Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 207
☆ MUA: Mobile Ultra-detailed Animatable Avatars
Building photorealistic, animatable full-body digital humans remains a longstanding challenge in computer graphics and vision. Recent advances in animatable avatar modeling have largely progressed along two directions: improving the fidelity of dynamic geometry and appearance, or reducing computational complexity to enable deployment on resource-constrained platforms, e.g., VR headsets. However, existing approaches fail to achieve both goals simultaneously: Ultra-high-fidelity avatars typically require substantial computation on server-class GPUs, whereas lightweight avatars often suffer from limited surface dynamics, reduced appearance details, and noticeable artifacts. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel animatable avatar representation, termed Wavelet-guided Multi-level Spatial Factorized Blendshapes, and a corresponding distillation pipeline that transfers motion-aware clothing dynamics and fine-grained appearance details from a pre-trained ultra-high-quality avatar model into a compact, efficient representation. By coupling multi-level wavelet spectral decomposition with low-rank structural factorization in texture space, our method achieves up to 2000X lower computational cost and a 10X smaller model size than the original high-quality teacher avatar model, while preserving visually plausible dynamics and appearance details closely resemble those of the teacher model. Extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art methods show that our approach significantly outperforms existing avatar approaches designed for mobile settings and achieves comparable or superior rendering quality to most approaches that can only run on servers. Importantly, our representation substantially improves the practicality of high-fidelity avatars for immersive applications, achieving over 180 FPS on a desktop PC and real-time native on-device performance at 24 FPS on a standalone Meta Quest 3.
comment: Project page: https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/MUA/
☆ ReCap: Lightweight Referential Grounding for Coherent Story Visualization
Story Visualization aims to generate a sequence of images that faithfully depicts a textual narrative that preserve character identity, spatial configuration, and stylistic coherence as the narratives unfold. Maintaining such cross-frame consistency has traditionally relied on explicit memory banks, architectural expansion, or auxiliary language models, resulting in substantial parameter growth and inference overhead. We introduce ReCap, a lightweight consistency framework that improves character stability and visual fidelity without modifying the base diffusion backbone. ReCap's CORE (COnditional frame REferencing) module treats anaphors, in our case pronouns, as visual anchors, activating only when characters are referred to by a pronoun and conditioning on the preceding frame to propagate visual identity. This selective design avoids unconditional cross-frame conditioning and introduces only 149K additional parameters, a fraction of the cost of memory-bank and LLM-augmented approaches. To further stabilize identity, we incorporate SemDrift (Guided Semantic Drift Correction) applied only during training. When text is vague or referential, the denoiser lacks a visual anchor for identity-defining attributes, causing character appearance to drift across frames, SemDrift corrects this by aligning denoiser representations with pretrained DINOv3 visual embeddings, enforcing semantic identity stability at zero inference cost. ReCap outperforms previous state-of-the-art, StoryGPT-V, on the two main benchmarks for story visualization by 2.63% Character-Accuracy on FlintstonesSV and by 5.65% on PororoSV, establishing a new state-of-the-art character consistency on both benchmarks. Furthermore, we extend story visualization to human-centric narratives derived from real films, demonstrating the capability of ReCap beyond stylized cartoon domains.
comment: Diffusion Models, Story Visualization
☆ T-REN: Learning Text-Aligned Region Tokens Improves Dense Vision-Language Alignment and Scalability
Despite recent progress, vision-language encoders struggle with two core limitations: (1) weak alignment between language and dense vision features, which hurts tasks like open-vocabulary semantic segmentation; and (2) high token counts for fine-grained visual representations, which limits scalability to long videos. This work addresses both limitations. We propose T-REN (Text-aligned Region Encoder Network), an efficient encoder that maps visual data to a compact set of text-aligned region-level representations (or region tokens). T-REN achieves this through a lightweight network added on top of a frozen vision backbone, trained to pool patch-level representations within each semantic region into region tokens and align them with region-level text annotations. With only 3.7% additional parameters compared to the vision-language backbone, this design yields substantially stronger dense cross-modal understanding while reducing the token count by orders of magnitude. Specifically, T-REN delivers +5.9 mIoU on ADE20K open-vocabulary segmentation, +18.4% recall on COCO object-level text-image retrieval, +15.6% recall on Ego4D video object localization, and +17.6% mIoU on VSPW video scene parsing, all while reducing token counts by more than 24x for images and 187x for videos compared to the patch-based vision-language backbone. The code and model are available at https://github.com/savya08/T-REN.
☆ Back into Plato's Cave: Examining Cross-modal Representational Convergence at Scale
The Platonic Representation Hypothesis suggests that neural networks trained on different modalities (e.g., text and images) align and eventually converge toward the same representation of reality. If true, this has significant implications for whether modality choice matters at all. We show that the experimental evidence for this hypothesis is fragile and depends critically on the evaluation regime. Alignment is measured using mutual nearest neighbors on small datasets ($\approx$1K samples) and degrades substantially as the dataset is scaled to millions of samples. The alignment that remains between model representations reflects coarse semantic overlap rather than consistent fine-grained structure. Moreover, the evaluations in Huh et al. are done in a one-to-one image-caption setting, a constraint that breaks down in realistic many-to-many settings and further reduces alignment. We also find that the reported trend of stronger language models increasingly aligning with vision does not appear to hold for newer models. Overall, our findings suggest that the current evidence for cross-modal representational convergence is considerably weaker than subsequent works have taken it to be. Models trained on different modalities may learn equally rich representations of the world, just not the same one.
comment: Project page: http://akoepke.github.io/cave_umwelten/
☆ MultiWorld: Scalable Multi-Agent Multi-View Video World Models
Video world models have achieved remarkable success in simulating environmental dynamics in response to actions by users or agents. They are modeled as action-conditioned video generation models that take historical frames and current actions as input to predict future frames. Yet, most existing approaches are limited to single-agent scenarios and fail to capture the complex interactions inherent in real-world multi-agent systems. We present \textbf{MultiWorld}, a unified framework for multi-agent multi-view world modeling that enables accurate control of multiple agents while maintaining multi-view consistency. We introduce the Multi-Agent Condition Module to achieve precise multi-agent controllability, and the Global State Encoder to ensure coherent observations across different views. MultiWorld supports flexible scaling of agent and view counts, and synthesizes different views in parallel for high efficiency. Experiments on multi-player game environments and multi-robot manipulation tasks demonstrate that MultiWorld outperforms baselines in video fidelity, action-following ability, and multi-view consistency. Project page: https://multi-world.github.io/
comment: 15 pages, 10 figures
☆ AnchorSeg: Language Grounded Query Banks for Reasoning Segmentation ACL 2026
Rui Qian, Chuanhang Deng, Qiang Huang, Jian Xiong, Mingxuan Li, Yingbo Zhou, Wei Zhai, Jintao Chen, Dejing Dou
Reasoning segmentation requires models to ground complex, implicit textual queries into precise pixel-level masks. Existing approaches rely on a single segmentation token $\texttt{}$, whose hidden state implicitly encodes both semantic reasoning and spatial localization, limiting the model's ability to explicitly disentangle what to segment from where to segment. We introduce AnchorSeg, which reformulates reasoning segmentation as a structured conditional generation process over image tokens, conditioned on language grounded query banks. Instead of compressing all semantic reasoning and spatial localization into a single embedding, AnchorSeg constructs an ordered sequence of query banks: latent reasoning tokens that capture intermediate semantic states, and a segmentation anchor token that provides explicit spatial grounding. We model spatial conditioning as a factorized distribution over image tokens, where the anchor query determines localization signals while contextual queries provide semantic modulation. To bridge token-level predictions and pixel-level supervision, we propose Token--Mask Cycle Consistency (TMCC), a bidirectional training objective that enforces alignment across resolutions. By explicitly decoupling spatial grounding from semantic reasoning through structured language grounded query banks, AnchorSeg achieves state-of-the-art results on ReasonSeg test set (67.7\% gIoU and 68.1\% cIoU). All code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/rui-qian/AnchorSeg.
comment: This work has been accepted to ACL 2026, please refer to https://github.com/rui-qian/AnchorSeg
☆ SynAgent: Generalizable Cooperative Humanoid Manipulation via Solo-to-Cooperative Agent Synergy
Wei Yao, Haohan Ma, Hongwen Zhang, Yunlian Sun, Liangjun Xing, Zhile Yang, Yuanjun Guo, Yebin Liu, Jinhui Tang
Controllable cooperative humanoid manipulation is a fundamental yet challenging problem for embodied intelligence, due to severe data scarcity, complexities in multi-agent coordination, and limited generalization across objects. In this paper, we present SynAgent, a unified framework that enables scalable and physically plausible cooperative manipulation by leveraging Solo-to-Cooperative Agent Synergy to transfer skills from single-agent human-object interaction to multi-agent human-object-human scenarios. To maintain semantic integrity during motion transfer, we introduce an interaction-preserving retargeting method based on an Interact Mesh constructed via Delaunay tetrahedralization, which faithfully maintains spatial relationships among humans and objects. Building upon this refined data, we propose a single-agent pretraining and adaptation paradigm that bootstraps synergistic collaborative behaviors from abundant single-human data through decentralized training and multi-agent PPO. Finally, we develop a trajectory-conditioned generative policy using a conditional VAE, trained via multi-teacher distillation from motion imitation priors to achieve stable and controllable object-level trajectory execution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SynAgent significantly outperforms existing baselines in both cooperative imitation and trajectory-conditioned control, while generalizing across diverse object geometries. Codes and data will be available after publication. Project Page: http://yw0208.github.io/synagent
☆ Advancing Vision Transformer with Enhanced Spatial Priors
In recent years, the Vision Transformer (ViT) has garnered significant attention within the computer vision community. However, the core component of ViT, Self-Attention, lacks explicit spatial priors and suffers from quadratic computational complexity, limiting its applicability. To address these issues, we have proposed RMT, a robust vision backbone with explicit spatial priors for general purposes. RMT utilizes Manhattan distance decay to introduce spatial information and employs a horizontal and vertical decomposition attention method to model global information. Building on the strengths of RMT, Euclidean enhanced Vision Transformer (EVT) is an expanded version that incorporates several key improvements. Firstly, EVT uses a more reasonable Euclidean distance decay to enhance the modeling of spatial information, allowing for a more accurate representation of spatial relationships compared to the Manhattan distance used in RMT. Secondly, EVT abandons the decomposed attention mechanism featured in RMT and instead adopts a simpler spatially-independent grouping approach, providing the model with greater flexibility in controlling the number of tokens within each group. By addressing these modifications, EVT offers a more sophisticated and adaptable approach to incorporating spatial priors into the Self-Attention mechanism, thus overcoming some of the limitations associated with RMT and further enhancing its applicability in various computer vision tasks. Extensive experiments on Image Classification, Object Detection, Instance Segmentation, and Semantic Segmentation demonstrate that EVT exhibits exceptional performance. Without additional training data, EVT achieves 86.6% top1-acc on ImageNet-1k.
comment: Accepted by TPAMI2026
☆ MetaCloak-JPEG: JPEG-Robust Adversarial Perturbation for Preventing Unauthorized DreamBooth-Based Deepfake Generation
The rapid progress of subject-driven text-to-image synthesis, and in particular DreamBooth, has enabled a consent-free deepfake pipeline: an adversary needs only 4-8 publicly available face images to fine-tune a personalized diffusion model and produce photorealistic harmful content. Current adversarial face-protection systems -- PhotoGuard, Anti-DreamBooth, and MetaCloak -- perturb user images to disrupt surrogate fine-tuning, but all share a structural blindness: none backpropagates gradients through the JPEG compression pipeline that every major social-media platform applies before adversary access. Because JPEG quantization relies on round(), whose derivative is zero almost everywhere, adversarial energy concentrates in high-frequency DCT bands that JPEG discards, eliminating 60-80% of the protective signal. We introduce MetaCloak-JPEG, which closes this gap by inserting a Differentiable JPEG (DiffJPEG) layer built on the Straight-Through Estimator (STE): the forward pass applies standard JPEG compression, while the backward pass replaces round() with the identity. DiffJPEG is embedded in a JPEG-aware EOT distribution (~70% of augmentations include DiffJPEG) and a curriculum quality-factor schedule (QF: 95 to 50) inside a bilevel meta-learning loop. Under an l-inf perturbation budget of eps=8/255, MetaCloak-JPEG attains 32.7 dB PSNR, a 91.3% JPEG survival rate, and outperforms PhotoGuard on all 9 evaluated JPEG quality factors (9/9 wins, mean denoising-loss gain +0.125) within a 4.1 GB training-memory budget.
comment: 8 pages, 5 figures
☆ UDM-GRPO: Stable and Efficient Group Relative Policy Optimization for Uniform Discrete Diffusion Models
Uniform Discrete Diffusion Model (UDM) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm for discrete generative modeling; however, its integration with reinforcement learning remains largely unexplored. We observe that naively applying GRPO to UDM leads to training instability and marginal performance gains. To address this, we propose \Ours, the first framework to integrate UDM with RL. Our method is guided by two key insights: (i) treating the final clean sample as the action provides more accurate and stable optimization signals; and (ii) reconstructing trajectories via the diffusion forward process better aligns probability paths with the pretraining distribution. Additionally, we introduce two strategies, Reduced-Step and CFG-Free, to further improve training efficiency. \Ours significantly improves base model performance across multiple T2I tasks. Notably, GenEval accuracy improves from $69\%$ to $96\%$ and PickScore increases from $20.46$ to $23.81$, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both continuous and discrete settings. On the OCR benchmark, accuracy rises from $8\%$ to $57\%$, further validating the generalization ability of our method. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/Yovecent/UDM-GRPO}{https://github.com/Yovecent/UDM-GRPO}.
comment: Code:\href{https://github.com/Yovecent/UDM-GRPO}{this https URL}
☆ S2H-DPO: Hardness-Aware Preference Optimization for Vision-Language Models
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in single-image understanding, yet effective reasoning across multiple images remains challenging. We identify a critical capability gap in existing multi-image alignment approaches: current methods focus primarily on localized reasoning with pre-specified image indices (``Look at Image 3 and...''), bypassing the essential skills of global visual search and autonomous cross-image comparison. To address this limitation, we introduce a Simple-to-Hard (S2H) learning framework that systematically constructs multi-image preference data across three hierarchical reasoning levels requiring an increasing level of capabilities: (1) single-image localized reasoning, (2) multi-image localized comparison, and (3) global visual search. Unlike prior work that relies on model-specific attributes, such as hallucinations or attention heuristics, to generate preference pairs, our approach leverages prompt-driven complexity to create chosen/rejected pairs that are applicable across different models. Through extensive evaluations on LLaVA and Qwen-VL models, we show that our diverse multi-image reasoning data significantly enhances multi-image reasoning performance, yielding significant improvements over baseline methods across benchmarks. Importantly, our approach maintains strong single-image reasoning performance while simultaneously strengthening multi-image understanding capabilities, thus advancing the state of the art for holistic visual preference alignment.
☆ OneVL: One-Step Latent Reasoning and Planning with Vision-Language Explanation
Jinghui Lu, Jiayi Guan, Zhijian Huang, Jinlong Li, Guang Li, Lingdong Kong, Yingyan Li, Han Wang, Shaoqing Xu, Yuechen Luo, Fang Li, Chenxu Dang, Junli Wang, Tao Xu, Jing Wu, Jianhua Wu, Xiaoshuai Hao, Wen Zhang, Tianyi Jiang, Lingfeng Zhang, Lei Zhou, Yingbo Tang, Jie Wang, Yinfeng Gao, Xizhou Bu, Haochen Tian, Yihang Qiu, Feiyang Jia, Lin Liu, Yigu Ge, Hanbing Li, Yuannan Shen, Jianwei Cui, Hongwei Xie, Bing Wang, Haiyang Sun, Jingwei Zhao, Jiahui Huang, Pei Liu, Zeyu Zhu, Yuncheng Jiang, Zibin Guo, Chuhong Gong, Hanchao Leng, Kun Ma, Naiyang Wang, Guang Chen, Kuiyuan Yang, Hangjun Ye, Long Chen
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has become a powerful driver of trajectory prediction in VLA-based autonomous driving, yet its autoregressive nature imposes a latency cost that is prohibitive for real-time deployment. Latent CoT methods attempt to close this gap by compressing reasoning into continuous hidden states, but consistently fall short of their explicit counterparts. We suggest that this is due to purely linguistic latent representations compressing a symbolic abstraction of the world, rather than the causal dynamics that actually govern driving. Thus, we present OneVL (One-step latent reasoning and planning with Vision-Language explanations), a unified VLA and World Model framework that routes reasoning through compact latent tokens supervised by dual auxiliary decoders. Alongside a language decoder that reconstructs text CoT, we introduce a visual world model decoder that predicts future-frame tokens, forcing the latent space to internalize the causal dynamics of road geometry, agent motion, and environmental change. A three-stage training pipeline progressively aligns these latents with trajectory, language, and visual objectives, ensuring stable joint optimization. At inference, the auxiliary decoders are discarded and all latent tokens are prefilled in a single parallel pass, matching the speed of answer-only prediction. Across four benchmarks, OneVL becomes the first latent CoT method to surpass explicit CoT, delivering state-of-the-art accuracy at answer-only latency, and providing direct evidence that tighter compression, when guided in both language and world-model supervision, produces more generalizable representations than verbose token-by-token reasoning. Project Page: https://xiaomi-embodied-intelligence.github.io/OneVL
comment: Technical Report; 49 pages, 22 figures, 10 tables; Project Page at https://xiaomi-embodied-intelligence.github.io/OneVL
☆ XEmbodied: A Foundation Model with Enhanced Geometric and Physical Cues for Large-Scale Embodied Environments
Kangan Qian, ChuChu Xie, Yang Zhong, Jingrui Pang, Siwen Jiao, Sicong Jiang, Zilin Huang, Yunlong Wang, Kun Jiang, Mengmeng Yang, Hao Ye, Guanghao Zhang, Hangjun Ye, Guang Chen, Long Chen, Diange Yang
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models drive next-generation autonomous systems, but training them requires scalable, high-quality annotations from complex environments. Current cloud pipelines rely on generic vision-language models (VLMs) that lack geometric reasoning and domain semantics due to their 2D image-text pretraining. To address this mismatch, we propose XEmbodied, a cloud-side foundation model that endows VLMs with intrinsic 3D geometric awareness and interaction with physical cues (e.g., occupancy grids, 3D boxes). Instead of treating geometry as auxiliary input, XEmbodied integrates geometric representations via a structured 3D Adapter and distills physical signals into context tokens using an Efficient Image-Embodied Adapter. Through progressive domain curriculum and reinforcement learning post-training, XEmbodied preserves general capabilities while demonstrating robust performance across 18 public benchmarks. It significantly improves spatial reasoning, traffic semantics, embodied affordance, and out-of-distribution generalization for large-scale scenario mining and embodied VQA.
comment: 15 pages, 5 figures
☆ SemLT3D: Semantic-Guided Expert Distillation for Camera-only Long-Tailed 3D Object Detection CVPR 2026
Camera-only 3D object detection has emerged as a cost-effective and scalable alternative to LiDAR for autonomous driving, yet existing methods primarily prioritize overall performance while overlooking the severe long-tail imbalance inherent in real-world datasets. In practice, many rare but safety-critical categories such as children, strollers, or emergency vehicles are heavily underrepresented, leading to biased learning and degraded performance. This challenge is further exacerbated by pronounced inter-class ambiguity (e.g., visually similar subclasses) and substantial intra-class diversity (e.g., objects varying widely in appearance, scale, pose, or context), which together hinder reliable long-tail recognition. In this work, we introduce SemLT3D, a Semantic-Guided Expert Distillation framework designed to enrich the representation space for underrepresented classes through semantic priors. SemLT3D consists of: (1) a language-guided mixture-of-experts module that routes 3D queries to specialized experts according to their semantic affinity, enabling the model to better disentangle confusing classes and specialize on tail distributions; and (2) a semantic projection distillation pipeline that aligns 3D queries with CLIP-informed 2D semantics, producing more coherent and discriminative features across diverse visual manifestations. Although motivated by long-tail imbalance, the semantically structured learning in SemLT3D also improves robustness under broader appearance variations and challenging corner cases, offering a principled step toward more reliable camera-only 3D perception.
comment: CVPR 2026
☆ Asset Harvester: Extracting 3D Assets from Autonomous Driving Logs for Simulation
Tianshi Cao, Jiawei Ren, Yuxuan Zhang, Jaewoo Seo, Jiahui Huang, Shikhar Solanki, Haotian Zhang, Mingfei Guo, Haithem Turki, Muxingzi Li, Yue Zhu, Sipeng Zhang, Zan Gojcic, Sanja Fidler, Kangxue Yin
Closed-loop simulation is a core component of autonomous vehicle (AV) development, enabling scalable testing, training, and safety validation before real-world deployment. Neural scene reconstruction converts driving logs into interactive 3D environments for simulation, but it does not produce complete 3D object assets required for agent manipulation and large-viewpoint novel-view synthesis. To address this challenge, we present Asset Harvester, an image-to-3D model and end-to-end pipeline that converts sparse, in-the-wild object observations from real driving logs into complete, simulation-ready assets. Rather than relying on a single model component, we developed a system-level design for real-world AV data that combines large-scale curation of object-centric training tuples, geometry-aware preprocessing across heterogeneous sensors, and a robust training recipe that couples sparse-view-conditioned multiview generation with 3D Gaussian lifting. Within this system, SparseViewDiT is explicitly designed to address limited-angle views and other real-world data challenges. Together with hybrid data curation, augmentation, and self-distillation, this system enables scalable conversion of sparse AV object observations into reusable 3D assets.
comment: NVIDIA white paper. The project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/sil/projects/asset-harvester/
☆ Progressive Online Video Understanding with Evidence-Aligned Timing and Transparent Decisions
Kecheng Zhang, Zongxin Yang, Mingfei Han, Haihong Hao, Yunzhi Zhuge, Changlin Li, Junhan Zhao, Zhihui Li, Xiaojun Chang
Visual agents operating in the wild must respond to queries precisely when sufficient evidence first appears in a video stream, a critical capability that is overlooked by conventional video LLMs evaluated in offline settings. The shift to an online, streaming paradigm introduces significant challenges: a lack of decision transparency, the difficulty of aligning response timing with visual evidence, and the need to maintain a global, causally consistent understanding under tight computational budgets. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework that decouples reasoning control from memory integration. We introduce \textbf{\model{}}, an instantiation of this framework with two core components. First, the \emph{Active Thinking Decision Maker (ATDM)} is a transparent reasoning controller that externalizes its decision process using observable progress ($\boldsymbolρ$) and confidence ($\boldsymbol{c}$) metrics. This allows it to precisely time its response $t_r$ to match the first-sufficient-evidence timestamp $t^\star$ while streaming its reasoning to the user. Second, the \emph{Hierarchical Progressive Semantic Integration (HPSI)} module acts as an efficient memory system. It employs a set of learnable, multi-level aggregation tokens that are propagated across clips to build a rich, global cognitive state without exceeding token budgets. %Our approach sets a new standard on key online video understanding benchmarks, achieving strong performance of \textbf{71.6\%} on StreamingBench and \textbf{46.9\%} on OVOBench, demonstrating a robust solution for evidence-aligned and transparent online video analysis. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ATDM and HPSI, e.g., Thinking-QwenVL improves the accuracy of the previous state-of-the-art from 67.63\% to 71.60\% on the StreamingBench benchmark.
☆ ESsEN: Training Compact Discriminative Vision-Language Transformers in a Low-Resource Setting
Vision-language modeling is rapidly increasing in popularity with an ever expanding list of available models. In most cases, these vision-language models have parameters in the tens of billions, which is necessary for some needs, but in many cases smaller models are necessary (e.g., on edge devices or independent robotic platforms). Unfortunately, there is little research in producing light-weight models or in training them with small datasets. Inspired by the language learning progression and data sparsity in child development, in this paper, we address both of these goals in a systematic fashion. We show that two-tower encoder models are superior to one-tower encoders in low-resource settings for discriminative English tasks. We show also that incorporating traditional convolutional networks into the two-tower transformer architecture can help produce parameter efficient vision-language models. Finally, we show that the cross-modal fusion module of two-tower encoders can vary significantly in shape and size while producing the same results. In addition, we present ESsEN, a compact vision-language model that can be trained end-to-end with relatively few resources that performs as well on several tasks with only a fraction of the parameters compared to other models. The experimental results and the tools we present here make vision-language modeling more accessible to a wider variety of researchers.
☆ ProtoCLIP: Prototype-Aligned Latent Refinement for Robust Zero-Shot Chest X-Ray Classification
Zero-shot vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise for chest radiograph classification, but their performance is often limited by confounding label co-occurrence, long-tail class imbalance, and transfer instability under domain shift. We propose ProtoCLIP, a refinement strategy for CLIP-style VLMs that improves zero-shot discrimination through targeted data curation and distilled anchor alignment. Specifically, we construct pathology-focused training subsets with curated negative samples to reduce co-occurrence bias. We also introduce a representation-preserving distillation objective to stabilize adaptation while maintaining semantic structure and improving discrimination of clinically relevant co-occurring pathologies. Evaluated on an unseen dataset VinDr-CXR, ProtoCLIP improves AUC by 2-10 percentage points over a strong CLIP-based baseline across multiple findings. For pneumothorax specifically, ProtoCLIP achieves a state-of-the-art AUC of 0.94. These results demonstrate that anchor-guided refinement, coupled with curated supervision and controlled adaptation, can mitigate common zero-shot transfer failures in medical VLMs without requiring large-scale retraining.
☆ Revisiting Change VQA in Remote Sensing with Structured and Native Multimodal Qwen Models
Change visual question answering (Change VQA) addresses the problem of answering natural-language questions about semantic changes between bi-temporal remote sensing (RS) images. Although vision-language models (VLMs) have recently been studied for temporal RS image understanding, Change VQA remains underexplored in the context of modern multimodal models. In this letter, we revisit the CDVQA benchmark using recent Qwen models under a unified low-rank adaptation (LoRA) setting. We compare Qwen3-VL, which follows a structured vision-language pipeline with multi-depth visual conditioning and a full-attention decoder, with Qwen3.5, a native multimodal model that combines a single-stage alignment with a hybrid decoder backbone. Experimental results on the official CDVQA test splits show that recent VLMs improve over earlier specialized baselines. They further show that performance does not scale monotonically with model size, and that native multimodal models are more effective than structured vision-language pipelines for this task. These findings indicate that tightly integrated multimodal backbones contribute more to performance than scale or explicit multi-depth visual conditioning for language-driven semantic change reasoning in RS imagery.
☆ MedProbeBench: Systematic Benchmarking at Deep Evidence Integration for Expert-level Medical Guideline
Jiyao Liu, Jianghan Shen, Sida Song, Tianbin Li, Xiaojia Liu, Rongbin Li, Ziyan Huang, Jiashi Lin, Junzhi Ning, Changkai Ji, Siqi Luo, Wenjie Li, Chenglong Ma, Ming Hu, Jing Xiong, Jin Ye, Bin Fu, Ningsheng Xu, Yirong Chen, Lei Jin, Hong Chen, Junjun He
Recent advances in deep research systems enable large language models to retrieve, synthesize, and reason over large-scale external knowledge. In medicine, developing clinical guidelines critically depends on such deep evidence integration. However, existing benchmarks fail to evaluate this capability in realistic workflows requiring multi-step evidence integration and expert-level judgment. To address this gap, we introduce MedProbeBench, the first benchmark leveraging high-quality clinical guidelines as expert-level references. Medical guidelines, with their rigorous standards in neutrality and verifiability, represent the pinnacle of medical expertise and pose substantial challenges for deep research agents. For evaluation, we propose MedProbe-Eval, a comprehensive evaluation framework featuring: (1) Holistic Rubrics with 1,200+ task-adaptive rubric criteria for comprehensive quality assessment, and (2) Fine-grained Evidence Verification for rigorous validation of evidence precision, grounded in 5,130+ atomic claims. Evaluation of 17 LLMs and deep research agents reveals critical gaps in evidence integration and guideline generation, underscoring the substantial distance between current capabilities and expert-level clinical guideline development. Project: https://github.com/uni-medical/MedProbeBench
☆ One-Step Diffusion with Inverse Residual Fields for Unsupervised Industrial Anomaly Detection
Diffusion models have achieved outstanding performance in unsupervised industrial anomaly detection (uIAD) by learning a manifold of normal data under the common assumption that off-manifold anomalies are harder to generate, resulting in larger reconstruction errors in data space or lower probability densities in the tractable latent space. However, their iterative denoising and noising nature leads to slow inference. In this paper, we propose OSD-IRF, a novel one-step diffusion with inverse residual fields, to address this limitation for uIAD task. We first train a deep diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) on normal data without any conditioning. Then, for a test sample, we predict its inverse residual fields (IRF) based on the noise estimated by the well-trained parametric noise function of the DDPM. Finally, uIAD is performed by evaluating the probability density of the IRF under a Gaussian distribution and comparing it with a threshold. Our key observation is that anomalies become distinguishable in this IRF space, a finding that has seldom been reported in prior works. Moreover, OSD-IRF requires only single step diffusion for uIAD, thanks to the property that IRF holds for any neighboring time step in the denoising process. Extensive experiments on three widely used uIAD benchmarks show that our model achieves SOTA or competitive performance across six metrics, along with roughly a 2X inference speedup without distillation.
☆ Towards Robust Text-to-Image Person Retrieval: Multi-View Reformulation for Semantic Compensation
In text-to-image person retrieval tasks, the diversity of natural language expressions and the implicitness of visual semantics often lead to the problem of Expression Drift, where semantically equivalent texts exhibit significant feature discrepancies in the embedding space due to phrasing variations, thereby degrading the robustness of image-text alignment. This paper proposes a semantic compensation framework (MVR) driven by Large Language Models (LLMs), which enhances cross-modal representation consistency through multi-view semantic reformulation and feature compensation. The core methodology comprises three components: Multi-View Reformulation (MVR): A dual-branch prompting strategy combines key feature guidance (extracting visually critical components via feature similarity) and diversity-aware rewriting to generate semantically equivalent yet distributionally diverse textual variants; Textual Feature Robustness Enhancement: A training-free latent space compensation mechanism suppresses noise interference through multi-view feature mean-pooling and residual connections, effectively capturing "Semantic Echoes"; Visual Semantic Compensation: VLM generates multi-perspective image descriptions, which are further enhanced through shared text reformulation to address visual semantic gaps. Experiments demonstrate that our method can improve the accuracy of the original model well without training and performs SOTA on three text-to-image person retrieval datasets.
☆ DSA-CycleGAN: A Domain Shift Aware CycleGAN for Robust Multi-Stain Glomeruli Segmentation
A key challenge in segmentation in digital histopathology is inter- and intra-stain variations as it reduces model performance. Labelling each stain is expensive and time-consuming so methods using stain transfer via CycleGAN, have been developed for training multi-stain segmentation models using labels from a single stain. Nevertheless, CycleGAN tends to introduce noise during translation because of the one-to-many nature of some stain pairs, which conflicts with its cycle consistency loss. To address this, we propose the Domain Shift Aware CycleGAN, which reduces the presence of such noise. Furthermore, we evaluate several advances from the field of machine learning aimed at resolving similar problems and compare their effectiveness against DSA-CycleGAN in the context of multi-stain glomeruli segmentation. Experiments demonstrate that DSA-CycleGAN not only improves segmentation performance in glomeruli segmentation but also outperforms other methods in reducing noise. This is particularly evident when translating between biologically distinct stains. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/zeeshannisar/DSA-CycleGAN.
☆ EAST: Early Action Prediction Sampling Strategy with Token Masking ICLR 2026
Early action prediction seeks to anticipate an action before it fully unfolds, but limited visual evidence makes this task especially challenging. We introduce EAST, a simple and efficient framework that enables a model to reason about incomplete observations. In our empirical study, we identify key components when training early action prediction models. Our key contribution is a randomized training strategy that samples a time step separating observed and unobserved video frames, enabling a single model to generalize seamlessly across all test-time observation ratios. We further show that joint learning on both observed and future (oracle) representations significantly boosts performance, even allowing an encoder-only model to excel. To improve scalability, we propose a token masking procedure that cuts memory usage in half and accelerates training by 2x with negligible accuracy loss. Combined with a forecasting decoder, EAST sets a new state of the art on NTU60, SSv2, and UCF101, surpassing previous best work by 10.1, 7.7, and 3.9 percentage points, respectively.
comment: Accepted at ICLR 2026
☆ LBFTI: Layer-Based Facial Template Inversion for Identity-Preserving Fine-Grained Face Reconstruction
In face recognition systems, facial templates are widely adopted for identity authentication due to their compliance with the data minimization principle. However, facial template inversion technologies have posed a severe privacy leakage risk by enabling face reconstruction from templates. This paper proposes a Layer-Based Facial Template Inversion (LBFTI) method to reconstruct identity-preserving fine-grained face images. Our scheme decomposes face images into three layers: foreground layers (including eyebrows, eyes, nose, and mouth), midground layers (skin), and background layers (other parts). LBFTI leverages dedicated generators to produce these layers, adopting a rigorous three-stage training strategy: (1) independent refined generation of foreground and midground layers, (2) fusion of foreground and midground layers with template secondary injection to produce complete panoramic face images with background layers, and (3) joint fine-tuning of all modules to optimize inter-layer coordination and identity consistency. Experiments demonstrate that our LBFTI not only outperforms state-of-the-art methods in machine authentication performance, with a 25.3% improvement in TAR, but also achieves better similarity in human perception, as validated by both quantitative metrics and a questionnaire survey.
☆ AdaCluster: Adaptive Query-Key Clustering for Sparse Attention in Video Generation CVPR 2026
Video diffusion transformers (DiTs) suffer from prohibitive inference latency due to quadratic attention complexity. Existing sparse attention methods either overlook semantic similarity or fail to adapt to heterogeneous token distributions across layers, leading to model performance degradation. We propose AdaCluster, a training-free adaptive clustering framework that accelerates the generation of DiTs while preserving accuracy. AdaCluster applies an angle-similarity-preserving clustering method to query vectors for higher compression, and designs a euclidean-similarity-preserving clustering method for keys, covering cluster number assignment, threshold-wise adaptive clustering, and efficient critical cluster selection. Experiments on CogVideoX-2B, HunyuanVideo, and Wan-2.1 on one A40 GPU demonstrate up to 1.67-4.31x speedup with negligible quality degradation.
comment: CVPR 2026 poster
☆ Enhancing Glass Surface Reconstruction via Depth Prior for Robot Navigation
Indoor robot navigation is often compromised by glass surfaces, which severely corrupt depth sensor measurements. While foundation models like Depth Anything 3 provide excellent geometric priors, they lack an absolute metric scale. We propose a training-free framework that leverages depth foundation models as a structural prior, employing a robust local RANSAC-based alignment to fuse it with raw sensor depth. This naturally avoids contamination from erroneous glass measurements and recovers an accurate metric scale. Furthermore, we introduce \ti{GlassRecon}, a novel RGB-D dataset with geometrically derived ground truth for glass regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, especially under severe sensor depth corruption. The dataset and related code will be released at https://github.com/jarvisyjw/GlassRecon.
comment: 9 pages, 8 figures
☆ OmniHuman: A Large-scale Dataset and Benchmark for Human-Centric Video Generation
Recent advancements in audio-video joint generation models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in content creation. However, generating high-fidelity human-centric videos in complex, real-world physical scenes remains a significant challenge. We identify that the root cause lies in the structural deficiencies of existing datasets across three dimensions: limited global scene and camera diversity, sparse interaction modeling (both person-person and person-object), and insufficient individual attribute alignment. To bridge these gaps, we present OmniHuman, a large-scale, multi-scene dataset designed for fine-grained human modeling. OmniHuman provides a hierarchical annotation covering video-level scenes, frame-level interactions, and individual-level attributes. To facilitate this, we develop a fully automated pipeline for high-quality data collection and multi-modal annotation. Complementary to the dataset, we establish the OmniHuman Benchmark (OHBench), a three-level evaluation system that provides a scientific diagnosis for human-centric audio-video synthesis. Crucially, OHBench introduces metrics that are highly consistent with human perception, filling the gaps in existing benchmarks by providing a comprehensive diagnosis across global scenes, relational interactions, and individual attributes.
comment: 19 pages, 6 figures
☆ EVE: Verifiable Self-Evolution of MLLMs via Executable Visual Transformations
Self-evolution of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) remains a critical challenge: pseudo-label-based methods suffer from progressive quality degradation as model predictions drift, while template-based methods are confined to a static set of transformations that cannot adapt in difficulty or diversity. We contend that robust, continuous self-improvement requires not only deterministic external feedback independent of the model's internal certainty, but also a mechanism to perpetually diversify the training distribution. To this end, we introduce EVE (Executable Visual transformation-based self-Evolution), a novel framework that entirely bypasses pseudo-labels by harnessing executable visual transformations continuously enriched in both variety and complexity. EVE adopts a Challenger-Solver dual-policy architecture. The Challenger maintains and progressively expands a queue of visual transformation code examples, from which it synthesizes novel Python scripts to perform dynamic visual transformations. Executing these scripts yields VQA problems with absolute, execution-verified ground-truth answers, eliminating any reliance on model-generated supervision. A multi-dimensional reward system integrating semantic diversity and dynamic difficulty calibration steers the Challenger to enrich its code example queue while posing progressively more challenging tasks, preventing mode collapse and fostering reciprocal co-evolution between the two policies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EVE consistently surpasses existing self-evolution methods, establishing a robust and scalable paradigm for verifiable MLLM self-evolution. The code is available at https://github.com/0001Henry/EVE .
☆ Denoise and Align: Diffusion-Driven Foreground Knowledge Prompting for Open-Vocabulary Temporal Action Detection SIGIR 2026
Open-Vocabulary Temporal Action Detection (OV-TAD) aims to localize and classify action segments of unseen categories in untrimmed videos, where effective alignment between action semantics and video representations is critical for accurate detection. However, existing methods struggle to mitigate the semantic imbalance between concise, abstract action labels and rich, complex video contents, inevitably introducing semantic noise and misleading cross-modal alignment. To address this challenge, we propose DFAlign, the first framework that leverages diffusion-based denoising to generate foreground knowledge for the guidance of action-video alignment. Following the 'conditioning, denoising and aligning' manner, we first introduce the Semantic-Unify Conditioning (SUC) module, which unifies action-shared and action-specific semantics as conditions for diffusion denoising. Then, the Background-Suppress Denoising (BSD) module generates foreground knowledge by progressively removing background redundancy from videos through denoising process. This foreground knowledge serves as effective intermediate semantic anchor between video and text representations, mitigating the semantic gap and enhancing the discriminability of action-relevant segments. Furthermore, we introduce the Foreground-Prompt Alignment (FPA) module to inject extracted foreground knowledge as prompt tokens into text representations, guiding model's attention towards action-relevant segments and enabling precise cross-modal alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two OV-TAD benchmarks. The code repository is provided as follows: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Code-2114/.
comment: Accepted by SIGIR 2026
☆ Relative State Estimation using Event-Based Propeller Sensing
Ravi Kumar Thakur, Luis Granados Segura, Jan Klivan, Radim Špetlík, Tobiáš Vinklárek, Matouš Vrba, Martin Saska
Autonomous swarms of multi-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system requires an accurate and fast relative state estimation. Although monocular frame-based camera methods perform well in ideal conditions, they are slow, suffer scale ambiguity, and often struggle in visually challenging conditions. The advent of event cameras addresses these challenging tasks by providing low latency, high dynamic range, and microsecond-level temporal resolution. This paper proposes a framework for relative state estimation for quadrotors using event-based propeller sensing. The propellers in the event stream are tracked by detection to extract the region-of-interests. The event streams in these regions are processed in temporal chunks to estimate per-propeller frequencies. These frequency measurements drive a kinematic state estimation module as a thrust input, while camera-derived position measurements provide the update step. Additionally, we use geometric primitives derived from event streams to estimate the orientation of the quadrotor by fitting an ellipse over a propeller and backprojecting it to recover body-frame tilt-axis. The existing event-based approaches for quadrotor state estimation use the propeller frequency in simulated flight sequences. Our approach estimates the propeller frequency under 3% error on a test dataset of five real-world outdoor flight sequences, providing a method for decentralized relative localization for multi-robot systems using event camera.
☆ Spike-NVPT: Learning Robust Visual Prompts via Bio-Inspired Temporal Filtering and Discretization
Pre-trained vision models have found widespread application across diverse domains. Prompt tuning-based methods have emerged as a parameter-efficient paradigm for adapting pre-trained vision models. While effective on standard benchmarks, the continuous and dense nature of learned prompts can lead to sensitivity against input noise, as the high-capacity prompts tend to overfit task-irrelevant details. To address this trade-off, we propose Spike-NVPT, a noise-robust visual prompt tuning method. Specifically, we design a Signal Filtering Layer based on spiking neurons, which uses the integrate-and-fire (IF) mechanism to accumulate task-relevant signals over time and filter transient noise fluctuations. A subsequent Spike Discretization Unit converts filtered signals into sparse binary prompts. This discretization acts as a strong regularizer, forcing the model to anchor decision boundaries on the most discriminative and robust features. Notably, the resulting binary prompts remain static during deployment, ensuring zero additional computational overhead during inference. Experimental results demonstrate that Spike-NVPT achieves superior robustness performance, with a maximum improvement of 11.2% over conventional methods, and retains competitive accuracy on clean datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to leverage spiking neurons for fine-tuning traditional artificial neural network (ANN)-based visual models.
☆ LiquidTAD: An Efficient Method for Temporal Action Detection via Liquid Neural Dynamics
Temporal Action Detection (TAD) in untrimmed videos is currently dominated by Transformer-based architectures. While high-performing, their quadratic computational complexity and substantial parameter redundancy limit deployment in resource-constrained environments. In this paper, we propose LiquidTAD, a novel parameter-efficient framework that replaces cumbersome self-attention layers with parallelized ActionLiquid blocks. Unlike traditional Liquid Neural Networks (LNNs) that suffer from sequential execution bottlenecks, LiquidTAD leverages a closed-form continuous-time (CfC) formulation, allowing the model to be reformulated as a parallelizable operator while preserving the intrinsic physical prior of continuous-time dynamics. This architecture captures complex temporal dependencies with $O(N)$ linear complexity and adaptively modulates temporal sensitivity through learned time-constants ($τ$), providing a robust mechanism for handling varying action durations. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to introduce a parallelized LNN-based architecture to the TAD domain. Experimental results on the THUMOS-14 dataset demonstrate that LiquidTAD achieves a highly competitive Average mAP of 69.46\% with only 10.82M parameters -- a 63\% reduction compared to the ActionFormer baseline. Further evaluations on ActivityNet-1.3 and Ego4D benchmarks confirm that LiquidTAD achieves an optimal accuracy-efficiency trade-off and exhibits superior robustness to temporal sampling variations, advancing the Pareto frontier of modern TAD frameworks.
☆ MARCO: Navigating the Unseen Space of Semantic Correspondence CVPR 2026
Recent advances in semantic correspondence rely on dual-encoder architectures, combining DINOv2 with diffusion backbones. While accurate, these billion-parameter models generalize poorly beyond training keypoints, revealing a gap between benchmark performance and real-world usability, where queried points rarely match those seen during training. Building upon DINOv2, we introduce MARCO, a unified model for generalizable correspondence driven by a novel training framework that enhances both fine-grained localization and semantic generalization. By coupling a coarse-to-fine objective that refines spatial precision with a self-distillation framework, which expands sparse supervision beyond annotated regions, our approach transforms a handful of keypoints into dense, semantically coherent correspondences. MARCO sets a new state of the art on SPair-71k, AP-10K, and PF-PASCAL, with gains that amplify at fine-grained localization thresholds (+8.9 PCK@0.01), strongest generalization to unseen keypoints (+5.1, SPair-U) and categories (+4.7, MP-100), while remaining 3x smaller and 10x faster than diffusion-based approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/visinf/MARCO .
comment: CVPR 2026 Oral. Project page: https://visinf.github.io/MARCO/
☆ Geometry-Guided 3D Visual Token Pruning for Video-Language Models CVPR 2026
Multimodal large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in 2D vision, motivating their extension to 3D scene understanding. Recent studies represent 3D scenes as 3D spatial videos composed of image sequences with depth and camera pose information, enabling pre-trained video-language models to perform 3D reasoning tasks. However, the large number of visual tokens in spatial videos remains a major bottleneck for efficient inference and context management. Existing pruning methods overlook the view consistency of spatial videos and the spatial diversity of the remaining tokens, which prevents them from effectively removing inter-frame redundancy and preserving scene completeness. In this paper, we propose Geo3DPruner, a Geometry-Guided 3D Visual Token Pruning framework. Geo3DPruner first models cross-frame relevance through geometry-aware global attention, and then performs a two-stage pruning process. The intra-voxel stage selects representative multi-view features within each voxel, while the inter-voxel stage preserves spatial diversity by selecting a globally distributed subset of voxels. Extensive experiments on multiple 3D scene understanding benchmarks demonstrate that Geo3DPruner retains over 90% of the original performance while pruning 90% of visual tokens, significantly outperforming existing text-guided and vision-guided pruning methods.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026
☆ Long-Text-to-Image Generation via Compositional Prompt Decomposition ICLR 2026
While modern text-to-image (T2I) models excel at generating images from intricate prompts, they struggle to capture the key details when the inputs are descriptive paragraphs. This limitation stems from the prevalence of concise captions that shape their training distributions. Existing methods attempt to bridge this gap by either fine-tuning T2I models on long prompts, which generalizes poorly to longer lengths; or by projecting the oversize inputs into normal-prompt space and compromising fidelity. We propose Prompt Refraction for Intricate Scene Modeling (PRISM), a compositional approach that enables pre-trained T2I models to process long sequence inputs. PRISM uses a lightweight module to extract constituent representations from the long prompts. The T2I model makes independent noise predictions for each component, and their outputs are merged into a single denoising step using energy-based conjunction. We evaluate PRISM across a wide range of model architectures, showing comparable performances to models fine-tuned on the same training data. Furthermore, PRISM demonstrates superior generalization, outperforming baseline models by 7.4% on prompts over 500 tokens in a challenging public benchmark.
comment: Accepted to the Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026)
☆ Domain-Specialized Object Detection via Model-Level Mixtures of Experts IJCNN 2026
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models provide a structured approach to combining specialized neural networks and offer greater interpretability than conventional ensembles. While MoEs have been successfully applied to image classification and semantic segmentation, their use in object detection remains limited due to challenges in merging dense and structured predictions. In this work, we investigate model-level mixtures of object detectors and analyze their suitability for improving performance and interpretability in object detection. We propose an MoE architecture that combines YOLO-based detectors trained on semantically disjoint data subsets, with a learned gating network that dynamically weights expert contributions. We study different strategies for fusing detection outputs and for training the gating mechanism, including balancing losses to prevent expert collapse. Experiments on the BDD100K dataset demonstrate that the proposed MoE consistently outperforms standard ensemble approaches and provides insights into expert specialization across domains, highlighting model-level MoEs as a viable alternative to traditional ensembling for object detection. Our code is available at https://github.com/KASTEL-MobilityLab/mixtures-of-experts/.
comment: Accepted for publication at IJCNN 2026
☆ Style-Based Neural Architectures for Real-Time Weather Classification
In this paper, we present three neural network architectures designed for real-time classification of weather conditions (sunny, rain, snow, fog) from images. These models, inspired by recent advances in style transfer, aim to capture the stylistic elements present in images. One model, called "Multi-PatchGAN", is based on PatchGANs used in well-known architectures such as Pix2Pix and CycleGAN, but here adapted with multiple patch sizes for detection tasks. The second model, "Truncated ResNet50", is a simplified version of ResNet50 retaining only its first nine layers. This truncation, determined by an evolutionary algorithm, facilitates the extraction of high-frequency features essential for capturing subtle stylistic details. Finally, we propose "Truncated ResNet50 with Gram Matrix and Attention", which computes Gram matrices for each layer during training and automatically weights them via an attention mechanism, thus optimizing the extraction of the most relevant stylistic expressions for classification. These last two models outperform the state of the art and demonstrate remarkable generalization capability on several public databases. Although developed for weather detection, these architectures are also suitable for other appearance-based classification tasks, such as animal species recognition, texture classification, disease detection in medical imaging, or industrial defect identification.
comment: 9 pages, 21 figures
☆ Medical Image Understanding Improves Survival Prediction via Visual Instruction Tuning MICCAI 2026
Xixi Liu, Jorge Lazo, Andreas Hallqvist, Mikael Johansson, Åse Johnsson, Jonas S Andersson, Ella Äng Eklund, Patrik Sund, Nasser Hosseini, Jennifer Alvén, Ida Häggström
Accurate prognostication and risk estimation are essential for guiding clinical decision-making and optimizing patient management. While radiologist-assessed features from CT scans provide valuable indicators of disease severity and outcomes, interpreting such images requires expert knowledge, and translating rich visual information into textual summaries inevitably leads to information loss. In this work, we propose a vision-language framework for 3D CT image understanding that leverages large-scale open-sourced CT images paired with radiology reports through visual instruction tuning. This pre-training enables the model to learn clinically meaningful visual-textual representations, which can then be adapted to downstream survival prediction tasks. By incorporating a survival prediction head on top of the pre-trained model, our approach improves survival prediction from CT images and clinical data while generating clinically meaningful language responses to predefined questions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline methods in survival prediction, particularly, when clinical data alone is less predictive. The code will be released upon acceptance.
comment: Submitted to MICCAI 2026
☆ Is SAM3 ready for pathology segmentation?
Is Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3) capable in segmenting Any Pathology Images? Digital pathology segmentation spans tissue-level and nuclei-level scales, where traditional methods often suffer from high annotation costs and poor generalization. SAM3 introduces Promptable Concept Segmentation, offering a potential automated interface via text prompts. With this work, we propose a systematic evaluation protocol to explore the capability space of SAM3 in a structured manner. Specifically, we evaluate SAM3 under different supervision settings including zero-shot, few-shot, and supervised with varying prompting strategies. Our extensive evaluation on pathological datasets including NuInsSeg, PanNuke and GlaS, reveals that: 1.text-only prompts poorly activate nuclear concepts. 2.performance is highly sensitive to visual prompt types and budgets. 3.few-shot learning offers gains, but SAM3 lacks robustness against visual prompt noise. and 4.a significant gap persists between prompt-based usage and task-trained adapter-based reference. Our study delineates SAM3's boundaries in pathology image segmentation and provides practical guidance on the necessity of pathology domain adaptation.
☆ Instruction-as-State: Environment-Guided and State-Conditioned Semantic Understanding for Embodied Navigation
Vision-and-Language Navigation requires agents to follow natural-language instructions in visually changing environments. A central challenge is the dynamic entanglement between language and observations: the meaning of instruction shifts as the agent's field of view and spatial context evolve. However, many existing models encode the instruction as a static global representation, limiting their ability to adapt instruction meaning to the current visual context. We therefore model instruction understanding as an Instruction-as-State variable: a decision-relevant, token-level instruction state that evolves step by step conditioned on the agent's perceptual state, where the perceptual state denotes the observation-grounded navigation context at each step. To realize this principle, we introduce State-Entangled Environment-Guided Instruction Understanding (S-EGIU), a coarse-to-fine framework for state-conditioned segment activation and token-level semantic refinement. At the coarse level, S-EGIU activates the instruction segment whose semantics align with the current observation. At the fine level, it refines the activated segment through observation-guided token grounding and contextual modeling, sharpening its internal semantics under the current observation. Together, these stages maintain an instruction state that is continuously updated according to the agent's perceptual state during navigation. S-EGIU delivers strong performance on several key metrics, including a +2.68% SPL gain on REVERIE Test Unseen, and demonstrates consistent efficiency gains across multiple VLN benchmarks, underscoring the value of dynamic instruction--perception entanglement.
☆ Memorize When Needed: Decoupled Memory Control for Spatially Consistent Long-Horizon Video Generation
Spatially consistent long-horizon video generation aims to maintain temporal and spatial consistency along predefined camera trajectories. Existing methods mostly entangle memory modeling with video generation, leading to inconsistent content during scene revisits and diminished generative capacity when exploring novel regions, even trained on extensive annotated data. To address these limitations, we propose a decoupled framework that separates memory conditioning from generation. Our approach significantly reduces training costs while simultaneously enhancing spatial consistency and preserving the generative capacity for novel scene exploration. Specifically, we employ a lightweight, independent memory branch to learn precise spatial consistency from historical observation. We first introduce a hybrid memory representation to capture complementary temporal and spatial cues from generated frames, then leverage a per-frame cross-attention mechanism to ensure each frame is conditioned exclusively on the most spatially relevant historical information, which is injected into the generative model to ensure spatial consistency. When generating new scenes, a camera-aware gating mechanism is proposed to mediate the interaction between memory and generation modules, enabling memory conditioning only when meaningful historical references exist. Compared with the existing method, our method is highly data-efficient, yet the experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both visual quality and spatial consistency.
comment: 24 pages, with supplementary material
☆ Towards Symmetry-sensitive Pose Estimation: A Rotation Representation for Symmetric Object Classes
Symmetric objects are common in daily life and industry, yet their inherent orientation ambiguities that impede the training of deep learning networks for pose estimation are rarely discussed in the literature. To cope with these ambiguities, existing solutions typically require the design of specific loss functions and network architectures or resort to symmetry-invariant evaluation metrics. In contrast, we focus on the numeric representation of the rotation itself, modifying trigonometric identities with the degrees of symmetry derived from the objects' shapes. We use our representation, SARR, to obtain canonic (symmetry-resolved) poses for the symmetric objects in two popular 6D pose estimation datasets, T-LESS and ITODD, where SARR is unique and continuous w.r.t. the visual appearance. This allows us to use a standard CNN for 3D orientation estimation whose performance is evaluated with the symmetry-sensitive cosine distance $\text{AR}_{\text{C}}$. Our networks outperform the state of the art using $\text{AR}_{\text{C}}$ and achieve satisfactory performance when using conventional symmetry-invariant measures. Our method does not require any 3D models but only depth, or, as part of an additional experiment, texture-less RGB/grayscale images as input. We also show that networks trained on SARR outperform the same networks trained on rotation matrices, Euler angles, quaternions, standard trigonometrics or the recently popular 6d representation -- even in inference scenarios where no prior knowledge of the objects' symmetry properties is available. Code and a visualization toolkit are available at https://github.com/akriegler/SARR .
comment: Published Open-Access in IJCV, see https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11263-026-02770-x . 28 pages, 6 figures, 9 tables, 1 algorithm
☆ A Comparative Evaluation of Geometric Accuracy in NeRF and Gaussian Splatting
Recent advances in neural rendering have introduced numerous 3D scene representations. Although standard computer vision metrics evaluate the visual quality of generated images, they often overlook the fidelity of surface geometry. This limitation is particularly critical in robotics, where accurate geometry is essential for tasks such as grasping and object manipulation. In this paper, we present an evaluation pipeline for neural rendering methods that focuses on geometric accuracy, along with a benchmark comprising 19 diverse scenes. Our approach enables a systematic assessment of reconstruction methods in terms of surface and shape fidelity, complementing traditional visual metrics.
☆ DiffuSAM: Diffusion Guided Zero-Shot Object Grounding for Remote Sensing Imagery ICLR 2026
Diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for a wide range of vision tasks, including text-guided image generation and editing. In this work, we explore their potential for object grounding in remote sensing imagery. We propose a hybrid pipeline that integrates diffusion-based localization cues with state-of-the-art segmentation models such as RemoteSAM and SAM3 to obtain more accurate bounding boxes. By leveraging the complementary strengths of generative diffusion models and foundational segmentation models, our approach enables robust and adaptive object localization across complex scenes. Experiments demonstrate that our pipeline significantly improves localization performance, achieving over a 14% increase in Acc@0.5 compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.
comment: Accepted at ICLR 2026 ML4RS Workshop
☆ Attraction, Repulsion, and Friction: Introducing DMF, a Friction-Augmented Drifting Model
Drifting Models [Deng et al., 2026] train a one-step generator by evolving samples under a kernel-based drift field, avoiding ODE integration at inference. The original analysis leaves two questions open. The drift-field iteration admits a locally repulsive regime in a two-particle surrogate, and vanishing of the drift ($V_{p,q}\equiv 0$) is not known to force the learned distribution $q$ to match the target $p$. We derive a contraction threshold for the surrogate and show that a linearly-scheduled friction coefficient gives a finite-horizon bound on the error trajectory. Under a Gaussian kernel we prove that the drift-field equilibrium is identifiable: vanishing of $V_{p,q}$ on any open set forces $q=p$, closing the converse of Proposition 3.1 of Deng et al. Our friction-augmented model, DMF (Drifting Model with Friction), matches or exceeds Optimal Flow Matching on FFHQ adult-to-child domain translation at 16x lower training compute.
comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables
☆ CanonSLR: Canonical-View Guided Multi-View Continuous Sign Language Recognition
Continuous Sign Language Recognition (CSLR) has achieved remarkable progress in recent years; however, most existing methods are developed under single-view settings and thus remain insufficiently robust to viewpoint variations in real-world scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose CanonSLR, a canonical-view guided framework for multi-view CSLR. Specifically, we introduce a frontal-view-anchored teacher-student learning strategy, in which a teacher network trained on frontal-view data provides canonical temporal supervision for a student network trained on all viewpoints. To further reduce cross-view semantic discrepancy, we propose Sequence-Level Soft-Target Distillation, which transfers structured temporal knowledge from the frontal view to non-frontal samples, thereby alleviating gloss boundary ambiguity and category confusion caused by occlusion and projection variation. In addition, we introduce Temporal Motion Relational Enhancement to explicitly model motion-aware temporal relations in high-level visual features, strengthening stable dynamic representations while suppressing viewpoint-sensitive appearance disturbances. To support multi-view CSLR research, we further develop a universal multi-view sign language data construction pipeline that transforms original single-view RGB videos into semantically consistent, temporally coherent, and viewpoint-controllable multi-view sign language videos. Based on this pipeline, we extend PHOENIX-2014T and CSL-Daily into two seven-view benchmarks, namely PT14-MV and CSL-MV, providing a new experimental foundation for multi-view CSLR. Extensive experiments on PT14-MV and CSL-MV demonstrate that CanonSLR consistently outperforms existing approaches under multi-view settings and exhibits stronger robustness, especially on challenging non-frontal views.
☆ Extending One-Step Image Generation from Class Labels to Text via Discriminative Text Representation CVPR2026
Chenxi Zhao, Chen Zhu, Xiaokun Feng, Aiming Hao, Jiashu Zhu, Jiachen Lei, Jiahong Wu, Xiangxiang Chu, Jufeng Yang
Few-step generation has been a long-standing goal, with recent one-step generation methods exemplified by MeanFlow achieving remarkable results. Existing research on MeanFlow primarily focuses on class-to-image generation. However, an intuitive yet unexplored direction is to extend the condition from fixed class labels to flexible text inputs, enabling richer content creation. Compared to the limited class labels, text conditions pose greater challenges to the model's understanding capability, necessitating the effective integration of powerful text encoders into the MeanFlow framework. Surprisingly, although incorporating text conditions appears straightforward, we find that integrating powerful LLM-based text encoders using conventional training strategies results in unsatisfactory performance. To uncover the underlying cause, we conduct detailed analyses and reveal that, due to the extremely limited number of refinement steps in the MeanFlow generation, such as only one step, the text feature representations are required to possess sufficiently high discriminability. This also explains why discrete and easily distinguishable class features perform well within the MeanFlow framework. Guided by these insights, we leverage a powerful LLM-based text encoder validated to possess the required semantic properties and adapt the MeanFlow generation process to this framework, resulting in efficient text-conditioned synthesis for the first time. Furthermore, we validate our approach on the widely used diffusion model, demonstrating significant generation performance improvements. We hope this work provides a general and practical reference for future research on text-conditioned MeanFlow generation. The code is available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/EMF.
comment: CVPR2026
☆ Embedding Arithmetic: A Lightweight, Tuning-Free Framework for Post-hoc Bias Mitigation in Text-to-Image Models
Modern text-to-image (T2I) models amplify harmful societal biases, challenging their ethical deployment. We introduce an inference-time method that reliably mitigates social bias while keeping prompt semantics and visual context (background, layout, and style) intact. This ensures context persistency and provides a controllable parameter to adjust mitigation strength, giving practitioners fine-grained control over fairness-coherence trade-offs. Using Embedding Arithmetic, we analyze how bias is structured in the embedding space and correct it without altering model weights, prompts, or datasets. Experiments on FLUX 1.0-Dev and Stable Diffusion 3.5-Large show that the conditional embedding space forms a complex, entangled manifold rather than a grid of disentangled concepts. To rigorously assess semantic preservation beyond the circularity and bias limitations of of CLIP scores, we propose the Concept Coherence Score (CCS). Evaluated against this robust metric, our lightweight, tuning-free method significantly outperforms existing baselines in improving diversity while maintaining high concept coherence, effectively resolving the critical fairness-coherence trade-off. By characterizing how models represent social concepts, we establish geometric understanding of latent space as a principled path toward more transparent, controllable, and fair image generation.
comment: A demo notebook with basic implementations can be found at \url{https://github.com/cvims/EMBEDDING-ARITHMETIC}
☆ MM-JudgeBias: A Benchmark for Evaluating Compositional Biases in MLLM-as-a-Judge ACL 2026
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been increasingly used as automatic evaluators-a paradigm known as MLLM-as-a-Judge. However, their reliability and vulnerabilities to biases remain underexplored. We find that many MLLM judges fail to reliably integrate key visual or textual cues, yielding unreliable evaluations when evidence is missing or mismatched, and exhibiting instability under semantically irrelevant perturbations. To address this, we systematically define Compositional Bias in MLLM-as-a-Judge systems and introduce MM-JudgeBias, a benchmark for evaluating it. MM-JudgeBias introduces controlled perturbations across Query, Image, and Response, and evaluates model behavior via two complementary metrics: Bias-Deviation (BD) for sensitivity and Bias-Conformity (BC) for stability. Our dataset of over 1,800 curated and refined multimodal samples, drawn from 29 source benchmarks, enables a fine-grained diagnosis of nine bias types across diverse tasks and domains. Experiments on 26 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal systematic modality neglect and asymmetric evaluation tendencies, underscoring the need for more reliable judges.
comment: ACL 2026 Main
☆ AI-based Waste Mapping for Addressing Climate-Exacerbated Flood Risk
Urban flooding is a growing climate change-related hazard in rapidly expanding African cities, where inadequate waste management often blocks drainage systems and amplifies flood risks. This study introduces an AI-powered urban waste mapping workflow that leverages openly available aerial and street-view imagery to detect municipal solid waste at high resolution. Applied in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, our approach reveals spatial waste patterns linked to informal settlements and socio-economic factors. Waste accumulation in waterways was found to be up to three times higher than in adjacent urban areas, highlighting critical hotspots for climate-exacerbated flooding. Unlike traditional manual mapping methods, this scalable AI approach allows city-wide monitoring and prioritization of interventions. Crucially, our collaboration with local partners ensured culturally and contextually relevant data labeling, reflecting real-world reuse practices for solid waste. The results offer actionable insights for urban planning, climate adaptation, and sustainable waste management in flood-prone urban areas.
☆ Attention-ResUNet for Automated Fetal Head Segmentation
Automated fetal head segmentation in ultrasound images is critical for accurate biometric measurements in prenatal care. While existing deep learning approaches have achieved a reasonable performance, they struggle with issues like low contrast, noise, and complex anatomical boundaries which are inherent to ultrasound imaging. This paper presents Attention-ResUNet. It is a novel architecture that synergistically combines residual learning with multi-scale attention mechanisms in order to achieve enhanced fetal head segmentation. Our approach integrates attention gates at four decoder levels to focus selectively on anatomically relevant regions while suppressing the background noise, and complemented by residual connections which facilitates gradient flow and feature reuse. Extensive evaluation on the HC18 Challenge dataset where n = 200 demonstrates that Attention ResUNet achieves a superior performance with a mean Dice score of 99.30 +/- 0.14% against similar architectures. It significantly outperforms five baseline architectures including ResUNet (99.26%), Attention U-Net (98.79%), Swin U-Net (98.60%), Standard U-Net (98.58%), and U-Net++ (97.46%). Through statistical analysis we confirm highly significant improvements (p < 0.001) with effect sizes that range from 0.230 to 13.159 (Cohen's d). Using Saliency map analysis, we reveal that our architecture produces highly concentrated, anatomically consistent activation patterns, which demonstrate an enhanced interpretability which is crucial for clinical deployment. The proposed method establishes a new state of the art performance for automated fetal head segmentation whilst maintaining computational efficiency with 14.7M parameters and a 45 GFLOPs inference cost. Code repository: https://github.com/Ammar-ss
comment: Accepted and Presented at ANTIC 2025, IIITM Gwalior (5th International Conference on Advanced Network Technologies and Intelligent Computing) on 23rd December 2025. Presented with the best paper award in Image Processing Track
☆ Region-Grounded Report Generation for 3D Medical Imaging: A Fine-Grained Dataset and Graph-Enhanced Framework ACL 2026
Cong Huy Nguyen, Son Dinh Nguyen, Guanlin Li, Tuan Dung Nguyen, Aditya Narayan Sankaran, Mai Huy Thong, Thanh Trung Nguyen, Mai Hong Son, Reza Farahbakhsh, Phi Le Nguyen, Noel Crespi
Automated medical report generation for 3D PET/CT imaging is fundamentally challenged by the high-dimensional nature of volumetric data and a critical scarcity of annotated datasets, particularly for low-resource languages. Current black-box methods map whole volumes to reports, ignoring the clinical workflow of analyzing localized Regions of Interest (RoIs) to derive diagnostic conclusions. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing VietPET-RoI, the first large-scale 3D PET/CT dataset with fine-grained RoI annotation for a low-resource language, comprising 600 PET/CT samples and 1,960 manually annotated RoIs, paired with corresponding clinical reports. Furthermore, to demonstrate the utility of this dataset, we propose HiRRA, a novel framework that mimics the professional radiologist diagnostic workflow by employing graph-based relational modules to capture dependencies between RoI attributes. This approach shifts from global pattern matching toward localized clinical findings. Additionally, we introduce new clinical evaluation metrics, namely RoI Coverage and RoI Quality Index, that measure both RoI localization accuracy and attribute description fidelity using LLM-based extraction. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that our framework achieves SOTA performance, surpassing existing models by 19.7% in BLEU and 4.7% in ROUGE-L, while achieving a remarkable 45.8% improvement in clinical metrics, indicating enhanced clinical reliability and reduced hallucination. Our code and dataset are available on GitHub.
comment: 16 pages; Accepted to appear in ACL 2026
☆ Soft Label Pruning and Quantization for Large-Scale Dataset Distillation
Large-scale dataset distillation requires storing auxiliary soft labels that can be 30-40x larger on ImageNet-1K and 200x larger on ImageNet-21K than the condensed images, undermining the goal of dataset compression. We identify two fundamental issues necessitating such extensive labels: (1) insufficient image diversity, where high within-class similarity in synthetic images requires extensive augmentation, and (2) insufficient supervision diversity, where limited variety in supervisory signals during training leads to performance degradation at high compression rates. To address these challenges, we propose Label Pruning and Quantization for Large-scale Distillation (LPQLD). We enhance image diversity via class-wise batching and batch-normalization supervision during synthesis. For supervision diversity, we introduce Label Pruning with Dynamic Knowledge Reuse to improve label-per-augmentation diversity, and Label Quantization with Calibrated Student-Teacher Alignment to improve augmentation-per-image diversity. Our approach reduces soft label storage by 78x on ImageNet-1K and 500x on ImageNet-21K while improving accuracy by up to 7.2% and 2.8%, respectively. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of LPQLD across different network architectures and dataset distillation methods. Code is available at https://github.com/he-y/soft-label-pruning-quantization-for-dataset-distillation.
☆ Can LLM-Generated Text Empower Surgical Vision-Language Pre-training? CVPR
Recent advancements in self-supervised learning have led to powerful surgical vision encoders capable of spatiotemporal understanding. However, extending these visual foundations to multi-modal reasoning tasks is severely bottlenecked by the prohibitive cost of expert textual annotations. To overcome this scalability limitation, we introduce \textbf{LIME}, a large-scale multi-modal dataset derived from open-access surgical videos using human-free, Large Language Model (LLM)-generated narratives. While LIME offers immense scalability, unverified generated texts may contain errors, including hallucinations, that could potentially lead to catastrophically degraded pre-trained medical priors in standard contrastive pipelines. To mitigate this, we propose \textbf{SurgLIME}, a parameter-efficient Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) framework designed to learn reliable cross-modal alignments using noisy narratives. SurgLIME preserves foundational medical priors using a LoRA-adapted dual-encoder architecture and introduces an automated confidence estimation mechanism that dynamically down-weights uncertain text during contrastive alignment. Evaluations on the AutoLaparo and Cholec80 benchmarks show that SurgLIME achieves competitive zero-shot cross-modal alignment while preserving the robust linear probing performance of the visual foundation model. Dataset, code, and models are publicly available at \href{https://github.com/visurg-ai/SurgLIME}{https://github.com/visurg-ai/SurgLIME}.
comment: Accepted at CVPRW 2026 (AI4RWC Oral presentationn)
☆ Chatting about Conditional Trajectory Prediction
Human behavior has the nature of mutual dependencies, which requires human-robot interactive systems to predict surrounding agents trajectories by modeling complex social interactions, avoiding collisions and executing safe path planning. While there exist many trajectory prediction methods, most of them do not incorporate the own motion of the ego agent and only model interactions based on static information. We are inspired by the humans theory of mind during trajectory selection and propose a Cross time domain intention-interactive method for conditional Trajectory prediction(CiT). Our proposed CiT conducts joint analysis of behavior intentions over time, and achieves information complementarity and integration across different time domains. The intention in its own time domain can be corrected by the social interaction information from the other time domain to obtain a more precise intention representation. In addition, CiT is designed to closely integrate with robotic motion planning and control modules, capable of generating a set of optional trajectory prediction results for all surrounding agents based on potential motions of the ego agent. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed CiT significantly outperforms the existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance in the benchmarks.
☆ Test-Time Perturbation Learning with Delayed Feedback for Vision-Language-Action Models
Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) achieve remarkable performance in sequential decision-making but remain fragile to subtle environmental shifts, such as small changes in object pose. We attribute this brittleness to trajectory overfitting, where VLAs over-attend to the spurious correlation between actions and entities, then reproduce memorized action patterns. We propose Perturbation learning with Delayed Feedback (PDF), a verifier-free test-time adaptation framework that improves decision performance without fine-tuning the base model. PDF mitigates the spurious correlation through uncertainty-based data augmentation and action voting, while an adaptive scheduler allocates augmentation budgets to balance performance and efficiency. To further improve stability, PDF learns a lightweight perturbation module that retrospectively adjusts action logits guided by delayed feedback, correcting overconfidence issue. Experiments on LIBERO (+7.4\% success rate) and Atari (+10.3 human normalized score) demonstrate consistent gains of PDF in task success over vanilla VLA and VLA with test-time adaptation, establishing a practical path toward reliable test-time adaptation in multimodal decision-making agents. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/zhoujiahuan1991/CVPR2026-PDF}{https://github.com/zhoujiahuan1991/CVPR2026-PDF}.
comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, 5 tables
☆ Decision-Aware Attention Propagation for Vision Transformer Explainability
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become a dominant architecture in computer vision, yet their prediction process remains difficult to interpret because information is propagated through complex interactions across layers and attention heads. Existing attention based explanation methods provide an intuitive way to trace information flow. However, they rely mainly on raw attention weights, which do not explicitly reflect the final decision and often lead to explanations with limited class discriminability. In contrast, gradient based localization methods are more effective at highlighting class specific evidence, but they do not fully exploit the hierarchical attention propagation mechanism of transformers. To address this limitation, we propose Decision-Aware Attention Propagation (DAP), an attribution method that injects decision-relevant priors into transformer attention propagation. By estimating token importance through gradient based localization and integrating it into layer wise attention rollout, the method captures both the structural flow of attention and the evidence most relevant to the final prediction. Consequently, DAP produces attribution maps that are more class sensitive, compact, and faithful than those generated by conventional attention based methods. Extensive experiments across Vision Transformer variants of different model scales show that DAP consistently outperforms existing baselines in both quantitative metrics and qualitative visualizations, indicating that decision aware propagation is an effective direction for improving ViT interpretability.
comment: 16 pages, 4 figures
☆ Culture-Aware Humorous Captioning: Multimodal Humor Generation across Cultural Contexts
Recent multimodal large language models have shown promising ability in generating humorous captions for images, yet they still lack stable control over explicit cultural context, making it difficult to jointly maintain image relevance, contextual appropriateness, and humor quality under a specified cultural background. To address this limitation, we introduce a new multimodal generation task, culture-aware humorous captioning, which requires a model to generate a humorous caption conditioned on both an input image and a target cultural context. Captions generated under different cultural contexts are not expected to share the same surface form, but should remain grounded in similar visual situations or humorous rationales.To support this task, we establish a six-dimensional evaluation framework covering image relevance, contextual fit, semantic richness, reasonableness, humor, and creativity. We further propose a staged alignment framework that first initializes the model with high-resource supervision under the Western cultural context, then performs multi-dimensional preference alignment via judge-based GRPO with a Degradation-aware Prototype Repulsion Constraint to mitigate reward hacking in open-ended generation, and finally adapts the model to the Eastern cultural context with a small amount of supervision. Experimental results show that our method achieves stronger overall performance under the proposed evaluation framework, with particularly large gains in contextual fit and a better balance between image relevance and humor under cultural constraints.
☆ Autonomous Unmanned Aircraft Systems for Enhanced Search and Rescue of Drowning Swimmers: Image-Based Localization and Mission Simulation
Drowning is an omnipresent risk associated with any activity on or in the water, and rescuing a drowning person is particularly challenging because of the time pressure, making a short response time important. Further complicating water rescue are unsupervised and extensive swimming areas, precise localization of the target, and the transport of rescue personnel. Technical innovations can provide a remedy: We propose an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS), also known as a drone-in-a-box system, consisting of a fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) allocated to purpose-built hangars near swimming areas. In an emergency, the UAS can be deployed in addition to Standard Rescue Operation (SRO) equipment to locate the distressed person early by performing a fully automated Search and Rescue (S&R) operation and dropping a flotation device. In this paper, we address automatically locating distressed swimmers using the image-based object detection architecture You Only Look Once (YOLO). We present a dataset created for this application and outline the training process. We evaluate the performance of YOLO versions 3, 5, and 8 and architecture sizes (nano, extra-large) using Mean Average Precision (mAP) metrics mAP@.5 and mAP@.5:.95. Furthermore, we present two Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) approaches to simulate response times of SRO and UAS-based water rescue. This enables estimation of time savings relative to SRO when selecting the UAS configuration (type, number, and location of UAVs and hangars). Computational experiments for a test area in the Lusatian Lake District, Germany, show that UAS assistance shortens response time. Even a small UAS with two hangars, each containing one UAV, reduces response time by a factor of five compared to SRO.
comment: Submitted to "Applied Intelligence"
☆ Class-specific diffusion models improve military object detection in a low-data domain SP
Ella P. Fokkinga, Jan Erik van Woerden, Thijs A. Eker, Sebastiaan P. Snel, Elfi I. S. Hofmeijer, Klamer Schutte, Friso G. Heslinga
Diffusion-based image synthesis has emerged as a promising source of synthetic training data for AI-based object detection and classification. In this work, we investigate whether images generated with diffusion can improve military vehicle detection under low-data conditions. We fine-tuned the text-to-image diffusion model FLUX.1 [dev] using LoRA with only 8 or 24 real images per class across 15 vehicle categories, resulting in class-specific diffusion models, which were used to generate new samples from automatically generated text prompts. The same real images were used to fine-tune the RF-DETR detector for a 15-class object detection task. Synthetic datasets generated by the diffusion models were then used to further improve detector performance. Importantly, no additional real data was required, as the generative models leveraged the same limited training samples. FLUX-generated images improved detection performance, particularly in the low-data regime (up to +8.0% mAP$_{50}$ with 8 real samples). To address the limited geometric control of text prompt-based diffusion, we additionally generated structurally guided synthetic data using ControlNet with Canny edge-map conditioning, yielding a FLUX-ControlNet (FLUX-CN) dataset with explicit control over viewpoint and pose. Structural guidance further enhanced performance when data is scarce (+4.1% mAP$_{50}$ with 8 real samples), but no additional benefit was observed when more real data is available. This study demonstrates that object-specific diffusion models are effective for improving military object detection in a low-data domain, and that structural guidance is most beneficial when real data is highly limited. These results highlight generative image data as an alternative to traditional simulation pipelines for the training of military AI systems.
comment: Submitted to SPIE Defense + Security
☆ Enhancing Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models via Dynamic Prefix Weighting CVPR 2026
We investigate recently introduced domain-class incremental learning scenarios for vision-language models (VLMs). Recent works address this challenge using parameter-efficient methods, such as prefix-tuning or adapters, which facilitate model adaptation to downstream tasks by incorporating task-specific information into input tokens through additive vectors. However, previous approaches often normalize the weights of these vectors, disregarding the fact that different input tokens require different degrees of adjustment. To overcome this issue, we propose Dynamic Prefix Weighting (DPW), a framework that dynamically assigns weights to prefixes, complemented by adapters. DPW consists of 1) a gating module that adjusts the weights of each prefix based on the importance of the corresponding input token, and 2) a weighting mechanism that derives adapter output weights as a residual of prefix-tuning weights, ensuring that adapters are utilized only when necessary. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in domain-class incremental learning scenarios for VLMs. The code is available at: https://github.com/YonseiML/dpw.
comment: CVPR 2026; revised text and figures for improved readability
☆ INTENT: Invariance and Discrimination-aware Noise Mitigation for Robust Composed Image Retrieval AAAI 2026
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a challenging image retrieval paradigm that enables to retrieve target images based on multimodal queries consisting of reference images and modification texts. Although substantial progress has been made in recent years, existing methods assume that all samples are correctly matched. However, in real-world scenarios, due to high triplet annotation costs, CIR datasets inevitably contain annotation errors, resulting in incorrectly matched triplets. To address this issue, the problem of Noisy Triplet Correspondence (NTC) has attracted growing attention. We argue that noise in CIR can be categorized into two types: cross-modal correspondence noise and modality-inherent noise. The former arises from mismatches across modalities, whereas the latter originates from intra-modal background interference or visual factors irrelevant to the coarse-grained modification annotations. However, modality-inherent noise is often overlooked, and research on cross-modal correspondence noise remains nascent. To tackle above issues, we propose the Invariance and discrimiNaTion-awarE Noise neTwork (INTENT), comprising two components: Visual Invariant Composition and Bi-Objective Discriminative Learning, specifically designed to handle the two-aspect noise. The former applies causal intervention on the visual side via Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to generate intervened composed features, enforcing visual invariance and enabling the model to ignore modality-inherent noise during composition. The latter adopts collaborative optimization with both positive and negative samples, and constructs a scalable decision boundary that dynamically adjusts decisions based on the loyalty degree, enabling robust correspondence discrimination. Extensive experiments on two widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority and robustness of INTENT.
comment: Accepted by AAAI 2026
☆ GS-STVSR: Ultra-Efficient Continuous Spatio-Temporal Video Super-Resolution via 2D Gaussian Splatting
Mingyu Shi, Xin Di, Long Peng, Boxiang Cao, Anran Wu, Zhanfeng Feng, Jiaming Guo, Renjing Pei, Xueyang Fu, Yang Cao, Zhengjun Zha
Continuous Spatio-Temporal Video Super-Resolution (C-STVSR) aims to simultaneously enhance the spatial resolution and frame rate of videos by arbitrary scale factors, offering greater flexibility than fixed-scale methods that are constrained by predefined upsampling ratios. In recent years, methods based on Implicit Neural Representations (INR) have made significant progress in C-STVSR by learning continuous mappings from spatio-temporal coordinates to pixel values. However, these methods fundamentally rely on dense pixel-wise grid queries, causing computational cost to scale linearly with the number of interpolated frames and severely limiting inference efficiency. We propose GS-STVSR, an ultra-efficient C-STVSR framework based on 2D Gaussian Splatting (2D-GS) that drives the spatiotemporal evolution of Gaussian kernels through continuous motion modeling, bypassing dense grid queries entirely. We exploit the strong temporal stability of covariance parameters for lightweight intermediate fitting, design an optical flow-guided motion module to derive Gaussian position and color at arbitrary time steps, introduce a Covariance resampling alignment module to prevent covariance drift, and propose an adaptive offset window for large-scale motion. Extensive experiments on Vid4, GoPro, and Adobe240 show that GS-STVSR achieves state-of-the-art quality across all benchmarks. Moreover, its inference time remains nearly constant at conventional temporal scales (X2--X8) and delivers over X3 speedup at extreme scales X32, demonstrating strong practical applicability.
☆ HABIT: Chrono-Synergia Robust Progressive Learning Framework for Composed Image Retrieval AAAI 2026
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a flexible image retrieval paradigm that enables users to accurately locate the target image through a multimodal query composed of a reference image and modification text. Although this task has demonstrated promising applications in personalized search and recommendation systems, it encounters a severe challenge in practical scenarios known as the Noise Triplet Correspondence (NTC) problem. This issue primarily arises from the high cost and subjectivity involved in annotating triplet data. To address this problem, we identify two central challenges: the precise estimation of composed semantic discrepancy and the insufficient progressive adaptation to modification discrepancy. To tackle these challenges, we propose a cHrono-synergiA roBust progressIve learning framework for composed image reTrieval (HABIT), which consists of two core modules. First, the Mutual Knowledge Estimation Module quantifies sample cleanliness by calculating the Transition Rate of mutual information between the composed feature and the target image, thereby effectively identifying clean samples that align with the intended modification semantics. Second, the Dual-consistency Progressive Learning Module introduces a collaborative mechanism between the historical and current models, simulating human habit formation to retain good habits and calibrate bad habits, ultimately enabling robust learning under the presence of NTC. Extensive experiments conducted on two standard CIR datasets demonstrate that HABIT significantly outperforms most methods under various noise ratios, exhibiting superior robustness and retrieval performance. Codes are available at https://github.com/Lee-zixu/HABIT
comment: Accepted by AAAI 2026
☆ SignDPO: Multi-level Direct Preference Optimisation for Skeleton-based Gloss-free Sign Language Translation
We present SignDPO, a novel multi-level Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO) framework designed to enhance the alignment of skeleton-based Sign Language Translation. While current skeleton-based models have made significant progress using Maximum Likelihood Estimation, they are primarily constrained by an imitation-based paradigm that lacks discriminative sensitivity to the fine-grained spatio-temporal nuances of sign language, often leading to semantic drift. To address this, SignDPO shifts the optimisation goal from simple sequence mimicry to structured preference alignment across spatial, temporal, and linguistic dimensions. Our framework involves three key designs. First, we introduce a hierarchical perturbation strategy to construct spatial and temporal non-preferred samples at both global and local granularities automatically. Second, we propose a self-guiding mechanism that leverages decoder cross-attention scores to identify and perturb semantically salient skeletal regions, forcing the model to distinguish genuine sign signals from structural distortions. Third, we establish an automated language-level preference generator by fine-tuning a dedicated perturbation model, capturing complex output-level failure modes without manual annotation. Extensive experiments on three widely adopted benchmarks, CSL-Daily, How2Sign, and OpenASL, demonstrate that SignDPO consistently outperforms state-of-the-art gloss-free methods and even rivals established gloss-based ones. Our results suggest that multi-level preference alignment is a powerful paradigm for bridging the gap between high-entropy skeletal trajectories and discrete linguistic semantics.
☆ CFSR: Geometry-Conditioned Shadow Removal via Physical Disentanglement
Traditional shadow removal networks often treat image restoration as an unconstrained mapping, lacking the physical interpretability required to balance localized texture recovery with global illumination consistency. To address this, we propose CFSR, a multi-modal prior-driven framework that reframes shadow removal as a physics-constrained restoration process. By seamlessly integrating 3D geometric cues with large-scale foundation model semantics, CFSR effectively bridges the 2D-3D domain gap. Specifically, we first map observations into a custom HVI color space to suppress shadow-induced noise and robustly fuse RGB data with estimated depth priors. At its core, our Geometric & Semantic Dual Explicit Guided Attention mechanism utilizes DINO features and 3D surface normals to directly modulate the attention affinity matrix, structurally enforcing physical lighting constraints. To recover severely degraded regions, we inject holistic priors via a frozen CLIP encoder. Finally, our Frequency Collaborative Reconstruction Module (FCRM) achieves an optimal synthesis by decoupling the decoding process. Conditioned on geometric priors, FCRM seamlessly harmonizes the reconstruction of sharp high-frequency occlusion boundaries with the restoration of low-frequency global illumination. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CFSR achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple challenging benchmarks.
☆ Multi-View Hierarchical Graph Neural Network for Sketch-Based 3D Shape Retrieval
Sketch-based 3D shape retrieval (SBSR) aims to retrieve 3D shapes that are consistent with the category of the input hand-drawn sketch. The core challenge of this task lies in two aspects: existing methods typically employ simplified aggregation strategies for independently encoded 3D multi-view features, which ignore the geometric relationships between views and multi-level details, resulting in weak 3D representation. Simultaneously, traditional SBSR methods are constrained by visible category limitations, leading to poor performance in zero-shot scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose Multi-View Hierarchical Graph Neural Network (MV-HGNN), a novel framework for SBSR. Specifically, we construct a view-level graph and capture adjacent geometric dependencies and cross-view message passing via local graph convolution and global attention. A view selector is further introduced to perform hierarchical graph coarsening, enabling a progressively larger receptive field for graph convolution and mitigating the interference of redundant views, which leads to more discriminate discriminative hierarchical 3D representation. To enable category agnostic alignment and mitigate overfitting to seen classes, we leverage CLIP text embeddings as semantic prototypes and project both sketch and 3D features into a shared semantic space. We use a two-stage training strategy for category-level retrieval and a one-stage strategy for zero-shot retrieval under the same model architecture. Under both category-level and zero-shot settings, extensive experiments on two public benchmarks demonstrate that MV-HGNN outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
☆ Trustworthy Endoscopic Super-Resolution
Super-resolution (SR) models are attracting growing interest for enhancing minimally invasive surgery and diagnostic videos under hardware constraints. However, valid concerns remain regarding the introduction of hallucinated structures and amplified noise, limiting their reliability in safety-critical settings. We propose a direct and practical framework to make SR systems more trustworthy by identifying where reconstructions are likely to fail. Our approach integrates a lightweight error-prediction network that operates on intermediate representations to estimate pixel-wise reconstruction error. The module is computationally efficient and low-latency, making it suitable for real-time deployment. We convert these predictions into operational failure decisions by constructing Conformal Failure Masks (CFM), which localize regions where the SR output should not be trusted. Built on conformal risk control principles, our method provides theoretical guarantees for controlling both the tolerated error limit and the miscoverage in detected failures. We evaluate our approach on image and video SR, demonstrating its effectiveness in detecting unreliable reconstructions in endoscopic and robotic surgery settings. To our knowledge, this is the first study to provide a model-agnostic, theoretically grounded approach to improving the safety of real-time endoscopic image SR.
comment: Code: https://github.com/jusiro/Endoscopic-CFM
☆ Mitigating Multimodal Hallucination via Phase-wise Self-reward
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) still struggle with vision hallucination, where generated responses are inconsistent with the visual input. Existing methods either rely on large-scale annotated data for fine-tuning, which incurs massive computational overhead, or employ static post-hoc strategies that overlook the dynamic nature of hallucination emergence. To address these, we introduce a new self-rewarding framework, enabling dynamic hallucination mitigation at inference time without external supervision. On the empirical side, we reveal that visual hallucination exhibits phase-wise dynamic patterns, peaking at the onset of each semantic phase. Drawing on these insights, we propose \textbf{PSRD} (\textbf{Phase-wise \textbf{S}elf-\textbf{R}eward \textbf{D}ecoding) for online hallucination correction guided by phase-wise self-reward signals. To reduce the cost of repeated self-evaluation during decoding, we distill the hallucination guidance signal from LVLMs into a lightweight reward model. The reward model subsequently provides on-the-fly guidance for targeted intervention during the decoding process, enabling precise hallucination suppression. The proposed PSRD significantly reduces the hallucination rate of LLaVA-1.5-7B by 50.0% and consistently outperforms existing post-hoc methods across five hallucination evaluation benchmarks for four LVLMs. Further analysis confirms that PSRD effectively mitigates hallucination propagation and achieves a highly controllable trade-off between strong performance and inference efficiency.
comment: Self-reward for vision hallucination mitigation
☆ Identifying Ethical Biases in Action Recognition Models
Human Action Recognition (HAR) models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes environments, yet their fairness across different human appearances has not been analyzed. We introduce a framework for auditing bias in HAR models using synthetic video data, generated with full control over visual identity attributes such as skin color. Unlike prior work that focuses on static images or pose estimation, our approach preserves temporal consistency, allowing us to isolate and test how changes to a single attribute affect model predictions. Through controlled interventions using the BEDLAM simulation platform, we show whether some popular HAR models exhibit statistically significant biases on the skin color even when the motion remains identical. Our results highlight how models may encode unwanted visual associations, and we provide evidence of systematic errors across groups. This work contributes a framework for auditing HAR models and supports the development of more transparent, accountable systems in light of upcoming regulatory standards.
☆ E3VS-Bench: A Benchmark for Viewpoint-Dependent Active Perception in 3D Gaussian Splatting Scenes
Koya Sakamoto, Taiki Miyanishi, Daichi Azuma, Shuhei Kurita, Shu Morikuni, Naoya Chiba, Motoaki Kawanabe, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo
Visual search in 3D environments requires embodied agents to actively explore their surroundings and acquire task-relevant evidence. However, existing visual search and embodied AI benchmarks, including EQA, typically rely on static observations or constrained egocentric motion, and thus do not explicitly evaluate fine-grained viewpoint-dependent phenomena that arise under unrestricted 5-DoF viewpoint control in real-world 3D environments, such as visibility changes caused by vertical viewpoint shifts, revealing contents inside containers, and disambiguating object attributes that are only observable from specific angles. To address this limitation, we introduce {E3VS-Bench}, a benchmark for embodied 3D visual search where agents must control their viewpoints in 5-DoF to gather viewpoint-dependent evidence for question answering. E3VS-Bench consists of 99 high-fidelity 3D scenes reconstructed using 3D Gaussian Splatting and 2,014 question-driven episodes. 3D Gaussian Splatting enables photorealistic free-viewpoint rendering that preserves fine-grained visual details (e.g., small text and subtle attributes) often degraded in mesh-based simulators, thereby allowing the construction of questions that cannot be answered from a single view and instead require active inspection across viewpoints in 5-DoF. We evaluate multiple state-of-the-art VLMs and compare their performance with humans. Despite strong 2D reasoning ability, all models exhibit a substantial gap from humans, highlighting limitations in active perception and coherent viewpoint planning specifically under full 5-DoF viewpoint changes.
☆ MU-GeNeRF: Multi-view Uncertainty-guided Generalizable Neural Radiance Fields for Distractor-aware Scene CVPR 2026
Wenjie Mu, Zhan Li, Chuanzhou Su, Xuanyi Shen, Ziniu Liu, Fan Lu, Yujian Mo, Junqiao Zhao, Tiantian Feng, Chen Ye, Guang Chen
Generalizable Neural Radiance Fields (GeNeRFs) enable high-quality scene reconstruction from sparse views and can generalize to unseen scenes. However, in real-world settings, transient distractors break cross-view structural consistency, corrupting supervision and degrading reconstruction quality. Existing distractor-free NeRF methods rely on per-scene optimization and estimate uncertainty from per-view reconstruction errors, which are not reliable for GeNeRFs and often misjudge inconsistent static structures as distractors. To this end, we propose MU-GeNeRF, a Multi-view Uncertainty-guided distractor-aware GeNeRF framework designed to alleviate GeNeRF's robust modeling challenges in the presence of transient distractions. We decompose distractor awareness into two complementary uncertainty components: Source-view Uncertainty, which captures structural discrepancies across source views caused by viewpoint changes or dynamic factors; and Target-view Uncertainty, which detects observation anomalies in the target image induced by transient distractors.These two uncertainties address distinct error sources and are combined through a heteroscedastic reconstruction loss, which guides the model to adaptively modulate supervision, enabling more robust distractor suppression and geometric modeling.Extensive experiments show that our method not only surpasses existing GeNeRFs but also achieves performance comparable to scene-specific distractor-free NeRFs.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026
☆ DifFoundMAD: Foundation Models meet Differential Morphing Attack Detection
In this work, we introduce DifFoundMAD, a parameter-efficient D-MAD framework that exploits the generalisation capabilities of vision foundation models (FM) to capture discrepancies between suspected morphs and live capture images. In contrast to conventional D-MAD systems that rely on face recognition embeddings or handcrafted feature differences, DifFoundMAD follows the standard differential paradigm while replacing the underlying representation space with embeddings extracted from FMs. By combining lightweight finetuning with class-balanced optimisation, the proposed method updates only a small subset of parameters while preserving the rich representational priors of the underlying FMs. Extensive cross-database evaluations on standard D-MAD benchmarks demonstrate that DifFoundMAD achieves consistent improvements over state-of-the-art systems, particularly at the strict security levels required in operational deployments such as border control: The error rates reported in the current state-of-the-art were reduced from 6.16% to 2.17% for high-security levels using DifFoundMAD.
☆ Chatting about Upper-Body Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation
Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation (EHPS) plays a crucial role in various AR/VR applications and has witnessed significant progress in recent years. However, current state-of-the-art methods still struggle with accurate parameter estimation for facial and hand regions and exhibit limited generalization to wild images. To address these challenges, we present CoEvoer, a novel one-stage synergistic cross-dependency transformer framework tailored for upper-body EHPS. CoEvoer enables explicit feature-level interaction across different body parts, allowing for mutual enhancement through contextual information exchange. Specifically, larger and more easily estimated regions such as the torso provide global semantics and positional priors to guide the estimation of finer, more complex regions like the face and hands. Conversely, the localized details captured in facial and hand regions help refine and calibrate adjacent body parts. To the best of our knowledge, CoEvoer is the first framework designed specifically for upper-body EHPS, with the goal of capturing the strong coupling and semantic dependencies among the face, hands, and torso through joint parameter regression. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoEvoer achieves state-of-the-art performance on upper-body benchmarks and exhibits strong generalization capability even on unseen wild images.
☆ ZSG-IAD: A Multimodal Framework for Zero-Shot Grounded Industrial Anomaly Detection
Deep learning-based industrial anomaly detectors often behave as black boxes, making it hard to justify decisions with physically meaningful defect evidence. We propose ZSG-IAD, a multimodal vision-language framework for zero-shot grounded industrial anomaly detection. Given RGB images, sensor images, and 3D point clouds, ZSG-IAD generates structured anomaly reports and pixel-level anomaly masks. ZSG-IAD introduces a language-guided two-hop grounding module: (1) anomaly-related sentences select evidence-like latent slots distilled from multimodal features, yielding coarse spatial support; (2) selected slots modulate feature maps via channel-spatial gating and a lightweight decoder to produce fine-grained masks. To improve reliability, we further apply Executable-Rule GRPO with verifiable rewards to promote structured outputs, anomaly-region consistency, and reasoning-conclusion coherence. Experiments across multiple industrial anomaly benchmarks show strong zero-shot performance and more transparent, physically grounded explanations than prior methods. We will release code and annotations to support future research on trustworthy industrial anomaly detection systems.
☆ From Heads to Neurons: Causal Attribution and Steering in Multi-Task Vision-Language Models ACL 2026
Recent work has increasingly explored neuron-level interpretation in vision-language models (VLMs) to identify neurons critical to final predictions. However, existing neuron analyses generally focus on single tasks, limiting the comparability of neuron importance across tasks. Moreover, ranking strategies tend to score neurons in isolation, overlooking how task-dependent information pathways shape the write-in effects of feed-forward network (FFN) neurons. This oversight can exacerbate neuron polysemanticity in multi-task settings, introducing noise into the identification and intervention of task-critical neurons. In this study, we propose HONES (Head-Oriented Neuron Explanation & Steering), a gradient-free framework for task-aware neuron attribution and steering in multi-task VLMs. HONES ranks FFN neurons by their causal write-in contributions conditioned on task-relevant attention heads, and further modulates salient neurons via lightweight scaling. Experiments on four diverse multimodal tasks and two popular VLMs show that HONES outperforms existing methods in identifying task-critical neurons and improves model performance after steering. Our source code is released at: https://github.com/petergit1/HONES.
comment: ACL 2026 Findings
☆ Brain-Inspired Capture: Evidence-Driven Neuromimetic Perceptual Simulation for Visual Decoding
Feixue Shao, Guangze Shi, Xueyu Liu, Yongfei Wu, Mingqiang Wei, Jianan Zhang, Jianbo Lu, Guiying Yan, Weihua Yang
Visual decoding of neurophysiological signals is a critical challenge for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and computational neuroscience. However, current approaches are often constrained by the systematic and stochastic gaps between neural and visual modalities, largely neglecting the intrinsic computational mechanisms of the Human Visual System (HVS). To address this, we propose Brain-Inspired Capture (BI-Cap), a neuromimetic perceptual simulation paradigm that aligns these modalities by emulating HVS processing. Specifically, we construct a neuromimetic pipeline comprising four biologically plausible dynamic and static transformations, coupled with Mutual Information (MI)-guided dynamic blur regulation to simulate adaptive visual processing. Furthermore, to mitigate the inherent non-stationarity of neural activity, we introduce an evidence-driven latent space representation. This formulation explicitly models uncertainty, thereby ensuring robust neural embeddings. Extensive evaluations on zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval across two public benchmarks demonstrate that BI-Cap substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving relative gains of 9.2\% and 8.0\%, respectively. We have released the source code on GitHub through the link https://github.com/flysnow1024/BI-Cap.
☆ Prompting Foundation Models for Zero-Shot Ship Instance Segmentation in SAR Imagery
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) plays a critical role in maritime surveillance, yet deep learning for SAR analysis is limited by the lack of pixel-level annotations. This paper explores how general-purpose vision foundation models can enable zero-shot ship instance segmentation in SAR imagery, eliminating the need for pixel-level supervision. A YOLOv11-based detector trained on open SAR datasets localizes ships via bounding boxes, which then prompt the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) to produce instance masks without any mask annotations. Unlike prior SAM-based SAR approaches that rely on fine tuning or adapters, our method demonstrates that spatial constraints from a SAR-trained detector alone can effectively regularize foundation model predictions. This design partially mitigates the optical-SAR domain gap and enables downstream applications such as vessel classification, size estimation, and wake analysis. Experiments on the SSDD benchmark achieve a mean IoU of 0.637 (89% of a fully supervised baseline) with an overall ship detection rate of 89.2%, confirming a scalable, annotation-efficient pathway toward foundation-model-driven SAR image understanding.
comment: 6 pages
☆ OneDrive: Unified Multi-Paradigm Driving with Vision-Language-Action Models
Yiwei Zhang, Xuesong Chen, Jin Gao, Hanshi Wang, Fudong Ge, Weiming Hu, Shaoshuai Shi, Zhipeng Zhang
Vision-Language Models(VLMs) excel at autoregressive text generation, yet end-to-end autonomous driving requires multi-task learning with structured outputs and heterogeneous decoding behaviors, such as autoregressive language generation, parallel object detection and trajectory regression. To accommodate these differences, existing systems typically introduce separate or cascaded decoders, resulting in architectural fragmentation and limited backbone reuse. In this work, we present a unified autonomous driving framework built upon a pretrained VLM, where heterogeneous decoding behaviors are reconciled within a single transformer decoder. We demonstrate that pretrained VLM attention exhibits strong transferability beyond pure language modeling. By organizing visual and structured query tokens within a single causal decoder, structured queries can naturally condition on visual context through the original attention mechanism. Textual and structured outputs share a common attention backbone, enabling stable joint optimization across heterogeneous tasks. Trajectory planning is realized within the same causal LLM decoder by introducing structured trajectory queries. This unified formulation enables planning to share the pretrained attention backbone with images and perception tokens. Extensive experiments on end-to-end autonomous driving benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, including 0.28 L2 and 0.18 collision rate on nuScenes open-loop evaluation and competitive results (86.8 PDMS) on NAVSIM closed-loop evaluation. The full model preserves multi-modal generation capability, while an efficient inference mode achieves approximately 40% lower latency. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Z1zyw/OneDrive
☆ Beyond Binary Contrast: Modeling Continuous Skeleton Action Spaces with Transitional Anchors
Self-supervised contrastive learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for skeleton-based action recognition by enforcing consistency in the embedding space. However, existing methods rely on binary contrastive objectives that overlook the intrinsic continuity of human motion, resulting in fragmented feature clusters and rigid class boundaries. To address these limitations, we propose TranCLR, a Transitional anchor-based Contrastive Learning framework that captures the continuous geometry of the action space. Specifically, the proposed Action Transitional Anchor Construction (ATAC) explicitly models the geometric structure of transitional states to enhance the model's perception of motion continuity. Building upon these anchors, a Multi-Level Geometric Manifold Calibration (MGMC) mechanism is introduced to adaptively calibrate the action manifold across multiple levels of continuity, yielding a smoother and more discriminative representation space. Extensive experiments on the NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120 and PKU-MMD datasets demonstrate that TranCLR achieves superior accuracy and calibration performance, effectively learning continuous and uncertainty-aware skeleton representations. The code is available at https://github.com/Philchieh/TranCLR.
☆ MEDN: Motion-Emotion Feature Decoupling Network for Micro-Expression Recognition
Unlike macro-expression, micro-expression does not follow a strictly consistent mapping rule between emotions and Action Units (AUs). As a result, some micro-expressions share identical AUs yet represent completely opposite emotional categories, making them highly visually similar. Existing microexpression recognition (MER) methods mostly rely on explicit facial motion cues (e.g., optical flow, frame differences, AU features) while ignoring implicit emotion information. To tackle this issue, this paper presents a Motion Emotion Feature Decoupling Network (MEDN) for MER. We design a dual-branch framework to separately extract motion and emotion features. In the motion branch, an AU-detection task restricts features to the explicit motion domain, and orthogonal loss is adopted to reduce motion emotion feature coupling. For implicit emotion modeling, we propose a Sparse Emotion Vision Transformer (SEVit) that sparsifies spatial tokens to highlight local temporal variations with multi-scale sparsity rates. A Collaborative Fusion Module (CoFM) is further developed to fuse disentangled motion and emotion features adaptively. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets validate that MEDN effectively decouples motion and emotion features and achieves superior recognition performance, offering a new perspective for enhancing recognition accuracy and generalization.
comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, 7 tabels
☆ ReTrack: Evidence-Driven Dual-Stream Directional Anchor Calibration Network for Composed Video Retrieval AAAI 2026
With the rapid growth of video data, Composed Video Retrieval (CVR) has emerged as a novel paradigm in video retrieval and is receiving increasing attention from researchers. Unlike unimodal video retrieval methods, the CVR task takes a multi-modal query consisting of a reference video and a piece of modification text as input. The modification text conveys the user's intended alterations to the reference video. Based on this input, the model aims to retrieve the most relevant target video. In the CVR task, there exists a substantial discrepancy in information density between video and text modalities. Traditional composition methods tend to bias the composed feature toward the reference video, which leads to suboptimal retrieval performance. This limitation is significant due to the presence of three core challenges: (1) modal contribution entanglement, (2) explicit optimization of composed features, and (3) retrieval uncertainty. To address these challenges, we propose the evidence-dRivRn dual-sTream diRectionAl anChor calibration networK (ReTrack). ReTrack is the first CVR framework that improves multi-modal query understanding by calibrating directional bias in composed features. It consists of three key modules: Semantic Contribution Disentanglement, Composition Geometry Calibration, and Reliable Evidence-driven Alignment. Specifically, ReTrack estimates the semantic contribution of each modality to calibrate the directional bias of the composed feature. It then uses the calibrated directional anchors to compute bidirectional evidence that drives reliable composed-to-target similarity estimation. Moreover, ReTrack exhibits strong generalization to the Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) task, achieving SOTA performance across three benchmark datasets in both CVR and CIR scenarios. Codes are available at https://github.com/Lee-zixu/ReTrack
comment: Accepted by AAAI 2026
☆ AeroRAG: Structured Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented LLM for Fine-Grained Aerial Visual Reasoning
Despite recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), reliable visual question answering in aerial scenes remains challenging. In such scenes, task-critical evidence is often carried by small objects, explicit quantities, coarse locations, and inter-object relations, whereas conventional dense visual-token representations are not well aligned with these structured semantics. To address this interface mismatch, we propose AeroRAG, a scene-graph-guided multimodal retrieval-augmented generation framework for visual question answering. The framework first converts an input image into structured visual knowledge, including object categories, quantities, spatial locations, and semantic relations, and then retrieves query-relevant semantic chunks to construct compact prompts for a text-based large language model. Rather than relying on direct reasoning over dense visual tokens, our method introduces a more explicit intermediate interface between perception and language reasoning. Experiments on the AUG aerial dataset and the general-domain VG-150 benchmark show consistent improvements over six strong MLLM baselines, with the largest gains observed in dense aerial scenes and relation-sensitive reasoning. We further evaluate the framework on VQAv2 to verify that the proposed interface remains compatible with standard visual reasoning settings. These results suggest that structured retrieval is a practical design direction for deployment-oriented and grounded visual reasoning systems.
☆ ST-$π$: Structured SpatioTemporal VLA for Robotic Manipulation
Vision-language-action (VLA) models have achieved great success on general robotic tasks, but still face challenges in fine-grained spatiotemporal manipulation. Typically, existing methods mainly embed spatiotemporal knowledge into visual and action representations, and directly perform a cross-modal mapping for step-level action prediction. However, such spatiotemporal reasoning remains largely implicit, making it difficult to handle multiple sequential behaviors with explicit spatiotemporal boundaries. In this work, we propose ST-$π$, a structured spatiotemporal VLA model for robotic manipulation. Our model is guided by two key designs: 1) Spatiotemporal VLM. We encode 4D observations and task instructions into latent spaces, and feed them into the LLM to generate a sequence of causally ordered chunk-level action prompts consisting of sub-tasks, spatial grounding and temporal grounding. 2) Spatiotemporal action expert. Conditioned on chunk-level action prompts, we design a structured dual-generator guidance to jointly model spatial dependencies and temporal causality, thus predicting step-level action parameters. Within this structured framework, the VLM explicitly plans global spatiotemporal behavior, and the action expert further refines local spatiotemporal control. In addition, we propose a real-world robotic dataset with structured spatiotemporal annotations for fine-tuning. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model. Our code link: https://github.com/chuanhaoma/ST-pi.
☆ Exploring Boundary-Aware Spatial-Frequency Fusion for Camouflaged Object Detection
Camouflaged Object Detection is challenging due to the high degree of similarity between camouflaged objects and their surrounding backgrounds. Current COD methods mainly rely on edge extraction in the spatial domain and local pixel-level information, neglecting the importance of global structural features. Additionally, they fail to effectively leverage the importance of phase spectrum information within frequency domain features. To this end, we propose a COD framework BASFNet based on boundary-aware frequency domain and spatial domain fusion.This method uses dual guided integration of frequency domain and spatial domain features. A phase-spectrum-based frequency-enhanced edge exploration module (FEEM) and a spatial core segmentation module (SCSM) are introduced to jointly capture the boundary and object features of camouflaged objects. These features are then effectively integrated through a spatial-frequency fusion interaction module (SFFIM). Furthermore, the boundary detection is further optimized through an boundary-aware training strategy. BASFNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on three benchmark datasets, validating the effectiveness of the fusion of frequency and spatial domain information in COD tasks.
☆ Spatiotemporal Sycophancy: Negation-Based Gaslighting in Video Large Language Models
Video Large Language Models (Vid-LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in video understanding tasks, yet their robustness under conversational interaction remains largely underexplored. In this paper, we identify spatiotemporal sycophancy, a failure mode in which Vid-LLMs retract initially correct, visually grounded judgments and conform to misleading user feedback under negation-based gaslighting. Rather than merely changing their answers, the models often fabricate unsupported temporal or spatial explanations to justify incorrect revisions. To systematically investigate this phenomenon, we propose a negation-based gaslighting evaluation framework and introduce GasVideo-1000, a curated benchmark designed to probe spatiotemporal sycophancy with clear visual grounding and temporal reasoning requirements. We evaluate a broad range of state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary Vid-LLMs across diverse video understanding tasks. Extensive experiments reveal that vulnerability to negation-based gaslighting is pervasive and severe, even among models with strong baseline performance. While prompt-level grounding constraints can partially mitigate this behavior, they do not reliably prevent hallucinated justifications or belief reversal. Our results indicate that current Vid-LLMs lack robust mechanisms for maintaining grounded spatiotemporal beliefs under adversarial conversational feedback.
☆ Sharpening Lightweight Models for Generalized Polyp Segmentation: A Boundary Guided Distillation from Foundation Models
Automated polyp segmentation is critical for early colorectal cancer detection and its prevention, yet remains challenging due to weak boundaries, large appearance variations, and limited annotated data. Lightweight segmentation models such as U-Net, U-Net++, and PraNet offer practical efficiency for clinical deployment but struggle to capture the rich semantic and structural cues required for accurate delineation of complex polyp regions. In contrast, large Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), including SAM, OneFormer, Mask2Former, and DINOv2, exhibit strong generalization but transfer poorly to polyp segmentation due to domain mismatch, insufficient boundary sensitivity, and high computational cost. To bridge this gap, we propose \textit{\textbf{LiteBounD}, a \underline{Li}gh\underline{t}w\underline{e}ight \underline{Boun}dary-guided \underline{D}istillation} framework that transfers complementary semantic and structural priors from multiple VFMs into compact segmentation backbones. LiteBounD introduces (i) a dual-path distillation mechanism that disentangles semantic and boundary-aware representations, (ii) a frequency-aware alignment strategy that supervises low-frequency global semantics and high-frequency boundary details separately, and (iii) a boundary-aware decoder that fuses multi-scale encoder features with distilled semantically rich boundary information for precise segmentation. Extensive experiments on both seen (Kvasir-SEG, CVC-ClinicDB) and unseen (ColonDB, CVC-300, ETIS) datasets demonstrate that LiteBounD consistently outperforms its lightweight baselines by a significant margin and achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining the efficiency required for real-time clinical use. Our code is available at https://github.com/lostinrepo/LiteBounD.
☆ PlankFormer: Robust Plankton Instance Segmentation via MAE-Pretrained Vision Transformers and Pseudo Community Image Generation ICPR2026
Plankton monitoring is essential for assessing aquatic ecosystems but is limited by the labor-intensive nature of manual microscopic analysis. Automating the segmentation of plankton from crowded images is crucial, however, it faces two major challenges: (i) the scarcity of pixel-level annotated datasets and (ii) the difficulty of distinguishing plankton from debris and overlapping individuals using conventional CNN-based methods. To address these issues, we propose PlankFormer, a novel framework for plankton instance segmentation. First, to overcome the data shortage, we introduce a method to generate labeled Pseudo Community Images (PCI) by synthesizing individual plankton images onto diverse backgrounds, including those created by generative models. Second, we propose a segmentation model utilizing a Vision Transformer (ViT) backbone with a Mask2Former decoder. To robustly capture the global structural features of plankton against occlusion and debris, we employ a Masked Autoencoder (MAE) for self-supervised pre-training on unlabeled individual images. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms conventional methods, such as Mask R-CNN, particularly in challenging environments with high debris density. We demonstrate that our synthetic training strategy and MAE-based architecture enable high-precision segmentation with requiring less manual annotations for individual plankton images.
comment: Accepted to ICPR2026
☆ UniCSG: Unified High-Fidelity Content-Constrained Style-Driven Generation via Staged Semantic and Frequency Disentanglement
Style transfer must match a target style while preserving content semantics. DiT-based diffusion models often suffer from content-style entanglement, leading to reference-content leakage and unstable generation. We present UniCSG, a unified framework for content-constrained, style-driven generation in both text-guided and reference-guided settings. UniCSG employs staged training: (i) a latent-space semantic disentanglement stage that combines low-frequency preprocessing with conditioning corruption to encourage content-style separation, and (ii) a latent-space frequency-aware detail reconstruction stage that refines details via multi-scale frequency supervision. We further incorporate pixel-space reward learning to align latent objectives with perceptual quality after decoding. Experiments demonstrate improved content faithfulness, style alignment, and robustness in both settings.
☆ AI Approach for MRI-only Full-Spine Vertebral Segmentation and 3D Reconstruction in Paediatric Scoliosis
MRI is preferred over CT in paediatric imaging because it avoids ionising radiation, but its use in spine deformity assessment is largely limited by the lack of automated, high-resolution 3D bony reconstruction, which continues to rely on CT. MRI-based 3D reconstruction remains impractical due to manual workflows and the scarcity of labelled full-spine datasets. This study introduces an AI framework that enables fully automated thoracolumbar spine (T1-L5) segmentation and 3D reconstruction from MRI alone. Historical low-dose CT scans from adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) patients were converted into MRI-like images using a GAN and combined with existing labelled thoracic MRI data to train a U-Net-based model. The resulting algorithm accurately generated continuous thoracolumbar 3D reconstructions, improved segmentation accuracy (88% Dice score), and reduced processing time from approximately 1 hour to under one minute, while preserving AIS-specific deformity features. This approach enables radiation-free 3D deformity assessment from MRI, supporting clinical evaluation, surgical planning, and navigation in paediatric spine care.
comment: Presented at 2026 Spine Society of Australia 37th Annual Scientific Meeting
☆ PCM-NeRF: Probabilistic Camera Modeling for Neural Radiance Fields under Pose Uncertainty CVPR
Neural surface reconstruction methods typically treat camera poses as fixed values, assuming perfect accuracy from Structure-from-Motion (SfM) systems. This assumption breaks down with imperfect pose estimates, leading to distorted or incomplete reconstructions. We present PCM-NeRF, a probabilistic framework that augments neural surface reconstruction with per-camera learnable uncertainty, built on top of SG-NeRF. Rather than treating all cameras equally throughout optimization, we represent each pose as a distribution with a learnable mean and variance, initialized from SfM correspondence quality. An uncertainty regularization loss couples the learned variance to view confidence, and the resulting uncertainty directly modulates the effective pose learning rate: uncertain cameras receive damped gradient updates, preventing poorly initialized views from corrupting the reconstruction. This lightweight mechanism requires no changes to the rendering pipeline and adds negligible overhead. Experiments on challenging scenes with severe pose outliers demonstrate that PCM-NeRF consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both Chamfer Distance and F-Score, particularly for geometrically complex structures, without requiring foreground masks.
comment: CVPR-W 2026 (GenRec3D)
☆ GR4CIL: Gap-compensated Routing for CLIP-based Class Incremental Learning
Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to continuously acquire new categories while preserving previously learned knowledge. Recently, Contrastive Language-Image Pre-trained (CLIP) models have shown strong potential for CIL due to their powerful generalization ability. However, existing methods still face two key challenges: shared-parameter adaptation tends to cause old-knowledge drift, and task-specific knowledge organization often leads to poorly calibrated cross-task responses, making reliable routing difficult. To address these issues, we propose GR4CIL, a framework combining task discrimination and knowledge routing for CLIP-based CIL. GR4CIL preserves task-specific visual knowledge while maintaining an incrementally stable shared textual semantic space, thereby reducing interference across tasks. Moreover, we introduce an orthogonal compensation mechanism to mitigate modality-gap-induced bias, enhance within-task discrimination, and enlarge the score margin between the ground-truth task and competing tasks. As a result, GR4CIL enables more reliable task-aware routing over learned knowledge while retaining the zero-shot generalization capability. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that GR4CIL consistently outperforms strong baselines.
☆ AnyLift: Scaling Motion Reconstruction from Internet Videos via 2D Diffusion CVPR 2026
Reconstructing 3D human motion and human-object interactions (HOI) from Internet videos is a fundamental step toward building large-scale datasets of human behavior. Existing methods struggle to recover globally consistent 3D motion under dynamic cameras, especially for motion types underrepresented in current motion-capture datasets, and face additional difficulty recovering coherent human-object interactions in 3D. We introduce a two-stage framework leveraging 2D diffusion that reconstructs 3D human motion and HOI from Internet videos. In the first stage, we synthesize multi-view 2D motion data for each domain, leveraging 2D keypoints extracted from Internet videos to incorporate human motions that rarely appear in existing MoCap datasets. In the second stage, a camera-conditioned multi-view 2D motion diffusion model is trained on the domain-specific synthetic data to recover 3D human motion and 3D HOI in the world space. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on Internet videos featuring challenging motions such as gymnastics, as well as in-the-wild HOI videos, and show that it outperforms prior work in producing realistic human motion and human-object interaction.
comment: CVPR 2026. Project website: https://awfuact.github.io/anylift/ The first two authors contribute equally
☆ Re$^2$MoGen: Open-Vocabulary Motion Generation via LLM Reasoning and Physics-Aware Refinement
Text-to-motion (T2M) generation aims to control the behavior of a target character via textual descriptions. Leveraging text-motion paired datasets, existing T2M models have achieved impressive performance in generating high-quality motions within the distribution of their training data. However, their performance deteriorates notably when the motion descriptions differ significantly from the training texts. To address this issue, we propose Re$^2$MoGen, a Reasoning and Refinement open-vocabulary Motion Generation framework that leverages enhanced Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning to generate an initial motion planning and then refine its physical plausibility via reinforcement learning (RL) post-training. Specifically, Re$^2$MoGen consists of three stages: We first employ Monte Carlo tree search to enhance the LLM's reasoning ability in generating reasonable keyframes of the motion based on text prompts, specifying only the root and several key joints' positions to ease the reasoning process. Then, we apply a human pose model as a prior to optimize the full-body poses based on the planned keyframes and use the resulting incomplete motion to supervise fine-tuning a pre-trained motion generator via a dynamic temporal matching objective, enabling spatiotemporal completion. Finally, we use post-training with physics-aware reward to refine motion quality to eliminate physical implausibility in LLM-planned motions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework can generate semantically consistent and physically plausible motions and achieve state-of-the-art performance in open-vocabulary motion generation.
☆ Optimally Bridging Semantics and Data: Generative Semantic Communication via Schrödinger Bridge
Generative Semantic Communication (GSC) is a promising solution for image transmission over narrow-band and high-noise channels. However, existing GSC methods rely on long, indirect transport trajectories from a Gaussian to an image distribution guided by semantics, causing severe hallucination and high computational cost. To address this, we propose a general framework named Schrödinger Bridge-based GSC (SBGSC). By leveraging the Schrödinger Bridge (SB) to construct optimal transport trajectories between arbitrary distributions, SBGSC breaks Gaussian limitations and enables direct generative decoding from semantics to images. Within this framework, we design Diffusion SB-based GSC (DSBGSC). DSBGSC reconstructs the nonlinear drift term of diffusion models using Schrödinger potentials, achieving direct optimal distribution transport to reduce hallucinations and computational overhead. To further accelerate generation, we propose a self-consistency-based objective guiding the model to learn a nonlinear velocity field pointing directly toward the image, bypassing Markovian noise prediction to significantly reduce sampling steps. Simulation results demonstrate that DSBGSC outperforms state-of-the-art GSC methods, improving FID by at least 38% and SSIM by 49.3%, while accelerating inference speed by over 8 times.
comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, under review
☆ View-Consistent 3D Scene Editing via Dual-Path Structural Correspondense and Semantic Continuity
Text-driven 3D scene editing has recently attracted increasing attention. Most existing methods follow a render-edit-optimize pipeline, where multi-view images are rendered from a 3D scene, edited with 2D image editors, and then used to optimize the underlying 3D representation. However, cross-view inconsistency remains a major bottleneck. Although recent methods introduce geometric cues, cross-view interactions, or video priors to mitigate this issue, they still largely rely on inference-time synchronization and thus remain limited in robustness and generalization.In this work, we recast multi-view consistent 3D editing from a distributional perspective: 3D scene editing essentially requires a joint distribution modeling across viewpoints.Based on this insight, we propose a view-consistent 3D editing framework that explicitly introduces cross-view dependencies into the editing process. Furthermore, motivated by the observation that structural correspondence and semantic continuity rely on different cross-view cues, we introduce a dual-path consistency mechanism consisting of projection-guided structural guidance and patch-level semantic propagation for effective cross-view editing. Further, we construct a paired multi-view editing dataset that provides reliable supervision for learning cross-view consistency in edited scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior editing performance with precise and consistent views for complex scenes.
comment: Preprint. 11 pages, 7 figures
☆ ReFineVLA: Multimodal Reasoning-Aware Generalist Robotic Policies via Teacher-Guided Fine-Tuning
Tuan Van Vo, Tan Q. Nguyen, Khang Nguyen, Nhat Xuan Tran, Duy H. M. Nguyen, An T. Le, Ngo Anh Vien, Minh Nhat Vu
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have gained much attention from the research community thanks to their strength in translating multimodal observations with linguistic instructions into desired robotic actions. Despite their advancements, VLAs often overlook explicit reasoning and learn the functional input-action mappings, omitting crucial logical steps, which are especially pronounced in interpretability and generalization for complex, long-horizon manipulation tasks. In this work, we propose ReFineVLA, a multimodal reasoning-aware framework that fine-tunes VLAs with teacher-guided reasons. We first augment robotic datasets with reasoning rationales generated by an expert teacher model, guiding VLA models to learn to reason about their actions. Then, we fine-tune pre-trained VLAs with the reasoning-enriched datasets with ReFineVLA, while maintaining the underlying generalization abilities and boosting reasoning capabilities. We also conduct attention map visualization to analyze the alignment among visual observation, linguistic prompts, and to-be-executed actions of ReFineVLA, reflecting the model is ability to focus on relevant tasks and actions. Through this additional step, we explore that ReFineVLA-trained models exhibit a meaningful agreement between vision-language and action domains, highlighting the enhanced multimodal understanding and generalization. Evaluated across a suite of simulated manipulation benchmarks on SimplerEnv with both WidowX and Google Robot tasks, ReFineVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance, in success rate over the second-best method on the both the WidowX benchmark and Google Robot Tasks.
comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2505.19080
☆ Weakly-Supervised Referring Video Object Segmentation through Text Supervision CVPR 2026
Referring video object segmentation (RVOS) aims to segment the target instance in a video, referred by a text expression. Conventional approaches are mostly supervised learning, requiring expensive pixel-level mask annotations. To tackle it, weakly-supervised RVOS has recently been proposed to replace mask annotations with bounding boxes or points, which are however still costly and labor-intensive. In this paper, we design a novel weakly-supervised RVOS method, namely WSRVOS, to train the model with only text expressions. Given an input video and the referring expression, we first design a contrastive referring expression augmentation scheme that leverages the captioning capabilities of a multimodal large language model to generate both positive and negative expressions. We extract visual and linguistic features from the input video and generated expressions, then perform bi-directional vision-language feature selection and interaction to enable fine-grained multimodal alignment. Next, we propose an instance-aware expression classification scheme to optimize the model in distinguishing positive from negative expressions. Also, we introduce a positive-prediction fusion strategy to generate high-quality pseudo-masks, which serve as additional supervision to the model. Last, we design a temporal segment ranking constraint such that the overlaps between mask predictions of temporally neighboring frames are required to conform to specific orders. Extensive experiments on four publicly available RVOS datasets, including A2D Sentences, J-HMDB Sentences, Ref-YouTube-VOS, and Ref-DAVIS17, demonstrate the superiority of our method. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/viscom-tongji/WSRVOS}{https://github.com/viscom-tongji/WSRVOS}.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026 Findings
☆ DuQuant++: Fine-grained Rotation Enhances Microscaling FP4 Quantization
Haokun Lin, Xinle Jia, Haobo Xu, Bingchen Yao, Xianglong Guo, Yichen Wu, Zhichao Lu, Ying Wei, Qingfu Zhang, Zhenan Sun
The MXFP4 microscaling format, which partitions tensors into blocks of 32 elements sharing an E8M0 scaling factor, has emerged as a promising substrate for efficient LLM inference, backed by native hardware support on NVIDIA Blackwell Tensor Cores. However, activation outliers pose a unique challenge under this format: a single outlier inflates the shared block scale, compressing the effective dynamic range of the remaining elements and causing significant quantization error. Existing rotation-based remedies, including randomized Hadamard and learnable rotations, are data-agnostic and therefore unable to specifically target the channels where outliers concentrate. We propose DuQuant++, which adapts the outlier-aware fine-grained rotation of DuQuant to the MXFP4 format by aligning the rotation block size with the microscaling group size (B{=}32). Because each MXFP4 group possesses an independent scaling factor, the cross-block variance issue that necessitates dual rotations and a zigzag permutation in the original DuQuant becomes irrelevant, enabling DuQuant++ to replace the entire pipeline with a single outlier-aware rotation, which halves the online rotation cost while simultaneously smoothing the weight distribution. Extensive experiments on the LLaMA-3 family under MXFP4 W4A4 quantization show that DuQuant++ consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/Hsu1023/DuQuant++.
comment: Technical Report
☆ Subject-Aware Multi-Granularity Alignment for Zero-Shot EEG-to-Image Retrieval
Zero-shot EEG-to-image retrieval aims to decode perceived visual content from electroencephalography (EEG) by aligning neural responses with pretrained visual representations, providing a promising route toward scalable visual neural decoding and practical brain-computer interfaces. However, robust EEG-to-image retrieval remains challenging, because prior methods usually rely on either a single fixed visual target or a subject-invariant target construction scheme. Such designs overlook two important properties of visually evoked EEG signals: they preserve information across multiple representational scales, and the visual granularity best matched to EEG may vary across subjects. To address these issues, subject-aware multi-granularity alignment (SAMGA) framework is proposed for zero-shot EEG-to-image retrieval. SAMGA first constructs a subject-aware visual supervision target by adaptively aggregating multiple intermediate representations from a pretrained vision encoder, allowing the model to absorb subject-dependent granularity deviations during training while preserving subject-agnostic inference. Building on this adaptive target construction, a coarse-to-fine cross-modal alignment strategy is further designed with a shared encoder wherein the coarse stage stabilizes the shared semantic geometry and reduces subject-induced distribution shift, and the fine stage further improves instance-level retrieval discrimination. Extensive experiments on the THINGS-EEG benchmark demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 91.3% Top-1 and 98.8% Top-5 accuracy in the intra-subject setting, and 34.4% Top-1 and 64.8% Top-5 accuracy in the inter-subject setting, outperforming recent state-of-the-art methods.
☆ Structure-Adaptive Sparse Diffusion in Voxel Space for 3D Medical Image Enhancement
Three-dimensional (3D) medical image enhancement, including denoising and super-resolution, is critical for clinical diagnosis in CT, PET, and MRI. Although diffusion models have shown remarkable success in 2D medical imaging, scaling them to high-resolution 3D volumes remains computationally prohibitive due to lengthy diffusion trajectories over high-dimensional volumetric data. We observe that in conditional enhancement, strong anatomical priors in the degraded input render dense noise schedules largely redundant. Leveraging this insight, we propose a sparse voxel-space diffusion framework that trains and samples on a compact set of uniformly subsampled timesteps. The network predicts clean data directly on the data manifold, supervised in velocity space for stable gradient scaling. A lightweight Structure-aware Trajectory Modulation (STM) module recalibrates time embeddings at each network block based on local anatomical content, enabling structure-adaptive denoising over the shared sparse schedule. Operating directly in voxel space, our framework preserves fine anatomical detail without lossy compression while achieving up to $10\times$ training acceleration. Experiments on four datasets spanning CT, PET, and MRI demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on both denoising and super-resolution tasks. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/mirthAI/sparse-3d-diffusion.
☆ Evolutionary Negative Module Pruning for Better LoRA Merging ACL 2026
Merging multiple Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) experts into a single backbone is a promising approach for efficient multi-task deployment. While existing methods strive to alleviate interference via weight interpolation or subspace alignment, they rest upon the implicit assumption that all LoRA matrices contribute constructively to the merged model. In this paper, we uncover a critical bottleneck in current merging paradigms: the existence of $\textit{negative modules}$ -- specific LoRA layers that inherently degrade global performance upon merging. We propose $\textbf{E}$volutionary $\textbf{N}$egative $\textbf{M}$odule $\textbf{P}$runing ($\textbf{ENMP}$), a plug-and-play LoRA pruning method to locate and exclude these detrimental modules prior to merging. By leveraging an evolutionary search strategy, ENMP effectively navigates the discrete, non-differentiable landscape of module selection to identify optimal pruning configurations. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that ENMP consistently boosts the performance of existing merging algorithms, achieving a new state-of-the-art across both language and vision domains. Code is available at https://github.com/CaoAnda/ENMP-LoRAMerging.
comment: Accepted to ACL 2026 (main conference)
☆ Ego-InBetween: Generating Object State Transitions in Ego-Centric Videos CVPR2026
Mengmeng Ge, Takashi Isobe, Xu Jia, Yanan Sun, Zetong Yang, Weinong Wang, Dong Zhou, Dong Li, Huchuan Lu, Emad Barsoum
Understanding physical transformation processes is crucial for both human cognition and artificial intelligence systems, particularly from an egocentric perspective, which serves as a key bridge between humans and machines in action modeling. We define this modeling process as Egocentric Instructed Visual State Transition (EIVST), which involves generating intermediate frames that depict object transformations between initial and target states under a brief action instruction. EIVST poses two challenges for current generative models: (1) understanding the visual scenes of the initial and target states and reasoning about transformation steps from an egocentric view, and (2) generating a consistent intermediate transition that follows the given instruction while preserving object appearance across the two visual states. To address these challenges, we propose the EgoIn framework. It first infers the multi-step transition process between two given states using TransitionVLM, fine-tuned on our curated dataset to better adapt to this task and reduce hallucinated information. It then generates a sequence of frames based on transition conditions produced by the proposed Transition Conditioning module. Additionally, we introduce Object-aware Auxiliary Supervision to preserve consistent object appearance throughout the transition. Extensive experiments on human-object and robot-object interaction datasets demonstrate EgoIn's superior performance in generating semantically meaningful and visually coherent transformation sequences.
comment: CVPR2026
☆ Source-Free Domain Adaptation with Vision-Language Prior
Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) seeks to adapt a source model, which is pre-trained on a supervised source domain, for a target domain, with only access to unlabeled target training data. Relying on pseudo labeling and/or auxiliary supervision, conventional methods are inevitably error-prone. To mitigate this limitation, in this work we for the first time explore the potentials of off-the-shelf vision-language (ViL) multimodal models (e.g., CLIP) with rich whilst heterogeneous knowledge. We find that directly applying the ViL model to the target domain in a zero-shot fashion is unsatisfactory, as it is not specialized for this particular task but largely generic. To make it task-specific, we propose a novel DIFO++ approach. Specifically, DIFO++ alternates between two steps during adaptation: (i) Customizing the ViL model by maximizing the mutual information with the target model in a prompt learning manner, (ii) Distilling the knowledge of this customized ViL model to the target model, centering on gap region reduction. During progressive knowledge adaptation, we first identify and focus on the gap region, where enclosed features are entangled and class-ambiguous, as it often captures richer task-specific semantics. Reliable pseudo-labels are then generated by fusing predictions from the target and ViL models, supported by a memory mechanism. Finally, gap region reduction is guided by category attention and predictive consistency for semantic alignment, complemented by referenced entropy minimization to suppress uncertainty. Extensive experiments show that DIFO++ significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art alternatives. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/tntek/DIFO-Plus.
☆ IncreFA: Breaking the Static Wall of Generative Model Attribution
As AI generative models evolve at unprecedented speed, image attribution has become a moving target. New diffusion, adversarial and autoregressive generators appear almost monthly, making existing watermark, classifier and inversion methods obsolete upon release. The core problem lies not in model recognition, but in the inability to adapt attribution itself. We introduce IncreFA, a framework that redefines attribution as a structured incremental learning problem, allowing the system to learn continuously as new generative models emerge. IncreFA departs from conventional incremental learning by exploiting the hierarchical relationships among generative architectures and coupling them with continual adaptation. It integrates two mutually reinforcing mechanisms: (1) Hierarchical Constraints, which encode architectural hierarchies through learnable orthogonal priors to disentangle family-level invariants from model-specific idiosyncrasies; and (2) a Latent Memory Bank, which replays compact latent exemplars and mixes them to generate pseudo-unseen samples, stabilising representation drift and enhancing open-set awareness. On the newly constructed Incremental Attribution Benchmark (IABench) covering 28 generative models released between 2022 and 2025, IncreFA achieves state-of-the-art attribution accuracy and 98.93% unseen detection under a temporally ordered open-set protocol. Code will be available at https://github.com/Ant0ny44/IncreFA.
☆ Score-Based Matching with Target Guidance for Cryo-EM Denoising
Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) enables single-particle analysis of biological macromolecules under strict low-dose imaging conditions, but the resulting micrographs often exhibit extremely low signal-to-noise ratios and weak particle visibility. Image denoising is therefore an important preprocessing step for downstream cryo-EM analysis, including particle picking, 2D classification, and 3D reconstruction. Existing cryo-EM denoising methods are commonly trained with pixel-wise or Noise2Noise-style objectives, which can improve visual quality but do not explicitly account for structural consistency required by downstream analysis. In this work, we propose a score-based denoising framework for cryo-EM that learns the clean-data score to recover particle signals while better preserving structural information. Building on this formulation, we further introduce a target-guided variant that incorporates reference-density guidance to stabilize score learning under weak and ambiguous signal conditions. Rather than simply amplifying particle-like responses, our framework better suppresses structured low-frequency background, which improves particle--background separability for downstream analysis. Experiments on multiple cryo-EM datasets show that our score-based methods consistently improve downstream particle picking and produce more structure-consistent 3D reconstructions. Experiments on multiple cryo-EM datasets show that our methods improve downstream particle picking and produce more structure-consistent reconstructions.
☆ Voronoi-guided Bilateral 2D Gaussian Splatting for Arbitrary-Scale Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution
Most existing hyperspectral image super-resolution methods require modifications for different scales, limiting their flexibility in arbitrary-scale reconstruction. 2D Gaussian splatting provides a continuous representation that is compatible with arbitrary-scale super-resolution. Existing methods often rely on rasterization strategies, which may limit flexible spatial modeling. Extending them to hyperspectral image super-resolution remains challenging, as the task requires adaptive spatial reconstruction while preserving spectral fidelity. This paper proposes GaussianHSI, a Gaussian-Splatting-based framework for arbitrary-scale hyperspectral image super-resolution. We develop a Voronoi-Guided Bilateral 2D Gaussian Splatting for spatial reconstruction. After predicting a set of Gaussian functions to represent the input, it associates each target pixel with relevant Gaussian functions through Voronoi-guided selection. The target pixel is then reconstructed by aggregating the selected Gaussian functions with reference-aware bilateral weighting, which considers both geometric relevance and consistency with low-resolution features. We further introduce a Spectral Detail Enhancement module to improve spectral reconstruction. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GaussianHSI over state-of-the-art methods for arbitrary-scale hyperspectral image super-resolution.
☆ GeGS-PCR: Effective and Robust 3D Point Cloud Registration with Two-Stage Color-Enhanced Geometric-3DGS Fusion
We address the challenge of point cloud registration using color information, where traditional methods relying solely on geometric features often struggle in low-overlap and incomplete scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose GeGS-PCR, a novel two-stage method that combines geometric, color, and Gaussian information for robust registration. Our approach incorporates a dedicated color encoder that enhances color features by extracting multi-level geometric and color data from the original point cloud. We introduce the \textbf{Ge}ometric-3D\textbf{GS} module, which encodes the local neighborhood information of colored superpoints to ensure a globally invariant geometric-color context. Leveraging LORA optimization, we maintain high performance while preserving the expressiveness of 3DGS. Additionally, fast differentiable rendering is utilized to refine the registration process, leading to improved convergence. To further enhance performance, we propose a joint photometric loss that exploits both geometric and color features. This enables strong performance in challenging conditions with extremely low point cloud overlap. We validate our method by colorizing the Kitti dataset as ColorKitti and testing on both Color3DMatch and Color3DLoMatch datasets. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with \textit{Registration Recall} at 99.9\%, \textit{Relative Rotation Error} as low as 0.013, and \textit{Relative Translation Error} as low as 0.024, improving precision by at least a factor of 2.
☆ FlashFPS: Efficient Farthest Point Sampling for Large-Scale Point Clouds via Pruning and Caching
Yuzhe Fu, Hancheng Ye, Cong Guo, Junyao Zhang, Qinsi Wang, Yueqian Lin, Changchun Zhou, Hai, Li, Yiran Chen
Point-based Neural Networks (PNNs) have become a key approach for point cloud processing. However, a core operation in these models, Farthest Point Sampling (FPS), often introduces significant inference latency, especially for large-scale processing. Despite existing CUDA- and hardware-level optimizations, FPS remains a major bottleneck due to exhaustive computations across multiple network layers in PNNs, which hinders scalability. Through systematic analysis, we identify three substantial redundancies in FPS, including unnecessary full-cloud computations, redundant late-stage iterations, and predictable inter-layer outputs that make later FPS computations avoidable. To address these, we propose \textbf{\textit{FlashFPS}}, a hardware-agnostic, plug-and-play framework for FPS acceleration, composed of \textit{FPS-Prune} and \textit{FPS-Cache}. \textit{FPS-Prune} introduces candidate pruning and iteration pruning to reduce redundant computations in FPS while preserving sampling quality, and \textit{FPS-Cache} eliminates layer-wise redundancy via cache-and-reuse. Integrated into existing CUDA libraries and state-of-the-art PNN accelerators, \textit{FlashFPS} achieves 5.16$\times$ speedup over the standard CUDA baseline on GPU and 2.69$\times$ on PNN accelerators, with negligible accuracy loss, enabling efficient and scalable PNN inference. Codes are released at https://github.com/Yuzhe-Fu/FlashFPS.
comment: Accepted to DAC'26
☆ Dynamic Visual-semantic Alignment for Zero-shot Learning with Ambiguous Labels ICME 2026
Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognize unseen classes without visual instances. However, existing methods usually assume clean labels, overlooking real-world label noise and ambiguity, which degrades performance. To bridge this gap, we propose the Dynamic Visual-semantic Alignment (DVSA), a robust ZSL framework for learning from ambiguous labels. DVSA uses a bidirectional visual-semantic alignment module with attention to mutually calibrate visual features and attribute prototypes, and a contrastive optimization grounded in Mutual Information (MI) at the attribute level to strengthen discriminative, semantically consistent attributes. In addition, a dynamic label disambiguation mechanism iteratively corrects noisy supervision while preserving semantic consistency, narrowing the instance-label gap, and improving generalization. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks verify that DVSA achieves stronger performance under ambiguous supervision.
comment: Accepted by ICME 2026 (IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo)
☆ Dual-stream Spatio-Temporal GCN-Transformer Network for 3D Human Pose Estimation
3D human pose estimation is a classic and important research direction in the field of computer vision. In recent years, Transformer-based methods have made significant progress in lifting 2D to 3D human pose estimation. However, these methods primarily focus on modeling global temporal and spatial relationships, neglecting local skeletal relationships and the information interaction between different channels. Therefore, we have proposed a novel method,the Dual-stream Spatio-temporal GCN-Transformer Network (MixTGFormer). This method models the spatial and temporal relationships of human skeletons simultaneously through two parallel channels, achieving effective fusion of global and local features. The core of MixTGFormer is composed of stacked Mixformers. Specifically, the Mixformer includes the Mixformer Block and the Squeeze-and-Excitation Layer ( SE Layer). It first extracts and fuses various information of human skeletons through two parallel Mixformer Blocks with different modes. Then, it further supplements the fused information through the SE Layer. The Mixformer Block integrates Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) into the Transformer, enhancing both local and global information utilization. Additionally, we further implement its temporal and spatial forms to extract both spatial and temporal relationships. We extensively evaluated our model on two benchmark datasets (Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP). The experimental results showed that, compared to other methods, our MixTGFormer achieved state-of-the-art results, with P1 errors of 37.6mm and 15.7mm on these datasets, respectively.
comment: Published in Displays, Vol. 93, 2026, Article 103429. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.displa.2026.103429 Free access: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1mnPTWHUHYdGQ
♻ ☆ Self-Correcting Text-to-Video Generation with Misalignment Detection and Localized Refinement ACL 2026
Recent text-to-video (T2V) diffusion models have made remarkable progress in generating high-quality videos. However, they often struggle to align with complex text prompts, particularly when multiple objects, attributes, or spatial relations are specified. We introduce VideoRepair, the first self-correcting, training-free, and model-agnostic video refinement framework that automatically detects fine-grained text-video misalignments and performs targeted, localized corrections. Our key insight is that even misaligned videos usually contain correctly generated regions that should be preserved rather than regenerated. Building on this observation, VideoRepair proposes a novel region-preserving refinement strategy with three stages: (i) misalignment detection, where MLLM-based evaluation with automatically generated evaluation questions identifies misaligned regions; (ii) refinement planning, which preserves correctly generated entities, segments their regions across frames, and constructs targeted prompts for misaligned areas; and (iii) localized refinement, which selectively regenerates problematic regions while preserving faithful content through joint optimization of preserved and newly generated areas. On two benchmarks, EvalCrafter and T2V-CompBench with four recent T2V backbones, VideoRepair achieves substantial improvements over recent baselines across diverse alignment metrics. Comprehensive ablations further demonstrate the efficiency, robustness, and interpretability of our framework.
comment: Accepted to ACL 2026 Findings. Project page: https://video-repair.github.io
♻ ☆ Mechanisms of Multimodal Synchronization: Insights from Decoder-Based Video-Text-to-Speech Synthesis
Akshita Gupta, Tatiana Likhomanenko, Karren Dai Yang, Richard He Bai, Zakaria Aldeneh, Navdeep Jaitly
Unified decoder-only transformers have shown promise for multimodal generation, yet the mechanisms by which they synchronize modalities with heterogeneous sampling rates remain underexplored. We investigate these mechanisms through video-text-to-speech (VTTS) synthesis-a controlled task requiring fine-grained temporal alignment between sparse text, video, and continuous speech. Using a unified decoder-only transformer, dubbed Visatronic, trained on VoxCeleb2, we study: (i) how modalities contribute complementary information, (ii) how positional encoding strategies enable synchronization across heterogeneous rates, (iii) how modality ordering shapes the trade-off between in-domain performance and cross-domain transfer, (iv) how phoneme-level synchronization metrics provide diagnostic insight into per-phoneme timing errors. Our findings reveal that both "global sequential indexing'' (unique position IDs across modalities) and "co-temporal ordered indexing'' (identical IDs for temporally corresponding tokens) achieve strong synchronization performance, with co-temporal ordered indexing providing a simple mechanism without explicit timestamp metadata. Both text and video contribute complementary signals: text ensures intelligibility while video provides temporal cues and emotional expressiveness. Modality ordering reveals a consistent trade-off: video-first ordering achieves stronger in-domain performance while text-first ordering generalizes more robustly to unseen domains. Our findings also reveal, that diverse large-scale training enables transferable synchronization strategies. To enable fine-grained analysis, we also introduce TimeSync, a phoneme-level metric that reveals temporal misalignments overlooked by frame-level metrics. These insights establish VTTS as a valuable testbed for understanding temporal synchronization in unified multimodal decoders.
comment: 30 pages, Decoder-only model, Speech Synthesis
♻ ☆ DualToken: Towards Unifying Visual Understanding and Generation with Dual Visual Vocabularies
Wei Song, Yuran Wang, Zijia Song, Yadong Li, Zenan Zhou, Long Chen, Jianhua Xu, Jiaqi Wang, Kaicheng Yu
The differing representation spaces required for visual understanding and generation pose a challenge in unifying them within the autoregressive paradigm of large language models. A vision tokenizer trained for reconstruction excels at capturing low-level visual appearance, making it well-suited for visual generation but lacking high-level semantic representations for understanding tasks. Conversely, a vision encoder trained via contrastive learning aligns well with language but struggles to decode back into the pixel space for generation tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose DualToken, a method that unifies representations for both understanding and generation within a single tokenizer. However, directly integrating reconstruction and semantic objectives creates conflicts, leading to degraded performance in both reconstruction fidelity and semantic accuracy. Instead of forcing a single codebook to capture both visual appearance and semantics, DualToken disentangles them by introducing separate codebooks for high-level semantics and low-level visual details. As a result, DualToken achieves 0.25 rFID and 82.0% zero-shot accuracy on ImageNet, and demonstrates strong effectiveness in downstream MLLM tasks for both understanding and generation. Specifically, our method surpasses VILA-U by 5.8 points on average across ten visual understanding benchmarks and delivers a 13% improvement on GenAI-Bench. Notably, incorporating dual visual tokens outperforms using a single token type on both understanding and generation tasks. We hope our research offers a new perspective on leveraging dual visual vocabularies for building unified vision-language models. Project page is available at https://songweii.github.io/dualtoken-project-page.
♻ ☆ Neural Surface Reconstruction from Sparse Views Using Epipolar Geometry
Reconstructing accurate surfaces from sparse multi-view images remains challenging due to severe geometric ambiguity and occlusions. Existing generalizable neural surface reconstruction methods primarily rely on cost volumes that summarize multi-view features using simple statistics (e.g., mean and variance), which discard critical view-dependent geometric structure and often lead to over-smoothed reconstructions. We propose EpiS, a generalizable neural surface reconstruction framework that explicitly leverages epipolar geometry for sparse-view inputs. Instead of directly regressing geometry from cost-volume statistics, EpiS uses coarse cost-volume features to guide the aggregation of fine-grained epipolar features sampled along corresponding epipolar lines across source views. An epipolar transformer fuses multi-view information, followed by ray-wise aggregation to produce SDF-aware features for surface estimation. To further mitigate information loss under sparse views, we introduce a geometry regularization strategy that leverages a pretrained monocular depth model through scale-invariant global and local constraints. Extensive experiments on DTU and BlendedMVS demonstrate that EpiS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art generalizable surface reconstruction methods under sparse-view settings, while maintaining strong generalization without per-scene optimization.
♻ ☆ Rays as Pixels: Learning A Joint Distribution of Videos and Camera Trajectories
Wonbong Jang, Shikun Liu, Soubhik Sanyal, Juan Camilo Perez, Kam Woh Ng, Sanskar Agrawal, Juan-Manuel Perez-Rua, Yiannis Douratsos, Tao Xiang
Recovering camera parameters from images and rendering scenes from novel viewpoints have been treated as separate tasks in computer vision and graphics. This separation breaks down when image coverage is sparse or poses are ambiguous, since each task depends on what the other produces. We propose Rays as Pixels, a Video Diffusion Model (VDM) that learns a joint distribution over videos and camera trajectories. To our knowledge, this is the first model to predict camera poses and do camera-controlled video generation within a single framework. We represent each camera as dense ray pixels (raxels), a pixel-aligned encoding that lives in the same latent space as video frames, and denoise the two jointly through a Decoupled Self-Cross Attention mechanism. A single trained model handles three tasks: predicting camera trajectories from video, generating video from input images along a pre-defined trajectory, and jointly synthesizing video and trajectory from input images. We evaluate on pose estimation and camera-controlled video generation, and introduce a closed-loop self-consistency test showing that the model's predicted poses and its renderings conditioned on those poses agree. Ablations against Plücker embeddings confirm that representing cameras in a shared latent space with video is subtantially more effective.
comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 4 tables. Project page: https://wbjang.github.io/raysaspixels/
♻ ☆ Integrating Feature Selection and Machine Learning for Nitrogen Assessment in Grapevine Leaves using In-Field Hyperspectral Imaging
Atif Bilal Asad, Achyut Paudel, Safal Kshetri, Chenchen Kang, Salik Ram Khanal, Nataliya Shcherbatyuk, Pierre Davadant, R. Paul Schreiner, Santosh Kalauni, Manoj Karkee, Markus Keller
Nitrogen (N) is one of the most critical nutrients in winegrape production, influencing vine vigor, fruit composition, and wine quality. Because soil N availability varies spatially and temporally, accurate estimation of leaf N concentration is essential for optimizing fertilization at the individual plant level. In this study, in-field hyperspectral images (400-1000 nm) were collected from four grapevine cultivars (Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Concord, and Syrah) across two growth stages (bloom and veraison) during the 2022 and 2023 growing seasons at both the leaf and canopy levels. An ensemble feature selection framework was developed to identify the most informative spectral bands for N estimation within individual cultivars, effectively reducing redundancy and selecting compact, physiologically meaningful band combinations spanning the visible, red-edge, and near-infrared regions. At the leaf level, models achieved the highest predictive accuracy for Chardonnay (R^2 = 0.82, RMSE = 0.19 %DW) and Pinot Noir (R^2 = 0.69, RMSE = 0.20 %DW). Canopy-level predictions also performed well, with R^2 values of 0.65, 0.72, and 0.70 for Chardonnay, Concord, and Syrah, respectively. White cultivars exhibited balanced spectral contributions across the visible, red-edge, and near-infrared regions, whereas red cultivars relied more heavily on visible bands due to anthocyanin-chlorophyll interactions. Leaf-level N-sensitive bands selected for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir were successfully transferred to the canopy level, improving or maintaining prediction accuracy across cultivars. These results confirm that ensemble feature selection captures spectrally robust, scale-consistent bands transferable across measurement levels and cultivars, demonstrating the potential of integrating in-field hyperspectral imaging with machine learning for vineyard N status monitoring.
comment: Major Revision
♻ ☆ Unleashing Spatial Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models via Textual Representation Guided Reasoning ACL 2026
Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with 3D spatial reasoning, as they fail to construct structured abstractions of the 3D environment depicted in video inputs. To bridge this gap, drawing inspiration from cognitive theories of allocentric spatial reasoning, we investigate how to enable MLLMs to model and reason over text-based spatial representations of video. Specifically, we introduce Textual Representation of Allocentric Context from Egocentric Video (TRACE), a prompting method that induces MLLMs to generate text-based representations of 3D environments as intermediate reasoning traces for more accurate spatial question answering. TRACE encodes meta-context, camera trajectories, and detailed object entities to support structured spatial reasoning over egocentric videos. Extensive experiments on VSI-Bench and OST-Bench demonstrate that TRACE yields notable and consistent improvements over prior prompting strategies across a diverse range of MLLM backbones, spanning different parameter scales and training schemas. We further present ablation studies to validate our design choices, along with detailed analyses that probe the bottlenecks of 3D spatial reasoning in MLLMs.
comment: Accepted to ACL 2026. 22 pages, 6 figures, 10 tables. Project page: https://trace-reasoning.github.io
♻ ☆ TrianguLang: Geometry-Aware Semantic Consensus for Pose-Free 3D Localization
Localizing objects and parts from natural language in 3D space is essential for robotics, AR, and embodied AI, yet existing methods face a trade-off between the accuracy and geometric consistency of per-scene optimization and the efficiency of feed-forward inference. We present TrianguLang, a feed-forward framework for 3D localization that requires no camera calibration at inference. Unlike prior methods that treat views independently, we introduce Geometry-Aware Semantic Attention (GASA), which utilizes predicted geometry to gate cross-view feature correspondence, suppressing semantically-plausible but geometrically-inconsistent matches without requiring ground-truth poses. Validated on five benchmarks including ScanNet++ and uCO3D, TrianguLang achieves state-of-the-art feed-forward text-guided segmentation and localization, reducing user effort from $O(N)$ clicks to a single text query. The model processes each frame at 1008x1008 resolution in $\sim$57ms ($\sim$18 FPS) without optimization, enabling practical deployment for interactive robotics and AR applications. Code and checkpoints are available at https://cwru-aism.github.io/triangulang/.
comment: Tables updated with current results, typographical errors fixed
♻ ☆ GeoRC: A Benchmark for Geolocation Reasoning Chains ACL 2026
Mohit Talreja, Joshua Diao, Jim Thannikary James, Radu Casapu, Tejas Santanam, Ethan Mendes, Alan Ritter, Wei Xu, James Hays
Vision Language Models (VLMs) are good at recognizing the global location of a photograph -- their geolocation prediction accuracy rivals the best human experts. But many VLMs are startlingly bad at \textit{explaining} which image evidence led to their prediction, even when their location prediction is correct. In this paper, we introduce GeoRC, the first benchmark for geolocation reasoning chains sourced directly from Champion-tier GeoGuessr experts, including the reigning world champion. This benchmark consists of 800 ``ground truth'' reasoning chains across 500 query scenes from GeoGuessr maps, with expert chains addressing hundreds of different discriminative attributes, such as soil properties, architecture, and license plate shapes. We evaluate LLM-as-a-judge and VLM-as-a-judge strategies for scoring VLM-generated reasoning chains against our expert reasoning chains and find that Qwen 3 LLM-as-a-judge correlates best with human-expert scoring. Our benchmark reveals that while large, closed-source VLMs such as Gemini and GPT 5 rival human experts at predicting locations, they still lag behind human experts when it comes to producing auditable reasoning chains. Small open-weight VLMs such as Llama and Qwen catastrophically fail on our benchmark -- they perform only slightly better than a baseline in which an LLM hallucinates a reasoning chain with oracle knowledge of the photo location but \textit{no visual information at all}. We believe the gap between human experts and VLMs on this task points to VLM limitations at extracting fine-grained visual attributes from high resolution images. We open source our benchmark for the community to use.
comment: Accepted to ACL 2026
♻ ☆ Mammo-FM: Breast-specific foundational model for Integrated Mammographic Diagnosis, Prognosis, and Reporting
Shantanu Ghosh, Vedant Parthesh Joshi, Rayan Syed, Aya Kassem, Abhishek Varshney, Payel Basak, Weicheng Dai, Judy Wawira Gichoya, Hari M. Trivedi, Imon Banerjee, Shyam Visweswaran, Clare B. Poynton, Kayhan Batmanghelich
Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of death among women worldwide. We introduce Mammo-FM, the first foundation model specifically for mammography, pretrained on the largest and most diverse dataset to date - 140,677 patients (821,326 mammograms) across four U.S. institutions. Mammo-FM provides a unified foundation for core clinical tasks in breast imaging, including cancer diagnosis, pathology localization, structured report generation, and cancer risk prognosis within a single framework. Its alignment between images and text enables both visual and textual interpretability, improving transparency and clinical auditability, which are essential for real-world adoption. We rigorously evaluate Mammo-FM across diagnosis, prognosis, and report-generation tasks in in- and out-of-distribution datasets. Despite operating on native-resolution mammograms and using only one-third of the parameters of state-of-the-art generalist FMs, Mammo-FM consistently outperforms them across multiple public and private benchmarks. These results highlight the efficiency and value of domain-specific foundation models designed around the full spectrum of tasks within a clinical domain and emphasize the importance of rigorous, domain-aligned evaluation.
♻ ☆ SpatialStack: Layered Geometry-Language Fusion for 3D VLM Spatial Reasoning CVPR 2026
Large vision-language models (VLMs) still struggle with reliable 3D spatial reasoning, a core capability for embodied and physical AI systems. This limitation arises from their inability to capture fine-grained 3D geometry and spatial relationships. While recent efforts have introduced multi-view geometry transformers into VLMs, they typically fuse only the deep-layer features from vision and geometry encoders, discarding rich hierarchical signals and creating a fundamental bottleneck for spatial understanding. To overcome this, we propose SpatialStack, a general hierarchical fusion framework that progressively aligns vision, geometry, and language representations across the model hierarchy. Moving beyond conventional late-stage vision-geometry fusion, SpatialStack stacks and synchronizes multi-level geometric features with the language backbone, enabling the model to capture both local geometric precision and global contextual semantics. Building upon this framework, we develop VLM-SpatialStack, a model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple 3D spatial reasoning benchmarks. Extensive experiments and ablations demonstrate that our multi-level fusion strategy consistently enhances 3D understanding and generalizes robustly across diverse spatial reasoning tasks, establishing SpatialStack as an effective and extensible design paradigm for vision-language-geometry integration in next-generation multimodal physical AI systems.
comment: CVPR 2026, Project Website: https://spatial-stack.github.io/
♻ ☆ TOOLCAD: Exploring Tool-Using Large Language Models in Text-to-CAD Generation with Reinforcement Learning ACL2026
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.
comment: ACL2026
♻ ☆ VLM-3R: Vision-Language Models Augmented with Instruction-Aligned 3D Reconstruction
Zhiwen Fan, Jian Zhang, Renjie Li, Junge Zhang, Runjin Chen, Hezhen Hu, Kevin Wang, Huaizhi Qu, Shijie Zhou, Dilin Wang, Zhicheng Yan, Hongyu Xu, Justin Theiss, Tianlong Chen, Jiachen Li, Zhengzhong Tu, Zhangyang Wang, Rakesh Ranjan
The rapid advancement of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for 2D images and videos has motivated extending these models to understand 3D scenes, aiming for human-like visual-spatial intelligence. Nevertheless, achieving deep spatial understanding comparable to human capabilities poses significant challenges in model encoding and data acquisition. Existing methods frequently depend on external depth sensors for geometry capture or utilize off-the-shelf algorithms for pre-constructing 3D maps, thereby limiting their scalability, especially with prevalent monocular video inputs and for time-sensitive applications. In this work, we introduce VLM-3R, a unified framework for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) that incorporates 3D Reconstructive instruction tuning. VLM-3R processes monocular video frames by employing a geometry encoder to derive implicit 3D tokens that represent spatial understanding. Leveraging our Spatial-Visual-View Fusion and over 200K curated 3D reconstructive instruction tuning question-answer (QA) pairs, VLM-3R effectively aligns real-world spatial context with language instructions. This enables monocular 3D spatial assistance and embodied reasoning. To facilitate the evaluation of temporal reasoning, we introduce the Vision-Spatial-Temporal Intelligence benchmark, featuring over 138.6K QA pairs across five distinct tasks focused on evolving spatial relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model, VLM-3R, not only facilitates robust visual-spatial reasoning but also enables the understanding of temporal 3D context changes, excelling in both accuracy and scalability.
comment: Project Page: https://vlm-3r.github.io/
♻ ☆ ScienceBoard: Evaluating Multimodal Autonomous Agents in Realistic Scientific Workflows ICLR 2026
Qiushi Sun, Zhoumianze Liu, Chang Ma, Zichen Ding, Fangzhi Xu, Zhangyue Yin, Haiteng Zhao, Zhenyu Wu, Kanzhi Cheng, Zhaoyang Liu, Jianing Wang, Qintong Li, Xiangru Tang, Tianbao Xie, Xiachong Feng, Xiang Li, Ben Kao, Wenhai Wang, Biqing Qi, Lingpeng Kong, Zhiyong Wu
Large Language Models (LLMs) have extended their impact beyond Natural Language Processing, substantially fostering the development of interdisciplinary research. Recently, various LLM-based agents have been developed to assist scientific discovery progress across multiple aspects and domains. Among these, computer-using agents, capable of interacting with operating systems as humans do, are paving the way to automated scientific problem-solving and addressing routines in researchers' workflows. Recognizing the transformative potential of these agents, we introduce ScienceBoard, which encompasses two complementary contributions: (i) a realistic, multi-domain environment featuring dynamic and visually rich scientific workflows with integrated professional software, where agents can autonomously interact via different interfaces to accelerate complex research tasks and experiments; and (ii) a challenging benchmark of 169 high-quality, rigorously validated real-world tasks curated by humans, spanning scientific-discovery workflows in domains such as biochemistry, astronomy, and geoinformatics. Extensive evaluations of agents with state-of-the-art backbones (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude 3.7, UI-TARS) show that, despite some promising results, they still fall short of reliably assisting scientists in complex workflows, achieving only a 15% overall success rate. In-depth analysis further provides valuable insights for addressing current agent limitations and more effective design principles, paving the way to build more capable agents for scientific discovery. Our code, environment, and benchmark are at https://qiushisun.github.io/ScienceBoard-Home/.
comment: ICLR 2026 Camera Ready Version
♻ ☆ Preparation of Fractal-Inspired Computational Architectures for Automated Neural Design Exploration
It introduces FractalNet, a fractal-inspired computational architectures for advanced large language model analysis that mainly challenges model diversity on a large scale in an efficient manner. The new set-up involves a template-driven generator, runner, and evaluation framework that, through systematic permutations of convolutional, normalization, activation, and dropout layers, can create more than 1,200 variants of neural networks. Fractal templates allow for structural recursion and multi-column pathways, thus, models become deeper and wider in a balanced way. Training utilizes PyTorch, Automatic Mixed Precision (AMP), and gradient checkpointing and is carried out on the CIFAR-10 dataset for five epochs. The outcomes show that fractal-based architectures are capable of strong performance and are computationally efficient. The paper positions fractal design as a feasible and resource-efficient method of automated architecture exploration.
♻ ☆ AvatarPointillist: AutoRegressive 4D Gaussian Avatarization CVPR 2026
Hongyu Liu, Xuan Wang, Zijian Wu, Yating Wang, Ziyu Wan, Yue Ma, Runtao Liu, Boyao Zhou, Yujun Shen, Qifeng Chen
We introduce AvatarPointillist, a novel framework for generating dynamic 4D Gaussian avatars from a single portrait image. At the core of our method is a decoder-only Transformer that autoregressively generates a point cloud for 3D Gaussian Splatting. This sequential approach allows for precise, adaptive construction, dynamically adjusting point density and the total number of points based on the subject's complexity. During point generation, the AR model also jointly predicts per-point binding information, enabling realistic animation. After generation, a dedicated Gaussian decoder converts the points into complete, renderable Gaussian attributes. We demonstrate that conditioning the decoder on the latent features from the AR generator enables effective interaction between stages and markedly improves fidelity. Extensive experiments validate that AvatarPointillist produces high-quality, photorealistic, and controllable avatars. We believe this autoregressive formulation represents a new paradigm for avatar generation, and we will release our code inspire future research.
comment: Accepted by the CVPR 2026 main conference. Project page: https://kumapowerliu.github.io/AvatarPointillist/
♻ ☆ BridgeEQA: Virtual Embodied Agents for Real Bridge Inspections
Deploying embodied agents that can answer questions about their surroundings in realistic real-world settings remains difficult, partly due to the scarcity of benchmarks for episodic memory Embodied Question Answering (EQA). Inspired by the challenges of infrastructure inspections, we propose Inspection EQA as a compelling problem class for advancing episodic memory EQA. It demands multi-scale reasoning and long-range spatial understanding, while offering standardized evaluation, professional inspection reports as grounding, and egocentric imagery. We introduce BridgeEQA, a benchmark of 2,200 open-vocabulary question-answer pairs (in the style of OpenEQA) grounded in professional inspection reports across 200 real-world bridge scenes with 47.93 images on average per scene. We further propose a new EQA metric Image Citation Relevance to evaluate the ability of a model to cite relevant images. Evaluations of state-of-the-art vision-language models reveal substantial performance gaps. To address this, we propose Embodied Memory Visual Reasoning (EMVR), which formulates the inspection EQA task as a Markov decision process. EMVR shows strong performance over the baselines. Code and dataset are available at https://drags99.github.io/bridge-eqa/
♻ ☆ VEFX-Bench: A Holistic Benchmark for Generic Video Editing and Visual Effects
Xiangbo Gao, Sicong Jiang, Bangya Liu, Xinghao Chen, Minglai Yang, Siyuan Yang, Mingyang Wu, Jiongze Yu, Qi Zheng, Haozhi Wang, Jiayi Zhang, Jie Yang, Zihan Wang, Qing Yin, Zhengzhong Tu
As AI-assisted video creation becomes increasingly practical, instruction-guided video editing has become essential for refining generated or captured footage to meet professional requirements. Yet the field still lacks both a large-scale human-annotated dataset with complete editing examples and a standardized evaluator for comparing editing systems. Existing resources are limited by small scale, missing edited outputs, or the absence of human quality labels, while current evaluation often relies on expensive manual inspection or generic vision-language model judges that are not specialized for editing quality. We introduce VEFX-Dataset, a human-annotated dataset containing 5,049 video editing examples across 9 major editing categories and 32 subcategories, each labeled along three decoupled dimensions: Instruction Following, Rendering Quality, and Edit Exclusivity. Building on VEFX-Dataset, we propose VEFX-Reward, a reward model designed specifically for video editing quality assessment. VEFX-Reward jointly processes the source video, the editing instruction, and the edited video, and predicts per-dimension quality scores via ordinal regression. We further release VEFX-Bench, a benchmark of 300 curated video-prompt pairs for standardized comparison of editing systems. Experiments show that VEFX-Reward aligns more strongly with human judgments than generic VLM judges and prior reward models on both standard IQA/VQA metrics and group-wise preference evaluation. Using VEFX-Reward as an evaluator, we benchmark representative commercial and open-source video editing systems, revealing a persistent gap between visual plausibility, instruction following, and edit locality in current models. Our project page is https://xiangbogaobarry.github.io/VEFX-Bench/.
♻ ☆ Bridging the Ex-Vivo to In-Vivo Gap: Synthetic Priors for Monocular Depth Estimation in Specular Surgical Environments
Accurate Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) is critical for autonomous robotic surgery. However, existing self-supervised methods often exhibit a severe "ex-vivo to in-vivo gap": they achieve high accuracy on public datasets but struggle in actual clinical deployments. This disparity arises because the severe specular reflections and fluid-filled deformations inherent to real surgeries. Models trained on noisy real-world pseudo-labels consequently suffer from severe boundary collapse. To address this, we leverage the high-fidelity synthetic priors of the \textit{Depth Anything V2} architecture, which inherently capture precise geometric details, and efficiently adapt them to the medical domain using Dynamic Vector Low-Rank Adaptation (DV-LORA). Our contributions are two-fold. Technically, our approach establishes a new state-of-the-art on the public SCARED dataset; under a novel physically-stratified evaluation protocol, it reduces Squared Relative Error by over 17\% in high-specularity regimes compared to strong baselines. Furthermore, to provide a rigorous reality check for the field, we introduce \textbf{ROCAL-T 90} (Real Operative CT-Aligned Laparoscopic Trajectories 90), the first real-surgery validation dataset featuring 90 clinical endoscopic sequences with sub-millimeter ($< 1$mm) ground-truth trajectories. Evaluations on ROCAL-T 90 demonstrate our model's superior robustness in true clinical settings.
♻ ☆ InternScenes: A Large-scale Simulatable Indoor Scene Dataset with Realistic Layouts
Weipeng Zhong, Peizhou Cao, Yichen Jin, Li Luo, Wenzhe Cai, Jingli Lin, Hanqing Wang, Zhaoyang Lyu, Tai Wang, Bo Dai, Xudong Xu, Jiangmiao Pang
The advancement of Embodied AI heavily relies on large-scale, simulatable 3D scene datasets characterized by scene diversity and realistic layouts. However, existing datasets typically suffer from limitations in data scale or diversity, sanitized layouts lacking small items, and severe object collisions. To address these shortcomings, we introduce \textbf{InternScenes}, a novel large-scale simulatable indoor scene dataset comprising approximately 40,000 diverse scenes by integrating three disparate scene sources, real-world scans, procedurally generated scenes, and designer-created scenes, including 1.96M 3D objects and covering 15 common scene types and 288 object classes. We particularly preserve massive small items in the scenes, resulting in realistic and complex layouts with an average of 41.5 objects per region. Our comprehensive data processing pipeline ensures simulatability by creating real-to-sim replicas for real-world scans, enhances interactivity by incorporating interactive objects into these scenes, and resolves object collisions by physical simulations. We demonstrate the value of InternScenes with two benchmark applications: scene layout generation and point-goal navigation. Both show the new challenges posed by the complex and realistic layouts. More importantly, InternScenes paves the way for scaling up the model training for both tasks, making the generation and navigation in such complex scenes possible. We commit to open-sourcing the data, models, and benchmarks to benefit the whole community.
♻ ☆ NVGS: Neural Visibility for Occlusion Culling in 3D Gaussian Splatting
3D Gaussian Splatting can exploit frustum culling and level-of-detail strategies to accelerate rendering of scenes containing a large number of primitives. However, the semi-transparent nature of Gaussians prevents the application of another highly effective technique: occlusion culling. We address this limitation by proposing a novel method to learn the viewpoint-dependent visibility function of all Gaussians in a trained model using a small, shared MLP across instances of an asset in a scene. By querying it for Gaussians within the viewing frustum prior to rasterization, our method can discard occluded primitives during rendering. Leveraging Tensor Cores for efficient computation, we integrate these neural queries directly into a novel instanced software rasterizer. Our approach outperforms the current state of the art for composed scenes in terms of VRAM usage and image quality, utilizing a combination of our instanced rasterizer and occlusion culling MLP, and exhibits complementary properties to existing LoD techniques.
comment: 17 pages, 15 figures
♻ ☆ ENTIRE: Learning-based Volume Rendering Time Prediction
We introduce ENTIRE, a novel deep learning-based approach for fast and accurate volume rendering time prediction. Predicting rendering time is inherently challenging due to its dependence on multiple factors, including volume data characteristics, image resolution, camera configuration, and transfer function settings. Our method addresses this by first extracting a feature vector that encodes structural volume properties relevant to rendering performance. This feature vector is then integrated with additional rendering parameters, such as image resolution, camera setup, and transfer function settings, to produce the final prediction. We evaluate ENTIRE across multiple rendering frameworks (CPU- and GPU-based) and configurations (with and without single-scattering) on diverse datasets. The results demonstrate that our model achieves high prediction accuracy with fast inference speed and can be efficiently adapted to new scenarios by fine-tuning the pretrained model with few samples. Furthermore, we showcase ENTIRE's effectiveness in two case studies, where it enables dynamic parameter adaptation for stable frame rates and load balancing.
♻ ☆ ORSIFlow: Saliency-Guided Rectified Flow for Optical Remote Sensing Salient Object Detection
Optical Remote Sensing Image Salient Object Detection (ORSI-SOD) remains challenging due to complex backgrounds, low contrast, irregular object shapes, and large variations in object scale. Existing discriminative methods directly regress saliency maps, while recent diffusion-based generative approaches suffer from stochastic sampling and high computational cost. In this paper, we propose ORSIFlow, a saliency-guided rectified flow framework that reformulates ORSI-SOD as a deterministic latent flow generation problem. ORSIFlow performs saliency mask generation in a compact latent space constructed by a frozen variational autoencoder, enabling efficient inference with only a few steps. To enhance saliency awareness, we design a Salient Feature Discriminator for global semantic discrimination and a Salient Feature Calibrator for precise boundary refinement. Extensive experiments on multiple public benchmarks show that ORSIFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly improved efficiency.
♻ ☆ 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/
♻ ☆ LMMs Meet Object-Centric Vision: Understanding, Segmentation, Editing and Generation
Yuqian Yuan, Wenqiao Zhang, Juekai Lin, Yu Zhong, Mingjian Gao, Binhe Yu, Yunqi Cao, Wentong Li, Yueting Zhuang, Beng Chin Ooi
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved remarkable progress in general-purpose vision--language understanding, yet they remain limited in tasks requiring precise object-level grounding, fine-grained spatial reasoning, and controllable visual manipulation. In particular, existing systems often struggle to identify the correct instance, preserve object identity across interactions, and localize or modify designated regions with high precision. Object-centric vision provides a principled framework for addressing these challenges by promoting explicit representations and operations over visual entities, thereby extending multimodal systems from global scene understanding to object-level understanding, segmentation, editing, and generation. This paper presents a comprehensive review of recent advances at the convergence of LMMs and object-centric vision. We organize the literature into four major themes: object-centric visual understanding, object-centric referring segmentation, object-centric visual editing, and object-centric visual generation. We further summarize the key modeling paradigms, learning strategies, and evaluation protocols that support these capabilities. Finally, we discuss open challenges and future directions, including robust instance permanence, fine-grained spatial control, consistent multi-step interaction, unified cross-task modeling, and reliable benchmarking under distribution shift. We hope this paper provides a structured perspective on the development of scalable, precise, and trustworthy object-centric multimodal systems.
comment: 38 pages, 6 figures
♻ ☆ SMILE-UHURA Challenge -- Small Vessel Segmentation at Mesoscopic Scale from Ultra-High Resolution 7T Magnetic Resonance Angiograms
Soumick Chatterjee, Hendrik Mattern, Marc Dörner, Alessandro Sciarra, Florian Dubost, Hannes Schnurre, Rupali Khatun, Chun-Chih Yu, Tsung-Lin Hsieh, Yi-Shan Tsai, Yi-Zeng Fang, Yung-Ching Yang, Juinn-Dar Huang, Marshall Xu, Siyu Liu, Fernanda L. Ribeiro, Saskia Bollmann, Karthikesh Varma Chintalapati, Chethan Mysuru Radhakrishna, Sri Chandana Hudukula Ram Kumara, Raviteja Sutrave, Abdul Qayyum, Moona Mazher, Imran Razzak, Cristobal Rodero, Steven Niederren, Fengming Lin, Yan Xia, Jiacheng Wang, Riyu Qiu, Liansheng Wang, Arya Yazdan Panah, Rosana El Jurdi, Guanghui Fu, Janan Arslan, Ghislain Vaillant, Romain Valabregue, Didier Dormont, Bruno Stankoff, Olivier Colliot, Luisa Vargas, Isai Daniel Chacón, Ioannis Pitsiorlas, Pablo Arbeláez, Maria A. Zuluaga, Stefanie Schreiber, Oliver Speck, Andreas Nürnberger
The human brain receives nutrients and oxygen through an intricate network of blood vessels. Pathology affecting small vessels, at the mesoscopic scale, represents a critical vulnerability within the cerebral blood supply and can lead to severe conditions, such as Cerebral Small Vessel Diseases. The advent of 7 Tesla MRI systems has enabled the acquisition of higher spatial resolution images, making it possible to visualise such vessels in the brain. However, the lack of publicly available annotated datasets has impeded the development of robust, machine learning-driven segmentation algorithms. To address this, the SMILE-UHURA challenge was organised. This challenge, held in conjunction with the ISBI 2023, in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, aimed to provide a platform for researchers working on related topics. The SMILE-UHURA challenge addresses the gap in publicly available annotated datasets by providing an annotated dataset of Time-of-Flight angiography acquired with 7T MRI. This dataset was created through a combination of automated pre-segmentation and extensive manual refinement. In this manuscript, sixteen submitted methods and two baseline methods are compared both quantitatively and qualitatively on two different datasets: held-out test MRAs from the same dataset as the training data (with labels kept secret) and a separate 7T ToF MRA dataset where both input volumes and labels are kept secret. The results demonstrate that most of the submitted deep learning methods, trained on the provided training dataset, achieved reliable segmentation performance. Dice scores reached up to 0.838 $\pm$ 0.066 and 0.716 $\pm$ 0.125 on the respective datasets, with an average performance of up to 0.804 $\pm$ 0.15.
♻ ☆ Generating Attribution Reports for Manipulated Facial Images: A Dataset and Baseline ACL 2026
Existing facial forgery detection methods typically focus on binary classification or pixel-level localization, providing little semantic insight into the nature of the manipulation. To address this, we introduce Forgery Attribution Report Generation, a new multimodal task that jointly localizes forged regions ("Where") and generates natural language explanations grounded in the editing process ("Why"). This dual-focus approach goes beyond traditional forensics, providing a comprehensive understanding of the manipulation. To enable research in this domain, we present Multi-Modal Tamper Tracing (MMTT), a large-scale dataset of 152,217 samples, each with a process-derived ground-truth mask and a human-authored textual description, ensuring high annotation precision and linguistic richness. We further propose ForgeryTalker, a unified end-to-end framework that integrates vision and language via a shared encoder (image encoder + Q-former) and dual decoders for mask and text generation, enabling coherent cross-modal reasoning. Experiments show that ForgeryTalker achieves competitive performance on both report generation and forgery localization subtasks, i.e., 59.3 CIDEr and 73.67 IoU, respectively, establishing a baseline for explainable multimedia forensics. Dataset and code will be released to foster future research.
comment: Accepted to ACL 2026 (Main Conference). This version includes camera-ready revisions and updated experimental results
♻ ☆ FireScope: Wildfire Risk Prediction with a Chain-of-Thought Oracle
Predicting wildfire risk is a reasoning-intensive spatial problem that requires the integration of visual, climatic, and geographic factors to infer continuous risk maps. Existing methods lack the causal reasoning and multimodal understanding required for reliable generalization. We introduce $\textbf{FireScope-Bench}$, a large-scale dataset and benchmark that couples Sentinel-2 imagery and climate data with expert-defined risk rasters across the USA, and real wildfire events in Europe for cross-continental evaluation. Building on this dataset, we propose $\textbf{FireScope}$, a VLM-based reasoning-to-generation framework that learns from both reinforcement learning and visual supervision to predict risk rasters with complementary reasoning traces. When trained in the USA and tested in Europe, $\textbf{FireScope}$ achieves substantial performance gains, while expert feedback and automated analysis confirm that its reasoning traces are faithful and semantically meaningful. Our findings demonstrate that reasoning can ground raster prediction models, improving both generalization and interpretability. To our knowledge, this is the first framework to (1) demonstrate that language-based reasoning can improve generalization in visual generation, (2) propose a high-resolution wildfire risk model that can be applied across continents, and (3) enable systematic studies of robust cross-continental generalization for multimodal fire risk models. We believe that $\textbf{FireScope-Bench}$ has the potential to serve as a foundation for advancing reasoning-driven, interpretable and generalizable spatial modeling. Data and source code will be made publicly available.
♻ ☆ KaLDeX: Kalman Filter based Linear Deformable Cross Attention for Retina Vessel Segmentation
Background and Objective: In the realm of ophthalmic imaging, accurate vascular segmentation is paramount for diagnosing and managing various eye diseases. Contemporary deep learning-based vascular segmentation models rival human accuracy but still face substantial challenges in accurately segmenting minuscule blood vessels in neural network applications. Due to the necessity of multiple downsampling operations in the CNN models, fine details from high-resolution images are inevitably lost. The objective of this study is to design a structure to capture the delicate and small blood vessels. Methods: To address these issues, we propose a novel network (KaLDeX) for vascular segmentation leveraging a Kalman filter based linear deformable cross attention (LDCA) module, integrated within a UNet++ framework. Our approach is based on two key components: Kalman filter (KF) based linear deformable convolution (LD) and cross-attention (CA) modules. The LD module is designed to adaptively adjust the focus on thin vessels that might be overlooked in standard convolution. The CA module improves the global understanding of vascular structures by aggregating the detailed features from the LD module with the high level features from the UNet++ architecture. Finally, we adopt a topological loss function based on persistent homology to constrain the topological continuity of the segmentation. Results: The proposed method is evaluated on retinal fundus image datasets (DRIVE, CHASE_BD1, and STARE) as well as the 3mm and 6mm of the OCTA-500 dataset, achieving an average accuracy (ACC) of 97.25%, 97.77%, 97.85%, 98.89%, and 98.21%, respectively. Conclusions: Empirical evidence shows that our method outperforms the current best models on different vessel segmentation datasets. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/AIEyeSystem/KalDeX.
♻ ☆ SVGDreamer: Text Guided SVG Generation with Diffusion Model CVPR 2024
Text-guided scalable vector graphics (SVG) synthesis has broad applications in icon and sketch generation. However, existing text-to-SVG methods often suffer from limited editability, suboptimal visual quality, and low sample diversity. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{SVGDreamer}, a novel framework for text-guided vector graphics synthesis. Our method introduces a \textbf{semantic-driven image vectorization (SIVE)} process, which decomposes the generation procedure into foreground objects and background elements, thereby improving structural controllability and editability. In particular, SIVE incorporates attention-based primitive control and an attention-mask loss to facilitate fine-grained manipulation of individual vector elements. To further improve generation quality and diversity, we propose \textbf{Vectorized Particle-based Score Distillation (VPSD)}, which models SVGs as distributions over control points and colors. Compared with existing text-to-SVG optimization methods, VPSD alleviates over-smoothed shapes, over-saturated colors, limited diversity, and slow convergence. Moreover, VPSD leverages a reward model to reweight vector particles, leading to better visual aesthetics and faster convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SVGDreamer consistently outperforms existing baselines in editability, visual quality, and diversity. Project page: https://ximinng.github.io/SVGDreamer-project/
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2024. Project Page: https://ximinng.github.io/SVGDreamer-project/
♻ ☆ NOOUGAT: Towards Unified Online and Offline Multi-Object Tracking
The long-standing division between \textit{online} and \textit{offline} Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has led to fragmented solutions that fail to address the flexible temporal requirements of real-world deployment scenarios. Current \textit{online} trackers rely on frame-by-frame hand-crafted association strategies and struggle with long-term occlusions, whereas \textit{offline} approaches can cover larger time gaps, but still rely on heuristic stitching for arbitrarily long sequences. In this paper, we introduce NOOUGAT, the first tracker designed to operate with arbitrary temporal horizons. NOOUGAT leverages a unified Graph Neural Network (GNN) framework that processes non-overlapping subclips, and fuses them through a novel Autoregressive Long-term Tracking (ALT) layer. The subclip size controls the trade-off between latency and temporal context, enabling a wide range of deployment scenarios, from frame-by-frame to batch processing. NOOUGAT achieves state-of-the-art performance across both tracking regimes, improving \textit{online} AssA by +2.3 on DanceTrack, +9.2 on SportsMOT, and +5.0 on MOT20, with even greater gains in \textit{offline} mode.
comment: Accepted to International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV)
♻ ☆ MMErroR: A Benchmark for Erroneous Reasoning in Vision-Language Models ACL 2026
Yang Shi, Yifeng Xie, Minzhe Guo, Liangsi Lu, Mingxuan Huang, Jingchao Wang, Zhihong Zhu, Boyan Xu, Zhiqi Huang
Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have improved performance in multi-modal learning, raising the question of whether these models truly understand the content they process. Crucially, can VLMs detect when a reasoning process is wrong and identify its error type? To answer this, we present MMErroR, a multi-modal benchmark of 1997 samples, each embedding a single coherent reasoning error. These samples span 24 subdomains across six top-level domains, ensuring broad coverage and taxonomic richness. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on answer correctness, MMErroR targets a process-level, error-centric evaluation that requires models to detect incorrect reasoning and classify the error type within both visual and linguistic contexts. We evaluate 12 representative VLMs, and even the best model, Gemini-3-Pro-Preview, classifies the error correctly in only 66.65\% of cases, underscoring the challenge of identifying erroneous reasoning. Furthermore, the ability to accurately identify errors offers valuable insights into the capabilities of multi-modal models. Project Page: https://mmerror-benchmark.github.io
comment: Accepted by ACL 2026 Main
♻ ☆ Understanding Counting Mechanisms in Large Language and Vision-Language Models CVPR 2026
Hosein Hasani, Amirmohammad Izadi, Fatemeh Askari, Mobin Bagherian, Sadegh Mohammadian, Mohammad Izadi, Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah
Counting is one of the fundamental abilities of large language models (LLMs) and large vision-language models (LVLMs). This paper examines how these foundation models represent and compute numerical information in counting tasks. We use controlled experiments with repeated textual and visual items and analyze counting in LLMs and LVLMs through a set of behavioral, observational, and causal mediation analyses. To this end, we design a specialized tool, CountScope, for the mechanistic interpretability of numerical content. Results show that individual tokens or visual features encode latent positional count information that can be extracted and transferred across contexts. Layerwise analyses reveal a progressive emergence of numerical representations, with lower layers encoding small counts and higher layers representing larger ones. We identify an internal counter mechanism that updates with each item, stored mainly in the final token or region. In LVLMs, numerical information also appears in visual embeddings, shifting between background and foreground regions depending on spatial composition. We further reveal that models rely on structural cues such as separators in text, which act as shortcuts for tracking item counts and strongly influence the accuracy of numerical predictions. Overall, counting emerges as a structured, layerwise process in LLMs and follows the same general pattern in LVLMs, shaped by the properties of the vision encoder.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026
♻ ☆ DisCa: Accelerating Video Diffusion Transformers with Distillation-Compatible Learnable Feature Caching
Chang Zou, Changlin Li, Yang Li, Patrol Li, Jianbing Wu, Xiao He, Songtao Liu, Zhao Zhong, Kailin Huang, Linfeng Zhang
While diffusion models have achieved great success in the field of video generation, this progress is accompanied by a rapidly escalating computational burden. Among the existing acceleration methods, Feature Caching is popular due to its training-free property and considerable speedup performance, but it inevitably faces semantic and detail drop with further compression. Another widely adopted method, training-aware step-distillation, though successful in image generation, also faces drastic degradation in video generation with a few steps. Furthermore, the quality loss becomes more severe when simply applying training-free feature caching to the step-distilled models, due to the sparser sampling steps. This paper novelly introduces a distillation-compatible learnable feature caching mechanism for the first time. We employ a lightweight learnable neural predictor instead of traditional training-free heuristics for diffusion models, enabling a more accurate capture of the high-dimensional feature evolution process. Furthermore, we explore the challenges of highly compressed distillation on large-scale video models and propose a conservative Restricted MeanFlow approach to achieve more stable and lossless distillation. By undertaking these initiatives, we further push the acceleration boundaries to $11.8\times$ while preserving generation quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Code has been made publicly available: https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/DisCa
comment: 18 pages, 8 figures; cvpr2026 paper
♻ ☆ CROC: Evaluating and Training T2I Metrics with Pseudo- and Human-Labeled Contrastive Robustness Checks ACL
The assessment of evaluation metrics (meta-evaluation) is crucial for determining the suitability of existing metrics in text-to-image (T2I) generation tasks. Human-based meta-evaluation is costly and time-intensive, and automated alternatives are scarce. We address this gap and propose CROC: a scalable framework for automated Contrastive Robustness Checks that systematically probes and quantifies metric robustness by synthesizing contrastive test cases across a comprehensive taxonomy of image properties. With CROC, we generate a pseudo-labeled dataset (CROC$^{syn}$) of over 1 million contrastive prompt-image pairs to enable a fine-grained comparison of evaluation metrics. We also use this dataset to train CROCScore, a new metric that achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source methods, demonstrating an additional key application of our framework. To complement this dataset, we introduce a human-supervised benchmark (CROC$^{hum}$) targeting especially challenging categories. Our results highlight robustness issues in existing metrics: for example, many fail on prompts involving negation, and all tested open-source metrics fail on at least 24% of cases involving correct identification of body parts.
comment: pre-MIT Press publication version; Accepted at TACL
♻ ☆ When Pretty Isn't Useful: Investigating Why Modern Text-to-Image Models Fail as Reliable Training Data Generators CVPR26
Krzysztof Adamkiewicz, Brian Bernhard Moser, Stanislav Frolov, Tobias Christian Nauen, Federico Raue, Andreas Dengel
Recent text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models produce visually stunning images and demonstrate excellent prompt following. But do they perform well as synthetic vision data generators? In this work, we revisit the promise of synthetic data as a scalable substitute for real training sets and uncover a surprising performance regression. We generate large-scale synthetic datasets using state-of-the-art T2I models released between 2022 and 2025, train standard classifiers solely on this synthetic data, and evaluate them on real test data. Despite observable advances in visual fidelity and prompt adherence, classification accuracy on real test data consistently declines with newer T2I models as training data generators. Our analysis reveals a hidden trend: These models collapse to a narrow, aesthetic-centric distribution that undermines diversity and real data distribution coverage. Overall, our findings challenge a growing assumption in vision research, namely that progress in generative realism implies progress in data realism. We thus highlight an urgent need to rethink the capabilities of modern T2I models as reliable training data generators.
comment: Accepted to CVPR26
♻ ☆ ToLL: Topological Layout Learning with Asymmetric Cross-View Structural Distillation for 3D Scene Graph Generation Pretraining
3D Scene Graph (3DSG) generation plays a pivotal role in spatial understanding and affordance perception. To mitigate generalization issues from data scarcity, joint-embedding and generative proxy tasks are proposed to pre-train 3DSG representations on predicate label-free datasets. Currently, generative pre-training usually bypasses the semantic corruption caused by the geometric augmentations in joint-embedding, but cannot avoid a negative problem ``Geometric Shortcut." In this problem, exposing dense object spatial and scale priors will induce models to trivially reconstruct scenes by interpolating object positions, rather than learning the underlying topological constraints provided by edges. To address this issue, we propose a Topological Layout Learning (ToLL) for 3DSG generation pretraining framework. In detail, we design an Anchor-Conditioned Topological Geometry Reasoning. It adopts a recurrent GNN to recover the global layout of zero-centered subgraphs (the non-visible spatial features) by one anchor with sparse spatial prior. Considering the absence of spatial layout information within the objects, it creates an information bottleneck, compelling our model to recover the full scene layout by leveraging predicate representation learning. Moreover, we construct a Structural Multi-view Augmentation to avoid semantic corruption, enhancing 3DSG representations via self-distillation. The extensive experiments on special dataset demonstrate that our ToLL could often improve 3DSG pertaining quality, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.
comment: Under Reivew
♻ ☆ What's Left Unsaid? Detecting and Correcting Misleading Omissions in Multimodal News Previews
Even when factually correct, social-media news previews (image-headline pairs) can induce interpretation drift: by selectively omitting crucial context, they lead readers to form judgments that diverge from what the full article supports. This covert harm is subtler than explicit misinformation, yet remains underexplored. To address this gap, we develop a multi-stage pipeline that simulates preview-based and context-based understanding, enabling construction of the MM-Misleading benchmark. Using MM-Misleading, we systematically evaluate open-source LVLMs and uncover pronounced blind spots in omission-based misleadingness detection. We further propose OMGuard, which combines (1) Interpretation-Aware Fine-Tuning for misleadingness detection and (2) Rationale-Guided Misleading Content Correction, where explicit rationales guide headline rewriting to reduce misleading impressions. Experiments show that OMGuard lifts an 8B model's detection accuracy to the level of a 235B LVLM while delivering markedly stronger end-to-end correction. Further analysis shows that misleadingness usually arises from local narrative shifts, such as missing background, instead of global frame changes, and identifies image-driven cases where text-only correction fails, underscoring the need for visual interventions.
♻ ☆ LLaMA-XR: A Novel Framework for Radiology Report Generation using LLaMA and QLoRA Fine Tuning
Automated radiology report generation holds significant potential to reduce radiologists' workload and enhance diagnostic accuracy. However, generating precise and clinically meaningful reports from chest radiographs remains challenging due to the complexity of medical language and the need for contextual understanding. Existing models often struggle with maintaining both accuracy and contextual relevance. In this paper, we present LLaMA-XR, a novel framework that integrates LLaMA 3.1 with DenseNet-121-based image embeddings and Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) fine-tuning. LLaMA-XR achieves improved coherence and clinical accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency. This efficiency is driven by an optimization strategy that enhances parameter utilization and reduces memory overhead, enabling faster report generation with lower computational resource demands. Extensive experiments conducted on the IU X-ray benchmark dataset demonstrate that LLaMA-XR outperforms a range of state-of-the-art methods. Our model achieves a ROUGE-L score of 0.433 and a METEOR score of 0.336, establishing new performance benchmarks in the domain. These results underscore LLaMA-XR's potential as an effective and efficient AI system for automated radiology reporting, offering enhanced clinical utility and reliability.
comment: 25 pages
♻ ☆ Automated Road Crack Localization to Guide Highway Maintenance
Highway networks are crucial for economic prosperity. Climate change-induced temperature fluctuations are exacerbating stress on road pavements, resulting in elevated maintenance costs. This underscores the need for targeted and efficient maintenance strategies. This study investigates the potential of open-source data to guide highway infrastructure maintenance. The proposed framework integrates airborne imagery and OpenStreetMap (OSM) to fine-tune YOLOv11 for highway crack localization. To demonstrate the framework's real-world applicability, a Swiss Relative Highway Crack Density (RHCD) index was calculated to inform nationwide highway maintenance. The crack classification model achieved an F1-score of $0.84$ for the positive class (crack) and $0.97$ for the negative class (no crack). The Swiss RHCD index exhibited weak correlations with Long-term Land Surface Temperature Amplitudes (LT-LST-A) (Pearson's $r\ = -0.05$) and Traffic Volume (TV) (Pearson's $r\ = 0.17$), underlining the added value of this novel index for guiding maintenance over other data. Significantly high RHCD values were observed near urban centers and intersections, providing contextual validation for the predictions. These findings highlight the value of open-source data sharing to drive innovation, ultimately enabling more efficient solutions in the public sector.
comment: 22 pages, 9 figures
♻ ☆ Hybrid-Vector Retrieval for Visually Rich Documents: Combining Single-Vector Efficiency and Multi-Vector Accuracy ACL 2026
Retrieval over visually rich documents is essential for tasks such as legal discovery, scientific search, and enterprise knowledge management. Existing approaches fall into two paradigms: single-vector retrieval, which is efficient but coarse, and multi-vector retrieval, which is accurate but computationally expensive. To address this trade-off, we propose HEAVEN, a plug-and-play two-stage hybrid-vector framework. In the first stage, HEAVEN efficiently retrieves candidate pages using a single-vector method over Visually-Summarized Pages (VS-Pages), which assemble representative visual layouts from multiple pages. In the second stage, it reranks candidates with a multi-vector method while filtering query tokens by linguistic importance to reduce redundant computations. To evaluate retrieval systems under realistic conditions, we also introduce ViMDoc, a benchmark for visually rich, multi-document, and long-document retrieval. Across four benchmarks, HEAVEN attains 99.87% of the Recall@1 performance of multi-vector models on average while reducing per-query computation by 99.82%, achieving efficiency and accuracy. Our code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/juyeonnn/HEAVEN
comment: ACL 2026 Findings
♻ ☆ ViT$^3$: Unlocking Test-Time Training in Vision CVPR 2026
Dongchen Han, Yining Li, Tianyu Li, Zixuan Cao, Ziming Wang, Jun Song, Yu Cheng, Bo Zheng, Gao Huang
Test-Time Training (TTT) has recently emerged as a promising direction for efficient sequence modeling. TTT reformulates attention operation as an online learning problem, constructing a compact inner model from key-value pairs at test time. This reformulation opens a rich and flexible design space while achieving linear computational complexity. However, crafting a powerful visual TTT design remains challenging: fundamental choices for the inner module and inner training lack comprehensive understanding and practical guidelines. To bridge this critical gap, in this paper, we present a systematic empirical study of TTT designs for visual sequence modeling. From a series of experiments and analyses, we distill six practical insights that establish design principles for effective visual TTT and illuminate paths for future improvement. These findings culminate in the Vision Test-Time Training (ViT$^3$) model, a pure TTT architecture that achieves linear complexity and parallelizable computation. We evaluate ViT$^3$ across diverse visual tasks, including image classification, image generation, object detection, and semantic segmentation. Results show that ViT$^3$ consistently matches or outperforms advanced linear-complexity models (e.g., Mamba and linear attention variants) and effectively narrows the gap to highly optimized vision Transformers. We hope this study and the ViT$^3$ baseline can facilitate future work on visual TTT models. Code: github.com/LeapLabTHU/ViTTT.
comment: CVPR 2026, oral
♻ ☆ Lumos3D: A Single-Forward Framework for Low-Light 3D Scene Restoration
Restoring 3D scenes with low-light conditions is challenging, and most existing methods depend on precomputed camera poses and scene-specific optimization, which greatly restricts their application to real-world scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose Lumos3D, a pose-free single-forward framework for 3D low-light scene restoration. First, we develop a cross-illumination distillation scheme, where a frozen teacher network takes normal-light ground truth images as input to distill accurate geometric information to the student model. Second, we define a Lumos loss to improve the restoration quality of the reconstructed 3D Gaussian space. Trained on a single dataset, Lumos3D performs inference in a purely feed-forward manner, directly restoring illumination and structure from unposed, low-light multi-view images without any per-scene training or optimization. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that Lumos3D achieves competitive restoration results compared to scene-specific methods. Our codes will be released soon.
♻ ☆ Measuring Social Bias in Vision-Language Models with Face-Only Counterfactuals from Real Photos
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in socially consequential settings, raising concerns about social bias driven by demographic cues. A central challenge in measuring such social bias is attribution under visual confounding: real-world images entangle race and gender with correlated factors such as background and clothing, obscuring attribution. We propose a \textbf{face-only counterfactual evaluation paradigm} that isolates demographic effects while preserving real-image realism. Starting from real photographs, we generate counterfactual variants by editing only facial attributes related to race and gender, keeping all other visual factors fixed. Based on this paradigm, we construct \textbf{FOCUS}, a dataset of 480 scene-matched counterfactual images across six occupations and ten demographic groups, and propose \textbf{REFLECT}, a benchmark comprising three decision-oriented tasks: two-alternative forced choice, multiple-choice socioeconomic inference, and numeric salary recommendation. Experiments on five state-of-the-art VLMs reveal that demographic disparities persist under strict visual control and vary substantially across task formulations. These findings underscore the necessity of controlled, counterfactual audits and highlight task design as a critical factor in evaluating social bias in multimodal models.
comment: 18 pages, 18 figures, and 3 tables
♻ ☆ 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 Added references for section 2 Added Acknowledgment
♻ ☆ Missing Pattern Tree based Decision Grouping and Ensemble for Enhancing Pair Utilization in Deep Incomplete Multi-View Clustering
Real-world multi-view data often exhibit highly inconsistent missing patterns, posing significant challenges for incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC). Although existing IMVC methods have made progress from both imputation-based and imputation-free routes, they largely overlook the issue of pair underutilization. Specifically, inconsistent missing patterns prevent incomplete but available multi-view pairs from being fully exploited, thereby limiting the model performance. To address this limitation, we propose a novel missing-pattern tree based IMVC framework. Specifically, to fully leverage available multi-view pairs, we first introduce a missing-pattern tree model to group data into multiple decision sets according to their missing patterns, and then perform multi-view clustering within each set. Furthermore, a multi-view decision ensemble module is proposed to aggregate clustering results across all decision sets. This module infers uncertainty-based weights to suppress unreliable clustering decisions and produce robust outputs. Finally, we develop an ensemble-to-individual knowledge distillation module module, which transfers ensemble knowledge to view-specific clustering models. This design enables mutual enhancement between ensemble and individual modules by optimizing cross-view consistency and inter-cluster discrimination losses. Extensive theoretical analysis supports our key designs, and empirical experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method effectively mitigates the pair underutilization issue and achieve superior IMVC performance.
♻ ☆ SemMorph3D: Unsupervised Semantic-Aware 3D Morphing via Mesh-Guided Gaussians
We introduce METHODNAME, a novel framework for semantic-aware 3D shape and texture morphing directly from multi-view images. While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables photorealistic rendering, its unstructured nature often leads to catastrophic geometric fragmentation during morphing. Conversely, traditional mesh-based morphing enforces structural integrity but mandates pristine input topology and struggles with complex appearances. Our method resolves this dichotomy by employing a mesh-guided strategy where a coarse, extracted base mesh acts as a flexible geometric anchor. This anchor provides the necessary topological scaffolding to guide unstructured Gaussians, successfully compensating for mesh extraction artifacts and topological limitations. Furthermore, we propose a novel dual-domain optimization strategy that leverages this hybrid representation to establish unsupervised semantic correspondence, synergizing geodesic regularizations for shape preservation with texture-aware constraints for coherent color evolution. This integrated approach ensures stable, physically plausible transformations without requiring labeled data, specialized 3D assets, or category-specific templates. On the proposed TexMorph benchmark, METHODNAME substantially outperforms prior 2D and 3D methods, yielding fully textured, topologically robust 3D morphing while reducing color consistency error (Delta E) by 22.2% and EI by 26.2%. Project page: https://baiyunshu.github.io/GAUSSIANMORPHING.github.io/
comment: Project page: https://baiyunshu.github.io/GAUSSIANMORPHING.github.io/
♻ ☆ Splatography: Sparse multi-view dynamic Gaussian Splatting for filmmaking challenges IEEE
Deformable Gaussian Splatting (GS) accomplishes photorealistic dynamic 3-D reconstruction from dense multi-view video (MVV) by learning to deform a canonical GS representation. However, in filmmaking, tight budgets can result in sparse camera configurations, which limits state-of-the-art (SotA) methods when capturing complex dynamic features. To address this issue, we introduce an approach that splits the canonical Gaussians and deformation field into foreground and background components using a sparse set of masks for frames at t=0. Each representation is separately trained on different loss functions during canonical pre-training. Then, during dynamic training, different parameters are modeled for each deformation field following common filmmaking practices. The foreground stage contains diverse dynamic features so changes in color, position and rotation are learned. While, the background containing film-crew and equipment, is typically dimmer and less dynamic so only changes in point position are learned. Experiments on 3-D and 2.5-D entertainment datasets show that our method produces SotA qualitative and quantitative results; up to 3 PSNR higher with half the model size on 3-D scenes. Unlike the SotA and without the need for dense mask supervision, our method also produces segmented dynamic reconstructions including transparent and dynamic textures. Code and video comparisons are available online: https://azzarelli.github.io/splatographypage/index.html
comment: Accepted to IEEE International Conference on 3DV (2026)
♻ ☆ EgoEsportsQA: An Egocentric Video Benchmark for Perception and Reasoning in Esports
While video large language models (Video-LLMs) excel in understanding slow-paced, real-world egocentric videos, their capabilities in high-velocity, information-dense virtual environments remain under-explored. Existing benchmarks focus on daily activities, yet lack a rigorous testbed for evaluating fast, rule-bound reasoning in virtual scenarios. To fill this gap, we introduce EgoEsportsQA, a pioneering video question-answering (QA) benchmark for grounding perception and reasoning in expert esports knowledge. We curate 1,745 high-quality QA pairs from professional matches across 3 first-person shooter games via a scalable six-stage pipeline. These questions are structured into a two-dimensional decoupled taxonomy: 11 sub-tasks in the cognitive capability dimension (covering perception and reasoning levels) and 6 sub-tasks in the esports knowledge dimension. Comprehensive evaluations of state-of-the-art Video-LLMs reveal that current models still fail to achieve satisfactory performance, with the best model only 71.58%. The results expose notable gaps across both axes: models exhibit stronger capabilities in basic visual perception than in deep tactical reasoning, and they grasp overall macro-progression better than fine-grained micro-operations. Extensive ablation experiments demonstrate the intrinsic weaknesses of current Video-LLM architectures. Further analysis suggests that our dataset not only reveals the connections between real-world and virtual egocentric domains, but also offers guidance for optimizing downstream esports applications, thereby fostering the future advancement of Video-LLMs in various egocentric environments.
comment: Work in progress
♻ ☆ ADAPT: Benchmarking Commonsense Planning under Unspecified Affordance Constraints
Intelligent embodied agents should not simply follow instructions, as real-world environments often involve unexpected conditions and exceptions. However, existing methods usually focus on directly executing instructions, without considering whether the target objects can actually be manipulated, meaning they fail to assess available affordances. To address this limitation, we introduce DynAfford, a benchmark that evaluates embodied agents in dynamic environments where object affordances may change over time and are not specified in the instruction. DynAfford requires agents to perceive object states, infer implicit preconditions, and adapt their actions accordingly. To enable this capability, we introduce ADAPT, a plug-and-play module that augments existing planners with explicit affordance reasoning. Experiments demonstrate that incorporating ADAPT significantly improves robustness and task success across both seen and unseen environments. We also show that a domain-adapted, LoRA-finetuned vision-language model used as the affordance inference backend outperforms a commercial LLM (GPT-4o), highlighting the importance of task-aligned affordance grounding.
♻ ☆ Explaining Uncertainty in Multiple Sclerosis Cortical Lesion Segmentation Beyond Prediction Errors
Nataliia Molchanova, Pedro M. Gordaliza, Alessandro Cagol, Mario Ocampo--Pineda, Po--Jui Lu, Matthias Weigel, Xinjie Chen, Erin S. Beck, Haris Tsagkas, Daniel Reich, Anna Stölting, Pietro Maggi, Delphine Ribes, Adrien Depeursinge, Cristina Granziera, Henning Müller, Meritxell Bach Cuadra
Trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) is essential in healthcare, particularly for high-stakes tasks like medical image segmentation. Explainable AI and uncertainty quantification significantly enhance AI reliability by addressing key attributes such as robustness, usability, and explainability. Despite extensive technical advances in uncertainty quantification for medical imaging, understanding the clinical informativeness and interpretability of uncertainty remains limited. This study presents an interpretability framework for analyzing lesion-scale predictive uncertainty in cortical lesion segmentation in multiple sclerosis using deep ensembles. The analysis shifts the focus from the uncertainty--error relationship towards clinically relevant medical and engineering factors. Our findings reveal that instance-wise uncertainty is strongly related to lesion size, shape, and cortical involvement. Expert rater feedback confirms that similar factors impede annotator confidence. Evaluations conducted on two datasets (206 patients, almost 2000 lesions) under both in-domain and distribution-shift conditions highlight the utility of the framework in different scenarios.
♻ ☆ Video Panels for Long Video Understanding CVPR 2026
Recent Video-Language Models (VLMs) achieve promising results on long-video understanding, but their performance still lags behind that achieved on tasks involving images or short videos. This has led to great interest in improving the long context modeling of VLMs by introducing novel modules and additional complexity. In this paper, we take a different approach: rather than fine-tuning VLMs with the limited data available, we attempt to maximize the performance of existing models. To this end, we propose a novel visual prompting strategy specifically designed for long-video understanding. By combining multiple frames as panels into one image, we effectively trade off spatial details for temporal resolution. Our approach is training-free, parameter-free, and model-agnostic, and can be seamlessly integrated into existing VLMs. Extensive experiments on five established benchmarks across a wide range of model architectures, sizes, and context windows confirm the consistency of our approach. For the TimeScope (Long) dataset, which has the longest videos, the accuracy for video question answering is improved by up to 19.4%. Overall, our method raises the bar for long video understanding models. The code is available at https://fedespu.github.io/Video-Panels.
comment: CVPR 2026
♻ ☆ New Fourth-Order Grayscale Indicator-Based Telegraph Diffusion Model for Image Despeckling
Second-order PDE models have been widely used for suppressing multiplicative noise, but they often introduce blocky artifacts in the early stages of denoising. To resolve this, we propose a fourth-order nonlinear PDE model that integrates diffusion and wave properties. The diffusion process, guided by both the Laplacian and intensity values, reduces noise better than gradient-based methods, while the wave part keeps fine details and textures. The effectiveness of the proposed model is evaluated against two second-order anisotropic diffusion approaches using the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Mean Structural Similarity Index (MSSIM) for images with available ground truth. For SAR images, where a noise-free reference is unavailable, the Speckle Index (SI) is used to measure noise reduction. Additionally, we extend the proposed model to study color images by applying the denoising process independently to each channel, preserving both structure and color consistency. The same quantitative metrics PSNR and MSSIM are used for performance evaluation, ensuring a fair comparison across grayscale and color images. In all the cases, our computed results produce better results compared to existing models in this genre.
♻ ☆ PowerCLIP: Powerset Alignment for Contrastive Pre-Training
Contrastive vision-language pre-training frameworks such as CLIP have demonstrated impressive zero-shot performance across a range of vision-language tasks. Recent studies have shown that aligning individual text tokens with specific image patches or regions enhances fine-grained compositional understanding. However, it remains challenging to capture compositional semantics that span multiple image regions. To address this limitation, we propose PowerCLIP, a novel contrastive pre-training framework enhanced by powerset alignment, which exhaustively optimizes region-to-phrase alignments by minimizing the loss defined between powersets of image regions and textual parse trees. Since the naive powerset construction incurs exponential computational cost due to the combinatorial explosion in the number of region subsets, we introduce efficient non-linear aggregators (NLAs) that reduce complexity from O(2^M) to O(M) with respect to the number of regions M, while approximating the exact loss value with arbitrary precision. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that PowerCLIP outperforms state-of-the-art methods in zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks, underscoring the compositionality and robustness of our approach. Code is available at https://github.com/Masakichi210/PowerCLIP.
♻ ☆ Adaptive Quantized Planetary Crater Detection System for Autonomous Space Exploration
Autonomous planetary exploration demands real-time, high-fidelity environmental perception. Standard deep learning models require massive computational resources. Conversely, space-qualified onboard computers operate under strict power, thermal, and memory limits. This disparity creates a severe engineering bottleneck, preventing the deployment of highly capable perception architectures on extraterrestrial exploration platforms. In this foundational concept paper, we propose the theoretical architecture for the Adaptive Quantized Planetary Crater Detection System (AQ-PCDSys) to resolve this bottleneck. We present a mathematical blueprint integrating an INT8 Quantized Neural Network (QNN) designed specifically for Quantization Aware Training (QAT). To address sensor fragility, we mathematically formalize an Adaptive Multi-Sensor Fusion (AMF) module. By deriving the exact integer requantization multiplier required for spatial attention gating, this module actively selects and fuses Optical Imagery (OI) and Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) at the feature level, ensuring reliable perception during extreme cross-illuminations and optical hardware dropouts. Furthermore, the architecture introduces anchor-free, center-to-edge regression heads, protected by a localized FP16 coordinate conversion, to accurately frame asymmetrical lunar craters without catastrophic integer truncation. Rather than presenting physical hardware telemetry, this manuscript establishes the theoretical bounds, structural logic, and mathematical justifications for the architecture. We outline a rigorous Hardware-in-the-Loop (HITL) evaluation protocol to define the exact testing criteria required for future empirical validation, paving the way for next-generation space-mission software design.
comment: 14 pages, 7 figures. A foundational architectural blueprint for a deep-learning-based planetary crater detection system utilizing INT8 quantization and adaptive multi-sensor fusion for resource-constrained spaceflight hardware
♻ ☆ Removing Motion Artifact in MRI by Using a Perceptual Loss Driven Deep Learning Framework
Ziheng Guo, Danqun Zheng, Shuai Li, Chengwei Chen, Boyang Pan, Xuezhou Li, Ziqin Yu, Langdi Zhong, Chenwei Shao, Yun Bian, Nan-Jie Gong
Purpose: Deep learning-based MRI artifact correction methods often demonstrate poor generalization to clinical data. This limitation largely stems from the inability of deep learning models in reliably distinguishing motion artifacts from true anatomical structures, due to insufficient awareness of artifact characteristics. To address this challenge, we proposed PERCEPT-Net, a deep learning framework that enhances structure preserving and suppresses artifact through dedicated perceptual supervision.Method: PERCEPT-Net is built on a residual U-Net backbone and incorporates three auxiliary components. The first multi-scale recovery module is designed to preserve both global anatomical context and fine structural details, while the second dual attention mechanisms further improve performance by prioritizing clinically relevant features. At the core of the framework is the third Motion Perceptual Loss (MPL), an artifact-aware perceptual supervision strategy that learns generalized representations of MRI motion artifacts, enabling the model to effectively suppress them while maintaining anatomical fidelity. The model is trained on a hybrid dataset comprising both real and simulated paired volumes, and its performance is validated on a prospective test set using a combination of quantitative metrics and qualitative assessments by experienced radiologists.Result: PERCEPT-Net outperformed state-of-the-art methods on clinical data. Ablation studies identified the Motion Perceptual Loss as the primary contributor to this performance, yielding significant improvements in structural consistency and tissue contrast, as reflected by higher SSIM and PSNR values. These findings were further corroborated by radiologist evaluations, which demonstrated significantly higher diagnostic confidence in the corrected volumes.
comment: 7 figrues, 6 tables
♻ ☆ When Seeing Overrides Knowing: Disentangling Knowledge Conflicts in Vision-Language Models ACL 2026
Vision-language models (VLMs) increasingly combine visual and textual information to perform complex tasks. However, conflicts between their internal knowledge and external visual input can lead to hallucinations and unreliable predictions. In this work, we investigate the mechanisms that VLMs use to resolve cross-modal conflicts by introducing WHOOPS-AHA!, a dataset of multimodal counterfactual queries that deliberately contradict internal commonsense knowledge. Through logit inspection, we identify a small set of attention heads that mediate this conflict. By intervening in these heads, we can steer the model towards its internal parametric knowledge or the visual information. Our results show that attention patterns on these heads effectively locate image regions that influence visual overrides, providing a more precise attribution compared to gradient-based methods.
comment: ACL 2026 (Main)
♻ ☆ Composed Vision-Language Retrieval for Skin Cancer Case Search via Joint Alignment of Global and Local Representations
Medical image retrieval aims to identify clinically relevant lesion cases to support diagnostic decision making, education, and quality control. In practice, retrieval queries often combine a reference lesion image with textual descriptors such as dermoscopic features. We study composed vision-language retrieval for skin cancer, where each query consists of an image to text pair and the database contains biopsy-confirmed, multi-class disease cases. We propose a transformer based framework that learns hierarchical composed query representations and performs joint global-local alignment between queries and candidate images. Local alignment aggregates discriminative regions via multiple spatial attention masks, while global alignment provides holistic semantic supervision. The final similarity is computed through a convex, domain-informed weighting that emphasizes clinically salient local evidence while preserving global consistency. Experiments on the public Derm7pt dataset demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods. The proposed framework enables efficient access to relevant medical records and supports practical clinical deployment.
♻ ☆ CaTS-Bench: Can Language Models Describe Time Series?
Time series captioning, the task of describing time series in natural language, requires numeric and temporal reasoning, trend interpretation, and contextual understanding. Existing benchmarks, however, often rely on fully synthetic or generic captions, and typically neglect metadata and visual representations. We introduce CaTS-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for Context-aware Time Series reasoning across 11 diverse domains, centered on a gold-standard evaluation set of 1746 human-rewritten captions that measure how effectively models translate numeric trends into immediately interpretable narratives. To address the scarcity of human-annotated data, we also propose a scalable pipeline for generating high-fidelity synthetic captions, the quality of which we validate. We evaluate leading Vision-Language Models on our benchmark, revealing that even proprietary models struggle to capture numeric nuances in temporal descriptions, while finetuning open-source models on synthetic data yields substantial performance gains. Finally, we release a diagnostic suite of 910 multiple-choice questions and use tailored numeric metrics to gauge time-series-specific reasoning capabilities, establishing CaTS-Bench as a reliable foundation for grounded, multimodal text generation in numeric domains.
comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 4 tables in the main paper. Many more in the appendix
♻ ☆ Forest Before Trees: Latent Superposition for Efficient Visual Reasoning ACL 2026
While Chain-of-Thought empowers Large Vision-Language Models with multi-step reasoning, explicit textual rationales suffer from an information bandwidth bottleneck, where continuous visual details are discarded during discrete tokenization. Recent latent reasoning methods attempt to address this challenge, but often fall prey to premature semantic collapse due to rigid autoregressive objectives. In this paper, we propose Laser, a novel paradigm that reformulates visual deduction via Dynamic Windowed Alignment Learning (DWAL). Instead of forcing a point-wise prediction, Laser aligns the latent state with a dynamic validity window of future semantics. This mechanism enforces a "Forest-before-Trees" cognitive hierarchy, enabling the model to maintain a probabilistic superposition of global features before narrowing down to local details. Crucially, Laser maintains interpretability via decodable trajectories while stabilizing unconstrained learning via Self-Refined Superposition. Extensive experiments on 6 benchmarks demonstrate that Laser achieves state-of-the-art performance among latent reasoning methods, surpassing the strong baseline Monet by 5.03% on average. Notably, it achieves these gains with extreme efficiency, reducing inference tokens by more than 97%, while demonstrating robust generalization to out-of-distribution domains.
comment: Accepted by ACL 2026 Main Conference
♻ ☆ DeepDetect: Learning All-in-One Dense Keypoints
Keypoint detection is the foundation of many computer vision tasks, including image registration, structure-from-motion, 3D reconstruction, visual odometry, and SLAM. Traditional detectors (SIFT, ORB, BRISK, FAST, etc.) and learning-based methods (SuperPoint, R2D2, QuadNet, LIFT, etc.) have shown strong performance gains yet suffer from key limitations: sensitivity to photometric changes, low keypoint density and repeatability, limited adaptability to challenging scenes, and lack of semantic understanding, often failing to prioritize visually important regions. We present DeepDetect, an intelligent, all-in-one, dense detector that unifies the strengths of classical detectors using deep learning. Firstly, we create ground-truth masks by fusing outputs of 7 keypoint and 2 edge detectors, extracting diverse visual cues from corners and blobs to prominent edges and textures in the images. Afterwards, a lightweight and efficient model: ESPNet, is trained using fused masks as labels, enabling DeepDetect to focus semantically on images while producing highly dense keypoints, that are adaptable to diverse and visually degraded conditions. Evaluations on Oxford, HPatches, and Middlebury datasets demonstrate that DeepDetect surpasses other detectors achieving maximum values of 0.5143 (average keypoint density), 0.9582 (average repeatability), 338,118 (correct matches), and 842,045 (voxels in stereo 3D reconstruction).
comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, 6 equations
♻ ☆ SHRUG-FM: Reliability-Aware Foundation Models for Earth Observation CVPR
Maria Gonzalez-Calabuig, Kai-Hendrik Cohrs, Vishal Nedungadi, Zuzanna Osika, Ruben Cartuyvels, Steffen Knoblauch, Joppe Massant, Shruti Nath, Patrick Ebel, Vasileios Sitokonstantinou
Geospatial foundation models (GFMs) for Earth observation often fail to perform reliably in environments underrepresented during pretraining. We introduce SHRUG-FM, a framework for reliability-aware prediction that enables GFMs to identify and abstain from likely failures. Our approach integrates three complementary signals: geophysical out-of-distribution (OOD) detection in the input space, OOD detection in the embedding space, and task-specific predictive uncertainty. We evaluate SHRUG-FM across three high-stakes rapid-mapping tasks: burn scar segmentation, flood mapping, and landslide detection. Our results show that SHRUG-FM consistently reduces prediction risk on retained samples, outperforming established single-signal baselines like predictive entropy. Crucially, by utilizing a shallow "glass-box" decision tree for signal fusion, SHRUG-FM provides interpretable abstention thresholds. It builds a pathway toward safer and more interpretable deployment of GFMs in climate-sensitive applications, bridging the gap between benchmark performance and real-world reliability.
comment: Accepted for proceedings at CVPR EarthVision 2026
♻ ☆ Scaling Beyond Context: A Survey of Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Document Understanding ACL2026
Sensen Gao, Shanshan Zhao, Xu Jiang, Lunhao Duan, Yong Xien Chng, Qing-Guo Chen, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang, Jia-Wang Bian, Mingming Gong
Document understanding is critical for applications from financial analysis to scientific discovery. Current approaches, whether OCR-based pipelines feeding Large Language Models (LLMs) or native Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), face key limitations: the former loses structural detail, while the latter struggles with context modeling. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) helps ground models in external data, but documents' multimodal nature, i.e., combining text, tables, charts, and layout, demands a more advanced paradigm: Multimodal RAG. This approach enables holistic retrieval and reasoning across all modalities, unlocking comprehensive document intelligence. Recognizing its importance, this paper presents a systematic survey of Multimodal RAG for document understanding. We propose a taxonomy based on domain, retrieval modality, and granularity, and review advances involving graph structures and agentic frameworks. We also summarize key datasets, benchmarks, applications and industry deployment, and highlight open challenges in efficiency, fine-grained representation, and robustness, providing a roadmap for future progress in document AI.
comment: Accepted by ACL2026 Main Conference; Project is available at https://github.com/SensenGao/Multimodal-RAG-Survey-For-Document
♻ ☆ Concept-wise Attention for Fine-grained Concept Bottleneck Models CVPR 2026
Recently impressive performance has been achieved in Concept Bottleneck Models (CBM) by utilizing the image-text alignment learned by a large pre-trained vision-language model (i.e. CLIP). However, there exist two key limitations in concept modeling. Existing methods often suffer from pre-training biases, manifested as granularity misalignment or reliance on structural priors. Moreover, fine-tuning with Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) loss treats each concept independently, which ignores mutual exclusivity among concepts, leading to suboptimal alignment. To address these limitations, we propose Concept-wise Attention for Fine-grained Concept Bottleneck Models (CoAt-CBM), a novel framework that achieves adaptive fine-grained image-concept alignment and high interpretability. Specifically, CoAt-CBM employs learnable concept-wise visual queries to adaptively obtain fine-grained concept-wise visual embeddings, which are then used to produce a concept score vector. Then, a novel concept contrastive optimization guides the model to handle the relative importance of the concept scores, enabling concept predictions to faithfully reflect the image content and improved alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoAt-CBM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The codes will be available upon acceptance.
comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Accepted by CVPR 2026 Findings
♻ ☆ RainFusion2.0: Temporal-Spatial Awareness and Hardware-Efficient Block-wise Sparse Attention
Aiyue Chen, Yaofu Liu, Junjian Huang, Guang Lian, Yiwu Yao, Wangli Lan, Jing Lin, Zhixin Ma, Tingting Zhou
In video and image generation tasks, Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models incur extremely high computational costs due to attention mechanisms, which limits their practical applications. Furthermore, with hardware advancements, a wide range of devices besides graphics processing unit (GPU), such as application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), have been increasingly adopted for model inference. Sparse attention, which leverages the inherent sparsity of attention by skipping computations for insignificant tokens, is an effective approach to mitigate computational costs. However, existing sparse attention methods have two critical limitations: the overhead of sparse pattern prediction and the lack of hardware generality, as most of these methods are designed for GPU. To address these challenges, this study proposes RainFusion2.0, which aims to develop an online adaptive, hardware-efficient, and low-overhead sparse attention mechanism to accelerate both video and image generative models, with robust performance across diverse hardware platforms. Key technical insights include: (1) leveraging block-wise mean values as representative tokens for sparse mask prediction; (2) implementing spatiotemporal-aware token permutation; and (3) introducing a first-frame sink mechanism specifically designed for video generation scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that RainFusion2.0 can achieve 80% sparsity while achieving an end-to-end speedup of 1.5~1.8x without compromising video quality. Moreover, RainFusion2.0 demonstrates effectiveness across various generative models and validates its generalization across diverse hardware platforms.
♻ ☆ End-to-end Listen, Look, Speak and Act
Human interaction is inherently multimodal and full-duplex: we listen while watching, speak while acting, and fluidly adapt to turn-taking and interruptions. Realizing these capabilities is essential for building models simulating humans. We present ELLSA (End-to-end Listen, Look, Speak and Act), which, to our knowledge, is the first full-duplex, end-to-end model that simultaneously perceives and generates across vision, text, speech, and action within a single architecture, enabling interaction patterns previously out of reach, yielding more natural, human-like behaviors. At its core is a novel SA-MoE architecture (Self-Attention Mixture-of-Experts) that routes each modality to specialized experts and fuses them through a unified attention backbone. This provides a generalizable solution for joint multimodal perception and concurrent generation, leveraging strong pre-trained components while enabling efficient modality integration and mitigating modality interference. On speech-interaction and robot-manipulation benchmarks, ELLSA matches modality-specific baselines, while uniquely supporting advanced multimodal and full-duplex behaviors such as dialogue and action turn-taking, defective instruction rejection, speaking-while-acting, context-grounded visual question answering, and action barge-ins. We contend that ELLSA represents a step toward more natural and general interactive intelligence, contributing to the broader pursuit of artificial general intelligence. All data, code and model checkpoints will be released at https://github.com/bytedance/SALMONN/tree/ELLSA.
comment: 22 pages, 8 figures
♻ ☆ StableMTL: Repurposing Latent Diffusion Models for Multi-Task Learning from Partially Annotated Synthetic Datasets CVPR 2026
Multi-task learning for dense prediction is limited by the need for extensive annotation for every task, though recent works have explored training with partial task labels. Leveraging the generalization power of diffusion models, we extend the partial learning setup to a zero-shot setting, training a multi-task model on multiple synthetic datasets, each labeled for only a subset of tasks. Our method, StableMTL, repurposes image generators for latent regression. Adapting a denoising framework with task encoding, per-task conditioning and a tailored training scheme. Instead of per-task losses requiring careful balancing, a unified latent loss is adopted, enabling seamless scaling to more tasks. To encourage inter-task synergy, we introduce a multi-stream model with a task-attention mechanism that converts N-to-N task interactions into efficient 1-to-N attention, promoting effective cross-task sharing. StableMTL outperforms baselines on 7 tasks across 8 benchmarks.
comment: Accepted at CVPR 2026. Code is at https://github.com/astra-vision/StableMTL
♻ ☆ Vision-Braille: A Curriculum Learning Toolkit and Braille-Chinese Corpus for Braille Translation
We present Vision-Braille, the first publicly available end-to-end system for translating Chinese Braille extracted from images into written Chinese. This system addresses the unique challenges of limited annotated resources and tone omission. It integrates a robust Braille OCR pipeline with an LLM fine-tuned for sequence-to-sequence translation. We construct a synthetic Braille-Chinese corpus, including tone-omission variants that mimic authentic Braille writing habits. We fine-tune the model using a four-stage curriculum: starting with sentence-level data with full tone markers, progressing to passage-level data, then applying a tone-omission schedule of decreasing retention, and finally consolidating on passages with heavy tone omission. On passage-level translation with 10\% tone retention, \methodname{} achieves 83.28 BLEU. Vision-Braille offers an inclusive NLP solution that empowers students with visual impairments to participate in mainstream education by enabling teachers to grade Braille homework without extensive training. Our code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EMNLP_2026_Supp_Code_Data-2F6D.
♻ ☆ LLaVA-Octopus: Unlocking Instruction-Driven Adaptive Projector Fusion for Video Understanding
In this paper, we introduce LLaVA-Octopus, a novel video multimodal large language model. LLaVA-Octopus adaptively weights features from different visual projectors based on user instructions, enabling us to leverage the complementary strengths of each projector. We observe that different visual projectors exhibit distinct characteristics when handling specific tasks. For instance, some projectors excel at capturing static details, while others are more effective at processing temporal information, and some are better suited for tasks requiring temporal coherence. By dynamically adjusting feature weights according to user instructions, LLaVA-Octopus dynamically selects and combines the most suitable features, significantly enhancing the model's performance in multimodal tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that LLaVA-Octopus achieves excellent performance across multiple benchmarks, especially in tasks such as video question answering, long video understanding, and comprehensive multi-choices benchmarks, highlighting its broad application potential.
comment: 18 pages, 10 figures
♻ ☆ Constructive Distortion: Improving MLLMs with Attention-Guided Image Warping ICLR 2026
Dwip Dalal, Gautam Vashishtha, Utkarsh Mishra, Jeonghwan Kim, Madhav Kanda, Hyeonjeong Ha, Svetlana Lazebnik, Heng Ji, Unnat Jain
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often miss small details and spatial relations in cluttered scenes, leading to errors in fine-grained perceptual grounding. We introduce AttWarp, a lightweight method that allocates more resolution to query-relevant content while compressing less informative areas, all while preserving global context. At test time, the approach uses an MLLM's cross-modal attention to perform rectilinear warping of the input image, reallocating spatial resolution toward regions the model deems important, without changing model weights or architecture. This attention-guided warping preserves all original image information but redistributes it non-uniformly, so small objects and subtle relationships become easier for the same model to read while the global layout remains intact. Across five benchmarks (TextVQA, GQA, DocVQA, POPE, MMMU) and four MLLMs (LLaVA, Qwen-VL, InternVL, and InstructBLIP), AttWarp consistently improves accuracy, strengthens compositional reasoning, and reduces hallucinations, outperforming four competitive baselines that manipulate raw images at test time. Together, these results show that attention-guided warping prioritizes information relevant to the query while preserving context, and that the same MLLMs perform better when given such warped inputs.
comment: Accepted at ICLR 2026
♻ ☆ Are We Using the Right Benchmark: An Evaluation Framework for Visual Token Compression Methods ACL2026
Chenfei Liao, Wensong Wang, Zichen Wen, Xu Zheng, Yiyu Wang, Haocong He, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Lutao Jiang, Xin Zou, Yuqian Fu, Bin Ren, Linfeng Zhang, Xuming Hu
Recent efforts to accelerate inference in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have largely focused on visual token compression. The effectiveness of these methods is commonly evaluated by measuring the accuracy drop on existing MLLM benchmarks before and after compression. However, these benchmarks are originally designed to assess general perception and reasoning abilities, rather than the specific challenges posed by visual token compression, leading to a fundamental task mismatch. In this work, we uncover a counterintuitive yet consistent phenomenon: simple image downsampling outperforms many advanced visual token compression methods across multiple widely used benchmarks. Through a comprehensive empirical study spanning eight popular benchmarks and multiple state-of-the-art compression techniques, we show that (i) current benchmarks contain substantial noise (task-irrelevant samples) for evaluating visual token compression, and (ii) downsampling can act as an effective data filter that distinguishes between simple and difficult samples with respect to compression sensitivity. Motivated by these findings, we propose VTC-Bench, an evaluation framework that explicitly leverages downsampling as a discriminator to denoise existing benchmarks, enabling a fairer and more meaningful additional assessment of visual token compression methods.
comment: Accepted by ACL2026 Main. Code: https://github.com/Chenfei-Liao/VTC-Bench; Project Page: https://chenfei-liao.github.io/VTC-Bench-Page/
♻ ☆ VIDEOP2R: Video Understanding from Perception to Reasoning CVPR
Yifan Jiang, Yueying Wang, Rui Zhao, Toufiq Parag, Zhimin Chen, Zhenyu Liao, Jayakrishnan Unnikrishnan
Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT), a two-stage framework consisting of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promising results on improving reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). Yet extending RFT to large video language models (LVLMs) remains challenging. We propose VideoP2R, a novel process-aware video RFT framework that enhances video reasoning by modeling perception and reasoning as distinct processes. In the SFT stage, we develop a three-step pipeline to generate VideoP2R-CoT-162K, a high-quality, process-aware chain-of-thought (CoT) dataset for perception and reasoning. In the RL stage, we introduce a novel process-aware group relative policy optimization (PA-GRPO) algorithm that supplies separate rewards for perception and reasoning. Extensive experiments show that VideoP2R achieves state-of-the-art (SotA) performance on six out of seven video reasoning and understanding benchmarks. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of our process-aware modeling and PA-GRPO and demonstrate that model's perception output is information-sufficient for downstream reasoning. Our project page is available at https://videop2r.github.io/videop2r/.
comment: CVPR Findings 2026
♻ ☆ MLE-UVAD: Minimal Latent Entropy Autoencoder for Fully Unsupervised Video Anomaly Detection
Yuang Geng, Junkai Zhou, Kang Yang, Pan He, Zhuoyang Zhou, Jose C. Principe, Joel Harley, Ivan Ruchkin
In this paper, we address the challenging problem of single-scene, fully unsupervised video anomaly detection (VAD), where raw videos containing both normal and abnormal events are used directly for training and testing without any labels. This differs sharply from prior work that either requires extensive labeling (fully or weakly supervised) or depends on normal-only videos (one-class classification), which are vulnerable to distribution shifts and contamination. We propose an entropy-guided autoencoder that detects anomalies through reconstruction error by reconstructing normal frames well while making anomalies reconstruct poorly. The key idea is to combine the standard reconstruction loss with a novel Minimal Latent Entropy (MLE) loss in the autoencoder. Reconstruction loss alone maps normal and abnormal inputs to distinct latent clusters due to their inherent differences, but also risks reconstructing anomalies too well to detect. Therefore, MLE loss addresses this by minimizing the entropy of latent embeddings, encouraging them to concentrate around high-density regions. Since normal frames dominate the raw video, sparse anomalous embeddings are pulled into the normal cluster, so the decoder emphasizes normal patterns and produces poor reconstructions for anomalies. This dual-loss design produces a clear reconstruction gap that enables effective anomaly detection. Extensive experiments on two widely used benchmarks and a challenging self-collected driving dataset demonstrate that our method achieves robust and superior performance over baselines.
♻ ☆ OVOD-Agent: A Markov-Bandit Framework for Proactive Visual Reasoning and Self-Evolving Detection
Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) aims to enable detectors to generalize across categories by leveraging semantic information. Although existing methods are pretrained on large vision-language datasets, their inference is still limited to fixed category names, creating a gap between multimodal training and unimodal inference. Previous work has shown that improving textual representation can significantly enhance OVOD performance, indicating that the textual space is still underexplored. To this end, we propose OVOD-Agent, which transforms passive category matching into proactive visual reasoning and self-evolving detection. Inspired by the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm, OVOD-Agent extends the textual optimization process into an interpretable Visual-CoT with explicit actions. OVOD's lightweight nature makes LLM-based management unsuitable; instead, we model visual context transitions as a Weakly Markovian Decision Process (w-MDP) over eight state spaces, which naturally represents the agent's state, memory, and interaction dynamics. A Bandit module generates exploration signals under limited supervision, helping the agent focus on uncertain regions and adapt its detection policy. We further integrate Markov transition matrices with Bandit trajectories for self-supervised Reward Model (RM) optimization, forming a closed loop from Bandit exploration to RM learning. Experiments on COCO and LVIS show that OVOD-Agent provides consistent improvements across OVOD backbones, particularly on rare categories, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
♻ ☆ EmoVerse: A MLLMs-Driven Emotion Representation Dataset for Interpretable Visual Emotion Analysis CVPR 2026
Visual Emotion Analysis (VEA) aims to bridge the affective gap between visual content and human emotional responses. Despite its promise, progress in this field remains limited by the lack of open-source and interpretable datasets. Most existing studies assign a single discrete emotion label to an entire image, offering limited insight into how visual elements contribute to emotion. In this work, we introduce EmoVerse, a large-scale open-source dataset that enables interpretable visual emotion analysis through multi-layered, knowledge-graph-inspired annotations. By decomposing emotions into Background-Attribute-Subject (B-A-S) triplets and grounding each element to visual regions, EmoVerse provides word-level and subject-level emotional reasoning. With over 219k images, the dataset further includes dual annotations in Categorical Emotion States (CES) and Dimensional Emotion Space (DES), facilitating unified discrete and continuous emotion representation. A novel multi-stage pipeline ensures high annotation reliability with minimal human effort. Finally, we introduce an interpretable model that maps visual cues into DES representations and provides detailed attribution explanations. Together, the dataset, pipeline, and model form a comprehensive foundation for advancing explainable high-level emotion understanding.
comment: 11 pages, 7 figures. This is a preprint version of a paper submitted to CVPR 2026
♻ ☆ MegaRAG: Multimodal Knowledge Graph-Based Retrieval Augmented Generation ACL 2026
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to dynamically access external information, which is powerful for answering questions over previously unseen documents. Nonetheless, they struggle with high-level conceptual understanding and holistic comprehension due to limited context windows, which constrain their ability to perform deep reasoning over long-form, domain-specific content such as full-length books. To solve this problem, knowledge graphs (KGs) have been leveraged to provide entity-centric structure and hierarchical summaries, offering more structured support for reasoning. However, existing KG-based RAG solutions remain restricted to text-only inputs and fail to leverage the complementary insights provided by other modalities such as vision. On the other hand, reasoning from visual documents requires textual, visual, and spatial cues into structured, hierarchical concepts. To address this issue, we introduce a multimodal knowledge graph-based RAG that enables cross-modal reasoning for better content understanding. Our method incorporates visual cues into the construction of knowledge graphs, the retrieval phase, and the answer generation process. Experimental results across both global and fine-grained question answering tasks show that our approach consistently outperforms existing RAG-based approaches on both textual and multimodal corpora.
comment: ACL 2026
♻ ☆ PlanViz: Evaluating Planning-Oriented Image Generation and Editing for Computer-Use Tasks
Junxian Li, Kai Liu, Leyang Chen, Weida Wang, Zhixin Wang, Jiaqi Xu, Fan Li, Renjing Pei, Linghe Kong, Yulun Zhang
Unified multimodal models (UMMs) have shown impressive capabilities in generating natural images and supporting multimodal reasoning. However, their potential in supporting computer-use planning tasks, which are closely related to our lives, remain underexplored. Image generation and editing in computer-use tasks require capabilities like spatial reasoning and procedural understanding, and it is still unknown whether UMMs have these capabilities to finish these tasks or not. Therefore, we propose PlanViz, a new benchmark designed to evaluate image generation and editing for computer-use tasks. To achieve the goal of our evaluation, we focus on sub-tasks which frequently involve in daily life and require planning. Specifically, three representative sub-tasks are designed: route planning, work diagramming, and web&UI displaying. We address challenges in data quality ensuring by curating human-annotated questions and reference images, and a quality control process. For detailed and exact evaluation, a task-adaptive score, PlanScore, is proposed. The score helps understanding the correctness, visual quality and efficiency of generated images. Through experiments, we highlight key limitations and opportunities for future research on this topic.
comment: The main part of our paper: PlanViz Code is at: https://github.com/lijunxian111/PlanViz Supplementary material is at: https://github.com/lijunxian111/PlanViz/releases/tag/v1
♻ ☆ Pref-GRPO: Pairwise Preference Reward-based GRPO for Stable Text-to-Image Reinforcement Learning
Yibin Wang, Zhimin Li, Yuhang Zang, Yujie Zhou, Jiazi Bu, Chunyu Wang, Qinglin Lu, Cheng Jin, Jiaqi Wang
Recent advancements highlight the importance of GRPO-based reinforcement learning methods and benchmarking in enhancing text-to-image (T2I) generation. However, current methods using pointwise reward models (RM) for scoring generated images are susceptible to reward hacking. We reveal that this happens when minimal score differences between images are amplified after normalization, creating illusory advantages that drive the model to over-optimize for trivial gains, ultimately destabilizing the image generation process. To address this, we propose Pref-GRPO, a pairwise preference reward-based GRPO method that shifts the optimization objective from score maximization to preference fitting, ensuring more stable training. In Pref-GRPO, images are pairwise compared within each group using preference RM, and the win rate is used as the reward signal. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PREF-GRPO differentiates subtle image quality differences, providing more stable advantages and mitigating reward hacking. Additionally, existing T2I benchmarks are limited by coarse evaluation criteria, hindering comprehensive model assessment. To solve this, we introduce UniGenBench, a unified T2I benchmark comprising 600 prompts across 5 main themes and 20 subthemes. It evaluates semantic consistency through 10 primary and 27 sub-criteria, leveraging MLLM for benchmark construction and evaluation. Our benchmarks uncover the strengths and weaknesses of both open and closed-source T2I models and validate the effectiveness of Pref-GRPO.
comment: Project Page: https://codegoat24.github.io/UnifiedReward/Pref-GRPO
♻ ☆ OmniZip: Audio-Guided Dynamic Token Compression for Fast Omnimodal Large Language Models CVPR 2026
Omnimodal large language models (OmniLLMs) have attracted increasing research attention of late towards unified audio-video understanding. However, the high computational cost of processing longer joint audio-video token sequences has become a key bottleneck. Existing token compression methods have not addressed the emerging need to jointly compress multimodal tokens. To bridge this gap, we present OmniZip, a training-free, audio-guided audio-visual token-compression framework that optimizes multimodal token representation and accelerates model inference. Specifically, OmniZip first identifies salient audio tokens, then computes an audio retention score for each time group to capture information density, thereby dynamically guiding video token pruning and preserving cues from audio anchors enhanced by cross-modal similarity. For each time window, OmniZip compresses the video tokens using an interleaved spatio-temporal scheme. Extensive results demonstrate the merits of OmniZip: it achieves a 3.42X inference speedup and a 1.4X memory reduction over other top-performing counterparts, while maintaining the performance of OmniLLMs without training.
comment: [CVPR 2026] Code Link: https://github.com/KD-TAO/OmniZip
♻ ☆ Combined Hyperbolic and Euclidean Soft Triple Loss Beyond the Single Space Deep Metric Learning
Deep metric learning (DML) aims to learn a neural network mapping data to an embedding space, which can represent semantic similarity between data points. Hyperbolic space is attractive for DML since it can represent richer structures, such as tree structures. DML in hyperbolic space is based on pair-based loss or unsupervised regularization loss. On the other hand, supervised proxy-based losses in hyperbolic space have not been reported yet due to some issues in applying proxy-based losses in a hyperbolic space. However, proxy-based losses are attractive for large-scale datasets since they have less training complexity. To address these, this paper proposes the Combined Hyperbolic and Euclidean Soft Triple (CHEST) loss. CHEST loss is composed of the proxy-based losses in hyperbolic and Euclidean spaces and the regularization loss based on hyperbolic hierarchical clustering. We find that the combination of hyperbolic and Euclidean spaces improves DML accuracy and learning stability for both spaces. Finally, we evaluate the CHEST loss on four benchmark datasets, achieving a new state-of-the-art performance.
comment: 12 pages, 3 figures
♻ ☆ Live Avatar: Streaming Real-time Audio-Driven Avatar Generation with Infinite Length
Yubo Huang, Hailong Guo, Fangtai Wu, Weiqiang Wang, Shifeng Zhang, Shijie Huang, Qijun Gan, Lin Liu, Sirui Zhao, Enhong Chen, Jiaming Liu, Steven Hoi
Audio-driven avatar interaction demands real-time, streaming, and infinite-length generation -- capabilities fundamentally at odds with the sequential denoising and long-horizon drift of current diffusion models. We present Live Avatar, an algorithm-system co-designed framework that addresses both challenges for a 14-billion-parameter diffusion model. On the algorithm side, a two-stage pipeline distills a pretrained bidirectional model into a causal, few-step streaming one, while a set of complementary long-horizon strategies eliminate identity drift and visual artifacts, enabling stable autoregressive generation exceeding 10000 seconds. On the system side, Timestep-forcing Pipeline Parallelism (TPP) assigns each GPU a fixed denoising timestep, converting the sequential diffusion chain into an asynchronous spatial pipeline that simultaneously boosts throughput and improves temporal consistency. Live Avatar achieves 45 FPS with a TTFF of 1.21\,s on 5 H800 GPUs, and to our knowledge is the first to enable practical real-time streaming of a 14B diffusion model for infinite-length avatar generation. We further introduce GenBench, a standardized long-form benchmark, to facilitate reproducible evaluation. Our project page is at https://liveavatar.github.io/.
♻ ☆ CORP: A Multi-Modal Dataset for Campus-Oriented Roadside Perception Tasks
Beibei Wang, Zijian Yu, Lu Zhang, Jingjing Huang, Yao Li, Haojie Ren, Yuxuan Xiao, Yuru Peng, Jianmin Ji, Yu Zhang, Yanyong Zhang
Numerous roadside perception datasets have been introduced to propel advancements in autonomous driving and intelligent transportation systems research and development. However, it has been observed that the majority of their concentrates is on urban arterial roads, inadvertently overlooking residential areas such as parks and campuses that exhibit entirely distinct characteristics. In light of this gap, we propose CORP, which stands as the first public benchmark dataset tailored for multi-modal roadside perception tasks under campus scenarios. Collected in a university campus, CORP consists of over 205k images plus 102k point clouds captured from 18 cameras and 9 LiDAR sensors. These sensors with different configurations are mounted on roadside utility poles to provide diverse viewpoints within the campus region. The annotations of CORP encompass multi-dimensional information beyond 2D and 3D bounding boxes, providing extra support for 3D seamless tracking and instance segmentation with unique IDs and pixel masks for identifying targets, to enhance the understanding of objects and their behaviors distributed across the campus premises. Unlike other roadside datasets about urban traffic, CORP extends the spectrum to highlight the challenges for multi-modal perception in campuses and other residential areas.
♻ ☆ FlowCoMotion: Text-to-Motion Generation via Token-Latent Flow Modeling
Text-to-motion generation is driven by learning motion representations for semantic alignment with language. Existing methods rely on either continuous or discrete motion representations. However, continuous representations entangle semantics with dynamics, while discrete representations lose fine-grained motion details. In this context, we propose FlowCoMotion, a novel motion generation framework that unifies both treatments from a modeling perspective. Specifically, FlowCoMotion employs token-latent coupling to capture both semantic content and high-fidelity motion details. In the latent branch, we apply multi-view distillation to regularize the continuous latent space, while in the token branch we use discrete temporal resolution quantization to extract high-level semantic cues. The motion latent is then obtained by combining the representations from the two branches through a token-latent coupling network. Subsequently, a velocity field is predicted based on the textual conditions. An ODE solver integrates this velocity field from a simple prior, thereby guiding the sample to the potential state of the target motion. Extensive experiments show that FlowCoMotion achieves competitive performance on text-to-motion benchmarks, including HumanML3D and SnapMoGen.
comment: 23 pages, 14 figures
♻ ☆ QuadSync: Quadrifocal Tensor Synchronization via Tucker Decomposition CVPR 2026
In structure from motion, quadrifocal tensors capture more information than their pairwise counterparts (essential matrices), yet they have often been thought of as impractical and only of theoretical interest. In this work, we challenge such beliefs by providing a new framework to recover $n$ cameras from the corresponding collection of quadrifocal tensors. We form the block quadrifocal tensor and show that it admits a Tucker decomposition whose factor matrices are the stacked camera matrices, and which thus has a multilinear rank of (4,~4,~4,~4) independent of $n$. We develop the first synchronization algorithm for quadrifocal tensors, using Tucker decomposition, alternating direction method of multipliers, and iteratively reweighted least squares. We further establish relationships between the block quadrifocal, trifocal, and bifocal tensors, and introduce an algorithm that jointly synchronizes these three entities. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods on modern datasets, indicating the potential and importance of using higher-order information in synchronization.
comment: 30 pages, accepted to CVPR 2026 as an Oral Presentation. Complementary code can be found at github.com/dmiao153/QuadSync
♻ ☆ Compressing then Matching: An Efficient Pre-training Paradigm for Multimodal Embedding ACL2026
Da Li, Yuxiao Luo, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo, Wei Yuan, Biao Yang, Yan Wang, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Guorui Zhou
Multimodal Large Language Models advance multimodal representation learning by acquiring transferable semantic embeddings, thereby substantially enhancing performance across a range of vision-language tasks, including cross-modal retrieval, clustering, and classification. An effective embedding is expected to comprehensively preserve the semantic content of the input while simultaneously emphasizing features that are discriminative for downstream tasks. Recent approaches demonstrate that MLLMs can be adapted into competitive embedding models via large-scale contrastive learning, enabling the simultaneous optimization of two complementary objectives. We argue that the two aforementioned objectives can be decoupled: a comprehensive understanding of the input enables the embedding model to achieve superior performance on downstream tasks via contrastive learning. In this paper, we propose CoMa, a compressed pre-training phase, which serves as a warm-up stage for contrastive learning. Experiments demonstrate that with only a small amount of pre-training data, we can transform an MLLM into a competitive embedding model. CoMa achieves new state-of-the-art results among MLLMs of comparable size on the MMEB, realizing optimization in both efficiency and effectiveness. Our project is available at https://github.com/Trustworthy-Information-Access/CoMa.
comment: ACL2026
♻ ☆ DriveAgent-R1: Advancing VLM-based Autonomous Driving with Active Perception and Hybrid Thinking ICLR 2026
The advent of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has significantly advanced end-to-end autonomous driving, demonstrating powerful reasoning abilities for high-level behavior planning tasks. However, existing methods are often constrained by a passive perception paradigm, relying solely on text-based reasoning. This passivity restricts the model's capacity to actively seek crucial visual evidence when faced with uncertainty. To address this, we introduce DriveAgent-R1, the first autonomous driving agent capable of active perception for planning. In complex scenarios, DriveAgent-R1 proactively invokes tools to perform visual reasoning, firmly grounding its decisions in visual evidence, thereby enhancing both interpretability and reliability. Furthermore, we propose a hybrid thinking framework, inspired by human driver cognitive patterns, allowing the agent to adaptively switch between efficient text-only reasoning and robust tool-augmented visual reasoning based on scene complexity. This capability is cultivated through a three-stage progressive training strategy, featuring a core Cascaded Reinforcement Learning (Cascaded RL) phase. Extensive experiments on the Drive-Internal dataset, which is rich in long-tail scenarios, and the public nuScenes dataset show that, with only 3B parameters, DriveAgent-R1 achieves competitive performance comparable to top closed model systems such as GPT-5 and to human driving proficiency while remaining deployment-friendly, offering a proven path toward building more intelligent autonomous driving systems.
comment: Accepted to ICLR 2026
♻ ☆ 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.
♻ ☆ Rethinking Post-Unlearning Behavior of Large Vision-Language Models
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) can recognize individuals in images and disclose sensitive personal information about them, raising critical privacy concerns. Machine unlearning aims to remove such knowledge from the model. However, existing methods rarely prescribe what the model should output in place of the forgotten content, leading to Unlearning Aftermaths: degenerate, hallucinated, or excessively refused responses. We argue that, especially for generative LVLMs, it is crucial to consider the quality and informativeness of post-unlearning responses rather than relying solely on naive suppression. To address this, we introduce a new unlearning task for LVLMs that requires models to provide privacy-preserving yet informative and visually grounded responses. We also propose PUBG, a novel unlearning method that explicitly guides post-unlearning behavior toward a desirable output distribution. Experiments show that, while existing methods suffer from Unlearning Aftermaths despite successfully preventing privacy violations, PUBG effectively mitigates these issues, generating visually grounded and informative responses without privacy leakage for forgotten targets.
comment: 11 pages
♻ ☆ High-Resolution Visual Reasoning via Multi-Turn Grounding-Based Reinforcement Learning ACL
State-of-the-art large multi-modal models (LMMs) face challenges when processing high-resolution images, as these inputs are converted into enormous visual tokens, many of which are irrelevant to the downstream task. In this paper, we propose Multi-turn Grounding-based Policy Optimization (MGPO), an end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) framework that enables LMMs to iteratively focus on key visual regions by automatically cropping sub-images, based on model-predicted grounding coordinates within a multi-turn conversation framework. Compared to supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which requires costly additional grounding annotations, our approach highlights that LMMs can emerge robust grounding abilities during the RL training process, leveraging only a binary reward function derived from the correctness of the final answer. Additionally, we observe that LMMs struggle to autonomously trigger visual grounding during the rollout process. To address this cold start problem, we design a multi-turn conversational template and restrict policy loss computation to model outputs generated across multiple dialogue rounds, thereby promoting stable optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, when trained on standard visual-question-short answering data without grounding annotations, MGPO effectively elicits stronger grounding capabilities compared to GRPO, leading to 5.4\% improvement on in-distribution MME-Realworld and 5.2\% improvement on the challenging out-of-distribution (OOD) V* Bench. Notably, MGPO post-training on Qwen2.5-VL-7B with 21K samples surpasses OpenAI's o1 and GPT-4o models on the OOD V* Bench. Codes are available at https://github.com/EvolvingLMMs-Lab/MGPO.
comment: Accepted by ACL(Findings) 2026
♻ ☆ Beyond the Failures: Rethinking Foundation Models in Pathology
Despite their successes in vision and language, foundation models have stumbled in pathology, revealing low accuracy, instability, and heavy computational demands. These shortcomings stem not from tuning problems but from deeper conceptual mismatches: dense embeddings cannot represent the combinatorial richness of tissue, and current architectures inherit flaws in self-supervision, patch design, and noise-fragile pretraining. Biological complexity and limited domain innovation further widen the gap. The evidence is clear-pathology requires models explicitly designed for biological images rather than adaptations of large-scale natural-image methods whose assumptions do not hold for tissue.
♻ ☆ Sculpting the Vector Space: Towards Efficient Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrieval via Prune-then-Merge Framework ACL 2026
Visual Document Retrieval (VDR), which aims to retrieve relevant pages within vast corpora of visually-rich documents, is of significance in current multimodal retrieval applications. The state-of-the-art multi-vector paradigm excels in performance but suffers from prohibitive overhead, a problem that current efficiency methods like pruning and merging address imperfectly, creating a difficult trade-off between compression rate and feature fidelity. To overcome this dilemma, we introduce Prune-then-Merge, a novel two-stage framework that synergizes these complementary approaches. Our method first employs an adaptive pruning stage to filter out low-information patches, creating a refined, high-signal set of embeddings. Subsequently, a hierarchical merging stage compresses this pre-filtered set, effectively summarizing semantic content without the noise-induced feature dilution seen in single-stage methods. Extensive experiments on 29 VDR datasets demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms existing methods, significantly extending the near-lossless compression range and providing robust performance at high compression ratios.
comment: Accepted by The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026, Findings)
♻ ☆ Graph neural network for colliding particles with an application to sea ice floe modeling
This paper introduces a novel approach to sea ice modeling using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), utilizing the natural graph structure of sea ice, where nodes represent individual ice pieces, and edges model the physical interactions, including collisions. This concept is developed within a one-dimensional framework as a foundational step. Traditional numerical methods, while effective, are computationally intensive and less scalable. By utilizing GNNs, the proposed model, termed the Collision-captured Network (CN), integrates data assimilation (DA) techniques to effectively learn and predict sea ice dynamics under various conditions. The approach was validated using synthetic data, both with and without observed data points, and it was found that the model accelerates the simulation of trajectories without compromising accuracy. This advancement offers a more efficient tool for forecasting in marginal ice zones (MIZ) and highlights the potential of combining machine learning with data assimilation for more effective and efficient modeling.
comment: Zhu, R. Graph Neural Network for Colliding Particles with an Application to Sea Ice Floe Modeling. Arab J Sci Eng (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13369-026-11188-z
♻ ☆ Generating Findings for Jaw Cysts in Dental Panoramic Radiographs Using a GPT-Based VLM: A Preliminary Study on Building a Two-Stage Self-Correction Loop with Structured Output (SLSO) Framework
Nanaka Hosokawa, Ryo Takahashi, Tomoya Kitano, Yukihiro Iida, Chisako Muramatsu, Tatsuro Hayashi, Yuta Seino, Xiangrong Zhou, Takeshi Hara, Akitoshi Katsumata, Hiroshi Fujita
Vision-language models (VLMs) such as GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) have shown potential for medical image interpretation; however, challenges remain in generating reliable radiological findings in clinical practice, as exemplified by dental pathologies. This study proposes a Self-correction Loop with Structured Output (SLSO) framework as an integrated processing methodology to enhance the accuracy and reliability of AI-generated findings for jaw cysts in dental panoramic radiographs. Dental panoramic radiographs with jaw cysts were used to implement a 10-step integrated processing framework incorporating image analysis, structured data generation, tooth number extraction, consistency checking, and iterative regeneration. The framework functioned as an external validation mechanism for GPT outputs. Performance was compared against the conventional Chain-of-Thought (CoT) method across seven evaluation items: transparency, internal structure, borders, root resorption, tooth movement, relationships with other structures, and tooth number. The SLSO framework improved output accuracy for multiple items compared to the CoT method, with the most notable improvements observed in tooth number identification, tooth movement detection, and root resorption assessment. In successful cases, consistently structured outputs were achieved after up to five regenerations. The framework enforced explicit negative finding descriptions and suppressed hallucinations, although accurate identification of extensive lesions spanning multiple teeth remained limited. This investigation established the feasibility of the proposed integrated processing methodology and provided a foundation for future validation studies with larger, more diverse datasets.
comment: Revised manuscript; supplementary materials added. Published in Diagnostics
♻ ☆ HiPrune: Hierarchical Attention for Efficient Token Pruning in Vision-Language Models ACL-2026
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) encode images and videos into abundant tokens, which contain substantial redundancy and computation cost. While visual token pruning mitigates the issue, most existing methods lack insight into the intrinsic property of the vision encoder itself. In this work, we dive into the vision encoder and prove that the middle layers pay more attention to the main objects of the image qualitatively and quantitatively, while the deep layers to tokens with rich global information. Utilizing this Hierarchical attention pattern, we propose HiPrune, a training-free and model-agnostic token Pruning method. HiPrune identifies three types of visual tokens according to their attention in different phases of the vision encoder, which preserves different levels of information. By coupling with the similarity of text tokens, we propose a prompt-aware variance, HiPrune++, which further improves instruction following performance under a very low token budget. Extensive experiments across four representative VLMs show that HiPrune achieves up to 99.3% of task accuracy with only 1/3 of the tokens, while reducing inference FLOPs by 58.7%. HiPrune++ maintains up to 99.7% accuracy with 2/9 tokens, highlighting robustness under high-resolution. Our code is available at https://github.com/Danielement321/HiPrune.
comment: Accepted at ACL-2026 Findings
♻ ☆ Ouroboros: Single-step Diffusion Models for Cycle-consistent Forward and Inverse Rendering ICCV 2025
While multi-step diffusion models have advanced both forward and inverse rendering, existing approaches often treat these problems independently, leading to cycle inconsistency and slow inference speed. In this work, we present Ouroboros, a framework composed of two single-step diffusion models that handle forward and inverse rendering with mutual reinforcement. Our approach extends intrinsic decomposition to both indoor and outdoor scenes and introduces a cycle consistency mechanism that ensures coherence between forward and inverse rendering outputs. Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across diverse scenes while achieving substantially faster inference speed compared to other diffusion-based methods. We also demonstrate that Ouroboros can transfer to video decomposition in a training-free manner, reducing temporal inconsistency in video sequences while maintaining high-quality per-frame inverse rendering.
comment: Accepted by ICCV 2025