Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 196
☆ VibeVideoBench:Evaluating Multimodal Agents on Code-Driven Video Generation
Muxi Diao, Wenbin Xu, Lele Yang, Xuyang Ma, Yuzhe Chen, Jiankang Chen, Kaiyu Jiang, Changyi Liu, Haoyu Zhang, Hongyi Fu, Jianxiong Wang, Tianke Zhang, Haonan Fan, Yingxin Li, Bingyi Li, Xu Wang, Xuanyu Zheng, Bin Wen, Tingting Gao, Han Li, Wentao Zhang, Weiran Xu, Kongming Liang, Zhanyu Ma
Diffusion video models produce striking clips, but they cannot reliably render an exact formula, a correct chart, a ruleconsistent game or narration synchronized to on-screen events. A different route is emerging: multimodal agents that write code to render every frame and synthesize every sound. We introduce VibeVideoBench, a benchmark for evaluating agents on code-driven video generation. Its 239 self-contained tasks in English and Chinese span 12 categories, from data stories and music-driven pieces to classroom lessons and paper explainers; each asks an agent, running in its native harness inside a sandbox, to deliver a finished MP4 with sound within one hour. Evaluation is hierarchical and evidence-based: program checks of the delivery spec, about 13k task-specific rubric checks traced to the requirements they enforce, and five quality dimensions anchored per task, judged by three VLM judge panels and validated with blind human preferences. Across nine frontier agent systems and 2,151 scored rollouts, the benchmark is far from solved: GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 lead clearly, yet even the best system fails a core requirement on about a quarter of tasks. Whether a video arrives at all matters as much as its quality, and three quarters of the lost videos are final renders started too late, run too slowly or never started. The judges agree with each other and with human preferences on system rankings, but only moderately on individual videos.
☆ Do vision models know that three is three?
Do vision models encode the transition $2{\to}3$ the same way whether it appears in handwritten digits or in hand gestures, and do they "understand" that clean${\to}$dirty is the same transformation regardless of whether it is applied to a kitchen or a carpet? The linear representation hypothesis (LRH) answers this for language models: concept changes correspond to directions in (language) embedding space. In vision, the same concept can manifest in visually unrelated "regimes" that rarely co-occur: images of digits and hands do not share much in common in pixel space. To understand whether vision models still encode the underlying abstract concepts, we study 46 vision encoders across architectures, training objectives, and scales, on 10 concept families including numerosity, age, object identity, and MIT-States attributes. Within each regime, we find statistically significant concept directions near-universally across our tested models. However, two distinct regimes do not always share the same concept direction. Several models learn multiple linear structures for the same concept transition, split across regimes. We call this phenomenon "fragmented linearity": strong local linearity coexisting with near-absent global linearity. Fragmentation is, however, not fixed: models with stronger local linearity progressively escape it (local-global linearity correlated with $τ\in [0.38, 0.89]$ across all concepts), and where global linearity does emerge, concept directions can transfer as linear probes across regimes.
☆ FL4N: Feed-forward Latent Model for 4D Novel View Synthesis
Eunbeen Hong, Hyeonseo Yu, Honggyu An, Jooho Son, Hyunah Ko, Soowon Son, Chaehyun Kim, Jahyeok Koo, Jisoo Kim, Junhwa Hur, Seungryong Kim
4D novel view synthesis (NVS) aims to render dynamic scenes across viewpoints and timestamps, which requires jointly inferring 3D structure and temporal dynamics. Existing monocular feed-forward methods often rely on explicit 4D Gaussian representations, which are prone to temporal inconsistency and severe rendering artifacts. We present FL4N, the first feed-forward latent 4D NVS model. Instead of relying on explicit 4D primitives, FL4N encodes a 4D scene prior into a unified latent representation across space and time. Our core insight is that learning temporal dynamics as residuals on top of a pretrained static latent prior enables effective 4D modeling with limited dynamic training data. To this end, we introduce a lightweight dynamic encoder that leverages static scene features to disentangle object motion from camera-induced parallax. Trained solely with an image synthesis objective, FL4N achieves state-of-the-art 4D NVS quality while rendering in real time. Its learned latent representation generalizes to real-world videos and disentangles viewpoint from time.
comment: Project page and code are available at https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/FL4N/
☆ OSWAM: An Effective World Action Model with One-Step Action Generation
Direct-policy World Action Models (WAM) have demonstrated the benefits of decoupling action generation from explicit future visual prediction for efficient inference in autonomous driving and embodied control. However, they still require tens of denoising steps to achieve competitive action quality, incurring substantial latency and hindering real-time deployment. Simply reducing the number of denoising steps will collapse the nonlinear multi-step denoising trajectory into coarse updates, substantially degrading action quality. To reduce the denoising steps while enabling real-time action generation, we present an effective world action model with one-step action generation, namely OSWAM, for autonomous driving and embodied control. We argue that it is the absence of structured action priors in random noise initialization that forces direct-policy WAMs to recover coherent action sequences through iterative denoising. Hence, we construct imagination tokens to initialize the diffusion process, providing physical priors and action-conditioned representations. We further introduce privileged information distillation with future conditioning to enhance future-aware action generation. As a result, OSWAM can efficiently and effectively generate high quality actions in just one diffusion step. Our experiments demonstrate that OSWAM achieves comparable or even better results in both autonomous driving and embodied control than direct-policy WAM and Joint-WAM that require tens of steps. It obtains approximately $3\times$ speedup over direct-policy WAM baselines and supports real-time compiled inference with latency as low as 40ms on an NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPU. The project page is available at https://gwenzhang.github.io/OSWAM/
comment: 18 pages, 6 figures
☆ MedVTok: A General-Purpose Medical Visual Tokenizer NeurIPS 2026
Chenglong Ma, Yuanfeng Ji, Junzhi Ning, Jiyao Liu, Yujie Wei, Shaohao Rui, Chaoyang Zhang, Wenjie Li, Wenhao Tang, Cheng Tang, Wei Li, Shujian Gao, Yujie Zhang, Ying Chen, Zilong Li, Zongyuan Ge, Diping Song, Jin Ye, Ming Hu, Junjun He, Hongming Shan
Multimodal medical AI requires a common visual interface for encoding heterogeneous imaging evidence for patient condition modeling. However, existing medical visual tokenizers are often tied to a specific dimension and imaging modality, forcing multimodal systems to rely on fragmented and poorly reusable representations. We introduce MedVTok, a general-purpose visual tokenizer that maps 2D images and 3D volumes from diverse imaging modalities into a unified token space. Building such a tokenizer poses two key challenges: preserving anatomical structure across dimensions and capturing clinical semantics across modalities. To this end, MedVTok introduces (i) slice differential regularization, which explicitly models inter-slice anatomical coherence missing in previous per-pixel/per-voxel supervision, and (ii) multi-expert representation alignment, which integrates knowledge from multiple medical expert encoders while retaining modality-specific complementary knowledge. Trained on 28M images and 70K volumes across 9 imaging modalities, MedVTok supports classification, retrieval, segmentation, synthesis, visual question answering, and medical report generation through a single tokenizer. Across 24 benchmarks, MedVTok achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating a scalable token interface that unifies medical image dimension, modality, and task usage.
comment: NeurIPS 2026
☆ Seeing Through Distractions: Context-Stable Attribution via the Least Core
Shapley-value-based explanations are widely used for feature attribution in machine learning. However, in computer vision, a feature may reduce the target-class score when added to the complete genuine image, even when the predicted label remains unchanged. We formalize such features as contextual distractors and investigate their attributions under semivalues and the least core. Under a weak average marginal monotonicity assumption, we derive quantitative semivalue--least-core gap bounds and sufficient conditions based on the probability of sampling smaller contexts. We further show that shifting semivalue weights toward larger contexts decreases the signed gap. Finally, controlled image-classification experiments and evaluations on Salient ImageNet provide strong empirical support for our theoretical findings.
comment: 22 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables
☆ Back to Basics: A Skill-Centric Approach to Generalist Web Agents
Browser agents do not just need more practice. They need to practice the right things. We introduce MiniWeb, a realistic miniature of the web comprising 65 interconnected websites across 15 domains, where agents navigate, search, and transact as people do. Its 369 human-annotated tasks cover everyday workflows and label 37 reusable interaction primitives grouped into 7 skill families, allowing us to diagnose which skills fail rather than only whether a task succeeds. Benchmarking ten open-weight agents, we find that drag & gesture is consistently the weakest family, with no agent solving more than 24% of its instances. To address this gap, we introduce MiniWebGen, a framework that autonomously generates verified, skill-centric training data from MiniWeb. Fine-tuning Qwen3.5-4B on just 3.1K verified trajectories improves single-primitive success by 24.9pp across 13 unseen websites, with gains across every skill family. However, these trajectories teach short-horizon interactions, which do not directly translate to full-task success. We build on this result with MiniWebAgent, which pairs the trained executor with a planner that decomposes full tasks into the skill-level steps it learned to perform. This approach improves task success by 19.4pp points on unseen MiniWeb sites and transfers to external benchmarks, with gains of 9.3pp on WebArena-Lite, 16.1pp on Online-Mind2Web, and 20.0pp on WebVoyager, without training on their trajectories. We provide a simple recipe for compact browser agents: practice reusable skills directly, then compose them to solve unfamiliar tasks.
☆ Pretraining Knows What, Simulation Teaches How: Compositional Generalization in a Sim-Trained Robot Agent
Benjamin Pikus, Daniel Saunders, Mircea Mironenco, Salman Mohammadi, Mathew Mathew, Sirou Zhu, Divya Makkar, Xuhua Huang, Qinbo Li, Supreeth Narasimhaswamy, Siyuan Cen, Thomas Neff, Dejia Xu, Shyamal Buch
A robot policy needs to understand what a task is asking for in a scene, and how to move the robot to accomplish that task. To achieve these two skills, we introduce Zero-real Agent Policy (ZAP), a recipe that teaches a small off-the-shelf vision-language model to control a robot via a simple tool harness. We use a pretrained 27B parameter model to bootstrap world understanding and reasoning, followed by supervised fine-tuning and GRPO on simple simulated tasks to teach it how to move the robot. Without any real-world robot data during training, ZAP reaches 96.7% success on real-world tasks, matching GPT-6 Astra in our harness and outperforming the MolmoAct2 VLA (33.3%), while running 3x faster and 17x cheaper than GPT-6 Astra. We demonstrate that ZAP also generalizes to completely new objects, goals, strategies, and language by seating a test tube in a rack (and choosing a different hole in the rack when prompted), handing a test tube between arms mid-air, drawing an X on a tic-tac-toe board, and playing chess. These goals and types of manipulation don't appear in our training data. Furthermore, ZAP also transfers to an unseen embodiment. On a single-arm Franka, ZAP reaches 55.9% on RoboLab-120, 4.9 percentage points ahead of the leading VLA/WAM baseline.
☆ Multimodal Concert Video Editing: System Design and Exploratory Evaluation
Editing multi-camera concerts requires coordinated decisions about musical relevance, visual quality and cut timing. We present a modular framework that combines instrument activity from multitrack audio, visible instruments and image sharpness with beat-based timing and probabilistic camera selection. An interpretable scoring model links these components to the choice of views over complete shot intervals. Component tests and an exploratory expert study on a four-camera concert yield mixed assessments across the editing variants. The findings motivate extending local audiovisual relevance with contextual and sequence-level criteria. The architecture provides a basis for testing these extensions and studying how component behaviour affects the quality of complete edits.
comment: 19 pages, 3 figures
☆ Does VGGT Know What It Does Not Know?
Feed-forward 3D reconstruction models such as VGGT regress cameras and geometry in a single forward pass, but they report no uncertainty for the camera poses they predict: an incorrect relative pose looks no different from a correct one. We ask whether the frozen model nonetheless knows when its pose is wrong. On HardMatch, a benchmark of 1,000 deliberately difficult image pairs on which VGGT fails on 35% of pairs, a linear probe on VGGT's frozen features predicts pose failure on held-out categories with ROC-AUC 93.5%, compared with 79.7% for VGGT's own point-map confidence and 77.7% for a classifier trained on all of VGGT's outputs. The probe catches failures VGGT is confident about, lets a downstream system abstain on the pairs it distrusts, and transfers without retraining to rotation failures on PhotoTourism and ScanNet-1500, beyond what co-visibility explains. This knowledge is absent from the per-image encoder: it is computed partway through the layers that fuse the two views, and the same holds for a second model, $π^3$. In essence, we find that VGGT knows more about its own failures than it reports.
comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 7 tables
☆ Improving Signals, Declining Encoder: A Known-Answer Test of Label-Free Monitoring in Self-Supervised Learning
Self-supervised training is monitored without labels, through the loss and statistics of the learned features. We report a case where we know the encoders lost part of what they had learned, so we can check whether these signals noticed. We trained LeJEPA encoders on synthetic images with known generating factors. In nine of ten seeds, the readability of those factors fell abruptly and stayed down, nearly always along the same direction in factor space. Meanwhile the loss kept falling, and most of the eleven label-free signals we tracked kept improving and rated the declining runs better than runs that did not decline. Standard change-point detection rarely flagged the decline near its onset, and selecting checkpoints by these signals mostly chose ones after it.
comment: 17 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables. Code and data: https://github.com/nilotpal09/improving-signals-declining-encoder. Checkpoints: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23666713
☆ VidEdit3D: Flexible 3D Gaussian Editing with Video Diffusion
Recent advancements in text-guided 3D editing, particularly with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), have shown promise but still lag behind the flexibility of 2D editing tools. Existing methods face a critical trade-off between preserving multi-view consistency and allowing structural modifications. Image-based editors can also struggle to apply the intended edit to objects viewed from unusual angles. To address these limitations, we introduce VidEdit3D, a framework that reformulates 3D scene editing as a trajectory-based video editing task. By drawing a parallel between camera movement in static 3D scenes and temporal dynamics in video, we leverage the robust spatiotemporal priors of pre-trained Video Diffusion Models (VDMs) to encourage semantic and structural coherence across views. Specifically, we propose Trajectory-Guided Rendering (TGR) to select informative keyframes and construct smooth video clips aligned with VDM input requirements. To propagate edits from an anchor view to these clips, we develop Flow-Aligned Video Editing (FAVE), a training-free framework incorporating an Editing Consistency Guidance (ECG) mechanism. ECG contrasts source and edited image conditions at a shared latent state, using scheduled source-image amplification to strengthen adherence to the edited reference while maintaining original scene context. Finally, we introduce Region-Selective 3DGS Refinement (RS-GS) to strictly confine geometric and appearance updates to target primitives, reducing background attribute leakage. Experiments demonstrate stronger instruction alignment and better multi-view consistency than the baselines.
comment: Project Page: https://2hitee.github.io/VidEdit3D-page/
☆ A Category-Selective Encryption Framework for Privacy Protection of UAV Images
Imagery captured by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems increasingly raises privacy concerns, as UAV aerial surveillance routinely captures sensitive objects such as pedestrians and vehicles alongside ordinary scene content. Existing privacy-preserving approaches typically employ class-agnostic saliency detection to indiscriminately obfuscate all visually salient regions, leading to unnecessary information loss and hindering downstream scene analysis. This paper proposes a category-selective encryption framework for privacy-preserving UAV surveillance. The core advance over prior class-agnostic approaches is semantic-level selectivity: the system first recognizes what is present in the scene via an 80-class detector, then encrypts only user-specified sensitive categories while leaving non-sensitive objects and background intact for downstream analytics. The framework supports two complementary encryption schemes: Thumbnail-Preserving Encryption (TPE), which applies adaptive pixelation with a learnable blend parameter and recovers content through a jointly trained Enhanced U-Net, and XOR stream cipher encryption, which offers parameter-free, mathematically exact reversibility. The architectural design, composite loss formulation, and joint training methodology are presented in detail, establishing a foundation for practical privacy-preserving UAV surveillance that balances protection strength and scene utility.
☆ MatAnyone-E: Sparse Memory Propagation for Efficient High-Resolution Video Matting
High-resolution video matting requires preserving fine details, such as hair strands and soft transparency, while maintaining consistency across frames. Memory-based methods achieve strong matting quality by matching current-frame features with information stored from earlier frames, but this process becomes increasingly costly as resolution grows. We present MatAnyone-E, an efficient extension of MatAnyone 2 that focuses computation where it is most needed. Our approach first performs low-resolution propagation to identify uncertain regions that require closer inspection and the memory candidates most relevant to them. It then performs high-resolution matching only for these regions using the selected memory, while reusing low-resolution matching results elsewhere. This strategy reduces both the number of locations requiring detailed matching and the amount of memory searched, while preserving the information needed to produce a complete matte. We further reduce the cost of generating high-resolution mattes with a lightweight decoder designed around measured runtime bottlenecks and trained to reproduce the original decoder's representations. Experiments show that MatAnyone-E maintains matting quality comparable to MatAnyone 2 while achieving an estimated 7.4x inference speedup and reducing peak GPU memory usage to 7.6% of the usage of MatAnyone 2 at 4K. With compilation-enabled inference on a single NVIDIA H200 GPU, it reaches 73.07 FPS at 1080p and 28.62 FPS at 4K.
comment: Project page: https://shuyun-wang.github.io/projects/MatAnyone-E
☆ Triage: Skip, Skim, or Refine Attention Tiles in Video Diffusion Transformers
Attention over tens of thousands of visual tokens dominates the inference of video diffusion transformers (DiTs). Existing methods reduce this cost through sparsity, low precision, or both, but use a single precision for all kept tiles. We observe that the output error introduced by approximation varies widely across tiles. Many tiles can be skipped with little error, others must be computed but gain little beyond low precision, and a few retain substantial error even at low precision. We present Triage, a training-free attention method that assigns each tile one of three approximation tiers: skipping it by replacing it with its block means, skimming it in NVFP4, or refining it with NVFP4 residual correction. A lightweight router predicts each tile's error under each tier from block statistics and moves a tile to a more accurate tier only when the predicted error reduction justifies the extra compute, with a single price setting this trade-off. A fused kernel executes all three tiers in a single pass on the FP4 tensor cores of RTX Blackwell GPUs. Across Wan2.2, HunyuanVideo, and LTX-2.5, Triage accelerates end-to-end generation by up to 2.32x over dense FlashAttention, and in each of five settings it runs faster than every baseline while reaching 0.3-3.0 dB higher PSNR than the highest-PSNR baseline.
☆ OmniShowcase: Omnidirectional Subject-Consistent Video Generation from Multi-View Images
Generating videos of a specific subject from a few reference images remains challenging when the camera reveals surfaces that are not visible in the input. Early subject-to-video (S2V) methods condition on a single reference image and must therefore infer the subject's unseen appearance and geometry as the viewpoint changes. To address this limitation, recent methods extend S2V to multiple reference views, providing more information about the subject from different viewpoints. However, they do not explicitly specify the 3D structure that connects these observations. In addition, existing training data do not guarantee that viewpoint changes preserve the same underlying 3D subject. We present OmniShowcase, built on two components: (i) a fully automated data synthesis pipeline that produces training videos along diverse camera trajectories, with viewpoint variation driven by underlying subject geometry, even spanning full 360-degree orbits; and (ii) a geometry-conditioning method that provides the video model with a turntable of surface-normal maps reconstructed from the reference views without requiring temporal alignment with the generated frames. We construct Showcase-4K, a corpus of 3D-asset-based videos covering twelve camera motions across 88 trajectory configurations with reconstruction-derived surface-normal conditioning, and ShowcaseBench, a held-out evaluation set with the source meshes and camera parameters used to render each video. Experiments show state-of-the-art subject identity and 3D consistency while maintaining competitive video quality and motion. Project page: justin4ai.github.io/OmniShowcase
comment: 25 pages
☆ Printed and Scanned: Exposing the Fragility of Single-Image Morphing Attack Detectors under Print-Scan Degradation
Face morphing attacks, in which the biometric traits of two or more identities are blended into a single face image, pose a severe threat to identity document issuance and automated border control. Consequently, a large body of work has proposed Single-image Morphing Attack Detection (S-MAD) algorithms and benchmarked them on datasets such as SYN-MAD22. However, the majority of these benchmarks operate exclusively in the digital domain, which contrasts with the real-world passport issuance pipeline in some countries, which still requires an applicant-supplied photograph to be printed and subsequently re-scanned before it is embedded in the identity document or fed into an automated verification system. This print-scan step introduces halftoning, resampling, color-space, and sensor noise that are absent from digital pipelines, and may mask the high-frequency artifacts that S-MAD models rely on. In this work, we introduce a print-scan version of the SYN-MAD22 dataset, obtained by printing and re-scanning all bona fide and morphed images at 300 and 600 DPI, and we use it to evaluate eight state-of-the-art S-MAD models trained exclusively on digital data. We additionally repeat the acquisition with a second scanner to assess cross-device robustness. Our results show that detectors that achieve near state-of-the-art performance in the digital domain suffer a more than threefold increase in average equal error rate, with the same qualitative degradation observed across both scanning devices, exposing a critical, previously under-reported gap between digital-benchmark performance and robustness to print-scan degradation.
☆ CounterFlow: Target-Conditioned Flow Matching for Visual Counterfactuals
In eXplainable AI, counterfactual explanations have gained significant traction by offering users direct, intuitive, and actionable insights into model decisions. We introduce CounterFlow, a novel framework based on Conditional Flow Matching that generates visual counterfactual explanations by directly steering a source image toward a user-specified target class. By leveraging target-conditioned vector fields, CounterFlow identifies highly realistic semantic modifications while requiring substantially lower computational overhead than traditional GAN- or diffusion-based architectures. Empirical evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate that CounterFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance in both visual realism and target class switching. By working directly in the raw pixel space, CounterFlow offers a more practical solution for real-world deployment.
☆ VPR-Space: A Benchmark for Visual Place Recognition in Space Analog Domains
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is an important means for loop closure detection in visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). While state-of-the-art VPR and SLAM approaches excel in urban and feature-rich natural environments, the vast and feature-poor environments of extraterrestrial surfaces like on the Moon or Mars pose severe challenges for existing approaches. This paper presents a novel benchmark, VPR-Space, to evaluate VPR capabilities on extraterrestrial surfaces. There are three contributions: (1) We collected sixteen VPR database-query datasets based on existing data from Space Analog Domains (SAD), terrestrial environments that resemble properties of the Moon or Mars. The collection includes a range of challenges regarding environment, viewpoint change, and illumination conditions. (2) To address the ill-posed nature of VPR, we propose a novel approach to generate the ground-truth information in VPR benchmarks. Instead of defining that a query and datbase image show the same place if and only if their camera poses are within fixed position and viewing direction thresholds, we propose to make the decision dependent on whether the match would be valuable in the downstream SLAM task. To avoid the overhead and restrictions of evaluating VPR in-the-loop within SLAM systems, we provide VPR ground-truth (GT) matrices based on the performance of an ensemble of state-of-the-art Relative Pose Estimators (RPE). Under this GT we require a VPR method to identify exactly those image pairs for which a subsequently applied RPE is expected to provide a valuable pose estimate in a SLAM context. (3) We evaluated nine state-of-the-art VPR approaches. The results show considerable room for improvement and indicate directions for future research. We provide a pre-release version of the dataset on github: $\texttt{https://github.com/rfechner/VPR-Space}$
☆ SeeRF: Learning to See Beyond Fields of View via Generative Image Registration and Fusion
Due to the inherent discrepancies in imaging viewpoints and field-of-view mismatches among multi-modal sensors, existing fusion methods have long struggled to achieve complete scene-level information integration beyond the limitation in sensor fields of view. Consequently, the generated fusion results often contain modality-specific regions and fusion artifacts, limiting the comprehensive representation of scene structures and semantic information. To address this challenge, we propose a generative registration-fusion framework, termed SeeRF. Specifically, it first introduces a deformation generation strategy based on the diffeomorphic stationary velocity field, combined with visual foundation model-guided feature extraction and a coarse-to-fine progressive multi-modal image registration module, to achieve accurate cross-modal flow estimation and generate valid field-of-view masks. Subsequently, the registration module is tightly coupled with the generative diffusion module for multi-modal completion and fusion, where the cross-modal control encoding module and the control residual feature encoder-decoder mechanism provide effective guidance. By leveraging the powerful prior modeling capability of generative diffusion models, the proposed framework overcomes the limitations imposed by shared fields of view and enables effective completion and natural fusion of non-overlapping field-of-view regions. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets and real-world scenarios demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance, validating its effectiveness, superiority, and robustness. The code will be available at https://github.com/XunpengYi/SeeRF.
☆ Synthetic Deformable Tubular Benchmark: A mechanically annotated dataset for evaluating deformable 3D reconstruction
Evaluating deformable 3D reconstruction requires ground truth linking camera motion, surface deformation, material correspondence and image appearance. We introduce the Synthetic Deformable Tubular Benchmark, generated with LumenMorph, an open-source toolkit for creating, annotating and evaluating tubular scenes. The release contains 5,580 RGB images. Its baseline crosses three surface-motion conditions with moving and stationary cameras in six scene families; matched appearance variants cover only moving-camera finite-element actions in four families. Documented public and evaluation interfaces expose camera poses, geometry, depth, deformation fields, persistent material correspondences and discrete finite-element records. Persistent triangle identities and material weights let users track the same surface location across frames and query its three-dimensional trajectory. Separately implemented geometric and mechanical checks assess annotation consistency with the generating models. Structure-from-motion, optical-flow and supplied-geometry displacement-interpolation studies demonstrate how the resource distinguishes registration coverage from geometric accuracy, exposes camera- and surface-motion effects, and tests the benefits and mismatch of mechanical priors. Public readers, evaluation contracts and the configurable generator support reuse and extension. Data integrity, fixed-environment repeatability and retained-prediction score replay have distinct verification scopes. The benchmark provides a controlled synthetic reference without claiming anatomical or clinical realism.
comment: 34 pages, including 5 pages of Supplementary Methods; 10 main-text figures and 1 supplementary figure
☆ RoboDoctor: Training-Free Recursive Self-Improvement for Robot Policies
Heyang Yu, Haomin Li, Sihang Li, Jixin Yan, Shiyun Peng, Wanqi Zhong, Tianyu Xin, Yuan Yao, Xiaoyu Tian, Yiming Li
Generalist robot policies and language-model agents provide complementary capabilities, but completing a task also requires adapting their use to the consequences of physical interaction. We study execution as a locus of adaptation: feedback guides the current action and supplies evidence for revising subsequent decisions under fixed model weights. We introduce RoboDoctor, a training-free framework that connects diagnosis, grounded action, and persistent experience across three revision targets. The harness allocates control between policy and agent; intervention determines when to assist while preserving useful policy behavior; and operation refines physical methods through observed effects. Linked experience records retain the reason for a decision, the attempted method, its outcome, and conditions for reuse. On a curated archive of 54 RoboDojo-Sim task entries, RoboDoctor achieves a five-dimension mean score of 57.10, with a native success rate of 49.44%. Recorded interactions illustrate strategy changes, selective correction, and grasp revision. These findings characterize execution-time adaptation in the evaluated system; controlled trials remain necessary to isolate the contribution of cross-episode experience.
comment: Project Page: https://robodoctor-rsi.github.io/
☆ Beyond Distribution Matching: Self-Supervised Representation Forcing for Few-Step Video Generation NeurIPS 2026
Few-step distillation is essential for deploying modern video diffusion models. Among existing approaches, Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) has emerged as a highly promising paradigm by achieving strong output-space fidelity without adversarial training, while remaining flexible across various student architectures. We observe, however, that DMD fundamentally relies on an output-space objective, lacking explicit regularization on the model's internal representations. As the distillation step count aggressively shrinks, this output-only supervision becomes insufficient, causing the distilled student to degrade in both fine-grained spatial structures and coherent temporal dynamics. To address this limitation, we introduce Self Flow Forcing (SF$^2$), which incorporates a predictive representation loss into the DMD framework without altering its output objective. By providing the student and an Exponential Moving Average (EMA) teacher with heterogeneous noise levels, we establish an information asymmetry. This formulation forces the student to predict the teacher's internal representations from a more corrupted input, effectively integrating self-supervised representation alignment into distribution matching. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SF$^2$ effectively mitigates temporal flickering and consistently improves both spatial fidelity and motion quality. Furthermore, the proposed mechanism is architecture-agnostic - seamlessly supporting both bidirectional and causal models - and requires no external feature extractors, introducing minimal computational overhead.
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2026. Project page: https://sotamak1r.github.io/SF2-web/
☆ Hyperspectral Unmixing using a Structured Linear Mixing Model with Additive Spectral Variability
Salah Eddine Brezini, Yannick Deville, Moussa Sofiane Karoui, Fatima Zohra Benhalouche, Abdelaziz Ouamri
Linear hyperspectral unmixing aims at retrieving pure material spectra present in an observed scene and their associated abundance fractions in each pixel. In most practical situations, hyperspectral images are affected by spectral variability (SV) also known as intra-class variability, which is caused by different physical phenomena including atmospheric effects, intrinsic variability of the pure materials and illumination or topographic changes. Nevertheless, the standard hyperspectral unmixing methods that rely on the Linear Mixing Model (LMM) do not consider these phenomena. Thus, neglecting them will spread errors throughout the linear hyperspectral unmixing process. To avoid this problem, this paper proposes two hyperspectral unmixing algorithms dedicated to a parametric model called Structured Additive Variability LMM (SAV-LMM). This mixing model handles SV in an additive manner by incorporating two terms into the standard LMM. Moreover, the designed algorithms are based on Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) and optimize a cost function which integrates additional penalization accounting for SV. Furthermore, a novel improved initialization scheme, which takes SV into account, is proposed. Experiments conducted on both synthetic and real datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms for linearly unmixing hyperspectral images with SV compared to the tested state-of-the-art methods.
☆ Copying As Defense: Protecting Images from Editing By Eliciting Model Copying
Image editors built on diffusion transformers (DiTs), such as Flux Kontext, make it possible to turn a single photograph into a convincing manipulated image, including harmful and non-consensual edits. Proactive defenses aim to prevent such manipulations by adding an imperceptible perturbation before an image is shared. Existing defenses for DiT-based in-context editors make the output attend less to the protected reference image. But this leaves the model free to follow the edit instruction using the text and its own generated tokens, often producing a new, weakly grounded image rather than preventing the edit. We find that the opposite strategy is more effective: instead of leading the model to ignore the reference, we encourage it to copy it. Through controlled attention interventions, we show that concentrating target-token attention on the reference image in only a few early blocks is sufficient to collapse the editing behavior, causing the model to reproduce its input, often as a lossy copy, rather than execute the requested transformation. Based on this insight, we introduce Copying-as-Defense (CaD), which maximizes per-token target-to-reference attention mass in early transformer blocks. Since attention rows are normalized, increasing reference attention suppresses the attention allocated to the text and generated canvas. Restricting the objective to early blocks also lets us truncate the backpropagation path, keeping optimization cheap. Across editors and benchmarks, CaD reduces average edit success from 81.4% on unprotected images to 24.0%, a 70.6% relative reduction, and by a further 44.3% relative to DeContext, the strongest baseline (43.0%). CaD is also roughly 1.8-2.0x faster per optimization step than comparable methods.
☆ Metric Scale for Insta360 Structure-from-Motion from the Camera's Embedded IMU
Structure-from-motion (SfM) from the dual-fisheye video of a consumer 360-degree camera recovers geometry only up to a similarity transform; in the pipeline considered here, metric scale is obtained from smartphone ARKit or ARCore poses captured alongside the camera. This paper evaluates a self-contained alternative: the IMU embedded in the Insta360 X5 and X6, recorded at 1 kHz. The sensor is characterised (noise density, camera-IMU synchronisation, accelerometer scale factor, bias stability), the camera-IMU rotation and frame timing are estimated from the data, and the scale is recovered by a linear visual-inertial alignment over the SfM poses of a whole survey. The standard formulation, with gravity and accelerometer bias shared across the survey, overestimates the scale by 3.4% on average; estimating each contiguous segment independently and averaging removes the bias. On nine surveys with a co-mounted LiDAR scanner the inertial scale deviates from the LiDAR by 0.74% in mean absolute error, against 1.94% for the smartphone scale; on printed fiducial markers both agree within the 1% uncertainty of the target. On the reference trajectories of thirty sequences of a public benchmark, brought to scales of 1/40, 1 and 40, the estimator recovers the metric scale with a mean error of -0.07% and a standard deviation of 1.28%. On fifty production surveys where the smartphone is the only reference, the two scales agree to a standard deviation of 2.6%, the inertial scale being 0.9% lower on average; the difference does not depend on window construction, grows with the extent of the smartphone anchor, and cannot be attributed to either reference. An ablation over window construction and a comparison with monocular metric-depth networks complete the study.
comment: 17 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables. Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/OverTheReality/OverMaps360_50
☆ EARS: Evidence-Aware Retrieval via Sound and Motion for Budgeted Video Reasoning
Uniform frame sampling can miss brief evidence in sparse-event videos when the VLM sees only K frames. We propose EARS (Evidence-Aware Retrieval via Sound and motion), a training-free, query-free front-end that ranks frames using optical-flow motion and audio energy, then applies temporal non-maximum suppression for diversity. The evidence score alone has frame-level AP 0.39; used only to select frames for the VLM, EARS with temporal diversity reaches localization AP 0.94, compared with 0.88 under Uniform sampling. In the updated matched study, at K = 1 EARS reaches XD-subset F1 0.660 versus 0.614 for centered Uniform (the paired interval includes zero); earlier backbone studies use separate protocols. On mostly-silent UCF-Crime, however, EARS slightly trails Uniform. A single configuration is used across both benchmarks; the new controls do not repeat the original held-out search. EARS therefore targets low-budget videos whose salient evidence aligns with motion or audio; on dense narratives or stealthy events, uniform or semantic selection remains preferable, and cheap modality statistics cannot reliably route between them. Code: https://github.com/mikeslin-ir/EARS
comment: 20 pages, 8 figures. Code: https://github.com/mikeslin-ir/EARS
☆ WorldPager: Zero-Stall Tiered Memory for Long-Horizon World Models on a Single Consumer GPU
Interactive world models keep the KV of past chunks as retrieval memory so that revisited places stay consistent. On a single consumer machine (one RTX 4090, 32 GiB of host memory, one NVMe SSD), long sessions with such memory hit two walls. The first is capacity: the KV of Matrix-Game 2.0 exhausts host memory after 45 seconds of video in bf16 and after 2.8 minutes in int4. The second is the model's positional horizon of 4.3 minutes. We show that this memory is capacity-bound rather than bandwidth-bound and that its access set is known before compute, because the camera pose is an input. An analytical model built on these observations predicts spill points to within one chunk and classifies zero versus non-zero stalls correctly on held-out configurations. Guided by it, WorldPager stores int4 KV in a GPU/DRAM/NVMe hierarchy instead of recomputing it, prefetches each chunk's memory from the extrapolated pose, never waits on a miss, and writes back in the background; to our knowledge, it is the first to place the KV memory of an interactive world model on an NVMe tier with zero-stall prefetching. With training-free position handling, it generates 37.5 minutes of video continuously with zero stalls and constant host memory, at about 9.5 frames per second. On a sealed test set, int4 storage shows no measurable quality loss; on long-gap revisits it lowers image quality by about one MUSIQ point.
comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 9 tables
☆ Generative Structure from Motion with Native 3D Diffusion NeurIPS 2026
Recovering an object's 3D structure and camera motion from a few uncalibrated views is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Classical structure from motion methods recover 3D geometry consistent with the input images but cannot recover unseen regions; native generation methods produce plausible 3D objects which are related but not necessarily faithful to the input images. Methods simply concatenating reconstruction and generation allow error to cascade across the two stages, instead of producing a 3D object consistent with both the distribution and the input. We propose GenSfM, which integrates image-based 3D reconstruction with a native 3D diffusion model. In particular, we use a multi-modal diffusion transformer to jointly denoise the shape latent and per-view pose latents under shared self-attention, grounding generated geometry in the observed views while using object-level priors to infer unobserved regions. A compact 3D-native UV-volume tokenization keeps the joint sequence small as views are added, and a pose-aware stage refines geometry and texture by sampling per-voxel image features at the recovered camera poses. On Toys4k and GSO, for $4$ uncalibrated views, GenSfM improves novel-view PSNR by $3.2$-$4.5$ dB and reduces median Chamfer distance by $2.8$-$3.8\times$ over a strong native-3D generation baseline, while recovering input-view poses over $96\%$ Acc@$5^\circ$ without any external pose-estimation backbone, post-hoc optimization, or known intrinsics. Project page: https://dotb1ue.github.io/GenSfm/.
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2026. Project page: https://dotb1ue.github.io/GenSfm/
☆ Learning High-Quality Pseudo-Labels for Point-Supervised Temporal Action Localization
Point-supervised temporal action localization (PTAL) aims to recognize and localize action instances in untrimmed videos using only point-level annotations. Existing pseudo-label-based methods have made substantial progress in PTAL. However, confidence-based initialization can overlook well-localized proposals. Meanwhile, existing methods either keep pseudo-labels fixed during detector training or update them without fully exploiting alternative boundary evidence from the original proposal pool. These limitations constrain supervision quality, thereby hindering detection performance. To learn high-quality pseudo-labels, we propose a framework that integrates prior-guided initialization with consensus-guided refinement during detector training. Our framework comprises two modules: Prior-Guided Initialization (PGI) and Consensus-Guided Refinement (CGR). PGI combines proposal confidence with point-derived priors to establish instance-specific reliability for initial pseudo-label selection and candidate retention. CGR continually uses the retained original candidates to construct boundary targets, combining their consensus with evolving detector predictions to refine pseudo-labels throughout training. Experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves competitive detection performance compared with existing methods. In particular, our method achieves 68.5\% average mAP over tIoU thresholds 0.1--0.7 on THUMOS14, surpassing PseR by 3.7 percentage points. Code is available at https://github.com/zhenyingfang/LHQP
comment: 14 pages, 7 figures
☆ HiFiPix: Bringing High-Fidelity Real-World Super-Resolution Back to Pixel Space
Wenjie Li, Du Chen, Hui Wang, Linlong Fan, Youwei Lv, Zeyi Chen, Zehan Chen, Jinwei Chen, Heng Guo, Zhanyu Ma, Qingnan Fan
Diffusion-based real-world image super-resolution suffers from limited reconstruction fidelity due to information loss in VAE-based latent representations. Recently, pixel-space diffusion models offer a promising high-faithfulness alternative by avoiding latent compression, but adapting them to Real-ISR remains challenging due to inherent patch boundary artifacts and degraded generative capability. To address the issues and maximize the potential of pretrained pixel-space diffusion models, we propose HiFiPix, a pixel-space Real-ISR framework capable of ultra high-fidelity reconstruction and fine-grained visual generation effects. To suppress patch boundary artifacts, we penalize unrealistic high-frequency periodic components with a Cross-Scale Wavelet Discriminator (CWSD) for image-level supervision, and Mixup Contrastive Self-Distillation (MixCSD) for intermediate representation regularization. Furthermore, we uncover a heterogeneous generation-fidelity trade-off across low-rank adapters (LoRA) and propose Selective LoRA Pruning (LoRA-SP) to adaptively prune LoRA layers, enhancing generative capability with minimal deterioration of reconstruction fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HiFiPix consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art latent space methods in terms of both restoration accuracy and perceptual quality by a large margin. Code and models will be released.
☆ Learning Scene Coordinate Reconstruction from Unposed Images via Pose Graph Optimization CVPR 2026
Learning-based structure-from-motion methods such as ACE-Zero have demonstrated strong performance in estimating cameraposes and scene coordinates from unordered image collections without requiring ground truth supervision. However, the lack of global and multi-view consistency constraints in ACE-Zero can lead to pose drift and misalignment, particularly in complex or ambiguous scenes. In this work, we propose a hybrid framework that integrates pose graph optimization (PGO) into ACE-Zero to refine camera poses and suppress incorrect refinements. We construct pose graphs directly from ACE-Zero outputs by extracting relative pose constraints from predicted scene coordinates. Furthermore, we introduce an uncertainty-aware optimization strategy by estimating confidence scores using geometric priors, including epipolar and optical flow consistencies across views. Our approach improves the robustness and accuracy of pose estimation, demonstrating that global geometric reasoning can effectively complement learning-based inference in structure-from-motion.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026 (Highlight). Project page: https://eldentse.github.io/visual_localization_pgo_public/
☆ S$^2$-RL: Sample-Set Dual Reinforcement Learning for Generative Semantic Segmentation Dataset Distillation NeurIPS 2026
While dataset distillation has witnessed significant advances in image classification, its extension to dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation is plagued by two core bottlenecks: bi-level optimization-based approaches suffer from prohibitive computational costs stemming from pixel-wise gradient unrolling, whereas proxy-based generative methods merely infuse visual textures into fixed semantic masks derived from real data, thus failing to condense rich semantic knowledge into a compact set of informative, novel scene generations. To address both bottlenecks simultaneously, we propose a novel Sample-Set Reinforcement Learning (S$^2$-RL) framework for generative semantic segmentation dataset distillation (SSDD). Specifically, S$^2$-RL formulates SSDD as a diffusion model based text-to-image generation paradigm, enabling flexible generation of images with informative, novel semantic distributions via a concise text prompt. Furthermore, we fine-tune a diffusion policy via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), leveraging a sample-set dual reward paradigm: for individual samples, it enforces semantic alignment with input text prompts and intra-class feature diversity; for sample sets, it maximizes inter-sample semantic distribution diversity by solving a contextual multi-armed bandit problem. These design choices enable S$^2$-RL to distill large-scale semantic segmentation datasets into a compact set of generated samples that encapsulate diverse, informative semantic knowledge without the need of pixel-wise gradient unrolling. Extensive experiments on the ADE20K and COCO datasets demonstrate that S$^2$-RL achieves substantial and consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baselines, establishing a new benchmark for SSDD.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. Project Page: https://00why00.github.io/S2RL/
☆ TP-JSCC: Efficient Token Pruning and Joint Source-Channel Coding for LVLMs-based 3D-VQA in Cloud-Edge Collaboration
Deploying large vision-language models (LVLMs) on resource-constrained embodied agents for 3D visual question answering necessitates cloud-edge collaboration. However, offloading massive visual data to the cloud over bandwidth-limited and noisy channels introduces severe latency and transmission distortion. To address this, we propose TP-JSCC, an efficient token pruning and joint source-channel coding method for LVLMs-based 3D-VQA in Cloud-Edge Collaboration. First, we develop a Local and Global Semantics-based Hybrid Token Pruning (LGS-HTP) module to significantly reduce the visual token count. By decoupling foreground-background tokens and jointly selecting local and global semantics, LGS-HTP effectively reduces redundancy while preserving reasoning-critical tokens. Second, we introduce a lightweight Token Joint Source-Channel Coding (T-JSCC) module to further compress the pruned tokens and ensure their robust transmission over error-prone channels. By employing lightweight cascaded linear layers and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR)-adaptive mechanism, this module adapts to fluctuating channel conditions while maintaining minimal computational overhead. Extensive experiments on ScanQA and SQA3D datasets indicate the exceptional efficiency and robustness of our approach. Specifically, on ScanQA validation set, the LGS-HTP module could achieve 90% pruning ratio while incurring less than a 1% CIDEr loss. Building on this, the T-JSCC further compresses the tokens by 18 times, resulting in an overall 180 times data volume reduction for robust transmission, while saving 90% in computational complexity for LVLM deployment. Our code is available at https://github.com/yuanhui0325/TP-JSCC.
☆ Beyond Words Alone: Disentangling Distributed Evidence for Visually Grounded Cultural Translation
Dingming Li, Yiwen Qiu, Linjuan Wu, Hongxing Li, Zixuan Wang, Xinze Lyu, Ye Guo, Daoxin Zhang, Zhe Xu, Weiming Lu, Yongliang Shen
Social media enables cross-lingual communication, yet the meaning of user-generated content (UGC) is often distributed across text, images, and cultural knowledge, making translation challenging. Existing evaluations typically treat images as optional and assume textual information is sufficient, obscuring whether errors stem from missing visual evidence or inadequate cultural adaptation. We introduce \textbf{Culture-MMT}, a diagnostic benchmark for \textbf{distributed-evidence pragmatic reconstruction} in social-media translation. It contains 498 curated, de-identified UGC instances across 20 domains, categorized into Symbol, Visual, and Hybrid by their required evidence. We also develop a human-aligned domain-specific judge, Judger, and a controlled evaluation framework that systematically varies the evidence available to translators. Across 17 model configurations, real images improve performance by +0.280 on Visual and +0.197 on Hybrid, but only +0.050 on Symbol, while random images provide no comparable gains. Human-authored descriptions further show that jointly dependent cases remain more challenging even when visual facts are explicit. These results characterize culturally effective social-media translation as {meaning reconstruction from distributed evidence}, highlighting visual grounding and cultural-pragmatic adaptation as distinct model bottlenecks.
☆ OBB-PBD: Extending Parallel Box Decoding to Oriented Bounding Boxes for Referring Expression Grounding in Aerial Imagery
Referring expression grounding in overhead imagery requires oriented bounding boxes rather than horizontal ones, since aerial objects appear at arbitrary orientations. Most grounding models emit box coordinates sequentially; Parallel Box Decoding (PBD) instead predicts all geometry slots in one forward pass, but only for four-coordinate horizontal boxes. We extend this block-aligned interface to a six-slot oriented representation using a double-angle parameterization. Rather than assuming correctness from a decreasing loss curve, we verify the extension with image/prompt-shuffle controls and visibility/leakage probes, which show that the corrected model depends on both the image and the prompt rather than on prompt statistics alone. On the aerial vehicle visual grounding (AVVG) benchmark, whose targets are genuinely oriented, the extended model improves rotated intersection over union (rotIoU) from 0.1253 for the zero-shot baseline to 0.303 +/- 0.012 (mean +/- standard deviation over three training seeds) across the complete 6139-record test split spanning all 120 images. Learning oriented boxes rather than their axis-aligned envelopes adds 0.055 +/- 0.008 rotIoU beyond a matched control (per-seed 95% confidence intervals all excluding zero), whereas block expansion alone yields no rotIoU gain distinguishable from zero.
comment: Published in Remote Sensing 18(20), 3535 (2026). Code and checkpoints: https://github.com/ce-dric/OBB-PBD and https://huggingface.co/ce-dric/OBB-PBD
☆ Model-Aware Generation of Safety-Critical Scenes for Robust End-to-End Driving via Distilled Planner Surrogates
End-to-end driving models perform well on standard benchmarks but collide frequently in safety-critical scenarios. We present a failure-mode analysis on NeuroNCAP which shows that 95.9% of DiffusionDrive's collisions are planning failures despite reliable detection, pinpointing the bottleneck in planning rather than perception. We attribute this to a fundamental data imbalance, as safety-critical interactions are rare in real driving logs, so planners are hardly ever trained on them. We close this gap with a novel model-aware framework that generates safety-critical training scenes against a specific planner. Each planner is attacked at the bird's-eye-view (BEV) level through a differentiable surrogate distilled from its own planning head. This keeps the expensive video renderer out of the attack loop. We extract 50 scenes per planner, each pairing an attack with a safe escape trajectory that serves as the fine-tuning label. A fully automated quality-diversity search generates both the attacks and the escapes, so that their variety is not specified by hand. Only these scenes are rendered to fine-tune the planner, which reduces the computational cost significantly. Fine-tuning on these scenes roughly halves the closed-loop collision rate of two planners on NeuroNCAP (SparseDrive 28.0% to 12.2%, DiffusionDrive 37.5% to 19.2%) while largely preserving normal driving. A cross-planner transfer experiment shows that the gain comes from targeting the specific planner. Each planner improves most on the scenes generated against itself, and DiffusionDrive fine-tuned on SparseDrive's scenes retains only 6.7 of its 18.3-point collision-rate reduction.
☆ Omni-InteractScope: Benchmarking Proactive and Agentic Interaction in Continuous Omnimodal Streams
Yinsong Yan, Ling Wang, Yuxuan Wang, Yifan Yang, Ruiyang Xu, Junming Lin, Qi Chen, Meng Gao, Minghao Han, Yunfei Chu, Qize Yang, Xize Cheng, Jin Xu, Jibin Wu
Omnimodal large language models (Omni-LLMs) are increasingly expected to assist users while observing continuous audiovisual streams. However, existing evaluations provide limited insight into how reliably these models connect stream evidence and user needs to timely, sustained interventions. We introduce \textbf{Omni-InteractScope}, a benchmark of 1,479 human-annotated, cross-reviewed interactions with 1,790 temporal targets across eight task groups. It links input modalities, event triggers, intervention types, and user needs, covering event-timed tool invocation and query-free assistance alongside notifications, warnings, state tracking, and continuous responses. Our experimental results on the proposed benchmark reveal three critical limitations of current Omni-LLMs: (1) \textbf{Timely tool invocation remains unreliable}: all 12 evaluated models produce an on-time first response for at most 40\% of tool-invocation targets, and joint timing-and-tool accuracy reaches at most 32.0\%. (2) \textbf{Query-free reminders remain poorly covered}: all evaluated models achieve lower timely reference-target recall on query-free reminders than on explicit questions, measured on their respective target sets. Reminder recall never exceeds 23.0\%. (3) \textbf{End-to-end guidance coverage remains limited}: nine models cover none of the 26 guidance sequences in full, and the remaining three cover only one to three sequences each. Targeted controls further show that tool-invocation scores alone do not establish event grounding and that reminder coverage depends on response history and frequency. These findings motivate developing and evaluating streaming assistants for timely action, initiative under general user needs, and coverage of entire response sequences.
☆ Unveil the Mask: Jointly-Optimized Diffusion Masked Pretraining for Appearance-Agnostic Operator Verification ACCV 2026
Photorealistic avatar videos decouple the appearance of a rendered face from the person who operates it, which makes conventional face recognition unsuitable for identifying the operator. Verifying the operator therefore requires representations of how a face moves that are insensitive to what the avatar looks like. We propose a verification framework built without any external pretrained model. It uses two complementary modalities provided for each sample: facial landmark sequences and video frames. From the landmark modality, it learns motion representations by diffusion masked pretraining over grouped landmarks, guided by lightweight auxiliary tasks that predict behavioral cues such as motion intensity and eye openness, and turns them into operator embeddings with a contrastive linear probe. To generalize to unseen avatar generators, the pretraining input is randomly transformed to simulate how a generator may alter the operator's motion. From the video modality, it captures fine facial motion through differences between consecutive frames. The embeddings of the two modalities are combined into one. Our approach reaches an overall AUC of 0.769 on the WBA2026 benchmark. Linear probing shows that the video embedding retains little information about the avatar's identity, whereas the landmark embedding retains some, and fusing the two modalities improves verification in particular across speaking and listening modes.
comment: Accepted at ACCV 2026 Workshop on Who Is Behind the Avatar? (WBA)
☆ NeSySpec: Neuro-Symbolic Technical Intelligence for Auditing Engineering Specifications with an Application to Aircraft
Engineers who audit a declared specification of an engineered system need to know which physical constraints it respects, which it violates, which field was altered and how to correct it. NeSySpec is an integrated and interpretable neuro-symbolic audit framework, built on Logic Tensor Networks, that answers these questions in one pipeline. Its axioms encode the physical relations of the domain as differentiable graded predicates whose tolerances are learned from a fleet of real records; from the same degrees, it diagnoses the violated constraint, identifies the altered field by abduction, proposes a minimum-change correction and ties image evidence to the parts it describes, abstaining exactly where evidence is missing, and returns all of it in one verification report. We validate NeSySpec on 107 aircraft types, with 16 test aircraft of 9 families held out of training, on specification records paired with ground photographs and satellite imagery and on synthetic errors: generated corruptions, edits labeled from the edit alone and deliberate falsifications. NeSySpec combines all the assessed audit outputs in one pipeline, which no learned, rule-based, solver-based, neuro-symbolic or language-model comparator does; on the test aircraft none is ahead of it in the macro-F1 of its constraint verdicts, in naming the violated constraint and the altered field or in the repair error, and it is competitive in record and image-pair detection. Its diagnosis names the violated constraint in 94.2% of corrupted test records, against 79.5% for classical Fellegi-Holt diagnosis, and on edits labeled from the edit alone, without retraining, abduction finds the altered field in 59.3% of records, against 30.6% for minimum-cardinality localization with random tie- breaking. Only the knowledge base, the visual predicates, the corruption generator and the data are specific to the domain.
☆ Toward Clinical Translation of Deep Learning-Based Intracranial Super-Resolution 4D Flow MRI Using Multi-Cohort Transfer Learning
Oliver Welin Odeback, Susanne Schnell, Patrick Winter, Johan Lundberg, Fredrik Piehl, Tobias Granberg, Alexander Fyrdahl, David Marlevi
We evaluated synthetic pretraining and multi-cohort transfer learning for deep learning-based super-resolution of intracranial 4D Flow MRI across heterogeneous neurologic cohorts. This mixed prospective-retrospective study analyzed 18 participants (12 healthy participants, 3 with moyamoya disease, and 3 with multiple sclerosis) with paired 1.2-mm and 0.6-mm 4D Flow MRI scans. A convolutional neural network pretrained on synthetic cerebrovascular data was fine-tuned using cohort-specific or pooled multi-cohort in vivo data. High-resolution-derived inputs enabled voxel-wise evaluation; native standard-resolution scans were used for angiographic and hemodynamic analyses. Synthetic pretraining reduced mean artery-wise velocity-normalized root mean square error (vNRMSE) versus interpolation (0.147 vs 0.166). Pooled transfer learning yielded the lowest mean vNRMSE (0.119 vs 0.127 for cohort-specific models and 0.147 for synthetic pretraining), with narrower 95% limits-of-agreement widths than synthetic pretraining across all test cases (0.109-0.222 vs 0.154-0.278 m/s). Super-resolved phase-contrast angiography achieved higher precision-recall area under the curve than native standard-resolution imaging in all cohorts (0.848-0.896 vs 0.486-0.805). These results indicate that pooled transfer learning improves cross-cohort reconstruction agreement and that super-resolution can improve vessel depiction, supporting further multi-center validation for cerebrovascular imaging.
comment: 28 pages, 6 main figures, 4 main tables; supplementary material includes 6 sections, 2 figures, and 1 table
☆ ACSAN: All-Convolutional Self-Attention Network Integrating Convolutional Operations with Vision Transformer
In the past few years, Vision Transformer (ViT) has achieved excellent performance in the field of computer vision. However, there still some problems remain. For instance, ViTs heavily rely on large-scale training data since they simply contain a large number of trainable parameters, which slows down their learning efficiency and limits their applicability in resource-constrained scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning model, namely All-Convolutional Self-Attention Network (ACSAN), which applies convolution operations to replace fully-connected matrices multiplications in the ViT framework. To implement ACSAN, we firstly design Dynamic Convolutional Self-Attention (DCSA) as the basic module, which employs multi-scale dilated convolutions to generate Query, Key, and Value. We defined spatial self-attention and channel self-attention to generate attention features respectively. The two attention features are finally merged as the output of the DCSA module. Based on DCSA, we then construct the basic ACSAN block. Comparing with ViT, we use DCSA to replace the regular self-attention operations, and use convolution layers to replace MLPs. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we train ACSAN on three widely-used image classification databases, i.e. CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-1k, from scratch. Experimental results show that ACSAN achieves excellent classification accuracy comparing with standard ViT with comparable or fewer parameters, as well as other state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies verify that each component contributes positively to the final performance.
☆ GIFT: Representation Geometry Matters for Single-Domain Generalized Object Detection NeurIPS 2026
Single-Domain Generalized Object Detection (S-DGOD) aims to generalize from a single source domain to unseen domains under distribution shifts. Existing efforts mainly focus on simulating unseen domains or suppressing domain-specific factors. However, they largely overlook the intrinsic generalization capability embedded in Vision Foundation Models (VFMs). In this work, we show that unconstrained fine-tuning disrupts the geometric structure of pre-trained representations, which encodes domain-invariant semantics. Motivated by this, we propose Geometric-Invariance Fine-Tuning (GIFT), a geometric-aware fine-tuning method for VFMs. Specifically, we introduce a series of learnable Householder reflections to the pre-trained weights to encourage geometry-consistent adaptation under domain shift. In addition, we propose a lightweight channel-wise scaling to facilitate effective task-specific adaptation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GIFT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches on two S-DGOD benchmarks. Notably, by introducing fewer than 1% additional trainable parameters into the frozen backbone, the proposed method achieves improvements of +7.9% and +2.9% in mPC over the previous SOTA on the Cityscapes-C and Diverse Weather Dataset, respectively. This finding highlights that preserving representation geometry is crucial for robust cross-domain generalization, establishing GIFT as a principled and efficient solution to domain shift.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. 22 pages, 11 figures
☆ Shared-Factor-Conditioned Diffusion for Low-Rank Tensor Recovery
Tensor recovery spans heterogeneous data structures and observation processes, calling for a representation that can adapt across modalities and tasks. We propose DiffTR, an unsupervised framework that unifies tensor completion, denoising, and hyperspectral super-resolution through coordinate-conditioned diffusion. Shared factors indexed by tensor coordinates condition a compact score network, and score matching jointly learns the factors and an implicit tensor representation from the available observations. Scalar and vector-valued outputs accommodate individual entries and entire tubes, enabling a common formulation for tabular tensors, images, and videos. The framework separates representation learning from task-specific observation modeling: reverse diffusion recovers missing values; estimation via Tweedie's formula, soft thresholding, and optional spatial consistency support mixed-noise denoising; and measurement-guided sampling transfers a prior learned from low-resolution hyperspectral observations to high-resolution reconstruction, followed by post-sampling refinement with data consistency and spectral subspace regularization. This separation makes the representation compatible with different corruption models and permits task-specific constraints to be incorporated within the same recovery framework. Experiments across multiple tensor modalities and recovery tasks demonstrate competitive reconstruction quality and the flexibility of a unified conditional generative representation. The code is available at https://github.com/CZY-Code/DiffTR
☆ SG-Splat: Stable Geometry Learning under Pose Uncertainty for Pose-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become a promising representation for real-time novel view synthesis and 3D scene reconstruction. For practical deployment, recent studies have explored pose-free feed-forward 3DGS, which reconstructs Gaussian representations directly from unposed input images. However, these methods remain sensitive to residual pose errors, which perturb canonical-space Gaussian transformation, introducing noisy supervision for geometry and attribute learning. To address this problem, we present SG-Splat, a pose-free feed-forward 3DGS framework that improves robustness to pose uncertainty and stabilizes the learning of Gaussian primitives. SG-Splat decouples geometry estimation and Gaussian attribute prediction into two dedicated branches, reducing error coupling between pose-sensitive geometry and Gaussian attributes. We further introduce a coarse-to-fine refinement pipeline, consisting of Flow-Guided Pose Refinement (FGPR) and Residual-Guided Geometry Correction (RGC), to improve geometric alignment before Gaussian attribute reconstruction. Specifically, FGPR refines camera poses with flow-based correlation features and differentiable bundle adjustment. RGC then corrects initial point maps using depth residuals derived from FGPR, producing more reliable Gaussian centers. To stabilize training, we introduce a dual-path strategy that mixes ground-truth and predicted poses for canonical transformation. It provides clean supervision for Gaussian attributes while improving geometry robustness to residual pose errors. Extensive experiments on DL3DV and RealEstate10K show that SG-Splat achieves state-of-the-art performance in both novel view synthesis and pose estimation.
☆ CVTSplat: Multi-view Reconstruction Using an Adaptive Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation
Voronoi tessellations have recently emerged as an adaptive, space-partitioning discretization for shape and appearance reconstruction from multi-view images. However, the irregular cells they produce make the repeated reconstruction of the tessellation during optimization costly. We therefore explore adaptive centroidal Voronoi tessellations (CVTs), which extend standard CVTs with non-uniform cell sizes while preserving the regular, well-shaped cells that make them efficient to compute. In CVTSplat, cell size is modulated by the evolving signed distance field, concentrating sites near the zero level set while keeping cells nearly centroidal. This regularity lets us specialize the whole pipeline, with GPU algorithms for nearest-neighbor queries and approximate Voronoi construction, and a rasterizer tailored to small, nearly isotropic cells. Our Voronoi construction is 5 to 10 times faster than general-purpose alternatives in this regime. On DTU and BlendedMVS, CVTSplat reaches geometric accuracy competitive with the best Gaussian-splatting surface methods while training in about 2.5 minutes on a single GPU.
comment: 13 pages
☆ Targeted Deep Regression - Initial Applications in Whole-Body Water-Fat MRI in UK Biobank
Filip Marttala, Taro Langner, Johan Öfverstedt, Nouman Ahmad, Håkan Ahlström, Robin Strand, Joel Kullberg
UK Biobank is a British clinical study which, in addition to large amounts of medical data collected, plans to include detailed Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) examina- tions from 100,000 participants. The image data can be analyzed for example by auto- mated analysis with neural networks for image segmentation or classification to expand the collection of image-derived phenotypes for medical research. In this work, we pro- pose, present and evaluate a methodology that uses image-based regression to estimate numerical properties from the collected neck-to-knee water-fat MRI scans. It applies a ResNet50-style network to 2D multi-channel collages that represent targeted and study- specific anatomical sub-regions from the MRI scan. The targeted sub-region sampling is achieved by propagating manually defined subregions from a reference scan to the other >30,000 analyzed scans using image registration. The resulting collages can be compact while retaining high-resolution, for example by providing multiple slices of kidney tissue for a kidney volume regression network. This approach also enables group-wise saliency analysis that highlight image and anatomical regions used by the network for the pre- dictions. The method was applied for the regression endpoints of kidney volume, heart volume, and age. Predictive performance was found between R2 = 0.731-0.984 and the group-wise saliency maps were found to highlight medically relevant regions. We con- clude that the method can be used to standardize and restrict the information presented to a deep regression analysis pipeline, increasing information density and opening up a wide range of future medical inference studies.
comment: 16 pages, 8 figures
☆ OVM-Occ: Open-Vocabulary Monocular Occupancy Prediction via Geometry-Aware Vision-Language Distillation
Monocular occupancy prediction in indoor scenes aims to recover a scene's 3D geometry and semantics from a single RGB image. Existing methods are restricted to a closed set of predefined categories, limiting their ability to generalize to unseen categories. This limitation is particularly critical in indoor scenes, where objects exhibit highly diverse and fine-grained semantic categories. We study open-vocabulary monocular occupancy prediction for indoor scenes and present OVM-Occ, a Gaussian-based occupancy framework with an instance-aware vision-language teacher. Specifically, we adopt Language-Embedded Gaussians as the intermediate scene representation, propose a geometry-aware deformable attention module to refine Gaussian semantic features, and construct instance-level vision-language embeddings to provide reliable semantic supervision. We further introduce geometry-aware decoupled semantic distillation to mitigate the interference between geometry learning and semantic learning. To evaluate open-vocabulary occupancy prediction performance, we introduce OpenOcc-ScanNet and OpenOcc-Replica, two extended benchmarks with more diverse and fine-grained semantic categories. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in open-vocabulary monocular occupancy prediction for indoor scenes, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art approach by 12.2 mIoU and 0.6 IoU on the Occ-ScanNet dataset, with consistent gains under new open-vocabulary evaluation protocols.
comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, 8 tables
☆ Low-rank MERA Decomposition of 3D OCT Image Volume for Compression, Denoising, Feature Extraction and Diagnosis of Retinal Diseases
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive imaging modality used for visualization of retinal tissue. However, OCT volumes are affected by speckle noise, which degrades image contrast and obscures fine structural details. Furthermore, modern clinical practice requires large field-of-view, high-resolution OCT volumes, whose storage and transmission are demanding for archiving and teleophthalmology applications. To address aforementioned challenges, we propose a low-rank multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) tensor network approximation of 3D OCT image volume, where the image volume is represented as contractions of a top core factor encoding global features and multiple interacting low-rank orthogonal or semi-orthogonal factors modeling inter- and intra-B scan correlations. This representation jointly enables compression, denoising, and feature extraction. Unlike deep learning approaches, the proposed approach is training-free and processes each OCT volume independently. We evaluate the proposed framework on OCT image volumes acquired by two different scanners and demonstrate improved visual quality and reduced retinal layer segmentation errors in comparison with several competing methods. We also extract MERA features from two clinical OCT volume datasets. They are subsequently classified using a Grassmann-manifold nearest-subspace classifier. With the subspace dimension as its only hyperparameter, the classifier is theoretically shown to be robust in small-sample clinical scenario. We demonstrate competitive accuracy of classification of retinal diseases in these small-sample settings, where deep learning methods are often limited by the scarcity of labeled data. The proposed structure-aware model-driven representation learning for high-dimensional data under limited supervision provides good generalization performance while maintaining high interpretability.
comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 5 tables
☆ Beyond Vision-Language Models: Visual-Semantic Affect Graphs for Emotion Recognition in Artworks
Emotion recognition in artworks remains challenging because affective meaning is often subjective, implicit, and shaped by relationships between visual form and semantic associations. While vision-language models provide strong multimodal representations, direct image-to-emotion prediction may overlook explicit relations among formal, semantic, and affective cues that support emotional interpretation. This paper proposes Visual-Semantic Affect Graphs (VSAG), a graph-based framework that represents artworks through interpretable feature nodes, including color, brushstroke, composition, light-shadow, line quality, and extracted visual entities. The graph learns feature-emotion associations for dominant emotion prediction, with valence-arousal structure modeled through an optional hierarchical auxiliary affect module. We evaluate VSAG and VSAG-TopK against direct VLM inference using Qwen3-VL and InternVL3.5 on EmoArt-5k. Results show that direct VLMs provide useful but modest baselines, while graph-based models improve dominant emotion prediction. In particular, the hierarchical valence-arousal variant of VSAG achieves the best overall performance, improving accuracy, macro-F1, and weighted-F1 over both direct VLM inference and the emotion-only VSAG baseline. Per-class results indicate that graph-based models and VLMs capture partly complementary signals, while valence-arousal structure is most useful when integrated as a coarse-to-fine affect hierarchy rather than as a simple post-hoc correction. These findings suggest that explicit visual-semantic structure can support both prediction and interpretation in artwork emotion recognition.
comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, IJCKG conference
☆ Reading Beyond OCR Noise: Robust Cross-Lingual RAG for Legislative Archives
India's historical public archives present severe computer vision and document image analysis challenges: decades of parliamentary records survive only as degraded, multi-column scanned pages featuring mixed scripts, complex layouts, and dense visual noise where OCR failure is the primary obstacle to information retrieval. We present an end-to-end framework that couples vision-based layout segmentation and multi-script OCR with an agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline. Our approach specifically addresses how visual degradation and layout fragmentation propagate into text extraction errors, using an iterative agentic loop to navigate around OCR noise and layout ambiguities before generating answers. Evaluated on the 200,000-page Punjab Vidhan Sabha archive, our system demonstrates robust handling of historical document degradation, outperforming standard text-only baselines.
☆ Thermal-Headroom Routing for Efficient Robot Perception in Extreme Heat IEEE
Sparsh Roy, Kevin Zhou, Arhaan Shah, Shreyan Garg, Vihaan Joshi-Apte, Maxim Kudryashov, Nanda Cheruvanthala
Adaptive robot perception systems must balance detector accuracy, inference latency, and energy consumption, particularly when high ambient temperatures cause processors to thermally throttle. We propose Thermal-Headroom Routing (THR), a lightweight model-selection policy that forecasts processor temperature using a closed-form RC thermal model and excludes detector configurations predicted to cross a throttling threshold. We evaluate THR with four YOLO11 configurations across seven real-world perception traces, eight ambient temperatures, and 20 randomized seeds, comparing it with latency-aware routing, fixed-threshold thermostats, duty caps, and a matched-compute-budget control. At ambient temperatures of 45-55 degrees C and a tight inference deadline, THR eliminates throttling in simulation, reduces deadline misses by 3.9-7.5 percentage points, and reduces energy per on-time frame by approximately 12-13% relative to a latency-belief router. A separate experiment using deadline-paced, nonoverlapping frame execution yields miss-rate reductions of 6.2-9.5 percentage points. A tuned thermostat or duty cap can match THR at a fixed operating point; predictive routing is most useful when ambient conditions or calibrated thermal parameters differ from those used to tune static policies. Measurements on an Apple M5 support the single-node heating approximation but do not validate hardware throttling. The results characterize the conditions under which thermal forecasting improves the efficiency and timeliness of resource-constrained robot perception.
comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, 11 tables. Code and experimental outputs: https://github.com/ImSpxrsh/thermal-headroom-routing {Submitted IEEE Big Data}
☆ Joint Latent Reasoning and Observation for Agentic Video Understanding
Effective video agents must learn not only how to answer, but also where to look next. Transferring this capability to smaller models is challenging because each observation serves two purposes: supporting an answer and guiding the search for further evidence. Textual descriptions may capture what is currently visible while omitting cues needed for subsequent acquisition. We introduce Latent Agentic Reasoning for Video Analysis (LARVA), a framework that distills multi-round video agents through jointly learned latent reasoning and visual observations. Rather than communicating through captions, an observer passes compact continuous representations to a reasoner that selects the next acquisition action or produces the final answer. Crucially, action and answer supervision propagate through this interface, training the observer to communicate information useful for downstream decisions. Observation reconstruction and reasoning-distribution alignment provide auxiliary supervision from textual teacher trajectories. Across five video-understanding benchmarks, LARVA achieves strong performance with 4B and 7B backbones. On VideoHolmes, Video-MME, and LVBench, the 7B model outperforms a textual CoT student trained on the same teacher trajectories by 5.1, 2.5, and 3.7 percentage points, respectively. These results highlight the value of jointly learning how agents represent evidence and act on it when distilling video-understanding capabilities.
☆ GaussianSpline: Adaptive Bézier Splines for Highly Dynamic 4D Gaussian Splatting
We present GaussianSpline, a dynamic 4D Gaussian Splatting method that models per-Gaussian motion using adaptive, non-uniform piecewise cubic Bézier splines. Unlike approaches based on global deformations, fixed-order polynomials, or uniformly parameterized splines, GaussianSpline jointly learns the Bézier control points and the temporal partition of each Gaussian's trajectory. This adaptive representation allocates greater temporal capacity to highly dynamic regions while maintaining compact trajectories for near-static regions, enabling high-fidelity reconstruction of complex and rapidly changing motion. To jointly achieve globally smooth motion and local adaptivity, we enforce $G^1$ continuity between consecutive Bézier segments using a reflection-based constraint on their control points. This produces smooth, fully differentiable trajectories while preserving the flexibility of non-uniform temporal parameterization. Experiments on the Neural 3D Video benchmark, the Google Immersive dataset, as well as on synthetic scenes demonstrate that GaussianSpline substantially improves reconstruction quality in scenes with highly non-uniform and challenging dynamics, while maintaining competitive performance on general dynamic scenes compared with state-of-the-art 4D Gaussian Splatting methods.
comment: 8 pages, 4 figures
☆ O2D-MedNet: An Optimization-Aware Dual-Domain Framework for Robust Medical Image Segmentation
Medical image segmentation (MIS) remains challenging due to composite degradations and multi-scale geometric variations, which jointly impair lesion-background separability, structural consistency, and optimization stability. Existing single-stream frameworks entangle heterogeneous cues within a single representation pathway, while hybrid-stream approaches often rely on generic or static fusion, limiting effective coordination across domains and failing to explicitly address optimization instability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new optimization-aware dual-domain framework for MIS (O2D-MedNet). First, a degradation-aware dualdomain interaction (DDI) module integrates Fourier - and Wavelet-domain features to suppress degradation-sensitive responses while preserving structural and fine-detail information. Second, a cross-backbone contour-guided fusion (CGF) module enables selective interaction between CNN-based local detail modeling and visual state-space-based global structure modeling, improving boundary accuracy and representation consistency. Third, a gradient-context optimization (GCO) strategy stabilizes training by adaptively adjusting learning dynamics based on loss trends and gradient statistics, mitigating instability caused by class imbalance and heterogeneous sample difficulty. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art MIS methods across multiple imaging modalities. Further analyses confirm enhanced sensitivity, structural consistency, and optimization stability, validating the effectiveness of the proposed O2D-MedNet for robust MIS under heterogeneous conditions.
comment: 16 pages, 12 figures
☆ Multi-Agent Relay Thinking
Existing multi-agent collaboration (MAC) methods have primarily explored a group thinking collaboration topology, where agents independently generate solutions and aggregate their outputs. In this work, we investigate an alternative relay thinking topology, where reasoning ownership is dynamically transferred across agents, allowing subsequent agents to inherit and refine an evolving reasoning trajectory. We introduce Multi-Agent Confidence-guided Relay (MACR), a framework that enables dynamical relay collaboration among agents. The key challenge is determining when reasoning should be relayed and which agent should continue the process. method addresses this challenge through confidence-guided relay triggering and a bidding mechanism that selects the next agent based on its confidence. Experiments on four benchmarks show that method outperforms the strongest single-model strategies in accuracy, e.g., +3.3% on MathVista and +3.9% on MMStar, and remains on par with multi-agent strategies while consuming 6.0x less token overhead on HallusionBench and MMStar.Further analysis demonstrates that relay collaboration enables heterogeneous agents to progressively integrate complementary insights, combining heterogeneous capabilities across reasoning stages. Our source code is available at https://github.com/67L1/MACR.
☆ OrthoRF: Exploring Orthogonality in Object-Centric Representations ICLR 2026
Despoina Touska, Bastiaan Onne Fagginger Auer, Alexandru Onose, Tejaswi Kasarla, Luis Armando Pérez Rey, Maximilian Lipp, Lyubov Amitonova, Martin R. Oswald, Pascal Cerfontaine
Neural synchrony is hypothesized to help the brain organize visual scenes into structured multi-object representations. In machine learning, synchrony-based models analogously learn object-centric representations by storing binding in the phase of complex-valued features. Rotating Features (RF) instantiate this idea with vector-valued activations, encoding object presence in magnitudes and affiliation in orientations. We propose Orthogonal Rotating Features (OrthoRF), which enforces orthogonality in RF's orientation space via an inner-product loss and architectural modifications. This yields sharper phase alignment and more reliable grouping. In evaluations of unsupervised object discovery, including settings with overlapping objects, noise, and out-of-distribution tests, OrthoRF matches or outperforms current models while producing more interpretable representations, and it eliminates the post-hoc clustering required by many synchrony-based approaches. Unlike current models, OrthoRF also recovers occluded object parts, indicating stronger grouping under occlusion. Overall, orthogonality emerges as a simple, effective inductive bias for synchrony-based object-centric learning.
comment: Poster presentation at ICLR 2026
☆ Complexity-guided Regularization for Generalizable Human Gaussian Splatting NeurIPS 2026
Recent studies on generalizable human Gaussian splatting have achieved the notable progress in synthesizing novel views of unseen human subjects from multi-view images. Despite this progress, existing methods still struggle to represent fine-grained details of human subjects, which inherently involve high geometric and textural complexity. This is because previous methods do not impose a constraint on how densely Gaussians are placed, which often leads to blurry rendering results in complex regions. To address this problem, we propose a complexity-guided regularization scheme. The key idea is to leverage a complexity prior computed via the local entropy in geometric and textural characteristics of a clothed human. This effectively prevents Gaussians from being coarsely placed in complex regions, which facilitates the faithful reconstruction of intricate structures. Furthermore, we sample local patches predominantly from complex regions according to this complexity prior, which allows the model to be sufficiently supervised by local details. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method delivers state-of-the-art performance while maintaining the real-time inference speed in generalizable human Gaussian splatting. The code and model are publicly available at https://github.com/DCVL-3D/CGR-GS_release.
comment: 28 pages, 11 figures, including appendix. Accepted to NeurIPS 2026
☆ Temporal Slice Learning for AI-Generated Video Detection with 400$\times$ Fewer FLOPs NeurIPS 2026
Recent advances in generative video models have improved visual realism, making detection increasingly dependent on subtle temporal inconsistencies. However, these signals are weak and spatially localized, while most of the video content is redundant. This creates a fundamental mismatch: existing detectors rely on heavy backbones to model full videos, which leads to high computational cost and limited scalability. In this work, we rethink AI-generated video detection from a representation perspective. Instead of modeling entire videos, we restructure them into compact temporal slice representations that isolate informative temporal evolution. We introduce a lightweight framework using frequency-aware temporal slice consistency learning, where informative spatial rows and columns are aggregated over time to form slice-domain inputs. This reparameterization suppresses redundant appearance while preserving discriminative temporal dynamics, enabling efficient and targeted detection. By constructing slices from both high- and low-frequency regions, our method exposes complementary temporal artifacts, including unstable details and abnormal motion smoothness. We instantiate this idea in a Temporal Slice Consistency Network, which integrates task-driven slice localization, hierarchical positional encoding, and a lightweight Transformer to model cross-slice and cross-frequency dependencies. We further introduce AI-Artist, a new benchmark with artist-curated videos from recent high-fidelity generators, including Seedance and Kling. Experiments on GenVideo and AI-Artist show that our method achieves strong performance while requiring over 400$\times$ fewer model-forward FLOPs and 3.6$\times$ faster model inference than the strong video-based baseline ReStraV (2.9$\times$ faster end to end, including preprocessing), enabling scalable and practical deployment.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. 35 pages, 18 figures. Project page: https://shangwei5.github.io/TSC-Net/
☆ Sexual dimorphism and sex-specific features of pediatric hand bone shapes via statistical shape modeling
Understanding the envelope of shape variation encompassing both sexual dimorphism and growth-related changes in living tissue is a non-trivial task. In this work, we use statistical shape models (SSMs) and analyze demographic-stratified shape parameters to quantify sexual dimorphism and sex-specific shape changes. To this end, we developed a two-stage detection-segmentation framework that accurately segmented $n = 27664$ unique bone masks from a radiographic dataset of $n = 1456$ subjects with diverse ages and sexes (HD95 = $1.512 \pm 0.005$, ASSD $0.449 \pm 001$, Dice = $0.987 \pm 0.00004$, IoU = $0.975 \pm 0.0001$). Following SSM fitting, our follow-up analyses of stratified shape parameters highlighted the morphology of sexual dimorphisms for each bone and demonstrated sex-specific differences in shape development. Our results were consistent with existing literature and provided an unambiguous, data-driven methodology for characterizing tissue shape and its population-scale variation. This approach provides a potential methodological foundation for developing population-based models of anatomical variation and could be extended to investigate tissue growth and shape changes over time. Future work should evaluate the applicability of this methodology on alternative anatomical structures and imaging modalities, with the goal of validating these growth trajectories on longitudinal data.
☆ Domain-Adapted Latent Diffusion Models for CT-to-PET Image Translation
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) provides important metabolic information for tumor detection and staging but remains significantly less accessible than Computed Tomography (CT) due to its high cost, infrastructure requirements, and reliance on injected radioactive tracers. CT-to-PET image translation using generative models aims to address this disparity, yet state-of-the-art diffusion-based methods are limited by the scarcity of paired training data. To overcome this, we propose a domain-adapted latent diffusion framework that transfers natural-image priors using a relatively small dataset of 21,930 paired CT/PET slices, incorporating a signed power transform to resolve extreme intensity sparsity in PET data. Compared to CPDM, a state-ofthe-art baseline for CT-to-PET image translation, our approach yields superior performance in pixel-wise reconstruction and localized tumor fidelity, demonstrating effective transfer of natural-image priors to the medical domain. We further provide a systematic analysis of evaluation metric reliability for sparse PET data, showing that standard full-image metrics can be misleading indicators of translated image quality, and propose background-filtered and mask-restricted metrics as more clinically meaningful alternatives.
☆ Understanding and Repairing Cooperative Perception under Adverse Weather
A cooperative 3D detector can miss a vehicle even when the LiDAR points on it remain unchanged. We study this failure under adverse weather as Weather-Induced Context Interference. To our knowledge, this is the first controlled study of how weather-related exterior changes remove cooperative benefits while preserving all points inside annotated objects. Controlled experiments on simulated and real roadside inputs show that exterior loss changes object representations before fusion and removes previously useful assistance. On real inputs, restoring object-neighborhood features recovers 30 of 31 induced failures; three equal-area exterior controls recover none. The failure condition also appears with a second fusion model. These findings motivate Adverse-Weather Cooperative Repair (AWCR), with separate implementations for the available supervision. Point Classifier filters added weather returns in simulation. On real inputs, Local Correction refines candidates and Quality Selection checks them against current measurements, without naturally paired clear/adverse-weather recordings. Candidate tracing shows that correction supplies accurate geometry for some targets that original candidates cannot localize at the evaluation threshold. On natural adverse-weather CoInfra development data, AWCR improves car bird's-eye-view (BEV) AP@0.7 by 4.66 points with V2X-ViT and 5.56 with AttFuse. On simulated V2X-R fog, it improves vehicle BEV AP@0.7 by 4.47 points at a fixed 4,096-candidate budget.
☆ Uncertainty Evaluation to Support Safety of the Intended Functionality Analysis for Determining the Applicability of Performance Targets Across Triggering Conditions in ML-Based LiDAR Object Detection
For safety of the intended functionality (SOTIF) analysis according to ISO 21448, a machine learning object detector for light detection and ranging (LiDAR) point clouds can meet a performance target, a limit on the mean per-frame share of wrong detections among accepted detections, by rejecting detections above an uncertainty threshold. A threshold selected on data of one condition carries a statistical guarantee only for data distributed like its selection data, whereas SOTIF analysis covers every triggering condition. This paper presents an uncertainty evaluation in which the threshold is transferred into a triggering condition, a test decides at a stated error probability whether the target is applicable there, not applicable or not determined, and a lower bound counts the independent units an applicable outcome requires. For PointPillars ensembles on KITTI and nuScenes, counted in recorded sequences, as the dependence between frames requires, neither dataset held enough independent units for any target limit, and no transfer had a not applicable outcome. Counted in frames, the same data gave not applicable outcomes at limits fixed in advance after transfers into far distance, into rain and between two separately trained detectors, thresholds that met the target limit after a transfer rejected most correct detections, and in rain the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve did not decrease. A performance target met under one condition therefore counts as evidence under a triggering condition only after a test there, reported with its share of accepted correct detections and its number of independent recorded sequences.
comment: 24 pages, 6 figures. Extended version of the VEHITS 2026 conference paper (doi:10.5220/0014967200004030). Submitted for journal publication. Code and recorded results: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23495356
☆ Test-Time Prompt-Agnostic Decomposition NeurIPS 2026
Test-Time Prompt Tuning (TPT) adapts large pretrained models to unseen target distribution shifts by updating only lightweight prompt tokens. Existing TPT methods are effective, but they mainly optimize each prompt update locally. Across test-time steps, prompts updated at the current step are reused for the corresponding predictions and updates, so noisy or biased unlabeled objectives can accumulate and destabilize the prompt-update trajectory. We identify two failure modes: magnitude expansion, where updates move the prompt too far, and directional drift, where consecutive updates point in inconsistent directions. To analyze and control these failures, we propose Test-Time Prompt-Agnostic Decomposition ($\mathtt{TPD}$), which characterizes observed prompt-update trajectories from a dynamical-systems view and decomposes base prompt updates into magnitude and direction. $\mathtt{TPD}$ computes a spectral radius to measure update expansion and decomposes update directions into persistent, oscillatory, and residual components. Building on this decomposition, Adaptive Koopman Control ($\mathtt{AKC}$) regulates update magnitude by shrinking updates under expansive recent dynamics, while Hankel Update Router ($\mathtt{HUR}$) refines update direction by preserving persistent components and suppressing oscillatory and residual components. Together, $\mathtt{AKC}$ and $\mathtt{HUR}$ produce a stabilized prompt update. As a prompt-agnostic framework, $\mathtt{TPD}$ can be plugged into visual and text TPT methods without modifying the backbone, prompt architecture, or adaptation loss. Experiments on 15 datasets show that $\mathtt{TPD}$ consistently improves 10 baselines, with accuracy gains of $3$--$8\%$ for visual prompts and over $2\%$ for text prompts.
comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2026
☆ Reading the Registers of Honorius III without Manual Line Transcription: Forced-Aligned HTR, End to End, Modular or Hybrid
Unlocking medieval archives at scale is bottlenecked by the cost of line-level diplomatic transcriptions and manual abbreviation expansion. Focusing on the registers of Pope Honorius III (1216-1227) over 5,000 letters surviving in full only as manuscript images - we show that existing, line-break-free expert transcriptions (edition drafts) suffice to train end-to-end hand-written text recognition (HTR) that jointly transcribes and expands heavily abbreviated Latin. Using forced alignment on 860 unaligned edition entries across 394 pages of Reg. Vat. 9, we automatically bootstrap 13,122 training lines without manual alignment of segmented lines. While the generic CATMuS baseline struggles on this domain (18.9% CER) and a modular space-free HTR + word-segmentation pipeline (cf. Camps et al. 2021) plateaus at 15.6% WER, our from-scratch hybrid Conformer - combining CTC with bidirectional subword attention decoders, iterative self-realignment and n-best LM rescoring - achieves 4.7% CER and 8.7% WER (8.4% WER with ROVER system combination), nearly halving errors on clause-final words (22.7% to 12.2% WER). These figures are measured on the test lines that align with the transcription (86% of all test lines for the best hybrid). Furthermore, we address a tension between paleographic fidelity and editorial normalization: training on targets that preserve scribal name initials reduces the WER against the manuscript text on the 31 affected test lines from 13.3% to 9.2%, at a small cost against the expanded transcription (WER +0.3 points, CER +0.4). Finally, extensive ablations show that none of an auxiliary diplomatic CTC head, a copy mechanism, a permutation decoder or masked-image pretraining improves on direct end-to-end supervision, while strict padding-mask propagation and per-line beam termination make inference batch-invariant.
comment: 10 pages, 10 figures
☆ Improving VLMs on Scientific Chart Analysis via Autonomous Evolution
Understanding and operating with scientific charts is a standard approach in data analysis, and while humans are good at interpreting such charts, open vision-language models (VLMs) are known to perform poorly when it comes to question answering based on such data types. Motivated by an initial observation that many of their errors are due to inexact answering, we raise the following natural question: how much accuracy can we recover without changing the model at all? In this paper, we study this question by searching over inference programs and the code around a "frozen" version of the model. Using ideas from autonomous evolution (famously used in AlphaEvolve), we first start from a baseline inference program, and in each round we show an LLM judge the code together with a few failures on training questions, and ask for an improving evolutionary move. As usual in autonomous evolution approaches, the candidate programs are kept in a small pool ranked by training accuracy, and the next edit is performed on top-scorers from this pool. We run this approach on three VLMs and four popular benchmarks on scientific charts, and we measure the fraction of descriptive questions whose answer exactly matches the ground truth. The accuracy improves in all experimental settings. On average, it rises from 16.6% with the starting program to 41.3% with the evolved one, and the largest single increase is 55.2 percentage points. As a side benefit, our evolved program is 3.8x faster than the starting program, because short answers are easier to grade and faster to generate. Our results demonstrate that a large part of the observed errors arise due to the inference pipeline, and that optimizing it can improve the "frozen" VLM without the need to retrain it.
comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables. Code: https://github.com/AbhinavDubey30/VLM-Autonomous-Evolution
☆ Blendshape Generation for Models with Disconnected Parts: Adding ARKit/MediaPipe Blendshapes to Anime-Style Character Models WACV 2027
Blendshape generation for 3D models has been extensively researched, but very few works address generating blendshapes for models with multiple disconnected parts. We present a case study of generating fixed facial expression blendshapes for commercial anime-style 3D character models with up to 11 parts per face. To make sure that our system can handle models in a way that is agnostic to topology, we train neural networks to generate deformation fields around the input meshes. We employ at least one network to independently process each part, and the relative positions of their outputs are coordinated by having each network also process the geometry of an anchor part. We use two mechanisms to improve accuracy: having the networks predict whether the output displacement is zero or not, and classifying blendshapes into different size groups and dedicating a network to each group. We also introduce a method to improve blendshape quality by enhancing bilateral symmetry. Our method is simpler than recent neural-network-based works and solves a real problem of the user community of these models.
comment: Accepted to WACV 2027
☆ MemVLN: Streaming Episodic Memory for Vision-Language Navigation
Vision-language navigation (VLN) requires an embodied agent to follow language instructions through 3D environments. Maintaining persistent episodic memory remains a challenge for VLM-based streaming agents in long-horizon navigation. We present MEMVLN, a streaming episodic memory framework that maintains a bounded bank of compressed perceptual features annotated with timesteps and action-derived relative poses, and produces compact memory tokens via cross-attention. We pair the proposed memory with a frozen pretrained geometry encoder. To learn the memory module, we design a masking-based trajectory summarization task with multi-granularity sub-trajectory decomposition, encouraging route reconstruction exclusively from episodic memory. Under navigation training restricted to the official R2R/RxR trajectories, MEMVLN achieves state-of-the-art performance on most reported metrics on standard VLN-CE benchmarks. Long-horizon analyses further characterize when episodic memory is useful. For physical evaluation, we collect 30 instruction-conditioned episodes in one physical scene, use 24 as demonstrations for post-training, and hold out six for testing. On the held-out episodes, MEMVLN improves success over the VLM baseline from 17% to 40%, and post-training further raises it to 47%.
comment: Project page: https://memvln.github.io/
☆ Kronecker-Structured Video Completion with Cross-Fitted Self-Supervised Residual Learning
Tube-wise video completion reconstructs temporal trajectories at spatial locations unobserved in every frame. We propose a two-stage framework combining regularized masked Kronecker product decomposition (KPD) with cross-fitted self-supervised residual learning. First, we estimate a compact structural backbone directly from observed entries using cyclic component-wise least-squares updates, spatial and temporal factor regularization, and regularizer-optimal scale balancing. The exact updates yield a nonincreasing objective. Second, we address the mismatch between in-sample fitting errors and the prediction errors encountered at missing tubes. We partition observed tubes into folds and construct residual targets using backbone models fitted without the corresponding target tubes. A lightweight 3-D convolutional neural network then predicts corrections from the backbone, visible residual context, observation mask, and local detail features. Exact data consistency preserves observed measurements. Experiments include ablations, sensitivity analysis, grayscale and RGB video completion, and structured missing patterns. Our method achieves the highest mean PSNR and SSIM at the higher tested sampling rates on the grayscale benchmark. On eight selected DAVIS RGB sequences, it achieves the highest mean missing-region PSNR and full-frame SSIM and the lowest mean missing-tube temporal-gradient MAE at every evaluated sampling rate.
☆ LOCUS: Locate Once, Check Until Settled. Draft-and-Verify Visual Grounding with a Box Head and Coordinate-Token Verification
Vision-language models (VLMs) ground a referring expression in one of two ways. They decode the box as coordinate tokens, which is precise but takes one sequential step per token, or they regress it from a hidden state with a small head, which takes one step but loses accuracy at high IoU. The two fail differently: a head usually finds the right object but places its edges loosely, while coordinate tokens place edges precisely. We therefore use the regression head as a speculative drafter for the model's own coordinate tokens. Locus writes the head's box as coordinate tokens and checks them with the same backbone by Jacobi iteration over a shared image prefix. The fixed point is the model's greedy coordinate-token answer, reached in about 5.60 sequential passes on average instead of 18.46 decoding steps; head and verifier are one set of weights, trained jointly. On the 8 RefCOCO, RefCOCO+ and RefCOCOg splits, verification raises Locus-2B's Acc@0.9 from 54.87 for its own head to 59.13, and the one-pass head is ahead at Acc@0.5 of every published model with at most 3B parameters except Florence-2-L. Against Jag, the strongest open regression-head model, at its own size and training budget, Locus ties at Acc@0.5 and, with typical acceptance, gains +4.52 points at Acc@0.9, with paired significance tests. Exact answers come 1.5x faster than vLLM greedy-decoding the same coordinate tokens with the same weights; a pure regression head remains faster still.
comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 10 tables. Project page: https://muhammad-talha-ad.github.io/LOCUS/ Code: https://github.com/muhammad-talha-ad/LOCUS Models: https://huggingface.co/MTalha2001/LOCUS-2B and https://huggingface.co/MTalha2001/LOCUS-0.8B
☆ DriveUniTok: A Unified Multimodal Tokenizer for Driving World-Action Models
Jingbo Xu, Hanchao Leng, JiaHui Huang, Hanbing Li, Jingwei Zhao, Kuiyuan Yang, Chen Gao, Guang Chen, Hangjun Ye, Yong Li
World models are emerging as a fundamental component of policy learning for real-world agents, enabling agents to predict future world states and plan actions within a learned representation of the dynamic environment. Existing approaches, however, often model appearance, metric geometry represented by projected LiDAR depth, and ego motion either partially or independently, overlooking the fact that these modalities are different projections of a shared underlying world state. This separation can lead to information loss and cross-modal inconsistency, ultimately limiting downstream performance. Motivated by this unified view of the world, we propose DriveUniTok, a unified multimodal tokenizer for driving world-action models (WAMs) that encodes these modalities in a single decodable continuous latent. We freeze DriveUniTok and adapt a pretrained diffusion model, DriveUniWAM, to predict future unified latents; the tokenizer then decodes them into future appearance, projected LiDAR depth, and ego trajectories. Experiments on NAVSIM demonstrate that our unified design achieves better future prediction and planning performance at lower downstream computational cost than separate-stream alternatives. With reinforcement learning post-training, DriveUniWAM achieves a PDMS of 91.54, reaching state-of-the-art performance among the evaluated WAM-based planners.
comment: 31 pages, 16 figures, 8 tables, including appendices
☆ Revealing Imaging Characteristics of Thermal Wakes from Underwater Vehicles Without Cooling-Water Discharge
Guoyi Zhang, Yanjin Du, Guangsheng Xu, Zhengyao Zhao, Siyang Chen, Jingjing Gao, Yuezheng Zhou, Yiyang Wu, Bin Wu, Tongsu Zhang, Lejia Ye, Donghe Wang, Jie Wang, Kaiye Hu, Zhipeng Ren, Han Wang, Boo Cheong Khoo, Xiangpeng Xu, Xiaohu Zhang
Small uncrewed underwater vehicles are proliferating and threaten maritime security, yet evade sonar and magnetic sensors built for larger submarines. Infrared thermal wakes, generated by hydrodynamic displacement that modulates the cold-skin layer, offer a non-acoustic, non-magnetic alternative even without cooling-water discharge. Existing studies, however, rely on idealized simulations that fail to capture real-world backgrounds, offering limited guidance for target-background discrimination. We establish AVP-IR-Wake, the first large-scale, real-world, physically diverse benchmark of 161,485 frames collected over three years. We show that thermal wakes are extended structures of discrete vortices, violating the compactness assumption of conventional targets. We reveal local indistinguishability: individual wake vortices are statistically identical to wind-induced background vortices in temporal, frequency, and sparse domains, sharing low-frequency information and long-range correlations. This challenges the assumptions of compact, transient, high-frequency targets in conventional detection. Yet we establish global morphological separability: although locally inseparable, the wake as a whole is organized by vehicle trajectory, whereas background clutter is organized by wind-driven thermal fronts. This explains why representative detectors fail and shows that reliable detection must shift from local feature extraction to global trajectory-constrained physical modeling. Because the cold-skin layer varies globally and seasonally, forecasting wake observability will require integrating physical oceanography and atmospheric science, linking underwater surveillance to the changing ocean surface.
☆ Zero-Shot Monocular Depth Estimation for Visual Perception in Lower-Limb Prostheses IEEE
Ishi Vijayvergiya, Marc Hölle, Youssef Dawoud, Amir El-Ghoussani, Michele De Vita, Rohan Asthana, Philipp Beckerle, Vasileios Belagiannis
Monocular depth estimation has advanced rapidly with the development of foundation models that demonstrate strong zero-shot generalisation across diverse visual domains. However, the applicability of these models to visual perception for lower-limb prosthetics remains largely unexplored. Reliable depth perception is particularly important for prosthesis users, who often experience significant challenges when navigating stairs, uneven terrain, and other complex environments. To address this gap, we introduce the Lower-Limb Prosthesis (LP) dataset, a benchmark designed to evaluate depth perception from an emulated knee-level prosthetic viewpoint. Using this dataset, we evaluate four state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation foundation models. Our results provide the first systematic benchmark of monocular depth estimation performance from a prosthetic viewpoint, while highlighting both the challenges and the potential of deploying foundation models in prosthetic perception systems. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Ishivijay/lp_dataset.
comment: Accepted at IEEE International Conference on Integrated Systems in Medical Technologies 2026
☆ When Pointing Becomes Profiling: Social Bias and Refusal in Text-Steerable Visual Encoders
Text-steerable visual encoders condition a frozen Vision Transformer on a natural-language prompt and point at the matching image region, producing prompt-conditioned heatmaps and features. We audit the released SteerViT model and find that its steering interface turns language-driven pointing into demographic profiling. On counterfactual face mosaics and real multi-person photographs, "the person" selects a man more often than the base rate, crime words select Black people more often than occupation words do, "the man" among four women selects the Black woman 75.6% of the time on SocialCounterfactuals, and "the monkey" selects Black people. None of them is in the backbone's unsteered saliency, and the crime association is not in the frozen text encoder; the race effects grow with steering strength and enter through the last two cross-attention layers: giving the prompt to those layers alone reproduces them. Four other grounding models, CLIPSeg, Grounding-DINO, SAM 3, and Qwen2.5-VL, show no crime routing and weaker race routing. The model cannot refuse. Its patch softmax must place its mass somewhere, and its heatmap separates a groundable request ("the police officer") from one that is absent ("the pizza") or that would require a stereotyped demographic inference ("the criminal") only at chance (AUROC 0.52). We introduce SafeSteer, which adds a learned abstention output and counterfactual-invariance training on the same 23M steering parameters. SafeSteer separates should-point from should-abstain prompts at AUROC 0.997, generalizes to held-out sensitive and absent words (0.998; at a 0.5 threshold it refuses 99.8% of trained and 62% of held-out sensitive words) with no over-refusal of visible people on the benchmark, and removes most race routing while keeping localization and retrieval within 1 point of the released model. Code, benchmarks, and the curated mosaic sets will be released.
☆ Shifted Window Temporal Transformer for YOLO-Guided Phase Recognition in Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy Surgery
Intelligent operating rooms require accurate awareness of surgical workflow for better intra-operative decisions, teamwork, and surgical documentation. Therefore, accurately recognizing surgical phase during surgery is crucial. However, previous artificial intelligence-based methods provide fluctuating predictions for the transitions, restricting their clinical use. To address this challenge, we propose a clinically meaningful framework that integrates a Swin Transformer and Temporal Transformer Encoder (TTE) for effective surgical phase recognition and a parallel YOLOv11s network for real-time surgical instrument localization. To avoid phase flickering and to produce stable workflow predictions, a causal temporal smoothing is applied. The proposed framework is tested on the Cholec80 dataset for the simultaneous recognition of the surgical phases and instruments. The overall phase recognition accuracy of this model was 92%, and the macro average F1-score was 0.86. This performance surpasses CNN based methods such as EndoNet (81.7%) and SV-RCNet (85.3%), as well as temporal convolutional and transformer-based approaches including TeCNO (88.6%), Trans-SVNet (90.9%), and LoViT (91.5%). Besides, the module of instrument detection achieved mAP@0.5 = 0.863. The reliability of the results is confirmed, obtaining a high recognition rate of the workflows, and a high accuracy of the localization of the instruments. The proposed framework can serve as a foundation for intelligent surgical assistance, enriching situation awareness, and potential robotic surgery applications. Code will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/ac005sheekar/LapChol-Surgery-Swin-Cholec80
☆ DUET4D: Self-Corrective Coupled Guidance for Sparse-View 4D Reconstruction
Sparse-view 4D reconstruction is highly under-constrained when only a few cameras are available. Generative priors can recover missing appearances, but video models are computationally impractical for iterative reconstruction, whereas single-view models produce temporally inconsistent pseudo-observations. Moreover, directly absorbing uncertain generative outputs into Gaussian optimization often creates redundant primitives and floating artifacts. To address these challenges, we propose DUET4D, a self-corrective coupled guidance framework for sparse-view 4D Gaussian splatting. The core of our approach is a self-corrective framework where the 4D representation guides generative prior for spatio-temporal consistent supervisions. We first construct sequential alignments from current Gaussian evidence to steer the latent restoration. Then we use Sequential Fidelity Resampling to lift generative supervisions into Gaussian space to selectively distinguish repeatedly supported primitives. The corrected representation then provides more reliable Gaussian evidence for the next restoration cycle. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DUET4D significantly improves rendering quality and rendering efficiency.
☆ More Memory, Better Videos? A Controlled Study of Visual Memory in Long-Video Generation
Yuzhuo Chen, Huafeng Shi, Xinyu Wang, Yulong Xu, Yucheng Wang, Haoqin Hong, Guoxin Zhang, Zehua Ma, Weiming Zhang
Long-video generators increasingly retrieve past visual observations to prevent identity drift. The intuition is compelling: more access to history should make future video more consistent. But an image can be faithful to the past and wrong for the present. Does visual memory always improve the generated story? We investigate this question through VMem-Bench, a two-track diagnostic study. Track-A measures which references are selected from 92 real films (16,548 segments), before generation and without generator confounds. Track-B compares four retrieval policies with no-memory and gold-informed last-seen controls on 30 causally generated stories (2,824 segments) using a shared generator. Retrieval increases entity recall from 0.559 to 0.628-0.693 and improves similarity to past appearances, but decreases precision from 0.977 to 0.915-0.938 and forbidden-entity avoidance from 0.968 to 0.845-0.898. It can also reinforce obsolete appearances after the story changes them. Conversely, high long-gap recall can arise without memory when the prompt itself supplies the appearance; an appearance-stripping analysis exposes this confound. These results distinguish historical fidelity from current-story correctness and show why retrieval relevance or final-video consistency alone does not establish memory utility.
☆ Reason or Recite: Complementary Specialists with an LLM Judge for Traffic Anomaly Reasoning ECCV 2026
Road anomalies such as collisions, violations, and sudden hazards demand more from video understanding than detection: a practical system must verify what happened, describe the scene, and explain the cause. We find these competences pull in opposite directions for vision-language models: closed-form questions reward precise, evidence-grounded reasoning, while open-ended answers are scored by similarity to reference text, where matching the annotation style matters as much as reasoning correctly. We present Reason-or-Recite (RoR), a two-specialist framework for the Traffic Anomaly Reasoning track of the 2026 AI City Challenge. RoR (1) rewrites the official chain-of-thought annotations into a structured, temporally grounded schema and LoRA-tunes a 9B vision-language model on the enhanced traces; (2) fine-tunes a 4-bit-quantized 27B model on answers alone, absorbing the annotation style; and (3) selects between the two candidates per question with a training-free LLM judge. RoR ranks first on the in-domain leaderboard with mean score 0.6788.
comment: 18 pages, 3 figures, 5 tables. Accepted at the AI City Challenge Workshop, ECCV 2026. 1st place in Track 3 (Traffic Anomaly Reasoning)
☆ Sparse Recovery Bird's-Eye View Model Soup for Robust Camera-Based 3D Object Detection IROS 2026
Camera-based bird's-eye view (BEV) perception methods such as Fast-BEV have demonstrated promising results with fast inference speed and competitive accuracy. However, their robustness to real-world corruptions remains insufficiently explored, posing risks for autonomous driving deployment where environmental variations are inevitable. In this paper, we propose Sparse Recovery Bird's-Eye View Model Soup (SR-BEVS), a sparse recovery learning approach that simultaneously improves clean accuracy and corruption robustness without requiring additional data or architectural modifications. Our method identifies pruning candidates based on layer-wise weight magnitudes, applies random pruning to create diverse sparse models, and retrains each model with a randomly sampled learning rate. By averaging these diverse recovered models into a single dense model, we achieve enhanced robustness against various corruptions while introducing zero inference overhead. We further provide a mode connectivity analysis demonstrating that our pruning-based diversification preserves the connected low-loss basin necessary for stable weight averaging. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate up to 33.8% improvement in corruption robustness and a 1.8% gain in clean accuracy over the Fast-BEV baseline, with consistent improvements across sensor noise, weather distortions, and illumination changes. Our simple yet effective approach may be applicable to other BEV models.
comment: Accepted to IROS 2026. 8 pages, 6 figures
☆ GUIFlow: Temporal Redundancy-Aware Incremental Inference for GUI Agents
Ye Li, Haoran Ding, Huanan Liu, Yuan Meng, Yutian Shen, Yuansong Wang, Kangye Ji, Hanyun Cui, Hongbo Duan, Chen Tang, Jiawei Li, Shu-Tao Xia, Zhi Wang
GUI agents built on vision-language models interact with continuously evolving interfaces, yet conventional inference repeatedly recomputes representations of largely overlapping observations and histories. This mismatch makes multi-step interaction costly, while changes in context, interface content, and action arguments prevent straightforward cache reuse. We introduce GUIFlow, a framework for full-pipeline incremental inference in multi-image GUI interaction. Our central insight is that advancing a decision need not require rebuilding all supporting representations: each interaction step can instead selectively update computational states maintained across the trajectory. To support new decisions as the context evolves, GUIFlow adapts how past computation is reused: historical KV states are position-aligned and injected into the current context; change signals guide selective updates of current-observation states in the vision encoder and language model; and earlier action responses serve as speculative drafts verified by the target model. Together, these mechanisms enable cross-step reuse throughout visual encoding, prefill, and decoding without additional training, a separate draft model, or changes to the model-visible inputs and action interface. Experiments demonstrate up to 3.39x geometric-mean speedup across offline multi-image benchmarks and up to 3.49x in online, closed-loop interaction on OSWorld, while maintaining task performance broadly comparable to the dense baseline.
☆ DimFlow: Bidirectional Grid-Expert Learning for Dynamic Gaussian Reconstruction
Dynamic Gaussian reconstruction requires compact scene features to support coordinated changes in geometry and appearance. A factorized grid provides efficient local queries, but accurate interpolation alone does not ensure that the resulting dynamic attributes remain compatible across space and time. We introduce DimFlow, a framework that learns these features through bidirectional interaction between a multi-resolution grid and a coordinate-based expert branch. Feature-level adversarial alignment connects their distributions, adaptive fusion transfers complementary information, and activation-masked residual feedback refines the grid during training. Four attribute experts organize deformation, rotation, opacity, and temporal information before Gaussian rendering. In the aggregate comparison across D-NeRF, HyperNeRF, and DAVIS, DimFlow achieves 39.73 dB PSNR, improving on 4D-GS by 1.92 dB while matching its reported 85 FPS rendering speed. The model occupies 18.9 MB, compared with 18.3 MB for 4D-GS. Component and attribute-expert ablations reveal complementary contributions from feature alignment, adaptive exchange, and temporal processing.
☆ Fed-MAPTrack: Federated Modality-aware Prompt Tuning for RGB-X Tracking
RGB-X tracking complements RGB appearance with thermal, depth, or event observations, but centralized training requires collecting multimodal videos at a single location. Federated training keeps raw videos local, but sensor heterogeneity can create a mismatch between parameter-sharing domains and the clients contributing to them. This mismatch is particularly relevant when RGB-only clients coexist with sensor-equipped clients: their RGB observations remain useful, but they provide no auxiliary measurements for learning sensor-dependent interactions. We propose Fed-MAPTrack, a modality-aware federated prompt tuning framework for RGB-X tracking. The pretrained tracking backbone and prediction head are frozen, and clients optimize and exchange only prompt-related parameters. The server aggregates RGB-shared parameters globally and maintains separate thermal, event, and depth banks for auxiliary-specific, fusion, and normalization parameters. Selective participation retains RGB-only clients' contributions to the global RGB bank while excluding their fusion and normalization updates from modality-specific aggregation. Across three matched training repetitions under a fixed client partition, Fed-MAPTrack improves the mean FedAvg scores by 2.35 AUC points on LasHeR, 3.45 SR points on VisEvent, and 2.11 F-score points on DepthTrack. Among the nine evaluated methods, it achieves the highest mean thermal AUC and depth F-score, while its mean event SR is 0.07 points below that of Independent FL. Controlled ablations show that extending the bucketing scope without a compatible participation rule can reduce performance. These results highlight the need to jointly define the sharing domain and eligible contributors for each parameter group.
☆ Supervising the Visible State: Separating Representation from View Selection in Streaming Video
Yihao Hu, Pan Wang, Yitong Lin, Zhihao Wen, Deyuan Liu, Hang Wang, Mingda Wan, Yiwen Zhao, Yutong Li, Yuchen Mao, Tao Lin
An action seen once and the same action seen three times receive the same action-recognition label, so that supervision does not require a model to count. Answers shared across histories that differ in event order, accumulation, or relations leave those distinctions unconstrained; we call this state under-specification. Visible-State Supervision (ViSS) addresses it by training on source-grounded probes of event identity, order, accumulation, relation change, and answer sufficiency; under the same recent-frame interface it improves OVO-Bench over a strict-matched generic temporal supervision baseline while remaining comparable on StreamingBench, with the largest gain in hallucination detection. Test-Time Causal View Search (TVS) then adapts evidence access while keeping the learned model fixed, expanding from recent frames to sparse event and compact history views on demand. The two interventions separate representation from view selection: supervision particularly benefits hallucination detection and causal reasoning, access particularly benefits event recall and forward reasoning. Together they reach the best reported accuracy among the published systems compared here on StreamingBench and OVO-Bench at a fraction of the processed frames of exhaustive selection, and strict replay shows that most of the remaining gap to a three-view oracle is a correct answer that was later replaced. Streaming accuracy depends on what supervision asks the model to keep, what evidence inference exposes, and whether the model keeps a correct answer once it has one.
☆ Rethinking Data Imbalance in Class Incremental Surgical Instrument Segmentation
Shifang Zhao, Long Bai, Kun Yuan, Feng Li, Jieming Yu, Wenzhen Dong, Guankun Wang, Mobarakol Islam, Nicolas Padoy, Nassir Navab, Hongliang Ren
In surgical instrument segmentation, the increasing variety of instruments over time poses a significant challenge for existing neural networks, as they are unable to effectively learn such incremental tasks and suffer from catastrophic forgetting. When learning new data, the model experiences a sharp performance drop on previously learned data. Although several continual learning methods have been proposed for incremental understanding tasks in surgical scenarios, the issue of data imbalance often leads to a strong bias in the segmentation head, resulting in poor performance. Data imbalance can occur in two forms: (i) class imbalance between new and old data, and (ii) class imbalance within the same time point of data. Such imbalances often cause the dominant classes to take over the training process of continual semantic segmentation (CSS). To address this issue, we propose SurgCSS, a novel plug-and-play CSS framework for surgical instrument segmentation under data imbalance. Specifically, we generate realistic surgical backgrounds through inpainting and blend instrument foregrounds with the generated backgrounds in a class-aware manner to balance the data distribution in various scenarios. We further propose the Class Desensitization Loss by employing contrastive learning to correct edge biases caused by data imbalance. Moreover, we dynamically fuse the weight parameters of the old and new models to achieve a better trade-off between the biased and unbiased model weights. To investigate the data imbalance problem in surgical scenarios, we construct a new benchmark for surgical instrument CSS by integrating datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, achieving significant performance improvement against existing baselines.
☆ DiffAuction: An Auction-Driven Framework for Generative Image Advertising
Diffusion models enable multiple advertisers to compete for exposure within a shared generated image. Yet existing approaches are computationally costly when generating images under varying target-share configurations, and it remains unclear how the resulting outcomes should be evaluated and priced. To address these gaps, we propose DiffAuction, a framework integrating controllable generation, click-intent evaluation, and auction design. First, our training-free Residual Share Calibration (RSC) decomposes joint-attention updates into product-specific residuals and rescales them according to target shares. We further introduce Share-Conditioned Prompting (SCP) to adapt the viewpoint to each desired allocation. Second, we develop an evaluator that uses a VLM to extract visual evidence and an LLM to assess Click-Through Intent (CTI), a proxy for click propensity, along four dimensions: Product Prominence, Brand Recognizability, Scene Integration, and Contextual Value Communication. We validate its assessments against judgments from 10 trained annotators on 1000 images. Third, we formulate this advertising setting as an auction over jointly feasible generation configurations. Each configuration has a public expected CTI vector, while advertisers hold configuration-specific private values per unit of CTI that map click intent into commercial value. We adopt a learnable affine maximizer auction (AMA), which jointly selects a shared generation configuration and determines advertiser-specific payments to maximize expected platform revenue. The resulting allocation and payment rules guarantee dominant-strategy incentive compatibility (DSIC) and individual rationality (IR). Experiments show that our generation method strengthens the monotonic relationship between target shares and CTI relative to baselines, while the learned AMA achieves higher platform revenue in the resulting auction setting.
☆ Accuracy and efficiency of compact foundation models for surface-water mapping during floods
Pretrained Earth observation models may reduce the effort needed to map surface water, but their value depends on the alternative against which they are compared. We evaluated Prithvi-EO-2.0-Tiny using the 446 hand-labeled Sentinel-2 chips from 11 flood events in Sen1Floods11. A fine-tuned model, a frozen-encoder model, and an identical randomly initialized architecture were compared with a similarly sized U-Net, a larger Prithvi model, and spectral-index thresholds. Experiments varied the number of training chips, excluded events from model fitting, and measured computational cost and prediction reliability. With 252 training chips, U-Net achieved a water intersection-over-union (IoU) of 0.856 on the official test set, compared with 0.833 for fine-tuned Prithvi-Tiny. Pretraining improved the tiny transformer over random initialization by a reported 0.046 IoU with 25 training chips and 0.023 with 252 chips, but did not reverse the U-Net ranking. Across 11 event-exclusion evaluations, mean IoU was 0.768 for fine-tuned Prithvi-Tiny and 0.777 for U-Net; the paired interval included zero. Fine-tuned Prithvi-Tiny processed a 512x512-pixel chip in 16.1 ms on a GPU and 258 ms on a laptop CPU, compared with 30.6 and 665 ms for U-Net. Errors were concentrated near water boundaries, and high predictive entropy identified many, but not all, erroneous pixels. These results support a specific role for compact pretrained models: lower measured computational demand with competitive accuracy, rather than consistent superiority. Event-dependent performance, shared hyperparameter selection, and the distinction between observed water and newly inundated land delimit the conclusions.
comment: 19 pages, 8 figures, 7 tables. Code: https://github.com/MohammadrezaNarimaniUCDavis/Prithvi_Tiny_Floodwater_GeoAI Data: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23653544
☆ LE-GDA: Layer Ensemble Gaussian Discriminant Analysis for Training-Free Few-Shot CLIP Adaptation WACV 2027
Pavodi Maniamfu, Vogel Kiketa, Zezina Kuzulu Kuetu, Jakin Mukendi Kabongo, David Mayoya Kutangila, Pescie Honore Kinkani Mampuya, L'Or Wolo Sieka
Training-free few-shot adaptation of vision-language models typically constructs a classifier from CLIP's final projected image representation, leaving intermediate representations unused. Combining them is not straightforward. Class scores from different representations differ in spread by orders of magnitude for the same query. Direct averaging allocates influence by numerical scale rather than predictive information. We propose Layer-Ensemble Gaussian Discriminant Analysis (LE-GDA), a method that fits regularized shared-covariance discriminants independently to intermediate and final representations extracted in one frozen encoder pass. LE-GDA standardizes each discriminant's class scores per query, selects a small representation multiset on labeled validation data, and combines it with the zero-shot classifier without gradient-based optimization. Across 11 datasets, four CLIP backbones, five shot counts, and three independently sampled K-shot training sets, LE-GDA achieves the highest mean accuracy of all evaluated methods on every backbone, raising the 16-shot mean from 78.01% to 79.54% over a matched GDA-CLIP (final-feature) baseline and improving that baseline for every backbone-shot combination. At one shot, LE-GDA retains a 1.20-point mean gain over the baseline even though covariance estimation is unavailable and per-query standardization is neutral. A control with richer per-class structure inside a single representation does not reproduce the gain, indicating that the benefit comes from combining representations. These results show that intermediate CLIP representations carry information beyond the final embedding and can improve training-free few-shot adaptation. Code and evaluation resources are available at https://github.com/pavodi-NM/le-gda.
comment: Accepted at WACV 2027. 23 pages, 5 figures, including supplementary material
☆ SGDB: Semantic-Geometric Decoupling and Evidence Binding for Logical Anomaly Detection
Logical anomaly detection requires recognizing scene components and measuring whether their configuration satisfies task constraints. Correct identities can coexist with inaccurate geometry; clean mask fragments can yield misleading lengths. We propose Semantic-Geometric Decoupling and Evidence Binding (SGDB). A semantic decoder learns object identities from component-annotated normal sources and factual edits; a separate reader supplies final measurements. Partial one-to-one association binds geometric witnesses to identities while retaining unmatched objects in the count. A support-certified reader selects mask-derived axes using line quality and complete component ownership. Explicit task requirements and normal-data references define executable checks, with decision thresholds fixed by independent normal calibration. Execution-grounded explanation traces rule contributions to source objects and measurements, extracting compact sufficient alarm certificates. A frozen language model expresses selected outcomes as cited claims, with numeric evidence retained by the executor. Reports preserve observed deviations and unavailable evidence. SGDB achieves 98.19% AUROC and 94.52% fixed-threshold F1 on five MVTec LOCO logical categories, and 93.56% AUROC and 92.76% F1 across all 50 VID-AD tasks. Frozen-output controls evaluate geometric readout and explanatory sufficiency and compactness.
comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, includes supplementary material. Code: https://github.com/Qybc/SGDB
☆ MMGNet: Multi-Modal 6-DoF Grasp Synthesis for Cluttered Scenes
Grasping is a foundational capability in robotic manipulation. Scene-level 6-DoF grasp synthesis relies on point clouds for metric geometry, yet real-world point observations are often noisy, incomplete, and over-smoothed. RGB images provide object-region, boundary, and appearance cues, yet two bottlenecks limit their effective use in scene representation and local grasp reasoning. We present MMGNet, a Multi-Modal Grasp Synthesis Network that addresses these bottlenecks through hierarchical image-to-3D feature injection and rotational graspness modeling. Hierarchical injection integrates multi-scale image features throughout 3D representation formation, while the rotational graspness jointly predicts the grasp approach direction and in-plane rotation before organizing local image-informed features through grasp-shaded grouping. Ablation studies show that these two modules provide complementary gains. MMGNet achieves a mean AP of 60.34 on GraspNet-1Billion with RealSense, surpassing all compared methods. In real-world experiments with adversarial grasp objects, MMGNet improves the grasp success rate over AnyGrasp by 8.46 percentage points. \emph{Code, models, and data will be released upon publication.}
comment: Under Review
☆ MedAdaptAgent: An Automatic Harness for Adapting Medical Imaging Models to New Sites
Reusing pretrained medical-imaging models offers an alternative to training from scratch. A model trained for the same task may perform poorly at a new hospital because imaging protocols and preprocessing differ. Effective adaptation depends on the model architecture, domain shift, and available labels and compute. Adaptation can improve scores on a small labeled set yet reduce performance on unseen data. We present MedAdaptAgent, an automatic harness that turns a supplied model, target data, and a free-text request into a new-site adaptation workflow. Its LLM-driven Adaptation Planner uses model-site evidence to choose compatible experiments and revise subsequent adjustments. The harness requires evidence of improvement over the pretrained model, then delivers the selected model as a complete, runnable package. Evaluation spans 26 segmentation and classification transfers across architectures and compute settings, with segmentation annotation budgets ranging from zero-shot transfer to few-shot adaptation. With 20 local annotations, mean segmentation Dice rises from 0.483 to 0.774 across 10 transfers, a 60.1% relative gain, with no harmful replacements. Mean classification AUROC rises from 0.810 to 0.837 across 13 transfers, a 3.4% relative gain. Comparing adapted models with the pretrained model reduces harmful classification replacements by 30.8% versus selecting the highest-scoring model on the available labels, using identical candidates. Seven public-model deployments demonstrate adaptation and reproducible package delivery across contrast and modality shifts. A CT-to-MRI study extends the evaluation to four LLM planners, including two open-weight models. We release the code on GitHub.
comment: 17 pages, 2 figures. Code: https://github.com/Guhanxue/medagent
☆ LayoutMamba: Efficient Document Layout Analysis with Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Networks
Document layout analysis (DLA) faces a long-standing dilemma: existing methods either capture rich local details at prohibitive computational cost (e.g., Transformer-based approaches with quadratic complexity) or achieve efficient global modeling but sacrifice fine-grained structural awareness (e.g., state-space models). This trade-off hinders deployment in resource-constrained scenarios. We present LayoutMamba, a hybrid framework that synergistically combines sparse-attention Transformers for localized feature extraction (O(n) complexity) and the recurrent state-space mechanism of Mamba for dilution-free long-range dependency modeling across the 2D document canvas. Our two-stage paradigm first uses a lightweight Transformer encoder to hierarchically distill salient local semantics; second, Mamba propagates global contextual dependencies without attention dilution, enabling precise, efficient, and scalable layout understanding. We further identify a critical yet overlooked issue in existing DLA benchmarks: the inherent low-overlap distribution bias of layout objects, which we mitigate through a novel Geometric Overlap Penalty Loss (GOPLoss), a dual-optimization objective that minimizes redundant bounding box overlaps and encourages geometrically consistent predictions. Extensive experiments on PubLayNet and D4LA show that LayoutMamba surpasses state-of-the-art AP on PubLayNet with 8x fewer parameters and maintains leading performance on D4LA, ranking top-3 among published methods, achieving an unprecedented balance between accuracy, efficiency, and scalability. Our work pioneers a cognition-inspired paradigm for document analysis, advancing practical deployment in edge computing and resource-limited environments.
comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, 4 tables
☆ CoDeRNet: Selective Cross-Task Routing under Heterogeneous Supervision for Change Detection and Captioning NeurIPS 2026
Change Detection & Captioning (CDC) aims to jointly localize changed regions and describe their semantic content from bi-temporal remote sensing images. While recent approaches have demonstrated the effectiveness of unified modeling, they primarily rely on shared representations or jointly optimized architectures, leaving task-specific communication under heterogeneous supervision less explored. However, detection and captioning differ fundamentally in their supervision granularity, leading to heterogeneous representations with uneven reliability across tasks and spatial locations. In this paper, we reformulate CDC as a selective information routing problem between heterogeneous task branches, where the key challenge is to determine when and where information should be transferred. To this end, we propose CoDeRNet, a unified framework that preserves task-specific representations while enabling bidirectional exchange of complementary information. CoDeRNet introduces a Confidence-Decomposed Routing (CoDeR) mechanism, which decomposes the routing condition into receiver-side need for support and sender-side reliability cues to guide selective transfer. Experiments on LEVIR-MCI and WHU-CDC show that CoDeRNet achieves strong overall CDC performance, particularly improving caption generation while preserving competitive change localization. Extensive analyses further show that the benefits arise not merely from joint learning or generic cross-task communication, but from explicitly modeling selective cross-task information routing. These results highlight the importance of conditional information transfer for unified CDC under heterogeneous supervision.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. 20 pages
☆ DocTalk: Enhancing Medical Knowledge Retrieval via Fine-tuned Large Language Models with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Robust Clinical Decision Support
Objective: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) in healthcare has opened new possibilities for AI-assisted clinical decision-making; however, safe and effective deployment remains challenging because of hallucination and domain misalignment. This study introduces DocTalk, a doctor-assistive question-answering (QA) system designed to generate concise, chart-grounded responses from de-identified discharge summaries. Methods: We developed a high-fidelity data generation pipeline that produces 500 clinically relevant QA pairs through sentence-level decomposition, chain-of-thought-guided question formulation, and expert review. Six open-source LLMs, including three general-purpose and three biomedical models, were evaluated before and after parameter-efficient instruction tuning using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). The framework integrates prompt engineering, in-context learning, and medically aligned evaluation to support factual and interpretable responses. Results: On DocTalk-QA, instruction tuning produced consistent improvements across lexical, semantic, and clinical fidelity metrics. The best-performing tuned model, Llama-3-Med42-8B, achieved ROUGE-L = 0.40, BERTScore-F1 = 0.76, and UMLS-F1 = 0.49. To examine external generalization beyond the DocTalk-QA dataset, the two best-performing models, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and Llama-3-Med42-8B, were evaluated on PubMedQA before and after instruction tuning. Accuracy improved from 0.931 to 0.977 for Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and from 0.935 to 0.943 for Llama-3-Med42-8B. Conclusion: DocTalk was deployed as a secure web-based platform for interactive EHR querying. These findings suggest that clinically grounded instruction tuning can improve medical QA performance and support practical clinical decision support.
☆ DecoyCount: Evaluating Visual-Reasoning Misalignment in Counting
Qiuyi, Zhang, Zhen Xu, Jing Gu, Seojin Bang, Arnav Mohanty Das, Yaning Hu, Gautam Kumar, Jared Lichtarge, Le Xue, Bettina Catoto, Akul Datta, Daniel Luo, Farha Khan, Marcella Valentine, Yinfei Yang, Andrew M. Dai
Visual counting benchmarks report whether vision-language models produce the correct number, but not whether errors arise from perception or reasoning. We introduce DecoyCount, a benchmark built from 1,660 real-world images with designed decoys across seven mechanisms, along with paired prompts: a neutral question, a matched alignment cue, and a novel multi-hop, multi-image question that situates the same counting problem in a realistic scenario. Using this design, we find that counting failures are induced partly by visual misalignment: models can execute the intended counting process when cue-guided but fail to select it unaided, and we term this difference in accuracy the reasoning-alignment gap. Despite being highly capable on general reasoning, frontier models remain below 50\% accuracy on our benchmark, while alignment gaps range from 11.8-22.1 percentage points; strikingly, we observe that more capable models, greater thinking budgets, and agentic processes often induce larger gaps. Because humans may bring context that models lack, we test whether textual underspecification contributes to misalignment using a scenario-based multi-hop condition without explicit hinting, but this added context does not improve aggregate performance. Our analysis concludes that stronger general reasoning does not by itself generalize to aligned visual reasoning, leaving misalignment with human visual expectations as a substantial component of the remaining deficit.
☆ Learning Dual-Camera Smooth Zoom via Decoupled Geometric-Photometric Data Synthesis
When zooming between dual cameras on smartphones, prominent discontinuities in both geometric perspective and color rendition inevitably degrade the visual experience of users. To address this issue, we introduce the dual-camera smooth zoom (DCSZ) task, aiming to synthesize continuous intermediate frames for fluid zooming. However, directly applying existing video frame interpolation (VFI) models to this task is severely hindered by substantial domain gaps and the practical intractability of capturing real-world continuous ground-truth. To this end, we propose a novel data synthesis framework to generate high-fidelity DCSZ training sequences, named ZoomGS v2. It explicitly decouples geometric and color transformations from 3D scene representation modeling, thereby enabling extensive data generation from easily accessible single-camera 3D scenes. Furthermore, we develop ZoomFI, a specialized VFI network tailored to the DCSZ task, which leverages complementary bidirectional warping for comprehensive dual-camera information fusion. Extensive experiments on test datasets captured using two mobile phones demonstrate that training with the constructed DCSZ data significantly improves the performance of various VFI models. Moreover, ZoomFI achieves state-of-the-art results in both quantitative metrics and visual quality. The datasets, code, and pretrained models are available at https://hitjunjief.github.io/DCSZ-v2
comment: Project page: https://hitjunjief.github.io/DCSZ-v2/; Code: https://github.com/hitfanjj/DCSZ-v2. 13 pages, 13 figures
☆ Recovering Black-Box Point Cloud Models from Pose Shifts via Derivative-Free Optimization WACV 2027
Point cloud models are increasingly deployed through score-only black-box interfaces. Under this access model, test-time rotations outside the training distribution can substantially degrade performance. Although existing mitigations such as equivariant retraining and gradient-based adaptation are effective, they are infeasible without access to model weights or gradients. To address this limitation, we propose CanDO, a test-time canonicalization method that recovers lost performance using only forward queries. Specifically, CanDO searches for an input transformation that maximizes model confidence and uses derivative-free optimization to perform this search without gradients. We further identify three conditions for successful recovery: a training augmentation gap, an accuracy-aligned confidence surrogate, and global search over a multi-modal objective. Across multiple architectures and benchmarks, CanDO recovers 76% of the oracle gap under azimuthal misorientation and 51% under arbitrary SO(3) rotations for object part segmentation. These results show that frozen score-only point cloud models can recover from rotation-induced distribution shifts through post-deployment canonicalization alone.
comment: WACV 2027
☆ Seeing Before Naming: Context-Grounded Learning of Novel Visual Concepts
Learning an unfamiliar visual category requires more than adapting a classifier: the model must connect its visual evidence to a useful semantic name. A pre-trained vision-language model can retain discriminative image features while providing a weak textual anchor for the target concept. We address this imbalance through context-grounded semantic anchoring. Our framework, SynerNet, learns concept-specific name embeddings, exposes them to compatible linguistic contexts, and conditions their representations on visual evidence. Difficulty-aware processing and adaptive objective weighting coordinate this adaptation while retaining the pre-trained backbone. On four VISTA-Beyond domains, SynerNet reaches a mean 16-shot accuracy of 74.35%, compared with 72.45% for few-shot name learning. Across 14 domains in the name-masked transfer setting, it improves mean accuracy from 45.17% to 46.74%. Ablations identify concept-specific name embeddings and cross-modal context integration as important components. These results support treating concept acquisition as the construction of visually grounded semantic anchors.
☆ PosePlaner: Denoising Any Feed-Forward Pose Predictor from Pairwise Planar Geometry NeurIPS 2026
Recent multi-view Transformers (e.g., DUSt3R and VGGT) have advanced 3D reconstruction by scaling training data and model capacity from two views to many views and long sequences, subsuming the classical SfM/SLAM pipeline of feature extraction, matching, and pose estimation in a single feed-forward pass. Yet this subsumption hides the interfaces between pipeline stages---correspondences, geometry, and pose are entangled in a single forward pass, leaving supervised fine-tuning as the major path to improvement and offering no mechanism to correct predictions from geometric evidence at test time. We propose PosePlaner to close this gap by reviving the classical coupling between correspondences and pose via flow matching, treating pose refinement as a conditional generation problem that takes coarse geometric matches and initial pose as input condition and fuses the resulting pose hypotheses into a single refined estimate, providing a continuous, data-driven analog of RANSAC voting. Our method is trained efficiently on two-view data, yet serves as a periodic refiner for streaming n-view pose estimators with no retraining. Empirically, it corrects failures of feed-forward predictors, substantially improves correspondence-based solvers, and reduces accumulated drift in long streaming sequences.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. Project page: https://robbyant-research.github.io/PosePlaner/
☆ Interpretable Brain Age Prediction Using White Matter Fiber Orientation Distributions with Rotation-Equivariant Deep Learning
Chenyang Fan, Robert D. Sanders, Elie Matar, Yixuan Yuan, Xiang Li, Sharon L. Naismith, Fernando Calamante, Jinglei Lv
Diffusion MRI (dMRI) provides information about white matter microstructure that can support brain age prediction. However, many existing prediction models use diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) scalar metrics that omit orientation information. Deep learning is increasingly used for brain age prediction, but conventional CNNs do not explicitly respect the geometric structure of orientation-dependent features. We present an interpretable brain age prediction framework that combines white matter fiber orientation distributions (WM-FODs) with an SE(3) (Special Euclidean group in 3 dimensions) equivariant CNN. The network operates directly on spherical harmonic (SH) coefficients of the FOD, preserving their transformation properties under rotation. Evaluation in 692 participants aged 36-90 years from the Human Connectome Project Aging dataset showed that the combined framework outperformed the evaluated DTI-based models and conventional CNNs. Averaging predictions from five cross-validation models yielded a mean absolute error of 3.54 years and Pearson's correlation of 0.958. Our results indicated that the performance advantage depended on combining WM-FODs with equivariant processing. Prediction accuracy was highest at a maximum SH order of Lmax = 2 and declined at higher orders. Tract-level occlusion, where each segmented tract was masked in turn, revealed age-dependent patterns of model sensitivity, with importance peaks in frontal projection pathways at 36-44 years, the fornix at 45-54 years, the callosal isthmus at 55-64 years, the middle cerebellar peduncle at 65-74 years, and the callosal genu at 75-90 years. These findings support rotation-equivariant processing of WM-FODs for accurate brain age prediction with anatomically interpretable model sensitivity.
comment: 10 pages, 8 figures and 2 tables
☆ Selective Monocular Precession Estimation under Geometric and Evaluation Ambiguity: An Auditable Synthetic Study with ORBIT-SCOUT
Monocular observations of a tumbling object can support a precise fitted trajectory without establishing that the recovered physical axis is correct. We study this distinction for elongated, approximately cylindrical targets observed by a calibrated stationary camera. ORBIT-SCOUT couples image-derived line and rim geometry to constant-cone and torque-free triaxial trajectory families, then returns a linked momentum-axis and mean-precession-rate estimate only when numerical, geometric, temporal and competing-hypothesis checks pass. We describe the measurement objective, selection policy and limitations, and situate them within spacecraft pose estimation, unknown-target reconstruction, rigid-body identification and selective prediction. An internally preregistered population of 96 new synthetic scenes was processed in two cold passes, retaining all 192 attempts. In the primary pass, 38 scenes produced jointly correct estimates, none produced an incorrect estimate, 57 were withheld and one execution was incomplete. Correct coverage on the 64 supported scenes was 25/64. Ninety-five repeated pairs were scientifically equivalent under a frozen comparison policy; the remaining pair was incomplete. The registered coverage, failure-free execution and all-case repeatability targets were not met. Historical audits also exposed an overly permissive axis metric and motion-dependent acquisition cadence. The contribution is a documented measurement-to-decision implementation and a failure-preserving evaluation case study, not a new rigid-body theory or evidence of state-of-the-art accuracy. Zero observed errors does not establish calibrated risk, and conditional temporal checks do not remove shared image-feature bias. Real-image transfer and external reproduction remain open.
comment: 29 pages, 4 figures and 7 tables; extended narrative review and ancillary code/data for descriptive arithmetic and physical-metric reproduction
☆ Towards Spatio-Temporal Intelligence Systems in Urban Space: A Twin-Agent Perspective
Zhen Dong, Haiping Wang, Wei Tu, Yuan Liu, Bing Wang, Xuan Sun, Jinzhou Cao, Ronald Clark, Zhiheng Fu, Mohammed Bennamoun, Danfeng Hong, Yuanzheng Cui, Gemine Vivone, Pedram Ghamisi, Bisheng Yang, Qingquan Li, Deren Li
Cities must coordinate domains like infrastructure, mobility, environmental management, emergency response, and public services as conditions evolve. An urban Spatio-Temporal Intelligence (STI) system helps the city monitor citywide states, analyze problems, plan and execute interventions, and adapt through feedback, making urban governance more timely, effective, and transparent. Recent urban twinning and agentic AI techniques provide foundations for such systems. From a twin-agent perspective, this survey takes a system-level view of how these disparate techniques can be coherently integrated into an urban STI system. Specifically, we review how the twin reconstructs and represents a persistent, information-enriched urban environment, and how the agent understands the twin via interfaces, reasons over it, acts reliably, and continuously evolves with the city. Built upon this synthesis, we summarize a two-loop blueprint, where an inner agent loop for grounding, reasoning, and verification, and an outer system loop linking data, twin, agentic action, feedback, and update. We then use this to structure an STI research agenda and show how a shared prototype supports diverse urban domains.
comment: A review of urban digital twins and urban agent systems
☆ Natural Jammers: When Non-Robust Features Become Antagonistic NeurIPS 2026
Deep neural networks are known to rely on non-robust features that align poorly with human perception. Prior work has largely framed these features as opportunistic shortcuts that help standard models on clean data. We show instead that non-robust cues can be antagonistic: they can act as Natural Jammers that actively mislead standard models on clean, unmodified images. Using disagreement between a standard model and robust models as an analysis lens, we identify a Jammed Set on which robust models outperform standard models. We provide causal evidence for Spectral-spatial Locking: jamming arises only when high-frequency components are precisely aligned with specific spatial structures. Disrupting this lock through spectral filtering or small geometric shifts can restore correct predictions. Crucially, we uncover a Substitution Paradox: while individual jammers are fragile to geometric shifts, the aggregate prevalence of jamming remains approximately stable and is redistributed rather than eliminated under such transformations. Our results reframe natural non-robustness as a failure field over the empirical model-data geometry: one that redistributes rather than disappears under small transformations.
comment: NeurIPS 2026 Spotlight
☆ ToDoPro: Faster and Better Reference-Based Generation: Early Token Reduction via Downsampled Self-Probing
Recent generic reference-based image generation models natively support multiple conditions by concatenating all reference image and text tokens into a joint sequence processed by a single Diffusion Transformer (DiT). However, this versatile paradigm comes at an efficiency cost: accommodating multiple references leads to a token explosion, incurring massive $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$ computational complexity. Most acceleration methods operate inside the DiT, showing limited capability in reducing spatial redundancy and failing to alleviate peak VRAM. While some pre-model token reduction alternatives exist, they inevitably introduce external models. This raises a question: Is it possible to achieve acceleration and memory savings while preserving compatibility with in-model techniques and requiring no additional parameters? In this work, we realize this goal by proposing the early Token reduction via Downsampled self-Probing (ToDoPro). By executing a few denoising steps on spatially $2\times$ downsampled reference images, this cheap probing stage utilizes the DiT model itself to effectively and efficiently extract reference token importance. Using the probed importance, we apply a hierarchical reduction before the main denoising stage: we completely discard low-importance tokens, substitute mid-importance tokens with their downsampled counterparts to cheaply preserve global context, and keep high-importance tokens. Experiments across three base models and two benchmarks demonstrate that our early reduction accelerates inference significantly and mitigates peak GPU memory. Furthermore, we can improve generation quality by safely filtering out noisy, uninformative reference tokens, enabling the model to concentrate its limited attention capacity on genuinely useful tokens. The code will be released at https://github.com/scy639/ToDoPro
☆ Factorized Gradients for Scalable Highly-expressive Parametric Diffeomorphisms NeurIPS 2026
Diffeomorphisms provide a flexible, topology-preserving mathematical tool for modeling complex spatial or temporal deformations and are used in various scientific fields. However, making these deformations simultaneously highly expressive and computationally efficient remains challenging. Continuous Piecewise-Affine Based (CPAB) transformations (Freifeld et al., ICCV 2015; IEEE TPAMI 2017) offer an attractive solution by parameterizing a family of diffeomorphisms via continuous velocity fields that are piecewise affine with respect to a chosen tessellation of the domain. Importantly, $d=\dim(θ)$, the dimension of the parameter vector $θ$, depends on the fineness of the tessellation rather than on the data resolution. Despite this compact parameterization, CPAB optimization has long been hindered by the tight coupling between trajectory integration and gradient computation with respect to $θ$. We introduce FG-CPAB, a factorized-gradient formulation for scalable CPAB transformations. By separating integration from parameter-space projection, our method reduces gradient computation complexity from $\mathcal{O}(dTN)$ to $\mathcal{O}(TN+dC)$, where $T$ is the number of integration steps, $N$ is the number of transformed points, and $C$ is the number of tessellation cells. This reformulation yields speedups of up to four orders of magnitude (e.g., $\approx 10^4\times$ in 2D), substantial memory savings (e.g., $\approx 500\times$ reduction in peak GPU memory usage in 2D), and dramatically higher expressiveness. This makes fine-tessellation CPAB practical in 2D and 3D for the first time, enabling highly expressive parametric diffeomorphisms.
comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2026
☆ Efficient Multi-modal Video Fusion Network with Dynamic Region-Guided Temporal Interaction
Multi-modal video fusion aims to generate temporally coherent videos with salient targets and rich structural details by integrating complementary information from heterogeneous sensors. However, existing video fusion methods commonly rely on optical flow estimation and feature warping for inter-frame alignment and cross-frame information aggregation to maintain temporal consistency, thereby introducing considerable computational overhead and making the fusion performance vulnerable to flow estimation errors. To address these limitations, this paper proposes an efficient multi-modal video fusion network with dynamic region-guided temporal interaction. Specifically, the proposed spatio-temporal interaction module leverages the Test-Time Training paradigm to model temporal dependencies with linear complexity. Building on this design, the module restricts temporal modeling to key dynamic regions in the video sequence, as static background regions provide limited temporal cues. By excluding low-variation tokens from unnecessary temporal interaction, this selective strategy contributes to improved fusion quality and temporal consistency. In addition, leveraging the strong ability of pretrained MAE features to capture global structural dependencies, we introduce a feature-level temporal consistency constraint to suppress local flickering by aligning the inter-frame variation directions of the fused and source videos. We further propose a new MAE-based temporal metric that quantifies directional distance between their temporal variations within dynamic regions. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with existing state-of-the-art methods, our method achieves superior fusion quality and temporal consistency on multiple benchmark datasets, while exhibiting high computational efficiency under edge-device deployment settings.
☆ SceneAgent: An Agentic Pipeline from 3D and 4D Captures to Simulation Environments
Visual captures provide detailed scene appearance, but converting them into interactive simulation environments requires object reconstruction, physical modeling, and correction of intermediate errors. We present SceneAgent, an agentic pipeline that coordinates these steps through simulator-based visual inspection and repair. The pipeline processes 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), photogrammetry, LiDAR captures, AI-generated 3DGS scenes, and 4D videos of dynamic scenes, and combines object segmentation, physical parameter estimation, part decomposition, articulation, and deformable simulation. To support policy learning, SceneAgent generates diverse object variants ("digital sisters") and scripted demonstrations. On a cluttered bin scene from GraspClutter6D, SceneAgent raises F1 at 1 cm for every coding agent with scorable outputs both with and without its skills, and its reconstructions are better than SimFoundry: all agent configurations exceed SimFoundry's F1 score, with a best of 60.75% versus 6.9%. On three dynamic scenes from 4DCodeBench, SceneAgent raises the mean dynamic IoU of Gemini 4 Argon from 0.86% to 99.09%. We further demonstrate diverse simulated interactions and preliminary policy transfer to a real robot.
☆ From Sentinel-2 to 1-m Imagery: Real-World $\times 10$ Cross-Sensor Super-Resolution via Visual Autoregressive Modeling
Reconstructing 1-m imagery from Sentinel-2 combines two difficulties. The input and the reference are observed by different satellites, which differ in spatial resolution, spectral response, radiometry, acquisition time, and local geometry, so no synthetic degradation operator links them. The required magnification of ten in each spatial dimension also far exceeds the factors of two to four at which remote sensing super-resolution is usually developed. We study this real-world $\times 10$ problem using YREB-SR, which pairs 2022 Sentinel-2 RGB composites with 2022 Jilin-1 RGB references resampled to a 1-m grid over the Yangtze River Economic Belt. The benchmark contains 11,559 geographically matched scene pairs, with 6,409, 2,135, and 3,015 assigned to training, validation, and testing, respectively. We develop CrossVAR, a visual autoregressive model that predicts the 1-m latent as a nine-scale hierarchy conditioned on the Sentinel-2 input and estimates the remaining quantization residual with a diffusion refiner run without injected noise. Complete 1600 $\times$ 1600 scenes are reconstructed in overlapping windows that start on the Sentinel-2 pixel grid, as every training patch does, and every window is decoded at the size on which the decoder was trained before the windows are blended with Gaussian weights. On all 3,015 test scenes, CrossVAR achieves 27.60 dB PSNR, 0.7725 SSIM, 0.1451 LPIPS, and 7.15 FID, the best value of each metric among the compared methods. These results establish a strong autoregressive baseline for large-scale cross-sensor reconstruction. To facilitate reproducibility, the source code and implementation are publicly available at https://github.com/SHANOAL/RSSR.
comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, 7 tables. Code available at https://github.com/SHANOAL/RSSR
☆ FGD2HF: Frequency-guided Dual-domain Hypergraph Fusion for Semantic Segmentation
Frequency-domain information is beneficial for semantic segmentation. However, existing frequency-based methods often suffer from insufficient frequency utilization, inefficient fusion, and high computational complexity. To address these issues, we propose FGD2HF, a dual-domain fusion network that leverages frequency features to guide spatial-domain fusion and enhancement. Specifically, we introduce a novel Hybrid-Attention Encoder (NAHA) that jointly models local and global relationships through neighborhood and hypergraph attention, enhancing the network's ability to extract effective features. We further introduce a Wavelet Transform and Enhancement (WTE) module to extract and refine low- and high-frequency cues from preceding-stage features, followed by Frequency-guided Dual-domain Fusion (FGDF) modules that use frequency cues to condition current-stage spatial grouping and feature propagation. This design incorporates both global and local frequency guidance into spatial feature modulation, enhancement and fusion with low computational cost. Extensive comparisons with numerous state-of-the-art semantic segmentation methods demonstrate that our method is highly competitive. Our full FGD2HF-B model achieves 48.7% mIoU on ADE20K (+0.3% over SegMAN-B with 18% fewer GFLOPs), 83.2% mIoU on Cityscapes (comparable to SegMAN-B with 21% fewer GFLOPs), and 1.1% higher mIoU than VWFormer-T on SBD with 21% fewer GFLOPs, while also achieving significant improvements in boundary segmentation accuracy.
comment: 20 pages
☆ RSKD: Grounding Semantic Consistency in Driving VLMs via Distillation
Knowledge distillation can transfer large multimodal models to compact models for autonomous driving, but uniform token-level matching can dilute planning-relevant semantics and amplify teacher errors. We propose RSKD, a semantic-consistency-guided distillation framework that routes supervision according to both the task importance of an answer phrase and its semantic consistency with the teacher prediction. Task-critical semantic phrases are localized in the ground-truth answer, and a phrase-level consistency score controls the balance between Jensen--Shannon divergence (JSD) distillation and ground-truth supervision. Teacher information is emphasized only where it is semantically consistent, while semantically inconsistent phrases receive stronger ground-truth supervision. We evaluate RSKD on DrivingVQA, LingoQA, and MapLMv2. RSKD improves over the compared student-based baselines on DrivingVQA and LingoQA and remains competitive on MapLMv2.
☆ From Speech Tokens to Stolen Voices: Attacker-Chosen-Text Speaker Impersonation via Representation Inversion
Speech interaction systems have gradually evolved from traditional cascaded systems that use text as intermediate information to end-to-end speech language models that directly process speech representations. In some applications, the speech frontend runs on the user's device and sends speech representations to a remote server for inference, while the original audio remains local. However, these representations may still contain speaker identity information. If an attacker obtains them, it may use this information to imitate the user's voice, threatening their voice privacy. To investigate this risk, we propose \stia, a Speech Token Inversion Attack that generates speech with attacker-specified text in a victim's voice using a single short leaked representation, without access to the original audio or its transcript. Specifically, \stia converts discrete, continuous, or mixed speech representations into conditioning sequences and trains a conditional flow-matching speech generation model using pairs of different utterances from the same speaker in public speech datasets. The model combines speaker characteristics contained in the leaked representation with the specified text to generate speech in the victim's voice. Experiments show that, with a Moshi representation leak corresponding to 3 seconds of speech, \stia achieves an average CAM++ speaker cosine similarity of 0.78 and a target-text word error rate of 3.80\%. These results show that speech frontend representations reveal reusable speaker identity information and highlight the need to consider privacy risks when designing speech frontend representation methods.
☆ Good Rankings, Poor Choices? Rethinking Language-Only Vision-Language Model Selection
Language-Only Vision-Language Model Selection (LOVM) aims to identify the Vision-Language Model (VLM) with the highest zero-shot accuracy on a target task using only textual information. We revisit the existing LOVM evaluation protocol and argue that ranking metrics, such as top-5 recall and Kendall's rank correlation, do not directly assess the performance of the selected model. We therefore adopt simple regret (SR), defined as the performance gap between the best and selected models, and introduce Outlier-Robust Normalized Regret (ORNR) to account for the varying performance ranges across tasks while reducing sensitivity to outliers. Building on this revised evaluation protocol, we propose Target-Conditioned Expected Source Regret (TC-ESR), a training-free method that selects the model with the lowest similarity-weighted mean regret across source tasks. Across 22 target tasks and 43 VLMs, TC-ESR achieves the lowest mean SR and ORNR among all compared methods. Separately, we identify two sources of target performance leakage in the prior ranking-based evaluation protocol and provide corrections that remove both.
☆ Exploring perceptual straightness in learned visual representations ICLR 2023
Anne Harrington, Vasha DuTell, Ayush Tewari, Mark Hamilton, Simon Stent, Ruth Rosenholtz, William T. Freeman
Humans have been shown to use a "straightened" encoding to represent the natural visual world as it evolves in time (Hénaff et al. 2019). In the context of discrete video sequences, "straightened" means that changes between frames follow a more linear path in representation space at progressively deeper levels of processing. While deep convolutional networks are often proposed as models of human visual processing, many do not straighten natural videos. In this paper, we explore the relationship between network architecture, differing types of robustness, biologically-inspired filtering mechanisms, and representational straightness in response to time-varying input; we identify strengths and limitations of straightness as a useful way of evaluating neural network representations. We find that (1) adversarial training leads to straighter representations in both CNN and transformer-based architectures but (2) this effect is task-dependent, not generalizing to tasks such as segmentation and frame-prediction, where straight representations are not favorable for predictions; and nor to other types of robustness. In addition, (3) straighter representations impart temporal stability to class predictions, even for out-of-distribution data. Finally, (4) biologically-inspired elements increase straightness in the early stages of a network, but do not guarantee increased straightness in downstream layers of CNNs. We show that straightness is an easily computed measure of representational robustness and stability, as well as a hallmark of human representations with benefits for computer vision models.
comment: Published at ICLR 2023
☆ Benchmarking Obstacle-Conditioned Safety in Household Robot Navigation
Safe household navigation requires robots to regulate clearance and speed according to what an obstacle is and how close it is, without unnecessary conservatism. Yet existing evaluations do not test whether semantic safety distinctions are reflected in continuous motion. To that end, we introduce OSMA-Bench, an Obstacle-Conditioned Safe Motion Adaptation Benchmark built on spatially matched scenario sets that differ only in obstacle type. We also propose the \emph{Semantic Sensitivity Index} (SSI), which measures whether clearance and distance-dependent speed and smoothness follow the caution ordering of obstacles. Evaluating VLM-based and vision-language-action (VLA) policies on the benchmark, we find that neither consistently adapts its motion to obstacle safety, even with explicit safety prompts. Our analysis shows that the policies can correctly distinguish obstacles by safety relevance but fail to reflect this distinction in the motion parameters or actions they produce. For VLM-based policies, which recognize the obstacle and then generate a navigation program, adding an explicit parameter-inference step between these two stages improves adaptation. These findings expose a gap in \emph{semantic-to-motion grounding}, highlighting the need to translate semantic caution into appropriately safe motion.
☆ Video World Models Need Predictable Latents
Video world models trained on large-scale robot data promise a safe and scalable approach for learning and evaluating policies that act in the physical world. However, they still struggle with long-horizon rollouts and out-of-distribution generalization, and they remain computationally demanding at inference time. Typically, video world models make predictions in the latent space of a reconstruction-trained autoencoder, which however is not directly optimized for dynamics modeling. On the other hand, world models designed for latent planning usually optimize latents to be predictable, but they forgo accurate prediction of observations in pixel space. In this paper, we show that it is possible to achieve the best of both worlds: a latent geometry optimized to make future prediction as simple as possible without sacrificing accurate prediction of future observations. More precisely, we find that temporal objectives for representation learning, paired with a past-conditioned decoder architecture, lead to consistent improvements in generative video world models at the same training budget. The gains include up to 5x cheaper inference, over 7x faster training, and 15-24% lower pixel and perceptual errors out of distribution and over long horizons. Our world models also agree more closely with real-world policy evaluation when using a vision-language model to judge task success from their pixel-space predictions. Overall, our study indicates that temporal predictability is an important design criterion for the latent space of video world models, and provides concrete guidance on how to incorporate it into the training of autoencoders.
comment: 54 pages, 25 figures, 14 tables. Code: https://github.com/mattia-scardecchia/predictable-latents
☆ StreamVibe: Proactive Video Agents for Evolving User Intent
Chengzhi Liu, Yuxiang Lai, Yuzhe Yang, Yanqing Liu, Jiheng Hou, Yue Cao, Haonan Wang, Ruixi Fan, Lan Wang, Sheng Liu, Songyou Peng, Yale Song, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Xin Eric Wang, Jui-Hsin Lai, Youbao Tang
Vision-language models are shifting from offline passive understanding toward online proactive interaction. However, prevailing methods largely rely on explicit requests while miss the implicit user intent (e.g., "where should I click next?" while a user navigate a website), meanwhile fail to update the state simultaneously as user requests might update continuously. These limitations make them less suited to intent-aware interaction in practical. To address these challenges, we introduce StreamVibe-Bench, a new benchmark serving as testbed for user intent interaction, with 4.1K evaluation samples and 85K training samples spanning explicit, implicit, and dynamic intents. Building on this benchmark, we develop StreamVibe-VL, a streaming proactive model that infers implicit user intents from continuous observations and dynamically tailors its interactions as these intents evolve. We further introduce StreamVibe-Harness, which maintains user intents as persistent states with a fleixble lifecycles via a hierarchical memory to track the latest user intent and environmental state. Our experiments reveal three key findings: (i) StreamVibe-VL preserves strong general video understanding while improving response timing and answer quality by 10.7% over other baselines; (ii) existing proactive models remain limited in understanding user intent and deciding when to respond, especially under implicit and dynamic intents; and (iii) StreamVibe-Harness further improves response consistency and adaptation over sustained interaction, resulting in a 12.3% gain in proactive interaction.
comment: 43 pages
☆ Regional prediction of hematoma expansion from non-contrast computed tomography in spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage patients
Natasha Ironside, Hongyu Kan, Kristofor Pas, Mohammad Shifat-E-Rabbi, Benjamin Newman, Shinjini Kundu, Kareem El Naamani, Tanvir Rizvi, Andrea Becerril-Gaitan, Harrison Snyder, Aarathi Manchikalapudi, Sarah Ratcliffe, Stacie L. Demel, Carl D. Langefeld, Daniel Woo, Stephan Mayer, E. Sander Connolly, Gustavo Rohde, for the ERICH Investigators, the VISTA-ICH collaboration
Background The combination of hematoma location, expansion and final volume influence neurological outcome. The aim of this study was to derive and validate a quantitative and interpretable region-based NCCT image feature model for predicting hematoma expansion. Methods The Ethnic/Racial Variations of Intracerebral Hemorrhage(ERICH) study was used for derivation and the Virtual International Trials in Stroke Archive(VISTA) was used for validation. NCCT images at presentation and 24+/-6hours were pre-processed, segmented and categorized into lobar, basal ganglia or thalamic regions. Hematoma expansion was defined by region and according to its effect on clinical outcome. Transport-based morphometry (TBM) produced a unique transport-based representation from each NCCT hematoma image. Linear classifiers applied to transport representations were used to derive a predictive model. The regional TBM model's performance was compared to alternate methods using AUROC analyses. Results The derivation dataset included 574 patients, comprising 162 lobar, 257 basal ganglia and 155 thalamic hematomas. The validation dataset included 196 patients, comprising 31 lobar, 119 basal ganglia and 46 thalamic hematomas. A combined regional model predicted hematoma expansion in the validation dataset with an AUROC of 0.787. The principal image features which varied by location were size, heterogeneity, eccentricity and density distribution towards the hematoma periphery. The regional TBM model outperformed alternative clinician based and machine-learning methods. Conclusions TBM discriminated and visualized regional features of hematoma expansion from presentation NCCT scans. This provides preliminary evidence for regional radiographic features of hematoma expansion. It has the potential to improve hematoma expansion prediction and understanding of hematoma expansion pathophysiology.
♻ ☆ Revisiting Vehicle Color Recognition in Long-Tailed Surveillance Scenarios ICPR
Vehicle color recognition is an important cue for vehicle identification in surveillance systems, especially when license plates are illegible due to low resolution, occlusion, motion blur, or poor illumination. However, real-world vehicle color distributions are highly imbalanced, making overall accuracy insufficient to assess performance on rare but operationally relevant colors. This paper presents a comprehensive study of vehicle color recognition under severe class imbalance using UFPR-VeSV, a challenging real-world surveillance dataset. We investigate synthetic minority-class augmentation through two off-the-shelf generative strategies: text-conditioned image generation with RunDiffusion/JuggernautXL and image-conditioned color editing with Gemini 2.0 Flash. The curated synthetic data are combined with modern visual representations, loss reweighting, learning-rate scheduling, color-safe augmentation, foreground-aware preprocessing, and ensemble fusion. The bestperforming approach achieves 94.6% micro accuracy and 79.7% macro accuracy, improving macro accuracy by 8.2 percentage points over recent literature. A manual error analysis further shows that many remaining failures are visually ambiguous even for human annotators, highlighting the practical limits of color-based vehicle identification in unconstrained surveillance imagery. The generated images and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/viniciusorru/vcr-synthetic
comment: Accepted for presentation at the 2026 International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) - V3SC Workshop
♻ ☆ ICPR 2026 Competition on Low-Resolution License Plate Recognition ICPR
Rayson Laroca, Valfride Nascimento, Donggun Kim, Sanghyeok Chung, Subin Bae, Uihwan Seo, Seungsang Oh, Chi M. Phung, Minh G. Vo, Xingsong Ye, Yongkun Du, Yuchen Su, Zhineng Chen, Sunhee Heo, Hyangwoo Lee, Kihyun Na, Khanh V. Vu Nguyen, Sang T. Pham, Duc N. N. Phung, Trong P. Le, Vy N. Vo Tran, David Menotti
Low-Resolution License Plate Recognition (LRLPR) remains a challenging problem in real-world surveillance scenarios, where long capture distances, compression artifacts, and adverse imaging conditions can severely degrade license plate legibility. To promote progress in this area, we organized the ICPR 2026 Competition on Low-Resolution License Plate Recognition, the first competition specifically dedicated to LRLPR using real low-quality data collected under operationally relevant conditions. The competition was based on the LRLPR-26 dataset, which comprises 20,000 training tracks and 3,000 test tracks; each training track contains five low-resolution and five high-resolution images of the same license plate. Notably, a total of 269 teams from 41 countries registered for the competition, and 99 teams submitted valid entries in the Blind Test Phase. The winning team achieved a Recognition Rate of 82.13%, and four teams surpassed the 80% mark, highlighting both the high level of competition at the top of the leaderboard and the continued difficulty of the task. In addition to presenting the competition design, evaluation protocol, and main results, this paper summarizes the methods adopted by the top-5 teams and discusses current trends and promising directions for future research on LRLPR. The competition webpage is available at https://icpr26lrlpr.github.io/
comment: Accepted for presentation at the International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) 2026
♻ ☆ CEZSAR: A Contrastive Embedding Method for Zero-Shot Action Recognition ICPR
This paper proposes a novel Zero-Shot Action Recognition~(ZSAR) method based on contrastive learning. In ZSAR, we aim to classify examples from classes that were missing during training. Two well-known problems remain in ZSAR: the semantic gap and the domain shift. A semantic gap occurs because label representations come from the textual domain (i.e., language models) and must be associated with visual representations (i.e., CNNs, RNNs, transformer-based). This multimodal nature implies that the semantic properties of the two spaces are not identical. On the other hand, the domain shift arises from differences between the training and test sets and is inherent to ZSAR once the test set is unknown. One of the most promising methods to address both issues is learning joint embedding spaces. Therefore, we propose a new model that encodes videos and sentences in a joint embedding space, trained by aligning videos with their natural-language descriptions. We design an automatic negative sampling procedure to augment the training dataset and generate unpaired data, i.e., visual appearance and unrelated descriptions. Our results are state-of-the-art on the UCF-101 and Kinetics-400 datasets under several split configurations. Our code is available at https://github.com/valterlej/cezsar.
comment: Accepted for presentation at the International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) 2026
♻ ☆ WorldArena 2.0: Extending Embodied World Model Benchmarking on Modality, Functionality and Platform
Zhuohang Li, Yiding Ma, Yu Shang, Lei Jin, Shengyuan Wang, Jianjie Fang, Zhaolu Wang, Xvyuan Liu, Yinzhou Tang, Xin Jin, Ziyou Wang, Weikang Su, Xin Zhang, Haisheng Su, Weizhen He, Wei Wu, Haoyi Duan, Gordon Wetzstein, Xihui Liu, Dhruv Shah, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Zhibo Chen, Jun Zhu, Yonghong Tian, Tat-Seng Chua, Xin Wang, Wenwu Zhu, Chen Gao, Yong Li
World models have emerged as a central paradigm for embodied intelligence, enabling agents to predict action-conditioned future and reason about environmental dynamics. However, existing embodied world model benchmarks are still largely confined to vision-only prediction, offline embodied applications, and simulator-based evaluation, making them insufficient for assessing increasingly comprehensive world models. In this work, we introduce WorldArena 2.0, an expanded benchmark that systematically broadens embodied world model evaluation along three dimensions: modality, functionality, and platform. Along the modality dimension, WorldArena 2.0 extends evaluation from vision-only to visuotactile modalities, enabling assessment of multimodal perception and prediction. Along the functionality dimension, it extends beyond policy evaluation and planning to assess world models as interactive RL environments for policy optimization. Along the platform dimension, it moves beyond simulator-only evaluation to a diverse suite of simulated and real-world robotic settings across multiple embodiments. Under a standardized protocol, WorldArena 2.0 comprehensively evaluates perceptual quality, interactive utility, and cross-platform performance, providing a comprehensive testbed for tracking progress toward embodied world models. The project page including codes and demos is available at: https://world-arena.ai/.
♻ ☆ CleanGS: Pareto-Guided Post-Hoc Cleanup of 3D Gaussian Splatting Scenes
A pretrained 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) reconstruction can reproduce its capture views well while retaining off-object structure that becomes visible under reframing. We present CleanGS, a post-hoc cleanup method that removes such structure without retraining the underlying representation. Given calibrated views and binary target masks, CleanGS scores candidate three-view subsets using mask reliability, camera baseline, viewing-direction diversity, and complementary sparse 3D support. Rather than collapsing these objectives a priori, it computes the exact Pareto front over subsets of the reduced candidate pool and selects a balanced on-dominated subset using weighted Chebyshev scalarization. The selected views then drive rasterization-aware two-of-three voting to retain a subset of the original Gaussians. We evaluate the exported asset directly and introduce a fixed-pose widened-field protocol that exposes structure outside the original framing. Across 18 scenes, CleanGS achieves 19.03 dB standard and 17.83 dB widened-field PSNR, compared with 16.44/16.29 dB for FlashSplat and 15.28/15.10 dB for GaussianCut with the same three masks. CleanGS leads five of six photometric metrics and remains within 0.32 dB of the uncleaned reconstruction in standard PSNR. Its filtering-and-export stage takes a median of 20 seconds and 1.9 GB peak memory, compared with 3.1 minutes and 41.6 GB for FlashSplat and 4.2 minutes and 34.9 GB for GaussianCut. Code is available at https://github.com/smlab-niser/clean-gs/.
comment: Accepted to ICVGIP 2026
♻ ☆ CountVideoBench: A Benchmark to Evaluate Prediction Biases on the Object Counting task by Video-Language Models BMVC 2026
Object counting in videos remains a poorly characterized capability of multimodal large language models. Counting questions are included in many existing VideoQA benchmarks, but the ground-truth count distributions in these benchmarks are heavily skewed toward small values. Across the nine benchmarks we survey, the median ground-truth count is at most five, and the three most frequent values together account for between 45% and 93% of the videos. The resulting mean accuracy is then dominated by the most frequent counts; a value-dependent bias at a rare count contributes negligibly to the average and remains invisible. We introduce CountVideoBench, a benchmark of 2,600 synthetic videos covering 26 cardinalities in the interval [5, 50] (100 videos each), grouped into six clusters of consecutive counts that span the range while enabling near-neighbor comparisons. Each video contains a single class of static objects under a controlled camera motion, removing object motion and reducing recognition as confounds. We evaluate sixteen video-language models from nine architecture families in a zero-shot setting. No model exceeds 27.6% Exact Match. The dependence of accuracy on cardinality varies across models, ranging from monotonic decline to a non-monotonic peak-and-collapse pattern, which rules out increasing difficulty with cardinality as the dominant explanation of counting failure. Every model further concentrates its predictions on its own set of preferred integers, with accuracy peaks coinciding with these values and collapsing at adjacent counts. These findings highlight the need for balanced, diagnostic counting benchmarks to reliably assess this fundamental visual capability.
comment: Accepted at BMVC 2026. Project page: https://countvideobench.github.io
♻ ☆ Learning Action-Conditional and Object-Centric Gaussian Splatting World Models for Rigid Objects
World models enable intelligent agents to predict the consequences of their actions on the environment. In this paper, we propose Multi Rigid Object Gaussian World Model (MRO-GWM), a novel model that learns action-conditional dynamics of rigid objects in 3D. Using object-centric Gaussians, we can represent arbitrary object shapes and multi-object scenes. We develop a novel temporal-spatial transformer architecture that predicts future rigid body motion from a history of object Gaussians and future actions. Objects are represented by Gaussians in an object-centric frame, which allows to describe object motion as a rigid body transformation. Our model is trained on reconstructions from multiple viewpoints, which requires the model to also handle partial observations of objects due to occlusions. We analyze prediction performance of our approach on synthetic datasets composed of typical household objects with multi-object dynamics and interactions by a robot end effector. We also evaluate our model in model-predictive control for non-prehensile manipulation in simulation and for image-based tracking and prediction of object motion in simulated and real-world scenes.
♻ ☆ ProactEgoMem: Benchmarking Proactive Memory in Streaming Egocentric Video
Ruotong Liao, Meikel Kokowski, Xiaoxiao Sun, Yongqin Xian, Laura Bravo Sánchez, Shiye Su, Federico Tombari, Serena Yeung-Levy, Volker Tresp
Today's multimodal assistants are typically prompted to interpret the visual evidence presented to them. To offload the cognitive burden of remembering across long horizons, wearable assistants should instead proactively acquire and maintain useful memory as the user's surroundings evolve. Doing so on the user's behalf requires identifying what matters, understanding the scene in real time, and initiating memory maintenance in the background while the user stays focused on their activities. We introduce ProactEgoMem, a benchmark that evaluates proactive memory in streaming egocentric video. Three tasks ground the evaluation in ambient environmental needs: Information Capture (IC) preserves transient yet dense visual information, State Tracking (ST) follows changing object states, and Location Tracking (LT) records object movements. The benchmark defines its protocol at two levels of proactiveness: the Notification Level asks for a single timely notification that satisfies the user's intent, while the deeper Intervention Level asks the agent to maintain memory on the user's behalf through an active start-to-stop tool lifecycle. Parallel ProactEgoMem-Daily and ProactEgoMem-Sci tracks contain 300/100 clips covering daily and scientific use cases, paired with 1000/500 questions in ProactEgoMem-QA, which measures the quality of the proactively acquired memory. Across proprietary, open-source, video-language, and streaming baselines, even the strongest models fail to capture memory both timely and accurately. ProactEgoMem provides a rigorous evaluation foundation for proactive multimodal assistance and for video agents that co-exist with their users.
comment: 30 pages, 22 figures, Project Page: https://proactegomem.github.io/
♻ ☆ Mem3R: Streaming 3D Reconstruction with Hybrid Memory WACV
Streaming 3D perception is well suited to robotics and augmented reality, where long visual streams must be processed efficiently and consistently. Recent recurrent models offer a promising solution by maintaining fixed-size states and enabling linear-time inference, but they often suffer from temporal forgetting over long sequences due to the limited capacity of compressed memories. We propose Mem3R, a streaming 3D reconstruction model with a hybrid memory design that decouples camera tracking from geometric mapping to improve temporal consistency over long sequences. For camera tracking, Mem3R employs an implicit fast-weight memory implemented as a lightweight Multi-Layer Perceptron updated via Test-Time Training. For geometric mapping, Mem3R maintains an explicit token-based fixed-size state. Compared with CUT3R, this design not only significantly improves long-sequence performance but also reduces the model size from 793M to 644M parameters. Mem3R supports existing improved plug-and-play state update strategies developed for CUT3R. Specifically, Mem3R combined with TTT3R reduces absolute trajectory error by up to 39% relative to CUT3R combined with TTT3R on 500- to 1000-frame sequences from the TUM Dynamics dataset. The resulting improvements also extend to other downstream tasks, including video depth estimation and 3D reconstruction. Project page: https://lck666666.github.io/Mem3R/.
comment: Accepted to the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2027. Project page: https://lck666666.github.io/Mem3R/
♻ ☆ High-Fidelity Synthetic Transmission Electron Microscopy Image Generation Using Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Data-Limited Semiconductor Metrology IEEE
Advanced semiconductor nodes drastically increased demand for Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), yet destructive sample preparation, slow imaging and high costs severely limit the availability of diverse datasets needed for downstream machine learning (ML). Synthetic data generation is becoming essential, but current generative models often miss TEM-specific noise, structural detail, and stochastic variability crucial for evaluation. We present a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) framework for synthetic TEM image generation under extreme data scarcity. A progressive patch-based training strategy scales from low-resolution patches to full images, enabling from-scratch training with only 15 samples. We integrate a custom TrivialAugment adaptation, cross-process domain transfer, classifier guidance, and RePaint-style inpainting, culminating in full-image generation that preserves the global structural and spatial relationships relevant to FAB metrology. Beyond synthesis, we repurpose DDPM feature representations for segmentation, partitioning encoder feature maps to obtain coherent region masks. On the closest 1% of nearest-neighbor pairs, our synthetic DEVICE-TEM images reach MS-SSIM $0.985 \pm 0.002$ (full-set mean $0.587$), and a blinded qualitative expert assessment is consistent with the structural similarity results. The synthetic images are intended as training data for downstream ML in defect detection, segmentation, and metrology.
comment: Presented at the 2026 International Symposium on Electronics in Marine (ELMAR), published by IEEE in the conference proceedings: https://doi.org/10.1109/ELMAR71231.2026.11712233
♻ ☆ Diversifying Long Prompt Image Generation through Structured Prompt Embedding Space Sampling BMVC 2026
Modern text-to-image models produce impressive visual results from richly specified prompts, yet their behavior under long prompts remains insufficiently understood. In this paper, we study a practical failure mode in which accumulated semantic constraints progressively suppress output variation, causing diversity to collapse even when many visual factors remain unspecified. We show that this phenomenon appears consistently across recent generation models as prompt length increases, and provide a theoretical motivation that connects long-prompt conditioning with reduced sampling entropy in the prompt embedding space. Based on this observation, we introduce PromptMoG, a training-free approach that samples prompt embeddings from a Mixture-of-Gaussians distribution to restore generative flexibility while maintaining semantic fidelity. To support systematic evaluation, we further present LPD-Bench, a structured benchmark of long and semantically dense prompts for measuring both fidelity and diversity under compositional text conditioning. Extensive experiments on four large-scale diffusion models, including SD3.5-Large, Flux.1-Krea-Dev, CogView4, and Qwen-Image, show that PromptMoG consistently improves diversity for long-prompt image generation. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/basiclab/PromptMoG.
comment: Accepted by BMVC 2026
♻ ☆ DCGrasp: Distance-aware Controllable Grasp Generation SIGGRAPH
Hiroyasu Akada, Jesús Pérez, Emre Aksan, Vasileios Choutas, Cristian Romero, Alberto Garcia-Garcia, Vladislav Golyanik, Christian Theobalt, Thabo Beeler
Generating 3D hand-object interactions is essential for applications in robotics, AR/VR, and synthetic data generation, where flexible controllability and strong generalization to diverse object geometries are required. However, existing methods rarely satisfy these requirements, limiting their practical applicability. We present DCGrasp, a multi-modal diffusion framework for distance-aware controllable grasp generation. DCGrasp is built on a novel grasp energy term that computes Distance Profile, a signed distance from each hand vertex to the nearest object point, coupled with distance-aware weighting, effectively capturing the semantically similar hand-object interaction in near-contact regions while remaining invariant to object and hand identity. Given various controllable signals, DCGrasp first generates a Distance Profile based on a Diffusion Transformer, together with a corresponding candidate hand pose. We then refine the candidate pose through optimization, enforcing consistency between the optimized hand pose and the generated Distance Profile in near-contact regions. Our experiments show that DCGrasp produces high-quality, geometrically plausible grasps with flexible user control, generalizing to diverse object and hand shapes and scales. Our work establishes a robust and versatile pipeline for the synthesis of controllable 3D hand-object interactions. The supplementary video with dynamic visualization is available on our project page.
comment: Accepted to SIGGRAPH Asia 2026. Project page: https://4dqv.mpi-inf.mpg.de/DCGrasp/
♻ ☆ \textit{4DSurf}: High-Fidelity Dynamic Scene Surface Reconstruction CVPR 2026
This paper addresses the problem of dynamic scene surface reconstruction using Gaussian Splatting (GS), aiming to recover temporally consistent geometry. While existing GS-based dynamic surface reconstruction methods can yield superior reconstruction, they are typically limited to either a single object or objects with only small deformations, struggling to maintain temporally consistent surface reconstruction of large deformations over time. We propose ``\textit{4DSurf}'', a novel and unified framework for generic dynamic surface reconstruction that does not require specifying the number or types of objects in the scene, can handle large surface deformations and temporal inconsistency in reconstruction. The key innovation of our framework is the introduction of Gaussian deformations induced Signed Distance Function Flow Regularization that constrains the motion of Gaussians to align with the evolving surface. To handle large deformations, we introduce an Overlapping Segment Partitioning strategy that divides the sequence into overlapping segments with small deformations and incrementally passes geometric information across segments through the shared overlapping timestep. Experiments on two challenging dynamic scene datasets, Hi4D and CMU Panoptic, demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art surface reconstruction methods by 49\% and 19\% in Chamfer distance, respectively, and achieves superior temporal consistency under sparse-view settings.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026. Project Page: https://github.com/RyansLearning/4DSurf
♻ ☆ Detector Confidence Signals Presence Rather Than Occlusion in Cluttered Manipulation IEEE
An open-vocabulary detector's confidence that a named object is present barely changes when clutter hides all but an eighth of it, and can even rise as clutter grows. That score is read as a visibility signal: it thresholds detections, grounds language, and gates when an agent acquires another view. We measure it against a geometry oracle that supplies detector-free ground-truth visibility. As true visibility falls from every scene to one in eight, the confidence stays flat and uncorrelated, while the detector reports the target present in nine of ten scenes by firing on same-category distractors: the score says the category is present somewhere, not that the target is visible. A confidence metric understates the benefit of resolving occlusion tenfold ($8$ against $88$ points), and a confidence gate stays put exactly when the object is hidden. A single camera motion makes the target localizable in every occluded scene, against $5\%$ from the fixed view. The same identity failure holds across three detectors, nine object categories, two simulators, and real video, where it calls the object present in $99\%$ of occluded frames, with its box off the target. We release the benchmark and recommend target-grounded signals for gating and evaluation.
comment: Accepted to IEEE MSN 2026. 9 pages
♻ ☆ Gaussians on Fire: High-Frequency Reconstruction of Flames ECCV 2026
Jakob Nazarenus, Dominik Michels, Wojtek Palubicki, Simin Kou, Fang-Lue Zhang, Sören Pirk, Reinhard Koch
We propose a method to reconstruct dynamic fire in 3D from a limited set of camera views with a Gaussian-based spatiotemporal representation. Capturing and reconstructing fire and its dynamics is highly challenging due to its volatile nature, transparent quality, and multitude of high-frequency features. Despite these challenges, we aim to reconstruct fire from only three views, which consequently requires solving for under-constrained geometry. We solve this by separating the static background from the dynamic fire region by combining dense multi-view stereo images with monocular depth priors. The fire is initialized as a 3D flow field, obtained by fusing per-view dense optical flow projections. To capture the high-frequency features of fire, each 3D Gaussian encodes a lifetime and linear velocity to match the dense optical flow. To ensure sub-frame temporal alignment across cameras, we employ a custom hardware synchronization pattern -- allowing us to reconstruct fire with affordable commodity hardware. Our quantitative and qualitative validations across numerous reconstruction experiments demonstrate robust performance for diverse and challenging real and simulated fire scenarios.
comment: 38 pages, 17 figures, 8 tables; ECCV 2026 version with corrected results (bugfix in the initialization of our method for real-world scenes)
♻ ☆ FlowHOI: Flow-based Semantics-Grounded Generation of Hand-Object Interactions for Dexterous Robot Manipulation NeurIPS 2026
Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models can generate plausible end-effector motions, yet they often fail in long-horizon, contact-rich tasks because the underlying hand-object interaction (HOI) structure is not explicitly represented. An embodiment-agnostic interaction representation that captures this structure would make manipulation behaviors easier to validate and transfer across robots. We propose FlowHOI, a two-stage flow-matching framework that generates semantically grounded, temporally coherent HOI sequences, comprising hand poses, object poses, and hand-object contact states, conditioned on an egocentric observation, a language instruction, and a 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) scene reconstruction. We decouple geometry-centric grasping from semantics-centric manipulation, conditioning the latter on compact 3D scene tokens and employing a motion-text alignment loss to semantically ground the generated interactions in both the physical scene layout and the language instruction. To address the scarcity of high-fidelity HOI supervision, we introduce a reconstruction pipeline that recovers aligned hand-object trajectories and meshes from large-scale egocentric videos, yielding an HOI prior for robust generation. Across the GRAB and HOT3D benchmarks, FlowHOI achieves the highest action recognition accuracy and a 1.7$\times$ higher physics simulation success rate than the strongest diffusion-based baseline, while delivering a 40$\times$ inference speedup. We further demonstrate real-robot execution on four dexterous manipulation tasks, illustrating the feasibility of retargeting generated HOI representations to real-robot execution pipelines.
comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2026. Project Page: https://huajian-zeng.github.io/projects/flowhoi/
♻ ☆ StableHand: Quality-Aware Flow Matching for World-Space Dual-Hand Motion Estimation from Egocentric Video NeurIPS 2026
Recovering world space 4D motion of two interacting hands from egocentric video is a fundamental capability for supervising robot policy learning, where wrist trajectories track the end-effector and finger articulations specify the grasp pose. Two major challenges arise in this setting: hands frequently leave the camera view for extended periods due to head motion, and persistent hand-object interactions cause severe occlusions of one or both hands. Existing methods uniformly condition on noisy hand motion observations without accounting for their per-frame reliability, leading to substantial performance degradation. Our key insight is that accurate world space hand motion estimation is tightly coupled with the quality of per-frame hand observations. To this end, we decompose the quality of hand motion observations extracted from an off-the-shelf hand pose estimator into four channels: wrist global translation and finger articulations for both hands. We propose StableHand, a quality-aware flow-matching framework conditioned on these four-channel quality signals, which are predicted by a learned quality network. We naturally incorporate the quality signals into the flow-matching process through a per-channel forward schedule, a quality-adjusted velocity target, AdaLN modulation of the DiT denoiser, and a quality-aware ODE initialization. This unified generative process preserves high-quality observations while reconstructing unreliable ones using a learned bimanual motion prior. Experiments on HOT3D and ARCTIC, two egocentric benchmarks featuring long missing-hand spans and persistent hand-object occlusions, show that StableHand achieves state-of-the-art performance across all reported metrics, reducing W-MPJPE by 20-25% compared to the strongest baseline, with the largest gains on heavily occluded ARCTIC sequences.
comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2026. Project Page: https://huajian-zeng.github.io/projects/stablehand/
♻ ☆ VaViT: Vanilla ViT for Automotive Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation WACV 2027
Plain Transformers have become the de-facto architecture for processing text, audio, image, and video, offering a unified backbone for multimodal learning. However, state-of-the-art architectures for point cloud semantic segmentation remain dominated by U-Nets architectures where convolutions are interleaved with local or windowed attentions. In this work, we show how to effectively leverage vanilla, non-hierarchical ViTs for the segmentation of large-scale automotive lidar scenes. We bridge the performance gap thanks to a carefully designed tokenizer, a lightweight decoder segmentation head, and tailored data augmentations. Our approach, VaViT, for Vanilla ViT, matches or exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art methods while maintaining the simplicity of ViT architecture. We provide extensive evaluations on nuScenes, SemanticKITTI, and Waymo Open Dataset to validate the efficiency of our method. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/valeoai/VaViT.
comment: WACV 2027
♻ ☆ Beyond Trial-and-Error: Agentic Optimization for Image-to-Video Adherence
Modern black-box Image-to-Video (I2V) models offer powerful capabilities in automated content creation, yet their lack of fine-grained control and reliability presents significant challenges in professional workflows. Their inherent stochasticity causes minor variations in textual prompts or hyperparameters to yield drastically different outputs often necessitating inefficient, brute-force trial-and-error processes. To address these limitations, we introduce the ``Agentic Self-Improvement" framework, which reframes video synthesis into a closed-loop, goal-directed optimization. Our framework systematically navigates the generation parameter space using a novel two-stage approach. In the first stage, an iterative prompt optimization loop uses a multimodal Large Language Model (mLLM) to refine the input prompt. This refinement implements two automated evaluations: Davidsonian Scene Graph (DSG) queries ensure semantic adherence, and Common Mistake Questions (CMQ) for artifact detection. At the second stage, we use Bayesian optimization to efficiently co-optimize stochastic seeds and CFG scales. This search is guided by a suite of quality metrics, including the novel Video-Text Adherence (VTA) score derived from the DSG and CMQ evaluations. Our framework significantly outperforms unguided search methods: in human preference studies, videos generated via our agentic approach were strongly preferred over baseline outputs, achieving win rates up to 69\%. This work provides a practical and extensible methodology for enhancing the predictability and control of state-of-the-art video generation models, moving the field beyond speculative curiosities toward reliable, production-ready tools.
♻ ☆ Authoring for Living Worlds: Tool-Constrained LLM Agents for Executable Multi-Actor Scenarios ECCV
Authoring a multi-actor scenario for a living 3D world, where every action changes its state, and each action's validity depends on the state accumulated before it, demands the freedom of storytelling and the rigor of simulation at once. We author such scenarios with LLM agents, as Graphs of Events in Space and Time (GESTs) that a simulation engine executes deterministically into narrative videos with per-frame spatial, temporal, and semantic ground truth. A staged pipeline driving a flagship LLM, the standard design in video generation, failed outright: the model violates rules stated verbatim in its prompt, and cannot track the dynamic world state. We answer with a constraint-enforcing tool layer: our Director and Scene Builder agents explore the world's capabilities page by page and build every scene through operations checked against simulator state, so every specification they emit is valid by construction. Because we generate each seed text from an existing scenario graph, we can measure reconstruction: the agent authors its own graph from the text alone, yet matches the original at 0.83 F1 on its events, each action with its participants (0.55 for a random scenario of the same kind), and 0.77 on their ordering (0.43 random). End to end: the standard staged pipeline produced 0 executable specifications in 50 attempts; our agents, driving a budget model, execute 20 of 25 (80%), and are, to our knowledge, the first to exercise the full expressive capacity of GEST.
comment: Accepted at the ECCVW 2026. Agent in World: Living Worlds with Interactive Agents (AIW), Proceedings Track. v1 arXiv was titled "Agentic Video Generation: From Text to Executable Event Graphs via Tool-Constrained LLM Planning"
♻ ☆ MedEvo: Medical Reasoning Evolution through Knowledge Navigation
Xiaoliang Wang, Zhuo Chen, Chuanyang Zheng, Quanbin Wang, Jiangwei Lao, Yingao Liu, Jiajia Liu, Jinming Cao, Honglin Lin, Zhihong Lu, Hao Jin, Jian Wang, Jinjie Gu, Lijun Wu
Medical multimodal reasoning models are typically trained on teacher-generated rationales, discarding the valid reasoning in students' own failed trajectories, while general-domain correction methods offer little guidance for errors in image reading, anatomical context, or differential diagnosis. We propose MedEvo, which uses medical knowledge, namely a tag taxonomy and error-type diagnosis, to navigate both trajectory repair and data selection. For each failed rollout, a gold-blind auditor locates the first consequential error and provides a minimal, answer-free hint; the same student retains the valid prefix and regenerates the erroneous suffix. After each round, MedEvo identifies capability gaps across medical tags on a held-out feedback set and prioritizes related questions for new rollouts and repairs. With supervised fine-tuning (SFT) alone, MedEvo raises Qwen3.5-9B mean accuracy across seven benchmarks from 65.57% to 69.12% (47.40% to 54.50% on the multimodal track of MedXpertQA (MedXpertQA-MM)), surpassing teacher-distillation SFT (66.93%). It also raises Qwen3.5-35B and Qwen3.5-397B mean accuracy from 67.91% to 73.04% and from 71.83% to 74.95%, respectively. Our analyses show that failed trajectories contain reasoning worth preserving, that repair success does not imply learning value, and that independent feedback is key to sustained improvement.
comment: Project: https://pork-pay.github.io/MedEvo/ GitHub: https://github.com/pork-pay/MedEvo
♻ ☆ Foundation Models in Medical Image Analysis: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Praveenbalaji Rajendran, Mojtaba Safari, Wenfeng He, Mingzhe Hu, Shansong Wang, Jun Zhou, Xiaofeng Yang
Recent advancements in foundation models (FMs) have catalyzed a paradigm shift in medical image analysis. Unlike traditional task-specific artificial intelligence (AI) models, FMs leverage large-scale datasets to learn generalized representations that can be adapted to downstream clinical applications. Despite the rapid proliferation of FM research in medical imaging, there is a lack of unified synthesis that systematically maps the evolution of architectures, training paradigms, and clinical applications across modalities. To address this gap, this review provides a comprehensive and structured synthesis of FMs in medical image analysis by systematically organizing studies into two primary categories: vision-only foundation models (VFMs) and vision-language foundation models (VLFMs), based on their architectural foundations, training strategies, and downstream clinical tasks. A quantitative analysis was conducted on both VFMs and VLFMs to characterize temporal trends in dataset utilization and application domains, along with pooled performance and subgroup analyses. We also critically discuss persistent challenges, including cross-domain generalization, computational scalability, FM evaluation, fairness, and deployment. Finally, we identify key future research directions aimed at enhancing the robustness, interpretability, and clinical integration of FMs, thereby accelerating their translation into real-world medical practice.
♻ ☆ Efficient Image Synthesis with Sphere Latent Encoder NeurIPS 2026
Few-step image generation has seen rapid progress, with consistency and meanflow-based methods significantly reducing the number of sampling steps. Despite their low inference cost, these approaches often suffer from training instability and limited scalability. Sphere Encoder is a recent alternative that produces high-quality images in only a few steps; however, it requires repeated transitions between the pixel space and latent space during inference while jointly optimizing reconstruction and generation within a single architecture. This design leads to computational inefficiency and objective conflict between reconstruction and generation. To address these limitations, we decouple the framework into a fixed pretrained image encoder and a separate latent denoising model trained entirely in a spherical latent space. Our approach eliminates repeated pixel-space operations during training and inference, improving efficiency and allowing reconstruction and generation to specialize independently. On Animal-Faces, Oxford-Flowers and ImageNet-1K datasets, our method significantly outperforms Sphere Encoder in both generation quality and inference speed, while achieving competitive results against strong few-step and multi-step baselines.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026 (Poster). Project page: https://sphere-latent-encoder.github.io/
♻ ☆ Missingness-Conditioned Spatio-Temporal Fusion for Human Activity Recognition from Low-Quality Wearable Sensor Data
Body-worn sensor networks capture human activities through complementary views, where nodes, modalities, and axes partially describe the underlying motion. In real deployments, hardware faults, wireless dropouts, and loose attachments often cause entire channels or nodes to go missing, while environmental interference degrades the remaining signals. The common impute-then-recognize pipeline introduces reconstruction errors that cannot be observed or corrected at inference. We propose the Missingness-Conditioned Spatio-Temporal Network (MCSTN), an end-to-end framework for robust activity recognition under imperfect sensing. MCSTN has three components: a structured imperfection generator that simulates point, temporal-block, axis, modality, and node failures, plus noise at varying signal-to-noise levels; a mask-aware representation that conditions node embeddings, attention, and temporal aggregation on the availability mask; and a complete-to-imperfect multi-view learning scheme where an exponential-moving-average teacher guides multiple degraded student views through semantic consistency. The encoder models temporal and cross-feature dependencies in parallel: a bi-directional selective state-space branch captures long-range temporal dependencies, a transposed-attention branch models cross-channel correlations, and adaptive weights fuse their outputs. At inference, the generator, teacher, and consistency loss are removed, so MCSTN predicts directly from the observed window and its mask without reconstruction or noise-level estimation. On PAMAP2, Opportunity, and WISDM, MCSTN achieves average macro-F1 scores of 94.24\%, 91.67\%, and 96.22\% under imperfect observations, the best among all compared methods on each dataset, and the best in every failure mode on Opportunity. It requires fewer than one million parameters, with 3.78~ms inference latency per sample.
♻ ☆ Towards Generalized Image Manipulation Localization via Score-based Model ICMR 2026
With the rapid evolution of synthetic media, Image Manipulation Localization (IML) has emerged as a critical component in multimedia forensics for ensuring the integrity of digital content. However, generalization remains a core challenge, as existing discriminative methods typically learn a fixed decision boundary that tends to overfit to specific training artifacts and fails to adapt to unseen manipulation types. To address this, we propose DiffIML, a novel framework that introduces score-based generative modeling to IML. Diverging from the direct estimation of hard boundaries, DiffIML approximates the score function, the gradient of the log-likelihood, to capture the intrinsic geometric topology of mask distributions. This paradigm leverages structural priors to iteratively recover coherent masks from noise, thereby circumventing the brittleness associated with discriminative models. Under this formulation, diffusion models serve as an effective numerical solver for the learned score function.To ensure practicality, we respectively resolve the efficiency and stability bottlenecks of standard diffusion by: (1) utilizing a Lightweight Mask-Specific VAE for fast latent-space process and a decoupled architecture with a lightweight denoising UNet, (2) edge supervision and error prior to mitigate error accumulation during sampling. Extensive experiments of two distinct protocols on eight non-generative and three generative benchmarks demonstrate that DiffIML consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, yielding remarkable generalization improvements on diverse unseen datasets. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/scu-zjz/DiffIML.
comment: Published in ICMR 2026. 9 pages, 4 figures. Code: https://github.com/scu-zjz/DiffIML. Added funding acknowledgment
♻ ☆ Unveiling the Secret of AdaLN-Zero in Diffusion Transformer IEEE
Diffusion transformer (DiT), a rapidly emerging architecture for image generation, has gained much attention. However, despite ongoing efforts to improve its performance, the understanding of DiT remains superficial. In this work, we delve into and investigate a critical conditioning mechanism within DiT, adaLN-Zero, which achieves superior performance compared to adaLN. Our work studies three potential elements driving this performance, including an SE-like structure, zero-initialization, and a "gradual" update order, among which zero-initialization is proved to be the most influential. Building on this understanding, we propose an analysis-guided initialization strategy, termed adaLN-Gaussian, which serves both as an empirical validation of our analysis and as a practical initialization method that consistently improves optimization efficiency. On the other hand, inspired by the SE-like structure, we introduce an improved conditioning mechanism called SE-adaLN-Zero. Extensive experiments following DiT on four datasets, especially on ImageNet1K, demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of adaLN-Gaussian and SE-adaLN-Zero. Beyond class-to-image generation, we also evaluate the generalization of the two improved methods on text-to-image generation.
comment: Accepted by IEEE TPAMI 2026, camera-ready version
♻ ☆ GRASP: Guided Residual Adapters with Sample-wise Partitioning
Text-to-image flow matching transformers degrade sharply in long-tail settings: tail-class outputs collapse in fidelity and diversity, limiting their value as synthetic augmentation for rare conditions. We trace this to low head-versus-tail gradient alignment during fine-tuning, an optimization-level pathology that conditioning- and sampling-side interventions do not address. We propose GRASP (Guided Residual Adapters with Sample-wise Partitioning): a deterministic partition of the conditioning space, paired with group-specific residual adapters in the transformer feedforward layers, that leaves the flow-matching objective and the sampler untouched. In conditional flow matching, condition values index distinct sets of probability paths, which makes the conditioning a structurally natural axis along which to factorize residual updates. Because the partition is static, every tail sample is guaranteed to update its assigned expert, which bypasses extreme long-tail failure modes. GRASP is non-invasive and composable: on MIMIC-CXR-LT, combining GRASP with self-guided minority sampling at inference outperforms its learned counterpart on 10 of 12 metrics. Performance is stable across random reassignments of labels to experts and across expert counts, as long as no expert is starved of samples. Used as training data for a downstream DenseNet classifier on NIH-CXR-LT, GRASP synthetics significantly outperform every non-GRASP alternative on macro F1 and yield nonzero F1 on 9 of 13 classes versus 3 of 13 from real data, while maintaining comparable macro F1. Results on ImageNet-LT confirm the mechanism is not tied to medical inductive bias. Code is available at https://github.com/Felix-012/GRASP-LT
comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, 9 tables
♻ ☆ FICGen: Frequency-Inspired Contextual Disentanglement for Layout-driven Degraded Image Generation ICCV 2025
Layout-to-image (L2I) generation has exhibited promising results in natural domains, but suffers from limited generative fidelity and weak alignment with user-provided layouts when applied to degraded scenes (i.e., low-light, underwater). We primarily attribute these limitations to the "contextual illusion dilemma" in degraded conditions, where foreground instances are overwhelmed by context-dominant frequency distributions. Motivated by this, our paper proposes a new Frequency-Inspired Contextual Disentanglement Generative (FICGen) paradigm, which seeks to transfer frequency knowledge of degraded images into the latent diffusion space, thereby facilitating the rendering of degraded instances and their surroundings via contextual frequency-aware guidance. To be specific, FICGen consists of two major steps. Firstly, we introduce a learnable dual-query mechanism, each paired with a dedicated frequency resampler, to extract contextual frequency prototypes from pre-collected degraded exemplars in the training set. Secondly, a visual-frequency enhanced attention is employed to inject frequency prototypes into the degraded generation process. To alleviate the contextual illusion and attribute leakage, an instance coherence map is developed to regulate latent-space disentanglement between individual instances and their surroundings, coupled with an adaptive spatial-frequency aggregation module to reconstruct spatial-frequency mixed degraded representations. Extensive experiments on 5 benchmarks involving a variety of degraded scenarios-from severe low-light to mild blur-demonstrate that FICGen consistently surpasses existing L2I methods in terms of generative fidelity, alignment and downstream auxiliary trainability.
comment: 21 pages, 19 figures, ICCV 2025
♻ ☆ GLIMPSE: Global-Local Indexing with Multi-Precision Spectral Encoding for Explorable Video World Models
A camera-controlled video world model must keep a scene consistent when the camera returns to it. Memories that render stored features into the target frame can turn depth and pose errors into ghosting or duplicated structure. Positional transport avoids that resampling by relocating a historical patch's address rather than its content, but assigns full positional precision even to inaccurate projections. We present GLIMPSE, a global-local memory interface with band-wise multi-precision coordinates and geometry-conditioned spectral attenuation to reduce sensitivity to inaccurate projected addresses. Local patch memory supplies view-specific appearance, while recurrent global memory provides scene context. Footprint-guided retrieval selects historical patches under a fixed local read budget. Under matched retrieval and read budgets, GLIMPSE improves geometric correspondence and photometric consistency over deterministic positional transport.
comment: 21 pages, 8 figures
♻ ☆ Cranio-Diff: Diffusion-based Cross-domain Craniofacial Reconstruction with 2D X-ray Skull Guidance and Structural Identity Constraints
The identification of unknown human remains is a persistent humanitarian and forensic challenge. In forensic investigations, it becomes even more challenging when common biometric DNA identifications, such as soft-tissue or hair strands are not present, as they degrade with time. To narrow down the process of identification, few attempts have been made to identify an individual by reconstructing a face from the given skeletal remains ( i.e., skull) using generative AI models, such as CycleGAN, Pix2Pix, and diffusion models. However, they fail to effectively capture semantic information in craniofacial reconstruction, due to a mismatch in the alignment of structural information across modalities. To address this issue, we propose Cranio-Diff, a diffusion-based framework for craniofacial reconstruction from 2D X-ray skull images. The proposed approach integrates skull-conditioned structural guidance through ControlNet with biometric text prompts to generate a face. The proposed Cranio-Diff method is evaluated on skull-face dataset obtained from X-ray scans of 120 subjects in lateral and frontal views. To enable controlled evaluation, each face image is artificially synthesized across three age groups (25, 45, 65) and three BMI variations 10%, yielding 4320 paired samples. This dataset is also curated across different facial modalities ( RGB and sketch) with different appearance conditions (hair and without hair). To the best of our knowledge, this is the only X-ray-face dataset with this magnitude. Extensive experiments showed that the proposed method achieves improved performance over the recent existing approaches in both generated image quality and retrieval task. Finally, to evaluate the performance of our proposed method, we have evaluated the quality of the generated image using FID, SSIM, LPIPS score.
comment: 18 pages, 9 figures, Journal
♻ ☆ Video Prediction Policy 2: Predict Better, Act Better
Yanjiang Guo, Haodong Yan, Zhide Zhong, Zhongru Zhang, Qingyuan Yang, Qingzhou Lu, Xiaoyu Chen, Yen-Jen Wang, Shuying Deng, Chenghan Yang, Puzhen Yuan, Chenxin Liu, Tun Ban, Xiang Zhu, Yichen Liu, Kun Feng, Haoang Li, Jianyu Chen
World action models (WAMs) have emerged as an important class of generalist robot policies, aiming to transfer video prediction priors to action learning. However, we find that existing WAMs frequently produce incorrect motion predictions in open-ended environment, leading to erroneous actions. We attribute this limitation to two factors: (1) base video models are not optimized for manipulation, and (2) naively incorporating action components into video models can substantially degrade their generalization capabilities. We introduce Video Prediction Policy 2 (VPP2), a WAM that enables strong zero-shot generalization in both video prediction and action generation. First, we curate a large-scale, diverse dataset of manipulation videos to continue pretraining the base video foundation model. We annotate video clips with detailed captions and perform \textit{event-level} video pretraining to promote generalization across open-ended manipulation tasks. Second, we post-train and distill the video model into a single-step visual planner with fixed prediction horizon. Finally, we introduce action module via a mixture-of-transformers (MoT) architecture to learn implicit inverse dynamics model. Experiments demonstrate three key results: (1) VPP2-14B outperforms Cosmos3-64B by 11.0\% points in video prediction instruction-following success rate on open-ended tasks; (2) VPP2 surpasses the strongest baseline by 18.5\% points in success rate on real-world zero-shot ALOHA manipulation tasks; and (3) following benchmark-specific post-training, VPP2 achieves the highest success rates among evaluated methods on the challenging LIBERO-Pro, LIBERO-OOD, and RoboDojo benchmarks.
comment: Project Page: https://robert-gyj.github.io/video-prediction-policy-2
♻ ☆ What Makes Synthetic Hard Negatives Work in Vision-Language Pretraining? ACCV 2026
Nikos Giakoumoglou, Paschalis Giakoumoglou, Andreas Floros, Kleanthis Marios Papadopoulos, Tania Stathaki
Synthetic hard negatives generated in the representation space have proven effective for unimodal self-supervised learning, but transferring this idea to vision-language pretraining is not straightforward. We analyze six representation-space synthesis strategies and identify two failure modes in their transfer to vision-language pretraining: cross-modal constructions that produce overly easy negatives or pull them toward the query, and intra-modal constructions that incorporate the matched positive. We also observe logit-scale saturation when training with synthetic hard negatives and a learnable temperature, and find that fixing the temperature improves downstream performance. Using this geometric analysis we propose SNAP, which generates intra-modal hard negatives that never involve the positive from either modality, avoiding both failure modes entirely. SNAP is model-agnostic, requires no external generative models, and adds less than 10% training time overhead. Evaluated on top of CLIP and FLIP across multiple architectures and datasets, SNAP delivers consistent improvements on zero-shot retrieval, zero-shot classification, and linear probe evaluation.
comment: ACCV 2026
♻ ☆ MJev-Spatial: System One Spatial Intelligence via Native Attention Matching
Luozheng Qin, Yuhan Zhu, Changhai Zhou, Qian Qiao, Jun Gao, Yuhua Zhou, Harry Zhang, Xiangyu Zeng, Yuxuan Liu, Yuxin Lu, Kaijie Chen, Andrew Chen, Pony Ma
Spatial intelligence lets an agent perceive and act in the physical world, and many of its judgments must be made at interaction rates: which spatial relation holds, how far an object is, or where to place it. Vision-language models (VLMs) produce these answers by free-form text generation, paying for autoregressive decoding and answer parsing even though the output space is compact: one of a few options, a scalar, or a 2D point. In light of this, we introduce MJev-Spatial, a System 1 multimodal decision model that tackles all three types of spatial understanding tasks within a unified classification framework. Specifically, MJev-Spatial treats each candidate as a class and scores it using the backbone's pretrained query and key projections, without adding parameters. The candidates are the given options for choice tasks, or value bins and image regions refined through coarse-to-fine classification for numerical and point prediction, respectively. At inference, each classification decision takes a single forward pass and generates no answer tokens. To train on heterogeneous spatial data efficiently, we supervise all coarse-to-fine stages jointly with teacher forcing in one forward pass, and combine this with length-aware global batching and cross-GPU load balancing, raising training throughput by 30.8% over the original batching strategy. Built on Qwen3.5-4B and trained on 12.3M question-answer pairs converted from existing spatial datasets, MJev-Spatial achieves the highest overall score (65.64%) among eight tested models, ranks first on seven of twelve benchmarks, and outperforms its unmodified autoregressive base model on all twelve, while running 2.5 times faster than the fastest autoregressive baseline and 5.6 times faster than the base model.
comment: 37 pages, 7 figures, 27 tables. Code: https://github.com/Fr0zenCrane/MJev-Spatial
♻ ☆ Beyond Perturbation Magnitude: Direction-Dependent Responses in Multimodal Geometric Representations IEEE
Geometric alignment scores based on Gram determinants provide a compact way to model higher-order consistency among modalities, yet how such scores respond to modality degradation is poorly understood. This paper asks whether the response of a multimodal geometric score is determined primarily by the magnitude of the perturbation-induced displacement. Using frozen cohorts from MSR-VTT (N=878) and DiDeMo (N=980), we apply controlled video blur and audio noise and analyze the response in the relational geometry on which the score is defined. Displacement magnitude explains at most 15% of the out-of-sample variance in the absolute response, and magnitude-matched pairs respond systematically differently, so scalar magnitude does not organize the response. The closed-form first-order expansion of the Gramian volume yields the Directional Geometric Response (DGR): the projection of the displacement onto the local volume gradient, which jointly captures the clean operating point, displacement magnitude, and displacement direction. The absolute first-order DGR term explains the observed response with out-of-sample R^2 of 0.838-0.969, matched-magnitude ranking accuracies of 0.864-0.963, and response-sign accuracies of 0.909-0.989, whereas the tested direction-free alternatives remain weak or unstable under the corresponding evaluation protocols. A pre-specified gain-normalization candidate, V/(g_V+eps), fails its predictability and clean-order gates. DGR uses the observed degraded-state displacement and is therefore an explanatory quantity, not a deployment-time predictor: geometric response depends on where the representation operates, how far degradation moves the relational geometry, and in which direction it moves.
comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM). 10 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables; supplementary material (4 pages) and code at https://github.com/VincentLuoMust/DGR
♻ ☆ Cross-Architectural Feature Fusion for Coronary Artery Stenosis Detection in X-ray Angiography
Coronary artery disease remains a leading cause of mortality, with stenosis detection from invasive X-ray Coronary Angiography (XCA) critical for diagnosis. Manual interpretation is time-consuming, subjective, and variable, especially under low contrast and vessel overlap. Existing deep learning methods often rely solely on detection or segmentation, limiting performance. We propose a hybrid framework, Fusion-YOLOv11-L, combining a YOLOv11-L detector with a pretrained UNet++ via a channel attention gating module. This enables fusion of semantic and vessel-aware structural features, improving localisation of stenotic regions. The UNet++ is pretrained on ARCADE vessel segmentation dataset to provide anatomically informed representations. Experiments on the relabeled ARCADE (ARCADE*) dataset show improved performance over YOLOv11-L, achieving AP@50 of 0.585 and F1-score of 0.596. Cross-domain evaluation on a dataset from the Oxford Acute Myocardial Infarction (OxAMI) Study reveals performance degradation due to domain shift, mitigated using test-time adaptation and augmentation. Test-time augmentation improves AP@50 from 0.434 to 0.480, indicating better generalisability. These results show that cross-architecture feature fusion and lightweight adaptation improve robustness and generalisability of automated stenosis detection in XCA.
comment: 12 pages, 3 figures
♻ ☆ PhyMo: Learning Physical Dynamics with Accurate and Continuous Motion from Multi-View Videos NeurIPS 2026
Recovering dynamic 3D scene geometry, appearance, and the physical motion states that govern scene evolution from multi-view videos is important yet challenging. A key difficulty is that appearance can be deceptive. Under rendering supervision alone, a model may fit the observed images by changing color or opacity to compensate for inaccurate deformation, rather than recovering the true evolving geometry and motion. This issue is especially severe in scenes with fast or locally complex motion, where inaccurate trajectories can still produce plausible images over the observed frames, but lead to unreliable reconstruction and discontinuous future prediction. In this paper, we propose PhyMo, a framework for learning evolving dynamics from multi-view videos. We introduce a Motion-Aware Trajectory Representation that drives the model to recover accurate motion from deformation, rather than relying on appearance shortcuts to explain observed motion. On top of this, we propose a Continuous Motion Evolution module with bidirectional kinematic continuity constraint to promote temporally consistent evolution of displacement, velocity, and acceleration. Together, these designs yield geometrically faithful interpolation and continuous motion extrapolation. Experiments on four dynamic scene benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ Surface Reconstruction from Range Scans Under Visibility Constraints
Surface reconstruction from range scans is challenging in the presence of noise and outliers, as fidelity to observations must be balanced against sensitivity to measurement errors. Yet, most neural approaches discard the sensor positions and corresponding visibility information, compensating for this loss with geometric priors or regularization terms. We instead formulate surface reconstruction as robust regression of the predicted first surface intersection along each acquisition ray against its measured depth, which penalizes predicted surface intersections within the segment between the sensor and the observed point. We represent the surface as the zero set of a 1-Lipschitz multi-layer perceptron, allowing the use of linearly convergent sphere tracing to compute the first hit, and use a robust Huber loss for regression. Our formulation requires neither oriented normals, sampled off-surface points, nor an eikonal loss. Comparisons with the state of the art on synthetic and real data with varying levels of noise and outlier contamination demonstrate competitive performance on clean data and much improved fidelity and robustness under even moderate corruption. Our analysis further confirms a trade-off between fidelity and robustness: greater fitting capacity improves data fidelity in the clean case but increases sensitivity to the measurement errors inherent in real acquisitions, with a sweet spot typically emerging at intermediate capacity.
♻ ☆ A Cross-Modal Prompt Injection Attack against Large Vision-Language Models with Image-Only Perturbation
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for multimodal intelligence, but their growing deployment also expands the attack surface of prompt injection. Despite this growing concern, existing attacks still suffer from a critical limitation: the injected prompt for one modality only steers the model's interpretation of that singular input. Alternatively, these attacks remain multimodal but fail to achieve cross-modal prompt perturbation. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel cross-modal prompt injection attack CrossMPI, which can steer the model's interpretation of both textual and visual inputs via image-only prompt injection. Our design is underpinned by the following key breakthroughs. First, we turn the focus of the injected prompt perturbation optimization from the visual embedding space (typically with only $10^5$ parameters) to the model hidden state space (for multimodal information integration and with $10^7$ parameters). Then, two strategies are adopted to mitigate the optimization challenges posed by the larger parameter space. To constrain the optimized model parameter space, we introduce a layer selection strategy that identifies the layers most critical to multimodal integration. Interestingly, deviating from the past experience, our analysis reveals that the optimal layers for LVLM prompt perturbation reside in the middle of the model rather than the last. To constrain the image perturbation space, we propose a new distance-decremental perturbation budget assignment strategy that allocates budgets decrementally as the pixel distance to semantic-critical regions increases. Extensive experiments across multiple LVLMs and datasets show that our method significantly outperforms baseline approaches.
♻ ☆ PAIQ: Patch-Aligned Semantic Injection via Residual Rotation
Language-aligned and self-supervised visual encoders offer complementary strengths in semantic abstraction and spatial detail. Harnessing this complementarity requires enriching local features while retaining distinctions between semantically related patches. We introduce PAIQ, a patch-aligned semantic injection framework that combines content-based cross-encoder matching with orthogonally constrained residual updates. Using DINOv3 patch features as the spatial base, PAIQ aggregates complementary SigLIP features through joint source allocation and injects the aggregate--base differences through a shared orthogonal transformation Q. This rotation adapts update directions while preserving residual norms and pairwise angles. For fixed projected features, we derive conditions for patch separability under similar semantic aggregates and show that rotation adds a nonnegative separation term over direct interpolation when the aggregate is shared. Only the projection and fusion parameters are trained; both visual encoders and the language model remain frozen, and fusion retains 196 visual tokens. Across diverse language backbones, PAIQ yields broad gains in judge-assessed correctness and reductions in hallucination severity over single-encoder interfaces on image description and visual question answering. On the 2B and 9B Qwen backbones, this compact interface outperforms the strongest evaluated fusion or token-compression baselines by about 2.9 correctness points on average.
♻ ☆ OmniReasoning: Pushing the Limits of Audio-Visual Joint Reasoning
Junming Lin, Yuxuan Wang, Zhenxin Lei, Yuxin Liu, Ruixun Liu, Yinsong Yan, Ling Wang, Minghao Han, Yunfei Chu, Shun Lei, Xueyao Zhang, Qize Yang, Jin Xu, Yiwu Zhong
Recent advances have enabled unified omni-modal models in understanding audio, vision, and language. However, existing benchmarks, training data, and learning methods largely treat the modalities independently, leaving the capability of audio-visual joint reasoning poorly evaluated and insufficiently elicited. We address this gap with a benchmark, data engine, and learning method. First, we introduce OmniReasoningBench, a benchmark where both audio and visual evidence are indispensable. It comprises 1,150 multiple-choice and open-ended questions across two tasks, reasoning over video and reasoning beyond video. Second, we develop a data engine OmniQA. It automatically constructs evidence-grounded QA pairs that explicitly necessitate audio-visual joint reasoning, together with time-stamped clue chains that guide the annotation of thinking process. Besides our benchmark, this engine produces training data OmniReasoning-SFT-112K and OmniReasoning-RL-19K. Finally, we propose an on-policy self-distillation method Modality-Factored Self-Distillation (MFSD). It evaluates each sampled response under modality-specific clue contexts, disentangling the contributions of individual clues and their cross-modal interactions for token-level credit assignment. With our training data and learning method, our model OmniReasoning-30B-A3B achieves 50.0% on OmniVideoBench and 42.5% on OmniReasoningBench, improving the base model Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Thinking by 12.8 and 9.3 percentage points, respectively. Moreover, it delivers substantial gains on general and long-video benchmarks, including Video-MME-v2. We hope our work offers a solid step for facilitating future research in omni-modal joint reasoning.
♻ ☆ Finding Change in Satellite Archives from Text: How to Combine Before-and-After Images Efficiently ACL
Operational Earth observation increasingly calls for answering queries such as ``find the image pairs where a new building appeared.'' This means searching an archive of before-and-after (bi-temporal) satellite image pairs and ranking each pair by how well it matches a natural-language description of the change. The component that performs this match, the fusion module that combines the ``before'' and ``after'' views, must be run at query time across many candidate pairs, so its speed largely sets the cost of every search. We present a controlled comparison of how to build that module. Using one fixed image encoder (a frozen CLIP model) and one training recipe for all variants, we evaluate eight designs drawn from three families: attention, state-space models (Mamba), and learned compression (our Temporal Bottleneck Fusion, TBF). Each design is tested on two benchmarks (LEVIR-CC and Dubai-CC) with ten random seeds, so the reported differences are statistically grounded. We outline three findings: first, a training-free two-stage search (a cheap difference model that shortlists candidates, followed by attention fusion that re-ranks them) matches or exceeds full-fusion recall on LEVIR-CC while cutting query cost $10$-$15\times$, with comparable R@1/R@5 on Dubai-CC; second, the linear-time scan of Mamba, attractive on paper, gives no speed benefit at the patch counts typical of vision transformers ($L{=}196$): the scan is limited by memory bandwidth, whereas attention maps cleanly onto parallel hardware; and third, compressing the fused representation (TBF) reduces parameters by $2.3\times$ and latency by $1.6\times$ for a change-only BLEU-1 cost of $0.007$, although more aggressive compression quietly discards change-relevant detail that aggregate metrics fail to reveal.
comment: 10 pages, 3 figures. Accepted at the MACLEAN Workshop (ECML PKDD 2026
♻ ☆ LUMA: Benchmarking Segmentation via a Lightweight Universal Mask Adapter WACV 2027
Tobias Christian Nauen, Anosh Billimoria, Federico Raue, Stanislav Frolov, Brian B. Moser, Andreas Dengel
Comparing transformer backbones for image segmentation is confounded: each is paired with a different decoder, recipe, and pretraining, so reported differences rarely reflect the backbone itself. We introduce the Lightweight Universal Mask Adapter (LUMA), a lightweight, backbone-agnostic mask-transformer head that treats any backbone as a black-box feature extractor, letting a set of queries read from its features through cheap cross-attention. LUMA matches the accuracy of EoMT, the state-of-the-art efficient ViT-segmenter, at cost parity, while attaching unchanged to hierarchical, convolutional, and mixture-of-experts backbones alike. Holding this head fixed, we benchmark 20 backbones, 11 pretraining schemes and a range of resolutions on ADE20K, COCO, and Cityscapes under one modern recipe. We find that ``efficient'' token mixers fail to deliver efficiency even at the high resolutions that motivate them, with plain ViT holding the throughput Pareto front at every resolution. Additionally, the pretraining objective, not the architecture, the lever the field has tuned hardest, governs segmentation quality.
Code: https://github.com/tobna/LUMA
comment: Accepted at WACV 2027. v2: Camera-ready version with supplementary material included
♻ ☆ ScenePercept: Scenario-Conditioned Perceptual Assessment of Real-World User-Generated Content Images
The rapid development of mobile imaging and social platforms has led to explosive growth in user-generated content images, making their systematic and comprehensive perceptual assessment increasingly important. Existing image perception benchmarks are typically task-oriented, curating specific scenarios for quality or aesthetic assessment and applying a uniform perceptual criterion across diverse scenarios. This limits their ability to capture the scene diversity and perceptual complexity of real-world UGC images. To address these limitations, we introduce ScenePercept-Bench, a benchmark designed to reflect the distribution of real-world UGC images, comprising 23,100 images across 21 categories and 105 fine-grained scenes. To account for the influence of scene context on human perception, we design a hierarchical, scene-aware annotation protocol, covering visual quality, aesthetic perception, and scene semantics, with 15 attributes in total. Each image is annotated with an overall score, 15 attribute-level scores, and structured explanatory reasoning. Building on this benchmark, we further introduce Scenario-Conditioned Perceptual Alignment, a training framework that tackles the heterogeneity of perceptual criteria across scenarios. SCPA jointly optimizes absolute score prediction, preference ranking, and cross-scenario calibration, preserving the model general perceptual assessment ability while encouraging it to explore and adapt perceptual criteria across different scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCPA achieves state-of-the-art performance in UGC image perception and generalizes effectively to established IQA and IAA benchmarks.
comment: Revise some experimental results
♻ ☆ Code as Worlds: Agentic Discovery of Executable World Representations for Physical Reasoning
Hanyang Wang, Yimo Cai, Weiliang Chen, Jiawei Chi, Haowen Sun, Qiyu Dai, Yi-Hsin Hung, Xingzhuo Guo, Jinshan Ren, Runmao Yao, Ziwei Liu, Mingsheng Long, Yueqi Duan, Jun Gao, Jiangran Lyu, Fangfu Liu, Jialong Wu
Physical understanding and reasoning depend on forming compact and generalizable representations of the world. While modern vision-language models can recognize and explain diverse physical events, they often lack explicit representations of the underlying mechanisms-such as object states, physical parameters, and governing dynamics-needed for reliably reasoning how the world evolves and responds to interventions. In this work, we introduce Code-as-World, a paradigm that represents physical worlds through executable world representations. By expressing physical composition, dynamic evolution, and visual appearance as executable code, Code-as-World provides a compact, quantitatively grounded, and controllable abstraction of the physical world. To construct such representations from multimodal observations, such as natural-language descriptions or real-world videos, we develop an agentic discovery loop inspired by abductive reasoning, where an agent proposes, executes, renders, verifies, and iteratively refines executable world hypotheses. As a concrete application, we use verified executable worlds to provide scalable physical supervision for training vision-language models on quantitative physical reasoning. Experiments show that Code-as-World-VL achieves state-of-the-art performance on QuantiPhy and surpasses leading proprietary models, highlighting the potential of executable world representations as a scalable foundation for physical intelligence.
comment: Project Page: https://mirros-lab.github.io/code-as-world
♻ ☆ FermatSyn: SAM2-Enhanced Bidirectional Mamba with Isotropic Spiral Scanning for Multi-Modal Medical Image Synthesis MICCAI 2026
Multi-modal medical image synthesis is pivotal for alleviating clinical data scarcity, yet existing methods fail to reconcile global anatomical consistency with high-fidelity local detail. We propose FermatSyn, which addresses three persistent limitations: (1) SAM2-based Prior Encoder that injects domain-aware anatomical knowledge via LoRA$^{+}$ efficient fine-tuning of a frozen SAM2 Vision Transformer; (2) Hierarchical Residual Downsampling Module (HRDM) coupled with a Cross-scale Integration Network (CIN) that preserves high-frequency lesion details and adaptively fuses global--local representations; and (3) continuity constrained Fermat Spiral Scanning strategy within a Bidirectional Fermat Scan Mamba (BFS-Mamba), constructing an approximately isotropic receptive field that substantially reduces the directional bias of raster or spiral serialization. Experiments on SynthRAD2023, BraTS2019, BraTS-MEN, and BraTS-MET show FermatSyn surpasses state-of-the-art methods in PSNR, SSIM, FID, and 3D structural consistency. Downstream segmentation on synthesized images yields no significant difference from real-image training ($p{>}0.05$), confirming clinical utility. Code is available at https://github.com/exsinger-hub/ FermatSyn.
comment: MICCAI 2026
♻ ☆ Towards Generalist Game Agents: A Survey of Foundation Models in Virtual Worlds
Kuan Zhang, Dongchen Liu, Qiyue Zhao, Tianyu Xin, Yue Su, Haisheng Wang, Han Yin, Hongbo Ma, Peize Li, Tianjun Gu, Xiangnan Wu, Xinran Zhang, Yongxuan Li, Zirong Chen, Yiming Li
The real world unfolds along a single set of physics laws, yet human intelligence demonstrates a remarkable capacity to generalize experiences from this singular physical existence into a multiverse of games, each governed by entirely different rules, aesthetics, physics, and objectives. This omni-reality adaptability is a hallmark of general intelligence. As Artificial Intelligence progresses towards Artificial General Intelligence, the multiverse of games has evolved from mere entertainment into the ultimate ground for training and evaluating AGI. The pursuit of this generality has unfolded across four eras: from environment-specific symbolic and reinforcement learning agents, to current large foundation models acting as generalist players, and toward a future creator stage where agent both creates new game worlds and continually evolves within them. We trace the full lifecycle of a generalist game player along four interdependent pillars: Dataset, Model, Harness, and Benchmark. Every advance across these pillars can be read as an attempt to break one of five fundamental trade-offs that currently bound the whole system. Building on this end-to-end view, we chart a five-step roadmap, progressing from single-game mastery to the ultimate creator stage in which the agent simultaneously creates and evolves within theoretical game multiverse. Taken together, our work offers a unified lens onto a rapidly shifting field, and a principled path toward the omnipotent generalist agent capable of seamlessly mastering any challenge within the multiverse of games, thereby paving the way for AGI.
comment: Project Page: https://thusi-lab.github.io/Awesome-LFMs-Play-Games/ , Github: https://github.com/THUSI-Lab/Awesome-LFMs-Play-Games
♻ ☆ PixFoundation: Are We Heading in the Right Direction with Pixel-level Vision Foundation Models?
Multiple works have emerged to push the boundaries of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) towards pixel-level understanding. The current trend is to train MLLMs with pixel-level grounding supervision in terms of masks on large-scale labelled data and specialized decoders for the segmentation task. However, we show that such MLLMs when evaluated on recent challenging vision-centric benchmarks, exhibit a weak ability in visual question answering (VQA). Surprisingly, some of these methods even downgrade the grounding ability of MLLMs that were never trained with such pixel-level supervision. In this work, we propose two novel challenging benchmarks with paired evaluation for both VQA and grounding. We demonstrate that simple baselines that are not unified achieve performance that matches or surpasses some of the pixel-level MLLMs. Our paired benchmarks and evaluation enable additional analysis on whether the failure stems from VQA and/or grounding abilities. Furthermore, we propose a paired prompt sensitivity analysis on both the language and visual prompts tailored for the grounding task. Our benchmarking pushes pixel-level MLLMs to improve in both accuracy and robustness, without sacrificing language abilities. More importantly, we study the research question of ``When does grounding emerge in MLLMs with respect to the output tokens?'' We propose a post-hoc interpretability tool that can be plugged into any MLLM to study the aforementioned question. We show that grounding does not necessarily coincide with the exact referring expression in the output, but can coincide with the object parts, its location, appearance, context or state. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://msiam.github.io/PixFoundationSeries/.
comment: Accepted in TMLR 2026, https://openreview.net/forum?id=HNtjTTAac1
♻ ☆ PixFoundation 2.0: Do Video Multi-Modal LLMs Use Motion in Visual Grounding? NeurIPS 2026
Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive generalization across tasks using images and text modalities. While their extension to video has enabled tasks such as video question answering and video captioning, their pixel-level visual grounding abilities are less studied. In this work, we raise the pertinent question of whether motion is used in pixel-level visual grounding and whether video MLLMs can segment objects based on natural language expressions describing their motion patterns. We identify the shortcomings in the current benchmarks, where we show that a single frame can often suffice for capturing the referring expression without any temporal reasoning. To address this, we introduce novel motion-centric probing, particularly designed for the visual grounding task, to study video MLLMs' ability to identify true motion from a fake one and their ability to grasp the ordering of motion. Consequently, we introduce MoCentric-Bench, a motion-centric benchmark designed to evaluate video MLLMs based on their ability to capture the interaction between motion and language, rather than relying primarily on static cues. We further establish strong single-image baselines that either match or surpass prior methods. Finally, we explore a simple motion-centric adaptation that provides state-of-the-art performance on our MoCentric-Bench. Code is available at https://msiam.github.io/PixFoundationSeries/.
comment: Accepted in NeurIPS 2026, Evaluations and Datasets Track
♻ ☆ MoRE: Motion-Regularized Encoding for Articulated 3D Generation
Generating an articulated object from a single image requires recovering both its appearance and the mechanism governing its parts. A compact encoding of joint attributes does not by itself ensure that reconstruction preserves the resulting motion. We present MoRE, Motion-Regularized Encoding for articulated 3D generation. MoRE represents coordinate-aligned joint lines with axis classification and two axis-orthogonal Plücker moment coefficients, removing the arbitrary choice of an origin along the axis. During representation learning, decoded joint hypotheses are used to move corresponding three-dimensional anchors, and their motions are compared with those of annotated joints. A differentiable expectation over joint types and axis directions couples attribute reconstruction to the motion it induces. An image-conditioned flow learns the resulting functional latents, while a multi-state-adapted Gaussian model supplies appearance. At inference, recovered part assignments and joints articulate a single set of rest-pose Gaussians without regenerating the object for each state. Experiments on PartNet-Mobility and ACD show stronger part-box agreement, articulated-state geometry and visual similarity than the compared baselines, while joint prediction reduces axis, origin and range errors relative to ArtiLatent. Controlled ablations support the joint-line encoding and show that motion supervision reduces anchor-motion error. Code and pretrained checkpoints will be released in the future.
comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables
♻ ☆ Meta Inverse Prompting for Video Generative Models NeurIPS 2026
Recent advances in video generative models have enabled flexible conditional generation and editing pipelines, such as text-to-video, image-to-video, and reference-guided synthesis. However, these workflows are inherently one-directional, mapping conditions to videos without providing a mechanism to invert this process. In complex media production settings, the ability to recover controllable textual conditions from a given video is highly desirable, yet remains underexplored. While inverse prompting has been studied for image generation, directly extending these approaches to video is challenging due to the need to capture temporal dynamics beyond static appearance, as well as the substantial computational cost of per-video optimization. In this work, we propose the first practical framework for efficient video inverse prompting. Specifically, we formulate inverse prompting as a meta-learning problem and introduce Meta Video Inverse Prompting (MVIP), which learns a meta-prompt optimized over temporal dimensions to enable fast and effective prompt inference. Our approach amortizes the inversion process, eliminating the need for costly iterative optimization at test time. Experimental results demonstrate that MVIP recovers higher-quality inverse prompts with significantly improved reconstruction fidelity compared to image-based inversion and iterative captioning baselines, while achieving substantial gains in efficiency. Code and video results are available at https://ueriniuno.github.io/mvip-page/.
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2026. Project page: https://ueriniuno.github.io/mvip-page/ Code: https://github.com/ueriniuno/MVIP
♻ ☆ Patch-level Gaze Distribution Prediction for Gaze Following WACV 2023
Gaze following aims to predict where a person is looking in a scene, by predicting the target location, or indicating that the target is located outside the image. Recent works detect the gaze target by training a heatmap regression task with a pixel-wise mean-square error (MSE) loss, while formulating the in/out prediction task as a binary classification task. This training formulation puts a strict, pixel-level constraint in higher resolution on the single annotation available in training, and does not consider annotation variance and the correlation between the two subtasks. To address these issues, we introduce the patch distribution prediction (PDP) method. We replace the in/out prediction branch in previous models with the PDP branch, by predicting a patch-level gaze distribution that also considers the outside cases. Experiments show that our model regularizes the MSE loss by predicting better heatmap distributions on images with larger annotation variances, meanwhile bridging the gap between the target prediction and in/out prediction subtasks, showing a significant improvement in performance on both subtasks on public gaze following datasets. Code is available at: https://github.com/qiaomu-miao/gazefollowing_pdp
comment: Accepted to WACV 2023
♻ ☆ UniWorld: A Unified World Model for Real-Time Visual World Simulation
Continuous visual world simulation requires coupling evolving scene geometry with temporally persistent appearance. We present UniWorld, a unified framework that integrates depth trajectories and reference appearance within a shared video generation model. The central design maintains visual and geometric histories on a common timeline. Noise-aligned overlapping continuation places generated history at the prescribed sampling noise level and commits only newly generated latents. Rolling depth latent state preserves the corresponding geometric controls, incrementally reads newly available geometry, and keeps the conditioning fixed within each sampling window. Together, these mechanisms ensure exact preservation of latent history while bounding the active depth state by the window size. We evaluate continuous generation, paired history interventions, and long-horizon behavior across diverse scene categories. The same generator supports estimated, native, and on-demand simulator depth, while cached and incremental execution paths produce bitwise-identical outputs. Appearance changes and geometric control branches operate through the same interface without modifying committed history. The measured steady-state DiT execution path achieves real-time generation throughput, demonstrating the efficiency of UniWorld for continuous visual world simulation. Project page: https://zephipage.github.io/UniWorld.
comment: Project page: https://zephipage.github.io/UniWorld
♻ ☆ Drag as Evidence: Motion-Grounded Latent Recomposition for Drag-Based Editing
Modern image editors excel at semantic manipulation and visual synthesis, yet remain limited in precise spatial control, motivating the development of drag-based editing. However, existing drag-based methods often struggle to balance drag accuracy with natural, plausible, and intent-aligned generation. We propose MoRe-Drag, a motion-grounded drag-based editing method. Our key insight is to treat pixel-space warping as coarse motion evidence, and to inject this evidence into the generative sampling trajectory. Specifically, MoRe-Drag performs region-aware latent recomposition over refinement, inpainting, and preservation regions, coupled with stage-adaptive conditioning that progressively shifts from motion-grounded structure formation to semantic refinement. We further support a no-manual-instruction interface by adapting the MLLM-based text encoder for drag-aware instruction inference. Experiments on DragBench-SR and DragBench-DR show that MoRe-Drag substantially improves drag precision over strong base editors and achieves superior drag accuracy among SOTA drag-based methods, while delivering strong semantic consistency and visually realistic results. Project page: https://xinyu-pu.github.io/projects/more-drag/.
♻ ☆ SLVR: Structured Latent Visual Reasoning via Human-like Reasoning Flows NeurIPS 2026
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often answer visual reasoning questions by relying on linguistic priors rather than task-relevant visual evidence. Textual chain-of-thought reasoning can partially mitigate this issue by encouraging models to decompose visual questions into intermediate evidence-seeking steps, but generating these steps autoregressively increases inference cost. Latent reasoning avoids explicit rationale generation, but existing approaches provide limited control over what intermediate states encode, making it difficult to impose separate supervision for planning, grounding, and evidence selection. We propose Structured Latent Visual Reasoning (SLVR), a training framework that bridges explicit chain-of-thought and latent reasoning by organizing multimodal reasoning into typed latent stages for planning, grounding, evidence selection, and reasoning integration.
SLVR first trains the model to rely on the image by masking answer-revealing text and contrasting the correct answer with visually plausible distractors. It then organizes reasoning into latent stages for planning, grounding, evidence selection, and integration, supervising each stage with the corresponding signal: plans, boxes, visual evidence, and final rationales. This gives latent reasoning an explicit functional structure while avoiding generated textual chains at inference time.
Built on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, SLVR improves consistently across multimodal reasoning benchmarks, with absolute gains of +9.4 on MMVP and +14.2 on BLINK Relation, as well as improvements on V*, MathVista, and ChartQA. These results suggest that structured latent supervision can improve fine-grained visual reasoning without the decoding overhead of textual CoT. Project page is available \href{https://bogao-code.github.io/SLVR/}{here}.
comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2026.Project page \href{https://bogao-code.github.io/SLVR/}
♻ ☆ Probing Visual Planning in Image Editing Models NeurIPS 2026
Visual planning represents a crucial facet of human intelligence, especially in tasks that require complex spatial reasoning and navigation. Yet, in machine learning, this inherently visual problem is often tackled through a verbal-centric lens. While recent research demonstrates the promise of fully visual approaches, they suffer from significant computational inefficiency due to the step-by-step planning-by-generation paradigm. In this work, we present EAR, an editing-as-reasoning paradigm that reformulates visual planning as a single-step image transformation. To isolate intrinsic reasoning from visual recognition, we employ abstract puzzles as probing tasks and introduce AMAZE, a procedurally generated dataset that features the classical Maze and Queen problems, covering distinct, complementary forms of visual planning. The abstract nature of AMAZE also facilitates automatic evaluation of autoregressive and diffusion-based models in terms of both pixel-wise fidelity and logical validity. We assess leading proprietary and open-source editing models. The results show that they all struggle in the zero-shot setting, finetuning on basic scales enables remarkable generalization to larger in-domain scales and out-of-domain scales and geometries. However, our best model that runs on high-end hardware fails to match the zero-shot efficiency of human solvers, highlighting a persistent gap in neural visual reasoning.
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2026. Our code is available at https://github.com/spatigen/amaze
♻ ☆ UniPro: Unified Multi-Mode Medical Image Segmentation from 2D Images to 3D Volumes via Propagation
Medical image segmentation remains fragmented along two axes: segmentation paradigms and data dimensionality. Existing methods are typically developed separately for semantic, in-context, and interactive segmentation, and are further specialized to either native 2D images or 3D volumetric data. In clinical practice, however, segmentation workflows take many forms: a case may be initialized by semantic prediction, reference-guided segmentation, or user interaction. Regardless of how it begins, fine-grained refinement is naturally performed on 2D views; for volumetric scans, such 2D edits must propagate coherently to the rest of the volume. We present UniPro, a unified model that bridges segmentation paradigms and data dimensionality, using propagation to extend 2D segmentation to 3D volumes. Our key insight is that volumetric propagation and in-context segmentation share the same reference-conditioned prediction mechanism, differing only in whether the reference image-mask pairs come from other cases or from previously segmented neighboring slices. Building on this view, UniPro supports semantic, in-context, interactive, and propagation-based segmentation within a single slice-based framework, using class priors, reference exemplars, user clicks, and neighboring-slice predictions as mode-specific conditioning inputs. To improve propagation reliability, UniPro further incorporates bidirectional and 3D supervision to regularize slice-wise propagation beyond per-slice losses. Extensive experiments across diverse modalities and anatomies show that UniPro achieves strong performance across all segmentation settings, enabling annotation-efficient 3D segmentation from sparse 2D initialization and reducing slice-by-slice correction effort.
♻ ☆ Rebalancing Reference Frame Dominance to Improve Motion in Image-to-Video Models NeurIPS 2026
Image-to-video models often generate videos that remain overly static, compared to text-to-video models. While prior approaches mitigate this issue by weakening or modifying the image-conditioning signal, they often require additional training or sacrifice fidelity to the reference image. In this work, we identify reference-frame dominance as a key mechanism behind motion suppression. We observe that non-reference frames in I2V models allocate excessive self-attention to reference-frame key tokens, causing reference information to be over-propagated across time and suppressing inter-frame dynamics. Based on this finding, we propose DyMoS (Dynamic Motion Slider), a training-free and model-agnostic method that rebalances the attention pathway from generated frames to the reference frame during initial denoising steps. DyMoS leaves both the input image and model weights unchanged and introduces a single scalar parameter for continuous control over motion strength. Experiments across multiple state-of-the-art I2V backbones demonstrate that DyMoS consistently improves motion dynamics while maintaining visual quality and fidelity to the reference image.
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2026. Project page: https://i2v-dymos.github.io/
♻ ☆ Vision Transformers on the Edge: A Comprehensive Survey of Model Compression and Acceleration Strategies
In recent years, vision transformers (ViTs) have emerged as powerful and promising techniques for computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, and segmentation. Unlike convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which rely on hierarchical feature extraction, ViTs treat images as sequences of patches and leverage self-attention mechanisms. However, their high computational complexity and memory demands pose significant challenges for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. To address these limitations, extensive research has focused on model compression techniques and hardware-aware acceleration strategies. Nonetheless, a comprehensive review that systematically categorizes these techniques and their trade-offs in accuracy, efficiency, and hardware adaptability for edge deployment remains lacking. This survey bridges this gap by providing a structured analysis of model compression techniques, software tools for inference on edge, and hardware acceleration strategies for ViTs. We discuss their impact on accuracy, efficiency, and hardware adaptability, highlighting key challenges and emerging research directions to advance ViT deployment on edge platforms, including graphics processing units (GPUs), application-specific integrated circuit (ASICs), and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The goal is to inspire further research with a contemporary guide on optimizing ViTs for efficient deployment on edge devices.
comment: Accepted in Neurocomputing (Elsevier), Vol. 643, 130417, 2025. Paper list: https://github.com/shaibal13/Vision-transformers-on-the-edge-A-comprehensive-survey
♻ ☆ Disentangled Sparse Representations for Concept-Separated Diffusion Unlearning NeurIPS 2026
Unlearning specific concepts in text-to-image diffusion models has become increasingly important for preventing undesirable content generation. Among prior approaches, sparse autoencoder (SAE)-based methods have attracted attention due to their ability to suppress target concepts through lightweight manipulation of latent features, without modifying model parameters. However, SAEs trained primarily for sparse reconstruction do not explicitly enforce concept-wise separation, allowing semantically related concepts to share latent features. To address this, we propose SAEParate, which explicitly separates semantically overlapping concepts in the SAE latent space through concept-aware contrastive learning, supported by cross-attention-guided spatial aggregation that emphasizes concept-relevant regions. In addition, we enhance the encoder with a nonlinear transformation to increase its expressive capacity under this separation objective, enabling more concept-discriminative latent representations. Experiments on UnlearnCanvas demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with particularly strong gains in joint style-object unlearning, a challenging setting where existing methods suffer from severe interference between target and non-target concepts.
comment: 53 pages, 25 figures. Accepted at NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ Learning Universal Features for Generalizable Image Forgery Localization
In recent years, advanced image editing and generation methods have rapidly evolved, making detecting and locating forged image content increasingly challenging. Most existing image forgery detection methods rely on identifying the edited traces left in the image. However, because the traces of different forgeries are distinct, these methods can identify familiar forgeries included in the training data but struggle to handle unseen ones. In response, we present an approach for Generalizable Image Forgery Localization (GIFL). Once trained, our model can detect both seen and unseen forgeries, providing a more practical and efficient solution to counter false information in the era of generative AI. Our method focuses on learning general features from the pristine content rather than traces of specific forgeries, which are relatively consistent across different types of forgeries and therefore can be used as universal features to locate unseen forgeries. Additionally, as existing image forgery datasets are still dominated by traditional hand-crafted forgeries, we construct a new dataset consisting of images edited by various popular deep generative image editing methods to further encourage research in detecting images manipulated by deep generative models. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the detection of unseen forgeries and also demonstrates competitive results for seen forgeries. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ZhaoHengrun/GIFL.
comment: The main method of the paper has been significantly modified
♻ ☆ Rethinking Densification in Gaussian SLAM: A Stationary Sampling Perspective
Gaussian Splatting enables high-fidelity differentiable SLAM by representing scenes as anisotropic Gaussian primitives. Most systems rely on residual-driven densification, which couples refinement with representation growth: accuracy saturates at a moderate primitive count, yet memory grows throughout the trajectory, degrading throughput. We introduce TopoGS-SLAM, a stationary-sampling formulation that decouples refinement from capacity through coverage-triggered Gaussian initialization and bounded-topology optimization, turning mapping into a bounded-dimensional problem with stable scaling. On standard indoor benchmarks, TopoGS-SLAM matches or surpasses densification-based pipelines in localization and reconstruction accuracy while substantially improving memory scalability and throughput, showing that iterative topology mutation is not required for accurate Gaussian SLAM in bounded-area static indoor scenes with sufficient multi-view coverage. Additional details and resources are available at this URL: https://breeze1124.github.io/topogs-slam-project-page/
comment: 10 pages, 6 figures
♻ ☆ RoGe: Novel View Synthesis via End-to-End Implicit Reconstruction and Generation
Novel view synthesis from sparse inputs requires both geometric grounding from the observed views and generative priors of unobserved regions, motivating recent hybrid methods that combine reconstruction and generation. However, existing methods bridge the two with rendered images or explicit 3D representations such as point maps or 3D Gaussians. Generation is thus conditioned on a lossy and imperfect projection of the scene, inheriting its errors, and reconstruction receives no signal from generation to correct them. We present RoGe, an end-to-end unified reconstruction and generation framework that removes this explicit bridge. It targets roaming within a scene anchored by sparse views: given a few posed images and a camera trajectory, it synthesizes a temporally coherent video along that trajectory. From the sparse input views, RoGe builds an implicit scene representation with a feed-forward reconstruction model, and queries it with camera rays to obtain per-view geometric features. These features are injected into a video diffusion model as conditioning, without any explicit 3D intermediate. Both modules are trained jointly, so the generation objective directly shapes its own geometric conditioning. We conduct extensive experiments, where RoGe outperforms reconstruction-based, generation-based, and hybrid baselines in terms of image-level quality and video-level temporal and geometric consistency. Ablations confirm that ray-queried implicit features outperform both raw reconstruction tokens and rendered RGB as conditioning, and that joint training brings further gains. Our code will be released on https://jerry-locker.github.io/roge/.
♻ ☆ StreamEval: Evaluating Interactive Streaming Video Generation Models
We introduce StreamEval with four key features: (1) First interactive streaming video generation benchmark. (2) Fully open source. Benchmark data, evaluation code, protocols, and scoring rules are publicly available. (3) Comprehensive coverage. Five tasks cover avatar dialogue, avatar performance, world generation, instruction editing, and reference editing, with 300 scripted cases lasting 15 to 300 seconds. Ten metrics assess task execution, state consistency, visual fidelity, and audiovisual coordination. (4) Monthly updates. We will evaluate new and updated models and publish leaderboard results monthly. Results from 37 models show that high visual quality and identity retention do not necessarily coincide with reliable request execution or sustained state consistency. The leaderboard is available at https://streameval.ai.
♻ ☆ C-MambaPose: Phase-Preserving Complex Mamba for Cross-Environment Wi-Fi Human Pose Estimation IEEE
Cross-environment generalization remains a fundamental challenge for Wi-Fi-based human pose estimation (HPE), as environmental multipath can drastically alter Channel State Information (CSI) for the same human motion. Existing approaches often discard CSI phase or collapse complex signals into real-valued features early, losing motion-sensitive phase dynamics. We present C-MambaPose, a phase-preserving complex-valued state-space framework for robust cross-environment Wi-Fi 3D HPE. Our key insight is to preserve complex phase relationships throughout spatiotemporal modeling, rather than using phase only as an input feature. C-MambaPose sanitizes synchronization-induced phase errors and employs a Spatiotemporal Complex Mamba encoder with dynamic multi-scale receptive fields to capture long-range phase-amplitude dynamics. Cross-attention then maps the learned representations to human joints, followed by a skeleton-aware GraFormer decoder for anatomically coherent pose estimation. Experiments on MM-Fi show that C-MambaPose achieves strong performance across all settings, with the largest gains in unseen environments, reaching $298.5$ mm and $317.6$ mm MPJPE on the two cross-environment protocols using only $3.78$ M parameters and no pretraining. Ablations further show that prematurely discarding complex phase relationships substantially degrades performance, demonstrating their importance for cross-environment Wi-Fi HPE.
comment: Accepted to IEEE RIVF 2026
♻ ☆ Prompt-Induced Score Variance in Zero-Shot Binary Vision-Language Safety Classification
Safety pipelines often block content by thresholding a model's first-token unsafe score. We show that a single prompt's score is not a reliable probability and compare two repairs: mean ensemble and calibration with development labels. Across seven vision-language models and two benchmarks, an input's unsafe probability varies across 15 task-preserving rewordings with a standard deviation of 0.16-0.30 on average; the inputs that vary most are more often misclassified. The 15-prompt mean has lower negative log-likelihood (NLL) than the best single prompt, even one chosen with evaluation labels, on 13 of 14 model-benchmark pairs. Development labels change the picture: jointly selecting and calibrating a single prompt outperforms the similarly calibrated mean for all seven models on held-out data from the development benchmark. Under cross-benchmark evaluation without refitting, however, the advantage reverses, with the calibrated mean outperforming the single prompt on six of seven models. We recommend evaluating first-token scores as a prompt family, using the mean ensemble as the label-free baseline, calibrating one prompt when development labels exist and deployment data match, and calibrating the mean when they may not.
♻ ☆ JRDB-AVR: An Active Visual Reasoning Benchmark for Embodied Agents in Real-World Environments NeurIPS 2026
Zhixi Cai, Fucai Ke, Sukai Huang, Maria Garcia de la Banda, Peter J. Stuckey, Gholamreza Haffari, Hamid Rezatofighi
In complex embodied visual reasoning scenarios, an agent often has only a limited field of view, and the evidence needed to answer a question may be distributed across time, viewpoint, and interacting objects. A model may therefore give a plausible answer without ever observing the relevant object, time, or view that supports it. Current visual reasoning benchmarks largely evaluate passive observations and final answers, overlooking settings that require active reasoning and evidence acquisition. We introduce JRDB-AVR, a benchmark derived from existing real-world JRDB robotics data through a structured question-generation engine that turns this gap into an explicit evaluation: an embodied agentic system receives a visual reasoning question, requests bounded observations by timestamp and viewing angle, and is evaluated on both the final answer and the grounded visual evidence supporting it. The benchmark contains diverse questions over multiple real-world environments involving temporal search, viewpoint selection, and human-oriented compositional reasoning. We also introduce JRDB-AVR-Agent, a reference active reasoning agentic method that maintains an explicit observation-grounded graph-based world model and answers through solving. Experiments reveal a substantial gap between answer accuracy and evidence accuracy in current baselines, showing that current VLMs can produce unsupported correct answers and that active evidence-aware evaluation is necessary for embodied visual reasoning. Code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/ControlNet/JRDB-AVR.
comment: NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ WAVE: Wavelet-Controlled Coarse-to-Fine Guidance for 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, isolating the misleading RGB color and texture cues before any feature is learned so that their admission can be controlled explicitly, 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.
♻ ☆ InfoDiffusion: Representation Learning Using Information Maximizing Diffusion Models ICML 2023
Yingheng Wang, Yair Schiff, Aaron Gokaslan, Weishen Pan, Fei Wang, Christopher De Sa, Volodymyr Kuleshov
While diffusion models excel at generating high-quality samples, their latent variables typically lack semantic meaning and are not suitable for representation learning. Here, we propose InfoDiffusion, an algorithm that augments diffusion models with low-dimensional latent variables that capture high-level factors of variation in the data. InfoDiffusion relies on a learning objective regularized with the mutual information between observed and hidden variables, which is designed to improve latent space quality and to prevent the latents from being ignored by expressive diffusion-based decoders. Empirically, we find that InfoDiffusion learns disentangled and human-interpretable latent representations that are competitive with state-of-the-art generative and contrastive methods, while retaining the high sample quality of diffusion models. Our method enables manipulating the attributes of generated images and has the potential to assist tasks that require exploring a learned latent space to generate quality samples, e.g., generative design.
comment: Published in ICML 2023; Code is available on the project page: https://yingheng-wang.com/infodiffusion-page/
♻ ☆ Adaptation of Foundation Models in Medical Image Analysis: Mechanisms, Evidence, and Deployment Considerations
Foundation models, pretrained on diverse data, objectives, or modalities for reuse across downstream tasks, are increasingly applied to medical image analysis. Their performance depends not only on pretraining but also on how they are adapted to specific tasks, data regimes, and deployment settings. Whereas previous reviews have considered adaptation within broader syntheses, this review focuses specifically on post-pretraining interventions applied to existing FMs. Using a structured narrative review with a systematic, auditable workflow, we identified 719 eligible reports representing 705 independent studies. Of these, 473 provided controlled comparative evidence: 322 formally published studies formed the primary synthesis and 151 preprint-only studies a sensitivity layer. Adaptation was organized into five non-mutually exclusive families: parameter-level, representation-level, objective-level, data-centric, and architectural/sequence-level adaptation, with model use and update regime analyzed separately. Controlled comparisons showed no consistent ranking among frozen, parameter-efficient, partial, or full updating, or across broader adaptation families; outcomes varied by task, data regime, comparator, and evaluation setting. Clinical-readiness evidence remained limited: 173/705 studies (24.5\%) had confirmed independent external validation, 10 (1.4\%) reported calibration or uncertainty evidence, and 97/322 formally published comparative studies (30.1\%) included a qualifying externally validated arm. Overall, FM adaptation is a context-dependent design space rather than a hierarchy of preferred strategies.
comment: Revised following peer review. Published in Artificial Intelligence Review (2026)
♻ ☆ FMC-DETR: Frequency-Decoupled Multi-Domain Coordination for Aerial-View Object Detection
Remote sensing object detection is a critical technology for real-world applications such as natural resource monitoring, traffic management, and UAV-based rescue. Detecting tiny objects in high-resolution aerial imagery remains challenging due to weak visual cues and insufficient global context modeling in complex scenes. Existing methods often suffer from delayed contextual interaction and limited nonlinear reasoning, which restrict their ability to effectively refine shallow representations and ultimately lead to suboptimal performance. To address these challenges, we propose FMC-DETR, a frequency-decoupled fusion framework for aerial-view object detection. First, we propose the Wavelet Kolmogorov-Arnold Transformer (WeKat) backbone, which employs cascaded wavelet transforms to enhance global low-frequency structure perception in shallow features while preserving fine-grained details, and further leverages Kolmogorov-Arnold networks for adaptive nonlinear modeling of multi-scale dependencies. Second, we introduce the Multi-Domain Feature Coordination (MDFC) module, which refines cross-scale fused representations through partial-channel spatial, spectral, and structural coordination, thereby strengthening small-object-related feature responses in cluttered scenes. Finally, we design the Compact Partial Fusion (CPF) module, which performs compact multi-branch aggregation with progressive partial refinement to improve feature diversity and multi-scale interaction while preserving stable information flow and reducing redundant perturbation. Extensive experiments across multiple remote sensing benchmarks demonstrate that FMC-DETR achieves state-of-the-art performance and significantly outperforming the baseline detector. Code is available at https://github.com/bloomingvision/FMC-DETR.
♻ ☆ FlatVPR: Plug-and-play Geo-linear Residual Adapter for Geometric Rectification of Foundation Model Feature Manifolds
This paper proposes ``FlatVPR,'' a novel geometric rectification paradigm that effectively bridges the trade-off between map lightweightness and localization accuracy in visual place recognition (VPR) by enforcing a feature manifold structure where any descriptor between two adjacent anchors $\mathbf{z}_A$ and $\mathbf{z}_B$ can be accurately reconstructed via linear interpolation $\hat{\mathbf{z}}_{pseudo} = (1-t)\mathbf{z}_A + t\mathbf{z}_B$, where $t \in [0,1]$ denotes the relative position. While state-of-the-art foundation models such as DINOv2-ViT-S/14 provide robust semantic features, their latent manifolds exhibit prominent curvature, projecting uniform linear motion in physical space onto highly non-linear trajectories in the feature space, which hinders reliable reconstruction under sparse anchor conditions. To enable the aforementioned interpolation-based reconstruction, we introduce a residual transformation $\hat{\mathbf{z}} = \mathbf{z} + \text{Res}(\mathbf{z})$ to the raw foundation features $\mathbf{z}$, where $\text{Res}(\cdot)$ represents a learnable adapter. Our method explicitly suppresses manifold curvature using a mathematically grounded Pullback Flatness Loss that minimizes the deviation of intermediate features from the linear segment connecting adjacent anchors, thereby minimizing the intrinsic curvature of the manifold. Through this spatial flattening, map construction is formulated within an Expectation-Maximization (EM) framework, decoupled into a continuous M-step for manifold adaptation and a conceptual E-step for optimal anchor selection guidelines. Experiments on the NCLT dataset demonstrate that the application of our adapter leads to significant performance improvements even under extremely sparse anchor conditions with 100m intervals and extreme seasonal changes.
comment: 25 pages, 7 figures, technical report; v3: Added supplementary materials for downstream tasks and included a supplementary roadmap in Section I
♻ ☆ Catalogue-Grounded Multimodal Attribution for Museum Video under Resource and Regulatory Constraints
Museum audiovisual archives are important records of visual culture, yet in-gallery video remains difficult to search because it lacks catalogue-compatible metadata. We propose CaGMulA, catalogue-grounded multimodal attribution for museum video: a locally deployable pipeline that combines video-language models, structured catalogue retrieval, and abstention-aware decision policies. The system summarises visible artworks, generates catalogue-style descriptions, and attributes title and artist only when evidence is sufficient. We evaluate VideoLLaMA2 and Qwen2-VL across four model configurations and four attribution modes on 18 in-gallery videos. Open-ended generation fails under conservative conditions, producing 0\% coverage across models. By contrast, closed-set catalogue retrieval reaches 100\% coverage with 62\% accepted title--artist correctness, while a verifier-gated hybrid mode reduces coverage to 50\% but improves accepted correctness to 78\%. The results show that reliable museum-video attribution is driven less by unrestricted generation than by catalogue grounding, visual retrieval, and selective abstention for curatorial review.
comment: Demo video url: https://jn00767.pages.surrey.ac.uk/catalogue-grounded-multimodal-attribution-for-museum-video/
♻ ☆ STATIC: Surface-normal-guided Two-branch Alignment and Temporal Integration for Consistent Video Depth Estimation
Video depth estimation is essential for applications such as autonomous driving, AR/VR, and robotics. Recent transformer-based single-image monocular depth estimation models perform well on a single image but struggle with depth consistency across video frames. Traditional methods aim to improve temporal consistency using multi-frame temporal modules or explicit priors like optical flow and camera parameters. However, these approaches face issues such as high memory use, reduced performance with dynamic or irregular motion, and a heavy reliance on the accuracy of external motion estimators. We propose STATIC, a novel model that independently learns temporal consistency in geometrically stable and unstable regions using only two adjacent frames. By leveraging intrinsic geometric cues rather than external motion priors, STATIC generates a depth-derived geometry-aware difference mask from surface normals to identify regions with inter-frame geometric variation by measuring directional variance. For geometrically stable regions, the Masked Stable (MS) module enhances temporal consistency by focusing on structurally stable regions. For geometrically unstable regions, the Surface Normal Similarity (SNS) module models inter-frame correspondences and ensures temporal consistency by measuring feature similarities between frames. A final refinement integrates the independently learned stable and unstable features, enabling STATIC to improve consistent depth prediction across consecutive frames. Experiments on KITTI, NYUv2, and Sintel demonstrate strong depth accuracy and temporal consistency, as well as stable performance across the tested frame-rate and camera-motion conditions.
comment: Accepted by Pattern Recognition
♻ ☆ AutoWorld: Learning Multi-Agent Traffic Simulation with Self-Supervised World Models
Simulation with realistic traffic agents is essential for validating autonomous driving systems. Existing data-driven simulators learn agent behavior from higher-level abstractions such as 3D bounding boxes and polylines, inferred by upstream perception pipelines. These lossy abstractions discard sensory context that directly shapes agent behavior, limiting the distributional realism that simulation aims to reproduce. To address this limitation, we propose AutoWorld, a traffic simulation framework that grounds agent behavior in raw sensor observations through a self-supervised world model trained on LiDAR occupancy data. Given world model samples, AutoWorld constructs a coarse-to-fine predictive scene context as input to a multi-agent motion generation model. Furthermore, we designed a motion-aware latent supervision objective that enriches AutoWorld's latent representation of scene dynamics. To better exploit this latent space during inference, AutoWorld employs a cascaded Determinantal Point Process framework to guide diversity-aware sampling across both the world model and motion model. Experiments on nuPlan and Waymo demonstrate that AutoWorld improves generation realism, with larger gains in partially observed scenarios where trajectory abstractions are most limited, reducing collision rates by 36%. AutoWorld also remains physically plausible under planner-controlled ego behavior and supports controllable, diverse safety-critical scenario generation.
♻ ☆ Query-adaptive Recurrent Tokenization
Visual information worth extracting from an image and the token budget it warrants depend on the text query. Yet modern vision and vision-language models largely encode images independently of the query and allocate a fixed visual token budget to every input. We introduce the Query-Adaptive Recurrent Tokenizer (QART), a backbone-agnostic module that makes visual representations both query-steerable and budget-adaptive. QART steers the visual representation toward query-relevant evidence while adapting its token budget to the amount of information required. Its key principle is simple. Additional tokens are allocated until the visual features relevant to the query are represented with sufficient fidelity. Starting from frozen encoder features, QART recurrently constructs a compact representation and uses reconstruction quality over the query-relevant visual support to control token allocation. On Visual7W and VQAv2, QART achieves 81.96% and 76.37% accuracy using only about 29 visual tokens, reducing token counts by 20-25x relative to dense VLM inputs. It further reaches 92.0% P@1 on CORE and 36.3% PR-AUC on PODS, outperforming SteerViT on PODS by 8.4%. Together, these results show that visual representations need not be fixed in either content or capacity and can instead adapt to what each query requires.
♻ ☆ RigidDriveGS: Object-Centric Vehicle Reconstruction from Fixed Multi-Camera Drive-Through Captures WACV 2027
Nitin Kulkarni, Akhil Devarashetti, Charlie Cluss, Livio Forte, Philip Schneider, Chunming Qiao, Alina Vereshchaka
High-fidelity 3D reconstruction of vehicle exteriors improves buyer confidence in online automotive marketplaces, but fixed multi-camera drive-through capture departs from standard Structure-from-Motion (SfM): static cameras observe a moving vehicle amid clutter, rotating wheels, fisheye distortion, and specular reflections. We present RigidDriveGS, an object-centric pipeline combining motion-gated tracking, bifurcated masks that exclude wheels for SfM while optionally retaining them for rendering, mask-guided dense correspondences on raw distorted images, rig-constrained global SfM, and clean object-centric neural rendering with trimap-aware opacity or density supervision and native-alpha white compositing. We evaluate 25 vehicles from 10 dealership installations and six phone-recorded vehicles, each captured from 14 independent handheld positions. Under a staggered per-camera temporal-block holdout, 3DGUT+MCMC achieves 30.42 dB PSNR, 0.90 SSIM, and 0.20 LPIPS, improving PSNR by 7.78 dB over undistorted 3D-GS; independently recorded reference LiDAR scans yield full/body Chamfer-L1 of 0.026/0.013 m and F1@5 cm of 0.703/0.885. These results support clutter-free, object-centric novel-view synthesis without controlled studio infrastructure.
comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, Accepted at IEEE/CVF WACV 2027
♻ ☆ FOCUS: Benchmarking Retinal Model Generalization from Foundation Vision Encoders to Multimodal LLMs NeurIPS 2026
David Restrepo, Chenwei Wu, Luis Filipe Nakayama, Miguel L. Martins, Stergios Christodoulidis, Maria Vakalopoulou, Enzo Ferrante
Progress in AI-based retinal image analysis has accelerated with the adoption of foundation models, yet evaluating their real-world reliability remains challenging. Performance reported on a single dataset does not capture how models behave under dataset shift, across clinical definitions, or for different patient subgroups. This limitation is particularly critical in medical imaging, where robustness, calibration, and fairness are essential for safe deployment. We introduce FOCUS (Foundation Ophthalmic Cross-Dataset Understanding under Shift), a cross-dataset benchmark evaluating retinal fundus models across vision-only encoder models (VM), vision-language dual-encoder models (VLM), and multimodal large language models (MLLM). FOCUS harmonizes binary diabetic retinopathy, referable diabetic retinopathy, and glaucomatous optic neuropathy tasks across ten public datasets spanning diverse geographies, acquisition conditions, and label protocols. The benchmark evaluates models through a unified analysis layer that measures ranking performance, calibration, subgroup disparities, and image-quality robustness. We present a large-scale evaluation covering 532 base configurations and 228 MLLM configurations adapted via LoRA fine-tuning. Results show no model family consistently dominates across tasks and datasets: general VM encoders achieve the strongest average ranking performance, medical MLLMs are competitive but variable, and dual-encoder VLMs benefit substantially from lightweight adaptation. Fine-tuning improves in-domain performance but exhibits heterogeneous transfer to external datasets, particularly in calibration. FOCUS provides a practical framework and public benchmark to assess generalization, reliability, and robustness beyond single-dataset leaderboards.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026, Evaluations & Datasets Track. Interactive benchmark dashboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/dsrestrepo/FOCUS-Retinal-Benchmark
♻ ☆ ManiFusion: Unlocking the High-Throughput Generation via Superposition in Manifold Space
Diffusion models achieve high-quality image generation but remain computationally expensive due to iterative denoising across many timesteps. Existing acceleration methods mainly reduce per-sample latency, but gains along this axis are becoming saturated. We instead explore an orthogonal throughput-oriented direction by processing multiple samples within a single denoising evaluation. To this end, we propose ManiFusion, a backbone-agnostic framework for multi-sample generation through fused-space computation. ManiFusion jointly processes multiple samples by fusing them before the denoising backbone and separating them afterward through unfusion. We provide a geometric perspective on how multiple samples can share a fused representation while retaining the information needed to guide their individual generation trajectories. To better align fusion allocation with denoising stages, ManiFusion uses Trajectory-Fusion Scheduling (TFS), which dynamically adjusts fusion factors throughout sampling. ManiFusion generalizes across diffusion families, including both U-Net and transformer backbones in pixel and latent spaces. We further show that ManiFusion composes with existing acceleration methods and reaches throughput regimes unattainable by prior approaches with minimal quality degradation.
♻ ☆ H-GRPO: Permutation-Invariant Reinforcement Learning for Improving Spatial Grounded Reasoning
Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on visual reasoning tasks, yet a correct final answer does not necessarily imply that the model followed a correct or visually grounded reasoning process. We study how VLMs can be trained to produce explicit intermediate reasoning steps that are both semantically meaningful and grounded in visual evidence. We represent each reasoning step as a structured triplet consisting of a sub-question, sub-answer, and supporting bounding box, enabling the reasoning process to be evaluated along both semantic and spatial dimensions. To optimize this representation, we introduce Hungarian-GRPO (H-GRPO), a reinforcement-learning framework that aligns predicted and reference reasoning steps using permutation-invariant Hungarian matching, avoiding the assumption that valid reasoning steps must follow a fixed ordering.
Experiments show that optimizing grounded reasoning improves both intermediate reasoning quality and answer accuracy, with an H-GRPO variant achieving the strongest overall grounding and decomposition performance. Our analyses show that grounding quality and answer correctness are related but distinct, while counterfactual evidence masking confirms that the localized regions contain information important to the model's predictions. These findings motivate evaluating VLMs beyond answer accuracy and demonstrate the value of explicit, spatially grounded reasoning.
♻ ☆ ReMATF: Recurrent Motion-Adaptive Multi-scale Turbulence Mitigation for Dynamic Scenes
Atmospheric turbulence severely degrades video quality by introducing distortions such as geometric warping, blur, and temporal flickering, posing significant challenges to both visual clarity and temporal consistency. Current state-of-the-art methods are based on 3D architectures and require multi-frame input, but their large computational cost and memory usage limit real-time deployment. Here, we propose ReMATF, a lightweight recurrent framework that restores videos using only two frames at a time while preserving spatial detail and temporal stability. ReMATF combines a multi-scale encoder-decoder with temporal warping and a motion-adaptive temporal fusion module that performs per-pixel fusion between the warped previous output and the current prediction to enhance coherence without enlarging the temporal window. This design reduces flicker, sharpens details, and remains efficient. Experiments on synthetic and real turbulence datasets show consistent improvements in PSNR(+2.83 dB), SSIM(+0.05) and LPIPS(-0.048), along with substantially faster inference, making ReMATF suitable for turbulence mitigation in resource-constrained scenarios.