Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 136
☆ Read It Back: Pretrained MLLMs Are Zero-Shot Reward Models for Text-to-Image Generation
In this paper, we propose SpectraReward, a training-free reward function that turns pretrained MLLMs into off-the-shelf reward models for image-generation reinforcement learning. Instead of asking the MLLM to judge a generated image or answer decomposed verification questions, SpectraReward measures how well the original prompt can be recovered from the generated image through a single image-conditioned, teacher-forced forward pass. We use the average image-conditioned prompt log-likelihood as the reward, directly reusing the MLLM's pretrained image-text alignment ability without preference labels, reward-model fine-tuning. We further introduce Self-SpectraReward, a special case for unified multimodal models where the policy's own understanding branch serves as the reward model for its generation branch, forming a closed-loop self-improving framework without external reward models or external knowledge. Extensive experiments validate SpectraReward through a broad image-generation RL study covering two diffusion models, three RL algorithms, nine reward MLLM backbones from four MLLM families spanning 4B to 235B parameters, and five out-of-distribution text-to-image benchmarks. Results show that both SpectraReward and Self-SpectraReward significantly and consistently improve generation performance and outperform prior MLLM-derived reward training methods. Further analysis reveals that larger reward MLLMs are not always better, while Self-SpectraReward can match or surpass much larger external reward models, suggesting that reward-policy alignment is a key factor for effective image-generation RL. Project Page: https://huangrh99.github.io/SpectraReward/
☆ Latent-Identity Tuning in Text-to-Image Personalization Models
Generating and editing a person's face demands high precision, as even minor modifications can significantly alter a subject's perceived identity. Current personalization and editing methods built on general-purpose text-to-image models, however, often lack the precision required for fine-grained facial edits. We present a method for fine-grained identity tuning in text-to-image personalization models. Unlike standard image editing, which operates on a given image, identity tuning modifies the latent representation of a specific identity, enabling the generation of diverse images that consistently depict the same edited identity. To enable fine-grained latent identity tuning, we explore the latent space of a pre-trained, frozen encoder for text-to-image personalization. Our approach requires no additional training. Instead, it leverages the existing architecture of a frozen encoder to uncover latent semantic directions. This space consists of a set of latent tokens that play distinct roles in capturing different aspects of an identity and often correspond to specific spatial or semantic facial regions. We show that meaningful directions can be identified within this space and within subspaces defined by selected tokens, enabling localized, fine-grained, and semantically coherent edits. We validate our approach through qualitative and quantitative experiments that demonstrate diverse localized facial edits while preserving cross-image identity consistency. Project page at: https://garibida.github.io/IdentityTuning/
comment: Project page at: https://garibida.github.io/IdentityTuning/
☆ Evidence-Backed Video Question Answering
Shijie Wang, Honglu Zhou, Ziyang Wang, Ran Xu, Caiming Xiong, Silvio Savarese, Chen Sun, Juan Carlos Niebles
Current Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) excel in question answering (QA) but largely operate as black boxes, providing textual answers without verifiable visual grounding. Existing explainability efforts rely on textual rationales or sparse bounding boxes, which struggle to capture complex video dynamics such as occlusions and non-rigid deformations. We propose Evidence-Backed Video Question Answering (E-VQA), a novel task requiring models to jointly output a semantic answer and precise spatio-temporal evidence: temporal segments and dense, tracked object segmentation masklets. To support this, we introduce ST-Evidence, the first human-verified benchmark for both discriminative and generative pixel-level grounding. Evaluations of state-of-the-art models reveal a critical decoupling between QA accuracy and true visual perception that scaling alone fails to bridge. To address this, we develop scalable, automated generation pipelines to create ST-Evidence-Instruct, a 160k-scale dataset bridging high-level reasoning with fine-grained grounding. Fine-tuning grounded Video LLMs on this data yields substantial gains over the corresponding size-matched UniPixel baselines (e.g., +27.2 t-mean and +13.8 J&F on a 7B model), establishing a robust baseline for explainable, evidence-backed video understanding. Code and data are available at https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/EVQA.
☆ Beyond the Single Camera: Agentic Multi-View Reasoning in Sports Video Understanding
Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve strong performance on single-view video understanding benchmarks. However, sports videos involve dense occlusion, rapid motion, and complex interactions that are difficult to resolve from a single viewpoint. In practice, sports events are recorded from multiple camera angles, providing complementary evidence used by referees. Yet, no existing benchmark evaluates MLLMs on multi-view sports video understanding. To address this gap, we introduce SportMV-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark built from official match recordings, through a dedicated pipeline combining LLM-based generation, MLLM-based verification, and human filtering to ensure quality and consistency. SportMV-Bench containing 787 multi-view video bundles and 2592 question-answer pairs across three categories: Perception-Aware Recognition (PAR), Rule-aware Event Interpretation (REI), and Adjudicative Decision Reasoning(ADR). Our analysis shows that current MLLMs fail to effectively exploit multi-view information, with the bottlenecks lying in fine-grained visual perception and view selection rather than logical reasoning or domain knowledge. We propose SportMV-Agent, an agentic framework that orchestrates an iterative loop of active view selection, perception tool execution, and evidence-grounded reasoning, achieving a significant 14.46% relative improvement over the strongest MLLM baseline.
☆ LoRA-Based Cascaded Multimodal Fusion for Action Recognition in Medical Training Environments
This paper presents a cascaded Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA)-based multimodal fusion framework for action and activity recognition in healthcare-oriented training environments. The proposed architecture combines parameter-efficient modality-specific adaptation with sequential fusion, enabling modalities to be integrated in stages without retraining previously learned components. Rather than assuming a fixed fusion structure, the framework first integrates more closely related modalities and then incorporates additional heterogeneous modalities, supporting scalable adaptation across datasets with different modality sets.We evaluate the framework on two healthcare-oriented training environment datasets: NurViD and the Nurse Training dataset. Across these datasets, preliminary results suggest that the proposed cascaded fusion strategy improves over individual modality models and provides competitive performance relative to previously reported dataset-specific baselines. Overall, these findings indicate that cascaded LoRA-based fusion is a promising parameter-efficient approach for integrating heterogeneous modalities in medical training action and activity recognition tasks. github: https://github.com/anonymous0-ai/LoRA-Based-Cascaded-Multimodal-Fusion-.git.
☆ HASTE: A Platform for Rapid Post-Disaster Building Damage Assessment
Caleb Robinson, Anthony Ortiz, Simone Fobi Nsutezo, Cameron Birge, Meygha Machado, Marcelo Duarte, Joaquin Rivero Rodriguez, Anthony Cintron Roman, Kevin White, Inbal Becker-Reshef, Juan M. Lavista Ferres
When a large disaster strikes, responders need a map of which buildings are damaged within hours. The models that do well on public benchmarks assume matched before-and-after imagery and a training set drawn from similar past events, and neither is usually available for a new disaster in its first day. We present HASTE (High-speed Assessment and Satellite Tracking for Emergencies), a no-code web platform that lets analysts who are not machine learning engineers produce per-building damage maps from post-disaster satellite imagery. HASTE implements two methods that share one interface. The first requires the user to label polygons over the post-disaster scene, trains a small semantic segmentation model on that single scene, runs it over the whole image, and joins the per-pixel output to existing building footprints. The second embeds every footprint with a pretrained vision model, requires the user to label a handful of buildings, and fits a logistic regression in the browser that scores the rest of the scene in seconds. We describe the platform, both methods, and the engineering that supports them. We also report preliminary experiments on xBD showing that foundation-model embeddings pooled over footprints separate damaged from intact buildings using post-disaster imagery alone, matching a fully supervised ResNet-50 baseline with a twentieth of its labels. HASTE and its predecessors have supported more than thirty real-world disaster responses since 2023, spanning earthquakes, hurricanes, cyclones, floods, wildfires, and tornadoes, delivering results to humanitarian partners within hours to days of imagery becoming available. We close with the directions we think are most promising, including vision-language assessment, active learning, and damage models for roads and other infrastructure. HASTE is open source at https://github.com/microsoft/haste.
☆ Cycle-World: Mitigating Error Accumulation in Long-term Video World Models via Reverse-Prediction Cycle Consistency ECCV 2026
Autoregressive diffusion models have enabled high-quality video generation, yet their sequential nature inherently suffers from error accumulation. In long-horizon video synthesis, minor prediction deviations compound over time, inevitably leading to unconstrained generative drift, structural collapse, and severe visual degradation. To address this, we propose Cycle-World, a novel framework designed for stable and temporally consistent long-video generation. Our approach tackles error drift by enforcing strict temporal reversibility across both the training and inference phases. Theoretically, we demonstrate that forward generative drift can be strictly bottlenecked by a cycle-consistency objective. During training, we integrate an efficient reverse-prediction model to implicitly embed causal constraints into the forward generator, compelling it to produce reversible sequences that tightly adhere to the natural video manifold. At inference time, we repurpose this frozen reverse model as a runtime corrector. Through gradient-based cycle guidance, it iteratively refines the generated latent representations, actively suppressing accumulated errors before they are committed to the historical context. Extensive experiments on the VBench benchmark demonstrate that Cycle-World's dual-phase synergy significantly mitigates error drift, achieving state-of-the-art overall generation quality and long-horizon temporal consistency in 60-second synthesis.
comment: Accepted by ECCV 2026
☆ MicroCharNet: Less is More for License Plate Character Detection
License plate character detection is a crucial component of intelligent transportation systems, where high accuracy and computational efficiency are required for real-time deployment. Although recent deep learning-based methods have substantially improved detection performance, many high-accuracy models rely on large-scale architectures that incur substantial computational overhead, limiting their applicability to resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we propose MicroCharNet, an ultra-lightweight model specifically designed for license plate character detection. The proposed architecture employs a compact backbone composed of C2f blocks, integrated with CoordAtt module to enhance feature extraction while preserving spatial information. A lightweight C3k2-based neck fuses multi-level features, followed by a single-level anchor-free detection head that enables end-to-end prediction. Experiments conducted on the UFPR-ALPR dataset demonstrate that MicroCharNet achieves competitive detection accuracy with only 0.08M parameters and 0.096 GFLOPs, while outperforming several recent YOLO-based baselines. Hardware-level evaluations further confirm its efficiency for real-time deployment on edge devices. These results indicate that carefully designed ultra-lightweight architectures can effectively balance accuracy and efficiency in license plate character detection. The source code is available at https://github.com/chequanghuy/MicroCharNet.
☆ MM-ToolSandBox: A Unified Framework for Evaluating Visual Tool-Calling Agents
We introduce MM-ToolSandBox, a benchmark and evaluation framework for visually grounded tool-calling agents. The framework provides a stateful execution environment spanning 500+ tools across 16 application domains, supporting multi-image, multi-turn tasks where agents must ground progressively arriving visual inputs into executable tool calls while handling realistic conversational phenomena (goal revisions, error corrections, state mutations). An automated scenario generation pipeline produces diverse, visually grounded scenarios through information-flow-guided planning and multi-stage quality filtering, yielding 258 human-verified nominal scenarios and 50 variants targeting interactive UI applications. Evaluating 12 state-of-the-art models, from 4B open-weight to frontier proprietary systems, shows that current models still lack robust visual tool-calling capability: even the best model achieves below 50% success rate. Our failure analysis further reveals that visual precision, not only planning, is a primary bottleneck for capable models: 53% of failures stem from incorrect information extraction from images despite otherwise correct task workflows. A planning-to-precision crossover emerges with scale: smaller models fail at deciding what to do, while larger models fail at perceiving what they see, suggesting fundamentally different research directions for improving models at different capability levels. The framework and the benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/apple/ml-mmtoolsandbox
comment: Benchmark link: https://github.com/apple/ml-mmtoolsandbox
☆ StoryTeller: Training-Free Narrative Grounding for Long-Form Audio Description ECCV
Long-form audio description (AD) requires more than describing visible actions: it must preserve characters, events, relationships, and story context across scenes so that blind and low-vision (BLV) audiences can follow a film. Modern video-language models (VLMs) are effective on short clips, but they often treat each moment independently, producing descriptions that miss who characters are, why events matter, and how the current scene connects to earlier narrative context. We propose StoryTeller, a training-free framework for story-aware long-form AD. Instead of relying only on local visual cues, StoryTeller maintains a verified narrative memory that carries forward story-relevant information across scenes, enabling later descriptions to remain coherent, grounded, and contextually informative. Given only raw video and a movie title, StoryTeller can optionally retrieve public movie metadata to resolve names and story context, while accepting only facts that are supported by the video through semantic filtering and VLM verification. The method requires no subtitles, scripts, AD transcripts, aligned captions, character banks, precomputed face identities, or task-specific fine-tuning. To evaluate whether generated AD preserves narrative information, we introduce StoryAD-QA, a question-answering benchmark that tests whether a language model can answer story-context questions using only the generated descriptions. Experiments on standard AD benchmarks and diverse long-form videos show that StoryTeller consistently improves narrative coherence, factual grounding, and story comprehension over strong baselines in automatic, QA-based, and human evaluations.
comment: Accepted to the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2026
☆ Higher-Order Cell Tracking Transformer
Reconstructing lineages from live-imaging microscopy requires linking cell detections across time, including through cell divisions. A common approach is to construct a candidate graph and associate cell segmentations (nodes) across frames. However, these and other existing methods overlook two structural obstacles in candidate tracking graphs: (i) cell divisions entangle distinct lineage paths in the node embedding space, and (ii) edges sharing a node have near-random label agreement, so the candidate-graph topology carries no useful information for graph neural networks to aggregate. We propose the \textbf{Higher-Order Cell Tracking Transformer} (HOCT), an edge-centric architecture in which candidate cell links attend to one another under a 3D geometric prior, resolving both issues. Evaluated on the Cell Tracking Challenge and a bacteria division benchmark, HOCT achieves state-of-the-art results without deep pre-trained image encoders. Moreover, the proposed approach is easier to fine-tune, quickly reducing tracking errors by 59% with 400 annotations in a human-in-the-loop setting, outperforming LoRA fine-tuning of competing transformer baselines (6.75% improvement).
☆ NeuralActuator: Neural Actuation Modeling for Robot Dynamics and External Force Perception
Zhiyang Dou, John U. Onyemelukwe, Hangxing Zhang, Heng Zhang, Minghao Guo, Yunsheng Tian, Michal Piotr Lipiec, Joshua Jacob, Chao Liu, Peter Yichen Chen, Yuri Ivanov, Wojciech Matusik
Differentiable simulators have advanced policy learning and model-based control, yet actuator dynamics remain an important source of sim-to-real error. This is particularly acute on low-cost platforms, where the linear current-to-torque relation $τ= K_tI$ becomes unreliable during commanded-target tracking because of friction, hysteresis, backlash, and thermal effects. We present NeuralActuator, a neural actuator model that jointly predicts (i) a simulator-equivalent generalized-effort surrogate for trajectory propagation on low-cost servo platforms, (ii) external force with a contact-probability gate for sensorless force perception, and (iii) a motor-condition score for the supervised joint. We also introduce the Neural Actuation Dataset (NAD), collected with a twin-arm teleoperation system that records robot states and actuator telemetry together with external-force labels. The torque-surrogate head is trained through differentiable simulation from pose trajectories without direct generalized-effort labels, while the force, gate, and motor-condition heads receive direct supervision. A Transformer captures temporal dependencies while supporting real-time inference. We evaluate NeuralActuator on a 5-DoF OpenManipulator-X, a 6-DoF SO-101, and a 7-DoF Franka Emika Panda, spanning three actuator families and platforms costing approximately USD 500 to over USD 30,000. The low-cost platforms support dynamics and force evaluation, while the offline Franka experiment provides an additional payload-force-estimation benchmark. Experiments further demonstrate its application for motor condition estimation on OpenManipulator-X and improved behavior-cloning performance when NeuralActuator is used as a pretrained module.
comment: Project Page: https://people.csail.mit.edu/frankzydou/projects/NeuralActuator/index.html Code: https://github.com/Frank-ZY-Dou/Dynamics-Modeling/tree/main/NeuralActuator
☆ GFR-SAM: Training-Free Referring Camouflaged Object Segmentation via Cross-Image Prompting
Referring Camouflaged Object Detection (Ref-COD) requires segmenting hidden targets guided by reference cues. While supervised methods are annotation-heavy and training-free approaches via sparse point-prompting are sensitive to localization errors, we propose GFR-SAM, a robust three-stage training-free framework. GFR-SAM shifts the paradigm from fragile point-matching to a "Generate-Filter-Refine" pipeline. First, we introduce In-Context Exemplar-guided Segmentation, empowering SAM3 with cross-image inference to generate candidate masks via holistic visual exemplars, bypassing its native intra-image constraints. Second, a Region-Global Contrastive Filtering module ranks candidates through DINOv3-based prototypical alignment, effectively suppressing background distractors. Finally, a Geometric-Semantic Refinement module synergizes bounding box and text prompts to recover fine-grained boundaries and enhance instance recall. Evaluated on the R2C7K benchmark, GFR-SAM outperforms existing training-free methods by 8.7\% in weighted F-measure ($F_β^w$) and competes with supervised state-of-the-art counterparts. Ultimately, this work underscores the potential of unlocking SAM3's latent capability for cross-image In-Context prompting, establishing a robust, training-free paradigm that effectively bridges the gap between general-purpose foundation models and specialized, label-intensive perception tasks without the need for task-specific fine-tuning.
☆ SVI360: Spherical Video Interpolation ECCV 2026
This paper addresses the problem of omnidirectional video interpolation, which plays an essential role in applications such as virtual reality and immersive video enhancement. Existing video interpolation methods are not well-suited for spherical videos, as they have difficulty handling severe distortions close to the poles. To address this issue, we propose SVI360, a dual-branch framework that combines the image frame and its rotated orthogonal view to deal with these distortions. The core methodological aspect of the approach is to reinforce equivariance of the flow displacements between the original and orthogonal views to improve intermediate frame prediction. Experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in interpolation quality while maintaining accurate optical flow in four different public benchmarks. Code and pre-trained models are available at: https://icb-vision-ai.github.io/video360_interpolation/
comment: Accepted at ECCV 2026. Code and trained models are available at: https://icb-vision-ai.github.io/video360_interpolation/
☆ Illuminant-Adaptive 3D Lookup Tables for Camera Color Correction
Color correction is a key component of camera image signal processing (ISP) pipelines, encompassing illuminant discounting and colorimetric mapping of device-dependent sensor responses to device-independent color spaces, such as CIE XYZ. Despite extensive research, accurate color correction remains challenging due to the non-linear relationship between camera sensor responses and CIE XYZ color space, as well as to the increasing presence of highly chromatic and spectrally complex LED illuminants. We propose a color correction framework based on illuminant-adaptive three-dimensional lookup tables (LUTs), which we call Color Correction LUT (C$^2$LUT). Our method combines a chromaticity-aware illuminant representation with a non-linear color transformation, enabling accurate correction under illuminants spanning a wide range of chromaticities and spectral complexities. We employ Tucker tensor decomposition to represent the LUTs, ensuring that computational requirements remain sufficiently low for deployment in camera ISPs. In addition, we introduce a large-scale illuminants dataset comprising 1,473 spectral power distributions, with different chromaticities and spectral profiles. Experiments across multiple cameras, illuminants, reflectance datasets, and real captured images demonstrate consistent improvements over existing methods for color correction, reducing CIE $ΔE_{00}$ by up to 20% and angular error by up to 18% while remaining compatible with modern camera hardware constraints. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/claudiom4sir/C2LUT.
☆ ABot-3DWorld 0: A Universal World Model to Explore Any 3D Space
Mingchao Sun, Luyang Tang, Yu Liu, Xu Yan, Zhan Li, Yunwei Zhang, Fei Yu, Zengye Ge, Yumin Liu, Jiacheng Zhang, Yongchang Zhang, Jiawei Zhang, Zhicheng Liu, Zhongxu Sun, Tianjian Ouyang, Wenzheng Chen, Shixing Yang, Nianfei Fan, Guodong Sun, Huan Li, Zheng Zhou, Yongze Li, Yingliang Peng, Mengmeng Du, Yuan Liu, Haozhe Shi, Chunnuo Gong, Chengzhen Yu, Chunxue Jia, Yang Liu, Shiying Zeng, Junnan Lai, Hang Zhang, Ning Guo, Baoquan Chen, Mu Xu, Hongyu Pan
We present ABot-3DWorld 0, a universal multimodal 3D world model that turns text, image, and video inputs into high-fidelity, explorable 3D worlds. At the heart of our framework is a unified Spatial Generative Primitive (SGP), a compact tuple of a high-quality panorama and a spatial point cloud that delivers an efficient description of any 3D space. Multimodal inputs are first lifted into this primitive; a 3D-consistent panoramic video generator then explores the primitive along a planned trajectory; finally, our panoramic video reconstruction engine converts the generated video into a clean, photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) world. This pipeline covers two regimes: rich inputs (multi-view sets, casual video) are lifted into the SGP through a geometry-rigorous recovery that mirrors the observed scene, while a single image or sentence is completed generatively into a creative world. The result is one low-barrier engine for general 3D content creation that further anchors generated worlds to geographic points of interest, enabling map-native spatial exploration at consumer scale. Experiments show that ABot-3DWorld 0 sets the state of the art among open-source methods and demonstrates stronger scene fidelity than Marble under rich multimodal inputs.
comment: Official Page: https://abot-world.amap.com/plaza
☆ Feature-Space Guided Diffusion for Realistic Ultrasound Image Synthesis MICCAI 2026
Conditional diffusion models can generate anatomically plausible medical ultrasound (US) images, but anatomical plausibility alone does not ensure realistic B-mode appearance. Most US pipelines adapt standard generative architectures and condition them on anatomical masks, or use guidance mechanisms that reinforce the same anatomical signal. However, B-mode US images are shaped by acquisition-dependent properties such as speckle texture, tissue contrast, and attenuation. Using a frozen US foundation model, we show that standard conditional diffusion baselines remain separated from real images in representation space. In this work, we propose Feature-Space Candidate Guidance (FSCG), a training-free sampling strategy to reduce this gap. At sampling time, FSCG applies local k-NN feature correction and selects the best of multiple stochastic candidates according to their feature-space energy. In this way, the mask defines the anatomy, while FSCG steers samples toward the real US domain. Across three different datasets, FSCG reduces average FID64 by 56\%, FID192 by 57\%, and nearest-neighbour feature distance by 47\% over standard conditional diffusion sampling, outperforming alternative inference-time guidance baselines. The results suggest that domain-aware feature representations can reveal and reduce realism gaps in medical diffusion synthesis without retraining the generator. Our code is available at https://github.com/marinadominguez/FSCG.
comment: 11 pages, 4 figures. Pre-review manuscript version of a paper accepted at DGM4MICCAI 2026
☆ Event-RGB Adaptive Tracking for Nighttime Highway Perception
Intelligent Transportation Systems deployed on highways predominantly rely on conventional RGB cameras for traffic perception and vehicle tracking. However, highway environments present unique challenges: the absence of artificial lighting infrastructure, combined with high vehicle velocities, results in severely degraded perception performance under low-light conditions. Specifically, nighttime scenarios suffer from motion blur, insufficient exposure, and poor signal-to-noise ratios, which catastrophically impair the reliability of RGB-based sensing systems. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Joint Event-RGB Adaptive Tracking (JEAT) framework. Unlike existing multi-sensor trackers constrained by rigid, hard-coded prioritization, JEAT merges asynchronous event streams and RGB frames into a unified joint data association optimization. By employing an Adaptive Extended Kalman Filter to continuously estimate measurement noise via NIS statistics, the framework dynamically weights and fuses both modalities, optimally harnessing event streams during dark or high-speed motion while leveraging RGB frames under bright or static conditions. Furthermore, given the absence of publicly available datasets tailored for event-based highway perception with diverse environmental conditions, we present SEHN, a large-scale synthetic dataset generated using the CARLA simulator. Our dataset encompasses diverse environmental conditions (daytime, nighttime, nighttime with out artificial lighting) and varying traffic densities, providing synchronized RGB imagery and event streams to facilitate multi-modal fusion research. Our code and datasets will be available at https://github.com/haidongwang96/SEHN.
☆ Motion4Motion: Motion Transfer Across Subjects at Inference SIGGRAPH 2026
This work explores the motion transfer from one video to another, which is crucial in animation for diverse characters. Previously, video motion transfer has been largely explored between human and human-like characters, enabling a lot of applications in digital creation. However, these approaches encounter a main limitation. Specifically, related technical pipelines heavily rely on a predefined human skeleton structure and accordingly require skeleton-conditional model training. On the one hand, these methods are difficult to generalize to diverse characters, such as animals from different species, while preserving their unique motion styles. On the other hand, labeled data in diverse skeletons is limited, which additionally restricts the large-scale training for the task. In this paper, we jump out of the skeleton-based motion transfer framework and propose a training-free motion transfer framework, named Motion4Motion. Motion4Motionmodels the motion flow of the character in a video instead of skeletons, which makes motion transfer across species easier. Extensive experimental results and novel applications show our methods outperform baselines impressively. Project page is available at https://lhchen.top/Motion4Motion.
comment: SIGGRAPH 2026
☆ Backbone-Agnostic Perturbation-Induced Uncertainty Learning for End-to-End Real-World Image Dehazing
Real-world paired image dehazing remains challenging because haze degradation is spatially non-uniform, illumination-dependent, and physically ambiguous even when haze-free references are available. Existing end-to-end restoration networks usually formulate dehazing as a deterministic mapping from a hazy observation to a clean target, leaving the uncertainty hidden in degraded features, haze priors, and cross-domain negative samples insufficiently explored. In this paper, we propose Backbone-Agnostic Perturbation-Induced Uncertainty Learning (BPUL), a plug-and-play uncertainty learning framework for end-to-end real-world image dehazing. BPUL first introduces a Learnable Perturbation-induced Uncertainty Modulator (LPUM) that estimates channel-wise and spatial-wise feature sensitivity through reparameterized stochastic perturbations. It then develops a Prior-informed Uncertainty-guided Reconstruction Module (PURM), which exploits transmission and atmospheric-light priors to reconstruct the hazy observation from the restored result and enforce degradation consistency. Furthermore, we propose a Dual-space Domain-diversified Distribution-aware Contrastive Loss ($D^3$CL) to regularize both clean restoration and hazy reconstruction spaces with real-world and synthetic negatives. Experiments on five real-world paired benchmarks show that BPUL consistently improves multiple representative backbones. Since only LPUM is retained during inference while PURM and $D^3$CL are used as training-time constraints, BPUL brings substantial restoration gains with only marginal additional inference overhead.
☆ Similarity-Guided Curriculum Fine-Tuning of LLMs for Neural Architecture Synthesis
Introduce a MinHash-based similarity scheduling framework that constructs a progressive curriculum over neural architecture code for LLM-based neural architecture search (NAS). Using 128-permutation MinHash signatures over normalised 7-gram source code shingles, we partition the reference pool into similarity bands and present them in increasing architectural heterogeneity, with the best LoRA adapter from each stage merged cumulatively into the backbone. We evaluate the framework on OlympicCoder-7B within the LEMUR benchmark on CIFAR-10 image classification, generating N =15 candidate architectures per epoch across six progressive fine-tuning steps. The curriculum achieves 60% peak success rate at the high-similarity level without post-processing repair. A 2*2 ablation at the most diverse level curriculum versus base model, with versus without partial interface repair reveals that without repair the base model (47% peak SR) substantially outperforms the curriculum model (7% SR), while adding partial repair brings both to 53% SR. This pattern is consistent with merge-level weight drift progressively erasing evaluator-interface priors, and suggests that interface repair and curriculum scheduling target distinct failure modes. We further report a cross-dataset transfer observation on SVHN, where direct base-model generation without curriculum warmup yields 27% peak SR at substantially lower accuracy (60.5%) than the CIFAR-10 equivalent, consistent with the increased synthesis difficulty of the unq-family anchor architecture.
☆ FoundationGeo: Learning Spatial Pixel-Wise Fields for Monocular Metric Geometry ECCV 2026
Muxin Liu, Xiaoyang Lyu, Tianhe Ren, Peng Dai, Xiaoshan Wu, Zhiyue Zhang, Jiaqi Zhang, Jiehong Lin, Shaoshuai Shi, Xiaojuan Qi
We present FoundationGeo, a two-stage framework that explicitly bridges relative and metric prediction via spatial calibration and principled data design. Stage 1 learns a high-fidelity, affine-invariant geometry model by initializing with DINOv3 and training on a curated 10.2M-sample multi-domain corpus with complementary local-detail supervision, yielding sharp boundaries and strong cross-domain generalization. Stage 2 moves beyond global scaling by introducing lightweight pixel-wise calibration fields for metric estimation: a scale field for spatially varying metric alignment and a ray-direction correction field that mitigates directional bias in point-map geometry, together producing metrically consistent 3D point maps. Beyond model design, we identify camera intrinsic coverage, especially focal length distribution mismatch between training and test data, as a key bottleneck for zero-shot metric generalization: performance drops sharply when test intrinsics fall outside the training distribution. To address this, we synthesize additional training data across diverse focal lengths using a Blender-based data engine, repairing under-covered focal regimes and improving robustness under intrinsic shift. Extensive zero-shot evaluations across seven benchmarks show that FoundationGeo significantly strengthens cross-domain robustness, staying near the top across diverse domains while avoiding the sharp cross-domain performance drops observed in other methods. This consistency translates into the best overall performance, surpassing heavier baselines by over 5.2% on average.
comment: 28 pages, 8 figures. Accepted to ECCV 2026. Muxin Liu and Xiaoyang Lyu contributed equally. Shaoshuai Shi and Xiaojuan Qi are corresponding authors. Project page: https://mx-liu6.github.io/FoundationGeo-web/
☆ GB-SVFBP: Gaussian-Based Shift-Variant FBP neural network
This paper proposes a Gaussian-Based Shift-Variant filtered backprojection (FBP) neural network, which is designed for the efficient reconstruction of non-circular trajectory cone beam computed tomography. The traditional differentiable shift-variant FBP model consists of a filtering component and a backprojection process. The filtering component includes operations such as weightings, differentiations, a 2D Radon transform, and a 2D backprojection. The proposed methods build on this framework by introducing a trainable 2D Gaussian model to represent the trajectory-related part in the filtering process, achieving a substantial reduction in the number of trainable parameters. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model reduces the parameter count by 99%, while only sacrificing a slight amount of reconstruction quality. Furthermore, the training time for each trajectory is reduced to one-fourth of the original, significantly accelerating convergence. These enhancements demonstrate a considerable augmentation in the model's practicality and effectiveness, making it a valuable asset for real-world applications.
comment: Accepted for poster presentation at the 18th International Meeting on Fully Three-Dimensional Image Reconstruction in Radiology and Nuclear Medicine (Fully3D 2025), Shanghai, China, May 27-30, 2025
☆ Actor as Its Own Critic: Unifying Region Understanding and Localization via CycleGRPO ECCV 2026
This paper introduces Actor as Its Own Critic, a unified reinforcement learning framework, Cycle Group Relative Policy Optimization (CycleGRPO), that jointly optimizes region understanding and localization for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Unlike existing separate pipelines, we leverage the inherent duality between the two tasks to construct a self-evaluating reinforcement learning paradigm: "region $\to$ text $\to$ region''. Specifically, a single MLLM first acts as the actor to generate region captions, then immediately transitions to a critic to ground its generated text back in the spatial domain. Therefore, CycleGRPO requires only region inputs, e.g., masks or bounding boxes, entirely bypassing the need for textual ground truths. A quality-aware token-level cycle-consistency reward is employed to assess the semantic discriminability of text captions via their physical localization accuracy. Empirically, built upon SAMTok, our CycleGRPO framework successfully bootstraps both capabilities simultaneously. Without any task-specific fine-tuning, the framework yields consistent performance gains across a wide range of benchmarks, including region captioning, region VQA, grounded dialogue, and referring segmentation. Overall, CycleGRPO offers a straightforward and scalable way to advance pixel-level capabilities in MLLMs. Code and models are released at https://github.com/devinxzhang/CycleGRPO.
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026
☆ DiffEEG: A Self-Supervised Denoising Diffusion Model for Learning EEG Generic Representations
Deep learning for EEG-based seizure detection faces critical challenges: severe annotation scarcity and extreme class imbalance, where ictal events comprise less than 10\% of clinical recordings. We present DiffEEG, a 9.6M-parameter self-supervised foundation model that addresses both limitations through denoising diffusion pre-training and reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning. Pre-trained on 1.3M unlabeled segments from the Temple University Hospital Seizure Corpus (TUHSZ), DiffEEG learns generic neural representations via a 1D U-Net with multi-head self-attention. For downstream adaptation, a reinforced decision layer employs policy gradient optimization to directly maximize F1-score, prioritizing sensitivity to rare seizure events over overall accuracy. Under strict patient-wise evaluation (279 patients, Leave-One-Fold-Out), DiffEEG achieves 61\% accuracy and 59\% F1 for 4-class seizure subtyping, and 81\% accuracy with 85\% weighted F1 for binary detection, maintaining clinically viable seizure recall (59\%) despite extreme imbalance (6.7\% prevalence). Segment-level evaluation establishes an upper bound of 97.6\% accuracy, confirming strong architectural capacity. DiffEEG demonstrates that diffusion-based pre-training combined with metric-aware reinforcement learning enables clinically deployable seizure monitoring with minimal labeled data requirements.
comment: 19 pages, 6 figures
☆ MonkeyOCRv2: A Visual-Text Foundation Model for Document AI
Yuliang Liu, Zhang Li, Ziyang Zhang, Shuo Zhang, Qiang Liu, Jiajun Song, Zidun Guo, Xinhan Wang, Handong Zheng, Yang Liu, Dongliang Luo, Zhiyin Ma, Jiarui Zhang, Xiang Bai
Mainstream visual encoders are pretrained on natural images and cannot be effectively applied to document images without document-oriented adaptation, as dense text and fine-grained character strokes demand character-level visual perception. We present MonkeyOCRv2, a visual-text pretrained model for document AI. First, we construct MonkeyDoc v2, to our knowledge the largest document-image pretraining corpus, comprising 113 million images spanning 17 languages. Second, we propose a pretraining strategy that jointly learns image-to-text generation and pixel-level document reconstruction: the former aligns visual representations with textual content, while the latter preserves character strokes and layout details. Extensive experiments are conducted on five representative document analysis tasks, including text recognition, formula recognition, text detection, document tampering detection, and overlapping text segmentation. Replacing the original encoders with MonkeyOCRv2 consistently improves performance across all five tasks. Finally, we validate its effectiveness as the vision encoder of multimodal large language models on the more challenging tasks of document parsing and document understanding. Kept frozen and paired with a lightweight language model, it yields a 0.7B document parsing model that sets a new open-source state-of-the-art on MDPBench, a recent benchmark spanning digital-born and photographed documents across 17 languages, surpassing the previous best 3B dots.mocr by 2.8% absolute with a vision encoder roughly 11$\times$ smaller. The frozen encoder also powers a document understanding model that outperforms counterparts built on CLIP, DINO, and SAM across eight benchmarks under identical training settings. These results suggest that document-oriented visual pretraining can serve as a foundation for document intelligence in its own right.
☆ Technical Report on the CVPR 2026@AdvML Workshop Challenge
Tianyuan Zhang, Zonglei Jing, Jiangfan Liu, Ligong Zhang, Ke Ma, Chengzhi Sun, Xiaohai Xu, Zhirui Zhang, Qianqian Xu, Qingming Huang, Hanyu Fang, Junhua Liu, Zheng Wang, Xiaoliang Liu, Yuanbo Li, Shuai Gui, Bin Wang, Menghe Zheng, Jing Nie, Hanyang Meng, Zeyang Zhang, Xiang Zhang, Yongxuan Zhu, Rui Ding, Hainan Li, Yongkang Zhang, Zhilei Zhu, Xianglong Kong, Jin Hu, Zonghao Ying, Yisong Xiao, Lei Chen, Haotong Qin, Jiakai Wang, Aishan Liu, Ruikai Li, Julia Karbing, Yinpeng Dong, Zhenfei Yin, Shao Jing, Xia Hu, Jingyi Xu, Juntao Dai, Xinyun Chen, Vishal M. Patel, Xianglong Liu, Dawn Song, Alan Yuille, Philip H. S. Torr, Dacheng Tao
Vision-language agents (VLAs) are increasingly used to interpret complex driving scenes and support safety-critical reasoning. This report presents the CVPR 2026@AdvML Workshop Challenge on adversarial multimodal attacks against autonomous-driving VLAs. Built on DriveLM-style multi-view visual question answering, the challenge represents each scene with six synchronized camera images and a structured collection of driving-related question-answer pairs. Participants generate adversarial images and suffix-only textual perturbations that induce model responses to deviate from reference answers while preserving image fidelity and limiting textual cost. The competition comprises two phases, with Phase II adding a hidden black-box model to assess transferability. We describe the task design, submission rules, evaluation protocol, and leaderboard results, and then examine five leading submissions for which technical reports were available. Across these reports, several recurring patterns emerge: image-side attacks are favored by the suffix penalty; scene-level, multi-view optimization is more effective than treating views in isolation; QA types and graph structure provide useful priors for allocating attack budget; feature-space objectives can improve black-box transfer; and typographic content embedded in camera images exposes a persistent vulnerability in driving VLAs. These findings provide a practical reference for future robustness evaluation and defense design in multimodal autonomous-driving systems.
☆ Single-Teacher View Augmentation: Enhancing Knowledge Distillation with Student-Guided Perturbations
Knowledge distillation (KD) typically relies on the fixed perspective of a single teacher, limiting the diversity of supervisory signals. While multi-teacher distillation addresses this by aggregating knowledge from multiple models, it incurs prohibitive computational and storage costs. To balance efficiency and diversity, recent research has focused on generating virtual views from a single teacher. However, existing methods face a trade-off: random perturbation approaches offer efficiency but lack controlled diversity, while structured augmentation methods require multi-stage training and incur linear parameter growth. We observe that this trade-off stems from a common design choice: using the teacher's strong but static features to generate views. Instead, we propose Shift-Augmented Knowledge Distillation (SAKD), a simple yet effective framework that leverages the student's evolving features as a dynamic condition for perturbation generation. This shift in perspective enables single-stage training while producing adaptive, diverse views through a parameter-free cyclic shift. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet demonstrate that SAKD consistently outperforms random perturbation methods and achieves accuracy on par with two-stage approaches, while using significantly fewer parameters and eliminating pre-training requirements.
☆ Training-Free Off-Screen Player Imputation for Broadcast-Based Spatial Football Analytics
Spatial football metrics such as pitch control assume access to the positions of all 22 players, yet the most widely available source of positional data -- the broadcast main camera -- shows only 10-16 of them at any moment. We quantify the resulting distortion with an open, reproducible benchmark: a simulated broadcast viewport applied to open full-pitch tracking data (Metrica Sports; three matches, one held out from method development). Ignoring off-screen players -- the visible-only baseline implied whenever a video-based game-state-reconstruction (GSR) pipeline adds no imputation layer -- inflates hidden-zone pitch-control error to 25.1-26.9 percentage points and a mean absolute control-share error of 11.1-13.4 points across the three matches. We then evaluate a ladder of training-free, online imputation baselines that use only observations from the match being analysed. The best overall on these decision-relevant metrics, role-anchored centroid voting (each visible player votes for the full-team centroid by subtracting its running role offset, attenuating the viewport-induced subset bias), roughly halves hidden-zone error (to 12.2-13.8 points) and cuts control-share error to 28-48% of the ignore policy at every viewport width from 36 m to 60 m in all three matches. For occlusions <=9.6 s -- the regime of the closest learned prior work -- it reaches binwise median position errors of 3.3-8.9 m; but 50-57% of hidden-player observations lie beyond that regime. Integrated end-to-end into a broadcast-video GSR pipeline, imputation moves a downstream possession-quality score (Space-Creation Index) by 15.6 and 17.2 points on two real World Cup broadcast windows, flipping the verdict class in one.
comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables. Code and data: https://github.com/nowayfootball/offscreen-impute
☆ Adaptive Routing for Efficient Diffusion Transformer-Based PNI Prediction
Youngung Han, Dohyun Kweon, Kyeonghun Kim, Hyunsu Go, Jina Jeong, Suah Park, Induk Um, Junga Kim, Anna Jung, Yului Jeong, Sungha Park, Jinyong Jun, Pa Hong, Woo Kyoung Jeong, Won Jae Lee, Ken Ying-Kai Liao, Hyuk-Jae Lee, Nam-Joon Kim
Perineural invasion (PNI) is a critical prognostic factor in cholangiocarcinoma. However, its preoperative prediction from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) remains challenging due to subtle imaging features that extend beyond tumor boundaries into surrounding regions. Conventional convolutional neural networks are limited in capturing long-range spatial dependencies. Transformer-based architectures improve global modeling of volumetric MRI by aggregating spatially distributed contextual cues, yet capturing subtle and noise-sensitive patterns in peritumoral regions remains challenging. Diffusion-based classifiers offer an alternative formulation by leveraging denoising-based class scoring to better capture such subtle patterns. However, these approaches introduce substantial computational overhead due to the combination of transformer-based modeling and iterative denoising processes. To address these challenges, we formulate PNI prediction as a diffusion-based classification problem and implement the denoising network using a transformer-based representation. To improve computational efficiency, we introduce adaptive routing across attention heads, spatial tokens, and MLP width. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves an AUC of 0.731 with 257.57 GFLOPs.
☆ Parse, Search, and Confirmation: Training-Free Aerial Vision-and-Dialog Navigation with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning and Structured Spatial Memory CVPR 2026
Yu Qi, Hongyu Li, Shaofei Huang, Tianrui Hui, Yaxiong Wang, Lechao Cheng, Zhun Zhong, Si Liu, Meng Wang
In this paper, we tackle the Aerial Vision-and-Dialog Navigation (AVDN) task in the training-free setting for resource-efficient high-altitude UAV navigation.Naively applying MLLMs leads to unreliable navigation due to weak directional grounding and the lack of explicit spatial memory.To address these issues, we propose PSC-AVDN, a training-free framework that tightly couples a three-stage Parsing-Search-Confirmation reasoning pipeline with a Structured Spatial Memory (SSM).The parsing stage uses an LLM to convert ambiguous dialogue instructions into stable geometric directional and destination cues.A Search Chain-of-Thought (S-CoT) then performs stepwise target exploration under high-altitude observations, and a Confirmation Chain-of-Thought (C-CoT) conducts fine-grained verification around candidate regions to resolve visual ambiguity.Meanwhile, SSM integrates three complementary sources of spatial cues, including multi-scale visual observation, spatial visual memory, and structured geometric memory to provide global spatial context and long-horizon consistency.Extensive experiments on ANDH and ANDH-Full show that PSC-AVDN establishes new state-of-the-art performance in the training-free setting, matching or surpassing several finetuned methods.Code will be publicly available at: https://github.com/QY6616/PSC-AVDN
comment: 10 pages, 4 figures. Accepted to CVPR 2026
☆ Vinci2: Providing Proactive Assistance in Continuous Egocentric Videos ECCV 2026
Gong Sitong, Tianyu Yan, Caixin Kang, Bo Zheng, Xiang Ruan, Huchuan Lu, Kaipeng Zhang, Yoichi Sato, Yifei Huang
When should an intelligent assistant speak up without being asked? Continuous egocentric video offers rich, evolving context that enables a new form of assistance: one that is proactive rather than merely reactive. Yet existing approaches either wait passively for user queries or treat every detected event as requiring a response, without considering the user's history, current activity, or whether assistance would actually be welcome. We reframe proactive assistance as a context-dependent decision problem: the agent must not only perceive what is happening, but reason over accumulated temporal context to determine when and whether to intervene. To this end, we present Vinci2, a proactive egocentric assistance system that advances the on-device assistant Vinci from reactive response toward proactivity. On the evaluation side, we present EgoServe, the first large-scale benchmark for proactive assistance in continuous egocentric video. EgoServe comprises over 3,000 service instances organized along 4 temporal memory horizons, ranging from immediate safety alerts to long-term habit coaching, across 10 service categories. On the modeling side, we propose EgoMemo, a training-free, memory-augmented agent that maintains three complementary memory representations: multi-scale temporal summaries, a semantic knowledge graph, and visual embedding archives. At each timestep, EgoMemo performs retrieval-augmented reasoning to determine whether assistance is warranted and, if so, produces contextually grounded responses. Experiments demonstrate that EgoMemo establishes strong baselines on EgoServe while remaining competitive on existing egocentric benchmarks. Our benchmark and code are publicly available at \href{https://sitonggong.github.io/EgoServe-page/}{Vinci2}.
comment: Accepted by ECCV 2026
☆ CFR-Net:Collaborative Feature Refnement Network for Medical Image Anomaly Detection
Zihan Nie, Muhao Xu, Wei Feng, Yuan Cui, Hua Wei, Sijie Niu, Yi Wan, Xunbin Wei, Weiye Song, Zongyuan Ge
Medical image anomaly detection remains challenging because networks pretrained on natural images often exhibit limited adaptability to medical images, where abnormal patterns appear as fine-grained local shifts, multi-scale contextual mismatches, and orientation-sensitive structural deviations. To address this, we propose the Collaborative Feature Refinement Network (CFR-Net), which combines shared teacher-student feature refinement before decoding with cross-space consistency after decoding. CFR-Net refines frozen teacher features and trainable student features using a Multi-Path Feature Refinement Module (MPFRM) with shared parameters, imposing common multi-path refinement rules on generic visual references and representations adapted to the medical domain, thereby mitigating domain discrepancy while modeling local, multi-scale, and orientation-sensitive feature characteristics. A variance-sensitive objective and dynamic ``homework set'' reorganization further support layer-adaptive consistency learning. Experiments on medical benchmarks show that CFR-Net achieves competitive anomaly classification and strong anomaly localization performance when trained on normal data.
☆ HyperGS: Fast and Generalizable Gaussian Video Representation
Gaussian Splatting has emerged as an effective representation for video, but existing methods rely on per-video optimization. This leads to slow encoding and limits generalization across videos. To amortize this optimization, we propose HyperGS, a feedforward, optimization-free approach that directly predicts Gaussian representations from any video in a single forward pass, speeding up encoding and decoding by orders of magnitude while generalizing to out-of-distribution videos at higher resolutions. In HyperGS, we design a factorized spatiotemporal Transformer to extract tokens from video, and a learnable query-based Transformer to obtain 8-parameter Gaussian representations for each video frame. We find that naively predicting Gaussians across diverse videos induces a needle-like degeneration that collapses training, and address this with a rank-based geometric regularizer whose strength adapts dynamically to stabilize optimization. HyperGS achieves encoding at $10^4$--$10^5\times$ the speed of per-video Gaussian optimization at matched reconstruction quality while generalizing zero-shot to $720p$ video, enabling higher-resolution rendering without re-encoding. HyperGS improves PSNR by +2.9--3.1 dB over the prior video encoders on K400, SSv2, and UCF101 at a smaller video representation size. By predicting explicit 2D Gaussians in a single forward pass, HyperGS combines the fast, flexible rendering of Gaussian Splatting with the speed and generalization of feedforward prediction, advancing Gaussians as a practical direction for fast and generalizable video representation.
☆ LightMem-Ego: Your AI Memory for Everyday Life
Yijun Chen, Boyi Xiao, Yixian Zhao, Haoting Xia, Buqiang Xu, Jizhan Fang, Yanya Li, Yaqi Zheng, Xuehai Wang, Zirui Xue, Liuxin Zhang, Hui Li, Ningyu Zhang
Personal AI assistants on mobile and wearable devices continuously perceive users' daily lives through visual and audio streams. However, answering queries about past experiences requires lightweight multimodal memory that can continuously accumulate, organize, and retrieve long-term experiences, which remains challenging. To address this challenge, we present LightMem-Ego, a lightweight streaming multimodal memory system for everyday-life assistance. The system continuously captures egocentric visual and audio streams, aligns them on a shared timeline, and organizes them into a hierarchical memory consisting of current, short-term, and long-term memory. Given a user query, LightMem-Ego dynamically routes retrieval to the appropriate memory level and generates answers grounded in multimodal evidence. The demonstration can be deployed on smartphones and AI glasses, supporting object finding, conversation recall, life summarization, routine discovery, and personalized assistance. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/LightMem-Ego.
comment: Ongoing work
☆ Towards Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Embedded Hardware via Multi-Dimensional Pruning IEEE
Hao Kong, Di Liu, Xiangzhong Luo, Shuo Huai, Ravi Subramaniam, Christian Makaya, Qian Lin, Weichen Liu
In this paper, we propose TECO, a multi-dimensional pruning framework to collaboratively prune the three dimensions (depth, width, and resolution) of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for better execution efficiency on embedded hardware. In TECO, we first introduce a two-stage importance evaluation framework, which efficiently and comprehensively evaluates each pruning unit according to both the local importance inside each dimension and the global importance across different dimensions. Based on the evaluation framework, we present a heuristic pruning algorithm to progressively prune the three dimensions of CNNs towards the optimal trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Experiments on multiple benchmarks validate the advantages of TECO over existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/ntuliuteam/Teco.
comment: Author's accepted version. Published in Proceedings of the 60th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC 2023)
☆ Direct Image-to-Modern Vietnamese Translation of Han-Nom Manuscripts via Multimodal RLHF Preference Alignment
Translating Han-Nom manuscripts into modern Vietnamese is challenging because historical pages are often degraded, the script contains rare logographic characters, and parallel supervision is limited. We propose a multimodal RLHF preference-alignment framework that conditions Vietnamese generation on manuscript images and aligned Han-Nom source text. The model combines four streams: CLIP ViT-L/14@336 for visual features, bert-base-chinese for Han-Nom representations, vinai/phobert-base for Vietnamese representations, and T5-small encoder states. Modality-specific projections and a fusion block compress the resulting 2,048-dimensional concatenation into a shared 512-dimensional representation. Starting from the same supervised fine-tuned policy, we compare PPO, DPO, and KTO under matched work-level macro-averaged evaluation. DPO achieves the best BLEU-4, ROUGE-L, BERTScore, semantic similarity, CER, WER, and token accuracy, whereas PPO obtains the highest precision, recall, and F1. KTO remains competitive through its desirable-undesirable utility objective. All preference-aligned policies improve the BLEU-4 and semantic-similarity scores available for the SFT baseline. These results indicate that multimodal preference optimization complements supervised learning by improving lexical and semantic quality in low-resource historical translation.
comment: Accepted Paper at 2026 International Conference on Multimedia Analysis and Pattern Recognition (MAPR)
☆ Video Transformer for Remote Identity Document Hologram Detection
Remote identity authentification using Identification Documents has been a major challenge for several years. DeepFakes advent and the development of AI-guided tools helps fraudsters creating counterfeit ID Documents. Ensuring the authenticity of ID Documents has become a real clue in the seurization of remote authentification. This need is all the more pressing given the increasing digitization of administrative and transactional processes. To ensure widespread accessibility, the system should rely solely on video captured via mobile devices. In this specific context, confirming the authenticity of ID is a real challenge as many security features needs specific device like infrared sensor for instance. Among underutilized but promising security features, holographic printings hold a special place. Difficult to counterfeit, they produce distinctive visual effects according enlightment, making them both detectable in a video captured by a smartphone camera and difficult to imitate. In this paper, we propose a Remote Identity Document Verification System (RIDVS) and an approach based on a video transformer for detecting holograms in simple videos captured by smartphones. Our system is designed for a smartphone-based capture process, followed by a server-side verification. The hologram detection method builds on a robust model previously validated in a related research domain. We demonstrate that it outperforms existing SotA methods, achieving near-perfect accuracy even when trained on medium- to small-sized datasets. In particular, we report improvements of +26.86\% in Recall and +17.93\% in accuracy over the best MIDV-Holo baseline. This study includes several experiments that evaluate the model adaptation to frugality, both for training samples and computational resources.
comment: Accepted to SMC2026 conference, 6 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables
☆ Uncertainty Quantification for EO Regression Tasks: Building Height, Tree Canopy Height and Above-ground Biomass Estimation
Earth Observation regression tasks such as building height, canopy height, and above-ground biomass estimation underpin critical applications in urban planning, forest monitoring, and climate policy, where both accuracy and reliability are critical. Yet most deep learning models yield only deterministic predictions, providing no indication of per-pixel reliability. These regression tasks are inherently challenging due to heterogeneous land surfaces, skewed target distributions, sensor noise, and signal saturation at high target values, making uncertainty (UC) estimation essential for reliable inference. We address this gap by modeling aleatoric uncertainty using year-long Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 MSI time series, proposing two complementary approaches: (i) Gaussian UC, which jointly predicts mean and standard deviation under a Gaussian assumption, and (ii) Quantile UC, which estimates the 10th, 50th, and 90th quantiles to capture asymmetric and heteroscedastic error distributions. Both models are evaluated on three representative EO regression tasks at 10 m spatial resolution. Results show that both approaches match or surpass deterministic benchmarks and existing global products, while delivering well-calibrated, interpretable, and operationally useful confidence estimates. Notably, both models outperform the current 10 m state-of-the-art uncertainty-aware model for canopy height estimation. Our implementation will be available at: https://github.com/RituYadav92/EO-Regression-Uncertainty-Estimation
☆ Diffusion MRI preprocessing affects ADC estimation and automatic PI-RADS v2.1 classification in bi-parametric prostate MRI
Christos Kanakis, Mathias Perslev, Tim Schakel, Silvia Ingala, Akshay Pai, Dennis Klomp, Chantal M. W. Tax
Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is acquired as part of bi-parametric prostate MRI, but suffers from artifacts that degrade downstream quantitative and diagnostic performance. While DWI preprocessing is standard in brain imaging, its adoption in prostate imaging remains limited and lacks standardized pipelines. This study investigated the effect of different DWI preprocessing strategies on apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) estimation and automatic Prostate Imaging Reporting and Data System (PI-RADS) classification. 268 cases were derived from the fastMRI prostate cohort by sequentially applying denoising, Gibbs-ringing correction, and diffeomorphic registration for susceptibility distortion correction. ADC maps were compared using linear least squares (LLS) and iteratively-weighted LLS (IWLLS). A 3-class DenseNet classifier was trained to predict PI-RADS scores from multi-channel MRI inputs. ADC analysis revealed statistically significant differences across preprocessing pipelines, with LLS and IWLLS producing numerically equivalent maps. Linear relationships between ADC values were preserved across most datasets (PCC ~0.99), while distortion correction realigned DWI to T2w anatomy and altered ADC values accordingly (PCC ~0.90). Classification showed the best AUROC and sensitivity for high-risk PI-RADS classes in the fully processed dataset. False-negative analysis revealed this dataset produced the least overconfident incorrect predictions on high-risk classes, which is a desirable property for clinical triage. DWI preprocessing, particularly distortion correction, enhances both ADC map quality and the predictive power of deep learning models for PI-RADS classification, supporting the need for optimized preprocessing pipelines in prostate MRI.
comment: 19 pages, 10 figures, ISMRM Diffusion workshop 2025, ESMRMB 2025
☆ Self-supervised training for high-resolution close-range multispectral remote sensing imagery
Although self-supervised learning (SSL) offers a promising way to reduce annotation effort in close-range remote sensing, its effectiveness for high-resolution multispectral unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery remains underexplored due to limited data. This study evaluated SSL pretraining for precision agriculture using cm-scale multispectral drone imagery collected across multiple sensors, years, and regions. Transformer-based encoders were pretrained with Momentum Contrast v3 (MoCo-v3) and Masked Autoencoders on a harmonized dataset combining msuav500K with newly collected multi-year UAV imagery from agricultural fields in Finland. Pretraining used four spectral bands (Green, Red, Red-Edge, Near-Infrared) for cross-sensor compatibility. The models were evaluated on crop-weed semantic segmentation using the WeedMap dataset with 5--100% training data. The following two subsets served as downstream tasks: Task A (Germany, RedEdge-M), where all pretrained models were compared under partial and full fine-tuning, and Task B (Switzerland, Sequoia), where the best encoder from Task A was assessed. Our Swin Transformer pretrained with MoCo-v3 achieved the strongest performance on both tasks, surpassing the Swin Transformer model of Doornbos et al. pretrained on a pre-release of msuav500K. Our pretrained Swin Transformer further demonstrated cross-sensor and cross-region generalization. We additionally provide a public multi-year multispectral UAV dataset from Finland to support future research.
☆ Efficient Tuning Before Low-Bit Post-Training Quantization for Stochastic Gradient Descent-optimized Models IEEE
Post-training quantization (PTQ) compresses deep neural networks for deployment under limited memory and computational budgets. However, low-bit (i.e., 2-bit or 4-bit) PTQ often suffers from substantial performance degradation. Most existing PTQ methods operate on an unconstrained full-precision (FP) model and primarily address quantization errors through post-hoc reconstruction. We argue that low-bit PTQ accuracy is limited not only by post-quantization error minimization, but also by the quantization-error tolerance of a FP model itself. In this paper, we propose Efficient Tuning Before Quantization (ETBQ), a pre-conditioning tuning stage for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD)-optimized models before PTQ. During tuning, the FP model is optimized under perturbations sampled from the error distributions of weight and activation quantization, guiding the model toward a loss-landscape region that is less sensitive to the subsequent PTQ. Unlike QAT, ETBQ does not train a fake-quantized deployment model, which is computationally and memory intensive. Instead, ETBQ outputs a FP model that can be used by any PTQ backend. Experiments on CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, ImageNet, and Cityscapes provide consistent evidence that ETBQ improves low-bit PTQ across diverse tasks. Under W2A4 settings, e.g., ETBQ improves over naive PTQ by 2.14\% top-1 accuracy on Tiny-ImageNet and by 5.80\% mIoU on Cityscapes. Code is available at https://github.com/xpxpxp2001xpxpxp/ETBQ.
comment: 12 pages, 10 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS). Code available at https://github.com/xpxpxp2001xpxpxp/ETBQ
☆ Benchmarking Edge Inference Strategies for Deep Learning Models in Industrial Machine Vision IEEE
Edge deployment is often the preferred solution for industrial machine vision systems when low latency, data security, or limited connectivity are critical requirements. Several frameworks are available to optimise inference on edge devices; however, relatively few studies have systematically compared their inference-time performance under industrial deployment conditions.
In this work, we present a comparative study of four widely used approaches for machine vision inference in industrial settings: plain PyTorch, ONNX Runtime, OpenVINO, and TensorRT. The evaluation focuses on inference time, covers several CPU- and GPU-based hardware platforms, and includes both conventional convolutional neural networks and a transformer-based vision model. For the hardware platforms and models evaluated, the results show that OpenVINO achieves the lowest inference time on CPUs, while TensorRT achieves the lowest inference time on GPUs. However, TensorRT does not outperform plain PyTorch for the transformer-based model considered in this study.
comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, accepted at IEEE COINS 2026. Preprint version; camera-ready version to appear in the conference proceedings
☆ Longitudinal Multi-View Breast Cancer Risk Prediction MICCAI 2026
Solveig Thrun, Zijun Sun, Suaiba A. Salahuddin, Kristoffer Wickstrøm, Elisabeth Wetzer, Stine Hansen, Robert Jenssen, Michael Kampffmeyer
Accurate breast cancer risk prediction from screening mammography is critical for enabling personalized screening intervals and early detection. Recent deep learning methods have shown the value of longitudinal data and explicit temporal alignment. However, existing approaches either perform explicit alignment using a single mammographic view or model multiple views without explicit longitudinal alignment, limiting their ability to exploit the complementary spatial-temporal information used in clinical practice. To address this gap, we propose LMV-Net, a longitudinal multi-view breast cancer risk prediction model that jointly analyzes anatomically complementary CC and MLO views within an explicitly aligned longitudinal framework. We evaluate our approach on the public EMBED and CSAW-CC datasets, comparing it to state-of-the-art breast cancer risk prediction methods. Our model consistently outperforms existing approaches in overall risk prediction performance and across different breast density and cancer subgroups. Importantly, these improvements highlight the potential of longitudinal multi-view modeling to enhance risk stratification, paving the way for future work on personalized screening, earlier identification of high-risk patients, and more efficient screening resource allocation. The code is available at https://github.com/sot176/LMV-Net.
comment: Accepted at MICCAI 2026
☆ The In-Car Sign Language Corpus (ICSL): A Multi-Modal Resource for Constrained-Space Sign Language Recognition LREC2026
Raviteja Boddu, Guilherme Vieira Leite, Joed Lopes da Silva, Ângelo Benetti, Isabela Barbieri, Natália de Melo Afonso, Thyago Santos, Helio Pedrini, Felipe Venâncio Barbosa, José Mario De Martino, Munir Georges, Alessandro Zimmer
This paper addresses the challenges of using sign language within shared mobility services, such as taxis, carpools, or ride-sharing platforms. The use of sign language recognition (SLR) in real-world, confined environments, specifically vehicle interiors remains largely unexplored. To motivate research in this area, we present the In-Car Sign Language (ICSL) dataset for Brazilian Sign Language (Libras), with the long-term goal of improving public transport accessibility for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing community. The dataset consists of: (1) high-precision laboratory motion capture (MoCap) data to establish an idealized linguistic baseline and (2) real-world multi-modal in-car recordings captured using a 2D camera and 3D Time-of-Flight sensors. The dataset provides a basis for comparative analyses between synthesized signing avatar animations and recorded real signing interpreter videos, which enable future research into robust "in-the-wild" SLR models and domain adaptation. We describe in detail the use cases, the setup, the data collection protocol, and the metadata structure of the corpus. In total, we recorded a multimodal dataset exceeding 1.5 million frames, comprising the synchronized multimodal streams described above featuring Libras users across various in-car scenarios. The corpus is provided with gloss annotation of lexical signs and non-lexical sign language elements specially designed to support the training and evaluation of deep neural networks for constrained space recognition. In-vehicle signing offers a technically significant example of a constrained, occluded, and non-frontal environment. While recognizing the diverse communication strategies already employed by the Deaf community, identifying automotive-specific limitations provides a useful stepping stone for research into enhancing in-car accessibility and passenger quality of life.
comment: Published in the Proceedings of the LREC2026 12th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Language in Motion Original publication: https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/26.html The paper is distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. Link to paper: https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/26033.html
☆ HierCAD: Hierarchical Text-to-CAD Design via Structure Alignment and Parameter Grounding
Recent text-to-CAD approaches have shown promising results by leveraging large language models, but they often struggle with maintaining structural consistency in complex designs and accurately grounding geometric parameters. To address these issues, we propose HierCAD, a hierarchical text-to-CAD framework that improves both structural reasoning and parameter prediction. HierCAD reformulates CAD generation as progressive reasoning by decomposing CAD construction trees into object-level procedural reasoning and part-level topology reasoning trajectories. To further improve generation fidelity, we introduce a unified Structure Alignment and Parameter Grounding (SAPG) learning strategy. Structure alignment aligns topology reasoning trajectories with their corresponding parametric CAD spans, while parameter grounding mitigates shortcut learning through structure-preserving parameter perturbations and ranking-based supervision. Experiments demonstrate that HierCAD outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods on both CAD sequence generation and reconstructed CAD model evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Collab-Gen/HierCAD.
☆ SLVMBench: Skill Learning from Video Memory
We introduce Skill Learning from Video Memory (SLVMBench), the first benchmark that jointly evaluates whether video large language models (video-LLMs) can learn skills from long video memory and apply them to real-time tasks. SLVMBench presents models with 2-3 hour video streams that contain a tutorial video embedded in a stream of arbitrary irrelevant videos, resembling real-world human learning practices. Video-LLMs are asked to apply the acquired skill to answer real-time questions about an ongoing video. Unlike long-video understanding benchmarks that emphasize passive comprehension and skill-learning benchmarks that rely on short, immediate demonstrations, SLVMBench tests the full pipeline of memorizing and extracting procedural knowledge, as well as transferring it to real-time tasks. Moreover, rigorous human annotations feature sub-second-level temporal calibration, manually engineered questions eliminating common-sense guessing, and collated tutorials to ensure coverage of the required skills. Evaluations on state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source video LLMs show that video-LLMs struggle substantially with learning and applying skill knowledge from videos. Moreover, performance degrades markedly when the skill knowledge is placed within a long video memory. These results reveal a key limitation of existing video LLMs and position SLVMBench as the first benchmark for studying real-time skill acquisition and application from long-context video memory.
☆ ASUMOT: Motion-Consistency-Based Asynchronous UAV Detection and Tracking with Event Cameras
Event cameras offer microsecond-level temporal resolution and high dynamic range for low-altitude UAV perception. However, long-range UAVs often produce sparse, fragmented, and noise-contaminated event responses, where one semantic target may appear as multiple spatially separated blobs. Direct blob-level asynchronous tracking therefore suffers from duplicate trajectories and unstable identities. We propose ASUMOT, a motion-consistency-based asynchronous UAV detection and tracking framework operating directly on raw events. ASUMOT models each UAV as a set of motion-consistent event blobs. A local motion-consistency estimator triggers reliable candidates, a lightweight multi-task verifier provides UAV confidence and motion-direction cues, and motion-consistency clustering aggregates fragmented blobs into identity-consistent UAV tracks. We also introduce ES-UAV, a high-definition event-level UAV benchmark with dense semantic annotations. Experiments on public UAV tracking data and ES-UAV show that ASUMOT improves the accuracy--efficiency trade-off while preserving asynchronous event processing. Code and Dataset will be released.
☆ Metadata Supervised MRI Representations for Modelling and Controlling Acquisition Variability
Mehmet Yigit Avci, Pedro Borges, Virginia Fernandez, Natalia Glazman, Paul Wright, Mehmet Yigitsoy, Sebastien Ourselin, Jorge Cardoso
Magnetic resonance imaging exhibits substantial acquisition variability, where identical anatomy can appear markedly different across scanners and imaging protocols. Consequently, learned representations entangle biological structure with acquisition-dependent appearance, limiting interpretability, generalisation, and clinical deployment. We show that these sources of variation can be separated by jointly modelling MRI images and DICOM metadata. Using large-scale clinical brain MRI data, we learn representations that separate anatomical structure from contrast-dependent appearance. Resulting contrast representations organise heterogeneous acquisitions, support sequence understanding, and detect image--metadata inconsistencies, whereas anatomical representations suppress acquisition-specific variation while preserving biologically relevant information. Building on these disentangled representations, we introduce a unified anatomy-preserving harmonisation model for cross-modality and cross-site adaptation, conditioned on image or acquisition metadata. Our findings suggest that acquisition variability is a structured component of the imaging process that can be modelled, audited, and controlled, providing a foundation for acquisition-aware representation learning in large-scale medical imaging.
☆ A Unified Framework for Comprehensive Cardiac CT Segmentation and Phenotyping: Human-in-the-Loop Data Annotation, Vision Foundation Model Development, Multicenter Evaluation and Clinical Validation
Pooya Mohammadi Kazaj, Leo Fridolin Weber, Wen Xie, Seyed Amir Ahmad Safavi-Naini, Anselm Stark, Giovanni Baj, Ali Mokhtari, Toshiya Yoshida, Christoph Ryffel, Taishi Okuno, Yoshihiro Akashi, Ronny R. Buechel, Thomas Pilgrim, Waldo Valenzuela, George C. M. Siontis, Xiaowei Xu, Moritz Hundertmark, Stephan Windecker, Christoph Grani, Isaac Shiri
Comprehensive quantification of cardiac structures from computed tomography (CT) remains limited not by data availability but by the scalability of measurements, which makes routine use impractical. Here we present a unified framework for comprehensive cardiac CT segmentation and phenotyping that combines a human-in-the-loop annotation pipeline, a cardiac CT augmentation technique, and a self-supervised foundation model pre-trained on 60,000 unlabeled cardiac CT scans. Using this approach, we assembled the largest and most comprehensive expert-annotated cardiac CT segmentation dataset to date, comprising 1598 cases and 14 distinct cardiac structures (1000 for training, 598 for the external test set). Across five external datasets, the framework segmented all structures more accurately and comprehensively than existing open-source tools. Self-supervised pre-training improved labeling efficiency, with the most significant gains observed during external evaluation in the low-data regime. Benchmarking across convolutional, transformer, and state-space architectures showed comparable performance, indicating that data quality and pre-training, rather than architecture, drove accuracy. The framework was scaled to population-level phenotyping, with segmented anatomy that carries functionally relevant information about ventricular function and disease severity beyond demographic variables. By openly releasing the largest dataset with human labels, code, model weights, a CT augmentation library, and software, this work provides a reproducible foundation for opportunistic cardiac phenotyping from routinely acquired CT scans.
☆ SalientGS: Unified SfM-to-3DGS with Importance-Guided MCMC Gaussian Allocation
Reconstructing 3D scenes from unordered images remains bottlenecked by expensive Structure-from-Motion (SfM) preprocessing and frozen pose interfaces. We present SalientGS, a unified SfM-to-3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) pipeline. Its central contribution is importance-guided Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) Gaussian allocation, which aggregates multi-view residuals into per-Gaussian underfit and redundancy signals. These signals define a smooth importance-weighted sampling distribution that biases both birth and relocation toward underfit regions. This reallocates capacity from well-fit areas without altering the underlying stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD). SalientGS achieves end-to-end reconstruction in 15 minutes with state-of-the-art perceptual quality. The supplementary material provides dedicated sections for Per-Scene Qualitative Comparisons and Per-Image Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) Analysis, including failure cases. Code and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/Six-Bit-TX/SalientGS.
comment: Accepted
☆ The Devil Is in the Leakage: A Disentangled Dual-Purification Framework for High-Fidelity Hairstyle Transfer ACM MM 2026
Hairstyle transfer aims to synthesize a photorealistic portrait by transplanting the hairstyle from a reference image onto a source subject while preserving the source identity. Recent foundation models show strong generative capability, but they struggle with the zero-shot disentanglement required for precise local editing, often entangling the reference hairstyle with its original identity and pose. Existing diffusion-based pipelines typically decompose the task by first generating a "bald" image from the source and then injecting hairstyle features from the reference. However, we show that this paradigm suffers from a fundamental leakage problem. Identity Leakage in Hairstyle occurs when hairstyle features retain reference identity or pose information, while Flaw Leakage in Bald arises when residual artifacts in the bald image are propagated into the final synthesis. To address both issues, we propose the Dual-Purification Framework (DPF), which introduces two complementary training-time regularizers. Adversarial Hairstyle Purification (AHP) purifies hairstyle features by suppressing identity predictability under a mutual-information-inspired adversarial objective. Contrastive Geometric Purification (CGP) regularizes the ControlNet pathway with a contrastive objective, reducing the model's reliance on geometric artifacts in the bald condition. By jointly purifying the hairstyle representation and geometric pathway, DPF achieves high-fidelity, identity-preserving hairstyle transfer and state-of-the-art performance on diverse benchmarks.
comment: Accepted by ACM MM 2026
☆ LaGuadia: Language-Guided Adaptive Distillation from Pathology Foundation Models
Pathology Foundation Models (PFMs) offer powerful Whole Slide Image (WSI) representations but suffer from massive computational costs. While Knowledge Distillation (KD) can create efficient student models, existing multi-teacher methods often use suboptimal uniform weighting that ignores tissue heterogeneity. We propose LaGuadia (Language-Guided Adaptive DistillAtion), a framework that develops a compact pathology image encoder by dynamically integrating expertise from multiple PFMs under clinical linguistic guidance. Our approach utilizes a multi-stage pipeline: first, extracting visually observable clinical keywords from pathology reports; second, aligning visual features with these keywords via a Vision-Language meta-teacher (MedSigLIP) to provide dense semantic guidance; and finally, performing adaptive KD where teacher contributions are weighted based on their semantic alignment with the clinical narrative. Experiments on WSI captioning, visual question answering, and slide-level classification tasks demonstrate that an 87M parameter LaGuadia student model matches or exceeds foundation-scale models such as GigaPath and UNI, achieving strong factual consistency and robust generalization. These results highlight clinical language as an effective semantic anchor for building efficient and reliable digital pathology systems. Code is available at https://github.com/hvcl/LaGuadia.
☆ A Nearable Soft Mat Based on Distributed Optical Fiber Sensing for Physiological Monitoring
Vincenzo Lavorgna, Martina Pulcinelli, Andrea Polimadei, Rosaria D Amato, Carlo Massaroni, Michele Arturo Caponero, Emiliano Schena, Daniela Lo Presti
Distributed optical fiber sensing (DOFS) combines the advantages of fiber optic sensors, including flexibility, small size, immunity to electromagnetic interference, and high metrological performance, with the capability to transform a single optical fiber into a continuous sensing element for spatially resolved mechanical measurements. Optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR), based on Rayleigh backscattering, enables high spatial resolution DOFS measurements, broadening the range of potential sensing applications. However, OFDR based DOFS remains largely unexplored for biomedical applications, despite the need for sensitive, spatially resolved, and conformable sensing interfaces. This study presents a soft DOFS based mat as a large-area interface for physiological monitoring. A single-mode optical fiber was embedded in a flexible silicone matrix and arranged in a serpentine layout to distribute sensing over the mat surface. With a gage pitch of 2.6 mm, the system provided 2250 sensing sites across the active area at a sampling frequency of 50 Hz. The mat was assessed on six healthy volunteers in a seated nearable configuration on the backrest of a standard office chair. The distributed output enabled two dimensional mapping of the mat response, reflecting back mat mechanical coupling and cardiorespiratory induced perturbations. Respiratory rate and heart rate were therefore estimated and compared with a reference wearable system. The maps revealed physiologically coherent spatial and temporal patterns, while the estimated rates showed good agreement with the reference measurements. These results demonstrate the feasibility of combining large area distributed sensing, spatial mapping, and quantitative cardiorespiratory monitoring within a DOFS based soft nearable interface.
☆ Structure-Detail Decoupled Autoregressive Generation for Fast and High-Fidelity Virtual Try-On
Virtual try-on (VTON) is a bi-conditional image generation problem that requires not only accurate person preservation but also faithful garment deformation and detail synthesis. Diffusion-based VTON methods can jointly model these factors in a compressed latent space, but suffer from high-frequency detail loss due to inherent latent compression, even with costly multi-step denoising. Recent visual autoregressive (VAR) models offer a promising alternative for high-quality generation with faster inference, yet remain unexplored for VTON due to the lack of effective bi-conditioning mechanisms. To bridge this gap, we first introduce VAR-VTON, a VAR-based VTON model that incorporates garment conditioning and structural guidance for efficient latent-space VTON. Despite its efficacy, latent-space generation still struggles to preserve fine-grained garment details. We argue that different VTON sub-tasks should be addressed in different representation spaces: structural synthesis such as garment warping and person layout is suited to the latent space, whereas fine-grained detail recovery should be tackled in the pixel space. Motivated by this insight, we further propose STAR-VTON, a Two-Stage AutoRegressive framework that builds upon VAR-VTON by decoupling latent-space structural synthesis from pixel-space detail recovery. Our idea is to resort to a matching-informed refiner to establish dense correspondences between the stage-one generation and the source garment to directly map fine-grained pixel-space details. Extensive experiments show that STAR-VTON achieves an impressive efficiency-fidelity trade-off: VAR-VTON runs at least $4\times$ faster than diffusion-based counterparts without degrading quality, and the pixel-space refiner effectively restores fine details and acts as a plug-and-play module that can benefit existing VTON approaches.
☆ HandFlow: Fully Generative 4D Hand Recovery with Flow Matching
Accurate monocular 4D hand reconstruction remains challenging. Per-frame discriminative regressors lack temporal context and often produce jittery predictions. Temporal models improve consistency by aggregating information across frames, but they are typically deterministic regressors, making them vulnerable to ambiguous observations caused by occlusion and motion blur. Generative modeling offers a natural alternative by learning a prior over plausible hand motion sequences, enabling coherent hand-state recovery when visual evidence is incomplete or unreliable.
Motivated by this observation, we present HandFlow, a fully generative flow-matching framework for temporally coherent 3D hand pose and shape estimation from monocular video. Given visual and skeletal observations, HandFlow denoises an entire temporal window of MANO parameters through a single ODE integration. To support this, we use a Flux-style dual-stream transformer that attends across the full sequence to capture long-range dependencies without autoregressive decoding, and a confidence-aware continuous masking mechanism that blends observed features with learnable mask tokens to handle noisy or missing observations. Experiments on DexYCB and HOT3D show that HandFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance, with particularly large gains in world-space accuracy and temporal smoothness. It reduces world-space pose error by over 30% compared with the strongest baseline and achieves the lowest acceleration error among all evaluated methods, while remaining competitive in per-frame pose accuracy. Moreover, on a single GPU HandFlow reconstructs a 150-frame sequence at 47 fps, about 12x faster than the fastest prior video-based method, with reconstruction itself accounting for only a small fraction of the end-to-end latency.
☆ A Novel Method to Evaluate Models on Unreliable, Noisy and Inconsistent Labels: Adaptive Resolution Label Aggregation (ARLA)
Labels are critical for both training and evaluating deep learning segmentation models, but are often inconsistent, noisy, or ambiguous at class boundaries. Many approaches have been developed to support training models on weak labels, but few to none currently exist to facilitate evaluating models on unreliable labels. We therefore introduce a method called "Adaptive Resolution Label Aggregation", or "ARLA", which dynamically adapts the resolution of both the label and the model prediction at inference time before the evaluation metrics are computed. We demonstrate how ARLA can be used to better analyse model behaviour with a practical application to a real flood prediction model, where ARLA was able to overcome issues with inconsistent labelling of forested areas and errors in labels within regions of heavy cloud cover. Our work presents a new approach to evaluating segmentation models, with adjustable parameters to adapt the aggregated resolution to the precision of the label or the level of label noise. Fundamentally, ARLA exploits the information encapsulated by a label but minimises the label error, extracting from the noise a clearer signal of a model's true performance.
☆ Parallax Portrait Matting ECCV 2026
Image matting is highly ill-posed, especially when both the foreground and background are richly textured. While single-image matting methods learn strong priors from data, they often struggle on these challenging cases. Existing approaches improve results by requiring additional signals such as green screens, polarized lighting, or clean background images, but these typically rely on specialized capture setups. We present Parallax Portrait Matting, a practical two-frame matting method that uses a second image captured with slight viewpoint change. Such a setting arises naturally in burst photography, where small camera motion induces foreground-background parallax and provides complementary observations for matting. Our pipeline estimates trimaps and foreground/background motion, then constructs aligned views for prediction. To handle imperfect motion estimation, the network uses the background-aligned pair for direct fusion and the foreground-aligned cue through cross-attention for error compensation. Experiments show that our method recovers finer details and more accurate foreground colors than strong single-image matting baselines on challenging portrait cases.
comment: ECCV 2026
☆ DynEval: Holistic Evaluations of T2I Generative Models in the Wild ECCV 2026
Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have led to models capable of producing highly realistic images. Yet, reliably evaluating their outputs remains challenging, especially at scale. Existing automatic evaluators, often relying on a static prompt set, struggle to capture subtle failure modes such as partial prompt misalignment, compositional errors, or visually plausible but semantically incorrect generations. In this work, we introduce DynEval, a Dynamic Evaluation framework designed to jointly assess text-to-image alignment and image quality of T2I models. To support scalable training beyond limited human-annotated data, we construct two large datasets. First, we build GenDB, a collection of 500K prompt-image pairs generated from human-written prompts drawn from DiffusionDB using a tiered prompt-model generation strategy. Second, building upon GenDB, we construct DynEvalInstruct, a 250K instruction dataset comprising prompt-image-response triplets distilled from a structured evaluation pipeline that decomposes evaluation into text-image alignment and visual quality reasoning. Using this dataset, we perform full fine-tuning of a compact evaluator through a curriculum learning strategy to effectively distill the superior evaluation capabilities of a larger teacher vision-language model, resulting in DynEval-2B and DynEval-4B. In extensive comparisons against existing evaluators across 11 benchmarks, our evaluator achieves a higher overall correlation with human judgments. Furthermore, it provides fine-grained analysis of the capabilities and failure modes of 36 T2I models across 42 subcategories and 9 semantic dimensions.
comment: Accepted at ECCV 2026. Project page: https://vcl-iisc.github.io/dyneval/
☆ Slot-RAE: Streamlining Object-Centric Learning via Direct Representation Auto-Encoders
Deploying object-centric models for real-world scene understanding typically requires complex pipelines to achieve both robust scene decomposition and high-fidelity generation. Recent diffusion-based approaches have improved visual quality, but they almost universally rely on heavy, pretrained generative priors (e.g., Stable Diffusion) and external VAE latent spaces. In this paper, we propose Slot-RAE, a much simpler, fully integrated framework that operates directly within the continuous semantic feature space of visual foundation models (e.g., DINOv3). Slot-RAE employs a feature-space diffusion process using a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) decoder and a Representation Alignment (REPA) head. Unlike existing diffusion-based objectcentric methods that rely heavily on subsidized text-toimage priors, the generative core of Slot-RAE (Slot Attention and the DiT) is trained from scratch within the frozen VFM feature space. This eliminates the need for VAE bottlenecks and task-agnostic generative pre-training. Experiments on the COCO dataset demonstrate that despite its architectural simplicity, Slot-RAE achieves state-of-the-art results. It delivers comparable unsupervised object discovery, higher-fidelity image reconstruction, and robust zero-shot compositionality, all while being significantly faster and more computationally efficient than existing object-centric latent diffusion models.
☆ GDP.pdf: Benchmarking Grounded Multimodal Reasoning over Professional PDF Documents CVPR 2026
A large share of day-to-day work in professional domains happens inside PDF files: benefits packets, leases, datasheets, clinical guidelines, construction plans. Benchmarks for document AI have generally measured the required capabilities in isolation: OCR, layout analysis, chart reasoning, table QA, document VQA. A high score on any one of them does not necessarily reveal whether a model can answer a realistic question that someone in the field would actually ask about a specific PDF. GDP.pdf is a benchmark built to measure this directly. It consists of question-document pairs authored by working professionals in ten fields, and a candidate question was kept only when at least two frontier multimodal models failed it in a way that mattered: a wrong answer, missed decisive evidence, or a fabricated claim, rather than a superficial difference such as style. Each item comes with a rubric of atomic criteria, so we can report a graded rubric score as well as a strict task-level pass rate, and each item is tagged against a taxonomy of eleven capabilities in three tiers, spanning text extraction and grounding, table and chart comprehension, cross-referencing, spatial reasoning, and abstention on unsupported queries. We evaluated seven frontier models on the 100-item benchmark. The best model passed only 15% of the items and the worst passed 1%. Most errors trace back to a small set of recurring loss patterns: misaligned tables, misread charts, skipped footnotes and exclusions, miscounted floor-plan symbols, scan noise, and amendments that supersede earlier text. The full 100-item benchmark is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/surgeai/GDP.pdf
comment: 9 pages. Accepted at the 2nd Workshop on Knowledge-Intensive Multimodal Reasoning (KnowledgeMR) at CVPR 2026 (non-archival), under the paper's former title "PDFParse: A Benchmark for Grounded Multimodal Reasoning over Professional PDF Documents". Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/surgeai/GDP.pdf ; Code: https://github.com/surge-ai/gdp-pdf
☆ When Depth Is Better Told Than Shown: Depth-Ordinal Prompting for Vision-Language Spatial Reasoning
Vision-language models (VLMs) are expected to reason about physical space -- which object is closer, what lies behind what, and how objects are arranged in 3D -- yet they still struggle with such spatial judgments. A natural remedy is to show the model a depth map, but we find that this can make performance worse. We show that depth is not absent: it reaches the language model, but becomes difficult to access for downstream reasoning, while rendered pseudo-depth maps act as noisy auxiliary images that frozen VLMs cannot easily regulate. We propose Depth-Ordinal Prompting (DOP), a training-free method that converts monocular depth into a single question-targeted ordinal text cue at the queried objects, without adding a depth image, training a module, injecting features, or using labels. Our key finding is form dependence: the same depth signal can hurt when shown as an image but help when told as text.Across benchmarks, models, and depth estimators, DOP improves spatial reasoning when pseudo-depth provides reliable object-level ordering and remains largely neutral in strong original-image regimes. It is also competitive with the strongest training-free depth-prompting alternative while being simpler and more targeted.
comment: Work in progress
☆ TC-MAF: Train-Calibrated Bounded Multi-Evidence Fusion for Multimodal Industrial Anomaly Detection ACM MM 2026
Multimodal anomaly detection benefits from complementary RGB and 3D evidence, yet auxiliary RGB reconstruction is not equally reliable across product categories and class-wise test-time policy selection is usually unavailable. We propose TC-MAF, a base-anchored multi-evidence fusion design that combines a multimodal detector, complementary Dinomaly evidence, and a small cross-modal consistency cue under one fixed pixel-level fusion formula. A lightweight training-dispersion confidence (TDC) term scales auxiliary participation using only normal training statistics. On MVTec-3D, TC-MAF reaches 0.979 image-level AUROC and 0.990 pixel-level AUPRO, achieving the best mean results on both detection and localization among the compared multimodal methods. Systematic ablations show that the fusion structure itself is the dominant factor, while TDC provides a smaller but reproducible calibration gain over no calibration or arbitrary calibration. Additional experiments show that the same design remains effective under a pooled-statistics variant, auxiliary-branch and backbone substitutions, few-shot settings, a missing-3D setting, and cross-dataset evaluation on Eyecandies. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TC_MAF-C3BB.
comment: accepted by ACM MM 2026
☆ SISA-Rec: A Semantically Integrated Sequential Recommender with Contrastive Alignment
Recommendation systems help users recommend relevant items from a large collection of choices. Present work on transformer-based sequential recommendation learns user preferences from interaction logs, but it mostly focuses on item identifiers and doesn't fully use the semantic meaning of items. This limitation becomes a major challenge in sparse and cold-start scenarios where historical interaction data is limited. To solve this problem, we introduce SISA-Rec (Semantically Integrated Sequential Recommendation), a transformer-based framework that embeds semantic context directly into sequential modeling. Our approach fuses item ID embeddings with BERT-based text embeddings via a gated fusion module, injects semantic similarity into the self-attention mechanism, and leverages an attention-based aggregation module to construct comprehensive user representations. Finally, a joint learning objective which combines Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) and contrastive alignment loss, aligns the underlying behavioral and semantic spaces. Experiments were conducted on the two highly sparse Amazon Beauty and Amazon Toys \& Games datasets, both having 99.93\% sparsity. The results show that SISA-Rec outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models across all evaluation metrics. Compared with the BERT4Rec \cite{petrov2022systematic}, SISA-Rec improves HR@10 by 16.6\% and NDCG@10 by 10.3\% on Amazon Beauty, and HR@10 by 23.1\% and NDCG@10 by 17.9\% on Amazon Toys \& Games. Cold-start analysis further shows that the proposed model achieves the largest improvements for users with limited interaction historical records. This showcases the value of semantic information when user behavior data is scarce. Overall, the results demonstrate that integrating semantic information into the attention mechanism leads to more accurate and reliable recommendations.
☆ Simple Features and Honest Calibration for Ambivalence and Hesitancy Recognition in Video
We address ambivalence and hesitancy (A/H) recognition in the ABAW 2026 BAH Challenge: given a short interview video, predict whether the person shows signs of A/H. Our system combines affect-specialised text, audio, and visual representations with a small set of readable linguistic hesitation cues, fused by a reliability gate we call Affective Marker Fusion (AMF), and finished with a simple AP-weighted ensemble at a fixed decision threshold. We also introduce \emph{ASR-erased time}: speech recognisers delete fillers and hesitation pauses from the transcript, but the chunk timestamps keep the time those events took, and sixteen features built from these gaps form the strongest and most independent non-verbal channel we measured (AP $0.718$, correlation $0.11$--$0.36$ with all other members). Across controlled experiments we find three things: cross-modal conflict design does not reliably help on BAH; language is by far the strongest channel while affect-specialised audio is a useful second; and calibration matters more than architecture. Fitting ensemble weights and a threshold on the small validation split overfits: it scores $0.741$ macro-F1 on validation but only $0.690$ on the untouched test set. AP-weighting at a fixed threshold instead reaches $\mathbf{0.731}$ on test.
☆ GHOST: Geometry-Guided Hallucination of Opaque Surface Textures
Transparent objects pose a fundamental challenge for depth estimation and 3D reconstruction due to their violation of Lambertian assumptions, leading to severe geometry degradation in downstream tasks. To address this, we propose a novel geometry-guided preprocessing framework \textbf{GHOST} that leverages visual foundation models to transform transparent regions into opaque, structurally consistent representations without requiring downstream model retraining. Specifically, our pipeline utilizes (1) \textbf{TransDINO} and (2) \textbf{TransDecomp} to disentangle masks and transparency physical properties, while (3) \textbf{DAF-Net} recovers surface normal priors to encode geometric curvature. Subsequently, (4) \textbf{GeoSemTransNet} integrates these multi-modal cues to synthesize a texture-rich opaque RGB image that preserves the transparent object's 3D structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the accuracy of state-of-the-art depth estimation and reconstruction models on transparent objects by restoring essential photometric cues.
☆ Beyond the Eye: Efficient Multimodal Reasoning via Self-Regulated Implicit Visual Tools
Xiuwei Chen, Quanlin Chen, Wentao Hu, Zisheng Chen, Kun Xiang, Zehua Ma, Mingyang Zhang, Jianhua Han, Hanhui Li, Hang Xu, Xiaodan Liang
Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made remarkable progress on fine-grained perception tasks under the "Thinking with Images" (TwI) paradigm by iteratively performing various visual tool operations. However, this paradigm relies heavily on frequent external tool calls and repeated image re-encoding, which leads to substantial computational overhead and inference latency. To address these issues, we propose Beyond the Eye (BEE), a novel implicit visual tool paradigm centered on self-regulated capability. BEE directly incorporates visual tool invocation behaviors into the training objective and encourages the model to develop a self-regulated invocation mechanism. This design enables the model to adaptively balance internal knowledge and implicit tools, avoiding redundant tool usage while substantially reducing inference latency. Specifically, BEE involves a two-stage training process: (1) Formalized Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT). We construct CoT trajectories with structured tool slots and mixed invocation states. This stage activates the model's implicit tool representations and adaptive switching capability. (2) Self-regulated Reward-Driven Alignment. To address redundant tool usage caused by ambiguous cognitive boundaries, we first introduce the Net Tool Gain (NTG) metric to quantify this phenomenon. Based on this observation, we further propose a self-regulated reward mechanism. This mechanism penalizes ineffective tool dependency and encourages the model to perform knowledge routing, ensuring that implicit tools are invoked only when the model's internal knowledge is insufficient. BEE achieves state-of-the-art performance in fine-grained visual perception while remaining competitive in general reasoning tasks and achieving substantial gains in inference efficiency.
☆ FlowPET: Physics-Informed Symplectic Flow Matching for Low-Count PET Reconstruction ICML 2026
Low-count Positron Emission Tomography (PET) reconstruction is severely hindered by the dissipative nature of prevailing generative models, where the inherent phase-space contraction leads to the numerical extinction (``wash-out'') of weak but diagnostically critical lesion signals. To overcome this geometric limitation, we propose \textbf{FlowPET}, a physics-informed framework that reformulates reconstruction as volume-preserving transport in a symplectic phase space. By parameterizing the posterior dynamics via a Separable Hamiltonian System, our approach guarantees a divergence-free vector field by construction, theoretically immunizing weak signals against probability mass collapse. To steer this conservative flow, we introduce conjugate boundary conditions based on the Range-Null space decomposition of the PET operator; this strictly enforces data consistency in the range space while confining stochastic uncertainty injection to the unobserved null space. We train the model via symplectic flow matching and perform inference using a symplectic leapfrog integrator. Extensive experiments on BrainWeb, clinical pediatric, and UDPET datasets demonstrate that \textbf{FlowPET} not only surpasses state-of-the-art deterministic and stochastic baselines in SSIM and PSNR but, more crucially, exhibits superior recovery of low-contrast lesions. The results confirm that imposing Hamiltonian structural constraints offers a robust geometric safeguard for medical inverse problems in high-noise regimes.
comment: ICML 2026
☆ Desc++: Efficient Descriptor Enhancement for Data Association in Existing Visual SLAM Systems
Reliable visual data association is fundamental to visual SLAM (V-SLAM), as it directly determines the quality of the camera pose estimation and map consistency. However, the handcrafted descriptors used by most mature real-time systems degrade under illumination and viewpoint changes, while learning-based front-ends that address this weakness typically require replacing the extraction-and-matching pipeline and introduce substantial computational overhead. Descriptor enhancement offers a compromise by refining existing descriptors within their original format, yet current methods rely on simplified attention mechanisms whose limited contextual modeling constrains the achievable matching quality. To resolve this trade-off between contextual expressiveness and efficiency, we propose Desc++, a lightweight enhancement module that jointly encodes descriptor representations and keypoint geometry and aggregates spatial context through a hybrid architecture that combines order-agnostic global attention with geometry-aware sequential modeling in linear time. The enhanced descriptors retain their original dimensionality and matching interface, enabling integration into deployed V-SLAM systems without modifying the pipeline. Experiments across descriptor matching, correspondence analysis, and system-level benchmarks with four different V-SLAM systems demonstrate that Desc++ improves matching accuracy over the state-of-the-art enhancement method, translates these gains into more accurate and stable trajectory estimation, and achieves a favorable balance between accuracy and efficiency for practical integration into existing real-time V-SLAM pipelines.
comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, and 9 tables
☆ Revisiting Matching Response and Swept Feature Volumes for Wide-baseline Omnidirectional Stereo
In this paper, we propose a training strategy for confidence estimation in omnidirectional stereo, targeting the ambiguous matches that frequently occur in wide-baseline setups. Reinterpreting the matching responses produced by the 3D encoder decoder block, we show that their expectation values provide intrinsic confidence signals. Building on this, our method directly penalizes ambiguous responses without auxiliary heads, multi-pass inference, or additional modules, resulting in more efficient and generalized predictions. Beyond confidence, we introduce swept feature volume resampling, where response features produced by 3D CNNs are resampled using regressed positive matching indices and then processed by 2D CNNs to predict meta-information such as surface normals. This joint learning introduces auxiliary geometric regularization and improves depth coherence by leveraging additional contextual cues during response aggregation stage. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach enhances both confidence estimation and surface normal prediction while maintaining deployment practicality for autonomous mobility applications.
☆ Difference-Driven Gating: Adaptive Feature Fusion for U-Net Decoder
The U-Net style models have been widely used in many applications. A critical step in these models is to reconstruct the lower-level features using a top-down decoder. This reconstruction requires precise fusion of high-level semantics and low-level details. Existing attention-based fusion methods typically derive attention weights from the top-down decoder features (global) alone or the correlation between the top-down decoder features and the bottom-up encoder features (local), then modulate the encoder features using these weights. In this work, we explore a different paradigm: deriving attention weights from the difference between the two feature streams. To this end, we propose two difference-based gating approaches: Feature-difference gating (FDG), which directly uses the absolute difference between global and local features to generate adaptive gating maps, and Entropy-difference gating (EDG), which measures the representational certainty of each stream via information entropy and uses their signed entropy difference to derive the attention weights. Both methods produce coupled gating maps that simultaneously modulate the global and local features. Experiments on different tasks including medical image segmentation, remote sensing image cloud removal and speech separation showed that both methods outperformed existing attention-based fusion methods, and EDG performed better. The results suggested a new paradigm for multi-scale feature fusion in the U-Net style structures.
comment: 15 pages, 13 figures
☆ Why Low-Light Cameras Go Color Blind: Removing Color Bias in Raw Denoising
Mohammad Mohammadi, Sina Honari, Stavros Tsogkas, Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong, Michael S. Brown, Iqbal Mohomed, Konstantinos G. Derpanis, Alex Levinshtein, Igor Gilitschenski
Raw images inherently suffer from noise due to the stochastic nature of light and sensor hardware imperfections. As real photon counts fall, the ratio of this noise to the signal degrades; consequently, for low-light conditions, robust denoising is especially vital for high-quality results. While recent data-driven methods achieve strong performance, they typically rely on large-scale noisy-clean image pairs that are costly and difficult to collect. Alternatively, parametric noise models can generate synthetic training data, but this necessitates precise camera calibration, which is often impractical for unknown devices. In this work, we propose a camera-agnostic, calibration-free paradigm for low-light raw denoising. We identify that color bias from black-level error is a primary source of performance degradation and causes severe color shifts. To mitigate this, we introduce a bias estimator network that predicts the black-level error as a global feature of the noisy input. We evaluate our approach across the ELD, SID, and LRID datasets, demonstrating superior performance among blind denoisers, particularly in terms of color correction. In many cases, we are competitive with-or can even surpass-methods with stronger supervision. Furthermore, we reveal that the widely used SIDD dataset contains significant color bias in its ground-truth images, which yields unrealistic color reproduction in trained models. We introduce a new ground-truth extraction framework to resolve this issue and provide a benchmark of existing methods on the corrected dataset.
comment: Accepted at ICCP 2026
☆ CUST: Clustered Unit-level Similarity Transformer for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution
Recently, Vision Transformer (ViT)-based models have exhibited remarkable performance in image super-resolution. However, the quadratic computational complexity of ViTs with respect to spatial resolution severely constrains their efficiency, leading to high latency and massive memory consumption. To alleviate this, various window-based attention mechanisms have been proposed; yet, they inherently compromise the long-range dependency modeling that is the primary advantage of ViTs. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Clustered Unit-level Similarity Transformer (CUST), a novel architecture that efficiently integrates global and local information. Specifically, CUST enables each patch to aggregate and attend to similar patches within a broadened regional scope outside its local window, thereby capturing extensive contextual understanding. Furthermore, it employs overlapping attention windows to capture local dependencies, while explicitly extracting high-frequency details by computing the residual difference between the original features and their downsampled-upsampled counterparts. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model achieves a practical balance between computational efficiency and restoration performance. It achieves a lower memory footprint and faster inference speed compared to recent global context or lightweight models under realistic constraints. Code is available at [https://github.com/jwgdmkj/CUST].
comment: 15 pages, 7 figures
☆ Controlling Motion Transfer in Diffusion Transformers via Attention Heads ECCV 2026
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have advanced video generation with high-quality, temporally coherent results. However, extending them to motion transfer, which requires following reference motion while aligning with a target prompt, remains challenging due to limited understanding of motion and structure representations within DiTs. We analyze video DiTs at the attention-head level and identify distinct heads specialized for motion and spatial structure. Based on this insight, we propose a head-aware controllable motion transfer framework that requires no parameter updates. Our method refines motion cues from motion-specialized heads via semantic correspondence guidance and preserves structure through selective feature injection. This head-level control not only enables accurate motion transfer but also provides an interpretable foundation for controllable video generation with DiTs.
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026, Project page: https://sunyj-hxppy.github.io/halo/
☆ Do Video-LLMs Actually Watch? Diagnosing Character-Tracking Failures in Long-Form Video
Can a Video Large Language Model (Video-LLM) follow one person through a long video, keeping track of who they are well enough to report, in order, how their outfit changes across a full TV episode? Benchmarks increasingly score this kind of task, and the strongest open-source 7--8B models now reach 37--38% on InfiniBench's global appearance task, which asks exactly that. But does that score come from tracking the named character, or from something easier? We test this with a nine-condition diagnostic protocol applied to three architecturally distinct open-source Video-LLMs, with Gemini~2.5~Flash as a frontier reference, and find the accuracy does not come from character tracking. When we change the character named in the question to a different cast member, leaving the video and answer options untouched, the models change their answer only 4--31% of the time, so they are largely ignoring who the question asks about. Breaking that test down by the gender of the swapped name shows why: the models react more when the name is changed to a different-gender character than to a same-gender one (a 13--28 point gap), picking up coarse gender cues but unable to tell same-gender individuals apart. This shallow processing surfaces again when we drop the multiple-choice options and ask the same questions open-endedly: open-source accuracy drops 18--25 points, with none of 151 answers fully correct, versus a 12-point drop for Gemini. Further checks rule out the obvious innocent explanations, adding subtitles, using the most informative frames, or doubling the number of frames all leave character tracking unimproved, so the bottleneck is not how much video the model sees but how it ties that video to the person the question names. We release a diagnostic toolkit for auditing what such benchmark scores actually measure.
☆ DDR-Net: Haze-Aware Dual-Domain Refinement for Single-Image Dehazing
Single-image dehazing aims to recover clear scenes from haze-degraded images. It remains challenging due to the atmospheric scattering and the complexity of real-world haze distributions. Although recent end-to-end networks have achieved promising performance, two issues still limit their effectiveness: insufficient feature refinement at the bottleneck stage and weak local structural representation in encoder-decoder architectures. Thus, we propose a Haze-Aware Dual-Domain Refinement Network (DDR-Net) for single-image dehazing. Our method is built upon three modules: Haze Prior Extractor (HPE) provides multi-scale haze-aware priors by operating directly on downsampled hazy images; Detail-Enhanced Blocks (DE Blocks) serve as the core feature extraction units, capturing multi-scale structural information and enhancing edge and texture recovery via gradient-aware convolutions; and Spatial-Frequency Bottleneck Refinement (SFBR) at the bottleneck jointly exploits spatial and frequency information to refine bottleneck features. DDR-Net achieves more effective feature representation and reconstruction for haze removal. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing dehazing approaches. It achieves competitive performance on synthetic datasets.
comment: Accepted by PRCV 2026
☆ WiFi-JEPA: Self-supervised Learning for WiFi-CSI 3D Human Pose Estimation
WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) enables privacy-preserving human pose sensing in camera-denied environments, but existing WiFi-based pose estimators often fail under environment shifts and rely on costly camera-based annotation pipelines that limit scale. We propose WiFi-JEPA, a self-supervised framework that learns CSI-native representations by predicting masked latent embeddings instead of reconstructing raw CSI signals that may contain hardware-specific artifacts. WiFi-JEPA makes three contributions: (i) CSI-specific tokenization and link masking tailored to the CSI tensor over channel, time, and link (C,T,L); masking entire Tx-Rx antenna links forces the model to predict one spatial link view from others, capturing cross-link correlations informative of 3D spatial structure. (ii) A ray-tracing CSI simulation pipeline that generates diverse unlabeled CSI from randomized geometric primitives, providing scalable pre-training data without pose annotations. (iii) State-of-the-art results on Person-in-WiFi-3D: WiFi-JEPA outperforms prior WiFi-CSI baselines on both single- and multi-person 3D pose estimation under the same evaluation protocol. We also show that simulated CSI provides complementary pre-training signal to real CSI, and that four vision-native SSL objectives degrade performance below training from scratch, whereas WiFi-JEPA consistently improves downstream pose estimation.
☆ FSFVE: Few Shot Compressed Face Video Enhancement
Videocalling has become a popular form of communication in the world today, with many companies providing free services for it. However, there are still millions of people around the world that experience poor quality videocalls due to limitations in bandwidth. This despite, most people having the required hardware. In this paper we present a novel framework for enhancing highly compressed videocalls. We show, that with as little as 10 frames of the face, we can rapidly (in under 100 seconds) train a model to enhance that instance of the videocall. The model can be trained either prior to or during the call, enhancing the rest of the call by producing better quality video. The video conferencing application need not be modified - it can be off the shelf with our system as a layer on top that trains quickly then simply lets the video conferencing application (e.g. Zoom) run as usual, where our system intercepts and improves images before they are displayed. The model is designed to run in realtime on low-compute devices such as a typical laptop CPU. Experimentally, we show that the model significantly improves quality of compressed face video both quantitatively as well as perceptually. Code can be found at https://github.com/varun-jois/FSFVE.
☆ RTFVE: Realtime Face Video Enhancement
There's been a surge in adoption of video conferencing applications for both personal and business use cases. However, the bandwidth limitations faced by many users worldwide may restrict the optimal use of such applications. Although deep learning offers a solution for enhancing low bit rate videos, most models today are either hard to incorporate with modern compression standards or require specialized hardware to run such as significant GPUs making these models impractical. To address these issues, we introduce the Realtime Face Video Enhancement (RTFVE) model which can be easily incorporated with any video decoder and can run in realtime on ordinary CPUs. Experiments show that our model improves perceptual quality over the compressed video baseline at multiple low bitrate settings. The source code will be made available at https://github.com/varun-jois/RTFVE.
☆ Learning to Navigate Efficiently with Only 0.58M Trainable Parameters
Recent progress in visual navigation has largely been driven by scale: end-to-end policies with hundreds of millions of parameters trained on billions of frames or large-scale simulated data. We ask how much of this scale a single task family actually requires, and what structure can substitute for it. We propose a decomposed navigation model in which operations with known closed-form structure, such as projective geometry, occupancy, and coordinate transforms, are computed analytically and serve as interfaces between three small learned modules: an egress predictor that grounds the episode goal as a local subgoal in the current view, a navigation predictor that estimates a goal-conditioned posterior over where trajectories travel, and an endpoint-pinned residual diffusion generator that samples trajectory shapes from this posterior. The system trains only 0.58M out of a total of 22.7M parameters, on 44k frames in under one GPU-hour, yet approaches the performance of state-of-the-art models on navigation tasks across 6060 point-goal episodes and 60 environments, while having 233x fewer trainable parameters, the lowest collision rate among all evaluated methods, and 50 Hz inference speed. The decomposition further transfers to no-goal exploration by retraining only the 123k-parameter egress head, and its failure modes under sensor corruption are transparent and analytically correctable.
comment: 6 pages, 4 figures
☆ Reference-Based Face Super-Resolution Using the Spatial Transformer
Face super-resolution is the task of increasing the resolution of an image containing a face thereby adding finer detail. It is a ubiquitous task in many computer vision applications and quite often the user isn't even aware that it is being performed. However, doing it with high fidelity is challenging as it is an ill-posed problem. In this paper we present a reference-based solution for face super-resolution that uses higher resolution reference images to aid in the task. We show an alignment module based on the spatial transformer that is considerably more stable than the popular deformable convolutions. We also show an aggregation function that can take good quality information from the reference images when available or suppress the function when such information is unavailable. Finally, we show that our relatively smaller model can achieve state of the art results on multiple datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/varun-jois/FSRST.
☆ SynCLIP: Synonym-Coherent Language-Image Pretraining for Robust Open-Vocabulary Dense Perception CVPR 2026
Open-vocabulary dense perception (OVDP) aims to localize objects unseen during training by leveraging textual knowledge. Despite the remarkable progress of recent CLIP-based approaches, we identify a critical limitation: synonym-induced grounding inconsistency, where semantically equivalent expressions yield disparate spatial attention patterns. This inconsistency undermines the robustness and performance of existing methods in real-world OVDP applications. To address this issue, we propose SynCLIP, a Synonym-Coherent Language-Image Pretraining framework that enhances synonym-robust grounding for OVDP. SynCLIP introduces a Semantic-consistent Spatial Attention alignment (SSA) module to enhance spatial attention consistency by minimizing discrepancies between attention maps of original and synonymous expressions. Furthermore, a Spatial Attention Refinement (SAR) module selectively strengthens the most semantically relevant spatial regions within aligned maps for more precise and stable grounding. To support synonym-coherent pretraining, we also construct a Synonym-Enriched Visual Corpus (SEViC), which augments each category with multiple synonyms and textual definitions. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SynCLIP substantially improves grounding consistency under diverse linguistic variants and achieves state-of-the-art performance among CLIP-based OVDP methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Justlovesmile/SynCLIP.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026
☆ Temporal Feature Distillation for Label-Efficient Precise Event Spotting in Sports Videos ACM MM 2026
Precise Event Spotting (PES) requires distinguishing visually similar yet semantically distinct adjacent frames, making it fundamentally different from image classification and coarse action recognition. Although self-distillation methods such as DINO have shown strong representation learning ability in images, we find that directly applying them to PES is ineffective: without supervised guidance, subtle but crucial motion cues are often suppressed as noise, leading to representations that are insensitive to precise event boundaries. To address this, we propose Temporal Feature Distillation, a semi-supervised objective that aligns temporally informative backbone features, rather than projection-head outputs, to preserve motion-sensitive and boundary-aware cues for frame-level localization. A supervised warm-up with a ramp-up schedule further stabilizes training by ensuring that meaningful event cues are learned before unlabeled distillation begins. We also introduce Transformer Gate Shift, a multi-scale gated shifting module that injects motion-aware temporal information into Vision Transformers. Experiments on four fine-grained sports benchmarks show consistent improvements over fully supervised and semi-supervised baselines. Under 10\% supervision on FSPerf, our method improves mAP by 4.54 points over the strongest competing approach, and with only 80\% labeled data, it matches or surpasses the fully supervised 100\% baseline on two of the four datasets.
comment: Accepted at ACM MM 2026
☆ AsySplat: Efficient Asymmetric 3D Gaussian Splatting for Long-Sequence Scene Modeling
Recent generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting models have advanced long-sequence novel view synthesis (NVS), but at the cost of substantial redundant computation. We identify that the redundancy can be mitigated based on two observations: (i) high-precision geometry is not strictly required for high-quality NVS; (ii) appearance learning is generally easier than geometry recovery. Motivated by these insights, we propose an asymmetric architecture that decouples geometry and appearance modeling. The geometry branch processes coarse-grained tokens with most of the parameters for multi-view reconstruction, while the appearance branch operates on fine-grained tokens to capture details using significantly fewer parameters. The two branches interact through bilateral connections, enabling mutual guidance for their respective tasks. This task-aware asymmetry reduces the computational redundancy and allocates the computation more judiciously, thereby increasing parameter efficiency and enabling smaller models to achieve strong performance. On 32-view 960P inputs, our model matches optimization-based methods while delivering nearly 800x speedup, and surpasses the zero-shot performance of state-of-the-art generalizable models with markedly fewer parameters and reduced training/inference overhead, achieving an overall efficiency improvement.
comment: The project page is at https://zhongyingji.github.io/asysplat/
☆ Confidence Scores in Open-Vocabulary Detection Are a Biased Mixture of Scale and Semantics ICPR
Foundation models such as CLIP have enabled open-vocabulary object detectors that generalise to novel categories via vision-language similarity. However, the confidence scores these detectors produce are not reliable localization probability estimates: they conflate visual scale and semantic query specificity with the true detection signal. Through controlled experiments on COCO across three foundation-model-based detectors (GroundingDINO, OWL-ViT, YOLO-World), with the scale-bias finding further replicated on LVIS (1,203 categories) using GroundingDINO, we show that s=cos(v,t) is a biased mixture of two effects. Scale bias (alpha = +0.064, r = 0.579, p = 1.29 x 10^-58) systematically inflates scores for large objects. Semantic bias (beta = -0.705, p = 5.23 x 10^-41) suppresses scores for generic queries. Both biases are structurally inevitable from CLIP's image-level pretraining. Threshold adjustment cannot remove them: oracle per-scale thresholding yields Delta F1 = +0.001 for small objects versus +0.102 for large. A parameter-free temperature scaling correction improves small-object Recall@10 by 19.6% (p < 0.01) without retraining. This comes at a modest, measurable cost to pooled-ranking precision, so the bias is partially, not freely, reversible at inference time. These findings reveal a fundamental limitation of adapting image-level foundation models to region-level detection tasks.
comment: ICPR Workshop 2026 (FMVA)
☆ LoSA-Net: A Localized and Scale-Adaptive Network for Boundary-Sensitive Prediction of Perineural Invasion in 3D MRI IEEE 23
Youngung Han, Hyunsu Go, Kyeonghun Kim, Induk Um, Junga Kim, Jaewon Jung, Woo Kyoung Jeong, Won Jae Lee, Pa Hong, Ken Ying-Kai Liao, Hyuk-Jae Lee, Nam-Joon Kim
Perineural invasion (PNI) is a clinically relevant indicator of tumor aggressiveness and can influence surgical decision-making, motivating interest in reliable preoperative assessment. The subtle MRI features of PNI, however, often resemble nearby anatomy, complicating noninvasive prediction. These fine perineural cues are easily attenuated by routine downsampling or overly global feature aggregation, reducing the effectiveness of conventional volumetric models. We present LoSA-Net, a localized and scale-adaptive architecture for boundary-sensitive PNI prediction in 3D MRI. Talking Neighborhood Attention (TNA) preserves nerve-aligned detail through localized self-attention with head-wise mixing, and Scale-Adaptive Feature Mixing (SAFM) modulates the receptive field using multi-scale depthwise processing. Cross-Scale Refinement and Alignment (CSRA) maintains consistency between semantic context and high-resolution boundaries across stages. In contrast-enhanced MRI scans from 168 patients with cholangiocarcinoma, LoSA-Net achieves an AUC of 0.7567 and outperforms representative convolutional and transformer baselines under matched preprocessing and optimization settings.
comment: Published in the 2026 IEEE 23rd International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI 2026); accepted for oral presentation
☆ Think When It Matters: Conditional VLM Reasoning for Social Navigation with RL Policies
Ali Ahmadi, Hamed Rahimi, Adrien Jacquet Cretides, Marie Samson, Mahdi Khoramshahi, Mohamed Chetouani
As mobile robots become more integrated into everyday human environments, social robot navigation is becoming essential for ensuring human comfort, safety, and trust. While reinforcement learning (RL) navigation policies provide the fast inference and reactive behavior necessary for real-time deployment, they still lack flexible semantic reasoning capabilities and often fail to generalize to complex social scenarios. Recent approaches have increasingly turned to vision-language models (VLMs) in place of RL policies to improve semantic and social reasoning in robot navigation. Nevertheless, their high computational cost and slow inference remain major barriers to real-time deployment. To overcome these limitations, we introduce HUMA (Hybrid Understanding for Multi-modal social Navigation), a hybrid architecture that dynamically balances the computational efficiency of RL policies with the deep semantic understanding of VLMs. Our approach uses a reactive RL policy to handle low-density, routine navigation tasks, while conditioning it on a post-trained high-level VLM when a human enters sensitive situations, such as the robot's proximity zone. We evaluate HUMA on the Social-MP3D and Social-HM3D benchmarks, where it achieves task success improvements of 20% and 3%, respectively, while significantly reducing personal space violations and human collisions against state-of-the-art baselines. Extensive ablation studies validate each architectural component, and real-world deployment on the Mirokaï mobile robot further demonstrates the practical viability of our approach.
comment: CoRL 2026 submission. 15 pages, 7 figures
☆ TreeSoc: Tree-Structured Dynamic Reasoning and Tool Synergy for Soccer Video Understanding
Automated understanding of complex soccer scenarios from video remains a significant challenge for contemporary vision-language models (VLMs), which suffer from shallow cross-modal alignment and exhibit fundamental limitations in multi-step reasoning and coordinated tool integration. We present TreeSoc, a structured reasoning framework that reformulates soccer video question answering as a hierarchical search problem rather than a single-pass prediction. Specifically, TreeSoc employs a dynamic depth-first search (DFS) mechanism that decomposes complex queries into sequentially ordered sub-tasks, enabling iterative reasoning refinement through explicit intermediate states. This tree-structured decomposition naturally supports adaptive tool routing, wherein domain-specific modules are selectively activated and their outputs incorporated at each reasoning node to produce contextually grounded predictions. On SoccerBench, TreeSoc achieves state-of-the-art performance, with accuracies of 85.2%, 87.4%, and 82.2% on TextQA, ImageQA, and VideoQA, respectively. Additionally, TreeSoc further demonstrates strong cross-domain generalization, attaining 74.16% accuracy on NExT-QA. These results establish structured, tool-augmented tree reasoning as an effective paradigm for robust video understanding. Code is available at: https://github.com/thanhnhan29/TreeSoc.
comment: Accepted to ICMV 2026
☆ MMA-Former: Multi-Window Mixture-of-Head Attention Transformer for Adaptive PNI Prediction in 3D MRI IEEE 23
Youngung Han, Induk Um, Kyeonghun Kim, Junga Kim, Hyunsu Go, Jaewon Jung, Woo Kyoung Jeong, Won Jae Lee, Pa Hong, Ken Ying-Kai Liao, Hyuk-Jae Lee, Nam-Joon Kim
Perineural invasion (PNI) is a critical prognostic factor in cholangiocarcinoma. Non-invasive prediction from 3D MRI is challenging, demanding models that efficiently capture both fine-grained details and global context. We propose the Multi-window Mixture-of-Head Attention Transformer (MMA-Former), a novel end-to-end 3D architecture featuring a Coarse-Fine Transformer (CFT) structure for parallel multi-scale feature extraction. We advance this structure by integrating a novel Window-Specific Mixture-of-Head attention (WS-MoH) mechanism. Unlike standard Multi-Head Self Attention (MSA), WS-MoH generates a representation for each 3D window and dynamically routes the entire window to specialized or common attention heads. This enables spatially adaptive feature extraction tailored to the local context of each window, enhancing specialization and reducing redundancy without increasing parameters. Evaluated on a retrospective dataset of 168 T1-weighted MRI scans, MMA-Former achieved an AUC of 0.752, outperforming other 3D architectures, including the best CNN (AUC of 0.708) and Transformer baselines (AUC of 0.681).
comment: Published in the 2026 IEEE 23rd International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI 2026); accepted for oral presentation
☆ MED-DSLC: Multi-Expert-Domain Classification via Domain Supervision and Logit Calibration ECCV 2026
Vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP enable zero-shot classification by comparing image features with text prompts in a shared embedding space. A fundamental property underlying this capability is the global comparability of logits across arbitrary candidate classes. However, VLMs are often adapted to fine-grained domains using techniques such as LoRA. While this improves in-domain accuracy, out-of-domain accuracy degrades. This leads to a highly fragmented model ecosystem, with thousands of specialized models. Multi-Expert-Domain classification seeks to address this problem, by merging LoRAs trained independently on specialized domains. However, due to the independent training, the various domain experts no longer produce globally calibrated logits. As a result, when evaluating over the union of multiple domain-specific class sets, heterogeneous logit scales induce cross-domain interference and artificially high confidence for out-of-domain classes, inducing prediction errors. In this work, we identify domain supervision and cross-domain logit miscalibration as the key issue to scalable multi-domain zero-shot recognition. We propose MED-DSLC, combining domain supervised training and domain-wise logit scaling, to explicitly restore global logit comparability. MED-DSLC is a lightweight solution for MED classification, which is shown to preserve within-domain discrimination while reducing cross-domain logit interference with minimal data. Extensive experiments across diverse fine-grained benchmarks demonstrate that it substantially improves mean accuracy (+15\%), cross-domain robustness, and scalability in the size of MED classification problem. Our results show that restoring output-level calibration is essential under highly data imbalanced settings for achieving a truly zero-shot VLM under multi-domain specialization.
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026. Code is available at https://github.com/Leonard-Zeng/MED-DSLC
☆ EquiFusion: Kinematics-Agnostic Human Motion Prediction via Equivariant Latent Diffusion ECCV 2026
Existing Stochastic 3D Human Motion Prediction models are fundamentally constrained by hard-coding the skeleton kinematics, severely limiting generalization, preventing cross-dataset training, and requiring complex data retargeting. We introduce EquiFusion, the first kinematics-agnostic model to solve this bottleneck, implementing a latent diffusion model with a permutation equivariant architecture. EquiFusion treats the kinematics' connectivity as an explicit input parameter, ensuring its internal computations are inherently agnostic to joint ordering and graph structure. This novel design enables truly cross-dataset generalization to unseen kinematics and unlocks novel zero-shot directions, such as motion prediction from partial or occluded observations and targeted limb generation. EquiFusion achieves state-of-the-art results on major benchmarks, being up to 75% more compact than previous kinematics-specific methods, while achieving faster training and inference. EquiFusion thus establishes a new, flexible standard for robust human motion prediction. Model and training code are available at https://ceveloper.github.io/publications/equifusion/.
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026. Visit our webpage at https://ceveloper.github.io/publications/equifusion/
♻ ☆ Are DeepFakes Realistic Enough? Exploring Semantic Mismatch as a Novel Challenge
Current DeepFake detection scenarios are mostly binary, yet data manipulation can vary across audio, video, or both, whose variability is not captured in binary settings. Four-class audio-visual formulations address this by discriminating manipulation type, but introduce an unresolved problem: models may rely solely on data source integrity to detect DeepFakes without evaluating their semantic consistency. If the DeepFake origin is not in the data source but in its content, can semantic mismatch be assessed by the state-of-the-art? This paper proposes a new evaluation setup, extending the four-class formulation by explicitly modeling semantic-level inconsistency between authentic modalities with the introduction of a new class: Real Audio-Real Video with Semantic Mismatch RARV-SMM. We assess the robustness of state-of-the-art models in this new realistic DeepFake setting, using the FakeAVCeleb dataset, highlighting the limitations of existing approaches when faced with semantic mismatch data. We further introduce three RARV-SMM variants that expose distinct architectural vulnerabilities as audio-visual divergence increases. We also propose a semantic reinforcement strategy that incorporates the semantic mismatch class and ImageBind embeddings to probe whether an explicit semantic coherence signal improves detection across architectures with different detection strategies, on FakeAVCeleb and LAV-DF, contributing toward more realistic DeepFake detectors. The source code available at https://github.com/sharayu-20/deepfake-semantic-mismatch.
comment: Added missing FGI results in semantic reinforcement eval (Table 9), showing an architecture-dependent effect. Abstract, contributions, and conclusion revised accordingly. Clarified RARV-SMM/semantic mismatch definition. Corrected SOTA comparison claim (Sec. 4.7). Added code link
♻ ☆ GTASA: Ground Truth Annotations for Spatiotemporal Analysis, Evaluation and Training of Video Models
Game engines hold what video models struggle to learn: a complete, explicit world state behind every frame. We turn one into a data instrument. GEST-Engine, our production-grade open-source system, deterministically executes Graphs of Events in Space and Time (GESTs), whether procedurally generated or derived from text, into videos of synchronized multi-actor scenarios, recording ground truth as it renders: 3D entity and camera state, pairwise spatial relations, event-to-frame mappings, instance segmentation, and long descriptions, at zero marginal annotation cost. With it we release GTASA, a 938-video sample of what the system can generate at arbitrary scale, carrying, to our knowledge, the densest spatial-relation coverage of any video dataset: a complete entity-pair relation graph at every frame, ~84x denser than the state of the art, frame-for-frame. We validate GTASA both qualitatively, through human evaluation of physical validity and semantic alignment where frontier neural generators, given the same prompts, largely fail, and quantitatively, with GTASA pretraining improving VLM video captioning. Probing six frozen video encoders across 11 spatio-temporal tasks enabled by GTASA's exact 3D ground truth, a previously untestable inter-entity relational probe of frozen video features, reveals that who-is-near-whom barely rises above chance for all of them. We release the engine, the corpus, and the benchmark, making this gap a measurable, trainable target.
♻ ☆ MemoBench: Benchmarking World Modeling in Dynamically Changing Environments
Haoyu Chen, Kaichen Zhou, Hang Hua, Kaile Zhang, Jingwen Qian, Wufei Ma, Haonan Chen, Chunjiang Liu, Yizhou Zhao, Xiaoyuan Wang, Weiyue Li, Alan Yuille, Paul Pu Liang, Yilun Du
Video generation models aspire to simulate dynamic environments, and several benchmarks now evaluate memory consistency across frames. However, most assess consistency only while the target remains in view, and the few that force objects out of view evaluate static scenes where nothing changes during occlusion. To bridge this gap, we introduce MemoBench, a diagnostic benchmark built around the disappear-and-reappear paradigm in dynamically changing environments: a target object undergoes a physical process, disappears from view, and must be correctly recovered in its updated state upon reappearance. We curate 360 ground-truth clips spanning synthetic and real-world scenes, and design an evaluation suite combining automated metrics with VQA-based assessment across four diagnostic pillars. Evaluation of eight state-of-the-art models reveals key insights and open challenges regarding memory consistency under the disappear-and-reappear paradigm.
♻ ☆ Toward a Scientific Discovery Engine for Weather and Climate Data: A Visual Analytics Workbench for Embedding-Based Exploration
Nihanth W. Cherukuru, Matt Rehme, Kirsten J. Mayer, David John Gagne, John Schreck, John Clyne, Charlie Becker
Earth system science is producing increasingly large, high-dimensional datasets from both physics-based and AI-driven models. While embedding-based representations make these data searchable and serve as foundational building blocks for AI-driven discovery engines, nearest neighbors in latent spaces are not automatically scientifically meaningful. They may reflect real meteorological structures, or simply artifacts of preprocessing, geography, or model bias. Researchers therefore need visual tools to inspect latent space organization, trace search results back to physical evidence, and evaluate candidate representations against one another.
We present an open source visual analytics workbench designed to support this provenance-aware scientific retrieval workflow. The system links distinct embedding experiments to shared source data, metadata, spatial contexts, and model configurations. It enables interactive retrieval strategy design by allowing users to issue image-level and localized patch-level queries, apply multi-constraint filters, and inspect analogs through familiar meteorological views. This facilitates a discovery loop where scientists characterize a phenomenon in a well-understood dataset and use its latent signature to probe larger archives. While we demonstrate the workbench through a tropical cyclone retrieval scenario using a vision foundation model (DINOv3) on ERA5 data, the framework is model-agnostic and designed to integrate with other embedding architectures in the future. Finally, we evaluate its out-of-core retrieval backend, demonstrating that interactive visual search over tens of millions of embeddings is highly scalable on commodity hardware.
comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, Preprint
♻ ☆ INFANiTE: Implicit Neural representation for high-resolution Fetal brain spatio-temporal Atlas learNing from clinical Thick-slicE MRI
Xiaotian Hu, Mingxuan Liu, Hongjia Yang, Juncheng Zhu, Yijin Li, Yifei Chen, Haoxiang Li, Tongxi Song, Zihan Li, Yingqi Hao, Ziyu Li, Yujin Zhang, Gang Ning, Yi Liao, Haibo Qu, Qiyuan Tian
Spatio-temporal fetal brain atlases are important for characterizing normative neurodevelopment and identifying congenital anomalies. However, existing atlas construction pipelines necessitate days for slice-to-volume reconstruction (SVR) to generate high-resolution 3D brain volumes and several additional days for iterative volume registration, thereby rendering atlas construction from large-scale cohorts prohibitively impractical. We address these limitations with INFANiTE, an Implicit Neural Representation (INR) framework for high-resolution Fetal brain spatio-temporal Atlas learNing from clinical Thick-slicE MRI scans, bypassing both the costly SVR and the iterative non-rigid registration steps entirely, thereby substantially accelerating atlas construction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that INFANiTE outperforms existing baselines in subject consistency, reference fidelity, intrinsic quality and biological plausibility, even under challenging sparse-data settings. Additionally, INFANiTE reduces the end-to-end processing time (i.e., from raw scans to the final atlas) from days to hours compared to the traditional 3D volume-based pipeline (e.g., SyGN), facilitating large-scale population-level fetal brain analysis. Our code is publicly available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/INFANiTE-5D74
♻ ☆ Direct Object-Level Reconstruction via Probabilistic Gaussian Splatting
Object-level 3D reconstruction play important roles across domains such as cultural heritage digitization, industrial manufacturing, and virtual reality. However, existing Gaussian Splatting-based approaches generally rely on full-scene reconstruction, in which substantial redundant background information is introduced, leading to increased computational and storage overhead. To address this limitation, we propose an efficient single-object 3D reconstruction method based on 2D Gaussian Splatting. By directly integrating foreground-background probability cues into Gaussian primitives and dynamically pruning low-probability Gaussians during training, the proposed method fundamentally focuses on an object of interest and improves the memory and computational efficiency. Our pipeline leverages probability masks generated by YOLO and SAM to supervise probabilistic Gaussian attributes, replacing binary masks with continuous probability values to mitigate boundary ambiguity. Additionally, we propose a dual-stage filtering strategy for training's startup to suppress background Gaussians. And, during training, rendered probability masks are conversely employed to refine supervision and enhance boundary consistency across views. Experiments conducted on the MIP-360, T&T, and NVOS datasets demonstrate that our method exhibits strong self-correction capability in the presence of mask errors and achieves reconstruction quality comparable to standard 3DGS approaches, while requiring only approximately 1/10 of their Gaussian amount. These results validate the efficiency and robustness of our method for single-object reconstruction and highlight its potential for applications requiring both high fidelity and computational efficiency.
♻ ☆ PivotMerge: Bridging Heterogeneous Multimodal Pre-training via Post-Alignment Model Merging
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) rely on multimodal pre-training over diverse data sources, where different datasets often induce complementary cross-modal alignment capabilities. Model merging provides a cost-effective mechanism for integrating multiple expert MLLMs with complementary strengths into a unified model. However, existing model merging research mainly focuses on post-finetuning scenarios, leaving the pre-training stage largely unexplored. We argue that the core of MLLM pre-training lies in establishing effective cross-modal alignment, which bridges visual and textual representations into a unified semantic space. Motivated by this insight, we introduce the post-alignment merging task, which aims to integrate cross-modal alignment capabilities learned from heterogeneous multimodal pre-training. This setting introduces two key challenges: cross-domain parameter interference, where parameter updates learned from different data distributions conflict during merging, and layer-wise alignment contribution disparity, where different layers and projectors contribute unevenly to cross-modal alignment. To address them, we propose \textbf{PivotMerge}, a post-alignment merging framework for cross-modal projectors. PivotMerge incorporates two key components: Shared-space Decomposition and Filtering, which disentangles shared alignment patterns from domain-specific variations and suppresses conflicting directions, and Alignment-guided Layer-wise Merging, which assigns layer-specific merging weights based on differing alignment contributions. We construct systematic CC12M-based post-alignment merging scenarios for evaluation. Extensive experiments on multiple multimodal benchmarks show that PivotMerge consistently outperforms existing baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness and generalization ability.
♻ ☆ VIBE: Annotation-Free Video-to-Text Information Bottleneck Evaluation for TL;DR
Many decision-making tasks, where both accuracy and efficiency matter, still require human supervision. For example, tasks like traffic officers reviewing hour-long dashcam footage or researchers screening conference videos can benefit from concise summaries that reduce cognitive load and save time. Yet current vision-language models (VLMs) often produce verbose, redundant outputs that hinder task performance. Existing video caption evaluation depends on costly human annotations and overlooks the summaries' utility in downstream tasks. We address these gaps with Video-to-text Information Bottleneck Evaluation (VIBE), an annotation-free method that scores VLM outputs using two metrics: grounding (how well the summary aligns with visual content) and utility (how informative it is for the task). VIBE selects from randomly sampled VLM outputs by ranking them according to the two scores to support effective human decision-making. Human studies on LearningPaper24, SUTD-TrafficQA, and LongVideoBench show that summaries selected by VIBE consistently improve performance-boosting task accuracy by up to 61.23% and reducing response time by 75.77% compared to naive VLM summaries or raw video.
♻ ☆ KAMERA: Enhancing Aerial Surveys of Ice-associated Seals in Arctic Environments
Adam Romlein, Benjamin X. Hou, Yuval Boss, Cynthia L. Christman, Stacie Koslovsky, Erin E. Moreland, Jason Parham, Anthony Hoogs
We introduce KAMERA: a comprehensive system for multi-camera, multi-spectral synchronization and real-time detection of seals and polar bears. Utilized in aerial surveys for ice-associated seals in the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort seas around Alaska, KAMERA provides up to an 80% reduction in dataset processing time over previous methods. Our rigorous calibration and hardware synchronization enable using multiple spectra for object detection. All collected data are annotated with metadata so they can be easily referenced later. All imagery and animal detections from a survey are mapped onto a world plane for accurate surveyed area estimates and quick assessment of survey results. We hope KAMERA will inspire other mapping and detection efforts in the scientific community, with all software, models, and schematics fully open-sourced.
comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables. Code: https://github.com/Kitware/kamera
♻ ☆ SplatReasoner: Enhancing Embodied Reasoning and Grounding by Novel View Synthesis ECCV 2026
Kim Yu-Ji, Dahye Lee, Kim Jun-Seong, Nam Hyeon-Woo, GeonU Kim, Yongjin Kwon, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Jaesung Choe, Tae-Hyun Oh
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities over images and videos, yet their application to embodied scene understanding often constrained by the fixed viewpoints stored in episodic RGB-D memories. These observations may fail to capture query-relevant evidence due to occlusions, object truncation, restricted fields of view, or suboptimal view composition. We present SplatReasoner, a framework that introduces novel view synthesis into the VLM reasoning process by leveraging 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Given a user query about a 3D scene, SplatReasoner retrieves relevant observations and synthesizes query-conditioned viewpoints that reveal the visual evidence needed to answer the query and ground the referred entities in 3D. Experiments show that query-conditioned novel view synthesis improves both embodied reasoning and 3D grounding over fixed-view memory and language-embedded 3DGS baselines.
comment: Accepted at ECCV 2026. Project page: https://splatreasoner.github.io/
♻ ☆ MoLingo: Motion-Language Alignment for Text-to-Human Motion Generation CVPR 2026
Yannan He, Garvita Tiwari, Xiaohan Zhang, Pankaj Bora, Tolga Birdal, Jan Eric Lenssen, Gerard Pons-Moll
We introduce MoLingo, a text-to-motion (T2M) model that generates realistic, lifelike human motion by denoising in a continuous latent space. Recent works perform latent space diffusion, either on the whole latent at once or auto-regressively over multiple latents. In this paper, we study how to make diffusion on continuous motion latents work best. We focus on two questions: (1) how to build a semantically aligned latent space so diffusion becomes more effective, and (2) how to best inject text conditioning so the motion follows the description closely. We propose a semantic-aligned motion encoder trained with frame-level text labels so that latents with similar text meaning stay close, which makes the latent space more diffusion-friendly. We also compare single-token conditioning with a multi-token cross-attention scheme and find that cross-attention gives better motion realism and text-motion alignment. With semantically aligned latents, auto-regressive generation, and cross-attention text conditioning, our model sets a new state of the art in human motion generation on standard metrics and in a user study. We will release our code and models for further research and downstream usage.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026. Project page: https://hynann.github.io/molingo/MoLingo.html. Title type fixed, content unchanged
♻ ☆ Youtu-Parsing: Perception, Structuring and Recognition via High-Parallelism Decoding
Haoyu Cao, Kun Yin, Yunfei Wu, Bing Liu, Zhongpeng Cai, Xiaotian Li, Huang Chen, Xin Li, Yinsong Liu, Deqiang Jiang, Xing Sun, Yunsheng Wu, Qianyu Li, Antai Guo, Yanzhen Liao, Yanqiu Qu, Haodong Lin, Chengxu He, Shuangyin Liu
This paper presents Youtu-Parsing, an efficient and versatile document parsing model designed for high-performance content extraction. The architecture employs a native Vision Transformer (ViT) featuring a dynamic-resolution visual encoder to extract shared document features, coupled with a prompt-guided Youtu-LLM-2B language model for layout analysis and region-prompted decoding. Leveraging this decoupled and feature-reusable framework, we introduce a high-parallelism decoding strategy comprising two core components: token parallelism and query parallelism. The token parallelism strategy concurrently generates up to 64 candidate tokens per inference step, which are subsequently validated through a verification mechanism. This approach yields a 5--11x speedup over traditional autoregressive decoding and is particularly well-suited for highly structured scenarios, such as table recognition. To further exploit the advantages of region-prompted decoding, the query parallelism strategy enables simultaneous content prediction for multiple bounding boxes (up to five), providing an additional 2x acceleration while maintaining output quality equivalent to standard decoding. Youtu-Parsing encompasses a diverse range of document elements, including text, formulas, tables, charts, seals, and hierarchical structures. Furthermore, the model exhibits strong robustness when handling rare characters, multilingual text, and handwritten content. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Youtu-Parsing achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both the OmniDocBench and olmOCR-bench benchmarks. Overall, Youtu-Parsing demonstrates significant experimental value and practical utility for large-scale document intelligence applications.
♻ ☆ 4DR360: State Reasoning for Joint 3D Detection and Occupancy Prediction in 4D Radar-Camera Full-Scene Perception
Reliable autonomous driving requires full-scene perception that couples foreground objects with dense semantic layout. Recently, 4D millimeter-wave radar has emerged as a robust and affordable sensor, yet its sparse returns make radar-camera fusion necessary for comprehensive scene understanding. Existing radar-camera methods mainly optimize detection, while dual-task systems usually decode boxes and occupancy with limited interaction. To address this gap and advance radar-based multi-task learning, we propose \method, a 4D radar-camera framework for 360$^\circ$ full-scene perception, which models semantic occupancy as a persistent scene state rather than a terminal output. \method{} follows a cross-modal state reasoning paradigm, where the occupancy state is modeled and propagated through stages for coarse-to-fine feature aggregation. Specifically, State-guided BEV Enhancement (SBE) strengthens intra-frame BEV representation, while Doppler-guided Temporal Fusion (DTF) preserves state evidence over longer temporal horizons. Beyond the model, we further extend ManTruckScenes with satellite-map-based generated occupancy labels and pair it with OmniHD-Scenes in a unified cross-dataset detection-and-occupancy protocol. The resulting experiments cover accuracy, robustness, ablation, and efficiency under one radar-camera multi-task evaluation framework. Code and labels will be released upon acceptance.
comment: 5 pages, 8 figures
♻ ☆ Sat2RealCity: Geometry-Aware and Appearance-Controllable 3D Urban Generation from Satellite Imagery
3D urban generation from satellite imagery is an important task for scalable digital twins and real-world simulation environments. Existing approaches primarily rely on scene-level generation paradigms, which often require large-scale 3D city assets and struggle with controllability, geographic alignment, and realistic appearance grounding in real-world urban environments. To address these limitations, we present Sat2RealCity, a grounded urban generation framework that leverages object-level 3D generative priors for scalable city synthesis from satellite imagery. Our framework decomposes cities into geographically grounded building entities, enabling the reuse of pretrained object-level 3D generative priors while preserving real-world spatial structures. Supported by our constructed BuildVerse3D dataset, (1) we introduce an OpenStreetMap (OSM)-guided spatial grounding strategy to inject geospatial constraints into the 3D generation process; (2) we design an appearance-guided controllable generation mechanism for realistic architectural appearance and regional style consistency; and (3) we construct an MLLM-powered semantic pipeline for regional appearance understanding and semantic-aware appearance synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Sat2RealCity achieves strong geographic alignment, regional stylistic consistency, and plausible urban asset synthesis compared with existing urban generation and 3D asset generation approaches.
♻ ☆ Debiasing Central Fixation Confounds Reveals a Peripheral "Sweet Spot" for Human-like Scanpaths in Hard-Attention Vision
Human eye movements in visual recognition reflect a balance between foveal sampling and peripheral context. Task-driven hard-attention models for vision are often evaluated by how well their scanpaths match human gaze. However, common scanpath metrics can be strongly confounded by dataset-specific center bias, especially on object-centric datasets. Using Gaze-CIFAR-10, we show that a trivial center-fixation baseline achieves surprisingly strong scanpath scores, approaching many learned policies. This makes standard metrics optimistic and blurs the distinction between genuine behavioral alignment and mere central tendency. We then analyze a hard-attention classifier under constrained vision by sweeping foveal patch size and peripheral context, revealing a peripheral sweet spot: only a narrow range of sensory constraints yields scanpaths that are simultaneously (i) above the center baseline after debiasing and (ii) temporally human-like in movement statistics. To address center bias, we propose GCS (Gaze Consistency Score), a center-debiased composite metric augmented with movement similarity. GCS uncovers a robust sweet spot at medium patch size with both foveal and peripheral vision, that is not obvious from raw scanpath metrics or accuracy alone, and also highlights a "shortcut regime" when the field-of-view becomes too large. We discuss implications for evaluating active perception on object-centric datasets and for designing gaze benchmarks that better separate behavioral alignment from center bias.
♻ ☆ Reliable Mislabel Detection for Video Capsule Endoscopy Data IEEE
Julia Werner, Julius Oexle, Oliver Bause, Maxime Le Floch, Franz Brinkmann, Hannah Tolle, Jochen Hampe, Oliver Bringmann
The classification performance of deep neural networks relies strongly on access to large, accurately annotated datasets. In medical imaging, however, obtaining such datasets is particularly challenging since annotations must be provided by specialized physicians, which severely limits the pool of annotators. Furthermore, class boundaries can often be ambiguous or difficult to define which further complicates machine learning-based classification. In this paper, we want to address this problem and introduce a framework for mislabel detection in medical datasets. This is validated on the two largest, publicly available datasets for Video Capsule Endoscopy, an important imaging procedure for examining the gastrointestinal tract based on a video stream of lowresolution images. In addition, potentially mislabeled samples identified by our pipeline were reviewed and re-annotated by three experienced gastroenterologists. Our results show that the proposed framework successfully detects incorrectly labeled data and results in an improved anomaly detection performance after cleaning the datasets compared to current baselines.
comment: Accepted at IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC) 2026. Code on Github: https://github.com/juliawerner/vce-noise-identification
♻ ☆ Emotion Recognition in Signers
Recognition of signers' emotions suffers from one theoretical challenge and one practical challenge, namely, the overlap between grammatical and affective facial expressions and the scarcity of data for model training. This paper addresses these two challenges in a cross-lingual setting using our eJSL dataset, a new benchmark dataset for emotion recognition in Japanese Sign Language signers, and BOBSL, a large British Sign Language dataset with subtitles. In eJSL, two signers expressed 78 distinct utterances with each of seven different emotional states, resulting in 1,092 video clips. We empirically demonstrate that 1) textual emotion recognition in spoken language mitigates data scarcity in sign language, 2) temporal segment selection has a significant impact, and 3) incorporating hand motion enhances emotion recognition in signers. Finally we establish a stronger baseline than spoken language LLMs.
♻ ☆ MAVIN: Multi-Shot Audio-Visual Generation with Customized Narrative Control ECCV 2026
Kaiqi Liu, Yunyao Mao, Ziqi Cai, Zheng Geng, Jing Wang, Qiulin Wang, Xintao Wang, Pengfei Wan, Kun Gai, Shuchen Weng, Boxin Shi
While recent generative models produce high-fidelity videos, they struggle with the complex narrative control required for coherent multi-shot audio-visual generation. Existing methods suffer from temporal misalignment, limited controllability, and incomplete scripting. In this paper, we propose MAVIN, the first framework for multi-shot audio-visual generation with customized narrative control. To resolve temporal misalignment, we propose boundary-aware attention, which leverages hierarchical captions and boundary-aware token routing to render audio-visual elements within their respective temporal boundaries. To improve the controllability for multi-subject scenarios, we propose ID-aware propagation, utilizing identity embeddings and an identity-aware mask to bind specific identities to consistent visual appearances and vocal timbres. To provide comprehensive audio-visual narratives, we present a multi-agent scripting pipeline to transform free-form user inputs into hierarchical captions. Furthermore, we construct MAVINSet, a multi-shot audio-visual dataset for robust training and evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAVIN achieves state-of-the-art performance, opening up a new avenue for integrating generative models into professional filmmaking workflows.
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026
♻ ☆ Is the Geometry Doing the Work? An Operating-Point Audit of Hierarchy in Hyperbolic Vision-Language Models
Whether a hyperbolic representation model uses its geometry cannot be inferred from curvature alone: what matters is the dimensionless operating point $\sqrt{c}ρ$ and whether the radial and cone mechanisms are operational there. We develop necessary-condition diagnostics and audit three published hyperbolic vision-language families -- MERU, HyCoCLIP, and PHyCLIP -- across released checkpoints and matched interventions. All converged checkpoints remain near-Euclidean ($H(u)\approx1$; none reaches $\sqrt{c}ρ>1$), and releasing the curvature floor changes $c$ and norms without leaving this regime or substantially degrading downstream performance. Entailment cones are inactive or saturated, and graded traversal fails under controlled readouts, including the models' native distance metrics. External parent-child ordering shows no shuffle-controlled pair-specific radial signal at quantified sensitivity; the only surviving pair-specific signal, a statistically detectable but small residual on the GRIT box-to-full-caption relation, remains non-operative under the evaluated readouts. Taxonomy correlations show no detectable norm contribution beyond cosine, and coarse-retrieval gains co-vary with box/compositional supervision without establishing an active radial mechanism. Gradient diagnostics expose a low-curvature, wide-cone shortcut in the entailment objective. A closed-form aperture identity places the saturation edge at $\sqrt{c}ρ\le2K$: with the floor released, all trained relation-level parent means lie at or below this edge, leaving the parent cones fully or nearly saturated. Entailment-off runs pass the edge and continue contracting. The shortcut is the dominant accelerator of collapse, not its sole cause. These audited formulations do not show an operative radial/cone mechanism under our diagnostics. We distill the audit into a five-number geometry report for hierarchy claims.
comment: 49 pages, 5 figures, Under review at TMLR
♻ ☆ ClothTransformer: Unified Latent-Space Transformers for Scalable Cloth Simulation
Unified and scalable Transformers have recently achieved remarkable success in modeling diverse phenomena traditionally associated with computer graphics, such as 3D visual effects, rendering processes, and motion in videos. In this work, we take a step further by investigating whether modern Transformer techniques can tackle the challenging task of cloth simulation. To this end, we present ClothTransformer, a framework that reformulates cloth simulation as autoregressive sequence modeling in a learned latent space. Existing neural cloth simulators are largely specialized to single scenarios, intrinsically coupled to the mesh discretization, and lack robust collision handling. Our approach addresses these limitations through three contributions: (1) a unified Transformer architecture that handles diverse scenarios -- body-driven garments, robotic manipulation, and free-fall collisions -- under a single model and achieves approximately $4$--$9{\times}$ lower error than prior state-of-the-art methods across all scenarios; (2) a scalable latent-space formulation that compresses arbitrary-resolution meshes into a fixed-size set of latent tokens, making temporal dynamics computation independent of mesh resolution; and (3) a diverse-scenario high-fidelity penetration-free dataset of ${\sim}$493.4k frames spanning all three settings, which enables a differentiable Continuous Collision Detection (CCD) module to suppress penetration artifacts. Project Page: https://yucrazing.github.io/clothtransformer/
♻ ☆ SalFormer360: a transformer-based saliency estimation model for 360-degree videos
Saliency estimation has received growing attention in recent years due to its importance in a wide range of applications. In the context of 360-degree video, it has been particularly valuable for tasks such as viewport prediction and immersive content optimization. In this paper, we propose SalFormer360, a novel saliency estimation model for 360-degree videos built on a transformer-based architecture. Our approach is based on the combination of an existing encoder architecture, SegFormer, and a custom decoder. The SegFormer model was originally developed for 2D segmentation tasks, and it has been fine-tuned to adapt it to 360-degree content. To further enhance prediction accuracy in our model, we incorporated Viewing Center Bias to reflect user attention in 360-degree environments. Extensive experiments on the three largest benchmark datasets for saliency estimation demonstrate that SalFormer360 outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. In terms of Pearson Correlation Coefficient, our model achieves 8.4% higher performance on Sport360, 2.5% on PVS-HM, and 18.6% on VR-EyeTracking compared to previous state-of-the-art.
♻ ☆ Zero-Shot Paragraph-level Handwriting Imitation with Latent Diffusion Models
Martin Mayr, Marcel Dreier, Florian Kordon, Mathias Seuret, Jochen Zöllner, Fei Wu, Andreas Maier, Vincent Christlein
The imitation of cursive handwriting is mainly limited to generating handwritten words or lines. Multiple synthetic outputs must be stitched together to create paragraphs or whole pages, whereby consistency and layout information are lost. To close this gap, we propose a method for imitating handwriting at the paragraph level that also works for unseen writing styles. Therefore, we introduce a modified latent diffusion model that enriches the encoder-decoder mechanism with specialized loss functions that explicitly preserve the style and content. We enhance the attention mechanism of the diffusion model with adaptive 2D positional encoding and the conditioning mechanism to work with two modalities simultaneously: a style image and the target text. This significantly improves the realism of the generated handwriting. We set a new benchmark in our comprehensive evaluation, achieving 61 % mAP and 56 % top-1 accuracy in style preservation, significantly outperforming the previous best method (37 % mAP, 30 % top-1). We are making our code publicly available for reproducibility, supporting research in this area and research into potential countermeasures: https://github.com/M4rt1nM4yr/paragraph_handwriting_imitation_ldm
♻ ☆ RealityBridge: Bridging Editable 3D Gaussian Splatting Driving Simulations and Real-World Videos
Long-tail hazardous scenarios are essential for safety-oriented autonomous driving, yet they are difficult to collect and reproduce at scale. Editable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) simulation offers a promising alternative by reconstructing real driving scenes and supporting controllable scene editing. However, edited 3DGS-rendered videos still suffer from a significant Sim-to-Real gap, including rendering artifacts, degraded foreground assets, inconsistent illumination, and temporal flickering. Existing restoration and video generation methods are insufficient for this task, as they often fail to jointly repair 3DGS-specific artifacts, improve visual realism, and ensure temporal consistency. To fill this gap, we propose RealityBridge, a structure-preserving and asset-aware Sim-to-Real framework for edited 3DGS driving videos. RealityBridge uses multimodal controls, including rendered videos, foreground masks, edge maps, and semantic masks, together with a lightweight GateNet for adaptive condition allocation across backbone layers. We further construct targeted training data and introduce autoregressive long-video training with reward-guided post-training to improve restoration quality, temporal stability, and hallucination suppression. Extensive experiments on internal and public driving datasets show that RealityBridge outperforms existing methods in artifact removal, illumination harmonization, and long-sequence temporal consistency.
♻ ☆ Wan-Dancer: A Hierarchical Framework for Minute-scale Coherent Music-to-Dance Generation
Generating long-duration, high-definition, and rhythmically synchronized dance videos directly from music remains a significant challenge, primarily due to the temporal constraints of current diffusion models, which typically fail beyond 20 seconds. Existing approaches, whether they rely on intermediate 3D skeletons or on end-to-end video synthesis, suffer from temporal drift, identity inconsistency, and repetitive motion patterns when extended to longer horizons. To address these limitations, we propose a novel hierarchical framework for minute-scale coherent music-to-dance generation. Our method decouples the process into global keyframe planning and local temporal refinement, leveraging full-track musical context to ensure long-range coherence. Key innovations include dynamic frame rate adaptation via time-mapped RoPE embeddings for precise alignment, an optical-flow-based loss function to enhance motion continuity, and motion-speed control to preserve high-fidelity details during rapid movements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework surpasses the conventional duration barrier, generating stable, 720p/30fps videos exceeding one minute with superior temporal stability. Furthermore, the model exhibits robust versatility across five distinct dance genres, conditioned on both audio and textual prompts, establishing a new state-of-the-art in coherent, long-form dance video synthesis.
comment: 17 pages, 13 figures, project: https://humanaigc.github.io/wan-dancer-project/
♻ ☆ Event Burst Trigger: An Availability Backdoor Attack on Event-Based SNN Object Detection DSN 2026
Event-based vision and spiking neural networks (SNNs) are increasingly adopted for edge intelligence under strict latency and energy constraints. However, the vulnerability of event-based SNN object detection models to availability backdoor attacks remains insufficiently studied. This paper presents Event Burst Trigger (EBT), an availability backdoor attack targeting SNN-based object detection models. EBT injects carefully crafted event-based triggers into the training data, which induce temporally concentrated event streams during inference. These burst-like activations increase the number of phantom (i.e., spurious) object candidates, and consequently inflate the computational cost of the post-processing stage, particularly Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS). We evaluate EBT on SpikeYOLO, the state-of-the-art SNN-based object detector, under a poison-only threat model that does not require modifications to the model architecture, loss function, or inference pipeline. Experimental results show that while detection accuracy remains largely preserved, with mAP@0.5 decreasing by less than 0.099, the latency of the NMS stage increases by up to 38%. This indicates that NMS can become a dominant availability bottleneck in event-based SNN object detection. Experiments on an edge platform further show that the proposed attack elevates baseline resource utilization and reduces scheduling slack without inducing conspicuous peaks in resource usage. In addition, STRIP-based backdoor detection fails to reliably distinguish the proposed attack from benign inputs. These results characterize a previously underexplored availability backdoor threat in event-based SNN object detection systems.
comment: The 56th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2026)
♻ ☆ GeoWorld: Providing Full-frame Geometry Features to Facilitate 3D Scene Generation
Yuhao Wan, Lijuan Liu, Jingzhi Zhou, Zihan Zhou, Xuying Zhang, Dongbo Zhang, Shaohui Jiao, Qibin Hou, Ming-Ming Cheng
Previous works that leverage video models for image-to-3D scene generation often suffer from geometric distortions and blurry content. Using video generation models to implicitly maintain geometric consistency according to a single-frame input is ineffective. In this paper, we present a two-stage method, named $\textbf{GeoWorld}$, that renovates the image-to-3D scene generation pipeline by providing full-frame geometry features. The first-stage video generation model, followed by a multi-view geometry model, produces $\textbf{full-frame}$ geometry features, which are then used as a mental draft of geometric conditions to aid the second-stage video-generation model. A geometric loss is proposed to impose real-world geometric constraints, and a geometry adaptation module is introduced to ensure the effective utilization of geometry features. Thanks to full-frame geometric modeling, the two smaller video models in our two-stage method can generate higher-fidelity 3D scenes than SOTA methods, while being even faster, e.g. 7.5$\times$ faster than Hunyuan-Voyager. Project page: https://peaes.github.io/GeoWorld.
♻ ☆ LiveEdit: Towards Real-Time Diffusion-Based Streaming Video Editing ECCV 2026
Streaming video editing has made rapid progress, yet practical deployment is still limited by two core issues: maintaining stable backgrounds and non-edited regions over time, and achieving the low latency required for real-time interactive scenarios. Meanwhile, recent streaming video generation methods are mostly developed for synthesis and cannot be directly applied to editing due to the strict preservation requirement and region-specific control. In this work, we present a novel streaming video editing framework that performs causal, frame-by-frame editing with strong content preservation and real-time responsiveness. Our key design is a three-stage distillation pipeline that progressively transfers editing capability from a powerful bidirectional foundation model to an efficient unidirectional streaming editor, enabling stable long-horizon edits without sacrificing visual fidelity. To further support real-time deployment, we introduce an AR-oriented mask cache that reuses region-related computation across frames, substantially reducing redundant processing and accelerating inference. Finally, we establish a dedicated benchmark for streaming video editing. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art visual quality among streaming baselines while drastically boosting inference speed to 12.66 FPS, making it suitable for interactive and augmented reality applications.
comment: Accepted by ECCV 2026, Project page: https://live-edit.github.io
♻ ☆ Hierarchical and Holistic Open-Vocabulary Functional 3D Scene Graphs for Indoor Spaces
Xinggang Hu, Chenyangguang Zhang, Alexandros Delitzas, Xiangkui Zhang, Marc Pollefeys, Francis Engelmann, Xiangyang Ji
Functional 3D scene graphs offer a versatile and flexible representation for 3D scene understanding and robotic manipulation, defined by object nodes, interactive elements, and functional relationship edges. However, their potential remains underexplored due to the limited coverage of existing benchmarks and the overly straightforward design of previous pipelines, which primarily focus on large-scale furniture but lack of hierarchical structures. Therefore, in this work, we extend the benchmark coverage by introducing dense tabletop objects and explicit multi-level functional relationships. This expansion introduces critical challenges involving small-scale, dense, and similar instances, with lack of visual anchoring in relational reasoning, instance confusion during cross-frame fusion, and attribution uncertainty under dynamic viewpoints. To address these issues, we propose an open-vocabulary pipeline based on 2D visual grounding and 3D graph optimization. Specifically, we anchor fine-grained functional edges from 2D visual evidence, and associate nodes across frames in 3D using multiple cues. Furthermore, edge association is formulated as temporal graph optimization, integrating evidence accumulation, entropy regularization, and temporal smoothing to robustly determine the functional connections of each node. Finally, global hierarchy shaping is performed to recover the hierarchical graph structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can reliably infer functional 3D scene graphs in challenging real-world scenes, thereby further unlocking their potential for practical applications.
♻ ☆ Satellite-Free Training for Drone-View Geo-Localization
Drone-view geo-localization (DVGL) aims to determine the location of drones in GPS-denied environments by retrieving the corresponding geotagged satellite tile from a reference gallery given UAV observations of a location. In many existing formulations, these observations are represented by a single oblique UAV image. In contrast, our satellite-free setting is designed for multi-view UAV sequences, which are used to construct a geometry-normalized UAV-side location representation before cross-view retrieval. Existing approaches rely on satellite imagery during training, either through paired supervision or unsupervised alignment, which limits practical deployment when satellite data are unavailable or restricted. In this paper, we propose a satellite-free training (SFT) framework that converts drone imagery into cross-view compatible representations through three main stages: drone-side 3D scene reconstruction, geometry-based pseudo-orthophoto generation, and satellite-free feature aggregation for retrieval. Specifically, we first reconstruct dense 3D scenes from multi-view drone images using 3D Gaussian splatting and project the reconstructed geometry into pseudo-orthophotos via PCA-guided orthographic projection. This rendering stage operates directly on reconstructed scene geometry without requiring camera parameters at rendering time. Next, we refine these orthophotos with lightweight geometry-guided inpainting to obtain texture-complete drone-side views. Finally, we extract DINOv3 patch features from the generated orthophotos, learn a Fisher vector aggregation model solely from drone data, and reuse it at test time to encode satellite tiles for cross-view retrieval. Experimental results on University-1652 and SUES-200 show that our SFT framework substantially outperforms satellite-free generalization baselines and narrows the gap to methods trained with satellite imagery.
comment: Withdrawn by the authors to allow for substantial revision in light of valuable reviewer feedback. A thoroughly revised version may be submitted in the future
♻ ☆ Do All Visual Tokens Matter Equally? Object-Evidence Preserving Token Merging for Vision-Language Retrieval
Multi-vector vision-language retrieval preserves fine-grained visual evidence through maximum-similarity late interaction, but dense image-side tokens make storage and scoring expensive. Existing token compression methods reduce this cost, yet they can remove or collapse object- and region-level evidence that future query tokens may need to select. We propose SaMer, an object-aware token merging framework that compresses image-side post-projector tokens into $K$ representative centroids while preserving the original late-interaction interface. SaMer uses object annotations only during training as a merge prior to discourage cross-instance mixing, requires no ground-truth bounding boxes or detectors at inference time, and adapts only the shared projection layer with frozen vision and language backbones. With $K=64$, SaMer removes more than 93% of image-side tokens and reduces ColPali storage by $16.09\times$, while improving R@1 on Flickr30K and MSCOCO. These gains arise because object-aware merging preserves query-selectable object evidence that pruning or feature-only pooling can remove or collapse. SaMer also outperforms compression baselines and shows stronger phrase-level grounding, suggesting that efficient multi-vector retrieval depends not only on reducing token count, but on preserving the evidence future query tokens need to select.
♻ ☆ Cascaded Multi-Scale Attention for Enhanced Multi-Scale Feature Extraction and Interaction with Low-Resolution Images
In real-world applications of image recognition tasks, such as human pose estimation, cameras often capture objects, like human bodies, at low resolutions. This scenario poses a challenge in extracting and leveraging multi-scale features, which is often essential for precise inference. To address this challenge, we propose a new attention mechanism, named cascaded multi-scale attention (CMSA), tailored for use in CNN-ViT hybrid architectures, to handle low-resolution inputs effectively. The design of CMSA enables the extraction and seamless integration of features across various scales without necessitating the downsampling of the input image or feature maps. This is achieved through a novel combination of grouped multi-head self-attention mechanisms with window-based local attention and cascaded fusion of multi-scale features over different scales. This architecture allows for the effective handling of features across different scales, enhancing the model's ability to perform tasks such as human pose estimation, head pose estimation, and more with low-resolution images. Our experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in these areas with fewer parameters, showcasing its potential for broad application in real-world scenarios where capturing high-resolution images is not feasible. Code is available at https://github.com/xyongLu/CMSA.
comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, 7 tables
♻ ☆ pyMEAL: A Multi-Encoder Augmentation-Aware-Learning Toolbox for Robust Medical Image Translation
Abdul-mojeed Olabisi Ilyas, Adeleke Maradesa, Jamal Banzi, Jianpan Huang, Henry K. F. Mak, Kannie W. Y. Chan
Medical imaging plays a vital role in clinical diagnosis, yet AI-driven imaging methods remain challenged by patient variability, image artifacts, and limited robustness across acquisition conditions. Although deep learning has advanced medical image analysis, 3D image translation remains hindered by limited training data and variability arising from scanner differences, imaging protocols, and patient motion. Conventional data augmentation typically relies on a single transformation pipeline, overlooking augmentation-specific characteristics and limiting representation learning.
To address these challenges, we propose Multi-Encoder Augmentation-Aware Learning (MEAL), which processes multiple augmentation variants through dedicated encoder pathways. Three feature integration strategies are investigated: encoder concatenation (MEAL-CC), fusion layer (MEAL-FL), and an adaptive controller block (MEAL-BD). By dynamically weighting augmentation-specific features before decoding, MEAL-BD preserves complementary representations and improves robustness to clinically relevant variability.
We evaluate MEAL using CT-to-T1-weighted MRI translation, a clinically relevant task when MRI is unavailable, contraindicated, or delayed. Across predefined and unseen test datasets, MEAL-BD consistently outperformed competing approaches under both geometric perturbations and standard imaging conditions, achieving higher peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM). By prioritizing structural fidelity over perceptual realism, MEAL supports clinical interpretation and downstream image analysis rather than replacing diagnostic MRI, demonstrating that augmentation-aware representation learning improves the robustness and clinical applicability of medical image translation.
comment: 46 pages, 11 figures, 3 tables
♻ ☆ Scene Graph Thinking: Reinforcing Structured Visual Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models ICML 2026
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong perception and reasoning capabilities. However, most existing models focus on isolated objects and neglect structured relationships for efficient target navigation, limiting their performance on visually intensive tasks. To address this challenge, we introduce Scene Graph Thinking (SaGe), a novel paradigm that enables fine-grained and structured visual reasoning through explicit scene-graph representations. Specifically, we first introduce an automated data engine that converts flat image-text corpora into structured scene graphs, where hierarchical entities constitute the nodes and diverse visual relations define the edges. Building upon this, we construct 120K high-quality training data by sampling reasoning traces from scene graphs. Then, two-stage graph-aligned post-training paradigms are introduced, where supervised fine-tuning internalizes MLLMs with structured reasoning, and subsequent reinforcement fine-tuning proposes node-as-proxy graph rewards to consolidate efficient graph exploration. With curated data and graph-aligned training, our approach achieves significant improvements across eight multimodal benchmarks, demonstrating strong effectiveness on fine-grained perception and reasoning tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/zwyang6/SaGe.
comment: ICML 2026
♻ ☆ On the Design of Mixture-of-Experts for Dynamic Gaussian Splatting IEEE
Dynamic scene reconstruction remains challenging due to the heterogeneous and spatially varying nature of real-world motion. Although recent 3D Gaussian Splatting methods have introduced diverse deformation formulations for dynamic novel view synthesis, each method typically relies on a single deformation model within its representation, which limits robustness across diverse dynamic scenarios. In this work, we study a fundamental problem-multi-deformation modeling for dynamic 3D Gaussian representations-under two distinct integration constraints that differ in when and how multiple deformation experts interact during training. From a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) perspective, we view multi-deformation modeling as the problem of combining multiple specialized deformation models within a unified 3D representation. We first introduce Mixture of Deformation Experts (MoDE), which integrates multiple deformation experts directly into the deformable Gaussian Splatting pipeline through joint optimization. In MoDE, experts operate on a shared canonical Gaussian representation, enabling multi-deformation modeling without introducing additional training stages or modifying the original optimization schedule. In contrast, we further present Mixture of Experts for Dynamic Gaussian Splatting (MoE-GS) under a different integration constraint, where deformation experts are optimized independently and combined through a separate routing stage. As a result, expert interaction occurs over non-canonical Gaussian representations after individual optimization. Together, these two approaches provide alternative strategies for multi-deformation modeling, clarifying how integration constraints shape the design and behavior of deformation experts in dynamic 3D Gaussian representations. Our code is available at: https://github.com/cvsp-lab/MoE-GS-studio.
comment: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI, 2026)
♻ ☆ Driving Like Yourself: A Benchmark for Closed-Loop Personalized End-to-End Autonomous Driving ECCV 2026
Xiaoru Dong, Ruiqin Li, Xiao Han, Zhenxuan Wu, Jiamin Wang, Jian Chen, Qi Jiang, SM Yiu, Xinge Zhu, Yuexin Ma
Human driving behavior is inherently diverse, yet most end-to-end autonomous driving (E2E-AD) systems learn a single average driving style, neglecting individual differences. Achieving personalized E2E-AD faces challenges across three levels: limited real-world datasets with individual-level annotations, a lack of quantitative metrics for evaluating personal driving styles, and the absence of algorithms that can learn stylized representations from users' trajectories. To address these gaps, we propose Person2Drive, a comprehensive personalized E2E-AD platform and benchmark. It includes an open-source, flexible data collection system that simulates realistic scenarios to generate scalable, diverse personalized driving datasets; style vector-based evaluation metrics with Maximum Mean Discrepancy and KL divergence to comprehensively quantify individual driving behaviors; and a personalized E2E-AD framework with a style reward model that efficiently adapts E2E models for safe and individualized driving. Crucially, our framework enables plug-and-play personalization by fine-tuning only the trajectory prediction head, preserving the pretrained base model and ensuring safety. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Person2Drive enables fine-grained analysis and effective personalization, while preserving driving performance and success rate even in challenging scenarios.
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026. Camera-ready version
♻ ☆ Sparse Attention for Dense Open-Vocabulary Prediction in CLIP
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) relies on softmax-based self-attention, a strictly positive distribution that assigns probability mass to every pair of tokens-even semantically irrelevant ones. While these dense softmax weights are effective for gathering broad context during pre-training, they spread attention across many low-salience tokens, producing noise that obscures the fine-grained, spatially localized cues required for dense, open-vocabulary prediction. We study an inference-time substitution of the row-wise softmax in the final visual self-attention layers with the $α$-entmax transform, applied across both the standard query-key attention and self-correlation variants. Because entmax applies a data-dependent threshold that maps low scores exactly to zero, it acts as an implicit denoiser, zeroing contextually irrelevant dependencies while redistributing mass onto the most relevant tokens. We evaluate on open-vocabulary tasks-dense semantic segmentation (Pascal VOC, Pascal Context, ADE20K) and fine-grained retrieval (FG-OVD)-and find the gain from attention sparsification is proportional to how much the baseline attention spreads off the target class.
♻ ☆ Let It Be Simple: One-Step Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Models
Generating diverse images from sparse text is hard; generating compact actions from rich observations is easier. From the condition-target view, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) thus aligns with image-to-text, not text-to-image. We formalize this view through the irreducible velocity loss $R_v(t,c)$ of standard flow matching and validate it with a controlled 8-mode toy experiment and image-to-text MNIST task. We then show that high-noise training boosts one-step VLA decoding on standard LIBERO, achieving 95.6% on LIBERO-Long, and remains competitive across LIBERO-Plus, LIBERO-Pro, and real-world robot tasks, while ablations that weaken the condition or expand the horizon predictably erase the one-step gain. These results suggest that whether one-step action generation works in VLA depends not on specialized training, but on the condition-target structure.
comment: 13 pages, 10 figures
♻ ☆ WristMimic: Full-Body Humanoid Control with Wrist-Guided Manipulation ECCV 2026
Retargeting human object interaction demonstrations to physics based simulation requires reproducing not only body motion but also the object motion and contacts that make manipulation succeed. However, position only hand trajectories do not specify the contact forces needed to manipulate objects, and directly tracking them can overconstrain contact rich finger behavior. We introduce WristMimic, a wrist guided whole body control framework that explicitly separates contact free body motion from contact rich hand manipulation. The contact free body and wrist are guided by kinematic pose targets, whereas the fingers are not directly supervised by human hand pose. Instead, they learn grasping and manipulation behaviors from object tracking and contact outcomes. Our key insight is that the wrist is the natural gate between these two regimes. It is largely free from contact and can be tracked kinematically, yet it determines the global hand configuration and places the fingers within reachable grasp affordances. To ensure reliable wrist placement during interaction, we introduce wrist specific reset constraints and reward prioritization. Experiments show that WristMimic matches or surpasses methods using full finger pose supervision while enabling finger agnostic retargeting across diverse hand embodiments.
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026
♻ ☆ Towards Temporal Compositional Reasoning in Long-Form Sports Videos
Sports videos are a challenging domain for multimodal understanding because they involve complex and dynamic human activities. Despite rapid progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), long-horizon reasoning in sports videos remains difficult, as answering questions requires both locating temporally sparse evidence and integrating it into reasoning. We attribute this limitation to two closely coupled factors: insufficient supervision over temporally dispersed evidence, and the lack of methods that require models to identify, localize, and justify temporal evidence. To address these gaps, we introduce SportsTime, a large-scale benchmark for long-form sports video understanding, comprising 14K+ open-ended QA pairs and 50K+ step-wise temporal evidence annotations. Building on SportsTime, we propose Chain-of-Time Reasoning (CoTR), which treats reasoning as a process of temporally grounded evidence composition. Specifically, during training, CoTR introduces a temporal-reward GRPO to encourage temporally grounded reasoning. During inference, it employs an anchor-observe-infer evidence-seeking loop to iteratively localize, verify, and compose temporal evidence before producing the final answer. Experiments demonstrate the usefulness of SportsTime as a benchmark and the effectiveness of CoTR, which consistently improves temporal compositional reasoning and step-wise grounding quality over strong MLLM baselines.
♻ ☆ CAIRN: Cross-Room 3D Scene Understanding with Topology-Aware Large Multimodal Models
Existing 3D scene-grounded Large Language Models (3D-LLMs) focus on answering questions grounded in simplified single-room 3D scenes, lacking the ability to reason over real-world household environments containing multiple interconnected rooms and diverse object categories. We introduce CAIRN, a topology-aware 3D-LLM for multi-room 3D scene understanding. CAIRN aligns transformer attention with scene hierarchy, giving the model explicit awareness of object-level relations and room-level connectivity. It enriches object tokens with room-local relational context via a graph neural network, introduces learned room tokens for room-level abstraction, and applies a hierarchical attention mask with geometric bias to route information according to scene topology. CAIRN is developed on CAIRN-MR, a benchmark we introduce on HM3D for multi-room 3D scene understanding, covering grounding, captioning, and four question-answering tasks that progressively evaluate from intra-room perception to cross-room reasoning. Experiments show that CAIRN outperforms prior 3D-LLMs by a large margin across all CAIRN-MR tasks while remaining competitive on five single-room benchmarks.
comment: Project Page: https://oceansdepp.github.io/cairn_web/
♻ ☆ From Hindsight to Foresight: Self-Encouraged Hindsight Distillation for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering
Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KBVQA) necessitates external knowledge incorporation beyond cross-modal understanding. Existing KBVQA methods either utilize implicit knowledge in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) via in-context learning or explicit knowledge via retrieval augmented generation. However, their reasoning processes remain implicit, without explicit multi-step trajectories from MLLMs. To address this gap, we provide a Hindsight Distilled Reasoning (HinD) framework with Knowledge Encouragement Preference Optimization, aiming at self-encouraging the knowledge reasoning ability inside the MLLM. First, we construct the Hindsight Teacher by prompting the MLLM to complete the reasoning process with knowing the right answer, obtaining Hindsight-Zero training data. Then, the Foresight Student, without knowing the answer, learns the golden trajectories from Hindsight: (1) Hindsight Distillation Fine-Tuning (HDFT) to self-distill the Hindsight-Zero into a modularized Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Generator and a Knowledge Generator for sequential steps and discrete facts generation, respectively; (2) Knowledge Encouragement Preference Optimization (KEPO) to encourage the under-confident but relevant knowledge inside the MLLM and suppress the over-confident but irrelevant one. Experiments on OK-VQA and A-OKVQA validate the effectiveness of HinD, showing that HinD with 7-8B MLLM achieves superior performance without commercial model APIs or retrieved knowledge.
♻ ☆ An Approximate Graph Elicits Detonation Lattice
This study presents a novel algorithm based on graph theory for the precise segmentation and measurement of detonation cells from 3D pressure traces, termed detonation lattices, addressing the limitations of manual and primitive 2D edge detection methods prevalent in the field. Using a segmentation model, the proposed training-free algorithm is designed to accurately extract cellular patterns, a longstanding challenge in detonations research. First, the efficacy of segmentation phase on two synthetic datasets is evaluated with an error of 2%. Next, 3D simulation data is used to establish performance of the graph-based workflow. The results of statistics and joint probability densities show oblong cells aligned with the wave propagation axis with 17% deviation, whereas larger dispersion in volume reflects cubic amplification of linear variability. Although the framework is robust, it remains challenging to reliably segment and quantify highly complex cellular patterns. However, the graph-based formulation generalizes across diverse cellular geometries, positioning it as a practical tool for detonation analysis and a strong foundation for future extensions in triple-point collision studies.
comment: 3D Detonation; Soot Foil; Graph; Cell Classification; Cellular Detonation; Detonation Lattice; SAM Model
♻ ☆ SpurLens: Automatic Detection of Spurious Cues in Multimodal LLMs
Unimodal vision models are known to rely on spurious correlations, but it remains unclear to what extent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit similar biases despite language supervision. In this paper, we investigate spurious bias in MLLMs and introduce SpurLens, a pipeline that leverages GPT-4 and open-set object detectors to automatically identify spurious visual cues without human supervision. Our findings reveal that spurious correlations cause two major failure modes in MLLMs: (1) over-reliance on spurious cues for object recognition, where removing these cues reduces accuracy, and (2) object hallucination, where spurious cues amplify the hallucination by over 10x. We validate our findings in various MLLMs and datasets. Beyond diagnosing these failures, we explore potential mitigation strategies, such as prompt ensembling and reasoning-based prompting, and conduct ablation studies to examine the root causes of spurious bias in MLLMs. By exposing the persistence of spurious correlations, our study calls for more rigorous evaluation methods and mitigation strategies to enhance the reliability of MLLMs.
♻ ☆ SOLAR: Self-supervised Joint Learning for Symmetric Multimodal Retrieval ICML 2026
In this work, we address the critical yet underexplored challenge of symmetric multimodal-to-multimodal (MM2MM) retrieval, where queries and contexts are interchangeable. Existing universal multimodal retrieval works struggle with this task, as they are constrained by the labeled asymmetric datasets used. We produce SOLAR (Self-supervised jOint LeArning for symmetric multimodal Retrieval), a novel two-stage self-supervised framework that leverages readily available unlabeled web-scale image-text pairs. Based on the observation that both semantic alignment and discrepancies exist between two modalities, in the first stage, we learn the intersection mask of image-text pair, allowing us to align intersection while preserving semantic of difference. In the second stage, the learned mask is further utilized to construct positive and hardnegative samples via masking different parts of image/text, which enable us to conduct self-supervised multimodal embedding learning. Complementing this framework, we present a new benchmark featuring high-quality human-verified positive and hard-negative pairs to evaluate symmetric MM2MM retrieval under realistic conditions, as well as the corresponding pipeline. Extensive experiments against ten SOTA methods show SOLAR surpasses the strongest supervised VLM by 7.08 points on this benchmark, with over 50x fewer model parameters and a 5x smaller embedding dimension. Code, model and benchmark are available at https://github.com/codefuse-ai/SOLAR.
comment: Accepted by ICML 2026. Code, model and benchmark are available at https://github.com/codefuse-ai/SOLAR
♻ ☆ Uncertainty-guided Compositional Alignment with Part-to-Whole Semantic Representativeness in Hyperbolic Vision-Language Models CVPR 2026
While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable performance, their Euclidean embeddings remain limited in capturing hierarchical relationships such as part-to-whole or parent-child structures, and often face challenges in multi-object compositional scenarios. Hyperbolic VLMs mitigate this issue by better preserving hierarchical structures and modeling part-whole relations (i.e., whole scene and its part images) through entailment. However, existing approaches do not model that each part has a different level of semantic representativeness to the whole. We propose UNcertainty-guided Compositional Hyperbolic Alignment (UNCHA) for enhancing hyperbolic VLMs. UNCHA models part-to-whole semantic representativeness with hyperbolic uncertainty, by assigning lower uncertainty to more representative parts and higher uncertainty to less representative ones for the whole scene. This representativeness is then incorporated into the contrastive objective with uncertainty-guided weights. Finally, the uncertainty is further calibrated with an entailment loss regularized by entropy-based term. With the proposed losses, UNCHA learns hyperbolic embeddings with more accurate part-whole ordering, capturing the underlying compositional structure in an image and improving its understanding of complex multi-object scenes. UNCHA achieves state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot classification, retrieval, and multi-label classification benchmarks. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/jeeit17/UNCHA.git.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026