Authors: Jie Zhu, Yiyang Su, Minchul Kim, Anil Jain, Xiaoming Liu
Abstract: Whole-body biometric recognition is a challenging multimodal task that integrates various biometric modalities, including face, gait, and body. This integration is essential for overcoming the limitations of unimodal systems. Traditionally, whole-body recognition involves deploying different models to process multiple modalities, achieving the final outcome by score-fusion (e.g., weighted averaging of similarity matrices from each model). However, these conventional methods may overlook the variations in score distributions of individual modalities, making it challenging to improve final performance. In this work, we present \textbf{Q}uality-guided \textbf{M}ixture of score-fusion \textbf{E}xperts (QME), a novel framework designed for improving whole-body biometric recognition performance through a learnable score-fusion strategy using a Mixture of Experts (MoE). We introduce a novel pseudo-quality loss for quality estimation with a modality-specific Quality Estimator (QE), and a score triplet loss to improve the metric performance. Extensive experiments on multiple whole-body biometric datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, achieving state-of-the-art results across various metrics compared to baseline methods. Our method is effective for multimodal and multi-model, addressing key challenges such as model misalignment in the similarity score domain and variability in data quality.
Authors: Raiyaan Abdullah, Jared Claypoole, Michael Cogswell, Ajay Divakaran, Yogesh Rawat
Abstract: Action recognition models demonstrate strong generalization, but can they effectively transfer high-level motion concepts across diverse contexts, even within similar distributions? For example, can a model recognize the broad action "punching" when presented with an unseen variation such as "punching person"? To explore this, we introduce a motion transferability framework with three datasets: (1) Syn-TA, a synthetic dataset with 3D object motions; (2) Kinetics400-TA; and (3) Something-Something-v2-TA, both adapted from natural video datasets. We evaluate 13 state-of-the-art models on these benchmarks and observe a significant drop in performance when recognizing high-level actions in novel contexts. Our analysis reveals: 1) Multimodal models struggle more with fine-grained unknown actions than with coarse ones; 2) The bias-free Syn-TA proves as challenging as real-world datasets, with models showing greater performance drops in controlled settings; 3) Larger models improve transferability when spatial cues dominate but struggle with intensive temporal reasoning, while reliance on object and background cues hinders generalization. We further explore how disentangling coarse and fine motions can improve recognition in temporally challenging datasets. We believe this study establishes a crucial benchmark for assessing motion transferability in action recognition. Datasets and relevant code: https://github.com/raiyaan-abdullah/Motion-Transfer.
Authors: Mateo de Mayo, Daniel Cremers, Taih\'u Pire
Abstract: Humanoid robots and mixed reality headsets benefit from the use of head-mounted sensors for tracking. While advancements in visual-inertial odometry (VIO) and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) have produced new and high-quality state-of-the-art tracking systems, we show that these are still unable to gracefully handle many of the challenging settings presented in the head-mounted use cases. Common scenarios like high-intensity motions, dynamic occlusions, long tracking sessions, low-textured areas, adverse lighting conditions, saturation of sensors, to name a few, continue to be covered poorly by existing datasets in the literature. In this way, systems may inadvertently overlook these essential real-world issues. To address this, we present the Monado SLAM dataset, a set of real sequences taken from multiple virtual reality headsets. We release the dataset under a permissive CC BY 4.0 license, to drive advancements in VIO/SLAM research and development.
Authors: Basna Mohammed Salih Hasan, Ramadhan J. Mstafa
Abstract: Gender classification has emerged as a crucial aspect in various fields, including security, human-machine interaction, surveillance, and advertising. Nonetheless, the accuracy of this classification can be influenced by factors such as cosmetics and disguise. Consequently, our study is dedicated to addressing this concern by concentrating on gender classification using color images of the periocular region. The periocular region refers to the area surrounding the eye, including the eyelids, eyebrows, and the region between them. It contains valuable visual cues that can be used to extract key features for gender classification. This paper introduces a sophisticated Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model that utilizes color image databases to evaluate the effectiveness of the periocular region for gender classification. To validate the model's performance, we conducted tests on two eye datasets, namely CVBL and (Female and Male). The recommended architecture achieved an outstanding accuracy of 99% on the previously unused CVBL dataset while attaining a commendable accuracy of 96% with a small number of learnable parameters (7,235,089) on the (Female and Male) dataset. To ascertain the effectiveness of our proposed model for gender classification using the periocular region, we evaluated its performance through an extensive range of metrics and compared it with other state-of-the-art approaches. The results unequivocally demonstrate the efficacy of our model, thereby suggesting its potential for practical application in domains such as security and surveillance.
Authors: Akshat Rakheja, Aarsh Ashdhir, Aryan Bhattacharjee, Vanshika Sharma
Abstract: We introduce World Consistency Score (WCS), a novel unified evaluation metric for generative video models that emphasizes internal world consistency of the generated videos. WCS integrates four interpretable sub-components - object permanence, relation stability, causal compliance, and flicker penalty - each measuring a distinct aspect of temporal and physical coherence in a video. These submetrics are combined via a learned weighted formula to produce a single consistency score that aligns with human judgments. We detail the motivation for WCS in the context of existing video evaluation metrics, formalize each submetric and how it is computed with open-source tools (trackers, action recognizers, CLIP embeddings, optical flow), and describe how the weights of the WCS combination are trained using human preference data. We also outline an experimental validation blueprint: using benchmarks like VBench-2.0, EvalCrafter, and LOVE to test WCS's correlation with human evaluations, performing sensitivity analyses, and comparing WCS against established metrics (FVD, CLIPScore, VBench, FVMD). The proposed WCS offers a comprehensive and interpretable framework for evaluating video generation models on their ability to maintain a coherent "world" over time, addressing gaps left by prior metrics focused only on visual fidelity or prompt alignment.
Authors: Li Mi, Manon Bechaz, Zeming Chen, Antoine Bosselut, Devis Tuia
Abstract: Active Geo-localization (AGL) is the task of localizing a goal, represented in various modalities (e.g., aerial images, ground-level images, or text), within a predefined search area. Current methods approach AGL as a goal-reaching reinforcement learning (RL) problem with a distance-based reward. They localize the goal by implicitly learning to minimize the relative distance from it. However, when distance estimation becomes challenging or when encountering unseen targets and environments, the agent exhibits reduced robustness and generalization ability due to the less reliable exploration strategy learned during training. In this paper, we propose GeoExplorer, an AGL agent that incorporates curiosity-driven exploration through intrinsic rewards. Unlike distance-based rewards, our curiosity-driven reward is goal-agnostic, enabling robust, diverse, and contextually relevant exploration based on effective environment modeling. These capabilities have been proven through extensive experiments across four AGL benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalization ability of GeoExplorer in diverse settings, particularly in localizing unfamiliar targets and environments.
Authors: Bhavya Goyal, Felipe Gutierrez-Barragan, Wei Lin, Andreas Velten, Yin Li, Mohit Gupta
Abstract: LiDAR-based 3D sensors provide point clouds, a canonical 3D representation used in various scene understanding tasks. Modern LiDARs face key challenges in several real-world scenarios, such as long-distance or low-albedo objects, producing sparse or erroneous point clouds. These errors, which are rooted in the noisy raw LiDAR measurements, get propagated to downstream perception models, resulting in potentially severe loss of accuracy. This is because conventional 3D processing pipelines do not retain any uncertainty information from the raw measurements when constructing point clouds. We propose Probabilistic Point Clouds (PPC), a novel 3D scene representation where each point is augmented with a probability attribute that encapsulates the measurement uncertainty (or confidence) in the raw data. We further introduce inference approaches that leverage PPC for robust 3D object detection; these methods are versatile and can be used as computationally lightweight drop-in modules in 3D inference pipelines. We demonstrate, via both simulations and real captures, that PPC-based 3D inference methods outperform several baselines using LiDAR as well as camera-LiDAR fusion models, across challenging indoor and outdoor scenarios involving small, distant, and low-albedo objects, as well as strong ambient light. Our project webpage is at https://bhavyagoyal.github.io/ppc .
Authors: David Restrepo, Ira Ktena, Maria Vakalopoulou, Stergios Christodoulidis, Enzo Ferrante
Abstract: Clinical decision-making relies on the integrated analysis of medical images and the associated clinical reports. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can offer a unified framework for such tasks, they can exhibit strong biases toward one modality, frequently overlooking critical visual cues in favor of textual information. In this work, we introduce Selective Modality Shifting (SMS), a perturbation-based approach to quantify a model's reliance on each modality in binary classification tasks. By systematically swapping images or text between samples with opposing labels, we expose modality-specific biases. We assess six open-source VLMs-four generalist models and two fine-tuned for medical data-on two medical imaging datasets with distinct modalities: MIMIC-CXR (chest X-ray) and FairVLMed (scanning laser ophthalmoscopy). By assessing model performance and the calibration of every model in both unperturbed and perturbed settings, we reveal a marked dependency on text input, which persists despite the presence of complementary visual information. We also perform a qualitative attention-based analysis which further confirms that image content is often overshadowed by text details. Our findings highlight the importance of designing and evaluating multimodal medical models that genuinely integrate visual and textual cues, rather than relying on single-modality signals.
Authors: Eric Mjolsness, Cory B. Scott
Abstract: Graphs, and sequences of growing graphs, can be used to specify the architecture of mathematical models in many fields including machine learning and computational science. Here we define structured graph "lineages" (ordered by level number) that grow in a hierarchical fashion, so that: (1) the number of graph vertices and edges increases exponentially in level number; (2) bipartite graphs connect successive levels within a graph lineage and, as in multigrid methods, can constrain matrices relating successive levels; (3) using prolongation maps within a graph lineage, process-derived distance measures between graphs at successive levels can be defined; (4) a category of "graded graphs" can be defined, and using it low-cost "skeletal" variants of standard algebraic graph operations and type constructors (cross product, box product, disjoint sum, and function types) can be derived for graded graphs and hence hierarchical graph lineages; (5) these skeletal binary operators have similar but not identical algebraic and category-theoretic properties to their standard counterparts; (6) graph lineages and their skeletal product constructors can approach continuum limit objects. Additional space-efficient unary operators on graded graphs are also derived: thickening, which creates a graph lineage of multiscale graphs, and escalation to a graph lineage of search frontiers (useful as a generalization of adaptive grids and in defining "skeletal" functions). The result is an algebraic type theory for graded graphs and (hierarchical) graph lineages. The approach is expected to be well suited to defining hierarchical model architectures - "hierarchitectures" - and local sampling, search, or optimization algorithms on them. We demonstrate such application to deep neural networks (including visual and feature scale spaces) and to multigrid numerical methods.
Authors: Xiangyu Kong, Hengde Zhu, Haoqin Sun, Zhihao Guo, Jiayan Gu, Xinyi Ni, Wei Zhang, Shizhe Liu, Siyang Song
Abstract: Automatic real personality recognition (RPR) aims to evaluate human real personality traits from their expressive behaviours. However, most existing solutions generally act as external observers to infer observers' personality impressions based on target individuals' expressive behaviours, which significantly deviate from their real personalities and consistently lead to inferior recognition performance. Inspired by the association between real personality and human internal cognition underlying the generation of expressive behaviours, we propose a novel RPR approach that efficiently simulates personalised internal cognition from easy-accessible external short audio-visual behaviours expressed by the target individual. The simulated personalised cognition, represented as a set of network weights that enforce the personalised network to reproduce the individual-specific facial reactions, is further encoded as a novel graph containing two-dimensional node and edge feature matrices, with a novel 2D Graph Neural Network (2D-GNN) proposed for inferring real personality traits from it. To simulate real personality-related cognition, an end-to-end strategy is designed to jointly train our cognition simulation, 2D graph construction, and personality recognition modules.
Authors: Shayan Jalilian, Abdul Bais
Abstract: The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated impressive generalization in prompt-based segmentation. Yet, the potential of semantic text prompts remains underexplored compared to traditional spatial prompts like points and boxes. This paper introduces SAM-PTx, a parameter-efficient approach for adapting SAM using frozen CLIP-derived text embeddings as class-level semantic guidance. Specifically, we propose a lightweight adapter design called Parallel-Text that injects text embeddings into SAM's image encoder, enabling semantics-guided segmentation while keeping most of the original architecture frozen. Our adapter modifies only the MLP-parallel branch of each transformer block, preserving the attention pathway for spatial reasoning. Through supervised experiments and ablations on the COD10K dataset as well as low-data subsets of COCO and ADE20K, we show that incorporating fixed text embeddings as input improves segmentation performance over purely spatial prompt baselines. To our knowledge, this is the first work to use text prompts for segmentation on the COD10K dataset. These results suggest that integrating semantic conditioning into SAM's architecture offers a practical and scalable path for efficient adaptation with minimal computational complexity.
Authors: Aymane Abdali, Bartosz Boguslawski, Lucas Drumetz, Vincent Gripon
Abstract: In the domain of Few-Shot Image Classification, operating with as little as one example per class, the presence of image ambiguities stemming from multiple objects or complex backgrounds can significantly deteriorate performance. Our research demonstrates that incorporating additional information about the local positioning of an object within its image markedly enhances classification across established benchmarks. More importantly, we show that a significant fraction of the improvement can be achieved through the use of the Segment Anything Model, requiring only a pixel of the object of interest to be pointed out, or by employing fully unsupervised foreground object extraction methods.
Authors: Chenggang Guo, Hao Xu, XianMing Wan
Abstract: Depth map super-resolution technology aims to improve the spatial resolution of low-resolution depth maps and effectively restore high-frequency detail information. Traditional convolutional neural network has limitations in dealing with long-range dependencies and are unable to fully model the global contextual information in depth maps. Although transformer can model global dependencies, its computational complexity and memory consumption are quadratic, which significantly limits its ability to process high-resolution depth maps. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale fusion U-shaped Mamba (MSF-UM) model, a novel guided depth map super-resolution framework. The core innovation of this model is to integrate Mamba's efficient state-space modeling capabilities into a multi-scale U-shaped fusion structure guided by a color image. The structure combining the residual dense channel attention block and the Mamba state space module is designed, which combines the local feature extraction capability of the convolutional layer with the modeling advantage of the state space model for long-distance dependencies. At the same time, the model adopts a multi-scale cross-modal fusion strategy to make full use of the high-frequency texture information from the color image to guide the super-resolution process of the depth map. Compared with existing mainstream methods, the proposed MSF-UM significantly reduces the number of model parameters while achieving better reconstruction accuracy. Extensive experiments on multiple publicly available datasets validate the effectiveness of the model, especially showing excellent generalization ability in the task of large-scale depth map super-resolution.
Authors: Wentao Sun, Hanqing Xu, Quanyun Wu, Dedong Zhang, Yiping Chen, Lingfei Ma, John S. Zelek, Jonathan Li
Abstract: We introduce PointGauss, a novel point cloud-guided framework for real-time multi-object segmentation in Gaussian Splatting representations. Unlike existing methods that suffer from prolonged initialization and limited multi-view consistency, our approach achieves efficient 3D segmentation by directly parsing Gaussian primitives through a point cloud segmentation-driven pipeline. The key innovation lies in two aspects: (1) a point cloud-based Gaussian primitive decoder that generates 3D instance masks within 1 minute, and (2) a GPU-accelerated 2D mask rendering system that ensures multi-view consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate significant improvements over previous state-of-the-art methods, achieving performance gains of 1.89 to 31.78% in multi-view mIoU, while maintaining superior computational efficiency. To address the limitations of current benchmarks (single-object focus, inconsistent 3D evaluation, small scale, and partial coverage), we present DesktopObjects-360, a novel comprehensive dataset for 3D segmentation in radiance fields, featuring: (1) complex multi-object scenes, (2) globally consistent 2D annotations, (3) large-scale training data (over 27 thousand 2D masks), (4) full 360{\deg} coverage, and (5) 3D evaluation masks.
Authors: Hyundong Jin, Hyung Jin Chang, Eunwoo Kim
Abstract: Continual learning enables pre-trained generative vision-language models (VLMs) to incorporate knowledge from new tasks without retraining data from previous ones. Recent methods update a visual projector to translate visual information for new tasks, connecting pre-trained vision encoders with large language models. However, such adjustments may cause the models to prioritize visual inputs over language instructions, particularly learning tasks with repetitive types of textual instructions. To address the neglect of language instructions, we propose a novel framework that grounds the translation of visual information on instructions for language models. We introduce a mixture of visual projectors, each serving as a specialized visual-to-language translation expert based on the given instruction context to adapt to new tasks. To avoid using experts for irrelevant instruction contexts, we propose an expert recommendation strategy that reuses experts for tasks similar to those previously learned. Additionally, we introduce expert pruning to alleviate interference from the use of experts that cumulatively activated in previous tasks. Extensive experiments on diverse vision-language tasks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing continual learning approaches by generating instruction-following responses.
Authors: Henghui Ding, Song Tang, Shuting He, Chang Liu, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
Abstract: Multimodal referring segmentation aims to segment target objects in visual scenes, such as images, videos, and 3D scenes, based on referring expressions in text or audio format. This task plays a crucial role in practical applications requiring accurate object perception based on user instructions. Over the past decade, it has gained significant attention in the multimodal community, driven by advances in convolutional neural networks, transformers, and large language models, all of which have substantially improved multimodal perception capabilities. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of multimodal referring segmentation. We begin by introducing this field's background, including problem definitions and commonly used datasets. Next, we summarize a unified meta architecture for referring segmentation and review representative methods across three primary visual scenes, including images, videos, and 3D scenes. We further discuss Generalized Referring Expression (GREx) methods to address the challenges of real-world complexity, along with related tasks and practical applications. Extensive performance comparisons on standard benchmarks are also provided. We continually track related works at https://github.com/henghuiding/Awesome-Multimodal-Referring-Segmentation.
URLs: https://github.com/henghuiding/Awesome-Multimodal-Referring-Segmentation.
Authors: Wenyue Chong
Abstract: Semantic correspondence aims to identify semantically meaningful relationships between different images and is a fundamental challenge in computer vision. It forms the foundation for numerous tasks such as 3D reconstruction, object tracking, and image editing. With the progress of large-scale vision models, semantic correspondence has achieved remarkable performance in controlled and high-quality conditions. However, the robustness of semantic correspondence in challenging scenarios is much less investigated. In this work, we establish a novel benchmark for evaluating semantic correspondence in adverse conditions. The benchmark dataset comprises 14 distinct challenging scenarios that reflect commonly encountered imaging issues, including geometric distortion, image blurring, digital artifacts, and environmental occlusion. Through extensive evaluations, we provide several key insights into the robustness of semantic correspondence approaches: (1) All existing methods suffer from noticeable performance drops under adverse conditions; (2) Using large-scale vision models can enhance overall robustness, but fine-tuning on these models leads to a decline in relative robustness; (3) The DINO model outperforms the Stable Diffusion in relative robustness, and their fusion achieves better absolute robustness; Moreover, We evaluate common robustness enhancement strategies for semantic correspondence and find that general data augmentations are ineffective, highlighting the need for task-specific designs. These results are consistent across both our dataset and real-world benchmarks.
Authors: Tran Viet Khoa, Do Hai Son, Mohammad Abu Alsheikh, Yibeltal F Alem, Dinh Thai Hoang
Abstract: Driver drowsiness is one of the main causes of road accidents and is recognized as a leading contributor to traffic-related fatalities. However, detecting drowsiness accurately remains a challenging task, especially in real-world settings where facial data from different individuals is decentralized and highly diverse. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for drowsiness detection that is designed to work effectively with heterogeneous and decentralized data. Our approach develops a new Spatial Self-Attention (SSA) mechanism integrated with a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network to better extract key facial features and improve detection performance. To support federated learning, we employ a Gradient Similarity Comparison (GSC) that selects the most relevant trained models from different operators before aggregation. This improves the accuracy and robustness of the global model while preserving user privacy. We also develop a customized tool that automatically processes video data by extracting frames, detecting and cropping faces, and applying data augmentation techniques such as rotation, flipping, brightness adjustment, and zooming. Experimental results show that our framework achieves a detection accuracy of 89.9% in the federated learning settings, outperforming existing methods under various deployment scenarios. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in handling real-world data variability and highlight its potential for deployment in intelligent transportation systems to enhance road safety through early and reliable drowsiness detection.
Authors: Christian Simon, Masato Ishii, Akio Hayakawa, Zhi Zhong, Shusuke Takahashi, Takashi Shibuya, Yuki Mitsufuji
Abstract: In the recent development of conditional diffusion models still require heavy supervised fine-tuning for performing control on a category of tasks. Training-free conditioning via guidance with off-the-shelf models is a favorable alternative to avoid further fine-tuning on the base model. However, the existing training-free guidance frameworks either have heavy memory requirements or offer sub-optimal control due to rough estimation. These shortcomings limit the applicability to control diffusion models that require intense computation, such as Text-to-Video (T2V) diffusion models. In this work, we propose Taming Inference Time Alignment for Guided Text-to-Video Diffusion Model, so-called TITAN-Guide, which overcomes memory space issues, and provides more optimal control in the guidance process compared to the counterparts. In particular, we develop an efficient method for optimizing diffusion latents without backpropagation from a discriminative guiding model. In particular, we study forward gradient descents for guided diffusion tasks with various options on directional directives. In our experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in efficiently managing memory during latent optimization, while previous methods fall short. Our proposed approach not only minimizes memory requirements but also significantly enhances T2V performance across a range of diffusion guidance benchmarks. Code, models, and demo are available at https://titanguide.github.io.
Authors: Jin Lyu, Liang An, Li Lin, Pujin Cheng, Yebin Liu, Xiaoying Tang
Abstract: In the era of foundation models, achieving a unified understanding of different dynamic objects through a single network has the potential to empower stronger spatial intelligence. Moreover, accurate estimation of animal pose and shape across diverse species is essential for quantitative analysis in biological research. However, this topic remains underexplored due to the limited network capacity of previous methods and the scarcity of comprehensive multi-species datasets. To address these limitations, we introduce AniMer+, an extended version of our scalable AniMer framework. In this paper, we focus on a unified approach for reconstructing mammals (mammalia) and birds (aves). A key innovation of AniMer+ is its high-capacity, family-aware Vision Transformer (ViT) incorporating a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design. Its architecture partitions network layers into taxa-specific components (for mammalia and aves) and taxa-shared components, enabling efficient learning of both distinct and common anatomical features within a single model. To overcome the critical shortage of 3D training data, especially for birds, we introduce a diffusion-based conditional image generation pipeline. This pipeline produces two large-scale synthetic datasets: CtrlAni3D for quadrupeds and CtrlAVES3D for birds. To note, CtrlAVES3D is the first large-scale, 3D-annotated dataset for birds, which is crucial for resolving single-view depth ambiguities. Trained on an aggregated collection of 41.3k mammalian and 12.4k avian images (combining real and synthetic data), our method demonstrates superior performance over existing approaches across a wide range of benchmarks, including the challenging out-of-domain Animal Kingdom dataset. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of both our novel network architecture and the generated synthetic datasets in enhancing real-world application performance.
Authors: Danzhen Fu, Jiagao Hu, Daiguo Zhou, Fei Wang, Zepeng Wang, Wenhua Liao
Abstract: Pedestrian detection models in autonomous driving systems often lack robustness due to insufficient representation of dangerous pedestrian scenarios in training datasets. To address this limitation, we present a novel framework for controllable pedestrian video editing in multi-view driving scenarios by integrating video inpainting and human motion control techniques. Our approach begins by identifying pedestrian regions of interest across multiple camera views, expanding detection bounding boxes with a fixed ratio, and resizing and stitching these regions into a unified canvas while preserving cross-view spatial relationships. A binary mask is then applied to designate the editable area, within which pedestrian editing is guided by pose sequence control conditions. This enables flexible editing functionalities, including pedestrian insertion, replacement, and removal. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves high-quality pedestrian editing with strong visual realism, spatiotemporal coherence, and cross-view consistency. These results establish the proposed method as a robust and versatile solution for multi-view pedestrian video generation, with broad potential for applications in data augmentation and scenario simulation in autonomous driving.
Authors: Chunyan She, Fujun Han, Chengyu Fang, Shukai Duan, Lidan Wang
Abstract: The event camera, benefiting from its high dynamic range and low latency, provides performance gain for low-light image enhancement. Unlike frame-based cameras, it records intensity changes with extremely high temporal resolution, capturing sufficient structure information. Currently, existing event-based methods feed a frame and events directly into a single model without fully exploiting modality-specific advantages, which limits their performance. Therefore, by analyzing the role of each sensing modality, the enhancement pipeline is decoupled into two stages: visibility restoration and structure refinement. In the first stage, we design a visibility restoration network with amplitude-phase entanglement by rethinking the relationship between amplitude and phase components in Fourier space. In the second stage, a fusion strategy with dynamic alignment is proposed to mitigate the spatial mismatch caused by the temporal resolution discrepancy between two sensing modalities, aiming to refine the structure information of the image enhanced by the visibility restoration network. In addition, we utilize spatial-frequency interpolation to simulate negative samples with diverse illumination, noise and artifact degradations, thereby developing a contrastive loss that encourages the model to learn discriminative representations. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models.
Authors: Yufeng Zhong, Zhixiong Zeng, Lei Chen, Longrong Yang, Liming Zheng, Jing Huang, Siqi Yang, Lin Ma
Abstract: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for mathematical formula is essential for the intelligent analysis of scientific literature. However, both task-specific and general vision-language models often struggle to handle the structural diversity, complexity, and real-world variability inherent in mathematical content. In this work, we present DocTron-Formula, a unified framework built upon general vision-language models, thereby eliminating the need for specialized architectures. Furthermore, we introduce CSFormula, a large-scale and challenging dataset that encompasses multidisciplinary and structurally complex formulas at the line, paragraph, and page levels. Through straightforward supervised fine-tuning, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across a variety of styles, scientific domains, and complex layouts. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only surpasses specialized models in terms of accuracy and robustness, but also establishes a new paradigm for the automated understanding of complex scientific documents.
Authors: Suhang Cai, Xiaohao Peng, Chong Wang, Xiaojie Cai, Jiangbo Qian
Abstract: Video anomaly detection (VAD) plays a critical role in public safety applications such as intelligent surveillance. However, the rarity, unpredictability, and high annotation cost of real-world anomalies make it difficult to scale VAD datasets, which limits the performance and generalization ability of existing models. To address this challenge, we propose a generative video-enhanced weakly-supervised video anomaly detection (GV-VAD) framework that leverages text-conditioned video generation models to produce semantically controllable and physically plausible synthetic videos. These virtual videos are used to augment training data at low cost. In addition, a synthetic sample loss scaling strategy is utilized to control the influence of generated synthetic samples for efficient training. The experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on UCF-Crime datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Sumutan/GV-VAD.git.
Authors: Sunghyun Park, Seokeon Choi, Hyoungwoo Park, Sungrack Yun
Abstract: Personalizing text-to-image diffusion models is crucial for adapting the pre-trained models to specific target concepts, enabling diverse image generation. However, fine-tuning with few images introduces an inherent trade-off between aligning with the target distribution (e.g., subject fidelity) and preserving the broad knowledge of the original model (e.g., text editability). Existing sampling guidance methods, such as classifier-free guidance (CFG) and autoguidance (AG), fail to effectively guide the output toward well-balanced space: CFG restricts the adaptation to the target distribution, while AG compromises text alignment. To address these limitations, we propose personalization guidance, a simple yet effective method leveraging an unlearned weak model conditioned on a null text prompt. Moreover, our method dynamically controls the extent of unlearning in a weak model through weight interpolation between pre-trained and fine-tuned models during inference. Unlike existing guidance methods, which depend solely on guidance scales, our method explicitly steers the outputs toward a balanced latent space without additional computational overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed guidance can improve text alignment and target distribution fidelity, integrating seamlessly with various fine-tuning strategies.
Authors: Lilika Makabe, Hiroaki Santo, Fumio Okura, Michael S. Brown, Yasuyuki Matsushita
Abstract: This paper introduces a practical and accurate calibration method for camera spectral sensitivity using a diffraction grating. Accurate calibration of camera spectral sensitivity is crucial for various computer vision tasks, including color correction, illumination estimation, and material analysis. Unlike existing approaches that require specialized narrow-band filters or reference targets with known spectral reflectances, our method only requires an uncalibrated diffraction grating sheet, readily available off-the-shelf. By capturing images of the direct illumination and its diffracted pattern through the grating sheet, our method estimates both the camera spectral sensitivity and the diffraction grating parameters in a closed-form manner. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate that our method outperforms conventional reference target-based methods, underscoring its effectiveness and practicality.
Authors: Angelos Vlachos, Giorgos Filandrianos, Maria Lymperaiou, Nikolaos Spanos, Ilias Mitsouras, Vasileios Karampinis, Athanasios Voulodimos
Abstract: We present a Collaborative Agent-Based Framework for Multi-Image Reasoning. Our approach tackles the challenge of interleaved multimodal reasoning across diverse datasets and task formats by employing a dual-agent system: a language-based PromptEngineer, which generates context-aware, task-specific prompts, and a VisionReasoner, a large vision-language model (LVLM) responsible for final inference. The framework is fully automated, modular, and training-free, enabling generalization across classification, question answering, and free-form generation tasks involving one or multiple input images. We evaluate our method on 18 diverse datasets from the 2025 MIRAGE Challenge (Track A), covering a broad spectrum of visual reasoning tasks including document QA, visual comparison, dialogue-based understanding, and scene-level inference. Our results demonstrate that LVLMs can effectively reason over multiple images when guided by informative prompts. Notably, Claude 3.7 achieves near-ceiling performance on challenging tasks such as TQA (99.13% accuracy), DocVQA (96.87%), and MMCoQA (75.28 ROUGE-L). We also explore how design choices-such as model selection, shot count, and input length-influence the reasoning performance of different LVLMs.
Authors: Yan Gong, Mengjun Chen, Hao Liu, Gao Yongsheng, Lei Yang, Naibang Wang, Ziying Song, Haoqun Ma
Abstract: Multi-object tracking (MOT) enables autonomous vehicles to continuously perceive dynamic objects, supplying essential temporal cues for prediction, behavior understanding, and safe planning. However, conventional tracking-by-detection methods typically rely on static coordinate transformations based on ego-vehicle poses, disregarding ego-vehicle speed-induced variations in observation noise and reference frame changes, which degrades tracking stability and accuracy in dynamic, high-speed scenarios. In this paper, we investigate the critical role of ego-vehicle speed in MOT and propose a Speed-Guided Learnable Kalman Filter (SG-LKF) that dynamically adapts uncertainty modeling to ego-vehicle speed, significantly improving stability and accuracy in highly dynamic scenarios. Central to SG-LKF is MotionScaleNet (MSNet), a decoupled token-mixing and channel-mixing MLP that adaptively predicts key parameters of SG-LKF. To enhance inter-frame association and trajectory continuity, we introduce a self-supervised trajectory consistency loss jointly optimized with semantic and positional constraints. Extensive experiments show that SG-LKF ranks first among all vision-based methods on KITTI 2D MOT with 79.59% HOTA, delivers strong results on KITTI 3D MOT with 82.03% HOTA, and outperforms SimpleTrack by 2.2% AMOTA on nuScenes 3D MOT.
Authors: Zongheng Tang, Yi Liu, Yifan Sun, Yulu Gao, Jinyu Chen, Runsheng Xu, Si Liu
Abstract: Collaborative perception shares information among different agents and helps solving problems that individual agents may face, e.g., occlusions and small sensing range. Prior methods usually separate the multi-agent fusion and multi-time fusion into two consecutive steps. In contrast, this paper proposes an efficient collaborative perception that aggregates the observations from different agents (space) and different times into a unified spatio-temporal space simultanesouly. The unified spatio-temporal space brings two benefits, i.e., efficient feature transmission and superior feature fusion. 1) Efficient feature transmission: each static object yields a single observation in the spatial temporal space, and thus only requires transmission only once (whereas prior methods re-transmit all the object features multiple times). 2) superior feature fusion: merging the multi-agent and multi-time fusion into a unified spatial-temporal aggregation enables a more holistic perspective, thereby enhancing perception performance in challenging scenarios. Consequently, our Collaborative perception with Spatio-temporal Transformer (CoST) gains improvement in both efficiency and accuracy. Notably, CoST is not tied to any specific method and is compatible with a majority of previous methods, enhancing their accuracy while reducing the transmission bandwidth.
Authors: Mokhtar A. Al-Awadhi, Ratnadeep R. Deshmukh
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a machine learning-based method for automatically classifying honey botanical origins. Dataset preparation, feature extraction, and classification are the three main steps of the proposed method. We use a class transformation method in the dataset preparation phase to maximize the separability across classes. The feature extraction phase employs the Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) technique for extracting relevant features and reducing the number of dimensions. In the classification phase, we use Support Vector Machines (SVM) and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) models to classify the extracted features of honey samples into their botanical origins. We evaluate our system using a standard honey hyperspectral imaging (HSI) dataset. Experimental findings demonstrate that the proposed system produces state-of-the-art results on this dataset, achieving the highest classification accuracy of 95.13% for hyperspectral image-based classification and 92.80% for hyperspectral instance-based classification.
Authors: Liang Han, Xu Zhang, Haichuan Song, Kanle Shi, Yu-Shen Liu, Zhizhong Han
Abstract: Surface reconstruction from sparse views aims to reconstruct a 3D shape or scene from few RGB images. The latest methods are either generalization-based or overfitting-based. However, the generalization-based methods do not generalize well on views that were unseen during training, while the reconstruction quality of overfitting-based methods is still limited by the limited geometry clues. To address this issue, we propose SparseRecon, a novel neural implicit reconstruction method for sparse views with volume rendering-based feature consistency and uncertainty-guided depth constraint. Firstly, we introduce a feature consistency loss across views to constrain the neural implicit field. This design alleviates the ambiguity caused by insufficient consistency information of views and ensures completeness and smoothness in the reconstruction results. Secondly, we employ an uncertainty-guided depth constraint to back up the feature consistency loss in areas with occlusion and insignificant features, which recovers geometry details for better reconstruction quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, which can produce high-quality geometry with sparse-view input, especially in the scenarios with small overlapping views. Project page: https://hanl2010.github.io/SparseRecon/.
Authors: Joonmyung Choi, Sanghyeok Lee, Byungoh Ko, Eunseo Kim, Jihyung Kil, Hyunwoo J. Kim
Abstract: Transformers have demonstrated remarkable success across vision, language, and video. Yet, increasing task complexity has led to larger models and more tokens, raising the quadratic cost of self-attention and the overhead of GPU memory access. To reduce the computation cost of self-attention, prior work has proposed token compression techniques that drop redundant or less informative tokens. Meanwhile, fused attention kernels such as FlashAttention have been developed to alleviate memory overhead by avoiding attention map construction and its associated I/O to HBM. This, however, makes it incompatible with most training-free token compression methods, which rely on attention maps to determine token importance. Here, we propose Representation Shift, a training-free, model-agnostic metric that measures the degree of change in each token's representation. This seamlessly integrates token compression with FlashAttention, without attention maps or retraining. Our method further generalizes beyond Transformers to CNNs and state space models. Extensive experiments show that Representation Shift enables effective token compression compatible with FlashAttention, yielding significant speedups of up to 5.5% and 4.4% in video-text retrieval and video QA, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/Representation-Shift.
Authors: Yuji Sato, Yasunori Ishii, Takayoshi Yamashita
Abstract: Video-based long-term action anticipation is crucial for early risk detection in areas such as automated driving and robotics. Conventional approaches extract features from past actions using encoders and predict future events with decoders, which limits performance due to their unidirectional nature. These methods struggle to capture semantically distinct sub-actions within a scene. The proposed method, BiAnt, addresses this limitation by combining forward prediction with backward prediction using a large language model. Experimental results on Ego4D demonstrate that BiAnt improves performance in terms of edit distance compared to baseline methods.
Authors: Kamal Basha S, Athira Nambiar
Abstract: Weld defect detection is crucial for ensuring the safety and reliability of piping systems in the oil and gas industry, especially in challenging marine and offshore environments. Traditional non-destructive testing (NDT) methods often fail to detect subtle or internal defects, leading to potential failures and costly downtime. Furthermore, existing neural network-based approaches for defect classification frequently rely on arbitrarily selected pretrained architectures and lack interpretability, raising safety concerns for deployment. To address these challenges, this paper introduces ``Adapt-WeldNet", an adaptive framework for welding defect detection that systematically evaluates various pre-trained architectures, transfer learning strategies, and adaptive optimizers to identify the best-performing model and hyperparameters, optimizing defect detection and providing actionable insights. Additionally, a novel Defect Detection Interpretability Analysis (DDIA) framework is proposed to enhance system transparency. DDIA employs Explainable AI (XAI) techniques, such as Grad-CAM and LIME, alongside domain-specific evaluations validated by certified ASNT NDE Level II professionals. Incorporating a Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) approach and aligning with the principles of Trustworthy AI, DDIA ensures the reliability, fairness, and accountability of the defect detection system, fostering confidence in automated decisions through expert validation. By improving both performance and interpretability, this work enhances trust, safety, and reliability in welding defect detection systems, supporting critical operations in offshore and marine environments.
Authors: Won June Cho, Hongjun Yoon, Daeky Jeong, Hyeongyeol Lim, Yosep Chong
Abstract: Spatial transcriptomics reveals gene expression patterns within tissue context, enabling precision oncology applications such as treatment response prediction, but its high cost and technical complexity limit clinical adoption. Predicting spatial gene expression (biomarkers) from routine histopathology images offers a practical alternative, yet current vision foundation models (VFMs) in pathology based on Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones perform below clinical standards. Given that VFMs are already trained on millions of diverse whole slide images, we hypothesize that architectural innovations beyond ViTs may better capture the low-frequency, subtle morphological patterns correlating with molecular phenotypes. By demonstrating that state space models initialized with negative real eigenvalues exhibit strong low-frequency bias, we introduce $MV_{Hybrid}$, a hybrid backbone architecture combining state space models (SSMs) with ViT. We compare five other different backbone architectures for pathology VFMs, all pretrained on identical colorectal cancer datasets using the DINOv2 self-supervised learning method. We evaluate all pretrained models using both random split and leave-one-study-out (LOSO) settings of the same biomarker dataset. In LOSO evaluation, $MV_{Hybrid}$ achieves 57% higher correlation than the best-performing ViT and shows 43% smaller performance degradation compared to random split in gene expression prediction, demonstrating superior performance and robustness, respectively. Furthermore, $MV_{Hybrid}$ shows equal or better downstream performance in classification, patch retrieval, and survival prediction tasks compared to that of ViT, showing its promise as a next-generation pathology VFM backbone. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/deepnoid-ai/MVHybrid.
Authors: Guanjie Huang, Danny H. K. Tsang, Shan Yang, Guangzhi Lei, Li Liu
Abstract: Cued Speech (CS) is a visual communication system that combines lip-reading with hand coding to facilitate communication for individuals with hearing impairments. Automatic CS Recognition (ACSR) aims to convert CS hand gestures and lip movements into text via AI-driven methods. Traditionally, the temporal asynchrony between hand and lip movements requires the design of complex modules to facilitate effective multimodal fusion. However, constrained by limited data availability, current methods demonstrate insufficient capacity for adequately training these fusion mechanisms, resulting in suboptimal performance. Recently, multi-agent systems have shown promising capabilities in handling complex tasks with limited data availability. To this end, we propose the first collaborative multi-agent system for ACSR, named Cued-Agent. It integrates four specialized sub-agents: a Multimodal Large Language Model-based Hand Recognition agent that employs keyframe screening and CS expert prompt strategies to decode hand movements, a pretrained Transformer-based Lip Recognition agent that extracts lip features from the input video, a Hand Prompt Decoding agent that dynamically integrates hand prompts with lip features during inference in a training-free manner, and a Self-Correction Phoneme-to-Word agent that enables post-process and end-to-end conversion from phoneme sequences to natural language sentences for the first time through semantic refinement. To support this study, we expand the existing Mandarin CS dataset by collecting data from eight hearing-impaired cuers, establishing a mixed dataset of fourteen subjects. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Cued-Agent performs superbly in both normal and hearing-impaired scenarios compared with state-of-the-art methods. The implementation is available at https://github.com/DennisHgj/Cued-Agent.
Authors: Fei Zhang, Tianfei Zhou, Jiangchao Yao, Ya Zhang, Ivor W. Tsang, Yanfeng Wang
Abstract: Prompt tuning (PT), as an emerging resource-efficient fine-tuning paradigm, has showcased remarkable effectiveness in improving the task-specific transferability of vision-language models. This paper delves into a previously overlooked information asymmetry issue in PT, where the visual modality mostly conveys more context than the object-oriented textual modality. Correspondingly, coarsely aligning these two modalities could result in the biased attention, driving the model to merely focus on the context area. To address this, we propose DAPT, an effective PT framework based on an intuitive decouple-before-align concept. First, we propose to explicitly decouple the visual modality into the foreground and background representation via exploiting coarse-and-fine visual segmenting cues, and then both of these decoupled patterns are aligned with the original foreground texts and the hand-crafted background classes, thereby symmetrically strengthening the modal alignment. To further enhance the visual concentration, we propose a visual pull-push regularization tailored for the foreground-background patterns, directing the original visual representation towards unbiased attention on the region-of-interest object. We demonstrate the power of architecture-free DAPT through few-shot learning, base-to-novel generalization, and data-efficient learning, all of which yield superior performance across prevailing benchmarks. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Ferenas/DAPT.
Authors: Xi Xue, Kunio Suzuki, Nabarun Goswami, Takuya Shintate
Abstract: The rapid advancement of diffusion-based video generation models has led to increasingly realistic synthetic content, presenting new challenges for video forgery detection. Existing methods often struggle to capture fine-grained temporal inconsistencies, particularly in AI-generated videos with high visual fidelity and coherent motion. In this work, we propose a detection framework that leverages spatial-temporal consistency by combining RGB appearance features with optical flow residuals. The model adopts a dual-branch architecture, where one branch analyzes RGB frames to detect appearance-level artifacts, while the other processes flow residuals to reveal subtle motion anomalies caused by imperfect temporal synthesis. By integrating these complementary features, the proposed method effectively detects a wide range of forged videos. Extensive experiments on text-to-video and image-to-video tasks across ten diverse generative models demonstrate the robustness and strong generalization ability of the proposed approach.
Authors: Raiyaan Abdullah, Yogesh Singh Rawat, Shruti Vyas
Abstract: Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled impressive generalization across diverse video understanding tasks under zero-shot settings. However, their capabilities in high-stakes industrial domains-where recognizing both routine operations and safety-critical anomalies is essential-remain largely underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce iSafetyBench, a new video-language benchmark specifically designed to evaluate model performance in industrial environments across both normal and hazardous scenarios. iSafetyBench comprises 1,100 video clips sourced from real-world industrial settings, annotated with open-vocabulary, multi-label action tags spanning 98 routine and 67 hazardous action categories. Each clip is paired with multiple-choice questions for both single-label and multi-label evaluation, enabling fine-grained assessment of VLMs in both standard and safety-critical contexts. We evaluate eight state-of-the-art video-language models under zero-shot conditions. Despite their strong performance on existing video benchmarks, these models struggle with iSafetyBench-particularly in recognizing hazardous activities and in multi-label scenarios. Our results reveal significant performance gaps, underscoring the need for more robust, safety-aware multimodal models for industrial applications. iSafetyBench provides a first-of-its-kind testbed to drive progress in this direction. The dataset is available at: https://github.com/raiyaan-abdullah/iSafety-Bench.
Authors: Janika Deborah Gajo, Gerarld Paul Merales, Jerome Escarcha, Brenden Ashley Molina, Gian Nartea, Emmanuel G. Maminta, Juan Carlos Roldan, Rowel O. Atienza
Abstract: We present Sari Sandbox, a high-fidelity, photorealistic 3D retail store simulation for benchmarking embodied agents against human performance in shopping tasks. Addressing a gap in retail-specific sim environments for embodied agent training, Sari Sandbox features over 250 interactive grocery items across three store configurations, controlled via an API. It supports both virtual reality (VR) for human interaction and a vision language model (VLM)-powered embodied agent. We also introduce SariBench, a dataset of annotated human demonstrations across varied task difficulties. Our sandbox enables embodied agents to navigate, inspect, and manipulate retail items, providing baselines against human performance. We conclude with benchmarks, performance analysis, and recommendations for enhancing realism and scalability. The source code can be accessed via https://github.com/upeee/sari-sandbox-env.
Authors: Tao Wu, Jingyuan Ye, Ying Fu
Abstract: Geometric distortions and blurring caused by atmospheric turbulence degrade the quality of long-range dynamic scene videos. Existing methods struggle with restoring edge details and eliminating mixed distortions, especially under conditions of strong turbulence and complex dynamics. To address these challenges, we introduce a Dynamic Efficiency Index ($DEI$), which combines turbulence intensity, optical flow, and proportions of dynamic regions to accurately quantify video dynamic intensity under varying turbulence conditions and provide a high-dynamic turbulence training dataset. Additionally, we propose a Physical Model-Driven Multi-Stage Video Restoration ($PMR$) framework that consists of three stages: \textbf{de-tilting} for geometric stabilization, \textbf{motion segmentation enhancement} for dynamic region refinement, and \textbf{de-blurring} for quality restoration. $PMR$ employs lightweight backbones and stage-wise joint training to ensure both efficiency and high restoration quality. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively suppresses motion trailing artifacts, restores edge details and exhibits strong generalization capability, especially in real-world scenarios characterized by high-turbulence and complex dynamics. We will make the code and datasets openly available.
Authors: Hanqi Chen, Xu Zhang, Xiaoliu Guan, Lielin Jiang, Guanzhong Wang, Zeyu Chen, Yi Liu
Abstract: Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have demonstrated remarkable generative capabilities, particularly benefiting from Transformer architectures that enhance visual and artistic fidelity. However, their inherently sequential denoising process results in high inference latency, limiting their deployment in real-time scenarios. Existing training-free acceleration approaches typically reuse intermediate features at fixed timesteps or layers, overlooking the evolving semantic focus across denoising stages and Transformer blocks.To address this, we propose Sortblock, a training-free inference acceleration framework that dynamically caches block-wise features based on their similarity across adjacent timesteps. By ranking the evolution of residuals, Sortblock adaptively determines a recomputation ratio, selectively skipping redundant computations while preserving generation quality. Furthermore, we incorporate a lightweight linear prediction mechanism to reduce accumulated errors in skipped blocks.Extensive experiments across various tasks and DiT architectures demonstrate that Sortblock achieves over 2$\times$ inference speedup with minimal degradation in output quality, offering an effective and generalizable solution for accelerating diffusion-based generative models.
Authors: Junyu Chen, Dongyun Zou, Wenkun He, Junsong Chen, Enze Xie, Song Han, Han Cai
Abstract: We present DC-AE 1.5, a new family of deep compression autoencoders for high-resolution diffusion models. Increasing the autoencoder's latent channel number is a highly effective approach for improving its reconstruction quality. However, it results in slow convergence for diffusion models, leading to poorer generation quality despite better reconstruction quality. This issue limits the quality upper bound of latent diffusion models and hinders the employment of autoencoders with higher spatial compression ratios. We introduce two key innovations to address this challenge: i) Structured Latent Space, a training-based approach to impose a desired channel-wise structure on the latent space with front latent channels capturing object structures and latter latent channels capturing image details; ii) Augmented Diffusion Training, an augmented diffusion training strategy with additional diffusion training objectives on object latent channels to accelerate convergence. With these techniques, DC-AE 1.5 delivers faster convergence and better diffusion scaling results than DC-AE. On ImageNet 512x512, DC-AE-1.5-f64c128 delivers better image generation quality than DC-AE-f32c32 while being 4x faster. Code: https://github.com/dc-ai-projects/DC-Gen.
Authors: Sangwoo Youn, Minji Lee, Nokap Tony Park, Yeonggyoo Jeon, Taeyoung Na
Abstract: Video outpainting presents a unique challenge of extending the borders while maintaining consistency with the given content. In this paper, we suggest the use of video inpainting models that excel in object flow learning and reconstruction in outpainting rather than solely generating the background as in existing methods. However, directly applying or fine-tuning inpainting models to outpainting has shown to be ineffective, often leading to blurry results. Our extensive experiments on discriminator designs reveal that a critical component missing in the outpainting fine-tuning process is a discriminator capable of effectively assessing the perceptual quality of the extended areas. To tackle this limitation, we differentiate the objectives of adversarial training into global and local goals and introduce a hierarchical discriminator that meets both objectives. Additionally, we develop a specialized outpainting loss function that leverages both local and global features of the discriminator. Fine-tuning on this adversarial loss function enhances the generator's ability to produce both visually appealing and globally coherent outpainted scenes. Our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. Supplementary materials including the demo video and the code are available in SigPort.
Authors: Runmin Cong, Zongji Yu, Hao Fang, Haoyan Sun, Sam Kwong
Abstract: Underwater Instance Segmentation (UIS) tasks are crucial for underwater complex scene detection. Mamba, as an emerging state space model with inherently linear complexity and global receptive fields, is highly suitable for processing image segmentation tasks with long sequence features. However, due to the particularity of underwater scenes, there are many challenges in applying Mamba to UIS. The existing fixed-patch scanning mechanism cannot maintain the internal continuity of scanned instances in the presence of severely underwater color distortion and blurred instance boundaries, and the hidden state of the complex underwater background can also inhibit the understanding of instance objects. In this work, we propose the first Mamba-based underwater instance segmentation model UIS-Mamba, and design two innovative modules, Dynamic Tree Scan (DTS) and Hidden State Weaken (HSW), to migrate Mamba to the underwater task. DTS module maintains the continuity of the internal features of the instance objects by allowing the patches to dynamically offset and scale, thereby guiding the minimum spanning tree and providing dynamic local receptive fields. HSW module suppresses the interference of complex backgrounds and effectively focuses the information flow of state propagation to the instances themselves through the Ncut-based hidden state weakening mechanism. Experimental results show that UIS-Mamba achieves state-of-the-art performance on both UIIS and USIS10K datasets, while maintaining a low number of parameters and computational complexity. Code is available at https://github.com/Maricalce/UIS-Mamba.
Authors: Seunggeun Chi, Enna Sachdeva, Pin-Hao Huang, Kwonjoon Lee
Abstract: Amodal completion, which is the process of inferring the full appearance of objects despite partial occlusions, is crucial for understanding complex human-object interactions (HOI) in computer vision and robotics. Existing methods, such as those that use pre-trained diffusion models, often struggle to generate plausible completions in dynamic scenarios because they have a limited understanding of HOI. To solve this problem, we've developed a new approach that uses physical prior knowledge along with a specialized multi-regional inpainting technique designed for HOI. By incorporating physical constraints from human topology and contact information, we define two distinct regions: the primary region, where occluded object parts are most likely to be, and the secondary region, where occlusions are less probable. Our multi-regional inpainting method uses customized denoising strategies across these regions within a diffusion model. This improves the accuracy and realism of the generated completions in both their shape and visual detail. Our experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods in HOI scenarios, moving machine perception closer to a more human-like understanding of dynamic environments. We also show that our pipeline is robust even without ground-truth contact annotations, which broadens its applicability to tasks like 3D reconstruction and novel view/pose synthesis.
Authors: M. A. P\'erez-Cuti\~no, J. Valverde, J. Capit\'an, J. M. D\'iaz-B\'a\~nez
Abstract: In the context of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants, aerial images captured by drones present a unique set of challenges. Unlike urban or natural landscapes commonly found in existing datasets, solar fields contain highly reflective surfaces, and domain-specific elements that are uncommon in traditional computer vision benchmarks. As a result, machine learning models trained on generic datasets struggle to generalize to this setting without extensive retraining and large volumes of annotated data. However, collecting and labeling such data is costly and time-consuming, making it impractical for rapid deployment in industrial applications. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach: the creation of AerialCSP, a virtual dataset that simulates aerial imagery of CSP plants. By generating synthetic data that closely mimic real-world conditions, our objective is to facilitate pretraining of models before deployment, significantly reducing the need for extensive manual labeling. Our main contributions are threefold: (1) we introduce AerialCSP, a high-quality synthetic dataset for aerial inspection of CSP plants, providing annotated data for object detection and image segmentation; (2) we benchmark multiple models on AerialCSP, establishing a baseline for CSP-related vision tasks; and (3) we demonstrate that pretraining on AerialCSP significantly improves real-world fault detection, particularly for rare and small defects, reducing the need for extensive manual labeling. AerialCSP is made publicly available at https://mpcutino.github.io/aerialcsp/.
Authors: Jiale Zhou, Wenhan Wang, Shikun Li, Xiaolei Qu, Xin Guo, Yizhong Liu, Wenzhong Tang, Xun Lin, Yefeng Zheng
Abstract: Tubular structure segmentation (TSS) is important for various applications, such as hemodynamic analysis and route navigation. Despite significant progress in TSS, domain shifts remain a major challenge, leading to performance degradation in unseen target domains. Unlike other segmentation tasks, TSS is more sensitive to domain shifts, as changes in topological structures can compromise segmentation integrity, and variations in local features distinguishing foreground from background (e.g., texture and contrast) may further disrupt topological continuity. To address these challenges, we propose Topology-enhanced Test-Time Adaptation (TopoTTA), the first test-time adaptation framework designed specifically for TSS. TopoTTA consists of two stages: Stage 1 adapts models to cross-domain topological discrepancies using the proposed Topological Meta Difference Convolutions (TopoMDCs), which enhance topological representation without altering pre-trained parameters; Stage 2 improves topological continuity by a novel Topology Hard sample Generation (TopoHG) strategy and prediction alignment on hard samples with pseudo-labels in the generated pseudo-break regions. Extensive experiments across four scenarios and ten datasets demonstrate TopoTTA's effectiveness in handling topological distribution shifts, achieving an average improvement of 31.81% in clDice. TopoTTA also serves as a plug-and-play TTA solution for CNN-based TSS models.
Authors: Longfei Huang, Yu Liang, Hao Zhang, Jinwei Chen, Wei Dong, Lunde Chen, Wanyu Liu, Bo Li, Pengtao Jiang
Abstract: Recent interactive matting methods have shown satisfactory performance in capturing the primary regions of objects, but they fall short in extracting fine-grained details in edge regions. Diffusion models trained on billions of image-text pairs, demonstrate exceptional capability in modeling highly complex data distributions and synthesizing realistic texture details, while exhibiting robust text-driven interaction capabilities, making them an attractive solution for interactive matting. To this end, we propose SDMatte, a diffusion-driven interactive matting model, with three key contributions. First, we exploit the powerful priors of diffusion models and transform the text-driven interaction capability into visual prompt-driven interaction capability to enable interactive matting. Second, we integrate coordinate embeddings of visual prompts and opacity embeddings of target objects into U-Net, enhancing SDMatte's sensitivity to spatial position information and opacity information. Third, we propose a masked self-attention mechanism that enables the model to focus on areas specified by visual prompts, leading to better performance. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method, validating its effectiveness in interactive matting. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/vivoCameraResearch/SDMatte.
Authors: Hongyi Cai, Mohammad Mahdinur Rahman, Mingkang Dong, Jie Li, Muxin Pu, Zhili Fang, Yinan Peng, Hanjun Luo, Yang Liu
Abstract: Text-to-Image (T2I) models generate high-quality images from text prompts but often exhibit unintended social biases, such as gender or racial stereotypes, even when these attributes are not mentioned. Existing debiasing methods work well for simple or well-known cases but struggle with subtle or overlapping biases. We propose AutoDebias, a framework that automatically identifies and mitigates harmful biases in T2I models without prior knowledge of specific bias types. Specifically, AutoDebias leverages vision-language models to detect biased visual patterns and constructs fairness guides by generating inclusive alternative prompts that reflect balanced representations. These guides drive a CLIP-guided training process that promotes fairer outputs while preserving the original model's image quality and diversity. Unlike existing methods, AutoDebias effectively addresses both subtle stereotypes and multiple interacting biases. We evaluate the framework on a benchmark covering over 25 bias scenarios, including challenging cases where multiple biases occur simultaneously. AutoDebias detects harmful patterns with 91.6% accuracy and reduces biased outputs from 90% to negligible levels, while preserving the visual fidelity of the original model.
Authors: Anju Rani, Daniel Ortiz-Arroyo, Petar Durdevic
Abstract: Understanding the temporal dynamics of biological growth is critical across diverse fields such as microbiology, agriculture, and biodegradation research. Although vision-language models like Contrastive Language Image Pretraining (CLIP) have shown strong capabilities in joint visual-textual reasoning, their effectiveness in capturing temporal progression remains limited. To address this, we propose CLIPTime, a multimodal, multitask framework designed to predict both the developmental stage and the corresponding timestamp of fungal growth from image and text inputs. Built upon the CLIP architecture, our model learns joint visual-textual embeddings and enables time-aware inference without requiring explicit temporal input during testing. To facilitate training and evaluation, we introduce a synthetic fungal growth dataset annotated with aligned timestamps and categorical stage labels. CLIPTime jointly performs classification and regression, predicting discrete growth stages alongside continuous timestamps. We also propose custom evaluation metrics, including temporal accuracy and regression error, to assess the precision of time-aware predictions. Experimental results demonstrate that CLIPTime effectively models biological progression and produces interpretable, temporally grounded outputs, highlighting the potential of vision-language models in real-world biological monitoring applications.
Authors: Baisong Li, Xingwang Wang, Haixiao Xu
Abstract: The goal of multispectral and hyperspectral image fusion (MHIF) is to generate high-quality images that simultaneously possess rich spectral information and fine spatial details. However, due to the inherent trade-off between spectral and spatial information and the limited availability of observations, this task is fundamentally ill-posed. Previous studies have not effectively addressed the ill-posed nature caused by data misalignment. To tackle this challenge, we propose a fusion framework named PIF-Net, which explicitly incorporates ill-posed priors to effectively fuse multispectral images and hyperspectral images. To balance global spectral modeling with computational efficiency, we design a method based on an invertible Mamba architecture that maintains information consistency during feature transformation and fusion, ensuring stable gradient flow and process reversibility. Furthermore, we introduce a novel fusion module called the Fusion-Aware Low-Rank Adaptation module, which dynamically calibrates spectral and spatial features while keeping the model lightweight. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that PIF-Net achieves significantly better image restoration performance than current state-of-the-art methods while maintaining model efficiency.
Authors: Yiwen Wang, Xinning Chai, Yuhong Zhang, Zhengxue Cheng, Jun Zhao, Rong Xie, Li Song
Abstract: Recent advancements in video super-resolution (VSR) models have demonstrated impressive results in enhancing low-resolution videos. However, due to limitations in adequately controlling the generation process, achieving high fidelity alignment with the low-resolution input while maintaining temporal consistency across frames remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose Semantic and Temporal Guided Video Super-Resolution (SeTe-VSR), a novel approach that incorporates both semantic and temporal-spatio guidance in the latent diffusion space to address these challenges. By incorporating high-level semantic information and integrating spatial and temporal information, our approach achieves a seamless balance between recovering intricate details and ensuring temporal coherence. Our method not only preserves high-reality visual content but also significantly enhances fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SeTe-VSR outperforms existing methods in terms of detail recovery and perceptual quality, highlighting its effectiveness for complex video super-resolution tasks.
Authors: Jiaping Cao, Kangkang Zhou, Juan Du
Abstract: Video anomaly detection is a fundamental task in video surveillance, with broad applications in public safety and intelligent monitoring systems. Although previous methods leverage Euclidean representations in RGB or depth domains, such embeddings are inherently limited in capturing hierarchical event structures and spatio-temporal continuity. To address these limitations, we propose HyPCV-Former, a novel hyperbolic spatio-temporal transformer for anomaly detection in 3D point cloud videos. Our approach first extracts per-frame spatial features from point cloud sequences via point cloud extractor, and then embeds them into Lorentzian hyperbolic space, which better captures the latent hierarchical structure of events. To model temporal dynamics, we introduce a hyperbolic multi-head self-attention (HMHA) mechanism that leverages Lorentzian inner products and curvature-aware softmax to learn temporal dependencies under non-Euclidean geometry. Our method performs all feature transformations and anomaly scoring directly within full Lorentzian space rather than via tangent space approximation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HyPCV-Former achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple anomaly categories, with a 7\% improvement on the TIMo dataset and a 5.6\% gain on the DAD dataset compared to benchmarks. The code will be released upon paper acceptance.
Authors: Yuzhuo Chen, Zehua Ma, Jianhua Wang, Kai Kang, Shunyu Yao, Weiming Zhang
Abstract: In controllable image synthesis, generating coherent and consistent images from multiple references with spatial layout awareness remains an open challenge. We present LAMIC, a Layout-Aware Multi-Image Composition framework that, for the first time, extends single-reference diffusion models to multi-reference scenarios in a training-free manner. Built upon the MMDiT model, LAMIC introduces two plug-and-play attention mechanisms: 1) Group Isolation Attention (GIA) to enhance entity disentanglement; and 2) Region-Modulated Attention (RMA) to enable layout-aware generation. To comprehensively evaluate model capabilities, we further introduce three metrics: 1) Inclusion Ratio (IN-R) and Fill Ratio (FI-R) for assessing layout control; and 2) Background Similarity (BG-S) for measuring background consistency. Extensive experiments show that LAMIC achieves state-of-the-art performance across most major metrics: it consistently outperforms existing multi-reference baselines in ID-S, BG-S, IN-R and AVG scores across all settings, and achieves the best DPG in complex composition tasks. These results demonstrate LAMIC's superior abilities in identity keeping, background preservation, layout control, and prompt-following, all achieved without any training or fine-tuning, showcasing strong zero-shot generalization ability. By inheriting the strengths of advanced single-reference models and enabling seamless extension to multi-image scenarios, LAMIC establishes a new training-free paradigm for controllable multi-image composition. As foundation models continue to evolve, LAMIC's performance is expected to scale accordingly. Our implementation is available at: https://github.com/Suchenl/LAMIC.
Authors: Alfie Roddan, Tobias Czempiel, Chi Xu, Daniel S. Elson, Stamatia Giannarou
Abstract: We present SAMSA 2.0, an interactive segmentation framework for hyperspectral medical imaging that introduces spectral angle prompting to guide the Segment Anything Model (SAM) using spectral similarity alongside spatial cues. This early fusion of spectral information enables more accurate and robust segmentation across diverse spectral datasets. Without retraining, SAMSA 2.0 achieves up to +3.8% higher Dice scores compared to RGB-only models and up to +3.1% over prior spectral fusion methods. Our approach enhances few-shot and zero-shot performance, demonstrating strong generalization in challenging low-data and noisy scenarios common in clinical imaging.
Authors: Mohammed Kamran, Maria Bernathova, Raoul Varga, Christian Singer, Zsuzsanna Bago-Horvath, Thomas Helbich, Georg Langs, Philipp Seeb\"ock
Abstract: Accurate segmentation of small lesions in Breast Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) is critical for early cancer detection, especially in high-risk patients. While recent deep learning methods have advanced lesion segmentation, they primarily target large lesions and neglect valuable longitudinal and clinical information routinely used by radiologists. In real-world screening, detecting subtle or emerging lesions requires radiologists to compare across timepoints and consider previous radiology assessments, such as the BI-RADS score. We propose LesiOnTime, a novel 3D segmentation approach that mimics clinical diagnostic workflows by jointly leveraging longitudinal imaging and BIRADS scores. The key components are: (1) a Temporal Prior Attention (TPA) block that dynamically integrates information from previous and current scans; and (2) a BI-RADS Consistency Regularization (BCR) loss that enforces latent space alignment for scans with similar radiological assessments, thus embedding domain knowledge into the training process. Evaluated on a curated in-house longitudinal dataset of high-risk patients with DCE-MRI, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art single-timepoint and longitudinal baselines by 5% in terms of Dice. Ablation studies demonstrate that both TPA and BCR contribute complementary performance gains. These results highlight the importance of incorporating temporal and clinical context for reliable early lesion segmentation in real-world breast cancer screening. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/cirmuw/LesiOnTime
Authors: Tulsi Patel, Mark W. Jones, Thomas Redfern
Abstract: Machine learning for remote sensing imaging relies on up-to-date and accurate labels for model training and testing. Labelling remote sensing imagery is time and cost intensive, requiring expert analysis. Previous labelling tools rely on pre-labelled data for training in order to label new unseen data. In this work, we define an unsupervised pipeline for finding and labelling geographical areas of similar context and content within Sentinel-2 satellite imagery. Our approach removes limitations of previous methods by utilising segmentation with convolutional and graph neural networks to encode a more robust feature space for image comparison. Unlike previous approaches we segment the image into homogeneous regions of pixels that are grouped based on colour and spatial similarity. Graph neural networks are used to aggregate information about the surrounding segments enabling the feature representation to encode the local neighbourhood whilst preserving its own local information. This reduces outliers in the labelling tool, allows users to label at a granular level, and allows a rotationally invariant semantic relationship at the image level to be formed within the encoding space.
Authors: Shuo Liang, Yiwu Zhong, Zi-Yuan Hu, Yeyao Tao, Liwei Wang
Abstract: Spatiotemporal video grounding aims to localize target entities in videos based on textual queries. While existing research has made significant progress in exocentric videos, the egocentric setting remains relatively underexplored, despite its growing importance in applications such as augmented reality and robotics. In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis of the discrepancies between egocentric and exocentric videos, revealing key challenges such as shorter object durations, sparser trajectories, smaller object sizes, and larger positional shifts. To address these challenges, we introduce EgoMask, the first pixel-level benchmark for fine-grained spatiotemporal grounding in egocentric videos. It is constructed by our proposed automatic annotation pipeline, which annotates referring expressions and object masks across short-, medium-, and long-term videos. Additionally, we create EgoMask-Train, a large-scale training dataset to facilitate model development. Experiments demonstrate that the state-of-the-art spatiotemporal grounding models perform poorly on our benchmark EgoMask, but fine-tuning on EgoMask-Train yields significant improvements, while preserving performance on exocentric datasets. Our work thus provides essential resources and insights for advancing egocentric video understanding. Our code is available at https://github.com/LaVi-Lab/EgoMask .
Authors: Jinsong Yang, Zeyuan Hu, Yichen Li
Abstract: Underwater fish detection (UFD) remains a challenging task in computer vision due to low object resolution, significant background interference, and high visual similarity between targets and surroundings. Existing approaches primarily focus on local feature enhancement or incorporate complex attention mechanisms to highlight small objects, often at the cost of increased model complexity and reduced efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose an efficient path aggregation network (EPANet), which leverages complementary feature integration to achieve accurate and lightweight UFD. EPANet consists of two key components: an efficient path aggregation feature pyramid network (EPA-FPN) and a multi-scale diverse-division short path bottleneck (MS-DDSP bottleneck). The EPA-FPN introduces long-range skip connections across disparate scales to improve semantic-spatial complementarity, while cross-layer fusion paths are adopted to enhance feature integration efficiency. The MS-DDSP bottleneck extends the conventional bottleneck structure by introducing finer-grained feature division and diverse convolutional operations, thereby increasing local feature diversity and representation capacity. Extensive experiments on benchmark UFD datasets demonstrate that EPANet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of detection accuracy and inference speed, while maintaining comparable or even lower parameter complexity.
Authors: Seunghyun Shin, Dongmin Shin, Jisu Shin, Hae-Gon Jeon, Joon-Young Lee
Abstract: Different from color correction and transfer, color grading involves adjusting colors for artistic or storytelling purposes in a video, which is used to establish a specific look or mood. However, due to the complexity of the process and the need for specialized editing skills, video color grading remains primarily the domain of professional colorists. In this paper, we present a reference-based video color grading framework. Our key idea is explicitly generating a look-up table (LUT) for color attribute alignment between reference scenes and input video via a diffusion model. As a training objective, we enforce that high-level features of the reference scenes like look, mood, and emotion should be similar to that of the input video. Our LUT-based approach allows for color grading without any loss of structural details in the whole video frames as well as achieving fast inference. We further build a pipeline to incorporate a user-preference via text prompts for low-level feature enhancement such as contrast and brightness, etc. Experimental results, including extensive user studies, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for video color grading. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/seunghyuns98/VideoColorGrading.
Authors: Daniel Wolf, Heiko Hillenhagen, Billurvan Taskin, Alex B\"auerle, Meinrad Beer, Michael G\"otz, Timo Ropinski
Abstract: Clinical decision-making relies heavily on understanding relative positions of anatomical structures and anomalies. Therefore, for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to be applicable in clinical practice, the ability to accurately determine relative positions on medical images is a fundamental prerequisite. Despite its importance, this capability remains highly underexplored. To address this gap, we evaluate the ability of state-of-the-art VLMs, GPT-4o, Llama3.2, Pixtral, and JanusPro, and find that all models fail at this fundamental task. Inspired by successful approaches in computer vision, we investigate whether visual prompts, such as alphanumeric or colored markers placed on anatomical structures, can enhance performance. While these markers provide moderate improvements, results remain significantly lower on medical images compared to observations made on natural images. Our evaluations suggest that, in medical imaging, VLMs rely more on prior anatomical knowledge than on actual image content for answering relative position questions, often leading to incorrect conclusions. To facilitate further research in this area, we introduce the MIRP , Medical Imaging Relative Positioning, benchmark dataset, designed to systematically evaluate the capability to identify relative positions in medical images.
Authors: Chihan Huang, Belal Alsinglawi, Islam Al-qudah
Abstract: Recent advances in deep neural networks (DNNs) have led to remarkable success across a wide range of tasks. However, their susceptibility to adversarial perturbations remains a critical vulnerability. Existing diffusion-based adversarial purification methods often require intensive iterative denoising, severely limiting their practical deployment. In this paper, we propose Diffusion Bridge Distillation for Purification (DBLP), a novel and efficient diffusion-based framework for adversarial purification. Central to our approach is a new objective, noise bridge distillation, which constructs a principled alignment between the adversarial noise distribution and the clean data distribution within a latent consistency model (LCM). To further enhance semantic fidelity, we introduce adaptive semantic enhancement, which fuses multi-scale pyramid edge maps as conditioning input to guide the purification process. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that DBLP achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) robust accuracy, superior image quality, and around 0.2s inference time, marking a significant step toward real-time adversarial purification.
Authors: Jizhihui Liu, Feiyi Du, Guangdao Zhu, Niu Lian, Jun Li, Bin Chen
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) encode images into lengthy sequences of visual tokens, leading to excessive computational overhead and limited inference efficiency. While prior efforts prune or merge tokens to address this issue, they often rely on special tokens (e.g., CLS) or require task-specific training, hindering scalability across architectures. In this paper, we propose HiPrune, a training-free and model-agnostic token Pruning framework that exploits the Hierarchical attention structure within vision encoders. We identify that middle layers attend to object-centric regions, while deep layers capture global contextual features. Based on this observation, HiPrune selects three types of informative tokens: (1) Anchor tokens with high attention in object-centric layers, (2) Buffer tokens adjacent to anchors for spatial continuity, and (3) Register tokens with strong attention in deep layers for global summarization. Our method requires no retraining and integrates seamlessly with any ViT-based VLM. Extensive experiments on LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-NeXT, and Qwen2.5-VL demonstrate that HiPrune achieves state-of-the-art pruning performance, preserving up to 99.3% task accuracy with only 33.3% tokens, and maintaining 99.5% accuracy with just 11.1% tokens. Meanwhile, it reduces inference FLOPs and latency by up to 9$\times$, showcasing strong generalization across models and tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Danielement321/HiPrune.
Authors: Qi Chen, Lingxiao Yang, Yun Chen, Nailong Zhao, Jianhuang Lai, Jie Shao, Xiaohua Xie
Abstract: Fine-tuning pre-trained vision-language models has emerged as a powerful approach for enhancing open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS). However, the substantial computational and resource demands associated with training on large datasets have prompted interest in training-free methods for OVSS. Existing training-free approaches primarily focus on modifying model architectures and generating prototypes to improve segmentation performance. However, they often neglect the challenges posed by class redundancy, where multiple categories are not present in the current test image, and visual-language ambiguity, where semantic similarities among categories create confusion in class activation. These issues can lead to suboptimal class activation maps and affinity-refined activation maps. Motivated by these observations, we propose FreeCP, a novel training-free class purification framework designed to address these challenges. FreeCP focuses on purifying semantic categories and rectifying errors caused by redundancy and ambiguity. The purified class representations are then leveraged to produce final segmentation predictions. We conduct extensive experiments across eight benchmarks to validate FreeCP's effectiveness. Results demonstrate that FreeCP, as a plug-and-play module, significantly boosts segmentation performance when combined with other OVSS methods.
Authors: Jens U. Kreber, Joerg Stueckler
Abstract: Articulated objects are an important type of interactable objects in everyday environments. In this paper, we propose PhysNAP, a novel diffusion model-based approach for generating articulated objects that aligns them with partial point clouds and improves their physical plausibility. The model represents part shapes by signed distance functions (SDFs). We guide the reverse diffusion process using a point cloud alignment loss computed using the predicted SDFs. Additionally, we impose non-penetration and mobility constraints based on the part SDFs for guiding the model to generate more physically plausible objects. We also make our diffusion approach category-aware to further improve point cloud alignment if category information is available. We evaluate the generative ability and constraint consistency of samples generated with PhysNAP using the PartNet-Mobility dataset. We also compare it with an unguided baseline diffusion model and demonstrate that PhysNAP can improve constraint consistency and provides a tradeoff with generative ability.
Authors: Hannah Kniesel, Leon Sick, Tristan Payer, Tim Bergner, Kavitha Shaga Devan, Clarissa Read, Paul Walther, Timo Ropinski
Abstract: Current state-of-the-art methods for object detection rely on annotated bounding boxes of large data sets for training. However, obtaining such annotations is expensive and can require up to hundreds of hours of manual labor. This poses a challenge, especially since such annotations can only be provided by experts, as they require knowledge about the scientific domain. To tackle this challenge, we propose a domain-specific weakly supervised object detection algorithm that only relies on image-level annotations, which are significantly easier to acquire. Our method distills the knowledge of a pre-trained model, on the task of predicting the presence or absence of a virus in an image, to obtain a set of pseudo-labels that can be used to later train a state-of-the-art object detection model. To do so, we use an optimization approach with a shrinking receptive field to extract virus particles directly without specific network architectures. Through a set of extensive studies, we show how the proposed pseudo-labels are easier to obtain, and, more importantly, are able to outperform other existing weak labeling methods, and even ground truth labels, in cases where the time to obtain the annotation is limited.
Authors: Jingchao Xie, Oussema Dhaouadi, Weirong Chen, Johannes Meier, Jacques Kaiser, Daniel Cremers
Abstract: Visual Odometry (VO) is fundamental to autonomous navigation, robotics, and augmented reality, with unsupervised approaches eliminating the need for expensive ground-truth labels. However, these methods struggle when dynamic objects violate the static scene assumption, leading to erroneous pose estimations. We tackle this problem by uncertainty modeling, which is a commonly used technique that creates robust masks to filter out dynamic objects and occlusions without requiring explicit motion segmentation. Traditional uncertainty modeling considers only single-frame information, overlooking the uncertainties across consecutive frames. Our key insight is that uncertainty must be propagated and combined across temporal frames to effectively identify unreliable regions, particularly in dynamic scenes. To address this challenge, we introduce Combined Projected Uncertainty VO (CoProU-VO), a novel end-to-end approach that combines target frame uncertainty with projected reference frame uncertainty using a principled probabilistic formulation. Built upon vision transformer backbones, our model simultaneously learns depth, uncertainty estimation, and camera poses. Consequently, experiments on the KITTI and nuScenes datasets demonstrate significant improvements over previous unsupervised monocular end-to-end two-frame-based methods and exhibit strong performance in challenging highway scenes where other approaches often fail. Additionally, comprehensive ablation studies validate the effectiveness of cross-frame uncertainty propagation.
Authors: Marc H\"olle, Walter Kellermann, Vasileios Belagiannis
Abstract: Semantic segmentation models trained on known object classes often fail in real-world autonomous driving scenarios by confidently misclassifying unknown objects. While pixel-wise out-of-distribution detection can identify unknown objects, existing methods struggle in complex scenes where rare object classes are often confused with truly unknown objects. We introduce an uncertainty-aware likelihood ratio estimation method that addresses these limitations. Our approach uses an evidential classifier within a likelihood ratio test to distinguish between known and unknown pixel features from a semantic segmentation model, while explicitly accounting for uncertainty. Instead of producing point estimates, our method outputs probability distributions that capture uncertainty from both rare training examples and imperfect synthetic outliers. We show that by incorporating uncertainty in this way, outlier exposure can be leveraged more effectively. Evaluated on five standard benchmark datasets, our method achieves the lowest average false positive rate (2.5%) among state-of-the-art while maintaining high average precision (90.91%) and incurring only negligible computational overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/glasbruch/ULRE.
Authors: Stefan Englmeier (Munich University of Applied Sciences, Intelligent Vehicles Lab), Max A. B\"uttner (Munich University of Applied Sciences, Intelligent Vehicles Lab), Katharina Winter (Munich University of Applied Sciences, Intelligent Vehicles Lab), Fabian B. Flohr (Munich University of Applied Sciences, Intelligent Vehicles Lab)
Abstract: Autonomous driving systems must operate reliably in safety-critical scenarios, particularly those involving unusual or complex behavior by Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs). Identifying these edge cases in driving datasets is essential for robust evaluation and generalization, but retrieving such rare human behavior scenarios within the long tail of large-scale datasets is challenging. To support targeted evaluation of autonomous driving systems in diverse, human-centered scenarios, we propose a novel context-aware motion retrieval framework. Our method combines Skinned Multi-Person Linear (SMPL)-based motion sequences and corresponding video frames before encoding them into a shared multimodal embedding space aligned with natural language. Our approach enables the scalable retrieval of human behavior and their context through text queries. This work also introduces our dataset WayMoCo, an extension of the Waymo Open Dataset. It contains automatically labeled motion and scene context descriptions derived from generated pseudo-ground-truth SMPL sequences and corresponding image data. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art models by up to 27.5% accuracy in motion-context retrieval, when evaluated on the WayMoCo dataset.
Authors: Yihe Tian, Kwan Man Cheng, Zhengbo Zhang, Tao Zhang, Suju Li, Dongmei Yan, Bing Xu
Abstract: Artificial Night-Time Light (NTL) remote sensing is a vital proxy for quantifying the intensity and spatial distribution of human activities. Although the NPP-VIIRS sensor provides high-quality NTL observations, its temporal coverage, which begins in 2012, restricts long-term time-series studies that extend to earlier periods. Despite the progress in extending VIIRS-like NTL time-series, current methods still suffer from two significant shortcomings: the underestimation of light intensity and the structural omission. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel reconstruction framework consisting of a two-stage process: construction and refinement. The construction stage features a Hierarchical Fusion Decoder (HFD) designed to enhance the fidelity of the initial reconstruction. The refinement stage employs a Dual Feature Refiner (DFR), which leverages high-resolution impervious surface masks to guide and enhance fine-grained structural details. Based on this framework, we developed the Extended VIIRS-like Artificial Nighttime Light (EVAL) product for China, extending the standard data record backwards by 26 years to begin in 1986. Quantitative evaluation shows that EVAL significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art products, boosting the $\text{R}^2$ from 0.68 to 0.80 while lowering the RMSE from 1.27 to 0.99. Furthermore, EVAL exhibits excellent temporal consistency and maintains a high correlation with socioeconomic parameters, confirming its reliability for long-term analysis. The resulting EVAL dataset provides a valuable new resource for the research community and is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.11888/HumanNat.tpdc.302930.
Authors: Mingrui Liu, Sixiao Zhang, Cheng Long
Abstract: Text-to-Image (T2I) generation is a popular AI-generated content (AIGC) technology enabling diverse and creative image synthesis. However, some outputs may contain Not Safe For Work (NSFW) content (e.g., violence), violating community guidelines. Detecting NSFW content efficiently and accurately, known as external safeguarding, is essential. Existing external safeguards fall into two types: text filters, which analyze user prompts but overlook T2I model-specific variations and are prone to adversarial attacks; and image filters, which analyze final generated images but are computationally costly and introduce latency. Diffusion models, the foundation of modern T2I systems like Stable Diffusion, generate images through iterative denoising using a U-Net architecture with ResNet and Transformer blocks. We observe that: (1) early denoising steps define the semantic layout of the image, and (2) cross-attention layers in U-Net are crucial for aligning text and image regions. Based on these insights, we propose Wukong, a transformer-based NSFW detection framework that leverages intermediate outputs from early denoising steps and reuses U-Net's pre-trained cross-attention parameters. Wukong operates within the diffusion process, enabling early detection without waiting for full image generation. We also introduce a new dataset containing prompts, seeds, and image-specific NSFW labels, and evaluate Wukong on this and two public benchmarks. Results show that Wukong significantly outperforms text-based safeguards and achieves comparable accuracy of image filters, while offering much greater efficiency.
Authors: Jiajun Le, Jiayi Ma
Abstract: Recent progress in two-view geometry increasingly emphasizes enforcing smoothness and global consistency priors when estimating motion fields between pairs of images. However, in complex real-world scenes, characterized by extreme viewpoint and scale changes as well as pronounced depth discontinuities, the motion field often exhibits diverse and heterogeneous motion patterns. Most existing methods lack targeted modeling strategies and fail to explicitly account for this variability, resulting in estimated motion fields that diverge from their true underlying structure and distribution. We observe that Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) can assign dedicated experts to motion sub-fields, enabling a divide-and-conquer strategy for heterogeneous motion patterns. Building on this insight, we re-architect motion field modeling in two-view geometry with GeoMoE, a streamlined framework. Specifically, we first devise a Probabilistic Prior-Guided Decomposition strategy that exploits inlier probability signals to perform a structure-aware decomposition of the motion field into heterogeneous sub-fields, sharply curbing outlier-induced bias. Next, we introduce an MoE-Enhanced Bi-Path Rectifier that enhances each sub-field along spatial-context and channel-semantic paths and routes it to a customized expert for targeted modeling, thereby decoupling heterogeneous motion regimes, suppressing cross-sub-field interference and representational entanglement, and yielding fine-grained motion-field rectification. With this minimalist design, GeoMoE outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods in relative pose and homography estimation and shows strong generalization. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/JiajunLe/GeoMoE.
Authors: Junzhe Lu, Jing Lin, Hongkun Dou, Ailing Zeng, Yue Deng, Xian Liu, Zhongang Cai, Lei Yang, Yulun Zhang, Haoqian Wang, Ziwei Liu
Abstract: We present DPoser-X, a diffusion-based prior model for 3D whole-body human poses. Building a versatile and robust full-body human pose prior remains challenging due to the inherent complexity of articulated human poses and the scarcity of high-quality whole-body pose datasets. To address these limitations, we introduce a Diffusion model as body Pose prior (DPoser) and extend it to DPoser-X for expressive whole-body human pose modeling. Our approach unifies various pose-centric tasks as inverse problems, solving them through variational diffusion sampling. To enhance performance on downstream applications, we introduce a novel truncated timestep scheduling method specifically designed for pose data characteristics. We also propose a masked training mechanism that effectively combines whole-body and part-specific datasets, enabling our model to capture interdependencies between body parts while avoiding overfitting to specific actions. Extensive experiments demonstrate DPoser-X's robustness and versatility across multiple benchmarks for body, hand, face, and full-body pose modeling. Our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives, establishing a new benchmark for whole-body human pose prior modeling.
Authors: Quentin Le Roux, Yannick Teglia, Teddy Furon, Philippe Loubet-Moundi
Abstract: Face Recognition Systems that operate in unconstrained environments capture images under varying conditions,such as inconsistent lighting, or diverse face poses. These challenges require including a Face Detection module that regresses bounding boxes and landmark coordinates for proper Face Alignment. This paper shows the effectiveness of Object Generation Attacks on Face Detection, dubbed Face Generation Attacks, and demonstrates for the first time a Landmark Shift Attack that backdoors the coordinate regression task performed by face detectors. We then offer mitigations against these vulnerabilities.
Authors: Luisa Gall\'ee, Catharina Silvia Lisson, Christoph Gerhard Lisson, Daniela Drees, Felix Weig, Daniel Vogele, Meinrad Beer, Michael G\"otz
Abstract: Classification models that provide human-interpretable explanations enhance clinicians' trust and usability in medical image diagnosis. One research focus is the integration and prediction of pathology-related visual attributes used by radiologists alongside the diagnosis, aligning AI decision-making with clinical reasoning. Radiologists use attributes like shape and texture as established diagnostic criteria and mirroring these in AI decision-making both enhances transparency and enables explicit validation of model outputs. However, the adoption of such models is limited by the scarcity of large-scale medical image datasets annotated with these attributes. To address this challenge, we propose synthesizing attribute-annotated data using a generative model. We enhance the Diffusion Model with attribute conditioning and train it using only 20 attribute-labeled lung nodule samples from the LIDC-IDRI dataset. Incorporating its generated images into the training of an explainable model boosts performance, increasing attribute prediction accuracy by 13.4% and target prediction accuracy by 1.8% compared to training with only the small real attribute-annotated dataset. This work highlights the potential of synthetic data to overcome dataset limitations, enhancing the applicability of explainable models in medical image analysis.
Authors: Junhao Zheng, Jiahao Sun, Chenhao Lin, Zhengyu Zhao, Chen Ma, Chong Zhang, Cong Wang, Qian Wang, Chao Shen
Abstract: Developing reliable defenses against patch attacks on object detectors has attracted increasing interest. However, we identify that existing defense evaluations lack a unified and comprehensive framework, resulting in inconsistent and incomplete assessments of current methods. To address this issue, we revisit 11 representative defenses and present the first patch defense benchmark, involving 2 attack goals, 13 patch attacks, 11 object detectors, and 4 diverse metrics. This leads to the large-scale adversarial patch dataset with 94 types of patches and 94,000 images. Our comprehensive analyses reveal new insights: (1) The difficulty in defending against naturalistic patches lies in the data distribution, rather than the commonly believed high frequencies. Our new dataset with diverse patch distributions can be used to improve existing defenses by 15.09% AP@0.5. (2) The average precision of the attacked object, rather than the commonly pursued patch detection accuracy, shows high consistency with defense performance. (3) Adaptive attacks can substantially bypass existing defenses, and defenses with complex/stochastic models or universal patch properties are relatively robust. We hope that our analyses will serve as guidance on properly evaluating patch attacks/defenses and advancing their design. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Gandolfczjh/APDE, where we will keep integrating new attacks/defenses.
Authors: Hongfei Zhang, Kun Zhou, Ruizheng Wu, Jiangbo Lu
Abstract: Image dehazing remains a challenging problem due to the spatially varying nature of haze in real-world scenes. While existing methods have demonstrated the promise of large-scale pretrained models for image dehazing, their architecture-specific designs hinder adaptability across diverse scenarios with different accuracy and efficiency requirements. In this work, we systematically investigate the generalization capability of pretrained depth representations-learned from millions of diverse images-for image dehazing. Our empirical analysis reveals that the learned deep depth features maintain remarkable consistency across varying haze levels. Building on this insight, we propose a plug-and-play RGB-D fusion module that seamlessly integrates with diverse dehazing architectures. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks validate both the effectiveness and broad applicability of our approach.
Authors: Chende Zheng, Ruiqi suo, Chenhao Lin, Zhengyu Zhao, Le Yang, Shuai Liu, Minghui Yang, Cong Wang, Chao Shen
Abstract: The evolution of video generation techniques, such as Sora, has made it increasingly easy to produce high-fidelity AI-generated videos, raising public concern over the dissemination of synthetic content. However, existing detection methodologies remain limited by their insufficient exploration of temporal artifacts in synthetic videos. To bridge this gap, we establish a theoretical framework through second-order dynamical analysis under Newtonian mechanics, subsequently extending the Second-order Central Difference features tailored for temporal artifact detection. Building on this theoretical foundation, we reveal a fundamental divergence in second-order feature distributions between real and AI-generated videos. Concretely, we propose Detection by Difference of Differences (D3), a novel training-free detection method that leverages the above second-order temporal discrepancies. We validate the superiority of our D3 on 4 open-source datasets (Gen-Video, VideoPhy, EvalCrafter, VidProM), 40 subsets in total. For example, on GenVideo, D3 outperforms the previous best method by 10.39% (absolute) mean Average Precision. Additional experiments on time cost and post-processing operations demonstrate D3's exceptional computational efficiency and strong robust performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zig-HS/D3.
Authors: Jiale Li, Mingrui Wu, Zixiang Jin, Hao Chen, Jiayi Ji, Xiaoshuai Sun, Liujuan Cao, Rongrong Ji
Abstract: Despite growing interest in hallucination in Multimodal Large Language Models, existing studies primarily focus on single-image settings, leaving hallucination in multi-image scenarios largely unexplored. To address this gap, we conduct the first systematic study of hallucinations in multi-image MLLMs and propose MIHBench, a benchmark specifically tailored for evaluating object-related hallucinations across multiple images. MIHBench comprises three core tasks: Multi-Image Object Existence Hallucination, Multi-Image Object Count Hallucination, and Object Identity Consistency Hallucination, targeting semantic understanding across object existence, quantity reasoning, and cross-view identity consistency. Through extensive evaluation, we identify key factors associated with the occurrence of multi-image hallucinations, including: a progressive relationship between the number of image inputs and the likelihood of hallucination occurrences; a strong correlation between single-image hallucination tendencies and those observed in multi-image contexts; and the influence of same-object image ratios and the positional placement of negative samples within image sequences on the occurrence of object identity consistency hallucination. To address these challenges, we propose a Dynamic Attention Balancing mechanism that adjusts inter-image attention distributions while preserving the overall visual attention proportion. Experiments across multiple state-of-the-art MLLMs demonstrate that our method effectively reduces hallucination occurrences and enhances semantic integration and reasoning stability in multi-image scenarios.
Authors: Guanning Zeng, Xiang Zhang, Zirui Wang, Haiyang Xu, Zeyuan Chen, Bingnan Li, Zhuowen Tu
Abstract: We propose YOLO-Count, a differentiable open-vocabulary object counting model that tackles both general counting challenges and enables precise quantity control for text-to-image (T2I) generation. A core contribution is the 'cardinality' map, a novel regression target that accounts for variations in object size and spatial distribution. Leveraging representation alignment and a hybrid strong-weak supervision scheme, YOLO-Count bridges the gap between open-vocabulary counting and T2I generation control. Its fully differentiable architecture facilitates gradient-based optimization, enabling accurate object count estimation and fine-grained guidance for generative models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that YOLO-Count achieves state-of-the-art counting accuracy while providing robust and effective quantity control for T2I systems.
Authors: Adwait Chandorkar, Hasan Tercan, Tobias Meisen
Abstract: Recent advancements in LiDAR-based 3D object detection have significantly accelerated progress toward the realization of fully autonomous driving in real-world environments. Despite achieving high detection performance, most of the approaches still rely on a VGG-based or ResNet-based backbone for feature exploration, which increases the model complexity. Lightweight backbone design is well-explored for 2D object detection, but research on 3D object detection still remains limited. In this work, we introduce Dense Backbone, a lightweight backbone that combines the benefits of high processing speed, lightweight architecture, and robust detection accuracy. We adapt multiple SoTA 3d object detectors, such as PillarNet, with our backbone and show that with our backbone, these models retain most of their detection capability at a significantly reduced computational cost. To our knowledge, this is the first dense-layer-based backbone tailored specifically for 3D object detection from point cloud data. DensePillarNet, our adaptation of PillarNet, achieves a 29% reduction in model parameters and a 28% reduction in latency with just a 2% drop in detection accuracy on the nuScenes test set. Furthermore, Dense Backbone's plug-and-play design allows straightforward integration into existing architectures, requiring no modifications to other network components.
Authors: Regine Hartwig, Dominik Muhle, Riccardo Marin, Daniel Cremers
Abstract: Recent advances in feature learning have shown that self-supervised vision foundation models can capture semantic correspondences but often lack awareness of underlying 3D geometry. GECO addresses this gap by producing geometrically coherent features that semantically distinguish parts based on geometry (e.g., left/right eyes, front/back legs). We propose a training framework based on optimal transport, enabling supervision beyond keypoints, even under occlusions and disocclusions. With a lightweight architecture, GECO runs at 30 fps, 98.2% faster than prior methods, while achieving state-of-the-art performance on PFPascal, APK, and CUB, improving PCK by 6.0%, 6.2%, and 4.1%, respectively. Finally, we show that PCK alone is insufficient to capture geometric quality and introduce new metrics and insights for more geometry-aware feature learning. Link to project page: https://reginehartwig.github.io/publications/geco/
Authors: Laura Pedrouzo-Rodriguez, Pedro Delgado-DeRobles, Luis F. Gomez, Ruben Tolosana, Ruben Vera-Rodriguez, Aythami Morales, Julian Fierrez
Abstract: Photorealistic talking-head avatars are becoming increasingly common in virtual meetings, gaming, and social platforms. These avatars allow for more immersive communication, but they also introduce serious security risks. One emerging threat is impersonation: an attacker can steal a user's avatar-preserving their appearance and voice-making it nearly impossible to detect its fraudulent usage by sight or sound alone. In this paper, we explore the challenge of biometric verification in such avatar-mediated scenarios. Our main question is whether an individual's facial motion patterns can serve as reliable behavioral biometrics to verify their identity when the avatar's visual appearance is a facsimile of its owner. To answer this question, we introduce a new dataset of realistic avatar videos created using a state-of-the-art one-shot avatar generation model, GAGAvatar, with genuine and impostor avatar videos. We also propose a lightweight, explainable spatio-temporal Graph Convolutional Network architecture with temporal attention pooling, that uses only facial landmarks to model dynamic facial gestures. Experimental results demonstrate that facial motion cues enable meaningful identity verification with AUC values approaching 80%. The proposed benchmark and biometric system are available for the research community in order to bring attention to the urgent need for more advanced behavioral biometric defenses in avatar-based communication systems.
Authors: Prerana Ramkumar
Abstract: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have achieved realistic super-resolution (SR) of images however, they lack semantic consistency and per-pixel confidence, limiting their credibility in critical remote sensing applications such as disaster response, urban planning and agriculture. This paper introduces Semantic and Uncertainty-Aware ESRGAN (SU-ESRGAN), the first SR framework designed for satellite imagery to integrate the ESRGAN, segmentation loss via DeepLabv3 for class detail preservation and Monte Carlo dropout to produce pixel-wise uncertainty maps. The SU-ESRGAN produces results (PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS) comparable to the Baseline ESRGAN on aerial imagery. This novel model is valuable in satellite systems or UAVs that use wide field-of-view (FoV) cameras, trading off spatial resolution for coverage. The modular design allows integration in UAV data pipelines for on-board or post-processing SR to enhance imagery resulting due to motion blur, compression and sensor limitations. Further, the model is fine-tuned to evaluate its performance on cross domain applications. The tests are conducted on two drone based datasets which differ in altitude and imaging perspective. Performance evaluation of the fine-tuned models show a stronger adaptation to the Aerial Maritime Drone Dataset, whose imaging characteristics align with the training data, highlighting the importance of domain-aware training in SR-applications.
Authors: Irene Iele, Francesco Di Feola, Valerio Guarrasi, Paolo Soda
Abstract: Image-to-image translation has emerged as a powerful technique in medical imaging, enabling tasks such as image denoising and cross-modality conversion. However, it suffers from limitations in handling out-of-distribution samples without causing performance degradation. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) framework that dynamically adjusts the translation process based on the characteristics of each test sample. Our method introduces a Reconstruction Module to quantify the domain shift and a Dynamic Adaptation Block that selectively modifies the internal features of a pretrained translation model to mitigate the shift without compromising the performance on in-distribution samples that do not require adaptation. We evaluate our approach on two medical image-to-image translation tasks: low-dose CT denoising and T1 to T2 MRI translation, showing consistent improvements over both the baseline translation model without TTA and prior TTA methods. Our analysis highlights the limitations of the state-of-the-art that uniformly apply the adaptation to both out-of-distribution and in-distribution samples, demonstrating that dynamic, sample-specific adjustment offers a promising path to improve model resilience in real-world scenarios. The code is available at: https://github.com/cosbidev/Sample-Aware_TTA.
Authors: Zihan Wang, Samira Ebrahimi Kahou, Narges Armanfard
Abstract: Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) enables identifying and localizing defects in unseen categories by relying solely on generalizable features rather than requiring any labeled examples of anomalies. However, existing ZSAD methods, whether using fixed or learned prompts, struggle under domain shifts because their training data are derived from limited training domains and fail to generalize to new distributions. In this paper, we introduce PILOT, a framework designed to overcome these challenges through two key innovations: (1) a novel dual-branch prompt learning mechanism that dynamically integrates a pool of learnable prompts with structured semantic attributes, enabling the model to adaptively weight the most relevant anomaly cues for each input image; and (2) a label-free test-time adaptation strategy that updates the learnable prompt parameters using high-confidence pseudo-labels from unlabeled test data. Extensive experiments on 13 industrial and medical benchmarks demonstrate that PILOT achieves state-of-the-art performance in both anomaly detection and localization under domain shift.
Authors: Alexander Nikitas Dimopoulos, Joseph Grasso
Abstract: This study analyzes semantic segmentation performance across heterogeneously labeled point-cloud datasets relevant to public safety applications, including pre-incident planning systems derived from lidar scans. Using NIST's Point Cloud City dataset (Enfield and Memphis collections), we investigate challenges in unifying differently labeled 3D data. Our methodology employs a graded schema with the KPConv architecture, evaluating performance through IoU metrics on safety-relevant features. Results indicate performance variability: geometrically large objects (e.g. stairs, windows) achieve higher segmentation performance, suggesting potential for navigational context, while smaller safety-critical features exhibit lower recognition rates. Performance is impacted by class imbalance and the limited geometric distinction of smaller objects in typical lidar scans, indicating limitations in detecting certain safety-relevant features using current point-cloud methods. Key identified challenges include insufficient labeled data, difficulties in unifying class labels across datasets, and the need for standardization. Potential directions include automated labeling and multi-dataset learning strategies. We conclude that reliable point-cloud semantic segmentation for public safety necessitates standardized annotation protocols and improved labeling techniques to address data heterogeneity and the detection of small, safety-critical elements.
Authors: Wenxuan Guo, Xiuwei Xu, Hang Yin, Ziwei Wang, Jianjiang Feng, Jie Zhou, Jiwen Lu
Abstract: Visual navigation with an image as goal is a fundamental and challenging problem. Conventional methods either rely on end-to-end RL learning or modular-based policy with topological graph or BEV map as memory, which cannot fully model the geometric relationship between the explored 3D environment and the goal image. In order to efficiently and accurately localize the goal image in 3D space, we build our navigation system upon the renderable 3D gaussian (3DGS) representation. However, due to the computational intensity of 3DGS optimization and the large search space of 6-DoF camera pose, directly leveraging 3DGS for image localization during agent exploration process is prohibitively inefficient. To this end, we propose IGL-Nav, an Incremental 3D Gaussian Localization framework for efficient and 3D-aware image-goal navigation. Specifically, we incrementally update the scene representation as new images arrive with feed-forward monocular prediction. Then we coarsely localize the goal by leveraging the geometric information for discrete space matching, which can be equivalent to efficient 3D convolution. When the agent is close to the goal, we finally solve the fine target pose with optimization via differentiable rendering. The proposed IGL-Nav outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin across diverse experimental configurations. It can also handle the more challenging free-view image-goal setting and be deployed on real-world robotic platform using a cellphone to capture goal image at arbitrary pose. Project page: https://gwxuan.github.io/IGL-Nav/.
Authors: Murong Xu, Tamaz Amiranashvili, Fernando Navarro, Maksym Fritsak, Ibrahim Ethem Hamamci, Suprosanna Shit, Bastian Wittmann, Sezgin Er, Sebastian M. Christ, Ezequiel de la Rosa, Julian Deseoe, Robert Graf, Hendrik M\"oller, Anjany Sekuboyina, Jan C. Peeken, Sven Becker, Giulia Baldini, Johannes Haubold, Felix Nensa, Ren\'e Hosch, Nikhil Mirajkar, Saad Khalid, Stefan Zachow, Marc-Andr\'e Weber, Georg Langs, Jakob Wasserthal, Mehmet Kemal Ozdemir, Andrey Fedorov, Ron Kikinis, Stephanie Tanadini-Lang, Jan S. Kirschke, Stephanie E. Combs, Bjoern Menze
Abstract: Accurate delineation of anatomical structures in volumetric CT scans is crucial for diagnosis and treatment planning. While AI has advanced automated segmentation, current approaches typically target individual structures, creating a fragmented landscape of incompatible models with varying performance and disparate evaluation protocols. Foundational segmentation models address these limitations by providing a holistic anatomical view through a single model. Yet, robust clinical deployment demands comprehensive training data, which is lacking in existing whole-body approaches, both in terms of data heterogeneity and, more importantly, anatomical coverage. In this work, rather than pursuing incremental optimizations in model architecture, we present CADS, an open-source framework that prioritizes the systematic integration, standardization, and labeling of heterogeneous data sources for whole-body CT segmentation. At its core is a large-scale dataset of 22,022 CT volumes with complete annotations for 167 anatomical structures, representing a significant advancement in both scale and coverage, with 18 times more scans than existing collections and 60% more distinct anatomical targets. Building on this diverse dataset, we develop the CADS-model using established architectures for accessible and automated full-body CT segmentation. Through comprehensive evaluation across 18 public datasets and an independent real-world hospital cohort, we demonstrate advantages over SoTA approaches. Notably, thorough testing of the model's performance in segmentation tasks from radiation oncology validates its direct utility for clinical interventions. By making our large-scale dataset, our segmentation models, and our clinical software tool publicly available, we aim to advance robust AI solutions in radiology and make comprehensive anatomical analysis accessible to clinicians and researchers alike.
Authors: Ashkan Shakarami, Yousef Yeganeh, Azade Farshad, Lorenzo Nicole, Stefano Ghidoni, Nassir Navab
Abstract: This paper introduces Stress-Aware Learning, a resilient neural training paradigm in which deep neural networks dynamically adjust their optimization behavior - whether under stable training regimes or in settings with uncertain dynamics - based on the concept of Temporary (Elastic) and Permanent (Plastic) Deformation, inspired by structural fatigue in materials science. To instantiate this concept, we propose Plastic Deformation Optimizer, a stress-aware mechanism that injects adaptive noise into model parameters whenever an internal stress signal - reflecting stagnation in training loss and accuracy - indicates persistent optimization difficulty. This enables the model to escape sharp minima and converge toward flatter, more generalizable regions of the loss landscape. Experiments across six architectures, four optimizers, and seven vision benchmarks demonstrate improved robustness and generalization with minimal computational overhead. The code and 3D visuals will be available on GitHub: https://github.com/Stress-Aware-Learning/SAL.
Authors: Tomasz Szczepa\'nski, Szymon P{\l}otka, Michal K. Grzeszczyk, Arleta Adamowicz, Piotr Fudalej, Przemys{\l}aw Korzeniowski, Tomasz Trzci\'nski, Arkadiusz Sitek
Abstract: Tooth segmentation in Cone-Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) remains challenging, especially for fine structures like root apices, which is critical for assessing root resorption in orthodontics. We introduce GEPAR3D, a novel approach that unifies instance detection and multi-class segmentation into a single step tailored to improve root segmentation. Our method integrates a Statistical Shape Model of dentition as a geometric prior, capturing anatomical context and morphological consistency without enforcing restrictive adjacency constraints. We leverage a deep watershed method, modeling each tooth as a continuous 3D energy basin encoding voxel distances to boundaries. This instance-aware representation ensures accurate segmentation of narrow, complex root apices. Trained on publicly available CBCT scans from a single center, our method is evaluated on external test sets from two in-house and two public medical centers. GEPAR3D achieves the highest overall segmentation performance, averaging a Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 95.0% (+2.8% over the second-best method) and increasing recall to 95.2% (+9.5%) across all test sets. Qualitative analyses demonstrated substantial improvements in root segmentation quality, indicating significant potential for more accurate root resorption assessment and enhanced clinical decision-making in orthodontics. We provide the implementation and dataset at https://github.com/tomek1911/GEPAR3D.
Authors: Paul Albert, Frederic Z. Zhang, Hemanth Saratchandran, Anton van den Hengel, Ehsan Abbasnejad
Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become a standard approach for adapting large pre-trained models. Amongst PEFT methods, low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has achieved notable success. However, recent studies have highlighted its limitations compared against full-rank alternatives, particularly when applied to multimodal and large language models. In this work, we present a quantitative comparison amongst full-rank and low-rank PEFT methods using a synthetic matrix approximation benchmark with controlled spectral properties. Our results confirm that LoRA struggles to approximate matrices with relatively flat spectrums or high frequency components -- signs of high effective ranks. To this end, we introduce KRAdapter, a novel PEFT algorithm that leverages the Khatri-Rao product to produce weight updates, which, by construction, tends to produce matrix product with a high effective rank. We demonstrate performance gains with KRAdapter on vision-language models up to 1B parameters and on large language models up to 8B parameters, particularly on unseen common-sense reasoning tasks. In addition, KRAdapter maintains the memory and compute efficiency of LoRA, making it a practical and robust alternative to fine-tune billion-scale parameter models.
Authors: Erin Rainville, Amirhossein Rasoulian, Hassan Rivaz, Yiming Xiao
Abstract: Intracranial aneurysms (IAs) are abnormal dilations of cerebral blood vessels that, if ruptured, can lead to life-threatening consequences. However, their small size and soft contrast in radiological scans often make it difficult to perform accurate and efficient detection and morphological analyses, which are critical in the clinical care of the disorder. Furthermore, the lack of large public datasets with voxel-wise expert annotations pose challenges for developing deep learning algorithms to address the issues. Therefore, we proposed a novel weakly supervised 3D multi-task UNet that integrates vesselness priors to jointly perform aneurysm detection and segmentation in time-of-flight MR angiography (TOF-MRA). Specifically, to robustly guide IA detection and segmentation, we employ the popular Frangi's vesselness filter to derive soft cerebrovascular priors for both network input and an attention block to conduct segmentation from the decoder and detection from an auxiliary branch. We train our model on the Lausanne dataset with coarse ground truth segmentation, and evaluate it on the test set with refined labels from the same database. To further assess our model's generalizability, we also validate it externally on the ADAM dataset. Our results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed technique over the SOTA techniques for aneurysm segmentation (Dice = 0.614, 95%HD =1.38mm) and detection (false positive rate = 1.47, sensitivity = 92.9%).
Authors: Victor D. Martinez, Vidya Manian, Sudhir Malik
Abstract: This article presents, for the first time, the application of diffusion models for generating jet images corresponding to proton-proton collision events at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The kinematic variables of quark, gluon, W-boson, Z-boson, and top quark jets from the JetNet simulation dataset are mapped to two-dimensional image representations. Diffusion models are trained on these images to learn the spatial distribution of jet constituents. We compare the performance of score-based diffusion models and consistency models in accurately generating class-conditional jet images. Unlike approaches based on latent distributions, our method operates directly in image space. The fidelity of the generated images is evaluated using several metrics, including the Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID), which demonstrates that consistency models achieve higher fidelity and generation stability compared to score-based diffusion models. These advancements offer significant improvements in computational efficiency and generation accuracy, providing valuable tools for High Energy Physics (HEP) research.
Authors: Jianqiang Xiao, Yuexuan Sun, Yixin Shao, Boxi Gan, Rongqiang Liu, Yanjing Wu, Weili Gua, Xiang Deng
Abstract: Aerial navigation is a fundamental yet underexplored capability in embodied intelligence, enabling agents to operate in large-scale, unstructured environments where traditional navigation paradigms fall short. However, most existing research follows the Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) paradigm, which heavily depends on sequential linguistic instructions, limiting its scalability and autonomy. To address this gap, we introduce UAV-ON, a benchmark for large-scale Object Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) by aerial agents in open-world environments, where agents operate based on high-level semantic goals without relying on detailed instructional guidance as in VLN. UAV-ON comprises 14 high-fidelity Unreal Engine environments with diverse semantic regions and complex spatial layouts, covering urban, natural, and mixed-use settings. It defines 1270 annotated target objects, each characterized by an instance-level instruction that encodes category, physical footprint, and visual descriptors, allowing grounded reasoning. These instructions serve as semantic goals, introducing realistic ambiguity and complex reasoning challenges for aerial agents. To evaluate the benchmark, we implement several baseline methods, including Aerial ObjectNav Agent (AOA), a modular policy that integrates instruction semantics with egocentric observations for long-horizon, goal-directed exploration. Empirical results show that all baselines struggle in this setting, highlighting the compounded challenges of aerial navigation and semantic goal grounding. UAV-ON aims to advance research on scalable UAV autonomy driven by semantic goal descriptions in complex real-world environments.
Authors: Tianshuang Qiu, Zehan Ma, Karim El-Refai, Hiya Shah, Chung Min Kim, Justin Kerr, Ken Goldberg
Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splats (3DGSs) are 3D object models derived from multi-view images. Such "digital twins" are useful for simulations, virtual reality, marketing, robot policy fine-tuning, and part inspection. 3D object scanning usually requires multi-camera arrays, precise laser scanners, or robot wrist-mounted cameras, which have restricted workspaces. We propose Omni-Scan, a pipeline for producing high-quality 3D Gaussian Splat models using a bi-manual robot that grasps an object with one gripper and rotates the object with respect to a stationary camera. The object is then re-grasped by a second gripper to expose surfaces that were occluded by the first gripper. We present the Omni-Scan robot pipeline using DepthAny-thing, Segment Anything, as well as RAFT optical flow models to identify and isolate objects held by a robot gripper while removing the gripper and the background. We then modify the 3DGS training pipeline to support concatenated datasets with gripper occlusion, producing an omni-directional (360 degree view) model of the object. We apply Omni-Scan to part defect inspection, finding that it can identify visual or geometric defects in 12 different industrial and household objects with an average accuracy of 83%. Interactive videos of Omni-Scan 3DGS models can be found at https://berkeleyautomation.github.io/omni-scan/
Authors: Shixin Yi, Lin Shang
Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has shown promise in improving reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs), but it often produces explanations that are linguistically fluent yet lack grounding in visual content. We observe that such hallucinations arise in part from the absence of an explicit verification mechanism during multi-step reasoning. To address this, we propose \textbf{CoRGI}(\textbf{C}hain \textbf{o}f \textbf{R}easoning with \textbf{G}rounded \textbf{I}nsights), a modular framework that introduces visual verification into the reasoning process. CoRGI follows a three-stage pipeline: it first generates a textual reasoning chain, then extracts supporting visual evidence for each reasoning step via a dedicated module (VEVM), and finally synthesizes the textual rationale with visual evidence to generate a grounded, verified answer. The framework can be integrated with existing VLMs without end-to-end retraining. We evaluate CoRGI on the VCR benchmark and find that it improves reasoning performance on two representative open-source VLM backbones, Qwen-2.5VL and LLaVA-1.6. Ablation studies confirm the contribution of each step in the verification module, and human evaluations suggest that CoRGI leads to more factual and helpful explanations. We also examine alternative designs for the visual verification step and discuss potential limitations of post-hoc verification frameworks. These findings highlight the importance of grounding intermediate reasoning steps in visual evidence to enhance the robustness of multimodal reasoning.
Authors: Zeqi Zheng, Zizheng Zhu, Yingchao Yu, Yanchen Huang, Changze Lv, Junfeng Tang, Zhaofei Yu, Yaochu Jin
Abstract: Transformer-based Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) suffer from a great performance gap compared to floating-point Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to the binary nature of spike trains. Recent efforts have introduced deep-level feedback loops to transmit high-level semantic information to narrow this gap. However, these designs often span multiple deep layers, resulting in costly feature transformations, higher parameter overhead, increased energy consumption, and longer inference latency. To address this issue, we propose Shallow-level Temporal Feedback (STF), a lightweight plug-and-play module for the encoding layer, which consists of Temporal-Spatial Position Embedding (TSPE) and Temporal Feedback (TF).Extensive experiments show that STF consistently improves performance across various Transformer-based SNN backbones on static datasets, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-1K, under different spike timestep settings. Further analysis reveals that STF enhances the diversity of the spike patterns, which is key to performance gain. Moreover, evaluations on adversarial robustness and temporal sensitivity confirm that STF outperforms direct coding and its variants, highlighting its potential as a new spike encoding scheme for static scenarios. Our code will be released upon acceptance.
Authors: Sunjae Yoon, Gwanhyeong Koo, Younghwan Lee, Ji Woo Hong, Chang D. Yoo
Abstract: 3D animation aims to generate a 3D animated video from an input image and a target 3D motion sequence. Recent advances in image-to-3D models enable the creation of animations directly from user-hand drawings. Distinguished from conventional 3D animation, drawing-based 3D animation is crucial to preserve artist's unique style properties, such as rough contours and distinct stroke patterns. However, recent methods still exhibit quality deterioration in style properties, especially under occlusions caused by overlapping body parts, leading to contour flickering and stroke blurring. This occurs due to a `stylization pose gap' between training and inference in stylization networks designed to preserve drawing styles in drawing-based 3D animation systems. The stylization pose gap denotes that input target poses used to train the stylization network are always in occlusion-free poses, while target poses encountered in an inference include diverse occlusions under dynamic motions. To this end, we propose Occlusion-robust Stylization Framework (OSF) for drawing-based 3D animation. We found that while employing object's edge can be effective input prior for guiding stylization, it becomes notably inaccurate when occlusions occur at inference. Thus, our proposed OSF provides occlusion-robust edge guidance for stylization network using optical flow, ensuring a consistent stylization even under occlusions. Furthermore, OSF operates in a single run instead of the previous two-stage method, achieving 2.4x faster inference and 2.1x less memory.
Authors: Sumin Seo, In Kyu Lee, Hyun-Woo Kim, Jaesik Min, Chung-Hwan Jung
Abstract: Coronary stenosis is a major risk factor for ischemic heart events leading to increased mortality, and medical treatments for this condition require meticulous, labor-intensive analysis. Coronary angiography provides critical visual cues for assessing stenosis, supporting clinicians in making informed decisions for diagnosis and treatment. Recent advances in deep learning have shown great potential for automated localization and severity measurement of stenosis. In real-world scenarios, however, the success of these competent approaches is often hindered by challenges such as limited labeled data and class imbalance. In this study, we propose a novel data augmentation approach that uses an inpainting method based on a diffusion model to generate realistic lesions, allowing user-guided control of severity. Extensive evaluation on lesion detection and severity classification across various synthetic dataset sizes shows superior performance of our method on both a large-scale in-house dataset and a public coronary angiography dataset. Furthermore, our approach maintains high detection and classification performance even when trained with limited data, highlighting its clinical importance in improving the assessment of severity of stenosis and optimizing data utilization for more reliable decision support.
Authors: Jack A. Kilgallen, Barak A. Pearlmutter, Jeffrey Mark Siskind
Abstract: In neural-decoding studies, recordings of participants' responses to stimuli are used to train models. In recent years, there has been an explosion of publications detailing applications of innovations from deep-learning research to neural-decoding studies. The data-hungry models used in these experiments have resulted in a demand for increasingly large datasets. Consequently, in some studies, the same stimuli are presented multiple times to each participant to increase the number of trials available for use in model training. However, when a decoding model is trained and subsequently evaluated on responses to the same stimuli, stimulus identity becomes a confounder for accuracy. We term this the repeated-stimulus confound. We identify a susceptible dataset, and 16 publications which report model performance based on evaluation procedures affected by the confound. We conducted experiments using models from the affected studies to investigate the likely extent to which results in the literature have been misreported. Our findings suggest that the decoding accuracies of these models were overestimated by between 4.46-7.42%. Our analysis also indicates that per 1% increase in accuracy under the confound, the magnitude of the overestimation increases by 0.26%. The confound not only results in optimistic estimates of decoding performance, but undermines the validity of several claims made within the affected publications. We conducted further experiments to investigate the implications of the confound in alternative contexts. We found that the same methodology used within the affected studies could also be used to justify an array of pseudoscientific claims, such as the existence of extrasensory perception.
Authors: Wenxuan Wang, Zizhan Ma, Meidan Ding, Shiyi Zheng, Shengyuan Liu, Jie Liu, Jiaming Ji, Wenting Chen, Xiang Li, Linlin Shen, Yixuan Yuan
Abstract: The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in medicine has enabled impressive capabilities, yet a critical gap remains in their ability to perform systematic, transparent, and verifiable reasoning, a cornerstone of clinical practice. This has catalyzed a shift from single-step answer generation to the development of LLMs explicitly designed for medical reasoning. This paper provides the first systematic review of this emerging field. We propose a taxonomy of reasoning enhancement techniques, categorized into training-time strategies (e.g., supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning) and test-time mechanisms (e.g., prompt engineering, multi-agent systems). We analyze how these techniques are applied across different data modalities (text, image, code) and in key clinical applications such as diagnosis, education, and treatment planning. Furthermore, we survey the evolution of evaluation benchmarks from simple accuracy metrics to sophisticated assessments of reasoning quality and visual interpretability. Based on an analysis of 60 seminal studies from 2022-2025, we conclude by identifying critical challenges, including the faithfulness-plausibility gap and the need for native multimodal reasoning, and outlining future directions toward building efficient, robust, and sociotechnically responsible medical AI.
Authors: Yiming Wu, Huan Wang, Zhenghao Chen, Jianxin Pang, Dong Xu
Abstract: Diffusion Policies have significantly advanced robotic manipulation tasks via imitation learning, but their application on resource-constrained mobile platforms remains challenging due to computational inefficiency and extensive memory footprint. In this paper, we propose LightDP, a novel framework specifically designed to accelerate Diffusion Policies for real-time deployment on mobile devices. LightDP addresses the computational bottleneck through two core strategies: network compression of the denoising modules and reduction of the required sampling steps. We first conduct an extensive computational analysis on existing Diffusion Policy architectures, identifying the denoising network as the primary contributor to latency. To overcome performance degradation typically associated with conventional pruning methods, we introduce a unified pruning and retraining pipeline, optimizing the model's post-pruning recoverability explicitly. Furthermore, we combine pruning techniques with consistency distillation to effectively reduce sampling steps while maintaining action prediction accuracy. Experimental evaluations on the standard datasets, \ie, PushT, Robomimic, CALVIN, and LIBERO, demonstrate that LightDP achieves real-time action prediction on mobile devices with competitive performance, marking an important step toward practical deployment of diffusion-based policies in resource-limited environments. Extensive real-world experiments also show the proposed LightDP can achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art Diffusion Policies.
Authors: Yuxiang Wan, Ryan Devera, Wenjie Zhang, Ju Sun
Abstract: We present FMPlug, a novel plug-in framework that enhances foundation flow-matching (FM) priors for solving ill-posed inverse problems. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on domain-specific or untrained priors, FMPlug smartly leverages two simple but powerful insights: the similarity between observed and desired objects and the Gaussianity of generative flows. By introducing a time-adaptive warm-up strategy and sharp Gaussianity regularization, FMPlug unlocks the true potential of domain-agnostic foundation models. Our method beats state-of-the-art methods that use foundation FM priors by significant margins, on image super-resolution and Gaussian deblurring.
Authors: Le Wang, Jun Wang, Feng Deng, Chen Zhang, Kun Gai, Di Zhang
Abstract: We present AudioGen-Omni - a unified approach based on multimodal diffusion transformers (MMDit), capable of generating high-fidelity audio, speech, and songs coherently synchronized with the input video. AudioGen-Omni introduces a novel joint training paradigm that seamlessly integrates large-scale video-text-audio corpora, enabling a model capable of generating semantically rich, acoustically diverse audio conditioned on multimodal inputs and adaptable to a wide range of audio generation tasks. AudioGen-Omni employs a unified lyrics-transcription encoder that encodes graphemes and phonemes from both sung and spoken inputs into dense frame-level representations. Dense frame-level representations are fused using an AdaLN-based joint attention mechanism enhanced with phase-aligned anisotropic positional infusion (PAAPI), wherein RoPE is selectively applied to temporally structured modalities to ensure precise and robust cross-modal alignment. By unfreezing all modalities and masking missing inputs, AudioGen-Omni mitigates the semantic constraints of text-frozen paradigms, enabling effective cross-modal conditioning. This joint training approach enhances audio quality, semantic alignment, and lip-sync accuracy, while also achieving state-of-the-art results on Text-to-Audio/Speech/Song tasks. With an inference time of 1.91 seconds for 8 seconds of audio, it offers substantial improvements in both efficiency and generality.
Authors: Peng Hu, Wenxuan Zhang
Abstract: The growing density of satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) presents serious challenges to space sustainability, primarily due to the increased risk of in-orbit collisions. Traditional ground-based tracking systems are constrained by latency and coverage limitations, underscoring the need for onboard, vision-based space object detection (SOD) capabilities. In this paper, we propose a novel satellite clustering framework that enables the collaborative execution of deep learning (DL)-based SOD tasks across multiple satellites. To support this approach, we construct a high-fidelity dataset simulating imaging scenarios for clustered satellite formations. A distance-aware viewpoint selection strategy is introduced to optimize detection performance, and recent DL models are used for evaluation. Experimental results show that the clustering-based method achieves competitive detection accuracy compared to single-satellite and existing approaches, while maintaining a low size, weight, and power (SWaP) footprint. These findings underscore the potential of distributed, AI-enabled in-orbit systems to enhance space situational awareness and contribute to long-term space sustainability.
Authors: Kien T. Pham, Yingqing He, Yazhou Xing, Qifeng Chen, Long Chen
Abstract: Audio-driven video generation aims to synthesize realistic videos that align with input audio recordings, akin to the human ability to visualize scenes from auditory input. However, existing approaches predominantly focus on exploring semantic information, such as the classes of sounding sources present in the audio, limiting their ability to generate videos with accurate content and spatial composition. In contrast, we humans can not only naturally identify the semantic categories of sounding sources but also determine their deeply encoded spatial attributes, including locations and movement directions. This useful information can be elucidated by considering specific spatial indicators derived from the inherent physical properties of sound, such as loudness or frequency. As prior methods largely ignore this factor, we present SpA2V, the first framework explicitly exploits these spatial auditory cues from audios to generate videos with high semantic and spatial correspondence. SpA2V decomposes the generation process into two stages: 1) Audio-guided Video Planning: We meticulously adapt a state-of-the-art MLLM for a novel task of harnessing spatial and semantic cues from input audio to construct Video Scene Layouts (VSLs). This serves as an intermediate representation to bridge the gap between the audio and video modalities. 2) Layout-grounded Video Generation: We develop an efficient and effective approach to seamlessly integrate VSLs as conditional guidance into pre-trained diffusion models, enabling VSL-grounded video generation in a training-free manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SpA2V excels in generating realistic videos with semantic and spatial alignment to the input audios.
Authors: Xinpeng Zhao, Yanwei Zheng, Chuanlin Lan, Xiaowei Zhang, Bowen Huang, Jibin Yang, Dongxiao Yu
Abstract: Weakly supervised text-based person retrieval seeks to retrieve images of a target person using textual descriptions, without relying on identity annotations and is more challenging and practical. The primary challenge is the intra-class differences, encompassing intra-modal feature variations and cross-modal semantic gaps. Prior works have focused on instance-level samples and ignored prototypical features of each person which are intrinsic and invariant. Toward this, we propose a Cross-Modal Prototypical Contrastive Learning (CPCL) method. In practice, the CPCL introduces the CLIP model to weakly supervised text-based person retrieval to map visual and textual instances into a shared latent space. Subsequently, the proposed Prototypical Multi-modal Memory (PMM) module captures associations between heterogeneous modalities of image-text pairs belonging to the same person through the Hybrid Cross-modal Matching (HCM) module in a many-to-many mapping fashion. Moreover, the Outlier Pseudo Label Mining (OPLM) module further distinguishes valuable outlier samples from each modality, enhancing the creation of more reliable clusters by mining implicit relationships between image-text pairs. We conduct extensive experiments on popular benchmarks of weakly supervised text-based person retrieval, which validate the effectiveness, generalizability of CPCL.
Authors: Weijie Lyu, Xueting Li, Abhijit Kundu, Yi-Hsuan Tsai, Ming-Hsuan Yang
Abstract: We introduce Gaga, a framework that reconstructs and segments open-world 3D scenes by leveraging inconsistent 2D masks predicted by zero-shot class-agnostic segmentation models. Contrasted to prior 3D scene segmentation approaches that rely on video object tracking or contrastive learning methods, Gaga utilizes spatial information and effectively associates object masks across diverse camera poses through a novel 3D-aware memory bank. By eliminating the assumption of continuous view changes in training images, Gaga demonstrates robustness to variations in camera poses, particularly beneficial for sparsely sampled images, ensuring precise mask label consistency. Furthermore, Gaga accommodates 2D segmentation masks from diverse sources and demonstrates robust performance with different open-world zero-shot class-agnostic segmentation models, significantly enhancing its versatility. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that Gaga performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods, emphasizing its potential for real-world applications such as 3D scene understanding and manipulation.
Authors: Chunlin Qiu, Ang Li, Yiheng Duan, Shenyi Zhang, Yuanjie Zhang, Lingchen Zhao, Qian Wang
Abstract: Transfer-based attacks craft adversarial examples on white-box surrogate models and directly deploy them against black-box target models, offering model-agnostic and query-free threat scenarios. While flatness-enhanced methods have recently emerged to improve transferability by enhancing the loss surface flatness of adversarial examples, their divergent flatness definitions and heuristic attack designs suffer from unexamined optimization limitations and missing theoretical foundation, thus constraining their effectiveness and efficiency. This work exposes the severely imbalanced exploitation-exploration dynamics in flatness optimization, establishing the first theoretical foundation for flatness-based transferability and proposing a principled framework to overcome these optimization pitfalls. Specifically, we systematically unify fragmented flatness definitions across existing methods, revealing their imbalanced optimization limitations in over-exploration of sensitivity peaks or over-exploitation of local plateaus. To resolve these issues, we rigorously formalize average-case flatness and transferability gaps, proving that enhancing zeroth-order average-case flatness minimizes cross-model discrepancies. Building on this theory, we design a Maximin Expected Flatness (MEF) attack that enhances zeroth-order average-case flatness while balancing flatness exploration and exploitation. Extensive evaluations across 22 models and 24 current transfer-based attacks demonstrate MEF's superiority: it surpasses the state-of-the-art PGN attack by 4% in attack success rate at half the computational cost and achieves 8% higher success rate under the same budget. When combined with input augmentation, MEF attains 15% additional gains against defense-equipped models, establishing new robustness benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/SignedQiu/MEFAttack.
Authors: Da Li, Guoqiang Zhao, Chen Yao, Kaiqiang Zhu, Houjun Sun, Jiacheng Bao, Maokun Li
Abstract: Multi-aspect multi-baseline SAR 3D imaging is a critical remote sensing technique, promising in urban mapping and monitoring. However, sparse observation due to constrained flight trajectories degrade imaging quality, particularly for anisotropic small targets like vehicles and aircraft. In the past, compressive sensing (CS) was the mainstream approach for sparse 3D SAR reconstruction. More recently, deep learning (DL) has emerged as a powerful alternative, markedly boosting reconstruction quality and efficiency through strong data-driven representations capabilities and fast inference characteristics. However, existing DL methods typically train deep neural networks (DNNs) using only high-resolution radar images. This unimodal learning paradigm precludes the incorporation of complementary information from other data sources, thereby limiting potential improvements in reconstruction performance. In this paper, we introduce cross-modal learning and propose a Cross-Modal 3D-SAR Reconstruction Network (CMAR-Net) that enhances sparse 3D SAR reconstruction by fusing heterogeneous information. Leveraging cross-modal supervision from 2D optical images and error propagation guaranteed by differentiable rendering, CMAR-Net achieves efficient training and reconstructs highly sparse-aspect multi-baseline SAR image into visually structured and accurate 3D images, particularly for vehicle targets. Trained solely on simulated data, CMAR-Net exhibits strong generalization across extensive real-world evaluations on parking lot measurements containing numerous civilian vehicles, outperforming state-of-the-art CS and DL methods in structural accuracy. Our work highlights the potential of cross-modal learning for 3D SAR reconstruction and introduces a novel framework for radar imaging research.
Authors: Quanfeng Lu, Wenqi Shao, Zitao Liu, Lingxiao Du, Fanqing Meng, Boxuan Li, Botong Chen, Siyuan Huang, Kaipeng Zhang, Ping Luo
Abstract: Autonomous Graphical User Interface (GUI) navigation agents can enhance user experience in communication, entertainment, and productivity by streamlining workflows and reducing manual intervention. However, prior GUI agents often trained with datasets comprising tasks that can be completed within a single app, leading to poor performance in cross-app navigation. To address this problem, we present GUIOdyssey, a comprehensive dataset for cross-app mobile GUI navigation. GUIOdyssey comprises 8,334 episodes with an average of 15.3 steps per episode, covering 6 mobile devices, 212 distinct apps, and 1,357 app combinations. Each step is enriched with detailed semantic reasoning annotations, which aid the model in building cognitive processes and enhancing its reasoning abilities for complex cross-app tasks. Building on GUIOdyssey, we develop OdysseyAgent, an exploratory multimodal agent for long-step cross-app navigation equipped with a history resampler module that efficiently attends to historical screenshot tokens, balancing performance and inference speed. Extensive experiments conducted in both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios validate the effectiveness of our approach. Moreover, we demonstrate that historial information involving actions, screenshots and context in our dataset can significantly enhances OdysseyAgent's performance on complex cross-app tasks.
Authors: Dazhao Du, Lingyu Si, Fanjiang Xu, Jianwei Niu, Fuchun Sun
Abstract: Due to the selective absorption and scattering of light by diverse aquatic media, underwater images usually suffer from various visual degradations. Existing underwater image enhancement (UIE) approaches that combine underwater physical imaging models with neural networks often fail to accurately estimate imaging model parameters such as depth and veiling light, resulting in poor performance in certain scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a physical model-guided framework for jointly training a Deep Degradation Model (DDM) with any advanced UIE model. DDM includes three well-designed sub-networks to accurately estimate various imaging parameters: a veiling light estimation sub-network, a factors estimation sub-network, and a depth estimation sub-network. Based on the estimated parameters and the underwater physical imaging model, we impose physical constraints on the enhancement process by modeling the relationship between underwater images and desired clean images, i.e., outputs of the UIE model. Moreover, while our framework is compatible with any UIE model, we design a simple yet effective fully convolutional UIE model, termed UIEConv. UIEConv utilizes both global and local features for image enhancement through a dual-branch structure. UIEConv trained within our framework achieves remarkable enhancement results across diverse underwater scenes. Furthermore, as a byproduct of UIE, the trained depth estimation sub-network enables accurate underwater scene depth estimation. Extensive experiments conducted in various real underwater imaging scenarios, including deep-sea environments with artificial light sources, validate the effectiveness of our framework and the UIEConv model.
Authors: Lipeng Gu, Mingqiang Wei, Xuefeng Yan, Dingkun Zhu, Wei Zhao, Haoran Xie
Abstract: Multi-modal 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) typically necessitates extensive computational costs of deep neural networks (DNNs) to extract multi-modal representations. In this paper, we propose an intriguing question: May we learn from multiple modalities only during training to avoid multi-modal input in the inference phase? To answer it, we propose \textbf{YOLOO}, a novel multi-modal 3D MOT paradigm: You Only Learn from Others Once. YOLOO empowers the point cloud encoder to learn a unified tri-modal representation (UTR) from point clouds and other modalities, such as images and textual cues, all at once. Leveraging this UTR, YOLOO achieves efficient tracking solely using the point cloud encoder without compromising its performance, fundamentally obviating the need for computationally intensive DNNs. Specifically, YOLOO includes two core components: a unified tri-modal encoder (UTEnc) and a flexible geometric constraint (F-GC) module. UTEnc integrates a point cloud encoder with image and text encoders adapted from pre-trained CLIP. It seamlessly fuses point cloud information with rich visual-textual knowledge from CLIP into the point cloud encoder, yielding highly discriminative UTRs that facilitate the association between trajectories and detections. Additionally, F-GC filters out mismatched associations with similar representations but significant positional discrepancies. It further enhances the robustness of UTRs without requiring any scene-specific tuning, addressing a key limitation of customized geometric constraints (e.g., 3D IoU). Lastly, high-quality 3D trajectories are generated by a traditional data association component. By integrating these advancements into a multi-modal 3D MOT scheme, our YOLOO achieves substantial gains in both robustness and efficiency.
Authors: Shih-Chieh Su
Abstract: We introduce AttnMod, a training-free technique that modulates cross-attention in pre-trained diffusion models to generate novel, unpromptable art styles. The method is inspired by how a human artist might reinterpret a generated image, for example by emphasizing certain features, dispersing color, twisting silhouettes, or materializing unseen elements. AttnMod simulates this intent by altering how the text prompt conditions the image through attention during denoising. These targeted modulations enable diverse stylistic transformations without changing the prompt or retraining the model, and they expand the expressive capacity of text-to-image generation.
Authors: Yichen Shen, Yijin Li, Shuo Chen, Guanglin Li, Zhaoyang Huang, Hujun Bao, Zhaopeng Cui, Guofeng Zhang
Abstract: Event cameras, known for their high temporal resolution and ability to capture asynchronous changes, have gained significant attention for their potential in feature tracking, especially in challenging conditions. However, event cameras lack the fine-grained texture information that conventional cameras provide, leading to error accumulation in tracking. To address this, we propose a novel framework, BlinkTrack, which integrates event data with grayscale images for high-frequency feature tracking. Our method extends the traditional Kalman filter into a learning-based framework, utilizing differentiable Kalman filters in both event and image branches. This approach improves single-modality tracking and effectively solves the data association and fusion from asynchronous event and image data. We also introduce new synthetic and augmented datasets to better evaluate our model. Experimental results indicate that BlinkTrack significantly outperforms existing methods, exceeding 80 FPS with multi-modality data and 100 FPS with preprocessed event data. Codes and dataset are available at https://github.com/ColieShen/BlinkTrack.
Authors: Yuanhan Zhang, Jinming Wu, Wei Li, Bo Li, Zejun Ma, Ziwei Liu, Chunyuan Li
Abstract: The development of video large multimodal models (LMMs) has been hindered by the difficulty of curating large amounts of high-quality raw data from the web. To address this, we propose an alternative approach by creating a high-quality synthetic dataset specifically for video instruction-following, namely LLaVA-Video-178K. This dataset includes key tasks such as detailed captioning, open-ended question-answering (QA), and multiple-choice QA. By training on this dataset, in combination with existing visual instruction tuning data, we introduce LLaVA-Video, a new video LMM. Our experiments demonstrate that LLaVA-Video achieves strong performance across various video benchmarks, highlighting the effectiveness of our dataset. We plan to release the dataset, its generation pipeline, and the model checkpoints.
Authors: Chen Ziwen, Hao Tan, Kai Zhang, Sai Bi, Fujun Luan, Yicong Hong, Li Fuxin, Zexiang Xu
Abstract: We propose Long-LRM, a feed-forward 3D Gaussian reconstruction model for instant, high-resolution, 360{\deg} wide-coverage, scene-level reconstruction. Specifically, it takes in 32 input images at a resolution of 960x540 and produces the Gaussian reconstruction in just 1 second on a single A100 GPU. To handle the long sequence of 250K tokens brought by the large input size, Long-LRM features a mixture of the recent Mamba2 blocks and the classical transformer blocks, enhanced by a light-weight token merging module and Gaussian pruning steps that balance between quality and efficiency. We evaluate Long-LRM on the large-scale DL3DV benchmark and Tanks&Temples, demonstrating reconstruction quality comparable to the optimization-based methods while achieving an 800x speedup w.r.t. the optimization-based approaches and an input size at least 60x larger than the previous feed-forward approaches. We conduct extensive ablation studies on our model design choices for both rendering quality and computation efficiency. We also explore Long-LRM's compatibility with other Gaussian variants such as 2D GS, which enhances Long-LRM's ability in geometry reconstruction. Project page: https://arthurhero.github.io/projects/llrm
Authors: Xiujin Zhu, Chee-Onn Chow, Joon Huang Chuah
Abstract: Image shadow removal is a common low-level vision problem. Shadows cause sudden brightness changes in some areas, which can affect the accuracy of downstream tasks. Currently, Transformer-based shadow removal methods improve computational efficiency by using a window mechanism. However, this approach reduces the effective receptive field and weakens the ability to model long-range dependencies in shadow images. Recently, Mamba has achieved significant success in computer vision by modeling long-sequence information globally with linear complexity. However, when applied to shadow removal, its original scanning mechanism overlooks the semantic continuity along shadow boundaries, and the coherence within each region. To solve this issue, we propose a new boundary-region selective scanning mechanism that scans shadow, boundary, and non-shadow regions separately, making pixels of the same type closer in the sequence. This increases semantic continuity and helps the model understand local details better. Incorporating this idea, we design the first Mamba-based lightweight shadow removal model, called ShadowMamba. It uses a hierarchical combination U-Net structure, which effectively reduces the number of parameters and computational complexity. Shallow layers rely on our boundary-region selective scanning to capture local details, while deeper layers use global cross-scanning to learn global brightness features. Extensive experiments show that ShadowMamba outperforms current state-of-the-art models on ISTD+, ISTD, and SRD datasets, and it also requires fewer parameters and less computational cost. (Code will be made available upon paper acceptance.)
Authors: Dengke Zhang, Fagui Liu, Quan Tang
Abstract: Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation aims to assign semantic labels to each pixel without being constrained by a predefined set of categories. While Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) excels in zero-shot classification, it struggles to align image patches with category embeddings because of its incoherent patch correlations. This study reveals that inter-class correlations are the main reason for impairing CLIP's segmentation performance. Accordingly, we propose CorrCLIP, which reconstructs the scope and value of patch correlations. Specifically, CorrCLIP leverages the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to define the scope of patch interactions, reducing inter-class correlations. To mitigate the problem that SAM-generated masks may contain patches belonging to different classes, CorrCLIP incorporates self-supervised models to compute coherent similarity values, suppressing the weight of inter-class correlations. Additionally, we introduce two additional branches to strengthen patch features' spatial details and semantic representation. Finally, we update segmentation maps with SAM-generated masks to improve spatial consistency. Based on the improvement across patch correlations, feature representations, and segmentation maps, CorrCLIP achieves superior performance across eight benchmarks. Codes are available at: https://github.com/zdk258/CorrCLIP.
Authors: Teng Zhou, Xiaoyu Zhang, Yongchuan Tang
Abstract: Panoramic Image Generation (PIG) aims to create coherent images of arbitrary lengths. Most existing methods fall in the joint diffusion paradigm, but their complex and heuristic crop connection designs often limit their ability to achieve multilevel coherence. By deconstructing this challenge into its core components, we find it naturally aligns with next-token prediction, leading us to adopt an autoregressive (AR) paradigm for PIG modeling. However, existing visual AR (VAR) models are limited to fixed-size generation, lacking the capability to produce panoramic images. In this paper, we propose PanoLlama, a novel framework that achieves endless and coherent panorama generation with the autoregressive paradigm. Our approach develops a training-free strategy that utilizes token redirection to overcome the size limitations of existing VAR models, enabling next-crop prediction in both horizontal and vertical directions. This refreshes the PIG pipeline while achieving SOTA performance in coherence (47.50%), fidelity(28.16%), and aesthetics (15%). Additionally, PanoLlama supports applications other PIG methods cannot achieve, including mask-free layout control, multi-scale and multi-guidance synthesis. To facilitate standardized evaluation, we also establish a dataset with 1,000 prompts spanning 100+ themes, providing a new testing benchmark for PIG research. The code is available at https://github.com/0606zt/PanoLlama.
Authors: Xiaoling Hu, Xiangrui Zeng, Oula Puonti, Juan Eugenio Iglesias, Bruce Fischl, Yael Balbastre
Abstract: Domain randomization through synthesis is a powerful strategy to train networks that are unbiased with respect to the domain of the input images. Randomization allows networks to see a virtually infinite range of intensities and artifacts during training, thereby minimizing overfitting to appearance and maximizing generalization to unseen data. Although powerful, this approach relies on the accurate tuning of a large set of hyperparameters that govern the probabilistic distribution of the synthesized images. Instead of manually tuning these parameters, we introduce Learn2Synth, a novel procedure in which synthesis parameters are learned using a small set of real labeled data. Unlike methods that impose constraints to align synthetic data with real data (e.g., contrastive or adversarial techniques), which risk misaligning the image and its label map, we tune an augmentation engine such that a segmentation network trained on synthetic data has optimal accuracy when applied to real data. This approach allows the training procedure to benefit from real labeled examples, without ever using these real examples to train the segmentation network, which avoids biasing the network towards the properties of the training set. Specifically, we develop parametric and nonparametric strategies to enhance synthetic images in a way that improves the performance of the segmentation network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this learning strategy on synthetic and real-world brain scans. Code is available at: https://github.com/HuXiaoling/Learn2Synth.
Authors: Taekyung Ki, Dongchan Min, Gyeongsu Chae
Abstract: With the rapid advancement of diffusion-based generative models, portrait image animation has achieved remarkable results. However, it still faces challenges in temporally consistent video generation and fast sampling due to its iterative sampling nature. This paper presents FLOAT, an audio-driven talking portrait video generation method based on flow matching generative model. Instead of a pixel-based latent space, we take advantage of a learned orthogonal motion latent space, enabling efficient generation and editing of temporally consistent motion. To achieve this, we introduce a transformer-based vector field predictor with an effective frame-wise conditioning mechanism. Additionally, our method supports speech-driven emotion enhancement, enabling a natural incorporation of expressive motions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art audio-driven talking portrait methods in terms of visual quality, motion fidelity, and efficiency.
Authors: Miroslav Purkrabek, Jiri Matas
Abstract: Human pose estimation methods work well on isolated people but struggle with multiple-bodies-in-proximity scenarios. Previous work has addressed this problem by conditioning pose estimation by detected bounding boxes or keypoints, but overlooked instance masks. We propose to iteratively enforce mutual consistency of bounding boxes, instance masks, and poses. The introduced BBox-Mask-Pose (BMP) method uses three specialized models that improve each other's output in a closed loop. All models are adapted for mutual conditioning, which improves robustness in multi-body scenes. MaskPose, a new mask-conditioned pose estimation model, is the best among top-down approaches on OCHuman. BBox-Mask-Pose pushes SOTA on OCHuman dataset in all three tasks - detection, instance segmentation, and pose estimation. It also achieves SOTA performance on COCO pose estimation. The method is especially good in scenes with large instances overlap, where it improves detection by 39% over the baseline detector. With small specialized models and faster runtime, BMP is an effective alternative to large human-centered foundational models. Code and models are available on https://MiraPurkrabek.github.io/BBox-Mask-Pose.
Authors: Sarthak Kumar Maharana, Baoming Zhang, Leonid Karlinsky, Rogerio Feris, Yunhui Guo
Abstract: Although open-vocabulary classification models like Contrastive Language Image Pretraining (CLIP) have demonstrated strong zero-shot learning capabilities, their robustness to common image corruptions remains poorly understood. Through extensive experiments, we show that zero-shot CLIP lacks robustness to common image corruptions during test-time, necessitating the adaptation of CLIP to unlabeled corrupted images using test-time adaptation (TTA). However, we found that existing TTA methods have severe limitations in adapting CLIP due to their unimodal nature. To address these limitations, we propose $\texttt{BATCLIP}$, a bimodal $\textbf{online}$ TTA method designed to improve CLIP's robustness to common image corruptions. The key insight of our approach is not only to adapt the visual encoders for improving image features but also to strengthen the alignment between image and text features by promoting a stronger association between the image class prototype, computed using pseudo-labels, and the corresponding text feature. We evaluate our approach on benchmark image corruption datasets and achieve state-of-the-art results in online TTA for CLIP. Furthermore, we evaluate our proposed TTA approach on various domain generalization datasets to demonstrate its generalization capabilities. Our code is available at https://github.com/sarthaxxxxx/BATCLIP
Authors: Ruoyu Wang, Huayang Huang, Ye Zhu, Olga Russakovsky, Yu Wu
Abstract: In this work, we introduce NoiseQuery as a novel method for enhanced noise initialization in versatile goal-driven text-to-image (T2I) generation. Specifically, we propose to leverage an aligned Gaussian noise as implicit guidance to complement explicit user-defined inputs, such as text prompts, for better generation quality and controllability. Unlike existing noise optimization methods designed for specific models, our approach is grounded in a fundamental examination of the generic finite-step noise scheduler design in diffusion formulation, allowing better generalization across different diffusion-based architectures in a tuning-free manner. This model-agnostic nature allows us to construct a reusable noise library compatible with multiple T2I models and enhancement techniques, serving as a foundational layer for more effective generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NoiseQuery enables fine-grained control and yields significant performance boosts not only over high-level semantics but also over low-level visual attributes, which are typically difficult to specify through text alone, with seamless integration into current workflows with minimal computational overhead.
Authors: Mark Endo, Xiaohan Wang, Serena Yeung-Levy
Abstract: Recent works on accelerating Vision-Language Models achieve strong performance across a variety of vision-language tasks despite highly compressing visual information. In this work, we examine the popular acceleration approach of early pruning of visual tokens inside the language model. Surprisingly, we find that while strong performance is maintained across many tasks, it exhibits drastically different behavior for a subset of vision-centric tasks such as localization. Upon further investigation, we uncover a core issue with the acceleration approach where most tokens towards the top of the image are pruned away. Yet, on many benchmarks aiming to evaluate vision-centric capabilities, strong performance persists with the flawed pruning strategy, highlighting these benchmarks' limited ability to assess fine-grained visual capabilities. Based on these findings, we propose FEATHER (Fast and Effective Acceleration wiTH Ensemble cRiteria), a straightforward approach that resolves the discovered early-layer pruning issue and further enhances the preservation of relevant tokens via multistage pruning with early uniform sampling to ensure broad image coverage. With comparable computational savings, we find that FEATHER achieves more than 5x performance improvement on the vision-centric localization benchmarks compared to the original acceleration approach.
Authors: Weijie Lyu, Yi Zhou, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Zhixin Shu
Abstract: We present FaceLift, a novel feed-forward approach for generalizable high-quality 360-degree 3D head reconstruction from a single image. Our pipeline first employs a multi-view latent diffusion model to generate consistent side and back views from a single facial input, which then feeds into a transformer-based reconstructor that produces a comprehensive 3D Gaussian splats representation. Previous methods for monocular 3D face reconstruction often lack full view coverage or view consistency due to insufficient multi-view supervision. We address this by creating a high-quality synthetic head dataset that enables consistent supervision across viewpoints. To bridge the domain gap between synthetic training data and real-world images, we propose a simple yet effective technique that ensures the view generation process maintains fidelity to the input by learning to reconstruct the input image alongside the view generation. Despite being trained exclusively on synthetic data, our method demonstrates remarkable generalization to real-world images. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations, we show that FaceLift outperforms state-of-the-art 3D face reconstruction methods on identity preservation, detail recovery, and rendering quality.
Authors: Sangyun Chung, Youngjoon Yu, Se Yeon Kim, Youngchae Chee, Yong Man Ro
Abstract: Large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved notable progress in aligning visual inputs with text. However, their ability to deeply understand the unique physical properties of non-RGB vision sensor images remains limited. In this paper, we revisit and analyze these limitations and introduce a novel, cost-efficient paradigm that significantly advances sensor image understanding-without requiring extensive training data or any modifications to the existing VLM architectures. Specifically, we propose Sensor-Aware Attributes Fine-Tuning (SAFT) with the Diverse Negative Attributes (DNA) optimization, which leverages minimal sensor-specific data to enable robust learning of non-RGB characteristics and overcome RGB-centric biases inherent in current VLMs. In addition, we present VS-TDX-the first comprehensive, public benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate VLMs' sensor-specific understanding across diverse and realistic scenarios. Through extensive experiments on VLMs and various sensor modalities, we validate that our method consistently delivers superior performance and generalization under resource-constrained and architecture-invariant settings. Our approach provides a practical advance towards scalable deployment of VLMs in increasingly sensor-diverse real-world environments.
Authors: Jiwen Yu, Yiran Qin, Xintao Wang, Pengfei Wan, Di Zhang, Xihui Liu
Abstract: Generative videos have the potential to revolutionize game development by autonomously creating new content. In this paper, we present GameFactory, a framework for action-controlled scene-generalizable game video generation. We first address the fundamental challenge of action controllability by introducing GF-Minecraft, an action-annotated game video dataset without human bias, and developing an action control module that enables precise control over both keyboard and mouse inputs. We further extend to support autoregressive generation for unlimited-length interactive videos. More importantly, GameFactory tackles the critical challenge of scene-generalizable action control, which most existing methods fail to address. To enable the creation of entirely new and diverse games beyond fixed styles and scenes, we leverage the open-domain generative priors from pre-trained video diffusion models. To bridge the domain gap between open-domain priors and small-scale game datasets, we propose a multi-phase training strategy with a domain adapter that decouples game style learning from action control. This decoupling ensures that action control learning is no longer bound to specific game styles, thereby achieving scene-generalizable action control. Experimental results demonstrate that GameFactory effectively generates open-domain action-controllable game videos, representing a significant step forward in AI-driven game generation.
Authors: Jinjiang You, Hewei Wang, Yijie Li, Mingxiao Huo, Long Van Tran Ha, Mingyuan Ma, Jinfeng Xu, Jiayi Zhang, Puzhen Wu, Shubham Garg, Wei Pu
Abstract: Calibrating large-scale camera arrays, such as those in dome-based setups, is time-intensive and typically requires dedicated captures of known patterns. While extrinsics in such arrays are fixed due to the physical setup, intrinsics often vary across sessions due to factors like lens adjustments or temperature changes. In this paper, we propose a dense-feature-driven multi-frame calibration method that refines intrinsics directly from scene data, eliminating the necessity for additional calibration captures. Our approach enhances traditional Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipelines by introducing an extrinsics regularization term to progressively align estimated extrinsics with ground-truth values, a dense feature reprojection term to reduce keypoint errors by minimizing reprojection loss in the feature space, and an intrinsics variance term for joint optimization across multiple frames. Experiments on the Multiface dataset show that our method achieves nearly the same precision as dedicated calibration processes, and significantly enhances intrinsics and 3D reconstruction accuracy. Fully compatible with existing SfM pipelines, our method provides an efficient and practical plug-and-play solution for large-scale camera setups. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/YJJfish/Multi-Cali-Anything
Authors: Haowen Bai, Jiangshe Zhang, Zixiang Zhao, Lilun Deng, Yukun Cui, Shuang Xu
Abstract: Multi-exposure image fusion (MEF) synthesizes multiple, differently exposed images of the same scene into a single, well-exposed composite. Retinex theory, which separates image illumination from scene reflectance, provides a natural framework to ensure consistent scene representation and effective information fusion across varied exposure levels. However, the conventional pixel-wise multiplication of illumination and reflectance inadequately models the glare effect induced by overexposure. To address this limitation, we introduce an unsupervised and controllable method termed Retinex-MEF. Specifically, our method decomposes multi-exposure images into separate illumination components with a shared reflectance component, and effectively models the glare induced by overexposure. The shared reflectance is learned via a bidirectional loss, which enables our approach to effectively mitigate the glare effect. Furthermore, we introduce a controllable exposure fusion criterion, enabling global exposure adjustments while preserving contrast, thus overcoming the constraints of a fixed exposure level. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets, including underexposure-overexposure fusion, exposure controlled fusion, and homogeneous extreme exposure fusion, demonstrate the effective decomposition and flexible fusion capability of our model. The code is available at https://github.com/HaowenBai/Retinex-MEF
Authors: Yi Wang, Zhitong Xiong, Chenying Liu, Adam J. Stewart, Thomas Dujardin, Nikolaos Ioannis Bountos, Angelos Zavras, Franziska Gerken, Ioannis Papoutsis, Laura Leal-Taix\'e, Xiao Xiang Zhu
Abstract: Advances in Earth observation (EO) foundation models have unlocked the potential of big satellite data to learn generic representations from space, benefiting a wide range of downstream applications crucial to our planet. However, most existing efforts remain limited to fixed spectral sensors, focus solely on the Earth's surface, and overlook valuable metadata beyond imagery. In this work, we take a step towards next-generation EO foundation models with three key components: 1) Copernicus-Pretrain, a massive-scale pretraining dataset that integrates 18.7M aligned images from all major Copernicus Sentinel missions, spanning from the Earth's surface to its atmosphere; 2) Copernicus-FM, a unified foundation model capable of processing any spectral or non-spectral sensor modality using extended dynamic hypernetworks and flexible metadata encoding; and 3) Copernicus-Bench, a systematic evaluation benchmark with 15 hierarchical downstream tasks ranging from preprocessing to specialized applications for each Sentinel mission. Our dataset, model, and benchmark greatly improve the scalability, versatility, and multimodal adaptability of EO foundation models, while also creating new opportunities to connect EO, weather, and climate research. Codes, datasets and models are available at https://github.com/zhu-xlab/Copernicus-FM.
Authors: Shintaro Shiba, Yoshimitsu Aoki, Guillermo Gallego
Abstract: Event cameras are emerging vision sensors whose noise is challenging to characterize. Existing denoising methods for event cameras are often designed in isolation and thus consider other tasks, such as motion estimation, separately (i.e., sequentially after denoising). However, motion is an intrinsic part of event data, since scene edges cannot be sensed without motion. We propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first method that simultaneously estimates motion in its various forms (e.g., ego-motion, optical flow) and noise. The method is flexible, as it allows replacing the one-step motion estimation of the widely-used Contrast Maximization framework with any other motion estimator, such as deep neural networks. The experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on the E-MLB denoising benchmark and competitive results on the DND21 benchmark, while demonstrating effectiveness across motion estimation and intensity reconstruction tasks. Our approach advances event-data denoising theory and expands practical denoising use-cases via open-source code. Project page: https://github.com/tub-rip/ESMD
Authors: Javier Mu\~noz-Haro, Ruben Tolosana, Ruben Vera-Rodriguez, Aythami Morales, Julian Fierrez
Abstract: Verifying the authenticity of identity documents (IDs) has become a critical challenge for real-life applications such as digital banking, crypto-exchanges, renting, etc. This study focuses on the topic of fake ID detection, covering several limitations in the field. In particular, there are no publicly available data from real IDs for proper research in this area, and most published studies rely on proprietary internal databases that are not available for privacy reasons. In order to advance this critical challenge of real data scarcity that makes it so difficult to advance the technology of machine learning-based fake ID detection, we introduce a new patch-based methodology that trades off privacy and performance, and propose a novel patch-wise approach for privacy-aware fake ID detection: FakeIDet. In our experiments, we explore: i) two levels of anonymization for an ID (i.e., fully- and pseudo-anonymized), and ii) different patch size configurations, varying the amount of sensitive data visible in the patch image. State-of-the-art methods, such as vision transformers and foundation models, are considered as backbones. Our results show that, on an unseen database (DLC-2021), our proposal for fake ID detection achieves 13.91% and 0% EERs at the patch and the whole ID level, showing a good generalization to other databases. In addition to the path-based methodology introduced and the new FakeIDet method based on it, another key contribution of our article is the release of the first publicly available database that contains 48,400 patches from real and fake IDs, called FakeIDet-db, together with the experimental framework.
Authors: Benedikt Blumenstiel, Paolo Fraccaro, Valerio Marsocci, Johannes Jakubik, Stefano Maurogiovanni, Mikolaj Czerkawski, Rocco Sedona, Gabriele Cavallaro, Thomas Brunschwiler, Juan Bernabe-Moreno, Nicolas Long\'ep\'e
Abstract: Large-scale foundation models in Earth Observation can learn versatile, label-efficient representations by leveraging massive amounts of unlabeled data. However, existing public datasets are often limited in scale, geographic coverage, or sensor variety. We introduce TerraMesh, a new globally diverse, multimodal dataset combining optical, synthetic aperture radar, elevation, and land-cover modalities in an Analysis-Ready Data format. TerraMesh includes over 9~million samples with eight spatiotemporal aligned modalities, enabling large-scale pre-training. We provide detailed data processing steps, comprehensive statistics, and empirical evidence demonstrating improved model performance when pre-trained on TerraMesh. The dataset is hosted at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ibm-esa-geospatial/TerraMesh.
URLs: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ibm-esa-geospatial/TerraMesh.
Authors: Aniruddha Bala, Rohit Chowdhury, Rohan Jaiswal, Siddharth Roheda
Abstract: Advancements in diffusion models have enabled effortless image editing via text prompts, raising concerns about image security. Attackers with access to user images can exploit these tools for malicious edits. Recent defenses attempt to protect images by adding a limited noise in the pixel space to disrupt the functioning of diffusion-based editing models. However, the adversarial noise added by previous methods is easily noticeable to the human eye. Moreover, most of these methods are not robust to purification techniques like JPEG compression under a feasible pixel budget. We propose a novel optimization approach that introduces adversarial perturbations directly in the frequency domain by modifying the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients of the input image. By leveraging the JPEG pipeline, our method generates adversarial images that effectively prevent malicious image editing. Extensive experiments across a variety of tasks and datasets demonstrate that our approach introduces fewer visual artifacts while maintaining similar levels of edit protection and robustness to noise purification techniques.
Authors: Keiller Nogueira, Akram Zaytar, Wanli Ma, Ribana Roscher, Ronny H\"ansch, Caleb Robinson, Anthony Ortiz, Simone Nsutezo, Rahul Dodhia, Juan M. Lavista Ferres, Oktay Karaku\c{s}, Paul L. Rosin
Abstract: The increasing accessibility of remotely sensed data and the potential of such data to inform large-scale decision-making has driven the development of deep learning models for many Earth Observation tasks. Traditionally, such models must be trained on large datasets. However, the common assumption that broadly larger datasets lead to better outcomes tends to overlook the complexities of the data distribution, the potential for introducing biases and noise, and the computational resources required for processing and storing vast datasets. Therefore, effective solutions should consider both the quantity and quality of data. In this paper, we propose six novel core-set selection methods for selecting important subsets of samples from remote sensing image segmentation datasets that rely on imagery only, labels only, and a combination of each. We benchmark these approaches against a random-selection baseline on three commonly used land cover classification datasets: DFC2022, Vaihingen, and Potsdam. In each of the datasets, we demonstrate that training on a subset of samples outperforms the random baseline, and some approaches outperform training on all available data. This result shows the importance and potential of data-centric learning for the remote sensing domain. The code is available at https://github.com/keillernogueira/data-centric-rs-classification/.
URLs: https://github.com/keillernogueira/data-centric-rs-classification/.
Authors: Dongbin Zhang, Yunfei Liu, Lijian Lin, Ye Zhu, Yang Li, Minghan Qin, Yu Li, Haoqian Wang
Abstract: Reconstructing a high-quality, animatable 3D human avatar with expressive facial and hand motions from a single image has gained significant attention due to its broad application potential. 3D human avatar reconstruction typically requires multi-view or monocular videos and training on individual IDs, which is both complex and time-consuming. Furthermore, limited by SMPLX's expressiveness, these methods often focus on body motion but struggle with facial expressions. To address these challenges, we first introduce an expressive human model (EHM) to enhance facial expression capabilities and develop an accurate tracking method. Based on this template model, we propose GUAVA, the first framework for fast animatable upper-body 3D Gaussian avatar reconstruction. We leverage inverse texture mapping and projection sampling techniques to infer Ubody (upper-body) Gaussians from a single image. The rendered images are refined through a neural refiner. Experimental results demonstrate that GUAVA significantly outperforms previous methods in rendering quality and offers significant speed improvements, with reconstruction times in the sub-second range (0.1s), and supports real-time animation and rendering.
Authors: Wanjiang Weng, Xiaofeng Tan, Hongsong Wang, Pan Zhou
Abstract: Bilingual text-to-motion generation, which synthesizes 3D human motions from bilingual text inputs, holds immense potential for cross-linguistic applications in gaming, film, and robotics. However, this task faces critical challenges: the absence of bilingual motion-language datasets and the misalignment between text and motion distributions in diffusion models, leading to semantically inconsistent or low-quality motions. To address these challenges, we propose BiHumanML3D, a novel bilingual human motion dataset, which establishes a crucial benchmark for bilingual text-to-motion generation models. Furthermore, we propose a Bilingual Motion Diffusion model (BiMD), which leverages cross-lingual aligned representations to capture semantics, thereby achieving a unified bilingual model. Building upon this, we propose Reward-guided sampling Alignment (ReAlign) method, comprising a step-aware reward model to assess alignment quality during sampling and a reward-guided strategy that directs the diffusion process toward an optimally aligned distribution. This reward model integrates step-aware tokens and combines a text-aligned module for semantic consistency and a motion-aligned module for realism, refining noisy motions at each timestep to balance probability density and alignment. Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves text-motion alignment and motion quality compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. Project page: https://wengwanjiang.github.io/ReAlign-page/.
Authors: Edoardo Bianchi, Antonio Liotta
Abstract: Assessing human skill levels in complex activities is a challenging problem with applications in sports, rehabilitation, and training. In this work, we present SkillFormer, a parameter-efficient architecture for unified multi-view proficiency estimation from egocentric and exocentric videos. Building on the TimeSformer backbone, SkillFormer introduces a CrossViewFusion module that fuses view-specific features using multi-head cross-attention, learnable gating, and adaptive self-calibration. We leverage Low-Rank Adaptation to fine-tune only a small subset of parameters, significantly reducing training costs. In fact, when evaluated on the EgoExo4D dataset, SkillFormer achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in multi-view settings while demonstrating remarkable computational efficiency, using 4.5x fewer parameters and requiring 3.75x fewer training epochs than prior baselines. It excels in multiple structured tasks, confirming the value of multi-view integration for fine-grained skill assessment.
Authors: Shaina Raza, Aravind Narayanan, Vahid Reza Khazaie, Ashmal Vayani, Mukund S. Chettiar, Amandeep Singh, Mubarak Shah, Deval Pandya
Abstract: Large multimodal models (LMMs) have been widely tested on tasks like visual question answering (VQA), image captioning, and grounding, but lack rigorous evaluation for alignment with human-centered (HC) values such as fairness, ethics, and inclusivity. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{HumaniBench}, a novel benchmark of 32,000 real-world image-question pairs and an evaluation suite. Labels are generated via an AI-assisted pipeline and validated by experts. HumaniBench assesses LMMs across seven key alignment principles: fairness, ethics, empathy, inclusivity, reasoning, robustness, and multilinguality, through diverse open-ended and closed-ended VQA tasks. Grounded in AI ethics and real-world needs, these principles provide a holistic lens for societal impact. Benchmarking results on different LMM shows that proprietary models generally lead in reasoning, fairness, and multilinguality, while open-source models excel in robustness and grounding. Most models struggle to balance accuracy with ethical and inclusive behavior. Techniques like Chain-of-Thought prompting and test-time scaling improve alignment. As the first benchmark tailored for HC alignment, HumaniBench offers a rigorous testbed to diagnose limitations, and promote responsible LMM development. All data and code are publicly available for reproducibility. Keywords: HumaniBench, vision-language models, responsible AI benchmark, AI alignment evaluation, AI ethics assessment, fairness in AI models, visual question answering (VQA) benchmark, image captioning evaluation, visual grounding tasks, trustworthy AI models, Chain-of-Thought prompting, test-time scaling, ethical AI development tools.
Authors: Sijie Zhao, Feng Liu, Enzhuo Zhang, Yiqing Guo, Pengfeng Xiao, Lei Bai, Xueliang Zhang, Hao Chen
Abstract: The proliferation of multi-source remote sensing data has propelled the development of deep learning for dense prediction, yet significant challenges in data and task unification persist. Current deep learning architectures for remote sensing are fundamentally rigid. They are engineered for fixed input-output configurations, restricting their adaptability to the heterogeneous spatial, temporal, and spectral dimensions inherent in real-world data. Furthermore, these models neglect the intrinsic correlations among semantic segmentation, binary change detection, and semantic change detection, necessitating the development of distinct models or task-specific decoders. This paradigm is also constrained to a predefined set of output semantic classes, where any change to the classes requires costly retraining. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Spatial-Temporal-Spectral Unified Network (STSUN) for unified modeling. STSUN can adapt to input and output data with arbitrary spatial sizes, temporal lengths, and spectral bands by leveraging their metadata for a unified representation. Moreover, STSUN unifies disparate dense prediction tasks within a single architecture by conditioning the model on trainable task embeddings. Similarly, STSUN facilitates flexible prediction across multiple set of semantic categories by integrating trainable category embeddings as metadata. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets with diverse Spatial-Temporal-Spectral configurations in multiple scenarios demonstrate that a single STSUN model effectively adapts to heterogeneous inputs and outputs, unifying various dense prediction tasks and diverse semantic class predictions. The proposed approach consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting its robustness and generalizability for complex remote sensing applications.
Authors: Samee Arif, Sualeha Farid
Abstract: This paper introduces an end-to-end pipeline for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on Urdu newspapers, addressing challenges posed by complex multi-column layouts, low-resolution scans, and the stylistic variability of the Nastaliq script. Our system comprises four modules: (1) article segmentation, (2) image super-resolution, (3) column segmentation, and (4) text recognition. We fine-tune YOLOv11x for segmentation, achieving 0.963 precision for articles and 0.970 for columns. A SwinIR-based super-resolution model boosts LLM text recognition accuracy by 25-70%. We also introduce the Urdu Newspaper Benchmark (UNB), a manually annotated dataset for Urdu OCR. Using UNB and the OpenITI corpus, we compare traditional CNN+RNN-based OCR models with modern LLMs. Gemini-2.5-Pro achieves the best performance with a WER of 0.133. We further analyze LLM outputs via insertion, deletion, and substitution error breakdowns, as well as character-level confusion analysis. Finally, we show that fine-tuning on just 500 samples yields a 6.13% WER improvement, highlighting the adaptability of LLMs for Urdu OCR.
Authors: Jaeyeon Lee, Dong-Wan Choi
Abstract: Although Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become the standard architecture in computer vision, their massive sizes lead to significant computational overhead. Token compression techniques have attracted considerable attention to address this issue, but they often suffer from severe information loss, requiring extensive additional training to achieve practical performance. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Token Merging (ATM), a novel method that ensures lossless token merging, eliminating the need for fine-tuning while maintaining competitive performance. ATM adaptively reduces tokens across layers and batches by carefully adjusting layer-specific similarity thresholds, thereby preventing the undesirable merging of less similar tokens with respect to each layer. Furthermore, ATM introduces a novel token matching technique that considers not only similarity but also merging sizes, particularly for the final layers, to minimize the information loss incurred from each merging operation. We empirically validate our method across a wide range of pretrained models, demonstrating that ATM not only outperforms all existing training-free methods but also surpasses most training-intensive approaches, even without additional training. Remarkably, training-free ATM achieves over a 30% reduction in FLOPs for the DeiT-T and DeiT-S models without any drop in their original accuracy.
Authors: Zongyan Han, Jiale Cao, Shuo Chen, Tong Wang, Jorma Laaksonen, Rao Muhammad Anwer
Abstract: Open-Vocabulary Segmentation (OVS) has drawn increasing attention for its capacity to generalize segmentation beyond predefined categories. However, existing methods typically predict segmentation masks with simple forward inference, lacking explicit reasoning and interpretability. This makes it challenging for OVS model to distinguish similar categories in open-world settings due to the lack of contextual understanding and discriminative visual cues. To address this limitation, we propose a step-by-step visual reasoning framework for open-vocabulary segmentation, named OpenSeg-R. The proposed OpenSeg-R leverages Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to perform hierarchical visual reasoning before segmentation. Specifically, we generate both generic and image-specific reasoning for each image, forming structured triplets that explain the visual reason for objects in a coarse-to-fine manner. Based on these reasoning steps, we can compose detailed description prompts, and feed them to the segmentor to produce more accurate segmentation masks. To the best of our knowledge, OpenSeg-R is the first framework to introduce explicit step-by-step visual reasoning into OVS. Experimental results demonstrate that OpenSeg-R significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on open-vocabulary semantic segmentation across five benchmark datasets. Moreover, it achieves consistent gains across all metrics on open-vocabulary panoptic segmentation. Qualitative results further highlight the effectiveness of our reasoning-guided framework in improving both segmentation precision and interpretability. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Hanzy1996/OpenSeg-R.
Authors: Weichao Pan, Bohan Xu, Xu Wang, Chengze Lv, Shuoyang Wang, Zhenke Duan, Zhen Tian
Abstract: Fire detection in dynamic environments faces continuous challenges, including the interference of illumination changes, many false detections or missed detections, and it is difficult to achieve both efficiency and accuracy. To address the problem of feature extraction limitation and information loss in the existing YOLO-based models, this study propose You Only Look Once for Fire Detection with Attention-guided Inverted Residual and Dual-pooling Downscale Fusion (YOLO-FireAD) with two core innovations: (1) Attention-guided Inverted Residual Block (AIR) integrates hybrid channel-spatial attention with inverted residuals to adaptively enhance fire features and suppress environmental noise; (2) Dual Pool Downscale Fusion Block (DPDF) preserves multi-scale fire patterns through learnable fusion of max-average pooling outputs, mitigating small-fire detection failures. Extensive evaluation on two public datasets shows the efficient performance of our model. Our proposed model keeps the sum amount of parameters (1.45M, 51.8% lower than YOLOv8n) (4.6G, 43.2% lower than YOLOv8n), and mAP75 is higher than the mainstream real-time object detection models YOLOv8n, YOL-Ov9t, YOLOv10n, YOLO11n, YOLOv12n and other YOLOv8 variants 1.3-5.5%. For more details, please visit our repository: https://github.com/JEFfersusu/YOLO-FireAD
Authors: Lintao Xu, Yinghao Wang, Chaohui Wang
Abstract: Occlusion Boundary Estimation (OBE) identifies boundaries arising from both inter-object occlusions and self-occlusion within individual objects, distinguishing them from ordinary edges and semantic contours to support more accurate scene understanding. This task is closely related to Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE), which infers depth from a single image, as Occlusion Boundaries (OBs) provide critical geometric cues for resolving depth ambiguities, while depth can conversely refine occlusion reasoning. In this paper, we propose MoDOT, a novel method that jointly estimates depth and OBs from a single image for the first time. MoDOT incorporates a new module, CASM, which combines cross-attention and multi-scale strip convolutions to leverage mid-level OB features for improved depth prediction. It also includes an occlusion-aware loss, OBDCL, which encourages more accurate boundaries in the predicted depth map. Extensive experiments demonstrate the mutual benefits of jointly estimating depth and OBs, and validate the effectiveness of MoDOT's design. Our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on two synthetic datasets and the widely used NYUD-v2 real-world dataset, significantly outperforming multi-task baselines. Furthermore, the cross-domain results of MoDOT on real-world depth prediction - trained solely on our synthetic dataset - yield promising results, preserving sharp OBs in the predicted depth maps and demonstrating improved geometric fidelity compared to competitors. We will release our code, pre-trained models, and dataset at [link].
Authors: Chenbin Pan, Wenbin He, Zhengzhong Tu, Liu Ren
Abstract: The recent explosive interest in the reasoning capabilities of large language models, such as DeepSeek-R1, has demonstrated remarkable success through reinforcement learning-based fine-tuning frameworks, exemplified by methods like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). However, such reasoning abilities remain underexplored and notably absent in vision foundation models, including representation models like the DINO series. In this work, we propose \textbf{DINO-R1}, the first such attempt to incentivize visual in-context reasoning capabilities of vision foundation models using reinforcement learning. Specifically, DINO-R1 introduces \textbf{Group Relative Query Optimization (GRQO)}, a novel reinforcement-style training strategy explicitly designed for query-based representation models, which computes query-level rewards based on group-normalized alignment quality. We also apply KL-regularization to stabilize the objectness distribution to reduce the training instability. This joint optimization enables dense and expressive supervision across queries while mitigating overfitting and distributional drift. Building upon Grounding-DINO, we train a series of DINO-R1 family models that integrate a visual prompt encoder and a visual-guided query selection mechanism. Extensive experiments on COCO, LVIS, and ODinW demonstrate that DINO-R1 significantly outperforms supervised fine-tuning baselines, achieving strong generalization in both open-vocabulary and closed-set visual prompting scenarios.
Authors: Markus Knoche, Daan de Geus, Bastian Leibe
Abstract: Predicting the motion of other agents in a scene is highly relevant for autonomous driving, as it allows a self-driving car to anticipate. Inspired by the success of decoder-only models for language modeling, we propose DONUT, a Decoder-Only Network for Unrolling Trajectories. Unlike existing encoder-decoder forecasting models, we encode historical trajectories and predict future trajectories with a single autoregressive model. This allows the model to make iterative predictions in a consistent manner, and ensures that the model is always provided with up-to-date information, thereby enhancing performance. Furthermore, inspired by multi-token prediction for language modeling, we introduce an 'overprediction' strategy that gives the model the auxiliary task of predicting trajectories at longer temporal horizons. This allows the model to better anticipate the future and further improves performance. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our decoder-only approach outperforms the encoder-decoder baseline, and achieves new state-of-the-art results on the Argoverse 2 single-agent motion forecasting benchmark.
Authors: Kunal Swami, Debtanu Gupta, Amrit Kumar Muduli, Chirag Jaiswal, Pankaj Kumar Bajpai
Abstract: Depth estimation is crucial for intelligent systems, enabling applications from autonomous navigation to augmented reality. While traditional stereo and active depth sensors have limitations in cost, power, and robustness, dual-pixel (DP) technology, ubiquitous in modern cameras, offers a compelling alternative. This paper introduces DiFuse-Net, a novel modality decoupled network design for disentangled RGB and DP based depth estimation. DiFuse-Net features a window bi-directional parallax attention mechanism (WBiPAM) specifically designed to capture the subtle DP disparity cues unique to smartphone cameras with small aperture. A separate encoder extracts contextual information from the RGB image, and these features are fused to enhance depth prediction. We also propose a Cross-modal Transfer Learning (CmTL) mechanism to utilize large-scale RGB-D datasets in the literature to cope with the limitations of obtaining large-scale RGB-DP-D dataset. Our evaluation and comparison of the proposed method demonstrates its superiority over the DP and stereo-based baseline methods. Additionally, we contribute a new, high-quality, real-world RGB-DP-D training dataset, named Dual-Camera Dual-Pixel (DCDP) dataset, created using our novel symmetric stereo camera hardware setup, stereo calibration and rectification protocol, and AI stereo disparity estimation method.
Authors: Binbin Xiang, Maciej Wielgosz, Stefano Puliti, Kamil Kr\'al, Martin Kr\r{u}\v{c}ek, Azim Missarov, Rasmus Astrup
Abstract: The segmentation of forest LiDAR 3D point clouds, including both individual tree and semantic segmentation, is fundamental for advancing forest management and ecological research. However, current approaches often struggle with the complexity and variability of natural forest environments. We present ForestFormer3D, a new unified and end-to-end framework designed for precise individual tree and semantic segmentation. ForestFormer3D incorporates ISA-guided query point selection, a score-based block merging strategy during inference, and a one-to-many association mechanism for effective training. By combining these new components, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance for individual tree segmentation on the newly introduced FOR-instanceV2 dataset, which spans diverse forest types and regions. Additionally, ForestFormer3D generalizes well to unseen test sets (Wytham woods and LAUTx), showcasing its robustness across different forest conditions and sensor modalities. The FOR-instanceV2 dataset and the ForestFormer3D code are publicly available at https://bxiang233.github.io/FF3D/.
Authors: Ziyue Guo (College of Biosystems Engineering and Food Science, Zhejiang University, Key Laboratory of Spectroscopy Sensing, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs), Xin Yang (College of Biosystems Engineering and Food Science, Zhejiang University, Key Laboratory of Spectroscopy Sensing, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs), Yutao Shen (College of Biosystems Engineering and Food Science, Zhejiang University, Key Laboratory of Spectroscopy Sensing, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs), Yang Zhu (Institute of Crop Science, Zhejiang University), Lixi Jiang (Institute of Crop Science, Zhejiang University), Haiyan Cen (College of Biosystems Engineering and Food Science, Zhejiang University, Key Laboratory of Spectroscopy Sensing, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs)
Abstract: Quantitative descriptions of the complete canopy architecture are essential for accurately evaluating crop photosynthesis and yield performance to guide ideotype design. Although various sensing technologies have been developed for three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of individual plants and canopies, they failed to obtain an accurate description of canopy architectures due to severe occlusion among complex canopy architectures. We proposed an effective method for 3D reconstruction of complex, dynamic population canopy architecture for rapeseed crops with a novel point cloud completion model. A complete point cloud generation framework was developed for automated annotation of the training dataset by distinguishing surface points from occluded points within canopies. The crop population point cloud completion network (CP-PCN) was then designed with a multi-resolution dynamic graph convolutional encoder (MRDG) and a point pyramid decoder (PPD) to predict occluded points. To further enhance feature extraction, a dynamic graph convolutional feature extractor (DGCFE) module was proposed to capture structural variations over the whole rapeseed growth period. The results demonstrated that CP-PCN achieved chamfer distance (CD) values of 3.35 cm -4.51 cm over four growth stages, outperforming the state-of-the-art transformer-based method (PoinTr). Ablation studies confirmed the effectiveness of the MRDG and DGCFE modules. Moreover, the validation experiment demonstrated that the silique efficiency index developed from CP-PCN improved the overall accuracy of rapeseed yield prediction by 11.2% compared to that of using incomplete point clouds. The CP-PCN pipeline has the potential to be extended to other crops, significantly advancing the quantitatively analysis of in-field population canopy architectures.
Authors: Yitao Peng, Lianghua He, Hongzhou Chen
Abstract: Although interpretable prototype networks have improved the transparency of deep learning image classification, the need for multiple prototypes in collaborative decision-making increases cognitive complexity and hinders user understanding. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel interpretable deep architecture for image classification, called ProtoSolo. Unlike existing prototypical networks, ProtoSolo requires activation of only a single prototype to complete the classification. This design significantly simplifies interpretation, as the explanation for each class requires displaying only the prototype with the highest similarity score and its corresponding feature map. Additionally, the traditional full-channel feature vector is replaced with a feature map for similarity comparison and prototype learning, enabling the use of richer global information within a single-prototype activation decision. A non-projection prototype learning strategy is also introduced to preserve the association between the prototype and image patch while avoiding abrupt structural changes in the network caused by projection, which can affect classification performance. Experiments on the CUB-200-2011 and Stanford Cars datasets demonstrate that ProtoSolo matches state-of-the-art interpretable methods in classification accuracy while achieving the lowest cognitive complexity. The code is available at https://github.com/pyt19/ProtoSolo.
Authors: Mehmet Yigit Avci, Pedro Borges, Paul Wright, Mehmet Yigitsoy, Sebastien Ourselin, Jorge Cardoso
Abstract: Accurate interpretation of Magnetic Resonance Imaging scans in clinical systems is based on a precise understanding of image contrast. This contrast is primarily governed by acquisition parameters, such as echo time and repetition time, which are stored in the DICOM metadata. To simplify contrast identification, broad labels such as T1-weighted or T2-weighted are commonly used, but these offer only a coarse approximation of the underlying acquisition settings. In many real-world datasets, such labels are entirely missing, leaving raw acquisition parameters as the only indicators of contrast. Adding to this challenge, the available metadata is often incomplete, noisy, or inconsistent. The lack of reliable and standardized metadata complicates tasks such as image interpretation, retrieval, and integration into clinical workflows. Furthermore, robust contrast-aware representations are essential to enable more advanced clinical applications, such as achieving modality-invariant representations and data harmonization. To address these challenges, we propose MR-CLIP, a multimodal contrastive learning framework that aligns MR images with their DICOM metadata to learn contrast-aware representations, without relying on manual labels. Trained on a diverse clinical dataset that spans various scanners and protocols, MR-CLIP captures contrast variations across acquisitions and within scans, enabling anatomy-invariant representations. We demonstrate its effectiveness in cross-modal retrieval and contrast classification, highlighting its scalability and potential for further clinical applications. The code and weights are publicly available at https://github.com/myigitavci/MR-CLIP.
Authors: JianHe Low, Ozge Mercanoglu Sincan, Richard Bowden
Abstract: Sign spotting, the task of identifying and localizing individual signs within continuous sign language video, plays a pivotal role in scaling dataset annotations and addressing the severe data scarcity issue in sign language translation. While automatic sign spotting holds great promise for enabling frame-level supervision at scale, it grapples with challenges such as vocabulary inflexibility and ambiguity inherent in continuous sign streams. Hence, we introduce a novel, training-free framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) to significantly enhance sign spotting quality. Our approach extracts global spatio-temporal and hand shape features, which are then matched against a large-scale sign dictionary using dynamic time warping and cosine similarity. This dictionary-based matching inherently offers superior vocabulary flexibility without requiring model retraining. To mitigate noise and ambiguity from the matching process, an LLM performs context-aware gloss disambiguation via beam search, notably without fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world sign language datasets demonstrate our method's superior accuracy and sentence fluency compared to traditional approaches, highlighting the potential of LLMs in advancing sign spotting.
Authors: Xu Shaowu, Jia Xibin, Gao Junyu, Sun Qianmei, Chang Jing, Fan Chao
Abstract: Long-term action recognition (LTAR) is challenging due to extended temporal spans with complex atomic action correlations and visual confounders. Although vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise, they often rely on statistical correlations instead of causal mechanisms. Moreover, existing causality-based methods address modal-specific biases but lack cross-modal causal modeling, limiting their utility in VLM-based LTAR. This paper proposes \textbf{C}ross-\textbf{M}odal \textbf{D}ual-\textbf{C}ausal \textbf{L}earning (CMDCL), which introduces a structural causal model to uncover causal relationships between videos and label texts. CMDCL addresses cross-modal biases in text embeddings via textual causal intervention and removes confounders inherent in the visual modality through visual causal intervention guided by the debiased text. These dual-causal interventions enable robust action representations to address LTAR challenges. Experimental results on three benchmarks including Charades, Breakfast and COIN, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Our code is available at https://github.com/xushaowu/CMDCL.
Authors: Yung-Hong Sun, Ting-Hung Lin, Jiangang Chen, Hongrui Jiang, Yu Hen Hu
Abstract: Multi-view multi-instance feature association constitutes a crucial step in 3D reconstruction, facilitating the consistent grouping of object instances across various camera perspectives. The presence of multiple identical objects within a scene often leads to ambiguities for appearance-based feature matching algorithms. Our work circumvents this challenge by exclusively employing geometrical constraints, specifically epipolar geometry, for feature association. We introduce C-DOG (Connected delta-Overlap Graph), an algorithm designed for robust geometrical feature association, even in the presence of noisy feature detections. In a C-DOG graph, two nodes representing 2D feature points from distinct views are connected by an edge if they correspond to the same 3D point. Each edge is weighted by its epipolar distance. Ideally, true associations yield a zero distance; however, noisy feature detections can result in non-zero values. To robustly retain edges where the epipolar distance is less than a threshold delta, we employ a Szymkiewicz--Simpson coefficient. This process leads to a delta-neighbor-overlap clustering of 2D nodes. Furthermore, unreliable nodes are pruned from these clusters using an Inter-quartile Range (IQR)-based criterion. Our extensive experiments on synthetic benchmarks demonstrate that C-DOG not only outperforms geometry-based baseline algorithms but also remains remarkably robust under demanding conditions. This includes scenes with high object density, no visual features, and restricted camera overlap, positioning C-DOG as an excellent solution for scalable 3D reconstruction in practical applications.
Authors: Ran Zhang, Xuanhua He, Li Xueheng, Ke Cao, Liu Liu, Wenbo Xu, Fang Jiabin, Yang Qize, Jie Zhang
Abstract: The field of pan-sharpening has recently seen a trend towards increasingly large and complex models, often trained on single, specific satellite datasets. This approach, however, leads to high computational overhead and poor generalization on full resolution data, a paradigm we challenge in this paper. In response to this issue, we propose PanTiny, a lightweight, single-step pan-sharpening framework designed for both efficiency and robust performance. More critically, we introduce multiple-in-one training paradigm, where a single, compact model is trained simultaneously on three distinct satellite datasets (WV2, WV3, and GF2) with different resolution and spectral information. Our experiments show that this unified training strategy not only simplifies deployment but also significantly boosts generalization on full-resolution data. Further, we introduce a universally powerful composite loss function that elevates the performance of almost all of models for pan-sharpening, pushing state-of-the-art metrics into a new era. Our PanTiny model, benefiting from these innovations, achieves a superior performance-to-efficiency balance, outperforming most larger, specialized models. Through extensive ablation studies, we validate that principled engineering in model design, training paradigms, and loss functions can surpass brute-force scaling. Our work advocates for a community-wide shift towards creating efficient, generalizable, and data-conscious models for pan-sharpening. The code is available at https://github.com/Zirconium233/PanTiny .
Authors: Peirong Zhang, Haowei Xu, Jiaxin Zhang, Guitao Xu, Xuhan Zheng, Zhenhua Yang, Junle Liu, Yuyi Zhang, Lianwen Jin
Abstract: Text image is a unique and crucial information medium that integrates visual aesthetics and linguistic semantics in modern e-society. Due to their subtlety and complexity, the generation of text images represents a challenging and evolving frontier in the image generation field. The recent surge of specialized image generators (\emph{e.g.}, Flux-series) and unified generative models (\emph{e.g.}, GPT-4o), which demonstrate exceptional fidelity, raises a natural question: can they master the intricacies of text image generation and editing? Motivated by this, we assess current state-of-the-art generative models' capabilities in terms of text image generation and editing. We incorporate various typical optical character recognition (OCR) tasks into our evaluation and broaden the concept of text-based generation tasks into OCR generative tasks. We select 33 representative tasks and categorize them into five categories: document, handwritten text, scene text, artistic text, and complex \& layout-rich text. For comprehensive evaluation, we examine six models across both closed-source and open-source domains, using tailored, high-quality image inputs and prompts. Through this evaluation, we draw crucial observations and identify the weaknesses of current generative models for OCR tasks. We argue that photorealistic text image generation and editing should be internalized as foundational skills into general-domain generative models, rather than being delegated to specialized solutions, and we hope this empirical analysis can provide valuable insights for the community to achieve this goal. This evaluation is online and will be continuously updated at our GitHub repository.
Authors: Peiqi Chen, Lei Yu, Yi Wan, Yingying Pei, Xinyi Liu, Yongxiang Yao, Yingying Zhang, Lixiang Ru, Liheng Zhong, Jingdong Chen, Ming Yang, Yongjun Zhang
Abstract: Semi-dense feature matching methods have shown strong performance in challenging scenarios. However, the existing pipeline relies on a global search across the entire feature map to establish coarse matches, limiting further improvements in accuracy and efficiency. Motivated by this limitation, we propose a novel pipeline, CasP, which leverages cascaded correspondence priors for guidance. Specifically, the matching stage is decomposed into two progressive phases, bridged by a region-based selective cross-attention mechanism designed to enhance feature discriminability. In the second phase, one-to-one matches are determined by restricting the search range to the one-to-many prior areas identified in the first phase. Additionally, this pipeline benefits from incorporating high-level features, which helps reduce the computational costs of low-level feature extraction. The acceleration gains of CasP increase with higher resolution, and our lite model achieves a speedup of $\sim2.2\times$ at a resolution of 1152 compared to the most efficient method, ELoFTR. Furthermore, extensive experiments demonstrate its superiority in geometric estimation, particularly with impressive cross-domain generalization. These advantages highlight its potential for latency-sensitive and high-robustness applications, such as SLAM and UAV systems. Code is available at https://github.com/pq-chen/CasP.
Authors: Xiaoyu Zhang, Zhifeng Bao, Hai Dong, Ziwei Wang, Jiajun Liu
Abstract: Autonomous vehicles generate massive volumes of point cloud data, yet only a subset is relevant for specific tasks such as collision detection, traffic analysis, or congestion monitoring. Effectively querying this data is essential to enable targeted analytics. In this work, we formalize point cloud querying by defining three core query types: RETRIEVAL, COUNT, and AGGREGATION, each aligned with distinct analytical scenarios. All these queries rely heavily on accurate object counts to produce meaningful results, making precise object counting a critical component of query execution. Prior work has focused on indexing techniques for 2D video data, assuming detection models provide accurate counting information. However, when applied to 3D point cloud data, state-of-the-art detection models often fail to generate reliable object counts, leading to substantial errors in query results. To address this limitation, we propose CounterNet, a heatmap-based network designed for accurate object counting in large-scale point cloud data. Rather than focusing on accurate object localization, CounterNet detects object presence by finding object centers to improve counting accuracy. We further enhance its performance with a feature map partitioning strategy using overlapping regions, enabling better handling of both small and large objects in complex traffic scenes. To adapt to varying frame characteristics, we introduce a per-frame dynamic model selection strategy that selects the most effective configuration for each input. Evaluations on three real-world autonomous vehicle datasets show that CounterNet improves counting accuracy by 5% to 20% across object categories, resulting in more reliable query outcomes across all supported query types.
Authors: Babak Taati, Muhammad Muzammil, Yasamin Zarghami, Abhishek Moturu, Amirhossein Kazerouni, Hailey Reimer, Alex Mihailidis, Thomas Hadjistavropoulos
Abstract: Accurate pain assessment in patients with limited ability to communicate, such as older adults with dementia, represents a critical healthcare challenge. Robust automated systems of pain detection may facilitate such assessments. Existing pain detection datasets, however, suffer from limited ethnic/racial diversity, privacy constraints, and underrepresentation of older adults who are the primary target population for clinical deployment. We present SynPAIN, a large-scale synthetic dataset containing 10,710 facial expression images (5,355 neutral/expressive pairs) across five ethnicities/races, two age groups (young: 20-35, old: 75+), and two genders. Using commercial generative AI tools, we created demographically balanced synthetic identities with clinically meaningful pain expressions. Our validation demonstrates that synthetic pain expressions exhibit expected pain patterns, scoring significantly higher than neutral and non-pain expressions using clinically validated pain assessment tools based on facial action unit analysis. We experimentally demonstrate SynPAIN's utility in identifying algorithmic bias in existing pain detection models. Through comprehensive bias evaluation, we reveal substantial performance disparities across demographic characteristics. These performance disparities were previously undetectable with smaller, less diverse datasets. Furthermore, we demonstrate that age-matched synthetic data augmentation improves pain detection performance on real clinical data, achieving a 7.0% improvement in average precision. SynPAIN addresses critical gaps in pain assessment research by providing the first publicly available, demographically diverse synthetic dataset specifically designed for older adult pain detection, while establishing a framework for measuring and mitigating algorithmic bias. The dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.5683/SP3/WCXMAP
Authors: Chang Liu, Yunfan Ye, Fan Zhang, Qingyang Zhou, Yuchuan Luo, Zhiping Cai
Abstract: Numerous synthesized videos from generative models, especially human-centric ones that simulate realistic human actions, pose significant threats to human information security and authenticity. While progress has been made in binary forgery video detection, the lack of fine-grained understanding of forgery types raises concerns regarding both reliability and interpretability, which are critical for real-world applications. To address this limitation, we propose HumanSAM, a new framework that builds upon the fundamental challenges of video generation models. Specifically, HumanSAM aims to classify human-centric forgeries into three distinct types of artifacts commonly observed in generated content: spatial, appearance, and motion anomaly. To better capture the features of geometry, semantics and spatiotemporal consistency, we propose to generate the human forgery representation by fusing two branches of video understanding and spatial depth. We also adopt a rank-based confidence enhancement strategy during the training process to learn more robust representation by introducing three prior scores. For training and evaluation, we construct the first public benchmark, the Human-centric Forgery Video (HFV) dataset, with all types of forgeries carefully annotated semi-automatically. In our experiments, HumanSAM yields promising results in comparison with state-of-the-art methods, both in binary and multi-class forgery classification.
Authors: Shide Du, Chunming Wu, Zihan Fang, Wendi Zhao, Yilin Wu, Changwei Wang, Shiping Wang
Abstract: Deep anchor-based multi-view clustering methods enhance the scalability of neural networks by utilizing representative anchors to reduce the computational complexity of large-scale clustering. Despite their scalability advantages, existing approaches often incorporate anchor structures in a heuristic or task-agnostic manner, either through post-hoc graph construction or as auxiliary components for message passing. Such designs overlook the core structural demands of anchor-based clustering, neglecting key optimization principles. To bridge this gap, we revisit the underlying optimization problem of large-scale anchor-based multi-view clustering and unfold its iterative solution into a novel deep network architecture, termed LargeMvC-Net. The proposed model decomposes the anchor-based clustering process into three modules: RepresentModule, NoiseModule, and AnchorModule, corresponding to representation learning, noise suppression, and anchor indicator estimation. Each module is derived by unfolding a step of the original optimization procedure into a dedicated network component, providing structural clarity and optimization traceability. In addition, an unsupervised reconstruction loss aligns each view with the anchor-induced latent space, encouraging consistent clustering structures across views. Extensive experiments on several large-scale multi-view benchmarks show that LargeMvC-Net consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both effectiveness and scalability.
Authors: Yung-Sung Chuang, Yang Li, Dong Wang, Ching-Feng Yeh, Kehan Lyu, Ramya Raghavendra, James Glass, Lifei Huang, Jason Weston, Luke Zettlemoyer, Xinlei Chen, Zhuang Liu, Saining Xie, Wen-tau Yih, Shang-Wen Li, Hu Xu
Abstract: Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) is a popular foundation model, supporting from zero-shot classification, retrieval to encoders for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Although CLIP is successfully trained on billion-scale image-text pairs from the English world, scaling CLIP's training further to learning from the worldwide web data is still challenging: (1) no curation method is available to handle data points from non-English world; (2) the English performance from existing multilingual CLIP is worse than its English-only counterpart, i.e., "curse of multilinguality" that is common in LLMs. Here, we present Meta CLIP 2, the first recipe training CLIP from scratch on worldwide web-scale image-text pairs. To generalize our findings, we conduct rigorous ablations with minimal changes that are necessary to address the above challenges and present a recipe enabling mutual benefits from English and non-English world data. In zero-shot ImageNet classification, Meta CLIP 2 ViT-H/14 surpasses its English-only counterpart by 0.8% and mSigLIP by 0.7%, and surprisingly sets new state-of-the-art without system-level confounding factors (e.g., translation, bespoke architecture changes) on multilingual benchmarks, such as CVQA with 57.4%, Babel-ImageNet with 50.2% and XM3600 with 64.3% on image-to-text retrieval.
Authors: Hanshen Zhu, Zhen Zhu, Kaile Zhang, Yiming Gong, Yuliang Liu, Xiang Bai
Abstract: We tackle the task of geometric image editing, where an object within an image is repositioned, reoriented, or reshaped while preserving overall scene coherence. Previous diffusion-based editing methods often attempt to handle all relevant subtasks in a single step, proving difficult when transformations become large or structurally complex. We address this by proposing a decoupled pipeline that separates object transformation, source region inpainting, and target region refinement. Both inpainting and refinement are implemented using a training-free diffusion approach, FreeFine. In experiments on our new GeoBench benchmark, which contains both 2D and 3D editing scenarios, FreeFine outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives in image fidelity, and edit precision, especially under demanding transformations. Code and benchmark are available at: https://github.com/CIawevy/FreeFine
Authors: Changqing Xu, Ziqiang Yang, Yi Liu, Xinfang Liao, Guiqi Mo, Hao Zeng, Yintang Yang
Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a biologically plausible framework for energy-efficient neuromorphic computing. However, it is a challenge to train SNNs due to their non-differentiability, efficiently. Existing gradient approximation approaches frequently sacrifice accuracy and face deployment limitations on edge devices due to the substantial computational requirements of backpropagation. To address these challenges, we propose a Forward-Forward (FF) based gradient approximation-free training framework for Spiking Neural Networks, which treats spiking activations as black-box modules, thereby eliminating the need for gradient approximation while significantly reducing computational complexity. Furthermore, we introduce a class-aware complexity adaptation mechanism that dynamically optimizes the loss function based on inter-class difficulty metrics, enabling efficient allocation of network resources across different categories. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed training framework achieves test accuracies of 99.58%, 92.13%, and 75.64% on the MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 datasets, respectively, surpassing all existing FF-based SNN approaches. Additionally, our proposed method exhibits significant advantages in terms of memory access and computational power consumption.
Authors: Hanchi Ren, Jingjing Deng, Xianghua Xie
Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a widely adopted privacy-preserving machine learning approach where private data remains local, enabling secure computations and the exchange of local model gradients between local clients and third-party parameter servers. However, recent findings reveal that privacy may be compromised and sensitive information potentially recovered from shared gradients. In this study, we offer detailed analysis and a novel perspective on understanding the gradient leakage problem. These theoretical works lead to a new gradient leakage defense technique that secures arbitrary model architectures using a private key-lock module. Only the locked gradient is transmitted to the parameter server for global model aggregation. Our proposed learning method is resistant to gradient leakage attacks, and the key-lock module is designed and trained to ensure that, without the private information of the key-lock module: a) reconstructing private training data from the shared gradient is infeasible; and b) the global model's inference performance is significantly compromised. We discuss the theoretical underpinnings of why gradients can leak private information and provide theoretical proof of our method's effectiveness. We conducted extensive empirical evaluations with many models on several popular benchmarks, demonstrating the robustness of our proposed approach in both maintaining model performance and defending against gradient leakage attacks.
Authors: Dong-Hwan Jang, Sangdoo Yun, Dongyoon Han
Abstract: This paper introduces an efficient fine-tuning method for large pre-trained models, offering strong in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) performance. Breaking away from traditional practices that need a multitude of fine-tuned models for averaging, our approach employs significantly fewer models to achieve final weights yet yield superior accuracy. Drawing from key insights in the weight space of fine-tuned weights, we uncover a strong link between the performance and proximity to the center of weight space. Based on this, we introduce a method that approximates a center-close weight using only two fine-tuned models, applicable during or after training. Our innovative layer-wise weight averaging technique surpasses state-of-the-art model methods such as Model Soup, utilizing only two fine-tuned models. This strategy can be aptly coined Model Stock, highlighting its reliance on selecting a minimal number of models to draw a more optimized-averaged model. We demonstrate the efficacy of Model Stock with fine-tuned models based upon pre-trained CLIP architectures, achieving remarkable performance on both ID and OOD tasks on the standard benchmarks, all while barely bringing extra computational demands. Our code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/naver-ai/model-stock.
Authors: Zixian Su, Jingwei Guo, Xi Yang, Qiufeng Wang, Frans Coenen, Kaizhu Huang
Abstract: Medical Image Analysis (MedIA) has become indispensable in modern healthcare, enhancing clinical diagnostics and personalized treatment. Despite the remarkable advancements supported by deep learning (DL) technologies, their practical deployment faces challenges due to distribution shifts, where models trained on specific datasets underperform across others from varying hospitals, regions, or patient populations. To navigate this issue, researchers have been actively developing strategies to increase the adaptability and robustness of DL models, enabling their effective use in unfamiliar and diverse environments. This paper systematically reviews approaches that apply DL techniques to MedIA systems affected by distribution shifts. Unlike traditional categorizations based on technical specifications, our approach is grounded in the real-world operational constraints faced by healthcare institutions. Specifically, we categorize the existing body of work into Joint Training, Federated Learning, Fine-tuning, and Domain Generalization, with each method tailored to distinct scenarios caused by Data Accessibility, Privacy Concerns, and Collaborative Protocols. This perspective equips researchers with a nuanced understanding of how DL can be strategically deployed to address distribution shifts in MedIA, ensuring diverse and robust medical applications. By delving deeper into these topics, we highlight potential pathways for future research that not only address existing limitations but also push the boundaries of deployable MedIA technologies.
Authors: Zijiang Yan, Jianhua Pei, Hongda Wu, Hina Tabassum, Ping Wang
Abstract: This paper proposes a novel Semantic Communication (SemCom) framework for real-time adaptive-bitrate video streaming by integrating Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) within the FFmpeg techniques. This solution addresses the challenges of high bandwidth usage, storage inefficiencies, and quality of experience (QoE) degradation associated with traditional Constant Bitrate Streaming (CBS) and Adaptive Bitrate Streaming (ABS). The proposed approach leverages LDMs to compress I-frames into a latent space, offering significant storage and semantic transmission savings without sacrificing high visual quality. While retaining B-frames and P-frames as adjustment metadata to support efficient refinement of video reconstruction at the user side, the proposed framework further incorporates state-of-the-art denoising and Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) techniques. These techniques mitigate semantic ambiguity and restore temporal coherence between frames, even in noisy wireless communication environments. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed method achieves high-quality video streaming with optimized bandwidth usage, outperforming state-of-the-art solutions in terms of QoE and resource efficiency. This work opens new possibilities for scalable real-time video streaming in 5G and future post-5G networks.
Authors: Michael Steiner, Thomas K\"ohler, Lukas Radl, Felix Windisch, Dieter Schmalstieg, Markus Steinberger
Abstract: Although 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has revolutionized 3D reconstruction, it still faces challenges such as aliasing, projection artifacts, and view inconsistencies, primarily due to the simplification of treating splats as 2D entities. We argue that incorporating full 3D evaluation of Gaussians throughout the 3DGS pipeline can effectively address these issues while preserving rasterization efficiency. Specifically, we introduce an adaptive 3D smoothing filter to mitigate aliasing and present a stable view-space bounding method that eliminates popping artifacts when Gaussians extend beyond the view frustum. Furthermore, we promote tile-based culling to 3D with screen-space planes, accelerating rendering and reducing sorting costs for hierarchical rasterization. Our method achieves state-of-the-art quality on in-distribution evaluation sets and significantly outperforms other approaches for out-of-distribution views. Our qualitative evaluations further demonstrate the effective removal of aliasing, distortions, and popping artifacts, ensuring real-time, artifact-free rendering.
Authors: Anirban Ghosh, Iliya Kulbaka, Ian Dahlin, Ayan Dutta
Abstract: Point cloud-based object/place recognition remains a problem of interest in applications such as autonomous driving, scene reconstruction, and localization. Extracting a meaningful global descriptor from a query point cloud that can be matched with the descriptors of the database point clouds is a challenging problem. Furthermore, when the query point cloud is noisy or has been transformed (e.g., rotated), it adds to the complexity. To this end, we propose a novel methodology, named TopoRec, which utilizes Topological Data Analysis (TDA) for extracting local descriptors from a point cloud, thereby eliminating the need for resource-intensive GPU-based machine learning training. More specifically, we used the ATOL vectorization method to generate vectors for point clouds. To test the quality of the proposed TopoRec technique, we have implemented it on multiple real-world (e.g., Oxford RobotCar, NCLT) and realistic (e.g., ShapeNet) point cloud datasets for large-scale place and object recognition, respectively. Unlike existing learning-based approaches such as PointNetVLAD and PCAN, our method does not require extensive training, making it easily adaptable to new environments. Despite this, it consistently outperforms both state-of-the-art learning-based and handcrafted baselines (e.g., M2DP, ScanContext) on standard benchmark datasets, demonstrating superior accuracy and strong generalization.
Authors: Hongzhe Bi, Lingxuan Wu, Tianwei Lin, Hengkai Tan, Zhizhong Su, Hang Su, Jun Zhu
Abstract: Imitation learning for robotic manipulation faces a fundamental challenge: the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality robot demonstration data. Recent robotic foundation models often pre-train on cross-embodiment robot datasets to increase data scale, while they face significant limitations as the diverse morphologies and action spaces across different robot embodiments make unified training challenging. In this paper, we present H-RDT (Human to Robotics Diffusion Transformer), a novel approach that leverages human manipulation data to enhance robot manipulation capabilities. Our key insight is that large-scale egocentric human manipulation videos with paired 3D hand pose annotations provide rich behavioral priors that capture natural manipulation strategies and can benefit robotic policy learning. We introduce a two-stage training paradigm: (1) pre-training on large-scale egocentric human manipulation data, and (2) cross-embodiment fine-tuning on robot-specific data with modular action encoders and decoders. Built on a diffusion transformer architecture with 2B parameters, H-RDT uses flow matching to model complex action distributions. Extensive evaluations encompassing both simulation and real-world experiments, single-task and multitask scenarios, as well as few-shot learning and robustness assessments, demonstrate that H-RDT outperforms training from scratch and existing state-of-the-art methods, including Pi0 and RDT, achieving significant improvements of 13.9% and 40.5% over training from scratch in simulation and real-world experiments, respectively. The results validate our core hypothesis that human manipulation data can serve as a powerful foundation for learning bimanual robotic manipulation policies.