Authors: Paul Hueber, Luca Peres, Florian Pitters, Alejandro Gloriani, Oliver Rhodes
Abstract: Eye tracking for wearable systems demands low latency and milliwatt-level power, but conventional frame-based pipelines struggle with motion blur, high compute cost, and limited temporal resolution. Such capabilities are vital for enabling seamless and responsive interaction in emerging technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), where understanding user gaze is key to immersion and interface design. Neuromorphic sensors and spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising alternative, yet existing SNN approaches are either too specialized or fall short of the performance of modern ANN architectures. This paper presents a neuromorphic version of top-performing event-based eye-tracking models, replacing their recurrent and attention modules with lightweight LIF layers and exploiting depth-wise separable convolutions to reduce model complexity. Our models obtain 3.7-4.1px mean error, approaching the accuracy of the application-specific neuromorphic system, Retina (3.24px), while reducing model size by 20x and theoretical compute by 850x, compared to the closest ANN variant of the proposed model. These efficient variants are projected to operate at an estimated 3.9-4.9 mW with 3 ms latency at 1 kHz. The present results indicate that high-performing event-based eye-tracking architectures can be redesigned as SNNs with substantial efficiency gains, while retaining accuracy suitable for real-time wearable deployment.
Authors: Woojin Lee, Hyugjae Chang, Jaeho Moon, Jaehyup Lee, Munchurl Kim
Abstract: Weakly supervised oriented object detection (WS-OOD) has gained attention as a cost-effective alternative to fully supervised methods, providing both efficiency and high accuracy. Among weakly supervised approaches, horizontal bounding box (HBox)-supervised OOD stands out for its ability to directly leverage existing HBox annotations while achieving the highest accuracy under weak supervision settings. This paper introduces adaptive bounding box scaling and symmetry-prior-based orientation prediction, called ABBSPO, a framework for WS-OOD. Our ABBSPO addresses limitations of previous HBox-supervised OOD methods, which compare ground truth (GT) HBoxes directly with the minimum circumscribed rectangles of predicted RBoxes, often leading to inaccurate scale estimation. To overcome this, we propose: (i) Adaptive Bounding Box Scaling (ABBS), which appropriately scales GT HBoxes to optimize for the size of each predicted RBox, ensuring more accurate scale prediction; and (ii) a Symmetric Prior Angle (SPA) loss that exploits inherent symmetry of aerial objects for self-supervised learning, resolving issues in previous methods where learning collapses when predictions for all three augmented views (original, rotated, and flipped) are consistently incorrect. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that ABBSPO achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing methods.
Authors: Jia Cheng Hu, Roberto Cavicchioli, Alessandro Capotondi
Abstract: Diffusion Denoising models demonstrated impressive results across generative Computer Vision tasks, but they still fail to outperform standard autoregressive solutions in the discrete domain, and only match them at best. In this work, we propose a different paradigm by adopting diffusion models to provide suggestions to the autoregressive generation rather than replacing them. By doing so, we combine the bidirectional and refining capabilities of the former with the strong linguistic structure provided by the latter. To showcase its effectiveness, we present Show, Suggest and Tell (SST), which achieves State-of-the-Art results on COCO, among models in a similar setting. In particular, SST achieves 125.1 CIDEr-D on the COCO dataset without Reinforcement Learning, outperforming both autoregressive and diffusion model State-of-the-Art results by 1.5 and 2.5 points. On top of the strong results, we performed extensive experiments to validate the proposal and analyze the impact of the suggestion module. Results demonstrate a positive correlation between suggestion and caption quality, overall indicating a currently underexplored but promising research direction. Code will be available at: https://github.com/jchenghu/show\_suggest\_tell.
Authors: Yihao Liu, Chenyu Gao, Lianrui Zuo, Michael E. Kim, Brian D. Boyd, Lisa L. Barnes, Walter A. Kukull, Lori L. Beason-Held, Susan M. Resnick, Timothy J. Hohman, Warren D. Taylor, Bennett A. Landman
Abstract: Modern deep learning methods have achieved impressive results across tasks from disease classification, estimating continuous biomarkers, to generating realistic medical images. Most of these approaches are trained to model conditional distributions defined by a specific predictive direction with a specific set of input variables. We introduce MetaVoxel, a generative joint diffusion modeling framework that models the joint distribution over imaging data and clinical metadata by learning a single diffusion process spanning all variables. By capturing the joint distribution, MetaVoxel unifies tasks that traditionally require separate conditional models and supports flexible zero-shot inference using arbitrary subsets of inputs without task-specific retraining. Using more than 10,000 T1-weighted MRI scans paired with clinical metadata from nine datasets, we show that a single MetaVoxel model can perform image generation, age estimation, and sex prediction, achieving performance comparable to established task-specific baselines. Additional experiments highlight its capabilities for flexible inference.Together, these findings demonstrate that joint multimodal diffusion offers a promising direction for unifying medical AI models and enabling broader clinical applicability.
Authors: Jiahao Liu
Abstract: Large-scale Vision-Language models have achieved remarkable results in various domains, such as image captioning and conditioned image generation. Neverthe- less, these models still encounter difficulties in achieving human-like composi- tional generalization. In this study, we propose a new method called Independent Density Estimation (IDE) to tackle this challenge. IDE aims to learn the connec- tion between individual words in a sentence and the corresponding features in an image, enabling compositional generalization. We build two models based on the philosophy of IDE. The first one utilizes fully disentangled visual representations as input, and the second leverages a Variational Auto-Encoder to obtain partially disentangled features from raw images. Additionally, we propose an entropy- based compositional inference method to combine predictions of each word in the sentence. Our models exhibit superior generalization to unseen compositions compared to current models when evaluated on various datasets.
Authors: Jiachen Tao, Junyi Wu, Haoxuan Wang, Zongxin Yang, Dawen Cai, Yan Yan
Abstract: We present TraceFlow, a novel framework for high-fidelity rendering of dynamic specular scenes by addressing two key challenges: precise reflection direction estimation and physically accurate reflection modeling. To achieve this, we propose a Residual Material-Augmented 2D Gaussian Splatting representation that models dynamic geometry and material properties, allowing accurate reflection ray computation. Furthermore, we introduce a Dynamic Environment Gaussian and a hybrid rendering pipeline that decomposes rendering into diffuse and specular components, enabling physically grounded specular synthesis via rasterization and ray tracing. Finally, we devise a coarse-to-fine training strategy to improve optimization stability and promote physically meaningful decomposition. Extensive experiments on dynamic scene benchmarks demonstrate that TraceFlow outperforms prior methods both quantitatively and qualitatively, producing sharper and more realistic specular reflections in complex dynamic environments.
Authors: Neelima Prasad, Jarek Reynolds, Neel Karsanbhai, Tanusree Sharma, Lotus Zhang, Abigale Stangl, Yang Wang, Leah Findlater, Danna Gurari
Abstract: We propose a novel task, hierarchical instance tracking, which entails tracking all instances of predefined categories of objects and parts, while maintaining their hierarchical relationships. We introduce the first benchmark dataset supporting this task, consisting of 2,765 unique entities that are tracked in 552 videos and belong to 40 categories (across objects and parts). Evaluation of seven variants of four models tailored to our novel task reveals the new dataset is challenging. Our dataset is available at https://vizwiz.org/tasks-and-datasets/hierarchical-instance-tracking/
URLs: https://vizwiz.org/tasks-and-datasets/hierarchical-instance-tracking/
Authors: Charles Fanning, Mehmet Emin Aktas
Abstract: Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women and a leading cause of cancer death worldwide. Screening mammography reduces mortality, yet interpretation still suffers from substantial false negatives and false positives, and model accuracy often degrades when deployed across scanners, modalities, and patient populations. We propose a simple conditioning signal aimed at improving external performance based on a wavelet based vectorization of persistent homology. Using topological data analysis, we summarize image structure that persists across intensity thresholds and convert this information into spatial, multi scale maps that are provably stable to small intensity perturbations. These maps are integrated into a two stage detection pipeline through input level channel concatenation. The model is trained and validated on the CBIS DDSM digitized film mammography cohort from the United States and evaluated on two independent full field digital mammography cohorts from Portugal (INbreast) and China (CMMD), with performance reported at the patient level. On INbreast, augmenting ConvNeXt Tiny with wavelet persistence channels increases patient level AUC from 0.55 to 0.75 under a limited training budget.
Authors: Md Eimran Hossain Eimon, Juan Merlos, Ashan Perera, Hari Kalva, Velibor Adzic, Borko Furht
Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) drive modern machine vision but are challenging to deploy on edge devices due to high compute demands. Traditional approaches-running the full model on-device or offloading to the cloud face trade-offs in latency, bandwidth, and privacy. Splitting the inference workload between the edge and the cloud offers a balanced solution, but transmitting intermediate features to enable such splitting introduces new bandwidth challenges. To address this, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) initiated the Feature Coding for Machines (FCM) standard, establishing a bitstream syntax and codec pipeline tailored for compressing intermediate features. This paper presents the design and performance of the Feature Coding Test Model (FCTM), showing significant bitrate reductions-averaging 85.14%-across multiple vision tasks while preserving accuracy. FCM offers a scalable path for efficient and interoperable deployment of intelligent features in bandwidth-limited and privacy-sensitive consumer applications.
Authors: Shuhan Tan, Kashyap Chitta, Yuxiao Chen, Ran Tian, Yurong You, Yan Wang, Wenjie Luo, Yulong Cao, Philipp Krahenbuhl, Marco Pavone, Boris Ivanovic
Abstract: Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for autonomous driving explore inference-time reasoning as a way to improve driving performance and safety in challenging scenarios. Most prior work uses natural language to express chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning before producing driving actions. However, text may not be the most efficient representation for reasoning. In this work, we present Latent-CoT-Drive (LCDrive): a model that expresses CoT in a latent language that captures possible outcomes of the driving actions being considered. Our approach unifies CoT reasoning and decision making by representing both in an action-aligned latent space. Instead of natural language, the model reasons by interleaving (1) action-proposal tokens, which use the same vocabulary as the model's output actions; and (2) world model tokens, which are grounded in a learned latent world model and express future outcomes of these actions. We cold start latent CoT by supervising the model's action proposals and world model tokens based on ground-truth future rollouts of the scene. We then post-train with closed-loop reinforcement learning to strengthen reasoning capabilities. On a large-scale end-to-end driving benchmark, LCDrive achieves faster inference, better trajectory quality, and larger improvements from interactive reinforcement learning compared to both non-reasoning and text-reasoning baselines.
Authors: Md Eimran Hossain Eimon, Velibor Adzic, Hari Kalva, Borko Furht
Abstract: Machines are increasingly becoming the primary consumers of visual data, yet most deployments of machine-to-machine systems still rely on remote inference where pixel-based video is streamed using codecs optimized for human perception. Consequently, this paradigm is bandwidth intensive, scales poorly, and exposes raw images to third parties. Recent efforts in the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) redesigned the pipeline for machine-to-machine communication: Video Coding for Machines (VCM) is designed to apply task-aware coding tools in the pixel domain, and Feature Coding for Machines (FCM) is designed to compress intermediate neural features to reduce bitrate, preserve privacy, and support compute offload. Experiments show that FCM is capable of maintaining accuracy close to edge inference while significantly reducing bitrate. Additional analysis of H.26X codecs used as inner codecs in FCM reveals that H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC) achieve almost identical machine task performance, with an average BD-Rate increase of 1.39% when VVC is replaced with HEVC. In contrast, H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC) yields an average BD-Rate increase of 32.28% compared to VVC. However, for the tracking task, the impact of codec choice is minimal, with HEVC outperforming VVC and achieving BD Rate of -1.81% and 8.79% for AVC, indicating that existing hardware for already deployed codecs can support machine-to-machine communication without degrading performance.
Authors: Jiho Jang, Jinyoung Kim, Kyungjune Baek, Nojun Kwak
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback has emerged as a standard for aligning diffusion models. However, we identify a fundamental limitation in the standard DPO formulation because it relies on the Bradley-Terry model to aggregate diverse evaluation axes like aesthetic quality and semantic alignment into a single scalar reward. This aggregation creates a reward conflict where the model is forced to unlearn desirable features of a specific dimension if they appear in a globally non-preferred sample. To address this issue, we propose Multi Reward Conditional DPO (MCDPO). This method resolves reward conflicts by introducing a disentangled Bradley-Terry objective. MCDPO explicitly injects a preference outcome vector as a condition during training, which allows the model to learn the correct optimization direction for each reward axis independently within a single network. We further introduce dimensional reward dropout to ensure balanced optimization across dimensions. Extensive experiments on Stable Diffusion 1.5 and SDXL demonstrate that MCDPO achieves superior performance on benchmarks. Notably, our conditional framework enables dynamic and multiple-axis control at inference time using Classifier Free Guidance to amplify specific reward dimensions without additional training or external reward models.
Authors: Tian Liu, Anwesha Basu, James Caverlee, Shu Kong
Abstract: Semi-supervised few-shot learning (SSFSL) formulates real-world applications like ''auto-annotation'', as it aims to learn a model over a few labeled and abundant unlabeled examples to annotate the unlabeled ones. Despite the availability of powerful open-source Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and their pretraining data, the SSFSL literature largely neglects these open-source resources. In contrast, the related area few-shot learning (FSL) has already exploited them to boost performance. Arguably, to achieve auto-annotation in the real world, SSFSL should leverage such open-source resources. To this end, we start by applying established SSL methods to finetune a VLM. Counterintuitively, they significantly underperform FSL baselines. Our in-depth analysis reveals the root cause: VLMs produce rather ''flat'' distributions of softmax probabilities. This results in zero utilization of unlabeled data and weak supervision signals. We address this issue with embarrassingly simple techniques: classifier initialization and temperature tuning. They jointly increase the confidence scores of pseudo-labels, improving the utilization rate of unlabeled data, and strengthening supervision signals. Building on this, we propose: Stage-Wise Finetuning with Temperature Tuning (SWIFT), which enables existing SSL methods to effectively finetune a VLM on limited labeled data, abundant unlabeled data, and task-relevant but noisy data retrieved from the VLM's pretraining set. Extensive experiments on five SSFSL benchmarks show that SWIFT outperforms recent FSL and SSL methods by $\sim$5 accuracy points. SWIFT even rivals supervised learning, which finetunes VLMs with the unlabeled data being labeled with ground truth!
Authors: Zhuo Wang, Xiliang Liu, Ligang Sun
Abstract: The proliferation of AI-generated video technologies poses challenges to information integrity. While recent benchmarks advance AIGC video detection, they overlook a critical factor: many state-of-the-art generative models embed digital watermarks in outputs, and detectors may partially rely on these patterns. To evaluate this influence, we present RobustSora, the benchmark designed to assess watermark robustness in AIGC video detection. We systematically construct a dataset of 6,500 videos comprising four types: Authentic-Clean (A-C), Authentic-Spoofed with fake watermarks (A-S), Generated-Watermarked (G-W), and Generated-DeWatermarked (G-DeW). Our benchmark introduces two evaluation tasks: Task-I tests performance on watermark-removed AI videos, while Task-II assesses false alarm rates on authentic videos with fake watermarks. Experiments with ten models spanning specialized AIGC detectors, transformer architectures, and MLLM approaches reveal performance variations of 2-8pp under watermark manipulation. Transformer-based models show consistent moderate dependency (6-8pp), while MLLMs exhibit diverse patterns (2-8pp). These findings indicate partial watermark dependency and highlight the need for watermark-aware training strategies. RobustSora provides essential tools to advance robust AIGC detection research.
Authors: Eunho Lee, Chaehyeon Song, Seunghoon Jeong, Ayoung Kim
Abstract: Category-level object pose estimation requires both global context and local structure to ensure robustness against intra-class variations. However, 3D graph convolution (3D-GC) methods only focus on local geometry and depth information, making them vulnerable to complex objects and visual ambiguities. To address this, we present THE-Pose, a novel category-level 6D pose estimation framework that leverages a topological prior via surface embedding and hybrid graph fusion. Specifically, we extract consistent and invariant topological features from the image domain, effectively overcoming the limitations inherent in existing 3D-GC based methods. Our Hybrid Graph Fusion (HGF) module adaptively integrates the topological features with point-cloud features, seamlessly bridging 2D image context and 3D geometric structure. These fused features ensure stability for unseen or complicated objects, even under significant occlusions. Extensive experiments on the REAL275 dataset show that THE-Pose achieves a 35.8% improvement over the 3D-GC baseline (HS-Pose) and surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by 7.2% across all key metrics. The code is avaialbe on https://github.com/EHxxx/THE-Pose
Authors: Rui Wang, Yimu Sun, Jingxing Guo, Huisi Wu, Jing Qin
Abstract: Accurate segmentation of cardiac chambers in echocardiography sequences is crucial for the quantitative analysis of cardiac function, aiding in clinical diagnosis and treatment. The imaging noise, artifacts, and the deformation and motion of the heart pose challenges to segmentation algorithms. While existing methods based on convolutional neural networks, Transformers, and space-time memory networks have improved segmentation accuracy, they often struggle with the trade-off between capturing long-range spatiotemporal dependencies and maintaining computational efficiency with fine-grained feature representation. In this paper, we introduce GDKVM, a novel architecture for echocardiography video segmentation. The model employs Linear Key-Value Association (LKVA) to effectively model inter-frame correlations, and introduces Gated Delta Rule (GDR) to efficiently store intermediate memory states. Key-Pixel Feature Fusion (KPFF) module is designed to integrate local and global features at multiple scales, enhancing robustness against boundary blurring and noise interference. We validated GDKVM on two mainstream echocardiography video datasets (CAMUS and EchoNet-Dynamic) and compared it with various state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results show that GDKVM outperforms existing approaches in terms of segmentation accuracy and robustness, while ensuring real-time performance. Code is available at https://github.com/wangrui2025/GDKVM.
Authors: Yuetong Su, Baoguo Wei, Xinyu Wang, Xu Li, Lixin Li
Abstract: Novel Class Discovery aims to utilise prior knowledge of known classes to classify and discover unknown classes from unlabelled data. Existing NCD methods for images primarily rely on visual features, which suffer from limitations such as insufficient feature discriminability and the long-tail distribution of data. We propose LLM-NCD, a multimodal framework that breaks this bottleneck by fusing visual-textual semantics and prototype guided clustering. Our key innovation lies in modelling cluster centres and semantic prototypes of known classes by jointly optimising known class image and text features, and a dualphase discovery mechanism that dynamically separates known or novel samples via semantic affinity thresholds and adaptive clustering. Experiments on the CIFAR-100 dataset show that compared to the current methods, this method achieves up to 25.3% improvement in accuracy for unknown classes. Notably, our method shows unique resilience to long tail distributions, a first in NCD literature.
Authors: Chen Ziwen, Hao Tan, Peng Wang, Zexiang Xu, Li Fuxin
Abstract: Recent advances in generalizable Gaussian splatting (GS) have enabled feed-forward reconstruction of scenes from tens of input views. Long-LRM notably scales this paradigm to 32 input images at $950\times540$ resolution, achieving 360{\deg} scene-level reconstruction in a single forward pass. However, directly predicting millions of Gaussian parameters at once remains highly error-sensitive: small inaccuracies in positions or other attributes lead to noticeable blurring, particularly in fine structures such as text. In parallel, implicit representation methods such as LVSM and LaCT have demonstrated significantly higher rendering fidelity by compressing scene information into model weights rather than explicit Gaussians, and decoding RGB frames using the full transformer or TTT backbone. However, this computationally intensive decompression process for every rendered frame makes real-time rendering infeasible. These observations raise key questions: Is the deep, sequential "decompression" process necessary? Can we retain the benefits of implicit representations while enabling real-time performance? We address these questions with Long-LRM++, a model that adopts a semi-explicit scene representation combined with a lightweight decoder. Long-LRM++ matches the rendering quality of LaCT on DL3DV while achieving real-time 14 FPS rendering on an A100 GPU, overcoming the speed limitations of prior implicit methods. Our design also scales to 64 input views at the $950\times540$ resolution, demonstrating strong generalization to increased input lengths. Additionally, Long-LRM++ delivers superior novel-view depth prediction on ScanNetv2 compared to direct depth rendering from Gaussians. Extensive ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each component in the proposed framework.
Authors: Hongsin Lee, Hye Won Chung
Abstract: Adversarial distillation in the standard min-max adversarial training framework aims to transfer adversarial robustness from a large, robust teacher network to a compact student. However, existing work often neglects to incorporate state-of-the-art robust teachers. Through extensive analysis, we find that stronger teachers do not necessarily yield more robust students-a phenomenon known as robust saturation. While typically attributed to capacity gaps, we show that such explanations are incomplete. Instead, we identify adversarial transferability-the fraction of student-crafted adversarial examples that remain effective against the teacher-as a key factor in successful robustness transfer. Based on this insight, we propose Sample-wise Adaptive Adversarial Distillation (SAAD), which reweights training examples by their measured transferability without incurring additional computational cost. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet show that SAAD consistently improves AutoAttack robustness over prior methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/HongsinLee/saad.
Authors: Yixin Wan, Lei Ke, Wenhao Yu, Kai-Wei Chang, Dong Yu
Abstract: We introduce MotionEdit, a novel dataset for motion-centric image editing-the task of modifying subject actions and interactions while preserving identity, structure, and physical plausibility. Unlike existing image editing datasets that focus on static appearance changes or contain only sparse, low-quality motion edits, MotionEdit provides high-fidelity image pairs depicting realistic motion transformations extracted and verified from continuous videos. This new task is not only scientifically challenging but also practically significant, powering downstream applications such as frame-controlled video synthesis and animation. To evaluate model performance on the novel task, we introduce MotionEdit-Bench, a benchmark that challenges models on motion-centric edits and measures model performance with generative, discriminative, and preference-based metrics. Benchmark results reveal that motion editing remains highly challenging for existing state-of-the-art diffusion-based editing models. To address this gap, we propose MotionNFT (Motion-guided Negative-aware Fine Tuning), a post-training framework that computes motion alignment rewards based on how well the motion flow between input and model-edited images matches the ground-truth motion, guiding models toward accurate motion transformations. Extensive experiments on FLUX.1 Kontext and Qwen-Image-Edit show that MotionNFT consistently improves editing quality and motion fidelity of both base models on the motion editing task without sacrificing general editing ability, demonstrating its effectiveness.
Authors: Xiaoxue Wu, Xinyuan Chen, Yaohui Wang, Yu Qiao
Abstract: Shot transitions play a pivotal role in multi-shot video generation, as they determine the overall narrative expression and the directorial design of visual storytelling. However, recent progress has primarily focused on low-level visual consistency across shots, neglecting how transitions are designed and how cinematographic language contributes to coherent narrative expression. This often leads to mere sequential shot changes without intentional film-editing patterns. To address this limitation, we propose ShotDirector, an efficient framework that integrates parameter-level camera control and hierarchical editing-pattern-aware prompting. Specifically, we adopt a camera control module that incorporates 6-DoF poses and intrinsic settings to enable precise camera information injection. In addition, a shot-aware mask mechanism is employed to introduce hierarchical prompts aware of professional editing patterns, allowing fine-grained control over shot content. Through this design, our framework effectively combines parameter-level conditions with high-level semantic guidance, achieving film-like controllable shot transitions. To facilitate training and evaluation, we construct ShotWeaver40K, a dataset that captures the priors of film-like editing patterns, and develop a set of evaluation metrics for controllable multi-shot video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.
Authors: Karthikeya KV, Narendra Bandaru
Abstract: We introduce Disentangled360, an innovative 3D-aware technology that integrates the advantages of direction disentangled volume rendering with single-image 360{\deg} unique view synthesis for applications in medical imaging and natural scene reconstruction. In contrast to current techniques that either oversimplify anisotropic light behavior or lack generalizability across various contexts, our framework distinctly differentiates between isotropic and anisotropic contributions inside a Gaussian Splatting backbone. We implement a dual-branch conditioning framework, one optimized for CT intensity driven scattering in volumetric data and the other for real-world RGB scenes through normalized camera embeddings. To address scale ambiguity and maintain structural realism, we present a hybrid pose agnostic anchoring method that adaptively samples scene depth and material transitions, functioning as stable pivots during scene distillation. Our design integrates preoperative radiography simulation and consumer-grade 360{\deg} rendering into a singular inference pipeline, facilitating rapid, photorealistic view synthesis with inherent directionality. Evaluations on the Mip-NeRF 360, RealEstate10K, and DeepDRR datasets indicate superior SSIM and LPIPS performance, while runtime assessments confirm its viability for interactive applications. Disentangled360 facilitates mixed-reality medical supervision, robotic perception, and immersive content creation, eliminating the necessity for scene-specific finetuning or expensive photon simulations.
Authors: Duo Zheng, Shijia Huang, Yanyang Li, Liwei Wang
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising potential in Vision-Language Navigation (VLN). However, their practical development is severely hindered by the substantial training overhead. We recognize two key issues that contribute to the overhead: (1) the quadratic computational burden from processing long-horizon historical observations as massive sequences of tokens, and (2) the exploration-efficiency trade-off in DAgger, i.e., a data aggregation process of collecting agent-explored trajectories. While more exploration yields effective error-recovery trajectories for handling test-time distribution shifts, it comes at the cost of longer trajectory lengths for both training and inference. To address these challenges, we propose Efficient-VLN, a training-efficient VLN model. Specifically, to mitigate the token processing burden, we design two efficient memory mechanisms: a progressive memory that dynamically allocates more tokens to recent observations, and a learnable recursive memory that utilizes the key-value cache of learnable tokens as the memory state. Moreover, we introduce a dynamic mixed policy to balance the exploration-efficiency trade-off. Extensive experiments show that Efficient-VLN achieves state-of-the-art performance on R2R-CE (64.2% SR) and RxR-CE (67.0% SR). Critically, our model consumes merely 282 H800 GPU hours, demonstrating a dramatic reduction in training overhead compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Anh M. Vu (equal contribution), Khang P. Le (equal contribution), Trang T. K. Vo (equal contribution), Ha Thach, Huy Hung Nguyen, David Yang, Han H. Huynh, Quynh Nguyen, Tuan M. Pham, Tuan-Anh Le, Minh H. N. Le, Thanh-Huy Nguyen, Akash Awasthi, Chandra Mohan, Zhu Han, Hien Van Nguyen
Abstract: Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) in histopathology seeks to reduce annotation cost by learning from image-level labels, yet it remains limited by inter-class homogeneity, intra-class heterogeneity, and the region-shrinkage effect of CAM-based supervision. We propose a simple and effective prototype-driven framework that leverages vision-language alignment to improve region discovery under weak supervision. Our method integrates CoOp-style learnable prompt tuning to generate text-based prototypes and combines them with learnable image prototypes, forming a dual-modal prototype bank that captures both semantic and appearance cues. To address oversmoothing in ViT representations, we incorporate a multi-scale pyramid module that enhances spatial precision and improves localization quality. Experiments on the BCSS-WSSS benchmark show that our approach surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods, and detailed analyses demonstrate the benefits of text description diversity, context length, and the complementary behavior of text and image prototypes. These results highlight the effectiveness of jointly leveraging textual semantics and visual prototype learning for WSSS in digital pathology.
Authors: Khang Le (equal contribution), Ha Thach (equal contribution), Anh M. Vu (equal contribution), Trang T. K. Vo, Han H. Huynh, David Yang, Minh H. N. Le, Thanh-Huy Nguyen, Akash Awasthi, Chandra Mohan, Zhu Han, Hien Van Nguyen
Abstract: Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) in histopathology relies heavily on classification backbones, yet these models often localize only the most discriminative regions and struggle to capture the full spatial extent of tissue structures. Vision-language models such as CONCH offer rich semantic alignment and morphology-aware representations, while modern segmentation backbones like SegFormer preserve fine-grained spatial cues. However, combining these complementary strengths remains challenging, especially under weak supervision and without dense annotations. We propose a prototype learning framework for WSSS in histopathological images that integrates morphology-aware representations from CONCH, multi-scale structural cues from SegFormer, and text-guided semantic alignment to produce prototypes that are simultaneously semantically discriminative and spatially coherent. To effectively leverage these heterogeneous sources, we introduce text-guided prototype initialization that incorporates pathology descriptions to generate more complete and semantically accurate pseudo-masks. A structural distillation mechanism transfers spatial knowledge from SegFormer to preserve fine-grained morphological patterns and local tissue boundaries during prototype learning. Our approach produces high-quality pseudo masks without pixel-level annotations, improves localization completeness, and enhances semantic consistency across tissue types. Experiments on BCSS-WSSS datasets demonstrate that our prototype learning framework outperforms existing WSSS methods while remaining computationally efficient through frozen foundation model backbones and lightweight trainable adapters.
Authors: Hyunsoo Lee, Daeum Jeon, Hyeokjae Oh
Abstract: We propose a novel generative approach for 3D human pose estimation. 3D human pose estimation poses several key challenges due to the complex geometry of the human body, self-occluding joints, and the requirement for large-scale real-world motion datasets. To address these challenges, we introduce Point2Pose, a framework that effectively models the distribution of human poses conditioned on sequential point cloud and pose history. Specifically, we employ a spatio-temporal point cloud encoder and a pose feature encoder to extract joint-wise features, followed by an attention-based generative regressor. Additionally, we present a large-scale indoor dataset MVPose3D, which contains multiple modalities, including IMU data of non-trivial human motions, dense multi-view point clouds, and RGB images. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline models, demonstrating its superior performance across various datasets.
Authors: Chao Gong, Depeng Wang, Zhipeng Wei, Ya Guo, Huijia Zhu, Jingjing Chen
Abstract: Audio-Visual Large Language Models (AV-LLMs) face prohibitive computational overhead from massive audio and video tokens. Token reduction, while extensively explored for video-only LLMs, is insufficient for the audio-visual domain, as these unimodal methods cannot leverage audio-visual cross-modal synergies. Furthermore, the distinct and dynamic information densities of audio and video render static budgets per modality suboptimal. How to perform token reduction on a joint audio-visual stream thus remains an unaddressed bottleneck. To fill this gap, we introduce EchoingPixels, a framework inspired by the coexistence and interaction of visuals and sound in real-world scenes. The core of our framework is the Cross-Modal Semantic Sieve (CS2), a module enabling early audio-visual interaction. Instead of compressing modalities independently, CS2 co-attends to the joint multimodal stream and reduces tokens from an entire combined pool of audio-visual tokens rather than using fixed budgets per modality. This single-pool approach allows it to adaptively allocate the token budget across both modalities and dynamically identify salient tokens in concert. To ensure this aggressive reduction preserves the vital temporal modeling capability, we co-design a Synchronization-Augmented RoPE (Sync-RoPE) to maintain critical temporal relationships for the sparsely selected tokens. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EchoingPixels achieves performance comparable to strong baselines using only 5-20% of the original tokens, with a 2-3x speedup and memory reduction.
Authors: Jiawen Li, Jiali Hu, Xitong Ling, Yongqiang Lv, Yuxuan Chen, Yizhi Wang, Tian Guan, Yifei Liu, Yonghong He
Abstract: Foundation models trained with self-supervised learning (SSL) on large-scale histological images have significantly accelerated the development of computational pathology. These models can serve as backbones for region-of-interest (ROI) image analysis or patch-level feature extractors in whole-slide images (WSIs) based on multiple instance learning (MIL). Existing pathology foundation models (PFMs) are typically pre-trained on Hematoxylin-Eosin (H&E) stained pathology images. However, images with special stains, such as immunohistochemistry, are also frequently used in clinical practice. PFMs pre-trained mainly on H\&E-stained images may be limited in clinical applications involving special stains. To address this issue, we propose StainNet, a specialized foundation model for special stains based on the vision transformer (ViT) architecture. StainNet adopts a self-distillation SSL approach and is trained on over 1.4 million patch images cropping from 20,231 publicly available special staining WSIs in the HISTAI database. To evaluate StainNet, we conduct experiments on an in-house slide-level liver malignancy classification task and two public ROI-level datasets to demonstrate its strong ability. We also perform few-ratio learning and retrieval evaluations, and compare StainNet with recently larger PFMs to further highlight its strengths. We have released the StainNet model weights at: https://huggingface.co/JWonderLand/StainNet.
Authors: Cai Xu, Jinlong Liu, Yilin Zhang, Ziyu Guan, Wei Zhao
Abstract: Incomplete multi-view data, where different views suffer from missing and unbalanced observations, pose significant challenges for clustering. Existing imputation-based methods attempt to estimate missing views to restore data associations, but indiscriminate imputation often introduces noise and bias, especially when the available information is insufficient. Imputation-free methods avoid this risk by relying solely on observed data, but struggle under severe incompleteness due to the lack of cross-view complementarity. To address this issue, we propose Informativeness-based Selective imputation Multi-View Clustering (ISMVC). Our method evaluates the imputation-relevant informativeness of each missing position based on intra-view similarity and cross-view consistency, and selectively imputes only when sufficient support is available. Furthermore, we integrate this selection with a variational autoencoder equipped with a mixture-of-Gaussians prior to learn clustering-friendly latent representations. By performing distribution-level imputation, ISMVC not only stabilizes the aggregation of posterior distributions but also explicitly models imputation uncertainty, enabling robust fusion and preventing overconfident reconstructions. Compared with existing cautious imputation strategies that depend on training dynamics or model feedback, our method is lightweight, data-driven, and model-agnostic. It can be readily integrated into existing IMC models as a plug-in module. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets under a more realistic and challenging unbalanced missing scenario demonstrate that our method outperforms both imputation-based and imputation-free approaches.
Authors: Yi Liu, Yichi Zhang
Abstract: Thin and elongated filamentous structures, such as microtubules and actin filaments, often play important roles in biological systems. Segmenting these filaments in biological images is a fundamental step for quantitative analysis. Recent advances in deep learning have significantly improved the performance of filament segmentation. However, there is a big challenge in acquiring high quality pixel-level annotated dataset for filamentous structures, as the dense distribution and geometric properties of filaments making manual annotation extremely laborious and time-consuming. To address the data shortage problem, we propose a conditional generative framework based on the Pix2Pix architecture to generate realistic filaments in microscopy images from binary masks. We also propose a filament-aware structural loss to improve the structure similarity when generating synthetic images. Our experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach and outperformed existing model trained without synthetic data.
Authors: Yi-Cheng Liao, Shyang-En Weng, Yu-Syuan Xu, Chi-Wei Hsiao, Wei-Chen Chiu, Ching-Chun Huang
Abstract: Real-World Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR) aims to recover high-quality images from low-quality inputs degraded by unknown and complex real-world factors. Real-world scenarios involve diverse and coupled degradations, making it necessary to provide diffusion models with richer and more informative guidance. However, existing methods often assume known degradation severity and rely on CLIP text encoders that cannot capture numerical severity, limiting their generalization ability. To address this, we propose \textbf{HD-CLIP} (\textbf{H}ierarchical \textbf{D}egradation CLIP), which decomposes a low-quality image into a semantic embedding and an ordinal degradation embedding that captures ordered relationships and allows interpolation across unseen levels. Furthermore, we integrated it into diffusion models via classifier-free guidance (CFG) and proposed classifier-free projection guidance (CFPG). HD-CLIP leverages semantic cues to guide generative restoration while using degradation cues to suppress undesired hallucinations and artifacts. As a \textbf{plug-and-play module}, HD-CLIP can be seamlessly integrated into various super-resolution frameworks without training, significantly improving detail fidelity and perceptual realism across diverse real-world datasets.
Authors: Shresth Grover, Priyank Pathak, Akash Kumar, Vibhav Vineet, Yogesh S Rawat
Abstract: Large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit impressive complex reasoning capabilities but remain largely unexplored in visual sequential planning, i.e., executing multi-step actions towards a goal. Additionally, practical sequential planning often involves non-optimal (erroneous) steps, challenging VLMs to detect and correct such steps. We propose Corrective Sequential Planning Benchmark (CoSPlan) to evaluate VLMs in error-prone, vision-based sequential planning tasks across 4 domains: maze navigation, block rearrangement, image reconstruction,and object reorganization. CoSPlan assesses two key abilities: Error Detection (identifying non-optimal action) and Step Completion (correcting and completing action sequences to reach the goal). Despite using state-of-the-art reasoning techniques such as Chain-of-Thought and Scene Graphs, VLMs (e.g. Intern-VLM and Qwen2) struggle on CoSPlan, failing to leverage contextual cues to reach goals. Addressing this, we propose a novel training-free method, Scene Graph Incremental updates (SGI), which introduces intermediate reasoning steps between the initial and goal states. SGI helps VLMs reason about sequences, yielding an average performance gain of 5.2%. In addition to enhancing reliability in corrective sequential planning, SGI generalizes to traditional planning tasks such as Plan-Bench and VQA.
Authors: Keyi Chen, Mingze Sun, Zhenyu Liu, Zhangquan Chen, Ruqi Huang
Abstract: Motion generation is fundamental to computer animation and widely used across entertainment, robotics, and virtual environments. While recent methods achieve impressive results, most rely on fixed skeletal templates, which prevent them from generalizing to skeletons with different or perturbed topologies. We address the core limitation of current motion generation methods - the combined lack of large-scale heterogeneous animal motion data and unified generative frameworks capable of jointly modeling arbitrary skeletal topologies and textual conditions. To this end, we introduce OmniZoo, a large-scale animal motion dataset spanning 140 species and 32,979 sequences, enriched with multimodal annotations. Building on OmniZoo, we propose a generalized autoregressive motion generation framework capable of producing text-driven motions for arbitrary skeletal topologies. Central to our model is a Topology-aware Skeleton Embedding Module that encodes geometric and structural properties of any skeleton into a shared token space, enabling seamless fusion with textual semantics. Given a text prompt and a target skeleton, our method generates temporally coherent, physically plausible, and semantically aligned motions, and further enables cross-species motion style transfer.
Authors: Yiheng Lyu, Lian Xu, Mohammed Bennamoun, Farid Boussaid, Coen Arrow, Girish Dwivedi
Abstract: Weakly supervised semantic segmentation offers a label-efficient solution to train segmentation models for volumetric medical imaging. However, existing approaches often rely on 2D encoders that neglect the inherent volumetric nature of the data. We propose TranSamba, a hybrid Transformer-Mamba architecture designed to capture 3D context for weakly supervised volumetric medical segmentation. TranSamba augments a standard Vision Transformer backbone with Cross-Plane Mamba blocks, which leverage the linear complexity of state space models for efficient information exchange across neighboring slices. The information exchange enhances the pairwise self-attention within slices computed by the Transformer blocks, directly contributing to the attention maps for object localization. TranSamba achieves effective volumetric modeling with time complexity that scales linearly with the input volume depth and maintains constant memory usage for batch processing. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that TranSamba establishes new state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming existing methods across diverse modalities and pathologies. Our source code and trained models are openly accessible at: https://github.com/YihengLyu/TranSamba.
Authors: Tarik Reza Toha (Louie), Shao-Jung (Louie), Lu, Shahriar Nirjon
Abstract: mmWave radars struggle to detect or count individuals in dense, static (non-moving) groups due to limitations in spatial resolution and reliance on movement for detection. We present mmCounter, which accurately counts static people in dense indoor spaces (up to three people per square meter). mmCounter achieves this by extracting ultra-low frequency (< 1 Hz) signals, primarily from breathing and micro-scale body movements such as slight torso shifts, and applying novel signal processing techniques to differentiate these subtle signals from background noise and nearby static objects. Our problem differs significantly from existing studies on breathing rate estimation, which assume the number of people is known a priori. In contrast, mmCounter utilizes a novel multi-stage signal processing pipeline to extract relevant low-frequency sources along with their spatial information and map these sources to individual people, enabling accurate counting. Extensive evaluations in various environments demonstrate that mmCounter delivers an 87% average F1 score and 0.6 mean absolute error in familiar environments, and a 60% average F1 score and 1.1 mean absolute error in previously untested environments. It can count up to seven individuals in a three square meter space, such that there is no side-by-side spacing and only a one-meter front-to-back distance.
Authors: Sunqi Fan, Jiashuo Cui, Meng-Hao Guo, Shuojin Yang
Abstract: Video Question Answering (VideoQA) task serves as a critical playground for evaluating whether foundation models can effectively perceive, understand, and reason about dynamic real-world scenarios. However, existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with simultaneously modeling spatial relationships within video frames and understanding the causal dynamics of temporal evolution on complex and reasoning-intensive VideoQA task. In this work, we equip MLLM with a comprehensive and extensible Video Toolkit, to enhance MLLM's spatiotemporal reasoning capabilities and ensure the harmony between the quantity and diversity of tools. To better control the tool invocation sequence and avoid toolchain shortcut issues, we propose a Spatiotemporal Reasoning Framework (STAR) that strategically schedules temporal and spatial tools, thereby progressively localizing the key area in the video. Our STAR framework enhances GPT-4o using lightweight tools, achieving an 8.2% gain on VideoMME and 4.6% on LongVideoBench. We believe that our proposed Video Toolkit and STAR framework make an important step towards building autonomous and intelligent video analysis assistants. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/fansunqi/VideoTool.
Authors: Woojun Jung, Jaehoon Go, Mingyu Jeon, Sunjae Yoon, Junyeong Kim
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive reasoning capabilities, but often fail to perceive fine-grained visual details, limiting their applicability in precision-demanding tasks. While methods that crop salient regions of an image offer a partial solution, we identify a critical limitation they introduce: "Contextual Blindness". This failure occurs due to structural disconnect between high-fidelity details (from the crop) and the broader global context (from the original image), even when all necessary visual information is present. We argue that this limitation stems not from a lack of information 'Quantity', but from a lack of 'Structural Diversity' in the model's input. To resolve this, we propose Visual Funnel, a training-free, two-step approach. Visual Funnel first performs Contextual Anchoring to identify the region of interest in a single forward pass. It then constructs an Entropy-Scaled Portfolio that preserves the hierarchical context - ranging from focal detail to broader surroundings - by dynamically determining crop sizes based on attention entropy and refining crop centers. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Visual Funnel significantly outperforms naive single-crop and unstructured multi-crop baselines. Our results further validate that simply adding more unstructured crops provides limited or even detrimental benefits, confirming that the hierarchical structure of our portfolio is key to resolving Contextual Blindness.
Authors: Mingyu Jeon, Jisoo Yang, Sungjin Han, Jinkwon Hwang, Sunjae Yoon, Jonghee Kim, Junyeoung Kim
Abstract: Zero-shot Long Video Moment Retrieval (ZLVMR) is the task of identifying temporal segments in hour-long videos using a natural language query without task-specific training. The core technical challenge of LVMR stems from the computational infeasibility of processing entire lengthy videos in a single pass. This limitation has established a 'Search-then-Refine' approach, where candidates are rapidly narrowed down, and only those portions are analyzed, as the dominant paradigm for LVMR. However, existing approaches to this paradigm face severe limitations. Conventional supervised learning suffers from limited scalability and poor generalization, despite substantial resource consumption. Yet, existing zero-shot methods also fail, facing a dual challenge: (1) their heuristic strategies cause a 'search' phase candidate explosion, and (2) the 'refine' phase, which is vulnerable to semantic discrepancy, requires high-cost VLMs for verification, incurring significant computational overhead. We propose \textbf{P}oint-\textbf{to}-\textbf{S}pan (P2S), a novel training-free framework to overcome this challenge of inefficient 'search' and costly 'refine' phases. P2S overcomes these challenges with two key innovations: an 'Adaptive Span Generator' to prevent the search phase candidate explosion, and 'Query Decomposition' to refine candidates without relying on high-cost VLM verification. To our knowledge, P2S is the first zero-shot framework capable of temporal grounding in hour-long videos, outperforming supervised state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin (e.g., +3.7\% on R5@0.1 on MAD).
Authors: Zhankuo Xu, Chaoran Feng, Yingtao Li, Jianbin Zhao, Jiashu Yang, Wangbo Yu, Li Yuan, Yonghong Tian
Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a state-of-the-art method for novel view synthesis. However, its performance heavily relies on dense, high-quality input imagery, an assumption that is often violated in real-world applications, where data is typically sparse and motion-blurred. These two issues create a vicious cycle: sparse views ignore the multi-view constraints necessary to resolve motion blur, while motion blur erases high-frequency details crucial for aligning the limited views. Thus, reconstruction often fails catastrophically, with fragmented views and a low-frequency bias. To break this cycle, we introduce CoherentGS, a novel framework for high-fidelity 3D reconstruction from sparse and blurry images. Our key insight is to address these compound degradations using a dual-prior strategy. Specifically, we combine two pre-trained generative models: a specialized deblurring network for restoring sharp details and providing photometric guidance, and a diffusion model that offers geometric priors to fill in unobserved regions of the scene. This dual-prior strategy is supported by several key techniques, including a consistency-guided camera exploration module that adaptively guides the generative process, and a depth regularization loss that ensures geometric plausibility. We evaluate CoherentGS through both quantitative and qualitative experiments on synthetic and real-world scenes, using as few as 3, 6, and 9 input views. Our results demonstrate that CoherentGS significantly outperforms existing methods, setting a new state-of-the-art for this challenging task. The code and video demos are available at https://potatobigroom.github.io/CoherentGS/.
Authors: Jingyun Fu, Zhiyu Xiang, Na Zhao
Abstract: Recent multimodal fusion methods, integrating images with LiDAR point clouds, have shown promise in scene flow estimation. However, the fusion of 4D millimeter wave radar and LiDAR remains unexplored. Unlike LiDAR, radar is cheaper, more robust in various weather conditions and can detect point-wise velocity, making it a valuable complement to LiDAR. However, radar inputs pose challenges due to noise, low resolution, and sparsity. Moreover, there is currently no dataset that combines LiDAR and radar data specifically for scene flow estimation. To address this gap, we construct a Radar-LiDAR scene flow dataset based on a public real-world automotive dataset. We propose an effective preprocessing strategy for radar denoising and scene flow label generation, deriving more reliable flow ground truth for radar points out of the object boundaries. Additionally, we introduce RaLiFlow, the first joint scene flow learning framework for 4D radar and LiDAR, which achieves effective radar-LiDAR fusion through a novel Dynamic-aware Bidirectional Cross-modal Fusion (DBCF) module and a carefully designed set of loss functions. The DBCF module integrates dynamic cues from radar into the local cross-attention mechanism, enabling the propagation of contextual information across modalities. Meanwhile, the proposed loss functions mitigate the adverse effects of unreliable radar data during training and enhance the instance-level consistency in scene flow predictions from both modalities, particularly for dynamic foreground areas. Extensive experiments on the repurposed scene flow dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms existing LiDAR-based and radar-based single-modal methods by a significant margin.
Authors: Alberto Rota, Elena De Momi
Abstract: Accurate spatial understanding is essential for image-guided surgery, augmented reality integration and context awareness. In minimally invasive procedures, where visual input is the sole intraoperative modality, establishing precise pixel-level correspondences between endoscopic frames is critical for 3D reconstruction, camera tracking, and scene interpretation. However, the surgical domain presents distinct challenges: weak perspective cues, non-Lambertian tissue reflections, and complex, deformable anatomy degrade the performance of conventional computer vision techniques. While Deep Learning models have shown strong performance in natural scenes, their features are not inherently suited for fine-grained matching in surgical images and require targeted adaptation to meet the demands of this domain. This research presents a novel Deep Learning pipeline for establishing feature correspondences in endoscopic image pairs, alongside a self-supervised optimization framework for model training. The proposed methodology leverages a novel-view synthesis pipeline to generate ground-truth inlier correspondences, subsequently utilized for mining triplets within a contrastive learning paradigm. Through this self-supervised approach, we augment the DINOv2 backbone with an additional Transformer layer, specifically optimized to produce embeddings that facilitate direct matching through cosine similarity thresholding. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that our pipeline surpasses state-of-the-art methodologies on the SCARED datasets improved matching precision and lower epipolar error compared to the related work. The proposed framework constitutes a valuable contribution toward enabling more accurate high-level computer vision applications in surgical endoscopy.
Authors: Cong Pang, Hongtao Yu, Zixuan Chen, Lewei Lu, Xin Lou
Abstract: Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have made remarkable progress, enabling sophisticated vision-language interaction and dialogue applications. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on reasoning tasks, often neglecting fine-grained recognition, which is crucial for practical application scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce the Fine-grained Recognition Open World (FROW) benchmark, designed for detailed evaluation of LVLMs with GPT-4o. On the basis of that, we propose a novel optimization strategy from two perspectives: \textit{data construction} and \textit{training process}, to improve the performance of LVLMs. Our dataset includes mosaic data, which combines multiple short-answer responses, and open-world data, generated from real-world questions and answers using GPT-4o, creating a comprehensive framework for evaluating fine-grained recognition in LVLMs. Experiments show that mosaic data improves category recognition accuracy by 1\% and open-world data boosts FROW benchmark accuracy by 10\%-20\% and content accuracy by 6\%-12\%. Meanwhile, incorporating fine-grained data into the pre-training phase can improve the model's category recognition accuracy by up to 10\%. The benchmark will be available at https://github.com/pc-inno/FROW.
Authors: Ge Zhang, Chunyang Wang, Bo Xiao, Xuelian Liu, Bin Liu
Abstract: High-quality point cloud data is a critical foundation for tasks such as autonomous driving and 3D reconstruction. However, LiDAR-based point cloud acquisition is often affected by various disturbances, resulting in a large number of noise points that degrade the accuracy of subsequent point cloud object detection and recognition. Moreover, existing point cloud denoising methods typically sacrifice computational efficiency in pursuit of higher denoising accuracy, or, conversely, improve processing speed at the expense of preserving object boundaries and fine structural details, making it difficult to simultaneously achieve high denoising accuracy, strong edge preservation, and real-time performance. To address these limitations, this paper proposes an adaptive dual-weight gravitational-based point cloud denoising method. First, an octree is employed to perform spatial partitioning of the global point cloud, enabling parallel acceleration. Then, within each leaf node, adaptive voxel-based occupancy statistics and k-nearest neighbor (kNN) density estimation are applied to rapidly remove clearly isolated and low-density noise points, thereby reducing the effective candidate set. Finally, a gravitational scoring function that combines density weights with adaptive distance weights is constructed to finely distinguish noise points from object points. Experiments conducted on the Stanford 3D Scanning Repository, the Canadian Adverse Driving Conditions (CADC) dataset, and in-house FMCW LiDAR point clouds acquired in our laboratory demonstrate that, compared with existing methods, the proposed approach achieves consistent improvements in F1, PSNR, and Chamfer Distance (CD) across various noise conditions while reducing the single-frame processing time, thereby validating its high accuracy, robustness, and real-time performance in multi-noise scenarios.
Authors: Qiyue Sun, Tailin Chen, Yinghui Zhang, Yuchen Zhang, Jiangbei Yue, Jianbo Jiao, Zeyu Fu
Abstract: The rapid growth of video content on platforms such as TikTok and YouTube has intensified the spread of multimodal hate speech, where harmful cues emerge subtly and asynchronously across visual, acoustic, and textual streams. Existing research primarily focuses on video-level classification, leaving the practically crucial task of temporal localisation, identifying when hateful segments occur, largely unaddressed. This challenge is even more noticeable under weak supervision, where only video-level labels are available, and static fusion or classification-based architectures struggle to capture cross-modal and temporal dynamics. To address these challenges, we propose MultiHateLoc, the first framework designed for weakly-supervised multimodal hate localisation. MultiHateLoc incorporates (1) modality-aware temporal encoders to model heterogeneous sequential patterns, including a tailored text-based preprocessing module for feature enhancement; (2) dynamic cross-modal fusion to adaptively emphasise the most informative modality at each moment and a cross-modal contrastive alignment strategy to enhance multimodal feature consistency; (3) a modality-aware MIL objective to identify discriminative segments under video-level supervision. Despite relying solely on coarse labels, MultiHateLoc produces fine-grained, interpretable frame-level predictions. Experiments on HateMM and MultiHateClip show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in the localisation task.
Authors: Wenfei Guan, Jilin Mei, Tong Shen, Xumin Wu, Shuo Wang, Cheng Min, Yu Hu
Abstract: Deep learning has advanced vectorized road extraction in urban settings, yet off-road environments remain underexplored and challenging. A significant domain gap causes advanced models to fail in wild terrains due to two key issues: lack of large-scale vectorized datasets and structural weakness in prevailing methods. Models such as SAM-Road employ a node-centric paradigm that reasons at sparse endpoints, making them fragile to occlusions and ambiguous junctions in off-road scenes, leading to topological errors.This work addresses these limitations in two complementary ways. First, we release WildRoad, a gloabal off-road road network dataset constructed efficiently with a dedicated interactive annotation tool tailored for road-network labeling. Second, we introduce MaGRoad (Mask-aware Geodesic Road network extractor), a path-centric framework that aggregates multi-scale visual evidence along candidate paths to infer connectivity robustly.Extensive experiments show that MaGRoad achieves state-of-the-art performance on our challenging WildRoad benchmark while generalizing well to urban datasets. A streamlined pipeline also yields roughly 2.5x faster inference, improving practical applicability. Together, the dataset and path-centric paradigm provide a stronger foundation for mapping roads in the wild.
Authors: Phu Pham, Damon Conover, Aniket Bera
Abstract: Aerial-ground localization is difficult due to large viewpoint and modality gaps between ground-level LiDAR and overhead imagery. We propose TransLocNet, a cross-modal attention framework that fuses LiDAR geometry with aerial semantic context. LiDAR scans are projected into a bird's-eye-view representation and aligned with aerial features through bidirectional attention, followed by a likelihood map decoder that outputs spatial probability distributions over position and orientation. A contrastive learning module enforces a shared embedding space to improve cross-modal alignment. Experiments on CARLA and KITTI show that TransLocNet outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing localization error by up to 63% and achieving sub-meter, sub-degree accuracy. These results demonstrate that TransLocNet provides robust and generalizable aerial-ground localization in both synthetic and real-world settings.
Authors: Xiao Chen, Zhongjing Du, Jiazhen Huang, Xu Jiang, Li Lu, Jingyan Jiang, Zhi Wang
Abstract: Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) enhances model robustness to out-of-distribution (OOD) data by updating the model online during inference, yet existing methods lack theoretical insights into the fundamental causes of performance degradation under domain shifts. Recently, Neural Collapse (NC) has been proposed as an emergent geometric property of deep neural networks (DNNs), providing valuable insights for TTA. In this work, we extend NC to the sample-wise level and discover a novel phenomenon termed Sample-wise Alignment Collapse (NC3+), demonstrating that a sample's feature embedding, obtained by a trained model, aligns closely with the corresponding classifier weight. Building on NC3+, we identify that the performance degradation stems from sample-wise misalignment in adaptation which exacerbates under larger distribution shifts. This indicates the necessity of realigning the feature embeddings with their corresponding classifier weights. However, the misalignment makes pseudo-labels unreliable under domain shifts. To address this challenge, we propose NCTTA, a novel feature-classifier alignment method with hybrid targets to mitigate the impact of unreliable pseudo-labels, which blends geometric proximity with predictive confidence. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of NCTTA in enhancing robustness to domain shifts. For example, NCTTA outperforms Tent by 14.52% on ImageNet-C.
Authors: Stylianos Kandylakis, Christos Orfanopoulos, Georgios Siolas, Panayiotis Tsanakas
Abstract: This work presents an efficient algorithmic framework for real-time identification, classification, and evaluation of human physiotherapy exercises using mobile devices. The proposed method interprets a kinetic movement as a sequence of static poses, which are estimated from camera input using a pose-estimation neural network. Extracted body keypoints are transformed into trigonometric angle-based features and classified with lightweight supervised models to generate frame-level pose predictions and accuracy scores. To recognize full exercise movements and detect deviations from prescribed patterns, we employ a dynamic-programming scheme based on a modified Levenshtein distance algorithm, enabling robust sequence matching and localization of inaccuracies. The system operates entirely on the client side, ensuring scalability and real-time performance. Experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the methodology and highlights its applicability to remote physiotherapy supervision and m-health applications.
Authors: Han Li, Shaohui Li, Wenrui Dai, Chenglin Li, Xinlong Pan, Haipeng Wang, Junni Zou, Hongkai Xiong
Abstract: Existing frameworks for learned video compression suffer from a dilemma between inaccurate temporal alignment and error propagation for motion estimation and compensation (ME/MC). The separate-transform framework employs distinct transforms for intra-frame and inter-frame compression to yield impressive rate-distortion (R-D) performance but causes evident error propagation, while the unified-transform framework eliminates error propagation via shared transforms but is inferior in ME/MC in shared latent domains. To address this limitation, in this paper, we propose a novel unifiedtransform framework with dual-domain progressive temporal alignment and quality-conditioned mixture-of-expert (QCMoE) to enable quality-consistent and error-propagation-free streaming for learned video compression. Specifically, we propose dualdomain progressive temporal alignment for ME/MC that leverages coarse pixel-domain alignment and refined latent-domain alignment to significantly enhance temporal context modeling in a coarse-to-fine fashion. The coarse pixel-domain alignment efficiently handles simple motion patterns with optical flow estimated from a single reference frame, while the refined latent-domain alignment develops a Flow-Guided Deformable Transformer (FGDT) over latents from multiple reference frames to achieve long-term motion refinement (LTMR) for complex motion patterns. Furthermore, we design a QCMoE module for continuous bit-rate adaptation that dynamically assigns different experts to adjust quantization steps per pixel based on target quality and content rather than relies on a single quantization step. QCMoE allows continuous and consistent rate control with appealing R-D performance. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves competitive R-D performance compared with the state-of-the-arts, while successfully eliminating error propagation.
Authors: Khurram Ashfaq, Muhammad Tariq Mahmood
Abstract: Shape-from-Focus (SFF) is a passive depth estimation technique that infers scene depth by analyzing focus variations in a focal stack. Most recent deep learning-based SFF methods typically operate in two stages: first, they extract focus volumes (a per pixel representation of focus likelihood across the focal stack) using heavy feature encoders; then, they estimate depth via a simple one-step aggregation technique that often introduces artifacts and amplifies noise in the depth map. To address these issues, we propose a hybrid framework. Our method computes multi-scale focus volumes traditionally using handcrafted Directional Dilated Laplacian (DDL) kernels, which capture long-range and directional focus variations to form robust focus volumes. These focus volumes are then fed into a lightweight, multi-scale GRU-based depth extraction module that iteratively refines an initial depth estimate at a lower resolution for computational efficiency. Finally, a learned convex upsampling module within our recurrent network reconstructs high-resolution depth maps while preserving fine scene details and sharp boundaries. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning and traditional methods, achieving superior accuracy and generalization across diverse focal conditions.
Authors: Maurice Rohr, Tobias Reinhardt, Tizian Dege, Justus Thies, Christoph Hoog Antink
Abstract: We present Pulse3DFace, the first dataset of its kind for estimating 3D blood pulsation maps. These maps can be used to develop models of dynamic facial blood pulsation, enabling the creation of synthetic video data to improve and validate remote pulse estimation methods via photoplethysmography imaging. Additionally, the dataset facilitates research into novel multi-view-based approaches for mitigating illumination effects in blood pulsation analysis. Pulse3DFace consists of raw videos from 15 subjects recorded at 30 Hz with an RGB camera from 23 viewpoints, blood pulse reference measurements, and facial 3D scans generated using monocular structure-from-motion techniques. It also includes processed 3D pulsation maps compatible with the texture space of the 3D head model FLAME. These maps provide signal-to-noise ratio, local pulse amplitude, phase information, and supplementary data. We offer a comprehensive evaluation of the dataset's illumination conditions, map consistency, and its ability to capture physiologically meaningful features in the facial and neck skin regions.
Authors: Pasquale De Marinis, Gennaro Vessio, Giovanna Castellano
Abstract: Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) aims to segment novel classes in query images using only a small annotated support set. While prior research has mainly focused on improving decoders, the encoder's limited ability to extract meaningful features for unseen classes remains a key bottleneck. In this work, we introduce \textit{Take a Peek} (TaP), a simple yet effective method that enhances encoder adaptability for both FSS and cross-domain FSS (CD-FSS). TaP leverages Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the encoder on the support set with minimal computational overhead, enabling fast adaptation to novel classes while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Our method is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated into existing FSS pipelines. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks--including COCO $20^i$, Pascal $5^i$, and cross-domain datasets such as DeepGlobe, ISIC, and Chest X-ray--demonstrate that TaP consistently improves segmentation performance across diverse models and shot settings. Notably, TaP delivers significant gains in complex multi-class scenarios, highlighting its practical effectiveness in realistic settings. A rank sensitivity analysis also shows that strong performance can be achieved even with low-rank adaptations, ensuring computational efficiency. By addressing a critical limitation in FSS--the encoder's generalization to novel classes--TaP paves the way toward more robust, efficient, and generalizable segmentation systems. The code is available at https://github.com/pasqualedem/TakeAPeek.
Authors: Yuchen Feng, Zhenyu Zhang, Naibin Gu, Yilong Chen, Peng Fu, Zheng Lin, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Weiping Wang, Haifeng Wang
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on various vision-language tasks, yet their visual perception remains limited. Humans, in comparison, perceive complex scenes efficiently by dynamically scanning and focusing on salient regions in a sequential "blink-like" process. Motivated by this strategy, we first investigate whether MLLMs exhibit similar behavior. Our pilot analysis reveals that MLLMs naturally attend to different visual regions across layers and that selectively allocating more computation to salient tokens can enhance visual perception. Building on this insight, we propose Blink, a dynamic visual token resolution framework that emulates the human-inspired process within a single forward pass. Specifically, Blink includes two modules: saliency-guided scanning and dynamic token resolution. It first estimates the saliency of visual tokens in each layer based on the attention map, and extends important tokens through a plug-and-play token super-resolution (TokenSR) module. In the next layer, it drops the extended tokens when they lose focus. This dynamic mechanism balances broad exploration and fine-grained focus, thereby enhancing visual perception adaptively and efficiently. Extensive experiments validate Blink, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing visual perception and multimodal understanding.
Authors: Xiangxuan Ren, Zhongdao Wang, Liping Hou, Pin Tang, Guoqing Wang, Chao Ma
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant advancements in vision understanding and reasoning. However, the autoregressive Transformer architecture used by MLLMs requries tokenization on input images, which limits their ability to accurately ground objects within the 2D image space. This raises an important question: how can sequential language tokens be improved to better ground objects in 2D spatial space for MLLMs? To address this, we present a spatial representation method for grounding objects, namely GETok, that integrates a specialized vocabulary of learnable tokens into MLLMs. GETok first uses grid tokens to partition the image plane into structured spatial anchors, and then exploits offset tokens to enable precise and iterative refinement of localization predictions. By embedding spatial relationships directly into tokens, GETok significantly advances MLLMs in native 2D space reasoning without modifying the autoregressive architecture. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GETok achieves superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods across various referring tasks in both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning settings.
Authors: Meher Md Saad
Abstract: Isolated Sign Language Recognition (ISLR) is critical for bridging the communication gap between the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) community and the hearing world. However, robust ISLR is fundamentally constrained by data scarcity and the long-tail distribution of sign vocabulary, where gathering sufficient examples for thousands of unique signs is prohibitively expensive. Standard classification approaches struggle under these conditions, often overfitting to frequent classes while failing to generalize to rare ones. To address this bottleneck, we propose a Few-Shot Prototypical Network framework adapted for a skeleton based encoder. Unlike traditional classifiers that learn fixed decision boundaries, our approach utilizes episodic training to learn a semantic metric space where signs are classified based on their proximity to dynamic class prototypes. We integrate a Spatiotemporal Graph Convolutional Network (ST-GCN) with a novel Multi-Scale Temporal Aggregation (MSTA) module to capture both rapid and fluid motion dynamics. Experimental results on the WLASL dataset demonstrate the superiority of this metric learning paradigm: our model achieves 43.75% Top-1 and 77.10% Top-5 accuracy on the test set. Crucially, this outperforms a standard classification baseline sharing the identical backbone architecture by over 13%, proving that the prototypical training strategy effectively outperforms in a data scarce situation where standard classification fails. Furthermore, the model exhibits strong zero-shot generalization, achieving nearly 30% accuracy on the unseen SignASL dataset without fine-tuning, offering a scalable pathway for recognizing extensive sign vocabularies with limited data.
Authors: Haojie Zheng, Shuchen Weng, Jingqi Liu, Siqi Yang, Boxin Shi, Xinlong Wang
Abstract: Recent advancements in video generation highlight that realistic audio-visual synchronization is crucial for engaging content creation. However, existing video editing methods largely overlook audio-visual synchronization and lack the fine-grained spatial and temporal controllability required for precise instance-level edits. In this paper, we propose AVI-Edit, a framework for audio-sync video instance editing. We propose a granularity-aware mask refiner that iteratively refines coarse user-provided masks into precise instance-level regions. We further design a self-feedback audio agent to curate high-quality audio guidance, providing fine-grained temporal control. To facilitate this task, we additionally construct a large-scale dataset with instance-centric correspondence and comprehensive annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AVI-Edit outperforms state-of-the-art methods in visual quality, condition following, and audio-visual synchronization. Project page: https://hjzheng.net/projects/AVI-Edit/.
Authors: Wenlong Jiao, Heyang Lee, Ping Wang, Pengfei Zhu, Qinghua Hu, Dongwei Ren
Abstract: All-in-one image restoration aims to handle diverse degradations (e.g., noise, blur, adverse weather) within a unified framework, yet existing methods increasingly rely on complex architectures (e.g., Mixture-of-Experts, diffusion models) and elaborate degradation prompt strategies. In this work, we reveal a critical insight: well-crafted feature extraction inherently encodes degradation-carrying information, and a symmetric U-Net architecture is sufficient to unleash these cues effectively. By aligning feature scales across encoder-decoder and enabling streamlined cross-scale propagation, our symmetric design preserves intrinsic degradation signals robustly, rendering simple additive fusion in skip connections sufficient for state-of-the-art performance. Our primary baseline, SymUNet, is built on this symmetric U-Net and achieves better results across benchmark datasets than existing approaches while reducing computational cost. We further propose a semantic enhanced variant, SE-SymUNet, which integrates direct semantic injection from frozen CLIP features via simple cross-attention to explicitly amplify degradation priors. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks validate the superiority of our methods. Both baselines SymUNet and SE-SymUNet establish simpler and stronger foundations for future advancements in all-in-one image restoration. The source code is available at https://github.com/WenlongJiao/SymUNet.
Authors: Quan Chen, Xiaokai Yang, Tingyu Wang, Rongfeng Lu, Xichun Sheng, Yaoqi Sun, Chenggang Yan
Abstract: Salient object detection (SOD), a foundational task in computer vision, has advanced from single-modal to multi-modal paradigms to enhance generalization. However, most existing SOD methods assume low-noise visual conditions, overlooking the degradation of segmentation accuracy caused by weather-induced noise in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a SOD framework tailored for diverse weather conditions, encompassing a specific encoder and a replaceable decoder. To enable handling of varying weather noises, we introduce a one-hot vector as a noise indicator to represent different weather types and design a Noise Indicator Fusion Module (NIFM). The NIFM takes both semantic features and the noise indicator as dual inputs and is inserted between consecutive stages of the encoder to embed weather-aware priors via adaptive feature modulation. Critically, the proposed specific encoder retains compatibility with mainstream SOD decoders. Extensive experiments are conducted on the WXSOD dataset under varying training data scales (100%, 50%, 30% of the full training set), three encoder and seven decoder configurations. Results show that the proposed SOD framework (particularly the NIFM-enhanced specific encoder) improves segmentation accuracy under complex weather conditions compared to a vanilla encoder.
Authors: J. Xiao, Y. Guo, X. Zi, K. Thiyagarajan, C. Moreira, M. Prasad
Abstract: Semantic retrieval of remote sensing (RS) images is a critical task fundamentally challenged by the \textquote{semantic gap}, the discrepancy between a model's low-level visual features and high-level human concepts. While large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer a promising path to bridge this gap, existing methods often rely on costly, domain-specific training, and there is a lack of benchmarks to evaluate the practical utility of VLM-generated text in a zero-shot retrieval context. To address this research gap, we introduce the Remote Sensing Rich Text (RSRT) dataset, a new benchmark featuring multiple structured captions per image. Based on this dataset, we propose a fully training-free, text-only retrieval reference called TRSLLaVA. Our methodology reformulates cross-modal retrieval as a text-to-text (T2T) matching problem, leveraging rich text descriptions as queries against a database of VLM-generated captions within a unified textual embedding space. This approach completely bypasses model training or fine-tuning. Experiments on the RSITMD and RSICD benchmarks show our training-free method is highly competitive with state-of-the-art supervised models. For instance, on RSITMD, our method achieves a mean Recall of 42.62\%, nearly doubling the 23.86\% of the standard zero-shot CLIP baseline and surpassing several top supervised models. This validates that high-quality semantic representation through structured text provides a powerful and cost-effective paradigm for remote sensing image retrieval.
Authors: Bishoy Galoaa, Sarah Ostadabbas
Abstract: We propose Track and Caption Any Motion (TCAM), a motion-centric framework for automatic video understanding that discovers and describes motion patterns without user queries. Understanding videos in challenging conditions like occlusion, camouflage, or rapid movement often depends more on motion dynamics than static appearance. TCAM autonomously observes a video, identifies multiple motion activities, and spatially grounds each natural language description to its corresponding trajectory through a motion-field attention mechanism. Our key insight is that motion patterns, when aligned with contrastive vision-language representations, provide powerful semantic signals for recognizing and describing actions. Through unified training that combines global video-text alignment with fine-grained spatial correspondence, TCAM enables query-free discovery of multiple motion expressions via multi-head cross-attention. On the MeViS benchmark, TCAM achieves 58.4% video-to-text retrieval, 64.9 JF for spatial grounding, and discovers 4.8 relevant expressions per video with 84.7% precision, demonstrating strong cross-task generalization.
Authors: Mohammad Sadegh Gholizadeh, Amir Arsalan Rezapour
Abstract: In recent years, the incidence of vision-threatening eye diseases has risen dramatically, necessitating scalable and accurate screening solutions. This paper presents a comprehensive study on deep learning architectures for the automated diagnosis of ocular conditions. To mitigate the "black-box" limitations of standard convolutional neural networks (CNNs), we implement a pipeline that combines deep feature extraction with interpretable image processing modules. Specifically, we focus on high-fidelity retinal vessel segmentation as an auxiliary task to guide the classification process. By grounding the model's predictions in clinically relevant morphological features, we aim to bridge the gap between algorithmic output and expert medical validation, thereby reducing false positives and improving deployment viability in clinical settings.
Authors: Bishoy Galoaa, Xiangyu Bai, Sarah Ostadabbas
Abstract: We present Lang2Motion, a framework for language-guided point trajectory generation by aligning motion manifolds with joint embedding spaces. Unlike prior work focusing on human motion or video synthesis, we generate explicit trajectories for arbitrary objects using motion extracted from real-world videos via point tracking. Our transformer-based auto-encoder learns trajectory representations through dual supervision: textual motion descriptions and rendered trajectory visualizations, both mapped through CLIP's frozen encoders. Lang2Motion achieves 34.2% Recall@1 on text-to-trajectory retrieval, outperforming video-based methods by 12.5 points, and improves motion accuracy by 33-52% (12.4 ADE vs 18.3-25.3) compared to video generation baselines. We demonstrate 88.3% Top-1 accuracy on human action recognition despite training only on diverse object motions, showing effective transfer across motion domains. Lang2Motion supports style transfer, semantic interpolation, and latent-space editing through CLIP-aligned trajectory representations.
Authors: Qintong Zhang, Junyuan Zhang, Zhifei Ren, Linke Ouyang, Zichen Wen, Junbo Niu, Yuan Qu, Bin Wang, Ka-Ho Chow, Conghui He, Wentao Zhang
Abstract: Document parsing aims to transform unstructured PDF images into semi-structured data, facilitating the digitization and utilization of information in diverse domains. While vision language models (VLMs) have significantly advanced this task, achieving reliable, high-quality parsing in real-world scenarios remains challenging. Common practice often selects the top-performing model on standard benchmarks. However, these benchmarks may carry dataset-specific biases, leading to inconsistent model rankings and limited correlation with real-world performance. Moreover, benchmark metrics typically provide only overall scores, which can obscure distinct error patterns in output. This raises a key challenge: how can we reliably and comprehensively assess document parsing quality in the wild? We address this problem with DOCR-Inspector, which formalizes document parsing assessment as fine-grained error detection and analysis. Leveraging VLM-as-a-Judge, DOCR-Inspector analyzes a document image and its parsed output, identifies all errors, assigns them to one of 28 predefined types, and produces a comprehensive quality assessment. To enable this capability, we construct DOCRcase-200K for training and propose the Chain-of-Checklist reasoning paradigm to enable the hierarchical structure of parsing quality assessment. For empirical validation, we introduce DOCRcaseBench, a set of 882 real-world document parsing cases with manual annotations. On this benchmark, DOCR-Inspector-7B outperforms commercial models like Gemini 2.5 Pro, as well as leading open-source models. Further experiments demonstrate that its quality assessments provide valuable guidance for parsing results refinement, making DOCR-Inspector both a practical evaluator and a driver for advancing document parsing systems at scale. Model and code are released at: https://github.com/ZZZZZQT/DOCR-Inspector.
Authors: Bishoy Galoaa, Pau Closas, Sarah Ostadabbas
Abstract: Point tracking in video sequences is a foundational capability for real-world computer vision applications, including robotics, autonomous systems, augmented reality, and video analysis. While recent deep learning-based trackers achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on challenging benchmarks, their reliance on per-frame GPU inference poses a major barrier to deployment on resource-constrained edge devices, where compute, power, and connectivity are limited. We introduce K-Track (Kalman-enhanced Tracking), a general-purpose, tracker-agnostic acceleration framework designed to bridge this deployment gap. K-Track reduces inference cost by combining sparse deep learning keyframe updates with lightweight Kalman filtering for intermediate frame prediction, using principled Bayesian uncertainty propagation to maintain temporal coherence. This hybrid strategy enables 5-10X speedup while retaining over 85% of the original trackers' accuracy. We evaluate K-Track across multiple state-of-the-art point trackers and demonstrate real-time performance on edge platforms such as the NVIDIA Jetson Nano and RTX Titan. By preserving accuracy while dramatically lowering computational requirements, K-Track provides a practical path toward deploying high-quality point tracking in real-world, resource-limited settings, closing the gap between modern tracking algorithms and deployable vision systems.
Authors: Jian-Yu Jiang-Lin, Kang-Yang Huang, Ling Zou, Ling Lo, Sheng-Ping Yang, Yu-Wen Tseng, Kun-Hsiang Lin, Chia-Ling Chen, Yu-Ting Ta, Yan-Tsung Wang, Po-Ching Chen, Hongxia Xie, Hong-Han Shuai, Wen-Huang Cheng
Abstract: Advances in generative modeling have made it increasingly easy to fabricate realistic portrayals of individuals, creating serious risks for security, communication, and public trust. Detecting such person-driven manipulations requires systems that not only distinguish altered content from authentic media but also provide clear and reliable reasoning. In this paper, we introduce TriDF, a comprehensive benchmark for interpretable DeepFake detection. TriDF contains high-quality forgeries from advanced synthesis models, covering 16 DeepFake types across image, video, and audio modalities. The benchmark evaluates three key aspects: Perception, which measures the ability of a model to identify fine-grained manipulation artifacts using human-annotated evidence; Detection, which assesses classification performance across diverse forgery families and generators; and Hallucination, which quantifies the reliability of model-generated explanations. Experiments on state-of-the-art multimodal large language models show that accurate perception is essential for reliable detection, but hallucination can severely disrupt decision-making, revealing the interdependence of these three aspects. TriDF provides a unified framework for understanding the interaction between detection accuracy, evidence identification, and explanation reliability, offering a foundation for building trustworthy systems that address real-world synthetic media threats.
Authors: Hanfeng Wu, Marlon Steiner, Michael Schmidt, Alvaro Marcos-Ramiro, Christoph Stiller
Abstract: The complexity of autonomous driving scenarios requires robust models that can interpret high-level navigation commands and generate safe trajectories. While traditional rule-based systems can react to these commands, they often struggle in dynamic environments, and end-to-end methods face challenges in complying with explicit navigation commands. To address this, we present NaviHydra, a controllable navigation-guided end-to-end model distilled from an existing rule-based simulator. Our framework accepts high-level navigation commands as control signals, generating trajectories that align with specified intentions. We utilize a Bird's Eye View (BEV) based trajectory gathering method to enhance the trajectory feature extraction. Additionally, we introduce a novel navigation compliance metric to evaluate adherence to intended route, improving controllability and navigation safety. To comprehensively assess our model's controllability, we design a test that evaluates its response to various navigation commands. Our method significantly outperforms baseline models, achieving state-of-the-art results in the NAVSIM benchmark, demonstrating its effectiveness in advancing autonomous driving.
Authors: Jingxuan Zhang, Tianqi Yu, Yatu Zhang, Jinze Wu, Kaixin Yao, Jingyang Liu, Yuyao Zhang, Jiayuan Gu, Jingyi Yu
Abstract: A deep understanding of the physical world is a central goal for embodied AI and realistic simulation. While current models excel at capturing an object's surface geometry and appearance, they largely neglect its internal physical properties. This omission is critical, as properties like volumetric density are fundamental for predicting an object's center of mass, stability, and interaction dynamics in applications ranging from robotic manipulation to physical simulation. The primary bottleneck has been the absence of large-scale, real-world data. To bridge this gap, we introduce XDen-1K, the first large-scale, multi-modal dataset designed for real-world physical property estimation, with a particular focus on volumetric density. The core of this dataset consists of 1,000 real-world objects across 148 categories, for which we provide comprehensive multi-modal data, including a high-resolution 3D geometric model with part-level annotations and a corresponding set of real-world biplanar X-ray scans. Building upon this data, we introduce a novel optimization framework that recovers a high-fidelity volumetric density field of each object from its sparse X-ray views. To demonstrate its practical value, we add X-ray images as a conditioning signal to an existing segmentation network and perform volumetric segmentation. Furthermore, we conduct experiments on downstream robotics tasks. The results show that leveraging the dataset can effectively improve the accuracy of center-of-mass estimation and the success rate of robotic manipulation. We believe XDen-1K will serve as a foundational resource and a challenging new benchmark, catalyzing future research in physically grounded visual inference and embodied AI.
Authors: Javier Villena Toro, Mehdi Tarkian
Abstract: Recent progress in zero-shot 6D object pose estimation has been driven largely by large-scale models and cloud-based inference. However, these approaches often introduce high latency, elevated energy consumption, and deployment risks related to connectivity, cost, and data governance; factors that conflict with the practical constraints of real-world robotics, where compute is limited and on-device inference is frequently required. We introduce Geo6DPose, a lightweight, fully local, and training-free pipeline for zero-shot 6D pose estimation that trades model scale for geometric reliability. Our method combines foundation model visual features with a geometric filtering strategy: Similarity maps are computed between onboarded template DINO descriptors and scene patches, and mutual correspondences are established by projecting scene patch centers to 3D and template descriptors to the object model coordinate system. Final poses are recovered via correspondence-driven RANSAC and ranked using a weighted geometric alignment metric that jointly accounts for reprojection consistency and spatial support, improving robustness to noise, clutter, and partial visibility. Geo6DPose achieves sub-second inference on a single commodity GPU while matching the average recall of significantly larger zero-shot baselines (53.7 AR, 1.08 FPS). It requires no training, fine-tuning, or network access, and remains compatible with evolving foundation backbones, advancing practical, fully local 6D perception for robotic deployment.
Authors: Romain Seailles (DI-ENS), Jean-Baptiste Masson (IP, CNRS, UPCit\'e), Jean Ponce (DI-ENS, CDS), Julien Mairal (LJK)
Abstract: Single-molecule localization microscopy (SMLM) allows reconstructing biology-relevant structures beyond the diffraction limit by detecting and localizing individual fluorophores -- fluorescent molecules stained onto the observed specimen -- over time to reconstruct super-resolved images. Currently, efficient SMLM requires non-overlapping emitting fluorophores, leading to long acquisition times that hinders live-cell imaging. Recent deep-learning approaches can handle denser emissions, but they rely on variants of non-maximum suppression (NMS) layers, which are unfortunately non-differentiable and may discard true positives with their local fusion strategy. In this presentation, we reformulate the SMLM training objective as a set-matching problem, deriving an optimal-transport loss that eliminates the need for NMS during inference and enables end-to-end training. Additionally, we propose an iterative neural network that integrates knowledge of the microscope's optical system inside our model. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks and real biological data show that both our new loss function and architecture surpass the state of the art at moderate and high emitter densities. Code is available at https://github.com/RSLLES/SHOT.
Authors: Lars Mescheder, Wei Dong, Shiwei Li, Xuyang Bai, Marcel Santos, Peiyun Hu, Bruno Lecouat, Mingmin Zhen, Ama\"el Delaunoy, Tian Fang, Yanghai Tsin, Stephan R. Richter, Vladlen Koltun
Abstract: We present SHARP, an approach to photorealistic view synthesis from a single image. Given a single photograph, SHARP regresses the parameters of a 3D Gaussian representation of the depicted scene. This is done in less than a second on a standard GPU via a single feedforward pass through a neural network. The 3D Gaussian representation produced by SHARP can then be rendered in real time, yielding high-resolution photorealistic images for nearby views. The representation is metric, with absolute scale, supporting metric camera movements. Experimental results demonstrate that SHARP delivers robust zero-shot generalization across datasets. It sets a new state of the art on multiple datasets, reducing LPIPS by 25-34% and DISTS by 21-43% versus the best prior model, while lowering the synthesis time by three orders of magnitude. Code and weights are provided at https://github.com/apple/ml-sharp
Authors: Matias Cosarinsky, Nicolas Gaggion, Rodrigo Echeveste, Enzo Ferrante
Abstract: Uncertainty estimation is essential for the safe clinical deployment of medical image segmentation systems, enabling the identification of unreliable predictions and supporting human oversight. While prior work has largely focused on pixel-level uncertainty, landmark-based segmentation offers inherent topological guarantees yet remains underexplored from an uncertainty perspective. In this work, we study uncertainty estimation for anatomical landmark-based segmentation on chest X-rays. Inspired by hybrid neural network architectures that combine standard image convolutional encoders with graph-based generative decoders, and leveraging their variational latent space, we derive two complementary measures: (i) latent uncertainty, captured directly from the learned distribution parameters, and (ii) predictive uncertainty, obtained by generating multiple stochastic output predictions from latent samples. Through controlled corruption experiments we show that both uncertainty measures increase with perturbation severity, reflecting both global and local degradation. We demonstrate that these uncertainty signals can identify unreliable predictions by comparing with manual ground-truth, and support out-of-distribution detection on the CheXmask dataset. More importantly, we release CheXmask-U (huggingface.co/datasets/mcosarinsky/CheXmask-U), a large scale dataset of 657,566 chest X-ray landmark segmentations with per-node uncertainty estimates, enabling researchers to account for spatial variations in segmentation quality when using these anatomical masks. Our findings establish uncertainty estimation as a promising direction to enhance robustness and safe deployment of landmark-based anatomical segmentation methods in chest X-ray. A fully working interactive demo of the method is available at huggingface.co/spaces/matiasky/CheXmask-U and the source code at github.com/mcosarinsky/CheXmask-U.
Authors: Peizheng Li, Zhenghao Zhang, David Holtz, Hang Yu, Yutong Yang, Yuzhi Lai, Rui Song, Andreas Geiger, Andreas Zell
Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving methods built on vision language models (VLMs) have undergone rapid development driven by their universal visual understanding and strong reasoning capabilities obtained from the large-scale pretraining. However, we find that current VLMs struggle to understand fine-grained 3D spatial relationships which is a fundamental requirement for systems interacting with the physical world. To address this issue, we propose SpaceDrive, a spatial-aware VLM-based driving framework that treats spatial information as explicit positional encodings (PEs) instead of textual digit tokens, enabling joint reasoning over semantic and spatial representations. SpaceDrive employs a universal positional encoder to all 3D coordinates derived from multi-view depth estimation, historical ego-states, and text prompts. These 3D PEs are first superimposed to augment the corresponding 2D visual tokens. Meanwhile, they serve as a task-agnostic coordinate representation, replacing the digit-wise numerical tokens as both inputs and outputs for the VLM. This mechanism enables the model to better index specific visual semantics in spatial reasoning and directly regress trajectory coordinates rather than generating digit-by-digit, thereby enhancing planning accuracy. Extensive experiments validate that SpaceDrive achieves state-of-the-art open-loop performance on the nuScenes dataset and the second-best Driving Score of 78.02 on the Bench2Drive closed-loop benchmark over existing VLM-based methods.
Authors: Luigi Piccinelli, Thiemo Wandel, Christos Sakaridis, Wim Abbeloos, Luc Van Gool
Abstract: Depth estimation in videos is essential for visual perception in real-world applications. However, existing methods either rely on simple frame-by-frame monocular models, leading to temporal inconsistencies and inaccuracies, or use computationally demanding temporal modeling, unsuitable for real-time applications. These limitations significantly restrict general applicability and performance in practical settings. To address this, we propose VeloDepth, an efficient and robust online video depth estimation pipeline that effectively leverages spatiotemporal priors from previous depth predictions and performs deep feature propagation. Our method introduces a novel Propagation Module that refines and propagates depth features and predictions using flow-based warping coupled with learned residual corrections. In addition, our design structurally enforces temporal consistency, resulting in stable depth predictions across consecutive frames with improved efficiency. Comprehensive zero-shot evaluation on multiple benchmarks demonstrates the state-of-the-art temporal consistency and competitive accuracy of VeloDepth, alongside its significantly faster inference compared to existing video-based depth estimators. VeloDepth thus provides a practical, efficient, and accurate solution for real-time depth estimation suitable for diverse perception tasks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/lpiccinelli-eth/velodepth
Authors: Yuan-Ming Li, Qize Yang, Nan Lei, Shenghao Fu, Ling-An Zeng, Jian-Fang Hu, Xihan Wei, Wei-Shi Zheng
Abstract: Recent advances in motion-aware large language models have shown remarkable promise for unifying motion understanding and generation tasks. However, these models typically treat understanding and generation separately, limiting the mutual benefits that could arise from interactive feedback between tasks. In this work, we reveal that motion assessment and refinement tasks act as crucial bridges to enable bidirectional knowledge flow between understanding and generation. Leveraging this insight, we propose Interleaved Reasoning for Motion Generation (IRMoGen), a novel paradigm that tightly couples motion generation with assessment and refinement through iterative text-motion dialogue. To realize this, we introduce IRG-MotionLLM, the first model that seamlessly interleaves motion generation, assessment, and refinement to improve generation performance. IRG-MotionLLM is developed progressively with a novel three-stage training scheme, initializing and subsequently enhancing native IRMoGen capabilities. To facilitate this development, we construct an automated data engine to synthesize interleaved reasoning annotations from existing text-motion datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that: (i) Assessment and refinement tasks significantly improve text-motion alignment; (ii) Interleaving motion generation, assessment, and refinement steps yields consistent performance gains across training stages; and (iii) IRG-MotionLLM clearly outperforms the baseline model and achieves advanced performance on standard text-to-motion generation benchmarks. Cross-evaluator testing further validates its effectiveness. Code & Data: https://github.com/HumanMLLM/IRG-MotionLLM/tree/main.
Authors: Tianyu Zhou, Junyi Tang, Zehui Li, Dahong Qian, Suncheng Xiang
Abstract: Colonoscopic polyp diagnosis is pivotal for early colorectal cancer detection, yet traditional automated reporting suffers from inconsistencies and hallucinations due to the scarcity of high-quality multimodal medical data. To bridge this gap, we propose LDP, a novel framework leveraging multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for professional polyp diagnosis report generation. Specifically, we curate MMEndo, a multimodal endoscopic dataset comprising expert-annotated colonoscopy image-text pairs. We fine-tune the Qwen2-VL-7B backbone using Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (LoRA) and align it with clinical standards via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Extensive experiments show that our LDP outperforms existing baselines on both automated metrics and rigorous clinical expert evaluations (achieving a Physician Score of 7.2/10), significantly reducing training computational costs by 833x compared to full fine-tuning. The proposed solution offers a scalable, clinically viable path for primary healthcare, with additional validation on the IU-XRay dataset confirming its robustness.
Authors: Rene Lisasi, Michele Esposito, Chen Zhao
Abstract: Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) based simulation of coronary blood flow provides valuable hemodynamic markers, such as pressure gradients, for diagnosing coronary artery disease (CAD). However, CFD is computationally expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to integrate into large-scale clinical workflows. These limitations restrict the availability of labeled hemodynamic data for training AI models and hinder broad adoption of non-invasive, physiology based CAD assessment. To address these challenges, we develop an end to end pipeline that automates coronary geometry extraction from coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA), streamlines simulation data generation, and enables efficient learning of coronary blood pressure distributions. The pipeline reduces the manual burden associated with traditional CFD workflows while producing consistent training data. We further introduce a diffusion-based regression model designed to predict coronary blood pressure directly from CCTA derived features, bypassing the need for slow CFD computation during inference. Evaluated on a dataset of simulated coronary hemodynamics, the proposed model achieves state of the art performance, with an R2 of 64.42%, a root mean squared error of 0.0974, and a normalized RMSE of 0.154, outperforming several baseline approaches. This work provides a scalable and accessible framework for rapid, non-invasive blood pressure prediction to support CAD diagnosis.
Authors: Jaskirat Singh, Xingjian Leng, Zongze Wu, Liang Zheng, Richard Zhang, Eli Shechtman, Saining Xie
Abstract: Representation alignment (REPA) guides generative training by distilling representations from a strong, pretrained vision encoder to intermediate diffusion features. We investigate a fundamental question: what aspect of the target representation matters for generation, its \textit{global} \revision{semantic} information (e.g., measured by ImageNet-1K accuracy) or its spatial structure (i.e. pairwise cosine similarity between patch tokens)? Prevalent wisdom holds that stronger global semantic performance leads to better generation as a target representation. To study this, we first perform a large-scale empirical analysis across 27 different vision encoders and different model scales. The results are surprising; spatial structure, rather than global performance, drives the generation performance of a target representation. To further study this, we introduce two straightforward modifications, which specifically accentuate the transfer of \emph{spatial} information. We replace the standard MLP projection layer in REPA with a simple convolution layer and introduce a spatial normalization layer for the external representation. Surprisingly, our simple method (implemented in $<$4 lines of code), termed iREPA, consistently improves convergence speed of REPA, across a diverse set of vision encoders, model sizes, and training variants (such as REPA, REPA-E, Meanflow, JiT etc). %, etc. Our work motivates revisiting the fundamental working mechanism of representational alignment and how it can be leveraged for improved training of generative models. The code and project page are available at https://end2end-diffusion.github.io/irepa
Authors: Masum Shah Junayed, John Derek Van Vessem, Qian Wan, Gahie Nam, Sheida Nabavi
Abstract: Prostate cancer grading from whole-slide images (WSIs) remains a challenging task due to the large-scale nature of WSIs, the presence of heterogeneous tissue structures, and difficulty of selecting diagnostically relevant regions. Existing approaches often rely on random or static patch selection, leading to the inclusion of redundant or non-informative regions that degrade performance. To address this, we propose a Graph Laplacian Attention-Based Transformer (GLAT) integrated with an Iterative Refinement Module (IRM) to enhance both feature learning and spatial consistency. The IRM iteratively refines patch selection by leveraging a pretrained ResNet50 for local feature extraction and a foundation model in no-gradient mode for importance scoring, ensuring only the most relevant tissue regions are preserved. The GLAT models tissue-level connectivity by constructing a graph where patches serve as nodes, ensuring spatial consistency through graph Laplacian constraints and refining feature representations via a learnable filtering mechanism that enhances discriminative histological structures. Additionally, a convex aggregation mechanism dynamically adjusts patch importance to generate a robust WSI-level representation. Extensive experiments on five public and one private dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving higher performance and spatial consistency while maintaining computational efficiency.
Authors: Wang Lu, Jindong Wang
Abstract: While computer vision and machine learning have made great progress, their robustness is still challenged by two key issues: data distribution shift and label noise. When domain generalization (DG) encounters noise, noisy labels further exacerbate the emergence of spurious features in deep layers, i.e. spurious feature enlargement, leading to a degradation in the performance of existing algorithms. This paper, starting from domain generalization, explores how to make existing methods rework when meeting noise. We find that the latent features inside the model have certain discriminative capabilities, and different latent features focus on different parts of the image. Based on these observations, we propose the Self-Ensemble Post Learning approach (SEPL) to diversify features which can be leveraged. Specifically, SEPL consists of two parts: feature probing training and prediction ensemble inference. It leverages intermediate feature representations within the model architecture, training multiple probing classifiers to fully exploit the capabilities of pre-trained models, while the final predictions are obtained through the integration of outputs from these diverse classification heads. Considering the presence of noisy labels, we employ semi-supervised algorithms to train probing classifiers. Given that different probing classifiers focus on different areas, we integrate their predictions using a crowdsourcing inference approach. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method not only enhances the robustness of existing methods but also exhibits significant potential for real-world applications with high flexibility.
Authors: Jianqi Chen, Biao Zhang, Xiangjun Tang, Peter Wonka
Abstract: 6D object pose estimation, which predicts the transformation of an object relative to the camera, remains challenging for unseen objects. Existing approaches typically rely on explicitly constructing feature correspondences between the query image and either the object model or template images. In this work, we propose PoseGAM, a geometry-aware multi-view framework that directly predicts object pose from a query image and multiple template images, eliminating the need for explicit matching. Built upon recent multi-view-based foundation model architectures, the method integrates object geometry information through two complementary mechanisms: explicit point-based geometry and learned features from geometry representation networks. In addition, we construct a large-scale synthetic dataset containing more than 190k objects under diverse environmental conditions to enhance robustness and generalization. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance, yielding an average AR improvement of 5.1% over prior methods and achieving up to 17.6% gains on individual datasets, indicating strong generalization to unseen objects. Project page: https://windvchen.github.io/PoseGAM/ .
Authors: Kehong Gong, Zhengyu Wen, Mingxi Xu, Weixia He, Qi Wang, Ning Zhang, Zhengyu Li, Chenbin Li, Dongze Lian, Wei Zhao, Xiaoyu He, Mingyuan Zhang
Abstract: Despite significant progress in 4D content generation, the conversion of monocular videos into high-quality animated 3D assets with explicit 4D meshes remains considerably challenging. The scarcity of large-scale, naturally captured 4D mesh datasets further limits the ability to train generalizable video-to-4D models from scratch in a purely data-driven manner. Meanwhile, advances in image-to-3D generation, supported by extensive datasets, offer powerful prior models that can be leveraged. To better utilize these priors while minimizing reliance on 4D supervision, we introduce SWiT-4D, a Sliding-Window Transformer for lossless, parameter-free temporal 4D mesh generation. SWiT-4D integrates seamlessly with any Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based image-to-3D generator, adding spatial-temporal modeling across video frames while preserving the original single-image forward process, enabling 4D mesh reconstruction from videos of arbitrary length. To recover global translation, we further introduce an optimization-based trajectory module tailored for static-camera monocular videos. SWiT-4D demonstrates strong data efficiency: with only a single short (<10s) video for fine-tuning, it achieves high-fidelity geometry and stable temporal consistency, indicating practical deployability under extremely limited 4D supervision. Comprehensive experiments on both in-domain zoo-test sets and challenging out-of-domain benchmarks (C4D, Objaverse, and in-the-wild videos) show that SWiT-4D consistently outperforms existing baselines in temporal smoothness. Project page: https://animotionlab.github.io/SWIT4D/
Authors: Jingli Lin, Runsen Xu, Shaohao Zhu, Sihan Yang, Peizhou Cao, Yunlong Ran, Miao Hu, Chenming Zhu, Yiman Xie, Yilin Long, Wenbo Hu, Dahua Lin, Tai Wang, Jiangmiao Pang
Abstract: Spatial understanding over continuous visual input is crucial for MLLMs to evolve into general-purpose assistants in physical environments. Yet there is still no comprehensive benchmark that holistically assesses the progress toward this goal. In this work, we introduce MMSI-Video-Bench, a fully human-annotated benchmark for video-based spatial intelligence in MLLMs. It operationalizes a four-level framework, Perception, Planning, Prediction, and Cross-Video Reasoning, through 1,106 questions grounded in 1,278 clips from 25 datasets and in-house videos. Each item is carefully designed and reviewed by 3DV experts with explanatory rationales to ensure precise, unambiguous grounding. Leveraging its diverse data sources and holistic task coverage, MMSI-Video-Bench also supports three domain-oriented sub-benchmarks (Indoor Scene Perception Bench, Robot Bench and Grounding Bench) for targeted capability assessment. We evaluate 25 strong open-source and proprietary MLLMs, revealing a striking human--AI gap: many models perform near chance, and the best reasoning model lags humans by nearly 60%. We further find that spatially fine-tuned models still fail to generalize effectively on our benchmark. Fine-grained error analysis exposes systematic failures in geometric reasoning, motion grounding, long-horizon prediction, and cross-video correspondence. We also show that typical frame-sampling strategies transfer poorly to our reasoning-intensive benchmark, and that neither 3D spatial cues nor chain-of-thought prompting yields meaningful gains. We expect our benchmark to establish a solid testbed for advancing video-based spatial intelligence.
Authors: Zongzhao Li, Xiangzhe Kong, Jiahui Su, Zongyang Ma, Mingze Li, Songyou Li, Yuelin Zhang, Yu Rong, Tingyang Xu, Deli Zhao, Wenbing Huang
Abstract: This paper introduces the concept of Microscopic Spatial Intelligence (MiSI), the capability to perceive and reason about the spatial relationships of invisible microscopic entities, which is fundamental to scientific discovery. To assess the potential of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in this domain, we propose a systematic benchmark framework MiSI-Bench. This framework features over 163,000 question-answer pairs and 587,000 images derived from approximately 4,000 molecular structures, covering nine complementary tasks that evaluate abilities ranging from elementary spatial transformations to complex relational identifications. Experimental results reveal that current state-of-the-art VLMs perform significantly below human level on this benchmark. However, a fine-tuned 7B model demonstrates substantial potential, even surpassing humans in spatial transformation tasks, while its poor performance in scientifically-grounded tasks like hydrogen bond recognition underscores the necessity of integrating explicit domain knowledge for progress toward scientific AGI. The datasets are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/zongzhao/MiSI-bench.
Authors: Kehong Gong, Zhengyu Wen, Weixia He, Mingxi Xu, Qi Wang, Ning Zhang, Zhengyu Li, Dongze Lian, Wei Zhao, Xiaoyu He, Mingyuan Zhang
Abstract: Motion capture now underpins content creation far beyond digital humans, yet most existing pipelines remain species- or template-specific. We formalize this gap as Category-Agnostic Motion Capture (CAMoCap): given a monocular video and an arbitrary rigged 3D asset as a prompt, the goal is to reconstruct a rotation-based animation such as BVH that directly drives the specific asset. We present MoCapAnything, a reference-guided, factorized framework that first predicts 3D joint trajectories and then recovers asset-specific rotations via constraint-aware inverse kinematics. The system contains three learnable modules and a lightweight IK stage: (1) a Reference Prompt Encoder that extracts per-joint queries from the asset's skeleton, mesh, and rendered images; (2) a Video Feature Extractor that computes dense visual descriptors and reconstructs a coarse 4D deforming mesh to bridge the gap between video and joint space; and (3) a Unified Motion Decoder that fuses these cues to produce temporally coherent trajectories. We also curate Truebones Zoo with 1038 motion clips, each providing a standardized skeleton-mesh-render triad. Experiments on both in-domain benchmarks and in-the-wild videos show that MoCapAnything delivers high-quality skeletal animations and exhibits meaningful cross-species retargeting across heterogeneous rigs, enabling scalable, prompt-driven 3D motion capture for arbitrary assets. Project page: https://animotionlab.github.io/MoCapAnything/
Authors: Brandon Smock, Valerie Faucon-Morin, Max Sokolov, Libin Liang, Tayyibah Khanam, Maury Courtland
Abstract: Table extraction (TE) is a key challenge in visual document understanding. Traditional approaches detect tables first, then recognize their structure. Recently, interest has surged in developing methods, such as vision-language models (VLMs), that can extract tables directly in their full page or document context. However, progress has been difficult to demonstrate due to a lack of annotated data. To address this, we create a new large-scale dataset, PubTables-v2. PubTables-v2 supports a number of current challenging table extraction tasks. Notably, it is the first large-scale benchmark for multi-page table structure recognition. We demonstrate its usefulness by evaluating domain-specialized VLMs on these tasks and highlighting current progress. Finally, we use PubTables-v2 to create the Page-Object Table Transformer (POTATR), an image-to-graph extension of the Table Transformer to comprehensive page-level TE. Data, code, and trained models will be released.
Authors: Peiying Zhang, Nanxuan Zhao, Matthew Fisher, Yiran Xu, Jing Liao, Difan Liu
Abstract: Recent vision-language model (VLM)-based approaches have achieved impressive results on SVG generation. However, because they generate only text and lack visual signals during decoding, they often struggle with complex semantics and fail to produce visually appealing or geometrically coherent SVGs. We introduce DuetSVG, a unified multimodal model that jointly generates image tokens and corresponding SVG tokens in an end-to-end manner. DuetSVG is trained on both image and SVG datasets. At inference, we apply a novel test-time scaling strategy that leverages the model's native visual predictions as guidance to improve SVG decoding quality. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing methods, producing visually faithful, semantically aligned, and syntactically clean SVGs across a wide range of applications.
Authors: Yulu Gan, Ligeng Zhu, Dandan Shan, Baifeng Shi, Hongxu Yin, Boris Ivanovic, Song Han, Trevor Darrell, Jitendra Malik, Marco Pavone, Boyi Li
Abstract: Motion understanding is fundamental to physical reasoning, enabling models to infer dynamics and predict future states. However, state-of-the-art models still struggle on recent motion benchmarks, primarily due to the scarcity of large-scale, fine-grained motion datasets. Existing motion datasets are often constructed from costly manual annotation, severely limiting scalability. To address this challenge, we introduce FoundationMotion, a fully automated data curation pipeline that constructs large-scale motion datasets. Our approach first detects and tracks objects in videos to extract their trajectories, then leverages these trajectories and video frames with Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate fine-grained captions and diverse question-answer pairs about motion and spatial reasoning. Using datasets produced by this pipeline, we fine-tune open-source models including NVILA-Video-15B and Qwen2.5-7B, achieving substantial improvements in motion understanding without compromising performance on other tasks. Notably, our models outperform strong closed-source baselines like Gemini-2.5 Flash and large open-source models such as Qwen2.5-VL-72B across diverse motion understanding datasets and benchmarks. FoundationMotion thus provides a scalable solution for curating fine-grained motion datasets that enable effective fine-tuning of diverse models to enhance motion understanding and spatial reasoning capabilities.
Authors: Shengao Wang, Wenqi Wang, Zecheng Wang, Max Whitton, Michael Wakeham, Arjun Chandra, Joey Huang, Pengyue Zhu, Helen Chen, David Li, Jeffrey Li, Shawn Li, Andrew Zagula, Amy Zhao, Andrew Zhu, Sayaka Nakamura, Yuki Yamamoto, Jerry Jun Yokono, Aaron Mueller, Bryan A. Plummer, Kate Saenko, Venkatesh Saligrama, Boqing Gong
Abstract: Early children's developmental trajectories set up a natural goal for sample-efficient pretraining of vision foundation models. We introduce BabyVLM-V2, a developmentally grounded framework for infant-inspired vision-language modeling that extensively improves upon BabyVLM-V1 through a longitudinal, multifaceted pretraining set, a versatile model, and, most importantly, DevCV Toolbox for cognitive evaluation. The pretraining set maximizes coverage while minimizing curation of a longitudinal, infant-centric audiovisual corpus, yielding video-utterance, image-utterance, and multi-turn conversational data that mirror infant experiences. DevCV Toolbox adapts all vision-related measures of the recently released NIH Baby Toolbox into a benchmark suite of ten multimodal tasks, covering spatial reasoning, memory, and vocabulary understanding aligned with early children's capabilities. Experimental results show that a compact model pretrained from scratch can achieve competitive performance on DevCV Toolbox, outperforming GPT-4o on some tasks. We hope the principled, unified BabyVLM-V2 framework will accelerate research in developmentally plausible pretraining of vision foundation models.
Authors: Jay Karhade, Nikhil Keetha, Yuchen Zhang, Tanisha Gupta, Akash Sharma, Sebastian Scherer, Deva Ramanan
Abstract: We present Any4D, a scalable multi-view transformer for metric-scale, dense feed-forward 4D reconstruction. Any4D directly generates per-pixel motion and geometry predictions for N frames, in contrast to prior work that typically focuses on either 2-view dense scene flow or sparse 3D point tracking. Moreover, unlike other recent methods for 4D reconstruction from monocular RGB videos, Any4D can process additional modalities and sensors such as RGB-D frames, IMU-based egomotion, and Radar Doppler measurements, when available. One of the key innovations that allows for such a flexible framework is a modular representation of a 4D scene; specifically, per-view 4D predictions are encoded using a variety of egocentric factors (depthmaps and camera intrinsics) represented in local camera coordinates, and allocentric factors (camera extrinsics and scene flow) represented in global world coordinates. We achieve superior performance across diverse setups - both in terms of accuracy (2-3X lower error) and compute efficiency (15X faster), opening avenues for multiple downstream applications.
Authors: Madhav Agarwal, Mingtian Zhang, Laura Sevilla-Lara, Steven McDonagh
Abstract: Speech-driven talking heads have recently emerged and enable interactive avatars. However, real-world applications are limited, as current methods achieve high visual fidelity but slow or fast yet temporally unstable. Diffusion methods provide realistic image generation, yet struggle with oneshot settings. Gaussian Splatting approaches are real-time, yet inaccuracies in facial tracking, or inconsistent Gaussian mappings, lead to unstable outputs and video artifacts that are detrimental to realistic use cases. We address this problem by mapping Gaussian Splatting using 3D Morphable Models to generate person-specific avatars. We introduce transformer-based prediction of model parameters, directly from audio, to drive temporal consistency. From monocular video and independent audio speech inputs, our method enables generation of real-time talking head videos where we report competitive quantitative and qualitative performance.
Authors: Xiang Fan, Sharath Girish, Vivek Ramanujan, Chaoyang Wang, Ashkan Mirzaei, Petr Sushko, Aliaksandr Siarohin, Sergey Tulyakov, Ranjay Krishna
Abstract: Prior approaches injecting camera control into diffusion models have focused on specific subsets of 4D consistency tasks: novel view synthesis, text-to-video with camera control, image-to-video, amongst others. Therefore, these fragmented approaches are trained on disjoint slices of available 3D/4D data. We introduce OmniView, a unified framework that generalizes across a wide range of 4D consistency tasks. Our method separately represents space, time, and view conditions, enabling flexible combinations of these inputs. For example, OmniView can synthesize novel views from static, dynamic, and multiview inputs, extrapolate trajectories forward and backward in time, and create videos from text or image prompts with full camera control. OmniView is competitive with task-specific models across diverse benchmarks and metrics, improving image quality scores among camera-conditioned diffusion models by up to 33\% in multiview NVS LLFF dataset, 60\% in dynamic NVS Neural 3D Video benchmark, 20\% in static camera control on RE-10K, and reducing camera trajectory errors by 4x in text-conditioned video generation. With strong generalizability in one model, OmniView demonstrates the feasibility of a generalist 4D video model. Project page is available at https://snap-research.github.io/OmniView/
Authors: Arijit Ray, Ahmed Abdelkader, Chengzhi Mao, Bryan A. Plummer, Kate Saenko, Ranjay Krishna, Leonidas Guibas, Wen-Sheng Chu
Abstract: Reasoning goes beyond language; the real world requires reasoning about space, time, affordances, and much more that words alone cannot convey. Existing multimodal models exploring the potential of reasoning with images are brittle and do not scale. They rely on calling specialist tools, costly generation of images, or handcrafted reasoning data to switch between text and image thoughts. Instead, we offer a simpler alternative -- Mull-Tokens -- modality-agnostic latent tokens pre-trained to hold intermediate information in either image or text modalities to let the model think free-form towards the correct answer. We investigate best practices to train Mull-Tokens inspired by latent reasoning frameworks. We first train Mull-Tokens using supervision from interleaved text-image traces, and then fine-tune without any supervision by only using the final answers. Across four challenging spatial reasoning benchmarks involving tasks such as solving puzzles and taking different perspectives, we demonstrate that Mull-Tokens improve upon several baselines utilizing text-only reasoning or interleaved image-text reasoning, achieving a +3% average improvement and up to +16% on a puzzle solving reasoning-heavy split compared to our strongest baseline. Adding to conversations around challenges in grounding textual and visual reasoning, Mull-Tokens offers a simple solution to abstractly think in multiple modalities.
Authors: Delong Chen, Mustafa Shukor, Theo Moutakanni, Willy Chung, Jade Yu, Tejaswi Kasarla, Allen Bolourchi, Yann LeCun, Pascale Fung
Abstract: We introduce VL-JEPA, a vision-language model built on a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA). Instead of autoregressively generating tokens as in classical VLMs, VL-JEPA predicts continuous embeddings of the target texts. By learning in an abstract representation space, the model focuses on task-relevant semantics while abstracting away surface-level linguistic variability. In a strictly controlled comparison against standard token-space VLM training with the same vision encoder and training data, VL-JEPA achieves stronger performance while having 50% fewer trainable parameters. At inference time, a lightweight text decoder is invoked only when needed to translate VL-JEPA predicted embeddings into text. We show that VL-JEPA natively supports selective decoding that reduces the number of decoding operations by 2.85x while maintaining similar performance compared to non-adaptive uniform decoding. Beyond generation, the VL-JEPA's embedding space naturally supports open-vocabulary classification, text-to-video retrieval, and discriminative VQA without any architecture modification. On eight video classification and eight video retrieval datasets, the average performance VL-JEPA surpasses that of CLIP, SigLIP2, and Perception Encoder. At the same time, the model achieves comparable performance as classical VLMs (InstructBLIP, QwenVL) on four VQA datasets: GQA, TallyQA, POPE and POPEv2, despite only having 1.6B parameters.
Authors: Sharath Girish, Viacheslav Ivanov, Tsai-Shien Chen, Hao Chen, Aliaksandr Siarohin, Sergey Tulyakov
Abstract: Recent advances in subject-driven video generation with large diffusion models have enabled personalized content synthesis conditioned on user-provided subjects. However, existing methods lack fine-grained temporal control over subject appearance and disappearance, which are essential for applications such as compositional video synthesis, storyboarding, and controllable animation. We propose AlcheMinT, a unified framework that introduces explicit timestamps conditioning for subject-driven video generation. Our approach introduces a novel positional encoding mechanism that unlocks the encoding of temporal intervals, associated in our case with subject identities, while seamlessly integrating with the pretrained video generation model positional embeddings. Additionally, we incorporate subject-descriptive text tokens to strengthen binding between visual identity and video captions, mitigating ambiguity during generation. Through token-wise concatenation, AlcheMinT avoids any additional cross-attention modules and incurs negligible parameter overhead. We establish a benchmark evaluating multiple subject identity preservation, video fidelity, and temporal adherence. Experimental results demonstrate that AlcheMinT achieves visual quality matching state-of-the-art video personalization methods, while, for the first time, enabling precise temporal control over multi-subject generation within videos. Project page is at https://snap-research.github.io/Video-AlcheMinT
Authors: Henghui Ding, Chang Liu, Shuting He, Kaining Ying, Xudong Jiang, Chen Change Loy, Yu-Gang Jiang
Abstract: This paper proposes a large-scale multi-modal dataset for referring motion expression video segmentation, focusing on segmenting and tracking target objects in videos based on language description of objects' motions. Existing referring video segmentation datasets often focus on salient objects and use language expressions rich in static attributes, potentially allowing the target object to be identified in a single frame. Such datasets underemphasize the role of motion in both videos and languages. To explore the feasibility of using motion expressions and motion reasoning clues for pixel-level video understanding, we introduce MeViS, a dataset containing 33,072 human-annotated motion expressions in both text and audio, covering 8,171 objects in 2,006 videos of complex scenarios. We benchmark 15 existing methods across 4 tasks supported by MeViS, including 6 referring video object segmentation (RVOS) methods, 3 audio-guided video object segmentation (AVOS) methods, 2 referring multi-object tracking (RMOT) methods, and 4 video captioning methods for the newly introduced referring motion expression generation (RMEG) task. The results demonstrate weaknesses and limitations of existing methods in addressing motion expression-guided video understanding. We further analyze the challenges and propose an approach LMPM++ for RVOS/AVOS/RMOT that achieves new state-of-the-art results. Our dataset provides a platform that facilitates the development of motion expression-guided video understanding algorithms in complex video scenes. The proposed MeViS dataset and the method's source code are publicly available at https://henghuiding.com/MeViS/
Authors: Jiawei Yang, Ziyu Chen, Yurong You, Yan Wang, Yiming Li, Yuxiao Chen, Boyi Li, Boris Ivanovic, Marco Pavone, Yue Wang
Abstract: We present Flex, an efficient and effective scene encoder that addresses the computational bottleneck of processing high-volume multi-camera data in end-to-end autonomous driving. Flex employs a small set of learnable scene tokens to jointly encode information from all image tokens across different cameras and timesteps. By design, our approach is geometry-agnostic, learning a compact scene representation directly from data without relying on the explicit 3D inductive biases, such as Bird-Eye-View (BEV), occupancy or tri-plane representations, which are common in prior work. This holistic encoding strategy aggressively compresses the visual input for the downstream Large Language Model (LLM) based policy model. Evaluated on a large-scale proprietary dataset of 20,000 driving hours, our Flex achieves 2.2x greater inference throughput while improving driving performance by a large margin compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we show that these compact scene tokens develop an emergent capability for scene decomposition without any explicit supervision. Our findings challenge the prevailing assumption that 3D priors are necessary, demonstrating that a data-driven, joint encoding strategy offers a more scalable, efficient and effective path for future autonomous driving systems.
Authors: Shengkai Hu, Jiaqi Ma, Jun Wan, Wenwen Min, Yongcheng Jing, Lefei Zhang, Dacheng Tao
Abstract: All-in-One Image Restoration (AiOIR) aims to recover high-quality images from diverse degradations within a unified framework. However, existing methods often fail to explicitly model degradation types and struggle to adapt their restoration behavior to complex or mixed degradations. To address these issues, we propose ClusIR, a Cluster-Guided Image Restoration framework that explicitly models degradation semantics through learnable clustering and propagates cluster-aware cues across spatial and frequency domains for adaptive restoration. Specifically, ClusIR comprises two key components: a Probabilistic Cluster-Guided Routing Mechanism (PCGRM) and a Degradation-Aware Frequency Modulation Module (DAFMM). The proposed PCGRM disentangles degradation recognition from expert activation, enabling discriminative degradation perception and stable expert routing. Meanwhile, DAFMM leverages the cluster-guided priors to perform adaptive frequency decomposition and targeted modulation, collaboratively refining structural and textural representations for higher restoration fidelity. The cluster-guided synergy seamlessly bridges semantic cues with frequency-domain modulation, empowering ClusIR to attain remarkable restoration results across a wide range of degradations. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks validate that ClusIR reaches competitive performance under several scenarios.
Authors: Yiwen Tang, Zoey Guo, Kaixin Zhu, Ray Zhang, Qizhi Chen, Dongzhi Jiang, Junli Liu, Bohan Zeng, Haoming Song, Delin Qu, Tianyi Bai, Dan Xu, Wentao Zhang, Bin Zhao
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL), earlier proven to be effective in large language and multi-modal models, has been successfully extended to enhance 2D image generation recently. However, applying RL to 3D generation remains largely unexplored due to the higher spatial complexity of 3D objects, which require globally consistent geometry and fine-grained local textures. This makes 3D generation significantly sensitive to reward designs and RL algorithms. To address these challenges, we conduct the first systematic study of RL for text-to-3D autoregressive generation across several dimensions. (1) Reward designs: We evaluate reward dimensions and model choices, showing that alignment with human preference is crucial, and that general multi-modal models provide robust signal for 3D attributes. (2) RL algorithms: We study GRPO variants, highlighting the effectiveness of token-level optimization, and further investigate the scaling of training data and iterations. (3) Text-to-3D Benchmarks: Since existing benchmarks fail to measure implicit reasoning abilities in 3D generation models, we introduce MME-3DR. (4) Advanced RL paradigms: Motivated by the natural hierarchy of 3D generation, we propose Hi-GRPO, which optimizes the global-to-local hierarchical 3D generation through dedicated reward ensembles. Based on these insights, we develop AR3D-R1, the first RL-enhanced text-to-3D model, expert from coarse shape to texture refinement. We hope this study provides insights into RL-driven reasoning for 3D generation. Code is released at https://github.com/Ivan-Tang-3D/3DGen-R1.
Authors: Qitao Zhao, Hao Tan, Qianqian Wang, Sai Bi, Kai Zhang, Kalyan Sunkavalli, Shubham Tulsiani, Hanwen Jiang
Abstract: Self-supervised pre-training has revolutionized foundation models for languages, individual 2D images and videos, but remains largely unexplored for learning 3D-aware representations from multi-view images. In this paper, we present E-RayZer, a self-supervised large 3D Vision model that learns truly 3D-aware representations directly from unlabeled images. Unlike prior self-supervised methods such as RayZer that infer 3D indirectly through latent-space view synthesis, E-RayZer operates directly in 3D space, performing self-supervised 3D reconstruction with Explicit geometry. This formulation eliminates shortcut solutions and yields representations that are geometrically grounded. To ensure convergence and scalability, we introduce a novel fine-grained learning curriculum that organizes training from easy to hard samples and harmonizes heterogeneous data sources in an entirely unsupervised manner. Experiments demonstrate that E-RayZer significantly outperforms RayZer on pose estimation, matches or sometimes surpasses fully supervised reconstruction models such as VGGT. Furthermore, its learned representations outperform leading visual pre-training models (e.g., DINOv3, CroCo v2, VideoMAE V2, and RayZer) when transferring to 3D downstream tasks, establishing E-RayZer as a new paradigm for 3D-aware visual pre-training.
Authors: Sicheng Mo, Thao Nguyen, Richard Zhang, Nick Kolkin, Siddharth Srinivasan Iyer, Eli Shechtman, Krishna Kumar Singh, Yong Jae Lee, Bolei Zhou, Yuheng Li
Abstract: In this work, we explore an untapped signal in diffusion model inference. While all previous methods generate images independently at inference, we instead ask if samples can be generated collaboratively. We propose Group Diffusion, unlocking the attention mechanism to be shared across images, rather than limited to just the patches within an image. This enables images to be jointly denoised at inference time, learning both intra and inter-image correspondence. We observe a clear scaling effect - larger group sizes yield stronger cross-sample attention and better generation quality. Furthermore, we introduce a qualitative measure to capture this behavior and show that its strength closely correlates with FID. Built on standard diffusion transformers, our GroupDiff achieves up to 32.2% FID improvement on ImageNet-256x256. Our work reveals cross-sample inference as an effective, previously unexplored mechanism for generative modeling.
Authors: Tsai-Shien Chen, Aliaksandr Siarohin, Guocheng Gordon Qian, Kuan-Chieh Jackson Wang, Egor Nemchinov, Moayed Haji-Ali, Riza Alp Guler, Willi Menapace, Ivan Skorokhodov, Anil Kag, Jun-Yan Zhu, Sergey Tulyakov
Abstract: Visual concept personalization aims to transfer only specific image attributes, such as identity, expression, lighting, and style, into unseen contexts. However, existing methods rely on holistic embeddings from general-purpose image encoders, which entangle multiple visual factors and make it difficult to isolate a single attribute. This often leads to information leakage and incoherent synthesis. To address this limitation, we introduce Omni-Attribute, the first open-vocabulary image attribute encoder designed to learn high-fidelity, attribute-specific representations. Our approach jointly designs the data and model: (i) we curate semantically linked image pairs annotated with positive and negative attributes to explicitly teach the encoder what to preserve or suppress; and (ii) we adopt a dual-objective training paradigm that balances generative fidelity with contrastive disentanglement. The resulting embeddings prove effective for open-vocabulary attribute retrieval, personalization, and compositional generation, achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks.
Authors: Wentao Zhou, Xuweiyi Chen, Vignesh Rajagopal, Jeffrey Chen, Rohan Chandra, Zezhou Cheng
Abstract: The success of foundation models in language and vision motivated research in fully end-to-end robot navigation foundation models (NFMs). NFMs directly map monocular visual input to control actions and ignore mid-level vision modules (tracking, depth estimation, etc) entirely. While the assumption that vision capabilities will emerge implicitly is compelling, it requires large amounts of pixel-to-action supervision that are difficult to obtain. The challenge is especially pronounced in dynamic and unstructured settings, where robust navigation requires precise geometric and dynamic understanding, while the depth-scale ambiguity in monocular views further limits accurate spatial reasoning. In this paper, we show that relying on monocular vision and ignoring mid-level vision priors is inefficient. We present StereoWalker, which augments NFMs with stereo inputs and explicit mid-level vision such as depth estimation and dense pixel tracking. Our intuition is straightforward: stereo inputs resolve the depth-scale ambiguity, and modern mid-level vision models provide reliable geometric and motion structure in dynamic scenes. We also curate a large stereo navigation dataset with automatic action annotation from Internet stereo videos to support training of StereoWalker and to facilitate future research. Through our experiments, we find that mid-level vision enables StereoWalker to achieve a comparable performance as the state-of-the-art using only 1.5% of the training data, and surpasses the state-of-the-art using the full data. We also observe that stereo vision yields higher navigation performance than monocular input.
Authors: Yukai Shi, Weiyu Li, Zihao Wang, Hongyang Li, Xingyu Chen, Ping Tan, Lei Zhang
Abstract: We propose a decoupled 3D scene generation framework called SceneMaker in this work. Due to the lack of sufficient open-set de-occlusion and pose estimation priors, existing methods struggle to simultaneously produce high-quality geometry and accurate poses under severe occlusion and open-set settings. To address these issues, we first decouple the de-occlusion model from 3D object generation, and enhance it by leveraging image datasets and collected de-occlusion datasets for much more diverse open-set occlusion patterns. Then, we propose a unified pose estimation model that integrates global and local mechanisms for both self-attention and cross-attention to improve accuracy. Besides, we construct an open-set 3D scene dataset to further extend the generalization of the pose estimation model. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our decoupled framework on both indoor and open-set scenes. Our codes and datasets is released at https://idea-research.github.io/SceneMaker/.
Authors: Ao Liang, Lingdong Kong, Tianyi Yan, Hongsi Liu, Wesley Yang, Ziqi Huang, Wei Yin, Jialong Zuo, Yixuan Hu, Dekai Zhu, Dongyue Lu, Youquan Liu, Guangfeng Jiang, Linfeng Li, Xiangtai Li, Long Zhuo, Lai Xing Ng, Benoit R. Cottereau, Changxin Gao, Liang Pan, Wei Tsang Ooi, Ziwei Liu
Abstract: Generative world models are reshaping embodied AI, enabling agents to synthesize realistic 4D driving environments that look convincing but often fail physically or behaviorally. Despite rapid progress, the field still lacks a unified way to assess whether generated worlds preserve geometry, obey physics, or support reliable control. We introduce WorldLens, a full-spectrum benchmark evaluating how well a model builds, understands, and behaves within its generated world. It spans five aspects -- Generation, Reconstruction, Action-Following, Downstream Task, and Human Preference -- jointly covering visual realism, geometric consistency, physical plausibility, and functional reliability. Across these dimensions, no existing world model excels universally: those with strong textures often violate physics, while geometry-stable ones lack behavioral fidelity. To align objective metrics with human judgment, we further construct WorldLens-26K, a large-scale dataset of human-annotated videos with numerical scores and textual rationales, and develop WorldLens-Agent, an evaluation model distilled from these annotations to enable scalable, explainable scoring. Together, the benchmark, dataset, and agent form a unified ecosystem for measuring world fidelity -- standardizing how future models are judged not only by how real they look, but by how real they behave.
Authors: Tjark Behrens, Anton Obukhov, Bingxin Ke, Fabio Tosi, Matteo Poggi, Konrad Schindler
Abstract: We introduce StereoSpace, a diffusion-based framework for monocular-to-stereo synthesis that models geometry purely through viewpoint conditioning, without explicit depth or warping. A canonical rectified space and the conditioning guide the generator to infer correspondences and fill disocclusions end-to-end. To ensure fair and leakage-free evaluation, we introduce an end-to-end protocol that excludes any ground truth or proxy geometry estimates at test time. The protocol emphasizes metrics reflecting downstream relevance: iSQoE for perceptual comfort and MEt3R for geometric consistency. StereoSpace surpasses other methods from the warp & inpaint, latent-warping, and warped-conditioning categories, achieving sharp parallax and strong robustness on layered and non-Lambertian scenes. This establishes viewpoint-conditioned diffusion as a scalable, depth-free solution for stereo generation.
Authors: Mihir Panchal, Ying-Jung Chen, Surya Parkash
Abstract: Landslides are a growing climate induced hazard with severe environmental and human consequences, particularly in high mountain Asia. Despite increasing access to satellite and temporal datasets, timely detection and disaster response remain underdeveloped and fragmented. This work introduces CC-GRMAS, a framework leveraging a series of satellite observations and environmental signals to enhance the accuracy of landslide forecasting. The system is structured around three interlinked agents Prediction, Planning, and Execution, which collaboratively enable real time situational awareness, response planning, and intervention. By incorporating local environmental factors and operationalizing multi agent coordination, this approach offers a scalable and proactive solution for climate resilient disaster preparedness across vulnerable mountainous terrains.
Authors: Moein Heidari, Mohammad Amin Roohi, Armin Khosravi, Ilker Hacihaliloglu
Abstract: Echocardiography is central to contemporary cardiovascular care, but full-study interpretation remains a cognitively demanding, multi-view task that is still performed manually. While recent foundation models for echocardiography can achieve strong performance on individual perceptual subtasks such as view classification, segmentation, or disease prediction, they typically operate in isolation and do not provide a unified, clinically coherent assessment. In this work, we introduce Echo-CoPilot, a multi-view, multi-task agent that uses a large language model to orchestrate a suite of specialized echocardiography tools. Within a ReAct-style loop, the agent decomposes clinician queries, invokes tools for view recognition, cardiac structure segmentation, measurement and disease prediction, and report synthesis, and integrates their outputs into guideline-aware answers and narrative summaries. We evaluate Echo-CoPilot on the public MIMIC-EchoQA benchmark, where it achieves an accuracy of 50.8\%, outperforming both general-purpose and biomedical video vision-language models. Qualitative analyses further show that the agent leverages quantitative measurements and physiologic context to resolve challenging cases near clinical decision thresholds, such as borderline left ventricular hypertrophy or pericardial effusion severity. The code will be released upon acceptance of the paper.
Authors: Ragja Palakkadavath, Hung Le, Thanh Nguyen-Tang, Svetha Venkatesh, Sunil Gupta
Abstract: Federated domain generalization (FedDG) addresses distribution shifts among clients in a federated learning framework. FedDG methods aggregate the parameters of locally trained client models to form a global model that generalizes to unseen clients while preserving data privacy. While improving the generalization capability of the global model, many existing approaches in FedDG jeopardize privacy by sharing statistics of client data between themselves. Our solution addresses this problem by contributing new ways to perform local client training and model aggregation. To improve local client training, we enforce (domain) invariance across local models with the help of a novel technique, \textbf{latent space inversion}, which enables better client privacy. When clients are not \emph{i.i.d}, aggregating their local models may discard certain local adaptations. To overcome this, we propose an \textbf{important weight} aggregation strategy to prioritize parameters that significantly influence predictions of local models during aggregation. Our extensive experiments show that our approach achieves superior results over state-of-the-art methods with less communication overhead.
Authors: Muhammad Usama, Muhammad Ibrahim Khan, Ahmad Hasan, Muhammad Shaaf Nadeem, Khawaja Fahad Iqbal, Jawad Aslam, Mian Ashfaq Ali, Asad Nisar Awan
Abstract: Mobile robots are increasingly utilized in agriculture to automate labor-intensive tasks such as weeding, sowing, harvesting and soil analysis. Recently, agricultural robots have been developed to detect and remove weeds using mechanical tools or precise herbicide sprays. Mechanical weeding is inefficient over large fields, and herbicides harm the soil ecosystem. Laser weeding with mobile robots has emerged as a sustainable alternative in precision farming. In this paper, we present an autonomous weeding robot that uses controlled exposure to a low energy laser beam for weed removal. The proposed robot is six-wheeled with a novel double four-bar suspension for higher stability. The laser is guided towards the detected weeds by a three-dimensional linear actuation mechanism. Field tests have demonstrated the robot's capability to navigate agricultural terrains effectively by overcoming obstacles up to 15 cm in height. At an optimal speed of 42.5 cm/s, the robot achieves a weed detection rate of 86.2\% and operating time of 87 seconds per meter. The laser actuation mechanism maintains a minimal mean positional error of 1.54 mm, combined with a high hit rate of 97\%, ensuring effective and accurate weed removal. This combination of speed, accuracy, and efficiency highlights the robot's potential for significantly enhancing precision farming practices.
Authors: Sai Bharath Chandra Gutha, Ricardo Vinuesa, Hossein Azizpour
Abstract: A pre-trained unconditional diffusion model, combined with posterior sampling or maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation techniques, can solve arbitrary inverse problems without task-specific training or fine-tuning. However, existing posterior sampling and MAP estimation methods often rely on modeling approximations and can be computationally demanding. In this work, we propose the variational mode-seeking loss (VML), which, when minimized during each reverse diffusion step, guides the generated sample towards the MAP estimate. VML arises from a novel perspective of minimizing the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the diffusion posterior $p(\mathbf{x}_0|\mathbf{x}_t)$ and the measurement posterior $p(\mathbf{x}_0|\mathbf{y})$, where $\mathbf{y}$ denotes the measurement. Importantly, for linear inverse problems, VML can be analytically derived and need not be approximated. Based on further theoretical insights, we propose VML-MAP, an empirically effective algorithm for solving inverse problems, and validate its efficacy over existing methods in both performance and computational time, through extensive experiments on diverse image-restoration tasks across multiple datasets.
Authors: Gemini Robotics Team, Coline Devin, Yilun Du, Debidatta Dwibedi, Ruiqi Gao, Abhishek Jindal, Thomas Kipf, Sean Kirmani, Fangchen Liu, Anirudha Majumdar, Andrew Marmon, Carolina Parada, Yulia Rubanova, Dhruv Shah, Vikas Sindhwani, Jie Tan, Fei Xia, Ted Xiao, Sherry Yang, Wenhao Yu, Allan Zhou
Abstract: Generative world models hold significant potential for simulating interactions with visuomotor policies in varied environments. Frontier video models can enable generation of realistic observations and environment interactions in a scalable and general manner. However, the use of video models in robotics has been limited primarily to in-distribution evaluations, i.e., scenarios that are similar to ones used to train the policy or fine-tune the base video model. In this report, we demonstrate that video models can be used for the entire spectrum of policy evaluation use cases in robotics: from assessing nominal performance to out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, and probing physical and semantic safety. We introduce a generative evaluation system built upon a frontier video foundation model (Veo). The system is optimized to support robot action conditioning and multi-view consistency, while integrating generative image-editing and multi-view completion to synthesize realistic variations of real-world scenes along multiple axes of generalization. We demonstrate that the system preserves the base capabilities of the video model to enable accurate simulation of scenes that have been edited to include novel interaction objects, novel visual backgrounds, and novel distractor objects. This fidelity enables accurately predicting the relative performance of different policies in both nominal and OOD conditions, determining the relative impact of different axes of generalization on policy performance, and performing red teaming of policies to expose behaviors that violate physical or semantic safety constraints. We validate these capabilities through 1600+ real-world evaluations of eight Gemini Robotics policy checkpoints and five tasks for a bimanual manipulator.
Authors: Benjamin Gundersen, Nicolas Deperrois, Samuel Ruiperez-Campillo, Thomas M. Sutter, Julia E. Vogt, Michael Moor, Farhad Nooralahzadeh, Michael Krauthammer
Abstract: Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have improved Chest X-ray (CXR) interpretation in multiple aspects. However, many medical VLMs rely solely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which optimizes next-token prediction without evaluating answer quality. In contrast, reinforcement learning (RL) can incorporate task-specific feedback, and its combination with explicit intermediate reasoning ("thinking") has demonstrated substantial gains on verifiable math and coding tasks. To investigate the effects of RL and thinking in a CXR VLM, we perform large-scale SFT on CXR data to build an updated RadVLM based on Qwen3-VL, followed by a cold-start SFT stage that equips the model with basic thinking ability. We then apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with clinically grounded, task-specific rewards for report generation and visual grounding, and run matched RL experiments on both domain-specific and general-domain Qwen3-VL variants, with and without thinking. Across these settings, we find that while strong SFT remains crucial for high base performance, RL provides additional gains on both tasks, whereas explicit thinking does not appear to further improve results. Under a unified evaluation pipeline, the RL-optimized RadVLM models outperform their baseline counterparts and reach state-of-the-art performance on both report generation and grounding, highlighting clinically aligned RL as a powerful complement to SFT for medical VLMs.
Authors: Chenyu Zhang, Yiwen Ma, Lanjun Wang, Wenhui Li, Yi Tu, An-An Liu
Abstract: Text-to-image~(T2I) models commonly incorporate defense mechanisms to prevent the generation of sensitive images. Unfortunately, recent jailbreaking attacks have shown that adversarial prompts can effectively bypass these mechanisms and induce T2I models to produce sensitive content, revealing critical safety vulnerabilities. However, existing attack methods implicitly assume that the attacker knows the type of deployed defenses, which limits their effectiveness against unknown or diverse defense mechanisms. In this work, we introduce \textbf{MJA}, a \textbf{m}etaphor-based \textbf{j}ailbreaking \textbf{a}ttack method inspired by the Taboo game, aiming to effectively and efficiently attack diverse defense mechanisms without prior knowledge of their type by generating metaphor-based adversarial prompts. Specifically, MJA consists of two modules: an LLM-based multi-agent generation module~(MLAG) and an adversarial prompt optimization module~(APO). MLAG decomposes the generation of metaphor-based adversarial prompts into three subtasks: metaphor retrieval, context matching, and adversarial prompt generation. Subsequently, MLAG coordinates three LLM-based agents to generate diverse adversarial prompts by exploring various metaphors and contexts. To enhance attack efficiency, APO first trains a surrogate model to predict the attack results of adversarial prompts and then designs an acquisition strategy to adaptively identify optimal adversarial prompts. Extensive experiments on T2I models with various external and internal defense mechanisms demonstrate that MJA outperforms six baseline methods, achieving stronger attack performance while using fewer queries. Code is available in https://github.com/datar001/metaphor-based-jailbreaking-attack.
URLs: https://github.com/datar001/metaphor-based-jailbreaking-attack.
Authors: Akshay Kulkarni, Tsui-Wei Weng, Vivek Narayanaswamy, Shusen Liu, Wesam A. Sakla, Kowshik Thopalli
Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) promise a unified approach for mechanistic interpretability, concept discovery, and model steering in LLMs and LVLMs. However, realizing this potential requires that the learned features be both interpretable and steerable. To that end, we introduce two new computationally inexpensive interpretability and steerability metrics and conduct a systematic analysis on LVLMs. Our analysis uncovers two observations; (i) a majority of SAE neurons exhibit either low interpretability or low steerability or both, rendering them ineffective for downstream use; and (ii) due to the unsupervised nature of SAEs, user-desired concepts are often absent in the learned dictionary, thus limiting their practical utility. To address these limitations, we propose Concept Bottleneck Sparse Autoencoders (CB-SAE) - a novel post-hoc framework that prunes low-utility neurons and augments the latent space with a lightweight concept bottleneck aligned to a user-defined concept set. The resulting CB-SAE improves interpretability by +32.1% and steerability by +14.5% across LVLMs and image generation tasks. We will make our code and model weights available.
Authors: Brian P. Powell, Jordan A. Caraballo-Vega, Mark L. Carroll, Thomas Maxwell, Andrew Ptak, Greg Olmschenk, Jorge Martinez-Palomera
Abstract: We report the discovery that binary encoding allows neural networks to extrapolate periodic functions beyond their training bounds. We introduce Normalized Base-2 Encoding (NB2E) as a method for encoding continuous numerical values and demonstrate that, using this input encoding, vanilla multi-layer perceptrons (MLP) successfully extrapolate diverse periodic signals without prior knowledge of their functional form. Internal activation analysis reveals that NB2E induces bit-phase representations, enabling MLPs to learn and extrapolate signal structure independently of position.
Authors: Leijie Wang, Otilia Stretcu, Wei Qiao, Thomas Denby, Krishnamurthy Viswanathan, Enming Luo, Chun-Ta Lu, Tushar Dogra, Ranjay Krishna, Ariel Fuxman
Abstract: From content moderation to content curation, applications requiring vision classifiers for visual concepts are rapidly expanding. Existing human-in-the-loop approaches typically assume users begin with a clear, stable concept understanding to be able to provide high-quality supervision. In reality, users often start with a vague idea and must iteratively refine it through "concept deliberation", a practice we uncovered through structured interviews with content moderation experts. We operationalize the common strategies in deliberation used by real content moderators into a human-in-the-loop framework called "Agile Deliberation" that explicitly supports evolving and subjective concepts. The system supports users in defining the concept for themselves by exposing them to borderline cases. The system does this with two deliberation stages: (1) concept scoping, which decomposes the initial concept into a structured hierarchy of sub-concepts, and (2) concept iteration, which surfaces semantically borderline examples for user reflection and feedback to iteratively align an image classifier with the user's evolving intent. Since concept deliberation is inherently subjective and interactive, we painstakingly evaluate the framework through 18 user sessions, each 1.5h long, rather than standard benchmarking datasets. We find that Agile Deliberation achieves 7.5% higher F1 scores than automated decomposition baselines and more than 3% higher than manual deliberation, while participants reported clearer conceptual understanding and lower cognitive effort.
Authors: Mingzhi Chen, Taiming Lu, Jiachen Zhu, Mingjie Sun, Zhuang Liu
Abstract: Although normalization layers have long been viewed as indispensable components of deep learning architectures, the recent introduction of Dynamic Tanh (DyT) has demonstrated that alternatives are possible. The point-wise function DyT constrains extreme values for stable convergence and reaches normalization-level performance; this work seeks further for function designs that can surpass it. We first study how the intrinsic properties of point-wise functions influence training and performance. Building on these findings, we conduct a large-scale search for a more effective function design. Through this exploration, we introduce $\mathrm{Derf}(x) = \mathrm{erf}(\alpha x + s)$, where $\mathrm{erf}(x)$ is the rescaled Gaussian cumulative distribution function, and identify it as the most performant design. Derf outperforms LayerNorm, RMSNorm, and DyT across a wide range of domains, including vision (image recognition and generation), speech representation, and DNA sequence modeling. Our findings suggest that the performance gains of Derf largely stem from its improved generalization rather than stronger fitting capacity. Its simplicity and stronger performance make Derf a practical choice for normalization-free Transformer architectures.
Authors: Yiyang Lu, Qiao Sun, Xianbang Wang, Zhicheng Jiang, Hanhong Zhao, Kaiming He
Abstract: Normalizing Flows (NFs) have been established as a principled framework for generative modeling. Standard NFs consist of a forward process and a reverse process: the forward process maps data to noise, while the reverse process generates samples by inverting it. Typical NF forward transformations are constrained by explicit invertibility, ensuring that the reverse process can serve as their exact analytic inverse. Recent developments in TARFlow and its variants have revitalized NF methods by combining Transformers and autoregressive flows, but have also exposed causal decoding as a major bottleneck. In this work, we introduce Bidirectional Normalizing Flow ($\textbf{BiFlow}$), a framework that removes the need for an exact analytic inverse. BiFlow learns a reverse model that approximates the underlying noise-to-data inverse mapping, enabling more flexible loss functions and architectures. Experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that BiFlow, compared to its causal decoding counterpart, improves generation quality while accelerating sampling by up to two orders of magnitude. BiFlow yields state-of-the-art results among NF-based methods and competitive performance among single-evaluation ("1-NFE") methods. Following recent encouraging progress on NFs, we hope our work will draw further attention to this classical paradigm.
Authors: Hantao Yao, Changsheng Xu
Abstract: Recently, cluster contrastive learning has been proven effective for object ReID by computing the contrastive loss between the individual features and the cluster memory. However, existing methods that use the individual features to momentum update the cluster memory will fluctuate over the training examples, especially for the outlier samples. Unlike the individual-based updating mechanism, the centroid-based updating mechanism that applies the mean feature of each cluster to update the cluster memory can reduce the impact of individual samples. Therefore, we formulate the individual-based updating and centroid-based updating mechanisms in a unified cluster contrastive framework, named Dual Cluster Contrastive framework (DCC), which maintains two types of memory banks: individual and centroid cluster memory banks. Significantly, the individual cluster memory considers just one individual at a time to take a single step for updating. The centroid cluster memory applies the mean feature of each cluster to update the corresponding cluster memory. During optimization, besides the vallina contrastive loss of each memory, a cross-view consistency constraint is applied to exchange the benefits of two memories for generating a discriminative description for the object ReID. Note that DCC can be easily applied for unsupervised or supervised object ReID by using ground-truth labels or the generated pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks, \emph{e.g.,} Market-1501, MSMT17, and VeRi-776, under \textbf{supervised Object ReID} and \textbf{unsupervised Object ReID} demonstrate the superiority of the proposed DCC.
Authors: Xu Yang, Juantao Zhong, Daoyuan Wu, Xiao Yi, Jimmy H. M. Lee, Tan Lee, Peng Han
Abstract: Online exams, conducted via video conferencing platforms such as Zoom, have become popular in educational institutions since COVID-19. While convenient, ensuring the integrity and security of online exams remains challenging, as traditional invigilation struggles to effectively monitor multiple student video feeds in real time. In this paper, we present iExam, an effective online exam proctoring and analysis system that combines lightweight face detection and deep recognition. iExam employs real-time face detection to assist invigilators in continuously monitoring student presence, and leverages deep face recognition for post-exam video analysis to identify abnormal behaviors--including face disappearance, face rotation, and identity substitution. To realize this system, we address three core challenges: (i) designing a lightweight approach to efficiently capture and analyze exam video streams in real time; (ii) developing an enhanced OCR method to automatically extract student identities from dynamically positioned Zoom name tags, enabling reliable ground truth labeling without manual intervention; and (iii) optimizing the training and inference pipeline to significantlyreduce resource and time requirements on ordinary teacher devices. Extensive experiments demonstrate that iExam achieves 90.4% accuracy for real-time face detection and 98.4% accuracy for post-exam face recognition, while maintaining low overhead. These results show that iExam can substantially enhance the automation and reliability of online exam proctoring in practice.
Authors: Muxin Zhang, Qiao Feng, Zhuo Su, Chao Wen, Zhou Xue, Kun Li
Abstract: 3D human generation is increasingly significant in various applications. However, the direct use of 2D generative methods in 3D generation often results in losing local details, while methods that reconstruct geometry from generated images struggle with global view consistency. In this work, we introduce Joint2Human, a novel method that leverages 2D diffusion models to generate detailed 3D human geometry directly, ensuring both global structure and local details. To achieve this, we employ the Fourier occupancy field (FOF) representation, enabling the direct generation of 3D shapes as preliminary results with 2D generative models. With the proposed high-frequency enhancer and the multi-view recarving strategy, our method can seamlessly integrate the details from different views into a uniform global shape. To better utilize the 3D human prior and enhance control over the generated geometry, we introduce a compact spherical embedding of 3D joints. This allows for an effective guidance of pose during the generation process. Additionally, our method can generate 3D humans guided by textual inputs. Our experimental results demonstrate the capability of our method to ensure global structure, local details, high resolution, and low computational cost simultaneously. More results and the code can be found on our project page at http://cic.tju.edu.cn/faculty/likun/projects/Joint2Human.
URLs: http://cic.tju.edu.cn/faculty/likun/projects/Joint2Human.
Authors: Gargi Panda, Soumitra Kundu, Saumik Bhattacharya, Aurobinda Routray
Abstract: Multi-modal image fusion (MMIF) enhances the information content of the fused image by combining the unique as well as common features obtained from different modality sensor images, improving visualization, object detection, and many more tasks. In this work, we introduce an interpretable network for the MMIF task, named FNet, based on an $\ell_0$-regularized multi-modal convolutional sparse coding (MCSC) model. Specifically, for solving the $\ell_0$-regularized CSC problem, we design a learnable $\ell_0$-regularized sparse coding (LZSC) block in a principled manner through deep unfolding. Given different modality source images, FNet first separates the unique and common features from them using the LZSC block and then these features are combined to generate the final fused image. Additionally, we propose an $\ell_0$-regularized MCSC model for the inverse fusion process. Based on this model, we introduce an interpretable inverse fusion network named IFNet, which is utilized during FNet's training. Extensive experiments show that FNet achieves high-quality fusion results across eight different MMIF datasets. Furthermore, we show that FNet enhances downstream object detection \textcolor[rgb]{ 0, 0, 0}{and semantic segmentation} in visible-thermal image pairs. We have also visualized the intermediate results of FNet, which demonstrates the good interpretability of our network. Link for code and models: https://github.com/gargi884/FNet-MMIF.
Authors: Gayatri Deshmukh, Somsubhra De, Chirag Sehgal, Jishu Sen Gupta, Sparsh Mittal
Abstract: Specialized datasets that capture the fashion industry's rich language and styling elements can boost progress in AI-driven fashion design. We present FLORA, (Fashion Language Outfit Representation for Apparel Generation), the first comprehensive dataset containing 4,330 curated pairs of fashion outfits and corresponding textual descriptions. Each description utilizes industry-specific terminology and jargon commonly used by professional fashion designers, providing precise and detailed insights into the outfits. Hence, the dataset captures the delicate features and subtle stylistic elements necessary to create high-fidelity fashion designs. We demonstrate that fine-tuning generative models on the FLORA dataset significantly enhances their capability to generate accurate and stylistically rich images from textual descriptions of fashion sketches. FLORA will catalyze the creation of advanced AI models capable of comprehending and producing subtle, stylistically rich fashion designs. It will also help fashion designers and end-users to bring their ideas to life. As a second orthogonal contribution, we introduce NeRA (Nonlinear low-rank Expressive Representation Adapter), a novel adapter architecture based on Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN). Unlike traditional PEFT techniques such as LoRA, LoKR, DoRA, and LoHA that use MLP adapters, NeRA uses learnable spline-based nonlinear transformations, enabling superior modeling of complex semantic relationships, achieving strong fidelity, faster convergence and semantic alignment. Extensive experiments on our proposed FLORA and LAION-5B datasets validate the superiority of NeRA over existing adapters. We will open-source both the FLORA dataset and our implementation code.
Authors: Niranjan Rajesh, Georgin Jacob, SP Arun
Abstract: Despite the rapid pace at which deep networks are improving on standardized vision benchmarks, they are still outperformed by humans on real-world vision tasks. One solution to this problem is to make deep networks more brain-like. Although there are several benchmarks that compare the ability of deep networks to predict brain responses on natural images, they do not capture subtle but important emergent properties present in brains. It is also unclear which design principle -- architecture, training data, or training regime -- would have the greatest impact on these emergent properties. To investigate these issues, we systematically evaluated over 30 state-of-the-art networks with varying network architectures, training datasets, and training regimes for the presence or absence of brain-like properties. Our main findings are as follows. First, network architecture had the strongest impact on brain-like properties compared to dataset and training regime variations. Second, networks varied widely in their alignment to the brain with no single network outperforming all others. Taken together, our results offer a principled and interpretable path toward closing the gap between artificial and human vision.
Authors: Fr\'ed\'eric Fortier-Chouinard, Zitian Zhang, Louis-Etienne Messier, Mathieu Garon, Anand Bhattad, Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Lalonde
Abstract: Recent work has shown that diffusion models can serve as powerful neural rendering engines that can be leveraged for inserting virtual objects into images. However, unlike typical physics-based renderers, these neural rendering engines are limited by the lack of manual control over the lighting, which is often essential for improving or personalizing the desired image outcome. In this paper, we show that precise and controllable lighting can be achieved without any additional training, simply by supplying a coarse shadow hint for the object. Indeed, we show that injecting only the desired shadow of the object into a pre-trained diffusion-based neural renderer enables it to accurately shade the object according to the desired light position, while properly harmonizing the object (and its shadow) within the target background image. Our method, SpotLight, is entirely training-free and leverages existing neural rendering approaches to achieve controllable relighting. We show that SpotLight achieves superior object compositing results, both quantitatively and perceptually, as confirmed by a user study, outperforming existing diffusion-based models specifically designed for relighting. We also demonstrate other applications, such as hand-scribbling shadows and full-image relighting, demonstrating its versatility.
Authors: Young-Jin Park, Carson Sobolewski, Navid Azizan
Abstract: DETR and its variants have emerged as promising architectures for object detection, offering an end-to-end prediction pipeline. In practice, however, DETRs generate hundreds of predictions that far outnumber the actual objects present in an image. This raises a critical question: which of these predictions could be trusted? Addressing this concern, we provide empirical and theoretical evidence that predictions within the same image play distinct roles, resulting in varying reliability levels. Our analysis reveals that DETRs employ an optimal specialist strategy: one prediction per object is trained to be well-calibrated, while the remaining predictions are trained to suppress their foreground confidence to near zero, even when maintaining accurate localization. We show that this strategy emerges as the loss-minimizing solution to the Hungarian matching algorithm, fundamentally shaping DETRs' outputs. While selecting the well-calibrated predictions is ideal, they are unidentifiable at inference time. This means that any post-processing algorithm poses a risk of outputting a set of predictions with mixed calibration levels. Therefore, practical deployment necessitates a joint evaluation of both the model's calibration quality and the effectiveness of the post-processing algorithm. However, we demonstrate that existing metrics like average precision and expected calibration error are inadequate for this task. To address this issue, we further introduce Object-level Calibration Error (OCE): This object-centric design penalizes both retaining suppressed predictions and missed ground truth foreground objects, making OCE suitable for both evaluating models and identifying reliable prediction subsets. Finally, we present a post hoc uncertainty quantification framework that predicts per-image model accuracy.
Authors: Dmitry Petrov, Pradyumn Goyal, Divyansh Shivashok, Yuanming Tao, Melinos Averkiou, Evangelos Kalogerakis
Abstract: We introduce ShapeWords, an approach for synthesizing images based on 3D shape guidance and text prompts. ShapeWords incorporates target 3D shape information within specialized tokens embedded together with the input text, effectively blending 3D shape awareness with textual context to guide the image synthesis process. Unlike conventional shape guidance methods that rely on depth maps restricted to fixed viewpoints and often overlook full 3D structure or textual context, ShapeWords generates diverse yet consistent images that reflect both the target shape's geometry and the textual description. Experimental results show that ShapeWords produces images that are more text-compliant, aesthetically plausible, while also maintaining 3D shape awareness.
Authors: Vivek Ramanujan, Kushal Tirumala, Armen Aghajanyan, Luke Zettlemoyer, Ali Farhadi
Abstract: Current image generation methods are based on a two-stage training approach. In stage 1, an auto-encoder is trained to compress an image into a latent space; in stage 2, a generative model is trained to learn a distribution over that latent space. This reveals a fundamental trade-off, do we compress more aggressively to make the latent distribution easier for the stage 2 model to learn even if it makes reconstruction worse? We study this problem in the context of discrete, auto-regressive image generation. Through the lens of scaling laws, we show that smaller stage 2 models can benefit from more compressed stage 1 latents even if reconstruction performance worsens, demonstrating that generation modeling capacity plays a role in this trade-off. Diving deeper, we rigorously study the connection between compute scaling and the stage 1 rate-distortion trade-off. Next, we introduce Causally Regularized Tokenization (CRT), which uses knowledge of the stage 2 generation modeling procedure to embed useful inductive biases in stage 1 latents. This regularization improves stage 2 generation performance better by making the tokens easier to model without affecting the stage 1 compression rate and marginally affecting distortion: we are able to improve compute efficiency 2-3$\times$ over baseline. Finally, we use CRT with further optimizations to the visual tokenizer setup to result in a generative pipeline that matches LlamaGen-3B generation performance (2.18 FID) with half the tokens per image (256 vs. 576) and a fourth the total model parameters (775M vs. 3.1B) while using the same architecture and inference procedure.
Authors: Wenhui Lei, Yusheng Tan, Anqi Li, Hanyu Chen, Hengrui Tian, Ruiying Li, Zhengqun Jiang, Fang Yan, Xiaofan Zhang, Shaoting Zhang
Abstract: Foundation models have advanced computational pathology by learning transferable visual representations from large histological datasets, yet recent evaluations reveal substantial variability in their performance across tasks. This inconsistency arises from differences in training data diversity and is further constrained by the reliance of many high-performing models on proprietary datasets that cannot be shared or expanded. Offline distillation offers a partial remedy but depends heavily on the size and heterogeneity of the distillation corpus and requires full retraining to incorporate new models. To address these limitations, we propose Shazam, a task-specific online integration framework that unifies multiple pretrained pathology foundation models within a single flexible inference system. Shazam fuses multi-level representations through adaptive expert weighting and learns task-aligned features via online distillation. Across spatial transcriptomics prediction, survival prognosis, tile classification, and visual question answering, Shazam consistently outperforms strong individual models, highlighting its promise as a scalable approach for harnessing the rapid evolution of pathology foundation models in a unified and adaptable manner.
Authors: Tasmiah Haque, Md. Asif Bin Syed, Byungheon Jeong, Xue Bai, Sumit Mohan, Somdyuti Paul, Imtiaz Ahmed, Srinjoy Das
Abstract: Motion Transfer is a technique that synthesizes videos by transferring motion dynamics from a driving video to a source image. In this work we propose a deep learning-based framework to enable real-time video motion transfer which is critical for enabling bandwidth-efficient applications such as video conferencing, remote health monitoring, virtual reality interaction, and vision-based anomaly detection. This is done using keypoints which serve as semantically meaningful, compact representations of motion across time. To enable bandwidth savings during video transmission we perform forecasting of keypoints using two generative time series models VRNN and GRU-NF. The predicted keypoints are transformed into realistic video frames using an optical flow-based module paired with a generator network, thereby enabling efficient, low-frame-rate video transmission. Based on the application this allows the framework to either generate a deterministic future sequence or sample a diverse set of plausible futures. Experimental results demonstrate that VRNN achieves the best point-forecast fidelity (lowest MAE) in applications requiring stable and accurate multi-step forecasting and is particularly competitive in higher-uncertainty, multi-modal settings. This is achieved by introducing recurrently conditioned stochastic latent variables that carry past contexts to capture uncertainty and temporal variation. On the other hand the GRU-NF model enables richer diversity of generated videos while maintaining high visual quality. This is realized by learning an invertible, exact-likelihood mapping between the keypoints and their latent representations which supports rich and controllable sampling of diverse yet coherent keypoint sequences. Our work lays the foundation for next-generation AI systems that require real-time, bandwidth-efficient, and semantically controllable video generation.
Authors: Linshan Wu, Yuxiang Nie, Sunan He, Jiaxin Zhuang, Luyang Luo, Tao Li, Zhuoyao Xie, Dexuan Chen, Yinghua Zhao, Neeraj Mahboobani, Varut Vardhanabhuti, Ronald Cheong Kin Chan, Yifan Peng, Pranav Rajpurkar, Hao Chen
Abstract: The integration of AI-assisted biomedical image analysis into clinical practice demands AI-generated findings that are not only accurate but also interpretable to clinicians. However, existing biomedical AI models generally lack the ability to simultaneously generate diagnostic findings and localize corresponding biomedical objects. This limitation makes it challenging for clinicians to correlate AI-generated findings with visual evidence (e.g., tiny lesions) in images and interpret the results of AI models. To address this challenge, we introduce UniBiomed, the first universal foundation model for grounded biomedical image interpretation, which is capable of generating accurate diagnostic findings and simultaneously segmenting the corresponding biomedical targets. UniBiomed is based on a novel integration of Multi-modal Large Language Model and Segment Anything Model, which can effectively unify diverse biomedical tasks in universal training for advancing grounded interpretation. To develop UniBiomed, we curate a large-scale dataset comprising over 27 million triplets of images, region annotations, and text descriptions across ten biomedical imaging modalities. Extensive validation on 70 internal and 14 external datasets demonstrated the state-of-the-art performance of UniBiomed in diverse biomedical tasks, including image segmentation, disease recognition, region-aware diagnosis, vision question answering, and report generation. In summary, UniBiomed is a powerful and versatile biomedical foundation model, unlocking the untapped grounded interpretation capability for optimizing AI-assisted biomedical image analysis.
Authors: Mengfei Duan, Yuheng Zhang, Yihong Cao, Fei Teng, Kai Luo, Jiaming Zhang, Kailun Yang, Zhiyong Li
Abstract: Panoramic imaging enables capturing 360{\deg} images with an ultra-wide Field-of-View (FoV) for dense omnidirectional perception, which is critical to applications, such as autonomous driving and augmented reality, etc. However, current panoramic semantic segmentation methods fail to identify outliers, and pinhole Out-of-distribution Segmentation (OoS) models perform unsatisfactorily in the panoramic domain due to pixel distortions and background clutter. To address these issues, we introduce a new task, Panoramic Out-of-distribution Segmentation (PanOoS), with the aim of achieving comprehensive and safe scene understanding. Furthermore, we propose the first solution, POS, which adapts to the characteristics of panoramic images through text-guided prompt distribution learning. Specifically, POS integrates a disentanglement strategy designed to materialize the cross-domain generalization capability of CLIP. The proposed Prompt-based Restoration Attention (PRA) optimizes semantic decoding by prompt guidance and self-adaptive correction, while Bilevel Prompt Distribution Learning (BPDL) refines the manifold of per-pixel mask embeddings via semantic prototype supervision. Besides, to compensate for the scarcity of PanOoS datasets, we establish two benchmarks: DenseOoS, which features diverse outliers in complex environments, and QuadOoS, captured by a quadruped robot with a panoramic annular lens system. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance of POS, with AuPRC improving by 34.25% and FPR95 decreasing by 21.42% on DenseOoS, outperforming state-of-the-art pinhole-OoS methods. Moreover, POS achieves leading closed-set segmentation capabilities and advances the development of panoramic understanding. Code and datasets will be available at https://github.com/MengfeiD/PanOoS.
Authors: Nitish Shukla, Arun Ross
Abstract: A face morph is created by combining two face images corresponding to two identities to produce a composite that successfully matches both the constituent identities. Reference-free (RF) demorphing reverses this process using only the morph image, without the need for additional reference images. Previous RF demorphing methods are overly constrained, as they rely on assumptions about the distributions of training and testing morphs such as the morphing technique used (e.g., landmark-based) and face image style (e.g., passport photos). In this paper, we introduce a novel diffusion-based approach, referred to as diffDeMorph, that effectively disentangles component images from a composite morph image with high visual fidelity. Our method is the first to generalize across morph techniques and face styles, beating the current state of the art by $\geq 59.46\%$ under a common training protocol across all datasets tested. We train our method on morphs created using synthetically generated face images and test on real morphs, thereby enhancing the practicality of the technique. Experiments on six datasets and two face matchers establish the utility and efficacy of our method.
Authors: Haoning Wu, Xiao Huang, Yaohui Chen, Ya Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Weidi Xie
Abstract: Existing evaluations of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on spatial intelligence are typically fragmented and limited in scope. In this work, we aim to conduct a holistic assessment of the spatial understanding capabilities of modern MLLMs and propose complementary data-driven and agent-based solutions. Specifically, we make the following contributions: (i) we introduce SpatialScore, to our knowledge, the most comprehensive and diverse benchmark for multimodal spatial intelligence to date. It covers multiple visual data types, input modalities, and question-answering formats, and contains approximately 5K manually verified samples spanning 30 distinct tasks; (ii) using SpatialScore, we extensively evaluate 40 representative MLLMs, revealing persistent challenges and a substantial gap between current models and human-level spatial intelligence; (iii) to advance model capabilities, we construct SpatialCorpus, a large-scale training resource with 331K multimodal QA samples that supports fine-tuning on spatial reasoning tasks and significantly improves the performance of existing models (e.g., Qwen3-VL); (iv) to complement this data-driven route with a training-free paradigm, we develop SpatialAgent, a multi-agent system equipped with 12 specialized spatial perception tools that supports both Plan-Execute and ReAct reasoning, enabling substantial gains in spatial reasoning without additional model training. Extensive experiments and in-depth analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of our benchmark, corpus, and agent framework. We expect these resources to serve as a solid foundation for advancing MLLMs toward human-level spatial intelligence. All data, code, and models will be released to the research community.
Authors: Yuchen Zhang, Yaxiong Wang, Yujiao Wu, Lianwei Wu, Li Zhu, Zhedong Zheng
Abstract: The detection and grounding of multimedia manipulation has emerged as a critical challenge in combating AI-generated disinformation. While existing methods have made progress in recent years, we identify two fundamental limitations in current approaches: (1) Underestimation of MLLM-driven deception risk: prevailing techniques primarily address rule-based text manipulations, yet fail to account for sophisticated misinformation synthesized by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that can dynamically generate semantically coherent, contextually plausible yet deceptive narratives conditioned on manipulated images; (2) Unrealistic misalignment artifacts: currently focused scenarios rely on artificially misaligned content that lacks semantic coherence, rendering them easily detectable. To address these gaps holistically, we propose a new adversarial pipeline that leverages MLLMs to generate high-risk disinformation. Our approach begins with constructing the MLLM-Driven Synthetic Multimodal (MDSM) dataset, where images are first altered using state-of-the-art editing techniques and then paired with MLLM-generated deceptive texts that maintain semantic consistency with the visual manipulations. Building upon this foundation, we present the Artifact-aware Manipulation Diagnosis via MLLM (AMD) framework featuring two key innovations: Artifact Pre-perception Encoding strategy and Manipulation-Oriented Reasoning, to tame MLLMs for the MDSM problem. Comprehensive experiments validate our framework's superior generalization capabilities as a unified architecture for detecting MLLM-powered multimodal deceptions. In cross-domain testing on the MDSM dataset, AMD achieves the best average performance, with 88.18 ACC, 60.25 mAP, and 61.02 mIoU scores.
Authors: Haihong Xiao, Jianan Zou, Yuxin Zhou, Ying He, Wenxiong Kang
Abstract: We present SplatCo, a structure-view collaborative Gaussian splatting framework for high-fidelity rendering of complex outdoor scenes. SplatCo builds upon three novel components: 1) a cross-structure collaboration module that combines global tri-plane representations, which capture coarse scene layouts, with local context grid features representing fine details. This fusion is achieved through a hierarchical compensation mechanism, ensuring both global spatial awareness and local detail preservation; 2) a cross-view pruning mechanism that removes overfitted or inaccurate Gaussians based on structural consistency, thereby improving storage efficiency and preventing rendering artifacts; 3) a structure view co-learning module that aggregates structural gradients with view gradients,thereby steering the optimization of Gaussian geometric and appearance attributes more robustly. By combining these key components, SplatCo effectively achieves high-fidelity rendering for large-scale scenes. Code and project page are available at https://splatco-tech.github.io.
Authors: Xiao Chen, Jiazhen Huang, Zhiming Liu, Qinting Jiang, Fanding Huang, Jingyan Jiang, Zhi Wang
Abstract: Deep neural networks often suffer performance degradation upon deployment due to distribution shifts. Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) aims to address this issue in an unsupervised manner, yet existing methods, which rely on self-supervision, are prone to an inherent self-referential feedback loop that amplifies initial prediction errors, leading to model drift. We revisit this limitation and propose Test-Time Distillation (TTD), which reframes adaptation as a distillation process guided by a frozen Vision-Language Model (VLM) as an external signal. While promising, we find that direct distillation is fraught with two pitfalls: the Generalist Trap, where the VLM's broad but non-specialized knowledge leads to suboptimal performance on specific tasks and shifts, and the Entropy Bias, where naive model fusion techniques based on entropy fail due to the disparate calibration of heterogeneous models. These pitfalls motivate our insight: the key is to build a robust supervisory signal and leverage it to guide the target model toward stable adaptation. Hence, we present CoDiRe, a Continual Distillation and Rectification framework for TTD. CoDiRe first constructs a robust blended teacher by dynamically fusing the predictions of the VLM and the target model. Critically, it circumvents the Entropy Bias by leveraging Maximum Softmax Probability (MSP) as a more reliable confidence metric for weighting each model's expertise. Then applies an Optimal Transport based rectification to further align predictions with the blended teacher, enabling continuous and stable adaptation. Extensive experiments show that CoDiRe outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, exceeding CoTTA by 10.55% while using only 48% of its time cost on ImageNet-C.
Authors: Yake Wei, Yu Miao, Dongzhan Zhou, Di Hu
Abstract: In this paper, we reveal that most current efficient multimodal fine-tuning methods are hindered by a key limitation: they are directly borrowed from LLMs, often neglecting the intrinsic differences of multimodal scenarios and even affecting the full utilization of all modalities. Inspired by our empirical observation, we argue that unimodal adaptation and cross-modal adaptation are two essential parts for the effective fine-tuning of MLLMs. From this perspective, we propose Multimodal low-rank Adaptation (MokA), a multimodal-aware efficient fine-tuning strategy that takes multimodal characteristics into consideration. It compresses unimodal information by modality-specific parameters while explicitly enhancing cross-modal interaction, ensuring both unimodal and cross-modal adaptation. Extensive experiments cover three representative multimodal scenarios (audio-visual-text, visual-text, and speech-text), and multiple LLM backbones (LLaMA2/3, Qwen2, Qwen2.5-VL, etc). Consistent improvements indicate the efficacy and versatility of the proposed method. Ablation studies and efficiency evaluation are also conducted to fully asses our method. Overall, we think MokA provides a more targeted solution for efficient adaptation of MLLMs, paving the way for further exploration. The project page is at https://gewu-lab.github.io/MokA.
Authors: Han Yi, Yulu Pan, Feihong He, Xinyu Liu, Benjamin Zhang, Oluwatumininu Oguntola, Gedas Bertasius
Abstract: We present ExAct, a new video-language benchmark for expert-level understanding of skilled physical human activities. Our new benchmark contains 3521 expert-curated video question-answer pairs spanning 11 physical activities in 6 domains: Sports, Bike Repair, Cooking, Health, Music, and Dance. ExAct requires the correct answer to be selected from five carefully designed candidate options, thus necessitating a nuanced, fine-grained, expert-level understanding of physical human skills. Evaluating the recent state-of-the-art VLMs on ExAct reveals a substantial performance gap relative to human expert performance. Specifically, the best-performing GPT-4o model achieves only 44.70% accuracy, well below the 82.02% attained by trained human specialists/experts. We believe that ExAct will be beneficial for developing and evaluating VLMs capable of precise understanding of human skills in various physical and procedural domains. Dataset and code are available at https://texaser.github.io/exact_project_page/
Authors: Tieyuan Chen, Huabin Liu, Yi Wang, Chaofan Gan, Mingxi Lyu, Ziran Qin, Shijie Li, Liquan Shen, Junhui Hou, Zheng Wang, Weiyao Lin
Abstract: Video Question Answering (VideoQA) aims to answer natural language questions based on the given video, with prior work primarily focusing on identifying the duration of relevant segments, referred to as explicit visual evidence. However, explicit visual evidence is not always directly available, particularly when questions target symbolic meanings or deeper intentions, leading to significant performance degradation. To fill this gap, we introduce a novel task and dataset, $\textbf{I}$mplicit $\textbf{V}$ideo $\textbf{Q}$uestion $\textbf{A}$nswering (I-VQA), which focuses on answering questions in scenarios where explicit visual evidence is inaccessible. Given an implicit question and its corresponding video, I-VQA requires answering based on the contextual visual cues present within the video. To tackle I-VQA, we propose a novel reasoning framework, IRM (Implicit Reasoning Model), incorporating dual-stream modeling of contextual actions and intent clues as implicit reasoning chains. IRM comprises the Action-Intent Module (AIM) and the Visual Enhancement Module (VEM). AIM deduces and preserves question-related dual clues by generating clue candidates and performing relation deduction. VEM enhances contextual visual representation by leveraging key contextual clues. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our IRM in I-VQA tasks, outperforming GPT-4o, OpenAI-o3, and fine-tuned VideoChat2 by $0.76\%$, $1.37\%$, and $4.87\%$, respectively. Additionally, IRM performs SOTA on similar implicit advertisement understanding and future prediction in traffic-VQA. Datasets and codes are available for double-blind review in anonymous repo: https://github.com/tychen-SJTU/Implicit-VideoQA.
Authors: Siyu Chen, Ting Han, Chengzheng Fu, Changshe Zhang, Chaolei Wang, Jinhe Su, Guorong Cai, Meiliu Wu
Abstract: Open-Vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) and domain generalization in semantic segmentation (DGSS) highlight a subtle complementarity that motivates Open-Vocabulary Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation (OV-DGSS). OV-DGSS aims to generate pixel-level masks for unseen categories while maintaining robustness across unseen domains, a critical capability for real-world scenarios such as autonomous driving in adverse conditions. We introduce Vireo, a novel single-stage framework for OV-DGSS that unifies the strengths of OVSS and DGSS for the first time. Vireo builds upon the frozen Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) and incorporates scene geometry via Depth VFMs to extract domain-invariant structural features. To bridge the gap between visual and textual modalities under domain shift, we propose three key components: (1) GeoText Prompts, which align geometric features with language cues and progressively refine VFM encoder representations; (2) Coarse Mask Prior Embedding (CMPE) for enhancing gradient flow for faster convergence and stronger textual influence; and (3) the Domain-Open-Vocabulary Vector Embedding Head (DOV-VEH), which fuses refined structural and semantic features for robust prediction. Comprehensive evaluation on these components demonstrates the effectiveness of our designs. Our proposed Vireo achieves the state-of-the-art performance and surpasses existing methods by a large margin in both domain generalization and open-vocabulary recognition, offering a unified and scalable solution for robust visual understanding in diverse and dynamic environments. Code is available at https://github.com/anonymouse-9c53tp182bvz/Vireo.
Authors: Xumin Gao, Mark Stevens, Grzegorz Cielniak
Abstract: Accurate pest population monitoring and tracking their dynamic changes are crucial for precision agriculture decision-making. A common limitation in existing vision-based automatic pest counting research is that models are typically evaluated on datasets with ground truth but deployed in real-world scenarios without assessing the reliability of counting results due to the lack of ground truth. To this end, this paper proposed a method for comprehensively evaluating pest counting confidence in the image, based on information related to counting results and external environmental conditions. First, a pest detection network is used for pest detection and counting, extracting counting result-related information. Then, the pest images undergo image quality assessment, image complexity assessment, and pest distribution uniformity assessment. And the changes in image clarity caused by stirring during image acquisition are quantified by calculating the average gradient magnitude. Notably, we designed a hypothesis-driven multi-factor sensitivity analysis method to select the optimal image quality assessment and image complexity assessment methods. And we proposed an adaptive DBSCAN clustering algorithm for pest distribution uniformity assessment. Finally, the obtained information related to counting results and external environmental conditions is input into a regression model for prediction, resulting in the final pest counting confidence. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study dedicated to comprehensively evaluating counting confidence in counting tasks, and quantifying the relationship between influencing factors and counting confidence through a model. Experimental results show our method reduces MSE by 31.7% and improves R2 by 15.2% on the pest counting confidence test set, compared to the baseline built primarily on information related to counting results.
Authors: Hao Xing, Kai Zhe Boey, Yuankai Wu, Darius Burschka, Gordon Cheng
Abstract: Accurate temporal segmentation of human actions is critical for intelligent robots in collaborative settings, where a precise understanding of sub-activity labels and their temporal structure is essential. However, the inherent noise in both human pose estimation and object detection often leads to over-segmentation errors, disrupting the coherence of action sequences. To address this, we propose a Multi-Modal Graph Convolutional Network (MMGCN) that integrates low-frame-rate (e.g., 1 fps) visual data with high-frame-rate (e.g., 30 fps) motion data (skeleton and object detections) to mitigate fragmentation. Our framework introduces three key contributions. First, a sinusoidal encoding strategy that maps 3D skeleton coordinates into a continuous sin-cos space to enhance spatial representation robustness. Second, a temporal graph fusion module that aligns multi-modal inputs with differing resolutions via hierarchical feature aggregation, Third, inspired by the smooth transitions inherent to human actions, we design SmoothLabelMix, a data augmentation technique that mixes input sequences and labels to generate synthetic training examples with gradual action transitions, enhancing temporal consistency in predictions and reducing over-segmentation artifacts. Extensive experiments on the Bimanual Actions Dataset, a public benchmark for human-object interaction understanding, demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially in action segmentation accuracy, achieving F1@10: 94.5% and F1@25: 92.8%.
Authors: Hao Xing, Kai Zhe Boey, Gordon Cheng
Abstract: Human-object interaction segmentation is a fundamental task of daily activity understanding, which plays a crucial role in applications such as assistive robotics, healthcare, and autonomous systems. Most existing learning-based methods excel in closed-world action segmentation, they struggle to generalize to open-world scenarios where novel actions emerge. Collecting exhaustive action categories for training is impractical due to the dynamic diversity of human activities, necessitating models that detect and segment out-of-distribution actions without manual annotation. To address this issue, we formally define the open-world action segmentation problem and propose a structured framework for detecting and segmenting unseen actions. Our framework introduces three key innovations: 1) an Enhanced Pyramid Graph Convolutional Network (EPGCN) with a novel decoder module for robust spatiotemporal feature upsampling. 2) Mixup-based training to synthesize out-of-distribution data, eliminating reliance on manual annotations. 3) A novel Temporal Clustering loss that groups in-distribution actions while distancing out-of-distribution samples. We evaluate our framework on two challenging human-object interaction recognition datasets: Bimanual Actions and 2 Hands and Object (H2O) datasets. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art action segmentation models across multiple open-set evaluation metrics, achieving 16.9% and 34.6% relative gains in open-set segmentation (F1@50) and out-of-distribution detection performances (AUROC), respectively. Additionally, we conduct an in-depth ablation study to assess the impact of each proposed component, identifying the optimal framework configuration for open-world action segmentation.
Authors: Arian Mousakhan, Sudhanshu Mittal, Silvio Galesso, Karim Farid, Thomas Brox
Abstract: Existing world models for autonomous driving struggle with long-horizon generation and generalization to challenging scenarios. In this work, we develop a model using simple design choices, and without additional supervision or sensors, such as maps, depth, or multiple cameras. We show that our model yields state-of-the-art performance, despite having only 469M parameters and being trained on 280h of video data. It particularly stands out in difficult scenarios like turning maneuvers and urban traffic. We test whether discrete token models possibly have advantages over continuous models based on flow matching. To this end, we set up a hybrid tokenizer that is compatible with both approaches and allows for a side-by-side comparison. Our study concludes in favor of the continuous autoregressive model, which is less brittle on individual design choices and more powerful than the model built on discrete tokens. Code, models and qualitative results are publicly available at https://lmb-freiburg.github.io/orbis.github.io/.
Authors: Fevziye Irem Eyiokur, Dogucan Yaman, Haz{\i}m Kemal Ekenel, Alexander Waibel
Abstract: We address Embodied Reference Understanding, the task of predicting the object a person in the scene refers to through pointing gesture and language. This requires multimodal reasoning over text, visual pointing cues, and scene context, yet existing methods often fail to fully exploit visual disambiguation signals. We also observe that while the referent often aligns with the head-to-fingertip direction, in many cases it aligns more closely with the wrist-to-fingertip direction, making a single-line assumption overly limiting. To address this, we propose a dual-model framework, where one model learns from the head-to-fingertip direction and the other from the wrist-to-fingertip direction. We introduce a Gaussian ray heatmap representation of these lines and use them as input to provide a strong supervisory signal that encourages the model to better attend to pointing cues. To fuse their complementary strengths, we present the CLIP-Aware Pointing Ensemble module, which performs a hybrid ensemble guided by CLIP features. We further incorporate an auxiliary object center prediction head to enhance referent localization. We validate our approach on YouRefIt, achieving 75.0 mAP at 0.25 IoU, alongside state-of-the-art CLIP and C_D scores, and demonstrate its generality on unseen CAESAR and ISL Pointing, showing robust performance across benchmarks.
Authors: Zhonghao Yan, Muxi Diao, Yuxuan Yang, Ruoyan Jing, Jiayuan Xu, Kaizhou Zhang, Lele Yang, Yanxi Liu, Kongming Liang, Zhanyu Ma
Abstract: Accurately grounding regions of interest (ROIs) is critical for diagnosis and treatment planning in medical imaging. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) combine visual perception with natural language, current medical-grounding pipelines still rely on supervised fine-tuning with explicit spatial hints, making them ill-equipped to handle the implicit queries common in clinical practice. This work makes three core contributions. We first define Unified Medical Reasoning Grounding (UMRG), a novel vision-language task that demands clinical reasoning and pixel-level grounding. Second, we release U-MRG-14K, a dataset of 14K samples featuring pixel-level masks alongside implicit clinical queries and reasoning traces, spanning 10 modalities, 15 super-categories, and 108 specific categories. Finally, we introduce MedReasoner, a modular framework that distinctly separates reasoning from segmentation: an MLLM reasoner is optimized with reinforcement learning, while a frozen segmentation expert converts spatial prompts into masks, with alignment achieved through format and accuracy rewards. MedReasoner achieves state-of-the-art performance on U-MRG-14K and demonstrates strong generalization to unseen clinical queries, underscoring the significant promise of reinforcement learning for interpretable medical grounding.
Authors: Neham Jain, Andrew Jong, Sebastian Scherer, Ioannis Gkioulekas
Abstract: Smoke in real-world scenes can severely degrade image quality and hamper visibility. Recent image restoration methods either rely on data-driven priors that are susceptible to hallucinations, or are limited to static low-density smoke. We introduce SmokeSeer, a method for simultaneous 3D scene reconstruction and smoke removal from multi-view video sequences. Our method uses thermal and RGB images, leveraging the reduced scattering in thermal images to see through smoke. We build upon 3D Gaussian splatting to fuse information from the two image modalities, and decompose the scene into smoke and non-smoke components. Unlike prior work, SmokeSeer handles a broad range of smoke densities and adapts to temporally varying smoke. We validate our method on synthetic data and a new real-world smoke dataset with RGB and thermal images. We provide an open-source implementation and data on the project website.
Authors: Akwasi Asare, Thanh-Huy Nguyen, Ulas Bagci
Abstract: Colorectal cancer (CRC) remains one of the leading causes of cancer-related morbidity and mortality worldwide, with gastrointestinal (GI) polyps serving as critical precursors according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Early and accurate segmentation of polyps during colonoscopy is essential for reducing CRC progression, yet manual delineation is labor-intensive and prone to observer variability. Deep learning methods have demonstrated strong potential for automated polyp analysis, but their limited interpretability remains a barrier to clinical adoption. In this study, we present PolypSeg-GradCAM, an explainable deep learning framework that integrates a U-Net architecture with a pre-trained ResNet-34 backbone and Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) for transparent polyp segmentation. To ensure rigorous benchmarking, the model was trained and evaluated using 5-Fold Cross-Validation on the Kvasir-SEG dataset of 1,000 annotated endoscopic images. Experimental results show a mean Dice coefficient of 0.8902 +/- 0.0125, a mean Intersection-over-Union (IoU) of 0.8023, and an Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC-ROC) of 0.9722. Advanced quantitative analysis using an optimal threshold yielded a Sensitivity of 0.9058 and Precision of 0.9083. Additionally, Grad-CAM visualizations confirmed that predictions were guided by clinically relevant regions, offering insight into the model's decision-making process. This study demonstrates that integrating segmentation accuracy with interpretability can support the development of trustworthy AI-assisted colonoscopy tools.
Authors: Xichen Xu, Yanshu Wang, Jinbao Wang, Xiaoning Lei, Guoyang Xie, Guannan Jiang, Zhichao Lu
Abstract: Industrial anomaly segmentation relies heavily on pixel-level annotations, yet real-world anomalies are often scarce, diverse, and costly to label. Segmentation-oriented industrial anomaly synthesis (SIAS) has emerged as a promising alternative; however, existing methods struggle to balance sampling efficiency and generation quality. Moreover, most approaches treat all spatial regions uniformly, overlooking the distinct statistical differences between anomaly and background areas. This uniform treatment hinders the synthesis of controllable, structure-specific anomalies tailored for segmentation tasks. In this paper, we propose FAST, a foreground-aware diffusion framework featuring two novel modules: the Anomaly-Informed Accelerated Sampling (AIAS) and the Foreground-Aware Reconstruction Module (FARM). AIAS is a training-free sampling algorithm specifically designed for segmentation-oriented industrial anomaly synthesis, which accelerates the reverse process through coarse-to-fine aggregation and enables the synthesis of state-of-the-art segmentation-oriented anomalies in as few as 10 steps. Meanwhile, FARM adaptively adjusts the anomaly-aware noise within the masked foreground regions at each sampling step, preserving localized anomaly signals throughout the denoising trajectory. Extensive experiments on multiple industrial benchmarks demonstrate that FAST consistently outperforms existing anomaly synthesis methods in downstream segmentation tasks. We release the code at: https://github.com/Chhro123/fast-foreground-aware-anomaly-synthesis.
URLs: https://github.com/Chhro123/fast-foreground-aware-anomaly-synthesis.
Authors: Miao Jing, Mengting Jia, Junling Lin, Zhongxia Shen, Huan Gao, Mingkun Xu, Shangyang Li
Abstract: Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on standard medical benchmarks, yet their true clinical reasoning ability remains unclear. Existing datasets predominantly emphasize classification accuracy, creating an evaluation illusion in which models appear proficient while still failing at high-stakes diagnostic reasoning. We introduce Neural-MedBench, a compact yet reasoning-intensive benchmark specifically designed to probe the limits of multimodal clinical reasoning in neurology. Neural-MedBench integrates multi-sequence MRI scans, structured electronic health records, and clinical notes, and encompasses three core task families: differential diagnosis, lesion recognition, and rationale generation. To ensure reliable evaluation, we develop a hybrid scoring pipeline that combines LLM-based graders, clinician validation, and semantic similarity metrics. Through systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art VLMs, including GPT-4o, Claude-4, and MedGemma, we observe a sharp performance drop compared to conventional datasets. Error analysis shows that reasoning failures, rather than perceptual errors, dominate model shortcomings. Our findings highlight the necessity of a Two-Axis Evaluation Framework: breadth-oriented large datasets for statistical generalization, and depth-oriented, compact benchmarks such as Neural-MedBench for reasoning fidelity. We release Neural-MedBench at https://neuromedbench.github.io/ as an open and extensible diagnostic testbed, which guides the expansion of future benchmarks and enables rigorous yet cost-effective assessment of clinically trustworthy AI.
Authors: Yuqing Wang, Zhaiyu Chen, Xiao Xiang Zhu
Abstract: 3D shape completion methods typically assume scans are pre-aligned to a canonical frame. This leaks pose and scale cues that networks may exploit to memorize absolute positions rather than inferring intrinsic geometry. When such alignment is absent in real data, performance collapses. We argue that robust generalization demands architectural equivariance to the similarity group, SIM(3), so the model remains agnostic to pose and scale. Following this principle, we introduce the first SIM(3)-equivariant shape completion network, whose modular layers successively canonicalize features, reason over similarity-invariant geometry, and restore the original frame. Under a de-biased evaluation protocol that removes the hidden cues, our model outperforms both equivariant and augmentation baselines on the PCN benchmark. It also sets new cross-domain records on real driving and indoor scans, lowering minimal matching distance on KITTI by 17% and Chamfer distance $\ell1$ on OmniObject3D by 14%. Perhaps surprisingly, ours under the stricter protocol still outperforms competitors under their biased settings. These results establish full SIM(3) equivariance as an effective route to truly generalizable shape completion. Project page: https://sime-completion.github.io.
Authors: Junhao He, Jiaxu Wang, Jia Li, Mingyuan Sun, Qiang Zhang, Jiahang Cao, Ziyi Zhang, Yi Gu, Jingkai Sun, Renjing Xu
Abstract: Reconstructing Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) from low-framerate RGB videos is challenging. This is because large inter-frame motions will increase the uncertainty of the solution space. For example, one pixel in the first frame might have more choices to reach the corresponding pixel in the second frame. Event cameras can asynchronously capture rapid visual changes and are robust to motion blur, but they do not provide color information. Intuitively, the event stream can provide deterministic constraints for the inter-frame large motion by the event trajectories. Hence, combining low-temporal-resolution images with high-framerate event streams can address this challenge. However, it is challenging to jointly optimize Dynamic 3DGS using both RGB and event modalities due to the significant discrepancy between these two data modalities. This paper introduces a novel framework that jointly optimizes dynamic 3DGS from the two modalities. The key idea is to adopt event motion priors to guide the optimization of the deformation fields. First, we extract the motion priors encoded in event streams by using the proposed LoCM unsupervised fine-tuning framework to adapt an event flow estimator to a certain unseen scene. Then, we present the geometry-aware data association method to build the event-Gaussian motion correspondence, which is the primary foundation of the pipeline, accompanied by two useful strategies, namely motion decomposition and inter-frame pseudo-label. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing image and event-based approaches across synthetic and real scenes and prove that our method can effectively optimize dynamic 3DGS with the help of event data.
Authors: Yuhao Yang, Zhen Yang, Zi-Yi Dou, Anh Nguyen, Keen You, Omar Attia, Andrew Szot, Michael Feng, Ram Ramrakhya, Alexander Toshev, Chao Huang, Yinfei Yang, Zhe Gan
Abstract: Computer-use agents face a fundamental limitation. They rely exclusively on primitive GUI actions (click, type, scroll), creating brittle execution chains prone to cascading failures. While API-driven agents harness rich capabilities through structured interfaces and tools, computer-use agents remain constrained to low-level visual interactions. We present UltraCUA, a foundation model that transcends this limitation through hybrid action-seamlessly unifying primitive GUI operations with high-level tool execution. Our innovation rests on four critical advances. First, an automated pipeline extracts and scales tool capabilities from software documentation and code repositories. Second, a synthetic data engine produces 17,000+ verifiable tasks capturing real-world computer-use complexity. Third, comprehensive hybrid action trajectory collection incorporates both GUI primitives and strategic tool calls. Fourth, a two-stage training methodology combines supervised fine-tuning with online reinforcement learning, enabling intelligent action selection between GUI and API. Evaluation with our 7B and 32B UltraCUA models reveals transformative performance gains. On OSWorld, UltraCUA achieves 22% relative improvement while executing 11% faster than existing approaches, averagely. Cross-domain validation on WindowsAgentArena demonstrates robust generalization with 21.7% success rate, surpassing Windows-trained baselines. The hybrid action paradigm proves essential, reducing error propagation while improving execution efficiency. This work establishes a scalable paradigm bridging primitive GUI interactions and high-level tool intelligence, enabling more resilient and adaptable computer use agents for diverse environments and complex real-world tasks.
Authors: Kai Zeng, Zhanqian Wu, Kaixin Xiong, Xiaobao Wei, Xiangyu Guo, Zhenxin Zhu, Kalok Ho, Lijun Zhou, Bohan Zeng, Ming Lu, Haiyang Sun, Bing Wang, Guang Chen, Hangjun Ye, Wentao Zhang
Abstract: Recent advancements in driving world models enable controllable generation of high-quality RGB videos or multimodal videos. Existing methods primarily focus on metrics related to generation quality and controllability. However, they often overlook the evaluation of downstream perception tasks, which are $\mathbf{really\ crucial}$ for the performance of autonomous driving. Existing methods usually leverage a training strategy that first pretrains on synthetic data and finetunes on real data, resulting in twice the epochs compared to the baseline (real data only). When we double the epochs in the baseline, the benefit of synthetic data becomes negligible. To thoroughly demonstrate the benefit of synthetic data, we introduce Dream4Drive, a novel synthetic data generation framework designed for enhancing the downstream perception tasks. Dream4Drive first decomposes the input video into several 3D-aware guidance maps and subsequently renders the 3D assets onto these guidance maps. Finally, the driving world model is fine-tuned to produce the edited, multi-view photorealistic videos, which can be used to train the downstream perception models. Dream4Drive enables unprecedented flexibility in generating multi-view corner cases at scale, significantly boosting corner case perception in autonomous driving. To facilitate future research, we also contribute a large-scale 3D asset dataset named DriveObj3D, covering the typical categories in driving scenarios and enabling diverse 3D-aware video editing. We conduct comprehensive experiments to show that Dream4Drive can effectively boost the performance of downstream perception models under various training epochs. Page: https://wm-research.github.io/Dream4Drive/ GitHub Link: https://github.com/wm-research/Dream4Drive
URLs: https://wm-research.github.io/Dream4Drive/, https://github.com/wm-research/Dream4Drive
Authors: Huanlin Gao, Ping Chen, Fuyuan Shi, Chao Tan, Zhaoxiang Liu, Fang Zhao, Kai Wang, Shiguo Lian
Abstract: We present LeMiCa, a training-free and efficient acceleration framework for diffusion-based video generation. While existing caching strategies primarily focus on reducing local heuristic errors, they often overlook the accumulation of global errors, leading to noticeable content degradation between accelerated and original videos. To address this issue, we formulate cache scheduling as a directed graph with error-weighted edges and introduce a Lexicographic Minimax Path Optimization strategy that explicitly bounds the worst-case path error. This approach substantially improves the consistency of global content and style across generated frames. Extensive experiments on multiple text-to-video benchmarks demonstrate that LeMiCa delivers dual improvements in both inference speed and generation quality. Notably, our method achieves a 2.9x speedup on the Latte model and reaches an LPIPS score of 0.05 on Open-Sora, outperforming prior caching techniques. Importantly, these gains come with minimal perceptual quality degradation, making LeMiCa a robust and generalizable paradigm for accelerating diffusion-based video generation. We believe this approach can serve as a strong foundation for future research on efficient and reliable video synthesis. Our code is available at :https://github.com/UnicomAI/LeMiCa
Authors: Nicolas Schuler, Lea Dewald, Nick Baldig, J\"urgen Graf
Abstract: Video Understanding, Scene Interpretation and Commonsense Reasoning are highly challenging tasks enabling the interpretation of visual information, allowing agents to perceive, interact with and make rational decisions in its environment. Large Language Models (LLMs) and Visual Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable advancements in these areas in recent years, enabling domain-specific applications as well as zero-shot open vocabulary tasks, combining multiple domains. However, the required computational complexity poses challenges for their application on edge devices and in the context of Mobile Robotics, especially considering the trade-off between accuracy and inference time. In this paper, we investigate the capabilities of state-of-the-art VLMs for the task of Scene Interpretation and Action Recognition, with special regard to small VLMs capable of being deployed to edge devices in the context of Mobile Robotics. The proposed pipeline is evaluated on a diverse dataset consisting of various real-world cityscape, on-campus and indoor scenarios. The experimental evaluation discusses the potential of these small models on edge devices, with particular emphasis on challenges, weaknesses, inherent model biases and the application of the gained information. Supplementary material is provided via the following repository: https://datahub.rz.rptu.de/hstr-csrl-public/publications/scene-interpretation-on-edge-devices/
URLs: https://datahub.rz.rptu.de/hstr-csrl-public/publications/scene-interpretation-on-edge-devices/
Authors: Jessica Plassmann, Nicolas Schuler, Georg von Freymann, Michael Schuth
Abstract: Shearography is a non-destructive testing method for detecting subsurface defects, offering high sensitivity and full-field inspection capabilities. However, its industrial adoption remains limited due to the need for expert interpretation. To reduce reliance on labeled data and manual evaluation, this study explores unsupervised learning methods for automated anomaly detection in shearographic images. Three architectures are evaluated: a fully connected autoencoder, a convolutional autoencoder, and a student-teacher feature matching model. All models are trained solely on defect-free data. A controlled dataset was developed using a custom specimen with reproducible defect patterns, enabling systematic acquisition of shearographic measurements under both ideal and realistic deformation conditions. Two training subsets were defined: one containing only undistorted, defect-free samples, and one additionally including globally deformed, yet defect-free, data. The latter simulates practical inspection conditions by incorporating deformation-induced fringe patterns that may obscure localized anomalies. The models are evaluated in terms of binary classification and, for the student-teacher model, spatial defect localization. Results show that the student-teacher approach achieves superior classification robustness and enables precise localization. Compared to the autoencoder-based models, it demonstrates improved separability of feature representations, as visualized through t-SNE embeddings. Additionally, a YOLOv8 model trained on labeled defect data serves as a reference to benchmark localization quality. This study underscores the potential of unsupervised deep learning for scalable, label-efficient shearographic inspection in industrial environments.
Authors: Chamuditha Jayanga Galappaththige, Jason Lai, Lloyd Windrim, Donald Dansereau, Niko S\"underhauf, Dimity Miller
Abstract: Online Scene Change Detection (SCD) is an extremely challenging problem that requires an agent to detect relevant changes on the fly while observing the scene from unconstrained viewpoints. Existing online SCD methods are significantly less accurate than offline approaches. We present the first online SCD approach that is pose-agnostic, label-free, and ensures multi-view consistency, while operating at over 10 FPS and achieving new state-of-the-art performance, surpassing even the best offline approaches. Our method introduces a new self-supervised fusion loss to infer scene changes from multiple cues and observations, PnP-based fast pose estimation against the reference scene, and a fast change-guided update strategy for the 3D Gaussian Splatting scene representation. Extensive experiments on complex real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms both online and offline baselines.
Authors: Wenjie Li, Jinglei Shi, Jin Han, Heng Guo, Zhanyu Ma
Abstract: Clean images are crucial for visual tasks such as small object detection, especially at high resolutions. However, real-world images are often degraded by adverse weather, and weather restoration methods may sacrifice high-frequency details critical for analyzing small objects. A natural solution is to apply super-resolution (SR) after weather removal to recover both clarity and fine structures. However, simply cascading restoration and SR struggle to bridge their inherent conflict: removal aims to remove high-frequency weather-induced noise, while SR aims to hallucinate high-frequency textures from existing details, leading to inconsistent restoration contents. In this paper, we take deraining as a case study and propose DHGM, a Diffusion-based High-frequency Guided Model for generating clean and high-resolution images. DHGM integrates pre-trained diffusion priors with high-pass filters to simultaneously remove rain artifacts and enhance structural details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DHGM achieves superior performance over existing methods, with lower costs.
Authors: Yuping Yan, Yuhan Xie, Yixin Zhang, Lingjuan Lyu, Handing Wang, Yaochu Jin
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) have recently demonstrated remarkable progress in embodied environments, enabling robots to perceive, reason, and act through unified multimodal understanding. Despite their impressive capabilities, the adversarial robustness of these systems remains largely unexplored, especially under realistic multimodal and black-box conditions. Existing studies mainly focus on single-modality perturbations and overlook the cross-modal misalignment that fundamentally affects embodied reasoning and decision-making. In this paper, we introduce VLA-Fool, a comprehensive study of multimodal adversarial robustness in embodied VLA models under both white-box and black-box settings. VLA-Fool unifies three levels of multimodal adversarial attacks: (1) textual perturbations through gradient-based and prompt-based manipulations, (2) visual perturbations via patch and noise distortions, and (3) cross-modal misalignment attacks that intentionally disrupt the semantic correspondence between perception and instruction. We further incorporate a VLA-aware semantic space into linguistic prompts, developing the first automatically crafted and semantically guided prompting framework. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark using a fine-tuned OpenVLA model reveal that even minor multimodal perturbations can cause significant behavioral deviations, demonstrating the fragility of embodied multimodal alignment.
Authors: Shihan Cheng, Nilesh Kulkarni, David Hyde, Dmitriy Smirnov
Abstract: Fine-tuning large-scale text-to-video diffusion models to add new generative controls, such as those over physical camera parameters (e.g., shutter speed or aperture), typically requires vast, high-fidelity datasets that are difficult to acquire. In this work, we propose a data-efficient fine-tuning strategy that learns these controls from sparse, low-quality synthetic data. We show that not only does fine-tuning on such simple data enable the desired controls, it actually yields superior results to models fine-tuned on photorealistic "real" data. Beyond demonstrating these results, we provide a framework that justifies this phenomenon both intuitively and quantitatively.
Authors: Tianyang Han, Junhao Su, Junjie Hu, Peizhen Yang, Hengyu Shi, Junfeng Luo, Jialin Gao
Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) models today are capable of producing photorealistic, instruction-following images, yet they still frequently fail on prompts that require implicit world knowledge. Existing evaluation protocols either emphasize compositional alignment or rely on single-round VQA-based scoring, leaving critical dimensions such as knowledge grounding, multi-physics interactions, and auditable evidence-substantially undertested. To address these limitations, we introduce PicWorld, the first comprehensive benchmark that assesses the grasp of implicit world knowledge and physical causal reasoning of T2I models. This benchmark consists of 1,100 prompts across three core categories. To facilitate fine-grained evaluation, we propose PW-Agent, an evidence-grounded multi-agent evaluator to hierarchically assess images on their physical realism and logical consistency by decomposing prompts into verifiable visual evidence. We conduct a thorough analysis of 17 mainstream T2I models on PicWorld, illustrating that they universally exhibit a fundamental limitation in their capacity for implicit world knowledge and physical causal reasoning to varying degrees. The findings highlight the need for reasoning-aware, knowledge-integrative architectures in future T2I systems.
Authors: Xuanke Shi, Boxuan Li, Xiaoyang Han, Zhongang Cai, Lei Yang, Dahua Lin, Quan Wang
Abstract: Unified multimodal models that couple visual understanding with image generation have advanced rapidly, yet most systems still focus on visual grounding-aligning language with image regions-while their generative counterpart, linguistic-embedded layout-grounded generation (LELG) for layout-controllable multi-instance generation, remains underexplored and limits precise compositional control. We present ConsistCompose, a unified multimodal framework that embeds layout coordinates directly into language prompts, enabling layout-controlled multi-instance image generation from Interleaved Image-Text within a single generative interface. We further construct ConsistCompose3M, a 3.4M multi-instance generation dataset with layout and identity annotations (2.6M text-guided and 0.8M image-guided data pairs) that provides large-scale supervision for layout-conditioned generation. Within this framework, LELG is instantiated through instance-coordinate binding prompts and coordinate-aware classifier-free guidance, which translate linguistic layout cues into precise spatial control without task-specific branches. Experiments on COCO-Position and MS-Bench show that ConsistCompose substantially improves spatial accuracy over layout-controlled baselines while preserving identity fidelity and competitive general multimodal understanding, establishing a unified paradigm for layout-controllable multimodal image generation.
Authors: Lin Liu, Caiyan Jia, Guanyi Yu, Ziying Song, JunQiao Li, Feiyang Jia, Peiliang Wu, Xiaoshuai Hao, Yandan Luo
Abstract: Driving planning is a critical component of end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving. However, prevailing Imitative E2E Planners often suffer from multimodal trajectory mode collapse, failing to produce diverse trajectory proposals. Meanwhile, Generative E2E Planners struggle to incorporate crucial safety and physical constraints directly into the generative process, necessitating an additional optimization stage to refine their outputs. In this paper, we propose \textit{\textbf{GuideFlow}}, a novel planning framework that leverages Constrained Flow Matching. Concretely, \textit{\textbf{GuideFlow}} explicitly models the flow matching process, which inherently mitigates mode collapse and allows for flexible guidance from various conditioning signals. Our core contribution lies in directly enforcing explicit constraints within the flow matching generation process, rather than relying on implicit constraint encoding. Crucially, \textit{\textbf{GuideFlow}} unifies the training of the flow matching with the Energy-Based Model (EBM) to enhance the model's autonomous optimization capability to robustly satisfy physical constraints. Secondly, \textit{\textbf{GuideFlow}} parameterizes driving aggressiveness as a control signal during generation, enabling precise manipulation of trajectory style. Extensive evaluations on major driving benchmarks (Bench2Drive, NuScenes, NavSim and ADV-NuScenes) validate the effectiveness of \textit{\textbf{GuideFlow}}. Notably, on the NavSim test hard split (Navhard), \textit{\textbf{GuideFlow}} achieved SOTA with an EPDMS score of 43.0. The code will be in https://github.com/liulin815/GuideFlow.
Authors: Zhantao Gong, Liaoyuan Fan, Qing Guo, Xun Xu, Xulei Yang, Shijie Li
Abstract: In this work, we define Foresight Intelligence as the capability to anticipate and interpret future events-an ability essential for applications such as autonomous driving, yet largely overlooked by existing research. To bridge this gap, we introduce FSU-QA, a new Visual Question-Answering (VQA) dataset specifically designed to elicit and evaluate Foresight Intelligence. Using FSU-QA, we conduct the first comprehensive study of state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) under foresight-oriented tasks, revealing that current models still struggle to reason about future situations. Beyond serving as a benchmark, FSU-QA also enables the assessment of world models by measuring the semantic coherence of their generated predictions, quantified through performance gains when VLMs are augmented with such outputs. Our experiments further demonstrate that FSU-QA can effectively enhance foresight reasoning: even small VLMs fine-tuned on FSU-QA surpass much larger, advanced models by a substantial margin. Together, these findings position FSU-QA as a principled foundation for developing next-generation models capable of truly anticipating and understanding future events.
Authors: Yash Mali
Abstract: Test-time adaptation (TTA) enables models to adapt to distribution shifts at inference time. While entropy minimization over the output distribution has proven effective for TTA, transformers offer an additional unsupervised learning signal through their attention mechanisms. We propose minimizing the entropy of attention distributions from the CLS token to image patches as a novel TTA objective. This approach encourages the model to attend more confidently to relevant image regions under distribution shift and is effective even when only a single test image is available. We demonstrate that attention entropy minimization improves robustness across diverse corruption types while not hurting performance on clean data on a single sample stream of images at test time.
Authors: Hunyuan Vision Team, Pengyuan Lyu, Xingyu Wan, Gengluo Li, Shangpin Peng, Weinong Wang, Liang Wu, Huawen Shen, Yu Zhou, Canhui Tang, Qi Yang, Qiming Peng, Bin Luo, Hower Yang, Xinsong Zhang, Jinnian Zhang, Houwen Peng, Hongming Yang, Senhao Xie, Longsha Zhou, Ge Pei, Binghong Wu, Rui Yan, Kan Wu, Jieneng Yang, Bochao Wang, Kai Liu, Jianchen Zhu, Jie Jiang, Linus, Han Hu, Chengquan Zhang
Abstract: This paper presents HunyuanOCR, a commercial-grade, open-source, and lightweight (1B parameters) Vision-Language Model (VLM) dedicated to OCR tasks. The architecture comprises a Native Vision Transformer (ViT) and a lightweight LLM connected via an MLP adapter. HunyuanOCR demonstrates superior performance, outperforming commercial APIs, traditional pipelines, and larger models (e.g., Qwen3-VL-4B). Specifically, it surpasses current public solutions in perception tasks (Text Spotting, Parsing) and excels in semantic tasks (IE, Text Image Translation), securing first place in the ICDAR 2025 DIMT Challenge (Small Model Track). Furthermore, it achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on OCRBench among VLMs with fewer than 3B parameters. HunyuanOCR achieves breakthroughs in three key aspects: 1) Unifying Versatility and Efficiency: We implement comprehensive support for core capabilities including spotting, parsing, IE, VQA, and translation within a lightweight framework. This addresses the limitations of narrow "OCR expert models" and inefficient "General VLMs". 2) Streamlined End-to-End Architecture: Adopting a pure end-to-end paradigm eliminates dependencies on pre-processing modules (e.g., layout analysis). This fundamentally resolves error propagation common in traditional pipelines and simplifies system deployment. 3) Data-Driven and RL Strategies: We confirm the critical role of high-quality data and, for the first time in the industry, demonstrate that Reinforcement Learning (RL) strategies yield significant performance gains in OCR tasks. HunyuanOCR is officially open-sourced on HuggingFace. We also provide a high-performance deployment solution based on vLLM, placing its production efficiency in the top tier. We hope this model will advance frontier research and provide a solid foundation for industrial applications.
Authors: M. Naseer Subhani
Abstract: Interactive segmentation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) have demonstrated remarkable generalization on natural images, but perform suboptimally on remote sensing imagery (RSI) due to severe domain shift and the scarcity of dense annotations. To address this, we propose a self-prompting, point-supervised framework that adapts SAM to RSIs using only sparse point annotations. Our method employs a Refine-Requery-Reinforce loop, where coarse pseudo-masks are generated from initial points (Refine), improved with self-constructed box prompts (Requery), and embeddings are aligned across iterations to reduce confirmation bias (Reinforce). Without relying on full-mask supervision, our approach progressively enhances SAM's segmentation quality and domain robustness through self-guided prompt adaptation . We evaluate our proposed method on three RSI benchmark datasets, including WHU, HRSID, and NWPU VHR-10, showing that our method consistently surpasses pretrained SAM and recent point-supervised segmentation methods. Our results demonstrate that self-prompting and semantic alignment provide an efficient path towards scalable, point-level adaptation of foundation segmentation models for remote sensing applications.
Authors: Dian Zheng, Manyuan Zhang, Hongyu Li, Kai Zou, Hongbo Liu, Ziyu Guo, Kaituo Feng, Yexin Liu, Ying Luo, Yan Feng, Peng Pei, Xunliang Cai, Hongsheng Li
Abstract: Unified multimodal models for image generation and understanding represent a significant step toward AGI and have attracted widespread attention from researchers. The main challenge of this task lies in the difficulty in establishing an optimal training paradigm due to inherent conflicting targets in understanding and generation tasks. To alleviate these conflicts and pursue higher performance, many researchers adopt varying degrees of model decoupling (e.g., Double image encoders, MOE/MOT architecture, or frozen MLLM). However, excessive model decoupling can lead to the loss of interleave generation ability, undermining the original intent of unified models. In this work, we aim to explore how to mitigate task conflicts without resorting to model decoupling. Firstly, we analyze why decoupling alleviates conflicts by studying the cross-modal attention behavior of models. We observe that model decoupling essentially drives models toward task-specific multimodal interaction patterns, as seen in Qwen-VL and HunyuanImage, and that the more thorough the decoupling, the more consistent the behavior becomes. Motivated by this observation, we propose Attention Interaction Alignment (AIA) loss, which explicitly learns Task-Specific multimodal interaction patterns during training. To demonstrate the generalizability of our AIA loss, we apply it to Emu3 and Janus-Pro during SFT and post-training stage respectively. Without bells and whistles, AIA not only refines cross-modal attention patterns, but also boosts both generation and understanding performance.
Authors: Ivo Bueno, Ruikun Hou, Babette B\"uhler, Tim F\"utterer, James Drimalla, Jonathan Kyle Foster, Peter Youngs, Peter Gerjets, Ulrich Trautwein, Enkelejda Kasneci
Abstract: Observation of classroom interactions can provide concrete feedback to teachers, but current methods rely on manual annotation, which is resource-intensive and hard to scale. This work explores AI-driven analysis of classroom recordings, focusing on multimodal instructional activity and discourse recognition as a foundation for actionable feedback. Using a densely annotated dataset of 164 hours of video and 68 lesson transcripts, we design parallel, modality-specific pipelines. For video, we evaluate zero-shot multimodal LLMs, fine-tuned vision-language models, and self-supervised video transformers on 24 activity labels. For transcripts, we fine-tune a transformer-based classifier with contextualized inputs and compare it against prompting-based LLMs on 19 discourse labels. To handle class imbalance and multi-label complexity, we apply per-label thresholding, context windows, and imbalance-aware loss functions. The results show that fine-tuned models consistently outperform prompting-based approaches, achieving macro-F1 scores of 0.577 for video and 0.460 for transcripts. These results demonstrate the feasibility of automated classroom analysis and establish a foundation for scalable teacher feedback systems.
Authors: Neeraj Anand, Rishabh Jain, Sohan Patnaik, Balaji Krishnamurthy, Mausoom Sarkar
Abstract: There is a growing demand for mobile user interface (UI) automation, driven by its broad applications across industries. With the advent of visual language models (VLMs), GUI automation has progressed from generating text-based instructions for humans to autonomously executing tasks, thus optimizing automation workflows. Recent approaches leverage VLMs for this problem due to their ability to 1) process on-screen content directly, 2) remain independent of device-specific APIs by utilizing human actions (e.g., clicks, typing), and 3) apply real-world contextual knowledge for task understanding. However, these models often have trouble accurately identifying widgets and determining actions due to limited spatial information in vision encoder features. Additionally, top-performing models are often large, requiring extensive training and resulting in inference delays. In this work, we introduce AFRAgent, an instruct-BLIP-based multimodal architecture that achieves superior performance in GUI automation while being less than one-fourth the size of its nearest competitor. To enhance image embeddings in the large language model (LLM) pipeline, we propose an adaptive feature renormalization-based (a token-level affine transformation) technique that effectively enriches low-resolution image embeddings and fuses high-resolution details. We evaluate AFRAgent on Meta-GUI and AITW benchmarks, establishing a new state-of-the-art baseline for smartphone automation.
Authors: Yumeng Li, Guang Yang, Hao Liu, Bowen Wang, Colin Zhang
Abstract: Document Layout Parsing serves as a critical gateway for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to access and interpret the world's vast stores of structured knowledge. This process,which encompasses layout detection, text recognition, and relational understanding, is particularly crucial for empowering next-generation Vision-Language Models. Current methods, however, rely on fragmented, multi-stage pipelines that suffer from error propagation and fail to leverage the synergies of joint training. In this paper, we introduce dots.ocr, a single Vision-Language Model that, for the first time, demonstrates the advantages of jointly learning three core tasks within a unified, end-to-end framework. This is made possible by a highly scalable data engine that synthesizes a vast multilingual corpus, empowering the model to deliver robust performance across a wide array of tasks, encompassing diverse languages, layouts, and domains. The efficacy of our unified paradigm is validated by state-of-the-art performance on the comprehensive OmniDocBench. Furthermore, to catalyze research in global document intelligence, we introduce XDocParse, a challenging new benchmark spanning 126 languages. On this testbed, dots.ocr establishes a powerful new baseline, outperforming the next-best competitor by a remarkable +7.4 point margin and proving its unparalleled multilingual capabilities.
Authors: Zhuobai Dong, Rui Zhao, Songjie Wu, Junchao Yi, Linjie Li, Zhengyuan Yang, Lijuan Wang, Alex Jinpeng Wang
Abstract: Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in image generation, yet their deployment remains constrained by the heavy computational cost and the need for numerous inference steps. Previous efforts on fewer-step distillation attempt to skip redundant steps by training compact student models, yet they often suffer from heavy retraining costs and degraded generalization. In this work, we take a different perspective: we accelerate smartly, not evenly, applying smaller speedups to early semantic stages and larger ones to later redundant phases. We instantiate this phase-aware strategy with two experts that specialize in slow and fast denoising phases. Surprisingly, instead of investing massive effort in retraining student models, we find that simply equipping the base model with lightweight LoRA adapters achieves both efficient acceleration and strong generalization. We refer to these two adapters as Slow-LoRA and Fast-LoRA. Through extensive experiments, our method achieves up to 5 acceleration over the base model while maintaining comparable visual quality across diverse benchmarks. Remarkably, the LoRA experts are trained with only 1 samples on a single V100 within one hour, yet the resulting models generalize strongly on unseen prompts.
Authors: Zeqi Xiao, Yiwei Zhao, Lingxiao Li, Yushi Lan, Ning Yu, Rahul Garg, Roshni Cooper, Mohammad H. Taghavi, Xingang Pan
Abstract: We investigate whether video generative models can exhibit visuospatial intelligence, a capability central to human cognition, using only visual data. To this end, we present Video4Spatial, a framework showing that video diffusion models conditioned solely on video-based scene context can perform complex spatial tasks. We validate on two tasks: scene navigation - following camera-pose instructions while remaining consistent with 3D geometry of the scene, and object grounding - which requires semantic localization, instruction following, and planning. Both tasks use video-only inputs, without auxiliary modalities such as depth or poses. With simple yet effective design choices in the framework and data curation, Video4Spatial demonstrates strong spatial understanding from video context: it plans navigation and grounds target objects end-to-end, follows camera-pose instructions while maintaining spatial consistency, and generalizes to long contexts and out-of-domain environments. Taken together, these results advance video generative models toward general visuospatial reasoning.
Authors: Lynn Kandakji, William Woof, Nikolas Pontikos
Abstract: The detection of weak, spatially distributed anomalies in volumetric medical imaging remains challenging due to the difficulty of integrating subtle signals across non-adjacent regions. This study presents a controlled comparison of sixteen architectures spanning convolutional, hybrid, and transformer families for subclinical keratoconus detection from three-dimensional anterior segment optical coherence tomography (AS-OCT). The results demonstrate that hierarchical architectures achieve 21-23% higher sensitivity and specificity, particularly in the difficult subclinical regime, outperforming both convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and global-attention Vision Transformer (ViT) baselines. Mechanistic analyses indicate that this advantage arises from spatial scale alignment: hierarchical windowing produces effective receptive fields matched to the intermediate extent of subclinical abnormalities, avoiding the excessive locality observed in convolutional models and the diffuse integration characteristic of pure global attention. Attention-distance measurements show that subclinical cases require longer spatial integration than healthy or overtly pathological volumes, with hierarchical models exhibiting lower variance and more anatomically coherent focus. Representational similarity further indicates that hierarchical attention learns a distinct feature space that balances local structure sensitivity with flexible long-range interactions. Auxiliary age and sex prediction tasks demonstrate moderately high cross-task consistency, supporting the generalizability of these inductive principles. The findings provide design guidance for volumetric anomaly detection and highlight hierarchical attention as a principled approach for early pathological change analysis in medical imaging.
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: 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: Jiaqi Ma, Shengkai Hu, Xu Zhang, Jun Wan, Jiaxing Huang, Lefei Zhang, Salman Khan
Abstract: All-in-One Image Restoration (AiOIR) tasks often involve diverse degradation that require robust and versatile strategies. However, most existing approaches typically lack explicit frequency modeling and rely on fixed or heuristic optimization schedules, which limit the generalization across heterogeneous degradation. To address these limitations, we propose EvoIR, an AiOIR-specific framework that introduces evolutionary frequency modulation for dynamic and adaptive image restoration. Specifically, EvoIR employs the Frequency-Modulated Module (FMM) that decomposes features into high- and low-frequency branches in an explicit manner and adaptively modulates them to enhance both structural fidelity and fine-grained details. Central to EvoIR, an Evolutionary Optimization Strategy (EOS) iteratively adjusts frequency-aware objectives through a population-based evolutionary process, dynamically balancing structural accuracy and perceptual fidelity. Its evolutionary guidance further mitigates gradient conflicts across degradation and accelerates convergence. By synergizing FMM and EOS, EvoIR yields greater improvements than using either component alone, underscoring their complementary roles. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that EvoIR outperforms state-of-the-art AiOIR methods.
Authors: Qingqiao Hu, Weimin Lyu, Meilong Xu, Kehan Qi, Xiaoling Hu, Saumya Gupta, Jiawei Zhou, Chao Chen
Abstract: Whole Slide Image (WSI) understanding is fundamentally challenging due to its gigapixel scale and the extreme sparsity of diagnostically relevant regions. Unlike human experts who primarily rely on key areas to arrive at a diagnosis, existing slide-level multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for pathology rely on heavy slide-level encoders that process thousands of patch features in a brute-force manner, resulting in excessive computational cost. In this work, we revisit the WSI-language modeling paradigm and show that tile-level features exhibit strong global and local redundancy, whereas only a small subset of tiles are truly task-relevant. Motivated by this observation, we introduce an efficient MLLM framework, called LoC-Path, that replaces the expensive slide-level encoder with redundancy-reducing modules. We first design a Sparse Token Merger (STM) and an MAE-pretrained resampler to remove local redundancy and compress globally redundant tile tokens into a compact slide-level representation set. We then propose a Cross-Attention Routing Adapter (CARA) and a Token Importance Scorer (TIS) to integrate the compressed visual representation with the language model in a computation-efficient manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves performance comparable to existing state-of-the-art whole-slide MLLMs, while requiring significantly lower computation and memory.
Authors: Chang Liu, Tianjiao Jing, Chengcheng Ma, Xuanqi Zhou, Zhengxuan Lian, Qin Jin, Hongliang Yuan, Shi-Sheng Huang
Abstract: Recent photo-realistic 3D talking head via 3D Gaussian Splatting still has significant shortcoming in emotional expression manipulation, especially for fine-grained and expansive dynamics emotional editing using multi-modal control. This paper introduces a new editable 3D Gaussian talking head, i.e. EmoDiffTalk. Our key idea is a novel Emotion-aware Gaussian Diffusion, which includes an action unit (AU) prompt Gaussian diffusion process for fine-grained facial animator, and moreover an accurate text-to-AU emotion controller to provide accurate and expansive dynamic emotional editing using text input. Experiments on public EmoTalk3D and RenderMe-360 datasets demonstrate superior emotional subtlety, lip-sync fidelity, and controllability of our EmoDiffTalk over previous works, establishing a principled pathway toward high-quality, diffusion-driven, multimodal editable 3D talking-head synthesis. To our best knowledge, our EmoDiffTalk is one of the first few 3D Gaussian Splatting talking-head generation framework, especially supporting continuous, multimodal emotional editing within the AU-based expression space.
Authors: Ramazan Fazylov, Sergey Zagoruyko, Aleksandr Parkin, Stamatis Lefkimmiatis, Ivan Laptev
Abstract: The generation of high-fidelity, animatable 3D human avatars remains a core challenge in computer graphics and vision, with applications in VR, telepresence, and entertainment. Existing approaches based on implicit representations like NeRFs suffer from slow rendering and dynamic inconsistencies, while 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods are typically limited to static head generation, lacking dynamic control. We bridge this gap by introducing AGORA, a novel framework that extends 3DGS within a generative adversarial network to produce animatable avatars. Our key contribution is a lightweight, FLAME-conditioned deformation branch that predicts per-Gaussian residuals, enabling identity-preserving, fine-grained expression control while allowing real-time inference. Expression fidelity is enforced via a dual-discriminator training scheme leveraging synthetic renderings of the parametric mesh. AGORA generates avatars that are not only visually realistic but also precisely controllable. Quantitatively, we outperform state-of-the-art NeRF-based methods on expression accuracy while rendering at 250+ FPS on a single GPU, and, notably, at $\sim$9 FPS under CPU-only inference - representing, to our knowledge, the first demonstration of practical CPU-only animatable 3DGS avatar synthesis. This work represents a significant step toward practical, high-performance digital humans. Project website: https://ramazan793.github.io/AGORA/
Authors: Yueying Ke
Abstract: Accurate taxonomic identification of diatoms is essential for aquatic ecosystem monitoring, yet conventional methods depend heavily on expert taxonomists. Recent deep learning approaches improve automation, but most treat diatom recognition as flat classification, predicting only one taxonomic rank. We investigate whether embedding taxonomic hierarchy into neural network architectures can improve both accuracy and error locality. We introduce DiatomCascadeNet (H-COFGS), a hierarchical convolutional network with five cascaded heads that jointly predict class, order, family, genus, and species. Each head receives shared backbone features and probability distributions from higher levels, with binary masks restricting predictions to valid descendants during training and inference. Using a filtered dataset of 1,456 diatom images covering 82 species, we compare hierarchical and flat models under identical settings. H-COFGS matches flat baselines at the species level (69.4% accuracy) while outperforming at all upper taxonomic levels. When species predictions fail, errors remain taxonomically local: 92.5% of misclassified species are correctly predicted at the genus level, versus 67.2% for flat baselines. H-COFGS reduces mean taxonomic distance by 38.2% (1.209 vs. 1.955). Progressive training reveals bidirectional mechanisms: hierarchical constraint masks operate top-down to constrain prediction space, while gradients from fine-grained levels propagate bottom-up through the shared backbone, refining features. This improves class accuracy from 96.2% to 99.5% and yields 6-8% gains at upper levels, producing more robust, interpretable, and biologically aligned predictions for multi-level taxonomic classification.
Authors: Changliang Xia, Chengyou Jia, Minnan Luo, Zhuohang Dang, Xin Shen, Bowen Ping
Abstract: Although diffusion models with strong visual priors have emerged as powerful dense prediction backboens, they overlook a core limitation: the stochastic noise at the core of diffusion sampling is inherently misaligned with dense prediction that requires a deterministic mapping from image to geometry. In this paper, we show that this stochastic noise corrupts fine-grained spatial cues and pushes the model toward timestep-specific noise objectives, consequently destroying meaningful geometric structure mappings. To address this, we introduce $\mathrm{D}^\mathrm{3}$-Predictor, a noise-free deterministic framework built by reformulating a pretrained diffusion model without stochasticity noise. Instead of relying on noisy inputs to leverage diffusion priors, $\mathrm{D}^\mathrm{3}$-Predictor views the pretrained diffusion network as an ensemble of timestep-dependent visual experts and self-supervisedly aggregates their heterogeneous priors into a single, clean, and complete geometric prior. Meanwhile, we utilize task-specific supervision to seamlessly adapt this noise-free prior to dense prediction tasks. Extensive experiments on various dense prediction tasks demonstrate that $\mathrm{D}^\mathrm{3}$-Predictor achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance in diverse scenarios. In addition, it requires less than half the training data previously used and efficiently performs inference in a single step. Our code, data, and checkpoints are publicly available at https://x-gengroup.github.io/HomePage_D3-Predictor/.
Authors: Shihao Li, Naisheng Ye, Tianyu Li, Kashyap Chitta, Tuo An, Peng Su, Boyang Wang, Haiou Liu, Chen Lv, Hongyang Li
Abstract: Realistic and diverse multi-agent driving scenes are crucial for evaluating autonomous vehicles, but safety-critical events which are essential for this task are rare and underrepresented in driving datasets. Data-driven scene generation offers a low-cost alternative by synthesizing complex traffic behaviors from existing driving logs. However, existing models often lack controllability or yield samples that violate physical or social constraints, limiting their usability. We present OMEGA, an optimization-guided, training-free framework that enforces structural consistency and interaction awareness during diffusion-based sampling from a scene generation model. OMEGA re-anchors each reverse diffusion step via constrained optimization, steering the generation towards physically plausible and behaviorally coherent trajectories. Building on this framework, we formulate ego-attacker interactions as a game-theoretic optimization in the distribution space, approximating Nash equilibria to generate realistic, safety-critical adversarial scenarios. Experiments on nuPlan and Waymo show that OMEGA improves generation realism, consistency, and controllability, increasing the ratio of physically and behaviorally valid scenes from 32.35% to 72.27% for free exploration capabilities, and from 11% to 80% for controllability-focused generation. Our approach can also generate $5\times$ more near-collision frames with a time-to-collision under three seconds while maintaining the overall scene realism.
Authors: Sangha Park, Eunji Kim, Yeongtak Oh, Jooyoung Choi, Sungroh Yoon
Abstract: Despite substantial progress in text-to-image generation, achieving precise text-image alignment remains challenging, particularly for prompts with rich compositional structure or imaginative elements. To address this, we introduce Negative Prompting for Image Correction (NPC), an automated pipeline that improves alignment by identifying and applying negative prompts that suppress unintended content. We begin by analyzing cross-attention patterns to explain why both targeted negatives-those directly tied to the prompt's alignment error-and untargeted negatives-tokens unrelated to the prompt but present in the generated image-can enhance alignment. To discover useful negatives, NPC generates candidate prompts using a verifier-captioner-proposer framework and ranks them with a salient text-space score, enabling effective selection without requiring additional image synthesis. On GenEval++ and Imagine-Bench, NPC outperforms strong baselines, achieving 0.571 vs. 0.371 on GenEval++ and the best overall performance on Imagine-Bench. By guiding what not to generate, NPC provides a principled, fully automated route to stronger text-image alignment in diffusion models. Code is released at https://github.com/wiarae/NPC.
Authors: Sangha Park, Seungryong Yoo, Jisoo Mok, Sungroh Yoon
Abstract: Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced substantially, they remain vulnerable to object hallucination caused by language priors and visual information loss. To address this, we propose SAVE (Sparse Autoencoder-Driven Visual Information Enhancement), a framework that mitigates hallucination by steering the model along Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) latent features. A binary object-presence question-answering probe identifies the SAE features most indicative of the model's visual information processing, referred to as visual understanding features. Steering the model along these identified features reinforces grounded visual understanding and effectively reduces hallucination. With its simple design, SAVE outperforms state-of-the-art training-free methods on standard benchmarks, achieving a 10\%p improvement in CHAIR\_S and consistent gains on POPE and MMHal-Bench. Extensive evaluations across multiple models and layers confirm the robustness and generalizability of our approach. Further analysis reveals that steering along visual understanding features suppresses the generation of uncertain object tokens and increases attention to image tokens, mitigating hallucination. Code is released at https://github.com/wiarae/SAVE.
Authors: Samitha Nuwan Thilakarathna, Ercan Avsar, Martin Mathias Nielsen, Malte Pedersen
Abstract: Accurate fisheries data are crucial for effective and sustainable marine resource management. With the recent adoption of Electronic Monitoring (EM) systems, more video data is now being collected than can be feasibly reviewed manually. This paper addresses this challenge by developing an optimized deep learning pipeline for automated fish re-identification (Re-ID) using the novel AutoFish dataset, which simulates EM systems with conveyor belts with six similarly looking fish species. We demonstrate that key Re-ID metrics (R1 and mAP@k) are substantially improved by using hard triplet mining in conjunction with a custom image transformation pipeline that includes dataset-specific normalization. By employing these strategies, we demonstrate that the Vision Transformer-based Swin-T architecture consistently outperforms the Convolutional Neural Network-based ResNet-50, achieving peak performance of 41.65% mAP@k and 90.43% Rank-1 accuracy. An in-depth analysis reveals that the primary challenge is distinguishing visually similar individuals of the same species (Intra-species errors), where viewpoint inconsistency proves significantly more detrimental than partial occlusion. The source code and documentation are available at: https://github.com/msamdk/Fish_Re_Identification.git
Authors: Wenxi Yang, Yuzhong Zhao, Fang Wan, Qixiang Ye
Abstract: Thinking-with-images paradigms have showcased remarkable visual reasoning capability by integrating visual information as dynamic elements into the Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, optimizing interleaved multimodal CoT (iMCoT) through reinforcement learning remains challenging, as it relies on scarce high-quality reasoning data. In this study, we propose Self-Calling Chain-of-Thought (sCoT), a novel visual reasoning paradigm that reformulates iMCoT as a language-only CoT with self-calling. Specifically, a main agent decomposes the complex visual reasoning task to atomic subtasks and invokes its virtual replicas, i.e. parameter-sharing subagents, to solve them in isolated context. sCoT enjoys substantial training effectiveness and efficiency, as it requires no explicit interleaving between modalities. sCoT employs group-relative policy optimization to reinforce effective reasoning behavior to enhance optimization. Experiments on HR-Bench 4K show that sCoT improves the overall reasoning performance by up to $1.9\%$ with $\sim 75\%$ fewer GPU hours compared to strong baseline approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/YWenxi/think-with-images-through-self-calling.
URLs: https://github.com/YWenxi/think-with-images-through-self-calling.
Authors: Seonghwa Choi, Moonkyeong Choi, Mingyu Jang, Jaekyung Kim, Jianfei Cai, Wen-Huang Cheng, Sanghoon Lee
Abstract: Modeling relightable and animatable human avatars from monocular video is a long-standing and challenging task. Recently, Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods have been employed to reconstruct the avatars. However, they often produce unsatisfactory photo-realistic results because of insufficient geometrical details related to body motion, such as clothing wrinkles. In this paper, we propose a 3DGS-based human avatar modeling framework, termed as Relightable and Dynamic Gaussian Avatar (RnD-Avatar), that presents accurate pose-variant deformation for high-fidelity geometrical details. To achieve this, we introduce dynamic skinning weights that define the human avatar's articulation based on pose while also learning additional deformations induced by body motion. We also introduce a novel regularization to capture fine geometric details under sparse visual cues. Furthermore, we present a new multi-view dataset with varied lighting conditions to evaluate relight. Our framework enables realistic rendering of novel poses and views while supporting photo-realistic lighting effects under arbitrary lighting conditions. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in novel view synthesis, novel pose rendering, and relighting.
Authors: Ke Xing, Xiaojie Jin, Longfei Li, Yuyang Yin, Hanwen Liang, Guixun Luo, Chen Fang, Jue Wang, Konstantinos N. Plataniotis, Yao Zhao, Yunchao Wei
Abstract: The growing adoption of XR devices has fueled strong demand for high-quality stereo video, yet its production remains costly and artifact-prone. To address this challenge, we present StereoWorld, an end-to-end framework that repurposes a pretrained video generator for high-fidelity monocular-to-stereo video generation. Our framework jointly conditions the model on the monocular video input while explicitly supervising the generation with a geometry-aware regularization to ensure 3D structural fidelity. A spatio-temporal tiling scheme is further integrated to enable efficient, high-resolution synthesis. To enable large-scale training and evaluation, we curate a high-definition stereo video dataset containing over 11M frames aligned to natural human interpupillary distance (IPD). Extensive experiments demonstrate that StereoWorld substantially outperforms prior methods, generating stereo videos with superior visual fidelity and geometric consistency. The project webpage is available at https://ke-xing.github.io/StereoWorld/.
Authors: Yang Cheng, Ziteng Cui, Shenghan Su, Lin Gu, Zenghui Zhang
Abstract: White balance (WB) is a key step in the image signal processor (ISP) pipeline that mitigates color casts caused by varying illumination and restores the scene's true colors. Currently, sRGB-based WB editing for post-ISP WB correction is widely used to address color constancy failures in the ISP pipeline when the original camera RAW is unavailable. However, additive color models (e.g., sRGB) are inherently limited by fixed nonlinear transformations and entangled color channels, which often impede their generalization to complex lighting conditions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework for WB correction that leverages a perception-inspired Learnable HSI (LHSI) color space. Built upon a cylindrical color model that naturally separates luminance from chromatic components, our framework further introduces dedicated parameters to enhance this disentanglement and learnable mapping to adaptively refine the flexibility. Moreover, a new Mamba-based network is introduced, which is tailored to the characteristics of the proposed LHSI color space. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method, highlighting the potential of perception-inspired color space design in computational photography. The source code is available at https://github.com/YangCheng58/WB_Color_Space.
Authors: Abdullah Al Mamun, Miaohua Zhang, David Ahmedt-Aristizabal, Zeeshan Hayder, Mohammad Awrangjeb
Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) is attractive for plant disease detection as it can exploit large collections of unlabeled leaf images, yet most existing SSL methods are built on CNNs or vision transformers that are poorly matched to agricultural imagery. CNN-based SSL struggles to capture disease patterns that evolve continuously along leaf structures, while transformer-based SSL introduces quadratic attention cost from high-resolution patches. To address these limitations, we propose StateSpace-SSL, a linear-time SSL framework that employs a Vision Mamba state-space encoder to model long-range lesion continuity through directional scanning across the leaf surface. A prototype-driven teacher-student objective aligns representations across multiple views, encouraging stable and lesion-aware features from labelled data. Experiments on three publicly available plant disease datasets show that StateSpace-SSL consistently outperforms the CNN- and transformer-based SSL baselines in various evaluation metrics. Qualitative analyses further confirm that it learns compact, lesion-focused feature maps, highlighting the advantage of linear state-space modelling for self-supervised plant disease representation learning.
Authors: Alberto Rota, Mert Kiray, Mert Asim Karaoglu, Patrick Ruhkamp, Elena De Momi, Nassir Navab, Benjamin Busam
Abstract: Specular highlights distort appearance, obscure texture, and hinder geometric reasoning in both natural and surgical imagery. We present UnReflectAnything, an RGB-only framework that removes highlights from a single image by predicting a highlight map together with a reflection-free diffuse reconstruction. The model uses a frozen vision transformer encoder to extract multi-scale features, a lightweight head to localize specular regions, and a token-level inpainting module that restores corrupted feature patches before producing the final diffuse image. To overcome the lack of paired supervision, we introduce a Virtual Highlight Synthesis pipeline that renders physically plausible specularities using monocular geometry, Fresnel-aware shading, and randomized lighting which enables training on arbitrary RGB images with correct geometric structure. UnReflectAnything generalizes across natural and surgical domains where non-Lambertian surfaces and non-uniform lighting create severe highlights and it achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks. Project Page: https://alberto-rota.github.io/UnReflectAnything/
Authors: Xinyu Liu, Hangjie Yuan, Yujie Wei, Jiazheng Xing, Yujin Han, Jiahao Pan, Yanbiao Ma, Chi-Min Chan, Kang Zhao, Shiwei Zhang, Wenhan Luo, Yike Guo
Abstract: Video unified models exhibit strong capabilities in understanding and generation, yet they struggle with reason-informed visual editing even when equipped with powerful internal vision-language models (VLMs). We attribute this gap to two factors: 1) existing datasets are inadequate for training and evaluating reasoning-aware video editing, and 2) an inherent disconnect between the models' reasoning and editing capabilities, which prevents the rich understanding from effectively instructing the editing process. Bridging this gap requires an integrated framework that connects reasoning with visual transformation. To address this gap, we introduce the Reason-Informed Video Editing (RVE) task, which requires reasoning about physical plausibility and causal dynamics during editing. To support systematic evaluation, we construct RVE-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark with two complementary subsets: Reasoning-Informed Video Editing and In-Context Video Generation. These subsets cover diverse reasoning dimensions and real-world editing scenarios. Building upon this foundation, we propose the ReViSE, a Self-Reflective Reasoning (SRF) framework that unifies generation and evaluation within a single architecture. The model's internal VLM provides intrinsic feedback by assessing whether the edited video logically satisfies the given instruction. The differential feedback that refines the generator's reasoning behavior during training. Extensive experiments on RVE-Bench demonstrate that ReViSE significantly enhances editing accuracy and visual fidelity, achieving a 32% improvement of the Overall score in the reasoning-informed video editing subset over state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Yuhao He, Jinyu Tian, Xianwei Zheng, Li Dong, Yuanman Li, Jiantao Zhou
Abstract: Recent studies have shown that deep learning models are very vulnerable to poisoning attacks. Many defense methods have been proposed to address this issue. However, traditional poisoning attacks are not as threatening as commonly believed. This is because they often cause differences in how the model performs on the training set compared to the validation set. Such inconsistency can alert defenders that their data has been poisoned, allowing them to take the necessary defensive actions. In this paper, we introduce a more threatening type of poisoning attack called the Deferred Poisoning Attack. This new attack allows the model to function normally during the training and validation phases but makes it very sensitive to evasion attacks or even natural noise. We achieve this by ensuring the poisoned model's loss function has a similar value as a normally trained model at each input sample but with a large local curvature. A similar model loss ensures that there is no obvious inconsistency between the training and validation accuracy, demonstrating high stealthiness. On the other hand, the large curvature implies that a small perturbation may cause a significant increase in model loss, leading to substantial performance degradation, which reflects a worse robustness. We fulfill this purpose by making the model have singular Hessian information at the optimal point via our proposed Singularization Regularization term. We have conducted both theoretical and empirical analyses of the proposed method and validated its effectiveness through experiments on image classification tasks. Furthermore, we have confirmed the hazards of this form of poisoning attack under more general scenarios using natural noise, offering a new perspective for research in the field of security.
Authors: Guixian Xu, Jinglai Li, Junqi Tang
Abstract: Equivariant Imaging (EI) regularization has become the de-facto technique for unsupervised training of deep imaging networks, without any need of ground-truth data. Observing that the EI-based unsupervised training paradigm currently has significant computational redundancy leading to inefficiency in high-dimensional applications, we propose a sketched EI regularization which leverages the randomized sketching techniques for acceleration. We apply our sketched EI regularization to develop an accelerated deep internal learning framework, which can be efficiently applied for test-time network adaptation. Additionally, for network adaptation tasks, we propose a parameter-efficient approach to accelerate both EI and Sketched-EI via optimizing only the normalization layers. Our numerical study on X-ray CT and multicoil magnetic resonance image reconstruction tasks demonstrate that our approach can achieve significant computational acceleration over the standard EI counterpart, especially in test-time training tasks.
Authors: Ruben van Bergen, Justus H\"ubotter, Alma Lago, Pablo Lanillos
Abstract: Autonomous intelligent agents must bridge computational challenges at disparate levels of abstraction, from the low-level spaces of sensory input and motor commands to the high-level domain of abstract reasoning and planning. A key question in designing such agents is how best to instantiate the representational space that will interface between these two levels -- ideally without requiring supervision in the form of expensive data annotations. These objectives can be efficiently achieved by representing the world in terms of objects (grounded in perception and action). In this work, we present a novel, brain-inspired, deep-learning architecture that learns from pixels to interpret, control, and reason about its environment, using object-centric representations. We show the utility of our approach through tasks in synthetic environments that require a combination of (high-level) logical reasoning and (low-level) continuous control. Results show that the agent can learn emergent conditional behavioural reasoning, such as $(A \to B) \land (\neg A \to C)$, as well as logical composition $(A \to B) \land (A \to C) \vdash A \to (B \land C)$ and XOR operations, and successfully controls its environment to satisfy objectives deduced from these logical rules. The agent can adapt online to unexpected changes in its environment and is robust to mild violations of its world model, thanks to dynamic internal desired goal generation. While the present results are limited to synthetic settings (2D and 3D activated versions of dSprites), which fall short of real-world levels of complexity, the proposed architecture shows how to manipulate grounded object representations, as a key inductive bias for unsupervised learning, to enable behavioral reasoning.
Authors: Sebastian Salwig, Till Kahlke, Florian Hirschberger, Dennis Forster, J\"org L\"ucke
Abstract: Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) range among the most frequently used models in machine learning. However, training large, general GMMs becomes computationally prohibitive for datasets that have many data points $N$ of high-dimensionality $D$. For GMMs with arbitrary covariances, we here derive a highly efficient variational approximation, which is then integrated with mixtures of factor analyzers (MFAs). For GMMs with $C$ components, our proposed algorithm substantially reduces runtime complexity from $\mathcal{O}(NCD^2)$ per iteration to a complexity scaling linearly with $D$ and sublinearly with $NC$. In numerical experiments, we first validate that the complexity reduction results in a sublinear scaling for the entire GMM optimization process. Second, we show on large-scale benchmarks that the sublinear algorithm results in speed-ups of an order-of-magnitude compared to the state-of-the-art. Third, as a proof of concept, we finally train GMMs with over 10 billion parameters on about 100 million images, observing training times of less than nine hours on a single state-of-the-art CPU. Finally, and forth, we demonstrate the effectiveness of large-scale GMMs on the task of zero-shot image denoising, where sublinear training results in state-of-the-art denoising times while competitive denoising performance is maintained.
Authors: Ling Xing, Alex Jinpeng Wang, Rui Yan, Xiangbo Shu, Jinhui Tang
Abstract: Real-world applications are stretching context windows to hundreds of thousand of tokens while Large Language Models (LLMs) swell from billions to trillions of parameters. This dual expansion send compute and memory costs skyrocketing, making token compression indispensable. We introduce Vision Centric Token Compression (Vist), a slow-fast compression framework that mirrors human reading: the fast path renders distant tokens into images, letting a frozen, lightweight vision encoder skim the low-salience context; the slow path feeds the proximal window into the LLM for fine-grained reasoning. A Probability-Informed Visual Enhancement (PVE) objective masks high-frequency tokens during training, steering the Resampler to concentrate on semantically rich regions-just as skilled reader gloss over function words. On eleven in-context learning benchmarks, Vist achieves the same accuracy with 2.3 times fewer tokens, cutting FLOPs by 16% and memory by 50%. This method delivers remarkable results, outperforming the strongest text encoder-based compression method CEPE by 7.6% on average over benchmarks like TriviaQA, NQ, PopQA, NLUI, and CLIN, setting a new standard for token efficiency in LLMs. The project is at https://github.com/CSU-JPG/VIST.
Authors: Arno Verduyn, Maxim Vochten, Joris De Schutter
Abstract: The ability of robots to recognize human gestures facilitates a natural and accessible human-robot collaboration. However, most work in gesture recognition remains rooted in reference frame-dependent representations. This poses a challenge when reference frames vary due to different work cell layouts, imprecise frame calibrations, or other environmental changes. This paper investigated the use of invariant trajectory descriptors for robust hand palm motion gesture recognition under reference frame changes. First, a novel dataset of recorded Hand Palm Motion (HPM) gestures is introduced. The motion gestures in this dataset were specifically designed to be distinguishable without dependence on specific reference frames or directional cues. Afterwards, multiple invariant trajectory descriptor approaches were benchmarked to assess how their performances generalize to this novel HPM dataset. After this offline benchmarking, the best scoring approach is validated for online recognition by developing a real-time Proof of Concept (PoC). In this PoC, hand palm motion gestures were used to control the real-time movement of a manipulator arm. The PoC demonstrated a high recognition reliability in real-time operation, achieving an $F_1$-score of 92.3%. This work demonstrates the effectiveness of the invariant descriptor approach as a standalone solution. Moreover, we believe that the invariant descriptor approach can also be utilized within other state-of-the-art pattern recognition and learning systems to improve their robustness against reference frame variations.
Authors: Yuhan Yuan, Xiaomo Jiang, Haibin Yang, Haixin Zhao, Shengbo Wang, Xueyu Cheng, Jigang Meng, Shuhua Yang
Abstract: Many fault diagnosis methods of rotating machines are based on discriminative features extracted from signals collected from the key components such as bearings. However, under complex operating conditions, periodic impulsive characteristics in the signal related to weak fault information are often obscured by noise interference. Consequently, existing approaches struggle to learn interpretable fault-related features in such scenarios. This paper proposes a novel transformer framework (FE-MCFormer) to extract interpretable time-frequency features, with the aim of improving the fault detection accuracy and intrepretability of rotating machines under strong noise. First, a Fourier adaptive reconstruction embedding layer is introduced as a global information encoder in the model. Subsequently, a time-frequency fusion module is designed, further improve the model robustness and interpretability. The effectiveness of FE-MCFormer in machine fault diagnosis is validated through three case studies.
Authors: Defang Chen, Zhenyu Zhou, Can Wang, Siwei Lyu
Abstract: Diffusion-based generative models employ stochastic differential equations (SDEs) and their equivalent probability flow ordinary differential equations (ODEs) to establish a smooth transformation between complex high-dimensional data distributions and tractable prior distributions. In this paper, we reveal a striking geometric regularity in the deterministic sampling dynamics of diffusion generative models: each simulated sampling trajectory along the gradient field lies within an extremely low-dimensional subspace, and all trajectories exhibit an almost identical boomerang shape, regardless of the model architecture, applied conditions, or generated content. We characterize several intriguing properties of these trajectories, particularly under closed-form solutions based on kernel-estimated data modeling. We also demonstrate a practical application of the discovered trajectory regularity by proposing a dynamic programming-based scheme to better align the sampling time schedule with the underlying trajectory structure. This simple strategy requires minimal modification to existing deterministic numerical solvers, incurs negligible computational overhead, and achieves superior image generation performance, especially in regions with only 5 - 10 function evaluations.
Authors: Ankit Sanjyal
Abstract: High-resolution image synthesis with diffusion models often suffers from energy instabilities and guidance artifacts that degrade visual quality. We analyze the latent energy landscape during sampling and propose adaptive classifier-free guidance (CFG) schedules that maintain stable energy trajectories. Our approach introduces energy-aware scheduling strategies that modulate guidance strength over time, achieving superior stability scores (0.9998) and consistency metrics (0.9873) compared to fixed-guidance approaches. We demonstrate that DPM++ 2M with linear-decreasing CFG scheduling yields optimal performance, providing sharper, more faithful images while reducing artifacts. Our energy profiling framework serves as a powerful diagnostic tool for understanding and improving diffusion model behavior.
Authors: Xiuxiu Qi, Yu Yang, Jiannong Cao, Luyao Bai, Chongshan Fan, Chengtai Cao, Hongpeng Wang
Abstract: Language-conditioned manipulation facilitates human-robot interaction via behavioral cloning (BC), which learns control policies from human demonstrations and serves as a cornerstone of embodied AI. Overcoming compounding errors in sequential action decisions remains a central challenge to improving BC performance. Existing approaches mitigate compounding errors through data augmentation, expressive representation, or temporal abstraction. However, they suffer from physical discontinuities and semantic-physical misalignment, leading to inaccurate action cloning and intermittent execution. In this paper, we present Continuous vision-language-action Co-Learning with Semantic-Physical Alignment (CCoL), a novel BC framework that ensures temporally consistent execution and fine-grained semantic grounding. It generates robust and smooth action execution trajectories through continuous co-learning across vision, language, and proprioceptive inputs (e.g., robot internal states). Meanwhile, we anchor language semantics to visuomotor representations by a bidirectional cross-attention to learn contextual information for action generation, successfully overcoming the problem of semantic-physical misalignment. Extensive experiments show that CCoL achieves an average 8.0% relative improvement across three simulation suites, with up to 19.2% relative gain in human-demonstrated bimanual insertion tasks. Real-world tests on a 7-DoF robot further confirm CCoL's generalization under unseen and noisy object states.
Authors: Xiangyu Zhao, Yaling Shen, Yiwen Jiang, Zimu Wang, Jiahe Liu, Maxmartwell H Cheng, Guilherme C Oliveira, Robert Desimone, Dominic Dwyer, Zongyuan Ge
Abstract: Depression is one of the most prevalent mental health disorders globally. In recent years, multi-modal data, such as speech, video, and transcripts, has been increasingly used to develop AI-assisted depression assessment systems. Large language models have further advanced this field due to their strong language understanding and generalization capabilities. However, conventional LLMs remain text-centric and cannot process the rich non-verbal cues found in audio and visual modalities, which are critical components in mental health evaluation. While multi-modal LLMs offer a promising direction, few are tailored for psychological applications. In this study, we propose a novel multi-modal LLM framework for depression detection. Our approach augments an audio language model with visual understanding and aligns audio-visual features at the timestamp level. This fine-grained alignment improves modeling of temporal dynamics across modalities while reducing the need for extensive training data and computational resources. Experiments on the DAIC-WoZ dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms both single-modality approaches and previous multi-modal methods. Moreover, the proposed framework can be extended to incorporate additional physiological signals, paving the way for broader clinical applications beyond mental health.
Authors: James Ni, Zekai Wang, Wei Lin, Amir Bar, Yann LeCun, Trevor Darrell, Jitendra Malik, Roei Herzig
Abstract: Video generation models are rapidly improving in their ability to synthesize human actions in novel contexts, holding the potential to serve as high-level planners for contextual robot control. To realize this potential, a key research question remains open: how can a humanoid execute the human actions from generated videos in a zero-shot manner? This challenge arises because generated videos are often noisy and exhibit morphological distortions that make direct imitation difficult compared to real video. To address this, we introduce a two-stage pipeline. First, we lift video pixels into a 4D human representation and then retarget to the humanoid morphology. Second, we propose GenMimic-a physics-aware reinforcement learning policy conditioned on 3D keypoints, and trained with symmetry regularization and keypoint-weighted tracking rewards. As a result, GenMimic can mimic human actions from noisy, generated videos. We curate GenMimicBench, a synthetic human-motion dataset generated using two video generation models across a spectrum of actions and contexts, establishing a benchmark for assessing zero-shot generalization and policy robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate improvements over strong baselines in simulation and confirm coherent, physically stable motion tracking on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot without fine-tuning. This work offers a promising path to realizing the potential of video generation models as high-level policies for robot control.
Authors: Ashik E Rasul, Humaira Tasnim, Ji Yu Kim, Young Hyun Lim, Scott Schmitz, Bruce W. Jo, Hyung-Jin Yoon
Abstract: QuadPlanes combine the range efficiency of fixed-wing aircraft with the maneuverability of multi-rotor platforms for long-range autonomous missions. In GPS-denied or cluttered urban environments, perception-based landing is vital for reliable operation. Unlike structured landing zones, real-world sites are unstructured and highly variable, requiring strong generalization capabilities from the perception system. Deep neural networks (DNNs) provide a scalable solution for learning landing site features across diverse visual and environmental conditions. While perception-driven landing has been shown in simulation, real-world deployment introduces significant challenges. Payload and volume constraints limit high-performance edge AI devices like the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, which are crucial for real-time detection and control. Accurate pose estimation during descent is necessary, especially in the absence of GPS, and relies on dependable visual-inertial odometry. Achieving this with limited edge AI resources requires careful optimization of the entire deployment framework. The flight characteristics of large QuadPlanes further complicate the problem. These aircraft exhibit high inertia, reduced thrust vectoring, and slow response times further complicate stable landing maneuvers. This work presents a lightweight QuadPlane system for efficient vision-based autonomous landing and visual-inertial odometry, specifically developed for long-range QuadPlane operations such as aerial monitoring. It describes the hardware platform, sensor configuration, and embedded computing architecture designed to meet demanding real-time, physical constraints. This establishes a foundation for deploying autonomous landing in dynamic, unstructured, GPS-denied environments.