Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 173
☆ SceneBloom: Agentic Indoor Environment Generation with Realistic and Diverse Layouts for Embodied Learning
Training generalizable embodied agents requires realistic, varied, and simulation-ready indoor environments. Language-guided methods support semantic planning and object-level reasoning, but precise spatial grounding remains difficult. Visual generative models offer rich priors over plausible arrangements, yet their outputs require geometric reasoning to become physically valid 3D scenes. We introduce SceneBloom, an agentic framework that combines visual layout sampling with contract-guided 3D compilation. A hierarchical sampler uses diffusion priors to generate furniture arrangements within functional zones. A compiler then uses relations extracted from each proposal to guide geometric fitting and local pose correction. Across five room types, SceneBloom attains the highest visual quality and physical stability among the compared methods and is the only method with no detected mesh collisions and out-of-bounds objects. Its layouts are also closer to the distribution of real rooms than those of all compared baselines. Object navigation policies trained in these realistic scenes achieve a higher success rate in held-out real scans than those trained on an equal number of real training scans. Code is available at https://github.com/Tinaliu0123/scenebloom.
☆ UniAction: Unified Action Conditioning for World Models
Actions that condition world models are highly heterogeneous, and thus existing action-conditioned world models are typically built for individual action types, fragmenting already limited action-annotated data across separate models. We introduce UniAction, a unified action-conditioning framework that represents any action as a sparse set of action elements, each with a discrete semantic identity and a continuous spatiotemporal grounding coordinate. By mapping these coordinates directly into the pretrained video model's native positional space, UniAction allows heterogeneous actions to condition a shared world model within the same spatiotemporal structure. We further introduce cardinality-calibrated attention to address the bias from differing action representation granularities. We evaluate UniAction on four representative action forms: force, camera control, hand pose, and robot pose. UniAction outperforms conditioning alternatives in action following, and a single jointly trained model surpasses the action-specific experts, showing that heterogeneous action data benefit from unified model and joint training.
comment: Project page: https://uniaction.github.io/
☆ FlexGlue: Sparse-to-Dense Feature Matching and Visual Disambiguation
To estimate correspondences across images, existing approaches match either sparse interest points, which is highly efficient but limited by repeatability, or dense pixel grids, which is robust but expensive. Furthermore, these approaches are trained with only matching pairs and thus often fail to reject unrelated pairs that exhibit visual symmetries, which is equally important in applications like Structure-from-Motion (SfM). We bridge these gaps by introducing FlexGlue, a neural network for asymmetric sparse-to-dense matching and disambiguation. Given two images and coordinates of points in the first image, FlexGlue estimates the coordinates of the corresponding points in the second image while simultaneously rejecting the pair if non-matching. By searching for a limited set of correspondences among dense pixels, our approach is both fast and effective at both matching and disambiguation: it combines the sub-pixel accuracy of dense matching with the speed of sparse matching, while rejecting incorrect pairs with high precision. Experiments on multiple datasets show that FlexGlue pushes the Pareto frontier in relative pose estimation and significantly outperforms existing approaches for SfM and visual localization. FlexGlue is publicly available at https://github.com/cvg/flexglue .
☆ MiD-VLM: Detecting and Grounding Global Semantic Misinformation in Image-Caption Pairs
Semantic misinformation can arise when an authentic image is paired with a caption that changes or distorts its narrative. Because the image itself may contain no visible signs of manipulation, methods designed to detect pixel-level artifacts can miss these misleading image-caption pairs. We study this problem using DGM4+, a dataset designed to evaluate the detection of global scene and semantic inconsistencies. We propose a multimodal model that combines image-text representations from SigLIP with visual scene features from DINOv2 through a projection MLP, and adapts Qwen2-VL-7B using LoRA. The model jointly predicts whether an image-caption pair is authentic, identifies the manipulation type, and grounds the misleading caption tokens. On the DGM4+ validation split, the model achieves an F1 score of $0.9679$ for binary authenticity classification. These results suggest that parameter-efficient adaptation of vision-language models is promising for detecting semantic inconsistencies, while also motivating further work on precise token-level grounding.
☆ ViT-H: Generative Video-To-Humanoid Control with Motion Tracking Feedback
Zimo He, Tianyi Bian, Zizhong Yang, Hongjie Li, Nan Jiang, Jieming Cui, Baoxiong Jia, Yizhou Wang, Siyuan Huang, Yixin Zhu
Learning humanoid control from monocular human videos offers a scalable way to acquire diverse whole-body behaviors. Yet, existing reconstruction-retargeting-tracking pipelines are limited in system-level scalability by separately optimized intermediate stages and cannot directly optimize reference motion executability using downstream tracking feedback. We present ViT-H, a video-to-humanoid control framework following a generation-and-tracking paradigm. ViT-H directly generates humanoid reference motions from videos with a diffusion model, bypassing human motion reconstruction and retargeting, and uses motion-tracking outcomes to post-train the generator with direct preference optimization. We further introduce an autoregressive variant that enables real-time humanoid video teleoperation with sub-400 ms latency. Extensive experiments on the Unitree G1 demonstrate that ViT-H outperforms state-of-the-art reconstruction-retargeting-tracking pipelines in both motion quality and executability. We further show that ViT-H scales favorably with model size and with both pre-training and post-training data scale, while motion-tracking feedback consistently improves executability across different motion trackers.
comment: The first four authors contributed equally. Project website: https://awfuact.github.io/vit-h/
☆ Flownomaly: Single-Step Conditional-Mean Recovery for Few-Shot Anomaly Detection WACV 2027
Few-shot industrial anomaly detection requires modeling category-specific normality from only a handful of defect-free images. Common approaches tie inference to stored exemplars, impose rigid linear structure, or risk reproducing anomalous content. Flownomaly instead casts the problem as normal-counterpart recovery in frozen DINOv2 feature space. Given normal supports, a velocity field is learned through conditional flow matching over frozen patch tokens to transport Gaussian noise toward normal features. Along straight paths, a single recovery step using one evaluation of the optimal field yields the posterior mean of the clean normal token without trajectory integration. The operating time governs how strongly recovery modifies a query token. With no anomalous validation samples available for tuning, a normal-only Jacobian gain-to-noise criterion selects this time from the supports alone. Squared residuals between query tokens and their recovered counterparts yield anomaly signals for both dense localization and image-level detection. Across 1-, 2-, and 4-shot benchmarks on MVTec-AD and VisA, together with sample-shot evaluations on Real-IAD, Flownomaly achieves state-of-the-art performance against recent category-specific methods. In the 1-shot setting, image- and pixel-level AUROC reach 97.8% and 98.0% on MVTec-AD and 95.3% and 98.7% on VisA, with a 2.1-point image-level AUROC improvement over the strongest baseline on VisA. Code is available at https://github.com/b-rbmp/Flownomaly.
comment: Accepted to WACV 2027
☆ Beyond Discrete Tokens: Preserving Numerical Continuity in Medical Vision-Language Models
Objective: To develop a unified vision-language model for prompt-conditioned quantitative ultrasound measurement that addresses the mismatch between continuous measurement targets and discrete token-based numerical prediction. Methods: This article presents HAD-VLM, a hybrid autoregressive-diffusion framework that combines autoregressive text generation with continuous measurement prediction within a shared backbone. Visual prompt tuning adapts the vision encoder to ultrasound images. A diffusion process predicts a five-component representation comprising caliper endpoint coordinates and measurement length. A post-processing strategy combining the proposed coordinate-length consistency mechanism with ensemble prediction is introduced to refine measurement estimates. We evaluate four echocardiographic measurement tasks on EchoNet-LVH, with additional assessments of medical question answering and X-ray vertebral measurement. Results: HAD-VLM achieves mean absolute errors of 1.36, 2.77, 3.05, and 1.16 mm for IVSd, LVIDd, LVIDs, and LVPWd, respectively, reducing errors by 21.4-37.6\% relative to the Vicuna-based autoregressive baseline. It also outperforms fine-tuned Qwen3-VL and direct MLP regression across all four tasks. Medical question answering performance is preserved on the evaluated dataset. For X-ray vertebral measurement, HAD-VLM reduces mean absolute error from 11.4 to 6.7 pixels. Conclusion: Integrating autoregressive language generation with diffusion-based continuous prediction improves quantitative medical image measurement while retaining prompt-conditioned task flexibility. Significance: HAD-VLM provides a unified approach to combining language interaction with anatomically grounded numerical prediction for quantitative medical image analysis.
☆ STROKE: Simple Sparse Structural Occlusions for Black-Box Adversarial Attacks
We introduce STROKE, a query-efficient score-based black-box adversarial attack that constructs perturbations from simple oriented rectangular occlusions. STROKE optimizes these perturbations through a lightweight greedy add-and-refine procedure. Across diverse image classifiers, STROKE achieves high attack success with low query counts at nominal 1--2\% area settings, showing favorable performance relative to existing patch-based attacks in several configurations. Matched comparisons further demonstrate substantial reductions in wall-clock attack time, while ablation studies examine the key design choices and effectiveness across structural primitives. These findings suggest that simple structural occlusions offer an effective and computationally efficient search space for black-box adversarial attacks.
comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables, and 16 pages of Supplementary Information with 3 figures and 5 tables
☆ LoCA: Enabling Multi-Modality in Geospatial Location Encoders
Panagiotis Koromilas, Eleanna Vali, Diogenis Antonopoulos, Eleni Saka, Dimitris Christofis, Nikolaos Ioannis Bountos, Konstantin Klemmer, Ioannis Papoutsis, Yannis Panagakis, Mihalis A. Nicolaou
Location encoders map geographic coordinates to high-dimensional descriptors through contrastive alignment with paired Earth Observation imagery. We prove that this construction is structurally limited: any Lipschitz location encoder produces an output of intrinsic dimension at most 2, regardless of architecture or bandwidth, which forces the contrastive loss to strictly exceed its asymptotic optimum. Empirically, joint training also collapses the encoder's embedding covariance to low rank. Although dimension-limited, current location encoders sidestep this spectral collapse by training against a frozen image encoder, which we reinterpret as a covariance regularizer that supplies a high-rank target for the location encoder to fold onto. However, extending this approach to multimodal inputs is challenging, as location encoders should simultaneously map a single location to multiple, potentially incompatible, descriptors. We identify two requirements a regularizer must satisfy for location encoding in multimodal regimes: co-alignment across modalities, since adapters alone cannot align independently pretrained encoders; and high effective rank, since the location encoder inherits its target's spectrum. We propose LoCA (Location Contrastive Alignment), a two-stage pipeline that satisfies both. Stage 1 jointly trains Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 encoders with contrastive learning, producing a co-aligned, high-rank multimodal target. Stage 2 freezes the image encoders and trains a location and a tabular metadata encoder as projection adapters with multi-view contrastive learning. Against five state-of-the-art encoders on 17 tasks ranging from land cover and wildfire forecasting to geophysical, socio-economic, biodiversity and climate applications, LoCA achieves the most task wins, is the only model to outperform every other on a majority of tasks, and wins 68.8% of all per-task comparisons.
☆ Closing the Modality Gap via Simplex-Constrained Representations
While multimodal contrastive models like CLIP and CLAP successfully learn shared representations, their embeddings typically exhibit a persistent \emph{modality gap}. We propose addressing this separation through a purely geometric approach: changing the embedding domain from the unit sphere, $S^{d-1}$, to the probability simplex, $Δ^{d-1}$. Although both manifolds share the same intrinsic dimension, the simplex acts as a structural prior; its nonnegative, unit-mass constraints serve as a cross-modal calibration that forces both modalities to ground themselves in the same coordinate system. By attaching lightweight softmax adapters and using Total Variation similarity, we reduce the centroid $\ell_2$ gap by 97--99\% across five multimodal retrieval benchmarks. This confirms that simplicial geometry induces genuine semantic alignment, matching or exceeding the retrieval performance of standard unconstrained models.
☆ VTRL-Med: Progressive Visual Refinement with Topology-Guided Regularization for Medical Image Clustering
Deep clustering offers a promising approach for analyzing large unlabeled medical image datasets, yet prevailing methods still face two limitations: they may neglect class-agnostic structural priors that capture object boundaries and regions, and they do not explicitly encode topological patterns (e.g., connectivity and holes). These sources of information play distinct and complementary roles: visual-structural features provide the primary discriminative representation for clustering, while topological features provide additional global geometric cues for residual visual ambiguities. We introduce VTRL-Med, a progressive visual-structural learning framework with topology-guided regularization for medical image clustering. VTRL-Med first adapts the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to extract image features that retain structural cues inherited from mask-supervised pretraining. It then generates reliable pseudo-labels through a two-step filtering process that combines prototype-based selection with k-nearest neighbor consistency validation. Finally, it progressively refines the visual branch while an auxiliary topology branch, constructed from persistent homology (PH) descriptors, provides additional geometric regularization during training. Across 13 medical image benchmarks, VTRL-Med achieves state-of-the-art clustering performance, improving average accuracy by 4.48% over existing methods. On three representative datasets, topology-guided regularization further improves accuracy by 1.3--4.3% over visual refinement alone.
☆ Multimodal Generative AI Assists Comprehensive Echocardiographic Interpretation
Yi Qin, Marawan Elbatel, Shanshan Song, Taoran Huang, Jiarong Guo, Ningshu Li, Lehan Wang, Chenxu Zhao, Jiexin He, Machteld J. Boonstra, Stephan van der Zwaard, Marielle C. van de Veerdonk, Pere Lopez-Gutierrez, Lydia Dux-Santoy, Andrea Guala, Enrique Almar-Munoz, Sebastian Johannes Reinstadler, Radek Debiec, Yi-Hang Zhu, Huiyu Zhou, Adrian P Cheong, Yike Guo, Agnes Mayr, Karim Lekadir, Yong Jiang, Nilesh J. Samani, Dacheng Tao, Folkert W. Asselbergs, Hongwen Fei, Alex PW Lee, Xiaomeng Li
Echocardiography is the cornerstone of cardiovascular diagnostics, yet its global utility is constrained by a critical shortage of experienced interpreters. Current artificial intelligence (AI) solutions remain limited, typically operating as opaque "black boxes" or focusing on narrow tasks that fail to capture the holistic, guideline-driven reasoning of a clinician. Here we introduce EchoChat, a generative multimodal vision-language model that performs comprehensive echocardiographic analysis to support clinician interpretation. By emulating the cognitive workflow of a cardiologist, EchoChat integrates vast medical knowledge with a chain-of-thought reasoning mechanism to explicitly ground its conclusions in visual evidence. Trained on echocardiography-instruction pairs from 46,358 examinations, our model establishes a new state-of-the-art across diverse cohorts from six international medical centers. It supports the broadest diagnostic scope of 33 cardiac conditions and findings, including 15 newly added conditions for which it achieves an average F1 of 73.7% across available external evaluations. It surpasses existing best-performing foundation models in cardiac condition recognition (improving average recall by 13.54% on shared tasks) and quantification (average R2 score increase of 0.275 on shared tasks). Furthermore, in a source-blinded echocardiographer reader study, echocardiography reports co-generated with EchoChat were rated higher in diagnostic accuracy and completeness by two senior echocardiographers, and improved diagnostic performance from 72.78% to 82.75% in terms of F1 score over routine-reader only reports. These results demonstrate that integrating clinical reasoning into multimodal AI can democratize specialist expertise and transform the standard of cardiovascular care.
☆ OpenStripe supports open-set identification and spatial stripe profiling in wild Amur tigers
Yichun Peng, Yansong Li, Jin Hou, Qi Song, Xi Guo, Ning Zhang, Degang Wei, Huang Yang, Yu Guan, Jianping Ge, Lei Bao, Tianming Wang
Non-invasive camera-trap monitoring of endangered wildlife requires open-set individual identification---grouping field images into identities without predefined classes or a known population size---yet pose deformation and cluttered backgrounds complicate image comparison. Here, we present OpenStripe, a multi-agent framework that reconstructs canonical two-dimensional (2D) tiger torso patterns and encodes four interpretable local stripe structures: breakpoints, bifurcations, irregular structures, and round structures. We evaluated OpenStripe on 100 camera-trap records from 28 wild Amur tigers (Panthera tigris altaica), representing nearly one-third of the documented population in the Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park. Combining all four complementary structures enabled automatic identity grouping with 0.90 matched accuracy and a 0.85 adjusted Rand index (ARI), outperforming 49 baseline configurations under the same backend (up to 0.43 accuracy and 0.14 ARI). In addition, results from OpenStripe indicate that stripe similarity in Amur tigers declines with geographic distance and suggest that traits such as fractal dimension and inter-stripe spacing are associated with geographic proximity. OpenStripe thus provides an interpretable representation that connects automated individual grouping with spatial phenotypic profiling in wild populations.
comment: 14 pages, 4 figures. Code and nonspatial data: https://github.com/Yichun-Peng/OpenStripe
☆ SPOOK: Sparse Pixel Optimization for Off-Manifold Knowledge in Vision Encoders
Modern vision encoders are widely used as semantic representations, but the relationship between embedding similarity and human-visible semantics can become unclear far from the natural-image manifold. We probe this regime in a black-box setting by applying sparse pixel edits to blank canvases with a simple pixel-level hill-climbing procedure. Across ImageNet and Flickr30k, we evaluate whether these edited blank canvases can retrieve chosen targets in multimodal contrastive encoders and self-supervised visual encoders. On OpenCLIP, inputs optimized toward class prompts achieve strong top-1 and top-5 targeted retrieval performance; on DINOv3, inputs optimized toward class prototypes achieve high target alignment and near-top prototype ranks. These results show that sparse edits on otherwise blank, visually non-semantic inputs can enter target semantic basins in both language-aligned and self-supervised visual representation spaces. Our findings identify a shared off-manifold failure mode of modern vision encoders and suggest sparse blank-canvas optimization as a simple probe of representation geometry.
comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, and 14 pages of Supplementary Material with 8 figures
☆ Sounding Surgical Instrument Localisation through Audio-Visual Correspondence
Surgical scene understanding is a prerequisite for context-aware and intelligent systems in the operating room. Current methods rely mostly on visual data, while acoustic sensing has shown potential to provide complementary information on surgical activity. First approaches for the localisation of surgical activity relied on microphone arrays and acoustic beamforming. This work investigates whether the active instrument can be localized from a single microphone and a camera by learning the correspondence between the appearance and the sound of surgical instruments, without annotating its position. We adapt weakly supervised audio-visual localisation, which learns from the co-occurrence of image and sound, to the surgical setting. We record simulated surgical actions, sawing, drilling, and chiseling, and train the model on these recordings without any spatial annotation to produce a heatmap over the sounding tool. We extend the training objective by two terms: a silence term, which suppresses the output for silence and background noise, and a composite term, which trains the model to select the sounding one of two visible instruments. The model localizes the active instrument on an independent corpus recorded with a different camera and microphone, in which instrument positions were obtained by optical tracking. It separates tool activity from silence and background noise and can attribute sound correctly when two tools are present. Audio-visual correspondence learned from in-domain recordings connects the sound of a surgical action to the instrument that produces it, using a single microphone and a camera. This proof of concept introduces a novel paradigm that enables the detection and localisation of surgical activity without manual annotations.
☆ CompMVR: Compression-Aware Multi-View Restoration Using Diffusion Models for Geometrically Consistent 3D Reconstruction SIGGRAPH
Dong-hwi Kim, Chaewon Moon, Hojun Song, Dongbeom Kim, Junyeong Jang, Aro Kim, Gahyeon Kim, Heejung Choi, Jehee Kim, Gianella Cravioto, Sohyun Lee, Gyeongjin Choi, EunHye Jeong, Soo Ye Kim, Jaehyup Lee, Sang-hyo Park
Real-world 3D reconstruction pipelines often rely on multi-view images degraded by lossy compression. While compression artifacts have been extensively studied in single-image or video restoration, their impact on multi-view geometry remains largely overlooked. In this work, we identify compression-induced cross-view geometric inconsistency as a critical failure mode, where view-dependent artifacts disrupt feature matching, dense correspondence, camera parameter estimation, and downstream 3D reconstruction tasks such as novel view synthesis. To address this problem, we propose CompMVR, a compression-aware multi-view diffusion restoration framework that jointly refines compressed views while preserving cross-view consistency, and construct compressed datasets for systematic evaluation. Unlike conventional restoration methods that optimize each image independently for 2D perceptual quality, CompMVR leverages learned compression priors and cross-view correspondence to recover visual details while improving geometric reliability across views. Experiments across diverse datasets, codecs, and compression levels demonstrate gains in restoration quality and downstream 3D tasks, including novel-view synthesis, camera pose estimation, and view matching. These results establish compressed multi-view restoration as a distinct problem and highlight its importance for 3D reconstruction under lossy compression. Code and data for this paper are available at https://mchaewon.github.io/CompMVR-project-page/.
comment: Accepted to SIGGRAPH Asia 2026 (Technical paper)
☆ Consommé: Conditioned Token Merging for Split Inference
Split inference partitions a Vision Transformer between a resource-constrained edge device and a server. However, transmitting intermediate tokens across the communication channel is costly. Deploying fine-tuned backbones to every endpoint becomes expensive as well. We study token reduction for split inference under a frozen backbone, where only a small adapter is shipped. We observe that the CLS token plays a dual role: it acts as the global summary the receiver needs for classification, and it serves as a signal on which patches to keep. We propose Consommé, a method utilizing both characteristics. There, an information bottleneck compresses the CLS token into a compact latent which is transmitted in place of the full CLS token and conditions a learned patch gate merging patches into exactly $k$ tokens via soft assignment. It reaches any budget in a single step, thus escaping the per-layer cap of bipartite matching (BPM). On DeiT-S/T, it leads all methods at aggressive token budgets and remains operable at shallow splits where BPM cannot operate, while matching fine-tuned methods at gentle budgets at a fraction of their deployment cost.
☆ SREdit: Scene Response Guided Appearance Editing for Projection Mapping
Projection-based appearance editing changes selected visual attributes of a physical object through projection mapping (PM). To display a desired appearance, PM typically uses projector compensation, which computes a projector input that counteracts the geometric and photometric distortions of the scene. Compensation can only approximate this appearance within the available projection range, and it cannot revise the appearance itself. Pretrained LLM-based image editors provide a direct way to produce the desired appearance from a text prompt or reference image; projector compensation can then attempt to reproduce the edited result through projection. However, these editors do not have an accurate measure of the scene geometry or scene response. Therefore, their outputs may contain geometric misalignment, inconsistent shading, or changes outside the available projection range, which downstream projector compensation cannot correct. To address this problem, we introduce SREdit, an efficient response-guided framework for projection-based appearance editing. SREdit estimates a scene response map from the reconstructed scene that reflects how strongly projected illumination can affect different surface regions. SREdit uses the source appearance to constrain the early sampling process and preserve registration with the fixed physical object, while the scene response map adapts the amount of editing across surface regions. Experiments across two pretrained image editors show that SREdit improves projected appearance quality and reproduction fidelity. It adds less than one second per image with negligible VRAM overhead. Participants also consistently preferred the results produced with SREdit in our user study.
comment: 28 pages, 65 figures
☆ Video-MemComp: Taylor-Guided Sensitivity-Aware Memory Management for Streaming Video Understanding ACM MM 2026
Yonghui Niu, Yuhao Ji, Chang Nie, Jiao Zhang, Yilong Li, Junlan Feng, Ran He, Caifeng Shan, Chaoyou Fu
The rapid growth of video data has created an urgent need for efficient video understanding systems that can handle long and continuous visual inputs, posing significant challenges for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) due to severe memory bottlenecks. Moreover, existing compression methods often overlook the explosive accumulation of approximation errors. To address this issue, we propose Video-MemComp, a training-free and sensitivity-aware context management framework for memory-constrained streaming video understanding. Our method theoretically decomposes compression error into orthogonal local approximation error and layer-wise structural sensitivity via a first-order Taylor expansion. To minimize local approximation error, we perform token aggregation in a pre-RoPE safe zone with an attention-conserving logit bias, mitigating geometric distortions caused by RoPE rotations. To manage layer-wise structural sensitivity, we dynamically allocate the KV cache budget based on offline gradient priors and online context entropy, prioritizing high-sensitivity layers. Video-MemComp outperforms or achieves performance comparable to full-cache and state-of-the-art compression methods on benchmarks including MLVU, VideoMME, and EgoSchema. Notably, it improves the overall accuracy of Qwen2.5-VL-3B from 62.3% to 64.1% while reducing the KV cache to an equivalent of 6,000 tokens per layer, saving over 90% of KV memory.
comment: Accepted by ACM MM 2026. Project Page: https://hhnk666.github.io/Video-MemComp.github.io
☆ SCDM-HTD: Spectral-Wise Conditional Diffusion Model for Hyperspectral Target Detection
Hyperspectral target detection (HTD) aims to locate and recognize objects at a fine-grained scale, playing a pivotal role in remote sensing. Despite significant progress, current HTD methods primarily focus on feature comparison while neglecting distribution learning for background-target separation, which can limit detection robustness in practical applications. This paper addresses this issue by introducing a spectral-wise conditional diffusion model that reformulates HTD as a task of generating a detection map. Specifically, we treat background and target confidence scores as training samples and use the corresponding pixel spectra as guiding conditions to capture the distributional discrepancy between background and target through diffusion and denoising. To enhance practical applicability, we propose a lightweight conditional denoising network based on multilayer perceptron to map noisy confidence scores to their ideal counterparts and adopt a deterministic reverse non-Markov chain to skip sampling steps, thereby accelerating the generation process. Furthermore, we introduce a composite loss to improve background-target separation. This loss integrates constrained energy minimization loss to enhance target saliency and suppress the background by maximizing the target response while minimizing average output energy, alongside binary cross-entropy loss to classify background and target using pixel-wise labels. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, with improvements in both quantitative metrics and qualitative visual effects.
☆ ARENA: Active Region attENtion Aggregation for interpretable solar flare prediction NeurIPS 2026
Luis Bauer, Annalena Kofler, Andrés Asensio Ramos, Aparna Venkataramanasastry, Valentín Martínez Pillet, Bernhard Schölkopf
Predicting solar flares is a challenging space-weather forecasting problem with potentially significant impacts on Earth's upper atmosphere, including disruptions to radio communications. We propose Active Region attENtion Aggregation (ARENA), a neural network architecture that predicts solar flares from a variable number of active-region cutouts while learning to identify the region most relevant to the prediction. ARENA is trained using multiple-instance learning under weak supervision, requiring only a flare/no-flare label for the observation and no labels specifying the flare origin. The learned attention mechanism therefore provides a means of localizing the active region driving the prediction without explicit origin annotations. ARENA achieves a heidke skill score of 0.45 which is comparable to other flare prediction approaches. These results demonstrate that active-region-based aggregation can provide an efficient and interpretable approach to solar flare prediction. The code is available at https://github.com/LuisBauer22/ARENA.
comment: 7+12 pages (2+8 figures), accepted at the "Representations for the Physical Sciences" workshop at NeurIPS 2026
☆ Cross-Architectural Feature Fusion for Coronary Artery Stenosis Detection in X-ray Angiography
Coronary artery disease remains a leading cause of mortality, with stenosis detection from invasive X-ray Coronary Angiography (XCA) critical for diagnosis. Manual interpretation is time-consuming, subjective, and variable, especially under low contrast and vessel overlap. Existing deep learning methods often rely solely on detection or segmentation, limiting performance.We propose a hybrid framework, Fusion-YOLOv11-L, combining a YOLOv11-L detector with a pretrained UNet++ via a channel attention gating module. This enables fusion of semantic and vessel-aware structural features, improving localisation of stenotic regions. The UNet++ is pretrained on ARCADE vessel segmentation dataset to provide anatomically informed representations. Experiments on the relabeled ARCADE (ARCADE*) dataset show improved performance over YOLOv11-L, achieving AP@50 of 0.585 and F1-score of 0.596. Cross-domain evaluation on a dataset from the Oxford Acute Myocardial Infarction (OxAMI) Study reveals performance degradation due to domain shift, mitigated using test-time adaptation and augmentation. Test-time augmentation improves AP@50 from 0.434 to 0.480, indicating better generalisability. These results show that cross-architecture feature fusion and lightweight adaptation improve robustness and generalisability of automated stenosis detection in XCA.
comment: 12 pages, 3 figures
☆ CityLift: Compositional 3D Urban Generation from a Single Image
Generating editable 3D urban scenes from a single image requires detailed building assets with a coherent spatial arrangement. Occlusion and perspective ambiguity make it difficult to infer complete building geometry together with consistent relative scales and positions. We present CityLift, a framework that generates individual textured building meshes from an urban image by coupling scene-level spatial modeling with building-level synthesis. CityLift first learns building shape and placement jointly through coupled scene and instance streams, producing coarse sparse structures in a common coordinate system. We then introduce generative spatial inheritance, which maps each building's coarse occupancy and scene-conditioned 3D feature field into a local volume to guide a flow model that generates finer structure. The same coordinate mapping places the generated meshes back into the scene, preserving their spatial relationship to the scaffold. To address the scarcity of urban data pairing scene images with individual 3D buildings, we construct CityLift-5K, comprising 4,997 synthetic scenes with instance masks, building meshes, and placement annotations. Experiments on CityLift-5K and scene blocks from UrbanScene3D and InstanceBuilding demonstrate improved building geometry and scene composition. The project page is available at https://ranhaogong.github.io/CityLift/.
☆ Are Textual Residuals Truly Complementary? Learning Visual Complements under Semantic Superposition for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification
Text-enhanced visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) exploits textual descriptions to compensate for appearance cues that are weak or unavailable under infrared imaging. Existing methods construct compensation from differences between modality-oriented textual representations, implicitly assuming that textual differences are visually complementary. We revisit this assumption through semantic superposition and show that dense textual residuals may entangle useful appearance variations with redundant, making direct residual fusion unreliable. We propose Superposition-Aware Residual Calibration, which transforms dense textual differences into selective and visually grounded complements. Low-Interference Sparse Residual Learning represents modality-oriented text embeddings as sparse activation strengths over a shared dictionary, selects positive strength differences, and suppresses both dictionary-level overlap and activation-weighted interference to reconstruct a compact, selectively controlled residual. Visual Complement and Counterfactual Calibration further calibrates the residual against identity-specific RGB-IR visual discrepancies, encouraging retained semantics to provide meaningful compensation while preserving the residual structure. Experiments on Tri-SYSU-MM01, Tri-RegDB, and Tri-LLCM show that SARC consistently improves the VI-ReID backbone and remains competitive with text-assisted methods. Mechanism analyses show that SARC produces more concentrated textual variations, reduces dictionary-level feature interference, and improves residual-visual-complement alignment for most samples. These results demonstrate that effective cross-modal compensation requires textual residuals to be selectively represented and explicitly calibrated, rather than directly treated as visual complements. Code and implementation details will be released upon publication.
comment: 24 pages, 4 figures
☆ SP-Guide: Enhancing Aerial Vision-Language Navigation with Spatial Priors
Aerial vision-language navigation (AVLN) requires a UAV to reach a language-described target from partial egocentric observations while reasoning over large outdoor scenes. Existing approaches typically fuse view-centered RGB observations and globally anchored history maps as generic visual embeddings, leaving cross-modal spatial alignment to be learned from sparse navigation supervision. We present SP-Guide, a transformer- based goal-prediction framework that addresses this weakness of alignment through a Spatial Prior Cross-Modal Encoder, an Instruction Enhanced Decoder, and a Goal Convergence Filter for terminal target refinement. Experiments implemented on the CityNav benchmark show that SP-Guide improves success rate over the representative baselines, with the largest gains on unseen environments. These results indicate that physically grounded spatial priors provide an effective inductive bias for robust AVLN.
☆ Robust Offset-Free Lane-Keeping Control Framework for Vision-Only Automated Vehicles
Achieving accurate, real-time lane-keeping control during high-speed cornering on large-curvature roads while ensuring robust vehicle stability is a critical challenge in autonomous driving. To address this challenge, this study developed a robust offset-free model predictive control (OF-MPC) framework for vision-based autonomous vehicle lane-keeping. The regulation problem in this framework is solved using several algorithms. Numerical simulation results indicated that the interpolation-tube-based constrained iterative linear quadratic regulator (itube-CILQR) algorithm outperformed solvers based on the standard Interior Point Optimizer (IPOPT) and Operator Splitting Quadratic Program (OSQP), achieving a mean computation time of less than 5 ms. The itube-CILQR algorithm was then used for vehicle control in vision-based lane-keeping experiments in a simulation environment to quantify the perceptual uncertainty of a visual perception model (multitask UNet). This quantification was performed using the OF-MPC framework for traffic scenes that were not encountered during model training. Overall, the developed OF-MPC framework and the proposed method for characterizing the perceptual uncertainty of a visual perception system in unseen environments can contribute to the future development of advanced autonomous driving systems.
comment: 13 pages, 10 figures
☆ The Answer Knows Where to Look: Zooming before MLLMs Answer under Visual-Token Budgets
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) read images through visual tokens, and under the small per-image budgets that efficient deployment requires, the fine text of documents, charts and infographics becomes illegible. Zooming in recovers the evidence, but the region must be chosen before the model answers. We find that MLLMs know where the evidence is, but not in a form that can be read before they answer: the answer tokens localize it from the middle layers on, whereas the attention available before answering does so only in the top layers, at a depth that varies across models, and diffusely. Supervising the pre-answer attention to point degrades reading, and the benefit of zooming is governed by each image's information gap. Building on these findings, we introduce ours, which lets an MLLM look where its answer would. A dedicated look token, processed in a single prefill and kept out of the answering pass, learns in hindsight to attend as the model's own correct answers do, extracting this knowledge into a concentrated pointer before any answer exists. Its hidden state then selects how to look, from no zoom to crops, square windows, windows that adapt to the pointer and foveated warps, supervised by the counterfactual outcome of every view. ours needs no box annotations, per-model layer search, external localizers or generation before the answer. On Qwen3-VL at three scales and five text-rich benchmarks, it surpasses the strongest baseline by 4.8-9.1 points at 98 visual tokens per view and attention-guided zooming by 11.1-17.0 points, while running faster than attention-guided and grounding-based zooming.
☆ SemGeo-Gen: Unsupervised Generation of Approximate Cross-Instance Semantic-Geometric Correspondences NeurIPS 2026
We introduce SemGeo-Gen, an unsupervised method for generating approximate cross-instance semantic-geometric supervision from weakly aligned 3D object collections. Our goal is not to recover exact point-level correspondences, which are often ambiguous across different instances and would require expensive, impractical manual supervision at scale. Instead, we automatically produce approximate correspondences that are semantically meaningful, geometrically consistent, and diverse enough to train modern correspondence models. Given only coarse category-level rotation alignment, SemGeo-Gen lifts multi-view DINOv2 features to 3D, aligns object instances using continuous piecewise-affine registration, and prunes candidate matches using semantic consistency. The resulting 3D correspondences can be projected into rendered views, yielding scalable 3D-3D, 3D-2D, and 2D-2D supervision without manual annotation. We validate the generated correspondences against sparse human annotations from KeypointNet, obtaining 93% PCK@0.10 and 97% PCK@0.15. More importantly, we show that using the generated correspondences for synthetic pretraining improves recent state-of-the-art semantic correspondence models on SPair-71k after fine-tuning on real data, with gains of up to 5 PCK@0.10 points. Together, these results indicate that approximate semantic-geometric supervision generated from 3D assets can improve real-image correspondence learning and serve as a scalable alternative to costly manual annotation. Project page: https://bgu-cs-vil.github.io/SemGeo-Gen/.
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2026
☆ Computational imaging through turbid, bubbly and flowing water near the telescope
Alexander Ingold, Sabina D. Menon, Aadhi Umamageswaran, Alec Ikei, May H. Hlaing, Syed N. Qadri, Rajesh Menon
Cameras in the surf zone or behind ship wakes look through turbid, bubbly, moving water close to the lens, yet restoration networks are usually scored only on displayed images. We introduce a measured dataset of a telescope viewing displayed images and physical objects through a 25~mm water layer 45~mm in front of its objective, under seven combinations of flow, bubbles and turbidity, with clear-water recordings as a second reference. Because the suspension scatters light far outside the 1.3\textdegree{} field of view, turbidity mainly removes contrast, 4.4- to 4.8-fold on a Siemens star. Restoring the mean of eight frames improves structural similarity (SSIM) by 0.032 over a single frame, and learned fusion of the frames adds little. One raw frame supports five-category recognition (96.8\%) as well as restored images. Adding synthetic training pairs leaves display-image scores unchanged but raises the correlation of a restored Siemens star with its clear-water recording from below 0.5 to above 0.9. These networks also improve ordinary underwater photographs without retraining, where training on measured pairs alone fails. Scoring against the digital source or a clear-water recording reverses the ranking of raw and restored images. These results support a simple pipeline: average the frames, classify raw frames directly, and restore with networks trained on measured and synthetic pairs.
☆ EditJev: System One Routing for Image Editing Models
Instruction-based image editing models exhibit pronounced sample-specific performance variation: different models can produce substantially different results for the same source image and editing instruction, and the best-performing model often varies across requests. These models also differ substantially in inference latency, making fixed-model deployment inefficient. We therefore study image editing model routing, which dynamically selects an editor from a candidate pool given an input image and editing instruction. We introduce EditJev, a System One routing model that directly predicts sample-level preference scores over candidate image editing models in a single forward pass. A lightweight preference head on a vision-language backbone produces a fixed-dimensional score vector without autoregressive model-name generation or response parsing. To train EditJev, we construct pairwise preferences from offline candidate outputs and optimize a pairwise ranking objective to learn relative model suitability. At inference time, EditJev combines the predicted preference scores with model-level speed scores to balance editing quality and generation latency. Experiments on ImgEdit and GEdit-En show that EditJev improves aggregate quality over the strongest fixed editor, from 4.540 to 4.592 and from 8.194 to 8.255, respectively, while reducing estimated end-to-end latency by 60.8% and 31.7%. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of direct, structured model routing for efficient image editing.
comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, 7 tables
☆ Earth embeddings are decomposable records of the land surface
Ecological monitoring, carbon accounting and biodiversity assessment increasingly rely on annual Earth embeddings--learned vectors that compress a year of satellite observation for every ten-meter pixel on Earth, consumed in place of the imagery itself. What these vectors mean has not been established. Here we decompose two widely used embedding products and show that they contain individual ecological features, including fire, forest clearing and crop type, validated against independent reference data on events across six continents. The recovered concepts date abrupt canopy loss to the first post-disturbance growing season and resolve severity well enough to separate prescribed fire from wildfire. Small fires that recover quickly are detectable in one product but not the other, which instead separates crops more strongly.
☆ DriveOSS: Dataset and Benchmark for 3D Anomaly Segmentation and Open-set Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving WACV 2027
Zhiran Yan, Savankumar Bhanderi, Sourabh Lolge, Rui Song, Girdharbhai Paneliya, Shiva Agrawal, Gordon Elger
Recent advances in 3D semantic segmentation have significantly improved scene understanding in autonomous driving. However, existing methods are typically developed under a closed-set assumption and evaluated under standard driving conditions, where all categories are known in advance. In real-world driving, autonomous vehicles inevitably encounter previously unseen objects, making closed-set perception insufficient for safe deployment. To address this challenge, we introduce DriveOSS, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first real-world multimodal dataset and benchmark specifically designed for 3D anomaly segmentation and open-set semantic segmentation. It contains 12,661 synchronized and annotated frames captured using six surround-view RGB cameras, a 128-beam LiDAR, and a GPS/IMU unit. The dataset comprises 52 real-world driving scenes collected under clear, nighttime, cloudy, rainy, and snowy conditions and is organized into ID (in-distribution) and OOD (out-of-distribution) subsets. The ID scenes contain only known classes and are used for training, whereas the OOD scenes additionally contain unknown objects annotated as the outlier class and are used for validation and testing. Extensive experiments show that unseen objects remain a major challenge for current 3D perception systems. The dataset, benchmark protocols, and code are available at https://github.com/chrisyan/DriveOSS.
comment: Accepted to WACV 2027
☆ Hair Segmentation and Skin Characterization on Macroscopic Dermatological Images for Laser Treatment Parameterization
Alex Navarro Navarro, Marc Arriaga Hidalgo, Carlos Moreno Rubio, Maxime Talarmain, Noelia Vaquero Gallardo
Current light-based devices, such as laser hair removal, intense pulsed light (IPL), vascular laser therapy, and dermatologic phototherapy, are widely used in clinical dermatology but rely heavily on subjective manual parameterization or uncalibrated point-based colorimeters. To overcome these limitations, this work presents a unified system for hair segmentation and skin characterization in macroscopic dermatological images. Unlike most existing literature that relies on dermoscopic datasets captured under highly controlled conditions, our approach is specifically designed for macroscopic images that replicate real clinical laser treatments. The proposed pipeline integrates a custom-trained variant of the YOLOv9 deep learning architecture for instance segmentation and classical image processing within a single workflow to extract objective skin and hair parameters such as phototype, hair density, color, and thickness. A color calibration stage using spectrophotometric measurements ensures accurate feature estimation regardless of illumination conditions. Experimental results show competitive segmentation metrics (mAP@50 $\approx$ 0.80) on a custom dataset featuring short, shaved hairs, typical of pre-treatment scenarios. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed pipeline in providing the objective, foundational skin and hair features required for future automated laser parameterization, paving the way for its extension to broader light-based medical therapies.
comment: Published open access in Journal of Imaging Informatics in Medicine (2026)
☆ Standing on Open Shoulders: Regional Fine-Tuning of Open-Weight Camera-Trap Models for UK Wildlife with Modest Data and Compute
Camera-trap species classification is dominated by large models from well-resourced organisations, which often lack the species-level distinctions regional conservation needs, such as native red versus invasive grey squirrels in the UK. We ask whether open weights let a small team with a modest dataset and a single GPU take a real part in AI development. We fine-tuned the open DeepFaune classifier on 28 UK classes, paired it with the unmodified MegaDetector v6, and compared the resulting DeepFaune-UK v1.2 with DeepFaune v1.5.0 and SpeciesNet on 20,212 hand-verified MammalWeb citizen-science images, after removing sequences sharing any of 1,039 images with our training archive. DeepFaune-UK achieved a strict image-level accuracy of 88.8%, including empty frames, against 56.5% and 59.0% for the baselines, but at DeepFaune's coarser label resolution DeepFaune v1.5.0 was more accurate, though not significantly under contributor resampling (91.4% vs. 88.8%). As DeepFaune v1.5.0 uses a newer DINOv3-based classifier, we applied the identical recipe, without new data, to that classifier. The resulting DeepFaune-UK v1.3 reached 90.6% strict accuracy, narrowed the like-for-like gap to 0.8 points and reduced roe deer misclassified as fallow deer by 69%. On 1,850 images from the 26 contributors with no overlapping images, the three DeepFaune-based models did not differ significantly (90.5%, 90.6%, 89.9% like-for-like). Fine-tuning on 10% of the training crops (about 150 per class) gave out-of-distribution accuracy similar to using all of them, and a DINOv2 run on this subset took about 22 minutes with under 4 GB of GPU memory. Open weights thus make regional model development feasible for small teams, but the largest like-for-like gain came from a newer base model trained by others, so this democratisation depends on large actors continuing to release open weights, under licences that may change.
comment: 39 pages, 9 Figures, and 8 Tables
☆ Reuse, Don't Retrain: Efficient, Modality-Versatile Geospatial Foundation Models through Feature Distillation
Geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs) are costly to pretrain, yet model families often repeat this process across backbone scales and sensing modalities. We investigate feature distillation as a more efficient way to reuse existing representations. First, we distill frozen CROMA and TerraMind teachers into smaller Vision Transformers through patch-level feature matching. Across nine PANGAEA tasks, distilled TerraMind Tiny, Small, and Base outperform their scale-matched released counterparts by 2.76, 3.02, and 1.87 mean IoU points, respectively; each also matches or exceeds the next-larger released model. Distilled CROMA-Base gains 2.05 points. TerraMind-Base required only 43 A6000 GPU-hours, approximately 0.5\% of the reported cost of independent pretraining. Second, we introduce TEDI, an unpaired multi-expert approach combining TerraMind for multispectral imagery and DINOv3 for high-resolution RGB. Separate patch embeddings route unpaired inputs into a shared Transformer trunk, removing the need for co-registered data. TEDI-Large achieves the highest single-model mean in our PANGAEA-9 comparison (62.51 mIoU), outperforming both teachers overall while retaining their modality-specific strengths. TEDI-Base reaches 61.75 mIoU with 72\% fewer parameters. These results show that distillation improves the GeoFM accuracy-compute frontier while consolidating complementary experts into a single versatile backbone.
☆ Shared Is Not Enough: Predictor Width and Factor Readability Under Masked Latent Prediction
Masked latent prediction methods such as I-JEPA aim to learn predictable features, but what determines which information they retain is less clear. We built a simulator in which every factor behind an image is known, so a probe can measure how readable each factor remains after training. We trained small encoders (0.7M parameters) with I-JEPA, SimCLR and BYOL on the same pairs of views and probed a factor that both views share. I-JEPA had a predictor with half the encoder's width and depth, the proportions it uses for ViT-B. Its median score was about 40% of SimCLR's. Widening the predictor to the encoder's width reversed this ordering at every training seed, against both other methods. We release the simulator and the trained models.
☆ HEALPix-Based Implicit Neural Compression of Omnidirectional Images IEEE
Real-time decoding of omnidirectional images is essential for immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences. Compared with conventional transform-based learned image compression (LIC), overfitted codecs offer lower decoding complexity by representing each image with a lightweight implicit neural representation (INR). However, existing approaches typically operate on the equirectangular projection (ERP), which introduces nonuniform spherical sampling and spatial distortion, leading to redundant sampling near the poles and latitude-dependent receptive fields. To address these limitations, we propose a spherical overfitted codec based on a multi-scale Hierarchical Equal Area isoLatitude Pixelization (HEALPix) representation, which enables equal-area sampling and efficient hierarchical modeling of spherical signals. Building on this representation, we develop a Spherical Inter-Scale Conditional entropy model that exploits spatial dependencies and cross-scale correlations among HEALPix latents to improve coding efficiency. We further introduce a Multi-Ring Spherical Convolution that aggregates neighboring pixels over a nearly uniform spherical receptive field across latitudes. Experiments on a public omnidirectional image dataset demonstrate BD-rate reductions of 16.3%, 26.5%, and 19.5% over VVC in terms of V-PSNR, V-MS-SSIM, and V-LPIPS, respectively. Our method also achieves a 13.1% BD-rate reduction over ERP-based Cool-Chic 5.0 in terms of V-PSNR, while providing 2.6-3.6x faster decoding than the evaluated learned autoencoder codecs.
comment: [N] pages, 10 figures, 4 tables. Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
☆ VERA-Hand: A Verified Multidimensional Benchmark for 2D Hand Pose Estimation in Third-Person Dynamic Gesture Videos WACV 2027
Hand landmarks serve as input for gesture recognition, sign language understanding, and touchless human-computer interaction. Yet hand pose estimators are typically evaluated with frame-wise localization metrics such as PCK or MPJPE, which are computed over matched predictions and overlook missed or spurious hands, handedness errors, and temporal instability. To address these limitations, we present VERA-Hand, a benchmark that evaluates estimators using manually verified, frame-level 2D annotations for 10,690 hands across four complementary dimensions (detection, localization, identification, and temporal stability), as well as a joint Pose-F1 metric that requires both correct detection and accurate localization. Evaluating six estimators spanning hand-specific, whole-body, reconstruction-based, and foundation-model paradigms, we find that no estimator dominates: rankings reorder sharply across dimensions. VERA-Hand also exposes failures that localization-only and downstream evaluations may not reveal, including cross-hand overlap in over 85% of frames for a recent foundation model. A post-hoc cleanup case study demonstrates how the benchmark can validate corrective interventions, while stratified analyses show that robustness varies across motion-blur classes and hand regions. We release the verified annotations, protocol, and code at https://gibranbenitez.github.io/VERA_Hand/
comment: Accepted to WACV 2027
☆ Fast and Useful: Adapting Distilled Generators for Visual Learning
Distilled text-to-image models generate images quickly, but classifiers trained on those images can perform substantially worse than classifiers trained on images from their slower base models. We adapt released distilled generators to produce better training data while retaining fast generation. We fit a low-rank update to the student's first prediction so that it reaches an intermediate state produced by its unguided base, then disable the update and let the unchanged student finish generation. The base supplies training targets and is absent at inference. Guided targets and shorter jumps give classifiers lower accuracy in our ablations, showing why the state used for supervision matters. Across three generator families, the adapted images train better classifiers than images from the released students. With class-name templates at full ImageNet-1k scale, ResNet-50 top-1 rises from 8.4% to 34.2% for FLUX.2-klein and from 12.7% to 32.1% for SD-Turbo, using two and three denoiser evaluations per image, respectively. Fixed adapters also improve results on additional classes, fine-grained datasets, and other learner architectures and training recipes. Template-based adaptation remains useful against richer-prompt alternatives, while the benefit of combining adaptation with LLM generation prompts depends on the generator. Adapting a single generation step makes fast generators substantially more useful for training visual models.
☆ Augmentation Strategy for DINO in Glaucoma Classification MICCAI 2026
Self-supervised learning (SSL) offers a promising approach to medical image representation learning, yet augmentation strategies of SSL frameworks validated on natural images do not reliably transfer to specialized medical imaging domains. We analyze DINO, a knowledge-distillation based SSL framework, and empirically demonstrate that its default augmentation strategy produces unreliable representations for retinal fundus images, degrading downstream glaucoma classification performance. Guided by the principle that effective cropped views should share minimal redundant information while retaining clinically relevant signal, we redesign DINO's augmentation strategy. Our approach biases the learned representations toward diagnostically critical features rather than low-level image statistics. We evaluate our method for glaucoma classification by training a linear classifier on the frozen representations, achieving strong generalization across seven benchmark datasets. URL for code and weights: https://github.com/ashish-256/task_dino
comment: 11 pages, 3 figures. Accepted at the 17th International Workshop on Machine Learning in Medical Imaging (MLMI 2026), held in conjunction with MICCAI 2026
☆ Distortion-Aware Spatiotemporal Learning for Real-Time Wide-Angle Video Rectification
While wide-angle lenses provide an expanded field of view (FoV), they exhibit severe nonlinear distortion near image boundaries, unnaturally stretching people in these regions. Existing methods mostly focus on facial regions, require high computational costs, and lack temporal modeling, resulting in incomplete full-body rectification, impractical real-time deployment, and noticeable inter-frame shakes. To tackle these issues, we propose \textbf{FastVC}, an efficient full-body video rectification framework driven by distortion-aware spatiotemporal learning. Grounded in lens physics, FastVC introduces a distortion-aware thin-plate spline (DA-TPS) module that nonlinearly remaps control points into a peripheral-dense layout, enabling more accurate geometric fitting without additional computational cost. We further develop a dual-level spatiotemporal learning scheme for causal and stable video rectification. At the model level, neighborhood spatiotemporal attention (NST) aggregates local context and selectively fuses historical features with low overhead. At the optimization level, sparse spatiotemporal supervision applies spatial alignment only to anchor frames, decoupling frame-wise accuracy from temporal stability. Besides, we contribute the first benchmark dataset for wide-angle full-body video correction. Extensive experiments show that FastVC achieves state-of-the-art rectification fidelity and visual stability at 57.0 FPS.
comment: 9 pages, 7 figures
☆ K-CLUE: A Segmentation-to-Clustering Framework for Ki67 Cell Typing BMVC 2026
Ana Beatriz Vieira, Sara P. Oliveira, Diana Montezuma, João Fraga, Jaime S. Cardoso, Arlindo L. Oliveira
Ki67 is a key marker of tumor proliferation in breast cancer, but its quantification from immunohistochemistry images normally depends on supervised classifiers trained per dataset. We examine the role of frozen pretrained visual representations in annotation-free Ki67 cell typing. To this end, we use K-CLUE, a framework that segments individual nuclei, represents each nucleus with a pretrained encoder, reduces the resulting embeddings with principal component analysis, and separates Ki67-positive from Ki67-negative nuclei using k-means clustering, without task-specific training or manual annotations. Clustering the raw components is highly sensitive to the choice of encoder: across seven encoders, the Ki67-positive F1-score on matched MIST nuclei varies by 44 points, although Ki67 status remains linearly decodable from every representation, with supervised probe AUCs above 0.98. Analysis of the embedding spaces shows that clustering succeeds when DAB-related variation occupies the leading directions of variance. Whitening the retained principal components removes this dependence, reducing the spread across encoders to 1.00 F1-score point. Handcrafted color representations are also competitive, confirming that Ki67 status is strongly reflected in chromatic information, but they require an explicit choice of color space. In end-to-end evaluation, K-CLUE reaches F1-scores of 85.00% and 81.91% for Ki67-positive and Ki67-negative nuclei on MIST, and 79.59% and 81.16% on BCData, outperforming DeepLIIF and IHCScoreGAN on both datasets. These results show that pretrained representations can support annotation-free Ki67 typing when their variance structure is accounted for.
comment: Accepted at the BD-MedVis Workshop, BMVC 2026
☆ L0-Norm-Based CycleGAN for Unpaired Brain CT-to-MR Synthesis
Computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) imaging provide complementary information for the brain, but acquiring both modalities is not always possible. The cycle-consistent adversarial network (CycleGAN) enables unpaired CT-to-MR synthesis, but because the standard L1-norm cycle?consistency penalty grows linearly with the residual magnitude, the network tends to focus on large residuals. This paper introduces an L0-norm-based cycle?consistency term, in which the L0-norm is approximated by a smooth and bounded function. This approximation not only increases sensitivity to small residuals but also effectively suppresses the influence of large residuals. The proposed model and an otherwise identical L1-norm baseline were trained on 102 images and evaluated on 9 test images. The proposed model achieves a lower mean squared error (0.02746 versus 0.03464, a 20.7% reduction), a higher mean peak signal-to-noise ratio (15.80 versus 14.77 dB), and a higher mean structural similarity index (0.5689 versus 0.5407). It also has a lower maximum MSE and higher minimum PSNR and SSIM than the baseline. These results indicate that modifying the cycle-consistency penalty can improve reconstruction accuracy on this dataset.
comment: 13 pages, 2 figures
☆ Efficient Zero-Shot Video Anomaly Detection via Signal-Aware Adaptive Fusion (SAAF) WACV 2027
Deploying Vision-Language Models for video anomaly detection confronts a fundamental constraint. Their semantic reasoning demands computational budgets incompatible with the scale of real-world video streams. We present Signal-Aware Adaptive Fusion (SAAF), a framework that achieves efficient zero-shot anomaly detection through three key innovations. First, we introduce a dual-signal adaptive sampler operating in semantic embedding space: a delta signal captures sudden events via frame-to-frame cosine distance, while a drift signal detects static and gradual anomalies through deviation from rolling temporal context. Their OR-gated combination with adaptive EMA-based thresholding provides comprehensive anomaly coverage without training data. Second, we propose a threshold-gated cascaded architecture where lightweight frame-level scoring precedes expensive video-level temporal analysis, invoking it only when confidence warrants additional context. Third, we design a signal-aware weighted fusion mechanism that dynamically adapts score combination based on which signal triggered frame selection. Across four benchmarks, SAAF delivers competitive accuracy at substantially lower cost. Among training-free zero-shot methods, SAAF sets a new state of the art on XD-Violence (92.07%), MSAD (86.70%), and ShanghaiTech (80.54%) AUC-ROC, with XD-Violence and MSAD also surpassing supervised baselines. SAAF sustains 44.95, 48.61, and 41.06 FPS on XD-Violence, UCF-Crime, and MSAD, a 2.43$\times$, 2.63$\times$, and 2.22$\times$ throughput improvement over the prior best zero-shot method. Code: https://github.com/kdawoud91/SAAF
comment: Accepted at WACV 2027
☆ PCFBench: How Far Can Large Vision-Language Models Go in Physics-aware Photonic Inverse Design? NeurIPS 2026
Photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) underpin critical applications in telecommunications, sensing, and high-power laser delivery, yet their design remains a manual, expert-intensive process that couples geometric intuition with deep waveguide physics. Vision-language models (VLMs) offer a promising path toward automating PCF design, but can they truly reason about photonic physics from microscopy images, or do they merely recognize visual patterns? We introduce PCFBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating VLMs on the perception, reasoning, and decision steps of the photonic inverse-design loop. PCFBench spans 26 tasks organized into six categories of increasing cognitive demand (Geometry Perception, Physics Understanding, Text Generation, Multi-modal Reasoning, Inverse-Design Decision, and Code Generation), built from over 220K FDTD simulation samples across 18 structurally diverse fiber families. We evaluate both individual VLMs on isolated tasks and multi-agent systems (MAS) on the full sequential pipeline from perception to design. Our results reveal a striking perception-design gap: current models can identify fiber geometry with moderate success, yet consistently fail to translate that visual understanding into physics-aware design actions. Moreover, cascading agents through the pipeline exposes significant error propagation, where upstream perception mistakes compound into downstream design failures. These findings suggest that neither model scaling nor naive agent chaining suffices, and that closing the loop demands explicit physical grounding. PCFBench provides the community with a rigorous, multi-dimensional testbed to measure progress toward AI-assisted photonic engineering. The project is available at https://pcfbench.github.io/.
comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2026, 66 pages, 30 figures, 27 tables
☆ PathJev: Decision-Native Vision-Language Modelling for Histopathology
Vision-language models used for decisions in histopathology rarely return calibrated probabilities over the candidates a user cares about. Decision-native models write a question and a candidate set chosen at run time into the input and return a normalised distribution from a small decision head in one forward pass. We build PathJev-P, a decision-native model for histopathology: MedGemma-1.5-4B with LoRA adapters and a decision head, trained on 40,000 patch states from three public collections whose expert labels are turned into typed questions with organ-specific candidate sets and a "none of these" option. In a comparison over 3 seeds with an analysis plan fixed before testing, on test sets without documented overlap with the training data of the backbone, PathJev-P is more accurate than a generative model trained with the same backbone, data and selection rule, the zero-shot pathology model CONCH and a general medical decision model (balanced accuracy 0.541 against 0.492, 0.345 and 0.213); its advantage over the generative model comes from two organs absent from training. The calibration advantage depends on how the generative model's probabilities are read out. With the summed candidate log-likelihood used in previous work, PathJev-P has the lower calibration error (ECE 0.204 against 0.279); with a length-normalised read-out of the same generative model, examined post hoc, the two have similar mean calibration error (0.201) and the generative model is better calibrated on the unseen organs, where PathJev-P remains over-confident. A supervised linear probe on a pathology foundation model is better calibrated in every setting. In a qualitative whole-slide demonstration, PathJev-P labels unsupervised tissue clusters with abstention and separates carcinoma from other tissue while running the model on a fraction of the tiles.
comment: 25 pages, 4 figures. Code: https://github.com/CosmoIknosLab/PathJev ; model and demo: https://huggingface.co/Cristiandieti/PathJev-P
☆ From Perception to Pixels: Human-Derived Visually Distinct Colors for Improved Dominant Color Extraction
Dominant color extraction is a fundamental task in computer vision, with applications in design, image retrieval, and content recommendation. However, conventional algorithms based on device-oriented color spaces (e.g., RGB) and fixed quantization often fail to capture how humans perceive color differences. In this study, we propose a human-perception-based framework for dominant color extraction, built on a novel Human Color Dictionary (HCD) derived from a perceptual experiment. Participants (n=110) were sequentially shown 120 colors and asked to identify those they perceived as unique. Based on their responses, we constructed a 120 by 120 co-occurrence matrix and applied a greedy selection algorithm to derive 64 perceptually distinct colors, forming the HCD. This dictionary was integrated into RGB color histogram and K-means color extraction algorithms by initializing centroids and mapping pixel values to their nearest perceptual color using the deltaE 00 distance. Evaluation on a dataset of 4,562 images paired with expert-designed palettes demonstrated that our method improves perceptual alignment, as measured by Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) and best-match distance. Our findings suggest no meaningful gender differences in the number of uniquely perceived colors, indicating that sex does not significantly influence color perception in this task. Another key finding is that highly saturated colors are perceived as the most distinguishable, whereas dark and deep colors tend to perceptually collapse and are less reliably differentiated. The results confirm that incorporating experimentally derived human color representations ensures the generated color clusters align more closely with human perception, thus improving the usability of color palette generation in practical applications.
☆ Online Continual Learning in Edge-Cloud Applications
Deployed machine learning models in real-world IoT and edge/cloud systems face a critical reliability bottleneck: the requirement for online adaptation to non-stationary data streams while operating without access to the full original training dataset. Performance is severely degraded when models encounter Out-of-Distribution (OOD) inputs or suffer from catastrophic forgetting. Addressing these challenges requires adaptation mechanisms capable of learning from evolving data streams while preserving previously acquired knowledge. This paper proposes an edge-cloud methodology for integrating Continual Learning (CL) with Out-of-Distribution (OOD) Detection and Concept Drift Detection in IoT applications. The methodology incorporates ODIN and ECDD as alternative mechanisms for identifying informative samples for annotation and triggering rehearsal-based model updates. Experimental results across automotive, healthcare, and agricultural datasets demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodology and its potential to support model adaptation while mitigating catastrophic forgetting.
☆ OPTARI: An open-source software framework for clinical translation of optoacoustic imaging
Moritz Schillinger, Maximilian Bader, Adrian Buehler, Felix Wachter, Ferdinand Knieling, Vasilis Ntziachristos, Katharina Breininger
Combined optoacoustic (OptA) and ultrasound imaging is a promising modality across a wide range of pathologies. Its use in clinical research, however, is limited by a lack of analysis software accessible to users without programming expertise. Existing tools are either script-based engineering frameworks or proprietary vendor applications. We present OPTARI, an open-source graphical software application to facilitate large-scale clinical optoacoustic-ultrasound (OPUS) studies. OPTARI builds on the napari image viewer and the PATATO toolkit for OptA data processing. It supports native vendor and open HDF5 data formats, aligns with the IPASC standard, and is distributed as a standalone executable. Features include region-of-interest annotation, reconstruction, chromophore unmixing, deep-learning-based tissue segmentation, and temporal and spectral analysis modules. OPTARI offers a combination of features for clinical study analysis that none of the compared tools provide. The automated tissue segmentation produced results comparable to expert labeling for muscle tissue, and batch processing reduced analysis time from minutes to under one second per scan. The tool is used in ongoing clinical OPUS studies. OPTARI connects engineering frameworks with medical research and provides an open-source basis for reproducible and standardized analysis in clinical OptA imaging studies.
comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. Submitted to the Journal of Biomedical Optics. Code and documentation: https://mo-sc.github.io/OPTARI/
☆ MDMR-Bench: A Multi-Dimensional Benchmark for Multi-Reference Image Generation NeurIPS 2026
Image generation models have rapidly advanced, with many models now supporting generation conditioned on multiple reference images and textual instructions. Such models enable a wide range of applications, including entity fusion and attribute transfer across images. However, existing benchmarks for multi-reference image generation rely on limited evaluation dimensions and fail to capture the diverse challenges of the task. To address this limitation, we propose MDMR-Bench, a Multi-Dimensional benchmark for Multi-Reference image generation. MDMR-Bench is organized around representative capability settings and consists of multiple evaluation subsets spanning diverse dimensions of multi-reference image generation, including (1) common entity fusion and attribute transfer, (2) multi-element extraction from a single image, (3) infographic manipulation, and (4) visual reasoning-intensive generation. This design enables systematic analysis of model capabilities and failure modes across different challenge dimensions. Furthermore, to achieve more reliable and interpretable evaluation, we introduce a checklist-based evaluation protocol that decomposes generation quality into fine-grained evaluation aspects. Instead of relying solely on holistic scoring, our framework uses structured checklists composed of both global-level and atomic-level queries, enabling more diagnostic assessment of model performance. By benchmarking both open-source and proprietary models, we demonstrate that MDMR-Bench provides fine-grained insights into model performance across different dimensions. The dataset and code are publicly available.
comment: Bowen Zheng and Jintao Lin contributed equally to this work. Accepted at NeurIPS 2026, Evaluations & Datasets Track
☆ AutoMIL: Automated Multiple Instance Learning for Whole-Slide Image Classification
Developing multiple instance learning pipelines for the classification of whole-slide images involves many interdependent design decisions and expertise in both pathology and machine learning. We present AutoMIL, an open-source framework that applies principles from the field of automated machine learning to tackle this task by automating integral pipeline steps, such as preprocessing, training and evaluation. In a benchmark evaluation with default settings, AutoMIL reached ROC-AUC scores of 0.94 on UBC-OCEAN, 0.99 on PCam and 0.93-0.96 on a TCGA-NSCLC subset, comparable to specialised pipelines in related work. Ensembling mainly improved performance on imbalanced data, showing that an automated pipeline must adapt to dataset characteristics. AutoMIL thus provides an accessible baseline for whole-slide image classification without manual pipeline configuration.
☆ Learning Fine-Grained Visual Classification with Text as Privileged Information via Multimodal Distillation
Fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) requires distinguishing between highly similar categories by focusing on subtle, localized visual differences. Recent multimodal methods have demonstrated that textual attribute descriptions can provide valuable semantic supervision by explicitly describing discriminative object characteristics. However, these descriptions are typically unavailable at test time, limiting their direct use in deployment. We propose FG-LUPI, a Learning Using Privileged Information (LUPI)-based framework that leverages attribute descriptions during training. We train a multimodal teacher that integrates image patches and textual attributes via gated cross-attention, allowing semantic attributes to condition visual representations. We distill this knowledge into an image-only student using multi-level distillation at the prediction, patch, and attention levels, aligning global predictions, patch representations, and attention patterns with the teacher. This encourages the student to inherit attention structure learned from multimodal supervision while maintaining image-only inference. Experiments on multiple FGVC benchmarks show consistent improvements in classification accuracy over strong ViT-based baselines. Furthermore, evaluation using Expected Calibration Error (ECE) shows that FG-LUPI also produces better-calibrated predictions across all six benchmarks. These results suggest that textual attribute supervision can benefit not only fine-grained recognition performance but also the reliability of model confidence, while preserving the efficiency and practicality of image-only inference.
comment: 16 pages
☆ PROVE: Probabilistic Visual Grounding via Patch-Level Evidence for Vision-Language Models
Visual grounding with vision-language models such as CLIP typically produces a single deterministic relevance map for an image-query pair, without indicating whether the localisation is reliable or whether the referent is present at all. We introduce \textbf{PROVE} (\textbf{Pro}babilistic \textbf{V}isual Grounding via Patch-Level \textbf{E}vidence), a post-hoc evidential adapter that maps frozen CLIP patch features to per-patch Beta distributions without modifying the backbone. PROVE casts grounding as per-patch membership: each patch accumulates positive and negative evidence for whether it belongs to the referent, so a query may match zero, one, or many patches. We train PROVE with an evidential objective on soft patch-coverage targets, and define a prior-pull objective that keeps absent-referent examples near an uninformative prior, so that vacuity serves as an absence signal without a dedicated presence classifier. During inference, a single forward pass yields, in closed form, a posterior-mean grounding map, a spatial vacuity map, and an image-level absence score. We evaluate PROVE on referring-expression benchmarks: it is competitive in localisation with state-of-the-art CLIP grounding methods, its uncertainty tracks localisation error and supports selective prediction under abstention, and its image-level score detects when the referent is absent altogether. Our evidential patch-membership modelling offers a simple, drop-in mechanism for probabilistic verification in frozen vision-language grounding systems.
☆ Tempo-Zero: Recursive Self-Play in Executable Worlds for Video Reasoning
Jingmin Zhu, Yanyan Zou, Xiuyu Li, James Bailey, Dinh Phung, Tao Yu, Yunyun Hou, Jun Liu, Jun Zhou, Sirui Wang, Nan Duan, Jiachen Liu, Qiuhong Ke
Video reasoning requires understanding how events unfold over time, yet videos with accurate temporal annotations are expensive to collect. Self-play offers an alternative by letting a model generate and solve its own tasks without manual annotation. However, existing video self-play methods train on fixed sets of recorded videos, so they cannot alter the underlying event dynamics and rely on noisy pseudo-labels derived from the model's own outputs, such as majority voting, that risk reinforcing shared model errors. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Tempo-Zero, a self-improvement framework that closes a loop of executable environments, execution-verified self-play, and environment evolution, where executing a program renders a video with the ground-truth option and interval of every question. A single policy plays both Questioner and Solver, proposing questions and answering them with timestamped evidence lines, and is trained on execution-grounded rewards instead of model consensus. The Solver's performance steers a curriculum over tasks and difficulty levels, and the policy selects rule changes that enrich the event dynamics of later rounds. Despite being trained solely on simple programs, without supervised fine-tuning or external video data which prior methods typically require, Tempo-Zero outperforms the base models and recent self-play baselines on average across twelve real-world video benchmarks at different model scales, with particularly strong gains on temporal grounding tasks. Project page: https://alchemist-jo.github.io/tempo-zero/
☆ Cycle-of-Thought: Self-Evaluative Iterative Reasoning for Table Visual Question Answering in Document Images
Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly improved Visual Question Answering (VQA) performance, yet their reasoning over structured content such as tables remains inconsistent, often plagued by spatial misalignment and logical hallucinations. Existing approaches for improving table VQA typically rely on architectural modifications or expensive supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which impose high barriers to entry due to the need for large-scale, expert-annotated datasets and significant computational resources. In this work, we propose Self-RefineVQA, a training-free, inference-time self-correction framework that improves table VQA performance without additional labeled data or model updates. Inspired by human revision behavior, our method enables a single VLM to iteratively act as a generator, critic, and refiner, forming a closed self-feedback loop that corrects common reasoning errors through prompt-guided re-evaluation. Experiments on tabular VQA benchmarks demonstrate that Self-RefineVQA yields consistent accuracy gains in monolingual and cross-lingual understanding, with a particularly significant boost for small models, enabling lightweight models (e.g., 2B-7B parameters) to rival the performance of significantly larger counterparts. Furthermore, we provide a comparative complexity analysis demonstrating that while inference cost increases linearly, our framework offers superior data efficiency and a lower cumulative cost by eliminating the prohibitive annotation bottleneck of human labeling required for fine-tuning. Our results highlight the potential of prompt-based self-improvement as a scalable, accessible paradigm for reliable table reasoning in VLMs.
☆ AlphaAnything: Extending Pretrained RGB Generators to RGBA
Existing RGBA generation methods commonly learn a transparency-specific representation through reconstruction, introducing an additional training stage and potentially altering the RGB decoding function inherited from pretrained models. We present AlphaAnything, a lightweight framework that extends pretrained RGB generators to RGBA directly in their original latent space, without RGBA reconstruction pretraining. AlphaAnything inserts LoRA modules into the generative transformer and attaches an alpha branch to the frozen RGB VAE decoder. Unidirectional RGB-to-alpha feature sharing allows opacity supervision to shape the generative latent while guaranteeing that, for any fixed latent, RGB decoding remains identical to that of the pretrained decoder. We further introduce Endpoint-Aware Alpha Loss (EA Loss), which derives opacity supervision from the complementary foreground--background weights used in compositing. It supports exact opacity endpoints and continuous partial transparency while emphasizing localized alpha errors. Experiments on text-to-RGBA and image-to-RGBA tasks across multiple pretrained RGB backbones demonstrate competitive generation quality, and controlled ablations validate the shared-latent training design and EA Loss.
☆ TIE: Training-free CLIP Embedding Guidance for Compositional Text-to-Image Alignment
Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have advanced notably, but still fail to satisfy prompt conditions, resulting in attribute mismatches and missing objects. These errors normally fall into two categories: concept loss, when an object or attribute (i.e., concept) goes missing, and concept confusion, when an attribute is assigned to the wrong object or multiple objects blend together. Recent studies suggest that these challenges are caused by the limited capacity of CLIP text encoder to capture fine-grained semantic details. Although several methods have been proposed, concept loss and concept confusion persist in recent T2I models when handling multi-object, multi-attribute prompts. In this paper, we conduct an embedding-level analysis to develop a training-free, inference-time solution for concept loss and concept confusion across CLIP-based T2I models. We find that (1) concepts mentioned later exhibit higher embedding entropy, reflecting less concentrated representations that are more often associated with concept loss, and (2) the first CLIP attention layer captures the strength of binding between each object and its attribute. Guided by our findings, we introduce TIE, a method that improves semantic alignment through a single text-embedding update. TIE addresses concept loss via entropy-aware singular value amplification and resolves concept confusion through interpolation-extrapolation binding based on CLIP attention scores, all in a training-free manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TIE enhances semantic fidelity in multi-concept scenarios with minimal sampling overhead. The project page is available at https://hong-sujung.github.io/TIE/.
☆ An Error Budget for Shuffled Multimodal Windows in the 3rd WEAR Challenge: Stacking, Count Constraints and Seam Matching SC
The 3rd WEAR Dataset Challenge asks for an activity label for every one-second window of four unseen participants. Each window has 15 VideoMAEv2 frame embeddings, the accelerometer signal of one random limb, and the windows are shuffled. This report is an empirical analysis of one system built after the challenge deadline. Window classifiers are stacked with features averaged over per-participant graphs of video neighbours and scored successor candidates, and a mean-field style decoder with a soft count constraint per activity labels all windows of a participant together. The setting is offline and transductive, and the count constraint relies on each activity being performed once. In a participant-wise simulation with participant-level bootstrap intervals, stacking added 0.051 macro F1 over stage-1 fusion and the count constraint 0.011 (95% interval 0.006 to 0.017). A quadratic seam distance ranks the true same-limb successor first among about 720 candidates in 83.9% of cases, but adding it to the link model changed macro F1 by -0.0001 (-0.0006 to 0.0005). With the decoder settings and the mixing weight chosen inside the folds and the mislabelled spans left out of training, the system scores 0.936 in simulation (0.940 for participants who performed each activity once); the submitted configuration scores 0.938 (0.943). Per-participant scores range from 0.80 to 0.97. These results come from a non-nested stacking protocol that uses unlabelled features transductively, so they are not a fully inductive estimate. An oracle that averages the final unary scores over the true segments reaches 0.973, and 79% of the remaining errors involve the null class. On the private leaderboard, which no choice used, the selected Kaggle submission scored 0.9231 (public 0.9254, with bounds partly tuned there), and a later one with bounds chosen in simulation scored 0.9247 (public 0.9253).
comment: 12 pages, 10 tables, 1 figure. Technical report on a post-deadline system for the 3rd WEAR Dataset Challenge at HASCA 2026. Code: https://github.com/soheilkooklan/wear-seam-decoder
☆ Interactive image diagnosis using test-time backpropagation from the auxiliary task SP
Multi-task deep learning has been developed to ensure explainability in computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems. These systems simultaneously predict interpretable characteristics of findings in auxiliary tasks to help radiologists assess the reliability of the diagnostic prediction. However, the CAD's opinion would not be referred to when the auxiliary task prediction deviates from the radiologist's expectation. To further leverage CAD's knowledge in the above situation, we proposed a multi-task gradient assist (MGA) method that brings interactivity to multi-task models without additional training. MGA allows radiologists to give feedback to the CAD and ask for additional diagnostic suggestions. Using two datasets of mammography and CT, we show that MGA successfully improves diagnostic accuracy upon feedback on various auxiliary tasks. Compared to an existing method using forward propagation only, MGA performs more robustly and can be combined to further improve accuracy. Our method paves a promising way for integrating artificial intelligence into image diagnosis.
comment: 8 pages, accepted to SPIE Medical Imaging 2025
☆ PASTA: Prompt-Aware Annealed Diffusion Sampling ICONIP2026
Ren Ajiki, Ryugo Morita, Stanislav Frolov, Brian Bernhard Moser, Ko Watanabe, Riku Takahashi, Andreas Dengel, Jinjia Zhou
While Diffusion models produce high-quality images, real-world visual design requires intentionally preserving clean regions for headlines, logos, or UI elements. Existing layout-aware text-to-image methods struggle to strictly preserve reserved regions, often introducing unwanted content that complicates downstream editing. Existing approaches either manipulate attention to displace content or suppress conditioning via noise-level interventions. However, these methods sacrifice visual coherence, producing flat regions or noticeable style inconsistencies between reserved and non-reserved areas. To address this limitation, we propose a Prompt-Aware Shared-Latent Training-Free Annealed Diffusion Sampling (PASTA), a training-free framework that enforces reserved-region constraints by selectively applying semantic guidance to object-allowed regions during sampling. PASTA operates on a shared latent trajectory, where full-prompt and context-prompt guidance are fused through mask-guided sampling. An annealed schedule suppresses semantic leakage during early denoising stages while gradually restoring visual consistency in later stages. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PASTA improves reserved-region fidelity while preserving overall image realism and perceptual consistency.
comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. Accepted to ICONIP2026
☆ UniWorld: A Unified World Model for Real-Time Visual World Simulation
Continuous visual world simulation requires coupling evolving scene geometry with temporally persistent appearance. We present UniWorld, a unified framework that integrates depth trajectories and reference appearance within a shared video generation model. The central design maintains visual and geometric histories on a common timeline. Noise-aligned overlapping continuation places generated history at the prescribed sampling noise level and commits only newly generated latents. Rolling depth latent state preserves the corresponding geometric controls, incrementally reads newly available geometry, and keeps the conditioning fixed within each sampling window. Together, these mechanisms ensure exact preservation of latent history while bounding the active depth state by the window size. We evaluate continuous generation, paired history interventions, and long-horizon behavior across diverse scene categories. The same generator supports estimated, native, and on-demand simulator depth, while cached and incremental execution paths produce bitwise-identical outputs. Appearance changes and geometric control branches operate through the same interface without modifying committed history. The measured steady-state DiT execution path achieves real-time generation throughput, demonstrating the efficiency of UniWorld for continuous visual world simulation.
☆ Sam-Correction: Fully Adaptive Label Noise Reduction for Medical Image Segmentation IEEE
The quality of the teacher label has a dramatic impact on the outcome of the machine learning process. Medical image segmentation often suffers from a noisy ground truth (GT) mask due to difficulties in consistent annotation. Although a recent study has proposed a promising method to curate the noisy GT mask, this requires additional well-curated GT masks that are not always accessible without the aid of multiple medical experts. As an alternative, we propose SAM-Correction, which utilizes a foundation model to correct the noisy GT mask in a fully adaptive manner instead of manually preparing well-curated masks. In our approach, we progressively mitigate label noise via the segment anything model (SAM), where prompts are given from another segmentation network that we train concurrently. Experiments with various types of label noise derived from actual human annotations demonstrate that SAM-C achieves precise noise reduction and high-performing segmentation models trained thereby. Our method paves the way for robust model training even when clean labels are entirely unavailable.
comment: 5 pages, accepted to IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) 2024
☆ EigenGradCAM with AugSmooth: Enhancing Explainability and Precision in Multi-Stage Alzheimer's Disease Detection
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurological disorder associated with memory loss, cognitive decline, and behavioral disturbances. Early and accurate diagnosis is essential, yet MRI-based deep learning models often lack interpretability, limiting their clinical use. This study presents an explainable deep learning approach for four-class AD staging using 2D axial MRI images. The method combines eigenvector-based Grad-CAM with gradient smoothing to improve saliency localization and heatmap stability. Principal component analysis is applied to gradient-weighted convolutional layers, while Gaussian noise is added to saliency weights before decomposition. To address class imbalance in the Moderate Dementia category, Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network with Gradient Penalty (WGAN-GP) generates synthetic samples to balance the four-stage training distribution. Custom convolutional neural networks are trained on the Best Alzheimer MRI Dataset, achieving 97.2% test accuracy, 97.0% balanced accuracy, and a Matthews correlation coefficient of 0.944. The area under the ROC curve ranges from 0.96 to 0.99 across classes. Generated heatmaps highlight the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, regions associated with Alzheimer's disease biomarkers. These findings suggest that the proposed approach combines strong classification performance with improved model interpretability, although further clinical validation is needed.
☆ Past as State, Present as Attention: Persistent-State Blockwise Flow Matching for Long-Horizon Co-Speech Motion Generation NeurIPS 2026
Co-speech motion generation remains challenging over long horizons due to the need for temporal coherence and consistent style. Existing methods typically generate long motions segment by segment, either conditioning on a short seed of recent frames, which gradually drifts, or retaining ever-longer explicit histories, which are costly to maintain and hard to learn from limited data. We trace these limitations to a key asymmetry between past and present: past motion carries slowly varying style that should be compactly summarized, whereas the current segment exhibits fast-changing local dynamics that require fine-grained modeling. This asymmetry motivates a simple Past-As-State, Present-as-Attention principle for long-horizon co-speech motion generation. Following this principle, we propose PASPA, which summarizes past history with an inter-block persistent state and models the current segment with intra-block bidirectional self-attention. We instantiate PASPA within a blockwise flow matching framework, with multi-block supervision for effective training over variable histories, prefill-decode state caching for efficient rollout, and hybrid classifier-free guidance for enhanced history and speech conditioning. Extensive public-benchmark experiments show that PASPA achieves state-of-the-art FGD performance and preserves motion style across long-sequence generation.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. 38 pages, 10 figures, 17 tables
☆ A Regularity Condition Under Which a CPAB Transformation is a Diffeomorphism
Continuous Piecewise-Affine Based (CPAB) transformations, introduced by Freifeld et al. (2015, 2017), are flows obtained by integrating continuous piecewise-affine (CPA) velocity fields. These expressive transformations have proven useful in applications including nonlinear temporal warping and trainable activation functions in 1D, as well as nonrigid spatial deformations in 2D and 3D. While computational costs were not an issue in 1D, they originally limited the practical expressiveness of CPAB transformations in higher dimensions, especially in 3D. Our recent work (Aflalo et al., 2026) removed this bottleneck, enabling efficient optimization with much finer tessellations and substantially greater expressiveness. There is, however, a mathematical subtlety that was overlooked in the original CPAB papers (Freifeld et al., 2015, 2017). CPAB transformations are always bi-Lipschitz homeomorphisms, implying that both the transformations and their inverses are differentiable almost everywhere. They are not, however, necessarily diffeomorphisms. This note remedies the omission by identifying sufficient regularity conditions under which a CPAB transformation is guaranteed to be a diffeomorphism. We explain how differentiability can fail and how the proposed conditions prevent this failure. In 1D and 2D, we show that these conditions can be easily enforced and, for commonly used tessellations, hold with probability one under standard sampling assumptions. We expect analogous behavior in 3D.
☆ Search-Based Testing of Modality Sensitivity in Vision Language Models
Vision-language models (VLMs) process images and text jointly, yet robustness evaluations often perturb these inputs separately or assess only predefined corruption levels. Such evaluations provide limited evidence of which modality is more susceptible to perturbations and whether smaller changes across both modalities can jointly expose failures. We present MoST, a black-box testing framework that characterizes modality sensitivity by comparing image-only, text-only, and joint perturbations. MoST uses multi-objective search to select and combine perturbations and adjust their severity, seeking prediction degradation while limiting changes to images and prompts. We evaluate MoST on four VLMs performing object localization on ImageNet and driving images. The models exhibit distinct sensitivities: textual perturbations dominate for some, whereas others are susceptible across both modalities. In several configurations, joint perturbations match or exceed the effectiveness of single-modality perturbations with smaller modifications to each input. In a human study, 60-76% of assessments across models judge the perturbed inputs sufficiently understandable to perform the task, and human localization is more accurate than that of the corresponding VLMs. These results show that evaluating modalities separately can overlook failure-inducing combinations and that modality sensitivity provides a more detailed account of VLM robustness than aggregate failure rates alone.
☆ 4DMemory: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Spatiotemporal Memory with Harness-Augmented Agents
Yanhao Jia, Yi Zhu, Yiran Zhong, Weigao Sun, Feida Zhu, Pengkun Jiao, Sihan Yang, Ming Ma, Steven Hoi, Erik Cambria
Humans efficiently process multimodal streams spanning hours to years, building persistent, fine-grained spatiotemporal memories that support reasoning about and predicting long-horizon events. In contrast, existing benchmarks focus on short- and medium-context tasks, and most foundation models struggle to preserve fine-grained information over long horizons. To evaluate and improve long-horizon spatiotemporal reasoning, we introduce the LongVideo dataset and the 4DMemoryBench. LongVideo comprises about 900 hours of video and over 5,000 manually reviewed questions covering visual, textual, and spatiotemporal reasoning across diverse context lengths. We further develop the 4DMemory Harness, which integrates four complementary skills, 22+ specialized tool models, and a model-specific retrieval-augmented generation system. Evaluating 13 leading models, we find that standalone foundation models struggle with long-horizon tasks, while the 4DMemory Harness improves all of them by over 50\%. Compared to previous benchmark, the same models exhibit a performance drop of more than 10\% on 4DMemoryBench. We hope 4DMemory will facilitate the development of spatiotemporal agents capable of addressing complex, long-horizon tasks.
comment: 22 pages, 5 figures
☆ ChoreoStudio: Planning What, When, and Who in Music-Driven Group Choreography
Music-driven group dance generation must decide not only how each dancer moves, but also what formation the group should form, when it should change, and who should execute each transition. Existing methods can generate orderly and rhythmically synchronized group motion, but remain limited in formation evolution and inter-dancer interaction. In human choreography, formation transitions often align with changes in high-level musical structure, such as the progression from an introduction to a chorus or from a chorus to a climax. We present ChoreoStudio, which makes choreography planning explicit. A music disentangler first decomposes the audio into frame-level rhythmic features and segment-level structural features. Given the segment-level features and sparse labels, a frozen omni-modal model acts as a scriptwriter, producing a global semantic description that guides the Director's choreography planning. Based on this context, the Director produces three coupled interaction decisions: a centroid-relative point set specifies what formation to produce, a transition gate determines when it should change, and a mobility allocation indicates who should execute the transition. The transition gate and mobility allocation are further conditioned on the planned geometric change, coupling formation targets with their temporal and dancer-specific execution. At a finer temporal scale, frame-aligned music features condition the diffusion generator to control detailed body motion and preserve beat-level alignment. The segment-level interaction plan is injected in parallel through frame-aligned instruction tokens and cross-dancer attention biases, coordinating how the generator realizes each transition. Experiments on AIOZ-GDance demonstrate that ChoreoStudio follows the planned interactions while achieving state-of-the-art performance in motion quality, group organization, and formation dynamics.
☆ DeformStruct: Deformable Structure Modeling for Point-Supervised Temporal Action Localization
Point-supervised Temporal Action Localization (PTAL) aims to localize action instances using only a single annotated timestamp for each instance. Such sparse supervision offers limited guidance for modeling the structural organization of an action instance. Existing PTAL methods primarily infer action regions from classification responses, leaving the structural organization of multiple action-related parts within each instance insufficiently modeled. To address this problem, we propose DeformStruct, an instance-level deformable structure modeling framework for PTAL. DeformStruct progressively constructs the structure of each action instance through three stages. First, Structural Anchor Mining discovers multiple anchors from annotated points and action-responsive regions, providing structural nodes grounded in the current instance. Second, Deformable Part Alignment associates latent structural parts with these anchors through deformation-aware matching, allowing their temporal supports to adapt to instance-dependent variations. Third, Relational Structural Organization explicitly models the relative temporal relations among the aligned parts, forming a relational representation that characterizes how different action-related parts are organized together. Extensive experiments on THUMOS14, ActivityNet-v1.3, GTEA, and BEOID demonstrate consistent improvements in point-supervised temporal localization and validate the effectiveness of deformable structural modeling.
☆ Organizing Temporal Evidence in Hyperbolic Space for Video Moment Retrieval
Video moment retrieval aims to localize a query-relevant temporal segment in an untrimmed video. Existing methods typically perform video-text alignment in Euclidean space, where representations are embedded in a flat geometry. However, accurate moment localization requires organizing query-relevant evidence across multiple grounding states, where target regions, boundary transitions, and contextual distractors exhibit distinct temporal structures and relevance patterns. Such Euclidean representations lack an explicit geometry to jointly capture these relationships, motivating us to explore structured temporal evidence organization from a geometric perspective. Specifically, we propose Hyperbolic Temporal Evidence Organization (HTEO), a geometric framework that organizes query-aware temporal memory in hyperbolic space. HTEO maps temporal representations into a Poincaré ball and organizes temporal evidence through Radial Evidence Organization (REO) and Orthogonal Angular Refinement (OAR). REO adjusts temporal tokens' radial positions to encode the structural differences among temporal evidence, while OAR enhances query-conditioned semantic alignment through orthogonal rotation. The organized representation is then projected back to the Euclidean tangent space and injected into the decoder through a lightweight residual memory update, enabling hyperbolic geometric cues to be incorporated into standard Transformer decoders while preserving the original cross-modal memory. Furthermore, we introduce radial structure regularization and angular relevance supervision to explicitly guide temporal evidence organization and query-conditioned semantic alignment, respectively. Extensive experiments and analyses across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that HTEO improves temporal localization while providing an interpretable geometric organization of temporal evidence.
☆ GeoLEON-CLIP: Graph-Anchored Multimodal Contrastive Learning for Geographic Region Representation SP
Geographic regions are multimodal: satellite imagery captures visual morphology, text conveys human-interpretable semantics, and map structures describe urban context. Existing geospatial contrastive methods typically align image-text or image-location pairs, underusing structured map data. We introduce GeoLEON-CLIP, a graph-anchored contrastive framework that aligns three views of each H3-indexed region: an OpenStreetMap-derived graph embedding, a satellite image crop, and a textual description. Frozen pretrained LEON graph embeddings provide a semantic anchor between vision and language. Frozen graph, image, and text encoders are connected by trainable residual projection heads and trained with a symmetric tri-modal contrastive objective. Experiments show strong graph-image and graph-text alignment; graph-image retrieval achieves the best cross-modal performance in a mixed-resolution pool. To evaluate the anchoring hypothesis, we propose chained cross-modal recall $\mathrm{R}@A@B$, which routes retrieval through the graph modality and compares it with direct retrieval under a matched candidate budget. At $\mathrm{R}@1@1$, image$\rightarrow$graph$\rightarrow$text and text$\rightarrow$graph$\rightarrow$image outperform direct image-text retrieval by 4.8 and 4.4 points, respectively, despite using a single intermediate cell. Downstream probes show task-dependent gains, with the largest improvements on Airbnb and Beijing housing. These results indicate that OpenStreetMap graph structure can anchor multimodal representations combining maps, imagery, and language.
comment: Accepted at the 9th International Workshop on AI for Geographic Knowledge Discovery (GeoAI 2026), co-located with the 34th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (SIGSPATIAL 2026)
☆ OlmoEarth v1.3: Embeddings
Gabriel Tseng, Favyen Bastani, Patrick Alan Johnson, Yawen Zhang, Piper Wolters, Ando Shah, Hadrien Sablon, Joseph Redmon, Heather DeHaven, Rachel Ratner, Sasha Levy, Jordan Steward, Katrina Midgley, Andrew Howe, Hunter Pitelka, Ted Schmitt
We make some OlmoEarth embeddings. To do this, we train a new model: OlmoEarth v1.3. OlmoEarth v1.3 is designed to condense multimodal, multitemporal remote sensing data into a single digestible 64 or 128-dimensional vector. OlmoEarth v1.3 produces state-of-the-art embeddings. In addition, OlmoEarth v1.3 is a strong encoder backbone -- competitive with OlmoEarth v1 and v1.2 -- while requiring 18% and 53% of the GPU hours to train, respectively. We use OlmoEarth v1.3 to compute global, annualized 10m embeddings, which we release under the OlmoEarth artifact license.
☆ Complementing DINO Features with Image Structure for Part Discovery
Self-supervised Vision Transformers (ViTs) like DINO encode rich semantics, enabling training-free segmentation of objects from the background and discovery of their parts via feature clustering. This paper focuses on part discovery: partitioning a foreground object into semantic parts. Existing approaches produce imprecise part boundaries. We trace this to the rigid ViT patch grid used in training DINO, where patches straddling boundaries contain pixels from multiple parts. While DINO's invariance-based training could absorb this pixel-level mixing into clean features, experiments with over 26K foreground patches show it does not: boundary-overlapping patches produce features with higher entropy and lower assignment confidence, blurring predicted part boundaries. Rather than make the massive effort of retraining DINO over geometrically coherent regions, an easier approach is to take boundaries directly from a boundary detector, which supplies the geometric information DINO's features lack. Motivated by this, we introduce Part-DINO, a training-free framework that combines boundaries from low-level image segmentation with DINO's semantic features. We use the boundaries to partition the image into regions, pool DINO features within each region, and group them to discover parts. Without any training, Part-DINO produces structurally coherent part assignments, outperforming training-free baselines across four standard benchmarks (CUB, CelebA, PartImageNet-OOD, PartImageNet-Seg) and remaining competitive with weakly-supervised and unsupervised methods.
☆ ReLEAP: Upcycling Vision Datasets through Cross-Task Unification and Semi-Supervised Annotation ACCV
Developing robust vision models requires large amounts of annotated data, especially for tasks involving fine-grained class distinctions under variable environmental conditions. Even in domains with numerous existing datasets, differences in annotation formats, label definitions and targeted learning tasks hinder data reuse and integration. To address this challenge, we introduce ReLEAP, a scalable Python framework for unifying heterogeneous image datasets through data-source abstraction, systematic reuse of annotations across learning tasks, and mapping of labels to a shared hierarchical taxonomy. We demonstrate its applicability in precision agriculture by integrating fifteen diverse datasets covering a broad range of plant species and annotation types. Beyond unification, ReLEAP enables systematic recycling of existing data and provides a robust foundation for learning-based annotation upcycling. Leveraging this foundation, we conduct extensive cross-dataset and fine-tuning experiments to investigate how domain-specific models trained on unified data and foundation models can be used to automatically generate higher-level annotations under unsupervised, weakly supervised and semi-supervised settings, and how dataset characteristics influence their effectiveness. Our results show that unified data access and annotation upcycling substantially expand the pool of reusable training data and annotations while improving data transparency, enabling more sustainable and resource-efficient use of existing datasets. We release the framework and trained models for academic use to support accessible and collaborative research, particularly in data-scarce and heterogeneous domains.
comment: Accepted at Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV) 2026. Code and models available at https://github.com/releap-vision/releap
☆ Polyp-VSSD: A Pre-trained Transformer with Local-Global Joint VSSD Decoding for Polyp Segmentation
Early detection of colorectal polyps is essential for preventing colorectal cancer, making accurate polyp segmentation a key component in computer-aided diagnosis systems. However, existing endoscopic segmentation methods often exhibit limited representational capacity and insufficient integration of global and local contextual information. To address these limitations, we propose Polyp-VSSD, a novel local-global joint decoding framework built upon a pre-trained Transformer backbone for high-precision polyp segmentation. Polyp-VSSD leverages the strong feature expressiveness of large-scale visual pre-training and unifies global semantic modeling with local fine-grained reconstruction to enhance segmentation fidelity. Extensive experiments on multiple public endoscopic datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both Dice and IoU. On the EndoScene dataset, Polyp-VSSD achieves mIoU and mDice scores of 0.903 and 0.946, respectively, highlighting its robustness and strong generalization capability. This work presents an effective and scalable solution for intelligent endoscopic image analysis.
☆ RootDown: Deploying and Benchmarking Models for Beet-Root Detection on Edge Devices ACCV 2026
Quality inspection of sugar beets after harvest and storage is critical to preserve sugar content and ensure optimal processing efficiency. The transfer of harvested beets to field clamps or trucks provides an opportunity to visually inspect individual beets automatically on loader conveyors. However, this is a challenging task as the large number of beets causes partial overlap and occlusion, complicating both annotation and detection. In this work, we propose an end-to-end image-based pipeline for detecting partially occluded sugar beets in loading scenarios as a first step toward automated quality inspection. We introduce a dedicated benchmark and present an automatic annotation strategy that leverages the SAM 3 foundation model to generate bounding boxes. We compare models trained on manually annotated and automatically generated labels. Additionally, we investigate deployment considerations by benchmarking multiple inference configurations, including execution on an edge device, under realistic operational constraints regarding precision, inference time and power consumption. Our results show that, despite substantial occlusion and inherent annotation ambiguity, foundation-model-based labels can substitute for a substantial share of manual annotation, trading labeling effort for data volume at a modest accuracy cost. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a Raspberry Pi 5 equipped with a Hailo accelerator enables high-performance, low-power inference, making it a practical solution for mobile outdoor deployment.
comment: Accepted at MLCSA Workshop at Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV 2026). Benchmark, code and models available at https://github.com/semanticsugarbeets/rootdown
☆ RVG-Bench: A Benchmark for Reasoning-Driven Audio-Visual Temporal Grounding
Existing temporal video grounding (TVG) benchmarks primarily focus on localizing target video segments according to descriptive text queries of the visual content. However, real-world queries are more diverse and often require the model to first understand the user's intent before localization, such as finding visual evidence, identifying the cause of an event, or recalling a remembered moment, yet such queries remain largely overlooked. To mitigate this gap, we introduce RVG-Bench, a benchmark for reasoning-driven audio-visual temporal grounding, where every query is constructed such that the target segment can only be identified through reasoning about the query's underlying intent. We carefully construct the benchmark and rigorously verify its data quality to ensure models truly comprehend the audio-visual content. RVG-Bench comprises 1,255 videos and 1,890 query-interval pairs across eight reasoning types. We evaluate 22 models and find that the strongest, Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash, achieves only 49.6 mIoU. Through a series of controlled analyses, including oracle-grounding probes and test-time scaling experiments, we systematically examine where and why current models struggle, providing insights for future model development.
comment: 42 pages, including appendices. Project page: https://fyrisk.github.io/RVG-Bench/
☆ Hyperparameter-Free Boundary-Interior t-vMF Dice Loss for Medical Image Segmentation
Class imbalance and errors near anatomical boundaries remain challenges in medical image segmentation, motivating loss functions that account for these difficulties. Adaptive t-vMF Dice Loss adjusts the similarity function during training but requires hyperparameter tuning. We propose Self-Tuned Boundary-Aware t-vMF Dice Loss (STB-tvMF Dice), which adapts the function separately for boundary and interior regions without tuning shape-adaptation parameters. Each region's shape parameter of t-vMF function is determined from its mean prediction-target cosine similarity in the preceding epoch and remains fixed throughout the current epoch. This rule maximizes the slope of the similarity function at the observed mean similarity, providing a principled basis for adaptation without validation-based parameter selection. Experiments on three datasets and architectures demonstrated its effectiveness. On Synapse with U-Net, STB-tvMF Dice achieved a mean DSC of 70.75%, compared with 63.03% for Adaptive t-vMF Dice Loss. Our code will be available soon.
☆ LapaFM: A Laparoscopic Foundation Model via Multi-Stage Continual Learning
Xiaobo Zhu, Shiwei Wu, Yu An, Yuechen Tao, He Sun, Song Zhang, Jianbo Wang, Xiaojing Wang, Junwei Liu, Wei Guo, Yanfei Shao, Xuan Zhao, Jiangwei Xiao, Wenbo Niu, Bo Wei, Yuhan Wang, Gang Hu, Fei Liu, Kunshan He, Chongwei Chi, Jianqiang Tang, Kang Zhang, Jie Tian, Zhenyu Liu
Artificial intelligence-based analysis of intraoperative laparoscopic videos has the potential to improve surgical decision-making and precision. However, effective surgical assistance requires models that can generalize across diverse intraoperative tasks. Here we present LapaFM, a foundation model for laparoscopic surgery trained on more than 20,000 minutes of surgical videos using a multi-stage continual learning strategy that mitigates catastrophic forgetting and inter-task interference. LapaFM learns multimodal visual representations and supports multiple tasks, including smoke removal, surgical phase recognition, instrument and polyp segmentation, and lesion identification. The model was evaluated on 13 retrospective and two prospective cohorts collected from different imaging devices. LapaFM consistently outperformed task-specific models and existing foundation models across datasets, and also generalized to gastrointestinal endoscopy tasks, including polyp detection and classification. Notably, it recovered over 90% of smoke-obscured frames and achieved clinician-level or superior performance in lymph node metastasis prediction and prospective polyp classification.
☆ Beyond Pattern Matching in 3D MLLMs: Part-Level Functional Reasoning for Generalizable Recognition
3D MLLMs recognize objects via pattern matching, which fails when geometrically similar objects require functional reasoning to disambiguate (e.g., dresser vs. wardrobe). Our per-sample Geometric Confusion Score (GCS) exposes this failure: baseline accuracy is 33.7% on ModelNet40's most ambiguous 20% versus 84.0% on its least ambiguous 20%. We identify a function-as-annotation pattern, in which functional language decorates a known identity instead of supporting inference, and hypothesize that reversing this information flow should concentrate improvements on the most ambiguous samples. PFIR (Part-level Functional Inference for Recognition) reverses that flow. Built on PartNeXt part segmentation, its data pipeline produces 507K QA pairs with functional CoTs (geometry $\to$ function $\to$ identity), and its progressive curriculum culminates in dual-objective GRPO: strict functional reasoning and descriptive grounding for Objaverse's diverse distribution. The two RL objectives yield nearly orthogonal task vectors ($\cos = 0.056$), enabling composition via Task Arithmetic. Under a strict dual OOD protocol (Objaverse $\to$ ModelNet40; XYZRGB $\to$ XYZ-only), PFIR raises zero-shot accuracy from 60.5% to 66.7%, with gains concentrated $2.6\times$ more on geometrically ambiguous samples---supporting part-level functional reasoning as an effective route to more generalizable 3D recognition. Code: https://github.com/this233/pfir-3d.
☆ Representation Learning via Composite Subspace Flow Matching
Distilling semantic meaning from raw image data remains a challenge in machine learning. Current self-supervised paradigms face a trade-off: joint-embedding architectures produce relevant features by aggressively discarding intra-class variance, irreversibly spatial and reconstruction. Conversely, generative models preserve spatial details but struggle to isolate semantics, as their optimization is dominated by pixel variations. To bridge this divide, we propose composite subspace flow matching (CSFM). Rather than corrupting data with unstructured isotropic noise, CSFM formulates representation learning as the variance-minimizing inversion of a deterministic degradation curriculum across spectral, color, and illumination subspaces. By bounding trajectory variance with hard temporal style truncation, a capacity-constrained encoder is driven to ignore transient style artifacts and encode persistent content. Empirical evaluations across CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and STL-10 show that CSFM yields competitive discriminative transferability while preserving generative synthesis across both convolutional and vision transformer architectures. By avoiding the collapse pathologies of non-generative methods, CSFM forms a smooth latent space that outperforms standard optimal transport flows on linear probing and few-shot classification, while enabling coherent synthesis and trajectory interpolation. These results confirm that steering the physical dynamics of generative flows offers a scalable paradigm for learning representations that are simultaneously linearly separable and generatively invertible.
comment: 27 pages, 4 figures
☆ Easy-3Dfy: Object-Level Geometric Composition for Single-Image 3D Scene Construction
Single-image 3D scene construction is a fundamental problem in 3D vision. Recent methods such as SAM-3Dfy enable end-to-end reconstruction of 3D assets and their scene layouts, but still struggle with fine-grained scene geometry and asset quality. Meanwhile, specialized 3D object generators provide detailed object geometry, while 3D foundation models offer strong and generalizable spatial understanding. We propose Easy-3Dfy, a compositional workflow that decouples object generation from scene layout estimation, allowing specialized models to fully exploit their respective strengths. An RPF-based aligner then bridges these capabilities by establishing geometric correspondence between object-local meshes and partial scene pointmaps, recovering object layout for scene composition. Without requiring complete scene-level supervision, the proposed workflow consistently outperforms SAM-3Dfy across multiple geometric metrics on Scene-Maker and 3D-FUTURE200. Our results demonstrate that explicit geometric composition can effectively combine high-quality object generation with strong spatial understanding, while enabling the workflow to benefit independently from advances in both 3D object generation and foundation models.
☆ TileShare: Training-Free Acceleration of Overlapping Tiled ViT Decoding
Xiangzhong Ye, Zhongshen Li, Shen You, Ziyang Meng, Liang Xu, Junkai Ji, Qiuzhen Lin, Xiangtao Li, Ka-Chun Wong
Fixed-window Vision Transformer (ViT) decoders run at deployment resolution as overlapping tiles: every token in an overlap band is processed by several full decoder instances. In the 2.4B-parameter MiniMax-H3 video decoder, about half of all per-token computation is duplicated. Removing the tiles fails because attention, global tokens and coordinates are bound to them. TileShare keeps each released tile's attention and computes every other operation once per token. The released computation changes at one kind of step only: an overlap token's per-tile results are blended into one shared state with the released weights. Interventions show that this blend costs quality where attention reads the shared states, mainly in the first few layers, which TileShare therefore keeps per tile. Without training, keeping six layers per tile decodes 1.38-1.51x faster than batched and compiled tiling on two GPU types (up to 1.96x with FP8) and is equivalent to the released decoder in PSNR, LPIPS and DISTS on DAVIS videos. On unseen UVG videos with the setting frozen beforehand, it matches PSNR and DISTS and improves LPIPS. TileShare carries over to two further decoders and is again confirmed on unseen data. It is equivalent in PSNR and DISTS on MAGI-1. On the ViTok-v2 image autoencoder at 2K-4K, it matches overlapping tiling in PSNR, improves LPIPS and DISTS and decodes 1.5-1.8x faster. How many layers stay per tile is measured once per model (for decoders, without labels); we report it for 14 decoders and encoders. Optionally, two GPU-hours of self-distillation let MiniMax-H3 share every layer without a loss in PSNR, and a coordinate field trained while the network stays frozen brings fully shared CLIP-based open-vocabulary segmentation to parity with sliding windows on seven benchmarks.
comment: 8 pages main paper + supplementary material
☆ Towards Effective and Transferable Physical Camouflage against Multi-View BEV-based 3D Perception in Autonomous Driving
Modern autonomous driving systems widely adopt multi-view Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) based 3D perception models due to their superior performance. Despite their success, the robustness of these models against adversarial camouflage attacks remains largely unexplored. Existing camouflage attacks primarily target single-view 2D detectors, limiting their effectiveness in multi-view 3D perception settings. To address this gap, we propose BEVCA, a novel adversarial camouflage generation framework tailored for multi-view BEV-based 3D perception. Our framework integrates a BEV-feature-based adversarial loss with a multi-view neural rendering module, enabling effective and transferable camouflage attacks across different models and tasks. Extensive experiments in both digital and physical settings demonstrate that BEVCA outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and exhibits strong robustness under real-world conditions. Our code is available at https://github.com/WAVE-AT-IDEA/BEVCA.
☆ ACWM-RM: A Reference-Free Reward Model from Complementary Mismatch Preferences
Reinforcement learning has gained attention for improving action-conditioned world models (ACWMs), as it enables reward-driven optimization of visual quality (VQ) and action-following fidelity (AF) beyond flow-matching optimization. Realizing this potential requires reward signals that reliably rank videos by both VQ and AF. However, existing rewards capture only one dimension: metric-based rewards assess VQ but require ground-truth videos and do not directly assess AF, while inverse dynamics model (IDM) rewards assess AF without references but do not guarantee VQ. Moreover, IDMs, typically trained on real videos, may provide unreliable rewards for generated videos containing visual artifacts and physical inconsistencies. In this work, we introduce the Action and Video Mismatch Benchmark (AVM-Eval), comprising 67.2k pairs that evaluate how reliably IDMs assess AF on real and generated videos. We then propose ACWM-RM, a reward model that jointly assesses VQ and AF without ground-truth videos during reward computation. To train it, we first construct the Action and Video Mismatch Preference Dataset (AVM-Pref) with 506.3k pairs providing complementary supervision: action-mismatch pairs supervise AF, while video-mismatch pairs supervise VQ and expose the model to generated videos. We then pretrain an action-conditioned predictor on real videos to learn forward dynamics before jointly training it with a patch-weighted score head on AVM-Pref to transfer these dynamics to AF assessment on generated videos. Evaluation on AVM-Eval reveals the limited reliability of IDMs on generated videos, while downstream RL experiments show that ACWM-RM outperforms reward baselines in both criteria.
☆ Angular Supervision for Visual Object Grounding in Autoregressive Vision-Language Models
Autoregressive vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to ground generated text in the correct image regions, and existing explainability methods, such as attention maps and Logit Lens, often produce poor spatial explanations due to weak text-to-vision attention and sink tokens. We propose \textbf{Angular Relevance} ($R_L$), a simple visualization measure based on cosine similarity between visual token embeddings and unembedding-matrix rows. Because $R_L$ is invariant to token norm, it produces substantially sharper and more faithful heatmaps than attention maps or Logit Lens on out-of-the-box models. Without any training, $R_L$ yields competitive referring-expression segmentation (RES), outperforming prior diagnostic maps and CLIP-based training-free methods. To preserve localized object information during cross-modal mixing, we introduce \textbf{Angular Object-Aware Loss (AOL)}, an auxiliary loss that directly supervises visual token embeddings to align angularly with the vocabulary directions of their corresponding object concepts. Finetuning with AOL alongside the standard next-token prediction objective significantly sharpens object localization in heatmaps, showing that the VLM's own visual tokens can be used directly for grounding and improving RES, without training any segmentation heads and without degrading general VQA performance. We further demonstrate that the learned grounding also transfers to category-level segmentation of object categories not seen during training.
☆ Benchmarking Data-Free Continual Model Merging for Whole-Slide Image Survival Analysis
Continual survival analysis on whole-slide images (WSIs) requires models to integrate knowledge from sequentially arriving cancer cohorts while preserving previously learned information. Model merging offers a data-free alternative by combining independently fine-tuned task experts without retaining previous training data. However, the relative behavior of different merging strategies for WSI-based survival prediction remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we establish an end-to-end benchmark for data-free continual model merging, covering task-specific fine-tuning, sequential merging, and inference under both TASK-IL and CLASS-IL settings. We systematically evaluate six representative merging strategies across four TCGA cancer cohorts and three task orders using C-index, IPCW C-index, Forgetting, and Backward Transfer under a controlled protocol. Results show that no merging strategy consistently dominates across all evaluation criteria, while censoring-aware evaluation can substantially alter the relative ranking of the compared methods. This benchmark provides a unified foundation for developing and evaluating more effective continual model merging methods for WSI-based survival analysis.
☆ Neural Disjunctive Normal Forms for Learning Exact Rank Filters
Gradient-based learning of morphological operators is hindered by locally sparse derivatives with respect to the structuring elements. We develop a method for learning rank filters that retains exact operator evaluation while distributing the derivatives across the window. Using threshold decomposition, we construct a neural disjunctive normal form representation and establish a sufficient condition for exactness with integer-valued images and structuring elements. We then derive a smooth surrogate from the unique root of a smooth threshold equation. Implicit differentiation gives closed-form derivatives with normalised local weights, whose distribution is controlled by a smoothing parameter. These derivatives are used in a straight-through procedure: the forward pass evaluates the exact rank filter, while the backward pass uses the surrogate. For fixed ranks, the procedure learns real-valued structuring elements of any rank filter, including the median, and extends to compositions, infima, and suprema of rank filters. Experiments on image denoising using MNIST and Fashion-MNIST and retinal vessel segmentation show that, starting from a generic random initialisation, the proposed approach consistently improves performance over training with exact subgradients in every setting. In image denoising, our best network also outperforms smooth morphological networks in all settings. On vessel segmentation, the learned erosions recover structuring elements that fit the vessels, as theoretically expected, whereas most of those trained with exact subgradients remain close to their initialisation.
comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables
☆ DS-BiCA-Net: Pair-Preserving Cross-Temporal Modeling for Remote Sensing Change Captioning
Remote sensing image change captioning (RSICC) describes in natural language the semantic changes between two images of the same scene captured at different times. Previous methods commonly merge the pair during repeated processing or combine intra-image and cross-image relations in one operation, weakening source identity and leaving the two temporal directions implicit. Without separate modules for intra-image and cross-temporal processing and a separate path for each direction, the contribution of each part cannot be measured on its own, so it remains unclear which part matters most, and the design of later models has no such evidence to build on. To address these issues, we propose DS-BiCA-Net, which assigns the two kinds of processing to separate modules and keeps the two images as separate streams throughout the encoder. A windowed state-space module models context within each image, and a bidirectional cross-attention module compares the two images along two directed paths that share their projections. The two modules use the same pre-normalisation residual architecture and differ only in their mixers, and the two streams are fused only in the aggregation head, so each module and each direction can be removed and its contribution measured on its own. Controlled experiments on LEVIR-CC and Dubai-CC examine operator interaction, temporal direction and module order, showing that intra-image refinement carries no benefit alone and becomes beneficial only when followed by bidirectional cross-attention, an order that outperforms the reverse at matched parameter count and FLOPs. The bidirectional module also outperforms either temporal direction alone. Our method reaches an S_m^* of 82.65 on LEVIR-CC, the highest among the published results compared, and 66.72 on Dubai-CC without geometric augmentation, the second-highest among the published results compared.
☆ Depth-Dependent Safety Geometry in Vision-Language Models: Layer-Wise Localization and Bidirectional Refusal Control NeurIPS 2026
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are widely deployed, yet the internal mechanisms behind their safety behavior remain poorly understood. We present a lightweight inference-time framework for localizing and manipulating safety-sensitive representations in frozen VLMs, without retraining or modifying parameters. On Qwen3-VL-4B, layer-wise activation divergence analysis reveals non-uniform safety geometry across depth. Causal interventions show that early vision layers support strong bidirectional refusal control through activation steering along a learned safety direction, with unsafe rejection spanning 6%-96%, whereas later layers respond more to activation magnitude scaling and exhibit a substantial safety-selectivity trade-off. Deeper layers remain well separated along the safety direction yet are largely insensitive to steering, distinguishing representational separability from causal controllability. InternVL2.5-4B shows qualitatively similar depth-dependent activation geometry despite differences in layer location and magnitude. Our results expose a white-box, representation-level refusal-bypass attack surface in VLM vision encoders and motivate inference-time stabilization of safety-sensitive representations.
comment: Accepted at the NeurIPS 2026 Workshop
☆ Searching with Sparse Histories: Cross-Task Architecture Search from Incomplete Search Logs and Zero-Cost Proxies
Neural architecture search (NAS) is expensive, but cross-task transfer can reduce costs by reusing knowledge from previous tasks. However, existing methods struggle with sparse search histories and task-specific transfer failures. We propose a method, a risk-robust strategy that combines sparse source logs with zero-cost proxies through champion-based initialization and joint pairwise-ranker pretraining. On TransNAS-Bench-101, the proposal mitigates severe worst-case failures, reducing worst-10% ranks from 290 to 43 for Micro autoencoding and from 465 to 45 for Macro room layout. Across 13 cell-space targets, it outperforms a proxy-only ranker on 10 targets in both mean and worst-case performance, while maintaining competitive average performance.
☆ $Ψ$-0.6: Adaptive Streams of Thought in a Unified Vision-Language World Model
Khai Loong Aw, Klemen Kotar, Baihan Zhang, Yifan Liu, Lilian Chen, Atlas Kazemian, Rahul Venkatesh, Daniel Yamins
Humans reason about the physical world by flexibly combining different forms of inference as a problem unfolds. Achieving this flexibility is a major open challenge in AI: capabilities often remain separated across specialized models, limiting how they can be composed and jointly adapted to a task. We introduce $Ψ$-0.6, a unified vision-language world model that adaptively composes perception, language, geometry, and simulation within a shared reasoning process we call streams of thought. These streams interleave images, text, and explicit representations of geometry and motion, all of which the model can generate and interpret through a shared token interface. $Ψ$-0.6 surpasses leading open-weight models zero-shot on multi-view spatial reasoning, with further gains from reasoning through geometric intermediates. It also supports counterfactual simulation: generating and interpreting imagined scenes to determine, for example, whether moving an object would obstruct a pathway. Reinforcement learning from task feedback jointly optimizes the selection, generation, and use of intermediate representations, improving visual question-answering accuracy with gains that transfer to unseen benchmarks. $Ψ$-0.6 offers a path toward adaptive physical reasoning -- not only predicting the physical world but also choosing the representations through which to reason.
☆ Real-Time Localisation of Dorsal Anatomical Regions on Dairy Cows in Commercial Rotary Parlours from RGB-D
Automated monitoring of dairy cows increasingly measures one part of the body, such as the rump for temperature or the back for posture, yet the region itself is usually placed by hand. Existing systems either score the cow as a whole or detect sparse keypoints, often in controlled walkways, and neither yields the named region masks that such measurements need on a crowded commercial rotary platform. We present a perception front end that finds the target cow, ten bony landmarks and four named dorsal regions (withers, back, rump and tail-head) in a single forward pass over a whole RGB-D frame from a commercial rotary parlour. Two encoders, one for colour and one for depth, are fused late and share one decoder with three heads. On an anatomical region dataset that we built on public rotary-parlour RGB-D images (538 annotated frames, cow-disjoint test set), the network reaches PCK@10 0.905 for landmarks and region IoU 0.70 to 0.91, and runs end to end in 26.4 ms per frame on a T4 GPU, against an 11 fps camera. Dense region supervision is what makes the landmarks accurate: removing the region head costs 0.15 PCK@10. Agreement between the two heads flags unreliable frames without labels. On our own rig at the largest dairy farm in Western Australia, the model transfers with ten labelled frames (PCK@10 0.84), and its regions are carried through depth into a radiometric thermal camera, giving one repeatable temperature per region and cow.
comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables. Submitted to ACRA 2026
☆ Forging Emotions: a deep learning experiment on emotions and art
Affective computing is an interdisciplinary field that studies computational methods that relate to or influence emotion. These methods have been applied to interactive media artworks, but they have focused on affect detection rather than affect generation. For affect generation, computationally creative methods need to be explored that have recently been driven by the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), a deep learning method. The experiment presented in this paper, Forging Emotions, explores the use of visual emotion datasets and the working processes of GANs for visual affect generation, that is, for generating images that can convey or trigger specified emotions. This experiment concludes that the methodology used so far by computer science researchers to build image datasets for describing high-level concepts such as emotions is insufficient and proposes utilizing emotional networks of associations according to psychology research. Forging Emotions also concludes that to generate affect visually, merely corresponding to basic psychology findings, such as bright or dark colours, does not seem adequate. Therefore, research efforts should aim to understand the structure of trained GANs and compositional GANs in order to produce genuinely novel compositions that can convey or trigger emotions through the subject matter of generated images.
comment: 10 pages. Published in Artnodes no. 31 (2023), Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, under CC BY 4.0. Extended version of a paper presented at ISEA 2022, Barcelona
☆ Playing Bias: Epistemic Games for Interpreting Text-to-Image Models
Text-to-image (T2I) systems do not merely render prompts; they circulate defaults for "what X looks like," shaping recognition through pose, camera, costume, props, and setting. While technical audits quantify disparities, they rarely cultivate the literacy needed to argue how images assemble stereotypes and confer authority. This paper translates a three-stage, humanities-informed framework into a set of epistemic games that make this cultural work visible and debatable: Interpret (art-historical close looking with AI outputs), Interrogate (counter-intent prompting as artistic exploration), and Expose (creative misuse through paired prompts with a constant motif and a BiasSlot rule, in which only the bias cue varies). In a pilot with undergraduate fine-arts students, the games shifted discussion from impressionistic reactions to concise, warranted hypotheses grounded in visual evidence, supported by lightweight classroom instruments that enabled reproducibility and structured collaboration. We argue that such game-based approaches foster critical literacy across educational contexts, equipping learners to recognize, discuss, and contest how T2I models encode bias.
comment: 11 pages. Accepted at iLRN 2026, the 12th International Conference of the Immersive Learning Research Network, Athens, Greece, June 2026. Video presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_4MiKG5sjw
☆ Separating Angular Alignment from Radial Ordering in Hyperbolic Vision-Language Models
Mingyang Gao, Yuwei Wu, Shiyu Luo, Wei Wu, Xiaomeng Fan, Qihao Lv, Haoyu Zhang, Rui Gao, Bingzhen Liu, Zhi Gao, Che Sun
Hyperbolic vision-language models are well suited to modeling the hierarchical structure of multimodal data, because hyperbolic volume grows exponentially with radius, enabling low-distortion representations of tree-like taxonomies from general to specific concepts. However, existing pretraining objectives for hyperbolic vision-language models entangle semantic alignment with entailment modeling, forcing radial coordinates to simultaneously encode semantic matching and hierarchical structure, leading to conflicting geometric constraints. In this paper, we introduce AURORA, a hyperbolic vision-language framework that decouples the objectives through angular alignment and a novel Radial-Angular Order Cone (RAOC) for entailment modeling. Angular alignment captures semantic similarity while preserving the radial structure for representing hierarchies. Unlike conventional entailment cones, RAOC determines angular allowance from relative parent-child radial gaps. It is incorporated into hierarchical entailment contrastive training to capture partial-order relations. We further introduce a norm regularization term that prevents undesirable radial degeneration for stable training. We train models on millions of image-text pairs and evaluate them across zero-shot classification, image-text retrieval, hierarchical reasoning, and compositional understanding. Our model consistently outperforms strong Euclidean and hyperbolic vision-language baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of decoupling semantic alignment from hierarchical entailment modeling.
comment: 34 pages, 12 figures
☆ SyncPro: Synchronous Reasoning and Responding for Proactive Streaming Video Understanding
Xueyun Tian, Bingbing Xu, Jiaming Liu, Jinpeng Yu, Yang Shi, Yu Zhao, Ruihua Huang, Yuanzhuo Wang, Huawei Shen
Proactive streaming video understanding requires assistants to track unfolding events and respond when a user's requested condition is met. To make these decisions, assistants must accumulate relevant evidence and reassess response conditions as new observations arrive. Existing work offers complementary capabilities for this process: proactive video assistants learn when to respond, while streaming video reasoning methods generate scheduled intermediate text to organize observations and support subsequent answers. Together, these capabilities provide a foundation for proactive reasoning, but how to coordinate ongoing reasoning with timely responses remains underexplored. In a direct adaptation, fixed reasoning intervals can trigger updates when nothing relevant has changed or postpone useful updates until the next scheduled step. Sharing one generation path also couples two distinct requirements: preserving evidence for future decisions and producing only the response requested by the user. Moreover, responses generated after reasoning must wait for it to finish, even when sufficient evidence is already available. To address these challenges, we introduce SyncPro, a synchronous dual-stream framework with specialized generation paths for evidence tracking and user-facing responses. Its Inner and Response branches share causal history and activate independently, allowing relevant evidence changes to trigger internal updates and responses to proceed concurrently with ongoing reasoning. We construct 189K dual-stream examples and train SyncPro through supervised fine-tuning followed by trajectory-level reinforcement learning. Experiments across three proactive benchmarks show improved response timing and more accurate answers to user requests.
☆ Data Quality in RVL-CDIP: A Systematic Audit
RVL-CDIP is the de facto standard benchmark for document classification, and reported accuracy on it is now 98.8%. In this paper, we audit RVL-CDIP for data quality issues and find that approximately 10.5% of its 400,000 documents have erroneous labels and that 35.2% of the test set has a duplicate or near-duplicate in the training set. Identification codes on the pages are sufficient to classify at 69% accuracy, and a state-of-the-art model loses 11 points without them. Image-only models trained on RVL-CDIP lose 16 to 28 points on documents from other sources, and the choice of OCR engine changes accuracy by 4.1 to 8.3 points. We find that nearly 16,000 RVL-CDIP documents contain sensitive personal data, and produce de-identified versions of these documents. We re-benchmark 25 models, and with all defects remediated, the 13 that we retrain are 0.9 to 2.9 points more accurate than in the original condition; the most accurate of them, LayoutLMv3, is 96.5% accurate. We release the corrected corpus, the annotations and the out-of-distribution data.
☆ ImageRSI: Verification-Driven Recursive Self-Improvement for Agentic Image Generation
Complex text-to-image requests remain difficult to satisfy reliably. Verifying and repairing an image can fix an individual output, but a successful repair does not necessarily carry over to other requests. We present ImageRSI, a framework that keeps the image generator frozen and combines three components: five-dimensional verification and repair within each task, an experience library shared across tasks, and offline updating of the judge. Candidate experiences enter the library only after paired A/B validation, and the judge is updated with supervised fine-tuning and GRPO on accumulated image-judgment records and evaluated before reuse. We also introduce ImageReq-Bench, a benchmark of 961 requests built around hard cases in real-world image-generation requests, each paired with an evaluation checklist. ImageRSI achieves a Checklist Strict Accuracy (CSA) of 52.6% on MindBench (with Nano Banana Pro as the generator) and 65.66% on ImageReq-Bench, and we compare system outcomes across judge-training configurations.
☆ TTT in VLA Models: Exploring Training with Human Demonstrations
Long-horizon robot tasks require retaining and using past information. We integrate Test-Time Training (TTT), which stores context in fast weights, into InternVLA-A1 and Pi0.5 to study action generation conditioned on human demonstrations through training on paired demonstrations and robot trajectories. We implement memory transfer between the two phases and truncated backpropagation, and examine training objectives, gradient coverage, and contrastive regularization across video, short-video, and single-frame cue tasks. In our experiments, adding TTT and training on paired data at the current scale did not lead to consistent target selection based on demonstrations. Under the tested settings, shorter sequences, full trajectory gradient connectivity, and contrastive regularization did not clearly improve responsiveness to demonstrations. When demonstrations were reduced to single-frame cues, real-robot execution still showed a preference for cups at fixed positions. We document the implementation, training configurations, and observations to support further inspection and replication.
comment: 22 pages, 6 figures, a techreport form standard-robots company
☆ RADIANT: Object-Centric Feed-Forward Global Illumination
Feed-forward neural renderers synthesize global illumination across novel 3D scenes without per-scene optimization or runtime ray tracing. Existing transformer-based renderers tokenize individual triangles, so self-attention scales quadratically with mesh resolution. Yet macroscopic radiative transport is governed by the underlying surface geometry and object arrangements rather than a particular mesh discretization; finer tessellation can thus inflate token counts without changing the underlying transport physics, motivating a discretization-agnostic and object-centric representation. We introduce RADIANT (RADiance-based Inter-Actor Neural Transformer), an object-centric architecture for feed-forward global illumination from point inputs. By representing each object with a compact budget of 32 surface-patch tokens, RADIANT decouples attention sequence length from polygon counts. In a single network, an inter-object scene transformer models 3D radiative exchange and a view decoder renders images at target camera poses. To capture light transport without materializing O(N^2) bias matrices, invariant form-factor attention embeds geometric distances and surface orientations directly into query-key dot products as SE(3)-invariant inner products weighted by learned area and material gains. For primary visibility without mesh connectivity, camera rays cross-attend scene tokens guided by depth-tested point splats in a shared spherical frame. Across a 1.03M-scene benchmark under matched model capacity, RADIANT reaches 25 dB tone-mapped PSNR in 5x fewer training steps than RenderFormer, and achieves 32.2 dB at 600k steps (+3.3 dB over RenderFormer and +7.6 dB over RenderFormer-V2). We further demonstrate the scalability of RADIANT, which completes a 512x512 forward pass of a 500-object scene in 0.83 s, with computational cost scaling with the number of objects rather than polygons.
☆ Guided Zero-Shot Anomaly Explanation for Anonymized Crowd Video Monitoring: Context, Categorization, and Spatial Localization
Despite the promising development of deep learning for video anomaly detection (VAD), explainability (XAI) of these models remains a challenge. Explainable and privacy-protecting VAD builds transparency and trust that facilitates adoption of computer vision systems, including safety and security monitoring. However, anomaly explainability in privacy-preserving VAD systems is underexplored. In this study, we present the XAVAD approach, a unified descriptive anomaly XAI for an anonymized VAD, that integrates flexible zero-shot anonymization, anomaly type categorization, visual localization, and scene context description. We provide empirical and qualitative assessments of multifaceted explanations integrated with full-body visual anonymization for privacy protection. We adopt a multimodal CLIP embedding for videos, using improved LLM-assisted prompting and pool-scoring mechanisms for anomaly-type identification. We enhance Grad-ECLIP for spatial anomaly heatmap localization, leveraging computation and accuracy through our novel prompt-guided patching autofocus mechanism. We employ VLMs to generate context and reasoning descriptions of detected anomalies through curated prompt engineering. We have evaluated the accuracy and computational cost of XAVAD on several publicly available CCTV and video datasets. Our experiments demonstrate substantial gains of our XAVAD over state-of-the-art benchmark approaches and provide insights into privacy protection trade-offs in XAI for VAD. We further present ablation studies and assessments across diverse configurations and modeling alternatives to demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed methods. Code: https://github.com/muleina/XAVAD}{https://github.com/muleina/XAVAD .
comment: 21 pages, 12 figures, 13 tables, preprint
☆ Concept Acupuncturist: An Efficient and Precise Concept Erasure Method for Diffusion Models via Sparse Autoencoders
Diffusion-based image generation models produce high-quality images but may generate harmful or policy-violating content, motivating machine unlearning (MU) to selectively remove target concepts while preserving general capabilities. However, existing MU approaches often struggle with the distributed and entangled nature of concept representations, leading to inefficient optimization and imprecise edits when applied through large-scale fine-tuning over full diffusion trajectories. To bridge this gap, we propose Concept Acupuncturist (ConceptACP), a novel MU framework that integrates interpretability-guided analysis with inference-free fine-tuning for efficient and precise concept removal. By establishing mappings between semantic concepts and cross-attention blocks in the U-Net denoiser and localizing the most concept-relevant block for targeted optimization, ConceptACP avoids full diffusion trajectory optimization, thereby improving fine-tuning efficiency. To mitigate concept entanglement, we propose a feature-level correction mechanism based on Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), where SAE-derived sparse, semantically meaningful feature activations are manipulated to construct targeted correction signals, which are then projected back to the output space of the corresponding block and used as supervision for precise concept removal. Consequently, ConceptACP eliminates the need for external inference-time modules while achieving efficient and fine-grained unlearning. Instantiated on SDXL-Turbo, ConceptACP improves the forgetting success rate by 36.34 percentage points in the standard one-step generation setting on average over the best-performing baseline, while preserving image quality and prompt fidelity, and generalizes effectively across other Stable Diffusion backbones. Our code is available at https://github.com/Eran-Xia/ConceptACP.
☆ ACVA-Bench: Beyond Prompt Following in Abstract Concept Visualization Ability for Text-to-Image Models
Text-to-image (T2I) models have achieved remarkable progress in image quality and instruction following, prompting growing research interest in their capacity for deep understanding that goes beyond literal prompt matching. However, without an explicit visual scheme provided, it remains unclear and has not been systematically evaluated whether T2I models can autonomously translate abstract concepts lacking a fixed visual referent, such as "loyalty," into visual representations that are accurate, diverse, and distinguishable from closely related concepts. We define this capability as Abstract Concept Visualization Ability (ACVA) and introduce ACVA-Bench, a category-balanced benchmark grounded in psycholinguistic norms of abstract concepts, which examines models' ACVA along three dimensions semantic sufficiency, representational diversity, and conceptual distinctiveness under a low-intervention setting that withholds concrete objects, scenes, or visual metaphors. Since abstract concepts lack a unique reference image, conventional evaluation metrics that rely on reference-image matching are difficult to apply. To address this, we propose a fine-grained visual-semantic evaluation method constrained by concept semantics, which decomposes concept semantics into independently verifiable visual-semantic questions to assess the semantic representation quality of generated images, with its validity further confirmed by human evaluation. Benchmarking results on mainstream T2I models show that these models rely on a small set of prototypical visual patterns, leaving room for improvement in representational diversity and conceptual distinctiveness for abstract concepts, thereby providing an interpretable and reproducible evaluation foundation for future research.
☆ X-Dubbing: Speech-to-Speech Translation under Temporal and Visual Constraints
Cross-lingual dubbing aims to convert source speech into target-language speech that remains synchronized with the original video. The key to this task is to produce a faithful translation that is naturally speakable within the source timing, which is non-trivial because languages differ in duration, rhythm, and articulation. In this paper, we propose X-Dubbing, which formulates the task as a joint problem of time-aware speech-to-text translation and video-aware text-to-speech. Specifically, our method consists of a Dubbing Translator that generates temporally structured scripts and a Voice Actor that renders them in synchrony with the source video, both grounded in a language-agnostic timing budget. We further refine the translator with dubbing-aware feedback from the synthesized speech, encouraging scripts that yield well-synchronized dubbing. This design requires no paired dubbing data, as the two components are trained on speech-text and monolingual audio-visual data respectively. Extensive experiments show that X-Dubbing outperforms recent baselines across diverse metrics, including isochrony and audio-visual correspondence.
☆ NUViT: Vision Transformers for Fourier Space Data
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated strong performance in many computer vision tasks but do not naturally extend beyond the natural image domain. One important example is Fourier-space data, which is used to represent a rich and diverse set of modalities, including medical imaging and microscopy. Standard ViT tokenization partitions an image into square patches on a Cartesian grid, which poorly fit the frequency and phase structure of Fourier-space data. We introduce Non-Uniform ViT, a simple, general-purpose vision transformer that redesigns image tokenization, data representation, and positional encoding to respect this structure. Experiments on Fourier-domain image classification, 2D crystal lattice identification, MRI annotation, and cryo-EM protein heterogeneity analysis show that NUViT consistently captures the structure of Fourier data better than standard architectures.
☆ Rethinking Representation Geometry in Supervised Contrastive Learning under Long-Tailed Data
Supervised contrastive learning and its balanced variants have demonstrated their effectiveness for representation learning under long-tailed distributions. However, although prior analyses suggest that their optimal representations may exhibit a regular simplex geometry, whether such a geometry is indeed exhibited remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we present a theoretical framework for these objectives that characterizes whether a regular simplex is formed at the optimum. By applying this to representative objectives, we show that these objectives fail to form a regular simplex at the optimum because they remain dependent on the number of samples per class. Motivated by this analysis, we introduce structural balancing that can be applied to contrastive objectives, and propose a fully balanced contrastive objective that provably forms a regular simplex geometry at its optimum. Both theoretical and empirical results demonstrate that the proposed method yields a more balanced representation space and improves performance on long-tailed recognition and transfer learning tasks.
☆ MAGIC: Margin-gated Contrastive Debiasing with Evidence Restoration for VLM Test-time Robustness Scaling
This paper studies the problem of test-time robustness scaling for large vision-language models (LVLMs), which aims to mitigate language bias during inference. Existing approaches typically adopt test-time scaling techniques such as contrastive decoding to improve inference performance. Despite the progress, the performance of these approaches is far from satisfactory due to intentional evidence removal during perturbations and redundant inference cost. Towards this end, we propose a novel approach named Margin-gated Contrastive Debiasing with Evidence Restoration (MAGIC). The core of our MAGIC is to evaluate the decision margins of LVLMs to selectively activate textual and visual perturbation branches for efficient debiased inference. In particular, our MAGIC first measures the prediction margins of crucial tokens, and applies a gating function to identify low-confidence responses that are susceptible to language biases. For selected samples, we integrate the token logits from multiple textual and image perturbation branches with the original ones for debiased decision. More importantly, we selectively restore the most informative corrupted views with sharp prediction distributions for ambiguous samples after debiasing, enabling evidence recovery for discriminative decision-making. We further utilize a calibration dataset to actively identify and prune ineffective branches during contrastive debiasing for cost reduction. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed MAGIC in comparison with extensive baselines.
♻ ☆ Driving Video Retrieval for Complex Queries with Structured Grounding NeurIPS 2026
Video retrieval at scale is central to data curation and safety validation in autonomous driving, where users want to find not only scenes but also dynamic events such as cut-ins and hard braking. Existing vision-language and keyword-based retrieval methods often miss these events because the relevant motion may not be explicitly described in text or captured by lexical overlap. Rule-based retrieval can encode such events more directly, but it is brittle: generated or hand-written rules often fail when their assumptions do not match real driving data. We propose STRIVE-D, a data-calibrated retrieval framework for driving videos. It uses weakly labeled in-domain videos to estimate when a query rule is reliable, adapt rules that mismatch observed data, and fuse calibrated rule scores with vision-language and keyword-based retrieval signals. Across three driving benchmarks, including newly released human-annotated event data on DrivingDojo, STRIVE-D delivers up to 84% relative improvement in top-1 accuracy over state-of-the-art methods.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ Semantic Anchoring for Robotic Action Representations
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models inherit rich semantic representations from pretrained Vision-Language Models, yet fine-tuning on limited robot demonstrations degrades this structure and undermines generalization. A fundamental question therefore arises: what constitutes a good action representation? Inspired by the mirror neuron theory's insight that observation and execution share an intention-level encoding, we examine whether a robot's action representations preserve the semantic structure captured by pretrained encoders. Systematic probing confirms that this structure erodes during finetuning, and that its quality synchronizes with both task success and out-of-distribution generalization. We further introduce a plug-and-play method that anchors action representations to a semantic manifold while decomposing representations into a shared semantic channel and a private channel, all discarded at inference, leaving the deployed model unchanged. Validated on different VLA backbones across simulation and real-world benchmarks, our method yields up to +18.7% on real-world in-distribution tasks and +21.5% on out-of-distribution generalization.
comment: Accepted at CoRL 2026. Project page: https://xy02-05.github.io/SemanticMN
♻ ☆ Test-Time Scaling of Text-to-Image Flow Matching Models with Noise-Rejuvenated Sequential Monte Carlo
Test-time scaling of diffusion models with sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) has become a promising strategy for sampling under user-specified rewards, such as human preference scores. However, the standard SMC framework typically relies on stochastic proposals and therefore does not directly transfer to flow matching models, in which inference is governed by deterministic ODEs. In this work, we introduce noise-rejuvenated SMC, an inference-time scaling method tailored for text-to-image flow matching models. Our key idea is to perturb each resampled particle by changing its source noise and constructing a new intermediate state using its current endpoint estimate. This moves the particle to another state that remains representable under the flow-matching interpolation form, enabling particle exploration without converting the sampler to an SDE. We further introduce a look-ahead mechanism to refine resampled particles before weighting. Experiments on Stable Diffusion 3, FLUX.1-dev, and Z-Image demonstrate consistent improvements in reward-guided generation, while ablation studies validate the contributions of noise rejuvenation and look-ahead refinement. Code is available at https://github.com/shermanlian/NR-SMC.
comment: Accepted to TMLR
♻ ☆ Attention-space Contrastive Guidance for Efficient Hallucination Mitigation in LVLMs CVPR 2026
Hallucinations in large vision--language models (LVLMs) often arise when language priors dominate over visual evidence, leading to object misidentification and visually inconsistent descriptions. We address this problem by framing hallucination mitigation as contrastive guidance that steers generation toward visually grounded and semantically faithful text. We propose Attention-space Contrastive Guidance (ACG), a training-free, single-pass method that operates directly in self-attention layers, where hallucination-inducing cross-modal biases emerge. ACG constructs both image-conditioned and approximate text-only attention paths within a single forward pass, enabling efficient guidance before errors accumulate at the output layer. Because this masking-based surrogate can introduce approximation bias, we further apply a lightweight orthogonal projection that suppresses components aligned with the text-only path, yielding a more visually grounded correction. Experiments on CHAIR and POPE show that ACG improves faithfulness over existing training-free baselines while maintaining caption quality, reducing latency by up to $2\times$ compared to multi-pass contrastive decoding methods.
comment: Accepted at CVPR 2026 Findings. Code: https://github.com/ZoYujin/ACG
♻ ☆ LEVI: Benchmarking Visual Identity Fidelity with Verifiable Low-Entropy Constructs
Modern generative models can produce visually plausible images while violating exact identity constraints. Evaluating such failures requires distinguishing violations of the requested identity from permissible variation in appearance. We introduce Low-Entropy Visual Identity (LEVI), which characterizes visual identities determined by compact facts and explicit rules. The low-entropy requirement concerns identity uncertainty, while appearance may remain diverse. We formulate identity fidelity in terms of the probability that a conditional image distribution assigns to the identities permitted by the prompt. Visual Identity Spaces (VIS) formalize this distinction by specifying admissible identity values and which different realizations express the same identity. Building on this formulation, we develop Verifiable Visual Grammar (VVG), a declarative language whose typed primitives and compositional constraints describe identity-bearing structures. Using this grammar, we build a benchmark for image generation. It assesses each output against the task's identity requirements, drawing evidence from the final pixels. The curated benchmark contains 1,375 tasks spanning 120 base identity spaces across six domains. Among ten evaluated model configurations, the highest whole-task pass rate is 58.69%. These results reveal a persistent gap between visually plausible images and faithful realization of their specified identities. Project page: https://maxiao0234.github.io/LEVI/.
comment: 24 pages, including supplementary material. Updated author list and affiliations. Main text and quantitative results unchanged
♻ ☆ DepState-JEPA: Learning Depth-Grounded State Representation for Visual Perception and Manipulation
Xiujian Liang, Liuyuan Na, Zehao Du, Jiacheng Xu, Weixi Song, Mingyang Sun, Xingjun Ma, Cewu Lu, Jianhua Sun
Predictive representations for robot manipulation should connect scene geometry with the state changes induced by actions. Our intuition is that understanding what an action will change starts with understanding where things are: complementary RGB and depth observations ground a common scene representation from which to infer those changes. Guided by this intuition, we introduce DepState-JEPA, a dual-stream RGB--Depth joint-embedding predictive architecture that connects spatial understanding with action-conditioned prediction through a shared latent state, DepState. Built on V-JEPA~2.1, the framework uses depth both as a complementary observation stream and to ground both modalities in metric 3D space, aggregating shared information into DepState while retaining modality-private features for decoding. Ray-conditioned readouts predict local features without target depth; after an action-conditioned transition, the same decoders predict future RGB and depth features using the predicted state and fixed initial private features. Robot-state readouts provide recursive proprioceptive inputs; object-trajectory supervision and calibrated forward kinematics shape state learning through motion targets and joint--TCP consistency. Comparisons show stronger RGB-encoder transfer after RGB-D adaptation, feature completion, conditioned visual forecasting, and manipulation success. Within-model ablations identify contributions from depth content, metric coordinates, and future-state matching, with additional control gains from FK regularization. The project page is available at https://shawnleung-sii.github.io/depstate-jepa/.
♻ ☆ From Frames to Temporal Graphs: In-Context Egocentric Action Recognition with Vision-Language Models
Bessie Dominguez-Dager, Francisco Gomez-Donoso, Miguel Cazorla, Marc Pollefeys, Daniel Barath, Zuria Bauer
Action reasoning in egocentric video requires capturing fine-grained transitions of hand-object interactions, a task where general-purpose Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle when operating directly on raw pixels. We propose to decouple visual perception from symbolic reasoning by converting videos into Temporal Action Graphs. In a multi-stage prompting pipeline, we first generate dense natural language narratives over short temporal windows as a semantic bottleneck, then formalize them into structured, open-vocabulary graph representations. On the EGTEA and Epic-Kitchens-100 datasets, the symbolic representation unlocks efficient in-context learning: few-shot graph demonstrations yield substantial accuracy gains over zero-shot frame-based inference. Even in the zero-shot setting, graph-based reasoning remains competitive with pixel-based inference despite potential pretraining contamination favoring the latter. Across 11 open-weight VLMs from 6 model families ranging from 2B to 235B parameters, our findings indicate that current VLMs are more effective as symbolic reasoners than as direct visual observers. By projecting video into the language domain, we provide a scalable, fine-tuning-free alternative to end-to-end approaches that better leverages these models' latent reasoning strengths. The code will be made public.
♻ ☆ Demo: Generative AI helps Radiotherapy Planning with User Preference NeurIPS 2025
Riqiang Gao, Simon Arberet, Martin Kraus, Han Liu, Wilko F. A. R. Verbakel, Dorin Comaniciu, Florin-Cristian Ghesu, Ali Kamen
Radiotherapy planning is a highly complex process that often varies significantly across institutions and individual planners. Most existing deep learning approaches for 3D dose prediction rely on reference plans as ground truth during training, which can inadvertently bias models toward specific planning styles or institutional preferences. In this study, we introduce a novel generative model that predicts 3D dose distributions based solely on user-defined preference flavors. These customizable preferences enable planners to prioritize specific trade-offs between organs-at-risk (OARs) and planning target volumes (PTVs), offering greater flexibility and personalization. Designed for seamless integration with clinical treatment planning systems, our approach assists users in generating high-quality plans efficiently. Comparative evaluations demonstrate that our method can surpasses the Varian RapidPlan model in both adaptability and plan quality in some scenarios.
comment: Best paper in GenAI4Health at NeurIPS 2025
♻ ☆ Multilevel Stochastic Plug-and-Play for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction
Sparse-view computed tomography (SVCT) reduces radiation exposure and acquisition time, but the limited number of projection views makes the reconstruction problem severely ill-posed and leads to streak artifacts when analytical methods are used. Plug-and-Play (PnP) methods combine data fidelity with learned image priors, while stochastic PnP methods use re-noising to reduce the mismatch between denoiser training inputs and reconstruction iterates. However, these methods often require many iterations, which limits their practical efficiency. In this work, we propose multilevel (ML) Stochastic Plug-and-Play (ML-SPnP), a ML stochastic PnP method for SVCT reconstruction formulated on wavelet multiresolution analysis (MRA) approximation spaces. The method combines coarse-to-fine initialization with a finite sequence of ML corrections using resolution-specific denoisers. Under suitable assumptions, the fine-level iterations following the finite ML phase inherit the convergence guarantees of the underlying stochastic PnP algorithm. Experiments on two CT datasets with 20-50 projection views show that ML-SPnP achieves reconstruction quality comparable to the evaluated stochastic PnP methods, while generally requiring less reconstruction time. These results support ML acceleration as an effective strategy for reducing the computational cost of stochastic PnP reconstruction. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/antoinedepaepe/ml-spnp.
comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables
♻ ☆ DisPOSE: Projected Polystochastic Diffusion for Self-Supervised Multi-View 3D Human Pose Estimation ICML 2026
Recovering 3D human poses for multiple individuals from different camera views is a fundamental bottleneck for analyzing interacting behaviors. Existing self-supervised approaches leverage synthetic catalogues of 3D poses; however, this leads to poor generalization in real-world scenarios due to distribution shifts. We therefore introduce DisPOSE, a self-supervised framework that approximates the inherently discrete multi-view person-assignment problem as a generative diffusion process over the space of polystochastic tensors. By employing differentiable Sinkhorn projections during denoising, our model learns to guide solutions toward valid and feasible assignments based on 2D image priors. The complete 3D skeletons of localized individuals are then regressed using a Hypergraph-Convolutional Decoder that explicitly models relational structures and articulated joints across multiple views. The proposed approach outperforms current state-of-the-art self-supervised methods on standard datasets and demonstrates strong performance on a newly proposed benchmark featuring highly occluded scenes from surgical operating rooms. Our diffusion-based localization demonstrates high label efficiency, retaining 99% of its performance with only 10% of the pseudo-labels. Notably, disentangling the assignment and root regression components while maintaining differentiability makes DisPOSE nearly agnostic to different camera arrangements. Project site and code: https://wngtn.github.io/DisPOSE/
comment: Accepted at ICML 2026
♻ ☆ SpatialMem: Metric-Aligned Long-Horizon Video Memory for Language Grounding and QA
Xinyi Zheng, Yunze Liu, Chi-Hao Wu, Fan Zhang, Hao Zheng, Wenqi Zhou, Walterio W. Mayol-Cuevas, Junxiao Shen
SpatialMem is a memory-based system which integrates 3D geometry, semantics, and language with one another in one combined, queryable representation. Starting with casually recorded egocentric RGB video, SpatialMem recreates metrically scaled interior scenes, recognizes structural 3D anchors (walls, doors, windows) as the first-layer scaffold, and associates open-vocabulary object nodes with evidence patches, visual embeddings, and two-layer descriptions to 3D coordinates, enabling spatial-relation reasoning, language-directed retrieval, and QA without special sensors. We test at scale on public benchmarks. On VSI-Bench ($288$ videos, $5{,}130$ questions) SpatialMem scores $37.5$ overall with RGB alone, and its margin is precisely where a metric memory should earn it (room size $41.4$ vs.\ $24.4$ with a same-size frame model). On the episodic-memory task of OpenEQA ($953$ questions) the memory serialised to text is lower than the blind control, but as evidence-frame retrieval it recovers frame-level accuracy, matching uniform sampling at an equal eight-frame budget and pulling ahead as the budget tightens, with every answer grounded in linked 3D evidence. On $12$ ScanNet scenes evaluated using instance-level official annotations, the anchor-first hierarchy assigns the retrieved object to the proper structural parent where open-vocabulary 3D scene graphs essentially cannot ($0.24$ compared to $0.01$ with matched input), a capability difference instead of an overall win. The queryable index has a cost of $14$\,KB per scene without the linked evidence frames, and we make available the suites, memories and code.
♻ ☆ Velocity-Space 3D Asset Editing NeurIPS 2026
Local 3D asset editing requires modifying a target region while preserving the rest. Existing methods enforce locality through mechanisms external to the generator, such as manual 3D masks, post-hoc voxel merging, or 2D multi-view lifting. None intervene where the corruption originates: inside the ODE sampler. For faithful local editing, a rectified-flow generator's velocity field should be strong over the target region while vanishing on preserved content. Yet a single velocity field can hardly satisfy both requirements, leading to three problems: (i) identity leakage that keeps the edit signal non-zero on preserved regions; (ii) no dedicated edit-amplification channel, so strengthening the edit perturbs identity; and (iii) identity drag at the geometry and material stages, where a global condition pulls every token toward the target. We propose VS3D (Velocity-Space 3D Asset editing), an inversion-free, training-free, and mask-free framework that derives edit and preserve signals by comparing the frozen model's source- and target-conditioned responses and realizes this principle through three stage-specific modules. Reconstruction-Anchored Source Injection (RASI) absorbs identity leakage by turning the unconditional embedding into a per-step, asset-specific anchor calibrated through source reconstruction. Partial-Mean Guidance (PMG) amplifies the edit signal by contrasting high- and low-quality subsample estimates of the velocity difference, active only where a consistent edit exists. Twin-Agreement Residual Injection (TAR) lets the sampler decide token by token what to preserve at the geometry and material stages. Experiments on diverse 3D assets show that VS3D outperforms state-of-the-art native-3D and 2D-lifted editors, demonstrating the effectiveness of velocity-space editing for training-free 3D asset editing. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/LHaoooo/VS3D.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. Revised manuscript with additional experiments and supplementary material
♻ ☆ Order Matters: Competition-Guided Query Ordering for RNN-Based Object Detection NeurIPS 2026
DETR-style detectors use one-to-one bipartite matching during training to assign object queries to ground-truth objects, enabling end-to-end set prediction without non-maximum suppression (NMS). However, without an explicit de-duplication procedure, multiple queries can still produce highly similar hypotheses for the same object, making training unstable and predictions less decisive. Inspired by the sequential ordering of NMS, we propose DETRNN, a plug-and-play module that turns unordered object queries into a competition-aware sequence for recurrent refinement. DETRNN builds an explicit confidence-and-similarity based order from prior predictions, then refines queries with an RNN along this order to model competition inside the decoder. This ordered recurrent refinement reduces redundant predictions, stabilizes optimization, and improves final detection accuracy. Experiments on multiple DETR-style detectors show consistent gains with comparable efficiency. Code repository: https://github.com/nigelwoo2008-coder/DETRNN.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ StemBind: When MLLMs Get Lost Between Rules and Instances in Abstract Visual Reasoning NeurIPS 2026
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often know the rule but pick the wrong answer: on abstract visual reasoning (AVR) tasks, a model can describe what it sees and name the underlying pattern, yet still fail to choose the matching candidate. Existing AVR benchmarks cannot detect this because they collapse perception, rule induction, and answer selection into a single right-or-wrong signal. We introduce StemBind, a shared-stem diagnostic benchmark that probes the same visual stem with three aligned questions: Perception (what is in the image), Rule (what pattern governs it), and Full (which option completes it), so a final-answer error can be attributed to a specific sub-step on the same evidence. StemBind contains 2,298 curated knowledge-light stems across nine auditable visual operations, totaling 19,533 P/R/F tasks, with each full item annotated by Sternberg's four reasoning stages (S1 Encode, S2 Infer, S3 Map, S4 Apply). Evaluating 24 frontier MLLM configurations yields four findings. (i) The R-F chasm: rule accuracy exceeds full-item accuracy on 22 of 24 models, so most failures happen after the rule is identified. (ii) A persistent binding gap: even when P and R are both correct on the same stem, models still answer F incorrectly 51.2% of the time. (iii) The bottleneck is S3: process diagnostics and Stage-wise Stimulus Augmentation localize the dominant failure to rule-to-instance mapping. (iv) Scaling and thinking do not help: neither larger models nor explicit thinking mode reliably closes the gap, and thinking even lowers rule and full-item accuracy. StemBind reframes AVR evaluation from final-answer ranking to locating where abstract visual reasoning breaks down, identifying rule-to-instance binding as a concrete next target for vision-grounded reasoning.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026 (Evaluations and Datasets Track). Camera-ready version. Project page: https://hexixiang.github.io/StemBind ; Code: https://github.com/hexixiang/StemBind ; Data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/user48271/Stembind
♻ ☆ Attractive Faces Skew Text-to-Image Reward Models and Leaderboards WACV 2027
Human preference is now central to the evaluation, guidance, finetuning, and ranking of text-to-image models. However, the susceptibility of human preferences to bias in image generation remains underexplored. We identify a key observation: for human faces, perceived attractiveness overrides image quality in preference judgments, even when comparing real photographs of comparable fidelity. In a controlled user study, annotators rank more attractive faces as higher quality, even when unattractive real faces are compared with attractive AI-generated ones. We examine the downstream consequences of this bias. Firstly, simulating Elo rankings from user study data shows attractiveness can distort a leaderboard's ranking, elevating synthetic attractive faces over real, unattractive ones. Secondly, the same bias reappears in the human preference models. Editing 40 annotated facial attributes in isolation, we find that attractiveness is the strongest correlate of score for four of five human preference models (PickScore, MPS, HPSv2.1, HPSv3), and the strongest predictor of score in regression analysis. We further show that preference aligned generation shifts faces toward younger, more feminine faces, and can override explicit prompts for unattractive faces, thereby limiting user control. Finally, we explore mitigation strategies, both for data collection and post training on human preference models. These findings highlight the need for preference models that disentangle image quality from human cognitive bias, enabling more reliable evaluation.
comment: WACV 2027
♻ ☆ Half-Truths Break Similarity-Based Retrieval NeurIPS 2026
When a text description is extended with an additional detail, image-text similarity should drop if that detail is wrong. We show that CLIP-style dual encoders often violate this intuition: appending a plausible but incorrect object or relation to an otherwise correct description can increase the similarity score. We call such cases half-truths. On COCO, CLIP prefers the correct shorter description only 34.0% of the time, and performance drops to 27.8% when the added detail is a relation. We trace this vulnerability to weak supervision on caption parts: contrastive training aligns full sentences but does not explicitly enforce that individual entities and relations are grounded. We propose CS-CLIP (Component-Supervised CLIP), which decomposes captions into entity and relation units, constructs a minimally edited foil for each unit, and fine-tunes the model to score the correct unit above its foil while preserving standard dual-encoder inference. CS-CLIP raises half-truth accuracy to 76.4% and improves average performance on established compositional benchmarks by 5.8 points, suggesting that reducing half-truth errors aligns with broader gains in compositional understanding.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. Camera-ready version with expanded evaluation and additional analyses. 40 pages, 10 figures, including appendices. Code, checkpoints, and datasets: https://github.com/kargibora/CS-CLIP
♻ ☆ Barycentric Guidance: Turning Foundation Image Editors into Continuous Affective Controllers NeurIPS 2026
Emotions are expressed on a continuum and are naturally described in the valence-arousal (VA) space. Existing VA-based image editors are typically training-based and domain-specific, limiting them to VA regions seen during training and making them brittle across datasets and domains. Meanwhile, despite producing high-quality edits, state-of-the-art foundation image editors are not continuous affective controllers: non-linear emotion representations in text encoders makes prompt interpolation poorly calibrated, so accurate and continuous VA control remains unreliable. To fill this gap, we introduce Barycentric Guidance, a training-free framework that turns pretrained foundation image editors into continuous affective controllers over VA, requiring no finetuning, extra data, or model changes. Our method maps any target VA point to simplex-based guidance weights, enabling VA controllability in three aspects: (i) accurate targeting of VA states, (ii) broad coverage across the VA plane, and (iii) continuous control. Across three face datasets, we improve VA target accuracy by 25-29%, expand VA-plane coverage by 28-50%, and increase expression diversity by 29-49%, over the strongest baseline. Unlike prior domain-specific methods, our training-free approach exploits the foundation model's inherent versatility, enabling generalization beyond human faces to animals, artworks, and complex scenes within a single framework. Code is available at https://github.com/harveymannering/BarycentricGuidance.
comment: NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ Localization and Neural Splatting on the Edge: An FPGA Scene Memory for Robots
Resource-constrained robots and autonomous vehicles need scene memories that localize a camera and render nearby views without a desktop GPU. Scene-coordinate regression (SCR) and 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) fit because they avoid an SfM stage, but ACEsplat-style pipelines are GPU-centered, and moving them to an edge FPGA is hard because SCR is pose-sensitive and 3DGS rendering is irregular and capacity-sensitive. We present LENS, an edge scene-memory acceleration system on the AMD KR260 that brings an ACEsplat-style workload to a low-power FPGA/ARM platform. Rather than proposing a new scene model, LENS co-designs the two dominant kernels with the board data path: an INT16 SCR accelerator that preserves pose accuracy, and a bit-exact fixed-point ordered 3DGS renderer that rewrites alpha transmittance as a log-sum-exp recurrence and removes provably useless streamed Gaussians. All LENS latency, power, and quality results are board-measured. The SCR engine preserves DSAC* localization accuracy at 25.42 ms, the on-board renderer reaches 34.11 dB on Cambridge against ACEsplat's 33.20, novel-view synthesis on RealEstate10K reaches 27.84 dB against 26.11, and all ten Wayspots scenes reach the ACEsplat rendering target. LENS wins performance per watt over a Jetson Orin NX on every deployment task, by 1.9x to 5.7x at about a quarter of the power, and is faster in absolute latency on localization and Wayspots rendering. On-device training reaches ACEsplat-level quality but not the GPU's time or energy, marking the remaining boundary for a future training accelerator.
comment: 8 pages
♻ ☆ OccamView: Object-Conditioned View Selection for Frame-Budgeted Active 3D Gaussian Reconstruction
Active 3D Gaussian reconstruction fundamentally relies on selecting informative next-best views under limited sensing budgets. Existing active 3DGS methods primarily plan viewpoints according to geometric information gain, treating object-induced hidden regions in the same manner as general unexplored space. Under tight frame budgets, such geometry-driven strategies may prioritize global scene coverage while leaving partially observed objects incompletely reconstructed. To address this limitation, we propose OccamView, an object-conditioned view-selection framework for frame-budgeted active 3D Gaussian reconstruction. Rather than predicting unseen object geometry or performing shape completion, OccamView maintains an online object memory from open-vocabulary detections grounded in measured RGB-D observations and represents unresolved local occupancy around detected objects as conservative hidden-region proxies. Candidate viewpoints are then evaluated using an occlusion-aware proxy-coverage score. Furthermore, we introduce a Geo-Floor mechanism that restricts object-conditioned re-ranking to geometrically competitive candidates, allowing object-conditioned cues to guide complementary observations while preserving the geometry-driven exploration behavior of the underlying planner. Experiments on Replica and Matterport3D under a unified frame-budgeted protocol show that OccamView consistently reduces Completion and improves Completion Ratio across five frame budgets, with particularly pronounced gains under limited frame budgets. These results demonstrate that lightweight object-conditioned cues effectively complement geometry-driven active view planning.
comment: The research method need to be further polished to keep pace with current research
♻ ☆ A Closer Look at Evaluation of Text-to-Video Models Under Camera Motion WACV 2027
Existing text-to-video (T2V) evaluation benchmarks, such as VBench and EvalCrafter, predominantly contain either subject-centric prompts or static camera scenes, overlooking the importance of camera motion, essential for producing cinematic shots with realistic scenes. Due to this, the metrics developed in these works often produce incorrect results in the presence of camera motion. To fill this gap, we introduce DynamicEval, a benchmark comprising of systematically curated prompts that emphasize dynamic camera motion, paired with 45k human annotations on video pairs. DynamicEval evaluates two key dimensions of video quality: the consistency of the foreground subjects and the consistency of the background scene. To address the shortcomings of existing metrics under camera motion, we introduce two novel metrics: 1) Tracker-FG, which evaluates subject consistency by assessing the keypoint tracks of the subject. 2) Debiased Motion Smoothness, for background consistency, devoid from issues of occlusions/disocclusions arising from camera and foreground subject movements. Extensive experiments on the large-scale DynamicEval benchmark demonstrate that our proposed metrics achieve stronger correlations with human preferences at both the video level, and the model level with an increase of 0.32 in average Pearson Linear Correlation.
comment: Accepted at WACV 2027. 22 pages, 15 figures, 13 tables. Access the project page in https://nithincbabu7.github.io/DynamicEval
♻ ☆ CatchUp: Depth-Aware Re-Admission of Visual Tokens for Efficient Large Vision-Language Models WACV 2027
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) repeatedly process hundreds of visual tokens across decoder layers, incurring substantial computation and memory costs. Existing visual-token reduction methods often irreversibly discard tokens despite depth-varying query relevance. Although recoverable routing allows excluded tokens to return, re-admitted tokens retain stale hidden states after bypassing intermediate decoder transformations. Thus, token recoverability does not guarantee representation readiness at the current decoder depth. Under a fixed routing trajectory at a 64-token budget, replacing stale re-admitted states with current-depth oracle representations improves average RefCOCO Acc@0.5 from 18.96 to 23.18, revealing the impact of representation staleness. We propose CatchUp, a training-free framework combining reversible visual-token routing with Local Transition Correction (LTC). CatchUp repeatedly re-evaluates query-conditioned relevance over the complete visual-token set, preserving deferred tokens for later re-admission. LTC approximates their skipped representation evolution by transferring reference-to-current hidden-state transitions from semantically and spatially related active anchors. This correction improves alignment with current-depth oracle representations without recomputing the skipped decoder layers. Across three referring-expression grounding datasets and six multimodal benchmarks, CatchUp achieves the best grounding performance across all eight splits and the highest average multimodal retention among evaluated efficient methods at 64-, 128-, and 192-token budgets. At a 64-token budget, CatchUp processes 88.9% fewer active visual tokens per post-routing decoder interval, retains 92.17% of dense-model multimodal performance, and reduces end-to-end latency by 8.0%. Code is available at https://github.com/pej0918/CatchUp
comment: WACV 2027. Code: https://github.com/pej0918/CatchUp
♻ ☆ IGLOSS: Image Generation for Lidar Open-vocabulary Semantic Segmentation NeurIPS 2026
This paper presents a new method for the zero-shot open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) of 3D automotive lidar data. To circumvent the recognized image-text modality gap that is intrinsic to approaches based on Vision Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP, our method relies instead on image generation from text, to create prototype images. Given a 3D network distilled from a 2D Vision Foundation Model (VFM), we then label a point cloud by matching 3D point features with 2D image features of these prototypes. Our method is state-of-the-art for OVSS on nuScenes and SemanticKITTI. Code, pre-trained models and generated images are available at https://github.com/valeoai/IGLOSS.
comment: NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ Do Robotic World Models Really Follow Actions? Diagnosing and Aligning Action-Conditioned Generation for Policy Learning
Sixiang Chen, Jiaming Liu, Jixian Wu, Yichen Guo, Tinghao Wang, QR Li, Siyuan Qian, Peterson Co, Hao Chen, Jiajun Cao, Zhoujian Li, Lingfei Zhai, Jian Tang, Shanghang Zhang
Action-conditioned world models increasingly serve as learned simulators for robotic policy improvement, yet their reliability rests on an unverified assumption: generated futures faithfully reflect the consequences of arbitrary valid actions. Systematic evaluation against action-specific ground truth remains limited beyond expert demonstrations. To address this gap, we introduce WorldEcho, which evaluates action following over a broader action distribution through visual integrity and SE(3) end-effector trajectory alignment. Our diagnosis shows that expert-trained models perform better on demonstrated actions but struggle with off-expert trajectories, producing motion inconsistent with the commanded actions or visually invalid rollouts. To mitigate these failures, we propose WorldSync, which broadens action coverage, grounds intermediate video representations in action-induced robot dynamics through an Action-Forcing Expert, and aligns predicted and ground-truth changes under action interventions. Experiments show that WorldSync reduces integrity-gated error on RoboTwin and, when used for iterative policy improvement, yields higher success rates in simulation and on real robots.
♻ ☆ Making MLLM Latents Matter: Factor-Aware Predictive Learning for Cinematic Video Generation
Songlin Yang, Zhe Wang, Xiaotong Zhao, Xi Wang, Ran Zhang, Shuai Li, Taiyi Wu, Songlian Li, Eric Liu, Alan Zhao, Anyi Rao
Cinematic video generation requires both temporal inference from limited inputs (i.e., sparse rather than frame-by-frame guidance) and factor-aware control of character, scene, action, and camera. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer useful priors for both capabilities, but their representations are not automatically actionable for video generation: a Video Diffusion Transformer (DiT) may bypass them through native conditioning pathways, and using them does not ensure either factor-aware control or generation-compatible temporal prediction. We propose Factor-Aware Predictive Learning (FAPL), which establishes effective MLLM latent use as a shared prerequisite and then targets the two capabilities with complementary learning signals. First, latent-only generator grounding trains the DiT with a frozen MLLM and connector, strengthening the DiT's use of MLLM latents for generation. Second, for factor-aware control, paired videos specify a target-factor change and non-target preservation, and factor-span replacement trains the DiT to realize this relationship in its output. Third, for temporal inference, text-only and text-plus-complete-video observations share a video target, and the trained DiT is then frozen while the MLLM and connector are optimized through it. This final stage trains limited-input representations for generation while retaining complete-observation reconstruction as a complementary training mode. Extensive experiments demonstrate our consistently better performance on three cinematic video generation tasks (i.e., sparse-to-video, factor-aware editing, and multi-shot generation) over baselines and validate FAPL's contributions to MLLM feature use, temporal control, and factor coordination.
♻ ☆ Probing Collision Grounding in Vision-Language Models for Safe Human-Robot Collaboration
Safe human--robot collaboration requires more than visual description: a monitor must determine whether the robot body is safely separated, already colliding with the scene or a person, or about to collide. We call this capability collision grounding: binding visual observations to robot body geometry, camera viewpoint, scene layout, human proximity, and temporal motion in order to infer present and imminent contact. We introduce TouchSafeBench, a physics-grounded benchmark for evaluating collision grounding in vision-language models (VLMs). Built in Habitat~3.0, TouchSafeBench contains 2,940 simulated indoor co-presence episodes across social navigation and social rearrangement, with synchronized multi-view RGB-D observations, top-down trajectory maps, calibrated camera metadata, and simulator-derived contact labels. We study two deployment-facing tasks: classifying the current safety state and warning about imminent collision before contact. Across three frontier or robotics-oriented VLMs and nine visual representations, current models remain far from reliable: the best average Macro-F1 stays below 50\%, explicit depth is not automatically transformed into robot-body collision evidence, and robot--scene contact is consistently harder than human-contact risk. TouchSafeBench reveals a central limitation of embodied VLMs: visual fluency does not imply physical accountability. Reliable robot safety monitors will need representations that explicitly bind viewpoint, robot morphology, metric geometry, and future collision. The benchmark is available at https://jun25336-bit.github.io/TouchSafeBench/ .
comment: Accepted by 10th Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2026), Austin TX, USA
♻ ☆ Enhancing Table Recognition with Vision LLMs: A Benchmark and Neighbor-Guided Toolchain Reasoner IJCAI 2025
Pre-trained foundation models have recently made significant progress in table-related tasks such as table understanding and reasoning. However, recognizing the structure and content of unstructured tables using Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) remains under-explored. To bridge this gap, we propose a benchmark based on a hierarchical design philosophy to evaluate the recognition capabilities of VLLMs in training-free scenarios. Through in-depth evaluations, we find that low-quality image input is a significant bottleneck in the recognition process. Drawing inspiration from this, we propose the Neighbor-Guided Toolchain Reasoner (NGTR) framework, which is characterized by integrating diverse lightweight tools for visual operations aimed at mitigating issues with low-quality images. Specifically, we transfer a tool selection experience from a similar neighbor to the input and design a reflection module to supervise the tool invocation process. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the recognition capabilities of the vanilla VLLMs. We believe that the benchmark and framework could provide an alternative solution to table recognition.
comment: 9 pages. Published in IJCAI 2025
♻ ☆ SGF+: Decoupling Gradient Flows for Autoregressive Video Generation
Zihan Su, Junhao Zhuang, Yaowei Li, Siwen Lu, Haoran Li, Lingen Li, Haoyu Wu, Weiyang Jin, Songchun Zhang, Haoyang Huang, Chun Yuan, Zeyue Xue, Nan Duan
Autoregressive video generation requires denoising the current frames while writing their key-value representations as context for future predictions. However, these two roles typically share parameters, and we find that their gradients exhibit distinct patterns and systematic negative alignment, hindering the joint optimization of visual quality and temporal consistency. We introduce Self Gradient Forcing Plus (SGF+), which assigns separate parameters to context writing and denoising while preserving their interaction through causal attention. Both roles are jointly optimized using the original generation objective without auxiliary losses, with context writing supervised through its contribution to future predictions. This simple change improves visual quality and long-horizon consistency over the evaluated baselines in both framewise and chunkwise generation, without additional video training data or a longer training horizon. Trained on only 5s rollouts, SGF+ supports continuous generation for up to 24 hours without long-video fine-tuning. These results highlight role-specific parameterization as an effective design principle for high-quality autoregressive video generation and native long-horizon extrapolation.
comment: Project page: https://zihan-su.github.io/self-gradient-forcing-plus
♻ ☆ RSure-Agent: Reliable Use of Tool Observations for Remote Sensing Agents
Fuyuan Liu, Nayu Liu, Wenhao Yu, Peijin Wang, Yingchao Feng, Fanglong Yao, Yue Zhou, Xue Yang, Chao Ren, Liang Wan, Wei Feng
Remote sensing agents rely on perception, measurement, and raster analysis tools to solve Earth observation tasks. We refer to their judgments and quantitative results about ground objects as tool observations. However, these observations are subject to uncertainty and may be incorrect even when tools execute successfully. When agents accept incorrect observations, the errors can propagate through subsequent reasoning and cause task failure. We analyze 1,229 execution trajectories across three remote sensing agent benchmarks. On each benchmark, at least 88.1 percent of tasks depend on tool observations. Among these tasks, at least 22.7 percent contain incorrect observations despite successful tool execution. These errors propagate to the final answer in at least 82.0 percent of affected tasks on each benchmark. To address this problem, we propose RSure-Agent, a framework for verifying tool observations and limiting error propagation. We introduce a verifiable observation protocol that requires tools to return process evidence for the agent to verify their observations. We construct a task-tool reliability prior from offline task feedback. The prior summarizes each tool configuration's past performance across task types and provides a task-specific reference for verification. Using process evidence and this prior, RSure-Agent decides whether to accept an observation, request additional evidence, or reject it. We evaluate RSure-Agent on EarthBench, ThinkGeo, TerraLogic, and CHOICE-420. Across three agent benchmarks, RSure-Agent reduces the error propagation rate by 21.3 to 25.9 percentage points relative to the base configuration with verification and the prior disabled. On CHOICE-420, it improves overall accuracy over direct answering by 5.71 percentage points on average across 11 backbone models. On EarthBench, it reduces the tool-call ratio by 25.9 percent relative to Earth-Agent.
comment: The demo is available at https://github.com/airs101/RSure-Agent (code will be released for further research)
♻ ☆ Hierarchical Vision Transformer with Prototypes for Interpretable Medical Image Classification
Explainability is an important requirement for machine learning models in high-risk domains such as medicine. We introduce HierViT, a hierarchical Vision Transformer that combines competitive predictive performance with multiple mechanisms to support the interpretation of its predictions. The model first predicts clinically relevant visual appearance attributes, which are then used to infer the final target prediction through a hierarchical reasoning process. To facilitate understanding of the intermediate representations, attribute-specific prototypes are visualized as representative image examples, while attribute-specific attention maps highlight image regions associated with each visual feature. Together, these attribute-level components provide complementary views of the model's reasoning by linking representative image examples and spatial attention to semantically defined visual features. We evaluate HierViT on two medical benchmark datasets: LIDC-IDRI for lung nodule assessment and derm7pt for skin lesion classification. Across both datasets, HierViT achieves competitive predictive performance while providing attribute-level prototypes and attention visualizations that support the interpretation of its predictions.
♻ ☆ Deep learning enables urban change profiling through alignment of historical maps
Sidi Wu, Yizi Chen, Maurizio Gribaudi, Konrad Schindler, Clément Mallet, Julien Perret, Lorenz Hurni
Prior to modern Earth observation technologies, historical maps provide a unique record of long-term urban transformation and offer a lens on the evolving identity of cities. However, extracting consistent and fine-grained change information from historical map series remains challenging due to spatial misalignment, cartographic variation, and degrading document quality, limiting most analyses to small-scale or qualitative approaches. We propose a deep-learning-based framework for fine-grained urban change analysis from large collections of historical maps, built on a modular design that integrates spatial map alignment, multi-temporal object extraction, and change estimation. This framework shifts the analysis of historical maps from ad hoc visual comparison toward systematic, quantitative characterization of urban change. Experiments demonstrate the robust performance of the proposed alignment and object extraction methods. Applied to Paris between 1868 and 1937, the framework reveals the spatial and temporal heterogeneity in urban transformation, suggesting its potential relevance for research in the social sciences and humanities. The modular design of our framework provides flexibility for future adaptation to different cartographic contexts and downstream applications.
comment: 46 pages
♻ ☆ StreamEval: Evaluating Interactive Streaming Video Generation Models
We introduce StreamEval with four key features: (1) First interactive streaming video generation benchmark. (2) Fully open source. Benchmark data, evaluation code, protocols, and scoring rules are publicly available. (3) Comprehensive coverage. Five tasks cover avatar dialogue, avatar performance, world generation, instruction editing, and reference editing, with 300 scripted cases lasting 15 to 300 seconds. Ten metrics assess task execution, state consistency, visual fidelity, and audiovisual coordination. (4) Monthly updates. We will evaluate new and updated models and publish leaderboard results monthly. Results from 37 models show that high visual quality and identity retention do not necessarily coincide with reliable request execution or sustained state consistency. The leaderboard is available at https://streameval.ai.
♻ ☆ Feature-Space Smoothing: Certified Robustness of Deep Representations
Modern deep learning models exhibit strong capabilities across diverse applications, yet remain vulnerable to malicious inputs that induce erroneous predictions via feature-space distortion. To address that, we propose Feature-Space Smoothing (FS), a representation-level certification framework built upon Gaussian randomized smoothing. We show that FS converts a given feature encoder into a smoothed variant that is guaranteed to maintain a certified lower bound on the cosine similarity between clean and adversarial features under l_2-bounded perturbations. We then establish that this Feature Cosine Similarity Bound (FCSB) can be extended to the prediction-wise certification under the cosine similarity measure, and the value of FCSB is determined by the encoder intrinsic Gaussian robustness score. Building on those insights, we introduce the Gaussian Smoothness Booster (GSB), a plug-and-play module to improve the encoder Gaussian robustness score. Specifically, the GSB module is plugged to enhance the feature-space consistency and maintain the feature utility for downstream tasks under Gaussian perturbations. This design enables seamless integration of FS on the protected model, e.g., Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), without additional model retraining or alignment, improving its robustness while preserving the performance for downstream task-oriented decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that integrating FS consistently provides non-trivial certified robustness and significantly improves task-oriented performance under strong white-box adversarial attacks across diverse models and applications.
comment: Under review
♻ ☆ SteerVTE: Seamless Video Text Editing with Style and Glyph Control
Kai Zeng, Moran Li, Zhengwei Wang, Yingchen Yu, Yiheng Lin, Ruichuan An, Ming Lu, Qi She, Wentao Zhang
Visual text editing aims to precisely modify text in images and videos while preserving stylistic consistency and visual realism. Despite significant advances in the image domain, video text editing remains largely unexplored: it is a localized task demanding stroke-level precision within small text regions, which compounds the challenges of cross-frame accuracy, temporal coherence, and stylistic fidelity. We introduce SteerVTE, a unified framework that steers a frozen video diffusion model to perform precise Video Text Editing through style and glyph control. Built on a frozen diffusion transformer, SteerVTE attaches a lightweight text context adapter with two complementary modules: a style encoder capturing the original text's visual attributes, and dual-granularity glyph encoders encoding the target text at both the line and character levels. To overcome the inherently weak text rendering priors of video foundation models, we further propose a glyph-aware spatial-focal loss and a three-stage progressive training curriculum that scales from image to video data. To support large-scale training, we also develop an automatic synthesis pipeline and construct SteerVTE-1M, a dataset of one million triplets spanning diverse scenes, fonts, and stylistic effects. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SteerVTE substantially outperforms existing video editing baselines across text accuracy, style consistency, and temporal coherence. Our project page is available at https://zengkaiya.github.io/SteerVTE/.
♻ ☆ GenTrack3: Hybrid Stochastic-Deterministic Online Multi-Object Tracking with Cluster-Aware Association
Multi-object tracking (MOT) involves maintaining consistent target identities as objects dynamically enter and leave a scene. Deterministic approaches, such as tracking-by-detection with data association, produce reproducible results and are computationally efficient, but they rely heavily on motion models and are sensitive to noisy detections that can lead to association errors. In contrast, stochastic methods explicitly model uncertainty and can better handle complex non-linear dynamics, albeit at the cost of increased computational complexity and variability arising from random sampling. This paper presents an online MOT framework that integrates deterministic and stochastic principles to achieve robust tracking under uncertainty. Furthermore, a novel track-to-detection matching approach is introduced to enhance scalability with increasing target numbers while supporting group tracking. The tracking inference mechanism employs a tracklet that includes identifiers, states, velocities, track penalties and track ages of targets, supporting a systematic tracking pipeline. Each target is associated with a stochastic particle set to compute the matching cost to detections. Reference implementations of the proposed approach and baseline trackers can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/SDU-VelKoTek/GenTrack3.
comment: The content of this paper was included in the full manuscript of GenTrack family which has been submitted to the journal for possible publication
♻ ☆ GenTrack2: An Improved Hybrid Approach for Multi-Object Tracking
This paper proposes a visual multi-object tracking method that jointly employs stochastic and deterministic mechanisms to ensure identifier consistency for unknown and time-varying target numbers under nonlinear dynamics. A stochastic particle filter addresses nonlinear dynamics and non-Gaussian noise, with support from particle swarm optimization (PSO) to guide particles toward state distribution modes and mitigate divergence through proposed fitness measures incorporating motion consistency, appearance similarity, and social-interaction cues with neighboring targets. Deterministic association further enforces identifier consistency via a proposed cost matrix incorporating spatial consistency between particles and current detections, detection confidences, and track penalties. Subsequently, a novel scheme is proposed for the smooth updating of target states while preserving their identities, particularly for weak tracks during interactions with other targets and prolonged occlusions. Moreover, velocity regression over past states provides trend-seed velocities, enhancing particle sampling and state updates. The proposed tracker is designed to operate flexibly for both pre-recorded videos and camera live streams, where future frames are unavailable. Experimental results confirm superior performance compared to state-of-the-art trackers. The source-code reference implementations of both the proposed method and compared-trackers are provided on GitHub: https://github.com/SDU-VelKoTek/GenTrack2
comment: The content of this paper was included in the full manuscript of GenTrack family which has been submitted to the journal for possible publication
♻ ☆ 3D Generation for Embodied AI and Robotic Simulation: A Survey
Tianwei Ye, Yifan Mao, Minwen Liao, Jian Liu, Chunchao Guo, Dazhao Du, Quanxin Shou, Fangqi Zhu, Song Guo
Embodied AI and robotic systems increasingly depend on scalable, diverse, and physically grounded 3D content for simulation-based training and real-world deployment. While 3D generative modeling has advanced rapidly, embodied applications impose requirements far beyond visual realism: generated objects must carry kinematic structure and material properties, scenes must support interaction and task execution, and the resulting content must bridge the gap between simulation and reality. This survey reviews 3D generation for embodied AI and organizes the literature around three roles that 3D generation plays in embodied systems. In Data Generator, 3D generation produces simulation-ready objects and assets, including articulated, physically grounded, and deformable content for downstream interaction; in Simulation Environments, it constructs interactive and task-oriented worlds, spanning structure-aware, controllable, and agentic scene generation; and in Sim2Real Bridge, it supports digital twin reconstruction, data augmentation, and synthetic demonstrations for downstream robot learning and real-world transfer. We also show that the field is shifting from visual realism toward interaction readiness, and we identify the main bottlenecks, including limited physical annotations, the gap between geometric quality and physical validity, fragmented evaluation, and the persistent sim-to-real divide, that must be addressed for 3D generation to become a dependable foundation for embodied intelligence. Our project page is at https://3dgen4robot.github.io.
comment: 27 pages. For paper updates, please refer to https://3dgen4robot.github.io
♻ ☆ RLSplat: Resource-Linear Budget Control for Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting
Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (FF3DGS) reconstructs 3D scenes from images in a single forward pass, making it well-suited to applications that must operate within limited resource budgets. To further improve its practicality, recent budget-controllable FF3DGS methods allow the number of Gaussians to be adjusted at inference, so that the output meets a given storage limit or rendering-latency constraint. However, these methods overlook the cost of inference itself: to produce a representation with the target number of Gaussians, they first predict a dense set of Gaussians and then prune or select from it, requiring nearly constant latency and peak memory regardless of the budget. We therefore propose RLSplat, a resource-linear budget-controllable FF3DGS framework whose representation size, inference latency, and peak memory all decrease linearly as the Gaussian budget is reduced. Instead of pruning or selection, RLSplat learns a Gaussian allocation policy that distributes the budget across local scene regions, so that exactly the requested number of Gaussians is generated. These Gaussians are then refined through resource-linear Gaussian decoding, in which each Gaussian attends only to nearby Gaussians found via an efficient hierarchical neighbor search, so that the decoding cost decreases linearly with fewer Gaussians. In zero-shot evaluation, RLSplat outperforms prior budget-controllable methods at every budget, surpassing the strongest baseline even with 4$\times$ fewer Gaussians, while running up to 4.1$\times$ faster with 9.6$\times$ less peak memory at low budgets.
comment: Code available at https://github.com/mlvlab/RLSplat
♻ ☆ Rethinking Densification in Gaussian SLAM: A Stationary Sampling Perspective
Gaussian Splatting enables high-fidelity differentiable SLAM by representing scenes as anisotropic Gaussian primitives. Most systems rely on residual-driven densification, which couples refinement with representation growth: accuracy saturates at a moderate primitive count, yet memory grows throughout the trajectory, degrading throughput. We introduce TopoGS-SLAM, a stationary-sampling formulation that decouples refinement from capacity through coverage-triggered Gaussian initialization and bounded-topology optimization, turning mapping into a bounded-dimensional problem with stable scaling. On standard indoor benchmarks, TopoGS-SLAM matches or surpasses densification-based pipelines in localization and reconstruction accuracy while substantially improving memory scalability and throughput, showing that iterative topology mutation is not required for accurate Gaussian SLAM in bounded-area static indoor scenes with sufficient multi-view coverage. Additional details and resources are available at this URL: https://breeze1124.github.io/rgs-slam-project-page/
comment: 10 pages, 6 figures
♻ ☆ Latent space configuration for neural network finetuning, fast ranking, and embedding dimensionality reduction
Finding K most similar elements for a query in a large gallery of neural network (NN) embeddings is essential in various areas of computer science and industrial applications of artificial intelligence. This paper proposes search algorithms for structured latent spaces (LS) of NNs which allow to speed up top K item retrieval owing to O(1) complexity small candidate gallery subset search. ArcFace-pretrained IResNet50 models are finetuned using Latent Space Configuration (LSC) methodology to obtain new distribution of embeddings with desired geometric properties. Applying the proposed algorithms to embeddings obtained from finetuned models leads to several times speed-up over baseline exhaustive search. Specifically, we report up to 3 times speed-up on GPU and 40% speed-up on CPU compared to the baseline method GPU speed. These results are obtained for the original and reduced numbers of LS dimensions. The results show that LS dimensionality reduction allows to further accelerate the search and even improve rank-N metrics.
comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables, 2 algorithms
♻ ☆ Do Image Editing Models Understand Lighting? NeurIPS 2026
While recent advancements in generative image editing models have achieved stunning visual fidelity, it remains an open question whether these systems possess an intrinsic knowledge of real-world lighting. Existing benchmarks typically evaluate high-level plausibility of perceptual light transport on curated internet imagery, using VLMs or human judgement, or they rely on synthetically generated datasets. In this work, we introduce the 3D-anchored Light Probe (3DLP) benchmark, for which we have captured a new high-fidelity HDR dataset of real-world lighting changes. The dataset consists of 1K image pairs of diverse indoor scenery in which light probes are physically turned on and off. To allow for a granular performance analysis, we annotated specific image regions such as cast shadows or metallic surfaces. With this data, we evaluate a range of state-of-the-art image editing models by measuring how well their light probe edits align with reality. The evaluation uses two new scores to compensate for AI-generated photographic effects, such as adjusted white balance. Our results show that the overall performance of models differs considerably, with differences slightly less pronounced for specular highlights. The best image editing models are remarkably consistent with real-world physics, however, they still leave room for improvement. We observe that image regions that receive less light from the light probe are more prone to errors for all models. Furthermore, building on their success in evaluating macroscopic lighting plausibility, we test VLMs on our task but find that they are unsuitable for pixel-level light transport analysis. We will make the benchmark, together with the real-world dataset, publicly available to encourage future research on this topic.
comment: NeurIPS 2026 Evaluations & Datasets Track (Spotlight). Project page: https://tim-kuechler.github.io/3DLP/
♻ ☆ Leakage and Multiway Interaction Loss: What Matricization and Single-Mode Truncation Discard from Multiway Signals
Tensor methods are said to preserve structure that matrix methods destroy, but what is lost, and why, is unclear. Relative to a multilinear reference, we split the squared error of any reconstruction exactly into coefficient distortion, multiway interaction loss, directional loss, and out-of-model leakage. Di rectional loss removes components in several modes; interaction loss removes a direction in one mode while its partners in other modes remain. Optimal truncation of a matrix or of an orthogonally decomposable tensor incurs only directional loss, whereas for generic tensors of order three or more with balanced ranks, optimally truncating one unfolding below its rank incurs only interaction loss. Matricization is the extreme case: when the other modes have low rank, it must under resolve the processed mode at budgets at which multilinear truncation is lossless, and under noise it adds leakage scaling with the product of the unprocessed dimensions. For sources with orthonormal signatures in all modes but one, interaction loss is the energy-weighted signature distortion of the surviving sources; without noise, a distortion below a threshold keeps the periodogram estimate within its main lobe and bounds its bias. To first order, multidimensional rotational-invariance estimation sees only in-model noise and single-mode leakage, so the leakage energy removed by tensor-based subspace estimation does not predict its gain. A calibrated resolution makes the split usable under noise. On a measured hyperspectral image with nearly full-rank spatial modes, spectral principal component analysis was as storage-efficient as multilinear truncation.
comment: 15 pages, 6 figures
♻ ☆ Decoupling candidate dual AGN from chance superpositions in the GOTHIC survey via a deep-learning framework
Bhavesh Mukheja, Snehanshu Saha, Anwesh Bhattacharya, Mousumi Das, Françoise Combes, Sudhanshu Barway
Dual active galactic nuclei (DAGN) mark a critical phase in the evolution of merging galaxies and the pairing of supermassive black holes, yet they remain difficult to identify in large imaging surveys because of projection effects and limited spatial resolution. Compact foreground stars and unresolved substructure can mimic dual nuclei through chance superposition, complicating automated detection. We revisit the 46,061 galaxies flagged but rejected as DAGN candidates by the GOTHIC pipeline, primarily because the two nuclei fell within the SDSS fibre aperture or exceeded its separation threshold. We train a supervised deep-learning framework based on the YOLOv11 oriented-bounding-box architecture on annotated SDSS imaging to separate genuine dual nuclei from foreground stellar contaminants and other spurious alignments. The final model attains a validation precision of 0.919, recall of 0.905, and $F_1$ of 0.912, and yields 29,605 dual-nucleus candidates after removing star-dominated and blended detections. Structured visual inspection indicates that $54.5$--$62\%$ are consistent with genuine dual nuclei, implying $\sim(1.4$--$1.8)\times10^{4}$ plausible systems. Cross-calibrating the YOLO separation against the deterministic GOTHIC centroid measurement and restricting to the compact regime ($d \le 6.87''$) gives a conservative subset of $\sim 13{,}672$ candidates, reaching calibrated separations of $\sim 0.56''$. Spectroscopy of the most compact ($\le 1$ kpc) systems shows spectra dominated by stellar absorption, with no resolved double-peaked emission, so confirmation requires higher-resolution follow-up. The catalogue is a statistically refined list of candidates, not confirmed DAGN. Nonetheless, deep-learning detection substantially reduces contamination and expands the plausible DAGN census.
comment: Accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS; ref. MN-26-2211-P.R1) on 2026 October 22. Supplementary material has been incorporated into the main text. Code is available at https://github.com/BhaveshMukheja/yolo-dagn
♻ ☆ Towards Generalizable 3D Anomaly Detection via Relational Inconsistency Modeling NeurIPS 2026
3D anomaly detection (3DAD) aims to identify defective regions in point cloud data, serving as a critical component in industrial inspection systems. Existing methods are normality-centered -- learning the distribution of normal samples and treating deviations as anomalies -- without explicitly modeling what constitutes a defect. This leads to ambiguous decision boundaries with increased false positives and negatives, particularly in unified and cross-domain settings where diverse normal distributions further blur the boundaries. We propose a relational inconsistency modeling framework that characterizes defects as violations of geometric consistency among neighboring structures. Our approach learns category-agnostic defect cues through pseudo-anomalies designed as controlled relational violations, instantiated by two key modules: Edge-aware Graph Refinement (EGR) for encoding geometric relationships among local regions, and Cluster-Deviation Modeling (CDM) for identifying regions that are relationally incompatible within their structural peer group. Extensive experiments on Anomaly-ShapeNet and Real3D-AD demonstrate consistent improvements over prior state-of-the-art methods in both in-domain and cross-domain settings, validating the effectiveness of learning an explicit, relation-based defect criterion for 3D anomaly detection. Project page: https://visualsciencelab-khu.github.io/GRIM_project/.
comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2026. Code: https://github.com/VisualScienceLab-KHU/GRIM
♻ ☆ SetCon: Towards Open-Ended Referring Segmentation via Set-Level Concept Prediction
Zhixiong Zhang, Yizhuo Li, Shuangrui Ding, Yuhang Zang, Shengyuan Ding, Long Xing, Yibin Wang, Qiaosheng Zhang, Jiaqi Wang
Referring segmentation grounds natural-language queries to pixel-level masks, but extending it to complex scenarios with multiple instances, cross-category groups, or open-ended target sets remains challenging. Previous Large Vision Language Model (LVLM)-based methods represent referred targets with one or more special tokens sequentially, treating multiple targets as separate outputs rather than a coherent set and offering little incentive to capture set-level properties such as completeness and mutual exclusivity. We reformulate open-ended referring segmentation as explicit set-level concept prediction and propose Set-Concept Segmentation (SetCon), which uses LVLM-generated natural-language concepts, instead of segmentation-specific tokens, as semantic conditions for joint mask-set decoding. A hierarchical semantic decomposition first predicts a shared set-level concept defining the target scope and then refines it into fine-grained concept groups aligned with target subsets. To support this, a two-stage annotation pipeline augments existing reasoning segmentation datasets with hierarchical semantic supervision (236k samples, 784k concept phrases). SetCon achieves state-of-the-art results on image benchmarks (+3.3 gIoU on gRefCOCO, +12.1 gIoU on MUSE), with margins that grow as the number of referred targets increases. The concept interface also transfers to video under a detect-and-track setting, yielding new state-of-the-art results on seven referring video benchmarks, including +10.9 J&F on MeViS and +12.4 J&F on Ref-SeCVOS.
♻ ☆ DepTR-MOT: Unveiling the Potential of Depth-Informed Trajectory Refinement for Multi-Object Tracking IEEE
Visual Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) is a crucial component of robotic perception, yet existing Tracking-By-Detection (TBD) methods often rely on 2D cues, such as bounding boxes and motion modeling, which struggle under occlusions and close-proximity interactions. Trackers relying on these 2D cues are particularly unreliable in robotic environments, where dense targets and frequent occlusions are common. While depth information has the potential to alleviate these issues, most existing MOT datasets lack depth annotations, leading to its underexploited role in the domain. To unveil the potential of depth-informed trajectory refinement, we introduce DepTR-MOT, a category-agnostic DETR-based detector enhanced with instance-level depth information. Specifically, we propose two key innovations: (i) foundation model-based instance-level soft depth label supervision, which refines depth prediction, and (ii) the distillation of dense depth maps to maintain global depth consistency. These strategies enable DepTR-MOT to embed instance-level depth awareness into detector and to output instance-level depth during inference. All designs strictly follow the prevailing Tracking-By-Detection (TBD) paradigm, requiring no additional training or inference stages. By incorporating depth cues, our method enhances the robustness of the TBD paradigm and effectively resolves occlusion and close-proximity challenges. Experiments on the QuadTrack, DanceTrack, SportsMOT, and VisDrone19 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving HOTA scores of 27.59, 44.939, 61.2, and 42.5, respectively. These consistent gains across aerial, sports, and surveillance platforms highlight the advantages of our method in handling occlusion and close-proximity challenges in robotic tracking. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/warriordby/DepTR-MOT.
comment: Accepted to IEEE ROBIO 2026. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/warriordby/DepTR-MOT
♻ ☆ NS-Net: Decoupling CLIP Semantic Information through NULL-Space for Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection
The rapid progress of generative models, such as GANs and diffusion models, has facilitated the creation of highly realistic images, raising growing concerns over their misuse in security-sensitive domains. While existing detectors perform well under known generative settings, they often fail to generalize to unknown generative models, especially when semantic content between real and fake images is closely aligned. In this paper, we revisit the use of CLIP features for AI-generated image detection and uncover a critical limitation: the high-level semantic information embedded in CLIP's visual features hinders effective discrimination. To address this, we propose the NS-Net, a novel detection framework that leverages NULL-Space projection to decouple semantic information from CLIP's visual features, followed by contrastive learning to capture intrinsic distributional differences between real and generated images. Furthermore, we design a Patch Selection strategy to preserve fine-grained artifacts by selecting patches with the highest and lowest spectral entropy. Extensive experiments on an open-world benchmark comprising images generated by 47 diverse generative models show that NS-Net outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving a 5.0\% improvement in detection accuracy, thereby demonstrating strong generalization across both GAN- and diffusion-based image generation techniques. Our code is available at https://github.com/HorizonTEL/NS-Net.
♻ ☆ DetailAnywhere: Fashion Detail Generation via Cross-Modal Feature Alignment Distillation
Zijun Li, Yimin Zhou, Jia Sun, Honglie Wang, Pengcheng Wei, Junlong Wu, Yongrui Heng, Jiyuan Wang, Huan Ouyang, Boheng Zhang, Huaiqing Wang, Dewen Fan, Qianqian Gan, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao
Diffusion-based generative AI has achieved remarkable success in e-commerce applications such as virtual try-on, poster generation, and product background synthesis. However, when making online purchasing decisions for apparel, consumers also desire the freedom to examine specific detail regions of interest, such as collars, cuffs, and fabric textures, yet existing methods have not explicitly studied this setting. We therefore formalize a new, non-template task: Fashion Detail Generation with focus conditioning, and release FDBench, the first benchmark comprising 40K+ human-verified reference-detail pairs across 41 different categories. This task poses a unique semantic gap challenge: the model must bridge the correspondence between a focus marker on a product reference image and a photorealistic close-up view of the indicated region, while faithfully preserving the garment's identity, without any precise prompt. To bridge this gap, we propose Cross-modal Feature Alignment Distillation (CFAD), which leverages a fine-tuned DINOv3 teacher to align both branches of a Multimodal Diffusion Transformer in a shared semantic space via dual-branch distillation. To further improve consistency between generated details and reference images, we introduce a consistency reward model that jointly scores image pairs along three quality axes and optimizes generation via reinforcement learning. Experiments show that our model DetailAnywhere significantly outperforms all state-of-the-art opensource methods across all metrics and human evaluations.
♻ ☆ DisasterRoute: Evidence-Guided Dual-System Routing for Visual Disaster Question Answering
Visual question answering from low-altitude UAV imagery must deliver timely and accurate judgments to support disaster response under limited edge computing resources. Routine questions may be answered through direct decisions, whereas more challenging questions may benefit from step-by-step reasoning. However, existing research primarily focuses on improving models' visual understanding and generative reasoning capabilities, with limited exploration of efficient direct decision-making and its adaptive coordination with generative reasoning. We develop Disaster-S1 based on a vision-language model adapted to the disaster domain. Trained for option discrimination, it outputs a probability distribution over answer options in a single multimodal forward pass for fast decision-making. We further propose DisasterRoute, a dual-system routing framework that combines prediction confidence with disaster evidence to decide whether to accept the initial answer or invoke the disaster reasoning model DisasterVL for review. By allocating inference computation on demand, the framework retains the efficiency of direct decision-making and improves overall question-answering accuracy through selective review. Experiments on DisasterBench show that Disaster-S1 achieves superior accuracy with low latency, while DisasterRoute further improves accuracy through selective review at substantially lower latency than full reasoning.
comment: Technical report; follow-up study to DisasterBench; this version is not intended for conference or journal submission
♻ ☆ Sensorimotor Alignment: A Platonic Proxy for Embodied Policy Success
Robot foundation models are typically evaluated through costly closed-loop rollouts, motivating low-cost offline proxies for model capability. The Platonic Representation Hypothesis (PRH) suggests that as representations improve, modalities such as vision and language converge toward a shared statistical model of reality. We ask whether motion trajectories form another such modality: as embodied models become more capable, should their sensory representations converge toward the structure of physical motion? To test this, we propose Sensorimotor Alignment ($S^2$), a training-free offline metric that measures how well a model's sensory representation aligns with the geometry of physical motion. We find that $S^2$ correlates positively with downstream robot task success across model families, making it a low-cost offline proxy for prioritizing models before closed-loop evaluation. $S^2$ can also identify promising vision-language model (VLM) backbones before costly fine-tuning into vision-language-action models (VLAs). Beyond this correlation, $S^2$ offers representation-level explanations for phenomena observed in VLAs and world action models (WAMs). With $S^2$, we extend PRH to robotics and make sensorimotor alignment measurable, offering a low-cost, representation-level view of robot foundation models that closed-loop success rates alone cannot reveal.
comment: 28 pages. Project page and code available at https://yunfeixie233.github.io/s2/
♻ ☆ Next-Frequency Autoregressive Modeling for Remote Sensing Change Detection
Remote sensing change detection identifies land-cover changes from bi-temporal images. Most existing methods follow a one-shot dense prediction paradigm, directly regressing a change mask from fused features, but overlook the intrinsic frequency characteristics of change patterns. We propose Freq-RemoteVAR, a frequency autoregressive framework that reformulates change detection as structured generation in the frequency domain. Instead of predicting the change mask in one step, we introduce next-frequency prediction, where change information is progressively generated from coarse to fine. We design a frequency-aware mask tokenization strategy that decomposes change supervision into multi-frequency token targets via Fourier transformation and quantization. Based on this representation, we develop a Frequency VAR Transformer, which performs causal autoregressive modeling over frequency tokens. Starting from learned mask queries, it progressively predicts frequency-level tokens conditioned on previously generated tokens and bi-temporal image features, capturing long-range dependencies across frequency scales. We further introduce Scale-Aligned RoPE Cross Attention (SRCA), which aligns frequency-domain mask queries with spatial-domain bi-temporal features under a unified coordinate system, enhancing spatial-frequency consistency. To mitigate unreliable signals, a Change-quality Control module adaptively modulates generation through dynamic normalization, attention biasing, and spatial offset adjustment, suppressing pseudo-change responses and improving robustness. Experiments on CDD, GZ-CD, and LEVIR-CD show that Freq-RemoteVAR consistently outperforms existing methods, especially in challenging scenarios with complex appearance variations and noisy disturbances.
♻ ☆ Camera Movement Estimation and Path Correction using the Combination of Modified A-SIFT and Stereo System for 3D Modelling
Creating accurate and efficient 3D models poses significant challenges, particularly in addressing large viewpoint variations, computational complexity, and alignment discrepancies. Efficient camera path generation can help resolve these issues. In this context, a modified version of the Affine Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (ASIFT) is proposed to extract more matching points with reduced computational overhead, ensuring an adequate number of inliers for precise camera rotation angle estimation. Additionally, a novel two-camera-based rotation correction model is introduced to mitigate small rotational errors, further enhancing accuracy. Furthermore, a stereo camera-based translation estimation and correction model is implemented to determine camera movement in 3D space by altering the Structure From Motion (SFM) model. Finally, the novel combination of ASIFT and two camera-based SFM models provides an accurate camera movement trajectory in 3D space. Experimental results show that the proposed camera movement approach achieves 99.9% accuracy compared to the actual camera movement path and outperforms state-of-the-art camera path estimation methods. By leveraging this accurate camera path, the system facilitates the creation of precise 3D models, making it a robust solution for applications requiring high fidelity and efficiency in 3D reconstruction.
comment: The manuscript is being withdrawn due to the need for substantial revisions and corrections to the current version. We apologize for any inconvenience caused to readers
♻ ☆ Verus-Insight: Towards Explainable Artifact Detection in AI-Generated Videos
Zhuoran Zhang, Yang Shi, Qixun Wang, Tengfei Liu, Yuqi Tang, Xuanyu Zhu, Yizhuo Jia, Jingyun Hua, Shixuan Liu, Xianghua Ying, Haotian Wang, Yuanxing Zhang, Pengfei Wan, Wenjing Yang
Recent advances in video generation have made synthetic videos increasingly realistic, placing greater demands on reliable AI-generated video detection. Existing artifact-based detectors typically identify generation artifacts as evidence for source prediction, yet they may either fail to recognize subtle artifacts or reach the correct source decision without faithfully identifying the evidence underlying it. In this work, we systematically investigate how to design and train effective artifact detectors and formulate artifact detection as a structured process comprising three complementary capabilities: Inspection Planning, which determines what should be examined; Evidence Verification, which verifies whether the inspected content exhibits genuine generation artifacts; and Evidence Aggregation, which integrates the verified evidence into the final source decision. Building on this formulation, we introduce Verus-Insight, trained with human-anchored full-process supervision and progressive capability training to strengthen both fine-grained artifact detection and video-level detection. We further introduce Verus-Bench, a benchmark with fine-grained human annotations of perceptible artifacts for evaluating artifact detection. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that Verus-Insight achieves strong performance in both fine-grained artifact analysis and AI-generated video detection, with substantial gains in recovering human-perceived artifacts. Further analyses reveal that the three capabilities are complementary yet distinct, and that Verus-Insight more reliably converts relevant inspection targets into supported artifact evidence without increasing spurious artifact claims.
comment: 36 pages
♻ ☆ Token-Set Choice Confounds POPE: A Systematic Audit of Yes/No Extraction in VLM Hallucination Evaluation NeurIPS 2026
We set out to reproduce a recent hallucination-mitigation result on the POPE benchmark. The LLaVA-1.5-7B baseline we measured, 82.21 F1 on the adversarial split, sat 1.21 to 8.67 points above the adversarial baselines we planned to compare against (81.00, 79.30, and 73.54). We looked at the evaluation code and found a readout choice that moves F1 on its own. A two-token logit readout decides yes versus no by comparing two vocabulary IDs, 3582 ("yes") and 1217 ("no"). Across 9,000 greedy-decode questions spanning all three splits, neither ID is generated even once. The model emits " Yes" (token 3869) and " No" (token 1939), because SentencePiece prepends a space byte after the prompt suffix "ASSISTANT:". Read with an eight-token lookup that covers the space-prefixed surface forms, LLaVA-1.5-7B scores F1 0.8221, 0.8498, and 0.8713 on the adversarial, popular, and random splits. That 6.13-point adversarial shift exceeds the adversarial gain reported by five of the six papers we surveyed. None of them states its readout, and our reference ran under 4-bit NF4 quantization, so we cannot say how much of any reported gain a matched evaluation would keep. That comparison stays unresolved until readout and precision are matched. On the fixed baseline we run nine inference-time corrections of our own (none beat it) and dissect why the adversarial split resists logit-level intervention. In a 3,000-question probe, wrong predictions draw more image attention than correct ones (Cohen's $d=-0.46$, $p=1.4\times10^{-24}$), the opposite of what grounding-based corrections assume. A four-readout audit across four further VLMs from three tokenizer families confirms the confound is protocol-level, not model-specific: porting the LLaVA-1.5 IDs verbatim drops F1 to 0.00 on the two disjoint-vocabulary models, whereas a tokenizer-derived readout holds between 0.80 and 0.92.
comment: NeurIPS 2026 VLM4RWD. 21 pages, 10 figures. Code: https://github.com/Kesav2k04/ugaa-research
♻ ☆ Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Synapse and Neuron Proofreading in Connectomics
Yicong Li, Junjie Wang, Leander Lauenburg, Ella Hugie, Alexandra Irger, Wanhua Li, Donglai Wei, Hanspeter Pfister
We benchmarked vision-language models (VLMs) on the decisions annotators take when inspecting electron microscopy images in connectomics: synapse proofreading (presence and polarity) and neuron proofreading (split errors and merge errors). For synapse proofreading, we evaluated 19 open and 2 closed models across various architectures and sizes under zero-shot, four-shot in-context learning and LoRA settings, against specialist models, on datasets constructed by us using public resources. For neuron proofreading, we evaluated 3 open and 2 closed models on the ConnectomeBench2 dataset, with cross-species transfer from fly and mouse to human and zebrafish. Most models were at chance zero-shot; a few examples helped mainly the closed and largest open ones. LoRA on a few thousand labels brought open models level with specialist models. When evaluated on unseen species, the best adapted VLMs outperformed specialist models in identifying merge errors. The project will be publicly available upon acceptance.
♻ ☆ World from Motion: Generative Dynamic Gaussian Reconstruction from Monocular Video NeurIPS 2026
Liyuan Zhu, Shengyu Huang, Amrita Mazumdar, Tianye Li, Zan Gojcic, Gordon Wetzstein, Iro Armeni, Shalini De Mello, Alex Trevithick
We present World from Motion, a method for generating freely renderable dynamic 3D Gaussian representations from monocular videos. Our approach conditions a video model on dense, pixel-aligned renderings that encode appearance, geometry, and 3D scene motion along both input and target camera trajectories to correct rendering artifacts and fill in missing regions from an initial reconstruction. To train this model, we construct a dataset of aligned multiview video pairs and dynamic 3DGS representations, with simulated artifacts characteristic of monocular reconstruction. At test time, we distill the model's generations, including newly observed regions and motions, back into a single consistent, high-quality dynamic 3DGS, improving both novel-view synthesis and the underlying 3D motion. Our method sets a new state of the art in 4D reconstruction and seamlessly generalizes to in-the-wild videos with large viewpoint changes and dynamic motions.
comment: NeurIPS 2026 Camera Ready. Project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/amri/projects/world-from-motion/
♻ ☆ VLMs Trace Without Tracking: Diagnosing Failures in Visual Path Following NeurIPS 2026
Vision-language models (VLMs) perform strongly on multimodal benchmarks, yet their ability to reliably follow continuous visual structure remains unclear. We focus on path following, a basic operation that requires following a selected path through successive visual continuations. Before considering complex factors such as crossings or overlaps, we first test whether current VLMs can robustly follow a simple continuous line under controlled settings that remove such confounds. Across frontier models, we find that tracing is already fragile, with this vulnerability manifesting as unstable path preservation in the presence of other nearby paths. Analysis of internal representations shows that information needed to determine the correct path continuation becomes weaker, with this degradation already emerging in the visual encoding stage. Common remedies do not resolve this weakness: model scaling provides limited improvement, additional reasoning provides uneven gains at substantial cost, and explicit tracing instructions fail to stabilize performance. The same path-preservation failures and sensitivity to nearby paths persist in visually richer and more realistic settings, suggesting that current VLMs lack a robust mechanism for following a selected path.
comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2026
♻ ☆ ProCLIP: Progressive Vision-Language Alignment via LLM-based Embedder NeurIPS'26
Xiaoxing Hu, Kaicheng Yang, Ziqi Ye, Ziyang Gong, Qi Ming, Zonghao Guo, Yu Tian, Xiang An, Ziyong Feng, Xue Yang
The original CLIP text encoder is limited by a maximum input length of 77 tokens, which hampers its ability to effectively process long texts and perform fine-grained semantic understanding. In addition, the CLIP text encoder lacks support for multilingual inputs. All these limitations significantly restrict its applicability across a broader range of tasks. Recent studies have attempted to replace the CLIP text encoder with an LLM-based embedder to enhance its ability in processing long texts, multilingual understanding, and fine-grained semantic comprehension. However, because the representation spaces of LLMs and the vision-language space of CLIP are pretrained independently without alignment priors, direct alignment using contrastive learning can disrupt the intrinsic vision-language alignment in the CLIP image encoder, leading to an underutilization of the knowledge acquired during pre-training. To address this challenge, we propose ProCLIP, a curriculum learning-based progressive vision-language alignment framework to effectively align the CLIP image encoder with an LLM-based embedder. Specifically, ProCLIP first distills knowledge from CLIP's text encoder into the LLM-based embedder to leverage CLIP's rich pretrained knowledge while establishing initial alignment between the LLM embedder and CLIP image encoder. Subsequently, ProCLIP further aligns the CLIP image encoder with the LLM-based embedder through image-text contrastive tuning, employing self-distillation regularization to avoid overfitting. To achieve a more effective alignment, instance semantic alignment loss and embedding structure alignment loss are employed during representation inheritance and contrastive tuning. The Code is available at https://github.com/VisionXLab/ProCLIP.
comment: NeurIPS'26 Camera Ready
♻ ☆ STATIC: Surface-normal-guided Two-branch Alignment and Temporal Integration for Consistent Video Depth Estimation
Video depth estimation is essential for applications such as autonomous driving, AR/VR, and robotics. Recent transformer-based single-image monocular depth estimation models perform well on a single image but struggle with depth consistency across video frames. Traditional methods aim to improve temporal consistency using multi-frame temporal modules or explicit priors like optical flow and camera parameters. However, these approaches face issues such as high memory use, reduced performance with dynamic or irregular motion, and a heavy reliance on the accuracy of external motion estimators. We propose STATIC, a novel model that independently learns temporal consistency in geometrically stable and unstable regions using only two adjacent frames. By leveraging intrinsic geometric cues rather than external motion priors, STATIC generates a depth-derived geometry-aware difference mask from surface normals to identify regions with inter-frame geometric variation by measuring directional variance. For geometrically stable regions, the Masked Stable (MS) module enhances temporal consistency by focusing on structurally stable regions. For geometrically unstable regions, the Surface Normal Similarity (SNS) module models inter-frame correspondences and ensures temporal consistency by measuring feature similarities between frames. A final refinement integrates the independently learned stable and unstable features, enabling STATIC to improve consistent depth prediction across consecutive frames. Experiments on KITTI, NYUv2, and Sintel demonstrate strong depth accuracy and temporal consistency, as well as stable performance across the tested frame-rate and camera-motion conditions.
comment: Accepted by Pattern Recognition
♻ ☆ Learning from Next-Frame Prediction: Towards Unified and Scalable Visual World Modeling
Video provides a natural source of supervision: what happens next serves as a learning signal for visual world modeling. Yet masked video pretraining focuses on recovering missing content from surrounding context rather than predicting the future from the past. Autoregressive methods instead predict forward one token at a time, but have yet to match joint-embedding methods in representation quality. This gap motivates us to revisit the granularity and space of future prediction. In this work, we introduce VANE, a self-supervised visual pretraining framework built on next-frame prediction in embedding space. A causal encoder summarizes past observations for a state predictor that infers the representation of the entire next frame, making temporal evolution the primary learning signal. This prediction is carried out in a fixed embedding space provided by a frozen semantic tokenizer, emphasizing scene content and structure. To retain fine-grained spatial detail alongside semantic content, a lightweight auxiliary generative decoder reconstructs future-frame patches conditioned on the predicted representations. To unify visual modeling across images and videos, we construct a local-to-global crop sequence for still images, allowing the same encoder to predict newly revealed regions from earlier crops under the same objective. Experiments show that VANE improves with model and data scaling, achieving SOTA on most anticipation, recognition, and dense perception benchmarks among unified encoders. Especially on EPIC-KITCHENS-100 action anticipation, it surpasses V-JEPA 2.1 by 7.1 points in mean-class recall@5. These results demonstrate that next-frame prediction in embedding space is effective and scalable for visual world modeling.
♻ ☆ Seeing Through the Chain: Understanding and Mitigating Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Reasoning Models NeurIPS-2026
While multimodal reasoning models (MLRMs) have exhibited impressive capabilities, they remain prone to hallucinations, and effective solutions are still underexplored. In this paper, we experimentally analyze the hallucination cause and propose C3PO, a training-based mitigation framework comprising \textbf{C}hain-of-Thought \textbf{C}ompression and \textbf{C}ontrastive \textbf{P}reference \textbf{O}ptimization. Firstly, we identify that introducing reasoning mechanisms exacerbates models' reliance on language priors while overlooking visual inputs, which can produce CoTs with reduced visual cues but redundant text tokens. To this end, we propose to selectively filter redundant thinking tokens for a more compact and signal-efficient CoT representation that preserves task-relevant information while suppressing noise. In addition, we observe that the quality of the reasoning trace largely determines whether hallucination emerges in subsequent responses. To leverage this insight, we introduce a reasoning-enhanced preference tuning scheme that constructs training pairs using high-quality AI feedback. We further design a multimodal hallucination-inducing mechanism that elicits models' inherent hallucination patterns via carefully crafted inducers, yielding informative negative signals for contrastive correction. We provide theoretical justification for the effectiveness and demonstrate consistent hallucination reduction across diverse MLRMs and benchmarks.
comment: [NeurIPS-2026]
♻ ☆ Long-Tailed 3D Detection via Multi-Modal Fusion
Contemporary autonomous vehicle (AV) benchmarks have significantly advanced multimodal (LiDAR+RGB) 3D detection. However, despite the naturally long-tailed distribution of object classes, existing benchmarking protocols primarily focus on frequent categories (e.g., pedestrian and car), largely overlooking rare but safety-critical classes such as stroller and emergency vehicle. In practice, reliable detection of both common and rare classes is essential for safe autonomous driving. We formalize this problem as Long-Tailed 3D Detection (LT3D), where evaluation encompasses all annotated classes, including rare ones. To address LT3D, we introduce hierarchical losses that promote feature sharing across classes, diagnostic metrics that assign partial credit to semantically reasonable mistakes with respect to the semantic hierarchy (e.g., confusing a child with an adult), and a multimodal late-fusion (MMLF) framework to fuse detections. In particular, we show that rare-class accuracy benefits substantially from MMLF of independently trained uni-modal LiDAR and RGB detectors. Because of the modular design, unlike prevailing end-to-end trained multi-modal detectors that require paired LiDAR-RGB data, MMLF enables the use of advanced unimodal detectors that are trained on large-scale uni-modal datasets with sufficient data for rare classes. Lastly, we examine three fundamental design choices in MMLF, including the RGB detector representation (2D vs. 3D), cross-modal association (3D vs. image plane), and fusion strategy. We find that 2D RGB detectors recognize rare classes more reliably than 3D RGB detectors, image-plane association is more robust to depth estimation errors, and probabilistic score-calibrated fusion consistently yields the best performance. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and Argoverse2 demonstrate substantial improvements of MMLF, establishing a new state of the art.
comment: To appear in IJCV. Project page at https://github.com/cc50121/lt3d-lf
♻ ☆ OACap: Caption-Guided Active Observation for Detailed Video Captioning
Unlike question answering, where a query specifies a perceptual target, open-ended detailed captioning must determine what evidence to acquire and how to integrate it into a coherent global description. We propose Observation-Adaptive Video Captioner (OACap), a caption-centered agent that turns unsupported or missing information into targeted observation requests, uses spatiotemporal tools to acquire evidence, and iteratively verifies and revises the caption. OACap captions consistently improve performance across general video-understanding benchmarks using a fixed text-only reader. To better diagnose the information they preserve, we introduce Factual-Semantic Captioning Bench (FSCap-Bench). Its Core-Support Factuality Score (CSFS) combines claim precision with importance-aware fact coverage and responds as expected to four controlled perturbation types on 93.0-98.3% of valid caption pairs. Its Cross-Modal Semantic Round-Trip Score (CSRS) measures semantic preservation through a video-caption-video-caption round trip by matching atomic facts from source and recovered captions. Together, they connect downstream textual-memory utility with factual and semantic preservation.
comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables. Technical report
♻ ☆ MeshCone: Second-Order Cone Programming for Geometrically-Constrained Mesh Enhancement
Modern mesh generation pipelines whether learning-based or classical often produce outputs requiring post-processing to achieve production-quality geometry. This work introduces MeshCone, a convex optimization framework for guided mesh refinement that leverages reference geometry to correct deformed or degraded meshes. We formulate the problem as a second-order cone program where vertex positions are optimized to align with target geometry while enforcing smoothness through convex edge-length regularization. MeshCone performs geometry-aware optimization that preserves fine details while correcting structural defects. We demonstrate robust performance across 56 diverse object categories from ShapeNet and ThreeDScans, achieving superior refinement quality compared to Laplacian smoothing and unoptimized baselines while maintaining sub-second inference times. MeshCone is particularly suited for applications where reference geometry is available, such as mesh-from-template workflows, scan-to-CAD alignment, and quality assurance in asset production pipelines.
comment: This submission has been withdrawn by the authors. Upon further review, we identified issues in the analysis that require significant revision. An updated and more thoroughly developed version will be submitted once these have been resolved
♻ ☆ Superpixel-Based Image Segmentation Using Squared 2-Wasserstein Distances
We present an efficient method for image segmentation in the presence of strong intensity inhomogeneities. The approach combines two levels of clustering: pixels are first grouped into superpixels using Power-SLIC, which admits a discrete optimal transport (OT) interpretation, and these superpixels are subsequently merged using squared 2-Wasserstein distances between their empirical distributions. We formulate the merging process as an adjacency-constrained hierarchical optimization problem with a regularized objective that accounts for the heterogeneities of previously formed regions. We establish NP-completeness of the associated global optimization problem, even for two final regions and two-bin histograms. For the proposed greedy algorithm, we prove exact recovery under suitable histogram separation conditions and derive an additive approximation bound for the regularized energy. Numerical experiments demonstrate competitive segmentation accuracy on images exhibiting substantial intensity inhomogeneity, while retaining computational efficiency.
comment: 29 pages
♻ ☆ OmniSpace: Efficient Geometry Awareness for Autonomous Vehicles MLLMs
Hao Vo, Phu Loc Nguyen, Khoa Vo, Sieu Tran, Duc Minh Nguyen, Ngo Xuan Cuong, Nghi D. Q. Bui, Anh Nguyen, Duy Minh Ho Nguyen, Ngan Le
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on 2D visual tasks, yet enhancing their spatial intelligence for real-world applications such as Autonomous Vehicles (AV) remains an open challenge. Existing geometry-aware MLLMs typically rely on auxiliary 3D models at inference time, introducing pipeline complexity and the risk of cascading failures. In this paper, we present OmniSpace, a simple yet effective plug-and-play paradigm for geometry-aware spatial reasoning from purely 2D observations. Motivated by our finding that current MLLMs are bottlenecked by weak cross-view correspondence and depth estimation, OmniSpace introduces a Camera Pose Injector, a Multi-view Epipolar Attention module, and a 3D Geometric Distillation objective that jointly address these two limitations by transferring geometric knowledge into the model. Extensive experiments show that OmniSpace surpasses existing methods on planning benchmarks (nuScenes, Bench2Drive), risk detection (nuInstruct), language (Omnidrive), and generalization (DriveBench).