Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 180
☆ Medical Image Segmentation: Foundation Model Adaptation versus Task-Specific Training
Foundation models pretrained on large natural-image collections are increasingly adapted for medical image segmentation, in the expectation that they will replace models trained for each task. Most comparisons, however, use data from the training distribution and a single task-specific baseline whose configuration is rarely justified, and therefore provide limited evidence of performance at new clinical sites. It also remains unclear how much of a foundation model must be adapted, and what determines this. We adapted a foundation model, DINOv2, with strategies ranging from tuning only its bias terms to full fine-tuning, and compared it with U-Nets and ResU-Nets trained from scratch. Experiments covered colonoscopy, breast ultrasound and dermoscopy, with testing on held-out data from the training source and on independent datasets from other institutions. The adapted foundation model generalised better on every external dataset. Within the training distribution, the task-specific models remained competitive when training data were abundant, and delineated boundaries more precisely, while the foundation model more often missed small lesions. Only a small fraction of the foundation model required adaptation, and the capacity needed was determined by the imaging domain rather than by the adaptation method. A widely used polyp test set was also found to duplicate images from another benchmark. Foundation-model adaptation is therefore warranted where models must work across sites, with capacity selected on the target domain.
☆ Toward Foundation Detection Models via Example-Based Grounding in EM-DETR
DeepLearning (DL)-based Computer-Aided Diagnostic (CAD) systems have shown great promise in supporting clinicians, but their performance heavily depends on the availability of large, well-annotated datasets. In medical lesion detection, the scarcity of comprehensive, stan dardized annotations and the heterogeneity of existing datasets limit the development of robust foundation models. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to building a multi-domain foundation model for le sion detection by integrating diverse medical image datasets annotated for both anatomical structures and abnormalities. We first propose a student-teacher training strategy to effectively combine datasets with heterogeneous label spaces, mitigating catastrophic forgetting, and im proving feature learning. In addition, building on our previously pro posed example-based EM-DETR framework, we adapt it to jointly learn from multiple domain-specific datasets, enabling fine-grained, example driven detection across modalities. Our model achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results, with image-level AUC scores exceeding previous SOTA by 1% point on four key findings in CXRs. We achieve a leading mAP50 in CXRs and mammography, surpassing EM-DETR trained on a single dataset by 2-3% points. This approach paves the way for scalable foundation models in medical imaging that leverage heterogeneous data while maintaining robust and generalizable performance.
☆ Measuring Robustness and Efficiency in a Connectome-Constrained Fly Visual System Model: Linking an Adversarial and a Perceptual Illusion NeurIPS 2026
Alexandre Garcia-Duran, Alejandro Rodriguez-Garcia, Manuel Molano-Mazón, Alexandre Hyafil, Srikanth Ramaswamy, Janne K. Lappalainen
Biological visual systems compute reliably under tight metabolic and wiring constraints, whereas artificial vision systems consume far more energy and can be sensitive to adversarial perturbations. Whether networks with brain-like wiring are more robust at lower computational cost is unclear. We address this by benchmarking a task-optimized, continuous-time recurrent neural network of the fly visual system constrained by its synaptic connectome (FlyNet) against artificial neural networks. We compare it against CNNs, RAFT, and continuous-time recurrent neural networks without detailed connectome constraints (sCTRNN, CTRNN) on a collision-detection task within a differentiable 3D rendering pipeline. FlyNet is adversarially vulnerable but, relative to its compute, more robust to common video corruptions than RAFT, while using up to five orders of magnitude fewer FLOPs. The CTRNNs remain more robust than FlyNet across almost all tested perturbations, suggesting that connectome constraints benefit efficiency, through their low edge count, over robustness. Recurrence improves robustness to white-box attacks in RAFT and temporal context improves robustness to common corruptions. FlyNet's position and velocity representations degrade under adversarial textures but recover under counterfactual textures that restore correct classification while staying equally far from training, ruling out unfamiliar textures as the cause of failure. The reverse-phi illusion similarly disrupts these representations and inverts the same low-level motion statistic as the adversarial textures. Optimizing this input statistic alone, without access to the network, suffices to induce classification failure, attributing both perturbations to the same circuit vulnerability. Connectome-constrained models can thus surface adversarial failure mechanisms as testable hypotheses about biological perceptual vulnerabilities.
comment: 39 pages, 24 figures, 2 tables, Accepted at 40th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026)
☆ RS-JEPA: Remote Sensing Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture with Scan-Path Views for Cross-Sensor Image Retrieval
Cross-sensor remote sensing image retrieval aims to find scenes with the same content across heterogeneous sensors, such as SAR and optical or panchromatic (PAN) and multispectral (MS) imagery, without manual labels. Existing self-supervised methods either reconstruct sensor-specific pixel detail, align each image only with its co-registered twin, or rely on large transformers with 118-173M parameters (and up to 398M). We introduce RS-JEPA, a compact joint-embedding predictive framework built on a Vision Mamba encoder shared by both sensors. Since a state-space encoder reads an image as an ordered sequence of patches, we propose scan-path views, which treat two reading orders of the same image as two views with identical pixels and predict the hidden patches in one order from the visible patches in the other.To keep this prediction challenging, we propose Adversarial View Coupling (AVC), which learns the hardest split of the visible patches, and a neighbourhood consensus loss that aligns the scene similarities of both sensors. Extensive experiments on SAR-optical (BEN-14K, CBRSIR-VS) and PAN-MS (DSRSID) benchmarks demonstrate that RS-JEPA achieves the highest F1@5 among twelve re-implemented methods (72.92, 80.35 and 94.43) with a retrieval network of only 3.88M parameters (14.57M in training, 8-16times fewer than prior JEPA retrievers). Like prior methods, RS-JEPA trains on co-registered pairs. Our results highlight reading order as a source of self-supervised views. code: https://github.com/Tanishq251/RSJEPA.
☆ Mechanistic Interpretability Needs a Logic of Inference NeurIPS 2026
Neural networks are increasingly studied not merely as predictive systems, but as complex systems whose internal computations are themselves objects of scientific inquiry. Recent progress in mechanistic interpretability (MI) has made it possible to identify neurons, features, circuits, population structures, and dynamical patterns associated with model behavior. As these tools improve, attention is shifting from what can be observed inside a model to how those observations support mechanistic explanations. We examine the parallel efforts of neuroscience and MI to address this question and identify recurring inferential bottlenecks when inferring mechanisms from complex neural systems. We propose five principles and organize them into a recursive logic for a more rigorous procedure of mechanistic inference. These principles provide a framework that supports scientific discovery in two senses: it helps turn local interpretability findings into cumulative knowledge of mechanisms within models, and it makes those mechanisms sufficiently precise to generate testable hypotheses about domains beyond the models. Evidence beyond MI is ultimately required to establish what model mechanisms reveal about the world.
comment: NeurIPS 2026 Interp4Discovery (Oral)
☆ BoviShift: A Six-Year Multi-Attribute Audit of Visual Cattle Phenotyping Across Animals and Time
Computer vision offers a scalable, non-contact means of estimating livestock traits, but correlated images and video frames make reliable evaluation difficult. Image-random splitting can place views of the same animal in both training and test sets, while deployment further requires transfer to animals captured in future years. We introduce BoviShift, a corpus reconstructed from six consecutive annual cohorts of an operational cattle marketplace collected from 2021 to 2026. It contains 2{,}657 cattle, 10{,}610 still images, and 2{,}566 walk-around videos across nine recorded breed categories. We evaluate three splitting strategies through four configurations: image-random and pooled cattle-disjoint splits over the same development cohorts, followed by separate future-2025 and locked future-2026 evaluations. Using a fixed ResNet-50 multi-task baseline, we assess weight, age, height, breed, and coat color. Differences between image-random and cattle-disjoint splitting are task-dependent rather than a universal leakage penalty. Future-cohort behavior is also attribute- and cohort-specific: breed declines relative to pooled evaluation; mean weight and age performance fails to beat constant baselines in 2025; height remains above baseline; and color transfers well to 2025 but degrades in 2026. Multi-task training improves all five point estimates in a single-seed ablation, still-view aggregation helps selectively, and zero-shot video-frame aggregation exposes a still-to-video domain gap. To our knowledge, BoviShift is the longest-spanning cattle-vision resource combining consecutive annual cohorts with physical and visual attributes.
☆ TanCRAFT: Context-Reasoned Anticipatory Feedback for Assembly Tasks IEEE
Sassan Mokhtar, Lars Doorenbos, Marius Bock, Sina Mokhtar, Katharina Beckh, Dominik Bach, Juergen Gall
Preventing human error in physical assembly tasks requires assistance systems that can intervene before mistakes are made. This is especially challenging in settings where users are free to choose the construction order and correctness depends on the evolving assembly rather than a fixed next step. We present TanCRAFT, a four-stage real-time predictive assistance system that tracks the scene state, reasons about the current partial assembly, forecasts the near-future motion of manipulated pieces, and intervenes when the predicted placement is incompatible with the target. We instantiate our framework and confirm its effectiveness in a controlled tangram assembly task through offline benchmarks and a within-subject user study. Our findings show that the predictive feedback significantly reduces mistakes relative to unguided and reactive sessions, while yielding the lowest mean perceived workload and shortest mean completion time. Overall, these results demonstrate the value of predictive feedback for error prevention and provide a step toward cost-aware assistance for automation and human-robot workcells.
comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication
☆ C$^2$-Routing: Complementary Cropping and Compression for Efficient Vision-Language Inference
Visual Question Answering (VQA) imposes substantial computational overhead on vision-language models (VLMs), motivating model-agnostic input reduction methods that can be readily applied across diverse VLMs, including in black-box settings. Simply enforcing a visual-token cap reduces computation, but it can discard information needed to answer the question. A single reduction strategy also struggles to accommodate different scenarios. Our key observation is that cropping and compression are complementary: cropping highlights small targets and local details, whereas whole-image compression better preserves context for large targets or distributed evidence. Based on this observation, we propose C$^2$-Routing, which adaptively selects cropping or compression according to the input image and question. Since both strategies may still discard key information, we further design a safety gate that uses the predicted joint correctness distribution under original and reduced inputs to guide fallback and protect accuracy. To accommodate consumer GPU resource constraints, all training and evaluation experiments run on RTX 3090 GPUs. To measure gains beyond token capping, we use full-image baselines with the same cap of 1,024 visual tokens. We conduct extensive evaluation on three VLMs and 18 datasets spanning local details, global scenes, scene text, and documents. With the visual budget already capped, C$^2$-Routing further reduces end-to-end FLOPs by 36.53% and visual tokens by 42.36% on average, with a mean relative task-score decrease of only 0.77%.
☆ A Lightweight Differentiable Method for Real-Time Skin Rendering and Digitization
Inverse rendering for skin typically relies on offline path tracing to estimate physical properties, which fail to map directly to the approximate shaders utilized in interactive applications, such as game engines. We bridge this gap by directly estimating subsurface scattering parameters tailored for real-time rendering pipelines. We introduce a differentiable Screen-Space Subsurface Scattering (SSSS) framework that enables the joint optimization of spatially varying base textures and scattering distances. To account for local variations in skin thickness, we estimate these parameters across distinct facial regions, generating a blended profile map ready for production runtime engines. Our pipeline utilizes a low-cost, single-light, single-view capture setup designed for accessible and practical appearance acquisition. Optimization is driven by a masked loss function targeting regions where subsurface scattering effects are dominant. We validate our approach on a real-world dataset of $45$ individuals across the Monk Skin Tone Scale, ensuring demographic generalization. Furthermore, we complement this evaluation with synthetic data, a multi-light setup validating our single-light assumption, and a tilted-view configuration confirming angular consistency. Results demonstrate that our method effectively recovers scattering parameters from lightweight inputs, yielding realistic skin appearance directly compatible with standard real-time shaders.
comment: 20 pages, 25 figures; includes 6 pages of supplementary material. Accepted to Computers and Graphics
☆ UGG: Unified Generative Geometry Model NeurIPS 2026
Understanding 4D scenes is a core challenge in visual intelligence, requiring models to jointly capture scene geometry, appearance, and dynamics from partial observations. However, existing approaches are subdivided into feedforward models for direct geometric prediction, and generative models for visual synthesis. We introduce UGG, a unified framework for 4D scene understanding that jointly models RGB video and geometric representations such as depth and camera pose. By assigning different noise levels across modalities and time, UGG formulates visual generation and geometric prediction as conditional completion within a single generative model. This flexible formulation enables the model to learn from diverse, heterogeneous datasets with different subsets of geometric and visual annotations. Furthermore, our generative formulation enables inference-time search over multiple plausible scene hypotheses, using geometric evidence extracted from observed RGB frames to improve geometric prediction without ground truth geometry. We demonstrate UGG's effectiveness over non-unified baselines across camera-controlled video generation, depth estimation, and camera pose prediction, including in challenging sparse observation settings. Code and visualizations are available at https://ugg-model.github.io/
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. 31 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables. Project page: https://ugg-model.github.io/
☆ Metric-Aligned Group Relative Policy Optimization for Explainable Deepfake Detection
Deepfake detectors are commonly evaluated on real/fake classification alone, but real-world applications require explanations of the visual evidence behind each prediction. Joint vision-language models struggle with authenticity assessment, producing "real" narratives for manipulated images. To address this, we propose a decoupled predict-then-explain pipeline as our submission to the ACM Multimedia 2026 Explainable Deepfake Detection Challenge, with methods trained and evaluated on the XPlainVerse benchmark. A vision-foundation-model ensemble first classifies the image, then a Qwen3-VL-8B model generates a decision-conditioned explanation of the visual evidence. For fake images, a second Qwen3-VL-8B compresses that text into a short non-expert summary without using the image. We further apply metric-aligned Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to optimize both explainers against the challenge criteria. Under matched conditions, GRPO raises complex BERTScore-F1 from 0.686 to 0.712 and also improves grounding (entity and evidence F1); our submission ranked first on complex BERTScore-F1 and seventh overall.
comment: 5 pages. Accepted to MRAC '26 (ACM Multimedia 2026)
☆ One Policy for 100 Household Tasks: Our Solution for the 2026 BEHAVIOR Challenge
Ilia Larchenko, Gleb Zarin, Atindra Nair, Keerti Manney, Vitaly Kleban, Mirko Kiefer, Anjana Yodaiken
We describe our solution for the 2026 BEHAVIOR Challenge: 100 long-horizon household tasks in the OmniGibson simulator. We placed 9th on the final leaderboard, the only independent team in the top 10. The core of the solution is a single vision-language-action (VLA) model, one checkpoint for all 100 tasks, built on our 1st-place 2025 solution, which is based on $π_{0.5}$. On the 50 tasks shared with 2025, its Q rises from 0.260 to 0.371; across all 100 tasks it scores 0.392. Our main conclusion from 2025 was that the model was undertrained, so most of the 2026 work went into training the model for longer, optimizing some training parameters, making each training step slightly faster and reducing the gradient noise: a migration from 50 to 100 tasks (semantic stages built from the demonstrations' skill annotations, task and stage embeddings of new tasks warm-started from similar old ones, and a 21-dimensional action space matching the teleoperation controls); variance-reduced multi-sample flow matching with a simple noise-vs-compute model that picks the number of action-expert samples per observation without ablations; and a 200k-step training run, about one pass over the 211M frames of the demonstrations. A cloud evaluation infrastructure keeps a shared record with provenance, episode diagnostics and restorable simulator states, and runs six simulators on one GPU together faster than real time. On top of the learned policy, 14 tasks are routed to a GPT-6 Astra coding agent that controls the robot through observation and motion tools, starting every episode from a frozen copy of its own practice session on training instances. Across these 14 tasks, Astra's mean Q is 0.639, against 0.108 for the learned policy. The public submission included only part of the Astra results and scored 0.446 Q with 27.3% full-task success.
comment: Code: https://github.com/Robot-Learning-Collective/behavior-1k-solution-2026 ; checkpoint: https://huggingface.co/IliaLarchenko/BEHAVIOR2026VLA ; project page: https://robot-learning-collective.github.io/behavior-1k-2026/
☆ OnlyAct: Extracting Action Representations from Foundation Models for World Models
Video world models promise general-purpose interactive simulators, but their training is limited by action supervision: action labels are scarce, fragmented across incompatible specifications, and do not scale with the unlabeled video pretraining corpus. A common workaround jointly trains an action encoder to compress consecutive frames into a latent action and a decoder to reconstruct the next frame from the previous frame and that latent, forcing the latent to capture only new information. This has two limitations: learning the action space from scratch can limit generalization to unseen domains, and the bottleneck trades expressiveness for separation, with tighter settings losing nuance and looser ones risking scene leakage under domain shifts. We argue for a different starting point: rather than learning actions from scratch, we start from a pretrained foundation model (V-JEPA 2), whose embeddings of a frame pair already carry substantial action information after large-scale, diverse video pretraining. The remaining challenge is to extract the action while discarding the scene. We propose a label-free contrastive adaptation framework that pulls together frame pairs sharing the same motion under a different scene and pushes apart pairs from the same scene with different motion, reshaping the geometry of the pretrained space without imposing a reconstruction bottleneck. We introduce a unified evaluation protocol along three axes (action expressiveness, scene invariance, and action-conditioned video generation quality) across robot manipulation, camera navigation, game, and driving benchmarks, most of which are unseen during adaptation. Compared with annotation-free latent-action methods, our representations are substantially more expressive while matching their scene invariance, and they yield world models that transfer demonstrated actions to new scenes more faithfully.
☆ What Factors Matter for Collection-Level Counting with Human-AI Collaboration?
Many scientific and policy decisions require estimating the total number of target objects across a large image collection. Exhaustive human labeling is often infeasible, while raw model predictions can be biased, especially under domain shift. Recent human-AI estimation methods combine imperfect model predictions with limited human verification to obtain reliable collection-level estimates. However, existing work provides little guidance on how practitioners should choose among models, estimators, and adaptation strategies for a new deployment. We study these choices within a common human-in-the-loop counting framework across 12 tasks spanning biomedical microscopy, ground-level and aerial wildlife surveys, and overhead imagery of urban structures. Our results show that modern multimodal models provide a strong, training-free starting point for many tasks, while fine-tuned detectors become more advantageous at larger labeling budgets and across repeated deployments. Estimation efficiency improves further when model predictions are used to prioritize which units humans label, rather than sampling uniformly. We also find that each model's ranking quality can be estimated with a small pilot set, yielding practical guidance for selecting strategies on new counting tasks. In a field deployment on aerial pronghorn surveys, a task-specific adaptation of these methods meets the survey's $\pm 5\%$ tolerance after reviewing a median of only $3.2\%$ of collected images.
☆ From Video Frames to Robot Meta-Frames: A Unified Latent Interface for World Action Models
Pretrained video diffusion models (VDMs) offer a powerful foundation for World Action Models (WAMs), which jointly predict robot actions and future observations. Building such models requires injecting low-dimensional robot signals (e.g. proprioception, actions, and values) into a latent space shaped by natural videos, and a key design choice is the interface through which these signals enter: existing schemes treat it as a formatting detail, spending a separate latent frame on each signal or bolting on dedicated encoders and decoders. We argue that signal injection is instead a distribution-alignment problem: how well a representation matches the prior of the pretrained VDMs during denoising. Using the relative reconstruction error of a frozen VDM denoiser as a probe, we find that conventional spatial encodings sit far off this prior, whereas frequency-domain packing yields latents that the denoiser corrects far less. Motivated by this diagnostic result, we propose MetaWAM, which folds all robot signals into a single unified meta-frame: each signal is assigned to a disjoint frequency-domain channel band and lifted to the spatial latent by an inverse DCT, yielding a decodable interface aligned with the pretrained VDM prior without any added module or architectural change. A fixed band layout together with slot-aware routing lets the same meta-frame support policy, world-model, and value prediction over a shared set of robot variables. On RoboCasa, MetaWAM reaches 68.9% success while collapsing the per-signal frames into one and cutting inference latency by 39%, and attains 85.0% success on three real-world Franka tasks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/showlab/MetaWAM
☆ Multimodal Abstention That Preserves Acquired Correct Answers
Adding abstention to a task-adapted multimodal model can discard correct answers, including capabilities acquired during adaptation. We formulate abstention repair as maximizing correct abstention on unanswerable questions under a budget on newly lost correct answers. We propose ReFrain (Regression-Free Abstention), which combines a linear probe on first-token logits, threshold calibration on held-out image clusters, and a deterministic veto that replaces rejected outputs with the displayed "none of the above" option while preserving all other responses. "Regression-free" denotes zero loss on the calibration set at the zero-budget target. All abstention methods in our main comparison start from the same answering-SFT checkpoint; we separately track lost correct answers, repaired errors, and retained SFT gains. On Qwen2.5-VL-3B, ReFrain at zero budget retains all 57 SFT-gained answers with no losses and improves correct abstention by 7.30 percentage points. At a 0.5% calibration budget, it reaches 74.05% correct abstention with 8 losses and retains 55 gains; CLIP-UP EmbLoRA reaches 64.65% with 62 losses, 41 repairs, and 40 retained gains. The same probe at its default threshold loses 298 correct answers. With models and thresholds frozen, confirmation on 228 independent question clusters yields 66.05% correct abstention and no losses at the 0.5% point, exceeding EmbLoRA by 32.72 percentage points. Ordinary refusal SFT achieves higher correct abstention at greater regression cost. Code and reproduction materials: https://github.com/ModeLiberaL/ReFrain.
comment: 28 pages. Code and reproduction materials: https://github.com/ModeLiberaL/ReFrain
☆ TaoMate-R1: Temporal Role Specialization for Streaming Multi-Reference Video Generation
Streaming multi-reference video generation establishes a scene from specified people and objects, then continues it under changing instructions. We introduce TaoMate-R1, a streaming multi-reference generator that organizes adaptation parameters through temporal role specialization. It assigns separate low-rank adapters to scene establishment and continuation on a frozen backbone. Each adapter performs both denoising and context writing for its role; Self Gradient Forcing jointly trains the roles through the history they construct. This allocation contrasts with operation-based specialization, which separates denoising from context writing across all chunks. A fixed-replay gradient analysis characterizes the update directions admitted by the two sharing schemes. On 32 multi-reference cases, we compare the schemes at the same two-adapter budget. Across ten approximately two-minute streams with changing instructions and shared teacher-audio conditioning, TaoMate-R1 reduces the mean boundary luminance jump from 1.96 to 0.613, with higher boundary feature similarity. It also achieves higher mean CLIP and DINO temporal similarity across short interactions, long streams, and public reference compositions. These results support grouping adaptation parameters by scene establishment and continuation for streaming multi-reference generation. Our code and model are released at https://github.com/TaoLiveAIGC/TaoMate-H3.
☆ ForeseeDrive: Future-Token Conditioning for Anticipatory Generative Driving
Shaokai Wu, Xunchu Zhou, Pinzhi Wang, Bo Dong, Yuting Hu, Yanbiao Ji, Qiuchang Li, Xiao Cui, Qi Kong, Hongtao Lu, Yue Ding
Generative driving planners can represent diverse ego futures, but a downstream scorer can choose only among sampled candidates; it cannot recover an absent maneuver. We present ForeseeDrive, which turns future scene evolution into a deployable interface for shaping candidate generation. Rather than reconstructing dense future states or scoring a fixed menu, ForeseeDrive derives query-indexed tokens from logged actor motion, occupancy evolution, route interactions, and TTC margins, and predicts the same token space from present context at deployment. The tokens condition trajectory geometry before candidates materialize. A zero-token-gated residual path and candidate-preservation loss limit unnecessary drift, while a TTC-margin guard targets brittle safe-to-unsafe boundary crossings. Under their respective benchmark protocols, ForeseeDrive reaches 89.2 PDMS on NAVSIM navtest, 0.41\,m average L2 and 0.05\% collision rate on nuScenes validation, and a 76.50 driving score on Bench2Drive. Controlled DiffusionDrive/NAVSIM diagnostics show an exact zero-token no-op, a small aligned-over-shuffled selected-PDM advantage under preservation, mixed oracle-best quality, and localized TTC-boundary failures. Together, the benchmark results and bounded mechanism tests support future-conditioned generation as a practical interface for anticipation. Code is included in the supplementary materials.
comment: 15 pages (8 pages main text + appendix), 3 figures, 7 tables
☆ UniFlow-RS: Unified Generative Prediction for Heterogeneous Remote-Sensing Tasks
Remote-sensing foundation models increasingly unify representations across sensing modalities and downstream tasks, yet their prediction mechanisms remain largely task-specific. Separate decoders, prediction heads, and objectives leave prediction fragmented across tasks. This naturally raises a question: can heterogeneous remote-sensing tasks share the prediction process? UniFlow-RS answers this question with a single latent flow-matching predictor shared across tasks. This requires addressing two key challenges: unifying heterogeneous prediction spaces and harmonizing joint optimization across tasks. First, we cast heterogeneous task outputs into structured visual targets in a common latent space, allowing them to be modeled by the same pretrained flow predictor. Task-dependent conditioning further accommodates differences in input configurations. Second, we optimize all tasks with a common Flow Matching objective, eliminating task-specific prediction losses. To mitigate optimization mismatch across tasks and modalities, we introduce Task-Modality Adaptive Timestep Sampling (TMAS), which dynamically allocates training timesteps according to the online learning state of each task-modality group. Using a single shared model, UniFlow-RS handles six tasks and thirteen datasets, surpassing recent task-specific state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks while remaining competitive on the others. Beyond these benchmarks, the same checkpoint demonstrates strong zero-shot transfer across unseen datasets, task settings, occlusion conditions, and near-infrared false-color imagery, without target-specific adaptation.
☆ AutoThreshold: Joint Confusion-Profile Learning for Adaptive Mask Binarization
A single validation-tuned threshold can become brittle when dense-score distributions shift. We introduce AutoThreshold, a post-hoc policy that predicts the joint mass of positive and negative pixels over score bins. This target directly parameterizes threshold-indexed confusion counts, avoiding products of independently estimated prevalence and class-conditional rates. Softmax normalization and cumulative decoding yield coherent, monotone confusion profiles; a plug-in decoder then selects a threshold for any $F_β$ objective without retraining the head. Across three independently trained Kvasir pipelines transferred to four polyp datasets, Joint exceeds continuous Otsu by $0.0080 \pm 0.0046$ external macro Dice, with positive gains in 3/3 runs. On the reference pipeline, three head seeds achieve $0.6324 \pm 0.0027$, 0.0085 above Otsu; direct-utility Ridge achieves 0.6342, with the paired difference interval spanning zero. The same Joint checkpoints outperform Otsu for $F_{0.5}$, Dice, and $F_2$. On developmental KITTI Road leave-one-corruption-family-out evaluation, Joint improves over scalar regression by 0.0082 [0.0064, 0.0101], while direct utility is 0.0022 higher. These results establish joint confusion prediction as a useful, metric-retargetable inductive bias, without claiming Bayes-optimal $F_β$ decisions.
comment: 9 pages, 6 tables
☆ Elastic-WAM: Adaptive Spatiotemporal Imagination for Efficient Robot Control
Haitian Li, Tianfu Li, Xuxi Zhao, Zizheng Liu, Yangcheng Yu, Yiwen Hou, Zeyu Xiao, Mutian Xu, Ziqian Yang, Haonan Chen, Lin Shao
World-Action Models improve robot control by predicting future visual dynamics, but iterative video denoising incurs substantial inference overhead. Recent approaches reduce this cost through partial future denoising, yet typically rely on fixed refinement budgets. Our empirical observations reveal that preferred refinement depths vary across tasks and states, while different future regions exhibit varying relevance to action generation. Motivated by these findings, we propose Elastic-WAM, which adaptively allocates world refinement computation across temporal denoising time and spatial future space. A unified spatiotemporal refinement demand field governs when to stop world refinement, how far to advance each denoising step, and which regions to refresh. We parameterize this field with a shared temporal basis and spatial amplitudes, and learn it through a three-stage action-grounded supervised procedure. At inference, the learned field guides recurrent sparse world refinement to improve task success while reducing inference overhead. Evaluations across diverse simulation benchmarks and real-world long-horizon manipulation demonstrate state-of-the-art control performance with reduced inference latency.
comment: 14 pages. Project page: https://lihaitian.com/Elastic-WAM/
☆ Location Matters: Sparse Latent-Variance Attacks for Face Privacy against Diffusion Personalization
Text-to-image diffusion models can learn and reproduce an individual's identity from only a few reference photos, creating risks of unauthorized and misleading content generation. Proactive defenses address this risk by adding adversarial perturbations to facial images before release, thereby disrupting identity acquisition during downstream personalization. However, existing methods typically rely on dense $L_\infty$-bounded perturbations, whose accumulated distortions can become visible around facial structures. Recent methods improve protected-image quality, but often at the cost of reduced protection effectiveness. In this paper, we propose Sparse Encoder Attack on Latent Variance (SEAL), a sparse adversarial protection framework that modifies only 5% of the spatial locations in a facial image. SEAL combines a differentiable top-k masking scheme that jointly optimizes perturbation locations and values with a variance-oriented objective over the frozen VAE encoder's latent distribution to disrupt identity-consistent representations. A saliency-guided dispersion penalty further discourages perturbation concentration in perceptually salient facial regions. Experiments on CelebA-HQ and VGGFace2 show that SEAL achieves the best protected-image quality among the compared methods, exceeding 41 dB PSNR with 0.97 SSIM and at most 0.07 LPIPS, while reducing identity similarity to at most 0.15 after diffusion personalization. These results demonstrate that sparse location optimization enables strong identity protection while preserving high visual quality. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Lvxan/SEAL
☆ ViGA-FLAME: Aligning Latent Visual and Geometric Representations for Robust 3D Head Expression Estimation
Estimating 3D head expression from a single image requires mapping visual appearance to underlying facial geometry. We propose ViGA-FLAME, a two-stage framework that aligns semantic visual features with a structured geometric latent space. First, a Parametric-Geometric Variational Autoencoder (PG-VAE) learns a unified representation of canonical head surfaces and FLAME parameters, supporting both detailed surface reconstruction and interpretable parameter recovery. Supervision on geometry and parameters, together with consistency between the two decoding branches, connects surface detail with parametric structure. Second, a trainable Visual-Geometric Adapter (ViGA) maps features from a pretrained semantic visual encoder into this latent space. Asymmetric attention enables ViGA to align semantic image features from the visual encoder with the structured geometric information represented in the PG-VAE latent space, without altering the original visual stream. By grounding image evidence in this latent prior, ViGA-FLAME enables robust 3D head expression estimation across severe facial deformations and large viewing angles, efficiently improving robustness over competing feed-forward methods.
☆ DailyWildfireCAN: A Dataset and Benchmark for Next-Day Wildfire Spread Prediction in Canada
Wildfires represent a critical ecological and socio-economic challenge in Canada, where vast boreal forests and a warming climate have amplified the frequency and severity of extreme fire seasons. Predicting next-day wildfire spread can support fire management, but requires capturing complex interactions among weather, fuels, and terrain. Deep learning has emerged as a promising approach to learning these relationships from heterogeneous environmental data, yet its development and evaluation depend on representative datasets. Existing deep learning research on wildfire spread relies predominantly on US-focused datasets, leaving Canadian fire environments underrepresented. To address this gap, we present DailyWildfireCAN, a multi-modal, multi-temporal dataset and benchmark for predicting next-day wildfire spread across Canada. The dataset tracks continuous fire progression over multi-day events at a high spatial and temporal resolution of 90-m and 24-hour, respectively. This resolution preserves fine-scale information relevant to fire-edge geometry, local fuel variations, and terrain effects, supporting research toward improved daily wildfire spread forecasting. DailyWildfireCAN covers 2,440 wildfire events across eight fire seasons 2017-2024 and integrates 33 features across diverse modalities, including topography, meteorology, land cover, vegetation and forest structure, human influence indices, and satellite imagery. We establish a comprehensive benchmark comparing mono-temporal and multi-temporal prediction models, accompanied by a multi-dimensional evaluation framework assessing robustness across wildfire characteristics, geographic regions, and temporal conditions, spatial prediction quality, and sensitivity to reference label variations.
☆ SpecValley: Aggregation as Spectral Valley in Dense Heterophilic Graphs
Node classification in heterophilic graphs remains an open problem: aggregating over neighbourhoods can damp precisely the part of the signal that carries the labels. The field has answered with ever more expressive propagation operators, leaving the aggregation step that precedes them fixed by degree normalisation. However, degree normalisation acts as a spectral valley in its own right, attenuating a fixed middle band whose position at lambda equal 1 is set by the normalisation rather than by the data, exactly where the eigenvalues of dense graphs accumulate. We therefore begin with the representations rather than the propagation, in two stages: a learnable aggregation followed by an ordinary spectral filter. The first, SpecValley learns the position, sharpness and flank gains of the valley for every graph. We show formally how the aggregation operator and downstream filter interact. We establish that the response 1 minus lambda of degree normalisation vanishes exactly at that accumulation point. A spectral energy budget shows that what aggregation removes from a band, no linear spectral filter can recover. Crowding alone says nothing about the benefit. That is decided by how much label energy the valley removes, which we measure for every graph. SpecValley achieves strong results across heterophilic benchmarks, and a controlled ablation over aggregation operators and downstream filters attributes the gain to aggregation rather than the filter.
☆ GARD: Gradient-Guided Adversarial Representation Defense against Backdoors in Multimodal Contrastive Learning Models
Multimodal contrastive learning models such as CLIP are vulnerable to backdoor attacks with diverse trigger structures, ranging from localized patches to globally distributed perturbations, with recent attacks increasingly optimizing these triggers in the representation space. Existing post-hoc defenses based on clean fine-tuning may leave backdoors active, while trigger-inversion methods depend on accurately estimating the attack target and trigger. We observe that backdoored encoders exhibit structure-dependent representation sensitivity: global perturbations preferentially expose distributed backdoors, whereas local patch perturbations are more effective for localized backdoors. Based on this observation, we propose Gradient-Guided Adversarial Representation Defense (GARD), a target- and trigger-agnostic post-hoc defense. GARD optimizes complementary global and local adversarial probes to maximally displace clean-image representations, and then realigns the perturbed representations with detached clean anchors while preserving image-text alignment. The resulting model requires no additional computation at inference time. Across six visual backdoor attacks and two CLIP visual backbones, GARD reduces the attack success rate below 1% in all 12 evaluated attack-backbone combinations while maintaining competitive clean accuracy. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of adversarial representation probing for repairing backdoored multimodal contrastive encoders.
☆ HaiRuo: Forecasting Ocean Eddies as Fields and Objects with a Satellite-Altimetry Foundation Model
Mesoscale eddies carry most of the ocean's kinetic energy and move heat, salt and nutrients across basins, yet where an eddy will be two weeks ahead is still read off ocean models with post-hoc tracking heuristics. We introduce HaiRuo, which forecasts eddies as fields and as objects at once: from 30 days of satellite sea-level maps, one forward pass returns 15 days of sea level and geostrophic velocity, daily eddy masks and the trajectory of every eddy alive today. HaiRuo pairs two components with a clear division of labour: (1) HaiRuo-1B, an open-weight 1.05-billion-parameter foundation model pretrained without labels on 24 years of global satellite-altimetry observations, which supplies the 15-day physical fields and masks (+0.14 field skill and +1.1 mIoU points under the same decoder) and further lowers 15-day centre error by 1.2 km frozen (1.35 km over training from scratch); and (2) XuanJi, a Lagrangian object decoder that samples the evolving forecast in each eddy's co-moving polar frame and refines the 15-day path across three look-ahead rounds, removing 2.5 km on HaiRuo-1B (2.9 km with joint fine-tuning) and 2.5-3.3 km via its object attention across six published backbones. Under one pre-registered global evaluation over the whole ocean, HaiRuo improves on fourteen methods on every endpoint (25.2 vs. 30.6 km 15-day centre error, -18%), holding its margin outside the labelled regions and through both phases of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), while reproducing westward drift, 50-60 deg S eastward reversal and poleward cyclone-anticyclone deflection. Over ten days through one fixed tracker, HaiRuo's forecast field cuts the eddy-centre error of WenHai and XiHe by 37-43% (-2.8 km vs. day 0 while they degrade +4.3-8.7 km), and its object trajectories cut pipeline error by 77-78% globally. Open-weight checkpoints, code and project page: https://github.com/xkqin/HaiRuo
☆ Sim(3)-TurboReg: Robust and Efficient Scale-Aware Registration via Tri-Scale Consistency
Feed-forward 3D foundation models recover geometry at high fidelity, yet inference memory constraints keep them from processing long sequences natively. Current streaming systems work around this limit with sliding-window chunking, which introduces severe monocular scale ambiguity. Resolving this ambiguity requires Sim(3) registration that stays accurate and efficient under outlier contamination. We introduce Sim(3)-TurboReg, which reformulates the compatibility graph construction of TurboReg by replacing absolute distance constraints with a strict Tri-Scale Consistency (TSC) criterion. Our analysis shows that TSC suppresses both mismatching and coordinate-distortion outliers. We integrate the resulting solver into existing streaming systems and obtain high-fidelity, kilometer-scale reconstruction for feed-forward models. On controlled unknown-scale registration at 90% outliers, ours matches RANSAC accuracy with 92.5% lower median latency. In DA3-Streaming on KITTI, ours improves mean ATE RMSE by 22.2% and reduces mean end-to-end time by 16.6%. Code: https://github.com/ivan-zzj/Sim3-TurboReg
comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 6 tables. Code available at https://github.com/ivan-zzj/Sim3-TurboReg
☆ Continuous 3D Spatial Transcriptomics Reconstruction via Histology-Informed Implicit Neural Representations
Kaito Shiku, Ryoma Bise, Ahtisham Fazeel Abbasi, Yuichiro Iwashita, Shumpei Takezaki, Andreas Dengel, Muhammad Nabeel Asim
Three-dimensional spatial transcriptomics (3D ST) enables the analysis of gene-expression patterns across tissue depths. However, 3D ST measurements are acquired from discrete 2D tissue sections, which are often sparsely sampled due to high acquisition costs. To address this limitation, we propose a histology-informed multi-task implicit neural representation (HIM-INR) for continuous 3D gene-expression reconstruction from sparse ST observations. HIM-INR jointly reconstructs gene-expression profiles and histological representations using an INR with a shared backbone, leveraging densely sampled histological images as auxiliary spatial supervision. Once trained, HIM-INR predicts gene expression at arbitrary 3D coordinates without requiring histological images. Experiments on two 3D ST datasets demonstrate improved reconstruction over existing methods, particularly as the number of missing ST sections increases.
comment: 5 pages, 2 figures
☆ CroCoMAE: Cross-modal self-supervised collaborative representation learning for SAR-optical remote sensing data
Vito Recchia, Giuseppe Guarino, Cássio Fraga Dantas, Giuseppina Andresini, Annalisa Appice, Dino Ienco
Remote sensing increasingly captures the Earth's surface through complementary sensors such as SAR and optical, yet ground-truth annotations remain scarce, limiting supervised approaches. Self-supervised learning (SSL) addresses the label scarcity, and cross-modal SSL further exploits the complementarity between co-located sensors, but existing cross-modal frameworks align modalities mostly through global image-level representations or treat them as largely redundant, leaving their fine-grained complementary structure underexploited. We propose CroCoMAE, a cross-modal SSL framework for SAR-optical remote sensing that unifies contrastive learning and masked image modeling within a ViT-based architecture, operating at two complementary levels. At the image level, an intra-modality contrastive loss on the class token yields globally discriminative, augmentation-invariant representations. At the patch level, masked image modeling drives fine-grained per-modality representations, while a cross-modal contrastive objective aligns a shared subspace across SAR and optical patch tokens, leaving the complementary subspace unconstrained to retain modality-specific information. On two SAR-optical benchmarks covering scene classification and semantic segmentation, CroCoMAE improves over uni-modal SSL baselines and outperforms state-of-the-art cross-modal frameworks in most configurations, with gains in both single-modality and multi-modal evaluation across varying label regimes and the largest improvements on semantic segmentation.
☆ TAMEing the Open-World Personalization: Towards Open-Set Personalized MLLM Assistant NeurIPS 2026
Personalizing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) as intelligent assistants has recently emerged as an active research topic, where an MLLM is expected to go beyond generic, one-size-fits-all replies, and instead generate responses grounded in user-specific objects, entities, and concepts encountered during interactions. Nevertheless, existing studies mainly focus on personalizing MLLMs on a static, predefined set of personalized concepts and require users to manually and frequently extend this set to accommodate newly emerging concepts, which is infeasible in dynamic-world scenarios. To address this limitation, we recast conventional MLLM personalization as an Open-Set problem, and propose TAME-O, the first long-context open-set personalized MLLM assistant. Specifically, TAME-O introduces a training-free, plug-and-play Concept Reconciliation Skill (CR Skill). It enables the assistant to automatically unlock novel concepts during prolonged human-MLLM interactions while preventing confusion with previously unlocked ones, allowing the MLLM to continually grasp more and more concepts and progressively refine the modeling of known ones. Extensive experiments under the open-set personalization setting underscore the efficacy of our method.
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2026 Main Track; code and data are available at https://github.com/ronpay/TAME-O
☆ Visual Similarity in Adult Word Extension and Artificial Word Learning
When two objects share a name, how much does their visual similarity explain, and what do the teaching examples add? First, we reanalyzed trial-level data from a large adult word-extension study (Lewis & Frank, 2018), computing each test image's distance to the examples shown in the space of a frozen self-supervised visual encoder (DINOv2). Distance was associated with extension (log odds -3.23 per standard deviation; 520 people), and an exploratory post hoc analysis suggested that this association persisted within the taught domain after controlling for taxonomic level and teaching condition. Example composition also mattered: after three examples, adults extended a word to 1.1% of superordinate items when the examples were subordinate and to 77.5% when they were superordinate. Second, in an artificial learner using the same encoder, words joining two categories were learned less accurately the farther apart the categories were (84.7%, 65.4%, and 53.0% naming accuracy for near, mid, and far pairs). The encoder's distances correlated with human similarity and confusability measures from three datasets (rho = .501-.795), but this representational alignment did not translate into conclusive evidence that human-derived distances predict learner difficulty, and a second encoder trained on one child's experience reproduced the tier ordering but not the pair-level effect. The secondary human data were analyzed under an internal plan fixed before the confirmatory analyses (not externally preregistered). Visual similarity accounts for part of how generalization is organized in both systems, while the composition of examples contributes what the distance we used does not capture.
comment: 15 pages, 5 figures. Code: https://github.com/patriciomvera/lexical-consensus . Data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/MrPatoVera/lexical-consensus-data and https://huggingface.co/datasets/MrPatoVera/lexical-consensus-data-cifar10h
☆ Looking One Step Ahead: An Anticipation-guided Agent for Object State Readout in Videos
Understanding the progress of an activity requires tracking how the objects involved change over time. Object state readout provides this information by describing a target object's states and transitions across video frames. Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) generate detailed visual descriptions, these descriptions may leave the attributes needed to distinguish successive states insufficiently specified. In this paper, we propose look-ahead state readout (LASER), an anticipation-guided agent for object state readout that uses possible next-step changes to determine which attributes to inspect in the present. Given temporally ordered frames and a target object, LASER converts anticipated changes into targeted visual questions and inspects the current frame to establish attribute values. It then checks state readouts and forecasts against independent observations of subsequent frames, refining a state record used to generate the final description. Reusable textual observation skills guide this process and are refined by tracing discrepancies with reference captions to the responsible instructions. Candidate revisions are selected on separate videos based on improved caption quality without increased contradictions with reference facts. Model parameters remain frozen throughout adaptation and inference, and the revised skills remain fixed during evaluation. Experiment results and further analysis on OSCaR and PLM RCap show consistent improvements of LASER over strong baselines and existing approaches, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.
comment: 13 pages, 2 figures
☆ ZoomGain: Mining Global-to-Zoom Perception Gaps for Fine-Grained Visual Supervision
Fine-grained visual perception requires Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to locate and interpret subtle evidence within complex scenes. Constructing supervision for this ability is challenging: questions must have correct, unambiguous answers that depend on actual fine-grained visual details rather than coarse cues or language priors. Verifying these properties makes manual annotation labor-intensive and automatic generation difficult for models that themselves struggle with fine-grained perception. Yet the same models can often recognize such details once the region is zoomed in. We exploit this global-to-zoom perception gap and introduce ZoomGain, a data construction pipeline that constructs questions about the full image from visual information gained only by zooming in. It verifies each answer on the zoomed view with multiple models, ensures that each question remains unambiguous in the full image and cannot be answered from language priors, and specifically generates high-quality distractors for multiple-choice questions. With this pipeline and human-only screening (no manual QA editing), we build ZoomGainBench, a 1,000-question bilingual benchmark on which the best of 28 VLMs achieves only 61.08. Failure analysis reveals that models favor a particular type of distractor when answering multiple-choice questions incorrectly. Beyond evaluation, training on just 9K ZoomGain samples substantially improves the visual perception capabilities of our 4B/9B models, enabling them to outperform several hundred-billion-parameter models across various perception benchmarks. The trained 9B model achieves SoTA performance on several benchmarks, such as 90.25 on HR-Bench 4K. These results establish global-to-zoom perception gaps as a practical basis for scaling fine-grained visual supervision for both evaluation and training. Our code is available at https://github.com/inclusionAI/ZoomGain.
comment: Code: https://github.com/inclusionAI/ZoomGain
☆ Obscured Wildfire Flame Detection by Spatio-temporal Analysis of Smoke Patterns Using Frame-wise Transformers
In this paper, we propose a new paradigm in wildfire management for detecting both visible and obscured fire using Deep Learning (DL). The essence of our method is the joint spatial and temporal analysis of RGB videos, embracing the fact that temporal patterns of smoke motions in consecutive video frames can indicate obscured fire flames. This perspective contrasts the traditional approach of independently analyzing images and individual video frames. To this end, we propose a frame-wise transformer architecture that applies an attention mechanism between the consecutive frames while preserving spatial information within frames as opposed to regular attention mechanisms like the non-local block, which combines spatial and temporal information into a single vector. We also optimize the temporal pattern lengths under different spatial resolutions to achieve the highest performance while reducing the computational cost. To investigate the applicability of our method in aerial image processing, we applied it to a curated version of the FLAME2 dataset that includes dual-mode RGB/IR videos. The IR video feed is used to extract ground truth, while the model is trained only on RGB videos to maintain applicability to lowcost commercial drones (which are equipped only with regular cameras) and facilitate processing existing RGB-only datasets. Our proposed method achieves a Segmentation Foreground Dice score of 92.61%, an Object Detection Precision and Recall rate of 93.21% and 91.73%, and clip-level classification accuracy of 98.02%, respectively. We also investigated the efficacy and generalizability of our method through ablation study
comment: 8 pages, 8 figures. Published in the 2024 20th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Smart Systems and the Internet of Things (DCOSS-IoT), pp. 58-65
☆ Where Do Vision-Language Models Get Left and Right? Position-Code Counterfactuals in Qwen2.5-VL, Qwen3-VL and InternVL3
A vision-language model may take left-right direction from the orientation of image content within patches, its vision transformer's (ViT) position code, or token positions and order in its language model (LLM). Ablations show the ViT code is necessary; we test sufficiency by mirroring only a position code. In Qwen2.5-VL-7B, Qwen3-VL-4B and InternVL3-2B, mirroring ViT width positions reproduces the flipped-image answer on 84.3-93.2% of CV-Bench left-right questions (Qwen2.5-VL-3B: 87.5%, partly a left fallback). With two options, this also counts disruption; a half-grid shift flips most answers too. With the ViT code intact, LLM-side id and token-order mirrors change few left-right answers in all three series (a weak id test in Qwen2.5-VL). In Qwen2.5-VL-7B the effect sits in the global-attention ViT blocks, mostly the last. On What'sUp, flipping content and token order, not the position code, keeps more on/under than left-right answers at the flipped-image answer. Post hoc analyses qualify these results. On CV-Bench items with located objects, random permutations flip 18.9-31.0 points more answers when reversing the objects' order than when keeping it. On What'sUp, in Qwen2.5-VL and Qwen3-VL, the share of the left-right changes made by random permutations that land on the mirror relation is mostly below chance. Counted as returns to the original answer, the What'sUp contrast of support with left-right relations is clear only in InternVL3-2B. Most remaining errors give the same relation whichever object is asked about, suggesting that repair may target relation binding, object localization or use of the reference object.
comment: 25 pages, 6 figures, 10 tables. Code: https://github.com/chen4study-hub/where-vlms-get-left-right
☆ CURRENT: A Recurrent Neural Network for Concurrent Spatial and Temporal Super-Resolution of 4D Flow MRI
Objective: To improve the spatial and temporal resolution of aortic 4D flow MRI through a unified deep learning framework for post-acquisition super-resolution (SR) of reconstructed velocity vector fields.
Methods: We propose CURRENT, a recurrent neural network that performs spatial and temporal SR with a single network architecture. Supervised training was conducted using paired low- and high-resolution datasets generated by embedding computational fluid dynamics simulations of aortic flow into in vivo thoracic MRI backgrounds, followed by controlled spatial and temporal downsampling. CURRENT was evaluated for two-fold spatial and temporal SR against 4DFlowNet and for two-fold spatiotemporal SR against sequential spatial and temporal SR pipelines based on 4DFlowNet. Image-based and k-space-based quantitative metrics were considered and conventional interpolation were used as baselines. In addition, the impact of CURRENT's spatiotemporal SR on physics-informed relative pressure estimation was assessed. Finally, the ability of CURRENT to generalize from synthetic training data to in vivo acquisitions was investigated.
Results: CURRENT achieved superior spatial SR performance and comparable temporal SR performance to dedicated 4DFlowNet models while providing a unified solution for both tasks. Simultaneous spatiotemporal SR using CURRENT yielded more accurate relative pressure estimates than either spatial or temporal SR alone and outperformed sequential 4DFlowNet-based spatial and temporal SR approaches. Furthermore, the proposed model demonstrated promising generalization to in vivo 4D flow MRI data despite being trained exclusively on synthetic datasets.
Conclusion: CURRENT provides a unified framework for spatial and temporal SR of 4D flow MRI. The proposed approach has the potential to enhance physics-based analysis and broaden the applicability of accelerated 4D flow MRI.
comment: Under review
☆ Structured Confidence Perturbation via Fisher Geometry for Adversarial Training
Adversarial training is often plagued by "pseudo-attacks", perturbations that significantly increase the loss value but fail to truly alter the model's confidence structure. To address this, we propose two complementary approaches to directly attack and defend against confidence structure deformation. First, building upon the traditional loss maximization perspective, we introduce a hybrid objective that integrates cross-entropy and KL divergence, encouraging adversarial examples to simultaneously disrupt prediction accuracy and distribution consistency. Second, we geometrically reconstruct adversarial training by generating perturbations that maximize the distribution distance on the confidence manifold. Theoretical analysis shows that the optimal perturbation direction aligns with the principal eigenvectors of the Fisher information matrix. We also propose an efficient algorithm to avoid high-dimensional matrix computations. Experiments on multiple datasets and model architectures demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods in adversarial robustness and robust transferability, particularly excelling in structural perturbations within high-confidence regions.
comment: 20 pages, 4 figures
☆ Few-Step Streaming Video Generation via Condition Shifting
Deyuan Liu, Jungang Li, Kaiwen Zheng, Kai Jiang, Jintao Chen, Yaole Wang, Ming Lin, Tao Lin, Jianfei Chen, Jun Zhu, Jintao Zhang
Few-step sampling reduces the cost of streaming video generation. Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) supervises few-step generators with a separate fake-score network, which adds training memory and computation and must track the evolving generator. We extend APEX to streaming video by using condition shifting to estimate the velocity field of the generated distribution within the generator. The original text condition selects generation, while a shifted condition selects fake estimation using the same parameters. This removes the independent fake network while retaining S2-Avatar's frozen reference teacher, Self-Replay Forcing, and perceptual regularization. We evaluate APEX on 180-second videos using three backbone evaluations per block and a one-step spatial Refiner, with a 70-case human study and a 320-case StreamAV-Bench comparison. Compared with S2-Avatar, APEX achieves higher video instruction fulfillment on the Progressive track (3.856 versus 3.831) and higher visual aesthetics across both tracks (0.641898 versus 0.632606). Human raters favor APEX most strongly on instruction following, with +30.0% net preference, followed by consistency and video quality at +4.3% each. Motion quality favors S2-Avatar, audiovisual synchronization is predominantly tied, and usability is unchanged. Separate measurements under matched training settings show 4.4% lower peak allocated GPU memory per GPU and 9.2% shorter mean iteration time than DMD.
☆ HiPFuse: Real-Time LiDAR Semantic Segmentation for Robotic Perception on Edge Devices
Real-time robotic perception requires accurate LiDAR semantics under limited resources. Bird's-eye-view (BEV) aggregation is efficient but can mix differently labeled surfaces in columns. We present HiPFuse, a point-BEV fusion framework that exchanges point and height-partitioned BEV features across horizontal scales, combining point-wise detail with 2D spatial context from one LiDAR scan. Fixed height assignments preserve separate vertical aggregation groups, with auxiliary supervision of initial BEV features using targets from the same 3D cells. A dual-scale BEV context module adds broader context from a coarser grid. On SemanticKITTI and MCD, HiPFuse achieves 63.7% and 62.5% mIoU at 14.2 and 22.4 FPS on Jetson AGX Orin, respectively, exceeding the 10 Hz scan rate. Separate training and evaluation show indoor applicability. Replacing only the baseline semantic front end with HiPFuse in fixed robotic systems reduces odometry absolute trajectory error RMSE by 10.6% on average across two outdoor sequences and increases accepted-loop recall by 8.7 percentage points on SemanticKITTI. Qualitative semantic maps show more continuous road labeling. Our code is available at https://github.com/haiyang2022/HiPFuse.
comment: 13 pages, 6 figures
☆ Interleaving anatomical inspection and diagnostic reasoning for explainable radiology report generation
Chentao Huang, Runlong Lin, Zhijun Wang, Yunxiang Li, Yuanyuan Sun, Jian Wang, Hongfei Lin, Ling Luo
Automated radiology report generation can draft clinically plausible reports, yet the pathway from visual evidence to reported findings remains opaque, leaving the diagnostic basis of these reports unexplained and the generated reports difficult to review or revise. We introduce ARIVE (Anatomy-guided Reasoning with Interleaved Visual Evidence), an explainable report generation framework that interleaves anatomical inspection with diagnostic reasoning prior to final report composition. To support this process, we constructed 159,416 multimodal chain-of-thought (MCoT) trajectories from MIMIC-CXR, wherein visual evidence from inspected anatomical regions informs subsequent clinical interpretation. Trained on these trajectories and further optimized using anatomical and clinical-content rewards, ARIVE achieved superior clinical-efficacy performance compared with strong baselines on MIMIC-CXR and the abnormality-centered MIMIC-ABN. ARIVE's reports were competitive with those of leading models in blinded expert grading, and its MCoT trajectories earned high ratings for diagnostic traceability. Furthermore, a paired review evaluation suggests that access to MCoT can aid in identifying errors within generated reports.
☆ A Stage-Wise Explainable Pipeline for Arteriolar-to-Venular Ratio Estimation and Retinopathy Screening IEEE
The arteriolar-to-venular diameter ratio (AVR) is a clinically motivated marker of retinal vascular health. We present a five-stage pipeline for AVR estimation and exploratory retinopathy screening from fundus images, with inspectable intermediate outputs at each stage. The pipeline combines vessel and artery-vein masks, optic-disc localization, vessel-calibre estimation using a minimal-chord boundary walk, and AVR computation from dominant arterial and venular branches. An explicit threshold-based rule produces the screening decision, enabling errors to be traced to individual processing stages. On an exploratory cohort of 30 HRF images, we report 96.7% accuracy, an F1-score of 0.968 and ROC-AUC of 0.978. Ablation studies and an exploratory comparison with VascX examine the effects of vessel pairing, calibre measurement and aggregation. Interpretation is limited by the small cohort, proxy disease labels and absence of independent reference calibre measurements. The pipeline provides a transparent framework for investigating retinal vascular biomarkers, with further validation needed on larger, clinically graded cohorts.
comment: Accepted for presentation at the 23rd IEEE India Council International Conference (INDICON 2026)
☆ Specify Privacy Yourself: Assessing Inference-Time Personalized Privacy Preservation Ability of Large Vision-Language Models
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but raise significant privacy concerns due to their abilities to infer sensitive personal information from images with high precision. While current LVLMs are relatively well aligned to protect universal privacy, e.g., credit card data, we argue that privacy is inherently personalized and context-dependent. This work pivots towards a novel task: can LVLMs achieve Inference-Time Personalized Privacy Protection (ITP$^3$), allowing users to dynamically specify privacy boundaries through language specifications? To this end, we present SPY-Bench, the first systematic assessment of ITP$^3$ ability, which comprises (1) 32,700 unique samples with image-question pairs and personalized privacy instructions across 67 categories and 24 real-world scenarios, and (2) novel metrics grounded in user specifications and context awareness. Benchmarking the ITP$^3$ ability of 21 SOTA LVLMs, we reveal that: (i) most models, even the top-performing o4-mini, perform poorly, with only $\sim$24% compliance accuracy; (ii) they show quite limited contextual privacy understanding capability. Therefore, we implemented initial ITP$^3$ alignment methods, including a novel Noise Contrastive Alignment variant which achieves 96.88% accuracy while maintaining reasonable general performance. These results mark an initial step towards the ethical deployment of more controllable LVLMs. Code and data are available at https://github.com/achernarwang/specify-privacy-yourself
comment: Accepted by ACM Multimedia 2025 (Brave New Ideas track)
☆ Lipschitz-Controlled Flow Matching for Robust Image Restoration
Flow-matching models can produce high-quality image restorations, but their learned dynamics may amplify small input perturbations and make reconstructions unstable. We introduce LipsFlower to reduce this amplification. We derive stability bounds for Flow-from-$Y$, which initializes the ordinary differential equation from a noise-perturbed observation, as well as for observation-conditioned posterior sampling, which conditions the velocity field on the observation throughout integration. Based on this analysis, we develop LipHDiT, a Lipschitz-aware hourglass diffusion transformer that serves as the vector-field architecture of LipsFlower. LipHDiT incorporates stabilized approximate spectral normalization, bounded modulation, and convex residual mixing. We also use adversarial finite-radius gain regularization at sampled interpolation states to penalize excessive sensitivity to the state and, for conditional sampling, the observation. We test both formulations on blind face restoration, measuring adversarial robustness and the perceptual quality of the reconstructions. LipsFlower reduces perturbation amplification while keeping restoration quality competitive with the evaluated baselines. These results suggest that Lipschitz-aware flow matching can improve the stability of generative image restoration.
☆ Pulse or Provenance? What rPPG-Based Deepfake Detectors Learn
Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) has been proposed as a physiological cue for deepfake detection, based on the premise that synthesized faces lack a genuine cardiac signal. We examine what rPPG-style detectors learn on Celeb-DF++ (22 forgery methods) and FaceForensics++ (FF++), using one identically sampled window per real and fake video. On talking-face forgeries, simple chrominance traces reach an AUC of 0.998, exceeding a dedicated rPPG extractor (0.87). Controlled experiments indicate that this signal is not physiological in origin. On fully synthesized forgeries, it is equally discriminative when extracted from background regions or from full frames without face detection, and it is concentrated above the 0.7 to 4 Hz heart-rate band. It is largely removed by shuffling frame order but persists after normalizing resolution, frame rate and encoding, and an independent reimplementation reproduces these findings. Removing high-frequency content makes most synthesized videos appear real, adding it makes real videos appear fake, and injecting a synthetic pulse has little effect. In controlled self-reenactment experiments with two generators, animating a face from a single frame introduces the same high-frequency signal, whereas reconstructing each frame from its own source does not. Face-based chrominance detectors trained on Celeb-DF++ classify over 99% of real FF++ videos as fake, indicating that they largely encode video source rather than manipulation, and a CLIP-based detector exhibits the same behavior. A frozen CLIP backbone matches or exceeds fusions of CLIP with rPPG and frequency features. Finally, we show that the official Celeb-DF and Celeb-DF++ splits share identities and source-video content between training and test, and that custom protocols reusing test videos and identities in training inflate weaker detectors by up to 0.30 AUC.
☆ TransGHOST: Real-Time, Synthesis-Free Reconstruction of Instrument-Occluded Regions in Ophthalmic Microsurgery
Intraoperative scene perception in ophthalmic microsurgery is limited by instrument occlusion: when a tool enters the high-magnification field, it conceals tissue from both the surgeon and the perception components of robot-assisted systems that process the video. Generative inpainting can remove the occluder but replaces the missing image content with synthesis, which is unsuitable when visual provenance matters. Many video inpainters also depend on future frames and cannot operate online. We present TransGHOST, a causal reference-guided reconstruction pipeline whose non-generative safe mode operates in real time. Every restored value is obtained by resampling a recorded frame using geometric transforms fitted only to visible regions. The system provides per-pixel confidence and provenance and marks unsupported pixels as abstentions. We evaluate TransGHOST on a new veterinary clinical corpus of canine cataract surgery with pixel-level instrument and anatomy labels. Only the occluded region is scored, and each scoring target is verified to differ from the reference supplied to the system. Safe mode reaches 31.89 dB masked PSNR and 0.915 masked SSIM at 51.7 ms median and 85.5 ms 95th-percentile latency. On a pre-declared held-out cohort using instrument cutouts excluded from segmentation training, it reaches 29.83 dB masked PSNR, while matched-mask evaluation on validation shows a 3.45 dB advantage over LaMa. Region-aware reference selection improves masked PSNR by 3.60 dB over recency when candidate references can themselves be occluded. Reference-age analysis further defines the operating interval for the brief, repeated occlusions targeted by TransGHOST.
comment: 21 pages, 10 figures, 11 tables
☆ Counterfactual Analysis of Extent Leakage from Annotation-Derived Prompts in Vision-Language Medical Image Segmentation
Text-guided segmentation models receive an image and a short caption about the lesion, and on public benchmarks the caption improves accuracy considerably. On colonoscopy and breast ultrasound, however, the size, count and location words of each caption were computed from the mask that later scores the prediction, and the chest X-ray captions were written by benchmark annotators. We tested what two published models take from them. On colonoscopy and chest X-ray, it is mostly the lesion's extent. Keeping only the size word or the lung-zone phrase recovers 84 to 98 percent of the improvement over an empty caption, and removing it loses 52 to 77 percent. The rest matters little, and a polyp called a rock is segmented just as well. We call this extent leakage. On breast ultrasound, nearly half the captions also name the diagnosis, which carries part of the benefit. Retraining on three datasets shows that models pick up this habit from their training captions, though only partly on breast ultrasound, and that it weakens their segmentation from the image alone. The leak can be measured without training a model, since caption words alone predict lesion area (coefficient of determination 0.54 to 0.77 on six of seven test sets). Without the test mask, the best method we tested, which estimates extent from the image, reaches 74.59 Dice on colonoscopy against the published 77.23. We propose an evaluation protocol that keeps what a caption says about the image apart from what it copies from the label.
comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, 13 tables
☆ RB-LDC: Redundancy-Balanced Latent Coding for Noise-Robust Diffusion Latents
Latent diffusion models decode approximately correct latents, making decoder sensitivity to perturbations relevant to image quality. After whitening, forward diffusion corrupts every direction at the same signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), despite unequal decoder sensitivities. We study an invertible linear layer between the encoder and diffusion process that shifts each direction's log-SNR. Its linear minimum mean-square-error (LMMSE) recovery risk has an exact spectral expression for any whitened latent distribution. Under an energy budget and a floor ensuring invertibility, minimizing decoder-sensitivity-weighted LMMSE risk integrated over the diffusion schedule yields a unique optimal allocation. The layer aligns with the decoder's expected pullback metric and equalizes marginal risk reduction across directions, computed by a deterministic spectral solver. At large budgets, the allocation follows a power law in sensitivity whose exponent is determined by the low-SNR tail of the loss weighting: one half for noise prediction and two thirds for data prediction under the cosine schedule, with a crossover on truncated schedules. We instantiate this principle as RB-LDC using Jacobian-based sensitivity estimates. On ImageNet at 256 x 256 resolution with SD-VAE and VA-VAE, trained RB-LDC improves reconstruction from noisy latents over budget-matched isotropic coding in all four metrics and five coding configurations, averaged over 15 SNRs and three pipeline seeds. It reduces average perturbed FID by 17.1 for VA-VAE block-local coding while preserving clean reconstruction. We also report intermediate SNRs where perturbed FID worsens. With a frozen diffusion model, RB-LDC yields lower FID point estimates in all 12 tested combinations of sampling progress and channel SNR under corruption during sampling.
comment: 35 pages, 4 figures, including appendices
☆ MEOW: Medical Open-World Interactive Segmentation
Philip Matthias Winter, Maria Wimmer, Bernhard Schäfl, David Major, Dimitrios Lenis, Astrid Berg, Theresa Neubauer, Ariharasudhan Muthusami, Johannes Novotny, Georg Zotti, Katja Bühler
In open-world recognition, machine learning models not only make predictions on unknown structures ("generalized open-set"), but also continually learn and improve from those predictions over time. Interactive segmentation, despite its access to user feedback, has so far remained confined to the open-set setting. In this work we introduce MEOW, the first framework that turns non-interactive segmentation backbones into interactive open-world learners without updating learnable model parameters. MEOW combines parameter-free transductive reasoning with memory consolidation to accumulate knowledge and thereby improve future performance. Focusing on medical data, we show that MEOW consistently improves its own predictions on classes never seen during training, and transfers zero-shot to unfamiliar domains, including micro-CT data and other imaging modalities.
comment: Preprint. 18 pages, 9 figures
☆ The Case for AI-Enabled Gate Monitoring as Farm Security in the UK: A PRISMA-Guided Review of the Evidence on Rural Crime, Livestock Predation and Farm Access
Farm security in the UK rests on thinner evidence than its cost suggests. We ran a PRISMA guided review: twelve searches of Web of Science and Scopus on 2nd -4th November 2026 returned 1,183 records (761 unique), and grey-literature and hand-searches added 35 assessed sources. We synthesised 96 database records and 24 grey sources narratively. UK peer-reviewed evidence is small (16 records), and the main UK survey of crime and farmer mental health has 80 responses. Cost estimates rest on insurer claims: NFU Mutual put UK rural crime at £41.5 million in 2025, with livestock theft up almost 30% to about £4.5 million and dog attacks on livestock costing £1.95 million. The Home Office states that agricultural crime cannot be separately identified in its central data. We found no independent evaluation of cameras, sensors, trackers or marking; light and sound deterrents lost effect within one to five months in a systematic review of anti-predator interventions; and no study examined how often farm gates are left open or what follows. Camera-trap AI papers report accuracy on ecological datasets, none at a farm gate in the records we found, and in one comparison machine learning detected 41% of wildlife against 81% for analysts. We argue, as an inference from these gaps and not as a demonstrated effect, that continuous gate-level AI-mediated monitoring, as implemented in Fieldmark AI, would be highly beneficial for UK farm security. It would create the farm-level, time-stamped record that no official source holds, verify events that periodic human checks miss, resolve whether foxes, dogs or people were responsible, and give every other security measure something to be tested against. No study has yet shown that it reduces loss, and we set out the evaluation needed to show it.
comment: Keywords: farm security; rural crime; livestock predation; camera traps; computer vision; PRISMA; evidence review
☆ CAppleNet: A Coordinate Attention-Based YOLO11 for Real-Time Apple Stem Cavity and Calyx Detection
Automated fruit grading, sorting, and orientation systems require real-time, accurate detection of fruit-level morphological landmarks rather than the fruit boundary alone. This paper presents a custom, fully self-collected and self-annotated dataset of 1506 apple images (1054 training, 301 validation, 151 test) captured under controlled, fixed-camera conditions and annotated for three target classes: fruit body, stem cavity, and calyx. A YOLO11s detector trained with default hyperparameters is adopted as the baseline, and a systematic, one-factor-at-a-time ablation study is conducted across input resolution, data augmentation policy, optimizer configuration, and lightweight architectural enhancement to identify the factors that most improve detection of these fine-grained landmarks under high inter-cultivar color and texture variability. Neither increased input resolution, nor any of six tested augmentation variants, nor manual optimizer tuning improved on the untuned baseline (F1 = 0.9047); only a same-slot architectural substitution of the backbone's C2PSA block with Coordinate Attention (CA) matched the baseline's overall F1 (0.9038) while reducing parameter count by 10.2% and achieving the study's best mAP@0.5 (0.935) and best stem-cavity F1 (0.8217). A confidence-threshold sweep identified 0.15 as the deployment operating point for this model, and a confirmatory experiment combining the CA-swap architecture with the best-performing augmentation variant showed the two effects do not combine additively, reversing the architectural gain rather than compounding it. The resulting design recommendations --- the CA-swap architecture alone, at a 0.15 confidence threshold --- target real-time apple landmark detection for orientation-aware industrial sorting and alignment systems.
comment: 19 pages, 6 figures, 15 tables
☆ MicroBT: Centroid-Guided Synergistic Learning for Multi-Modal Micro Brain Tumor Segmentation and Counting BMVC
Multi-modal brain tumor segmentation is essential for clinical diagnosis, radiotherapy planning, and longitudinal monitoring. While recent studies have achieved remarkable overall segmentation performance, they rely on overlap-based objectives that inherently favor large regions, causing sub-3 mm micro-lesions to be systematically suppressed during training. Moreover, existing pixel-level segmentation frameworks lack explicit instance-level modeling, leading to unreliable lesion counting that directly impacts clinical staging and therapeutic decisions. To address these challenges, we propose MicroBT, a unified multi-modal framework for micro brain tumor segmentation and counting. Our core insight is that a fundamental geometric property is inherently scale-invariant: regardless of size, each lesion possesses a well-defined centroid. Leveraging this, we first devise a centroid-anchored synergistic paradigm that utilizes predicted centroids as shared anchors to simultaneously condition dense segmentation and instance-level localization. To counteract the tumor size imbalance, we further devise a Volume-Calibrated Loss (VC-Loss) that adaptively amplifies the gradient contribution of micro-lesions, alongside a Size-Aware Curriculum Optimization (SACO) that stabilizes multi-task training by establishing global representations before progressively unlocking fine-grained localization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MicroBT outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly on metastases, where micro-lesion ($\leq 3$ mm) localization precision improves by approximately 7% and counting estimation errors decrease by approximately 26%. The code is available at https://github.com/leonlou921/MicroBT.
comment: Accepted at the 37th British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), 2026
☆ Adapting a Vision Foundation Model for Fracture Characterization in Acoustic Image Logs
Natural fractures (NFs) and drilling-induced tensile fractures (DITFs) in acoustic image logs provide insights into rock mass structure and in situ stress, but manual characterization is time-consuming. Deep learning can automate this task, although expert-labeled data are scarce. We investigate whether adapting a pretrained vision foundation model (VFM) outperforms task-specific models trained from scratch with limited annotations. Using 80 annotated acoustic image samples, we fine-tuned DINOv3, pretrained on satellite imagery, and evaluated it on four boreholes excluded from fine-tuning. The adapted model estimated NF and DITF parameters comparably to human interpretation. Relative to U-Net, YOLOv8, and Swin Transformer models trained from scratch, it yielded fewer false positives and negatives and more accurate fracture counts and orientations. However, its performance advantage generally narrowed as training sample size decreased. We also assessed decoder architecture, fine-tuning strategy, and image enhancement. A progressive upsampling decoder with full fine-tuning performed best among the DINOv3 configurations tested, while fracture-focused image enhancement did not consistently improve accuracy. These results demonstrate the potential of VFM adaptation for fracture characterization in acoustic image logs with limited labeled data and suggest a transferable workflow for other annotation-scarce geoscientific imaging tasks.
☆ EVAThink: Evidence Sufficiency-Guided Training for Adaptive Thinking in Video Understanding
Under a fixed frame budget, video understanding with vision-language models (VLMs) depends on whether the sampled frames provide sufficient evidence for the question. Sufficient frame evidence supports direct answering, whereas less informative observations may benefit from reasoning that connects the available cues. We introduce EVAThink, which enhances video understanding through evidence sufficiency-guided training for adaptive thinking. First, Recoverable Evidence Gap Mining constructs evidence-dense and evidence-sparse video views that share the same question and answer under an identical frame budget. It retains pairs where sparse views yield lower direct-answer accuracy than dense views but benefit from explicit reasoning, providing supervision for response-mode selection. Second, Evidence-Guided Two-Stage Reinforcement Learning uses stage-specific rewards to guide training with evidence-based mode preferences and then refine response efficiency, while first-token advantage regularization mitigates mode collapse. Trained on only 6.7K curated samples, EVAThink consistently improves upon the base model across video understanding benchmarks under both 32- and 64-frame budgets, while outperforming strong baselines on average. The code, model, and datasets are available at \href{https://github.com/ChangtiWu/EVAThink}{EVAThink}.
comment: The code, model, and datasets are available at \href{https://github.com/ChangtiWu/EVAThink}{EVAThink}
☆ Persistent Metric-Semantic Maritime Scene Memory from Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs
Three-dimensional scene graphs (3DSGs) can provide robots with persistent metric-semantic representations for spatial reasoning, but the existing methods have primarily been developed for indoor and terrestrial environments. In this paper we investigate how a representative outdoor open-vocabulary method transfers to maritime environments and which adaptations are needed. Our experiments show that zero-shot representative outdoor 3DSG descriptions agree with our labeled ground truth for a majority of geometry-supported objects on our data, but the resulting map exhibits considerable physical-entity fragmentation, and its terrestrial higher-level assumptions don't capture maritime spatial organization needs. We therefore keep the underlying mapping method and post-process its accumulated evidence. We show a metric-semantic consolidation method followed by geometry-grounded multi-view vision-language model (VLM) reasoning that reconciles remaining fragments into physical entities and groups entities through observations into local places. In parallel, we construct maritime macro regions using map priors and onboard water and structure observations, and associate them with the local places. The resulting representation reduces physical-entity fragmentation beyond both the baseline and our geometry-semantic consolidation component alone, supports correspondence of fixed local places across repeated maritime traversals, and improves contextual retrieval on our reviewed queries over tested baselines. These results show how an outdoor open-vocabulary map can be adapted into persistent maritime scene memory with our methods for object/place identity and spatial abstractions.
comment: Website: https://kimachristensen.github.io/maritime_3dsg
☆ A 10K drone image dataset with component-level annotations for rooftop photovoltaic inspection
Penglei Zhang, Wan Zhang, Ruizhe Deng, Bo Chen, Wenhao Duan, Jinhe Zhang, Yanzhen Zhang, Qi Chen, Zhiling Guo, Haoran Zhang, Yuntian Chen
Component-level information supports rooftop photovoltaic (PV) inspection, but recognizing individual components across complex scenes remains challenging. We present PVIS-10K, a dataset of 10,065 drone images with component-level annotations covering 63,632 physical PV modules across 22 rooftop installations. The high-resolution red-green-blue (RGB) images were acquired by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, also known as drones) in Ningbo, Shaoxing and Shenzhen, China. Multi-angle oblique observations capture installation-height and scale variation, dense arrangements, occlusion, shadows and reflections. Three-dimensional delineation, reprojection and image-by-image review produced 3,516,675 image-level polygon annotations, stored in Common Objects in Context (COCO) format. Station-disjoint partitions support evaluation on unseen stations within and across cities. Four supervised models and text-prompted zero-shot Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) provide full-resolution benchmarks of instance matching and foreground coverage. PVIS-10K supports component localization, delineation and image-based counting for drone-based rooftop PV inspection research.
comment: 14 pages, 4 figures. Supplementary information is included as an ancillary file
☆ DroneSegEdit: Adapting Pretrained Generative Editors for UAV Segmentation with Language-Grounded Verification WACV 2027
Recent work has shown that pretrained image generators can support diverse visual tasks. Yet directly applying them to language-guided unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) segmentation exposes a key limitation: a plausible mask may correspond to the wrong instance among small and repeated objects. We call this mismatch between mask rendering and expression-level target selection the Grounding-Rendering Gap. We present DroneSegEdit, which combines RGB proposal rendering with language-grounded, proposal-constrained verification to select supported foreground while retaining rendered geometry. DroneSegEdit adapts the open-weight LongCat-Image-Edit model using task-specific LoRA and fixed color-to-label decoding. For referring segmentation, a Language-Grounded Spatial Verifier (LGSV) reads hierarchical states from the frozen multimodal large language model backbone to derive expression-conditioned spatial evidence, which is mapped back to the rendered proposal without introducing foreground outside it. On RIS-LAD, DroneSegEdit reaches a new state of the art at 52.78 mIoU, 7.16 points above the previous best. It remains competitive overall on UAVid-RIS and VDD-RIS, with its clearest class-wise gains on compact, application-relevant categories, notably vehicles and humans. A separate verifier-free experiment extends the RGB interface to full-scene parsing: a task-specific adapter jointly renders all classes from one task-level instruction without enumerating class names or palette colors.
comment: Accepted at WACV 2027
☆ Region-Wise Logit Fusion and Utility-Gated Refinement for Brain Metastasis Segmentation MICCAI 2026
BraTS-METS 2026 Task 1 evaluates segmentation of brain metastases and postoperative resection cavities on heterogeneous multiparametric MRI, requiring detection of small enhancing foci while preserving the geometry and hierarchy of enhancing tumor (ET), tumor core (TC), whole tumor (WT), and resection cavity (RC). We present COMPASS-METS (Component-Aware Multi-Trainer Probability Assembly with Structured Segmentation), which combines three five-fold nnU-Net configurations into aligned regional probability ensembles. A structured-probability anchor applies region-specific component decisions, TC boundary completion, RC filtering, and hierarchy-preserving conversion. Omitted ET candidates are recovered additively using learned component confidence and deterministic multi-trainer support for ET and its TC/WT parents; a final utility gate admits only disconnected candidates with sufficient lesion-existence and geometry-safety probabilities. On the reused 179-case challenge development cohort, COMPASS-METS (Team: MicroBT) achieved Small F1 0.354, lesion-wise DSC 0.712, NSD 0.714, All F1 0.779, and HD95 56.6 mm. Relative to ResEncXL, it improved DSC, NSD, and All F1 and reduced HD95, while Small F1 changed from 0.367 to 0.354. Stagewise analysis attributes the principal geometric gains to structured probability construction and shows that guarded ET refinement recovers most of the associated small-lesion detection loss. These 179-case results remain selection-aware development estimates. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/leonlou921/COMPASS-METS.
comment: Accepted at the Brain Tumor Segmentation Challenge - Metastases (BraTS-METS), held in conjunction with MICCAI 2026
☆ The BRIDGE dataset: paired brightfield whole-slide images of prostate core-needle biopsies in paraffin, after deparaffinization and H&E staining
Julia A. Mielcarz, Justyna Durślewicz, Marek Zdrenka, Ahmad Abbadi, Martin Eklund, Mateusz Matusiak, Łukasz Szylberg, Andrea Camilloni
Computational approaches are increasingly being explored to streamline histopathology workflows, including label-free methods that aim to reduce reliance on chemical staining. Among these, deep learning-based label-free virtual staining uses images of unstained tissue to computationally generate stained images. Despite growing interest, model development and validation remain constrained by the scarcity of paired, clinically annotated whole-slide imaging datasets. We present BRIDGE, a dataset of prostate core-needle biopsies collected at the Prof. Franciszek Lukaszczyk Oncology Centre in Bydgoszcz, Poland. The dataset comprises 869 glass slides from 169 patients, each digitized sequentially after sectioning, deparaffinization, and hematoxylin and eosin staining, yielding in total 2607 whole-slide images. The dataset supports the development and external validation of label-free virtual staining, virtual unstaining, image-registration and segmentation methods. Each slide is accompanied by a Gleason score, enabling downstream analyses of cancer classification and grading concordance. The stained images can be used independently for color normalization and cross-scanner robustness studies. All images are de-identified, distributed in their native scanner format and will be available through the BioImage Archive.
☆ Spatial-Spectral Coupling as Attention: Scaling Shape Correspondence to High-Resolution Surfaces
Bence Demeter, Kilian Ehrenreich, Amelie Kleber, Ioana Oprisiu, Philipp Spohn, Christian Wachinger, Fabian Bongratz, Lennart Bastian
Establishing dense correspondence between high-resolution 3D shapes remains challenging due to the spatial--spectral coupling at the core of many functional-map methods, which grows quadratically with mesh resolution. We observe that this coupling is equivalent to a scaled dot-product attention formulation, with learned descriptors serving as queries and keys and spectral basis functions as values. This connection makes efficient attention implementations directly applicable to shape matching and an effective mechanism for scaling spatial-spectral coupling. We show that optimized quadratic attention implementations can scale modern deep functional map pipelines to large mesh sizes, improving both runtime and memory consumption, while sub-quadratic methods introduce errors, particularly for non-isometric shape pairs, where an exact coupling proves most necessary. These insights motivate \textit{Geo-FlashAttention}, which restricts the exact softmax to geometry-selected surface patches and achieves near-linear empirical scaling while preserving correspondence accuracy of exact implementations. Across six standard benchmarks and three functional-map pipelines, rigorous analysis shows that efficient couplings preserve correspondence accuracy. At $60k$ vertices, these insights reduce peak training memory from 106.08 to 5.67\,GiB, with Geo-FlashAttention being $1.5\times$ faster per training step than FlashAttention. This enables end-to-end learning for correspondence problems on large meshes such as cortical surfaces, where high resolution is required to preserve disease-relevant intricacies of the surface geometry. Project page available https://spatial-spectral-attention.github.io/
☆ Mechanistic Interpretability of Deep Neural Networks: Methods, Frameworks, and Perspectives
Deep neural networks underpin fundamental tasks in a wide range of signal domains, such as image, audio, and language processing. However, their internal mechanisms are notably difficult to interpret. Internal activations are structured signals transformed across layers that may encode a multitude of interdependent relationships, as individual neurons frequently represent multiple underlying concepts. Mechanistic interpretability aims to uncover the internal mechanisms of neural networks by identifying components whose activations are causally responsible for specific behaviors. In such a context, this article provides an overview of advances in mechanistic interpretability for the analysis of causal inference in deep neural networks.
☆ Towards Text-Only Remote Sensing Scene Classification via Semantic Proxy
Remote sensing scene classification (RSSC) is traditionally formulated as a vision-centric problem, where inference relies on rich visual representations extracted from images. In this work, we revisit this assumption by introducing text-only RSSC, a new problem setting that investigates whether remote sensing scenes can be recognized using only textual semantic representations. To enable this study, we propose SeProRS, which reformulates RSSC as a text-only classification task through semantic proxy generation. Specifically, a vision-language model (VLM) is first employed to convert remote sensing images into textual descriptions, termed semantic proxies, which are then encoded by a text embedding model for scene classification. This decoupled pipeline provides a unified and reproducible benchmark for evaluating text-only scene understanding. Furthermore, we investigate representative prompting strategies and proxy generators, and analyze their impact on classification performance, text embedding behavior, cross-generator transferability, and efficiency. Extensive experiments on three well-known RSSC datasets show that semantic proxies can preserve substantial discriminative information, while also revealing inherent limitations of purely text-based scene understanding. This paper does not aim to replace image-based RSSC, but instead establishes a new research direction by quantifying the feasibility and boundaries of semantic proxy-based scene recognition. The proposed benchmark and analysis provide a foundation for future research on efficient and modality-reduced remote sensing scene understanding. The source code and datasets will be accessible at https://github.com/sstary/SSRS.
comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, 14 tables, including appendices
☆ Satellite Pretraining Is Not One Thing: A Matched-Pair Study of Generic and Earth-Observation Foundation Models for Scene Classification WACV 2027
Geospatial foundation models are pretrained on satellite and aerial imagery, but whether such an encoder beats a strong generic one for few-label land-use/land-cover mapping remains unclear, as prior comparisons rarely isolate the pretraining data. We study five matched pairs of Earth-observation (EO) and generic encoders sharing objective and architecture (DINO/SatDINO, DINOv3/DINOv3-SAT, MAE/SatMAE, MAE/Scale-MAE, CLIP/RemoteCLIP) within a benchmark of 14 frozen encoders on five RGB scene-classification datasets (0.06-30 m GSD). With native preprocessing, we evaluate k-NN, linear and attentive probes and image retrieval over six low-label splits, using paired per-image significance tests. EO pretraining is not uniformly helpful: on most datasets and metrics, it significantly improves three pairs (SatDINO, Scale-MAE, RemoteCLIP, the latter evaluated only on unseen datasets) and significantly hurts two (linear probe: DINOv3-SAT by up to 22.5 points, SatMAE by up to 8.8), with opposite outcomes even for two MAEs pretrained on the same fMoW-RGB imagery. These effects are robust to patch-token pooling and attentive probing, concentrate on small man-made objects, and are largest with 1-5% labels. Across encoders, the silhouette score of frozen embeddings predicts k-NN accuracy and retrieval mAP almost perfectly (Spearman $ρ\geq 0.96$ on four of five datasets). Pretraining on satellite imagery is thus not a reliable selection criterion; candidate checkpoints must be validated on target data.
comment: Accepted at the 3rd Workshop on Computer Vision for Geospatial Image Analysis (GeoCV) at WACV 2027
☆ CASCADE: Constraint-Aware SCAffolded DEcomposition for Logical Anomaly Detection IEEE
Logical Anomaly Detection (LAD) requires verifying whether all category-specific constraints, such as object counts, pairing relations, and measurement ranges, are satisfied by a query image given only a few normal references. Recent LAD methods based on Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) formulate this as checklist verification, decomposing the decision into independent textual checks. This decomposition, however, is text-only. Every item still reads the same unmodified query image, so the LVLM must extract different forms of visual evidence from one raw image. We identify this text-image mismatch as a constraint-specific perception gap, the source of two failure modes: instance conflation for binding constraints and scale drift for calibration constraints. To diagnose whether these failures stem from insufficient reasoning or insufficient perception, we compare textual reasoning guides and visual perception guides in a training-free setting. Our analysis shows that reasoning over the same image provides little benefit, whereas adapting the visual input to each constraint substantially improves verification accuracy. Based on this finding, we propose CASCADE, a training-free framework that extends checklist decomposition using constraint-specific visual scaffolds. We further introduce CASCADE++, which adapts these scaffolds at the object level by deriving their configurations from the constraint structure and reference distribution. Across MVTec-LOCO and VID-AD, CASCADE++ surpasses the full-shot state of the art by 3.9 AUROC points with only three references, and improves over the strongest VID-AD baseline by 11.4, transferring across multiple LVLM backbones without any training.
comment: Accepted at the 26th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2026). 10 pages, 6 figures, 6 tables
☆ FastWild-GS: Minutes-Scale In-the-Wild Gaussian Splatting via Compact Per-Image Appearance Adaptation
Internet photos of a scene differ in exposure, illumination and transient objects such as passers-by, so one set of Gaussian colours cannot explain all photos (the in-the-wild setting). Recent in-the-wild Gaussian Splatting methods mostly report hours of per-scene optimization. We present FastWild-GS, which describes each photo by a 128-dimensional Photo Appearance Token and a per-channel transform, a scale and an offset applied to the rendered image (six parameters); a small MLP predicts the colour of each Gaussian from this token and a per-Gaussian feature, replacing the spherical-harmonics colour. The same transform is applied to the renders that score Gaussians for densification and pruning, so appearance differences between photos are not counted as reconstruction error. On PhotoTourism, FastWild-GS trains in 8.8 minutes per scene with the lowest LPIPS among the compared methods, 23x faster than AsymGS, the next best in LPIPS. On NeRF-OSR, it has the best average PSNR, SSIM and LPIPS among the compared methods in 9.7 minutes per scene.
comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, 13 tables
☆ Relaxing Cross-Modal Correspondence for Multimodal Remote Sensing Pretraining
Multimodal remote sensing pretraining commonly relies on exact instance-level correspondence across modalities, implicitly treating strictly paired observations as a prerequisite for learning transferable representations. In this work, we revisit this assumption by relaxing cross-modal correspondence from the instance level to the semantic level. We introduce Semantic Pairing (SemPair), a pairing-relaxed pretraining strategy that replaces exact instance pairs with class-consistent cross-instance pairs. To characterize the effect of correspondence relaxation, we formulate a latent-factor model that separates cross-modal dependence into shared semantic structure and instance-specific correlation, showing that SemPair preserves the former while marginalizing instance-specific cross-modal correlations in expectation. We further introduce Mixed Pairing (MixPair) as a controlled interpolation between semantic and exact pairing to study correspondence granularity along a continuous spectrum. Extensive experiments consistently show that SemPair achieves transfer performance comparable to exact pairing (ExaPair), while MixPair reveals a non-monotonic relationship between downstream transfer and the instance-pairing ratio. These results demonstrate that exact instance correspondence is not a prerequisite for effective multimodal remote sensing pretraining and establish cross-modal correspondence granularity as an important design dimension for transferable multimodal representation learning. More broadly, this finding suggests a practical route toward scaling multimodal pretraining with reduced dependence on costly instance-aligned data.
comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, 13 tables
☆ The Target Is a Predicate: Predicate-State Grounding for Semantic-Level Video Reasoning Segmentation
Yuhuan Hong, Yiming Ren, Zhiqiang Lin, Feize Wu, Xingyun Liu, Yitong Xie, Lei Zhou, Lisheng Wu, Junjie Wang, Yujiu Yang
In this paper, we introduce Predicate-State Video Reasoning Segmentation (PS-VRS), where a query defines a dynamic predicate $P(o,t)$ over objects and time rather than a fixed object identity. Existing methods typically treat the target as permanently active once identified, leading to over-emission of masks during vacant intervals and failure to handle target switching. To address this, we construct PS-Bench, a large-scale benchmark with 2,077 videos and 16,250 queries annotated with explicit active/vacant predicate states, temporal intervals, and pixel masks. We further propose Predicate-State Grounding (PSG), a State-Bind-Emit pipeline that: (1) predicts [ACTIVE]/[VACANT] state tokens; (2) aligns them to video frames via dense cross-modal similarity; and (3) emits masks via SAM2 only for active states. Experiments show that PSG outperforms existing baselines by +9.32 J&F on PS-Bench and significantly reduces false-positive mask emissions. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of explicit predicate-state modeling for video reasoning segmentation with dynamic visual witnesses.
☆ Marrying Capacity and Precision for Efficient 2D Gaussian Image Representation
2D Gaussian representations provide an explicit and efficient way to represent images, but their rate-distortion performance under limited budgets depends critically on how Gaussian capacity and parameter precision are allocated. Existing methods typically optimize these two resources separately, overlooking content-dependent capacity demands and heterogeneous quantization sensitivity. We present CP-GS, a capacity-precision coupled Gaussian splatting framework for budget-aware 2D Gaussian image representation that jointly optimizes capacity allocation and attribute precision under a shared rate constraint. CP-GS first constructs a content-adaptive Gaussian representation by dynamically reallocating a fixed Gaussian budget from redundant regions to areas with higher representation demand. It then introduces hierarchical distortion-aware representation quantization, using efficient rendering-based calibration to allocate precision across Gaussian attributes and further refine it within heterogeneous attribute groups. Finally, it jointly optimizes Gaussian capacity and attribute precision by constructing candidate representations with different Gaussian counts and precision configurations and selecting operating points according to decoded distortion and actual serialized size. Experiments on DIV2K and Kodak show that CP-GS achieves improved rate-distortion performance over representative 2D Gaussian and implicit neural representations across a range of budgets, while maintaining a fixed overall representation budget and low optimization cost. These results demonstrate the benefit of jointly optimizing spatial capacity and parameter precision for compact Gaussian image representation.
☆ DisasterAgent: An Evidence-Driven Agent for Verifiable Disaster Report Generation From Remote Sensing Imagery
Remote sensing disaster assessment is moving from simple damage classification toward comprehensive report-level analysis. In this setting, responders need not only damage descriptions but also verifiable evidence to guide response and recovery. Recent vision-language models (VLMs) and tool-augmented agents offer strong multimodal reasoning and perception, but they struggle to provide the evidence required for high-stakes verification. To address these limitations, we propose DisasterAgent, an evidence-driven agent that uses a Perception-Augmentation-Generation workflow to generate verifiable disaster reports from bitemporal optical imagery. DisasterAgent first invokes a specialized vision expert toolkit in the perception phase to build a Spatiotemporal Perception Graph (STPG), serving as a structured memory to store and organize disaster-induced changes across space and time. Evidence-based Augmentation (EA) then extracts evidence from the STPG, attaching inline citations that form a closed evidence loop from each statement to the supporting visual evidence. Extensive experiments on the DisasterM3 and RSCC benchmarks demonstrate that DisasterAgent consistently outperforms general-domain VLMs, remote sensing-specialized models, and existing remote sensing agents. Notably, compared with the original model, it improves the average score for disaster report generation on DisasterM3 by 13.5\% and ST5-SCS on RSCC by 15.34\%, providing a more accurate and verifiable solution for disaster emergency response. The code will be available at https://github.com/ZhijianLi2003/DisasterAgent.
☆ RF3DGS: Reflection-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting with Self-Priors
3D reflection removal is crucial in applications demanding high-fidelity visualization, such as museum exhibitions. In this work, we propose Reflection-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting (RF3DGS), a novel method for superior reflection removal. RF3DGS exclusively leverages a widely-adopted photometric prior for reflection removal: that the minimum pixel intensity across multi-view images corresponding to the same 3D point strongly correlates with reflection-free information. However, generalizing this principle to a 3D Gaussian Splatting within a multi-view context is non-trivial. To address this, RF3DGS first optimizes a vanilla 3DGS model using a geometric prior to estimate a coarse, reflection-free depth map for each view. Leveraging these depth maps and photometric prior, a 3D warping process aggregates reflection-free information from auxiliary views to construct a clean transmission pseudo-label for a given reference view. This pseudo-label provides a robust self-supervised signal for optimization. We further introduce an Adaptive Twin Rendering (ATR) loss to synergistically utilize this pseudo-label while preserving high-frequency details from the original, reflection-degraded images. By adeptly fusing these internal 3D self-priors with the ATR loss, RF3DGS demonstrates state-of-the-art reflection removal performance across both synthetic and real-world scenarios. Furthermore, we establish the first 3D reflection removal benchmark, based on the Unity rendering engine, for rigorous quantitative evaluation.
comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, 5 tables. Joint first authors: Qiang Wen, Guotao Meng, and Junhong Ruan
☆ From Depth to Safe Depth: Uncertainty-Aware Monocular Perception for Mobile Robot Navigation
Monocular depth foundation models make it tempting to replace depth sensors on mobile robots with a single RGB camera. We show that, used off the shelf, this is unsafe: in a simulated indoor navigation benchmark, a standard Nav2 stack driven by Depth Anything V2 (metric) collides in 63\% of 120 episodes, because the model systematically over-estimates the distance to nearby obstacles. We propose a lightweight plug-in module that turns predicted depth into \emph{safe depth}. A 0.58\,M-parameter head on top of the \emph{frozen} depth model predicts, per pixel, a log-depth correction $μ$ and an uncertainty $σ$, trained with a $β$-weighted Gaussian negative log-likelihood. The navigation stack consumes the one-sided bound $\hat d_{\text{safe}}=d\,e^{μ-kσ}$, where $k$ is set by conformal calibration on a held-out world, and uncertainty also decides which pixels may be treated as floor. The correction halves the depth error (AbsRel $0.262\rightarrow0.134$) and reduces near-range over-estimation from 59.8\% to 12.0\%. In navigation, safe depth raises the success rate from 37\% to 70\% and lowers collisions from 63\% to 3\%, close to the 2\% of ground-truth depth. A constant safety margin calibrated to the same pixel coverage reaches only 30\% success because it freezes the robot; uncertainty-aware safety wins 52 of 56 discordant paired episodes against it. Gains hold on glass, texture-less walls and dark regions.
☆ Exploring Synchrony for Communication in Modular Neural Networks ICLR2027
One motivation for modular neural networks is to divide computation across components that learn distinct, reusable functions, which could then be recombined to support compositional generalisation. In practice, modular structure alone does not guarantee that such roles develop, and unrestricted communication between modules can undermine any specialisation that does emerge. This raises the question of how modular communication should be organised. The problem can be viewed as an analogue of the perceptual binding problem, where synchrony has been proposed as a mechanism for coordinating distributed representations. We introduce SyncNet, a modular architecture that separates module content from a dynamical phase state: learnt Kuramoto dynamics evolve the phases, while phase alignment determines communication through a shared channel. We evaluate SyncNet on Sort-of-CLEVR for relational reasoning and on SQOOP for systematic generalisation, where lower pair variety demands more recombination at test time. SyncNet gives the best held-out accuracy of the models compared at the three lowest pair varieties, by 5.1 percentage points at the hardest, and is competitive on Sort-of-CLEVR though below the strongest attention baselines. Test-time overrides show that performance depends on phases that evolve: fixed phases cost as much as no addressing at all, and permuting which module holds which region is nearly as damaging. A content-addressed variant trained from scratch nonetheless matches it, so the benefit appears to come from the modular decomposition rather than synchrony itself.
comment: Under Review on ICLR2027
☆ Word-Level Alignment of OCR and Ground Truth under Zoning and Reading-Order Errors ICDAR 2027
OCR post-processing needs OCR text aligned word by word with its ground truth. Data sets rarely provide that mapping, and a monotone aligner can lose its place when zoning errors permute the reading order. We revisit this problem, the Zoning Problem of our 2019 paper, with a protocol that tests correctness under such permutations. We apply OCR-side reading-order permutations with construction-time word-level gold and score correct-match F1, cascade length and recovery. We compare the 2019 location-aware aligner, a re-anchoring extension of it, a RETAS-style baseline (RETAS-lite), a multi-region aligner that combines unique-word and unique n-gram anchors with chunk-to-window assignment, genalog's RETAS and the original Java RETAS. Experiments use synthetic character noise with block moves, paragraph swaps and column interleaving, historical newspaper reading-order permutations, geometry-derived gold for Tesseract OCR, and a small word-box set. Synthetic tests show where local tracking fails after large displacements and where unique-anchor methods collapse when unique anchors are scarce. On our synthetic boilerplate page the 2019 method had the highest F1 among those tested. Historical newspaper and geometry-derived evaluations carry the limitations of approximate gold and the article-order convention. The first multi-region version has a quadratic scaling cost. Local tracking remains fragile under large reading-order changes; the tested anchor-based methods handle many of those cases but fail when unique anchors are scarce. Approximate gold, the article-order convention, missing residual annotation, and the lack of modern multi-column word-level ground truth remain limitations.
comment: 19 pages. Submitted to IJDAR (ICDAR 2027 Journal Track). Code: https://github.com/SniperJF/zone-robust-ocr-align
☆ Effects of Laser Beam Width and Measurement Noise on Tree Diameter Estimation in Laser Scanning
Jesse Muhojoki, Nuutti Ervasti, Eric Hyyppä, Aapo Erkkilä, Eppu Honkanen, Tuomas Yrttimaa, Mikko Vastaranta, Juha Hyyppä
Laser scanning has been utilized for decades to measure tree structure and geometry. Despite continuous advances in sensor technology, uncertainties arising from scanner characteristics and measurement conditions has remained relevant sources of error. In particular, factors such as laser beam diameter can introduce both systematic and random errors in the reconstructed tree geometry. This study investigates the main sources of these errors in mobile laser scanning (MLS) and quantifies their effects on stem curve (stem diameter) estimation. We discovered through simulations and experiments that the heteroscedasticity (difference in variance in ranging and scan angle) in the measurement noise is a key factor along with the beam width of the lidar, which cause the bias of the diameter estimates to depend not only on distance, but also on the tree diameter. We demonstrated that this bias can be reliably predicted and negated for trees with a diameter at the breast height greater than 10 cm using technical specifications of the sensor without any additional calibration. In experiments, the proposed bias compensation method reduced the root-mean-square error of stem diameter estimates to sub-centimeter level on boreal forest test sites. However, for small trees with diameter below 10 cm, the diameter bias becomes sensitive to the diameter of the tree$\unicode{x2013}$an unknown factor$\unicode{x2013}$and other factors, such as different bark and out-of-roundness of the stem, limiting the precision of lidar for measuring geometry of trees and applicability of the presented method.
☆ Hint, Not Hole: Localization-Robust Video Overlay Removal
Video overlay removal recovers the scene beneath burned-in subtitles, karaoke lyrics, titles, credits, logos and watermarks. Generative video models now fill a known region convincingly, but in practice the region comes from a detector or a segmenter, and it is wrong in both directions: it misses strokes, halos, whole frames and whole objects, and it covers background between characters, around boxes and on genuine scene text. Erasers that treat the mask as a hole, regenerating inside and copying outside, inherit every one of these errors. We present HintErase, which treats localization as a hint, not a hole. The model sees the full, unmasked video together with a hint channel; during training the hint is corrupted the way real localizers fail, while supervision follows the true overlay. The result is a single model that removes overlay the hint missed, keeps background the hint wrongly covered, and is trained to keep genuine scene text even when the hint lands on it. For full-length releases, a streaming pipeline handles interlaced sources, shot cuts, missed and jittering hints, paste-back and audio, with memory independent of the length of the video. This report describes the approach, the pipeline that turns it into full-length deliveries, and qualitative results; video results, with input, hint and output side by side, are on the project page.
☆ CJRR-Net: A Candidate-Joint Reprojection Ranking for Future-View Selection in Human Pose Estimation
Multi-camera systems support performance recording, sports and human-movement analysis, where selecting an informative viewpoint is important for reliable human pose estimation. We propose the Candidate-Joint Reprojection Ranking Network (CJRR-Net) for future-view selection among eight calibrated cameras in MPI-INF-3DHP. The model combines current-view pose observations, camera configuration, and candidate-specific geometric features obtained by reprojecting the estimated 3D pose and its uncertainty into each candidate view. CJRR-Net achieves a selected-view 2D mean per-joint position error (MPJPE) of 105.18 pixels, compared with 114.64 pixels for the shared-input MLP and 117.56 pixels for adapted PoseErrNet. It also achieves the lowest mean error among the listed policies in each evaluated occlusion group. A blender rollout illustrates repeated camera selection. These findings support candidate-specific geometry for single-view selection in the evaluated fixed eight-camera setting.
comment: 10pages, 4 figures, 4 tables. Accepted for oral presentation at the Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation (ACRA 2026)
☆ Ego Guidance: Enhancing Robot Policy Learning with Action-Free Human Egocentric Videos
In this paper, we investigate how human egocentric videos can benefit robot policy learning without action supervision. Building on a pretrained VLM, we propose Shared Prediction on Action and Representation (SPAR), an MoT architecture in which future visual state prediction can provide independent and complementary learning signals alongside action prediction. We find that representations learned from egocentric videos improve downstream performance on out-of-distribution robot tasks, with further gains as video data scales. We also study the effects of objective choices and data curation, providing insights into how to leverage action-free videos for scalable robot learning.
comment: Project Page: https://llong-cs.github.io/EgoGuidance
☆ EgoHMP: Achieving Precise Human Motion Prediction in 3D Scenes via Egocentric Cues NeurIPS 2026
The complex interactive dependencies between human behavior and 3D scenes make accurately predicting human intent a major challenge for human motion prediction (HMP). While recent studies use human gaze to infer intent, gaze signals suffer from ambiguity, drift, and a reliance on eye-tracking hardware. Research in cognitive science indicates that egocentric views inherently encode potential interactions, while head motion serves as a crucial precursor in motion planning. Motivated by this, we propose EgoHMP, a novel framework that uses egocentric views and head motions as robust carriers of interaction intent. By translating this intent into an envisioning of future interactions, EgoHMP achieves precise HMP in 3D scenes. EgoHMP first employs a vision-motion alignment encoder to align the visual and motion feature spaces. Based on these aligned features, an egocentric intent predictor with a modality-aware modulation mechanism adaptively suppresses invalid interaction cues to predict an accurate interaction probability map. Furthermore, to enhance the stability and realism of the generated motions, we propose a contact-aware motion decoder. Specifically, inspired by the human cognitive process of planning trajectories prior to action execution, we first predict a global trajectory to serve as a self-prompt, effectively mitigating the optimization conflict in diffusion models. Subsequently, we introduce a multi-stage denoiser, which relieves motion artifacts by incorporating human contact modeling through a multi-stage optimization strategy. Finally, a GCN-based motion decoder is employed to synthesize physically plausible and semantically consistent motions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EgoHMP achieves state-of-the-art performance.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026 (Main Conference)
☆ Predicting Single-Cell Spatial Gene Expression from H&E using Pathology Foundation Models NeurIPS 2026
Ashley P. Tsang, Evan Liu, Conrad Foo, Bob Chen, Hassaan Maan, Donny Chan, Elisa Penna, Veronica Ibarra Lopez, Hector Corrada Bravo, Aicha BenTaieb, Lisa M. McGinnis, Runmin Wei, Kenneth T. Gao
Predicting gene expression directly from hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) images offers a scalable and cost-effective approach to deriving spatial molecular insights from routine histology. Pathology foundation models, typically pretrained using tile-level objectives, may not adequately capture the fine-grained cellular features required for single-cell molecular prediction. In this work, we systematically evaluate and establish domain-informed and task-specific strategies for adapting pathology foundation models to single-cell spatial gene expression prediction. Using paired H&E and Xenium 5K data, our approach improves mean gene-wise Pearson correlation by 2.67x over the standard zero-shot baseline and achieves state-of-the-art performance on this task. We demonstrate strong gene-detection performance across the full gene panel (AUROC = 0.800) and importantly identify that predictive performance varies substantially across biological contexts, with our model achieving its highest Pearson correlation for spatially variable genes (r = 0.643). Our findings demonstrate that, despite the challenges of sparse single-cell measurements, H&E-derived representations can recover biologically meaningful spatial expression patterns, highlighting both the opportunities and limitations of morphology-based molecular inference at cellular resolution.
comment: NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on AI at Scale for Clinical Impact. Project page: https://he2sc-st.github.io/
☆ picoEmergencyNet : Attention-Enhanced Ultra-Small Deep Learning Model for Aerial Image Classification in Emergency Monitoring IJCNN2026
Real-time disaster recognition from aerial imagery requires deep learning models that operate under strict memory, compute, and latency constraints. While recent approaches achieve high accuracy, their computational cost limits deployment on resource-constrained UAV platforms. This work introduces picoEmergencyNet, an ultra-lightweight convolutional neural network designed for aerial image disaster classification. The proposed architecture combines depthwise dilated convolutions with efficient channel attention and channel shuffling to enable multi-scale feature extraction at minimal computational cost. picoEmergencyNet has 23k parameters and 7M FLOPs, requiring only 0.1 MB of model storage. Evaluated on the AIDER and AIDERv2 disaster datasets, it achieves up to 96.1% accuracy, matching or exceeding state-of-the-art lightweight models that are orders of magnitude larger. Deployment experiments on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin show that, without hardware-specific optimizations, picoEmergencyNet achieves 258 FPS on GPU and 46 FPS on CPU with a 7x lower activation memory footprint compared to competing models. These results demonstrate that careful architectural specialization, rather than model scaling, enables highly efficient and accurate TinyML-ready disaster recognition for real-time UAV-based emergency monitoring.
comment: 6 pages, Appeared in IJCNN2026 C. Kyrkou, "picoEmergencyNet: Attention-Enhanced Ultra-Small Deep Learning Model for Aerial Image Classification in Emergency Monitoring," 2026 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), Maastricht, Netherlands, 2026, pp. 1-6
☆ DepthGS: Depth-Guided Gaussian Splatting with Adaptive Regularization for High-Quality Surface Reconstruction IEEE
Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as an efficient representation for novel view synthesis, offering fast differentiable rendering and high visual fidelity, and has increasingly been extended to surface reconstruction. However, the relationship between depth information and reconstruction error remains insufficiently explored, limiting the principled design of geometric optimization strategies. To fill the above gap, we propose DepthGS, a depth-guided Gaussian splatting framework. We derive theoretical relations between depth discrepancies and reconstruction error under single-view and multi-view settings, and rigorously establish corresponding upper bounds on reconstruction error. The above analysis informs the design of adaptive regularization strategies in both single-view and multi-view optimization. More specifically, for single-view optimization, we propose a depth-difference-guided adaptive normal regularization strategy that modulates the normal constraint strength using a geometric reliability weight computed from local depth differences. For multi-view optimization, we introduce a cross-view depth consistency regularization strategy that promotes consistency between neighboring-view depth maps and the corresponding depth predictions obtained by transforming the current view's depth predictions into those neighboring views. Extensive experiments on DTU, Mip-NeRF360, and Tanks and Temples demonstrate that DepthGS achieves competitive performance in both surface reconstruction and novel view synthesis.
comment: To appear in IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
☆ FlashMotion: Ultra-Fast Long-Term 3D Motion Generation
Kaixing Yang, Xulong Tang, Ronghui Li, Xiangyue Zhang, Ziqiao Peng, Mingshuang Luo, Chenxi Zhao, Haoyu Wu, Ju Fan, Hongyan Liu, Puwei Wang, Zijiao Zeng, Jun He
3D human motion generation plays a crucial role in game development, extended reality (XR), digital humans, and embodied simulation. Beyond motion generation, practical pipelines include rigging, retargeting, and rendering, making ultra-fast long-term 3D motion generation without compromising quality valuable for real-time interactive applications. Despite promising progress, high-quality long-horizon motion generation under tight inference budgets remains challenging, owing to 2 coupled bottlenecks: (1) generative strategies that require many sampling steps for high-quality 3D motion generation and (2) model architectures with substantial per-step computational and memory costs for long sequences. We present FlashMotion, a co-designed framework for high-quality long-horizon 3D motion generation under a strict inference budget, covering text-to-motion, music-to-dance, and speech-to-gesture tasks. To enhance trajectory-level efficiency, we introduce a 3D motion-space MeanFlow formulation with kinematic and dynamic consistency constraints for few-step generation, together with an Adaptive Soft masking mechanism for temporally coherent motion editing. To improve per-step efficiency, we design a lightweight non-autoregressive BiMamba architecture with condition-guided state selection and AdaIN-based condition fusion mechanism, enhancing cross-modal alignment and generalization to longer motion sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlashMotion achieves overall state-of-the-art performance in both quality and efficiency across text-to-motion, speech-to-gesture, and music-to-dance generation. Code is available at FlashMotion (https://github.com/Sun-Happy-YKX/FlashMotion).
comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, 10 tables. Code: https://github.com/Sun-Happy-YKX/FlashMotion
☆ PUMA: Probability-Constrained Sequential Interaction for Forensic Localization
Image manipulation localization must jointly exploit semantic structure and noise-sensitive forensic evidence. However, the effects of spatial correspondence, matching quality, and interaction order are often conflated. Existing semantic-forensic fusion methods provide complementary representations, but do not explicitly preserve quality-mismatch information during spatial correspondence or adaptively select the order in which information is propagated across branches. We propose PUMA (Probability-constrained Unbalanced Matching and Aggregation), which combines spatially constrained unbalanced optimal transport with position-wise convex selection between two sequential operators through a shared positional interface. Before normalization, PUMA retains signed transport-mass residuals, constructs row-stochastic cross-branch and within-noise-branch operators, and updates noise features through a gated residual path. PUMA achieves strong localization results on four test sets, with scores on COVERAGE and NIST16 exceeding the published results of the representative methods listed in our comparison. The experiments support the utility of local matching states and adaptive sequential interaction for cross-source localization and several post-processing conditions.
comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 1 table
☆ When to Start Denoising? Adaptive Denoising Entry for Generative Video Compression
Generative video compression offers a promising solution for compressing and reconstructing videos under extremely low bitrate constraints, among which the diffusion-based solutions still achieve the best performance by providing the powerful generative latent prior. However, their effectiveness critically depends on when the compressed latent is introduced into the diffusion process, which directly governs the trade-off between reconstruction fidelity and perceptual realism. To address this limitation, we identify denoising start-timestep selection as a key factor governing this trade-off and formulate it as a geometric optimization problem. Based on this formulation, we propose a novel adaptive diffusion entry method for generative video compression (ADE-GVC), the first timestep-aware generative video compression framework, featuring a lightweight predictor that estimates an adaptive denoising start point from the compressed latent. A temporal adapter further extracts compression-aware conditions and injects them into a pretrained video diffusion model, enabling the reconstruction of videos with both high fidelity and realism. More importantly, we observe a strong quantitative relationship between the predicted timesteps and the distortion between the original and compressed latents, providing empirical support for our optimization formulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ADE-GVC achieves the state-of-the-art performance on perceptual metrics and substantially improves reconstruction realism over existing generative video compression methods. Notably, our ADE-GVC achieves an average bitrate savings of 40.99\% (on DISTS) and 95.24\% (on PSNR) compared to the latest open-source baseline GLC-Video.
comment: 10 pages, 8 figures
☆ Post-OCR Correction of Mixed-Script Uzbek Text: Byte-Level ByT5 with an Empirical Homoglyph Noise Matrix
In Uzbek official and technical documents, a large share of OCR errors is caused not by poor image quality but by characters that are visually identical across the two alphabets in use. Because the script transition is still under way, Cyrillic and Latin appear on the same page and often within a single sentence, and in our measurements the density of homoglyph errors on such pages is close to five times higher than in single-script text. We study this problem in a setting where the corpus of engineering-geological and ICT infrastructure reports may not leave the organisation, so every stage was executed on local hardware. The proposed system combines a byte-level ByT5 model with a noise generator whose sampling weights are estimated from 359 manually classified error events, together with a Levenshtein-bounded conservative decoding rule. On a Gold set of 5,204 line pairs it lowers the character error rate from 0.0578 to 0.0369, restores 91.3% of the homoglyphs and introduces only 84 new errors.
comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, 7 tables. Accepted at the 10th International Conference on Future Networks and Distributed Systems (ICFNDS 2026), ACM ICPS. Code: https://github.com/OybekNarzullaev/byt5-uzbek-postocr
☆ Towards Reliable VLM Judges: State-Conditional Invariance and Presentation-Aware Diagnostics NeurIPS 2026
Qinan Zhang, Xinyu Wang, Qihang Jin, Tianyuan Wang, Hongbing Luo, Pengfei Li, Wenjun Lv, Yu Kang, Jian Di
Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used as automated judges for multimodal and embodied tasks, yet aggregate accuracy or consistency alone does not reveal whether a judge changes its verdict for the right reason. We propose State-Conditional Invariance (SCI), a reliability principle requiring a judge to remain stable under semantics-preserving changes in presentation while responding to causal interventions that change the task outcome. We instantiate SCI in GridWM-Judge, a simulator-grounded diagnostic benchmark built from deterministic MiniGrid trajectories with aligned Full, evidence-removal, and counterfactual variants, plus presentation and representation probes. Across five diagnostic tasks, GridWM-Judge tests local perception, action-conditioned transitions, presentation stability, representation exchangeability, and Full-CF causal discrimination. Our diagnostic evaluations reveal heterogeneous failure modes, including sensitivity to evidence presentation and encoding, low activation on successful trajectories, and weak paired counterfactual discrimination. Perception-controlled analyses further indicate that visual grounding and objective recovery are substantial, model-dependent bottlenecks. These results motivate jointly reporting correctness, presentation stability, and causal sensitivity instead of relying on a single score.
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2026 (Track on Evaluations and Datasets). 47 pages, 16 figures. Project page: https://xinyuw922-pixel.github.io/Towards-Reliable-VLM-Judge/ ; Code: https://github.com/xinyuw922-pixel/Towards-Reliable-VLM-Judge ; Data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/nahco318/Towards-Reliable-VLM-Judges
☆ Lightweight Deep Learning Framework for Astrocyte-Centric 3D Reconstruction across Normal and Stress-associated Ultrastructural States
The morphology of astrocytes is closely associated with their ability to support and modulate neural circuit functions; however, its reconstruction from volume electron microscopy (vEM) data remains labor-intensive and computationally resource-intensive, placing substantial barriers on its broader adoption and scalability despite the high spatial resolution of vEM. We present AstroSeg-vEM, a lightweight, astrocyte-centric framework for morphology-preserving astrocyte segmentation, 3D reconstruction, and quantitative morphological analysis in vEM images. AstroSeg-vEM combines transformer-based 2D segmentation with dedicated post-processing methods and operates directly on high-resolution EM sections, making it well suited to anisotropic vEM data and downstream proofreading workflows while preserving the full in-plane resolution of the original EM data. Across four mouse hippocampal datasets representing normal and morphologically defined stress-associated astrocyte ultrastructural states, AstroSeg-vEM demonstrates robust performance and generalization, achieving average Dice and weighted Dice values of 0.92 and 0.95, respectively, on a held-out test dataset. Its lightweight architecture enables efficient, high-fidelity reconstruction on consumer-grade hardware, providing a scalable and accessible platform for large-scale astrocyte ultrastructure analysis and future astrocyte-neuron interaction studies.
comment: Accepted for publication in npj Imaging. 19 pages, 4 figures, 6 tables, including Supplementary Material. Code is available at https://github.com/QuIN-Lab/AstroSeg-vEM
☆ PhyRubric: Rubric-Grounded Diagnostic Evaluation of Physical Commonsense in Text-to-Video Generation
Huiyi Chen, Weitai Kang, Shicheng Fan, Xinshuo Wang, Zhixiang Shen, Yan Yan, Philip S. Yu, Baoxin Li
As text-to-video (T2V) models are increasingly positioned as world simulators, it is essential to evaluate whether their videos conform to physical commonsense. However, existing benchmarks rely on annotators who rate each video with a single score based on intuition, yielding ratings that are subjective and do not tell which physical principle is violated. We introduce PhyRubric, a rubric-grounded diagnostic framework for evaluating physical commonsense in T2V generation. For each caption, PhyRubric constructs a caption-specific rubric before any video is seen, decomposing the caption into semantic and physical items, and derives scores from item-level verdicts grounded in timestamped evidence. We instantiate this framework as PhyRubric-Bench, which spans 34 categories across five physical domains, and scale it up to PhyRubric-Train with 3,788 videos, on which we fine-tune the open-source PhyRubric-Judge. Empirical results across ten T2V models show that physical commonsense remains far from solved, and that PhyRubric-Judge correlates more closely with human judgments than existing open-source judges while matching the frontier proprietary Gemini 4 Argon. Further analysis provides actionable insights for T2V models.
comment: 34 pages, 19 figures
☆ AgenticConflictLens: From Long Traffic Videos to Verifiable Conflict Evidence
Traffic cameras continuously record urban road-user behavior, providing proactive safety evidence beyond crash reports. Yet safety-critical events - conflicts, near misses, unsafe turns, sudden braking, and crosswalk interactions - are rare and brief, buried in hours of routine footage. Existing traffic-video pipelines extract detections, trajectories, and risk scores but process footage uniformly, without adapting to an analyst's query. Vision-language methods improve scene understanding but often lack traffic-specific verification of participant-level conflicts. We introduce AgenticConflictLens, an agentic, query-conditioned framework for efficient, auditable conflict extraction from long fixed-camera traffic videos. Given a natural-language safety query, a Traffic-Aware Controller combines structured traffic memory with specialized conflict-analysis tools to choose where to search, which road users to examine, and which evidence to verify or reject. A coarse-to-fine search retrieves candidate intervals and applies detailed verification selectively. The framework produces conflict records with refined time intervals, participant pairs, semantic regions, trajectories, motion evidence, uncertainty, rejection reasons, and supporting clips. On 96 annotated hours from Bellevue and NYC DOT, AgenticConflictLens achieves the highest conflict-existence F1 and temporal IoU on both datasets: 0.84 F1/0.77 tIoU on Bellevue and 0.80 F1/0.73 tIoU on NYC DOT, while inspecting only 8.7% and 11.9% of video, respectively. These results support scalable, evidence-grounded urban traffic-safety analysis.
☆ UniWeaver: Harnessing Unified Multimodal Models for Interleaved Text-Image Generation
Hongxu Chen, Zixuan Zhong, Donghao Zhou, Haodong Li, Xiaomin Yu, Tianhao Li, Shiyao Yu, Zhongwei Wan, Pheng-Ann Heng
Unified multimodal models (UMMs) have opened up new possibilities for generating rich interleaved text-image content. However, they generally lack native support for coordinating the two modalities, and translating coarse user requests into coherent multimodal compositions also requires explicit planning. We propose UniWeaver, a structured, model-agnostic harness framework that integrates multimodal planning, generation, and visual feedback to produce coherent interleaved outputs. To train UMMs for this task, we construct UniWeaver-10K, a dataset of 10,000 tasks across 20 task families, paired with execution trajectories guided by UniWeaver. We also introduce UniWeaver-Bench, a task-oriented benchmark systematically assessing text coverage, writing quality, visual coverage, and image-text alignment. Experiments show that UniWeaver achieves state-of-the-art performance and improves interleaved text-image generation across multiple UMM backbones.
comment: Project Page: https://poscape.github.io/UniWeaver/
☆ GEMOR-GS: Global Extrinsic-calibration-refined Mapping and Online Relocalization for 3D Gaussian-Splatting SLAM
Photorealistic and metrically consistent world representations are a primary requirement for LiDAR--inertial--visual SLAM systems that serve robots over continuous operation. 3D Gaussian splatting makes such representations attainable by supplying an explicit, renderable, and queryable scene model. We present GEMOR-GS (Global Extrinsic-calibration-refined Mapping and Online Relocalization for 3D Gaussian-Splatting SLAM) to make the Gaussian map geometrically accurate, globally refined, and re-enterable, providing a better appearance for robot perception and decision-making. To improve the 3DGS map, the LiDAR--camera extrinsic is first estimated offline by direct-method alignment over dedicated calibration segments and reused by all following online and offline processes. Under the calibrated geometry, keyframe poses and Gaussian parameters are refined alternately under a gated differentiable-rendering and LiDAR--projection objective. The final global reconstruction is then rebuilt from the refined keyframe schema with all online constraints lifted. For the robot SLAM lifecycle, the method recovers the pose from the 3DGS map after tracking loss through an XFeat bypass map, RANSAC-PnP coarse localization, and Gaussian RGB-D warp refinement. Experiments on one self-collected and five public sequences quantify each element: the offline reconstruction wins all paired keyframes against the online map by 14.3--19.9 dB, improves PSNR by approximately 9 dB over Gaussian-LIC2, and achieves 86--100% held-out relocalization success tied to extrinsic quality. The results show that GEMOR-GS improves the geometric accuracy, appearance fidelity, and re-enterability of the 3DGS map, serving as a dependable robot world model for SLAM and downstream tasks.
☆ Seeing the Small: Deformable Duality Mamba for Retinal Lesion Segmentation
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) lesions vary widely in shape, and microaneurysms (MAs) span only a few pixels. We hypothesize that modeling the spatial organization of lesion regions, with global context and shape-adaptive scanning, improves the segmentation of such small and irregular lesions. To test this, we propose D$^2$Mamba, which couples non-causal state space duality with deformable Mamba scanning. We evaluate it with five-fold cross-validation on the DDR dataset, comparing against representative segmentation baselines under an identical training protocol, and conduct ablations on each component. D$^2$Mamba achieved the best overall performance, with 33.87% mIoU, 2.99 percentage points above the strongest baseline. The largest gain appeared on MAs, the smallest and most easily missed lesions, where Dice improved by 10.06 percentage points. These results confirm our hypothesis that spatially adaptive state space modeling benefits tiny-lesion segmentation. Code and pretrained weights are available at https://github.com/PUREPANEL1/D2Mamba.
comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, 1 table
☆ Evidential Deep Learning with conditional entropy for glaucoma detection TAAI 2026
We propose a novel conditional entropy function as a basis for quantifying predictive uncertainty in Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) for glaucoma detection from retinal fundus images. Using the EyePACS-AIROGS-light-V2 and RIM-ONE-DL datasets for validation, we found that our proposed EDL model regularized by conditional entropy function produced uncertainty estimates with substantially lower calibration errors than Deep Ensembles, MC Dropout, post-hoc calibration and the conventional EDL framework based on Dempster uncertainty. To further probe our models' interpretability, we analyzed Grad-CAM heatmaps using a focus index representing spatial concentration. Compared with the other uncertainty quantification methods, EDL models exhibited greater separation between the index distributions of correctly and incorrectly classified fundus images. In particular, false negatives were associated with localized Grad-CAM activations that were displaced from the optic disc, consistent with its established clinical importance in glaucoma assessment. Overall, our findings suggest that our proposed EDL framework for glaucoma detection provides not only enhanced uncertainty calibration but also admits a more physiologically consistent interpretability.
comment: 15 pages, 4 figures. To appear in TAAI 2026
☆ TMAL: Topology-preserving Multi-offset Affinity Learning for Curvilinear Structure Segmentation WACV 2027
Curvilinear structures such as retinal vessels and surface cracks need both pixel-level accuracy and structural continuity. Pixel-wise supervision does not model the connections between pixels, and topology-based losses still produce ordinary masks. Connectivity-based methods predict these connections directly, but they use binary connectivity targets over a fixed local range. Such labels give the same value to thin segments and to thick regions, and they cannot describe connections at larger offsets. To address these limitations, we propose Topology-preserving Multi-offset Affinity Learning (TMAL). TMAL uses soft affinities that emphasize thin regions near the boundary, and it predicts directional affinities at several offsets to reach further. It then combines these affinities with weights that come from the decoder features, so local continuity and wider context are used together. An auxiliary segmentation branch adds region-level supervision and keeps the overlap accuracy high. On the retinal vessel dataset DRIVE and the crack inspection dataset DeepCrack, TMAL reaches the highest Dice, IoU, and clDice scores, and it greatly reduces the connected-component error $Δβ_0$. Code is available at https://github.com/suho-han/TMAL.
comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, submitted to WACV 2027
☆ Distribution Shift Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery using Machine Learning Models WACV 2027
Remote sensing imagery acquired by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) supports wide range of applications; however, deploying machine learning (ML) models on resource-constrained aerial platforms introduces challenges beyond predictive accuracy, particularly when deployment data differ from the distributions observed during training. Such shifts are common in remote sensing due to geographic, sensor, seasonal, and other visual variations. A practical solution is to equip deployed models with mechanisms that detect emerging distribution shifts and support subsequent responsive actions. This paper presents an empirical case study of three open-source detection tools: (i) Alibi-Detect; (ii) NannyML; and (iii) PyTorch-OOD. Using cross-dataset remote-sensing shifts, we evaluate both detection effectiveness and computational latency of these tools. Our results reveal differences in detection behavior and processing cost across methods and implementations, highlighting trade-offs between detection capability and response-time. These findings motivate further work toward lightweight, and latency-aware monitoring mechanisms for resource-constrained systems.
comment: Accepted as a short paper at the 4th Workshop on Computer Vision for Earth Observation (CV4EO), held in conjunction with WACV 2027
☆ Dark Matters: VAE-Aware HDR Encoding for SDR-to-HDR Video Reconstruction
SDR-to-HDR reconstruction is an ill-posed problem in which clipped highlights, crushed shadows, and quantization artifacts must be recovered while preserving the original content. Latent diffusion models provide powerful generative priors for restoring missing detail, but their effectiveness is constrained by how HDR signals pass through the pretrained VAE. We find that common log-like encodings suppress low-luminance chromatic differences before generation, producing a dark-side collapse in the frozen-VAE latent. We introduce EquivFlow, a compact, invertible exposure-equivariant encoding that maps exposure changes to additive shifts while retaining a scale-independent chromatic component, without modifying the VAE. Encoding-level tests across pretrained image and video VAEs show that its exposure structure and deep-dark chroma transport persist across the tested hosts. Integrated into SDR-to-HDR video diffusion, EquivFlow delivers consistent chromatic-fidelity gains across the tested settings while retaining competitive reconstruction fidelity.
comment: 13 pages, 4 figures
☆ Reasoning-Aware Relational Representation Learning for Open-Vocabulary Scene Graph Generation NeurIPS 2026
Open-Vocabulary Scene Graph Generation (OV-SGG) requires models to recognize visual relationships beyond the training vocabulary, yet existing methods often rely on dataset-specific object--predicate co-occurrence patterns. Under long-tailed distributions and noisy object localization, such reliance leads to biased, entangled relation representations, limiting both rare-relation recognition and generalization to unseen predicates. To address these challenges, we propose RaRe, a reasoning-aware relational representation learning framework that transforms MLLM-generated chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales into structured relation embeddings. Rather than using CoT only as an intermediate reasoning trace for final prediction, RaRe directly optimizes the rationale-derived representation space to improve inter-relation discriminability. Specifically, RaRe first aligns rationale embeddings with textualized relation descriptions through self-supervised contrastive learning, and then refines rationale generation with a specificity-oriented reinforcement learning objective that encourages semantically object-pair-specific relational evidence. Experiments on VG150 and PSG demonstrate improved category-balanced recognition over existing baselines, while the additional gains from learning vary across datasets and proposal settings. Code available at: https://artanic30.github.io/project_pages/RaRe.
comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2026, codes are available at project page https://artanic30.github.io/project_pages/RaRe
☆ When Reconstruction Helps Event-Camera Person Triggers
Event cameras record asynchronous changes in brightness. To use a general visual model as a recording trigger, a system must represent these measurements in a form the model can interpret. We compare direct grayscale accumulation, two temporal encodings, and two intensity reconstructors on paired real event data. On 192 windows from four held-out DSEC recordings, thresholds calibrated only on development data yielded 40 of 52 person detections and 12 of 140 background positives with E2VID. The strongest direct temporal encoding at an admissible fixed cutoff yielded 14 detections and seven background positives. A retrospective comparison at a common 10% background-positive cap yielded 40 detections for E2VID and at most 19 for any direct encoding. FireNet+ had lower preparation cost and produced 21 detections with zero observed background positives at its frozen cutoff. On the same 192 windows, Qwen3-VL-4B yielded 33/52, 2/140 with E2VID and 9/52, 9/140 with the highest-recall direct rendering, the three-bin image (person detections, background positives). A 96-second exploratory replay illustrates the sensitivity of episode capture and recording starts to cutoff selection. The experiments identify a detection benefit from reconstruction under controlled input history and distinguish it from the cost and false starts of continuous triggering.
comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, ancillary score tables and recomputation script
☆ Hand-Object Contact Transition Detection in Egocentric Video ACCV 2026
This paper tackles the task of hand-object contact transition detection in egocentric video, which aims to localize the two temporal boundaries of a contact episode: the moment a hand first establishes contact with an object (touch) and the moment contact is released (release). We propose a unified framework that jointly models the interacting hand and object to accurately localize both transition types. The proposed framework augments hand-centric spatiotemporal representations with object-aware features learned directly from the video and introduces a transition-aware event spotting formulation tailored to contact transitions, without relying on external object or hand-object interaction detectors during inference. To support this task, we present ContactTransition, a dataset comprising 4,021 egocentric videos with 8,498 touch and 8,077 release annotations, together with object-of-interest supervision. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms strong two-stage and end-to-end event-spotting baselines on both transition types. Finally, we show that detected contact transitions provide effective temporal anchors for downstream egocentric hand-object reasoning.
comment: ACCV 2026
☆ Camera3R: Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction from Heterogeneous Camera Models NeurIPS 2026
Feed-forward 3D reconstruction (3R) from unconstrained multi-view images has recently emerged as a prominent research direction in 3D computer vision. Various foundational reconstruction models have been proposed with different architectures and reconstruction paradigms. Despite being trained on large-scale perspective datasets with substantial computational resources, these models generally struggle to generalize to non-perspective images. This limitation hinders their deployment in applications involving arbitrary, unknown, and potentially heterogeneous camera models. To build on the capabilities of existing reconstruction models with minimal retraining, we propose Camera3R, a low-rank adaptation framework that efficiently extends perspective-pretrained 3R networks to any other camera models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, with only 0.5% additional parameters and less than a day of training, Camera3R adapts a foundational 3D reconstruction model to non-perspective cameras while fully preserving its original performance on perspective inputs. Code is available at https://github.com/android-xr/camera3r.
comment: 40th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026)
☆ Prompt2Echo (P2Echo): Text-Prompted Multi-View Echocardiography Segmentation with One Model
Moein Heidari, Alvin Kimbowa, Mahdi Tabatabaei, Afshin Bozorgpour, Sina Ghorbani Kolahi, River Jiang, Wenjin Chen, David J. Foran, Jasmine Grewal, Dorit Merhof, Ilker Hacihaliloglu
Automated segmentation in multi-view echocardiography is essential for comprehensive cardiac assessment, yet remains challenging due to substantial anatomical and appearance variability across standard acoustic windows. In this paper, we present P2Echo, a unified framework capable of segmenting diverse cardiac structures across multiple standard echocardiographic views using a single model controlled by structured view-aware text prompts. Unlike recent foundation model adaptations that rely on implicit latent priors, P2Echo explicitly conditions the segmentation process via a novel Dynamic Image-Text Alignment (DyITA) module. DyITA integrates a differentiable routing mechanism and token differential operators to dynamically modulate decoder features according to the requested view and target structure. This allows the network to adaptively switch its processing pathways for different views without architectural changes. Extensive experiments on a large-scale internal dataset (seen during training) and held-out evaluation on three external datasets demonstrate that P2Echo matches or exceeds both view-specific specialists and state-of-the-art universal models at a fraction of their computational cost, offering an efficient, controllable solution for multi-plane cardiac analysis. Code is available at: https://github.com/moeinheidari7829/P2Echo.
comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 7 tables
☆ How Hyperbolic Are Hyperbolic Vision-Language Models?
Hyperbolic vision-language models (VLMs) have emerged as a rapidly growing area of research, reporting strong zero-shot performance alongside an interpretable embedding space in which radius orders representations by generality. But how hyperbolic are hyperbolic VLMs in practice? We investigate this at the exponential map, the single operation through which curvature enters an otherwise Euclidean network. We show that across MERU, HyCoCLIP, ARGENT, and PHyCLIP, the exponential map is well approximated by the identity function, i.e., pairwise distances and angles in the pre-map Euclidean space barely change under projection, and removing the map at inference leaves evaluation scores unchanged. Motivated by this observation, we train Euclidean VLMs on CC3M from scratch under the same hierarchy losses. Over roughly the final 90% of the training steps, the training statistics are nearly indistinguishable from those of their hyperbolic counterparts, and the resulting models match the evaluation scores and recover the same radial distributions. Our findings establish Euclidean space as a sufficient substrate for hierarchical vision-language learning as it is currently practiced, and motivate new paradigms in which hyperbolic geometry can deliver on its theoretical promise. Code is available at https://github.com/fbyrman/hyperbolic-vlms.
♻ ☆ Multimodal Model Diffing for Feature Discovery and Control NeurIPS 2026
Hunar Batra, Lachin Naghashyar, Ashkan Khakzar, Philip Torr, Christian Schroeder de Witt, Constantin Venhoff, Ronald Clark
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit strong visual understanding, yet the internal features that cause these behaviors remain difficult to identify, audit, or control. While applicable to post-hoc inspection, hidden states that are decomposed into interpretable feature directions using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) neither readily isolate which features are changed by multimodal training, nor are they directly useful for targeted control. We introduce MMDiff, a multimodal model-diffing framework that trains multimodal SAEs and turns them into feature-level interfaces for discovering and controlling multimodal behavior. MMDiff supports three uses: (i) feature isolation, by diffing a base-LM SAE against its multimodal-adapted counterpart to identify features altered by multimodal training; (ii) task-specific feature detection, via per-token contrastive firing analysis that isolates causal features; and (iii) feature-level control, by causally removing or steering the discovered feature directions. We train multimodal SAEs for three MLLM families, LLaVA-MORE, PaliGemma 2, and InternVL3.5, and evaluate on visual-spatial understanding, multimodal safety, and OCR. MMDiff discovers sparse, causally specific features whose removal selectively degrades target behaviors by an average of 12% on spatial tasks and 17% on OCR, and reduces attack success rate by 24% on multimodal safety attacks, with no impact on VQA performance. Steering these features improves spatial and OCR accuracy by +3.6% and +1.8% on average over a standard single-layer steering baseline. These results show that multimodal SAEs can serve not only as interpretability tools, but as mechanisms for auditing, steering, and controlling MLLMs behavior toward safer and more capable generations.
comment: Accepted at the 40th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026)
♻ ☆ RepFusion: Leveraging Multimodal Priors for Denoising in Representation Space NeurIPS 2026
Large language models (LLMs) are widely used in text-to-image (T2I) systems, but they are typically limited to text encoding, while denoising is handled by newly trained generative backbones. The emergence of representation autoencoders (RAEs) shifts the generation target toward semantically structured visual representations, creating a latent space that is more compatible with pretrained LLM priors. Inspired by multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), where an MLP projector is sufficient to align clean visual representations with a pretrained LLM, we repurpose the MLLM itself as a noisy representation encoder, extending this mechanism from clean to noisy inputs. We present RepFusion, which uses the resulting MLLM outputs as the conditioning signal for a diffusion transformer. In controlled comparisons at similar inference budgets, RepFusion outperforms baselines that devote comparable capacity to newly initialized denoisers. Reusing MLLM outputs across denoising steps further accelerates inference while retaining performance comparable to per-step MLLM recomputation. These results demonstrate that MLLMs provide strong priors for denoising visual representations.
comment: NeurIPS 2026; Project page: https://xichenpan.com/repfusion
♻ ☆ $A^2$: Smaller Self-Supervised ViTs Localize Better than Larger Ones NeurIPS 2026
Robust visual classification often depends on localizing the main foreground objects in an image while ignoring contextual distractors. Surprisingly, we find that the last layer attention maps of smaller self-supervised ViTs localize foreground objects better than those of larger ViTs. However, we still need large ViTs, because they extract richer representations from each patch. To get the best of both worlds, good localization and rich representations, we propose $A^2$, a simple method that leverages this inverse scaling finding by decoupling where to look (a small attention model) from what to extract (a large embedding model): we crop around the attention peaks of a small model and embed the crops with a larger model. $A^2$ uses entirely pretrained features, requires no group labels, and does not require per-dataset attention or backbone training. Across 5 benchmarks, $A^2$ is competitive with backbone-matched loss-level methods like DFR, and outperforms end-to-end attention training under stronger distribution shifts.
comment: NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ Diff-Instruct with Diffused Reward: Towards Principled One-step Generator RL
Recent advances in one-step text-to-image generation have enabled real-time synthesis with remarkable efficiency and quality. Previous reinforcement learning methods for one-step generators combine image-space reward optimization with diffusion noisy-space distribution matching. This paradigm brings challenges due to a mismatch between terminal reward optimization and the underlying generative dynamics. As a result, optimization tends to exploit stochastic degrees of freedom, often improving reward at the expense of image fidelity. To address this issue, we propose Diff-Instruct with Diffused Reward (DIDR), a data-free trajectory-level alignment framework derived from Integral KL minimization. DIDR propagates the RLHF-optimal reward-tilted clean-image distribution across all noise levels along the diffusion trajectory. We show that this objective admits the same minimizer as clean-image RLHF, while naturally inducing the Diffused Reward Score (DRS), which acts as a reward-driven correction to the reference score function. To make this practical, we further introduce the Diffused Reward Proxy (DRP), an efficient estimator of DRS based on differentiable short-step denoising. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DIDR consistently Pareto-dominates existing one-step SDXL baselines. Moreover, when transferred to a 6B DiT backbone (Z-Image), DIDR surpasses its 50-step teacher in preference alignment while requiring only a single generation step. Code: https://github.com/Junyi-W/DIDR
comment: 33 pages. Updated manuscript and author information
♻ ☆ Minority Reports: Balancing Cost and Quality in Ground Truth Data Annotation
Data annotation is an essential but costly aspect of developing machine learning-based technology, requiring multiple human workers to repeatedly label each data point in a data set. We explore the tradeoff between annotation accuracy and cost by identifying minority reports---worker responses disagreeing with the reference majority-vote label---that may indicate unnecessary redundancy, and can therefore be proactively pruned before they are executed. We develop a theoretical framework for choosing the number of repeated annotations required for a task and pruning policies at a target label quality. We estimate minority-report risk on two computer vision datasets re-annotated through a professional platform, then evaluate a rolling policy on the assignment stream to prune over 35% of repeats while preserving more than 99.9% of reference majority-vote labels.
comment: 43 pages
♻ ☆ Generalizable fetal brain biometry via adaptive artificial intelligence
Yijin Li, Mingxuan Liu, Yi Liao, Le Chang, Hongjia Yang, Kasidit Anmahapong, Xiaotian Hu, Ziang Wang, Yingqi Hao, Haoxiang Li, Yifei Chen, Zihan Li, Ziyu Li, Juncheng Zhu, Min Kang, Yan Song, Hua Lai, Xiaoling Zhou, Dingzhi Yue, Xu Liu, Nan Sun, Rong Hu, Xuesheng Li, Fenglin Jia, Gang Ning, Haibo Qu, Qiyuan Tian
Fetal brain biometry provides a quantitative basis for assessing prenatal growth and identifying congenital brain abnormalities. However, comprehensive assessment remains limited by labor-intensive manual measurements and automated models that lose accuracy across imaging sequences and institutions. We introduce BioTTA, an anatomically guided test-time adaptation framework that measures 11 fetal brain biometrics from reconstructed three-dimensional magnetic resonance images. BioTTA adapts pretrained models to individual unlabeled volumes using geometric consistency and atlas priors, without access to source images. In a retrospective study across five centers in China and Switzerland, BioTTA improved measurement accuracy across three out-of-distribution datasets and two network architectures. It reduced mean absolute measurement errors by 46-82% relative to the corresponding models without adaptation, achieving errors similar to those of supervised fine-tuning. Its measurements were mapped onto normative growth trajectories derived from expert annotations, enabling gestational-age-specific assessment through a web-based reporting platform. Across four disease cohorts, the platform achieved 82.1-95.0% accuracy in binary detection of ventriculomegaly or cerebellar abnormalities, with performance similar to that of a senior radiologist. BioTTA provides a practical foundation for standardized fetal brain biometry across heterogeneous imaging settings, supporting scalable prenatal growth assessment and quantitative evaluation of brain abnormalities.
comment: 67 pages, 8 figures
♻ ☆ CD-RCM: Generalizable Continuous-Depth Novel View Synthesis for Reflectance Confocal Microscopy
Reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM) provides noninvasive, cellular-resolution "optical biopsies" of human skin in vivo by acquiring en-face images at successive depths, forming a sparse z-stack. Due to optical limitations, these stacks are anisotropic 3D volumes with lateral resolution (0.5 $μ$m) $\sim$6 times higher compared to axial resolution, which is defined by the optical sectioning (3 $μ$m), limiting the interpretation of tissue. Our goal is to provide continuous-depth visualization by interpolating intermediate sections and making the 3D volume isotropic. Such a representation permits arbitrary-direction sectioning, including histopathology-like cross-sectional examination, without requiring per-patient optimization. To that end, we introduce the first RCM-specific novel-view synthesis (NVS) approach, CD-RCM, a feedforward model that predicts realistic, unseen depths from sparsely sampled RCM stacks. Classical neural rendering methods focus on reconstruction from surface-level multi-view observations. In contrast to surface-level camera views, RCM can acquire optically sectioned en-face images of tissue beyond the surface up to 200 $μ$m. However, during visualization of the RCM stacks, observations of the shallower sections (towards the surface) obscure the deeper ones. This unique axial imaging geometry and layer-dependent anatomical organization motivated our development of a tailored architectural and training framework that explicitly accounts for RCM's depth-resolved, occlusive imaging physics. Experiments demonstrate that CD-RCM achieves high-fidelity novel-view synthesis with sub-second inference time.
♻ ☆ Causal Attribution via Activation Patching NeurIPS 2026
Amirmohammad Izadi, Mohammadali Banayeeanzade, Alireza Mirrokni, Hosein Hasani, Mobin Bagherian, Faridoun Mehri, Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah
Attribution methods for Vision Transformers (ViTs) aim to identify image regions that influence model predictions, but producing faithful and well-localized attributions remains challenging. Existing attribution methods face several limitations, with gradient-based, relevance-propagation, and attention-based methods relying on local approximations, while perturbation- or optimization-based methods intervene on inputs, tokens, or surrogates rather than internal patch representations. The key challenge is that class-relevant evidence is formed through interactions between patch tokens across layers; methods that operate only on input changes, attention weights, or backward relevance signals may therefore provide indirect proxies for patch importance rather than directly testing the predictive effect of contextualized patch representations. We propose Causal Attribution via Activation Patching (CAAP), which estimates the contribution of individual image patches to the ViT's prediction by directly intervening on internal activations rather than using learned masks or synthetic perturbation patterns. For each patch, CAAP inserts the corresponding source-image activations into a neutral target context over an intermediate range of layers and uses the resulting target-class score as the attribution signal. The resulting attribution map reflects the causal contribution of patch-associated internal representations on the model's prediction. The causal intervention serves as a principled measure of patch influence by capturing semantic evidence after initial representation formation, while avoiding late-layer global mixing that can reduce spatial specificity. Across multiple ViT backbones and standard metrics, CAAP consistently outperforms existing methods in various settings and produces more faithful and localized attributions.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ Can One Hear Geometry? Gauge-Invariant Spectral Descriptors for Text-to-B-rep Retrieval
Hongzhu Yi, Hao Liu, Tao Yu, Tiankun Yang, Yujia Yang, Zhenghao Zhang, Tianyu Zong, Zhenyu Guan, Bingkang Shi, Haopeng Jin, Yuanxiang Wang, Zhongtian Luo, Kun Tang, Tong Li, Jungang Xu
Text-to-3D solid retrieval faces a fundamental representation gap: while natural language describes intrinsic shapes, Boundary Representation (B-rep) entangles precise geometry with arbitrary variations in pose, scale, and boundary encoding conventions. Existing methods either discretize B-reps at the cost of analytic precision, or learn features from topological graphs without explicit invariance guarantees. We propose **SpectraBRep** (*Spectral Geometry for Text-to-B-rep Retrieval*), a framework based on geometric invariance and spectral descriptors that mathematically eliminates representation ambiguities prior to cross-modal alignment. Formalizing translation, rotation, reflection, uniform scaling, and contour re-indexing via group actions, we exploit the planar-profile-and-extrusion structure of engineering solids to construct a unified spectral descriptor across cross-sectional regions, contour boundaries, and extrusion depths. On public benchmarks, our method achieves state-of-the-art recall performance across all evaluation metrics.
♻ ☆ Dual-State Slot Attention: Decoupling Appearance and Identity for Video Object-Centric Learning
Unsupervised video object-centric learning aims to decompose dynamic scenes into persistent, object-level representations without supervision. However, existing slot-based methods struggle to maintain stable object identity in challenging settings such as rapid motion and partial occlusion. First, they typically encode both the per-frame appearance of an object and its identity across frames in a single slot vector, creating an objective conflict that leads to slot swapping: reconstruction requires sensitivity to transient visual changes, whereas temporal consistency requires invariance to them. Second, the token renormalization used in Slot Attention can amplify weakly attending slots, allowing them to absorb tokens from other objects and destabilize slot-to-object correspondence.
We propose Dual-State Slot Attention (DSSA), a fully self-supervised framework that addresses these limitations by separating appearance from identity and by reducing spurious updates from weakly matching slots. DSSA decomposes each slot into a local state for per-frame appearance and an identity state for temporally stable object information, thereby aligning reconstruction and temporal consistency with separate representations. The identity state is updated through a learned recurrent transition that acts as a temporal filter on the local state, while competition-modulated aggregation (CMA) down-weights updates from weakly matching slots and prevents them from absorbing tokens from other objects. Experiments on MOVi-C, MOVi-D, and YouTube-VIS demonstrate that DSSA consistently improves segmentation quality and temporal consistency over prior methods, while also yielding stronger downstream object recognition and video dynamics prediction. Code is available at https://uark-aicv.github.io/dssa/.
comment: Accepted to ACM Multimedia 2026 (MM '26)
♻ ☆ Unified Panoramic Geometry Estimation via Multi-View Foundation Models
Vukasin Bozic, Isidora Slavkovic, Dominik Narnhofer, Nando Metzger, Denis Rozumny, Konrad Schindler, Nikolai Kalischek
Geometry estimation from perspective images has greatly advanced, maturing to the point where off-the-shelf foundation models are able to reconstruct 3D scene structure not only from multi-view imagery, but even from a single view. A natural extension is 3D reconstruction from panoramas, with the exciting prospect of recovering a full 360-degree scene from a single panoramic image. In this work, we introduce PaGeR (Panoramic Geometry Reconstruction), a framework to lift powerful 3D foundation models designed for perspective imagery to the panorama domain. Our strategy is to start from a pre-trained transformer for 3D reconstruction and turn it into a unified high-performance model that predicts scale-invariant depth, metric depth, surface normals, and sky masks from both perspective and omnidirectional images, in a single forward pass. By keeping architectural changes to a minimum and mixing perspective and panoramic images during training, PaGeR retains the rich 3D prior of the underlying foundation model while learning to also estimate geometrically consistent 360-degree scenes from single panoramas. We extensively test our method in both indoor and outdoor environments and find that it delivers state-of-the-art performance and excellent zero-shot performance across a wide range of scenes. Code, data and models are available $\href{https://github.com/prs-eth/PaGeR}{\text{here}}$.
♻ ☆ VL-UniTrack: A Unified Framework with Visual-Language Prompts for UAV-Ground Visual Tracking IEEE
UAV-ground visual tracking (UGVT) aims to simultaneously track the same target from both UAV and ground views. However, existing two-stream methods suffer from isolated feature extraction and rely heavily on implicit appearance matching, which often fails to establish reliable cross-view correspondence under drastic viewpoint discrepancies, thereby leading to unstable tracking. To address these issues, we propose VL-UniTrack, a unified framework enhanced by visual-language prompts. By encoding features from both views with a single shared encoder, our method reduces feature isolation between the two views and enables sufficient cross-view interaction. To alleviate the ambiguity caused by appearance-only matching, we further design a visual-language viewpoint prompting module that fuses language descriptions with visual features to generate learnable prompts. These prompts are then injected into a prompt-guided cross-view adapter to facilitate cross-view interaction and guide the learning of view-specific feature representations. In addition, we introduce a confidence-modulated mutual distillation loss to regularize training by suppressing noise propagation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VL-UniTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance on the latest benchmark. The code is available at https://github.com/xuboyue1999/VL-UniTrack.git.
comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, 10 tables. Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. Updated to the author accepted manuscript
♻ ☆ FUTON: Fourier Tensor Networks for Implicit Neural Representations NeurIPS 2026
Implicit neural representations (INRs) have emerged as powerful tools for encoding signals, yet dominant MLP-based designs often suffer from slow convergence, and how their accuracy depends on their size is known only empirically. We introduce FUTON (Fourier Tensor Network), which models signals as generalized Fourier series whose coefficients are parameterized by a low-rank tensor decomposition, read out by a linear or MLP head. FUTON combines complementary inductive biases: Fourier bases capture smoothness and periodicity, while the low-rank parameterization enforces low-dimensional spectral structure. Beyond universal approximation, we show that with a linear head, the best FUTON's error splits exactly into the truncation of the signal's series and the best low-rank error of its coefficients, which we bracket from the samples before training, with a FUTON that attains the upper bound. On image fitting, occupancy volumes, and novel view synthesis, against twelve INRs of matched size, FUTON achieves the best average quality, reaches the final quality of each task's strongest baseline 4-34x sooner than that baseline, infers fastest, and trains in the least memory.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. 41 pages, 18 figures, 14 tables. v2: the NeurIPS 2026 camera-ready version, with the learning-rate schedule of the radiance fields corrected (Sec. 5, App. G). Project page: https://pashtari.github.io/inro/
♻ ☆ Edit in Sync: Unified End-to-End Audio-Visual Editing for Human-Centric Videos
Ziye Yuan, Minghong Cai, Xu He, Ruchang Yao, Xiao Fu, Kaixin Ding, Ming Zhang, Xiangyu Du, Tianpeng Lan, Da Xie, Xiangyu Yue
Human-centric audio-visual editing requires precise alignment of lip movements, gestures, and expressions with speech. Existing methods process inputs through independent video and audio pipelines, preventing cross-modal interaction between visual editing and audio dubbing. Many of these pipelines further rely on mask-based inpainting. As a result, they suffer from poor lip-audio synchronization, cumulative pipeline errors, and an inherent mask-size dilemma. We present AVE, the first unified end-to-end framework that jointly performs reference-guided person swapping, insertion, and deletion across both audio and video modalities without requiring spatial masks. To overcome data scarcity, we design a synthesis pipeline and introduce AVE-Dataset, the first audio-visual editing dataset to provide 100K pairs with appearance and voice references. By combining Synthetic-to-Real reconstruction with preliminary audio warm-up, our framework transcends synthetic pipeline limits and mitigates audio-video token imbalance. AVE outperforms modality-separate audio-visual editing pipelines in editing realism, temporal consistency, and audio-visual alignment.
comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables
♻ ☆ Epipolar Geometry Improves Video Generation Models
Orest Kupyn, Théo Uscidda, Marta Tintore Gazulla, Fabian Manhardt, Federico Tombari, Christian Rupprecht
Video generation models have advanced significantly through the latent diffusion transformers trained with rectified flow techniques. Yet these models still struggle with geometric inconsistencies, unstable motion, and visual artifacts that break the illusion of realistic 3D scenes. 3D-consistent video generation could significantly impact numerous downstream applications in generation and reconstruction tasks. We explore how epipolar geometry constraints improve modern video diffusion models. Despite using massive training data, these models fail to capture fundamental geometric principles. We align diffusion models using pairwise epipolar geometry constraints via preference-based optimization, directly addressing unstable trajectories and geometric artifacts through mathematically principled geometric enforcement. Our approach efficiently enforces geometric principles without requiring end-to-end differentiability. Evaluation demonstrates that classical geometric constraints provide more reliable preference signals than the video-quality and geometry metrics based on foundational models. We construct preferences from static scenes with camera motion, where the epipolar metric is most reliable, while the aligned model generalizes to dynamic scenes. By bridging data-driven learning with classical computer vision, we reduce epipolar error by 31% and improve human-rated consistency from 54% to 72% without compromising visual quality.
♻ ☆ Prune-and-Merge: Training-Free Scaling of Vision Transformers NeurIPS 2026
Vision Transformers achieve strong performance but incur high computational costs from quadratic token interactions. Training-free token reduction methods improve efficiency, but their robustness remains underexplored. We propose Prune-and Merge ViT, a training-free framework for off-the-shelf models. It combines class attention-based pruning with similarity-based merging to reduce redundancy while preserving semantic information. To evaluate robustness we introduce two metrics. Relative Accuracy Drop (RAD) measures relative accuracy degradation under transformations, and Prediction Flip Rate (PFR) quantifies prediction consistency. On pretrained ViT and DeiT, Prune-and-Merge reduces computation competitively while maintaining robustness and better accuracy than existing token reduction methods. Our analysis suggests that hybrid token reduction does not introduce hallucination-like behavior and preserves prediction stability for common image transformations.
comment: Accepted at the GlobalSouthAI Workshop at NeurIPS 2026; 12 pages
♻ ☆ Meituan-Robotics-0: A Vision-Language-Action Foundation Model for Desktop Manipulation
Meituan Robotics Team, Caicheng Wang, Chen Zhao, Chengpeng Jin, Duo Xu, Fengjiao Chen, Guanglu Wan, Heqing Yang, Jia Wang, Jiacong Zhou, Jie Hu, Jiyuan Ru, Lingfeng Zhang, Linjiang Huang, Manyuan Zhang, Ningchu Liu, Shijie Zhou, Si Liu, Shuo Li, Tianyi Zhang, Xi Zhang, Xin Chen, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai, Yanbin Zeng, Yang Yang, Yang Yi, Yanli Tan, Yifu Xu, Yimeng Jia, Yuchen Tang, Yuchen Xie, Yuxiang Zheng, Zerwei Chng, Zilong Huang, Zipeng Ye, Ziyuan Qin, Ziqin Wang
We present Meituan-Robotics-0 (MR0), a vision-language-action foundation model and embodied-agent system for stationary-base desktop manipulation. MR0 combines 147 million vision-language samples with 15,060 hours of curated robot trajectories spanning 12 embodiments. A three-stage training recipe aligns multimodal representations with robot behavior through discrete action-token pre-training, transfers these priors to continuous cross-embodiment control through flow-matching mid-training, and adapts the policy through real-world post-training. We introduce Rollback, which pairs replaced policy segments with human corrections to provide positive and negative supervision for CFG-DAgger without value learning or advantage labeling. A unified end-effector interface supports heterogeneous embodiments, while asynchronous action-chunk merging maintains smooth execution under variable inference latency. An event-driven agent maintains persistent task events and reassesses plans when progress or feasibility changes, enabling cross-task retrieval and conditional task resumption. MR0 achieves 93.6% success on RoboTwin 2.0 and ranks fifth in the RoboDojo VLA track. Under matched HG-DAgger post-training, MR0 achieves higher average success rate and progress score than $π_{0.5}$ across three real-robot tasks. On Ethernet insertion, CFG-DAgger trained with Rollback data reaches 70% success and a progress score of 0.90. Qualitative agent deployments demonstrate cross-task event retrieval and recovery from temporarily unsatisfied task conditions.
comment: 25 pages. Project page: https://meituan-robotics.github.io/Meituan-Robotics-0/ ; Code: https://github.com/Meituan-Robotics/Meituan-Robotics-0
♻ ☆ Altitude-Adaptive UAV-to-Map Image Matching for Aerial Geo-Localization
Matching downward-looking unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images to georeferenced satellite or aerial map tiles supports map-based geo-localization when direct positioning signals are degraded or unavailable. Variations in UAV altitude change the observed ground footprint and create a scale mismatch between query images and fixed-scale map references. We address this problem with an altitude-adaptive aerial geo-localization framework. The framework estimates relative altitude from a single image using a frequency-domain representation and regression-as-classification. The predicted altitude-class center defines a scale prior that guides query normalization toward the canonical map scale before full-gallery visual place recognition. A footprint-adaptive margin classifier (FAMC) adjusts training margins according to footprint overlap. Experiments on two synthetic and two real-flight datasets show that, at the 100 m localization threshold, altitude adaptation improves average R@1 and R@5 by 50.68 and 47.20 percentage points, respectively, for our visual place recognition module compared with the same retrieval pipeline without altitude normalization. These results show that a relative-altitude-derived scale prior improves cross-altitude UAV-to-map image matching in the evaluated regions and camera settings.
♻ ☆ CADS: A Comprehensive Anatomical Dataset and Segmentation for Whole-Body Anatomy in Computed Tomography
Murong Xu, Fernando Navarro, Maksym Fritsak, Ibrahim Ethem Hamamci, Suprosanna Shit, Bastian Wittmann, Sezgin Er, Sebastian M. Christ, Ezequiel de la Rosa, Julian Deseoe, Robert Graf, Hendrik Möller, Anjany Sekuboyina, Jan C. Peeken, Sven Becker, Giulia Baldini, Johannes Haubold, Felix Nensa, René Hosch, Nikhil Mirajkar, Saad Khalid, Stefan Zachow, Marc-André Weber, Georg Langs, Jakob Wasserthal, Mehmet Kemal Ozdemir, Andrey Fedorov, Ron Kikinis, Stephanie Tanadini-Lang, Jan S. Kirschke, Stephanie E. Combs, Tamaz Amiranashvili, Bjoern Menze
Volumetric computed tomography (CT) segmentation supports quantitative image analysis, but most AI-based methods remain organ-specific, with fragmented models, inconsistent label definitions, and heterogeneous training and evaluation protocols. Here we present CADS, a unified data-model framework for scalable and generalizable whole-body CT segmentation. We construct a SNOMED-CT-referenced anatomical label space harmonizing heterogeneous cohorts from over 100 imaging centers, yielding complete annotations of 167 structures across 22,022 CT volumes and markedly expanding anatomical coverage and scale beyond existing resources. To complete labels on sparsely annotated CTs, we combine self-training with shape-informed quality control based on neural implicit functions, curating high-quality pseudo-labels. Trained on this resource, CADS shows robust whole-body segmentation across distribution shifts and improved performance relative to state-of-the-art approaches across 18 public datasets. We further validate it in an independent, expert-reviewed real-world oncology cohort of 2,864 CTs. The curated dataset, pretrained models, and user-friendly software together provide an accessible, reproducible foundation for large-scale anatomical segmentation and computational anatomy research.
♻ ☆ A Generative Data Framework with Reliable Supervision for Underwater Image Restoration and Enhancement
Learning-based underwater image restoration and enhancement rely heavily on high-quality paired training data. However, obtaining clear reference images for real underwater scenes remains challenging. Existing datasets often use the outputs of enhancement algorithms as references, which may introduce uncertainty into supervision targets. To address this issue, we propose a generative data framework that preserves clear source images as restoration references and synthesizes corresponding underwater inputs through unpaired image-to-image translation. Using representative underwater appearances to guide the translation, we construct UWNature from natural photographs. We systematically examine the reliability of the generated supervision through its agreement with real underwater appearances, structural consistency, and depth-related degradation characteristics. Experiments across 6 restoration architectures and 3 test sets evaluate its effectiveness through objective metrics, human perceptual assessment, and the correspondence between synthetic degradation and learned restoration behavior. The results demonstrate competitive restoration performance and favorable perceptual quality on real underwater images. Further analysis reveals that greater spatial plausibility of synthetic degradation does not necessarily improve restoration performance, highlighting the importance of evaluating both the intrinsic properties of synthetic data and their effectiveness for model learning. These findings support a scalable framework for constructing and evaluating reliable paired supervision for underwater image restoration and enhancement. The generated datasets are available at: https://github.com/tianyufengcn/SynUIEDatasets.
comment: Substantially revised version with expanded analyses of synthetic supervision reliability, including appearance distributions, structural consistency, depth-aware modulation, perceptual evaluation, and restoration behavior
♻ ☆ GAGR-Lab: Evaluating Joint Spatial-Geometric and Analytic Function Reasoning
Joint spatial-geometric and analytic function reasoning requires translating a perceived spatial configuration into a symbolic function whose executed curve satisfies geometric constraints. We present GAGR-Lab, a framework for measuring this capability through Cartesian game scenes, explicit function semantics, and authoritative Rust trajectory execution. It distinguishes spatial perception, metric grounding, geometric relations, function interpretation, function construction, and constrained synthesis. We specify four configurable scene-difficulty presets and a prospective 24-cell diagnostic design, while reporting only the subset actually evaluated. A bounded pilot of one hosted model (Llama 3.2 11B Vision Instruct) using two API credentials as execution replicas yields 72 balanced games with 432 attempts, 429 valid provider responses, and no target hits; exploratory ordinary-function prompt variants also fail to hit, while the structured localization interface yields no scoreable outputs. A privileged analytic search control independently succeeds on 600 directional cases from 300 generated scenes, with exact repeatability and 1,200 successful vertical-reflection or translation checks. The framework separates serving reliability, symbolic compliance, and geometric success, and preserves exact model-visible inputs and realized paths. A staged protocol outlines diagnostic calibration, held-out replication, multi-model comparison, and paired robustness tests. The contribution is an operational research framework with an executed pilot and a clearly identified prospective study plan; the full difficulty matrix and comparative model results remain untested.
comment: 15 pages, 1 figure, 7 tables
♻ ☆ Remote Sensing Change Detection via Weak Temporal Supervision WACV2027
Xavier Bou, Elliot Vincent, Gabriele Facciolo, Rafael Grompone von Gioi, Jean-Michel Morel, Thibaud Ehret
Semantic change detection in remote sensing aims to identify land cover changes between bi-temporal image pairs. Progress in this area has been limited by the scarcity of annotated datasets, as pixel-level annotation is costly and time-consuming. To address this, recent methods leverage synthetic data or generate artificial change pairs, but transferring change detection models across datasets and acquisition conditions remains challenging. In this work, we introduce a weak temporal supervision strategy that leverages additional temporal observations of existing single-temporal datasets, without requiring any new annotations. Specifically, we extend single-date remote sensing datasets with new observations acquired at different times and train a change detection model by assuming that real bi-temporal pairs mostly contain no change, while pairing images from different locations to generate change examples. To handle the inherent noise in these weak labels, we employ an object-aware change map generation and an iterative refinement process. We validate our approach on extended versions of the FLAIR and IAILD aerial datasets, showing competitive zero-shot and low-data regime performance. Lastly, we showcase results over large areas in France, highlighting the scalability potential of our method.
comment: Accepted at WACV2027
♻ ☆ DORIS: Polarization Aware Multimodal Degradation Perception for Underwater Image Restoration
Wenshuo Zhang, Xiangyue Zhang, Junlin Li, Wenjie Tian, Yubo Zheng, Zhixin Dong, Hongli Xu, Jingyu Ru, Xinde Li
Recovering high-quality images from degraded underwater observations is crucial for underwater exploration. Polarization observations show promise as an effective source of complementary physical cues for recovering target radiance under clear-water conditions. However, existing methods have yet to jointly model raw intensity information and polarization cues to enable image restoration driven by an understanding of mixed underwater degradations. To overcome these limitations, we propose DORIS, a unified multimodal language-driven framework that jointly uses polarization and RGB information to generate textual descriptions of degradation types and severity levels through structured semantic instructions and enhances joint restoration representations under the guidance of degradation-aware semantic features to improve restoration robustness under mixed degradations. We further construct a new benchmark named MixPolar, which contains underwater images exhibiting real degradations and the corresponding annotations. It supports systematic evaluation of degradation perception, image restoration, and downstream task performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method effectively integrates polarization and RGB information, achieving competitive performance in degradation perception and image restoration.
comment: 11 pages,8 figures
♻ ☆ Filter-Enhanced Smartphone Hyperspectral Imaging
Daniil Reutsky, Daniil Vladimirov, Yasin Mamedov, Georgy Perevozchikov, Nancy Mehta, Egor Ershov, Radu Timofte
Hyperspectral reconstruction from RGB imagery offers an affordable alternative to costly hyperspectral acquisition devices. However, its accuracy is fundamentally constrained by the limited spectral resolution of standard RGB cameras. In this paper, we propose a new approach that leverages the multi-camera systems integrated into most modern smartphones and enhances their capabilities by modulating their spectral response functions using carefully selected spectral filters, enabling a smartphone to capture richer spectral information. We propose a neural network able to exploit auxiliary RGB images with diverse spectral characteristics, enabling more accurate hyperspectral reconstruction compared to conventional single-image methods. Training is supported by a newly collected dataset, Doomer, which consists of multiple misaligned RGB images alongside corresponding hyperspectral data. We also propose a device-adaptation strategy that conditions the multi-image hyperspectral reconstruction network on camera color correction matrices available in standard DNG metadata, requiring no real images from the target device. We evaluate it on three physical smartphones, two of them unseen during training.
♻ ☆ 3A-VLA: Abstraction-Aligned Action Learning for Vision-Language Agents in 3D Game Worlds NeurIPS 2026
Despite advances in vision-language-action (VLA) models, they remain limited in highly dynamic game settings such as 3D open worlds and competitive player versus player (PvP) settings, where agents must efficiently extract sparse, actionable signals from dense visual input while integrating multimodal cues to track off-screen high-value targets in real time. To address this, we introduce 3A-VLA (Abstraction-Aligned Action VLA), a framework that grounds action learning in explicit intention and environment abstractions rather than superficial pattern matching. We introduce dual task-agnostic abstractions: the intention abstraction (IA), which condenses verbose instructions and reasoning into explicit semantic primitives, and the environment semantics abstraction (ESA), which structures dense visual streams into a spatial-functional affordance representation to guide grounded actions. We further propose an abstraction alignment reweighting (AAR) module that adaptively reweights the action imitation loss. A continuous intention-environment alignment signal is used to emphasize reliable action supervision when abstractions agree and reduce the influence of ambiguous demonstrations when they diverge, thereby learning a policy that balances fine-grained control and high-level reasoning without the need for manual rules. Extensive experiments show that 3A-VLA performs competitively among the evaluated baselines in both open-world (Minecraft) and competitive PvP (Game for Peace) settings. It also demonstrates zero-shot combat transfer from Game for Peace to high-fidelity games, including Valorant, CS2, GTA V, Elden Ring, and Mount & Blade.
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ AnyMo: Geometry-Aware Setup-Agnostic Modeling of Human Motion in the Wild NeurIPS 2026
As wearable and mobile devices become increasingly embedded in daily life, they offer a practical way to continuously sense human motion in the wild. But inertial signals are highly dependent on the sensing setup, including body location, mounting position, sensor orientation, device hardware, and sampling protocol. This setup dependence makes it difficult to learn motion representations that transfer across devices and datasets, and limits the broader use of wearable IMUs beyond closed-set recognition. We introduce AnyMo, a geometry-aware framework for setup-agnostic human motion modeling. AnyMo uses physics-grounded IMU simulation over dense body-surface placements to generate diverse and plausible synthetic signals, pre-trains a graph encoder from paired synthetic placement views and masked partial observations, tokenizes multi-position IMU into full-body motion tokens, and aligns these tokens with an LLM for motion-language understanding. We evaluate AnyMo on three complementary tasks: zero-shot activity recognition across 14 unseen downstream datasets, cross-modal retrieval, and wearable IMU motion captioning, where it improves average Accuracy/F1/R@2 by 11.7\%/11.6\%/22.6\% on HAR, increases zero-shot IMU-to-text and text-to-IMU retrieval MRR by 15.9\% and 28.6\%, respectively, and improves zero-shot captioning BERT-F1 by 7.5\%. These results support AnyMo as a generalist model for wearable motion understanding in the wild. Project page: https://anymo-project.github.io.
comment: NeurIPS 2026. Check out our project page for code, model, benchmark and more: https://anymo-project.github.io
♻ ☆ SplatLab: Autonomous Scientific Discovery for 3DGS Research NeurIPS 2026
Scientific discovery requires more than generating hypotheses: ideas must be grounded in prior work, translated into executable methods, experimentally validated, challenged by counterevidence, and communicated through reproducible findings. Despite recent advances in autonomous research agents, closing this entire loop remains challenging in rapidly evolving computer-vision fields with complex training pipelines and expensive evaluations.
We introduce SplatLab, an autonomous scientific discovery system for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) that integrates literature understanding, hypothesis generation, implementation, experimental refinement, falsification, and manuscript writing into a unified research pipeline. Given a research prompt, a target-paper URL, or no input at all, SplatLab identifies research opportunities, proposes novel methods, trains and ablates candidates across Mip-NeRF 360 and LLFF, and produces manuscripts grounded in verifiable experimental evidence.
Unlike prior systems, SplatLab performs discovery over verified baseline implementations using domain-aligned modification scaffolds. A cascade-weighted Elo tournament evolves candidate methods using measured GPU performance and verbal-gradient feedback, while a standing falsifier incorporates adversarial stress testing directly into selection. An integrity audit binds reported claims to logged experiments, and reviewer-driven feedback can initiate further experimentation rather than merely revising text.
SplatLab discovers methods achieving PSNR improvements of +0.18 to +3.78 dB over matched baselines, including +3.78 dB on astrophotographic nebula rendering, a previously unexplored setting for 3DGS. By closing the loop between scientific reasoning, executable experimentation, and evidence-backed communication, SplatLab compresses months of researcher effort into days of mostly autonomous compute.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. 14 pages, 4 figures. Project page: https://seemandhar.github.io/splatlab
♻ ☆ RedDiffuser: Auditing Multimodal Safety Failures in Vision-Language Models via Reinforced Diffusion
Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in open-ended environments, where ensuring reliable safety under multimodal inputs is critical. However, existing evaluations remain largely instruction-centric, focusing on explicit malicious queries while overlooking a more realistic and underexplored risk: whether safety alignment remains robust under harmful contextual exposure. This limitation is particularly important for multimodal systems, where visual inputs can substantially steer model behavior and render text-only auditing insufficient. In this work, we study multimodal safety auditing under harmful contextual exposure, asking whether VLMs can maintain safe behavior when partial toxic text is paired with visual context. To enable systematic auditing, we propose RedDiffuser (RedDiff), a reinforcement-based framework that leverages diffusion models to generate semantically coherent visual inputs for black-box safety testing. By combining greedy prompt search with reinforcement optimization, RedDiffuser uncovers high-risk multimodal inputs that expose latent safety failures. Extensive experiments on both open-source and commercial VLMs show that such context-conditioned failures are widespread. On LLaVA, RedDiffuser increases unsafe response rates by up to 10.69% on the original set and 8.91% on a hold-out set, with strong transferability to Gemini and LLaMA-Vision. These vulnerabilities persist even under external safety guardrails, suggesting that current system-level safety mechanisms remain insufficient for realistic multimodal risks. Our findings reveal a critical blind spot in existing safety evaluations and establish context-aware multimodal auditing as an essential paradigm for diagnosing hidden vulnerabilities in modern VLM systems.
♻ ☆ PathXAI: Evidence-guided structured pathology reporting by transferable tissue segmentation
Zhaorui Tan, Jun Aun Tan, Weixiang Zhong, Xiaoxi Wang, Tan Pan, Xingdong Xue, Li Liu, Jing Zhang, Jing Zhang, Weimiao Yu
Pathology reporting translates tissue observations across regions and slides into diagnoses and supporting morphological descriptions, yet explicit tissue-composition measurements are rarely used to guide H&E-based report generation. We developed PathXAI, which pairs transferable tissue segmentation with a pretrained vision-language model. Because supplying tissue information directly with H&E images gave limited benefit, PathXAI-Report uses segmentation overlays and tissue statistics in separate steps, selects between candidate diagnoses by fixed rules, acquires further images when evidence is insufficient and records every step for review, without updating model weights. Its segmentation component exceeded baselines in mean Dice on internal and external tests. In automated evaluation on 1,200 public and 151 private cases, PathXAI achieved higher agreement with reference diagnoses and documented morphology than H&E-based comparators. On the public cohort, it exceeded Qwen+H&E by 4.4 percentage points in cancer family match rate and 5.7 percentage points in finding F1.
comment: More experimental results will be added in the future version
♻ ☆ SegDis: Foreground Segmentation Followed by Type Discrimination for Salient and Camouflaged Object Detection
Salient and camouflaged object detection (SOD and COD) both recover foreground support, yet most joint methods output only a binary mask and therefore cannot distinguish the type. USC12K distinguishes the two types, but its baseline USCNet still binds foreground existence to the type within a single normalization, so the failure source cannot be attributed. Our cross-task study shows that foreground localization transfers between SOD and COD, whereas type discrimination does not: a COD-only model recovers foreground on SOD images but its type judgement follows the training distribution rather than the foreground-background relation, so the two decisions require separate mechanisms. SegDis factorizes the output into an explicit foreground probability and a conditional type probability given foreground: FLR provides high-quality task-agnostic support, and RTA refines the SOD/COD assignment from the foreground-background relation without a task identifier. Because support is explicit, each ground-truth foreground pixel is classified as correct-type, type-swapped, or missed, so foreground-recovery and type-assignment errors are diagnosed separately. With PVT-v2-B2, SegDis attains 68.98% FG-mIoU and 78.35% mIoU on USC12K at about one-eighth of USCNet's parameters; CSCS is 5.75.
comment: 10pages, unincludes supplementary material
♻ ☆ Towards Scalable Diagnostic-Driven Whole-Slide Image Retrieval for Pathology Archives
The growing adoption of digital pathology has rapidly expanded collections of hematoxylin-and-eosin whole-slide images, yet efficient navigation through these archives remains challenging, as metadata is often inconsistent or unavailable. Content-based image retrieval addresses this challenge by identifying similar cases directly from visual representations instead of manual annotations or metadata. Existing retrieval systems have demonstrated promising performance but largely rely on handcrafted indexing pipelines and predefined sampling strategies, constraining scalability and generalization. Here, we present CLEAR-WSI (Constant-Length Embedding for Automatic Retrieval of Whole-Slide Images) as a scalable, diagnostic-driven slide-retrieval framework, validated on both public and clinical data. Using a fixed-length slide embedding, CLEAR-WSI refines retrieved candidates with either a predicted diagnostic label or the ground-truth label, depending on the retrieval setting. Newly processed cases are subsequently added to the expanding memory bank, allowing the retrieval archive to grow over time. On a comprehensive benchmark consisting of two public and one private clinical datasets representing four retrieval tasks, CLEAR-WSI improves Precision@5 over the strongest evaluated baseline, with gains on CAMELYON16 (3.10), BRACS-1 (2.75), BRACS-2 (1.95), and X-HER2 (3.75). Additional ablation and latency studies further examine the contribution of each component and highlight its potential for scalable deployment.
♻ ☆ BigEarthNet.txt: A Large-Scale Multi-Sensor Image-Text Dataset and Benchmark for Earth Observation
Johann-Ludwig Herzog, Mathis Jürgen Adler, Leonard Hackel, Yan Shu, Angelos Zavras, Ioannis Papoutsis, Paolo Rota, Begüm Demir
Vision-langugage models (VLMs) have shown strong performance in computer vision (CV), yet their performance on remote sensing (RS) data remains limited due to the lack of large-scale, multi-sensor RS image-text datasets with diverse textual annotations. Existing datasets predominantly include aerial Red-Green-Blue imagery, with short or weakly grounded captions, and provide limited diversity in annotation types. To address this limitation, we introduce BigEarthNet$.$txt, a large-scale, multi-sensor image-text dataset designed to advance instruction-driven image-text learning in Earth observation across multiple tasks. It contains 464044 co-registered Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar and Sentinel-2 multispectral images with 9.6M text annotations, including: i) geographically anchored captions describing land-use/land-cover (LULC) classes, their spatial relations, and environmental context; ii) visual question answering pairs relevant for different tasks; and iii) referring expression detection instructions for bounding box prediction. A comparative statistical analysis shows that BigEarthNet$.$txt surpasses existing RS image-text datasets in textual richness and annotation type variety. We further establish a manually-verified benchmark split and extensively evaluate existing VLMs in RS and CV. The results show the limitations of these models on tasks that involve complex LULC classes, whereas fine-tuning using BigEarthNet$.$txt results in consistent performance gains across all considered tasks. Our code and data are publicly available at https://txt.bigearth.net.
comment: Accepted at IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision 2027. Our code and data are publicly available at https://txt.bigearth.net
♻ ☆ Pose Distance Fields for Humanoid Robots NeurIPS 2026
Yi Gu, Yukang Gao, Yangchen Zhou, Xingyu Chen, Yixiao Feng, Mingle Zhao, Yunyang Mo, Zhaorui Wang, Lixin Xu, Renjing Xu
Pose and motion priors play a crucial role in humanoid robotics. Although such priors have been widely studied in human motion recovery (HMR) domain with a range of models, their adoption for humanoid robots remains limited, largely due to the scarcity of high-quality humanoid motion data. In this work, we introduce Pose Distance Fields for Humanoid Robots (PDF-HR), a lightweight prior that represents the robot pose distribution as a continuous and differentiable manifold. Given an arbitrary pose, PDF-HR predicts its distance to a large corpus of retargeted robot poses, yielding a smooth measure of pose plausibility that is well suited for optimization and control. PDF-HR can be integrated as a reward shaping term, a regularizer, or a standalone plausibility scorer across diverse pipelines. We evaluate PDF-HR on various humanoid tasks, including single-trajectory motion tracking, general motion tracking, style-based motion mimicry, and general motion retargeting. Experiments show that this plug-and-play prior consistently and substantially strengthens strong baselines. Code and models are publicly available at https://gaoyukang33.github.io/PDF-HR.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. Project page: https://gaoyukang33.github.io/PDF-HR
♻ ☆ Video-Mirai: Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models Need Foresight
Causal video generators must predict from the past, but they need not learn only from it. In streaming autoregressive video diffusion, each emitted segment becomes a commitment that future segments must preserve. Standard training, however, does not explicitly supervise causal states with future-informed representation targets. This creates what we call a representation-level planning gap: states that fit the current segment may discard identity, layout, and motion information needed for a consistent future. We introduce Video-Mirai, a training-only method that closes this gap without changing causal inference: the generator rolls out causally, a frozen foresight encoder reads the completed rollout non-causally, and a lightweight predictor distills the resulting stopped-gradient targets into causal states. Future frames supervise representations, never generator inputs. At inference, the encoder and predictor are discarded, leaving the original architecture, per-step FLOPs, and KV-cache behavior unchanged. Video-Mirai improves a strong Causal-Forcing baseline on 5-second VBench from 83.8 to 84.6 in terms of Total Score. On 30-second rollouts beyond the training horizon, subject consistency improves from 84.9 to 88.5 and background consistency from 90.2 to 91.9. Ablations identify future-conditioned targets as a key ingredient, and probes show that future frames become more decodable from current features. Causality should constrain inference, not representation supervision. Our study highlights that visual autoregressive models need foresight. Project Page: https://y0uroy.github.io/Video-Mirai.
♻ ☆ Polarization Aware Deep Learning Framework for SAR Despeckling
Speckle is an inherent characteristic of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery that complicates image interpretation and the extraction of reliable information. Although deep-learning-based despeckling methods have demonstrated promising performance, their applicability across different polarimetric configurations is often limited by the need for specialized architectures or separate training procedures. This paper presents a unified deep-learning framework for despeckling single-, dual-, and full-polarization SAR data using a single trained convolutional neural network. The proposed approach adopts a common nine-channel representation of the polarimetric covariance matrix and a polarization-aware masking strategy to accommodate different configurations without modifying the network architecture. Qualitative and quantitative comparison on three different scenes from different sensors demonstrate competitive performance across the considered experiments and support the feasibility of a unified, polarization-flexible approach to SAR despeckling across different polarimetric configurations.
♻ ☆ STABLE: A Continual Learning Optimizer with Adaptive Drift Control NeurIPS 2026
Continual learning suffers from catastrophic forgetting, leading to the loss of past knowledge and unstable adaptation across task streams. Existing approaches typically address this issue through replay buffers, architectural changes, or additional regularization terms. We argue that forgetting is a consequence of unstable learning dynamics, which may benefit from an optimizer-level solution. The main challenge is that learning dynamics are time-dependent, as demonstrated by empirical phenomena such as the stability gap. First, we formally prove that, for distance-based classifiers, bounded parameter drift guarantees bounded margin erosion under a local score-stability condition. Based on this insight, we propose STABLE, a primal-dual optimizer with adaptive drift control. STABLE enforces a drift budget by increasing the dual variable when the budget is violated and decreasing it otherwise. This results in high stability without penalizing plasticity. Experiments on long-horizon unimodal streams and CLIP-based multimodal streams show that vanilla PEFT baselines trained with STABLE match or outperform specialized continual learning methods. In the multimodal setting, STABLE further preserves zero-shot transfer, matching or exceeding dedicated multimodal continual learning methods. Code is available at https://github.com/atlas-luiss/STABLE.
comment: Accepted at the 40th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026)
♻ ☆ How Many Demonstrations Does a VLA Need? On the Sample Efficiency of VLA Finetuning
Pretrained vision language action (VLA) models show strong zero-shot performance but they are rarely deployed directly and are often first post-trained on demonstrations from the target setting. Yet VLAs are typically compared by zero-shot or full-data fine-tuned success which reveals little about the data and compute required for downstream adaptation. We study adaptation efficiency for six VLAs ($π_0$, $π_{0.5}$, and GR00T N1-N1.7) on four LIBERO suites, varying both demonstrations and training steps. This reveals differences hidden by full-data fine-tuning: models which are within two points on the full LIBERO-Spatial dataset differ by up to 3$\times$ in success with 50 demonstrations. $π_{0.5}$ needs 2-5$\times$ fewer demonstrations than $π_0$ and is the most sample-efficient model at every budget, with the largest gap on the long-horizon suite. Within GR00T, N1.5 adapts more efficiently than N1.6 and N1.7 on three of four suites, despite their stronger zero-shot performance. We also study one pretraining factor behind these differences by freezing the VLM during finetuning: this severely degrades the $π$ models whose VLM is jointly trained with the action expert during pretraining, but barely affects GR00T models.
comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, CoRL Workshop
♻ ☆ Open-HumanWAM: An Open Recipe for Scaling Human and Robot Experience for Embodied Foundation Models
Juncheng Ma, Jiaxin Li, Jiankai Tu, Bo Liang, Guodong Lv, Yufan Deng, Junzhe Tang, Liangzhu Yang, Chen Bian, Shukai Gong, Ye Huang, Yintianrun Zhang, Zicong Cao, Baohao Zhu, Jianxin Bi, Tengfei Yan, Yinyuan Zhang, Kewei Zhang, Xinglong Chen, Kaiqi Chen, Duomin Wang, Xiaotian Tang, Liang Tan, Li Li, Yuan Xu, Haosen Yang, Yuqi Wang, Jingfei Xia, Songyan Huang, Zhiyang Dou, Zhen Dong, Enze Xie, Wojciech Matusik, Tat-Seng Chua, Daquan Zhou
Egocentric human video offers a scalable source of manipulation priors for robot learning, yet translating raw data scale into generalizable robot policies demands rigorous data curation and training recipes. We introduce Open-HumanWAM, the first fully open recipe for scaling egocentric pretraining to 50,000 hours, anchored by Open-HumanWAM-50K---a curated egocentric video corpus densely annotated with hand motion and natural language. Leveraging this corpus, we systematically investigate pure human pretraining via closed-loop simulation evaluations and uncover an empirical log-linear scaling law linking pretraining data hours to downstream robot success rates. Grounded in these findings, we develop HumanWAM-Vanilla, a world--action model pretrained exclusively on 50k hours of egocentric human video. Upon robot post-training, HumanWAM-Vanilla reaches 92.08% success on RoboTwin 2.0 Clean2Clean and 68.88% on Clean2Random, alongside a 14.17% mean success rate and a 19.00 mean progress score on RoboDojo. To push the capability frontier further, we explore joint human--robot pretraining with HumanWAM-Goal, a visual-goal-conditioned world--action model. Hybrid data scaling unlocks broad zero-shot generalization across both simulation and physical benchmarks, propelling post-trained RoboTwin 2.0 performance to new state-of-the-art levels: 92.70% on Clean2Clean and a substantial leap to 84.60% on Clean2Random. On physical robots, HumanWAM-Goal further exhibits emergent embodied in-context learning, dynamically adapting its manipulation behavior to unseen visual goals without parameter updates. To support reproducible scaling research in embodied AI, we open-source the Open-HumanWAM-50K corpus, data curation and pretraining pipelines, alongside the pretrained and post-trained HumanWAM checkpoints, inference code, and simulation evaluation suites.
comment: GitHub: https://github.com/DAGroup-PKU/HumanNet/tree/Open-HumanWAM Project website: https://dagroup-pku.github.io/open-humanwam/
♻ ☆ MSCR: Jointly Balancing Utilization Across Modalities and Discovering Synergistic Information NeurIPS 2026
Xinyu Chen, Liangjian Wen, Jiang Duan, Dongkai Wang, Yong Dai, Jiayu Bai, Jianzhuang Liu, Zhen Tian, Guoping Qiu, Zhao Kan
In multimodal learning, modality imbalance often lets one modality dominate optimization and keeps the model from fully exploiting cross-modal interactions. Balance-oriented methods such as the Multimodal Competition Regularizer (MCR) perform well by alleviating this imbalance during training. These dynamic balancing methods, however, mainly adjust modality contributions and do not consider how imbalance affects the formation of synergistic information during fusion. Synergy is a major source of multimodal advantage, because it is predictive gain that cannot be recovered from unimodal evidence alone. We propose the Multimodal Synergistic Competition Regularizer (MSCR), a fusion method that jointly promotes balanced modality utilization and the discovery of synergistic information. MSCR has two complementary objectives. An anti-dominance objective suppresses excessive unimodal influence and leaves room for synergistic information, and a synergy objective encourages the fused predictor to outperform a non-synergistic unimodal reference. An adaptive gate further concentrates the regularization on samples that need stronger collaborative modeling. Experiments on five benchmarks show that MSCR consistently improves performance over MCR and strengthens synergistic capability. It raises conditional recovery, the accuracy of the fused prediction on samples that the unimodal predictors misclassify, as well as the share of the model's output that InterSHAP attributes to cross-modal interactions. Its gain in conditional recovery persists when the fusion module is Transformer-based. Code is available at https://github.com/chenxinyu991-collab/MSCR.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ COMO: Closed-Loop Optical Molecule Recognition with Minimum Risk Training
Optical chemical structure recognition (OCSR) translates molecular images into machine-readable representations such as SMILES strings or molecular graphs, but remains challenging in real-world documents due to wide variations in chemical structures, shorthand conventions, and scanning artifacts. Most existing deep learning approaches rely on teacher forcing with token-level Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE). This training paradigm suffers from exposure bias, as models are trained under ground-truth prefixes but must condition on their own previous predictions during inference. Moreover, token-level MLE objectives hinder the optimization towards molecular-level evaluation criteria such as chemical validity and structural similarity. Here we introduce Minimum Risk Training (MRT) to OCSR and propose COMO (Closed-loop Optical Molecule recOgnition), a framework that mitigates exposure bias by directly optimizing over molecule-level, non-differentiable objectives. Experiments on ten benchmarks, including synthetic and real-world chemical diagrams from patent and scientific literature, demonstrate that COMO substantially outperforms existing rule-based and learning-based methods with less training data, consistently achieving superior performance across both reproduced baselines and previously reported results. Ablation studies further show that MRT is architecture-agnostic, demonstrating its potential for broad application to end-to-end OCSR systems.
♻ ☆ Learning Where to Trust: Reliability-Guided Expert Routing and Velocity Gating for 3D Deformable Registration
Chenyu Guo, Wenjie Dai, Yiqian Chang, Zhiyuan Zhang, Yunfan Wei, Shuhan Qi, Tianrui Xu, Dong Liu, Ming Cong
Deformable image registration relies on accurate anatomical correspondences. However, explicitly coupling local matching reliability with spatial context selection and deformation update strength remains insufficiently explored in learning-based registration. This challenge is particularly pronounced in homogeneous, weakly textured, and severely deformed regions, where ambiguous matches may induce erroneous deformation updates. We propose ReliMorph, a reliability-routed symmetric framework for 3D deformable registration that couples correspondence assessment with spatial context selection and update strength.Local correlation distributions characterize correspondence ambiguity using shared anatomical features with modality-specific adaptation. These reliability cues guide spatial expert fusion and gate residual velocities during coarse-to-fine refinement. Updated inverse-inconsistency feedback guides routing and gating at finer pyramid levels. To our knowledge, ReliMorph is the first 3D deformable registration framework to jointly condition spatial expert routing and residual velocity gating on correspondence reliability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReliMorph consistently outperforms competing methods in anatomical overlap, highlighting its effectiveness across unimodal and multimodal registration tasks.
♻ ☆ Transfer the Style, Not the Semantics: Mitigating Semantic Leakage in Image-Guided Stylization
Image-guided zero-shot style transfer enables training-free stylization of arbitrary content images using a reference style. Despite recent progress, existing methods commonly rely on self-attention manipulation to inject style information, which may transfer semantic content from the style image, leading to semantic leakage. In this work, we revisit this phenomenon from the perspective of key--value coupling in the self-attention of diffusion models. Our analysis shows that the native correspondence between style keys and values plays an important role in transferring semantic information from the style image. Motivated by this observation, we propose SuRe, a timestep-aware key--value regulation framework that mitigates semantic leakage by disrupting the native key--value correspondence while progressively restoring it for faithful style transfer. Specifically, we present value shuffle to decouple style keys and values while preserving the empirical distribution of the values, together with a progressive recoupling mechanism that gradually recouples them throughout the stylization process. Experiments against 18 representative methods demonstrate that SuRe maintains competitive style similarity while consistently improving content similarity across SD1.5, SDXL, SD3, and FLUX.1-dev, with natural generalization to multi-style transfer. The code will be publicly available at https://xinr-tang.github.io/SuRe-homepage/.
comment: Updated manuscript
♻ ☆ DVFace: Spatio-Temporal Dual-Prior Diffusion for Video Face Restoration
Zheng Chen, Bowen Chai, Rongjun Gao, Mingtao Nie, Xi Li, Bingnan Duan, Jianping Fang, Xiaohong Liu, Linghe Kong, Yulun Zhang
Video face restoration aims to enhance degraded face videos into high-quality results with realistic facial details, stable identity, and temporal coherence. Recent diffusion-based methods have brought strong generative priors to restoration and enabled more realistic detail synthesis. However, existing approaches for face videos still rely heavily on generic diffusion priors and multi-step sampling, which limit both facial adaptation and inference efficiency. These limitations motivate the use of one-step diffusion for video face restoration, yet achieving faithful facial recovery alongside temporally stable outputs remains challenging. In this paper, we propose, DVFace, a one-step diffusion framework for real-world video face restoration. Specifically, we introduce a spatio-temporal dual-codebook design to extract complementary spatial and temporal facial priors from degraded videos. We further propose an asymmetric spatio-temporal fusion module to inject these priors into the diffusion backbone according to their distinct roles. Evaluation on various benchmarks shows that DVFace delivers superior restoration quality, temporal consistency, and identity preservation compared to recent methods. Code: https://github.com/zhengchen1999/DVFace.
comment: Code is available at: https://github.com/zhengchen1999/DVFace
♻ ☆ Effect of Temporal Resolution on Zero-Shot Semantic Understanding of Rapid Human Actions
Understanding human actions from visual observations is essential for human-robot interaction, particularly when semantic interpretation of unfamiliar or hard-to-annotate actions is required. For rapid or less common activities, collecting sufficient labeled data for supervised learning is challenging, making zero-shot approaches a practical alternative for semantic understanding without task-specific training. While recent advances in large-scale pre-trained models enable such zero-shot reasoning, the impact of temporal resolution, especially for rapid and fine-grained motions, remains underexplored.
In this study, we investigate temporal-resolution conditions for zero-shot semantic understanding of high-speed human actions. Using kendo as a representative case of rapid and subtle motion patterns, we propose a training-free pipeline that combines a pre-trained video-language model for semantic representation with large language model-based reasoning for pairwise action comparison. Our primary experiment evaluates full-observation raw videos from 10 to 120 Hz in 10-Hz increments. Nearest class prototype (NCP) accuracy is highest at 120 Hz, and the mean over 70-120 Hz is higher than that over 10-60 Hz. The corresponding mean prototype margin changes from -5.74 to +2.52 similarity-score points between these two halves and is also highest at 120 Hz. Secondary experiments show that tracking overlays reduce mean full-observation performance but improve mean partial-observation performance. These findings provide preliminary evidence that retaining high-temporal-resolution visual information can benefit training-free semantic understanding of rapid human actions.
♻ ☆ When Does Sliced Inference Pay Off? Resolution, Tiling and Dense Fusion for Small Object Detection
Sliced inference such as SAHI is the standard remedy for small objects in high-resolution imagery, but its gains are usually measured against low-resolution baselines. We revisit sliced inference with scale as the explicit variable and ask when tiling actually pays off. We compare seven dense detectors from four families on VisDrone and DOTA, under pre-specified hypotheses, calibration-only tuning and a single evaluation on held-out test data. Two findings emerge. First, much of the benefit attributed to slicing is a resolution effect: on VisDrone, a single pass trained at a higher resolution outperforms tiling with box fusion (merging decoded boxes) for every detector that could be trained at that resolution, and at equal compute a higher resolution helps more than a larger model. Second, tiles carry complementary information that box fusion wastes. We introduce SCAHI (Slicing with Coverage-Aware Hyper Inference), which accumulates the dense outputs of all passes with weights that give every image position the same total coverage, and reads objects off a peak grid fine enough to keep crowded neighbours apart. On identical passes, SCAHI outperforms box fusion for every YOLO detector on both datasets and matches it for FCOS. On DOTA, whose images far exceed the resolution a single pass can be trained at, tiles with SCAHI beat the best single pass for every detector, by 4.3 to 5.6 mAP50 at 2048 px, and replacing only SAHI's merge step by SCAHI adds 2.3 to 4.0 mAP50. An ablation attributes the gain to the border weighting and the resolution of the peak grid. Source code is available at https://github.com/beckerio/scahi.
♻ ☆ Learning Dexterous Manipulation Using Contact Wrench Guidance From Human Demonstration
Xinghao Zhu, Zixi Liu, Shalin Jain, Chenran Li, Milad Noori, Michael Andres Lin, Huihua Zhao, John Welsh, Mrinal Verghese, Wei Liu, Tingwu Wang, Xingye Da, Zhengyi Luo, Vishal Kulkarni, Naema Bhatti, Yuke Zhu, Linxi Fan, Bowen Wen, Danfei Xu, Soha Pouya, Yan Chang
Dexterous robot manipulation can benefit from the abundance of human demonstrations, but transferring such demonstrations to robot policies remains challenging. We present Contact Wrench Guidance from Human Demonstration in Robotic Dexterous Manipulation (CHORD), a framework for long-horizon manipulation of rigid and articulated objects with reinforcement learning. The key idea is object-centric contact wrench space guidance: we represent human and robot motions by the forces and torques they can induce on the object, enabling similarity to be measured by the induced instantaneous motions. This guidance makes reinforcement learning more scalable for contact-rich dexterous manipulation. We further introduce a large-scale simulation benchmark with 4,739 bimanual dexterous manipulation tasks, constructed from motion-capture datasets and reconstructed in-house videos. Evaluated on 1,831 benchmark tasks, CHORD achieves an average success rate of 82.12%, demonstrating strong scalability. CHORD also generalizes to whole-body manipulation from hand-only and third-person demonstrations, achieving a 90.77% success rate, and the learned policies transfer to the real world in both open-loop and closed-loop settings.
♻ ☆ Pygmalion Effect in Vision: Image-to-Clay Translation for Reflective Geometry Reconstruction NeurIPS 2026
Understanding reflection remains a long-standing challenge in 3D reconstruction due to the entanglement of appearance and geometry under view-dependent reflections. In this work, we present the Pygmalion Effect in Vision, a novel framework that metaphorically "sculpts" reflective objects into clay-like forms through image-to-clay translation. We then introduce a dual-branch design in which a BRDF-based reflective branch and a clay-guided branch share the same Gaussian geometry but operate through independent rendering paths. The clay-guided branch, supervised by the synthesized clay images, provides reflection-free geometric guidance that complements the photometric supervision of the BRDF branch. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets show consistent improvements in both geometry and photometric metrics. Beyond technical gains, our framework reveals that seeing by unshining, translating radiance into neutrality, can serve as a powerful inductive bias for reflective object geometry learning.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ AnalogRetriever: Learning Cross-Modal Representations for Analog Circuit Retrieval
Analog circuit design relies heavily on reusing existing intellectual property (IP), yet searching across heterogeneous representations such as SPICE netlists, schematics, and functional descriptions remains challenging. Existing methods are largely limited to exact matching within a single modality, failing to capture cross-modal semantic relationships. To bridge this gap, we present AnalogRetriever, a unified tri-modal retrieval framework for analog circuit search. We first build a high-quality dataset on top of Masala-CHAI through a two-stage repair pipeline that raises the netlist compile rate from 22.0\% to 99.97\%. Built on this foundation, AnalogRetriever encodes schematics and descriptions with a vision-language model and netlists with a port-aware relational graph convolutional network, mapping all three modalities into a shared embedding space via curriculum contrastive learning. Experiments show that AnalogRetriever achieves an average Recall@1 of 75.2\% across all six cross-modal retrieval directions, significantly outperforming existing baselines. When integrated into the AnalogCoder agentic framework as a retrieval-augmented generation module, it consistently improves functional pass rates and enables previously unsolved tasks to be completed.
comment: ICCAD Camera Ready Version, Code and data: \url{https://github.com/yihan-wa/AnalogRetriever_ICCAD}
♻ ☆ CRIL-U-Net: Compact Ratio-Interaction Learning for Focal Cortical Dysplasia Segmentation from T1w and FLAIR MRI
Focal cortical dysplasia (FCD) type II is an important cause of drug-resistant focal epilepsy, but its small size and subtle magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) appearance make automated segmentation difficult. Conventional multimodal networks concatenate T1-weighted (T1w) and fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) images and rely on subsequent layers to learn their relationships implicitly. We propose Compact Ratio-Interaction Learning U-Net (CRIL-U-Net), a 3D U-Net extension incorporating a Compact Ratio-Interaction Learning module that combines local spatial features, voxel-wise cross-modal mixing, and bidirectional ratio-inspired interactions. CRIL-U-Net was compared with a 3D U-Net and a U-Net with input-level self-attention using five-fold cross-validation on 85 FCD subjects and 25 healthy controls. Each architecture was trained independently with Dice-binary cross-entropy (Dice-BCE) and Focal Tversky-Focal (FTF) losses. With FTF, CRIL-U-Net achieved the highest mean Dice score ($0.196\pm0.262$), compared with $0.136\pm0.224$ for the U-Net and $0.135\pm0.214$ for the attention comparator. It localised 44 of 85 lesions, compared with 36 for the U-Net, and significantly outperformed both comparison architectures after false-discovery-rate correction. CRIL adds only 4,320 parameters to the backbone, indicating that compact cross-modal representation learning can improve FCD segmentation when combined with an imbalance-aware objective. The remaining 48.2\% miss rate nevertheless requires further methodological development and external validation.
comment: Accepted in MICAD 2026
♻ ☆ Aligning Forest and Trees in Images & Long Captions for Visually Grounded Understanding NeurIPS 2026
Vision-language models such as CLIP often struggle to faithfully understand long, detail-rich captions, relying on dominant scene cues while overlooking fine-grained visual evidence. We propose a hierarchical vision-language learning principle for understanding scenes as part-to-whole compositions: before forming a whole-scene representation, a model should uncover what semantic parts appear where in the image. To this end, we propose CAFT (Cross-domain Alignment of Forest and Trees), a vision-language model that jointly learns local text-region alignment at intermediate representations and global image-text alignment at the final representation. Exploiting the organization of long captions, where local descriptions often correspond to scene parts, CAFT employs a fine-to-coarse image encoder and a part-whole text encoder to discover localized part semantics and progressively compose them into a global image-text representation. Trained on 30M image-text pairs, CAFT achieves state-of-the-art performance on six long-text retrieval benchmarks and exhibits strong scaling behavior. Experiments show that CAFT learns fine-grained representations that localize textual semantics in image regions without explicit region-level supervision.
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2026. Project page: https://byeongju.me/CAFT
♻ ☆ iCATS: Fast Video Generation via Interaction-Aware Sparse Attention and Timestep-Adaptive Sparsity NeurIPS 2026
Training-free sparse attention offers a practical acceleration solution to Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) via reducing computations without fine-tuning. It typically involves estimating the importance of query-key regions and deriving sparse masks to compute only the important candidates, which inevitably introduces approximation errors that may degrade generation quality. To better balance the efficiency-quality trade-off, we propose iCATS, integrating improved importance estimation and sparse mask construction with an efficient hardware execution strategy. Specifically, for importance estimation, unlike previous works that perform independent clustering over query and key tokens based on feature similarity to estimate attention scores, iCATS demonstrates that clustering based on query-key dot-product interactions is more accurate and further reformulates this objective as a simple quadratic form for low-cost computation. For sparse mask construction, instead of using a fixed top-p rule, we observe that tolerance to sparse approximation errors varies across denoising timesteps and therefore introduce an SNR-guided sparsity schedule to adjust sparsity dynamically, leading to higher accuracy. Finally, for hardware execution, we devise a tail-merging strategy to reduce padding overhead caused by irregular cluster sizes, improving GPU kernel utilization. Extensive experiments show that iCATS achieves $2.03\times$ acceleration with 31.017 dB PSNR on HunyuanVideo-T2V-13B and $1.55\times$ acceleration with 29.301 dB PSNR on Wan2.1-T2V-14B, delivering a state-of-the-art efficiency-quality trade-off.
comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ Direct Trajectory Optimization for Inference-Time Alignment of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Alignment of text-to-image diffusion models with reward functions is a key challenge in controllable generation. Existing approaches typically rely on optimizing model inputs or fine-tuning denoising networks, which requires computationally expensive backpropagation through large denoising models. In this work, we propose Direct Trajectory Optimization (DTO), a training-free framework that performs alignment by directly optimizing the sampling trajectory of diffusion models. Specifically, DTO treats intermediate denoising scores and sampled noise as the optimization variables, eliminating the need for gradients through the denoising network. To mitigate the out-of-distribution problem, we introduce Reward-Optimized Score Guidance, which interpolates between the optimized scores and the pretrained model predictions to stabilize sampling, while providing a provable theoretical guarantee of reward improvement under constrained distributions. Empirically, DTO improves alignment performance across three diffusion models on two benchmarks, outperforming existing inference-time alignment methods while maintaining high efficiency. These results suggest that trajectory-level optimization is a promising direction for efficient and effective diffusion model alignment.
♻ ☆ LucidNFT: LR-Anchored Multi-Reward Preference Optimization for Flow-Based Real-World Super-Resolution
Generative real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) can synthesize visually convincing details from severely degraded low-resolution (LR) inputs, but stochastic sampling can introduce semantic or structural hallucinations unsupported by the LR evidence. Sampling multiple outputs per LR input exposes trade-offs between perceptual quality and faithfulness that reinforcement learning (RL) can optimize beyond paired supervision. Effective alignment is limited by the lack of a degradation-robust LR-referenced faithfulness signal, the loss of per-objective reward contrasts when rewards are combined before normalization in Diffusion Negative-aware FineTuning (DiffusionNFT), and limited coverage of real degradations. We propose LucidNFT, a multi-reward RL framework for flow-matching Real-ISR. LucidNFT introduces LucidConsistency, a degradation-invariant LR-referenced evaluator trained with content-consistent degradation pools and hard negatives created by inpainting to detect localized hallucinations. Its decoupled reward normalization strategy normalizes each reward within each LR-conditioned rollout group before fusion, preserving per-objective contrasts across candidates. LucidLR provides a large-scale collection of real-world degraded images for RL fine-tuning. Experiments show that LucidNFT improves perceptual quality on strong flow-based Real-ISR baselines while generally maintaining LR-referenced consistency across diverse real-world scenarios. In a reward-independent human study, LucidNFT outputs were judged more faithful to the LR inputs in 72.5 percent of comparisons.
♻ ☆ When to Trust Adaptation: Contextual Fusion for Transferable Vision-Language Prompting
When a vision-language model encounters a new class or domain, how much should it trust its learned prompts? Because source adaptation can correct pretrained errors on some target images while disturbing valid predictions on others, we introduce Contextual Adaptive Fusion (CAF), which retains four prediction branches by pairing frozen and prompted visual and textual representations. To arbitrate when branches disagree on an image, CAF combines each branch's predictive confidence with how frequently the branches favor its proposed class across the unlabeled target collection, placing greater trust in predictions that are locally confident yet less dominated by collection-wide frequency bias. The fusion coefficients are learned once on source data and remain fixed at inference. Trained on ImageNet, CAF achieves 69.96% average accuracy across ten cross-dataset benchmarks (1.92 percentage points above ManiPT) and remains highly competitive across four ImageNet variants, setting a new best of 52.21% on ImageNet-S. In base-to-novel transfer across eleven datasets, CAF further reaches 79.77% novel-class accuracy and an 82.81% harmonic mean. Code is available at https://github.com/zhenyuanchenai/CAF.
♻ ☆ GRACE: Adaptive Concept Erasure with Geometry-Guided Retention in Diffusion Models
Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models inevitably internalize sensitive or non-compliant concepts from large-scale pretraining data, necessitating post-hoc concept erasure. However, existing erasure methods often lack explicit constraints on parameter updates, leading to over-intervention and unintended semantic drift. In addition, many methods rely on manually crafted counterfactual supervision, such as surrogate prompts, which incurs substantial data construction costs that limit scalability to new concepts. To address these limitations, we propose GRACE, a structured concept erasure framework designed to enable localized and selective intervention. Specifically, we introduce a semantically weighted sensitive subspace estimation to precisely lock intervention directions, and employ lightweight subspace-constrained adapters to prevent global semantic disturbance. To eliminate the dependency on manual prompt engineering, we design an automatically decoupled safe-anchor mechanism. To mitigate semantic drift induced by excessive intervention, we introduce an energy-driven dynamic gating mechanism that adaptively controls the timing and strength of intervention at inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a superior balance between erasure effectiveness and generation fidelity. Compared with the average performance of five state-of-the-art (SOTA) concept erasure methods, our method improves the fine-grained NSFW reduction rate by $17.86\%$, while reducing the macro-averaged target CLIP Score and preservation-oriented Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) by $4.55\%$ and $52.14\%$, indicating stronger concept suppression with substantially improved preservation of the original model's generative utility.
comment: 35 pages,14 figures
♻ ☆ Counting Events, Not Seeing Them: Diagnosing and Repairing the Readout Failure in Video LLMs
Video LLMs fail conspicuously at counting how many times an object crosses the screen, a failure attributed to missing object permanence. Using construction-grounded synthetic testbeds with validated labels, we show this attribution is incomplete: the count signal is present but unread - linear probes decode per-window presence at 93% while global count decoding collapses to a duration confound. Concurrent work reports the same representation-output dissociation for repetition counting; we show that in exit-and-reappear event counting it is repairable: two readout-directed repairs (episode-localization supervision and a discrete event-symbol side channel) raise same-object counting from 46.7% to 65.0% (oracle 66.7%) on a chance-33% benchmark across 7B-30B systems. Transfer to an independent factory costs nothing, and a measurement audit exposes five data-integrity failures that had obscured the boundary. A real-video audit (REALCOUNT, n=18, blind-audited) shows the boundary persists - best 55.6% at chance 33.3% - and symbol transfer fails zero-shot. A 1-epoch in-domain adaptation bench is negative (six levers at 28-50%), but 3 epochs reverse this for the symbol channel: with oracle timelines the reader reaches 94.4% sequence-disjoint (and 100% strict on the full set), while the deployed 2-epoch head reaches 61.1% in all three seeds (42-44), no better than a shuffled-symbol control (61.1% seed 42, 66.7% seed 43), and one clip above the unadapted reader (55.6%). The residual gap is detector evidence, not reader capacity: the same reader reaches 72.2-88.9% on GT timelines. The failure is repairable with informative timelines, but the deployed head remains the bottleneck; a frozen-feature boundary probe is weak (AUC 0.62 vs. 0.51 permutation) and non-transferring (0.77 within-clip vs. 0.62 across windows).
comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, 8 tables. Preprint v2 (2026-11-10). Corrected-prompt retrain; Tables 5-8 updated; Appendix A item 5 closed. Comments welcome
♻ ☆ Split and Bridge: Multimodal Generation via Diffusion Bridging
Visual data are often expressed through multiple complementary modalities (e.g., images and segmentation masks), each capturing different aspects of the same underlying structure. Most existing multimodal methods adopt a top-down paradigm, learning a shared latent variable through joint training from scratch, which limits scalability. We propose Split and Bridge (SnB), a bottom-up framework for multimodal generation that couples pretrained unimodal diffusion models at sampling time. Rather than learning a unified latent space, SnB generates coherent multimodal samples by following a shared diffusion trajectory up to a split point and then branching into modality-specific trajectories guided by a bridge module. This design enables plug-and-play reuse of powerful pretrained models without joint training, making it scalable and easily adaptable. Across standard benchmarks (PolyMNIST, CelebAMask-HQ) and more complex settings (PIE-Bench++, ROCO), SnB achieves a strong balance between sample quality and coherence. We show that SnB naturally extends to downstream zero-shot tasks such as interleaved co-generation, image editing, and style coupling/decoupling. Our results demonstrate that bottom-up generation provides a practical framework that complements existing top-down multimodal approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/AhmadArrabi/SnB
♻ ☆ With Tools or Because of Tools? Tracing Capability Gains in Multimodal Agents
Jiawei Guo, Donglei Yu, Yu Chen, Xiang Wang, Shuai Li, Xinpei Zhao, Huaxing Liu, Qinghao Wang, Minpeng Liao
Tool-augmented multimodal agents show strong benchmark gains, often taken as evidence that agents have learned to use tools. We argue that this interpretation can be premature: a tool-call trace alone does not show whether the tool supplied answer-critical information. We study two representative ``thinking with images'' agents, Thyme and DeepEyesV2, across real-world understanding, OCR, chart understanding, and mathematical reasoning. Each agent is compared with its Tool-Free counterpart and with a Pure-Text Reasoner trained from the same source pool without tool-calling trajectories. Tool access yields little consistent aggregate improvement, does not reliably reduce generated-token cost, and leaves only a small tool-only solved set: 93% of DeepEyesV2's tool-solved problems and 96% of Thyme's are also solved by at least one non-tool setting. Mechanism ablations further show that the full tool-use loop does not consistently outperform either the tool-call format or the returned execution result alone. In the settings we study, the analyzed agents appear to learn tool-calling patterns more reliably than tool-contributed capabilities, suggesting that evaluation should distinguish tool availability from whether tools actually expand what agents can solve.
♻ ☆ Mixture of Cognitive Experts in Large Vision-Language Models ECCV 2026
Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) require strong reasoning over both visual and textual inputs. Recent work suggests that cognitive elements, especially diverse representations and metacognition, correlate with better performance. Many required perceptual functions are already provided by specialized domain-specific computer vision models, which can serve as the perceptual subsystem for detecting objects, localizing them, inferring states, recovering spatial layout, and reading text. The key challenge is integrating these multi-encoder experts into a trustworthy, interpretable, and coherent representation that improves verifiability and reduces hallucinations. This is difficult because vision-language questions span different cognitive levels, yet most LVLM pipelines apply the same perception-reasoning routing regardless of the query's demands. We propose an evidence-driven multimodal reasoning framework that uses a Bloom-inspired taxonomy as a hierarchical reasoning protocol. Our two-stage cognitive verbalization first produces a Literal Evidence Summary by decomposing expert outputs into short, atomic evidence statements, then performs Bloom Verbalization to convert these items into a staged reasoning trace. A lightweight Reasoning Trace Module quantitatively analyzes the trace, making evidence usage and reasoning progression explicit. Experiments show improvements in both perception and reasoning and diagnostics indicate that different queries induce different cognitive entry levels and evidence-use trajectories.
comment: ECCV 2026 MARS2 Workshop
♻ ☆ CoMet: Context and Multiplicity Decomposition for Multimodal Uncertainty Estimation NeurIPS 2026
Uncertainty estimation has been a long-standing challenge in AI models; it amounts to "knowing what you don't know," and metacognition is notoriously difficult even for humans (cf. the Dunning-Kruger effect). Although it is still far from solved even in simpler classification systems, tackling it in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is becoming increasingly important. Within MLLMs, uncertainty can stem from any of the diverse sources as well as from their relationships, and further can stem from the unbounded answers in the open-ended setting. To tackle the issues, we propose CoMet, an MLLM uncertainty estimation method by decomposing uncertainty into a context-specific term and a multiplicity-specific term. The former captures ambiguity induced by the given context (e.g., task or prompt), while the latter captures how many plausible answers determined by the context remain compatible with the given input. We train a lightweight post-hoc uncertainty module to estimate these quantities, which enables efficient uncertainty estimation without autoregressive answer generation or repeated sampling. Experiments on various open-ended multimodal benchmarks, hallucination detection, and multiple-choice visual question answering benchmarks show that CoMet consistently improves uncertainty estimation over existing baselines while remaining efficient in practice. Code is available at https://github.com/princetonvisualai/comet_uncertainty
comment: NeurIPS 2026 camera-ready; 36 pages, 13.3MB
♻ ☆ Spatially-Aware Class-Agnostic Object Counting
Generalised object counting aims to estimate the number of instances of an arbitrary object category from a single image, but many recent methods can struggle on structurally complex objects due to limited spatial modelling. We present \textit{UpCount}, a class-agnostic counter designed to better preserve spatial structure. UpCount strengthens the visual representation by extracting multi-layer features from a ViT-B/16 encoder and reassembling them into a refined multi-scale pyramid that is spatially refined using Dense Prediction Transformers and FeatUp, yielding features with improved structural and spatial sensitivity; a proposal--verification counting head then identifies repeated patterns and produces a density map for the final count. On FSC-147, UpCount achieves 12.39 MAE and 100.89 RMSE on the test set, and it transfers effectively to vehicle counting on CARPK (6.27 MAE, 8.79 RMSE). Code: https://github.com/r28112072-rgb/upcount
comment: VCIP 2026
♻ ☆ Are Text-to-Image Models Inductivist Turkeys? A Counterfactual Benchmark for Causal Reasoning
Jiayi Lei, Yuandong Pu, Xingyu Han, Rongpeng Zhu, Jing Xu, Jinyao Wang, Zijian Zhou, Bin Fu, Yuewen Cao, Yihao Liu, Hongsheng Li
Text-to-image (T2I) generation models have achieved remarkable progress in producing visually realistic images from natural language prompts. Yet it remains unclear whether their success reflects genuine causal understanding or sophisticated pattern matching over visual-textual correlations. Inspired by Russell's inductivist turkey, we introduce Counterfactual-World (CF-World), a counterfactual benchmark designed to investigate whether text-to-image models can generate images under rules that systematically contradict real-world priors. CF-World organizes each scenario into three progressive levels: factual generation under ordinary world knowledge, explicit counterfactual generation with direct visual instructions, and implicit counterfactual generation requiring causal deduction from altered rules. We evaluate open-source and closed-source text-to-image models using CF-Eval, a scoring pipeline based on vision-language models. We report the scores at each prompt level as the primary results and use Prior Resistance Rate (PRR) and Reasoning Retention Rate (RRR) as auxiliary descriptive indicators. All evaluated models score lower on counterfactual prompts than on factual prompts. Diagnostic experiments reveal difficulties in following altered rules and recombining rarely co-occurring visual attributes. The gains from rephrasing object and attribute names are consistent with a role for learned visual priors in counterfactual generation. Our benchmark and evaluation code are publicly available at https://jylei16.github.io/CF-World.github.io/.
comment: 10 pages, 7 figures. Project page: https://github.com/jylei16/CF-World.github.io
♻ ☆ Attention Fusion for Bridge Deck Delamination Detection
Subsurface delaminations in reinforced concrete bridge decks escape conventional visual inspection, and the two principal sensing techniques used to find them are individually incomplete: Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) penetrates deeply but degrades near the surface, while Infrared Thermography (IRT) resolves shallow defects but cannot reach deeper structure. This paper presents a framework for fusing the two modalities through hierarchical attention: temporal self-attention over GPR A-scans, channel-spatial attention over IRT patches, and cross-modal multi-head attention with learnable modality embeddings, coupled with decomposed aleatoric/epistemic uncertainty estimation. Beyond the architecture itself, which is lightweight at approximately 0.53M parameters with a closed-form accounting of where capacity resides, we contribute an elementary formal analysis. Two-token cross-modal attention is shown to be exactly a bank of per-sample learned gates; a gradient-allocation proposition quantifies how class imbalance starves attention parameters of minority-class signal and how loss reweighting trades that starvation for gradient variance; and closed-form metric floors under majority-class collapse anchor a diagnostic divergence between ranking metrics (AUC) and thresholded metrics (F1). The analysis suggests that adaptively weighted fusion, precisely because its feature-selection policy is learned, may be distinctively vulnerable to the severe class imbalance typical of operational bridge decks; establishing whether and when this occurs is deferred to empirical evaluation.
comment: Withdrawn by the authors: the experimental results are overstated because of a flaw in the train/test split and are not reproducible under corrected evaluation
♻ ☆ Seeing Isn't Enough: Unlocking Visual Reasoning by Bridging the Reasoning-Access Gap with TIGER NeurIPS 2026
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) inherit strong textual reasoning capabilities from their language backbones and text pretraining, but often fail to apply the same level of competency to visual inputs. We show that this degradation cannot be attributed to only perception failures, by evaluating models on semantically-equivalent text and rendered-text image inputs: models can accurately read text in the images and recover near-text performance when provided their own transcriptions, but just cannot reason well on the images directly. We characterize this discrepancy as a modality reasoning-access gap, where models fail to route perceived visual content into existing reasoning machinery accessible with text. To bridge this, we propose TIGER (Text-to-Image Gap-targeted training for Enhanced Reasoning), which first mines synthetic modality counterfactuals where a model succeeds on a text problem but fails when provided the corresponding rendered image, and post-trains the model on the image input via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), along with SFT and DPO variants. Importantly, although trained exclusively on synthetic rendered-text images with no multimodal annotations, TIGER results in model performance improvements across diverse real-world visual benchmarks including geometric diagrams (MathVerse), multi-disciplinary sciences (EMMA, MMMU), complex charts (ChartQAPro), and embodied spatial reasoning (RoboSpatial-Home). TIGER also complements existing state-of-the-art RLVR visual reasoning methods, yielding further performance gains. Analysis involving reasoning-subspace activation and activation patching provide support indicating that TIGER helps to align visual-to-reasoning pathways toward text reasoning states. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/minhngh/Tiger.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. Gregory and Minh contributed equally
♻ ☆ SciFigure2Code: An AI-Reconstructed Benchmark for Scientific Figure-to-Code
Scientific figures are the interface through which research claims are inspected and reused, but final published panels rarely expose the data or plotting code that produced them. Recovering this hidden provenance from pixels is therefore underdetermined. We introduce SciFigure2Code, an AI-reconstructed benchmark that evaluates presentation recovery: generating editable Python programs that preserve how a scientific panel is arranged and read. Role-specialized Codex agents generate, execute, visually refine, and audit silver-standard presentation programs that capture geometry, visual hierarchy, encodings, annotations, and typography. This reconstruction-and-audit protocol turns final published panels into auditable reference packages; the resulting resource contains 6,740 reviewed panels and SciFigureBench, a balanced 337-panel test set across 31 chart subtypes, five domains, and three complexity levels. Across 14 zero-shot models, execution and structural fidelity remain weak; a 328-panel full-figure study further exposes failures to locate and isolate requested panels. Claude Opus 4.7 leads image-only reconstruction, Claude Opus 4.6 leads caption-assisted reconstruction, and plan-then-code prompting improves all four tested models. SciFigure2Code provides an auditable testbed for constructing editable, visually faithful scientific figure presentations.
comment: 20 pages
♻ ☆ MAPLE: Latent Multi-Agent Play for End-to-End Autonomous Driving NeurIPS 2026
Rajeev Yasarla, Deepti Hegde, Hsin-Pai Cheng, Shizhong Han, Yunxiao Shi, Meysam Sadeghigooghari, Hanno Ackermann, Litian Liu, Pranav Desai, Fatih Porikli, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Hong Cai
Vision-language-action (VLA) models are effective as end-to-end motion planners, but can be brittle when evaluated in closed-loop settings due to being trained under traditional imitation learning framework. Existing closed-loop supervision approaches lack scalability and fail to completely model a reactive environment. We propose MAPLE, a novel framework for reactive, multi-agent rollout of a dynamic driving scenario in the latent space of the VLA model. The ego vehicle and nearby traffic agents are independently controlled over multi-step horizons, while being reactive to other agents in the scene, enabling closed-loop training. MAPLE consists of two training stages: (1) supervised fine-tuning on the latent rollouts based on ground-truth trajectories, followed by (2) reinforcement learning with global and agent -specific rewards that encourage safety, progress, and interaction realism. We further propose diversity rewards that encourage the model to generate planning behaviors that may not be present in logged driving data. Notably, our closed-loop training framework is scalable and does not require external simulators, which can be computationally expensive to run and have limited visual fidelity to the real-world. MAPLE achieves state-of-the-art driving performance on Bench2Drive and demonstrates scalable, closed-loop multi-agent play for robust E2E autonomous driving systems.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ Generative Scenario Rollouts for End-to-End Autonomous Driving NeurIPS 2026
Rajeev Yasarla, Deepti Hegde, Shizhong Han, Hsin-Pai Cheng, Yunxiao Shi, Meysam Sadeghigooghari, Shweta Mahajan, Apratim Bhattacharyya, Litian Liu, Risheek Garrepalli, Thomas Svantesson, Fatih Porikli, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Hong Cai
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are emerging as highly effective planning models for end-to-end autonomous driving systems. However, current works mostly rely on imitation learning from sparse trajectory annotations and underutilize their potential as generative models. We propose Generative Scenario Rollouts (GeRo), a plug-and-play framework for VLA models that jointly performs planning and generation of language-grounded future traffic scenes through an autoregressive rollout strategy. First, a VLA model is trained to encode ego vehicle and agent dynamics into latent tokens under supervision from planning, motion, and language tasks, facilitating text-aligned generation. Next, GeRo performs language-conditioned autoregressive generation. Given multi-view images, a scenario description, and ego-action questions, it generates future latent tokens and textual responses to guide long-horizon rollouts. A rollout-consistency loss stabilizes predictions using ground truth or pseudo-labels, mitigating drift and preserving text-action alignment. This design enables GeRo to perform temporally consistent, language-grounded rollouts that support long-horizon reasoning and multi-agent planning. On Bench2Drive, GeRo improves driving score and success rate by +15.7 and +26.2, respectively. By integrating reinforcement learning with generative rollouts, GeRo achieves state-of-the-art closed-loop and open-loop performance, demonstrating strong zero-shot robustness. These results highlight the promise of generative, language-conditioned reasoning as a foundation for safer and more interpretable end-to-end autonomous driving.
comment: Accepted NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ Multi-View Relational Distillation for Spatial Reasoning with Vision-Language Models
Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong image and video understanding, yet their visual-spatial representations remain geometrically fragile, leading to failures in spatial reasoning needed for embodied AI, robotics, and autonomous driving. Prior approaches to geometry grounding either fine-tune VLMs on spatial question answering, which can perpetuate spurious visual representations, or fuse features from large geometry-grounded vision models, which substantially increases model size at inference. Knowledge distillation from geometry-grounded vision models offers an alternative, but directly matching multi-view teacher features can disrupt the pretrained alignment between visual and textual representations, degrading object- and language-semantic capabilities. We propose multi-view relational distillation (MVRD), which distills patch-wise cosine similarities across views instead of the teacher features themselves. These relations encode geometric correspondences adequate for spatial understanding, while leaving the student representation underdetermined, allowing it to remain close to its pretrained vision- language space. Across representative VLMs, MVRD improves visual-spatial reasoning, outperforming supervised fine-tuning and feature distillation while approaching feature fusion methods with considerably fewer added parameters and lower latency. We show that MVRD makes visual representations more geometric while retaining language alignment, and generalizes to 3D scene understanding tasks such as object grounding, dense captioning, and question answering. Code is available at https://github.com/kietngt00/MVRD
♻ ☆ MC$^2$: Monte Carlo Correction for Fast Elliptic PDE Solving NeurIPS 2026
Partial differential equation (PDE) solvers underpin modern computer graphics, geometry processing, and scientific computing. Classical Monte Carlo PDE solvers such as Walk-on-Spheres (WoS) provide mesh-free estimations that are unbiased, but with accuracy limited by sampling and numerical approximation. Learned solvers are fast but biased and brittle under distribution shift. We therefore present MC$^2$, a hybrid Neural Network-Monte Carlo PDE solver that treats a low-budget Monte Carlo solution as a structured estimator of the true field and learns a single-pass neural correction to recover a high-fidelity solution. MC$^2$ matches the accuracy of solutions using over $1000\times$ more Monte Carlo samples, outperforming all evaluated mesh-free classical, denoising, and neural-operator baselines. To enable reproducible study of finite-compute PDE solving, we additionally release PDEZoo, the largest standardized elliptic PDE benchmark to date: 2 million PDEs spanning 5 elliptic families and unlimited geometric compositions, with analytic ground truth and multi-budget Monte Carlo trajectories. Together, MC$^2$ and PDEZoo (1) empirically establish that finite-sample Monte Carlo error is structured, learnable, and correctable in a single forward pass, (2) show that we can solve PDEs $\sim$218$\times$ faster than WoS at matched accuracy and achieve a $\sim$171$\times$ reduction in inference time relative to state-of-the-art diffusion methods while attaining higher accuracy, and (3) provide the reproducible evaluation infrastructure the field has so far lacked.
Code & Data: https://mc-error-correction.github.io
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ Federated Learning of Binary Neural Networks: Enabling Low-Cost Inference
Federated Learning (FL) enables distributed clients to jointly train a global model without sharing their raw data. However, deploying the resulting deep neural networks on resource-constrained edge devices remains challenging due to their inference-time computational and memory requirements. Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) offer substantial efficiency gains by representing weights and activations using a single bit, but achieving competitive accuracy under such aggressive quantization remains difficult. Rotation-aware binarization reduces quantization errors by aligning real-valued weights with their binary representations. Despite its effectiveness in centralized learning, applying rotation-aware binarization in FL is non-trivial due to discrepancies between local and global models, particularly under heterogeneous client data distributions. To address this challenge, we propose FedBNN, a federated rotation-aware binarization framework that leverages global model information to guide local binarization while incorporating locally learned rotation information into server-side construction of the global binary model. Experiments across multiple benchmark datasets, model architectures, and degrees of data heterogeneity demonstrate that the proposed integrated methodology achieves accuracy competitive with full-precision federated models while generally outperforming existing federated binary learning approaches. Overall, FedBNN enables accurate binary inference in heterogeneous federated settings, with savings of up to $58\times$ in FLOPs and $32\times$ in memory over full-precision models, offering a practical balance between predictive performance and deployment efficiency on resource-constrained edge devices.
comment: 31 pages, 13 figures
♻ ☆ Distill to Think, Foresee to Act: Cognitive-Physical Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving
Current end-to-end autonomous driving models are fundamentally constrained by the behavioral cloning ceiling of imitation learning. While reinforcement learning offers a path to smarter autonomy, it demands two missing pieces of infrastructure: (1) a cognitive foundation that understands traffic semantics and driving intent, and (2) a foresighted physical environment that can anticipate the consequences of candidate actions. To this end, we propose CoPhy, a CognitivePhysical reinforcement learning framework for autonomous driving. To distill to think, we distill VLM knowledge into the BEV encoder and then discard the VLM entirely, retaining cognitive ability at zero inference cost while releasing the cognitive channel as a pluggable interface for optional human language commands. To foresee to act, we build an auto-regressive BEV world model that explicitly predicts future semantic maps conditioned on candidate actions, serving as an interpretable physical sandbox from which safety metrics are directly derived. Built upon this dual infrastructure, we optimize the driving policy via GRPO with a novel dual-reward mechanism: a physical reward derived from BEV rollouts enforces hard safety constraints, while a cognitive reward from a language-aligned scorer ensures intent compliance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoPhy not only achieves state-of-the-art results on NAVSIM v1 and v2 benchmarks, but also enables safer driving via cognitively informed scene compliance and flexible intent control through user-defined language instructions. Project page: https://wuyang98.github.io/CoPhy/.
♻ ☆ Action-Guided Reachability for Deterministic World Models of Vision-Based Systems
End-to-end vision-based controllers map raw camera images directly to control actions, yet verifying their closed-loop behavior remains challenging: no analytical model maps a physical state to a camera image, and propagating a set of states through high-dimensional images yields loose reachable sets. We address both challenges with two techniques. First, we propose a Deterministic World Model (DWM), a latent-free decoder that generates camera images only from the physical state, trained with a saliency-weighted reconstruction loss and a control-consistency loss. The DWM replaces the camera in the closed loop, so a sound and tight reachable tube of the surrogate closed loop can be computed without bounding any latent variables. Second, we propose an action-guided partition-and-verify scheme that certifies as many initial sets as possible within a fixed computation budget. A Gaussian process learned from cheap simulations orders the cells and splits those that lie across the property boundary, while every other unknown cell is split along the state dimension that most changes the controller's actions along the simulated closed loop, i.e., the one that most reduces the pixel uncertainty reaching the controller. On a CARLA braking system and three Gym benchmarks, the DWM is more accurate to the real camera than a cGAN surrogate and yields 1.9x to 69x narrower robustness intervals. The vision part causes most of the remaining overapproximation, and our splitting reduces the unknown fraction of the four-dimensional CartPole initial set from 21.88% to 8.18% within the budget.
♻ ☆ RECAP: Local Hebbian Prototype Learning as a Self-Organizing Readout for Reservoir Dynamics
Robust perception in brains is often attributed to high-dimensional population activity together with local plasticity mechanisms that reinforce recurring structure. In contrast, most modern image recognition systems are trained by error backpropagation and end-to-end gradient optimization, which are not naturally aligned with local computation and local plasticity. We introduce RECAP (Reservoir Computing with Hebbian Co-Activation Prototypes), a bio-inspired learning strategy for robust image classification that couples untrained reservoir dynamics with a self-organizing Hebbian prototype readout. RECAP discretizes time-averaged reservoir responses into activation levels, constructs a co-activation mask over reservoir unit pairs, and incrementally updates class-wise prototype matrices via a Hebbian-like potentiation-decay rule. Inference is performed by overlap-based prototype matching. The method avoids error backpropagation and is naturally compatible with online prototype updates. We illustrate the resulting robustness behavior on MNIST-C, where RECAP remains robust under diverse corruptions without exposure to corrupted training samples.
comment: Accepted at AICCC 2026. 14 pages, 6 figures
♻ ☆ Deep Learning-based Filtering for Video Coding: A Survey on Architectures, Algorithms, and Complexity Analysis
As Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) displays and immersive media services become ubiquitous in the Internet of Things (IoT) and Consumer Electronics (CE) sectors, including 8K display and mobile devices, the demand for high-efficiency video coding is unprecedented. While Deep Learning-based Filtering (DLF) has emerged as a promising solution to mitigate compression artifacts inherent in standards like High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265) and Versatile Video Coding (VVC/H.266), its deployment in CE devices is severely constrained by computational complexity, memory bandwidth, and power consumption. To bridge the gap between academic research and practical deployment, this paper presents a comprehensive, hardware-oriented survey of DLF techniques. We propose a systematic three-dimensional taxonomy classifying methods into (1) Integration Scheme within the Video Coding, (2) Coding Information Utilization, and (3) Network Design Strategy. Unlike prior reviews, this work critically analyzes the trade-offs between Rate-Distortion (RD) performance and hardware feasibility, highlighting the evolution from heavy, performance-oriented models to lightweight, hardware-friendly architectures targeting Neural Processing Units (NPUs). Furthermore, we incorporate the latest standardization activities from the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET) on Neural Network-based Video Coding (NNVC) to provide realistic guidelines. We also identify open challenges such as real-time inference latency and error propagation, providing a roadmap toward robust, low-power intelligent video coding in next-generation CE vision endpoints.
♻ ☆ RANSAC Scoring Done Right NeurIPS 2026
The most widely used RANSAC variants score a candidate model by summing per-point scores that fall to zero beyond a threshold. These scores derive from the negative log-likelihood of a Gaussian-uniform mixture. The threshold separates inliers, which follow the noise model, from outliers, and it is a function of the observation noise level, also known as the inlier scale. We remove this dependence on the threshold by reversing the usual order of RANSAC inference: rather than estimating the scale and then scoring against it, we marginalize the scale in closed form for a fixed inlier partition and then optimize over partitions. The resulting score is maximized by a single sort followed by a linear sweep. A single closed-form expression spans informative and non-informative priors, so the same score adapts to datasets with extensive or limited ground-truth annotation. The proposed score has a single hyperparameter, the half-width of the uniform outlier distribution. We show that this half-width is far less sensitive to miscalibration than the inlier threshold and is easier to cross-validate. The proposed score is the first likelihood-based RANSAC score in which the inlier scale is absent from the formula. Project page: https://ransacscoringdoneright.github.io
comment: Camera-ready version, NeurIPS 2026. 20 pages
♻ ☆ ORCA: Hunting Compositional Failures in Text-to-Image Diffusion NeurIPS 2026
Arshia Hemmat, Amirhossein Vahidi, Amitis Shidani, Mohammad Vali Sanian, Hesam Asadollahzadeh, Aryan Yazdan Parast, Mohammad Lotfollahi
Text-to-image diffusion models fail predictably on compositional prompts: attributes bind to the wrong objects, spatial relations invert, and multi-object scenes lose count. Recent architectures already augment CLIP with a T5 encoder precisely because CLIP's contrastive embedding loses compositional structure, yet these failures persist. We argue the binding problem is therefore not one of missing information but of misaligned information: a text encoder preserves compositional structure, but in a representation space shaped by language modelling rather than vision, and the denoising objective does not directly reward aligning the two. We show this correspondence can be supplied as an explicit training signal, that the relevant cross-modal information is concentrated in a low-rank subspace of self-supervised visual features, and that supplying it can be folded into diffusion training as a single auxiliary loss. Our method, ORCA (Orthogonal Residual Compositional Alignment), aligns the latent of a diffusion transformer with a low-rank target derived from a frozen visual encoder, through a predictor whose orthogonal basis is parameterised by a learned residual between T5 and CLIP embeddings, which provides a prompt-dependent signal for selecting the visual readout subspace. We prove that the cross-modal information recoverable at a given rank is bounded by the spectral mass of the visual encoder's covariance in the top components. Across three diffusion-transformer backbones (DiT-B/2, DiT-L/2, U-ViT-L), ORCA improves FID and GenEval over both vanilla and REPA baselines at zero inference-time cost; on DiT-L/2 it reaches FID 16.65 and GenEval 0.291 at 200K steps, exceeding the strongest 400K baseline at half the training cost, with the largest gains concentrated on attribute binding, spatial relations, and multi-object prompts.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. Camera-ready version. 28 pages, 4 figures, 13 tables. Project page: https://arshiahemmat.com/orca
♻ ☆ 3D-Guided Scalable Flow Matching for Generating Volumetric Tissue Spatial Transcriptomics from Serial Histology
Mohammad Vali Sanian, Arshia Hemmat, Amirhossein Vahidi, Jonas Maaskola, Jimmy Tsz Hang Lee, Martin Prete, Stanislaw Makarchuk, Yeliz Demirci, Nana-Jane Chipampe, Muzlifah Haniffa, Omer Bayraktar, Lassi Paavolainen, Mohammad Lotfollahi
A 3D transcriptomic profile of a tissue can give a holistic view of its organization in health and disease, but spatial transcriptomics (ST) is costly, so usually only some serial sections are profiled, while H&E is available for all. Most methods that infer ST from histology treat each section independently and ignore 3D structure, while existing 3D-aware approaches are not generative and do not scale well. We present Holographic Tissue Expression Inpainting and Analysis (HoloTea), a 3D-aware flow-matching framework that imputes spot-level gene expression on an unprofiled section from its H&E and the measured expression of adjacent profiled sections. Our key idea is to take the measured expression at the same registered position on neighboring sections and feed this cross-section context to the flow model through a lightweight ControlNet, so that predictions follow anatomical continuity along z. To capture the discrete, zero-inflated nature of counts, the flow starts from a learned zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) prior that, on an unprofiled section, is predicted from the measured expression of the nearest profiled section. A global attention block with a small set of inducing tokens adds whole-slide context at a cost linear in the number of spots, so training and inference scale to large 3D ST datasets. Across three ST datasets spanning different tissue types and resolutions, HoloTea consistently improves 3D expression accuracy and generalization compared to 2D and 3D baselines. We envision HoloTea advancing the creation of accurate 3D virtual tissues, ultimately accelerating biomarker discovery and deepening our understanding of disease. Code is available at https://github.com/Lotfollahi-lab/HoloTea.
comment: Accepted at MLCB 2026 (oral). 30 pages (10 main, 3 references, 17 supplementary)
♻ ☆ Einstein World Models
Does intelligence require the ability to reason about phenomena beyond direct experience? It is natural to suspect that some complex thought cannot be captured through language alone. However, of particular concern to this work, is whether visualising counterfactual events can complement language as a mechanism for complex thought. We ask whether LLMs can be trained to utilise such visualisation mechanisms, in a way that benefits their reasoning abilities. Motivated by this question, we propose Einstein World Models. EWMs are a blueprint for LLM-based reasoning systems that place visual-temporal rollouts inside the reasoning trace, allowing them to reason in ways that text alone may not support well. In an EWM, the LLM calls a world-module (not to be confused with a world model), to produce short rollouts of scenes under consideration. The returned rollout is treated not as the answer, but as an inspectable hypothesis that can support later reasoning. Einstein World Models extend the capability of LLMs for tool calling (such as web search or code execution), into the domain of visual thought experiments.
comment: 12 pages (9 without references), 2 figures, 1 algorithm