Authors: Rakesh Raj Madavan, Akshat Kaimal, Hashim Faisal, Chandrakala S
Abstract: An ensemble of trained multimodal encoders and vision-language models (VLMs) has become a standard approach for visual question answering (VQA) tasks. However, such models often fail to produce responses with the detailed precision necessary for complex, domain-specific applications such as medical VQA. Our representation model, BIND: BLIVA Integrated with Dense Encoding, extends prior multimodal work by refining the joint embedding space through dense, query-token-based encodings inspired by contrastive pretraining techniques. This refined encoder powers Med-GRIM, a model designed for medical VQA tasks that leverages graph-based retrieval and prompt engineering to integrate domain-specific knowledge. Rather than relying on compute-heavy fine-tuning of vision and language models on specific datasets, Med-GRIM applies a low-compute, modular workflow with small language models (SLMs) for efficiency. Med-GRIM employs prompt-based retrieval to dynamically inject relevant knowledge, ensuring both accuracy and robustness in its responses. By assigning distinct roles to each agent within the VQA system, Med-GRIM achieves large language model performance at a fraction of the computational cost. Additionally, to support scalable research in zero-shot multimodal medical applications, we introduce DermaGraph, a novel Graph-RAG dataset comprising diverse dermatological conditions. This dataset facilitates both multimodal and unimodal querying. The code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/Rakesh-123-cryp/Med-GRIM.git
Authors: He Feng, Yongjia Ma, Donglin Di, Lei Fan, Tonghua Su, Xiangqian Wu
Abstract: Portrait animation aims to synthesize talking videos from a static reference face, conditioned on audio and style frame cues (e.g., emotion and head poses), while ensuring precise lip synchronization and faithful reproduction of speaking styles. Existing diffusion-based portrait animation methods primarily focus on lip synchronization or static emotion transformation, often overlooking dynamic styles such as head movements. Moreover, most of these methods rely on a dual U-Net architecture, which preserves identity consistency but incurs additional computational overhead. To this end, we propose DiTalker, a unified DiT-based framework for speaking style-controllable portrait animation. We design a Style-Emotion Encoding Module that employs two separate branches: a style branch extracting identity-specific style information (e.g., head poses and movements), and an emotion branch extracting identity-agnostic emotion features. We further introduce an Audio-Style Fusion Module that decouples audio and speaking styles via two parallel cross-attention layers, using these features to guide the animation process. To enhance the quality of results, we adopt and modify two optimization constraints: one to improve lip synchronization and the other to preserve fine-grained identity and background details. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of DiTalker in terms of lip synchronization and speaking style controllability. Project Page: https://thenameishope.github.io/DiTalker/
Authors: Minh Duc Chu, Kshitij Pawar, Zihao He, Roxanna Sharifi, Ross Sonnenblick, Magdalayna Curry, Laura D'Adamo, Lindsay Young, Stuart B Murray, Kristina Lerman
Abstract: Social media platforms increasingly struggle to detect harmful content that promotes muscle dysmorphic behaviors, particularly pro-bigorexia content that disproportionately affects adolescent males. Unlike traditional eating disorder detection focused on the "thin ideal," pro-bigorexia material masquerades as legitimate fitness content through complex multimodal combinations of visual displays, coded language, and motivational messaging that evade text-based detection systems. We address this challenge by developing BigTokDetect, a clinically-informed detection framework for identifying pro-bigorexia content on TikTok. We introduce BigTok, the first expert-annotated multimodal dataset of over 2,200 TikTok videos labeled by clinical psychologists and psychiatrists across five primary categories spanning body image, nutrition, exercise, supplements, and masculinity. Through a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art vision language models, we achieve 0.829% accuracy on primary category classification and 0.690% on subcategory detection via domain-specific finetuning. Our ablation studies demonstrate that multimodal fusion improves performance by 5-10% over text-only approaches, with video features providing the most discriminative signals. These findings establish new benchmarks for multimodal harmful content detection and provide both the computational tools and methodological framework needed for scalable content moderation in specialized mental health domains.
Authors: Haoran Xi, Chen Liu, Xiaolin Li
Abstract: Automated polyp segmentation is essential for early diagnosis of colorectal cancer, yet developing robust models remains challenging due to limited annotated data and significant performance degradation under domain shift. Although semi-supervised learning (SSL) reduces annotation requirements, existing methods rely on generic augmentations that ignore polyp-specific structural properties, resulting in poor generalization to new imaging centers and devices. To address this, we introduce Frequency Prior Guided Matching (FPGM), a novel augmentation framework built on a key discovery: polyp edges exhibit a remarkably consistent frequency signature across diverse datasets. FPGM leverages this intrinsic regularity in a two-stage process. It first learns a domain-invariant frequency prior from the edge regions of labeled polyps. Then, it performs principled spectral perturbations on unlabeled images, aligning their amplitude spectra with this learned prior while preserving phase information to maintain structural integrity. This targeted alignment normalizes domain-specific textural variations, thereby compelling the model to learn the underlying, generalizable anatomical structure. Validated on six public datasets, FPGM establishes a new state-of-the-art against ten competing methods. It demonstrates exceptional zero-shot generalization capabilities, achieving over 10% absolute gain in Dice score in data-scarce scenarios. By significantly enhancing cross-domain robustness, FPGM presents a powerful solution for clinically deployable polyp segmentation under limited supervision.
Authors: Guoyuan An, JaeYoon Kim, SungEui Yoon
Abstract: This paper presents several novel findings on the explainability of vision reflection in large multimodal models (LMMs). First, we show that prompting an LMM to verify the prediction of a specialized vision model can improve recognition accuracy, even on benchmarks like ImageNet, despite prior evidence that LMMs typically underperform dedicated vision encoders. Second, we analyze the internal behavior of vision reflection and find that the vision-language connector maps visual features into explicit textual concepts, allowing the language model to reason about prediction plausibility using commonsense knowledge. We further observe that replacing a large number of vision tokens with only a few text tokens still enables LLaVA to generate similar answers, suggesting that LMMs may rely primarily on a compact set of distilled textual representations rather than raw vision features. Third, we show that a training-free connector can enhance LMM performance in fine-grained recognition tasks, without extensive feature-alignment training. Together, these findings offer new insights into the explainability of vision-language models and suggest that vision reflection is a promising strategy for achieving robust and interpretable visual recognition.
Authors: Xiuliang Zhang, Tadiwa Elisha Nyamasvisva, Chuntao Liu
Abstract: Video-based behavior recognition is essential in fields such as public safety, intelligent surveillance, and human-computer interaction. Traditional 3D Convolutional Neural Network (3D CNN) effectively capture local spatiotemporal features but struggle with modeling long-range dependencies. Conversely, Transformers excel at learning global contextual information but face challenges with high computational costs. To address these limitations, we propose a hybrid framework combining 3D CNN and Transformer architectures. The 3D CNN module extracts low-level spatiotemporal features, while the Transformer module captures long-range temporal dependencies, with a fusion mechanism integrating both representations. Evaluated on benchmark datasets, the proposed model outperforms traditional 3D CNN and standalone Transformers, achieving higher recognition accuracy with manageable complexity. Ablation studies further validate the complementary strengths of the two modules. This hybrid framework offers an effective and scalable solution for video-based behavior recognition.
Authors: Jiayuan Wang, Q. M. Jonathan Wu, Katsuya Suto, Ning Zhang
Abstract: Autonomous driving systems rely on panoptic driving perception that requires both precision and real-time performance. In this work, we propose RMT-PPAD, a real-time, transformer-based multi-task model that jointly performs object detection, drivable area segmentation, and lane line segmentation. We introduce a lightweight module, a gate control with an adapter to adaptively fuse shared and task-specific features, effectively alleviating negative transfer between tasks. Additionally, we design an adaptive segmentation decoder to learn the weights over multi-scale features automatically during the training stage. This avoids the manual design of task-specific structures for different segmentation tasks. We also identify and resolve the inconsistency between training and testing labels in lane line segmentation. This allows fairer evaluation. Experiments on the BDD100K dataset demonstrate that RMT-PPAD achieves state-of-the-art results with mAP50 of 84.9% and Recall of 95.4% for object detection, mIoU of 92.6% for drivable area segmentation, and IoU of 56.8% and accuracy of 84.7% for lane line segmentation. The inference speed reaches 32.6 FPS. Moreover, we introduce real-world scenarios to evaluate RMT-PPAD performance in practice. The results show that RMT-PPAD consistently delivers stable performance. The source codes and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/JiayuanWang-JW/RMT-PPAD.
Authors: Ming-Kun Xie, Jia-Hao Xiao, Gang Niu, Lei Feng, Zhiqiang Kou, Min-Ling Zhang, Masashi Sugiyama
Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), empowered by the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), have achieved impressive performance across domains. Despite the great advances in LVLMs, they still suffer from the unavailable object hallucination issue, which tends to generate objects inconsistent with the image content. The most commonly used Polling-based Object Probing Evaluation (POPE) benchmark evaluates this issue by sampling negative categories according to category-level statistics, \textit{e.g.}, category frequencies and co-occurrence. However, with the continuous advancement of LVLMs, the POPE benchmark has shown diminishing effectiveness in assessing object hallucination, as it employs a simplistic sampling strategy that overlooks image-specific information and restricts distractors to negative object categories only. In this paper, we introduce the Hallucination searching-based Object Probing Evaluation (HOPE) benchmark, aiming to generate the most misleading distractors (\textit{i.e.}, non-existent objects or incorrect image descriptions) that can trigger hallucination in LVLMs, which serves as a means to more rigorously assess their immunity to hallucination. To explore the image-specific information, the content-aware hallucination searching leverages Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) to approximate the predictive behavior of LVLMs by selecting negative objects with the highest predicted likelihood as distractors. To expand the scope of hallucination assessment, the description-based hallucination searching constructs highly misleading distractors by pairing true objects with false descriptions. Experimental results show that HOPE leads to a precision drop of at least 9\% and up to 23\% across various state-of-the-art LVLMs, significantly outperforming POPE in exposing hallucination vulnerabilities. The code is available at https://github.com/xiemk/HOPE.
Authors: Shantanusinh Parmar
Abstract: Object detection models are typically trained on datasets like ImageNet, COCO, and PASCAL VOC, which focus on everyday objects. However, these lack signal sparsity found in non-commercial domains. MobilTelesco, a smartphone-based astrophotography dataset, addresses this by providing sparse night-sky images. We benchmark several detection models on it, highlighting challenges under feature-deficient conditions.
Authors: Jinghan Yu, Zhiyuan Ma, Yue Ma, Kaiqi Liu, Yuhan Wang, Jianjun Li
Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the success of diffusion models in image-customized tasks. Prior works have achieved notable progress on human-oriented erasing using explicit mask guidance and semantic-aware inpainting. However, they struggle under complex multi-IP scenarios involving human-human occlusions, human-object entanglements, and background interferences. These challenges are mainly due to: 1) Dataset limitations, as existing datasets rarely cover dense occlusions, camouflaged backgrounds, and diverse interactions; 2) Lack of spatial decoupling, where foreground instances cannot be effectively disentangled, limiting clean background restoration. In this work, we introduce a high-quality multi-IP human erasing dataset with diverse pose variations and complex backgrounds. We then propose Multi-Layer Diffusion (MILD), a novel strategy that decomposes generation into semantically separated pathways for each instance and the background. To enhance human-centric understanding, we introduce Human Morphology Guidance, integrating pose, parsing, and spatial relations. We further present Spatially-Modulated Attention to better guide attention flow. Extensive experiments show that MILD outperforms state-of-the-art methods on challenging human erasing benchmarks.
Authors: Qi Xun Yeo, Yanyan Li, Gim Hee Lee
Abstract: Modern 3D semantic scene graph estimation methods utilize ground truth 3D annotations to accurately predict target objects, predicates, and relationships. In the absence of given 3D ground truth representations, we explore leveraging only multi-view RGB images to tackle this task. To attain robust features for accurate scene graph estimation, we must overcome the noisy reconstructed pseudo point-based geometry from predicted depth maps and reduce the amount of background noise present in multi-view image features. The key is to enrich node and edge features with accurate semantic and spatial information and through neighboring relations. We obtain semantic masks to guide feature aggregation to filter background features and design a novel method to incorporate neighboring node information to aid robustness of our scene graph estimates. Furthermore, we leverage on explicit statistical priors calculated from the training summary statistics to refine node and edge predictions based on their one-hop neighborhood. Our experiments show that our method outperforms current methods purely using multi-view images as the initial input. Our project page is available at https://qixun1.github.io/projects/SCRSSG.
Authors: Ye Tao
Abstract: Training deep neural networks (DNNs) has become an increasingly resource-intensive task, requiring large volumes of labeled data, substantial computational power, and considerable fine-tuning efforts to achieve optimal performance across diverse use cases. Although pre-trained models offer a useful starting point, adapting them to meet specific user needs often demands extensive customization, and infrastructure overhead. This challenge grows when a single model must support diverse appli-cations with differing requirements for performance. Traditional solutions often involve training multiple model versions to meet varying requirements, which can be inefficient and difficult to maintain. In order to overcome this challenge, we propose NNObfuscator, a novel utility control mechanism that enables AI models to dynamically modify their performance according to predefined conditions. It is different from traditional methods that need separate models for each user. Instead, NNObfuscator allows a single model to be adapted in real time, giving you controlled access to multiple levels of performance. This mechanism enables model owners set up tiered access, ensuring that free-tier users receive a baseline level of performance while premium users benefit from enhanced capabilities. The approach improves resource allocation, reduces unnecessary computation, and supports sustainable business models in AI deployment. To validate our approach, we conducted experiments on multiple tasks, including image classification, semantic segmentation, and text to image generation, using well-established models such as ResNet, DeepLab, VGG16, FCN and Stable Diffusion. Experimental results show that NNObfuscator successfully makes model more adaptable, so that a single trained model can handle a broad range of tasks without requiring a lot of changes.
Authors: Unisha Joshi
Abstract: The challenges associated with deepfake detection are increasing significantly with the latest advancements in technology and the growing popularity of deepfake videos and images. Despite the presence of numerous detection models, demographic bias in the deepfake dataset remains largely unaddressed. This paper focuses on the mitigation of age-specific bias in the deepfake dataset by introducing an age-diverse deepfake dataset that will improve fairness across age groups. The dataset is constructed through a modular pipeline incorporating the existing deepfake datasets Celeb-DF, FaceForensics++, and UTKFace datasets, and the creation of synthetic data to fill the age distribution gaps. The effectiveness and generalizability of this dataset are evaluated using three deepfake detection models: XceptionNet, EfficientNet, and LipForensics. Evaluation metrics, including AUC, pAUC, and EER, revealed that models trained on the age-diverse dataset demonstrated fairer performance across age groups, improved overall accuracy, and higher generalization across datasets. This study contributes a reproducible, fairness-aware deepfake dataset and model pipeline that can serve as a foundation for future research in fairer deepfake detection. The complete dataset and implementation code are available at https://github.com/unishajoshi/age-diverse-deepfake-detection.
URLs: https://github.com/unishajoshi/age-diverse-deepfake-detection.
Authors: Jiahao Xiao, Jianbo Zhang, BoWen Yan, Shengyu Guo, Tongrui Ye, Kaiwei Zhang, Zicheng Zhang, Xiaohong Liu, Zhengxue Cheng, Lei Fan, Chuyi Li, Guangtao Zhai
Abstract: Embodied intelligence is advancing rapidly, driving the need for efficient evaluation. Current benchmarks typically rely on interactive simulated environments or real-world setups, which are costly, fragmented, and hard to scale. To address this, we introduce StaticEmbodiedBench, a plug-and-play benchmark that enables unified evaluation using static scene representations. Covering 42 diverse scenarios and 8 core dimensions, it supports scalable and comprehensive assessment through a simple interface. Furthermore, we evaluate 19 Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and 11 Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs), establishing the first unified static leaderboard for Embodied intelligence. Moreover, we release a subset of 200 samples from our benchmark to accelerate the development of embodied intelligence.
Authors: Hongbo Ma, Fei Shen, Hongbin Xu, Xiaoce Wang, Gang Xu, Jinkai Zheng, Liangqiong Qu, Ming Li
Abstract: The advancement of intelligent agents has revolutionized problem-solving across diverse domains, yet solutions for personalized fashion styling remain underexplored, which holds immense promise for promoting shopping experiences. In this work, we present StyleTailor, the first collaborative agent framework that seamlessly unifies personalized apparel design, shopping recommendation, virtual try-on, and systematic evaluation into a cohesive workflow. To this end, StyleTailor pioneers an iterative visual refinement paradigm driven by multi-level negative feedback, enabling adaptive and precise user alignment. Specifically, our framework features two core agents, i.e., Designer for personalized garment selection and Consultant for virtual try-on, whose outputs are progressively refined via hierarchical vision-language model feedback spanning individual items, complete outfits, and try-on efficacy. Counterexamples are aggregated into negative prompts, forming a closed-loop mechanism that enhances recommendation quality. To assess the performance, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation suite encompassing style consistency, visual quality, face similarity, and artistic appraisal. Extensive experiments demonstrate StyleTailor's superior performance in delivering personalized designs and recommendations, outperforming strong baselines without negative feedback and establishing a new benchmark for intelligent fashion systems.
Authors: Sarina Penquitt, Jonathan Klees, Rinor Cakaj, Daniel Kondermann, Matthias Rottmann, Lars Schmarje
Abstract: Object detection has advanced rapidly in recent years, driven by increasingly large and diverse datasets. However, label errors, defined as missing labels, incorrect classification or inaccurate localization, often compromise the quality of these datasets. This can have a significant impact on the outcomes of training and benchmark evaluations. Although several methods now exist for detecting label errors in object detection datasets, they are typically validated only on synthetic benchmarks or limited manual inspection. How to correct such errors systemically and at scale therefore remains an open problem. We introduce a semi-automated framework for label-error correction called REC$\checkmark$D (Rechecked). Building on existing detectors, the framework pairs their error proposals with lightweight, crowd-sourced microtasks. These tasks enable multiple annotators to independently verify each candidate bounding box, and their responses are aggregated to estimate ambiguity and improve label quality. To demonstrate the effectiveness of REC$\checkmark$D, we apply it to the class pedestrian in the KITTI dataset. Our crowdsourced review yields high-quality corrected annotations, which indicate a rate of at least 24% of missing and inaccurate annotations in original annotations. This validated set will be released as a new real-world benchmark for label error detection and correction. We show that current label error detection methods, when combined with our correction framework, can recover hundreds of errors in the time it would take a human to annotate bounding boxes from scratch. However, even the best methods still miss up to 66% of the true errors and with low quality labels introduce more errors than they find. This highlights the urgent need for further research, now enabled by our released benchmark.
Authors: Simon Baur, Alexandra Benova, Emilio Dolgener Cant\'u, Jackie Ma
Abstract: Deploying deep learning models in clinical practice often requires leveraging multiple data modalities, such as images, text, and structured data, to achieve robust and trustworthy decisions. However, not all modalities are always available at inference time. In this work, we propose multimodal privileged knowledge distillation (MMPKD), a training strategy that utilizes additional modalities available solely during training to guide a unimodal vision model. Specifically, we used a text-based teacher model for chest radiographs (MIMIC-CXR) and a tabular metadata-based teacher model for mammography (CBIS-DDSM) to distill knowledge into a vision transformer student model. We show that MMPKD can improve the resulting attention maps' zero-shot capabilities of localizing ROI in input images, while this effect does not generalize across domains, as contrarily suggested by prior research.
Authors: Guanyu Hu, Dimitrios Kollias, Xinyu Yang
Abstract: Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations remains a challenging task due to the complex interplay of textual, acoustic and visual signals. While recent models have improved performance via advanced fusion strategies, they often lack psychologically meaningful priors to guide multimodal alignment. In this paper, we revisit the use of CLIP and propose a novel Visual Emotion Guided Anchoring (VEGA) mechanism that introduces class-level visual semantics into the fusion and classification process. Distinct from prior work that primarily utilizes CLIP's textual encoder, our approach leverages its image encoder to construct emotion-specific visual anchors based on facial exemplars. These anchors guide unimodal and multimodal features toward a perceptually grounded and psychologically aligned representation space, drawing inspiration from cognitive theories (prototypical emotion categories and multisensory integration). A stochastic anchor sampling strategy further enhances robustness by balancing semantic stability and intra-class diversity. Integrated into a dual-branch architecture with self-distillation, our VEGA-augmented model achieves sota performance on IEMOCAP and MELD. Code is available at: https://github.com/dkollias/VEGA.
Authors: Jing Zhang, Xiaowei Yu, Minheng Chen, Lu Zhang, Tong Chen, Yan Zhuang, Chao Cao, Yanjun Lyu, Li Su, Tianming Liu, Dajiang Zhu
Abstract: Integrating brain imaging data with clinical reports offers a valuable opportunity to leverage complementary multimodal information for more effective and timely diagnosis in practical clinical settings. This approach has gained significant attention in brain disorder research, yet a key challenge remains: how to effectively link objective imaging data with subjective text-based reports, such as doctors' notes. In this work, we propose a novel framework that aligns brain connectomes with clinical reports in a shared cross-modal latent space at both the subject and connectome levels, thereby enhancing representation learning. The key innovation of our approach is that we treat brain subnetworks as tokens of imaging data, rather than raw image patches, to align with word tokens in clinical reports. This enables a more efficient identification of system-level associations between neuroimaging findings and clinical observations, which is critical since brain disorders often manifest as network-level abnormalities rather than isolated regional alterations. We applied our method to mild cognitive impairment (MCI) using the ADNI dataset. Our approach not only achieves state-of-the-art predictive performance but also identifies clinically meaningful connectome-text pairs, offering new insights into the early mechanisms of Alzheimer's disease and supporting the development of clinically useful multimodal biomarkers.
Authors: Manish Kansana, Elias Hossain, Shahram Rahimi, Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarz
Abstract: Surface material recognition is a key component in robotic perception and physical interaction, particularly when leveraging both tactile and visual sensory inputs. In this work, we propose Surformer v1, a transformer-based architecture designed for surface classification using structured tactile features and PCA-reduced visual embeddings extracted via ResNet-50. The model integrates modality-specific encoders with cross-modal attention layers, enabling rich interactions between vision and touch. Currently, state-of-the-art deep learning models for vision tasks have achieved remarkable performance. With this in mind, our first set of experiments focused exclusively on tactile-only surface classification. Using feature engineering, we trained and evaluated multiple machine learning models, assessing their accuracy and inference time. We then implemented an encoder-only Transformer model tailored for tactile features. This model not only achieved the highest accuracy but also demonstrated significantly faster inference time compared to other evaluated models, highlighting its potential for real-time applications. To extend this investigation, we introduced a multimodal fusion setup by combining vision and tactile inputs. We trained both Surformer v1 (using structured features) and Multimodal CNN (using raw images) to examine the impact of feature-based versus image-based multimodal learning on classification accuracy and computational efficiency. The results showed that Surformer v1 achieved 99.4% accuracy with an inference time of 0.77 ms, while the Multimodal CNN achieved slightly higher accuracy but required significantly more inference time. These findings suggest Surformer v1 offers a compelling balance between accuracy, efficiency, and computational cost for surface material recognition.
Authors: Mohammad Zia Ur Rehman, Anukriti Bhatnagar, Omkar Kabde, Shubhi Bansal, Nagendra Kumar
Abstract: The existing research has primarily focused on text and image-based hate speech detection, video-based approaches remain underexplored. In this work, we introduce a novel dataset, ImpliHateVid, specifically curated for implicit hate speech detection in videos. ImpliHateVid consists of 2,009 videos comprising 509 implicit hate videos, 500 explicit hate videos, and 1,000 non-hate videos, making it one of the first large-scale video datasets dedicated to implicit hate detection. We also propose a novel two-stage contrastive learning framework for hate speech detection in videos. In the first stage, we train modality-specific encoders for audio, text, and image using contrastive loss by concatenating features from the three encoders. In the second stage, we train cross-encoders using contrastive learning to refine multimodal representations. Additionally, we incorporate sentiment, emotion, and caption-based features to enhance implicit hate detection. We evaluate our method on two datasets, ImpliHateVid for implicit hate speech detection and another dataset for general hate speech detection in videos, HateMM dataset, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed multimodal contrastive learning for hateful content detection in videos and the significance of our dataset.
Authors: Sihan Ma, Qiming Wu, Ruotong Jiang, Frank Burns
Abstract: The proliferation of digital news media necessitates robust methods for verifying content veracity, particularly regarding the consistency between visual and textual information. Traditional approaches often fall short in addressing the fine-grained cross-modal contextual consistency (FCCC) problem, which encompasses deeper alignment of visual narrative, emotional tone, and background information with text, beyond mere entity matching. To address this, we propose ContextGuard-LVLM, a novel framework built upon advanced Vision-Language Large Models (LVLMs) and integrating a multi-stage contextual reasoning mechanism. Our model is uniquely enhanced through reinforced or adversarial learning paradigms, enabling it to detect subtle contextual misalignments that evade zero-shot baselines. We extend and augment three established datasets (TamperedNews-Ent, News400-Ent, MMG-Ent) with new fine-grained contextual annotations, including "contextual sentiment," "visual narrative theme," and "scene-event logical coherence," and introduce a comprehensive CTXT (Contextual Coherence) entity type. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ContextGuard-LVLM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot LVLM baselines (InstructBLIP and LLaVA 1.5) across nearly all fine-grained consistency tasks, showing significant improvements in complex logical reasoning and nuanced contextual understanding. Furthermore, our model exhibits superior robustness to subtle perturbations and a higher agreement rate with human expert judgments on challenging samples, affirming its efficacy in discerning sophisticated forms of context detachment.
Authors: Kexin Yu, Zihan Xu, Jialei Xie, Carter Adams
Abstract: Accurate diagnosis of skin diseases remains a significant challenge due to the complex and diverse visual features present in dermatoscopic images, often compounded by a lack of interpretability in existing purely visual diagnostic models. To address these limitations, this study introduces VL-MedGuide (Visual-Linguistic Medical Guide), a novel framework leveraging the powerful multi-modal understanding and reasoning capabilities of Visual-Language Large Models (LVLMs) for intelligent and inherently interpretable auxiliary diagnosis of skin conditions. VL-MedGuide operates in two interconnected stages: a Multi-modal Concept Perception Module, which identifies and linguistically describes dermatologically relevant visual features through sophisticated prompt engineering, and an Explainable Disease Reasoning Module, which integrates these concepts with raw visual information via Chain-of-Thought prompting to provide precise disease diagnoses alongside transparent rationales. Comprehensive experiments on the Derm7pt dataset demonstrate that VL-MedGuide achieves state-of-the-art performance in both disease diagnosis (83.55% BACC, 80.12% F1) and concept detection (76.10% BACC, 67.45% F1), surpassing existing baselines. Furthermore, human evaluations confirm the high clarity, completeness, and trustworthiness of its generated explanations, bridging the gap between AI performance and clinical utility by offering actionable, explainable insights for dermatological practice.
Authors: Shilong Zou, Yuhang Huang, Renjiao Yi, Chenyang Zhu, Kai Xu
Abstract: We introduce a diffusion-based cross-domain image translator in the absence of paired training data. Unlike GAN-based methods, our approach integrates diffusion models to learn the image translation process, allowing for more coverable modeling of the data distribution and performance improvement of the cross-domain translation. However, incorporating the translation process within the diffusion process is still challenging since the two processes are not aligned exactly, i.e., the diffusion process is applied to the noisy signal while the translation process is conducted on the clean signal. As a result, recent diffusion-based studies employ separate training or shallow integration to learn the two processes, yet this may cause the local minimal of the translation optimization, constraining the effectiveness of diffusion models. To address the problem, we propose a novel joint learning framework that aligns the diffusion and the translation process, thereby improving the global optimality. Specifically, we propose to extract the image components with diffusion models to represent the clean signal and employ the translation process with the image components, enabling an end-to-end joint learning manner. On the other hand, we introduce a time-dependent translation network to learn the complex translation mapping, resulting in effective translation learning and significant performance improvement. Benefiting from the design of joint learning, our method enables global optimization of both processes, enhancing the optimality and achieving improved fidelity and structural consistency. We have conducted extensive experiments on RGB$\leftrightarrow$RGB and diverse cross-modality translation tasks including RGB$\leftrightarrow$Edge, RGB$\leftrightarrow$Semantics and RGB$\leftrightarrow$Depth, showcasing better generative performances than the state of the arts.
Authors: Wenpeng Xing, Jie Chen, Zaifeng Yang, Tiancheng Zhao, Gaolei Li, Changting Lin, Yike Guo, Meng Han
Abstract: Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have shown impressive performance in novel view synthesis, but challenges remain in rendering scenes with complex specular reflections and highlights. Existing approaches may produce blurry reflections due to entanglement between lighting and material properties, or encounter optimization instability when relying on physically-based inverse rendering. In this work, we present a neural rendering framework based on dynamic coefficient decomposition, aiming to improve the modeling of view-dependent appearance. Our approach decomposes complex appearance into a shared, static neural basis that encodes intrinsic material properties, and a set of dynamic coefficients generated by a Coefficient Network conditioned on view and illumination. A Dynamic Radiance Integrator then combines these components to synthesize the final radiance. Experimental results on several challenging benchmarks suggest that our method can produce sharper and more realistic specular highlights compared to existing techniques. We hope that this decomposition paradigm can provide a flexible and effective direction for modeling complex appearance in neural scene representations.
Authors: Zheyuan Zhang, Weihao Tang, Hong Chen
Abstract: Micro-expression recognition (MER) is a highly challenging task in affective computing. With the reduced-sized micro-expression (ME) input that contains key information based on key-frame indexes, key-frame-based methods have significantly improved the performance of MER. However, most of these methods focus on improving the performance with relatively accurate key-frame indexes, while ignoring the difficulty of obtaining accurate key-frame indexes and the objective existence of key-frame index errors, which impedes them from moving towards practical applications. In this paper, we propose CausalNet, a novel framework to achieve robust MER facing key-frame index errors while maintaining accurate recognition. To enhance robustness, CausalNet takes the representation of the entire ME sequence as the input. To address the information redundancy brought by the complete ME range input and maintain accurate recognition, first, the Causal Motion Position Learning Module (CMPLM) is proposed to help the model locate the muscle movement areas related to Action Units (AUs), thereby reducing the attention to other redundant areas. Second, the Causal Attention Block (CAB) is proposed to deeply learn the causal relationships between the muscle contraction and relaxation movements in MEs. Empirical experiments have demonstrated that on popular ME benchmarks, the CausalNet has achieved robust MER under different levels of key-frame index noise. Meanwhile, it has surpassed state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on several standard MER benchmarks when using the provided annotated key-frames. Code is available at https://github.com/tony19980810/CausalNet.
Authors: Denis Lukovnikov, Andreas M\"uller, Erwin Quiring, Asja Fischer
Abstract: In-generation watermarking for detecting and attributing generated content has recently been explored for latent diffusion models (LDMs), demonstrating high robustness. However, the use of in-generation watermarks in autoregressive (AR) image models has not been explored yet. AR models generate images by autoregressively predicting a sequence of visual tokens that are then decoded into pixels using a vector-quantized decoder. Inspired by red-green watermarks for large language models, we examine token-level watermarking schemes that bias the next-token prediction based on prior tokens. We find that a direct transfer of these schemes works in principle, but the detectability of the watermarks decreases considerably under common image perturbations. As a remedy, we propose two novel watermarking methods that rely on visual token clustering to assign similar tokens to the same set. Firstly, we investigate a training-free approach that relies on a cluster lookup table, and secondly, we finetune VAE encoders to predict token clusters directly from perturbed images. Overall, our experiments show that cluster-level watermarks improve robustness against perturbations and regeneration attacks while preserving image quality. Cluster classification further boosts watermark detectability, outperforming a set of baselines. Moreover, our methods offer fast verification runtime, comparable to lightweight post-hoc watermarking methods.
Authors: Tianqin Li, George Liu, Tai Sing Lee
Abstract: Despite remarkable progress in computer vision, modern recognition systems remain limited by their dependence on rich, redundant visual inputs. In contrast, humans can effortlessly understand sparse, minimal representations like line drawings - suggesting that structure, rather than appearance, underlies efficient visual understanding. In this work, we propose using line drawings as a structure-first pretraining modality to induce more compact and generalizable visual representations. We show that models pretrained on line drawings develop stronger shape bias, more focused attention, and greater data efficiency across classification, detection, and segmentation tasks. Notably, these models also exhibit lower intrinsic dimensionality, requiring significantly fewer principal components to capture representational variance - echoing the similar observation in low dimensional efficient representation in the brain. Beyond performance improvements, line drawing pretraining produces more compressible representations, enabling better distillation into lightweight student models. Students distilled from line-pretrained teachers consistently outperform those trained from color-supervised teachers, highlighting the benefits of structurally compact knowledge. Finally, we demonstrate that the pretraining with line-drawing can also be extended to unsupervised setting via our proposed method "learning to draw". Together, our results support the view that structure-first visual learning fosters efficiency, generalization, and human-aligned inductive biases - offering a simple yet powerful strategy for building more robust and adaptable vision systems.
Authors: Md Rezwanul Haque, Md. Milon Islam, S M Taslim Uddin Raju, Hamdi Altaheri, Lobna Nassar, Fakhri Karray
Abstract: Depression is a serious mental health illness that significantly affects an individual's well-being and quality of life, making early detection crucial for adequate care and treatment. Detecting depression is often difficult, as it is based primarily on subjective evaluations during clinical interviews. Hence, the early diagnosis of depression, thanks to the content of social networks, has become a prominent research area. The extensive and diverse nature of user-generated information poses a significant challenge, limiting the accurate extraction of relevant temporal information and the effective fusion of data across multiple modalities. This paper introduces MMFformer, a multimodal depression detection network designed to retrieve depressive spatio-temporal high-level patterns from multimodal social media information. The transformer network with residual connections captures spatial features from videos, and a transformer encoder is exploited to design important temporal dynamics in audio. Moreover, the fusion architecture fused the extracted features through late and intermediate fusion strategies to find out the most relevant intermodal correlations among them. Finally, the proposed network is assessed on two large-scale depression detection datasets, and the results clearly reveal that it surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches, improving the F1-Score by 13.92% for D-Vlog dataset and 7.74% for LMVD dataset. The code is made available publicly at https://github.com/rezwanh001/Large-Scale-Multimodal-Depression-Detection.
URLs: https://github.com/rezwanh001/Large-Scale-Multimodal-Depression-Detection.
Authors: Justin London
Abstract: Computer-generated holography (CGH) is a promising method that modulates user-defined waveforms with digital holograms. An efficient and fast pipeline framework is proposed to synthesize CGH using initial point cloud and MRI data. This input data is reconstructed into volumetric objects that are then input into non-convex Fourier optics optimization algorithms for phase-only hologram (POH) and complex-hologram (CH) generation using alternating projection, SGD, and quasi-Netwton methods. Comparison of reconstruction performance of these algorithms as measured by MSE, RMSE, and PSNR is analyzed as well as to HoloNet deep learning CGH. Performance metrics are shown to be improved by using 2D median filtering to remove artifacts and speckled noise during optimization.
Authors: Jixuan He, Chieh Hubert Lin, Lu Qi, Ming-Hsuan Yang
Abstract: Creating deformable 3D content has gained increasing attention with the rise of text-to-image and image-to-video generative models. While these models provide rich semantic priors for appearance, they struggle to capture the physical realism and motion dynamics needed for authentic 4D scene synthesis. In contrast, real-world videos can provide physically grounded geometry and articulation cues that are difficult to hallucinate. One question is raised: \textit{Can we generate physically consistent 4D content by leveraging the motion priors of the real-world video}? In this work, we explore the task of reanimating deformable 3D scenes from a single video, using the original sequence as a supervisory signal to correct artifacts from synthetic motion. We introduce \textbf{Restage4D}, a geometry-preserving pipeline for video-conditioned 4D restaging. Our approach uses a video-rewinding training strategy to temporally bridge a real base video and a synthetic driving video via a shared motion representation. We further incorporate an occlusion-aware rigidity loss and a disocclusion backtracing mechanism to improve structural and geometry consistency under challenging motion. We validate Restage4D on DAVIS and PointOdyssey, demonstrating improved geometry consistency, motion quality, and 3D tracking performance. Our method not only preserves deformable structure under novel motion, but also automatically corrects errors introduced by generative models, revealing the potential of video prior in 4D restaging task. Source code and trained models will be released.
Authors: Somayeh Farahani, Marjaneh Hejazi, Antonio Di Ieva, Sidong Liu
Abstract: Accurate, noninvasive detection of isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) mutation is essential for effective glioma management. Traditional methods rely on invasive tissue sampling, which may fail to capture a tumor's spatial heterogeneity. While deep learning models have shown promise in molecular profiling, their performance is often limited by scarce annotated data. In contrast, foundation deep learning models offer a more generalizable approach for glioma imaging biomarkers. We propose a Foundation-based Biomarker Network (FoundBioNet) that utilizes a SWIN-UNETR-based architecture to noninvasively predict IDH mutation status from multi-parametric MRI. Two key modules are incorporated: Tumor-Aware Feature Encoding (TAFE) for extracting multi-scale, tumor-focused features, and Cross-Modality Differential (CMD) for highlighting subtle T2-FLAIR mismatch signals associated with IDH mutation. The model was trained and validated on a diverse, multi-center cohort of 1705 glioma patients from six public datasets. Our model achieved AUCs of 90.58%, 88.08%, 65.41%, and 80.31% on independent test sets from EGD, TCGA, Ivy GAP, RHUH, and UPenn, consistently outperforming baseline approaches (p <= 0.05). Ablation studies confirmed that both the TAFE and CMD modules are essential for improving predictive accuracy. By integrating large-scale pretraining and task-specific fine-tuning, FoundBioNet enables generalizable glioma characterization. This approach enhances diagnostic accuracy and interpretability, with the potential to enable more personalized patient care.
Authors: Yash Garg, Saketh Bachu, Arindam Dutta, Rohit Lal, Sarosij Bose, Calvin-Khang Ta, M. Salman Asif, Amit Roy-Chowdhury
Abstract: Human pose and shape (HPS) estimation methods have been extensively studied, with many demonstrating high zero-shot performance on in-the-wild images and videos. However, these methods often struggle in challenging scenarios involving complex human poses or significant occlusions. Although some studies address 3D human pose estimation under occlusion, they typically evaluate performance on datasets that lack realistic or substantial occlusions, e.g., most existing datasets introduce occlusions with random patches over the human or clipart-style overlays, which may not reflect real-world challenges. To bridge this gap in realistic occlusion datasets, we introduce a novel benchmark dataset, VOccl3D, a Video-based human Occlusion dataset with 3D body pose and shape annotations. Inspired by works such as AGORA and BEDLAM, we constructed this dataset using advanced computer graphics rendering techniques, incorporating diverse real-world occlusion scenarios, clothing textures, and human motions. Additionally, we fine-tuned recent HPS methods, CLIFF and BEDLAM-CLIFF, on our dataset, demonstrating significant qualitative and quantitative improvements across multiple public datasets, as well as on the test split of our dataset, while comparing its performance with other state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we leveraged our dataset to enhance human detection performance under occlusion by fine-tuning an existing object detector, YOLO11, thus leading to a robust end-to-end HPS estimation system under occlusions. Overall, this dataset serves as a valuable resource for future research aimed at benchmarking methods designed to handle occlusions, offering a more realistic alternative to existing occlusion datasets. See the Project page for code and dataset:https://yashgarg98.github.io/VOccl3D-dataset/
Authors: Zihao Sheng, Zilin Huang, Yen-Jung Chen, Yansong Qu, Yuhao Luo, Yue Leng, Sikai Chen
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across a range of vision-language tasks and demonstrate strong potential for traffic accident understanding. However, existing MLLMs in this domain primarily focus on coarse-grained image-level or video-level comprehension and often struggle to handle fine-grained visual details or localized scene components, limiting their applicability in complex accident scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose SafePLUG, a novel framework that empowers MLLMs with both Pixel-Level Understanding and temporal Grounding for comprehensive traffic accident analysis. SafePLUG supports both arbitrary-shaped visual prompts for region-aware question answering and pixel-level segmentation based on language instructions, while also enabling the recognition of temporally anchored events in traffic accident scenarios. To advance the development of MLLMs for traffic accident understanding, we curate a new dataset containing multimodal question-answer pairs centered on diverse accident scenarios, with detailed pixel-level annotations and temporal event boundaries. Experimental results show that SafePLUG achieves strong performance on multiple tasks, including region-based question answering, pixel-level segmentation, temporal event localization, and accident event understanding. These capabilities lay a foundation for fine-grained understanding of complex traffic scenes, with the potential to improve driving safety and enhance situational awareness in smart transportation systems. The code, dataset, and model checkpoints will be made publicly available at: https://zihaosheng.github.io/SafePLUG
Authors: Noe Bertramo, Gabriel Duguey, Vivek Gopalakrishnan
Abstract: Intraoperative ultrasound imaging provides real-time guidance during numerous surgical procedures, but its interpretation is complicated by noise, artifacts, and poor alignment with high-resolution preoperative MRI/CT scans. To bridge the gap between reoperative planning and intraoperative guidance, we present DiffUS, a physics-based, differentiable ultrasound renderer that synthesizes realistic B-mode images from volumetric imaging. DiffUS first converts MRI 3D scans into acoustic impedance volumes using a machine learning approach. Next, we simulate ultrasound beam propagation using ray tracing with coupled reflection-transmission equations. DiffUS formulates wave propagation as a sparse linear system that captures multiple internal reflections. Finally, we reconstruct B-mode images via depth-resolved echo extraction across fan-shaped acquisition geometry, incorporating realistic artifacts including speckle noise and depth-dependent degradation. DiffUS is entirely implemented as differentiable tensor operations in PyTorch, enabling gradient-based optimization for downstream applications such as slice-to-volume registration and volumetric reconstruction. Evaluation on the ReMIND dataset demonstrates DiffUS's ability to generate anatomically accurate ultrasound images from brain MRI data.
Authors: Aarav Mehta, Priya Deshmukh, Vikram Singh, Siddharth Malhotra, Krishnan Menon Iyer, Tanvi Iyer
Abstract: Accurate localization of organ boundaries is critical in medical imaging for segmentation, registration, surgical planning, and radiotherapy. While deep convolutional networks (ConvNets) have advanced general-purpose edge detection to near-human performance on natural images, their outputs often lack precise localization, a limitation that is particularly harmful in medical applications where millimeter-level accuracy is required. Building on a systematic analysis of ConvNet edge outputs, we propose a medically focused crisp edge detector that adapts a novel top-down backward refinement architecture to medical images (2D and volumetric). Our method progressively upsamples and fuses high-level semantic features with fine-grained low-level cues through a backward refinement pathway, producing high-resolution, well-localized organ boundaries. We further extend the design to handle anisotropic volumes by combining 2D slice-wise refinement with light 3D context aggregation to retain computational efficiency. Evaluations on several CT and MRI organ datasets demonstrate substantially improved boundary localization under strict criteria (boundary F-measure, Hausdorff distance) compared to baseline ConvNet detectors and contemporary medical edge/contour methods. Importantly, integrating our crisp edge maps into downstream pipelines yields consistent gains in organ segmentation (higher Dice scores, lower boundary errors), more accurate image registration, and improved delineation of lesions near organ interfaces. The proposed approach produces clinically valuable, crisp organ edges that materially enhance common medical-imaging tasks.
Authors: Vikram Singh, Kabir Malhotra, Rohan Desai, Ananya Shankaracharya, Priyadarshini Chatterjee, Krishnan Menon Iyer
Abstract: Accurate segmentation of melanocytic tumors in dermoscopic images is a critical step for automated skin cancer screening and clinical decision support. Unlike natural scene segmentation, lesion delineation must reconcile subtle texture and color variations, frequent artifacts (hairs, rulers, bubbles), and a strong need for precise boundary localization to support downstream diagnosis. In this paper we introduce Our method, a novel ResNet inspired dual resolution architecture specifically designed for melanocytic tumor segmentation. Our method maintains a full resolution stream that preserves fine grained boundary information while a complementary pooled stream aggregates multi scale contextual cues for robust lesion recognition. The streams are tightly coupled by boundary aware residual connections that inject high frequency edge information into deep feature maps, and by a channel attention module that adapts color and texture sensitivity to dermoscopic appearance. To further address common imaging artifacts and the limited size of clinical datasets, we propose a lightweight artifact suppression block and a multi task training objective that combines a Dice Tversky segmentation loss with an explicit boundary loss and a contrastive regularizer for feature stability. The combined design yields pixel accurate masks without requiring heavy post processing or complex pre training protocols. Extensive experiments on public dermoscopic benchmarks demonstrate that Our method significantly improves boundary adherence and clinically relevant segmentation metrics compared to standard encoder decoder baselines, making it a practical building block for automated melanoma assessment systems.
Authors: Ayaan Nooruddin Siddiqui, Mahnoor Zaidi, Ayesha Nazneen Shahbaz, Priyadarshini Chatterjee, Krishnan Menon Iyer
Abstract: Accurate segmentation of subcutaneous vessels from clinical images is hampered by scarce, expensive ground truth and by low contrast, noisy appearance of vessels across patients and modalities. We present a novel weakly supervised training framework tailored for subcutaneous vessel segmentation that leverages inexpensive sparse annotations (e.g., centerline traces, dot markers, or short scribbles). Sparse labels are expanded into dense, probabilistic supervision via a differentiable random walk label propagation model whose transition weights incorporate image driven vesselness cues and tubular continuity priors. The propagation yields per-pixel hitting probabilities together with calibrated uncertainty estimates; these are incorporated into an uncertainty weighted loss to avoid over fitting to ambiguous regions. Crucially, the label-propagator is learned jointly with a CNN based segmentation predictor, enabling the system to discover vessel edges and continuity constraints without explicit edge supervision. We further introduce a topology aware regularizer that encourages centerline connectivity and penalizes spurious branches, improving clinical usability. In experiments on clinical subcutaneous imaging datasets, our method consistently outperforms naive training on sparse labels and conventional dense pseudo-labeling, producing more complete vascular maps and better calibrated uncertainty for downstream decision making. The approach substantially reduces annotation burden while preserving clinically relevant vessel topology.
Authors: Taha Mustapha Nehdi, Nairouz Mrabah, Atif Belal, Marco Pedersoli, Eric Granger
Abstract: Adapting person re-identification (reID) models to new target environments remains a challenging problem that is typically addressed using unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods. Recent works show that when labeled data originates from several distinct sources (e.g., datasets and cameras), considering each source separately and applying multi-source domain adaptation (MSDA) typically yields higher accuracy and robustness compared to blending the sources and performing conventional UDA. However, state-of-the-art MSDA methods learn domain-specific backbone models or require access to source domain data during adaptation, resulting in significant growth in training parameters and computational cost. In this paper, a Source-free Adaptive Gated Experts (SAGE-reID) method is introduced for person reID. Our SAGE-reID is a cost-effective, source-free MSDA method that first trains individual source-specific low-rank adapters (LoRA) through source-free UDA. Next, a lightweight gating network is introduced and trained to dynamically assign optimal merging weights for fusion of LoRA experts, enabling effective cross-domain knowledge transfer. While the number of backbone parameters remains constant across source domains, LoRA experts scale linearly but remain negligible in size (<= 2% of the backbone), reducing both the memory consumption and risk of overfitting. Extensive experiments conducted on three challenging benchmarks: Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID, and MSMT17 indicate that SAGE-reID outperforms state-of-the-art methods while being computationally efficient.
Authors: Hamidreza Samadi, Md Manjurul Ahsan, Shivakumar Raman
Abstract: This study addresses the challenge of accurately forecasting geometric deviations in manufactured components using advanced 3D surface analysis. Despite progress in modern manufacturing, maintaining dimensional precision remains difficult, particularly for complex geometries. We present a methodology that employs a high-resolution 3D scanner to acquire multi-angle surface data from 237 components produced across different batches. The data were processed through precise alignment, noise reduction, and merging techniques to generate accurate 3D representations. A hybrid machine learning framework was developed, combining convolutional neural networks for feature extraction with gradient-boosted decision trees for predictive modeling. The proposed system achieved a prediction accuracy of 0.012 mm at a 95% confidence level, representing a 73% improvement over conventional statistical process control methods. In addition to improved accuracy, the model revealed hidden correlations between manufacturing parameters and geometric deviations. This approach offers significant potential for automated quality control, predictive maintenance, and design optimization in precision manufacturing, and the resulting dataset provides a strong foundation for future predictive modeling research.
Authors: L. D. M. S. Sai Teja, Ashok Urlana, Pruthwik Mishra
Abstract: Despite significant progress in image captioning, generating accurate and descriptive captions remains a long-standing challenge. In this study, we propose Attention-Guided Image Captioning (AGIC), which amplifies salient visual regions directly in the feature space to guide caption generation. We further introduce a hybrid decoding strategy that combines deterministic and probabilistic sampling to balance fluency and diversity. To evaluate AGIC, we conduct extensive experiments on the Flickr8k and Flickr30k datasets. The results show that AGIC matches or surpasses several state-of-the-art models while achieving faster inference. Moreover, AGIC demonstrates strong performance across multiple evaluation metrics, offering a scalable and interpretable solution for image captioning.
Authors: Mengxue Jia, Zhihua Allen-Zhao, You Zhao, Sanyang Liu
Abstract: Multiview clustering (MC) aims to group samples using consistent and complementary information across various views. The subspace clustering, as a fundamental technique of MC, has attracted significant attention. In this paper, we propose a novel joint sparse self-representation learning model for MC, where a featured difference is the extraction of view-specific local information by introducing cardinality (i.e., $\ell_0$-norm) constraints instead of Graph-Laplacian regularization. Specifically, under each view, cardinality constraints directly restrict the samples used in the self-representation stage to extract reliable local and global structure information, while the low-rank constraint aids in revealing a global coherent structure in the consensus affinity matrix during merging. The attendant challenge is that Augmented Lagrange Method (ALM)-based alternating minimization algorithms cannot guarantee convergence when applied directly to our nonconvex, nonsmooth model, thus resulting in poor generalization ability. To address it, we develop an alternating quadratic penalty (AQP) method with global convergence, where two subproblems are iteratively solved by closed-form solutions. Empirical results on six standard datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model and AQP method, compared to eight state-of-the-art algorithms.
Authors: Jianxiang He, Shaoguang Wang, Weiyu Guo, Meisheng Hong, Jungang Li, Yijie Xu, Ziyang Chen, Hui Xiong
Abstract: Long video understanding presents a significant challenge to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) primarily due to the immense data scale. A critical and widely adopted strategy for making this task computationally tractable is keyframe retrieval, which seeks to identify a sparse set of video frames that are most salient to a given textual query. However, the efficacy of this approach is hindered by weak multimodal alignment between textual queries and visual content and fails to capture the complex temporal semantic information required for precise reasoning. To address this, we propose Visual-Subtitle Integeration(VSI), a multimodal keyframe search method that integrates subtitles, timestamps, and scene boundaries into a unified multimodal search process. The proposed method captures the visual information of video frames as well as the complementary textual information through a dual-stream search mechanism by Video Search Stream as well as Subtitle Match Stream, respectively, and improves the keyframe search accuracy through the interaction of the two search streams. Experimental results show that VSI achieve 40.00% key frame localization accuracy on the text-relevant subset of LongVideoBench and 68.48% accuracy on downstream long Video-QA tasks, surpassing competitive baselines by 20.35% and 15.79%, respectively. Furthermore, on the LongVideoBench, VSI achieved state-of-the-art(SOTA) in medium-to-long video-QA tasks, demonstrating the robustness and generalizability of the proposed multimodal search strategy.
Authors: Maoxun Yuan, Duanni Meng, Ziteng Xi, Tianyi Zhao, Shiji Zhao, Yimian Dai, Xingxing Wei
Abstract: Infrared small target detection and segmentation (IRSTDS) is a critical yet challenging task in defense and civilian applications, owing to the dim, shapeless appearance of targets and severe background clutter. Recent CNN-based methods have achieved promising target perception results, but they only focus on enhancing feature representation to offset the impact of noise, which results in the increased false alarms problem. In this paper, through analyzing the problem from the frequency domain, we pioneer in improving performance from noise suppression perspective and propose a novel noise-suppression feature pyramid network (NS-FPN), which integrates a low-frequency guided feature purification (LFP) module and a spiral-aware feature sampling (SFS) module into the original FPN structure. The LFP module suppresses the noise features by purifying high-frequency components to achieve feature enhancement devoid of noise interference, while the SFS module further adopts spiral sampling to fuse target-relevant features in feature fusion process. Our NS-FPN is designed to be lightweight yet effective and can be easily plugged into existing IRSTDS frameworks. Extensive experiments on the public IRSTDS datasets demonstrate that our method significantly reduces false alarms and achieves superior performance on IRSTDS tasks.
Authors: Jianting Tang, Yubo Wang, Haoyu Cao, Linli Xu
Abstract: Mainstream Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve visual understanding by using a vision projector to bridge well-pretrained vision encoders and large language models (LLMs). The inherent gap between visual and textual modalities makes the embeddings from the vision projector critical for visual comprehension. However, current alignment approaches treat visual embeddings as contextual cues and merely apply auto-regressive supervision to textual outputs, neglecting the necessity of introducing equivalent direct visual supervision, which hinders the potential finer alignment of visual embeddings. In this paper, based on our analysis of the refinement process of visual embeddings in the LLM's shallow layers, we propose BASIC, a method that utilizes refined visual embeddings within the LLM as supervision to directly guide the projector in generating initial visual embeddings. Specifically, the guidance is conducted from two perspectives: (i) optimizing embedding directions by reducing angles between initial and supervisory embeddings in semantic space; (ii) improving semantic matching by minimizing disparities between the logit distributions of both visual embeddings. Without additional supervisory models or artificial annotations, BASIC significantly improves the performance of MLLMs across a wide range of benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our introduced direct visual supervision.
Authors: Weiran Chen, Guiqian Zhu, Ying Li, Yi Ji, Chunping Liu
Abstract: Chinese font generation aims to create a new Chinese font library based on some reference samples. It is a topic of great concern to many font designers and typographers. Over the past years, with the rapid development of deep learning algorithms, various new techniques have achieved flourishing and thriving progress. Nevertheless, how to improve the overall quality of generated Chinese character images remains a tough issue. In this paper, we conduct a holistic survey of the recent Chinese font generation approaches based on deep learning. To be specific, we first illustrate the research background of the task. Then, we outline our literature selection and analysis methodology, and review a series of related fundamentals, including classical deep learning architectures, font representation formats, public datasets, and frequently-used evaluation metrics. After that, relying on the number of reference samples required to generate a new font, we categorize the existing methods into two major groups: many-shot font generation and few-shot font generation methods. Within each category, representative approaches are summarized, and their strengths and limitations are also discussed in detail. Finally, we conclude our paper with the challenges and future directions, with the expectation to provide some valuable illuminations for the researchers in this field.
Authors: Xuecheng Wu, Dingkang Yang, Danlei Huang, Xinyi Yin, Yifan Wang, Jia Zhang, Jiayu Nie, Liangyu Fu, Yang Liu, Junxiao Xue, Hadi Amirpour, Wei Zhou
Abstract: Short-form videos (SVs) have become a vital part of our online routine for acquiring and sharing information. Their multimodal complexity poses new challenges for video analysis, highlighting the need for video emotion analysis (VEA) within the community. Given the limited availability of SVs emotion data, we introduce eMotions, a large-scale dataset consisting of 27,996 videos with full-scale annotations. To ensure quality and reduce subjective bias, we emphasize better personnel allocation and propose a multi-stage annotation procedure. Additionally, we provide the category-balanced and test-oriented variants through targeted sampling to meet diverse needs. While there have been significant studies on videos with clear emotional cues (e.g., facial expressions), analyzing emotions in SVs remains a challenging task. The challenge arises from the broader content diversity, which introduces more distinct semantic gaps and complicates the representations learning of emotion-related features. Furthermore, the prevalence of audio-visual co-expressions in SVs leads to the local biases and collective information gaps caused by the inconsistencies in emotional expressions. To tackle this, we propose AV-CANet, an end-to-end audio-visual fusion network that leverages video transformer to capture semantically relevant representations. We further introduce the Local-Global Fusion Module designed to progressively capture the correlations of audio-visual features. Besides, EP-CE Loss is constructed to globally steer optimizations with tripolar penalties. Extensive experiments across three eMotions-related datasets and four public VEA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed AV-CANet, while providing broad insights for future research. Moreover, we conduct ablation studies to examine the critical components of our method. Dataset and code will be made available at Github.
Authors: Chao Yin, Jide Li, Xiaoqiang Li
Abstract: Camouflaged Object Segmentation (COS) remains highly challenging due to the intrinsic visual similarity between target objects and their surroundings. While training-based COS methods achieve good performance, their performance degrades rapidly with increased annotation sparsity. To circumvent this limitation, recent studies have explored training-free COS methods, leveraging the Segment Anything Model (SAM) by automatically generating visual prompts from a single task-generic prompt (\textit{e.g.}, "\textit{camouflaged animal}") uniformly applied across all test images. However, these methods typically produce only semantic-level visual prompts, causing SAM to output coarse semantic masks and thus failing to handle scenarios with multiple discrete camouflaged instances effectively. To address this critical limitation, we propose a simple yet powerful \textbf{I}nstance-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{P}rompting \textbf{F}ramework (IAPF), the first training-free COS pipeline that explicitly converts a task-generic prompt into fine-grained instance masks. Specifically, the IAPF comprises three steps: (1) Text Prompt Generator, utilizing task-generic queries to prompt a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) for generating image-specific foreground and background tags; (2) \textbf{Instance Mask Generator}, leveraging Grounding DINO to produce precise instance-level bounding box prompts, alongside the proposed Single-Foreground Multi-Background Prompting strategy to sample region-constrained point prompts within each box, enabling SAM to yield a candidate instance mask; (3) Self-consistency Instance Mask Voting, which selects the final COS prediction by identifying the candidate mask most consistent across multiple candidate instance masks. Extensive evaluations on standard COS benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed IAPF significantly surpasses existing state-of-the-art training-free COS methods.
Authors: Ruoxi Chen, Dongping Chen, Siyuan Wu, Sinan Wang, Shiyun Lang, Petr Sushko, Gaoyang Jiang, Yao Wan, Ranjay Krishna
Abstract: Visual designers naturally draw inspiration from multiple visual references, combining diverse elements and aesthetic principles to create artwork. However, current image generative frameworks predominantly rely on single-source inputs -- either text prompts or individual reference images. In this paper, we focus on the task of controllable image generation using multiple visual references. We introduce MultiRef-bench, a rigorous evaluation framework comprising 990 synthetic and 1,000 real-world samples that require incorporating visual content from multiple reference images. The synthetic samples are synthetically generated through our data engine RefBlend, with 10 reference types and 33 reference combinations. Based on RefBlend, we further construct a dataset MultiRef containing 38k high-quality images to facilitate further research. Our experiments across three interleaved image-text models (i.e., OmniGen, ACE, and Show-o) and six agentic frameworks (e.g., ChatDiT and LLM + SD) reveal that even state-of-the-art systems struggle with multi-reference conditioning, with the best model OmniGen achieving only 66.6% in synthetic samples and 79.0% in real-world cases on average compared to the golden answer. These findings provide valuable directions for developing more flexible and human-like creative tools that can effectively integrate multiple sources of visual inspiration. The dataset is publicly available at: https://multiref.github.io/.
Authors: Jinhao Li, Zijian Chen, Lirong Deng, Changbo Wang, Guangtao Zhai
Abstract: Person re-identification (ReID) aims to retrieve the images of an interested person in the gallery images, with wide applications in medical rehabilitation, abnormal behavior detection, and public security. However, traditional person ReID models suffer from uni-modal capability, leading to poor generalization ability in multi-modal data, such as RGB, thermal, infrared, sketch images, textual descriptions, etc. Recently, the emergence of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) shows a promising avenue for addressing this problem. Despite this potential, existing methods merely regard MLLMs as feature extractors or caption generators, which do not fully unleash their reasoning, instruction-following, and cross-modal understanding capabilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce MMReID-Bench, the first multi-task multi-modal benchmark specifically designed for person ReID. The MMReID-Bench includes 20,710 multi-modal queries and gallery images covering 10 different person ReID tasks. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the remarkable capabilities of MLLMs in delivering effective and versatile person ReID. Nevertheless, they also have limitations in handling a few modalities, particularly thermal and infrared data. We hope MMReID-Bench can facilitate the community to develop more robust and generalizable multimodal foundation models for person ReID.
Authors: Shichao Ma, Yunhe Guo, Jiahao Su, Qihe Huang, Zhengyang Zhou, Yang Wang
Abstract: Text-to-image generation tasks have driven remarkable advances in diverse media applications, yet most focus on single-turn scenarios and struggle with iterative, multi-turn creative tasks. Recent dialogue-based systems attempt to bridge this gap, but their single-agent, sequential paradigm often causes intention drift and incoherent edits. To address these limitations, we present Talk2Image, a novel multi-agent system for interactive image generation and editing in multi-turn dialogue scenarios. Our approach integrates three key components: intention parsing from dialogue history, task decomposition and collaborative execution across specialized agents, and feedback-driven refinement based on a multi-view evaluation mechanism. Talk2Image enables step-by-step alignment with user intention and consistent image editing. Experiments demonstrate that Talk2Image outperforms existing baselines in controllability, coherence, and user satisfaction across iterative image generation and editing tasks.
Authors: Shihao Yuan, Yahui Liu, Yang Yue, Jingyuan Zhang, Wangmeng Zuo, Qi Wang, Fuzheng Zhang, Guorui Zhou
Abstract: Inspired by the success of reinforcement learning (RL) in refining large language models (LLMs), we propose AR-GRPO, an approach to integrate online RL training into autoregressive (AR) image generation models. We adapt the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm to refine the vanilla autoregressive models' outputs by carefully designed reward functions that evaluate generated images across multiple quality dimensions, including perceptual quality, realism, and semantic fidelity. We conduct comprehensive experiments on both class-conditional (i.e., class-to-image) and text-conditional (i.e., text-to-image) image generation tasks, demonstrating that our RL-enhanced framework significantly improves both the image quality and human preference of generated images compared to the standard AR baselines. Our results show consistent improvements across various evaluation metrics, establishing the viability of RL-based optimization for AR image generation and opening new avenues for controllable and high-quality image synthesis. The source codes and models are available at: https://github.com/Kwai-Klear/AR-GRPO.
Authors: Weiyan Xie, Han Gao, Didan Deng, Kaican Li, April Hua Liu, Yongxiang Huang, Nevin L. Zhang
Abstract: Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) models have enabled training-free regional image editing by leveraging the generative priors of foundation models. However, existing methods struggle to balance text adherence in edited regions, context fidelity in unedited areas, and seamless integration of edits. We introduce CannyEdit, a novel training-free framework that addresses these challenges through two key innovations: (1) Selective Canny Control, which masks the structural guidance of Canny ControlNet in user-specified editable regions while strictly preserving details of the source images in unedited areas via inversion-phase ControlNet information retention. This enables precise, text-driven edits without compromising contextual integrity. (2) Dual-Prompt Guidance, which combines local prompts for object-specific edits with a global target prompt to maintain coherent scene interactions. On real-world image editing tasks (addition, replacement, removal), CannyEdit outperforms prior methods like KV-Edit, achieving a 2.93 to 10.49 percent improvement in the balance of text adherence and context fidelity. In terms of editing seamlessness, user studies reveal only 49.2 percent of general users and 42.0 percent of AIGC experts identified CannyEdit's results as AI-edited when paired with real images without edits, versus 76.08 to 89.09 percent for competitor methods.
Authors: Harry Walsh, Ed Fish, Ozge Mercanoglu Sincan, Mohamed Ilyes Lakhal, Richard Bowden, Neil Fox, Bencie Woll, Kepeng Wu, Zecheng Li, Weichao Zhao, Haodong Wang, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li, Shengeng Tang, Jiayi He, Xu Wang, Ruobei Zhang, Yaxiong Wang, Lechao Cheng, Meryem Tasyurek, Tugce Kiziltepe, Hacer Yalim Keles
Abstract: Sign Language Production (SLP) is the task of generating sign language video from spoken language inputs. The field has seen a range of innovations over the last few years, with the introduction of deep learning-based approaches providing significant improvements in the realism and naturalness of generated outputs. However, the lack of standardized evaluation metrics for SLP approaches hampers meaningful comparisons across different systems. To address this, we introduce the first Sign Language Production Challenge, held as part of the third SLRTP Workshop at CVPR 2025. The competition's aims are to evaluate architectures that translate from spoken language sentences to a sequence of skeleton poses, known as Text-to-Pose (T2P) translation, over a range of metrics. For our evaluation data, we use the RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather-2014T dataset, a German Sign Language - Deutsche Gebardensprache (DGS) weather broadcast dataset. In addition, we curate a custom hidden test set from a similar domain of discourse. This paper presents the challenge design and the winning methodologies. The challenge attracted 33 participants who submitted 231 solutions, with the top-performing team achieving BLEU-1 scores of 31.40 and DTW-MJE of 0.0574. The winning approach utilized a retrieval-based framework and a pre-trained language model. As part of the workshop, we release a standardized evaluation network, including high-quality skeleton extraction-based keypoints establishing a consistent baseline for the SLP field, which will enable future researchers to compare their work against a broader range of methods.
Authors: Qin Xu, Lili Zhu, Xiaoxia Cheng, Bo Jiang
Abstract: The crux of resolving fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) lies in capturing discriminative and class-specific cues that correspond to subtle visual characteristics. Recently, frequency decomposition/transform based approaches have attracted considerable interests since its appearing discriminative cue mining ability. However, the frequency-domain methods are based on fixed basis functions, lacking adaptability to image content and unable to dynamically adjust feature extraction according to the discriminative requirements of different images. To address this, we propose a novel method for FGVC, named Subtle-Cue Oriented Perception Engine (SCOPE), which adaptively enhances the representational capability of low-level details and high-level semantics in the spatial domain, breaking through the limitations of fixed scales in the frequency domain and improving the flexibility of multi-scale fusion. The core of SCOPE lies in two modules: the Subtle Detail Extractor (SDE), which dynamically enhances subtle details such as edges and textures from shallow features, and the Salient Semantic Refiner (SSR), which learns semantically coherent and structure-aware refinement features from the high-level features guided by the enhanced shallow features. The SDE and SSR are cascaded stage-by-stage to progressively combine local details with global semantics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art on four popular fine-grained image classification benchmarks.
Authors: Qiwei Tian, Chenhao Lin, Zhengyu Zhao, Qian Li, Shuai Liu, Chao Shen
Abstract: Thanks to the development of cross-modal models, text-to-video retrieval (T2VR) is advancing rapidly, but its robustness remains largely unexamined. Existing attacks against T2VR are designed to push videos away from queries, i.e., suppressing the ranks of videos, while the attacks that pull videos towards selected queries, i.e., promoting the ranks of videos, remain largely unexplored. These attacks can be more impactful as attackers may gain more views/clicks for financial benefits and widespread (mis)information. To this end, we pioneer the first attack against T2VR to promote videos adversarially, dubbed the Video Promotion attack (ViPro). We further propose Modal Refinement (MoRe) to capture the finer-grained, intricate interaction between visual and textual modalities to enhance black-box transferability. Comprehensive experiments cover 2 existing baselines, 3 leading T2VR models, 3 prevailing datasets with over 10k videos, evaluated under 3 scenarios. All experiments are conducted in a multi-target setting to reflect realistic scenarios where attackers seek to promote the video regarding multiple queries simultaneously. We also evaluated our attacks for defences and imperceptibility. Overall, ViPro surpasses other baselines by over $30/10/4\%$ for white/grey/black-box settings on average. Our work highlights an overlooked vulnerability, provides a qualitative analysis on the upper/lower bound of our attacks, and offers insights into potential counterplays. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/michaeltian108/ViPro.
Authors: Ulas Gunes, Matias Turkulainen, Juho Kannala, Esa Rahtu
Abstract: We present the first evaluation of fisheye-based 3D Gaussian Splatting methods, Fisheye-GS and 3DGUT, on real images with fields of view exceeding 180 degree. Our study covers both indoor and outdoor scenes captured with 200 degree fisheye cameras and analyzes how each method handles extreme distortion in real world settings. We evaluate performance under varying fields of view (200 degree, 160 degree, and 120 degree) to study the tradeoff between peripheral distortion and spatial coverage. Fisheye-GS benefits from field of view (FoV) reduction, particularly at 160 degree, while 3DGUT remains stable across all settings and maintains high perceptual quality at the full 200 degree view. To address the limitations of SfM-based initialization, which often fails under strong distortion, we also propose a depth-based strategy using UniK3D predictions from only 2-3 fisheye images per scene. Although UniK3D is not trained on real fisheye data, it produces dense point clouds that enable reconstruction quality on par with SfM, even in difficult scenes with fog, glare, or sky. Our results highlight the practical viability of fisheye-based 3DGS methods for wide-angle 3D reconstruction from sparse and distortion-heavy image inputs.
Authors: Yixin Zhu, Zuoliang Zhu, Milo\v{s} Ha\v{s}an, Jian Yang, Jin Xie, Beibei Wang
Abstract: Forward and inverse rendering have emerged as key techniques for enabling understanding and reconstruction in the context of autonomous driving (AD). However, complex weather and illumination pose great challenges to this task. The emergence of large diffusion models has shown promise in achieving reasonable results through learning from 2D priors, but these models are difficult to control and lack robustness. In this paper, we introduce WeatherDiffusion, a diffusion-based framework for forward and inverse rendering on AD scenes with various weather and lighting conditions. Our method enables authentic estimation of material properties, scene geometry, and lighting, and further supports controllable weather and illumination editing through the use of predicted intrinsic maps guided by text descriptions. We observe that different intrinsic maps should correspond to different regions of the original image. Based on this observation, we propose Intrinsic map-aware attention (MAA) to enable high-quality inverse rendering. Additionally, we introduce a synthetic dataset (\ie WeatherSynthetic) and a real-world dataset (\ie WeatherReal) for forward and inverse rendering on AD scenes with diverse weather and lighting. Extensive experiments show that our WeatherDiffusion outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks. Moreover, our method demonstrates significant value in downstream tasks for AD, enhancing the robustness of object detection and image segmentation in challenging weather scenarios.
Authors: Fangmin Zhao, Weichao Zeng, Zhenhang Li, Dongbao Yang, Yu Zhou
Abstract: Flattening curved, wrinkled, and rotated document images captured by portable photographing devices, termed document image dewarping, has become an increasingly important task with the rise of digital economy and online working. Although many methods have been proposed recently, they often struggle to achieve satisfactory results when confronted with intricate document structures and higher degrees of deformation in real-world scenarios. Our main insight is that, unlike other document restoration tasks (e.g., deblurring), dewarping in real physical scenes is a progressive motion rather than a one-step transformation. Based on this, we have undertaken two key initiatives. Firstly, we reformulate this task, modeling it for the first time as a dynamic process that encompasses a series of intermediate states. Secondly, we design a lightweight framework called TADoc (Time-Aware Document Dewarping Network) to address the geometric distortion of document images. In addition, due to the inadequacy of OCR metrics for document images containing sparse text, the comprehensiveness of evaluation is insufficient. To address this shortcoming, we propose a new metric -- DLS (Document Layout Similarity) -- to evaluate the effectiveness of document dewarping in downstream tasks. Extensive experiments and in-depth evaluations have been conducted and the results indicate that our model possesses strong robustness, achieving superiority on several benchmarks with different document types and degrees of distortion.
Authors: Nick Lemke, John Kalkhof, Niklas Babendererde, Anirban Mukhopadhyay
Abstract: Medical applications demand segmentation of large inputs, like prostate MRIs, pathology slices, or videos of surgery. These inputs should ideally be inferred at once to provide the model with proper spatial or temporal context. When segmenting large inputs, the VRAM consumption of the GPU becomes the bottleneck. Architectures like UNets or Vision Transformers scale very poorly in VRAM consumption, resulting in patch- or frame-wise approaches that compromise global consistency and inference speed. The lightweight Neural Cellular Automaton (NCA) is a bio-inspired model that is by construction size-invariant. However, due to its local-only communication rules, it lacks global knowledge. We propose OctreeNCA by generalizing the neighborhood definition using an octree data structure. Our generalized neighborhood definition enables the efficient traversal of global knowledge. Since deep learning frameworks are mainly developed for large multi-layer networks, their implementation does not fully leverage the advantages of NCAs. We implement an NCA inference function in CUDA that further reduces VRAM demands and increases inference speed. Our OctreeNCA segments high-resolution images and videos quickly while occupying 90% less VRAM than a UNet during evaluation. This allows us to segment 184 Megapixel pathology slices or 1-minute surgical videos at once.
Authors: Huihui Xu, Jin Ye, Hongqiu Wang, Changkai Ji, Jiashi Lin, Ming Hu, Ziyan Huang, Ying Chen, Chenglong Ma, Tianbin Li, Lihao Liu, Junjun He, Lei Zhu
Abstract: Recent self-supervised image segmentation models have achieved promising performance on semantic segmentation and class-agnostic instance segmentation. However, their pretraining schedule is multi-stage, requiring a time-consuming pseudo-masks generation process between each training epoch. This time-consuming offline process not only makes it difficult to scale with training dataset size, but also leads to sub-optimal solutions due to its discontinuous optimization routine. To solve these, we first present a novel pseudo-mask algorithm, Fast Universal Agglomerative Pooling (UniAP). Each layer of UniAP can identify groups of similar nodes in parallel, allowing to generate both semantic-level and instance-level and multi-granular pseudo-masks within ens of milliseconds for one image. Based on the fast UniAP, we propose the Scalable Self-Supervised Universal Segmentation (S2-UniSeg), which employs a student and a momentum teacher for continuous pretraining. A novel segmentation-oriented pretext task, Query-wise Self-Distillation (QuerySD), is proposed to pretrain S2-UniSeg to learn the local-to-global correspondences. Under the same setting, S2-UniSeg outperforms the SOTA UnSAM model, achieving notable improvements of AP+6.9 on COCO, AR+11.1 on UVO, PixelAcc+4.5 on COCOStuff-27, RQ+8.0 on Cityscapes. After scaling up to a larger 2M-image subset of SA-1B, S2-UniSeg further achieves performance gains on all four benchmarks. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/bio-mlhui/S2-UniSeg
Authors: Zixiong Wang, Jian Yang, Yiwei Hu, Milos Hasan, Beibei Wang
Abstract: Creating highly detailed SVBRDFs is essential for 3D content creation. The rise of high-resolution text-to-image generative models, based on diffusion transformers (DiT), suggests an opportunity to finetune them for this task. However, retargeting the models to produce multiple aligned SVBRDF maps instead of just RGB images, while achieving high efficiency and ensuring consistency across different maps, remains a challenge. In this paper, we introduce HiMat: a memory- and computation-efficient diffusion-based framework capable of generating native 4K-resolution SVBRDFs. A key challenge we address is maintaining consistency across different maps in a lightweight manner, without relying on training new VAEs or significantly altering the DiT backbone (which would damage its prior capabilities). To tackle this, we introduce the CrossStitch module, a lightweight convolutional module that captures inter-map dependencies through localized operations. Its weights are initialized such that the DiT backbone operation is unchanged before finetuning starts. HiMat enables generation with strong structural coherence and high-frequency details. Results with a large set of text prompts demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for 4K SVBRDF generation. Further experiments suggest generalization to tasks such as intrinsic decomposition.
Authors: Tanjim Bin Faruk, Abdul Matin, Shrideep Pallickara, Sangmi Lee Pallickara
Abstract: Hyperspectral satellite imagery offers sub-30 m views of Earth in hundreds of contiguous spectral bands, enabling fine-grained mapping of soils, crops, and land cover. While self-supervised Masked Autoencoders excel on RGB and low-band multispectral data, they struggle to exploit the intricate spatial-spectral correlations in 200+ band hyperspectral images. We introduce TerraMAE, a novel HSI encoding framework specifically designed to learn highly representative spatial-spectral embeddings for diverse geospatial analyses. TerraMAE features an adaptive channel grouping strategy, based on statistical reflectance properties to capture spectral similarities, and an enhanced reconstruction loss function that incorporates spatial and spectral quality metrics. We demonstrate TerraMAE's effectiveness through superior spatial-spectral information preservation in high-fidelity image reconstruction. Furthermore, we validate its practical utility and the quality of its learned representations through strong performance on three key downstream geospatial tasks: crop identification, land cover classification, and soil texture prediction.
Authors: Kun Qian, Wenjie Li, Tianyu Sun, Wenhong Wang, Wenhan Luo
Abstract: The exponential growth of scientific literature in PDF format necessitates advanced tools for efficient and accurate document understanding, summarization, and content optimization. Traditional methods fall short in handling complex layouts and multimodal content, while direct application of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Large Models (LVLMs) lacks precision and control for intricate editing tasks. This paper introduces DocRefine, an innovative framework designed for intelligent understanding, content refinement, and automated summarization of scientific PDF documents, driven by natural language instructions. DocRefine leverages the power of advanced LVLMs (e.g., GPT-4o) by orchestrating a sophisticated multi-agent system comprising six specialized and collaborative agents: Layout & Structure Analysis, Multimodal Content Understanding, Instruction Decomposition, Content Refinement, Summarization & Generation, and Fidelity & Consistency Verification. This closed-loop feedback architecture ensures high semantic accuracy and visual fidelity. Evaluated on the comprehensive DocEditBench dataset, DocRefine consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across various tasks, achieving overall scores of 86.7% for Semantic Consistency Score (SCS), 93.9% for Layout Fidelity Index (LFI), and 85.0% for Instruction Adherence Rate (IAR). These results demonstrate DocRefine's superior capability in handling complex multimodal document editing, preserving semantic integrity, and maintaining visual consistency, marking a significant advancement in automated scientific document processing.
Authors: Jingwei Peng, Jiehao Chen, Mateo Alejandro Rojas, Meilin Zhang
Abstract: Complex Visual Question Answering (Complex VQA) tasks, which demand sophisticated multi-modal reasoning and external knowledge integration, present significant challenges for existing large vision-language models (LVLMs) often limited by their reliance on high-level global features. To address this, we propose MV-CoRe (Multimodal Visual-Conceptual Reasoning), a novel model designed to enhance Complex VQA performance through the deep fusion of diverse visual and linguistic information. MV-CoRe meticulously integrates global embeddings from pre-trained Vision Large Models (VLMs) and Language Large Models (LLMs) with fine-grained semantic-aware visual features, including object detection characteristics and scene graph representations. An innovative Multimodal Fusion Transformer then processes and deeply integrates these diverse feature sets, enabling rich cross-modal attention and facilitating complex reasoning. We evaluate MV-CoRe on challenging Complex VQA benchmarks, including GQA, A-OKVQA, and OKVQA, after training on VQAv2. Our experimental results demonstrate that MV-CoRe consistently outperforms established LVLM baselines, achieving an overall accuracy of 77.5% on GQA. Ablation studies confirm the critical contribution of both object and scene graph features, and human evaluations further validate MV-CoRe's superior factual correctness and reasoning depth, underscoring its robust capabilities for deep visual and conceptual understanding.
Authors: Juntong Fan, Shuyi Fan, Debesh Jha, Changsheng Fang, Tieyong Zeng, Hengyong Yu, Dayang Wang
Abstract: Accurate endoscopic image segmentation on the polyps is critical for early colorectal cancer detection. However, this task remains challenging due to low contrast with surrounding mucosa, specular highlights, and indistinct boundaries. To address these challenges, we propose FOCUS-Med, which stands for Fusion of spatial and structural graph with attentional context-aware polyp segmentation in endoscopic medical imaging. FOCUS-Med integrates a Dual Graph Convolutional Network (Dual-GCN) module to capture contextual spatial and topological structural dependencies. This graph-based representation enables the model to better distinguish polyps from background tissues by leveraging topological cues and spatial connectivity, which are often obscured in raw image intensities. It enhances the model's ability to preserve boundaries and delineate complex shapes typical of polyps. In addition, a location-fused stand-alone self-attention is employed to strengthen global context integration. To bridge the semantic gap between encoder-decoder layers, we incorporate a trainable weighted fast normalized fusion strategy for efficient multi-scale aggregation. Notably, we are the first to introduce the use of a Large Language Model (LLM) to provide detailed qualitative evaluations of segmentation quality. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that FOCUS-Med achieves state-of-the-art performance across five key metrics, underscoring its effectiveness and clinical potential for AI-assisted colonoscopy.
Authors: Yueyu Hu, Ran Gong, Tingyu Fan, Yao Wang
Abstract: 3D visual content streaming is a key technology for emerging 3D telepresence and AR/VR applications. One fundamental element underlying the technology is a versatile 3D representation that is capable of producing high-quality renders and can be efficiently compressed at the same time. Existing 3D representations like point clouds, meshes and 3D Gaussians each have limitations in terms of rendering quality, surface definition, and compressibility. In this paper, we present the Textured Surfel Octree (TeSO), a novel 3D representation that is built from point clouds but addresses the aforementioned limitations. It represents a 3D scene as cube-bounded surfels organized on an octree, where each surfel is further associated with a texture patch. By approximating a smooth surface with a large surfel at a coarser level of the octree, it reduces the number of primitives required to represent the 3D scene, and yet retains the high-frequency texture details through the texture map attached to each surfel. We further propose a compression scheme to encode the geometry and texture efficiently, leveraging the octree structure. The proposed textured surfel octree combined with the compression scheme achieves higher rendering quality at lower bit-rates compared to multiple point cloud and 3D Gaussian-based baselines.
Authors: Sandro Papais, Letian Wang, Brian Cheong, Steven L. Waslander
Abstract: We introduce ForeSight, a novel joint detection and forecasting framework for vision-based 3D perception in autonomous vehicles. Traditional approaches treat detection and forecasting as separate sequential tasks, limiting their ability to leverage temporal cues. ForeSight addresses this limitation with a multi-task streaming and bidirectional learning approach, allowing detection and forecasting to share query memory and propagate information seamlessly. The forecast-aware detection transformer enhances spatial reasoning by integrating trajectory predictions from a multiple hypothesis forecast memory queue, while the streaming forecast transformer improves temporal consistency using past forecasts and refined detections. Unlike tracking-based methods, ForeSight eliminates the need for explicit object association, reducing error propagation with a tracking-free model that efficiently scales across multi-frame sequences. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset show that ForeSight achieves state-of-the-art performance, achieving an EPA of 54.9%, surpassing previous methods by 9.3%, while also attaining the best mAP and minADE among multi-view detection and forecasting models.
Authors: Yue Hu, Juntong Peng, Yunqiao Yang, Siheng Chen
Abstract: Collaborative 3D detection can substantially boost detection performance by allowing agents to exchange complementary information. It inherently results in a fundamental trade-off between detection performance and communication bandwidth. To tackle this bottleneck issue, we propose a novel hybrid collaboration that adaptively integrates two types of communication messages: perceptual outputs, which are compact, and raw observations, which offer richer information. This approach focuses on two key aspects: i) integrating complementary information from two message types and ii) prioritizing the most critical data within each type. By adaptively selecting the most critical set of messages, it ensures optimal perceptual information and adaptability, effectively meeting the demands of diverse communication scenarios.Building on this hybrid collaboration, we present \texttt{HyComm}, a communication-efficient LiDAR-based collaborative 3D detection system. \texttt{HyComm} boasts two main benefits: i) it facilitates adaptable compression rates for messages, addressing various communication requirements, and ii) it uses standardized data formats for messages. This ensures they are independent of specific detection models, fostering adaptability across different agent configurations. To evaluate HyComm, we conduct experiments on both real-world and simulation datasets: DAIR-V2X and OPV2V. HyComm consistently outperforms previous methods and achieves a superior performance-bandwidth trade-off regardless of whether agents use the same or varied detection models. It achieves a lower communication volume of more than 2,006$\times$ and still outperforms Where2comm on DAIR-V2X in terms of AP50. The related code will be released.
Authors: Nikolai Warner, Wenjin Zhang, Irfan Essa, Apaar Sadhwani
Abstract: Lifting-based methods for 3D Human Pose Estimation (HPE), which predict 3D poses from detected 2D keypoints, often generalize poorly to new datasets and real-world settings. To address this, we propose \emph{AugLift}, a simple yet effective reformulation of the standard lifting pipeline that significantly improves generalization performance without requiring additional data collection or sensors. AugLift sparsely enriches the standard input -- the 2D keypoint coordinates $(x, y)$ -- by augmenting it with a keypoint detection confidence score $c$ and a corresponding depth estimate $d$. These additional signals are computed from the image using off-the-shelf, pre-trained models (e.g., for monocular depth estimation), thereby inheriting their strong generalization capabilities. Importantly, AugLift serves as a modular add-on and can be readily integrated into existing lifting architectures. Our extensive experiments across four datasets demonstrate that AugLift boosts cross-dataset performance on unseen datasets by an average of $10.1\%$, while also improving in-distribution performance by $4.0\%$. These gains are consistent across various lifting architectures, highlighting the robustness of our method. Our analysis suggests that these sparse, keypoint-aligned cues provide robust frame-level context, offering a practical way to significantly improve the generalization of any lifting-based pose estimation model. Code will be made publicly available.
Authors: Gregory Schuit, Denis Parra, Cecilia Besa
Abstract: Generative image models have achieved remarkable progress in both natural and medical imaging. In the medical context, these techniques offer a potential solution to data scarcity-especially for low-prevalence anomalies that impair the performance of AI-driven diagnostic and segmentation tools. However, questions remain regarding the fidelity and clinical utility of synthetic images, since poor generation quality can undermine model generalizability and trust. In this study, we evaluate the effectiveness of state-of-the-art generative models-Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Diffusion Models (DMs)-for synthesizing chest X-rays conditioned on four abnormalities: Atelectasis (AT), Lung Opacity (LO), Pleural Effusion (PE), and Enlarged Cardiac Silhouette (ECS). Using a benchmark composed of real images from the MIMIC-CXR dataset and synthetic images from both GANs and DMs, we conducted a reader study with three radiologists of varied experience. Participants were asked to distinguish real from synthetic images and assess the consistency between visual features and the target abnormality. Our results show that while DMs generate more visually realistic images overall, GANs can report better accuracy for specific conditions, such as absence of ECS. We further identify visual cues radiologists use to detect synthetic images, offering insights into the perceptual gaps in current models. These findings underscore the complementary strengths of GANs and DMs and point to the need for further refinement to ensure generative models can reliably augment training datasets for AI diagnostic systems.
Authors: Yingtie Lei, Fanghai Yi, Yihang Dong, Weihuang Liu, Xiaofeng Zhang, Zimeng Li, Chi-Man Pun, Xuhang Chen
Abstract: Murals, as invaluable cultural artifacts, face continuous deterioration from environmental factors and human activities. Digital restoration of murals faces unique challenges due to their complex degradation patterns and the critical need to preserve artistic authenticity. Existing learning-based methods struggle with maintaining consistent mask guidance throughout their networks, leading to insufficient focus on damaged regions and compromised restoration quality. We propose CMAMRNet, a Contextual Mask-Aware Mural Restoration Network that addresses these limitations through comprehensive mask guidance and multi-scale feature extraction. Our framework introduces two key components: (1) the Mask-Aware Up/Down-Sampler (MAUDS), which ensures consistent mask sensitivity across resolution scales through dedicated channel-wise feature selection and mask-guided feature fusion; and (2) the Co-Feature Aggregator (CFA), operating at both the highest and lowest resolutions to extract complementary features for capturing fine textures and global structures in degraded regions. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that CMAMRNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods, effectively preserving both structural integrity and artistic details in restored murals. The code is available at~\href{https://github.com/CXH-Research/CMAMRNet}{https://github.com/CXH-Research/CMAMRNet}.
URLs: https://github.com/CXH-Research/CMAMRNet, https://github.com/CXH-Research/CMAMRNet
Authors: Xuanhan Wang, Huimin Deng, Ke Liu, Jun Wang, Lianli Gao, Jingkuan Song
Abstract: Human-centric vision models (HVMs) have achieved remarkable generalization due to large-scale pretraining on massive person images. However, their dependence on large neural architectures and the restricted accessibility of pretraining data significantly limits their practicality in real-world applications. To address this limitation, we propose Dynamic Pattern Alignment Learning (DPAL), a novel distillation-based pretraining framework that efficiently trains lightweight HVMs to acquire strong generalization from large HVMs. In particular, human-centric visual perception are highly dependent on three typical visual patterns, including global identity pattern, local shape pattern and multi-person interaction pattern. To achieve generalizable lightweight HVMs, we firstly design a dynamic pattern decoder (D-PaDe), acting as a dynamic Mixture of Expert (MoE) model. It incorporates three specialized experts dedicated to adaptively extract typical visual patterns, conditioned on both input image and pattern queries. And then, we present three levels of alignment objectives, which aims to minimize generalization gap between lightweight HVMs and large HVMs at global image level, local pixel level, and instance relation level. With these two deliberate designs, the DPAL effectively guides lightweight model to learn all typical human visual patterns from large HVMs, which can generalize to various human-centric vision tasks. Extensive experiments conducted on 15 challenging datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the DPAL. Remarkably, when employing PATH-B as the teacher, DPAL-ViT/Ti (5M parameters) achieves surprising generalizability similar to existing large HVMs such as PATH-B (84M) and Sapiens-L (307M), and outperforms previous distillation-based pretraining methods including Proteus-ViT/Ti (5M) and TinyMiM-ViT/Ti (5M) by a large margin.
Authors: Yu Liu, Zhijie Liu, Xiao Ren, You-Fu Li, He Kong
Abstract: Predicting pedestrian motion trajectories is critical for the path planning and motion control of autonomous vehicles. Recent diffusion-based models have shown promising results in capturing the inherent stochasticity of pedestrian behavior for trajectory prediction. However, the absence of explicit semantic modelling of pedestrian intent in many diffusion-based methods may result in misinterpreted behaviors and reduced prediction accuracy. To address the above challenges, we propose a diffusion-based pedestrian trajectory prediction framework that incorporates both short-term and long-term motion intentions. Short-term intent is modelled using a residual polar representation, which decouples direction and magnitude to capture fine-grained local motion patterns. Long-term intent is estimated through a learnable, token-based endpoint predictor that generates multiple candidate goals with associated probabilities, enabling multimodal and context-aware intention modelling. Furthermore, we enhance the diffusion process by incorporating adaptive guidance and a residual noise predictor that dynamically refines denoising accuracy. The proposed framework is evaluated on the widely used ETH, UCY, and SDD benchmarks, demonstrating competitive results against state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Ruolin Yang, Da Li, Honggang Zhang, Yi-Zhe Song
Abstract: Sketching is a uniquely human tool for expressing ideas and creativity. The animation of sketches infuses life into these static drawings, opening a new dimension for designers. Animating sketches is a time-consuming process that demands professional skills and extensive experience, often proving daunting for amateurs. In this paper, we propose a novel sketch animation model SketchAnimator, which enables adding creative motion to a given sketch, like "a jumping car''. Namely, given an input sketch and a reference video, we divide the sketch animation into three stages: Appearance Learning, Motion Learning and Video Prior Distillation. In stages 1 and 2, we utilize LoRA to integrate sketch appearance information and motion dynamics from the reference video into the pre-trained T2V model. In the third stage, we utilize Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) to update the parameters of the Bezier curves in each sketch frame according to the acquired motion information. Consequently, our model produces a sketch video that not only retains the original appearance of the sketch but also mirrors the dynamic movements of the reference video. We compare our method with alternative approaches and demonstrate that it generates the desired sketch video under the challenge of one-shot motion customization.
Authors: Xiaotong Lin, Tianming Liang, Jian-Fang Hu, Kun-Yu Lin, Yulei Kang, Chunwei Tian, Jianhuang Lai, Wei-Shi Zheng
Abstract: 3D human-object interaction (HOI) anticipation aims to predict the future motion of humans and their manipulated objects, conditioned on the historical context. Generally, the articulated humans and rigid objects exhibit different motion patterns, due to their distinct intrinsic physical properties. However, this distinction is ignored by most of the existing works, which intend to capture the dynamics of both humans and objects within a single prediction model. In this work, we propose a novel contact-consistent decoupled diffusion framework CoopDiff, which employs two distinct branches to decouple human and object motion modeling, with the human-object contact points as shared anchors to bridge the motion generation across branches. The human dynamics branch is aimed to predict highly structured human motion, while the object dynamics branch focuses on the object motion with rigid translations and rotations. These two branches are bridged by a series of shared contact points with consistency constraint for coherent human-object motion prediction. To further enhance human-object consistency and prediction reliability, we propose a human-driven interaction module to guide object motion modeling. Extensive experiments on the BEHAVE and Human-object Interaction datasets demonstrate that our CoopDiff outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Yunpeng Shi, Lei Chen, Xiaolu Shen, Yanju Guo
Abstract: In the domain of computer vision, multi-scale feature extraction is vital for tasks such as salient object detection. However, achieving this capability in lightweight networks remains challenging due to the trade-off between efficiency and performance. This paper proposes a novel lightweight multi-scale feature extraction layer, termed the LMF layer, which employs depthwise separable dilated convolutions in a fully connected structure. By integrating multiple LMF layers, we develop LMFNet, a lightweight network tailored for salient object detection. Our approach significantly reduces the number of parameters while maintaining competitive performance. Here, we show that LMFNet achieves state-of-the-art or comparable results on five benchmark datasets with only 0.81M parameters, outperforming several traditional and lightweight models in terms of both efficiency and accuracy. Our work not only addresses the challenge of multi-scale learning in lightweight networks but also demonstrates the potential for broader applications in image processing tasks. The related code files are available at https://github.com/Shi-Yun-peng/LMFNet
Authors: Huihui Xu, Jiashi Lin, Haoyu Chen, Junjun He, Lei Zhu
Abstract: Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) aims to segment out the object in a video referred by an expression. Current RVOS methods view referring expressions as unstructured sequences, neglecting their crucial semantic structure essential for referent reasoning. Besides, in contrast to image-referring expressions whose semantics focus only on object attributes and object-object relations, video-referring expressions also encompass event attributes and event-event temporal relations. This complexity challenges traditional structured reasoning image approaches. In this paper, we propose the Event Referential Reasoning (EventRR) framework. EventRR decouples RVOS into object summarization part and referent reasoning part. The summarization phase begins by summarizing each frame into a set of bottleneck tokens, which are then efficiently aggregated in the video-level summarization step to exchange the global cross-modal temporal context. For reasoning part, EventRR extracts semantic eventful structure of a video-referring expression into highly expressive Referential Event Graph (REG), which is a single-rooted directed acyclic graph. Guided by topological traversal of REG, we propose Temporal Concept-Role Reasoning (TCRR) to accumulate the referring score of each temporal query from REG leaf nodes to root node. Each reasoning step can be interpreted as a question-answer pair derived from the concept-role relations in REG. Extensive experiments across four widely recognized benchmark datasets, show that EventRR quantitatively and qualitatively outperforms state-of-the-art RVOS methods. Code is available at https://github.com/bio-mlhui/EventRR
Authors: Junyi He, Liuling Chen, Hongyang Zhou, Zhang xiaoxing, Xiaobin Zhu, Shengxiang Yu, Jingyan Qin, Xu-Cheng Yin
Abstract: Image restoration has seen substantial progress in recent years. However, existing methods often neglect depth information, which hurts similarity matching, results in attention distractions in shallow depth-of-field (DoF) scenarios, and excessive enhancement of background content in deep DoF settings. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel Depth-Guided Network (DGN) for image restoration, together with a novel large-scale high-resolution dataset. Specifically, the network consists of two interactive branches: a depth estimation branch that provides structural guidance, and an image restoration branch that performs the core restoration task. In addition, the image restoration branch exploits intra-object similarity through progressive window-based self-attention and captures inter-object similarity via sparse non-local attention. Through joint training, depth features contribute to improved restoration quality, while the enhanced visual features from the restoration branch in turn help refine depth estimation. Notably, we also introduce a new dataset for training and evaluation, consisting of 9,205 high-resolution images from 403 plant species, with diverse depth and texture variations. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several standard benchmarks and generalizes well to unseen plant images, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness.
Authors: Hongyang Zhou, Xiaobin Zhu, Liuling Chen, Junyi He, Jingyan Qin, Xu-Cheng Yin, Zhang xiaoxing
Abstract: Unsupervised real-world super-resolution (SR) faces critical challenges due to the complex, unknown degradation distributions in practical scenarios. Existing methods struggle to generalize from synthetic low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) image pairs to real-world data due to a significant domain gap. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised real-world SR method based on rectified flow to effectively capture and model real-world degradation, synthesizing LR-HR training pairs with realistic degradation. Specifically, given unpaired LR and HR images, we propose a novel Rectified Flow Degradation Module (RFDM) that introduces degradation-transformed LR (DT-LR) images as intermediaries. By modeling the degradation trajectory in a continuous and invertible manner, RFDM better captures real-world degradation and enhances the realism of generated LR images. Additionally, we propose a Fourier Prior Guided Degradation Module (FGDM) that leverages structural information embedded in Fourier phase components to ensure more precise modeling of real-world degradation. Finally, the LR images are processed by both FGDM and RFDM, producing final synthetic LR images with real-world degradation. The synthetic LR images are paired with the given HR images to train the off-the-shelf SR networks. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the performance of existing SR approaches in real-world scenarios.
Authors: Songlin Li, Zhiqing Guo, Yuanman Li, Zeyu Li, Yunfeng Diao, Gaobo Yang, Liejun Wang
Abstract: The existing image manipulation localization (IML) models mainly relies on visual cues, but ignores the semantic logical relationships between content features. In fact, the content semantics conveyed by real images often conform to human cognitive laws. However, image manipulation technology usually destroys the internal relationship between content features, thus leaving semantic clues for IML. In this paper, we propose a cognition-inspired multimodal boundary-preserving network (CMB-Net). Specifically, CMB-Net utilizes large language models (LLMs) to analyze manipulated regions within images and generate prompt-based textual information to compensate for the lack of semantic relationships in the visual information. Considering that the erroneous texts induced by hallucination from LLMs will damage the accuracy of IML, we propose an image-text central ambiguity module (ITCAM). It assigns weights to the text features by quantifying the ambiguity between text and image features, thereby ensuring the beneficial impact of textual information. We also propose an image-text interaction module (ITIM) that aligns visual and text features using a correlation matrix for fine-grained interaction. Finally, inspired by invertible neural networks, we propose a restoration edge decoder (RED) that mutually generates input and output features to preserve boundary information in manipulated regions without loss. Extensive experiments show that CMB-Net outperforms most existing IML models.
Authors: Yuqi Han, Qi Cai, Yuanxin Wu
Abstract: Offline camera calibration techniques typically employ parametric or generic camera models. Selecting parametric models relies heavily on user experience, and an inappropriate camera model can significantly affect calibration accuracy. Meanwhile, generic calibration methods involve complex procedures and cannot provide traditional intrinsic parameters. This paper reveals a pose ambiguity in the pose solutions of generic calibration methods that irreversibly impacts subsequent pose estimation. A linear solver and a nonlinear optimization are proposed to address this ambiguity issue. Then a global optimization hybrid calibration method is introduced to integrate generic and parametric models together, which improves extrinsic parameter accuracy of generic calibration and mitigates overfitting and numerical instability in parametric calibration. Simulation and real-world experimental results demonstrate that the generic-parametric hybrid calibration method consistently excels across various lens types and noise contamination, hopefully serving as a reliable and accurate solution for camera calibration in complex scenarios.
Authors: Lei Yang, Junshan Jin, Mingyuan Zhang, Yi He, Bofan Chen, Shilin Wang
Abstract: Visual speech recognition is a technique to identify spoken content in silent speech videos, which has raised significant attention in recent years. Advancements in data-driven deep learning methods have significantly improved both the speed and accuracy of recognition. However, these deep learning methods can be effected by visual disturbances, such as lightning conditions, skin texture and other user-specific features. Data-driven approaches could reduce the performance degradation caused by these visual disturbances using models pretrained on large-scale datasets. But these methods often require large amounts of training data and computational resources, making them costly. To reduce the influence of user-specific features and enhance performance with limited data, this paper proposed a landmark guided visual feature extractor. Facial landmarks are used as auxiliary information to aid in training the visual feature extractor. A spatio-temporal multi-graph convolutional network is designed to fully exploit the spatial locations and spatio-temporal features of facial landmarks. Additionally, a multi-level lip dynamic fusion framework is introduced to combine the spatio-temporal features of the landmarks with the visual features extracted from the raw video frames. Experimental results show that this approach performs well with limited data and also improves the model's accuracy on unseen speakers.
Authors: Bo Wang, Mengyuan Xu, Yue Yan, Yuqun Yang, Kechen Shu, Wei Ping, Xu Tang, Wei Jiang, Zheng You
Abstract: Precise lesion resection depends on accurately identifying fine-grained anatomical structures. While many coarse-grained segmentation (CGS) methods have been successful in large-scale segmentation (e.g., organs), they fall short in clinical scenarios requiring fine-grained segmentation (FGS), which remains challenging due to frequent individual variations in small-scale anatomical structures. Although recent Mamba-based models have advanced medical image segmentation, they often rely on fixed manually-defined scanning orders, which limit their adaptability to individual variations in FGS. To address this, we propose ASM-UNet, a novel Mamba-based architecture for FGS. It introduces adaptive scan scores to dynamically guide the scanning order, generated by combining group-level commonalities and individual-level variations. Experiments on two public datasets (ACDC and Synapse) and a newly proposed challenging biliary tract FGS dataset, namely BTMS, demonstrate that ASM-UNet achieves superior performance in both CGS and FGS tasks. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/YqunYang/ASM-UNet.
Authors: Xin Ma, Yaohui Wang, Genyun Jia, Xinyuan Chen, Tien-Tsin Wong, Cunjian Chen
Abstract: Image animation has seen significant progress, driven by the powerful generative capabilities of diffusion models. However, maintaining appearance consistency with static input images and mitigating abrupt motion transitions in generated animations remain persistent challenges. While text-to-video (T2V) generation has demonstrated impressive performance with diffusion transformer models, the image animation field still largely relies on U-Net-based diffusion models, which lag behind the latest T2V approaches. Moreover, the quadratic complexity of vanilla self-attention mechanisms in Transformers imposes heavy computational demands, making image animation particularly resource-intensive. To address these issues, we propose MiraMo, a framework designed to enhance efficiency, appearance consistency, and motion smoothness in image animation. Specifically, MiraMo introduces three key elements: (1) A foundational text-to-video architecture replacing vanilla self-attention with efficient linear attention to reduce computational overhead while preserving generation quality; (2) A novel motion residual learning paradigm that focuses on modeling motion dynamics rather than directly predicting frames, improving temporal consistency; and (3) A DCT-based noise refinement strategy during inference to suppress sudden motion artifacts, complemented by a dynamics control module to balance motion smoothness and expressiveness. Extensive experiments against state-of-the-art methods validate the superiority of MiraMo in generating consistent, smooth, and controllable animations with accelerated inference speed. Additionally, we demonstrate the versatility of MiraMo through applications in motion transfer and video editing tasks.
Authors: Fengchao Xiong, Zhenxing Wu, Sen Jia, Yuntao Qian
Abstract: Hyperspectral videos (HSVs), with their inherent spatial-spectral-temporal structure, offer distinct advantages in challenging tracking scenarios such as cluttered backgrounds and small objects. However, existing methods primarily focus on spatial interactions between the template and search regions, often overlooking spectral interactions, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this issue, this paper investigates spectral interactions from both the architectural and training perspectives. At the architectural level, we first establish band-wise long-range spatial relationships between the template and search regions using Transformers. We then model spectral interactions using the inclusion-exclusion principle from set theory, treating them as the union of spatial interactions across all bands. This enables the effective integration of both shared and band-specific spatial cues. At the training level, we introduce a spectral loss to enforce material distribution alignment between the template and predicted regions, enhancing robustness to shape deformation and appearance variations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our tracker achieves state-of-the-art tracking performance. The source code, trained models and results will be publicly available via https://github.com/bearshng/suit to support reproducibility.
Authors: Junsheng Huang, Shengyu Hao, Bocheng Hu, Gaoang Wang
Abstract: Understanding dynamic 4D scenes from an egocentric perspective-modeling changes in 3D spatial structure over time-is crucial for human-machine interaction, autonomous navigation, and embodied intelligence. While existing egocentric datasets contain dynamic scenes, they lack unified 4D annotations and task-driven evaluation protocols for fine-grained spatio-temporal reasoning, especially on motion of objects and human, together with their interactions. To address this gap, we introduce EgoDynamic4D, a novel QA benchmark on highly dynamic scenes, comprising RGB-D video, camera poses, globally unique instance masks, and 4D bounding boxes. We construct 927K QA pairs accompanied by explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT), enabling verifiable, step-by-step spatio-temporal reasoning. We design 12 dynamic QA tasks covering agent motion, human-object interaction, trajectory prediction, relation understanding, and temporal-causal reasoning, with fine-grained, multidimensional metrics. To tackle these tasks, we propose an end-to-end spatio-temporal reasoning framework that unifies dynamic and static scene information, using instance-aware feature encoding, time and camera encoding, and spatially adaptive down-sampling to compress large 4D scenes into token sequences manageable by LLMs. Experiments on EgoDynamic4D show that our method consistently outperforms baselines, validating the effectiveness of multimodal temporal modeling for egocentric dynamic scene understanding.
Authors: Sihan Yang, Huitong Ji, Shaolin Lu, Jiayi Chen, Binxiao Xu, Ming Lu, Yuanxing Zhang, Wenhui Dong, Wentao Zhang
Abstract: Personalizing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to transform them into daily assistants has emerged as a trending research direction. However, leading companies like OpenAI continue to increase model size and develop complex designs such as the chain of thought (CoT). While large VLMs are proficient in complex multi-modal understanding, their high training costs and limited access via paid APIs restrict direct personalization. Conversely, small VLMs are easily personalized and freely available, but they lack sufficient reasoning capabilities. Inspired by this, we propose a novel collaborative framework named Small-Large Collaboration (SLC) for large VLM personalization, where the small VLM is responsible for generating personalized information, while the large model integrates this personalized information to deliver accurate responses. To effectively incorporate personalized information, we develop a test-time reflection strategy, preventing the potential hallucination of the small VLM. Since SLC only needs to train a meta personalized small VLM for the large VLMs, the overall process is training-efficient. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first training-efficient framework that supports both open-source and closed-source large VLMs, enabling broader real-world personalized applications. We conduct thorough experiments across various benchmarks and large VLMs to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SLC framework. The code will be released at https://github.com/Hhankyangg/SLC.
Authors: Xiang Xiang, Qinhao Zhou, Zhuo Xu, Jing Ma, Jiaxin Dai, Yifan Liang, Hanlin Li
Abstract: Substantial progress has been made in various techniques for open-world recognition. Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods can effectively distinguish between known and unknown classes in the data, while incremental learning enables continuous model knowledge updates. However, in open-world scenarios, these approaches still face limitations. Relying solely on OOD detection does not facilitate knowledge updates in the model, and incremental fine-tuning typically requires supervised conditions, which significantly deviate from open-world settings. To address these challenges, this paper proposes OpenHAIV, a novel framework that integrates OOD detection, new class discovery, and incremental continual fine-tuning into a unified pipeline. This framework allows models to autonomously acquire and update knowledge in open-world environments. The proposed framework is available at https://haiv-lab.github.io/openhaiv .
Authors: Hongbo Zhu, Angelo Cangelosi
Abstract: Understanding internal feature representations of deep neural networks (DNNs) is a fundamental step toward model interpretability. Inspired by neuroscience methods that probe biological neurons using visual stimuli, recent deep learning studies have employed Activation Maximization (AM) to synthesize inputs that elicit strong responses from artificial neurons. In this work, we propose a unified feature visualization framework applicable to both Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). Unlike prior efforts that predominantly focus on the last output-layer neurons in CNNs, we extend feature visualization to intermediate layers as well, offering deeper insights into the hierarchical structure of learned feature representations. Furthermore, we investigate how activation maximization can be leveraged to generate adversarial examples, revealing potential vulnerabilities and decision boundaries of DNNs. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in both traditional CNNs and modern ViT, highlighting its generalizability and interpretive value.
Authors: Zhiqiang Shen, Peng Cao, Xiaoli Liu, Jinzhu Yang, Osmar R. Zaiane
Abstract: Label scarcity remains a major challenge in deep learning-based medical image segmentation. Recent studies use strong-weak pseudo supervision to leverage unlabeled data. However, performance is often hindered by inconsistencies between pseudo labels and their corresponding unlabeled images. In this work, we propose \textbf{SynMatch}, a novel framework that sidesteps the need for improving pseudo labels by synthesizing images to match them instead. Specifically, SynMatch synthesizes images using texture and shape features extracted from the same segmentation model that generates the corresponding pseudo labels for unlabeled images. This design enables the generation of highly consistent synthesized-image-pseudo-label pairs without requiring any training parameters for image synthesis. We extensively evaluate SynMatch across diverse medical image segmentation tasks under semi-supervised learning (SSL), weakly-supervised learning (WSL), and barely-supervised learning (BSL) settings with increasingly limited annotations. The results demonstrate that SynMatch achieves superior performance, especially in the most challenging BSL setting. For example, it outperforms the recent strong-weak pseudo supervision-based method by 29.71\% and 10.05\% on the polyp segmentation task with 5\% and 10\% scribble annotations, respectively. The code will be released at https://github.com/Senyh/SynMatch.
Authors: Ping-Mao Huang, I-Tien Chao, Ping-Chia Huang, Jia-Wei Liao, Yung-Yu Chuang
Abstract: Real-time semantic segmentation presents the dual challenge of designing efficient architectures that capture large receptive fields for semantic understanding while also refining detailed contours. Vision transformers model long-range dependencies effectively but incur high computational cost. To address these challenges, we introduce the Large Kernel Attention (LKA) mechanism. Our proposed Bilateral Efficient Visual Attention Network (BEVANet) expands the receptive field to capture contextual information and extracts visual and structural features using Sparse Decomposed Large Separable Kernel Attentions (SDLSKA). The Comprehensive Kernel Selection (CKS) mechanism dynamically adapts the receptive field to further enhance performance. Furthermore, the Deep Large Kernel Pyramid Pooling Module (DLKPPM) enriches contextual features by synergistically combining dilated convolutions and large kernel attention. The bilateral architecture facilitates frequent branch communication, and the Boundary Guided Adaptive Fusion (BGAF) module enhances boundary delineation by integrating spatial and semantic features under boundary guidance. BEVANet achieves real-time segmentation at 33 FPS, yielding 79.3% mIoU without pretraining and 81.0% mIoU on Cityscapes after ImageNet pretraining, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance. The code and model is available at https://github.com/maomao0819/BEVANet.
Authors: Md Zahurul Haquea, Yeahyea Sarker, Muhammed Farhan Sadique Mahi, Syed Jubayer Jaman, Md Robiul Islam
Abstract: Dragon fruit, renowned for its nutritional benefits and economic value, has experienced rising global demand due to its affordability and local availability. As dragon fruit cultivation expands, efficient pre- and post-harvest quality inspection has become essential for improving agricultural productivity and minimizing post-harvest losses. This study presents DragonFruitQualityNet, a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) optimized for real-time quality assessment of dragon fruits on mobile devices. We curated a diverse dataset of 13,789 images, integrating self-collected samples with public datasets (dataset from Mendeley Data), and classified them into four categories: fresh, immature, mature, and defective fruits to ensure robust model training. The proposed model achieves an impressive 93.98% accuracy, outperforming existing methods in fruit quality classification. To facilitate practical adoption, we embedded the model into an intuitive mobile application, enabling farmers and agricultural stakeholders to conduct on-device, real-time quality inspections. This research provides an accurate, efficient, and scalable AI-driven solution for dragon fruit quality control, supporting digital agriculture and empowering smallholder farmers with accessible technology. By bridging the gap between research and real-world application, our work advances post-harvest management and promotes sustainable farming practices.
Authors: Haiyang Guo, Fei Zhu, Hongbo Zhao, Fanhu Zeng, Wenzhuo Liu, Shijie Ma, Da-Han Wang, Xu-Yao Zhang
Abstract: Continual learning aims to equip AI systems with the ability to continuously acquire and adapt to new knowledge without forgetting previously learned information, similar to human learning. While traditional continual learning methods focusing on unimodal tasks have achieved notable success, the emergence of Multimodal Large Language Models has brought increasing attention to Multimodal Continual Learning tasks involving multiple modalities, such as vision and language. In this setting, models are expected to not only mitigate catastrophic forgetting but also handle the challenges posed by cross-modal interactions and coordination. To facilitate research in this direction, we introduce MCITlib, a comprehensive and constantly evolving code library for continual instruction tuning of Multimodal Large Language Models. In MCITlib, we have currently implemented 8 representative algorithms for Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning and systematically evaluated them on 2 carefully selected benchmarks. MCITlib will be continuously updated to reflect advances in the Multimodal Continual Learning field. The codebase is released at https://github.com/Ghy0501/MCITlib.
Authors: Min Yang, Zihan Jia, Zhilin Dai, Sheng Guo, Limin Wang
Abstract: Efficient lightweight neural networks are with increasing attention due to their faster reasoning speed and easier deployment on mobile devices. However, existing video pre-trained models still focus on the common ViT architecture with high latency, and few works attempt to build efficient architecture on mobile devices. This paper bridges this gap by introducing temporal structural reparameterization into an efficient image-text model and training it on a large-scale high-quality video-text dataset, resulting in an efficient video-text model that can run on mobile devices with strong zero-shot classification and retrieval capabilities, termed as MobileViCLIP. In particular, in terms of inference speed on mobile devices, our MobileViCLIP-Small is 55.4x times faster than InternVideo2-L14 and 6.7x faster than InternVideo2-S14. In terms of zero-shot retrieval performance, our MobileViCLIP-Small obtains similar performance as InternVideo2-L14 and obtains 6.9\% better than InternVideo2-S14 on MSR-VTT. The code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/MobileViCLIP.
Authors: Junyu Xiong, Yonghui Wang, Weichao Zhao, Chenyu Liu, Bing Yin, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li
Abstract: Understanding multi-page documents poses a significant challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as it requires fine-grained visual comprehension and multi-hop reasoning across pages. While prior work has explored reinforcement learning (RL) for enhancing advanced reasoning in MLLMs, its application to multi-page document understanding remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce DocR1, an MLLM trained with a novel RL framework, Evidence Page-Guided GRPO (EviGRPO). EviGRPO incorporates an evidence-aware reward mechanism that promotes a coarse-to-fine reasoning strategy, guiding the model to first retrieve relevant pages before generating answers. This training paradigm enables us to build high-quality models with limited supervision. To support this, we design a two-stage annotation pipeline and a curriculum learning strategy, based on which we construct two datasets: EviBench, a high-quality training set with 4.8k examples, and ArxivFullQA, an evaluation benchmark with 8.6k QA pairs based on scientific papers. Extensive experiments across a wide range of benchmarks demonstrate that DocR1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on multi-page tasks, while consistently maintaining strong results on single-page benchmarks.
Authors: Jinjing Gu, Tianbao Qin, Yuanyuan Pu, Zhengpeng Zhao
Abstract: Image captioning aims to generate natural language descriptions for input images in an open-form manner. To accurately generate descriptions related to the image, a critical step in image captioning is to identify objects and understand their relations within the image. Modern approaches typically capitalize on object detectors or combine detectors with Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). However, these models suffer from redundant detection information, difficulty in GCN construction, and high training costs. To address these issues, a Retrieval-based Objects and Relations Prompt for Image Captioning (RORPCap) is proposed, inspired by the fact that image-text retrieval can provide rich semantic information for input images. RORPCap employs an Objects and relations Extraction Model to extract object and relation words from the image. These words are then incorporate into predefined prompt templates and encoded as prompt embeddings. Next, a Mamba-based mapping network is designed to quickly map image embeddings extracted by CLIP to visual-text embeddings. Finally, the resulting prompt embeddings and visual-text embeddings are concatenated to form textual-enriched feature embeddings, which are fed into a GPT-2 model for caption generation. Extensive experiments conducted on the widely used MS-COCO dataset show that the RORPCap requires only 2.6 hours under cross-entropy loss training, achieving 120.5% CIDEr score and 22.0% SPICE score on the "Karpathy" test split. RORPCap achieves comparable performance metrics to detector-based and GCN-based models with the shortest training time and demonstrates its potential as an alternative for image captioning.
Authors: Tuyen Tran, Thao Minh Le, Quang-Hung Le, Truyen Tran
Abstract: Vision-language alignment in video must address the complexity of language, evolving interacting entities, their action chains, and semantic gaps between language and vision. This work introduces Planner-Refiner, a framework to overcome these challenges. Planner-Refiner bridges the semantic gap by iteratively refining visual elements' space-time representation, guided by language until semantic gaps are minimal. A Planner module schedules language guidance by decomposing complex linguistic prompts into short sentence chains. The Refiner processes each short sentence, a noun-phrase and verb-phrase pair, to direct visual tokens' self-attention across space then time, achieving efficient single-step refinement. A recurrent system chains these steps, maintaining refined visual token representations. The final representation feeds into task-specific heads for alignment generation. We demonstrate Planner-Refiner's effectiveness on two video-language alignment tasks: Referring Video Object Segmentation and Temporal Grounding with varying language complexity. We further introduce a new MeViS-X benchmark to assess models' capability with long queries. Superior performance versus state-of-the-art methods on these benchmarks shows the approach's potential, especially for complex prompts.
Authors: Fangtai Wu, Mushui Liu, Weijie He, Wanggui He, Hao Jiang, Zhao Wang, Yunlong Yu
Abstract: The unified autoregressive (AR) model excels at multimodal understanding and generation, but its potential for customized image generation remains underexplored. Existing customized generation methods rely on full fine-tuning or adapters, making them costly and prone to overfitting or catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we propose \textbf{CoAR}, a novel framework for injecting subject concepts into the unified AR models while keeping all pre-trained parameters completely frozen. CoAR learns effective, specific subject representations with only a minimal number of parameters using a Layerwise Multimodal Context Learning strategy. To address overfitting and language drift, we further introduce regularization that preserves the pre-trained distribution and anchors context tokens to improve subject fidelity and re-contextualization. Additionally, CoAR supports training-free subject customization in a user-provided style. Experiments demonstrate that CoAR achieves superior performance on both subject-driven personalization and style personalization, while delivering significant gains in computational and memory efficiency. Notably, CoAR tunes less than \textbf{0.05\%} of the parameters while achieving competitive performance compared to recent Proxy-Tuning. Code: https://github.com/KZF-kzf/CoAR
Authors: Tingyu Yang, Jue Gong, Jinpei Guo, Wenbo Li, Yong Guo, Yulun Zhang
Abstract: JPEG, as a widely used image compression standard, often introduces severe visual artifacts when achieving high compression ratios. Although existing deep learning-based restoration methods have made considerable progress, they often struggle to recover complex texture details, resulting in over-smoothed outputs. To overcome these limitations, we propose SODiff, a novel and efficient semantic-oriented one-step diffusion model for JPEG artifacts removal. Our core idea is that effective restoration hinges on providing semantic-oriented guidance to the pre-trained diffusion model, thereby fully leveraging its powerful generative prior. To this end, SODiff incorporates a semantic-aligned image prompt extractor (SAIPE). SAIPE extracts rich features from low-quality (LQ) images and projects them into an embedding space semantically aligned with that of the text encoder. Simultaneously, it preserves crucial information for faithful reconstruction. Furthermore, we propose a quality factor-aware time predictor that implicitly learns the compression quality factor (QF) of the LQ image and adaptively selects the optimal denoising start timestep for the diffusion process. Extensive experimental results show that our SODiff outperforms recent leading methods in both visual quality and quantitative metrics. Code is available at: https://github.com/frakenation/SODiff
Authors: Qilin Zhang, Olaf Wysocki, Boris Jutzi
Abstract: Recent advances in Gaussian Splatting (GS) have demonstrated its effectiveness in photo-realistic rendering and 3D reconstruction. Among these, 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) is particularly suitable for surface reconstruction due to its flattened Gaussian representation and integrated normal regularization. However, its performance often degrades in large-scale and complex urban scenes with frequent occlusions, leading to incomplete building reconstructions. We propose GS4Buildings, a novel prior-guided Gaussian Splatting method leveraging the ubiquity of semantic 3D building models for robust and scalable building surface reconstruction. Instead of relying on traditional Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipelines, GS4Buildings initializes Gaussians directly from low-level Level of Detail (LoD)2 semantic 3D building models. Moreover, we generate prior depth and normal maps from the planar building geometry and incorporate them into the optimization process, providing strong geometric guidance for surface consistency and structural accuracy. We also introduce an optional building-focused mode that limits reconstruction to building regions, achieving a 71.8% reduction in Gaussian primitives and enabling a more efficient and compact representation. Experiments on urban datasets demonstrate that GS4Buildings improves reconstruction completeness by 20.5% and geometric accuracy by 32.8%. These results highlight the potential of semantic building model integration to advance GS-based reconstruction toward real-world urban applications such as smart cities and digital twins. Our project is available: https://github.com/zqlin0521/GS4Buildings.
Authors: Tianyu Xin, Jin-Liang Xiao, Zeyu Xia, Shan Yin, Liang-Jian Deng
Abstract: Deep learning methods for pansharpening have advanced rapidly, yet models pretrained on data from a specific sensor often generalize poorly to data from other sensors. Existing methods to tackle such cross-sensor degradation include retraining model or zero-shot methods, but they are highly time-consuming or even need extra training data. To address these challenges, our method first performs modular decomposition on deep learning-based pansharpening models, revealing a general yet critical interface where high-dimensional fused features begin mapping to the channel space of the final image. % may need revisement A Feature Tailor is then integrated at this interface to address cross-sensor degradation at the feature level, and is trained efficiently with physics-aware unsupervised losses. Moreover, our method operates in a patch-wise manner, training on partial patches and performing parallel inference on all patches to boost efficiency. Our method offers two key advantages: (1) $\textit{Improved Generalization Ability}$: it significantly enhance performance in cross-sensor cases. (2) $\textit{Low Generalization Cost}$: it achieves sub-second training and inference, requiring only partial test inputs and no external data, whereas prior methods often take minutes or even hours. Experiments on the real-world data from multiple datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art quality and efficiency in tackling cross-sensor degradation. For example, training and inference of $512\times512\times8$ image within $\textit{0.2 seconds}$ and $4000\times4000\times8$ image within $\textit{3 seconds}$ at the fastest setting on a commonly used RTX 3090 GPU, which is over 100 times faster than zero-shot methods.
Authors: Rajaei Khatib, Raja Giryes
Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is a leading 3D scene reconstruction method, obtaining high-quality reconstruction with real-time rendering runtime performance. The main idea behind 3DGS is to represent the scene as a collection of 3D gaussians, while learning their parameters to fit the given views of the scene. While achieving superior performance in the presence of many views, 3DGS struggles with sparse view reconstruction, where the input views are sparse and do not fully cover the scene and have low overlaps. In this paper, we propose DIP-GS, a Deep Image Prior (DIP) 3DGS representation. By using the DIP prior, which utilizes internal structure and patterns, with coarse-to-fine manner, DIP-based 3DGS can operate in scenarios where vanilla 3DGS fails, such as sparse view recovery. Note that our approach does not use any pre-trained models such as generative models and depth estimation, but rather relies only on the input frames. Among such methods, DIP-GS obtains state-of-the-art (SOTA) competitive results on various sparse-view reconstruction tasks, demonstrating its capabilities.
Authors: Rui Chen, Xingyu Chen, Shaoan Wang, Shihan Kong, Junzhi Yu
Abstract: Event cameras output event streams as sparse, asynchronous data with microsecond-level temporal resolution, enabling visual perception with low latency and a high dynamic range. While existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved significant success in understanding and analyzing RGB video content, they either fail to interpret event streams effectively or remain constrained to very short sequences. In this paper, we introduce LET-US, a framework for long event-stream--text comprehension that employs an adaptive compression mechanism to reduce the volume of input events while preserving critical visual details. LET-US thus establishes a new frontier in cross-modal inferential understanding over extended event sequences. To bridge the substantial modality gap between event streams and textual representations, we adopt a two-stage optimization paradigm that progressively equips our model with the capacity to interpret event-based scenes. To handle the voluminous temporal information inherent in long event streams, we leverage text-guided cross-modal queries for feature reduction, augmented by hierarchical clustering and similarity computation to distill the most representative event features. Moreover, we curate and construct a large-scale event-text aligned dataset to train our model, achieving tighter alignment of event features within the LLM embedding space. We also develop a comprehensive benchmark covering a diverse set of tasks -- reasoning, captioning, classification, temporal localization and moment retrieval. Experimental results demonstrate that LET-US outperforms prior state-of-the-art MLLMs in both descriptive accuracy and semantic comprehension on long-duration event streams. All datasets, codes, and models will be publicly available.
Authors: Rongxuan Peng, Shunquan Tan, Chenqi Kong, Anwei Luo, Alex C. Kot, Jiwu Huang
Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has emerged as a popular strategy for adapting large vision foundation models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and LLaVA, to downstream tasks like image forgery detection and localization (IFDL). However, existing PEFT-based approaches overlook their vulnerability to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we show that highly transferable adversarial images can be crafted solely via the upstream model, without accessing the downstream model or training data, significantly degrading the IFDL performance. To address this, we propose ForensicsSAM, a unified IFDL framework with built-in adversarial robustness. Our design is guided by three key ideas: (1) To compensate for the lack of forgery-relevant knowledge in the frozen image encoder, we inject forgery experts into each transformer block to enhance its ability to capture forgery artifacts. These forgery experts are always activated and shared across any input images. (2) To detect adversarial images, we design an light-weight adversary detector that learns to capture structured, task-specific artifact in RGB domain, enabling reliable discrimination across various attack methods. (3) To resist adversarial attacks, we inject adversary experts into the global attention layers and MLP modules to progressively correct feature shifts induced by adversarial noise. These adversary experts are adaptively activated by the adversary detector, thereby avoiding unnecessary interference with clean images. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that ForensicsSAM achieves superior resistance to various adversarial attack methods, while also delivering state-of-the-art performance in image-level forgery detection and pixel-level forgery localization. The resource is available at https://github.com/siriusPRX/ForensicsSAM.
Authors: Junyao Gao, Jiaxing Li, Wenran Liu, Yanhong Zeng, Fei Shen, Kai Chen, Yanan Sun, Cairong Zhao
Abstract: In this paper, we propose \textbf{CharacterShot}, a controllable and consistent 4D character animation framework that enables any individual designer to create dynamic 3D characters (i.e., 4D character animation) from a single reference character image and a 2D pose sequence. We begin by pretraining a powerful 2D character animation model based on a cutting-edge DiT-based image-to-video model, which allows for any 2D pose sequnce as controllable signal. We then lift the animation model from 2D to 3D through introducing dual-attention module together with camera prior to generate multi-view videos with spatial-temporal and spatial-view consistency. Finally, we employ a novel neighbor-constrained 4D gaussian splatting optimization on these multi-view videos, resulting in continuous and stable 4D character representations. Moreover, to improve character-centric performance, we construct a large-scale dataset Character4D, containing 13,115 unique characters with diverse appearances and motions, rendered from multiple viewpoints. Extensive experiments on our newly constructed benchmark, CharacterBench, demonstrate that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods. Code, models, and datasets will be publicly available at https://github.com/Jeoyal/CharacterShot.
Authors: Youqi Wang, Shunquan Tan, Rongxuan Peng, Bin Li, Jiwu Huang
Abstract: The increasing accessibility of image editing tools and generative AI has led to a proliferation of visually convincing forgeries, compromising the authenticity of digital media. In this paper, in addition to leveraging distortions from conventional forgeries, we repurpose the mechanism of a state-of-the-art (SOTA) text-to-image synthesis model by exploiting its internal generative process, turning it into a high-fidelity forgery localization tool. To this end, we propose CLUE (Capture Latent Uncovered Evidence), a framework that employs Low- Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to parameter-efficiently reconfigure Stable Diffusion 3 (SD3) as a forensic feature extractor. Our approach begins with the strategic use of SD3's Rectified Flow (RF) mechanism to inject noise at varying intensities into the latent representation, thereby steering the LoRAtuned denoising process to amplify subtle statistical inconsistencies indicative of a forgery. To complement the latent analysis with high-level semantic context and precise spatial details, our method incorporates contextual features from the image encoder of the Segment Anything Model (SAM), which is parameter-efficiently adapted to better trace the boundaries of forged regions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate CLUE's SOTA generalization performance, significantly outperforming prior methods. Furthermore, CLUE shows superior robustness against common post-processing attacks and Online Social Networks (OSNs). Code is publicly available at https://github.com/SZAISEC/CLUE.
Authors: Vivek Hruday Kavuri, Vysishtya Karanam, Venkata Jahnavi Venkamsetty, Kriti Madumadukala, Lakshmipathi Balaji Darur, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru
Abstract: Vision Language Models achieve impressive multi-modal performance but often inherit gender biases from their training data. This bias might be coming from both the vision and text modalities. In this work, we dissect the contributions of vision and text backbones to these biases by applying targeted debiasing using Counterfactual Data Augmentation and Task Vector methods. Inspired by data-efficient approaches in hate-speech classification, we introduce a novel metric, Degree of Stereotypicality and a corresponding debiasing method, Data Augmentation Using Degree of Stereotypicality - DAUDoS, to reduce bias with minimal computational cost. We curate a gender annotated dataset and evaluate all methods on VisoGender benchmark to quantify improvements and identify dominant source of bias. Our results show that CDA reduces the gender gap by 6% and DAUDoS by 3% but using only one-third of the data. Both methods also improve the model's ability to correctly identify gender in images by 3%, with DAUDoS achieving this improvement using only almost one-third of training data. From our experiment's, we observed that CLIP's vision encoder is more biased whereas PaliGemma2's text encoder is more biased. By identifying whether bias stems more from vision or text encoders, our work enables more targeted and effective bias mitigation strategies in future multi-modal systems.
Authors: Yuxin Zhang, Yunkang Cao, Yuqi Cheng, Yihan Sun, Weiming Shen
Abstract: This paper addresses the challenge of fully unsupervised image anomaly detection (FUIAD), where training data may contain unlabeled anomalies. Conventional methods assume anomaly-free training data, but real-world contamination leads models to absorb anomalies as normal, degrading detection performance. To mitigate this, we propose a two-stage framework that systematically exploits inherent learning bias in models. The learning bias stems from: (1) the statistical dominance of normal samples, driving models to prioritize learning stable normal patterns over sparse anomalies, and (2) feature-space divergence, where normal data exhibit high intra-class consistency while anomalies display high diversity, leading to unstable model responses. Leveraging the learning bias, stage 1 partitions the training set into subsets, trains sub-models, and aggregates cross-model anomaly scores to filter a purified dataset. Stage 2 trains the final detector on this dataset. Experiments on the Real-IAD benchmark demonstrate superior anomaly detection and localization performance under different noise conditions. Ablation studies further validate the framework's contamination resilience, emphasizing the critical role of learning bias exploitation. The model-agnostic design ensures compatibility with diverse unsupervised backbones, offering a practical solution for real-world scenarios with imperfect training data. Code is available at https://github.com/hustzhangyuxin/LLBNAD.
Authors: Suman Kunwar, Prabesh Rai
Abstract: The increasing number of Health Care facilities in Nepal has also added up the challenges on managing health care waste (HCW). Improper segregation and disposal of HCW leads to the contamination, spreading of infectious diseases and puts a risk of waste handlers. This study benchmarks the state of the art waste classification models: ResNeXt-50, EfficientNet-B0, MobileNetV3-S, YOLOv8-n and YOLOv5-s using Stratified K-fold techniques where we use 5 folds on combined HCW data, and found that the YOLOv5-s achieved higher of 95.06% accuracy but fell short few milliseconds in inference speed with YOLOv8-n model. The EfficientNet-B0 showed promising results of 93.22% accuracy but took the highest inference time. A repetitive ANOVA was performed to see statistical significance and the best performing model (YOLOv5-s) was deployed to the web with mapped bin color using Nepal's HCW management standards for public usage. Further work on the data was suggested along with localized context.
Authors: Siminfar Samakoush Galougah, Rishie Raj, Sanjoy Chowdhury, Sayan Nag, Ramani Duraiswami
Abstract: Current audio-visual (AV) benchmarks focus on final answer accuracy, overlooking the underlying reasoning process. This makes it difficult to distinguish genuine comprehension from correct answers derived through flawed reasoning or hallucinations. To address this, we introduce AURA (Audio-visual Understanding and Reasoning Assessment), a benchmark for evaluating the cross-modal reasoning capabilities of Audio-Visual Large Language Models (AV-LLMs) and Omni-modal Language Models (OLMs). AURA includes questions across six challenging cognitive domains, such as causality, timbre and pitch, tempo and AV synchronization, unanswerability, implicit distractions, and skill profiling, explicitly designed to be unanswerable from a single modality. This forces models to construct a valid logical path grounded in both audio and video, setting AURA apart from AV datasets that allow uni-modal shortcuts. To assess reasoning traces, we propose a novel metric, AuraScore, which addresses the lack of robust tools for evaluating reasoning fidelity. It decomposes reasoning into two aspects: (i) Factual Consistency - whether reasoning is grounded in perceptual evidence, and (ii) Core Inference - the logical validity of each reasoning step. Evaluations of SOTA models on AURA reveal a critical reasoning gap: although models achieve high accuracy (up to 92% on some tasks), their Factual Consistency and Core Inference scores fall below 45%. This discrepancy highlights that models often arrive at correct answers through flawed logic, underscoring the need for our benchmark and paving the way for more robust multimodal evaluation.
Authors: Pranav Chougule
Abstract: In this paper, I present a comprehensive study comparing Photogrammetry and Gaussian Splatting techniques for 3D model reconstruction and view synthesis. I created a dataset of images from a real-world scene and constructed 3D models using both methods. To evaluate the performance, I compared the models using structural similarity index (SSIM), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS), and lp/mm resolution based on the USAF resolution chart. A significant contribution of this work is the development of a modified Gaussian Splatting repository, which I forked and enhanced to enable rendering images from novel camera poses generated in the Blender environment. This innovation allows for the synthesis of high-quality novel views, showcasing the flexibility and potential of Gaussian Splatting. My investigation extends to an augmented dataset that includes both original ground images and novel views synthesized via Gaussian Splatting. This augmented dataset was employed to generate a new photogrammetry model, which was then compared against the original photogrammetry model created using only the original images. The results demonstrate the efficacy of using Gaussian Splatting to generate novel high-quality views and its potential to improve photogrammetry-based 3D reconstructions. The comparative analysis highlights the strengths and limitations of both approaches, providing valuable information for applications in extended reality (XR), photogrammetry, and autonomous vehicle simulations. Code is available at https://github.com/pranavc2255/gaussian-splatting-novel-view-render.git.
URLs: https://github.com/pranavc2255/gaussian-splatting-novel-view-render.git.
Authors: Jian Chen, Ming Li, Jihyung Kil, Chenguang Wang, Tong Yu, Ryan Rossi, Tianyi Zhou, Changyou Chen, Ruiyi Zhang
Abstract: Most organizational data in this world are stored as documents, and visual retrieval plays a crucial role in unlocking the collective intelligence from all these documents. However, existing benchmarks focus on English-only document retrieval or only consider multilingual question-answering on a single-page image. To bridge this gap, we introduce VisR-Bench, a multilingual benchmark designed for question-driven multimodal retrieval in long documents. Our benchmark comprises over 35K high-quality QA pairs across 1.2K documents, enabling fine-grained evaluation of multimodal retrieval. VisR-Bench spans sixteen languages with three question types (figures, text, and tables), offering diverse linguistic and question coverage. Unlike prior datasets, we include queries without explicit answers, preventing models from relying on superficial keyword matching. We evaluate various retrieval models, including text-based methods, multimodal encoders, and MLLMs, providing insights into their strengths and limitations. Our results show that while MLLMs significantly outperform text-based and multimodal encoder models, they still struggle with structured tables and low-resource languages, highlighting key challenges in multilingual visual retrieval.
Authors: Xiaoye Zuo, Nikos Athanasiou, Ginger Delmas, Yiming Huang, Xingyu Fu, Lingjie Liu
Abstract: Good form is the difference between strength and strain, yet for the fast-growing community of at-home fitness enthusiasts, expert feedback is often out of reach. FormCoach transforms a simple camera into an always-on, interactive AI training partner, capable of spotting subtle form errors and delivering tailored corrections in real time, leveraging vision-language models (VLMs). We showcase this capability through a web interface and benchmark state-of-the-art VLMs on a dataset of 1,700 expert-annotated user-reference video pairs spanning 22 strength and mobility exercises. To accelerate research in AI-driven coaching, we release both the dataset and an automated, rubric-based evaluation pipeline, enabling standardized comparison across models. Our benchmarks reveal substantial gaps compared to human-level coaching, underscoring both the challenges and opportunities in integrating nuanced, context-aware movement analysis into interactive AI systems. By framing form correction as a collaborative and creative process between humans and machines, FormCoach opens a new frontier in embodied AI.
Authors: Artzai Picon, Itziar Eguskiza, Daniel Mugica, Javier Romero, Carlos Javier Jimenez, Eric White, Gabriel Do-Lago-Junqueira, Christian Klukas, Ramon Navarra-Mestre
Abstract: Field trials are vital in herbicide research and development to assess effects on crops and weeds under varied conditions. Traditionally, evaluations rely on manual visual assessments, which are time-consuming, labor-intensive, and subjective. Automating species and damage identification is challenging due to subtle visual differences, but it can greatly enhance efficiency and consistency. We present an improved segmentation model combining a general-purpose self-supervised visual model with hierarchical inference based on botanical taxonomy. Trained on a multi-year dataset (2018-2020) from Germany and Spain using digital and mobile cameras, the model was tested on digital camera data (year 2023) and drone imagery from the United States, Germany, and Spain (year 2024) to evaluate robustness under domain shift. This cross-device evaluation marks a key step in assessing generalization across platforms of the model. Our model significantly improved species identification (F1-score: 0.52 to 0.85, R-squared: 0.75 to 0.98) and damage classification (F1-score: 0.28 to 0.44, R-squared: 0.71 to 0.87) over prior methods. Under domain shift (drone images), it maintained strong performance with moderate degradation (species: F1-score 0.60, R-squared 0.80; damage: F1-score 0.41, R-squared 0.62), where earlier models failed. These results confirm the model's robustness and real-world applicability. It is now deployed in BASF's phenotyping pipeline, enabling large-scale, automated crop and weed monitoring across diverse geographies.
Authors: Joonghyuk Shin, Alchan Hwang, Yujin Kim, Daneul Kim, Jaesik Park
Abstract: Transformer-based diffusion models have recently superseded traditional U-Net architectures, with multimodal diffusion transformers (MM-DiT) emerging as the dominant approach in state-of-the-art models like Stable Diffusion 3 and Flux.1. Previous approaches have relied on unidirectional cross-attention mechanisms, with information flowing from text embeddings to image latents. In contrast, MMDiT introduces a unified attention mechanism that concatenates input projections from both modalities and performs a single full attention operation, allowing bidirectional information flow between text and image branches. This architectural shift presents significant challenges for existing editing techniques. In this paper, we systematically analyze MM-DiT's attention mechanism by decomposing attention matrices into four distinct blocks, revealing their inherent characteristics. Through these analyses, we propose a robust, prompt-based image editing method for MM-DiT that supports global to local edits across various MM-DiT variants, including few-step models. We believe our findings bridge the gap between existing U-Net-based methods and emerging architectures, offering deeper insights into MMDiT's behavioral patterns.
Authors: Xiaotong Ji, Ryoma Bise, Seiichi Uchida
Abstract: In medical image processing, accurate diagnosis is of paramount importance. Leveraging machine learning techniques, particularly top-rank learning, shows significant promise by focusing on the most crucial instances. However, challenges arise from noisy labels and class-ambiguous instances, which can severely hinder the top-rank objective, as they may be erroneously placed among the top-ranked instances. To address these, we propose a novel approach that enhances toprank learning by integrating a rejection module. Cooptimized with the top-rank loss, this module identifies and mitigates the impact of outliers that hinder training effectiveness. The rejection module functions as an additional branch, assessing instances based on a rejection function that measures their deviation from the norm. Through experimental validation on a medical dataset, our methodology demonstrates its efficacy in detecting and mitigating outliers, improving the reliability and accuracy of medical image diagnoses.
Authors: Xiaoming Li, Wangmeng Zuo, Chen Change Loy
Abstract: Faithful text image super-resolution (SR) is challenging because each character has a unique structure and usually exhibits diverse font styles and layouts. While existing methods primarily focus on English text, less attention has been paid to more complex scripts like Chinese. In this paper, we introduce a high-quality text image SR framework designed to restore the precise strokes of low-resolution (LR) Chinese characters. Unlike methods that rely on character recognition priors to regularize the SR task, we propose a novel structure prior that offers structure-level guidance to enhance visual quality. Our framework incorporates this structure prior within a StyleGAN model, leveraging its generative capabilities for restoration. To maintain the integrity of character structures while accommodating various font styles and layouts, we implement a codebook-based mechanism that restricts the generative space of StyleGAN. Each code in the codebook represents the structure of a specific character, while the vector $w$ in StyleGAN controls the character's style, including typeface, orientation, and location. Through the collaborative interaction between the codebook and style, we generate a high-resolution structure prior that aligns with LR characters both spatially and structurally. Experiments demonstrate that this structure prior provides robust, character-specific guidance, enabling the accurate restoration of clear strokes in degraded characters, even for real-world LR Chinese text with irregular layouts. Our code and pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/csxmli2016/MARCONetPlusPlus
Authors: Hongzhu Jiang, Sihan Xie, Zhiyu Wan
Abstract: Image de-identification is essential for the public sharing of medical images, particularly in the widely used Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) format as required by various regulations and standards, including Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy rules, the DICOM PS3.15 standard, and best practices recommended by the Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA). The Medical Image De-Identification Benchmark (MIDI-B) Challenge at the 27th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2024) was organized to evaluate rule-based DICOM image de-identification algorithms with a large dataset of clinical DICOM images. In this report, we explore the critical challenges of de-identifying DICOM images, emphasize the importance of removing personally identifiable information (PII) to protect patient privacy while ensuring the continued utility of medical data for research, diagnostics, and treatment, and provide a comprehensive overview of the standards and regulations that govern this process. Additionally, we detail the de-identification methods we applied - such as pixel masking, date shifting, date hashing, text recognition, text replacement, and text removal - to process datasets during the test phase in strict compliance with these standards. According to the final leaderboard of the MIDI-B challenge, the latest version of our solution algorithm correctly executed 99.92% of the required actions and ranked 2nd out of 10 teams that completed the challenge (from a total of 22 registered teams). Finally, we conducted a thorough analysis of the resulting statistics and discussed the limitations of current approaches and potential avenues for future improvement.
Authors: Yuki Shigeyasu, Shota Harada, Akihiko Yoshizawa, Kazuhiro Terada, Naoki Nakazima, Mariyo Kurata, Hiroyuki Abe, Tetsuo Ushiku, Ryoma Bise
Abstract: In this paper, we address domain shifts in pathological images by focusing on shifts within whole slide images~(WSIs), such as patient characteristics and tissue thickness, rather than shifts between hospitals. Traditional approaches rely on multi-hospital data, but data collection challenges often make this impractical. Therefore, the proposed domain generalization method captures and leverages intra-hospital domain shifts by clustering WSI-level features from non-tumor regions and treating these clusters as domains. To mitigate domain shift, we apply contrastive learning to reduce feature gaps between WSI pairs from different clusters. The proposed method introduces a two-stage contrastive learning approach WSI-level and patch-level contrastive learning to minimize these gaps effectively.
Authors: Junuk Cha, Jihyeon Kim
Abstract: Recent advances in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) and chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning have led to significant progress in image and text generation tasks. However, the field of 3D human pose generation still faces critical limitations. Most existing text-to-pose models rely heavily on detailed (low-level) prompts that explicitly describe joint configurations. In contrast, humans tend to communicate actions and intentions using abstract (high-level) language. This mismatch results in a practical challenge for deploying pose generation systems in real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel framework that incorporates CoT reasoning into the pose generation process, enabling the interpretation of abstract prompts into accurate 3D human poses. We further propose a data synthesis pipeline that automatically generates triplets of abstract prompts, detailed prompts, and corresponding 3D poses for training process. Experimental results demonstrate that our reasoning-enhanced model, CoT-Pose, can effectively generate plausible and semantically aligned poses from abstract textual inputs. This work highlights the importance of high-level understanding in pose generation and opens new directions for reasoning-enhanced approach for human pose generation.
Authors: Chidaksh Ravuru
Abstract: Automated soccer commentary generation has evolved from template-based systems to advanced neural architectures, aiming to produce real-time descriptions of sports events. While frameworks like SoccerNet-Caption laid foundational work, their inability to achieve fine-grained alignment between video content and commentary remains a significant challenge. Recent efforts such as MatchTime, with its MatchVoice model, address this issue through coarse and fine-grained alignment techniques, achieving improved temporal synchronization. In this paper, we extend MatchVoice to commentary generation for soccer highlights using the GOAL dataset, which emphasizes short clips over entire games. We conduct extensive experiments to reproduce the original MatchTime results and evaluate our setup, highlighting the impact of different training configurations and hardware limitations. Furthermore, we explore the effect of varying window sizes on zero-shot performance. While MatchVoice exhibits promising generalization capabilities, our findings suggest the need for integrating techniques from broader video-language domains to further enhance performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/chidaksh/SoccerCommentary.
Authors: Takehiro Yamane, Itaru Tsuge, Susumu Saito, Ryoma Bise
Abstract: This paper proposes a novel pseudo-labeling method for medical image segmentation that can perform learning on ``individual images'' to select effective pseudo-labels. We introduce Positive and Unlabeled Learning (PU learning), which uses only positive and unlabeled data for binary classification problems, to obtain the appropriate metric for discriminating foreground and background regions on each unlabeled image. Our PU learning makes us easy to select pseudo-labels for various background regions. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our method.
Authors: Ludan Zhang, Sihan Wang, Yuqi Dai, Shuofei Qiao, Qinyue Luo, Lei He
Abstract: End-to-end models are emerging as the mainstream in autonomous driving perception and planning. However, the lack of explicit supervision signals for intermediate functional modules leads to opaque operational mechanisms and limited interpretability, making it challenging for traditional methods to independently evaluate and train these modules. Pioneering in the issue, this study builds upon the feature map-truth representation similarity-based evaluation framework and proposes an independent evaluation method based on Feature Map Convergence Score (FMCS). A Dual-Granularity Dynamic Weighted Scoring System (DG-DWSS) is constructed, formulating a unified quantitative metric - Feature Map Quality Score - to enable comprehensive evaluation of the quality of feature maps generated by functional modules. A CLIP-based Feature Map Quality Evaluation Network (CLIP-FMQE-Net) is further developed, combining feature-truth encoders and quality score prediction heads to enable real-time quality analysis of feature maps generated by functional modules. Experimental results on the NuScenes dataset demonstrate that integrating our evaluation module into the training improves 3D object detection performance, achieving a 3.89 percent gain in NDS. These results verify the effectiveness of our method in enhancing feature representation quality and overall model performance.
Authors: Minghao Yin, Yukang Cao, Songyou Peng, Kai Han
Abstract: Generating high-quality 4D content from monocular videos for applications such as digital humans and AR/VR poses challenges in ensuring temporal and spatial consistency, preserving intricate details, and incorporating user guidance effectively. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Splat4D, a novel framework enabling high-fidelity 4D content generation from a monocular video. Splat4D achieves superior performance while maintaining faithful spatial-temporal coherence by leveraging multi-view rendering, inconsistency identification, a video diffusion model, and an asymmetric U-Net for refinement. Through extensive evaluations on public benchmarks, Splat4D consistently demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across various metrics, underscoring the efficacy of our approach. Additionally, the versatility of Splat4D is validated in various applications such as text/image conditioned 4D generation, 4D human generation, and text-guided content editing, producing coherent outcomes following user instructions.
Authors: Khanh-Binh Nguyen, Phuoc-Nguyen Bui, Hyunseung Choo, Duc Thanh Nguyen
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit remarkable zero-shot generalization but suffer performance degradation under distribution shifts in downstream tasks, particularly in the absence of labeled data. Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) addresses this challenge by enabling online optimization of VLMs during inference, eliminating the need for annotated data. Cache-based TTA methods exploit historical knowledge by maintaining a dynamic memory cache of low-entropy or high-confidence samples, promoting efficient adaptation to out-of-distribution data. Nevertheless, these methods face two critical challenges: (1) unreliable confidence metrics under significant distribution shifts, resulting in error accumulation within the cache and degraded adaptation performance; and (2) rigid decision boundaries that fail to accommodate substantial distributional variations, leading to suboptimal predictions. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Adaptive Cache Enhancement (ACE) framework, which constructs a robust cache by selectively storing high-confidence or low-entropy image embeddings per class, guided by dynamic, class-specific thresholds initialized from zero-shot statistics and iteratively refined using an exponential moving average and exploration-augmented updates. This approach enables adaptive, class-wise decision boundaries, ensuring robust and accurate predictions across diverse visual distributions. Extensive experiments on 15 diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that ACE achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering superior robustness and generalization compared to existing TTA methods in challenging out-of-distribution scenarios.
Authors: Zhaorui Tan, Tan Pan, Kaizhu Huang, Weimiao Yu, Kai Yao, Chen Jiang, Qiufeng Wang, Anh Nguyen, Xin Guo, Yuan Cheng, Xi Yang
Abstract: LayerNorm is pivotal in Vision Transformers (ViTs), yet its fine-tuning dynamics under data scarcity and domain shifts remain underexplored. This paper shows that shifts in LayerNorm parameters after fine-tuning (LayerNorm shifts) are indicative of the transitions between source and target domains; its efficacy is contingent upon the degree to which the target training samples accurately represent the target domain, as quantified by our proposed Fine-tuning Shift Ratio ($FSR$). Building on this, we propose a simple yet effective rescaling mechanism using a scalar $\lambda$ that is negatively correlated to $FSR$ to align learned LayerNorm shifts with those ideal shifts achieved under fully representative data, combined with a cyclic framework that further enhances the LayerNorm fine-tuning. Extensive experiments across natural and pathological images, in both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) settings, and various target training sample regimes validate our framework. Notably, OOD tasks tend to yield lower $FSR$ and higher $\lambda$ in comparison to ID cases, especially with scarce data, indicating under-represented target training samples. Moreover, ViTFs fine-tuned on pathological data behave more like ID settings, favoring conservative LayerNorm updates. Our findings illuminate the underexplored dynamics of LayerNorm in transfer learning and provide practical strategies for LayerNorm fine-tuning.
Authors: Yu-Huan Wu, Wei Liu, Zi-Xuan Zhu, Zizhou Wang, Yong Liu, Liangli Zhen
Abstract: Recent salient object detection (SOD) models predominantly rely on heavyweight backbones, incurring substantial computational cost and hindering their practical application in various real-world settings, particularly on edge devices. This paper presents GAPNet, a lightweight network built on the granularity-aware paradigm for both image and video SOD. We assign saliency maps of different granularities to supervise the multi-scale decoder side-outputs: coarse object locations for high-level outputs and fine-grained object boundaries for low-level outputs. Specifically, our decoder is built with granularity-aware connections which fuse high-level features of low granularity and low-level features of high granularity, respectively. To support these connections, we design granular pyramid convolution (GPC) and cross-scale attention (CSA) modules for efficient fusion of low-scale and high-scale features, respectively. On top of the encoder, a self-attention module is built to learn global information, enabling accurate object localization with negligible computational cost. Unlike traditional U-Net-based approaches, our proposed method optimizes feature utilization and semantic interpretation while applying appropriate supervision at each processing stage. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves a new state-of-the-art performance among lightweight image and video SOD models. Code is available at https://github.com/yuhuan-wu/GAPNet.
Authors: Sri Raksha Siva, Nived Suthahar, Prakash Boominathan, Uma Ranjan
Abstract: Voice disorders significantly affect communication and quality of life, requiring an early and accurate diagnosis. Traditional methods like laryngoscopy are invasive, subjective, and often inaccessible. This research proposes a noninvasive, machine learning-based framework for detecting voice pathologies using phonation data. Phonation data from the Saarbr\"ucken Voice Database are analyzed using acoustic features such as Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs), chroma features, and Mel spectrograms. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), including LSTM and attention mechanisms, classify samples into normal and pathological categories. Data augmentation techniques, including pitch shifting and Gaussian noise addition, enhance model generalizability, while preprocessing ensures signal quality. Scale-based features, such as H\"older and Hurst exponents, further capture signal irregularities and long-term dependencies. The proposed framework offers a noninvasive, automated diagnostic tool for early detection of voice pathologies, supporting AI-driven healthcare, and improving patient outcomes.
Authors: Shahroz Tariq, Simon S. Woo, Priyanka Singh, Irena Irmalasari, Saakshi Gupta, Dev Gupta
Abstract: The proliferation of deepfake technologies poses urgent challenges and serious risks to digital integrity, particularly within critical sectors such as forensics, journalism, and the legal system. While existing detection systems have made significant progress in classification accuracy, they typically function as black-box models, offering limited transparency and minimal support for human reasoning. This lack of interpretability hinders their usability in real-world decision-making contexts, especially for non-expert users. In this paper, we present DF-P2E (Deepfake: Prediction to Explanation), a novel multimodal framework that integrates visual, semantic, and narrative layers of explanation to make deepfake detection interpretable and accessible. The framework consists of three modular components: (1) a deepfake classifier with Grad-CAM-based saliency visualisation, (2) a visual captioning module that generates natural language summaries of manipulated regions, and (3) a narrative refinement module that uses a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM) to produce context-aware, user-sensitive explanations. We instantiate and evaluate the framework on the DF40 benchmark, the most diverse deepfake dataset to date. Experiments demonstrate that our system achieves competitive detection performance while providing high-quality explanations aligned with Grad-CAM activations. By unifying prediction and explanation in a coherent, human-aligned pipeline, this work offers a scalable approach to interpretable deepfake detection, advancing the broader vision of trustworthy and transparent AI systems in adversarial media environments.
Authors: Yuang Zhang, Junqi Cheng, Haoyu Zhao, Jiaxi Gu, Fangyuan Zou, Zenghui Lu, Peng Shu
Abstract: Over-the-shoulder dialogue videos are essential in films, short dramas, and advertisements, providing visual variety and enhancing viewers' emotional connection. Despite their importance, such dialogue scenes remain largely underexplored in video generation research. The main challenges include maintaining character consistency across different shots, creating a sense of spatial continuity, and generating long, multi-turn dialogues within limited computational budgets. Here, we present ShoulderShot, a framework that combines dual-shot generation with looping video, enabling extended dialogues while preserving character consistency. Our results demonstrate capabilities that surpass existing methods in terms of shot-reverse-shot layout, spatial continuity, and flexibility in dialogue length, thereby opening up new possibilities for practical dialogue video generation. Videos and comparisons are available at https://shouldershot.github.io.
Authors: Wenhui Song, Hanhui Li, Jiehui Huang, Panwen Hu, Yuhao Cheng, Long Chen, Yiqiang Yan, Xiaodan Liang
Abstract: In this paper, we present LaVieID, a novel \underline{l}ocal \underline{a}utoregressive \underline{vi}d\underline{e}o diffusion framework designed to tackle the challenging \underline{id}entity-preserving text-to-video task. The key idea of LaVieID is to mitigate the loss of identity information inherent in the stochastic global generation process of diffusion transformers (DiTs) from both spatial and temporal perspectives. Specifically, unlike the global and unstructured modeling of facial latent states in existing DiTs, LaVieID introduces a local router to explicitly represent latent states by weighted combinations of fine-grained local facial structures. This alleviates undesirable feature interference and encourages DiTs to capture distinctive facial characteristics. Furthermore, a temporal autoregressive module is integrated into LaVieID to refine denoised latent tokens before video decoding. This module divides latent tokens temporally into chunks, exploiting their long-range temporal dependencies to predict biases for rectifying tokens, thereby significantly enhancing inter-frame identity consistency. Consequently, LaVieID can generate high-fidelity personalized videos and achieve state-of-the-art performance. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/ssugarwh/LaVieID.
Authors: Jian Ma, Xujie Zhu, Zihao Pan, Qirong Peng, Xu Guo, Chen Chen, Haonan Lu
Abstract: Existing open-source datasets for arbitrary-instruction image editing remain suboptimal, while a plug-and-play editing module compatible with community-prevalent generative models is notably absent. In this paper, we first introduce the X2Edit Dataset, a comprehensive dataset covering 14 diverse editing tasks, including subject-driven generation. We utilize the industry-leading unified image generation models and expert models to construct the data. Meanwhile, we design reasonable editing instructions with the VLM and implement various scoring mechanisms to filter the data. As a result, we construct 3.7 million high-quality data with balanced categories. Second, to better integrate seamlessly with community image generation models, we design task-aware MoE-LoRA training based on FLUX.1, with only 8\% of the parameters of the full model. To further improve the final performance, we utilize the internal representations of the diffusion model and define positive/negative samples based on image editing types to introduce contrastive learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the model's editing performance is competitive among many excellent models. Additionally, the constructed dataset exhibits substantial advantages over existing open-source datasets. The open-source code, checkpoints, and datasets for X2Edit can be found at the following link: https://github.com/OPPO-Mente-Lab/X2Edit.
Authors: Hyoung Suk Park, Kiwan Jeon
Abstract: In dental cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT), compact and cost-effective system designs often use small detectors, resulting in a truncated field of view (FOV) that does not fully encompass the patient's head. In iterative reconstruction approaches, the discrepancy between the actual projection and the forward projection within the truncated FOV accumulates over iterations, leading to significant degradation in the reconstructed image quality. In this study, we propose a two-stage approach to mitigate truncation artifacts in dental CBCT. In the first stage, we employ Implicit Neural Representation (INR), leveraging its superior representation power, to generate a prior image over an extended region so that its forward projection fully covers the patient's head. To reduce computational and memory burdens, INR reconstruction is performed with a coarse voxel size. The forward projection of this prior image is then used to estimate the discrepancy due to truncated FOV in the measured projection data. In the second stage, the discrepancy-corrected projection data is utilized in a conventional iterative reconstruction process within the truncated region. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed two-grid approach effectively suppresses truncation artifacts, leading to improved CBCT image quality.
Authors: Yunsung Chung, Chanho Lim, Ghassan Bidaoui, Christian Massad, Nassir Marrouche, Jihun Hamm
Abstract: Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a prevalent cardiac arrhythmia often treated with catheter ablation procedures, but procedural outcomes are highly variable. Evaluating and improving ablation efficacy is challenging due to the complex interaction between patient-specific tissue and procedural factors. This paper asks two questions: Can AF recurrence be predicted by simulating the effects of procedural parameters? How should we ablate to reduce AF recurrence? We propose SOFA (Simulating and Optimizing Atrial Fibrillation Ablation), a novel deep-learning framework that addresses these questions. SOFA first simulates the outcome of an ablation strategy by generating a post-ablation image depicting scar formation, conditioned on a patient's pre-ablation LGE-MRI and the specific procedural parameters used (e.g., ablation locations, duration, temperature, power, and force). During this simulation, it predicts AF recurrence risk. Critically, SOFA then introduces an optimization scheme that refines these procedural parameters to minimize the predicted risk. Our method leverages a multi-modal, multi-view generator that processes 2.5D representations of the atrium. Quantitative evaluations show that SOFA accurately synthesizes post-ablation images and that our optimization scheme leads to a 22.18\% reduction in the model-predicted recurrence risk. To the best of our knowledge, SOFA is the first framework to integrate the simulation of procedural effects, recurrence prediction, and parameter optimization, offering a novel tool for personalizing AF ablation.
Authors: Vishakha Lall, Yisi Liu
Abstract: In many real-world applications involving static environments, the spatial layout of objects remains consistent across instances. However, state-of-the-art object detection models often fail to leverage this spatial prior, resulting in inconsistent predictions, missed detections, or misclassifications, particularly in cluttered or occluded scenes. In this work, we propose a graph-based post-processing pipeline that explicitly models the spatial relationships between objects to correct detection anomalies in egocentric frames. Using a graph neural network (GNN) trained on manually annotated data, our model identifies invalid object class labels and predicts corrected class labels based on their neighbourhood context. We evaluate our approach both as a standalone anomaly detection and correction framework and as a post-processing module for standard object detectors such as YOLOv7 and RT-DETR. Experiments demonstrate that incorporating this spatial reasoning significantly improves detection performance, with mAP@50 gains of up to 4%. This method highlights the potential of leveraging the environment's spatial structure to improve reliability in object detection systems.
Authors: Junxiao Xue, Xiaozhen Liu, Jie Wang, Xuecheng Wu, Bin Wu
Abstract: Existing emotion recognition methods mainly focus on enhancing performance by employing complex deep models, typically resulting in significantly higher model complexity. Although effective, it is also crucial to ensure the reliability of the final decision, especially for noisy, corrupted and out-of-distribution data. To this end, we propose a novel emotion recognition method called trusted emotion recognition (TER), which utilizes uncertainty estimation to calculate the confidence value of predictions. TER combines the results from multiple modalities based on their confidence values to output the trusted predictions. We also provide a new evaluation criterion to assess the reliability of predictions. Specifically, we incorporate trusted precision and trusted recall to determine the trusted threshold and formulate the trusted Acc. and trusted F1 score to evaluate the model's trusted performance. The proposed framework combines the confidence module that accordingly endows the model with reliability and robustness against possible noise or corruption. The extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed model. The TER achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Music-video, achieving 82.40% Acc. In terms of trusted performance, TER outperforms other methods on the IEMOCAP and Music-video, achieving trusted F1 scores of 0.7511 and 0.9035, respectively.
Authors: Dejie Yang, Zijing Zhao, Yang Liu
Abstract: Visual Robot Manipulation (VRM) aims to enable a robot to follow natural language instructions based on robot states and visual observations, and therefore requires costly multi-modal data. To compensate for the deficiency of robot data, existing approaches have employed vision-language pretraining with large-scale data. However, they either utilize web data that differs from robotic tasks, or train the model in an implicit way (e.g., predicting future frames at the pixel level), thus showing limited generalization ability under insufficient robot data. In this paper, we propose to learn from large-scale human action video datasets in an explicit way (i.e., imitating human actions from hand keypoints), introducing Visual Robot Manipulation with Analogical Reasoning (AR-VRM). To acquire action knowledge explicitly from human action videos, we propose a keypoint Vision-Language Model (VLM) pretraining scheme, enabling the VLM to learn human action knowledge and directly predict human hand keypoints. During fine-tuning on robot data, to facilitate the robotic arm in imitating the action patterns of human motions, we first retrieve human action videos that perform similar manipulation tasks and have similar historical observations , and then learn the Analogical Reasoning (AR) map between human hand keypoints and robot components. Taking advantage of focusing on action keypoints instead of irrelevant visual cues, our method achieves leading performance on the CALVIN benchmark {and real-world experiments}. In few-shot scenarios, our AR-VRM outperforms previous methods by large margins , underscoring the effectiveness of explicitly imitating human actions under data scarcity.
Authors: Xiaohang Zhan, Dingming Liu
Abstract: We propose a novel training-free image generation algorithm that precisely controls the occlusion relationships between objects in an image. Existing image generation methods typically rely on prompts to influence occlusion, which often lack precision. While layout-to-image methods provide control over object locations, they fail to address occlusion relationships explicitly. Given a pre-trained image diffusion model, our method leverages volume rendering principles to "render" the scene in latent space, guided by occlusion relationships and the estimated transmittance of objects. This approach does not require retraining or fine-tuning the image diffusion model, yet it enables accurate occlusion control due to its physics-grounded foundation. In extensive experiments, our method significantly outperforms existing approaches in terms of occlusion accuracy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that by adjusting the opacities of objects or concepts during rendering, our method can achieve a variety of effects, such as altering the transparency of objects, the density of mass (e.g., forests), the concentration of particles (e.g., rain, fog), the intensity of light, and the strength of lens effects, etc.
Authors: Yimin Fu, Zhunga Liu, Dongxiu Guo, Longfei Wang
Abstract: The acquisition of high-quality labeled synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is challenging due to the demanding requirement for expert knowledge. Consequently, the presence of unreliable noisy labels is unavoidable, which results in performance degradation of SAR automatic target recognition (ATR). Existing research on learning with noisy labels mainly focuses on image data. However, the non-intuitive visual characteristics of SAR data are insufficient to achieve noise-robust learning. To address this problem, we propose collaborative learning of scattering and deep features (CLSDF) for SAR ATR with noisy labels. Specifically, a multi-model feature fusion framework is designed to integrate scattering and deep features. The attributed scattering centers (ASCs) are treated as dynamic graph structure data, and the extracted physical characteristics effectively enrich the representation of deep image features. Then, the samples with clean and noisy labels are divided by modeling the loss distribution with multiple class-wise Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs). Afterward, the semi-supervised learning of two divergent branches is conducted based on the data divided by each other. Moreover, a joint distribution alignment strategy is introduced to enhance the reliability of co-guessed labels. Extensive experiments have been done on the Moving and Stationary Target Acquisition and Recognition (MSTAR) dataset, and the results show that the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art performance under different operating conditions with various label noises.
Authors: Zhiying Li, Junhao Wu, Yeying Jin, Daiheng Gao, Yun Ji, Kaichuan Kong, Lei Yu, Hao Xu, Kai Chen, Bruce Gu, Nana Wang, Zhaoxin Fan
Abstract: Virtual try-on (VTON) is a crucial task for enhancing user experience in online shopping by generating realistic garment previews on personal photos. Although existing methods have achieved impressive results, they struggle with long-sleeve-to-short-sleeve conversions-a common and practical scenario-often producing unrealistic outputs when exposed skin is underrepresented in the original image. We argue that this challenge arises from the ''majority'' completion rule in current VTON models, which leads to inaccurate skin restoration in such cases. To address this, we propose UR-VTON (Undress-Redress Virtual Try-ON), a novel, training-free framework that can be seamlessly integrated with any existing VTON method. UR-VTON introduces an ''undress-to-redress'' mechanism: it first reveals the user's torso by virtually ''undressing,'' then applies the target short-sleeve garment, effectively decomposing the conversion into two more manageable steps. Additionally, we incorporate Dynamic Classifier-Free Guidance scheduling to balance diversity and image quality during DDPM sampling, and employ Structural Refiner to enhance detail fidelity using high-frequency cues. Finally, we present LS-TON, a new benchmark for long-sleeve-to-short-sleeve try-on. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UR-VTON outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both detail preservation and image quality. Code will be released upon acceptance.
Authors: Chaohong Guo, Xun Mo, Yongwei Nie, Xuemiao Xu, Chao Xu, Fei Yu, Chengjiang Long
Abstract: Temporal Video Grounding (TVG) aims to precisely localize video segments corresponding to natural language queries, which is a critical capability for long-form video understanding. Although existing reinforcement learning approaches encourage models to generate reasoning chains before predictions, they fail to explicitly constrain the reasoning process to ensure the quality of the final temporal predictions. To address this limitation, we propose Timestamp Anchor-constrained Reasoning for Temporal Video Grounding (TAR-TVG), a novel framework that introduces timestamp anchors within the reasoning process to enforce explicit supervision to the thought content. These anchors serve as intermediate verification points. More importantly, we require each reasoning step to produce increasingly accurate temporal estimations, thereby ensuring that the reasoning process contributes meaningfully to the final prediction. To address the challenge of low-probability anchor generation in models (e.g., Qwen2.5-VL-3B), we develop an efficient self-distillation training strategy: (1) initial GRPO training to collect 30K high-quality reasoning traces containing multiple timestamp anchors, (2) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on distilled data, and (3) final GRPO optimization on the SFT-enhanced model. This three-stage training strategy enables robust anchor generation while maintaining reasoning quality. Experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance while producing interpretable, verifiable reasoning chains with progressively refined temporal estimations.
Authors: Weitao Wang, Haoran Xu, Jun Meng, Haoqian Wang
Abstract: As 3D generation techniques continue to flourish, the demand for generating personalized content is rapidly rising. Users increasingly seek to apply various editing methods to polish generated 3D content, aiming to enhance its color, style, and lighting without compromising the underlying geometry. However, most existing editing tools focus on the 2D domain, and directly feeding their results into 3D generation methods (like multi-view diffusion models) will introduce information loss, degrading the quality of the final 3D assets. In this paper, we propose a tuning-free, plug-and-play scheme that aligns edited assets with their original geometry in a single inference run. Central to our approach is a geometry preservation module that guides the edited multi-view generation with original input normal latents. Besides, an injection switcher is proposed to deliberately control the supervision extent of the original normals, ensuring the alignment between the edited color and normal views. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently improves both the multi-view consistency and mesh quality of edited 3D assets, across multiple combinations of multi-view diffusion models and editing methods.
Authors: Bo Jia, Yanan Guo, Ying Chang, Benkui Zhang, Ying Xie, Kangning Du, Lin Cao
Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieves remarkable results in the field of surface reconstruction. However, when Gaussian normal vectors are aligned within the single-view projection plane, while the geometry appears reasonable in the current view, biases may emerge upon switching to nearby views. To address the distance and global matching challenges in multi-view scenes, we design multi-view normal and distance-guided Gaussian splatting. This method achieves geometric depth unification and high-accuracy reconstruction by constraining nearby depth maps and aligning 3D normals. Specifically, for the reconstruction of small indoor and outdoor scenes, we propose a multi-view distance reprojection regularization module that achieves multi-view Gaussian alignment by computing the distance loss between two nearby views and the same Gaussian surface. Additionally, we develop a multi-view normal enhancement module, which ensures consistency across views by matching the normals of pixel points in nearby views and calculating the loss. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the baseline in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, significantly enhancing the surface reconstruction capability of 3DGS.
Authors: Licheng Zhang, Bach Le, Naveed Akhtar, Tuan Ngo
Abstract: Accurate detection and classification of diverse door types in floor plans drawings is critical for multiple applications, such as building compliance checking, and indoor scene understanding. Despite their importance, publicly available datasets specifically designed for fine-grained multi-class door detection remain scarce. In this work, we present a semi-automated pipeline that leverages a state-of-the-art object detector and a large language model (LLM) to construct a multi-class door detection dataset with minimal manual effort. Doors are first detected as a unified category using a deep object detection model. Next, an LLM classifies each detected instance based on its visual and contextual features. Finally, a human-in-the-loop stage ensures high-quality labels and bounding boxes. Our method significantly reduces annotation cost while producing a dataset suitable for benchmarking neural models in floor plan analysis. This work demonstrates the potential of combining deep learning and multimodal reasoning for efficient dataset construction in complex real-world domains.
Authors: Daoping Zhang, Xue-Cheng Tai, Lok Ming Lui
Abstract: Image segmentation plays a crucial role in extracting objects of interest and identifying their boundaries within an image. However, accurate segmentation becomes challenging when dealing with occlusions, obscurities, or noise in corrupted images. To tackle this challenge, prior information is often utilized, with recent attention on star-shape priors. In this paper, we propose a star-shape segmentation model based on the registration framework. By combining the level set representation with the registration framework and imposing constraints on the deformed level set function, our model enables both full and partial star-shape segmentation, accommodating single or multiple centers. Additionally, our approach allows for the enforcement of identified boundaries to pass through specified landmark locations. We tackle the proposed models using the alternating direction method of multipliers. Through numerical experiments conducted on synthetic and real images, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in achieving accurate star-shape segmentation.
Authors: Ting Xiang, Changjian Chen, Zhuo Tang, Qifeng Zhang, Fei Lyu, Li Yang, Jiapeng Zhang, Kenli Li
Abstract: The performance of computer vision models in certain real-world applications, such as medical diagnosis, is often limited by the scarcity of available images. Expanding datasets using pre-trained generative models is an effective solution. However, due to the uncontrollable generation process and the ambiguity of natural language, noisy images may be generated. Re-weighting is an effective way to address this issue by assigning low weights to such noisy images. We first theoretically analyze three types of supervision for the generated images. Based on the theoretical analysis, we develop TriReWeight, a triplet-connection-based sample re-weighting method to enhance generative data augmentation. Theoretically, TriReWeight can be integrated with any generative data augmentation methods and never downgrade their performance. Moreover, its generalization approaches the optimal in the order $O(\sqrt{d\ln (n)/n})$. Our experiments validate the correctness of the theoretical analysis and demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing SOTA methods by $7.9\%$ on average over six natural image datasets and by $3.4\%$ on average over three medical datasets. We also experimentally validate that our method can enhance the performance of different generative data augmentation methods.
Authors: Junhyuk So, Juncheol Shin, Hyunho Kook, Eunhyeok Park
Abstract: Recently, autoregressive (AR) image models have demonstrated remarkable generative capabilities, positioning themselves as a compelling alternative to diffusion models. However, their sequential nature leads to long inference times, limiting their practical scalability. In this work, we introduce Grouped Speculative Decoding (GSD), a novel, training-free acceleration method for AR image models. While recent studies have explored Speculative Decoding (SD) as a means to speed up AR image generation, existing approaches either provide only modest acceleration or require additional training. Our in-depth analysis reveals a fundamental difference between language and image tokens: image tokens exhibit inherent redundancy and diversity, meaning multiple tokens can convey valid semantics. However, traditional SD methods are designed to accept only a single most-likely token, which fails to leverage this difference, leading to excessive false-negative rejections. To address this, we propose a new SD strategy that evaluates clusters of visually valid tokens rather than relying on a single target token. Additionally, we observe that static clustering based on embedding distance is ineffective, which motivates our dynamic GSD approach. Extensive experiments show that GSD accelerates AR image models by an average of 3.7x while preserving image quality-all without requiring any additional training. The source code is available at https://github.com/junhyukso/GSD
Authors: Minseo Kim, Minchan Kwon, Dongyeun Lee, Yunho Jeon, Junmo Kim
Abstract: The recent demand for customized image generation raises a need for techniques that effectively extract the common concept from small sets of images. Existing methods typically rely on additional guidance, such as text prompts or spatial masks, to capture the common target concept. Unfortunately, relying on manually provided guidance can lead to incomplete separation of auxiliary features, which degrades generation quality.In this paper, we propose Contrastive Inversion, a novel approach that identifies the common concept by comparing the input images without relying on additional information. We train the target token along with the image-wise auxiliary text tokens via contrastive learning, which extracts the well-disentangled true semantics of the target. Then we apply disentangled cross-attention fine-tuning to improve concept fidelity without overfitting. Experimental results and analysis demonstrate that our method achieves a balanced, high-level performance in both concept representation and editing, outperforming existing techniques.
Authors: Haoran Wang, Zekun Li, Jian Zhang, Lei Qi, Yinghuan Shi
Abstract: Large vision models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibit significant limitations when applied to downstream tasks in the wild. Consequently, reference segmentation, which leverages reference images and their corresponding masks to impart novel knowledge to the model, emerges as a promising new direction for adapting vision models. However, existing reference segmentation approaches predominantly rely on meta-learning, which still necessitates an extensive meta-training process and brings massive data and computational cost. In this study, we propose a novel approach by representing the inherent correspondence between reference-target image pairs as a pseudo video. This perspective allows the latest version of SAM, known as SAM2, which is equipped with interactive video object segmentation (iVOS) capabilities, to be adapted to downstream tasks in a lightweight manner. We term this approach Correspondence As Video for SAM (CAV-SAM). CAV-SAM comprises two key modules: the Diffusion-Based Semantic Transition (DBST) module employs a diffusion model to construct a semantic transformation sequence, while the Test-Time Geometric Alignment (TTGA) module aligns the geometric changes within this sequence through test-time fine-tuning. We evaluated CAVSAM on widely-used datasets, achieving segmentation performance improvements exceeding 5% over SOTA methods. Implementation is provided in the supplementary materials.
Authors: Jinke Li, Jiarui Yu, Chenxing Wei, Hande Dong, Qiang Lin, Liangjing Yang, Zhicai Wang, Yanbin Hao
Abstract: Unlike bitmap images, scalable vector graphics (SVG) maintain quality when scaled, frequently employed in computer vision and artistic design in the representation of SVG code. In this era of proliferating AI-powered systems, enabling AI to understand and generate SVG has become increasingly urgent. However, AI-driven SVG understanding and generation (U&G) remain significant challenges. SVG code, equivalent to a set of curves and lines controlled by floating-point parameters, demands high precision in SVG U&G. Besides, SVG generation operates under diverse conditional constraints, including textual prompts and visual references, which requires powerful multi-modal processing for condition-to-SVG transformation. Recently, the rapid growth of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated capabilities to process multi-modal inputs and generate complex vector controlling parameters, suggesting the potential to address SVG U&G tasks within a unified model. To unlock MLLM's capabilities in the SVG area, we propose an SVG-centric dataset called UniSVG, comprising 525k data items, tailored for MLLM training and evaluation. To our best knowledge, it is the first comprehensive dataset designed for unified SVG generation (from textual prompts and images) and SVG understanding (color, category, usage, etc.). As expected, learning on the proposed dataset boosts open-source MLLMs' performance on various SVG U&G tasks, surpassing SOTA close-source MLLMs like GPT-4V. We release dataset, benchmark, weights, codes and experiment details on https://ryanlijinke.github.io/.
Authors: Xiaoyan Liu, Kangrui Li, Jiaxin Liu
Abstract: The synthesis of spatiotemporally coherent 4D content presents fundamental challenges in computer vision, requiring simultaneous modeling of high-fidelity spatial representations and physically plausible temporal dynamics. Current approaches often struggle to maintain view consistency while handling complex scene dynamics, particularly in large-scale environments with multiple interacting elements. This work introduces Dream4D, a novel framework that bridges this gap through a synergy of controllable video generation and neural 4D reconstruction. Our approach seamlessly combines a two-stage architecture: it first predicts optimal camera trajectories from a single image using few-shot learning, then generates geometrically consistent multi-view sequences via a specialized pose-conditioned diffusion process, which are finally converted into a persistent 4D representation. This framework is the first to leverage both rich temporal priors from video diffusion models and geometric awareness of the reconstruction models, which significantly facilitates 4D generation and shows higher quality (e.g., mPSNR, mSSIM) over existing methods.
Authors: Lei Wang, Shiming Chen, Guo-Sen Xie, Ziming Hong, Chaojian Yu, Qinmu Peng, Xinge You
Abstract: In Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL), embedding-based methods enable knowledge transfer from seen to unseen classes by learning a visual-semantic mapping from seen-class images to class-level semantic prototypes (e.g., attributes). However, these semantic prototypes are manually defined and may introduce noisy supervision for two main reasons: (i) instance-level mismatch: variations in perspective, occlusion, and annotation bias will cause discrepancies between individual sample and the class-level semantic prototypes; and (ii) class-level imprecision: the manually defined semantic prototypes may not accurately reflect the true semantics of the class. Consequently, the visual-semantic mapping will be misled, reducing the effectiveness of knowledge transfer to unseen classes. In this work, we propose a prototype-guided curriculum learning framework (dubbed as CLZSL), which mitigates instance-level mismatches through a Prototype-Guided Curriculum Learning (PCL) module and addresses class-level imprecision via a Prototype Update (PUP) module. Specifically, the PCL module prioritizes samples with high cosine similarity between their visual mappings and the class-level semantic prototypes, and progressively advances to less-aligned samples, thereby reducing the interference of instance-level mismatches to achieve accurate visual-semantic mapping. Besides, the PUP module dynamically updates the class-level semantic prototypes by leveraging the visual mappings learned from instances, thereby reducing class-level imprecision and further improving the visual-semantic mapping. Experiments were conducted on standard benchmark datasets-AWA2, SUN, and CUB-to verify the effectiveness of our method.
Authors: Lennart Bastian, Mohammad Rashed, Nassir Navab, Tolga Birdal
Abstract: Modeling the rotation of moving objects is a fundamental task in computer vision, yet $SO(3)$ extrapolation still presents numerous challenges: (1) unknown quantities such as the moment of inertia complicate dynamics, (2) the presence of external forces and torques can lead to non-conservative kinematics, and (3) estimating evolving state trajectories under sparse, noisy observations requires robustness. We propose modeling trajectories of noisy pose estimates on the manifold of 3D rotations in a physically and geometrically meaningful way by leveraging Neural Controlled Differential Equations guided with $SO(3)$ Savitzky-Golay paths. Existing extrapolation methods often rely on energy conservation or constant velocity assumptions, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios involving non-conservative forces. In contrast, our approach is agnostic to energy and momentum conservation while being robust to input noise, making it applicable to complex, non-inertial systems. Our approach is easily integrated as a module in existing pipelines and generalizes well to trajectories with unknown physical parameters. By learning to approximate object dynamics from noisy states during training, our model attains robust extrapolation capabilities in simulation and various real-world settings. Code is available at https://github.com/bastianlb/forecasting-rotational-dynamics
URLs: https://github.com/bastianlb/forecasting-rotational-dynamics
Authors: Saihui Hou, Chenye Wang, Wenpeng Lang, Zhengxiang Lan, Yongzhen Huang
Abstract: Recent advancements in gait recognition have significantly enhanced performance by treating silhouettes as either an unordered set or an ordered sequence. However, both set-based and sequence-based approaches exhibit notable limitations. Specifically, set-based methods tend to overlook short-range temporal context for individual frames, while sequence-based methods struggle to capture long-range temporal dependencies effectively. To address these challenges, we draw inspiration from human identification and propose a new perspective that conceptualizes human gait as a composition of individualized actions. Each action is represented by a series of frames, randomly selected from a continuous segment of the sequence, which we term a snippet. Fundamentally, the collection of snippets for a given sequence enables the incorporation of multi-scale temporal context, facilitating more comprehensive gait feature learning. Moreover, we introduce a non-trivial solution for snippet-based gait recognition, focusing on Snippet Sampling and Snippet Modeling as key components. Extensive experiments on four widely-used gait datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach and, more importantly, highlight the potential of gait snippets. For instance, our method achieves the rank-1 accuracy of 77.5% on Gait3D and 81.7% on GREW using a 2D convolution-based backbone.
Authors: Hongrui Zheng, Yuezun Li, Liejun Wang, Yunfeng Diao, Zhiqing Guo
Abstract: Active defense strategies have been developed to counter the threat of deepfake technology. However, a primary challenge is their lack of persistence, as their effectiveness is often short-lived. Attackers can bypass these defenses by simply collecting protected samples and retraining their models. This means that static defenses inevitably fail when attackers retrain their models, which severely limits practical use. We argue that an effective defense not only distorts forged content but also blocks the model's ability to adapt, which occurs when attackers retrain their models on protected images. To achieve this, we propose an innovative Two-Stage Defense Framework (TSDF). Benefiting from the intensity separation mechanism designed in this paper, the framework uses dual-function adversarial perturbations to perform two roles. First, it can directly distort the forged results. Second, it acts as a poisoning vehicle that disrupts the data preparation process essential for an attacker's retraining pipeline. By poisoning the data source, TSDF aims to prevent the attacker's model from adapting to the defensive perturbations, thus ensuring the defense remains effective long-term. Comprehensive experiments show that the performance of traditional interruption methods degrades sharply when it is subjected to adversarial retraining. However, our framework shows a strong dual defense capability, which can improve the persistence of active defense. Our code will be available at https://github.com/vpsg-research/TSDF.
Authors: Xiaoqi Zhao, Peiqian Cao, Lihe Zhang, Zonglei Feng, Hanqi Liu, Jiaming Zuo, Youwei Pang, Weisi Lin, Georges El Fakhri, Huchuan Lu, Xiaofeng Liu
Abstract: Power batteries are essential components in electric vehicles, where internal structural defects can pose serious safety risks. We conduct a comprehensive study on a new task, power battery detection (PBD), which aims to localize the dense endpoints of cathode and anode plates from industrial X-ray images for quality inspection. Manual inspection is inefficient and error-prone, while traditional vision algorithms struggle with densely packed plates, low contrast, scale variation, and imaging artifacts. To address this issue and drive more attention into this meaningful task, we present PBD5K, the first large-scale benchmark for this task, consisting of 5,000 X-ray images from nine battery types with fine-grained annotations and eight types of real-world visual interference. To support scalable and consistent labeling, we develop an intelligent annotation pipeline that combines image filtering, model-assisted pre-labeling, cross-verification, and layered quality evaluation. We formulate PBD as a point-level segmentation problem and propose MDCNeXt, a model designed to extract and integrate multi-dimensional structure clues including point, line, and count information from the plate itself. To improve discrimination between plates and suppress visual interference, MDCNeXt incorporates two state space modules. The first is a prompt-filtered module that learns contrastive relationships guided by task-specific prompts. The second is a density-aware reordering module that refines segmentation in regions with high plate density. In addition, we propose a distance-adaptive mask generation strategy to provide robust supervision under varying spatial distributions of anode and cathode positions. The source code and datasets will be publicly available at \href{https://github.com/Xiaoqi-Zhao-DLUT/X-ray-PBD}{PBD5K}.
Authors: Yushen Xu, Xiaosong Li, Zhenyu Kuang, Xiaoqi Cheng, Haishu Tan, Huafeng Li
Abstract: The goal of multimodal image fusion is to integrate complementary information from infrared and visible images, generating multimodal fused images for downstream tasks. Existing downstream pre-training models are typically trained on visible images. However, the significant pixel distribution differences between visible and multimodal fusion images can degrade downstream task performance, sometimes even below that of using only visible images. This paper explores adapting multimodal fused images with significant modality differences to object detection and semantic segmentation models trained on visible images. To address this, we propose MambaTrans, a novel multimodal fusion image modality translator. MambaTrans uses descriptions from a multimodal large language model and masks from semantic segmentation models as input. Its core component, the Multi-Model State Space Block, combines mask-image-text cross-attention and a 3D-Selective Scan Module, enhancing pure visual capabilities. By leveraging object detection prior knowledge, MambaTrans minimizes detection loss during training and captures long-term dependencies among text, masks, and images. This enables favorable results in pre-trained models without adjusting their parameters. Experiments on public datasets show that MambaTrans effectively improves multimodal image performance in downstream tasks.
Authors: Bao Li, Xiaomei Zhang, Miao Xu, Zhaoxin Fan, Xiangyu Zhu, Zhen Lei
Abstract: Generating 3D human poses from multimodal inputs such as images or text requires models to capture both rich spatial and semantic correspondences. While pose-specific multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promise in this task, they are typically trained with supervised objectives such as SMPL parameter regression or token-level prediction, which struggle to model the inherent ambiguity and achieve task-specific alignment required for accurate 3D pose generation. To address these limitations, we propose Pose-RFT, a reinforcement fine-tuning framework tailored for 3D human pose generation in MLLMs. We formulate the task as a hybrid action reinforcement learning problem that jointly optimizes discrete language prediction and continuous pose generation. To this end, we introduce HyGRPO, a hybrid reinforcement learning algorithm that performs group-wise reward normalization over sampled responses to guide joint optimization of discrete and continuous actions. Pose-RFT further incorporates task-specific reward functions to guide optimization towards spatial alignment in image-to-pose generation and semantic consistency in text-to-pose generation. Extensive experiments on multiple pose generation benchmarks demonstrate that Pose-RFT significantly improves performance over existing pose-specific MLLMs, validating the effectiveness of hybrid action reinforcement fine-tuning for 3D pose generation.
Authors: Sicheng Gao, Nancy Mehta, Zongwei Wu, Radu Timofte
Abstract: Video restoration aims to reconstruct high quality video sequences from low quality inputs, addressing tasks such as super resolution, denoising, and deblurring. Traditional regression based methods often produce unrealistic details and require extensive paired datasets, while recent generative diffusion models face challenges in ensuring temporal consistency. We introduce DiTVR, a zero shot video restoration framework that couples a diffusion transformer with trajectory aware attention and a wavelet guided, flow consistent sampler. Unlike prior 3D convolutional or frame wise diffusion approaches, our attention mechanism aligns tokens along optical flow trajectories, with particular emphasis on vital layers that exhibit the highest sensitivity to temporal dynamics. A spatiotemporal neighbour cache dynamically selects relevant tokens based on motion correspondences across frames. The flow guided sampler injects data consistency only into low-frequency bands, preserving high frequency priors while accelerating convergence. DiTVR establishes a new zero shot state of the art on video restoration benchmarks, demonstrating superior temporal consistency and detail preservation while remaining robust to flow noise and occlusions.
Authors: Jingze Gai, Changchun Li
Abstract: Driven by the complementary nature of optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, SAR-optical image matching has garnered significant interest. Most existing SAR-optical image matching methods aim to capture effective matching features by employing the supervision of pixel-level matched correspondences within SAR-optical image pairs, which, however, suffers from time-consuming and complex manual annotation, making it difficult to collect sufficient labeled SAR-optical image pairs. To handle this, we design a semi-supervised SAR-optical image matching pipeline that leverages both scarce labeled and abundant unlabeled image pairs and propose a semi-supervised multiscale matching for SAR-optical image matching (S2M2-SAR). Specifically, we pseudo-label those unlabeled SAR-optical image pairs with pseudo ground-truth similarity heatmaps by combining both deep and shallow level matching results, and train the matching model by employing labeled and pseudo-labeled similarity heatmaps. In addition, we introduce a cross-modal feature enhancement module trained using a cross-modality mutual independence loss, which requires no ground-truth labels. This unsupervised objective promotes the separation of modality-shared and modality-specific features by encouraging statistical independence between them, enabling effective feature disentanglement across optical and SAR modalities. To evaluate the effectiveness of S2M2-SAR, we compare it with existing competitors on benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that S2M2-SAR not only surpasses existing semi-supervised methods but also achieves performance competitive with fully supervised SOTA methods, demonstrating its efficiency and practical potential.
Authors: Chenyue Song, Chen Hui, Haiqi Zhu, Feng Jiang, Yachun Mi, Wei Zhang, Shaohui Liu
Abstract: No-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) aims to simulate the process of perceiving image quality aligned with subjective human perception. However, existing NR-IQA methods either focus on global representations that leads to limited insights into the semantically salient regions or employ a uniform weighting for region features that weakens the sensitivity to local quality variations. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained image quality assessment model, named RSFIQA, which integrates region-level distortion information to perceive multi-dimensional quality discrepancies. To enhance regional quality awareness, we first utilize the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to dynamically partition the input image into non-overlapping semantic regions. For each region, we teach a powerful Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) to extract descriptive content and perceive multi-dimensional distortions, enabling a comprehensive understanding of both local semantics and quality degradations. To effectively leverage this information, we introduce Region-Aware Semantic Attention (RSA) mechanism, which generates a global attention map by aggregating fine-grained representations from local regions. In addition, RSFIQA is backbone-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated into various deep neural network architectures. Extensive experiments demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed method, which achieves competitive quality prediction performance across multiple benchmark datasets.
Authors: Ke Ma, Jun Long, Hongxiao Fei, Liujie Hua, Yueyi Luo
Abstract: Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) face a significant adaptation gap when applied to Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection (ZSAD), stemming from their lack of local inductive biases for dense prediction and their reliance on inflexible feature fusion paradigms. We address these limitations through an Architectural Co-Design framework that jointly refines feature representation and cross-modal fusion. Our method integrates a parameter-efficient Convolutional Low-Rank Adaptation (Conv-LoRA) adapter to inject local inductive biases for fine-grained representation, and introduces a Dynamic Fusion Gateway (DFG) that leverages visual context to adaptively modulate text prompts, enabling a powerful bidirectional fusion. Extensive experiments on diverse industrial and medical benchmarks demonstrate superior accuracy and robustness, validating that this synergistic co-design is critical for robustly adapting foundation models to dense perception tasks.
Authors: Animesh Jain, Alexandros Stergiou
Abstract: Vision Language Models (VLMs) encode multimodal inputs over large, complex, and difficult-to-interpret architectures, which limit transparency and trust. We propose a Multimodal Inversion for Model Interpretation and Conceptualization (MIMIC) framework to visualize the internal representations of VLMs by synthesizing visual concepts corresponding to internal encodings. MIMIC uses a joint VLM-based inversion and a feature alignment objective to account for VLM's autoregressive processing. It additionally includes a triplet of regularizers for spatial alignment, natural image smoothness, and semantic realism. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate MIMIC by inverting visual concepts over a range of varying-length free-form VLM output texts. Reported results include both standard visual quality metrics as well as semantic text-based metrics. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first model inversion approach addressing visual interpretations of VLM concepts.
Authors: Jingna Qiu, Nishanth Jain, Jonas Ammeling, Marc Aubreville, Katharina Breininger
Abstract: Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in histopathology, such as CONCH and QuiltNet, have demonstrated impressive zero-shot classification capabilities across various tasks. However, their general-purpose design may lead to suboptimal performance in specific downstream applications. While supervised fine-tuning methods address this issue, they require manually labeled samples for adaptation. This paper investigates annotation-free adaptation of VLMs through continued pretraining on domain- and task-relevant image-caption pairs extracted from existing databases. Our experiments on two VLMs, CONCH and QuiltNet, across three downstream tasks reveal that these pairs substantially enhance both zero-shot and few-shot performance. Notably, with larger training sizes, continued pretraining matches the performance of few-shot methods while eliminating manual labeling. Its effectiveness, task-agnostic design, and annotation-free workflow make it a promising pathway for adapting VLMs to new histopathology tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/DeepMicroscopy/Annotation-free-VLM-specialization.
URLs: https://github.com/DeepMicroscopy/Annotation-free-VLM-specialization.
Authors: Qi Xiang, Kunsong Shi, Zhigui Lin, Lei He
Abstract: Bird's Eye View (BEV) perception systems based on multi-sensor feature fusion have become a fundamental cornerstone for end-to-end autonomous driving. However, existing multi-modal BEV methods commonly suffer from limited input adaptability, constrained modeling capacity, and suboptimal generalization. To address these challenges, we propose a hierarchically decoupled Mixture-of-Experts architecture at the functional module level, termed Computing Brain DEvelopment System Mixture-of-Experts (CBDES MoE). CBDES MoE integrates multiple structurally heterogeneous expert networks with a lightweight Self-Attention Router (SAR) gating mechanism, enabling dynamic expert path selection and sparse, input-aware efficient inference. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first modular Mixture-of-Experts framework constructed at the functional module granularity within the autonomous driving domain. Extensive evaluations on the real-world nuScenes dataset demonstrate that CBDES MoE consistently outperforms fixed single-expert baselines in 3D object detection. Compared to the strongest single-expert model, CBDES MoE achieves a 1.6-point increase in mAP and a 4.1-point improvement in NDS, demonstrating the effectiveness and practical advantages of the proposed approach.
Authors: Shunya Nagashima, Komei Sugiura
Abstract: Accurate, reliable solar flare prediction is crucial for mitigating potential disruptions to critical infrastructure, while predicting solar flares remains a significant challenge. Existing methods based on heuristic physical features often lack representation learning from solar images. On the other hand, end-to-end learning approaches struggle to model long-range temporal dependencies in solar images. In this study, we propose Deep Space Weather Model (Deep SWM), which is based on multiple deep state space models for handling both ten-channel solar images and long-range spatio-temporal dependencies. Deep SWM also features a sparse masked autoencoder, a novel pretraining strategy that employs a two-phase masking approach to preserve crucial regions such as sunspots while compressing spatial information. Furthermore, we built FlareBench, a new public benchmark for solar flare prediction covering a full 11-year solar activity cycle, to validate our method. Our method outperformed baseline methods and even human expert performance on standard metrics in terms of performance and reliability. The project page can be found at https://keio-smilab25.github.io/DeepSWM.
Authors: Noriko Nitta, Rei Miyata, Naoto Oishi
Abstract: In this paper, electron microscopy images of microstructures formed on Ge surfaces by ion beam irradiation were processed to extract topological features as skeleton graphs, which were then embedded using a graph convolutional network. The resulting embeddings were analyzed using principal component analysis, and cluster separability in the resulting PCA space was evaluated using the Davies-Bouldin index. The results indicate that variations in irradiation angle have a more significant impact on the morphological properties of Ge surfaces than variations in irradiation fluence.
Authors: Konrad Reuter, Suresh Guttikonda, Sarah Latus, Lennart Maack, Christian Betz, Tobias Maurer, Alexander Schlaefer
Abstract: Minimally invasive surgery presents challenges such as dynamic tissue motion and a limited field of view. Accurate tissue tracking has the potential to support surgical guidance, improve safety by helping avoid damage to sensitive structures, and enable context-aware robotic assistance during complex procedures. In this work, we propose a novel method for markerless 3D tissue tracking by leveraging 2D Tracking Any Point (TAP) networks. Our method combines two CoTracker models, one for temporal tracking and one for stereo matching, to estimate 3D motion from stereo endoscopic images. We evaluate the system using a clinical laparoscopic setup and a robotic arm simulating tissue motion, with experiments conducted on a synthetic 3D-printed phantom and a chicken tissue phantom. Tracking on the chicken tissue phantom yielded more reliable results, with Euclidean distance errors as low as 1.1 mm at a velocity of 10 mm/s. These findings highlight the potential of TAP-based models for accurate, markerless 3D tracking in challenging surgical scenarios.
Authors: Bin Cao, Sipeng Zheng, Ye Wang, Lujie Xia, Qianshan Wei, Qin Jin, Jing Liu, Zongqing Lu
Abstract: Human motion generation has emerged as a critical technology with transformative potential for real-world applications. However, existing vision-language-motion models (VLMMs) face significant limitations that hinder their practical deployment. We identify controllability as a main bottleneck, manifesting in five key aspects: inadequate response to diverse human commands, limited pose initialization capabilities, poor performance on long-term sequences, insufficient handling of unseen scenarios, and lack of fine-grained control over individual body parts. To overcome these limitations, we present Being-M0.5, the first real-time, controllable VLMM that achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple motion generation tasks. Our approach is built upon HuMo100M, the largest and most comprehensive human motion dataset to date, comprising over 5 million self-collected motion sequences, 100 million multi-task instructional instances, and detailed part-level annotations that address a critical gap in existing datasets. We introduce a novel part-aware residual quantization technique for motion tokenization that enables precise, granular control over individual body parts during generation. Extensive experimental validation demonstrates Being-M0.5's superior performance across diverse motion benchmarks, while comprehensive efficiency analysis confirms its real-time capabilities. Our contributions include design insights and detailed computational analysis to guide future development of practical motion generators. We believe that HuMo100M and Being-M0.5 represent significant advances that will accelerate the adoption of motion generation technologies in real-world applications. The project page is available at https://beingbeyond.github.io/Being-M0.5.
Authors: Yanshu Li, Jianjiang Yang, Zhennan Shen, Ligong Han, Haoyan Xu, Ruixiang Tang
Abstract: Modern large vision-language models (LVLMs) convert each input image into a large set of tokens, far outnumbering the text tokens. Although this improves visual perception, it introduces severe image token redundancy. Because image tokens carry sparse information, many add little to reasoning, yet greatly increase inference cost. The emerging image token pruning methods tackle this issue by identifying the most important tokens and discarding the rest. These methods can raise efficiency with only modest performance loss. However, most of them only consider single-image tasks and overlook multimodal in-context learning (ICL), where redundancy is greater and efficiency is more critical. Redundant tokens weaken the advantage of multimodal ICL for rapid domain adaptation and cause unstable performance. Applying existing pruning methods in this setting leads to large accuracy drops, exposing a clear gap and the need for new techniques. Thus, we propose Contextually Adaptive Token Pruning (CATP), a training-free pruning method targeted at multimodal ICL. CATP consists of two stages that perform progressive pruning to fully account for the complex cross-modal interactions in the input sequence. After removing 77.8\% of the image tokens, CATP produces an average performance gain of 0.6\% over the vanilla model on four LVLMs and eight benchmarks, exceeding all baselines remarkably. Meanwhile, it effectively improves efficiency by achieving an average reduction of 10.78\% in inference latency. CATP enhances the practical value of multimodal ICL and lays the groundwork for future progress in interleaved image-text scenarios.
Authors: WonJun Moon, Hyun Seok Seong, Jae-Pil Heo
Abstract: Facilitating an entity's interaction with objects requires accurately identifying parts that afford specific actions. Weakly supervised affordance grounding (WSAG) seeks to imitate human learning from third-person demonstrations, where humans intuitively grasp functional parts without needing pixel-level annotations. To achieve this, grounding is typically learned using a shared classifier across images from different perspectives, along with distillation strategies incorporating part discovery process. However, since affordance-relevant parts are not always easily distinguishable, models primarily rely on classification, often focusing on common class-specific patterns that are unrelated to affordance. To address this limitation, we move beyond isolated part-level learning by introducing selective prototypical and pixel contrastive objectives that adaptively learn affordance-relevant cues at both the part and object levels, depending on the granularity of the available information. Initially, we find the action-associated objects in both egocentric (object-focused) and exocentric (third-person example) images by leveraging CLIP. Then, by cross-referencing the discovered objects of complementary views, we excavate the precise part-level affordance clues in each perspective. By consistently learning to distinguish affordance-relevant regions from affordance-irrelevant background context, our approach effectively shifts activation from irrelevant areas toward meaningful affordance cues. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Codes are available at github.com/hynnsk/SelectiveCL.
Authors: Hanting Wang, Shengpeng Ji, Shulei Wang, Hai Huang, Xiao Jin, Qifei Zhang, Tao Jin
Abstract: Image restoration under adverse weather conditions has been extensively explored, leading to numerous high-performance methods. In particular, recent advances in All-in-One approaches have shown impressive results by training on multi-task image restoration datasets. However, most of these methods rely on dedicated network modules or parameters for each specific degradation type, resulting in a significant parameter overhead. Moreover, the relatedness across different restoration tasks is often overlooked. In light of these issues, we propose a parameter-efficient All-in-One image restoration framework that leverages task-aware enhanced prompts to tackle various adverse weather degradations.Specifically, we adopt a two-stage training paradigm consisting of a pretraining phase and a prompt-tuning phase to mitigate parameter conflicts across tasks. We first employ supervised learning to acquire general restoration knowledge, and then adapt the model to handle specific degradation via trainable soft prompts. Crucially, we enhance these task-specific prompts in a task-aware manner. We apply low-rank decomposition to these prompts to capture both task-general and task-specific characteristics, and impose contrastive constraints to better align them with the actual inter-task relatedness. These enhanced prompts not only improve the parameter efficiency of the restoration model but also enable more accurate task modeling, as evidenced by t-SNE analysis. Experimental results on different restoration tasks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance with only 2.75M parameters.
Authors: Tianle Zeng, Junlei Hu, Gerardo Loza Galindo, Sharib Ali, Duygu Sarikaya, Pietro Valdastri, Dominic Jones
Abstract: Computer vision-based technologies significantly enhance surgical automation by advancing tool tracking, detection, and localization. However, Current data-driven approaches are data-voracious, requiring large, high-quality labeled image datasets, which limits their application in surgical data science. Our Work introduces a novel dynamic Gaussian Splatting technique to address the data scarcity in surgical image datasets. We propose a dynamic Gaussian model to represent dynamic surgical scenes, enabling the rendering of surgical instruments from unseen viewpoints and deformations with real tissue backgrounds. We utilize a dynamic training adjustment strategy to address challenges posed by poorly calibrated camera poses from real-world scenarios. Additionally, we propose a method based on dynamic Gaussians for automatically generating annotations for our synthetic data. For evaluation, we constructed a new dataset featuring seven scenes with 14,000 frames of tool and camera motion and tool jaw articulation, with a background of an ex-vivo porcine model. Using this dataset, we synthetically replicate the scene deformation from the ground truth data, allowing direct comparisons of synthetic image quality. Experimental results illustrate that our method generates photo-realistic labeled image datasets with the highest values in Peak-Signal-to-Noise Ratio (29.87). We further evaluate the performance of medical-specific neural networks trained on real and synthetic images using an unseen real-world image dataset. Our results show that the performance of models trained on synthetic images generated by the proposed method outperforms those trained with state-of-the-art standard data augmentation by 10%, leading to an overall improvement in model performances by nearly 15%.
Authors: Bowen Xue, Qixin Yan, Wenjing Wang, Hao Liu, Chen Li
Abstract: Generating high-fidelity human videos that match user-specified identities is important yet challenging in the field of generative AI. Existing methods often rely on an excessive number of training parameters and lack compatibility with other AIGC tools. In this paper, we propose Stand-In, a lightweight and plug-and-play framework for identity preservation in video generation. Specifically, we introduce a conditional image branch into the pre-trained video generation model. Identity control is achieved through restricted self-attentions with conditional position mapping, and can be learned quickly with only 2000 pairs. Despite incorporating and training just $\sim$1% additional parameters, our framework achieves excellent results in video quality and identity preservation, outperforming other full-parameter training methods. Moreover, our framework can be seamlessly integrated for other tasks, such as subject-driven video generation, pose-referenced video generation, stylization, and face swapping.
Authors: Marco Peer, Anna Scius-Bertrand, Andreas Fischer
Abstract: Handwritten text recognition for historical documents remains challenging due to handwriting variability, degraded sources, and limited layout-aware annotations. In this work, we address annotation errors - particularly hyphenation issues - in the Bullinger correspondence, a large 16th-century letter collection. We introduce a self-training method based on a CTC alignment algorithm that matches full transcriptions to text line images using dynamic programming and model output probabilities trained with the CTC loss. Our approach improves performance (e.g., by 1.1 percentage points CER with PyLaia) and increases alignment accuracy. Interestingly, we find that weaker models yield more accurate alignments, enabling an iterative training strategy. We release a new manually corrected subset of 100 pages from the Bullinger dataset, along with our code and benchmarks. Our approach can be applied iteratively to further improve the CER as well as the alignment quality for text recognition pipelines. Code and data are available via https://github.com/andreas-fischer-unifr/nntp.
Authors: Yongtao Ge, Kangyang Xie, Guangkai Xu, Mingyu Liu, Li Ke, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen
Abstract: Video matting has traditionally been limited by the lack of high-quality ground-truth data. Most existing video matting datasets provide only human-annotated imperfect alpha and foreground annotations, which must be composited to background images or videos during the training stage. Thus, the generalization capability of previous methods in real-world scenarios is typically poor. In this work, we propose to solve the problem from two perspectives. First, we emphasize the importance of large-scale pre-training by pursuing diverse synthetic and pseudo-labeled segmentation datasets. We also develop a scalable synthetic data generation pipeline that can render diverse human bodies and fine-grained hairs, yielding around 200 video clips with a 3-second duration for fine-tuning. Second, we introduce a novel video matting approach that can effectively leverage the rich priors from pre-trained video diffusion models. This architecture offers two key advantages. First, strong priors play a critical role in bridging the domain gap between synthetic and real-world scenes. Second, unlike most existing methods that process video matting frame-by-frame and use an independent decoder to aggregate temporal information, our model is inherently designed for video, ensuring strong temporal consistency. We provide a comprehensive quantitative evaluation across three benchmark datasets, demonstrating our approach's superior performance, and present comprehensive qualitative results in diverse real-world scenes, illustrating the strong generalization capability of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/aim-uofa/GVM.
Authors: Xudong Cai, Shuo Wang, Peng Wang, Yongcai Wang, Zhaoxin Fan, Wanting Li, Tianbao Zhang, Jianrong Tao, Yeying Jin, Deying Li
Abstract: Reconstructing dense geometry for dynamic scenes from a monocular video is a critical yet challenging task. Recent memory-based methods enable efficient online reconstruction, but they fundamentally suffer from a Memory Demand Dilemma: The memory representation faces an inherent conflict between the long-term stability required for static structures and the rapid, high-fidelity detail retention needed for dynamic motion. This conflict forces existing methods into a compromise, leading to either geometric drift in static structures or blurred, inaccurate reconstructions of dynamic objects. To address this dilemma, we propose Mem4D, a novel framework that decouples the modeling of static geometry and dynamic motion. Guided by this insight, we design a dual-memory architecture: 1) The Transient Dynamics Memory (TDM) focuses on capturing high-frequency motion details from recent frames, enabling accurate and fine-grained modeling of dynamic content; 2) The Persistent Structure Memory (PSM) compresses and preserves long-term spatial information, ensuring global consistency and drift-free reconstruction for static elements. By alternating queries to these specialized memories, Mem4D simultaneously maintains static geometry with global consistency and reconstructs dynamic elements with high fidelity. Experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance while maintaining high efficiency. Codes will be publicly available.
Authors: Xing Zi, Jinghao Xiao, Yunxiao Shi, Xian Tao, Jun Li, Ali Braytee, Mukesh Prasad
Abstract: Visual Question Answering (VQA) in remote sensing (RS) is pivotal for interpreting Earth observation data. However, existing RS VQA datasets are constrained by limitations in annotation richness, question diversity, and the assessment of specific reasoning capabilities. This paper introduces RSVLM-QA dataset, a new large-scale, content-rich VQA dataset for the RS domain. RSVLM-QA is constructed by integrating data from several prominent RS segmentation and detection datasets: WHU, LoveDA, INRIA, and iSAID. We employ an innovative dual-track annotation generation pipeline. Firstly, we leverage Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4.1, with meticulously designed prompts to automatically generate a suite of detailed annotations including image captions, spatial relations, and semantic tags, alongside complex caption-based VQA pairs. Secondly, to address the challenging task of object counting in RS imagery, we have developed a specialized automated process that extracts object counts directly from the original segmentation data; GPT-4.1 then formulates natural language answers from these counts, which are paired with preset question templates to create counting QA pairs. RSVLM-QA comprises 13,820 images and 162,373 VQA pairs, featuring extensive annotations and diverse question types. We provide a detailed statistical analysis of the dataset and a comparison with existing RS VQA benchmarks, highlighting the superior depth and breadth of RSVLM-QA's annotations. Furthermore, we conduct benchmark experiments on Six mainstream Vision Language Models (VLMs), demonstrating that RSVLM-QA effectively evaluates and challenges the understanding and reasoning abilities of current VLMs in the RS domain. We believe RSVLM-QA will serve as a pivotal resource for the RS VQA and VLM research communities, poised to catalyze advancements in the field.
Authors: Jakub Binda, Valentina Paneta, Vasileios Eleftheriadis, Hongkyou Chung, Panagiotis Papadimitroulas, Neo Christopher Chung
Abstract: Generative AI holds great potentials to automate and enhance data synthesis in nuclear medicine. However, the high-stakes nature of biomedical imaging necessitates robust mechanisms to detect and manage unexpected or erroneous model behavior. We introduce development and implementation of a hybrid anomaly detection framework to safeguard GenAI models in BIOEMTECH's eyes(TM) systems. Two applications are demonstrated: Pose2Xray, which generates synthetic X-rays from photographic mouse images, and DosimetrEYE, which estimates 3D radiation dose maps from 2D SPECT/CT scans. In both cases, our outlier detection (OD) enhances reliability, reduces manual oversight, and supports real-time quality control. This approach strengthens the industrial viability of GenAI in preclinical settings by increasing robustness, scalability, and regulatory compliance.
Authors: Jin-Seop Lee, SungJoon Lee, Jaehan Ahn, YunSeok Choi, Jee-Hyong Lee
Abstract: Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) aims to extract relevant video segments based on a given natural language query. Recently, zero-shot VTG methods have gained attention by leveraging pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) to localize target moments without additional training. However, existing approaches suffer from semantic fragmentation, where temporally continuous frames sharing the same semantics are split across multiple segments. When segments are fragmented, it becomes difficult to predict an accurate target moment that aligns with the text query. Also, they rely on skewed similarity distributions for localization, making it difficult to select the optimal segment. Furthermore, they heavily depend on the use of LLMs which require expensive inferences. To address these limitations, we propose a \textit{TAG}, a simple yet effective Temporal-Aware approach for zero-shot video temporal Grounding, which incorporates temporal pooling, temporal coherence clustering, and similarity adjustment. Our proposed method effectively captures the temporal context of videos and addresses distorted similarity distributions without training. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on Charades-STA and ActivityNet Captions benchmark datasets without rely on LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/Nuetee/TAG
Authors: Ajnas Muhammed, Iurri Medvedev, Nuno Gon\c{c}alves
Abstract: Advancement of machine learning techniques, combined with the availability of large-scale datasets, has significantly improved the accuracy and efficiency of facial recognition. Modern facial recognition systems are trained using large face datasets collected from diverse individuals or public repositories. However, for training, these datasets are often replicated and stored in multiple workstations, resulting in data replication, which complicates database management and oversight. Currently, once a user submits their face for dataset preparation, they lose control over how their data is used, raising significant privacy and ethical concerns. This paper introduces VOIDFace, a novel framework for facial recognition systems that addresses two major issues. First, it eliminates the need of data replication and improves data control to securely store training face data by using visual secret sharing. Second, it proposes a patch-based multi-training network that uses this novel training data storage mechanism to develop a robust, privacy-preserving facial recognition system. By integrating these advancements, VOIDFace aims to improve the privacy, security, and efficiency of facial recognition training, while ensuring greater control over sensitive personal face data. VOIDFace also enables users to exercise their Right-To-Be-Forgotten property to control their personal data. Experimental evaluations on the VGGFace2 dataset show that VOIDFace provides Right-To-Be-Forgotten, improved data control, security, and privacy while maintaining competitive facial recognition performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/ajnasmuhammed89/VOIDFace
Authors: Tony Danjun Wang, Christian Heiliger, Nassir Navab, Lennart Bastian
Abstract: Providing intelligent support to surgical teams is a key frontier in automated surgical scene understanding, with the long-term goal of improving patient outcomes. Developing personalized intelligence for all staff members requires maintaining a consistent state of who is located where for long surgical procedures, which still poses numerous computational challenges. We propose TrackOR, a framework for tackling long-term multi-person tracking and re-identification in the operating room. TrackOR uses 3D geometric signatures to achieve state-of-the-art online tracking performance (+11% Association Accuracy over the strongest baseline), while also enabling an effective offline recovery process to create analysis-ready trajectories. Our work shows that by leveraging 3D geometric information, persistent identity tracking becomes attainable, enabling a critical shift towards the more granular, staff-centric analyses required for personalized intelligent systems in the operating room. This new capability opens up various applications, including our proposed temporal pathway imprints that translate raw tracking data into actionable insights for improving team efficiency and safety and ultimately providing personalized support.
Authors: Fangyuan Mao, Aiming Hao, Jintao Chen, Dongxia Liu, Xiaokun Feng, Jiashu Zhu, Meiqi Wu, Chubin Chen, Jiahong Wu, Xiangxiang Chu
Abstract: Visual effects (VFX) are essential visual enhancements fundamental to modern cinematic production. Although video generation models offer cost-efficient solutions for VFX production, current methods are constrained by per-effect LoRA training, which limits generation to single effects. This fundamental limitation impedes applications that require spatially controllable composite effects, i.e., the concurrent generation of multiple effects at designated locations. However, integrating diverse effects into a unified framework faces major challenges: interference from effect variations and spatial uncontrollability during multi-VFX joint training. To tackle these challenges, we propose Omni-Effects, a first unified framework capable of generating prompt-guided effects and spatially controllable composite effects. The core of our framework comprises two key innovations: (1) LoRA-based Mixture of Experts (LoRA-MoE), which employs a group of expert LoRAs, integrating diverse effects within a unified model while effectively mitigating cross-task interference. (2) Spatial-Aware Prompt (SAP) incorporates spatial mask information into the text token, enabling precise spatial control. Furthermore, we introduce an Independent-Information Flow (IIF) module integrated within the SAP, isolating the control signals corresponding to individual effects to prevent any unwanted blending. To facilitate this research, we construct a comprehensive VFX dataset Omni-VFX via a novel data collection pipeline combining image editing and First-Last Frame-to-Video (FLF2V) synthesis, and introduce a dedicated VFX evaluation framework for validating model performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Omni-Effects achieves precise spatial control and diverse effect generation, enabling users to specify both the category and location of desired effects.
Authors: Xiantao Zhang
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) hold immense promise as assistive technologies for the blind and visually impaired (BVI) community. However, we identify a critical failure mode that undermines their trustworthiness in real-world applications. We introduce the Escalator Problem -- the inability of state-of-the-art models to perceive an escalator's direction of travel -- as a canonical example of a deeper limitation we term Implicit Motion Blindness. This blindness stems from the dominant frame-sampling paradigm in video understanding, which, by treating videos as discrete sequences of static images, fundamentally struggles to perceive continuous, low-signal motion. As a position paper, our contribution is not a new model but rather to: (I) formally articulate this blind spot, (II) analyze its implications for user trust, and (III) issue a call to action. We advocate for a paradigm shift from purely semantic recognition towards robust physical perception and urge the development of new, human-centered benchmarks that prioritize safety, reliability, and the genuine needs of users in dynamic environments.
Authors: Thinesh Thiyakesan Ponbagavathi, Chengzheng Yang, Alina Roitberg
Abstract: Group Activity Detection (GAD) involves recognizing social groups and their collective behaviors in videos. Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), like DinoV2, offer excellent features, but are pretrained primarily on object-centric data and remain underexplored for modeling group dynamics. While they are a promising alternative to highly task-specific GAD architectures that require full fine-tuning, our initial investigation reveals that simply swapping CNN backbones used in these methods with VFMs brings little gain, underscoring the need for structured, group-aware reasoning on top. We introduce Prompt-driven Group Activity Detection (ProGraD) -- a method that bridges this gap through 1) learnable group prompts to guide the VFM attention toward social configurations, and 2) a lightweight two-layer GroupContext Transformer that infers actor-group associations and collective behavior. We evaluate our approach on two recent GAD benchmarks: Cafe, which features multiple concurrent social groups, and Social-CAD, which focuses on single-group interactions. While we surpass state-of-the-art in both settings, our method is especially effective in complex multi-group scenarios, where we yield a gain of 6.5\% (Group mAP\@1.0) and 8.2\% (Group mAP\@0.5) using only 10M trainable parameters. Furthermore, our experiments reveal that ProGraD produces interpretable attention maps, offering insights into actor-group reasoning. Code and models will be released.
Authors: Anqi Xiao, Weichen Yu, Hongyuan Yu
Abstract: Automatic data augmentation (AutoDA) plays an important role in enhancing the generalization of neural networks. However, mainstream AutoDA methods often encounter two challenges: either the search process is excessively time-consuming, hindering practical application, or the performance is suboptimal due to insufficient policy adaptation during training. To address these issues, we propose Sample-aware RandAugment (SRA), an asymmetric, search-free AutoDA method that dynamically adjusts augmentation policies while maintaining straightforward implementation. SRA incorporates a heuristic scoring module that evaluates the complexity of the original training data, enabling the application of tailored augmentations for each sample. Additionally, an asymmetric augmentation strategy is employed to maximize the potential of this scoring module. In multiple experimental settings, SRA narrows the performance gap between search-based and search-free AutoDA methods, achieving a state-of-the-art Top-1 accuracy of 78.31\% on ImageNet with ResNet-50. Notably, SRA demonstrates good compatibility with existing augmentation pipelines and solid generalization across new tasks, without requiring hyperparameter tuning. The pretrained models leveraging SRA also enhance recognition in downstream object detection tasks. SRA represents a promising step towards simpler, more effective, and practical AutoDA designs applicable to a variety of future tasks. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/ainieli/Sample-awareRandAugment}{https://github.com/ainieli/Sample-awareRandAugment
URLs: https://github.com/ainieli/Sample-awareRandAugment, https://github.com/ainieli/Sample-awareRandAugment
Authors: Tony Danjun Wang, Tobias Czempiel, Nassir Navab, Lennart Bastian
Abstract: Deep neural networks are prone to learning spurious correlations, exploiting dataset-specific artifacts rather than meaningful features for prediction. In surgical operating rooms (OR), these manifest through the standardization of smocks and gowns that obscure robust identifying landmarks, introducing model bias for tasks related to modeling OR personnel. Through gradient-based saliency analysis on two public OR datasets, we reveal that CNN models succumb to such shortcuts, fixating on incidental visual cues such as footwear beneath surgical gowns, distinctive eyewear, or other role-specific identifiers. Avoiding such biases is essential for the next generation of intelligent assistance systems in the OR, which should accurately recognize personalized workflow traits, such as surgical skill level or coordination with other staff members. We address this problem by encoding personnel as 3D point cloud sequences, disentangling identity-relevant shape and motion patterns from appearance-based confounders. Our experiments demonstrate that while RGB and geometric methods achieve comparable performance on datasets with apparent simulation artifacts, RGB models suffer a 12% accuracy drop in realistic clinical settings with decreased visual diversity due to standardizations. This performance gap confirms that geometric representations capture more meaningful biometric features, providing an avenue to developing robust methods of modeling humans in the OR.
Authors: Huawei Sun, Zixu Wang, Hao Feng, Julius Ott, Lorenzo Servadei, Robert Wille
Abstract: Depth estimation, essential for autonomous driving, seeks to interpret the 3D environment surrounding vehicles. The development of radar sensors, known for their cost-efficiency and robustness, has spurred interest in radar-camera fusion-based solutions. However, existing algorithms fuse features from these modalities without accounting for weather conditions, despite radars being known to be more robust than cameras under adverse weather. Additionally, while Vision-Language models have seen rapid advancement, utilizing language descriptions alongside other modalities for depth estimation remains an open challenge. This paper first introduces a text-generation strategy along with feature extraction and fusion techniques that can assist monocular depth estimation pipelines, leading to improved accuracy across different algorithms on the KITTI dataset. Building on this, we propose TRIDE, a radar-camera fusion algorithm that enhances text feature extraction by incorporating radar point information. To address the impact of weather on sensor performance, we introduce a weather-aware fusion block that adaptively adjusts radar weighting based on current weather conditions. Our method, benchmarked on the nuScenes dataset, demonstrates performance gains over the state-of-the-art, achieving a 12.87% improvement in MAE and a 9.08% improvement in RMSE. Code: https://github.com/harborsarah/TRIDE
Authors: Peng Dai, Feitong Tan, Qiangeng Xu, Yihua Huang, David Futschik, Ruofei Du, Sean Fanello, Yinda Zhang, Xiaojuan Qi
Abstract: While video generation models excel at producing high-quality monocular videos, generating 3D stereoscopic and spatial videos for immersive applications remains an underexplored challenge. We present a pose-free and training-free method that leverages an off-the-shelf monocular video generation model to produce immersive 3D videos. Our approach first warps the generated monocular video into pre-defined camera viewpoints using estimated depth information, then applies a novel \textit{frame matrix} inpainting framework. This framework utilizes the original video generation model to synthesize missing content across different viewpoints and timestamps, ensuring spatial and temporal consistency without requiring additional model fine-tuning. Moreover, we develop a \dualupdate~scheme that further improves the quality of video inpainting by alleviating the negative effects propagated from disoccluded areas in the latent space. The resulting multi-view videos are then adapted into stereoscopic pairs or optimized into 4D Gaussians for spatial video synthesis. We validate the efficacy of our proposed method by conducting experiments on videos from various generative models, such as Sora, Lumiere, WALT, and Zeroscope. The experiments demonstrate that our method has a significant improvement over previous methods. Project page at: https://daipengwa.github.io/S-2VG_ProjectPage/
Authors: Ziad Al-Haj Hemidi, Eytan Kats, Mattias P. Heinrich
Abstract: Accelerating Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) reduces scan time but often degrades image quality. While Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) show promise for MRI reconstruction, they struggle at high acceleration factors due to weak prior constraints, leading to structural loss and aliasing artefacts. To address this, we propose PrIINeR, an INR-based MRI reconstruction method that integrates prior knowledge from pre-trained deep learning models into the INR framework. By combining population-level knowledge with instance-based optimization and enforcing dual data consistency, PrIINeR aligns both with the acquired k-space data and the prior-informed reconstruction. Evaluated on the NYU fastMRI dataset, our method not only outperforms state-of-the-art INR-based approaches but also improves upon several learning-based state-of-the-art methods, significantly improving structural preservation and fidelity while effectively removing aliasing artefacts.PrIINeR bridges deep learning and INR-based techniques, offering a more reliable solution for high-quality, accelerated MRI reconstruction. The code is publicly available on https://github.com/multimodallearning/PrIINeR.
Authors: Weitai Kang, Weiming Zhuang, Zhizhong Li, Yan Yan, Lingjuan Lyu
Abstract: Fine-grained multimodal capability in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has emerged as a critical research direction, particularly for tackling the visual grounding (VG) problem. Despite the strong performance achieved by existing approaches, they often employ disparate design choices when fine-tuning MLLMs for VG, lacking systematic verification to support these designs. To bridge this gap, this paper presents a comprehensive study of various design choices that impact the VG performance of MLLMs. We conduct our analysis using LLaVA-1.5, which has been widely adopted in prior empirical studies of MLLMs. While more recent models exist, we follow this convention to ensure our findings remain broadly applicable and extendable to other architectures. We cover two key aspects: (1) exploring different visual grounding paradigms in MLLMs, identifying the most effective design, and providing our insights; and (2) conducting ablation studies on the design of grounding data to optimize MLLMs' fine-tuning for the VG task. Finally, our findings contribute to a stronger MLLM for VG, achieving improvements of +5.6% / +6.9% / +7.0% on RefCOCO/+/g over the LLaVA-1.5.
Authors: Xiaoxiao Cui, Yiran Li, Kai He, Shanzhi Jiang, Mengli Xue, Wentao Li, Junhong Leng, Zhi Liu, Lizhen Cui, Shuo Li
Abstract: Multi-label classification (MLC) of medical images aims to identify multiple diseases and holds significant clinical potential. A critical step is to learn class-specific features for accurate diagnosis and improved interpretability effectively. However, current works focus primarily on causal attention to learn class-specific features, yet they struggle to interpret the true cause due to the inadvertent attention to class-irrelevant features. To address this challenge, we propose a new structural causal model (SCM) that treats class-specific attention as a mixture of causal, spurious, and noisy factors, and a novel Information Bottleneck-based Causal Attention (IBCA) that is capable of learning the discriminative class-specific attention for MLC of medical images. Specifically, we propose learning Gaussian mixture multi-label spatial attention to filter out class-irrelevant information and capture each class-specific attention pattern. Then a contrastive enhancement-based causal intervention is proposed to gradually mitigate the spurious attention and reduce noise information by aligning multi-head attention with the Gaussian mixture multi-label spatial. Quantitative and ablation results on Endo and MuReD show that IBCA outperforms all methods. Compared to the second-best results for each metric, IBCA achieves improvements of 6.35\% in CR, 7.72\% in OR, and 5.02\% in mAP for MuReD, 1.47\% in CR, and 1.65\% in CF1, and 1.42\% in mAP for Endo.
Authors: Zizheng Guo, Bochao Zou, Junbao Zhuo, Huimin Ma
Abstract: Micro-expressions (MEs) are regarded as important indicators of an individual's intrinsic emotions, preferences, and tendencies. ME analysis requires spotting of ME intervals within long video sequences and recognition of their corresponding emotional categories. Previous deep learning approaches commonly employ sliding-window classification networks. However, the use of fixed window lengths and hard classification presents notable limitations in practice. Furthermore, these methods typically treat ME spotting and recognition as two separate tasks, overlooking the essential relationship between them. To address these challenges, this paper proposes two state space model-based architectures, namely ME-TST and ME-TST+, which utilize temporal state transition mechanisms to replace conventional window-level classification with video-level regression. This enables a more precise characterization of the temporal dynamics of MEs and supports the modeling of MEs with varying durations. In ME-TST+, we further introduce multi-granularity ROI modeling and the slowfast Mamba framework to alleviate information loss associated with treating ME analysis as a time-series task. Additionally, we propose a synergy strategy for spotting and recognition at both the feature and result levels, leveraging their intrinsic connection to enhance overall analysis performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art performance. The codes are available at https://github.com/zizheng-guo/ME-TST.
Authors: Zhongqi Yang, Wenhang Ge, Yuqi Li, Jiaqi Chen, Haoyuan Li, Mengyin An, Fei Kang, Hua Xue, Baixin Xu, Yuyang Yin, Eric Li, Yang Liu, Yikai Wang, Hao-Xiang Guo, Yahui Zhou
Abstract: Explorable 3D world generation from a single image or text prompt forms a cornerstone of spatial intelligence. Recent works utilize video model to achieve wide-scope and generalizable 3D world generation. However, existing approaches often suffer from a limited scope in the generated scenes. In this work, we propose Matrix-3D, a framework that utilize panoramic representation for wide-coverage omnidirectional explorable 3D world generation that combines conditional video generation and panoramic 3D reconstruction. We first train a trajectory-guided panoramic video diffusion model that employs scene mesh renders as condition, to enable high-quality and geometrically consistent scene video generation. To lift the panorama scene video to 3D world, we propose two separate methods: (1) a feed-forward large panorama reconstruction model for rapid 3D scene reconstruction and (2) an optimization-based pipeline for accurate and detailed 3D scene reconstruction. To facilitate effective training, we also introduce the Matrix-Pano dataset, the first large-scale synthetic collection comprising 116K high-quality static panoramic video sequences with depth and trajectory annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in panoramic video generation and 3D world generation. See more in https://matrix-3d.github.io.
Authors: Md Rezwanul Haque, Md. Milon Islam, S M Taslim Uddin Raju, Hamdi Altaheri, Lobna Nassar, Fakhri Karray
Abstract: Depression is a major mental health condition that severely impacts the emotional and physical well-being of individuals. The simple nature of data collection from social media platforms has attracted significant interest in properly utilizing this information for mental health research. A Multimodal Depression Detection Network (MDD-Net), utilizing acoustic and visual data obtained from social media networks, is proposed in this work where mutual transformers are exploited to efficiently extract and fuse multimodal features for efficient depression detection. The MDD-Net consists of four core modules: an acoustic feature extraction module for retrieving relevant acoustic attributes, a visual feature extraction module for extracting significant high-level patterns, a mutual transformer for computing the correlations among the generated features and fusing these features from multiple modalities, and a detection layer for detecting depression using the fused feature representations. The extensive experiments are performed using the multimodal D-Vlog dataset, and the findings reveal that the developed multimodal depression detection network surpasses the state-of-the-art by up to 17.37% for F1-Score, demonstrating the greater performance of the proposed system. The source code is accessible at https://github.com/rezwanh001/Multimodal-Depression-Detection.
URLs: https://github.com/rezwanh001/Multimodal-Depression-Detection.
Authors: Jiakai Lin, Jinchang Zhang, Ge Jin, Wenzhan Song, Tianming Liu, Guoyu Lu
Abstract: Plant roots typically exhibit a highly complex and dense architecture, incorporating numerous slender lateral roots and branches, which significantly hinders the precise capture and modeling of the entire root system. Additionally, roots often lack sufficient texture and color information, making it difficult to identify and track root traits using visual methods. Previous research on roots has been largely confined to 2D studies; however, exploring the 3D architecture of roots is crucial in botany. Since roots grow in real 3D space, 3D phenotypic information is more critical for studying genetic traits and their impact on root development. We have introduced a 3D root skeleton extraction method that efficiently derives the 3D architecture of plant roots from a few images. This method includes the detection and matching of lateral roots, triangulation to extract the skeletal structure of lateral roots, and the integration of lateral and primary roots. We developed a highly complex root dataset and tested our method on it. The extracted 3D root skeletons showed considerable similarity to the ground truth, validating the effectiveness of the model. This method can play a significant role in automated breeding robots. Through precise 3D root structure analysis, breeding robots can better identify plant phenotypic traits, especially root structure and growth patterns, helping practitioners select seeds with superior root systems. This automated approach not only improves breeding efficiency but also reduces manual intervention, making the breeding process more intelligent and efficient, thus advancing modern agriculture.
Authors: Junzhe Xu, Yuyang Yin, Xi Chen
Abstract: This paper introduces TBAC-UniImage, a novel unified model for multimodal understanding and generation. We achieve this by deeply integrating a pre-trained Diffusion Model, acting as a generative ladder, with a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). Previous diffusion-based unified models face two primary limitations. One approach uses only the MLLM's final hidden state as the generative condition. This creates a shallow connection, as the generator is isolated from the rich, hierarchical representations within the MLLM's intermediate layers. The other approach, pretraining a unified generative architecture from scratch, is computationally expensive and prohibitive for many researchers. To overcome these issues, our work explores a new paradigm. Instead of relying on a single output, we use representations from multiple, diverse layers of the MLLM as generative conditions for the diffusion model. This method treats the pre-trained generator as a ladder, receiving guidance from various depths of the MLLM's understanding process. Consequently, TBAC-UniImage achieves a much deeper and more fine-grained unification of understanding and generation.
Authors: Danfeng Hong, Chenyu Li, Naoto Yokoya, Bing Zhang, Xiuping Jia, Antonio Plaza, Paolo Gamba, Jon Atli Benediktsson, Jocelyn Chanussot
Abstract: Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is an advanced sensing modality that simultaneously captures spatial and spectral information, enabling non-invasive, label-free analysis of material, chemical, and biological properties. This Primer presents a comprehensive overview of HSI, from the underlying physical principles and sensor architectures to key steps in data acquisition, calibration, and correction. We summarize common data structures and highlight classical and modern analysis methods, including dimensionality reduction, classification, spectral unmixing, and AI-driven techniques such as deep learning. Representative applications across Earth observation, precision agriculture, biomedicine, industrial inspection, cultural heritage, and security are also discussed, emphasizing HSI's ability to uncover sub-visual features for advanced monitoring, diagnostics, and decision-making. Persistent challenges, such as hardware trade-offs, acquisition variability, and the complexity of high-dimensional data, are examined alongside emerging solutions, including computational imaging, physics-informed modeling, cross-modal fusion, and self-supervised learning. Best practices for dataset sharing, reproducibility, and metadata documentation are further highlighted to support transparency and reuse. Looking ahead, we explore future directions toward scalable, real-time, and embedded HSI systems, driven by sensor miniaturization, self-supervised learning, and foundation models. As HSI evolves into a general-purpose, cross-disciplinary platform, it holds promise for transformative applications in science, technology, and society.
Authors: Xudong Han, Pengcheng Fang, Yueying Tian, Jianhui Yu, Xiaohao Cai, Daniel Roggen, Philip Birch
Abstract: Multi-object tracking (MOT) in monocular videos is fundamentally challenged by occlusions and depth ambiguity, issues that conventional tracking-by-detection (TBD) methods struggle to resolve owing to a lack of geometric awareness. To address these limitations, we introduce GRASPTrack, a novel depth-aware MOT framework that integrates monocular depth estimation and instance segmentation into a standard TBD pipeline to generate high-fidelity 3D point clouds from 2D detections, thereby enabling explicit 3D geometric reasoning. These 3D point clouds are then voxelized to enable a precise and robust Voxel-Based 3D Intersection-over-Union (IoU) for spatial association. To further enhance tracking robustness, our approach incorporates Depth-aware Adaptive Noise Compensation, which dynamically adjusts the Kalman filter process noise based on occlusion severity for more reliable state estimation. Additionally, we propose a Depth-enhanced Observation-Centric Momentum, which extends the motion direction consistency from the image plane into 3D space to improve motion-based association cues, particularly for objects with complex trajectories. Extensive experiments on the MOT17, MOT20, and DanceTrack benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance, significantly improving tracking robustness in complex scenes with frequent occlusions and intricate motion patterns.
Authors: Zeqian Long, Mingzhe Zheng, Kunyu Feng, Xinhua Zhang, Hongyu Liu, Harry Yang, Linfeng Zhang, Qifeng Chen, Yue Ma
Abstract: While recent flow-based image editing models demonstrate general-purpose capabilities across diverse tasks, they often struggle to specialize in challenging scenarios -- particularly those involving large-scale shape transformations. When performing such structural edits, these methods either fail to achieve the intended shape change or inadvertently alter non-target regions, resulting in degraded background quality. We propose Follow-Your-Shape, a training-free and mask-free framework that supports precise and controllable editing of object shapes while strictly preserving non-target content. Motivated by the divergence between inversion and editing trajectories, we compute a Trajectory Divergence Map (TDM) by comparing token-wise velocity differences between the inversion and denoising paths. The TDM enables precise localization of editable regions and guides a Scheduled KV Injection mechanism that ensures stable and faithful editing. To facilitate a rigorous evaluation, we introduce ReShapeBench, a new benchmark comprising 120 new images and enriched prompt pairs specifically curated for shape-aware editing. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior editability and visual fidelity, particularly in tasks requiring large-scale shape replacement.
Authors: Yitong Yang, Yinglin Wang, Changshuo Wang, Huajie Wang, Shuting He
Abstract: The success of 3DGS in generative and editing applications has sparked growing interest in 3DGS-based style transfer. However, current methods still face two major challenges: (1) multi-view inconsistency often leads to style conflicts, resulting in appearance smoothing and distortion; and (2) heavy reliance on VGG features, which struggle to disentangle style and content from style images, often causing content leakage and excessive stylization. To tackle these issues, we introduce \textbf{FantasyStyle}, a 3DGS-based style transfer framework, and the first to rely entirely on diffusion model distillation. It comprises two key components: (1) \textbf{Multi-View Frequency Consistency}. We enhance cross-view consistency by applying a 3D filter to multi-view noisy latent, selectively reducing low-frequency components to mitigate stylized prior conflicts. (2) \textbf{Controllable Stylized Distillation}. To suppress content leakage from style images, we introduce negative guidance to exclude undesired content. In addition, we identify the limitations of Score Distillation Sampling and Delta Denoising Score in 3D style transfer and remove the reconstruction term accordingly. Building on these insights, we propose a controllable stylized distillation that leverages negative guidance to more effectively optimize the 3D Gaussians. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving higher stylization quality and visual realism across various scenes and styles.
Authors: Nicholas Klein, Hemlata Tak, James Fullwood, Krishna Regmi, Leonidas Spinoulas, Ganesh Sivaraman, Tianxiang Chen, Elie Khoury
Abstract: The field of visual and audio generation is burgeoning with new state-of-the-art methods. This rapid proliferation of new techniques underscores the need for robust solutions for detecting synthetic content in videos. In particular, when fine-grained alterations via localized manipulations are performed in visual, audio, or both domains, these subtle modifications add challenges to the detection algorithms. This paper presents solutions for the problems of deepfake video classification and localization. The methods were submitted to the ACM 1M Deepfakes Detection Challenge, achieving the best performance in the temporal localization task and a top four ranking in the classification task for the TestA split of the evaluation dataset.
Authors: Yan Wang, Da-Wei Zhou, Han-Jia Ye
Abstract: Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) requires a learning system to continually learn new classes without forgetting. Existing pre-trained model-based CIL methods often freeze the pre-trained network and adapt to incremental tasks using additional lightweight modules such as adapters. However, incorrect module selection during inference hurts performance, and task-specific modules often overlook shared general knowledge, leading to errors on distinguishing between similar classes across tasks. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose integrating Task-Specific and Universal Adapters (TUNA) in this paper. Specifically, we train task-specific adapters to capture the most crucial features relevant to their respective tasks and introduce an entropy-based selection mechanism to choose the most suitable adapter. Furthermore, we leverage an adapter fusion strategy to construct a universal adapter, which encodes the most discriminative features shared across tasks. We combine task-specific and universal adapter predictions to harness both specialized and general knowledge during inference. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our approach. Code is available at: https://github.com/LAMDA-CL/ICCV2025-TUNA
Authors: Chaojun Ni, Guosheng Zhao, Xiaofeng Wang, Zheng Zhu, Wenkang Qin, Xinze Chen, Guanghong Jia, Guan Huang, Wenjun Mei
Abstract: Reinforcement learning for training end-to-end autonomous driving models in closed-loop simulations is gaining growing attention. However, most simulation environments differ significantly from real-world conditions, creating a substantial simulation-to-reality (sim2real) gap. To bridge this gap, some approaches utilize scene reconstruction techniques to create photorealistic environments as a simulator. While this improves realistic sensor simulation, these methods are inherently constrained by the distribution of the training data, making it difficult to render high-quality sensor data for novel trajectories or corner case scenarios. Therefore, we propose ReconDreamer-RL, a framework designed to integrate video diffusion priors into scene reconstruction to aid reinforcement learning, thereby enhancing end-to-end autonomous driving training. Specifically, in ReconDreamer-RL, we introduce ReconSimulator, which combines the video diffusion prior for appearance modeling and incorporates a kinematic model for physical modeling, thereby reconstructing driving scenarios from real-world data. This narrows the sim2real gap for closed-loop evaluation and reinforcement learning. To cover more corner-case scenarios, we introduce the Dynamic Adversary Agent (DAA), which adjusts the trajectories of surrounding vehicles relative to the ego vehicle, autonomously generating corner-case traffic scenarios (e.g., cut-in). Finally, the Cousin Trajectory Generator (CTG) is proposed to address the issue of training data distribution, which is often biased toward simple straight-line movements. Experiments show that ReconDreamer-RL improves end-to-end autonomous driving training, outperforming imitation learning methods with a 5x reduction in the Collision Ratio.
Authors: Chongke Bi, Xin Gao, Jiangkang Deng, Guan
Abstract: Large-scale scientific simulations require significant resources to generate high-resolution time-varying data (TVD). While super-resolution is an efficient post-processing strategy to reduce costs, existing methods rely on a large amount of HR training data, limiting their applicability to diverse simulation scenarios. To address this constraint, we proposed CD-TVD, a novel framework that combines contrastive learning and an improved diffusion-based super-resolution model to achieve accurate 3D super-resolution from limited time-step high-resolution data. During pre-training on historical simulation data, the contrastive encoder and diffusion superresolution modules learn degradation patterns and detailed features of high-resolution and low-resolution samples. In the training phase, the improved diffusion model with a local attention mechanism is fine-tuned using only one newly generated high-resolution timestep, leveraging the degradation knowledge learned by the encoder. This design minimizes the reliance on large-scale high-resolution datasets while maintaining the capability to recover fine-grained details. Experimental results on fluid and atmospheric simulation datasets confirm that CD-TVD delivers accurate and resource-efficient 3D super-resolution, marking a significant advancement in data augmentation for large-scale scientific simulations. The code is available at https://github.com/Xin-Gao-private/CD-TVD.
Authors: Zhonghao Yan, Muxi Diao, Yuxuan Yang, Jiayuan Xu, Kaizhou Zhang, Ruoyan Jing, Lele Yang, Yanxi Liu, Kongming Liang, Zhanyu Ma
Abstract: Accurately grounding regions of interest (ROIs) is critical for diagnosis and treatment planning in medical imaging. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) combine visual perception with natural language, current medical-grounding pipelines still rely on supervised fine-tuning with explicit spatial hints, making them ill-equipped to handle the implicit queries common in clinical practice. This work makes three core contributions. We first define Unified Medical Reasoning Grounding (UMRG), a novel vision-language task that demands clinical reasoning and pixel-level grounding. Second, we release U-MRG-14K, a dataset of 14K samples featuring pixel-level masks alongside implicit clinical queries and reasoning traces, spanning 10 modalities, 15 super-categories, and 108 specific categories. Finally, we introduce MedReasoner, a modular framework that distinctly separates reasoning from segmentation: an MLLM reasoner is optimized with reinforcement learning, while a frozen segmentation expert converts spatial prompts into masks, with alignment achieved through format and accuracy rewards. MedReasoner achieves state-of-the-art performance on U-MRG-14K and demonstrates strong generalization to unseen clinical queries, underscoring the significant promise of reinforcement learning for interpretable medical grounding.
Authors: Ozhan Suat, Bedirhan Uguz, Batuhan Karagoz, Muhammed Can Keles, Emre Akbas
Abstract: Despite significant progress in 3D human mesh estimation from RGB images; RGBD cameras, offering additional depth data, remain underutilized. In this paper, we present a method for accurate 3D human mesh estimation from a single RGBD view, leveraging the affordability and widespread adoption of RGBD cameras for real-world applications. A fully supervised approach for this problem, requires a dataset with RGBD image and 3D mesh label pairs. However, collecting such a dataset is costly and challenging, hence, existing datasets are small, and limited in pose and shape diversity. To overcome this data scarcity, we leverage existing Motion Capture (MoCap) datasets. We first obtain complete 3D meshes from the body models found in MoCap datasets, and create partial, single-view versions of them by projection to a virtual camera. This simulates the depth data provided by an RGBD camera from a single viewpoint. Then, we train a masked autoencoder to complete the partial, single-view mesh. During inference, our method, which we name as M$^3$ for ``Masked Mesh Modeling'', matches the depth values coming from the sensor to vertices of a template human mesh, which creates a partial, single-view mesh. We effectively recover parts of the 3D human body mesh model that are not visible, resulting in a full body mesh. M$^3$ achieves 16.8 mm and 22.0 mm per-vertex-error (PVE) on the SURREAL and CAPE datasets, respectively; outperforming existing methods that use full-body point clouds as input. We obtain a competitive 70.9 PVE on the BEHAVE dataset, outperforming a recently published RGB based method by 18.4 mm, highlighting the usefulness of depth data. Code will be released.
Authors: Sihan Zhao, Zixuan Wang, Tianyu Luan, Jia Jia, Wentao Zhu, Jiebo Luo, Junsong Yuan, Nan Xi
Abstract: Human motion generation has found widespread applications in AR/VR, film, sports, and medical rehabilitation, offering a cost-effective alternative to traditional motion capture systems. However, evaluating the fidelity of such generated motions is a crucial, multifaceted task. Although previous approaches have attempted at motion fidelity evaluation using human perception or physical constraints, there remains an inherent gap between human-perceived fidelity and physical feasibility. Moreover, the subjective and coarse binary labeling of human perception further undermines the development of a robust data-driven metric. We address these issues by introducing a physical labeling method. This method evaluates motion fidelity by calculating the minimum modifications needed for a motion to align with physical laws. With this approach, we are able to produce fine-grained, continuous physical alignment annotations that serve as objective ground truth. With these annotations, we propose PP-Motion, a novel data-driven metric to evaluate both physical and perceptual fidelity of human motion. To effectively capture underlying physical priors, we employ Pearson's correlation loss for the training of our metric. Additionally, by incorporating a human-based perceptual fidelity loss, our metric can capture fidelity that simultaneously considers both human perception and physical alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that our metric, PP-Motion, not only aligns with physical laws but also aligns better with human perception of motion fidelity than previous work.
Authors: Hongkun Jin, Hongcheng Jiang, Zejun Zhang, Yuan Zhang, Jia Fu, Tingfeng Li, Kai Luo
Abstract: Transformer-based methods have demonstrated strong potential in hyperspectral pansharpening by modeling long-range dependencies. However, their effectiveness is often limited by redundant token representations and a lack of multi-scale feature modeling. Hyperspectral images exhibit intrinsic spectral priors (e.g., abundance sparsity) and spatial priors (e.g., non-local similarity), which are critical for accurate reconstruction. From a spectral-spatial perspective, Vision Transformers (ViTs) face two major limitations: they struggle to preserve high-frequency components--such as material edges and texture transitions--and suffer from attention dispersion across redundant tokens. These issues stem from the global self-attention mechanism, which tends to dilute high-frequency signals and overlook localized details. To address these challenges, we propose the Token-wise High-frequency Augmentation Transformer (THAT), a novel framework designed to enhance hyperspectral pansharpening through improved high-frequency feature representation and token selection. Specifically, THAT introduces: (1) Pivotal Token Selective Attention (PTSA) to prioritize informative tokens and suppress redundancy; (2) a Multi-level Variance-aware Feed-forward Network (MVFN) to enhance high-frequency detail learning. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that THAT achieves state-of-the-art performance with improved reconstruction quality and efficiency. The source code is available at https://github.com/kailuo93/THAT.
Authors: Md Meftahul Ferdaus, Mahdi Abdelguerfi, Elias Ioup, Steven Sloan, Kendall N. Niles, Ken Pathak
Abstract: Semantic segmentation of structural defects in civil infrastructure remains challenging due to variable defect appearances, harsh imaging conditions, and significant class imbalance. Current deep learning methods, despite their effectiveness, typically require millions of parameters, rendering them impractical for real-time inspection systems. We introduce KARMA (Kolmogorov-Arnold Representation Mapping Architecture), a highly efficient semantic segmentation framework that models complex defect patterns through compositions of one-dimensional functions rather than conventional convolutions. KARMA features three technical innovations: (1) a parameter-efficient Tiny Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (TiKAN) module leveraging low-rank factorization for KAN-based feature transformation; (2) an optimized feature pyramid structure with separable convolutions for multi-scale defect analysis; and (3) a static-dynamic prototype mechanism that enhances feature representation for imbalanced classes. Extensive experiments on benchmark infrastructure inspection datasets demonstrate that KARMA achieves competitive or superior mean IoU performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches, while using significantly fewer parameters (0.959M vs. 31.04M, a 97% reduction). Operating at 0.264 GFLOPS, KARMA maintains inference speeds suitable for real-time deployment, enabling practical automated infrastructure inspection systems without compromising accuracy. The source code can be accessed at the following URL: https://github.com/faeyelab/karma.
Authors: Weijia Wu, Chen Gao, Joya Chen, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Qingwei Meng, Yiming Zhang, Yuke Qiu, Hong Zhou, Mike Zheng Shou
Abstract: Recent advances at the intersection of reinforcement learning (RL) and visual intelligence have enabled agents that not only perceive complex visual scenes but also reason, generate, and act within them. This survey offers a critical and up-to-date synthesis of the field. We first formalize visual RL problems and trace the evolution of policy-optimization strategies from RLHF to verifiable reward paradigms, and from Proximal Policy Optimization to Group Relative Policy Optimization. We then organize more than 200 representative works into four thematic pillars: multi-modal large language models, visual generation, unified model frameworks, and vision-language-action models. For each pillar we examine algorithmic design, reward engineering, benchmark progress, and we distill trends such as curriculum-driven training, preference-aligned diffusion, and unified reward modeling. Finally, we review evaluation protocols spanning set-level fidelity, sample-level preference, and state-level stability, and we identify open challenges that include sample efficiency, generalization, and safe deployment. Our goal is to provide researchers and practitioners with a coherent map of the rapidly expanding landscape of visual RL and to highlight promising directions for future inquiry. Resources are available at: https://github.com/weijiawu/Awesome-Visual-Reinforcement-Learning.
URLs: https://github.com/weijiawu/Awesome-Visual-Reinforcement-Learning.
Authors: Peiqi He, Zhenhao Zhang, Yixiang Zhang, Xiongjun Zhao, Shaoliang Peng
Abstract: Precise spatial modeling in the operating room (OR) is foundational to many clinical tasks, supporting intraoperative awareness, hazard avoidance, and surgical decision-making. While existing approaches leverage large-scale multimodal datasets for latent-space alignment to implicitly learn spatial relationships, they overlook the 3D capabilities of MLLMs. However, this approach raises two issues: (1) Operating rooms typically lack multiple video and audio sensors, making multimodal 3D data difficult to obtain; (2) Training solely on readily available 2D data fails to capture fine-grained details in complex scenes. To address this gap, we introduce Spatial-ORMLLM, the first large vision-language model for 3D spatial reasoning in operating rooms using only RGB modality to infer volumetric and semantic cues, enabling downstream medical tasks with detailed and holistic spatial context. Spatial-ORMLLM incorporates a Spatial-Enhanced Feature Fusion Block, which integrates 2D modality inputs with rich 3D spatial knowledge extracted by the estimation algorithm and then feeds the combined features into the visual tower. By employing a unified end-to-end MLLM framework, it combines powerful spatial features with textual features to deliver robust 3D scene reasoning without any additional expert annotations or sensor inputs. Experiments on multiple benchmark clinical datasets demonstrate that Spatial-ORMLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizes robustly to previously unseen surgical scenarios and downstream tasks.
Authors: Wentao Sun, Quanyun Wu, Hanqing Xu, Kyle Gao, Zhengsen Xu, Yiping Chen, Dedong Zhang, Lingfei Ma, John S. Zelek, Jonathan Li
Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for explicit 3D scene representation, yet achieving efficient and consistent 3D segmentation remains challenging. Current methods suffer from prohibitive computational costs, limited 3D spatial reasoning, and an inability to track multiple objects simultaneously. We present Segment Any Gaussians Online (SAGOnline), a lightweight and zero-shot framework for real-time 3D segmentation in Gaussian scenes that addresses these limitations through two key innovations: (1) a decoupled strategy that integrates video foundation models (e.g., SAM2) for view-consistent 2D mask propagation across synthesized views; and (2) a GPU-accelerated 3D mask generation and Gaussian-level instance labeling algorithm that assigns unique identifiers to 3D primitives, enabling lossless multi-object tracking and segmentation across views. SAGOnline achieves state-of-the-art performance on NVOS (92.7% mIoU) and Spin-NeRF (95.2% mIoU) benchmarks, outperforming Feature3DGS, OmniSeg3D-gs, and SA3D by 15--1500 times in inference speed (27 ms/frame). Qualitative results demonstrate robust multi-object segmentation and tracking in complex scenes. Our contributions include: (i) a lightweight and zero-shot framework for 3D segmentation in Gaussian scenes, (ii) explicit labeling of Gaussian primitives enabling simultaneous segmentation and tracking, and (iii) the effective adaptation of 2D video foundation models to the 3D domain. This work allows real-time rendering and 3D scene understanding, paving the way for practical AR/VR and robotic applications.
Authors: Wenyi Mo, Ying Ba, Tianyu Zhang, Yalong Bai, Biye Li
Abstract: User preference prediction requires a comprehensive and accurate understanding of individual tastes. This includes both surface-level attributes, such as color and style, and deeper content-related aspects, such as themes and composition. However, existing methods typically rely on general human preferences or assume static user profiles, often neglecting individual variability and the dynamic, multifaceted nature of personal taste. To address these limitations, we propose an approach built upon Multimodal Large Language Models, introducing contrastive preference loss and preference tokens to learn personalized user preferences from historical interactions. The contrastive preference loss is designed to effectively distinguish between user ''likes'' and ''dislikes'', while the learnable preference tokens capture shared interest representations among existing users, enabling the model to activate group-specific preferences and enhance consistency across similar users. Extensive experiments demonstrate our model outperforms other methods in preference prediction accuracy, effectively identifying users with similar aesthetic inclinations and providing more precise guidance for generating images that align with individual tastes. The project page is \texttt{https://learn-user-pref.github.io/}.
Authors: Zhiqiang Wu, Zhaomang Sun, Tong Zhou, Bingtao Fu, Ji Cong, Yitong Dong, Huaqi Zhang, Xuan Tang, Mingsong Chen, Xian Wei
Abstract: Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM) and Flow Matching (FM) generative models show promising potential for one-step Real-World Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR). Recent one-step Real-ISR models typically inject a Low-Quality (LQ) image latent distribution at the initial timestep. However, a fundamental gap exists between the LQ image latent distribution and the Gaussian noisy latent distribution, limiting the effective utilization of generative priors. We observe that the noisy latent distribution at DDPM/FM mid-timesteps aligns more closely with the LQ image latent distribution. Based on this insight, we present One Mid-timestep Guidance Real-ISR (OMGSR), a universal framework applicable to DDPM/FM-based generative models. OMGSR injects the LQ image latent distribution at a pre-computed mid-timestep, incorporating the proposed Latent Distribution Refinement loss to alleviate the latent distribution gap. We also design the Overlap-Chunked LPIPS/GAN loss to eliminate checkerboard artifacts in image generation. Within this framework, we instantiate OMGSR for DDPM/FM-based generative models with two variants: OMGSR-S (SD-Turbo) and OMGSR-F (FLUX.1-dev). Experimental results demonstrate that OMGSR-S/F achieves balanced/excellent performance across quantitative and qualitative metrics at 512-resolution. Notably, OMGSR-F establishes overwhelming dominance in all reference metrics. We further train a 1k-resolution OMGSR-F to match the default resolution of FLUX.1-dev, which yields excellent results, especially in the details of the image generation. We also generate 2k-resolution images by the 1k-resolution OMGSR-F using our two-stage Tiled VAE & Diffusion.
Authors: Jingwen He, Hongbo Liu, Jiajun Li, Ziqi Huang, Yu Qiao, Wanli Ouyang, Ziwei Liu
Abstract: Effective multi-shot generation demands purposeful, film-like transitions and strict cinematic continuity. Current methods, however, often prioritize basic visual consistency, neglecting crucial editing patterns (e.g., shot/reverse shot, cutaways) that drive narrative flow for compelling storytelling. This yields outputs that may be visually coherent but lack narrative sophistication and true cinematic integrity. To bridge this, we introduce Next Shot Generation (NSG): synthesizing a subsequent, high-quality shot that critically conforms to professional editing patterns while upholding rigorous cinematic continuity. Our framework, Cut2Next, leverages a Diffusion Transformer (DiT). It employs in-context tuning guided by a novel Hierarchical Multi-Prompting strategy. This strategy uses Relational Prompts to define overall context and inter-shot editing styles. Individual Prompts then specify per-shot content and cinematographic attributes. Together, these guide Cut2Next to generate cinematically appropriate next shots. Architectural innovations, Context-Aware Condition Injection (CACI) and Hierarchical Attention Mask (HAM), further integrate these diverse signals without introducing new parameters. We construct RawCuts (large-scale) and CuratedCuts (refined) datasets, both with hierarchical prompts, and introduce CutBench for evaluation. Experiments show Cut2Next excels in visual consistency and text fidelity. Crucially, user studies reveal a strong preference for Cut2Next, particularly for its adherence to intended editing patterns and overall cinematic continuity, validating its ability to generate high-quality, narratively expressive, and cinematically coherent subsequent shots.
Authors: Shuyuan Tu, Yueming Pan, Yinming Huang, Xintong Han, Zhen Xing, Qi Dai, Chong Luo, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
Abstract: Current diffusion models for audio-driven avatar video generation struggle to synthesize long videos with natural audio synchronization and identity consistency. This paper presents StableAvatar, the first end-to-end video diffusion transformer that synthesizes infinite-length high-quality videos without post-processing. Conditioned on a reference image and audio, StableAvatar integrates tailored training and inference modules to enable infinite-length video generation. We observe that the main reason preventing existing models from generating long videos lies in their audio modeling. They typically rely on third-party off-the-shelf extractors to obtain audio embeddings, which are then directly injected into the diffusion model via cross-attention. Since current diffusion backbones lack any audio-related priors, this approach causes severe latent distribution error accumulation across video clips, leading the latent distribution of subsequent segments to drift away from the optimal distribution gradually. To address this, StableAvatar introduces a novel Time-step-aware Audio Adapter that prevents error accumulation via time-step-aware modulation. During inference, we propose a novel Audio Native Guidance Mechanism to further enhance the audio synchronization by leveraging the diffusion's own evolving joint audio-latent prediction as a dynamic guidance signal. To enhance the smoothness of the infinite-length videos, we introduce a Dynamic Weighted Sliding-window Strategy that fuses latent over time. Experiments on benchmarks show the effectiveness of StableAvatar both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Authors: Shuting He, Guangquan Jie, Changshuo Wang, Yun Zhou, Shuming Hu, Guanbin Li, Henghui Ding
Abstract: We introduce Referring 3D Gaussian Splatting Segmentation (R3DGS), a new task that aims to segment target objects in a 3D Gaussian scene based on natural language descriptions, which often contain spatial relationships or object attributes. This task requires the model to identify newly described objects that may be occluded or not directly visible in a novel view, posing a significant challenge for 3D multi-modal understanding. Developing this capability is crucial for advancing embodied AI. To support research in this area, we construct the first R3DGS dataset, Ref-LERF. Our analysis reveals that 3D multi-modal understanding and spatial relationship modeling are key challenges for R3DGS. To address these challenges, we propose ReferSplat, a framework that explicitly models 3D Gaussian points with natural language expressions in a spatially aware paradigm. ReferSplat achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the newly proposed R3DGS task and 3D open-vocabulary segmentation benchmarks. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/heshuting555/ReferSplat.
Authors: Emily Yue-Ting Jia, Jiageng Mao, Zhiyuan Gao, Yajie Zhao, Yue Wang
Abstract: Humans possess an exceptional ability to imagine 4D scenes, encompassing both motion and 3D geometry, from a single still image. This ability is rooted in our accumulated observations of similar scenes and an intuitive understanding of physics. In this paper, we aim to replicate this capacity in neural networks, specifically focusing on natural fluid imagery. Existing methods for this task typically employ simplistic 2D motion estimators to animate the image, leading to motion predictions that often defy physical principles, resulting in unrealistic animations. Our approach introduces a novel method for generating 4D scenes with physics-consistent animation from a single image. We propose the use of a physics-informed neural network that predicts motion for each surface point, guided by a loss term derived from fundamental physical principles, including the Navier-Stokes equations. To capture appearance, we predict feature-based 3D Gaussians from the input image and its estimated depth, which are then animated using the predicted motions and rendered from any desired camera perspective. Experimental results highlight the effectiveness of our method in producing physically plausible animations, showcasing significant performance improvements over existing methods. Our project page is https://physfluid.github.io/ .
Authors: Peigen Ye, Yaping Sun, Shumin Yao, Hao Chen, Xiaodong Xu, Shuguang Cui
Abstract: Codebook-based generative semantic communication attracts increasing attention, since only indices are required to be transmitted when the codebook is shared between transmitter and receiver. However, due to the fact that the semantic relations among code vectors are not necessarily related to the distance of the corresponding code indices, the performance of the codebook-enabled semantic communication system is susceptible to the channel noise. Thus, how to improve the system robustness against the noise requires careful design. This paper proposes a robust codebook-assisted image semantic communication system, where semantic codec and codebook are first jointly constructed, and then vector-to-index transformer is designed guided by the codebook to eliminate the effects of channel noise, and achieve image generation. Thanks to the assistance of the high-quality codebook to the Transformer, the generated images at the receiver outperform those of the compared methods in terms of visual perception. In the end, numerical results and generated images demonstrate the advantages of the generative semantic communication method over JPEG+LDPC and traditional joint source channel coding (JSCC) methods.
Authors: Faisal Ahmed
Abstract: Accurate classification of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) from peripheral blood smear images is essential for early diagnosis and effective treatment planning. This study investigates the use of transfer learning with pretrained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to improve diagnostic performance. To address the class imbalance in the dataset of 3,631 Hematologic and 7,644 ALL images, we applied extensive data augmentation techniques to create a balanced training set of 10,000 images per class. We evaluated several models, including ResNet50, ResNet101, and EfficientNet variants B0, B1, and B3. EfficientNet-B3 achieved the best results, with an F1-score of 94.30%, accuracy of 92.02%, andAUCof94.79%,outperformingpreviouslyreported methods in the C-NMCChallenge. Thesefindings demonstrate the effectiveness of combining data augmentation with advanced transfer learning models, particularly EfficientNet-B3, in developing accurate and robust diagnostic tools for hematologic malignancy detection.
Authors: Anqing Jiang, Yu Gao, Yiru Wang, Zhigang Sun, Shuo Wang, Yuwen Heng, Hao Sun, Shichen Tang, Lijuan Zhu, Jinhao Chai, Jijun Wang, Zichong Gu, Hao Jiang, Li Sun
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated potential in autonomous driving. However, two critical challenges hinder their development: (1) Existing VLA architectures are typically based on imitation learning in open-loop setup which tends to capture the recorded behaviors in the dataset, leading to suboptimal and constrained performance, (2) Close-loop training relies heavily on high-fidelity sensor simulation, where domain gaps and computational inefficiencies pose significant barriers. In this paper, we introduce IRL-VLA, a novel close-loop Reinforcement Learning via \textbf{I}nverse \textbf{R}einforcement \textbf{L}earning reward world model with a self-built VLA approach. Our framework proceeds in a three-stage paradigm: In the first stage, we propose a VLA architecture and pretrain the VLA policy via imitation learning. In the second stage, we construct a lightweight reward world model via inverse reinforcement learning to enable efficient close-loop reward computation. To further enhance planning performance, finally, we design specialized reward world model guidence reinforcement learning via PPO(Proximal Policy Optimization) to effectively balance the safety incidents, comfortable driving, and traffic efficiency. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in NAVSIM v2 end-to-end driving benchmark, 1st runner up in CVPR2025 Autonomous Grand Challenge. We hope that our framework will accelerate VLA research in close-loop autonomous driving.
Authors: Jayant Sravan Tamarapalli, Rynaa Grover, Nilay Pande, Sahiti Yerramilli
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate remarkable fluency in understanding visual scenes, yet they exhibit a critical lack in a fundamental cognitive skill: object counting. This blind spot severely limits their reliability in real-world applications. To date, this capability has been largely unevaluated in complex scenarios, as existing benchmarks either feature sparse object densities or are confined to specific visual domains, failing to test models under realistic conditions. Addressing this gap, we introduce CountQA, a challenging new benchmark designed to probe this deficiency. Comprising over 1,500 question-answer pairs, CountQA features real-world images with high object density, clutter, and occlusion. We investigate this weakness by evaluating 15 prominent MLLMs on the CountQA benchmark and reveal that the top-performing model achieves a mere 42.9% accuracy, with performance declining as object counts rise. By providing a dedicated benchmark to diagnose and rectify this core weakness, CountQA paves the way for a new generation of MLLMs that are not only descriptively fluent but also numerically grounded and spatially aware. We will open-source the dataset and code upon paper acceptance to foster further research.
Authors: Shuo Tang, Jian Xu, Jiadong Zhang, Yi Chen, Qizhao Jin, Lingdong Shen, Chenglin Liu, Shiming Xiang
Abstract: Timely and accurate severe weather warnings are critical for disaster mitigation. However, current forecasting systems remain heavily reliant on manual expert interpretation, introducing subjectivity and significant operational burdens. With the rapid development of AI technologies, the end-to-end "AI weather station" is gradually emerging as a new trend in predicting severe weather events. Three core challenges impede the development of end-to-end AI severe weather system: (1) scarcity of severe weather event samples; (2) imperfect alignment between high-dimensional meteorological data and textual warnings; (3) existing multimodal language models are unable to handle high-dimensional meteorological data and struggle to fully capture the complex dependencies across temporal sequences, vertical pressure levels, and spatial dimensions. To address these challenges, we introduce MP-Bench, the first large-scale temporal multimodal dataset for severe weather events prediction, comprising 421,363 pairs of raw multi-year meteorological data and corresponding text caption, covering a wide range of severe weather scenarios across China. On top of this dataset, we develop a meteorology multimodal large model (MMLM) that directly ingests 4D meteorological inputs. In addition, it is designed to accommodate the unique characteristics of 4D meteorological data flow, incorporating three plug-and-play adaptive fusion modules that enable dynamic feature extraction and integration across temporal sequences, vertical pressure layers, and spatial dimensions. Extensive experiments on MP-Bench demonstrate that MMLM performs exceptionally well across multiple tasks, highlighting its effectiveness in severe weather understanding and marking a key step toward realizing automated, AI-driven weather forecasting systems. Our source code and dataset will be made publicly available.
Authors: Shisheng Zhang, Ramtin Gharleghi, Sonit Singh, Daniel Moses, Dona Adikari, Arcot Sowmya, Susann Beier
Abstract: Coronary artery disease (CAD) remains the leading cause of death globally, with computed tomography coronary angiography (CTCA) serving as a key diagnostic tool. However, coronary arterial analysis using CTCA, such as identifying artery-specific features from computational modelling, is labour-intensive and time-consuming. Automated anatomical labelling of coronary arteries offers a potential solution, yet the inherent anatomical variability of coronary trees presents a significant challenge. Traditional knowledge-based labelling methods fall short in leveraging data-driven insights, while recent deep-learning approaches often demand substantial computational resources and overlook critical clinical knowledge. To address these limitations, we propose a lightweight method that integrates anatomical knowledge with rule-based topology constraints for effective coronary artery labelling. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets, providing a promising alternative for automated coronary artery labelling.
Authors: Melika Filvantorkaman, Mohsen Piri, Maral Filvan Torkaman, Ashkan Zabihi, Hamidreza Moradi
Abstract: Accurate and interpretable classification of brain tumors from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is critical for effective diagnosis and treatment planning. This study presents an ensemble-based deep learning framework that combines MobileNetV2 and DenseNet121 convolutional neural networks (CNNs) using a soft voting strategy to classify three common brain tumor types: glioma, meningioma, and pituitary adenoma. The models were trained and evaluated on the Figshare dataset using a stratified 5-fold cross-validation protocol. To enhance transparency and clinical trust, the framework integrates an Explainable AI (XAI) module employing Grad-CAM++ for class-specific saliency visualization, alongside a symbolic Clinical Decision Rule Overlay (CDRO) that maps predictions to established radiological heuristics. The ensemble classifier achieved superior performance compared to individual CNNs, with an accuracy of 91.7%, precision of 91.9%, recall of 91.7%, and F1-score of 91.6%. Grad-CAM++ visualizations revealed strong spatial alignment between model attention and expert-annotated tumor regions, supported by Dice coefficients up to 0.88 and IoU scores up to 0.78. Clinical rule activation further validated model predictions in cases with distinct morphological features. A human-centered interpretability assessment involving five board-certified radiologists yielded high Likert-scale scores for both explanation usefulness (mean = 4.4) and heatmap-region correspondence (mean = 4.0), reinforcing the framework's clinical relevance. Overall, the proposed approach offers a robust, interpretable, and generalizable solution for automated brain tumor classification, advancing the integration of deep learning into clinical neurodiagnostics.
Authors: Zhongyu Chen, Chenyang Li, Xuesong Li, Dianye Huang, Zhongliang Jiang, Stefanie Speidel, Xiangyu Chu, K. W. Samuel Au
Abstract: Precise needle alignment is essential for percutaneous needle insertion in robotic ultrasound-guided procedures. However, inherent challenges such as speckle noise, needle-like artifacts, and low image resolution make robust needle detection difficult, particularly when visibility is reduced or lost. In this paper, we propose a method to restore needle alignment when the ultrasound imaging plane and the needle insertion plane are misaligned. Unlike many existing approaches that rely heavily on needle visibility in ultrasound images, our method uses a more robust feature by periodically vibrating the needle using a mechanical system. Specifically, we propose a vibration-based energy metric that remains effective even when the needle is fully out of plane. Using this metric, we develop a control strategy to reposition the ultrasound probe in response to misalignments between the imaging plane and the needle insertion plane in both translation and rotation. Experiments conducted on ex-vivo porcine tissue samples using a dual-arm robotic ultrasound-guided needle insertion system demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The experimental results show the translational error of 0.41$\pm$0.27 mm and the rotational error of 0.51$\pm$0.19 degrees.
Authors: Lixuan He, Jie Feng, Yong Li
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically fine-tuned for reasoning tasks through a two-stage pipeline of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL), a process fraught with catastrophic forgetting and suboptimal trade-offs between imitation and exploration. Recent single-stage methods attempt to unify SFT and RL using heuristics, but lack a principled mechanism for dynamically balancing the two paradigms. In this paper, we reframe this challenge through the theoretical lens of \textbf{implicit rewards}, viewing SFT and RL not as distinct methods but as complementary reward signals. We introduce \textbf{Adaptive Meta Fine-Tuning (AMFT)}, a novel single-stage algorithm that learns the optimal balance between SFT's implicit, path-level reward and RL's explicit, outcome-based reward. The core of AMFT is a \textbf{meta-gradient adaptive weight controller} that treats the SFT-RL balance as a learnable parameter, dynamically optimizing it to maximize long-term task performance. This forward-looking approach, regularized by policy entropy for stability, autonomously discovers an effective training curriculum. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation on challenging benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, abstract visual reasoning (General Points), and vision-language navigation (V-IRL). AMFT consistently establishes a new state-of-the-art and demonstrats superior generalization on out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks. Ablation studies and training dynamic analysis confirm that the meta-learning controller is crucial for AMFT's stability, sample efficiency, and performance, offering a more principled and effective paradigm for LLM alignment. Our codes are open-sourced via https://github.com/hlxtsyj/AMFT.
Authors: Gian Mario Favero, Ge Ya Luo, Nima Fathi, Justin Szeto, Douglas L. Arnold, Brennan Nichyporuk, Chris Pal, Tal Arbel
Abstract: Image-based personalized medicine has the potential to transform healthcare, particularly for diseases that exhibit heterogeneous progression such as Multiple Sclerosis (MS). In this work, we introduce the first treatment-aware spatio-temporal diffusion model that is able to generate future masks demonstrating lesion evolution in MS. Our voxel-space approach incorporates multi-modal patient data, including MRI and treatment information, to forecast new and enlarging T2 (NET2) lesion masks at a future time point. Extensive experiments on a multi-centre dataset of 2131 patient 3D MRIs from randomized clinical trials for relapsing-remitting MS demonstrate that our generative model is able to accurately predict NET2 lesion masks for patients across six different treatments. Moreover, we demonstrate our model has the potential for real-world clinical applications through downstream tasks such as future lesion count and location estimation, binary lesion activity classification, and generating counterfactual future NET2 masks for several treatments with different efficacies. This work highlights the potential of causal, image-based generative models as powerful tools for advancing data-driven prognostics in MS.
Authors: Anindya Bijoy Das, Shahnewaz Karim Sakib, Shibbir Ahmed
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to medical imaging tasks, including image interpretation and synthetic image generation. However, these models often produce hallucinations, which are confident but incorrect outputs that can mislead clinical decisions. This study examines hallucinations in two directions: image to text, where LLMs generate reports from X-ray, CT, or MRI scans, and text to image, where models create medical images from clinical prompts. We analyze errors such as factual inconsistencies and anatomical inaccuracies, evaluating outputs using expert informed criteria across imaging modalities. Our findings reveal common patterns of hallucination in both interpretive and generative tasks, with implications for clinical reliability. We also discuss factors contributing to these failures, including model architecture and training data. By systematically studying both image understanding and generation, this work provides insights into improving the safety and trustworthiness of LLM driven medical imaging systems.
Authors: Yuke Xing, William Gordon, Qi Yang, Kaifa Yang, Jiarui Wang, Yiling Xu
Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables real-time novel view synthesis with high visual fidelity, but its substantial storage requirements hinder practical deployment, prompting state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3DGS methods to incorporate compression modules. However, these 3DGS generative compression techniques introduce unique distortions lacking systematic quality assessment research. To this end, we establish 3DGS-VBench, a large-scale Video Quality Assessment (VQA) Dataset and Benchmark with 660 compressed 3DGS models and video sequences generated from 11 scenes across 6 SOTA 3DGS compression algorithms with systematically designed parameter levels. With annotations from 50 participants, we obtained MOS scores with outlier removal and validated dataset reliability. We benchmark 6 3DGS compression algorithms on storage efficiency and visual quality, and evaluate 15 quality assessment metrics across multiple paradigms. Our work enables specialized VQA model training for 3DGS, serving as a catalyst for compression and quality assessment research. The dataset is available at https://github.com/YukeXing/3DGS-VBench.
Authors: Junkai Liu, Nay Aung, Theodoros N. Arvanitis, Stefan K. Piechnik, Joao A C Lima, Steffen E. Petersen, Le Zhang
Abstract: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides detailed soft-tissue characteristics that assist in disease diagnosis and screening. However, the accuracy of clinical practice is often hindered by missing or unusable slices due to various factors. Volumetric MRI synthesis methods have been developed to address this issue by imputing missing slices from available ones. The inherent 3D nature of volumetric MRI data, such as cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR), poses significant challenges for missing slice imputation approaches, including (1) the difficulty of modeling local inter-slice correlations and dependencies of volumetric slices, and (2) the limited exploration of crucial 3D spatial information and global context. In this study, to mitigate these issues, we present Spatial-Aware Graph Completion Network (SAGCNet) to overcome the dependency on complete volumetric data, featuring two main innovations: (1) a volumetric slice graph completion module that incorporates the inter-slice relationships into a graph structure, and (2) a volumetric spatial adapter component that enables our model to effectively capture and utilize various forms of 3D spatial context. Extensive experiments on cardiac MRI datasets demonstrate that SAGCNet is capable of synthesizing absent CMR slices, outperforming competitive state-of-the-art MRI synthesis methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. Notably, our model maintains superior performance even with limited slice data.
Authors: Chenxu Zhao, Wei Qian, Aobo Chen, Mengdi Huai
Abstract: Recent studies have shown that deep learning models are vulnerable to membership inference attacks (MIAs), which aim to infer whether a data record was used to train a target model or not. To analyze and study these vulnerabilities, various MIA methods have been proposed. Despite the significance and popularity of MIAs, existing works on MIAs are limited in providing guarantees on the false discovery rate (FDR), which refers to the expected proportion of false discoveries among the identified positive discoveries. However, it is very challenging to ensure the false discovery rate guarantees, because the underlying distribution is usually unknown, and the estimated non-member probabilities often exhibit interdependence. To tackle the above challenges, in this paper, we design a novel membership inference attack method, which can provide the guarantees on the false discovery rate. Additionally, we show that our method can also provide the marginal probability guarantee on labeling true non-member data as member data. Notably, our method can work as a wrapper that can be seamlessly integrated with existing MIA methods in a post-hoc manner, while also providing the FDR control. We perform the theoretical analysis for our method. Extensive experiments in various settings (e.g., the black-box setting and the lifelong learning setting) are also conducted to verify the desirable performance of our method.
Authors: Yang Cao, Yubin Chen, Zhao Song, Jiahao Zhang
Abstract: Generative modelling has seen significant advances through simulation-free paradigms such as Flow Matching, and in particular, the MeanFlow framework, which replaces instantaneous velocity fields with average velocities to enable efficient single-step sampling. In this work, we introduce a theoretical study on Second-Order MeanFlow, a novel extension that incorporates average acceleration fields into the MeanFlow objective. We first establish the feasibility of our approach by proving that the average acceleration satisfies a generalized consistency condition analogous to first-order MeanFlow, thereby supporting stable, one-step sampling and tractable loss functions. We then characterize its expressivity via circuit complexity analysis, showing that under mild assumptions, the Second-Order MeanFlow sampling process can be implemented by uniform threshold circuits within the $\mathsf{TC}^0$ class. Finally, we derive provably efficient criteria for scalable implementation by leveraging fast approximate attention computations: we prove that attention operations within the Second-Order MeanFlow architecture can be approximated to within $1/\mathrm{poly}(n)$ error in time $n^{2+o(1)}$. Together, these results lay the theoretical foundation for high-order flow matching models that combine rich dynamics with practical sampling efficiency.
Authors: Antonino Greco, Marco D'Alessandro, Karl J. Friston, Giovanni Pezzulo, Markus Siegel
Abstract: Biological systems leverage top-down feedback for visual processing, yet most artificial vision models succeed in image classification using purely feedforward or recurrent architectures, calling into question the functional significance of descending cortical pathways. Here, we trained convolutional recurrent neural networks (ConvRNN) on image classification in the presence or absence of top-down feedback projections to elucidate the specific computational contributions of those feedback pathways. We found that ConvRNNs with top-down feedback exhibited remarkable speed-accuracy trade-off and robustness to noise perturbations and adversarial attacks, but only when they were trained with stochastic neural variability, simulated by randomly silencing single units via dropout. By performing detailed analyses to identify the reasons for such benefits, we observed that feedback information substantially shaped the representational geometry of the post-integration layer, combining the bottom-up and top-down streams, and this effect was amplified by dropout. Moreover, feedback signals coupled with dropout optimally constrained network activity onto a low-dimensional manifold and encoded object information more efficiently in out-of-distribution regimes, with top-down information stabilizing the representational dynamics at the population level. Together, these findings uncover a dual mechanism for resilient sensory coding. On the one hand, neural stochasticity prevents unit-level co-adaptation albeit at the cost of more chaotic dynamics. On the other hand, top-down feedback harnesses high-level information to stabilize network activity on compact low-dimensional manifolds.
Authors: Zelin Qiu, Xi Wang, Zhuoyao Xie, Juan Zhou, Yu Wang, Lingjie Yang, Xinrui Jiang, Juyoung Bae, Moo Hyun Son, Qiang Ye, Dexuan Chen, Rui Zhang, Tao Li, Neeraj Ramesh Mahboobani, Varut Vardhanabhuti, Xiaohui Duan, Yinghua Zhao, Hao Chen
Abstract: Multi-sequence Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) offers remarkable versatility, enabling the distinct visualization of different tissue types. Nevertheless, the inherent heterogeneity among MRI sequences poses significant challenges to the generalization capability of deep learning models. These challenges undermine model performance when faced with varying acquisition parameters, thereby severely restricting their clinical utility. In this study, we present PRISM, a foundation model PRe-trained with large-scale multI-Sequence MRI. We collected a total of 64 datasets from both public and private sources, encompassing a wide range of whole-body anatomical structures, with scans spanning diverse MRI sequences. Among them, 336,476 volumetric MRI scans from 34 datasets (8 public and 26 private) were curated to construct the largest multi-organ multi-sequence MRI pretraining corpus to date. We propose a novel pretraining paradigm that disentangles anatomically invariant features from sequence-specific variations in MRI, while preserving high-level semantic representations. We established a benchmark comprising 44 downstream tasks, including disease diagnosis, image segmentation, registration, progression prediction, and report generation. These tasks were evaluated on 32 public datasets and 5 private cohorts. PRISM consistently outperformed both non-pretrained models and existing foundation models, achieving first-rank results in 39 out of 44 downstream benchmarks with statistical significance improvements. These results underscore its ability to learn robust and generalizable representations across unseen data acquired under diverse MRI protocols. PRISM provides a scalable framework for multi-sequence MRI analysis, thereby enhancing the translational potential of AI in radiology. It delivers consistent performance across diverse imaging protocols, reinforcing its clinical applicability.
Authors: Xuepeng Liu, Zheng Jiang, Pinan Zhu, Hanyu Liu, Chao Li
Abstract: Spatial transcriptomics (ST) reveals spatial heterogeneity of gene expression, yet its resolution is limited by current platforms. Recent methods enhance resolution via H&E-stained histology, but three major challenges persist: (1) isolating expression-relevant features from visually complex H&E images; (2) achieving spatially precise multimodal alignment in diffusion-based frameworks; and (3) modeling gene-specific variation across expression channels. We propose HaDM-ST (Histology-assisted Differential Modeling for ST Generation), a high-resolution ST generation framework conditioned on H&E images and low-resolution ST. HaDM-ST includes: (i) a semantic distillation network to extract predictive cues from H&E; (ii) a spatial alignment module enforcing pixel-wise correspondence with low-resolution ST; and (iii) a channel-aware adversarial learner for fine-grained gene-level modeling. Experiments on 200 genes across diverse tissues and species show HaDM-ST consistently outperforms prior methods, enhancing spatial fidelity and gene-level coherence in high-resolution ST predictions.
Authors: Qingyuan Zeng, Shu Jiang, Jiajing Lin, Zhenzhong Wang, Kay Chen Tan, Min Jiang
Abstract: With the rise of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), a variety of digital watermarking techniques, embedding either 1D bitstreams or 2D images, are used for copyright protection. However, the robustness of these watermarking techniques against potential attacks remains underexplored. This paper introduces the first universal black-box attack framework, the Group-based Multi-objective Evolutionary Attack (GMEA), designed to challenge these watermarking systems. We formulate the attack as a large-scale multi-objective optimization problem, balancing watermark removal with visual quality. In a black-box setting, we introduce an indirect objective function that blinds the watermark detector by minimizing the standard deviation of features extracted by a convolutional network, thus rendering the feature maps uninformative. To manage the vast search space of 3DGS models, we employ a group-based optimization strategy to partition the model into multiple, independent sub-optimization problems. Experiments demonstrate that our framework effectively removes both 1D and 2D watermarks from mainstream 3DGS watermarking methods while maintaining high visual fidelity. This work reveals critical vulnerabilities in existing 3DGS copyright protection schemes and calls for the development of more robust watermarking systems.
Authors: Ivan Kukanov, Jun Wah Ng
Abstract: The rapid development of audio-driven talking head generators and advanced Text-To-Speech (TTS) models has led to more sophisticated temporal deepfakes. These advances highlight the need for robust methods capable of detecting and localizing deepfakes, even under novel, unseen attack scenarios. Current state-of-the-art deepfake detectors, while accurate, are often computationally expensive and struggle to generalize to novel manipulation techniques. To address these challenges, we propose multimodal approaches for the AV-Deepfake1M 2025 challenge. For the visual modality, we leverage handcrafted features to improve interpretability and adaptability. For the audio modality, we adapt a self-supervised learning (SSL) backbone coupled with graph attention networks to capture rich audio representations, improving detection robustness. Our approach strikes a balance between performance and real-world deployment, focusing on resilience and potential interpretability. On the AV-Deepfake1M++ dataset, our multimodal system achieves AUC of 92.78% for deepfake classification task and IoU of 0.3536 for temporal localization using only the audio modality.
Authors: Xiaobei Zhao, Xingqi Lyu, Xiang Li
Abstract: Agricultural robots have emerged as powerful members in agricultural tasks, nevertheless, still heavily rely on manual operation or untransportable railway for movement, resulting in limited mobility and poor adaptability. Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) enables robots to navigate to the target destinations following natural language instructions, demonstrating strong performance on several domains. However, none of the existing benchmarks or methods is specifically designed for agricultural scenes. To bridge this gap, we propose Agriculture to Agriculture (A2A) benchmark, containing 1,560 episodes across six diverse agricultural scenes, in which all realistic RGB videos are captured by front-facing camera on a quadruped robot at a height of 0.38 meters, aligning with the practical deployment conditions. Meanwhile, we propose Vision-and-Language Navigation for Agricultural Robots (AgriVLN) baseline based on Vision-Language Model (VLM) prompted with carefully crafted templates, which can understand both given instructions and agricultural environments to generate appropriate low-level actions for robot control. When evaluated on A2A, AgriVLN performs well on short instructions but struggles with long instructions, because it often fails to track which part of the instruction is currently being executed. To address this, we further propose Subtask List (STL) instruction decomposition module and integrate it into AgriVLN, improving Success Rate (SR) from 0.33 to 0.47. We additionally compare AgriVLN with several existing VLN methods, demonstrating the state-of-the-art performance in the agricultural domain.
Authors: Morteza Ziabakhsh, Kiyan Rezaee, Sadegh Eskandari, Seyed Amir Hossein Tabatabaei, Mohammad M. Ghassemi
Abstract: Modern software systems are increasingly shifting from monolithic architectures to microservices to enhance scalability, maintainability, and deployment flexibility. Existing microservice extraction methods typically rely on hard clustering, assigning each software component to a single microservice. This approach often increases inter-service coupling and reduces intra-service cohesion. We propose Mo2oM (Monolithic to Overlapping Microservices), a framework that formulates microservice extraction as a soft clustering problem, allowing components to belong probabilistically to multiple microservices. This approach is inspired by expert-driven decompositions, where practitioners intentionally replicate certain software components across services to reduce communication overhead. Mo2oM combines deep semantic embeddings with structural dependencies extracted from methodcall graphs to capture both functional and architectural relationships. A graph neural network-based soft clustering algorithm then generates the final set of microservices. We evaluate Mo2oM on four open-source monolithic benchmarks and compare it against eight state-of-the-art baselines. Our results demonstrate that Mo2oM achieves improvements of up to 40.97% in structural modularity (balancing cohesion and coupling), 58% in inter-service call percentage (communication overhead), 26.16% in interface number (modularity and decoupling), and 38.96% in non-extreme distribution (service size balance) across all benchmarks.
Authors: Yan Gong, Naibang Wang, Jianli Lu, Xinyu Zhang, Yongsheng Gao, Jie Zhao, Zifan Huang, Haozhi Bai, Nanxin Zeng, Nayu Su, Lei Yang, Ziying Song, Xiaoxi Hu, Xinmin Jiang, Xiaojuan Zhang, Susanto Rahardja
Abstract: Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) perception has become a foundational paradigm in autonomous driving, enabling unified spatial representations that support robust multi-sensor fusion and multi-agent collaboration. As autonomous vehicles transition from controlled environments to real-world deployment, ensuring the safety and reliability of BEV perception in complex scenarios - such as occlusions, adverse weather, and dynamic traffic - remains a critical challenge. This survey provides the first comprehensive review of BEV perception from a safety-critical perspective, systematically analyzing state-of-the-art frameworks and implementation strategies across three progressive stages: single-modality vehicle-side, multimodal vehicle-side, and multi-agent collaborative perception. Furthermore, we examine public datasets encompassing vehicle-side, roadside, and collaborative settings, evaluating their relevance to safety and robustness. We also identify key open-world challenges - including open-set recognition, large-scale unlabeled data, sensor degradation, and inter-agent communication latency - and outline future research directions, such as integration with end-to-end autonomous driving systems, embodied intelligence, and large language models.
Authors: Xiongwei Xiao, Baoying Chen, Jishen Zeng, Jianquan Yang
Abstract: Accurately assessing the perceptual quality of face images is crucial, especially with the rapid progress in face restoration and generation. Traditional quality assessment methods often struggle with the unique characteristics of face images, limiting their generalizability. While learning-based approaches demonstrate superior performance due to their strong fitting capabilities, their high complexity typically incurs significant computational and storage costs, hindering practical deployment. To address this, we propose a lightweight face quality assessment network with Multi-Stage Progressive Training (MSPT). Our network employs a three-stage progressive training strategy that gradually introduces more diverse data samples and increases input image resolution. This novel approach enables lightweight networks to achieve high performance by effectively learning complex quality features while significantly mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Our MSPT achieved the second highest score on the VQualA 2025 face image quality assessment benchmark dataset, demonstrating that MSPT achieves comparable or better performance than state-of-the-art methods while maintaining efficient inference.
Authors: Junxiao Xue, Xiaozhen Liu, Xuecheng Wu, Xinyi Yin, Danlei Huang, Fei Yu
Abstract: Audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) combines audio-visual modalities to improve speech recognition, especially in noisy environments. However, most existing methods deploy the unidirectional enhancement or symmetric fusion manner, which limits their capability to capture heterogeneous and complementary correlations of audio-visual data-especially under asymmetric information conditions. To tackle these gaps, we introduce a new AVSR framework termed AD-AVSR based on bidirectional modality enhancement. Specifically, we first introduce the audio dual-stream encoding strategy to enrich audio representations from multiple perspectives and intentionally establish asymmetry to support subsequent cross-modal interactions. The enhancement process involves two key components, Audio-aware Visual Refinement Module for enhanced visual representations under audio guidance, and Cross-modal Noise Suppression Masking Module which refines audio representations using visual cues, collaboratively leading to the closed-loop and bidirectional information flow. To further enhance correlation robustness, we adopt a threshold-based selection mechanism to filter out irrelevant or weakly correlated audio-visual pairs. Extensive experimental results on the LRS2 and LRS3 datasets indicate that our AD-AVSR consistently surpasses SOTA methods in both performance and noise robustness, highlighting the effectiveness of our model design.
Authors: Anirudh Iyengar Kaniyar Narayana Iyengar, Srija Mukhopadhyay, Adnan Qidwai, Shubhankar Singh, Dan Roth, Vivek Gupta
Abstract: We introduce InterChart, a diagnostic benchmark that evaluates how well vision-language models (VLMs) reason across multiple related charts, a task central to real-world applications such as scientific reporting, financial analysis, and public policy dashboards. Unlike prior benchmarks focusing on isolated, visually uniform charts, InterChart challenges models with diverse question types ranging from entity inference and trend correlation to numerical estimation and abstract multi-step reasoning grounded in 2-3 thematically or structurally related charts. We organize the benchmark into three tiers of increasing difficulty: (1) factual reasoning over individual charts, (2) integrative analysis across synthetically aligned chart sets, and (3) semantic inference over visually complex, real-world chart pairs. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art open and closed-source VLMs reveals consistent and steep accuracy declines as chart complexity increases. We find that models perform better when we decompose multi-entity charts into simpler visual units, underscoring their struggles with cross-chart integration. By exposing these systematic limitations, InterChart provides a rigorous framework for advancing multimodal reasoning in complex, multi-visual environments.
Authors: Tianyi Ma, Yue Zhang, Zehao Wang, Parisa Kordjamshidi
Abstract: Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) poses significant challenges in enabling agents to interpret natural language instructions and navigate complex 3D environments. While recent progress has been driven by large-scale pre-training and data augmentation, current methods still struggle to generalize to unseen scenarios, particularly when complex spatial and temporal reasoning is required. In this work, we propose SkillNav, a modular framework that introduces structured, skill-based reasoning into Transformer-based VLN agents. Our method decomposes navigation into a set of interpretable atomic skills (e.g., Vertical Movement, Area and Region Identification, Stop and Pause), each handled by a specialized agent. We then introduce a novel zero-shot Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based router, which dynamically selects the most suitable agent at each time step by aligning sub-goals with visual observations and historical actions. SkillNav achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on the R2R benchmark and demonstrates strong generalization to the GSA-R2R benchmark that includes novel instruction styles and unseen environments.
Authors: Wenzhuo Ma, Zhenzhong Chen
Abstract: In this work, we first propose DiffVC-OSD, a One-Step Diffusion-based Perceptual Neural Video Compression framework. Unlike conventional multi-step diffusion-based methods, DiffVC-OSD feeds the reconstructed latent representation directly into a One-Step Diffusion Model, enhancing perceptual quality through a single diffusion step guided by both temporal context and the latent itself. To better leverage temporal dependencies, we design a Temporal Context Adapter that encodes conditional inputs into multi-level features, offering more fine-grained guidance for the Denoising Unet. Additionally, we employ an End-to-End Finetuning strategy to improve overall compression performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffVC-OSD achieves state-of-the-art perceptual compression performance, offers about 20$\times$ faster decoding and a 86.92\% bitrate reduction compared to the corresponding multi-step diffusion-based variant.
Authors: Maximilian Kromer, Panagiotis Agrafiotis, Beg\"um Demir
Abstract: Accurate image-based bathymetric mapping in shallow waters remains challenging due to the complex optical distortions such as wave induced patterns, scattering and sunglint, introduced by the dynamic water surface, the water column properties, and solar illumination. In this work, we introduce Sea-Undistort, a comprehensive synthetic dataset of 1200 paired 512x512 through-water scenes rendered in Blender. Each pair comprises a distortion-free and a distorted view, featuring realistic water effects such as sun glint, waves, and scattering over diverse seabeds. Accompanied by per-image metadata such as camera parameters, sun position, and average depth, Sea-Undistort enables supervised training that is otherwise infeasible in real environments. We use Sea-Undistort to benchmark two state-of-the-art image restoration methods alongside an enhanced lightweight diffusion-based framework with an early-fusion sun-glint mask. When applied to real aerial data, the enhanced diffusion model delivers more complete Digital Surface Models (DSMs) of the seabed, especially in deeper areas, reduces bathymetric errors, suppresses glint and scattering, and crisply restores fine seabed details. Dataset, weights, and code are publicly available at https://www.magicbathy.eu/Sea-Undistort.html.
Authors: Mohammed Salah, Numan Saeed, Davor Svetinovic, Stefano Sfarra, Mohammed Omar, Yusra Abdulrahman
Abstract: Active Infrared thermography (AIRT) is a widely adopted non-destructive testing (NDT) technique for detecting subsurface anomalies in industrial components. Due to the high dimensionality of AIRT data, current approaches employ non-linear autoencoders (AEs) for dimensionality reduction. However, the latent space learned by AIRT AEs lacks structure, limiting their effectiveness in downstream defect characterization tasks. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a principal component analysis guided (PCA-guided) autoencoding framework for structured dimensionality reduction to capture intricate, non-linear features in thermographic signals while enforcing a structured latent space. A novel loss function, PCA distillation loss, is introduced to guide AIRT AEs to align the latent representation with structured PCA components while capturing the intricate, non-linear patterns in thermographic signals. To evaluate the utility of the learned, structured latent space, we propose a neural network-based evaluation metric that assesses its suitability for defect characterization. Experimental results show that the proposed PCA-guided AE outperforms state-of-the-art dimensionality reduction methods on PVC, CFRP, and PLA samples in terms of contrast, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and neural network-based metrics.
Authors: Runze Wang, Zeli Chen, Zhiyun Song, Wei Fang, Jiajin Zhang, Danyang Tu, Yuxing Tang, Minfeng Xu, Xianghua Ye, Le Lu, Dakai Jin
Abstract: To reduce radiation exposure and improve the diagnostic efficacy of low-dose computed tomography (LDCT), numerous deep learning-based denoising methods have been developed to mitigate noise and artifacts. However, most of these approaches ignore the anatomical semantics of human tissues, which may potentially result in suboptimal denoising outcomes. To address this problem, we propose ALDEN, an anatomy-aware LDCT denoising method that integrates semantic features of pretrained vision models (PVMs) with adversarial and contrastive learning. Specifically, we introduce an anatomy-aware discriminator that dynamically fuses hierarchical semantic features from reference normal-dose CT (NDCT) via cross-attention mechanisms, enabling tissue-specific realism evaluation in the discriminator. In addition, we propose a semantic-guided contrastive learning module that enforces anatomical consistency by contrasting PVM-derived features from LDCT, denoised CT and NDCT, preserving tissue-specific patterns through positive pairs and suppressing artifacts via dual negative pairs. Extensive experiments conducted on two LDCT denoising datasets reveal that ALDEN achieves the state-of-the-art performance, offering superior anatomy preservation and substantially reducing over-smoothing issue of previous work. Further validation on a downstream multi-organ segmentation task (encompassing 117 anatomical structures) affirms the model's ability to maintain anatomical awareness.
Authors: Tao Tang, Chengxu Yang
Abstract: The core role of medical images in disease diagnosis makes their quality directly affect the accuracy of clinical judgment. However, due to factors such as low-dose scanning, equipment limitations and imaging artifacts, medical images are often accompanied by non-uniform noise interference, which seriously affects structure recognition and lesion detection. This paper proposes a medical image adaptive denoising model (MI-ND) that integrates multi-scale convolutional and Transformer architecture, introduces a noise level estimator (NLE) and a noise adaptive attention module (NAAB), and realizes channel-spatial attention regulation and cross-modal feature fusion driven by noise perception. Systematic testing is carried out on multimodal public datasets. Experiments show that this method significantly outperforms the comparative methods in image quality indicators such as PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS, and improves the F1 score and ROC-AUC in downstream diagnostic tasks, showing strong prac-tical value and promotional potential. The model has outstanding benefits in structural recovery, diagnostic sensitivity, and cross-modal robustness, and provides an effective solution for medical image enhancement and AI-assisted diagnosis and treatment.
Authors: Shuo Han, Ahmed Karam Eldaly, Solomon Sunday Oyelere
Abstract: Invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) is the most prevalent form of breast cancer, and early, accurate diagnosis is critical to improving patient survival rates by guiding treatment decisions. Combining medical expertise with artificial intelligence (AI) holds significant promise for enhancing the precision and efficiency of IDC detection. In this work, we propose a human-in-the-loop (HITL) deep learning system designed to detect IDC in histopathology images. The system begins with an initial diagnosis provided by a high-performance EfficientNetV2S model, offering feedback from AI to the human expert. Medical professionals then review the AI-generated results, correct any misclassified images, and integrate the revised labels into the training dataset, forming a feedback loop from the human back to the AI. This iterative process refines the model's performance over time. The EfficientNetV2S model itself achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods in the literature, with an overall accuracy of 93.65\%. Incorporating the human-in-the-loop system further improves the model's accuracy using four experimental groups with misclassified images. These results demonstrate the potential of this collaborative approach to enhance AI performance in diagnostic systems. This work contributes to advancing automated, efficient, and highly accurate methods for IDC detection through human-AI collaboration, offering a promising direction for future AI-assisted medical diagnostics.
Authors: Shoaib Ahmmad, Zubayer Ahmed Aditto, Md Mehrab Hossain, Noushin Yeasmin, Shorower Hossain
Abstract: This paper introduces an advanced AI-driven perception system for autonomous quadcopter navigation in GPS-denied indoor environments. The proposed framework leverages cloud computing to offload computationally intensive tasks and incorporates a custom-designed printed circuit board (PCB) for efficient sensor data acquisition, enabling robust navigation in confined spaces. The system integrates YOLOv11 for object detection, Depth Anything V2 for monocular depth estimation, a PCB equipped with Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensors and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), and a cloud-based Large Language Model (LLM) for context-aware decision-making. A virtual safety envelope, enforced by calibrated sensor offsets, ensures collision avoidance, while a multithreaded architecture achieves low-latency processing. Enhanced spatial awareness is facilitated by 3D bounding box estimation with Kalman filtering. Experimental results in an indoor testbed demonstrate strong performance, with object detection achieving a mean Average Precision (mAP50) of 0.6, depth estimation Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 7.2 cm, only 16 safety envelope breaches across 42 trials over approximately 11 minutes, and end-to-end system latency below 1 second. This cloud-supported, high-intelligence framework serves as an auxiliary perception and navigation system, complementing state-of-the-art drone autonomy for GPS-denied confined spaces.
Authors: Johanna P. M\"uller, Anika Knupfer, Pedro Bl\"oss, Edoardo Berardi Vittur, Bernhard Kainz, Jana Hutter
Abstract: Despite significant progress in generative modelling, existing diffusion models often struggle to produce anatomically precise female pelvic images, limiting their application in gynaecological imaging, where data scarcity and patient privacy concerns are critical. To overcome these barriers, we introduce a novel diffusion-based framework for uterine MRI synthesis, integrating both unconditional and conditioned Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) and Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) in 2D and 3D. Our approach generates anatomically coherent, high fidelity synthetic images that closely mimic real scans and provide valuable resources for training robust diagnostic models. We evaluate generative quality using advanced perceptual and distributional metrics, benchmarking against standard reconstruction methods, and demonstrate substantial gains in diagnostic accuracy on a key classification task. A blinded expert evaluation further validates the clinical realism of our synthetic images. We release our models with privacy safeguards and a comprehensive synthetic uterine MRI dataset to support reproducible research and advance equitable AI in gynaecology.
Authors: Chen Shen, Wanqing Zhang, Kehan Li, Erwen Huang, Haitao Bi, Aiying Fan, Yiwen Shen, Hongmei Dong, Ji Zhang, Yuming Shao, Zengjia Liu, Xinshe Liu, Tao Li, Chunxia Yan, Shuanliang Fan, Di Wu, Jianhua Ma, Bin Cong, Zhenyuan Wang, Chunfeng Lian
Abstract: Forensic cause-of-death determination faces systemic challenges, including workforce shortages and diagnostic variability, particularly in high-volume systems like China's medicolegal infrastructure. We introduce FEAT (ForEnsic AgenT), a multi-agent AI framework that automates and standardizes death investigations through a domain-adapted large language model. FEAT's application-oriented architecture integrates: (i) a central Planner for task decomposition, (ii) specialized Local Solvers for evidence analysis, (iii) a Memory & Reflection module for iterative refinement, and (iv) a Global Solver for conclusion synthesis. The system employs tool-augmented reasoning, hierarchical retrieval-augmented generation, forensic-tuned LLMs, and human-in-the-loop feedback to ensure legal and medical validity. In evaluations across diverse Chinese case cohorts, FEAT outperformed state-of-the-art AI systems in both long-form autopsy analyses and concise cause-of-death conclusions. It demonstrated robust generalization across six geographic regions and achieved high expert concordance in blinded validations. Senior pathologists validated FEAT's outputs as comparable to those of human experts, with improved detection of subtle evidentiary nuances. To our knowledge, FEAT is the first LLM-based AI agent system dedicated to forensic medicine, offering scalable, consistent death certification while maintaining expert-level rigor. By integrating AI efficiency with human oversight, this work could advance equitable access to reliable medicolegal services while addressing critical capacity constraints in forensic systems.
Authors: Jiayao Wang, Yang Song, Zhendong Zhao, Jiale Zhang, Qilin Wu, Junwu Zhu, Dongfang Zhao
Abstract: Federated self-supervised learning (FSSL) combines the advantages of decentralized modeling and unlabeled representation learning, serving as a cutting-edge paradigm with strong potential for scalability and privacy preservation. Although FSSL has garnered increasing attention, research indicates that it remains vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing methods generally rely on visually obvious triggers, which makes it difficult to meet the requirements for stealth and practicality in real-world deployment. In this paper, we propose an imperceptible and effective backdoor attack method against FSSL, called IPBA. Our empirical study reveals that existing imperceptible triggers face a series of challenges in FSSL, particularly limited transferability, feature entanglement with augmented samples, and out-of-distribution properties. These issues collectively undermine the effectiveness and stealthiness of traditional backdoor attacks in FSSL. To overcome these challenges, IPBA decouples the feature distributions of backdoor and augmented samples, and introduces Sliced-Wasserstein distance to mitigate the out-of-distribution properties of backdoor samples, thereby optimizing the trigger generation process. Our experimental results on several FSSL scenarios and datasets show that IPBA significantly outperforms existing backdoor attack methods in performance and exhibits strong robustness under various defense mechanisms.
Authors: Bowen Tong, Hao Chen, Shaorui Guo, Dong Liu
Abstract: Microwave Tomography (MWT) aims to reconstruct the dielectric properties of tissues from measured scattered electromagnetic fields. This inverse problem is highly nonlinear and ill-posed, posing significant challenges for conventional optimization-based methods, which, despite being grounded in physical models, often fail to recover fine structural details. Recent deep learning strategies, including end-to-end and post-processing networks, have improved reconstruction quality but typically require large paired training datasets and may struggle to generalize. To overcome these limitations, we propose a physics-informed hybrid framework that integrates diffusion models as learned regularization within a data-consistency-driven variational scheme. Specifically, we introduce Single-Step Diffusion Regularization (SSD-Reg), a novel approach that embeds diffusion priors into the iterative reconstruction process, enabling the recovery of complex anatomical structures without the need for paired data. SSD-Reg maintains fidelity to both the governing physics and learned structural distributions, improving accuracy, stability, and robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SSD-Reg, implemented as a Plug-and-Play (PnP) module, provides a flexible and effective solution for tackling the ill-posedness inherent in functional image reconstruction.
Authors: Keyan Rahimi, Md. Wasiul Haque, Sagar Dasgupta, Mizanur Rahman
Abstract: Indoor navigation remains a complex challenge due to the absence of reliable GPS signals and the architectural intricacies of large enclosed environments. This study presents an indoor localization and navigation approach that integrates vision-based localization with large language model (LLM)-based navigation. The localization system utilizes a ResNet-50 convolutional neural network fine-tuned through a two-stage process to identify the user's position using smartphone camera input. To complement localization, the navigation module employs an LLM, guided by a carefully crafted system prompt, to interpret preprocessed floor plan images and generate step-by-step directions. Experimental evaluation was conducted in a realistic office corridor with repetitive features and limited visibility to test localization robustness. The model achieved high confidence and an accuracy of 96% across all tested waypoints, even under constrained viewing conditions and short-duration queries. Navigation tests using ChatGPT on real building floor maps yielded an average instruction accuracy of 75%, with observed limitations in zero-shot reasoning and inference time. This research demonstrates the potential for scalable, infrastructure-free indoor navigation using off-the-shelf cameras and publicly available floor plans, particularly in resource-constrained settings like hospitals, airports, and educational institutions.
Authors: Lingjing Chen (Shanghai Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance, School of Physics and Electronic Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China, Institute of Magnetic Resonance and Molecular Imaging in Medicine, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China), Chengxiu Zhang (Shanghai Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance, School of Physics and Electronic Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China, Institute of Magnetic Resonance and Molecular Imaging in Medicine, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China), Yinqiao Yi (Shanghai Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance, School of Physics and Electronic Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China, Institute of Magnetic Resonance and Molecular Imaging in Medicine, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China), Yida Wang (Shanghai Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance, School of Physics and Electronic Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China, Institute of Magnetic Resonance and Molecular Imaging in Medicine, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China), Yang Song (MR Research Collaboration Team, Siemens Healthineers, Shanghai, China), Xu Yan (MR Research Collaboration Team, Siemens Healthineers, Shanghai, China), Shengfang Xu (Department of Radiology, Gansu Provincial Maternity and Child-care Hospital, Lanzhou, China), Dalin Zhu (Department of Radiology, Gansu Provincial Maternity and Child-care Hospital, Lanzhou, China), Mengqiu Cao (MR Research Collaboration Team, Siemens Healthineers, Shanghai, China), Yan Zhou (Department of Radiology, Renji Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China), Chenglong Wang (Shanghai Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance, School of Physics and Electronic Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China, Institute of Magnetic Resonance and Molecular Imaging in Medicine, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China), Guang Yang (Shanghai Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance, School of Physics and Electronic Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China, Institute of Magnetic Resonance and Molecular Imaging in Medicine, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China)
Abstract: We propose a deep learning-based approach that integrates MRI sequence parameters to improve the accuracy and generalizability of quantitative image synthesis from clinical weighted MRI. Our physics-driven neural network embeds MRI sequence parameters -- repetition time (TR), echo time (TE), and inversion time (TI) -- directly into the model via parameter embedding, enabling the network to learn the underlying physical principles of MRI signal formation. The model takes conventional T1-weighted, T2-weighted, and T2-FLAIR images as input and synthesizes T1, T2, and proton density (PD) quantitative maps. Trained on healthy brain MR images, it was evaluated on both internal and external test datasets. The proposed method achieved high performance with PSNR values exceeding 34 dB and SSIM values above 0.92 for all synthesized parameter maps. It outperformed conventional deep learning models in accuracy and robustness, including data with previously unseen brain structures and lesions. Notably, our model accurately synthesized quantitative maps for these unseen pathological regions, highlighting its superior generalization capability. Incorporating MRI sequence parameters via parameter embedding allows the neural network to better learn the physical characteristics of MR signals, significantly enhancing the performance and reliability of quantitative MRI synthesis. This method shows great potential for accelerating qMRI and improving its clinical utility.
Authors: Luca Zedda, Andrea Loddo, Cecilia Di Ruberto, Carsten Marr
Abstract: Red blood cells (RBCs) are essential to human health, and their precise morphological analysis is important for diagnosing hematological disorders. Despite the promise of foundation models in medical diagnostics, comprehensive AI solutions for RBC analysis remain scarce. We present RedDino, a self-supervised foundation model designed for RBC image analysis. RedDino uses an RBC-specific adaptation of the DINOv2 self-supervised learning framework and is trained on a curated dataset of 1.25 million RBC images from diverse acquisition modalities and sources. Extensive evaluations show that RedDino outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on RBC shape classification. Through assessments including linear probing and nearest neighbor classification, we confirm its strong feature representations and generalization ability. Our main contributions are: (1) a foundation model tailored for RBC analysis, (2) ablation studies exploring DINOv2 configurations for RBC modeling, and (3) a detailed evaluation of generalization performance. RedDino addresses key challenges in computational hematology by capturing nuanced morphological features, advancing the development of reliable diagnostic tools. The source code and pretrained models for RedDino are available at https://github.com/Snarci/RedDino, and the pretrained models can be downloaded from our Hugging Face collection at https://huggingface.co/collections/Snarcy/reddino-689a13e29241d2e5690202fc
URLs: https://github.com/Snarci/RedDino,, https://huggingface.co/collections/Snarcy/reddino-689a13e29241d2e5690202fc
Authors: Kaijun Wang, Liqin Lu, Mingyu Liu, Jianuo Jiang, Zeju Li, Bolin Zhang, Wancai Zheng, Xinyi Yu, Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen
Abstract: Language-guided long-horizon mobile manipulation has long been a grand challenge in embodied semantic reasoning, generalizable manipulation, and adaptive locomotion. Three fundamental limitations hinder progress: First, although large language models have improved spatial reasoning and task planning through semantic priors, existing implementations remain confined to tabletop scenarios, failing to address the constrained perception and limited actuation ranges of mobile platforms. Second, current manipulation strategies exhibit insufficient generalization when confronted with the diverse object configurations encountered in open-world environments. Third, while crucial for practical deployment, the dual requirement of maintaining high platform maneuverability alongside precise end-effector control in unstructured settings remains understudied. In this work, we present ODYSSEY, a unified mobile manipulation framework for agile quadruped robots equipped with manipulators, which seamlessly integrates high-level task planning with low-level whole-body control. To address the challenge of egocentric perception in language-conditioned tasks, we introduce a hierarchical planner powered by a vision-language model, enabling long-horizon instruction decomposition and precise action execution. At the control level, our novel whole-body policy achieves robust coordination across challenging terrains. We further present the first benchmark for long-horizon mobile manipulation, evaluating diverse indoor and outdoor scenarios. Through successful sim-to-real transfer, we demonstrate the system's generalization and robustness in real-world deployments, underscoring the practicality of legged manipulators in unstructured environments. Our work advances the feasibility of generalized robotic assistants capable of complex, dynamic tasks. Our project page: https://kaijwang.github.io/odyssey.github.io/
Authors: Hao Li
Abstract: This note complements the author's recent paper "Robust representation learning with feedback for single image deraining" by providing heuristically theoretical explanations on the mechanism of representation learning with feedback, namely an essential merit of the works presented in this recent article. This note facilitates understanding of key points in the mechanism of representation learning with feedback.
Authors: Alexa R. Tartaglini, Sheridan Feucht, Michael A. Lepori, Wai Keen Vong, Charles Lovering, Brenden M. Lake, Ellie Pavlick
Abstract: Although deep neural networks can achieve human-level performance on many object recognition benchmarks, prior work suggests that these same models fail to learn simple abstract relations, such as determining whether two objects are the same or different. Much of this prior work focuses on training convolutional neural networks to classify images of two same or two different abstract shapes, testing generalization on within-distribution stimuli. In this article, we comprehensively study whether deep neural networks can acquire and generalize same-different relations both within and out-of-distribution using a variety of architectures, forms of pretraining, and fine-tuning datasets. We find that certain pretrained transformers can learn a same-different relation that generalizes with near perfect accuracy to out-of-distribution stimuli. Furthermore, we find that fine-tuning on abstract shapes that lack texture or color provides the strongest out-of-distribution generalization. Our results suggest that, with the right approach, deep neural networks can learn generalizable same-different visual relations.
Authors: Chi-Ping Su, Ching-Hsun Tseng, Bin Pu, Lei Zhao, Jiewen Yang, Zhuangzhuang Chen, Shin-Jye Lee
Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) enables a smaller "student" model to mimic a larger "teacher" model by transferring knowledge from the teacher's output or features. However, most KD methods treat all samples uniformly, overlooking the varying learning value of each sample and thereby limiting their effectiveness. In this paper, we propose Entropy-based Adaptive Knowledge Distillation (EA-KD), a simple yet effective plug-and-play KD method that prioritizes learning from valuable samples. EA-KD quantifies each sample's learning value by strategically combining the entropy of the teacher and student output, then dynamically reweights the distillation loss to place greater emphasis on high-entropy samples. Extensive experiments across diverse KD frameworks and tasks -- including image classification, object detection, and large language model (LLM) distillation -- demonstrate that EA-KD consistently enhances performance, achieving state-of-the-art results with negligible computational cost. Code is available at: https://github.com/cpsu00/EA-KD
Authors: Chao Chen, Mingzhi Zhu, Ankush Pratap Singh, Yu Yan, Felix Juefei Xu, Chen Feng
Abstract: Humans are remarkably efficient at forming spatial understanding from just a few visual observations. When browsing real estate or navigating unfamiliar spaces, they intuitively select a small set of views that summarize the spatial layout. Inspired by this ability, we introduce scene summarization, the task of condensing long, continuous scene videos into a compact set of spatially diverse keyframes that facilitate global spatial reasoning. Unlike conventional video summarization-which focuses on user-edited, fragmented clips and often ignores spatial continuity-our goal is to mimic how humans abstract spatial layout from sparse views. We propose SceneSum, a two-stage self-supervised pipeline that first clusters video frames using visual place recognition to promote spatial diversity, then selects representative keyframes from each cluster under resource constraints. When camera trajectories are available, a lightweight supervised loss further refines clustering and selection. Experiments on real and simulated indoor datasets show that SceneSum produces more spatially informative summaries and outperforms existing video summarization baselines.
Authors: Elias Marks, Jonas B\"omer, Federico Magistri, Anurag Sah, Jens Behley, Cyrill Stachniss
Abstract: Agricultural production is facing severe challenges in the next decades induced by climate change and the need for sustainability, reducing its impact on the environment. Advancements in field management through non-chemical weeding by robots in combination with monitoring of crops by autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and breeding of novel and more resilient crop varieties are helpful to address these challenges. The analysis of plant traits, called phenotyping, is an essential activity in plant breeding, it however involves a great amount of manual labor. With this paper, we address the problem of automatic fine-grained organ-level geometric analysis needed for precision phenotyping. As the availability of real-world data in this domain is relatively scarce, we propose a novel dataset that was acquired using UAVs capturing high-resolution images of a real breeding trial containing 48 plant varieties and therefore covering great morphological and appearance diversity. This enables the development of approaches for autonomous phenotyping that generalize well to different varieties. Based on overlapping high-resolution images from multiple viewing angles, we compute photogrammetric dense point clouds and provide detailed and accurate point-wise labels for plants, leaves, and salient points as the tip and the base. Additionally, we include measurements of phenotypic traits performed by experts from the German Federal Plant Variety Office on the real plants, allowing the evaluation of new approaches not only on segmentation and keypoint detection but also directly on the downstream tasks. The provided labeled point clouds enable fine-grained plant analysis and support further progress in the development of automatic phenotyping approaches, but also enable further research in surface reconstruction, point cloud completion, and semantic interpretation of point clouds.
Authors: Dong Zhang, Pingcheng Dong, Long Chen, Kwang-Ting Cheng
Abstract: It has been revealed that efficient dense image prediction (EDIP) models designed for AI chips, trained using the knowledge distillation (KD) framework, encounter two key challenges, including \emph{maintaining boundary region completeness} and \emph{ensuring target region connectivity}, despite their favorable real-time capacity to recognize the main object regions. In this work, we propose a customized boundary and context knowledge distillation (BCKD) method for EDIPs, which facilitates the targeted KD from large accurate teacher models to compact small student models. Specifically, the \emph{boundary distillation} focuses on extracting explicit object-level boundaries from the hierarchical feature maps to enhance the student model's mask quality in boundary regions. Meanwhile, the \emph{context distillation} leverages self-relations as a bridge to transfer implicit pixel-level contexts from the teacher model to the student model, ensuring strong connectivity in target regions. Our proposed method is specifically designed for the EDIP tasks and is characterized by its simplicity and efficiency. Theoretical analysis and extensive experimental results across semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation on five representative datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of BCKD, resulting in well-defined object boundaries and smooth connecting regions.
Authors: Joohyung Lee, Heejeong Nam, Kwanhyung Lee, Sangchul Hahn
Abstract: Whole-slide image (WSI) classification is a challenging task because 1) patches from WSI lack annotation, and 2) WSI possesses unnecessary variability, e.g., stain protocol. Recently, Multiple-Instance Learning (MIL) has made significant progress, allowing for classification based on slide-level, rather than patch-level, annotations. However, existing MIL methods ignore that all patches from normal slides are normal. Using this free annotation, we introduce a semi-supervision signal to de-bias the inter-slide variability and to capture the common factors of variation within normal patches. Because our method is orthogonal to the MIL algorithm, we evaluate our method on top of the recently proposed MIL algorithms and also compare the performance with other semi-supervised approaches. We evaluate our method on two public WSI datasets including Camelyon-16 and TCGA lung cancer and demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the predictive performance of existing MIL algorithms and outperforms other semi-supervised algorithms. We release our code at https://github.com/AITRICS/pathology_mil.
Authors: Zhende Song, Chenchen Wang, Jiamu Sheng, Chi Zhang, Shengji Tang, Jiayuan Fan, Tao Chen
Abstract: Recent large vision-language models (LVLMs) for video understanding are primarily fine-tuned with various videos scraped from online platforms. Existing datasets, such as ActivityNet, require considerable human labor for structuring and annotation before effectively utilized for tuning LVLMs. While current LVLMs are primarily trained on existing datasets in broad, general-purpose settings, adapting them to specific downstream scenarios remains challenging, as collecting and annotating task-specific videos is highly labor-intensive and time-consuming. To address this issue, we propose a three-stage framework named DreamFrame for automatically generating style-consistent keyframes and corresponding question-answer (QA) pairs to support LVLM instruction tuning. DreamFrame generates datasets in a movie-like manner. First, we utilize an LLM to generate structured movie plots including movie prior information (like overview and style), frame descriptions and plot-related QA pairs, with a story expansion strategy to mitigate context length limitations.Then, to ensure visual consistency across generated frames, we design a Style Immobilization Process which maintains consistent style through an embedding learning strategy. Finally, frame descriptions and style embeddings are integrated to produce coherent keyframes. Using DreamFrame, we construct a dataset comprising approximately 1k stylized keyframe-like videos and 100k diverse QA pairs. Extensive fine-tuned experiments on various LVLM architectures demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed dataset. Furthermore, based on the proposed dataset, we fine-tune a new LVLM named DreamFrame-7B, which significantly surpasses the previous similar-sized LVLMs across different benchmarks.
Authors: Yuxuan Li, Xiang Li, Weijie Li, Qibin Hou, Li Liu, Ming-Ming Cheng, Jian Yang
Abstract: Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) object detection has gained significant attention recently due to its irreplaceable all-weather imaging capabilities. However, this research field suffers from both limited public datasets (mostly comprising <2K images with only mono-category objects) and inaccessible source code. To tackle these challenges, we establish a new benchmark dataset and an open-source method for large-scale SAR object detection. Our dataset, SARDet-100K, is a result of intense surveying, collecting, and standardizing 10 existing SAR detection datasets, providing a large-scale and diverse dataset for research purposes. To the best of our knowledge, SARDet-100K is the first COCO-level large-scale multi-class SAR object detection dataset ever created. With this high-quality dataset, we conducted comprehensive experiments and uncovered a crucial challenge in SAR object detection: the substantial disparities between the pretraining on RGB datasets and finetuning on SAR datasets in terms of both data domain and model structure. To bridge these gaps, we propose a novel Multi-Stage with Filter Augmentation (MSFA) pretraining framework that tackles the problems from the perspective of data input, domain transition, and model migration. The proposed MSFA method significantly enhances the performance of SAR object detection models while demonstrating exceptional generalizability and flexibility across diverse models. This work aims to pave the way for further advancements in SAR object detection. The dataset and code is available at https://github.com/zcablii/SARDet_100K.
Authors: Yufei Zhan, Shurong Zheng, Yousong Zhu, Hongyin Zhao, Fan Yang, Ming Tang, Jinqiao Wang
Abstract: Large Vision Language Models have achieved fine-grained object perception, but the limitation of image resolution remains a significant obstacle to surpassing the performance of task-specific experts in complex and dense scenarios. Such limitation further restricts the model's potential to achieve nuanced visual and language referring in domains such as GUI Agents, counting, \textit{etc}. To address this issue, we introduce a unified high-resolution generalist model, Griffon v2, enabling flexible object referring with visual and textual prompts. To efficiently scale up image resolution, we design a simple and lightweight down-sampling projector to overcome the input tokens constraint in Large Language Models. This design inherently preserves the complete contexts and fine details and significantly improves multimodal perception ability, especially for small objects. Building upon this, we further equip the model with visual-language co-referring capabilities through a plug-and-play visual tokenizer. It enables user-friendly interaction with flexible target images, free-form texts, and even coordinates. Experiments demonstrate that Griffon v2 can localize objects of interest with visual and textual referring, achieve state-of-the-art performance on REC and phrase grounding, and outperform expert models in object detection, object counting, and REG. Data and codes are released at https://github.com/jefferyZhan/Griffon.
Authors: Ozge Mercanoglu Sincan, Richard Bowden
Abstract: Sign Language Translation (SLT) is a challenging task that aims to generate spoken language sentences from sign language videos. In this paper, we introduce a lightweight, modular SLT framework, Spotter+GPT, that leverages the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) and avoids heavy end-to-end training. Spotter+GPT breaks down the SLT task into two distinct stages. First, a sign spotter identifies individual signs within the input video. The spotted signs are then passed to an LLM, which transforms them into meaningful spoken language sentences. Spotter+GPT eliminates the requirement for SLT-specific training. This significantly reduces computational costs and time requirements. The source code and pretrained weights of the Spotter are available at https://gitlab.surrey.ac.uk/cogvispublic/sign-spotter.
URLs: https://gitlab.surrey.ac.uk/cogvispublic/sign-spotter.
Authors: Manav Prabhakar, Jwalandhar Girnar, Arpan Kusari
Abstract: While much research has recently focused on generating physics-based adversarial samples, a critical yet often overlooked category originates from physical failures within on-board cameras -- components essential to the perception systems of autonomous vehicles. Firstly, we motivate the study using two separate real-world experiments to showcase that indeed glass failures would cause the detection based neural network models to fail. Secondly, we develop a simulation-based study using the physical process of the glass breakage to create perturbed scenarios, representing a realistic class of physics-based adversarial samples. Using a finite element model (FEM)-based approach, we generate surface cracks on the camera image by applying a stress field defined by particles within a triangular mesh. Lastly, we use physically-based rendering (PBR) techniques to provide realistic visualizations of these physically plausible fractures. To analyze the safety implications, we superimpose these simulated broken glass effects as image filters on widely used open-source datasets: KITTI and BDD100K using two most prominent object detection neural networks (CNN-based -- YOLOv8 and Faster R-CNN) and Pyramid Vision Transformers. To further investigate the distributional impact of these visual distortions, we compute the Kullback-Leibler (K-L) divergence between three distinct data distributions, applying various broken glass filters to a custom dataset (captured through a cracked windshield), as well as the KITTI and Kaggle cats and dogs datasets. The K-L divergence analysis suggests that these broken glass filters do not introduce significant distributional shifts.
Authors: Haiyu Wu, Sicong Tian, Aman Bhatta, Jacob Gutierrez, Grace Bezold, Genesis Argueta, Karl Ricanek Jr., Michael C. King, Kevin W. Bowyer
Abstract: Reported face verification accuracy has reached a plateau on current well-known test sets. As a result, some difficult test sets have been assembled by reducing the image quality or adding artifacts to the image. However, we argue that test sets can be challenging without artificially reducing the image quality because the face recognition (FR) models suffer from correctly recognizing 1) the pairs from the same identity (i.e., genuine pairs) with a large face attribute difference, 2) the pairs from different identities (i.e., impostor pairs) with a small face attribute difference, and 3) the pairs of similar-looking identities (e.g., twins and relatives). We propose three challenging test sets to reveal important but ignored weaknesses of the existing FR algorithms. To challenge models on variation of facial attributes, we propose Hadrian and Eclipse to address facial hair differences and face exposure differences. The images in both test sets are high-quality and collected in a controlled environment. To challenge FR models on similar-looking persons, we propose twins-IND, which contains images from a dedicated twins dataset. The LFW test protocol is used to structure the proposed test sets. Moreover, we introduce additional rules to assemble "Goldilocks1" level test sets, including 1) restricted number of occurrence of hard samples, 2) equal chance evaluation across demographic groups, and 3) constrained identity overlap across validation folds. Quantitatively, without further processing the images, the proposed test sets have on-par or higher difficulties than the existing test sets. The datasets are available at: https: //github.com/HaiyuWu/SOTA-Face-Recognition-Train-and-Test.
Authors: Weihan Wang, Zehai He, Wenyi Hong, Yean Cheng, Xiaohan Zhang, Ji Qi, Xiaotao Gu, Shiyu Huang, Bin Xu, Yuxiao Dong, Ming Ding, Jie Tang
Abstract: Recent progress in multimodal large language models has markedly enhanced the understanding of short videos (typically under one minute), and several evaluation datasets have emerged accordingly. However, these advancements fall short of meeting the demands of real-world applications such as embodied intelligence for long-term decision-making, in-depth movie reviews and discussions, and live sports commentary, all of which require comprehension of long videos spanning several hours. To address this gap, we introduce LVBench, a benchmark specifically designed for long video understanding. Our dataset comprises publicly sourced videos and encompasses a diverse set of tasks aimed at long video comprehension and information extraction. LVBench is designed to challenge multimodal models to demonstrate long-term memory and extended comprehension capabilities. Our extensive evaluations reveal that current multimodal models still underperform on these demanding long video understanding tasks. Through LVBench, we aim to spur the development of more advanced models capable of tackling the complexities of long video comprehension. Our data and code are publicly available at: https://lvbench.github.io.
Authors: Kirolos Ataallah, Eslam Abdelrahman, Mahmoud Ahmed, Chenhui Gou, Khushbu Pahwa, Jian Ding, Mohamed Elhoseiny
Abstract: Understanding long-form videos, such as movies and TV episodes ranging from tens of minutes to two hours, remains a significant challenge for multi-modal models. Existing benchmarks often fail to test the full range of cognitive skills needed to process these temporally rich and narratively complex inputs. Therefore, we introduce InfiniBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of models in long video understanding rigorously. InfiniBench offers:(1) Over 1,000 hours of video content, with an average video length of 53 minutes. (2) The largest set of question-answer pairs for long video comprehension, totaling around 91 K. (3) Eight diverse skills that span both grounding-based (e.g., scene transitions, character actions) and reasoning-based (e.g., deep context understanding, multi-event linking). (4) Rich annotation formats, including both multiple-choice and open-ended questions. We conducted an in-depth evaluation across both commercial (GPT-4o, Gemini 2.0 Flash) and most recent open-source vision-language models such as Qwen2.5-VL, InternVL3.0). Results reveal that:(1) Models struggle across the board: Even the best model, GPT-4o, achieves only 47.1 % on grounding-based skills, with most models performing near or just above random chance. (2) Strong reliance on world knowledge: Models achieve surprisingly high scores using only metadata (e.g., video titles), highlighting a tendency to rely on pre-trained knowledge rather than actual visual or temporal understanding. (3) Multi-Modal Importance: When provided with full video and subtitle context, however, models show substantial improvements, confirming the critical role of multimodal input in video understanding. InfiniBench is publicly available at https://vision-cair.github.io/Infinibench
Authors: Haoyang He, Jiangning Zhang, Guanzhong Tian, Chengjie Wang, Lei Xie
Abstract: This study explores the recently proposed and challenging multi-view Anomaly Detection (AD) task. Single-view tasks will encounter blind spots from other perspectives, resulting in inaccuracies in sample-level prediction. Therefore, we introduce the Multi-View Anomaly Detection (MVAD) approach, which learns and integrates features from multi-views. Specifically, we propose a Multi-View Adaptive Selection (MVAS) algorithm for feature learning and fusion across multiple views. The feature maps are divided into neighbourhood attention windows to calculate a semantic correlation matrix between single-view windows and all other views, which is an attention mechanism conducted for each single-view window and the top-k most correlated multi-view windows. Adjusting the window sizes and top-k can minimise the complexity to O((hw)^4/3). Extensive experiments on the Real-IAD dataset under the multi-class setting validate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art performance with an average improvement of +2.5 across 10 metrics at the sample/image/pixel levels, using only 18M parameters and requiring fewer FLOPs and training time. The codes are available at https://github.com/lewandofskee/MVAD.
Authors: Zheng Liu, Hao Liang, Bozhou Li, Wentao Xiong, Chong Chen, Conghui He, Wentao Zhang, Bin Cui
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently emerged, demonstrating remarkable vision-understanding capabilities. However, training these models requires large-scale datasets, which brings challenges related to efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of web data. In this paper, we introduce SynthVLM, a new data synthesis and curation method for generating image-caption pairs. Unlike traditional methods, where captions are generated from images, SynthVLM utilizes advanced diffusion models and high-quality captions to synthesize and select images from text captions, thereby creating precisely aligned image-text pairs. We further introduce SynthVLM-100K, a high-quality dataset consisting of 100K curated and synthesized image-caption pairs. In both model and human evaluations, SynthVLM-100K outperforms traditional real-world datasets. Leveraging this dataset, we develop a new family of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), SynthVLM-7B and SynthVLM-13B, which achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on various vision question-answering (VQA) tasks. Notably, our models outperform LLaVA across most metrics with only 18\% pretrain data. Furthermore, SynthVLM-7B and SynthVLM-13B attain SOTA performance on the MMLU benchmark, demonstrating that the high-quality SynthVLM-100K dataset preserves language abilities.
Authors: Hao Liang, Linzhuang Sun, Minxuan Zhou, Zirong Chen, Meiyi Qiang, Mingan Lin, Tianpeng Li, Fan Yang, Zenan Zhou, Wentao Zhang
Abstract: With the rapid progress of Multimodal LLMs, evaluating their mathematical reasoning capabilities has become an increasingly important research direction. In particular, visual-textual mathematical reasoning serves as a key indicator of an MLLM's ability to comprehend and solve complex, multi-step quantitative problems. While existing benchmarks such as MathVista and MathVerse have advanced the evaluation of multimodal math proficiency, they primarily rely on digitally rendered content and fall short in capturing the complexity of real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce MathScape, a novel benchmark focused on assessing MLLMs' reasoning ability in realistic mathematical contexts. MathScape comprises 1,369 high-quality math problems paired with human-captured real-world images, closely reflecting the challenges encountered in practical educational settings. We conduct a thorough multi-dimensional evaluation across nine leading closed-source MLLMs, three open-source MLLMs with over 20 billion parameters, and seven smaller-scale MLLMs. Our results show that even SOTA models struggle with real-world math tasks, lagging behind human performance -- highlighting critical limitations in current model capabilities. Moreover, we find that strong performance on synthetic or digitally rendered images does not guarantee similar effectiveness on real-world tasks. This underscores the necessity of MathScape in the next stage of multimodal mathematical reasoning.
Authors: Jiasong Feng, Ao Ma, Jing Wang, Ke Cao, Zhanjie Zhang
Abstract: Synthesizing motion-rich and temporally consistent videos remains a challenge in artificial intelligence, especially when dealing with extended durations. Existing text-to-video (T2V) models commonly employ spatial cross-attention for text control, equivalently guiding different frame generations without frame-specific textual guidance. Thus, the model's capacity to comprehend the temporal logic conveyed in prompts and generate videos with coherent motion is restricted. To tackle this limitation, we introduce FancyVideo, an innovative video generator that improves the existing text-control mechanism with the well-designed Cross-frame Textual Guidance Module (CTGM). Specifically, CTGM incorporates the Temporal Information Injector (TII) and Temporal Affinity Refiner (TAR) at the beginning and end of cross-attention, respectively, to achieve frame-specific textual guidance. Firstly, TII injects frame-specific information from latent features into text conditions, thereby obtaining cross-frame textual conditions. Then, TAR refines the correlation matrix between cross-frame textual conditions and latent features along the time dimension. Extensive experiments comprising both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of FancyVideo. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art T2V generation results on the EvalCrafter benchmark and facilitates the synthesis of dynamic and consistent videos. Note that the T2V process of FancyVideo essentially involves a text-to-image step followed by T+I2V. This means it also supports the generation of videos from user images, i.e., the image-to-video (I2V) task. A significant number of experiments have shown that its performance is also outstanding.
Authors: Shuning Xu, Xina Liu, Binbin Song, Xiangyu Chen, Qiubo Chen, Jiantao Zhou
Abstract: Video demoireing aims to remove undesirable interference patterns that arise during the capture of screen content, restoring artifact-free frames while maintaining temporal consistency. Existing video demoireing methods typically utilize carefully designed alignment modules to estimate inter-frame motion for leveraging temporal information; however, these modules are often complex and computationally demanding. Meanwhile, recent works indicate that using raw data as input significantly enhances demoireing performance. Building on this insight, this paper introduces a novel alignment-free raw video demoireing network with frequency-assisted spatio-temporal Mamba (DemMamba). It incorporates sequentially arranged Spatial Mamba Blocks (SMB) and Temporal Mamba Blocks (TMB) to effectively model the inter- and intra-relationships in raw video demoireing. The SMB employs a multi-directional scanning mechanism coupled with a learnable frequency compressor to effectively differentiate interference patterns across various orientations and frequencies, resulting in reduced artifacts, sharper edges, and faithful texture reconstruction. Concurrently, the TMB enhances temporal consistency by performing bidirectional scanning across the temporal sequences and integrating channel attention techniques, facilitating improved temporal information fusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DemMamba surpasses state-of-the-art methods by 1.6 dB in PSNR, and also delivers a satisfactory visual experience.
Authors: Yitong Yang, Yinglin Wang, Tian Zhang, Jing Wang, Shuting He
Abstract: While text-driven diffusion models demonstrate remarkable performance in image editing, the critical components of their text embeddings remain underexplored. The ambiguity and entanglement of these embeddings pose challenges for precise editing. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive analysis of text embeddings in Stable Diffusion XL, offering three key insights: (1) \textit{aug embedding}~\footnote{\textit{aug embedding} is obtained by combining the pooled output of the final text encoder with the timestep embeddings. https://github.com/huggingface/diffusers} retains complete textual semantics but contributes minimally to image generation as it is only fused via the ResBlocks. More text information weakens its local semantics while preserving most global semantics. (2) \textit{BOS} and \textit{padding embedding} do not contain any semantic information. (3) \textit{EOS} holds the semantic information of all words and stylistic information. Each word embedding is important and does not interfere with the semantic injection of other embeddings. Based on these insights, we propose PSP (\textbf{P}rompt-\textbf{S}oftbox-\textbf{P}rompt), a training-free image editing method that leverages free-text embedding. PSP enables precise image editing by modifying text embeddings within the cross-attention layers and using Softbox to control the specific area for semantic injection. This technique enables the addition and replacement of objects without affecting other areas of the image. Additionally, PSP can achieve style transfer by simply replacing text embeddings. Extensive experiments show that PSP performs remarkably well in tasks such as object replacement, object addition, and style transfer. Our code is available at https://github.com/yangyt46/PSP.
URLs: https://github.com/huggingface/diffusers, https://github.com/yangyt46/PSP.
Authors: Mohammad Mehdi Rastikerdar, Jin Huang, Hui Guan, Deepak Ganesan
Abstract: Resource-constrained IoT devices increasingly rely on deep learning models, however, these models experience significant accuracy drops due to domain shifts when encountering variations in lighting, weather, and seasonal conditions. While cloud-based retraining can address this issue, many IoT deployments operate with limited connectivity and energy constraints, making traditional fine-tuning approaches impractical. We explore this challenge through the lens of wildlife ecology, where camera traps must maintain accurate species classification across changing seasons, weather, and habitats without reliable connectivity. We introduce WildFit, an autonomous in-situ adaptation framework that leverages the key insight that background scenes change more frequently than the visual characteristics of monitored species. WildFit combines background-aware synthesis to generate training samples on-device with drift-aware fine-tuning that triggers model updates only when necessary to conserve resources. Our background-aware synthesis surpasses efficient baselines by 7.3\% and diffusion models by 3.0\% while being orders of magnitude faster, our drift-aware fine-tuning achieves Pareto optimality with 50\% fewer updates and 1.5\% higher accuracy, and the end-to-end system outperforms domain adaptation approaches by 20--35%\% while consuming only 11.2 Wh over 37 days -- enabling battery-powered deployment.
Authors: Ghalib Ahmed Tahir
Abstract: This paper aims to shed light on the ethical problems of creating and deploying computer vision tech, particularly in using publicly available datasets. Due to the rapid growth of machine learning and artificial intelligence, computer vision has become a vital tool in many industries, including medical care, security systems, and trade. However, extensive use of visual data that is often collected without consent due to an informed discussion of its ramifications raises significant concerns about privacy and bias. The paper also examines these issues by analyzing popular datasets such as COCO, LFW, ImageNet, CelebA, PASCAL VOC, etc., that are usually used for training computer vision models. We offer a comprehensive ethical framework that addresses these challenges regarding the protection of individual rights, minimization of bias as well as openness and responsibility. We aim to encourage AI development that will take into account societal values as well as ethical standards to avoid any public harm.
Authors: Quang Tien Dam, Tri Tung Nguyen Nguyen, Yuki Endo, Dinh Tuan Tran, Joo-Ho Lee
Abstract: Accurate pain expression synthesis is essential for improving clinical training and human-robot interaction. Current Robotic Patient Simulators (RPSs) lack realistic pain facial expressions, limiting their effectiveness in medical training. In this work, we introduce PainDiffusion, a generative model that synthesizes naturalistic facial pain expressions. Unlike traditional heuristic or autoregressive methods, PainDiffusion operates in a continuous latent space, ensuring smoother and more natural facial motion while supporting indefinite-length generation via diffusion forcing. Our approach incorporates intrinsic characteristics such as pain expressiveness and emotion, allowing for personalized and controllable pain expression synthesis. We train and evaluate our model using the BioVid HeatPain Database. Additionally, we integrate PainDiffusion into a robotic system to assess its applicability in real-time rehabilitation exercises. Qualitative studies with clinicians reveal that PainDiffusion produces realistic pain expressions, with a 31.2% (std 4.8%) preference rate against ground-truth recordings. Our results suggest that PainDiffusion can serve as a viable alternative to real patients in clinical training and simulation, bridging the gap between synthetic and naturalistic pain expression. Code and videos are available at: https://damtien444.github.io/paindf/
Authors: Xiangning Zhang, Qingwei Zhang, Jinnan Chen, Chengfeng Zhou, Yaqi Wang, Zhengjie Zhang, Xiaobo Li, Dahong Qian
Abstract: Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection (ESD) is a minimally invasive procedure initially developed for early gastric cancer treatment and has expanded to address diverse gastrointestinal lesions. While computer-assisted surgery (CAS) systems enhance ESD precision and safety, their efficacy hinges on accurate real-time surgical phase recognition, a task complicated by ESD's inherent complexity, including heterogeneous lesion characteristics and dynamic tissue interactions. Existing video-based phase recognition algorithms, constrained by inefficient temporal context modeling, exhibit limited performance in capturing fine-grained phase transitions and long-range dependencies. To overcome these limitations, we propose SPRMamba, a novel framework integrating a Mamba-based architecture with a Scaled Residual TranMamba (SRTM) block to synergize long-term temporal modeling and localized detail extraction. SPRMamba further introduces the Hierarchical Sampling Strategy to optimize computational efficiency, enabling real-time processing critical for clinical deployment. Evaluated on the ESD385 dataset and the cholecystectomy benchmark Cholec80, SPRMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance (87.64% accuracy on ESD385, +1.0% over prior methods), demonstrating robust generalizability across surgical workflows. This advancement bridges the gap between computational efficiency and temporal sensitivity, offering a transformative tool for intraoperative guidance and skill assessment in ESD surgery. The code is accessible at https://github.com/Zxnyyyyy/SPRMamba.
Authors: Songning Lai, Jiayu Yang, Yu Huang, Lijie Hu, Tianlang Xue, Zhangyi Hu, Jiaxu Li, Haicheng Liao, Yutao Yue
Abstract: Deep learning has demonstrated transformative potential across domains, yet its inherent opacity has driven the development of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), which enforce interpretability through human-understandable concepts, represent a prominent advancement in XAI. However, despite their semantic transparency, CBMs remain vulnerable to security threats such as backdoor attacks malicious manipulations that induce controlled misbehaviors during inference. While CBMs leverage multimodal representations (visual inputs and textual concepts) to enhance interpretability, heir dual modality structure introduces new attack surfaces. To address the unexplored risk of concept-level backdoor attacks in multimodal XAI systems, we propose CAT (Concept-level Backdoor ATtacks), a methodology that injects triggers into conceptual representations during training, enabling precise prediction manipulation without compromising clean-data performance. An enhanced variant, CAT+, incorporates a concept correlation function to systematically optimize trigger-concept associations, thereby improving attack effectiveness and stealthiness. Through a comprehensive evaluation framework assessing attack success rate, stealth metrics, and model utility preservation, we demonstrate that CAT and CAT+ maintain high performance on clean data while achieving significant targeted effects on backdoored datasets. This work highlights critical security risks in interpretable AI systems and provides a robust methodology for future security assessments of CBMs.
Authors: Hongcheng Gao, Tianyu Pang, Chao Du, Taihang Hu, Zhijie Deng, Min Lin
Abstract: With the rapid progress of diffusion-based content generation, significant efforts are being made to unlearn harmful or copyrighted concepts from pretrained diffusion models (DMs) to prevent potential model misuse. However, it is observed that even when DMs are properly unlearned before release, malicious finetuning can compromise this process, causing DMs to relearn the unlearned concepts. This occurs partly because certain benign concepts (e.g., "skin") retained in DMs are related to the unlearned ones (e.g., "nudity"), facilitating their relearning via finetuning. To address this, we propose meta-unlearning on DMs. Intuitively, a meta-unlearned DM should behave like an unlearned DM when used as is; moreover, if the meta-unlearned DM undergoes malicious finetuning on unlearned concepts, the related benign concepts retained within it will be triggered to self-destruct, hindering the relearning of unlearned concepts. Our meta-unlearning framework is compatible with most existing unlearning methods, requiring only the addition of an easy-to-implement meta objective. We validate our approach through empirical experiments on meta-unlearning concepts from Stable Diffusion models (SD-v1-4 and SDXL), supported by extensive ablation studies. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/Meta-Unlearning.
Authors: Kunyun Wang, Shuo Yang, Jieru Zhao, Wenchao Ding, Quan Chen, Jingwen Leng, Minyi Guo
Abstract: Deep learning models have become pivotal in the field of video processing and is increasingly critical in practical applications such as autonomous driving and object detection. Although Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated their power, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) remain a highly efficient and high-performance choice for feature extraction and encoding. However, the intensive computational demands of convolution operations hinder its broader adoption as a video encoder. Given the inherent temporal continuity in video frames, changes between consecutive frames are minimal, allowing for the skipping of redundant computations. This technique, which we term as Diff Computation, presents two primary challenges. First, Diff Computation requires to cache intermediate feature maps to ensure the correctness of non-linear computations, leading to significant memory consumption. Second, the imbalance of sparsity among layers, introduced by Diff Computation, incurs accuracy degradation. To address these issues, we propose a memory-efficient scheduling method to eliminate memory overhead and an online adjustment mechanism to minimize accuracy degradation. We integrate these techniques into our framework, SparseTem, to seamlessly support various CNN-based video encoders. SparseTem achieves speedup of 1.79x for EfficientDet and 4.72x for CRNN, with minimal accuracy drop and no additional memory overhead. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that SparseTem sets a new state-of-the-art by effectively utilizing temporal continuity to accelerate CNN-based video encoders.
Authors: Kaiyu Song, Hanjiang Lai, Yan Pan, Kun Yue, Jian yin
Abstract: Training-free conditional generation based on flow matching aims to leverage pre-trained unconditional flow matching models to perform conditional generation without retraining. Recently, a successful training-free conditional generation approach incorporates conditions via posterior sampling, which relies on the availability of a score function in the unconditional diffusion model. However, flow matching models do not possess an explicit score function, rendering such a strategy inapplicable. Approximate posterior sampling for flow matching has been explored, but it is limited to linear inverse problems. In this paper, we propose Flow Matching-based Posterior Sampling (FMPS) to expand its application scope. We introduce a correction term by steering the velocity field. This correction term can be reformulated to incorporate a surrogate score function, thereby bridging the gap between flow matching models and score-based posterior sampling. Hence, FMPS enables the posterior sampling to be adjusted within the flow matching framework. Further, we propose two practical implementations of the correction mechanism: one aimed at improving generation quality, and the other focused on computational efficiency. Experimental results on diverse conditional generation tasks demonstrate that our method achieves superior generation quality compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches, validating the effectiveness and generality of FMPS.
Authors: Qihao Yuan, Kailai Li, Jiaming Zhang
Abstract: 3D visual grounding (3DVG) aims to locate objects in a 3D scene with natural language descriptions. Supervised methods have achieved decent accuracy, but have a closed vocabulary and limited language understanding ability. Zero-shot methods utilize large language models (LLMs) to handle natural language descriptions, where the LLM either produces grounding results directly or generates programs that compute results (symbolically). In this work, we propose a zero-shot method that reformulates the 3DVG task as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP), where the variables and constraints represent objects and their spatial relations, respectively. This allows a global symbolic reasoning of all relevant objects, producing grounding results of both the target and anchor objects. Moreover, we demonstrate the flexibility of our framework by handling negation- and counting-based queries with only minor extra coding efforts. Our system, Constraint Satisfaction Visual Grounding (CSVG), has been extensively evaluated on the public datasets ScanRefer and Nr3D datasets using only open-source LLMs. Results show the effectiveness of CSVG and superior grounding accuracy over current state-of-the-art zero-shot 3DVG methods with improvements of $+7.0\%$ (Acc@0.5 score) and $+11.2\%$ on the ScanRefer and Nr3D datasets, respectively. The code of our system is available at https://asig-x.github.io/csvg_web.
Authors: Ziyu Zhang, Binbin Huang, Hanqing Jiang, Liyang Zhou, Xiaojun Xiang, Shunhan Shen
Abstract: We propose Quadratic Gaussian Splatting (QGS), a novel representation that replaces static primitives with deformable quadric surfaces (e.g., ellipse, paraboloids) to capture intricate geometry. Unlike prior works that rely on Euclidean distance for primitive density modeling--a metric misaligned with surface geometry under deformation--QGS introduces geodesic distance-based density distributions. This innovation ensures that density weights adapt intrinsically to the primitive curvature, preserving consistency during shape changes (e.g., from planar disks to curved paraboloids). By solving geodesic distances in closed form on quadric surfaces, QGS enables surface-aware splatting, where a single primitive can represent complex curvature that previously required dozens of planar surfels, potentially reducing memory usage while maintaining efficient rendering via fast ray-quadric intersection. Experiments on DTU, Tanks and Temples, and MipNeRF360 datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art surface reconstruction, with QGS reducing geometric error (chamfer distance) by 33% over 2DGS and 27% over GOF on the DTU dataset. Crucially, QGS retains competitive appearance quality, bridging the gap between geometric precision and visual fidelity for applications like robotics and immersive reality.
Authors: Yogesh Kulkarni, Pooyan Fazli
Abstract: Recent advances in video-large language models (Video-LLMs) have led to significant progress in video understanding. Current preference optimization methods often rely on proprietary APIs or human-annotated captions to generate preference data (i.e., pairs of model outputs ranked by quality or alignment with human judgment), which is then used to train models for video-language alignment. This approach is both costly and labor-intensive. To address this limitation, we introduce VideoSAVi (Self-Aligned Video Language Model), a self-training pipeline that enables Video-LLMs to learn from video content without external supervision. Our approach includes a self-critiquing mechanism that identifies reasoning errors in the model's initial responses and generates improved alternatives, creating preference pairs directly from video content. VideoSAVi then applies Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to iteratively train the model using the preference data, thus enhancing its temporal and spatial reasoning for video understanding. Experiments show that VideoSAVi delivers significant improvements across multiple benchmarks, including a +4.2 percentage point gain on MVBench, +3.9 on PerceptionTest, and +6.8 on the challenging EgoSchema dataset compared to baseline models. Our model-agnostic approach is computationally efficient, requiring only 32 frames, offering a promising direction for self-aligned video understanding without reliance on external models or annotations.
Authors: Penghui Wen, Mengwei He, Patrick Filippi, Na Zhao, Feng Zhang, Thomas Francis Bishop, Zhiyong Wang, Kun Hu
Abstract: Accurate short-term precipitation forecasting is critical for weather-sensitive decision-making in agriculture, transportation, and disaster response. Existing deep learning approaches often struggle to balance global structural consistency with local detail preservation, especially under complex meteorological conditions. We propose DuoCast, a dual-diffusion framework that decomposes precipitation forecasting into low- and high-frequency components modeled in orthogonal latent subspaces. We theoretically prove that this frequency decomposition reduces prediction error compared to conventional single branch U-Net diffusion models. In DuoCast, the low-frequency model captures large-scale trends via convolutional encoders conditioned on weather front dynamics, while the high-frequency model refines fine-scale variability using a self-attention-based architecture. Experiments on four benchmark radar datasets show that DuoCast consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving superior accuracy in both spatial detail and temporal evolution.
Authors: Zhixiang Wang, Xingjun Ma, Yu-Gang Jiang
Abstract: Physical adversarial patches printed on clothing can enable individuals to evade person detectors, but most existing methods prioritize attack effectiveness over stealthiness, resulting in aesthetically unpleasing patches. While generative adversarial networks and diffusion models can produce more natural-looking patches, they often fail to balance stealthiness with attack effectiveness and lack flexibility for user customization. To address these limitations, we propose BadPatch, a novel diffusion-based framework for generating customizable and naturalistic adversarial patches. Our approach allows users to start from a reference image (rather than random noise) and incorporates masks to create patches of various shapes, not limited to squares. To preserve the original semantics during the diffusion process, we employ Null-text inversion to map random noise samples to a single input image and generate patches through Incomplete Diffusion Optimization (IDO). Our method achieves attack performance comparable to state-of-the-art non-naturalistic patches while maintaining a natural appearance. Using BadPatch, we construct AdvT-shirt-1K, the first physical adversarial T-shirt dataset comprising over a thousand images captured in diverse scenarios. AdvT-shirt-1K can serve as a useful dataset for training or testing future defense methods.
Authors: Yuci Liang, Xinheng Lyu, Wenting Chen, Meidan Ding, Jipeng Zhang, Xiangjian He, Song Wu, Xiaohan Xing, Sen Yang, Xiyue Wang, Linlin Shen
Abstract: Recent advancements in computational pathology have produced patch-level Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), but these models are limited by their inability to analyze whole slide images (WSIs) comprehensively and their tendency to bypass crucial morphological features that pathologists rely on for diagnosis. To address these challenges, we first introduce WSI-Bench, a large-scale morphology-aware benchmark containing 180k VQA pairs from 9,850 WSIs across 30 cancer types, designed to evaluate MLLMs' understanding of morphological characteristics crucial for accurate diagnosis. Building upon this benchmark, we present WSI-LLaVA, a novel framework for gigapixel WSI understanding that employs a three-stage training approach: WSI-text alignment, feature space alignment, and task-specific instruction tuning. To better assess model performance in pathological contexts, we develop two specialized WSI metrics: WSI-Precision and WSI-Relevance. Experimental results demonstrate that WSI-LLaVA outperforms existing models across all capability dimensions, with a significant improvement in morphological analysis, establishing a clear correlation between morphological understanding and diagnostic accuracy.
Authors: Donald Shenaj, Ondrej Bohdal, Mete Ozay, Pietro Zanuttigh, Umberto Michieli
Abstract: Recent advancements in image generation models have enabled personalized image creation with both user-defined subjects (content) and styles. Prior works achieved personalization by merging corresponding low-rank adapters (LoRAs) through optimization-based methods, which are computationally demanding and unsuitable for real-time use on resource-constrained devices like smartphones. To address this, we introduce LoRA$.$rar, a method that not only improves image quality but also achieves a remarkable speedup of over $4000\times$ in the merging process. We collect a dataset of style and subject LoRAs and pre-train a hypernetwork on a diverse set of content-style LoRA pairs, learning an efficient merging strategy that generalizes to new, unseen content-style pairs, enabling fast, high-quality personalization. Moreover, we identify limitations in existing evaluation metrics for content-style quality and propose a new protocol using multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for more accurate assessment. Our method significantly outperforms the current state of the art in both content and style fidelity, as validated by MLLM assessments and human evaluations.
Authors: Ruida Zhang, Chengxi Li, Chenyangguang Zhang, Xingyu Liu, Haili Yuan, Yanyan Li, Xiangyang Ji, Gim Hee Lee
Abstract: Realistic scene reconstruction in driving scenarios poses significant challenges due to fast-moving objects. Most existing methods rely on labor-intensive manual labeling of object poses to reconstruct dynamic objects in canonical space and move them based on these poses during rendering. While some approaches attempt to use 3D object trackers to replace manual annotations, the limited generalization of 3D trackers -- caused by the scarcity of large-scale 3D datasets -- results in inferior reconstructions in real-world settings. In contrast, 2D foundation models demonstrate strong generalization capabilities. To eliminate the reliance on 3D trackers and enhance robustness across diverse environments, we propose a stable object tracking module by leveraging associations from 2D deep trackers within a 3D object fusion strategy. We address inevitable tracking errors by further introducing a motion learning strategy in an implicit feature space that autonomously corrects trajectory errors and recovers missed detections. Experimental results on Waymo-NOTR and KITTI show that our method outperforms existing approaches. Our code will be made publicly available.
Authors: Qiao Feng, Yuanwang Yang, Yebin Liu, Yu-Kun Lai, Jingyu Yang, Kun Li
Abstract: We introduce FOF-X for real-time reconstruction of detailed human geometry from a single image. Balancing real-time speed against high-quality results is a persistent challenge, mainly due to the high computational demands of existing 3D representations. To address this, we propose Fourier Occupancy Field (FOF), an efficient 3D representation by learning the Fourier series. The core of FOF is to factorize a 3D occupancy field into a 2D vector field, retaining topology and spatial relationships within the 3D domain while facilitating compatibility with 2D convolutional neural networks. Such a representation bridges the gap between 3D and 2D domains, enabling the integration of human parametric models as priors and enhancing the reconstruction robustness. Based on FOF, we design a new reconstruction framework, FOF-X, to avoid the performance degradation caused by texture and lighting. This enables our real-time reconstruction system to better handle the domain gap between training images and real images. Additionally, in FOF-X, we enhance the inter-conversion algorithms between FOF and mesh representations with a Laplacian constraint and an automaton-based discontinuity matcher, improving both quality and robustness. We validate the strengths of our approach on different datasets and real-captured data, where FOF-X achieves new state-of-the-art results. The code has already been released for research purposes at https://cic.tju.edu.cn/faculty/likun/projects/FOFX/index.html.
URLs: https://cic.tju.edu.cn/faculty/likun/projects/FOFX/index.html.
Authors: Yunheng Li, Yuxuan Li, Quansheng Zeng, Wenhai Wang, Qibin Hou, Ming-Ming Cheng
Abstract: Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated impressive zero-shot recognition capability, but still underperform in dense prediction tasks. Self-distillation recently is emerging as a promising approach for fine-tuning VLMs to better adapt to local regions without requiring extensive annotations. However, previous state-of-the-art approaches often suffer from significant `foreground bias', where models tend to wrongly identify background regions as foreground objects. To alleviate this issue, we propose DenseVLM, a framework designed to learn unbiased region-language alignment from powerful pre-trained VLM representations. To alleviate this issue, we propose DenseVLM, a framework designed to learn unbiased region-language alignment from powerful pre-trained VLM representations. DenseVLM leverages the pre-trained VLM to retrieve categories for unlabeled regions and then decouples the interference between foreground and background features. We show that DenseVLM can directly replace the original VLM in open-vocabulary object detection and image segmentation methods, leading to notable performance improvements. Furthermore, it exhibits promising zero-shot scalability when training on more extensive and diverse datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/HVision-NKU/DenseVLM.
Authors: Zhuqiang Lu, Zhenfei Yin, Mengwei He, Zhihui Wang, Zicheng Liu, Zhiyong Wang, Kun Hu
Abstract: Recently, Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) integrated with vision encoders have shown promising performance in vision understanding. The key of VLLMs is to encode visual content into sequences of visual tokens, enabling VLLMs to simultaneously process both visual and textual content. However, understanding videos, especially long videos, remain a challenge to VLLMs as the number of visual tokens grows rapidly when encoding videos, resulting in the risk of exceeding the context window of VLLMs and introducing heavy computation burden. To restrict the number of visual tokens, existing VLLMs either: (1) uniformly downsample videos into a fixed number of frames or (2) reducing the number of visual tokens encoded from each frame. We argue the former solution neglects the rich temporal cue in videos and the later overlooks the spatial details in each frame. In this work, we present Balanced-VLLM (B-VLLM): a novel VLLM framework that aims to effectively leverage task relevant spatio-temporal cues while restricting the number of visual tokens under the VLLM context window length. At the core of our method, we devise a text-conditioned adaptive frame selection module to identify frames relevant to the visual understanding task. The selected frames are then de-duplicated using a temporal frame token merging technique. The visual tokens of the selected frames are processed through a spatial token sampling module and an optional spatial token merging strategy to achieve precise control over the token count. Experimental results show that B-VLLM is effective in balancing the number of frames and visual tokens in video understanding, yielding superior performance on various video understanding benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhuqiangLu/B-VLLM.
Authors: Xuying Zhang, Yutong Liu, Yangguang Li, Renrui Zhang, Yufei Liu, Kai Wang, Wanli Ouyang, Zhiwei Xiong, Peng Gao, Qibin Hou, Ming-Ming Cheng
Abstract: We present TAR3D, a novel framework that consists of a 3D-aware Vector Quantized-Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE) and a Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) to generate high-quality 3D assets. The core insight of this work is to migrate the multimodal unification and promising learning capabilities of the next-token prediction paradigm to conditional 3D object generation. To achieve this, the 3D VQ-VAE first encodes a wide range of 3D shapes into a compact triplane latent space and utilizes a set of discrete representations from a trainable codebook to reconstruct fine-grained geometries under the supervision of query point occupancy. Then, the 3D GPT, equipped with a custom triplane position embedding called TriPE, predicts the codebook index sequence with prefilling prompt tokens in an autoregressive manner so that the composition of 3D geometries can be modeled part by part. Extensive experiments on ShapeNet and Objaverse demonstrate that TAR3D can achieve superior generation quality over existing methods in text-to-3D and image-to-3D tasks
Authors: Seojeong Park, Jiho Choi, Kyungjune Baek, Hyunjung Shim
Abstract: Video Moment Retrieval (MR) aims to localize moments within a video based on a given natural language query. Given the prevalent use of platforms like YouTube for information retrieval, the demand for MR techniques is significantly growing. Recent DETR-based models have made notable advances in performance but still struggle with accurately localizing short moments. Through data analysis, we identified limited feature diversity in short moments, which motivated the development of MomentMix. MomentMix employs two augmentation strategies: ForegroundMix and BackgroundMix, each enhancing the feature representations of the foreground and background, respectively. Additionally, our analysis of prediction bias revealed that short moments particularly struggle with accurately predicting their center positions of moments. To address this, we propose a Length-Aware Decoder, which conditions length through a novel bipartite matching process. Our extensive studies demonstrate the efficacy of our length-aware approach, especially in localizing short moments, leading to improved overall performance. Our method surpasses state-of-the-art DETR-based methods on benchmark datasets, achieving the highest R1 and mAP on QVHighlights and the highest R1@0.7 on TACoS and Charades-STA (such as a 2.46% gain in R1@0.7 and a 2.57% gain in mAP average for QVHighlights). The code is available at https://github.com/sjpark5800/LA-DETR.
Authors: Xuyang Liu, Ziming Wang, Junjie Chen, Yuhang Han, Yingyao Wang, Jiale Yuan, Jun Song, Linfeng Zhang, Siteng Huang, Honggang Chen
Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) excel at visual understanding, but face efficiency challenges due to quadratic complexity in processing long multi-modal contexts. While token compression can reduce computational costs, existing approaches are designed for single-view LVLMs and fail to consider the unique multi-view characteristics of high-resolution LVLMs with dynamic cropping. Existing methods treat all tokens uniformly, but our analysis reveals that global thumbnails can naturally guide the compression of local crops by providing holistic context for informativeness evaluation. In this paper, we first analyze dynamic cropping strategy, revealing both the complementary nature between thumbnails and crops, and the distinctive characteristics across different crops. Based on our observations, we propose "Global Compression Commander" (GlobalCom$^2$), a novel plug-and-play token compression framework for HR-LVLMs. GlobalCom$^2$ leverages thumbnail as the "commander" to guide the compression of local crops, adaptively preserving informative details while eliminating redundancy. Extensive experiments show that GlobalCom$^2$ maintains over 90% performance while compressing 90% visual tokens, reducing FLOPs and peak memory to 9.1% and 60%. Our code is available at https://github.com/xuyang-liu16/GlobalCom2.
Authors: Yunlong Tang, Junjia Guo, Pinxin Liu, Zhiyuan Wang, Hang Hua, Jia-Xing Zhong, Yunzhong Xiao, Chao Huang, Luchuan Song, Susan Liang, Yizhi Song, Liu He, Jing Bi, Mingqian Feng, Xinyang Li, Zeliang Zhang, Chenliang Xu
Abstract: Traditional Celluloid (Cel) Animation production pipeline encompasses multiple essential steps, including storyboarding, layout design, keyframe animation, inbetweening, and colorization, which demand substantial manual effort, technical expertise, and significant time investment. These challenges have historically impeded the efficiency and scalability of Cel-Animation production. The rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), encompassing large language models, multimodal models, and diffusion models, offers innovative solutions by automating tasks such as inbetween frame generation, colorization, and storyboard creation. This survey explores how GenAI integration is revolutionizing traditional animation workflows by lowering technical barriers, broadening accessibility for a wider range of creators through tools like AniDoc, ToonCrafter, and AniSora, and enabling artists to focus more on creative expression and artistic innovation. Despite its potential, challenges like visual consistency, stylistic coherence, and ethical considerations persist. Additionally, this paper explores future directions and advancements in AI-assisted animation. For further exploration and resources, please visit our GitHub repository: https://github.com/yunlong10/Awesome-AI4Animation
Authors: Hyeonwoo Kim, Sangwon Baik, Hanbyul Joo
Abstract: Modeling how humans interact with objects is crucial for AI to effectively assist or mimic human behaviors. Existing studies for learning such ability primarily focus on static human-object interaction (HOI) patterns, such as contact and spatial relationships, while dynamic HOI patterns, capturing the movement of humans and objects over time, remain relatively underexplored. In this paper, we present a novel framework for learning Dynamic Affordance across various target object categories. To address the scarcity of 4D HOI datasets, our method learns the 3D dynamic affordance from synthetically generated 4D HOI samples. Specifically, we propose a pipeline that first generates 2D HOI videos from a given 3D target object using a pre-trained video diffusion model, then lifts them into 3D to generate 4D HOI samples. Leveraging these synthesized 4D HOI samples, we train DAViD, our generative 4D human-object interaction model, which is composed of two key components: (1) a human motion diffusion model (MDM) with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) module to fine-tune a pre-trained MDM to learn the HOI motion concepts from limited HOI motion samples, (2) a motion diffusion model for 4D object poses conditioned by produced human interaction motions. Interestingly, DAViD can integrate newly learned HOI motion concepts with pre-trained human motions to create novel HOI motions, even for multiple HOI motion concepts, demonstrating the advantage of our pipeline with LoRA in integrating dynamic HOI concepts. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that DAViD outperforms baselines in synthesizing HOI motion.
Authors: Hung Nguyen, Blark Runfa Li, Truong Nguyen
Abstract: Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) has achieved superior performance in novel view synthesis and 3D scene representation, but its practical applications are hindered by slow convergence and reliance on dense training views. To this end, we present DWTNeRF, a unified framework based on Instant-NGP's fast-training hash encoding. It is coupled with regularization terms designed for few-shot NeRF, which operates on sparse training views. Our DWTNeRF additionally includes a novel Discrete Wavelet loss that allows explicit prioritization of low frequencies directly in the training objective, reducing few-shot NeRF's overfitting on high frequencies in earlier training stages. We also introduce a model-based approach, based on multi-head attention, that is compatible with INGP, which are sensitive to architectural changes. On the 3-shot LLFF benchmark, DWTNeRF outperforms Vanilla INGP by 15.07% in PSNR, 24.45% in SSIM and 36.30% in LPIPS. Our approach encourages a re-thinking of current few-shot approaches for fast-converging implicit representations like INGP or 3DGS.
Authors: Michael Birsak, John Femiani, Biao Zhang, Peter Wonka
Abstract: Assigning realistic materials to 3D models remains a significant challenge in computer graphics. We propose MatCLIP, a novel method that extracts shape- and lighting-insensitive descriptors of Physically Based Rendering (PBR) materials to assign plausible textures to 3D objects based on images, such as the output of Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) or photographs. Matching PBR materials to static images is challenging because the PBR representation captures the dynamic appearance of materials under varying viewing angles, shapes, and lighting conditions. By extending an Alpha-CLIP-based model on material renderings across diverse shapes and lighting, and encoding multiple viewing conditions for PBR materials, our approach generates descriptors that bridge the domains of PBR representations with photographs or renderings, including LDM outputs. This enables consistent material assignments without requiring explicit knowledge of material relationships between different parts of an object. MatCLIP achieves a top-1 classification accuracy of 76.6%, outperforming state-of-the-art methods such as PhotoShape and MatAtlas by over 15 percentage points on publicly available datasets. Our method can be used to construct material assignments for 3D shape datasets such as ShapeNet, 3DCoMPaT++, and Objaverse. All code and data will be released.
Authors: JiangYong Yu, Sifan Zhou, Dawei Yang, Shuo Wang, Shuoyu Li, Xing Hu, Chen Xu, Zukang Xu, Changyong Shu, Zhihang Yuan
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have garnered widespread attention due to their ability to understand multimodal input. However, their large parameter sizes and substantial computational demands severely hinder their practical deployment and application.While quantization is an effective way to reduce model size and inference latency, its application to MLLMs remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose MQuant, a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework designed to tackle the unique challenges of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Conventional quantization often struggles with MLLMs because of (a) high inference latency from large visual token counts, (b) distributional disparities between visual and textual tokens, and (c) extreme outliers introduced by Hadamard-based transformations. To address these issues, MQuant introduces: Modality-Specific Static Quantization (MSQ), assigning distinct static scales for visual vs. textual tokens; Attention-Invariant Flexible Switching (AIFS), reordering tokens to preserve casual attention while eliminating expensive token-wise scale computations; Rotation Magnitude Suppression (RMS), mitigating weight outliers arising from online Hadamard rotations. On five mainstream MLLMs (including Qwen-VL, MiniCPM-V, CogVLM2), MQuant under W4A8 achieves near-floating-point accuracy (<1% degradation) while reducing inference latency by up to 30%, significantly outperforming existing PTQ baselines. Our MQuant effectively bridges the gap for efficient and accurate MLLMs inference in resource-constrained devices. Code has been released in https://github.com/StiphyJay/MQuant.
Authors: Yiren Song, Danze Chen, Mike Zheng Shou
Abstract: Generating cognitive-aligned layered SVGs remains challenging due to existing methods' tendencies toward either oversimplified single-layer outputs or optimization-induced shape redundancies. We propose LayerTracer, a diffusion transformer based framework that bridges this gap by learning designers' layered SVG creation processes from a novel dataset of sequential design operations. Our approach operates in two phases: First, a text-conditioned DiT generates multi-phase rasterized construction blueprints that simulate human design workflows. Second, layer-wise vectorization with path deduplication produces clean, editable SVGs. For image vectorization, we introduce a conditional diffusion mechanism that encodes reference images into latent tokens, guiding hierarchical reconstruction while preserving structural integrity. Extensive experiments demonstrate LayerTracer's superior performance against optimization-based and neural baselines in both generation quality and editability, effectively aligning AI-generated vectors with professional design cognition.
Authors: Alistair Weld, Luke Dixon, Alfie Roddan, Giulio Anichini, Sophie Camp, Stamatia Giannarou
Abstract: Purpose: An investigation of the challenge of annotating discrete segmentations of brain tumours in ultrasound, with a focus on the issue of aleatoric uncertainty along the tumour margin, particularly for diffuse tumours. A segmentation protocol and method is proposed that incorporates this margin-related uncertainty while minimising the interobserver variance through reduced subjectivity, thereby diminishing annotator epistemic uncertainty. Approach: A sparse confidence method for annotation is proposed, based on a protocol designed using computer vision and radiology theory. Results: Output annotations using the proposed method are compared with the corresponding professional discrete annotation variance between the observers. A linear relationship was measured within the tumour margin region, with a Pearson correlation of 0.8. The downstream application was explored, comparing training using confidence annotations as soft labels with using the best discrete annotations as hard labels. In all evaluation folds, the Brier score was superior for the soft-label trained network. Conclusion: A formal framework was constructed to demonstrate the infeasibility of discrete annotation of brain tumours in B-mode ultrasound. Subsequently, a method for sparse confidence-based annotation is proposed and evaluated. Keywords: Brain tumours, ultrasound, confidence, annotation.
Authors: Simon Boeder, Fabian Gigengack, Benjamin Risse
Abstract: Occupancy estimation has become a prominent task in 3D computer vision, particularly within the autonomous driving community. In this paper, we present a novel approach to occupancy estimation, termed GaussianFlowOcc, which is inspired by Gaussian Splatting and replaces traditional dense voxel grids with a sparse 3D Gaussian representation. Our efficient model architecture based on a Gaussian Transformer significantly reduces computational and memory requirements by eliminating the need for expensive 3D convolutions used with inefficient voxel-based representations that predominantly represent empty 3D spaces. GaussianFlowOcc effectively captures scene dynamics by estimating temporal flow for each Gaussian during the overall network training process, offering a straightforward solution to a complex problem that is often neglected by existing methods. Moreover, GaussianFlowOcc is designed for scalability, as it employs weak supervision and does not require costly dense 3D voxel annotations based on additional data (e.g., LiDAR). Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that GaussianFlowOcc significantly outperforms all previous methods for weakly supervised occupancy estimation on the nuScenes dataset while featuring an inference speed that is 50 times faster than current SOTA.
Authors: Ojonugwa Oluwafemi Ejiga Peter, Md Mahmudur Rahman, Fahmi Khalifa
Abstract: The MEDVQA-GI challenge addresses the integration of AI-driven text-to-image generative models in medical diagnostics, aiming to enhance diagnostic capabilities through synthetic image generation. Existing methods primarily focus on static image analysis and lack the dynamic generation of medical imagery from textual descriptions. This study intends to partially close this gap by introducing a novel approach based on fine-tuned generative models to generate dynamic, scalable, and precise images from textual descriptions. Particularly, our system integrates fine-tuned Stable Diffusion and DreamBooth models, as well as Low-Rank Adaptation (LORA), to generate high-fidelity medical images. The problem is around two sub-tasks namely: image synthesis (IS) and optimal prompt production (OPG). The former creates medical images via verbal prompts, whereas the latter provides prompts that produce high-quality images in specified categories. The study emphasizes the limitations of traditional medical image generation methods, such as hand sketching, constrained datasets, static procedures, and generic models. Our evaluation measures showed that Stable Diffusion surpasses CLIP and DreamBooth + LORA in terms of producing high-quality, diversified images. Specifically, Stable Diffusion had the lowest Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) scores (0.099 for single center, 0.064 for multi-center, and 0.067 for combined), indicating higher image quality. Furthermore, it had the highest average Inception Score (2.327 across all datasets), indicating exceptional diversity and quality. This advances the field of AI-powered medical diagnosis. Future research will concentrate on model refining, dataset augmentation, and ethical considerations for efficiently implementing these advances into clinical practice
Authors: Jian Ma, Qirong Peng, Xu Guo, Chen Chen, Haonan Lu, Zhenyu Yang
Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) models are well known for their ability to produce highly realistic images, while multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are renowned for their proficiency in understanding and integrating multiple modalities. However, currently there is no straightforward and efficient framework to transfer the multimodal comprehension abilities of MLLMs to T2I models to enable them to understand multimodal inputs. In this paper, we propose the X2I framework, which endows Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models with the capability to comprehend various modalities, including multilingual text, screenshot documents, images, videos, and audio. X2I is trained using merely 100K English corpus with 160 GPU hours. Building on the DiT teacher model, we adopt an innovative distillation method to extract the inference capabilities of the teacher model and design a lightweight AlignNet structure to serve as an intermediate bridge. Compared to the teacher model, X2I shows a decrease in performance degradation of less than 1\% while gaining various multimodal understanding abilities, including multilingual to image, image to image, image-text to image, video to image, audio to image, and utilizing creative fusion to enhance imagery. Furthermore, it is applicable for LoRA training in the context of image-text to image generation, filling a void in the industry in this area. We further design a simple LightControl to enhance the fidelity of instructional image editing. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, multifunctionality, and transferability of our X2I. The open-source code and checkpoints for X2I can be found at the following link: https://github.com/OPPO-Mente-Lab/X2I.
Authors: Huaqi Tao, Bingxi Liu, Calvin Chen, Tingjun Huang, He Li, Jinqiang Cui, Hong Zhang
Abstract: Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a crucial capability for long-term autonomous robots, enabling them to identify previously visited locations using visual information. However, existing methods remain limited in indoor settings due to the highly repetitive structures inherent in such environments. We observe that scene texts frequently appear in indoor spaces and can help distinguish visually similar but different places. This inspires us to propose TextInPlace, a simple yet effective VPR framework that integrates Scene Text Spotting (STS) to mitigate visual perceptual ambiguity in repetitive indoor environments. Specifically, TextInPlace adopts a dual-branch architecture within a local parameter sharing network. The VPR branch employs attention-based aggregation to extract global descriptors for coarse-grained retrieval, while the STS branch utilizes a bridging text spotter to detect and recognize scene texts. Finally, the discriminative texts are filtered to compute text similarity and re-rank the top-K retrieved images. To bridge the gap between current text-based repetitive indoor scene datasets and the typical scenarios encountered in robot navigation, we establish an indoor VPR benchmark dataset, called Maze-with-Text. Extensive experiments on both custom and public datasets demonstrate that TextInPlace achieves superior performance over existing methods that rely solely on appearance information. The dataset, code, and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/HqiTao/TextInPlace.
Authors: Jiacheng Liu, Chang Zou, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Junjie Chen, Linfeng Zhang
Abstract: Diffusion Transformers (DiT) have revolutionized high-fidelity image and video synthesis, yet their computational demands remain prohibitive for real-time applications. To solve this problem, feature caching has been proposed to accelerate diffusion models by caching the features in the previous timesteps and then reusing them in the following timesteps. However, at timesteps with significant intervals, the feature similarity in diffusion models decreases substantially, leading to a pronounced increase in errors introduced by feature caching, significantly harming the generation quality. To solve this problem, we propose TaylorSeer, which firstly shows that features of diffusion models at future timesteps can be predicted based on their values at previous timesteps. Based on the fact that features change slowly and continuously across timesteps, TaylorSeer employs a differential method to approximate the higher-order derivatives of features and predict features in future timesteps with Taylor series expansion. Extensive experiments demonstrate its significant effectiveness in both image and video synthesis, especially in high acceleration ratios. For instance, it achieves an almost lossless acceleration of 4.99$\times$ on FLUX and 5.00$\times$ on HunyuanVideo without additional training. On DiT, it achieves $3.41$ lower FID compared with previous SOTA at $4.53$$\times$ acceleration. %Our code is provided in the supplementary materials and will be made publicly available on GitHub. Our codes have been released in Github:https://github.com/Shenyi-Z/TaylorSeer
Authors: Juntian Du, Yuan Sun, Zhihu Zhou, Pinyi Chen, Runzhe Zhang, Keji Mao
Abstract: Recently, the Mamba architecture has demonstrated significant successes in various computer vision tasks, such as classification and segmentation. However, its application to optical flow estimation remains unexplored. In this paper, we introduce MambaFlow, a novel framework designed to leverage the high accuracy and efficiency of the Mamba architecture for capturing locally correlated features while preserving global information in end-to-end optical flow estimation. To our knowledge, MambaFlow is the first architecture centered around the Mamba design tailored specifically for optical flow estimation. It comprises two key components: (1) PolyMamba, which enhances feature representation through a dual-Mamba architecture, incorporating a Self-Mamba module for intra-token modeling and a Cross-Mamba module for inter-modality interaction, enabling both deep contextualization and effective feature fusion; and (2) PulseMamba, which leverages an Attention Guidance Aggregator (AGA) to adaptively integrate features with dynamically learned weights in contrast to naive concatenation, and then employs the intrinsic recurrent mechanism of Mamba to perform autoregressive flow decoding, facilitating efficient flow information dissemination. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MambaFlow achieves remarkable results comparable to mainstream methods on benchmark datasets. Compared to SEA-RAFT, MambaFlow attains higher accuracy on the Sintel benchmark, demonstrating stronger potential for real-world deployment on resource-constrained devices. The source code will be made publicly available upon acceptance of the paper.
Authors: Xing Xie, Jiawei Liu, Ziyue Lin, Huijie Fan, Zhi Han, Yandong Tang, Liangqiong Qu
Abstract: We present Autoregressive Representation Alignment (ARRA), a new training framework that unlocks global-coherent text-to-image generation in autoregressive LLMs without architectural modifications. Different from prior works that require complex architectural redesigns, ARRA aligns LLM's hidden states with visual representations from external visual foundational models via a global visual alignment loss and a hybrid token, [object Object]. This token enforces dual constraints: local next-token prediction and global semantic distillation, enabling LLMs to implicitly learn spatial and contextual coherence while retaining their original autoregressive paradigm. Extensive experiments validate ARRA's plug-and-play versatility. When training T2I LLMs from scratch, ARRA reduces FID by 16.6% (ImageNet), 12.0% (LAION-COCO) for autoregressive LLMs like LlamaGen, without modifying original architecture and inference mechanism. For training from text-generation-only LLMs, ARRA reduces FID by 25.5% (MIMIC-CXR), 8.8% (DeepEyeNet) for advanced LLMs like Chameleon. For domain adaptation, ARRA aligns general-purpose LLMs with specialized models (e.g., BioMedCLIP), achieving an 18.6% FID reduction over direct fine-tuning on medical imaging (MIMIC-CXR). These results demonstrate that training objective redesign, rather than architectural modifications, can resolve cross-modal global coherence challenges. ARRA offers a complementary paradigm for advancing autoregressive models. The code is available at https://github.com/xiexing0916/ARRA.
Authors: Zhongwei Chen, Zhao-Xu Yang, Hai-Jun Rong, Jiawei Lang, Guoqi Li
Abstract: Traditional supervised drone-view geo-localization (DVGL) methods heavily depend on paired training data and encounter difficulties in learning cross-view correlations from unpaired data. Moreover, when deployed in a new domain, these methods require obtaining the new paired data and subsequent retraining for model adaptation, which significantly increases computational overhead. Existing unsupervised methods have enabled to generate pseudo-labels based on cross-view similarity to infer the pairing relationships. However, geographical similarity and spatial continuity often cause visually analogous features at different geographical locations. The feature confusion compromises the reliability of pseudo-label generation, where incorrect pseudo-labels drive negative optimization. Given these challenges inherent in both supervised and unsupervised DVGL methods, we propose a novel cross-domain invariant knowledge transfer network (CDIKTNet) with limited supervision, whose architecture consists of a cross-domain invariance sub-network (CDIS) and a cross-domain transfer sub-network (CDTS). This architecture facilitates a closed-loop framework for invariance feature learning and knowledge transfer. The CDIS is designed to learn cross-view structural and spatial invariance from a small amount of paired data that serves as prior knowledge. It endows the shared feature space of unpaired data with similar implicit cross-view correlations at initialization, which alleviates feature confusion. Based on this, the CDTS employs dual-path contrastive learning to further optimize each subspace while preserving consistency in a shared feature space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CDIKTNet achieves state-of-the-art performance under full supervision compared with those supervised methods, and further surpasses existing unsupervised methods in both few-shot and cross-domain initialization.
Authors: Dennis Rotondi, Fabio Scaparro, Hermann Blum, Kai O. Arras
Abstract: The concept of 3D scene graphs is increasingly recognized as a powerful semantic and hierarchical representation of the environment. Current approaches often address this at a coarse, object-level resolution. In contrast, our goal is to develop a representation that enables robots to directly interact with their environment by identifying both the location of functional interactive elements and how these can be used. To achieve this, we focus on detecting and storing objects at a finer resolution, focusing on affordance-relevant parts. The primary challenge lies in the scarcity of data that extends beyond instance-level detection and the inherent difficulty of capturing detailed object features using robotic sensors. We leverage currently available 3D resources to generate 2D data and train a detector, which is then used to augment the standard 3D scene graph generation pipeline. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that our approach achieves functional element segmentation comparable to state-of-the-art 3D models and that our augmentation enables task-driven affordance grounding with higher accuracy than the current solutions. See our project page at https://fungraph.github.io.
Authors: Yeonjin Chang, Erqun Dong, Seunghyeon Seo, Nojun Kwak, Kwang Moo Yi
Abstract: While the quality of novel-view images has improved dramatically with 3D Gaussian Splatting, extracting specific objects from scenes remains challenging. Isolating individual 3D Gaussian primitives for each object and handling occlusions in scenes remains far from being solved. We propose a novel object extraction method based on two key principles: (1) object-centric reconstruction through removal of irrelevant primitives; and (2) leveraging generative inpainting to compensate for missing observations caused by occlusions. For pruning, we propose to remove irrelevant Gaussians by looking into how close they are to its K-nearest neighbors and removing those that are statistical outliers. Importantly, these distances must take into account the actual spatial extent they cover -- we thus propose to use Wasserstein distances. For inpainting, we employ an off-the-shelf diffusion-based inpainter combined with occlusion reasoning, utilizing the 3D representation of the entire scene. Our findings highlight the crucial synergy between proper pruning and inpainting, both of which significantly enhance extraction performance. We evaluate our method on a standard real-world dataset and introduce a synthetic dataset for quantitative analysis. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art, demonstrating its effectiveness in object extraction from complex scenes.
Authors: Brun\'o B. Englert, Gijs Dubbelman
Abstract: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) enables strong generalization from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, often with limited data. In parallel, Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) pretrained at scale without labels have also shown impressive downstream performance and generalization. This motivates us to explore how UDA can best leverage VFMs. Prior work (VFM-UDA) demonstrated that replacing a standard ImageNet-pretrained encoder with a VFM improves generalization. However, it also showed that commonly used feature distance losses harm performance when applied to VFMs. Additionally, VFM-UDA does not incorporate multi-scale inductive biases, which are known to improve semantic segmentation. Building on these insights, we propose VFM-UDA++, which (1) investigates the role of multi-scale features, (2) adapts feature distance loss to be compatible with ViT-based VFMs and (3) evaluates how UDA benefits from increased synthetic source and real target data. By addressing these questions, we can improve performance on the standard GTA5 $\rightarrow$ Cityscapes benchmark by +1.4 mIoU. While prior non-VFM UDA methods did not scale with more data, VFM-UDA++ shows consistent improvement and achieves a further +2.4 mIoU gain when scaling the data, demonstrating that VFM-based UDA continues to benefit from increased data availability.
Authors: Xuying Zhang, Yupeng Zhou, Kai Wang, Yikai Wang, Zhen Li, Shaohui Jiao, Daquan Zhou, Qibin Hou, Ming-Ming Cheng
Abstract: Novel view synthesis (NVS) is a cornerstone for image-to-3d creation. However, existing works still struggle to maintain consistency between the generated views and the input views, especially when there is a significant camera pose difference, leading to poor-quality 3D geometries and textures. We attribute this issue to their treatment of all target views with equal priority according to our empirical observation that the target views closer to the input views exhibit higher fidelity. With this inspiration, we propose AR-1-to-3, a novel next-view prediction paradigm based on diffusion models that first generates views close to the input views, which are then utilized as contextual information to progressively synthesize farther views. To encode the generated view subsequences as local and global conditions for the next-view prediction, we accordingly develop a stacked local feature encoding strategy (Stacked-LE) and an LSTM-based global feature encoding strategy (LSTM-GE). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves the consistency between the generated views and the input views, producing high-fidelity 3D assets.
Authors: Philipp Becker, Abhinav Mehrotra, Ruchika Chavhan, Malcolm Chadwick, Luca Morreale, Mehdi Noroozi, Alberto Gil Ramos, Sourav Bhattacharya
Abstract: Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have emerged as a leading architecture for text-to-image synthesis, producing high-quality and photorealistic images. However, the quadratic scaling properties of the attention in DiTs hinder image generation with higher resolution or on devices with limited resources. This work introduces an efficient diffusion transformer (EDiT) to alleviate these efficiency bottlenecks in conventional DiTs and Multimodal DiTs (MM-DiTs). First, we present a novel linear compressed attention method that uses a multi-layer convolutional network to modulate queries with local information while keys and values are aggregated spatially. Second, we formulate a hybrid attention scheme for multimodal inputs that combines linear attention for image-to-image interactions and standard scaled dot-product attention for interactions involving prompts. Merging these two approaches leads to an expressive, linear-time Multimodal Efficient Diffusion Transformer (MM-EDiT). We demonstrate the effectiveness of the EDiT and MM-EDiT architectures by integrating them into PixArt-Sigma (conventional DiT) and Stable Diffusion 3.5-Medium (MM-DiT), achieving up to 2.2x speedup with comparable image quality after distillation.
Authors: Bhishma Dedhia, David Bourgin, Krishna Kumar Singh, Yuheng Li, Yan Kang, Zhan Xu, Niraj K. Jha, Yuchen Liu
Abstract: Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) can generate short photorealistic videos, yet directly training and sampling longer videos with full attention across the video remains computationally challenging. Alternative methods break long videos down into sequential generation of short video segments, requiring multiple sampling chain iterations and specialized consistency modules. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a new paradigm called Video Interface Networks (VINs), which augment DiTs with an abstraction module to enable parallel inference of video chunks. At each diffusion step, VINs encode global semantics from the noisy input of local chunks and the encoded representations, in turn, guide DiTs in denoising chunks in parallel. The coupling of VIN and DiT is learned end-to-end on the denoising objective. Further, the VIN architecture maintains fixed-size encoding tokens that encode the input via a single cross-attention step. Disentangling the encoding tokens from the input thus enables VIN to scale to long videos and learn essential semantics. Experiments on VBench demonstrate that VINs surpass existing chunk-based methods in preserving background consistency and subject coherence. We then show via an optical flow analysis that our approach attains state-of-the-art motion smoothness while using 25-40% fewer FLOPs than full generation. Finally, human raters favorably assessed the overall video quality and temporal consistency of our method in a user study.
Authors: Sangwon Baik, Hyeonwoo Kim, Hanbyul Joo
Abstract: We present a method for learning 3D spatial relationships between object pairs, referred to as object-object spatial relationships (OOR), by leveraging synthetically generated 3D samples from pre-trained 2D diffusion models. We hypothesize that images synthesized by 2D diffusion models inherently capture realistic OOR cues, enabling efficient collection of a 3D dataset to learn OOR for various unbounded object categories. Our approach synthesizes diverse images that capture plausible OOR cues, which we then uplift into 3D samples. Leveraging our diverse collection of 3D samples for the object pairs, we train a score-based OOR diffusion model to learn the distribution of their relative spatial relationships. Additionally, we extend our pairwise OOR to multi-object OOR by enforcing consistency across pairwise relations and preventing object collisions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the robustness of our method across various object-object spatial relationships, along with its applicability to 3D scene arrangement tasks and human motion synthesis using our OOR diffusion model.
Authors: Vida Adeli, Soroush Mehraban, Majid Mirmehdi, Alan Whone, Benjamin Filtjens, Amirhossein Dadashzadeh, Alfonso Fasano, Andrea Iaboni, Babak Taati
Abstract: Gait analysis is crucial for the diagnosis and monitoring of movement disorders like Parkinson's Disease. While computer vision models have shown potential for objectively evaluating parkinsonian gait, their effectiveness is limited by scarce clinical datasets and the challenge of collecting large and well-labelled data, impacting model accuracy and risk of bias. To address these gaps, we propose GAITGen, a novel framework that generates realistic gait sequences conditioned on specified pathology severity levels. GAITGen employs a Conditional Residual Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder to learn disentangled representations of motion dynamics and pathology-specific factors, coupled with Mask and Residual Transformers for conditioned sequence generation. GAITGen generates realistic, diverse gait sequences across severity levels, enriching datasets and enabling large-scale model training in parkinsonian gait analysis. Experiments on our new PD-GaM (real) dataset demonstrate that GAITGen outperforms adapted state-of-the-art models in both reconstruction fidelity and generation quality, accurately capturing critical pathology-specific gait features. A clinical user study confirms the realism and clinical relevance of our generated sequences. Moreover, incorporating GAITGen-generated data into downstream tasks improves parkinsonian gait severity estimation, highlighting its potential for advancing clinical gait analysis.
Authors: Abdul Rehman, Talha Meraj, Aiman Mahmood Minhas, Ayisha Imran, Mohsen Ali, Waqas Sultani, Mubarak Shah
Abstract: Leukemia is the 10th most frequently diagnosed cancer and one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Realistic analysis of leukemia requires white blood cell (WBC) localization, classification, and morphological assessment. Despite deep learning advances in medical imaging, leukemia analysis lacks a large, diverse multi-task dataset, while existing small datasets lack domain diversity, limiting real-world applicability. To overcome dataset challenges, we present a large-scale WBC dataset named Large Leukemia Dataset (LLD) and novel methods for detecting WBC with their attributes. Our contribution here is threefold. First, we present a large-scale Leukemia dataset collected through Peripheral Blood Films (PBF) from 48 patients, through multiple microscopes, multi-cameras, and multi-magnification. To enhance diagnosis explainability and medical expert acceptance, each leukemia cell is annotated at 100x with 7 morphological attributes, ranging from Cell Size to Nuclear Shape. Secondly, we propose a multi-task model that not only detects WBCs but also predicts their attributes, providing an interpretable and clinically meaningful solution. Third, we propose a method for WBC detection with attribute analysis using sparse annotations. This approach reduces the annotation burden on hematologists, requiring them to mark only a small area within the field of view. Our method enables the model to leverage the entire field of view rather than just the annotated regions, enhancing learning efficiency and diagnostic accuracy. From diagnosis explainability to overcoming domain-shift challenges, the presented datasets can be used for many challenging aspects of microscopic image analysis. The datasets, code, and demo are available at: https://im.itu.edu.pk/sparse-leukemiaattri/
Authors: Mustafa Shukor, Enrico Fini, Victor Guilherme Turrisi da Costa, Matthieu Cord, Joshua Susskind, Alaaeldin El-Nouby
Abstract: Building general-purpose models that can effectively perceive the world through multimodal signals has been a long-standing goal. Current approaches involve integrating separately pre-trained components, such as connecting vision encoders to LLMs and continuing multimodal training. While such approaches exhibit remarkable sample efficiency, it remains an open question whether such late-fusion architectures are inherently superior. In this work, we revisit the architectural design of native multimodal models (NMMs)-those trained from the ground up on all modalities-and conduct an extensive scaling laws study, spanning 457 trained models with different architectures and training mixtures. Our investigation reveals no inherent advantage to late-fusion architectures over early-fusion ones, which do not rely on image encoders or tokenizers. On the contrary, early-fusion exhibits stronger performance at lower parameter counts, is more efficient to train, and is easier to deploy. Motivated by the strong performance of the early-fusion architectures, we show that incorporating Mixture of Experts (MoEs) allows models to learn modality-specific weights, significantly benefiting performance.
Authors: Hongyu Qu, Ling Xing, Jiachao Zhang, Rui Yan, Yazhou Yao, Xiangbo Shu
Abstract: Few-shot action recognition (FSAR) aims to recognize novel action categories with few exemplars. Existing methods typically learn frame-level representations for each video by designing inter-frame temporal modeling strategies or inter-video interaction at the coarse video-level granularity. However, they treat each episode task in isolation and neglect fine-grained temporal relation modeling between videos, thus failing to capture shared fine-grained temporal patterns across videos and reuse temporal knowledge from historical tasks. In light of this, we propose HR2G-shot, a Hierarchical Relation-augmented Representation Generalization framework for FSAR, which unifies three types of relation modeling (inter-frame, inter-video, and inter-task) to learn task-specific temporal patterns from a holistic view. Going beyond conducting inter-frame temporal interactions, we further devise two components to respectively explore inter-video and inter-task relationships: i) Inter-video Semantic Correlation (ISC) performs cross-video frame-level interactions in a fine-grained manner, thereby capturing task-specific query features and enhancing both intra-class consistency and inter-class separability; ii) Inter-task Knowledge Transfer (IKT) retrieves and aggregates relevant temporal knowledge from the bank, which stores diverse temporal patterns from historical episode tasks. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that HR2G-shot outperforms current top-leading FSAR methods.
Authors: Taihang Hu, Linxuan Li, Kai Wang, Yaxing Wang, Jian Yang, Ming-Ming Cheng
Abstract: Text-to-image generation has seen groundbreaking advancements with diffusion models, enabling high-fidelity synthesis and precise image editing through cross-attention manipulation. Recently, autoregressive (AR) models have re-emerged as powerful alternatives, leveraging next-token generation to match diffusion models. However, existing editing techniques designed for diffusion models fail to translate directly to AR models due to fundamental differences in structural control. Specifically, AR models suffer from spatial poverty of attention maps and sequential accumulation of structural errors during image editing, which disrupt object layouts and global consistency. In this work, we introduce Implicit Structure Locking (ISLock), the first training-free editing strategy for AR visual models. Rather than relying on explicit attention manipulation or fine-tuning, ISLock preserves structural blueprints by dynamically aligning self-attention patterns with reference images through the Anchor Token Matching (ATM) protocol. By implicitly enforcing structural consistency in latent space, our method ISLock enables structure-aware editing while maintaining generative autonomy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ISLock achieves high-quality, structure-consistent edits without additional training and is superior or comparable to conventional editing techniques. Our findings pioneer the way for efficient and flexible AR-based image editing, further bridging the performance gap between diffusion and autoregressive generative models. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/hutaiHang/ATM
Authors: Md Rakibul Hasan, Md Zakir Hossain, Aneesh Krishna, Shafin Rahman, Tom Gedeon
Abstract: Detecting empathy from video interactions is an emerging area of research, particularly in healthcare and social robotics. However, privacy and ethical concerns often prevent the release of raw video data, with many datasets instead shared as pre-extracted tabular features. Previous work on such datasets has established classical tree-based models as the state of the art. Motivated by recent successes of large-scale foundation models for text, we investigate the potential of tabular foundation models (TFMs) for empathy detection from video-derived tabular data. Our proposed system, TFMPathy, is demonstrated with two recent TFMs (TabPFN v2 and TabICL) under both in-context learning and fine-tuning paradigms. On a public human-robot interaction benchmark, TFMPathy significantly improves empathy detection accuracy reported in the literature. While the established evaluation protocol in the literature does not ensure cross-subject generalisation, our evaluation scheme also captures such generalisation. We show that TFMPathy under a fine-tuning setup has better cross-subject generalisation capacity over baseline methods (accuracy: $0.590 \rightarrow 0.730$; AUC: $0.564 \rightarrow 0.669$). Given the ongoing privacy and ethical constraints around raw video sharing, the proposed TFMPathy system provides a practical and scalable path toward building AI systems dependent on human-centred video datasets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/hasan-rakibul/TFMPathy (will be made available upon acceptance of this paper).
Authors: Alireza Salehi, Mohammadreza Salehi, Reshad Hosseini, Cees G. M. Snoek, Makoto Yamada, Mohammad Sabokrou
Abstract: Anomaly Detection involves identifying deviations from normal data distributions and is critical in fields such as medical diagnostics and industrial defect detection. Traditional AD methods typically require the availability of normal training samples; however, this assumption is not always feasible. Recently, the rich pretraining knowledge of CLIP has shown promising zero-shot generalization in detecting anomalies without the need for training samples from target domains. However, CLIP's coarse-grained image-text alignment limits localization and detection performance for fine-grained anomalies due to: (1) spatial misalignment, and (2) the limited sensitivity of global features to local anomalous patterns. In this paper, we propose Crane which tackles both problems. First, we introduce a correlation-based attention module to retain spatial alignment more accurately. Second, to boost the model's awareness of fine-grained anomalies, we condition the learnable prompts of the text encoder on image context extracted from the vision encoder and perform a local-to-global representation fusion. Moreover, our method can incorporate vision foundation models such as DINOv2 to further enhance spatial understanding and localization. The key insight of Crane is to balance learnable adaptations for modeling anomalous concepts with non-learnable adaptations that preserve and exploit generalized pretrained knowledge, thereby minimizing in-domain overfitting and maximizing performance on unseen domains. Extensive evaluation across 14 diverse industrial and medical datasets demonstrates that Crane consistently improves the state-of-the-art ZSAD from 2% to 28%, at both image and pixel levels, while remaining competitive in inference speed. The code is available at https://github.com/AlirezaSalehy/Crane.
Authors: Yiming Xiao, Ali Mostafavi
Abstract: Rapid, accurate, and descriptive building damage assessment is critical for directing post-disaster resources, yet current automated methods typically provide only binary (damaged/undamaged) or ordinal severity scales. This paper introduces DamageCAT, a framework that advances damage assessment through typology-based categorical classifications. We contribute: (1) the BD-TypoSAT dataset containing satellite image triplets from Hurricane Ida with four damage categories - partial roof damage, total roof damage, partial structural collapse, and total structural collapse - and (2) a hierarchical U-Net-based transformer architecture for processing pre- and post-disaster image pairs. Our model achieves 0.737 IoU and 0.846 F1-score overall, with cross-event evaluation demonstrating transferability across Hurricane Harvey, Florence, and Michael data. While performance varies across damage categories due to class imbalance, the framework shows that typology-based classifications can provide more actionable damage assessments than traditional severity-based approaches, enabling targeted emergency response and resource allocation.
Authors: Isabel Papadimitriou, Huangyuan Su, Thomas Fel, Sham Kakade, Stephanie Gil
Abstract: Vision-language models encode images and text in a joint space, minimizing the distance between corresponding image and text pairs. How are language and images organized in this joint space, and how do the models encode meaning and modality? To investigate this, we train and release sparse autoencoders (SAEs) on the embedding spaces of four vision-language models (CLIP, SigLIP, SigLIP2, and AIMv2). SAEs approximate model embeddings as sparse linear combinations of learned directions, or "concepts". We find that, compared to other methods of linear feature learning, SAEs are better at reconstructing the real embeddings, while also able to retain the most sparsity. Retraining SAEs with different seeds or different data diet leads to two findings: the rare, specific concepts captured by the SAEs are liable to change drastically, but we also show that commonly-activating concepts are remarkably stable across runs. Interestingly, while most concepts activate primarily for one modality, we find they are not merely encoding modality per se. Many are almost orthogonal to the subspace that defines modality, and the concept directions do not function as good modality classifiers, suggesting that they encode cross-modal semantics. To quantify this bridging behavior, we introduce the Bridge Score, a metric that identifies concept pairs which are both co-activated across aligned image-text inputs and geometrically aligned in the shared space. This reveals that even single-modality concepts can collaborate to support cross-modal integration. We release interactive demos of the SAEs for all models, allowing researchers to explore the organization of the concept spaces. Overall, our findings uncover a sparse linear structure within VLM embedding spaces that is shaped by modality, yet stitched together through latent bridges, offering new insight into how multimodal meaning is constructed.
Authors: Adriano D'Alessandro, Ali Mahdavi-Amiri, Ghassan Hamarneh
Abstract: Fine-grained object counting remains a major challenge for class-agnostic counting models, which overcount visually similar but incorrect instances (e.g., jalape\~no vs. poblano). Addressing this by annotating new data and fully retraining the model is time-consuming and does not guarantee generalization to additional novel categories at test time. Instead, we propose an alternative paradigm: Given a category name, tune a compact concept embedding derived from the prompt using synthetic images and pseudo-labels generated by a text-to-image diffusion model. This embedding conditions a specialization module that refines raw overcounts from any frozen counter into accurate, category-specific estimates\textemdash without requiring real images or human annotations. We validate our approach on \textsc{Lookalikes}, a challenging new benchmark containing 1,037 images across 27 fine-grained subcategories, and show substantial improvements over strong baselines. Code and data will be released upon acceptance.
Authors: Linjuan Fan, Di Wen, Kunyu Peng, Kailun Yang, Jiaming Zhang, Ruiping Liu, Yufan Chen, Junwei Zheng, Jiamin Wu, Xudong Han, Rainer Stiefelhagen
Abstract: As an open research topic in the field of deep learning, learning with noisy labels has attracted much attention and grown rapidly over the past ten years. Learning with label noise is crucial for driver distraction behavior recognition, as real-world video data often contains mislabeled samples, impacting model reliability and performance. However, label noise learning is barely explored in the driver activity recognition field. In this paper, we propose the first label noise learning approach for the driver activity recognition task. Based on the cluster assumption, we initially enable the model to learn clustering-friendly low-dimensional representations from given videos and assign the resultant embeddings into clusters. We subsequently perform co-refinement within each cluster to smooth the classifier outputs. Furthermore, we propose a flexible sample selection strategy that combines two selection criteria without relying on any hyperparameters to filter clean samples from the training dataset. We also incorporate a self-adaptive parameter into the sample selection process to enforce balancing across classes. A comprehensive variety of experiments on the public Drive&Act dataset for all granularity levels demonstrates the superior performance of our method in comparison with other label-denoising methods derived from the image classification field. The source code is available at https://github.com/ilonafan/DAR-noisy-labels.
Authors: Nairouz Mrabah, Nicolas Richet, Ismail Ben Ayed, \'Eric Granger
Abstract: Adapting Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to new domains with few labeled samples remains a significant challenge due to severe overfitting and computational constraints. State-of-the-art solutions, such as low-rank reparameterization, mitigate these issues but often struggle with generalization and require extensive hyperparameter tuning. In this paper, a novel Sparse Optimization (SO) framework is proposed. Unlike low-rank approaches that typically constrain updates to a fixed subspace, our SO method leverages high sparsity to dynamically adjust very few parameters. We introduce two key paradigms. First, we advocate for \textit{local sparsity and global density}, which updates a minimal subset of parameters per iteration while maintaining overall model expressiveness. As a second paradigm, we advocate for \textit{local randomness and global importance}, which sparsifies the gradient using random selection while pruning the first moment based on importance. This combination significantly mitigates overfitting and ensures stable adaptation in low-data regimes. Extensive experiments on 11 diverse datasets show that SO achieves state-of-the-art few-shot adaptation performance while reducing memory overhead.
Authors: Xiaoxing Hu, Kaicheng Yang, Jun Wang, Haoran Xu, Ziyong Feng, Yupei Wang
Abstract: Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has achieved success on multiple downstream tasks by aligning image and text modalities. However, the nature of global contrastive learning limits CLIP's ability to comprehend compositional concepts, such as relations and attributes. Although recent studies employ global hard negative samples to improve compositional understanding, these methods significantly compromise the model's inherent general capabilities by forcibly distancing textual negative samples from images in the embedding space. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a Decoupled Global-Local Alignment (DeGLA) framework that improves compositional understanding while substantially mitigating losses in general capabilities. To optimize the retention of the model's inherent capabilities, we incorporate a self-distillation mechanism within the global alignment process, aligning the learnable image-text encoder with a frozen teacher model derived from an exponential moving average. Under the constraint of self-distillation, it effectively mitigates the catastrophic forgetting of pretrained knowledge during fine-tuning. To improve compositional understanding, we first leverage the in-context learning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to construct about 2M high-quality negative captions across five types. Subsequently, we propose the Image-Grounded Contrast (IGC) loss and Text-Grounded Contrast (TGC) loss to enhance vision-language compositionally. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the DeGLA framework. Compared to previous state-of-the-art methods, DeGLA achieves an average enhancement of 3.5% across the VALSE, SugarCrepe, and ARO benchmarks. Concurrently, it obtains an average performance improvement of 13.0% on zero-shot classification tasks across eleven datasets. Our code will be released at https://github.com/xiaoxing2001/DeGLA
Authors: Chenhan Jiang, Yihan Zeng, Dit-Yan Yeung
Abstract: Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) has achieved remarkable success in text-to-3D content generation. However, SDS-based methods struggle to maintain semantic fidelity for user prompts, particularly when involving multiple objects with intricate interactions. While existing approaches often address 3D consistency through multiview diffusion model fine-tuning on 3D datasets, this strategy inadvertently exacerbates text-3D alignment degradation. The limitation stems from SDS's inherent accumulation of view-independent biases during optimization, which progressively diverges from the ideal text alignment direction. To alleviate this limitation, we propose a novel SDS objective, dubbed as Textual Coherent Score Distillation (TCSD), which integrates alignment feedback from multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Our TCSD leverages cross-modal understanding capabilities of MLLMs to assess and guide the text-3D correspondence during the optimization. We further develop 3DLLaVA-CRITIC - a fine-tuned MLLM specialized for evaluating multiview text alignment in 3D generations. Additionally, we introduce an LLM-layout initialization that significantly accelerates optimization convergence through semantic-aware spatial configuration. Our framework, CoherenDream, achieves consistent improvement across multiple metrics on TIFA subset.As the first study to incorporate MLLMs into SDS optimization, we also conduct extensive ablation studies to explore optimal MLLM adaptations for 3D generation tasks.
Authors: Lei Liu, Zhenghao Chen, Dong Xu
Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) data compression is crucial for enabling efficient storage and transmission in 3D scene modeling. However, its development remains limited due to inadequate entropy models and suboptimal quantization strategies for both lossless and lossy compression scenarios, where existing methods have yet to 1) fully leverage hyperprior information to construct robust conditional entropy models, and 2) apply fine-grained, element-wise quantization strategies for improved compression granularity. In this work, we propose a novel Mixture of Priors (MoP) strategy to simultaneously address these two challenges. Specifically, inspired by the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm, our MoP approach processes hyperprior information through multiple lightweight MLPs to generate diverse prior features, which are subsequently integrated into the MoP feature via a gating mechanism. To enhance lossless compression, the resulting MoP feature is utilized as a hyperprior to improve conditional entropy modeling. Meanwhile, for lossy compression, we employ the MoP feature as guidance information in an element-wise quantization procedure, leveraging a prior-guided Coarse-to-Fine Quantization (C2FQ) strategy with a predefined quantization step value. Specifically, we expand the quantization step value into a matrix and adaptively refine it from coarse to fine granularity, guided by the MoP feature, thereby obtaining a quantization step matrix that facilitates element-wise quantization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed 3DGS data compression framework achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, including Mip-NeRF360, BungeeNeRF, DeepBlending, and Tank&Temples.
Authors: Yueh-Cheng Liu, Lukas H\"ollein, Matthias Nie{\ss}ner, Angela Dai
Abstract: Surface reconstruction is fundamental to computer vision and graphics, enabling applications in 3D modeling, mixed reality, robotics, and more. Existing approaches based on volumetric rendering obtain promising results, but optimize on a per-scene basis, resulting in a slow optimization that can struggle to model under-observed or textureless regions. We introduce QuickSplat, which learns data-driven priors to generate dense initializations for 2D gaussian splatting optimization of large-scale indoor scenes. This provides a strong starting point for the reconstruction, which accelerates the convergence of the optimization and improves the geometry of flat wall structures. We further learn to jointly estimate the densification and update of the scene parameters during each iteration; our proposed densifier network predicts new Gaussians based on the rendering gradients of existing ones, removing the needs of heuristics for densification. Extensive experiments on large-scale indoor scene reconstruction demonstrate the superiority of our data-driven optimization. Concretely, we accelerate runtime by 8x, while decreasing depth errors by up to 48% in comparison to state of the art methods.
Authors: Dinh Nam Pham, Eleftherios Avramidis
Abstract: Sign Language Recognition (SLR) systems primarily focus on manual gestures, but non-manual features such as mouth movements, specifically mouthing, provide valuable linguistic information. This work directly classifies mouthing instances to their corresponding words in the spoken language while exploring the potential of transfer learning from Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) to mouthing recognition in German Sign Language. We leverage three VSR datasets: one in English, one in German with unrelated words and one in German containing the same target words as the mouthing dataset, to investigate the impact of task similarity in this setting. Our results demonstrate that multi-task learning improves both mouthing recognition and VSR accuracy as well as model robustness, suggesting that mouthing recognition should be treated as a distinct but related task to VSR. This research contributes to the field of SLR by proposing knowledge transfer from VSR to SLR datasets with limited mouthing annotations.
Authors: Zs\'ofia Moln\'ar, Gergely Szab\'o, Andr\'as Horv\'ath
Abstract: Supervised pretrained models have become widely used in deep learning, especially for image segmentation tasks. However, when applied to specialized datasets such as biomedical imaging, pretrained weights often introduce unintended biases. These biases cause models to assign different levels of importance to different slices, leading to inconsistencies in feature utilization, which can be observed as asymmetries in saliency map distributions. This transfer of color distributions from natural images to non-natural datasets can compromise model performance and reduce the reliability of results. In this study, we investigate the effects of these biases and propose strategies to mitigate them. Through a series of experiments, we test both pretrained and randomly initialized models, comparing their performance and saliency map distributions. Our proposed methods, which aim to neutralize the bias introduced by pretrained color channel weights, demonstrate promising results, offering a practical approach to improving model explainability while maintaining the benefits of pretrained models. This publication presents our findings, providing insights into addressing pretrained weight biases across various deep learning tasks.
Authors: Nakul Poudel, Zixin Yang, Kelly Merrell, Richard Simon, Cristian A. Linte
Abstract: Intra-operative data captured during image-guided surgery lacks sub-surface information, where key regions of interest, such as vessels and tumors, reside. Image-to-physical registration enables the fusion of pre-operative information and intra-operative data, typically represented as a point cloud. However, this registration process struggles due to partial visibility of the intra-operative point cloud. In this research, we propose a patient-specific point cloud completion approach to assist with the registration process. Specifically, we leverage VN-OccNet to generate a complete liver surface from a partial intra-operative point cloud. The network is trained in a patient-specific manner, where simulated deformations from the pre-operative model are used to train the model. First, we conduct an in-depth analysis of VN-OccNet's rotation-equivariant property and its effectiveness in recovering complete surfaces from partial intra-operative surfaces. Next, we integrate the completed intra-operative surface into the Go-ICP registration algorithm to demonstrate its utility in improving initial rigid registration outcomes. Our results highlight the promise of this patient-specific completion approach in mitigating the challenges posed by partial intra-operative visibility. The rotation equivariant and surface generation capabilities of VN-OccNet hold strong promise for developing robust registration frameworks for variations of the intra-operative point cloud.
Authors: Shihao Li, Aihua Zheng, Andong Lu, Jin Tang, Jixin Ma
Abstract: Multi-modal object Re-Identification (ReID) aims to obtain accurate identity features across heterogeneous modalities. However, most existing methods rely on implicit feature fusion modules, making it difficult to model fine-grained recognition patterns under various challenges in real world. Benefiting from the powerful Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), the object appearances are effectively translated into descriptive captions. In this paper, we propose a reliable caption generation pipeline based on attribute confidence, which significantly reduces the unknown recognition rate of MLLMs and improves the quality of generated text. Additionally, to model diverse identity patterns, we propose a novel ReID framework, named NEXT, the Multi-grained Mixture of Experts via Text-Modulation for Multi-modal Object Re-Identification. Specifically, we decouple the recognition problem into semantic and structural branches to separately capture fine-grained appearance features and coarse-grained structure features. For semantic recognition, we first propose a Text-Modulated Semantic Experts (TMSE), which randomly samples high-quality captions to modulate experts capturing semantic features and mining inter-modality complementary cues. Second, to recognize structure features, we propose a Context-Shared Structure Experts (CSSE), which focuses on the holistic object structure and maintains identity structural consistency via a soft routing mechanism. Finally, we propose a Multi-Grained Features Aggregation (MGFA), which adopts a unified fusion strategy to effectively integrate multi-grained experts into the final identity representations. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and show that it significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Liuhan Chen, Xiaodong Cun, Xiaoyu Li, Xianyi He, Shenghai Yuan, Jie Chen, Ying Shan, Li Yuan
Abstract: Video inbetweening aims to synthesize intermediate video sequences conditioned on the given start and end frames. Current state-of-the-art methods primarily extend large-scale pre-trained Image-to-Video Diffusion Models (I2V-DMs) by incorporating the end-frame condition via direct fine-tuning or temporally bidirectional sampling. However, the former results in a weak end-frame constraint, while the latter inevitably disrupts the input representation of video frames, leading to suboptimal performance. To improve the end-frame constraint while avoiding disruption of the input representation, we propose a novel video inbetweening framework specific to recent and more powerful transformer-based I2V-DMs, termed EF-VI. It efficiently strengthens the end-frame constraint by utilizing an enhanced injection. This is based on our proposed well-designed lightweight module, termed EF-Net, which encodes only the end frame and expands it into temporally adaptive frame-wise features injected into the I2V-DM. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our EF-VI compared with other baselines.
Authors: Yuxi Zhang, Yueting Li, Xinyu Du, Sibo Wang
Abstract: Generating images from rhetorical languages remains a critical challenge for text-to-image models. Even state-of-the-art (SOTA) multimodal large language models (MLLM) fail to generate images based on the hidden meaning inherent in rhetorical language--despite such content being readily mappable to visual representations by humans. A key limitation is that current models emphasize object-level word embedding alignment, causing metaphorical expressions to steer image generation towards their literal visuals and overlook the intended semantic meaning. To address this, we propose Rhet2Pix, a framework that formulates rhetorical text-to-image generation as a multi-step policy optimization problem, incorporating a two-layer MDP diffusion module. In the outer layer, Rhet2Pix converts the input prompt into incrementally elaborated sub-sentences and executes corresponding image-generation actions, constructing semantically richer visuals. In the inner layer, Rhet2Pix mitigates reward sparsity during image generation by discounting the final reward and optimizing every adjacent action pair along the diffusion denoising trajectory. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Rhet2Pix in rhetorical text-to-image generation. Our model outperforms SOTA MLLMs such as GPT-4o, Grok-3 and leading academic baselines across both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. The code and dataset used in this work are publicly available.
Authors: Junyi Guo, Jingxuan Zhang, Fangyu Wu, Huanda Lu, Qiufeng Wang, Wenmian Yang, Eng Gee Lim, Dongming Lu
Abstract: Diffusion-based garment synthesis tasks primarily focus on the design phase in the fashion domain, while the garment production process remains largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new task: Flat Sketch to Realistic Garment Image (FS2RG), which generates realistic garment images by integrating flat sketches and textual guidance. FS2RG presents two key challenges: 1) fabric characteristics are solely guided by textual prompts, providing insufficient visual supervision for diffusion-based models, which limits their ability to capture fine-grained fabric details; 2) flat sketches and textual guidance may provide conflicting information, requiring the model to selectively preserve or modify garment attributes while maintaining structural coherence. To tackle this task, we propose HiGarment, a novel framework that comprises two core components: i) a multi-modal semantic enhancement mechanism that enhances fabric representation across textual and visual modalities, and ii) a harmonized cross-attention mechanism that dynamically balances information from flat sketches and text prompts, allowing controllable synthesis by generating either sketch-aligned (image-biased) or text-guided (text-biased) outputs. Furthermore, we collect Multi-modal Detailed Garment, the largest open-source dataset for garment generation. Experimental results and user studies demonstrate the effectiveness of HiGarment in garment synthesis. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Maple498/HiGarment.
Authors: Yu Huang (May), Junhao Chen (May), Shuliang Liu (May), Hanqian Li (May), Qi Zheng (May), Yi R. (May), Fung, Xuming Hu
Abstract: The rapid development of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has led to significant progress in video generation but also raises serious concerns about intellectual property protection and reliable content tracing. Watermarking is a widely adopted solution to this issue, but existing methods for video generation mainly follow a post-generation paradigm, which introduces additional computational overhead and often fails to effectively balance the trade-off between video quality and watermark extraction. To address these issues, we propose Video Signature (VIDSIG), an in-generation watermarking method for latent video diffusion models, which enables implicit and adaptive watermark integration during generation. Specifically, we achieve this by partially fine-tuning the latent decoder, where Perturbation-Aware Suppression (PAS) pre-identifies and freezes perceptually sensitive layers to preserve visual quality. Beyond spatial fidelity, we further enhance temporal consistency by introducing a lightweight Temporal Alignment module that guides the decoder to generate coherent frame sequences during fine-tuning. Experimental results show that VIDSIG achieves the best overall performance in watermark extraction, visual quality, and generation efficiency. It also demonstrates strong robustness against both spatial and temporal tampering, highlighting its practicality in real-world scenarios. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/hardenyu21/Video-Signature}{here}
Authors: Emmanuel Hartman, Nicolas Charon
Abstract: Despite progress in the rapidly developing field of geometric deep learning, performing statistical analysis on geometric data--where each observation is a shape such as a curve, graph, or surface--remains challenging due to the non-Euclidean nature of shape spaces, which are defined as equivalence classes under invariance groups. Building machine learning frameworks that incorporate such invariances, notably to shape parametrization, is often crucial to ensure generalizability of the trained models to new observations. This work proposes \textit{SVarM} to exploit varifold representations of shapes as measures and their duality with test functions $h:\mathbb{R}^n \times S^{n-1} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$. This method provides a general framework akin to linear support vector machines but operating instead over the infinite-dimensional space of varifolds. We develop classification and regression models on shape datasets by introducing a neural network-based representation of the trainable test function $h$. This approach demonstrates strong performance and robustness across various shape graph and surface datasets, achieving results comparable to state-of-the-art methods while significantly reducing the number of trainable parameters.
Authors: Xuan Yu, Dayan Guan, Yanfeng Gu
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) often struggle to interpret high-resolution images accurately, where fine-grained details are crucial for complex visual understanding. We introduce Zoom-Refine, a novel training-free method that enhances MLLM capabilities to address this issue. Zoom-Refine operates through a synergistic process of \textit{Localized Zoom} and \textit{Self-Refinement}. In the \textit{Localized Zoom} step, Zoom-Refine leverages the MLLM to provide a preliminary response to an input query and identifies the most task-relevant image region by predicting its bounding box coordinates. During the \textit{Self-Refinement} step, Zoom-Refine then integrates fine-grained details from the high-resolution crop (identified by \textit{Localized Zoom}) with its initial reasoning to re-evaluate and refine its preliminary response. Our method harnesses the MLLM's inherent capabilities for spatial localization, contextual reasoning and comparative analysis without requiring additional training or external experts. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of Zoom-Refine on two challenging high-resolution multimodal benchmarks. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/xavier-yu114/Zoom-Refine}{\color{magenta}github.com/xavier-yu114/Zoom-Refine}
Authors: Qing Wang, Xiaohang Yang, Yilan Dong, Naveen Raj Govindaraj, Gregory Slabaugh, Shanxin Yuan
Abstract: Music-to-dance generation aims to synthesize human dance motion conditioned on musical input. Despite recent progress, significant challenges remain due to the semantic gap between music and dance motion, as music offers only abstract cues, such as melody, groove, and emotion, without explicitly specifying the physical movements. Moreover, a single piece of music can produce multiple plausible dance interpretations. This one-to-many mapping demands additional guidance, as music alone provides limited information for generating diverse dance movements. The challenge is further amplified by the scarcity of paired music and dance data, which restricts the model\^a\u{A}\'Zs ability to learn diverse dance patterns. In this paper, we introduce DanceChat, a Large Language Model (LLM)-guided music-to-dance generation approach. We use an LLM as a choreographer that provides textual motion instructions, offering explicit, high-level guidance for dance generation. This approach goes beyond implicit learning from music alone, enabling the model to generate dance that is both more diverse and better aligned with musical styles. Our approach consists of three components: (1) an LLM-based pseudo instruction generation module that produces textual dance guidance based on music style and structure, (2) a multi-modal feature extraction and fusion module that integrates music, rhythm, and textual guidance into a shared representation, and (3) a diffusion-based motion synthesis module together with a multi-modal alignment loss, which ensures that the generated dance is aligned with both musical and textual cues. Extensive experiments on AIST++ and human evaluations show that DanceChat outperforms state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Authors: Yue Yao, Zelin Wen, Yan Tong, Xinyu Tian, Xuqing Li, Xiao Ma, Dongliang Xu, Tom Gedeon
Abstract: Test-time scaling offers a promising way to improve the reasoning performance of vision-language large models (VLLMs) without additional training. In this paper, we explore a simple but effective approach for applying test-time scaling to radiology report generation. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight Thought Graph Traversal (TGT) framework that guides the model to reason through organ-specific findings in a medically coherent order. This framework integrates structured medical priors into the prompt, enabling deeper and more logical analysis with no changes to the underlying model. To further enhance reasoning depth, we apply a reasoning budget forcing strategy that adjusts the model's inference depth at test time by dynamically extending its generation process. This simple yet powerful combination allows a frozen radiology VLLM to self-correct and generate more accurate, consistent chest X-ray reports. Our method outperforms baseline prompting approaches on standard benchmarks, and also reveals dataset biases through traceable reasoning paths. Code and prompts are open-sourced for reproducibility at https://github.com/glerium/Thought-Graph-Traversal.
Authors: Nuwan Bandara, Thivya Kandappu, Archan Misra
Abstract: Event-based eye tracking holds significant promise for fine-grained cognitive state inference, offering high temporal resolution and robustness to motion artifacts, critical features for decoding subtle mental states such as attention, confusion, or fatigue. In this work, we introduce a model-agnostic, inference-time refinement framework designed to enhance the output of existing event-based gaze estimation models without modifying their architecture or requiring retraining. Our method comprises two key post-processing modules: (i) Motion-Aware Median Filtering, which suppresses blink-induced spikes while preserving natural gaze dynamics, and (ii) Optical Flow-Based Local Refinement, which aligns gaze predictions with cumulative event motion to reduce spatial jitter and temporal discontinuities. To complement traditional spatial accuracy metrics, we propose a novel Jitter Metric that captures the temporal smoothness of predicted gaze trajectories based on velocity regularity and local signal complexity. Together, these contributions significantly improve the consistency of event-based gaze signals, making them better suited for downstream tasks such as micro-expression analysis and mind-state decoding. Our results demonstrate consistent improvements across multiple baseline models on controlled datasets, laying the groundwork for future integration with multimodal affect recognition systems in real-world environments. Our code implementations can be found at https://github.com/eye-tracking-for-physiological-sensing/EyeLoRiN.
URLs: https://github.com/eye-tracking-for-physiological-sensing/EyeLoRiN.
Authors: Yuke Xing, Jiarui Wang, Peizhi Niu, Wenjie Huang, Guangtao Zhai, Yiling Xu
Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a promising approach for novel view synthesis, offering real-time rendering with high visual fidelity. However, its substantial storage requirements present significant challenges for practical applications. While recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3DGS methods increasingly incorporate dedicated compression modules, there is a lack of a comprehensive framework to evaluate their perceptual impact. Therefore we present 3DGS-IEval-15K, the first large-scale image quality assessment (IQA) dataset specifically designed for compressed 3DGS representations. Our dataset encompasses 15,200 images rendered from 10 real-world scenes through 6 representative 3DGS algorithms at 20 strategically selected viewpoints, with different compression levels leading to various distortion effects. Through controlled subjective experiments, we collect human perception data from 60 viewers. We validate dataset quality through scene diversity and MOS distribution analysis, and establish a comprehensive benchmark with 30 representative IQA metrics covering diverse types. As the largest-scale 3DGS quality assessment dataset to date, our work provides a foundation for developing 3DGS specialized IQA metrics, and offers essential data for investigating view-dependent quality distribution patterns unique to 3DGS. The database is publicly available at https://github.com/YukeXing/3DGS-IEval-15K.
Authors: Jiahua Ma, Yiran Qin, Yixiong Li, Xuanqi Liao, Yulan Guo, Ruimao Zhang
Abstract: Diffusion Policy (DP) enables robots to learn complex behaviors by imitating expert demonstrations through action diffusion. However, in practical applications, hardware limitations often degrade data quality, while real-time constraints restrict model inference to instantaneous state and scene observations. These limitations seriously reduce the efficacy of learning from expert demonstrations, resulting in failures in object localization, grasp planning, and long-horizon task execution. To address these challenges, we propose Causal Diffusion Policy (CDP), a novel transformer-based diffusion model that enhances action prediction by conditioning on historical action sequences, thereby enabling more coherent and context-aware visuomotor policy learning. To further mitigate the computational cost associated with autoregressive inference, a caching mechanism is also introduced to store attention key-value pairs from previous timesteps, substantially reducing redundant computations during execution. Extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world environments, spanning diverse 2D and 3D manipulation tasks, demonstrate that CDP uniquely leverages historical action sequences to achieve significantly higher accuracy than existing methods. Moreover, even when faced with degraded input observation quality, CDP maintains remarkable precision by reasoning through temporal continuity, which highlights its practical robustness for robotic control under realistic, imperfect conditions.
Authors: Chao Chen, Nobel Dang, Juexiao Zhang, Wenkai Sun, Pengfei Zheng, Xuhang He, Yimeng Ye, Jiasheng Zhang, Taarun Srinivas, Chen Feng
Abstract: Humans exhibit a remarkable ability to recognize co-visibility-the 3D regions simultaneously visible in multiple images-even when these images are sparsely distributed across a complex scene. This ability is foundational to 3D vision, robotic perception, and relies not only on low-level feature matching but also on high-level spatial reasoning and cognitive integration. Yet, it remains unclear whether current vision models can replicate this human-level proficiency. In this work, we introduce the Co-VisiON benchmark, designed to evaluate human-inspired co-visibility reasoning across more than 1,000 sparse-view indoor scenarios. Our results show that while co-visibility is often approached as a low-level feature-matching task, it remains challenging for existing vision models under sparse conditions. Notably, a proprietary vision-language model surpasses all vision-only baselines, but all models fall significantly short of human performance. This gap underscores the limitations of current architectures and motivates the need for models that integrate spatial and semantic information in a human-like manner. Inspired by human visual cognition, we propose a novel multi-view baseline, Covis, which achieves top performance among pure vision models and narrows the gap to the proprietary VLM. We hope our benchmark and findings will spur further advancements in developing vision models capable of robust, cognitively inspired reasoning in challenging, sparse environments. Our dataset and source code can be found at https://ai4ce.github.io/CoVISION.
Authors: Mihir Godbole, Xiangbo Gao, Zhengzhong Tu
Abstract: Understanding the short-term motion of vulnerable road users (VRUs) like pedestrians and cyclists is critical for safe autonomous driving, especially in urban scenarios with ambiguous or high-risk behaviors. While vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled open-vocabulary perception, their utility for fine-grained intent reasoning remains underexplored. Notably, no existing benchmark evaluates multi-class intent prediction in safety-critical situations, To address this gap, we introduce DRAMA-X, a fine-grained benchmark constructed from the DRAMA dataset via an automated annotation pipeline. DRAMA-X contains 5,686 accident-prone frames labeled with object bounding boxes, a nine-class directional intent taxonomy, binary risk scores, expert-generated action suggestions for the ego vehicle, and descriptive motion summaries. These annotations enable a structured evaluation of four interrelated tasks central to autonomous decision-making: object detection, intent prediction, risk assessment, and action suggestion. As a reference baseline, we propose SGG-Intent, a lightweight, training-free framework that mirrors the ego vehicle's reasoning pipeline. It sequentially generates a scene graph from visual input using VLM-backed detectors, infers intent, assesses risk, and recommends an action using a compositional reasoning stage powered by a large language model. We evaluate a range of recent VLMs, comparing performance across all four DRAMA-X tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that scene-graph-based reasoning enhances intent prediction and risk assessment, especially when contextual cues are explicitly modeled.
Authors: Fanyi Wang, Binzhi Dong, Haotian Hu, Jinjin Xu, Zhiwang Zhang
Abstract: Small Vision Language Models (SVLMs) generally refer to models with parameter sizes less than or equal to 2B. Their low cost and power consumption characteristics confer high commercial value. However, their reasoning abilities are limited by the number of parameters. To address this issue, this paper proposes a post-training optimization paradigm called the Incremental Training Strategy to enhance the reasoning ability of SVLMs. Firstly, we constructed a Self-Supervised Chain-of-Thought (COT) Data Construction System, which leverages multiple LVLMs with 7B parameters or more to transform original data into COT data in a self-supervised manner. Our proposed Incremental Training Strategy consists of four stages. Stage 1 injects domain knowledge by performing Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to the pretrained model on the COT data. Stage 2 aligns the COT data format by conducting a small amount of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) training constrained only by format rewards on the COT data. Stage 3 enhances reasoning ability by applying GRPO training on the COT data with constraints on both format and accuracy rewards. The resulting model shows significant improvement compared to the baseline. Stage 4 addresses the limited capacity of the SVLMs and the weak ability to capture complex patterns by proposing ClipLow GRPO (CLGRPO) to constrain the capture space of the training process. We conducted extensive comparative and ablation experiments on the abstract semantic recognition dataset EMOSet-118K. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the reasoning ability of 1B SVLM. Compared to the baseline model fine-tuned on the original data, accuracy increased by 2.77 and recall by 0.69, achieving performance comparable to that of 8B models.
Authors: Yue Zhou, Yuan Bi, Wenjuan Tong, Wei Wang, Nassir Navab, Zhongliang Jiang
Abstract: Precise anomaly detection in medical images is critical for clinical decision-making. While recent unsupervised or semi-supervised anomaly detection methods trained on large-scale normal data show promising results, they lack fine-grained differentiation, such as benign vs. malignant tumors. Additionally, ultrasound (US) imaging is highly sensitive to devices and acquisition parameter variations, creating significant domain gaps in the resulting US images. To address these challenges, we propose UltraAD, a vision-language model (VLM)-based approach that leverages few-shot US examples for generalized anomaly localization and fine-grained classification. To enhance localization performance, the image-level token of query visual prototypes is first fused with learnable text embeddings. This image-informed prompt feature is then further integrated with patch-level tokens, refining local representations for improved accuracy. For fine-grained classification, a memory bank is constructed from few-shot image samples and corresponding text descriptions that capture anatomical and abnormality-specific features. During training, the stored text embeddings remain frozen, while image features are adapted to better align with medical data. UltraAD has been extensively evaluated on three breast US datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in both lesion localization and fine-grained medical classification. The code will be released upon acceptance.
Authors: Xianghan Meng, Zhengyu Tong, Zhiyuan Huang, Chun-Guang Li
Abstract: Human Motion Segmentation (HMS), which aims to partition videos into non-overlapping human motions, has attracted increasing research attention recently. Existing approaches for HMS are mainly dominated by subspace clustering methods, which are grounded on the assumption that high-dimensional temporal data align with a Union-of-Subspaces (UoS) distribution. However, the frames in video capturing complex human motions with cluttered backgrounds may not align well with the UoS distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for HMS, named Temporal Rate Reduction Clustering ($\text{TR}^2\text{C}$), which jointly learns structured representations and affinity to segment the sequences of frames in video. Specifically, the structured representations learned by $\text{TR}^2\text{C}$ enjoy temporally consistency and are aligned well with a UoS structure, which is favorable for addressing the HMS task. We conduct extensive experiments on five benchmark HMS datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performances with different feature extractors. The code is available at: https://github.com/mengxianghan123/TR2C.
Authors: Mengyi Shan, Brian Curless, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, Steve Seitz
Abstract: We challenge text-to-image models with generating escape room puzzle images that are visually appealing, logically solid, and intellectually stimulating. While base image models struggle with spatial relationships and affordance reasoning, we propose a hierarchical multi-agent framework that decomposes this task into structured stages: functional design, symbolic scene graph reasoning, layout synthesis, and local image editing. Specialized agents collaborate through iterative feedback to ensure the scene is visually coherent and functionally solvable. Experiments show that agent collaboration improves output quality in terms of solvability, shortcut avoidance, and affordance clarity, while maintaining visual quality.
Authors: Jian Chen, Wenye Ma, Penghang Liu, Wei Wang, Tengwei Song, Ming Li, Chenguang Wang, Jiayu Qin, Ruiyi Zhang, Changyou Chen
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable visual reasoning abilities in natural images, text-rich documents, and graphic designs. However, their ability to interpret music sheets remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce MusiXQA, the first comprehensive dataset for evaluating and advancing MLLMs in music sheet understanding. MusiXQA features high-quality synthetic music sheets generated via MusiXTeX, with structured annotations covering note pitch and duration, chords, clefs, key/time signatures, and text, enabling diverse visual QA tasks. Through extensive evaluations, we reveal significant limitations of current state-of-the-art MLLMs in this domain. Beyond benchmarking, we developed Phi-3-MusiX, an MLLM fine-tuned on our dataset, achieving significant performance gains over GPT-based methods. The proposed dataset and model establish a foundation for future advances in MLLMs for music sheet understanding. Code, data, and model will be released upon acceptance.
Authors: Chongke Bi, Xin Gao, Baofeng Fu, Yuheng Zhao, Siming Chen, Ying Zhao, Lu Yang
Abstract: Large-scale simulations on supercomputers have become important tools for users. However, their scalability remains a problem due to the huge communication cost among parallel processes. Most of the existing communication latency analysis methods rely on the physical link layer information, which is only available to administrators. In this paper, a framework called PCLVis is proposed to help general users analyze process communication latency (PCL) events. Instead of the physical link layer information, the PCLVis uses the MPI process communication data for the analysis. First, a spatial PCL event locating method is developed. All processes with high correlation are classified into a single cluster by constructing a process-correlation tree. Second, the propagation path of PCL events is analyzed by constructing a communication-dependency-based directed acyclic graph (DAG), which can help users interactively explore a PCL event from the temporal evolution of a located PCL event cluster. In this graph, a sliding window algorithm is designed to generate the PCL events abstraction. Meanwhile, a new glyph called the communication state glyph (CS-Glyph) is designed for each process to show its communication states, including its in/out messages and load balance. Each leaf node can be further unfolded to view additional information. Third, a PCL event attribution strategy is formulated to help users optimize their simulations. The effectiveness of the PCLVis framework is demonstrated by analyzing the PCL events of several simulations running on the TH-1A supercomputer. By using the proposed framework, users can greatly improve the efficiency of their simulations.
Authors: Xiangning Zhang, Jinnan Chen, Qingwei Zhang, Yaqi Wang, Chengfeng Zhou, Xiaobo Li, Dahong Qian
Abstract: Gastrointestinal malignancies constitute a leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, with advanced-stage prognosis remaining particularly dismal. Originating as a groundbreaking technique for early gastric cancer treatment, Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection has evolved into a versatile intervention for diverse gastrointestinal lesions. While computer-assisted systems significantly enhance procedural precision and safety in ESD, their clinical adoption faces a critical bottleneck: reliable surgical phase recognition within complex endoscopic workflows. Current state-of-the-art approaches predominantly rely on multi-stage refinement architectures that iteratively optimize temporal predictions. In this paper, we present Clinical Prior Knowledge-Constrained Diffusion (CPKD), a novel generative framework that reimagines phase recognition through denoising diffusion principles while preserving the core iterative refinement philosophy. This architecture progressively reconstructs phase sequences starting from random noise and conditioned on visual-temporal features. To better capture three domain-specific characteristics, including positional priors, boundary ambiguity, and relation dependency, we design a conditional masking strategy. Furthermore, we incorporate clinical prior knowledge into the model training to improve its ability to correct phase logical errors. Comprehensive evaluations on ESD820, Cholec80, and external multi-center demonstrate that our proposed CPKD achieves superior or comparable performance to state-of-the-art approaches, validating the effectiveness of diffusion-based generative paradigms for surgical phase recognition.
Authors: Redwan Sony, Parisa Farmanifard, Arun Ross, Anil K. Jain
Abstract: In this paper, we address the following question: How do generic foundation models (e.g., CLIP, BLIP, GPT-4o, Grok-4) compare against a domain-specific face recognition model (viz., AdaFace or ArcFace) on the face recognition task? Through a series of experiments involving several foundation models and benchmark datasets, we report the following findings: (a) In all face benchmark datasets considered, domain-specific models outperformed zero-shot foundation models. (b) The performance of zero-shot generic foundation models improved on over-segmented face images compared to tightly cropped faces, thereby suggesting the importance of contextual clues. (c) A simple score-level fusion of a foundation model with a domain-specific face recognition model improved the accuracy at low false match rates. (d) Foundation models, such as GPT-4o and Grok-4, are able to provide explainability to the face recognition pipeline. In some instances, foundation models are even able to resolve low-confidence decisions made by AdaFace, thereby reiterating the importance of combining domain-specific face recognition models with generic foundation models in a judicious manner.
Authors: Xiao Zhang, Johan Bos
Abstract: Tombstones are historically and culturally rich artifacts, encapsulating individual lives, community memory, historical narratives and artistic expression. Yet, many tombstones today face significant preservation challenges, including physical erosion, vandalism, environmental degradation, and political shifts. In this paper, we introduce a novel multi-modal framework for tombstones digitization, aiming to improve the interpretation, organization and retrieval of tombstone content. Our approach leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to translate tombstone images into structured Tombstone Meaning Representations (TMRs), capturing both image and text information. To further enrich semantic parsing, we incorporate retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for integrate externally dependent elements such as toponyms, occupation codes, and ontological concepts. Compared to traditional OCR-based pipelines, our method improves parsing accuracy from an F1 score of 36.1 to 89.5. We additionally evaluate the model's robustness across diverse linguistic and cultural inscriptions, and simulate physical degradation through image fusion to assess performance under noisy or damaged conditions. Our work represents the first attempt to formalize tombstone understanding using large vision-language models, presenting implications for heritage preservation.
Authors: Zhang Li, Biao Yang, Qiang Liu, Shuo Zhang, Zhiyin Ma, Liang Yin, Linger Deng, Yabo Sun, Yuliang Liu, Xiang Bai
Abstract: While large multi-modal models (LMMs) demonstrate promising capabilities in segmentation and comprehension, they still struggle with two limitations: inaccurate segmentation and hallucinated comprehension. These challenges stem primarily from constraints in weak visual comprehension and a lack of fine-grained perception. To alleviate these limitations, we propose LIRA, a framework that capitalizes on the complementary relationship between visual comprehension and segmentation via two key components: (1) Semantic-Enhanced Feature Extractor (SEFE) improves object attribute inference by fusing semantic and pixel-level features, leading to more accurate segmentation; (2) Interleaved Local Visual Coupling (ILVC) autoregressively generates local descriptions after extracting local features based on segmentation masks, offering fine-grained supervision to mitigate hallucinations. Furthermore, we find that the precision of object segmentation is positively correlated with the latent related semantics of the
Authors: Weiran Li, Yeqiang Liu, Qiannan Guo, Yijie Wei, Hwa Liang Leo, Zhenbo Li
Abstract: Multiple object tracking (MOT) technology has made significant progress in terrestrial applications, but underwater tracking scenarios remain underexplored despite their importance to marine ecology and aquaculture. In this paper, we present Multiple Fish Tracking Dataset 2025 (MFT25), a comprehensive dataset specifically designed for underwater multiple fish tracking, featuring 15 diverse video sequences with 408,578 meticulously annotated bounding boxes across 48,066 frames. Our dataset captures various underwater environments, fish species, and challenging conditions including occlusions, similar appearances, and erratic motion patterns. Additionally, we introduce Scale-aware and Unscented Tracker (SU-T), a specialized tracking framework featuring an Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) optimized for non-linear swimming patterns of fish and a novel Fish-Intersection-over-Union (FishIoU) matching that accounts for the unique morphological characteristics of aquatic species. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our SU-T baseline achieves state-of-the-art performance on MFT25, with 34.1 HOTA and 44.6 IDF1, while revealing fundamental differences between fish tracking and terrestrial object tracking scenarios. The dataset and codes are released at https://vranlee.github.io/SU-T/.
Authors: Zichun Xu, Yuntao Li, Zhaomin Wang, Lei Zhuang, Guocai Yang, Jingdong Zhao
Abstract: Depth information is robust to scene appearance variations and inherently carries 3D spatial details. In this paper, a visual backbone based on the vision transformer is proposed to fuse RGB and depth modalities for enhancing generalization. Different modalities are first processed by separate CNN stems, and the combined convolutional features are delivered to the scalable vision transformer to obtain visual representations. Moreover, a contrastive unsupervised learning scheme is designed with masked and unmasked tokens to accelerate the sample efficiency during the reinforcement learning process. Simulation results demonstrate that our visual backbone can focus more on task-related regions and exhibit better generalization in unseen scenarios. For sim2real transfer, a flexible curriculum learning schedule is developed to deploy domain randomization over training processes. Finally, the feasibility of our model is validated to perform real-world manipulation tasks via zero-shot transfer.
Authors: Xianghong Zou, Jianping Li, Zhe Chen, Zhen Cao, Zhen Dong, Qiegen Liu, Bisheng Yang
Abstract: Point cloud place recognition (PCPR) determines the geo-location within a prebuilt map and plays a crucial role in geoscience and robotics applications such as autonomous driving, intelligent transportation, and augmented reality. In real-world large-scale deployments of a geographic positioning system, PCPR models must continuously acquire, update, and accumulate knowledge to adapt to diverse and dynamic environments, i.e., the ability known as continual learning (CL). However, existing PCPR models often suffer from catastrophic forgetting, leading to significant performance degradation in previously learned scenes when adapting to new environments or sensor types. This results in poor model scalability, increased maintenance costs, and system deployment difficulties, undermining the practicality of PCPR. To address these issues, we propose LifelongPR, a novel continual learning framework for PCPR, which effectively extracts and fuses knowledge from sequential point cloud data. First, to alleviate the knowledge loss, we propose a replay sample selection method that dynamically allocates sample sizes according to each dataset's information quantity and selects spatially diverse samples for maximal representativeness. Second, to handle domain shifts, we design a prompt learning-based CL framework with a lightweight prompt module and a two-stage training strategy, enabling domain-specific feature adaptation while minimizing forgetting. Comprehensive experiments on large-scale public and self-collected datasets are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, our method achieves 6.50% improvement in mIR@1, 7.96% improvement in mR@1, and an 8.95% reduction in F. The code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/zouxianghong/LifelongPR.
Authors: Tao Tang, Chengxu Yang
Abstract: Pansharpening refers to the process of integrating a high resolution panchromatic (PAN) image with a lower resolution multispectral (MS) image to generate a fused product, which is pivotal in remote sensing. Despite the effectiveness of CNNs in addressing this challenge, they are inherently constrained by the uniform application of convolutional kernels across all spatial positions, overlooking local content variations. To overcome this issue, we introduce RAPNet, a new architecture that leverages content-adaptive convolution. At its core, RAPNet employs the Receptive-field Adaptive Pansharpening Convolution (RAPConv), designed to produce spatially adaptive kernels responsive to local feature context, thereby enhancing the precision of spatial detail extraction. Additionally, the network integrates the Pansharpening Dynamic Feature Fusion (PAN-DFF) module, which incorporates an attention mechanism to achieve an optimal balance between spatial detail enhancement and spectral fidelity. Comprehensive evaluations on publicly available datasets confirm that RAPNet delivers superior performance compared to existing approaches, as demonstrated by both quantitative metrics and qualitative assessments. Ablation analyses further substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive components.
Authors: Judy Long, Tao Liu, Sean Alexander Woznicki, Miljana Markovi\'c, Oskar Marko, Molly Sears
Abstract: Crop mapping involves identifying and classifying crop types using spatial data, primarily derived from remote sensing imagery. This study presents the first comprehensive review of large-scale, pixel-wise crop mapping workflows, encompassing both conventional supervised methods and emerging transfer learning approaches. To identify the optimal time-series generation approaches and supervised crop mapping models, we conducted systematic experiments, comparing six widely adopted satellite image-based preprocessing methods, alongside eleven supervised pixel-wise classification models. Additionally, we assessed the synergistic impact of varied training sample sizes and variable combinations. Moreover, we identified optimal transfer learning techniques for different magnitudes of domain shift. The evaluation of optimal methods was conducted across five diverse agricultural sites. Landsat 8 served as the primary satellite data source. Labels come from CDL trusted pixels and field surveys. Our findings reveal three key insights. First, fine-scale interval preprocessing paired with Transformer models consistently delivered optimal performance for both supervised and transferable workflows. RF offered rapid training and competitive performance in conventional supervised learning and direct transfer to similar domains. Second, transfer learning techniques enhanced workflow adaptability, with UDA being effective for homogeneous crop classes while fine-tuning remains robust across diverse scenarios. Finally, workflow choice depends heavily on the availability of labeled samples. With a sufficient sample size, supervised training typically delivers more accurate and generalizable results. Below a certain threshold, transfer learning that matches the level of domain shift is a viable alternative to achieve crop mapping. All code is publicly available to encourage reproducibility practice.
Authors: Shuo Cao, Nan Ma, Jiayang Li, Xiaohui Li, Lihao Shao, Kaiwen Zhu, Yu Zhou, Yuandong Pu, Jiarui Wu, Jiaquan Wang, Bo Qu, Wenhai Wang, Yu Qiao, Dajuin Yao, Yihao Liu
Abstract: The rapid advancement of educational applications, artistic creation, and AI-generated content (AIGC) technologies has substantially increased practical requirements for comprehensive Image Aesthetics Assessment (IAA), particularly demanding methods capable of delivering both quantitative scoring and professional understanding. Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based IAA methods demonstrate stronger perceptual and generalization capabilities compared to traditional approaches, yet they suffer from modality bias (score-only or text-only) and lack fine-grained attribute decomposition, thereby failing to support further aesthetic assessment. In this paper, we present:(1) ArtiMuse, an innovative MLLM-based IAA model with Joint Scoring and Expert-Level Understanding capabilities; (2) ArtiMuse-10K, the first expert-curated image aesthetic dataset comprising 10,000 images spanning 5 main categories and 15 subcategories, each annotated by professional experts with 8-dimensional attributes analysis and a holistic score. Both the model and dataset will be made public to advance the field.
Authors: Wei Sun, Weixia Zhang, Linhan Cao, Jun Jia, Xiangyang Zhu, Dandan Zhu, Xiongkuo Min, Guangtao Zhai
Abstract: Face image quality assessment (FIQA) is essential for various face-related applications. Although FIQA has been extensively studied and achieved significant progress, the computational complexity of FIQA algorithms remains a key concern for ensuring scalability and practical deployment in real-world systems. In this paper, we aim to develop a computationally efficient FIQA method that can be easily deployed in real-world applications. Specifically, our method consists of two stages: training a powerful teacher model and distilling a lightweight student model from it. To build a strong teacher model, we adopt a self-training strategy to improve its capacity. We first train the teacher model using labeled face images, then use it to generate pseudo-labels for a set of unlabeled images. These pseudo-labeled samples are used in two ways: (1) to distill knowledge into the student model, and (2) to combine with the original labeled images to further enhance the teacher model through self-training. The enhanced teacher model is used to further pseudo-label another set of unlabeled images for distilling the student models. The student model is trained using a combination of labeled images, pseudo-labeled images from the original teacher model, and pseudo-labeled images from the enhanced teacher model. Experimental results demonstrate that our student model achieves comparable performance to the teacher model with an extremely low computational overhead. Moreover, our method achieved first place in the ICCV 2025 VQualA FIQA Challenge. The code is available at https://github.com/sunwei925/Efficient-FIQA.git.
Authors: Md. Al-Masrur Khan, Durgakant Pushp, Lantao Liu
Abstract: In Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation (UDA-SS), a model is trained on labeled source domain data (e.g., synthetic images) and adapted to an unlabeled target domain (e.g., real-world images) without access to target annotations. Existing UDA-SS methods often struggle to balance fine-grained local details with global contextual information, leading to segmentation errors in complex regions. To address this, we introduce the Adaptive Feature Refinement (AFR) module, which enhances segmentation accuracy by refining highresolution features using semantic priors from low-resolution logits. AFR also integrates high-frequency components, which capture fine-grained structures and provide crucial boundary information, improving object delineation. Additionally, AFR adaptively balances local and global information through uncertaintydriven attention, reducing misclassifications. Its lightweight design allows seamless integration into HRDA-based UDA methods, leading to state-of-the-art segmentation performance. Our approach improves existing UDA-SS methods by 1.05% mIoU on GTA V --> Cityscapes and 1.04% mIoU on Synthia-->Cityscapes. The implementation of our framework is available at: https://github.com/Masrur02/AFRDA
Authors: Yufei Ma, Hanwen Zhang, Qiya Yang, Guibo Luo, Yuesheng Zhu
Abstract: In multi-center scenarios, One-Shot Federated Learning (OSFL) has attracted increasing attention due to its low communication overhead, requiring only a single round of transmission. However, existing generative model-based OSFL methods suffer from low training efficiency and potential privacy leakage in the healthcare domain. Additionally, achieving convergence within a single round of model aggregation is challenging under non-Independent and Identically Distributed (non-IID) data. To address these challenges, in this paper a modified OSFL framework is proposed, in which a new Feature-Guided Rectified Flow Model (FG-RF) and Dual-Layer Knowledge Distillation (DLKD) aggregation method are developed. FG-RF on the client side accelerates generative modeling in medical imaging scenarios while preserving privacy by synthesizing feature-level images rather than pixel-level images. To handle non-IID distributions, DLKD enables the global student model to simultaneously mimic the output logits and align the intermediate-layer features of client-side teacher models during aggregation. Experimental results on three non-IID medical imaging datasets show that our new framework and method outperform multi-round federated learning approaches, achieving up to 21.73% improvement, and exceeds the baseline FedISCA by an average of 21.75%. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that feature-level synthetic images significantly reduce privacy leakage risks compared to pixel-level synthetic images. The code is available at https://github.com/LMIAPC/one-shot-fl-medical.
Authors: Hao-Yu Hou, Chun-Yi Lee, Motoharu Sonogashira, Yasutomo Kawanishi
Abstract: The ability to abstract complex 3D environments into simplified and structured representations is crucial across various domains. 3D semantic scene graphs (SSGs) achieve this by representing objects as nodes and their interrelationships as edges, facilitating high-level scene understanding. Existing methods for 3D SSG generation, however, face significant challenges, including high computational demands and non-incremental processing that hinder their suitability for real-time open-world applications. To address this issue, we propose FROSS (Faster-than-Real-Time Online 3D Semantic Scene Graph Generation), an innovative approach for online and faster-than-real-time 3D SSG generation that leverages the direct lifting of 2D scene graphs to 3D space and represents objects as 3D Gaussian distributions. This framework eliminates the dependency on precise and computationally-intensive point cloud processing. Furthermore, we extend the Replica dataset with inter-object relationship annotations, creating the ReplicaSSG dataset for comprehensive evaluation of FROSS. The experimental results from evaluations on ReplicaSSG and 3DSSG datasets show that FROSS can achieve superior performance while operating significantly faster than prior 3D SSG generation methods. Our implementation and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/Howardkhh/FROSS.
Authors: Hyung Kyu Kim, Hak Gu Kim
Abstract: Speech-driven 3D facial animation aims to generate realistic facial movements synchronized with audio. Traditional methods primarily minimize reconstruction loss by aligning each frame with ground-truth. However, this frame-wise approach often fails to capture the continuity of facial motion, leading to jittery and unnatural outputs due to coarticulation. To address this, we propose a novel phonetic context-aware loss, which explicitly models the influence of phonetic context on viseme transitions. By incorporating a viseme coarticulation weight, we assign adaptive importance to facial movements based on their dynamic changes over time, ensuring smoother and perceptually consistent animations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that replacing the conventional reconstruction loss with ours improves both quantitative metrics and visual quality. It highlights the importance of explicitly modeling phonetic context-dependent visemes in synthesizing natural speech-driven 3D facial animation. Project page: https://cau-irislab.github.io/interspeech25/
Authors: Kejia Zhang, Keda Tao, Zhiming Luo, Chang Liu, Jiasheng Tang, Huan Wang
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) enable vision-language reasoning, yet often generate plausible outputs that are factually incorrect or visually ungrounded, thereby compromising their reliability. Direct preference optimization (DPO) is a common strategy for correcting hallucinations by aligning model outputs with human preferences. Existing DPO strategies typically treat hallucination-related preferences as fixed targets, relying on static supervision signals during training. This approach tends to overfit to superficial linguistic cues in preference data, leading to distributional rigidity and spurious correlations that impair grounding in causally relevant visual information. To overcome this limitation, we propose TARS, a token-adaptive preference strategy that reformulates DPO as a min-max optimization problem. TARS maximizes token-level distributional shifts under semantic constraints to simulate alignment uncertainty, and simultaneously minimizes the expected preference loss under these controlled perturbations. This joint objective preserves causal grounding while mitigating overfitting to preference patterns, thereby reducing hallucinations in multimodal reasoning. We evaluate TARS on multiple hallucination benchmarks and find consistently strong performance. Using only 4.8k preference samples and no expert feedback, TARS reduces hallucination rates from 26.4% to 13.2% and decreases cognition value from 2.5 to 0.4. It outperforms standard DPO and matches GPT-4o on several key metrics.
Authors: Zijian Dong, Longteng Duan, Jie Song, Michael J. Black, Andreas Geiger
Abstract: We present MoGA, a novel method to reconstruct high-fidelity 3D Gaussian avatars from a single-view image. The main challenge lies in inferring unseen appearance and geometric details while ensuring 3D consistency and realism. Most previous methods rely on 2D diffusion models to synthesize unseen views; however, these generated views are sparse and inconsistent, resulting in unrealistic 3D artifacts and blurred appearance. To address these limitations, we leverage a generative avatar model, that can generate diverse 3D avatars by sampling deformed Gaussians from a learned prior distribution. Due to limited 3D training data, such a 3D model alone cannot capture all image details of unseen identities. Consequently, we integrate it as a prior, ensuring 3D consistency by projecting input images into its latent space and enforcing additional 3D appearance and geometric constraints. Our novel approach formulates Gaussian avatar creation as model inversion by fitting the generative avatar to synthetic views from 2D diffusion models. The generative avatar provides an initialization for model fitting, enforces 3D regularization, and helps in refining pose. Experiments show that our method surpasses state-of-the-art techniques and generalizes well to real-world scenarios. Our Gaussian avatars are also inherently animatable. For code, see https://zj-dong.github.io/MoGA/.
Authors: Hanxi Li, Jingqi Wu, Lin Yuanbo Wu, Mingliang Li, Deyin Liu, Jialie Shen, Chunhua Shen
Abstract: In this paper, we propose Self-Navigated Residual Mamba (SNARM), a novel framework for universal industrial anomaly detection that leverages ``self-referential learning'' within test images to enhance anomaly discrimination. Unlike conventional methods that depend solely on pre-trained features from normal training data, SNARM dynamically refines anomaly detection by iteratively comparing test patches against adaptively selected in-image references. Specifically, we first compute the ``inter-residuals'' features by contrasting test image patches with the training feature bank. Patches exhibiting small-norm residuals (indicating high normality) are then utilized as self-generated reference patches to compute ``intra-residuals'', amplifying discriminative signals. These inter- and intra-residual features are concatenated and fed into a novel Mamba module with multiple heads, which are dynamically navigated by residual properties to focus on anomalous regions. Finally, AD results are obtained by aggregating the outputs of a self-navigated Mamba in an ensemble learning paradigm. Extensive experiments on MVTec AD, MVTec 3D, and VisA benchmarks demonstrate that SNARM achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, with notable improvements in all metrics, including Image-AUROC, Pixel-AURC, PRO, and AP.
Authors: Julia Hindel, Ema Mekic, Enamundram Naga Karthik, Rohit Mohan, Daniele Cattaneo, Maria Kalweit, Abhinav Valada
Abstract: Robot-assisted surgeries rely on accurate and real-time scene understanding to safely guide surgical instruments. However, segmentation models trained on static datasets face key limitations when deployed in these dynamic and evolving surgical environments. Class-incremental semantic segmentation (CISS) allows models to continually adapt to new classes while avoiding catastrophic forgetting of prior knowledge, without training on previous data. In this work, we build upon the recently introduced Taxonomy-Oriented Poincar\'e-regularized Incremental Class Segmentation (TOPICS) approach and propose an enhanced variant, termed TOPICS+, specifically tailored for robust segmentation of surgical scenes. Concretely, we incorporate the Dice loss into the hierarchical loss formulation to handle strong class imbalances, introduce hierarchical pseudo-labeling, and design tailored label taxonomies for robotic surgery environments. We also propose six novel CISS benchmarks designed for robotic surgery environments including multiple incremental steps and several semantic categories to emulate realistic class-incremental settings in surgical environments. In addition, we introduce a refined set of labels with more than 144 classes on the Syn-Mediverse synthetic dataset, hosted online as an evaluation benchmark. We make the code and trained models publicly available at http://topics.cs.uni-freiburg.de.
Authors: Haoxin Yang, Weihong Chen, Xuemiao Xu, Cheng Xu, Peng Xiao, Cuifeng Sun, Shaoyu Huang, Shengfeng He
Abstract: Monocular 3D human pose estimation remains a challenging task due to inherent depth ambiguities and occlusions. Compared to traditional methods based on Transformers or Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), recent diffusion-based approaches have shown superior performance, leveraging their probabilistic nature and high-fidelity generation capabilities. However, these methods often fail to account for the spatial and temporal correlations across predicted frames, resulting in limited temporal consistency and inferior accuracy in predicted 3D pose sequences. To address these shortcomings, this paper proposes StarPose, an autoregressive diffusion framework that effectively incorporates historical 3D pose predictions and spatial-temporal physical guidance to significantly enhance both the accuracy and temporal coherence of pose predictions. Unlike existing approaches, StarPose models the 2D-to-3D pose mapping as an autoregressive diffusion process. By synergically integrating previously predicted 3D poses with 2D pose inputs via a Historical Pose Integration Module (HPIM), the framework generates rich and informative historical pose embeddings that guide subsequent denoising steps, ensuring temporally consistent predictions. In addition, a fully plug-and-play Spatial-Temporal Physical Guidance (STPG) mechanism is tailored to refine the denoising process in an iterative manner, which further enforces spatial anatomical plausibility and temporal motion dynamics, rendering robust and realistic pose estimates. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that StarPose outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior accuracy and temporal consistency in 3D human pose estimation. Code is available at https://github.com/wileychan/StarPose.
Authors: Xiangzeng Liu, Chi Wang, Guanglu Shi, Xiaodong Zhang, Qiguang Miao, Miao Fan
Abstract: Local feature matching remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Recent Area to Point Matching (A2PM) methods have improved matching accuracy. However, existing research based on this framework relies on inefficient pixel-level comparisons and complex graph matching that limit scalability. In this work, we introduce the Semantic and Geometric-aware Descriptor Network (SGAD), which fundamentally rethinks area-based matching by generating highly discriminative area descriptors that enable direct matching without complex graph optimization. This approach significantly improves both accuracy and efficiency of area matching. We further improve the performance of area matching through a novel supervision strategy that decomposes the area matching task into classification and ranking subtasks. Finally, we introduce the Hierarchical Containment Redundancy Filter (HCRF) to eliminate overlapping areas by analyzing containment graphs. SGAD demonstrates remarkable performance gains, reducing runtime by 60x (0.82s vs. 60.23s) compared to MESA. Extensive evaluations show consistent improvements across multiple point matchers: SGAD+LoFTR reduces runtime compared to DKM, while achieving higher accuracy (0.82s vs. 1.51s, 65.98 vs. 61.11) in outdoor pose estimation, and SGAD+ROMA delivers +7.39% AUC@5{\deg} in indoor pose estimation, establishing a new state-of-the-art.
Authors: Gefan Ye, Lin Li, Kexin Li, Jun Xiao, Long Chen
Abstract: Zero-shot compositional action recognition (ZS-CAR) aims to identify unseen verb-object compositions in the videos by exploiting the learned knowledge of verb and object primitives during training. Despite compositional learning's progress in ZS-CAR, two critical challenges persist: 1) Missing compositional structure constraint, leading to spurious correlations between primitives; 2) Neglecting semantic hierarchy constraint, leading to semantic ambiguity and impairing the training process. In this paper, we argue that human-like symbolic reasoning offers a principled solution to these challenges by explicitly modeling compositional and hierarchical structured abstraction. To this end, we propose a logic-driven ZS-CAR framework LogicCAR that integrates dual symbolic constraints: Explicit Compositional Logic and Hierarchical Primitive Logic. Specifically, the former models the restrictions within the compositions, enhancing the compositional reasoning ability of our model. The latter investigates the semantical dependencies among different primitives, empowering the models with fine-to-coarse reasoning capacity. By formalizing these constraints in first-order logic and embedding them into neural network architectures, LogicCAR systematically bridges the gap between symbolic abstraction and existing models. Extensive experiments on the Sth-com dataset demonstrate that our LogicCAR outperforms existing baseline methods, proving the effectiveness of our logic-driven constraints.
Authors: Wei Sun, Linhan Cao, Yuqin Cao, Weixia Zhang, Wen Wen, Kaiwei Zhang, Zijian Chen, Fangfang Lu, Xiongkuo Min, Guangtao Zhai
Abstract: The rapid proliferation of user-generated content (UGC) on short-form video platforms has made video engagement prediction increasingly important for optimizing recommendation systems and guiding content creation. However, this task remains challenging due to the complex interplay of factors such as semantic content, visual quality, audio characteristics, and user background. Prior studies have leveraged various types of features from different modalities, such as visual quality, semantic content, background sound, etc., but often struggle to effectively model their cross-feature and cross-modality interactions. In this work, we empirically investigate the potential of large multimodal models (LMMs) for video engagement prediction. We adopt two representative LMMs: VideoLLaMA2, which integrates audio, visual, and language modalities, and Qwen2.5-VL, which models only visual and language modalities. Specifically, VideoLLaMA2 jointly processes key video frames, text-based metadata, and background sound, while Qwen2.5-VL utilizes only key video frames and text-based metadata. Trained on the SnapUGC dataset, both models demonstrate competitive performance against state-of-the-art baselines, showcasing the effectiveness of LMMs in engagement prediction. Notably, VideoLLaMA2 consistently outperforms Qwen2.5-VL, highlighting the importance of audio features in engagement prediction. By ensembling two types of models, our method achieves first place in the ICCV VQualA 2025 EVQA-SnapUGC Challenge on short-form video engagement prediction. The code is available at https://github.com/sunwei925/LMM-EVQA.git.
Authors: Shaoguang Wang, Jianxiang He, Yijie Xu, Ziyang Chen, Weiyu Guo, Hui Xiong
Abstract: The practical application of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to Video Question Answering (Video-QA) is severely hindered by the high token cost of processing numerous video frames. While increasing the number of sampled frames is a common strategy, we observe a "less is more" phenomenon where excessive frames can paradoxically degrade performance due to context dilution. Concurrently, state-of-the-art keyframe selection methods, while effective, still yield significant temporal redundancy, which we term 'visual echoes'. To address these dual challenges, we propose Adaptive Frame-Pruning (AFP), a novel post-processing method that intelligently prunes the selected keyframes. AFP employs an adaptive hierarchical clustering algorithm on a fused ResNet-50 and CLIP feature space to identify and merge these echoes into single representatives. To compensate for information loss, we then introduce a lightweight, text-based semantic graph that provides critical context with minimal token overhead. Conducting extensive experiments on the LongVideoBench and VideoMME benchmarks across multiple leading MLLMs, our full approach demonstrates a drastic reduction in required frames by up to 86.9% and total input tokens by up to 83.2%. Crucially, by providing a concise, high-quality set of frames, our method not only enhances efficiency but often improves accuracy over baselines that use more frames. The code will be released upon publication.
Authors: Dasol Choi, Jihwan Lee, Minjae Lee, Minsuk Kahng
Abstract: While prior research on text-to-image generation has predominantly focused on biases in human depictions, we investigate a more subtle yet pervasive phenomenon: demographic bias in generated objects (e.g., cars). We introduce SODA (Stereotyped Object Diagnostic Audit), a novel framework for systematically measuring such biases. Our approach compares visual attributes of objects generated with demographic cues (e.g., "for young people'') to those from neutral prompts, across 2,700 images produced by three state-of-the-art models (GPT Image-1, Imagen 4, and Stable Diffusion) in five object categories. Through a comprehensive analysis, we uncover strong associations between specific demographic groups and visual attributes, such as recurring color patterns prompted by gender or ethnicity cues. These patterns reflect and reinforce not only well-known stereotypes but also more subtle and unintuitive biases. We also observe that some models generate less diverse outputs, which in turn amplifies the visual disparities compared to neutral prompts. Our proposed auditing framework offers a practical approach for testing, revealing how stereotypes still remain embedded in today's generative models. We see this as an essential step toward more systematic and responsible AI development.
Authors: Xiangyu Sun, Haoyi Jiang, Liu Liu, Seungtae Nam, Gyeongjin Kang, Xinjie Wang, Wei Sui, Zhizhong Su, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang, Eunbyung Park
Abstract: Reconstructing and semantically interpreting 3D scenes from sparse 2D views remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Conventional methods often decouple semantic understanding from reconstruction or necessitate costly per-scene optimization, thereby restricting their scalability and generalizability. In this paper, we introduce Uni3R, a novel feed-forward framework that jointly reconstructs a unified 3D scene representation enriched with open-vocabulary semantics, directly from unposed multi-view images. Our approach leverages a Cross-View Transformer to robustly integrate information across arbitrary multi-view inputs, which then regresses a set of 3D Gaussian primitives endowed with semantic feature fields. This unified representation facilitates high-fidelity novel view synthesis, open-vocabulary 3D semantic segmentation, and depth prediction, all within a single, feed-forward pass. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Uni3R establishes a new state-of-the-art across multiple benchmarks, including 25.07 PSNR on RE10K and 55.84 mIoU on ScanNet. Our work signifies a novel paradigm towards generalizable, unified 3D scene reconstruction and understanding. The code is available at https://github.com/HorizonRobotics/Uni3R.
Authors: Michele Andrade, Guilherme A. L. Silva, Val\'eria Santos, Gladston Moreira, Eduardo Luz
Abstract: Estimating the nutritional content of food from images is a critical task with significant implications for health and dietary monitoring. This is challenging, especially when relying solely on 2D images, due to the variability in food presentation, lighting, and the inherent difficulty in inferring volume and mass without depth information. Furthermore, reproducibility in this domain is hampered by the reliance of state-of-the-art methods on proprietary datasets for large-scale pre-training. In this paper, we investigate the impact of large-scale pre-training datasets on the performance of deep learning models for nutritional estimation using only 2D images. We fine-tune and evaluate Vision Transformer (ViT) models pre-trained on two large public datasets, ImageNet and COYO, comparing their performance against baseline CNN models (InceptionV2 and ResNet-50) and a state-of-the-art method pre-trained on the proprietary JFT-300M dataset. We conduct extensive experiments on the Nutrition5k dataset, a large-scale collection of real-world food plates with high-precision nutritional annotations. Our evaluation using Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAE%) reveals that models pre-trained on JFT-300M significantly outperform those pre-trained on public datasets. Unexpectedly, the model pre-trained on the massive COYO dataset performs worse than the model pre-trained on ImageNet for this specific regression task, refuting our initial hypothesis. Our analysis provides quantitative evidence highlighting the critical role of pre-training dataset characteristics, including scale, domain relevance, and curation quality, for effective transfer learning in 2D nutritional estimation.
Authors: Zhaohong Huang, Yuxin Zhang, Taojian Zhou, Guorong Cai, Rongrong Ji
Abstract: Deep Supervision Networks exhibit significant efficacy for the medical imaging community. Nevertheless, existing work merely supervises either the coarse-grained semantic features or fine-grained detailed features in isolation, which compromises the fact that these two types of features hold vital relationships in medical image analysis. We advocate the powers of complementary feature supervision for medical image segmentation, by proposing a Detail-Semantic Deep Supervision Network (DS$^2$Net). DS$^2$Net navigates both low-level detailed and high-level semantic feature supervision through Detail Enhance Module (DEM) and Semantic Enhance Module (SEM). DEM and SEM respectively harness low-level and high-level feature maps to create detail and semantic masks for enhancing feature supervision. This is a novel shift from single-view deep supervision to multi-view deep supervision. DS$^2$Net is also equipped with a novel uncertainty-based supervision loss that adaptively assigns the supervision strength of features within distinct scales based on their uncertainty, thus circumventing the sub-optimal heuristic design that typifies previous works. Through extensive experiments on six benchmarks captured under either colonoscopy, ultrasound and microscope, we demonstrate that DS$^2$Net consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods for medical image analysis.
Authors: Canhui Tang, Zifan Han, Hongbo Sun, Sanping Zhou, Xuchong Zhang, Xin Wei, Ye Yuan, Huayu Zhang, Jinglin Xu, Hao Sun
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in vision-language tasks, yet they still face challenges when processing long-duration video inputs. The limitation arises from MLLMs' context limit and training costs, necessitating sparse frame sampling before feeding videos into MLLMs. However, building a trainable sampling method remains challenging due to the unsupervised and non-differentiable nature of sparse frame sampling in Video-MLLMs. To address these problems, we propose Temporal Sampling Policy Optimization (TSPO), advancing MLLMs' long-form video-language understanding via reinforcement learning. Specifically, we first propose a trainable event-aware temporal agent, which captures event-query correlation for performing probabilistic keyframe selection. Then, we propose the TSPO reinforcement learning paradigm, which models keyframe selection and language generation as a joint decision-making process, enabling end-to-end group relative optimization for the temporal sampling policy. Furthermore, we propose a dual-style long video training data construction pipeline, balancing comprehensive temporal understanding and key segment localization. Finally, we incorporate rule-based answering accuracy and temporal locating reward mechanisms to optimize the temporal sampling policy. Comprehensive experiments show that our TSPO achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple long video understanding benchmarks, and shows transferable ability across different cutting-edge Video-MLLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/Hui-design/TSPO
Authors: Bo Deng, Levi Heath
Abstract: In this paper, we describe a feedforward artificial neural network trained on the ImageNet 2012 contest dataset [7] with the new method of [5] to an accuracy rate of 98.3% with a 99.69 Top-1 rate, and an average of 285.9 labels that are perfectly classified over the 10 batch partitions of the dataset. The best performing model uses 322,430,160 parameters, with 4 decimal places precision. We conjecture that the reason our model does not achieve a 100% accuracy rate is due to a double-labeling problem, by which there are duplicate images in the dataset with different labels.
Authors: Shushi Wang, Chunyi Li, Zicheng Zhang, Han Zhou, Wei Dong, Jun Chen, Guangtao Zhai, Xiaohong Liu
Abstract: AI-based image enhancement techniques have been widely adopted in various visual applications, significantly improving the perceptual quality of user-generated content (UGC). However, the lack of specialized quality assessment models has become a significant limiting factor in this field, limiting user experience and hindering the advancement of enhancement methods. While perceptual quality assessment methods have shown strong performance on UGC and AIGC individually, their effectiveness on AI-enhanced UGC (AI-UGC) which blends features from both, remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we construct AU-IQA, a benchmark dataset comprising 4,800 AI-UGC images produced by three representative enhancement types which include super-resolution, low-light enhancement, and denoising. On this dataset, we further evaluate a range of existing quality assessment models, including traditional IQA methods and large multimodal models. Finally, we provide a comprehensive analysis of how well current approaches perform in assessing the perceptual quality of AI-UGC. The access link to the AU-IQA is https://github.com/WNNGGU/AU-IQA-Dataset.
Authors: Huanyu Wang, Jushi Kai, Haoli Bai, Lu Hou, Bo Jiang, Ziwei He, Zhouhan Lin
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) typically replace the predefined image placeholder token (
Authors: Zeke Zexi Hu, Haodong Chen, Hui Ye, Xiaoming Chen, Vera Yuk Ying Chung, Yiran Shen, Weidong Cai
Abstract: A light field image captures scenes through an array of micro-lenses, providing a rich representation that encompasses spatial and angular information. While this richness comes at the cost of significant data redundancy, most existing light field methods still tend to indiscriminately utilize all the information from sub-aperture images (SAIs) in an attempt to harness every visual cue regardless of their disparity significance. However, this paradigm inevitably leads to disparity entanglement, a fundamental cause of inefficiency in light field image processing. To address this limitation, we introduce the Skim Transformer, a novel architecture inspired by the ``less is more" philosophy. Unlike conventional light field Transformers, our Skim Transformer features a multi-branch structure where each branch is dedicated to a specific disparity range by constructing its attention score matrix over a skimmed subset of SAIs, rather than all of them. Building upon this core component, we present SkimLFSR, an efficient yet powerful network for light field super-resolution (LFSR). Requiring only 67\% of parameters, SkimLFSR achieves state-of-the-art results surpassing the best existing method by an average of 0.59 dB and 0.35 dB in PSNR at the 2x and 4x tasks, respectively. Through in-depth analyses, we reveal that SkimLFSR, guided by the predefined skimmed SAI sets as prior knowledge, demonstrates distinct disparity-aware behaviors in attending to visual cues. These findings highlight its effectiveness and adaptability as a promising paradigm for light field image processing.
Authors: Cho Yang
Abstract: This paper proposes a novel model inspired by CycleGAN: FQGA-single to produce high quality medical synthetic CT (sCT) generated images more efficiently. Evaluations were done on the SynthRAD Grand Challenge dataset with the CycleGAN model used for benchmarking and for comparing the quality of CBCT-to-sCT generated images from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Finally, this paper also explores ideas from the paper "One Epoch Is All You Need" to compare models trained on a single epoch versus multiple epochs. Astonishing results from FQGA-single were obtained during this exploratory experiment, which show that the performance of FQGA-single when trained on a single epoch surpasses itself when trained on multiple epochs. More surprising is that its performance also surpasses CycleGAN's multiple-epoch and single-epoch models, and even a modified version of CycleGAN.
Authors: John M. Ball, Christopher L. Horner
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to analyze a nonlinear elasticity model introduced by the authors for comparing two images, regarded as bounded open subsets of $\R^n$ together with associated vector-valued intensity maps. Optimal transformations between the images are sought as minimisers of an integral functional among orientation-preserving homeomorphisms. The existence of minimisers is proved under natural coercivity and polyconvexity conditions, assuming only that the intensity functions are bounded measurable. Variants of the existence theorem are also proved, first under the constraint that finite sets of landmark points in the two images are mapped one to the other, and second when one image is to be compared to an unknown part of another. The question is studied as to whether for images related by an affine mapping the unique minimiser is given by that affine mapping. For a natural class of functional integrands an example is given guaranteeing that this property holds for pairs of images in which the second is a scaling of the first by a constant factor. However for the property to hold for arbitrary pairs of affinely related images it is shown that the integrand has to depend on the gradient of the transformation as a convex function of its determinant alone. This suggests a new model in which the integrand depends also on second derivatives of the transformation, and an example is given for which both existence of minimisers is assured and the above property holds for all pairs of affinely related images.
Authors: Shyang-En Weng, Cheng-Yen Hsiao, Li-Wei Lu, Yu-Shen Huang, Tzu-Han Chen, Shaou-Gang Miaou, Ricky Christanto
Abstract: Enhancing low-light images remains a critical challenge in computer vision, as does designing lightweight models for edge devices that can handle the computational demands of deep learning. This article introduces an extended version of the Channel-Prior and Gamma-Estimation Network (CPGA-Net), termed CPGA-Net+, incorporating the theoretically-based Attentions for illumination in local and global processing. Additionally, we assess our approach through a theoretical analysis of the block design by introducing both an ultra-lightweight and a stronger version, following the same design principles. The lightweight version significantly reduces computational costs by over two-thirds by utilizing the local branch as an auxiliary component. Meanwhile, the stronger version achieves an impressive balance by maximizing local and global processing capabilities. Our proposed methods have been validated as effective compared to recent lightweight approaches, offering superior performance and scalable solutions with limited computational resources.
Authors: Chinmay Rao, Matthias van Osch, Nicola Pezzotti, Jeroen de Bresser, Mark van Buchem, Laurens Beljaards, Jakob Meineke, Elwin de Weerdt, Huangling Lu, Mariya Doneva, Marius Staring
Abstract: Since multiple MRI contrasts of the same anatomy contain redundant information, one contrast can guide the reconstruction of an undersampled subsequent contrast. To this end, several end-to-end learning-based guided reconstruction methods have been proposed. However, a key challenge is the requirement of large paired training datasets comprising raw data and aligned reference images. We propose a modular two-stage approach addressing this issue, additionally providing an explanatory framework for the multi-contrast problem based on the shared and non-shared generative factors underlying two given contrasts. A content/style model of two-contrast image data is learned from a largely unpaired image-domain dataset and is subsequently applied as a plug-and-play operator in iterative reconstruction. The disentanglement of content and style allows explicit representation of contrast-independent and contrast-specific factors. Consequently, incorporating prior information into the reconstruction reduces to a simple replacement of the aliased content of the reconstruction iterate with high-quality content derived from the reference scan. Combining this component with a data consistency step and introducing a general corrective process for the content yields an iterative scheme. We name this novel approach PnP-CoSMo. Various aspects like interpretability and convergence are explored via simulations. Furthermore, its practicality is demonstrated on the public NYU fastMRI DICOM dataset, showing improved generalizability compared to end-to-end methods, and on two in-house multi-coil raw datasets, offering up to 32.6% more acceleration over learning-based non-guided reconstruction for a given SSIM.
Authors: Kai Cheng, Zhengyuan Li, Xingpeng Sun, Byung-Cheol Min, Amrit Singh Bedi, Aniket Bera
Abstract: Embodied Question Answering (EQA) is an essential yet challenging task for robot assistants. Large vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise for EQA, but existing approaches either treat it as static video question answering without active exploration or restrict answers to a closed set of choices. These limitations hinder real-world applicability, where a robot must explore efficiently and provide accurate answers in open-vocabulary settings. To overcome these challenges, we introduce EfficientEQA, a novel framework that couples efficient exploration with free-form answer generation. EfficientEQA features three key innovations: (1) Semantic-Value-Weighted Frontier Exploration (SFE) with Verbalized Confidence (VC) from a black-box VLM to prioritize semantically important areas to explore, enabling the agent to gather relevant information faster; (2) a BLIP relevancy-based mechanism to stop adaptively by flagging highly relevant observations as outliers to indicate whether the agent has collected enough information; and (3) a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) method for the VLM to answer accurately based on pertinent images from the agent's observation history without relying on predefined choices. Our experimental results show that EfficientEQA achieves over 15% higher answer accuracy and requires over 20% fewer exploration steps than state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/chengkaiAcademyCity/EfficientEQA
Authors: Zhefei Gong, Pengxiang Ding, Shangke Lyu, Siteng Huang, Mingyang Sun, Wei Zhao, Zhaoxin Fan, Donglin Wang
Abstract: In robotic visuomotor policy learning, diffusion-based models have achieved significant success in improving the accuracy of action trajectory generation compared to traditional autoregressive models. However, they suffer from inefficiency due to multiple denoising steps and limited flexibility from complex constraints. In this paper, we introduce Coarse-to-Fine AutoRegressive Policy (CARP), a novel paradigm for visuomotor policy learning that redefines the autoregressive action generation process as a coarse-to-fine, next-scale approach. CARP decouples action generation into two stages: first, an action autoencoder learns multi-scale representations of the entire action sequence; then, a GPT-style transformer refines the sequence prediction through a coarse-to-fine autoregressive process. This straightforward and intuitive approach produces highly accurate and smooth actions, matching or even surpassing the performance of diffusion-based policies while maintaining efficiency on par with autoregressive policies. We conduct extensive evaluations across diverse settings, including single-task and multi-task scenarios on state-based and image-based simulation benchmarks, as well as real-world tasks. CARP achieves competitive success rates, with up to a 10% improvement, and delivers 10x faster inference compared to state-of-the-art policies, establishing a high-performance, efficient, and flexible paradigm for action generation in robotic tasks.
Authors: Renyang Liu, Ziyu Lyu, Wei Zhou, See-Kiong Ng
Abstract: In the rapidly evolving field of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC), a central challenge is distinguishing AI-synthesized images from natural ones. Despite the impressive capabilities of advanced generative models in producing visually compelling images, significant discrepancies remain when compared to natural images. To systematically investigate and quantify these differences, we construct a large-scale multimodal dataset, D-ANI, comprising 5,000 natural images and over 440,000 AIGI samples generated by nine representative models using both unimodal and multimodal prompts, including Text-to-Image (T2I), Image-to-Image (I2I), and Text-and-Image-to-Image (TI2I). We then introduce an AI-Natural Image Discrepancy assessment benchmark (D-Judge) to address the critical question: how far are AI-generated images (AIGIs) from truly realistic images? Our fine-grained evaluation framework assesses the D-ANI dataset across five dimensions: naive visual quality, semantic alignment, aesthetic appeal, downstream task applicability, and coordinated human validation. Extensive experiments reveal substantial discrepancies across these dimensions, highlighting the importance of aligning quantitative metrics with human judgment to achieve a comprehensive understanding of AI-generated image quality. Code: https://github.com/ryliu68/DJudge ; Data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Renyang/DANI.
URLs: https://github.com/ryliu68/DJudge, https://huggingface.co/datasets/Renyang/DANI.
Authors: Sonia Raychaudhuri, Angel X. Chang
Abstract: Intelligent embodied agents (e.g. robots) need to perform complex semantic tasks in unfamiliar environments. Among many skills that the agents need to possess, building and maintaining a semantic map of the environment is most crucial in long-horizon tasks. A semantic map captures information about the environment in a structured way, allowing the agent to reference it for advanced reasoning throughout the task. While existing surveys in embodied AI focus on general advancements or specific tasks like navigation and manipulation, this paper provides a comprehensive review of semantic map-building approaches in embodied AI, specifically for indoor navigation. We categorize these approaches based on their structural representation (spatial grids, topological graphs, dense point-clouds or hybrid maps) and the type of information they encode (implicit features or explicit environmental data). We also explore the strengths and limitations of the map building techniques, highlight current challenges, and propose future research directions. We identify that the field is moving towards developing open-vocabulary, queryable, task-agnostic map representations, while high memory demands and computational inefficiency still remaining to be open challenges. This survey aims to guide current and future researchers in advancing semantic mapping techniques for embodied AI systems.
Authors: Ali Tourani, Deniz Isinsu Avsar, Hriday Bavle, Jose Luis Sanchez-Lopez, Jan Lagerwall, Holger Voos
Abstract: Fiducial markers are widely used in various robotics tasks, facilitating enhanced navigation, object recognition, and scene understanding. Despite their advantages for robots and Augmented Reality (AR) applications, they often disrupt the visual aesthetics of environments because they are visible to humans, making them unsuitable for non-intrusive use cases. To address this gap, this paper presents "iMarkers"-innovative, unobtrusive fiducial markers detectable exclusively by robots equipped with specialized sensors. These markers offer high flexibility in production, allowing customization of their visibility range and encoding algorithms to suit various demands. The paper also introduces the hardware designs and software algorithms developed for detecting iMarkers, highlighting their adaptability and robustness in the detection and recognition stages. Various evaluations have demonstrated the effectiveness of iMarkers compared to conventional (printed) and blended fiducial markers and confirmed their applicability in diverse robotics scenarios.
Authors: Junjie Wen, Yichen Zhu, Jinming Li, Zhibin Tang, Chaomin Shen, Feifei Feng
Abstract: Enabling robots to perform diverse tasks across varied environments is a central challenge in robot learning. While vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promise for generalizable robot skills, realizing their full potential requires addressing limitations in action representation and efficient training. Current VLA models often focus on scaling the vision-language model (VLM) component, while the action space representation remains a critical bottleneck. This paper introduces DexVLA, a novel framework designed to enhance the efficiency and generalization capabilities of VLAs for complex, long-horizon tasks across diverse robot embodiments. DexVLA features a novel diffusion-based action expert, scaled to one billion parameters, designed for cross-embodiment learning. A novel embodiment curriculum learning strategy facilitates efficient training: (1) pre-training the diffusion expert that is separable from the VLA on cross-embodiment data, (2) aligning the VLA model to specific embodiments, and (3) post-training for rapid adaptation to new tasks. We conduct comprehensive experiments across multiple embodiments, including single-arm, bimanual, and dexterous hand, demonstrating DexVLA's adaptability to challenging tasks without task-specific adaptation, its ability to learn dexterous skills on novel embodiments with limited data, and its capacity to complete complex, long-horizon tasks using only direct language prompting, such as laundry folding. In all settings, our method demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art models like Octo, OpenVLA, and Diffusion Policy.
Authors: Jingyu Song, Haoyu Ma, Onur Bagoren, Advaith V. Sethuraman, Yiting Zhang, Katherine A. Skinner
Abstract: Underwater simulators offer support for building robust underwater perception solutions. Significant work has recently been done to develop new simulators and to advance the performance of existing underwater simulators. Still, there remains room for improvement on physics-based underwater sensor modeling and rendering efficiency. In this paper, we propose OceanSim, a high-fidelity GPU-accelerated underwater simulator to address this research gap. We propose advanced physics-based rendering techniques to reduce the sim-to-real gap for underwater image simulation. We develop OceanSim to fully leverage the computing advantages of GPUs and achieve real-time imaging sonar rendering and fast synthetic data generation. We evaluate the capabilities and realism of OceanSim using real-world data to provide qualitative and quantitative results. The code and detailed documentation are made available on the project website to support the marine robotics community: https://umfieldrobotics.github.io/OceanSim.
Authors: Haoxuan Li, Ziya Erkoc, Lei Li, Daniele Sirigatti, Vladyslav Rozov, Angela Dai, Matthias Nie{\ss}ner
Abstract: We introduce MeshPad, a generative approach that creates 3D meshes from sketch inputs. Building on recent advances in artist-reminiscent triangle mesh generation, our approach addresses the need for interactive mesh creation. To this end, we focus on enabling consistent edits by decomposing editing into 'deletion' of regions of a mesh, followed by 'addition' of new mesh geometry. Both operations are invoked by simple user edits of a sketch image, facilitating an iterative content creation process and enabling the construction of complex 3D meshes. Our approach is based on a triangle sequence-based mesh representation, exploiting a large Transformer model for mesh triangle addition and deletion. In order to perform edits interactively, we introduce a vertex-aligned speculative prediction strategy on top of our additive mesh generator. This speculator predicts multiple output tokens corresponding to a vertex, thus significantly reducing the computational cost of inference and accelerating the editing process, making it possible to execute each editing step in only a few seconds. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MeshPad outperforms state-of-the-art sketch-conditioned mesh generation methods, achieving more than 22% mesh quality improvement in Chamfer distance, and being preferred by 90% of participants in perceptual evaluations.
Authors: Ruth Crasto
Abstract: Geographic distribution shift arises when the distribution of locations on Earth in a training dataset is different from what is seen at test time. The most common approaches to tackling geographic distribution shift treat regions delimited by administrative boundaries such as countries or continents as separate domains and apply standard domain adaptation methods, ignoring geographic coordinates that are often available as metadata. This paper proposes the use of location encoders for modeling continuous, learnable domain assignment. We show how both non-parametric sine-cosine encoders and pre-trained location encoders can be used in conjunction with standard domain adaptation methods for improved robustness to geographic distribution shift. Our proposed methods achieve new state-of-the-art results on two geo-tagged remote sensing datasets from the WILDS benchmark. We have made our code publicly available at: https://github.com/crastoru/wilds-geoshift.
Authors: Johanna P. M\"uller, Robert Wright, Thomas G. Day, Lorenzo Venturini, Samuel F. Budd, Hadrien Reynaud, Joseph V. Hajnal, Reza Razavi, Bernhard Kainz
Abstract: Accurate analysis of prenatal ultrasound (US) is essential for early detection of developmental anomalies. However, operator dependency and technical limitations (e.g. intrinsic artefacts and effects, setting errors) can complicate image interpretation and the assessment of diagnostic uncertainty. We present L-FUSION (Laplacian Fetal US Segmentation with Integrated FoundatiON models), a framework that integrates uncertainty quantification through unsupervised, normative learning and large-scale foundation models for robust segmentation of fetal structures in normal and pathological scans. We propose to utilise the aleatoric logit distributions of Stochastic Segmentation Networks and Laplace approximations with fast Hessian estimations to estimate epistemic uncertainty only from the segmentation head. This enables us to achieve reliable abnormality quantification for instant diagnostic feedback. Combined with an integrated Dropout component, L-FUSION enables reliable differentiation of lesions from normal fetal anatomy with enhanced uncertainty maps and segmentation counterfactuals in US imaging. It improves epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty interpretation and removes the need for manual disease-labelling. Evaluations across multiple datasets show that L-FUSION achieves superior segmentation accuracy and consistent uncertainty quantification, supporting on-site decision-making and offering a scalable solution for advancing fetal ultrasound analysis in clinical settings.
Authors: Wenjie Li, Heng Guo, Yuefeng Hou, Guangwei Gao, Zhanyu Ma
Abstract: Lightweight image super-resolution (SR) aims to reconstruct high-resolution images from low-resolution images under limited computational costs. We find that existing frequency-based SR methods cannot balance the reconstruction of overall structures and high-frequency parts. Meanwhile, these methods are inefficient for handling frequency features and unsuitable for lightweight SR. In this paper, we show that introducing both wavelet and Fourier information allows our model to consider both high-frequency features and overall SR structure reconstruction while reducing costs. Specifically, we propose a Dual-domain Modulation Network that integrates both wavelet and Fourier information for enhanced frequency modeling. Unlike existing methods that rely on a single frequency representation, our design combines wavelet-domain modulation via a Wavelet-domain Modulation Transformer (WMT) with global Fourier supervision, enabling complementary spectral learning well-suited for lightweight SR. Experimental results show that our method achieves a comparable PSNR to SRFormer and MambaIR while with less than 50\% and 60\% of their FLOPs and achieving inference speeds 15.4x and 5.4x faster, respectively, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method on SR quality and lightweight. Code link: https://github.com/24wenjie-li/DMNet
Authors: Luca L. C. Trautmann, Peter A. Wijeratne, Itamar Ronen, Ivor J. A. Simpson
Abstract: Introducing accelerated reconstruction algorithms into clinical settings requires measures of uncertainty quantification that accurately assess the relevant uncertainty introduced by the reconstruction algorithm. Many currently deployed approaches quantifying uncertainty by focusing on measuring the variability in voxelwise intensity variation. Although these provide interpretable maps, they lack a structural interpretation and do not show a clear relationship to how the data will be analysed subsequently. In this work we show that voxel level uncertainty does not provide insight into morphological uncertainty. To do so, we use segmentation as a clinically-relevant downstream task and deploy ensembles of reconstruction modes to measure uncertainty in the reconstructions. We show that variability and bias in the morphological structures are present and within-ensemble variability cannot be predicted well with uncertainty measured only by voxel intensity variations.
Authors: Ihab Asaad, Maha Shadaydeh, Joachim Denzler
Abstract: Machine learning classification models trained with empirical risk minimization (ERM) often inadvertently rely on spurious correlations. When absent in the test data, these unintended associations between non-target attributes and target labels lead to poor generalization. This paper addresses this problem from a model optimization perspective and proposes a novel method, Gradient Extrapolation for Debiased Representation Learning (GERNE), designed to learn debiased representations in both known and unknown attribute training cases. GERNE uses two distinct batches with different amounts of spurious correlations and defines the target gradient as a linear extrapolation of the gradients computed from each batch's loss. Our analysis shows that when the extrapolated gradient points toward the batch gradient with fewer spurious correlations, it effectively guides training toward learning a debiased model. GERNE serves as a general framework for debiasing, encompassing ERM and Resampling methods as special cases. We derive the theoretical upper and lower bounds of the extrapolation factor employed by GERNE. By tuning this factor, GERNE can adapt to maximize either Group-Balanced Accuracy (GBA) or Worst-Group Accuracy (WGA). We validate GERNE on five vision and one NLP benchmarks, demonstrating competitive and often superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines. The project page is available at: https://gerne-debias.github.io/.
Authors: Mikel Zhobro, Andreas Ren\'e Geist, Georg Martius
Abstract: Realistic simulation is critical for applications ranging from robotics to animation. Learned simulators have emerged as a possibility to capture real world physics directly from video data, but very often require privileged information such as depth information, particle tracks and hand-engineered features to maintain spatial and temporal consistency. These strong inductive biases or ground truth 3D information help in domains where data is sparse but limit scalability and generalization in data rich regimes. To overcome the key limitations, we propose 3DGSim, a learned 3D simulator that directly learns physical interactions from multi-view RGB videos. 3DGSim unifies 3D scene reconstruction, particle dynamics prediction and video synthesis into an end-to-end trained framework. It adopts MVSplat to learn a latent particle-based representation of 3D scenes, a Point Transformer for particle dynamics, a Temporal Merging module for consistent temporal aggregation and Gaussian Splatting to produce novel view renderings. By jointly training inverse rendering and dynamics forecasting, 3DGSim embeds the physical properties into point-wise latent features. This enables the model to capture diverse physical behaviors, from rigid to elastic, cloth-like dynamics, and boundary conditions (e.g. fixed cloth corner), along with realistic lighting effects that also generalize to unseen multibody interactions and novel scene edits.
Authors: Shu Han, Xubo Zhu, Ji Wu, Ximeng Cai, Wen Yang, Huai Yu, Gui-Song Xia
Abstract: Precise LiDAR-camera calibration is crucial for integrating these two sensors into robotic systems to achieve robust perception. In applications like autonomous driving, online targetless calibration enables a prompt sensor misalignment correction from mechanical vibrations without extra targets. However, existing methods exhibit limitations in effectively extracting consistent features from LiDAR and camera data and fail to prioritize salient regions, compromising cross-modal alignment robustness. To address these issues, we propose DF-Calib, a LiDAR-camera calibration method that reformulates calibration as an intra-modality depth flow estimation problem. DF-Calib estimates a dense depth map from the camera image and completes the sparse LiDAR projected depth map, using a shared feature encoder to extract consistent depth-to-depth features, effectively bridging the 2D-3D cross-modal gap. Additionally, we introduce a reliability map to prioritize valid pixels and propose a perceptually weighted sparse flow loss to enhance depth flow estimation. Experimental results across multiple datasets validate its accuracy and generalization,with DF-Calib achieving a mean translation error of 0.635cm and rotation error of 0.045 degrees on the KITTI dataset.
Authors: Adam McArthur, Stephanie Wichuk, Stephen Burnside, Andrew Kirby, Alexander Scammon, Damian Sol, Abhilash Hareendranathan, Jacob L. Jaremko
Abstract: Developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) poses significant diagnostic challenges, hindering timely intervention. Current screening methodologies lack standardization, and AI-driven studies suffer from reproducibility issues due to limited data and code availability. To address these limitations, we introduce Retuve, an open-source framework for multi-modality DDH analysis, encompassing both ultrasound (US) and X-ray imaging. Retuve provides a complete and reproducible workflow, offering open datasets comprising expert-annotated US and X-ray images, pre-trained models with training code and weights, and a user-friendly Python Application Programming Interface (API). The framework integrates segmentation and landmark detection models, enabling automated measurement of key diagnostic parameters such as the alpha angle and acetabular index. By adhering to open-source principles, Retuve promotes transparency, collaboration, and accessibility in DDH research. This initiative has the potential to democratize DDH screening, facilitate early diagnosis, and ultimately improve patient outcomes by enabling widespread screening and early intervention. The GitHub repository/code can be found here: https://github.com/radoss-org/retuve
Authors: Junyi Cao, Evangelos Kalogerakis
Abstract: We present SOPHY, a generative model for 3D physics-aware shape synthesis. Unlike existing 3D generative models that focus solely on static geometry or 4D models that produce physics-agnostic animations, our method jointly synthesizes shape, texture, and material properties related to physics-grounded dynamics, making the generated objects ready for simulations and interactive, dynamic environments. To train our model, we introduce a dataset of 3D objects annotated with detailed physical material attributes, along with an efficient pipeline for material annotation. Our method enables applications such as text-driven generation of interactive, physics-aware 3D objects and single-image reconstruction of physically plausible shapes. Furthermore, our experiments show that jointly modeling shape and material properties enhances the realism and fidelity of the generated shapes, improving performance on both generative geometry and physical plausibility.
Authors: Yui Lo, Yuqian Chen, Dongnan Liu, Leo Zekelman, Jarrett Rushmore, Yogesh Rathi, Nikos Makris, Alexandra J. Golby, Fan Zhang, Weidong Cai, Lauren J. O'Donnell
Abstract: Shape measures have emerged as promising descriptors of white matter tractography, offering complementary insights into anatomical variability and associations with cognitive and clinical phenotypes. However, conventional methods for computing shape measures are computationally expensive and time-consuming for large-scale datasets due to reliance on voxel-based representations. We propose Tract2Shape, a novel multimodal deep learning framework that leverages geometric (point cloud) and scalar (tabular) features to predict ten white matter tractography shape measures. To enhance model efficiency, we utilize a dimensionality reduction algorithm for the model to predict five primary shape components. The model is trained and evaluated on two independently acquired datasets, the HCP-YA dataset, and the PPMI dataset. We evaluate the performance of Tract2Shape by training and testing it on the HCP-YA dataset and comparing the results with state-of-the-art models. To further assess its robustness and generalization ability, we also test Tract2Shape on the unseen PPMI dataset. Tract2Shape outperforms SOTA deep learning models across all ten shape measures, achieving the highest average Pearson's r and the lowest nMSE on the HCP-YA dataset. The ablation study shows that both multimodal input and PCA contribute to performance gains. On the unseen testing PPMI dataset, Tract2Shape maintains a high Pearson's r and low nMSE, demonstrating strong generalizability in cross-dataset evaluation. Tract2Shape enables fast, accurate, and generalizable prediction of white matter shape measures from tractography data, supporting scalable analysis across datasets. This framework lays a promising foundation for future large-scale white matter shape analysis.
Authors: Frederik Nolte, Andreas Geiger, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Ingmar Posner
Abstract: This paper evaluates single-view mesh reconstruction models for their potential in enabling instant digital twin creation for real-time planning and dynamics prediction using physics simulators for robotic manipulation. Recent single-view 3D reconstruction advances offer a promising avenue toward an automated real-to-sim pipeline: directly mapping a single observation of a scene into a simulation instance by reconstructing scene objects as individual, complete, and physically plausible 3D meshes. However, their suitability for physics simulations and robotics applications under immediacy, physical fidelity, and simulation readiness remains underexplored. We establish robotics-specific benchmarking criteria for 3D reconstruction, including handling typical inputs, collision-free and stable geometry, occlusions robustness, and meeting computational constraints. Our empirical evaluation using realistic robotics datasets shows that despite success on computer vision benchmarks, existing approaches fail to meet robotics-specific requirements. We quantitively examine limitations of single-view reconstruction for practical robotics implementation, in contrast to prior work that focuses on multi-view approaches. Our findings highlight critical gaps between computer vision advances and robotics needs, guiding future research at this intersection.
Authors: Wenlong Jiao, Binglong Li, Wei Shang, Ping Wang, Dongwei Ren
Abstract: Image deblurring plays a crucial role in enhancing visual clarity across various applications. Although most deep learning approaches primarily focus on sRGB images, which inherently lose critical information during the image signal processing pipeline, RAW images, being unprocessed and linear, possess superior restoration potential but remain underexplored. Deblurring RAW images presents unique challenges, particularly in handling frequency-dependent blur while maintaining computational efficiency. To address these issues, we propose Frequency Enhanced Network (FrENet), a framework specifically designed for RAW-to-RAW deblurring that operates directly in the frequency domain. We introduce a novel Adaptive Frequency Positional Modulation module, which dynamically adjusts frequency components according to their spectral positions, thereby enabling precise control over the deblurring process. Additionally, frequency domain skip connections are adopted to further preserve high-frequency details. Experimental results demonstrate that FrENet surpasses state-of-the-art deblurring methods in RAW image deblurring, achieving significantly better restoration quality while maintaining high efficiency in terms of reduced MACs. Furthermore, FrENet's adaptability enables it to be extended to sRGB images, where it delivers comparable or superior performance compared to methods specifically designed for sRGB data. The code will be available at https://github.com/WenlongJiao/FrENet .
Authors: Guanzhou Ke, Bo Wang, Guoqing Chao, Weiming Hu, Shengfeng He
Abstract: Multimodal foundation models have demonstrated impressive capabilities across diverse tasks. However, their potential as plug-and-play solutions for missing modality reconstruction remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we identify and formalize three potential paradigms for missing modality reconstruction, and perform a comprehensive evaluation across these paradigms, covering 42 model variants in terms of reconstruction accuracy and adaptability to downstream tasks. Our analysis reveals that current foundation models often fall short in two critical aspects: (i) fine-grained semantic extraction from the available modalities, and (ii) robust validation of generated modalities. These limitations lead to suboptimal and, at times, misaligned generations. To address these challenges, we propose an agentic framework tailored for missing modality reconstruction. This framework dynamically formulates modality-aware mining strategies based on the input context, facilitating the extraction of richer and more discriminative semantic features. In addition, we introduce a self-refinement mechanism, which iteratively verifies and enhances the quality of generated modalities through internal feedback. Experimental results show that our method reduces FID for missing image reconstruction by at least 14\% and MER for missing text reconstruction by at least 10\% compared to baselines. Code are released at: https://github.com/Guanzhou-Ke/AFM2.
Authors: Gladston Moreira, Ivan Meneghini, Elizabeth Wanner
Abstract: Multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs) often require a trade-off between conflicting objectives, maximizing diversity and convergence in the objective space. This study presents an approach to improve the quality of MOP solutions by optimizing the dispersion in the decision space and the convergence in a specific region of the objective space. Our approach defines a Region of Interest (ROI) based on a cone representing the decision maker's preferences in the objective space, while enhancing the dispersion of solutions in the decision space using a uniformity measure. Combining solution concentration in the objective space with dispersion in the decision space intensifies the search for Pareto-optimal solutions while increasing solution diversity. When combined, these characteristics improve the quality of solutions and avoid the bias caused by clustering solutions in a specific region of the decision space. Preliminary experiments suggest that this method enhances multi-objective optimization by generating solutions that effectively balance dispersion and concentration, thereby mitigating bias in the decision space.
Authors: Zheng Fang, Xiaoming Qi, Chun-Mei Feng, Jialun Pei, Weixin Si, Yueming Jin
Abstract: Surgical instrument segmentation under Federated Learning (FL) is a promising direction, which enables multiple surgical sites to collaboratively train the model without centralizing datasets. However, there exist very limited FL works in surgical data science, and FL methods for other modalities do not consider inherent characteristics in surgical domain: i) different scenarios show diverse anatomical backgrounds while highly similar instrument representation; ii) there exist surgical simulators which promote large-scale synthetic data generation with minimal efforts. In this paper, we propose a novel Personalized FL scheme, Spatio-Temporal Representation Decoupling and Enhancement (FedST), which wisely leverages surgical domain knowledge during both local-site and global-server training to boost segmentation. Concretely, our model embraces a Representation Separation and Cooperation (RSC) mechanism in local-site training, which decouples the query embedding layer to be trained privately, to encode respective backgrounds. Meanwhile, other parameters are optimized globally to capture the consistent representations of instruments, including the temporal layer to capture similar motion patterns. A textual-guided channel selection is further designed to highlight site-specific features, facilitating model adapta tion to each site. Moreover, in global-server training, we propose Synthesis-based Explicit Representation Quantification (SERQ), which defines an explicit representation target based on synthetic data to synchronize the model convergence during fusion for improving model generalization.
Authors: Xuesong Li, Nassir Navab, Zhongliang Jiang
Abstract: Image denoising is a fundamental task in computer vision, particularly in medical ultrasound (US) imaging, where speckle noise significantly degrades image quality. Although recent advancements in deep neural networks have led to substantial improvements in denoising for natural images, these methods cannot be directly applied to US speckle noise, as it is not purely random. Instead, US speckle arises from complex wave interference within the body microstructure, making it tissue-dependent. This dependency means that obtaining two independent noisy observations of the same scene, as required by pioneering Noise2Noise, is not feasible. Additionally, blind-spot networks also cannot handle US speckle noise due to its high spatial dependency. To address this challenge, we introduce Speckle2Self, a novel self-supervised algorithm for speckle reduction using only single noisy observations. The key insight is that applying a multi-scale perturbation (MSP) operation introduces tissue-dependent variations in the speckle pattern across different scales, while preserving the shared anatomical structure. This enables effective speckle suppression by modeling the clean image as a low-rank signal and isolating the sparse noise component. To demonstrate its effectiveness, Speckle2Self is comprehensively compared with conventional filter-based denoising algorithms and SOTA learning-based methods, using both realistic simulated US images and human carotid US images. Additionally, data from multiple US machines are employed to evaluate model generalization and adaptability to images from unseen domains. Project page: https://noseefood.github.io/us-speckle2self/
Authors: Hanxue Gu, Yaqian Chen, Nicholas Konz, Qihang Li, Maciej A. Mazurowski
Abstract: Foundation models, pre-trained on large image datasets and capable of capturing rich feature representations, have recently shown potential for zero-shot image registration. However, their performance has mostly been tested in the context of rigid or less complex structures, such as the brain or abdominal organs, and it remains unclear whether these models can handle more challenging, deformable anatomy. Breast MRI registration is particularly difficult due to significant anatomical variation between patients, deformation caused by patient positioning, and the presence of thin and complex internal structure of fibroglandular tissue, where accurate alignment is crucial. Whether foundation model-based registration algorithms can address this level of complexity remains an open question. In this study, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of foundation model-based registration algorithms for breast MRI. We assess five pre-trained encoders, including DINO-v2, SAM, MedSAM, SSLSAM, and MedCLIP, across four key breast registration tasks that capture variations in different years and dates, sequences, modalities, and patient disease status (lesion versus no lesion). Our results show that foundation model-based algorithms such as SAM outperform traditional registration baselines for overall breast alignment, especially under large domain shifts, but struggle with capturing fine details of fibroglandular tissue. Interestingly, additional pre-training or fine-tuning on medical or breast-specific images in MedSAM and SSLSAM, does not improve registration performance and may even decrease it in some cases. Further work is needed to understand how domain-specific training influences registration and to explore targeted strategies that improve both global alignment and fine structure accuracy. We also publicly release our code at \href{https://github.com/mazurowski-lab/Foundation-based-reg}{Github}.
URLs: https://github.com/mazurowski-lab/Foundation-based-reg
Authors: Cong Chen, Ming Chen, Hoileong Lee, Yan Li, Jiyang Yu
Abstract: Surface defect detection of steel, especially the recognition of multi-scale defects, has always been a major challenge in industrial manufacturing. Steel surfaces not only have defects of various sizes and shapes, which limit the accuracy of traditional image processing and detection methods in complex environments. However, traditional defect detection methods face issues of insufficient accuracy and high miss-detection rates when dealing with small target defects. To address this issue, this study proposes a detection framework based on deep learning, specifically YOLOv9s, combined with the C3Ghost module, SCConv module, and CARAFE upsampling operator, to improve detection accuracy and model performance. First, the SCConv module is used to reduce feature redundancy and optimize feature representation by reconstructing the spatial and channel dimensions. Second, the C3Ghost module is introduced to enhance the model's feature extraction ability by reducing redundant computations and parameter volume, thereby improving model efficiency. Finally, the CARAFE upsampling operator, which can more finely reorganize feature maps in a content-aware manner, optimizes the upsampling process and ensures detailed restoration of high-resolution defect regions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves higher accuracy and robustness in steel surface defect detection tasks compared to other methods, effectively addressing defect detection problems.
Authors: Shuquan Lian, Yuhang Wu, Jia Ma, Yifan Ding, Zihan Song, Bingqi Chen, Xiawu Zheng, Hui Li
Abstract: The emergence of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has driven significant advances in Graphical User Interface (GUI) agent capabilities. Nevertheless, existing GUI agent training and inference techniques still suffer from a dilemma for reasoning designs, ineffective reward, and visual noise. To address these issues, we introduce UI-AGILE for enhancing GUI agents at both training and inference. For training, we propose a suite of improvements to the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) process: 1) a continuous reward function to incentivize high-precision grounding; 2) a ``Simple Thinking'' reward to balance planning with speed and grounding accuracy; and 3) a cropping-based resampling strategy to mitigate the sparse reward problem and improve learning on complex tasks. For inference, we present decomposed grounding with selection to dramatically improve grounding accuracy on high-resolution displays by breaking the image into smaller, manageable parts. Experiments show that UI-AGILE achieves the state-of-the-art grounding performance on two benchmarks ScreenSpot-Pro and ScreenSpot-v2 while it also exhibits strong general agent capabilities. For instance, using both our training and inference enhancement methods brings 23\% grounding accuracy improvement over the best baseline on ScreenSpot-Pro. We provide the code in https://github.com/KDEGroup/UI-AGILE.
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 \mbox{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 \mbox{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 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: Zahra Ebrahimi, Raheleh Salehi, Nassir Navab, Carsten Marr, Ario Sadafi
Abstract: The dynamic environment of laboratories and clinics, with streams of data arriving on a daily basis, requires regular updates of trained machine learning models for consistent performance. Continual learning is supposed to help train models without catastrophic forgetting. However, state-of-the-art methods are ineffective for multiple instance learning (MIL), which is often used in single-cell-based hematologic disease diagnosis (e.g., leukemia detection). Here, we propose the first continual learning method tailored specifically to MIL. Our method is rehearsal-based over a selection of single instances from various bags. We use a combination of the instance attention score and distance from the bag mean and class mean vectors to carefully select which samples and instances to store in exemplary sets from previous tasks, preserving the diversity of the data. Using the real-world input of one month of data from a leukemia laboratory, we study the effectiveness of our approach in a class incremental scenario, comparing it to well-known continual learning methods. We show that our method considerably outperforms state-of-the-art methods, providing the first continual learning approach for MIL. This enables the adaptation of models to shifting data distributions over time, such as those caused by changes in disease occurrence or underlying genetic alterations.
Authors: Song Yan, Hui Wei, Jinlong Fei, Guoliang Yang, Zhengyu Zhao, Zheng Wang
Abstract: Various (text) prompt filters and (image) safety checkers have been implemented to mitigate the misuse of Text-to-Image (T2I) models in creating Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content. In order to expose potential security vulnerabilities of such safeguards, multimodal jailbreaks have been studied. However, existing jailbreaks are limited to prompt-specific and image-specific perturbations, which suffer from poor scalability and time-consuming optimization. To address these limitations, we propose Universally Unfiltered and Unseen (U3)-Attack, a multimodal jailbreak attack method against T2I safeguards. Specifically, U3-Attack optimizes an adversarial patch on the image background to universally bypass safety checkers and optimizes a safe paraphrase set from a sensitive word to universally bypass prompt filters while eliminating redundant computations. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our U3-Attack on both open-source and commercial T2I models. For example, on the commercial Runway-inpainting model with both prompt filter and safety checker, our U3-Attack achieves $~4\times$ higher success rates than the state-of-the-art multimodal jailbreak attack, MMA-Diffusion.
Authors: Hanqing Wang, Shaoyang Wang, Yiming Zhong, Zemin Yang, Jiamin Wang, Zhiqing Cui, Jiahao Yuan, Yifan Han, Mingyu Liu, Yuexin Ma
Abstract: Affordance grounding focuses on predicting the specific regions of objects that are associated with the actions to be performed by robots. It plays a vital role in the fields of human-robot interaction, human-object interaction, embodied manipulation, and embodied perception. Existing models often neglect the affordance shared among different objects because they lack the Chain-of-Thought(CoT) reasoning abilities, limiting their out-of-domain (OOD) generalization and explicit reasoning capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose Affordance-R1, the first unified affordance grounding framework that integrates cognitive CoT guided Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) within a reinforcement learning paradigm. Specifically, we designed a sophisticated affordance function, which contains format, perception, and cognition rewards to effectively guide optimization directions. Furthermore, we constructed a high-quality affordance-centric reasoning dataset, ReasonAff, to support training. Trained exclusively via reinforcement learning with GRPO and without explicit reasoning data, Affordance-R1 achieves robust zero-shot generalization and exhibits emergent test-time reasoning capabilities. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms well-established methods and exhibits open-world generalization. To the best of our knowledge, Affordance-R1 is the first to integrate GRPO-based RL with reasoning into affordance reasoning. The code of our method and our dataset is released on https://github.com/hq-King/Affordance-R1.