Authors: Shan Zhang, Aotian Chen, Kai Zou, Jindong Gu, Yuan Xue, Anton van den Hengel
Abstract: Symbolic computer vision represents diagrams through explicit logical rules and structured representations, enabling interpretable understanding in machine vision. This requires fundamentally different learning paradigms from pixel-based visual models. Symbolic visual learners parse diagrams into geometric primitives-points, lines, and shapes-whereas pixel-based learners operate on textures and colors. We propose a novel self-supervised symbolic auto-encoder that encodes diagrams into structured primitives and their interrelationships within the latent space, and decodes them through our executable engine to reconstruct the input diagrams. Central to this architecture is Symbolic Hierarchical Process Reward Modeling, which applies hierarchical step-level parsing rewards to enforce point-on-line, line-on-shape, and shape-on-relation consistency. Since vanilla reinforcement learning exhibits poor exploration in the policy space during diagram reconstruction; we thus introduce stabilization mechanisms to balance exploration and exploitation. We fine-tune our symbolic encoder on downstream tasks, developing a neuro-symbolic system that integrates the reasoning capabilities of neural networks with the interpretability of symbolic models through reasoning-grounded visual rewards. Evaluations across reconstruction, perception, and reasoning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach: achieving a 98.2% reduction in MSE for geometric diagram reconstruction, surpassing GPT-4o by 0.6% with a 7B model on chart reconstruction, and improving by +13% on the MathGlance perception benchmark, and by +3% on MathVerse and GeoQA reasoning benchmarks.
Authors: Yasser Taha, Gr\'egoire Montavon, Nils K\"orber
Abstract: Modern deep learning faces significant challenges with noisy labels, class ambiguity, as well as the need to robustly reject out-of-distribution or corrupted samples. In this work, we propose a unified framework based on the concept of a "drainage node'' which we add at the output of the network. The node serves to reallocate probability mass toward uncertainty, while preserving desirable properties such as end-to-end training and differentiability. This mechanism provides a natural escape route for highly ambiguous, anomalous, or noisy samples, particularly relevant for instance-dependent and asymmetric label noise. In systematic experiments involving the addition of varying proportions of instance-dependent noise or asymmetric noise to CIFAR-10/100 labels, our drainage formulation achieves an accuracy increase of up to 9\% over existing approaches in the high-noise regime. Our results on real-world datasets, such as mini-WebVision, mini-ImageNet and Clothing-1M, match or surpass existing state-of-the-art methods. Qualitative analysis reveals a denoising effect, where the drainage neuron consistently absorbs corrupt, mislabeled, or outlier data, leading to more stable decision boundaries. Furthermore, our drainage formulation enables applications well beyond classification, with immediate benefits for web-scale, semi-supervised dataset cleaning, and open-set applications.
Authors: Justin Norman, Hany Farid
Abstract: Biometric facial recognition models often demonstrate significant decreases in accuracy when processing real-world images, often characterized by poor quality, non-frontal subject poses, and subject occlusions. We investigate whether targeted, AI-driven, head-pose correction and image restoration can improve recognition accuracy. Using a model-agnostic, large-scale, forensic-evaluation pipeline, we assess the impact of three restoration approaches: 3D reconstruction (NextFace), 2D frontalization (CFR-GAN), and feature enhancement (CodeFormer). We find that naive application of these techniques substantially degrades facial recognition accuracy. However, we also find that selective application of CFR-GAN combined with CodeFormer yields meaningful improvements.
Authors: Jingkang Wang, Henry Che, Yun Chen, Ze Yang, Lily Goli, Sivabalan Manivasagam, Raquel Urtasun
Abstract: Reconstructing large-scale dynamic scenes from visual observations is a fundamental challenge in computer vision, with critical implications for robotics and autonomous systems. While recent differentiable rendering methods such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have achieved impressive photorealistic reconstruction, they suffer from scalability limitations and require annotations to decouple actor motion. Existing self-supervised methods attempt to eliminate explicit annotations by leveraging motion cues and geometric priors, yet they remain constrained by per-scene optimization and sensitivity to hyperparameter tuning. In this paper, we introduce Flux4D, a simple and scalable framework for 4D reconstruction of large-scale dynamic scenes. Flux4D directly predicts 3D Gaussians and their motion dynamics to reconstruct sensor observations in a fully unsupervised manner. By adopting only photometric losses and enforcing an "as static as possible" regularization, Flux4D learns to decompose dynamic elements directly from raw data without requiring pre-trained supervised models or foundational priors simply by training across many scenes. Our approach enables efficient reconstruction of dynamic scenes within seconds, scales effectively to large datasets, and generalizes well to unseen environments, including rare and unknown objects. Experiments on outdoor driving datasets show Flux4D significantly outperforms existing methods in scalability, generalization, and reconstruction quality.
Authors: Richard F\"uzess\'ery, Kaziwa Saleh, S\'andor Sz\'en\'asi, Zolt\'an V\'amossy
Abstract: Zero-shot object counting attempts to estimate the number of object instances belonging to novel categories that the vision model performing the counting has never encountered during training. Existing methods typically require large amount of annotated data and often require visual exemplars to guide the counting process. However, large language models (LLMs) are powerful tools with remarkable reasoning and data understanding abilities, which suggest the possibility of utilizing them for counting tasks without any supervision. In this work we aim to leverage the visual capabilities of two multi-modal LLMs, GPT-4o and GPT-5, to perform object counting in a zero-shot manner using only textual prompts. We evaluate both models on the FSC-147 and CARPK datasets and provide a comparative analysis. Our findings show that the models achieve performance comparable to the state-of-the-art zero-shot approaches on FSC-147, in some cases, even surpass them.
Authors: Nafiseh Izadyar, Teseo Schneider
Abstract: Most existing 3D shape datasets and models focus solely on geometry, overlooking the material properties that determine how objects appear. We introduce a two-stage large language model (LLM) based method for inferring material composition directly from 3D point clouds with coarse segmentations. Our key insight is to decouple reasoning about what an object is from what it is made of. In the first stage, an LLM predicts the object's semantic; in the second stage, it assigns plausible materials to each geometric segment, conditioned on the inferred semantics. Both stages operate in a zero-shot manner, without task-specific training. Because existing datasets lack reliable material annotations, we evaluate our method using an LLM-as-a-Judge implemented in DeepEval. Across 1,000 shapes from Fusion/ABS and ShapeNet, our method achieves high semantic and material plausibility. These results demonstrate that language models can serve as general-purpose priors for bridging geometric reasoning and material understanding in 3D data.
Authors: Liying Lu, Rapha\"el Achddou, Sabine S\"usstrunk
Abstract: Raw images taken in low-light conditions are very noisy due to low photon count and sensor noise. Learning-based denoisers have the potential to reconstruct high-quality images. For training, however, these denoisers require large paired datasets of clean and noisy images, which are difficult to collect. Noise synthesis is an alternative to large-scale data acquisition: given a clean image, we can synthesize a realistic noisy counterpart. In this work, we propose a general and practical noise synthesis method that requires only one single noisy image and one single dark frame per ISO setting. We represent signal-dependent noise with a Poisson distribution and introduce a Fourier-domain spectral sampling algorithm to accurately model signal-independent noise. The latter generates diverse noise realizations that maintain the spatial and statistical properties of real sensor noise. As opposed to competing approaches, our method neither relies on simplified parametric models nor on large sets of clean-noisy image pairs. Our synthesis method is not only accurate and practical, it also leads to state-of-the-art performances on multiple low-light denoising benchmarks.
Authors: Haitian Zheng, Yuan Yao, Yongsheng Yu, Yuqian Zhou, Jiebo Luo, Zhe Lin
Abstract: Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) have markedly advanced the quality of image inpainting and local editing. However, the inherent latent compression often introduces pixel-level inconsistencies, such as chromatic shifts, texture mismatches, and visible seams along editing boundaries. Existing remedies, including background-conditioned latent decoding and pixel-space harmonization, usually fail to fully eliminate these artifacts in practice and do not generalize well across different latent representations or tasks. We introduce PixPerfect, a pixel-level refinement framework that delivers seamless, high-fidelity local edits across diverse LDM architectures and tasks. PixPerfect leverages (i) a differentiable discriminative pixel space that amplifies and suppresses subtle color and texture discrepancies, (ii) a comprehensive artifact simulation pipeline that exposes the refiner to realistic local editing artifacts during training, and (iii) a direct pixel-space refinement scheme that ensures broad applicability across diverse latent representations and tasks. Extensive experiments on inpainting, object removal, and insertion benchmarks demonstrate that PixPerfect substantially enhances perceptual fidelity and downstream editing performance, establishing a new standard for robust and high-fidelity localized image editing.
Authors: Mark Moussa, Andre Williams, Seth Roffe, Douglas Morton
Abstract: Rapid and accurate wildfire detection is crucial for emergency response and environmental management. In airborne and spaceborne missions, real-time algorithms must distinguish between no fire, active fire, and post-fire conditions, and estimate fire intensity. Multispectral and hyperspectral thermal imagers provide rich spectral information, but high data dimensionality and limited onboard resources make real-time processing challenging. As wildfires increase in frequency and severity, the need for low-latency and computationally efficient onboard detection methods is critical. We present a systematic evaluation of multiple deep learning architectures, including custom Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformer-based models, for multi-class fire classification. We also introduce PyroFocus, a two-stage pipeline that performs fire classification followed by fire radiative power (FRP) regression or segmentation to reduce inference time and computational cost for onboard deployment. Using data from NASA's MODIS/ASTER Airborne Simulator (MASTER), which is similar to a next-generation fire detection sensor, we compare accuracy, inference latency, and resource efficiency. Experimental results show that the proposed two-stage pipeline achieves strong trade-offs between speed and accuracy, demonstrating significant potential for real-time edge deployment in future wildfire monitoring missions.
Authors: Hongpei Zheng, Shijie Li, Yanran Li, Hujun Yin
Abstract: Spatial reasoning in large-scale 3D environments remains challenging for current vision-language models, which are typically constrained to room-scale scenarios. We introduce H$^2$U3D (Holistic House Understanding in 3D), a 3D visual question answering dataset designed for house-scale scene understanding. H$^2$U3D features multi-floor environments spanning up to three floors and 10-20 rooms, covering more than 300 m$^2$. Through an automated annotation pipeline, it constructs hierarchical coarse-to-fine visual representations and generates diverse question-answer pairs with chain-of-thought annotations. We further propose SpatialReasoner, an active perception framework that autonomously invokes spatial tools to explore 3D scenes based on textual queries. SpatialReasoner is trained through a two-stage strategy: a supervised cold start followed by reinforcement learning with an adaptive exploration reward that promotes efficient exploration while discouraging redundant operations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SpatialReasoner achieves state-of-the-art performance on H$^2$U3D, outperforming strong baselines including GPT-4o and Gemini-2.5-Pro. Notably, our method attains superior results while using only 3-4 images in total on average, compared to baselines requiring 16+ images, highlighting the effectiveness of our coarse-to-fine active exploration paradigm.
Authors: Thomas Monninger, Zihan Zhang, Steffen Staab, Sihao Ding
Abstract: Accurate environmental representations are essential for autonomous driving, providing the foundation for safe and efficient navigation. Traditionally, high-definition (HD) maps are providing this representation of the static road infrastructure to the autonomous system a priori. However, because the real world is constantly changing, such maps must be constructed online from on-board sensor data. Navigation-grade standard-definition (SD) maps are widely available, but their resolution is insufficient for direct deployment. Instead, they can be used as coarse prior to guide the online map construction process. We propose NavMapFusion, a diffusion-based framework that performs iterative denoising conditioned on high-fidelity sensor data and on low-fidelity navigation maps. This paper strives to answer: (1) How can coarse, potentially outdated navigation maps guide online map construction? (2) What advantages do diffusion models offer for map fusion? We demonstrate that diffusion-based map construction provides a robust framework for map fusion. Our key insight is that discrepancies between the prior map and online perception naturally correspond to noise within the diffusion process; consistent regions reinforce the map construction, whereas outdated segments are suppressed. On the nuScenes benchmark, NavMapFusion conditioned on coarse road lines from OpenStreetMap data reaches a 21.4% relative improvement on 100 m, and even stronger improvements on larger perception ranges, while maintaining real-time capabilities. By fusing low-fidelity priors with high-fidelity sensor data, the proposed method generates accurate and up-to-date environment representations, guiding towards safer and more reliable autonomous driving. The code is available at https://github.com/tmonnin/navmapfusion
Authors: Faizan Farooq Khan, K J Joseph, Koustava Goswami, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Balaji Vasan Srinivasan
Abstract: Design generation, in its essence, is a step-by-step process where designers progressively refine and enhance their work through careful modifications. Despite this fundamental characteristic, existing approaches mainly treat design synthesis as a single-step generation problem, significantly underestimating the inherent complexity of the creative process. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel problem setting called Step-by-Step Layered Design Generation, which tasks a machine learning model with generating a design that adheres to a sequence of instructions from a designer. Leveraging recent advancements in multi-modal LLMs, we propose SLEDGE: Step-by-step LayEred Design GEnerator to model each update to a design as an atomic, layered change over its previous state, while being grounded in the instruction. To complement our new problem setting, we introduce a new evaluation suite, including a dataset and a benchmark. Our exhaustive experimental analysis and comparison with state-of-the-art approaches tailored to our new setup demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. We hope our work will attract attention to this pragmatic and under-explored research area.
Authors: Yeganeh Ghamary, Victoria Wu, Hooman Vaseli, Christina Luong, Teresa Tsang, Siavash Bigdeli, Purang Abolmaesumi
Abstract: Ejection fraction (EF) is a crucial metric for assessing cardiac function and diagnosing conditions such as heart failure. Traditionally, EF estimation requires manual tracing and domain expertise, making the process time-consuming and subject to interobserver variability. Most current deep learning methods for EF prediction are black-box models with limited transparency, which reduces clinical trust. Some post-hoc explainability methods have been proposed to interpret the decision-making process after the prediction is made. However, these explanations do not guide the model's internal reasoning and therefore offer limited reliability in clinical applications. To address this, we introduce ProtoEFNet, a novel video-based prototype learning model for continuous EF regression. The model learns dynamic spatiotemporal prototypes that capture clinically meaningful cardiac motion patterns. Additionally, the proposed Prototype Angular Separation (PAS) loss enforces discriminative representations across the continuous EF spectrum. Our experiments on the EchonetDynamic dataset show that ProtoEFNet can achieve accuracy on par with its non-interpretable counterpart while providing clinically relevant insight. The ablation study shows that the proposed loss boosts performance with a 2% increase in F1 score from 77.67$\pm$2.68 to 79.64$\pm$2.10. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/DeepRCL/ProtoEF
Authors: Seunghoi Kim, Henry F. J. Tregidgo, Chen Jin, Matteo Figini, Daniel C. Alexander
Abstract: Generative models are prone to hallucinations: plausible but incorrect structures absent in the ground truth. This issue is problematic in image restoration for safety-critical domains such as medical imaging, industrial inspection, and remote sensing, where such errors undermine reliability and trust. For example, in low-field MRI, widely used in resource-limited settings, restoration models are essential for enhancing low-quality scans, yet hallucinations can lead to serious diagnostic errors. Progress has been hindered by a circular dependency: evaluating hallucinations requires labeled data, yet such labels are costly and subjective. We introduce HalluGen, a diffusion-based framework that synthesizes realistic hallucinations with controllable type, location, and severity, producing perceptually realistic but semantically incorrect outputs (segmentation IoU drops from 0.86 to 0.36). Using HalluGen, we construct the first large-scale hallucination dataset comprising 4,350 annotated images derived from 1,450 brain MR images for low-field enhancement, enabling systematic evaluation of hallucination detection and mitigation. We demonstrate its utility in two applications: (1) benchmarking image quality metrics and developing Semantic Hallucination Assessment via Feature Evaluation (SHAFE), a feature-based metric with soft-attention pooling that improves hallucination sensitivity over traditional metrics; and (2) training reference-free hallucination detectors that generalize to real restoration failures. Together, HalluGen and its open dataset establish the first scalable foundation for evaluating hallucinations in safety-critical image restoration.
Authors: Lynn Kandakji, William Woof, Nikolas Pontikos
Abstract: The detection of weak, spatially distributed anomalies in volumetric medical imaging remains a major challenge. The subtle, non-adjacent nature of early disease signals is often lost due to suboptimal architectural inductive biases: 2D/3D CNNs impose strong locality, while ViTs diffuse unconstrained global attention. This conflict leaves the optimal inductive structure for robust, sparse volumetric pattern recognition unresolved. This study presents a controlled comparison of sixteen modern deep learning architectures spanning 2D/3D convolutional, hybrid, and volumetric transformer families for subclinical keratoconus (SKC) detection from 3D anterior segment OCT volumes. We demonstrate that hierarchical attention models offer a superior and more parameter-efficient inductive bias, surpassing the performance of both 2D and 3D CNNs and ViTs. Our results show 21-23% higher sensitivity and specificity in the sparse anomaly (subclinical) regime. Mechanistic analyses reveal that this advantage stems from precise spatial scale alignment: hierarchical windowing produces effective receptive fields matched to the intermediate, multi-slice extent of subclinical abnormalities. This avoids excessive CNN locality and diffuse global attention. Attention-distance measurements confirm a key insight into architectural adaptation: the required spatial integration length shifts significantly based on the signal strength, with subclinical cases necessitating longer integration compared to both healthy and manifest disease states. Representational similarity and auxiliary age/sex prediction tasks further support the generalizability of these inductive principles. The findings provide design guidance for future volumetric anomaly detection systems, establishing hierarchical attention as a principled and effective approach for early pathological change analysis in 3D medical imaging.
Authors: Yu Yuan, Tharindu Wickremasinghe, Zeeshan Nadir, Xijun Wang, Yiheng Chi, Stanley H. Chan
Abstract: Images and videos are discrete 2D projections of the 4D world (3D space + time). Most visual understanding, prediction, and generation operate directly on 2D observations, leading to suboptimal performance. We propose SeeU, a novel approach that learns the continuous 4D dynamics and generate the unseen visual contents. The principle behind SeeU is a new 2D$\to$4D$\to$2D learning framework. SeeU first reconstructs the 4D world from sparse and monocular 2D frames (2D$\to$4D). It then learns the continuous 4D dynamics on a low-rank representation and physical constraints (discrete 4D$\to$continuous 4D). Finally, SeeU rolls the world forward in time, re-projects it back to 2D at sampled times and viewpoints, and generates unseen regions based on spatial-temporal context awareness (4D$\to$2D). By modeling dynamics in 4D, SeeU achieves continuous and physically-consistent novel visual generation, demonstrating strong potentials in multiple tasks including unseen temporal generation, unseen spatial generation, and video editing.
Authors: Md Rashidul Islam, Bakary Gibba, Altagi Abdallah Bakheit Abdelgadir
Abstract: Lung cancer is a very deadly disease worldwide, and its early diagnosis is crucial for increasing patient survival rates. Computed tomography (CT) scans are widely used for lung cancer diagnosis as they can give detailed lung structures. However, manual interpretation is time-consuming and prone to human error. To surmount this challenge, the study proposes a deep learning-based automatic lung cancer classification system to enhance detection accuracy and interpretability. The IQOTHNCCD lung cancer dataset is utilized, which is a public CT scan dataset consisting of cases categorized into Normal, Benign, and Malignant and used DenseNet169, which includes Squeezeand-Excitation blocks for attention-based feature extraction, Focal Loss for handling class imbalance, and a Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) for multi-scale feature fusion. In addition, an SVM model was developed using MobileNetV2 for feature extraction, improving its classification performance. For model interpretability enhancement, the study integrated Grad-CAM for the visualization of decision-making regions in CT scans and SHAP (Shapley Additive Explanations) for explanation of feature contributions within the SVM model. Intensive evaluation was performed, and it was found that both DenseNet169 and SVM models achieved 98% accuracy, suggesting their robustness for real-world medical practice. These results open up the potential for deep learning to improve the diagnosis of lung cancer by a higher level of accuracy, transparency, and robustness.
Authors: Nan Zhou, Huandong Wang, Jiahao Li, Han Li, Yali Song, Qiuhua Wang, Yong Li, Xinlei Chen
Abstract: Fine-grained wildfire spread prediction is crucial for enhancing emergency response efficacy and decision-making precision. However, existing research predominantly focuses on coarse spatiotemporal scales and relies on low-resolution satellite data, capturing only macroscopic fire states while fundamentally constraining high-precision localized fire dynamics modeling capabilities. To bridge this gap, we present FireSentry, a provincial-scale multi-modal wildfire dataset characterized by sub-meter spatial and sub-second temporal resolution. Collected using synchronized UAV platforms, FireSentry provides visible and infrared video streams, in-situ environmental measurements, and manually validated fire masks. Building on FireSentry, we establish a comprehensive benchmark encompassing physics-based, data-driven, and generative models, revealing the limitations of existing mask-only approaches. Our analysis proposes FiReDiff, a novel dual-modality paradigm that first predicts future video sequences in the infrared modality, and then precisely segments fire masks in the mask modality based on the generated dynamics. FiReDiff achieves state-of-the-art performance, with video quality gains of 39.2% in PSNR, 36.1% in SSIM, 50.0% in LPIPS, 29.4% in FVD, and mask accuracy gains of 3.3% in AUPRC, 59.1% in F1 score, 42.9% in IoU, and 62.5% in MSE when applied to generative models. The FireSentry benchmark dataset and FiReDiff paradigm collectively advance fine-grained wildfire forecasting and dynamic disaster simulation. The processed benchmark dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/Munan222/FireSentry-Benchmark-Dataset.
URLs: https://github.com/Munan222/FireSentry-Benchmark-Dataset.
Authors: Lingjun Zhao, Yandong Luo, James Hay, Lu Gan
Abstract: We introduce ShelfGaussian, an open-vocabulary multi-modal Gaussian-based 3D scene understanding framework supervised by off-the-shelf vision foundation models (VFMs). Gaussian-based methods have demonstrated superior performance and computational efficiency across a wide range of scene understanding tasks. However, existing methods either model objects as closed-set semantic Gaussians supervised by annotated 3D labels, neglecting their rendering ability, or learn open-set Gaussian representations via purely 2D self-supervision, leading to degraded geometry and limited to camera-only settings. To fully exploit the potential of Gaussians, we propose a Multi-Modal Gaussian Transformer that enables Gaussians to query features from diverse sensor modalities, and a Shelf-Supervised Learning Paradigm that efficiently optimizes Gaussians with VFM features jointly at 2D image and 3D scene levels. We evaluate ShelfGaussian on various perception and planning tasks. Experiments on Occ3D-nuScenes demonstrate its state-of-the-art zero-shot semantic occupancy prediction performance. ShelfGaussian is further evaluated on an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) to assess its in the-wild performance across diverse urban scenarios. Project website: https://lunarlab-gatech.github.io/ShelfGaussian/.
Authors: Yujian Zhao, Hankun Liu, Guanglin Niu
Abstract: Cross-modal ship re-identification (ReID) between optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery has recently emerged as a critical yet underexplored task in maritime intelligence and surveillance. However, the substantial modality gap between optical and SAR images poses a major challenge for robust identification. To address this issue, we propose MOS, a novel framework designed to mitigate the optical-SAR modality gap and achieve modality-consistent feature learning for optical-SAR cross-modal ship ReID. MOS consists of two core components: (1) Modality-Consistent Representation Learning (MCRL) applies denoise SAR image procession and a class-wise modality alignment loss to align intra-identity feature distributions across modalities. (2) Cross-modal Data Generation and Feature fusion (CDGF) leverages a brownian bridge diffusion model to synthesize cross-modal samples, which are subsequently fused with original features during inference to enhance alignment and discriminability. Extensive experiments on the HOSS ReID dataset demonstrate that MOS significantly surpasses state-of-the-art methods across all evaluation protocols, achieving notable improvements of +3.0%, +6.2%, and +16.4% in R1 accuracy under the ALL to ALL, Optical to SAR, and SAR to Optical settings, respectively. The code and trained models will be released upon publication.
Authors: Jiangtao Wu, Shihao Li, Zhaozhou Bian, Yuanxing Zhang, Jialu Chen, Runzhe Wen, An Ping, Yiwen He, Jiakai Wang, Jiaheng Liu
Abstract: Understanding visual differences between dynamic scenes requires the comparative perception of compositional, spatial, and temporal changes--a capability that remains underexplored in existing vision-language systems. While prior work on Image Difference Captioning (IDC) has enabled models to describe semantic changes between static images, these approaches fail to capture motion continuity, event evolution, or editing consistency over time. We introduce the ViDiC (Video Difference Captioning) task and its corresponding ViDiC-1K dataset, designed to evaluate the ability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to provide fine-grained descriptions of similarities and differences between video pairs. ViDiC-1K comprises 1,000 curated video pairs annotated with over 4,000 comparative checklist items, covering seven categories: subject, style, background, cinematography, motion, location, and playback techniques. To ensure reliable evaluation, we propose a dual-checklist framework that measures the accuracy of similarity and difference separately, based on the LLM-as-a-Judge protocol. Experiments on nineteen representative multimodal models reveal a significant performance gap in their comparative description and difference perception abilities. We hope ViDiC-1K can be a challenging benchmark that lays a solid foundation for advancing video understanding, edit awareness, and comparative reasoning in multimodal intelligence.
Authors: Yuqi Ji, Junjie Ke, Lihuo He, Jun Liu, Kaifan Zhang, Yu-Kun Lai, Guiguang Ding, Xinbo Gao
Abstract: Affordance detection aims to jointly address the fundamental "what-where-how" challenge in embodied AI by understanding "what" an object is, "where" the object is located, and "how" it can be used. However, most affordance learning methods focus solely on "how" objects can be used while neglecting the "what" and "where" aspects. Other affordance detection methods treat object detection and affordance learning as two independent tasks, lacking effective interaction and real-time capability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce YOLO Affordance (YOLOA), a real-time affordance detection model that jointly handles these two tasks via a large language model (LLM) adapter. Specifically, YOLOA employs a lightweight detector consisting of object detection and affordance learning branches refined through the LLM Adapter. During training, the LLM Adapter interacts with object and affordance preliminary predictions to refine both branches by generating more accurate class priors, box offsets, and affordance gates. Experiments on our relabeled ADG-Det and IIT-Heat benchmarks demonstrate that YOLOA achieves state-of-the-art accuracy (52.8 / 73.1 mAP on ADG-Det / IIT-Heat) while maintaining real-time performance (up to 89.77 FPS, and up to 846.24 FPS for the lightweight variant). This indicates that YOLOA achieves an excellent trade-off between accuracy and efficiency.
Authors: Bin Liu, Chunyang Wang, Xuelian Liu
Abstract: State Space Models (SSMs) demonstrate significant potential for long-sequence modeling, but their reliance on input order conflicts with the irregular nature of point clouds. Existing approaches often rely on predefined serialization strategies, which cannot adjust based on diverse geometric structures. To overcome this limitation, we propose \textbf{DM3D}, a deformable Mamba architecture for point cloud understanding. Specifically, DM3D introduces an offset-guided Gaussian sequencing mechanism that unifies local resampling and global reordering within a deformable scan. The Gaussian-based KNN Resampling (GKR) enhances structural awareness by adaptively reorganizing neighboring points, while the Gaussian-based Differentiable Reordering (GDR) enables end-to-end optimization of serialization order. Furthermore, a Tri-Path Frequency Fusion module enhances feature complementarity and reduces aliasing. Together, these components enable structure-adaptive serialization of point clouds. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that DM3D achieves state-of-the-art performance in classification, few-shot learning, and part segmentation, demonstrating that adaptive serialization effectively unlocks the potential of SSMs for point cloud understanding.
Authors: Yida Lin, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang, Sam Schofield, Richard Green
Abstract: Autonomous UAV forestry operations require robust depth estimation methods with strong cross-domain generalization. However, existing evaluations focus on urban and indoor scenarios, leaving a critical gap for specialized vegetation-dense environments. We present the first systematic zero-shot evaluation of eight state-of-the-art stereo methods--RAFT-Stereo, IGEV, IGEV++, BridgeDepth, StereoAnywhere, DEFOM (plus baseline methods ACVNet, PSMNet, TCstereo)--spanning iterative refinement, foundation model, and zero-shot adaptation paradigms. All methods are trained exclusively on Scene Flow and evaluated without fine-tuning on four standard benchmarks (ETH3D, KITTI 2012/2015, Middlebury) plus a novel 5,313-pair Canterbury forestry dataset captured with ZED Mini camera (1920x1080). Performance reveals scene-dependent patterns: foundation models excel on structured scenes (BridgeDepth: 0.23 px on ETH3D, 0.83-1.07 px on KITTI; DEFOM: 0.35-4.65 px across benchmarks), while iterative methods maintain cross-domain robustness (IGEV++: 0.36-6.77 px; IGEV: 0.33-21.91 px). Critical finding: RAFT-Stereo exhibits catastrophic ETH3D failure (26.23 px EPE, 98 percent error rate) due to negative disparity predictions, while performing normally on KITTI (0.90-1.11 px). Qualitative evaluation on Canterbury forestry dataset identifies DEFOM as the optimal gold-standard baseline for vegetation depth estimation, exhibiting superior depth smoothness, occlusion handling, and cross-domain consistency compared to IGEV++, despite IGEV++'s finer detail preservation.
Authors: Yuzhen Hu, Biplab Banerjee, Saurabh Prasad
Abstract: Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) enables detailed land cover classification, yet low spatial resolution and sparse annotations pose significant challenges. We present a label-efficient framework that leverages spatial features from a frozen diffusion model pretrained on natural images. Our approach extracts low-level representations from high-resolution decoder layers at early denoising timesteps, which transfer effectively to the low-texture structure of HSI. To integrate spectral and spatial information, we introduce a lightweight FiLM-based fusion module that adaptively modulates frozen spatial features using spectral cues, enabling robust multimodal learning under sparse supervision. Experiments on two recent hyperspectral datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches using only the provided sparse training labels. Ablation studies further highlight the benefits of diffusion-derived features and spectral-aware fusion. Overall, our results indicate that pretrained diffusion models can support domain-agnostic, label-efficient representation learning for remote sensing and broader scientific imaging tasks.
Authors: Xieji Li, Siyuan Yan, Yingsheng Liu, H. Peter Soyer, Monika Janda, Victoria Mar, Zongyuan Ge
Abstract: Vision-language pretraining (VLP) has emerged as a powerful paradigm in medical image analysis, enabling representation learning from large-scale image-text pairs without relying on expensive manual annotations. However, existing methods often struggle with the noise inherent in web-collected data and the complexity of unstructured long medical texts. To address these challenges, we propose a novel VLP framework integrating a Multi-Agent data GENeration (MAGEN) system and Ontology-based Multi-Aspect Knowledge-Enhanced (O-MAKE) pretraining. First, MAGEN enhances data quality by synthesizing knowledge-enriched descriptions via a foundation model-assisted captioning and retrieval-based verification pipeline. Second, O-MAKE addresses the difficulty of learning from long, unstructured texts by decomposing them into distinct knowledge aspects. This facilitates fine-grained alignment at both global and patch levels, while explicitly modeling medical concept relationships through ontology-guided mechanisms. We validate our framework in the field of dermatology, where comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of each component. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on disease classification and cross-modal retrieval tasks across eight datasets. Our code and the augmented dataset Derm1M-AgentAug, comprising over 400k skin-image-text pairs, will be released at https://github.com/SiyuanYan1/Derm1M.
Authors: Tongxu Zhang
Abstract: Background and Objective: Radiomics of knee MRI requires robust, anatomically meaningful regions of interest (ROIs) that jointly capture cartilage and subchondral bone. Most existing work relies on manual ROIs and rarely reports quality control (QC). We present LM-CartSeg, a fully automatic pipeline for cartilage/bone segmentation, geometric lateral/medial (L/M) compartmentalisation and radiomics analysis. Methods: Two 3D nnU-Net models were trained on SKM-TEA (138 knees) and OAIZIB-CM (404 knees). At test time, zero-shot predictions were fused and refined by simple geometric rules: connected-component cleaning, construction of 10 mm subchondral bone bands in physical space, and a data-driven tibial L/M split based on PCA and k-means. Segmentation was evaluated on an OAIZIB-CM test set (103 knees) and on SKI-10 (100 knees). QC used volume and thickness signatures. From 10 ROIs we extracted 4 650 non-shape radiomic features to study inter-compartment similarity, dependence on ROI size, and OA vs. non-OA classification on OAIZIB-CM Results: Post-processing improved macro ASSD on OAIZIB-CM from 2.63 to 0.36 mm and HD95 from 25.2 to 3.35 mm, with DSC 0.91; zero-shot DSC on SKI-10 was 0.80. The geometric L/M rule produced stable compartments across datasets, whereas a direct L/M nnU-Net showed domain-dependent side swaps. Only 6 to 12 percent of features per ROI were strongly correlated with volume or thickness. Radiomics-based models models restricted to size-linked features. Conclusions: LM-CartSeg yields automatic, QCd ROIs and radiomic features that carry discriminative information beyond simple morphometry, providing a practical foundation for multi-centre knee OA radiomics studies.
Authors: Rhys Newbury, Juyan Zhang, Tin Tran, Hanna Kurniawati, Dana Kuli\'c
Abstract: Understanding and representing the structure of 3D objects in an unsupervised manner remains a core challenge in computer vision and graphics. Most existing unsupervised keypoint methods are not designed for unconditional generative settings, restricting their use in modern 3D generative pipelines; our formulation explicitly bridges this gap. We present an unsupervised framework for learning spatially structured 3D keypoints from point cloud data. These keypoints serve as a compact and interpretable representation that conditions an Elucidated Diffusion Model (EDM) to reconstruct the full shape. The learned keypoints exhibit repeatable spatial structure across object instances and support smooth interpolation in keypoint space, indicating that they capture geometric variation. Our method achieves strong performance across diverse object categories, yielding a 6 percentage-point improvement in keypoint consistency compared to prior approaches.
Authors: Zhiye Song, Steve Dai, Ben Keller, Brucek Khailany
Abstract: Diffusion models have revolutionized video generation, becoming essential tools in creative content generation and physical simulation. Transformer-based architectures (DiTs) and classifier-free guidance (CFG) are two cornerstones of this success, enabling strong prompt adherence and realistic video quality. Despite their versatility and superior performance, these models require intensive computation. Each video generation requires dozens of iterative steps, and CFG doubles the required compute. This inefficiency hinders broader adoption in downstream applications. We introduce GalaxyDiT, a training-free method to accelerate video generation with guidance alignment and systematic proxy selection for reuse metrics. Through rank-order correlation analysis, our technique identifies the optimal proxy for each video model, across model families and parameter scales, thereby ensuring optimal computational reuse. We achieve $1.87\times$ and $2.37\times$ speedup on Wan2.1-1.3B and Wan2.1-14B with only 0.97% and 0.72% drops on the VBench-2.0 benchmark. At high speedup rates, our approach maintains superior fidelity to the base model, exceeding prior state-of-the-art approaches by 5 to 10 dB in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR).
Authors: Yunpeng Bai, Shaoheng Fang, Chaohui Yu, Fan Wang, Qixing Huang
Abstract: Recent advances in video generation have enabled the synthesis of high-quality and visually realistic clips using diffusion transformer models. However, most existing approaches operate purely in the 2D pixel space and lack explicit mechanisms for modeling 3D structures, often resulting in temporally inconsistent geometries, implausible motions, and structural artifacts. In this work, we introduce geometric regularization losses into video generation by augmenting latent diffusion models with per-frame depth prediction. We adopted depth as the geometric representation because of the great progress in depth prediction and its compatibility with image-based latent encoders. Specifically, to enforce structural consistency over time, we propose a multi-view geometric loss that aligns the predicted depth maps across frames within a shared 3D coordinate system. Our method bridges the gap between appearance generation and 3D structure modeling, leading to improved spatio-temporal coherence, shape consistency, and physical plausibility. Experiments across multiple datasets show that our approach produces significantly more stable and geometrically consistent results than existing baselines.
Authors: Haicheng Liao, Huanming Shen, Bonan Wang, Yongkang Li, Yihong Tang, Chengyue Wang, Dingyi Zhuang, Kehua Chen, Hai Yang, Chengzhong Xu, Zhenning Li
Abstract: Interpreting natural-language commands to localize target objects is critical for autonomous driving (AD). Existing visual grounding (VG) methods for autonomous vehicles (AVs) typically struggle with ambiguous, context-dependent instructions, as they lack reasoning over 3D spatial relations and anticipated scene evolution. Grounded in the principles of world models, we propose ThinkDeeper, a framework that reasons about future spatial states before making grounding decisions. At its core is a Spatial-Aware World Model (SA-WM) that learns to reason ahead by distilling the current scene into a command-aware latent state and rolling out a sequence of future latent states, providing forward-looking cues for disambiguation. Complementing this, a hypergraph-guided decoder then hierarchically fuses these states with the multimodal input, capturing higher-order spatial dependencies for robust localization. In addition, we present DrivePilot, a multi-source VG dataset in AD, featuring semantic annotations generated by a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-prompted LLM pipeline. Extensive evaluations on six benchmarks, ThinkDeeper ranks #1 on the Talk2Car leaderboard and surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on DrivePilot, MoCAD, and RefCOCO/+/g benchmarks. Notably, it shows strong robustness and efficiency in challenging scenes (long-text, multi-agent, ambiguity) and retains superior performance even when trained on 50% of the data.
Authors: Shojiro Yamabe, Futa Waseda, Daiki Shiono, Tsubasa Takahashi
Abstract: Recent large vision-language models (LVLMs) have been applied to diverse VQA tasks. However, achieving practical performance typically requires task-specific fine-tuning with large numbers of image-text pairs, which are costly to collect. In this work, we study text-centric training, a setting where only textual descriptions are available and no real images are provided, as a paradigm for low-cost data scaling. Unlike images, whose collection is often restricted by privacy constraints and scarcity in niche domains, text is widely available. Moreover, text is easily editable, enabling automatic diversification and expansion with LLMs at minimal human effort. While this offers clear advantages over image collection in terms of scalability and cost, training on raw text without images still yields limited gains on VQA tasks because of the image-text modality gap. To address this issue, we propose a Text-Printed Image (TPI), which generates synthetic images by directly rendering the given textual description on a plain white canvas. This simple rendering projects text into the image modality and can be integrated into arbitrary existing LVLM training pipelines at low cost. Moreover, TPI preserves the semantics of the text, whereas text-to-image models often fail to do. Across four models and seven benchmarks, our systematic experiments show that TPI enables more effective text-centric training than synthetic images generated by a diffusion model. We further explore TPI as a low-cost data-augmentation strategy and demonstrate its practical utility. Overall, our findings highlight the significant potential of text-centric training and, more broadly, chart a path toward fully automated data generation for LVLMs.
Authors: Chen Hu, Mingyu Zhou, Shuai Yuan, Hongbo Hu, Xiangyu Qiu, Junhai Luo, Tian Pu, Xiyin Li
Abstract: Infrared small target detection (ISTD) faces two major challenges: a lack of discernible target texture and severe background clutter, which results in the background obscuring the target. To enhance targets and suppress backgrounds, we propose the Basis Decomposition Module (BDM) as an extensible and lightweight module based on basis decomposition, which decomposes a complex feature into several basis features and enhances certain information while eliminating redundancy. Extending BDM leads to a series of modules, including the Spatial Difference Decomposition Module (SD$^\mathrm{2}$M), Spatial Difference Decomposition Downsampling Module (SD$^\mathrm{3}$M), and Temporal Difference Decomposition Module (TD$^\mathrm{2}$M). Based on these modules, we develop the Spatial Difference Decomposition Network (SD$^\mathrm{2}$Net) for single-frame ISTD (SISTD) and the Spatiotemporal Difference Decomposition Network (STD$^\mathrm{2}$Net) for multi-frame ISTD (MISTD). SD$^\mathrm{2}$Net integrates SD$^\mathrm{2}$M and SD$^\mathrm{3}$M within an adapted U-shaped architecture. We employ TD$^\mathrm{2}$M to introduce motion information, which transforms SD$^\mathrm{2}$Net into STD$^\mathrm{2}$Net. Extensive experiments on SISTD and MISTD datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. On the SISTD task, SD$^\mathrm{2}$Net performs well compared to most established networks. On the MISTD datasets, STD$^\mathrm{2}$Net achieves a mIoU of 87.68\%, outperforming SD$^\mathrm{2}$Net, which achieves a mIoU of 64.97\%. Our codes are available: https://github.com/greekinRoma/IRSTD_HC_Platform.
Authors: Wenliang Guo, Yujiang Pu, Yu Kong
Abstract: Mistake detection in procedural tasks is essential for building intelligent systems that support learning and task execution. Existing approaches primarily analyze how an action is performed, while overlooking what it produces, i.e., the \textbf{action effect}. Yet many errors manifest not in the execution itself but in the resulting outcome, such as an unintended object state or incorrect spatial arrangement. To address this gap, we propose Action Effect Modeling (AEM), a unified framework that jointly captures action execution and its outcomes through a probabilistic formulation. AEM first identifies the outcome of an action by selecting the most informative effect frame based on semantic relevance and visual quality. It then extracts complementary cues from visual grounding and symbolic scene graphs, aligning them in a shared latent space to form robust effect-aware representations. To detect mistakes, we further design a prompt-based detector that incorporates task-specific prompts and aligns each action segment with its intended execution semantics. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the EgoPER and CaptainCook4D benchmarks under the challenging one-class classification (OCC) setting. These results demonstrate that modeling both execution and outcome yields more reliable mistake detection, and highlight the potential of effect-aware representations to benefit a broader range of downstream applications.
Authors: Zijian Gu, Yuxi Liu, Zhenhao Zhang, Song Wang
Abstract: Vision-language models achieve expert-level performance on medical imaging tasks but exhibit significant diagnostic accuracy disparities across demographic groups. We introduce fairness-aware Low-Rank Adaptation for medical VLMs, combining parameter efficiency with explicit fairness optimization. Our key algorithmic contribution is a differentiable MaxAccGap loss that enables end-to-end optimization of accuracy parity across demographic groups. We propose three methods: FR-LoRA integrates MaxAccGap regularization into the training objective, GR-LoRA applies inverse frequency weighting to balance gradient contributions, and Hybrid-LoRA combines both mechanisms.Evaluated on 10,000 glaucoma fundus images, GR-LoRA reduces diagnostic accuracy disparities by 69% while maintaining 53.15% overall accuracy. Ablation studies reveal that strong regularization strength achieves optimal fairness with minimal accuracy trade-off, and race-specific optimization yields 60% disparity reduction. Our approach requires only 0.24% trainable parameters, enabling practical deployment of fair medical AI in resource-constrained healthcare settings.
Authors: Wenliang Guo, Yu Kong
Abstract: Understanding procedural activities is crucial for developing future assistive AI that can reason about complex real-world tasks. Existing action-centric methods struggle with the flexibility of real procedures, where step order varies depending on object states. In this work, we propose to shift the focus to an object-centric paradigm by regarding actions as mechanisms that drive state transitions. To advance this direction, we introduce Object-IVQA, a long-form instructional video benchmark with 107 videos and 514 open-ended question-answer pairs annotated with temporally grounded evidence. The benchmark evaluates four dimensions of object-centric reasoning, including state evolution, precondition verification, counterfactual reasoning and mistake recognition. We further propose an agent framework that orchestrates object-centric planning, perception, analysis and generation tools, enabling explicit evidence retrieval and multi-hop reasoning across disjoint segments. Experiments show that existing large vision-language models struggle in object-level recognition and reasoning, whereas our framework achieves substantially improvement.
Authors: Renqi Chen, Haoyang Su, Shixiang Tang
Abstract: The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has emerged as a powerful visual foundation model for image segmentation. However, adapting SAM to specific downstream tasks, such as medical and agricultural imaging, remains a significant challenge. To address this, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and its variants have been widely employed to enhancing SAM's adaptation performance on diverse domains. Despite advancements, a critical question arises: can we integrate inductive bias into the model? This is particularly relevant since the Transformer encoder in SAM inherently lacks spatial priors within image patches, potentially hindering the acquisition of high-level semantic information. In this paper, we propose NAS-LoRA, a new Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) method designed to bridge the semantic gap between pre-trained SAM and specialized domains. Specifically, NAS-LoRA incorporates a lightweight Neural Architecture Search (NAS) block between the encoder and decoder components of LoRA to dynamically optimize the prior knowledge integrated into weight updates. Furthermore, we propose a stage-wise optimization strategy to help the ViT encoder balance weight updates and architectural adjustments, facilitating the gradual learning of high-level semantic information. Various Experiments demonstrate our NAS-LoRA improves existing PEFT methods, while reducing training cost by 24.14% without increasing inference cost, highlighting the potential of NAS in enhancing PEFT for visual foundation models.
Authors: Te Yang, Xiangyu Zhu, Bo Wang, Quan Chen, Peng Jiang, Zhen Lei
Abstract: Long-form video understanding requires efficient navigation of extensive visual data to pinpoint sparse yet critical information. Current approaches to longform video understanding either suffer from severe computational overhead due to dense preprocessing, or fail to effectively balance exploration and exploitation, resulting in incomplete information coverage and inefficiency. In this work, we introduce EEA, a novel video agent framework that archives exploration-exploitation balance through semantic guidance with hierarchical tree search process. EEA autonomously discovers and dynamically updates task-relevant semantic queries, and collects video frames closely matched to these queries as semantic anchors. During the tree search process, instead of uniform expansion, EEA preferentially explores semantically relevant frames while ensuring sufficient coverage within unknown segments. Moreover, EEA adaptively combines intrinsic rewards from visionlanguage models (VLMs) with semantic priors by explicitly modeling uncertainty to achieve stable and precise evaluation of video segments. Experiments across various long-video benchmarks validate the superior performance and computational efficiency of our proposed method.
Authors: Seogkyu Jeon, Kibeom Hong, Hyeran Byun
Abstract: Recent domain generalized semantic segmentation (DGSS) studies have achieved notable improvements by distilling semantic knowledge from Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, they overlook the semantic misalignment between visual and textual contexts, which arises due to the rigidity of a fixed context prompt learned on a single source domain. To this end, we present a novel domain generalization framework for semantic segmentation, namely Domain-aware Prompt-driven Masked Transformer (DPMFormer). Firstly, we introduce domain-aware prompt learning to facilitate semantic alignment between visual and textual cues. To capture various domain-specific properties with a single source dataset, we propose domain-aware contrastive learning along with the texture perturbation that diversifies the observable domains. Lastly, to establish a framework resilient against diverse environmental changes, we have proposed the domain-robust consistency learning which guides the model to minimize discrepancies of prediction from original and the augmented images. Through experiments and analyses, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework, which establishes a new state-of-the-art on various DGSS benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/jone1222/DPMFormer.
Authors: Kwaku Opoku-Ware, Gideon Opoku
Abstract: This paper presents a preliminary investigation into automated dance movement analysis using contemporary computer vision techniques. We propose a proof-of-concept framework that integrates YOLOv8 and v11 for dancer detection with the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for precise segmentation, enabling the tracking and quantification of dancer movements in video recordings without specialized equipment or markers. Our approach identifies dancers within video frames, counts discrete dance steps, calculates spatial coverage patterns, and measures rhythm consistency across performance sequences. Testing this framework on a single 49-second recording of Ghanaian AfroBeats dance demonstrates technical feasibility, with the system achieving approximately 94% detection precision and 89% recall on manually inspected samples. The pixel-level segmentation provided by SAM, achieving approximately 83% intersection-over-union with visual inspection, enables motion quantification that captures body configuration changes beyond what bounding-box approaches can represent. Analysis of this preliminary case study indicates that the dancer classified as primary by our system executed 23% more steps with 37% higher motion intensity and utilized 42% more performance space compared to dancers classified as secondary. However, this work represents an early-stage investigation with substantial limitations including single-video validation, absence of systematic ground truth annotations, and lack of comparison with existing pose estimation methods. We present this framework to demonstrate technical feasibility, identify promising directions for quantitative dance metrics, and establish a foundation for future systematic validation studies.
Authors: Zhijian Qiao, Zehuan Yu, Tong Li, Chih-Chung Chou, Wenchao Ding, Shaojie Shen
Abstract: Crowdsourcing enables scalable autonomous driving map construction, but low-cost sensor noise hinders quality from improving with data volume. We propose CSMapping, a system that produces accurate semantic maps and topological road centerlines whose quality consistently increases with more crowdsourced data. For semantic mapping, we train a latent diffusion model on HD maps (optionally conditioned on SD maps) to learn a generative prior of real-world map structure, without requiring paired crowdsourced/HD-map supervision. This prior is incorporated via constrained MAP optimization in latent space, ensuring robustness to severe noise and plausible completion in unobserved areas. Initialization uses a robust vectorized mapping module followed by diffusion inversion; optimization employs efficient Gaussian-basis reparameterization, projected gradient descent zobracket multi-start, and latent-space factor-graph for global consistency. For topological mapping, we apply confidence-weighted k-medoids clustering and kinematic refinement to trajectories, yielding smooth, human-like centerlines robust to trajectory variation. Experiments on nuScenes, Argoverse 2, and a large proprietary dataset achieve state-of-the-art semantic and topological mapping performance, with thorough ablation and scalability studies.
Authors: Yiyi Cai, Yuhan Wu, Kunhang Li, You Zhou, Bo Zheng, Haiyang Liu
Abstract: We present FloodDiffusion, a new framework for text-driven, streaming human motion generation. Given time-varying text prompts, FloodDiffusion generates text-aligned, seamless motion sequences with real-time latency. Unlike existing methods that rely on chunk-by-chunk or auto-regressive model with diffusion head, we adopt a diffusion forcing framework to model this time-series generation task under time-varying control events. We find that a straightforward implementation of vanilla diffusion forcing (as proposed for video models) fails to model real motion distributions. We demonstrate that to guarantee modeling the output distribution, the vanilla diffusion forcing must be tailored to: (i) train with a bi-directional attention instead of casual attention; (ii) implement a lower triangular time scheduler instead of a random one; (iii) utilize a continues time-varying way to introduce text conditioning. With these improvements, we demonstrate in the first time that the diffusion forcing-based framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the streaming motion generation task, reaching an FID of 0.057 on the HumanML3D benchmark. Models, code, and weights are available. https://shandaai.github.io/FloodDiffusion/
Authors: Zhishan Zhou, Siyuan Wei, Zengran Wang, Chunjie Wang, Xiaosheng Yan, Xiao Liu
Abstract: Generalizing open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation (OV-3DIS) to diverse, unstructured, and mesh-free environments is crucial for robotics and AR/VR, yet remains a significant challenge. We attribute this to two key limitations of existing methods: (1) proposal generation relies on dataset-specific proposal networks or mesh-based superpoints, rendering them inapplicable in mesh-free scenarios and limiting generalization to novel scenes; and (2) the weak textual reasoning of CLIP-based classifiers, which struggle to recognize compositional and functional user queries. To address these issues, we introduce OpenTrack3D, a generalizable and accurate framework. Unlike methods that rely on pre-generated proposals, OpenTrack3D employs a novel visual-spatial tracker to construct cross-view consistent object proposals online. Given an RGB-D stream, our pipeline first leverages a 2D open-vocabulary segmenter to generate masks, which are lifted to 3D point clouds using depth. Mask-guided instance features are then extracted using DINO feature maps, and our tracker fuses visual and spatial cues to maintain instance consistency. The core pipeline is entirely mesh-free, yet we also provide an optional superpoints refinement module to further enhance performance when scene mesh is available. Finally, we replace CLIP with a multi-modal large language model (MLLM), significantly enhancing compositional reasoning for complex user queries. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks, including ScanNet200, Replica, ScanNet++, and SceneFun3D, demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and strong generalization capabilities.
Authors: Subin Kim, Sangwoo Mo, Mamshad Nayeem Rizve, Yiran Xu, Difan Liu, Jinwoo Shin, Tobias Hinz
Abstract: Achieving precise alignment between user intent and generated visuals remains a central challenge in text-to-visual generation, as a single attempt often fails to produce the desired output. To handle this, prior approaches mainly scale the visual generation process (e.g., increasing sampling steps or seeds), but this quickly leads to a quality plateau. This limitation arises because the prompt, crucial for guiding generation, is kept fixed. To address this, we propose Prompt Redesign for Inference-time Scaling, coined PRIS, a framework that adaptively revises the prompt during inference in response to the scaled visual generations. The core idea of PRIS is to review the generated visuals, identify recurring failure patterns across visuals, and redesign the prompt accordingly before regenerating the visuals with the revised prompt. To provide precise alignment feedback for prompt revision, we introduce a new verifier, element-level factual correction, which evaluates the alignment between prompt attributes and generated visuals at a fine-grained level, achieving more accurate and interpretable assessments than holistic measures. Extensive experiments on both text-to-image and text-to-video benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, including a 15% gain on VBench 2.0. These results highlight that jointly scaling prompts and visuals is key to fully leveraging scaling laws at inference-time. Visualizations are available at the website: https://subin-kim-cv.github.io/PRIS.
Authors: Ruoxuan Zhang, Bin Wen, Hongxia Xie, Yi Yao, Songhan Zuo, Jian-Yu Jiang-Lin, Hong-Han Shuai, Wen-Huang Cheng
Abstract: Cooking is a sequential and visually grounded activity, where each step such as chopping, mixing, or frying carries both procedural logic and visual semantics. While recent diffusion models have shown strong capabilities in text-to-image generation, they struggle to handle structured multi-step scenarios like recipe illustration. Additionally, current recipe illustration methods are unable to adjust to the natural variability in recipe length, generating a fixed number of images regardless of the actual instructions structure. To address these limitations, we present CookAnything, a flexible and consistent diffusion-based framework that generates coherent, semantically distinct image sequences from textual cooking instructions of arbitrary length. The framework introduces three key components: (1) Step-wise Regional Control (SRC), which aligns textual steps with corresponding image regions within a single denoising process; (2) Flexible RoPE, a step-aware positional encoding mechanism that enhances both temporal coherence and spatial diversity; and (3) Cross-Step Consistency Control (CSCC), which maintains fine-grained ingredient consistency across steps. Experimental results on recipe illustration benchmarks show that CookAnything performs better than existing methods in training-based and training-free settings. The proposed framework supports scalable, high-quality visual synthesis of complex multi-step instructions and holds significant potential for broad applications in instructional media, and procedural content creation.
Authors: Nan Sun, Zhenyu Zhang, Xixun Lin, Kun Wang, Yanmin Shang, Naibin Gu, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Yanan Cao
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in numerous vision-language tasks yet suffer from hallucinations, producing content inconsistent with input visuals, that undermine reliability in precision-sensitive domains. This issue stems from a fundamental problem of visual neglect, where models fail to adequately prioritize input images. Existing methods typically alleviate hallucinations by intervening in the attention score or output logits, focusing on "how to intervene" but overlooking the prerequisite "when to intervene", which leads to the "over-intervention" problem and subsequently introduces new hallucinations and unnecessary computational overhead. To address this gap, we first investigate the mechanism of visual neglect and reveal it can be accurately detected via head-level activation patterns in MLLMs. We thus propose V-ITI, a lightweight visual inference-time intervention framework integrating a Visual Neglect Detector that identifies visual neglect via head-level discriminative probes and a Visual Recall Intervenor that modulates activations with prestored visual activation information only when the visual neglect is detected. Extensive experiments across eight benchmarks and different MLLM families demonstrate that V-ITI consistently mitigates vision-related hallucinations while preserving general task performance.
Authors: Wei Chee Yew, Hailun Xu, Sanjay Saha, Xiaotian Fan, Hiok Hian Ong, David Yuchen Wang, Kanchan Sarkar, Zhenheng Yang, Danhui Guan
Abstract: Content moderation remains a critical yet challenging task for large-scale user-generated video platforms, especially in livestreaming environments where moderation must be timely, multimodal, and robust to evolving forms of unwanted content. We present a hybrid moderation framework deployed at production scale that combines supervised classification for known violations with reference-based similarity matching for novel or subtle cases. This hybrid design enables robust detection of both explicit violations and novel edge cases that evade traditional classifiers. Multimodal inputs (text, audio, visual) are processed through both pipelines, with a multimodal large language model (MLLM) distilling knowledge into each to boost accuracy while keeping inference lightweight. In production, the classification pipeline achieves 67% recall at 80% precision, and the similarity pipeline achieves 76% recall at 80% precision. Large-scale A/B tests show a 6-8% reduction in user views of unwanted livestreams}. These results demonstrate a scalable and adaptable approach to multimodal content governance, capable of addressing both explicit violations and emerging adversarial behaviors.
Authors: Huy Quang Ung, Guillaume Habault, Yasutaka Nishimura, Hao Niu, Roberto Legaspi, Tomoki Oya, Ryoichi Kojima, Masato Taya, Chihiro Ono, Atsunori Minamikawa, Yan Liu
Abstract: The rise of Visual-Language Models (LVLMs) has unlocked new possibilities for seamlessly integrating visual and textual information. However, their ability to interpret cartographic maps remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce CartoMapQA, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LVLMs' understanding of cartographic maps through question-answering tasks. The dataset includes over 2000 samples, each composed of a cartographic map, a question (with open-ended or multiple-choice answers), and a ground-truth answer. These tasks span key low-, mid- and high-level map interpretation skills, including symbol recognition, embedded information extraction, scale interpretation, and route-based reasoning. Our evaluation of both open-source and proprietary LVLMs reveals persistent challenges: models frequently struggle with map-specific semantics, exhibit limited geospatial reasoning, and are prone to Optical Character Recognition (OCR)-related errors. By isolating these weaknesses, CartoMapQA offers a valuable tool for guiding future improvements in LVLM architectures. Ultimately, it supports the development of models better equipped for real-world applications that depend on robust and reliable map understanding, such as navigation, geographic search, and urban planning. Our source code and data are openly available to the research community at: https://github.com/ungquanghuy-kddi/CartoMapQA.git
Authors: Hao Sun, Lei Fan, Donglin Di, Shaohui Liu
Abstract: Articulated object generation has seen increasing advancements, yet existing models often lack the ability to be conditioned on text prompts. To address the significant gap between textual descriptions and 3D articulated object representations, we propose GAOT, a three-phase framework that generates articulated objects from text prompts, leveraging diffusion models and hypergraph learning in a three-step process. First, we fine-tune a point cloud generation model to produce a coarse representation of objects from text prompts. Given the inherent connection between articulated objects and graph structures, we design a hypergraph-based learning method to refine these coarse representations, representing object parts as graph vertices. Finally, leveraging a diffusion model, the joints of articulated objects-represented as graph edges-are generated based on the object parts. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on the PartNet-Mobility dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving superior performance over previous methods.
Authors: Fuxiang Yang, Tonghua Su, Donglin Di, Yin Chen, Xiangqian Wu, Zhongjie Wang, Lei Fan
Abstract: Scene Text Editing (STE) involves replacing text in a scene image with new target text while preserving both the original text style and background texture. Existing methods suffer from two major challenges: inconsistency and length-insensitivity. They often fail to maintain coherence between the edited local patch and the surrounding area, and they struggle to handle significant differences in text length before and after editing. To tackle these challenges, we propose an end-to-end framework called Global-Local Aware Scene Text Editing (GLASTE), which simultaneously incorporates high-level global contextual information along with delicate local features. Specifically, we design a global-local combination structure, joint global and local losses, and enhance text image features to ensure consistency in text style within local patches while maintaining harmony between local and global areas. Additionally, we express the text style as a vector independent of the image size, which can be transferred to target text images of various sizes. We use an affine fusion to fill target text images into the editing patch while maintaining their aspect ratio unchanged. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets validate that our GLASTE model outperforms previous methods in both quantitative metrics and qualitative results and effectively mitigates the two challenges.
Authors: Chao Yuan, Shimin Chen, Minliang Lin, Limeng Qiao, Guanglu Wan, Lin Ma
Abstract: Distinct from attention-based compression methods, this paper presents an information uniqueness driven video compression framework, termed UniComp, which aims to maximize the information fidelity of video representations under constrained computational budgets. Starting from the information-theoretic perspective, we formulate the vision compression as an optimization problem that minimizes conditional entropy (reconstruction error) between retained and full tokens. To achieve this, we introduce the notion of information uniqueness to measure intrinsic redundancy among tokens to link with reconstruction error. Based on uniqueness, we design three modules-Frame Group Fusion, Token Allocation, and Spatial Dynamic Compression-that progressively perform semantic frame grouping, adaptive resource allocation, and fine-grained spatial compression. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniComp consistently outperforms existing compression methods in preserving essential visual tokens under limited computational budgets, highlighting the pivotal role of information uniqueness in token compression efficacy.
Authors: Yizhi Zhang, Lei Fan, Zhulin Tao, Donglin Di, Yang Song, Sidong Liu, Cong Cong
Abstract: Universal, transferable whole-slide image (WSI) representations are central to computational pathology. Incorporating multiple markers (e.g., immunohistochemistry, IHC) alongside H&E enriches H&E-based features with diverse, biologically meaningful information. However, progress is limited by the scarcity of well-aligned multi-stain datasets. Inter-stain misalignment shifts corresponding tissue across slides, hindering consistent patch-level features and degrading slide-level embeddings. To address this, we curated a slide-level aligned, five-stain dataset (H&E, HER2, KI67, ER, PGR) to enable paired H&E-IHC learning and robust cross-stain representation. Leveraging this dataset, we propose Cross-Stain Contrastive Learning (CSCL), a two-stage pretraining framework with a lightweight adapter trained using patch-wise contrastive alignment to improve the compatibility of H&E features with corresponding IHC-derived contextual cues, and slide-level representation learning with Multiple Instance Learning (MIL), which uses a cross-stain attention fusion module to integrate stain-specific patch features and a cross-stain global alignment module to enforce consistency among slide-level embeddings across different stains. Experiments on cancer subtype classification, IHC biomarker status classification, and survival prediction show consistent gains, yielding high-quality, transferable H&E slide-level representations. The code and data are available at https://github.com/lily-zyz/CSCL.
Authors: Malte Bleeker, Mauro Gotsch
Abstract: We propose the Dynamic Optical Test for Bot Identification (DOT-BI): a quick and easy method that uses human perception of motion to differentiate between human respondents and automated systems in surveys and online processes. In DOT-BI, a 'hidden' number is displayed with the same random black-and-white pixel texture as its background. Only the difference in motion and scale between the number and the background makes the number perceptible to humans across frames, while frame-by-frame algorithmic processing yields no meaningful signal. We conducted two preliminary assessments. Firstly, state-of-the-art, video-capable, multimodal models (GPT-5-Thinking and Gemini 2.5 Pro) fail to extract the correct value, even when given explicit instructions about the mechanism. Secondly, in an online survey (n=182), 99.5% (181/182) of participants solved the task, with an average end-to-end completion time of 10.7 seconds; a supervised lab study (n=39) found no negative effects on perceived ease-of-use or completion time relative to a control. We release code to generate tests and 100+ pre-rendered variants to facilitate adoption in surveys and online processes.
Authors: Yuchen Deng, Xiuyang Wu, Hai-Tao Zheng, Jie Wang, Feidiao Yang, Yuxing Han
Abstract: Handling fast, complex, and highly non-linear motion patterns has long posed challenges for video frame interpolation. Although recent diffusion-based approaches improve upon traditional optical-flow-based methods, they still struggle to cover diverse application scenarios and often fail to produce sharp, temporally consistent frames in fine-grained motion tasks such as audio-visual synchronized interpolation. To address these limitations, we introduce BBF (Beyond Boundary Frames), a context-aware video frame interpolation framework, which could be guided by audio/visual semantics. First, we enhance the input design of the interpolation model so that it can flexibly handle multiple conditional modalities, including text, audio, images, and video. Second, we propose a decoupled multimodal fusion mechanism that sequentially injects different conditional signals into a DiT backbone. Finally, to maintain the generation abilities of the foundation model, we adopt a progressive multi-stage training paradigm, where the start-end frame difference embedding is used to dynamically adjust both the data sampling and the loss weighting. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that BBF outperforms specialized state-of-the-art methods on both generic interpolation and audio-visual synchronized interpolation tasks, establishing a unified framework for video frame interpolation under coordinated multi-channel conditioning.
Authors: Guang Yang, Lei Fan
Abstract: The RNA inverse folding problem, a key challenge in RNA design, involves identifying nucleotide sequences that can fold into desired secondary structures, which are critical for ensuring molecular stability and function. The inherent complexity of this task stems from the intricate relationship between sequence and structure, making it particularly challenging. In this paper, we propose a framework, named HyperRNA, a generative model with an encoder-decoder architecture that leverages hypergraphs to design RNA sequences. Specifically, our HyperRNA model consists of three main components: preprocessing, encoding and decoding. In the preprocessing stage, graph structures are constructed by extracting the atom coordinates of RNA backbone based on 3-bead coarse-grained representation. The encoding stage processes these graphs, capturing higher order dependencies and complex biomolecular interactions using an attention embedding module and a hypergraph-based encoder. Finally, the decoding stage generates the RNA sequence in an autoregressive manner. We conducted quantitative and qualitative experiments on the PDBBind and RNAsolo datasets to evaluate the inverse folding task for RNA sequence generation and RNA-protein complex sequence generation. The experimental results demonstrate that HyperRNA not only outperforms existing RNA design methods but also highlights the potential of leveraging hypergraphs in RNA engineering.
Authors: David Svitov, Pietro Morerio, Lourdes Agapito, Alessio Del Bue
Abstract: We present a CloseUpAvatar - a novel approach for articulated human avatar representation dealing with more general camera motions, while preserving rendering quality for close-up views. CloseUpAvatar represents an avatar as a set of textured planes with two sets of learnable textures for low and high-frequency detail. The method automatically switches to high-frequency textures only for cameras positioned close to the avatar's surface and gradually reduces their impact as the camera moves farther away. Such parametrization of the avatar enables CloseUpAvatar to adjust rendering quality based on camera distance ensuring realistic rendering across a wider range of camera orientations than previous approaches. We provide experiments using the ActorsHQ dataset with high-resolution input images. CloseUpAvatar demonstrates both qualitative and quantitative improvements over existing methods in rendering from novel wide range camera positions, while maintaining high FPS by limiting the number of required primitives.
Authors: Fuchen Zheng, Xinyi Chen, Weixuan Li, Quanjun Li, Junhua Zhou, Xiaojiao Guo, Xuhang Chen, Chi-Man Pun, Shoujun Zhou
Abstract: Medical image segmentation is a cornerstone of modern clinical diagnostics. While Vision Transformers that leverage shifted window-based self-attention have established new benchmarks in this field, they are often hampered by a critical limitation: their localized attention mechanism struggles to effectively fuse local details with global context. This deficiency is particularly detrimental to challenging tasks such as the segmentation of microtumors and miniature organs, where both fine-grained boundary definition and broad contextual understanding are paramount. To address this gap, we propose HBFormer, a novel Hybrid-Bridge Transformer architecture. The 'Hybrid' design of HBFormer synergizes a classic U-shaped encoder-decoder framework with a powerful Swin Transformer backbone for robust hierarchical feature extraction. The core innovation lies in its 'Bridge' mechanism, a sophisticated nexus for multi-scale feature integration. This bridge is architecturally embodied by our novel Multi-Scale Feature Fusion (MFF) decoder. Departing from conventional symmetric designs, the MFF decoder is engineered to fuse multi-scale features from the encoder with global contextual information. It achieves this through a synergistic combination of channel and spatial attention modules, which are constructed from a series of dilated and depth-wise convolutions. These components work in concert to create a powerful feature bridge that explicitly captures long-range dependencies and refines object boundaries with exceptional precision. Comprehensive experiments on challenging medical image segmentation datasets, including multi-organ, liver tumor, and bladder tumor benchmarks, demonstrate that HBFormer achieves state-of-the-art results, showcasing its outstanding capabilities in microtumor and miniature organ segmentation. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/lzeeorno/HBFormer.
Authors: Jianan Sun, Yukang Huang, Dongzhihan Wang, Mingyu Fan
Abstract: Partial dental point clouds often suffer from large missing regions caused by occlusion and limited scanning views, which bias encoder-only global features and force decoders to hallucinate structures. We propose a retrieval-augmented framework for tooth completion that integrates a prototype memory into standard encoder--decoder pipelines. After encoding a partial input into a global descriptor, the model retrieves the nearest manifold prototype from a learnable memory and fuses it with the query feature through confidence-gated weighting before decoding. The memory is optimized end-to-end and self-organizes into reusable tooth-shape prototypes without requiring tooth-position labels, thereby providing structural priors that stabilize missing-region inference and free decoder capacity for detail recovery. The module is plug-and-play and compatible with common completion backbones, while keeping the same training losses. Experiments on a self-processed Teeth3DS benchmark demonstrate consistent improvements in Chamfer Distance, with visualizations showing sharper cusps, ridges, and interproximal transitions. Our approach provides a simple yet effective way to exploit cross-sample regularities for more accurate and faithful dental point-cloud completion.
Authors: Haoran Zhou, Gim Hee Lee
Abstract: Recent advancements in foundation models for 2D vision have substantially improved the analysis of dynamic scenes from monocular videos. However, despite their strong generalization capabilities, these models often lack 3D consistency, a fundamental requirement for understanding scene geometry and motion, thereby causing severe spatial misalignment and temporal flickering in complex 3D environments. In this paper, we present Motion4D, a novel framework that addresses these challenges by integrating 2D priors from foundation models into a unified 4D Gaussian Splatting representation. Our method features a two-part iterative optimization framework: 1) Sequential optimization, which updates motion and semantic fields in consecutive stages to maintain local consistency, and 2) Global optimization, which jointly refines all attributes for long-term coherence. To enhance motion accuracy, we introduce a 3D confidence map that dynamically adjusts the motion priors, and an adaptive resampling process that inserts new Gaussians into under-represented regions based on per-pixel RGB and semantic errors. Furthermore, we enhance semantic coherence through an iterative refinement process that resolves semantic inconsistencies by alternately optimizing the semantic fields and updating prompts of SAM2. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our Motion4D significantly outperforms both 2D foundation models and existing 3D-based approaches across diverse scene understanding tasks, including point-based tracking, video object segmentation, and novel view synthesis. Our code is available at https://hrzhou2.github.io/motion4d-web/.
Authors: Muhammed Burak Kizil, Enes Sanli, Niloy J. Mitra, Erkut Erdem, Aykut Erdem, Duygu Ceylan
Abstract: Video generation has achieved remarkable progress in visual fidelity and controllability, enabling conditioning on text, layout, or motion. Among these, motion control - specifying object dynamics and camera trajectories - is essential for composing complex, cinematic scenes, yet existing interfaces remain limited. We introduce LAMP that leverages large language models (LLMs) as motion planners to translate natural language descriptions into explicit 3D trajectories for dynamic objects and (relatively defined) cameras. LAMP defines a motion domain-specific language (DSL), inspired by cinematography conventions. By harnessing program synthesis capabilities of LLMs, LAMP generates structured motion programs from natural language, which are deterministically mapped to 3D trajectories. We construct a large-scale procedural dataset pairing natural text descriptions with corresponding motion programs and 3D trajectories. Experiments demonstrate LAMP's improved performance in motion controllability and alignment with user intent compared to state-of-the-art alternatives establishing the first framework for generating both object and camera motions directly from natural language specifications.
Authors: Yaokun Li, Shuaixian Wang, Mantang Guo, Jiehui Huang, Taojun Ding, Mu Hu, Kaixuan Wang, Shaojie Shen, Guang Tan
Abstract: We propose ReCamDriving, a purely vision-based, camera-controlled novel-trajectory video generation framework. While repair-based methods fail to restore complex artifacts and LiDAR-based approaches rely on sparse and incomplete cues, ReCamDriving leverages dense and scene-complete 3DGS renderings for explicit geometric guidance, achieving precise camera-controllable generation. To mitigate overfitting to restoration behaviors when conditioned on 3DGS renderings, ReCamDriving adopts a two-stage training paradigm: the first stage uses camera poses for coarse control, while the second stage incorporates 3DGS renderings for fine-grained viewpoint and geometric guidance. Furthermore, we present a 3DGS-based cross-trajectory data curation strategy to eliminate the train-test gap in camera transformation patterns, enabling scalable multi-trajectory supervision from monocular videos. Based on this strategy, we construct the ParaDrive dataset, containing over 110K parallel-trajectory video pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReCamDriving achieves state-of-the-art camera controllability and structural consistency.
Authors: Zhigang Yang, Yuan Liu, Jiawei Zhang, Puning Zhang, Xinqiang Ma
Abstract: Although the remarkable performance of deep neural networks (DNNs) in image classification, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks remains a critical challenge. Most existing detection methods rely on complex and poorly interpretable architectures, which compromise interpretability and generalization. To address this, we propose FeatureLens, a lightweight framework that acts as a lens to scrutinize anomalies in image features. Comprising an Image Feature Extractor (IFE) and shallow classifiers (e.g., SVM, MLP, or XGBoost) with model sizes ranging from 1,000 to 30,000 parameters, FeatureLens achieves high detection accuracy ranging from 97.8% to 99.75% in closed-set evaluation and 86.17% to 99.6% in generalization evaluation across FGSM, PGD, CW, and DAmageNet attacks, using only 51 dimensional features. By combining strong detection performance with excellent generalization, interpretability, and computational efficiency, FeatureLens offers a practical pathway toward transparent and effective adversarial defense.
Authors: Jiahao Zhang, Xiao Zhao, Guangyu Gao
Abstract: Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have substantially advanced object detection capabilities, particularly in remote sensing imagery. However, challenges persist, especially in detecting small objects where the high resolution of these images and the small size of target objects often result in a loss of critical information in the deeper layers of conventional CNNs. Additionally, the extensive spatial redundancy and intricate background details typical in remote-sensing images tend to obscure these small targets. To address these challenges, we introduce Multi-Kernel Selection Network (MKSNet), a novel network architecture featuring a novel Multi-Kernel Selection mechanism. The MKS mechanism utilizes large convolutional kernels to effectively capture an extensive range of contextual information. This innovative design allows for adaptive kernel size selection, significantly enhancing the network's ability to dynamically process and emphasize crucial spatial details for small object detection. Furthermore, MKSNet also incorporates a dual attention mechanism, merging spatial and channel attention modules. The spatial attention module adaptively fine-tunes the spatial weights of feature maps, focusing more intensively on relevant regions while mitigating background noise. Simultaneously, the channel attention module optimizes channel information selection, improving feature representation and detection accuracy. Empirical evaluations on the DOTA-v1.0 and HRSC2016 benchmark demonstrate that MKSNet substantially surpasses existing state-of-the-art models in detecting small objects in remote sensing images. These results highlight MKSNet's superior ability to manage the complexities associated with multi-scale and high-resolution image data, confirming its effectiveness and innovation in remote sensing object detection.
Authors: Ivan Yee Lee, Cheng Yang, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
Abstract: DeepSeek-OCR demonstrates that rendered text can be reconstructed with high fidelity from a small number of vision tokens. This finding has sparked excitement about vision-based context compression for language models. But the evaluation stops at reconstruction; whether these representations help language modeling remains untested. We test two assumptions implicit in the optical-compression narrative: that vision-based compression provides unique advantages for text reconstruction from compressed representations, and that DeepSeek-OCR's reconstruction results are evidence that vision-based compression will be useful for language modeling. Comparing their vision encoder against simple alternatives--parameter-free mean pooling and a learned hierarchical encoder--we find that these simple approaches match or surpass vision for reconstruction at matched compression ratios, and outperform it for language modeling--where vision-based compression fails to beat truncation. The excitement around optical context compression outpaces the evidence. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/ivnle/bad-autoencoding
Authors: Salim Khazem
Abstract: Visual prompting has recently emerged as an efficient strategy to adapt vision models using lightweight, learnable parameters injected into the input space. However, prior work mainly targets large Vision Transformers and high-resolution datasets such as ImageNet. In contrast, small-image benchmarks like MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 remain widely used in education, prototyping, and research, yet have received little attention in the context of prompting. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{Multi-Scale Visual Prompting (MSVP)}, a simple and generic module that learns a set of global, mid-scale, and local prompt maps fused with the input image via a lightweight $1 \times 1$ convolution. MSVP is backbone-agnostic, adds less than $0.02\%$ parameters, and significantly improves performance across CNN and Vision Transformer backbones. We provide a unified benchmark on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 using a simple CNN, ResNet-18, and a small Vision Transformer. Our method yields consistent improvements with negligible computational overhead. We further include ablations on prompt scales, fusion strategies, and backbone architectures, along with qualitative analyzes using prompt visualizations and Grad-CAM. Our results demonstrate that multi-scale prompting provides an effective inductive bias even on low-resolution images.
Authors: Qi'ao Xu, Tianwen Qian, Yuqian Fu, Kailing Li, Yang Jiao, Jiacheng Zhang, Xiaoling Wang, Liang He
Abstract: A core capability towards general embodied intelligence lies in localizing task-relevant objects from an egocentric perspective, formulated as Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (STVG). Despite recent progress, existing STVG studies remain largely confined to object-centric and descriptive instructions, neglecting the task-oriented reasoning that is crucial for embodied agents to accomplish goal-directed interactions. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{ToG-Bench}, the first task-oriented spatio-temporal video grounding benchmark for egocentric videos. ToG-Bench is characterized by three key features: (1) \textbf{Task-oriented Grounding}, which requires identifying and localizing objects based on intended tasks rather than straightforward descriptions; (2) \textbf{Explicit-Implicit Dual Grounding}, where target objects can be either explicitly mentioned or implicitly inferred by contextual reasoning; (3) \textbf{One-to-Many Grounding}, where a single instruction may correspond to multiple objects involved in task execution. Built upon videos sourced from ScanNet, ToG-Bench comprises 100 annotated clips with 2,704 task-oriented grounding instructions, constructed via a semi-automated pipeline that combines foundation model annotation and human refinement. In addition, we introduce a set of task-level evaluation metrics tailored for multi-object and explicit-implicit object grounding, and systematically benchmark seven state-of-the-art MLLMs. Extensive experiments reveal the intrinsic challenges of task-oriented STVG and substantial performance gaps across explicit-implicit and multi-object grounding, highlighting the difficulty of bridging perception and interaction in embodied scenarios. Data and code will be released at: \href{https://github.com/qaxuDev/ToG-Bench}{https://github.com/qaxuDev/ToG-Bench}..
URLs: https://github.com/qaxuDev/ToG-Bench, https://github.com/qaxuDev/ToG-Bench
Authors: Ge-Peng Ji, Jingyi Liu, Deng-Ping Fan, Nick Barnes
Abstract: In this study, we present Colon-X, an open initiative aimed at advancing multimodal intelligence in colonoscopy. We begin by constructing ColonVQA, the most comprehensive multimodal dataset ever built for colonoscopy, featuring over 1.1M+ visual question answering entries across 76 clinical findings and 18 multimodal tasks. Beyond serving as a community-wide data foundation, we further investigate a critical yet underexplored transition in colonoscopy - evolving from multimodal understanding to clinical reasoning: (a) To capture the current landscape of multimodal understanding behaviors, we systematically assess the generalizability of 22 multimodal large language models and examine their reliability under human-induced perturbations. The results reveal that clinical outputs from leading MLLMs remain far from robust and trustworthy. (b) To narrow this gap, we further explore reasoning-centric intelligence tailored for colonoscopy. Specifically, we curate ColonReason, a clinically grounded reasoning dataset annotated through a multi-expert debating pipeline, and develop ColonR1, the first R1-styled model incorporating task-adaptive rewarding and gradient-stable optimization techniques. Under data-scarce conditions, our ColonR1 achieves 56.61% overall accuracy, outperforming supervised fine-tuning by 25.22%, and sets a new reasoning-enabled baseline for multimodal colonoscopy analysis. All data and model resources are publicly available at https://github.com/ai4colonoscopy/Colon-X.
Authors: Feice Huang, Zuliang Han, Xing Zhou, Yihuang Chen, Lifei Zhu, Haoqian Wang
Abstract: Diffusion transformers have demonstrated strong capabilities in generating high-quality images. However, as model size increases, the growing memory footprint and inference latency pose significant challenges for practical deployment. Recent studies in large language models (LLMs) show that rotation-based techniques can smooth outliers and enable 4-bit quantization, but these approaches often incur substantial overhead and struggle with row-wise outliers in diffusion transformers. To address these challenges, we propose ConvRot, a group-wise rotation-based quantization method that leverages regular Hadamard transform (RHT) to suppress both row-wise and column-wise outliers while reducing complexity from quadratic to linear. Building on this, we design ConvLinear4bit, a plug-and-play module that integrates rotation, quantization, GEMM, and dequantization, enabling W4A4 inference without retraining and preserving visual quality. Experiments on FLUX.1-dev demonstrate a 2.26$\times$ speedup and 4.05$\times$ memory reduction while maintaining image fidelity. To our knowledge, this is the first application of rotation-based quantization for plug-and-play W4A4 inference in diffusion transformers.
Authors: Melis Ocal, Xiaoyan Xing, Yue Li, Ngo Anh Vien, Sezer Karaoglu, Theo Gevers
Abstract: 3D stylization is central to game development, virtual reality, and digital arts, where the demand for diverse assets calls for scalable methods that support fast, high-fidelity manipulation. Existing text-to-3D stylization methods typically distill from 2D image editors, requiring time-intensive per-asset optimization and exhibiting multi-view inconsistency due to the limitations of current text-to-image models, which makes them impractical for large-scale production. In this paper, we introduce GaussianBlender, a pioneering feed-forward framework for text-driven 3D stylization that performs edits instantly at inference. Our method learns structured, disentangled latent spaces with controlled information sharing for geometry and appearance from spatially-grouped 3D Gaussians. A latent diffusion model then applies text-conditioned edits on these learned representations. Comprehensive evaluations show that GaussianBlender not only delivers instant, high-fidelity, geometry-preserving, multi-view consistent stylization, but also surpasses methods that require per-instance test-time optimization - unlocking practical, democratized 3D stylization at scale.
Authors: Yian Li, Xiaoyu Guo, Hao Zhang, Shuiwang Li, Xiaowei Dai
Abstract: Active visual perception refers to the ability of a system to dynamically engage with its environment through sensing and action, allowing it to modify its behavior in response to specific goals or uncertainties. Unlike passive systems that rely solely on visual data, active visual perception systems can direct attention, move sensors, or interact with objects to acquire more informative data. This approach is particularly powerful in complex environments where static sensing methods may not provide sufficient information. Active visual perception plays a critical role in numerous applications, including robotics, autonomous vehicles, human-computer interaction, and surveillance systems. However, despite its significant promise, there are several challenges that need to be addressed, including real-time processing of complex visual data, decision-making in dynamic environments, and integrating multimodal sensory inputs. This paper explores both the opportunities and challenges inherent in active visual perception, providing a comprehensive overview of its potential, current research, and the obstacles that must be overcome for broader adoption.
Authors: Paula Seidler, Neill D. F. Campbell, Ivor J A Simpson
Abstract: Perceptual similarity scores that align with human vision are critical for both training and evaluating computer vision models. Deep perceptual losses, such as LPIPS, achieve good alignment but rely on complex, highly non-linear discriminative features with unknown invariances, while hand-crafted measures like SSIM are interpretable but miss key perceptual properties. We introduce the Structured Uncertainty Similarity Score (SUSS); it models each image through a set of perceptual components, each represented by a structured multivariate Normal distribution. These are trained in a generative, self-supervised manner to assign high likelihood to human-imperceptible augmentations. The final score is a weighted sum of component log-probabilities with weights learned from human perceptual datasets. Unlike feature-based methods, SUSS learns image-specific linear transformations of residuals in pixel space, enabling transparent inspection through decorrelated residuals and sampling. SUSS aligns closely with human perceptual judgments, shows strong perceptual calibration across diverse distortion types, and provides localized, interpretable explanations of its similarity assessments. We further demonstrate stable optimization behavior and competitive performance when using SUSS as a perceptual loss for downstream imaging tasks.
Authors: Kaichen Zhang, Tianxiang Sheng, Xuanming Shi
Abstract: This paper presents DINO-RotateMatch, a deep-learning framework designed to address the chal lenges of image matching in large-scale 3D reconstruction from unstructured Internet images. The method integrates a dataset-adaptive image pairing strategy with rotation-aware keypoint extraction and matching. DINO is employed to retrieve semantically relevant image pairs in large collections, while rotation-based augmentation captures orientation-dependent local features using ALIKED and Light Glue. Experiments on the Kaggle Image Matching Challenge 2025 demonstrate consistent improve ments in mean Average Accuracy (mAA), achieving a Silver Award (47th of 943 teams). The results confirm that combining self-supervised global descriptors with rotation-enhanced local matching offers a robust and scalable solution for large-scale 3D reconstruction.
Authors: Ziwen Li, Xin Wang, Hanlue Zhang, Runnan Chen, Runqi Lin, Xiao He, Han Huang, Yandong Guo, Fakhri Karray, Tongliang Liu, Mingming Gong
Abstract: The Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable performance on embodied tasks and shown promising potential for real-world applications. However, current VLAs still struggle to produce consistent and precise target-oriented actions, as they often generate redundant or unstable motions along trajectories, limiting their applicability in time-sensitive scenarios.In this work, we attribute these redundant actions to the spatially uniform perception field of existing VLAs, which causes them to be distracted by target-irrelevant objects, especially in complex environments.To address this issue, we propose an efficient PosA-VLA framework that anchors visual attention via pose-conditioned supervision, consistently guiding the model's perception toward task-relevant regions. The pose-conditioned anchor attention mechanism enables the model to better align instruction semantics with actionable visual cues, thereby improving action generation precision and efficiency. Moreover, our framework adopts a lightweight architecture and requires no auxiliary perception modules (e.g., segmentation or grounding networks), ensuring efficient inference. Extensive experiments verify that our method executes embodied tasks with precise and time-efficient behavior across diverse robotic manipulation benchmarks and shows robust generalization in a variety of challenging environments.
Authors: Melane Navaratnarajah, David A. Kelly, Hana Chockler
Abstract: Adversarial perturbations are a useful way to expose vulnerabilities in object detectors. Existing perturbation methods are frequently white-box and architecture specific. More importantly, while they are often successful, it is rarely clear why they work. Insights into the mechanism of this success would allow developers to understand and analyze these attacks, as well as fine-tune the model to prevent them. This paper presents BlackCAtt, a black-box algorithm and a tool, which uses minimal, causally sufficient pixel sets to construct explainable, imperceptible, reproducible, architecture-agnostic attacks on object detectors. BlackCAtt combines causal pixels with bounding boxes produced by object detectors to create adversarial attacks that lead to the loss, modification or addition of a bounding box. BlackCAtt works across different object detectors of different sizes and architectures, treating the detector as a black box. We compare the performance of BlackCAtt with other black-box attack methods and show that identification of causal pixels leads to more precisely targeted and less perceptible attacks. On the COCO test dataset, our approach is 2.7 times better than the baseline in removing a detection, 3.86 times better in changing a detection, and 5.75 times better in triggering new, spurious, detections. The attacks generated by BlackCAtt are very close to the original image, and hence imperceptible, demonstrating the power of causal pixels.
Authors: Jiaze Li, Yan Lu, Bin Liu, Guojun Yin, Mang Ye
Abstract: Two-stage learning pipeline has achieved promising results in unsupervised visible-infrared person re-identification (USL-VI-ReID). It first performs single-modality learning and then operates cross-modality learning to tackle the modality discrepancy. Although promising, this pipeline inevitably introduces modality bias: modality-specific cues learned in the single-modality training naturally propagate into the following cross-modality learning, impairing identity discrimination and generalization. To address this issue, we propose a Dual-level Modality Debiasing Learning (DMDL) framework that implements debiasing at both the model and optimization levels. At the model level, we propose a Causality-inspired Adjustment Intervention (CAI) module that replaces likelihood-based modeling with causal modeling, preventing modality-induced spurious patterns from being introduced, leading to a low-biased model. At the optimization level, a Collaborative Bias-free Training (CBT) strategy is introduced to interrupt the propagation of modality bias across data, labels, and features by integrating modality-specific augmentation, label refinement, and feature alignment. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that DMDL could enable modality-invariant feature learning and a more generalized model.
Authors: Zirun Guo, Minjie Hong, Feng Zhang, Kai Jia, Tao Jin
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that think with images can interactively use tools to reason about visual inputs, but current approaches often rely on a narrow set of tools with limited real-world necessity and scalability. In this work, we first reveal a critical and previously overlooked weakness: even state-of-the-art MLLMs are surprisingly brittle, showing significant performance degradation on images with simple orientation changes or natural corruptions, underscoring the need for more robust tool-based reasoning. To address this, we propose CodeVision, a flexible and scalable code-as-tool framework where the model generates code as a universal interface to invoke any image operation, moving beyond fixed tool registries. We train our model using a two-stage methodology, beginning with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on a high-quality dataset curated for complex, multi-turn tool composition and error recovery, followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a novel and dense process reward function to encourage strategic and efficient tool use. To facilitate this research, we construct new SFT and RL datasets and introduce a challenging new benchmark suite designed to rigorously evaluate robustness to orientation changes and multi-tool reasoning. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL and Qwen3-VL series show that our approach significantly improves model performance and fosters emergent capabilities such as flexible tool composition, efficient chained execution, and robust error recovery from runtime feedback. Code is available at https://github.com/ByteDance-BandAI/CodeVision.
Authors: Korada Sri Vardhana, Shrikrishna Lolla, Soma Biswas
Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have achieved widespread success due to their ability to generate high-resolution, photorealistic images. These models are trained on large-scale datasets, like LAION-5B, often scraped from the internet. However, since this data contains numerous biases, the models inherently learn and reproduce them, resulting in stereotypical outputs. We introduce SelfDebias, a fully unsupervised test-time debiasing method applicable to any diffusion model that uses a UNet as its noise predictor. SelfDebias identifies semantic clusters in an image encoder's embedding space and uses these clusters to guide the diffusion process during inference, minimizing the KL divergence between the output distribution and the uniform distribution. Unlike supervised approaches, SelfDebias does not require human-annotated datasets or external classifiers trained for each generated concept. Instead, it is designed to automatically identify semantic modes. Extensive experiments show that SelfDebias generalizes across prompts and diffusion model architectures, including both conditional and unconditional models. It not only effectively debiases images along key demographic dimensions while maintaining the visual fidelity of the generated images, but also more abstract concepts for which identifying biases is also challenging.
Authors: Yufeng Li, Wenchao Zhao, Bo Dang, Weimin Wang
Abstract: Previously, image interpretation in radiology relied heavily on manual methods. However, manual classification of brain tumor medical images is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Even with shallow convolutional neural network models, the accuracy is not ideal. To improve the efficiency and accuracy of brain tumor image classification, this paper proposes a brain tumor classification model based on an improved ResNet34 network. This model uses the ResNet34 residual network as the backbone network and incorporates multi-scale feature extraction. It uses a multi-scale input module as the first layer of the ResNet34 network and an Inception v2 module as the residual downsampling layer. Furthermore, a channel attention mechanism module assigns different weights to different channels of the image from a channel domain perspective, obtaining more important feature information. The results after a five-fold crossover experiment show that the average classification accuracy of the improved network model is approximately 98.8%, which is not only 1% higher than ResNet34, but also only 80% of the number of parameters of the original model. Therefore, the improved network model not only improves accuracy but also reduces clutter, achieving a classification effect with fewer parameters and higher accuracy.
Authors: Zichuan Lin, Yicheng Liu, Yang Yang, Lvfang Tao, Deheng Ye
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in visual question answering tasks, but their reliance on large numbers of visual tokens introduces significant computational overhead. While existing efficient VLM approaches reduce visual tokens through fixed-ratio compression, they operate passively and lack the ability to adapt to varying task requirements. This motivates a fundamental question: Can VLMs autonomously determine the minimum number of visual tokens required for each sample? Inspired by human active vision mechanisms, we introduce AdaptVision, an efficient VLM paradigm that enables adaptive visual token acquisition through a coarse-to-fine approach. Our model initially processes compressed visual tokens from low-resolution images and selectively acquires additional visual information by invoking a bounding box tool to crop key regions when necessary. We train AdaptVision using a reinforcement learning framework that carefully balances accuracy and efficiency. Central to our approach is Decoupled Turn Policy Optimization (DTPO), which decouples the learning objective into two components: (1) tool learning, which optimizes correct tool utilization, and (2) accuracy improvement, which refines the generated responses to improve answer correctness. Based on this formulation, we further decouple advantage estimation by computing separate advantages for tokens associated with each objective. This formulation enables more effective optimization for AdaptVision compared to vanilla GRPO. Comprehensive experiments across multiple VQA benchmarks demonstrate that AdaptVision achieves superior performance while consuming substantially fewer visual tokens than state-of-the-art efficient VLM methods.
Authors: Hong-Kai Zheng, Piji Li
Abstract: Visual Autoregressive (VAR) modeling approach for image generation proposes autoregressive processing across hierarchical scales, decoding multiple tokens per scale in parallel. This method achieves high-quality generation while accelerating synthesis. However, parallel token sampling within a scale may lead to structural errors, resulting in suboptimal generated images. To mitigate this, we propose Latent Scale Rejection Sampling (LSRS), a method that progressively refines token maps in the latent scale during inference to enhance VAR models. Our method uses a lightweight scoring model to evaluate multiple candidate token maps sampled at each scale, selecting the high-quality map to guide subsequent scale generation. By prioritizing early scales critical for structural coherence, LSRS effectively mitigates autoregressive error accumulation while maintaining computational efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that LSRS significantly improves VAR's generation quality with minimal additional computational overhead. For the VAR-d30 model, LSRS increases the inference time by merely 1% while reducing its FID score from 1.95 to 1.78. When the inference time is increased by 15%, the FID score can be further reduced to 1.66. LSRS offers an efficient test-time scaling solution for enhancing VAR-based generation.
Authors: Ahmed Nasser, Marwan Mohamed, Alaa Sherif, Basmala Mahmoud, Shereen Yehia, Asmaa Saad, Mariam S. El-Rahmany, Ensaf H. Mohamed
Abstract: Egyptian hieroglyphs, the ancient Egyptian writing system, are composed entirely of drawings. Translating these glyphs into English poses various challenges, including the fact that a single glyph can have multiple meanings. Deep learning translation applications are evolving rapidly, producing remarkable results that significantly impact our lives. In this research, we propose a method for the automatic recognition and translation of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs from images to English. This study utilized two datasets for classification and translation: the Morris Franken dataset and the EgyptianTranslation dataset. Our approach is divided into three stages: segmentation (using Contour and Detectron2), mapping symbols to Gardiner codes, and translation (using the CNN model). The model achieved a BLEU score of 42.2, a significant result compared to previous research.
Authors: Alexey Protopopov
Abstract: Proliferation of cheap and accessible cameras makes it possible to measure a subject's breath rate from video footage alone. Recent works on this topic have proposed a variety of approaches for accurately measuring human breath rate, however they are either tested in near-ideal conditions, or produce results that are not sufficiently accurate. The present study proposes a more robust method to measure breath rate in humans with minimal hardware requirements using a combination of mathematical transforms with a relative deviation from the ground truth of less than 5%. The method was tested on videos taken from 14 volunteers with a total duration of over 2 hours 30 minutes. The obtained results were compared to reference data and the average mean absolute error was found to be at 0.57 respirations per minute, which is noticeably better than the results from previous works. The breath rate measurement method proposed in the present article is more resistant to distortions caused by subject movement and thus allows one to remotely measure the subject's breath rate without any significant limitations on the subject's behavior.
Authors: Ture Hassler, Ida {\AA}kerholm, Marcus Nordstr\"om, Gabriele Balletti, Orcun Goksel
Abstract: Unet and its variations have been standard in semantic image segmentation, especially for computer assisted radiology. Current Unet architectures iteratively downsample spatial resolution while increasing channel dimensions to preserve information content. Such a structure demands a large memory footprint, limiting training batch sizes and increasing inference latency. Channel pruning compresses Unet architecture without accuracy loss, but requires lengthy optimization and may not generalize across tasks and datasets. By investigating Unet pruning, we hypothesize that the final structure is the crucial factor, not the channel selection strategy of pruning. Based on our observations, we propose a lean Unet architecture (LUnet) with a compact, flat hierarchy where channels are not doubled as resolution is halved. We evaluate on a public MRI dataset allowing comparable reporting, as well as on two internal CT datasets. We show that a state-of-the-art pruning solution (STAMP) mainly prunes from the layers with the highest number of channels. Comparatively, simply eliminating a random channel at the pruning-identified layer or at the largest layer achieves similar or better performance. Our proposed LUnet with fixed architectures and over 30 times fewer parameters achieves performance comparable to both conventional Unet counterparts and data-adaptively pruned networks. The proposed lean Unet with constant channel count across layers requires far fewer parameters while achieving performance superior to standard Unet for the same total number of parameters. Skip connections allow Unet bottleneck channels to be largely reduced, unlike standard encoder-decoder architectures requiring increased bottleneck channels for information propagation.
Authors: Mengyuan Liu, Jinfu Liu, Yongkang Jiang, Bin He
Abstract: Human action recognition (HAR) in videos has garnered widespread attention due to the rich information in RGB videos. Nevertheless, existing methods for extracting deep features from RGB videos face challenges such as information redundancy, susceptibility to noise and high storage costs. To address these issues and fully harness the useful information in videos, we propose a novel heatmap pooling network (HP-Net) for action recognition from videos, which extracts information-rich, robust and concise pooled features of the human body in videos through a feedback pooling module. The extracted pooled features demonstrate obvious performance advantages over the previously obtained pose data and heatmap features from videos. In addition, we design a spatial-motion co-learning module and a text refinement modulation module to integrate the extracted pooled features with other multimodal data, enabling more robust action recognition. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks namely NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, Toyota-Smarthome and UAV-Human consistently verify the effectiveness of our HP-Net, which outperforms the existing human action recognition methods. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/liujf69/HPNet-Action.
Authors: Letian Zhou, Songhua Liu, Xinchao Wang
Abstract: Prevailing Dataset Distillation (DD) methods leveraging generative models confront two fundamental limitations. First, despite pioneering the use of diffusion models in DD and delivering impressive performance, the vast majority of approaches paradoxically require a diffusion model pre-trained on the full target dataset, undermining the very purpose of DD and incurring prohibitive training costs. Second, although some methods turn to general text-to-image models without relying on such target-specific training, they suffer from a significant distributional mismatch, as the web-scale priors encapsulated in these foundation models fail to faithfully capture the target-specific semantics, leading to suboptimal performance. To tackle these challenges, we propose Core Distribution Alignment (CoDA), a framework that enables effective DD using only an off-the-shelf text-to-image model. Our key idea is to first identify the "intrinsic core distribution" of the target dataset using a robust density-based discovery mechanism. We then steer the generative process to align the generated samples with this core distribution. By doing so, CoDA effectively bridges the gap between general-purpose generative priors and target semantics, yielding highly representative distilled datasets. Extensive experiments suggest that, without relying on a generative model specifically trained on the target dataset, CoDA achieves performance on par with or even superior to previous methods with such reliance across all benchmarks, including ImageNet-1K and its subsets. Notably, it establishes a new state-of-the-art accuracy of 60.4% at the 50-images-per-class (IPC) setup on ImageNet-1K. Our code is available on the project webpage: https://github.com/zzzlt422/CoDA
Authors: Hania Ghouse, Maryam Alsharqi, Farhad R. Nezami, Muzammil Behzad
Abstract: Cardiac image analysis remains fragmented across tasks: anatomical segmentation, disease classification, and grounded clinical report generation are typically handled by separate networks trained under different data regimes. No existing framework unifies these objectives within a single architecture while retaining generalization across imaging modalities and datasets. We introduce PULSE, a multi-task vision-language framework built on self-supervised representations and optimized through a composite supervision strategy that balances region overlap learning, pixel wise classification fidelity, and boundary aware IoU refinement. A multi-scale token reconstruction decoder enables anatomical segmentation, while shared global representations support disease classification and clinically grounded text output allowing the model to transition from pixels to structures and finally clinical reasoning within one architecture. Unlike prior task-specific pipelines, PULSE learns task-invariant cardiac priors, generalizes robustly across datasets, and can be adapted to new imaging modalities with minimal supervision. This moves the field closer to a scalable, foundation style cardiac analysis framework.
Authors: Liwen Pan, Longguang Wang, Guangwei Gao, Jun Wang, Jun Shi, Juncheng Li
Abstract: Traffic image restoration under adverse weather conditions remains a critical challenge for intelligent transportation systems. Existing methods primarily focus on spatial-domain modeling but neglect frequency-domain priors. Although the emerging Mamba architecture excels at long-range dependency modeling through patch-wise correlation analysis, its potential for frequency-domain feature extraction remains unexplored. To address this, we propose Frequency-Aware Mamba (FAMamba), a novel framework that integrates frequency guidance with sequence modeling for efficient image restoration. Our architecture consists of two key components: (1) a Dual-Branch Feature Extraction Block (DFEB) that enhances local-global interaction via bidirectional 2D frequency-adaptive scanning, dynamically adjusting traversal paths based on sub-band texture distributions; and (2) a Prior-Guided Block (PGB) that refines texture details through wavelet-based high-frequency residual learning, enabling high-quality image reconstruction with precise details. Meanwhile, we design a novel Adaptive Frequency Scanning Mechanism (AFSM) for the Mamba architecture, which enables the Mamba to achieve frequency-domain scanning across distinct subgraphs, thereby fully leveraging the texture distribution characteristics inherent in subgraph structures. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of FAMamba.
Authors: Peshawa J. Muhammad Ali, Navin Vincent, Saman S. Abdulla, Han N. Mohammed Fadhl, Anders Blilie, Kelvin Szolnoky, Julia Anna Mielcarz, Xiaoyi Ji, Kimmo Kartasalo, Abdulbasit K. Al-Talabani, Nita Mulliqi
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in digital pathology. Publicly available histopathology datasets remain scarce, and those that do exist predominantly represent Western populations. Consequently, the generalizability of AI models to populations from less digitized regions, such as the Middle East, is largely unknown. This motivates the public release of our dataset to support the development and validation of pathology AI models across globally diverse populations. We present 339 whole-slide images of prostate core needle biopsies from a consecutive series of 185 patients collected in Erbil, Iraq. The slides are associated with Gleason scores and International Society of Urological Pathology grades assigned independently by three pathologists. Scanning was performed using two high-throughput scanners (Leica and Hamamatsu) and one compact scanner (Grundium). All slides were de-identified and are provided in their native formats without further conversion. The dataset enables grading concordance analyses, color normalization, and cross-scanner robustness evaluations. Data will be deposited in the Bioimage Archive (BIA) under accession code: to be announced (TBA), and released under a CC BY 4.0 license.
Authors: Oli Bridge, Huey Sun, Botond Branyicskai-Nagy, Charles D'Ornano, Shomit Basu
Abstract: While transformer-based architectures have taken computer vision and NLP by storm, they often require a vast amount of parameters and training data to attain strong performance. In this work, we experiment with three distinct pre-training, intermediate fine-tuning, and downstream datasets and training objectives to explore their marginal benefits on a small 5M-parameter vision transformer. We find that while pre-training and fine-tuning always help our model but have diminishing returns, intermediate fine-tuning can actually show harmful impact on downstream performance, potentially due to dissimilarity in task mechanics. Taken together, our results suggest that small-scale ViTs benefit most from targeted pre-training and careful data selection, while indiscriminate stacking of intermediate tasks can waste compute and even degrade performance.
Authors: Daniele Falcetta, Liane S. Canas, Lorenzo Suppa, Matteo Pentassuglia, Jon Cleary, Marc Modat, S\'ebastien Ourselin, Maria A. Zuluaga
Abstract: We present CaravelMetrics, a computational framework for automated cerebrovascular analysis that models vessel morphology through skeletonization-derived graph representations. The framework integrates atlas-based regional parcellation, centerline extraction, and graph construction to compute fifteen morphometric, topological, fractal, and geometric features. The features can be estimated globally from the complete vascular network or regionally within arterial territories, enabling multiscale characterization of cerebrovascular organization. Applied to 570 3D TOF-MRA scans from the IXI dataset (ages 20-86), CaravelMetrics yields reproducible vessel graphs capturing age- and sex-related variations and education-associated increases in vascular complexity, consistent with findings reported in the literature. The framework provides a scalable and fully automated approach for quantitative cerebrovascular feature extraction, supporting normative modeling and population-level studies of vascular health and aging.
Authors: Jorge Tapias Gomez, Despoina Kanata, Aneesh Rangnekar, Christina Lee, Julio Garcia-Aguilar, Joshua Jesse Smith, Harini Veeraraghavan
Abstract: Increasing evidence supports watch-and-wait (WW) surveillance for patients with rectal cancer who show clinical complete response (cCR) at restaging following total neoadjuvant treatment (TNT). However, objectively accurate methods to early detect local regrowth (LR) from follow-up endoscopy images during WW are essential to manage care and prevent distant metastases. Hence, we developed a Siamese Swin Transformer with Dual Cross-Attention (SSDCA) to combine longitudinal endoscopic images at restaging and follow-up and distinguish cCR from LR. SSDCA leverages pretrained Swin transformers to extract domain agnostic features and enhance robustness to imaging variations. Dual cross attention is implemented to emphasize features from the two scans without requiring any spatial alignment of images to predict response. SSDCA as well as Swin-based baselines were trained using image pairs from 135 patients and evaluated on a held-out set of image pairs from 62 patients. SSDCA produced the best balanced accuracy (81.76\% $\pm$ 0.04), sensitivity (90.07\% $\pm$ 0.08), and specificity (72.86\% $\pm$ 0.05). Robustness analysis showed stable performance irrespective of artifacts including blood, stool, telangiectasia, and poor image quality. UMAP clustering of extracted features showed maximal inter-cluster separation (1.45 $\pm$ 0.18) and minimal intra-cluster dispersion (1.07 $\pm$ 0.19) with SSDCA, confirming discriminative representation learning.
Authors: Shuai Yang, Junxin Lin, Yifan Zhou, Ziwei Liu, Chen Change Loy
Abstract: The remarkable success in text-to-image diffusion models has motivated extensive investigation of their potential for video applications. Zero-shot techniques aim to adapt image diffusion models for videos without requiring further model training. Recent methods largely emphasize integrating inter-frame correspondence into attention mechanisms. However, the soft constraint applied to identify the valid features to attend is insufficient, which could lead to temporal inconsistency. In this paper, we present FRESCO, which integrates intra-frame correspondence with inter-frame correspondence to formulate a more robust spatial-temporal constraint. This enhancement ensures a consistent transformation of semantically similar content between frames. Our method goes beyond attention guidance to explicitly optimize features, achieving high spatial-temporal consistency with the input video, significantly enhancing the visual coherence of manipulated videos. We verify FRESCO adaptations on two zero-shot tasks of video-to-video translation and text-guided video editing. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in generating high-quality, coherent videos, highlighting a significant advance over current zero-shot methods.
Authors: Youxin Pang, Yong Zhang, Ruizhi Shao, Xiang Deng, Feng Gao, Xu Xiaoming, Xiaoming Wei, Yebin Liu
Abstract: We propose UniMo, an innovative autoregressive model for joint modeling of 2D human videos and 3D human motions within a unified framework, enabling simultaneous generation and understanding of these two modalities for the first time. Current methods predominantly focus on generating one modality given another as the condition or integrating either of them with other modalities such as text and audio. Unifying 2D videos and 3D motions for simultaneous optimization and generation remains largely unexplored, presenting significant challenges due to their substantial structural and distributional differences. Inspired by the LLM's ability to unify different modalities, our method models videos and 3D motions as a unified tokens sequence, utilizing separate embedding layers to mitigate distribution gaps. Additionally, we devise a sequence modeling strategy that integrates two distinct tasks within a single framework, proving the effectiveness of unified modeling. Moreover, to efficiently align with visual tokens and preserve 3D spatial information, we design a novel 3D motion tokenizer with a temporal expansion strategy, using a single VQ-VAE to produce quantized motion tokens. It features multiple expert decoders that handle body shapes, translation, global orientation, and body poses for reliable 3D motion reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method simultaneously generates corresponding videos and motions while performing accurate motion capture. This work taps into the capacity of LLMs to fuse diverse data types, paving the way for integrating human-centric information into existing models and potentially enabling multimodal, controllable joint modeling of humans, objects, and scenes.
Authors: Donghun Ryou, Inju Ha, Sanghyeok Chu, Bohyung Han
Abstract: Deep learning-based image restoration has achieved significant success. However, when addressing real-world degradations, model performance is limited by the quality of ground-truth images in datasets due to practical constraints in data acquisition. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework that enhances existing ground truth images to provide higher-quality supervision for real-world restoration. Our framework generates perceptually enhanced ground truth images using super-resolution by incorporating adaptive frequency masks, which are learned by a conditional frequency mask generator. These masks guide the optimal fusion of frequency components from the original ground truth and its super-resolved variants, yielding enhanced ground truth images. This frequency-domain mixup preserves the semantic consistency of the original content while selectively enriching perceptual details, preventing hallucinated artifacts that could compromise fidelity. The enhanced ground truth images are used to train a lightweight output refinement network that can be seamlessly integrated with existing restoration models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently improves the quality of restored images. We further validate the effectiveness of both supervision enhancement and output refinement through user studies. Code is available at https://github.com/dhryougit/Beyond-the-Ground-Truth.
Authors: Guole Shen, Tianchen Deng, Xingrui Qin, Nailin Wang, Jianyu Wang, Yanbo Wang, Yongtao Chen, Hesheng Wang, Jingchuan Wang
Abstract: Recent stateful recurrent neural networks have achieved remarkable progress on static 3D reconstruction but remain vulnerable to motion-induced artifacts, where non-rigid regions corrupt attention propagation between the spatial memory and image feature. By analyzing the internal behaviors of the state and image token updating mechanism, we find that aggregating self-attention maps across layers reveals a consistent pattern: dynamic regions are naturally down-weighted, exposing an implicit motion cue that the pretrained transformer already encodes but never explicitly uses. Motivated by this observation, we introduce MUT3R, a training-free framework that applies the attention-derived motion cue to suppress dynamic content in the early layers of the transformer during inference. Our attention-level gating module suppresses the influence of dynamic regions before their artifacts propagate through the feature hierarchy. Notably, we do not retrain or fine-tune the model; we let the pretrained transformer diagnose its own motion cues and correct itself. This early regulation stabilizes geometric reasoning in streaming scenarios and leads to improvements in temporal consistency and camera pose robustness across multiple dynamic benchmarks, offering a simple and training-free pathway toward motion-aware streaming reconstruction.
Authors: Tao Wu, Li Yang, Gen Zhan, Yiting Liao, Junlin Li, Deliang Fu, Li Zhang, Limin Wang
Abstract: Enhancing the temporal understanding of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is essential for advancing long-form video analysis, enabling tasks such as temporal localization, action detection, and time-sensitive question answering. While reinforcement learning (RL) has recently been explored for improving temporal reasoning, existing approaches are often confined to limited task types and data, restricting their generalization across diverse temporal understanding scenarios. To address this challenge, we present TempR1, a temporal-aware multi-task reinforcement learning framework that systematically strengthens MLLMs' temporal comprehension. We curate a multi-task corpus that exposes the model to diverse temporal structures and semantics, and build upon the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm to achieve stable and effective cross-task optimization. Specifically, we categorize temporal tasks into three correspondence types between predicted intervals and ground-truth instances, and design tailored localization rewards for each, enabling TempR1 to capture fine-grained temporal dependencies and adapt to different temporal patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TempR1 attains state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks. Moreover, its joint optimization over complementary tasks yields a strong synergistic effect, enhancing both generalization and single-task performance, establishing a scalable and principled paradigm for temporal reasoning in MLLMs.
Authors: Lianyu Pang, Ji Zhou, Qiping Wang, Baoquan Zhao, Zhenguo Yang, Qing Li, Xudong Mao
Abstract: Tuning-free face personalization methods have developed along two distinct paradigms: text embedding approaches that map facial features into the text embedding space, and adapter-based methods that inject features through auxiliary cross-attention layers. While both paradigms have shown promise, existing methods struggle to simultaneously achieve high identity fidelity and flexible text controllability. We introduce UniID, a unified tuning-free framework that synergistically integrates both paradigms. Our key insight is that when merging these approaches, they should mutually reinforce only identity-relevant information while preserving the original diffusion prior for non-identity attributes. We realize this through a principled training-inference strategy: during training, we employ an identity-focused learning scheme that guides both branches to capture identity features exclusively; at inference, we introduce a normalized rescaling mechanism that recovers the text controllability of the base diffusion model while enabling complementary identity signals to enhance each other. This principled design enables UniID to achieve high-fidelity face personalization with flexible text controllability. Extensive experiments against six state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that UniID achieves superior performance in both identity preservation and text controllability. Code will be available at https://github.com/lyuPang/UniID
Authors: Jin-Ting He, Fu-Jen Tsai, Yan-Tsung Peng, Min-Hung Chen, Chia-Wen Lin, Yen-Yu Lin
Abstract: Diffusion models show promise for dynamic scene deblurring; however, existing studies often fail to leverage the intrinsic nature of the blurring process within diffusion models, limiting their full potential. To address it, we present a Blur Diffusion Model (BlurDM), which seamlessly integrates the blur formation process into diffusion for image deblurring. Observing that motion blur stems from continuous exposure, BlurDM implicitly models the blur formation process through a dual-diffusion forward scheme, diffusing both noise and blur onto a sharp image. During the reverse generation process, we derive a dual denoising and deblurring formulation, enabling BlurDM to recover the sharp image by simultaneously denoising and deblurring, given pure Gaussian noise conditioned on the blurred image as input. Additionally, to efficiently integrate BlurDM into deblurring networks, we perform BlurDM in the latent space, forming a flexible prior generation network for deblurring. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BlurDM significantly and consistently enhances existing deblurring methods on four benchmark datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/Jin-Ting-He/BlurDM.
Authors: Sheng-Hao Liao, Shang-Fu Chen, Tai-Ming Huang, Wen-Huang Cheng, Kai-Lung Hua
Abstract: Drag-based image editing using generative models provides intuitive control over image structures. However, existing methods rely heavily on manually provided masks and textual prompts to preserve semantic fidelity and motion precision. Removing these constraints creates a fundamental trade-off: visual artifacts without masks and poor spatial control without prompts. To address these limitations, we propose DirectDrag, a novel mask- and prompt-free editing framework. DirectDrag enables precise and efficient manipulation with minimal user input while maintaining high image fidelity and accurate point alignment. DirectDrag introduces two key innovations. First, we design an Auto Soft Mask Generation module that intelligently infers editable regions from point displacement, automatically localizing deformation along movement paths while preserving contextual integrity through the generative model's inherent capacity. Second, we develop a Readout-Guided Feature Alignment mechanism that leverages intermediate diffusion activations to maintain structural consistency during point-based edits, substantially improving visual fidelity. Despite operating without manual mask or prompt, DirectDrag achieves superior image quality compared to existing methods while maintaining competitive drag accuracy. Extensive experiments on DragBench and real-world scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of DirectDrag for high-quality, interactive image manipulation. Project Page: https://frakw.github.io/DirectDrag/. Code is available at: https://github.com/frakw/DirectDrag.
URLs: https://frakw.github.io/DirectDrag/., https://github.com/frakw/DirectDrag.
Authors: Zexin Lin, Hawen Wan, Yebin Zhong, Xiaoqiang
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) deployed in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving must handle continuous visual streams under imperfect conditions. However, existing benchmarks focus on static, high-quality images and ignore temporal degradation and error propagation, which are critical failure modes where transient visual corruption induces hallucinations that persist across subsequent frames. We introduce DIQ-H, the first benchmark for evaluating VLM robustness under dynamic visual degradation in temporal sequences. DIQ-H applies physics-based corruptions including motion blur, sensor noise, and compression artifacts, and measures hallucination persistence, error recovery, and temporal consistency through multi-turn question-answering tasks. To enable scalable annotation, we propose Uncertainty-Guided Iterative Refinement (UIR), which generates reliable pseudo-ground-truth using lightweight VLMs with uncertainty filtering, achieving a 15.3 percent accuracy improvement. Experiments on 16 state-of-the-art VLMs reveal substantial robustness gaps: even advanced models such as GPT-4o achieve only a 78.5 percent recovery rate, while open-source models struggle with temporal consistency at less than 60 percent. DIQ-H provides a comprehensive platform for evaluating VLM reliability in real-world deployments.
Authors: Hang Xu, Linjiang Huang, Feng Zhao
Abstract: Test-time scaling (TTS) aims to achieve better results by increasing random sampling and evaluating samples based on rules and metrics. However, in text-to-image(T2I) diffusion models, most related works focus on search strategies and reward models, yet the impact of the stochastic characteristic of noise in T2I diffusion models on the method's performance remains unexplored. In this work, we analyze the effects of randomness in T2I diffusion models and explore a new format of randomness for TTS: text embedding perturbation, which couples with existing randomness like SDE-injected noise to enhance generative diversity and quality. We start with a frequency-domain analysis of these formats of randomness and their impact on generation, and find that these two randomness exhibit complementary behavior in the frequency domain: spatial noise favors low-frequency components (early steps), while text embedding perturbation enhances high-frequency details (later steps), thereby compensating for the potential limitations of spatial noise randomness in high-frequency manipulation. Concurrently, text embedding demonstrates varying levels of tolerance to perturbation across different dimensions of the generation process. Specifically, our method consists of two key designs: (1) Introducing step-based text embedding perturbation, combining frequency-guided noise schedules with spatial noise perturbation. (2) Adapting the perturbation intensity selectively based on their frequency-specific contributions to generation and tolerance to perturbation. Our approach can be seamlessly integrated into existing TTS methods and demonstrates significant improvements on multiple benchmarks with almost no additional computation. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/xuhang07/TEP-Diffusion}{https://github.com/xuhang07/TEP-Diffusion}.
URLs: https://github.com/xuhang07/TEP-Diffusion, https://github.com/xuhang07/TEP-Diffusion
Authors: Jialuo Li, Bin Li, Jiahao Li, Yan Lu
Abstract: The application of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to long-form video understanding is constrained by limited context lengths and the computationally prohibitive cost of processing dense video tokens. Consequently, recent research has focused on query-aware frame selection, methods that often incur significant computational overhead. This paper challenges the assumption that such complex search mechanisms are universally necessary. We first identify and validate a query typology distinguishing between global query and localized query. We demonstrate that while uniform sampling is both effective and efficient for global queries, localized queries indeed necessitate query-aware selection for optimal performance. Building on this insight, we propose DIG, a training-free frame selection framework that adapts its strategy based on the query type. Specifically,DIG employs efficient uniform sampling for global queries while activating a specialized pipeline to extract query-relevant frames for localized queries. Experiments on three long-form video understanding benchmarks demonstrate that DIG consistently outperforms existing baselines and robustly improves LMM performance, even when scaling the input frame count to 256.
Authors: Marcelo Isaias de Moraes Junior, Moacir Antonelli Ponti
Abstract: Sketches are simple human hand-drawn abstractions of complex scenes and real-world objects. Although the field of sketch representation learning has advanced significantly, there is still a gap in understanding the true relevance of the temporal aspect to the quality of these representations. This work investigates whether it is indeed justifiable to treat sketches as sequences, as well as which internal orders play a more relevant role. The results indicate that, although the use of traditional positional encodings is valid for modeling sketches as sequences, absolute coordinates consistently outperform relative ones. Furthermore, non-autoregressive decoders outperform their autoregressive counterparts. Finally, the importance of temporality was shown to depend on both the order considered and the task evaluated.
Authors: Jisang Han, Sunghwan Hong, Jaewoo Jung, Wooseok Jang, Honggyu An, Qianqian Wang, Seungryong Kim, Chen Feng
Abstract: Reliable 3D reconstruction from in-the-wild image collections is often hindered by "noisy" images-irrelevant inputs with little or no view overlap with others. While traditional Structure-from-Motion pipelines handle such cases through geometric verification and outlier rejection, feed-forward 3D reconstruction models lack these explicit mechanisms, leading to degraded performance under in-the-wild conditions. In this paper, we discover that the existing feed-forward reconstruction model, e.g., VGGT, despite lacking explicit outlier-rejection mechanisms or noise-aware training, can inherently distinguish distractor images. Through an in-depth analysis under varying proportions of synthetic distractors, we identify a specific layer that naturally exhibits outlier-suppressing behavior. Further probing reveals that this layer encodes discriminative internal representations that enable an effective noise-filtering capability, which we simply leverage to perform outlier-view rejection in feed-forward 3D reconstruction without any additional fine-tuning or supervision. Extensive experiments on both controlled and in-the-wild datasets demonstrate that this implicit filtering mechanism is consistent and generalizes well across diverse scenarios.
Authors: Farhana Hossain Swarnali, Miaomiao Zhang, Tonmoy Hossain
Abstract: Modeling group actions on latent representations enables controllable transformations of high-dimensional image data. Prior works applying group-theoretic priors or modeling transformations typically operate in the high-dimensional data space, where group actions apply uniformly across the entire input, making it difficult to disentangle the subspace that varies under transformations. While latent-space methods offer greater flexibility, they still require manual partitioning of latent variables into equivariant and invariant subspaces, limiting the ability to robustly learn and operate group actions within the representation space. To address this, we introduce a novel end-to-end framework that for the first time learns group actions on latent image manifolds, automatically discovering transformation-relevant structures without manual intervention. Our method uses learnable binary masks with straight-through estimation to dynamically partition latent representations into transformation-sensitive and invariant components. We formulate this within a unified optimization framework that jointly learns latent disentanglement and group transformation mappings. The framework can be seamlessly integrated with any standard encoder-decoder architecture. We validate our approach on five 2D/3D image datasets, demonstrating its ability to automatically learn disentangled latent factors for group actions in diverse data, while downstream classification tasks confirm the effectiveness of the learned representations. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/farhanaswarnali/Learning-Group-Actions-In-Disentangled-Latent-Image-Representations .
Authors: Ho Man Kwan, Tianhao Peng, Ge Gao, Fan Zhang, Mike Nilsson, Andrew Gower, David Bull
Abstract: Recent works have demonstrated the viability of utilizing over-fitted implicit neural representations (INRs) as alternatives to autoencoder-based models for neural video compression. Among these INR-based video codecs, Neural Video Representation Compression (NVRC) was the first to adopt a fully end-to-end compression framework that compresses INRs, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, some recently proposed lightweight INRs have shown comparable performance to their baseline codecs with computational complexity lower than 10kMACs/pixel. In this work, we extend NVRC toward lightweight representations, and propose NVRC-Lite, which incorporates two key changes. Firstly, we integrated multi-scale feature grids into our lightweight neural representation, and the use of higher resolution grids significantly improves the performance of INRs at low complexity. Secondly, we address the issue that existing INRs typically leverage autoregressive models for entropy coding: these are effective but impractical due to their slow coding speed. In this work, we propose an octree-based context model for entropy coding high-dimensional feature grids, which accelerates the entropy coding module of the model. Our experimental results demonstrate that NVRC-Lite outperforms C3, one of the best lightweight INR-based video codecs, with up to 21.03% and 23.06% BD-rate savings when measured in PSNR and MS-SSIM, respectively, while achieving 8.4x encoding and 2.5x decoding speedup. The implementation of NVRC-Lite will be made available.
Authors: Honggyu An, Jaewoo Jung, Mungyeom Kim, Sunghwan Hong, Chaehyun Kim, Kazumi Fukuda, Minkyeong Jeon, Jisang Han, Takuya Narihira, Hyuna Ko, Junsu Kim, Yuki Mitsufuji, Seungryong Kim
Abstract: Reconstructing and understanding 3D scenes from unposed sparse views in a feed-forward manner remains as a challenging task in 3D computer vision. Recent approaches use per-pixel 3D Gaussian Splatting for reconstruction, followed by a 2D-to-3D feature lifting stage for scene understanding. However, they generate excessive redundant Gaussians, causing high memory overhead and sub-optimal multi-view feature aggregation, leading to degraded novel view synthesis and scene understanding performance. We propose C3G, a novel feed-forward framework that estimates compact 3D Gaussians only at essential spatial locations, minimizing redundancy while enabling effective feature lifting. We introduce learnable tokens that aggregate multi-view features through self-attention to guide Gaussian generation, ensuring each Gaussian integrates relevant visual features across views. We then exploit the learned attention patterns for Gaussian decoding to efficiently lift features. Extensive experiments on pose-free novel view synthesis, 3D open-vocabulary segmentation, and view-invariant feature aggregation demonstrate our approach's effectiveness. Results show that a compact yet geometrically meaningful representation is sufficient for high-quality scene reconstruction and understanding, achieving superior memory efficiency and feature fidelity compared to existing methods.
Authors: Xiaolong Li, Youping Gu, Xi Lin, Weijie Wang, Bohan Zhuang
Abstract: Attention mechanisms are the core of foundation models, but their quadratic complexity remains a critical bottleneck for scaling. This challenge has driven the development of efficient attention mechanisms, with sparsity emerging as the dominant paradigm. Current methods typically retain or discard entire key-value blocks with binary masks, resulting in substantial information loss under high sparsity. To mitigate this gap, we present Pyramid Sparse Attention (PSA), a versatile module applicable to both video understanding and generation tasks. Instead of binary masking, PSA introduces multi-level pooled KV representations, enabling finer mask granularity. Specifically, each query block dynamically allocates lower pooling levels to critical KV blocks and higher levels to less important ones, creating an informative interpolation between full retention and complete pruning. This design, analogous to fixed-point quantization and classical feature pyramid networks in computer vision, effectively mitigates information loss while preserving computational efficiency under a low compute budget. It works with a native, hardware-friendly kernel that leverages decoupled block-tile design to ensure efficient execution. Across video understanding and generation benchmarks, PSA preserves contextual information and visual fidelity, consistently outperforming or achieving comparable performance over existing sparse attention baselines with superior efficiency-quality trade-offs. Our code and model weights are publicly available at: http://ziplab.co/PSA
URLs: http://ziplab.co/PSA
Authors: Sandeep Nagar
Abstract: This thesis presents novel contributions in two primary areas: advancing the efficiency of generative models, particularly normalizing flows, and applying generative models to solve real-world computer vision challenges. The first part introduce significant improvements to normalizing flow architectures through six key innovations: 1) Development of invertible 3x3 Convolution layers with mathematically proven necessary and sufficient conditions for invertibility, (2) introduction of a more efficient Quad-coupling layer, 3) Design of a fast and efficient parallel inversion algorithm for kxk convolutional layers, 4) Fast & efficient backpropagation algorithm for inverse of convolution, 5) Using inverse of convolution, in Inverse-Flow, for the forward pass and training it using proposed backpropagation algorithm, and 6) Affine-StableSR, a compact and efficient super-resolution model that leverages pre-trained weights and Normalizing Flow layers to reduce parameter count while maintaining performance. The second part: 1) An automated quality assessment system for agricultural produce using Conditional GANs to address class imbalance, data scarcity and annotation challenges, achieving good accuracy in seed purity testing; 2) An unsupervised geological mapping framework utilizing stacked autoencoders for dimensionality reduction, showing improved feature extraction compared to conventional methods; 3) We proposed a privacy preserving method for autonomous driving datasets using on face detection and image inpainting; 4) Utilizing Stable Diffusion based image inpainting for replacing the detected face and license plate to advancing privacy-preserving techniques and ethical considerations in the field.; and 5) An adapted diffusion model for art restoration that effectively handles multiple types of degradation through unified fine-tuning.
Authors: Yicong Hong, Yiqun Mei, Chongjian Ge, Yiran Xu, Yang Zhou, Sai Bi, Yannick Hold-Geoffroy, Mike Roberts, Matthew Fisher, Eli Shechtman, Kalyan Sunkavalli, Feng Liu, Zhengqi Li, Hao Tan
Abstract: A truly interactive world model requires three key ingredients: real-time long-horizon streaming, consistent spatial memory, and precise user control. However, most existing approaches address only one of these aspects in isolation, as achieving all three simultaneously is highly challenging-for example, long-term memory mechanisms often degrade real-time performance. In this work, we present RELIC, a unified framework that tackles these three challenges altogether. Given a single image and a text description, RELIC enables memory-aware, long-duration exploration of arbitrary scenes in real time. Built upon recent autoregressive video-diffusion distillation techniques, our model represents long-horizon memory using highly compressed historical latent tokens encoded with both relative actions and absolute camera poses within the KV cache. This compact, camera-aware memory structure supports implicit 3D-consistent content retrieval and enforces long-term coherence with minimal computational overhead. In parallel, we fine-tune a bidirectional teacher video model to generate sequences beyond its original 5-second training horizon, and transform it into a causal student generator using a new memory-efficient self-forcing paradigm that enables full-context distillation over long-duration teacher as well as long student self-rollouts. Implemented as a 14B-parameter model and trained on a curated Unreal Engine-rendered dataset, RELIC achieves real-time generation at 16 FPS while demonstrating more accurate action following, more stable long-horizon streaming, and more robust spatial-memory retrieval compared with prior work. These capabilities establish RELIC as a strong foundation for the next generation of interactive world modeling.
Authors: Sen Fang, Yalin Feng, Hongbin Zhong, Yanxin Zhang, Dimitris N. Metaxas
Abstract: Sign Language Production (SLP) is the process of converting the complex input text into a real video. Most previous works focused on the Text2Gloss, Gloss2Pose, Pose2Vid stages, and some concentrated on Prompt2Gloss and Text2Avatar stages. However, this field has made slow progress due to the inaccuracy of text conversion, pose generation, and the rendering of poses into real human videos in these stages, resulting in gradually accumulating errors. Therefore, in this paper, we streamline the traditional redundant structure, simplify and optimize the task objective, and design a new sign language generative model called Stable Signer. It redefines the SLP task as a hierarchical generation end-to-end task that only includes text understanding (Prompt2Gloss, Text2Gloss) and Pose2Vid, and executes text understanding through our proposed new Sign Language Understanding Linker called SLUL, and generates hand gestures through the named SLP-MoE hand gesture rendering expert block to end-to-end generate high-quality and multi-style sign language videos. SLUL is trained using the newly developed Semantic-Aware Gloss Masking Loss (SAGM Loss). Its performance has improved by 48.6% compared to the current SOTA generation methods.
Authors: Siyi Chen, Mikaela Angelina Uy, Chan Hee Song, Faisal Ladhak, Adithyavairavan Murali, Qing Qu, Stan Birchfield, Valts Blukis, Jonathan Tremblay
Abstract: Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong qualitative visual understanding, but struggle with metrically precise spatial reasoning required for embodied applications. The agentic paradigm promises that VLMs can use a wide variety of tools that could augment these capabilities, such as depth estimators, segmentation models, and pose estimators. Yet it remains an open challenge how to realize this vision without solely relying on handcrafted prompting strategies or enforcing fixed, predefined tool pipelines that limit VLMs' ability to discover optimal tool-use patterns. Reinforcement Learning could overcome this gap, but has so far been limited to reasoning with a single visual tool due to the large search space in multi-tool reasoning. We introduce Double Interactive Reinforcement Learning (DIRL), a two-phase training framework where VLMs learn to coordinate multiple tools through interactive exploration and feedback. In the teaching phase, we combine demonstrations from a single tool specialist trained via interactive RL with traces from a frontier model using all tools. In the exploration phase, the model further refines multi-tool coordination through continued RL. Our model, SpaceTools, with tool-augmented spatial reasoning ability, achieves state-of-the-art performance on spatial understanding benchmarks (RoboSpatial-Home, BLINK, BOP-ASK) and demonstrates reliable real-world manipulation using a 7-DOF robot as a tool. DIRL provides substantial improvements over the vanilla SFT (+12% on RoboSpatial) and RL (+16% on RoboSpatial) baselines. Project page: https://spacetools.github.io/.
Authors: Jiazhe Wei, Ken Li, Tianyu Lao, Haofan Wang, Liang Wang, Caifeng Shan, Chenyang Si
Abstract: Graphic design forms the cornerstone of modern visual communication, serving as a vital medium for promoting cultural and commercial events. Recent advances have explored automating this process using Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), yet existing methods often produce geometrically inaccurate layouts and lack the iterative, layer-specific editing required in professional workflows. To address these limitations, we present PosterCopilot, a framework that advances layout reasoning and controllable editing for professional graphic design. Specifically, we introduce a progressive three-stage training strategy that equips LMMs with geometric understanding and aesthetic reasoning for layout design, consisting of Perturbed Supervised Fine-Tuning, Reinforcement Learning for Visual-Reality Alignment, and Reinforcement Learning from Aesthetic Feedback. Furthermore, we develop a complete workflow that couples the trained LMM-based design model with generative models, enabling layer-controllable, iterative editing for precise element refinement while maintaining global visual consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PosterCopilot achieves geometrically accurate and aesthetically superior layouts, offering unprecedented controllability for professional iterative design.
Authors: Qinyu Zhao, Guangting Zheng, Tao Yang, Rui Zhu, Xingjian Leng, Stephen Gould, Liang Zheng
Abstract: Normalizing Flows (NFs) learn invertible mappings between the data and a Gaussian distribution. Prior works usually suffer from two limitations. First, they add random noise to training samples or VAE latents as data augmentation, introducing complex pipelines including extra noising and denoising steps. Second, they use a pretrained and frozen VAE encoder, resulting in suboptimal reconstruction and generation quality. In this paper, we find that the two issues can be solved in a very simple way: just fixing the variance (which would otherwise be predicted by the VAE encoder) to a constant (e.g., 0.5). On the one hand, this method allows the encoder to output a broader distribution of tokens and the decoder to learn to reconstruct clean images from the augmented token distribution, avoiding additional noise or denoising design. On the other hand, fixed variance simplifies the VAE evidence lower bound, making it stable to train an NF with a VAE jointly. On the ImageNet $256 \times 256$ generation task, our model SimFlow obtains a gFID score of 2.15, outperforming the state-of-the-art method STARFlow (gFID 2.40). Moreover, SimFlow can be seamlessly integrated with the end-to-end representation alignment (REPA-E) method and achieves an improved gFID of 1.91, setting a new state of the art among NFs.
Authors: Tengda Han, Sayna Ebrahimi, Dilara Gokay, Li Yang Ku, Maks Ovsjanikov, Iva Babukova, Daniel Zoran, Viorica Patraucean, Joao Carreira, Andrew Zisserman, Dima Damen
Abstract: We introduce the "single-life" learning paradigm, where we train a distinct vision model exclusively on egocentric videos captured by one individual. We leverage the multiple viewpoints naturally captured within a single life to learn a visual encoder in a self-supervised manner. Our experiments demonstrate three key findings. First, models trained independently on different lives develop a highly aligned geometric understanding. We demonstrate this by training visual encoders on distinct datasets each capturing a different life, both indoors and outdoors, as well as introducing a novel cross-attention-based metric to quantify the functional alignment of the internal representations developed by different models. Second, we show that single-life models learn generalizable geometric representations that effectively transfer to downstream tasks, such as depth estimation, in unseen environments. Third, we demonstrate that training on up to 30 hours from one week of the same person's life leads to comparable performance to training on 30 hours of diverse web data, highlighting the strength of single-life representation learning. Overall, our results establish that the shared structure of the world, both leads to consistency in models trained on individual lives, and provides a powerful signal for visual representation learning.
Authors: Zeqiang Lai, Yunfei Zhao, Zibo Zhao, Haolin Liu, Qingxiang Lin, Jingwei Huang, Chunchao Guo, Xiangyu Yue
Abstract: We present LATTICE, a new framework for high-fidelity 3D asset generation that bridges the quality and scalability gap between 3D and 2D generative models. While 2D image synthesis benefits from fixed spatial grids and well-established transformer architectures, 3D generation remains fundamentally more challenging due to the need to predict both spatial structure and detailed geometric surfaces from scratch. These challenges are exacerbated by the computational complexity of existing 3D representations and the lack of structured and scalable 3D asset encoding schemes. To address this, we propose VoxSet, a semi-structured representation that compresses 3D assets into a compact set of latent vectors anchored to a coarse voxel grid, enabling efficient and position-aware generation. VoxSet retains the simplicity and compression advantages of prior VecSet methods while introducing explicit structure into the latent space, allowing positional embeddings to guide generation and enabling strong token-level test-time scaling. Built upon this representation, LATTICE adopts a two-stage pipeline: first generating a sparse voxelized geometry anchor, then producing detailed geometry using a rectified flow transformer. Our method is simple at its core, but supports arbitrary resolution decoding, low-cost training, and flexible inference schemes, achieving state-of-the-art performance on various aspects, and offering a significant step toward scalable, high-quality 3D asset creation.
Authors: Ciro Benito Raggio, Lucia Migliorelli, Nils Skupien, Mathias Krohmer Zabaleta, Oliver Blanck, Francesco Cicone, Giuseppe Lucio Cascini, Paolo Zaffino, Maria Francesca Spadea
Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) holds the potential to advance equality in health by enabling diverse institutions to collaboratively train deep learning (DL) models, even with limited data. However, the significant resource requirements of FL often exclude centres with limited computational infrastructure, further widening existing healthcare disparities. To address this issue, we propose a Green AI-oriented adaptive layer-freezing strategy designed to reduce energy consumption and computational load while maintaining model performance. We tested our approach using different federated architectures for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)-to-Computed Tomography (CT) conversion. The proposed adaptive strategy optimises the federated training by selectively freezing the encoder weights based on the monitored relative difference of the encoder weights from round to round. A patience-based mechanism ensures that freezing only occurs when updates remain consistently minimal. The energy consumption and CO2eq emissions of the federation were tracked using the CodeCarbon library. Compared to equivalent non-frozen counterparts, our approach reduced training time, total energy consumption and CO2eq emissions by up to 23%. At the same time, the MRI-to-CT conversion performance was maintained, with only small variations in the Mean Absolute Error (MAE). Notably, for three out of the five evaluated architectures, no statistically significant differences were observed, while two architectures exhibited statistically significant improvements. Our work aligns with a research paradigm that promotes DL-based frameworks meeting clinical requirements while ensuring climatic, social, and economic sustainability. It lays the groundwork for novel FL evaluation frameworks, advancing privacy, equity and, more broadly, justice in AI-driven healthcare.
Authors: Xiaoshui Huang, Tianlin Zhu, Yifan Zuo, Xue Xia, Zonghan Wu, Jiebin Yan, Dingli Hua, Zongyi Xu, Yuming Fang, Jian Zhang
Abstract: Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is essential for decoding tumor heterogeneity. However, pan-cancer research still faces two key challenges: learning discriminative and efficient single-cell representations, and establishing a comprehensive evaluation benchmark. In this paper, we introduce PanFoMa, a lightweight hybrid neural network that combines the strengths of Transformers and state-space models to achieve a balance between performance and efficiency. PanFoMa consists of a front-end local-context encoder with shared self-attention layers to capture complex, order-independent gene interactions; and a back-end global sequential feature decoder that efficiently integrates global context using a linear-time state-space model. This modular design preserves the expressive power of Transformers while leveraging the scalability of Mamba to enable transcriptome modeling, effectively capturing both local and global regulatory signals. To enable robust evaluation, we also construct a large-scale pan-cancer single-cell benchmark, PanFoMaBench, containing over 3.5 million high-quality cells across 33 cancer subtypes, curated through a rigorous preprocessing pipeline. Experimental results show that PanFoMa outperforms state-of-the-art models on our pan-cancer benchmark (+4.0\%) and across multiple public tasks, including cell type annotation (+7.4\%), batch integration (+4.0\%) and multi-omics integration (+3.1\%). The code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoshui-Huang/PanFoMa.
Authors: Aya Taourirte, Md Sohag Mia
Abstract: The deployment of multi-agent systems in dynamic, adversarial environments like robotic soccer necessitates real-time decision-making, sophisticated cooperation, and scalable algorithms to avoid the curse of dimensionality. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a promising framework, existing methods often struggle with the multi-granularity of tasks (long-term strategy vs. instant actions) and the complexity of large-scale agent interactions. This paper presents a unified Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) framework that addresses these challenges. First, we establish a baseline using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) within a client-server architecture for real-time action scheduling, with PPO demonstrating superior performance (4.32 avg. goals, 82.9% ball control). Second, we introduce a Hierarchical RL (HRL) structure based on the options framework to decompose the problem into a high-level trajectory planning layer (modeled as a Semi-Markov Decision Process) and a low-level action execution layer, improving global strategy (avg. goals increased to 5.26). Finally, to ensure scalability, we integrate mean-field theory into the HRL framework, simplifying many-agent interactions into a single agent vs. the population average. Our mean-field actor-critic method achieves a significant performance boost (5.93 avg. goals, 89.1% ball control, 92.3% passing accuracy) and enhanced training stability. Extensive simulations of 4v4 matches in the Webots environment validate our approach, demonstrating its potential for robust, scalable, and cooperative behavior in complex multi-agent domains.
Authors: Joan Nwatu, Longju Bai, Oana Ignat, Rada Mihalcea
Abstract: Culture shapes the objects people use and for what purposes, yet mainstream Vision-Language (VL) datasets frequently exhibit cultural biases, disproportionately favoring higher-income, Western contexts. This imbalance reduces model generalizability and perpetuates performance disparities, especially impacting lower-income and non-Western communities. To address these disparities, we propose a novel function-centric framework that categorizes objects by the functions they fulfill, across diverse cultural and economic contexts. We implement this framework by creating the Culture Affordance Atlas, a re-annotated and culturally grounded restructuring of the Dollar Street dataset spanning 46 functions and 288 objects publicly available at https://lit.eecs.umich.edu/CultureAffordance-Atlas/index.html. Through extensive empirical analyses using the CLIP model, we demonstrate that function-centric labels substantially reduce socioeconomic performance gaps between high- and low-income groups by a median of 6 pp (statistically significant), improving model effectiveness for lower-income contexts. Furthermore, our analyses reveals numerous culturally essential objects that are frequently overlooked in prominent VL datasets. Our contributions offer a scalable pathway toward building inclusive VL datasets and equitable AI systems.
URLs: https://lit.eecs.umich.edu/CultureAffordance-Atlas/index.html.
Authors: Alex Bocchieri, John Mamish, David Appleyard, Andreas Velten
Abstract: Scintillators are transparent materials that interact with high-energy particles and emit visible light as a result. They are used in state of the art methods of measuring high-energy particles and radiation sources. Most existing methods use fast single-pixel detectors to detect and time scintillation events. Cameras provide spatial resolution but can only capture an average over many events, making it difficult to image the events associated with an individual particle. Emerging single-photon avalanche diode cameras combine speed and spatial resolution to enable capturing images of individual events. This allows us to use machine vision techniques to analyze events, enabling new types of detectors. The main challenge is the very low brightness of the events. Techniques have to work with a very limited number of photons. We propose a kaleidoscopic scintillator to increase light collection in a single-photon camera while preserving the event's spatial information. The kaleidoscopic geometry creates mirror reflections of the event in known locations for a given event location that are captured by the camera. We introduce theory for imaging an event in a kaleidoscopic scintillator and an algorithm to estimate the event's 3D position. We find that the kaleidoscopic scintillator design provides sufficient light collection to perform high-resolution event measurements for advanced radiation imaging techniques using a commercial CMOS single-photon camera. Code and data are available at https://github.com/bocchs/kaleidoscopic_scintillator.
Authors: Tianchen Deng, Yue Pan, Shenghai Yuan, Dong Li, Chen Wang, Mingrui Li, Long Chen, Lihua Xie, Danwei Wang, Jingchuan Wang, Javier Civera, Hesheng Wang, Weidong Chen
Abstract: In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of existing scene representation methods for robotics, covering traditional representations such as point clouds, voxels, signed distance functions (SDF), and scene graphs, as well as more recent neural representations like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), and the emerging Foundation Models. While current SLAM and localization systems predominantly rely on sparse representations like point clouds and voxels, dense scene representations are expected to play a critical role in downstream tasks such as navigation and obstacle avoidance. Moreover, neural representations such as NeRF, 3DGS, and foundation models are well-suited for integrating high-level semantic features and language-based priors, enabling more comprehensive 3D scene understanding and embodied intelligence. In this paper, we categorized the core modules of robotics into five parts (Perception, Mapping, Localization, Navigation, Manipulation). We start by presenting the standard formulation of different scene representation methods and comparing the advantages and disadvantages of scene representation across different modules. This survey is centered around the question: What is the best 3D scene representation for robotics? We then discuss the future development trends of 3D scene representations, with a particular focus on how the 3D Foundation Model could replace current methods as the unified solution for future robotic applications. The remaining challenges in fully realizing this model are also explored. We aim to offer a valuable resource for both newcomers and experienced researchers to explore the future of 3D scene representations and their application in robotics. We have published an open-source project on GitHub and will continue to add new works and technologies to this project.
Authors: Adithya S Kolavi, Vyoman Jain
Abstract: Multimodal document retrieval systems have shown strong progress in aligning visual and textual content for semantic search. However, most existing approaches remain heavily English-centric, limiting their effectiveness in multilingual contexts. In this work, we present M3DR (Multilingual Multimodal Document Retrieval), a framework designed to bridge this gap across languages, enabling applicability across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. M3DR leverages synthetic multilingual document data and generalizes across different vision-language architectures and model sizes, enabling robust cross-lingual and cross-modal alignment. Using contrastive training, our models learn unified representations for text and document images that transfer effectively across languages. We validate this capability on 22 typologically diverse languages, demonstrating consistent performance and adaptability across linguistic and script variations. We further introduce a comprehensive benchmark that captures real-world multilingual scenarios, evaluating models under monolingual, multilingual, and mixed-language settings. M3DR generalizes across both single dense vector and ColBERT-style token-level multi-vector retrieval paradigms. Our models, NetraEmbed and ColNetraEmbed achieve state-of-the-art performance with ~150% relative improvements on cross-lingual retrieval.
Authors: Gihyeon Lee, Jungwoo Lee, Juwon Kim, Young-Sik Shin, Younggun Cho
Abstract: Robots are often required to localize in environments with unknown object classes and semantic ambiguity. However, when performing global localization using semantic objects, high semantic ambiguity intensifies object misclassification and increases the likelihood of incorrect associations, which in turn can cause significant errors in the estimated pose. Thus, in this letter, we propose a multi-label likelihood-based semantic graph matching framework for object-level global localization. The key idea is to exploit multi-label graph representations, rather than single-label alternatives, to capture and leverage the inherent semantic context of object observations. Based on these representations, our approach enhances semantic correspondence across graphs by combining the likelihood of each node with the maximum likelihood of its neighbors via context-aware likelihood propagation. For rigorous validation, data association and pose estimation performance are evaluated under both closed-set and open-set detection configurations. In addition, we demonstrate the scalability of our approach to large-vocabulary object categories in both real-world indoor scenes and synthetic environments.
Authors: Yinzhou Tang, Yu Shang, Yinuo Chen, Bingwen Wei, Xin Zhang, Shu'ang Yu, Liangzhi Shi, Chao Yu, Chen Gao, Wei Wu, Yong Li
Abstract: Achieving generalizable embodied policies remains a key challenge. Traditional policy learning paradigms, including both Imitation Learning (IL) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), struggle to cultivate generalizability across diverse scenarios. While IL policies often overfit to specific expert trajectories, RL suffers from the inherent lack of a unified and general reward signal necessary for effective multi-scene generalization. We posit that the world model is uniquely capable of serving as a universal environment proxy to address this limitation. However, current world models primarily focus on their ability to predict observations and still rely on task-specific, handcrafted reward functions, thereby failing to provide a truly general training environment. Toward this problem, we propose RoboScape-R, a framework leveraging the world model to serve as a versatile, general-purpose proxy for the embodied environment within the RL paradigm. We introduce a novel world model-based general reward mechanism that generates ''endogenous'' rewards derived from the model's intrinsic understanding of real-world state transition dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RoboScape-R effectively addresses the limitations of traditional RL methods by providing an efficient and general training environment that substantially enhances the generalization capability of embodied policies. Our approach offers critical insights into utilizing the world model as an online training strategy and achieves an average 37.5% performance improvement over baselines under out-of-domain scenarios.
Authors: Salim Khazem, Houssam Kanso
Abstract: Accurate electricity consumption forecasting is essential for demand management and smart grid operations. This paper introduces a unified deep learning framework that integrates cyclical temporal encoding with hybrid LSTM-CNN architectures to enhance multistep energy forecasting. We systematically transform calendar-based attributes using sine cosine encodings to preserve periodic structure and evaluate their predictive relevance through correlation analysis. To exploit both long-term seasonal effects and short-term local patterns, we employ an ensemble model composed of an LSTM, a CNN, and a meta-learner of MLP regressors specialized for each forecast horizon. Using a one year national consumption dataset, we conduct an extensive experimental study including ablation analyses with and without cyclical encodings and calendar features and comparisons with established baselines from the literature. Results demonstrate consistent improvements across all seven forecast horizons, with our hybrid model achieving lower RMSE and MAE than individual architectures and prior methods. These findings confirm the benefit of combining cyclical temporal representations with complementary deep learning structures. To our knowledge, this is the first work to jointly evaluate temporal encodings, calendar-based features, and hybrid ensemble architectures within a unified short-term energy forecasting framework.
Authors: Evan Bell, Shijun Liang, Ismail Alkhouri, Saiprasad Ravishankar
Abstract: Deep Image Prior (DIP) has recently emerged as a promising one-shot neural-network based image reconstruction method. However, DIP has seen limited application to 3D image reconstruction problems. In this work, we introduce Tada-DIP, a highly effective and fully 3D DIP method for solving 3D inverse problems. By combining input-adaptation and denoising regularization, Tada-DIP produces high-quality 3D reconstructions while avoiding the overfitting phenomenon that is common in DIP. Experiments on sparse-view X-ray computed tomography reconstruction validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, demonstrating that Tada-DIP produces much better reconstructions than training-data-free baselines and achieves reconstruction performance on par with a supervised network trained using a large dataset with fully-sampled volumes.
Authors: Levi Burner, Guido de Croon, Yiannis Aloimonos
Abstract: Animals with foveated vision, including humans, experience microsaccades, small, rapid eye movements that they are not aware of. Inspired by this phenomenon, we develop a method for "Artificial Microsaccade Compensation". It can stabilize video captured by a tailless ornithopter that has resisted attempts to use camera-based sensing because it shakes at 12-20 Hz. Our approach minimizes changes in image intensity by optimizing over 3D rotation represented in SO(3). This results in a stabilized video, computed in real time, suitable for human viewing, and free from distortion. When adapted to hold a fixed viewing orientation, up to occasional saccades, it can dramatically reduce inter-frame motion while also benefiting from an efficient recursive update. When compared to Adobe Premier Pro's warp stabilizer, which is widely regarded as the best commercial video stabilization software available, our method achieves higher quality results while also running in real time.
Authors: Andreas Koukounas, Georgios Mastrapas, Florian H\"onicke, Sedigheh Eslami, Guillaume Roncari, Scott Martens, Han Xiao
Abstract: We present Jina-VLM, a 2.4B parameter vision-language model that achieves state-of-the-art multilingual visual question answering among open 2B-scale VLMs. The model couples a SigLIP2 vision encoder with a Qwen3 language backbone through an attention-pooling connector that enables token-efficient processing of arbitrary-resolution images. Across standard VQA benchmarks and multilingual evaluations, Jina-VLM outperforms comparable models while preserving competitive text-only performance.
Authors: Alexander Mai, Trevor Hedstrom, George Kopanas, Janne Kontkanen, Falko Kuester, Jonathan T. Barron
Abstract: We introduce radiance meshes, a technique for representing radiance fields with constant density tetrahedral cells produced with a Delaunay tetrahedralization. Unlike a Voronoi diagram, a Delaunay tetrahedralization yields simple triangles that are natively supported by existing hardware. As such, our model is able to perform exact and fast volume rendering using both rasterization and ray-tracing. We introduce a new rasterization method that achieves faster rendering speeds than all prior radiance field representations (assuming an equivalent number of primitives and resolution) across a variety of platforms. Optimizing the positions of Delaunay vertices introduces topological discontinuities (edge flips). To solve this, we use a Zip-NeRF-style backbone which allows us to express a smoothly varying field even when the topology changes. Our rendering method exactly evaluates the volume rendering equation and enables high quality, real-time view synthesis on standard consumer hardware. Our tetrahedral meshes also lend themselves to a variety of exciting applications including fisheye lens distortion, physics-based simulation, editing, and mesh extraction.
Authors: Weijie Wang, Bo Li, Nicu Sebe, Bruno Lepri
Abstract: Due to the subjective crowdsourcing annotations and the inherent inter-class similarity of facial expressions, the real-world Facial Expression Recognition (FER) datasets usually exhibit ambiguous annotation. To simplify the learning paradigm, most previous methods convert ambiguous annotation results into precise one-hot annotations and train FER models in an end-to-end supervised manner. In this paper, we rethink the existing training paradigm and propose that it is better to use weakly supervised strategies to train FER models with original ambiguous annotation.
Authors: Jiarui Fang, Jinzhe Pan, Aoyu Li, Xibo Sun, Jiannan Wang
Abstract: This paper presents PipeFusion, an innovative parallel methodology to tackle the high latency issues associated with generating high-resolution images using diffusion transformers (DiTs) models. PipeFusion partitions images into patches and the model layers across multiple GPUs. It employs a patch-level pipeline parallel strategy to orchestrate communication and computation efficiently. By capitalizing on the high similarity between inputs from successive diffusion steps, PipeFusion reuses one-step stale feature maps to provide context for the current pipeline step. This approach notably reduces communication costs compared to existing DiTs inference parallelism, including tensor parallel, sequence parallel and DistriFusion. PipeFusion enhances memory efficiency through parameter distribution across devices, ideal for large DiTs like Flux.1. Experimental results demonstrate that PipeFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance on 8$\times$L40 PCIe GPUs for Pixart, Stable-Diffusion 3, and Flux.1 models. Our source code is available at https://github.com/xdit-project/xDiT.
Authors: Jiwoo Hong, Sayak Paul, Noah Lee, Kashif Rasul, James Thorne, Jongheon Jeong
Abstract: Modern preference alignment methods, such as DPO, rely on divergence regularization to a reference model for training stability-but this creates a fundamental problem we call "reference mismatch." In this paper, we investigate the negative impacts of reference mismatch in aligning text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models, showing that larger reference mismatch hinders effective adaptation given the same amount of data, e.g., as when learning new artistic styles, or personalizing to specific objects. We demonstrate this phenomenon across text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models and introduce margin-aware preference optimization (MaPO), a reference-agnostic approach that breaks free from this constraint. By directly optimizing the likelihood margin between preferred and dispreferred outputs under the Bradley-Terry model without anchoring to a reference, MaPO transforms diverse T2I tasks into unified pairwise preference optimization. We validate MaPO's versatility across five challenging domains: (1) safe generation, (2) style adaptation, (3) cultural representation, (4) personalization, and (5) general preference alignment. Our results reveal that MaPO's advantage grows dramatically with reference mismatch severity, outperforming both DPO and specialized methods like DreamBooth while reducing training time by 15%. MaPO thus emerges as a versatile and memory-efficient method for generic T2I adaptation tasks.
Authors: Ho Man Kwan, Ge Gao, Fan Zhang, Andrew Gower, David Bull
Abstract: Recent advances in implicit neural representation (INR)-based video coding have demonstrated its potential to compete with both conventional and other learning-based approaches. With INR methods, a neural network is trained to overfit a video sequence, with its parameters compressed to obtain a compact representation of the video content. However, although promising results have been achieved, the best INR-based methods are still out-performed by the latest standard codecs, such as VVC VTM, partially due to the simple model compression techniques employed. In this paper, rather than focusing on representation architectures as in many existing works, we propose a novel INR-based video compression framework, Neural Video Representation Compression (NVRC), targeting compression of the representation. Based on the novel entropy coding and quantization models proposed, NVRC, for the first time, is able to optimize an INR-based video codec in a fully end-to-end manner. To further minimize the additional bitrate overhead introduced by the entropy models, we have also proposed a new model compression framework for coding all the network, quantization and entropy model parameters hierarchically. Our experiments show that NVRC outperforms many conventional and learning-based benchmark codecs, with a 24% average coding gain over VVC VTM (Random Access) on the UVG dataset, measured in PSNR. As far as we are aware, this is the first time an INR-based video codec achieving such performance. The implementation of NVRC will be released.
Authors: Xiaorui Sun, Jun Liu, Heng Tao Shen, Xiaofeng Zhu, Ping Hu
Abstract: The Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a foundational model for image segmentation tasks, known for its strong generalization across diverse applications. However, its impressive performance comes with significant computational and resource demands, making it challenging to deploy in resource-limited environments such as edge devices. To address this, a variety of SAM variants have been proposed to enhance efficiency while keeping accuracy. This survey provides the first comprehensive review of these efficient SAM variants. We begin by exploring the motivations driving this research. We then present core techniques used in SAM and model acceleration. This is followed by a detailed exploration of SAM acceleration strategies, categorized by approach, and a discussion of several future research directions. Finally, we offer a unified and extensive evaluation of these methods across various hardware, assessing their efficiency and accuracy on representative benchmarks, and providing a clear comparison of their overall performance.
Authors: Hengwei Bian, Lingdong Kong, Haozhe Xie, Liang Pan, Yu Qiao, Ziwei Liu
Abstract: Urban scene generation has been developing rapidly recently. However, existing methods primarily focus on generating static and single-frame scenes, overlooking the inherently dynamic nature of real-world driving environments. In this work, we introduce DynamicCity, a novel 4D occupancy generation framework capable of generating large-scale, high-quality dynamic 4D scenes with semantics. DynamicCity mainly consists of two key models. 1) A VAE model for learning HexPlane as the compact 4D representation. Instead of using naive averaging operations, DynamicCity employs a novel Projection Module to effectively compress 4D features into six 2D feature maps for HexPlane construction, which significantly enhances HexPlane fitting quality (up to 12.56 mIoU gain). Furthermore, we utilize an Expansion & Squeeze Strategy to reconstruct 3D feature volumes in parallel, which improves both network training efficiency and reconstruction accuracy than naively querying each 3D point (up to 7.05 mIoU gain, 2.06x training speedup, and 70.84% memory reduction). 2) A DiT-based diffusion model for HexPlane generation. To make HexPlane feasible for DiT generation, a Padded Rollout Operation is proposed to reorganize all six feature planes of the HexPlane as a squared 2D feature map. In particular, various conditions could be introduced in the diffusion or sampling process, supporting versatile 4D generation applications, such as trajectory- and command-driven generation, inpainting, and layout-conditioned generation. Extensive experiments on the CarlaSC and Waymo datasets demonstrate that DynamicCity significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art 4D occupancy generation methods across multiple metrics. The code and models have been released to facilitate future research.
Authors: Xintian Sun, Benji Peng, Charles Zhang, Fei Jin, Qian Niu, Junyu Liu, Keyu Chen, Ming Li, Pohsun Feng, Ziqian Bi, Ming Liu, Xinyuan Song, Yichao Zhang
Abstract: Remote sensing has evolved from simple image acquisition to complex systems capable of integrating and processing visual and textual data. This review examines the development and application of multi-modal language models (MLLMs) in remote sensing, focusing on their ability to interpret and describe satellite imagery using natural language. We cover the technical underpinnings of MLLMs, including dual-encoder architectures, Transformer models, self-supervised and contrastive learning, and cross-modal integration. The unique challenges of remote sensing data--varying spatial resolutions, spectral richness, and temporal changes--are analyzed for their impact on MLLM performance. Key applications such as scene description, object detection, change detection, text-to-image retrieval, image-to-text generation, and visual question answering are discussed to demonstrate their relevance in environmental monitoring, urban planning, and disaster response. We review significant datasets and resources supporting the training and evaluation of these models. Challenges related to computational demands, scalability, data quality, and domain adaptation are highlighted. We conclude by proposing future research directions and technological advancements to further enhance MLLM utility in remote sensing.
Authors: Hanxue Zhang, Zetong Yang, Yanan Sun, Li Chen, Fei Xia, Fatma G\"uney, Hongyang Li
Abstract: This paper introduces Test-time Correction (TTC), an online 3D detection system designed to rectify test-time errors using various auxiliary feedback, aiming to enhance the safety of deployed autonomous driving systems. Unlike conventional offline 3D detectors that remain fixed during inference, TTC enables immediate online error correction without retraining, allowing autonomous vehicles to adapt to new scenarios and reduce deployment risks. To achieve this, we equip existing 3D detectors with an Online Adapter (OA) module -- a prompt-driven query generator for real-time correction. At the core of OA module are visual prompts: image-based descriptions of objects of interest derived from auxiliary feedback such as mismatches with 2D detections, road descriptions, or user clicks. These visual prompts, collected from risky objects during inference, are maintained in a visual prompt buffer to enable continuous correction in future frames. By leveraging this mechanism, TTC consistently detects risky objects, achieving reliable, adaptive, and versatile driving autonomy. Extensive experiments show that TTC significantly improves instant error rectification over frozen 3D detectors, even under limited labels, zero-shot settings, and adverse conditions. We hope this work inspires future research on post-deployment online rectification systems for autonomous driving.
Authors: Xiao Cai, Sitong Su, Jingkuan Song, Pengpeng Zeng, Ji Zhang, Qinhong Du, Mengqi Li, Heng Tao Shen, Lianli Gao
Abstract: Text-to-3D (T23D) generation has emerged as a crucial visual generation task, aiming at synthesizing 3D content from textual descriptions. Studies of this task are currently shifting from per-scene T23D, which requires optimization of the model for every content generated, to General T23D (GT23D), which requires only one pre-trained model to generate different content without re-optimization, for more generalized and efficient 3D generation. Despite notable advancements, GT23D is severely bottlenecked by two interconnected challenges: the lack of high-quality, large-scale training data and the prevalence of evaluation metrics that overlook intrinsic 3D properties. Existing datasets often suffer from incomplete annotations, noisy organization, and inconsistent quality, while current evaluations rely heavily on 2D image-text similarity or scoring, failing to thoroughly assess 3D geometric integrity and semantic relevance. To address these fundamental gaps, we introduce GT23D-Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for GT23D training and evaluation. We first construct a high-quality dataset of 400K 3D assets, featuring diverse visual annotations (70M+ visual samples) and multi-granularity hierarchical captions (1M+ descriptions) to foster robust semantic learning. Second, we propose a comprehensive evaluation suite with 10 metrics assessing both text-3D alignment and 3D visual quality at multiple levels. Crucially, we demonstrate through rigorous experiments that our proposed metrics exhibit significantly higher correlation with human judgment compared to existing methods. Our in-depth analysis of eight leading GT23D models using this benchmark provides the community with critical insights into current model capabilities and their shared failure modes. GT23D-Bench will be publicly available to facilitate rigorous and reproducible research.
Authors: Lingdong Kong, Xiang Xu, Youquan Liu, Jun Cen, Runnan Chen, Wenwei Zhang, Liang Pan, Kai Chen, Ziwei Liu
Abstract: Recent advancements in vision foundation models (VFMs) have revolutionized visual perception in 2D, yet their potential for 3D scene understanding, particularly in autonomous driving applications, remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce LargeAD, a versatile and scalable framework designed for large-scale 3D pretraining across diverse real-world driving datasets. Our framework leverages VFMs to extract semantically rich superpixels from 2D images, which are aligned with LiDAR point clouds to generate high-quality contrastive samples. This alignment facilitates cross-modal representation learning, enhancing the semantic consistency between 2D and 3D data. We introduce several key innovations: (i) VFM-driven superpixel generation for detailed semantic representation, (ii) a VFM-assisted contrastive learning strategy to align multimodal features, (iii) superpoint temporal consistency to maintain stable representations across time, and (iv) multi-source data pretraining to generalize across various LiDAR configurations. Our approach achieves substantial gains over state-of-the-art methods in linear probing and fine-tuning for LiDAR-based segmentation and object detection. Extensive experiments on 11 large-scale multi-sensor datasets highlight our superior performance, demonstrating adaptability, efficiency, and robustness in real-world autonomous driving scenarios.
Authors: Wentian Xu, Ziyun Liang, Harry Anthony, Yasin Ibrahim, Felix Cohen, Guang Yang, Konstantinos Kamnitsas
Abstract: Interactive segmentation uses real-time user inputs, such as mouse clicks, to iteratively refine model predictions. Although not originally designed to address distribution shifts, this paradigm naturally lends itself to such challenges. In medical imaging, where distribution shifts are common, interactive methods can use user inputs to guide models towards improved predictions. Moreover, once a model is deployed, user corrections can be used to adapt the network parameters to the new data distribution, mitigating distribution shift. Based on these insights, we aim to develop a practical, effective method for improving the adaptive capabilities of interactive segmentation models to new data distributions in medical imaging. Firstly, we found that strengthening the model's responsiveness to clicks is important for the initial training process. Moreover, we show that by treating the post-interaction user-refined model output as pseudo-ground-truth, we can design a lean, practical online adaptation method that enables a model to learn effectively across sequential test images. The framework includes two components: (i) a Post-Interaction adaptation process, updating the model after the user has completed interactive refinement of an image, and (ii) a Mid-Interaction adaptation process, updating incrementally after each click. Both processes include a Click-Centered Gaussian loss that strengthens the model's reaction to clicks and enhances focus on user-guided, clinically relevant regions. Experiments on 5 fundus and 4 brain-MRI databases show that our approach consistently outperforms existing methods under diverse distribution shifts, including unseen imaging modalities and pathologies. Code and pretrained models will be released upon publication.
Authors: Konstantinos D. Polyzos, Athanasios Bacharis, Saketh Madhuvarasu, Nikos Papanikolopoulos, Tara Javidi
Abstract: Gaussian splatting (GS) along with its extensions and variants provides outstanding performance in real-time scene rendering while meeting reduced storage demands and computational efficiency. While the selection of 2D images capturing the scene of interest is crucial for the proper initialization and training of GS, hence markedly affecting the rendering performance, prior works rely on passively and typically densely selected 2D images. In contrast, this paper proposes `ActiveInitSplat', a novel framework for active selection of training images for proper initialization and training of GS. ActiveInitSplat relies on density and occupancy criteria of the resultant 3D scene representation from the selected 2D images, to ensure that the latter are captured from diverse viewpoints leading to better scene coverage and that the initialized Gaussian functions are well aligned with the actual 3D structure. Numerical tests on well-known simulated and real environments demonstrate the merits of ActiveInitSplat resulting in significant GS rendering performance improvement over passive GS baselines in both dense- and sparse-view settings, in the widely adopted LPIPS, SSIM, and PSNR metrics.
Authors: Andrei Chubarau, Yinan Wang, James J. Clark
Abstract: We introduce Neural Radiance and Gaze Fields (NeRGs), a novel approach for representing visual attention in complex environments. Much like how Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) perform novel view synthesis, NeRGs reconstruct gaze patterns from arbitrary viewpoints, implicitly mapping visual attention to 3D surfaces. We achieve this by augmenting a standard NeRF with an additional network that models local egocentric gaze probability density, conditioned on scene geometry and observer position. The output of a NeRG is a rendered view of the scene alongside a pixel-wise salience map representing the conditional probability that a given observer fixates on visible surfaces. Unlike prior methods, our system is lightweight and enables visualization of gaze fields at interactive framerates. Moreover, NeRGs allow the observer perspective to be decoupled from the rendering camera and correctly account for gaze occlusion due to intervening geometry. We demonstrate the effectiveness of NeRGs using head pose from skeleton tracking as a proxy for gaze, employing our proposed gaze probes to aggregate noisy rays into robust probability density targets for supervision.
Authors: Kyle Sargent, Kyle Hsu, Justin Johnson, Li Fei-Fei, Jiajun Wu
Abstract: Since the advent of popular visual generation frameworks like VQGAN and latent diffusion models, state-of-the-art image generation systems have generally been two-stage systems that first tokenize or compress visual data into a lower-dimensional latent space before learning a generative model. Tokenizer training typically follows a standard recipe in which images are compressed and reconstructed subject to a combination of MSE, perceptual, and adversarial losses. Diffusion autoencoders have been proposed in prior work as a way to learn end-to-end perceptually-oriented image compression, but have not yet shown state-of-the-art performance on the competitive task of ImageNet-1K reconstruction. We propose FlowMo, a transformer-based diffusion autoencoder that achieves a new state-of-the-art for image tokenization at multiple compression rates without using convolutions, adversarial losses, spatially-aligned two-dimensional latent codes, or distilling from other tokenizers. Our key insight is that FlowMo training should be broken into a mode-matching pre-training stage and a mode-seeking post-training stage. In addition, we conduct extensive analyses and explore the training of generative models atop the FlowMo tokenizer. Our code and models will be available at http://kylesargent.github.io/flowmo .
Authors: Thomas Monninger, Md Zafar Anwar, Stanislaw Antol, Steffen Staab, Sihao Ding
Abstract: Autonomous driving requires understanding infrastructure elements, such as lanes and crosswalks. To navigate safely, this understanding must be derived from sensor data in real-time and needs to be represented in vectorized form. Learned Bird's-Eye View (BEV) encoders are commonly used to combine a set of camera images from multiple views into one joint latent BEV grid. Traditionally, from this latent space, an intermediate raster map is predicted, providing dense spatial supervision but requiring post-processing into the desired vectorized form. More recent models directly derive infrastructure elements as polylines using vectorized map decoders, providing instance-level information. Our approach, Augmentation Map Network (AugMapNet), proposes latent BEV feature grid augmentation, a novel technique that significantly enhances the latent BEV representation. AugMapNet combines vector decoding and dense spatial supervision more effectively than existing architectures while remaining easy to integrate compared to other hybrid approaches. It additionally benefits from extra processing on its latent BEV features. Experiments on nuScenes and Argoverse2 datasets demonstrate significant improvements on vectorized map prediction of up to 13.3% over the StreamMapNet baseline on 60 m range and greater improvements on larger ranges. We confirm transferability by applying our method to another baseline, SQD-MapNet, and find similar improvements. A detailed analysis of the latent BEV grid confirms a more structured latent space of AugMapNet and shows the value of our novel concept beyond pure performance improvement. The code can be found at https://github.com/tmonnin/augmapnet
Authors: Zhongnan Cai, Yingying Wang, Hui Zheng, Panwang Pan, ZiXu Lin, Ge Meng, Chenxin Li, Chunming He, Jiaxin Xie, Yunlong Lin, Junbin Lu, Yue Huang, Xinghao Ding
Abstract: Recently, deep learning-based pan-sharpening algorithms have achieved notable advancements over traditional methods. However, deep learning-based methods incur substantial computational overhead during inference, especially with large images. This excessive computational demand limits the applicability of these methods in real-world scenarios, particularly in the absence of dedicated computing devices such as GPUs and TPUs. To address these challenges, we propose Pan-LUT, a novel learnable look-up table (LUT) framework for pan-sharpening that strikes a balance between performance and computational efficiency for large remote sensing images. Our method makes it possible to process 15K*15K remote sensing images on a 24GB GPU. To finely control the spectral transformation, we devise the PAN-guided look-up table (PGLUT) for channel-wise spectral mapping. To effectively capture fine-grained spatial details, we introduce the spatial details look-up table (SDLUT). Furthermore, to adaptively aggregate channel information for generating high-resolution multispectral images, we design an adaptive output look-up table (AOLUT). Our model contains fewer than 700K parameters and processes a 9K*9K image in under 1 ms using one RTX 2080 Ti GPU, demonstrating significantly faster performance compared to other methods. Experiments reveal that Pan-LUT efficiently processes large remote sensing images in a lightweight manner, bridging the gap to real-world applications. Furthermore, our model surpasses SOTA methods in full-resolution scenes under real-world conditions, highlighting its effectiveness and efficiency.
Authors: Minh-Quan Viet Bui, Jongmin Park, Juan Luis Gonzalez Bello, Jaeho Moon, Jihyong Oh, Munchurl Kim
Abstract: We present MoBGS, a novel motion deblurring 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) framework capable of reconstructing sharp and high-quality novel spatio-temporal views from blurry monocular videos in an end-to-end manner. Existing dynamic novel view synthesis (NVS) methods are highly sensitive to motion blur in casually captured videos, resulting in significant degradation of rendering quality. While recent approaches address motion-blurred inputs for NVS, they primarily focus on static scene reconstruction and lack dedicated motion modeling for dynamic objects. To overcome these limitations, our MoBGS introduces a novel Blur-adaptive Latent Camera Estimation (BLCE) method using a proposed Blur-adaptive Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solver for effective latent camera trajectory estimation, improving global camera motion deblurring. In addition, we propose a Latent Camera-induced Exposure Estimation (LCEE) method to ensure consistent deblurring of both a global camera and local object motions. Extensive experiments on the Stereo Blur dataset and real-world blurry videos show that our MoBGS significantly outperforms the very recent methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance for dynamic NVS under motion blur.
Authors: Zhen Sun, Ziyi Zhang, Zeren Luo, Zhiyuan Zhong, Zeyang Sha, Tianshuo Cong, Zheng Li, Shiwen Cui, Weiqiang Wang, Jiaheng Wei, Xinlei He, Qi Li, Qian Wang
Abstract: Fine-grained detection and localization of localized image edits is crucial for assessing content authenticity, especially as modern diffusion models and image editors can produce highly realistic manipulations. However, this problem faces three key challenges: (1) most AIGC detectors produce only a global real-or-fake label without indicating where edits occur; (2) traditional computer vision methods for edit localization typically rely on costly pixel-level annotations; and (3) there is no large-scale, modern benchmark specifically targeting edited-image detection. To address these gaps, we develop an automated data-generation pipeline and construct FragFake, a large-scale benchmark of AI-edited images spanning multiple source datasets, diverse editing models, and several common edit types. Building on FragFake, we are the first to systematically study vision language models (VLMs) for edited-image classification and edited-region localization. Our experiments show that pretrained VLMs, including GPT4o, perform poorly on this task, whereas fine-tuned models such as Qwen2.5-VL achieve high accuracy and substantially higher object precision across all settings. We further explore GRPO-based RLVR training, which yields modest metric gains while improving the interpretability of model outputs. Ablation and transfer analyses reveal how data balancing, training size, LoRA rank, and training domain affect performance, and highlight both the potential and the limitations of cross-editor and cross-dataset generalization. We anticipate that this work will establish a solid foundation to facilitate and inspire subsequent research endeavors in the domain of multimodal content authenticity.
Authors: Chuming Shen, Wei Wei, Xiaoye Qu, Yu Cheng
Abstract: DeepSeek-R1 has demonstrated powerful reasoning capabilities in the text domain through stable reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, in the multimodal domain, works have begun to directly apply RL to generate R1-like free-form reasoning for Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks. However, multimodal tasks share an intrinsically different nature from textual tasks, which heavily rely on the understanding of the input image to solve the problem. Therefore, such free-form reasoning faces two critical limitations in the VQA task: (1) Extended reasoning chains diffuse visual focus away from task-critical regions, degrading answer accuracy. (2) Unverifiable intermediate steps amplify policy-gradient variance and computational costs overhead. To address these issues, in this paper, we introduce SATORI ($\textbf{S}patially$ $\textbf{A}nchored$ $\textbf{T}ask$ $\textbf{O}ptimization$ with $\textbf{R}e\textbf{I}nforcement$ Learning), which decomposes VQA into three verifiable stages, including global image captioning, region localization, and answer prediction, each supplying explicit reward signals. Furthermore, we also introduce VQA-Verify, a 12k dataset annotated with answer-aligned captions and bounding-boxes to facilitate training. Experiments demonstrate consistent performance improvements across seven VQA benchmarks, achieving up to $15.7\%$ improvement in accuracy in accuracy compared to the R1-like baseline. Our analysis of the attention map confirms enhanced focus on critical regions, which brings improvements in accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/justairr/SATORI-R1.
Authors: Kaiqing Lin, Zhiyuan Yan, Ke-Yue Zhang, Li Hao, Yue Zhou, Yuzhen Lin, Weixiang Li, Taiping Yao, Shouhong Ding, Bin Li
Abstract: Securing personal identity against deepfake attacks is increasingly critical in the digital age, especially for celebrities and political figures whose faces are easily accessible and frequently targeted. Most existing deepfake detection methods focus on general-purpose scenarios and often ignore the valuable prior knowledge of known facial identities, e.g., "VIP individuals" whose authentic facial data are already available. In this paper, we propose \textbf{VIPGuard}, a unified multimodal framework designed to capture fine-grained and comprehensive facial representations of a given identity, compare them against potentially fake or similar-looking faces, and reason over these comparisons to make accurate and explainable predictions. Specifically, our framework consists of three main stages. First, fine-tune a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to learn detailed and structural facial attributes. Second, we perform identity-level discriminative learning to enable the model to distinguish subtle differences between highly similar faces, including real and fake variations. Finally, we introduce user-specific customization, where we model the unique characteristics of the target face identity and perform semantic reasoning via MLLM to enable personalized and explainable deepfake detection. Our framework shows clear advantages over previous detection works, where traditional detectors mainly rely on low-level visual cues and provide no human-understandable explanations, while other MLLM-based models often lack a detailed understanding of specific face identities. To facilitate the evaluation of our method, we built a comprehensive identity-aware benchmark called \textbf{VIPBench} for personalized deepfake detection, involving the latest 7 face-swapping and 7 entire face synthesis techniques for generation. The code is available at https://github.com/KQL11/VIPGuard .
Authors: Wei Chow, Yuan Gao, Linfeng Li, Xian Wang, Qi Xu, Hang Song, Lingdong Kong, Ran Zhou, Yi Zeng, Yidong Cai, Botian Jiang, Shilin Xu, Jiajun Zhang, Minghui Qiu, Xiangtai Li, Tianshu Yang, Siliang Tang, Juncheng Li
Abstract: Semantic retrieval is crucial for modern applications yet remains underexplored in current research. Existing datasets are limited to single languages, single images, or singular retrieval conditions, often failing to fully exploit the expressive capacity of visual information as evidenced by maintained performance when images are replaced with captions. However, practical retrieval scenarios frequently involve interleaved multi-condition queries with multiple images. Hence, this paper introduces MERIT, the first multilingual dataset for interleaved multi-condition semantic retrieval, comprising 320,000 queries with 135,000 products in 5 languages, covering 7 distinct product categories. Extensive experiments on MERIT identify existing models's limitation: focusing solely on global semantic information while neglecting specific conditional elements in queries. Consequently, we propose Coral, a novel fine-tuning framework that adapts pre-trained MLLMs by integrating embedding reconstruction to preserve fine-grained conditional elements and contrastive learning to extract comprehensive global semantics. Experiments demonstrate that Coral achieves a 45.9% performance improvement over conventional approaches on MERIT, with strong generalization capabilities validated across 8 established retrieval benchmarks. Collectively, our contributions - a novel dataset, identification of critical limitations in existing approaches, and an innovative fine-tuning framework - establish a foundation for future research in interleaved multi-condition semantic retrieval.
Authors: Mingqi Jiang, Chanho Kim, Chen Ziwen, Li Fuxin
Abstract: Traditional SLAM algorithms excel at camera tracking, but typically produce incomplete and low-resolution maps that are not tightly integrated with semantics prediction. Recent work integrates Gaussian Splatting (GS) into SLAM to enable dense, photorealistic 3D mapping, yet existing GS-based SLAM methods require per-scene optimization that is slow and consumes an excessive number of Gaussians. We present GS4, the first generalizable GS-based semantic SLAM system. Compared with prior approaches, GS4 runs 10x faster, uses 10x fewer Gaussians, and achieves state-of-the-art performance across color, depth, semantic mapping and camera tracking. From an RGB-D video stream, GS4 incrementally builds and updates a set of 3D Gaussians using a feed-forward network. First, the Gaussian Prediction Model estimates a sparse set of Gaussian parameters from input frame, which integrates both color and semantic prediction with the same backbone. Then, the Gaussian Refinement Network merges new Gaussians with the existing set while avoiding redundancy. Finally, when significant pose changes are detected, we perform only 1-5 iterations of joint Gaussian-pose optimization to correct drift, remove floaters, and further improve tracking accuracy. Experiments on the real-world ScanNet and ScanNet++ benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art semantic SLAM performance, with strong generalization capability shown through zero-shot transfer to the NYUv2 and TUM RGB-D datasets.
Authors: Tuomas Oikarinen, Ge Yan, Akshay Kulkarni, Tsui-Wei Weng
Abstract: Interpreting individual neurons or directions in activation space is an important topic in mechanistic interpretability. Numerous automated interpretability methods have been proposed to generate such explanations, but it remains unclear how reliable these explanations are, and which methods produce the most accurate descriptions. While crowd-sourced evaluations are commonly used, existing pipelines are noisy, costly, and typically assess only the highest-activating inputs, leading to unreliable results. In this paper, we introduce two techniques to enable cost-effective and accurate crowdsourced evaluation of automated interpretability methods beyond top activating inputs. First, we propose Model-Guided Importance Sampling (MG-IS) to select the most informative inputs to show human raters. In our experiments, we show this reduces the number of inputs needed to reach the same evaluation accuracy by ~13x. Second, we address label noise in crowd-sourced ratings through Bayesian Rating Aggregation (BRAgg), which allows us to reduce the number of ratings per input required to overcome noise by ~3x. Together, these techniques reduce the evaluation cost by ~40x, making large-scale evaluation feasible. Finally, we use our methods to conduct a large scale crowd-sourced study comparing recent automated interpretability methods for vision networks.
Authors: Mengjiao Ma, Qi Ma, Yue Li, Jiahuan Cheng, Runyi Yang, Bin Ren, Nikola Popovic, Mingqiang Wei, Nicu Sebe, Luc Van Gool, Theo Gevers, Martin R. Oswald, Danda Pani Paudel
Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) serves as a highly performant and efficient encoding of scene geometry, appearance, and semantics. Moreover, grounding language in 3D scenes has proven to be an effective strategy for 3D scene understanding. Current Language Gaussian Splatting line of work fall into three main groups: (i) per-scene optimization-based, (ii) per-scene optimization-free, and (iii) generalizable approach. However, most of them are evaluated only on rendered 2D views of a handful of scenes and viewpoints close to the training views, limiting ability and insight into holistic 3D understanding. To address this gap, we propose the first large-scale benchmark that systematically assesses these three groups of methods directly in 3D space, evaluating on 1060 scenes across three indoor datasets and one outdoor dataset. Benchmark results demonstrate a clear advantage of the generalizable paradigm, particularly in relaxing the scene-specific limitation, enabling fast feed-forward inference on novel scenes, and achieving superior segmentation performance. We further introduce GaussianWorld-49K a carefully curated 3DGS dataset comprising around 49K diverse indoor and outdoor scenes obtained from multiple sources, with which we demonstrate the generalizable approach could harness strong data priors. Our codes, benchmark, and datasets are public to accelerate research in generalizable 3DGS scene understanding.
Authors: Samuel Cerezo, Javier Civera
Abstract: Initializing the state of a sensorized platform can be challenging, as a limited set of measurements often provide low-informative constraints that are in addition highly non-linear. This may lead to poor initial estimates that may converge to local minima during subsequent non-linear optimization. We propose an adaptive GNSS-inertial initialization strategy that delays the incorporation of global GNSS constraints until they become sufficiently informative. In the initial stage, our method leverages inter-epoch baseline vector residuals between consecutive GNSS fixes to mitigate inertial drift. To determine when to activate global constraints, we introduce a general criterion based on the evolution of the Hessian matrix's singular values, effectively quantifying system observability. Experiments on EuRoC, GVINS and MARS-LVIG datasets show that our approach consistently outperforms the naive strategy of fusing all measurements from the outset, yielding more accurate and robust initializations.
Authors: Youjin Jeon, Kyusik Cho, Suhan Woo, Euntai Kim
Abstract: Active Label Correction (ALC) has emerged as a promising solution to the high cost and error-prone nature of manual pixel-wise annotation in semantic segmentation, by actively identifying and correcting mislabeled data. Although recent work has improved correction efficiency by generating pseudo-labels using foundation models, substantial inefficiencies still remain. In this paper, we introduce A$^2$LC, an Active and Automated Label Correction framework for semantic segmentation, where manual and automatic correction stages operate in a cascaded manner. Specifically, the automatic correction stage leverages human feedback to extend label corrections beyond the queried samples, thereby maximizing cost efficiency. In addition, we introduce an adaptively balanced acquisition function that emphasizes underrepresented tail classes, working in strong synergy with the automatic correction stage. Extensive experiments on Cityscapes and PASCAL VOC 2012 demonstrate that A$^2$LC significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. Notably, A$^2$LC exhibits high efficiency by outperforming previous methods with only 20% of their budget, and shows strong effectiveness by achieving a 27.23% performance gain under the same budget on Cityscapes.
Authors: Louis Kerner, Michel Meintz, Bihe Zhao, Franziska Boenisch, Adam Dziedzic
Abstract: State-of-the-art text-to-image models generate photorealistic images at an unprecedented speed. This work focuses on models that operate in a bitwise autoregressive manner over a discrete set of tokens that is practically infinite in size. However, their impressive generative power comes with a growing risk: as their outputs increasingly populate the Internet, they are likely to be scraped and reused as training data-potentially by the very same models. This phenomenon has been shown to lead to model collapse, where repeated training on generated content, especially from the models' own previous versions, causes a gradual degradation in performance. A promising mitigation strategy is watermarking, which embeds human-imperceptible yet detectable signals into generated images-enabling the identification of generated content. In this work, we introduce BitMark, a robust bitwise watermarking framework. Our method embeds a watermark directly at the bit level of the token stream during the image generation process. Our bitwise watermark subtly influences the bits to preserve visual fidelity and generation speed while remaining robust against a spectrum of removal techniques. Furthermore, it exhibits high radioactivity, i.e., when watermarked generated images are used to train another image generative model, this second model's outputs will also carry the watermark. The radioactive traces remain detectable even when only fine-tuning diffusion or image autoregressive models on images watermarked with our BitMark. Overall, our approach provides a principled step toward preventing model collapse in image generative models by enabling reliable detection of generated outputs. The code is available at https://github.com/sprintml/BitMark.
Authors: Dimitrios Bouzoulas, Eerik Alamikkotervo, Risto Ojala
Abstract: Pedestrian detection in RGB images is a key task in pedestrian safety, as the most common sensor in autonomous vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems is the RGB camera. A challenge in RGB pedestrian detection, that does not appear to have large public datasets, is low-light conditions. As a solution, in this research, we propose an automated infrared-RGB labeling pipeline. The proposed pipeline consists of 1) Infrared detection, where a fine-tuned model for infrared pedestrian detection is used 2) Label transfer process from the infrared detections to their RGB counterparts 3) Training object detection models using the generated labels for low-light RGB pedestrian detection. The research was performed using the KAIST dataset. For the evaluation, object detection models were trained on the generated autolabels and ground truth labels. When compared on a previously unseen image sequence, the results showed that the models trained on generated labels outperformed the ones trained on ground-truth labels in 6 out of 9 cases for the mAP@50 and mAP@50-95 metrics. The source code for this research is available at https://github.com/BouzoulasDimitrios/IR-RGB-Automated-LowLight-Pedestrian-Labeling
URLs: https://github.com/BouzoulasDimitrios/IR-RGB-Automated-LowLight-Pedestrian-Labeling
Authors: Chengyu Bai, Jintao Chen, Xiang Bai, Yilong Chen, Qi She, Ming Lu, Shanghang Zhang
Abstract: While Unified Vision-Language Models promise to synergistically combine the high-level semantic understanding of vision-language models with the generative fidelity of diffusion models, current editing methodologies remain fundamentally decoupled and open loop performing static, pre-defined transformations without dynamic feedback between semantic interpretation and visual generation. A central limitation stems from the representation gap: understanding typically leverages high-level, language aligned encoders, whereas generation relies on low level, pixel-space autoencoders, resulting in misaligned feature spaces. To bridge this gap, Recent advances such as Representation Autoencoders and BLIP3-o advocate performing diffusion-based modeling directly in high level features from pretrained semantic encoders. We find editing in the semantic latent space modifies conceptual representations rather than pixels, ensuring intermediates that are both semantically coherent and visually plausible. Building on this insight, We propose UniEdit-I, the first training-free, closed-loop image editing framework that operates entirely within the semantic latent space of a unified VLM by introducing an Understanding-Editing-Verifying (UEV) loop, By transforming the VLM from a posthoc evaluator into an in-process conductor, UniEdit-I establishes the first semantics-driven, self-correcting closed-loop image editing pipeline. Evaluated on GEdit-Bench, UniEdit-I achieves state of the art performance without any fine tuning or architectural modifications, and even surpasses several largescale pretrained editors.
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. The code is available at https://github.com/yangyt46/FantasyStyle.
Authors: Haonan Zhang, Xinyao Wang, Boxi Wu, Tu Zheng, Wang Yunhua, Zheng Yang
Abstract: 3D multi-object tracking is a critical and challenging task in the field of autonomous driving. A common paradigm relies on modeling individual object motion, e.g., Kalman filters, to predict trajectories. While effective in simple scenarios, this approach often struggles in crowded environments or with inaccurate detections, as it overlooks the rich geometric relationships between objects. This highlights the need to leverage spatial cues. However, existing geometry-aware methods can be susceptible to interference from irrelevant objects, leading to ambiguous features and incorrect associations. To address this, we propose focusing on cue-consistency: identifying and matching stable spatial patterns over time. We introduce the Dynamic Scene Cue-Consistency Tracker (DSC-Track) to implement this principle. Firstly, we design a unified spatiotemporal encoder using Point Pair Features (PPF) to learn discriminative trajectory embeddings while suppressing interference. Secondly, our cue-consistency transformer module explicitly aligns consistent feature representations between historical tracks and current detections. Finally, a dynamic update mechanism preserves salient spatiotemporal information for stable online tracking. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes and Waymo Open Datasets validate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach. On the nuScenes benchmark, for instance, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 73.2% and 70.3% AMOTA on the validation and test sets, respectively.
Authors: Liang Lv, Di Wang, Jing Zhang, Lefei Zhang
Abstract: Semi-supervised semantic segmentation (S4) has advanced remote sensing (RS) analysis by leveraging unlabeled data through pseudo-labeling and consistency learning. However, existing S4 studies often rely on small-scale datasets and models, limiting their practical applicability. To address this, we propose S5, the first scalable framework for semi-supervised semantic segmentation in RS, which unlocks the potential of vast unlabeled Earth observation data typically underutilized due to costly pixel-level annotations. Built upon existing large-scale RS datasets, S5 introduces a data selection strategy that integrates entropy-based filtering and diversity expansion, resulting in the RS4P-1M dataset. Using this dataset, we systematically scale up S4 into a new pretraining paradigm, S4 pre-training (S4P), to pretrain RS foundation models (RSFMs) of varying sizes on this extensive corpus, significantly boosting their performance on land cover segmentation and object detection tasks. Furthermore, during fine-tuning, we incorporate a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)-based multi-dataset fine-tuning approach, which enables efficient adaptation to multiple RS benchmarks with fewer parameters. This approach improves the generalization and versatility of RSFMs across diverse RS benchmarks. The resulting RSFMs achieve state-of-the-art performance across all benchmarks, underscoring the viability of scaling semi-supervised learning for RS applications. All datasets, code, and models will be released at https://github.com/MiliLab/S5
Authors: Zhenyu Jin, Wenjie Li, Zhanyu Ma, Heng Guo
Abstract: Synthesizing spectral images across different wavelengths is essential for photorealistic rendering. Unlike conventional spectral uplifting methods that convert RGB images into spectral ones, we introduce SpecGen, a novel method that generates spectral bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs) from a single RGB image of a sphere. This enables spectral image rendering under arbitrary illuminations and shapes covered by the corresponding material. A key challenge in spectral BRDF generation is the scarcity of measured spectral BRDF data. To address this, we propose the Spectral-Spatial Tri-plane Aggregation (SSTA) network, which models reflectance responses across wavelengths and incident-outgoing directions, allowing the training strategy to leverage abundant RGB BRDF data to enhance spectral BRDF generation. Experiments show that our method accurately reconstructs spectral BRDFs from limited spectral data and surpasses state-of-the-art methods in hyperspectral image reconstruction, achieving an improvement of 8 dB in PSNR. Codes and data will be released upon acceptance.
Authors: Xiangxu Wang, Tianhong Zhao, Wei Tu, Bowen Zhang, Guanzhou Chen, Jinzhou Cao
Abstract: Origin-Destination (OD) flow matrices are critical for urban mobility analysis, supporting traffic forecasting, infrastructure planning, and policy design. Existing methods face two key limitations: (1) reliance on costly auxiliary features (e.g., Points of Interest, socioeconomic statistics) with limited spatial coverage, and (2) fragility to spatial topology changes, where reordering urban regions disrupts the structural coherence of generated flows. We propose Sat2Flow, a structure-aware diffusion framework that generates structurally coherent OD flows using only satellite imagery. Our approach employs a multi-kernel encoder to capture diverse regional interactions and a permutation-aware diffusion process that maintains consistency across regional orderings. Through joint contrastive training linking satellite features with OD patterns and equivariant diffusion training enforcing structural invariance, Sat2Flow ensures topological robustness under arbitrary regional reindexing. Experiments on real-world datasets show that Sat2Flow outperforms physics-based and data-driven baselines in accuracy while preserving flow distributions and spatial structures under index permutations. Sat2Flow offers a globally scalable solution for OD flow generation in data-scarce environments, eliminating region-specific auxiliary data dependencies while maintaining structural robustness for reliable mobility modeling.
Authors: Xiaomeng Zhu, Changwei Wang, Haozhe Wang, Xinyu Liu, Fangzhen Lin
Abstract: A scene graph is a structured representation of objects and their spatio-temporal relationships in dynamic scenes. Scene Graph Anticipation (SGA) involves predicting future scene graphs from video clips, enabling applications in intelligent surveillance and human-machine collaboration. While recent SGA approaches excel at leveraging visual evidence, long-horizon forecasting fundamentally depends on semantic priors and commonsense temporal regularities that are challenging to extract purely from visual features. To explicitly model these semantic dynamics, we propose Linguistic Scene Graph Anticipation (LSGA), a linguistic formulation of SGA that performs temporal relational reasoning over sequences of textualized scene graphs, with visual scene-graph detection handled by a modular front-end when operating on video. Building on this formulation, we introduce Object-Oriented Two-Stage Method (OOTSM), a language-based framework that anticipates object-set dynamics and forecasts object-centric relation trajectories with temporal consistency regularization, and we evaluate it on a dedicated benchmark constructed from Action Genome annotations. Extensive experiments show that compact fine-tuned language models with up to 3B parameters consistently outperform strong zero- and one-shot API baselines, including GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, and DeepSeek-V3, under matched textual inputs and context windows. When coupled with off-the-shelf visual scene-graph generators, the resulting multimodal system achieves substantial improvements on video-based SGA, boosting long-horizon mR@50 by up to 21.9\% over strong visual SGA baselines.
Authors: Lingdong Kong, Wesley Yang, Jianbiao Mei, Youquan Liu, Ao Liang, Dekai Zhu, Dongyue Lu, Wei Yin, Xiaotao Hu, Mingkai Jia, Junyuan Deng, Kaiwen Zhang, Yang Wu, Tianyi Yan, Shenyuan Gao, Song Wang, Linfeng Li, Liang Pan, Yong Liu, Jianke Zhu, Wei Tsang Ooi, Steven C. H. Hoi, Ziwei Liu
Abstract: World modeling has become a cornerstone in AI research, enabling agents to understand, represent, and predict the dynamic environments they inhabit. While prior work largely emphasizes generative methods for 2D image and video data, they overlook the rapidly growing body of work that leverages native 3D and 4D representations such as RGB-D imagery, occupancy grids, and LiDAR point clouds for large-scale scene modeling. At the same time, the absence of a standardized definition and taxonomy for ``world models'' has led to fragmented and sometimes inconsistent claims in the literature. This survey addresses these gaps by presenting the first comprehensive review explicitly dedicated to 3D and 4D world modeling and generation. We establish precise definitions, introduce a structured taxonomy spanning video-based (VideoGen), occupancy-based (OccGen), and LiDAR-based (LiDARGen) approaches, and systematically summarize datasets and evaluation metrics tailored to 3D/4D settings. We further discuss practical applications, identify open challenges, and highlight promising research directions, aiming to provide a coherent and foundational reference for advancing the field. A systematic summary of existing literature is available at https://github.com/worldbench/awesome-3d-4d-world-models
URLs: https://github.com/worldbench/awesome-3d-4d-world-models
Authors: Tim Broedermannn, Christos Sakaridis, Luigi Piccinelli, Wim Abbeloos, Luc Van Gool
Abstract: Robust semantic perception for autonomous vehicles relies on effectively combining multiple sensors with complementary strengths and weaknesses. State-of-the-art sensor fusion approaches to semantic perception often treat sensor data uniformly across the spatial extent of the input, which hinders performance when faced with challenging conditions. By contrast, we propose a novel depth-guided multimodal fusion method that upgrades condition-aware fusion by integrating depth information. Our network, DGFusion, poses multimodal segmentation as a multi-task problem, utilizing the lidar measurements, which are typically available in outdoor sensor suites, both as one of the model's inputs and as ground truth for learning depth. Our corresponding auxiliary depth head helps to learn depth-aware features, which are encoded into spatially varying local depth tokens that condition our attentive cross-modal fusion. Together with a global condition token, these local depth tokens dynamically adapt sensor fusion to the spatially varying reliability of each sensor across the scene, which largely depends on depth. In addition, we propose a robust loss for our depth, which is essential for learning from lidar inputs that are typically sparse and noisy in adverse conditions. Our method achieves state-of-the-art panoptic and semantic segmentation performance on the challenging MUSES and DeLiVER datasets. Code and models will be available at https://github.com/timbroed/DGFusion
Authors: Wenhao Tang, Heng Fang, Ge Wu, Xiang Li, Ming-Ming Cheng
Abstract: Computational pathology (CPath) digitizes pathology slides into whole slide images (WSIs), enabling analysis for critical healthcare tasks such as cancer diagnosis and prognosis. However, WSIs possess extremely long sequence lengths (up to 200K), significant length variations (from 200 to 200K), and limited supervision. These extreme variations in sequence length lead to high data heterogeneity and redundancy. Conventional methods often compromise on training efficiency and optimization to preserve such heterogeneity under limited supervision. To comprehensively address these challenges, we propose a pack-based MIL framework. It packs multiple sampled, variable-length feature sequences into fixed-length ones, enabling batched training while preserving data heterogeneity. Moreover, we introduce a residual branch that composes discarded features from multiple slides into a hyperslide which is trained with tailored labels. It offers multi-slide supervision while mitigating feature loss from sampling. Meanwhile, an attention-driven downsampler is introduced to compress features in both branches to reduce redundancy. By alleviating these challenges, our approach achieves an accuracy improvement of up to 8% while using only 12% of the training time in the PANDA(UNI). Extensive experiments demonstrate that focusing data challenges in CPath holds significant potential in the era of foundation models. The code is https://github.com/FangHeng/PackMIL
Authors: Laurent Mertens, Elahe' Yargholi, Laura Van Hove, Hans Op de Beeck, Jan Van den Stock, Joost Vennekens
Abstract: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a popular type of computer model that have proven their worth in many computer vision tasks. Moreover, they form an interesting study object for the field of psychology, with shown correspondences between the workings of CNNs and the human brain. However, these correspondences have so far mostly been studied in the context of general visual perception. In contrast, this paper explores to what extent this correspondence also holds for a more complex brain process, namely social cognition. To this end, we assess the alignment between popular CNN architectures and both human behavioral and fMRI data for image valence appraisal through a correlation analysis. We show that for this task CNNs struggle to go beyond simple visual processing, and do not seem to reflect higher-order brain processing. Furthermore, we present Object2Brain, a novel framework that combines GradCAM and object detection at the CNN-filter level with the aforementioned correlation analysis to study the influence of different object classes on the CNN-to-human correlations. Despite similar correlation trends, different CNN architectures are shown to display different object class sensitivities.
Authors: Shuang Liang, Jing He, Chuanmeizhi Wang, Lejun Liao, Guo Zhang, Yingcong Chen, Yuan Yuan
Abstract: Pre-trained diffusion models provide rich multi-scale latent features and are emerging as powerful vision backbones. While recent works such as Marigold and Lotus adapt diffusion priors for dense prediction with strong cross-domain generalization, their potential for structured outputs remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose SDPose, a fine-tuning framework built upon Stable Diffusion to fully exploit pre-trained diffusion priors for human pose estimation. First, rather than modifying cross-attention modules or introducing learnable embeddings, we directly predict keypoint heatmaps in the SD U-Net's image latent space to preserve the original generative priors. Second, we map these latent features into keypoint heatmaps through a lightweight convolutional pose head, which avoids disrupting the pre-trained backbone. Finally, to prevent overfitting and enhance out-of-distribution robustness, we incorporate an auxiliary RGB reconstruction branch that preserves domain-transferable generative semantics. To evaluate robustness under domain shift, we further construct COCO-OOD, a style-transferred variant of COCO with preserved annotations. With just one-fifth of the training schedule used by Sapiens on COCO, SDPose attains parity with Sapiens-1B/2B on the COCO validation set and establishes a new state of the art on the cross-domain benchmarks HumanArt and COCO-OOD. Extensive ablations highlight the importance of diffusion priors, RGB reconstruction, and multi-scale SD U-Net features for cross-domain generalization, and t-SNE analyses further explain SD's domain-invariant latent structure. We also show that SDPose serves as an effective zero-shot pose annotator for controllable image and video generation.
Authors: Mingyuan Zhou, Yi Gu, Huangjie Zheng, Liangchen Song, Guande He, Yizhe Zhang, Wenze Hu, Yinfei Yang
Abstract: Diffusion models achieve high-quality image generation but are limited by slow iterative sampling. Distillation methods alleviate this by enabling one- or few-step generation. Flow matching, originally introduced as a distinct framework, has since been shown to be theoretically equivalent to diffusion under Gaussian assumptions, raising the question of whether distillation techniques such as score distillation transfer directly. We provide a simple derivation -- based on Bayes' rule and conditional expectations -- that unifies Gaussian diffusion and flow matching without relying on ODE/SDE formulations. Building on this view, we extend Score identity Distillation (SiD) to pretrained text-to-image flow-matching models, including SANA, SD3-Medium, SD3.5-Medium/Large, and FLUX.1-dev, all with DiT backbones. Experiments show that, with only modest flow-matching- and DiT-specific adjustments, SiD works out of the box across these models, in both data-free and data-aided settings, without requiring teacher finetuning or architectural changes. This provides the first systematic evidence that score distillation applies broadly to text-to-image flow matching models, resolving prior concerns about stability and soundness and unifying acceleration techniques across diffusion- and flow-based generators. A project page is available at https://yigu1008.github.io/SiD-DiT.
Authors: Zuomin Qu, Yimao Guo, Qianyue Hu, Wei Lu
Abstract: Deepfakes pose significant societal risks, motivating the development of proactive defenses that embed adversarial perturbations in facial images to prevent manipulation. However, in this paper, we show that these preemptive defenses often lack robustness and reliability. We propose a novel approach, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) patching, which injects a plug-and-play LoRA patch into Deepfake generators to bypass state-of-the-art defenses. A learnable gating mechanism adaptively controls the effect of the LoRA patch and prevents gradient explosions during fine-tuning. We also introduce a Multi-Modal Feature Alignment (MMFA) loss, encouraging the features of adversarial outputs to align with those of the desired outputs at the semantic level. Beyond bypassing, we present defensive LoRA patching, embedding visible warnings in the outputs as a complementary solution to mitigate this newly identified security vulnerability. With only 1,000 facial examples and a single epoch of fine-tuning, LoRA patching successfully defeats multiple proactive defenses. These results reveal a critical weakness in current paradigms and underscore the need for more robust Deepfake defense strategies. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZOMIN28/LoRA-Patching.
Authors: Zhen Li, Xibin Jin, Guoliang Li, Shuai Wang, Miaowen Wen, Huseyin Arslan, Derrick Wing Kwan Ng, Chengzhong Xu
Abstract: Edge Gaussian splatting (EGS), which aggregates data from distributed clients (e.g., drones) and trains a global GS model at the edge (e.g., ground server), is an emerging paradigm for scene reconstruction in low-altitude economy. Unlike traditional edge resource management methods that emphasize communication throughput or general-purpose learning performance, EGS explicitly aims to maximize the GS qualities, rendering existing approaches inapplicable. To address this problem, this paper formulates a novel GS-oriented objective function that distinguishes the heterogeneous view contributions of different clients. However, evaluating this function in turn requires clients' images, leading to a causality dilemma. To this end, this paper further proposes a sample-then-transmit EGS (or STT-GS for short) strategy, which first samples a subset of images as pilot data from each client for loss prediction. Based on the first-stage evaluation, communication resources are then prioritized towards more valuable clients. To achieve efficient sampling, a feature-domain clustering (FDC) scheme is proposed to select the most representative data and pilot transmission time minimization (PTTM) is adopted to reduce the pilot overhead. Subsequently, we develop a joint client selection and power control (JCSPC) framework to maximize the GS-oriented function under communication resource constraints. Despite the nonconvexity of the problem, we propose a low-complexity efficient solution based on the penalty alternating majorization minimization (PAMM) algorithm. Experiments reveal that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms existing benchmarks on real-world datasets. The GS-oriented objective can be accurately predicted with low sampling ratios (e.g., 10%), and our method achieves an excellent tradeoff between view contributions and communication costs.
Authors: Wenwen Tong, Hewei Guo, Dongchuan Ran, Jiangnan Chen, Jiefan Lu, Kaibin Wang, Keqiang Li, Xiaoxu Zhu, Jiakui Li, Kehan Li, Xueheng Li, Lumin Li, Chenxu Guo, Jiasheng Zhou, Jiandong Chen, Xianye Wu, Jiahao Wang, Silei Wu, Lei Chen, Hanming Deng, Yuxuan Song, Dinghao Zhou, Guiping Zhong, Ken Zheng, Shiyin Kang, Lewei Lu
Abstract: We introduce InteractiveOmni, a unified and open-source omni-modal large language model for audio-visual multi-turn interaction, ranging from 4B to 8B parameters, designed to lead the field of lightweight models by offering comprehensive omni-modal understanding and speech generation capabilities. To achieve this, we integrate the vision encoder, audio encoder, large language model, and speech decoder into a unified model for understanding and generation tasks. We design a multi-stage training strategy to ensure robust cross-modal capabilities, including pre-training for omni-modal understanding, followed by post-training with speech conversation and audio-visual interaction. To enable human-like long-term conversational ability, we meticulously curate a multi-turn training dataset that enhances the model's ability to handle complex and multi-turn interactions. To effectively evaluate the multi-turn memory and speech interaction capabilities, we construct the multi-modal multi-turn memory benchmark and the multi-turn speech interaction benchmark. Experiments demonstrate that InteractiveOmni significantly outperforms leading open-source models and provides a more intelligent multi-turn audio-visual experience, particularly in its long-term memory capabilities. Notably, InteractiveOmni-4B is comparable to the much larger model like Qwen2.5-Omni-7B on general benchmarks, and it can retain 97% of the performance of the InteractiveOmni-8B while utilizing only 50% of the model size. Achieving state-of-the-art results against similarly sized models across image, audio, video understanding, and speech generation tasks, InteractiveOmni is an accessible, open-source foundation for next-generation intelligent interactive systems.
Authors: Zia Badar
Abstract: Quantization of neural networks provides benefits of inference in less compute and memory requirements. Previous work in quantization lack two important aspects which this work provides. First almost all previous work in quantization used a non-differentiable approach and for learning; the derivative is usually set manually in backpropogation which make the learning ability of algorithm questionable, our approach is not just differentiable, we also provide proof of convergence of our approach to the optimal neural network. Second previous work in shift/logrithmic quantization either have avoided activation quantization along with weight quantization or achieved less accuracy. Learning logrithmic quantize values of form $2^n$ requires the quantization function can scale to more than 1 bit quantization which is another benifit of our quantization that it provides $n$ bits quantization as well. Our approach when tested with image classification task using imagenet dataset, resnet18 and weight quantization only achieves less than 1 percent accuracy compared to full precision accuracy while taking only 15 epochs to train using shift bit quantization and achieves comparable to SOTA approaches accuracy in both weight and activation quantization using shift bit quantization in 15 training epochs with slightly higher(only higher cpu instructions) inference cost compared to 1 bit quantization(without logrithmic quantization) and not requiring any higher precision multiplication.
Authors: Shruti Palaskar, Leon Gatys, Mona Abdelrahman, Mar Jacobo, Larry Lindsey, Rutika Moharir, Gunnar Lund, Yang Xu, Navid Shiee, Jeffrey Bigham, Charles Maalouf, Joseph Yitan Cheng
Abstract: Safety evaluation of multimodal foundation models often treats vision and language inputs separately, missing risks from joint interpretation where benign content becomes harmful in combination. Existing approaches also fail to distinguish clearly unsafe content from borderline cases, leading to problematic over-blocking or under-refusal of genuinely harmful content. We present Vision Language Safety Understanding (VLSU), a comprehensive framework to systematically evaluate multimodal safety through fine-grained severity classification and combinatorial analysis across 17 distinct safety patterns. Using a multi-stage pipeline with real-world images and human annotation, we construct a large-scale benchmark of 8,187 samples spanning 15 harm categories. Our evaluation of eleven state-of-the-art models reveals systematic joint understanding failures: while models achieve 90%-plus accuracy on clear unimodal safety signals, performance degrades substantially to 20-55% when joint image-text reasoning is required to determine the safety label. Most critically, 34% of errors in joint image-text safety classification occur despite correct classification of the individual modalities, further demonstrating absent compositional reasoning capabilities. Additionally, we find that models struggle to balance refusing unsafe content while still responding to borderline cases that deserve engagement. For example, we find that instruction framing can reduce the over-blocking rate on borderline content from 62.4% to 10.4% in Gemini-1.5, but only at the cost of under-refusing on unsafe content with refusal rate dropping from 90.8% to 53.9%. Overall, our framework exposes weaknesses in joint image-text understanding and alignment gaps in current models, and provides a critical test bed to enable the next milestones in research on robust vision-language safety.
Authors: Konstantinos Bacharidis, Antonis A. Argyros
Abstract: Mistake analysis in procedural activities is a critical area of research with applications spanning industrial automation, physical rehabilitation, education and human-robot collaboration. This paper reviews vision-based methods for detecting and predicting mistakes in structured tasks, focusing on procedural and executional errors. By leveraging advancements in computer vision, including action recognition, anticipation and activity understanding, vision-based systems can identify deviations in task execution, such as incorrect sequencing, use of improper techniques, or timing errors. We explore the challenges posed by intra-class variability, viewpoint differences and compositional activity structures, which complicate mistake detection. Additionally, we provide a comprehensive overview of existing datasets, evaluation metrics and state-of-the-art methods, categorizing approaches based on their use of procedural structure, supervision levels and learning strategies. Open challenges, such as distinguishing permissible variations from true mistakes and modeling error propagation are discussed alongside future directions, including neuro-symbolic reasoning and counterfactual state modeling. This work aims to establish a unified perspective on vision-based mistake analysis in procedural activities, highlighting its potential to enhance safety, efficiency and task performance across diverse domains.
Authors: Sayed Pedram Haeri Boroujeni, Niloufar Mehrabi, Hazim Alzorgan, Mahlagha Fazeli, Abolfazl Razi
Abstract: Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are transforming the future of transportation through advances in intelligent perception, decision-making, and control systems. However, their success is tied to one core capability, reliable object detection in complex and multimodal environments. While recent breakthroughs in Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have driven remarkable progress, the field still faces a critical challenge as knowledge remains fragmented across multimodal perception, contextual reasoning, and cooperative intelligence. This survey bridges that gap by delivering a forward-looking analysis of object detection in AVs, emphasizing emerging paradigms such as Vision-Language Models (VLMs), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Generative AI rather than re-examining outdated techniques. We begin by systematically reviewing the fundamental spectrum of AV sensors (camera, ultrasonic, LiDAR, and Radar) and their fusion strategies, highlighting not only their capabilities and limitations in dynamic driving environments but also their potential to integrate with recent advances in LLM/VLM-driven perception frameworks. Next, we introduce a structured categorization of AV datasets that moves beyond simple collections, positioning ego-vehicle, infrastructure-based, and cooperative datasets (e.g., V2V, V2I, V2X, I2I), followed by a cross-analysis of data structures and characteristics. Ultimately, we analyze cutting-edge detection methodologies, ranging from 2D and 3D pipelines to hybrid sensor fusion, with particular attention to emerging transformer-driven approaches powered by Vision Transformers (ViTs), Large and Small Language Models (SLMs), and VLMs. By synthesizing these perspectives, our survey delivers a clear roadmap of current capabilities, open challenges, and future opportunities.
Authors: Hengjia Li, Jianjin Xu, Keli Cheng, Lei Wang, Ning Bi, Boxi Wu, Fernando De la Torre, Deng Cai
Abstract: Recent advances in personalized generative models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in producing identity-consistent images of the same individual across diverse scenes. However, most existing methods lack explicit viewpoint control and fail to ensure multi-view consistency of generated identities. To address this limitation, we present MagicView, a lightweight adaptation framework that equips existing generative models with multi-view generation capability through 3D priors-guided in-context learning. While prior studies have shown that in-context learning preserves identity consistency across grid samples, its effectiveness in multi-view settings remains unexplored. Building upon this insight, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the multi-view in-context learning ability, and design a conditioning architecture that leverages 3D priors to activate this capability for multi-view consistent identity customization. On the other hand, acquiring robust multi-view capability typically requires large-scale multi-dimensional datasets, which makes incorporating multi-view contextual learning under limited data regimes prone to textual controllability degradation. To address this issue, we introduce a novel Semantic Correspondence Alignment loss, which effectively preserves semantic alignment while maintaining multi-view consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MagicView substantially outperforms recent baselines in multi-view consistency, text alignment, identity similarity, and visual quality, achieving strong results with only 100 multi-view training samples.
Authors: Zheyuan Zhang, Jiwei Zhang, Boyu Zhou, Linzhimeng Duan, Hong Chen
Abstract: Visual Place Recognition (VPR) aims to determine the geographic location of a query image by retrieving its most visually similar counterpart from a geo-tagged reference database. Recently, the emergence of the powerful visual foundation model, DINOv2, trained in a self-supervised manner on massive datasets, has significantly improved VPR performance. This improvement stems from DINOv2's exceptional feature generalization capabilities but is often accompanied by increased model complexity and computational overhead that impede deployment on resource-constrained devices. To address this challenge, we propose $D^{2}$-VPR, a $D$istillation- and $D$eformable-based framework that retains the strong feature extraction capabilities of visual foundation models while significantly reducing model parameters and achieving a more favorable performance-efficiency trade-off. Specifically, first, we employ a two-stage training strategy that integrates knowledge distillation and fine-tuning. Additionally, we introduce a Distillation Recovery Module (DRM) to better align the feature spaces between the teacher and student models, thereby minimizing knowledge transfer losses to the greatest extent possible. Second, we design a Top-Down-attention-based Deformable Aggregator (TDDA) that leverages global semantic features to dynamically and adaptively adjust the Regions of Interest (ROI) used for aggregation, thereby improving adaptability to irregular structures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Meanwhile, it reduces the parameter count by approximately 64.2% and FLOPs by about 62.6% (compared to CricaVPR).Code is available at https://github.com/tony19980810/D2VPR.
Authors: Asya Y. Akkus, Bradley T. Wolfe, Pinghan Chu, Chengkun Huang, Chris S. Campbell, Mariana Alvarado Alvarez, Petr Volegov, David Fittinghoff, Robert Reinovsky, Zhehui Wang
Abstract: Neutron imaging is essential for diagnosing and optimizing inertial confinement fusion implosions at the National Ignition Facility. Due to the required 10-micrometer resolution, however, neutron image require image reconstruction using iterative algorithms. For low-yield sources, the images may be degraded by various types of noise. Gaussian and Poisson noise often coexist within one image, obscuring fine details and blurring the edges where the source information is encoded. Traditional denoising techniques, such as filtering and thresholding, can inadvertently alter critical features or reshape the noise statistics, potentially impacting the ultimate fidelity of the iterative image reconstruction pipeline. However, recent advances in synthetic data production and machine learning have opened new opportunities to address these challenges. In this study, we present an unsupervised autoencoder with a Cohen-Daubechies- Feauveau (CDF 97) wavelet transform in the latent space, designed to suppress for mixed Gaussian-Poisson noise while preserving essential image features. The network successfully denoises neutron imaging data. Benchmarking against both simulated and experimental NIF datasets demonstrates that our approach achieves lower reconstruction error and superior edge preservation compared to conventional filtering methods such as Block-matching and 3D filtering (BM3D). By validating the effectiveness of unsupervised learning for denoising neutron images, this study establishes a critical first step towards fully AI-driven, end-to-end reconstruction frameworks for ICF diagnostics.
Authors: Xinran Liu, Elaheh Akbari, Rocio Diaz Martin, Navid NaderiAlizadeh, Soheil Kolouri
Abstract: Optimal Transport (OT) offers a powerful framework for finding correspondences between distributions and addressing matching and alignment problems in various areas of computer vision, including shape analysis, image generation, and multimodal tasks. The computation cost of OT, however, hinders its scalability. Slice-based transport plans have recently shown promise for reducing the computational cost by leveraging the closed-form solutions of 1D OT problems. These methods optimize a one-dimensional projection (slice) to obtain a conditional transport plan that minimizes the transport cost in the ambient space. While efficient, these methods leave open the question of whether learned optimal slicers can transfer to new distribution pairs under distributional shift. Understanding this transferability is crucial in settings with evolving data or repeated OT computations across closely related distributions. In this paper, we study the min-Sliced Transport Plan (min-STP) framework and investigate the transferability of optimized slicers: can a slicer trained on one distribution pair yield effective transport plans for new, unseen pairs? Theoretically, we show that optimized slicers remain close under slight perturbations of the data distributions, enabling efficient transfer across related tasks. To further improve scalability, we introduce a minibatch formulation of min-STP and provide statistical guarantees on its accuracy. Empirically, we demonstrate that the transferable min-STP achieves strong one-shot matching performance and facilitates amortized training for point cloud alignment and flow-based generative modeling.
Authors: Qiang Li, Yingwenqi Jiang, Tuoxi Li, Duyu Chen, Xiang Feng, Yucheng Ao, Shangyue Liu, Xingchen Yu, Youcheng Cai, Yumeng Liu, Yuexin Ma, Xin Hu, Li Liu, Yu Zhang, Linkun Xu, Bingtao Gao, Xueyuan Wang, Shuchang Zhou, Xianming Liu, Ligang Liu
Abstract: Realistic and controllable simulation is critical for advancing end-to-end autonomous driving, yet existing approaches often struggle to support novel view synthesis under large viewpoint changes or to ensure geometric consistency. We introduce HybridWorldSim, a hybrid simulation framework that integrates multi-traversal neural reconstruction for static backgrounds with generative modeling for dynamic agents. This unified design addresses key limitations of previous methods, enabling the creation of diverse and high-fidelity driving scenarios with reliable visual and spatial consistency. To facilitate robust benchmarking, we further release a new multi-traversal dataset MIRROR that captures a wide range of routes and environmental conditions across different cities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HybridWorldSim surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods, providing a practical and scalable solution for high-fidelity simulation and a valuable resource for research and development in autonomous driving.
Authors: Tianle Chen, Chaitanya Chakka, Arjun Reddy Akula, Xavier Thomas, Deepti Ghadiyaram
Abstract: Despite remarkable advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), a fundamental question remains: are MLLMs robust to contradicting modalities? To rigorously study this, we introduce MMA-Bench comprising videos and tasks that probe a model's reliance on specific modalities. Using black-box and white-box interpretability techniques, we provide a critical analysis of the brittleness of both open- and closed-sourced MLLMs. We show that current MLLMs struggle under misaligned audio-visual pairs and simple misleading text, thereby lacking robust multi-modal reasoning. Building on these findings, we propose a modality alignment tuning strategy to teach the model when to prioritize, leverage, or ignore specific modality cues. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we show that our alignment tuning yields demonstrably stronger multimodal grounding. This work provides both interpretability tools and a clear path toward developing MLLMs with intrinsically reliable cross-modal reasoning. Code and dataset will be publicly available.
Authors: Shanhui Liu, Rui Xu, Yunke Wang
Abstract: Vision Mamba has emerged as a promising and efficient alternative to Vision Transformers, yet its efficiency remains fundamentally constrained by the number of input tokens. Existing token reduction approaches typically adopt token pruning or merging to reduce computation. However, they inherently lead to information loss as they discard or compress token representations. This problem is further exacerbated when the same fine-grained token processing is uniformly applied across all images regardless of visual complexity. We observe that not all inputs require fine-grained processing: simple images can be effectively handled at a coarse resolution, while only complex ones require refinement. Based on this insight, we propose MambaScope, an adaptive framework for efficient inference for Vision Mamba. MambaScope first performs coarse-grained inference by dividing the input image into large patches, significantly reducing token length and computation. When the model's prediction confidence is low, selected regions are re-processed at a finer resolution to recover essential visual details with minimal additional cost. This dynamic resolution assignment strategy allows MambaScope to allocate computation adaptively according to image complexity, achieving efficient processing without compromising accuracy. Experiments across various vision tasks demonstrate that MambaScope outperforms both the baseline Vision Mamba and state-of-the-art token reduction techniques in terms of accuracy and efficiency.
Authors: Haojie Ji, Te Hu, Haowen Li, Long Jin, Chongshi Xin, Yuchi Yao, Jiarui Xiao
Abstract: Intelligent driving systems are vulnerable to physical adversarial attacks on traffic signs. These attacks can cause misclassification, leading to erroneous driving decisions that compromise road safety. Moreover, within V2X networks, such misinterpretations can propagate, inducing cascading failures that disrupt overall traffic flow and system stability. However, a key limitation of current physical attacks is their lack of stealth. Most methods apply perturbations to central regions of the sign, resulting in visually salient patterns that are easily detectable by human observers, thereby limiting their real-world practicality. This study proposes TESP-Attack, a novel stealth-aware adversarial patch method for traffic sign classification. Based on the observation that human visual attention primarily focuses on the central regions of traffic signs, we employ instance segmentation to generate edge-aligned masks that conform to the shape characteristics of the signs. A U-Net generator is utilized to craft adversarial patches, which are then optimized through color and texture constraints along with frequency domain analysis to achieve seamless integration with the background environment, resulting in highly effective visual concealment. The proposed method demonstrates outstanding attack success rates across traffic sign classification models with varied architectures, achieving over 90% under limited query budgets. It also exhibits strong cross-model transferability and maintains robust real-world performance that remains stable under varying angles and distances.
Authors: Xisheng Feng
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit significant performance plateaus in specialized domains like precision agriculture, primarily due to "Reasoning-Driven Hallucination" where linguistic priors override visual perception. A key bottleneck is the "Modality Gap": visual embeddings fail to reliably activate the fine-grained expert knowledge already encoded in model parameters. We propose "Look, Recite, Then Answer," a parameter-efficient framework that enhances VLMs via self-generated knowledge hints while keeping backbone models frozen. The framework decouples inference into three stages: (1) Look generates objective visual descriptions and candidate sets; (2) Recite employs a lightweight 1.7B router to transform visual cues into targeted queries that trigger candidate-specific parametric knowledge; (3) Answer performs parallel evidence alignment between descriptions and recited knowledge to select the most consistent label. On AgroBench, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, improving Weed Identification accuracy by 23.52% over Qwen2-VL-72B and surpassing GPT-4o without external search overhead. This modular design mitigates hallucinations by transforming passive perception into active, controllable knowledge retrieval
Authors: Carlos Rebelo, Gil Rocha, Jo\~ao Daniel Silva, Bruno Martins
Abstract: Remote sensing image captioning has advanced rapidly through encoder--decoder models, although the reliance on large annotated datasets and the focus on English restricts global applicability. To address these limitations, we propose the first training-free multilingual approach, based on retrieval-augmented prompting. For a given aerial image, we employ a domain-adapted SigLIP2 encoder to retrieve related captions and few-shot examples from a datastore, which are then provided to a language model. We explore two variants: an image-blind setup, where a multilingual Large Language Model (LLM) generates the caption from textual prompts alone, and an image-aware setup, where a Vision--Language Model (VLM) jointly processes the prompt and the input image. To improve the coherence of the retrieved content, we introduce a graph-based re-ranking strategy using PageRank on a graph of images and captions. Experiments on four benchmark datasets across ten languages demonstrate that our approach is competitive with fully supervised English-only systems and generalizes to other languages. Results also highlight the importance of re-ranking with PageRank, yielding up to 35% improvements in performance metrics. Additionally, it was observed that while VLMs tend to generate visually grounded but lexically diverse captions, LLMs can achieve stronger BLEU and CIDEr scores. Lastly, directly generating captions in the target language consistently outperforms other translation-based strategies. Overall, our work delivers one of the first systematic evaluations of multilingual, training-free captioning for remote sensing imagery, advancing toward more inclusive and scalable multimodal Earth observation systems.
Authors: Ziqian Wang, Yonghao He, Licheng Yang, Wei Zou, Hongxuan Ma, Liu Liu, Wei Sui, Yuxin Guo, Hu Su
Abstract: Generating high-fidelity, physically interactive 3D simulated tabletop scenes is essential for embodied AI--especially for robotic manipulation policy learning and data synthesis. However, current text- or image-driven 3D scene generation methods mainly focus on large-scale scenes, struggling to capture the high-density layouts and complex spatial relations that characterize tabletop scenes. To address these challenges, we propose TabletopGen, a training-free, fully automatic framework that generates diverse, instance-level interactive 3D tabletop scenes. TabletopGen accepts a reference image as input, which can be synthesized by a text-to-image model to enhance scene diversity. We then perform instance segmentation and completion on the reference to obtain per-instance images. Each instance is reconstructed into a 3D model followed by canonical coordinate alignment. The aligned 3D models then undergo pose and scale estimation before being assembled into a collision-free, simulation-ready tabletop scene. A key component of our framework is a novel pose and scale alignment approach that decouples the complex spatial reasoning into two stages: a Differentiable Rotation Optimizer for precise rotation recovery and a Top-view Spatial Alignment mechanism for robust translation and scale estimation, enabling accurate 3D reconstruction from 2D reference. Extensive experiments and user studies show that TabletopGen achieves state-of-the-art performance, markedly surpassing existing methods in visual fidelity, layout accuracy, and physical plausibility, capable of generating realistic tabletop scenes with rich stylistic and spatial diversity. Our code will be publicly available.
Authors: Xusen Hei, Jiali Chen, Jinyu Yang, Mengchen Zhao, Yi Cai
Abstract: As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) frequently exhibit errors in complex video reasoning scenarios, correcting these errors is critical for uncovering their weaknesses and improving performance. However, existing benchmarks lack systematic evaluation of MLLMs' ability to identify and correct these video reasoning errors. To bridge this gap, we propose \textit{ViRectify}, a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate their fine-grained correction capability. Through an AI-assisted annotation pipeline with human verification, we construct a dataset of over 30\textit{K} instances spanning dynamic perception, scientific reasoning, and embodied decision-making domains. In \textit{ViRectify}, we challenge MLLMs to perform step-wise error identification and generate rationales with key video evidence grounding. In addition, we further propose the trajectory evidence-driven correction framework, comprising step-wise error trajectory and reward modeling on visual evidence-grounded correction. It encourages the model to explicitly concentrate on error propagation and key timestamps for correction. Extensive evaluation across 16 advanced MLLMs demonstrates that our \textit{ViRectify} serves as a challenging testbed, where GPT-5 achieves only 31.94\% correction accuracy. Our framework enables a Qwen2.5-VL-7B to consistently outperform the variants of 72B on \textit{ViRectify}, showing the effectiveness of our approach. Further analysis uncovers systematic asymmetries in error correction across models, and our dataset is also a valuable data resource to perform reflection learning. We believe \textit{ViRectify} provides a new direction for comprehensively evaluating the advanced MLLMs in video reasoning.
Authors: Xavier Thomas, Youngsun Lim, Ananya Srinivasan, Audrey Zheng, Deepti Ghadiyaram
Abstract: Despite rapid advances in video generative models, robust metrics for evaluating visual and temporal correctness of complex human actions remain elusive. Critically, existing pure-vision encoders and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are strongly appearance-biased, lack temporal understanding, and thus struggle to discern intricate motion dynamics and anatomical implausibilities in generated videos. We tackle this gap by introducing a novel evaluation metric derived from a learned latent space of real-world human actions. Our method first captures the nuances, constraints, and temporal smoothness of real-world motion by fusing appearance-agnostic human skeletal geometry features with appearance-based features. We posit that this combined feature space provides a robust representation of action plausibility. Given a generated video, our metric quantifies its action quality by measuring the distance between its underlying representations and this learned real-world action distribution. For rigorous validation, we develop a new multi-faceted benchmark specifically designed to probe temporally challenging aspects of human action fidelity. Through extensive experiments, we show that our metric achieves substantial improvement of more than 68% compared to existing state-of-the-art methods on our benchmark, performs competitively on established external benchmarks, and has a stronger correlation with human perception. Our in-depth analysis reveals critical limitations in current video generative models and establishes a new standard for advanced research in video generation.
Authors: Shuang Chen, Tomas Krajnik, Farshad Arvin, Amir Atapour-Abarghouei
Abstract: Biologically plausible and energy-efficient frameworks such as Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have not been sufficiently explored in low-level vision tasks. Taking image deraining as an example, this study addresses the representation of the inherent high-pass characteristics of spiking neurons, specifically in image deraining and innovatively proposes the Visual LIF (VLIF) neuron, overcoming the obstacle of lacking spatial contextual understanding present in traditional spiking neurons. To tackle the limitation of frequency-domain saturation inherent in conventional spiking neurons, we leverage the proposed VLIF to introduce the Spiking Decomposition and Enhancement Module and the lightweight Spiking Multi-scale Unit for hierarchical multi-scale representation learning. Extensive experiments across five benchmark deraining datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art SNN-based deraining methods, achieving this superior performance with only 13\% of their energy consumption. These findings establish a solid foundation for deploying SNNs in high-performance, energy-efficient low-level vision tasks.
Authors: Jianzong Wu, Hao Lian, Dachao Hao, Ye Tian, Qingyu Shi, Biaolong Chen, Hao Jiang, Yunhai Tong
Abstract: Recent audio-video generative systems suggest that coupling modalities benefits not only audio-video synchrony but also the video modality itself. We pose a fundamental question: Does audio-video joint denoising training improve video generation, even when we only care about video quality? To study this, we introduce a parameter-efficient Audio-Video Full DiT (AVFullDiT) architecture that leverages pre-trained text-to-video (T2V) and text-to-audio (T2A) modules for joint denoising. We train (i) a T2AV model with AVFullDiT and (ii) a T2V-only counterpart under identical settings. Our results provide the first systematic evidence that audio-video joint denoising can deliver more than synchrony. We observe consistent improvements on challenging subsets featuring large and object contact motions. We hypothesize that predicting audio acts as a privileged signal, encouraging the model to internalize causal relationships between visual events and their acoustic consequences (e.g., collision $\times$ impact sound), which in turn regularizes video dynamics. Our findings suggest that cross-modal co-training is a promising approach to developing stronger, more physically grounded world models. Code and dataset will be made publicly available.
Authors: Aditya Chaudhary, Prachet Dev Singh, Ankit Jha
Abstract: In computer vision, Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) is still a difficult problem. We present ViT-SR, a new technique to improve the performance of a Vision Transformer (ViT) employing a two-stage training strategy. In our method, the model learns rich, generalizable visual representations from the data itself through a self-supervised pretraining phase on a colourization task. The pre-trained model is then adjusted for 4x super-resolution. By predicting the addition of a high-frequency residual image to an initial bicubic interpolation, this design simplifies residual learning. ViT-SR, trained and evaluated on the DIV2K benchmark dataset, achieves an impressive SSIM of 0.712 and PSNR of 22.90 dB. These results demonstrate the efficacy of our two-stage approach and highlight the potential of self-supervised pre-training for complex image restoration tasks. Further improvements may be possible with larger ViT architectures or alternative pretext tasks.
Authors: Mohamed Awad, Mahmoud Akrm, Walid Gomaa
Abstract: Deep learning has achieved great success in computer vision, but remains vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Adversarial training is the leading defense designed to improve model robustness. However, its effect on the transferability of attacks is underexplored. In this work, we ask whether adversarial training unintentionally increases the transferability of adversarial examples. To answer this, we trained a diverse zoo of 36 models, including CNNs and ViTs, and conducted comprehensive transferability experiments. Our results reveal a clear paradox: adversarially trained (AT) models produce perturbations that transfer more effectively than those from standard models, which introduce a new ecosystem risk. To enable reproducibility and further study, we release all models, code, and experimental scripts. Furthermore, we argue that robustness evaluations should assess not only the resistance of a model to transferred attacks but also its propensity to produce transferable adversarial examples.
Authors: Wei Chen, Chaoqun Du, Feng Gu, Wei He, Qizhen Li, Zide Liu, Xuhao Pan, Chang Ren, Xudong Rao, Chenfeng Wang, Tao Wei, Chengjun Yu, Pengfei Yu, Yufei Zheng, Chunpeng Zhou, Pan Zhou, Xuhan Zhu
Abstract: We present MindGPT-4ov, a multimodal large language model (MLLM) that introduces a general post-training paradigm spanning data production, model training, and efficient deployment. It achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks at low cost, effectively enhancing the foundational capabilities of MLLMs and the generalization ability. Focusing on data construction, supervised fine-tuning strategies, and multimodal reinforcement learning methods, this work proposes three key innovations: (1) An information density-based data generation scheme, integrated with a dual-dimensional tree-structured label system, enabling automated generation of high-quality cross-domain data. (2) A collaborative curriculum supervised fine-tuning approach that balances the injection of domain-specific knowledge with the preservation of general capabilities. (3) A hybrid reinforcement learning paradigm that enhances reasoning ability while simultaneously addressing multi-objective optimization such as diversity exploration, maintenance of multimodal perception, and response conciseness. Moreover, we implement a series of infrastructure optimizations, such as 5D parallel training, operator optimization, and inference quantization to enhance training and inference efficiency while reducing the cost of domain adaptation. Experimental results demonstrate that the MindGPT-4ov model outperforms state-of-the-art models on benchmarks such as MMBench, MMStar, MathVision, and MathVista. In addition, MindGPT-4ov also demonstrates superior user experience in vertical domain tasks, enabling a seamless transition from academic research to industrial deployment. MindGPT-4ov provides a general post-training paradigm applicable to a wide range of MLLMs. The model weights, datasets, and code for the Qwen3-VL-based variants will be recently open-sourced to support the community's development of MLLMs.
Authors: Fan Yang, Kaihao Zhang
Abstract: Understanding high-resolution images remains a significant challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Recent study address this issue by dividing the image into smaller crops and computing the semantic similarity between each crop and a query using a pretrained retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model. The most relevant crops are then selected to localize the target object and suppress irrelevant information. However, such crop-based processing can fragment complete objects across multiple crops, thereby disrupting the computation of semantic similarity. In our experiments, we find that image crops of objects with different sizes are better handled at different resolutions. Based on this observation, we propose Multi-resolution Retrieval-Detection (MRD), a training-free framework for high-resolution image understanding. To address the issue of semantic similarity bias caused by objects being split across different image crops, we propose a multi-resolution semantic fusion method, which integrates semantic similarity maps obtained at different resolutions to produce more accurate semantic information and preserve the integrity of target objects. Furthermore, to achieve direct localization of target objects at a global scale, we introduce an open-vocalbulary object detection (OVD) model that identifies object regions using a sliding-window approach.Experiments on high-resolution image understanding benchmarks using different MLLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Authors: Zhihan Xiao, Lin Liu, Yixin Gao, Xiaopeng Zhang, Haoxuan Che, Songping Mai, Qi Tian
Abstract: Text-guided video editing, particularly for object removal and addition, remains a challenging task due to the need for precise spatial and temporal consistency. Existing methods often rely on auxiliary masks or reference images for editing guidance, which limits their scalability and generalization. To address these issues, we propose LoVoRA, a novel framework for mask-free video object removal and addition using object-aware localization mechanism. Our approach utilizes a unique dataset construction pipeline that integrates image-to-video translation, optical flow-based mask propagation, and video inpainting, enabling temporally consistent edits. The core innovation of LoVoRA is its learnable object-aware localization mechanism, which provides dense spatio-temporal supervision for both object insertion and removal tasks. By leveraging a Diffusion Mask Predictor, LoVoRA achieves end-to-end video editing without requiring external control signals during inference. Extensive experiments and human evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness and high-quality performance of LoVoRA. https://cz-5f.github.io/LoVoRA.github.io
Authors: Kairun Wen, Yuzhi Huang, Runyu Chen, Hui Zheng, Yunlong Lin, Panwang Pan, Chenxin Li, Wenyan Cong, Jian Zhang, Junbin Lu, Chenguo Lin, Dilin Wang, Zhicheng Yan, Hongyu Xu, Justin Theiss, Yue Huang, Xinghao Ding, Rakesh Ranjan, Zhiwen Fan
Abstract: Understanding the dynamic physical world, characterized by its evolving 3D structure, real-world motion, and semantic content with textual descriptions, is crucial for human-agent interaction and enables embodied agents to perceive and act within real environments with human-like capabilities. However, existing datasets are often derived from limited simulators or utilize traditional Structurefrom-Motion for up-to-scale annotation and offer limited descriptive captioning, which restricts the capacity of foundation models to accurately interpret real-world dynamics from monocular videos, commonly sourced from the internet. To bridge these gaps, we introduce DynamicVerse, a physical-scale, multimodal 4D world modeling framework for dynamic real-world video. We employ large vision, geometric, and multimodal models to interpret metric-scale static geometry, real-world dynamic motion, instance-level masks, and holistic descriptive captions. By integrating window-based Bundle Adjustment with global optimization, our method converts long real-world video sequences into a comprehensive 4D multimodal format. DynamicVerse delivers a large-scale dataset consisting of 100K+ videos with 800K+ annotated masks and 10M+ frames from internet videos. Experimental evaluations on three benchmark tasks, namely video depth estimation, camera pose estimation, and camera intrinsics estimation, demonstrate that our 4D modeling achieves superior performance in capturing physical-scale measurements with greater global accuracy than existing methods.
Authors: Kaituo Feng, Manyuan Zhang, Hongyu Li, Kaixuan Fan, Shuang Chen, Yilei Jiang, Dian Zheng, Peiwen Sun, Yiyuan Zhang, Haoze Sun, Yan Feng, Peng Pei, Xunliang Cai, Xiangyu Yue
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently achieved remarkable success in eliciting visual reasoning within Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, existing approaches typically train separate models for different tasks and treat image and video reasoning as disjoint domains. This results in limited scalability toward a multimodal reasoning generalist, which restricts practical versatility and hinders potential knowledge sharing across tasks and modalities. To this end, we propose OneThinker, an all-in-one reasoning model that unifies image and video understanding across diverse fundamental visual tasks, including question answering, captioning, spatial and temporal grounding, tracking, and segmentation. To achieve this, we construct the OneThinker-600k training corpus covering all these tasks and employ commercial models for CoT annotation, resulting in OneThinker-SFT-340k for SFT cold start. Furthermore, we propose EMA-GRPO to handle reward heterogeneity in multi-task RL by tracking task-wise moving averages of reward standard deviations for balanced optimization. Extensive experiments on diverse visual benchmarks show that OneThinker delivers strong performance on 31 benchmarks, across 10 fundamental visual understanding tasks. Moreover, it exhibits effective knowledge transfer between certain tasks and preliminary zero-shot generalization ability, marking a step toward a unified multimodal reasoning generalist. All code, model, and data are released.
Authors: Hongcheng Guo, Wei Zhang, Junhao Chen, Yaonan Gu, Jian Yang, Junjia Du, Shaosheng Cao, Binyuan Hui, Tianyu Liu, Jianxin Ma, Chang Zhou, Zhoujun Li
Abstract: Recently advancements in large multimodal models have led to significant strides in image comprehension capabilities. Despite these advancements, there is a lack of the robust benchmark specifically for assessing the Image-to-Web conversion proficiency of these large models. Primarily, it is essential to ensure the integrity of the web elements generated. These elements comprise visible and invisible categories. Previous evaluation methods (e.g.,BLEU) are notably susceptible to significant alterations due to the presence of invisible elements in Web. Furthermore, it is crucial to measure the layout information of web pages, referring to the positional relationships between elements, which is overlooked by previous work. To address challenges, we have curated and aligned a benchmark of images and corresponding web codes (IW-BENCH). Specifically, we propose the Element Accuracy, which tests the completeness of the elements by parsing the Document Object Model (DOM) tree. Layout Accuracy is also proposed to analyze the positional relationships of elements by converting DOM tree into a common subsequence. Besides, we design a five-hop multimodal Chain-of-Thought Prompting for better performance, which contains five hop: 1) SoM prompt injection. 2) Inferring Elements. 3) Inferring Layout. 4) Inferring Web code. 5) Reflection. Our benchmark comprises 1200 pairs of images and web codes with varying levels of difficulty. We have conducted extensive experiments on existing large multimodal models, offering insights into their performance and areas for improvement in image-to-web domain.
Authors: Xander Haijen, Bikram Koirala, Xuanwen Tao, Paul Scheunders
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a Two-Step Linear Mixing Model (2LMM) that bridges the gap between model complexity and computational tractability. The model achieves this by introducing two distinct scaling steps: an endmember scaling step across the image, and another for pixel-wise scaling. We show that this model leads to only a mildly non-convex optimization problem, which we solve with an optimization algorithm that incorporates second-order information. To the authors' knowledge, this work represents the first application of second-order optimization techniques to solve a spectral unmixing problem that models endmember variability. Our method is highly robust, as it requires virtually no hyperparameter tuning and can therefore be used easily and quickly in a wide range of unmixing tasks. We show through extensive experiments on both simulated and real data that the new model is competitive and in some cases superior to the state of the art in unmixing. The model also performs very well in challenging scenarios, such as blind unmixing.
Authors: Srikar Yellapragada, Alexandros Graikos, Zilinghan Li, Kostas Triaridis, Varun Belagali, Tarak Nath Nandi, Karen Bai, Beatrice S. Knudsen, Tahsin Kurc, Rajarsi R. Gupta, Prateek Prasanna, Ravi K Madduri, Joel Saltz, Dimitris Samaras
Abstract: The digitization of histology slides has revolutionized pathology, providing massive datasets for cancer diagnosis and research. Self-supervised and vision-language models have been shown to effectively mine large pathology datasets to learn discriminative representations. On the other hand, there are unique problems in pathology, such as annotated data scarcity, privacy regulations in data sharing, and inherently generative tasks like virtual staining. Generative models, capable of synthesizing realistic and diverse images, present a compelling solution to address these problems through image synthesis. We introduce PixCell, the first generative foundation model for histopathology images. PixCell is a diffusion model trained on PanCan-30M, a large, diverse dataset derived from 69,184 H&E-stained whole slide images of various cancer types. We employ a progressive training strategy and a self-supervision-based conditioning that allows us to scale up training without any human-annotated data. By conditioning on real slides, the synthetic images capture the properties of the real data and can be used as data augmentation for small-scale datasets to boost classification performance. We prove the foundational versatility of PixCell by applying it to two generative downstream tasks: privacy-preserving synthetic data generation and virtual IHC staining. PixCell's high-fidelity conditional generation enables institutions to use their private data to synthesize highly realistic, site-specific surrogate images that can be shared in place of raw patient data. Furthermore, using datasets of roughly paired H&E-IHC tiles, we learn to translate PixCell's conditioning from H&E to multiple IHC stains, allowing the generation of IHC images from H&E inputs. Our trained models are publicly released to accelerate research in computational pathology.
Authors: Beitao Chen, Xinyu Lyu, Lianli Gao, Jingkuan Song, Heng Tao Shen
Abstract: By incorporating visual inputs, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) extend LLMs to support visual reasoning. However, this integration also introduces new vulnerabilities, making MLLMs susceptible to multimodal jailbreak attacks and hindering their safe deployment.Existing defense methods, including Image-to-Text Translation, Safe Prompting, and Multimodal Safety Tuning, attempt to address this by aligning multimodal inputs with LLMs' built-in safeguards.Yet, they fall short in uncovering root causes of multimodal vulnerabilities, particularly how harmful multimodal tokens trigger jailbreak in MLLMs? Consequently, they remain vulnerable to text-driven multimodal jailbreaks, often exhibiting overdefensive behaviors and imposing heavy training overhead.To bridge this gap, we present an comprehensive analysis of where, how and which harmful multimodal tokens bypass safeguards in MLLMs. Surprisingly, we find that less than 1% tokens in early-middle layers are responsible for inducing unsafe behaviors, highlighting the potential of precisely removing a small subset of harmful tokens, without requiring safety tuning, can still effectively improve safety against jailbreaks. Motivated by this, we propose Safe Prune-then-Restore (SafePTR), an training-free defense framework that selectively prunes harmful tokens at vulnerable layers while restoring benign features at subsequent layers.Without incurring additional computational overhead, SafePTR significantly enhances the safety of MLLMs while preserving efficiency. Extensive evaluations across three MLLMs and five benchmarks demonstrate SafePTR's state-of-the-art performance in mitigating jailbreak risks without compromising utility.
Authors: Akwasi Asare, Mary Sagoe, Justice Williams Asare, Stephen Edward Moore
Abstract: Automated segmentation of diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs) plays a critical role in clinical diagnosis, therapeutic planning, and longitudinal wound monitoring. However, this task remains challenging due to the heterogeneous appearance, irregular morphology, and complex backgrounds associated with ulcer regions in clinical photographs. Traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs), such as U-Net, provide strong localization capabilities but struggle to model long-range spatial dependencies due to their inherently limited receptive fields. To address this, we employ the TransUNet architecture, a hybrid framework that integrates the global attention mechanism of Vision Transformers (ViTs) into the U-Net structure. This combination allows the model to extract global contextual features while maintaining fine-grained spatial resolution. We trained the model on the public Foot Ulcer Segmentation Challenge (FUSeg) dataset using a robust augmentation pipeline and a hybrid loss function to mitigate class imbalance. On the validation set, the model achieved a Dice Similarity Coefficient (F1-score) of 0.8799 using an optimized threshold of 0.4389. To ensure clinical transparency, we integrated Grad-CAM visualizations to highlight model focus areas. Furthermore, a clinical utility analysis demonstrated a strong correlation (Pearson r = 0.9631) between predicted and ground-truth wound areas. These outcomes demonstrate that our approach effectively integrates global and local feature extraction, offering a reliable, effective, and explainable solution for automated foot ulcer assessment.
Authors: Wenxuan Zhang (, Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China), Shuai Li (, Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China), Xinyi Wang (, Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China), Yu Sun (, Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China), Hongyu Kang (, Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China), Pui Yuk Chryste Wan (, Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China), Jing Qin (, the Centre for Smart Health, School of Nursing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China), Yuanpeng Zhang (, the Department of Medical Informatics, Nantong University, Nantong, China), Yong-Ping Zheng (, Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China, , the Research Institute of Smart Ageing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China), Sai-Kit Lam (, Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China, , the Research Institute of Smart Ageing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China)
Abstract: The Circle of Willis (CoW), vital for ensuring consistent blood flow to the brain, is closely linked to ischemic stroke. Accurate assessment of the CoW is important for identifying individuals at risk and guiding appropriate clinical management. Among existing imaging methods, Transcranial Color-coded Doppler (TCCD) offers unique advantages due to its radiation-free nature, affordability, and accessibility. However, reliable TCCD assessments depend heavily on operator expertise for identifying anatomical landmarks and performing accurate angle correction, which limits its widespread adoption. To address this challenge, we propose an AI-powered, real-time CoW auto-segmentation system capable of efficiently capturing cerebral arteries. No prior studies have explored AI-driven cerebrovascular segmentation using TCCD. In this work, we introduce a novel Attention-Augmented Wavelet YOLO (AAW-YOLO) network tailored for TCCD data, designed to provide real-time guidance for brain vessel segmentation in the CoW. We prospectively collected TCCD data comprising 738 annotated frames and 3,419 labeled artery instances to establish a high-quality dataset for model training and evaluation. The proposed AAW-YOLO demonstrated strong performance in segmenting both ipsilateral and contralateral CoW vessels, achieving an average Dice score of 0.901, IoU of 0.823, precision of 0.882, recall of 0.926, and mAP of 0.953, with a per-frame inference speed of 14.199 ms. This system offers a practical solution to reduce reliance on operator experience in TCCD-based cerebrovascular screening, with potential applications in routine clinical workflows and resource-constrained settings. Future research will explore bilateral modeling and larger-scale validation.
Authors: Luu Trong Nhan, Luu Trung Duong, Pham Ngoc Nam, Truong Cong Thang
Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have attracted growing interest in both computational neuroscience and artificial intelligence, primarily due to their inherent energy efficiency and compact memory footprint. However, achieving adversarial robustness in SNNs, (particularly for vision-related tasks) remains a nascent and underexplored challenge. Recent studies have proposed leveraging sparse gradients as a form of regularization to enhance robustness against adversarial perturbations. In this work, we present a surprising finding: under specific architectural configurations, SNNs exhibit natural gradient sparsity and can achieve state-of-the-art adversarial defense performance without the need for any explicit regularization. Further analysis reveals a trade-off between robustness and generalization: while sparse gradients contribute to improved adversarial resilience, they can impair the model's ability to generalize; conversely, denser gradients support better generalization but increase vulnerability to attacks. Our findings offer new insights into the dual role of gradient sparsity in SNN training.
Authors: Amirreza Tanevardi, Pooria Abbas Rad Moghadam, Seyed Mohammad Eshtehardian, Sajjad Amini, Babak Khalaj
Abstract: Diffusion models have emerged as powerful generative priors for solving inverse imaging problems. However, their practical deployment is hindered by the substantial computational cost of slow, multi-step sampling. Although Consistency Models (CMs) address this limitation by enabling high-quality generation in only one or a few steps, their direct application to inverse problems has remained largely unexplored. This paper introduces a modified consistency sampling framework specifically designed for inverse problems. The proposed approach regulates the sampler's stochasticity through a measurement-consistency mechanism that leverages the degradation operator, thereby enforcing fidelity to the observed data while preserving the computational efficiency of consistency-based generation. Comprehensive experiments on the Fashion-MNIST and LSUN Bedroom datasets demonstrate consistent improvements across both perceptual and pixel-level metrics, including the Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID), Kernel Inception Distance (KID), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and structural similarity index measure (SSIM), compared with baseline consistency and diffusion-based sampling methods. The proposed method achieves competitive or superior reconstruction quality with only a small number of sampling steps.
Authors: Duc Kieu, Kien Do, Tuan Hoang, Thao Minh Le, Tung Kieu, Dang Nguyen, Thin Nguyen
Abstract: Multi-domain translation (MDT) aims to learn translations between multiple domains, yet existing approaches either require fully aligned tuples or can only handle domain pairs seen in training, limiting their practicality and excluding many cross-domain mappings. We introduce universal MDT (UMDT), a generalization of MDT that seeks to translate between any pair of $K$ domains using only $K-1$ paired datasets with a central domain. To tackle this problem, we propose Diffusion Router (DR), a unified diffusion-based framework that models all central$\leftrightarrow$non-central translations with a single noise predictor conditioned on the source and target domain labels. DR enables indirect non-central translations by routing through the central domain. We further introduce a novel scalable learning strategy with a variational-bound objective and an efficient Tweedie refinement procedure to support direct non-central mappings. Through evaluation on three large-scale UMDT benchmarks, DR achieves state-of-the-art results for both indirect and direct translations, while lowering sampling cost and unlocking novel tasks such as sketch$\leftrightarrow$segmentation. These results establish DR as a scalable and versatile framework for universal translation across multiple domains.
Authors: Fanfan Liu, Haibo Qiu
Abstract: Million-level token inputs in long-context tasks pose significant computational and memory challenges for Large Language Models (LLMs). Recently, DeepSeek-OCR conducted research into the feasibility of Contexts Optical Compression and achieved preliminary results. Inspired by this, we introduce Context Cascade Compression C3 to explore the upper limits of text compression. Our method cascades two LLMs of different sizes to handle the compression and decoding tasks. Specifically, a small LLM, acting as the first stage, performs text compression by condensing a long context into a set of latent tokens (e.g., 32 or 64 in length), achieving a high ratio of text tokens to latent tokens. A large LLM, as the second stage, then executes the decoding task on this compressed context. Experiments show that at a 20x compression ratio (where the number of text tokens is 20 times the number of latent tokens), our model achieves 98% decoding accuracy, compared to approximately 60% for DeepSeek-OCR. When we further increase the compression ratio to 40x, the accuracy is maintained at around 93%. This indicates that in the domain of context compression, C3 Compression demonstrates superior performance and feasibility over optical character compression. C3 uses a simpler, pure-text pipeline that ignores factors like layout, color, and information loss from a visual encoder. This also suggests a potential upper bound for compression ratios in future work on optical character compression, OCR, and related fields. Codes and model weights are publicly accessible at https://github.com/liufanfanlff/C3-Context-Cascade-Compression
URLs: https://github.com/liufanfanlff/C3-Context-Cascade-Compression
Authors: Xianchao Zeng, Xinyu Zhou, Youcheng Li, Jiayou Shi, Tianle Li, Liangming Chen, Lei Ren, Yong-Lu Li
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently achieved remarkable progress in robotic manipulation, yet they remain limited in failure diagnosis and learning from failures. Additionally, existing failure datasets are mostly generated programmatically in simulation, which limits their generalization to the real world. In light of these, we introduce ViFailback, a framework designed to diagnose robotic manipulation failures and provide both textual and visual correction guidance. Our framework utilizes explicit visual symbols to enhance annotation efficiency. We further release the ViFailback dataset, a large-scale collection of 58,126 Visual Question Answering (VQA) pairs along with their corresponding 5,202 real-world manipulation trajectories. Based on the dataset, we establish ViFailback-Bench, a benchmark of 11 fine-grained VQA tasks designed to assess the failure diagnosis and correction abilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), featuring ViFailback-Bench Lite for closed-ended and ViFailback-Bench Hard for open-ended evaluation. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, we built the ViFailback-8B VLM, which not only achieves significant overall performance improvement on ViFailback-Bench but also generates visual symbols for corrective action guidance. Finally, by integrating ViFailback-8B with a VLA model, we conduct real-world robotic experiments demonstrating its ability to assist the VLA model in recovering from failures. Project Website: https://x1nyuzhou.github.io/vifailback.github.io/
Authors: Yuxuan Mu, Ziyu Zhang, Yi Shi, Minami Matsumoto, Kotaro Imamura, Guy Tevet, Chuan Guo, Michael Taylor, Chang Shu, Pengcheng Xi, Xue Bin Peng
Abstract: Data-driven motion priors that can guide agents toward producing naturalistic behaviors play a pivotal role in creating life-like virtual characters. Adversarial imitation learning has been a highly effective method for learning motion priors from reference motion data. However, adversarial priors, with few exceptions, need to be retrained for each new controller, thereby limiting their reusability and necessitating the retention of the reference motion data when training on downstream tasks. In this work, we present Score-Matching Motion Priors (SMP), which leverages pre-trained motion diffusion models and score distillation sampling (SDS) to create reusable task-agnostic motion priors. SMPs can be pre-trained on a motion dataset, independent of any control policy or task. Once trained, SMPs can be kept frozen and reused as general-purpose reward functions to train policies to produce naturalistic behaviors for downstream tasks. We show that a general motion prior trained on large-scale datasets can be repurposed into a variety of style-specific priors. Furthermore SMP can compose different styles to synthesize new styles not present in the original dataset. Our method produces high-quality motion comparable to state-of-the-art adversarial imitation learning methods through reusable and modular motion priors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SMP across a diverse suite of control tasks with physically simulated humanoid characters. Video demo available at https://youtu.be/ravlZJteS20