the boundary markers preserves 78 to 100% of the gain in several settings, while the model attends to the image more narrowly at latent positions than at answer positions. These results do not support slot contents as recoverable visual memory; much of the benefit is instead associated with marker and format control, together with visual-attention routing. At matched accuracy, methods can still rely on markedly different mechanisms shaped by training supervision. Latent visual reasoning thus needs evaluation not only by accuracy but by what the model actually relies on.
♻ ☆ OVO-S-Bench: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Streaming Spatial Intelligence in Multimodal LLMs EMNLP 2026
Multimodal agents in robotics, AR, and autonomous driving must reason about places and layouts from continuous egocentric streams, often using evidence outside the current view. Existing benchmarks either evaluate offline over full videos or target events rather than spatial structure. We introduce OVO-S-Bench, a fully human-annotated benchmark for streaming spatial intelligence, comprising 1,680 questions over 348 source videos. Annotation involves 12 trained annotators (each also serving as a blind cross-reviewer) across roughly 804 person-hours of multi-round quality assurance. Each question carries a query timestamp and an evidence interval, and at evaluation, the model sees only the prefix preceding the query. Questions span four levels of increasing abstraction: instantaneous egocentric perception, spatiotemporal context tracking, generative spatial reasoning, and allocentric spatial mapping. Across 38 proprietary and open-source MLLMs, Gemini-3.1-Pro trails human experts evaluated under the same prefix-access protocol by 33 points (59.2 vs. 92.2), with allocentric spatial mapping as the dominant bottleneck. Notably, streaming and spatially fine-tuned MLLMs underperform their own backbones. We further find that chain-of-thought reasoning amplifies spatial errors when ungrounded in the stream. By exposing these limitations, OVO-S-Bench establishes a demanding testbed for next-generation streaming spatial MLLMs.
comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2026 Main Conference. 55 pages, 12 figures, 20 tables. Project page: https://internlm.github.io/OVO-S-Bench/
♻ ☆ Rendering Novel Views of MRI Using 3D Gaussian Splatting ECCV 2026
Robin Y. Park, Mark C. Eid, Rhydian Windsor, Amir Jamaludin, Ana I. L. Namburete, João F. Henriques, Andrew Zisserman
The objective of this paper is to improve radiological gradings measured on MRIs of spines, by resampling scans so that the new view planes are better aligned with the target anatomy than the original sparse images. To this end, we adapt 3D Gaussian Splatting to form a volumetric reconstruction starting from non-aligned MRIs to render imaging planes aligned with the anatomy relevant for clinical evaluation. The novel view plane is optimal for diagnostic radiological grading of the target anatomy, whereas the original MRI is not. The resampled scans are then used to predict ordinal severity grades of localised stenosis conditions in spinal MRIs. We compare our method against (1) Voxel Interpolation, which takes the average of inverse-distance weighted nearest neighbour intensities for each target coordinate, and (2) Cubic B-spline resampling, which estimates target points using a smooth piecewise-cubic function built from the source points. Experiments show that across all stenosis conditions, resampled scans using Gaussian Splatting produce more accurate stenosis gradings compared to the raw scans which do not include the complete anatomy in-plane, as well as images resampled using Voxel Interpolation or Cubic B-spline resampling.
comment: Spotlight at AI4M3D workshop at ECCV 2026
♻ ☆ Reward Score Matching: Unifying Reward-based Fine-tuning for Flow and Diffusion Models SP
Reward-based fine-tuning steers a pretrained diffusion or flow-based generative model toward higher-reward samples while remaining close to the pretrained model. Although existing methods are derived from different perspectives, we show that many can be written under a common framework, which we call reward score matching (RSM). Under this view, alignment becomes score matching against a value-guided target, and the main differences across methods reduce to the construction of the value-guidance estimator and the effective optimization strength across timesteps. This unification clarifies the bias-variance-compute tradeoffs of existing designs, and distinguishes core optimization components from auxiliary mechanisms that add complexity without clear benefit. Guided by this perspective, we develop simpler, more efficient redesigns across representative differentiable and black-box reward alignment tasks. Overall, RSM turns a seemingly fragmented collection of reward-based fine-tuning methods into a smaller, more interpretable, and more actionable design space. Code is available at https://github.com/jaylee2000/rsm.
comment: 50 pages, 15 figures. Best Paper Award at SPIGM workshop, ICML 2026
♻ ☆ Low-Latency Event-Based Object Detection with Spatially-Sparse Linear Attention ECCV
Event cameras provide sequential visual data with spatial sparsity and high temporal resolution, making them attractive for low-latency object detection. Existing asynchronous event-based neural networks exploit this low-latency advantage by updating predictions event by event, but still suffer from two bottlenecks: recurrent architectures are difficult to train efficiently on long sequences, and improving accuracy often increases per-event computation and latency. Linear attention is appealing because it enables parallel training and recurrent inference. However, its dense state updates make per-event computation scale with the state size, yielding a poor accuracy-efficiency trade-off for object detection, where accurate localization requires fine-grained spatial states. The key challenge is therefore to introduce sparse state activation that exploits the spatial sparsity of events while preserving efficient parallel training. We propose Spatially-Sparse Linear Attention (SSLA), which introduces a mixture-of-spaces state decomposition and a scatter-compute-gather training procedure, enabling state-level sparsity as well as training parallelism. Building on SSLA, we develop an end-to-end asynchronous linear attention model, SSLA-Det, for low-latency event-based object detection. On Gen1 and N-Caltech101, SSLA-Det achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among asynchronous methods, reaching 0.375 mAP and 0.515 mAP, respectively, while reducing per-event computation by over 20 times compared with the strongest prior asynchronous baseline, demonstrating the potential of linear attention for low-latency event-based vision.
comment: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2026
♻ ☆ MObyGaze: a film dataset of multimodal objectification densely annotated by experts
Julie Tores, Elisa Ancarani, Lucile Sassatelli, Hui-Yin Wu, Clement Bergman, Lea Andolfi, Victor Ecrement, Remy Sun, Frederic Precioso, Thierry Devars, Magali Guaresi, Virginie Julliard, Sarah Lecossais
Characterizing and quantifying gender representation disparities in audiovisual storytelling contents is necessary to grasp how stereotypes may perpetuate on screen. In this article, we consider the high-level construct of objectification and introduce a new AI task to the ML community: characterize and quantify complex multimodal (visual, speech, audio) temporal patterns producing objectification in films. Building on film studies and psychology, we define the construct of objectification in a structured thesaurus involving 5 sub-constructs manifesting through 11 concepts spanning 3 modalities. We introduce the Multimodal Objectifying Gaze (MObyGaze) dataset, made of 20 movies annotated densely by experts for objectification levels and concepts over freely delimited segments: it amounts to 6072 segments over 43 hours of video with fine-grained localization and categorization. We formulate different learning tasks, propose and investigate best ways to learn from the diversity of labels among a low number of annotators, and benchmark recent vision, text and audio models, showing the feasibility of the task. We make our code and our dataset available to the community and described in the Croissant format: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MObyGaze-F600/.
♻ ☆ LaGen: Towards Autoregressive LiDAR Scene Generation ECCV 2026
Sizhuo Zhou, Xiaosong Jia, Fanrui Zhang, Junjie Li, Juyong Zhang, Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun, Songbur Wong, Junqi You, Junchi Yan
Generative world models for autonomous driving (AD) are of great value in applications such as data augmentation, closed-loop simulation, and safety-critical scenario evaluation. Unlike the widely studied image modality, in this work we explore generative world models for LiDAR data. Existing generation methods for LiDAR predominantly focus on single frame generation or lack the capacity for interactive simulation, while existing prediction approaches require multiple frames of historical input and can only deterministically predict multiple frames at once. Both paradigms fail to support long-horizon interactive generation. To this end, we introduce \textbf{LaGen}, which, to the best of our knowledge is the first autoregressive framework capable of generating long-horizon LiDAR scenes in a frame-by-frame, interactive manner. LaGen is able to take a single-frame input as a starting point and effectively utilize bounding box information as conditions to generate high-fidelity 4D scene. In addition, we introduce a scene decoupling estimation module to enhance the model's interactive generation capability for object-level content, as well as a noise modulation module to mitigate error accumulation during long-horizon generation. We extensively evaluate LaGen's performance in controlled data generation and long-horizon scene generation on the nuScenes dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that LaGen achieves state-of-the-art performance, especially on later frames. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/szzhou88/LaGen.
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026
♻ ☆ DAV-GSWT: Diffusion-Active-View Sampling for Data-Efficient Gaussian Splatting Wang Tiles
The emergence of 3D Gaussian Splatting has fundamentally redefined the capabilities of photorealistic neural rendering by enabling high-throughput synthesis of complex environments. While procedural methods like Wang Tiles have recently been integrated to facilitate the generation of expansive landscapes, these systems typically remain constrained by a reliance on densely sampled exemplar reconstructions. We present DAV-GSWT, a data-efficient framework that leverages diffusion priors and active view sampling to synthesize high-fidelity Gaussian Splatting Wang Tiles from minimal input observations. By integrating a hierarchical uncertainty quantification mechanism with generative diffusion models, our approach autonomously identifies the most informative viewpoints while hallucinating missing structural details to ensure seamless tile transitions. Experimental results indicate that our system significantly reduces the required data volume while maintaining the visual integrity and interactive performance necessary for large-scale virtual environments.
comment: 16 pages, 7 figures
♻ ☆ Semantics-Aware Hierarchical Consensus Learning for Remote Sensing Image Classification
Deep learning has become increasingly important in remote sensing image classification due to its ability to extract semantic information from complex data. Classification tasks often include predefined label hierarchies that represent the semantic relationships among classes. However, these hierarchies are frequently overlooked, and most approaches focus only on fine- grained classification schemes. In this paper, we present a novel Semantics-Aware Hierarchical Consensus (SAHC) approach that integrates hierarchical-level-specific classification heads within a deep network architecture and combines their output through cross-level probability projectors. Direct and projected predictions are fused into a geometric consensus distribution, which is used for self-consistent training and optional hierarchy-aware inference. This mechanism acts as a geometric ensemble that leverages the inherent structure of the hierarchical classification task. The projectors are initialized from the user-defined taxonomy (i.e. the hierarchical label structure), and can be adaptively refined during optimization. The proposed SAHC method is evaluated on two benchmark datasets with different degrees of hierarchical complexity on different tasks, considering varying spectral and spatial resolutions. Experimental results show both the effectiveness of the proposed approach in guiding network learning and the robustness of the hierarchical consensus for remote sensing image classification tasks. The source code will be released at https://github.com/rslab-unitrento/sahc.
comment: 18 pages, 8 figures
♻ ☆ Reliability analysis for BraTS-GoAT segmentation: a controlled robustness study of deep-ensemble uncertainty MICCAI 2026
Deep networks segment brain tumours accurately in-distribution, but can fail silently when the input differs from their training data. That risk is central to clinical deployment and is the premise of the BraTS-GoAT generalizability task. We ask not only how well a model segments, but whether its uncertainty knows when it is wrong. On BraTS-GoAT (Task 3) we train a 5-fold cross-validated nnU-Net baseline (one held-out prediction per case) and a 3-seed deep ensemble. Both are evaluated for calibration and error detection on a per-region relevant mask, aggregated per case. In-distribution the 3-seed ensemble improves modestly over the already strong single model on the same held-out split, with the clearest gain in calibration. The separation appears under shift. In a controlled robustness study using graded synthetic corruptions as a proxy for acquisition shift, the single model's confidence stays flat while its accuracy and calibration degrade. Inter-member disagreement instead rises steeply, about a quarter to a third above the clean condition, several times the single model's response. On the official validation leaderboard the 5-fold ensemble of those folds attains whole-tumour Dice 0.87. The generalization gap is concentrated on the harder regions, with a characteristic failure of missing small, satellite lesions on unseen cohorts. In the synthetic study, disagreement among the 3-seed members is a more sensitive case-level indicator of acquisition shift than single-model confidence. Its per-voxel error localisation weakens as severity grows. The contribution is a rigorous, honest reliability comparison rather than a claim that any one uncertainty method dominates.
comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. Conditionally accepted at MICCAI 2026 BraTS-GoAT challenge workshop. Code: https://github.com/riyashet-hds/brats-goat-reliability
♻ ☆ CityGuard: Graph-Aware Private Descriptors for Bias-Resilient Identity Search Across Urban Cameras
City-scale person re-identification across distributed cameras must handle severe appearance changes from viewpoint, occlusion, and domain shift while complying with data protection rules that prevent sharing raw imagery. We introduce CityGuard, a topology-aware transformer for privacy-preserving identity retrieval in decentralized surveillance. The framework integrates three components. A dispersion-adaptive metric learner adjusts instance-level margins according to feature spread, increasing intra-class compactness. Spatially conditioned attention injects coarse geometry, such as GPS or deployment floor plans, into graph-based self-attention to enable projectively consistent cross-view alignment using only coarse geometric priors without requiring survey-grade calibration. Differentially private embedding maps are coupled with compact approximate indexes to support secure and cost-efficient deployment. Together these designs produce descriptors robust to viewpoint variation, occlusion, and domain shifts, and they enable a tunable balance between privacy and utility under rigorous differential-privacy accounting. Experiments on Market-1501 and additional public benchmarks, complemented by database-scale retrieval studies, show consistent gains in retrieval precision and query throughput over strong baselines, confirming the practicality of the framework for privacy-critical urban identity matching.
comment: 36 pages, 12 figures
♻ ☆ Minimalist Visual Inertial Odometry IEEE
Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO), which is critical to mobile robot navigation, uses cameras with a large number of pixels. Capturing and processing camera images requires significant resources. This work presents a minimalist approach to planar odometry, showing that just four visual sensors (pixels) and an IMU provide robust motion estimation for differential-drive robots. Our key insight is that four downward-facing photodiodes that sense the world through optical Gabor masks produce signals that encode speed. Based on this, we jointly optimize the mask parameters alongside a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) using a physically-grounded simulator. The resulting model decodes speed from the four photodiode measurements. Pairing these estimates with an IMU's angular speed yields a continuous planar trajectory. We validate our approach with a prototype sensor mounted on a differential drive robot. Across diverse indoor and outdoor terrains, our system closely tracks the reference trajectories without any real-world fine-tuning. Our work shows that minimalist sensing enables efficient and accurate planar odometry.
comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication
♻ ☆ TASE: Truncation-Aware Semantic Embeddings for 3D Scene Understanding and Editing
High-fidelity semantic 3D scene representations are crucial for numerous applications, including robotics, autonomous driving, and simulation. Beyond this, the ability to edit such representations enables developers to adapt these applications more easily to specific target scenarios. Current approaches provide limited support for controllable editing. We introduce TASE, a method that projects pretrained 2D semantic features into a truncation-aware embedding space to enable flexible 3D scene editing. Our method explicitly optimizes a feature space in which progressively reducing feature channels yields increasingly abstract semantic representations, while retaining more channels preserves fine-grained detail. Additionally, we improve multi-view consistency of the features using a scale- and translation-equivariance loss. The resulting truncation-aware embedding space enables text-driven edits to 3D scenes, providing explicit control over how strongly edits adhere to the original scene content and allowing more substantial modifications than prior methods. Moreover, we propose a finetuning stage for the editing diffusion model to mitigate artifacts caused by geometric changes. Experimental results demonstrate competitive performance in 3D scene editing, substantially outperforming prior methods on edits involving large geometric modifications.
comment: Code: https://github.com/boschresearch/TASE
♻ ☆ Compact Feed-Forward 3D Gaussians via Saliency-Guided Primitive Merging
3D scene reconstruction, modeling, and rendering are highly relevant for numerous tasks, and 3D Gaussian splatting has become a standard choice in this context. Its feed-forward variants provide fast reconstruction from sparse input views but often produce per-pixel primitives, leading to highly redundant and thus inefficient representations. We present a structure-aware merging pipeline that takes per-pixel primitives from any feed-forward method and consolidates them into a compact, content-adaptive Gaussian set while largely retaining visual quality at just $\frac{1}{20}^\text{th}$ of the Gaussians of a per-pixel method. We group spatially coherent Gaussians of similar appearance into variable-size clusters via adaptive superpixel segmentation guided by a saliency map, which allocates fine segments to textured regions and coarse segments to homogeneous areas. We compress each cluster into a compact latent representation through a learned encoder, then match and consolidate representations across views based on geometric overlap and feature similarity via a learned merger. A level-of-detail decoder then produces the final Gaussians at a controllable resolution, enabling a flexible quality-efficiency trade-off at inference. As a post-processing module, the pipeline is backbone-agnostic, leveraging the strengths of existing feed-forward methods. This leads to better and more robust quality than achieved by previous approaches that target a reduction in primitive count, while providing a highly compact representation, that can be rendered efficiently.
♻ ☆ HandMvNet: Real-Time 3D Hand Pose Estimation Using Multi-View Cross-Attention Fusion
In this work, we present HandMvNet, one of the first real-time method designed to estimate 3D hand motion and shape from multi-view camera images. Unlike previous monocular approaches, which suffer from scale-depth ambiguities, our method ensures consistent and accurate absolute hand poses and shapes. This is achieved through a multi-view attention-fusion mechanism that effectively integrates features from multiple viewpoints. In contrast to previous multi-view methods, our approach eliminates the need for camera parameters as input to learn 3D geometry. HandMvNet also achieves a substantial reduction in inference time while delivering competitive results compared to the state-of-the-art methods, making it suitable for real-time applications. Evaluated on publicly available datasets, HandMvNet qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms previous methods under identical settings. Code is available at github.com/pyxploiter/handmvnet.
comment: Published at VISAPP 2025. 8 pages, 7 figures
♻ ☆ STATrack: A Target-Aware Fully Spiking Neural Network for Efficient UAV Tracking
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), characterized by their event-driven computation and low power consumption, have shown great potential for energy-efficient visual tracking on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, existing SNN-based trackers often rely on costly event cameras, which limits their deployment on standard RGB-camera UAV platforms. To address this limitation, we propose STATrack, a fully spiking neural network framework for UAV visual tracking using only RGB inputs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore fully spiking neural networks for RGB-based UAV visual tracking. Considering the challenge of preserving fine-grained target information in deep spiking representations under a limited number of time steps, we introduce Adaptive Mutual Information Maximization (AMIM). AMIM maximizes the statistical dependency between target-centered templates and their deep spiking representations, encouraging the spiking backbone to learn representations that better distinguish the target from surrounding backgrounds. We further develop a sample-difficulty-aware dynamic weighting strategy that adaptively adjusts the mutual-information constraint according to the relative localization difficulty of each training batch. Extensive experiments on four widely used UAV tracking benchmarks demonstrate that STATrack achieves state-of-the-art tracking performance with low theoretical energy consumption, highlighting its potential for energy-constrained UAV applications. Code is released at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/STATrack.
♻ ☆ Memory-V2V: Memory-Augmented Video-to-Video Diffusion for Consistent Multi-Turn Editing ECCV 2026
Video-to-video diffusion models achieve impressive single-turn editing performance, but practical editing workflows are inherently iterative. When edits are applied sequentially, existing models treat each turn independently, often causing previously generated regions to drift or be overwritten. We identify this failure mode as the problem of cross-turn consistency in multi-turn video editing. We introduce Memory-V2V, a memory-augmented framework that treats prior edits as structured constraints for subsequent generations. Memory-V2V maintains an external memory of previous outputs, retrieves task-relevant edits, and integrates them through relevance-aware tokenization and adaptive compression. These technical ingredients enable scalable conditioning without linear growth in computation. We demonstrate Memory-V2V on iterative video novel view synthesis and text-guided long video editing. Memory-V2V substantially enhances cross-turn consistency while maintaining visual quality, outperforming strong baselines with modest overhead.
comment: 38 pages, 22 figures, ECCV 2026, Project page: https://dohunlee1.github.io/MemoryV2V
♻ ☆ A Comprehensive Study for Edge Detection: Ideal-Prior Guidance Learning, High-Precision Architecture, and Better Distinguishability Evaluation Benchmark
Image edge detection (ED) requires specialized architectures, reliable supervision, and rigorous evaluation criteria to ensure accurate localization. In this work, we present a framework for high-precision ED that jointly addresses architectural design, data supervision, and evaluation consistency. We propose SDPED, a compact ED model built upon Cascaded Skipping Density Blocks (CSDB), motivated by a task-adaptive architectural transfer from image super-resolution. By re-engineering texture-oriented structures for ED, SDPED effectively differentiates textures from edges while preserving fine spatial precision. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets (BRIND, UDED, MDBD, and BIPED2) demonstrate consistent performance improvements, particularly in Average Precision (AP), with gains of up to 22.5% on MDBD and 11.8% on BIPED2. In addition, we introduce an ideal-prior guidance strategy that incorporates noiseless data into training by treating labels as noise-free samples, providing a practical means to mitigate the subjectivity and noise inherent in human annotations. To enable better distinguishability and resolution-independent evaluation, we further study the criterion for assessing ED models, which suggests a stricter 1-pixel error tolerance distance. Overall, this work offers a coherent solution for high-precision ED and provides insights applicable to precision-oriented modeling in low-level and soft-computing-based vision tasks. Codes can be found on https://github.com/Hao-B-Shu/SDPED.
comment: 41 pages
♻ ☆ PreResQ-R1: Response-Preference Disentangled Ranking-and-Scoring Reinforcement Optimization for Robust Visual Quality Assessment EMNLP 2026
Visual Quality Assessment (QA) seeks to predict human perceptual judgments of visual fidelity. While recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promise in reasoning about image and video quality, existing approaches mainly rely on supervised fine-tuning or rank-only objectives, resulting in shallow reasoning, poor score calibration, and limited cross-domain generalization. We propose PreResQ-R1, a Preference-Response Disentangled Reinforcement Learning framework that unifies absolute score regression and relative ranking consistency within a single reasoning-driven optimization scheme. Unlike prior QA methods, PreResQ-R1 introduces a dual-branch reward formulation that separately models intra-sample response coherence and inter-sample preference alignment, optimized via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). This design encourages fine-grained, stable, and interpretable chain-of-thought reasoning about perceptual quality. To extend beyond static imagery, we further design a global-temporal and local-spatial data flow strategy for Video Quality Assessment. Remarkably, with reinforcement fine-tuning on only 6K images and 28K videos, PreResQ-R1 achieves state-of-the-art results across 10 IQA and 5 VQA benchmarks under both SRCC and PLCC metrics, surpassing by margins of 5.30% and textbf2.15% in IQA task, respectively. Beyond quantitative gains, it produces human-aligned reasoning traces that reveal the perceptual cues underlying quality judgments.
comment: 27 pages, 16 figures, Accepted as EMNLP 2026 conference paper
♻ ☆ Synergistic Modality-and-Slice Memory Framework for Cross-Modal 3D Brain Tumor Segmentation
The 3D multi-modal brain tumor segmentation is critical to multi-modal healthcare, and it requires accurate identification of distinct internal anatomical subregions. While the recent prompt-based segmentation paradigms enable interactive experiences for clinicians, existing methods ignore cross-modal correlations and rely on labor-intensive category-specific prompts, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. To address these issues, we propose the MSM-Seg, a synergistic framework for multi-modal brain tumor segmentation. The MSM-Seg introduces a dual-memory segmentation paradigm that synergistically integrates multi-modal and inter-slice information with an efficient category-agnostic prompt for brain tumor understanding. To this end, we first devise a modality-and-slice memory attention (MSMA) to exploit the complex cross-modal correlations and spatial-slice dependencies among the input scans. \cz{Then, we propose a multi-scale category-agnostic prompt encoder (MCP-Encoder) to provide whole tumor region guidance for decoding.} Moreover, we devise a modality-adaptive fusion decoder (MF-Decoder) that leverages the complementary decoding information across different modalities to improve segmentation accuracy. Extensive experiments on different MRI datasets demonstrate that our MSM-Seg framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in multi-modal metastases and glioma tumor segmentation. The code is available at https://github.com/xq141839/MSM-Seg.
comment: Accepted by TMM
♻ ☆ 3DGS-HPC: Distractor-free 3D Gaussian Splatting with Hybrid Patch-wise Classification ICML 2026
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated remarkable performance in novel view synthesis and 3D scene reconstruction, but its quality often degrades in real-world environments due to transient distractors, such as moving objects and varying shadows. Existing methods commonly introduce semantic priors from pre-trained vision models either to group pixels into coherent regions or to define perceptual error metrics. However, semantic grouping is often misaligned with the binary static/transient distinction, while perceptual features can be fragile under appearance perturbations introduced during 3DGS optimization. We propose 3DGS-HPC, a framework that addresses these issues by combining two complementary principles: a patch-wise classification strategy that leverages local spatial consistency for robust region-level decisions, and a hybrid classification metric that adaptively integrates photometric and perceptual cues for more reliable separation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and robustness of our method in mitigating distractors to improve 3DGS-based novel view synthesis. Our project page is https://cnhaox.github.io/3DGS-HPC/ .
comment: Accepted at ICML 2026
♻ ☆ IRIS: Visual-Semantic Binding for Forgery-Resistant Watermarking of Diffusion Images
Most in-generation diffusion watermarks embed patterns independent of the image that carries them, and attackers transplant the marks onto images the generator did not produce, resulting in forgery. Binding the mark to visual semantics prevents such transplantation, yet existing bindings anchor to a proxy image rather than the image they mark. Realizing visual-semantic binding inside generation faces two challenges. The mark derives from the image itself yet enters the sampling trajectory before that image exists, and may itself shift the semantics it binds. The binding also meets opposite sensitivity demands, breaking under semantic change while holding through common processing. We present IRIS, a training-free watermarking scheme that embeds an Intrinsic Ring Identifier from Semantics. IRIS reads a content code from the non-watermarked generated image, derives a one-time ring from the code and a secret key, returns to the final low-noise steps of the same trajectory and blends the ring in, after the semantics it binds are settled. To meet the opposite sensitivity demands, the code is read through a canonicalization shared between embedding and detection, holding through common distortions and mild regeneration while flipping under semantic change. Detection recomputes the ring from the query image and the key alone, and the mark therefore fails on a foreign or spliced image, with acceptance tracking semantic displacement. On three prompt datasets IRIS detects reliably and stays close to its same-seed non-watermarked counterpart, a fidelity prior in-generation marks do not reach. While forgeries transfer fixed-pattern marks and regeneration strips post-hoc marks, IRIS alone among the compared marks withstands both.
comment: Substantial revisions
♻ ☆ RAVE: Re-Allocating Visual Attention in Large Multimodal Models
Large multimodal models (LMMs) inherit the self-attention mechanism of pretrained language backbones, yet standard attention can exhibit suboptimal allocation, including cross-modal misallocation between textual and visual evidence and intra-visual imbalance among visual tokens. We propose RAVE (Re-Allocating Visual Attention), a lightweight pair-gating mechanism that adds a learned query-key bias to pre-softmax attention scores over visual keys, derived from pre-RoPE query and key features. RAVE requires no architectural modification to the backbone and can be trained end-to-end with the rest of the model. Across a suite of multimodal benchmarks, RAVE improves over standard attention by an average of 3 points, with the largest gains on perception-intensive tasks -- including multilingual OCR, chart understanding, document VQA, and scene text VQA -- where accurate visual grounding is critical.
♻ ☆ DELE-w0.5: Inferring Action from Future Latent State for Robotic Manipulation
World-Action Models (WAMs) build robot control on video-generation backbones, which jointly predict dense future visual trajectories and robot actions. We argue that video generation is an unnecessary intermediate objective for world-action modeling. For robotic manipulation, the goal of a world model is not to reproduce how the world looks at every intermediate moment, but to predict the state that the world will reach after an action is executed. The intermediate frames only describe the visual transition between physical states, which consumes substantial model capacity and computation, but do not directly specify the physical outcome that the robot action is intended to produce. In this paper, we propose DELE-w0.5, which infers robot actions from predicted future states without relying on video generation. Concretely, DELE-w0.5 infers the action sequence from its corresponding compact future latent state. The future latent state captures the action-relevant physical outcome of robot interaction and serves as an explicit bridge between world modeling and action generation. The core design principle of DELE-w0.5 is to model how the physical world changes under robot actions, rather than how its visual appearance evolves frame by frame. This formulation removes the high-dimensional visual redundancy introduced by dense video representations, and it therefore enables cheaper training and low-latency inference. Across 480 real-robot trials on four long-horizon manipulation tasks, our DELE-w0.5 achieves the best performance among all compared policies, attaining 62.5 overall full-task success and 81.3 macro ordered-stage progress, outperforming the strongest baseline by 47.5 and 30.7 percentage points, respectively.
♻ ☆ Phase-Consistent Magnetic Spectral Learning for Multi-View Clustering
Unsupervised multi-view clustering (MVC) aims to partition data into meaningful groups by leveraging complementary information from multiple views without labels, yet a central challenge is to obtain a reliable shared structural signal to guide representation learning and cross-view alignment under view discrepancy and noise. Existing approaches often rely on magnitude-only affinities or early pseudo targets, which can be unstable when different views induce relations with comparable strengths but contradictory directional tendencies, thereby distorting the global spectral geometry and degrading clustering. In this paper, we propose Phase-Consistent Magnetic Spectral Learning for MVC: we derive a confidence-directed cross-view flow from anchor assignments, encode it as a phase term, and combine it with a nonnegative magnitude backbone to form a complex-valued magnetic affinity, extract a stable shared spectral signal via a Hermitian magnetic Laplacian, and use it as structured self-supervision to guide unsupervised multi-view representation learning and clustering. To obtain robust inputs for spectral extraction at scale, we construct a compact shared structure with anchor-based high-order consensus modeling and apply a lightweight refinement to suppress noisy or inconsistent relations. Experiments on ten public benchmarks show that our method achieves the best result on 22 of 30 dataset-metric combinations and ranks among the top two on 27 combinations, demonstrating strong and broadly consistent performance against classical and recent MVC baselines.
comment: Updated author list and revised manuscript
♻ ☆ Three-Way Open-Set Detection for Robust Autonomous Navigation
Autonomous navigation in complex scenes requires reliable perception across scenarios that the model did not encounter during its training. Along its route, an autonomous framework encounters objects it was trained to recognize, obstacles it has never seen, and background structures that resemble objects. Each of the three must be handled differently. To tackle this, existing open-set and out-of-distribution detectors discard low-confidence detections with an objectness threshold and only then test the rest for novelty. By forcing a single threshold like this they introduce a trade-off where a low threshold adds background clutter to the detected objects, while a high one may discard needed novel objects. We instead formulate open-set detection as a three-way classification of each detection into known object, unknown object, or background, computed post hoc from the outputs of a pretrained detector. We develop methods for domain generalization and for domain adaptation, evaluated across different detector families and benchmarks up to a combined semantic and covariate domain shift. To test the framework in a navigation context, we conduct simulations parameterized by the measured detection performance. The results show that the three-way decision yields safer and more efficient missions than binary alternatives.
♻ ☆ Lost in Motion: Vision Language Models Fail the Dynamic Gauges Test
The digital transformation of industrial manufacturing increasingly relies on the ability of autonomous robots to interact with legacy infrastructure, particularly analog gauges. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have the potential to provide a general solution for gauge reading and have already shown good performance in instrument recognition. However, performing accurate, real-time gauge readings is a more complex task. This paper evaluates state-of-the-art models, including versions from the GPT-5 (5.4 Thinking and 5.3 Instant) and Gemini 3 (Pro and Flash) families, against a set of simple but realistic dynamic gauge reading scenarios. To facilitate this evaluation, we introduce a novel dataset comprising video sequences of three instruments of different gauge types: circular, linear, and Vernier, under diverse motion and speed profiles. Our findings indicate that the evaluated frontier VLMs, under our specific testing conditions, exhibit a limited ability to interpret needle trajectories and scale semantics, failing to provide the traceability and reliability needed for safety-critical monitoring. The results demonstrate that these models have not yet achieved the performance necessary to be classified as trustworthy synthetic instruments under existing IEEE and ISO standards.
♻ ☆ A Simulator-Grounded Framework For Constructing Verifiable Muscle-Grounded QA From 3D Tongue Meshes (extended version)
Existing articulatory corpora based on real-time MRI and electromagnetic articulography capture tongue shape and motion but do not provide traceable labels for the muscle-driven process that generated an observed configuration. We introduce a simulator-grounded data-construction framework and instantiate it as 3DTongueQA. Controlled 11-dimensional muscle activations are mapped to fixed-topology tongue meshes with the ArtiSynth Badin finite-element model, converted into structured biomechanical records, and rendered as deterministic QA on muscle state, geometry, and target-directed change. We screen 295,157 configurations, retain 295,115 valid meshes, and construct 891,156 QA records per language. Language naturalization changes only surface form and is verified against the source records; English and Korean instantiations demonstrate construction-level portability. A swappable SpiralNet++--Qwen3-8B baseline reaches 62.9 $\pm$ 9.2 Muscle EM, 74.0 $\pm$ 0.2 Value Accuracy, and 65.9 $\pm$ 4.7 Direction EM, while mismatching the paired mesh reduces Muscle EM to 2.2; a dataset-leakage-controlled anchor-held-out model retains 80.4--98.6\% of the full-inventory scores on unseen anchors. Task-specific structured readouts further reach 88.7 $\pm$ 0.7 Muscle EM and 93.3 $\pm$ 1.0 Direction EM. These complementary results show that the constructed supervision supports both efficient structured prediction and heterogeneous natural-language QA rather than being tied to a particular decoder architecture.
comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, 15 tables
♻ ☆ Advancements in Content-Based Image Retrieval: A Comprehensive Survey of Relevance Feedback Techniques
Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems have emerged as crucial tools in the field of computer vision, allowing for image search based on visual content rather than relying solely on metadata. This survey paper presents a comprehensive overview of CBIR, emphasizing its role in object detection and its potential to identify and retrieve visually similar images based on content features. Challenges faced by CBIR systems, including the semantic gap and scalability, are discussed, along with potential solutions. It elaborates on the semantic gap, which arises from the disparity between low-level features and high-level semantic concepts, and explores approaches to bridge this gap. One notable solution is the integration of relevance feedback (RF), empowering users to provide feedback on retrieved images and refine search results iteratively. The survey encompasses long-term and short-term learning approaches that leverage RF for enhanced CBIR accuracy and relevance. These methods focus on weight optimization and the utilization of active learning algorithms to select samples for training classifiers. Furthermore, the paper investigates machine learning techniques and the utilization of deep learning and convolutional neural networks to enhance CBIR performance. This survey paper plays a significant role in advancing the understanding of CBIR and RF techniques. It guides researchers and practitioners in comprehending existing methodologies, challenges, and potential solutions while fostering knowledge dissemination and identifying research gaps. By addressing future research directions, it sets the stage for advancements in CBIR that will enhance retrieval accuracy, usability, and effectiveness in various application domains.
comment: 7 pages, 2 figures
♻ ☆ FORMSpoT: Revealing Fine-Scale Forest Disturbances from Nation-Wide 1.5 m Forest Canopy Height Time Series
Martin Schwartz, Fajwel Fogel, Nikola Besic, Damien Robert, Louis Geist, Jean-Pierre Renaud, Jean-Matthieu Monnet, Clemens Mosig, Cédric Vega, Alexandre d'Aspremont, Loic Landrieu, Philippe Ciais
Current large-scale satellite-based forest disturbance monitoring systems operate at 10-30~m resolution, too coarse to detect changes at the scale of individual trees and resulting in a systematic underestimation of forest disturbances. Here, we introduce FORMSpoT (Forest Mapping with SPOT Time series), a decade-long (2014-2024), country-scale mapping of forest canopy height at 1.5 m resolution over France, together with FORMSpoT-$Δ$, annual disturbance polygons derived from height differences in the FORMSpoT time series. Canopy heights were derived from annual SPOT-6/7 composites using a hierarchical transformer model (PVTv2) trained on high-resolution airborne laser scanning (ALS) data. To enable robust change detection, we developed a post-processing pipeline combining co-registration and spatio-temporal total variation denoising. We find that (1) the French disturbance regime is dominated by small events. Sub-100 m$^{2}$ disturbances alone represent 72% of all events, and disturbances below 0.1 ha account for 97% of events and 39% of the disturbed area. These events are largely missed by Sentinel-1/2 and Landsat-based products. (2) Validated against successive ALS revisits across 19 sites and 5,087 NFI plot revisits, FORMSpoT-$Δ$ provides reliable detection (F1>0.8) above 100 m$^{2}$ while retaining sensitivity to finer events that coarser products do not capture. (3) At the national scale, FORMSpoT-$Δ$ resolves contrasted disturbance regimes, from clear-cut-dominated dynamics in maritime pine plantations to diffuse, smaller disturbance events in mountain forests, and captures their temporal dynamics, including the salvage-logging signature of the 2017-2022 bark beetle crisis in northeastern France
♻ ☆ HEDGE: A Calibrated Ensemble for A/H Recognition ECCV
Ambivalence and hesitancy (A/H) undermine digital behaviour-change interventions, and recognizing them automatically from video is the goal of the ABAW A/H challenge on the BAH dataset. We describe HEDGE (Hesitancy/Ambivalence Estimation via Distribution-aware, Generalized Ensembling), our system for the 11th edition of the challenge: a calibrated, equal-weight ensemble of three fusion models over frozen face, audio, text, and pose embeddings, which reaches 0.7358 macro-F1 on the public test set. We also submitted four variants of this system to this year's private test (30 new participants): a fixed-threshold version, a single individual model, and an ensemble with cache-personalization test-time adaptation (TTA). The plain calibrated ensemble scored 0.7361 macro-F1 on the private test, closely matching our public-test estimate, and the TTA variant scored highest of all five at 0.7367 macro-F1, our official challenge result (team AIWELL, rank 5 of 12), even though TTA showed no benefit on the public test. The single individual model dropped to 0.6759, far more than any ensemble variant. We explain both results: TTA only has distribution shift to correct on the private test, which the public test lacks, and a text-only linear probe reaches 0.716 macro-F1 (within noise of the full system, correlated at 0.91 in its errors), so the ensemble's robustness to new participants comes from the same modality redundancy that makes single, less-diversified models comparatively brittle. We additionally report a systematic study of more than 60 further controlled experiments (modality, backbone, loss, and adaptation ablations) that did not improve on this system, and an explainability analysis showing the transcript's delivery style dominates the signal while the extractable non-verbal ceiling saturates near 0.60 macro-F1.
comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, ECCV workshops
♻ ☆ Bidirectional Temporal Dynamics Modeling for EEG-based Driving Fatigue Recognition
Yip Tin Po, Jianming Wang, Yutao Miao, Jiayan Zhang, Yunxu Zhao, Xiaomin Ouyang, Zhihong Li, Nevin L. Zhang
Driving fatigue is a major contributor to traffic accidents and poses a serious threat to road safety. Electroencephalography (EEG) provides a direct measurement of neural activity, yet EEG-based fatigue recognition is hindered by strong non-stationarity and asymmetric neural dynamics. To address these challenges, we propose DeltaGateNet, a novel framework that explicitly captures Bidirectional temporal dynamics for EEG-based driving fatigue recognition. Our key idea is to introduce a Bidirectional Delta module that decomposes first-order temporal differences into positive and negative components, enabling explicit modeling of asymmetric neural activation and suppression patterns. Furthermore, we design a Gated Temporal Convolution module to capture long-term temporal dependencies for each EEG channel using depthwise temporal convolutions and residual learning, preserving channel-wise specificity while enhancing temporal representation robustness. Extensive experiments conducted under both intra-subject and inter-subject evaluation settings on the public SEED-VIG and SADT driving fatigue datasets demonstrate that DeltaGateNet consistently outperforms existing methods. On SEED-VIG, DeltaGateNet achieves an intra-subject accuracy of 81.89% and an inter-subject accuracy of 55.55%. On the balanced SADT 2022 dataset, it attains intra-subject and inter-subject accuracies of 96.81% and 83.21%, respectively, while on the unbalanced SADT 2952 dataset, it achieves 96.84% intra-subject and 84.49% inter-subject accuracy. These results indicate that explicitly modeling Bidirectional temporal dynamics yields robust and generalizable performance under varying subject and class-distribution conditions.
♻ ☆ Boosting Reasoning in Large Multimodal Models via Activation Replay CVPR 2026
Recently, Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective approach to incentivizing reasoning capability in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), while the underlying mechanisms behind this post-training paradigm are poorly understood. We begin by exploring how input activations are affected by RLVR through the perspective of logit lens. Our systematic investigations across multiple post-trained LMMs suggest that RLVR shifts low-entropy activations unexpectedly, while high-entropy ones are less affected. We further demonstrate that such phenomena are associated with LMM reasoning by controlled experiments, suggesting a potentially beneficial role of modulating low-entropy activations. To this end, we propose Activation Replay, a novel simple yet effective training-free approach that boosts multimodal reasoning of post-trained LMMs without requiring expensive policy optimization. Our design involves manipulation of visual tokens at test time, replaying low-entropy activations from the input context of base LMMs to regulating the RLVR counterparts. Activation Replay triggers better reasoning across diverse scenarios, including mathematics, o3-like visual agents, and video reasoning. We further show that Activation Replay boosts Pass@K and mitigates narrower reasoning coverage of RLVR. Our design is compared against alternative choices, such as replaying high-entropy activations instead of low-entropy ones, or direct cross-model intervention instead of manipulating input tokens, demonstrating the superiority of our implementation. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/latentcraft/replay.
comment: CVPR 2026
♻ ☆ Sample Margin-Aware Recalibration of Temperature Scaling
Recent advances in deep learning have significantly improved predictive accuracy. However, modern neural networks remain systematically overconfident, posing risks for deployment in safety-critical scenarios. Current post-hoc calibration methods face a fundamental dilemma: global approaches like Temperature Scaling apply uniform adjustments across all samples, introducing high bias despite computational efficiency, while more expressive methods that operate on full logit distributions suffer from high variance due to noisy high-dimensional inputs and insufficient validation data. To address these challenges, we propose Sample Margin-Aware Recalibration of Temperature (SMART), a lightweight, data-efficient recalibration method that precisely scales logits based on the margin between the top two logits -- termed the logit gap. Specifically, the logit gap serves as a denoised, scalar signal directly tied to decision boundary uncertainty, providing a robust indicator that avoids the noise inherent in high-dimensional logit spaces while preserving model prediction invariance. Meanwhile, SMART employs a novel soft-binned Expected Calibration Error (SoftECE) objective that balances model bias and variance through adaptive binning, enabling stable parameter updates even with extremely limited calibration data. Extensive evaluations across diverse datasets and architectures demonstrate that SMART achieves state-of-the-art calibration performance even with substantially fewer parameters compared to existing parametric methods, offering a principled, robust, and highly efficient solution for practical uncertainty quantification in neural network predictions. The source code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SMART-8B11.
♻ ☆ GTPred: Benchmarking MLLMs for Interpretable Geo-localization and Time-of-capture Prediction
Geo-localization aims to infer the geographic location where an image was captured using observable visual evidence. Traditional methods achieve impressive results through large-scale training on massive image corpora. With the emergence of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), recent studies have explored their applications in geo-localization, benefiting from improved accuracy and interpretability. However, existing benchmarks largely ignore the temporal information inherent in images, which can further constrain the location. To bridge this gap, we introduce GTPred, a novel benchmark for geo-temporal prediction. GTPred comprises 370 globally distributed images spanning over 120 years. We evaluate MLLM predictions by jointly considering year and hierarchical location sequence matching, and further assess intermediate reasoning chains using meticulously annotated ground-truth reasoning processes. Experiments on 8 proprietary and 7 open-source MLLMs show that, despite strong visual perception, current models remain limited in world knowledge and geo-temporal reasoning. Results also demonstrate that incorporating temporal information significantly enhances location inference performance.
♻ ☆ Performance uncertainty in medical image analysis: a large-scale investigation of confidence intervals
Pascaline André, Charles Heitz, Evangelia Christodoulou, Annika Reinke, Carole H. Sudre, Michela Antonelli, Patrick Godau, M. Jorge Cardoso, Antoine Gilson, Sophie Tezenas du Montcel, Gaël Varoquaux, Lena Maier-Hein, Olivier Colliot
Performance uncertainty quantification is essential for reliable validation and eventual clinical translation of medical imaging artificial intelligence (AI). Confidence intervals (CIs) play a central role in this process by indicating how precise a reported performance estimate is. Yet, due to the limited amount of work examining CI behavior in medical imaging, the community remains largely unaware of how many diverse CI methods exist and how they behave in specific settings. The purpose of this study is to close this gap. To this end, we conducted a large-scale empirical analysis across a total of 24 segmentation and classification tasks, using 19 trained models per task group, a broad spectrum of commonly used performance metrics, multiple aggregation strategies, and several widely adopted CI methods. Reliability (coverage) and precision (width) of each CI method were estimated across all settings to characterize their dependence on study characteristics. Our analysis revealed five principal findings: 1) the sample size required for reliable CIs varies from a few dozens to several thousands of cases depending on study parameters; 2) CI behavior is strongly affected by the choice of performance metric; 3) aggregation strategy substantially influences the reliability of CIs, e.g. they require more observations for macro than for micro; 4) the machine learning problem (segmentation versus classification) modulates these effects; 5) different CI methods are not equally reliable and precise depending on the use case. Finally, we derived practical implications of this study in the form of a decision tree which shall prove useful to the community. This paves the way for future consensus guidelines on reporting performance uncertainty.
♻ ☆ Learning to Detect Unseen Jailbreak Attacks in Large Vision-Language Models
Despite extensive alignment efforts, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. To mitigate these risks, existing detection methods are essential, yet they face two major challenges: generalization and accuracy. While learning-based methods trained on specific attacks fail to generalize to unseen attacks, learning-free methods based on hand-crafted heuristics suffer from limited accuracy and reduced efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose Learning to Detect (LoD), a learnable framework that eliminates the need for any attack data or hand-crafted heuristics. LoD operates by first extracting layer-wise safety representations directly from the model's internal activations using Multi-modal Safety Concept Activation Vectors classifiers, and then converting the high-dimensional representations into a one-dimensional anomaly score for detection via a Safety Pattern Auto-Encoder. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LoD consistently achieves state-of-the-art detection performance (AUROC) across diverse unseen jailbreak attacks on multiple LVLMs, while also significantly improving efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/ShuangLiangX/Learning-to-Detect.
comment: 17 pages; Previously this version appeared as arXiv:2510.15430 which was submitted as a new work by accident
♻ ☆ ST-Lite: Training-Free KV Cache Compression with Spatio-Trajectory Guidance for Long-Horizon GUI Agents EMNLP 2026
Training-free KV cache compression is essential for deploying vision-language GUI agents under memory and latency constraints, yet existing methods are designed for generic language workloads and ignore the distinctive structure of GUI interaction traces. We characterize three GUI-specific workload properties--high inter-frame visual redundancy, extremely small UI-element spatial footprints, and near-uniform cross-layer attention sparsity--that cause existing schemes to retain as few as 39% of oracle-important KV pairs at the standard 20% budget. To address this, we propose ST-Lite, a training-free compression scheme whose three components each target one property: Trajectory-aware Semantic Gating (TSG) filters redundant historical frames, Component-centric Spatial Saliency (CSS) preserves fine-grained element boundaries, and a flat per-layer budget avoids hierarchical misallocation. Across seven GUI benchmarks and two backbones in the deployment-relevant 10%-40% window, ST-Lite consistently outperforms all existing compression baselines, matching or exceeding Full Cache task accuracy on the primary backbone at the 20% budget while delivering up to 2.35x decoding speedup at fivefold compression. The implementation is available at https://github.com/94wen94/ST-Lite.
comment: Accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2026. Camera-ready version. 37 pages
♻ ☆ SPARK-SAM: Learning How to Prompt and Respond for Infrared Small Target Segmentation
Promptable segmentation models provide a reusable interface, but direct transfer to automatic infrared small-target segmentation (IRSTD) exposes a mismatch between spatial prompts and target-domain mask responses. In a diagnostic using target-covering loose-box prompts deterministically derived from test reference masks, the best official SAM2.1 results are only 4.69%, 1.64%, and 2.28% IoU on NUAA-SIRST, NUDT-SIRST, and IRSTD-1K. We introduce SPARK-SAM (Self-Prompt Adaptation with Response Knowledge for SAM), which learns target-domain response knowledge and conditions the decoder through an image-conditioned joint self-prompt state. Training combines benchmark-mask supervision with reliability-aware response guidance. SPARK-SAM achieves 75.78%, 86.49%, and 68.34% IoU with 0.726M additional parameters, ranking first on two benchmarks among 14 retrained SAM variants and adaptations evaluated as automatic image-to-mask methods. The staged IRSTD-1K diagnostic shows that response adaptation reaches most of the final IoU before the predicted points acquire reliable target grounding. Prompt supervision aligns the predicted prompt candidates with target locations, and frozen-weight interventions measure output sensitivity to the joint self-prompt state. Matched ablations show consistent accuracy gains from response guidance and high-resolution prompt refinement across all three datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/Sakauma/SPARK-SAM.
comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables
♻ ☆ Training-Free Interaction-Aligned Visual Token Pruning for Efficient Embodied Manipulation
Jintao Cheng, Weibin Li, Haozhe Wang, Gang Wang, Yipu Zhang, Xiaoyu Tang, Jin Wu, Xieyuanli Chen, Yunhui Liu, Wei Zhang
Efficient visual representation is a central image-processing challenge in embodied manipulation, where policies repeatedly process dense visual-token sequences during closed-loop control. Existing methods rank or prune tokens using semantic relevance, VLM attention, cross-frame redundancy, or motion in the action space. These signals may discard task-relevant regions when instruction-related appearance and observed image motion are not yet spatially aligned. We introduce Interaction-Aligned Pruning (IAprune), a training-free method that treats per-frame budget setting and within-budget token selection as two linked decisions. Semantic--motion spatial agreement guides the choice between Conservative and Aggressive coverage, and the resulting region size is mapped to a calibrated dynamic budget. Continuous semantic and motion responses rank the existing tokens, while geometric residual correction redirects fixed selection slots toward under-represented boundaries without increasing the sequence length. Across four embodied manipulation policies, three simulation benchmarks, and a real-robot platform, IAprune provides a favorable accuracy--efficiency trade-off, matching the unpruned policy on LIBERO with a \(1.54\times\) speedup and reaching \(1.48\times\) acceleration on a real robot. Phase-wise analysis shows that retention gains are largest under tight budgets early in an episode, while fixed-budget analysis confirms that geometry replaces low-priority tokens with boundary and contact-region evidence rather than retaining more tokens. Our project website is: \href{https://chengjt1999.github.io/VLA-IAP.github.io/}{IAprune.com}.
comment: 27 pages, 8 figures
♻ ☆ Recurrence Meets Transformers for Universal Multimodal Retrieval
With the rapid advancement of multimodal retrieval and its application in LLMs and multimodal LLMs, increasingly complex retrieval tasks have emerged. Existing methods predominantly rely on task-specific fine-tuning of vision-language models and are limited to single-modality queries or documents. In this paper, we propose ReT-2, a unified retrieval model that supports multimodal queries, composed of both images and text, and searches across multimodal document collections where text and images coexist. ReT-2 leverages multi-layer representations and a recurrent Transformer architecture with LSTM-inspired gating mechanisms to dynamically integrate information across layers and modalities, capturing fine-grained visual and textual details. We evaluate ReT-2 on the challenging M2KR and M-BEIR benchmarks across different retrieval configurations. Results demonstrate that ReT-2 consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse settings, while offering faster inference and reduced memory usage compared to prior approaches. When integrated into retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, ReT-2 also improves downstream performance on Encyclopedic-VQA and InfoSeek datasets. Our source code and trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/ReT-2
comment: TPAMI 2026
♻ ☆ Diffusion-Based Multi-Class Normality for OOD Detection: An Application to CDP Authentication IEEE
Reconstruction-based generative models offer a natural framework for unsupervised out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, but multi-class normality modelling requires a single detector to capture multiple in-distribution manifolds and produce comparable anomaly scores across classes. We study this problem in copy detection pattern (CDP) authentication, where authentic and counterfeit samples are visually similar but differ in subtle printing-and-digitisation (P&D) signatures. We propose a diffusion-based multi-class normality framework in which a single class-conditional ControlNet is trained exclusively on authentic CDPs from multiple P&D classes and detects counterfeits through reconstruction error under authentic-class conditioning. We further introduce dual template masking, which hides complementary regions of the input template and scores only withheld pixels, reducing reliance on visible binary structure. On the Indigo 1 x 1 Base dataset, the proposed method outperforms traditional and adapted generative baselines under multi-class authentic-versus-counterfeit evaluation, without using counterfeit samples for training or threshold calibration.
comment: IEEE International Conference on Advanced Visual And Signal-Based Systems, Aug 2026, Lecce, Italy
♻ ☆ SEG-SAM: Semantic-Guided SAM for Unified Medical Image Segmentation
Recently, developing unified medical image segmentation models gains increasing attention, especially with the advent of the Segment Anything Model (SAM). SAM has shown promising binary segmentation performance in natural domains, however, transferring it to the medical domain remains challenging, as medical images often possess substantial inter-category overlaps. To address this, we propose the SEmantic-Guided SAM (SEG-SAM), a unified medical segmentation model that incorporates semantic medical knowledge to enhance medical segmentation performance. First, to avoid the potential conflict between binary and semantic predictions, we introduce a semantic-aware decoder independent of SAM's original decoder, specialized for both semantic segmentation on the prompted object and classification on unprompted objects in images. To further enhance the model's semantic understanding, we solicit key characteristics of medical categories from large language models and incorporate them into SEG-SAM through a text-to-vision semantic module, adaptively transferring the language information into the visual segmentation task. In the end, we introduce the cross-mask spatial alignment strategy to encourage greater overlap between the predicted masks from SEG-SAM's two decoders, thereby benefiting both predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SEG-SAM outperforms state-of-the-art SAM-based methods in unified binary medical segmentation and task-specific methods in semantic medical segmentation, showcasing promising results and potential for broader medical applications.
comment: 17 pages, 11 figures. Under review
♻ ☆ Forge4D: Feed-Forward 4D Human Reconstruction and Interpolation from Uncalibrated Sparse-view Videos
Yingdong Hu, Yisheng He, Jinnan Chen, Weihao Yuan, Kejie Qiu, Zehong Lin, Siyu Zhu, Zilong Dong, Steven Hoi, Jun Zhang
Instant reconstruction of dynamic 3D humans from uncalibrated sparse-view videos is critical for numerous downstream applications. Existing methods, however, are either limited by the slow reconstruction speeds or incapable of generating novel-time representations. To address these challenges, we propose Forge4D, a feed-forward 4D human reconstruction and interpolation model that efficiently reconstructs temporally aligned representations from uncalibrated sparse-view videos, enabling both novel view and novel time synthesis. Our model simplifies the 4D reconstruction and interpolation problem as a joint task of streaming 3D Gaussian reconstruction and dense motion prediction. For the task of streaming 3D Gaussian reconstruction, we first reconstruct static 3D Gaussians from uncalibrated sparse-view images and then introduce learnable state tokens to enforce temporal consistency in a memory-friendly manner by interactively updating shared information across different timestamps. For novel time synthesis, we design a novel motion prediction module to predict dense motions for each 3D Gaussian between two adjacent frames, coupled with an occlusion-aware Gaussian fusion process to interpolate 3D Gaussians at arbitrary timestamps. To overcome the lack of the ground truth for dense motion supervision, we formulate dense motion prediction as a dense point matching task and introduce a self-supervised retargeting loss to optimize this module. An additional occlusion-aware optical flow loss is introduced to ensure motion consistency with plausible human movement, providing stronger regularization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets. Project page and code at: https://zhenliuzju.github.io/huyingdong/Forge4D.
♻ ☆ SFDATrack: Generalized Source-Free Domain Adaptive Tracking Under Adverse Weather Conditions ECCV 2026
Domain adaptive visual object tracking under adverse weather conditions has garnered significant attention in recent years. Despite the impressive performance, existing methods heavily rely on the large-scale video frames from both source and target domains, which is impractical under rigid resource constraints where source data is unavailable. To overcome this limitation, we propose SFDATrack, a generalized source-free domain adaptive tracker that merely leverages adverse weather samples from the target domain for robust state estimation. Specifically, SFDATrack first employs a mean-teacher backbone with Dual Interactive Mamba (DIM) blocks to distill the candidate target tokens that are resilient to weather variations from classified, augmented samples. Afterwards, we introduce a hyperspherical prototype projection (HPP) module to project these tokens onto multi-domain prototypes within a latent hyperspherical space. By enforcing both domain-specific and domain-invariant properties of the multi-domain prototypes, SFDATrack can be seamlessly adapted to diverse weather conditions with powerful generalizability. Extensive experiments evaluated on various benchmarks demonstrate that SFDATrack achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/watcherBR0/sfdatrack.
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026
♻ ☆ Towards Fine-Grained Text-to-3D Quality Assessment: A Benchmark and A Two-Stage Rank-Learning Metric
Recent advances in Text-to-3D (T23D) generative models have enabled the synthesis of diverse, high-fidelity 3D assets from textual prompts. However, existing challenges restrict the development of reliable T23D quality assessment (T23DQA). First, existing benchmarks are outdated, fragmented, and coarse-grained, making fine-grained metric training infeasible. Moreover, current objective metrics exhibit inherent design limitations, resulting in non-representative feature extraction and diminished metric robustness. To address these limitations, we introduce T23D-CompBench, a comprehensive benchmark for compositional T23D generation. We define five components with twelve sub-components for compositional prompts, which are used to generate 3,600 textured meshes from ten state-of-the-art generative models. A large-scale subjective experiment is conducted to collect 129,600 reliable human ratings across different perspectives. Based on T23D-CompBench, we further propose Rank2Score, an effective evaluator with two-stage training for T23DQA. Rank2Score enhances pairwise training via supervised contrastive regression and curriculum learning in the first stage, and subsequently refines predictions using mean opinion scores to achieve closer alignment with human judgments in the second stage. Extensive experiments and downstream applications demonstrate that Rank2Score consistently outperforms existing metrics across multiple dimensions and can additionally serve as a reward function to optimize generative models. The project is available at https://cbysjtu.github.io/Rank2Score/.
♻ ☆ BRIDLE: Generalized Self-supervised Learning with Quantization
Hoang M. Nguyen, Satya N. Shukla, Qiang Zhang, Hanchao Yu, Sreya D. Roy, Dipesh Tamboli, Taipeng Tian, Lingjiong Zhu, Yuchen Liu
Self-supervised learning has been a powerful approach for learning meaningful representations from unlabeled data across various domains, reducing the reliance on large labeled datasets. Inspired by BERT's success in capturing deep bidirectional contexts in natural language processing, similar frameworks have been adapted to other modalities such as audio, with models like BEATs extending the bidirectional training paradigm to audio signals using vector quantization (VQ). However, these frameworks face challenges, notably their dependence on a single codebook for quantization, which may not capture the complex, multifaceted nature of signals. In addition, inefficiencies in codebook utilization lead to underutilized code vectors. To address these limitations, we introduce BRIDLE (Bidirectional Residual Quantization Interleaved Discrete Learning Encoder), a self-supervised encoder pretraining framework that incorporates residual quantization (RQ) into the bidirectional training process, and is generalized for pretraining with audio, image, and video. Using multiple hierarchical codebooks, RQ enables fine-grained discretization in the latent space, enhancing representation quality. BRIDLE involves an interleaved training procedure between the encoder and tokenizer. We evaluate BRIDLE on audio understanding tasks using classification benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results, and demonstrate competitive performance on image classification and video classification tasks, showing consistent improvements over traditional VQ methods in downstream performance.
♻ ☆ FLEET: Token-Based Feature Extraction for Event Camera-based Reinforcement Learning
Event cameras generate asynchronous, high-frequency data streams offering spatially sparse information at lower latency than traditional cameras. In principle, these properties should be ideal for the design of control policies. However, reinforcement learning research in this field remains limited as existing approaches fail to fully exploit the sensor's properties. CNN-based methods negate the sensors benefits by aggregating events into sparse grids. This couples compute cost to sensor resolution and blurs the temporal information. Meanwhile, existing generative baselines rely on the availability of trajectory data to pretrain the model. We propose FLEET (Feature Learning from Events via Efficient Tokenization), a feature extractor that processes event sequences directly. Leveraging random Fourier features and cross-attention, our architecture compresses variable streams into fixed-size latent representations. This decouples inference cost of the feature extractor's backbone from the sensor's resolution, enabling end-to-end learning without auxiliary losses. We validate FLEET on a new, high-throughput benchmark. The results demonstrate that our sequence-based approach surpasses SOTA performance and exhibits superior robustness to variations in observation frequencies.
♻ ☆ Context-Guided Semantic Alignment for Feature Fusion Networks BMVC 2026
Feature fusion networks are fundamental components in modern object detectors, aggregating multi-scale features to detect objects of varying sizes. However, directly fusing features from different pyramid levels often introduces semantic inconsistency, causing information conflicts that distort the fused representation and degrade detection accuracy. In this paper, we propose Feature Interaction NEtwork (FINE), a lightweight semantic alignment module that refines low-level features via high-level contextual guidance using cross-level attention prior to fusion. To bridge the structural gap and ensure computational efficiency, we introduce an Alignment-Aware Token Sampling that aligns corresponding spatial regions across scales, reducing the attention complexity by an order of magnitude. % The resulting attention weights generate a spatial-channel modulation map that is upsampled and applied to the low-level features via residual element-wise modulation. The resulting attention weights generate a spatial-channel modulation map that is applied to the low-level features via residual modulation. This mechanism ensures that the network selectively enhances semantically relevant pixels while preserving the sub-pixel localization accuracy necessary for dense prediction tasks. FINE is generally applicable to various detectors and consistently improves detection accuracy with minimal computational overhead. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/HyungseopLee/FINE.
comment: BMVC 2026 (Oral)
♻ ☆ Segmentation-Based Attention Entropy: Detecting and Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) achieve strong performance on many multimodal tasks, but object hallucinations severely undermine their reliability. Most existing studies focus on the text modality, attributing hallucinations to overly strong language priors and insufficient visual grounding. In contrast, we observe that abnormal attention patterns within the visual modality can also give rise to hallucinated objects. Building on this observation, we propose Segmentation-based Attention Entropy (SAE), which leverages semantic segmentation to quantify visual attention uncertainty in a semantic space. Based on SAE, we further design a reliability score for hallucination detection and an SAE-guided attention adjustment method that modifies visual attention at inference time to mitigate hallucinations. We evaluate our approach on public benchmarks and in real embodied multimodal scenarios with quadruped robots. Experiments show that SAE reduces hallucinations without additional training, improving LVLM reliability.
comment: Accepted to ACM Multimedia 2026 (MM '26)
♻ ☆ S-EMBER: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Streaming Egocentric Memory Retrieval
Xiaodong Wang, Xuanyi Zhao, Pedro Rodriguez, Devendra Singh Sachan, Barlas Oguz, Seungwhan Moon, Shang-Wen Li, Gargi Ghosh, Xin Dong, Wen-Tau Yih
As wearable devices enable continuous first-person recording, AI assistants must reason across long time horizons to recall past experiences-a capability known as episodic memory. Current benchmarks often rely on offline evaluation with access to entire video files, failing to simulate the streaming reality of wearable intelligence. We introduce S-EMBER (Streaming Egocentric Memory Benchmark for Episodic Retrieval), a large-scale benchmark comprising 3,141 videos totaling 388 hours of organic activity captured via Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. S-EMBER formalizes grounded streaming episodic retrieval, a paradigm shift from global offline search to causal, active recall triggered by visual events in a continuous stream. We provide 9,448 QA pairs requiring manual visual proof through precise temporal localization and supporting flexible response lengths to simulate natural human-AI interaction. Our extensive benchmarking of frontier models reveals a grounded recall gap: models answer and localize with moderate competence in isolation, yet fall furthest short of human performance when both must hold for the same query, the strongest reaching less than half the human rate. S-EMBER establishes a hardware-authentic foundation for developing grounded, reliable episodic memory in the next generation of wearable AI agents.
♻ ☆ Training-Free Agentic Computer Vision for Structural Component Detection in 2D Structural Framing Plans
Converting structural framing plans into editable finite-element model drafts is labor-intensive and susceptible to transcription errors. Existing building-component recognition systems generally depend on task-specific neural detectors, whereas language-model agents in structural engineering typically operate on text or model data rather than on drawings. To the authors' knowledge, this work is the first to apply an agentic vision-language layer to structural-component detection and model drafting from framing-plan PDFs without task-specific detector training or fine-tuning. A deterministic stage extracts geometric primitives, estimates scale by dimension-ratio consensus, recognizes five entity classes using an explicit drafting grammar, and assembles an editable layout. The agentic stage constrains typed corrections through deterministic candidates, operation-specific admission tests, change-level review, and fail-closed transactions. Evaluation used an author-generated benchmark of 100 plans, divided equally between a development half used for all rule revisions and a seed-disjoint held-out half generated after the rules were frozen and evaluated once. All scores are end-to-end results for the complete framework on the held-out half. Scale estimates were within 0.1% of the generator reference for every drawing. Recall and precision were 0.922/0.997 for columns, 0.886/0.990 for beams, 1.000/1.000 for walls, 1.000/1.000 for braces, and 1.000/0.964 for openings. A controlled study repeated two corruptions three times on three development drawings. Calibration passed all nine trials, whereas member repair satisfied every strict end-state criterion in five of nine trials. Because both benchmark halves share a generator, the evaluation does not address independently drafted plans, raster input, analytical connectivity, or solver validation.
♻ ☆ Scaling Muon for Diffusion Transformers
Chenghao Li, Xiao Han, Xinxin Huang, Wei Liu, Boyang Li, Bing Xiao, Heran Zhang, Juanma Perez Rua, Ke Xu, Kangning Liu, Linjun Kuang, Na Li, Tan Wang, Tian Xie, Wei Peng, Yang Pei, Yifan Xu, Yuanhao Zhai, Yuwei Lin, Zhe Wang, Zihao He, Daniel Li, Junbiao Tang, Ziyang Jiang, Dake Chen
The matrix-aware optimizer Muon improves large model training by balancing updates across singular directions, yet its scaling behavior and end-to-end efficiency on large Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) remain unclear. We first establish Muon's scaling behavior on DiTs from 1.3B to 15B parameters, showing that its optimization and generative quality advantages over AdamW persist across model scales. However, at scale, the 5-step Newton--Schulz iteration (NS5) performed at every optimization step, together with full-momentum materialization, introduces substantial computation and communication overhead that can offset Muon's step-efficiency advantage. We introduce \emph{Periodic Row-wise Muon}, which performs a full NS5 spectral update once every \(K\) steps and applies a low compute and communication cost row-wise constrained update based on the current momentum at the remaining steps. We further co-design a distributed implementation that operates directly on sharded momentum during non-refresh steps and accelerates spectral refreshes through bucketed all-gather and communication--computation overlap. Across all scales, Muon improves the best observed generative quality over AdamW by 12.9--19.1\%. Compared with vanilla Muon, Periodic Row-wise Muon remains within 0.5\% in best generative quality on the 1.3B--4B models and improves it by 4.5\% at 9B. It reduces optimizer time by 46.9--54.3\%, end-to-end step time by 15.7--24.3\%, and logical communication volume by 66.7\%, while reaching its respective best generative quality with 33.7--64.8\% less active training time. These results show that Periodic Row-wise Muon preserves Muon's generative quality advantage while translating it into end-to-end training efficiency for large DiTs.
♻ ☆ Platonic Representation Hypothesis on World Models
World models have demonstrated significant potential for perceiving and simulating complex environments. Despite their strong performance, the fundamental nature of their learned representations remains poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate the Platonic Representation Hypothesis within this domain by proposing the Predictive Consistency Assumption: we posit that the optimization of a shared state transition objective acts as a selective pressure that encourages heterogeneous models to converge toward a shared latent structure. Through systematic experiments with the DINO World Model (DINO-WM), in which we vary visual encoders to create heterogeneous models, we find that capable world models evolve toward geometrically similar internal structures. Moreover, via model stitching, we show that the internal features of one world model can be mapped to another with limited performance degradation, providing evidence of functional compatibility. Our findings suggest that the pursuit of predictive consistency can promote shared, transition-compatible latent structure across world models.
comment: 18 pages, 10 figures, 2 tables. Wenhow Li and Chengwei MA contributed equally. Project page: https://sellerbubble.github.io/platonic-representation-hypothesis-on-world-models/. Corrected author metadata formatting and updated the project-page link presentation in the abstract; manuscript content and results unchanged
♻ ☆ 3DGAA: Realistic and Robust 3D Gaussian-based Adversarial Attack for Autonomous Driving
Camera-based perception in connected and autonomous vehicles remains exposed to physical adversarial attacks. Prior attacks often either optimize image-plane textures, weakening cross-view consistency, or rely on shape modifications that are difficult to fabricate and deploy. Both cases limit their value for security and safety assessment of camera-based perception. This paper introduces a fabrication-first framework that learns view-consistent, geometry-preserving adversarial wraps for vehicles. The method performs three-dimensional multi-view optimization with a 3D Gaussian splatting surrogate to enforce consistency under an expectation over viewpoint, illumination, and occlusion, while the final artifact is constrained to print-only textures that keep vehicle geometry unchanged. We evaluate the framework through matched CARLA simulations, controlled miniature-vehicle physical evidence, and tests on multiple modern detectors. The wraps produce substantial and stable reductions in detection confidence and average precision across views while maintaining perceptual realism. Ablation studies isolate the effects of physical filtering, physical augmentation, and shape-consistency regularization, while efficiency analyses report convergence time and memory profiles. Additional experiments report ASR, mIoU-based segmentation degradation, cross-detector transfer against physical attack baselines, perturbation-area fairness diagnostics, and robustness under common input preprocessing defenses. By coupling three-dimensional optimization with a geometry-preserving realization, the study supports a practical pathway to systematically stress-test camera perception in safety-critical autonomous driving systems and provides evidence that can inform defense design and evaluation protocols in information forensics and security.
comment: TIFS
♻ ☆ ARGenSeg: Image Segmentation with Autoregressive Image Generation Model NeurIPS 2025
We propose a novel AutoRegressive Generation-based paradigm for image Segmentation (ARGenSeg), achieving multimodal understanding and pixel-level perception within a unified framework. Prior works integrating image segmentation into multimodal large language models (MLLMs) typically employ either boundary points representation or dedicated segmentation heads. These methods rely on discrete representations or semantic prompts fed into task-specific decoders, which limits the ability of the MLLM to capture fine-grained visual details. To address these challenges, we introduce a segmentation framework for MLLM based on image generation, which naturally produces dense masks for target objects. We leverage MLLM to output visual tokens and detokenize them into images using an universal VQ-VAE, making the segmentation fully dependent on the pixel-level understanding of the MLLM. To reduce inference latency, we employ a next-scale-prediction strategy to generate required visual tokens in parallel. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses prior state-of-the-art approaches on multiple segmentation datasets with a remarkable boost in inference speed, while maintaining strong understanding capabilities.
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2025, 25 pages
♻ ☆ Frequency-Decorrelated Temporal Ensembles for EEG--fNIRS Imagined-Handwriting Decoding
Imagined handwriting offers a temporally rich paradigm for non-invasive neural decoding, yet reliable recognition across unseen participants remains difficult because scalp EEG is noisy and internally generated stroke sequences vary across individuals. The Multimodal Brain-Computer Interface Grand Challenge provides synchronized EEG and fNIRS for four-class subject-independent handwriting-trajectory classification. We propose FRED, a task-adapted system that models imagined handwriting as a multi-second motor sequence and trains a compact multi-scale temporal network on three complementary EEG frequency views. With three seeds per view, cross-band members produce substantially less-correlated errors than same-band replicas, yielding a clean nine-member ensemble accuracy of 0.8076/0.7242/0.7492 on the public/private/overall test partitions without test-set adaptation or output constraints. The submitted pipeline further incorporates transductive pseudo-label training, three EEG-Conformer members, posterior aggregation, and a paradigm-aware decoder. Because every 12-trial randomization block contains three instances of each class, the final predictions are obtained by Hungarian assignment under the known block quota. On one fixed posterior pool, independent, session-constrained, and block-constrained decoding achieve 0.7600, 0.7758, and 0.7952 overall accuracy, respectively. The complete system reaches 0.8498/0.7718/0.7952, ranking fourth on the private split. A modality audit finds fNIRS-only decoding at chance (0.2511 overall), while adding fNIRS to EEG changes accuracy by only +0.0025. These results identify frequency-diverse temporal EEG modeling and protocol-matched structured inference as the principal sources of performance in this sparse-montage EEG--fNIRS setting. The source code is available at https://github.com/XiuFan719/EEG-fNIRS-fuse-method-for-MM-challenge.
♻ ☆ DeCoFlow: Structural Decomposition of Normalizing Flows for Continual Anomaly Detection ECCV 2026
In industrial environments, new product categories arrive sequentially, requiring continual anomaly detection without access to past data. Normalizing Flows (NFs) provide exact density estimation but suffer from catastrophic forgetting as parameter updates across tasks distort the density manifold. While parameter isolation can prevent interference, it must preserve the strict invertibility and Jacobian validity of NFs. To satisfy these requirements, we exploit the inherent property that affine coupling layers maintain transformation validity regardless of subnet parameterization. Based on this, we propose DeCoFlow, which decomposes subnets into a frozen universal base and task-specific low-rank adapters to isolate updates. We further introduce Task-Specific Alignment, Auxiliary Coupling Layers, and Tail-Aware Loss to compensate for frozen-base rigidity. DeCoFlow achieves state-of-the-art image-level AUROCs of 98.40% on MVTec-AD and 93.00% on VisA, while maintaining parameter-level zero forgetting (0.00% FM under correct routing) with only 2.27M parameters per task.
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026. Code available at https://github.com/crimama/DeCoFlow
♻ ☆ Lumos3D: A Single-Forward Framework for Low-Light 3D Scene Restoration
Restoring 3D scenes with low-light conditions is challenging, and most existing methods depend on precomputed camera poses and scene-specific optimization, which greatly restricts their application to real-world scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose Lumos3D, a pose-free single-forward framework for 3D low-light scene restoration. First, we develop a cross-illumination distillation scheme, where a frozen teacher network takes normal-light ground truth images as input to distill accurate geometric information to the student model. Second, we define a Lumos loss to improve the restoration quality of the reconstructed 3D Gaussian space. Trained on a single dataset, Lumos3D performs inference in a purely feed-forward manner, directly restoring illumination and structure from unposed, low-light multi-view images without any per-scene training or optimization. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that Lumos3D achieves competitive restoration results compared to scene-specific methods. Our codes are available at https://github.com/HanzhouLiu/Lumos3D.
♻ ☆ VGI-Bench: Probing Visual Intelligence in Video Generation Models
Xuan He, Cong Wei, Yuhao Cheng, Linrui Ma, Yuxuan Zhang, Zuojun Li, Yuhao Wen, Jize Jiang, Zeyi Liu, Yuren Hao, Songcheng Cai, Keming Wu, Penghui Du, Kai Zou, Rui Yang, Chenkai Sun, Ke Yang, Ping Nie, Kelsey R Allen, Chenglong Wang, Michel Galley, Jianfeng Gao, ChengXiang Zhai
Recent studies suggest that video generation models can exhibit certain forms of zero-shot visual reasoning through generated frames. Yet reliable evaluation remains challenging: benchmarks should adopt inputs aligned with the visual priors of current video models, require valid evolving processes rather than only plausible final states, and calibrate task difficulty to remain challenging yet partly feasible. To this end, we introduce VGI-bench, containing 27 tasks and 810 instances, organized by a two-level taxonomy of task domains and skill tags for fine-grained evaluation of visual reasoning capabilities of video generation models. Our evaluations show that current generative systems can solve a subset of visually grounded reasoning tasks, but remain far from reliable, with even the strongest model, Seedance 2.0, achieving only 51.0% under our evaluation criteria. Our analysis further explore the output failure modes, input condition sensitivity, performance transfer boundary from synthetic fine-tuning, and internal denoising perspective revealing limited self-correction, where later steps mainly refine early hypotheses rather than correct reasoning errors. We hope VGI-bench will help stimulate the development of next-generation video generation models. Website: https://hexuan21.github.io/VGI-Bench/