Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 219
☆ GaussiAnimate: Reconstruct and Rig Animatable Categories with Level of Dynamics
Free-form bones, that conform closely to the surface, can effectively capture non-rigid deformations, but lack a kinematic structure necessary for intuitive control. Thus, we propose a Scaffold-Skin Rigging System, termed "Skelebones", with three key steps: (1) Bones: compress temporally-consistent deformable Gaussians into free-form bones, approximating non-rigid surface deformations; (2) Skeleton: extract a Mean Curvature Skeleton from canonical Gaussians and refine it temporally, ensuring a category-agnostic, motion-adaptive, and topology-correct kinematic structure; (3) Binding: bind the skeleton and bones via non-parametric partwise motion matching (PartMM), synthesizing novel bone motions by matching, retrieving, and blending existing ones. Collectively, these three steps enable us to compress the Level of Dynamics of 4D shapes into compact skelebones that are both controllable and expressive. We validate our approach on both synthetic and real-world datasets, achieving significant improvements in reanimation performance across unseen poses-with 17.3% PSNR gains over Linear Blend Skinning (LBS) and 21.7% over Bag-of-Bones (BoB)-while maintaining excellent reconstruction fidelity, particularly for characters exhibiting complex non-rigid surface dynamics. Our Partwise Motion Matching algorithm demonstrates strong generalization to both Gaussian and mesh representations, especially under low-data regime (~1000 frames), achieving 48.4% RMSE improvement over robust LBS and outperforming GRU- and MLP-based learning methods by >20%. Code will be made publicly available for research purposes at cookmaker.cn/gaussianimate.
comment: Page: https://cookmaker.cn/gaussianimate
☆ ETCH-X: Robustify Expressive Body Fitting to Clothed Humans with Composable Datasets
Human body fitting, which aligns parametric body models such as SMPL to raw 3D point clouds of clothed humans, serves as a crucial first step for downstream tasks like animation and texturing. An effective fitting method should be both locally expressive-capturing fine details such as hands and facial features-and globally robust to handle real-world challenges, including clothing dynamics, pose variations, and noisy or partial inputs. Existing approaches typically excel in only one aspect, lacking an all-in-one solution.We upgrade ETCH to ETCH-X, which leverages a tightness-aware fitting paradigm to filter out clothing dynamics ("undress"), extends expressiveness with SMPL-X, and replaces explicit sparse markers (which are highly sensitive to partial data) with implicit dense correspondences ("dense fit") for more robust and fine-grained body fitting. Our disentangled "undress" and "dense fit" modular stages enable separate and scalable training on composable data sources, including diverse simulated garments (CLOTH3D), large-scale full-body motions (AMASS), and fine-grained hand gestures (InterHand2.6M), improving outfit generalization and pose robustness of both bodies and hands. Our approach achieves robust and expressive fitting across diverse clothing, poses, and levels of input completeness, delivering a substantial performance improvement over ETCH on both: 1) seen data, such as 4D-Dress (MPJPE-All, 33.0% ) and CAPE (V2V-Hands, 35.8% ), and 2) unseen data, such as BEDLAM2.0 (MPJPE-All, 80.8% ; V2V-All, 80.5% ). Code and models will be released at https://xiaobenli00.github.io/ETCH-X/.
comment: Page: https://xiaobenli00.github.io/ETCH-X/, Code: https://github.com/XiaobenLi00/ETCH-X
☆ When Numbers Speak: Aligning Textual Numerals and Visual Instances in Text-to-Video Diffusion Models CVPR 2026
Text-to-video diffusion models have enabled open-ended video synthesis, but often struggle with generating the correct number of objects specified in a prompt. We introduce NUMINA , a training-free identify-then-guide framework for improved numerical alignment. NUMINA identifies prompt-layout inconsistencies by selecting discriminative self- and cross-attention heads to derive a countable latent layout. It then refines this layout conservatively and modulates cross-attention to guide regeneration. On the introduced CountBench, NUMINA improves counting accuracy by up to 7.4% on Wan2.1-1.3B, and by 4.9% and 5.5% on 5B and 14B models, respectively. Furthermore, CLIP alignment is improved while maintaining temporal consistency. These results demonstrate that structural guidance complements seed search and prompt enhancement, offering a practical path toward count-accurate text-to-video diffusion. The code is available at https://github.com/H-EmbodVis/NUMINA.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026. Project page: https://h-embodvis.github.io/NUMINA
☆ Act Wisely: Cultivating Meta-Cognitive Tool Use in Agentic Multimodal Models
Shilin Yan, Jintao Tong, Hongwei Xue, Xiaojun Tang, Yangyang Wang, Kunyu Shi, Guannan Zhang, Ruixuan Li, Yixiong Zou
The advent of agentic multimodal models has empowered systems to actively interact with external environments. However, current agents suffer from a profound meta-cognitive deficit: they struggle to arbitrate between leveraging internal knowledge and querying external utilities. Consequently, they frequently fall prey to blind tool invocation, resorting to reflexive tool execution even when queries are resolvable from the raw visual context. This pathological behavior precipitates severe latency bottlenecks and injects extraneous noise that derails sound reasoning. Existing reinforcement learning protocols attempt to mitigate this via a scalarized reward that penalizes tool usage. Yet, this coupled formulation creates an irreconcilable optimization dilemma: an aggressive penalty suppresses essential tool use, whereas a mild penalty is entirely subsumed by the variance of the accuracy reward during advantage normalization, rendering it impotent against tool overuse. To transcend this bottleneck, we propose HDPO, a framework that reframes tool efficiency from a competing scalar objective to a strictly conditional one. By eschewing reward scalarization, HDPO maintains two orthogonal optimization channels: an accuracy channel that maximizes task correctness, and an efficiency channel that enforces execution economy exclusively within accurate trajectories via conditional advantage estimation. This decoupled architecture naturally induces a cognitive curriculum-compelling the agent to first master task resolution before refining its self-reliance. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our resulting model, Metis, reduces tool invocations by orders of magnitude while simultaneously elevating reasoning accuracy.
comment: Project Page: https://Accio-Lab.github.io/Metis
☆ SIM1: Physics-Aligned Simulator as Zero-Shot Data Scaler in Deformable Worlds
Yunsong Zhou, Hangxu Liu, Xuekun Jiang, Xing Shen, Yuanzhen Zhou, Hui Wang, Baole Fang, Yang Tian, Mulin Yu, Qiaojun Yu, Li Ma, Hengjie Li, Hanqing Wang, Jia Zeng, Jiangmiao Pang
Robotic manipulation with deformable objects represents a data-intensive regime in embodied learning, where shape, contact, and topology co-evolve in ways that far exceed the variability of rigids. Although simulation promises relief from the cost of real-world data acquisition, prevailing sim-to-real pipelines remain rooted in rigid-body abstractions, producing mismatched geometry, fragile soft dynamics, and motion primitives poorly suited for cloth interaction. We posit that simulation fails not for being synthetic, but for being ungrounded. To address this, we introduce SIM1, a physics-aligned real-to-sim-to-real data engine that grounds simulation in the physical world. Given limited demonstrations, the system digitizes scenes into metric-consistent twins, calibrates deformable dynamics through elastic modeling, and expands behaviors via diffusion-based trajectory generation with quality filtering. This pipeline transforms sparse observations into scaled synthetic supervision with near-demonstration fidelity. Experiments show that policies trained on purely synthetic data achieve parity with real-data baselines at a 1:15 equivalence ratio, while delivering 90% zero-shot success and 50% generalization gains in real-world deployment. These results validate physics-aligned simulation as scalable supervision for deformable manipulation and a practical pathway for data-efficient policy learning.
comment: Website: https://internrobotics.github.io/sim1.github.io/
☆ E-3DPSM: A State Machine for Event-Based Egocentric 3D Human Pose Estimation CVPR 2026
Event cameras offer multiple advantages in monocular egocentric 3D human pose estimation from head-mounted devices, such as millisecond temporal resolution, high dynamic range, and negligible motion blur. Existing methods effectively leverage these properties, but suffer from low 3D estimation accuracy, insufficient in many applications (e.g., immersive VR/AR). This is due to the design not being fully tailored towards event streams (e.g., their asynchronous and continuous nature), leading to high sensitivity to self-occlusions and temporal jitter in the estimates. This paper rethinks the setting and introduces E-3DPSM, an event-driven continuous pose state machine for event-based egocentric 3D human pose estimation. E-3DPSM aligns continuous human motion with fine-grained event dynamics; it evolves latent states and predicts continuous changes in 3D joint positions associated with observed events, which are fused with direct 3D human pose predictions, leading to stable and drift-free final 3D pose reconstructions. E-3DPSM runs in real-time at 80 Hz on a single workstation and sets a new state of the art in experiments on two benchmarks, improving accuracy by up to 19% (MPJPE) and temporal stability by up to 2.7x. See our project page for the source code and trained models.
comment: 20 pages; 14 figures and 14 tables; CVPR 2026; project page: https://4dqv.mpi-inf.mpg.de/E-3DPSM/
☆ Scal3R: Scalable Test-Time Training for Large-Scale 3D Reconstruction
Tao Xie, Peishan Yang, Yudong Jin, Yingfeng Cai, Wei Yin, Weiqiang Ren, Qian Zhang, Wei Hua, Sida Peng, Xiaoyang Guo, Xiaowei Zhou
This paper addresses the task of large-scale 3D scene reconstruction from long video sequences. Recent feed-forward reconstruction models have shown promising results by directly regressing 3D geometry from RGB images without explicit 3D priors or geometric constraints. However, these methods often struggle to maintain reconstruction accuracy and consistency over long sequences due to limited memory capacity and the inability to effectively capture global contextual cues. In contrast, humans can naturally exploit the global understanding of the scene to inform local perception. Motivated by this, we propose a novel neural global context representation that efficiently compresses and retains long-range scene information, enabling the model to leverage extensive contextual cues for enhanced reconstruction accuracy and consistency. The context representation is realized through a set of lightweight neural sub-networks that are rapidly adapted during test time via self-supervised objectives, which substantially increases memory capacity without incurring significant computational overhead. The experiments on multiple large-scale benchmarks, including the KITTI Odometry~\cite{Geiger2012CVPR} and Oxford Spires~\cite{tao2025spires} datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in handling ultra-large scenes, achieving leading pose accuracy and state-of-the-art 3D reconstruction accuracy while maintaining efficiency. Code is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/scal3r.
comment: Project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/scal3r
☆ Seeing but Not Thinking: Routing Distraction in Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts
Haolei Xu, Haiwen Hong, Hongxing Li, Rui Zhou, Yang Zhang, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Yongliang Shen, Weiming Lu, Yueting Zhuang
Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have achieved remarkable performance on vision-language tasks. However, we identify a puzzling phenomenon termed Seeing but Not Thinking: models accurately perceive image content yet fail in subsequent reasoning, while correctly solving identical problems presented as pure text. Through systematic analysis, we first verify that cross-modal semantic sharing exists in MoE architectures, ruling out semantic alignment failure as the sole explanation. We then reveal that visual experts and domain experts exhibit layer-wise separation, with image inputs inducing significant routing divergence from text inputs in middle layers where domain experts concentrate. Based on these findings, we propose the Routing Distraction hypothesis: when processing visual inputs, the routing mechanism fails to adequately activate task-relevant reasoning experts. To validate this hypothesis, we design a routing-guided intervention method that enhances domain expert activation. Experiments on three multimodal MoE models across six benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements, with gains of up to 3.17% on complex visual reasoning tasks. Our analysis further reveals that domain expert identification locates cognitive functions rather than sample-specific solutions, enabling effective transfer across tasks with different information structures.
☆ AVGen-Bench: A Task-Driven Benchmark for Multi-Granular Evaluation of Text-to-Audio-Video Generation
Text-to-Audio-Video (T2AV) generation is rapidly becoming a core interface for media creation, yet its evaluation remains fragmented. Existing benchmarks largely assess audio and video in isolation or rely on coarse embedding similarity, failing to capture the fine-grained joint correctness required by realistic prompts. We introduce AVGen-Bench, a task-driven benchmark for T2AV generation featuring high-quality prompts across 11 real-world categories. To support comprehensive assessment, we propose a multi-granular evaluation framework that combines lightweight specialist models with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), enabling evaluation from perceptual quality to fine-grained semantic controllability. Our evaluation reveals a pronounced gap between strong audio-visual aesthetics and weak semantic reliability, including persistent failures in text rendering, speech coherence, physical reasoning, and a universal breakdown in musical pitch control. Code and benchmark resources are available at http://aka.ms/avgenbench.
☆ OpenVLThinkerV2: A Generalist Multimodal Reasoning Model for Multi-domain Visual Tasks
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as the de facto Reinforcement Learning (RL) objective driving recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models. However, extending this success to open-source multimodal generalist models remains heavily constrained by two primary challenges: the extreme variance in reward topologies across diverse visual tasks, and the inherent difficulty of balancing fine-grained perception with multi-step reasoning capabilities. To address these issues, we introduce Gaussian GRPO (G$^2$RPO), a novel RL training objective that replaces standard linear scaling with non-linear distributional matching. By mathematically forcing the advantage distribution of any given task to strictly converge to a standard normal distribution, $\mathcal{N}(0,1)$, G$^2$RPO theoretically ensures inter-task gradient equity, mitigates vulnerabilities to heavy-tail outliers, and offers symmetric update for positive and negative rewards. Leveraging the enhanced training stability provided by G$^2$RPO, we introduce two task-level shaping mechanisms to seamlessly balance perception and reasoning. First, response length shaping dynamically elicits extended reasoning chains for complex queries while enforce direct outputs to bolster visual grounding. Second, entropy shaping tightly bounds the model's exploration zone, effectively preventing both entropy collapse and entropy explosion. Integrating these methodologies, we present OpenVLThinkerV2, a highly robust, general-purpose multimodal model. Extensive evaluations across 18 diverse benchmarks demonstrate its superior performance over strong open-source and leading proprietary frontier models.
comment: code at: https://github.com/uclanlp/openvlthinker
☆ ParseBench: A Document Parsing Benchmark for AI Agents
AI agents are changing the requirements for document parsing. What matters is \emph{semantic correctness}: parsed output must preserve the structure and meaning needed for autonomous decisions, including correct table structure, precise chart data, semantically meaningful formatting, and visual grounding. Existing benchmarks do not fully capture this setting for enterprise automation, relying on narrow document distributions and text-similarity metrics that miss agent-critical failures. We introduce \textbf{ParseBench}, a benchmark of ${\sim}2{,}000$ human-verified pages from enterprise documents spanning insurance, finance, and government, organized around five capability dimensions: tables, charts, content faithfulness, semantic formatting, and visual grounding. Across 14 methods spanning vision-language models, specialized document parsers, and LlamaParse, the benchmark reveals a fragmented capability landscape: no method is consistently strong across all five dimensions. LlamaParse Agentic achieves the highest overall score at \agenticoverall\%, and the benchmark highlights the remaining capability gaps across current systems. Dataset and evaluation code are available on \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/llamaindex/ParseBench}{HuggingFace} and \href{https://github.com/run-llama/ParseBench}{GitHub}.
☆ RewardFlow: Generate Images by Optimizing What You Reward CVPR 2026
Onkar Susladkar, Dong-Hwan Jang, Tushar Prakash, Adheesh Juvekar, Vedant Shah, Ayush Barik, Nabeel Bashir, Muntasir Wahed, Ritish Shrirao, Ismini Lourentzou
We introduce RewardFlow, an inversion-free framework that steers pretrained diffusion and flow-matching models at inference time through multi-reward Langevin dynamics. RewardFlow unifies complementary differentiable rewards for semantic alignment, perceptual fidelity, localized grounding, object consistency, and human preference, and further introduces a differentiable VQA-based reward that provides fine-grained semantic supervision through language-vision reasoning. To coordinate these heterogeneous objectives, we design a prompt-aware adaptive policy that extracts semantic primitives from the instruction, infers edit intent, and dynamically modulates reward weights and step sizes throughout sampling. Across several image editing and compositional generation benchmarks, RewardFlow delivers state-of-the-art edit fidelity and compositional alignment.
comment: CVPR 2026. Project page: https://plan-lab.github.io/rewardflow
☆ Fail2Drive: Benchmarking Closed-Loop Driving Generalization
Generalization under distribution shift remains a central bottleneck for closed-loop autonomous driving. Although simulators like CARLA enable safe and scalable testing, existing benchmarks rarely measure true generalization: they typically reuse training scenarios at test time. Success can therefore reflect memorization rather than robust driving behavior. We introduce Fail2Drive, the first paired-route benchmark for closed-loop generalization in CARLA, with 200 routes and 17 new scenario classes spanning appearance, layout, behavioral, and robustness shifts. Each shifted route is matched with an in-distribution counterpart, isolating the effect of the shift and turning qualitative failures into quantitative diagnostics. Evaluating multiple state-of-the-art models reveals consistent degradation, with an average success-rate drop of 22.8\%. Our analysis uncovers unexpected failure modes, such as ignoring objects clearly visible in the LiDAR and failing to learn the fundamental concepts of free and occupied space. To accelerate follow-up work, Fail2Drive includes an open-source toolbox for creating new scenarios and validating solvability via a privileged expert policy. Together, these components establish a reproducible foundation for benchmarking and improving closed-loop driving generalization. We open-source all code, data, and tools at https://github.com/autonomousvision/fail2drive .
☆ Self-Improving 4D Perception via Self-Distillation
Large-scale multi-view reconstruction models have made remarkable progress, but most existing approaches still rely on fully supervised training with ground-truth 3D/4D annotations. Such annotations are expensive and particularly scarce for dynamic scenes, limiting scalability. We propose SelfEvo, a self-improving framework that continually improves pretrained multi-view reconstruction models using unlabeled videos. SelfEvo introduces a self-distillation scheme using spatiotemporal context asymmetry, enabling self-improvement for learning-based 4D perception without external annotations. We systematically study design choices that make self-improvement effective, including loss signals, forms of asymmetry, and other training strategies. Across eight benchmarks spanning diverse datasets and domains, SelfEvo consistently improves pretrained baselines and generalizes across base models (e.g. VGGT and $π^3$), with significant gains on dynamic scenes. Overall, SelfEvo achieves up to 36.5% relative improvement in video depth estimation and 20.1% in camera estimation, without using any labeled data. Project Page: https://self-evo.github.io/.
☆ FIT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Fit-Aware Virtual Try-On SIGGRAPH 2026
Given a person and a garment image, virtual try-on (VTO) aims to synthesize a realistic image of the person wearing the garment, while preserving their original pose and identity. Although recent VTO methods excel at visualizing garment appearance, they largely overlook a crucial aspect of the try-on experience: the accuracy of garment fit -- for example, depicting how an extra-large shirt looks on an extra-small person. A key obstacle is the absence of datasets that provide precise garment and body size information, particularly for "ill-fit" cases, where garments are significantly too large or too small. Consequently, current VTO methods default to generating well-fitted results regardless of the garment or person size.
In this paper, we take the first steps towards solving this open problem. We introduce FIT (Fit-Inclusive Try-on), a large-scale VTO dataset comprising over 1.13M try-on image triplets accompanied by precise body and garment measurements. We overcome the challenges of data collection via a scalable synthetic strategy: (1) We programmatically generate 3D garments using GarmentCode and drape them via physics simulation to capture realistic garment fit. (2) We employ a novel re-texturing framework to transform synthetic renderings into photorealistic images while strictly preserving geometry. (3) We introduce person identity preservation into our re-texturing model to generate paired person images (same person, different garments) for supervised training. Finally, we leverage our FIT dataset to train a baseline fit-aware virtual try-on model. Our data and results set the new state-of-the-art for fit-aware virtual try-on, as well as offer a robust benchmark for future research. We will make all data and code publicly available on our project page: https://johannakarras.github.io/FIT.
comment: SIGGRAPH 2026
☆ UniversalVTG: A Universal and Lightweight Foundation Model for Video Temporal Grounding
Video temporal grounding (VTG) is typically tackled with dataset-specific models that transfer poorly across domains and query styles. Recent efforts to overcome this limitation have adapted large multimodal language models (MLLMs) to VTG, but their high compute cost and limited video context still hinder long-video grounding. We instead scale unified supervision while keeping the model lightweight. We present UniversalVTG, a single VTG model trained with large-scale cross-dataset pretraining. An offline Query Unifier canonicalizes heterogeneous query formats into a shared declarative space, reducing linguistic mismatch and preventing the negative transfer observed under naïve joint training. Combined with an efficient grounding head, UniversalVTG scales to long, untrimmed videos. Across diverse benchmarks-GoalStep-StepGrounding, Ego4D-NLQ, TACoS, Charades-STA, and ActivityNet-Captions-one UniversalVTG checkpoint achieves state-of-the-art performance versus dedicated VTG models. Moreover, despite being $>100\times$ smaller than recent MLLM-based approaches, UniversalVTG matches or exceeds their accuracy on multiple benchmarks, offering a practical alternative to parameter-heavy MLLMs.
comment: Project Page: https://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/universalvtg
☆ MolmoWeb: Open Visual Web Agent and Open Data for the Open Web
Tanmay Gupta, Piper Wolters, Zixian Ma, Peter Sushko, Rock Yuren Pang, Diego Llanes, Yue Yang, Taira Anderson, Boyuan Zheng, Zhongzheng Ren, Harsh Trivedi, Taylor Blanton, Caleb Ouellette, Winson Han, Ali Farhadi, Ranjay Krishna
Web agents--autonomous systems that navigate and execute tasks on the web on behalf of users--have the potential to transform how people interact with the digital world. However, the most capable web agents today rely on proprietary models with undisclosed training data and recipes, limiting scientific understanding, reproducibility, and community-driven progress.
We believe agents for the open web should be built in the open. To this end, we introduce (1) MolmoWebMix, a large and diverse mixture of browser task demonstrations and web-GUI perception data and (2) MolmoWeb, a family of fully open multimodal web agents. Specifically, MolmoWebMix combines over 100K synthetic task trajectories from multiple complementary generation pipelines with 30K+ human demonstrations, atomic web-skill trajectories, and GUI perception data, including referring expression grounding and screenshot question answering. MolmoWeb agents operate as instruction-conditioned visual-language action policies: given a task instruction and a webpage screenshot, they predict the next browser action, requiring no access to HTML, accessibility trees, or specialized APIs.
Available in 4B and 8B size, on browser-use benchmarks like WebVoyager, Online-Mind2Web, and DeepShop, MolmoWeb agents achieve state-of-the-art results outperforming similar scale open-weight-only models such as Fara-7B, UI-Tars-1.5-7B, and Holo1-7B. MolmoWeb-8B also surpasses set-of-marks (SoM) agents built on much larger closed frontier models like GPT-4o. We further demonstrate consistent gains through test-time scaling via parallel rollouts with best-of-N selection, achieving 94.7% and 60.5% pass@4 (compared to 78.2% and 35.3% pass@1) on WebVoyager and Online-Mind2Web respectively. We will release model checkpoints, training data, code, and a unified evaluation harness to enable reproducibility and accelerate open research on web agents.
comment: https://allenai.org/blog/molmoweb
☆ When Fine-Tuning Changes the Evidence: Architecture-Dependent Semantic Drift in Chest X-Ray Explanations
Transfer learning followed by fine-tuning is widely adopted in medical image classification due to consistent gains in diagnostic performance. However, in multi-class settings with overlapping visual features, improvements in accuracy do not guarantee stability of the visual evidence used to support predictions. We define semantic drift as systematic changes in the attribution structure supporting a model's predictions between transfer learning and full fine-tuning, reflecting potential shifts in underlying visual reasoning despite stable classification performance. Using a five-class chest X-ray task, we evaluate DenseNet201, ResNet50V2, and InceptionV3 under a two-stage training protocol and quantify drift with reference-free metrics capturing spatial localization and structural consistency of attribution maps. Across architectures, coarse anatomical localization remains stable, while overlap IoU reveals pronounced architecture-dependent reorganization of evidential structure. Beyond single-method analysis, stability rankings can reverse across LayerCAM and GradCAM++ under converged predictive performance, establishing explanation stability as an interaction between architecture, optimization phase, and attribution objective.
☆ Visually-grounded Humanoid Agents
Digital human generation has been studied for decades and supports a wide range of real-world applications. However, most existing systems are passively animated, relying on privileged state or scripted control, which limits scalability to novel environments. We instead ask: how can digital humans actively behave using only visual observations and specified goals in novel scenes? Achieving this would enable populating any 3D environments with digital humans at scale that exhibit spontaneous, natural, goal-directed behaviors. To this end, we introduce Visually-grounded Humanoid Agents, a coupled two-layer (world-agent) paradigm that replicates humans at multiple levels: they look, perceive, reason, and behave like real people in real-world 3D scenes. The World Layer reconstructs semantically rich 3D Gaussian scenes from real-world videos via an occlusion-aware pipeline and accommodates animatable Gaussian-based human avatars. The Agent Layer transforms these avatars into autonomous humanoid agents, equipping them with first-person RGB-D perception and enabling them to perform accurate, embodied planning with spatial awareness and iterative reasoning, which is then executed at the low level as full-body actions to drive their behaviors in the scene. We further introduce a benchmark to evaluate humanoid-scene interaction in diverse reconstructed environments. Experiments show our agents achieve robust autonomous behavior, yielding higher task success rates and fewer collisions than ablations and state-of-the-art planning methods. This work enables active digital human population and advances human-centric embodied AI. Data, code, and models will be open-sourced.
comment: Project page: https://alvinyh.github.io/VGHuman/
☆ Phantom: Physics-Infused Video Generation via Joint Modeling of Visual and Latent Physical Dynamics CVPR 2026
Recent advances in generative video modeling, driven by large-scale datasets and powerful architectures, have yielded remarkable visual realism. However, emerging evidence suggests that simply scaling data and model size does not endow these systems with an understanding of the underlying physical laws that govern real-world dynamics. Existing approaches often fail to capture or enforce such physical consistency, resulting in unrealistic motion and dynamics. In his work, we investigate whether integrating the inference of latent physical properties directly into the video generation process can equip models with the ability to produce physically plausible videos. To this end, we propose Phantom, a Physics-Infused Video Generation model that jointly models the visual content and latent physical dynamics. Conditioned on observed video frames and inferred physical states, Phantom jointly predicts latent physical dynamics and generates future video frames. Phantom leverages a physics-aware video representation that serves as an abstract yet informaive embedding of the underlying physics, facilitating the joint prediction of physical dynamics alongside video content without requiring an explicit specification of a complex set of physical dynamics and properties. By integrating the inference of physical-aware video representation directly into the video generation process, Phantom produces video sequences that are both visually realistic and physically consistent. Quantitative and qualitative results on both standard video generation and physics-aware benchmarks demonstrate that Phantom not only outperforms existing methods in terms of adherence to physical dynamics but also delivers competitive perceptual fidelity.
comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, CVPR 2026
☆ Quantifying Explanation Consistency: The C-Score Metric for CAM-Based Explainability in Medical Image Classification
Class Activation Mapping (CAM) methods are widely used to generate visual explanations for deep learning classifiers in medical imaging. However, existing evaluation frameworks assess whether explanations are correct, measured by localisation fidelity against radiologist annotations, rather than whether they are consistent: whether the model applies the same spatial reasoning strategy across different patients with the same pathology. We propose the C-Score (Consistency Score), a confidence-weighted, annotation-free metric that quantifies intra-class explanation reproducibility via intensity-emphasised pairwise soft IoU across correctly classified instances. We evaluate six CAM techniques: GradCAM, GradCAM++, LayerCAM, EigenCAM, ScoreCAM, and MS GradCAM++ across three CNN architectures (DenseNet201, InceptionV3, ResNet50V2) over thirty training epochs on the Kermany chest X-ray dataset, covering transfer learning and fine-tuning phases. We identify three distinct mechanisms of AUC-consistency dissociation, invisible to standard classification metrics: threshold-mediated gold list collapse, technique-specific attribution collapse at peak AUC, and class-level consistency masking in global aggregation. C-Score provides an early warning signal of impending model instability. ScoreCAM deterioration on ResNet50V2 is detectable one full checkpoint before catastrophic AUC collapse and yields architecture-specific clinical deployment recommendations grounded in explanation quality rather than predictive ranking alone.
☆ Novel View Synthesis as Video Completion
We tackle the problem of sparse novel view synthesis (NVS) using video diffusion models; given $K$ ($\approx 5$) multi-view images of a scene and their camera poses, we predict the view from a target camera pose. Many prior approaches leverage generative image priors encoded via diffusion models. However, models trained on single images lack multi-view knowledge. We instead argue that video models already contain implicit multi-view knowledge and so should be easier to adapt for NVS. Our key insight is to formulate sparse NVS as a low frame-rate video completion task. However, one challenge is that sparse NVS is defined over an unordered set of inputs, often too sparse to admit a meaningful order, so the models should be $\textit{invariant}$ to permutations of that input set. To this end, we present FrameCrafter, which adapts video models (naturally trained with coherent frame orderings) to permutation-invariant NVS through several architectural modifications, including per-frame latent encodings and removal of temporal positional embeddings. Our results suggest that video models can be easily trained to "forget" about time with minimal supervision, producing competitive performance on sparse-view NVS benchmarks. Project page: https://frame-crafter.github.io/
comment: Project page: https://frame-crafter.github.io/
☆ What They Saw, Not Just Where They Looked: Semantic Scanpath Similarity via VLMs and NLP metric
Scanpath similarity metrics are central to eye-movement research, yet existing methods predominantly evaluate spatial and temporal alignment while neglecting semantic equivalence between attended image regions. We present a semantic scanpath similarity framework that integrates vision-language models (VLMs) into eye-tracking analysis. Each fixation is encoded under controlled visual context (patch-based and marker-based strategies) and transformed into concise textual descriptions, which are aggregated into scanpath-level representations. Semantic similarity is then computed using embedding-based and lexical NLP metrics and compared against established spatial measures, including MultiMatch and DTW. Experiments on free-viewing eye-tracking data demonstrate that semantic similarity captures partially independent variance from geometric alignment, revealing cases of high content agreement despite spatial divergence. We further analyze the impact of contextual encoding on description fidelity and metric stability. Our findings suggest that multimodal foundation models enable interpretable, content-aware extensions of classical scanpath analysis, providing a complementary dimension for gaze research within the ETRA community.
comment: Accepted at ETRA 2026 GenAI workshop
☆ Faithful GRPO: Improving Visual Spatial Reasoning in Multimodal Language Models via Constrained Policy Optimization
Multimodal reasoning models (MRMs) trained with reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) show improved accuracy on visual reasoning benchmarks. However, we observe that accuracy gains often come at the cost of reasoning quality: generated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces are frequently inconsistent with the final answer and poorly grounded in the visual evidence. We systematically study this phenomenon across seven challenging real-world spatial reasoning benchmarks and find that it affects contemporary MRMs such as ViGoRL-Spatial, TreeVGR as well as our own models trained with standard Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We characterize CoT reasoning quality along two complementary axes: "logical consistency" (does the CoT entail the final answer?) and "visual grounding" (does each reasoning step accurately describe objects, attributes, and spatial relationships in the image?). To address this, we propose Faithful GRPO (FGRPO), a variant of GRPO that enforces consistency and grounding as constraints via Lagrangian dual ascent. FGRPO incorporates batch-level consistency and grounding constraints into the advantage computation within a group, adaptively adjusting the relative importance of constraints during optimization. We evaluate FGRPO on Qwen2.5-VL-7B and 3B backbones across seven spatial datasets. Our results show that FGRPO substantially improves reasoning quality, reducing the inconsistency rate from 24.5% to 1.7% and improving visual grounding scores by +13%. It also improves final answer accuracy over simple GRPO, demonstrating that faithful reasoning enables better answers.
☆ LAMP: Lift Image-Editing as General 3D Priors for Open-world Manipulation
Human-like generalization in open-world remains a fundamental challenge for robotic manipulation. Existing learning-based methods, including reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and vision-language-action-models (VLAs), often struggle with novel tasks and unseen environments. Another promising direction is to explore generalizable representations that capture fine-grained spatial and geometric relations for open-world manipulation. While large-language-model (LLMs) and vision-language-model (VLMs) provide strong semantic reasoning based on language or annotated 2D representations, their limited 3D awareness restricts their applicability to fine-grained manipulation. To address this, we propose LAMP, which lifts image-editing as 3D priors to extract inter-object 3D transformations as continuous, geometry-aware representations. Our key insight is that image-editing inherently encodes rich 2D spatial cues, and lifting these implicit cues into 3D transformations provides fine-grained and accurate guidance for open-world manipulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \codename delivers precise 3D transformations and achieves strong zero-shot generalization in open-world manipulation. Project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/LAMP/.
☆ OVS-DINO: Open-Vocabulary Segmentation via Structure-Aligned SAM-DINO with Language Guidance
Haoxi Zeng, Qiankun Liu, Yi Bin, Haiyue Zhang, Yujuan Ding, Guoqing Wang, Deqiang Ouyang, Heng Tao Shen
Open-Vocabulary Segmentation (OVS) aims to segment image regions beyond predefined category sets by leveraging semantic descriptions. While CLIP based approaches excel in semantic generalization, they frequently lack the fine-grained spatial awareness required for dense prediction. Recent efforts have incorporated Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) like DINO to alleviate these limitations. However, these methods still struggle with the precise edge perception necessary for high fidelity segmentation. In this paper, we analyze internal representations of DINO and discover that its inherent boundary awareness is not absent but rather undergoes progressive attenuation as features transition into deeper transformer blocks. To address this, we propose OVS-DINO, a novel framework that revitalizes latent edge-sensitivity of DINO through structural alignment with the Segment Anything Model (SAM). Specifically, we introduce a Structure-Aware Encoder (SAE) and a Structure-Modulated Decoder (SMD) to effectively activate boundary features of DINO using SAM's structural priors, complemented by a supervision strategy utilizing SAM generated pseudo-masks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple weakly-supervised OVS benchmarks, improving the average score by 2.1% (from 44.8% to 46.9%). Notably, our approach significantly enhances segmentation accuracy in complex, cluttered scenarios, with a gain of 6.3% on Cityscapes (from 36.6% to 42.9%).
comment: 14 pages, 12 figures, 5 tables
☆ CrashSight: A Phase-Aware, Infrastructure-Centric Video Benchmark for Traffic Crash Scene Understanding and Reasoning
Cooperative autonomous driving requires traffic scene understanding from both vehicle and infrastructure perspectives. While vision-language models (VLMs) show strong general reasoning capabilities, their performance in safety-critical traffic scenarios remains insufficiently evaluated due to the ego-vehicle focus of existing benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we present \textbf{CrashSight}, a large-scale vision-language benchmark for roadway crash understanding using real-world roadside camera data. The dataset comprises 250 crash videos, annotated with 13K multiple-choice question-answer pairs organized under a two-tier taxonomy. Tier 1 evaluates the visual grounding of scene context and involved parties, while Tier 2 probes higher-level reasoning, including crash mechanics, causal attribution, temporal progression, and post-crash outcomes. We benchmark 8 state-of-the-art VLMs and show that, despite strong scene description capabilities, current models struggle with temporal and causal reasoning in safety-critical scenarios. We provide a detailed analysis of failure scenarios and discuss directions for improving VLM crash understanding. The benchmark provides a standardized evaluation framework for infrastructure-assisted perception in cooperative autonomous driving. The CrashSight benchmark, including the full dataset and code, is accessible at https://mcgrche.github.io/crashsight.
☆ Entropy-Gradient Grounding: Training-Free Evidence Retrieval in Vision-Language Models
Despite rapid progress, pretrained vision-language models still struggle when answers depend on tiny visual details or on combining clues spread across multiple regions, as in documents and compositional queries. We address this by framing grounding as test-time evidence retrieval: given a query, the model should actively identify where to look next to resolve ambiguity. To this end, we propose a training-free, model-intrinsic grounding method that uses uncertainty as supervision. Specifically, we compute the entropy of the model's next-token distribution and backpropagate it to the visual token embeddings to obtain an entropy-gradient relevance map, without auxiliary detectors or attention-map heuristics. We then extract and rank multiple coherent regions to support multi-evidence queries, and introduce an iterative zoom-and-reground procedure with a spatial-entropy stopping rule to avoid over-refinement. Experiments on seven benchmarks across four VLM architectures demonstrate consistent improvements over existing methods, with the largest gains on detail-critical and high-resolution settings, while also producing more interpretable evidence localizations.
comment: Project Page : https://entropy-gradient-grounding.github.io/
☆ HST-HGN: Heterogeneous Spatial-Temporal Hypergraph Networks with Bidirectional State Space Models for Global Fatigue Assessment
It remains challenging to assess driver fatigue from untrimmed videos under constrained computational budgets, due to the difficulty of modeling long-range temporal dependencies in subtle facial expressions. Some existing approaches rely on computationally heavy architectures, whereas others employ traditional lightweight pairwise graph networks, despite their limited capacity to model high-order synergies and global temporal context. Therefore, we propose HST-HGN, a novel Heterogeneous Spatial-Temporal Hypergraph Network driven by Bidirectional State Space Models. Spatially, we introduce a hierarchical hypergraph network to fuse pose-disentangled geometric topologies with multi-modal texture patches dynamically. This formulation encapsulates high-order synergistic facial deformations, effectively overcoming the limitations of conventional methods. In temporal terms, a Bi-Mamba module with linear complexity is applied to perform bidirectional sequence modeling. This explicit temporal-evolution filtering enables the network to distinguish highly ambiguous transient actions, such as yawning versus speaking, while encompassing their complete physiological lifecycles. Extensive evaluations across diverse fatigue benchmarks demonstrate that HST-HGN achieves state-of-the-art performance. In particular, our method strikes a balance between discriminative power and computational efficiency, making it well-suited for real-time in-cabin edge deployment.
comment: 10 pages
☆ BLaDA: Bridging Language to Functional Dexterous Actions within 3DGS Fields
Fan Yang, Wenrui Chen, Guorun Yan, Ruize Liao, Wanjun Jia, Dongsheng Luo, Kailun Yang, Zhiyong Li, Yaonan Wang
In unstructured environments, functional dexterous grasping calls for the tight integration of semantic understanding, precise 3D functional localization, and physically interpretable execution. Modular hierarchical methods are more controllable and interpretable than end-to-end VLA approaches, but existing ones still rely on predefined affordance labels and lack the tight semantic--pose coupling needed for functional dexterous manipulation. To address this, we propose BLaDA (Bridging Language to Dexterous Actions in 3DGS fields), an interpretable zero-shot framework that grounds open-vocabulary instructions as perceptual and control constraints for functional dexterous manipulation. BLaDA establishes an interpretable reasoning chain by first parsing natural language into a structured sextuple of manipulation constraints via a Knowledge-guided Language Parsing (KLP) module. To achieve pose-consistent spatial reasoning, we introduce the Triangular Functional Point Localization (TriLocation) module, which utilizes 3D Gaussian Splatting as a continuous scene representation and identifies functional regions under triangular geometric constraints. Finally, the 3D Keypoint Grasp Matrix Transformation Execution (KGT3D+) module decodes these semantic-geometric constraints into physically plausible wrist poses and finger-level commands. Extensive experiments on complex benchmarks demonstrate that BLaDA significantly outperforms existing methods in both affordance grounding precision and the success rate of functional manipulation across diverse categories and tasks. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/PopeyePxx/BLaDA.
comment: Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/PopeyePxx/BLaDA
☆ SyncBreaker:Stage-Aware Multimodal Adversarial Attacks on Audio-Driven Talking Head Generation
Diffusion-based audio-driven talking-head generation enables realistic portrait animation, but also introduces risks of misuse, such as fraud and misinformation. Existing protection methods are largely limited to a single modality, and neither image-only nor audio-only attacks can effectively suppress speech-driven facial dynamics. To address this gap, we propose SyncBreaker, a stage-aware multimodal protection framework that jointly perturbs portrait and audio inputs under modality-specific perceptual constraints. Our key contributions are twofold. First, for the image stream, we introduce nullifying supervision with Multi-Interval Sampling (MIS) across diffusion stages to steer the generation toward the static reference portrait by aggregating guidance from multiple denoising intervals. Second, for the audio stream, we propose Cross-Attention Fooling (CAF), which suppresses interval-specific audio-conditioned cross-attention responses. Both streams are optimized independently and combined at inference time to enable flexible deployment. We evaluate SyncBreaker in a white-box proactive protection setting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SyncBreaker more effectively degrades lip synchronization and facial dynamics than strong single-modality baselines, while preserving input perceptual quality and remaining robust under purification. Code: https://github.com/kitty384/SyncBreaker.
☆ Phantasia: Context-Adaptive Backdoors in Vision Language Models CVPR 2026
Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have greatly enhanced the integration of visual perception and linguistic reasoning, driving rapid progress in multimodal understanding. Despite these achievements, the security of VLMs, particularly their vulnerability to backdoor attacks, remains significantly underexplored. Existing backdoor attacks on VLMs are still in an early stage of development, with most current methods relying on generating poisoned responses that contain fixed, easily identifiable patterns. In this work, we make two key contributions. First, we demonstrate for the first time that the stealthiness of existing VLM backdoor attacks has been substantially overestimated. By adapting defense techniques originally designed for other domains (e.g., vision-only and text-only models), we show that several state-of-the-art attacks can be detected with surprising ease. Second, to address this gap, we introduce Phantasia, a context-adaptive backdoor attack that dynamically aligns its poisoned outputs with the semantics of each input. Instead of producing static poisoned patterns, Phantasia encourages models to generate contextually coherent yet malicious responses that remain plausible, thereby significantly improving stealth and adaptability. Extensive experiments across diverse VLM architectures reveal that Phantasia achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates while maintaining benign performance under various defensive settings.
comment: CVPR 2026 Findings
☆ SurfelSplat: Learning Efficient and Generalizable Gaussian Surfel Representations for Sparse-View Surface Reconstruction
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated impressive performance in 3D scene reconstruction. Beyond novel view synthesis, it shows great potential for multi-view surface reconstruction. Existing methods employ optimization-based reconstruction pipelines that achieve precise and complete surface extractions. However, these approaches typically require dense input views and high time consumption for per-scene optimization. To address these limitations, we propose SurfelSplat, a feed-forward framework that generates efficient and generalizable pixel-aligned Gaussian surfel representations from sparse-view images. We observe that conventional feed-forward structures struggle to recover accurate geometric attributes of Gaussian surfels because the spatial frequency of pixel-aligned primitives exceeds Nyquist sampling rates. Therefore, we propose a cross-view feature aggregation module based on the Nyquist sampling theorem. Specifically, we first adapt the geometric forms of Gaussian surfels with spatial sampling rate-guided low-pass filters. We then project the filtered surfels across all input views to obtain cross-view feature correlations. By processing these correlations through a specially designed feature fusion network, we can finally regress Gaussian surfels with precise geometry. Extensive experiments on DTU reconstruction benchmarks demonstrate that our model achieves comparable results with state-of-the-art methods, and predict Gaussian surfels within 1 second, offering a 100x speedup without costly per-scene training.
comment: Code is available at https://github.com/Simon-Dcs/Surfel_Splat
☆ SOLAR: Communication-Efficient Model Adaptation via Subspace-Oriented Latent Adapter Reparametrization
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as LoRA, enable scalable adaptation of foundation models by injecting low-rank adapters. However, their communication and storage costs remain a major bottleneck in resource-constrained settings. We propose SOLAR (Subspace-Oriented Latent Adapter Reparameterization), a post-training compression framework that substantially reduces the communication cost (i.e., the number of parameters to transmit or store) of PEFT adapters. SOLAR expresses each PEFT update as a linear combination of basis vectors formed from the foundation model's singular vectors with controlled random perturbations. By exploiting the subspace similarity (the alignment of principal directions) between the foundation model and task-specific fine-tuned updates, SOLAR decouples the adapter size from PEFT structure and ensures compact yet expressive representations. It is model-agnostic and compatible with existing PEFT methods, including LoRA, AdaLoRA, and other adapter modules. We theoretically establish a bound on the reconstruction error. Experiments on language and vision tasks using LLaMA, GPT, and ViT models demonstrate that SOLAR preserves task performance while significantly reducing model representation sizes, offering an effective and communication-efficient solution for deployment in distributed systems and edge devices.
☆ Scaling-Aware Data Selection for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Systems CVPR 2026
Large-scale deep learning models for physical AI applications depend on diverse training data collection efforts. These models and correspondingly, the training data, must address different evaluation criteria necessary for the models to be deployable in real-world environments. Data selection policies can guide the development of the training set, but current frameworks do not account for the ambiguity in how data points affect different metrics. In this work, we propose Mixture Optimization via Scaling-Aware Iterative Collection (MOSAIC), a general data selection framework that operates by: (i) partitioning the dataset into domains; (ii) fitting neural scaling laws from each data domain to the evaluation metrics; and (iii) optimizing a data mixture by iteratively adding data from domains that maximize the change in metrics. We apply MOSAIC to autonomous driving (AD), where an End-to-End (E2E) planner model is evaluated on the Extended Predictive Driver Model Score (EPDMS), an aggregate of driving rule compliance metrics. Here, MOSAIC outperforms a diverse set of baselines on EPDMS with up to 80\% less data.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026, 8 pages of main body and 10 pages of appendix
☆ MegaStyle: Constructing Diverse and Scalable Style Dataset via Consistent Text-to-Image Style Mapping
Junyao Gao, Sibo Liu, Jiaxing Li, Yanan Sun, Yuanpeng Tu, Fei Shen, Weidong Zhang, Cairong Zhao, Jun Zhang
In this paper, we introduce MegaStyle, a novel and scalable data curation pipeline that constructs an intra-style consistent, inter-style diverse and high-quality style dataset. We achieve this by leveraging the consistent text-to-image style mapping capability of current large generative models, which can generate images in the same style from a given style description. Building on this foundation, we curate a diverse and balanced prompt gallery with 170K style prompts and 400K content prompts, and generate a large-scale style dataset MegaStyle-1.4M via content-style prompt combinations. With MegaStyle-1.4M, we propose style-supervised contrastive learning to fine-tune a style encoder MegaStyle-Encoder for extracting expressive, style-specific representations, and we also train a FLUX-based style transfer model MegaStyle-FLUX. Extensive experiments demonstrate the importance of maintaining intra-style consistency, inter-style diversity and high-quality for style dataset, as well as the effectiveness of the proposed MegaStyle-1.4M. Moreover, when trained on MegaStyle-1.4M, MegaStyle-Encoder and MegaStyle-FLUX provide reliable style similarity measurement and generalizable style transfer, making a significant contribution to the style transfer community. More results are available at our project website https://jeoyal.github.io/MegaStyle/.
comment: project website https://jeoyal.github.io/MegaStyle/
☆ PokeGym: A Visually-Driven Long-Horizon Benchmark for Vision-Language Models
While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in static visual understanding, their deployment in complex 3D embodied environments remains severely limited. Existing benchmarks suffer from four critical deficiencies: (1) passive perception tasks circumvent interactive dynamics; (2) simplified 2D environments fail to assess depth perception; (3) privileged state leakage bypasses genuine visual processing; and (4) human evaluation is prohibitively expensive and unscalable. We introduce PokeGym, a visually-driven long-horizon benchmark instantiated within Pokemon Legends: Z-A, a visually complex 3D open-world Role-Playing Game. PokeGym enforces strict code-level isolation: agents operate solely on raw RGB observations while an independent evaluator verifies success via memory scanning, ensuring pure vision-based decision-making and automated, scalable assessment. The benchmark comprises 30 tasks (30-220 steps) spanning navigation, interaction, and mixed scenarios, with three instruction granularities (Visual-Guided, Step-Guided, Goal-Only) to systematically deconstruct visual grounding, semantic reasoning, and autonomous exploration capabilities. Our evaluation reveals a key limitation of current VLMs: physical deadlock recovery, rather than high-level planning, constitutes the primary bottleneck, with deadlocks showing a strong negative correlation with task success. Furthermore, we uncover a metacognitive divergence: weaker models predominantly suffer from Unaware Deadlocks (oblivious to entrapment), whereas advanced models exhibit Aware Deadlocks (recognizing entrapment yet failing to recover). These findings highlight the need to integrate explicit spatial intuition into VLM architectures. The code and benchmark will be available on GitHub.
comment: Tech report
☆ InstAP: Instance-Aware Vision-Language Pre-Train for Spatial-Temporal Understanding
Ashutosh Kumar, Rajat Saini, Jingjing Pan, Mustafa Erdogan, Mingfang Zhang, Betty Le Dem, Norimasa Kobori, Quan Kong
Current vision-language pre-training (VLP) paradigms excel at global scene understanding but struggle with instance-level reasoning due to global-only supervision. We introduce InstAP, an Instance-Aware Pre-training framework that jointly optimizes global vision-text alignment and fine-grained, instance-level contrastive alignment by grounding textual mentions to specific spatial-temporal regions. To support this, we present InstVL, a large-scale dataset (2 million images, 50,000 videos) with dual-granularity annotations: holistic scene captions and dense, grounded instance descriptions. On the InstVL benchmark, InstAP substantially outperforms existing VLP models on instance-level retrieval, and also surpasses a strong VLP baseline trained on the exact same data corpus, isolating the benefit of our instance-aware objective. Moreover, instance-centric pre-training improves global understanding: InstAP achieves competitive zero-shot performance on multiple video benchmarks, including MSR-VTT and DiDeMo. Qualitative visualizations further show that InstAP localizes textual mentions to the correct instances, while global-only models exhibit more diffuse, scene-level attention.
☆ Lost in the Hype: Revealing and Dissecting the Performance Degradation of Medical Multimodal Large Language Models in Image Classification
The rise of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has sparked an unprecedented wave of applications in the field of medical imaging analysis. However, as one of the earliest and most fundamental tasks integrated into this paradigm, medical image classification reveals a sobering reality: state-of-the-art medical MLLMs consistently underperform compared to traditional deep learning models, despite their overwhelming advantages in pre-training data and model parameters. This paradox prompts a critical rethinking: where exactly does the performance degradation originate? In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments on 14 open-source medical MLLMs across three representative image classification datasets. Moving beyond superficial performance benchmarking, we employ feature probing to track the information flow of visual features module-by-module and layer-by-layer throughout the entire MLLM pipeline, enabling explicit visualization of where and how classification signals are distorted, diluted, or overridden. As the first attempt to dissect classification performance degradation in medical MLLMs, our findings reveal four failure modes: 1) quality limitation in visual representation, 2) fidelity loss in connector projection, 3) comprehension deficit in LLM reasoning, and 4) misalignment of semantic mapping. Meanwhile, we introduce quantitative scores that characterize the healthiness of feature evolution, enabling principled comparisons across diverse MLLMs and datasets. Furthermore, we provide insightful discussions centered on the critical barriers that prevent current medical MLLMs from fulfilling their promised clinical potential. We hope that our work provokes rethinking within the community-highlighting that the road from high expectations to clinically deployable MLLMs remains long and winding.
☆ Fundus-R1: Training a Fundus-Reading MLLM with Knowledge-Aware Reasoning on Public Data
Yuchuan Deng, Qijie Wei, Kaiheng Qian, Jiazhen Liu, Zijie Xin, Bangxiang Lan, Jingyu Liu, Jianfeng Dong, Xirong Li
Fundus imaging such as CFP, OCT and UWF is crucial for the early detection of retinal anomalies and diseases. Fundus image understanding, due to its knowledge-intensive nature, poses a challenging vision-language task. An emerging approach to addressing the task is to post-train a generic multimodal large language model (MLLM), either by supervised finetuning (SFT) or by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), on a considerable amount of in-house samples paired with high-quality clinical reports. However, these valuable samples are not publicly accessible, which not only hinders reproducibility but also practically limits research to few players. To overcome the barrier, we make a novel attempt to train a reasoning-enhanced fundus-reading MLLM, which we term Fundus-R1, using exclusively public datasets, wherein over 94\% of the data are annotated with only image-level labels. Our technical contributions are two-fold. First, we propose a RAG-based method for composing image-specific, knowledge-aware reasoning traces. Such auto-generated traces link visual findings identified by a generic MLLM to the image labels in terms of ophthalmic knowledge. Second, we enhance RLVR with a process reward that encourages self-consistency of the generated reasoning trace in each rollout. Extensive experiments on three fundus-reading benchmarks, i.e., FunBench, Omni-Fundus and GMAI-Fundus, show that Fundus-R1 clearly outperforms multiple baselines, including its generic counterpart (Qwen2.5-VL) and a stronger edition post-trained without using the generated traces. This work paves the way for training powerful fundus-reading MLLMs with publicly available data.
☆ Weakly-Supervised Lung Nodule Segmentation via Training-Free Guidance of 3D Rectified Flow MICCAI 2026
Dense annotations, such as segmentation masks, are expensive and time-consuming to obtain, especially for 3D medical images where expert voxel-wise labeling is required. Weakly supervised approaches aim to address this limitation, but often rely on attribution-based methods that struggle to accurately capture small structures such as lung nodules. In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised segmentation method for lung nodules by combining pretrained state-of-the-art rectified flow and predictor models in a plug-and-play manner. Our approach uses training-free guidance of a 3D rectified flow model, requiring only fine-tuning of the predictor using image-level labels and no retraining of the generative model. The proposed method produces improved-quality segmentations for two separate predictors, consistently detecting lung nodules of varying size and shapes. Experiments on LUNA16 demonstrate improvements over baseline methods, highlighting the potential of generative foundation models as tools for weakly supervised 3D medical image segmentation.
comment: Submitted to MICCAI 2026
☆ HistDiT: A Structure-Aware Latent Conditional Diffusion Model for High-Fidelity Virtual Staining in Histopathology ICPR 2026
Aasim Bin Saleem, Amr Ahmed, Ardhendu Behera, Hafeezullah Amin, Iman Yi Liao, Mahmoud Khattab, Pan Jia Wern, Haslina Makmur
Immunohistochemistry (IHC) is essential for assessing specific immune biomarkers like Human Epidermal growth-factor Receptor 2 (HER2) in breast cancer. However, the traditional protocols of obtaining IHC stains are resource-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to structural damages. Virtual staining has emerged as a scalable alternative, but it faces significant challenges in preserving fine-grained cellular structures while accurately translating biochemical expressions. Current state-of-the-art methods still rely on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or standard convolutional U-Net diffusion models that often struggle with "structure and staining trade-offs". The generated samples are either structurally relevant but blurry, or texturally realistic but have artifacts that compromise their diagnostic use. In this paper, we introduce HistDiT, a novel latent conditional Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture that establishes a new benchmark for visual fidelity in virtual histological staining. The novelty introduced in this work is, a) the Dual-Stream Conditioning strategy that explicitly maintains a balance between spatial constraints via VAE-encoded latents and semantic phenotype guidance via UNI embeddings; b) the multi-objective loss function that contributes to sharper images with clear morphological structure; and c) the use of the Structural Correlation Metric (SCM) to focus on the core morphological structure for precise assessment of sample quality. Consequently, our model outperforms existing baselines, as demonstrated through rigorous quantitative and qualitative evaluations.
comment: Accepted to ICPR 2026
☆ GroundingAnomaly: Spatially-Grounded Diffusion for Few-Shot Anomaly Synthesis
Yishen Liu, Hongcang Chen, Pengcheng Zhao, Yunfan Bao, Yuxi Tian, Jieming Zhang, Hao Chen, Zheng Zhi, Yongchun Liu, Ying Li, Dongpu Cao
The performance of visual anomaly inspection in industrial quality control is often constrained by the scarcity of real anomalous samples. Consequently, anomaly synthesis techniques have been developed to enlarge training sets and enhance downstream inspection. However, existing methods either suffer from poor integration caused by inpainting or fail to provide accurate masks. To address these limitations, we propose GroundingAnomaly, a novel few-shot anomaly image generation framework. Our framework introduces a Spatial Conditioning Module that leverages per-pixel semantic maps to enable precise spatial control over the synthesized anomalies. Furthermore, a Gated Self-Attention Module is designed to inject conditioning tokens into a frozen U-Net via gated attention layers. This carefully preserves pretrained priors while ensuring stable few-shot adaptation. Extensive evaluations on the MVTec AD and VisA datasets demonstrate that GroundingAnomaly generates high-quality anomalies and achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple downstream tasks, including anomaly detection, segmentation, and instance-level detection.
comment: 32 pages, 15 figures
☆ U-CECE: A Universal Multi-Resolution Framework for Conceptual Counterfactual Explanations
As AI models grow more complex, explainability is essential for building trust, yet concept-based counterfactual methods still face a trade-off between expressivity and efficiency. Representing underlying concepts as atomic sets is fast but misses relational context, whereas full graph representations are more faithful but require solving the NP-hard Graph Edit Distance (GED) problem. We propose U-CECE, a unified, model-agnostic multi-resolution framework for conceptual counterfactual explanations that adapts to data regime and compute budget. U-CECE spans three levels of expressivity: atomic concepts for broad explanations, relational sets-of-sets for simple interactions, and structural graphs for full semantic structure. At the structural level, both a precision-oriented transductive mode based on supervised Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and a scalable inductive mode based on unsupervised graph autoencoders (GAEs) are supported. Experiments on the structurally divergent CUB and Visual Genome datasets characterize the efficiency-expressivity trade-off across levels, while human surveys and LVLM-based evaluation show that the retrieved structural counterfactuals are semantically equivalent to, and often preferred over, exact GED-based ground-truth explanations.
☆ Can Vision Language Models Judge Action Quality? An Empirical Evaluation
Action Quality Assessment (AQA) has broad applications in physical therapy, sports coaching, and competitive judging. Although Vision Language Models (VLMs) hold considerable promise for AQA, their actual performance in this domain remains largely uncharacterised. We present a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art VLMs across activity domains (e.g. fitness, figure skating, diving), tasks, representations, and prompting strategies. Baseline results reveal that Gemini 3.1 Pro, Qwen3-VL and InternVL3.5 models perform only marginally above random chance, and although strategies such as incorporation of skeleton information, grounding instructions, reasoning structures and in-context learning lead to isolated gains, none is consistently effective. Analysis of prediction distributions uncovers two systematic biases: a tendency to predict correct execution regardless of visual evidence, and a sensitivity to superficial linguistic framing. Reformulating tasks contrastively to mitigate these biases yields minimal improvement, suggesting that the models' limitations go beyond these biases, pointing to a fundamental difficulty with fine-grained movement quality assessment. Our findings establish a rigorous baseline for future VLM-based AQA research and provide an actionable outline for failure modes requiring mitigation prior to reliable real-world deployment.
☆ CAMotion: A High-Quality Benchmark for Camouflaged Moving Object Detection in the Wild
Discovering camouflaged objects is a challenging task in computer vision due to the high similarity between camouflaged objects and their surroundings. While the problem of camouflaged object detection over sequential video frames has received increasing attention, the scale and diversity of existing video camouflaged object detection (VCOD) datasets are greatly limited, which hinders the deeper analysis and broader evaluation of recent deep learning-based algorithms with data-hungry training strategy. To break this bottleneck, in this paper, we construct CAMotion, a high-quality benchmark covers a wide range of species for camouflaged moving object detection in the wild. CAMotion comprises various sequences with multiple challenging attributes such as uncertain edge, occlusion, motion blur, and shape complexity, etc. The sequence annotation details and statistical distribution are presented from various perspectives, allowing CAMotion to provide in-depth analyses on the camouflaged object's motion characteristics in different challenging scenarios. Additionally, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of existing SOTA models on CAMotion, and discuss the major challenges in VCOD task. The benchmark is available at https://www.camotion.focuslab.net.cn, we hope that our CAMotion can lead to further advancements in the research community.
comment: Under review
☆ Revisiting Radar Perception With Spectral Point Clouds CVPR 2026
Radar perception models are trained with different inputs, from range-Doppler spectra to sparse point clouds. Dense spectra are assumed to outperform sparse point clouds, yet they can vary considerably across sensors and configurations, which hinders transfer. In this paper, we provide alternatives for incorporating spectral information into radar point clouds and show that, point clouds need not underperform compared to spectra. We introduce the spectral point cloud paradigm, where point clouds are treated as sparse, compressed representations of the radar spectra, and argue that, when enriched with spectral information, they serve as strong candidates for a unified input representation that is more robust against sensor-specific differences. We develop an experimental framework that compares spectral point cloud (PC) models at varying densities against a dense range-Doppler (RD) benchmark, and report the density levels where the PC configurations meet the performance of the RD benchmark. Furthermore, we experiment with two basic spectral enrichment approaches, that inject additional target-relevant information into the point clouds. Contrary to the common belief that the dense RD approach is superior, we show that point clouds can do just as well, and can surpass the RD benchmark when enrichment is applied. Spectral point clouds can therefore serve as strong candidates for unified radar perception, paving the way for future radar foundation models.
comment: CVPR 2026 Workshop (PBVS 2026). Project page: https://www.tue-mps.org/Spectral-Point-Clouds-Radar/
☆ Preventing Overfitting in Deep Image Prior for Hyperspectral Image Denoising
Deep image prior (DIP) is an unsupervised deep learning framework that has been successfully applied to a variety of inverse imaging problems. However, DIP-based methods are inherently prone to overfitting, which leads to performance degradation and necessitates early stopping. In this paper, we propose a method to mitigate overfitting in DIP-based hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising by jointly combining robust data fidelity and explicit sensitivity regularization. The proposed approach employs a Smooth $\ell_1$ data term together with a divergence-based regularization and input optimization during training. Experimental results on real HSIs corrupted by Gaussian, sparse, and stripe noise demonstrate that the proposed method effectively prevents overfitting and achieves superior denoising performance compared to state-of-the-art DIP-based HSI denoising methods.
comment: 7 pages, 5 figures
☆ Orion-Lite: Distilling LLM Reasoning into Efficient Vision-Only Driving Models
Leveraging the general world knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) holds significant promise for improving the ability of autonomous driving systems to handle rare and complex scenarios. While integrating LLMs into Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models has yielded state-of-the-art performance, their massive parameter counts pose severe challenges for latency-sensitive and energy-efficient deployment. Distilling LLM knowledge into a compact driving model offers a compelling solution to retain these reasoning capabilities while maintaining a manageable computational footprint. Although previous works have demonstrated the efficacy of distillation, these efforts have primarily focused on relatively simple scenarios and open-loop evaluations. Therefore, in this work, we investigate LLM distillation in more complex, interactive scenarios under closed-loop evaluation. We demonstrate that through a combination of latent feature distillation and ground-truth trajectory supervision, an efficient vision-only student model \textbf{Orion-Lite} can even surpass the performance of its massive VLA teacher, ORION. Setting a new state-of-the-art on the rigorous Bench2Drive benchmark, with a Driving Score of 80.6. Ultimately, this reveals that vision-only architectures still possess significant, untapped potential for high-performance reactive planning.
☆ DBMF: A Dual-Branch Multimodal Framework for Out-of-Distribution Detection
The complex and dynamic real-world clinical environment demands reliable deep learning (DL) systems. Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection plays a critical role in enhancing the reliability and generalizability of DL models when encountering data that deviate from the training distribution, such as unseen disease cases. However, existing OOD detection methods typically rely either on a single visual modality or solely on image-text matching, failing to fully leverage multimodal information. To overcome the challenge, we propose a novel dual-branch multimodal framework by introducing a text-image branch and a vision branch. Our framework fully exploits multimodal representations to identify OOD samples through these two complementary branches. After training, we compute scores from the text-image branch ($S_t$) and vision branch ($S_v$), and integrate them to obtain the final OOD score $S$ that is compared with a threshold for OOD detection. Comprehensive experiments on publicly available endoscopic image datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework is robust across diverse backbones and improves state-of-the-art performance in OOD detection by up to 24.84%
☆ $\oslash$ Source Models Leak What They Shouldn't $\nrightarrow$: Unlearning Zero-Shot Transfer in Domain Adaptation Through Adversarial Optimization CVPR 2026
The increasing adaptation of vision models across domains, such as satellite imagery and medical scans, has raised an emerging privacy risk: models may inadvertently retain and leak sensitive source-domain specific information in the target domain. This creates a compelling use case for machine unlearning to protect the privacy of sensitive source-domain data. Among adaptation techniques, source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) calls for an urgent need for machine unlearning (MU), where the source data itself is protected, yet the source model exposed during adaptation encodes its influence. Our experiments reveal that existing SFDA methods exhibit strong zero-shot performance on source-exclusive classes in the target domain, indicating they inadvertently leak knowledge of these classes into the target domain, even when they are not represented in the target data. We identify and address this risk by proposing an MU setting called SCADA-UL: Unlearning Source-exclusive ClAsses in Domain Adaptation. Existing MU methods do not address this setting as they are not designed to handle data distribution shifts. We propose a new unlearning method, where an adversarially generated forget class sample is unlearned by the model during the domain adaptation process using a novel rescaled labeling strategy and adversarial optimization. We also extend our study to two variants: a continual version of this problem setting and to one where the specific source classes to be forgotten may be unknown. Alongside theoretical interpretations, our comprehensive empirical results show that our method consistently outperforms baselines in the proposed setting while achieving retraining-level unlearning performance on benchmark datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/D-Arnav/SCADA
comment: CVPR 2026
☆ Generalization Under Scrutiny: Cross-Domain Detection Progresses, Pitfalls, and Persistent Challenges
Object detection models trained on a source domain often exhibit significant performance degradation when deployed in unseen target domains, due to various kinds of variations, such as sensing conditions, environments and data distributions. Hence, regardless the recent breakthrough advances in deep learning-based detection technology, cross-domain object detection (CDOD) remains a critical research area. Moreover, the existing literature remains fragmented, lacking a unified perspective on the structural challenges underlying domain shift and the effectiveness of adaptation strategies. This survey provides a comprehensive and systematic analysis of CDOD. We start upon a problem formulation that highlights the multi-stage nature of object detection under domain shift. Then, we organize the existing methods through a conceptual taxonomy that categorizes approaches based on adaptation paradigms, modeling assumptions, and pipeline components. Furthermore, we analyze how domain shift propagates across detection stages and discuss why adaptation in object detection is inherently more complex than in classification. In addition, we review commonly used datasets, evaluation protocols, and benchmarking practices. Finally, we identify the key challenges and outline promising future research directions. Cohesively, this survey aims to provide a unified framework for understanding CDOD and to guide the development of more robust detection systems.
comment: 44 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables
☆ EditCaption: Human-Aligned Instruction Synthesis for Image Editing via Supervised Fine-Tuning and Direct Preference Optimization
Xiangyuan Wang, Honghao Cai, Yunhao Bai, Tianze Zhou, Haohua Chen, Yao Hu, Xu Tang, Yibo Chen, Wei Zhu
High-quality training triplets (source-target image pairs with precise editing instructions) are a critical bottleneck for scaling instruction-guided image editing models. Vision-language models (VLMs) are widely used for automated instruction synthesis, but we identify three systematic failure modes in image-pair settings: orientation inconsistency (e.g., left/right confusion), viewpoint ambiguity, and insufficient fine-grained attribute description. Human evaluation shows that over 47% of instructions from strong baseline VLMs contain critical errors unusable for downstream training. We propose EditCaption, a scalable two-stage post-training pipeline for VLM-based instruction synthesis. Stage 1 builds a 100K supervised fine-tuning (SFT) dataset by combining GLM automatic annotation, EditScore-based filtering, and human refinement for spatial, directional, and attribute-level accuracy. Stage 2 collects 10K human preference pairs targeting the three failure modes and applies direct preference optimization (DPO) for alignment beyond SFT alone. On Eval-400, ByteMorph-Bench, and HQ-Edit, fine-tuned Qwen3-VL models outperform open-source baselines; the 235B model reaches 4.712 on Eval-400 (vs. Gemini-3-Pro 4.706, GPT-4.1 4.220, Kimi-K2.5 4.111) and 4.588 on ByteMorph-Bench (vs. Gemini-3-Pro 4.522, GPT-4.1 3.412). Human evaluation shows critical errors falling from 47.75% to 23% and correctness rising from 41.75% to 66%. The work offers a practical path to scalable, human-aligned instruction synthesis for image editing data.
☆ Vision-Language Foundation Models for Comprehensive Automated Pavement Condition Assessment
General-purpose vision-language models demonstrate strong performance in everyday domains but struggle with specialized technical fields requiring precise terminology, structured reasoning, and adherence to engineering standards. This work addresses whether domain-specific instruction tuning can enable comprehensive pavement condition assessment through vision-language models. PaveInstruct, a dataset containing 278,889 image-instruction-response pairs spanning 32 task types, was created by unifying annotations from nine heterogeneous pavement datasets. PaveGPT, a pavement foundation model trained on this dataset, was evaluated against state-of-the-art vision-language models across perception, understanding, and reasoning tasks. Instruction tuning transformed model capabilities, achieving improvements exceeding 20% in spatial grounding, reasoning, and generation tasks while producing ASTM D6433-compliant outputs. These results enable transportation agencies to deploy unified conversational assessment tools that replace multiple specialized systems, simplifying workflows and reducing technical expertise requirements. The approach establishes a pathway for developing instruction-driven AI systems across infrastructure domains including bridge inspection, railway maintenance, and building condition assessment.
☆ SciFigDetect: A Benchmark for AI-Generated Scientific Figure Detection
Modern multimodal generators can now produce scientific figures at near-publishable quality, creating a new challenge for visual forensics and research integrity. Unlike conventional AI-generated natural images, scientific figures are structured, text-dense, and tightly aligned with scholarly semantics, making them a distinct and difficult detection target. However, existing AI-generated image detection benchmarks and methods are almost entirely developed for open-domain imagery, leaving this setting largely unexplored. We present the first benchmark for AI-generated scientific figure detection. To construct it, we develop an agent-based data pipeline that retrieves licensed source papers, performs multimodal understanding of paper text and figures, builds structured prompts, synthesizes candidate figures, and filters them through a review-driven refinement loop. The resulting benchmark covers multiple figure categories, multiple generation sources and aligned real--synthetic pairs. We benchmark representative detectors under zero-shot, cross-generator, and degraded-image settings. Results show that current methods fail dramatically in zero-shot transfer, exhibit strong generator-specific overfitting, and remain fragile under common post-processing corruptions. These findings reveal a substantial gap between existing AIGI detection capabilities and the emerging distribution of high-quality scientific figures. We hope this benchmark can serve as a foundation for future research on robust and generalizable scientific-figure forensics. The dataset is available at https://github.com/Joyce-yoyo/SciFigDetect.
☆ OmniJigsaw: Enhancing Omni-Modal Reasoning via Modality-Orchestrated Reordering
Yiduo Jia, Muzhi Zhu, Hao Zhong, Mingyu Liu, Yuling Xi, Hao Chen, Bin Qin, Yongjie Yang, Zhenbo Luo, Chunhua Shen
To extend the reinforcement learning post-training paradigm to omni-modal models for concurrently bolstering video-audio understanding and collaborative reasoning, we propose OmniJigsaw, a generic self-supervised framework built upon a temporal reordering proxy task. Centered on the chronological reconstruction of shuffled audio-visual clips, this paradigm strategically orchestrates visual and auditory signals to compel cross-modal integration through three distinct strategies: Joint Modality Integration, Sample-level Modality Selection, and Clip-level Modality Masking. Recognizing that the efficacy of such proxy tasks is fundamentally tied to puzzle quality, we design a two-stage coarse-to-fine data filtering pipeline, which facilitates the efficient adaptation of OmniJigsaw to massive unannotated omni-modal data. Our analysis reveals a ``bi-modal shortcut phenomenon'' in joint modality integration and demonstrates that fine-grained clip-level modality masking mitigates this issue while outperforming sample-level modality selection. Extensive evaluations on 15 benchmarks show substantial gains in video, audio, and collaborative reasoning, validating OmniJigsaw as a scalable paradigm for self-supervised omni-modal learning.
comment: Project page: https://aim-uofa.github.io/OmniJigsaw/
☆ MedVR: Annotation-Free Medical Visual Reasoning via Agentic Reinforcement Learning ICLR 2026
Medical Vision-Language Models (VLMs) hold immense promise for complex clinical tasks, but their reasoning capabilities are often constrained by text-only paradigms that fail to ground inferences in visual evidence. This limitation not only curtails performance on tasks requiring fine-grained visual analysis but also introduces risks of visual hallucination in safety-critical applications. Thus, we introduce MedVR, a novel reinforcement learning framework that enables annotation-free visual reasoning for medical VLMs. Its core innovation lies in two synergistic mechanisms: Entropy-guided Visual Regrounding (EVR) uses model uncertainty to direct exploration, while Consensus-based Credit Assignment (CCA) distills pseudo-supervision from rollout agreement. Without any human annotations for intermediate steps, MedVR achieves state-of-the-art performance on diverse public medical VQA benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing models. By learning to reason directly with visual evidence, MedVR promotes the robustness and transparency essential for accelerating the clinical deployment of medical AI.
comment: Accepted by ICLR 2026
☆ Inside-Out: Measuring Generalization in Vision Transformers Through Inner Workings CVPR 2026
Reliable generalization metrics are fundamental to the evaluation of machine learning models. Especially in high-stakes applications where labeled target data are scarce, evaluation of models' generalization performance under distribution shift is a pressing need. We focus on two practical scenarios: (1) Before deployment, how to select the best model for unlabeled target data? (2) After deployment, how to monitor model performance under distribution shift? The central need in both cases is a reliable and label-free proxy metric. Yet existing proxy metrics, such as model confidence or accuracy-on-the-line, are often unreliable as they only assess model output while ignoring the internal mechanisms that produce them. We address this limitation by introducing a new perspective: using the inner workings of a model, i.e., circuits, as a predictive metric of generalization performance. Leveraging circuit discovery, we extract the causal interactions between internal representations as a circuit, from which we derive two metrics tailored to the two practical scenarios. (1) Before deployment, we introduce Dependency Depth Bias, which measures different models' generalization capability on target data. (2) After deployment, we propose Circuit Shift Score, which predicts a model's generalization under different distribution shifts. Across various tasks, both metrics demonstrate significantly improved correlation with generalization performance, outperforming existing proxies by an average of 13.4\% and 34.1\%, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/deep-real/GenCircuit.
comment: CVPR 2026(Highlight)
☆ On the Global Photometric Alignment for Low-Level Vision
Supervised low-level vision models rely on pixel-wise losses against paired references, yet paired training sets exhibit per-pair photometric inconsistency, say, different image pairs demand different global brightness, color, or white-balance mappings. This inconsistency enters through task-intrinsic photometric transfer (e.g., low-light enhancement) or unintended acquisition shifts (e.g., de-raining), and in either case causes an optimization pathology. Standard reconstruction losses allocate disproportionate gradient budget to conflicting per-pair photometric targets, crowding out content restoration. In this paper, we investigate this issue and prove that, under least-squares decomposition, the photometric and structural components of the prediction-target residual are orthogonal, and that the spatially dense photometric component dominates the gradient energy. Motivated by this analysis, we propose Photometric Alignment Loss (PAL). This flexible supervision objective discounts nuisance photometric discrepancy via closed-form affine color alignment while preserving restoration-relevant supervision, requiring only covariance statistics and tiny matrix inversion with negligible overhead. Across 6 tasks, 16 datasets, and 16 architectures, PAL consistently improves metrics and generalization. The implementation is in the appendix.
☆ OceanMAE: A Foundation Model for Ocean Remote Sensing
Accurate ocean mapping is essential for applications such as bathymetry estimation, seabed characterization, marine litter detection, and ecosystem monitoring. However, ocean remote sensing (RS) remains constrained by limited labeled data and by the reduced transferability of models pre-trained mainly on land-dominated Earth observation imagery. In this paper, we propose OceanMAE, an ocean-specific masked autoencoder that extends standard MAE pre-training by integrating multispectral Sentinel-2 observations with physically meaningful ocean descriptors during self-supervised learning. By incorporating these auxiliary ocean features, OceanMAE is designed to learn more informative and ocean-aware latent representations from large- scale unlabeled data. To transfer these representations to downstream applications, we further employ a modified UNet-based framework for marine segmentation and bathymetry estimation. Pre-trained on the Hydro dataset, OceanMAE is evaluated on MADOS and MARIDA for marine pollutant and debris segmentation, and on MagicBathyNet for bathymetry regression. The experiments show that OceanMAE yields the strongest gains on marine segmentation, while bathymetry benefits are competitive and task-dependent. In addition, an ablation against a standard MAE on MARIDA indicates that incorporating auxiliary ocean descriptors during pre-training improves downstream segmentation quality. These findings highlight the value of physically informed and domain-aligned self-supervised pre- training for ocean RS. Code and weights are publicly available at https://git.tu-berlin.de/joanna.stamer/SSLORS2.
☆ T-Gated Adapter: A Lightweight Temporal Adapter for Vision-Language Medical Segmentation CVPR 2026
Medical image segmentation traditionally relies on fully supervised 3D architectures that demand a large amount of dense, voxel-level annotations from clinical experts which is a prohibitively expensive process. Vision Language Models (VLMs) offer a powerful alternative by leveraging broad visual semantic representations learned from billions of images. However, when applied independently to 2D slices of a 3D scan, these models often produce noisy and anatomically implausible segmentations that violate the inherent continuity of anatomical structures. We propose a temporal adapter that addresses this by injecting adjacent-slice context directly into the model's visual token representations. The adapter comprises a temporal transformer attending across a fixed context window at the token level, a spatial context block refining within-slice representations, and an adaptive gate balancing temporal and single-slice features. Training on 30 labeled volumes from the FLARE22 dataset, our method achieves a mean Dice of 0.704 across 13 abdominal organs with a gain of +0.206 over the baseline VLM trained with no temporal context. Zero-shot evaluation on BTCV and AMOS22 datasets yields consistent improvements of +0.210 and +0.230, with the average cross-domain performance drop reducing from 38.0% to 24.9%. Furthermore, in a cross-modality evaluation on AMOS22 MRI with neither model receiving any MRI supervision, our method achieves a mean Dice of 0.366, outperforming a fully supervised 3D baseline (DynUNet, 0.224) trained exclusively on CT, suggesting that CLIP's visual semantic representations generalize more gracefully across imaging modalities than convolutional features.
comment: Accepted at the PHAROS-AIF-MIH Workshop at CVPR 2026
☆ Face-D(^2)CL: Multi-Domain Synergistic Representation with Dual Continual Learning for Facial DeepFake Detection
The rapid advancement of facial forgery techniques poses severe threats to public trust and information security, making facial DeepFake detection a critical research priority. Continual learning provides an effective approach to adapt facial DeepFake detection models to evolving forgery patterns. However, existing methods face two key bottlenecks in real-world continual learning scenarios: insufficient feature representation and catastrophic forgetting. To address these issues, we propose Face-D(^2)CL, a framework for facial DeepFake detection. It leverages multi-domain synergistic representation to fuse spatial and frequency-domain features for the comprehensive capture of diverse forgery traces, and employs a dual continual learning mechanism that combines Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC), which distinguishes parameter importance for real versus fake samples, and Orthogonal Gradient Constraint (OGC), which ensures updates to task-specific adapters do not interfere with previously learned knowledge. This synergy enables the model to achieve a dynamic balance between robust anti-forgetting capabilities and agile adaptability to emerging facial forgery paradigms, all without relying on historical data replay. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses current SOTA approaches in both stability and plasticity, achieving 60.7% relative reduction in average detection error rate, respectively. On unseen forgery domains, it further improves the average detection AUC by 7.9% compared to the current SOTA method.
☆ Semantic Noise Reduction via Teacher-Guided Dual-Path Audio-Visual Representation Learning
Recent advances in audio-visual representation learning have shown the value of combining contrastive alignment with masked reconstruction. However, jointly optimizing these objectives in a single forward pass forces the contrastive branch to rely on randomly visible patches designed for reconstruction rather than cross-modal alignment, introducing semantic noise and optimization interference. We propose TG-DP, a Teacher-Guided Dual-Path framework that decouples reconstruction and alignment into separate optimization paths. By disentangling the masking regimes of the two branches, TG-DP enables the contrastive pathway to use a visibility pattern better suited to cross-modal alignment. A teacher model further provides auxiliary guidance for organizing visible tokens in this branch, helping reduce interference and stabilize cross-modal representation learning. TG-DP achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot retrieval. On AudioSet, it improves R@1 from 35.2\% to 37.4\% for video-to-audio retrieval and from 27.9\% to 37.1\% for audio-to-video retrieval. The learned representations also remain semantically robust, achieving state-of-the-art linear-probe performance on AS20K and VGGSound. Taken together, our results suggest that decoupling multimodal objectives and introducing teacher-guided structure into the contrastive pathway provide an effective framework for improving large-scale audio-visual pretraining. Code is available at https://github.com/wanglg20/TG-DP.
☆ Bag of Bags: Adaptive Visual Vocabularies for Genizah Join Image Retrieval
Sharva Gogawale, Gal Grudka, Daria Vasyutinsky-Shapira, Omer Ventura, Berat Kurar-Barakat, Nachum Dershowitz
A join is a set of manuscript fragments identified as originally emanating from the same manuscript. We study manuscript join retrieval: Given a query image of a fragment, retrieve other fragments originating from the same physical manuscript. We propose Bag of Bags (BoB), an image-level representation that replaces the global-level visual codebook of classical Bag of Words (BoW) with a fragment-specific vocabulary of local visual words. Our pipeline trains a sparse convolutional autoencoder on binarized fragment patches, encodes connected components from each page, clusters the resulting embeddings with per image $k$-means, and compares images using set to set distances between their local vocabularies. Evaluated on fragments from the Cairo Genizah, the best BoB variant (viz.\@ Chamfer) achieves Hit@1 of 0.78 and MRR of 0.84, compared to 0.74 and 0.80, respectively, for the strongest BoW baseline (BoW-RawPatches-$χ^2$), a 6.1\% relative improvement in top-1 accuracy. We furthermore study a mass-weighted BoB-OT variant that incorporates cluster population into prototype matching and present a formal approximation guarantee bounding its deviation from full component-level optimal transport. A two-stage pipeline using a BoW shortlist followed by BoB-OT reranking provides a practical compromise between retrieval strength and computational cost, supporting applicability to larger manuscript collections.
☆ PolySLGen: Online Multimodal Speaking-Listening Reaction Generation in Polyadic Interaction
Human-like multimodal reaction generation is essential for natural group interactions between humans and embodied AI. However, existing approaches are limited to single-modality or speaking-only responses in dyadic interactions, making them unsuitable for realistic social scenarios. Many also overlook nonverbal cues and complex dynamics of polyadic interactions, both critical for engagement and conversational coherence. In this work, we present PolySLGen, an online framework for Polyadic multimodal Speaking and Listening reaction Generation. Given past conversation and motion from all participants, PolySLGen generates a future speaking or listening reaction for a target participant, including speech, body motion, and speaking state score. To model group interactions effectively, we propose a pose fusion module and a social cue encoder that jointly aggregate motion and social signals from the group. Extensive experiments, along with quantitative and qualitative evaluations, show that PolySLGen produces contextually appropriate and temporally coherent multi-modal reactions, outperforming several adapted and state-of-the-art baselines in motion quality, motion-speech alignment, speaking state prediction, and human-perceived realism.
☆ Uni-ViGU: Towards Unified Video Generation and Understanding via A Diffusion-Based Video Generator
Unified multimodal models integrating visual understanding and generation face a fundamental challenge: visual generation incurs substantially higher computational costs than understanding, particularly for video. This imbalance motivates us to invert the conventional paradigm: rather than extending understanding-centric MLLMs to support generation, we propose Uni-ViGU, a framework that unifies video generation and understanding by extending a video generator as the foundation. We introduce a unified flow method that performs continuous flow matching for video and discrete flow matching for text within a single process, enabling coherent multimodal generation. We further propose a modality-driven MoE-based framework that augments Transformer blocks with lightweight layers for text generation while preserving generative priors. To repurpose generation knowledge for understanding, we design a bidirectional training mechanism with two stages: Knowledge Recall reconstructs input prompts to leverage learned text-video correspondences, while Capability Refinement fine-tunes on detailed captions to establish discriminative shared representations. Experiments demonstrate that Uni-ViGU achieves competitive performance on both video generation and understanding, validating generation-centric architectures as a scalable path toward unified multimodal intelligence. Project Page and Code: https://fr0zencrane.github.io/uni-vigu-page/.
comment: Page and Code: https://fr0zencrane.github.io/uni-vigu-page/
☆ Small Vision-Language Models are Smart Compressors for Long Video Understanding
Junjie Fei, Jun Chen, Zechun Liu, Yunyang Xiong, Chong Zhou, Wei Wen, Junlin Han, Mingchen Zhuge, Saksham Suri, Qi Qian, Shuming Liu, Lemeng Wu, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Vikas Chandra, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Chenchen Zhu
Adapting Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for hour-long videos is bottlenecked by context limits. Dense visual streams saturate token budgets and exacerbate the lost-in-the-middle phenomenon. Existing heuristics, like sparse sampling or uniform pooling, blindly sacrifice fidelity by discarding decisive moments and wasting bandwidth on irrelevant backgrounds. We propose Tempo, an efficient query-aware framework compressing long videos for downstream understanding. Tempo leverages a Small Vision-Language Model (SVLM) as a local temporal compressor, casting token reduction as an early cross-modal distillation process to generate compact, intent-aligned representations in a single forward pass. To enforce strict budgets without breaking causality, we introduce Adaptive Token Allocation (ATA). Exploiting the SVLM's zero-shot relevance prior and semantic front-loading, ATA acts as a training-free $O(1)$ dynamic router. It allocates dense bandwidth to query-critical segments while compressing redundancies into minimal temporal anchors to maintain the global storyline. Extensive experiments show our 6B architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance with aggressive dynamic compression (0.5-16 tokens/frame). On the extreme-long LVBench (4101s), Tempo scores 52.3 under a strict 8K visual budget, outperforming GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro. Scaling to 2048 frames reaches 53.7. Crucially, Tempo compresses hour-long videos substantially below theoretical limits, proving true long-form video understanding relies on intent-driven efficiency rather than greedily padded context windows.
comment: Project page and demo are available at https://FeiElysia.github.io/tempo-page/
☆ Bias Redistribution in Visual Machine Unlearning: Does Forgetting One Group Harm Another?
Yunusa Haruna, Adamu Lawan, Ibrahim Haruna Abdulhamid, Hamza Mohammed Dauda, Jiaquan Zhang, Chaoning Zhang, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad
Machine unlearning enables models to selectively forget training data, driven by privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. However, its fairness implications remain underexplored: when a model forgets a demographic group, does it neutralize that concept or redistribute it to correlated groups, potentially amplifying bias? We investigate this bias redistribution phenomenon on CelebA using CLIP models (ViT/B-32, ViT-L/14, ViT-B/16) under a zero-shot classification setting across intersectional groups defined by age and gender. We evaluate three unlearning methods, Prompt Erasure, Prompt Reweighting, and Refusal Vector using per-group accuracy shifts, demographic parity gaps, and a redistribution score. Our results show that unlearning does not eliminate bias but redistributes it primarily along gender rather than age boundaries. In particular, removing the dominant Young Female group consistently transfers performance to Old Female across all model scales, revealing a gender-dominant structure in CLIP's embedding space. While the Refusal Vector method reduces redistribution, it fails to achieve complete forgetting and significantly degrades retained performance. These findings highlight a fundamental limitation of current unlearning methods: without accounting for embedding geometry, they risk amplifying bias in retained groups.
☆ OV-Stitcher: A Global Context-Aware Framework for Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation
Training-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation(TF-OVSS) has recently attracted attention for its ability to perform dense prediction by leveraging the pretrained knowledge of large vision and vision-language models, without requiring additional training. However, due to the limited input resolution of these pretrained encoders, existing TF-OVSS methods commonly adopt a sliding-window strategy that processes cropped sub-images independently. While effective for managing high-resolution inputs, this approach prevents global attention over the full image, leading to fragmented feature representations and limited contextual reasoning. We propose OV-Stitcher, a training-free framework that addresses this limitation by stitching fragmented sub-image features directly within the final encoder block. By reconstructing attention representations from fragmented sub-image features, OV-Stitcher enables global attention within the final encoder block, producing coherent context aggregation and spatially consistent, semantically aligned segmentation maps. Extensive evaluations across eight benchmarks demonstrate that OV-Stitcher establishes a scalable and effective solution for open-vocabulary segmentation, achieving a notable improvement in mean Intersection over Union(mIoU) from 48.7 to 50.7 compared with prior training-free baselines.
☆ EPIR: An Efficient Patch Tokenization, Integration and Representation Framework for Micro-expression Recognition
Micro-expression recognition can obtain the real emotion of the individual at the current moment. Although deep learning-based methods, especially Transformer-based methods, have achieved impressive results, these methods have high computational complexity due to the large number of tokens in the multi-head self-attention. In addition, the existing micro-expression datasets are small-scale, which makes it difficult for Transformer-based models to learn effective micro-expression representations. Therefore, we propose a novel Efficient Patch tokenization, Integration and Representation framework (EPIR), which can balance high recognition performance and low computational complexity. Specifically, we first propose a dual norm shifted tokenization (DNSPT) module to learn the spatial relationship between neighboring pixels in the face region, which is implemented by a refined spatial transformation and dual norm projection. Then, we propose a token integration module to integrate partial tokens among multiple cascaded Transformer blocks, thereby reducing the number of tokens without information loss. Furthermore, we design a discriminative token extractor, which first improves the attention in the Transformer block to reduce the unnecessary focus of the attention calculation on self-tokens, and uses the dynamic token selection module (DTSM) to select key tokens, thereby capturing more discriminative micro-expression representations. We conduct extensive experiments on four popular public datasets (i.e., CASME II, SAMM, SMIC, and CAS(ME)3. The experimental results show that our method achieves significant performance gains over the state-of-the-art methods, such as 9.6% improvement on the CAS(ME)$^3$ dataset in terms of UF1 and 4.58% improvement on the SMIC dataset in terms of UAR metric.
☆ Coordinate-Based Dual-Constrained Autoregressive Motion Generation
Text-to-motion generation has attracted increasing attention in the research community recently, with potential applications in animation, virtual reality, robotics, and human-computer interaction. Diffusion and autoregressive models are two popular and parallel research directions for text-to-motion generation. However, diffusion models often suffer from error amplification during noise prediction, while autoregressive models exhibit mode collapse due to motion discretization. To address these limitations, we propose a flexible, high-fidelity, and semantically faithful text-to-motion framework, named Coordinate-based Dual-constrained Autoregressive Motion Generation (CDAMD). With motion coordinates as input, CDAMD follows the autoregressive paradigm and leverages diffusion-inspired multi-layer perceptrons to enhance the fidelity of predicted motions. Furthermore, a Dual-Constrained Causal Mask is introduced to guide autoregressive generation, where motion tokens act as priors and are concatenated with textual encodings. Since there is limited work on coordinate-based motion synthesis, we establish new benchmarks for both text-to-motion generation and motion editing. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both fidelity and semantic consistency on these benchmarks.
comment: Code is available at: https://github.com/fly-dk/CDAMD
☆ DiffVC: A Non-autoregressive Framework Based on Diffusion Model for Video Captioning
Current video captioning methods usually use an encoder-decoder structure to generate text autoregressively. However, autoregressive methods have inherent limitations such as slow generation speed and large cumulative error. Furthermore, the few non-autoregressive counterparts suffer from deficiencies in generation quality due to the lack of sufficient multimodal interaction modeling. Therefore, we propose a non-autoregressive framework based on Diffusion model for Video Captioning (DiffVC) to address these issues. Its parallel decoding can effectively solve the problems of generation speed and cumulative error. At the same time, our proposed discriminative conditional Diffusion Model can generate higher-quality textual descriptions. Specifically, we first encode the video into a visual representation. During training, Gaussian noise is added to the textual representation of the ground-truth caption. Then, a new textual representation is generated via the discriminative denoiser with the visual representation as a conditional constraint. Finally, we input the new textual representation into a non-autoregressive language model to generate captions. During inference, we directly sample noise from the Gaussian distribution for generation. Experiments on MSVD, MSR-VTT, and VATEX show that our method can outperform previous non-autoregressive methods and achieve comparable performance to autoregressive methods, e.g., it achieved a maximum improvement of 9.9 on the CIDEr and improvement of 2.6 on the B@4, while having faster generation speed. The source code will be available soon.
☆ AdaSpark: Adaptive Sparsity for Efficient Long-Video Understanding CVPR2026
Handong Li, Zikang Liu, Longteng Guo, Tongtian Yue, Yepeng Tang, Xinxin Zhu, Chuanyang Zheng, Ziming Wang, Zhibin Wang, Jun Song, Cheng Yu, Bo Zheng, Jing Liu
Processing long-form videos with Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) is computationally prohibitive. Current efficiency methods often compromise fine-grained perception through irreversible information disposal or inhibit long-range temporal modeling via rigid, predefined sparse patterns. This paper introduces AdaSpark, an adaptive sparsity framework designed to address these limitations. AdaSpark first partitions video inputs into 3D spatio-temporal cubes. It then employs two co-designed, context-aware components: (1) Adaptive Cube-Selective Attention (AdaS-Attn), which adaptively selects a subset of relevant video cubes to attend for each query token, and (2) Adaptive Token-Selective FFN (AdaS-FFN), which selectively processes only the most salient tokens within each cube. An entropy-based (Top-p) selection mechanism adaptively allocates computational resources based on input complexity. Experiments demonstrate that AdaSpark significantly reduces computational load by up to 57% FLOPs while maintaining comparable performance to dense models and preserving fine-grained, long-range dependencies, as validated on challenging hour-scale video benchmarks.
comment: 8 pages, CVPR2026 Accept (Highlight)
☆ DinoRADE: Full Spectral Radar-Camera Fusion with Vision Foundation Model Features for Multi-class Object Detection in Adverse Weather CVPR
Reliable and weather-robust perception systems are essential for safe autonomous driving and typically employ multi-modal sensor configurations to achieve comprehensive environmental awareness. While recent automotive FMCW Radar-based approaches achieved remarkable performance on detection tasks in adverse weather conditions, they exhibited limitations in resolving fine-grained spatial details particularly critical for detecting smaller and vulnerable road users (VRUs). Furthermore, existing research has not adequately addressed VRU detection in adverse weather datasets such as K-Radar. We present DinoRADE, a Radar-centered detection pipeline that processes dense Radar tensors and aggregates vision features around transformed reference points in the camera perspective via deformable cross-attention. Vision features are provided by a DINOv3 Vision Foundation Model. We present a comprehensive performance evaluation on the K-Radar dataset in all weather conditions and are among the first to report detection performance individually for five object classes. Additionally, we compare our method with existing single-class detection approaches and outperform recent Radar-camera approaches by 12.1%. The code is available under https://github.com/chr-is-tof/RADE-Net.
comment: Accepted to IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2026
☆ Tensor-Augmented Convolutional Neural Networks: Enhancing Expressivity with Generic Tensor Kernels
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) excel at extracting local features hierarchically, but their performance in capturing complex correlations hinges heavily on deep architectures, which are usually computationally demanding and difficult to interpret. To address these issues, we propose a physically-guided shallow model: tensor-augmented CNN (TACNN), which replaces conventional convolution kernels with generic tensors to enhance representational capacity. This choice is motivated by the fact that an order-$N$ tensor naturally encodes an arbitrary quantum superposition state in the Hilbert space of dimension $d^N$, where $d$ is the local physical dimension, thus offering substantially richer expressivity. Furthermore, in our design the convolution output of each layer becomes a multilinear form capable of capturing high-order feature correlations, thereby equipping a shallow multilayer architecture with an expressive power competitive to that of deep CNNs. On the Fashion-MNIST benchmark, TACNN demonstrates clear advantages over conventional CNNs, achieving remarkable accuracies with only a few layers. In particular, a TACNN with only two convolution layers attains a test accuracy of 93.7$\%$, surpassing or matching considerably deeper models such as VGG-16 (93.5$\%$) and GoogLeNet (93.7$\%$). These findings highlight TACNN as a promising framework that strengthens model expressivity while preserving architectural simplicity, paving the way towards more interpretable and efficient deep learning models.
comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables
☆ AtlasOCR: Building the First Open-Source Darija OCR Model with Vision Language Models
Darija, the Moroccan Arabic dialect, is rich in visual content yet lacks specialized Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools. This paper introduces AtlasOCR, the first open-source Darija OCR model built by fine-tuning a 3B parameter Vision Language Model (VLM). We detail our comprehensive approach, from curating a unique Darija-specific dataset leveraging both synthetic generation with our OCRSmith library and carefully sourced real-world data, to implementing efficient fine-tuning strategies. We utilize QLoRA and Unsloth for parameter-efficient training of Qwen2.5-VL 3B and present comprehensive ablation studies optimizing key hyperparameters. Our evaluation on the newly curated AtlasOCRBench and the established KITAB-Bench demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, challenging larger models and highlighting AtlasOCR's robustness and generalization capabilities for both Darija and standard Arabic OCR tasks.
☆ Brain3D: EEG-to-3D Decoding of Visual Representations via Multimodal Reasoning
Emanuele Balloni, Emanuele Frontoni, Chiara Matti, Marina Paolanti, Roberto Pierdicca, Emiliano Santarnecchi
Decoding visual information from electroencephalography (EEG) has recently achieved promising results, primarily focusing on reconstructing two-dimensional (2D) images from brain activity. However, the reconstruction of three-dimensional (3D) representations remains largely unexplored. This limits the geometric understanding and reduces the applicability of neural decoding in different contexts. To address this gap, we propose Brain3D, a multimodal architecture for EEG-to-3D reconstruction based on EEG-to-image decoding. It progressively transforms neural representations into the 3D domain using geometry-aware generative reasoning. Our pipeline first produces visually grounded images from EEG signals, then employs a multimodal large language model to extract structured 3D-aware descriptions, which guide a diffusion-based generation stage whose outputs are finally converted into coherent 3D meshes via a single-image-to-3D model. By decomposing the problem into structured stages, the proposed approach avoids direct EEG-to-3D mappings and enables scalable brain-driven 3D generation. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation comparing the reconstructed 3D outputs against the original visual stimuli, assessing both semantic alignment and geometric fidelity. Experimental results demonstrate strong performance of the proposed architecture, achieving up to 85.4% 10-way Top-1 EEG decoding accuracy and 0.648 CLIPScore, supporting the feasibility of multimodal EEG-driven 3D reconstruction.
comment: 17 pages, 2 figures
☆ EEG2Vision: A Multimodal EEG-Based Framework for 2D Visual Reconstruction in Cognitive Neuroscience
Emanuele Balloni, Emanuele Frontoni, Chiara Matti, Marina Paolanti, Roberto Pierdicca, Emiliano Santarnecchi
Reconstructing visual stimuli from non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) remains challenging due to its low spatial resolution and high noise, particularly under realistic low-density electrode configurations. To address this, we present EEG2Vision, a modular, end-to-end EEG-to-image framework that systematically evaluates reconstruction performance across different EEG resolutions (128, 64, 32, and 24 channels) and enhances visual quality through a prompt-guided post-reconstruction boosting mechanism. Starting from EEG-conditioned diffusion reconstruction, the boosting stage uses a multimodal large language model to extract semantic descriptions and leverages image-to-image diffusion to refine geometry and perceptual coherence while preserving EEG-grounded structure. Our experiments show that semantic decoding accuracy degrades significantly with channel reduction (e.g., 50-way Top-1 Acc from 89% to 38%), while reconstruction quality slight decreases (e.g., FID from 76.77 to 80.51). The proposed boosting consistently improves perceptual metrics across all configurations, achieving up to 9.71% IS gains in low-channel settings. A user study confirms the clear perceptual preference for boosted reconstructions. The proposed approach significantly boosts the feasibility of real-time brain-2-image applications using low-resolution EEG devices, potentially unlocking this type of applications outside laboratory settings.
comment: 17 pages, 5 figures
☆ ABMAMBA: Multimodal Large Language Model with Aligned Hierarchical Bidirectional Scan for Efficient Video Captioning ICPR 2026
In this study, we focus on video captioning by fully open multimodal large language models (MLLMs). The comprehension of visual sequences is challenging because of their intricate temporal dependencies and substantial sequence length. The core attention mechanisms of existing Transformer-based approaches scale quadratically with the sequence length, making them computationally prohibitive. To address these limitations, we propose Aligned Hierarchical Bidirectional Scan Mamba (ABMamba), a fully open MLLM with linear computational complexity that enables the scalable processing of video sequences. ABMamba extends Deep State Space Models as its language backbone, replacing the costly quadratic attention mechanisms, and employs a novel Aligned Hierarchical Bidirectional Scan module that processes videos across multiple temporal resolutions. On standard video captioning benchmarks such as VATEX and MSR-VTT, ABMamba demonstrates competitive performance compared to typical MLLMs while achieving approximately three times higher throughput.
comment: Accepted to ICPR 2026
☆ Guiding a Diffusion Model by Swapping Its Tokens CVPR 2026
Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) is a widely used inference-time technique to boost the image quality of diffusion models. Yet, its reliance on text conditions prevents its use in unconditional generation. We propose a simple method to enable CFG-like guidance for both conditional and unconditional generation. The key idea is to generate a perturbed prediction via simple token swap operations, and use the direction between it and the clean prediction to steer sampling towards higher-fidelity distributions. In practice, we swap pairs of most semantically dissimilar token latents in either spatial or channel dimensions. Unlike existing methods that apply perturbation in a global or less constrained manner, our approach selectively exchanges and recomposes token latents, allowing finer control over perturbation and its influence on generated samples. Experiments on MS-COCO 2014, MS-COCO 2017, and ImageNet datasets demonstrate that the proposed Self-Swap Guidance (SSG), when applied to popular diffusion models, outperforms previous condition-free methods in image fidelity and prompt alignment under different set-ups. Its fine-grained perturbation granularity also improves robustness, reducing side-effects across a wider range of perturbation strengths. Overall, SSG extends CFG to a broader scope of applications including both conditional and unconditional generation, and can be readily inserted into any diffusion model as a plug-in to gain immediate improvements.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026 (Oral)
☆ Adapting Foundation Models for Annotation-Efficient Adnexal Mass Segmentation in Cine Images
Francesca Fati, Alberto Rota, Adriana V. Gregory, Anna Catozzo, Maria C. Giuliano, Mrinal Dhar, Luigi De Vitis, Annie T. Packard, Francesco Multinu, Elena De Momi, Carrie L. Langstraat, Timothy L. Kline
Adnexal mass evaluation via ultrasound is a challenging clinical task, often hindered by subjective interpretation and significant inter-observer variability. While automated segmentation is a foundational step for quantitative risk assessment, traditional fully supervised convolutional architectures frequently require large amounts of pixel-level annotations and struggle with domain shifts common in medical imaging. In this work, we propose a label-efficient segmentation framework that leverages the robust semantic priors of a pretrained DINOv3 foundational vision transformer backbone. By integrating this backbone with a Dense Prediction Transformer (DPT)-style decoder, our model hierarchically reassembles multi-scale features to combine global semantic representations with fine-grained spatial details. Evaluated on a clinical dataset of 7,777 annotated frames from 112 patients, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to established fully supervised baselines, including U-Net, U-Net++, DeepLabV3, and MAnet. Specifically, we obtain a Dice score of 0.945 and improved boundary adherence, reducing the 95th-percentile Hausdorff Distance by 11.4% relative to the strongest convolutional baseline. Furthermore, we conduct an extensive efficiency analysis demonstrating that our DINOv3-based approach retains significantly higher performance under data starvation regimes, maintaining strong results even when trained on only 25% of the data. These results suggest that leveraging large-scale self-supervised foundations provides a promising and data-efficient solution for medical image segmentation in data-constrained clinical environments. Project Repository: https://github.com/FrancescaFati/MESA
☆ 3DrawAgent: Teaching LLM to Draw in 3D with Early Contrastive Experience CVPR 2026
Sketching in 3D space enables expressive reasoning about shape, structure, and spatial relationships, yet generating 3D sketches through natural language remains a major challenge. In this work, we introduce 3DrawAgent, a training-free, language-driven framework for 3D sketch generation that leverages large language models (LLMs) to sequentially draw 3D Bezier curves under geometric feedback. Unlike prior 2D sketch agents, our method introduces a relative experience optimization strategy that adapts the recently proposed Group Reward Policy Optimization (GRPO) paradigm. Instead of relying on explicit ground-truth supervision, we construct pairwise comparisons among generated sketches, with each pair consisting of a relatively better and a worse result based on CLIP-based perceptual rewards and LLM-based fine-grained qualitative assessment. These experiences are then used to iteratively refine the prior knowledge of 3D drawing, enabling black-box reinforcement of the model's 3D awareness. This design allows our model to self-improve its spatial understanding and drawing quality without parameter updates. Experiments show that 3DrawAgent can generate complex and coherent 3D Bezier sketches from diverse textual prompts, exhibit emergent geometric reasoning, and generalize to novel shapes, establishing a new paradigm for advancing the field of training-free 3D sketch intelligence.
comment: CVPR 2026 Highlight
☆ LINE: LLM-based Iterative Neuron Explanations for Vision Models
Interpreting the concepts encoded by individual neurons in deep neural networks is a crucial step towards understanding their complex decision-making processes and ensuring AI safety. Despite recent progress in neuron labeling, existing methods often limit the search space to predefined concept vocabularies or produce overly specific descriptions that fail to capture higher-order, global concepts. We introduce LINE, a novel, training-free iterative approach tailored for open-vocabulary concept labeling in vision models. Operating in a strictly black-box setting, LINE leverages a large language model and a text-to-image generator to iteratively propose and refine concepts in a closed loop, guided by activation history. We demonstrate that LINE achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple model architectures, yielding AUC improvements of up to 0.18 on ImageNet and 0.05 on Places365, while discovering, on average, 29% of new concepts missed by massive predefined vocabularies. Beyond identifying the top concept, LINE provides a complete generation history, which enables polysemanticity evaluation and produces supporting visual explanations that rival gradient-dependent activation maximization methods.
☆ Beyond Mamba: Enhancing State-space Models with Deformable Dilated Convolutions for Multi-scale Traffic Object Detection
In a real-world traffic scenario, varying-scale objects are usually distributed in a cluttered background, which poses great challenges to accurate detection. Although current Mamba-based methods can efficiently model long-range dependencies, they still struggle to capture small objects with abundant local details, which hinders joint modeling of local structures and global semantics. Moreover, state-space models exhibit limited hierarchical feature representation and weak cross-scale interaction due to flat sequential modeling and insufficient spatial inductive biases, leading to sub-optimal performance in complex scenes. To address these issues, we propose a Mamba with Deformable Dilated Convolutions Network (MDDCNet) for accurate traffic object detection in this study. In MDDCNet, a well-designed hybrid backbone with successive Multi-Scale Deformable Dilated Convolution (MSDDC) blocks and Mamba blocks enables hierarchical feature representation from local details to global semantics. Meanwhile, a Channel-Enhanced Feed-Forward Network (CE-FFN) is further devised to overcome the limited channel interaction capability of conventional feed-forward networks, whilst a Mamba-based Attention-Aggregating Feature Pyramid Network (A^2FPN) is constructed to achieve enhanced multi-scale feature fusion and interaction. Extensive experimental results on public benchmark and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over various advanced detectors. The code is available at https://github.com/Bettermea/MDDCNet.
☆ PrivFedTalk: Privacy-Aware Federated Diffusion with Identity-Stable Adapters for Personalized Talking-Head Generation
Talking-head generation has advanced rapidly with diffusion-based generative models, but training usually depends on centralized face-video and speech datasets, raising major privacy concerns. The problem is more acute for personalized talking-head generation, where identity-specific data are highly sensitive and often cannot be pooled across users or devices. PrivFedTalk is presented as a privacy-aware federated framework for personalized talking-head generation that combines conditional latent diffusion with parameter-efficient identity adaptation. A shared diffusion backbone is trained across clients, while each client learns lightweight LoRA identity adapters from local private audio-visual data, avoiding raw data sharing and reducing communication cost. To address heterogeneous client distributions, Identity-Stable Federated Aggregation (ISFA) weights client updates using privacy-safe scalar reliability signals computed from on-device identity consistency and temporal stability estimates. Temporal-Denoising Consistency (TDC) regularization is introduced to reduce inter-frame drift, flicker, and identity drift during federated denoising. To limit update-side privacy risk, secure aggregation and client-level differential privacy are applied to adapter updates. The implementation supports both low-memory GPU execution and multi-GPU client-parallel training on heterogeneous shared hardware. Comparative experiments on the present setup across multiple training and aggregation conditions with PrivFedTalk, FedAvg, and FedProx show stable federated optimization and successful end-to-end training and evaluation under constrained resources. The results support the feasibility of privacy-aware personalized talking-head training in federated environments, while suggesting that stronger component-wise, privacy-utility, and qualitative claims need further standardized evaluation.
comment: GitHub: https://github.com/mazumdarsoumya/PrivFedTalk
☆ Rotation Equivariant Convolutions in Deformable Registration of Brain MRI
Image registration is a fundamental task that aligns anatomical structures between images. While CNNs perform well, they lack rotation equivariance - a rotated input does not produce a correspondingly rotated output. This hinders performance by failing to exploit the rotational symmetries inherent in anatomical structures, particularly in brain MRI. In this work, we integrate rotation-equivariant convolutions into deformable brain MRI registration networks. We evaluate this approach by replacing standard encoders with equivariant ones in three baseline architectures, testing on multiple public brain MRI datasets.
Our experiments demonstrate that equivariant encoders have three key advantages: 1) They achieve higher registration accuracy while reducing network parameters, confirming the benefit of this anatomical inductive bias. 2) They outperform baselines on rotated input pairs, demonstrating robustness to orientation variations common in clinical practice. 3) They show improved performance with less training data, indicating greater sample efficiency. Our results demonstrate that incorporating geometric priors is a critical step toward building more robust, accurate, and efficient registration models.
comment: Accepted at the 2026 International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) Poster 4-page paper presentation
☆ Open-Ended Instruction Realization with LLM-Enabled Multi-Planner Scheduling in Autonomous Vehicles
Most Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) research overlooks the maneuvering needs of passengers in autonomous driving (AD). Natural language offers an intuitive interface, yet translating passenger open-ended instructions into control signals, without sacrificing interpretability and traceability, remains a challenge. This study proposes an instruction-realization framework that leverages a large language model (LLM) to interpret instructions, generates executable scripts that schedule multiple model predictive control (MPC)-based motion planners based on real-time feedback, and converts planned trajectories into control signals. This scheduling-centric design decouples semantic reasoning from vehicle control at different timescales, establishing a transparent, traceable decision-making chain from high-level instructions to low-level actions. Due to the absence of high-fidelity evaluation tools, this study introduces a benchmark for open-ended instruction realization in a closed-loop setting. Comprehensive experiments reveal that the framework significantly improves task-completion rates over instruction-realization baselines, reduces LLM query costs, achieves safety and compliance on par with specialized AD approaches, and exhibits considerable tolerance to LLM inference latency. For more qualitative illustrations and a clearer understanding.
☆ Component-Adaptive and Lesion-Level Supervision for Improved Small Structure Segmentation in Brain MRI
We propose a unified objective function, termed CATMIL, that augments the base segmentation loss with two auxiliary supervision terms operating at different levels. The first term, Component-Adaptive Tversky, reweights voxel contributions based on connected components to balance the influence of lesions of different sizes. The second term, based on Multiple Instance Learning, introduces lesion-level supervision by encouraging the detection of each lesion instance. These terms are combined with the standard nnU-Net loss to jointly optimize voxel-level segmentation accuracy and lesion-level detection. We evaluate the proposed objective on the MSLesSeg dataset using a consistent nnU-Net framework and 5-fold cross-validation. The results show that CATMIL achieves the most balanced performance across segmentation accuracy, lesion detection, and error control. It improves Dice score (0.7834) and reduces boundary error compared to standard losses. More importantly, it substantially increases small lesion recall and reduces false negatives, while maintaining the lowest false positive volume among compared methods. These findings demonstrate that integrating component-level and lesion-level supervision within a unified objective provides an effective and practical approach for improving small lesion segmentation in highly imbalanced settings. All code and pretrained models are available at \href{https://github.com/luumsk/SmallLesionMRI}{this url}.
☆ Bridging Time and Space: Decoupled Spatio-Temporal Alignment for Video Grounding
Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding requires jointly localizing target objects across both temporal and spatial dimensions based on natural language queries, posing fundamental challenges for existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). We identify two core challenges: \textit{entangled spatio-temporal alignment}, arising from coupling two heterogeneous sub-tasks within the same autoregressive output space, and \textit{dual-domain visual token redundancy}, where target objects exhibit simultaneous temporal and spatial sparsity, rendering the overwhelming majority of visual tokens irrelevant to the grounding query. To address these, we propose \textbf{Bridge-STG}, an end-to-end framework that decouples temporal and spatial localization while maintaining semantic coherence. While decoupling is the natural solution to this entanglement, it risks creating a semantic gap between the temporal MLLM and the spatial decoder. Bridge-STG resolves this through two pivotal designs: the \textbf{Spatio-Temporal Semantic Bridging (STSB)} mechanism with Explicit Temporal Alignment (ETA) distills the MLLM's temporal reasoning context into enriched bridging queries as a robust semantic interface; and the \textbf{Query-Guided Spatial Localization (QGSL)} module leverages these queries to drive a purpose-built spatial decoder with multi-layer interactive queries and positive/negative frame sampling, jointly eliminating dual-domain visual token redundancy. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that Bridge-STG achieves state-of-the-art performance among MLLM-based methods. Bridge-STG improves average m\_vIoU from $26.4$ to $34.3$ on VidSTG and demonstrates strong cross-task transfer across various fine-grained video understanding tasks under a unified multi-task training regime.
☆ SearchAD: Large-Scale Rare Image Retrieval Dataset for Autonomous Driving CVPR 2026
Retrieving rare and safety-critical driving scenarios from large-scale datasets is essential for building robust autonomous driving (AD) systems. As dataset sizes continue to grow, the key challenge shifts from collecting more data to efficiently identifying the most relevant samples. We introduce SearchAD, a large-scale rare image retrieval dataset for AD containing over 423k frames drawn from 11 established datasets. SearchAD provides high-quality manual annotations of more than 513k bounding boxes covering 90 rare categories. It specifically targets the needle-in-a-haystack problem of locating extremely rare classes, with some appearing fewer than 50 times across the entire dataset. Unlike existing benchmarks, which focused on instance-level retrieval, SearchAD emphasizes semantic image retrieval with a well-defined data split, enabling text-to-image and image-to-image retrieval, few-shot learning, and fine-tuning of multi-modal retrieval models. Comprehensive evaluations show that text-based methods outperform image-based ones due to stronger inherent semantic grounding. While models directly aligning spatial visual features with language achieve the best zero-shot results, and our fine-tuning baseline significantly improves performance, absolute retrieval capabilities remain unsatisfactory. With a held-out test set on a public benchmark server, SearchAD establishes the first large-scale dataset for retrieval-driven data curation and long-tail perception research in AD: https://iis-esslingen.github.io/searchad/
comment: To be published in CVPR 2026
☆ PASK: Toward Intent-Aware Proactive Agents with Long-Term Memory
Zhifei Xie, Zongzheng Hu, Fangda Ye, Xin Zhang, Haobo Chai, Zihang Liu, Pengcheng Wu, Guibin Zhang, Yue Liao, Xiaobin Hu, Deheng Ye, Chunyan Miao, Shuicheng Yan
Proactivity is a core expectation for AGI. Prior work remains largely confined to laboratory settings, leaving a clear gap in real-world proactive agent: depth, complexity, ambiguity, precision and real-time constraints. We study this setting, where useful intervention requires inferring latent needs from ongoing context and grounding actions in evolving user memory under latency and long-horizon constraints. We first propose DD-MM-PAS (Demand Detection, Memory Modeling, Proactive Agent System) as a general paradigm for streaming proactive AI agent. We instantiate this paradigm in Pask, with streaming IntentFlow model for DD, a hybrid memory (workspace, user, global) for long-term MM, PAS infra framework and introduce how these components form a closed loop. We also introduce LatentNeeds-Bench, a real-world benchmark built from user-consented data and refined through thousands of rounds of human editing. Experiments show that IntentFlow matches leading Gemini3-Flash models under latency constraints, while identifying deeper user intent.
comment: Technical report; Work in progress
☆ Few-Shot Incremental 3D Object Detection in Dynamic Indoor Environments CVPR 2026
Incremental 3D object perception is a critical step toward embodied intelligence in dynamic indoor environments. However, existing incremental 3D detection methods rely on extensive annotations of novel classes for satisfactory performance. To address this limitation, we propose FI3Det, a Few-shot Incremental 3D Detection framework that enables efficient 3D perception with only a few novel samples by leveraging vision-language models (VLMs) to learn knowledge of unseen categories. FI3Det introduces a VLM-guided unknown object learning module in the base stage to enhance perception of unseen categories. Specifically, it employs VLMs to mine unknown objects and extract comprehensive representations, including 2D semantic features and class-agnostic 3D bounding boxes. To mitigate noise in these representations, a weighting mechanism is further designed to re-weight the contributions of point- and box-level features based on their spatial locations and feature consistency within each box. Moreover, FI3Det proposes a gated multimodal prototype imprinting module, where category prototypes are constructed from aligned 2D semantic and 3D geometric features to compute classification scores, which are then fused via a multimodal gating mechanism for novel object detection. As the first framework for few-shot incremental 3D object detection, we establish both batch and sequential evaluation settings on two datasets, ScanNet V2 and SUN RGB-D, where FI3Det achieves strong and consistent improvements over baseline methods. Code is available at https://github.com/zyrant/FI3Det.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026
☆ SAT: Selective Aggregation Transformer for Image Super-Resolution CVPR2026
Transformer-based approaches have revolutionized image super-resolution by modeling long-range dependencies. However, the quadratic computational complexity of vanilla self-attention mechanisms poses significant challenges, often leading to compromises between efficiency and global context exploitation. Recent window-based attention methods mitigate this by localizing computations, but they often yield restricted receptive fields. To mitigate these limitations, we propose Selective Aggregation Transformer (SAT). This novel transformer efficiently captures long-range dependencies, leading to an enlarged model receptive field by selectively aggregating key-value matrices (reducing the number of tokens by 97\%) via our Density-driven Token Aggregation algorithm while maintaining the full resolution of the query matrix. This design significantly reduces computational costs, resulting in lower complexity and enabling scalable global interactions without compromising reconstruction fidelity. SAT identifies and represents each cluster with a single aggregation token, utilizing density and isolation metrics to ensure that critical high-frequency details are preserved. Experimental results demonstrate that SAT outperforms the state-of-the-art method PFT by up to 0.22dB, while the total number of FLOPs can be reduced by up to 27\%.
comment: Accepted to CVPR2026 (Findings Track)
☆ MotionScape: A Large-Scale Real-World Highly Dynamic UAV Video Dataset for World Models
Recent advances in world models have demonstrated strong capabilities in simulating physical reality, making them an increasingly important foundation for embodied intelligence. For UAV agents in particular, accurate prediction of complex 3D dynamics is essential for autonomous navigation and robust decision-making in unconstrained environments. However, under the highly dynamic camera trajectories typical of UAV views, existing world models often struggle to maintain spatiotemporal physical consistency. A key reason lies in the distribution bias of current training data: most existing datasets exhibit restricted 2.5D motion patterns, such as ground-constrained autonomous driving scenes or relatively smooth human-centric egocentric videos, and therefore lack realistic high-dynamic 6-DoF UAV motion priors. To address this gap, we present MotionScape, a large-scale real-world UAV-view video dataset with highly dynamic motion for world modeling. MotionScape contains over 30 hours of 4K UAV-view videos, totaling more than 4.5M frames. This novel dataset features semantically and geometrically aligned training samples, where diverse real-world UAV videos are tightly coupled with accurate 6-DoF camera trajectories and fine-grained natural language descriptions. To build the dataset, we develop an automated multi-stage processing pipeline that integrates CLIP-based relevance filtering, temporal segmentation, robust visual SLAM for trajectory recovery, and large-language-model-driven semantic annotation. Extensive experiments show that incorporating such semantically and geometrically aligned annotations effectively improves the ability of existing world models to simulate complex 3D dynamics and handle large viewpoint shifts, thereby benefiting decision-making and planning for UAV agents in complex environments. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/Thelegendzz/MotionScape
☆ SceneScribe-1M: A Large-Scale Video Dataset with Comprehensive Geometric and Semantic Annotations CVPR 2026
Yunnan Wang, Kecheng Zheng, Jianyuan Wang, Minghao Chen, David Novotny, Christian Rupprecht, Yinghao Xu, Xing Zhu, Wenjun Zeng, Xin Jin, Yujun Shen
The convergence of 3D geometric perception and video synthesis has created an unprecedented demand for large-scale video data that is rich in both semantic and spatio-temporal information. While existing datasets have advanced either 3D understanding or video generation, a significant gap remains in providing a unified resource that supports both domains at scale. To bridge this chasm, we introduce SceneScribe-1M, a new large-scale, multi-modal video dataset. It comprises one million in-the-wild videos, each meticulously annotated with detailed textual descriptions, precise camera parameters, dense depth maps, and consistent 3D point tracks. We demonstrate the versatility and value of SceneScribe-1M by establishing benchmarks across a wide array of downstream tasks, including monocular depth estimation, scene reconstruction, and dynamic point tracking, as well as generative tasks such as text-to-video synthesis, with or without camera control. By open-sourcing SceneScribe-1M, we aim to provide a comprehensive benchmark and a catalyst for research, fostering the development of models that can both perceive the dynamic 3D world and generate controllable, realistic video content.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026
☆ DP-DeGauss: Dynamic Probabilistic Gaussian Decomposition for Egocentric 4D Scene Reconstruction
Egocentric video is crucial for next-generation 4D scene reconstruction, with applications in AR/VR and embodied AI. However, reconstructing dynamic first-person scenes is challenging due to complex ego-motion, occlusions, and hand-object interactions. Existing decomposition methods are ill-suited, assuming fixed viewpoints or merging dynamics into a single foreground. To address these limitations, we introduce DP-DeGauss, a dynamic probabilistic Gaussian decomposition framework for egocentric 4D reconstruction. Our method initializes a unified 3D Gaussian set from COLMAP priors, augments each with a learnable category probability, and dynamically routes them into specialized deformation branches for background, hands, or object modeling. We employ category-specific masks for better disentanglement and introduce brightness and motion-flow control to improve static rendering and dynamic reconstruction. Extensive experiments show that DP-DeGauss outperforms baselines by +1.70dB in PSNR on average with SSIM and LPIPS gains. More importantly, our framework achieves the first and state-of-the-art disentanglement of background, hand, and object components, enabling explicit, fine-grained separation, paving the way for more intuitive ego scene understanding and editing.
☆ Object-Centric Stereo Ranging for Autonomous Driving: From Dense Disparity to Census-Based Template Matching
Accurate depth estimation is critical for autonomous driving perception systems, particularly for long range vehicle detection on highways. Traditional dense stereo matching methods such as Block Matching (BM) and Semi Global Matching (SGM) produce per pixel disparity maps but suffer from high computational cost, sensitivity to radiometric differences between stereo cameras, and poor accuracy at long range where disparity values are small. In this report, we present a comprehensive stereo ranging system that integrates three complementary depth estimation approaches: dense BM/SGM disparity, object centric Census based template matching, and monocular geometric priors, within a unified detection ranging tracking pipeline. Our key contribution is a novel object centric Census based template matching algorithm that performs GPU accelerated sparse stereo matching directly within detected bounding boxes, employing a far close divide and conquer strategy, forward backward verification, occlusion aware sampling, and robust multi block aggregation. We further describe an online calibration refinement framework that combines auto rectification offset search, radar stereo voting based disparity correction, and object level radar stereo association for continuous extrinsic drift compensation. The complete system achieves real time performance through asynchronous GPU pipeline design and delivers robust ranging across diverse driving conditions including nighttime, rain, and varying illumination.
comment: 10 pages, 4 figures
☆ Lighting-grounded Video Generation with Renderer-based Agent Reasoning CVPR 2026
Diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in video generation, but their controllability remains a major limitation. Key scene factors such as layout, lighting, and camera trajectory are often entangled or only weakly modeled, restricting their applicability in domains like filmmaking and virtual production where explicit scene control is essential. We present LiVER, a diffusion-based framework for scene-controllable video generation. To achieve this, we introduce a novel framework that conditions video synthesis on explicit 3D scene properties, supported by a new large-scale dataset with dense annotations of object layout, lighting, and camera parameters. Our method disentangles these properties by rendering control signals from a unified 3D representation. We propose a lightweight conditioning module and a progressive training strategy to integrate these signals into a foundational video diffusion model, ensuring stable convergence and high fidelity. Our framework enables a wide range of applications, including image-to-video and video-to-video synthesis where the underlying 3D scene is fully editable. To further enhance usability, we develop a scene agent that automatically translates high-level user instructions into the required 3D control signals. Experiments show that LiVER achieves state-of-the-art photorealism and temporal consistency while enabling precise, disentangled control over scene factors, setting a new standard for controllable video generation.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026
☆ DSCA: Dynamic Subspace Concept Alignment for Lifelong VLM Editing CVPR 2026
Model editing aims to update knowledge to add new concepts and change relevant information without retraining. Lifelong editing is a challenging task, prone to disrupting previously learned concepts, especially for Vision Language Models (VLMs), because sequential edits can lead to degraded reasoning and cross modal misalignment. Existing VLM knowledge editing methods based on gated adapters, activation edits, and parameter merging techniques address catastrophic forgetting seen in full fine tuning; however, they still operate in the shared representation space of the VLM, where concepts are entangled, so edits interfere with other non relevant concepts. We hypothesize that this instability persists because current methods algorithmically control edits via optimization rather than structurally separating knowledge. We introduce Dynamic Subspace Concept Alignment (DSCA) which by design mitigates this limitation by decomposing the representation space into a set of orthogonal semantic subspaces and proposing edits only in those transformed spaces. These subspaces are obtained through incremental clustering and PCA on joint vision language representations. This process structurally isolates concepts, enabling precise, non interfering edits by turning isolation from a soft training objective into an architectural property. The surgical edits are guided by a multi term loss function for maintaining task fidelity, edit locality, and cross modal alignment. With the base model frozen, our method achieves 98 percent single edit success, remains over 95 percent after 1000 sequential edits, lowers hallucination by 3 to 5 percent, and achieves the best backward transfer (BWT) scores on continual instruction tuning benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate DSCA state of the art stability and knowledge retention capability in continual lifelong editing across various datasets and benchmarks.
comment: Accepted at CVPR 2026
☆ TOOLCAD: Exploring Tool-Using Large Language Models in Text-to-CAD Generation with Reinforcement Learning
Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is an expert-level task that relies on long-horizon reasoning and coherent modeling actions. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable advancements in enabling language agents to tackle real-world tasks. Notably, there has been no investigation into how tool-using LLMs optimally interact with CAD engines, hindering the emergence of LLM-based agentic text-to-CAD modeling systems. We propose ToolCAD, a novel agentic CAD framework deploying LLMs as tool-using agents for text-to-CAD generation. Furthermore, we introduce an interactive CAD modeling gym to rollout reasoning and tool-augmented interaction trajectories with the CAD engine, incorporating hybrid feedback and human supervision. Meanwhile, an end-to-end post-training strategy is presented to enable the LLM agent to elicit refined CAD Modeling Chain of Thought (CAD-CoT) and evolve into proficient CAD tool-using agents via online curriculum reinforcement learning. Our findings demonstrate ToolCAD fills the gap in adopting and training open-source LLMs for CAD tool-using agents, enabling them to perform comparably to proprietary models, paving the way for more accessible and robust autonomous text-to-CAD modeling systems.
☆ ImVideoEdit: Image-learning Video Editing via 2D Spatial Difference Attention Blocks
Jiayang Xu, Fan Zhuo, Majun Zhang, Changhao Pan, Zehan Wang, Siyu Chen, Xiaoda Yang, Tao Jin, Zhou Zhao
Current video editing models often rely on expensive paired video data, which limits their practical scalability. In essence, most video editing tasks can be formulated as a decoupled spatiotemporal process, where the temporal dynamics of the pretrained model are preserved while spatial content is selectively and precisely modified. Based on this insight, we propose ImVideoEdit, an efficient framework that learns video editing capabilities entirely from image pairs. By freezing the pre-trained 3D attention modules and treating images as single-frame videos, we decouple the 2D spatial learning process to help preserve the original temporal dynamics. The core of our approach is a Predict-Update Spatial Difference Attention module that progressively extracts and injects spatial differences. Rather than relying on rigid external masks, we incorporate a Text-Guided Dynamic Semantic Gating mechanism for adaptive and implicit text-driven modifications. Despite training on only 13K image pairs for 5 epochs with exceptionally low computational overhead, ImVideoEdit achieves editing fidelity and temporal consistency comparable to larger models trained on extensive video datasets.
☆ WorldMAP: Bootstrapping Vision-Language Navigation Trajectory Prediction with Generative World Models
Vision-language models (VLMs) and generative world models are opening new opportunities for embodied navigation. VLMs are increasingly used as direct planners or trajectory predictors, while world models support look-ahead reasoning by imagining future views. Yet predicting a reliable trajectory from a single egocentric observation remains challenging. Current VLMs often generate unstable trajectories, and world models, though able to synthesize plausible futures, do not directly provide the grounded signals needed for navigation learning. This raises a central question: how can generated futures be turned into supervision for grounded trajectory prediction? We present WorldMAP, a teacher--student framework that converts world-model-generated futures into persistent semantic-spatial structure and planning-derived supervision. Its world-model-driven teacher builds semantic-spatial memory from generated videos, grounds task-relevant targets and obstacles, and produces trajectory pseudo-labels through explicit planning. A lightweight student with a multi-hypothesis trajectory head is then trained to predict navigation trajectories directly from vision-language inputs. On Target-Bench, WorldMAP achieves the best ADE and FDE among compared methods, reducing ADE by 18.0% and FDE by 42.1% relative to the best competing baseline, while lifting a small open-source VLM to DTW performance competitive with proprietary models. More broadly, the results suggest that, in embodied navigation, the value of world models may lie less in supplying action-ready imagined evidence than in synthesizing structured supervision for navigation learning.
☆ Shortcut Learning in Glomerular AI: Adversarial Penalties Hurt, Entropy Helps IEEE
Stain variability is a pervasive source of distribution shift and potential shortcut learning in renal pathology AI. We ask whether lupus nephritis glomerular lesion classifiers exploit stain as a shortcut, and how to mitigate such bias without stain or site labels. We curate a multi-center, multi-stain dataset of 9{,}674 glomerular patches (224$\times$224) from 365 WSIs across three centers and four stains (PAS, H\&E, Jones, Trichrome), labeled as proliferative vs.\ non-proliferative. We evaluate Bayesian CNN and ViT backbones with Monte Carlo dropout in three settings: (1) stain-only classification; (2) a dual-head model jointly predicting lesion and stain with supervised stain loss; and (3) a dual-head model with label-free stain regularization via entropy maximization on the stain head. In (1), stain identity is trivially learnable, confirming a strong candidate shortcut. In (2), varying the strength and sign of stain supervision strongly modulates stain performance but leaves lesion metrics essentially unchanged, indicating no measurable stain-driven shortcut learning on this multi-stain, multi-center dataset, while overly adversarial stain penalties inflate predictive uncertainty. In (3), entropy-based regularization holds stain predictions near chance without degrading lesion accuracy or calibration. Overall, a carefully curated multi-stain dataset can be inherently robust to stain shortcuts, and a Bayesian dual-head architecture with label-free entropy regularization offers a simple, deployment-friendly safeguard against potential stain-related drift in glomerular AI.
comment: Accepted at IEEE ISBI 2026. Hien Nguyen and Chandra Mohan jointly supervised this work
☆ Generative 3D Gaussian Splatting for Arbitrary-ResolutionAtmospheric Downscaling and Forecasting
While AI-based numerical weather prediction (NWP) enables rapid forecasting, generating high-resolution outputs remains computationally demanding due to limited multi-scale adaptability and inefficient data representations. We propose the 3D Gaussian splatting-based scale-aware vision transformer (GSSA-ViT), a novel framework for arbitrary-resolution forecasting and flexible downscaling of high-dimensional atmospheric fields. Specifically, latitude-longitude grid points are treated as centers of 3D Gaussians. A generative 3D Gaussian prediction scheme is introduced to estimate key parameters, including covariance, attributes, and opacity, for unseen samples, improving generalization and mitigating overfitting. In addition, a scale-aware attention module is designed to capture cross-scale dependencies, enabling the model to effectively integrate information across varying downscaling ratios and support continuous resolution adaptation. To our knowledge, this is the first NWP approach that combines generative 3D Gaussian modeling with scale-aware attention for unified multi-scale prediction. Experiments on ERA5 show that the proposed method accurately forecasts 87 atmospheric variables at arbitrary resolutions, while evaluations on ERA5 and CMIP6 demonstrate its superior performance in downscaling tasks. The proposed framework provides an efficient and scalable solution for high-resolution, multi-scale atmospheric prediction and downscaling. Code is available at: https://github.com/binbin2xs/weather-GS.
comment: 20 pages, 13 figures
☆ Stitch4D: Sparse Multi-Location 4D Urban Reconstruction via Spatio-Temporal Interpolation
Dynamic urban environments are often captured by cameras placed at spatially separated locations with little or no view overlap. However, most existing 4D reconstruction methods assume densely overlapping views. When applied to such sparse observations, these methods fail to reconstruct intermediate regions and often introduce temporal artifacts. To address this practical yet underexplored sparse multi-location setting, we propose Stitch4D, a unified 4D reconstruction framework that explicitly compensates for missing spatial coverage in sparse observations. Stitch4D (i) synthesizes intermediate bridge views to densify spatial constraints and improve spatial coverage, and (ii) jointly optimizes real and synthesized observations within a unified coordinate frame under explicit inter-location consistency constraints. By restoring intermediate coverage before optimization, Stitch4D prevents geometric collapse and reconstructs coherent geometry and smooth scene dynamics even in sparsely observed environments. To evaluate this setting, we introduce Urban Sparse 4D (U-S4D), a CARLA-based benchmark designed to assess spatiotemporal alignment under sparse multi-location configurations. Experimental results on U-S4D show that Stitch4D surpasses representative 4D reconstruction baselines and achieves superior visual quality. These results indicate that recovering intermediate spatial coverage is essential for stable 4D reconstruction in sparse urban environments.
☆ Tarot-SAM3: Training-free SAM3 for Any Referring Expression Segmentation
Referring Expression Segmentation (RES) aims to segment image regions described by natural-language expressions, serving as a bridge between vision and language understanding. Existing RES methods, however, rely heavily on large annotated datasets and are limited to either explicit or implicit expressions, hindering their ability to generalize to any referring expression. Recently, the Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3) has shown impressive robustness in Promptable Concept Segmentation. Nonetheless, applying it to RES remains challenging: (1) SAM3 struggles with longer or implicit expressions; (2) naive coupling of SAM3 with a multimodal large language model (MLLM) makes the final results overly dependent on the MLLM's reasoning capability, without enabling refinement of SAM3's segmentation outputs. To this end, we present Tarot-SAM3, a novel training-free framework that can accurately segment from any referring expression. Specifically, Tarot-SAM3 consists of two key phases. First, the Expression Reasoning Interpreter (ERI) phase introduces reasoning-assisted prompt options to support structured expression parsing and evaluation-aware rephrasing. This transforms arbitrary queries into robust heterogeneous prompts for generating reliable masks with SAM3. Second, the Mask Self-Refining (MSR) phase selects the best mask across prompt types and performs self-refinement by leveraging rich feature relationships from DINOv3 to compare discriminative regions among ERI outputs. It then infers region affiliation to the target, thereby correcting over- and under-segmentation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Tarot-SAM3 achieves strong performance on both explicit and implicit RES benchmarks, as well as open-world scenarios. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each phase.
comment: Under review
☆ Mitigating Entangled Steering in Large Vision-Language Models for Hallucination Reduction
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable success across cross-modal tasks but remain hindered by hallucinations, producing textual outputs inconsistent with visual content. Existing methods mitigate hallucinations but often alter generation behavior, resulting in shorter outputs and shifted token distributions, especially in latent space steering approaches. We identify that this issue stems from entangled steering signals, where suppressing hallucinations inadvertently disrupts the model's intrinsic generation behavior. To address this, we propose MESA, an effective plug-and-play framework that performs controlled and selective latent intervention for hallucination mitigation. Specifically, MESA targets hallucination-relevant responses while preserving the model's original token distribution, enabling effective hallucination reduction without compromising generation behavior. Extensive experiments across diverse generative and discriminative benchmarks demonstrate that MESA consistently reduces hallucinations while better preserving generation behavior, outperforming prior methods across multiple LVLM families.
☆ ParkSense: Where Should a Delivery Driver Park? Leveraging Idle AV Compute and Vision-Language Models
Finding parking consumes a disproportionate share of food delivery time, yet no system addresses precise parking-spot selection relative to merchant entrances. We propose ParkSense, a framework that repurposes idle compute during low-risk AV states -- queuing at red lights, traffic congestion, parking-lot crawl -- to run a Vision-Language Model (VLM) on pre-cached satellite and street view imagery, identifying entrances and legal parking zones. We formalize the Delivery-Aware Precision Parking (DAPP) problem, show that a quantized 7B VLM completes inference in 4-8 seconds on HW4-class hardware, and estimate annual per-driver income gains of 3,000-8,000 USD in the U.S. Five open research directions are identified at this unexplored intersection of autonomous driving, computer vision, and last-mile logistics.
comment: 7 pages, 3 tables. No university resources were used for this work
☆ Kuramoto Oscillatory Phase Encoding: Neuro-inspired Synchronization for Improved Learning Efficiency
Spatiotemporal neural dynamics and oscillatory synchronization are widely implicated in biological information processing and have been hypothesized to support flexible coordination such as feature binding. By contrast, most deep learning architectures represent and propagate information through activation values, neglecting the joint dynamics of rate and phase. In this work, we introduce Kuramoto oscillatory Phase Encoding (KoPE) as an additional, evolving phase state to Vision Transformers, incorporating a neuro-inspired synchronization mechanism to advance learning efficiency. We show that KoPE can improve training, parameter, and data efficiency of vision models through synchronization-enhanced structure learning. Moreover, KoPE benefits tasks requiring structured understanding, including semantic and panoptic segmentation, representation alignment with language, and few-shot abstract visual reasoning (ARC-AGI). Theoretical analysis and empirical verification further suggest that KoPE can accelerate attention concentration for learning efficiency. These results indicate that synchronization can serve as a scalable, neuro-inspired mechanism for advancing state-of-the-art neural network models.
☆ PanoSAM2: Lightweight Distortion- and Memory-aware Adaptions of SAM2 for 360 Video Object Segmentation
360 video object segmentation (360VOS) aims to predict temporally-consistent masks in 360 videos, offering full-scene coverage, benefiting applications, such as VR/AR and embodied AI. Learning 360VOS model is nontrivial due to the lack of high-quality labeled dataset. Recently, Segment Anything Models (SAMs), especially SAM2 -- with its design of memory module -- shows strong, promptable VOS capability. However, directly using SAM2 for 360VOS yields implausible results as 360 videos suffer from the projection distortion, semantic inconsistency of left-right sides, and sparse object mask information in SAM2's memory. To this end, we propose PanoSAM2, a novel 360VOS framework based on our lightweight distortion- and memory-aware adaptation strategies of SAM2 to achieve reliable 360VOS while retaining SAM2's user-friendly prompting design. Concretely, to tackle the projection distortion and semantic inconsistency issues, we propose a Pano-Aware Decoder with seam-consistent receptive fields and iterative distortion refinement to maintain continuity across the 0/360 degree boundary. Meanwhile, a Distortion-Guided Mask Loss is introduced to weight pixels by distortion magnitude, stressing stretched regions and boundaries. To address the object sparsity issue, we propose a Long-Short Memory Module to maintain a compact long-term object pointer to re-instantiate and align short-term memories, thereby enhancing temporal coherence. Extensive experiments show that PanoSAM2 yields substantial gains over SAM2: +5.6 on 360VOTS and +6.7 on PanoVOS, showing the effectiveness of our method.
☆ AnomalyAgent: Agentic Industrial Anomaly Synthesis via Tool-Augmented Reinforcement Learning
Industrial anomaly generation is a crucial method for alleviating the data scarcity problem in anomaly detection tasks. Most existing anomaly synthesis methods rely on single-step generation mechanisms, lacking complex reasoning and iterative optimization capabilities, making it difficult to generate anomaly samples with high semantic realism. We propose AnomalyAgent, an anomaly synthesis agent with self-reflection, knowledge retrieval, and iterative refinement capabilities, aiming to generate realistic and diverse anomalies. Specifically, AnomalyAgent is equipped with five tools: Prompt Generation (PG), Image Generation (IG), Quality Evaluation (QE), Knowledge Retrieval (KR), and Mask Generation (MG), enabling closed-loop optimization. To improve decision-making and self-reflection, we construct structured trajectories from real anomaly images and design a two-stage training framework: supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning. This process is driven by a three-part reward mechanism: (1) task rewards to supervise the quality and location rationality of generated anomalies; (2) reflection rewards to train the model's ability to improve anomaly synthesis prompt; (3) behavioral rewards to ensure adherence to the trajectory. On the MVTec-AD dataset, AnomalyAgent achieves IS/IC-L of 2.10/0.33 for anomaly generation, 57.0% classification accuracy using ResNet34, and 99.3%/74.2% AP at the image/pixel level using a simple UNet, surpassing all zero-shot SOTA methods. The code and data will be made publicly available.
☆ Sampling-Aware 3D Spatial Analysis in Multiplexed Imaging IEEE
Highly multiplexed microscopy enables rich spatial characterization of tissues at single-cell resolution, yet most analyses rely on two-dimensional sections despite inherently three-dimensional tissue organization. Acquiring dense volumetric data in spatial proteomics remains costly and technically challenging, leaving practitioners to choose between 2D sections or 3D serial sections under limited imaging budgets. In this work, we study how sampling geometry impacts the stability of commonly used spatial statistics, and we introduce a geometry-aware reconstruction module that enables sparse yet consistent 3D analysis from serial sections. Using controlled simulations, we show that planar sampling reliably recovers global cell-type abundance but exhibits high variance for local statistics such as cell clustering and cell-cell interactions, particularly for rare or spatially localized populations. We observe consistent behavior in real multiplexed datasets, where interaction metrics and neighborhood relationships fluctuate substantially across individual sections. To support sparse 3D analysis in practice, we present a reconstruction approach that links cell projections across adjacent sections using phenotype and proximity constraints and recovers single-cell 3D centroids using cell-type-specific shape priors. We further analyze the trade-off between section spacing, coverage, and redundancy, identifying acquisition regimes that maximize reconstruction utility under fixed imaging budgets. We validate the reconstruction module on a public imaging mass cytometry dataset with dense axial sampling and demonstrate its downstream utility on an in-house CODEX dataset by enabling structure-level 3D analyses that are unreliable in 2D. Together, our results provide diagnostic tools and practical guidance for deciding when 2D sampling suffices and when sparse 3D reconstruction is warranted.
comment: Accepted to The 11th IEEE Workshop on Computer Vision for Multimodal Microscopy Image Analysis (CVMI), a CVPR 2026 workshop
☆ Reinforcement-Guided Synthetic Data Generation for Privacy-Sensitive Identity Recognition
High-fidelity generative models are increasingly needed in privacy-sensitive scenarios, where access to data is severely restricted due to regulatory and copyright constraints. This scarcity hampers model development--ironically, in settings where generative models are most needed to compensate for the lack of data. This creates a self-reinforcing challenge: limited data leads to poor generative models, which in turn fail to mitigate data scarcity. To break this cycle, we propose a reinforcement-guided synthetic data generation framework that adapts general-domain generative priors to privacy-sensitive identity recognition tasks. We first perform a cold-start adaptation to align a pretrained generator with the target domain, establishing semantic relevance and initial fidelity. Building on this foundation, we introduce a multi-objective reward that jointly optimizes semantic consistency, coverage diversity, and expression richness, guiding the generator to produce both realistic and task-effective samples. During downstream training, a dynamic sample selection mechanism further prioritizes high-utility synthetic samples, enabling adaptive data scaling and improved domain alignment. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly improves both generation fidelity and classification accuracy, while also exhibiting strong generalization to novel categories in small-data regimes.
☆ ReconPhys: Reconstruct Appearance and Physical Attributes from Single Video
Boyuan Wang, Xiaofeng Wang, Yongkang Li, Zheng Zhu, Yifan Chang, Angen Ye, Guosheng Zhao, Chaojun Ni, Guan Huang, Yijie Ren, Yueqi Duan, Xingang Wang
Reconstructing non-rigid objects with physical plausibility remains a significant challenge. Existing approaches leverage differentiable rendering for per-scene optimization, recovering geometry and dynamics but requiring expensive tuning or manual annotation, which limits practicality and generalizability. To address this, we propose ReconPhys, the first feedforward framework that jointly learns physical attribute estimation and 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstruction from a single monocular video. Our method employs a dual-branch architecture trained via a self-supervised strategy, eliminating the need for ground-truth physics labels. Given a video sequence, ReconPhys simultaneously infers geometry, appearance, and physical attributes. Experiments on a large-scale synthetic dataset demonstrate superior performance: our method achieves 21.64 PSNR in future prediction compared to 13.27 by state-of-the-art optimization baselines, while reducing Chamfer Distance from 0.349 to 0.004. Crucially, ReconPhys enables fast inference (<1 second) versus hours required by existing methods, facilitating rapid generation of simulation-ready assets for robotics and graphics.
☆ FlowGuard: Towards Lightweight In-Generation Safety Detection for Diffusion Models via Linear Latent Decoding
Diffusion-based image generation models have advanced rapidly but pose a safety risk due to their potential to generate Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content. Existing NSFW detection methods mainly operate either before or after image generation. Pre-generation methods rely on text prompts and struggle with the gap between prompt safety and image safety. Post-generation methods apply classifiers to final outputs, but they are poorly suited to intermediate noisy images. To address this, we introduce FlowGuard, a cross-model in-generation detection framework that inspects intermediate denoising steps. This is particularly challenging in latent diffusion, where early-stage noise obscures visual signals. FlowGuard employs a novel linear approximation for latent decoding and leverages a curriculum learning approach to stabilize training. By detecting unsafe content early, FlowGuard reduces unnecessary diffusion steps to cut computational costs. Our cross-model benchmark spanning nine diffusion-based backbones shows the effectiveness of FlowGuard for in-generation NSFW detection in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings, outperforming existing methods by over 30% in F1 score while delivering transformative efficiency gains, including slashing peak GPU memory demand by over 97% and projection time from 8.1 seconds to 0.2 seconds compared to standard VAE decoding.
☆ Are GUI Agents Focused Enough? Automated Distraction via Semantic-level UI Element Injection
Wenkui Yang, Chao Jin, Haisu Zhu, Weilin Luo, Derek Yuen, Kun Shao, Huaibo Huang, Junxian Duan, Jie Cao, Ran He
Existing red-teaming studies on GUI agents have important limitations. Adversarial perturbations typically require white-box access, which is unavailable for commercial systems, while prompt injection is increasingly mitigated by stronger safety alignment. To study robustness under a more practical threat model, we propose Semantic-level UI Element Injection, a red-teaming setting that overlays safety-aligned and harmless UI elements onto screenshots to misdirect the agent's visual grounding. Our method uses a modular Editor-Overlapper-Victim pipeline and an iterative search procedure that samples multiple candidate edits, keeps the best cumulative overlay, and adapts future prompt strategies based on previous failures. Across five victim models, our optimized attacks improve attack success rate by up to 4.4x over random injection on the strongest victims. Moreover, elements optimized on one source model transfer effectively to other target models, indicating model-agnostic vulnerabilities. After the first successful attack, the victim still clicks the attacker-controlled element in more than 15% of later independent trials, versus below 1% for random injection, showing that the injected element acts as a persistent attractor rather than simple visual clutter.
comment: 44 pages, 10 figures, public code will be available at https://github.com/HashTAG00002/UI-Injection
☆ LPM 1.0: Video-based Character Performance Model
Ailing Zeng, Casper Yang, Chauncey Ge, Eddie Zhang, Garvey Xu, Gavin Lin, Gilbert Gu, Jeremy Pi, Leo Li, Mingyi Shi, Sheng Bi, Steven Tang, Thorn Hang, Tobey Guo, Vincent Li, Xin Tong, Yikang Li, Yuchen Sun, Yue, Zhao, Yuhan Lu, Yuwei Li, Zane Zhang, Zeshi Yang, Zi Ye
Performance, the externalization of intent, emotion, and personality through visual, vocal, and temporal behavior, is what makes a character alive. Learning such performance from video is a promising alternative to traditional 3D pipelines. However, existing video models struggle to jointly achieve high expressiveness, real-time inference, and long-horizon identity stability, a tension we call the performance trilemma. Conversation is the most comprehensive performance scenario, as characters simultaneously speak, listen, react, and emote while maintaining identity over time. To address this, we present LPM 1.0 (Large Performance Model), focusing on single-person full-duplex audio-visual conversational performance. Concretely, we build a multimodal human-centric dataset through strict filtering, speaking-listening audio-video pairing, performance understanding, and identity-aware multi-reference extraction; train a 17B-parameter Diffusion Transformer (Base LPM) for highly controllable, identity-consistent performance through multimodal conditioning; and distill it into a causal streaming generator (Online LPM) for low-latency, infinite-length interaction. At inference, given a character image with identity-aware references, LPM 1.0 generates listening videos from user audio and speaking videos from synthesized audio, with text prompts for motion control, all at real-time speed with identity-stable, infinite-length generation. LPM 1.0 thus serves as a visual engine for conversational agents, live streaming characters, and game NPCs. To systematically evaluate this setting, we propose LPM-Bench, the first benchmark for interactive character performance. LPM 1.0 achieves state-of-the-art results across all evaluated dimensions while maintaining real-time inference.
comment: 43 pages, 15 figures, 2 tables. Project page: https://large-performance-model.github.io
☆ AgriChain Visually Grounded Expert Verified Reasoning for Interpretable Agricultural Vision Language Models
Accurate and interpretable plant disease diagnosis remains a major challenge for vision-language models (VLMs) in real-world agriculture. We introduce AgriChain, a dataset of approximately 11,000 expert-curated leaf images spanning diverse crops and pathologies, each paired with (i) a disease label, (ii) a calibrated confidence score (High/Medium/Low), and (iii) an expert-verified chain-of-thought (CoT) rationale. Draft explanations were first generated by GPT-4o and then verified by a professional agricultural engineer using standardized descriptors (e.g., lesion color, margin, and distribution). We fine-tune Qwen2.5-VL-3B on AgriChain, resulting in a specialized model termed AgriChain-VL3B, to jointly predict diseases and generate visually grounded reasoning. On a 1,000-image test set, our CoT-supervised model achieves 73.1% top-1 accuracy (macro F1 = 0.466; weighted F1 = 0.655), outperforming strong baselines including Gemini 1.5 Flash, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT-4o Mini. The generated explanations align closely with expert reasoning, consistently referencing key visual cues. These findings demonstrate that expert-verified reasoning supervision significantly enhances both accuracy and interpretability, bridging the gap between generic multimodal models and human expertise, and advancing trustworthy, globally deployable AI for sustainable agriculture. The dataset and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/hazzanabeel12-netizen/agrichain
comment: 9 pages
☆ HAWK: Head Importance-Aware Visual Token Pruning in Multimodal Models CVPR 2026
Qihui Zhu, Tao Zhang, Yuchen Wang, Zijian Wen, Mengjie Zhang, Shuangwu Chen, Xiaobin Tan, Jian Yang, Yang Liu, Zhenhua Dong, Xianzhi Yu, Yinfei Pan
In multimodal large language models (MLLMs), the surge of visual tokens significantly increases the inference time and computational overhead, making them impractical for real-time or resource-constrained applications. Visual token pruning is a promising strategy for reducing the cost of MLLM inference by removing redundant visual tokens. Existing research usually assumes that all attention heads contribute equally to the visual interpretation. However, our study reveals that different heads may capture distinct visual semantics and inherently play distinct roles in visual processing. In light of this observation, we propose HAWK, a head importance-aware visual token pruning method that perceives the varying importance of attention heads in visual tasks to maximize the retention of crucial tokens. By leveraging head importance weights and text-guided attention to assess visual token significance, HAWK effectively retains task-relevant visual tokens while removing redundant ones. The proposed HAWK is entirely training-free and can be seamlessly applied to various MLLMs. Extensive experiments on multiple mainstream vision-language benchmarks demonstrate that HAWK achieves state-of-the-art accuracy. When applied to Qwen2.5-VL, HAWK retains 96.0% of the original accuracy after pruning 80.2% of the visual tokens. Additionally, it reduces end-to-end latency to 74.4% of the original and further decreases GPU memory usage across the tested models. The code is available at https://github.com/peppery77/HAWK.git.
comment: CVPR 2026
☆ The Weaponization of Computer Vision: Tracing Military-Surveillance Ties through Conference Sponsorship
Computer vision, a core domain of artificial intelligence (AI), is the field that enables the computational analysis, understanding, and generation of visual data. Despite being historically rooted in military funding and increasingly deployed in warfare, the field tends to position itself as a neutral, purely technical endeavor, failing to engage in discussions about its dual-use applications. Yet it has been reported that computer vision systems are being systematically weaponized to assist in technologies that inflict harm, such as surveillance or warfare. Expanding on these concerns, we study the extent to which computer vision research is being used in the military and surveillance domains. We do so by collecting a dataset of tech companies with financial ties to the field's central research exchange platform: conferences. Conference sponsorship, we argue, not only serves as strong evidence of a company's investment in the field but also provides a privileged position for shaping its trajectory. By investigating sponsors' activities, we reveal that 44% of them have a direct connection with military or surveillance applications. We extend our analysis through two case studies in which we discuss the opportunities and limitations of sponsorship as a means for uncovering technological weaponization.
comment: FAccT 2026
☆ Latent Anomaly Knowledge Excavation: Unveiling Sparse Sensitive Neurons in Vision-Language Models
Large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit remarkable zero-shot capabilities, yet the internal mechanisms driving their anomaly detection (AD) performance remain poorly understood. Current methods predominantly treat VLMs as black-box feature extractors, assuming that anomaly-specific knowledge must be acquired through external adapters or memory banks. In this paper, we challenge this assumption by arguing that anomaly knowledge is intrinsically embedded within pre-trained models but remains latent and under-activated. We hypothesize that this knowledge is concentrated within a sparse subset of anomaly-sensitive neurons. To validate this, we propose latent anomaly knowledge excavation (LAKE), a training-free framework that identifies and elicits these critical neuronal signals using only a minimal set of normal samples. By isolating these sensitive neurons, LAKE constructs a highly compact normality representation that integrates visual structural deviations with cross-modal semantic activations. Extensive experiments on industrial AD benchmarks demonstrate that LAKE achieves state-of-the-art performance while providing intrinsic, neuron-level interpretability. Ultimately, our work advocates for a paradigm shift: redefining anomaly detection as the targeted activation of latent pre-trained knowledge rather than the acquisition of a downstream task.
☆ Image-Guided Geometric Stylization of 3D Meshes
Recent generative models can create visually plausible 3D representations of objects. However, the generation process often allows for implicit control signals, such as contextual descriptions, and rarely supports bold geometric distortions beyond existing data distributions. We propose a geometric stylization framework that deforms a 3D mesh, allowing it to express the style of an image. While style is inherently ambiguous, we utilize pre-trained diffusion models to extract an abstract representation of the provided image. Our coarse-to-fine stylization pipeline can drastically deform the input 3D model to express a diverse range of geometric variations while retaining the valid topology of the original mesh and part-level semantics. We also propose an approximate VAE encoder that provides efficient and reliable gradients from mesh renderings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can create stylized 3D meshes that reflect unique geometric features of the pictured assets, such as expressive poses and silhouettes, thereby supporting the creation of distinctive artistic 3D creations. Project page: https://changwoonchoi.github.io/GeoStyle
☆ Cross-Modal Emotion Transfer for Emotion Editing in Talking Face Video CVPR 2026
Talking face generation has gained significant attention as a core application of generative models. To enhance the expressiveness and realism of synthesized videos, emotion editing in talking face video plays a crucial role. However, existing approaches often limit expressive flexibility and struggle to generate extended emotions. Label-based methods represent emotions with discrete categories, which fail to capture a wide range of emotions. Audio-based methods can leverage emotionally rich speech signals - and even benefit from expressive text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis - but they fail to express the target emotions because emotions and linguistic contents are entangled in emotional speeches. Images-based methods, on the other hand, rely on target reference images to guide emotion transfer, yet they require high-quality frontal views and face challenges in acquiring reference data for extended emotions (e.g., sarcasm). To address these limitations, we propose Cross-Modal Emotion Transfer (C-MET), a novel approach that generates facial expressions based on speeches by modeling emotion semantic vectors between speech and visual feature spaces. C-MET leverages a large-scale pretrained audio encoder and a disentangled facial expression encoder to learn emotion semantic vectors that represent the difference between two different emotional embeddings across modalities. Extensive experiments on the MEAD and CREMA-D datasets demonstrate that our method improves emotion accuracy by 14% over state-of-the-art methods, while generating expressive talking face videos - even for unseen extended emotions. Code, checkpoint, and demo are available at https://chanhyeok-choi.github.io/C-MET/
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026. Project Page: https://chanhyeok-choi.github.io/C-MET/
☆ MonoUNet: A Robust Tiny Neural Network for Automated Knee Cartilage Segmentation on Point-of-Care Ultrasound Devices
Alvin Kimbowa, Arjun Parmar, Ibrahim Mujtaba, Will Wei, Maziar Badii, Matthew Harkey, David Liu, Ilker Hacihaliloglu
Objective: To develop a robust and compact deep learning model for automated knee cartilage segmentation on point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) devices.
Methods: We propose MonoUNet, an ultra-compact U-Net consisting of (i) an aggressively reduced backbone with an asymmetric decoder, (ii) a trainable monogenic block that extracts multi-scale local phase features, and (iii) a gated feature injection mechanism that integrates these features into the encoder stages to reduce sensitivity to variations in ultrasound image appearance and improve robustness across devices. MonoUNet was evaluated on a multi-site, multi-device knee cartilage ultrasound dataset acquired using cart-based, portable, and handheld POCUS devices.
Results: Overall, MonoUNet outperformed existing lightweight segmentation models, with average Dice scores ranging from 92.62% to 94.82% and mean average surface distance (MASD) values between 0.133 mm and 0.254 mm. MonoUNet reduces the number of parameters by 10x--700x and computational cost by 14x--2000x relative to existing lightweight models. MonoUNet cartilage outcomes showed excellent reliability and agreement with the manual outcomes: intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC$_{2,k})$=0.96 and bias=2.00% (0.047 mm) for average thickness, and ICC$_{2,k}$=0.99 and bias=0.80% (0.328 a.u.) for echo intensity.
Conclusion: Incorporating trainable local phase features improves the robustness of highly compact neural networks for knee cartilage segmentation across varying acquisition settings and could support scalable ultrasound-based assessment and monitoring of knee osteoarthritis using POCUS devices. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/alvinkimbowa/monounet.
comment: Accepted to Ultrasound in Medicine & Biology
☆ Plug-and-Play Logit Fusion for Heterogeneous Pathology Foundation Models
Pathology foundation models (FMs) have become central to computational histopathology, offering strong transfer performance across a wide range of diagnostic and prognostic tasks. The rapid proliferation of pathology foundation models creates a model-selection bottleneck: no single model is uniformly best, yet exhaustively adapting and validating many candidates for each downstream endpoint is prohibitively expensive. We address this challenge with a lightweight and novel model fusion strategy, LogitProd, which treats independently trained FM-based predictors as fixed experts and learns sample-adaptive fusion weights over their slide-level outputs. The fusion operates purely on logits, requiring no encoder retraining and no feature-space alignment across heterogeneous backbones. We further provide a theoretical analysis showing that the optimal weighted product fusion is guaranteed to perform at least as well as the best individual expert under the training objective. We systematically evaluate LogitProd on \textbf{22} benchmarks spanning WSI-level classification, tile-level classification, gene mutation prediction, and discrete-time survival modeling. LogitProd ranks first on 20/22 tasks and improves the average performance across all tasks by ~3% over the strongest single expert. LogitProd enables practitioners to upgrade heterogeneous FM-based pipelines in a plug-and-play manner, achieving multi-expert gains with $\sim$12$\times$ lower training cost than feature-fusion alternatives.
comment: 10 pages, 2 figures
☆ RoboAgent: Chaining Basic Capabilities for Embodied Task Planning CVPR 2026
This paper focuses on embodied task planning, where an agent acquires visual observations from the environment and executes atomic actions to accomplish a given task. Although recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved impressive results in multimodal understanding and reasoning, their performance remains limited when applied to embodied planning that involves multi-turn interaction, long-horizon reasoning, and extended context analysis. To bridge this gap, we propose RoboAgent, a capability-driven planning pipeline in which the model actively invokes different sub-capabilities. Each capability maintains its own context, and produces intermediate reasoning results or interacts with the environment according to the query given by a scheduler. This framework decomposes complex planning into a sequence of basic vision-language problems that VLMs can better address, enabling a more transparent and controllable reasoning process. The scheduler and all capabilities are implemented with a single VLM, without relying on external tools. To train this VLM, we adopt a multi-stage paradigm that consists of: (1) behavior cloning with expert plans, (2) DAgger training using trajectories collected by the model, and (3) reinforcement learning guided by an expert policy. Across these stages, we exploit the internal information of the environment simulator to construct high-quality supervision for each capability, and we further introduce augmented and synthetic data to enhance the model's performance in more diverse scenarios. Extensive experiments on widely used embodied task planning benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Our codes will be available at https://github.com/woyut/RoboAgent_CVPR26.
comment: CVPR 2026
☆ ESOM: Efficiently Understanding Streaming Video Anomalies with Open-world Dynamic Definitions
Open-world video anomaly detection (OWVAD) aims to detect and explain abnormal events under different anomaly definitions, which is important for applications such as intelligent surveillance and live-streaming content moderation. Recent MLLM-based methods have shown promising open-world generalization, but still suffer from three major limitations: inefficiency for practical deployment, lack of streaming processing adaptation, and limited support for dynamic anomaly definitions in both modeling and evaluation. To address these issues, this paper proposes ESOM, an efficient streaming OWVAD model that operates in a training-free manner. ESOM includes a Definition Normalization module to structure user prompts for reducing hallucination, an Inter-frame-matched Intra-frame Token Merging module to compress redundant visual tokens, a Hybrid Streaming Memory module for efficient causal inference, and a Probabilistic Scoring module that converts interval-level textual outputs into frame-level anomaly scores. In addition, this paper introduces OpenDef-Bench, a new benchmark with clean surveillance videos and diverse natural anomaly definitions for evaluating performance under varying conditions. Extensive experiments show that ESOM achieves real-time efficiency on a single GPU and state-of-the-art performance in anomaly temporal localization, classification, and description generation. The code and benchmark will be released at https://github.com/Kamino666/ESOM_OpenDef-Bench.
☆ RemoteAgent: Bridging Vague Human Intents and Earth Observation with RL-based Agentic MLLMs
Liang Yao, Shengxiang Xu, Fan Liu, Chuanyi Zhang, Bishun Yao, Rui Min, Yongjun Li, Chaoqian Ouyang, Shimin Di, Min-Ling Zhang
Earth Observation (EO) systems are essentially designed to support domain experts who often express their requirements through vague natural language rather than precise, machine-friendly instructions. Depending on the specific application scenario, these vague queries can demand vastly different levels of visual precision. Consequently, a practical EO AI system must bridge the gap between ambiguous human queries and the appropriate multi-granularity visual analysis tasks, ranging from holistic image interpretation to fine-grained pixel-wise predictions. While Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong semantic understanding, their text-based output format is inherently ill-suited for dense, precision-critical spatial predictions. Existing agentic frameworks address this limitation by delegating tasks to external tools, but indiscriminate tool invocation is computationally inefficient and underutilizes the MLLM's native capabilities. To this end, we propose RemoteAgent, an agentic framework that strategically respects the intrinsic capability boundaries of MLLMs. To empower this framework to understand real user intents, we construct VagueEO, a human-centric instruction dataset pairing EO tasks with simulated vague natural-language queries. By leveraging VagueEO for reinforcement fine-tuning, we align an MLLM into a robust cognitive core that directly resolves image- and sparse region-level tasks. Consequently, RemoteAgent processes suitable tasks internally while intelligently orchestrating specialized tools via the Model Context Protocol exclusively for dense predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RemoteAgent achieves robust intent recognition capabilities while delivering highly competitive performance across diverse EO tasks.
☆ Beyond Surface Artifacts: Capturing Shared Latent Forgery Knowledge Across Modalities
As generative artificial intelligence evolves, deepfake attacks have escalated from single-modality manipulations to complex, multimodal threats. Existing forensic techniques face a severe generalization bottleneck: by relying excessively on superficial, modality-specific artifacts, they neglect the shared latent forgery knowledge hidden beneath variable physical appearances. Consequently, these models suffer catastrophic performance degradation when confronted with unseen "dark modalities." To break this limitation, this paper introduces a paradigm shift that redefines multimodal forensics from conventional "feature fusion" to "modality generalization." We propose the first modality-agnostic forgery (MAF) detection framework. By explicitly decoupling modality-specific styles, MAF precisely extracts the essential, cross-modal latent forgery knowledge. Furthermore, we define two progressive dimensions to quantify model generalization: transferability toward semantically correlated modalities (Weak MAF), and robustness against completely isolated signals of "dark modality" (Strong MAF). To rigorously assess these generalization limits, we introduce the DeepModal-Bench benchmark, which integrates diverse multimodal forgery detection algorithms and adapts state-of-the-art generalized learning methods. This study not only empirically proves the existence of universal forgery traces but also achieves significant performance breakthroughs on unknown modalities via the MAF framework, offering a pioneering technical pathway for universal multimodal defense.
☆ WUTDet: A 100K-Scale Ship Detection Dataset and Benchmarks with Dense Small Objects
Ship detection for navigation is a fundamental perception task in intelligent waterway transportation systems. However, existing public ship detection datasets remain limited in terms of scale, the proportion of small-object instances, and scene diversity, which hinders the systematic evaluation and generalization study of detection algorithms in complex maritime environments. To this end, we construct WUTDet, a large-scale ship detection dataset. WUTDet contains 100,576 images and 381,378 annotated ship instances, covering diverse operational scenarios such as ports, anchorages, navigation, and berthing, as well as various imaging conditions including fog, glare, low-lightness, and rain, thereby exhibiting substantial diversity and challenge. Based on WUTDet, we systematically evaluate 20 baseline models from three mainstream detection architectures, namely CNN, Transformer, and Mamba. Experimental results show that the Transformer architecture achieves superior overall detection accuracy (AP) and small-object detection performance (APs), demonstrating stronger adaptability to complex maritime scenes; the CNN architecture maintains an advantage in inference efficiency, making it more suitable for real-time applications; and the Mamba architecture achieves a favorable balance between detection accuracy and computational efficiency. Furthermore, we construct a unified cross-dataset test set, Ship-GEN, to evaluate model generalization. Results on Ship-GEN show that models trained on WUTDet exhibit stronger generalization under different data distributions. These findings demonstrate that WUTDet provides effective data support for the research, evaluation, and generalization analysis of ship detection algorithms in complex maritime scenarios. The dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/MAPGroup/WUTDet.
☆ DailyArt: Discovering Articulation from Single Static Images via Latent Dynamics
Articulated objects are essential for embodied AI and world models, yet inferring their kinematics from a single closed-state image remains challenging because crucial motion cues are often occluded. Existing methods either require multi-state observations or rely on explicit part priors, retrieval, or other auxiliary inputs that partially expose the structure to be inferred. In this work, we present DailyArt, which formulates articulated joint estimation from a single static image as a synthesis-mediated reasoning problem. Instead of directly regressing joints from a heavily occluded observation, DailyArt first synthesizes a maximally articulated opened state under the same camera view to expose articulation cues, and then estimates the full set of joint parameters from the discrepancy between the observed and synthesized states. Using a set-prediction formulation, DailyArt recovers all joints simultaneously without requiring object-specific templates, multi-view inputs, or explicit part annotations at test time. Taking estimated joints as conditions, the framework further supports part-level novel state synthesis as a downstream capability. Extensive experiments show that DailyArt achieves strong performance in articulated joint estimation and supports part-level novel state synthesis conditioned on joints. Project page is available at https://rangooo123.github.io/DaliyArt.github.io/.
☆ Symbiotic-MoE: Unlocking the Synergy between Generation and Understanding
Empowering Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with image generation often leads to catastrophic forgetting in understanding tasks due to severe gradient conflicts. While existing paradigms like Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) mitigate this conflict through structural isolation, they fundamentally sever cross-modal synergy and suffer from capacity fragmentation. In this work, we present Symbiotic-MoE, a unified pre-training framework that resolves task interference within a native multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Transformers architecture with zero-parameter overhead. We first identify that standard MoE tuning leads to routing collapse, where generative gradients dominate expert utilization. To address this, we introduce Modality-Aware Expert Disentanglement, which partitions experts into task-specific groups while utilizing shared experts as a multimodal semantic bridge. Crucially, this design allows shared experts to absorb fine-grained visual semantics from generative tasks to enrich textual representations. To optimize this, we propose a Progressive Training Strategy featuring differential learning rates and early-stage gradient shielding. This mechanism not only shields pre-trained knowledge from early volatility but eventually transforms generative signals into constructive feedback for understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Symbiotic-MoE achieves rapid generative convergence while unlocking cross-modal synergy, boosting inherent understanding with remarkable gains on MMLU and OCRBench.
☆ MSCT: Differential Cross-Modal Attention for Deepfake Detection ICASSP2026
Audio-visual deepfake detection typically employs a complementary multi-modal model to check the forgery traces in the video. These methods primarily extract forgery traces through audio-visual alignment, which results from the inconsistency between audio and video modalities. However, the traditional multi-modal forgery detection method has the problem of insufficient feature extraction and modal alignment deviation. To address this, we propose a multi-scale cross-modal transformer encoder (MSCT) for deepfake detection. Our approach includes a multi-scale self-attention to integrate the features of adjacent embeddings and a differential cross-modal attention to fuse multi-modal features. Our experiments demonstrate competitive performance on the FakeAVCeleb dataset, validating the effectiveness of the proposed structure.
comment: Accpeted by ICASSP2026
☆ Beyond Pedestrians: Caption-Guided CLIP Framework for High-Difficulty Video-based Person Re-Identification
In recent years, video-based person Re-Identification (ReID) has gained attention for its ability to leverage spatiotemporal cues to match individuals across non-overlapping cameras. However, current methods struggle with high-difficulty scenarios, such as sports and dance performances, where multiple individuals wear similar clothing while performing dynamic movements. To overcome these challenges, we propose CG-CLIP, a novel caption-guided CLIP framework that leverages explicit textual descriptions and learnable tokens. Our method introduces two key components: Caption-guided Memory Refinement (CMR) and Token-based Feature Extraction (TFE). CMR utilizes captions generated by Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to refine identity-specific features, capturing fine-grained details. TFE employs a cross-attention mechanism with fixed-length learnable tokens to efficiently aggregate spatiotemporal features, reducing computational overhead. We evaluate our approach on two standard datasets (MARS and iLIDS-VID) and two newly constructed high-difficulty datasets (SportsVReID and DanceVReID). Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches, achieving significant improvements across all benchmarks.
☆ GEAR: GEometry-motion Alternating Refinement for Articulated Object Modeling with Gaussian Splatting CVPR
High-fidelity interactive digital assets are essential for embodied intelligence and robotic interaction, yet articulated objects remain challenging to reconstruct due to their complex structures and coupled geometry-motion relationships. Existing methods suffer from instability in geometry-motion joint optimization, while their generalization remains limited on complex multi-joint or out-of-distribution objects. To address these challenges, we propose GEAR, an EM-style alternating optimization framework that jointly models geometry and motion as interdependent components within a Gaussian Splatting representation. GEAR treats part segmentation as a latent variable and joint motion parameters as explicit variables, alternately refining them for improved convergence and geometric-motion consistency. To enhance part segmentation quality without sacrificing generalization, we leverage a vanilla 2D segmentation model to provide multi-view part priors, and employ a weakly supervised constraint to regularize the latent variable. Experiments on multiple benchmarks and our newly constructed dataset GEAR-Multi demonstrate that GEAR achieves state-of-the-art results in geometric reconstruction and motion parameters estimation, particularly on complex articulated objects with multiple movable parts.
comment: Accepted to CVPRF2026
☆ Direct Segmentation without Logits Optimization for Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation CVPR 2026
Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) aims to segment arbitrary category regions in images using open-vocabulary prompts, necessitating that existing methods possess pixel-level vision-language alignment capability. Typically, this capability involves computing the cosine similarity, \ie, logits, between visual and linguistic features, and minimizing the distribution discrepancy between the logits and the ground truth (GT) to generate optimal logits that are subsequently used to construct segmentation maps, yet it depends on time-consuming iterative training or model-specific attention modulation. In this work, we propose a more direct approach that eschews the logits-optimization process by directly deriving an analytic solution for the segmentation map. We posit a key hypothesis: the distribution discrepancy encodes semantic information; specifically, this discrepancy exhibits consistency across patches belonging to the same category but inconsistency across different categories. Based on this hypothesis, we directly utilize the analytic solution of this distribution discrepancy as the semantic maps. In other words, we reformulate the optimization of the distribution discrepancy as deriving its analytic solution, thereby eliminating time-consuming iterative training, freeing us from model-specific attention modulation, and achieving state-of-the-art performance on eight benchmark datasets.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026
☆ Needle in a Haystack -- One-Class Representation Learning for Detecting Rare Malignant Cells in Computational Cytology
In computational cytology, detecting malignancy on whole-slide images is difficult because malignant cells are morphologically diverse yet vanishingly rare amid a vast background of normal cells. Accurate detection of these extremely rare malignant cells remains challenging due to large class imbalance and limited annotations. Conventional weakly supervised approaches, such as multiple instance learning (MIL), often fail to generalize at the instance level, especially when the fraction of malignant cells (witness rate) is exceedingly low. In this study, we explore the use of one-class representation learning techniques for detecting malignant cells in low-witness-rate scenarios. These methods are trained exclusively on slide-negative patches, without requiring any instance-level supervision. Specifically, we evaluate two OCC approaches, DSVDD and DROC, and compare them with FS-SIL, WS-SIL, and the recent ItS2CLR method. The one-class methods learn compact representations of normality and detect deviations at test time. Experiments on a publicly available bone marrow cytomorphology dataset (TCIA) and an in-house oral cancer cytology dataset show that DSVDD achieves state-of-the-art performance in instance-level abnormality ranking, particularly in ultra-low witness-rate regimes ($\leq 1\%$) and, in some cases, even outperforming fully supervised learning, which is typically not a practical option in whole-slide cytology due to the infeasibility of exhaustive instance-level annotations. DROC is also competitive under extreme rarity, benefiting from distribution-augmented contrastive learning. These findings highlight one-class representation learning as a robust and interpretable superior choice to MIL for malignant cell detection under extreme rarity.
comment: 15 pages, 7 figures
☆ FireSenseNet: A Dual-Branch CNN with Cross-Attentive Feature Interaction for Next-Day Wildfire Spread Prediction
Accurate prediction of next-day wildfire spread is critical for disaster response and resource allocation. Existing deep learning approaches typically concatenate heterogeneous geospatial
inputs into a single tensor, ignoring the fundamental physical distinction between static fuel/terrain properties and dynamic meteorological conditions. We propose FireSenseNet, a
dual-branch convolutional neural network equipped with a novel Cross-Attentive Feature Interaction Module (CAFIM) that explicitly models the spatially varying interaction between fuel and
weather modalities through learnable attention gates at multiple encoder scales. Through a systematic comparison of seven architectures -- spanning pure CNNs, Vision Transformers, and hybrid
designs -- on the Google Next-Day Wildfire Spread benchmark, we demonstrate that FireSenseNet achieves an F1 of 0.4176 and AUC-PR of 0.3435, outperforming all alternatives including a
SegFormer with 3.8* more parameters (F1 = 0.3502). Ablation studies confirm that CAFIM provides a 7.1% relative F1 gain over naive concatenation, and channel-wise feature importance
analysis reveals that the previous-day fire mask dominates prediction while wind speed acts as noise at the dataset's coarse temporal resolution. We further incorporate Monte Carlo Dropout
for pixel-level uncertainty quantification and present a critical analysis showing that common evaluation shortcuts inflate reported F1 scores by over 44%.
☆ Weight Group-wise Post-Training Quantization for Medical Foundation Model
Yineng Chen, Peng Huang, Aozhong Zhang, Hui Guo, Penghang Yin, Shu Hu, Shao Lin, Xin Li, Tzu-Jen Kao, Balakrishnan Prabhakaran, MingChing Chang, Xin Wang
Foundation models have achieved remarkable results in medical image analysis. However, its large network architecture and high computational complexity significantly impact inference speed, limiting its application on terminal medical devices. Quantization, a technique that compresses models into low-bit versions, is a solution to this challenge. In this paper, we propose a post-training quantization algorithm, Permutation-COMQ. It eliminates the need for backpropagation by using simple dot products and rounding operations, thereby removing hyperparameter tuning and simplifying the process. Additionally, we introduce a weight-aware strategy that reorders the weight within each layer to address the accuracy degradation induced by channel-wise scaling during quantization, while preserving channel structure. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves the best results in 2-bit, 4-bit, and 8-bit quantization.
☆ Adaptive Depth-converted-Scale Convolution for Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation IEEE
Self-supervised monocular depth estimation (MDE) has received increasing interests in the last few years. The objects in the scene, including the object size and relationship among different objects, are the main clues to extract the scene structure. However, previous works lack the explicit handling of the changing sizes of the object due to the change of its depth. Especially in a monocular video, the size of the same object is continuously changed, resulting in size and depth ambiguity. To address this problem, we propose a Depth-converted-Scale Convolution (DcSConv) enhanced monocular depth estimation framework, by incorporating the prior relationship between the object depth and object scale to extract features from appropriate scales of the convolution receptive field. The proposed DcSConv focuses on the adaptive scale of the convolution filter instead of the local deformation of its shape. It establishes that the scale of the convolution filter matters no less (or even more in the evaluated task) than its local deformation. Moreover, a Depth-converted-Scale aware Fusion (DcS-F) is developed to adaptively fuse the DcSConv features and the conventional convolution features. Our DcSConv enhanced monocular depth estimation framework can be applied on top of existing CNN based methods as a plug-and-play module to enhance the conventional convolution block. Extensive experiments with different baselines have been conducted on the KITTI benchmark and our method achieves the best results with an improvement up to 11.6% in terms of SqRel reduction. Ablation study also validates the effectiveness of each proposed module.
comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
☆ Monocular Depth Estimation From the Perspective of Feature Restoration: A Diffusion Enhanced Depth Restoration Approach IEEE
Huibin Bai, Shuai Li, Hanxiao Zhai, Yanbo Gao, Chong Lv, Yibo Wang, Haipeng Ping, Wei Hua, Xingyu Gao
Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) is a fundamental computer vision task with important applications in 3D vision. The current mainstream MDE methods employ an encoder-decoder architecture with multi-level/scale feature processing. However, the limitations of the current architecture and the effects of different-level features on the prediction accuracy are not evaluated. In this paper, we first investigate the above problem and show that there is still substantial potential in the current framework if encoder features can be improved. Therefore, we propose to formulate the depth estimation problem from the feature restoration perspective, by treating pretrained encoder features as degraded features of an assumed ground truth feature that yields the ground truth depth map. Then an Invertible Transform-enhanced Indirect Diffusion (InvT-IndDiffusion) module is developed for feature restoration. Due to the absence of direct supervision on feature, only indirect supervision from the final sparse depth map is used. During the iterative procedure of diffusion, this results in feature deviations among steps. The proposed InvT-IndDiffusion solves this problem by using an invertible transform-based decoder under the bi-Lipschitz condition. Finally, a plug-and-play Auxiliary Viewpoint-based Low-level Feature Enhancement module (AV-LFE) is developed to enhance local details with auxiliary viewpoint when available. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art methods on various datasets. Specifically on the KITTI benchmark, compared with the baseline, the performance is improved by 4.09% and 37.77% under different training settings in terms of RMSE. Code is available at https://github.com/whitehb1/IID-RDepth.
comment: Accepted by IEEE TMM
♻ ☆ Privacy Attacks on Image AutoRegressive Models ICML2025
Image AutoRegressive generation has emerged as a new powerful paradigm with image autoregressive models (IARs) matching state-of-the-art diffusion models (DMs) in image quality (FID: 1.48 vs. 1.58) while allowing for a higher generation speed. However, the privacy risks associated with IARs remain unexplored, raising concerns regarding their responsible deployment. To address this gap, we conduct a comprehensive privacy analysis of IARs, comparing their privacy risks to the ones of DMs as reference points. Concretely, we develop a novel membership inference attack (MIA) that achieves a remarkably high success rate in detecting training images (with True Positive Rate at False Positive Rate = 1% of 94.57% vs. 6.38% for DMs with comparable attacks). We leverage our novel MIA to provide dataset inference (DI) for IARs, and show that it requires as few as 4 samples to detect dataset membership (compared to 200 for DI in DMs), confirming a higher information leakage in IARs. Finally, we are able to extract hundreds of training data points from an IAR (e.g., 698 from VAR-\textit{d}30). Our results suggest a fundamental privacy-utility trade-off: while IARs excel in image generation quality and speed, they are \textit{empirically} significantly more vulnerable to privacy attacks compared to DMs that achieve similar performance. We release the code at https://github.com/sprintml/privacy_attacks_against_iars for reproducibility.
comment: Accepted at ICML2025
♻ ☆ Adversarial Flow Models
We present adversarial flow models, a class of generative models that belongs to both the adversarial and flow families. Our method supports native one-step and multi-step generation and is trained with an adversarial objective. Unlike traditional GANs, in which the generator learns an arbitrary transport map between the noise and data distributions, our generator is encouraged to learn a deterministic noise-to-data mapping. This significantly stabilizes adversarial training. Unlike consistency-based methods, our model directly learns one-step or few-step generation without having to learn the intermediate timesteps of the probability flow for propagation. This preserves model capacity and avoids error accumulation. Under the same 1NFE setting on ImageNet-256px, our B/2 model approaches the performance of consistency-based XL/2 models, while our XL/2 model achieves a new best FID of 2.38. We additionally demonstrate end-to-end training of 56-layer and 112-layer models without any intermediate supervision, achieving FIDs of 2.08 and 1.94 with a single forward pass and surpassing the corresponding 28-layer 2NFE and 4NFE counterparts with equal compute and parameters. The code is available at https://github.com/ByteDance-Seed/Adversarial-Flow-Models
♻ ☆ Deep Learning-Powered Visual SLAM Aimed at Assisting Visually Impaired Navigation
Despite advancements in SLAM technologies, robust operation under challenging conditions such as low-texture, motion-blur, or challenging lighting remains an open challenge. Such conditions are common in applications such as assistive navigation for the visually impaired. These challenges undermine localization accuracy and tracking stability, reducing navigation reliability and safety. To overcome these limitations, we present SELM-SLAM3, a deep learning-enhanced visual SLAM framework that integrates SuperPoint and LightGlue for robust feature extraction and matching. We evaluated our framework using TUM RGB-D, ICL-NUIM, and TartanAir datasets, which feature diverse and challenging scenarios. SELM-SLAM3 outperforms conventional ORB-SLAM3 by an average of 87.84% and exceeds state-of-the-art RGB-D SLAM systems by 36.77%. Our framework demonstrates enhanced performance under challenging conditions, such as low-texture scenes and fast motion, providing a reliable platform for developing navigation aids for the visually impaired.
comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables. Published in the Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2025), VISAPP
♻ ☆ CycleChart: A Unified Consistency-Based Learning Framework for Bidirectional Chart Understanding and Generation
Current chart-related tasks, such as chart generation (NL2Chart), chart schema parsing, chart data parsing, and chart question answering (ChartQA), are typically studied in isolation, preventing models from learning the shared semantics that link chart creation and interpretation. We introduce CycleChart, a consistency-based learning framework for bidirectional chart understanding and generation. Unlike conventional multi-task approaches that draw training samples independently across tasks, CycleChart organizes all tasks around each single data instance. From a source table and natural-language query, the model generates a chart specification, renders and executes it, then learns to recover the schema and underlying data from the resulting chart image. This per-instance lifecycle design lets the model capture the full chain of transformations, from raw data through visual encoding to structured recovery, and a generate--parse consistency objective enforces semantic alignment between the forward generation and reverse parsing directions. To support this framework, we construct CycleChart-Bench, a lifecycle-aligned benchmark where every chart sample carries aligned annotations for generation, schema parsing, data parsing, and question answering. CycleChart achieves strong results across all four tasks and transfers effectively to unseen external benchmarks, demonstrating improved cross-task generalization and marking a step toward more general chart understanding models.
♻ ☆ Ecological Legacies of Pre-Columbian Settlements Evident in Palm Clusters of Neotropical Mountain Forests
Sebastian Fajardo, Sina Mohammadi, Jonas Gregorio de Souza, César Ardila, Alan Tapscott Baltar, Shaddai Heidgen, Maria Isabel Mayorga Hernández, Sylvia Mota de Oliveira, Fernando Montejo, Marco Moderato, Vinicius Peripato, Katy Puche, Carlos Reina, Juan Carlos Vargas, Frank W. Takes, Marco Madella
Ancient populations inhabited and transformed neotropical forests, yet the spatial extent of their ecological influence remains underexplored at high resolution. Here we present a deep learning and remote sensing based approach to estimate areas of pre-Columbian forest modification based on modern vegetation. We apply this method to high-resolution satellite imagery from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, as a demonstration of a scalable approach, to evaluate palm tree distributions in relation to archaeological infrastructure. Our findings document a non-random spatial association between archaeological infrastructure and contemporary palm concentrations. Palms were significantly more abundant near archaeological sites with large infrastructure investment. The extent of the largest palm cluster indicates that ancient human-managed areas linked to major infrastructure sites may be up to two orders of magnitude bigger than indicated by current archaeological evidence alone. These patterns are consistent with the hypothesis that past human activity may have influenced local palm abundance and potentially reduced the logistical costs of establishing infrastructure-heavy settlements in less accessible locations. More broadly, our results highlight the utility of palm landscape distributions as an interpretable signal within environmental and multispectral datasets for constraining predictive models of archaeological site locations.
♻ ☆ Reasoning Within the Mind: Dynamic Multimodal Interleaving in Latent Space
Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly enhanced cross-modal understanding and reasoning by incorporating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in the semantic space. Building upon this, recent studies extend the CoT mechanism to the visual modality, enabling models to integrate visual information during reasoning through external tools or explicit image generation. However, these methods remain dependent on explicit step-by-step reasoning, unstable perception-reasoning interaction and notable computational overhead. Inspired by human cognition, we posit that thinking unfolds not linearly but through the dynamic interleaving of reasoning and perception within the mind. Motivated by this perspective, we propose DMLR, a test-time Dynamic Multimodal Latent Reasoning framework that employs confidence-guided latent policy gradient optimization to refine latent think tokens for in-depth reasoning. Furthermore, a Dynamic Visual Injection Strategy is introduced, which retrieves the most relevant visual features at each latent think token and updates the set of best visual patches. The updated patches are then injected into latent think token to achieve dynamic visual-textual interleaving. Experiments across seven multimodal reasoning benchmarks and various model architectures demonstrate that DMLR significantly improves reasoning and perception performance while maintaining high inference efficiency.
♻ ☆ MCLR: Improving Conditional Modeling via Inter-Class Likelihood-Ratio Maximization and Unifying Classifier-Free Guidance with Alignment Objectives
Diffusion models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in generative modeling, but their success often relies heavily on classifier-free guidance (CFG), an inference-time heuristic that modifies the sampling trajectory. From a theoretical perspective, diffusion models trained with standard denoising score matching (DSM) are expected to recover the target data distribution, raising the question of why inference-time guidance is necessary in practice. In this work, we ask whether the DSM training objective can be modified in a principled manner such that standard reverse-time sampling, without inference-time guidance, yields effects comparable to CFG. We identify insufficient inter-class separation as a key limitation of standard diffusion models. To address this, we propose MCLR, a principled alignment objective that explicitly maximizes inter-class likelihood-ratios during training. Models fine-tuned with MCLR exhibit CFG-like improvements under standard sampling, achieving comparable qualitative and quantitative gains without requiring inference-time guidance. Beyond empirical benefits, we provide a theoretical result showing that the CFG-guided score is exactly the optimal solution to a weighted MCLR objective. This establishes a formal equivalence between classifier-free guidance and alignment-based objectives, offering a mechanistic interpretation of CFG.
♻ ☆ SeMoBridge: Semantic Modality Bridge for Efficient Few-Shot Adaptation of CLIP
While Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) excels at zero-shot tasks by aligning image and text embeddings, its performance in few-shot classification is hindered by a critical limitation: intra-modal misalignment. This issue, caused by a persistent modality gap and CLIP's exclusively inter-modal training objective, leaves the embedding spaces uncalibrated, making direct image-to-image comparisons unreliable. Existing methods attempt to address this by refining similarity logits or by computationally expensive per-sample optimization. To overcome these challenges, we introduce SeMoBridge, a lightweight yet powerful approach that directly addresses the misalignment. Our method maps images into the text modality, while keeping their semantic content intact through what we call a Semantic Modality Bridge. SeMoBridge is closed-form and can optionally be trained through multi-modal supervision, combining image and text-alignment losses to optimize the projection. Experiments show that the trained version, SeMoBridge-T, requires only a fraction of the training time while overall outperforming other methods, particularly in low-data scenarios (1, 2, and 4 shots). The code is available at https://github.com/christti98/semobridge.
comment: 22 pages, 12 figures
♻ ☆ OxEnsemble: Fair Ensembles for Low-Data Classification
We address the problem of fair classification in settings where data is scarce and unbalanced across demographic groups. Such low-data regimes are common in domains like medical imaging, where false negatives can have fatal consequences. We propose a novel approach \emph{OxEnsemble} for efficiently training ensembles and enforcing fairness in these low-data regimes. Unlike other approaches, we aggregate predictions across ensemble members, each trained to satisfy fairness constraints. By construction, \emph{OxEnsemble} is both data-efficient -- carefully reusing held-out data to enforce fairness reliably -- and compute-efficient, requiring little more compute than used to fine-tune or evaluate an existing model. We validate this approach with new theoretical guarantees. Experimentally, our approach yields more consistent outcomes and stronger fairness-accuracy trade-offs than existing methods across multiple challenging medical imaging classification datasets.
comment: Forthcoming @ MIDL 2026
♻ ☆ Action Without Interaction: Probing the Physical Foundations of Video LMMs via Contact-Release Detection
Daniel Harari, Michael Sidorov, Chen Shterental, Liel David, Abrham Kahsay Gebreselasie, Muhammad Haris Khan
Large multi-modal models (LMMs) show increasing performance in realistic visual tasks for images and, more recently, for videos. For example, given a video sequence, such models are able to describe in detail objects, the surroundings and dynamic actions. In this study, we explored the extent to which these models ground their semantic understanding in the actual visual input. Specifically, given sequences of hands interacting with objects, we asked models when and where the interaction begins or ends. For this purpose, we introduce a first of its kind, large-scale dataset with more than 20K annotated interactions on videos from the Something-Something-V2 dataset. 250 AMTurk human annotators labeled core interaction events, particularly when and where objects and agents become attached (`contact') or detached (`release'). We asked SoTA LMMs, including GPT, Gemini and Qwen to locate these events in short videos, each with a single event. The results show that while models reliably name target objects and identify actions, they exhibit a form of `shortcut learning' where semantic success masks a failure in physical grounding. Specifically, they consistently fail to identify the frame where the interaction begins or ends and poorly localize the physical event within the scene. This disconnect suggests that while LMMs excel at System 1 intuitive pattern recognition (naming the action and objects), they lack the System 2 cognitive foundations required to reason about physical primitives like `contact' and `release', hence truly ground dynamic scenes in physical reality.
♻ ☆ LumiCtrl : Learning Illuminant Prompts for Lighting Control in Personalized Text-to-Image Models CVPR 2026
Text-to-image (T2I) models have demonstrated remarkable progress in creative image generation, yet they still lack precise control over scene illuminants which is a crucial factor for content designers to manipulate visual aesthetics of generated images. In this paper, we present an illuminant personalization method named LumiCtrl that learns illuminant prompt given single image of the object. LumiCtrl consists of three components: given an image of the object, our method apply (a) physics-based illuminant augmentation along with Planckian locus to create fine-tuning variants under standard illuminants; (b) Edge-Guided Prompt Disentanglement using frozen ControlNet to ensure prompts focus on illumination, not the structure; and (c) a Masked Reconstruction Loss that focuses learning on foreground object while allowing background to adapt contextually which enables what we call Contextual Light Adaptation. We qualitatively and quantitatively compare LumiCtrl against other T2I customization methods. The results show that LumiCtrl achieves significantly better illuminant fidelity, aesthetic quality, and scene coherence compared to existing baselines. A human preference study further confirms the strong user preference for LumiCtrl generations.
comment: Accepted to IEEE/CVF CVPR 2026 Workshop on AI for Creative Visual Content Generation, Editing, and Understanding (CVEU)
♻ ☆ BADiff: Bandwidth Adaptive Diffusion Model NeurIPS 2025
In this work, we propose a novel framework to enable diffusion models to adapt their generation quality based on real-time network bandwidth constraints. Traditional diffusion models produce high-fidelity images by performing a fixed number of denoising steps, regardless of downstream transmission limitations. However, in practical cloud-to-device scenarios, limited bandwidth often necessitates heavy compression, leading to loss of fine textures and wasted computation. To address this, we introduce a joint end-to-end training strategy where the diffusion model is conditioned on a target quality level derived from the available bandwidth. During training, the model learns to adaptively modulate the denoising process, enabling early-stop sampling that maintains perceptual quality appropriate to the target transmission condition. Our method requires minimal architectural changes and leverages a lightweight quality embedding to guide the denoising trajectory. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the visual fidelity of bandwidth-adapted generations compared to naive early-stopping, offering a promising solution for efficient image delivery in bandwidth-constrained environments. Code is available at: https://github.com/xzhang9308/BADiff.
comment: NeurIPS 2025 Poster
♻ ☆ Gaze to Insight: A Scalable AI Approach for Detecting Gaze Behaviours in Face-to-Face Collaborative Learning
Previous studies have illustrated the potential of analysing gaze behaviours in collaborative learning to provide educationally meaningful information for students to reflect on their learning. Over the past decades, machine learning approaches have been developed to automatically detect gaze behaviours from video data. Yet, since these approaches often require large amounts of labelled data for training, human annotation remains necessary. Additionally, researchers have questioned the cross-configuration robustness of machine learning models developed, as training datasets often fail to encompass the full range of situations encountered in educational contexts. To address these challenges, this study proposes a scalable artificial intelligence approach that leverages pretrained and foundation models to automatically detect gaze behaviours in face-to-face collaborative learning contexts without requiring human-annotated data. The approach utilises pretrained YOLO11 for person tracking, YOLOE-26 with text-prompt capability for education-related object detection, and the Gaze-LLE model for gaze target prediction. The results indicate that the proposed approach achieves an F1-score of 0.829 in detecting students' gaze behaviours from video data, with strong performance for laptop-directed gaze and peer-directed gaze, yet weaker performance for other gaze targets. Furthermore, when compared to other supervised machine learning approaches, the proposed method demonstrates superior and more stable performance in complex contexts, highlighting its better cross-configuration robustness. The implications of this approach for supporting students' collaborative learning in real-world environments are also discussed.
comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, accepted by the 27th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED 2026)
♻ ☆ AnchorSplat: Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting with 3D Geometric Priors CVPR 2026
Xiaoxue Zhang, Xiaoxu Zheng, Yixuan Yin, Tiao Zhao, Kaihua Tang, Michael Bi Mi, Zhan Xu, Dave Zhenyu Chen
Recent feed-forward Gaussian reconstruction models adopt a pixel-aligned formulation that maps each 2D pixel to a 3D Gaussian, entangling Gaussian representations tightly with the input images. In this paper, we propose AnchorSplat, a novel feed-forward 3DGS framework for scene-level reconstruction that represents the scene directly in 3D space. AnchorSplat introduces an anchor-aligned Gaussian representation guided by 3D geometric priors (e.g., sparse point clouds, voxels, or RGB-D point clouds), enabling a more geometry-aware renderable 3D Gaussians that is independent of image resolution and number of views. This design substantially reduces the number of required Gaussians, improving computational efficiency while enhancing reconstruction fidelity. Beyond the anchor-aligned design, we utilize a Gaussian Refiner to adjust the intermediate Gaussiansy via merely a few forward passes. Experiments on the ScanNet++ v2 NVS benchmark demonstrate the SOTA performance, outperforming previous methods with more view-consistent and substantially fewer Gaussian primitives.
comment: CVPR 2026
♻ ☆ You Point, I Learn: Online Adaptation of Interactive Segmentation Models for Handling Distribution Shifts in Medical Imaging
Wentian Xu, Ziyun Liang, Harry Anthony, Yasin Ibrahim, Felix Cohen, Guang Yang, Konstantinos Kamnitsas
Interactive segmentation uses real-time user inputs, such as mouse clicks, to iteratively refine model predictions. Although not originally designed to address distribution shifts, this paradigm naturally lends itself to such challenges. In medical imaging, where distribution shifts are common, interactive methods can use user inputs to guide models towards improved predictions. Moreover, once a model is deployed, user corrections can be used to adapt the network parameters to the new data distribution, mitigating distribution shift. Based on these insights, we aim to develop a practical, effective method for improving the adaptive capabilities of interactive segmentation models to new data distributions in medical imaging. Firstly, we found that strengthening the model's responsiveness to clicks is important for the initial training process. Moreover, we show that by treating the post-interaction user-refined model output as pseudo-ground-truth, we can design a lean, practical online adaptation method that enables a model to learn effectively across sequential test images. The framework includes two components: (i) a Post-Interaction adaptation process, updating the model after the user has completed interactive refinement of an image, and (ii) a Mid-Interaction adaptation process, updating incrementally after each click. Both processes include a Click-Centered Gaussian loss that strengthens the model's reaction to clicks and enhances focus on user-guided, clinically relevant regions. Experiments on 5 fundus and 4 brain-MRI databases show that our approach consistently outperforms existing methods under diverse distribution shifts, including unseen imaging modalities and pathologies. Code and pretrained models will be released upon publication.
♻ ☆ Machine Unlearning in the Era of Quantum Machine Learning: An Empirical Study ICPR 2026
We present the first empirical study of machine unlearning (MU) in hybrid quantum-classical neural networks. While MU has been extensively explored in classical deep learning, its behavior within variational quantum circuits (VQCs) and quantum-augmented architectures remains largely unexplored. First, we adapt a broad suite of unlearning methods to quantum settings, including gradient-based, distillation-based, regularization-based and certified techniques. Second, we introduce two new unlearning strategies tailored to hybrid models. Experiments across Iris, MNIST, and Fashion-MNIST, under both subset removal and full-class deletion, reveal that quantum models can support effective unlearning, but outcomes depend strongly on circuit depth, entanglement structure, and task complexity. Shallow VQCs display high intrinsic stability with minimal memorization, whereas deeper hybrid models exhibit stronger trade-offs between utility, forgetting strength, and alignment with retrain oracle. We find that certain methods, e.g. EU-k, LCA, and Certified Unlearning, consistently provide the best balance across metrics. These findings establish baseline empirical insights into quantum machine unlearning and highlight the need for quantum-aware algorithms and theoretical guarantees, as quantum machine learning systems continue to expand in scale and capability. We publicly release our code at: https://github.com/CrivoiCarla/HQML.
comment: Accepted at ICPR 2026
♻ ☆ AnomalyVFM -- Transforming Vision Foundation Models into Zero-Shot Anomaly Detectors CVPR 2026
Zero-shot anomaly detection aims to detect and localise abnormal regions in the image without access to any in-domain training images. While recent approaches leverage vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, to transfer high-level concept knowledge, methods based on purely vision foundation models (VFMs), like DINOv2, have lagged behind in performance. We argue that this gap stems from two practical issues: (i) limited diversity in existing auxiliary anomaly detection datasets and (ii) overly shallow VFM adaptation strategies. To address both challenges, we propose AnomalyVFM, a general and effective framework that turns any pretrained VFM into a strong zero-shot anomaly detector. Our approach combines a robust three-stage synthetic dataset generation scheme with a parameter-efficient adaptation mechanism, utilising low-rank feature adapters and a confidence-weighted pixel loss. Together, these components enable modern VFMs to substantially outperform current state-of-the-art methods. More specifically, with RADIO as a backbone, AnomalyVFM achieves an average image-level AUROC of 94.1% across 9 diverse datasets, surpassing previous methods by significant 3.3 percentage points. Project Page: https://maticfuc.github.io/anomaly_vfm/
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026
♻ ☆ Mitigating Spurious Background Bias in Multimedia Recognition with Disentangled Concept Bottlenecks
Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) enhance interpretability by predicting human-understandable concepts as intermediate representations. However, existing CBMs often suffer from input-to-concept mapping bias and limited controllability, which restricts their practical utility and undermines the reliability of concept-based strategies. To address these challenges, we propose a Lightweight Disentangled Concept Bottleneck Model (LDCBM) that automatically groups visual features into semantically meaningful components without the need for region annotations. By introducing a filter grouping loss and joint concept supervision, our method improves the alignment between visual patterns and concepts, enabling more transparent and robust decision-making. Notably, experiments on three diverse datasets demonstrate that LDCBM achieves higher concept and class accuracy, outperforming previous CBMs in both interpretability and classification performance. Complexity analysis reveals that the parameter count and FLOPs of LDCBM are less than 5% higher than those of Vanilla CBM. Furthermore, background mask intervention experiments validate the model's strong capability to suppress irrelevant image regions, further corroborating the high precision of the visual-concept mapping under LDCBM's lightweight design paradigm. By grounding concepts in visual evidence, our method overcomes a fundamental limitation of prior models and enhances the reliability of interpretable AI.
♻ ☆ SpatialMosaic: A Multiview VLM Dataset for Partial Visibility
The rapid progress of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has unlocked the potential for enhanced 3D scene understanding and spatial reasoning. A recent line of work explores learning spatial reasoning directly from multi-view images, enabling MLLMs to understand 3D scenes without explicit 3D reconstructions. Nevertheless, key challenges that frequently arise in real-world environments, such as partial visibility, occlusion, and low-overlap conditions that require spatial reasoning from fragmented visual cues, remain under-explored. To address these limitations, we propose a scalable multi-view data generation and annotation pipeline that constructs realistic spatial reasoning QAs, resulting in SpatialMosaic, a comprehensive instruction-tuning dataset featuring 2M QA pairs. We further introduce SpatialMosaic-Bench, a challenging benchmark for evaluating multi-view spatial reasoning under complex and diverse scenarios, consisting of 1M QA pairs across 6 tasks. Our proposed dataset spans both indoor and outdoor scenes, enabling comprehensive evaluation in diverse real-world scenarios. In addition, we introduce a new baseline for multi-view settings, SpatialMosaicVLM, a hybrid framework that integrates 3D reconstruction models as geometry encoders within VLMs for robust spatial reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed dataset effectively enhances spatial reasoning under challenging multi-view conditions, validating the effectiveness of our data generation pipeline in constructing realistic and challenging QAs. Code and dataset will be available soon.
♻ ☆ EchoTorrent: Towards Swift, Sustained, and Streaming Multi-Modal Video Generation
Recent multi-modal video generation models have achieved high visual quality, but their prohibitive latency and limited temporal stability hinder real-time deployment. Streaming inference exacerbates these issues, leading to pronounced multimodal degradation, such as spatial blurring, temporal drift, and lip desynchronization, which creates an unresolved efficiency-performance trade-off. To this end, we propose EchoTorrent, a novel schema with a fourfold design: (1) Multi-Teacher Training fine-tunes a pre-trained model on distinct preference domains to obtain specialized domain experts, which sequentially transfer domain-specific knowledge to a student model; (2) Adaptive CFG Calibration (ACC-DMD), which calibrates the audio CFG augmentation errors in DMD via a phased spatiotemporal schedule, eliminating redundant CFG computations and enabling single-pass inference per step; (3) Hybrid Long Tail Forcing, which enforces alignment exclusively on tail frames during long-horizon self-rollout training via a causal-bidirectional hybrid architecture, effectively mitigates spatiotemporal degradation in streaming mode while enhancing fidelity to reference frames; and (4) VAE Decoder Refiner through pixel-domain optimization of the VAE decoder to recover high-frequency details while circumventing latent-space ambiguities. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate that EchoTorrent achieves few-pass autoregressive generation with substantially extended temporal consistency, identity preservation, and audio-lip synchronization.
♻ ☆ Dual-level Modality Debiasing Learning for Unsupervised Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification
Two-stage learning pipeline has achieved promising results in unsupervised visible-infrared person re-identification (USL-VI-ReID). It first performs single-modality learning and then operates cross-modality learning to tackle the modality discrepancy. Although promising, this pipeline inevitably introduces modality bias: modality-specific cues learned in the single-modality training naturally propagate into the following cross-modality learning, impairing identity discrimination and generalization. To address this issue, we propose a Dual-level Modality Debiasing Learning (DMDL) framework that implements debiasing at both the model and optimization levels. At the model level, we propose a Causality-inspired Adjustment Intervention (CAI) module that replaces likelihood-based modeling with causal modeling, preventing modality-induced spurious patterns from being introduced, leading to a low-biased model. At the optimization level, a Collaborative Bias-free Training (CBT) strategy is introduced to interrupt the propagation of modality bias across data, labels, and features by integrating modality-specific augmentation, label refinement, and feature alignment. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that DMDL could enable modality-invariant feature learning and a more generalized model. The code is available at https://github.com/priester3/DMDL.
♻ ☆ Mitigating Domain Drift in Multi Species Segmentation with DINOv2: A Cross-Domain Evaluation in Herbicide Research Trials
Artzai Picon, Itziar Eguskiza, Daniel Mugica, Javier Romero, Carlos Javier Jimenez, Eric White, Gabriel Do-Lago-Junqueira, Christian Klukas, Ramon Navarra-Mestre
Reliable plant species and damage segmentation for herbicide field research trials requires models that can withstand substantial real-world variation across seasons, geographies, devices, and sensing modalities. Most deep learning approaches trained on controlled datasets fail to generalize under these domain shifts, limiting their suitability for operational phenotyping pipelines. This study evaluates a segmentation framework that integrates vision foundation models (DINOv2) with hierarchical taxonomic inference to improve robustness across heterogeneous agricultural conditions. We train on a large, multi-year dataset collected in Germany and Spain (2018-2020), comprising 14 plant species and 4 herbicide damage classes, and assess generalization under increasingly challenging shifts: temporal and device changes (2023), geographic transfer to the United States, and extreme sensor shift to drone imagery (2024). Results show that the foundation-model backbone consistently outperforms prior baselines, improving species-level F1 from 0.52 to 0.87 on in-distribution data and maintaining significant advantages under moderate (0.77 vs. 0.24) and extreme (0.44 vs. 0.14) shift conditions. Hierarchical inference provides an additional layer of robustness, enabling meaningful predictions even when fine-grained species classification degrades (family F1: 0.68, class F1: 0.88 on aerial imagery). Error analysis reveals that failures under severe shift stem primarily from vegetation-soil confusion, suggesting that taxonomic distinctions remain preserved despite background and viewpoint variability. The system is now deployed within BASF's phenotyping workflow for herbicide research trials across multiple regions, illustrating the practical viability of combining foundation models with structured biological hierarchies for scalable, shift-resilient agricultural monitoring.
♻ ☆ OpenTrack3D: Towards Accurate and Generalizable Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation
Generalizing open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation (OV-3DIS) to diverse, unstructured, and mesh-free environments is crucial for robotics and AR/VR, yet remains a significant challenge. We attribute this to two key limitations of existing methods: (1) proposal generation relies on dataset-specific proposal networks or mesh-based superpoints, rendering them inapplicable in mesh-free scenarios and limiting generalization to novel scenes; and (2) the weak textual reasoning of CLIP-based classifiers, which struggle to recognize compositional and functional user queries. To address these issues, we introduce OpenTrack3D, a generalizable and accurate framework. Unlike methods that rely on pre-generated proposals, OpenTrack3D employs a novel visual-spatial tracker to construct cross-view consistent object proposals online. Given an RGB-D stream, our pipeline first leverages a 2D open-vocabulary segmenter to generate masks, which are lifted to 3D point clouds using depth. Mask-guided instance features are then extracted using DINO feature maps, and our tracker fuses visual and spatial cues to maintain instance consistency. The core pipeline is entirely mesh-free, yet we also provide an optional superpoints refinement module to further enhance performance when scene mesh is available. Finally, we replace CLIP with a multi-modal large language model (MLLM), significantly enhancing compositional reasoning for complex user queries. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks, including ScanNet200, Replica, ScanNet++, and SceneFun3D, demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and strong generalization capabilities.
♻ ☆ PhyEdit: Towards Real-World Object Manipulation via Physically-Grounded Image Editing
Achieving physically accurate object manipulation in image editing is essential for its potential applications in interactive world models. However, existing visual generative models often fail at precise spatial manipulation, resulting in incorrect scaling and positioning of objects. This limitation primarily stems from the lack of explicit mechanisms to incorporate 3D geometry and perspective projection. To achieve accurate manipulation, we develop PhyEdit, an image editing framework that leverages explicit geometric simulation as contextual 3D-aware visual guidance. By combining this plug-and-play 3D prior with joint 2D--3D supervision, our method effectively improves physical accuracy and manipulation consistency. To support this method and evaluate performance, we present a real-world dataset, RealManip-10K, for 3D-aware object manipulation featuring paired images and depth annotations. We also propose ManipEval, a benchmark with multi-dimensional metrics to evaluate 3D spatial control and geometric consistency. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms existing methods, including strong closed-source models, in both 3D geometric accuracy and manipulation consistency.
comment: Project page: https://nenhang.github.io/PhyEdit
♻ ☆ Location Is All You Need: Continuous Spatiotemporal Neural Representations of Earth Observation Data
In this work, we present LIANet (Location Is All You Need Network), a coordinate-based neural representation that models multi-temporal spaceborne Earth observation (EO) data for a given region of interest as a continuous spatiotemporal neural field. Given only spatial and temporal coordinates, LIANet reconstructs the corresponding satellite imagery. Once pretrained, this neural representation can be adapted to various EO downstream tasks, such as semantic segmentation or pixel-wise regression, importantly, without requiring access to the original satellite data. LIANet intends to serve as a user-friendly alternative to Geospatial Foundation Models (GFMs) by eliminating the overhead of data access and preprocessing for end-users and enabling fine-tuning solely based on labels. We demonstrate the pretraining of LIANet across target areas of varying sizes and show that fine-tuning it for downstream tasks achieves competitive performance compared to training from scratch or using established GFMs. The source code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/mojganmadadi/LIANet/tree/v1.0.1.
comment: Updated the affiliation of one of the authors, no changes to the technical content
♻ ☆ NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Bitstream-Corrupted Video Restoration: Methods and Results CVPR
Wenbin Zou, Tianyi Li, Kejun Wu, Huiping Zhuang, Zongwei Wu, Zhuyun Zhou, Radu Timofte, Kim-Hui Yap, Lap-Pui Chau, Yi Wang, Shiqi Zhou, Xiaodi Shi, Yuxiang Chen, Yilian Zhong, Shibo Yin, Yushun Fang, Xilei Zhu, Yahui Wang, Chen Lu, Zhitao Wang, Lifa Ha, Hengyu Man, Xiaopeng Fan, Priyansh Singh, Sidharth, Krrish Dev, Soham Kakkar, Vinit Jakhetiya, Ovais Iqbal Shah, Wei Zhou, Linfeng Li, Qi Xu, Zhenyang Liu, Kepeng Xu, Tong Qiao, Jiachen Tu, Guoyi Xu, Yaoxin Jiang, Jiajia Liu, Yaokun Shi
This paper reports on the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Bitstream-Corrupted Video Restoration (BSCVR). The challenge aims to advance research on recovering visually coherent videos from corrupted bitstreams, whose decoding often produces severe spatial-temporal artifacts and content distortion. Built upon recent progress in bitstream-corrupted video recovery, the challenge provides a common benchmark for evaluating restoration methods under realistic corruption settings. We describe the dataset, evaluation protocol, and participating methods, and summarize the final results and main technical trends. The challenge highlights the difficulty of this emerging task and provides useful insights for future research on robust video restoration under practical bitstream corruption.
comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, 1 table, CVPRW2026 NTIRE Challenge Report
♻ ☆ From Classical Machine Learning to Tabular Foundation Models: An Empirical Investigation of Robustness and Scalability Under Class Imbalance in Emergency and Critical Care
Millions of patients pass through emergency departments and intensive care units each year, where clinicians must make high-stakes decisions under time pressure and uncertainty. Machine learning could support these decisions by predicting deterioration, guiding triage, and identifying rare but serious outcomes. Yet clinical tabular data are often highly imbalanced, biasing models toward majority classes. Building methods that are robust to imbalance and efficient enough for deployment remains a practical challenge.
We investigated seven model families on imbalanced tabular data from MIMIC-IV-ED and eICU: Decision Tree, Random Forest, XGBoost, TabNet, TabResNet, TabICL, and TabPFN v2.6. TabResNet was designed as a lightweight alternative to TabNet. Models were evaluated using weighted F1-score, robustness to increasing imbalance, and computational scalability across seven prediction tasks.
Performance varied by dataset. On MIMIC-IV-ED, TabPFN v2.6 and TabICL achieved the strongest average weighted F1 ranks, with XGBoost and TabResNet remaining competitive. On eICU, XGBoost performed best overall, followed by other tree-based methods, while foundation models ranked in the middle. TabNet showed the steepest performance decline as imbalance increased and the highest computational cost. TabResNet consistently outperformed TabNet, but did not surpass the best ensemble models. Classical and tree-based methods scaled most favourably with dataset size, while foundation models achieved low per-task cost through their inference-based paradigm.
No single model family dominated across both datasets and tasks. However, tabular foundation models showed promise by combining competitive performance at low computational cost. If this efficiency generalizes to broader clinical settings, it could help lower the barrier to adaptive decision support in resource-constrained environments.
♻ ☆ Understanding Task Transfer in Vision-Language Models CVPR 2026
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) perform well on multimodal benchmarks but lag behind humans and specialized models on visual perception tasks like depth estimation or object counting. Finetuning on one task can unpredictably affect performance on others, making task-specific finetuning challenging. In this paper, we address this challenge through a systematic study of task transferability. We examine how finetuning a VLM on one perception task affects its zero-shot performance on others. We introduce Perfection Gap Factor (PGF), a normalized metric that measures change in performance as a result of task transfer. We utilize PGF to compute Task Transferability, which captures both the breadth and the magnitude of transfer induced by a source task. Using three open-weight VLMs evaluated across 13 perception tasks, we construct a task transfer graph that reveals previously unobserved relationships among perception tasks. Our analysis uncovers patterns of positive and negative transfer, identifies groups of tasks that mutually influence each other, organizes tasks into personas based on their transfer behavior and demonstrates how PGF can guide data selection for more efficient training. These findings highlight both opportunities for positive transfer and risks of negative interference, offering actionable guidance for advancing VLMs.
comment: CVPR 2026 (Oral)
♻ ☆ Mitigating Visual Context Degradation in Large Multimodal Models: A Training-Free Decoupled Agentic Framework
With the continuous expansion of Large Language Models (LLMs) and advances in reinforcement learning, LLMs have demonstrated exceptional reasoning capabilities, enabling them to address a wide range of complex problems. Inspired by these achievements, researchers have extended related techniques to Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). However, a critical limitation has emerged, reflected in the progressive loss of visual grounding. As the reasoning chain grows longer, LMMs tend to rely increasingly on the textual information generated in earlier steps, while the initially extracted visual information is rarely revisited or incorporated. This phenomenon often causes the reasoning process to drift away from the actual image content, resulting in visually implausible or even erroneous conclusions. To overcome this fundamental limitation, we propose a novel, training-free agentic paradigm that Decouples cognitive Reasoning from visual Perception (DRP). In this framework, a powerful LLM serves as a strategic Reasoner, orchestrating the inference process by explicitly querying an LMM-acting as a dedicated Observer-to retrieve fine-grained visual details on demand. This approach is lightweight, model-agnostic, and plug-and-play, necessitating no additional training or architectural modifications. Extensive experiments demonstrate our framework DRP's efficacy in regulating the visual reasoning trajectory, significantly mitigating reasoning drift, and enforcing robust visual grounding. Notably, on the MathVision benchmark, the integration of Qwen2.5-VL-7B and Qwen3-32B achieves an accuracy of 47.2\%, outperforming GPT-4o's 40.6\%. These findings underscore the potential of our approach to enhance multimodal reasoning reliability without the need for costly retraining. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/hongruijia/DRP.
♻ ☆ Pseudo-Expert Regularized Offline RL for End-to-End Autonomous Driving in Photorealistic Closed-Loop Environments CVPR
End-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving models that take only camera images as input and directly predict a future trajectory are appealing for their computational efficiency and potential for improved generalization via unified optimization; however, persistent failure modes remain due to reliance on imitation learning (IL). While online reinforcement learning (RL) could mitigate IL-induced issues, the computational burden of neural rendering-based simulation and large E2E networks renders iterative reward and hyperparameter tuning costly. We introduce a camera-only E2E offline RL framework that performs no additional exploration and trains solely on a fixed simulator dataset. Offline RL offers strong data efficiency and rapid experimental iteration, yet is susceptible to instability from overestimation on out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. To address this, we construct pseudo ground-truth trajectories from expert driving logs and use them as a behavior regularization signal, suppressing imitation of unsafe or suboptimal behavior while stabilizing value learning. Training and closed-loop evaluation are conducted in a neural rendering environment learned from the public nuScenes dataset. Empirically, the proposed method achieves substantial improvements in collision rate and route completion compared with IL baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/ToyotaInfoTech/PEBC.
comment: Accepted to CVPR Findings 2026
♻ ☆ GenLCA: 3D Diffusion for Full-Body Avatars from In-the-Wild Videos
Yiqian Wu, Rawal Khirodkar, Egor Zakharov, Timur Bagautdinov, Lei Xiao, Zhaoen Su, Shunsuke Saito, Xiaogang Jin, Junxuan Li
We present GenLCA, a diffusion-based generative model for generating and editing photorealistic full-body avatars from text and image inputs. The generated avatars are faithful to the inputs, while supporting high-fidelity facial and full-body animations. The core idea is a novel paradigm that enables training a full-body 3D diffusion model from partially observable 2D data, allowing the training dataset to scale to millions of real-world videos. This scalability contributes to the superior photorealism and generalizability of GenLCA. Specifically, we scale up the dataset by repurposing a pretrained feed-forward avatar reconstruction model as an animatable 3D tokenizer, which encodes unstructured video frames into structured 3D tokens. However, most real-world videos only provide partial observations of body parts, resulting in excessive blurring or transparency artifacts in the 3D tokens. To address this, we propose a novel visibility-aware diffusion training strategy that replaces invalid regions with learnable tokens and computes losses only over valid regions. We then train a flow-based diffusion model on the token dataset, inherently maintaining the photorealism and animatability provided by the pretrained avatar reconstruction model. Our approach effectively enables the use of large-scale real-world video data to train a diffusion model natively in 3D. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method through diverse and high-fidelity generation and editing results, outperforming existing solutions by a large margin. The project page is available at https://onethousandwu.com/GenLCA-Page.
♻ ☆ Flemme: A Flexible and Modular Learning Platform for Medical Images
As the rapid development of computer vision and the emergence of powerful network backbones and architectures, the application of deep learning in medical imaging has become increasingly significant. Unlike natural images, medical images lack huge volumes of data but feature more modalities, making it difficult to train a general model that has satisfactory performance across various datasets. In practice, practitioners often suffer from manually creating and testing models combining independent backbones and architectures, which is a laborious and time-consuming process. We propose Flemme, a FLExible and Modular learning platform for MEdical images. Our platform separates encoders from the model architectures so that different models can be constructed via various combinations of supported encoders and architectures. We construct encoders using building blocks based on convolution, transformer, and state-space model (SSM) to process both 2D and 3D image patches. A base architecture is implemented following an encoder-decoder style, with several derived architectures for image segmentation, reconstruction, and generation tasks. In addition, we propose a general hierarchical architecture incorporating a pyramid loss to optimize and fuse vertical features. Experiments demonstrate that this simple design leads to an average improvement of 5.60% in Dice score and 7.81% in mean interaction of units (mIoU) for segmentation models, as well as an enhancement of 5.57% in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and 8.22% in structural similarity (SSIM) for reconstruction models. We further utilize Flemme as an analytical tool to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of various encoders across different tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/wlsdzyzl/flemme.
comment: 8 pages, 6 figures
♻ ☆ CodecSight: Leveraging Video Codec Signals for Efficient Streaming VLM Inference
Yulin Zou, Yan Chen, Wenyan Chen, JooYoung Park, Shivaraman Nitin, Luo Tao, Francisco Romero, Dmitrii Ustiugov
Video streaming analytics is a crucial workload for vision-language model serving, but the high cost of multimodal inference limits scalability. Prior systems reduce inference cost by exploiting temporal and spatial redundancy in video streams, but they target either the vision transformer (ViT) or the LLM with a limited view, leaving end-to-end opportunities untapped. Moreover, existing methods incur significant overhead to identify redundancy, either through offline profiling and training or costly online computation, making them ill-suited for dynamic real-time streams.
We present CodecSight, a codec-guided streaming video analytics system, built on a key observation that video codecs already extract the temporal and spatial structure of each stream as a byproduct of compression. CodecSight treats this codec metadata as a low-cost runtime signal to unify optimization across video decoding, visual processing, and LLM prefilling, with transmission reduction as an inherent benefit of operating directly on compressed bitstreams. This drives codec-guided patch pruning before ViT encoding and selective key-value cache refresh during LLM prefilling, both of which are fully online and do not require offline training. Experiments show that CodecSight achieves an improvement in throughput of up to 3$\times$, and a reduction of up to 87% in GPU compute over state-of-the-art baselines, maintaining competitive accuracy with only 0$\sim$8% F1 drop.
comment: 18 pages, 34 figures
♻ ☆ MinerU2.5-Pro: Pushing the Limits of Data-Centric Document Parsing at Scale
Bin Wang, Tianyao He, Linke Ouyang, Fan Wu, Zhiyuan Zhao, Tao Chu, Yuan Qu, Zhenjiang Jin, Weijun Zeng, Ziyang Miao, Bangrui Xu, Junbo Niu, Mengzhang Cai, Jiantao Qiu, Qintong Zhang, Dongsheng Ma, Yuefeng Sun, Hejun Dong, Wenzheng Zhang, Jutao Xiao, Jiayong Shi, Pengyu Liao, Xiaomeng Zhao, Huaping Zhong, Liqun Wei, Jing Yu, Jie Yang, Wei Li, Shasha Wang, Qianqian Wu, Xuanhe Zhou, Weijia Li, Zhenxiang Li, Zhongying Tu, Jiang Wu, Lijun Wu, Chao Xu, Kai Chen, Wentao Zhang, Yu Qiao, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Conghui He
Current document parsing methods advance primarily through model architecture innovation, while systematic engineering of training data remains underexplored. Yet state-of-the-art models spanning diverse architectures and parameter scales exhibit highly consistent failure patterns on the same set of hard samples, suggesting that the performance bottleneck stems from shared deficiencies in training data rather than from architectural differences. Building on this finding, we present MinerU2.5-Pro, which advances the state of the art purely through data engineering and training strategy design while retaining the 1.2B-parameter architecture of MinerU2.5 unchanged. At its core is a Data Engine co-designed around coverage, informativeness, and annotation accuracy: Diversity-and-Difficulty-Aware Sampling expands training data from under 10M to 65.5M samples while mitigating distribution shift; Cross-Model Consistency Verification leverages output consensus among heterogeneous models to assess sample difficulty and generate reliable annotations; the Judge-and-Refine pipeline improves annotation quality for hard samples through render-then-verify iterative correction. A three-stage progressive training strategy--large-scale pre-training, hard sample fine-tuning, and GRPO alignment--sequentially exploits these data at different quality tiers. On the evaluation front, we rectify element-matching biases in OmniDocBench v1.5 and introduce a Hard subset, establishing the more discriminative OmniDocBench v1.6 protocol. Without any architectural modification, MinerU2.5-Pro achieves 95.69 on OmniDocBench v1.6, improving over the same-architecture baseline by 2.71 points and surpassing all existing methods, including those based on models with over 200x more parameters.
comment: Technical Report
♻ ☆ RectifiedHR: Enable Efficient High-Resolution Synthesis via Energy Rectification
Diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress across various visual generation tasks. However, their performance significantly declines when generating content at resolutions higher than those used during training. Although numerous methods have been proposed to enable high-resolution generation, they all suffer from inefficiency. In this paper, we propose RectifiedHR, a straightforward and efficient solution for training-free high-resolution synthesis. Specifically, we propose a noise refresh strategy that unlocks the model's training-free high-resolution synthesis capability and improves efficiency. Additionally, we are the first to observe the phenomenon of energy decay, which may cause image blurriness during the high-resolution synthesis process. To address this issue, we introduce average latent energy analysis and find that tuning the classifier-free guidance hyperparameter can significantly improve generation performance. Our method is entirely training-free and demonstrates efficient performance. Furthermore, we show that RectifiedHR is compatible with various diffusion model techniques, enabling advanced features such as image editing, customized generation, and video synthesis. Extensive comparisons with numerous baseline methods validate the superior effectiveness and efficiency of RectifiedHR.
comment: Project Page: https://zhenyangcs.github.io/RectifiedHR-Diffusion/
♻ ☆ MV-SAM3D: Adaptive Multi-View Fusion for Layout-Aware 3D Generation
Recent unified 3D generation models have made remarkable progress in producing high-quality 3D assets from a single image. Notably, layout-aware approaches such as SAM3D can reconstruct multiple objects while preserving their spatial arrangement, opening the door to practical scene-level 3D generation. However, current methods are limited to single-view input and cannot leverage complementary multi-view observations, while independently estimated object poses often lead to physically implausible layouts such as interpenetration and floating artifacts.
We present MV-SAM3D, a training-free framework that extends layout-aware 3D generation with multi-view consistency and physical plausibility. We formulate multi-view fusion as a Multi-Diffusion process in 3D latent space and propose two adaptive weighting strategies -- attention-entropy weighting and visibility weighting -- that enable confidence-aware fusion, ensuring each viewpoint contributes according to its local observation reliability. For multi-object composition, we introduce physics-aware optimization that injects collision and contact constraints both during and after generation, yielding physically plausible object arrangements. Experiments on standard benchmarks and real-world multi-object scenes demonstrate significant improvements in reconstruction fidelity and layout plausibility, all without any additional training. Code is available at https://github.com/devinli123/MV-SAM3D.
♻ ☆ Hierarchical Feature Learning for Medical Point Clouds via State Space Model
Deep learning-based point cloud modeling has been widely investigated as an indispensable component of general shape analysis. Recently, transformer and state space model (SSM) have shown promising capacities in point cloud learning. However, limited research has been conducted on medical point clouds, which have great potential in disease diagnosis and treatment. This paper presents an SSM-based hierarchical feature learning framework for medical point cloud understanding. Specifically, we down-sample input into multiple levels through the farthest point sampling. At each level, we perform a series of k-nearest neighbor (KNN) queries to aggregate multi-scale structural information. To assist SSM in processing point clouds, we introduce coordinate-order and inside-out scanning strategies for efficient serialization of irregular points. Point features are calculated progressively from short neighbor sequences and long point sequences through vanilla and group Point SSM blocks, to capture both local patterns and long-range dependencies. To evaluate the proposed method, we build a large-scale medical point cloud dataset named MedPointS for anatomy classification, completion, and segmentation. Extensive experiments conducted on MedPointS demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance across all tasks. The dataset is available at https://flemme-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/medpoints.html. Code is merged to a public medical imaging platform: https://github.com/wlsdzyzl/flemme.
comment: 10 pages, 3 figures
♻ ☆ Through the Magnifying Glass: Adaptive Perception Magnification for Hallucination-Free VLM Decoding ACL 2026
Existing vision-language models (VLMs) often suffer from visual hallucination, where the generated responses contain inaccuracies that are not grounded in the visual input. Efforts to address this issue without model finetuning primarily mitigate hallucination by contrastively reducing language biases or amplifying the weights of visual embedding during decoding. However, these approaches remain limited in their ability to capture fine-grained visual details. In this work, we propose the Perception Magnifier (PM), a novel visual decoding method that iteratively isolates relevant visual tokens based on attention and magnifies the corresponding regions, spurring the model to concentrate on fine-grained visual details during decoding. By magnifying critical regions while preserving the structural and contextual information at each decoding step, PM allows the VLM to enhance its scrutiny of the visual input, hence producing more accurate and faithful responses. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that PM not only achieves superior hallucination mitigation but also enhances language generation while preserving strong reasoning capabilities. Code can be found at https://github.com/ShunqiM/PM.
comment: ACL 2026 Main Conference
♻ ☆ A Geometric Algorithm for Blood Vessel Reconstruction from Skeletal Representation
We introduce a novel approach for the reconstruction of tubular shapes from skeletal representations. Our method processes all skeletal points as a whole, eliminating the need for splitting input structure into multiple segments. We represent the tubular shape as a truncated signed distance function (TSDF) in a voxel hashing manner, in which the signed distance between a voxel center and the object is computed through a simple geometric algorithm. Our method does not involve any surface sampling scheme or solving large matrix equations, and therefore is a faster and more elegant solution for tubular shape reconstruction compared to other approaches. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method. Code is avaliable at https://github.com/wlsdzyzl/Dragon.
comment: 9 pages (without reference), 6 figures
♻ ☆ VAREX: A Benchmark for Multi-Modal Structured Extraction from Documents
Udi Barzelay, Ophir Azulai, Inbar Shapira, Idan Friedman, Foad Abo Dahood, Madison Lee, Abraham Daniels
We introduce VAREX (VARied-schema EXtraction), a benchmark for evaluating multimodal foundation models on structured data extraction from government forms. VAREX employs a Reverse Annotation pipeline that programmatically fills PDF templates with synthetic values, producing deterministic ground truth validated through three-phase quality assurance. The benchmark comprises 1,777 documents with 1,771 unique schemas across three structural categories, each provided in four input modalities: plain text, layout-preserving text (whitespace-aligned to approximate column positions), document image, or both text and image combined. Unlike existing benchmarks that evaluate from a single input representation, VAREX provides four controlled modalities per document, enabling systematic ablation of how input format affects extraction accuracy -- a capability absent from prior benchmarks. We evaluate 20 models from frontier proprietary models to small open models, with particular attention to models <=4B parameters suitable for cost-sensitive and latency-constrained deployment. Results reveal that (1) below 4B parameters, structured output compliance -- not extraction capability -- is a dominant bottleneck; in particular, schema echo (models producing schema-conforming structure instead of extracted values) depresses scores by 45-65 pp (percentage points) in affected models; (2) extraction-specific fine-tuning at 2B yields +81 pp gains, demonstrating that the instruction-following deficit is addressable without scale; (3) layout-preserving text provides the largest accuracy gain (+3-18 pp), exceeding pixel-level visual cues; and (4) the benchmark most effectively discriminates models in the 60-95% accuracy band. Dataset and evaluation code are publicly available.
comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables, plus 12-page supplementary. Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ibm-research/VAREX Code: https://github.com/udibarzi/varex-bench
♻ ☆ Evaluating Low-Light Image Enhancement Across Multiple Intensity Levels
Maria Pilligua, David Serrano-Lozano, Pai Peng, Ramon Baldrich, Michael S. Brown, Javier Vazquez-Corral
Imaging in low-light environments is challenging due to reduced scene radiance, which leads to elevated sensor noise and reduced color saturation. Most learning-based low-light enhancement methods rely on paired training data captured under a single low-light condition and a well-lit reference. The lack of radiance diversity limits our understanding of how enhancement techniques perform across varying illumination intensities. We introduce the Multi-Illumination Low-Light (MILL) dataset, containing images captured at diverse light intensities under controlled conditions with fixed camera settings and precise illuminance measurements. MILL enables comprehensive evaluation of enhancement algorithms across variable lighting conditions. We benchmark several state-of-the-art methods and reveal significant performance variations across intensity levels. Leveraging the unique multi-illumination structure of our dataset, we propose improvements that enhance robustness across diverse illumination scenarios. Our modifications achieve up to 10 dB PSNR improvement for DSLR and 2 dB for the smartphone on Full HD images.
♻ ☆ A Spatial-Spectral-Frequency Interactive Network for Multimodal Remote Sensing Classification
Deep learning-based methods have achieved significant success in remote sensing Earth observation data analysis. Numerous feature fusion techniques address multimodal remote sensing image classification by integrating global and local features. However, these techniques often struggle to extract structural and detail features from heterogeneous and redundant multimodal images. With the goal of introducing frequency domain learning to model key and sparse detail features, this paper introduces the spatial-spectral-frequency interaction network (S$^2$Fin), which integrates pairwise fusion modules across the spatial, spectral, and frequency domains. Specifically, we propose a high-frequency sparse enhancement transformer that employs sparse spatial-spectral attention to optimize the parameters of the high-frequency filter. Subsequently, a two-level spatial-frequency fusion strategy is introduced, comprising an adaptive frequency channel module that fuses low-frequency structures with enhanced high-frequency details, and a high-frequency resonance mask that emphasizes sharp edges via phase similarity. In addition, a spatial-spectral attention fusion module further enhances feature extraction at intermediate layers of the network. Experiments on four benchmark multimodal datasets with limited labeled data demonstrate that S$^2$Fin performs superior classification, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/HaoLiu-XDU/SSFin.
♻ ☆ Balanced Diffusion-Guided Fusion for Multimodal Remote Sensing Classification
Deep learning-based techniques for the analysis of multimodal remote sensing data have become popular due to their ability to effectively integrate complementary spatial, spectral, and structural information from different sensors. Recently, denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) have attracted attention in the remote sensing community due to their powerful ability to capture robust and complex spatial-spectral distributions. However, pre-training multimodal DDPMs may result in modality imbalance, and effectively leveraging diffusion features to guide complementary diversity feature extraction remains an open question. To address these issues, this paper proposes a balanced diffusion-guided fusion (BDGF) framework that leverages multimodal diffusion features to guide a multi-branch network for land-cover classification. Specifically, we propose an adaptive modality masking strategy to encourage the DDPMs to obtain a modality-balanced rather than spectral image-dominated data distribution. Subsequently, these diffusion features hierarchically guide feature extraction among CNN, Mamba, and transformer networks by integrating feature fusion, group channel attention, and cross-attention mechanisms. Finally, a mutual learning strategy is developed to enhance inter-branch collaboration by aligning the probability entropy and feature similarity of individual subnetworks. Extensive experiments on four multimodal remote sensing datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior classification performance. The code is available at https://github.com/HaoLiu-XDU/BDGF.
♻ ☆ SUPERGLASSES: Benchmarking Vision Language Models as Intelligent Agents for AI Smart Glasses
The rapid advancement of AI-powered smart glasses-one of the hottest wearable devices-has unlocked new frontiers for multimodal interaction, with Visual Question Answering (VQA) over external knowledge sources emerging as a core application. Existing Vision Language Models (VLMs) adapted to smart glasses are typically trained and evaluated on traditional multimodal datasets; however, these datasets lack the variety and realism needed to reflect smart glasses usage scenarios and diverge from their specific challenges, where accurately identifying the object of interest must precede any external knowledge retrieval. To bridge this gap, we introduce SUPER- GLASSES, the first comprehensive VQA benchmark built on real-world data entirely collected by smart glasses devices. SUPERGLASSES comprises 2,422 egocentric image-question pairs spanning 14 image domains and 8 query categories, enriched with full search trajectories and reasoning annotations. We evaluate 26 representative VLMs on this benchmark, revealing significant performance gaps. To address the limitations of existing models, we further propose the SUPERLENS, a multimodal smart glasses agent that enables retrieval-augmented answer generation by integrating automatic object detection, query decoupling, and multimodal web search. SUPERLENS achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming GPT-4o by 2.19%, underscoring the need for task-specific solutions in smart glasses VQA. Our dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/xandery/SuperGlasses.
♻ ☆ PSR: Scaling Multi-Subject Personalized Image Generation with Pairwise Subject-Consistency Rewards CVPR 2026
Personalized generation models for a single subject have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness, highlighting their significant potential. However, when extended to multiple subjects, existing models often exhibit degraded performance, particularly in maintaining subject consistency and adhering to textual prompts. We attribute these limitations to the absence of high-quality multi-subject datasets and refined post-training strategies. To address these challenges, we propose a scalable multi-subject data generation pipeline that leverages powerful single-subject generation models to construct diverse and high-quality multi-subject training data. Through this dataset, we first enable single-subject personalization models to acquire knowledge of synthesizing multi-image and multi-subject scenarios. Furthermore, to enhance both subject consistency and text controllability, we design a set of Pairwise Subject-Consistency Rewards and general-purpose rewards, which are incorporated into a refined reinforcement learning stage. To comprehensively evaluate multi-subject personalization, we introduce a new benchmark that assesses model performance using seven subsets across three dimensions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in advancing multi-subject personalized image generation. Github Link: https://github.com/wang-shulei/PSR
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026
♻ ☆ Improving Image Coding for Machines through Optimizing Encoder via Auxiliary Loss ICIP 2024
Image coding for machines (ICM) aims to compress images for machine analysis using recognition models rather than human vision. Hence, in ICM, it is important for the encoder to recognize and compress the information necessary for the machine recognition task. There are two main approaches in learned ICM; optimization of the compression model based on task loss, and Region of Interest (ROI) based bit allocation. These approaches provide the encoder with the recognition capability. However, optimization with task loss becomes difficult when the recognition model is deep, and ROI-based methods often involve extra overhead during evaluation. In this study, we propose a novel training method for learned ICM models that applies auxiliary loss to the encoder to improve its recognition capability and rate-distortion performance. Our method achieves Bjontegaard Delta rate improvements of 27.7% and 20.3% in object detection and semantic segmentation tasks, compared to the conventional training method.
comment: Accepted at ICIP 2024
♻ ☆ ChangeBridge: Spatiotemporal Image Generation with Multimodal Controls for Remote Sensing CVPR 2026
Zhenghui Zhao, Chen Wu, Xiangyong Cao, Di Wang, Hongruixuan Chen, Datao Tang, Liangpei Zhang, Zhuo Zheng
Spatiotemporal image generation is a highly meaningful task, which can generate future scenes conditioned on given observations. However, existing change generation methods can only handle event-driven changes (e.g., new buildings) and fail to model cross-temporal variations (e.g., seasonal shifts). In this work, we propose ChangeBridge, a conditional spatiotemporal image generation model for remote sensing. Given pre-event images and multimodal event controls, ChangeBridge generates post-event scenes that are both spatially and temporally coherent. The core idea is a drift-asynchronous diffusion bridge. Specifically, it consists of three main modules: a) Composed Bridge Initialization, which replaces noise initialization. It starts the diffusion from a composed pre-event state, modeling a diffusion bridge process. b) Asynchronous Drift Diffusion, which uses a pixel-wise drift map, assigning different drift magnitudes to event and temporal evolution. This enables differentiated generation during the pre-to-post transition. c) Drift-Aware Denoising, which embeds the drift map into the denoising network, guiding drift-aware reconstruction. Experiments show that ChangeBridge can generate better cross-spatiotemporal aligned scenarios compared to state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, ChangeBridge shows great potential for land-use planning and as a data generation engine for a series of change detection tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/zhenghuizhao/ChangeBridge
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026
♻ ☆ Lang2Act: Fine-Grained Visual Reasoning through Self-Emergent Linguistic Toolchains
Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (VRAG) enhances Vision-Language Models (VLMs) by incorporating external visual documents to address a given query. Existing VRAG frameworks usually depend on rigid, pre-defined external tools to extend the perceptual capabilities of VLMs, typically by explicitly separating visual perception from subsequent reasoning processes. However, this decoupled design can lead to unnecessary loss of visual information, particularly when image-based operations such as cropping are applied. In this paper, we propose Lang2Act, which enables fine-grained visual perception and reasoning through self-emergent linguistic toolchains. Rather than invoking fixed external engines, Lang2Act collects self-emergent actions as linguistic tools and leverages them to enhance the visual perception capabilities of VLMs. To support this mechanism, we design a two-stage Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based training framework. Specifically, the first stage optimizes VLMs to self-explore high-quality actions for constructing a reusable linguistic toolbox, and the second stage further optimizes VLMs to exploit these linguistic tools for downstream reasoning effectively. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of Lang2Act in substantially enhancing the visual perception capabilities of VLMs, achieving performance improvements of over 4%. All code and data are available at https://github.com/NEUIR/Lang2Act.
♻ ☆ The Persistence of Cultural Memory: Investigating Multimodal Iconicity in Diffusion Models
The ambiguity between generalization and memorization in TTI diffusion models becomes pronounced when prompts invoke culturally shared visual references, a phenomenon we term multimodal iconicity. These are instances in which images and texts reflect established cultural associations, such as when a title recalls a familiar artwork or film scene. Such cases challenge existing approaches to evaluating memorization, as they define a setting in which instance-level memorization and culturally grounded generalization are structurally intertwined. To address this challenge, we propose an evaluation framework to assess a model's ability to remain culturally grounded without relying on visual replication. Specifically, we introduce the Cultural Reference Transformation (CRT) metric, which separates two dimensions of model behavior: Recognition, whether a model evokes a reference, from Realization, how it depicts it through replication or reinterpretation. We evaluate five diffusion models on 767 Wikidata-derived cultural references, covering both still and moving imagery, and find differences in how they respond to multimodal iconicity: some show weaker recognition, while others rely more heavily on replication. To assess linguistic sensitivity, we conduct prompt perturbation experiments using synonym substitutions and literal image descriptions, finding that models often reproduce iconic visual structures even when textual cues are altered. Finally, we find that cultural reference recognition correlates not only with training data frequency, but also textual uniqueness, reference popularity, and creation date. Our findings show that the behavior of diffusion models in culturally iconic settings cannot be reduced to simple reproduction, but depends on how references are recognized and realized, advancing evaluation beyond simple text-image matching toward richer contextual understanding.
♻ ☆ SD-FSMIS: Adapting Stable Diffusion for Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation CVPR2026
Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation (FSMIS) aims to segment novel object classes in medical images using only minimal annotated examples, addressing the critical challenges of data scarcity and domain shifts prevalent in medical imaging. While Diffusion Models (DM) excel in visual tasks, their potential for FSMIS remains largely unexplored. We propose that the rich visual priors learned by large-scale DMs offer a powerful foundation for a more robust and data-efficient segmentation approach. In this paper, we introduce SD-FSMIS, a novel framework designed to effectively adapt the powerful pre-trained Stable Diffusion (SD) model for the FSMIS task. Our approach repurposes its conditional generative architecture by introducing two key components: a Support-Query Interaction (SQI) and a Visual-to-Textual Condition Translator (VTCT). Specifically, SQI provides a straightforward yet powerful means of adapting SD to the FSMIS paradigm. The VTCT module translates visual cues from the support set into an implicit textual embedding that guides the diffusion model, enabling precise conditioning of the generation process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SD-FSMIS achieves competitive results compared to state-of-the-art methods in standard settings. Surprisingly, it also demonstrated excellent generalization ability in more challenging cross-domain scenarios. These findings highlight the immense potential of adapting large-scale generative models to advance data-efficient and robust medical image segmentation.
comment: CVPR2026
♻ ☆ DMin: Scalable Training Data Influence Estimation for Diffusion Models CVPR 2026
Identifying the training data samples that most influence a generated image is a critical task in understanding diffusion models (DMs), yet existing influence estimation methods are constrained to small-scale or LoRA-tuned models due to computational limitations. To address this challenge, we propose DMin (Diffusion Model influence), a scalable framework for estimating the influence of each training data sample on a given generated image. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first method capable of influence estimation for DMs with billions of parameters. Leveraging efficient gradient compression, DMin reduces storage requirements from hundreds of TBs to mere MBs or even KBs, and retrieves the top-k most influential training samples in under 1 second, all while maintaining performance. Our empirical results demonstrate DMin is both effective in identifying influential training samples and efficient in terms of computational and storage requirements.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026 (Findings)
♻ ☆ CompoDistill: Attention Distillation for Compositional Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs ICLR'26
Recently, efficient Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have gained significant attention as a solution to their high computational complexity, making them more practical for real-world applications. In this regard, the knowledge distillation (KD) approach has emerged as a promising alternative, which transfers the rich visual and linguistic knowledge from a larger model (teacher) to a smaller model (student). However, we observe that existing KD methods struggle to effectively distill the teacher MLLM's rich visual perception abilities to the student, a challenge that has been largely overlooked in previous studies. Through a systematic analysis, we identify visual attention misalignment between student and teacher as the main cause of this issue. Based on this insight, we propose CompoDistill, a novel KD framework that explicitly aligns the student's visual attention with that of the teacher to enhance the student's visual perception abilities. Our extensive experiments show that CompoDistill significantly improves performance on compositional reasoning tasks that require visual perception abilities while maintaining strong performance on visual question answering tasks, as done in existing studies. Furthermore, CompoDistill demonstrates effectiveness with a more advanced backbone, highlighting its generalizability.
comment: ICLR'26, Project Page : https://ptkjw1997.github.io/CompoDistill-page/
♻ ☆ Towards Effective Long Video Understanding of Multimodal Large Language Models via One-shot Clip Retrieval
Due to excessive memory overhead, most Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can only process videos of limited frames. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient paradigm to remedy this shortcoming, termed One-shot video-Clip based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (OneClip-RAG). Compared with existing video RAG methods, OneClip-RAG makes full use of the merits of video clips for augmented video understanding in terms of both knowledge integrity and semantic coherence. Besides, it is also equipped with a novel query-guided video chunking algorithm that can unify clip chunking and cross-modal retrieval in one processing step, avoiding redundant computations. To improve instruction following, we further propose a new dataset called SynLongVideo and design a progressive training regime for OneClip-RAG. OneClip-RAG is plugged into three recent MLLMs and validated on a set of long-video benchmarks. Experimental results not only show the obvious performance gains by OneClip-RAG over MLLMs, e.g., boosting Qwen3-VL 8B to the level of GPT-5 on MLVU, but also show its superior efficiency in handling long videos. e.g., enabling LLaVA-Video understand up to an hour of videos in less than 1.2 minutes on a single 4090 GPU.
♻ ☆ RDSplat: Robust Watermarking for 3D Gaussian Splatting Against 2D and 3D Diffusion Editing
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become a leading representation for high-fidelity 3D assets, yet protecting these assets via digital watermarking remains an open challenge. Existing 3DGS watermarking methods are robust only to classical distortions and fail under diffusion editing, which operates at both the 2D image level and the 3D scene level, covertly erasing embedded watermarks while preserving visual plausibility. We present RDSplat, the first 3DGS watermarking framework designed to withstand both 2D and 3D diffusion editing. Our key observation is that diffusion models act as low-pass filters that preserve low-frequency structures while regenerating high-frequency details. RDSplat exploits this by embedding 100-bit watermarks exclusively into low-frequency Gaussian primitives identified through Frequency-Aware Primitive Selection (FAPS), which combines the Mip score and directional balance score, while freezing all other primitives. Training efficiency is achieved through a surrogate strategy that replaces costly diffusion forward passes with Gaussian blur augmentation. A dedicated decoder, GeoMark, built on ViT-S/16 with spatially periodic secret embedding, jointly resists diffusion editing and the geometric transformations inherent to novel-view rendering. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks under seven 2D diffusion attacks and iterative 3D editing demonstrate strong classical robustness (bit accuracy 0.811) and competitive diffusion robustness (bit accuracy 0.701) at 100-bit capacity, while completing fine-tuning in 3 to 7 minutes on a single RTX 4090 GPU.
♻ ☆ BTC-LLM: Efficient Sub-1-Bit LLM Quantization via Learnable Transformation and Binary Codebook
Hao Gu, Lujun Li, Hao Wang, Lei Wang, Zheyu Wang, Bei Liu, Jiacheng Liu, Qiyuan Zhu, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
Binary quantization represents the most extreme form of compression, reducing weights to +/-1 for maximal memory and computational efficiency. While recent sparsity-aware binarization achieves sub-1-bit compression via weight pruning, it faces critical challenges: performance degradation, mask-management overhead, and limited hardware compatibility. In this paper, we present BTC-LLM, a novel sub-1-bit LLM quantization framework that leverages binary pattern clustering and weight transformation to overcome these limitations. Our approach incorporates two key innovations: (1) a Binary Codebook that clusters recurring vectors into compact indices using custom distance metrics and sign-based updates; (2) a Learnable Transformation that reduces outliers and promotes shared sign patterns among binary weights. This eliminates sparse masks, enabling efficient inference on standard hardware. Extensive evaluations across LLaMA, Qwen, and FBI-LLM families demonstrate that BTC-LLM achieves state-of-the-art results in extreme compression (1.11-0.7 bits). Notably, BTC-LLM compressed to 0.8 bits on LLaMA-2-13B maintains high performance, with only a 3.1 percent accuracy drop in zero-shot benchmarks, while delivering a 1.6x speedup over FP16.
♻ ☆ Diff-PCR: Diffusion-Based Correspondence Searching in Doubly Stochastic Matrix Space for Point Cloud Registration
Efficiently identifying accurate correspondences between point clouds is crucial for both rigid and non-rigid point cloud registration. Existing methods usually rely on geometric or semantic feature embeddings to establish correspondences and then estimate transformations or flow fields. Recently, several state-of-the-art methods have adopted RAFT-like iterative updates to refine solutions. However, these methods still have two major limitations. First, their iterative refinement mechanism lacks transparency, and the update trajectory is largely fixed once the refinement starts, which may lead to suboptimal solutions. Second, they overlook the importance of explicitly refining the correspondence matrix before solving for transformations or flow fields. Most existing approaches compute candidate correspondences in feature space and project the resulting matching matrix only once by using Sinkhorn or dual-softmax normalization. Such a one-shot projection can be far from the globally optimal solution, and these methods usually do not model the distribution of the target matching matrix. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that exploits a denoising diffusion model to predict a search gradient for the optimal matching matrix in doubly stochastic matrix space. Specifically, the diffusion model learns a denoising direction, and the reverse denoising process iteratively searches for improved solutions along this learned direction, which approximates the maximum-likelihood direction of the target matching matrix. To improve efficiency, we design a lightweight denoising module and adopt the accelerated sampling strategy of the Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM)\cite{song2020denoising}. Experimental results on 3DMatch/3DLoMatch and 4DMatch/4DLoMatch demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
♻ ☆ A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting
3D Gaussian splatting (GS) has emerged as a transformative technique in radiance fields. Unlike mainstream implicit neural models, 3D GS uses millions of learnable 3D Gaussians for an explicit scene representation. Paired with a differentiable rendering algorithm, this approach achieves real-time rendering and unprecedented editability, making it a potential game-changer for 3D reconstruction and representation. In the present paper, we provide the first systematic overview of the recent developments and critical contributions in 3D GS. We begin with a detailed exploration of the underlying principles and the driving forces behind the emergence of 3D GS, laying the groundwork for understanding its significance. A focal point of our discussion is the practical applicability of 3D GS. By enabling unprecedented rendering speed, 3D GS opens up a plethora of applications, ranging from virtual reality to interactive media and beyond. This is complemented by a comparative analysis of leading 3D GS models, evaluated across various benchmark tasks to highlight their performance and practical utility. The survey concludes by identifying current challenges and suggesting potential avenues for future research. Through this survey, we aim to provide a valuable resource for both newcomers and seasoned researchers, fostering further exploration and advancement in explicit radiance field.
comment: Accepted by ACM Computing Surveys; Paper list: https://github.com/guikunchen/Awesome3DGS ; Benchmark: https://github.com/guikunchen/3DGS-Benchmarks
♻ ☆ Learning to Search: A Decision-Based Agent for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering
Zhuohong Chen, Zhenxian Wu, Yunyao Yu, Hangrui Xu, Zirui Liao, Zhifang Liu, Xiangwen Deng, Pen Jiao, Haoqian Wang
Knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) requires vision-language models to understand images and use external knowledge, especially for rare entities and long-tail facts. Most existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods adopt a fixed pipeline that sequentially retrieves information, filters it, and then produces an answer. Such a design makes it difficult to adapt to diverse question types. Moreover, it separates retrieval from reasoning, making it hard for the model to decide when to search, how to refine queries, or when to stop. As a result, the retrieved evidence is often poorly aligned with the question. To address these limitations, we reformulate KB-VQA as a search-agent problem and model the solving process as a multi-step decision-making procedure. At each step, the agent selects one of four actions-Answer, Image Retrieval, Text Retrieval, and Caption-based on its current information state. We further design an automated pipeline to collect multi-step trajectories that record the agent's reasoning process, tool usage, and intermediate decisions. These trajectories are then used as supervision for fine-tuning. Experiments on InfoSeek and E-VQA demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming prior baselines and confirming the effectiveness of our framework.
♻ ☆ Physical Knot Classification Beyond Accuracy: A Benchmark and Diagnostic Study
Physical knot classification is a fine-grained task in which the intended cue
is rope crossing structure, but high accuracy may still come from appearance
shortcuts. Using a tightness-stratified benchmark built from the public
10Knots dataset (1,440 images, 10 classes), we train on loose knots and test
on tightly dressed knots to evaluate whether structure-guided training yields
topology-specific gains. Topological distance predicts residual confusion for
several backbones, but a random-distance control shows that topology-aware
centroid alignment does not provide reliable topology-specific improvement.
Auxiliary crossing-number prediction is more stable than centroid alignment,
but neither method removes strong appearance reliance. In causal probes,
background changes alone flip 17-32% of predictions, and phone-photo accuracy
drops by 58-69 percentage points. These results show that high closed-set
accuracy does not imply topology-dominant recognition, and that appearance
bias remains the main obstacle to deployment.
comment: 48 pages, 12 figures, 10 supplementary sections
♻ ☆ PLUME: Latent Reasoning Based Universal Multimodal Embedding
Chenwei He, Xiangzhao Hao, Tianyu Yang, Yuxiang Ma, Yuheng Jia, Lingxiang Wu, Chaoyang Zhao, Haiyun Guo, Jinqiao Wang
Universal multimodal embedding (UME) maps heterogeneous inputs into a shared retrieval space with a single model. Recent approaches improve UME by generating explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales before extracting embeddings, enabling multimodal large language models to better infer complex query intent. However, explicit CoT incurs substantial inference overhead and can compress rich multimodal evidence into a narrow textual bottleneck. We propose PLUME, a latent reasoning framework that advances UME by replacing verbalized CoT with a short autoregressive rollout of continuous latent states. To support diverse multimodal queries, PLUME further introduces a semantic-anchor-guided transition adapter that steers latent rollout along different reasoning trajectories under the same fixed computation budget. To stabilize training, PLUME adopts a progressive explicit-to-latent curriculum that uses verbalized reasoning only as a temporary training scaffold and gradually transfers this behavior into hidden-state computation, eliminating explicit CoT at inference. On the 78-task MMEB-v2 benchmark, PLUME outperforms strong explicit-CoT UME baselines while reducing reasoning from hundreds of generated tokens to fewer than 10 latent steps, delivering over 30x faster inference. PLUME is especially well suited to retrieval settings where relevant evidence is dense, structurally complex, and difficult to organize through verbalized intermediate rationales, such as video and visual document retrieval. These results show that structured latent computation can preserve the benefits of intermediate reasoning without the overhead of explicit rationale generation, providing a stronger and more efficient paradigm for practical retrieval systems.
♻ ☆ UniLACT: Depth-Aware RGB Latent Action Learning for Vision-Language-Action Models
Latent action representations learned from unlabeled videos have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for pretraining vision-language-action (VLA) models without explicit robot action supervision. However, latent actions derived solely from RGB observations primarily encode appearance-driven dynamics and lack explicit 3D geometric structure, which is essential for precise and contact-rich manipulation. To address this limitation, we introduce UniLACT, a transformer-based VLA model that incorporates geometric structure through depth-aware latent pretraining, enabling downstream policies to inherit stronger spatial priors. To facilitate this process, we propose UniLARN, a unified latent action learning framework based on inverse and forward dynamics objectives that learns a shared embedding space for RGB and depth while explicitly modeling their cross-modal interactions. This formulation produces modality-specific and unified latent action representations that serve as pseudo-labels for the depth-aware pretraining of UniLACT. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings demonstrate the effectiveness of depth-aware unified latent action representations. UniLACT consistently outperforms RGB-based latent action baselines under in-domain and out-of-domain pretraining regimes, as well as on both seen and unseen manipulation tasks.The project page is at https://manishgovind.github.io/unilact-vla/
comment: https://manishgovind.github.io/unilact-vla/
♻ ☆ SVGFusion: A VAE-Diffusion Transformer for Vector Graphic Generation
Generating high-quality Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) from text remains a significant challenge. Existing LLM-based models that generate SVG code as a flat token sequence struggle with poor structural understanding and error accumulation, while optimization-based methods are slow and yield uneditable outputs. To address these limitations, we introduce SVGFusion, a unified framework that adapts the VAE-diffusion architecture to bridge the dual code-visual nature of SVGs. Our model features two core components: a Vector-Pixel Fusion Variational Autoencoder (VP-VAE) that learns a perceptually rich latent space by jointly encoding SVG code and its rendered image, and a Vector Space Diffusion Transformer (VS-DiT) that achieves globally coherent compositions through iterative refinement. Furthermore, this architecture is enhanced by a Rendering Sequence Modeling strategy, which ensures accurate object layering and occlusion. Evaluated on our novel SVGX-Dataset comprising 240k human-designed SVGs, SVGFusion establishes a new state-of-the-art, generating high-quality, editable SVGs that are strictly semantically aligned with the input text.
comment: project page: https://ximinng.github.io/SVGFusionProject/
♻ ☆ Reason-SVG: Enhancing Structured Reasoning for Vector Graphics Generation with Reinforcement Learning CVPR 2026
Generating high-quality Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) is challenging for Large Language Models (LLMs), as it requires advanced reasoning for structural validity, semantic accuracy, and visual coherence -- areas where current LLMs often struggle. In this work, we introduce Reason-SVG, a novel framework equipped with enhanced structured reasoning for SVG generation. Reason-SVG pioneers the ``Drawing-with-Thought'' (DwT) paradigm, in which models generate both SVG code and explicit design rationales. Reason-SVG follows a two-stage training strategy: First, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) trains the LLM on the DwT paradigm to develop foundational reasoning abilities. Second, Reinforcement Learning (RL), utilizing Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), empowers the model to generate both DwT and SVG rationales through refined, reward-driven reasoning. To enable reasoning-driven SVG generation, we design a Hybrid Reward function that evaluates the presence and effectiveness of DwT reasoning, along with structural validity, semantic alignment, and visual quality. We also introduce the SVGX-DwT-10k dataset, a high-quality corpus of 10k SVG-DwT pairs, where each SVG code is generated based on explicit DwT reasoning. By integrating DwT, SFT, and Hybrid Reward-guided RL, Reason-SVG significantly improves the performance of LLMs and VLMs in generating accurate and visually coherent SVGs.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026. 16 pages, 7 figures
♻ ☆ Clinical Cognition Alignment for Gastrointestinal Diagnosis with Multimodal LLMs
Huan Zheng, Yucheng Zhou, Tianyi Yan, Dubing Chen, Hongbo Lu, Wenlong Liao, Tao He, Pai Peng, Jianbing Shen
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in medical image analysis. However, their application in gastrointestinal endoscopy is currently hindered by two critical limitations: the misalignment between general model reasoning and standardized clinical cognitive pathways, and the lack of causal association between visual features and diagnostic outcomes. In this paper, we propose a novel Clinical-Cognitive-Aligned (CogAlign) framework to address these challenges. First, we endow the model with rigorous clinical analytical capabilities by constructing the hierarchical clinical cognition dataset and employing Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Unlike conventional approaches, this strategy internalizes the hierarchical diagnostic logic of experts, ranging from anatomical localization and morphological evaluation to microvascular analysis, directly into the model. Second, to eliminate visual bias, we provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating that standard supervised tuning inevitably converges to spurious background correlations. Guided by this insight, we propose a counterfactual-driven reinforcement learning strategy to enforce causal rectification. By generating counterfactual normal samples via lesion masking and optimizing through clinical-cognition-centric rewards, we constrain the model to strictly ground its diagnosis in causal lesion features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves State-of-the-Art (SoTA) performance across multiple benchmarks, significantly enhancing diagnostic accuracy in complex clinical scenarios. All source code and datasets will be made publicly available.
♻ ☆ SMPL-GPTexture: Dual-View 3D Human Texture Estimation using Text-to-Image Generation Models
Generating high-quality, photorealistic textures for 3D human avatars remains a fundamental yet challenging task in computer vision and multimedia field. However, real paired front and back images of human subjects are rarely available with privacy, ethical and cost of acquisition, which restricts scalability of the data. Additionally, learning priors from image inputs using deep generative models, such as GANs or diffusion models, to infer unseen regions such as the human back often leads to artifacts, structural inconsistencies, or loss of fine-grained detail. To address these issues, we present SMPL-GPTexture (skinned multi-person linear model - general purpose Texture), a novel pipeline that takes natural language prompts as input and leverages a state-of-the-art text-to-image generation model to produce paired high-resolution front and back images of a human subject as the starting point for texture estimation. Using the generated paired dual-view images, we first employ a human mesh recovery model to obtain a robust 2D-to-3D SMPL alignment between image pixels and the 3D model's UV coordinates for each views. Second, we use an inverted rasterization technique that explicitly projects the observed colour from the input images into the UV space, thereby producing accurate, complete texture maps. Finally, we apply a diffusion-based inpainting module to fill in the missing regions, and the fusion mechanism then combines these results into a unified full texture map. Extensive experiments shows that our SMPL-GPTexture can generate high resolution texture aligned with user's prompts.
♻ ☆ CryoSplat: Gaussian Splatting for Cryo-EM Homogeneous Reconstruction ICLR 2026
As a critical modality for structural biology, cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) facilitates the determination of macromolecular structures at near-atomic resolution. The core computational task in single-particle cryo-EM is to reconstruct the 3D electrostatic potential of a molecule from noisy 2D projections acquired at unknown orientations. Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) provide a continuous, compact, and physically interpretable representation for molecular density and have recently gained interest in cryo-EM reconstruction. However, existing methods rely on external consensus maps or atomic models for initialization, limiting their use in self-contained pipelines. In parallel, differentiable rendering techniques such as Gaussian splatting have demonstrated remarkable scalability and efficiency for volumetric representations, suggesting a natural fit for GMM-based cryo-EM reconstruction. However, off-the-shelf Gaussian splatting methods are designed for photorealistic view synthesis and remain incompatible with cryo-EM due to mismatches in the image formation physics, reconstruction objectives, and coordinate systems. Addressing these issues, we propose cryoSplat, a GMM-based method that integrates Gaussian splatting with the physics of cryo-EM image formation. In particular, we develop an orthogonal projection-aware Gaussian splatting, with adaptations such as a view-dependent normalization term and FFT-aligned coordinate system tailored for cryo-EM imaging. These innovations enable stable and efficient homogeneous reconstruction directly from raw cryo-EM particle images using random initialization. Experimental results on real datasets validate the effectiveness and robustness of cryoSplat over representative baselines. The code will be released at https://github.com/Chen-Suyi/cryosplat.
comment: Accepted at ICLR 2026 (Camera-ready). Code available at https://github.com/Chen-Suyi/cryosplat
♻ ☆ Which Way Does Time Flow? A Psychophysics-Grounded Evaluation for Vision-Language Models
Modern vision-language models (VLMs) excel at many multimodal tasks, yet their grasp of temporal information in video remains weak and has not been adequately evaluated. We probe this gap with a deceptively simple but revealing challenge: judging the arrow of time (AoT)-whether a short clip is played forward or backward. We introduce AoT-PsyPhyBENCH, a psychophysically validated benchmark that tests whether VLMs can infer temporal direction in natural videos using the same stimuli and behavioral baselines established for humans. Our comprehensive evaluation of open-weight and proprietary, reasoning and non-reasoning VLMs reveals that most models perform near chance, and even the best model lags far behind human accuracy on physically irreversible processes (e.g., free fall, diffusion/explosion) and causal manual actions (division/addition) that humans recognize almost instantly. These results highlight a fundamental gap in current multimodal systems: while they capture rich visual-semantic correlations, they lack the inductive biases required for temporal continuity and causal understanding. We release the code and data for AoT-PsyPhyBENCH to encourage further progress in the physical and temporal reasoning capabilities of VLMs.
comment: 12 pages
♻ ☆ Physically Plausible Human-Object Rendering from Sparse Views via 3D Gaussian Splatting IEEE
Rendering realistic human-object interactions (HOIs) from sparse-view inputs is a challenging yet crucial task for various real-world applications. Existing methods often struggle to simultaneously achieve high rendering quality, physical plausibility, and computational efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose HOGS (Human-Object Rendering via 3D Gaussian Splatting), a novel framework for efficient HOI rendering with physically plausible geometric constraints from sparse views. HOGS represents both humans and objects as dynamic 3D Gaussians. Central to HOGS is a novel optimization process that operates directly on these Gaussians to enforce geometric consistency (i.e., preventing inter-penetration or floating contacts) to achieve physical plausibility. To support this core optimization under sparse-view ambiguity, our framework incorporates two pre-trained modules: an optimization-guided Human Pose Refiner for robust estimation under sparse-view occlusions, and a Human-Object Contact Predictor that efficiently identifies interaction regions to guide our novel contact and separation losses. Extensive experiments on both human-object and hand-object interaction datasets demonstrate that HOGS achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality and maintains high computational efficiency.
comment: 16 pages, 14 figures, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP)
♻ ☆ Progressive Multimodal Search and Reasoning for Knowledge-Intensive Visual Question Answering
Knowledge-intensive visual question answering (VQA) requires external knowledge beyond image content, demanding precise visual grounding and coherent integration of visual and textual information. Although multimodal retrieval-augmented generation has achieved notable advances by incorporating external knowledge bases, existing approaches largely adopt single-pass frameworks that often fail to acquire sufficient knowledge and lack mechanisms to revise misdirected reasoning. We propose PMSR (Progressive Multimodal Search and Reasoning), a framework that progressively constructs a structured reasoning trajectory to enhance both knowledge acquisition and synthesis. PMSR uses dual-scope queries conditioned on both the latest record and the trajectory to retrieve diverse knowledge from heterogeneous knowledge bases. The retrieved evidence is then synthesized into compact records via compositional reasoning. This design facilitates controlled iterative refinement, which supports more stable reasoning trajectories with reduced error propagation. Extensive experiments across six diverse benchmarks (Encyclopedic-VQA, InfoSeek, MMSearch, LiveVQA, FVQA, and OK-VQA) demonstrate that PMSR consistently improves both retrieval recall and end-to-end answer accuracy.
♻ ☆ SonoSelect: Efficient Ultrasound Perception via Active Probe Exploration
Ultrasound perception typically requires multiple scan views through probe movement to reduce diagnostic ambiguity, mitigate acoustic occlusions, and improve anatomical coverage. However, not all probe views are equally informative. Exhaustively acquiring a large number of views can introduce substantial redundancy, increase scanning and processing costs. To address this, we define an active view exploration task for ultrasound and propose SonoSelect, an ultrasound-specific method that adaptively guides probe movement based on current observations. Specifically, we cast ultrasound active view exploration as a sequential decision-making problem. Each new 2D ultrasound view is fused into a 3D spatial memory of the observed anatomy, which guides the next probe position. On top of this formulation, we propose an ultrasound-specific objective that favors probe movements with greater organ coverage, lower reconstruction uncertainty, and less redundant scanning. Experiments on the ultrasound simulator show that SonoSelect achieves promising multi-view organ classification accuracy using only 2 out of N views. Furthermore, for a more difficult kidney cyst detection task, it reaches 54.56% kidney coverage and 35.13% cyst coverage, with short trajectories consistently centered on the target cyst.
comment: Withdrawn due to incorrect institutional affiliation information. We need sufficient time to confirm the proper designations with the respective institutions before making the work public again
♻ ☆ Cognitive Mismatch in Multimodal Large Language Models for Discrete Symbol Understanding
Yinghui Li, Jiayi Kuang, Peng Xing, Daixian Liu, Yongheng Zhang, Junnan Dong, Shu-Yu Guo, Yangning Li, Qingyu Zhou, Wenhao Jiang, Hai-Tao Zheng, Ying Shen, Liang Lin, Philip S. Yu
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) perform strongly on natural images, yet their ability to understand discrete visual symbols remains unclear. We present a multi-domain benchmark spanning language, culture, mathematics, physics and chemistry, organized into three cognitive levels: perception and recognition, combination and reasoning, and association and critical thinking. Across leading MLLMs, we observe a consistent cognitive mismatch. Models frequently underperform on elementary symbol recognition while appearing relatively competent on more complex reasoning tasks. This recognition-reasoning inversion indicates that current systems often compensate with linguistic priors, template retrieval or procedural reasoning instead of robust visual grounding. The pattern is especially clear for sparse, low-redundancy symbols such as handwritten characters, formula graphs, circuit diagrams and chemical structures. These results show that symbolic understanding remains a major bottleneck for multimodal intelligence and motivate training and evaluation schemes that prioritize grounded perception in discrete semantic spaces.
♻ ☆ AnyImageNav: Any-View Geometry for Precise Last-Meter Image-Goal Navigation
Image Goal Navigation (ImageNav) is evaluated by a coarse success criterion, the agent must stop within 1m of the target, which is sufficient for finding objects but falls short for downstream tasks such as grasping that require precise positioning. We introduce AnyImageNav, a training-free system that pushes ImageNav toward this more demanding setting. Our key insight is that the goal image can be treated as a geometric query: any photo of an object, a hallway, or a room corner can be registered to the agent's observations via dense pixel-level correspondences, enabling recovery of the exact 6-DoF camera pose. Our method realizes this through a semantic-to-geometric cascade: a semantic relevance signal guides exploration and acts as a proximity gate, invoking a 3D multi-view foundation model only when the current view is highly relevant to the goal image; the model then self-certifies its registration in a loop for an accurate recovered pose. Our method sets state-of-the-art navigation success rates on Gibson (93.1%) and HM3D (82.6%), and achieves pose recovery that prior methods do not provide: a position error of 0.27m and heading error of 3.41 degrees on Gibson, and 0.21m / 1.23 degrees on HM3D, a 5-10x improvement over adapted baselines.Our project page: https://yijie21.github.io/ain/
♻ ☆ ASBench: Image Anomalies Synthesis Benchmark for Anomaly Detection IEEE
Anomaly detection plays a pivotal role in manufacturing quality control, yet its application is constrained by limited abnormal samples and high manual annotation costs. While anomaly synthesis offers a promising solution, existing studies predominantly treat anomaly synthesis as an auxiliary component within anomaly detection frameworks, lacking systematic evaluation of anomaly synthesis algorithms. Current research also overlook crucial factors specific to anomaly synthesis, such as decoupling its impact from detection, quantitative analysis of synthetic data and adaptability across different scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose ASBench, the first comprehensive benchmarking framework dedicated to evaluating anomaly synthesis methods. Our framework introduces four critical evaluation dimensions: (i) the generalization performance across different datasets and pipelines (ii) the ratio of synthetic to real data (iii) the correlation between intrinsic metrics of synthesis images and anomaly detection performance metrics , and (iv) strategies for hybrid anomaly synthesis methods. Through extensive experiments, ASBench not only reveals limitations in current anomaly synthesis methods but also provides actionable insights for future research directions in anomaly synthesis
comment: accpted by IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence
♻ ☆ Making MLLMs Blind: Adversarial Smuggling Attacks in MLLM Content Moderation ACL 2026
Zhiheng Li, Zongyang Ma, Yuntong Pan, Ziqi Zhang, Xiaolei Lv, Bo Li, Jun Gao, Jianing Zhang, Chunfeng Yuan, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly being deployed as automated content moderators. Within this landscape, we uncover a critical threat: Adversarial Smuggling Attacks. Unlike adversarial perturbations (for misclassification) and adversarial jailbreaks (for harmful output generation), adversarial smuggling exploits the Human-AI capability gap. It encodes harmful content into human-readable visual formats that remain AI-unreadable, thereby evading automated detection and enabling the dissemination of harmful content. We classify smuggling attacks into two pathways: (1) Perceptual Blindness, disrupting text recognition; and (2) Reasoning Blockade, inhibiting semantic understanding despite successful text recognition. To evaluate this threat, we constructed SmuggleBench, the first comprehensive benchmark comprising 1,700 adversarial smuggling attack instances. Evaluations on SmuggleBench reveal that both proprietary (e.g., GPT-5) and open-source (e.g., Qwen3-VL) state-of-the-art models are vulnerable to this threat, producing Attack Success Rates (ASR) exceeding 90%. By analyzing the vulnerability through the lenses of perception and reasoning, we identify three root causes: the limited capabilities of vision encoders, the robustness gap in OCR, and the scarcity of domain-specific adversarial examples. We conduct a preliminary exploration of mitigation strategies, investigating the potential of test-time scaling (via CoT) and adversarial training (via SFT) to mitigate this threat. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhihengli-casia/smugglebench.
comment: Accepted to ACL 2026. 19 pages, 6 figures
♻ ☆ AI-Driven Marine Robotics: Emerging Trends in Underwater Perception and Ecosystem Monitoring AAAI
Marine ecosystems face increasing pressure due to climate change, driving the need for scalable, AI-powered monitoring solutions to inform effective conservation and restoration efforts. This paper examines the rapid emergence of underwater AI as a major research frontier and analyzes the factors that have transformed marine perception from a niche application into a catalyst for AI innovation. We identify three convergent drivers: i) environmental necessity for ecosystem-scale monitoring, ii) democratization of underwater datasets through citizen science platforms, and iii) researcher migration from saturated terrestrial computer vision domains. Our analysis reveals how unique underwater challenges - turbidity, cryptic species detection, expert annotation bottlenecks, and cross-ecosystem generalization - are driving fundamental advances in weakly supervised learning, open-set recognition, and robust perception under degraded conditions. We survey emerging trends in datasets, scene understanding and 3D reconstruction, highlighting the paradigm shift from passive observation toward AI-driven, targeted intervention capabilities. The paper demonstrates how underwater constraints are pushing the boundaries of foundation models, self-supervised learning, and perception, with methodological innovations that extend far beyond marine applications to benefit general computer vision, robotics, and environmental monitoring.
comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, Accepted for Oral Presentation at AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2026
♻ ☆ Part$^{2}$GS: Part-aware Modeling of Articulated Objects using 3D Gaussian Splatting
Articulated objects are common in the real world, yet modeling their structure and motion remains a challenging task for 3D reconstruction methods. In this work, we introduce Part$^{2}$GS, a novel framework for modeling articulated digital twins of multi-part objects with high-fidelity geometry and physically consistent articulation. Part$^{2}$GS leverages a part-aware 3D Gaussian representation that encodes articulated components with learnable attributes, enabling structured, disentangled transformations that preserve high-fidelity geometry. To ensure physically consistent motion, we propose a motion-aware canonical representation guided by physics-based constraints, including contact enforcement, velocity consistency, and vector-field alignment. Furthermore, we introduce a field of repel points to prevent part collisions and maintain stable articulation paths, significantly improving motion coherence over baselines. Extensive evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that Part$^{2}$GS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 10$\times$ in Chamfer Distance for movable parts.
♻ ☆ Video Parallel Scaling: Aggregating Diverse Frame Subsets for VideoLLMs CVPR
Hyungjin Chung, Hyelin Nam, Jiyeon Kim, Hyojun Go, Byeongjun Park, Junho Kim, Joonseok Lee, Seongsu Ha, Byung-Hoon Kim
Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) face a critical bottleneck: increasing the number of input frames to capture fine-grained temporal detail leads to prohibitive computational costs and performance degradation from long context lengths. We introduce Video Parallel Scaling (VPS), an inference-time method that expands a model's perceptual bandwidth without increasing its context window. VPS operates by running multiple parallel inference streams, each processing a unique, disjoint subset of the video's frames. By aggregating the output probabilities from these complementary streams, VPS integrates a richer set of visual information than is possible with a single pass. We theoretically show that this approach effectively contracts the Chinchilla scaling law by leveraging uncorrelated visual evidence, thereby improving performance without additional training. Extensive experiments across various model architectures and scales (2B-32B) on benchmarks such as Video-MME and EventHallusion demonstrate that VPS consistently and significantly improves performance. It scales more favorably than other parallel alternatives (e.g. Self-consistency) and is complementary to other decoding strategies, offering a memory-efficient and robust framework for enhancing the temporal reasoning capabilities of VideoLLMs.
comment: CVPR Findings 2026; code: https://github.com/hyungjin-chung/VPS
♻ ☆ HOTFLoc++: End-to-End Hierarchical LiDAR Place Recognition, Re-Ranking, and 6-DoF Metric Localisation in Forests IEEE
This article presents HOTFLoc++, an end-to-end hierarchical framework for LiDAR place recognition, re-ranking, and 6-DoF metric localisation in forests. Leveraging an octree-based transformer, our approach extracts features at multiple granularities to increase robustness to clutter, self-similarity, and viewpoint changes in challenging scenarios, including ground-to-ground and ground-to-aerial in forest and urban environments. We propose learnable multi-scale geometric verification to reduce re-ranking failures due to degraded single-scale correspondences. Our joint training protocol enforces multi-scale geometric consistency of the octree hierarchy via joint optimisation of place recognition with re-ranking and localisation, improving place recognition convergence. Our system achieves comparable or lower localisation errors to baselines, with runtime improvements of almost two orders of magnitude over RANSAC-based registration for dense point clouds. Experimental results on public datasets show the superiority of our approach compared to state-of-the-art methods, achieving an average Recall@1 of 90.7% on CS-Wild-Places: an improvement of 29.6 percentage points over baselines, while maintaining high performance on single-source benchmarks with an average Recall@1 of 91.7% and 97.9% on Wild-Places and MulRan, respectively. Our method achieves under 2m and 5$^{\circ}$ error for 97.2% of 6-DoF registration attempts, with our multi-scale re-ranking module reducing localisation errors by ~2x on average. The code is available at https://github.com/csiro-robotics/HOTFLoc.
comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, Accepted for publication in IEEE RA-L (2026)