Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 122
☆ Designer-RSI: Evolving Procedural Memory from User Traffic for Agentic Graphic Design
Professional graphic design is a long-horizon agentic task in which structured, editable artifacts emerge from many interdependent actions, yet outcomes admit no reliable programmatic oracle. We introduce a continual adaptation framework in which a frozen frontier model operates professional design software through more than 230 tools, while an external procedural memory of natural-language skills accumulates and refines reusable design procedures from experience. The memory widens by acquiring procedures for recurring uncovered subtasks and deepens by revising existing procedures against their own successful and failed executions, while a matched replay gate admits only changes that repair failures without regressing observed successes. Five rounds over 1,406 real user briefs and 1,869 automatically graded trajectories, with no weight updates and no human labels, grow the bank from 76 documentation-derived skills to 139 and raise GenEval2 execution success on Claude-Sonnet-4 from 72.7% to 99.3% (+11.99 points in generation quality), with 61.8% and 67.6% win rates against the no-skill agent across four specialized design benchmarks on Claude-Sonnet-4 and Claude-Opus-4.6. We further show the two mechanisms are effective in combination: on 200 held-out briefs from user-traffic benchmark, widening or deepening alone reaches a 49.4% / 48.6% win rate over the no-skill agent, while their combination reaches 58.5% (p = 0.025). Procedural memory offers a practical route to continual adaptation of agents under noisy, unverifiable feedback.
comment: 9 pages, 7 figures
☆ MintAct: A Unified Visual Agent for Digital Environments
Mingfei Gao, Rui Tian, Haiming Gang, Bohan Zhai, Le Zhang, Yuanzheng Gong, Di Feng, Ege Özsoy, Kaixin Ma, Vishwesh Kirthivasan, Oğuzhan Fatih Kar, Roman Bachmann, Anders Boesen Lindbo Larsen, Afshin Dehghan
We present MintAct, a family of vision-language models that unifies UI grounding, multi-step navigation across mobile, desktop, and web, and visual tool use, trained at 2B, 4B, and 8B scales. Through careful design of our environments, data, and training recipes, MintAct models match the performance of per-domain specialists across all of these capabilities. To enable this, we develop a scalable environment and reinforcement learning (RL) infrastructure. On the environment side, we host hundreds of concurrent instances across heterogeneous per-domain backends, serving both trajectory data collection and online RL. To enable efficient and scalable RL training, an asynchronous framework keeps explicit control over the cross-domain training distribution and remains stable under noisy environment feedback and off-policy drift. Experimental results show that MintAct achieves state-of-the-art performance (48.9 on OSWorld-Verified) across a wide range of benchmarks at comparable model sizes.
☆ OmniVBench: A Benchmark and Large-Scale Dataset for Omni Reference-to-Video Generation
Wenxue Li, Peiyan Guan, Haoyang Jiang, Junxian Cai, Hualuo Liu, Chunjie Zhang, Chong Guan, Songlian Li, Taiyi Wu, Yongjian Yu, Xiaotong Zhao, Alan Zhao, Eric Liu, Xi Chen, Yu Liu, Lei Zhu
Reference-to-video (R2V) generation is evolving toward increasingly general and versatile reference control, giving rise to the emerging paradigm of omni R2V generation. However, existing benchmarks fall short of these emerging capabilities: their test cases cover limited reference types and compositions, and their evaluation protocols largely assess holistic reference consistency, overlooking whether reference factors are properly preserved, disentangled, and routed. Meanwhile, the high cost of constructing omni R2V training data makes suitable training resources scarce. To address these gaps, we introduce OmniVBench and the Omni-R2V Dataset for evaluating and training omni R2V models. OmniVBench expands R2V evaluation across broader reference types, fine-grained control tasks, and richer reference compositions, covering 7 task families and 18 fine-grained tasks spanning content, motion, style, structure, narrative, and multi-reference settings. We introduce factor-grounded evaluation with 12,172 case-specific checklist items, assessing whether intended reference factors are faithfully preserved, correctly disentangled and bound to their targets, and properly realized according to the instruction. We further introduce the Omni-R2V Dataset, bringing industrial-grade training resources for diverse R2V tasks to the broader research community. Drawing primarily on a large-scale corpus of professional video footage, it comprises 340K processed training samples spanning diverse reference types and multi-reference compositions. We develop task-specific pipelines for reference-target pair construction, offering a practical and scalable recipe for omni R2V data construction. Extensive evaluation of advanced open- and closed-source R2V models reveals clear performance gaps across task families and evaluation dimensions on OmniVBench, highlighting remaining limitations of current R2V models.
☆ Traffic Sign Recognition for Autonomous Driving Using Branched YOLOv2 and Geometric Features
Traffic sign recognition (TSR) is an important perception task for autonomous driving and advanced driver-assistance systems, where a system must both localize traffic signs and determine their semantic classes efficiently. This work presents a TSR system based on YOLOv2 for simultaneous detection and classification. Two complementary modifications are studied. First, YOLOv2 is extended with intermediate prediction layers, forming a branched architecture that can terminate inference early for easy cases and reduce computation time. Both whole-image and cell-wise branching strategies are investigated. Second, geometric information is introduced to reduce classification errors between visually similar signs. An unsupervised Bayesian image-segmentation method produces binary representations that are compared with class-specific geometric templates inside YOLOv2 bounding boxes. This information is used either during inference or as an additional signal during training. A dedicated dataset is constructed by combining GTSDB and GTSRB samples using seamless cloning and controlled image transformations. Experiments cover ten traffic-sign classes, with 3,000 training and 300 test samples. The selected branched architecture reports 0.647 s runtime and 0.680 mAP, compared with 0.6607 s and 0.680 mAP for baseline YOLOv2. Geometric verification during inference increases mAP to 0.713, while the geometric-feature training variant achieves 0.697 mAP with a reported runtime of 0.6608 s.
☆ PRIME: Perception Feedback with Situational Memory Embeddings in VLA Models
Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for autonomous driving operate primarily through feedforward inference across the perception--reasoning--planning hierarchy. While modern architectures maintain temporal recurrence within the perceptual module, early perception remains blind to downstream reasoning and navigation goals, processing visual inputs agnostically without prioritizing cues informed by prior decisions. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces PRIME, a learned feedback mechanism that conditions the VLA perceptual queries on a novel Situational Memory. By aggregating latent representations of past perception, reasoning, navigation goals, and predicted behaviors across an L-step window via cross-attention, PRIME enables intent-driven perceptual attention at minimal computational cost, adding only a maximum of 29.7M parameters (0.41% of the 7.3B-parameter base model). Evaluated on the Bench2Drive closed-loop benchmark, PRIME achieves a state-of-the-art Driving Score of 82.47 (+4.73 over ORION) and a Success Rate of 60.00% (+5.38 percentage points), the highest reported Driving Score among published VLAs trained on Think2Drive demonstrations.
☆ GALA: Geometry-Aware Latent Action Modeling for Vision-Language-Action Model Pretraining across Embodiments
Learning large-scale vision-language-action (VLA) models from multi-embodiment datasets remains challenging due to heterogeneous action spaces across end effectors. Although latent action models (LAMs) can learn embodiment-agnostic action representations from diverse video data, existing image-based LAMs often fail to capture fine-grained end-effector articulation, particularly finger-level geometric changes in human and dexterous robot hands. To address this limitation, we propose GALA, a Geometry-Aware Latent-Action modeling framework that augments image-based latent actions with 3D end-effector geometric motion. However, naively incorporating point clouds yields fine-grained action representations with limited shared semantics, hindering cross-embodiment pretraining. To address this issue, we introduce the Unified End-effector Motion Representation (UEMR), which preserves fine-grained motion information while improving the cross-embodiment generalizability of latent actions. Building upon UEMR, GALA combines visual latent actions that capture scene-level dynamics with geometric latent actions that capture shared fine-grained end-effector articulation, providing effective supervision for VLA pretraining from multi-embodiment data, including action-free ego-centric human videos. Experiments on fine-grained motion probing, cross-embodiment retrieval, and downstream VLA evaluation demonstrate GALA's effectiveness in modeling generalizable fine-grained motions across embodiments, achieving 68.3% RoboCasa-GR1 success rate and 75.5% real-world success rate. Code, appendix, and demos are available at https://puzhenyuan.github.io/GALA-website/.
☆ Info3R: Information-Adaptive Test-Time Training for 3D Reconstruction
Transformer-based models have recently achieved strong performance on 3D reconstruction from images, and recent works extend them to process video streams in an online manner for real-world deployment. However, existing methods overlook two key signals when handling long image streams: the importance of each incoming frame and the information saturation of the model's internal state. In this paper, we propose Info3R, a novel information-adaptive test-time training method for the online 3D reconstruction. We introduce an information-aware state update that modulates the state update strength based on the redundancy and informativeness of each incoming frame. To restore the state's plasticity -- its capacity to incorporate new observations -- we propose a dynamic state reset, triggered by the cumulative magnitude of state updates and the model's prediction confidence and accompanied by an anchor-to-world alignment. Our method achieves consistent improvements on camera pose estimation, video depth estimation, and 3D reconstruction, while substantially mitigating the performance degradation in the long sequence evaluation. Notably, on KITTI Odometry, our method achieves on average 1.68x lower ATE than LongStream, demonstrating its robustness on extended outdoor sequences.
☆ The Role of Radiometric Features in Cross-Site Leaf-Wood Segmentation of LiDAR Point Clouds IEEE
Leaf-wood segmentation of individual trees from LiDAR point clouds is essential for quantitative structure models (QSMs) used in non-destructive biomass estimation. Existing segmentation methods typically exclude radiometric features (e.g., intensity, return number) to maximize cross-sensor compatibility. We challenge this design choice by evaluating cross-site and cross-platform generalization: training on the public Heidelberg dataset (terrestrial TLS, 1550nm) and testing on a novel dataset from Ontario, Canada (RPA-LS, 905nm). Results show that geometry-only methods - including state-of-the-art deep learning models trained on high-density LiDAR datasets - fail to generalize to the sparse, top-down geometry of aerial scans, achieving F1 scores <= 0.56. Incorporating radiometric features (intensity, return number, number of returns) improves F1 to 0.61, but more critically, increases wood recall by 119% from 0.16 to 0.35. Furthermore, geometry-only approaches often result in fragmented stem and branch components. We find that leveraging radiometric features preserves greater structural connectivity, resulting in more coherent architectures that are better suited for QSM reconstruction. We demonstrate that while geometric patterns are view-dependent and prone to overfitting scan patterns, radiometric features encode physical material properties that generalize across disparate sensors and environments.
comment: 5 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for presentation at IGARSS 2026 (IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium)
☆ Catena: A Comprehensive Software Suite for Large-Scale Connectomics
Samia Mohinta, Pedro Gómez-Gálvez, Shi Yan Lee, Daniel Franco-Barranco, Michael Clayton, Stephan Preibisch, Jan Funke, Albert Cardona
The gold standard datasets for mapping connectomes are electron microscopy volumes of densely labeled neural tissue at nanometer resolution. Yet reconstructing and proofreading neuronal arbors and annotating all synapses requires pipelining multiple software tools that are often fragmented, inconsistently maintained, or proprietary, hindering reproducibility and automation. Here, we introduce Catena, an open-source, comprehensive, developer-centric software suite for connectomics that integrates modules for 3D neuron and organelle segmentation, synapse detection, microtubule tracking, and neurotransmitter inference. Catena organizes its modules in composable, chunk-wise processing pipelines in a completely documented, extensible, and adaptable design. We further reduce compute and ground-truth data requirements with pretrained machine learning models, facilitating fine-tuning. Catena ships fully containerized modules that encapsulate evolving dependencies for consistent execution across workstations and clusters. By consolidating open components, shareable models, and containerized runtimes, Catena delivers a reproducible and scalable approach to mapping cellular connectomes from electron microscopy volumes. Code and documentation: https://github.com/Mohinta2892/catena.git
☆ Benchmarking the Explanatory Quality of Open-Weight Vision-Language Models in Face Recognition
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently been proposed as promising tools for face recognition, as they can produce natural language explanations alongside similarity scores. This capability is considered appealing for face comparisons in forensic contexts, which require decisions to be transparent and auditable. However, existing evaluations of VLMs for that use case focus mostly on recognition accuracy, while the validity of generated explanations remains unquantified. In this work, we introduce a benchmarking framework for VLM-based face recognition that treats explanation quality as a core evaluation axis. We propose two criteria that explanations should satisfy: relevance, i.e., reliance on identity-stable facial features; and faithfulness, i.e., alignment with the visible image content without hallucinated features. We jointly develop a methodology enabling the quantification of relevance and faithfulness of evaluated models, based on constraining model outputs to a structured explanation format that supports automated querying and auditing. Using this framework, we benchmark several families of open-weight VLMs, jointly evaluating face verification accuracy and explanation quality. Our results highlight remaining shortcomings of produced explanations, and emphasize the need for such explanation quality metrics to get a complete picture of model performance. The proposed benchmark and open-source evaluation harness provide a foundation for proper benchmarking and future fine-tuning of explainable face recognition systems.
comment: 11 pages
☆ Chronosphere: Space-Time Tessellation of Local Climate Experts
We introduce Chronosphere, a spatio-temporal neural field that learns representations of climate. A central challenge in geographic representation learning is modeling environmental processes whose spatial and temporal complexity varies widely. Yet existing location encoders typically fix a single level of detail everywhere. Global bases such as spherical harmonics spread capacity uniformly across space and time. Localized bases resolve only predefined regions. Learned tessellations adapt, but are inefficient at representing higher frequencies. Chronosphere unifies these approaches, pairing an adaptive tessellation of learnable sites on the spacetime torus $S^2\times S^1$ with a shared bank of local basis functions. Both where capacity is placed and how much detail each region carries adapt to the data, across space and time. Trained to reconstruct climatology, Chronosphere matches or leads state-of-the-art location encoders across spatial and temporal tasks, with the largest gains under spatial and temporal transfer.
☆ Morphology-Aware Ambiguity Learning for Wafer Defect Decision Support
Wafer map defect recognition is commonly formulated as a fixed-taxonomy classification problem that assigns each wafer to a single defect class. However, some wafers exhibit morphologies near class boundaries, for which forcing a single prediction may be less informative than providing plausible diagnostic alternatives. This paper proposes a morphology-aware ambiguity learning framework that supports three diagnostic actions: automatic single-class diagnosis, assisted diagnosis with two plausible defect classes, and full review. Using the radial, angular, and geometric characteristics of training wafer maps, the framework constructs a class-level ambiguity matrix representing defect-class pairs with similar morphology and plausible diagnostic alternatives. It guides the model to learn plausible alternative classes rather than treating all incorrect classes equally. During inference, the matrix determines whether an uncertain prediction can be represented by a meaningful two-class diagnostic set or should be escalated for full review. Experiments on WM-811K show that the proposed framework outperforms conventional approaches in defect recognition and diagnostic decision support, providing meaningful two-class alternatives while reserving full review for cases with unresolved ambiguity. Illustrative cost analyses further show the potential cost advantage of the proposed routing strategy. The diagnostic behavior of the framework remains consistent across different backbone architectures.
☆ The Weight Is Over - Interactive Diffusion on Consumer GPUs
On-device inference is booming, but the momentum is almost all in language models. Diffusion pipelines are memory hungry, latency-sensitive, and require orchestrating an embedder, a transformer, a decoder, and often further postprocessing that is not as standardized as LLM inference loops are. We navigate the trade-off between performance, quality, and model footprint to reach as many client devices in the wild as possible. We make three contributions: an embedding translator that maps a small text encoder into a large encoder space to cut weight and latency; a reproducible sweep recipe for navigating the speed/quality/memory triangle in diffusion pipelines; and an interactive on-device image generation editor achieving sub-second TTFI on recent GPUs.
☆ Object Detection Benchmarks are Incomplete: The Role of Label Errors and Annotation Uncertainty
Sarina Penquitt, Jonathan Klees, Antonia van Betteray, Parssa Jashnieh, Peter Stehr, Matthias Rottmann, Lars Schmarje
While object detection has advanced through improved architectures and open-vocabulary models, we provide strong evidence that benchmark quality is limited by annotation incompleteness. Across four widely used datasets (COCO, Pascal VOC, Cityscapes, KITTI), re-annotation reveals substantial increases in annotated objects (e.g., up to +60% on KITTI and +40% on COCO), driven primarily by previously unlabeled small, occluded, or densely packed instances. While some differences arise from dataset-specific annotation conventions, we consistently find that missing annotations are the main source of label errors across all datasets. To achieve high data quality, we introduce a scalable annotation pipeline that emphasizes high recall and captures ambiguity through soft labels aggregated from at least 11 annotators per object. The resulting annotations improve coverage and align well with human calibration. We show that benchmark performance is highly sensitive to annotation quality, although model rankings remain largely stable. We introduce two large-scale benchmarks: (i) an uncertainty-aware object detection benchmark, and (ii) a label error detection benchmark grounded in real label errors. We show that current detectors are strongly depended on annotation quality and are misaligned with human perception. Current label error detection methods, which have been shown to perform well on synthetic noise, struggle to achieve high recall and precision on real label errors. Our results highlight the need for future object detection benchmarks to move beyond deterministic annotations toward high-recall, uncertainty-aware evaluation that maximizes valid instances and better reflects real-world ambiguity.
☆ How Many Posterior Samples? Calibrated Stopping for Adaptive Sensing
In classification-oriented adaptive sensing, posterior samples characterize uncertainty at the current measurement state and can serve two roles: they may guide the next sensing direction, while their class labels provide votes for the candidate classes and determine whether sensing should continue. We focus on the stopping layer that turns these votes into a declaration, without modifying the posterior sampler or sensing directions. A natural plug-in rule declares when the observed vote share exceeds a threshold. We show that this threshold is not itself a confidence guarantee: when the underlying vote mass equals the threshold, the plug-in rule declares about half the time. As alternatives, we calibrate a fixed-sample rule and a finite-horizon sequential rule to a prescribed false-declaration probability, and study exact curtailment, which stops a fixed-pool rule once its final verdict is forced. We then derive how one-round declaration probabilities determine posterior-sample cost and classification accuracy along a sensing path. On MNIST with DDRM and a fixed PCA-guided probe sequence, curtailment saves up to 62% of posterior samples. Among the evaluated rules at matched operating points, sequential stopping reduces the cost the most. At a high accuracy, that same sequential rule can trade more posterior samples for fewer measurements.
☆ Classification-oriented adaptive sensing via posterior sampling
Recent advances in diffusion models have enabled high-performance, instance-adaptive compressed sensing through posterior sampling, without task-specific policy training. Existing methods select sensing probes by maximizing total posterior signal variance and are therefore primarily reconstruction-driven. We introduce a classification-driven extension motivated by the closed-form posterior covariance of a class-conditional Gaussian mixture model, which decomposes into within-class and between-class uncertainty. Using calibrated soft classifier outputs, we estimate these uncertainty terms from diffusion posterior samples and propose a classification-oriented criterion for selecting the dominant sensing direction in the unmeasured subspace. Experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 compare the resulting classification accuracy, measurement cost, and reconstruction quality with those of reconstruction-oriented counterparts. The results identify regimes in which semantic posterior uncertainty yields a more favorable classification--measurement trade-off and quantify the associated reconstruction cost.
☆ MIST: Multimodal Survival Prediction with Genomic-Guided Histology Attention MICCAI 2026
Multimodal survival models can combine complementary prognostic information from whole-slide images and genomic profiles, but effective fusion remains challenging amid external cohort shift and computational complexity. To address these challenges, we propose MIST, multimodal survival prediction with genomic-guided histology attention. MIST represents genomic features as tokens and allows them to query compact foundation-model-derived histology context tokens before survival prediction. This design enriches molecular information with histology context rather than merging separately encoded modalities only at the final stage. Training combines discrete-time survival prediction with genomic feature masking, WSI dropout, and paired WSI-genomics contrastive alignment. Across four external evaluations in colon, renal, lung, and glioblastoma cohorts, MIST improves external C-index over standard fusion baselines in the primary comparisons. These results support genomic-guided histology attention as a compact and effective strategy for multimodal oncology outcome prediction. Our code is available at https://github.com/samiyavuuz/MIST .
comment: Accepted at the COMPAYL 2026 Workshop on Computational Pathology and Multimodal Data at MICCAI 2026. 11 pages, 2 figures, 4 tables
☆ VideoReloc: Long-Term Indoor Video Relocalization against a Kilobyte-Scale Semantic Scene Graph
Qianru Li, Xuyang Chen, Xuqin Wang, Zhenghao Zhang, Hongyi Luo, Tao Wu, Daniel Cremers, Lu Liu, Yanfeng Zhang
Given a compact semantic scene graph, long-term indoor video relocalization estimates a map-frame trajectory after lighting and furniture changes. Visual methods rely on appearance and become unreliable under these changes; localizing one frame at a time from object classes and geometry instead leaves sparse, ambiguous evidence. We introduce VideoReloc, whose adaptive clips use odometry to gather spatial evidence until object and motion criteria are met, adapting query length to the observed scene. Its run-level decision rechecks conflicting placements using evidence accumulated across connected clips, stabilizing the trajectory beyond adjacent-clip tracking. Hypothesis-first registration proposes poses from object triplets and verifies each using clip-wide object centers and box surfaces. Orientation-aware refinement uses box faces, gravity and wall directions to resolve ambiguity in camera orientation and refine the full pose. This reframes sparse-map relocalization as verification of spatially extended video queries, moving discriminative support from stored appearance to temporal context and permitting a 100 kB map of class-labelled boxes. On RIO10 and ReplicaCAD, the all-frame localization success rate at 1 m/10$^\circ$ is 73.5% and 61.1% under causal evaluation, rising to 90.6% and 74.8% with clip closure. The evaluated per-frame scene coordinate regressors reach up to 47.6% and 49.8%, respectively, with maps of 12.6-42 MB. Project page: https://videoreloc.github.io
comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables. Project page: https://videoreloc.github.io
☆ A Principled Approach to Unsupervised Anomaly Detection
Traditional unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) methods are designed to flag or localise deviations from a normative distribution, ignoring the underlying generative mechanisms of the anomalies. Yet the nature of an anomaly is often as important as its presence. We reformulate UAD as a Bayesian inverse problem, in which the objective is to infer the most probable corruption responsible for each observation. Our framework yields a probabilistic anomaly score as the energy of the inferred corruption parameters, and serves as a principled recipe for developing new UAD algorithms. We derive several existing methods as instances of the general framework, each corresponding to the same energy score under different modelling choices. Experimentally, we study the framework's components in a controlled setting, and improve object-class AUROC on the MVTec AD dataset by 2.3% by adapting the underlying corruption model. Finally, we validate the framework on a brain MRI benchmark, achieving strong detection performance while producing estimates of pathology intensity, bias, and geometry. Code is available at https://github.com/jgmyles/inverse-uad.
comment: 14 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables
☆ PointLAM: Local Attentive Mamba for Efficient Point-based 3D Object Detection ECCV 2026
3D object detection from LiDAR point clouds faces a fundamental dilemma: voxel-based methods achieve efficiency at the cost of geometric quantization, while point-based methods preserve fidelity but suffer from prohibitive computational bottlenecks. Specifically, point-based architectures are crippled by slow downsampling strategies (e.g., FPS) and expensive dynamic neighbor queries (e.g., k-NN) coupled with costly continuous interactions. To tackle these systemic inefficiencies, we propose PointLAM, a highly efficient and powerful point-based architecture driven by two synergistic innovations. First, to resolve the downsampling bottleneck, we develop the Laplacian Point Sampler (LPS). LPS employs an implicit discrete Laplacian high-pass filter and Doubly Sorted Sampling to achieve fast, structure-aware foreground preservation. Second, to overcome local modeling latency, we design the Local Hadamard Aggregator (LHA). LHA decouples spatial indexing from feature representation using transient grids, and replaces complex continuous interactions with a Hadamard Gating mechanism for topology-aware, attentive modulation. By coupling this local gating with Bi-Directional Mamba (BDM) layers for global sequence modeling, we formulate the Local Attentive Mamba (LAM) block. Powered by this architecture, PointLAM achieves competitive performance on nuScenes and Waymo for point-based detectors. It rivals highly optimized voxel competitors while requiring a fraction of the computational footprint, demonstrating marked superiority in detecting small instances and handling extreme sparsity. Project page: https://pointlam.github.io/.
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026
☆ XCalib Depth-Guided Geometric Optimization for Dense Thermal-Visible Video Registration
Image registration is a vital preprocessing step in multimodal perception tasks, including image fusion, object detection, and semantic segmentation. In Advanced Driver- Assistance Systems (ADAS), spatial misalignment between visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) cameras -caused by non-coincident optical axes and field-of-view differences- introduces non-uniform parallax and visual ghosting. Classical keypoint-based methods are restricted to global homographies that fail under dynamic depth, while unconstrained dense flow algorithms lack structural regularization and suffer from temporal instability. In this paper, we propose XCalib, an unsupervised dense thermal-visible registration framework that bridges this gap. Rather than serving as an absolute metric calibration tool, XCalib leverages virtual pinhole camera parameterization strictly as a geometric constraint space. By optimizing effective relative pose and intrinsics alongside predicted monocular metric depth, XCalib restricts the search space of spatial displacements to physically valid projection geometries. Our key contributions are: (1) a novel registration paradigm that uses camera parameterization as an implicit regularizer for dense cross-modal warping; (2) Normalized Edges Correlation (NEC), a robust structural similarity metric tailored to cross- spectral alignment; and (3) extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations across public ADAS datasets, demonstrating superior temporal stability and alignment accuracy over unconstrained dense flow baselines.
comment: 10 pages, 6 figures
☆ Beyond Benchmark Scores: Auditing Medical Vision-Language Models for Chest X-Ray Tuberculosis Screening
A medical model's benchmark score does not establish that the same conclusion holds under a different evaluation. This study tests whether claims about model ranking, score reliability and screening performance survive changes in cohort, prompt, negative spectrum, specified prevalence and operating threshold. We audit three medical vision-language models (BioMedCLIP, CheXficient, and MedSigLIP) and a general-domain OpenCLIP comparator on 12,200 chest radiograph records from four datasets (Montgomery, Shenzhen, TBX11K, and VinDr-CXR). Five fixed prompt families yield 244,000 model--image--prompt scores. No model leads every cohort and reliability criterion. Prompt-family changes alter AUROC in 21 of 48 multiplicity-controlled comparisons. Replacing healthy controls with sick non-tuberculosis controls reduces AUROC by 0.075--0.306 across all four models. On VinDr-CXR, the three medical models distinguish tuberculosis from no-finding controls substantially better than from pneumonia or lung tumor; their AUROC point estimates for both named diseases fall below 0.5. CheXficient has documented VinDr-CXR pretraining exposure, which limits the interpretation of its results. Thresholds chosen for 95\% sensitivity on TBX11K training retain that constraint by point estimate in only four of sixteen target evaluations. A five-seed supervised source model reaches 0.999 AUROC on TBX11K validation but 0.629 on each of two external cohorts. Conservative exclusion of perceptual-overlap candidates narrows this gap without closing it. These retrospective, single-task results show that discrimination, score reliability and threshold retention support different portability claims. Evidence for chest X-ray tuberculosis screening should identify the complete evaluation specification rather than attribute clinical portability to a checkpoint alone.
comment: 27 pages, 7 figures, and 21 tables; includes extended methods, statistical analyses, and robustness evaluations
☆ SFVO: Decoupled Confidence-Guided Stereo-Flow Visual Odometry with Bidirectional PnP
Deep learning-based visual odometry (VO) has achieved significant progress, yet most existing methods focus on a monocular approach, which suffers from scale ambiguity. Stereo VO provides real metric by its nature, but remains less studied in deep learning VO due to its high computational cost and modeling complexity. Recent advances in stereo matching and optical flow estimation have made dense visual correspondence increasingly accurate and reliable, but their complementary geometric information has not been fully exploited for VO. In this paper, we present SFVO, a correspondence-driven stereo VO framework that directly builds upon pretrained stereo matching and optical flow models. SFVO exploits pretrained stereo matching and optical flow models to estimate stereo and temporal correspondences. Instead of learning pose directly from images, SFVO maps learned correspondences into geometric constraints and predicts which points are trustworthy. To improve the reliability of visual correspondence-based geometric constraints, we introduce decoupled confidence maps for rotation and translation. This design better aligns the characteristics of visual correspondence and 6-DoF transformations. Extensive experiments on outdoor and indoor datasets demonstrate that SFVO achieves robust and accurate pose estimation with strong generalization capability. The code will be released.
☆ Balanced Prompt Adaptation against Entropy-Induced Collapse for Test-Time Binary Segmentation
Entropy minimization is a standard objective for test-time adaptation (TTA), but it can fail in imbalanced binary segmentation. Unlike image classification, dense segmentation aggregates thousands of pixel predictions, allowing the larger predicted class to dominate the update, pull minority predictions toward itself, and produce a degenerate mask as predictions saturate and their entropy gradients vanish. We theoretically establish this collapse in a shared-shift model. This analysis motivates Balanced-Anchor Prompt Adaptation (BAPA), which combines two complementary modules. The Class-Balanced Anchors (CBA) module selects high-confidence anchors separately from each predicted class and gives foreground and background equal total loss weight, preventing the larger region from dominating the update. Dynamic Prompt Adaptation (DPA) refreshes these anchors after each prediction update and optimizes only text-side prompt residuals while keeping the vision-language encoders frozen. This prompt-only update refines the foreground-background decision boundary without altering the pretrained dense visual representation. Across experiments from four domains, BAPA achieves the highest mean Dice among the evaluated methods. Factorized ablations further validate the complementary roles of CBA and DPA, supporting balanced prompt adaptation as an effective alternative to entropy minimization for test-time binary segmentation.
☆ ZYT-World: A Real-Time Controllable World Model for Closed-Loop Autonomous-Driving Simulation
Boni Hu, Xiong Wei, Haoming Huang, Yong Huang, Chenbo Wang, Yi Yang, Jiancheng Wang, Ruicheng Zhu, Zhimin Yang, Guanglai Liu, Qiaowan Jin, Dongzhuo Wang, Haiwei Kuang, Jiajun Fan, Yue Wu, Jiaxin Wei, Hao Sun, Feihong Yan, Wei Bi, Kaixuan Wang, Zichao Guo, Xiaozhi Chen
Generative world models offer controllable and repeatable closed-loop simulation for end-to-end and vision-language-action driving policies, but production deployment exposes three unresolved requirements: faithfully reproducing a mixed fisheye-pinhole rig at native resolutions; reconciling causal, per-timestep interaction with long-horizon stability and low latency; and preserving scene identity when a location is revisited. We present ZYT-World, a single architecture that natively generates four fisheye views with field of view > 180° and three pinhole views. Projection-specific Plucker adapters encode camera geometry, ego-motion adaptive layer normalization provides global motion control, and a lightweight pixel-aligned layout conditions traffic participants and signals through instance-level boxes, headings and colors. Heterogeneous training combines full-rig geometric coverage with high-resolution detail. Teacher forcing, causal consistency distillation, self-rollout distribution matching distillation, and RigCritic transform a 40-step bidirectional teacher into a one-step, per-latent streaming generator, with RigCritic evaluating the seven-view rig jointly. A 19M-parameter variational autoencoder decoder (TinyVAE), W8A8 quantization, and our inference engine reduce decoding, backbone, and incremental-execution costs, respectively. Finally, cross-trajectory pairs derived from real captures train a plug-in implicit-memory module that preserves place-specific evidence. On the internal multi-view test set, the one-step model retains more than 90% of the teacher's PSNR and SSIM, while FID, FVD, and LPIPS stay within 11% of the teacher. Under the generator-only timing in Figure 2, it is 107.7 times faster than the 40-step bidirectional teacher. TinyVAE decodes 59.8 times faster than Wan. 30s rollouts and cross-trajectory revisits show the intended long-horizon and memory behavior.
comment: Technical Report. Videos and additional results are available at zyt-aim.github.io/ZYT-World
☆ SignGPT: Toward LLM-Mediated Sign Language Interaction through Gloss-Free Translation and Generation
Ronghui Li, Jun Dong, Zhongyuan Hu, Zunnan Xu, Jun Zhou, Liyuan Chen, Shuoling Liu, Jiangpeng Yan, Jie Guo, Xiu Li, Linchao Bao
Large language models (LLMs) provide limited support for sign language interaction. Unifying sign language translation (SLT) and generation (SLG) to enable sign language as both input and output can reduce switching between separate models during sign-text interaction. We present SignGPT, a unified, pose-based framework for gloss-free SLT and SLG. SignGPT integrates part-aware hierarchical representations of body, hand, and facial motion into a shared language model and employs asymmetric multi-token prediction and progressive training for bidirectional modeling. We evaluate SignGPT on How2Sign (ASL) and Phoenix-2014T (DGS) through benchmark comparisons, qualitative analyses, and component ablations. An exploratory study with 12 Deaf ASL signers assesses an LLM-mediated sign-to-sign response pipeline, highlighting the potential of unified modeling to support sign language conversation (SLC).
☆ Diffusion-Based Tumor Inpainting for Renal Segmentation under Clinical Data Scarcity
Deep learning segmentation of renal tumors requires large annotated datasets, yet clinical deployments typically offer only a handful of tumor-positive cases from the target site. We propose a diffusion-based inpainting framework that synthesizes anatomically plausible renal tumors within healthy CT scans, requiring no additional annotation, and provide the first systematic comparison of 2D, 2.5D, and full 3D (MAISI) synthesis strategies for this task. Training the diffusion model on public data (KiTS23, KIRC) and evaluating nnU-Net segmentation on a internal cohort across three low-data regimes, we find that 2.5D and 3D augmentation substantially reduce false positives (from $\sim$18--20\% to $\sim$3--6\%) while maintaining Dice, whereas 2D provides no consistent benefit. Crucially, the proposed 2.5D method matches full 3D synthesis on every metric at substantially lower computational cost, indicating that local volumetric consistency alone is sufficient for effective augmentation in data- and resource-scarce clinical settings.
☆ Listen Before You Speak: Response Planning from Listener Facial Reactions for Conversational Speech Generation ECCV
Conversational speech depends on dialogue context and the listener's immediately preceding behavior. We propose ReACT-TTS, a two-stage framework that uses a one-second pre-response listener facial sequence to plan the next utterance's emotion and prosody before speech realization. On a strict dyadic MELD protocol, Temporal conditioning yields higher mean macro-F1 and VAD concordance than Text-only across ten seeds, while accuracy remains essentially unchanged. Ablations show that temporal modeling performs best among the visual variants and that an explicit early-to-late difference is unnecessary; correct listener reactions also outperform cyclic mismatches on average. In a contextual-appropriateness study with 20 speech researchers, 76% of judgments prefer Temporal, 9% Text-only, and 15% report no preference. We further connect the predicted response style to a Grad-TTS backbone for end-to-end speech realization. Overall, the results support pre-response listener dynamics as complementary cues for conversational response planning. The source code is available at https://github.com/CYJ1/ReACT-TTS_public.
comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, 2026 ECCV Workshop (11th ABAW) Best Student Paper Award
☆ DRT: Dense Reasoning Trace for Efficient and Grounded Multimodal Reasoning
Despite the remarkable progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), prevailing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigms remain confined to the natural-language expression space. Consequently, they inherently incur excessive linguistic overhead, leading to information dilution and weak visual grounding. To address this challenge, we propose Dense Reasoning Trace (DRT), a paradigm that departs from natural-language-centered CoT by expressing reasoning as compact structured traces, which include concise intermediate states with symbolic connectors and disentangle visual observations from logical deductions. First, we introduce the Dense Trace Initialization to internalize the DRT reasoning mode into the model, substantially improving token efficiency while preserving visual evidence. To further enable the model to faithfully capture the logical relations within traces, we propose the Trace-Grounded Reinforcement Learning framework, which builds reference traces through a tri-perspective verification pipeline and employs Trace-Grounded GRPO with structured rewards, encouraging the model to generate concise DRT-style traces with reduced hallucination and stronger logical grounding. Extensive experiments on challenging reasoning benchmarks show that DRT achieves 5.5$\times$ token efficiency improvement while improving 1.3 accuracy points over the Qwen3-VL baseline. These findings suggest that complex multimodal reasoning may not require verbose natural-language traces, opening a more efficient path for next-generation MLLMs. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/HIT-leaderone/DRT
☆ Configurable Multi-Stage Vision Pipeline for Crop Disease and Pest Diagnosis
Farmer.Chat is Digital Green's farm advisory service for smallholder farmers. When something looks wrong with a crop, the farmer takes a photograph and sends it, and that photograph is the whole question: no symptom described, no crop named, often no text at all. The service has to determine whether the picture can be used, what crop it shows, and what is wrong with it, from images taken on cheap phones in a field, in poor light and with a moving camera. The system doing this today cannot be adjusted. It has no adjustable thresholds for photograph rejection, crops and problems cannot be added, and there is no confidence cut-off to set.
We study about 1.16 million photographs sent to Farmer.Chat from Ethiopia, India, Kenya and Nigeria. The production quality gate rejected 46.8% of the images it judged, over a quarter of those reaching diagnosis returned no crop name, and 35.8% of the labelled problems filed under "disease" are pests, identifiable without the crop. We therefore split the work into three stages: a quality gate (M0), a crop detector (M1), and a disease or pest detector (M2). Route A fills all three with one fine-tuned vision-language model (Qwen3-VL-4B) answering in a single call. Route B fills each with a small specialist model (DaViT, YOLO26).
We replace our production GPT-4o quality gate with a small MobileNetV3 gate at 86.9% F1 in 12 ms. On one test set scored the same way for every system, a hierarchical DaViT-Base achieves 95.41% crop accuracy against 91.46% for the production baseline. It also leads on diagnosis and never declines to answer, while every language model in the comparison leaves a large share of rows with no diagnosis. The fine-tuned model retains two capabilities the specialists do not have: one call for all three stages, and a request for a better photograph when the image cannot support an answer.
comment: 14 pages, 26 Tables, 12 Figures
☆ Extending Decoupled Attention to Dense Prediction and Masked Training for Multi-Channel Images
Multi-Channel imaging (MCI) data differs fundamentally from natural images, as each channel records a semantically distinct signal rather than a colour band. To adapt vision encoders to MCI data, Multi-Channel Vision Transformers (MC-ViTs) tokenize each channel independently and concatenate the resulting tokens into one sequence, and the channel count is no longer fixed by the architecture. Self-attention is then computed across all channel-patch tokens with no restriction on which channels attend to which, which dilutes the features of individual channels. The Decoupled Vision Transformer (DC-ViT) regulates this by separating updates computed within a channel from updates computed across channels, and by forming a representation per channel before the channels are combined. Its formulation, however, pairs tokens by spatial position, and thus requires the same visible tokens in every channel. Correspondence under independent per-channel masking is recovered by solving a linear assignment between the retained patches of each channel, which allows decoupled attention to be combined with current masked multi-channel training in its standard configuration rather than a restricted one. Across three classification and three segmentation benchmarks spanning fluorescence microscopy, imaging mass cytometry and satellite imaging, including dense prediction at high channel counts, the resulting formulation outperforms the strongest MC-ViT baseline.
☆ Detection is solved, delineation is not: what governs tooth segmentation on panoramic radiographs
Automatic tooth segmentation and FDI numbering on panoramic radiographs underpins computer-assisted dental diagnosis, yet which factors govern performance remains unclear. We assemble a corpus of 1,422 panoramic radiographs containing 42,142 expert-delineated tooth polygons across the 32-class FDI taxonomy, annotated by 30 dental practitioners and independently reviewed by two others, and use it to isolate input resolution, architecture and anatomical priors under a single evaluation protocol.
First, resolution dominates: across a controlled 640/1024/1280 ablation, mask mAP50-95 rises 0.656 -> 0.710 -> 0.717 while mAP50 stays flat at ~0.982. Both gains are significant under a paired bootstrap over images (p < 0.001, p = 0.024); neither mAP50 change is distinguishable from zero. Added resolution buys boundary precision, not detection. Second, architecture is nearly irrelevant in-domain: a query-based transformer with 2.1x the parameters is statistically equivalent to a one-stage detector (95% CI [-0.0064, +0.0064]), only marginally better under domain shift, 5.5x slower on CPU and not executable under standard ONNX runtimes. Third, three targeted interventions fail: a LoRA-adapted self-supervised encoder underperforms, a promptable foundation segmenter degrades masks by 39%, and globally optimal anatomical label assignment yields +0.0007 despite correcting a constraint violated in 40% of out-of-domain predictions.
Zero-shot transfer to an independent multi-centre cohort, verified overlap-free, costs 62% of mask mAP50-95 but only 18% of mAP50, reproducing the dissociation. Decomposing masks along the tooth axis localises the residual error to the apical third. Boundary precision is therefore the binding constraint, and effort is better directed at resolution and acquisition diversity than at architectural novelty.
comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables. Code: https://github.com/Rehan000/opg-tooth-segmentation
☆ Learned Parametric Emotion Editing: Real-Time Affective Filtering for On-Device Social Media Video
Problematic internet use affects a growing share of the population, yet common interventions, e.g., time limits, blocking, forced breaks, are coercive and easily circumvented. We explore a less restrictive alternative: adapting the emotional intensity of visual content. Prior work has shown that optimization can steer an image's affective content, but its per-image optimization cost makes it impractical for real-time deployment. We instead learn a model that predicts this transformation in a single forward pass: a MobileNetV4 backbone with FiLM-based emotion conditioning outputs parameters for differentiable global transformations. This replaces prior iterative optimization (80 s per image) with a single 3.7 ms forward pass. In a user study (N = 54), the model reduced viewer-reported arousal relative to unedited images, comparably to the grayscale well-being filter, while being rated higher in perceived quality. We integrate the model into an Android app that adapts Instagram video in real time, sustaining 60 fps on a Samsung Galaxy S23.
comment: 18 pages, 13 figures
☆ HAT: Hypothesis-Anchored Tracking for Video Monocular Spacecraft Pose Estimation
Monocular 6-DoF pose estimation of non-cooperative targets is important for on-orbit servicing and debris removal. A single-image estimator can confuse near-symmetric spacecraft orientations, and tracking can preserve an incorrect pose. We present Hypothesis-Anchored Tracking (HAT), a causal framework that uses inter-frame motion to select among competing CAD-based pose hypotheses before alignment and fusion. Rather than independently choosing the highest-scoring hypothesis in each image, HAT retains competing orientation histories and selects a pose to anchor the relative trajectory estimated by monocular SLAM. Sparse anchors and pose fusion provide per-frame estimates after initialization without revising past outputs. The method requires only a calibrated RGB sequence, a metric CAD model, and target image regions, which can be supplied by detection or segmentation. The pretrained pose and SLAM networks require no target-specific training or fine-tuning. We evaluate two versions, Mega-HAT and Pico-HAT, using MegaPose and PicoPose, on SPARK-2024, SwissCube and SHIRT, with YCB-Video assessing performance outside the space domain. Using one temporal configuration per method, the arithmetic means of the four dataset-wise comparisons show 9.4% lower mean pose error and 3.76 times the sustained input FPS for Mega-HAT relative to independent MegaPose, and 23.9% lower mean pose error and 2.42 times the FPS for Pico-HAT relative to independent PicoPose. Mega-HAT ablations on SPARK and an offline reference examine component contributions and the effect of revising past estimates.
comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables
☆ Evaluating In-Context Learning and Retrieval Strategies for Devanagari Post-OCR Correction
In-context learning using Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a compelling path to training-free post-OCR correction, yet its effectiveness for Devanagari script remains entirely unexplored. We present the first systematic evaluation of LLMs (3B-32B) for post-OCR correction in Hindi and Marathi, comparing three in-context example retrieval strategies: domain-random selection, dense semantic retrieval, and our proposed CharBM25, which retrieves examples by character n-gram BM25 similarity over OCR inputs to target shared error patterns with the test sentence. Across a 20,000-sentence benchmark spanning five news domains, retrieval strategy is the decisive factor in correction quality: CharBM25 outperforms domain-random selection by 2.8-4.0pp absolute WER on Hindi and 2.9-3.8pp on Marathi, using character trigrams, which consistently outperform bigrams and unigrams. Scale dominates performance: Gemma-3-27B achieves WER reductions of 55.0% for Hindi and 33.3% for Marathi under CharBM25-5. Few-shot gains are capacity-gated: models below 8B do not reliably improve over the OCR baseline, and on Marathi the smallest models (3B) degrade more sentences than they improve. Marathi is persistently harder to correct than Hindi across all scales, reflecting its greater morphological complexity. These findings establish CharBM25 as an effective, GPU-free retrieval strategy that matches or exceeds dense retrieval at negligible computational cost, and show that combining it with a general-purpose LLM of 12B+ parameters delivers reliable, training-free Devanagari post-OCR correction without task-specific fine-tuning. Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/AbhishekBhandari/Devanagari-OCR-ICL-Benchmark
☆ A benchmark dataset and baseline methods for four-dimensional STEM diffraction patterns
Yuyan Guan, Haoran Zhang, Zian Mao, Antong Yang, Caifei Li, Jialong Wang, Chuying Ouyang, Hong Wang, Xiaoqin Zeng, Yujun Xie
Four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy (4D-STEM) records a two-dimensional diffraction pattern at each electron-probe position, yielding spatially resolved reciprocal-space information but large, heterogeneous data volumes. Here we describe 4D-ImageNet, a collection of 174,000 diffraction patterns comprising 145,000 experimental patterns selected from 29 acquisitions and 29,000 multislice simulations. The experimental data cover acquisition-level labels for Ag, Au, mixed Au-Ag, CoO, Pd and ZnO specimens across multiple fields of view, scan dimensions, camera lengths and exposure times. Each acquisition contributes 5,000 quality-ranked patterns with source scan coordinates and acquisition metadata. A set-prediction detector provides model-derived pseudo-labels for the direct-beam position and Bragg-disk centres, with a confidence score for each disk. The simulation data cover 13 crystal structures and include Euler rotations, reciprocal-space sampling and approximate low-index beam directions. A grouped mixed-domain masked-reconstruction benchmark is provided to assess leakage-resistant loading and evaluation across experimental and simulated data. The dataset is intended for representation learning, disk detection, diffraction-pattern retrieval, orientation analysis and simulation-to-experiment studies.
comment: 16 pages, 5 figures. Data and trained model weights: https://doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.nbsdc.00281. Code: https://github.com/Gaiya69-rgb/4D-ImageNet
☆ GestureFAR: Streaming Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Flow Autoregression
Generating natural co-speech gestures from streaming speech is essential for embodied conversational agents, where motion must be produced while a user is still speaking. Recent streaming gesture systems make online generation possible by autoregressing over discrete motion tokens, but this design compresses high-dimensional continuous motion into finite codebooks and can limit the realism and diversity of generated gestures. To preserve both causality and continuous expressiveness, we propose \textbf{GestureFAR}, a flow-autoregressive framework for streaming co-speech gesture generation. First, GestureFAR autoregresses over causal continuous motion latents, using a transformer to model streaming audio-motion context and a per-token flow-matching head to sample the next latent from a continuous distribution. Second, we introduce a head-only flow distillation strategy that freezes the causal backbone and distills the multi-step per-token flow head into a single network evaluation using consistency and distribution-matching objectives. This keeps the model token-causal while removing the main latency bottleneck for live interaction. Experiments on BEAT2 show that GestureFAR significantly improves the quality--latency trade-off among streaming-capable methods, preserving strong gesture quality while enabling real-time token-causal generation. Project Page: https://andypinxinliu.github.io/GestureFAR
☆ From Retrieval to Recognition:How Vision--Language Models Become OCR Specialists
Does a general vision--language model acquire specialized OCR ability by developing a new reading circuit or by reusing an existing mechanism? We address this question in the setting of full-sequence OCR, rather than local-answer retrieval. Using an evidence-grounded protocol with held-out causal interventions, we identify sparse and stable OCR-head sets in GLM-OCR, MinerU2.5, and PaddleOCR-VL-1.6. We then investigate the mechanistic origin of these OCR heads by comparing them with independently identified textual retrieval/copy heads in general VLMs. Across two general VLMs, visual OCR heads strongly overlap independently identified textual retrieval/copy heads, yielding untuned top-20 intersections of 73.3% and all-head Spearman correlations of 0.677-0.886. The overlap and causal interventions suggest that full-sequence OCR operates as dense sequential multimodal copy-and-paste, repeatedly retrieving visual evidence and routing it to the current output position. Finally, we examine how this shared circuit changes as a general VLM becomes an OCR specialist. Matched base-to-specialized comparisons show that OCR specialization largely preserves head identity, retaining 17-20 of the top 20 heads per task with all-head rank correlations of 0.874-0.942, while redistributing their functional and causal strengths.
☆ Purification and Regulation: Comorbidity-Aware Multi-Label Few-Shot Learning for Medical Image Classification
Multi-label few-shot learning (MLFSL) remains a significant challenge in medical image analysis (MIA). Current metric-based meta-learning methods face two critical limitations in MIA. First, conventional prototype generation often entangles irrelevant disease information, leading to contaminated prototypes and degraded performance. Second, prior studies typically enforce inter-class separability in embedding space, largely neglecting the inherent correlations among diseases. To overcome these challenges, we propose Prototype Purification and Regulation (PPR), a novel MLFSL framework for MIA. PPR first performs prototype purification by leveraging sample-level comorbidity scores to emphasize disease-specific features, producing purified prototypes that better characterize each disease. Building upon these purified prototypes, PPR further addresses the underexplored problem of inter-class prototype distance in MIA by incorporating disease-level comorbidity statistics to adaptively regulate inter-class similarity, forming a comorbidity-aware embedding space. Overall, PPR sequentially enables the model to capture pure disease features and inter-class relationships for reliable MLFSL in MIA. Extensive experiments across four chest X-ray benchmark datasets, including cross-domain evaluation, show that PPR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, significantly improving disease detection while demonstrating robust generalization and clinical applicability.
☆ Refine Then Fusion: Training-Free 3D Point Cloud Adaptation with Priority Refinement and Multi-Modal Knowledge Fusion
Recent pre-trained foundation models provide rich multi-modal priors for downstream 3D vision tasks. However, the effectiveness of these representations in few-shot scenarios is limited by two fundamental challenges: High-dimensional features often contain substantial channel redundancy and task-irrelevant noise, while the reliability of different modalities varies across samples. Consequently, direct aggregation of heterogeneous representations overlooks sample-dependent modality reliability and may obscure the discriminative cues essential. To address these limitations, we propose Refine Then Fusion(RTF), a training-free framework for few-shot 3D recognition. RTF first identifies discriminative feature channels by jointly modeling inter-class similarity and intra-class stability, thereby decoupling domain-specific knowledge refinement from the cached representations of pre-trained models. It then introduces a reliability-aware fusion mechanism that estimates sample-wise modality reliability from the distribution shifts induced by feature refinement, enabling adaptive aggregation of multi-modal representations. Furthermore, RTF constructs a memory cache that integrates instance-level support features with class-level prototypes to infer query labels. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that RTF consistently outperforms single-modal baselines, partial-fusion variants, and existing lightweight adaptation methods, achieving state-of-the-art few-shot 3D recognition performance without gradient optimization, additional training data, auxiliary training, or parameter updates.
☆ VidOmni-Bench: A Benchmark for Fine-Grained Video Understanding via Spatio-Temporal Event Verification across Complexity and Duration
While Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong performance, reliably evaluating their fine-grained video understanding remains challenging. Existing benchmarks often rely on question answering or ground-truth caption matching, where models may succeed through superficial cues and incomplete annotations. To this end, we introduce VidOmni-Bench, a benchmark that requires models to verify whether each event in dense video captions is supported by the video. VidOmni-Bench consists of 500 videos spanning five complexity types and diverse durations from 4 seconds to 90 minutes. After collecting videos along these axes, we use diverse Video-LLMs to generate dense captions and obtain human-verified sentence-level labels, where sentences containing incorrect events serve as hard negatives for evaluation. Our experiments on VidOmni-Bench reveal three key findings: (i) Video-LLMs frequently generate hallucinated descriptions in dense video captioning; (ii) they also struggle as verifiers, failing to reliably detect plausible but incorrect event descriptions; and (iii) model weaknesses vary across video complexity and duration, revealing diverse, model-specific bottlenecks in current Video-LLMs.
☆ 2D GauSS-MI: Efficient Active Scene Reconstruction with Balanced Visual and Geometric Quality
Active reconstruction requires efficient active view selection to achieve high-quality reconstruction within limited onboard computational resources. Existing methods face challenges in adequately balancing visual and geometric quality with the computational efficiency required for real-time operation. In this work, we present an active reconstruction framework based on 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS). We develop an efficient online 2DGS mapping pipeline for incremental RGB-D observations and introduce a probabilistic reliability model that characterizes the view-dependent reconstruction quality of individual 2D Gaussian splats. Building on this model, we formulate 2D Gaussian Splatting Shannon Mutual Information (2D GauSS-MI), a mutual-information-based metric that exploits the explicit surface orientation of 2DGS to evaluate the expected information gain of candidate views. The proposed metric enables active view selection to account for both visual and geometric reconstruction quality. We evaluate the proposed system against three state-of-the-art baselines on eight Replica scenes. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves a favorable balance between visual and geometric reconstruction quality with substantially lower computational cost and competitive model storage.
☆ 2nd Place Solution to the HANDS 2026 Workshop Challenge-Dexterous Grasp Motion Track: Single-Shot Trajectory Warping for Grasp Motion Generation
This report describes our 2nd place solution to the HANDS 2026 workshop challenge (Dexterous Grasp Motion track) in conjunction with ECCV 2026. In this challenge, we address grasp motion generation for the 12-DoF LinkerHand O6, aiming to produce physically plausible reach-and-lift trajectories for unseen objects from randomized initial hand poses in simulation. This task is particularly challenging because each grasp requires a per-step policy to make approximately $70$ twelve-dimensional decisions, with errors accumulating over time, while test objects and physical dynamics may differ from those encountered during training. To address these challenges, we propose editing a single successful GraspM3 demonstration instead of generating the motion step by step: a policy observes the object once and outputs a 12-D warp of the demonstration, which is then replayed open-loop. Moreover, we train the warp policy with one-step PPO over all $4{,}824$ training objects in parallel. As a result, our method achieved success rates of $94.61\%$ on the easy track, the highest of all submissions, and $57.18\%$ on the hard track of the private test set.
☆ Adaptive World Memory 3D Foundation Model for Scalable 3D Mapping, Localization, and Rendering
Tianchen Deng, Guole Shen, Yilin Shen, Wenhua Wu, Yilin Fang, Ziqi Ma, Tianjun Zhang, Shenghai Yuan, Wolfram Burgard, Hesheng Wang
Recent 3D foundation models enable generalizable geometric reasoning from RGB images but remain limited in persistent memory, scalability, and renderable scene modeling. We present a memory-centric 3D foundation model for scalable robotic localization, reconstruction, and Gaussian rendering. Its core is an adaptive world memory mechanism that combines transformer-based gated updates with test-time temporal-spatial regulation. Learned gates control recurrent memory propagation, while temporal state evolution and spatial observation-state consistency regulate token-wise updates and forgetting over long image sequences. To support large-scale mapping, we organize memory into local submaps and integrate progressive mapping and tracking, loop closure, and SL(4)-based global refinement to maintain local accuracy and global consistency. A Gaussian reconstruction head decodes memory-enhanced features into renderable primitives, unifying camera pose estimation, dense point-cloud reconstruction, and photorealistic rendering within a single model. Experiments on public benchmarks and self-collected datasets from diverse robotic platforms demonstrate improved trajectory accuracy, reconstruction completeness, and rendering quality over existing 3D foundation reconstruction and SLAM baselines. These results support adaptive memory as a foundation for persistent robotic world modeling. The dataset and code will be made publicly available at \href{https://github.com/dtc111111/AWM-3DFM}{https://github.com/dtc111111/AWM-3DFM}.
☆ VoxelTTO: Voxel-Aligned Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting with Test-Time Optimization
Recent feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods typically regress pixel-aligned Gaussian primitives, often causing excessive overlap and artifacts, while inaccuracies in predicted camera poses can lead to misalignment in novel-view synthesis (NVS). We present VoxelTTO, a feed-forward framework for reconstructing geometrically accurate 3DGS scenes from an arbitrary number of images and optional camera parameters. VoxelTTO aggregates dense image features into a global voxel representation and decodes Gaussians from voxel features, breaking the pixel-to-Gaussian correspondence. To exploit known camera parameters while keeping the pretrained visual foundation model (VFM) parameters frozen, we introduce test-time optimization (TTO) that adapts lightweight LoRA modules using pose supervision. We further replace vanilla 3DGS rasterization with stochastic solid volume rendering during training and inference, improving geometric fidelity. Training updates only the voxel-aligned Gaussian reconstruction modules, requiring 80 GPU hours. Experiments on Replica, Tanks and Temples, and DTU demonstrate improved RGB-D NVS and camera-pose estimation relative to prior methods.
☆ OpenSAL360: Open-Source Crowdsourcing Platform for Omnidirectional Video Saliency Collection ACM MM 2026
Omnidirectional video saliency prediction plays an important role in many immersive multimedia applications, including viewport-adaptive streaming and compression, foveated rendering, mesh simplification, perceptual quality assessment. Yet progress in this area remains constrained by the cost and complexity of collecting eye-tracking data with VR headsets, which makes large-scale dataset creation difficult to extend. We present OpenSAL360, the first open-source platform for scalable, low-cost 360° video saliency collection. Unlike conventional VR-based protocols, it requires only a standard screen, mouse, and internet connection, enabling parallel saliency data collection from common crowdsourcing assessors without specialized hardware. We validate our collection protocol against seven well-established VR eye-tracking datasets and conduct ablation studies on key interface, pre-, and post-processing parameters. To demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed methodology, we collect and publicly release a saliency dataset covering 500 omnidirectional videos annotated by 2,000+ crowdsourcing assessors, making it, to the best of our knowledge, the largest dataset in this field. We make OpenSAL360 publicly available at https://github.com/msu-video-group/OpenSAL360.
comment: Accepted by ACM MM 2026
☆ MT-WAM: Reorienting the One-Pass Predictive Representation Toward Action Generation
Fast-WAM shows that video-action co-training improves control without generating future video at inference, making the representation from a single video diffusion Transformer forward central to action generation. However, future-observation prediction does not explicitly prioritize the future dynamics and visual structure needed for control. We present MT-WAM, which retains the original training objectives and adds complementary supervision for future two-dimensional point trajectories and visual features. A lightweight dual-stream branch copied from the video backbone's final blocks provides target-specific processing, while a structured attention mask prevents cross-stream attention. Motion-stream tokens supply additional dynamics conditions to the action expert. Future visual-feature prediction provides supervision in a feature space that captures object and spatial structure. This supervision trains the video backbone to provide more informative visual context for action generation under changing visual conditions, without adding visual-feature-stream tokens to action conditioning. At inference, MT-WAM uses video and motion caches computed once per replan and skips future-video prediction. Without additional embodied policy pretraining, MT-WAM achieves 98.2% success on LIBERO and 73.7% on LIBERO-Plus, exceeding Fast-WAM by 23.8 percentage points on the latter. On RoboTwin 2.0 Clean2Rand, Random success increases from 6.30% to 19.40%; across four real-world tasks, average success increases from 67.0% to 77.8%.
☆ SkillIR: Evolving Scene-Aware Skills for Agentic Image Restoration
This paper studies agentic image restoration, in which multimodal agents coordinate specialized restoration tools to recover images affected by complex degradations. Existing restoration agents often derive complete tool-use plans from the original degraded image or retrieve previously successful trajectories, providing limited support for adapting individual actions to evolving intermediate restoration states. We find that accepted tool executions can change the residual degradation state and, consequently, the applicability of subsequent tools. To address this issue, we propose SkillIR, a skill-guided framework that represents restoration experience as degradation-centered action evidence rather than complete tool-use trajectories. SkillIR consolidates context-dependent action outcomes into scene-aware restoration skills that characterize applicable conditions, expected effects, and attributable failure cases. Instead of prescribing a complete restoration plan, the retrieved skills guide one bounded action at a time within a verified residual-state loop: each tool output is treated as a candidate, committed only after transition verification, and followed by reassessment of the active residual degradations. After each rollout, the resulting evidence is used to create, refine, or patch dynamic skills, enabling accumulated restoration experience to improve decision-making for subsequent inputs. Experiments on synthetic and real-world multi-degradation datasets demonstrate that SkillIR improves restoration quality and enables more reliable and effective tool use.
☆ PSEE: Progressive Sensor Event Expansion for Point-Supervised Temporal Action Localization
Temporal action localization (TAL) in wearable sensor streams identifies action classes and temporal boundaries, enabling finer-grained activity understanding than conventional action recognition. However, training typically requires costly start--end annotations for every action instance. To reduce this burden, we study point-supervised TAL, where each instance is labeled with only one timestamp and its class. We propose Progressive Sensor Event Expansion (PSEE), which combines semantic activations, sensor-specific transition evidence, and adaptive temporal ownership to recover point-supervised pseudo segments. These segments supervise standard TAL detectors without modifying their inference procedures. Cross-subject experiments on four inertial-sensing benchmarks demonstrate improved pseudo-boundary quality over adapted point-supervised baselines, compatibility with different TAL detectors, and robustness to point sampling. Code is available at https://github.com/joeeeeyin/PSEE.
☆ CompAdapt: Adaptable Composite Motion Modeling for Physics-Consistent Text-to-Video Generation NeurIPS 2026
While diffusion-based text-to-video (T2V) models have demonstrated impressive capability in generating realistic and temporally coherent videos, they often fail to respect fundamental physical dynamics. Although recent physics-constrained methods incorporate explicit dynamics priors to improve physical plausibility, they remain limited to simple single-type motions, depend on manually specified parameters, and struggle to generalize to unseen physical laws. In this work, we propose CompAdapt, a physics-consistent T2V framework for adaptable generation across complex real-world scenarios. It extends neural dynamics modeling beyond single-type motions to encompass composite physical behaviors, including coupled motions, multi-stage transitions, and multi-object collisions. Furthermore, CompAdapt translates natural language prompts into structured physical semantics, enabling end-to-end specification of motion types, temporal relations, and initial physical parameters. To generalize to novel physical environments, CompAdapt introduces dynamics-aware prior matching, achieving one-shot adaptation without retraining the core dynamics module. In addition, a physics-aware latent feature fusion module improves visual fidelity under fast and complex motion. Experiments on physics-focused T2V benchmarks demonstrate that CompAdapt improves physical consistency over both general T2V models and physics-constrained baselines, while preserving high visual quality and adaptability to unseen dynamics. The project page is available at https://makapic.github.io/CompAdapt/ .
comment: 23 pages, 4 figures. Submitted to the 40th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026). Project page: https://makapic.github.io/CompAdapt/
☆ ME-Dex 1.0: Bringing Heterogeneous Tactile Sensing into World Action Modeling
Xuancheng Zhang, Xuetao Liu, Qianying Tang, Jizhe Wang, Zhijing Cheng, Bochen Lin, Haoran Wen, Ming Li, Kun Zhan, Yu Liu
World Action Models bring the predictive capabilities of video models into robot action generation, providing a rich foundation for modeling future visual states. Tactile sensing complements this foundation with direct measurements of physical interaction. Some existing methods use tactile features as conditioning inputs without jointly predicting future tactile states, visual observations, and actions. Our key insight is that tactile signals, like video, provide observations of the evolving world state and should be modeled as future observations alongside video. We present ME-Dex-1.0 (MachEmbodied-Dex-1.0), a unified World Action Tactile Model for joint visual, tactile, and action learning. ME-Dex-1.0 adopts a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture comprising a Video Expert, a Tactile Expert, and an Action Expert, all trained with flow matching. We use shared attention connects the experts in intermediate layers, allowing action generation to draw on learned representations of visual and tactile dynamics during joint denoising. To support multi-source heterogeneous tactile inputs, a Canonical Hand Model and a Unified Tactile Autoencoder map tactile observations from different embodiments and sensing layouts into shared spatial and latent spaces. To address the limited availability of paired visual, tactile, and action data, we develop the Agentic Tactile Data Engine, an agent-based data production platform. It supplements RoboTwin and DexJoCo with tactile data recorded directly from force sensors during trajectory replay in simulation. Experiments on the RoboTwin, DexJoCo, and ManiFeel simulation platforms, together with real robot evaluations, demonstrate improved manipulation performance using both grippers and dexterous hands equipped with tactile sensing.
☆ Think Locally, Refine Globally for Memory-Efficient 3D Reconstruction
Jingke Zhou, Chenhang Ma, Zhizhou Zhong, Mingkai Liu, Zhuang Zhou, Yicheng ji, Binghua Su, Bo Cai, Xianliang Huang
We propose LoG-VGGT, a memory-efficient framework for long-sequence 3D reconstruction that balances local temporal modeling with global camera consistency. Instead of relying on full global attention, our method introduces cross-window attention at a small subset of transformer blocks, enabling effective information propagation across adjacent temporal windows while keeping memory usage bounded. To mitigate long-term pose drift, we further design a global camera consistency refinement module, where camera tokens interact with compact register tokens via cross-attention to enforce scene-level constraints across the entire sequence. This design enables joint optimization of camera representations and significantly improves long-horizon pose stability without incurring the high cost of sequence-wide attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LoG-VGGT achieves improved depth accuracy and robust camera pose estimation across multiple long-sequence benchmarks, while delivering competitive streaming reconstruction performance.
comment: 9 pages,4 figures
☆ P$^3$-SAM: SAM with Perceptual Parallel Prompt for Few-Shot Strip Steel Surface Defect Segmentation ICME 2026
Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) of strip steel surface defects (S$^3$D) has posed significant challenges distinct from natural scenes. Unlike natural images, S$^3$D task exhibits unique characteristics including low local contrast, uneven illumination, and complex fine-grained texture patterns. Although recent methods based on Segment Anything Model (SAM) have shown promise in FSS on natural images by leveraging SAM's powerful pre-trained representations, these unique industrial characteristics of S$^3$D images lead to performance drop when directly applying SAM to industrial defect scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel Perceptual Parallel Prompt (P$^3$) framework that empowers SAM, creating the P$^3$-SAM model to address these challenges through two core strategies. First, we develop a Perceptual-Optimized Encoding (POE) strategy that enhances local contrast and preserves critical texture details for S$^3$D segmentation. Second, we introduce the Parallel Prompt Generator (PPG) strategy that simultaneously generates both semantic and spatial prompts, enabling comprehensive guidance for SAM's decoder across varying images. Extensive experiments on three few-shot S$^3$D benchmarks demonstrate that P$^3$-SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance, with particularly notable improvements of 12.00% in mIoU on Surface Defects-4i dataset.
comment: Accepted by ICME 2026, 6 pages, 3 figures. Corresponding authors: Anpeng Wang and Runmin Cong
☆ When Online Adaptation Hurts: Parameter-Frozen Test-Time Ensembling for Continual Medical Image Segmentation
Medical image segmenters often get worse when sites, scanner vendors, or protocols change. Continual test-time adaptation (CTTA) addresses this problem without target labels, but it can be impossible to update a model on a non-stationary stream and can lead to a lot of errors. We examine a more reasonable and meaningful alternative: parameter-frozen inference enhancement(PIE). We use a source-trained segmenter that learns about anatomy-preserving scale and flip views, maps their predictions back to the native location, and averages the probabilities. We do not modify the weights of the model or the normalization statistics. On a cardiac MRI stream from M\&Ms, which is trained on vendor A and evaluated sequentially on vendors B, C, and D, PIE has 0.7786 mean Dice, compared to 0.7680 for source-only inference and 0.7388--0.7416 for five other online-adaptation baselines. The controlled ablations show that performance saturates at 28 views, and confidence weighting, class-prior correction, connected-component filtering, morphological refinement, and inter-slice smoothing have no effect or cause negative transfer. Qualitative results on cardiac MRI and fundus images are also consistent with the frozen ensemble keeping thinner and nested anatomical structures. These results provide a strong, stable baseline for medical CTTA and expose an important failure mode: adaptation and handcrafted refinement can be less reliable than carefully designed inference.
comment: 7 pages, 2 figures
☆ Quantization-Aware Kalman Estimation for Diffusion Sampling
Quantization offers a practical path to deploying diffusion models with reduced memory and computation, but aggressive compression can cause quantized outputs to deviate substantially from their full-precision counterparts. Sampling-stage correction methods seek to compensate for such deviations during sampling, but existing approaches rely primarily on local information and underexploit trajectory history, limiting their ability to correct errors that propagate across timesteps. In this work, we formulate sampling with a quantized denoiser as an online estimation problem, using the history of quantized denoiser outputs to recover the underlying full-precision outputs required by the sampler. We propose QuAKE, a Quantization-Aware Kalman Estimator that combines a smooth trajectory prior with a conditional Gaussian observation model. At each sampling step, QuAKE recursively updates the posterior over the output window in closed form and feeds its posterior mean to the sampler. QuAKE is a lightweight plug-and-play corrector that requires no modification to the quantized network and naturally supports arbitrary high-order multistep ODE samplers. Experiments across W4A4-quantized text-to-image diffusion models show that QuAKE consistently outperforms existing methods in reducing the distributional discrepancy from full-precision sampling.
comment: 20 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables
☆ SIRA: Reasoning-Aware Surgical Instrument Segmentation via Query-Anchored Alignment
Surgical instrument segmentation (SIS) plays a critical role in robotic assistance and surgical workflow analysis. However, most existing SIS methods formulate segmentation as a category-driven localization problem, limiting their ability to capture procedural context and task-dependent semantics in surgical workflows. We introduce Reasoning-Aware Surgical Instrument Segmentation (RA-SIS), a task formulation that frames segmentation as query-conditioned inference under surgical context. To benchmark this setting, we construct SurgRS, a surgical reasoning segmentation dataset consisting of 41,000 image-text pairs, which aligns instance-level masks with structured query-answer supervision to enable semantic grounding at the pixel level. Based on SurgRS, we propose Surgical Instrument Reasoning and Segmentation Assistant (SIRA), a multimodal framework that disentangles target-level and query-level semantics and integrates them with visual features through query-anchored dual alignment. By aligning query semantics with spatial features and segmentation prompts, SIRA enhances semantic-visual consistency in mask prediction. Extensive experiments on SurgRS demonstrate improvements over existing reasoning-aware baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/linxir226/SIRA.
☆ A Scene Language Model for Open-Vocabulary Scene Mapping
Adam Lilja, Fabio Hübel, Siming He, Junsheng Fu, Claire Tomlin, Lars Hammarstrand, Jitendra Malik, Jonas Frey, Marco Pavone
Open-vocabulary 3D scene mapping aims to build a persistent representation of the objects in an environment. Existing systems typically rely on engineered mapping pipelines to associate observations, merge information across views, and maintain a consistent scene representation over time. Many additionally store feature-rich object representations, such as embeddings or image crops, increasing the size and complexity of the persistent memory. We introduce SceneLM, a Scene-Language Model that directly maintains a textual scene map. The full scene is represented as a structured text list of objects, which serves as the model's only persistent memory. For each input image, the model reads the current scene state and updates the map by adding, editing, and removing objects. To learn this behavior, we introduce supervision tasks for iterative scene map maintenance together with an automatic annotation pipeline that generates training data from images without human labels. We evaluate SceneLM on both a language-grounded retrieval benchmark and a localization benchmark. Across both benchmarks, the model produces a scene map that achieves competitive performance with complete mapping systems built from dedicated perception and geometric modules while producing a scene representation that is 6-12x more compact. We further show that SceneLM can be run online on an edge device through experiments on a quadruped. These results show that a persistent open-vocabulary 3D scene map can be maintained directly by a single vision-language model using only a lightweight text representation. Training and inference code is available on https://goldengait.github.io/scenelm/.
☆ Omni Demand Understanding: A Benchmark for Contextual User-Intent Inference in Multimodal Interaction
Qi Chen, Yunfei Chu, Haolin He, Yifan Yang, Zihan Liu, Yuxuan Wang, Ziyang Ma, Ruiyang Xu, Meng Gao, Yinsong Yan, Ling Wang, Hui Wang, Wen Huang, Yiheng Chen, Guanrou Yang, Qiuqiang Kong, Jin Xu, Xie Chen
Natural audio-visual interaction is emerging as an important interface for AI assistants, allowing users to communicate through speech and vision rather than carefully composed text prompts. However, existing benchmarks of interactive capabilities still focus primarily on response quality, leaving a more fundamental question underexplored: can a model correctly infer the user's underlying demand from complex multimodal interaction? Real-world user demands are often underspecified in speech and must be inferred from multimodal cues and dialogue history. This inference is further complicated by ambiguous or disfluent expression and noisy acoustic environments. Conversely, request-like speech may not constitute a demand to the assistant, leading to false triggers. We establish Omni Demand Understanding (ODU) as a distinct multimodal contextual inference problem: given an interaction stream, a model must detect whether a user demand is present and infer intent from multimodal and conversational context. ODU evaluates this capability along five dimensions, covering both single-turn and multi-turn interactions. We construct ODU-Bench using a challenge-driven taxonomy, taxonomy-guided agentic video generation, and human-recorded interactions, followed by media-grounded annotation and human verification. We evaluate 14 native MLLMs. Even the strongest, Gemini 3.1 Pro, recovers only 44.7% of key information that must be inferred from visual, acoustic, or conversational context. Moreover, 11 of the 14 models exhibit false-trigger rates above 50% on non-demand scenarios. These results reveal a systematic capability gap in current MLLMs' ability to infer contextual user demands. We hope ODU can establish the evaluation of a previously underexplored yet essential capability in multimodal interaction: correctly understanding user demands before generating an appropriate response.
☆ WS-NeRF: A Mamba-Driven World-State-Aware Adaptive Deblurring Neural Radiance Field IEEE
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have attracted extensive attention in recent years due to their strong capability for high-quality 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis from multi-view images. Existing methods usually rely on high-quality sharp inputs, while real-world image acquisition is highly susceptible to blur degradation, which severely affects the reconstruction quality of NeRF. In this paper, we propose a novel Mamba-driven world-state-aware adaptive deblurring neural radiance field, termed WS-NeRF, to address image degradation and 3D inconsistency. We formulate the alternating optimization of radiance fields as a dynamic evolution process with temporal memory, and jointly exploit comprehensive multi-dimensional world states and a mixture-of-experts mechanism to dynamically adjust the confidence of deblurring priors. Experimental results show that WS-NeRF significantly improves blurry radiance field reconstruction quality, achieving better performance on PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS, while exhibiting more stable iterative recovery behavior.
comment: Main paper (6 pages). Accepted for publication by IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 2026 (IEEE SMC 2026)
☆ AgentVidBench: A Multi-Hop Video Question Answering Benchmark for Evaluating MLLM Agents
Comprehensive video understanding is crucial for advancing artificial intelligence toward the intricate dynamics of the physical world. While recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in video understanding, existing benchmarks remain confined to simple scene-level queries or global summaries that require only single-step inference. Real-world video understanding involves more challenging tasks that require multi-hop multimodal reasoning, and there is a critical absence of video benchmarks equipped to rigorously evaluate these agentic capabilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce AgentVidBench, a multi-hop video question answering benchmark focused on evaluating the spatial, temporal, and causal reasoning capabilities of MLLM agents. Beyond standard question-answer pairs, AgentVidBench provides step-by-step solution traces to support trajectory evaluation that assesses whether agents explicitly acquire the evidence needed to justify their answers. Experiments with 12 proprietary and open-source MLLMs show that single-turn performance remains limited on AgentVidBench, while integrating these models into state-of-the-art agentic workflows generally improves performance with respect to both accuracy and trajectory scores. We further present a simple yet effective agentic strategy that serves as a competitive baseline on AgentVidBench, establishing our benchmark as a holistic testbed for future research on agentic video understanding. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/krafton-ai/agentvidbench and https://huggingface.co/datasets/agentvidbench/agentvidbench.
comment: 36 pages, 8 figures. Code: https://github.com/krafton-ai/agentvidbench Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/agentvidbench/agentvidbench
☆ JEPA Guided Diffusion: Predictive Vision-Language Conditioning for Generative Traffic Forecasting ECCV
Accurate traffic forecasting requires both understanding scene dynamics and synthesizing realistic future observations. Recent diffusion-based video generation models produce visually plausible predictions but require expensive end-to-end training and often entangle scene understanding with image synthesis. In this work, we propose a decoupled forecasting framework that separates future representation learning from video generation. A frozen V-JEPA encoder first extracts predictive latent representations from the observed traffic videos, capturing the underlying scene dynamics in a semantic latent space. A lightweight latent alignment module then projects these representations into the conditioning space of a frozen Cosmos diffusion module, enabling future video synthesis without retraining the large generative model. By freezing all foundation models and training only the lightweight alignment module, the proposed framework substantially reduces optimization complexity while preserving forecasting capability. Experimental results on the AI City Challenge 2026 Track 5 benchmark demonstrate that the proposed method achieved a score of 75.1297, ranking third in the competition. These results suggest that predictive world representations learned by V-JEPA can effectively guide downstream video generation, providing a practical and efficient alternative to end-to-end diffusion-based forecasting.
comment: ECCV Workshop 2026, AI City Challenge 2026 Track 5
☆ RobotEQ-Video: A Video-Centric Benchmark for Social Proactive Intelligence with World-State Taxonomy
Xinyi Che, Zheng Lian, Kuofei Fang, Xuehao Wang, Xinghai Gao, Junqing Wu, Chuyu Wu, Liyi Liu, Yanhan Huang, Keyi Xie, Haomin Ouyang, Jinyang Wu, Fan Zhang, Runhao Zeng, Xun Yang, Bin He
Social Proactive Intelligence (SPI) extends proactive assistance beyond task completeness to consider social appropriateness in diverse embodied scenarios. However, prior SPI research faces two key limitations. First, existing work focuses on static images, whereas dynamic videos provide crucial cues for inferring human states and needs, offering richer information than isolated images. Second, prior work often relies on free-form data collection pipelines, which fail to guarantee comprehensive coverage of diverse scenarios. To address these gaps, we introduce RobotEQ-Video, shifting the focus from image-centric to video-centric analysis. To ensure comprehensive video coverage, we construct a hierarchical world-state taxonomy organized into a four-level coarse-to-fine structure, comprising 6 domains, 20 dimensions, 142 level-1 attributes, and 816 level-2 attributes. The resulting benchmark comprises 2K+ videos with 100K+ human annotations and 16K+ labels for assessing behavior properness. Benchmark evaluation reveals that current systems remain unreliable and fall short of human performance. We further explore how world models can help tackle this task. This work advances SPI research from static images to dynamic videos and ensures more comprehensive scenario coverage during benchmarking.
☆ ProTracer: Proprioception-Guided Failure Diagnosis in Robot Manipulation
Chang Dong, Mehdi Hosseinzadeh, King Hang Wong, Lingqiao Liu, Francois Fraysse, Feras Dayoub, Minh Hoai Nguyen
This paper presents a comprehensive framework for robot manipulation failure analysis that includes binary failure detection, failure categorization, explanation generation, and the additional capability of failure onset localization, which aims to identify the earliest moment at which a robot execution deviates from a valid task-completion trajectory and is ultimately followed by task failure. To address these tasks, we propose ProTracer, a training-free framework that leverages existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) together with proprioceptive signals for failure analysis. Our method uses proprioceptive dynamics to identify temporally informative action boundaries and converts richer robot-state signals into structured natural-language descriptions that can be jointly analyzed together with visual observations by the VLM. This design combines the temporal precision of proprioceptive signals with the multimodal reasoning capabilities of modern VLMs without requiring additional model training. We further introduce FailTime, a benchmark with synchronized visual and proprioceptive observations for evaluating conventional failure diagnosis tasks as well as failure onset localization. Experiments demonstrate that ProTracer achieves strong performance across both conventional failure diagnosis tasks and the newly introduced failure onset localization task, highlighting the importance of proprioceptive reasoning for fine-grained temporal failure analysis.
comment: 9pages, 5 figures, 5 tables
☆ Hiding in Plain Sight: A Diffusion-based Mitigation of Geolocation Privacy Leakage in Vision-Language Models NDSS 2027
Multimodal large reasoning models (MLRMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex visual understanding. However, this very power introduces a critical yet underexplored privacy threat: adversaries can exploit MLRMs to precisely infer users' geographic locations from casually shared photographs, by performing structured reasoning over subtle visual cues such as architectural styles, vegetation, and lighting conditions. In this work, we present a systematic study of MLRM-driven geolocation privacy leakage. We first reveal that refusal-based safeguards are critically insufficient, as carefully crafted jailbreak prompts can raise model response rates to 100%. We further identify that existing defenses, which inject imperceptible perturbations into shared images, suffer from structural limitations intrinsic to their pixel-space optimization, resulting in degraded black-box transferability and pronounced visual artifacts. Motivated by these findings, we propose a diffusion-based framework that provides targeted, proactive defense against geolocation privacy leakage. By injecting perturbations into the latent space of a diffusion model during reverse sampling, our method operates directly on high-level semantic representations, thereby resolving the effectiveness-utility bottlenecks by construction. We further ground our optimization with GeoCLIP, a model explicitly aligned with GPS coordinates, as a surrogate to pinpoint and disrupt the geographic signals that MLRMs exploit for location inference. This targeted semantic disruption yields significantly stronger black-box transferability while preserving perceptual image quality, offering a seamless integration on social media platforms.
comment: NDSS 2027
☆ Field Tracking of Insects Using a Stereoscopic Event-Based Camera Setup
Pratham G. Shenwai, Martin J. Lankheet, John T. Hrynuk, Mandiyam Y. Mahadeeswara, Mandyam V. Srinivasan, Sridhar Ravi
High-speed tracking of small, fast-moving organisms in their natural environments is important to better understand their behavior and ecology. Traditional frame-based imaging suffers from motion blur due to low temporal resolution, and data storage limitations, propelling a search for more adaptive solutions. Event cameras, which capture changes in brightness at pixel level instead of entire frames, have emerged as a promising solution by increasing temporal resolution and data efficiency. Here, we demonstrate the use of event-based imaging with standard video-based processing methods by converting the asynchronous events into conventional video formats, allowing us to leverage the event camera's enhanced temporal detail to capture intricate insect flight movements and apply established image analysis techniques. Coupling this conversion process with a stereoscopic configuration provides continuous, low-latency, three-dimensional tracking of fast-moving subjects in field conditions. As a result, we substantially mitigate motion artifacts and achieve more accurate representations of animal movements. By making event-based imaging more readily applicable in natural field settings, our method support broader applications across animal behavior and ecological research, agricultural management, and other fields requiring high-fidelity object tracking in the wild.
☆ PrismAlign: Prior-Steered Multi-View VLM Alignment for Hallucination-Robust Table OCR EMNLP
Table extraction suffers from frequent structural errors and semantic hallucinations. We propose PrismAlign, a multi-VLM framework aligning diverse visual perspectives to resolve ambiguity. It integrates priors of table logic to assess output plausibility, decoupling structural alignment from cell content alignment. A Bayesian decision strategy maximizes alignment accuracy by exploiting the correlation between extraction errors and computable rule violations. Evaluated on open-source and custom VLMs, PrismAlign reduces hallucinations and achieves state-of-the-art performance on OmniDocBench 1.5, as well as on the table category of CC-OCR and PureDocBench.
comment: Accepted by EMNLP industry track
☆ Cube-Splat: High-Fidelity 360° Gaussian Splatting SLAM via Cubemap Factorization and Adjoint-Consistent Optimization ECCV 2026
Recent progress in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has enabled dense visual SLAM with pinhole cameras, yet most pipelines are not designed for panoramic imagery. We present Cube-Splat, the first panoramic GS-SLAM framework that factorizes each 360° frame into a cubemap of four fixed-orientation virtual pinhole views sharing a single optical center. By designating the front face as the primary pose state, we accumulate gradients from all faces via an adjoint mapping, thereby enabling multi-face observations to coherently update a single state while strictly preserving cross-view geometric consistency. Concurrently, our mapping module densifies and optimizes anisotropic Gaussians using aggregated cubemap rays for high-fidelity, dense reconstruction. Furthermore, to rigorously evaluate panoramic SLAM under diverse and challenging conditions, we introduce SynPano, a highly scalable, photorealistic synthetic dataset featuring parameterized complex trajectories and multi-modal ground truth. Extensive evaluations on two public benchmarks (PALVIO and OmniBlender) and our SynPano dataset, collectively encompassing both indoor and outdoor scenes, demonstrate that Cube-Splat achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in tracking accuracy and reconstruction fidelity. Both the source code and the SynPano dataset are available at https://github.com/guoxf304/CubeSplat.
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026. Source code : https://github.com/guoxf304/CubeSplat
☆ VeriFuse: Bounded Vision-Language Arbitration and Reason-Guided Refinement for Cooperative 3D Perception
Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong scene understanding and semantic judgment across diverse tasks, but their appropriate role in cooperative perception remains unclear. Directly asking a VLM to regress 3D detections is unreliable and computationally expensive, whereas using it to select the output of a single source discards useful information from other agents. We introduce VeriFuse, a bounded arbitration framework for vehicle-infrastructure cooperative 3D detection. Each agent first produces detections independently. Around each vehicle and roadside proposal, VeriFuse generates source-conditioned geometric candidates and combines the original detections, their perturbations, and cross-source hypotheses into a unified candidate pool. A frozen VLM then chooses among three admissible actions: SELECT an adequate candidate; REFINE an existing anchor when an object is supported but all candidates are geometrically inadequate; or REJECT an unsupported infrastructure-only proposal. Experiments on the DAIR-V2X dataset show that VeriFuse achieves 0.494/0.357 cooperative 3D AP50/AP70 and limits the relative vehicle-side BEV AP50 drop under a 300 ms delay to 1.7%. Overall, VeriFuse assigns the VLM a clear and constrained role in cooperative perception: semantic reasoning resolves ambiguity among cross-agent hypotheses, while deterministic constraints determine the final 3D geometry.
comment: 8 pages, 4 figures
☆ S3VD: Semantic-Guidance Spatio-Temporal Scanning for Video Deraining
Heavy rainfall severely degrades outdoor videos by corrupting high-frequency details and introducing motion blur, critically undermining the reliability of visual tasks. Recently, State Space Models (SSMs), particularly Mamba, have emerged as efficient alternatives for vision tasks with their linear complexity and ability to model long-range dependencies. However, when confronted with the poor visual representations in rainy videos, Mamba still faces difficulties in preserving the integrity of 2D spatial semantics and modeling 3D spatio-temporal correlations. To break these limitations, we introduce S3VD, a Semantic-Guidance Spatio-Temporal Scanning framework for video deraining, featuring two key innovations: Multi-Scale Semantic Fusion (MSSF) Module and Spatio-Temporal Scanning Fusion (STSF) Module. The former integrates temporal semantic priors from DINOv2 to guide precise feature representation and counteract the loss of local semantic context inherent to Mamba's 1D flatten operation, enhancing robustness against extreme degradation. The latter introduces a spatio-temporal scanning mechanism and devises a Decoupled-Gating Mamba (DG-Mamba) layer, which employs two independent gates to adaptively control preceding and subsequent contextual information within the input clip, optimizing intra-frame and inter-frame correlation modeling. Experiments on video deraining benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of S3VD, achieving state-of-the-art performance with an average 0.84 dB PSNR improvement over Mamba-based baselines.
☆ Combining Object Detection with Geometry-Aware Clustering to Distinguish Overlapping Plants in UAV Imagery
Reliable plant-level information from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery is important for automated crop monitoring. However, in dense crop canopies, adjacent plants frequently overlap and are detected as a single object, reducing the reliability of plant-level measurements. This study presents a geometry-aware post-detection framework for resolving overlapping plant instances using standard RGB UAV imagery.
The framework combines object detection with geometric clustering of plant components. Leaves or branches detected within each bush-level region are represented using two complementary geometric features: component centroids and radial intersection points (RIPs) derived from detected plant structures. K-means and Gaussian mixture models determine whether a detected region contains a single plant or two overlapping plants. Density filtering suppresses spurious radial intersections, and a post-pipeline ensemble combines spatial and directional geometric information.
The framework was evaluated using UAV imagery of eggplant and tomato crops under field conditions. Centroid-based clustering achieved an F1-score of 0.89 for eggplant, while the combined centroid-RIP approach achieved the best tomato performance, with an accuracy of 0.80, precision of 1.00, and F1-score of 0.75 using K-means. Density filtering substantially improved RIP-based clustering for tomato.
The proposed approach provides a lightweight, modular engineering solution that can be integrated with existing RGB UAV monitoring pipelines without additional depth sensors, pixel-level segmentation, three-dimensional reconstruction, or retraining of the primary bush detector. The results demonstrate that geometric reasoning applied to existing detector outputs can complement deep-learning-based object detection and improve plant-level interpretation in dense agricultural canopies.
comment: 34 pages
☆ Beyond Exact Match: Task-Aware GRPO for Cross-Domain PCBA Visual Question Answering ACM MM 2026
In automated Printed Circuit Board Assembly (PCBA) inspection, standards-guided decisions require systems to jointly reason over fine-grained visual cues, component semantics, and manufacturing knowledge. Although large vision-language models (VLMs) provide a promising foundation, their deployment is hindered by the domain shift between standards-derived samples and real-world production-line imagery, together with heterogeneous output spaces spanning choice-based and numerical counting tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a multimodal reasoning framework for cross-domain PCBA visual question answering. The framework converts standards-derived, real-world, and auxiliary PCB-domain data into a unified instruction format and constructs verified reasoning traces aligned with visual evidence, question semantics, candidate options, and ground-truth answers. We further introduce Task-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which moves beyond exact-match supervision by integrating multi-component semantic rewards for choice-based questions, distance-aware rewards for counting questions, and an auxiliary format reward for valid outputs. During inference, answer-option semantic consistency correction, self-consistency voting, and multi-model arbitration are combined to improve prediction robustness. The proposed system achieves an Overall Score of 83.24 on the official PCBA Standard-to-Real Grand Challenge leaderboard, demonstrating the effectiveness of task-aware reward design and robust inference for cross-domain PCBA visual question answering.
comment: 8 pages, 2 figures. Accepted to the 34th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM 2026)
☆ Edit-VAR: Taming Visual Autoregressive Model for Precise Video Editing
Chongbo Zhao, Jiangming Wang, Xilai Wang, Xinyu Wang, Jingyi Tang, Chunjie Hao, Pengjie Song, Yue Ma
Text-guided video editing modifies target content while preserving the appearance and temporal coherence of unedited regions. Training-based approaches provide strong control but demand substantial data and computation. Training-free methods fall into inversion-free and inversion-based paradigms. Inversion-free approaches avoid trajectory recovery, but their source-preserving guidance can limit editing strength and leave semantic changes incomplete. Inversion-based approaches recover a latent trajectory before regeneration, where approximation errors can accumulate and cause source-content drift and temporal inconsistency. We introduce Edit-VAR, the first training-free and inversion-free framework for text-guided video editing with a pretrained visual autoregressive video model. Edit-VAR directly encodes the source video into multi-scale discrete tokens and performs probability-guided conditional token replacement for source preservation. Attention-guided token-wise and scale-aware modulation selectively relaxes source constraints over edit-relevant positions and generation stages. Scale-Decoupled Generation, implemented as late-scale constraint release, regenerates motion-consistent details and reduces texture fragmentation. Residual-guided token pruning further exploits redundancy at the final two high-resolution scales to reduce inference cost. Extensive experiments and a blind user study demonstrate that Edit-VAR outperforms existing training-free video editing methods overall in editing fidelity, source preservation, temporal coherence, and inference efficiency.
comment: Project page: https://chongbozhao3-coder.github.io/Edit-VAR. Code: https://github.com/chongbozhao3-coder/Edit-VAR
☆ Geometry-Aware Diffusion Guidance via Curvature-Adaptive Tubular Correction
Gradient-guided diffusion samplers provide flexible priors for inverse problems and conditional generation, but strong guidance can move the sampling trajectory into regions where the learned score is poorly supported. Existing tangent-projection strategies limit first-order departure from an iso-density surface, yet discard potentially useful normal motion and overlook the second-order departure induced by tangent motion on a curved surface. We introduce curvature-adaptive tubular correction (CAT), a training-free plugin that regulates both effects within a shared, noise-dependent geometric budget. CAT decomposes the guidance gradient into normal and tangent components, charges normal displacement at first order and tangent displacement according to directional curvature, and obtains their jointly optimal magnitudes from a one-dimensional dual equation. Armijo backtracking calibrates the resulting finite step against the actual guidance objective, while matrix-free directional derivatives avoid constructing the full score Jacobian. We establish local guarantees for the tubular approximation, uniqueness of the correction, and sufficient objective decrease. Across seven inverse problems on FFHQ and ImageNet, CAT improves the evaluated pixel- and latent-space host samplers, with particularly consistent gains in perceptual metrics. It also improves black hole reconstruction on InverseBench and yields the lowest FID among the compared methods at every tested classifier-free guidance scale, while maintaining stable saturation and contrast. These results support curvature-aware tubular control as a reusable mechanism for stabilizing diffusion guidance.
☆ VLA-Scope: Shift-Aware Failure Prediction for Vision-Language-Action Models
Vision-language-action (VLA) models map visual observations and natural-language instructions to robotic actions, but distribution shifts can compromise their reliability. Because these models may still succeed under out-of-distribution (OOD) conditions, detecting OOD inputs alone is insufficient to predict execution failure. In this paper, we introduce VLA-Scope, a two-stage framework that combines input-shift characterization with execution history to predict failure during OOD rollouts. The first stage uses pooled image and language representations to detect OOD inputs and classify their shift categories. For inputs flagged as OOD, the second stage combines the predicted category, action-prefix features, and execution progress features. A logistic regression model shared across shift categories updates failure risk as execution proceeds. We evaluate the framework with OpenVLA on ten LIBERO-Spatial tasks using leave-one-group-out cross-validation. OOD detection achieves a ROC-AUC of 0.9454, and shift classification achieves 91% accuracy. Evaluated independently of the OOD gate on all 1,400 OOD rollouts, the failure predictor achieves a ROC-AUC of 0.8497 after 60 executed actions, compared with 0.7906 without execution progress features. It also achieves a higher ROC-AUC than the evaluated ActProbe and SAFE-MLP baselines. These results suggest that combining action features with temporally aggregated execution step representations improves failure prediction under input shifts.
comment: 9 pages, 3 figures
☆ SafeStyle: Calibrated Style Residual Injection for Controllable Style-Leakage Trade-off in Diffusion Stylization
Reference-guided diffusion stylization aims to transfer visual style from a reference image while preserving the semantics specified by a text prompt. However, image conditioning often entangles transferable style cues with reference-specific content, leading to an inherent trade-off: stronger conditioning improves style fidelity but increases content leakage, whereas aggressive suppression reduces leakage at the cost of style expression. This challenge is further complicated by the distinct spatial organization of texture- and geometry-dominant styles. To address these issues, we propose SafeStyle, a training-free framework for calibrated style residual injection in frozen diffusion models. SafeStyle first estimates style-supported and content-associated subspaces from compact calibration sets, preserving their informative overlap while suppressing useless content variations. It then transports the purified style evidence over adaptive spatial granularity and constrains its effective influence through an explicit residual-norm budget. Experiments across texture- and geometry-dominant styles show that SafeStyle achieves a DINO style similarity of 0.432 while maintaining competitive text alignment. On a semantically disjoint leakage-stress benchmark, it further achieves a DINO style similarity of 0.474 with only 0.8\% semantic leakage, demonstrating an effective balance between style fidelity and reference-content suppression.
comment: 5pages, 6figures
☆ Multiclass Semantic Segmentation of Wildland Fire Images Using Context-Aware Centralized Copy-Paste Data Augmentation
Joon Tai Kim, Nishanth Kunchala, Vishv Patel, Tianle Chen, Ziyu Dong, Daniel Ospina Acero, Roger Williams, Mrinal Kumar
Producing accurate annotations for deep learning based image segmentation is both costly and labor intensive. This challenge is especially evident in wildland fire applications, where accurately labeled datasets are scarce due to the difficulty of collecting and annotating dynamic fire scenes. To address this problem, our previous work introduced the Centralized Copy-Paste Data Augmentation (CCPDA) method for semantic segmentation of wildland fire imagery, which generates artificial training samples by randomly pasting fire clusters from source images onto target images. However, random placement can produce contextually unrealistic scenes, such as fire burning on asphalt. In this paper, we present a context-aware strategy designed specifically to improve data quality and realism in small multiclass wildland fire datasets, ensuring that augmented samples remain contextually meaningful. The proposed method restricts fire placement to semantically valid target regions and selects the location whose Ash-Vegetation composition most closely matches the source context. This approach preserves existing fire regions in the target image, prevents unrealistic placements, and maintains contextual accuracy by generating images that resemble real wildland fire scenes. We evaluate the Context-Aware CCPDA strategy through numerical analysis and comparisons with other augmentation methods by a weighted sum-based multi-objective optimization (MOO) approach. The results confirm that the context-aware data augmentation strategy leads to improved segmentation performance and contextual realism, outperforming other augmentation procedures.
comment: 14 pages, 9 figures
☆ FOCAL-VLA: Subtask-Guided Geometry Distillation and Implicit World Modeling for Vision-Language-Action Models
Vision-language-action (VLA) models built on pretrained vision-language models have demonstrated strong performance across diverse robotic manipulation tasks. However, VLA models that directly map current 2D observations to actions often lack sufficient spatial and temporal understanding, limiting their performance in precise and long-horizon manipulation. Recent methods enhance VLA models through geometric supervision and future-state prediction across the entire scene. However, these methods can suffer from redundant scene information, distracting the model from learning the geometry and dynamics relevant to the current interaction. To address this issue, we propose FOCAL-VLA, a framework that combines subtask-guided geometry distillation with implicit world modeling to learn representations of current spatial structure and future interaction dynamics. To focus geometric learning on the current subtask, we transfer geometric knowledge from VGGT to the VLA model by aligning geometry latents with features from subtask-relevant image regions. To capture the future 3D evolution of the current interaction, we incorporate implicit world modeling using Track4World features from current and future demonstration frames. The two complementary representations jointly guide action generation without running VGGT or Track4World at inference time. Experiments show that FOCAL-VLA outperforms baselines on both simulation benchmarks and real-world manipulation tasks. Project website: https://zhiyuan-gao.github.io/FOCAL-VLA/.
☆ VGGT-CAD: Reconstructing Parametric CAD 3D Model with Geometric Grounding
Parametric CAD reconstruction requires recovering both precise geometry and editable modeling operations from visual observations, making it challenging under limited and ambiguous views. Existing methods mainly rely on 2D appearance cues and lack strong multi-view geometric priors. In this work, we present VGGT-CAD, a geometry-aware framework for parametric CAD reconstruction from single- and multi-view observations. We transfer pretrained 3D geometric priors into CAD reconstruction by encoding camera parameters as condition tokens and jointly modeling them with image tokens. To handle varying numbers of viewpoints, we introduce a variable-view cross-view context aggregation module that adaptively fuses multi-view features. We further develop a training-free geometry-aware view selection strategy to select complementary and reliable frames during inference. The resulting representation is decoded into CAD command sequences using a non-autoregressive decoder. We also develop VideoCAD, a large-scale multi-view video benchmark derived from existing CAD data through multi-view re-rendering. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of VGGT-CAD for visual CAD reconstruction under different observation configurations.
☆ Multi-viewpoint Geo-localization with Event Cameras
Robot localization is an ongoing challenge that demands mapping and positioning systems that are tolerant to viewpoint change. Event cameras are attracting increasing interest and adoption in robotics; however, dealing with viewpoint variance is an under-investigated problem in existing event-based localizers. In addition, event-based datasets that emphasize viewpoint variance for challenging localization situations are scarce. Here, we introduce an event-based visual place recognition (VPR) system that performs robustly under viewpoint changes. We converted five large-scale geo-tagged datasets, conventionally used to train frame-based localization systems, into synthetic event streams using Image-to-Event (I2E) conversion, and used them to fine-tune a pre-trained event-based vision transformer backbone with a multi-loss function, yielding a system we call MegaEvent that learns viewpoint-robust features for place recognition. We achieved an average Recall@1 of 82% across three existing event-based localization datasets, leading the next best event-based method by 20 recall points, and frame-based VPR models applied directly to event frames by 8 to 26 recall points. We introduce a new, challenging dataset - Springfield-Event-VPR - which features a 3.7km walking route recorded in three camera orientations for a total of 11.1km, which MegaEvent outperforms the strongest baseline by 9 recall points. The code for MegaEvent is available at https://github.com/AdamDHines/megaevent.
comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables, under review
☆ Hand-Aware Transition Modeling for Bimanual Procedural Anomaly Detection
Di Wen, Jimmy Weissert, Luc Maria Scherrer, Cedric Zöllner, Kailun Yang, Ruiping Liu, Yufan Chen, Jiale Wei, Junwei Zheng, Kunyu Peng
Procedural anomaly detection in bimanual assembly requires judging each hand action against the execution so far. A corrective action may look unusual in isolation, while a visually plausible action can violate the order of the procedure. We present HACT, a transition model over predicted per-hand events. A role-preserving history keeps the concurrent responsibilities of both hands, and a marked temporal point process assigns each observed transition a semantic and temporal surprisal. A supervised evidence head and a two-state filter convert these surprisals into per-hand anomaly posteriors. A recovery-aware protocol on predicted events and participant-disjoint folds reports the recovery false-positive rate at an operating point selected on validation participants. On two bimanual power-tool procedures HACT has the highest AUPRC and F1 among the compared methods and the fewest recovery alarms. Applied without retraining to a different assembly order of the same product, it retains the highest AUPRC and F1. The source code is available at https://github.com/Kratos-Wen/HACT.
comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables. Code: https://github.com/Kratos-Wen/HACT
☆ OnomatoBridge: Onomatopoeia Translation and Rendering Pipeline in Manga
Manga is a comic drawn by black and white paints gaining popularity around the world. Onomatopoeia in Manga specifically appeals to the audience with its unique visual styles, which convey sound, motion, and emotion. Visual onomatopoeia translation requires the clean replacement of Japanese onomatopoeia with onomatopoeia in the other language while preserving their visual style. Existing approaches often produce residual artifacts or style inconsistency when removing the Japanese onomatopoeia and rendering stylized English onomatopoeia. To approach these problems, we present OnomatoBridge, a filtering pipeline for visual onomatopoeia translation. We evaluate OnomatoBridge from Japanese to English on the Manga109 onomatopoeia dataset and compare it with baseline image editing models. Experimental results show that the filtered outputs by the proposed method outperform those of conventional methods. OnomatoBridge improves English text correctness by roughly 10 to 25 points and reduces residual Japanese text by about 20 to 50% in relative terms.
☆ Robust Structureless Monocular Visual Inertial Initialization Exploiting Line Features and Vanishing Points IROS 2026
Accurate initialization is essential for reliable visual-inertial odometry (VIO), but it is often ill-conditioned under degenerate motions. Existing methods typically require restrictive excitation motions to ensure sufficient observability or rely on computationally expensive 3D structure reconstruction, limiting efficient and practical deployment. To address these limitations, we propose SLIM-init, a structureless monocular VIO initializer that directly exploits geometric constraints from tracked 2D line features without explicit 3D landmark reconstruction. Specifically, SLIM-init leverages line-derived vanishing points (VPs) as translation-invariant orientation cues to provide robust rotation-only constraints under degenerate scenarios such as low-parallax or translation-dominant motions. It further incorporates a line epipolar residual to constrain translation and a line-normal projection residual to improve the conditioning of linear alignment, enhancing the accuracy and robustness of initial state estimation. Extensive experiments on a public benchmark and challenging custom degenerate-motion sequences demonstrate improved accuracy and robustness over state-of-the-art initialization methods. The source code is available at: https://github.com/cjunwan/SLIM-init.
comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, Accepted to IROS 2026
☆ 4DGS-Fixer: Generative Sparse-View 4D Gaussian Splatting with Iterative Refinement Guided by Video Diffusion Priors SIGGRAPH
Haitao Huang, Shenghao Zhao, Boyuan Tian, Shin-Fang Chng, Songlin Yang, Sheila Lim, Huangying Zhan, Yi Xu, Anyi Rao, Frank Guan
This paper addresses the challenges of dynamic scene synthesis from sparse-view videos. Existing methods employ geometric priors, adaptive optimization, or density-control strategies to improve 4D Gaussian modeling under sparse observations. However, they cannot fundamentally resolve the ill-posed problem caused by insufficient observations and missing scene information. Moreover, sparse-view 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) often suffers from poor geometric initialization: with only a few input views, COLMAP typically reconstructs sparse and incomplete point clouds, leaving large scene regions without sufficient Gaussian support and making them difficult to recover through subsequent optimization. To address these limitations, we propose a novel iterative refinement framework based on a video diffusion model to improve the completeness and consistency of dynamic 4D scenes. Specifically, we first estimate multi-view depth maps and fuse them into dense point clouds to provide more complete geometric initialization for a dynamic 4DGS representation. We then employ a pretrained video restoration model to refine sequences rendered along novel camera trajectories at different time steps. The restored sequences serve as pseudo-supervision to regularize and iteratively refine the 4DGS representation. Experiments on a widely used benchmark dataset demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms existing baselines, achieving nearly a 2 dB PSNR improvement over the previous best-performing method.
comment: Accepted to SIGGRAPH Asia TC
☆ Adaptive Color Grading
Independent control of tonescale regions (e.g., shadows, highlights) is essential for painters, photographers and cinematographers to bring 2D images to life. In image manipulation software this is most directly addressed by color grading modules, which use intensity thresholds to segment distinct illumination regions for local manipulation. In this work we develop an open source color grading tool and use it to annotate a large dataset of video frames with tonescale region thresholds. Using these thresholds we conduct modeling experiments with strategies based on both practitioners' conventional wisdom and machine learning. Results show that K-nearest neighbors is an effective prediction strategy, outperforming state-of-the-art end-to-end methods for image enhancement. This outcome demonstrates the benefit of focusing on a compact set of core parameters when modeling creative stylization processes. Our adaptive color grading interface and data are available at https://github.com/SamsungLabs/adaptive-color-grading.
comment: Accepted @ 34th Color & Imaging Conference
☆ OmniVBench: A Benchmark and Large-Scale Dataset for Omni Reference-to-Video Generation
Wenxue Li, Peiyan Guan, Haoyang Jiang, Junxian Cai, Hualuo Liu, Chunjie Zhang, Chong Guan, Kai Huang, Songlian Li, Taiyi Wu, Yongjian Yu, Xiaotong Zhao, Alan Zhao, Eric Liu, Xi Chen, Yu Liu, Lei Zhu
Reference-to-video (R2V) generation is evolving toward increasingly general and versatile reference control, giving rise to the emerging paradigm of omni R2V generation. However, existing benchmarks fall short of these emerging capabilities: their test cases cover limited reference types and compositions, and their evaluation protocols largely assess holistic reference consistency, overlooking whether reference factors are properly preserved, disentangled, and routed. Meanwhile, the high cost of constructing omni R2V training data makes suitable training resources scarce. To address these gaps, we introduce OmniVBench and the Omni-R2V Dataset for evaluating and training omni R2V models. OmniVBench expands R2V evaluation across broader reference types, fine-grained control tasks, and richer reference compositions, covering 7 task families and 18 fine-grained tasks spanning content, motion, style, structure, narrative, and multi-reference settings. We introduce factor-grounded evaluation with 12,172 case-specific checklist items, assessing whether intended reference factors are faithfully preserved, correctly disentangled and bound to their targets, and properly realized according to the instruction. We further introduce the Omni-R2V Dataset, bringing industrial-grade training resources for diverse R2V tasks to the broader research community. Drawing primarily on a large-scale corpus of professional video footage, it comprises 340K processed training samples spanning diverse reference types and multi-reference compositions. We develop task-specific pipelines for reference-target pair construction, offering a practical and scalable recipe for omni R2V data construction. Extensive evaluation of advanced open- and closed-source R2V models reveals clear performance gaps across task families and evaluation dimensions on OmniVBench, highlighting remaining limitations of current R2V models.
♻ ☆ Probability-Flow Distillation: Distribution Matching in Parameter Space
Score distillation methods use pretrained diffusion models as priors for optimizing parameters through differentiable forward models, most notably in text-to-3D generation. Yet the distribution they induce over those parameters is not well understood. Observing that existing distillation methods reduce to one of three: Score Distillation Sampling (SDS), Score Distillation via Inversion (SDI), and Variational Score Distillation (VSD), we extend the particle variational inference view of VSD to the other two. We show that SDS collapses onto the modes of the target, while SDI converges to a contracted version of it, and explain why SDI needs a negative classifier-free guidance scale. Next, we observe that the DDIM posterior mean equals a single Euler step of the probability-flow ODE (PF-ODE). Replacing this step in SDI with a full reverse solve makes the target a fixed point, but it requires solving two concatenated PF-ODEs. Dropping a Jacobian from the resulting gradient gives Probability-Flow Distillation (PFD), which requires solving only the forward PF-ODE. Experiments on synthetic targets, the CelebA dataset, and text-to-3D generation support our analysis and demonstrate the practical effectiveness of PFD.
comment: This version corrects an error in v1 that overlooked the implicit dependence of $q_0$ on the flow map and the confusion between practical Jacobian zeroing and its theoretical treatment under stop-gradient. Thus, v1 PFD is not an exact Wasserstein gradient descent. We strengthen the analysis, add new results, introduce a stronger PFD variant, and revise the title and abstract
♻ ☆ CASE: Contrastive Activation for Class-Sensitive Explanations
Saliency methods are widely used to visualize which input features are deemed relevant to a model's prediction. However, their visual plausibility can obscure critical limitations. In this work, we propose a diagnostic test for class sensitivity: a method's ability to distinguish between competing class labels on the same input. Through extensive experiments, we show that many widely used saliency methods produce nearly identical explanations regardless of the class label, calling into question their reliability. We find that class-insensitive behavior persists across architectures and datasets, suggesting the failure mode is structural rather than model-specific. Motivated by these findings, we introduce CASE, a contrastive explanation method that isolates features uniquely discriminative for the predicted class. We evaluate CASE using the proposed diagnostic and a perturbation-based fidelity test, and show that it produces faithful and more class-specific explanations than existing methods.
comment: 19 pages, 7 figures Accepted for publication in Springer Nature Machine Learning
♻ ☆ Optimizing YOLO27, YOLO26, YOLO11, and YOLOv8 for Fine-Grained Small-Object Detection and Segmentation in Complex Orchard Environments
This study presents an architectural and experimental cross-generation analysis of Ultralytics YOLO27 (YOLOv27), YOLO26 (YOLOv26), YOLO11 (YOLOv11), and YOLOv8 for fine-grained robotic perception in complex orchard environments. Fine-grained detection and instance segmentation of early-stage fruit anatomy remain challenging in complex orchard environments because of limited pixel footprints, green-on-green similarity, occlusion, and substantial scale variation. Because YOLO27 has been announced but its public implementation and trainable segmentation models are not yet available, the present study provides an architectural analysis of YOLO27, while controlled experiments benchmark YOLOv8, YOLO11, and YOLO26; YOLO27 experiments will be incorporated following public model availability. Five model scales-nano (n), small (s), medium (m), large (l), and extra-large (x)-were evaluated for fruitlet, calyx, and peduncle detection and segmentation using conventional 640 x 640 and small-object-focused 960 x 960 configurations, yielding 30 experiments. YOLO11s-960 achieved the highest observed mask mAP@50:95(0.402) and box mAP@50:95(0.426), whereas YOLO26s-960 achieved comparable values of 0.397 and 0.425 with only 10.37~M parameters and 34.1~GFLOPs. Peduncle remained the most challenging class, and increasing model capacity did not consistently improve accuracy. Overall, compact-to-moderate YOLO models combined with small-object-focused training provided favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-offs, establishing a reproducible benchmark for fine-grained agricultural robotic perception. Code, trained models, and experimental configurations are publicly available, and will be updated through our Github Link: https://github.com/rnjnspkt/Optimizing-and-Comparing-Ultralytics-YOLOv26-YOLOv11-and-YOLOv8-for-Small-Object-Detection-and-Seg
♻ ☆ Recursive Block-Diagonal Coupling for Resource-Efficient Training of Vision Models
Training high-capacity vision models from scratch requires substantial computational resources. To improve training efficiency of a wide target model, existing growth methods often assume the availability of narrower models, obscuring the true computational cost of the entire pipeline. We propose an efficient training protocol, RBDC, that builds wide models by coupling in a parameter-free block-diagonal way narrower, independently trained models in a recursive way. This allows a flexible allocation of the training budget available across all the models involved. Evaluated with vision transformers (DeiT) and convolutional networks (ResNet) on ImageNet, our RBDC training protocol shows a much better efficiency than models trained from scratch with the standard protocol, yielding 30% FLOPs reduction at similar test accuracies. It also achieves higher performances at same training FLOPs than training protocols from the model growth literature. Finally, we show that our models can serve as better backbones than their original counterparts for downstream object detection and instance segmentation tasks.
comment: 22 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables, and 34 references
♻ ☆ Graph-Augmented Topological Internalization with Dual-Stream Classifiers for Medical Report Generation
Automated medical report generation, MRG, holds substantial value for alleviating radiologist workload and enhancing diagnostic efficiency. However, mainstream approaches typically treat diverse chest abnormalities as isolated classification targets. This paradigm often overlooks inherent disease co-occurrences and struggles to translate medical topological structures into explicit data correlations, constraining the model's reasoning capacity on complex or subtle lesions. To address this, we propose a Graph-Augmented Dual-Stream Medical Report Generation with Topological Internalization, GDMRG. Our framework introduces a Topological Knowledge Internalization module, TKI, which leverages a Graph Convolutional Network, GCN, to generate an explicit parameterized weight matrix based on global disease co-occurrence priors. This facilitates efficient topological knowledge injection without relying on external retrieval mechanisms. Building upon this, we construct a dual-stream classification system: the main branch generates discrete diagnostic prompts under topological constraints, while the auxiliary branch employs an asymmetric optimization strategy to dynamically calibrate decision boundaries for highly imbalanced samples. Concurrently, to establish a logical closed loop between diagnosis and visual grounding, we design a diagnostic-driven Diagnosis-Guided Spatial Attention, DGSA, that utilizes high-dimensional clinical semantics to recalibrate the visual encoder, mitigating feature hallucinations. Comprehensive experiments on the MIMIC-CXR dataset demonstrate that GDMRG achieves competitive clinical efficacy, CE, while maintaining natural language fluency. Furthermore, our model exhibits robust zero-shot generalization on the IU X-Ray dataset. In summary, this work presents an integrated and interpretable paradigm for medical report generation.
♻ ☆ Medical Image Segmentation based on Deep Active Contour and Mean Curvature Loss Function
Medical image segmentation is an important task in clinical analysis. Although deep learning techniques are widely used, training at the individual pixel level ignores geometric prior information about the region being segmented. Integrating the Chan-Vese model into the loss function is a well-established remedy that accounts for the regions inside and outside the segmentation and, through its length term, for boundary regularity. However, such losses still lack an effective characterisation of local boundary geometry. We introduce the mean curvature as a natural geometric constraint and propose a Deep Active Contour and Mean Curvature (DACMC) loss function, in which a fixed convolution kernel approximates the mean curvature at negligible computational cost. The loss has a single hyper-parameter, the curvature weight $λ$, fixed at $10^{-3}$ for all experiments. We evaluate DACMC on three public datasets - liver computed tomography (CT), spleen magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and dermoscopy images from the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) - using two encoder-decoder networks as backbones and the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), the 95th-percentile Hausdorff distance (HD95), the Jaccard similarity (JS) and the average surface distance (ASD) as metrics, against the cross-entropy, Dice, active contour and elastica losses. DACMC attains the best or second-best DSC in five of the six dataset-backbone settings; on spleen MRI it reduces HD95 to 16.28 millimetres and ASD to 1.90 millimetres, and on ISIC it reduces HD95 to 7.08 millimetres. A sensitivity study shows a broad plateau for $λ\leq 10^{-3}$ and degeneration only when the curvature term dominates.
comment: Revised version: updated the abstract, unified method naming and reference formatting, and clarified the presentation. This work has been submitted to Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence
♻ ☆ ECG-Mamba-V2: Architectural Refinements to a Bidirectional State Space Model for Multi-Label 12-Lead ECG Classification
Huawei Jiang, Husna Mutahira, Shibo Wei, Gan Huang, Vladimir Shin, Dongryeol Ryu, Juneho Yi, Mannan Saeed Muhammad
State space models offer linear-time sequence modeling and are a promising backbone for multi-label 12-lead ECG classification, but the design choices that drive their accuracy remain unclear. This letter presents ECG-Mamba-V2, a set of empirical refinements to a bidirectional Vision Mamba encoder: the class token is appended at the end of the token sequence instead of the midpoint, the forward and backward scan outputs are summed without the conventional 1/2 scaling, and dropout is applied at a uniform rate across blocks. On PhysioNet/CinC Challenge 2021, ECG-Mamba-V2 reaches 0.6494 macro AUPRC and 0.9716 macro AUROC, against 0.6100 and 0.9646 for its predecessor, while using 34\% fewer parameters and delivering 38\% higher throughput; it wins all 15 paired runs.
comment: The article has been accepted by Frontiers of Computer Science (FCS), with the DOI: 10.1007/s11704-026-60814-4
♻ ☆ Beyond Final Answers: CRYSTAL Benchmark for Transparent Multimodal Reasoning Evaluation
We introduce CRYSTAL (Clear Reasoning via Yielded Steps, Traceability, and Logic), a diagnostic benchmark with 6,372 instances that evaluates multimodal reasoning through verifiable intermediate steps. We propose two complementary metrics: Match F1, which scores step-level precision and recall via semantic similarity matching, and Ordered Match F1, which further penalizes disordered reasoning chains. References are constructed through a Delphi-inspired pipeline in which four independent MLLMs generate trajectories, which are then aggregated via semantic clustering and validated through human quality gates. Evaluation of 20 MLLMs, including commercial frontier systems not used during benchmark construction, reveals systematic failures that are invisible to answer accuracy: universal cherry-picking (precision far exceeds recall), non-monotonic scaling trade-offs, and disordered reasoning in which no competitive model preserves more than 60% of matched steps in the correct order. Beyond evaluation, we propose the Causal Process Reward (CPR), a multiplicative reward that couples answer correctness with step-level alignment, and CPR-Curriculum, which progressively increases reasoning difficulty during training. CPR-Curriculum achieves a 32% improvement in Match F1 via GRPO where additive reward strategies fail, improving reasoning without manual step annotation.
♻ ☆ VectorHarness: Recovering Editable, Relation-Preserving Structure from Scientific Graphics
Converting scientific graphics into editable representations remains a challenging problem for image-to-code generation because of their heterogeneous elements and complex layouts. Recent multi-agent reconstruction systems have advanced this line of work, but often follow a copy-paste paradigm: the reconstructed image closely resembles the original, while complex regions remain effectively uneditable. We instead formulate a different objective, raster-to-authoring reconstruction, which aims to recover an authoring representation that supports native, customized editing rather than mere visual replication. To this end, we present VectorHarness, a multi-agent framework for raster-to-authoring reconstruction that recovers heterogeneous components using type-appropriate native representations. Text, formulas, shapes, connectors, icons, charts, and tables are reconstructed as natively editable objects, while intrinsically image-based regions remain raster content. To systematically evaluate reconstruction quality, we introduce VectorHarness-Bench, which jointly assesses rendering fidelity, raster fallback coverage, executable object edits, and relation-preserving edits. Experiments show that VectorHarness improves executable edit success and relation preservation, reduces avoidable raster fallback, and maintains high visual fidelity across heterogeneous graphics.
♻ ☆ DisasterInsight: A Building-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Vision--Language Models in Disaster Response ECCV 2026
Vision--language models (VLMs) show promise for disaster-response remote sensing, but existing benchmarks mainly emphasize scene-level or damage-centric assessment. To study this building-centric gap, we introduce \method{}, a diagnostic benchmark built on xBD, a pre/post-disaster satellite dataset with building-level damage labels. \method{} enriches building instances with OpenStreetMap-derived functional labels and contains 134{,}108 task-specific instruction records across 15 task types, spanning instance-level assessment, scene-level counting, multi-instance reasoning, and structured report generation. The benchmark supports RGB pre/post-disaster imagery, single- and multi-view instance formulations, and scene-level RGB/SAR diagnostic inputs. Experiments with general-domain and remote-sensing VLMs show that models perform better on visible damage cues than on building-function understanding, multi-instance reasoning, counting, and grounded reporting. Instruction tuning improves performance on several tasks but does not close this building-centric gap.
comment: Presented at the TerraBytes workshop at ECCV 2026
♻ ☆ PerSeM: Persistent Semantic Memory for Long-Horizon Open-Vocabulary UAV Mapping
Open-vocabulary segmentation enables rich semantic perception for UAVs, but frame-wise predictions can remain temporally inconsistent across repeated observations and changing viewpoints. We present PerSeM, a training-free persistent semantic memory framework for long-horizon open-vocabulary UAV mapping. PerSeM associates frame-wise semantic observations with persistent world-space voxels and constructs a majority-based semantic memory, which is conservatively refined through history-preserving spatial refinement, trust-aware replay, and context-guided verification. Experiments on the Forest and UAVScenes benchmarks show that persistent 3D memory provides substantial gains in semantic correctness and temporal stability over frame-wise predictions. Beyond this strong persistent-memory baseline, PerSeM provides consistent additional improvements, improving both semantic accuracy and temporal stability across all five evaluated UAVScenes sequences. Analysis using regions identified independently of the final PerSeM predictions further shows that these gains are concentrated in semantically difficult and temporally unstable regions, where majority-based memory is most likely to remain uncertain. These results demonstrate that persistent 3D aggregation provides a strong foundation for long-horizon semantic mapping, while conservative refinement of uncertain memory states can provide additional improvements without retraining or additional neural-network inference.
♻ ☆ LiteMedCoT-VL: Parameter-Efficient Adaptation for Medical Visual Question Answering NLPCC 2026
The reasoning gap between large and compact vision-language models (VLMs) limits the deployment of medical AI on portable clinical devices. Compact VLMs of 2-4B parameters can run on resource-constrained hardware but lack the multi-step reasoning capacity needed for interpretable clinical decision support. Existing knowledge distillation methods transfer answers without the reasoning process behind them. Medical visual question answering (VQA) serves as a testbed for this problem, as it requires models to integrate visual evidence with clinical knowledge through structured reasoning chains. We introduce LiteMedCoT-VL, a pipeline that transfers chain-of-thought reasoning from a 235B teacher model to 2B student models through LoRA-based fine-tuning on explanation-enriched training data. All inference is conducted without image captions by default, simulating the clinical scenario in which a physician interprets a medical image directly without an accompanying radiology report. On the PMC-VQA benchmark, LiteMedCoT-VL achieves 64.9% accuracy, exceeding the zero-shot Qwen3-VL-4B baseline of 53.9% by 11.0 percentage points and outperforming all published baselines. This result indicates that a 2B model with reasoning distillation can match or exceed models with twice the parameters. Visual grounding analysis shows that the model relies on image content rather than exploiting textual priors. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/R4nzer/LiteMedCoT-VL.
comment: Accepted at NLPCC 2026 (The 15th CCF International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing), Springer proceedings. 17 pages, 5 figures
♻ ☆ ALINA: Advanced Line Identification and Notation Algorithm CVPR
Mohammed Abdul Hafeez Khan, Parth Ganeriwala, Siddhartha Bhattacharyya, Natasha Neogi, Raja Muthalagu
Labels are the cornerstone of supervised machine learning algorithms. Most visual recognition methods are fully supervised, using bounding boxes or pixel-wise segmentations for object localization. Traditional labeling methods, such as crowd-sourcing, are prohibitive due to cost, data privacy, amount of time, and potential errors on large datasets. To address these issues, we propose a novel annotation framework, Advanced Line Identification and Notation Algorithm (ALINA), which can be used for labeling taxiway datasets that consist of different camera perspectives and variable weather attributes (sunny and cloudy). Additionally, the CIRCular threshoLd pixEl Discovery And Traversal (CIRCLEDAT) algorithm has been proposed, which is an integral step in determining the pixels corresponding to taxiway line markings. Once the pixels are identified, ALINA generates corresponding pixel coordinate annotations on the frame. Using this approach, 60,249 frames from the taxiway dataset, AssistTaxi have been labeled. To evaluate the performance, a context-based edge map (CBEM) set was generated manually based on edge features and connectivity. The detection rate after testing the annotated labels with the CBEM set was recorded as 98.45%, attesting its dependability and effectiveness.
comment: Paper has been accepted to The 3rd CVPR Workshop on Vision Datasets Understanding, 2024
♻ ☆ Ischemic Stroke Segmentation and Net Water Uptake Quantification on Multicenter Non-Contrast CT Using Supervised Target-Domain Adaptation
Linus Britt, Maximilian Nielsen, Susan Klapproth, Andre Kemmling, Michael H. Lev, Gabriel Broocks, Rene Werner, Thilo Sentker
Objectives: Quantitative assessment of infarct hypodensity on non-contrast computed tomography (NCCT), including net water uptake (NWU), requires manual or semi-manual lesion delineation, often guided by CT perfusion or diffusion-weighted MRI, limiting clinical applicability. Automated segmentation on NCCT could enable efficient biomarker extraction such as NWU but remains challenging across heterogeneous multicenter data. This study aimed to develop and externally test a domain-aware deep learning framework for ischemic stroke segmentation on NCCT and assess its suitability for NWU quantification.
Materials & Methods: In this retrospective multicenter study of 801 patients from four datasets, an nnU-Net-based model was trained on NCCT scans from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf and the Acute Ischemic Stroke Dataset. To adapt to new domains, the model was fine-tuned on target-domain subsets from Boston (n=11) and ISLES (n=75), with evaluation on held-out cases not used for fine-tuning. Automated segmentations and NWU values were compared with expert references.
Results: For lesions $\geq$ 30 mL, median Dice was 0.68 (Boston) and 0.56 (ISLES). Including smaller lesions, which predominated in ISLES, median Dice was 0.54 (interquartile range [IQR] 0.30-0.70) for acute lesion segmentation (Boston dataset) and 0.20 (IQR 0.03-0.41) for NCCT lesion segmentations when compared to post-treatment infarct (primary target of the ISLES challenge). Automated NWU mean absolute error was 1.37 percentage points (SD 1.61, Boston).
Conclusion: Target-domain adaptation supported NCCT-only infarct segmentation across heterogeneous external cohorts, although performance varied across domains. The approach enabled low-error NWU quantification from baseline NCCT without advanced imaging, supporting further prospective clinical evaluation.
♻ ☆ The MAMA-MIA Challenge: Advancing Generalizability and Fairness in Breast MRI Tumor Segmentation and Treatment Response Prediction
Lidia Garrucho, Smriti Joshi, Kaisar Kushibar, Richard Osuala, Maciej Bobowicz, Xavier Bargalló, Paulius Jaruševičius, Kai Geissler, Raphael Schäfer, Muhammad Alberb, Tony Xu, Anne Martel, Daniel Sleiman, Navchetan Awasthi, Hadeel Awwad, Joan C. Vilanova, Robert Martí, Daan Schouten, Jeong Hoon Lee, Mirabela Rusu, Eleonora Poeta, Luisa Vargas, Eliana Pastor, Maria A. Zuluaga, Jessica Kächele, Dimitrios Bounias, Alexandra Ertl, Katarzyna Gwoździewicz, Maria-Laura Cosaka, Pasant M. Abo-Elhoda, Sara W. Tantawy, Shorouq S. Sakrana, Norhan O. Shawky-Abdelfatah, Amr Muhammad Abdo-Salem, Androniki Kozana, Eugen Divjak, Gordana Ivanac, Katerina Nikiforaki, Michail E. Klontzas, Rosa García-Dosdá, Meltem Gulsun-Akpinar, Oğuz Lafcı, Carlos Martín-Isla, Oliver Díaz, Laura Igual, Karim Lekadir
Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed malignancy among women worldwide and a leading cause of cancer-related mortality. Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging plays a central role in tumor characterization and treatment monitoring, particularly in patients receiving neoadjuvant chemotherapy. However, existing artificial intelligence models for breast magnetic resonance imaging are typically developed and evaluated using heterogeneous datasets, study populations, and assessment protocols, making direct comparison difficult and limiting understanding of model robustness across institutions and clinically relevant patient subgroups. The MAMA-MIA Challenge was designed to address these challenges by providing a standardized benchmark for the joint evaluation of primary tumor segmentation and prediction of pathologic complete response using pre-treatment magnetic resonance imaging only. The training cohort comprised 1,506 patients from multiple institutions in the United States, while evaluation was conducted on an external test set of 574 patients from three independent European centers to assess cross-continental and cross-institutional generalization. A unified scoring framework combined predictive performance with subgroup consistency across age, menopausal status, and breast density. Twenty-six international teams participated in the final evaluation phase. Results demonstrate substantial performance variability under a common external evaluation framework and reveal trade-offs between overall accuracy and subgroup fairness. The challenge provides standardized datasets, evaluation protocols, and public resources to promote the development of robust and equitable artificial intelligence systems for breast cancer imaging.
♻ ☆ What Remains Normal? Clean Images Miss Useful Near-Defect Normal Patches for Anomaly Detection
Normal-only industrial anomaly detectors use patches from clean training images as normal references or reconstruction targets. This assumes that clean patches are sufficient for the normal regions encountered at test time. We test that assumption directly. On MVTec AD, admitting ground-truth-normal patches from real defect images to a DINOv2 memory candidate pool raises pixel average precision (P-AP) from 73.34 to 76.95 while keeping the encoder, test-time score, and number of stored references fixed. Patches within two patch cells of the annotated defect recover 94.70% of this gain. We then ask whether useful patches of this kind can be exposed using clean training images alone. BoundarySupport inserts a procedural synthetic defect to alter surrounding context, excludes every token intersecting the nominal insertion or a detected RGB change, and learns only from pixel-preserved neighboring patches. Across three paired seeds, the same principle improves P-AP in all six memory and reconstruction settings across MVTec, VisA, and Real-IAD. Matched controls identify the altered-context feature itself as the useful normal evidence: with synthetic input or selected positions fixed, altered-context features outperform their clean-view counterparts as both reconstruction targets and memory references. On MVTec memory, the final score change is also spatially selective, with larger reductions on normal patches next to defects than on mid-distance or far-normal patches in all 15 categories. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/jw-chae/boundary_support.
♻ ☆ Towards the Vision-Sound-Language-Action Paradigm: The HEAR Framework for Sound-Centric Manipulation
While recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have begun to incorporate audio, they typically treat sound as static pre-execution prompts or focus exclusively on human speech. This leaves a significant gap in real-time, sound-centric manipulation where fleeting environmental acoustics provide critical state verification during task execution. Consequently, key sounds are easily missed due to low-frequency updates or system latency. This problem is exacerbated by action chunking with open-loop execution, which creates a Blind Execution Interval where acoustic events are lost between discrete audio observation windows. Recognizing the necessity of continuous auditory awareness, we formalize Vision-Sound-Language-Action (VSLA) as a continuous control paradigm conditioned on vision, streaming audio, language, and proprioception under delayed decision loops. As an instantiation, we introduce HEAR, a VSLA framework integrating four components: (i) a streaming Historizer to maintain a compact, causal audio context across execution gaps; (ii) an Envisioner adapted from omni foundation models to reason over multi-sensory inputs; (iii) an Advancer, formulated as an audio world model, to learn temporal dynamics by predicting near-future audio codes; and (iv) a flow-matching Realizer policy to generate smooth action chunks. To address the scarcity of pretraining data and evaluations for VSLA, we construct OpenX-Sound for pretraining, alongside HEAR-Bench, the first sound-centric manipulation benchmark with strict causal timing rules. Our results suggest that robust sound-centric manipulation necessitates causal persistence and explicit temporal learning. This framework provides a practical step toward multi-sensory foundation models for embodied agents, enabling robots to perceive and interact with dynamic environments. Code and videos are available at https://hear.irmv.top
comment: Accepted by The International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR 2026). Project page: https://hear.irmv.top
♻ ☆ Personalizing Causal Audio-Driven Facial Motion via Dynamic Multi-modal Retrieval
Audio-driven facial animation is essential for immersive digital interaction, yet existing frameworks struggle to reconcile real-time streaming with high-fidelity personalization. Current methods either rely on latency-inducing audio look-ahead, or ask users to record scripted calibration sequences to pre-encode static identity embeddings that fail to capture dynamic idiosyncrasies. We present an end-to-end framework for personalized audio-driven facial motion generation, supporting causal, zero-lookahead streaming. We introduce two key innovations: (1) a causal multi-resolution motion tokenizer that captures both global temporal context and high-frequency articulatory details, and (2) a multi-modal style retriever that extracts stylistic priors from unstructured reference libraries by jointly querying ongoing audio and motion. Unlike prior retrieval mechanisms restricted to curated, fixed-size, or audio-only style banks, our design accepts arbitrary footage of the target identity, enabling personalization from a handful of casually recorded clips. By integrating these components, our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in lip-sync accuracy, identity consistency, and perceived realism, while preserving the streaming constraints of real-time telepresence. Code is available at https://github.com/xg-chu/Fallingwater.
comment: Code is available at https://github.com/xg-chu/Fallingwater
♻ ☆ REALM: An RGB- and Event-Aligned Latent Manifold for Cross-Modal Perception ECCV
Event cameras provide several unique advantages over standard frame-based sensors, including high temporal resolution, low latency, and robustness to extreme lighting. However, existing learning-based approaches for event processing are typically confined to narrow, task-specific silos and lack the ability to generalize across modalities. We address this gap with REALM, a cross-modal framework that learns an RGB- and Event-Aligned Latent Manifold by projecting event representations into the pretrained latent space of RGB foundation models. Instead of task-specific training, we leverage low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to bridge the modality gap, effectively unlocking the geometric and semantic priors of frozen RGB backbones for asynchronous event streams. We demonstrate that REALM effectively maps events into the ViT-based foundation latent space. Our method performs downstream tasks, such as depth estimation and semantic segmentation, by simply transferring linear heads trained on the RGB teacher. Most significantly, REALM enables the direct, zero-shot application of complex, frozen image-trained decoders, such as MASt3R, to raw event data. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in wide-baseline feature matching, significantly outperforming specialized architectures. Code and models are available at https://papers.starslab.ca/realm/.
comment: In Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Malmö, SE, 2026
♻ ☆ The Missing Temporal Link: Temporal Context Routing for Script-Driven Audio-Video Generation
Yichen Liu, Quanwei Zhang, Haozhe Wang, Donghao Zhou, Jiankun Zhang, Xiaojie Li, Yang Shi, Jiaming Liu, Ruihua Huang, Yingtian Zou, Daquan Zhou
Joint audio-video generation models have made substantial progress in visual quality and audio-visual synchronization. However, they still provide limited control over when shot transitions occur and dialogue is spoken. This limitation constrains their application in script-driven content creation, where timing errors can undermine narrative coherence and the viewing experience. Current joint generators align video and audio representations on a shared temporal axis, yet the precise timing of shots and dialogue specified in a structured prompt is encoded only in the prompt's text representation and remains unaligned with the temporal coordinates of either modality. Consequently, video and audio may remain synchronized with each other while both fail to follow the script timeline. This mismatch motivates us to extend temporal alignment beyond video and audio to include the structured script. We therefore introduce Temporal Context Routing (TCR), which maps the script timing onto the shared temporal axis of video and audio generation and routes each prompt's guidance to the corresponding positions in both modalities. Compared with the baseline on 200 test scripts, TCR reduces Shot Boundary MAE by 96%, from 1.11 s to 0.042 s, and raises Dialogue Acc@0.5 s from 28.3% to 84.1%. TCR achieves these improvements while maintaining visual quality and audio-visual synchronization comparable to those of the baselines. A user study further shows that participants prefer TCR on all five evaluated dimensions.
♻ ☆ Refining Ground Truth Poses in Autonomous Driving Datasets via Neural Rendering IEEE
Quentin Herau, Nathan Piasco, Moussab Bennehar, Luis Roldão, Dzmitry Tsishkou, Bingbing Liu, Cyrille Migniot, Pascal Vasseur, Cédric Demonceaux
Public autonomous driving datasets underpin the training and benchmarking of perception, mapping, and localization algorithms, yet residual inaccuracies in sensor calibration and ego-poses can silently degrade both model performance and evaluation reliability. We introduce MOISST++, a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF)-based pipeline that jointly refines extrinsic sensor calibration and continuous-time ego-trajectories at dataset scale. The method optimizes shared rig parameters across multiple subsequences and corrects per-subsequence trajectories via a learned continuous-time correction, going beyond prior work that targets individual scenes. We validate pose improvements without ground truth through a complementary evaluation suite combining Structure from Motion (SfM) triangulation, novel view synthesis, and multi-modal geometric consistency metrics, verify their coherence via cross-metric agreement, and confirm their sensitivity through a controlled-perturbation study with known injected errors. Applied to four major datasets (KITTI-360, nuScenes, PandaSet, and Waymo), MOISST++ yields statistically significant improvements on most metrics on nuScenes, PandaSet and Waymo, and marginal, within-noise changes on the already well-calibrated KITTI-360. We publicly release the optimized poses and calibration parameters, together with our evaluation code, to support more reliable research and benchmarking.
comment: Accepted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2026
♻ ☆ WorldRoamBench: An Open-World Benchmark for Long-Horizon Stability of Interactive World Models
Ting-Bing Xu, Jiacheng Sui, Zhe Gao, Kewei Shi, Wenjin Yang, Zhicheng Liu, Zhaoxu Sun, Mingchao Sun, Hongyu Pan, Fan Jiang, Mu Xu, Qi Fan, Yang Gao, Yong Li, Baoquan Chen
Despite rapid progress in interactive world models (IWMs), short-horizon performance does not establish sustained action following, visual stability, physical plausibility, or memory. We introduce WorldRoamBench, an open-world benchmark for long-horizon stability across four dimensions, each with innovations: (i) Action: per-frame action metric bypassing cross-model semantic scale disparity and exposing failures hidden by trajectory; (ii) Vision: sliding-window drift metric capturing non-monotonic mid-sequence collapse missed by start-vs-end comparisons; (iii) Physics: evaluation of physical plausibility across mechanics, optics, and 3D consistency, gated by camera-motion and subject-tracking checks; (iv) Memory: a trajectory-aware protocol reducing confounding from action-following errors, evaluating scene memory via transition-localized 3D point-cloud reconstruction and subject memory via tracking-plus-VLM reasoning. The benchmark comprises 1000+ test cases across Nature, Urban, and Indoor scenes in first/third-person views with WASD 10-60 s continuous interaction. Evaluating 10+ open/closed-source models reveals none reliably satisfies all dimensions; even the best achieves only moderate scores. Advances on WorldRoamBench are steps toward IWMs that are stable, physically grounded, memory-faithful, and deployable in real-world applications.
♻ ☆ VideoPulse: Neonatal heart rate and peripheral capillary oxygen saturation (SpO2) estimation from contact free video IEEE
Deependra Dewagiri, Kamesh Anuradha, Pabadhi Liyanage, Helitha Kulatunga, Pamuditha Somarathne, Udaya S. K. P. Miriya Thanthrige, Nishani Lucas, Anusha Withana, Joshua P. Kulasingham
Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables contact free monitoring of vital signs and is especially valuable for neonates, since conventional methods often require sustained skin contact with adhesive probes that can irritate fragile skin and increase infection control burden. We present VideoPulse, a neonatal dataset and an end to end pipeline that estimates neonatal heart rate and peripheral capillary oxygen saturation (SpO2) from facial video. VideoPulse contains 157 recordings totaling 2.6 hours from 52 neonates with diverse face orientations. Our pipeline performs face alignment and artifact aware supervision using denoised pulse oximeter signals, then applies 3D CNN backbones for heart rate and SpO2 regression with label distribution smoothing and weighted regression for SpO2. Predictions are produced in 2 second windows. On the NBHR neonatal dataset, we obtain heart rate MAE 2.97 bpm using 2 second windows (2.80 bpm at 6 second windows) and SpO2 MAE 1.69 percent. Under cross dataset evaluation, the NBHR trained heart rate model attains 5.34 bpm MAE on VideoPulse, and fine tuning an NBHR pretrained SpO2 model on VideoPulse yields MAE 1.68 percent. These results indicate that short unaligned neonatal video segments can support accurate heart rate and SpO2 estimation, enabling low cost non invasive monitoring in neonatal intensive care.
comment: Revised manuscript with updated methodology, figures, evaluation details, references, ethics and data availability statements. The manuscript has been aligned with the version being prepared for submission to an IEEE Journal
♻ ☆ Geometry-Aware Reinforcement Learning for 2D Irregular Nesting
Traditional heuristic solvers for the 2D irregular nesting problem share a fundamental limitation: they are blind to polygon geometry, relying on guided brute-force to navigate the continuous placement space with minimal geometrical guidance. In this paper, we argue that Reinforcement Learning is uniquely positioned to overcome this bottleneck. By pairing an optimization policy with a geometry-aware neural encoder, an agent can automatically discover rich geometric priors directly from data, utilizing these learned intuitions to strategically guide exploration. To realize this, we introduce the Polygons Transformer (PoT), a novel architecture that encodes 2D continuous vector geometries while allowing cross-polygon attention. We couple this novel architecture with a Combinatorial Optimization Reinforcement Learning (CORL) training framework to find optimal solutions. To support this paradigm, we release an open-source training dataset derived from complex geographic contours alongside a dedicated evaluation benchmark. Empirically, our agent slightly exceeds Sparrow, the state-of-the-art heuristic, on small (4-polygon) instances, while a clear scaling gap remains on larger (8-polygon) instances.
comment: 20 pages, 6 figures, 7 tables. Under review at the Transaction on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)
♻ ☆ DexTouch-WM: Learning Action-Conditioned Tactile World Models from Human Touch for Dexterous Robot Manipulation IROS 2026
Yan Qin, Yue Chen, Wenwei Lin, Shujia Liu, Chuqiao Lyu, Kailun Su, Weiyang Jin, Chenze Yu, Ping Luo, Wenbo Ding, Tianxing Chen, Renjing Xu
Learning predictive models of contact-rich dexterous manipulation requires dense tactile interaction, but such data are costly to scale on real robots and remain tied to embodiment-specific sensors. We introduce DexTouch-WM, an action-conditioned world model that learns from scalable human touch to jointly predict future RGB observations and bilateral tactile dynamics. Our insight is that human and robot manipulation share transferable contact dynamics when their tactile observations and action spaces are made compatible. We deploy flexible piezoresistive arrays with a shared sensing layout on both human and dexterous robot hands, and retarget human motion into the robot action space so that human interaction can supervise the same dynamics model used for real-robot prediction. DexTouch-WM couples a pretrained video expert with a lightweight tactile expert using anatomy-aware tactile tokens and aligned action conditioning. In human-to-robot scaling experiments, we keep five hours of real-robot supervision fixed while increasing human interaction from 0 to 100 hours, and observe substantial improvements in held-out robot-domain visual, geometric, and contact prediction despite disjoint human and robot task sets. Beyond prediction, we evaluate the world models as surrogate environments for policy evaluation and as generators of synthetic trajectories for real-robot policy learning, showing that scalable human interaction provides a complementary data axis for learning dexterous robot world models.
comment: Accept to IROS 2026 Workshop RoBoWoMo (Lightning Talk)
♻ ☆ RAVE: Re-Allocating Visual Attention in Large Multimodal Models EMNLP 2026
Large multimodal models (LMMs) inherit the self-attention mechanism of pretrained language backbones, yet standard attention can exhibit suboptimal allocation, including cross-modal misallocation between textual and visual evidence and intra-visual imbalance among visual tokens. We propose RAVE (Re-Allocating Visual Attention), a lightweight pair-gating mechanism that adds a learned query-key bias to pre-softmax attention scores over visual keys, derived from pre-RoPE query and key features. RAVE requires no architectural modification to the backbone and can be trained end-to-end with the rest of the model. Across a suite of multimodal benchmarks, RAVE improves over standard attention by an average of 3 points, with the largest gains on perception-intensive tasks -- including multilingual OCR, chart understanding, document VQA, and scene text VQA -- where accurate visual grounding is critical.
comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2026 Main Conference
♻ ☆ ULTRA: Unified Multimodal Control for Autonomous Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation IROS 2026
Achieving autonomous and versatile whole-body loco-manipulation remains a central barrier to making humanoids practically useful. Yet existing approaches are fundamentally constrained: retargeted data are often scarce or low-quality; methods struggle to scale to large skill repertoires; and, most importantly, they rely on tracking predefined motion references rather than generating behavior from perception and high-level task specifications. To address these limitations, we propose ULTRA, a unified framework with two key components. First, we introduce a physics-driven neural retargeting algorithm that translates large-scale motion capture to humanoid embodiments while preserving physical plausibility for contact-rich interactions. Second, we learn a unified multimodal controller that supports both dense references and sparse task specifications, under sensing ranging from accurate motion-capture state to noisy egocentric visual inputs. We distill a universal tracking policy into this controller, compress motor skills into a compact latent space, and apply reinforcement learning finetuning to expand coverage and improve robustness under out-of-distribution scenarios. This enables coordinated whole-body behavior from sparse intent without test-time reference motions. We evaluate ULTRA in simulation and on a real Unitree G1 humanoid. Results show that ULTRA generalizes to autonomous, goal-conditioned whole-body loco-manipulation from egocentric perception, consistently outperforming tracking-only baselines with limited skills.
comment: IROS 2026 Best Application (ICROS) and Mobile Manipulation (OMRON Sinic X) Paper Awards Finalist, Project Page: https://ultra-humanoid.github.io/
♻ ☆ HuRo: Robotizing Human Videos for Scalable VLA Pretraining
Human video datasets offer an abundant and diverse source of interaction data that can complement expensive real-robot data. To bridge the human-to-robot embodiment gap, existing approaches either robotize videos in task-matched settings or address observation and action alignment separately at scale. In this work, we systematically examine whether robotized human videos can serve as an effective and scalable source of supervision for VLA pretraining. To this end, we develop a robotization pipeline that converts heterogeneous human videos into robot-aligned observations and action trajectories while inferring missing intermediate signals across annotation levels. Using this pipeline, we construct the HuRo dataset, comprising about 630K robotized episodes and 142M processed frames from five human-video sources. Across four real-world manipulation tasks, increasing the amount of robotized pretraining data improves overall completion from 51.5% to 80.3% and OOD completion under spatial and visual shifts from 34.9% to 72.2%. Ablations further show that visual robotization improves OOD robustness and that end-to-end pretraining with retargeted actions outperforms visual-only transfer. Project website: https://3587jjh.github.io/HuRo.
comment: Accepted at CoRL 2026
♻ ☆ Privacy Leakage on DNNs: A Survey of Model Inversion Attacks and Defenses
Hao Fang, Yixiang Qiu, Hongyao Yu, Wenbo Yu, Jiawei Kong, Baoli Chong, Bin Chen, Xuan Wang, Shu-Tao Xia, Ke Xu
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have revolutionized various domains with their exceptional performance across numerous applications. However, Model Inversion (MI) attacks, which disclose private information about the training dataset by abusing access to the trained models, have emerged as a formidable privacy threat. Given a trained network, these attacks enable adversaries to reconstruct high-fidelity data that closely aligns with the private training samples, posing significant privacy concerns. Despite the rapid advances in the field, we lack a comprehensive and systematic overview of existing MI attacks and defenses. To fill this gap, this paper thoroughly investigates this realm and presents a holistic survey. Firstly, our work briefly reviews early MI studies on traditional machine learning scenarios. We then elaborately analyze and compare numerous recent attacks and defenses on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) across multiple modalities and learning tasks. By meticulously analyzing their distinctive features, we summarize and classify these methods into different categories and provide a novel taxonomy. Finally, this paper discusses promising research directions and presents potential solutions to open issues. To facilitate further study on MI attacks and defenses, we have implemented an open-source model inversion toolbox on GitHub (https://github.com/ffhibnese/Model-Inversion-Attack-ToolBox).
comment: Accepted by International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV)
♻ ☆ EventGeM: Global-to-Local Feature Matching for Event-Based Visual Place Recognition
Event cameras are rapidly rising in popularity for robotic and computer vision tasks because their sparse activation delivers energy-efficient, high-dynamic-range, and fast sensing. Event cameras have been used in robotic navigation and localization tasks where positioning must occur in real time with sufficient accuracy. However, current event-based localization methods suffer from poor spatial understanding and are not viewpoint tolerant. In this paper, we address the problem of viewpoint-robust place recognition directly from event streams. We present EventGeM, a global-to-local feature fusion pipeline for event-based visual place recognition that combines whole-image feature detection to shortlist top candidates for 2D homography-based re-ranking with random sample consensus (RANSAC). We also contribute a regional generalized mean pooling (GeM) layer that learns to return the most relevant spatial features using per-row exponents to pool event streams into a compact global descriptor, trained on the NYC-Event-VPR dataset. These contributions overcome shortfalls in currently available event-based localization methods that fail to recognize similar places with large changes in viewpoint. To evaluate viewpoint-robust localization, we contribute a new event-based dataset that includes repeated traverses with a severe lateral shift. EventGeM improves absolute Recall@1 by 7 to 43 percentage points over the strongest baseline in each experiment. We also deploy EventGeM on a robotic platform, demonstrating real-time performance of our hierarchical pipeline. The code for EventGeM is available at https://github.com/AdamDHines/Event-GeM.
comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables, under review
♻ ☆ DexPIE: Stable Dexterous Policy Improvement from Real-World Experience
Dexterous manipulation presents substantial challenges for imitation learning due to its high-dimensional action space and complex contact-rich dynamics. Policies trained purely from demonstrations often suffer from compounding errors during deployment and require large amounts of expert data to achieve reliable performance. To move beyond the limitations of demonstration data, in this work, we propose DexPIE, a post-training framework for dexterous policy improvement from experience collected through real-world deployment. First, DexPIE enables effective exploration coverage through a dexterous-hand-adapted intervention system and multi-stage DAgger-style data collection across initial and intermediate task stages. Meanwhile, we enhance consistency between training and inference to reduce the distribution shift between rollouts and demonstration data, better aligning rollout behavior with demonstrations, allowing the critic to learn a value function induced by a more consistent underlying policy. Together, these components provide reliable supervision for policy evaluation. Finally, DexPIE improves the policy through conditioning on a continuous optimality indicator, allowing the policy to leverage the quality of data in a more fine-grained manner. Across three challenging real-world dexterous manipulation tasks, DexPIE achieves a 37.3% improvement in success rate over the demonstration-based reference policy, outperforming all baseline methods and demonstrating stronger robustness. The source code and dataset will be made publicly available.
comment: Project website: https://siiuuuuuu.github.io/DexPIE
♻ ☆ Traits Run Deeper: Trait-Specific Asymmetric Fusion for Multimodal Personality Assessment
Personality assessment aims to infer stable traits from dynamic behaviors across modalities like language, voice, and facial expressions. Existing approaches often adopt a uniform multimodal fusion strategy for all personality dimensions, overlooking trait-specific modality preferences and causing cross-modal interference. To address this, we propose Traits Run Deeper, a novel personality assessment framework consisting of three components. First, the Multimodal Foundation Representation (MFR) module constructs personality-oriented inputs and incorporates psychology-informed semantic templates as anchors, enabling foundation models to capture trait-relevant behaviors. Second, the Trait-Specific Modality Fusion (TSMF) module employs an asymmetric fusion mechanism, allowing each dimension to selectively exploit different modality pathways to capture heterogeneous preferences while reducing cross-modal contamination. Third, the Distribution-Calibrated Personality Regression (DCPR) module mitigates label imbalance and central tendency bias through target distribution calibration, improving robustness and stability. Experimental results on the AVI Challenge 2026 validation set show that our framework reduces mean squared error (MSE) by approximately 25% compared with the baseline. Consistent improvements on the official test set demonstrate that our method achieves the best performance and ranks first in the AVI Challenge 2026 Personality Assessment Track. The source code will be made available at [https://github.com/MSA-LMC/TraitsRunDeeper](https://github.com/MSA-LMC/TraitsRunDeeper).
♻ ☆ SP-MoMamba: Superpixel-driven Mixture of State Space Experts for Efficient Image Super-Resolution
State space models (SSMs) have emerged as an efficient paradigm for single-image super-resolution (SR) due to their linear complexity and long-range modeling capabilities. However, existing visual SSMs mainly focus on improving how densely represented image features are traversed, while the construction of the visual sequence itself remains largely tied to predefined spatial layouts. Inspired by Gestalt perceptual grouping, we propose SP-MoMamba, a superpixel-driven mixture of state space experts for efficient SR. Instead of performing state-space modeling over densely serialized pixel features, the proposed Superpixel-driven State Space Model (SP-SSM) organizes spatially coherent features into compact region-level tokens and performs global sequence modeling over these content-aware representations, reducing redundant computation while facilitating long-range structural interaction. To accommodate image structures with varying representation granularities, we further develop a Multi-Scale Superpixel Mixture of State Space Experts (MSS-MoE), where scale-specific SP-SSM experts model region-level representations at different granularities and a sparse router dynamically selects an appropriate modeling scale. In addition, a Local Spatial Modulation Expert (LSME) complements region-level global modeling by refining local high-frequency details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SP-MoMamba achieves strong reconstruction performance with a favorable trade-off among model size, computational cost, and inference efficiency.
comment: 22 pages, 17 figures
♻ ☆ Uni-PrevPredMap: Extending PrevPredMap to a Unified Framework of Prior-Informed Modeling for Online Vectorized HD Map Construction IEEE
Safety-critical autonomous driving motivates the effective use of prior information. For online vectorized HD map construction, temporal predictions and cost-efficient HD map priors are two complementary yet individually imperfect sources. However, existing prior-informed approaches typically use only one of them or assume the HD map prior to be reliable. We present Uni-PrevPredMap, a unified framework that treats both as imperfect priors and processes them within a single pipeline through their common vectorized representation. At its core is a tri-mode training paradigm that exposes the model to non-prior, temporal-prior, and temporal-map-fusion conditions. This single design enables one model to perceive reliably without any prior, exploit priors when available, and stay robust when priors are imperfect, rather than being trained under a single fixed prior condition. Uni-PrevPredMap achieves state-of-the-art map-absent performance on nuScenes and Argoverse2. Combining both priors yields gains beyond either source alone, while robustness to imperfect priors is evaluated under synthetic perturbation types unseen during training, indicating that the model can benefit from map priors without over-relying on them. Code is available at https://github.com/pnnnnnnn/Uni-PrevPredMap.
comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 9 tables. Published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
♻ ☆ PACE: Precise AI Cinematic Expression
Between a screenplay and a film sits a planning problem that is spatial first: who stands where, and what a camera sees from where it stands. An image diffusion model asked for a shot in free text settles that plan by its own defaults. We present PACE (Precise AI Cinematic Expression), a typed representation for the plan: the screenplay evidence, the characters, props and locations it needs, where each subject stands, and what the camera does. A value is written once at the level it belongs to (script, scene, shot or panel) and inherited below it. A compiler turns the result into both the prompt sent to the diffusion model and a 3D scene built in metres, and a camera solver places the camera so that the declared framing is the framing built. Where a declared value becomes geometry, PACE measures, field by field, how far the compiled camera and the staged render sit from the declaration, rather than asking a model to judge. On the 11-scene Automatic Drive screenplay, every staged single-subject panel places its subject within 1.2% of frame width of its declared position; with two or three subjects one camera pose cannot satisfy every position, and the residual is reported rather than absorbed. On 204 external director-storyboard shots, delivered head height is 1.906 times the staged target from the director's words, 1.733 from the compiled prompt, and 0.955 with the greybox control; the condition that holds framing best draws the described action least. Declaring the pose on 30 shots raises the action drawn from 58.9% to 74.4% without moving the framing. Transitions, fitted motion and human review of the generated panels remain open. Code: https://github.com/StudioPiLabs/pace-core
comment: v2: the supplementary material referenced throughout v1 was never uploaded; it is removed and its 69 references resolved, two of its results moved into the main text and one dropped. 36 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables. Code: https://github.com/StudioPiLabs/pace-core
♻ ☆ Comparing Commercial Depth Sensor Accuracy for Medical Applications
Depth estimation has numerous medical and surgical applications. We benchmark four depth sensors on a porcine bone specimen, a porcine belly specimen, and a silicone kidney phantom using stylus-sampled references. These objects contain several real-world challenges, including homogeneous surfaces, specular surfaces, and subsurface scattering. The comparison includes stereo, structured-light, and time-of-flight sensors at a distance of approximately 50 cm. Specifically, the Intel RealSense D405 (Intel RealSense, United States), PMD Flexx2 (pmdtechnologies, Germany), Stereolabs ZED 2i (Stereolabs, France), and Zivid 2M+ 60 (Zivid, Norway) are compared. The Zivid 2M+ 60 performed best across all objects and metrics considered in this work. The ZED ranked second for real tissue, but last on the phantom.
comment: Accepted at CURAC 2026, 4 Pages
♻ ☆ Navi-Agent: Unlocalized Monocular Navigation Agent
Wenyuan Xie, Mengyang Hong, Yongzhong Wang, Yanbiao Ji, Yijin Zhou, Shaokai Wu, Shalayiding Sirejiding, Huayi Zhou, Yi-Chao Chen, Ma Ling, Yue Ding, Hongtao Lu
Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) requires an embodied agent to execute long-horizon instructions in unknown environments. Existing zero-shot VLN-CE systems typically maintain spatial states through geometric localization or coordinate-based representations. Recent geometry-constrained navigation removes depth and globally consistent coordinates, but maintaining persistent spatial awareness for place confirmation, progress verification, and recovery remains challenging. We present Navi-Agent, a zero-shot VLN-CE agent that constructs a coordinate-free spatial state from visual observations and executed motion histories. Navi-Agent organizes this state as a navigation topology, where nodes represent visual places and edges represent motion transitions. This representation enables observation-based approximate self-localization, task progress verification, and visual revisitation-based recovery. Navi-Agent performs closed-loop navigation by decomposing instructions into sub-goals, executing local visual navigation, and verifying visited places through the constructed spatial state. Experiments on zero-shot VLN-CE benchmark and real-world robot platforms show that Navi-Agent achieves state-of-the-art performance among geometry-constrained methods while remaining competitive with approaches relying on geometric localization.
comment: 8 pages, 7 figures