Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 204
☆ ParVL: Parallel Scaling and Expandable Compute Allocation for Multimodal LLMs
Yang Yang, Qinyu Zhao, Mouxiang Chen, Xiaohui Li, Lixin Gu, Wenhai Wang, Hongjie Zhang, Wenwei Zhang
Existing scaling strategies for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) typically expand either model parameters or sequential inference computation, incurring substantial memory or latency overhead. More importantly, most existing methods fail to alter the rigid, fixed computation allocation between the Vision Transformer and the Large Language Model components, limiting task-specific optimization. To address this, we introduce the Parallel Vision-Language (ParVL) scaling framework for MLLMs, which scales parallel computation by reusing the existing ViT and LLM backbone parameters across multiple vision and language branches. This framework raises a central question: given a fixed backbone parameter budget, how should additional shared-backbone computation be allocated between the vision and language modalities? We instantiate each parallel computational stream with branch-specific prefix parameters over a shared backbone, and train the entire model end-to-end via full-parameter supervised fine-tuning on roughly 13B tokens. We systematically study the computation-allocation trade-off between the ViT encoder and LLM decoder. ParVL improves overall multimodal performance over same-recipe single-branch baselines, and the best evaluated vision--language allocation varies across tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/YangYangGirl/ParVL.
comment: 14 pages, 4 figures
☆ Perceptual Anchoring: Prototype-Guided Text Calibration for Training-free Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation
Training-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) partitions an image into semantically distinct regions based on arbitrary text descriptions, without learning any additional parameters. However, existing methods typically focus on improving visual representations while treating text embeddings that encode only generic category concepts as fixed classification references. The resulting semantic gap between these generic concepts and the visual representations that capture the specific appearances of target instances often causes incomplete masks and erroneous predictions in non-target regions. Inspired by the symbol-percept correspondence underlying perceptual anchoring, we propose Prototype-Guided Text Calibration (PTC) for training-free OVSS. In the Perceiving stage, PTC selects reliable visual evidence based on initial matching scores to construct category-specific visual prototypes. In the Anchoring stage, PTC uses these prototypes to calibrate their corresponding text embeddings, with the calibration strength adaptively adjusted based on the amount of visual evidence. Consequently, the calibrated text embeddings align more accurately with instance-specific visual representations while preserving generic category semantics and open-vocabulary generalization. Moreover, PTC requires neither additional training nor external models and can serve as a plug-and-play module for existing methods. Extensive experiments across eight benchmarks show that PTC significantly enhances the performance of six representative methods and yields more complete and accurate segmentation results. These results validate PTC as a simple and effective approach to improving visual-text alignment.
comment: 17 pages, 5 figures
☆ Video-DeepResearch: Towards the Next-Generation Multimodal Deepresearch Agent
Zhen Fang, Yu Zeng, Wenxuan Huang, Yiming Zhao, Shiting Huang, Tianfei Ren, Qi Lu, Qingnan Ren, Qisheng Su, Lionel Z. Wang, Qingyu Yin, Shuang Chen, Zehui Chen, Lin Chen, Zhenfei Yin, Yao Hu, Shaohui Lin, Wanli Ouyang, Shaosheng Cao, Feng Zhao
We introduce Video-DeepResearch (Video-DR), extending multimodal agents from static images to continuous video streams, a setting that demands dense spatiotemporal grounding coupled with open-web exploration. Preliminary evaluations reveal two critical bottlenecks in current models: (1) modality bias, where agents bypass visual tools in favor of textual search, and (2) parametric knowledge leakage, where models rely on internal memory rather than genuine tool-augmented execution. To address these challenges, we propose Video-DR, featuring a decoupled perception-exploration pipeline with stage-wise tool unlocking that compels exhaustive cross-frame visual grounding prior to web retrieval. Our framework adopts a two-stage training recipe: supervised fine-tuning followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), enabling autonomous exploration that breaks the imitation-learning ceiling. Furthermore, we curate Video-DR-Bench, a human-AI collaborative benchmark comprising 200 complex, multi-hop VQA instances. Empirical results demonstrate that our Video-DeepResearch-35B-A3B establishes a new state-of-the-art of 64.0% average accuracy, surpassing proprietary Claude-4.5-Sonnet (59.0%) by 5.0 points and significantly outperforming GPT-5 (52.5%) and Gemini 2.5 Pro (57.5%). The 30B-A3B variant achieves 59.3%, competitive with Claude-4.5-Sonnet and demonstrating the effectiveness of our training paradigm even at compact scale. Code: https://github.com/Osilly/Vision-DeepResearch.
☆ JoyAI-Video-Edit: Real-Time Open-Ended Video Editing with Autoregressive Diffusion
Yicheng Xiao, Wenxun Dai, Xinran Qin, Lin Song, Maoquan Zhang, Hang Xu, Yukang Chen, Yitong Li, Guohui Zhang, Yuan Zhang, Xuying Zhang, Tommy Zhang, Jianlong Yuan, Peihao Li, Shuai Lu, Siming Fu, Chuyang Zhao, Xin Han, Jie Huang, Wenbo Li, Guoqing Ma, Wei Huang, Xiaojuan Qi, Haoyang Huang, Nan Duan
Real-time video editing requires low-latency causal generation with bounded computational resources while preserving source fidelity and long-term temporal consistency. We present JoyAI-Video-Edit, a 16B-parameter autoregressive diffusion framework for real-time, open-ended video editing without access to future frames or a predefined video duration. Our method combines chunk-wise autoregressive adaptation, Source-Anchored Distribution Matching Distillation (SA-DMD), and Long-Horizon Autoregressive Distillation to reduce train--inference mismatch, preserve source fidelity during two-step generation, and mitigate accumulated temporal drift. Extensive automatic and human evaluations show that JoyAI-Video-Edit substantially outperforms existing streaming editors and remains competitive with strong offline systems on both short and long videos. The complete system achieves end-to-end 720p video editing at approximately 30 FPS on a single Nvidia B200 GPU. Code is available at https://github.com/jd-opensource/JoyAI-Video-Edit.
comment: Code: https://github.com/jd-opensource/JoyAI-Video-Edit
☆ UniWorld-Design: From Pixel Generation to Layer-Native Design
Zongjian Li, Zhiyuan Yan, Chenxu Bai, Chen Chen, Haoxiang Sun, Shaodong Wang, Feize Wu, Shenghai Yuan, Bin Lin, Zheyuan Liu, Yuwei Niu, Li Yuan
We introduce UniWorld-Design, a framework that redefines image generation from flat pixel synthesis to structured visual composition, with semantic RGBA layers as the atomic units of generation, understanding, and editing. Our key insight is that pixels define how an image is rendered, whereas layers define how an image is created, understood, and edited. Just as human designers create and manipulate visual content through layers rather than raw pixels, UniWorld-Design equips multimodal generative models with a layer-native design space. UniWorld-Design comprises two models. The Text-to-RGBA (T2RGBA) model generates standalone RGBA assets directly from text. The Image-to-Layer (I2L) model conditions on a finished image, a global instruction and per-layer prompts, and jointly produces ordered, complete semantic RGBA layers. Its instruction interface supports top-level decomposition, recursive decomposition and targeted extraction, making layering an instruction-addressable operation for agentic editing. Because I2L learns complete semantic objects rather than visible-pixel partitions, its layers stay usable when moved or removed. On the Crello benchmark, I2L reduces per-layer RGB L1 error by 37% and achieves a 34% relative improvement in Alpha Soft IoU over Qwen-Image-Layered. Separately, T2RGBA achieves the highest CLIP Score, outperforming LayerDiffuse and OmniAlpha.
comment: Project page: https://rabbitvis.rabbitpre.com/blog
☆ Progressive Learning of a Diffusion-based Inpainting Model for Separating Overlapped Fingerprints
Overlapped friction ridge patterns are a recurring problem in latent fingerprints recovered from crime scenes and in live-scan scenarios where residual fingerprints on the sensor may corrupt subsequent acquisitions. Existing approaches for separating overlapped fingerprints either rely on rule-based orientation field completion that requires strong domain knowledge or train end-to-end deep neural networks that do not account for domain-specific considerations. This work introduces a diffusion-based pipeline for separating component fingerprints from an image containing overlapping friction ridge patterns. We formulate the separation problem as an inpainting task and progressively learn a diffusion model for this task in multiple stages. Starting from a pre-trained Stable Diffusion model, we progressively incorporate a fingerprint prior, add the ability to complete partial fingerprints, and finally propose \textbf{overlap-aware inpainting} that reconstructs each component print using a diffusion inpainting model based on multi-channel conditioning. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that component fingerprints reconstructed using the proposed diffusion-based inpainting method can match with their mated counterparts with very high probability.
comment: Accepted to IJCB 2026
☆ Latent Reward Registers for Diffusion Preference Alignment
Aligning diffusion models with human preferences usually relies on a sparse terminal reward evaluated on the final generated samples, presenting a severe temporal credit-assignment challenge across the multi-step denoising process. We propose Latent Reward Registers, a mechanism that estimates terminal preference directly from intermediate noisy latents by prepending learnable, position-free register tokens to the input sequence of a frozen Diffusion Transformer (DiT). This independent readout mechanism extracts latent reward evidence without altering the generator's hidden states or velocity field. The resulting dense, differentiable reward signal throughout the full denoising process facilitates two alignment strategies. For training, Reward-Gradient On-Policy Distillation (RG-OPD) distills reward-guided updates along on-policy trajectories, bypassing the computationally expensive rollouts of standard policy gradients. For inference, Reward-Guided Sampling (RGS) steers trajectories via magnitude-matched reward gradients without parameter updates. Empirically, at high noise levels (u = 0.8), the registers reach the highest pairwise accuracy among the evaluated latent reward models. Furthermore, RG-OPD outperforms online reinforcement learning baselines while reducing GPU hours by up to 33x, and RGS establishes a new state-of-the-art among training-free methods, strictly enhancing both alignment and perceptual metrics. Code and weights are available at https://github.com/Guanys-dar/latent-reward-register
☆ PRISM: Powerful Time Series to Image (TS2I) Representations for Multivariate Anomaly Detection
Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) underpins applications in predictive maintenance, finance, and cloud computing, however performance remains sensitive to representation choices, especially in multivariate settings. While transforming time series into images has shown success in forecasting and classification, it remains unclear how multivariate, high-dimensional series should be mapped to multi-channel images and whether vision backbones can match time-domain baselines in TSAD. We introduce PRISM, a plug-and-play meta-workflow enabling systematic construction and evaluation of image-based representations for multivariate TSAD. Our evaluation spanning over 7,000 experiments shows that well-designed PRISM configurations are competitive with 24 time-domain baselines, achieving the best VUS-PR on 10 of 14 datasets, with an average improvement of 41% over the best competing method on those datasets. Further, we identify channelization - how the channel dimension of multi-channel images is constructed - as a critical and previously understudied design dimension, and introduce MSM, a novel statistics-based scheme achieving 11-27% gains over PCA-based alternatives. Finally, ImageNet-pretrained encoders transfer effectively to TSAD, with frozen encoders retaining 92% of fine-tuned performance while training 1.8 times faster. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Smendowski/PRISM.
☆ GeoMAR: Unleashing Geometrically Aligned Features for Masked Autoregressive Blind Face Restoration
Codebook-based blind face restoration (BFR) often suffers from ambiguous conditioning features and a fragile prediction mechanism under severe degradation. To address these challenges, we propose GeoMAR, a framework designed to unleash geometrically aligned features with masked autoregressive (MAR) refinement for robust face restoration. For feature conditioning, we introduce a dual-input extraction pipeline to extract component-based geometric descriptions with explicit, spatially faithful anchors. These textual priors are integrated with low-quality (LQ) features via an Aligned Geometric Priors Injector, which employs a KV-Q exchange strategy to generate geometrically aligned features. For prediction mechanism, we reformulate the one-step mapping into a multi-step MAR process. This coarse-to-fine generation progressively refines complex facial regions based on increasingly reliable context. Experiments on one synthetic and three real-world benchmarks demonstrate that GeoMAR achieves highly competitive perceptual quality and coherent visual structures compared with existing methods. The code is available at https://github.com/BRL-SYSU/GeoMAR.git.
☆ Low-Dimensional High-Leverage Subspace Optimization: Beyond Full-Parameter Coupled Training for Neural Network Quantization
Low-bit quantization suffers severe accuracy degradation on compact networks, rooted in the dominant full-parameter coupled training paradigm that ignores parameter subspace heterogeneity. Their limited feature redundancy leaves little room to absorb quantization errors. Conventional pipelines adopt monolithic optimization: PTQ reconstructs fixed pretrained models without improving inherent quantization friendliness; QAT updates all parameters jointly, suffering from gradient coupling between backbone weights and calibration parameters. In this paper, we identify normalization affine parameters as a low-dimensional high-leverage subspace dominating quantization robustness, and propose Normalization Affine Preconditioning (NAP) for targeted subspace optimization. For PTQ, NAP freezes backbone weights and fine-tunes only affine parameters under the target fake-quantization graph on full-precision models, proactively boosting quantization friendliness before downstream reconstruction. For QAT, we introduce an alternating QAT-NAP schema that decouples feature learning and numerical calibration, breaking the performance ceiling of saturated joint training. Theoretical analysis confirms BN affine parameters fully cancel the channel-wise affine component of quantization distortion, while nonlinear rounding and clipping residuals form the irreducible error boundary; distillation-guided NAP acts as directional flatness optimization, projecting teacher-student logit mismatch onto the restricted subspace. Experiments on ImageNet and CIFAR-100 show NAP recovers severely collapsed low-bit quantization, consistently boosts reconstruction-based PTQ, and outperforms saturated full-parameter QAT with negligible tuning cost. This work reveals the principle of targeted low-dimensional subspace optimization, offering a new perspective beyond full-parameter coupled training for efficient deep learning.
comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, 7 tables
☆ When and Where to Look: Adaptive Visual Evidence Scheduling for Efficient Long Video Understanding
Efficient long-video understanding requires vision--language models (VLMs) to reason over a small number of frames selected as sparse visual evidence. Existing relevance-based methods rely on static one-shot selection with fixed frame budgets and candidate pools, while agent-based schedulers achieve adaptivity through costly multi-round reasoning and interactive search. We propose EcoFrame, a training-free framework for low-overhead query-adaptive visual evidence scheduling. EcoFrame leverages the VLM's inference feedback to determine when to increase the frame budget and where to search for additional candidate evidence. Specifically, entropy-gated budget scheduling uses output uncertainty to stop early when the current evidence is sufficient or progressively expand the frame budget otherwise. Meanwhile, attention-guided candidate proposal converts frame-level attention into a temporal prior, enabling dense local search in informative regions while preserving global coverage when attention is diffuse. Experiments on Video-MME, LongVideoBench, and MLVU demonstrate that EcoFrame achieves a better accuracy--efficiency trade-off across multiple VLM backbones. On Qwen2.5-VL, EcoFrame achieves an average accuracy of 64.4, surpassing BOLT at 63.5, while providing a $1.85\times$ speedup over AKS and BOLT. Compared with the agent-based A.I.R., EcoFrame maintains comparable accuracy with up to a $13.5\times$ inference speedup. Code will be available at https://github.com/AK-DREAM/EcoFrame.
☆ StreamDAM: Presence-Aware Memory for Real-Time Streaming Video Object Segmentation
Quality-tier video object segmentation (VOS) trackers such as DAM4SAM top accuracy leaderboards, but they are measured offline, one frame at a time with no clock. Under an honest streaming protocol at 30 frames per second, where a frame that misses its budget is served the last mask already computed, the winner collapses: the rich memory that makes it accurate is too slow to keep up, and what it emits is blind to whether the object is even present. We trace both failures to one place, the tracker's memory pipeline, and rebuild it for streaming. \method{} makes the memory machinery itself run at frame rate through in-model optimization rather than a bolted-on fallback, and governs it with a single learned presence signal that decides what enters memory, how far back the tracker reads, when to withhold output, and when to re-detect. A mechanism analysis shows why a fixed policy cannot win: the control that helps when an object truly disappears is the one that hurts when it is merely hard to see, so the choice must be made per frame. Across four benchmarks and five modern baselines, \method{} is the strongest streaming tracker, recovers nearly all of the offline model's accuracy under the clock, and on the hardest content exceeds the offline model it is built from.
☆ UniEvo-RS: Omni-Prompt Unified Remote Sensing Segmentation with Representative Exemplar-Driven Prototype Evolution
Prompt-driven vision-language models (VLMs) hold immense promise for accelerating dense remote sensing (RS) annotation, but static models suffer from severe performance degradation when deployed on novel scenes, unseen categories, or visually confusing backgrounds. Moreover, existing unified paradigms primarily rely on intra-image specific prompts, lacking flexible task routing to adapt to multi-intent operational workflows. In practical batch mapping, annotators typically refine a small set of representative samples before processing large datasets. Motivated by this practice, we propose UniEvo-RS, an omni-prompt unified RS segmentation framework equipped with representative exemplar-driven prototype evolution. First, we construct a multi-instruction prompt dataset that unifies text-driven and visual-driven prompts within a single architecture, establishing a dynamic task-routing mechanism for highly diverse RS annotation scenarios. Second, we introduce a representative feedback-driven, training-free prototype evolution mechanism. By contrasting manual annotations with initial predictions on exemplars, UniEvo-RS distills prediction errors into positive and negative prototypes. These prototypes enhance LLM query recall and suppress spatial background noise under a fixed-budget clustering memory. Extensive experiments show that UniEvo-RS unifies diverse prompting tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across most settings. Crucially, with minimal interaction on a few exemplars, it enables training-free, progressive accuracy enhancement on unseen categories during batch annotation.
comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, 9 tables
☆ NCGR: Noise-Conditional Gated Rectification for Camera Extrinsic Perturbations in BEV 3D Object Detection
Camera-based bird's-eye-view (BEV) 3D detection typically assumes accurate and fixed camera extrinsics. In detectors using spatial cross-attention (SCA), extrinsic perturbations displace the image-plane projections of BEV reference points, causing queries to sample features from incorrect regions and degrading detection performance. To address this failure mode, Noise-Conditional Gated Rectification (NCGR) is proposed to compensate for projection errors without explicitly estimating a full six-degree-of-freedom extrinsic correction. For each query-camera pair, a 2D rectification offset is predicted and modulated by a camera-level gate to rectify the base projection before native deformable sampling. During training, the perturbation-derived quantities used to construct the condition and gate are gradually replaced through scheduled interpolation by counterparts generated from an auxiliary scalar predicted from camera features. This transition enables blind inference without perturbation metadata. During training, a weight-shared clean-teacher/perturbed-student pair is used, and the rectification module is supervised by a BEV-consistency objective between the two branches. NCGR is evaluated on nuScenes with simulated dynamic and static extrinsic perturbations. In a five-camera dynamic stress test, NCGR achieves 39.69% NDS, compared with 28.00% for BEVFormer and 33.23% for CAPE. Under clean extrinsics, NCGR maintains performance comparable to that of BEVFormer.
comment: 21 pages, including supplementary material
☆ CARE-X: Towards Clinically Useful Radiology VLMs with Auxiliary Supervision, Reward-Aligned Learning, and Tool-Augmented Measurement
Mercy Prasanna Ranjit, Anirban Porya, Sathvik Joel, Niharika Vadlamudi, Nikhilesh Chowdary Eathamukkala, Prasanth V, Abhyuday Kumara Swamy, Pranay Narhari Umredkar, Pradeep Narayan, Vivek Rajagopal, Tanuja Ganu
A clinically useful chest X-ray system must go beyond fluent report generation: it should classify findings with tunable decision thresholds, localize them spatially, and derive the anatomical measurements upon which many diagnoses depend. Today's Vision-Language Models (VLMs) treat these as separate problems, if they address them at all, leaving a gap between what radiologists need and what generative models provide. We introduce CARE-X, a chest X-ray VLM that narrows this gap by unifying auxiliary discriminative supervision with reward-aligned generation. CARE-X augments its generative backbone with focal-loss classification and composite-loss grounding heads, co-trained alongside the language-modeling objective. This auxiliary supervision produces discriminative diagnostic predictions with tunable decision thresholds and precise spatial localization while also improving report quality, providing evidence that structured prediction and generation reinforce one another. Building on this foundation, Decoupled Clip and Dynamic Sampling Policy Optimization (DAPO) leverages task-specific reward signals for report generation, visual question answering (VQA), and spatial grounding, directly optimizing the clinical quality metrics that matter in practice. The result is state-of-the-art performance on the majority of metrics across four report-generation benchmarks, 94.0% VQA accuracy on ReXVQA (+6.0 pp over the next-best baseline), and generative spatial decoding that reaches near parity with dedicated detection heads. Separately, to address measurement-dependent diagnoses, we couple Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct with native tool-calling capabilities for invoking deterministic measurement tools, while retaining full visual access to the image. This hybrid inference yields +43.6 pp average F1 over perception-only baselines across five measurement-dependent conditions.
☆ MuRA: Multi-Rank Adaptation for Efficient and Effective Test-Time Vision-Language Generalization
Gengyuan Liu, Nanzhou Wang, Chang Liu, Qinwen Wu, Zhenhao Wang, Jiacong Wang, Bokui Chen, Xiangyang Ji
Vision-language models exhibit remarkable zero-shot capabilities but suffer significant performance degradation under distribution shifts. While test-time adaptation (TTA) via Low-Rank Adaptation offers a parameter-efficient solution, we identify a fundamental bottleneck in current methods: the reliance on static rank configurations. Because visual inputs inherently possess varying information densities, a fixed rank forces an inevitable optimization compromise, leading to underfitting on complex scenes and overfitting on simple ones. To bridge this gap, we propose Multi-Rank Adaptation (MuRA), a novel framework that dynamically selects and fuses adaptation modules of varying capacities based on token-level visual complexity. MuRA synergizes Multi-Rank Orthogonal Decomposition to provide a superior, knowledge-preserving initialization, and Unified Component Fusion with Continuous Router Updating to sustainably learn semantic-to-rank mappings. Furthermore, we provide rigorous theoretical justifications mathematically proving the necessity and gradient stability of this adaptive mechanism. Crucially, MuRA's dynamic design uniquely thrives at the deepest visual layer, capitalizing on the shortest gradient backpropagation path. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MuRA achieves state-of-the-art accuracy across extensive domain generalization and cross-dataset benchmarks while significantly reducing both computational and memory overhead.
☆ BanglaWild: An In-the-Wild Bengali Scene Text Recognition Benchmark for OCR and Vision-Language Models
In-the-wild Bengali scene text recognition is largely unmeasured: existing resources target handwritten documents or constrained sign-board parsing, report only aggregate edit-distance metrics, and evaluate either conventional OCR or VLMs, never both on the same in-the-wild data. To address this gap, we introduce BANGLAWILD, a benchmark of 2,535 Bengali scene text images, each paired with a verbatim gold transcription, two categorical axes, four diagnostic attributes, and an orthographically standard form where the in-image text deviates from canonical spelling. We evaluate fifteen VLMs and three conventional OCR systems under three prompting strategies, fine-tune 6 open-source models with LoRA, and complement edit-distance metrics with an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation. Our results reveal a persistent gap in which larger models within the same family do not outperform smaller ones. Our fifteen-class error taxonomy shows that visual mis-recognition accounts for ~60% of errors in the strongest systems, while conjunct-related errors contribute under 2%, challenging a long-standing assumption in Bengali OCR research; the same visual dominant profile also holds across architectures, including the one conventional baseline that reads Bengali reliably. Prompt language mainly affects cross-script drift and LoRA reduces catastrophic failures in weak models without lifting the ceiling on already competent ones. Code and data will be publicly released.
☆ CPrefix: A Combinatorial Tensor Framework for Structured Discrete Color Mappings IEEE
Discrete multi-channel mappings are typically represented through sampled values, providing accurate evaluations but limited insight into their underlying structure. We introduce CPrefix, a combinatorial observable representation for discrete mappings, realized within a unified tensor framework that enables representation, reconstruction, and structural analysis.
The framework is based on a counting tensor induced by multinomial counting observables. Its support forms a discrete Pascal simplex, not as a constraint on the observable space, but as a latent combinatorial representation from which mappings are reconstructed. This formulation separates the combinatorial organization of a mapping from its measured values, exposing the observable structure underlying the mapping.
The framework is validated on ICC display and printer profiles through latent reconstruction and perceptual gamut transport. Accurate reconstruction demonstrates that color mappings admit faithful observable representations, while reconstruction residuals provide insight into the compatibility of the underlying mapping with the proposed representation.
Although demonstrated on color transformations, the framework is independent of the physical interpretation of the observables, making it applicable to structured multi-channel mappings arising from color imaging, spectral measurements and other discrete systems.
comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for presentation at the IEEE ICIP 2026 Workshop on Computational Color Imaging (CCIW 2026). Withdrawn from the proceedings because the author was unable to attend the conference
☆ LiteMVS: Efficient Multi-View Stereo with Foundation Distillation and Expert Aggregation CVPR 2026
Real-time 3D perception is crucial for robotics, augmented reality, and embodied intelligence applications. Existing multi-view stereo (MVS) methods primarily rely on geometric correspondences, which often fail in textureless or repetitive regions, while monocular depth models leverage strong image-level priors but lack robust multi-view geometric constraints. More importantly, in robotics and embodied manipulation scenarios, high-quality 3D geometry is not only essential for static reconstruction, but also serves as a critical foundation for learning temporally consistent 4D representations. To obtain visual representations with stronger structural awareness and greater potential for spatiotemporal extension, we present LiteMVS, a lightweight multi-view depth estimation model that integrates plane-sweep geometric reasoning with strong monocular semantic and structural priors. The central idea of LiteMVS is to efficiently inject high-level monocular knowledge, obtained from lightweight segmentation models and large-scale vision foundation models, into a multi-view stereo framework. In particular, LiteMVS enriches the cost volume with semantic descriptors and employs a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) formulation to enable adaptive geometric aggregation across depth hypotheses. Moreover, geometric priors distilled from vision foundation models further strengthen monocular guidance without increasing inference cost. Through this design, LiteMVS not only improves depth estimation and 3D reconstruction quality in static scenes, but also provides a more reliable geometric foundation for subsequent temporal modeling and 4D representation learning. Experiments on ScanNetv2 and 7-Scenes demonstrate that LiteMVS achieves high-quality depth prediction and 3D reconstruction while maintaining competitive efficiency.
comment: CVPR 2026 Workshop accepted
☆ Geo-Embed: Towards Unified Multimodal Embeddings for Urban Understanding
Geospatial and urban applications increasingly require models to compare heterogeneous evidence across street-view imagery, remote-sensing observations, text descriptions, region proposals, and temporal change cues. However, existing multimodal embedding models and benchmarks are still largely designed and evaluated around general-purpose image-text matching, leaving unclear whether unified embedding space can support heterogeneous geospatial tasks involving spatial relationships, fine-grained semantics, and temporal changes. To address this gap, we make three key contributions. First, we introduce GeoMEB, a large-scale multimodal embedding benchmark that standardizes 45 urban evaluation tasks across retrieval, visual question answering, change detection, classification, and visual grounding, together with training collections comprising 1.32M examples and 286K evaluation queries. Second, we present Geo-Embed, a unified embedding model that adapts a shared vision-language backbone to instruction-conditioned query-target matching over heterogeneous geospatial inputs, including single images, multiple images, text, regions, and masks. On GeoMEB, Geo-Embed achieves the strongest overall performance among representative multimodal embedders, with a 15.3% relative improvement over the strongest baseline. These results motivate future geospatial embedders that organize training and evaluation around explicit query-target relations, including semantic, cross-view, region-level, and temporal correspondence.
☆ FlowForm: Synergizing Fluid Physics with Topological Consistency for Satellite Flood Synthesis
Developing robust flood assessment models requires high-quality paired satellite imagery, yet such data remain scarce for flood-specific image generation. Although generative models provide a promising means of data augmentation, existing methods often yield implausible spatial layouts of flooded regions and distort scene structures. We propose FlowForm, a framework for satellite flood synthesis that integrates SWE-inspired latent regularization with structure-aware conditioning. The Flood Descriptor Module (FDM) imposes differentiable penalties on residuals of the steady-state Shallow Water Equation in auxiliary latent fields at the diffusion bottleneck. The Terrain Anchor Adapter (TAA) injects depth, semantic, and edge features at four encoder scales of the U-Net. We further curate FloodScape, a large-scale, high-resolution dataset comprising paired satellite images acquired before and after disasters. In addition to standard image-generation metrics, we evaluate the consistency of flooded regions, zero-shot generalization to a geographically held-out flood event, and sensitivity to individual components. Across all reported comparisons, FlowForm achieves higher visual fidelity, greater similarity between paired images, and stronger consistency of flooded regions.
☆ UHP Detection: LVLMs have their Unique Hallucination Pattern in the Consistency Space
Amir Mohammad Ezzati, Kiyan Rezaee, Bardiya Kariminia, Mohamad Amin Yousefi, Asal Mohammadjafari Mamaqani, Behrad Samimi, Mohammad Hossein Rohban
Large vision--language models (LVLMs) demonstrate strong multimodal reasoning capabilities but remain prone to hallucination, where model predictions are not grounded in visual evidence. Existing black-box hallucination detection methods estimate uncertainty through a single consistency metric, implicitly assuming that model uncertainty can be adequately characterized by a single measure. However, hallucinations exhibit diverse manifestations of uncertainty across different behavioral probes, making a single measure insufficient to characterize their underlying behavior. We propose \emph{Unique Hallucination Pattern (UHP) Detection}, a fully black-box framework that models hallucination as a structured uncertainty pattern defined by two axes: perturbation modality (image vs.\ text) and logical polarity (a statement vs.\ its negation). Their intersection produces four complementary consistency groups that capture distinct manifestations of model uncertainty, from which both within-group and between-group features are extracted to train a lightweight classifier. Through comprehensive experiments on AMBER and PhD across three LVLMs, UHP Detection consistently outperforms prior black-box and white-box baselines, with improvements of up to $+18.72\%$ AUC-ROC and $+20.07\%$ AUC-PR over the strongest black-box methods. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate that each consistency group contributes complementary information and that their combination forms a structured hallucination pattern. Furthermore, cross-dataset evaluation shows that this learned pattern generalizes across benchmarks, indicating that hallucination behavior reflects a model-specific consistency pattern. \textbf{Code is publicly available at} https://github.com/amirezzati/uhpdet.
comment: 12 pages
☆ OmniPack: Unified Token Compression for Efficient Omni-modal Large Language Models
Wanshun Su, Yang Shi, Feihu Liu, Ziwen Yu, Yan Min, Zhuoran Zhang, Qixun Wang, Haotian Wang, Shixuan Liu, Yuanxing Zhang, Peng Wu, Chengfu Huo, Liang Ding
Omni-modal large language models (Omni-LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on audio-visual understanding tasks, but processing long and highly redundant visual and audio token sequences incurs substantial computational overhead, demanding aggressive token compression for efficient deployment. Existing methods often degrade at low token budgets: pre-LLM compression may discard structurally important and globally distributed evidence, whereas inner-LLM compression often underexploits query-conditioned audio-visual collaboration. To address these limitations, we propose OmniPack, a training-free framework that coordinates structural compression before the LLM with task-relevant semantic refinement within the LLM. Before the LLM, OmniPack removes structural redundancy through modality-specific importance, global coverage, and similarity-aware merging. After sufficient multimodal interaction, it further consolidates diverse, task-relevant representations through textual guidance and audio-visual collaboration. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks with three Omni-LLM backbones demonstrate that OmniPack consistently achieves the best performance-efficiency trade-off across diverse retention ratios, outperforming all existing methods. Notably, on Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, OmniPack preserves 98.0% of the original performance while reducing FLOPs to 16.7%, and still retains 92.9% of the original performance with only 6.8% of the original FLOPs.
comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, 15 tables
☆ AgenticVAU: Multi-Agent Explore-Verify Reasoning for Video Anomaly Understanding
Yuxiang Duan, Huining Li, Ao Li, Shuai Feng, Lanju Kong, Ning Liu, Jian Zhang, Xingdong Sheng, Yuntao Du
Video anomaly understanding (VAU) focuses on comprehensively interpreting abnormal events in videos, requiring models to identify anomalous occurrences, discover their supporting evidence, and explain the underlying causes beyond simple anomaly detection. Existing VAU methods often rely on specialized training or limited observations, restricting generalization or evidence coverage. Although single-agent alternatives support adaptive video observation, they still integrate exploration, observation, and decision-making within a unified reasoning process, offering limited role specialization and structured evidence coordination. To address these limitations, we present AgenticVAU, a training-free multi-agent framework that casts VAU as an explore--verify process, where the system first discovers potential anomalies and then verifies them through targeted observations. To achieve this, four specialized agents are introduced to handle visual-rule construction, search planning, video observation, and final decision, respectively. These agents communicate through an anchor registry, a shared evidence memory that binds each observation. Guided by this agent framework, AgenticVAU interleaves broad temporal exploration, dense local verification, and cross-interval comparison until sufficient evidence is collected. We conduct extensive experiments on the ECVA, UCF-Crime, and MSAD subsets of VAU-Bench, the results show that AgenticVAU outperforms zero-shot inference and reinforcement learning-based baselines, demonstrating the value of multi-agent collaboration for video anomaly understanding.
☆ TDVR: Joint Text Disambiguation and Viewpoint Reasoning for Zero-Shot 3D Visual Grounding
Zero-shot 3D visual grounding aims to localize specific objects based on textual descriptions and 3D visual input. However, the effectiveness of existing methods is significantly hindered by the ambiguous query text and deficient viewpoints. To address these issues, we propose TDVR, a training-free reasoning framework that disambiguates the input text and infers accurate viewpoints for zero-shot 3D visual grounding. First, we construct semantic 3D scene graph from the detected instances in the 3D point cloud. Subsequently, we put the original query, appearance and spatial relationship descriptions into the LLM for fusion, thereby disambiguating the initial input. We leverage chain-of-thought reasoning to generate the structured representation of disambiguated query. Then taking the scene graph and structured query as input, we get the optimal view via viewpoint reasoning to solve the problem of missing viewpoints during grounding. Based on the obtained optimal viewpoint, we further discriminate the distracting objects, enabling the model with the ability to distinguish similar instances. After that, we match the category text and appearance images with the query by computing the similarity of feature vectors. Finally, the target object was identified by integrating the viewpoint score, confusion score, category score, and appearance score. Compared with previous methods, our TDVR has stronger capabilities in viewpoint reasoning, similar object discrimination, and ambiguous query understanding. Experimental results on the public ScanRefer dataset show that our method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods by 15.25% and 14.46% in Acc@0.25 and Acc@0.5 respectively, demonstrating the effectiveness of our TDVR in addressing ambiguous query text and deficient viewpoints.
comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 7 tables
☆ Unsupervised Adversarial Domain Adaptation for Uterine layer Segmentation: From Labeled Cine to Unlabeled Dynamic EPI MRI
Uterine peristalsis is a key physiological phenomenon responsible for various functions across the menstrual cycle, intimately linked to uterine wall microstructure. Alterations in uterine motion and tissue properties are implicated in the etiology of gynecological diseases, yet these processes have been studied in isolation. We introduce a dynamic multi-echo gradient echo EPI framework for simultaneous characterization and correlation of uterine peristaltic activity and time-resolved T2* changes at 0.55T. Inherent susceptibility artifacts, reduced resolution, and burden of manual uterine layer annotation are addressed by an unsupervised adversarial domain adaptation framework, transferring segmentation knowledge from labeled cine MRI to unlabeled dynamic EPI. We implemented Unet-LSTM with multi-scale domain discriminators that exploits temporal layer dynamics. A Dice score of 0.88 and Jaccard index of 0.80 was achieved. Mean T2* values were 108ms, 76ms, and 124ms for the myometrium, junctional zone, and endometrium. A negative correlation between junctional zone area and T2* was observed in 14/39 cases, providing first insights into oxygenation patterns associated with junctional zone contraction and motion, demonstrating feasibility of assessing the interplay between contractility and dynamic T2* changes.
☆ Towards Reliable and Reproducible Fetal Brain Biometry: A Deep Learning Approach Using MRI
Francesca Maccarone, Marina Di Stefano, Giorgio Longari, Giulia Frigerio, Gloria Rizzato, Rocco Prudentino, Nivedita Agarwal, Tommaso Ciceri, Denis Peruzzo, Simone Melzi
Fetal brain biometry is essential for quantitative assessment of brain development, supporting gestational age estimation, developmental monitoring, and detection of abnormalities. In clinical practice, measurements are manually performed, making them time-consuming and prone to variability. While automated approaches have been proposed, reproducible methods remain limited, particularly those providing anatomically interpretable landmark localization. We present a fully automated deep learning-based framework for reliable and reproducible brain biometry from 3D super-resolution-reconstructed fetal brain MRI. The proposed four-step pipeline derives biometric parameters by jointly estimating linear measurements and their corresponding anatomical landmarks. A 3D convolutional neural network is trained to regress landmark coordinates from brain segmentation label maps, followed by measurement-specific geometric optimization to refine landmark positions and compute measurements. The pipeline is evaluated on two publicly available fetal MRI datasets comprising 150 volumes (gestational age range: 20-37 weeks) acquired across different scanners and protocols, assessing five key biometric measurements across varying acquisition settings and providing a comprehensive evaluation of both measurement accuracy and landmark localization using quantitative metrics and visual assessment. Compared with the only available automated pipeline, the proposed method achieves comparable or improved accuracy for most measurements. In conclusion, we introduce a straightforward pipeline for reliable biometry estimations, with efficiency, interpretability and scalability that support integration into clinical workflows.
comment: Currently under journal submission
☆ Attention is Case-Sensitive ECCV 2026
In human visual perception, uppercase lettering serves as a natural salience cue that captures attention within lowercase text. In this paper, we present a systematic empirical characterization study revealing that Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit an analogous property: letter casing modulates internal attention allocation. Through analysis across 13 models, nine LLMs and four Vision-Language Models (VLMs), with diverse tokenization schemes, we show that formatting target information in alternating or uppercase against a lowercase context concentrates attention on those textual spans. In text this effect is universal, holding across every evaluated non-reasoning model. We frame it as a previously under-explored latent property of pretrained transformers rather than a prescriptive method. Our investigation reveals a central attention-performance divergence: while this "casing effect" robustly shifts attention, its impact on downstream accuracy is non-trivial, increased concentration does not inherently improve task accuracy and, in high-entropy contexts like alternating case, can degrade it. We further identify a boundary condition: the deliberative "thinking" phase in reasoning models acts as a semantic buffer that mitigates typographic sensitivity in text. Extending the study to VLMs, we find the effect transfers partially: the same prompt-side casing reorganizes cross-modal attention along two coupled axes, predominantly a macroscopic disengagement from the image toward the text prompt, and secondarily a concentration of the residual visual attention on the target region. By isolating casing as a zero-shot mechanism for attention steering that requires no model access or fine-tuning, we provide a new foundational understanding of how pretraining internalizes typographic emphasis.
comment: Accepted at ECCV 2026
☆ MultiCompose: Multi-Concept Personalized Composition with Per-Subject Attribute Binding
Text-to-image diffusion models enable personalization of specific visual concepts from a small number of reference images. However, generating a single image that contains multiple personalized subjects, each bound to user-specified attributes such as clothing, accessories, and held objects, remains largely unaddressed. Without explicit spatial constraints, concurrently activated concept checkpoints produce overlapping cross-attention responses, causing per-subject identity degradation and attribute misalignment. Moreover, no established benchmark jointly evaluates these two failure modes in the personalized multi-subject setting. We present MultiCompose, a composition framework that decouples per-concept personalization from multi-subject inference. A semantic preservation regularization maintains attribute binding capacity during fine-tuning, while a two-phase inference procedure automatically establishes subject layout and composes per-concept predictions through spatially exclusive masks. We further introduce MSP-Bench, a benchmark that jointly evaluates identity fidelity (ID), attribute binding accuracy (BIND), and attribute misalignment (MIS) through a dual-pathway protocol. Experiments show that MultiCompose outperforms existing methods on both conventional metrics and MSP-Bench, confirming the benchmark's ability to reveal failure modes that conventional metrics overlook. Code is available at https://github.com/I2-Multimedia-Lab/MultiCompose
☆ Pattern over Pixels: Measuring Pattern Completion Bias in Multimodal Code Generation
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly used to translate webpage screenshots into front-end code, but repeated UI patterns may sway them toward visually incorrect yet pattern-consistent outputs. In this work, we test how repeated webpage patterns hurt MLLM accuracy on an objective screenshot-to-code fill-in-the-blank task. We introduce the first benchmark for visual pattern-completion bias, where one localized element in a repeated UI pattern is perturbed and the model must recover the masked width or font-size value from the screenshot and HTML context. Starting from 30 webpages curated from the Design2Code dataset, we build 1,440 evaluated screenshots spanning structural card and text-style patterns under standard and noise-overlaid conditions. We evaluate five frontier MLLMs and find that all are strongly biased toward the repeated baseline. Mean bias rate reaches 69.78% on card-width perturbations and 80.22% on text font-size perturbations, while mean accuracy is only 21.17% and 7.89%, respectively. Codex-5.3 performs best but still drops from 68.61% accuracy on cards to 13.89% on text, while Flash-3.0 reaches 96.11% bias on text. Noise, subtler perturbations, and boundary positions further increase bias rate. Reasoning analysis further shows that greater reasoning effort correlates with lower bias, yet qualitative evidence reveals that models can identify the anomalous element and still override it with the pattern-consistent answer. Our results identify a concrete failure mode in multimodal code generation and show that its severity is strongly associated with visual saliency
comment: 41st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
☆ Keep the Needle, Prune the Haystack: Defect-Preserving Token Pruning for Efficient Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection
Zero-shot visual anomaly detection has achieved remarkable progress, with recent vision-only approaches further improving performance while simplifying the inference pipeline. However, existing methods typically perform dense computation over all images and spatial tokens, despite the fact that normal samples dominate real-world scenarios and anomalies usually occupy only small regions. Token pruning offers a promising solution, but introduces an asymmetric pruning risk in anomaly detection: retaining normal tokens mainly incurs redundant computation, whereas removing anomalous tokens may eliminate the only evidence for detection and localization. This risk is particularly severe in early layers, where pruning provides the greatest computational benefit but anomaly semantics remain unreliable. We propose KeepAD, a defect-preserving token pruning framework that formulates token selection as high-recall, anomaly-aware routing. In shallow layers, KeepAD combines coverage-preserving selection over local $2\times2$ patch neighborhoods with deterministic anomaly rescue to reduce the risk of discarding subtle defects. In deeper layers, frozen normal and abnormal prototypes guide pruning under an image-adaptive token budget, aggressively removing low-risk normal tokens while preserving local anomaly evidence. Dense-to-sparse self-distillation further supervises early token routing without introducing additional inference overhead. Experiments on six industrial and seven medical zero-shot anomaly detection benchmarks show that KeepAD reduces the token retention ratio to below $20\%$, while limiting the average degradation in image-level and pixel-level AUROC to within $2.7$ percentage points. At the most aggressive operating point, KeepAD achieves a $7.9\times$ speedup over the strongest CLIP-based baseline.
comment: Code: https://github.com/7HHHHH/fast-uniadet
☆ XiDepth: a Lightweight and Efficient Network for Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation IEEE
Self-supervised monocular depth estimation has emerged as an appealing solution to design lightweight and effective models for deployment on computationally constrained devices due to its reduced reliance on expensive depth sensors. By eliminating the need for ground-truth annotations and leveraging the simplicity of monocular camera setups, this approach facilitates cost-effective data collection and broad applicability across fields such as computer vision and robotics. A critical challenge is achieving resource-efficient neural networks without compromising the overall performance. State-of-the-art models generally adopt depth-wise convolutions and attention mechanisms; however, these functions often incur high energy costs and face compatibility issues in embedded environments. To address this, we propose XiDepth, a lightweight architecture based on the XiNet operator block, designed to enhance feature extraction while maintaining low computational complexity and energy demand. On the KITTI dataset, XiDepth achieves state-of-the-art performance with only 0.8M parameters. Tests on a Raspberry Pi 4 further confirm its suitability for real-world embedded applications, reducing FLOPs by 40% and energy consumption by 35% compared to leading methods.
comment: Accepted to IEEE AVSS 2026
☆ Morphology-Aware Implicit Super-Resolution Network for Pathological Images
Jiaming Liang, QiHui Han, Haolin Chen, Chengxin Ye, Jiawen Liu, Jiazhou Chen, Xiaoqi Sheng, Hongmin Cai
Accurate diagnosis in Digital Pathology (DP) relies on high-resolution whole-slide images, yet clinical deployment is often limited by hardware costs. Super-Resolution (SR) offers a promising alternative by computationally enhancing low-resolution acquisitions. However, existing SR methods frequently struggle to preserve fine-grained cellular morphology, leading to texture oversmoothing and blurred structural boundaries under complex tissue variability. To address this issue, we propose Morph-ISR, a morphology-aware implicit super-resolution framework for DP that restores diagnostically relevant details with sub-pixel precision. Morph-ISR reformulates SR as a continuous coordinate-based reconstruction problem and integrates an Implicit Position-aware Kernel Generator (IPKG) to adaptively model spatially varying tissue morphology. To further enhance structural fidelity, a Morphological Fidelity Prior (MFP) is introduced, leveraging semantic guidance from a pre-trained cell segmentation network to enforce boundary-preserving and region-aware reconstruction, thereby improving the representation of critical cellular boundaries and nuclear textures. Experiments on TCGA and SurGen datasets show that Morph-ISR achieves the best LPIPS and ST-LPIPS among the evaluated methods, reducing them by up to 38.37% and 39.55%, respectively, over the second-best methods while maintaining strong PSNR and SSIM. These results demonstrate superior preservation of diagnostically relevant cellular boundaries and nuclear textures, while compact parameterization and high throughput support efficient edge deployment. Code and trained models will be released upon publication.
☆ When Do Fewer Visual Tokens Accelerate Multimodal Inference? A Break-Even Study Across Decision Locations and Hardware
Fewer visual tokens do not guarantee lower end-to-end latency. We evaluate break-even with a reproducible protocol that accounts for decision overhead, shared work, and the operators each policy can avoid. A stage-level decomposition reconciles these components with measured end-to-end latency. In a 30-example pilot, the two tested autoregressive probes remain slower than Full despite state reuse. A lightweight post-vision predictor yields paired confidence intervals below zero on RTX 3090 and A100 and remains significant after a conservative all-pairs Holm correction. A pre-vision image-size rule also yields intervals below zero on both GPUs, although neither comparison remains significant after the same correction. Pre-vision routing has a structural opportunity unavailable to post-vision pruning: it can avoid preprocessing and vision encoding. On A100, this opportunity outweighs a nearly eightfold larger downstream token reduction by the post-vision policy. Reported quality is conditional on examples answered correctly by Full and is not benchmark accuracy.
comment: 16 pages, 3 figures, 13 tables. Experiments use Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct on RTX 3090 and A100 PCIe GPUs
☆ Learning Biomechanically Plausible Human Motion from Sparse Radar Point Clouds
Radar-based human pose estimation has focused on improving learning algorithms while representing the body as unconstrained keypoint coordinates. We address the underexplored dimension of anatomical fidelity by integrating a full-body skeletal model into a differentiable, end-to-end trainable radar-based pose estimation framework, in which the pose network is supervised through forward kinematics while subject-specific geometry is fitted beforehand. Subject-specific body segment proportions are predicted from radar point cloud features to scale a biomechanical skeleton. A motion prediction network maps temporal radar sequences to generalized coordinates, and differentiable forward kinematics converts predicted joint angles into 3D positions. A contact classification loss encourages physically plausible foot-ground interaction. Under leave-one-subject-out cross-validation on 11 healthy participants performing rehabilitation exercises, the framework achieves 6.456 +/- 1.759 cm mean per-joint position error (MPJPE), 8.083 +/- 0.884 degrees mean per-joint angle error (MPJAE), 0.935 +/- 0.009 contact classification F1, and 3.4 +/- 1.3 % scaling error. This proof-of-concept study demonstrates the feasibility of recovering interpretable biomechanical descriptors from a single low-cost radar sensor in a controlled laboratory setting, a prerequisite for future clinical motion analysis.
☆ SEER: A Self-Grounded Evidence Interface for Controlled Spatial Relation Classification
Spatial relation questions require a model to identify the queried subject and object before comparing their layout. Yet a VLM can recognize both entities and still answer from the wrong instance or an ambiguous global view. We ask whether making query-specific evidence explicit can mitigate this failure and propose SEER (Self-grounded Evidence for Entity-Relation Reasoning), a training-free inference-time evidence interface for frozen VLMs. SEER hides candidate relations during pair localization, constructs a query-specific view with explicit subject/object roles, and retains the full image and sparse box geometry as complementary evidence. For relation-choice protocols with exact inverse support, an optional refinement swaps the entity roles and changes the forward decision only when exactly one visual state obeys the corresponding inverse relation. On an image-disjoint GQA-Train900 test frozen before model scoring, SEER pools to +3.94 [2.17,5.72] over Full; the gain remains positive under label-independent grounding-order counterbalancing and on the 535 rows whose entity names are unique. The unchanged protocol yields +4.35 to +11.79 on all 2,434 filtered EmbSpatial pair-relation questions across three models. Matched controls separate local refocus from role-explicit conditioning. These results establish query-specific evidence construction as the principal intervention, with reciprocal consistency as a smaller protocol-specific refinement.
comment: 23 pages total, 2 figures. Code: https://github.com/SouthWinter/SEER
☆ Geospatial-Prior Guidance for 3D Semantic Scene Completion
Inferring complete 3D geometry and semantics from onboard images remains challenging because occlusions and restricted fields of view leave large scene regions underconstrained. Although satellite imagery provides wide-area context, appearance cues alone offer limited structural guidance and may be unreliable because of spatial or temporal discrepancies. We present GeoScene, a geospatially guided framework that jointly uses satellite imagery and structured OpenStreetMap cues as soft priors for 3D semantic scene completion. GeoScene learns complementary voxel-wise reliability weights for onboard observations and geospatial guidance, and uses them to control feature refinement in observed and unobserved regions. This design preserves local visual evidence while exploiting large-scale road and building structure beyond onboard visibility. Experiments on SemanticKITTI and SSCBench-KITTI-360 demonstrate that GeoScene consistently improves both geometric and semantic completion under the geospatial-prior-assisted setting, with the most pronounced benefits for large-scale static and geospatially structured classes.
☆ A machine-readable catalogue of the Tsiolkovsky papers (fond 555, Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences), and a way to measure how well its handwriting can be read
The personal archive of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) is held as fond 555 of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The archive scanned the fond and published the images, but with no queryable catalogue, no full-text search and no dataset: the holdings can only be browsed one page at a time. This paper describes a machine-readable catalogue of all 2,019 files and 51,008 scans, a dating for 1,969 files taken from the archive's own descriptions, a page-level classification of every scan into handwriting and typescript, and a growing corpus of machine transcriptions (currently 322 files, 5,454 scans).
It also reports a way to measure handwritten-text-recognition accuracy in an archive with no ground truth. Archives of the typewriter era often preserve one text twice, as manuscript and as a typed copy; transcribing both and comparing isolates the reading error, since source and pipeline are identical and only page difficulty differs. Across 294 such pairs from 27 files, two readings of a handwritten page agree on a median 37% of words. On two files that also have a published edition the estimate can be checked against ground truth: it is unbiased to within a percentage point and ranks pages as the truth does (rank correlation 0.92 where the edition is a faithful witness). This bounds use: two variants of one work here share 19% of words, below the rate at which two readings of a single page agree, so the redactions cannot be collated word by word at this quality. That negative result is reported as such, and the constraint is built into the tool.
comment: 8 pages, 6 tables. Dataset and code: https://github.com/beskvladimir-create/tsiolkovsky-papers ; archived at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21705221 (CC0 catalogue, MIT code)
☆ Predictive Enhancement Calibration for Latent Breast MRI Virtual Contrast Enhancement MICCAI 2026
Virtual contrast enhancement (VCE) synthesizes enhanced breast MR images from pre-contrast acquisitions. Modern latent generators offer strong image priors, but their bounded natural-image autoencoders conflict with the non-canonical intensity scale of MRI. We show that the upper bound can alter radiomic fidelity before generation, while scaling source and target independently creates a coordinate inconsistency. We propose Predictive Enhancement Calibration (PEC), which represents each pair in a shared, case-adaptive coordinate during training and predicts its unavailable upper endpoint from the pre-contrast image at inference. We integrate PEC with a pretrained FLUX latent flow transformer via parameter-efficient reference conditioning. Target round trips first isolate representation loss before generation; near-matched conditional models then compare PEC with fixed-wide and separate coordinates under comparable training budgets and backbone settings. On the fixed internal MAMA100 development cohort, PEC improves all eight point estimates in this source-only VCE setting, with paired evidence strongest for MSE and LPIPS.\noindent\textbf{Code:} https://github.com/tanlei0/pec-breast-mri-vce
comment: Top-3 submission in the MICCAI 2026 MAMA-Synth Challenge
☆ SlimVLM: Sensitivity-aware Dynamic Structured Pruning with Adaptive Visual Token Selection for Efficient Vision-Language Models
While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in processing and understanding both text and images, their large parameter sizes lead to significant computational overhead, limiting their deployment on resource-constrained devices. While pruning has been effective for compressing Large Language Models (LLMs), directly applying it to VLMs leads to significant performance drops, largely due to redundant visual tokens interfering with importance estimation. To this end, we propose SlimVLM, a structured pruning framework designed to compress VLMs while preserving their task performance. We introduce an adaptive visual token selection strategy for VLMs that leverages average text-to-visual attention scores to assess the importance of visual tokens, removing redundant ones during pruning based on a set threshold, thereby optimizing the importance calculation. Recognizing the varying tolerance to sparsity across different modules, we also propose a Sensitivity-aware dynamic pruning mechanism that determines the appropriate pruning ratio for each module by calculating the linear reconstruction error between the outputs of the pruned and unpruned modules, ensuring overall performance stability. Experimental results show that SlimVLM outperforms existing methods across multiple multimodal benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
☆ Beyond Simply Environment Scaling: Designing Effective Environment Distributions for Multimodal Agent Learning
Recent works train agents by constructing large-scale multimodal environment pools. However, we find that simply increasing the number of multimodal environments does not always benefit. We further analyze the limitations in current multimodal environment distributions through a series of experiments. Based on these findings, we study how to build more effective training environment distributions from two dimensions: **diversity** and **difficulty structure**. For diversity, we propose **Ability-aware Environment Selection (AES)** to obtain diverse environment sets. For difficulty structure, we propose **Hierarchical Difficulty Curriculum (HDC)**, which organizes curriculum learning through two difficulty levels: harness weakening and state-scale progression. Experiments show that AES and HDC effectively improve multimodal agent training.
comment: Code: https://github.com/GaryStack/Beyond-MMEnv-Scaling
☆ Compass: Degradation-Simulated Reciprocal Learning with Lightweight Needle RWKV for Multimodal Crack Segmentation under Missing Modalities ACM MM 2026
In multimodal crack segmentation for industrial facilities, the key challenge is preventing missing modalities from degrading pixel-level performance while maintaining low computational cost. Existing methods struggle to address semantic degradation caused by missing modalities. We propose Compass, a lightweight network for robust crack segmentation under arbitrary missing modalities. Compass comprises Degradation Simulation Distillation (DSD), Needle Block, and Evidential Topology-Preserving Fusion (ETPF). DSD constructs a degradation simulation stream that mimics more severe missing conditions and performs reciprocal distillation with the original stream, decoupling complete perception from degradation adaptation. Within DSD, Feature-Aware Prototype Transmitter (FAPT) performs modality agnostic prototype-guided feature completion to maintain semantic integrity under incomplete modality conditions. As a lightweight backbone, Needle injects crack-direction cues into WKV modulation and combines connectivity-aware gating with anisotropic context probing for structure-aware modeling. ETPF fuses multimodal features via Dempster-Shafer evidential combination with uncertainty-gated decoding, preserving crack topology while suppressing unreliable features. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance under diverse missing modality scenarios. Even with 90\% depth modality missing on CrackDepth, Compass achieves F1 of 0.8216 and mIoU of 0.8434 with only 2.58M parameters. The code is available at https://github.com/Karl1109/Compass.
comment: This paper has been accepted by ACM MM 2026
☆ Test-Time Augmentation for Tabular-to-Image Classifiers under Distribution Shifts
Malena Loza, Felipe Grijalva, Eva Milara, Luis Bote-Curiel, Francisco J. Lara-Abelenda, David Chushig-Muzo
Tabular-to-image methods that convert tabular data into visual representations have emerged as a novel paradigm for leveraging the high performance of deep learning models. Despite their advantages, the robustness of these methods under distribution shifts remains under explored. Test-Time Augmentation (TTA) is an effective approach in image classification to improve model generalization and robustness, where predictions over multiple transformed views of each input are aggregated. This work evaluates the impact of TTA techniques on predictive performance under Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) for representations generated by tabular-to-image methods. Six tabular-to-image encoding methods were considered: TINTO, IGTD, DeepInsight, BIE, DistanceMatrix, Fotomics. Twenty-five TTA techniques were used, organized into six types: Geometric, Photometric, Structural, Frequency/Encoding, Mixup, and Composite. We employed two datasets from the TableShift benchmark (HELOC and Voting) that provide in-distribution and OOD test subsets designed to evaluate the effect of distribution shifts on tabular data. The results indicate that TTA improves OOD performance, with composite and photometric strategies providing the best trade-off between robustness and variance. In contrast, frequency-domain transformations that alter the encoder's feature-to-intensity mapping consistently degrade performance. These findings highlight TTA as a promising approach for improving the robustness and generalization of classifiers trained on image representations derived from tabular data, particularly under distribution shifts.
☆ S$^3$-Diff: Structural Semantic Synergy Diffusion Model for High Fidelity Super Resolution of Pathological Images
Jiaming Liang, QiHui Han, Guangye Ou, Jiawen Liu, Haolin Chen, Xi Zhong, Jiazhou Chen, Xiaoqi Sheng, Hongmin Cai
Digital pathology relies on high-resolution whole slide images for accurate diagnosis, yet limitations in imaging devices, storage, and transmission often make lower-resolution pathology images more common in clinical workflows. Current super-resolution techniques often tend to smooth diagnostically relevant morphology, leading to over-smoothed textures and semantic drift that compromise downstream clinical interpretation. To this end, we develop the Structural Semantic Synergy Diffusion Model (S3-Diff), a diffusion framework for high-fidelity super-resolution of pathological images. The core of S3-Diff is Specimen-aware Structural Anchoring (SSA), which combines prognosis-aware tissue support extracted by a fixed SAM with LR-HR gradient discrepancies to generate a specimen-specific structural anchor to preserve pathological morphology. Concurrently, we introduce Structure-guided Semantic Fidelity Tuning (SSFT) to adapt DINOv3 representations using SSA-derived structural supervision. SSFT combines the adapted semantic energy with LR-derived edge and grayscale cues. The resulting control guides denoising to suppress stochastic artifacts and maintain structural consistency. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that S3-Diff consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both reconstruction quality and downstream survival analysis performance. The source code will be made public.
☆ IRIS: Visual-Semantic Binding for Forgery-Resistant Watermarking of Diffusion Images
Most in-generation diffusion watermarks embed patterns independent of the image that carries them, and attackers transplant the marks onto images the generator did not produce, resulting in forgery. Binding the mark to visual semantics prevents such transplantation, yet existing bindings anchor to a proxy image rather than the image they mark. Realizing visual-semantic binding inside generation faces two challenges. The mark derives from the image itself yet enters the sampling trajectory before that image exists, and may itself shift the semantics it binds. The binding also meets opposite sensitivity demands, breaking under semantic change while holding through common processing. We present IRIS, a training-free watermarking scheme that embeds an Intrinsic Ring Identifier from Semantics. IRIS reads a content code from the non-watermarked generated image, derives a one-time ring from the code and a secret key, returns to the final low-noise steps of the same trajectory and blends the ring in, after the semantics it binds are settled. To meet the opposite sensitivity demands, the code is read through a canonicalization shared between embedding and detection, holding through common distortions and mild regeneration while flipping under semantic change. Detection recomputes the ring from the query image and the key alone, and the mark therefore fails on a foreign or spliced image, with acceptance tracking semantic displacement. On three prompt datasets IRIS detects reliably and stays close to its same-seed non-watermarked counterpart, a fidelity prior in-generation marks do not reach. While forgeries transfer fixed-pattern marks and regeneration strips post-hoc marks, IRIS alone among the compared marks withstands both.
☆ MinerU.Chem: A High-Precision System for Optical Chemical Structure and Reaction Recognition
Haote Yang, Jiang Wu, Jingchao Wang, Xingjian Wei, Lixin Ma, Linye Li, Chen Zhu, Xiaolong Wu, Yuheng Lu, Ziran Zhu, Junyuan Gao, Lingli Ge, Yuan Xu, Huijie Ao, QianQian Wu, Dechen Lin, Huaiyu Gu, Lu Chen, Shengxin Lu, ShaSha Wang, Yuanyuan Cao, Zhejia Yu, Ruijie Zhang, Zimai Tian, Jiaxing Sun, Yinfan Wang, Jiahe Song, Chuang Wang, Yubin Wang, Rui Nie, Hao Zheng, Bowen Jiang, Hongbin Lai, Yifan He, Chengjin Liu, Tingting Zhang, Liqun Wei, Lijun Wu, Bin Wang, Yuqiang Li, Guangyu Wang, Wei Li, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Conghui He
In organic chemistry papers and patents, molecular structures, reaction schemes, and experimental conditions are often presented as molecular structure depictions, reaction diagrams, and complex tables or figures. Such information is difficult for general-purpose document parsing systems to directly convert into machine-readable data. This limits data production for organic chemistry knowledge base construction and for AI for Chemistry tasks such as reaction prediction, retrosynthesis, condition recommendation, molecular property prediction, and drug molecule design. This report introduces MinerU.Chem, a document parsing system for organic chemistry literature integrated into the MinerU online platform. Built on top of MinerU's general document parsing pipeline, MinerU.Chem adds five chemistry-specific modules: chemistry relevance filtering, molecular structure detection, molecule identifier extraction, molecular structure recognition, and reaction scheme parsing. Together, these modules convert organic-chemistry-related image regions in documents into a Molecule Summary List and a Reaction Summary List. For molecular structure recognition, MinerU.Chem uses CARBON (Complex Atomic Representation and Bonding Object Notation) as its core representation. CARBON enables recognition results to preserve both the visual layout of the original image and complex chemical semantics, while supporting the export of standard downstream formats such as MolFile and SMILES. On the SMILES-evaluable subset of MolRecBench-Wild (N=2,392), MinerU.Chem's molecular structure recognition module achieves a SMILES exact-match accuracy of 93.02%, outperforming the best evaluated comparison system, GPT-5.6-Sol (74.87%), by 18.15 percentage points. The system has been integrated into the MinerU online platform and is available at https://mineru.net/OpenSourceTools/Extractor .
☆ GVCCTurbo: Rate-Compute Quality Scheduling for Codebook Driven Generative Compression
Codebook-driven generative compression uses a pretrained image or video generator as a zero-shot visual prior and transmits compact codebook indices to guide reconstruction at ultra-low bitrate. Current codecs tie each finite-rate correction to a fresh prior evaluation, so shortening the sampler also removes correction slots that carry target-dependent information. We propose GVCCTurbo, a BPP-driven scheduler that separates expensive prior refreshes from codebook corrections: after calibrating an atom-count operating point and skip-gap ratio once per protocol, it maps a target codebook-payload bitrate to a trajectory length and refresh period, making BPP a schedule input instead of a fixed consequence of sampler length. The same endpoint-prediction and finite-rate steering interface covers GVCC-style rectified-flow video and DDCM-style diffusion image compression, preserving zero-training deployment and compatibility with future distilled priors. Native 1080p curves position the complete zero-shot codec in the ultra-low-bitrate regime. In a controlled 720p Wan-GVCC study, the scheduler cuts prior evaluations from 20 to 9 for a $\sim\!44\%$ measured decoding-time reduction shared across the whole schedule family, at a small shared LPIPS cost on high-motion content; within that family, uniform refresh thinning (pure-skip) is a boundary point, and the BPP-aware interior point trades $2.9\%$ fewer codebook-payload bits for consistently higher PSNR at comparable LPIPS. These results support BPP-to-compute scheduling as a controllable extension of sampler-length tuning, without requiring the allocated point to dominate every boundary point.
☆ Detecting Pose Estimation Failures via Keypoint Self-Consistency
One common approach to pose estimation involves predicting object keypoints in an image, followed by using Perspective-n-Point algorithms to compute the object's rotation and translation relative to the camera. While rotations preserve object shapes, this property is often neglected in keypoint-based pose estimation methods, where keypoints are typically predicted independently from each other. As imprecise keypoint predictions negatively affects pose estimation accuracy, it also limits its reliability in downstream tasks. In this work, we explore whether such inaccurate pose estimates can be identified by simply examining spatial locations between 2D keypoints. We propose a set of hand-crafted geometric features that capture the self-consistency of keypoint predictions, including pairwise distances, reprojection consistency, as well as render and mask consistency. Despite its simplicity, a logistic regression classifier trained on these features reliably detects pose estimation failures, outperforming confidence-based approaches like conformal keypoint predictions that rely solely on keypoint uncertainty.
☆ How Many Labels Are Enough? ALDA: Active Learning Deployment Advisor for Medical Image Classification MICCAI
Active learning (AL) promises to reduce the cost of medical imaging projects by lowering the number of clinical labels required. However, practical deployment requires committing to a sampling strategy before the full annotation budget is spent, and choosing the wrong strategy can increase rather than decrease costs. We propose Active-Learning Deployment Advisor (ALDA), a deployment-oriented framework for AL method selection under clinical performance constraints. Given a short pilot phase, ALDA fits a parametric learning-curve model to each candidate strategy, estimates whether that strategy is expected to reach a required clinical performance target, and predicts the number of expert annotations needed to do so. In addition to absolute annotation cost, ALDA introduces a deployment window that quantifies the sensitivity of this cost estimate to uncertainty in the clinical threshold. The final recommendation follows a risk-aware rule: among strategies with near-optimal predicted cost, ALDA prefers the strategy with the narrowest deployment window, the most robust to threshold revisions. Experiments on four medical imaging classification domains show that ALDA predicts the deployment-optimal method from a pilot of 15-30% of the intended budget and reduces annotation costs by up to 82% compared with a poor strategy choice. Rather than introducing a new sampling heuristic, ALDA provides a practical decision layer that answers a deployment-critical question: how many labels are enough?
comment: Accepted at EMA4MICCAI Workshop 2026
☆ From Multi-Resolution Cells to Gigapixel Whole Slide Images Foundation Model for Computational Pathology
Vision Transformers (ViTs) and their hierarchical variants have achieved strong performance in Computational Pathology (CPath). However, most are pre-trained on single-resolution Whole Slide Images (WSIs), limiting their generalization across arbitrary resolutions. Gigapixel WSIs inherently contain diagnostic patterns at multiple scales, including cellular morphologies, tissue architectures, and global context, mirroring how expert pathologists examine WSIs. We introduce Multi-Resolution Pyramid Transformer (MRPT), a model that hierarchically aggregates multi-resolution information from cellular to tissue and WSI levels. MRPT employs a biologically meaningful Consecutive Cross-Resolution Attention (CCRA) mechanism to capture scale-independent interactions and enforces multi-resolution semantic consistency by aligning embeddings across resolutions, yielding robust and generalizable WSI representations. Pre-trained in a multi-resolution self-supervised manner on 624M patches, 2.4M regions, and 36K WSIs, MRPT learns rich coarse-to-fine histopathology features. Extensive experiments on 34 diverse datasets show that MRPT surpasses recent foundation models and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in cancer subtype classification, tissue phenotyping, and Visual Question Answering (VQA) for WSI understanding.
☆ Principles of Robot Autonomy
Autonomous robots are moving rapidly from research labs into everyday life - on roads, in the air, in warehouses, and in space. Robot autonomy is no longer solely an academic pursuit, but a collection of mature, field-tested methods and tools that practitioners rely on in real-world deployments. This book offers a clear, unified introduction to the methods that make this possible. Built on decades of teaching at Stanford, the text develops the core elements of modern autonomy stacks within a single conceptual framework, bridging classical robotics and modern physical AI. Every major topic is paired with hands-on Jupyter notebooks and implementation-driven exercises, so readers build practical intuition alongside theoretical understanding. The result is a principled, accessible, and deployment-aware foundation for anyone seeking to design, analyze, or contribute to the next generation of autonomous systems. This is a comprehensive resource for students, engineers, and researchers entering one of today's fastest-growing fields.
comment: 531 pages. Pre-publication version of a book forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, posted with the permission of the publisher
☆ Lightweight 3D Object Detection via Mamba-Based Knowledge Distillation IEEE
3D object detection using light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors requires a balance between accuracy and computational efficiency for onboard perception in autonomous driving and robotic navigation. Many existing LiDAR-based detection methods employ complex architectures to extract features, integrating large amounts of contextual information to enhance accuracy. This often results in significant computational costs, leading to suboptimal performance on resource-constrained embedded devices. In this study, we propose a knowledge distillation framework that transfers object-level voxel representations from a strong teacher model to lightweight student models through selective voxel-space feature alignment. Taking advantage of the linear-time sequence model with selective state spaces (Mamba), we design a multi-branch Mamba teacher backbone and a box-aware feature transfer mechanism that aligns spatially corresponding voxel features between teacher and student networks through a Mamba-based projection module. Experimental results on both a public dataset and real-world data show that our approach significantly reduces computational load while maintaining competitive accuracy compared with state-of-the-art methods.
comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2026
☆ Continue or Replan? Bernoulli-Continuation Policy Learning for Adaptive Horizon Execution
Weichen Xu, Zhenhua Liu, Lin Luo, Yaobo Liang, Chengtang Yao, Qingyu Mei, Jian Cao, Xixin Cao, Xing Zhang, Jiaolong Yang, Baining Guo
Existing chunk-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models execute a fixed number of actions (i.e., execution horizon) before replanning, turning replanning into a task-agnostic periodic schedule that is independent of task progress. As a result, when no replanning boundary falls before a critical manipulation stage, it is executed from a stale chunk rather than a freshly replanned one. To address this limitation, we propose Bernoulli-Continuation Policy (BCP), a lightweight, plug-and-play framework for adaptive horizon execution that keeps the base VLA frozen. Given a fixed-length action chunk, its continuation head decomposes execution-horizon selection into a sequence of continue-or-replan decisions, which imposes an ordinal, prefix-sharing inductive bias over candidate horizons rather than treating them as independent classes. Since the optimal horizon for each chunk is not observable, we train this head with reinforcement learning from trajectory-level outcomes and introduce a Replanning-Efficiency Reward that jointly rewards task success and efficient VLA usage, discouraging the policy from collapsing to unnecessarily short horizons. On RoboTwin 2.0 with LingBot-VLA as the base policy, BCP improves the average success rate by +11.08% on 13 low-success tasks and from 89.88% to 93.94% (+4.06%) across all 50 tasks. Although trained only under the Clean setting, BCP generalizes to the Randomized setting, raising the average success rate by +4.06%. It also transfers to a different base policy $π_{0.5}$, achieving a better result on LIBERO (+1.7%) and, notably, on the harder LIBERO-PRO (+6.8%). On a real robot, BCP lifts success from 74% to 92% and from 44% to 84% on two manipulation tasks. Meanwhile, its negligible overhead, combined with higher success, makes BCP's overall runtime even lower than the fixed-horizon baselines.
comment: Project page: https://fleetfootwork.github.io/BCP/
☆ MT-Web2Code: Benchmarking Coding Agents on Multi-Turn Regional Reconstruction and Localized Modification
Recent advances in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in web UI generation. However, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on single-turn full-page generation from scratch, overlooking the iterative workflow of real-world frontend engineering, where developers repeatedly reconstruct missing regions and modify localized elements within existing codebases. To bridge this gap, we introduce MT-Web2Code, the first multimodal coding benchmark for multi-turn Macro-Level Regional Reconstruction and Micro-Level Localized Modification, which contains 102 tasks spanning 16 vertical domains. To construct deterministic repair trajectories without costly turn-level human annotation, we develop a scalable Reverse-Corruption Trajectory Engine that iteratively injects structural and stylistic defects into golden pages. We further propose a dual-axis evaluation protocol that measures target-region fidelity and the preservation of unaffected content, where regional reconstruction is assessed by a 5-dimensional VLM-based rubric and localized modification by deterministic pixel-grounded alignment. Experiments on 13 frontier coding agents reveal that current agents struggle to faithfully reconstruct target regions while preserving unaffected content, lack fine-grained visual-code alignment for localized edits, and suffer from error snowballing over multiple turns. Beyond benchmarking, our deterministic evaluation metrics provide fine-grained feedback signals that may facilitate future research on training iterative UI coding agents. Our evaluation code and data will soon be released.
☆ Hi-Token: Hierarchical Coordinate Tokenization for Generative Visual Grounding
Generative Vision-Language Models (VLMs) commonly treat bounding-box coordinates as independent output symbols, leaving numerical order and axis semantics implicit. We identify this representation as an important source of error in visual grounding. Hi-Token encodes each coordinate with axis-specific tokens for the hundreds, tens, and ones digits, which adds coarse-to-fine structure and increases token reuse while retaining the existing VLM architecture. Hi-GAR complements this representation with a geometry-based reward for Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), using box overlap and coordinate accuracy at multiple scales. Controlled comparisons under matched training conditions show that Hi-Token improves localization throughout the evaluated IoU range. Hi-GAR further reduces low-overlap predictions and is used only during training. Experiments on three VLM backbones and the RefCOCO family show consistent gains across models and benchmarks. Hi-R1 achieves higher values than strong specialist baselines on most reported metrics. Analyses of token frequency, digit boundaries, object scale, and IoU distributions explain the effects of coordinate representation and reward training. The results show that structured coordinate generation provides an effective approach to generative visual grounding.
comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, 15 tables
☆ Balancing Efficiency and Efficacy: Training-Free Attention-Guided Switching Between Explicit and Latent Thoughts for MLLMs ACM MM 2026
Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) requires both fine-grained visual perception and rigorous logical deduction. Explicit text-based Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is computationally expensive and prone to visual hallucinations, while existing latent reasoning methods typically require costly training. Furthermore, directly adapting training-free LLM reasoning mechanisms to the multimodal setting yields unstable performance. We identify that this failure stems from their reliance on token-level entropy, which fundamentally conflates perceptual ambiguity (e.g., unclear visual details) with logical uncertainty (e.g., complex reasoning steps). To overcome this bottleneck, we present a novel training-free inference strategy for MLLMs that explicitly decouples perception and reasoning. We propose a novel metric, the vision-to-text attention ratio, to dynamically gauge the model's cognitive focus. Guided by this metric, our proposed framework, Attention-Guided Switching (AGS), adaptively triggers latent reasoning for perceptual tokens to preserve high-fidelity visual information in the continuous space, while enforcing explicit text generation for logical tokens to maintain structural anchoring. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly improving both accuracy and inference efficiency by reducing autoregressive steps and latency. Code is released at https://github.com/swordAndSnow/MM26-AGS.
comment: Accepted by ACM MM 2026. 10 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables
☆ A Low-Cost Hybrid Reservoir Computing Model for Isolated Sign Language Video Recognition
Sign language recognition (SLR) enhances communication between hearing and hearing-impaired individuals. Although deep learning (DL) has achieved promising performance in SLR, its high computational cost limits deployment on edge devices. To address this challenge, we propose a lightweight reservoir computing (RC)-based approach for SLR. In the proposed method, MediaPipe extracts body and hand keypoints to capture the spatial and temporal dynamics of gestures. These keypoints are then processed by a hybrid reservoir computing (HRC) architecture that combines deep reservoir computing (DRC) and bidirectional reservoir computing (BRC), transforming the input into a high-dimensional dynamic representation. A ridge regression model maps the final HRC state to class labels. This HRC-based SLR method achieved Top-1, Top-5, and Top-10 accuracies of 61.12%, 86.05%, and 92.56%, respectively, on the Word-Level American Sign Language 100 (WLASL100) video dataset, demonstrating competitive performance compared to deep learning-based approaches. Additionally, due to the lightweight nature of RC, the training time was drastically reduced to only a few seconds compared with DL-based methods such as Bi-GRU.This method offers low computational cost, showing its potential for deployment on edge devices.
☆ Stop Replacing Noise with Noise: Two-Source Reliability Assessment for Label Correction and Sample Reweighting in Label-Noise Learning
Refurbishment-based noisy-label learning mixes an observed label with a model-derived pseudo target, typically using one sample-wise cleanliness score to control both branches. This creates a hidden coupling: reducing trust in the observed label automatically increases trust in the pseudo target. We show that this complementarity can replace one unreliable signal with another because a pseudo target learned from corrupted supervision may reproduce the noise it is meant to correct. Our representation diagnostics provide a consistent account of this mismatch: noisy supervision redirects deeper layers more strongly, whereas shallower relations remain comparatively stable and provide information beyond the loss posterior. We therefore propose TRACE, a Two-Source Reliability Assessment framework for Label Correction and Sample Reweighting. TRACE assesses the observed label using loss fit, shallow relation stability, and prediction agreement, while separately assessing the pseudo target using model confidence. Its source-specific scores control target correction and supervision strength without assuming complementary reliability. Across synthetic and real-world noisy benchmarks, TRACE improves representative refurbishment baselines and yields more reliable pseudo supervision.
comment: preprint
☆ Dual-domain U-Nets with embedded back projection operators for motion-resolved 4D CBCT reconstruction
Ivo Herzig, Pascal Paysan, Daniel Barco, Marc André Stadelmann, Frank-Peter Schilling, Igor Peterlik, Michal Walczak, Lijin Aryananda, Woo Sang Ahn, Rudolf Marcel Füchslin, Lukas Lichtensteiger
Four-dimensional cone beam CT (4D CBCT) is important for image-guided radiation therapy of thoracic cancers, but its use is limited by long scan times, causing high patient dose and motion/sparse-sampling artifacts.
We propose a deep learning method for motion-resolved 4D CBCT reconstruction from conventional free-breathing scans, without a respiratory signal or explicit projection binning. Our CNN takes free-breathing 3D CBCT projections as input and predicts a static volume at maximum inhalation plus ten displacement vector fields (DVFs) spanning a breathing cycle.
The network extends U-Net: the encoder acts on filtered projection stacks, the decoder acts in the volume domain, and skip connections are replaced with non-trainable back-projection functions at multiple resolutions to transfer features between domains. The model is trained on simulated CBCT scans and evaluated on 11 unseen simulated patients and 13 clinical free-breathing scans. Two additional models (60 s and 6 s scans) were evaluated by clinical experts on three and two scans, comparing single phases of our 4D reconstruction to reference 3D SART-TV images for tumor and esophagus visibility.
Experts preferred our method for tumor visibility (59% vs. 36% no preference, 5% reference) and esophagus visibility (47% vs. 42%, 11%). On simulated data, image quality matched SART-TV (mean RMSE: -1.19 HU, PSNR: +0.09 dB, SSIM: -0.009) while enabling 4D reconstruction. On clinical scans, our method showed sharper dynamic structures (e.g., diaphragm) and fewer motion streak artifacts than traditional reconstruction.
This non-patient-specific CNN predicts static volumes and full 4D respiratory motion models from a single free-breathing scan, without a respiratory surrogate or projection binning, reducing motion artifacts while adding motion-modeling capability.
comment: 15 pages, 9 Figures
☆ SLAMFormer-$\infty$: Infinite SLAM Transformer for Unbounded Frontend and Backend Processing
Zhijian Fang, Weicheng Zheng, Yijun Yuan, Weibang Wang, Zhuoguang Chen, Chang Sun, Junhao Huang, Kenan Li, Minghui Qin, Hang Zhao
We introduce the Infinite SLAM Transformer (SLAMFormer-$\infty$), the first geometric transformer capable of supporting both long-range frontend and backend processing without an explicit distance bound. Instead of relying on a first-frame-anchored formulation, SLAMFormer-$\infty$ employs memory conditions to define flexible coordinate systems and scales for input frames, enabling more expressive structural conditioning. Built upon this formulation, the frontend preserves efficient local computation, while the backend jointly optimizes long-range trajectories and scene geometry in a globally consistent manner. Experimental results demonstrate that SLAMFormer-$\infty$ achieves superior or highly competitive performance in both trajectory estimation and scene reconstruction across large-scale datasets. Notably, SLAMFormer-$\infty$ generalizes to extremely long trajectories, successfully operating on sequences exceeding $17\mathrm{km}$.
☆ OliveGemma: A 3 Billion Visual Language Model for Recognising the Mediterranean & European Diet
Dimitrios I. Zaridis, Traianos Tsiokris, Vasileios C. Pezoulas, Daphni Plati, Eugenia Mylona, Eleni Georga, Nikos Tsiknakis, Antonis Sakellarios, Dimitrios I. Fotiadis
Image based dietary assessment offers a scalable alternative to self reported food diaries, yet fine-grained food recognition remains challenging due to high intra-class variability and visually similar dishes. This study presents OliveGemma, a vision language model for recognising and reasoning about Mediterranean and European cuisine. Built on the open-weight PaliGemma-2-3B architecture, OliveGemma is fine-tuned with LoRA on a unified corpus of 17,340 images from three European research project datasets (MedGR, ODIN, and VIPPSTAR), reconciled into a vocabulary of 216 composed dish categories and paired with 102,642 instruction style question-answer items covering dish recognition, likely and visible ingredients, class boundary discrimination, visual evidence and overall visual food understanding. Under a 3-fold cross-validation scheme, OliveGemma achieves a top-1 accuracy of 92.96% +/- 0.91%, exceeding the strongest CNN baseline (DenseNet-121) by 7.31% and outperforming zero-shot frontier models with exact instructions and bounded classes including Gemini Flash 3 and 3.5, GPT-5.4 Mini, and Claude Haiku 4.6 by 8%, 46%, and 64% respectively. Furthermore, OliveGemma demonstrates competitive performance on Top-3 and Top-5 accuracy, being second best across CNNs and frontier models, surpassed only by DenseNet-121. In addition, OliveGemma achieves 90.79% +/- 1.3% Exact-Set on the likely ingredients of the food categories. These results demonstrate that PEFT adaptation of a small VLM can surpass substantially larger proprietary models on specialised food recognition. The model is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/JamesZar/OliveGemma-3B and the experiments and results can be found at https://github.com/tsiokris/OliveGemma.
☆ SGFormer: Structure-Guided Transformer for Robust Local Feature Matching
Local feature matching is a fundamental component of photogrammetry, enabling accurate image correspondence critical for tasks such as 3D reconstruction, stereo mapping, and visual localization. While recent detector-free matching methods, like LoFTR, have advanced the field, the global features obtained by leveraging the global-range modeling capacity of the unconstrained attention mechanism compromise the model's attention to the salient structures in certain scenarios. This limitation leads to a phenomenon we define as attention divergence, wherein a portion of high-confidence matches are distributed outside the valid matching region (overlapping region), especially in scenes with large viewpoint variations. This occurs because similar features in irrelevant regions may receive equal weighting and consideration within the standard Transformer, limiting matching reliability in challenging photogrammetric environments. To address this issue in feature matching, we propose SGFormer (Structure-Guided Transformer), a novel structure-aware matching network that adaptively updates attention on features near salient structure in overlapping regions. SGFormer employs a semi-dense coarse-to-fine pipeline and incorporates the proposed Triple-Structure-Attention (TSA) module into the backbone net for extracting distinctive features. The TSA module utilizes shallow local features from early network layers to enhance the representation around salient structure, guiding subsequent transformer stages to intensify the model's focus on regions with salient structure across the global scope. SGFormer, thereby reinforcing attention to visually consistent areas while mitigating the influence of non-overlapping regions. Extensive experiments show that SGFormer significantly mitigates attention divergence and improves matching accuracy.
☆ HyperbolicDiffusion: Sharp & Scalable Tiled Generation on the Hyperbolic Plane
Planar tiled diffusion denoises overlapping windows of one rectangular canvas. The hyperbolic plane has no such canvas, and its area grows exponentially with radius. We introduce HyperbolicDiffusion, a training-free method for generating finite visual fields directly on the hyperbolic plane H2. Our Hyperbolic Blooming Cover reduces window placement to a compact dynamic program that runs in seconds while providing strong theoretical guarantees. Permanent surface IDs form a shared latent canvas: a standard diffusion model denoises local windows, whose predictions are fused back onto H2. Because curvature causes residual disagreement and blur at multi-window junctions, a geometry-derived second stage re-noises and repairs precisely those regions. The resulting fields are sharp, reprojectable, and consistent across viewpoints, providing a prompt-driven generative counterpart to Escher's Circle Limit series.
comment: Work in progress. Updated version incoming
☆ Multi-Task Multi-Frame Visual Piano Transcription
Audio-based piano transcription performs well on onset, pitch, and velocity, but the sustain pedal lets sound persist long after key release, so audio systems predict pedal-extended offsets rather than physical key release. Yet existing Visual Piano Transcription (VPT) systems focus on onset detection from short video windows, offset accuracy lags onset by a wide margin, and note-level velocity has not been reported. To address these gaps, we present V2N (Video to Notes), the first complete VPT system: a shared temporal backbone feeds task-specific heads for onset, offset, key hold, and velocity, jointly trained with per-frame supervision rather than only at the window center. Ablations show that multi-task supervision enables offset and velocity prediction while improving onset accuracy; longer temporal context yields further improvements. V2N sets new state-of-the-art results on PianoVAM and R3.
comment: Accepted to the 27th International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) Conference, 2026
☆ Earth Embeddings
Earth observation is moving from foundation models that users must run themselves toward embedding products that package model feature outputs as reusable data without needing to download and process the imagery used to generate them. Earth embeddings are vectors that summarize locations, image patches, or pixels, letting users analyze compact features instead of repeatedly training or running large models on raw satellite imagery. This chapter explains the main types of Earth embeddings, from implicit location encoders to explicit patch and pixel products, and compares their coverage, resolution, dimensionality, storage cost, licenses, and reproducibility. We review their use in land cover and crop mapping, ecological and hazard modeling, socioeconomic prediction, and semantic search, with evidence on when embeddings improve on conventional features and when pooling, fusion, or spatial transfer limit performance. Two case studies show practical workflows for similarity search and land cover mapping. We close with guidance for choosing, evaluating, storing, compressing, and publishing embeddings, and with open problems in oceanic and atmospheric coverage, uncertainty, and benchmarking.
comment: book chapter
☆ Distilled Roads: Generalisable Road Network Extraction Across Sensors, Resolutions, and Region ECCV 2026
Road network segmentation from satellite imagery remains challenging due to large geographic variation in road appearance, occlusions, and domain shifts introduced by differing resolutions and sensors. Existing models, typically trained under narrow resolution--region combinations, generalise poorly to unseen environments such as rural settings, regions with distinct road materials, or imagery from new satellite platforms, often producing broken or disconnected predictions. Adapting these models to new domains usually requires retraining or fine-tuning, which is costly and risks catastrophic forgetting.
In this work, we reframe global road extraction as a continual adaptation problem rather than an architectural one. Our framework combines cross-resolution knowledge distillation across a resolution-decreasing curriculum, multi-sensor training, and topology-aware supervision, yielding a single model that generalises across $0.3-1.0$ m imagery from multiple satellite platforms across continents. On publicly available benchmarks, including City-Scale and Global-Scale, our model outperforms state-of-the-art results by up to $22$ F1 points and $15$ APLS points, while remaining the most efficient, with $3\times$ faster inference. Our results suggest that improved robustness across diverse sub-meter satellite imagery can be achieved through targeted training strategies, such as data curricula, distillation, and topology-aware losses, rather than increasingly complex architectures.
comment: Accepted at ECCV 2026 workshop - TerraBytes II
☆ SRAP: SVD-Refined Adversarial Perturbations for Imperceptible Face-Swap Defense
Deepfake technologies pose increasing threats to facial privacy and identity security, motivating proactive defenses that protect facial images before misuse. Although adversarial perturbations generated by projected gradient descent (PGD) can disrupt the identity representations used by face-swapping models, their visual quality is degraded by two characteristics: perturbations are distributed broadly over the image, including identity-insensitive regions, and they contain visually salient high-frequency components. We analyze these spatial and spectral inefficiencies through identity-sensitivity estimation and the singular-value decomposition (SVD) of PGD perturbations. Our analysis shows that later singular components contain a disproportionate amount of high-frequency energy, while the leading components preserve most of the perturbation energy and defense utility. Based on these observations, we propose SRAP, which combines per-channel truncated SVD refinement with an identity-importance mask at every optimization step. The SVD refinement suppresses high-rank, high-frequency residuals, while the mask restricts perturbations to locations that strongly influence identity representations. Experiments on CelebA-HQ and VGGFace2-HQ demonstrate that SRAP substantially improves protected-image fidelity across all reported metrics while maintaining competitive identity-disruption performance, yielding a favorable trade-off between face-swap defense and visual imperceptibility.
comment: 13 pages, 8 figures
☆ FreqAdapt: Frequency-Adaptive Processing for RAW Object Detection
Existing object detection methods predominantly utilize sRGB inputs, which are compressed from RAW sensor data using Image Signal Processors (ISP) originally designed for visualization purposes. Compared to RGB images, RAW images possess favorable noise characteristics and richer information representation, which are crucial for object detection, particularly under challenging conditions such as adverse weather or low-light environments. In this paper, we propose FreqAdapt, a lightweight module for adaptive RAW data enhancement in the frequency domain. Unlike traditional spatial domain processing methods, FreqAdapt innovatively maps ISP operations to the Fourier frequency domain and performs domain separation based on the physical properties of ISP operations, ensuring each operation is performed in its most suitable domain. Meanwhile, through an adaptive frequency domain encoder that jointly analyzes amplitude spectrum, phase spectrum, and RAW image features, we provide global context for ISP parameter prediction and employ a learnable fusion mechanism to achieve adaptive feature enhancement. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets with diverse lighting and weather conditions demonstrate that FreqAdapt achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining lightweight efficiency and good physical interpretability. Furthermore, our module can be seamlessly incorporated into existing object detection frameworks, providing a novel solution for visual perception tasks in the RAW domain.
☆ Residual Flow Matching with Dynamic Cross-Interaction for 3D Multi-Person Motion Prediction
3D multi-person motion prediction requires modeling both individual kinematics and inter-person interactions. While Flow Matching is effective for multi-hypothesis generation to improve prediction accuracy, directly predicting skeletal sequences from pure noise often compromises structural consistency and introduces unreliable cross-agent interactions during early noise-dominated integration steps. To address this, we propose a Prior-Guided Residual Flow Matching framework. First, a Deterministic Coarse Prior (DCP) establishes a kinematic anchor, formulating the generative process as a conditional flow over motion residuals to simplify the generative objective and preserve structural stability. Second, a Dynamic Cross-Interaction (DCI) mechanism temporally synchronizes inter-agent message-passing with the integration progress, ensuring the extraction of reliable social contexts and improving multi-person motion fidelity. Finally, a decoupled joint-motion architecture with bidirectional fusion effectively preserves fine-grained kinematic coherence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art prediction accuracy across multiple datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/Wei-Wei-a/Residual-Flow-Matching-with-Dynamic-Cross-Interaction-for-3D-Multi-Person-Motion-Prediction.
☆ DRPFNet: Dual-domain Residual Progressive Fusion Network for RGB-Thermal Object Detection ICME 2026
RGB-thermal (RGB-T) object detection aims to fuse complementary information from visible and thermal modalities to achieve robust detection under varying illumination and weather conditions. Current methods typically employ attention mechanisms or transformers to perform cross-modal fusion independently at each feature scale, directly combining RGB and thermal features in the spatial domain. However, they still face significant limitations: cross-level knowledge inheritance caused by independent fusion at each scale,suppressing noise continuously due to the lack of bidirectional optimization, and information degradation induced by the absence of frequency-spatial collaboration. To address these issues, we propose DRPFNet, a Dual-domain Residual Progressive Fusion Network that constructs a unified information flow optimization system from three synergistic levels:structure, feature, and enhancement. At the structural level, we establish cross-scale propagation through bottom-up knowledge accumulation and bidirectional enhancement,ensuring smooth information flow. At the feature level, we collaboratively extract RGB high-frequency edges and thermal low-frequency structures via frequency band separation and edge guidance, guaranteeing representation quality. At the enhancement level, we enhance foreground-background discrimination through edge-guided dual-domain refinement,achieving precise object localization.Extensive experiments on two public RGB-T datasets demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance with competitive efficiency, validating the effectiveness of this hierarchical collaborative strategy.
comment: Accepted at ICME 2026
☆ ArtECulture: Benchmarking Culture-Conditioned Visual Emotion Understanding in Multimodal Large Language Models
Existing visual emotion understanding methods typically ignore cultural variations in emotional perception. We introduce culture-conditioned visual emotion understanding, a task that predicts the culture-specific emotional perception of a given image and explains the underlying rationale. Although related benchmarks exist, they are limited by inconsistent individual annotations, which hinder the derivation of majority-supported culture-level emotion labels, and imbalanced cultural coverage. Thus, we present ArtECulture, a benchmark containing 6,792 artworks with culture-specific emotion labels and explanations across English, Chinese, and Arabic cultures, with balanced Western and non-Western content. Evaluations of 16 open- and closed-source Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) under a zero-shot setting reveal that the task remains challenging, with the best model achieving below 50\% accuracy. To address this limitation, we introduce a retrieval-augmented culture-conditioned emotion understanding framework, which leverages a concept-based cultural emotion knowledge base to inject explicit cultural knowledge into MLLMs without additional training. The framework improves both culturally aligned emotion prediction and grounded explanation generation. Our benchmark and code will be publicly released.
☆ Can Text-to-Image Models Draw from the Right Frame of Reference?
Zheyuan Gu, Ruihang Li, Yong Huang, Yiqian Zhang, XIangzhao Hao, Jiaxin Niu, Jiahao Hu, Zhenyu Zhang
Spatial instruction following has become a crucial requirement for text-to-image (T2I) generation. A common challenge arises when directional expressions are interpreted under different frames of reference. For example, ``the left of'' may refer to the viewer's image coordinates or to the intrinsic orientation of an object, leading to different expected layouts. Existing T2I benchmarks reveal important layout failures, yet they rarely isolate whether models can follow a specified frame of reference when it differs from camera view. To mitigate this gap, we introduce FoR-T2I, a benchmark for evaluating this distinction with 1,200 prompt pairs built from controlled spatial layouts. In each pair, the camera-view (Cam) prompt states the target relation in camera view, while the frame-of-reference (FoR) prompt describes the same target placement through an oriented anchor object. Across 22 closed-source and open-source T2I models, mean final accuracy is 41.8\% lower on FoR prompts than on matched Cam prompts; even the best-performing model achieves only 44.3\% FoR accuracy. This suggests that current models struggle more when the same layout is described through an object's orientation rather than directly in image coordinates. We further analyze this gap by relation type and camera view, compare several training-free prompting and feedback-based mitigation strategies, and propose a VLM-gated rewriting approach that selects rewritten prompts using visual feedback, improving average FoR accuracy from 25.0\% to 29.2\% under the same generation budget.
comment: 9 pages, 3 figures
☆ When Oracle Conditioning Misleads Deployment: Conditioning-Availability Bias in Echocardiographic Segmentation MICCAI 2026
Conditional segmentation models may be trained and evaluated with auxiliary signals cleaner than those available at deployment. We study this protocol-level manifestation of shortcut learning and auxiliary-variable shift in phase-conditioned echocardiographic segmentation. The complementary gap pair measures loss on the deployable oracle-estimated pathway and probes sensitivity on the oracle-random pathway. On held-out CAMUS data, one strong-cyclic, oracle-selected run fails severely with estimated phase, while sensitivity to incorrect phase persists across three runs. On EchoNet-Dynamic, the current estimator remains usable, but random-phase testing reveals strong latent sensitivity. Deployment-aware checkpoint selection and phase perturbation reduce both gaps with little change in mean Dice. Exploratory subgroup analyses quantify variation across measured strata, and a downstream ejection fraction (EF) audit shows that recovering segmentation does not necessarily recover EF error or signed bias. Together, the gaps test whether oracle-conditioned performance survives the inference pathway actually available at deployment.
comment: Accepted for publication in the MICCAI 2026 Workshop on Fairness of AI in Medical Imaging (FAIMI 2026). To appear in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)
☆ SPADE: An Input-Adaptive Sparse Attention Engine for Fast Video Diffusion Models Inference IEEE
Video diffusion transformers (vDiTs) generate high quality but pay quadratic self-attention cost, making inference prohibitive at video-token scales. The challenge is input-adaptive sparsity: selecting critical Q/K/V tokens with negligible overhead and executing them for end-to-end gains. We present SPADE, a training-free sparse-attention engine of three parts: (i) vDiT-SSR, a specification defining 3D blocking candidates and formalizing dynamic masks via Summarizer/Estimator expressions; (ii) runtime scheme generation using SICS and a head-wise policy; and (iii) an executor with low-overhead index search, flash block-sparse attention, and kernel grouping. Across Hunyuan-Video and Wan 2.1/2.2 for text-to-video and image-to-video generation, SPADE raises sparsity and speed while preserving quality, accelerating attention by 2.26x-3.40x and end-to-end inference by 1.49x-1.80x. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/6somehow/DAC-SPADE.
comment: Published in the 63rd ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC '26). 7 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables
☆ PolyLayout: Multi-room Manhattan Layout Estimation ECCV
Estimating room layouts from multi-view imagery is a core task for indoor scene understanding. Existing methods are typically limited either by poor generalization to new datasets or restrictive geometric assumptions of the room shape or camera configuration. Most also estimate rooms independently, failing to exploit shared building structure such as dominant directions, ground plane or ceiling height.
We propose PolyLayout, a multi-room layout estimation method that parameterizes room layouts as Manhattan 3D polygons and optimizes them jointly across multiple rooms. The optimization objective is predicted by a neural network on top of robust pre-trained visual features and trained end-to-end with supervision only on output room layouts. At the same time, camera projection and polygon updates remain explicit and model-based. This separation between learned scoring and geometry improves generalization to new datasets and camera parameters. During optimization, PolyLayout adaptively refines the polygon topology through iterative wall split and merge operations while jointly utilizing structural cues across rooms. We introduce two new multi-view multi-room layout benchmarks by providing layout annotations to existing datasets, and experiments show that PolyLayout outperforms prior approaches, both in terms of accuracy and robustness.
Project page: https://ghanning.github.io/PolyLayout
comment: Accepted at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2026
☆ LocAnyMed: Vision-Language Grounding for Multimodal Medical Images
Zihan Wang, Tong Liu, Zhiwei Wang, Tao Huang, Wentao Jiang, Sihan Ma, Shanshan Ye, Xiaohui Yang, Jing Zhang
Medical visual grounding connects free-form clinical queries to spatial evidence in medical images and is an important component of interpretable medical artificial intelligence. However, general-purpose grounding models are predominantly trained on natural images, while existing medical localization resources remain fragmented across imaging modalities, datasets, and task formulations. To address this gap, we construct LocAnyMed-200K, a multimodal medical visual grounding dataset containing approximately 200K image-query-answer examples across computed tomography, optical medical imaging, ultrasound, and X-ray. We harmonize heterogeneous detection and localization resources into a unified free-form instruction format that supports one or multiple bounding boxes, point coordinates, and no-target outputs for negative queries. Full-parameter fine-tuning of LocateAnything-3B on LocAnyMed-200K improves F1@IoU 0.50 from 10.64 to 85.59 on a held-out evaluation split, demonstrating that large-scale domain-specific supervision can equip a general grounding model with effective medical localization capabilities. Beyond spatial coordinates, a clinically interpretable grounding system should also communicate the evidence supporting its prediction. We therefore derive LocAnyMed-CoT-20K, a rationale-augmented subset that connects anatomical context, visual observations, and spatial conclusions through structured reasoning and further improves cross-source generalization through fine-tuning. Together, these resources provide a unified foundation for studying both localization accuracy and rationale quality across heterogeneous medical imaging modalities. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/MiliLab/LocAnyMed.
comment: Technical report; work in progress. 28 pages, 5 figures, and 16 tables. Code: https://github.com/MiliLab/LocAnyMed
☆ Any-OPD: Heterogeneous On-Policy Distillation for Flow-Matching Models via Representation-Space Bridging
Siming Fu, Zheming Fu, Ruizhe He, Hualiang Wang, Jie Huang, Xiaoxiao Ma, Mingchen Zhong, Weihu Huang, Xiaoxuan He, Haojun Xu
On-policy distillation, in which a teacher corrects samples that the student itself generates, presupposes that the two models speak the same language: identical VAE latents, matching architectures, and a common timestep grid. We ask what happens when none of this holds, as when the strongest teacher available and the student one wishes to deploy come from different model families, and find that the standard recipes have no answer: teacher latents cannot serve as targets in a foreign coordinate system, per-pixel losses against a teacher that stochastically re-draws local detail degenerate into blur or divergence, and timestep indices lose their meaning across mismatched schedules. We present Any-OPD, to our knowledge the first framework for on-policy distillation between arbitrary pairs of latent flow-matching generators. Any-OPD treats the teacher purely as a black-box sampler and connects the two models at exactly one point: a frozen, model-agnostic vision representation in which their independently decoded outputs are compared, sidestepping every assumption about latents, features, or architecture. Trajectory correspondence is recovered by matching continuous noise levels instead of step indices, and a brief anchoring phase, in which teacher samples are re-encoded through the student's own VAE, ensures the on-policy gradient measures sample quality rather than domain mismatch. Distilling the 12B FLUX.1-dev into the 2.5B SD3.5-Medium, Any-OPD lifts the student's PickScore from 0.846 to 0.884 and HPSv3 from 9.12 to 10.97, rivaling the teacher at a fifth of its size, where direct latent regression fails to train at all.
☆ Recurrent Contrastive Learning for Imbalanced Medical Image Classification
Zhiyuan Zhu, Xinling Meng, Junxuan Yu, Jiongquan Chen, Qiongying Ni, Tuhang Shao, Yuhao Huang, Luping Zhou, Ruiyang Huang, Yuxue Wang, Rongliang Zhang, Xue Wang, Tianhong Tang, Likun Wang, Junbo Chen, Yong Jiang, Yongping Lu, Xin Yang
Medical image classification often suffers from class imbalance due to the inherent disparities in disease incidence. Existing approaches, such as class resampling and loss reweighting, mainly improve learning within the observed feature distribution, but do not explicitly enlarge the latent support region of tail classes. As a result, tail-class representations remain overly compact and are easily encroached upon by head classes, leading to biased decision boundaries. In this work, we propose Recurrent Contrastive Learning (RCL) for imbalanced medical image classification. RCL progressively expands the support region of tail classes by recurrently reusing historical feature states across training phases. Specifically, we adopt DINOv3 with LoRA adapters as the backbone to provide robust feature embeddings. We then devise a Temporal Memory Queue (TMQ) to preserve corpus-level features across training phases and provide diversified global references for contrastive learning. Based on TMQ, we construct Temporal Anchors (TARs) to form an anchor field around tail classes. This field enlarges the support region of tail classes, suppresses head-class encroachment, and improves inter-class separation. Extensive experiments on three imbalanced medical datasets demonstrate that RCL achieves consistent improvements over strong baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/dndins/RCL.
comment: 10 pages, 3 figures
☆ PLS-Calib: A Partial Least Squares Framework for Event Camera and Odometry Calibration under Ground Motion Constraints IROS 2026
Accurate extrinsic rotation calibration between sensors is fundamental to the performance of robotic perception systems. However, most existing calibration techniques rely on full 6-DoF motion to excite all degrees of freedom, which is often infeasible for ground-constrained robots with limited motion capabilities. Recent approaches designed for such restricted settings, such as Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA)-based methods, suffer from ill-conditioned covariance matrices that lead to numerical instability and suboptimal calibration accuracy. To overcome these limitations, we present a novel rotation calibration framework named PLS-Calib that, for the first time, leverages Partial Least Squares (PLS) regression to model the latent kinematic correlations between asynchronous, heterogeneous sensor streams. Specifically, we apply our method to the calibration of an event camera and an odometry onboard a ground robot. To improve event-based pattern detection, we introduce a polarity-aware event representation, which enhances spatiotemporal contrast in circular calibration targets. Our PLS-based formulation yields a closed-form, stable solution that avoids matrix singularities inherent in CCA-based approaches. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating significant improvements in calibration robustness and accuracy over state-of-the-art methods. This work offers a practical and theoretically grounded solution for rotation calibration in constrained robotic systems and opens up new directions for applying statistical learning techniques in neuromorphic vision.
comment: 8 pages, 10 figures, 4 tables. Accepted at the 2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2026)
☆ Test-Time Scaling for Safe Text-Guided Image Generation via Intermediate Clean Estimates
Ensuring safety and policy compliance in text-to-image diffusion models remains a critical challenge, as benign or adversarial prompts can often elicit prohibited content, e.g. nudity and protected intellectual property. While training-based unlearning methods are effective, they are computationally expensive and prone to catastrophic interference with general capabilities. Conversely, existing test-time defenses are primarily prompt-centric, relying on modifying textual descriptions only, and overlook the visual signals for detection. In this paper, we propose to leverage the intermediate clean image estimated during the generation process and employ a sparse margin objective to detect prohibited concepts. When a violation is detected, we immediately intervene by optimizing a structured low-rank residual in the text-conditioning space via truncated backpropagation. This design allows weight-preserving detection, keeps non-violating inference latency nearly unchanged as the maximum budget increases, and offers flexibility in safety performance via test-time scaling. Extensive experiments on Stable Diffusion v1.4 and v3.5 across nudity removal, IP protection, and style erasure demonstrate superior performance across suppression, fidelity and preservation compared to prior weight-preserving baselines, providing a scalable and flexible solution for safe generative deployment.
☆ 3DGSI-Assessor: A Large-Scale Dataset and An LMM-based Method for 3D Gaussian Splatting Image Quality Assessment
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become a dominant representation for real-time novel view synthesis (NVS), yet its storage footprint makes compression indispensable for practical deployment. 3DGS training and compression introduce representation-specific distortions such as floating artifacts and surface scattering, which conventional image quality assessment (IQA) metrics fail to capture. Moreover, the independent compression of geometric and color attributes may lead to decoupled dimension-specific distortions that must be diagnosed separately, yet existing metrics report only a single overall score. To address these gaps, we present 3DGS-IEval-15K+, a large-scale, multi-dimensional IQA dataset for compressed 3DGS, comprising 15,200 images from 10 diverse scenes, produced by 6 representative 3DGS algorithms at systematically designed compression levels and rendered from 20 strategically selected viewpoints spanning both training views and challenging novel views, annotated with 45,600 mean opinion scores (MOSs) across overall, geometry, and color quality. Based on 3DGS-IEval-15K+, we propose 3DGSI-Assessor, an all-in-one 3DGS IQA framework that integrates global semantic and dimension-specific local features within a large multimodal model (LMM), predicting all three dimensions in a single forward pass. 3DGSI-Assessor achieves state-of-the-art performance on 3DGS-IEval-15K+, and exhibits competitive generalization on other NVS benchmarks. Dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/YukeXing/3DGSI-Assessor.
☆ GUI-Lens: Coarse-to-Fine Cropping for GUI Grounding with General-Purpose VLMs
Zichuan Fu, Shirong Wang, Wenlin Zhang, Guojing Li, Yimin Deng, Jingtong Gao, Junjia Qi, Hanyu Yan, Yefeng Zheng, Xiaopeng Li, Wanyu Wang, Xian Wu, Xiangyu Zhao
GUI grounding maps natural-language instructions to click locations and is essential for reliable GUI agents. The task remains difficult on high-resolution, densely populated interfaces because a vision-language model (VLM) may recognize a requested control without locating it precisely enough for interaction. Most existing methods provide various forms of localization assistance, but still rely on a direct click prediction, allowing visual ambiguity or an inaccurate initial estimate to propagate to the final result. In this paper, we introduce GUI-Lens, a coarse-to-fine grounding framework that allows a general-purpose VLM to determine the target through active visual observations. Specifically, GUI-Lens extracts OCR text and detected UI components from the screenshot and presents their positions as coordinate references. Using the instruction, the current view, and these references, the VLM selects the region and scale of the next view, which is cropped and enlarged to provide finer visual details. This process continues over successively focused views until the target is determined. Proposed crops and clicks are checked against the instruction throughout the process, and the final local position is mapped back to the original screen coordinates. Experiments on four GUI grounding benchmarks and three general-purpose VLM backends show that GUI-Lens improves overall grounding accuracy by up to 24.9 percentage points and achieves state-of-the-art performance with GPT-5.5.
comment: Preprint. Code: https://github.com/Fzkuji/GUI-Agent-Harness
☆ Efficient Video Dataset Distillation via Cluster-Guided Prototype Blending
Video dataset distillation aims to compress a large video dataset into a compact surrogate set that preserves its training utility. Most existing approaches synthesize condensed videos through iterative optimization, whose cost is amplified by the temporal dimension. Rather than further reducing the number of optimized variables, we investigate whether effective distilled videos can be constructed without gradient-based optimization of the stored videos. Such a construction-based approach must address three challenges: selecting informative temporal segments, covering diverse intra-class variations under a limited videos-per-class budget, and increasing the information carried by each stored sample. To this end, we propose ProtoBlend, an efficient select-allocate-blend framework. First, teacher-guided temporal clip selection retains a high-confidence segment from each source video. Second, cluster-guided prototype allocation partitions the selected clips in the teacher feature space and assigns one distilled slot to each intra-class cluster. Third, each prototype is blended with an in-cluster anchor, while their teacher predictions are combined using the same coefficient to provide mixture-source supervision. Experiments on four trimmed action-recognition benchmarks demonstrate that ProtoBlend achieves a competitive accuracy-efficiency trade-off without iterative optimization of the distilled videos.
☆ Hear to See: Discerning Stateful Listening for Audio-Visual Instance Segmentation ACM MM 2026
Leiye Liu, Miao Zhang, Jiahong Jiang, Jingjing Li, Jialong Zhong, Kai Peng, Tingwei Liu, Wei Ji, Yongri Piao, Huchuan Lu
Audio-visual instance segmentation (AVIS) requires accurately identifying and tracking individual sounding objects with pixel-level masks. Existing methods struggle to match overlapping acoustic events with visual instances and handle asynchronous audio-visual dynamics. Therefore, two critical questions arise: how can a model establish precise correspondence between overlapping sound sources and visual instances, and how can a model maintain robust tracking when audio and visual signals are temporally misaligned?This paper proposes Hear to See (H2S), addressing these challenges through two mechanisms. The Acoustic-Semantic Projector (ASP) disentangles mixed audio and establishes hierarchical correspondence from semantic to spatial domains. The Asynchronous Dynamics Modulator (ADM) adaptively adjusts state transitions via audio-modulated Mamba, prioritizing current information during dynamic variations and maintaining continuity in stable periods.Experiments on AVISeg show H2S achieves SOTA performance, attaining 48.54 mAP with a COCO pretrained ResNet50 and surpassing the previous by 7.8\%. The code will be open-sourced once the paper is accepted. The source code will be publicly available at https://github.com/leiyeliu/H2S.
comment: Accepted by ACM MM 2026
☆ NanoMorph-3D: An End-to-End Physics-Driven Unrolling Framework for Nanomaterial Reconstruction
Precise 3D characterization of nanomaterials is essential for unlocking structure-property relationships. However, standard electron tomography is fundamentally limited by the missing wedge problem. Consequently, conventional algorithms suffer from severe geometric distortions, a challenge further complicated by pervasive noise interference. Current learning-based methods either rely on physics-blind post-processing or employ end-to-end architectures constrained by local receptive fields, failing to capture complex 3D topologies. We propose NanoMorph-3D, a unified end-to-end framework grounded in a comprehensive Nanomorphological Taxonomy. Powered by a large-scale synthetic dataset explicitly modeling non-linear electron attenuation, we design a Physics-Driven Unrolled Network mapping proximal gradient descent into a learnable architecture. To capture complex internal topologies, we formulate a hierarchical attention mechanism with Physics-Normalization for long-range 3D dependencies and scale invariance. Crucially, our Dual-Domain strategy leverages Sinusoidal Attention to explicitly model physical projection trajectories, enforcing strict sinogram consistency to mitigate missing wedge artifacts. Finally, an unsupervised dual-stream mechanism bridges the simulation-to-reality gap. Experiments demonstrate NanoMorph-3D reconstructs diverse topologies with superior fidelity and speed.
☆ Clarity Contrast and Similarity Selection for Multi-Focus Image Fusion
Multi-focus image fusion (MFIF) aims to generate an all-in-focus image from multiple images of the same scene focused at different regions. Most existing deep learning-based methods lack explicit interaction between the source images, which limits their performance and interpretability. This paper presents a novel Clarity Contrast and Similarity Selection Network (CSNet), to bridge direct information exchange for MFIF. Specifically, by contrasting the clarity differences between source images within our proposed Clarity Contrast Attention Module (CCAM), we mutually enhance sharp features while suppressing blurry ones. This allows us to identify the exactly focused regions in each source and locate the focused-defocused boundaries. Moreover, the Defocus Spread Effect (DSE) degrades pixels in all source images around the boundaries. To further refine these ambiguous areas, we introduce a Similarity Selection Strategy, which reconstructs an initial clear image from source images and selects optimal pixels by comparing the similarity among them. Through this interactive approach, CSNet effectively preserves focused regions as well as recovering natural boundaries to fuse an all-in-focus output. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our code is available on Github: https://github.com/ZYC-HUST/CSNet.
☆ CIGTSurv: Clinical Information Guided Tri-modal Survival Prediction with Local Prototype Association and Global Feature Alignment MICCAI 2026
Multimodal learning has significantly advanced survival prediction by integrating pathology images with genomic data. However, clinical information, despite its critical role in reflecting a patient' s overall health, remains underutilized due to its discrete, sparse, and low-dimensional nature. Furthermore, the inherent heterogeneity across these modalities pose significant challenges in modeling cross-modal interactions. In this paper, we propose CIGTSurv, a Clinical Information Guided Tri-modal framework for Survival prediction. Specifically, we first design a holistic text template and use pretrained foundation models to transform clinical tabular data into high-dimensional tokenized embeddings. Using clinical information as an anchor, we then introduce a dual-level interaction mechanism: 1) a local prototype association (LPA) module based on cross-attention to explicitly learn token-level correspondences between different modalities, and 2) a global feature alignment (GFA) loss based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) to implicitly enhance cross-modal distribution consistency. Extensive experiments on five TCGA cancer cohorts demonstrate that CIGTSurv achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) survival prediction performance. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Daijing-ai/CIGT-Surv.git.
comment: Accepted at MICCAI 2026
☆ Open-Linguistic Concept Unified Learning for Cross-Site Interpretable Dermatology Image Diagnosis
Human-interpretable computer-aided diagnosis is crucial for clinical decision making. Concept-based models excel by providing transparent reasoning and enabling post-hoc, clinician-in-the-loop interventions. However, their rigid dataset-specific adaptation inherently restricts cross-site generalization. Applying them across diverse modalities, such as dermoscopic and clinical photographs, is challenging due to heterogeneous concept taxonomies varying in availability, granularity, and semantics across cohorts. Consequently, adapting Foundation Vision-Language Models (FVLMs) demands costly label engineering and repeated post-training. Existing intervention mechanisms remain rigidly tied to predefined concepts, lacking adaptability and hindering scalable dermatology CAD deployment. To address these bottlenecks, we propose UniCon, an open-linguistic unified concept learning framework for multimodal interpretable vision-language diagnosis. UniCon resolves these challenges through three contributions: (1) A shared semantic representation space via a unified concept prototype codebook, seamlessly coordinating heterogeneous concept systems across modalities without dataset-specific retraining. (2) Open-linguistic based multi-faceted semantic specifications to overcome sparse textual label limitations, improving boundary sensitivity in uncertain clinical contexts. (3) A robust, cross-site adjustable intervention interface powered by reliability-gated bottleneck aggregation, enabling consistent reasoning and transferable clinician corrections. Extensive experiments demonstrate that beyond securing top-tier diagnostic accuracy, UniCon successfully bridges disparate clinical taxonomies, unlocking unprecedented cross-site intervention capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/wuchengyu123/UniCon.
comment: accepted by ACM Multimedia 2026
☆ Self-Supervised Representation-Guided Generative Dataset Distillation
Mingzhuo Li, Guang Li, Linfeng Ye, Jiafeng Mao, Takahiro Ogawa, Konstantinos N. Plataniotis, Miki Haseyama
Dataset distillation compresses a large training set into a compact synthetic set while retaining its downstream utility. Most existing methods target randomly initialized networks, whereas modern vision systems often adapt frozen pretrained encoders with lightweight modules. Distilled samples should therefore preserve the discriminative geometry of the pretrained representation space, which existing generative objectives do not explicitly consider. We propose self-supervised representation-guided generative dataset distillation (SRG), a framework that translates the SSL geometry into diffusion guidance. Specifically, SRG constructs class-wise prototypes from real-image SSL representations and performs guidance through three SSL-space objectives for prototype alignment, inter-class discrimination, and intra-class assignment. During diffusion sampling, it adopts a stage-wise guidance strategy: early denoising is anchored to the latent of the real image whose SSL representation is nearest to the assigned prototype, whereas later denoising is guided by the SSL-space objectives. This division preserves the visual realism provided by the generative prior while progressively steering samples toward representative and class-discriminative regions of the SSL representation space. SRG consistently outperforms the evaluated generative baselines across multiple datasets and IPC settings. A cross-encoder evaluation further indicates transfer across pretrained representation spaces. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of representation-guided generation for dataset distillation with pretrained SSL models.
☆ iFAN: Inference-Aware Learning for Plain Mask Transformers
Fang Li, Yu He, Haoyang Tong, Lichen Ma, Jingling Fu, Wenxiao Fan, Tongxuan Liu, Luohang Liu, Ke Zhang, Junshi Huang
Query-based mask transformers assemble segmentation outputs through pixel-wise competition among query predictions of the final layer, yet this inference process is not explicitly optimized during training. We identify two key mismatches: the query with the highest probability-mask score does not necessarily produce the most accurate mask, and final-layer decoding may discard superior predictions from intermediate layers. To address these issues, we propose Inference-Aware Learning (iFAN), a general training framework for plain mask transformers. iFAN introduces Adjusted Probability-Mask Ranking (APMR), which aligns query competition with predicted mask quality and suppresses high-confidence but inaccurate competitors. We further employ Cross-Layer Self-Distillation (CLSD) to transfer stronger intermediate predictions to the final layer. The ranking and distillation objectives are training-only, while inference retains efficient final-layer decoding. Experiments on COCO, ADE20K, and Cityscapes demonstrate consistent improvements across panoptic, instance, and semantic segmentation, as well as across different architectures, backbone scales, and input resolutions. Overall, iFAN improves performance by an average of 1.20 PQ, 1.30 AP, and 0.63 mIoU, with negligible additional parameters, FLOPs and inference latency.
comment: Project Page https://neesky163.github.io/iFAN/
☆ CrossScope: A Role-Asymmetric World Model for Joint Dual-Scope Surgical Video Prediction
Wanhao Liu, Jinsong Lin, Rulin Zhou, Chi Kit Ng, Wenbin Pan, Zhiqing Tang, Dongyue Li, Liwei Luo, Yanshen Wu, Panshuo Li, Zhiyong Xiong, Huxin Gao, Tamas Haidegger, Hongliang Ren
Visual world models typically learn future dynamics from a single observation stream, limiting their ability to model cooperative systems with multiple independently moving observers. We investigate this challenge in Mother--Child endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP), where two flexible scopes provide complementary yet role-dependent views without a calibrated stereo relationship. Unlike conventional multi-view fusion that assumes symmetric information exchange, we formulate \textbf{role-asymmetric dual-scope future prediction}, where cross-view evidence is selectively transferred according to the prediction target and its underlying spatial requirements. We propose \textbf{CrossScope}, a dual-stream surgical world model that preserves view-specific experts while enabling target-specific evidence routing through geometry-guided residual interactions. CrossScope learns two complementary communication directions: geometric motion cues from the Mother view guide Child-view future dynamics, while pose-aligned Child appearance supports Mother-view prediction only when valid spatial correspondence is established. This design allows each scope to contribute task-relevant evidence without compromising its view-specific representation. To evaluate this problem, we establish a paired dual-scope benchmark comprising synchronized phantom and real-world ERCP episodes, with evaluations assessing visual fidelity, structural preservation, target localization, and motion consistency. Experiments demonstrate that CrossScope consistently outperforms strong surgical video generation baselines, validating the importance of role-aware evidence routing for multi-observer visual world modeling.
☆ DRIFT: Derailing Denoising Trajectories of Flow-Matching VLAs with Adversarial Patch Attack
Flow-matching vision-language-action (VLA) models such as pi0 generate robot actions by integrating a learned denoising velocity field, and have been reported to resist adversarial perturbations that readily fool autoregressive VLAs. We show that this robustness is largely illusory: it stems from prior attacks ignoring the multi-step denoising ODE. We introduce DRIFT (Denoising Redirection via Input perturbation of the Flow-matching Trajectory), a test-time universal adversarial patch placed on the robot's gripper that attacks the denoising velocity field of an off-the-shelf policy. Our central finding is counterintuitive: attacking only the first denoising step is both stronger and cheaper than attacking a wider window of steps, which we explain through a gradient conflict unique to input-space optimization and which is exactly opposite to the training-time backdoor regime. On pi0 and pi0.5 across four LIBERO suites, DRIFT breaks essentially all originally-solvable tasks with a small single patch, far exceeding action- and embedding-space attack baselines.
☆ Bridging Online and Offline Handwriting via Differentiable Physical Rendering ECCV 2026
Realistic handwritten text generation plays an important role in numerous applications, such as font design, biometric authentication, and robotic calligraphy. Existing methods are typically divided into two independent paradigms: online approaches that estimate handwriting trajectories and offline approaches that synthesize realistic handwriting images. While online models capture structural and temporal dynamics, they often lack fine-grained textures, whereas offline models reproduce realistic appearance but discard stroke order. However, unifying online and offline models remains challenging due to (1) the lack of an explicit physical model linking stroke kinematics to pixel-level appearance and (2) the absence of paired trajectory-image datasets. Moreover, enabling end-to-end learning requires a differentiable rendering process across motion and appearance domains. To address these challenges, we propose a compact physical brush model that bridges stroke dynamics and visual appearance, together with a differentiable rendering module that converts stroke trajectories into stylized images. By integrating these components, we propose a unified online-offline handwriting generation framework via differentiable brush rendering. The proposed framework consists of four core modules: 1) a text-to-stroke generator that predicts the target stroke conditioned on the given text and style image, 2) a brush parameter observer that extracts brush model parameters from style references, 3) a differentiable brush renderer that maps a stroke sequence and physical brush parameters into a handwritten image, and 4) a zero-shot image refiner that refines rendered images via diffusion models. Extensive experiments and real-world robotic calligraphy demonstrations validate our approach, achieving both structural and visual fidelity.
comment: Accepted at ECCV 2026, Project page: https://seonmip.github.io/onoff
☆ CRIL-U-Net: Compact Ratio-Interaction Learning for Focal Cortical Dysplasia Segmentation from T1w and FLAIR MRI
Focal cortical dysplasia (FCD) type II is an important structural cause of drug-resistant focal epilepsy, but its small size, heterogeneous appearance, and subtle MRI characteristics make automated segmentation challenging. Conventional multimodal networks commonly concatenate T1-weighted (T1w) and fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) images, requiring subsequent layers to learn useful cross-modal relationships implicitly. We propose CRIL-U-Net, a 3D U-Net incorporating a Compact Ratio-Interaction Learning module that combines local spatial features, voxel-wise cross-modal mixing, and bidirectional ratio-inspired interactions. CRIL-U-Net was compared with a conventional 3D U-Net and an input self-attention U-Net using five-fold cross-validation on 85 FCD subjects and 25 healthy controls. Each architecture was trained independently using Dice-binary cross-entropy (Dice-BCE) and Focal Tversky-Focal (FTF) losses. With FTF, CRIL-U-Net achieved the highest mean Dice score (0.196 +/- 0.262), compared with 0.136 +/- 0.224 for the U-Net and 0.135 +/- 0.214 for the attention comparator. It produced nonzero lesion overlap in 44 of 85 cases, compared with 36 for the U-Net. Under FTF, CRIL-U-Net significantly outperformed both comparison architectures after false-discovery-rate correction. These findings suggest that compact cross-modal representation learning can improve FCD segmentation within a controlled U-Net setting when combined with an imbalance-aware objective, although the remaining zero-overlap rate of 48.2% highlights the need for further validation and methodological development.
☆ EditFlow3D: Automated Local Editing of 3D Assets with Trajectory Preservation
Controllable local editing of 3D assets requires precise target localization and appropriate visual guidance. However, existing methods lack a simple yet accurate way to obtain 3D masks and struggle to achieve the desired edit while faithfully preserving the structure and appearance of non-target regions. To address these challenges, we present EditFlow3D, a training-free framework for local 3D editing. Given a source asset and an edit instruction, a VLM-driven workflow interprets the editing intent and automatically constructs a visual guidance image and a refined 3D editing mask, enabling localized editing in the native representation space of a pretrained 3D generative model. Specifically, mask-guided differential flow focuses the edit on the target region, while step-wise trajectory preservation maintains consistency between non-target regions and the source asset without directly replacing intermediate features. Since the existing Edit3D-Bench covers only a limited range of local editing categories, we further introduce EditFlow-Bench as a complementary benchmark encompassing a broader variety of structural and appearance edits, and evaluate EditFlow3D on both benchmarks. Quantitative results, qualitative comparisons, and a user study demonstrate that EditFlow3D achieves more accurate target-region editing and better preserves non-target regions than existing 3D editing methods.
☆ Frequency-Decorrelated Temporal Ensembles for EEG--fNIRS Imagined-Handwriting Decoding
Imagined handwriting offers a temporally rich paradigm for non-invasive neural decoding, yet reliable recognition across unseen participants remains difficult because scalp EEG is noisy and internally generated stroke sequences vary across individuals. The Multimodal Brain-Computer Interface Grand Challenge provides synchronized EEG and fNIRS for four-class subject-independent handwriting-trajectory classification. We propose FRED, a task-adapted system that models imagined handwriting as a multi-second motor sequence and trains a compact multi-scale temporal network on three complementary EEG frequency views. With three seeds per view, cross-band members produce substantially less-correlated errors than same-band replicas, yielding a clean nine-member ensemble accuracy of 0.8076/0.7242/0.7492 on the public/private/overall test partitions without test-set adaptation or output constraints. The submitted pipeline further incorporates transductive pseudo-label training, three EEG-Conformer members, posterior aggregation, and a paradigm-aware decoder. Because every 12-trial randomization block contains three instances of each class, the final predictions are obtained by Hungarian assignment under the known block quota. On one fixed posterior pool, independent, session-constrained, and block-constrained decoding achieve 0.7600, 0.7758, and 0.7952 overall accuracy, respectively. The complete system reaches 0.8498/0.7718/0.7952, ranking fourth on the private split. A modality audit finds fNIRS-only decoding at chance (0.2511 overall), while adding fNIRS to EEG changes accuracy by only +0.0025. These results identify frequency-diverse temporal EEG modeling and protocol-matched structured inference as the principal sources of performance in this sparse-montage EEG--fNIRS setting. The source code is available at https://github.com/XiuFan719/EEG-fNIRS-fuse-method-for-MM-challenge.
☆ SpreadMark: Robust Image Watermarking via Spread-Spectrum Embedding
Invisible image watermarks are increasingly used for deepfake detection and provenance tracking, where they must survive not only incidental distortions but also deliberate removal. We revisit spread-spectrum embedding, a classical watermarking principle, inside a modern neural post-hoc watermarking architecture. Our starting point is a measurement: in existing encoder-decoder schemes each message bit occupies only a small fraction of the image, a shared contributing factor to their fragility, since removal then need only disturb the region a bit occupies. SpreadMark instead spreads each bit as a dense pseudo-random codeword over the whole image and recovers it by matched-filtering a learned cover-suppressed chip representation, with a parallel convolutional decoding path and sparsification-aware training. A conditional chip-space analysis shows that, under a codeword-independent perturbation model, dense spreading increases the budget required to disrupt matched-filter recovery. Evaluated on COCO and DIV2K against nine schemes, SpreadMark is the only evaluated method retaining high detection under both the regeneration and the latent-space sparsification settings we test, with competitive JPEG and additive-noise robustness. It keeps the embedded watermark imperceptible, maintaining high perceptual quality on both COCO and DIV2K.
comment: 12 pages, 6 figures
☆ Caved or Convinced: Temporal Sampling Gates Claim Deference in Video Large Language Models
When asked which of two events came first, video large language models can fail in two opposite ways: cave to a false claim, or reject a true one. Prior video sycophancy work measures only the first and mitigates it by teaching the model to trust the user less, a fix known in text and image models to worsen the second. In video, both failures come from two causes the literature treats as one: availability, whether the sparse sampled frames contain the two events, and weighting, whether that evidence is trusted over the user. We separate them with two interventions that keep the claim fixed: a frame-preserving reorder that flips the claim's truth, and a sampling-offset shift that captures or misses both events at a fixed frame budget. When the events are missed, the two twins present identical frames, so each of the nine models we evaluate accepts a true and a false claim at the same rate, making Youden's $J=0$ by construction. Availability is necessary but not sufficient. Five of the nine read the order, yet four of those five still cave to the false claim, so their deference hits a weighting ceiling. Since trust cannot be calibrated over evidence that was never sampled, we propose a reversal test that cancels the model's order prior by scoring the sampled frames forward and reversed, then answers, resamples, or abstains without reading the claim. The test raises the order accuracy to 0.92-1.00 on the models that read the order and abstains rather than guesses on those that cannot.
comment: 11 pages, 2 figures
☆ Surface Keypoint Representation for Multi-Object and Articulated Human-Object Interaction Generation
Daily activities require humans to coordinate whole-body motion with the motion of surrounding objects. Despite recent progress in human-object interaction (HOI) generation, most existing methods assume interactions with a single rigid object and do not extend well to scenarios involving a variable number of objects or articulated objects with diverse joint mechanisms. We propose surface keypoint trajectories as an object motion representation: for each rigid component, whether a standalone object or one part of an articulated assembly, we track a small set of non-collinear surface points over time. This representation handles multi-object coordination and diverse articulation mechanisms directly from point dynamics without requiring explicit joint-type specification. To model when and where each body region contacts each object, we introduce a spatio-temporal contact distance field that extends distance-based contact modeling to whole-body, multi-object, and articulated settings. We factorize HOI generation into three stages: generating object motions from text or waypoints, predicting the contact distance field, and synthesizing whole-body motion with contact-guided optimization. Experiments on ParaHome, HIMO, ARCTIC, and OMOMO demonstrate better or comparable performance to existing methods across single-object, multi-object, and articulated interaction settings.
comment: Project page: https://neu-vi.github.io/SK-HOI
☆ CROSS: Cascaded Distillation and Dual-Constraint Grounding for Remote Sensing Referring Segmentation ECCV
Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation (RRSIS) has achieved significant progress through the integration of VLMs and the Segment Anything Model (SAM). However, this progress largely relies on strong pre-trained capabilities, while leaving two fundamental limitations insufficiently addressed: (1) Architectural Weak-Coupling, where the unidirectional flow forces reliance on coarse VLM prompts and wastes SAM's pixel-level structural guidance, causing localization drift; and (2) Object-Centric Semantic Bias, where models overemphasize dominant object semantics while remaining insensitive to spatial reasoning crucial for RRSIS. Motivated by these observations, we propose CROSS, a tightly integrated paradigm for RRSIS. First, we introduce Linguistic-Guided Cascaded Distillation (LGCD) to bridge the architectural gap, which distills SAM's geometric affinities as soft regularizers into VLM intermediate layers, injecting dense structural priors to refine localization. Second, Perspective-Spatial Contrastive Learning (PSCL) imposes cross-anchored constraints by mining mask-filtered deceptive distractors and spatial-linguistic counterfactuals as hard negatives, explicitly shattering semantic shortcuts to enforce genuine logical consistency. Extensive experiments on RRSIS benchmarks demonstrate that CROSS achieves state-of-the-art performance and maintains precise localization even under severe spatial description perturbations, standing as a robust new paradigm for RRSIS.
comment: Accepted at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2026. 20 pages, 6 figures, and 5 tables. Tingzhang Luo and Ruizhong Liu contributed equally. Jianyuan Guo is the corresponding author. Project page: https://clarence-cv.github.io/CROSS/
☆ From Routes to Steps: Separating Semantic Progress from Local Execution in Vision-and-Language Navigation
Xiangyun Huang, Xiangchen Wang, Runfeng Lin, Yihao Xu, Kangyu Huang, Jiang Hengchen, Xiwang Dong, Lin Jiarong
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to follow a route-level instruction by executing its constituent steps from egocentric visual observations. Existing VLM-based navigators typically supervise both capabilities through next-action prediction alone, making progress-tracking errors difficult to distinguish from execution errors. When an agent deviates from the route, a corrective action label may recover the next movement but does not indicate whether the agent selected the wrong sub-instruction or failed to execute the correct one. Consequently, the agent may continue making decisions from an erroneous progress state. To resolve this ambiguity, we propose \textbf{Route2Step}, a framework that decouples semantic progress tracking from action generation through an explicit step-level interface. The Instruction Analysis Module ($\mathcal{M}_{\mathrm{IA}}$) predicts this state from the global instruction and visual history. Conditioned on the predicted state and recent observations, the Action Generation Module ($\mathcal{M}_{\mathrm{AG}}$) generates local action chunks. To supervise the progress state without manual temporal labels, E-SPA, a step-alignment procedure, associates sub-instructions with their corresponding portions of route-level demonstrations. These alignments enable state supervision for incorrect progress estimates, while direct action supervision is reserved for rollout groups that repeatedly fail under the correct active sub-instruction. On R2R-CE, Route2Step improves SR from 48.1\% to 55.3\% and SPL from 43.3\% to 48.2\%, using 190K state-level corrective samples while requiring only 11.5K directly action-supervised states. Experiments in real-world indoor and outdoor environments further demonstrate the practical applicability of Route2Step. The project page is: https://sisyphus-hxy.github.io/Route2Step/.
comment: 16 pages, 9 figures
☆ Frozen High-Resolution Inference for Cross-City Object Detection: An AI City Challenge 2026 Study
Cross-city object detection requires a detector trained in one city to generalize to an unlabeled target city. In AI City Challenge 2026 Track 6, we analyze archived configurations of a single RF-DETR-Large detector inside an air-gapped Training-as-a-Service platform whose server returns only an aggregate COCO-style AP over a hidden mixture of source- and target-city images. Frozen 1120 x 1120 inference of a checkpoint trained at 704 x 704 achieved the highest aggregate AP among the evaluated configurations (0.3272 -> 0.3654, +0.0382) without any parameter update, with the largest relative gain on small objects and the largest absolute gain on medium objects, at 2.53x the input pixels. A warm-start 1120px fine-tuning recipe reached 0.3470 while its in-domain validation AP rose (0.767 -> 0.789), a caution that in-domain validation is an unreliable model-selection signal under aggregate-only cross-city feedback. Because that run's evaluation used a higher confidence threshold than the inference-only runs (0.05 vs. 0.01), we treat its score as a descriptive archived outcome rather than a controlled verdict on fine-tuning. Gray-world normalization did not meaningfully change the frozen-1120 result, and a rectangular run was found by audit to have used an unintended portrait orientation. We release verbatim platform commands, configuration snapshots, and an explicit evidence boundary for every claim. Each configuration was submitted once and the best was selected on the hidden server, so these are exploratory, audited findings about the aggregate mixture; they do not establish target-city-specific improvement.
comment: 16 pages
☆ Rectify Then Diffuse: Disentangling Concepts Before Denoising Trajectory Unfolds
Text-to-image diffusion models can generate individual concepts well, but they often omit or merge concepts incorrectly with multiple concepts. We trace these failures to an early coordination bottleneck: before denoising begins, prompt-conditioned attention may allocate different concepts to strongly overlapping spatial support, which can keep their attention coupled as denoising proceeds. This observation motivates treating compositional generation as a boundary-condition problem rather than repeatedly controlling the evolving trajectory. To this end, we propose Rectify-then-Diffuse (RTD), a training-free framework that rectifies the initial allocation once before standard denoising. Firstly, we propose Soft-Overlap Disentanglement (SOD), which converts normalized overlap between pilot concept maps into a differentiable and layout-agnostic separation objective. Secondly, we introduce Isotropic Gradient Rectification (IGR), which normalizes the SOD gradient and applies a bounded latent displacement with a consistent scale across prompts and initializations. Extensive experiments show that RTD achieves state-of-the-art compositional fidelity and robust gains. On the AE-Bench object pair subset, RTD improves BLIP-VQA by 45.8% and ImageReward by 19.6% over CO3 while running 2.3$\times$ faster. Code will be released at https://github.com/Z-yiwei/rectify-then-diffuse
☆ SeCo-SBIR: Semantically Consistent Prompt Learning for Zero-Shot Sketch-Based Image Retrieval
Adapting CLIP for zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR) via prompt learning faces a fundamental tension: the model must bridge the sketch-photo domain gap through task-specific adaptation, yet the added flexibility risks overfitting to seen training categories and eroding CLIP's zero-shot generalization. We present SeCo-SBIR, a semantically consistent prompt learning framework that resolves this tension from both sides. First, a text-guided multi-modal prompting strategy routes learnable prompt vectors through CLIP's text encoder and projects the resulting intermediate representations into the visual encoder at every layer via learnable coupling functions. Because the text encoder has already learned robust, abstract category-level semantics from large-scale language supervision, this mechanism injects transferable semantic knowledge directly into the visual pathway - adapting the model to the sketch-photo domain while inherently favoring generalization to unseen classes. Second, a perturbation-based consistency constraint addresses the residual overfitting risk from the learnable coupling functions by aligning the adapted model with a frozen CLIP reference branch using an asymmetric InfoNCE objective - augmented inputs feed the frozen branch while clean inputs feed the trainable branch - anchoring the learned representations to CLIP's generalizable feature space. Together with lightweight adapters and a multi-objective loss combining triplet, NT-Xent, and classification terms, SeCo-SBIR achieves state-of-the-art results on all three standard ZS-SBIR benchmarks across categorical, generalized, and across-dataset settings.
comment: ACMMM 26
☆ Non-Destructive Quantification of Urea Adulteration in Bovine Milk Using Transmittance Multispectral Imaging
Sharukshan Niranjan, Iresha Ranaweera, Tharindu Chandrarathne, Kalana Dissanayaka, Roshan Godaliyadda, Vijitha Herath, Parakrama Ekanayake, Janak Vidanarachchi
Adulteration of bovine milk using urea remains a major food quality and health concern, motivating the development of rapid and quantitative screening tools. Conventional approaches, including laboratory-based analytical methods and spectroscopic techniques, have been used for urea detection; however, many remain less suitable for rapid, low-cost routine screening due to requirements such as specialized instrumentation, sample preparation, chemical reagents, or laboratory operation. This study introduces a pragmatic, cost-effective, accurate, and laboratory-validated MSI-based method for quantitative urea estimation under controlled density conditions using a multispectral-imaging-based regression framework. An in-house-built multispectral imaging system operating in twelve discrete spectral bands (365--940~nm) was used to acquire multispectral images of milk samples prepared with controlled urea addition and water for density balancing. Fresh milk was obtained on the day of image acquisition, and the specific gravity of the milk was verified to be 1.032 at 20°C using a hydrometer. Multiple linear regression provided an initial mapping with a high validation $R^2$ of 0.9599, while a feed-forward neural network further improved predictive performance with a validation $R^2$ of 0.9773. These results demonstrate the feasibility of transmittance multispectral imaging for accurate, non-destructive urea quantification under controlled density-balanced conditions, supporting its potential as a rapid screening approach for milk-quality assessment.
☆ Adaptive Two-Stage Visual Token Pruning for Efficient Inference in Video-Language Models
Vision-language models excel at image and video understanding but suffer from high inference latency due to the need to process thousands of tokens per image, limiting their deployment on resource-constrained edge devices and in real-time surveillance applications. This challenge is further amplified in video processing, where multiple frames must be analyzed simultaneously. Existing token reduction techniques are largely developed for single-image inputs and therefore fail to account for the temporal and inter-frame redundancies present in video sequences. In addition, these methods generally rely on a fixed, uniform pruning ratio applied across all inputs, which is suboptimal because the degree of redundancy can vary significantly between different videos, necessitating content-dependent pruning levels to preserve critical information. To address these limitations, we propose a two-stage adaptive token pruning strategy specifically designed for video processing. In the first stage, we prune out the redundant frames, and in the second stage, token-level pruning is applied within the retained frames. Crucially, the pruning ratio in the second stage is determined adaptively based on the content of each video. This is achieved by analyzing the correlation structure of token embeddings to quantify redundancy, which is used to determine the ratio. Importantly, our method is entirely post-hoc and requires no additional training or fine-tuning, while achieving strong empirical gains; notably, it improves accuracy by +7\% on a video captioning benchmark at 10\% token retention, while reducing computation TFLOPs by 95\%.
☆ Multimodal Plant Root Phenotyping with Integration of 3D Skeleton Extraction and Language Analysis
Plant root phenotyping is fundamental to understanding below-ground structures, optimizing crop management, and improving agricultural sustainability. This paper presents a multimodal robotic AI framework that integrates 3D skeleton extraction with language-guided reasoning for interpretable and data-efficient root analysis. We develop an unsupervised skeleton extraction network based on Weighted Laplacian Contraction (W-LBC) to generate high-fidelity structural representations from dense point clouds captured by robotic 3D sensing platforms. Quantitative morphological descriptors, including root count, length, branching angle, and density, are computed from the reconstructed skeleton graph to capture geometric and topological characteristics. Building on these features, we introduce an Evidence-First language modeling framework that fine-tunes GPT as an interactive analytical chatbot using automatically generated instruction--response pairs. Each training sample provides measurable evidence before natural-language reasoning, enabling the model to ground interpretation in quantitative morphology. Through supervised fine-tuning, GPT associates numerical structure with semantic meaning, producing biologically consistent explanations of growth patterns and adaptive traits. Experiments show that the structure-guided framework achieves robust, interpretable reasoning across 12 plant species with diverse root architectures. By integrating unsupervised 3D geometric perception with large-scale language understanding, our approach bridges quantitative analysis and semantic interpretation, establishing a unified paradigm for explainable robotic plant root phenotyping.
☆ A Unified Resolution-Conditioned Framework for Orthogonal Line-Scanning Image Fusion
Laser line-scanning microscopy enables fast volumetric imaging but produces anisotropic lateral resolution. Orthogonal line scans provide complementary directional information that can recover near-isotropic resolution, yet existing deep-learning methods require a separate model for each optical configuration. We present a unified, resolution-conditioned fusion framework based on Rank Enhanced Linear Attention (RELA). Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) conditions the network continuously on the resolving-power ratio, enabling one model to adapt across slit widths. We further introduce Adaptive RELA, which replaces fixed-kernel rank enhancement with ratio-conditioned multi-scale depthwise convolutions and uses a learnable attention temperature to adjust selectivity with degradation severity. Training data spanning multiple slit configurations are generated using a physics-grounded separable point-spread-function model verified against measured optical data at 48.3 dB accuracy. The resulting model achieves 34-40 dB PSNR across configurations, whereas unconditioned multi-slit training collapses to 24.3 dB and per-slit specialists lose 4-9 dB outside their training setting. It also generalizes smoothly to unseen intermediate configurations without interpolation artifacts. Ablations show that FiLM resolves configuration ambiguity, global linear attention captures long-range directional correspondences, and adaptive temperature yields an additional 2 dB in the challenging near-isotropic regime, where complementary signals are weak.
☆ FaithIR: Rethinking Infrared Image Super-Resolution from Perceptual Sharpness to Task Relevant Fidelity
Infrared image super-resolution (IISR) is important for downstream tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation. Existing IISR methods often produce artificial textures, over-sharpened edges, and spurious high-frequency details that distort authentic thermal structures and semantic information. To address this issue, we propose FaithIR, a faithful infrared super-resolution framework for reliable machine perception. FaithIR consists of a patch-level conditioning branch that captures global thermal and structural information and a pixel-level restoration branch that performs dense local reconstruction under structural guidance. The entire restoration process is performed directly in the pixel domain to preserve infrared-specific structures and task-relevant information. Extensive experiments on FLIR-IISR, M3FD, and FMB demonstrate strong reconstruction fidelity, cross-dataset generalization, and superior performance in object detection and semantic segmentation. These results show that demonstrate that preserving faithful infrared structure preservations is more important for reliable machine perception than merely pursuing perceptual sharpness alone.
comment: 14 pages: 7 pages of main text, 2 pages of references, and 5 pages of supplementary material
☆ Double Down on Defense: Strengthening Deep Perceptual Hashes against Evasion Attacks without Retraining
Near-duplicate image matching is crucial for trust and safety, provenance verification, copyright enforcement, and large-scale visual search. Modern platforms increasingly rely on deep perceptual hashes, which map visually similar images to nearby representations despite common image transformations. However, adversarial perturbations can cause near-duplicates to evade matching. We present DualShield, a plug-in defense that improves the robustness of existing deep perceptual hashes without retraining or modifying their underlying models. DualShield combines matching-time randomized smoothing, which aggregates decisions over perturbed reference-query pairs, with publication-time hardening, which adds an optimized imperceptible perturbation to each reference image before publication. Together, these mechanisms provide certified and empirical robustness. DualShield achieves a certified $\ell_2$ radius of approximately 0.3, guaranteeing that query perturbations within this radius cannot evade matching. We further evaluate it against adaptive white-box, black-box, and image-transformation attacks. Across eight deep perceptual hashes and three datasets, DualShield substantially reduces attack success rates while preserving low collision rates. These results show that deep perceptual hashes can be strengthened without costly retraining by improving the matching procedure and hardening reference images before publication.
☆ Channel-wise Dynamic Knowledge Distillation via Adaptive Sample Generation for Action Recognition ACM MM2026
Knowledge Distillation (KD) offers a promising yet underexplored path for compressing large action recognition models. However, existing KD methods suffer from two key limitations: 1) reliance on fixed input samples leads to suboptimal feature alignment between the frozen teacher (larger model) and the learnable student (smaller model), and 2) applying a uniform distillation strength for all channels fails to account for their varying importance in capturing distinct knowledge (e.g., motion tempo or magnitude) across training epochs. This motivates us to develop an Adaptive Sample-aware Channel-wise Dynamic (ASCD) KD approach, which operates in two stages. First, we use an adaptive sample generation module to create updated samples by incorporating semantics from sample gradients, which are derived by minimizing a feature loss weighted by channel centroid frequency differences at each layer. Meanwhile, crucial motion-related details are preserved by applying a Gaussian mask to frequency features. Second, we employ a channel-wise dynamic distillation module to train student on these generated samples, guided by sample gradients and feature frequencies. For efficiency, samples are updated periodically rather than per epoch. Extensive experiments on three video benchmarks (UCF101, Kinetics-400, Something-Something-v2) and two image datasets (CIFAR-100, ImageNet) demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvccn/ASCD_KD_Action.
comment: Accepted in ACM MM2026, 16 pages, 7 figures
☆ FakeI2V-Bench: Benchmarking the Applicability of Image-level Deepfake Detectors for Deepfake Video Detection KDD 2026
Recent advances in video generation models have significantly intensified the deepfake threat, yet the current deepfake video detection benchmarks remain underdeveloped. In particular, the effectiveness of image-level detectors in the video domain has not been systematically assessed. To fill this gap, we present FakeI2V-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating state-of-the-art video-level deepfake detectors in challenging scenarios, with a particular focus on systematically assessing the performance of image-level deepfake detectors in the video domain. FakeI2V-Bench comprises 97,548 videos, containing content generated by the latest powerful generation models and covering a broader range of categories. Using this dataset, we conduct a systematic evaluation of eight video-level detectors and twelve representative image-level detectors. Experimental results show that the best-performing image-level detector achieves an 80.16% AUC, slightly outperforming the strongest video-level detector (i.e., 79.99% AUC). Going beyond benchmarking, we present IV-Bridge, a general framework that enhances the applicability of image-level deepfake detectors to videos. IV-Bridge employs a random forest model with statistical features to aggregate frame-level predictions, allowing eleven image-level detectors to surpass state-of-the-art video-level approaches, with the best-performing variant achieving a 93.80% AUC. Overall, FakeI2V-Bench establishes a rigorous benchmark for deepfake video detection and introduces a novel pathway for extending image-level detectors to the video domain, offering new insights and directions for future research. Code and data are available at https://github.com/CryptoAILab/FakeI2V-Bench.
comment: To Appear in KDD 2026, Jeju, Korea, August 9-13, 2026
☆ SUV: Future Scene Understanding as Video Generation for End-to-End Driving
Yibo Yuan, Jiacheng Fu, Jiangtong Zhu, Yi Li, Jianhua Han, Meng Tian, Zhuohan Liu, Zhiwei Xiong, Hang Xu, Jianwu Fang, Jianru Xue
End-to-end driving requires a coherent understanding of future scenes, yet existing methods model these scenes using task-specific heads and output formats, with limited scalability. Can video generation instead provide a shared predictor? We introduce SUV, a unified end-to-end driving framework that casts future Scene Understanding as Video generation using a pretrained video foundation model. SUV models future appearance, semantics, relative depth, and instance-level dynamics as video streams with a shared video expert, without stream-specific visual prediction heads. Through joint video-action attention, the action expert attends to the latent representations of all future streams and generates the ego trajectory. Experiments show that SUV directly predicts all four future streams, while controlled ablations show that structured future supervision and direct future-stream access yield higher trajectory planning scores. With only a single front camera and no candidate-trajectory selection, SUV outperforms a broad set of recent state-of-the-art methods on both NAVSIM-v2 splits, achieving 91.0 EPDMS on navtest and 36.9 on navhard. On the long-tail WOD-E2E benchmark, SUV achieves a competitive RFS of 7.94.
comment: 16 pages, 5 figures. Code: https://github.com/ASH-2046/SUV
☆ GSTEP: Global Spatio-Temporal Density-Driven Visual Token Pruning for Efficient Video Large Language Models ACM MM 26
Mengjie Zhang, Qihui Zhu, Tao Zhang, Shuangwu Chen, Huihuang Qin, Yu Guo, Shenghao Ye, Zijian Wen, Yunpeng Hou, Dong Jin, Xiaobin Tan, Huasen He, Jian Yang
Video large language models (VideoLLMs) achieve strong video understanding performance, but their inference remains expensive due to the large number of redundant spatio-temporal visual tokens in long videos. Existing token pruning methods alleviate this cost by reducing redundant tokens, yet most of them rely on segment-level local pruning, where videos are partitioned into isolated segments and tokens are selected independently within each segment. Such designs may under-preserve short but semantically dense segments and discard tokens that appear non-salient locally but remain critical from a global perspective. To address this issue, we propose GSTEP (Global Spatio-Temporal Density Pruning), a plug-and-play pruning framework that models video as a continuous spatio-temporal information flow. GSTEP constructs a token-level spatio-temporal density by combining a continuous temporal density, obtained from a smoothed centered frame-level change signal, with intra-frame spatial density, and then performs global token sampling by jointly balancing information density and coverage. Extensive experiments on multiple VideoLLMs and public benchmarks demonstrate that GSTEP consistently achieves strong accuracy-efficiency trade-offs and generalizes well across model architectures and evaluation settings. On LLaVA-OneVision-7B, GSTEP prunes 75% of visual tokens, preserves up to 100.2% of the original average performance across benchmarks, and achieves a 1.17 end-to-end speedup.
comment: 4 figures, accepted to ACM MM 26'
☆ DiverseDiT++: Quantifying, Analyzing, and Promoting Representation Diversity in Diffusion Transformers
Recent advances in Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have enabled remarkable progress in visual synthesis, benefiting from their superior scalability. To facilitate DiTs' capability of capturing meaningful internal representations, recent works such as REPA incorporate external pretrained encoders for representation alignment. However, the underlying mechanisms governing representation learning within DiTs remain poorly understood in the community. To this end, this paper first presents a systematic analysis of the representation dynamics of DiTs via quantifying the diversity of block-wise representations. Specifically, we introduce a novel metric, termed the Weighted Diversity Score (WDS), to measure the representational discrepancies across different blocks. Through extensive investigations on the evolution and influence of internal representations under various settings, we reveal that representation diversity across blocks is a critical factor for effective representation learning in DiTs. More importantly, WDS exhibits a strong correlation with synthesis quality across diverse settings, model scales, and training stages (Pearson's $r=-0.869$ with $\log(\text{FID})$), suggesting its potential as an indicator to reflect model performance and a principled guide for model optimization. Based on this key finding, we propose DiverseDiT++, a novel framework that explicitly promotes diverse representation learning. Concretely, our method incorporates long residual connections to diversify input representations across blocks and a representation diversity loss to encourage blocks to learn distinct features. Extensive experiments on ImageNet $256\times256$ and $512\times512$ demonstrate that our DiverseDiT++ yields consistent performance gains and convergence acceleration when applied to different backbones with various sizes,...
comment: 35 pages, 32 figures
☆ CorePath: A Breast-Specialized Pathology Foundation Model for Core Needle Biopsy Diagnosis and Risk-Controlled Report Generation
Ting Yin, Danning Li, Chen Shu, Xiaoxia Yao, Boyu Fu, Yujing Chang, Tianyu Shi, Mengna Feng, Jie Chen, Jing Fu, Xiuli Xiao, Tianlin Li, Mumin Shao, Jiaxin Bi, Wenchuan Zhang, Xiaoyan Wu, Xiao Han, Zhang Zhang, Yuhao Yi, Hong Bu
Breast core needle biopsy (CNB) is central to breast cancer diagnosis yet remains challenging because limited tissue sampling, lesion heterogeneity, and subtle morphologic overlap can obscure subtype distinctions. We developed CorePath, a breast-specialized multimodal pathology foundation model fine-tuned from PRISM using 7901 paired CNB whole-slide images and diagnostic reports from two centers. Evaluated across six CNB cohorts and two public breast pathology benchmarks without task-specific retraining, CorePath consistently outperformed PRISM across cancer detection, invasion assessment, and histological subtyping. It achieved weighted area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUCs) of 0.9526-0.9735 for five-class CNB histological subtyping across private centers. On public benchmarks, CorePath outperformed leading pathology foundation models, achieving the highest weighted AUCs of 0.7780 for BCNB invasive carcinoma subtyping, 0.8178 for BRACS lesion stratification, and 0.8252 for BRACS fine-grained classification. In report generation, CorePath reduced the overall non-breast hallucinations from 30.1% to 2.8%, demonstrating improved domain fidelity after breast-specific adaptation. CorePath-CRG further combined conformal subtype-confidence gating with Learn-Then-Test risk control to enable selective report release, subtype-level fallback, and deferral. CorePath-CRG achieved zero non-breast hallucinations among released outputs and showed the strongest overall performance in pathologist-validated LLM-based Evaluation Scores and quantitative report-generation metrics across most centers. These results demonstrate that domain-specialized foundation models with statistical risk control offer a promising approach for accurate breast CNB diagnosis and reliable report generation.
comment: The code will be made publicly available upon publication
☆ LDU-Bench: Multimodal LLM Evaluation for Lithography Defect Understanding under Layout-Varying Circuit Backgrounds
Multimodal large language models have demonstrated strong defect recognition capability in industrial anomaly detection. However, in lithography review, merely determining whether an image contains a defect is insufficient for engineering inspection; models must also understand defect morphology, spatial location, and the potential causes supported by visible evidence. To this end, this paper proposes LDU-Bench, a multi-task multimodal benchmark for lithography defect understanding. Constructed from real lithography and integrated-circuit review images, LDU-Bench decomposes the review workflow into four independent tasks: defect triage, morphology recognition, coarse localization, and image-conditioned cause analysis. It systematically evaluates models using task-level metrics, diagnostic readouts, and the Lithography Closure Score (LCS). Experimental results show that although existing MLLMs can perform defect triage relatively reliably, this ability does not stably transfer to downstream review stages. Morphology alignment, effective localization, and evidence-to-cause mapping remain the major bottlenecks. Further diagnostics indicate that this capability break is not a fluctuation of a single metric, but reflects insufficient structured understanding across semantic levels. Overall, LDU-Bench provides a quantifiable and diagnostic unified platform for evaluating the usability, failure points, and capability boundaries of industrial MLLMs in lithography review chains.
comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, and 5 tables, including appendices
☆ Global Graph-Validated Optimization for VLM-based 3D Indoor Scene Generation
We study open-vocabulary 3D indoor layout generation, which synthesizes diverse and physically plausible scenes from unlabeled 3D assets using free-form language instructions. Recent methods leverage large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) to generate structured scenes from text. However, most model inter-asset relations implicitly or rely on local pairwise constraints and local optimization. These formulations are poorly aligned with the global, highly non-convex layout space, often yielding locally plausible yet globally inconsistent or physically infeasible scenes. We address this problem with a graph-based intermediate representation that separates semantic coherence from physical feasibility, together with a hybrid search-and-refinement strategy. First, Global Semantic Verification (GSV) represents scenes as structured graphs and enforces semantic constraints through rule-based verification. This explicit validation removes contradictory configurations and produces a globally consistent semantic scaffold. Second, Global Physical Feasibility Search (GPFS) combines evolutionary search for global exploration with gradient-based refinement for local exploitation. It reduces dependence on VLM-proposed initialization and improves robustness in non-convex and discontinuous feasible spaces. Together, GSV and GPFS move layout generation beyond local relational modeling and initialization-sensitive optimization toward globally consistent reasoning and search. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in open-vocabulary 3D indoor layout generation, improving both semantic consistency and physical plausibility.
comment: 15 pages, 8 figures
☆ RIDGE: Re-Noising with Internal Dynamic Guidance for Image Editing
Inversion-free flow-based image editing avoids latent inversion, but still requires a target-side state at every editing step. The widely used equal-displacement construction keeps the displacement between the noisy source state and the target-side state unchanged across noise levels. This is inconsistent with noising, under which the displacement between two clean states noised with the same noise level and noise sample should contract as the noise level increases. Thus, it can lead to overly aggressive updates at high noise levels. We introduce RIDGE: Re-Noising with Internal Dynamic Guidance for Image Editing, an inversion-free and training-free method that maintains the edited state as an evolving approximation to the unavailable clean target state. RIDGE re-noises this approximation using the same noise level and noise sample as the clean source state, allowing their noisy displacement to decrease naturally with increasing noise. Since the edited state initially contains limited target semantics, RIDGE further applies internal dynamic guidance during the early high-noise steps. A clean target state prediction guides the provisional edited state through a soft dynamic mask derived internally from the model, focusing guidance on regions that require modification without external segmentation or detection models. Experiments on two benchmarks using two backbones, SD3 Medium and FLUX.1-dev, show that RIDGE offers a favorable aggregate trade-off among source preservation, target alignment, and perceptual quality.
☆ TASQ: Temporal-Adaptive Bit Sparsification Quantization for Diffusion Models
Static quantization assigns one weight precision to every denoising step. To preserve quality, that precision must accommodate the most quantization-sensitive step, even though many other steps can tolerate fewer bits. The resulting model may satisfy its memory budget, but it repeatedly pays worst-case arithmetic throughout the denoising trajectory. We introduce Temporal-Adaptive Bit Sparsification Quantization (TASQ) to separate these two costs. TASQ stores one shared maximum-precision weight buffer and learns a Temporal-Spatial LSB Mask that selects a lower effective precision for each layer and denoising stage by truncating least-significant bits. Storage therefore remains fixed by the worst case, while BitOPs decrease at less sensitive stages without per-stage weight copies or runtime search. A Temporal-Precision Engine maps the learned schedule to bit-serial execution, where cycles scale with effective precision and switching precision has no measured cycle overhead. On PixArt-Sigma, SANA-1.6B, and SDXL-Turbo, TASQ achieves quality comparable to static quantization with less computation. Together with the Temporal-Precision Engine, it reduces execution cycles by 25 to 50 percent over static quantization and by 6.1 to 7.5x over a naive static 8-bit bit-serial execution. Code is available at https://github.com/seokho-han/tasq.
☆ PDD-RRG: Posterior Diagnostic Decision for Study-level Radiology Report Generation IJCAI 2026
Automatic radiology report generation (RRG) aims to simulate the workflow of radiologists, assisting them in clinical diagnosis. However, existing methods often fall short in utilizing all information relevant to the examination, as is typically done in clinical practice. Although some works attempt to incorporate multi-view images and historical data, these additional inputs may sometimes lead to avoidable diagnostic errors on the contrary. To address these challenges, we introduce a decision-making stage after report generation for the first time and propose a Posterior Diagnostic Decision framework (PDD-RRG) to integrate potentially conflicting diagnoses. Specifically, we create various subsets of input data and utilize an existing RRG model to generate reports from different perspectives. Then the Bayesian posterior probability and the learned thresholds for each clinical observation are calculated to obtain an aggregated diagnostic conclusion, which is subsequently used to refine the generated report. Experiments on MIMIC-CXR demonstrate that our proposed PDD-RRG can effectively enhance the clinical efficacy of existing RRG models without any retraining.
comment: Accepted by IJCAI 2026
☆ AIDE: Automated Instruction via Distilled Expertise for Reference-Free Motor Skill Coaching
Generating natural-language coaching feedback on motor skills can accelerate learning, yet expert coaches are scarce and expensive. Existing reference-based methods require expert demonstrations at both training and inference time, limiting practical deployment. We propose AIDE (Automated Instruction via Distilled Expertise), a framework that exploits expert references only during training and generates feedback from a learner's pose sequence alone at inference. A teacher model first learns to generate feedback from paired learner-expert poses via a frozen language model, producing separate learner tokens and difference tokens that encode the learner-expert difference. A student model then inherits the teacher's encoder and weight initialization, replacing the explicit expert comparison with an auxiliary module that produces complementary tokens from the learner's pose alone. On the ExpertAF dataset, AIDE outperforms reference-free baselines on most metrics and performs comparably to methods requiring expert demonstrations at both training and inference, with LLM-based evaluation supporting these findings.
comment: Accepted to ACM Multimedia 2026. 12 pages (including supplementary material), 4 figures
☆ CAPE-T2V: Captioner-Anchored Prompt Enhancement toward Two-Sided Conditioning Alignment in Text-to-Video Generation
Text-to-video (T2V) diffusion transformers (DiTs) are trained with detailed video captions, whereas inference often relies on user prompts rewritten by a prompt enhancer (PE). Prior work has improved generation by optimizing the PE, the DiT, or both; some methods have also sought to narrow the training-inference mismatch through shared schemas. Yet even within a shared schema, inference-time PE outputs and DiT training captions may still differ in detail selection, information organization, descriptive granularity, and phrasing. We refer to this residual mismatch as the PE-Caption gap and introduce CAPE-T2V, a two-step Captioner-Anchored Prompt Enhancement framework toward two-sided conditioning alignment in T2V generation. First, CAPE-T2V constructs three types of PE training examples, pairing captioner-generated targets with concise source captions, detailed source captions, or pseudo user prompts derived from those targets. It then fine-tunes the PE to map each input to its paired target. Second, CAPE-T2V fine-tunes the DiT on video-derived captions rewritten by the Anchored PE; the same PE rewrites user prompts at inference. Relative to a baseline using the same caption schema, CAPE-T2V achieves higher aggregate scores on StoryEval, VBench-2.0, and T2V-CompBench across Wan2.2 and LTX-2.3. Further, CAPE-T2V exhibits a smaller PE-Caption gap than the baseline: its DiT fine-tuning captions are closer in distribution to inference-time PE outputs, as measured by squared maximum mean discrepancy in a fixed embedding space. Overall, these results support CAPE-T2V as an effective approach to mitigating the PE-Caption gap. The project is available at https://github.com/yizzz927/CAPE-T2V.
comment: Includes appendix; 11 figures. Project page: https://github.com/yizzz927/CAPE-T2V
☆ Standalone DINOv3 for Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation in Remote Sensing
Remote sensing semantic segmentation is hindered by costly pixel-level annotations, motivating training-free open-vocabulary methods. Recently, the recent release of DINOv3 brings DINO.txt, which equips the standalone DINO backbone with image-text contrastive learning and thus opens up the possibility of open-vocabulary segmentation. We propose DinoSplat-OV, a training-free framework that adapts DINOv3 to remote sensing without fine-tuning or additional pretraining. Targeting the dense distribution, multi-scale nature, and large size of remote sensing imagery, we design two core modules. Its Text-aware Laplacian Propagation module de-noises patch-level predictions by combining textual semantic affinities with local visual similarity, improving regional consistency while preserving boundaries. Its Gaussian Splatting Upsampling module reconstructs pixel-level features through RGB-guided anisotropic aggregation and test-time optimization. A global-anchor sliding-window strategy further supports large-scale imagery. Experiments on UDD5, DOTA, and LoveDA demonstrate competitive or superior performance over existing training-free methods, effectively filling the gap of DINO-series models in training-free open-vocabulary segmentation and providing a viable new path for further advances in this direction.
☆ Clinically-Grounded Hierarchical Classification for Consistent Chest X-ray Interpretation MICCAI 2026
Accurate chest X-ray interpretation is inherently hierarchical. Clinical decisions depend not only on what abnormality is present but where it is situated, requiring reasoning from broad anatomical systems down to specific pathological findings. Yet existing automated systems largely treat this as a flat classification problem, failing to capture inter-level dependencies or enforce coherence between coarse and fine predictions. We propose CHASE (Classification with Hierarchical Analysis and Structured Enforcement), a unified single-stage framework that mirrors radiologists' coarse-to-fine reasoning through a clinically driven three-level taxonomy of 9 anatomical regions, 17 sub-regions, and 28 pathological findings. CHASE jointly optimizes multi-level supervision, cross-level probability alignment, and a hierarchy-violation penalty within a shared Vision Transformer backbone. This ensures that fine-grained findings are anatomically supported by their coarser-level context rather than predicted in isolation. Experiments demonstrate that CHASE outperforms flat and hierarchical baselines across all levels while achieving superior probabilistic hierarchy consistency, with level-wise attention maps confirming anatomically grounded predictions. Code is available at: https://github.com/yejix-ai/CHASE.
comment: MICCAI 2026 Accepted. First & Corresponding author: Jong Hak Moon (jh.moon@yejix.com)
☆ V-FIND: Revealing the Intrinsic Forgery Knowledge Encoded in Video Forgery Detectors
Shichao Kan, Chengpeng Hong, Jingtong Dou, Chuancheng Shi, Yuhan Liu, Linrui Xu, Yixiong Liang, Yigang Cen, Yanpeng Sun, Fei Shen, Tat-Seng Chua
As generated videos become increasingly realistic, reliable video forgery detection is increasingly important. Existing studies typically optimize and use video forgery detectors as black boxes, while the latent forgery-discriminative knowledge inside them remains largely unexplored. Instead of continuing to rely on resource-intensive full-model retraining to steadily improve detection performance, we ask whether video forgery detection can also be achieved by uncovering and activating sparse forensic knowledge within the detector. We find that forgery-discriminative knowledge is not uniformly distributed across the full representation space, but is concentrated in a sparse set of functionally specialized neurons. Based on this insight, we propose a video forgery-intrinsic neuron discovery (V-FIND) framework. V-FIND first localizes critical layers that exhibit pronounced discrepancies between real and forged videos, and then identifies latent anchor neurons that consistently carry forgery-discriminative signals, organizing them into a compact forensic subspace. With the original backbone frozen and only a lightweight linear classifier trained, this subspace still delivers strong detection performance across multiple external benchmarks for generated videos. Further neuron intervention experiments provide direct evidence for the functional specificity of the discovered neurons. Overall, these results suggest that video forgery detectors contain sparse, extractable, and reusable forgery-discriminative knowledge, offering a new perspective on understanding and exploiting their intrinsic forensic capability.
comment: 12 pages, 12 figures. Under review
☆ Qwen-3D: A Generalist 3D Vision-Language Model for Spatial Understanding
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved remarkable success on images and short videos, yet scaling them to long videos remains challenging due to frame-centric tokenization and limited context windows. 3D geometry provides a natural compression mechanism for visual streams: depth and camera pose enable observations from multiple views and time steps to be fused into a persistent, world-aligned representation. While recent 3D LMMs leverage geometry-aware representations to improve spatial reasoning, they continue to lag behind specialist 3D perception systems on grounding and segmentation tasks. We argue that a key limitation is geometry-aware decoding: existing methods communicate 3D predictions through language tokens, proposal selection, or lightweight grounding queries, creating a bottleneck between language reasoning and dense geometric prediction. Building on these insights, we introduce Qwen-3D, a geometry-aware LMM that compresses visual information within the Qwen backbone using multi-view geometric cues, enabling efficient long-horizon visual reasoning over static scenes. Qwen-3D augments visual tokens with 3D Rotary Positional Embeddings, allowing attention to operate directly in 3D scene space rather than across independent image frames and thereby facilitating scalable cross-view and temporal reasoning. To bridge language and geometry, Qwen-3D incorporates a query-based segmentation decoder that grounds language directly in the underlying 3D scene representation, unifying referential grounding, instance segmentation, and visual question answering across both images and videos. Across a diverse set of benchmarks, Qwen-3D surpasses existing 3D LMMs and outperforms several large proprietary 2D models. Notably, Qwen-3D achieves these improvements while maintaining strong performance on standard 2D vision-language benchmarks by jointly training on 2D and 3D data.
comment: Project Page: https://qwen-3d.github.io/
♻ ☆ NearID: Identity Representation Learning via Near-identity Distractors ECCV 2026
When evaluating identity-focused tasks such as personalized generation and image editing, existing vision encoders entangle object identity with background context, leading to unreliable representations and metrics. We introduce the first principled framework to address this vulnerability using Near-identity (NearID) distractors, where semantically similar but distinct instances are placed on the exact same background as a reference image, eliminating contextual shortcuts and isolating identity as the sole discriminative signal. Based on this principle, we present the NearID dataset (19K identities, 316K matched-context distractors) together with a strict margin-based evaluation protocol. Under this setting, pre-trained encoders perform poorly, achieving Sample Success Rates (SSR), a strict margin-based identity discrimination metric, as low as 30.7% and often ranking distractors above true cross-view matches. We address this by learning identity-aware representations on a frozen backbone using a two-tier contrastive objective enforcing the hierarchy: same identity > NearID distractor > random negative. This improves SSR to 99.2%, enhances part-level discrimination by 28.0%, and yields stronger alignment with human judgments on DreamBench++, a human-aligned benchmark for personalization. Project page: https://gorluxor.github.io/NearID/
comment: Accepted to ECCV 2026, Code, model, and dataset are released, visit https://github.com/Gorluxor/NearID
♻ ☆ VLMs Need Words: Vision Language Models Ignore Visual Detail In Favor of Semantic Anchors
Haz Sameen Shahgir, Xiaofu Chen, Yu Fu, Erfan Shayegani, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh, Yova Kementchedjhieva, Yue Dong
Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performance across a wide range of multimodal tasks. However, they often fail on tasks that require fine-grained visual perception, even when the required information is still present in their internal representations. Prior work has attributed this ``hidden-in-plain-sight'' gap to the language model, but the cause remains unexplained. In this work, we demonstrate that this gap arises from the language model's lack of semantic labels for fine-grained visual details: when visual entities can be mapped to known concepts, VLMs bypass visual comparison and reason through language; when they cannot, VLMs resort to brittle and hallucinated descriptions. We verify this across semantic correspondence, synthetic shape matching, and face matching, and find that VLMs perform much better when the relevant entities are nameable than when they are unnamable. Mechanistically, Logit Lens analysis confirms that VLMs explicitly recover semantic labels for nameable entities and surface more unique tokens compared to unnameable entities. Furthermore, we show that this limitation can be addressed: teaching completely arbitrary names for unknown entities improves performance. More importantly, task-specific finetuning yields even stronger generalization without relying on language priors, i.e., through real visual perception. Our findings suggest that current VLM failures on visual tasks reflect a learned shortcut rather than a fundamental limitation of multimodal reasoning. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Patchwork53/VLMs-Need-Words-COLM2026.
comment: Accepted at the Conference on Language Modeling 2026
♻ ☆ P3P Made Easy ECCV
We revisit the classical Perspective-Three-Point (P3P) problem, which aims to recover the absolute pose of a calibrated camera from three 2D-3D correspondences. It has long been known that P3P can be reduced to a quartic polynomial with analytically simple and computationally efficient coefficients. However, this elegant formulation has been largely overlooked in modern literature. Building on the theoretical foundation that traces back to Grunert's work in 1841, we propose a compact algebraic solver that achieves accuracy and runtime comparable to state-of-the-art methods. Our results show that this classical formulation remains highly competitive when implemented with modern insights, offering an excellent balance between simplicity, efficiency, and accuracy.
comment: Accepted to ECCV Workshop 2026 (SFM-DL)
♻ ☆ SVL: Empowering Spiking Neural Networks for Efficient 3D Open-World Understanding ICML 2026
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) provide an energy-efficient way to extract 3D spatio-temporal features. However, existing SNNs still exhibit a significant performance gap compared to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to inadequate pre-training strategies. These limitations manifest as restricted generalization ability, task specificity, and a lack of multimodal understanding, particularly in challenging tasks such as multimodal question answering and zero-shot 3D classification. To overcome these challenges, we propose a Spike-based Vision-Language (SVL) pretraining framework that empowers SNNs with open-world 3D understanding while maintaining spike-driven efficiency. SVL introduces two key components: (i) Multi-scale Triple Alignment (MTA) for label-free triplet-based contrastive learning across 3D, image, and text modalities, and (ii) Re-parameterizable Vision-Language Integration (Rep-VLI) to enable lightweight inference without relying on large text encoders. Extensive experiments show that SVL achieves a top-1 accuracy of 85.4% in zero-shot 3D classification, surpassing advanced ANN models, and consistently outperforms prior SNNs on downstream tasks, including 3D classification (+6.1%), DVS action recognition (+2.1%), 3D detection (+1.1%), and 3D segmentation (+2.1%) with remarkable efficiency. Moreover, SVL enables SNNs to perform open-world 3D question answering, sometimes outperforming ANNs. To the best of our knowledge, SVL represents the first scalable, generalizable, and hardware-friendly paradigm for 3D open-world understanding, effectively bridging the gap between SNNs and ANNs in complex open-world understanding tasks. Code is available https://github.com/bollossom/SVL.
comment: ICML 2026 Spotlight
♻ ☆ VLAFlow: A Unified Training Framework for Vision-Language-Action Models via Co-training and Future Latent Alignment
Vision-language-action models (VLAs) have recently advanced robotic manipulation, yet the effects of different robot-data pre-training paradigms remain difficult to compare because existing models often differ in architecture, data, action space, and evaluation protocol. We present VLAFlow (Vision-Language-Action Flow), a unified flow-matching framework for controlled comparison of VLA training objectives. Using a heterogeneous robot corpus, OXEMix, containing approximately 5,000 hours of data from DROID, OpenX-Embodiment, OpenX-Augmented, and RoboCOIN, we evaluate four paradigms under the same pi0-style architecture, shared VLM backbone, action expert, and 14-dimensional action space: action-only modeling (MindPI), language-supervised co-training (MindLPI), future latent alignment (MindWPI), and their combination (MindLWPI). Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and SimplerEnv show that action-only pre-training is sensitive to heterogeneous data. In contrast, language supervision helps preserve vision-language generalization, while future latent alignment improves state-transition and action-outcome modeling. By combining both signals, MindLWPI achieves the most stable overall transfer performance across benchmarks. These results suggest a meta-action space view: language and future latent representations provide complementary intermediate constraints that make heterogeneous action supervision smoother and more transferable.
♻ ☆ T2VAttack: Adversarial Attack on Text-to-Video Diffusion Models
The rapid evolution of Text-to-Video (T2V) diffusion models has driven remarkable advancements in generating high-quality, temporally coherent videos from natural language descriptions. Despite these achievements, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce T2VAttack, a comprehensive study of adversarial attacks on T2V diffusion models from both semantic and temporal perspectives. Considering the inherently dynamic nature of video data, we propose two distinct attack objectives: a semantic objective to evaluate video-text alignment and a temporal objective to assess the temporal dynamics. To achieve an effective and efficient attack process, we propose two adversarial attack methods: (i) T2VAttack-S, which identifies semantically or temporally critical words in prompts and replaces them with synonyms via greedy search, and (ii) T2VAttack-I, which iteratively inserts optimized words with minimal perturbation to the prompt. By combining these objectives and strategies, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation on the adversarial robustness of several state-of-the-art T2V models, including ModelScope, CogVideoX, Open-Sora, and HunyuanVideo. Our experiments reveal that even minor prompt modifications, such as the substitution or insertion of a single word, can cause substantial degradation in semantic fidelity and temporal dynamics, highlighting critical vulnerabilities in current T2V diffusion models.
♻ ☆ Learning Attribute-aware Representations for Few-shot Scene Text Segmentation
Yifan Tang, Chenming Li, Chengxu Liu, Yuanting Fan, Dangfeng Yang, Yong Huang, Cun Xin, Yu Li, Xingsong Hou, Xueming Qian
Supervised scene text segmentation has achieved notable progress in recent years. However, its development is largely constrained by the scarcity of high-quality datasets and the high cost of pixel-level annotations. To address this limitation, we explore few-shot learning for text segmentation and propose TSAL, an attribute-aware few-shot framework that leverages a pre-trained CLIP model to learn transferable text attributes for segmentation. Our framework comprises two complementary branches: I) a Visual-Guided Branch that extracts semantic and textural features for foreground text and background regions, respectively, and II) an Adaptive Prompt-Guided Branch that employs learnable prompt templates to capture diverse text attributes with minimal data dependence. To effectively align textual attributes with visual representations, we further introduce an Adaptive Feature Alignment~(AFA) module, which aligns learnable attribute tokens with visual features and prompt prototypes, enabling the model to capture both general and distinctive textual characteristics. As a result, TSAL can accurately segment text regions using only a few annotated samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across several public text segmentation benchmarks under few-shot settings and exhibits strong generalization to text-related tasks.
♻ ☆ Two-Way Garment Transfer: Unified Diffusion Framework for Dressing and Undressing Synthesis
While recent advances in virtual try-on (VTON) have achieved realistic garment transfer to human subjects, its inverse task, virtual try-off (VTOFF), which aims to reconstruct canonical garment templates from dressed humans, remains critically underexplored and lacks systematic investigation. Existing works predominantly treat them as isolated tasks: VTON focuses on garment dressing while VTOFF addresses garment extraction, thereby neglecting their complementary symmetry. To bridge this fundamental gap, we propose the Two-Way Garment Transfer Model (TWGTM), to the best of our knowledge, the first unified framework for joint clothing-centric image synthesis that simultaneously resolves both mask-guided VTON and mask-free VTOFF through bidirectional feature disentanglement. Specifically, our framework employs dual-conditioned guidance from both latent and pixel spaces of reference images to seamlessly bridge the dual tasks. On the other hand, to resolve the inherent mask dependency asymmetry between mask-guided VTON and mask-free VTOFF, we devise a phased training paradigm that progressively bridges this modality gap. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments conducted across the DressCode and VITON-HD datasets validate the efficacy and competitive edge of our proposed approach.
♻ ☆ Foundations of Equivariant Deep Learning: Unifying Graph and Sheaf Neural Networks ICML 2026
Symmetry is everywhere in nature and society. Geometric deep learning builds architectures respecting group symmetries, whereas topological deep learning organizes computation through cells, incidence relations, and local-to-global structure. In this paper, we extend geometric deep learning beyond simple group actions and unify it with topological deep learning. Specifically, we develop order-equivariant neural networks (OENN), which generalize standard graph message passing and sheaf neural networks via the theory of equivariant bundles over face posets (face categories). We (i) characterize all linear order-equivariant maps, (ii) build OENN layers, and (iii) prove universal approximation theorems (UATs) for continuous order-equivariant maps, which are new results even when restricted to sheaf neural networks. We illustrate the framework on graph and sheaf models. Our results can also be seen as extending the known UAT for graph neural networks to a more general setting that subsumes sheaf neural networks as well. In the appendix, we clarify the precise relationships between OENN and CENN (Category-Equivariant Neural Network), which gives the categorical general form of equivariant neural networks, allowing us to leverage categorical symmetry in data (e.g., non-invertible symmetries on multiple objects with compositional relations on those symmetries).
comment: Accepted at ICML 2026 as a spotlight paper with oral presentation
♻ ☆ A Systematic Benchmark of Intensity Normalisation Methods for 3D Knee MRI Segmentation and Cross-Domain Generalisability
Robust out-of-the-box performance is essential for the clinical deployment of deep learning models in medical imaging. An important but underexplored factor affecting model generalisability is intensity normalisation, particularly for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), where image intensities vary across scanners and protocols. In this study, we systematically compared seven normalisation methods and their impact on the performance of a 3D U-Net model for meniscus segmentation from knee MRI. The methods included standard scaling approaches, histogram-based techniques, and a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based method. Models were trained on the IWOAI 2019 dataset and evaluated on both internal and external test sets (SKM-TEA) to assess generalisability. Performance was similar internally but differences were significant on external data, with Z-score, Nyúl histogram matching, and CLAHE showing greater robustness than other methods. However, these differences were small compared to the significant performance drop observed between datasets. Overall, while intensity normalisation had a measurable effect on model generalisability, its impact was limited relative to the effects of domain shift, highlighting the need for complementary strategies for robust deployment.
comment: This preprint has not undergone peer review or any post-submission improvements or corrections. The Version of Record of this contribution is published in 30th Annual Conference on Medical Image Understanding and Analysis, MIUA 2026. Code is available at https://github.com/oliverjm1/mri_normalisation. Updated to include acknowledgements and funding information
♻ ☆ HiResNets: Native Full-HD Video Recognition with Foveal Residual Streams
Much of the recent progress in image and video recognition has come at the cost of memory: larger models, increased resolution, and longer temporal contexts. An inevitable component is the quadratic (or larger) growth of memory and compute based on image resolution, which is a property of the grid sampling used in convolutional networks and vision transformers. In this work we study residual networks whose convolutional blocks have logarithmic-square growth instead, enabling them to process very high-resolution video quickly. The key insight is to use a residual architecture's residual stream as a high-resolution buffer, to which convolutional blocks only read and write via log-polar image warp operations. Layers adaptively focus on different parts of each frame, with very high resolution only near the focus point. A complete high-resolution representation is built up in the residual stream, analogous to eye saccades creating a complete picture in biological vision, and a theoretical construction is presented that eliminates the quadratic dependency of the residual stream resolution. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed HiResNets learn to foveate around scenes similarly to human vision, and have superior performance in difficult egocentric video recognition tasks, especially egocentric video with small objects and fine-grained recognition.
♻ ☆ Noise-Robust Conditional Flow Matching: Generating Clean Samples from Noisy Datasets
Generative models learn the statistical properties of their training data, so high-quality generation depends on clean and representative datasets. In scientific imaging, acquisition often yields noisy measurements, while collecting clean references can be costly, impractical or even unattainable. Training directly on these measurements results in a model that reproduces the corrupted data. This can be circumvented by learning the clean population distribution directly from the noisy data. Conditional flow matching (CFM) combines a simple regression objective with stable training, efficient sampling, and strong image-generation performance, making it a natural framework for this setting. We introduce Noise-Robust Conditional Flow Matching (NR-CFM), an unconditional generator that learns from one corrupted observation per image. NR-CFM provides a closed-form clean endpoint correction for additive white Gaussian noise and learns a data-driven correction for general Gaussian corruptions with more complex covariance structure. Across the evaluated corruption settings, NR-CFM outperforms NR-GAN in most cases and remains competitive with Ambient Diffusion in the high-noise regime. We further evaluate NR-CFM on scientific data at signal-to-noise ratios as low as $0.001$, where it generates plausible particle images from severely corrupted measurements.
comment: 10 pages, 3 Figures, and an Appendix
♻ ☆ CollaFuse: Collaborative Diffusion Models
In the landscape of generative artificial intelligence, diffusion-based models have emerged as a promising method for generating synthetic images. However, the application of diffusion models poses numerous challenges, particularly concerning data availability, computational requirements, and privacy. Traditional approaches to address these shortcomings, like federated learning, often impose significant computational burdens on individual clients, especially those with constrained resources. In response to these challenges, we introduce the novel approach CollaFuse for distributed collaborative diffusion models inspired by split learning. Our approach facilitates collaborative training of diffusion models while alleviating client computational burdens during image synthesis. This reduced computational burden is achieved by retaining data and computationally inexpensive processes locally at each client while outsourcing the computationally expensive processes to shared, more efficient server resources. Through experiments on the common datasets CelebA, CIFAR-10, and Animals-with-Attributes2, our approach demonstrates enhanced performance while decreasing information disclosure as it reduces the necessity for sharing raw data. These capabilities hold significant potential across various application areas, including the design of edge computing solutions. Thus, our work advances distributed machine learning by contributing to the evolution of collaborative diffusion models.
comment: Accepted at the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR)
♻ ☆ Modeling Long-Term Memory and Temporal Attention Shifts for Video Salient Object Ranking with a New Benchmark
Salient Object Ranking (SOR) aims to estimate the relative saliency order among multiple salient objects. While SOR has been extensively studied in static images, Video Salient Object Ranking (VSOR) remains largely underexplored due to the lack of effective temporal saliency modeling. In particular, existing VSOR methods rely on short input frame clips, which limits their ability to capture long-term saliency evolution and identify dynamic attention shifts. To address these challenges, we propose LoTAS, a long-term memory framework for VSOR that jointly models historical saliency states and temporal attention transitions. To model historical saliency, we propose a Temporal Context Decoder (TCD) and a Rank-aware Saliency State Encoder (RSSE). The TCD retrieves historical saliency states from memory queries to provide references to previously salient instances and long-range temporal context, while the RSSE encodes current predictions into rank-aware state embeddings and updates the memory for future frames, allowing reliable ranking cues to accumulate across long video sequences. To capture temporal attention transitions, we introduce explicit inter-frame rank-transition supervision and jointly learn a binary transition predictor as an auxiliary task alongside ordinal ranking. In addition, to address the limited video types and scene diversity in the existing VSOR dataset, we propose a challenging dataset that covers diverse video types and scenes with 124 videos and 16,610 frames. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art VSOR methods. We will make the code and our proposed dataset available.
♻ ☆ Efficient unsupervised domain adaptation via self-supervised vision transformer and synergistic cross-domain alignment
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to mitigate domain shift, where the distribution of labeled source data differs from that of unlabeled target data. Despite recent advances, existing methods often rely on fine-tuning large backbone models, which leads to high computational cost and limits scalability in resource-constrained environments. This limitation highlights the need for parameter-efficient approaches that maintain strong performance with reduced training complexity. Self-supervised foundation models such as DINOv2 provide highly transferable representations and raise the question of whether effective domain adaptation can be achieved without full fine-tuning. To address this question, we propose Efficient Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (EUDA), a parameter-efficient framework that leverages a frozen DINOv2 backbone as a feature extractor and updates only a lightweight bottleneck and classification head. We also adopt a synergistic domain alignment loss (SDAL), which combines cross-entropy (CE) and maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) to promote both discriminative learning and cross-domain alignment. Experimental results on Office-Home, Office-31, VisDA-2017, and DomainNet demonstrate that EUDA achieves competitive performance across diverse domain complexities, while reducing the number of trainable parameters by 42 to 99.7%. These results show the suitability of the proposed method for resource-constrained and distributed environments.
comment: 22 pages, 4 figures
♻ ☆ Tarot-SAM3: Training-free SAM3 for Any Referring Expression Segmentation
Referring Expression Segmentation (RES) aims to segment image regions described by natural-language expressions, serving as a bridge between vision and language understanding. Existing RES methods, however, rely heavily on large annotated datasets and are limited to either explicit or implicit expressions, hindering their ability to generalize to any referring expression. Recently, the Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3) has shown impressive robustness in Promptable Concept Segmentation. Nonetheless, applying it to RES remains challenging: (1) SAM3 struggles with longer or implicit expressions; (2) naive coupling of SAM3 with a multimodal large language model (MLLM) makes the final results overly dependent on the MLLM's reasoning capability, without enabling refinement of SAM3's segmentation outputs. To this end, we present Tarot-SAM3, a novel training-free framework that can accurately segment from any referring expression. Specifically, Tarot-SAM3 consists of two key phases. First, the Expression Reasoning Interpreter (ERI) phase introduces reasoning-assisted prompt options to support structured expression parsing and evaluation-aware rephrasing. This transforms arbitrary queries into robust heterogeneous prompts for generating reliable masks with SAM3. Second, the Mask Self-Refining (MSR) phase selects the best mask across prompt types and performs self-refinement by leveraging rich feature relationships from DINOv3 to compare discriminative regions among ERI outputs. It then infers region affiliation to the target, thereby correcting over- and under-segmentation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Tarot-SAM3 achieves strong performance on both explicit and implicit RES benchmarks, as well as open-world scenarios. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each phase.
comment: We need to make a huge revision
♻ ☆ MeSS: City Mesh-Guided Outdoor Scene Generation with Cross-View Consistent Diffusion
Xuyang Chen, Zhijun Zhai, Kaixuan Zhou, Zengmao Wang, Jianan He, Dong Wang, Yanfeng Zhang, mingwei Sun, Rüdiger Westermann, Konrad Schindler, Liqiu Meng
Mesh models have become increasingly accessible for numerous cities; however, the lack of realistic textures restricts their application in virtual urban navigation and autonomous driving. To address this, this paper proposes MeSS (Meshbased Scene Synthesis) for generating high-quality, styleconsistent outdoor scenes with city mesh models serving as the geometric prior. While image and video diffusion models can leverage spatial layouts (such as depth maps or HD maps) as control conditions to generate street-level perspective views, they are not directly applicable to 3D scene generation. Video diffusion models excel at synthesizing consistent view sequences that depict scenes but often struggle to adhere to predefined camera paths or align accurately with rendered control videos. In contrast, image diffusion models, though unable to guarantee cross-view visual consistency, can produce more geometry-aligned results when combined with ControlNet. Building on this insight, our approach enhances image diffusion models by improving cross-view consistency. The pipeline comprises three key stages: first, we generate geometrically consistent sparse views using Cascaded Outpainting ControlNets; second, we propagate denser intermediate views via a component dubbed AGInpaint; and third, we globally eliminate visual inconsistencies (e.g., varying exposure) using the GCAlign module. Concurrently with generation, a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scene is reconstructed by initializing Gaussian balls on the mesh surface. Our method outperforms existing approaches in both geometric alignment and generation quality. Once synthesized, the scene can be rendered in diverse styles through relighting and style transfer techniques. project page: https://albertchen98.github.io/mess/
♻ ☆ Poisoning Prompt-Guided Sampling in Video Large Language Models
Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) are increasingly deployed as automated moderators on user-generated video platforms, where a few unwatched seconds of harmful footage are enough to suppress a safety alert. Because encoding every frame is prohibitive, modern VideoLLMs rely on prompt-guided sampling (PGS), which scores frames against the user prompt and forwards only the top-ranked ones to the visual encoder. Uniform and semantic samplers are known to be defeated by simple frame replacement, whereas PGS, the most prompt-aware family, has escaped scrutiny, and its prompt awareness in fact repairs the omission failures that defeat the other two. We show that this repair is superficial, since PoisonVID, a transfer attack, poisons the sampler's ranking so that harmful clips are never surfaced, without access to target weights, gradients, or sampling internals. It optimizes one video-level perturbation under a relevance-suppression loss defined over a depiction set of paraphrased harmful descriptions written by a shadow VideoLLM and a general-purpose language model, which drives perturbed harmful frames out of the prompt-conditioned subspace that PGS reads. Samplers that never consult that score keep the frames they always kept, which locates the failure at selection rather than at the encoder. Across three PGS methods, six VideoLLMs, and six harmful categories, PoisonVID attains 84% to 97% average attack success over the 18 sampler and model pairs and survives seven defenses. Re-encoding at lower resolution on ingest gives back part of what was evicted and costs the attack 48 points, which bounds the threat without closing it. PGS therefore buys accuracy with a structural safety debt, and sampler design will now have to repay that.
comment: 16 pages, 5 figures
♻ ☆ PAGE-4D: Disentangled pose and geometry estimation for vggt-4d perception ICLR 2026
Kaichen Zhou, Yuhan Wang, Grace Chen, Xinhai Chang, Gaspard Beaudouin, Fangneng Zhan, Paul Pu Liang, Mengyu Wang
Recent 3D feed-forward models, such as the Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT), have shown strong capability in inferring 3D attributes of static scenes. However, since they are typically trained on static datasets, these models often struggle in real-world scenarios involving complex dynamic elements, such as moving humans or deformable objects like umbrellas. To address this limitation, we introduce PAGE-4D, a feedforward model that extends VGGT to dynamic scenes, enabling camera pose estimation, depth prediction and point cloud reconstruction - all without post-processing. A central challenge in multitask 4D reconstruction is the inherent conflict between tasks: accurate camera pose estimation requires suppressing dynamic regions, while geometry reconstruction requires modeling them. To resolve this tension, we propose a dynamics aware aggregator that disentangles static and dynamic information by predicting a dynamics-aware mask - suppressing motion cues for pose estimation while amplifying them for geometry reconstruction. Extensive experiments show that PAGE-4D consistently outperforms the original VGGT in dynamic scenarios, achieving superior results in camera pose estimation, monocular and video depth estimation, and dense point map reconstruction. Necessary code and additional demos are available at Link: https://page4d.github.io/, including both the training-and-inference masking variant and the training-only masking variant (= VGGT architecture at inference). Keywords: VGGT-4D, 4D Perception, Dynamic Scene Reconstruction.
comment: ICLR 2026, VGGT-4D, Dynamic VGGT
♻ ☆ 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.
♻ ☆ Stream3D: Sequential Multi-View 3D Generation via Evidential Memory
View-conditioned 3D generators such as SAM 3D, TRELLIS, and Hunyuan3D produce high-quality object reconstructions from a single view, but real-world visual observation often arrives as long monocular streams. Naively applying these generators to each streaming frame independently leads to severe temporal inconsistency in the generated results. To address this problem, we propose Stream3D, the first training-free streaming mechanism that turns a frozen view-conditioned 3D generator into a streaming generator with constant cross-chunk memory. Stream3D achieves this by maintaining a compact evidential memory, which selectively caches the most informative historical frames based on a proposed evidence score mechanism. As the stream progresses, the memory dynamically updates to retain a fixed number of informative frames, preventing the memory footprint from growing linearly with sequence length. This also prevents degradation over long sequences and keeps the underlying generator completely unchanged without retraining, architectural modifications, or auxiliary losses. Evaluated on both realistic and synthetic streaming benchmarks, Stream3D outperforms latent-transport baselines, including KV-cache reuse and flow-based feature editing, across both photometric and geometric metrics. More details can be found at: https://stream-3d.github.io/stream3d.github.io/.
comment: Multi-view 3D Generation, Streaming 3D Generation
♻ ☆ Beyond the Single Camera: Agentic Multi-View Reasoning in Sports Video Understanding
Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve strong performance on single-view video understanding benchmarks. However, sports videos involve dense occlusion, rapid motion, and complex interactions that are difficult to resolve from a single viewpoint. In practice, sports events are recorded from multiple camera angles, providing complementary evidence used by referees. Yet, no existing benchmark evaluates MLLMs on multi-view sports video understanding. To address this gap, we introduce SportMV-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark built from official match recordings, through a dedicated pipeline combining LLM-based generation, MLLM-based verification, and human filtering to ensure quality and consistency. SportMV-Bench containing 1022 multi-view video bundles and 3015 question-answer pairs spanning 10 sports across three categories: Perception-Aware Recognition (PAR), Rule-aware Event Interpretation (REI), and Adjudicative Decision Reasoning (ADR). Our analysis shows that current MLLMs fail to effectively exploit multi-view information, with the bottlenecks lying in fine-grained visual perception and view selection rather than logical reasoning or domain knowledge. We propose SportMV-Agent, an agentic framework that orchestrates an iterative loop of active view selection, perception tool execution, and evidence-grounded reasoning, achieving a significant 15.61% relative improvement over the strongest MLLM baseline.
♻ ☆ FadeMem: Distance-Aware Memory Consolidation for Autoregressive Video Diffusion
Autoregressive video generators synthesize long videos by generating successive temporal segments, but their historical KV cache grows with video length. Existing bounded-cache methods reduce this cost with local windows, sink tokens, or compressed memory states, yet they usually assign fixed roles to different parts of the history. We propose FadeMem, a distance-aware KV memory consolidation mechanism that organizes historical KV blocks into a temporal hierarchy under a fixed cache budget. This design is motivated by frequency-dependent temporal decay: fine details decorrelate quickly, while coarse scene structure and identity remain useful over longer horizons. During generation, new history is inserted as fine-grained entries, while older adjacent entries are progressively merged under a power-law temporal allocation schedule, yielding a dense-near, sparse-far memory within one cache. Without architectural changes, FadeMem improves long-range consistency while largely preserving visual quality, and lightweight adaptation further enhances motion dynamics and visual fidelity. Using the same unified schedule under a fixed cache budget, FadeMem also remains effective over multi-minute and hour long video generation and reduces peak memory under a matched KV budget.
comment: 14 pages, 9 figures. Substantially revised manuscript with expanded experiments and integrated supplementary material. Project page: https://fademem.github.io/FadeMem_Webpage/
♻ ☆ OmniTryOn: Video Try-On Anything at Once!
Although video virtual try-on (VVT) has achieved significant progress, existing methods still exhibit two fundamental limitations: first, they are restricted to single-garment transfer, rendering simultaneous multi-object try-on highly impractical; second, their heavy reliance on explicit external priors (e.g., garment masks) inevitably destroys crucial physical dynamics and degrades visual quality. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes the novel Try-On Anything task, which aims to simultaneously transfer diverse wearable objects onto a person in a video in a single inference pass. To support and standardize this paradigm, we introduce TryAny-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark encompassing a paired video dataset alongside a tailored evaluation protocol. Furthermore, we present OmniTryOn, an external-prior-free generative framework designed to tackle this task. Specifically, OmniTryOn employs a First Frame Wearable Cache strategy, which directly provides diverse wearable objects for the generation process through the initial video frame. To maintain consistency, we propose the Spatiotemporally Consistent RoPE (STC-RoPE), which inherently establishes robust spatiotemporal anchors to strictly preserve complex human motions and background dynamics. Optimized by the proposed Gradual Try-On (GTO) training strategy, our model progressively masters robust multi-object synthesis. Extensive experiments on TryAny-Bench demonstrate that OmniTryOn significantly outperforms existing specialized video virtual try-on models and general video editing baselines, establishing a powerful new standard for the Try-On Anything task. Our dataset, code, and models are available at https://github.com/xcltql666/OminTryOn.
♻ ☆ Self-Supervised Uncalibrated Multi-View Video Anonymization in the Operating Room
Privacy preservation is a prerequisite for using video data in Operating Room (OR) research. Effective anonymization relies on the exhaustive localization of every individual; even a single missed detection necessitates extensive manual correction. However, existing approaches face two critical scalability bottlenecks: (1) they usually require manual annotations of each new clinical site for high accuracy; (2) while multi-camera setups have been widely adopted to address single-view ambiguity, camera calibration is typically required whenever cameras are repositioned. To address these problems, we propose a self-supervised multi-view video anonymization framework consisting of whole-body person detection and whole-body pose estimation, without annotation or camera calibration. Our core strategy is to enhance the single-view detector by "retrieving" false negatives using temporal and multi-view context, and conducting self-supervised domain adaptation. We first run an off-the-shelf whole-body person detector in each view with a low-score threshold to gather candidate detections. Then, we retrieve the low-score false negatives that exhibit consistency with the high-score detections via tracking and self-supervised uncalibrated multi-view association. These recovered detections serve as pseudo labels to iteratively fine-tune the whole-body detector. Finally, we apply whole-body pose estimation on each detected person, and fine-tune the pose model using its own high-score predictions. Experiments on the 4D-OR dataset of simulated surgeries and our dataset of real surgeries show the effectiveness of our approach achieving 99% and 97% recall, respectively. Moreover, we train a real-time whole-body detector using our pseudo labels, achieving comparable performance and highlighting our method's practical applicability. Code will be available at https://github.com/CAMMA-public/OR_anonymization.
♻ ☆ K-space Gaussian Representation for Parallel MRI
Accelerated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) aims to recover the k-space signal from acquired measurements, where accurate estimation of missing samples is essential for high-fidelity reconstruction. Existing k-space reconstruction methods estimate missing samples through interpolation operators or structure priors defined on discrete sampling grids. Although these formulations effectively exploit local interpolation relationships and global k-space redundancy, they reconstruct only discrete frequency coefficients and therefore do not explicitly model the underlying continuous signal. To overcome this limitation, we propose K-space Gaussian Representation (KGR), the first explicit continuous representation formulated directly in the native k-space domain. Rather than estimating unknown samples on discrete grids, KGR parameterizes the continuous signal using Gabor-Gaussian primitives with shared spatial geometry, yielding a compact representation that naturally preserves inter-coil correlations. Because unconstrained continuous fitting does not necessarily satisfy the intrinsic structural properties of multi-coil signal, the estimated representation is projected onto a low-rank manifold to enforce the algebraic constraints arising from smoothly varying phase and coil redundancy. A frequency-adaptive fitting strategy accommodates the heterogeneous characteristics of different k-space regions. Comprehensive validation across multiple datasets and sampling schemes shows consistent improvements over representative reconstruction baselines in both quantitative metrics and visual quality. These results suggest that explicit continuous parameterization of native k-space provides a principled framework for integrating continuous signal modeling with structured low-rank reconstruction.
♻ ☆ Compound and Parallel Modes of Tropical Convolutional Neural Networks
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are foundational to many state-of-the-art computer vision systems, yet their reliance on multiplication-intensive computations poses challenges for deployment on resource-constrained devices. While tropical convolutional neural networks (TCNNs) reduce this computational burden by replacing multiplications with cheaper min/maxplus operations, they often do so at the cost of reduced model accuracy. To address this tradeoff, we introduce two novel extensions of tropical convolution: compound tropical convolution (cTCNN) and parallel tropical convolution (pTCNN). These operators combine minplus and maxplus algebraic operations within a single layer to enhance representational capacity while maintaining low computational cost. We provide an open-source implementation of these operators in a PyTorch-compatible framework, featuring optimized GPU kernels developed with TileLang. Through extensive experiments on image classification and semantic segmentation benchmarks, we demonstrate that our proposed cTCNN and pTCNN layers achieve competitive performance against standard CNNs while significantly reducing the number of multiplications. Moreover, we show that hybrid models, which integrate both tropical and conventional convolutions, can further improve the accuracy-efficiency balance. Our findings suggest that these tropical convolution variants are viable and effective components for building efficient deep learning models
comment: 30 pages, 7 figures
♻ ☆ Failing to See or Failing to Know? Attributing Errors in Vision-Language Models
Vision-language models (VLMs) can recognize entities in clear images yet still fail when answering questions that require factual knowledge beyond what is directly observable. Prior work has either examined individual failure modes in isolation or treated incorrect answers as monolithic, binary failures. We propose a tree-structured framework that organizes failures in knowledge-intensive visual question answering into model-specific operational outcomes. Across two datasets and four VLMs, we observe consistent distributions of operational outcomes: some failures occur before entity recognition, while others persist after the relevant entity is recognized. Visual token representations are most informative for recognition-related decisions. Prompt hidden states predict answer success more effectively, although factual-access attribution remains difficult and exhibits only a weak signal. These pre-generation signals support attribution-guided routing to targeted interventions, including image repair, entity support, question rewriting, and factual evidence.
♻ ☆ Beyond Accuracy: Auditing Spatial Provenance in Visual Token Pruning for OCR-Critical MLLM Inference
Visual-token pruning is usually judged by answer quality at a fixed retention budget. For text-rich multimodal large language models (MLLMs), this protocol can miss a distinct failure: an answer remains correct even when no retained token is locally traceable to the small OCR region that supports it. We turn this blind spot into an evidence-risk audit that couples answer behavior with geometric token-origin provenance, interventions, and realized cost; transparent training-free selectors isolate controlled operating points. On locked image-disjoint confirmation, Qwen Target at 30% retention has observed accuracy 0.786 versus 0.783 for Full (paired image-cluster difference +0.003, 95% CI [-0.014, +0.020]), yet same-budget Target, Random, and Grid retain sharply different positive-support coverage: 0.620, 0.270, and 0.318. Across Qwen3-VL-8B, LLaVA-1.5-7B, and InternVL3.5-8B, matched controls, interventions, detector tests, and external methods reveal model-specific quality-risk-traceability frontiers that accuracy alone does not expose. Materialized prefixes yield up to 4.32x batch-prefill speedup and 76.4% lower incremental peak memory; full-validation TextVQA and DocVQA further show that favorable target-verification points do not imply task-general compression. Visual-token pruning should therefore report surviving spatial provenance and realized cost alongside quality and compression.
comment: 21 pages, including supplementary material. Code and reproducibility artifacts: https://github.com/SouthWinter/spatial-provenance-audit
♻ ☆ HyVIC: A Metric-Driven Spatio-Spectral Hyperspectral Image Compression Architecture Based on Variational Autoencoders
The rapid growth of hyperspectral data archives in remote sensing (RS) necessitates effective compression methods for storage and transmission. Recent advances in learning-based hyperspectral image (HSI) compression have significantly enhanced both reconstruction fidelity and compression efficiency. However, existing methods typically adapt variational image compression models designed for natural images, without adequately accounting for the distinct spatio-spectral redundancies inherent in HSIs. To address this issue, in this paper, we aim to study the effects of spatio-spectral feature learning on the rate-distortion (RD) performance of variational HSI compression as a first time in RS. To this end, we propose to use configurable spatial and spectral feature learning blocks within variational HSI compression. To achieve this, we introduce spatio-spectral variational hyperspectral image compression architecture (HyVIC), a configurable variational autoencoder (VAE) for HSI compression. HyVIC enables independent control of spatial and spectral feature learning, facilitating hyperspectral-specific variational image compression. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that the trade-off between spatial and spectral feature learning is crucial for the reconstruction fidelity. Motivated by this, we also present a metric-driven strategy to systematically select the hyperparameters of the proposed model. In detail, HyVIC achieves high spatial and spectral reconstruction fidelity across a wide range of compression ratios (CRs) and improves the state of the art by up to 4.66dB in terms of BD-PSNR. Based on our results, we offer insights and derive practical guidelines to guide future research directions in learning-based variational HSI compression in RS. Our code and pre-trained model weights are publicly available at https://git.tu-berlin.de/rsim/hyvic .
♻ ☆ Audio-Visual World Models: Learning Physically Grounded Multisensory Dynamics
World models simulate environmental dynamics to enable embodied agents to plan and reason about future states. While real-world perception is inherently multimodal, existing approaches focus primarily on visual observations, leaving crucial spatial and temporal acoustic cues underexplored. In this work, we present a unified formulation of Audio-Visual World Models (AVWM), casting multimodal environment simulation under action control as a partially observable Markov decision process with synchronized audio-visual observations. As a foundational benchmark, we construct AVW-4k, comprising 30 hours of action-annotated binaural audio-visual trajectories across 76 indoor environments. To capture these physically grounded multisensory dynamics, we propose AV-CDiT (Audio-Visual Conditional Diffusion Transformer), featuring a novel modality expert architecture that balances visual and auditory learning, optimized via a three-stage training strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AV-CDiT achieves high-fidelity prediction across both visual and auditory modalities. Furthermore, we validate its practical utility in embodied navigation, showing that AVWM significantly enhances a pretrained agent in continuous audio-visual navigation tasks.
♻ ☆ Rethinking Uncertainty Quantification and Entanglement in Image Segmentation
Jakob Lønborg Christensen, Vedrana Andersen Dahl, Morten Rieger Hannemose, Anders Bjorholm Dahl, Christian F. Baumgartner
Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is crucial in safety-critical applications such as medical image segmentation. Total uncertainty is typically decomposed into data-related aleatoric uncertainty (AU) and model-related epistemic uncertainty (EU). Many methods exist for modeling AU (such as Probabilistic UNet, Diffusion) and EU (such as ensembles, MC Dropout), but it is unclear how they interact when combined. Additionally, recent work has revealed substantial entanglement between AU and EU, undermining the interpretability and practical usefulness of the decomposition. We present a comprehensive empirical study covering a broad range of AU-EU model combinations, propose a metric to quantify uncertainty entanglement, and evaluate both across downstream UQ tasks. Ensembles consistently exhibit lower entanglement and superior performance. Softmax models usually beat other AU methods, except in calibration where the results are dataset-dependent. A softmax ensemble performs remarkably well on all tasks. Finally, we analyze potential sources of uncertainty entanglement and outline directions for mitigating this effect.
♻ ☆ MaterialFusion: High-Quality, Zero-Shot, and Controllable Material Transfer with Diffusion Models CVPR 2025
Manipulating the material appearance of objects in images is critical for applications like augmented reality, virtual prototyping, and digital content creation. We present MaterialFusion, a novel framework for high-quality material transfer that allows users to adjust the degree of material application, achieving an optimal balance between new material properties and the object's original features. MaterialFusion seamlessly integrates the modified object into the scene by maintaining background consistency and mitigating boundary artifacts. To thoroughly evaluate our approach, we have compiled a dataset of real-world material transfer examples and conducted complex comparative analyses. Through comprehensive quantitative evaluations and user studies, we demonstrate that MaterialFusion significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of quality, user control, and background preservation. Code is available at https://github.com/ControlGenAI/MaterialFusion.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2025
♻ ☆ Toward Visual Grounding: A Survey
Visual Grounding, also known as Referring Expression Comprehension and Phrase Grounding, aims to ground the specific region(s) within the image(s) based on the given expression text. This task simulates the common referential relationships between visual and linguistic modalities, enabling machines to develop human-like multimodal comprehension capabilities. Consequently, it has extensive applications in various domains. However, since 2021, visual grounding has witnessed significant advancements, with emerging new concepts such as grounded pre-training, grounding multimodal LLMs, generalized visual grounding, and giga-pixel grounding, which have brought numerous new challenges. In this survey, we first examine the developmental history of visual grounding and provide an overview of essential background knowledge. We systematically track and summarize the advancements, and then meticulously define and organize the various settings to standardize future research and ensure a fair comparison. Additionally, we delve into numerous related datasets and applications, and highlight several advanced topics. Finally, we outline the challenges confronting visual grounding and propose valuable directions for future research, which may serve as inspiration for subsequent researchers. By extracting common technical details, this survey encompasses the representative work in each subtopic over the past decade. To the best of our knowledge, this paper represents the most comprehensive overview currently available in the field of visual grounding. This survey is designed to be suitable for both beginners and experienced researchers, serving as an invaluable resource for understanding key concepts and tracking the latest research developments. We keep tracing related work at https://github.com/linhuixiao/Awesome-Visual-Grounding.
comment: Accepted by TPAMI 2025. We keep tracing related works at https://github.com/linhuixiao/Awesome-Visual-Grounding, article publication page: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/11235566
♻ ☆ CHASE: Competing Hypotheses for Ambiguity-Aware Selective Prediction
Standard selective prediction methods typically estimate uncertainty from the output of a single predictive branch. While effective for general uncertainty estimation, these approaches often struggle under partial observability, where local temporal evidence can be contradictory and standard confidence scores become misleading. We introduce CHASE (Competing Hypotheses for Ambiguity-Aware Selective Prediction), a selective prediction framework that explicitly compares structured temporal explanations to determine whether to commit to a decision or abstain. Because genuine ambiguity causes the score gap between competing hypotheses to collapse, CHASE optimizes a ranking-aware selector over these hypothesis margins to globally separate safe commitments from fundamentally uncertain ones. We evaluate this framework on the problem of hidden connectivity inference, utilizing a controlled, physically grounded simulator inspired by the dynamics of giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs), alongside zero-shot qualitative transfer (without retraining or fine tuning) to representative real GUV videos. Our experiments demonstrate that explicitly reasoning over competing hypotheses provides a superior balance of metrics. Compared to canonical uncertainty baselines, CHASE achieves statistically significant gains in overall no-abstain accuracy, three-way accuracy, and overall ambiguity-aligned abstention (at 80% coverage). Specifically, it yields up to an 11.0% relative mean improvement in overall alignment, alongside up to an 8.8% relative boost in three-way accuracy in the very-high ambiguity regime. By maintaining a selective risk boundary strictly at par with the best baselines at 80% coverage, and reducing overall risk by 9.9% at 90% coverage, this framework offers a more reliable approach to decision-making under structured ambiguity.
♻ ☆ Talker-T2AV: Joint Talking Audio-Video Generation with Autoregressive Diffusion Modeling
Zhen Ye, Xu Tan, Aoxiong Yin, Hongzhan Lin, Guangyan Zhang, Peiwen Sun, Yiming Li, Chi-Min Chan, Wei Ye, Shikun Zhang, Wei Xue
Joint audio-video generation models have shown that unified generation yields stronger cross-modal coherence than cascaded approaches. However, existing models couple modalities throughout denoising via pervasive attention, treating high-level semantics and low-level details in a fully entangled manner. This is suboptimal for talking head synthesis: while audio and facial motion are semantically correlated, their low-level realizations (acoustic signals and visual textures) follow distinct rendering processes. Enforcing joint modeling across all levels causes unnecessary entanglement and reduces efficiency. We propose Talker-T2AV, an autoregressive diffusion framework where high-level cross-modal modeling occurs in a shared backbone, while low-level refinement uses modality-specific decoders. A shared autoregressive language model jointly reasons over audio and video in a unified patch-level token space. Two lightweight diffusion transformer heads decode the hidden states into frame-level audio and video latents. Experiments on talking portrait benchmarks show Talker-T2AV outperforms dual-branch baselines in lip-sync accuracy, video quality, and audio quality, achieving stronger cross-modal consistency than cascaded pipelines.
♻ ☆ HomeSafeBench: A Benchmark for Embodied Vision-Language Models in Free-Exploration Home Safety Inspection
Safety hazards in the home are a leading cause of preventable domestic injuries, motivating an automated inspector that actively explores a home and reports hazards before they cause harm. We introduce HomeSafeBench, the first benchmark for free-exploration home safety inspection with egocentric visual feedback, in which an embodied agent navigates a fully interactive 3D home, adjusts its viewpoint, and reports hazards purely from rendered first-person views. Built on the VirtualHome simulator, it covers five categories of common household hazards and comprises 1,000 human-validated inspection tasks. Evaluating a broad range of state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) reveals a large gap, where the best model reaches only about 34.7% F1, far below the 98.0% of a human inspector. Moreover, precision far exceeds recall across models, revealing a systematic tendency to under-report hazards that reflects a shared deficiency in risk recognition. To close this gap at low cost, we propose CueBack, an offline data-construction method that exploits the clue-precedes-confirmation structure of inspection, backtracking a privileged trajectory to the earliest frame where a hazard cue becomes visible and rewriting it into executable supervision. Fine-tuning a 4B-size VLM on CueBack-constructed data raises the average F1 from 18.7% to 45.3% on an out-of-distribution test set, surpassing the strongest closed-source model performance 34.7%. The benchmark, training dataset, and code are available at https://github.com/BITHLP/HomeSafeBench.
comment: Preprint
♻ ☆ Towards Interpretable Foundation Models for Retinal Fundus Images MICCAI 2026
Foundation models are used to extract transferable representations from large amounts of unlabeled data, typically via self-supervised learning (SSL). However, many of these models rely on architectures that offer limited interpretability, a critical issue in high-stakes domains such as medical imaging. We propose DualIFM, a foundation model that is interpretable-by-design via a BagNet backbone whose small receptive fields generate class evidence maps that are faithful to the model's decision-making process. Additionally, DualIFM incorporates a $2D$ projection layer during pretraining that enables direct visualization of the representation space, providing a dataset-level view of the learned structure including meaningful clinical clusters as well as potential spurious correlations. We trained DualIFM on over 800,000 color fundus photographs from various sources to learn generalizable representations for different downstream tasks. Our model achieves performance comparable to RETFound, which has $16\times$ more parameters, while providing interpretable predictions on out-of-distribution data. These results suggest that large-scale SSL pretraining paired with inherent interpretability can lead to robust representations for retinal imaging. Code and pretrained models are available at github.com/berenslab/interpretable_FM.
comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables, submitted to iMIMIC workshop at MICCAI 2026
♻ ☆ ReCamDriving: LiDAR-Free Camera-Controlled Video Synthesis for Novel Trajectories
Yaokun Li, Shuaixian Wang, Mantang Guo, Jiehui Huang, Taojun Ding, Mu Hu, Kaixuan Wang, Shaojie Shen, Guang Tan
Synthesizing multi-pass videos is important for autonomous driving. While current repair-based methods often struggle with out-of-distribution artifacts, camera-controlled methods often produce 3D-inconsistent results due to sparse LiDAR cues. We propose ReCamDriving, a purely vision-based framework that achieves camera-controlled generation by leveraging dense, structurally complete 3DGS renderings as geometric guidance. Specifically, to prevent the model from overfitting to a trivial repair solution when conditioning on 3DGS renderings, we adopt a two-stage progressive training paradigm: the first stage uses camera poses for coarse control, while the second stage incorporates 3DGS renderings for fine-grained viewpoint and geometric guidance. Furthermore, to align training and inference camera transformation patterns, we propose a 3DGS-based cross-trajectory data curation strategy, enabling consistent lateral-trajectory supervision from single-pass videos. Based on this strategy, we construct the ParaDrive dataset, containing approximately 110K parallel-trajectory video pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReCamDriving achieves state-of-the-art camera controllability and structural consistency.
comment: Project page: https://recamdriving.github.io/
♻ ☆ SAMSEM -- A Generic and Scalable Approach for IC Metal Line Segmentation
Christian Gehrmann, Jonas Ricker, Simon Damm, Deruo Cheng, Julian Speith, Yiqiong Shi, Asja Fischer, Christof Paar
In light of globalized hardware supply chains, the assurance of hardware components has gained significant interest, particularly in cryptographic applications and high-stakes scenarios. Identifying metal lines on scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of integrated circuits (ICs) is one essential step in verifying the absence of malicious circuitry in chips manufactured in untrusted environments. Due to varying manufacturing processes and technologies, such verification usually requires tuning parameters and algorithms for each target IC. Often, a machine learning model trained on images of one IC fails to accurately detect metal lines on other ICs. To address this challenge, we create SAMSEM by adapting Meta's Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) to the domain of IC metal line segmentation. Specifically, we develop a multi-scale segmentation approach that can handle SEM images of varying sizes, resolutions, and magnifications. Furthermore, we deploy a topology-based loss alongside pixel-based losses to focus our segmentation on electrical connectivity rather than pixel-level accuracy. Based on a hyperparameter optimization, we then fine-tune the SAM2 model to obtain a model that generalizes across different technology nodes, manufacturing materials, sample preparation methods, and SEM imaging technologies. To this end, we leverage an unprecedented dataset of SEM images obtained from 48 metal layers across 14 different ICs. When fine-tuned on seven ICs, SAMSEM achieves an error rate as low as 0.72% when evaluated on other images from the same ICs. For the remaining seven unseen ICs, it still achieves error rates as low as 5.53%. Finally, when fine-tuned on all 14 ICs, we observe an error rate of 0.62%. Hence, SAMSEM proves to be a reliable tool that significantly advances the frontier in metal line segmentation, a key challenge in post-manufacturing IC verification.
♻ ☆ Bridging the Micro--Macro Gap: Frequency-Aware Semantic Alignment for Image Manipulation Localization
As generative image editing advances, image manipulation localization (IML) must handle both traditional manipulations with conspicuous forensic artifacts and diffusion-generated edits that appear locally realistic. Existing methods typically rely on either low-level forensic cues or high-level semantics alone, leading to a fundamental micro--macro gap. To bridge this gap, we propose FASA, a unified framework for localizing both traditional and diffusion-generated manipulations. Specifically, we extract manipulation-sensitive frequency cues through an adaptive dual-band DCT module and learn manipulation-aware semantic priors via patch-level contrastive alignment on frozen CLIP representations. We then inject these priors into a hierarchical frequency pathway through a semantic-frequency side adapter for multi-scale feature interaction, and employ a prototype-guided, frequency-gated mask decoder to integrate semantic consistency with boundary-aware localization for tampered region prediction. Extensive experiments on OpenSDI and multiple traditional manipulation benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art localization performance, strong cross-generator and cross-dataset generalization, and robust performance under common image degradations.
♻ ☆ Which Modality Decides? Counterfactual Modality Attribution for Multimodal LLMs
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) increasingly support high-stakes decision making by combining complementary information from images and text. While existing explainability methods identify influential image regions or text tokens, they cannot answer a fundamental question: which modality drives a prediction? Consequently, a model may produce the correct output while relying on the wrong source of evidence, masking shortcut learning and unsafe reasoning. We formulate modality attribution as a complementary explainability objective for multimodal foundation models and propose Counterfactual Modality Attribution (CMA), the first framework for quantifying modality-level contributions in MLLMs. CMA generates image-only, text-only, and joint multimodal counterfactuals using coupled diffusion priors and converts them into principled modality attribution scores through a cooperative game-theoretic formulation based on Shapley values. We evaluate CMA on controlled synthetic benchmarks with known ground-truth modality reliance and on a real-world multimodal clinical dataset. CMA correctly identifies the decision-driving modality in 98% of controlled cases and consistently outperforms baselines, revealing failures of cross-modal reasoning that remain invisible to predictive accuracy alone. Our results establish modality attribution as a complementary dimension of explainability beyond feature attribution, providing a principled framework for auditing multimodal foundation models in safety-critical applications.
comment: 9 pages, 5 figures
♻ ☆ Style-Aware Gloss Control for Generative Non-Photorealistic Rendering
Humans can infer material characteristics of objects from their visual appearance, and this ability extends to artistic depictions, where similar perceptual strategies guide the interpretation of paintings or drawings. Among the factors that define material appearance, gloss, along with color, is widely regarded as one of the most important, and recent studies indicate that humans can perceive gloss independently of the artistic style used to depict an object. To investigate how gloss and artistic style are represented in learned models, we train an unsupervised generative model on a newly curated dataset of painterly objects designed to systematically vary such factors. Our analysis reveals a hierarchical latent space in which gloss is disentangled from other appearance factors, allowing for a detailed study of how gloss is represented and varies across artistic styles. Building on this representation, we introduce a lightweight adapter that connects our style- and gloss-aware latent space to a latent-diffusion model, enabling the synthesis of non-photorealistic images with fine-grained control of these factors. We compare our approach with previous models and observe improved disentanglement and controllability of the learned factors.
comment: Published in Computers & Graphics journal
♻ ☆ URHead: A Unified UV-Space Representation for Joint Mesh-3DGS Optimization in Head Avatars ECCV 2026
We present URHead, a unified representation for high-fidelity and animatable head avatars that fundamentally redefines mesh-Gaussian integration. While mesh-based methods offer precise geometric control but lack photorealistic detail, and Gaussian-based approaches achieve photorealism but suffer from poor structural consistency, existing hybrid solutions fail to fully leverage their complementary strengths. Our key contribution is a UV-space unification where both representations share a common UV parameterization. Through joint optimization with adaptive gaussian sampling, our method automatically learns to disentangle and allocate appropriate roles to each component. URHead maintains full parametric controllability while preserving subject-specific details, and outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in reconstruction quality and animation consistency.
comment: Project page/code: https://lseonghak.github.io/website/project/urhead/, Accepted to ECCV 2026
♻ ☆ MIDAL: A Dataset of Math Image Descriptions for Accessible Learning
Many open educational resources are lacking in accessibility, especially in-depth image descriptions. In subjects like Science and Mathematics, however, it can be particularly difficult to write image descriptions since there can be many complicated expressions and names depending upon the course level. To help fill that gap in a small way, we introduce Math Image Descriptions for Accessible Learning (MIDAL), a math image-description dataset of 2,020 mathematical images spanning multiple educational levels, to aid in training vision language models to create image descriptions following accessibility best practices. We hope MIDAL is a valuable resource in enhancing the conversation and innovation regarding accessibility of STEM content in higher education. This dataset is however not just limited in math description generation but can also be used to fine-tune language models that can have improved mathematical reasoning and answers.
♻ ☆ Knowledge-guided Disentanglement with Atomic Actions for Action Recognition
Tianci Wu, Siqi Cao, Guangming Zhu, Jiang Lu, Siyuan Wang, Longfei Zhang, Jincai Huang, Jun Sheng, Liang Zhang
Action recognition in complex scenes often involves multiple concurrent fine-grained actions, making it challenging to model internal action structures. Most existing methods rely on holistic representations, which are insufficient for capturing subtle interactions and fine-grained semantics. While recent prompt-based approaches introduce disentanglement, they lack explicit semantic guidance, and methods based solely on visual or structured cues remain coarse-grained. In this paper, we propose Knowledge-guided Disentanglement with Atomic Actions (KDA), which leverages fine-grained semantic knowledge to enhance action representations and enable more precise disentanglement. Specifically, we use Large Language Models (LLMs) to decompose action labels into atomic actions, providing explicit spatial-temporal semantics. A Knowledge Injection Module (KIM) first integrates atomic action knowledge into video features. Based on this enhanced representation, a Knowledge Disentanglement Module (KDM) further disentangles atomic action knowledge to produce more precise semantic guidance for action disentanglement. A Knowledge Disentanglement Loss (KD Loss) is introduced to encourage clearer disentanglement of knowledge components within KDM. Extensive experiments demonstrate that KDA improves feature discriminability and achieves state-of-the-art performance on multi-label action recognition benchmarks. Moreover, KIM and KDM can be readily integrated into other methods, demonstrating strong generality.
comment: ACMMM 26
♻ ☆ Ranking Image Fusion the Way Humans Do: A Learned Pairwise Preference Metric for Infrared-Visible Fusion Assessment
Infrared-visible image fusion (IVIF) has no ideal fused reference, so fusion algorithms are routinely ranked by scalar objective metrics that formalize different proxies for information transfer, structure, or source similarity. These proxies often disagree with the judgment that ultimately matters: given the same sources, which of two fused results does a human prefer? Direct pairwise comparison is an established reference protocol for relative subjective assessment, but its cost grows quadratically with the number of algorithms, which prevents routine use. We present the Learned Perceptual Image Fusion Measure (LPIFM), a source-conditioned model that operationalizes the human A/B/Tie comparison protocol as a repeatable, scalable surrogate. LPIFM jointly observes the infrared source, the visible source, and two fused candidates, and predicts whether candidate A is better, candidate B is better, or the two are perceptually equivalent. Supervision comes from a new dense preference corpus that covers every unordered comparison among a broad pool of fusion methods on the scenes of a public benchmark, labeled under a blinded, randomized, two-stage protocol with expert adjudication. Across scene- and method-generalization settings, LPIFM tracks human pairwise decisions closely and reproduces the tie-aware Bradley-Terry rankings derived from human labels; on full method pools it surpasses the strongest conventional metric by a wide margin in both pairwise accuracy and ranking correlation. We release the annotated preference dataset, together with the LPIFM model weights, source code, and evaluation code, to support preference-aligned IVIF assessment. LPIFM offers a practical instrument for human-aligned method comparison and ranking at scale.
comment: 22 pages, 7 figures
♻ ☆ When Classes Evolve: A Benchmark and Framework for Stage-Aware Class-Incremental Learning ACM MM '26
Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to sequentially learn new classes while mitigating catastrophic forgetting of previously learned knowledge. Conventional CIL approaches implicitly assume that classes are morphologically static, focusing primarily on preserving previously learned representations as new classes are introduced. In practice, however, instances of the same semantic class may undergo substantial morphological evolution, such as a larva turning into a butterfly. Consequently, a model must both discriminate between classes and adapt to evolving appearances within a single class. To systematically address this challenge, we formalize Stage-Aware CIL (Stage-CIL), a paradigm in which each class is learned progressively through distinct morphological stages. We further introduce Stage-Bench, a 10-domain, two-stage benchmark and protocol for evaluating both inter-class forgetting and stage-level degradation within classes. Finally, we propose STAGE, an evolution-aware reference baseline that disentangles semantic identity from evolution dynamics through a fixed-size memory pool, enabling stage-aware prediction of later morphological forms from earlier representations. Extensive experiments show that conventional CIL reductions and existing continual-learning baselines remain insufficient under Stage-CIL, while STAGE consistently outperforms strong competitors, demonstrating the promise of explicit evolution-aware modeling for this new setting.
comment: 34th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM '26)
♻ ☆ Video Models as Native 4D Renderers: World-Grounded Conditioning from Animated Mesh
Junhao Chen, Mingjin Chen, Henghaofan Zhang, Minglin Chen, Liaoyuan Fan, Boran Zhang, Saining Zhang, Mingze Sun, Hao Zhao, Ruqi Huang, Zhihao Li, Yufei Wang
Pretrained video diffusion models can act as renderers when the desired scene state is already specified by an animated mesh, a camera trajectory, and a reference image. This 4D generative rendering setting raises a representation question: what image-format condition lets a video backbone obey both camera motion and scene-internal animation? We propose DAR, a reference-guided renderer that extends Wan2.2 camera control from Plücker rays alone to a joint camera-plus-geometry interface. DAR projects a neural 4D G-buffer (tracking, world position, and normal) from the animated mesh and injects it through a widened control adapter while preserving the pretrained image-to-video prior. The central design choice is the pair of tracking and world position. Tracking identifies the persistent surface element that should carry appearance; world position gives its current scene-coordinate state; normal supplies local shape. Depth plus calibrated rays can recover 3D in principle, but depth is a camera-dependent chart in which camera and object motion are mixed. On the 68-case DAR-4D benchmark, LoRA DAR reaches PSNR 23.22, SSIM 0.895, and LPIPS 0.134, improving over off-the-shelf Wan2.2-Depth by 1.54 dB PSNR; a full fine-tune reaches PSNR 25.36 and SSIM 0.917. Matched ablations show that replacing world position by depth reduces PSNR by 1.26--1.55 dB at every checkpoint, supporting tracking+world-position correspondence as a practical 4D rendering condition.
comment: 14 pages, 5 figures
♻ ☆ SIFT: Self-Imagination Fine-Tuning for Physically Plausible Motion in Video Diffusion Models ECCV 2026
Recent advances in video diffusion models have greatly improved visual fidelity, yet their generated motions often violate physical plausibility. We observe a common kinematic failure, "motion entanglement", the unintended coupling of independent motion sources, such as camera movement and object motion. We identify that this issue stems from data bias and the reconstruction-based training design of diffusion models. Training on noisy videos that still retain coarse motion cues inadvertently encourages the model to replicate existing motion without an incentive to learn how to model kinematically-grounded motions. To address this, we propose a Self-Imagination Fine-Tuning (SIFT) paradigm, which enables the model to learn from its own generated videos rather than directly reconstructing real ones, breaking the reconstruction shortcut. We further employ motion-aware discriminative supervision and a progressive hard-case replay strategy to stabilize and accelerate learning. By leveraging freely-generated text prompts, our method can densely cover a broad motion space, including rare or finely-disentangled scenarios that would be costly to collect as video data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach substantially improves the physical realism, motion disentanglement, and controllability of generated videos.
comment: ECCV 2026
♻ ☆ NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Single Image Reflection Removal in the Wild: Datasets, Results, and Methods
Jie Cai, Kangning Yang, Zhiyuan Li, Florin-Alexandru Vasluianu, Radu Timofte, Jinlong Li, Jinglin Shen, Zibo Meng, Junyan Cao, Lu Zhao, Pengwei Liu, Yuyi Zhang, Fengjun Guo, Jiagao Hu, Zepeng Wang, Fei Wang, Daiguo Zhou, Yi'ang Chen, Honghui Zhu, Mengru Yang, Yan Luo, Kui Jiang, Jin Guo, Jonghyuk Park, Jae-Young Sim, Wei Zhou, Hongyu Huang, Linfeng Li, Lindong Kong, Saiprasad Meesiyawar, Misbha Falak Khanpagadi, Nikhil Akalwadi, Ramesh Ashok Tabib, Uma Mudenagudi, Bilel Benjdira, Anas M. Ali, Wadii Boulila, Kosuke Shigematsu, Hiroto Shirono, Asuka Shin, Guoyi Xu, Yaoxin Jiang, Jiajia Liu, Yaokun Shi, Jiachen Tu, Shreeniketh Joshi, Jin-Hui Jiang, Yu-Fan Lin, Yu-Jou Hsiao, Chia-Ming Lee, Fu-En Yang, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Chih-Chung Hsu
In this paper, we review the NTIRE 2026 challenge on single-image reflection removal (SIRR) in the wild. SIRR is a fundamental task in image restoration. Despite progress in academic research, most methods are tested on synthetic images or limited real-world images, creating a gap in real-world applications. In this challenge, we provide participants with the OpenRR-5k dataset. This dataset requires participants to process real-world images covering a range of reflection scenarios and intensities, aiming to generate clean images without reflections. The challenge attracted more than 100 registrations, with eleven of them participating in the final testing phase. The top-ranked methods advanced the state-of-the-art reflection removal performance and earned unanimous recognition from five experts in the field. The proposed OpenRR-5k dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/qiuzhangTiTi/OpenRR-5k, and the homepage of this challenge is at https://github.com/caijie0620/OpenRR-5k.
♻ ☆ Enhanced Polarization Locking in VCSELs
While optical injection locking (OIL) of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) has been widely studied in the past, the polarization dynamics of OIL have received far less attention. Recent studies suggest that polarization locking via OIL could enable novel computational applications such as polarization-encoded Ising computers. However, the inherent polarization preference and limited polarization switchability of VCSELs hinder their use for such purposes. To address these challenges, we fabricate VCSELs with tailored oxide aperture designs and combine these with bias current tuning to study the overall impact on polarization locking. Experimental results demonstrate that this approach reduces the required injection power (to as low as 3.6 μW) and expands the locking range. To investigate the impact of the approach, the spin-flip model (SFM) is used to analyze the effects of amplitude anisotropy and bias current on polarization locking, demonstrating strong coherence with experimental results.
♻ ☆ Fusion-Poly: A Polyhedral Framework Based on Spatial-Temporal Fusion for 3D Multi-Object Tracking
LiDAR-camera 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) combines rich visual semantics with accurate depth cues to improve trajectory consistency and tracking reliability. In practice, however, LiDAR and cameras operate at different sampling rates. To maintain temporal alignment, existing data pipelines usually synchronize heterogeneous sensor streams and annotate them at a reduced shared frequency, forcing most prior methods to perform spatial fusion only at synchronized timestamps through projection-based or learnable cross-sensor association. As a result, abundant asynchronous observations remain underexploited, despite their potential to support more frequent association and more robust trajectory estimation over short temporal intervals.
To address this limitation, we propose Fusion-Poly, a spatial-temporal fusion framework for 3D MOT that integrates asynchronous LiDAR and camera data. Fusion-Poly associates trajectories with multi-modal observations at synchronized timestamps and with single-modal observations at asynchronous timestamps, enabling higher-frequency updates of motion and existence states. The framework contains three key components: a frequency-aware cascade matching module that adapts to synchronized and asynchronous frames according to available detection modalities; a frequency-aware trajectory estimation module that maintains trajectories through high-frequency motion prediction, differential updates, and confidence-calibrated lifecycle management; and a full-state observation alignment module that improves cross-modal consistency at synchronized timestamps by optimizing image-projection errors.
On the nuScenes test set, Fusion-Poly achieves 76.5% AMOTA, establishing a new state of the art among tracking-by-detection 3D MOT methods. Extensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each component. Code will be released.
♻ ☆ Deep Frequency-Aware Functional Maps for Robust Shape Matching
Deep functional map frameworks are widely employed for 3D shape matching. However, most existing deep functional map methods cannot adaptively capture important frequency information for functional map estimation in specific matching scenarios, i.e., lacking \textit{frequency awareness}, resulting in poor performance when dealing with large deformable shape matching. To this end, we propose a novel unsupervised learning-based framework called Deep Frequency-Aware Functional Maps, which can gracefully cope with various shape matching scenarios. We first introduce a general constraint called Spectral Filter Operator Preservation to compute desirable functional maps, where the spectral filter operator encodes informative frequency information and can promote frequency awareness for deep functional map frameworks by learning a set of filter functions. Then, we directly utilize the proposed constraint as a loss function to supervise functional maps, pointwise maps, and filter functions simultaneously, where the filter functions are derived from the orthonormal Jacobi basis, and the coefficients of the basis are learnable parameters. Finally, we develop an effective refinement strategy to improve the final pointwise map, which incorporates our constraint and learned filter functions, leading to more robust and accurate correspondences during the inference process. Extensive experimental results on various datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods, especially in challenging settings like datasets with non-isometric deformation and inconsistent topology.
♻ ☆ Cortex: Compact Behavior Cloning for Quake with Frozen Visual Features
We study how far a deliberately simple behavioral-cloning policy can progress in a visually rich first-person game before adding reinforcement learning or explicit memory. Cortex is a compact Quake policy with 10.98 million trainable parameters in a six-layer transformer over a frozen DINOv3 encoder. It is trained on the Quake subset of the public Pixels2Play corpus: 6,849 recordings (about 474.7 hours), represented as 17.09 million cached decision frames with keyboard and mouse actions. One sampled training epoch uses 517,048 four-frame windows and takes 3.3 minutes of policy-head optimization on one RTX 5080, excluding one-time feature extraction. We evaluate two independent batches of 20 stochastic, 120-second episodes on Quake E1M1. Cortex does not complete the level, but every episode reaches the opening door, button room, and gate descent; 19 of 20 episodes in each batch record at least one kill. Under the same time-controlled harness, released P2P-150M and NitroGen checkpoints remain shallower in five matched-duration episodes each. These comparisons are limited by small reference samples and different native interfaces. Ablations show that denser visual tokens improve combat and survival, while longer optimization and naive action history improve offline metrics without consistently improving play. The remaining failures are consistent with covariate shift and motivate targeted corrective data. We release the policy implementation, checkpoint, and a representative rollout.
comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, 9 tables
♻ ☆ A Deployment-Friendly Foundational Framework for Efficient Computational Pathology
Yu Cai, Cheng Jin, Zhengyu Zhang, Jiabo Ma, Fengtao Zhou, Yingxue Xu, Zhengrui Guo, Yihui Wang, Zhengyu Zhang, Ling Liang, Yonghao Tan, Pingcheng Dong, Du Cai, On Ki Tang, Chenglong Zhao, Zhijian Cen, Ying Tan, Xi Wang, Can Yang, Yali Xu, Jing Cui, Zhenhui Li, Ronald Cheong Kin Chan, Yueping Liu, Feng Gao, Xiuming Zhang, Li Liang, Hao Chen, Kwang-Ting Cheng
Pathology foundation models (PFMs) generalize well across computational pathology tasks but remain costly for gigapixel whole-slide image analysis. Here, we present LitePath, a deployment-friendly framework that addresses model over-parameterization and patch-level redundancy. LitePath combines LiteFM, a compact model distilled from Virchow2, H-Optimus-1 and UNI2 using 190 million patches, with the Adaptive Patch Selector for task-specific patch selection. Compared with Virchow2, LitePath uses 28x fewer parameters and 403.5x fewer FLOPs. On an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super, it processes 208 slides per hour, 104.5x faster than Virchow2, and consumes 0.36 kWh per 3,000 slides, 171x less energy than Virchow2 on an RTX 3090 GPU. We evaluated LitePath on 45 multicenter cohorts across four organs and 33 tasks, comprising 37 classification and 8 survival cohorts, including 33 internal, 10 external and 2 prospective cohorts, with 17,837 slides from 9,977 patients disjoint from the pretraining data. Among 22 PFMs, LitePath achieved the best average rank (6.56 vs. 6.58 for Virchow2), retained 99.71% of Virchow2's Macro-AUC across classification cohorts, and improved mean C-index by 2.14 percentage points across survival cohorts (71.91% vs. 69.77%). We further introduce the Deployability Score (D-Score), a weighted geometric mean of normalized task performance and FLOPs. LitePath achieved the highest D-Score (0.8455), outperforming H0-mini (0.7723) and Virchow2 (0.7297). In a randomized paired crossover study of four pathologists and 120 cases, LitePath increased diagnostic accuracy by 4.1-15.8 percentage points and reduced diagnostic time by 10.9-14.2%. These results demonstrate rapid, cost-effective and energy-efficient pathology image analysis on accessible hardware while maintaining competitive performance.
♻ ☆ What is the Right Embedding Space for Contrastive Learning in REC?
Referring Expression Counting (REC) requires distinguishing visually similar objects described by fine-grained text cues. Existing methods tackle this via image-text contrastive learning of visual features which aims to distinguish visual features corresponding to positive and negative referring expressions. However, this strategy relies heavily on accurate image-text alignment and is constrained by the limited number of available negative expressions. We argue that these limitations can be avoided by performing contrastive learning entirely in the visual embedding space. To this end, we introduce C-REX, a simple but effective supervised contrastive learning framework that learns fine-grained visual representations by contrasting visual tokens within the same image. By shifting the negative samples from incorrect Referring Expressions to visual tokens from the image, C-REX vastly increases the number of potential negatives, providing richer and more stable supervision. This design leads to stronger fine-grained visual discrimination and better generalization across complex open-world counting settings. C-REX serves as a plug-in module that can be seamlessly applied to any existing REC model without architectural changes. We apply it in three different REC architectures and achieve state-of-the-art results improving by up to 28% in MAE and 24.5% in RMSE. Moreover, we show that our framework is versatile and general, and can be applied to other counting tasks like class-agnostic counting, improving the performance of existing models.
comment: 15 pages, 4 figures
♻ ☆ MiniWorld: Democratizing the Training of Video World Models from Scratch
Video world models predict future observations conditioned on historical observations and control signals, enabling long-horizon generation through autoregressive state transitions. Unlike conventional video generation models that primarily capture visual appearance and motion, video world models learn the underlying dynamics governing environment evolution under agent actions, providing a foundation for embodied AI and interactive simulation. Recent progress has largely relied on adapting pretrained video generation models through post-training or distillation. Although effective, these approaches often require complex training pipelines, substantial computational resources, and suffer from the mismatch between bidirectional pretraining and causal streaming inference. Recent studies have shown that training autoregressive video world models from scratch is feasible and scalable. However, the community still lacks a lightweight, transparent, and fully reproducible baseline trainable end-to-end with modest computational resources. We present MiniWorld, a reproducible framework for training streaming video world models from scratch. MiniWorld employs a block-causal Video Diffusion Transformer trained with Flow Matching in the latent space of a pretrained Video VAE. Building on Diffusion Forcing, it adopts a chunk-wise non-decreasing noise schedule and two-stage continued training to improve temporal modeling and stability. During inference, MiniWorld combines a rolling KV cache with pipelined asynchronous denoising for efficient streaming generation under bounded computation. The entire model can be trained within several days on a single 8-GPU server. By releasing the training and inference codebase and pretrained checkpoints, we hope MiniWorld will facilitate future research on video world modeling.
comment: 19 pages
♻ ☆ IDraw: Artist Verification from Digital Drawing Images
As digital drawings are increasingly shared online, reliable authorship verification has become important for protecting artists and resolving disputes. Yet when authorship is questioned, verification may have to rely only on the disputed drawing and reference drawings known to be created by the claimed artist. This setting is challenging for two reasons. First, artist-specific drawing behavior, such as pen pressure and movement speed, is informative but is not available from a completed drawing. Second, similarities in the depicted object or scene can obscure similarities arising from the artist. We propose IDraw, a framework that learns from drawings paired with tablet-pen sensor signals collected from separate training artists. This allows IDraw to infer drawing behavior from completed images during a later authorship dispute, without requiring sensor data from the artist being verified. IDraw also reduces the influence of drawing content by identifying information shared by drawings of the same object across different artists and suppressing it before comparing drawings. To support this approach, we construct the first multimodal dataset for digital drawing authorship verification, containing 1,110 drawings from 37 artists and 14 types of tablet-pen sensor signals. Evaluated on previously unseen artists across nine image-encoder backbones, IDraw consistently outperforms standard image-based verification and reduces verification error by up to 40%. These results demonstrate that inferring drawing behavior from completed images and suppressing drawing content improve digital drawing authorship verification.
♻ ☆ StereoVGGT: A Training-Free Visual Geometry Transformer for Stereo Vision
Driven by the advancement of 3D devices, stereo vision tasks including stereo matching and stereo conversion have emerged as a critical research frontier. Contemporary stereo vision backbones typically rely on either Monocular Depth Estimation models or general-purpose Pre-trained Vision Models. Crucially, these models are predominantly pretrained without explicit supervision of camera poses. Given that such geometric knowledge is indispensable for stereo vision, the absence of explicit spatial constraints constitutes a significant performance bottleneck for existing architectures. Recognizing that the Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) operates as a foundation model pre-trained on extensive 3D priors, including camera poses, we investigate its potential as a robust backbone for stereo vision tasks. Nevertheless, empirical results indicate that its direct application to stereo vision yields suboptimal performance. We observe that VGGT suffers from a more significant degradation of geometric details during feature extraction. Such characteristics conflict with the requirements of binocular stereo vision, thereby constraining its efficacy for relative tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose StereoVGGT, a feature backbone specifically tailored for stereo vision. By leveraging the frozen VGGT and introducing a training-free feature adjustment pipeline, we mitigate geometric degradation and harness the latent camera calibration knowledge embedded within the model. StereoVGGT-based stereo matching network achieved the $1^{st}$ rank among all published methods on the KITTI benchmark, validating that StereoVGGT serves as a highly effective backbone for stereo vision.
♻ ☆ TransVLM: A Vision-Language Framework and Benchmark for Detecting Any Shot Transitions ECCV 2026
Traditional Shot Boundary Detection (SBD) inherently struggles with complex transitions by formulating the task around isolated cut points, frequently yielding corrupted video shots. We address this fundamental limitation by formalizing the Shot Transition Detection (STD) task. Rather than searching for ambiguous points, STD explicitly detects the continuous temporal segments of transitions. To tackle this, we propose TransVLM, a Vision-Language Model (VLM) framework for STD. Unlike regular VLMs that predominantly rely on spatial semantics and struggle with fine-grained inter-shot dynamics, our method explicitly injects optical flow as a critical motion prior at the input stage. Through a simple yet effective feature-fusion strategy, TransVLM directly processes concatenated color and motion representations, significantly enhancing its temporal awareness without incurring any additional visual token overhead on the language backbone. To overcome the severe class imbalance in public data, we design a scalable data engine to synthesize diverse transition videos for robust training, alongside a comprehensive benchmark for STD. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TransVLM achieves superior overall performance, outperforming traditional heuristic methods, specialized spatiotemporal networks, and top-tier VLMs. For more related research, please visit HeyGen Research (https://www.heygen.com/research) and HeyGen Avatar-V (https://www.heygen.com/research/avatar-v-model). Project page: https://chence17.github.io/TransVLM/
comment: v2: Corrected an inaccurate statement in the abstract regarding production deployment. Accepted by ECCV 2026. For more related research, please visit HeyGen Research (https://www.heygen.com/research) and HeyGen Avatar-V (https://www.heygen.com/research/avatar-v-model). Project page: https://chence17.github.io/TransVLM/
♻ ☆ Motion Beyond Morphology: Bootstrapping Cross-Category Motion Transfer from Abstract Motion Representations
Zhixue Fang, Zhimin Zhang, Bi'an Du, Zijie Meng, Yan Zhou, Wei Hu, Guoxin Zhang, Pengfei Wan, Kun Gai
Video motion transfer aims to animate a target object using dynamics from a reference video. Existing formulations largely rely on fixed structural correspondence, which becomes ill-defined when reference and target objects differ substantially in morphology, articulation, or deformation mechanisms. We introduce Motion Beyond Morphology, a perspective that seeks to transfer motion beyond fixed structural correspondence, by preserving dynamics that remain meaningful across different target morphologies. To realize this, we propose a two-stage framework. Stage~I learns complementary multi-granularity abstract motion views and uses them to bootstrap cross-category video pairs that preserve transferable dynamics across diverse morphologies. Stage~II internalizes this supervision into direct reference-video-conditioned generation, removing the need for explicit motion extraction at inference. We further introduce OpenVMT-Dataset and OpenVMT-Bench for training and evaluating image- and text-conditioned motion transfer across Same, Near, and Far category gaps. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art motion fidelity and target preservation. Project page: https://miniz233.github.io/MotionBeyondMorphology/
♻ ☆ MoECa: Aligning Feature Reuse with Expert Decomposition in Diffusion Transformers ACM MM'2026
Diffusion Transformers with Mixture-of-Experts (DiT-MoE) improve model capacity under sparse activation, but diffusion inference is still bottlenecked by redundant computation across timesteps. Existing caching methods mainly operate at the token level, which becomes suboptimal in DiT-MoE because each token update is internally decomposed into multiple routed expert branches. Our analysis shows that cross-timestep redundancy in DiT-MoE is better characterized at the expert-branch level than at the whole-token level. Based on this observation, we propose MoECa, a fine-grained caching framework that performs branch-level feature reuse across timesteps. MoECa further introduces expert-aware adaptive control and synchronized cache updates across MoE and attention paths to maintain stable intermediate states. Experiments on multiple DiT-MoE models show a favorable speed--quality trade-off, with up to 2.93$\times$ speedups while preserving generation quality.
comment: Will appear in ACM MM'2026
♻ ☆ VLC Fusion: Vision-Language Conditioned Sensor Fusion for Robust Object Detection ECML
Aditya Taparia, Noel Ngu, Mario Leiva, Joshua Shay Kricheli, John Corcoran, Nathaniel D. Bastian, Gerardo Simari, Paulo Shakarian, Ransalu Senanayake
Although fusing multiple sensor modalities can enhance object detection performance, existing fusion approaches often overlook subtle variations in environmental conditions and sensor inputs. As a result, they struggle to adaptively weight each modality under such variations. To address this challenge, we introduce Vision-Language Conditioned Fusion (VLC Fusion), a novel fusion framework that leverages a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to condition the fusion process on nuanced environmental cues. By capturing high-level environmental context such as darkness, rain, and camera blurring, the VLM guides the model to dynamically adjust modality weights based on the current scene, ensuring robustness against environmental shifts. We evaluate VLC Fusion on real-world autonomous driving and military target detection datasets that include image, LIDAR, and mid-wave infrared modalities. Our experiments show that VLC Fusion consistently outperforms conventional fusion baselines, achieving improved detection accuracy in both seen and unseen scenarios.
comment: 27 pages, 20 figures, Accepted for presentation at ECML PKDD 2026, Shortlisted for the Best Research Track Student Paper Award
♻ ☆ InfiniSplat: Implicit Gaussian Decoding for Large-Baseline Monocular View Synthesis SIGGRAPH
Jiawei Wang, Hao Yu, Yongzhen Hu, Xinyi Yang, Tao Ni, Xin Zhan, Junbo Chen, Xiaowei Zhou, Ruizhen Hu, Sida Peng
Single-image feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) aims to directly generate a renderable 3D scene representation from one input image, avoiding the cost of multi-view capture and per-scene optimization. However, existing methods are often constrained by a pixel-aligned representation, where Gaussians are predicted from fixed image-grid locations. Such pixel-aligned primitives can produce promising nearby-view renderings, but they remain weakly coupled to underlying scene surfaces and struggle to preserve coherent structures under large viewpoint shifts. We present InfiniSplat, a feed-forward single-image 3DGS framework that moves from a pixel-aligned representation toward a surface-aligned representation. InfiniSplat constructs this representation by first using geometry-guided sampling to place 2D supports according to depth-induced local surface structure, and then applying a query-conditioned implicit decoder to predict Gaussian attributes from the image features queried at these supports. By grounding support locations in geometry while decoupling Gaussian prediction from fixed pixel centers, InfiniSplat produces Gaussian layouts that better follow scene surfaces and reduce scattered primitives caused by grid discretization. Across multiple cross-dataset NVS evaluations, InfiniSplat achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with single-image feed-forward baselines, and demonstrates zero-shot generalization from Hypersim indoor synthetic training to complex open-world scenes. Project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/InfiniSplat.
comment: Accepted to SIGGRAPH Asia 2026 (Journal Track). Code: https://github.com/zju3dv/InfiniSplat
♻ ☆ From Forest to Future Capital: Tracking Land Cover Change in Ibu Kota Nusantara (IKN) from 2021 to 2026 with PlanetScope Imagery
Clarissa Rui Min Ong, Elizabeth Tee Inn Loo, Kenneth Woon Hao Soh, William Rachmadi, Qiming Zheng, Hao Li
Indonesia's relocation of its political and administrative capital from Jakarta to Ibu Kota Nusantara (IKN) has been framed around a Forest City vision, yet rapid construction within the Core Government Area (KIPP) raises concerns over land conversion, vegetation loss, and carbon stock decline. This study applies remote sensing techniques to systematically assess land use and vegetation cover change in KIPP from 2021 to 2026 using PlanetScope SuperDove satellite imagery. Cloud-free mosaics were prepared and analysed through spectral indices, including the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalised Difference Red Edge (NDRE), and Normalised Difference Water Index (NDWI), alongside supervised land use and land cover (LULC) classification using a Support Vector Machine algorithm. Results show substantial environmental transformation, with mean NDVI declined by 17.1%, total carbon stock decreased by 0.28%, developed land expanded by 672%, and total vegetation declined by 18.1%. Vegetation loss was most extensive between 2023 and 2024, although a temporary recovery in NDVI and carbon stock occurred from 2024 to 2025 as active clearing slowed and development shifted towards already-cleared land. Overall, the findings demonstrate that remote sensing provides an effective approach for monitoring the environmental impacts of large-scale urban development, while highlighting the need for higher-resolution, hyperspectral, and SAR-based methods to improve detection of construction stages and plantation-related land cover changes.
♻ ☆ PhyCheck: Fine-Grained Evidence-Grounded Dataset for Physical Law Understanding in Video-LLMs
Embodied intelligence and world models require video understanding systems to go beyond recognizing objects and actions and develop an understanding of physical regularities. However, despite their strong performance on general video understanding tasks, current video-language models still struggle to reliably determine whether an observed event conforms to specific physical laws. Existing benchmarks primarily assess the physical quality of generated videos, providing limited support for systematically evaluating and improving the physical-law understanding of Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs). To address this gap, we introduce PhyCheck, a video question answering dataset organized at two complementary levels of granularity. The coarse-grained subset asks models to determine whether the phenomenon shown in a video conforms to or violates physical laws, while the fine-grained subset further examines whether models can capture physical details responsible for the violation or compliance. We use these subsets as structured supervision to improve physical understanding. In addition, the dataset contains a diagnostic subset with external causal context that reveal hidden factors affecting physical plausibility, assessing whether models can recalibrate their judgments accordingly. Experiments with Fine-tune Qwen2.5-VL show that training with the proposed data substantially improves the understanding of physical-consistency, while evaluations in the diagnostic subset reveal that current models still have difficulty incorporating additional causal conditions into their decisions. These findings highlight the gap between recognizing surface-level inconsistencies and understanding underlying physical mechanisms, and provide a foundation for evaluating and improving physical understanding in Video-LLMs.
comment: 15pages, 4 figures, 4 tables
♻ ☆ RSVideo: Are Your Vision-Language Models Ready for Remote Sensing Videos?
Remote-sensing videos enable real-time observation of changes in target attributes, short-term activities, and scene evolution. They record motion, actions, interactions, and scene changes that cannot be captured by isolated images. Existing models primarily target single images or discrete temporal observations spanning a long time range. However, a unified evaluation setting for assessing vision-language models on continuous remote-sensing video understanding remains lacking. We introduce RSVideo-10K, a remote-sensing video dataset comprising 10,773 instances, 1.47 million frames, and 17.02 hours of footage, containing both unmanned aerial vehicles and satellite platforms. Its fixed evaluation benchmark, RSVideo-Bench, contains 2,731 test instances and evaluates two complementary aspects of remote-sensing video understanding: L1 Perception and L2 Reasoning, spanning seven capability groups and 17 tasks. Evaluations show that current vision-language models still struggle to recover small local evidence, track short-lived states, and use scene-constrained spatial relations. Based on this analysis, we further propose RSVideo, a reinforcement learning framework for small-target spatiotemporal focusing that selects question-relevant regions across frames and suppresses redundant background tokens. RSVideo achieves a maximum absolute improvement of 9.01% with InternVL3.5-14B and attains the highest accuracy of 40.63% with Qwen3.6-27B across 26 open-source vision-language backbones. Codes will be available at https://github.com/HongjieZhou0329/RSVideo.
♻ ☆ MedCRP-CL: Continual Medical Image Segmentation via Bayesian Nonparametric Semantic Modality Discovery ICML 2026
Medical image segmentation faces a fundamental challenge in continual learning: data arrives sequentially from heterogeneous sources, yet effective continual learning requires discovering which tasks share sufficient structure to benefit from joint learning. Existing methods either apply uniform constraints across all tasks, causing catastrophic forgetting when tasks conflict, or require predefined task groupings that cannot anticipate future task diversity. We introduce MedCRP-CL, a framework that performs online task structure discovery and structure-aware continual learning. Leveraging the Chinese Restaurant Process (CRP), our method dynamically infers task groupings from clinical text prompts as tasks arrive, without requiring predefined cluster counts or access to future tasks. We term these discovered groupings semantic modalities, as they capture finer-grained structure than physical imaging modalities by integrating anatomical region and pathological context. Guided by this discovered structure, we maintain semantic modality-specific LoRA adapters regularized by intra-modality EWC, ensuring parameter isolation across dissimilar task groups while facilitating knowledge transfer within similar ones. The framework is also replay-free, storing only aggregate statistics rather than raw patient data. Experiments on 16 medical segmentation tasks across four imaging modalities demonstrate that MedCRP-CL achieves 73.3% Dice score with only 4.1% forgetting, outperforming the best baseline by 8.0% while requiring 6$\times$ fewer parameters. Code is available at https://github.com/zygao930/MedCRP-CL.
comment: Accepted to ICML 2026
♻ ☆ Externally Validated Breast Ultrasound Segmentation via Multi-task Learning with BI-RADS-Consistent Morphological Priors
External validation of breast ultrasound segmentation models remains limited because internal train--test splits do not capture domain shifts across imaging systems, acquisition protocols, and patient populations. We introduce a novel multi-task framework for breast ultrasound segmentation and malignancy classification. Its central methodological advance is a differentiable morphology-to-malignancy bridge: lesion area, boundary roughness, compactness, and texture are computed from the predicted soft segmentation mask, aggregated with learned weights into a morphology-based malignancy score, and constrained to agree with the image-level classifier. To our knowledge, this is the first breast ultrasound framework to use BI-RADS-inspired morphology derived from its own soft segmentation output as an end-to-end consistency target for malignancy classification. It is also the first 2D B-mode multi-task study to report every directed external transfer among four independent datasets: training on each dataset and testing on the other three yields 12 source--target pairs, assessed with single models and five-fold ensembles. In matched comparisons across all pairs, the proposed single-model configuration outperforms dedicated single-task baselines in segmentation (DC: 0.764 vs. 0.740) and malignancy classification (AUC: 0.818 vs. 0.791). The ensemble achieves a mean external DC of 0.786 and is competitive with SAM-based segmentation methods using an EfficientNet-B7 encoder while also predicting malignancy. The learned morphology weights retain the same ordering across all four datasets, with boundary roughness receiving the greatest weight. These results establish the first complete four-dataset directed benchmark for joint 2D breast ultrasound segmentation and malignancy classification and demonstrate that clinically grounded morphological consistency improves both tasks under domain shift.
♻ ☆ Detail Continuation over a Trustworthy Coarse Scale for Autoregressive Super-Resolution
Hallucination remains a persistent challenge in generative super-resolution (GSR), where reconstructed results may contain visually plausible yet weakly supported content, structural deviations, or unnatural textures with respect to the low-resolution (LR) input. Existing GSR methods have extensively explored the trade-off between perceptual realism and reconstruction fidelity, but the division between preserving reliable coarse-scale information and restoring more uncertain fine details is often handled implicitly within the overall restoration process. Visual autoregressive (VAR) modeling provides a natural opportunity to revisit this issue, as its coarse-to-fine next-scale prediction offers an explicit scale-wise generation interface. However, existing VAR-based SR methods still inherit the original full 1-to-$N$ autoregressive generation path, even though, for super-resolution, coarse-scale information in LR is often relatively more reliable, while long autoregressive chains may accumulate prediction errors. Motivated by these observations, we propose \textbf{K2N}, which reformulates VAR-based SR from full-path generation into a $k$-to-$N$ detail continuation process. Specifically, early coarse-scale states are established directly from LR, while only the remaining finer scales are restored autoregressively. Experimental results show that K2N remains competitive with the VARSR baseline on standard SR metrics, while exhibiting clearer advantages on hallucination-focused evaluation. These findings suggest that explicitly rethinking the generation path in a scale-wise manner can be a promising direction for improving the reliability of generative super-resolution. Our code will be released soon at https://github.com/BRL-SYSU/K2NSR.
comment: Accepted by ACM Multimedia 2026
♻ ☆ OsteoFlow: Lyapunov-Guided Flow Distillation for Predicting Bone Remodeling after Mandibular Reconstruction
Hamidreza Aftabi, Faye Yu, Brooke Switzer, Zachary Fishman, Eitan Prisman, Antony Hodgson, Cari Whyne, Sidney Fels, Michael Hardisty
Predicting long-term bone remodeling after mandibular reconstruction would be of great clinical benefit, yet standard generative models struggle to maintain trajectory-level consistency and anatomical fidelity over long horizons, particularly in low-data regimes. We introduce OsteoFlow, a flow-based framework predicting Year-1 post-operative CT scans from Day-5 scans. Our core contribution is Lyapunov-guided trajectory distillation: Unlike one-step distillation, our method distills a continuous trajectory over transport time from a registration-derived stationary velocity field teacher. Combined with a resection-aware image loss, this enforces geometric correspondence without sacrificing generative capacity. Evaluated on 344 paired regions of interest, OsteoFlow significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing mean absolute error in the surgical resection zone by ~20%. This highlights the promise of trajectory distillation for long-term prediction in low-data clinical settings. Code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/hamidreza-aftabi/OsteoFlow.
♻ ☆ CLIP4VI-ReID: Learning Modality-shared Representations via CLIP Semantic Bridge for Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification IEEE
This paper proposes a novel CLIP-driven modality-shared representation learning network named CLIP4VI-ReID for VI-ReID task, which consists of Text Semantic Generation (TSG), Infrared Feature Embedding (IFE), and High-level Semantic Alignment (HSA). Specifically, considering the huge gap in the physical characteristics between natural images and infrared images, the TSG is designed to generate text semantics only for visible images, thereby enabling preliminary visible-text modality alignment. Then, the IFE is proposed to rectify the feature embeddings of infrared images using the generated text semantics. This process injects id-related semantics into the shared image encoder, enhancing its adaptability to the infrared modality. Besides, with text serving as a bridge, it enables indirect visible-infrared modality alignment. Finally, the HSA is established to refine the high-level semantic alignment. This process ensures that the fine-tuned text semantics only contain id-related information, thereby achieving more accurate cross-modal alignment and enhancing the discriminability of the learned modal-shared representations. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CLIP4VI-ReID achieves superior performance than other state-of-the-art methods on some widely used VI-ReID datasets.
comment: This article has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science
♻ ☆ JigShape: Evaluating Visual-Geometric Reasoning in VLMs through Jigsaw Puzzles
Shawn Li, Wei Yang, Jike Zhong, Jiate Li, Jiawei Yang, You Qin, Ryan Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt, Roger Zimmermann, Yue Wang, Zhengzhong Tu, Vicente Ordonez, Mohit Bansal, Yue Zhao
Jigsaw puzzle solving requires jointly reasoning about visual content and geometric constraints, yet existing benchmarks use rectangular cuts that create ambiguous ground truth in texture-repeated regions. We introduce \textit{\ours{}}, a benchmark with tab-and-blank interlocking pieces where geometric constraints provide strong local compatibility requirements that, combined with visual content, yield unambiguous ground truth. Across 95K instances at four grid densities (4$\times$4 to 16$\times$16), we find that \textbf{zero-shot VLMs largely lack geometric reasoning}: only one of five frontier models (GPT-5.5) exceeds random baseline on 4$\times$4 puzzles, while all others perform at chance level. While supervised fine-tuning achieves $>$97\% on 4$\times$4, \textbf{all models collapse on larger grids}: GPT-5.5 drops from 70\% to near-random on 8$\times$8, and even fine-tuned models fall below 5\% on 12$\times$12. This ``scaling cliff'' suggests current architectures cannot maintain consistent constraint satisfaction as the number of pieces increases. \ours{} establishes scalable geometric reasoning as an open challenge for vision-language models.
♻ ☆ LoViF 2026 Challenge on Human-oriented Semantic Image Quality Assessment: Methods and Results CVPR2026
Xin Li, Daoli Xu, Wei Luo, Guoqiang Xiang, Haoran Li, Chengyu Zhuang, Zhibo Chen, Jian Guan, Weiping Li, Weixia Zhang, Wei Sun, Zhihua Wang, Dandan Zhu, Chengguang Zhu, Ayush Gupta, Rachit Agarwal, Shouvik Das, Biplab Ch Das, Amartya Ghosh, Kanglong Fan, Wen Wen, Shuyan Zhai, Tianwu Zhi, Aoxiang Zhang, Jianzhao Liu, Yabin Zhang, Jiajun Wang, Yipeng Sun, Kaiwei Lian, Banghao Yin
This paper reviews the LoViF 2026 Challenge on Human-oriented Semantic Image Quality Assessment. This challenge aims to raise a new direction, i.e., how to evaluate the loss of semantic information from the human perspective, intending to promote the development of some new directions, like semantic coding, processing, and semantic-oriented optimization, etc. Unlike existing datasets of quality assessment, we form a dataset of human-oriented semantic quality assessment, termed the SeIQA dataset. This dataset is divided into three parts for this competition: (i) training data: 510 pairs of degraded images and their corresponding ground truth references; (ii) validation data: 80 pairs of degraded images and their corresponding ground-truth references; (iii) testing data: 160 pairs of degraded images and their corresponding ground-truth references. The primary objective of this challenge is to establish a new and powerful benchmark for human-oriented semantic image quality assessment. There are a total of 58 teams registered in this competition, and 6 teams submitted valid solutions and fact sheets for the final testing phase. These submissions achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the SeIQA dataset.
comment: Accepted by CVPR2026 Workshop; LoViF Challenge
♻ ☆ MSTAR: Multi-Scale Backbone Architecture Search for Timeseries Classification
Most of the previous approaches to Time Series Classification (TSC) highlight the significance of receptive fields and frequencies while overlooking the time resolution. Hence, unavoidably suffered from scalability issues as they integrated an extensive range of receptive fields into classification models. Other methods, while having a better adaptation for large datasets, require manual design and yet not being able to reach the optimal architecture due to the uniqueness of each dataset. We overcome these challenges by proposing a novel multi-scale search space and a framework for Neural architecture search (NAS), which addresses both the problem of frequency and time resolution, discovering the suitable scale for a specific dataset. We further show that our model can serve as a backbone to employ a powerful Transformer module with both untrained and pre-trained weights. Our search space reaches the state-of-the-art performance on four datasets on four different domains while introducing more than ten highly fine-tuned models for each data.
comment: Withdraw due to the authors do not support the work
♻ ☆ HERMES: A Hybrid Ensemble for Head-and-Neck Tumor Segmentation, TN Staging, and Recurrence-Free Survival on PET/CT
We present HERMES (Hybrid Ensemble for Radiotherapy-target segmentation, Malignancy staging, and Event-free Survival), a single containerized algorithm for the three HECKTOR 2026 subtasks: segmentation of the primary tumor (GTVp) and pathological lymph nodes (GTVn), radiological T/N staging, and recurrence-free survival (RFS), computed from a paired FDG-PET/CT scan and an electronic health record. A 10-fold ensemble of STU-Net Small networks produces the segmentation; the predicted mask then drives two downstream tasks. Rather than pass a generic radiomics vector to the staging models, we derive from the predicted masks a compact set of geometry features aligned with the size and number axes of AJCC/UICC 7th-edition radiological N/T staging. On internal cross-validation these features raise N-stage balanced accuracy from 0.691 to 0.720 (+0.030), our largest single design gain, at lower feature dimensionality. For prognosis we combine complementary deep and clinical risk experts in an equal-weight ensemble, and train one deep expert with a concordance-tracking survival loss of our own, whose value approximates the concordance index during training. Every component was selected on honest out-of-fold predictions under a regularization-oriented protocol, with no tuning on the public validation set, and deployed as two decorrelated submissions. On the HECKTOR 2026 validation leaderboard, HERMES achieved a weighted score of 0.6454 (Mean Dice 0.641, T balanced accuracy 0.580, N balanced accuracy 0.642, RFS C-index 0.679) and qualified for the testing phase. Team: AMC_HNC.
comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, conference