Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
★ Hoi3DGen: Generating High-Quality Human-Object-Interactions in 3D
Modeling and generating 3D human-object interactions from text is crucial for applications in AR, XR, and gaming. Existing approaches often rely on score distillation from text-to-image models, but their results suffer from the Janus problem and do not follow text prompts faithfully due to the scarcity of high-quality interaction data. We introduce Hoi3DGen, a framework that generates high-quality textured meshes of human-object interaction that follow the input interaction descriptions precisely. We first curate realistic and high-quality interaction data leveraging multimodal large language models, and then create a full text-to-3D pipeline, which achieves orders-of-magnitude improvements in interaction fidelity. Our method surpasses baselines by 4-15x in text consistency and 3-7x in 3D model quality, exhibiting strong generalization to diverse categories and interaction types, while maintaining high-quality 3D generation.
★ CRAFT: A Tendon-Driven Hand with Hybrid Hard-Soft Compliance
We introduce CRAFT hand, a tendon-driven anthropomorphic hand with hybrid hard-soft compliance for contact-rich manipulation. The design is based on a simple idea: contact is not uniform across the hand. Impacts concentrate at joints, while links carry most of the load. CRAFT places soft material at joints and keeps links rigid, and uses rollingcontact joint surfaces to keep flexion on repeatable motion paths. Fifteen motors mounted on the fingers drive the hand through tendons, keeping the form factor compact and the fingers light. In structural tests, CRAFT improves strength and endurance while maintaining comparable repeatability. In teleoperation, CRAFT improves handling of fragile and low-friction items, and the hand covers 33/33 grasps in the Feix taxonomy. The full design costs under $600 and will be released open-source with visionbased teleoperation and simulation integration. Project page: http://craft-hand.github.io/
★ EvoTok: A Unified Image Tokenizer via Residual Latent Evolution for Visual Understanding and Generation
The development of unified multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is fundamentally challenged by the granularity gap between visual understanding and generation: understanding requires high-level semantic abstractions, while image generation demands fine-grained pixel-level representations. Existing approaches usually enforce the two supervision on the same set of representation or decouple these two supervision on separate feature spaces, leading to interference and inconsistency, respectively. In this work, we propose EvoTok, a unified image tokenizer that reconciles these requirements through a residual evolution process within a shared latent space. Instead of maintaining separate token spaces for pixels and semantics, EvoTok encodes an image into a cascaded sequence of residual tokens via residual vector quantization. This residual sequence forms an evolution trajectory where earlier stages capture low-level details and deeper stages progressively transition toward high-level semantic representations. Despite being trained on a relatively modest dataset of 13M images, far smaller than the billion-scale datasets used by many previous unified tokenizers, EvoTok achieves a strong reconstruction quality of 0.43 rFID on ImageNet-1K at 256x256 resolution. When integrated with a large language model, EvoTok shows promising performance across 7 out of 9 visual understanding benchmarks, and remarkable results on image generation benchmarks such as GenEval and GenAI-Bench. These results demonstrate that modeling visual representations as an evolving trajectory provides an effective and principled solution for unifying visual understanding and generation.
★ Towards Universal Computational Aberration Correction in Photographic Cameras: A Comprehensive Benchmark Analysis CVPR 2026
Prevalent Computational Aberration Correction (CAC) methods are typically tailored to specific optical systems, leading to poor generalization and labor-intensive re-training for new lenses. Developing CAC paradigms capable of generalizing across diverse photographic lenses offers a promising solution to these challenges. However, efforts to achieve such cross-lens universality within consumer photography are still in their early stages due to the lack of a comprehensive benchmark that encompasses a sufficiently wide range of optical aberrations. Furthermore, it remains unclear which specific factors influence existing CAC methods and how these factors affect their performance. In this paper, we present comprehensive experiments and evaluations involving 24 image restoration and CAC algorithms, utilizing our newly proposed UniCAC, a large-scale benchmark for photographic cameras constructed via automatic optical design. The Optical Degradation Evaluator (ODE) is introduced as a novel framework to objectively assess the difficulty of CAC tasks, offering credible quantification of optical aberrations and enabling reliable evaluation. Drawing on our comparative analysis, we identify three key factors -- prior utilization, network architecture, and training strategy -- that most significantly influence CAC performance, and further investigate their respective effects. We believe that our benchmark, dataset, and observations contribute foundational insights to related areas and lay the groundwork for future investigations. Benchmarks, codes, and Zemax files will be available at https://github.com/XiaolongQian/UniCAC.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026. Benchmarks, codes, and Zemax files will be available at https://github.com/XiaolongQian/UniCAC
★ Node-RF: Learning Generalized Continuous Space-Time Scene Dynamics with Neural ODE-based NeRFs CVPR 2026
Predicting scene dynamics from visual observations is challenging. Existing methods capture dynamics only within observed boundaries failing to extrapolate far beyond the training sequence. Node-RF (Neural ODE-based NeRF) overcomes this limitation by integrating Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs) with dynamic Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), enabling a continuous-time, spatiotemporal representation that generalizes beyond observed trajectories at constant memory cost. From visual input, Node-RF learns an implicit scene state that evolves over time via an ODE solver, propagating feature embeddings via differential calculus. A NeRF-based renderer interprets calculated embeddings to synthesize arbitrary views for long-range extrapolation. Training on multiple motion sequences with shared dynamics allows for generalization to unseen conditions. Our experiments demonstrate that Node-RF can characterize abstract system behavior without explicit model to identify critical points for future predictions.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026. 13 pages, 9 figures
★ Paper Title: LoV3D: Grounding Cognitive Prognosis Reasoning in Longitudinal 3D Brain MRI via Regional Volume Assessments
Longitudinal brain MRI is essential for characterizing the progression of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's disease assessment. However, current deep-learning tools fragment this process: classifiers reduce a scan to a label, volumetric pipelines produce uninterpreted measurements, and vision-language models (VLMs) may generate fluent but potentially hallucinated conclusions. We present LoV3D, a pipeline for training 3D vision-language models, which reads longitudinal T1-weighted brain MRI, produces a region-level anatomical assessment, conducts longitudinal comparison with the prior scan, and finally outputs a three-class diagnosis (Cognitively Normal, Mild Cognitive Impairment, or Dementia) along with a synthesized diagnostic summary. The stepped pipeline grounds the final diagnosis by enforcing label consistency, longitudinal coherence, and biological plausibility, thereby reducing the risks of hallucinations. The training process introduces a clinically-weighted Verifier that scores candidate outputs automatically against normative references derived from standardized volume metrics, driving Direct Preference Optimization without a single human annotation. On a subject-level held-out ADNI test set (479 scans, 258 subjects), LoV3D achieves 93.7% three-class diagnostic accuracy (+34.8% over the no-grounding baseline), 97.2% on two-class diagnosis accuracy (+4% over the SOTA) and 82.6% region-level anatomical classification accuracy (+33.1% over VLM baselines). Zero-shot transfer yields 95.4% on MIRIAD (100% Dementia recall) and 82.9% three-class accuracy on AIBL, confirming high generalizability across sites, scanners, and populations. Code is available at https://github.com/Anonymous-TEVC/LoV-3D.
★ Beyond Convolution: A Taxonomy of Structured Operators for Learning-Based Image Processing
The convolution operator is the fundamental building block of modern convolutional neural networks (CNNs), owing to its simplicity, translational equivariance, and efficient implementation. However, its structure as a fixed, linear, locally-averaging operator limits its ability to capture structured signal properties such as low-rank decompositions, adaptive basis representations, and non-uniform spatial dependencies. This paper presents a systematic taxonomy of operators that extend or replace the standard convolution in learning-based image processing pipelines. We organise the landscape of alternative operators into five families: (i) decomposition-based operators, which separate structural and noise components through singular value or tensor decompositions; (ii) adaptive weighted operators, which modulate kernel contributions as a function of spatial position or signal content; (iii) basis-adaptive operators, which optimise the analysis bases together with the network weights; (iv) integral and kernel operators, which generalise the convolution to position-dependent and non-linear kernels; and (v) attention-based operators, which relax the locality assumption entirely. For each family, we provide a formal definition, a discussion of its structural properties with respect to the convolution, and a critical analysis of the tasks for which the operator is most appropriate. We further provide a comparative analysis of all families across relevant dimensions -- linearity, locality, equivariance, computational cost, and suitability for image-to-image and image-to-label tasks -- and outline the open challenges and future directions of this research area.
★ Dense Dynamic Scene Reconstruction and Camera Pose Estimation from Multi-View Videos
We address the challenging problem of dense dynamic scene reconstruction and camera pose estimation from multiple freely moving cameras -- a setting that arises naturally when multiple observers capture a shared event. Prior approaches either handle only single-camera input or require rigidly mounted, pre-calibrated camera rigs, limiting their practical applicability. We propose a two-stage optimization framework that decouples the task into robust camera tracking and dense depth refinement. In the first stage, we extend single-camera visual SLAM to the multi-camera setting by constructing a spatiotemporal connection graph that exploits both intra-camera temporal continuity and inter-camera spatial overlap, enabling consistent scale and robust tracking. To ensure robustness under limited overlap, we introduce a wide-baseline initialization strategy using feed-forward reconstruction models. In the second stage, we refine depth and camera poses by optimizing dense inter- and intra-camera consistency using wide-baseline optical flow. Additionally, we introduce MultiCamRobolab, a new real-world dataset with ground-truth poses from a motion capture system. Finally, we demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art feed-forward models on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks, while requiring less memory.
★ NBAvatar: Neural Billboards Avatars with Realistic Hand-Face Interaction
We present NBAvatar - a method for realistic rendering of head avatars handling non-rigid deformations caused by hand-face interaction. We introduce a novel representation for animated avatars by combining the training of oriented planar primitives with neural rendering. Such a combination of explicit and implicit representations enables NBAvatar to handle temporally and pose-consistent geometry, along with fine-grained appearance details provided by the neural rendering technique. In our experiments, we demonstrate that NBAvatar implicitly learns color transformations caused by face-hand interactions and surpasses existing approaches in terms of novel-view and novel-pose rendering quality. Specifically, NBAvatar achieves up to 30% LPIPS reduction under high-resolution megapixel rendering compared to Gaussian-based avatar methods, while also improving PSNR and SSIM, and achieves higher structural similarity compared to the state-of-the-art hand-face interaction method InteractAvatar.
★ Coarse-Guided Visual Generation via Weighted h-Transform Sampling
Coarse-guided visual generation, which synthesizes fine visual samples from degraded or low-fidelity coarse references, is essential for various real-world applications. While training-based approaches are effective, they are inherently limited by high training costs and restricted generalization due to paired data collection. Accordingly, recent training-free works propose to leverage pretrained diffusion models and incorporate guidance during the sampling process. However, these training-free methods either require knowing the forward (fine-to-coarse) transformation operator, e.g., bicubic downsampling, or are difficult to balance between guidance and synthetic quality. To address these challenges, we propose a novel guided method by using the h-transform, a tool that can constrain stochastic processes (e.g., sampling process) under desired conditions. Specifically, we modify the transition probability at each sampling timestep by adding to the original differential equation with a drift function, which approximately steers the generation toward the ideal fine sample. To address unavoidable approximation errors, we introduce a noise-level-aware schedule that gradually de-weights the term as the error increases, ensuring both guidance adherence and high-quality synthesis. Extensive experiments across diverse image and video generation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our method.
★ Continual Learning with Vision-Language Models via Semantic-Geometry Preservation
Continual learning of pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) is prone to catastrophic forgetting, yet current approaches adapt to new tasks without explicitly preserving the cross-modal semantic geometry inherited from pretraining and previous stages, allowing new-task supervision to induce geometric distortion. We observe that the most pronounced drift tends to concentrate in vulnerable neighborhoods near the old-new semantic interface, where shared visual patterns are easily re-explained by new textual semantics. To address this under an exemplar-free constraint, we propose Semantic Geometry Preservation for Continual Learning (SeGP-CL). SeGP-CL first probes the drift-prone region by constructing a compact set of adversarial anchors with dual-targeted projected gradient descent (DPGD), which drives selected new-task seeds toward old-class semantics while remaining faithful in raw visual space. During training, we preserve cross-modal structure by anchor-guided cross-modal geometry distillation (ACGD), and stabilize the textual reference frame across tasks via a lightweight text semantic-geometry regularization (TSGR). After training, we estimate anchor-induced raw-space drift to transfer old visual prototypes and perform dual-path inference by fusing cross-modal and visual cues. Extensive experiments on five continual learning benchmarks demonstrate that SeGP-CL consistently improves stability and forward transfer, achieving state-of-the-art performance while better preserving semantic geometry of VLMs.
comment: 14 pages, 11 figures, under review
★ Dr. SHAP-AV: Decoding Relative Modality Contributions via Shapley Attribution in Audio-Visual Speech Recognition
Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) leverages both acoustic and visual information for robust recognition under noise. However, how models balance these modalities remains unclear. We present Dr. SHAP-AV, a framework using Shapley values to analyze modality contributions in AVSR. Through experiments on six models across two benchmarks and varying SNR levels, we introduce three analyses: Global SHAP for overall modality balance, Generative SHAP for contribution dynamics during decoding, and Temporal Alignment SHAP for input-output correspondence. Our findings reveal that models shift toward visual reliance under noise yet maintain high audio contributions even under severe degradation. Modality balance evolves during generation, temporal alignment holds under noise, and SNR is the dominant factor driving modality weighting. These findings expose a persistent audio bias, motivating ad-hoc modality-weighting mechanisms and Shapley-based attribution as a standard AVSR diagnostic.
comment: Project website: https://umbertocappellazzo.github.io/Dr-SHAP-AV
★ Single Pixel Image Classification using an Ultrafast Digital Light Projector
Aisha Kanwal, Graeme E. Johnstone, Fahimeh Dehkhoda, Johannes H. Herrnsdorf, Robert K. Henderson, Martin D. Dawson, Xavier Porte, Michael J. Strain
Pattern recognition and image classification are essential tasks in machine vision. Autonomous vehicles, for example, require being able to collect the complex information contained in a changing environment and classify it in real time. Here, we experimentally demonstrate image classification at multi-kHz frame rates combining the technique of single pixel imaging (SPI) with a low complexity machine learning model. The use of a microLED-on-CMOS digital light projector for SPI enables ultrafast pattern generation for sub-ms image encoding. We investigate the classification accuracy of our experimental system against the broadly accepted benchmarking task of the MNIST digits classification. We compare the classification performance of two machine learning models: An extreme learning machine (ELM) and a backpropagation trained deep neural network. The complexity of both models is kept low so the overhead added to the inference time is comparable to the image generation time. Crucially, our single pixel image classification approach is based on a spatiotemporal transformation of the information, entirely bypassing the need for image reconstruction. By exploring the performance of our SPI based ELM as binary classifier we demonstrate its potential for efficient anomaly detection in ultrafast imaging scenarios.
★ Nyxus: A Next Generation Image Feature Extraction Library for the Big Data and AI Era
Modern imaging instruments can produce terabytes to petabytes of data for a single experiment. The biggest barrier to processing big image datasets has been computational, where image analysis algorithms often lack the efficiency needed to process such large datasets or make tradeoffs in robustness and accuracy. Deep learning algorithms have vastly improved the accuracy of the first step in an analysis workflow (region segmentation), but the expansion of domain specific feature extraction libraries across scientific disciplines has made it difficult to compare the performance and accuracy of extracted features. To address these needs, we developed a novel feature extraction library called Nyxus. Nyxus is designed from the ground up for scalable out-of-core feature extraction for 2D and 3D image data and rigorously tested against established standards. The comprehensive feature set of Nyxus covers multiple biomedical domains including radiomics and cellular analysis, and is designed for computational scalability across CPUs and GPUs. Nyxus has been packaged to be accessible to users of various skill sets and needs: as a Python package for code developers, a command line tool, as a Napari plugin for low to no-code users or users that want to visualize results, and as an Open Container Initiative (OCI) compliant container that can be used in cloud or super-computing workflows aimed at processing large data sets. Further, Nyxus enables a new methodological approach to feature extraction allowing for programmatic tuning of many features sets for optimal computational efficiency or coverage for use in novel machine learning and deep learning applications.
comment: 29 pages, 9 figures, 6 supplemental tables
★ Pano360: Perspective to Panoramic Vision with Geometric Consistency CVPR2026
Prior panorama stitching approaches heavily rely on pairwise feature correspondences and are unable to leverage geometric consistency across multiple views. This leads to severe distortion and misalignment, especially in challenging scenes with weak textures, large parallax, and repetitive patterns. Given that multi-view geometric correspondences can be directly constructed in 3D space, making them more accurate and globally consistent, we extend the 2D alignment task to the 3D photogrammetric space. We adopt a novel transformer-based architecture to achieve 3D awareness and aggregate global information across all views. It directly utilizes camera poses to guide image warping for global alignment in 3D space and employs a multi-feature joint optimization strategy to compute the seams. Additionally, to establish an evaluation benchmark and train our network, we constructed a large-scale dataset of real-world scenes. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms existing alternatives in alignment accuracy and perceptual quality.
comment: Accepted by CVPR2026
★ CrossEarth-SAR: A SAR-Centric and Billion-Scale Geospatial Foundation Model for Domain Generalizable Semantic Segmentation
Ziqi Ye, Ziyang Gong, Ning Liao, Xiaoxing Hu, Di Wang, Hongruixuan Chen, Chen Huang, Yiguo He, Yuru Jia, Xiaoxing Wang, Haipeng Wang, Xue Yang, Junchi Yan
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) enables global, all-weather earth observation. However, owing to diverse imaging mechanisms, domain shifts across sensors and regions severely hinder its semantic generalization. To address this, we present CrossEarth-SAR, the first billion-scale SAR vision foundation model built upon a novel physics-guided sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture incorporating physical descriptors, explicitly designed for cross-domain semantic segmentation. To facilitate large-scale pre-training, we develop CrossEarth-SAR-200K, a weakly and fully supervised dataset that unifies public and private SAR imagery. We also introduce a benchmark suite comprising 22 sub-benchmarks across 8 distinct domain gaps, establishing the first unified standard for domain generalization semantic segmentation on SAR imagery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CrossEarth-SAR achieves state-of-the-art results on 20 benchmarks, surpassing previous methods by over 10\% mIoU on some benchmarks under multi-gap transfer. All code, benchmark and datasets will be publicly available.
comment: 26 pages, 15 figures
★ Ada3Drift: Adaptive Training-Time Drifting for One-Step 3D Visuomotor Robotic Manipulation
Diffusion-based visuomotor policies effectively capture multimodal action distributions through iterative denoising, but their high inference latency limits real-time robotic control. Recent flow matching and consistency-based methods achieve single-step generation, yet sacrifice the ability to preserve distinct action modes, collapsing multimodal behaviors into averaged, often physically infeasible trajectories. We observe that the compute budget asymmetry in robotics (offline training vs.\ real-time inference) naturally motivates recovering this multimodal fidelity by shifting iterative refinement from inference time to training time. Building on this insight, we propose Ada3Drift, which learns a training-time drifting field that attracts predicted actions toward expert demonstration modes while repelling them from other generated samples, enabling high-fidelity single-step generation (1 NFE) from 3D point cloud observations. To handle the few-shot robotic regime, Ada3Drift further introduces a sigmoid-scheduled loss transition from coarse distribution learning to mode-sharpening refinement, and multi-scale field aggregation that captures action modes at varying spatial granularities. Experiments on three simulation benchmarks (Adroit, Meta-World, and RoboTwin) and real-world robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate that Ada3Drift achieves state-of-the-art performance while requiring $10\times$ fewer function evaluations than diffusion-based alternatives.
★ HomeSafe-Bench: Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Unsafe Action Detection for Embodied Agents in Household Scenarios
The rapid evolution of embodied agents has accelerated the deployment of household robots in real-world environments. However, unlike structured industrial settings, household spaces introduce unpredictable safety risks, where system limitations such as perception latency and lack of common sense knowledge can lead to dangerous errors. Current safety evaluations, often restricted to static images, text, or general hazards, fail to adequately benchmark dynamic unsafe action detection in these specific contexts. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{HomeSafe-Bench}, a challenging benchmark designed to evaluate Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on unsafe action detection in household scenarios. HomeSafe-Bench is contrusted via a hybrid pipeline combining physical simulation with advanced video generation and features 438 diverse cases across six functional areas with fine-grained multidimensional annotations. Beyond benchmarking, we propose \textbf{Hierarchical Dual-Brain Guard for Household Safety (HD-Guard)}, a hierarchical streaming architecture for real-time safety monitoring. HD-Guard coordinates a lightweight FastBrain for continuous high-frequency screening with an asynchronous large-scale SlowBrain for deep multimodal reasoning, effectively balancing inference efficiency with detection accuracy. Evaluations demonstrate that HD-Guard achieves a superior trade-off between latency and performance, while our analysis identifies critical bottlenecks in current VLM-based safety detection.
★ Multimodal Emotion Recognition via Bi-directional Cross-Attention and Temporal Modeling
Emotion recognition in in-the-wild video data remains a challenging problem due to large variations in facial appearance, head pose, illumination, background noise, and the inherently dynamic nature of human affect. Relying on a single modality, such as facial expressions or speech, is often insufficient to capture these complex emotional cues. To address this issue, we propose a multimodal emotion recognition framework for the Expression (EXPR) Recognition task in the 10th Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) Challenge.
Our approach leverages large-scale pre-trained models, namely CLIP for visual encoding and Wav2Vec 2.0 for audio representation learning, as frozen backbone networks. To model temporal dependencies in facial expression sequences, we employ a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) over fixed-length video windows. In addition, we introduce a bi-directional cross-attention fusion module, in which visual and audio features interact symmetrically to enhance cross-modal contextualization and capture complementary emotional information. A lightweight classification head is then used for final emotion prediction. We further incorporate a text-guided contrastive objective based on CLIP text features to encourage semantically aligned visual representations.
Experimental results on the ABAW 10th EXPR benchmark show that the proposed framework provides a strong multimodal baseline and achieves improved performance over unimodal modeling. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of combining temporal visual modeling, audio representation learning, and cross-modal fusion for robust emotion recognition in unconstrained real-world environments.
comment: 7 pages
★ AstroSplat: Physics-Based Gaussian Splatting for Rendering and Reconstruction of Small Celestial Bodies
Image-based surface reconstruction and characterization are crucial for missions to small celestial bodies (e.g., asteroids), as it informs mission planning, navigation, and scientific analysis. Recent advances in Gaussian splatting enable high-fidelity neural scene representations but typically rely on a spherical harmonic intensity parameterization that is strictly appearance-based and does not explicitly model material properties or light-surface interactions. We introduce AstroSplat, a physics-based Gaussian splatting framework that integrates planetary reflectance models to improve the autonomous reconstruction and photometric characterization of small-body surfaces from in-situ imagery. The proposed framework is validated on real imagery taken by NASA's Dawn mission, where we demonstrate superior rendering performance and surface reconstruction accuracy compared to the typical spherical harmonic parameterization.
comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, conference
★ Preliminary analysis of RGB-NIR Image Registration techniques for off-road forestry environments
RGB-NIR image registration plays an important role in sensor-fusion, image enhancement and off-road autonomy. In this work, we evaluate both classical and Deep Learning (DL) based image registration techniques to access their suitability for off-road forestry applications. NeMAR, trained under 6 different configurations, demonstrates partial success however, its GAN loss instability suggests challenges in preserving geometric consistency. MURF, when tested on off-road forestry data shows promising large scale feature alignment during shared information extraction but struggles with fine details in dense vegetation. Even though this is just a preliminary evaluation, our study necessitates further refinements for robust, multi-scale registration for off-road forest applications.
comment: Preliminary results
★ Prototype-Based Knowledge Guidance for Fine-Grained Structured Radiology Reporting
Structured radiology reporting promises faster, more consistent communication than free text, but automation remains difficult as models must make many fine-grained, discrete decisions about rare findings and attributes from limited structured supervision. In contrast, free-text reports are produced at scale in routine care and implicitly encode fine-grained, image-linked information through detailed descriptions. To leverage this unstructured knowledge, we propose ProtoSR, an approach for injecting free-text information into structured report population. First, we introduce an automatic extraction pipeline that uses an instruction-tuned LLM to mine 80k+ MIMIC-CXR studies and build a multimodal knowledge base aligned with a structured reporting template, representing each answer option with a visual prototype. Using this knowledge base, ProtoSR is trained to retrieve prototypes relevant for the current image-question pair and augment the model predictions through a prototype-conditioned residual, providing a data-driven second opinion that selectively corrects predictions. On the Rad-ReStruct benchmark, ProtoSR achieves state-of-the-art results, with the largest improvements on detailed attribute questions, demonstrating the value of integrating free-text derived signal for fine-grained image understanding.
★ AS-Bridge: A Bidirectional Generative Framework Bridging Next-Generation Astronomical Surveys
The upcoming decade of observational cosmology will be shaped by large sky surveys, such as the ground-based LSST at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the space-based Euclid mission. While they promise an unprecedented view of the Universe across depth, resolution, and wavelength, their differences in observational modality, sky coverage, point-spread function, and scanning cadence make joint analysis beneficial, but also challenging. To facilitate joint analysis, we introduce A(stronomical)S(urvey)-Bridge, a bidirectional generative model that translates between ground- and space-based observations. AS-Bridge learns a diffusion model that employs a stochastic Brownian Bridge process between the LSST and Euclid observations. The two surveys have overlapping sky regions, where we can explicitly model the conditional probabilistic distribution between them. We show that this formulation enables new scientific capabilities beyond single-survey analysis, including faithful probabilistic predictions of missing survey observations and inter-survey detection of rare events. These results establish the feasibility of inter-survey generative modeling. AS-Bridge is therefore well-positioned to serve as a complementary component of future LSST-Euclid joint data pipelines, enhancing the scientific return once data from both surveys become available. Data and code are available at \href{https://github.com/ZHANG7DC/AS-Bridge}{https://github.com/ZHANG7DC/AS-Bridge}.
comment: 10 pages, 4 figures. Code available at https://github.com/ZHANG7DC/AS-Bridge
★ PicoSAM3: Real-Time In-Sensor Region-of-Interest Segmentation
Real-time, on-device segmentation is critical for latency-sensitive and privacy-aware applications such as smart glasses and Internet-of-Things devices. We introduce PicoSAM3, a lightweight promptable visual segmentation model optimized for edge and in-sensor execution, including deployment on the Sony IMX500 vision sensor. PicoSAM3 has 1.3 M parameters and combines a dense CNN architecture with region of interest prompt encoding, Efficient Channel Attention, and knowledge distillation from SAM2 and SAM3. On COCO and LVIS, PicoSAM3 achieves 65.45% and 64.01% mIoU, respectively, outperforming existing SAM-based and edge-oriented baselines at similar or lower complexity. The INT8 quantized model preserves accuracy with negligible degradation while enabling real-time in-sensor inference at 11.82 ms latency on the IMX500, fully complying with its memory and operator constraints. Ablation studies show that distillation from large SAM models yields up to +14.5% mIoU improvement over supervised training and demonstrate that high-quality, spatially flexible promptable segmentation is feasible directly at the sensor level.
★ InSpatio-WorldFM: An Open-Source Real-Time Generative Frame Model
InSpatio Team, Xiaoyu Zhang, Weihong Pan, Zhichao Ye, Jialin Liu, Yipeng Chen, Nan Wang, Xiaojun Xiang, Weijian Xie, Yifu Wang, Haoyu Ji, Siji Pan, Zhewen Le, Jing Guo, Xianbin Liu, Donghui Shen, Ziqiang Zhao, Haomin Liu, Guofeng Zhang
We present InSpatio-WorldFM, an open-source real-time frame model for spatial intelligence. Unlike video-based world models that rely on sequential frame generation and incur substantial latency due to window-level processing, InSpatio-WorldFM adopts a frame-based paradigm that generates each frame independently, enabling low-latency real-time spatial inference. By enforcing multi-view spatial consistency through explicit 3D anchors and implicit spatial memory, the model preserves global scene geometry while maintaining fine-grained visual details across viewpoint changes. We further introduce a progressive three-stage training pipeline that transforms a pretrained image diffusion model into a controllable frame model and finally into a real-time generator through few-step distillation. Experimental results show that InSpatio-WorldFM achieves strong multi-view consistency while supporting interactive exploration on consumer-grade GPUs, providing an efficient alternative to traditional video-based world models for real-time world simulation.
comment: Project page: https://inspatio.github.io/worldfm/ Code: https://github.com/inspatio/worldfm
★ Think While Watching: Online Streaming Segment-Level Memory for Multi-Turn Video Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance on offline video understanding, but most are limited to offline inference or have weak online reasoning, making multi-turn interaction over continuously arriving video streams difficult. Existing streaming methods typically use an interleaved perception-generation paradigm, which prevents concurrent perception and generation and leads to early memory decay as streams grow, hurting long-range dependency modeling. We propose Think While Watching, a memory-anchored streaming video reasoning framework that preserves continuous segment-level memory during multi-turn interaction. We build a three-stage, multi-round chain-of-thought dataset and adopt a stage-matched training strategy, while enforcing strict causality through a segment-level streaming causal mask and streaming positional encoding. During inference, we introduce an efficient pipeline that overlaps watching and thinking and adaptively selects the best attention backend. Under both single-round and multi-round streaming input protocols, our method achieves strong results. Built on Qwen3-VL, it improves single-round accuracy by 2.6% on StreamingBench and by 3.79% on OVO-Bench. In the multi-round setting, it maintains performance while reducing output tokens by 56%. Code is available at: https://github.com/wl666hhh/Think_While_Watching/
★ Single-View Rolling-Shutter SfM
Rolling-shutter (RS) cameras are ubiquitous, but RS SfM (structure-from-motion) has not been fully solved yet. This work suggests an approach to remedy this: We characterize RS single-view geometry of observed world points or lines. Exploiting this geometry, we describe which motion and scene parameters can be recovered from a single RS image and systematically derive minimal reconstruction problems. We evaluate several representative cases with proof-of-concept solvers, highlighting both feasibility and practical limitations.
★ Derain-Agent: A Plug-and-Play Agent Framework for Rainy Image Restoration
While deep learning has advanced single-image deraining, existing models suffer from a fundamental limitation: they employ a static inference paradigm that fails to adapt to the complex, coupled degradations (e.g., noise artifacts, blur, and color deviation) of real-world rain. Consequently, restored images often exhibit residual artifacts and inconsistent perceptual quality. In this work, we present Derain-Agent, a plug-and-play refinement framework that transitions deraining from static processing to dynamic, agent-based restoration. Derain-Agent equips a base deraining model with two core capabilities: 1) a Planning Network that intelligently schedules an optimal sequence of restoration tools for each instance, and 2) a Strength Modulation mechanism that applies these tools with spatially adaptive intensity. This design enables precise, region-specific correction of residual errors without the prohibitive cost of iterative search. Our method demonstrates strong generalization, consistently boosting the performance of state-of-the-art deraining models on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks.
★ Deep Learning-based Assessment of the Relation Between the Third Molar and Mandibular Canal on Panoramic Radiographs using Local, Centralized, and Federated Learning
Johan Andreas Balle Rubak, Sara Haghighat, Sanyam Jain, Mostafa Aldesoki, Akhilanand Chaurasia, Sarah Sadat Ehsani, Faezeh Dehghan Ghanatkaman, Ahmad Badruddin Ghazali, Julien Issa, Basel Khalil, Rishi Ramani, Ruben Pauwels
Impaction of the mandibular third molar in proximity to the mandibular canal increases the risk of inferior alveolar nerve injury. Panoramic radiography is routinely used to assess this relationship. Automated classification of molar-canal overlap could support clinical triage and reduce unnecessary CBCT referrals, while federated learning (FL) enables multi-center collaboration without sharing patient data. We compared Local Learning (LL), FL, and Centralized Learning (CL) for binary overlap/no-overlap classification on cropped panoramic radiographs partitioned across eight independent labelers. A pretrained ResNet-34 was trained under each paradigm and evaluated using per-client metrics with locally optimized thresholds and pooled test performance with a global threshold. Performance was assessed using area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and threshold-based metrics, alongside training dynamics, Grad-CAM visualizations, and server-side aggregate monitoring signals. On the test set, CL achieved the highest performance (AUC 0.831; accuracy = 0.782), FL showed intermediate performance (AUC 0.757; accuracy = 0.703), and LL generalized poorly across clients (AUC range = 0.619-0.734; mean = 0.672). Training curves suggested overfitting, particularly in LL models, and Grad-CAM indicated more anatomically focused attention in CL and FL. Overall, centralized training provided the strongest performance, while FL offers a privacy-preserving alternative that outperforms LL.
★ ZeroSense:How Vision matters in Long Context Compression
Recent visual-text compression (VTC) methods, typified by DeepSeek-OCR, report impressive high token compression ratios for long-context modeling tasks by leveraging text-to-image rendering. However, existing evaluation protocols heavily rely on downstream task performance. Such evaluation metrics fail to accurately measure text preservation due to the strong inherent linguistic priors of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In this work, we introduce a new evaluation framework that decouples MLLMs' capabilities to faithfully assess VTC quality. Within this framework, we further introduce the ZeroSense Benchmark to ensure low semantic correlation of testing samples. By eliminating contextual dependencies, our benchmark guarantees that the evaluation results are purely reflective of VTC quality, unaffected by the semantic inference capabilities of downstream models. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that VTC quality and downstream task accuracy diverge significantly, highlighting the necessity of our decoupled evaluation framework.
★ A Decade of Generative Adversarial Networks for Porous Material Reconstruction
Digital reconstruction of porous materials has become increasingly critical for applications ranging from geological reservoir characterization to tissue engineering and electrochemical device design. While traditional methods such as micro-computed tomography and statistical reconstruction approaches have established foundations in this field, the emergence of deep learning techniques, particularly Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), has revolutionized porous media reconstruction capabilities. This review systematically analyzes 96 peer-reviewed articles published from 2017 to early 2026, examining the evolution and applications of GAN-based approaches for porous material image reconstruction. We categorize GAN architectures into six distinct classes, namely Vanilla GANs, Multi-Scale GANs, Conditional GANs, Attention-Enhanced GANs, Style-based GANs, and Hybrid Architecture GANs. Our analysis reveals substantial progress including improvements in porosity accuracy (within 1% of original samples), permeability prediction (up to 79% reduction in mean relative errors), and achievable reconstruction volumes (from initial $64^3$ to current $2{,}200^3$ voxels). Despite these advances, persistent challenges remain in computational efficiency, memory constraints for large-scale reconstruction, and maintaining structural continuity in 2D-to-3D transformations. This systematic analysis provides a comprehensive framework for selecting appropriate GAN architectures based on specific application requirements.
comment: 96 pages, supplementary material included (34 pages, 6 tables covering all 96 reviewed implementations)
★ Towards High-Fidelity CAD Generation via LLM-Driven Program Generation and Text-Based B-Rep Primitive Grounding
The field of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) generation has made significant progress in recent years. Existing methods typically fall into two separate categorie: parametric CAD modeling and direct boundary representation (B-Rep) synthesis. In modern feature-based CAD systems, parametric modeling and B-Rep are inherently intertwined, as advanced parametric operations (e.g., fillet and chamfer) require explicit selection of B-Rep geometric primitives, and the B-Rep itself is derived from parametric operations. Consequently, this paradigm gap remains a critical factor limiting AI-driven CAD modeling for complex industrial product design. This paper present FutureCAD, a novel text-to-CAD framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) and a B-Rep grounding transformer (BRepGround) for high-fidelity CAD generation. Our method generates executable CadQuery scripts, and introduces a text-based query mechanism that enables the LLM to specify geometric selections via natural language, which BRepGround then grounds to the target primitives. To train our framework, we construct a new dataset comprising real-world CAD models. For the LLM, we apply supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to establish fundamental CAD generation capabilities, followed by reinforcement learning (RL) to improve generalization. Experiments show that FutureCAD achieves state-of-the-art CAD generation performance.
comment: preprint
★ Multimodal classification of Radiation-Induced Contrast Enhancements and tumor recurrence using deep learning
Robin Peretzke, Marlin Hanstein, Maximilian Fischer, Lars Badhi Wessel, Obada Alhalabi, Sebastian Regnery, Andreas Kudak, Maximilian Deng, Tanja Eichkorn, Philipp Hoegen Saßmannshausen, Fabian Allmendinger, Jan-Hendrik Bolten, Philipp Schröter, Christine Jungk, Jürgen Peter Debus, Peter Neher, Laila König, Klaus Maier-Hein
The differentiation between tumor recurrence and radiation-induced contrast enhancements in post-treatment glioblastoma patients remains a major clinical challenge. Existing approaches rely on clinically sparsely available diffusion MRI or do not consider radiation maps, which are gaining increasing interest in the tumor board for this differentiation. We introduce RICE-NET, a multimodal 3D deep learning model that integrates longitudinal MRI data with radiotherapy dose distributions for automated lesion classification using conventional T1-weighted MRI data. Using a cohort of 92 patients, the model achieved an F1 score of 0.92 on an independent test set. During extensive ablation experiments, we quantified the contribution of each timepoint and modality and showed that reliable classification largely depends on the radiation map. Occlusion-based interpretability analyses further confirmed the model's focus on clinically relevant regions. These findings highlight the potential of multimodal deep learning to enhance diagnostic accuracy and support clinical decision-making in neuro-oncology.
★ Automated Detection of Malignant Lesions in the Ovary Using Deep Learning Models and XAI
Md. Hasin Sarwar Ifty, Nisharga Nirjan, Labib Islam, M. A. Diganta, Reeyad Ahmed Ornate, Anika Tasnim, Md. Saiful Islam
The unrestrained proliferation of cells that are malignant in nature is cancer. In recent times, medical professionals are constantly acquiring enhanced diagnostic and treatment abilities by implementing deep learning models to analyze medical data for better clinical decision, disease diagnosis and drug discovery. A majority of cancers are studied and treated by incorporating these technologies. However, ovarian cancer remains a dilemma as it has inaccurate non-invasive detection procedures and a time consuming, invasive procedure for accurate detection. Thus, in this research, several Convolutional Neural Networks such as LeNet-5, ResNet, VGGNet and GoogLeNet/Inception have been utilized to develop 15 variants and choose a model that accurately detects and identifies ovarian cancer. For effective model training, the dataset OvarianCancer&SubtypesDatasetHistopathology from Mendeley has been used. After constructing a model, we utilized Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) models such as LIME, Integrated Gradients and SHAP to explain the black box outcome of the selected model. For evaluating the performance of the model, Accuracy, Precision, Recall, F1-Score, ROC Curve and AUC have been used. From the evaluation, it was seen that the slightly compact InceptionV3 model with ReLu had the overall best result achieving an average score of 94% across all the performance metrics in the augmented dataset. Lastly for XAI, the three aforementioned XAI have been used for an overall comparative analysis. It is the aim of this research that the contributions of the study will help in achieving a better detection method for ovarian cancer.
comment: Accepted and published at ICAIC 2025. Accepted version
★ RADAR: Closed-Loop Robotic Data Generation via Semantic Planning and Autonomous Causal Environment Reset IROS
The acquisition of large-scale physical interaction data, a critical prerequisite for modern robot learning, is severely bottlenecked by the prohibitive cost and scalability limits of human-in-the-loop collection paradigms. To break this barrier, we introduce Robust Autonomous Data Acquisition for Robotics (RADAR), a fully autonomous, closed-loop data generation engine that completely removes human intervention from the collection cycle. RADAR elegantly divides the cognitive load into a four-module pipeline. Anchored by 2-5 3D human demonstrations as geometric priors, a Vision-Language Model first orchestrates scene-relevant task generation via precise semantic object grounding and skill retrieval. Next, a Graph Neural Network policy translates these subtasks into physical actions via in-context imitation learning. Following execution, the VLM performs automated success evaluation using a structured Visual Question Answering pipeline. Finally, to shatter the bottleneck of manual resets, a Finite State Machine orchestrates an autonomous environment reset and asymmetric data routing mechanism. Driven by simultaneous forward-reverse planning with a strict Last-In, First-Out causal sequence, the system seamlessly restores unstructured workspaces and robustly recovers from execution failures. This continuous brain-cerebellum synergy transforms data collection into a self-sustaining process. Extensive evaluations highlight RADAR's exceptional versatility. In simulation, our framework achieves up to 90% success rates on complex, long-horizon tasks, effortlessly solving challenges where traditional baselines plummet to near-zero performance. In real-world deployments, the system reliably executes diverse, contact-rich skills (e.g., deformable object manipulation) via few-shot adaptation without domain-specific fine-tuning, providing a highly scalable paradigm for robotic data acquisition.
comment: 8 pages, 4 figures. Submitted to IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
★ CEI-3D: Collaborative Explicit-Implicit 3D Reconstruction for Realistic and Fine-Grained Object Editing
Existing 3D editing methods often produce unrealistic and unrefined results due to the deeply integrated nature of their reconstruction networks. To address the challenge, this paper introduces CEI-3D, an editing-oriented reconstruction pipeline designed to facilitate realistic and fine-grained editing. Specifically, we propose a collaborative explicit-implicit reconstruction approach, which represents the target object using an implicit SDF network and a differentially sampled, locally controllable set of handler points. The implicit network provides a smooth and continuous geometry prior, while the explicit handler points offer localized control, enabling mutual guidance between the global 3D structure and user-specified local editing regions. To independently control each attribute of the handler points, we design a physical properties disentangling module to decouple the color of the handler points into separate physical properties. We also propose a dual-diffuse-albedo network in this module to process the edited and non-edited regions through separate branches, thereby preventing undesired interference from editing operations. Building on the reconstructed collaborative explicit-implicit representation with disentangled properties, we introduce a spatial-aware editing module that enables part-wise adjustment of relevant handler points. This module employs a cross-view propagation-based 3D segmentation strategy, which helps users to edit the specified physical attributes of a target part efficiently. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves more realistic and fine-grained editing results than the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods while requiring less editing time. Our code is available on https://github.com/shiyue001/CEI-3D.
★ A Diffeomorphism Groupoid and Algebroid Framework for Discontinuous Image Registration
In this paper, we propose a novel mathematical framework for piecewise diffeomorphic image registration that involves discontinuous sliding motion using a diffeomorphism groupoid and algebroid approach. The traditional Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping (LDDMM) registration method builds on Lie groups, which assume continuity and smoothness in velocity fields, limiting its applicability in handling discontinuous sliding motion. To overcome this limitation, we extend the diffeomorphism Lie groups to a framework of discontinuous diffeomorphism Lie groupoids, allowing for discontinuities along sliding boundaries while maintaining diffeomorphism within homogeneous regions. We provide a rigorous analysis of the associated mathematical structures, including Lie algebroids and their duals, and derive specific Euler-Arnold equations to govern optimal flows for discontinuous deformations. Some numerical tests are performed to validate the efficiency of the proposed approach.
★ OSM-based Domain Adaptation for Remote Sensing VLMs
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) adapted to remote sensing rely heavily on domain-specific image-text supervision, yet high-quality annotations for satellite and aerial imagery remain scarce and expensive to produce. Prevailing pseudo-labeling pipelines address this gap by distilling knowledge from large frontier models, but this dependence on large teachers is costly, limits scalability, and caps achievable performance at the ceiling of the teacher. We propose OSMDA: a self-contained domain adaptation framework that eliminates this dependency. Our key insight is that a capable base VLM can serve as its own annotation engine: by pairing aerial images with rendered OpenStreetMap (OSM) tiles, we leverage optical character recognition and chart comprehension capabilities of the model to generate captions enriched by OSM's vast auxiliary metadata. The model is then fine-tuned on the resulting corpus with satellite imagery alone, yielding OSMDA-VLM, a domain-adapted VLM that requires no manual labeling and no stronger external model. We conduct exhaustive evaluations spanning 10 benchmarks across image-text-to-text tasks and comparing against 9 competitive baselines. When equally mixed with real data, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, while being substantially cheaper to train than teacher-dependent alternatives. These results suggest that, given a strong foundation model, alignment with crowd-sourced geographic data is a practical and scalable path towards remote sensing domain adaptation. Dataset and model weights will be made publicly available.
★ Intrinsic Concept Extraction Based on Compositional Interpretability CVPR 2026
Unsupervised Concept Extraction aims to extract concepts from a single image; however, existing methods suffer from the inability to extract composable intrinsic concepts. To address this, this paper introduces a new task called Compositional and Interpretable Intrinsic Concept Extraction (CI-ICE). The CI-ICE task aims to leverage diffusion-based text-to-image models to extract composable object-level and attribute-level concepts from a single image, such that the original concept can be reconstructed through the combination of these concepts. To achieve this goal, we propose a method called HyperExpress, which addresses the CI-ICE task through two core aspects. Specifically, first, we propose a concept learning approach that leverages the inherent hierarchical modeling capability of hyperbolic space to achieve accurate concept disentanglement while preserving the hierarchical structure and relational dependencies among concepts; second, we introduce a concept-wise optimization method that maps the concept embedding space to maintain complex inter-concept relationships while ensuring concept composability. Our method demonstrates outstanding performance in extracting compositionally interpretable intrinsic concepts from a single image.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026
★ Locating Demographic Bias at the Attention-Head Level in CLIP's Vision Encoder
Standard fairness audits of foundation models quantify that a model is biased, but not where inside the network the bias resides. We propose a mechanistic fairness audit that combines projected residual-stream decomposition, zero-shot Concept Activation Vectors, and bias-augmented TextSpan analysis to locate demographic bias at the level of individual attention heads in vision transformers. As a feasibility case study, we apply this pipeline to the CLIP ViT-L-14 encoder on 42 profession classes of the FACET benchmark, auditing both gender and age bias. For gender, the pipeline identifies four terminal-layer heads whose ablation reduces global bias (Cramer's V: 0.381 -> 0.362) while marginally improving accuracy (+0.42%); a layer-matched random control confirms that this effect is specific to the identified heads. A single head in the final layer contributes to the majority of the reduction in the most stereotyped classes, and class-level analysis shows that corrected predictions shift toward the correct occupation. For age, the same pipeline identifies candidate heads, but ablation produces weaker and less consistent effects, suggesting that age bias is encoded more diffusely than gender bias in this model. These results provide preliminary evidence that head-level bias localisation is feasible for discriminative vision encoders and that the degree of localisability may vary across protected attributes.
keywords: Bias . CLIP . Mechanistic Interpretability . Vision Transformer . Fairness
comment: 14 pages, 6 tables, 2 figures. Work conducted during IPCV-AI Erasmus Mundus Master
★ HELM: Hierarchical and Explicit Label Modeling with Graph Learning for Multi-Label Image Classification
Hierarchical multi-label classification (HMLC) is essential for modeling complex label dependencies in remote sensing. Existing methods, however, struggle with multi-path hierarchies where instances belong to multiple branches, and they rarely exploit unlabeled data. We introduce HELM (\textit{Hierarchical and Explicit Label Modeling}), a novel framework that overcomes these limitations. HELM: (i) uses hierarchy-specific class tokens within a Vision Transformer to capture nuanced label interactions; (ii) employs graph convolutional networks to explicitly encode the hierarchical structure and generate hierarchy-aware embeddings; and (iii) integrates a self-supervised branch to effectively leverage unlabeled imagery. We perform a comprehensive evaluation on four remote sensing image (RSI) datasets (UCM, AID, DFC-15, MLRSNet). HELM achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming strong baselines in both supervised and semi-supervised settings, demonstrating particular strength in low-label scenarios.
comment: Accepted and presented at REO workshop at EurIPS 2025
★ Controllable Egocentric Video Generation via Occlusion-Aware Sparse 3D Hand Joints
Chenyangguang Zhang, Botao Ye, Boqi Chen, Alexandros Delitzas, Fangjinhua Wang, Marc Pollefeys, Xi Wang
Motion-controllable video generation is crucial for egocentric applications in virtual reality and embodied AI. However, existing methods often struggle to achieve 3D-consistent fine-grained hand articulation. By adopting on 2D trajectories or implicit poses, they collapse 3D geometry into spatially ambiguous signals or over rely on human-centric priors. Under severe egocentric occlusions, this causes motion inconsistencies and hallucinated artifacts, as well as preventing cross-embodiment generalization to robotic hands. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework that generates egocentric videos from a single reference frame, leveraging sparse 3D hand joints as embodiment-agnostic control signals with clear semantic and geometric structures. We introduce an efficient control module that resolves occlusion ambiguities while fully preserving 3D information. Specifically, it extracts occlusion-aware features from the source reference frame by penalizing unreliable visual signals from hidden joints, and employs a 3D-based weighting mechanism to robustly handle dynamically occluded target joints during motion propagation. Concurrently, the module directly injects 3D geometric embeddings into the latent space to strictly enforce structural consistency. To facilitate robust training and evaluation, we develop an automated annotation pipeline that yields over one million high-quality egocentric video clips paired with precise hand trajectories. Additionally, we register humanoid kinematic and camera data to construct a cross-embodiment benchmark. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, generating high-fidelity egocentric videos with realistic interactions and exhibiting exceptional cross-embodiment generalization to robotic hands.
★ SoulX-LiveAct: Towards Hour-Scale Real-Time Human Animation with Neighbor Forcing and ConvKV Memory
Autoregressive (AR) diffusion models offer a promising framework for sequential generation tasks such as video synthesis by combining diffusion modeling with causal inference. Although they support streaming generation, existing AR diffusion methods struggle to scale efficiently. In this paper, we identify two key challenges in hour-scale real-time human animation. First, most forcing strategies propagate sample-level representations with mismatched diffusion states, causing inconsistent learning signals and unstable convergence. Second, historical representations grow unbounded and lack structure, preventing effective reuse of cached states and severely limiting inference efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose Neighbor Forcing, a diffusion-step-consistent AR formulation that propagates temporally adjacent frames as latent neighbors under the same noise condition. This design provides a distribution-aligned and stable learning signal while preserving drifting throughout the AR chain. Building upon this, we introduce a structured ConvKV memory mechanism that compresses the keys and values in causal attention into a fixed-length representation, enabling constant-memory inference and truly infinite video generation without relying on short-term motion-frame memory. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves training convergence, hour-scale generation quality, and inference efficiency compared to existing AR diffusion methods. Numerically, LiveAct enables hour-scale real-time human animation and supports 20 FPS real-time streaming inference on as few as two NVIDIA H100 or H200 GPUs. Quantitative results demonstrate that our method attains state-of-the-art performance in lip-sync accuracy, human animation quality, and emotional expressiveness, with the lowest inference cost.
★ VTEdit-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multi-Reference Image Editing Models in Virtual Try-On
As virtual try-on (VTON) continues to advance, a growing number of real-world scenarios have emerged, pushing beyond the ability of the existing specialized VTON models. Meanwhile, universal multi-reference image editing models have progressed rapidly and exhibit strong generalization in visual editing, suggesting a promising route toward more flexible VTON systems. However, despite their strong capabilities, the strengths and limitations of universal editors for VTON remain insufficiently explored due to the lack of systematic evaluation benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce VTEdit-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate universal multi-reference image editing models across various realistic VTON scenarios. VTEdit-Bench contains 24,220 test image pairs spanning five representative VTON tasks with progressively increasing complexity, enabling systematic analysis of robustness and generalization. We further propose VTEdit-QA, a reference-aware VLM-based evaluator that assesses VTON performance from three key aspects: model consistency, cloth consistency, and overall image quality. Through this framework, we systematically evaluate eight universal editing models and compare them with seven specialized VTON models. Results show that top universal editors are competitive on conventional tasks and generalize more stably to harder scenarios, but remain challenged by complex reference configurations, particularly multi-cloth conditioning.
★ Cross-Resolution Attention Network for High-Resolution PM2.5 Prediction
Vision Transformers have achieved remarkable success in spatio-temporal prediction, but their scalability remains limited for ultra-high-resolution, continent-scale domains required in real-world environmental monitoring. A single European air-quality map at 1 km resolution comprises 29 million pixels, far beyond the limits of naive self-attention. We introduce CRAN-PM, a dual-branch Vision Transformer that leverages cross-resolution attention to efficiently fuse global meteorological data (25 km) with local high-resolution PM2.5 at the current time (1 km). Instead of including physically driven factors like temperature and topography as input, we further introduce elevation-aware self-attention and wind-guided cross-attention to force the network to learn physically consistent feature representations for PM2.5 forecasting. CRAN-PM is fully trainable and memory-efficient, generating the complete 29-million-pixel European map in 1.8 seconds on a single GPU. Evaluated on daily PM2.5 forecasting throughout Europe in 2022 (362 days, 2,971 European Environment Agency (EEA) stations), it reduces RMSE by 4.7% at T+1 and 10.7% at T+3 compared to the best single-scale baseline, while reducing bias in complex terrain by 36%.
★ COTONET: A custom cotton detection algorithm based on YOLO11 for stage of growth cotton boll detection
Cotton harvesting is a critical phase where cotton capsules are physically manipulated and can lead to fibre degradation. To maintain the highest quality, harvesting methods must emulate delicate manual grasping, to preserve cotton's intrinsic properties. Automating this process requires systems capable of recognising cotton capsules across various phenological stages. To address this challenge, we propose COTONET, an enhanced custom YOLO11 model tailored with attention mechanisms to improve the detection of difficult instances. The architecture incorporates gradients in non-learnable operations to enhance shape and feature extraction. Key architectural modifications include: the replacement of convolutional blocks with Squeeze-and-Exitation blocks, a redesigned backbone integrating attention mechanisms, and the substitution of standard upsampling operations for Content Aware Reassembly of Features (CARAFE). Additionally, we integrate Simple Attention Modules (SimAM) for primary feature aggregation and Parallel Hybrid Attention Mechanisms (PHAM) for channel-wise, spatial-wise and coordinate-wise attention in the downward neck path. This configuration offers increased flexibility and robustness for interpreting the complexity of cotton crop growth. COTONET aligns with small-to-medium YOLO models utilizing 7.6M parameters and 27.8 GFLOPS, making it suitable for low-resource edge computing and mobile robotics. COTONET outperforms the standard YOLO baselines, achieving a mAP50 of 81.1% and a mAP50-95 of 60.6%.
comment: 15 pages, 11 figures. This paper will be submitted to Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, special issue
★ OSCBench: Benchmarking Object State Change in Text-to-Video Generation SC
Xianjing Han, Bin Zhu, Shiqi Hu, Franklin Mingzhe Li, Patrick Carrington, Roger Zimmermann, Jingjing Chen
Text-to-video (T2V) generation models have made rapid progress in producing visually high-quality and temporally coherent videos. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on perceptual quality, text-video alignment, or physical plausibility, leaving a critical aspect of action understanding largely unexplored: object state change (OSC) explicitly specified in the text prompt. OSC refers to the transformation of an object's state induced by an action, such as peeling a potato or slicing a lemon. In this paper, we introduce OSCBench, a benchmark specifically designed to assess OSC performance in T2V models. OSCBench is constructed from instructional cooking data and systematically organizes action-object interactions into regular, novel, and compositional scenarios to probe both in-distribution performance and generalization. We evaluate six representative open-source and proprietary T2V models using both human user study and multimodal large language model (MLLM)-based automatic evaluation. Our results show that, despite strong performance on semantic and scene alignment, current T2V models consistently struggle with accurate and temporally consistent object state changes, especially in novel and compositional settings. These findings position OSC as a key bottleneck in text-to-video generation and establish OSCBench as a diagnostic benchmark for advancing state-aware video generation models.
comment: Project page: https://hanxjing.github.io/OSCBench
★ PolyCrysDiff: Controllable Generation of Three-Dimensional Computable Polycrystalline Material Structures
The three-dimensional (3D) microstructures of polycrystalline materials exert a critical influence on their mechanical and physical properties. Realistic, controllable construction of these microstructures is a key step toward elucidating structure-property relationships, yet remains a formidable challenge. Herein, we propose PolyCrysDiff, a framework based on conditional latent diffusion that enables the end-to-end generation of computable 3D polycrystalline microstructures. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that PolyCrysDiff faithfully reproduces target grain morphologies, orientation distributions, and 3D spatial correlations, while achieving an $R^2$ over 0.972 on grain attributes (e.g., size and sphericity) control, thereby outperforming mainstream approaches such as Markov random field (MRF)- and convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods. The computability and physical validity of the generated microstructures are verified through a series of crystal plasticity finite element method (CPFEM) simulations. Leveraging PolyCrysDiff's controllable generative capability, we systematically elucidate how grain-level microstructural characteristics affect the mechanical properties of polycrystalline materials. This development is expected to pave a key step toward accelerated, data-driven optimization and design of polycrystalline materials.
★ UCAN: Unified Convolutional Attention Network for Expansive Receptive Fields in Lightweight Super-Resolution CVPR 2026
Hybrid CNN-Transformer architectures achieve strong results in image super-resolution, but scaling attention windows or convolution kernels significantly increases computational cost, limiting deployment on resource-constrained devices. We present UCAN, a lightweight network that unifies convolution and attention to expand the effective receptive field efficiently. UCAN combines window-based spatial attention with a Hedgehog Attention mechanism to model both local texture and long-range dependencies, and introduces a distillation-based large-kernel module to preserve high-frequency structure without heavy computation. In addition, we employ cross-layer parameter sharing to further reduce complexity. On Manga109 ($4\times$), UCAN-L achieves 31.63 dB PSNR with only 48.4G MACs, surpassing recent lightweight models. On BSDS100, UCAN attains 27.79 dB, outperforming methods with significantly larger models. Extensive experiments show that UCAN achieves a superior trade-off between accuracy, efficiency, and scalability, making it well-suited for practical high-resolution image restoration.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026
★ PROMO: Promptable Outfitting for Efficient High-Fidelity Virtual Try-On CVPR 2026
Haohua Chen, Tianze Zhou, Wei Zhu, Runqi Wang, Yandong Guan, Dejia Song, Yibo Chen, Xu Tang, Yao Hu, Lu Sheng, Zhiyong Wu
Virtual Try-on (VTON) has become a core capability for online retail, where realistic try-on results provide reliable fit guidance, reduce returns, and benefit both consumers and merchants. Diffusion-based VTON methods achieve photorealistic synthesis, yet often rely on intricate architectures such as auxiliary reference networks and suffer from slow sampling, making the trade-off between fidelity and efficiency a persistent challenge. We approach VTON as a structured image editing problem that demands strong conditional generation under three key requirements: subject preservation, faithful texture transfer, and seamless harmonization. Under this perspective, our training framework is generic and transfers to broader image editing tasks. Moreover, the paired data produced by VTON constitutes a rich supervisory resource for training general-purpose editors. We present PROMO, a promptable virtual try-on framework built upon a Flow Matching DiT backbone with latent multi-modal conditional concatenation. By leveraging conditioning efficiency and self-reference mechanisms, our approach substantially reduces inference overhead. On standard benchmarks, PROMO surpasses both prior VTON methods and general image editing models in visual fidelity while delivering a competitive balance between quality and speed. These results demonstrate that flow-matching transformers, coupled with latent multi-modal conditioning and self-reference acceleration, offer an effective and training-efficient solution for high-quality virtual try-on.
comment: CVPR 2026
★ BackdoorIDS: Zero-shot Backdoor Detection for Pretrained Vision Encoder
Self-supervised and multimodal vision encoders learn strong visual representations that are widely adopted in downstream vision tasks and large vision-language models (LVLMs). However, downstream users often rely on third-party pretrained encoders with uncertain provenance, exposing them to backdoor attacks. In this work, we propose BackdoorIDS, a simple yet effective zero-shot, inference-time backdoor samples detection method for pretrained vision encoders. BackdoorIDS is motivated by two observations: Attention Hijacking and Restoration. Under progressive input masking, a backdoored image initially concentrates attention on malicious trigger features. Once the masking ratio exceeds the trigger's robustness threshold, the trigger is deactivated, and attention rapidly shifts to benign content. This transition induces a pronounced change in the image embedding, whereas embeddings of clean images evolve more smoothly across masking progress. BackdoorIDS operationalizes this signal by extracting an embedding sequence along the masking trajectory and applying density-based clustering such as DBSCAN. An input is flagged as backdoored if its embedding sequence forms more than one cluster. Extensive experiments show that BackdoorIDS consistently outperforms existing defenses across diverse attack types, datasets, and model families. Notably, it is a plug-and-play approach that requires no retraining and operates fully zero-shot at inference time, making it compatible with a wide range of encoder architectures, including CNNs, ViTs, CLIP, and LLaVA-1.5.
comment: 17 pages, 10 figures, 6 tables
★ FL-MedSegBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Federated Learning on Medical Image Segmentation
Federated learning (FL) offers a privacy-preserving paradigm for collaborative medical image analysis without sharing raw data. However, the absence of standardized benchmarks for medical image segmentation hinders fair and comprehensive evaluation of FL methods. To address this gap, we introduce FL-MedSegBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for federated learning on medical image segmentation. Our benchmark encompasses nine segmentation tasks across ten imaging modalities, covering both 2D and 3D formats with realistic clinical heterogeneity. We systematically evaluate eight generic FL (gFL) and five personalized FL (pFL) methods across multiple dimensions: segmentation accuracy, fairness, communication efficiency, convergence behavior, and generalization to unseen domains. Extensive experiments reveal several key insights: (i) pFL methods, particularly those with client-specific batch normalization (\textit{e.g.}, FedBN), consistently outperform generic approaches; (ii) No single method universally dominates, with performance being dataset-dependent; (iii) Communication frequency analysis shows normalization-based personalization methods exhibit remarkable robustness to reduced communication frequency; (iv) Fairness evaluation identifies methods like Ditto and FedRDN that protect underperforming clients; (v) A method's generalization to unseen domains is strongly tied to its ability to perform well across participating clients. We will release an open-source toolkit to foster reproducible research and accelerate clinically applicable FL solutions, providing empirically grounded guidelines for real-world clinical deployment. The source code is available at https://github.com/meiluzhu/FL-MedSegBench.
comment: 19 pages,4 figures
★ OmniForcing: Unleashing Real-time Joint Audio-Visual Generation
Yaofeng Su, Yuming Li, Zeyue Xue, Jie Huang, Siming Fu, Haoran Li, Ying Li, Zezhong Qian, Haoyang Huang, Nan Duan
Recent joint audio-visual diffusion models achieve remarkable generation quality but suffer from high latency due to their bidirectional attention dependencies, hindering real-time applications. We propose OmniForcing, the first framework to distill an offline, dual-stream bidirectional diffusion model into a high-fidelity streaming autoregressive generator. However, naively applying causal distillation to such dual-stream architectures triggers severe training instability, due to the extreme temporal asymmetry between modalities and the resulting token sparsity. We address the inherent information density gap by introducing an Asymmetric Block-Causal Alignment with a zero-truncation Global Prefix that prevents multi-modal synchronization drift. The gradient explosion caused by extreme audio token sparsity during the causal shift is further resolved through an Audio Sink Token mechanism equipped with an Identity RoPE constraint. Finally, a Joint Self-Forcing Distillation paradigm enables the model to dynamically self-correct cumulative cross-modal errors from exposure bias during long rollouts. Empowered by a modality-independent rolling KV-cache inference scheme, OmniForcing achieves state-of-the-art streaming generation at $\sim$25 FPS on a single GPU, maintaining multi-modal synchronization and visual quality on par with the bidirectional teacher.\textbf{Project Page:} \href{https://omniforcing.com}{https://omniforcing.com}
comment: 14 pages
★ IDRL: An Individual-Aware Multimodal Depression-Related Representation Learning Framework for Depression Diagnosis
Depression is a severe mental disorder, and reliable identification plays a critical role in early intervention and treatment. Multimodal depression detection aims to improve diagnostic performance by jointly modeling complementary information from multiple modalities. Recently, numerous multimodal learning approaches have been proposed for depression analysis; however, these methods suffer from the following limitations: 1) inter-modal inconsistency and depression-unrelated interference, where depression-related cues may conflict across modalities while substantial irrelevant content obscures critical depressive signals, and 2) diverse individual depressive presentations, leading to individual differences in modality and cue importance that hinder reliable fusion. To address these issues, we propose Individual-aware Multimodal Depression-related Representation Learning Framework (IDRL) for robust depression diagnosis. Specifically, IDRL 1) disentangles multimodal representations into a modality-common depression space, a modality-specific depression space, and a depression-unrelated space to enhance modality alignment while suppressing irrelevant information, and 2) introduces an individual-aware modality-fusion module (IAF) that dynamically adjusts the weights of disentangled depression-related features based on their predictive significance, thereby achieving adaptive cross-modal fusion for different individuals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IDRL achieves superior and robust performance for multimodal depression detection.
★ Tokenization Allows Multimodal Large Language Models to Understand, Generate and Edit Architectural Floor Plans CVPR 2026
Architectural floor plan design demands joint reasoning over geometry, semantics, and spatial hierarchy, which remains a major challenge for current AI systems. Although recent diffusion and language models improve visual fidelity, they still struggle with coherent spatial reasoning and controllable generation. We present HouseMind, a multimodal large language model that unifies floor plan understanding, generation, and editing in one framework. We introduce discrete room-instance tokens to construct a unified vocabulary that bridges layouts and symbolic reasoning. With multimodal alignment and instruction tuning, the model synthesizes coherent, controllable layouts from text instructions. Experiments show how the framework achieves superior geometric validity and controllability while remaining efficient and locally deployable.
comment: 20 pages, 9 figures. Accepted to CVPR 2026
★ MV-SAM3D: Adaptive Multi-View Fusion for Layout-Aware 3D Generation
Recent unified 3D generation models have made remarkable progress in producing high-quality 3D assets from a single image. Notably, layout-aware approaches such as SAM3D can reconstruct multiple objects while preserving their spatial arrangement, opening the door to practical scene-level 3D generation. However, current methods are limited to single-view input and cannot leverage complementary multi-view observations, while independently estimated object poses often lead to physically implausible layouts such as interpenetration and floating artifacts.
We present MV-SAM3D, a training-free framework that extends layout-aware 3D generation with multi-view consistency and physical plausibility. We formulate multi-view fusion as a Multi-Diffusion process in 3D latent space and propose two adaptive weighting strategies -- attention-entropy weighting and visibility weighting -- that enable confidence-aware fusion, ensuring each viewpoint contributes according to its local observation reliability. For multi-object composition, we introduce physics-aware optimization that injects collision and contact constraints both during and after generation, yielding physically plausible object arrangements. Experiments on standard benchmarks and real-world multi-object scenes demonstrate significant improvements in reconstruction fidelity and layout plausibility, all without any additional training. Code is available at https://github.com/devinli123/MV-SAM3D.
★ VisDoT : Enhancing Visual Reasoning through Human-Like Interpretation Grounding and Decomposition of Thought EACL 2026
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) struggle to reliably detect visual primitives in charts and align them with semantic representations, which severely limits their performance on complex visual reasoning. This lack of perceptual grounding constitutes a major bottleneck for chart-based reasoning. We propose VisDoT, a framework that enhances visual reasoning through human-like interpretation grounding. We formalize four perceptual tasks based on the theory of graphical perception, including position and length. Building on this foundation, we introduce Decomposition-of-Thought (DoT) prompting, which sequentially separates questions into visual perception sub-questions and logic sub-questions. Fine-tuning InternVL with VisDoT achieves a +11.2% improvement on ChartQA and surpasses GPT-4o on the more challenging ChartQAPro benchmark. On the newly introduced VisDoTQA benchmark, the model improves by +33.2%. Furthermore, consistent zero-shot gains on diverse open-domain VQA benchmarks confirm the generalizability of the perception-logic separation strategy for visual question answering. VisDoT leverages human-like perception to enhance visual grounding, achieving state-of-the-art chart understanding and interpretable visual reasoning.
comment: 30 pages, 21 figures, EACL 2026 Findings
★ Developing Foundation Models for Universal Segmentation from 3D Whole-Body Positron Emission Tomography
Yichi Zhang, Le Xue, Wenbo Zhang, Lanlan Li, Feiyang Xiao, Yuchen Liu, Xiaohui Zhang, Hongwei Zhang, Shuqi Wang, Gang Feng, Liling Peng, Xin Gao, Yuanfan Xu, Yuan Qi, Kuangyu Shi, Hong Zhang, Yuan Cheng, Mei Tian, Zixin Hu
Positron emission tomography (PET) is a key nuclear medicine imaging modality that visualizes radiotracer distributions to quantify in vivo physiological and metabolic processes, playing an irreplaceable role in disease management. Despite its clinical importance, the development of deep learning models for quantitative PET image analysis remains severely limited, driven by both the inherent segmentation challenge from PET's paucity of anatomical contrast and the high costs of data acquisition and annotation. To bridge this gap, we develop generalist foundational models for universal segmentation from 3D whole-body PET imaging. We first build the largest and most comprehensive PET dataset to date, comprising 11041 3D whole-body PET scans with 59831 segmentation masks for model development. Based on this dataset, we present SegAnyPET, an innovative foundational model with general-purpose applicability to diverse segmentation tasks. Built on a 3D architecture with a prompt engineering strategy for mask generation, SegAnyPET enables universal and scalable organ and lesion segmentation, supports efficient human correction with minimal effort, and enables a clinical human-in-the-loop workflow. Extensive evaluations on multi-center, multi-tracer, multi-disease datasets demonstrate that SegAnyPET achieves strong zero-shot performance across a wide range of segmentation tasks, highlighting its potential to advance the clinical applications of molecular imaging.
★ MedPruner: Training-Free Hierarchical Token Pruning for Efficient 3D Medical Image Understanding in Vision-Language Models
Shengyuan Liu, Zanting Ye, Yunrui Lin, Chen Hu, Wanting Geng, Xu Han, Bulat Ibragimov, Yefeng Zheng, Yixuan Yuan
While specialized Medical Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in interpreting 2D and 3D medical modalities, their deployment for 3D volumetric data remains constrained by significant computational inefficiencies. Current architectures typically suffer from massive anatomical redundancy due to the direct concatenation of consecutive 2D slices and lack the flexibility to handle heterogeneous information densities across different slices using fixed pruning ratios. To address these challenges, we propose MedPruner, a training-free and model-agnostic hierarchical token pruning framework specifically designed for efficient 3D medical image understanding. MedPruner introduces a two-stage mechanism: an Inter-slice Anchor-based Filtering module to eliminate slice-level temporal redundancy, followed by a Dynamic Information Nucleus Selection strategy that achieves adaptive token-level compression by quantifying cumulative attention weights. Extensive experiments on three 3D medical benchmarks and across three diverse medical VLMs reveal massive token redundancy in existing architectures. Notably, MedPruner enables models such as MedGemma to maintain or even exceed their original performance while retaining fewer than 5% of visual tokens, thereby drastically reducing computational overhead and validating the necessity of dynamic token selection for practical clinical deployment. Our code will be released.
comment: 10 pages
★ Shape-of-You: Fused Gromov-Wasserstein Optimal Transport for Semantic Correspondence in-the-Wild CVPR 2026
Semantic correspondence is essential for handling diverse in-the-wild images lacking explicit correspondence annotations. While recent 2D foundation models offer powerful features, adapting them for unsupervised learning via nearest-neighbor pseudo-labels has key limitations: it operates locally, ignoring structural relationships, and consequently its reliance on 2D appearance fails to resolve geometric ambiguities arising from symmetries or repetitive features. In this work, we address this by reformulating pseudo-label generation as a Fused Gromov-Wasserstein (FGW) problem, which jointly optimizes inter-feature similarity and intra-structural consistency. Our framework, Shape-of-You (SoY), leverages a 3D foundation model to define this intra-structure in the geometric space, resolving abovementioned ambiguity. However, since FGW is a computationally prohibitive quadratic problem, we approximate it through anchor-based linearization. The resulting probabilistic transport plan provides a structurally consistent but noisy supervisory signal. Thus, we introduce a soft-target loss dynamically blending guidance from this plan with network predictions to build a learning framework robust to this noise. SoY achieves state-of-the-art performance on SPair-71k and AP-10k datasets, establishing a new benchmark in semantic correspondence without explicit geometric annotations. Code is available at Shape-of-You.
comment: Accepted at CVPR 2026. Supplementary material included after references. 18 pages, 11 figures, 10 tables
★ Noise-aware few-shot learning through bi-directional multi-view prompt alignment
Vision-language models offer strong few-shot capability through prompt tuning but remain vulnerable to noisy labels, which can corrupt prompts and degrade cross-modal alignment. Existing approaches struggle because they often lack the ability to model fine-grained semantic cues and to adaptively separate clean from noisy signals. To address these challenges, we propose NA-MVP, a framework for Noise-Aware few-shot learning through bi-directional Multi-View Prompt alignment. NA-MVP is built upon a key conceptual shift: robust prompt learning requires moving from global matching to region-aware alignment that explicitly distinguishes clean cues from noisy ones. To realize this, NA-MVP employs (1) multi-view prompts combined with unbalanced optimal transport to achieve fine-grained patch-to-prompt correspondence while suppressing unreliable regions; (2) a bi-directional prompt design that captures complementary clean-oriented and noise-aware cues, enabling the model to focus on stable semantics; and (3) an alignment-guided selective refinement strategy that uses optimal transport to correct only mislabeled samples while retaining reliable data. Experiments on synthetic and real-world noisy benchmarks demonstrate that NA-MVP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, confirming its effectiveness in enabling robust few-shot learning under noisy supervision.
★ SemiTooth: a Generalizable Semi-supervised Framework for Multi-Source Tooth Segmentation ICASSP 2026
With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, intelligent dentistry for clinical diagnosis and treatment has become increasingly promising. As the primary clinical dentistry task, tooth structure segmentation for Cone-Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) has made significant progress in recent years. However, challenges arise from the obtainment difficulty of full-annotated data, and the acquisition variability of multi-source data across different institutions, which have caused low-quality utilization, voxel-level inconsistency, and domain-specific disparity in CBCT slices. Thus, the rational and efficient utilization of multi-source and unlabeled data represents a pivotal problem. In this paper, we propose SemiTooth, a generalizable semi-supervised framework for multi-source tooth segmentation. Specifically, we first compile MS3Toothset, Multi-Source Semi-Supervised Tooth DataSet for clinical dental CBCT, which contains data from three sources with different-level annotations. Then, we design a multi-teacher and multi-student framework, i.e., SemiTooth, which promotes semi-supervised learning for multi-source data. SemiTooth employs distinct student networks that learn from unlabeled data with different sources, supervised by its respective teachers. Furthermore, a Stricter Weighted-Confidence Constraint is introduced for multiple teachers to improve the multi-source accuracy.Extensive experiments are conducted on MS3Toothset to verify the feasibility and superiority of the SemiTooth framework, which achieves SOTA performance on the semi-supervised and multi-source tooth segmentation scenario.
comment: 5 pages, 5 figures. Accepted to IEEE ICASSP 2026
★ DyWeight: Dynamic Gradient Weighting for Few-Step Diffusion Sampling
Diffusion Models (DMs) have achieved state-of-the-art generative performance across multiple modalities, yet their sampling process remains prohibitively slow due to the need for hundreds of function evaluations. Recent progress in multi-step ODE solvers has greatly improved efficiency by reusing historical gradients, but existing methods rely on handcrafted coefficients that fail to adapt to the non-stationary dynamics of diffusion sampling. To address this limitation, we propose Dynamic Gradient Weighting (DyWeight), a lightweight, learning-based multi-step solver that introduces a streamlined implicit coupling paradigm. By relaxing classical numerical constraints, DyWeight learns unconstrained time-varying parameters that adaptively aggregate historical gradients while intrinsically scaling the effective step size. This implicit time calibration accurately aligns the solver's numerical trajectory with the model's internal denoising dynamics under large integration steps, avoiding complex decoupled parameterizations and optimizations. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, FFHQ, AFHQv2, ImageNet64, LSUN-Bedroom, Stable Diffusion and FLUX.1-dev demonstrate that DyWeight achieves superior visual fidelity and stability with significantly fewer function evaluations, establishing a new state-of-the-art among efficient diffusion solvers. Code is available at https://github.com/Westlake-AGI-Lab/DyWeight
comment: Code Link: see https://github.com/Westlake-AGI-Lab/DyWeight
★ Articulat3D: Reconstructing Articulated Digital Twins From Monocular Videos with Geometric and Motion Constraints
Building high-fidelity digital twins of articulated objects from visual data remains a central challenge. Existing approaches depend on multi-view captures of the object in discrete, static states, which severely constrains their real-world scalability. In this paper, we introduce Articulat3D, a novel framework that constructs such digital twins from casually captured monocular videos by jointly enforcing explicit 3D geometric and motion constraints. We first propose Motion Prior-Driven Initialization, which leverages 3D point tracks to exploit the low-dimensional structure of articulated motion. By modeling scene dynamics with a compact set of motion bases, we facilitate soft decomposition of the scene into multiple rigidly-moving groups. Building on this initialization, we introduce Geometric and Motion Constraints Refinement, which enforces physically plausible articulation through learnable kinematic primitives parameterized by a joint axis, a pivot point, and per-frame motion scalars, yielding reconstructions that are both geometrically accurate and temporally coherent. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Articulat3D achieves state-of-the-art performance on synthetic benchmarks and real-world casually captured monocular videos, significantly advancing the feasibility of digital twin creation under uncontrolled real-world conditions. Our project page is at https://maxwell-zhao.github.io/Articulat3D.
comment: 26 pages, 12 figures
★ LaMoGen: Language to Motion Generation Through LLM-Guided Symbolic Inference CVPR 2026
Human motion is highly expressive and naturally aligned with language, yet prevailing methods relying heavily on joint text-motion embeddings struggle to synthesize temporally accurate, detailed motions and often lack explainability. To address these limitations, we introduce LabanLite, a motion representation developed by adapting and extending the Labanotation system. Unlike black-box text-motion embeddings, LabanLite encodes each atomic body-part action (e.g., a single left-foot step) as a discrete Laban symbol paired with a textual template. This abstraction decomposes complex motions into interpretable symbol sequences and body-part instructions, establishing a symbolic link between high-level language and low-level motion trajectories. Building on LabanLite, we present LaMoGen, a Text-to-LabanLite-to-Motion Generation framework that enables large language models (LLMs) to compose motion sequences through symbolic reasoning. The LLM interprets motion patterns, relates them to textual descriptions, and recombines symbols into executable plans, producing motions that are both interpretable and linguistically grounded. To support rigorous evaluation, we introduce a Labanotation-based benchmark with structured description-motion pairs and three metrics that jointly measure text-motion alignment across symbolic, temporal, and harmony dimensions. Experiments demonstrate that LaMoGen establishes a new baseline for both interpretability and controllability, outperforming prior methods on our benchmark and two public datasets. These results highlight the advantages of symbolic reasoning and agent-based design for language-driven motion synthesis.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026. Supplementary material included. Project page: https://jjkislele.github.io/LaMoGen/
★ WeEdit: A Dataset, Benchmark and Glyph-Guided Framework for Text-centric Image Editing
Instruction-based image editing aims to modify specific content within existing images according to user-provided instructions while preserving non-target regions. Beyond traditional object- and style-centric manipulation, text-centric image editing focuses on modifying, translating, or rearranging textual elements embedded within images. However, existing leading models often struggle to execute complex text editing precisely, frequently producing blurry or hallucinated characters. We attribute these failures primarily to the lack of specialized training paradigms tailored for text-centric editing, as well as the absence of large-scale datasets and standardized benchmarks necessary for a closed-loop training and evaluation system. To address these limitations, we present WeEdit, a systematic solution encompassing a scalable data construction pipeline, two benchmarks, and a tailored two-stage training strategy. Specifically, we propose a novel HTML-based automatic editing pipeline, which generates 330K training pairs covering diverse editing operations and 15 languages, accompanied by standardized bilingual and multilingual benchmarks for comprehensive evaluation. On the algorithmic side, we employ glyph-guided supervised fine-tuning to inject explicit spatial and content priors, followed by a multi-objective reinforcement learning stage to align generation with instruction adherence, text clarity, and background preservation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that WeEdit outperforms previous open-source models by a clear margin across diverse editing operations.
★ R4Det: 4D Radar-Camera Fusion for High-Performance 3D Object Detection CVPR 2026
4D radar-camera sensing configuration has gained increasing importance in autonomous driving. However, existing 3D object detection methods that fuse 4D Radar and camera data confront several challenges. First, their absolute depth estimation module is not robust and accurate enough, leading to inaccurate 3D localization. Second, the performance of their temporal fusion module will degrade dramatically or even fail when the ego vehicle's pose is missing or inaccurate. Third, for some small objects, the sparse radar point clouds may completely fail to reflect from their surfaces. In such cases, detection must rely solely on visual unimodal priors. To address these limitations, we propose R4Det, which enhances depth estimation quality via the Panoramic Depth Fusion module, enabling mutual reinforcement between absolute and relative depth. For temporal fusion, we design a Deformable Gated Temporal Fusion module that does not rely on the ego vehicle's pose. In addition, we built an Instance-Guided Dynamic Refinement module that extracts semantic prototypes from 2D instance guidance. Experiments show that R4Det achieves state-of-the-art 3D object detection results on the TJ4DRadSet and VoD datasets.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026
★ SVLL: Staged Vision-Language Learning for Physically Grounded Embodied Task Planning
Yuyuan Yang, Junkun Hong, Hongrong Wang, Honghao Cai, Xunpeng Ren, Ge Wang, Mingcong Lei, Shenhao Yan, Jiahao Yang, Chengsi Yao, Xi Li, Yiming Zhao, Yatong Han, Jinke Ren
Embodied task planning demands vision-language models to generate action sequences that are both visually grounded and causally coherent over time. However, existing training paradigms face a critical trade-off: joint end-to-end training often leads to premature temporal binding, while standard reinforcement learning methods suffer from optimization instability. To bridge this gap, we present Staged Vision-Language Learning (SVLL), a unified three-stage framework for robust, physically-grounded embodied planning. In the first two stages, SVLL decouples spatial grounding from temporal reasoning, establishing robust visual dependency before introducing sequential action history. In the final stage, we identify a key limitation of standard Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), its purely relative nature -- optimizing only the preference gap between winning and losing trajectories while neglecting absolute likelihood constraints on optimal path, often yields unsafe or hallucinated behaviors. To address this, we further introduce Bias-DPO, a novel alignment objective that injects an inductive bias toward expert trajectories by explicitly maximizing likelihood on ground-truth actions while penalizing overconfident hallucinations. By anchoring the policy to the expert manifold and mitigating causal misalignment, SVLL, powered by Bias-DPO, ensures strict adherence to environmental affordances and effectively suppresses physically impossible shortcuts. Finally, extensive experiments on the interactive AI2-THOR benchmark and real-world robotic deployments demonstrate that SVLL outperforms both state-of-the-art open-source (e.g., Qwen2.5-VL-7B) and closed-source models (e.g., GPT-4o, Gemini-2.0-flash) in task success rate, while significantly reducing physical constraint violations.
★ TornadoNet: Real-Time Building Damage Detection with Ordinal Supervision
Robinson Umeike, Cuong Pham, Ryan Hausen, Thang Dao, Shane Crawford, Tanya Brown-Giammanco, Gerard Lemson, John van de Lindt, Blythe Johnston, Arik Mitschang, Trung Do
We present TornadoNet, a comprehensive benchmark for automated street-level building damage assessment evaluating how modern real-time object detection architectures and ordinal-aware supervision strategies perform under realistic post-disaster conditions. TornadoNet provides the first controlled benchmark demonstrating how architectural design and loss formulation jointly influence multi-level damage detection from street-view imagery, delivering methodological insights and deployable tools for disaster response. Using 3,333 high-resolution geotagged images and 8,890 annotated building instances from the 2021 Midwest tornado outbreak, we systematically compare CNN-based detectors from the YOLO family against transformer-based models (RT-DETR) for multi-level damage detection. Models are trained under standardized protocols using a five-level damage classification framework based on IN-CORE damage states, validated through expert cross-annotation. Baseline experiments reveal complementary architectural strengths. CNN-based YOLO models achieve highest detection accuracy and throughput, with larger variants reaching 46.05% mAP@0.5 at 66-276 FPS on A100 GPUs. Transformer-based RT-DETR models exhibit stronger ordinal consistency, achieving 88.13% Ordinal Top-1 Accuracy and MAOE of 0.65, indicating more reliable severity grading despite lower baseline mAP. To align supervision with the ordered nature of damage severity, we introduce soft ordinal classification targets and evaluate explicit ordinal-distance penalties. RT-DETR trained with calibrated ordinal supervision achieves 44.70% mAP@0.5, a 4.8 percentage-point improvement, with gains in ordinal metrics (91.15% Ordinal Top-1 Accuracy, MAOE = 0.56). These findings establish that ordinal-aware supervision improves damage severity estimation when aligned with detector architecture. Model & Data: https://github.com/crumeike/TornadoNet
★ Enhancing Image Aesthetics with Dual-Conditioned Diffusion Models Guided by Multimodal Perception
Image aesthetic enhancement aims to perceive aesthetic deficiencies in images and perform corresponding editing operations, which is highly challenging and requires the model to possess creativity and aesthetic perception capabilities. Although recent advancements in image editing models have significantly enhanced their controllability and flexibility, they struggle with enhancing image aesthetic. The primary challenges are twofold: first, following editing instructions with aesthetic perception is difficult, and second, there is a scarcity of "perfectly-paired" images that have consistent content but distinct aesthetic qualities. In this paper, we propose Dual-supervised Image Aesthetic Enhancement (DIAE), a diffusion-based generative model with multimodal aesthetic perception. First, DIAE incorporates Multimodal Aesthetic Perception (MAP) to convert the ambiguous aesthetic instruction into explicit guidance by (i) employing detailed, standardized aesthetic instructions across multiple aesthetic attributes, and (ii) utilizing multimodal control signals derived from text-image pairs that maintain consistency within the same aesthetic attribute. Second, to mitigate the lack of "perfectly-paired" images, we collect "imperfectly-paired" dataset called IIAEData, consisting of images with varying aesthetic qualities while sharing identical semantics. To better leverage the weak matching characteristics of IIAEData during training, a dual-branch supervision framework is also introduced for weakly supervised image aesthetic enhancement. Experimental results demonstrate that DIAE outperforms the baselines and obtains superior image aesthetic scores and image content consistency scores.
★ MANSION: Multi-floor lANguage-to-3D Scene generatIOn for loNg-horizon tasks
Real-world robotic tasks are long-horizon and often span multiple floors, demanding rich spatial reasoning. However, existing embodied benchmarks are largely confined to single-floor in-house environments, failing to reflect the complexity of real-world tasks. We introduce MANSION, the first language-driven framework for generating building-scale, multi-floor 3D environments. Being aware of vertical structural constraints, MANSION generates realistic, navigable whole-building structures with diverse, human-friendly scenes, enabling the development and evaluation of cross-floor long-horizon tasks. Building on this framework, we release MansionWorld, a dataset of over 1,000 diverse buildings ranging from hospitals to offices, alongside a Task-Semantic Scene Editing Agent that customizes these environments using open-vocabulary commands to meet specific user needs. Benchmarking reveals that state-of-the-art agents degrade sharply in our settings, establishing MANSION as a critical testbed for the next generation of spatial reasoning and planning.
★ Shadowless Projection Mapping for Tabletop Workspaces with Synthetic Aperture Projector
Projection mapping (PM) enables augmented reality (AR) experiences without requiring users to wear head-mounted displays and supports multi-user interaction. It is regarded as a promising technology for a variety of applications in which users interact with content superimposed onto augmented objects in tabletop workspaces, including remote collaboration, healthcare, industrial design, urban planning, artwork creation, and office work. However, conventional PM systems often suffer from projection shadows when users occlude the light path. Prior approaches employing multiple distributed projectors can compensate for occlusion, but suffer from latency due to computational processing, degrading the user experience. In this research, we introduce a synthetic-aperture PM system that uses a significantly larger number of projectors, arranged densely in the environment, to achieve delay-free, shadowless projection for tabletop workspaces without requiring computational compensation. To address spatial resolution degradation caused by subpixel misalignment among overlaid projections, we develop and validate an offline blur compensation method whose computation time remains independent of the number of projectors. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our shadowless PM plays a critical role in achieving a fundamental goal of PM: altering material properties without evoking projection-like impression. Specifically, we define this perceptual impression as ``sense of projection (SoP)'' and establish a PM design framework to minimize the SoP based on user studies.
★ PCA-Enhanced Probabilistic U-Net for Effective Ambiguous Medical Image Segmentation
Xiangyu Li, Chenglin Wang, Qiantong Shen, Fanding Li, Wei Wang, Kuanquan Wang, Yi Shen, Baochun Zhao, Gongning Luo
Ambiguous Medical Image Segmentation (AMIS) is significant to address the challenges of inherent uncertainties from image ambiguities, noise, and subjective annotations. Existing conditional variational autoencoder (cVAE)-based methods effectively capture uncertainty but face limitations including redundancy in high-dimensional latent spaces and limited expressiveness of single posterior networks. To overcome these issues, we introduce a novel PCA-Enhanced Probabilistic U-Net (\textbf{PEP U-Net}). Our method effectively incorporates Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction in the posterior network to mitigate redundancy and improve computational efficiency. Additionally, we further employ an inverse PCA operation to reconstruct critical information, enhancing the latent space's representational capacity. Compared to conventional generative models, our method preserves the ability to generate diverse segmentation hypotheses while achieving a superior balance between segmentation accuracy and predictive variability, thereby advancing the performance of generative modeling in medical image segmentation.
★ Mango-GS: Enhancing Spatio-Temporal Consistency in Dynamic Scenes Reconstruction using Multi-Frame Node-Guided 4D Gaussian Splatting
Reconstructing dynamic 3D scenes with photorealistic detail and strong temporal coherence remains a significant challenge. Existing Gaussian splatting approaches for dynamic scene modeling often rely on per-frame optimization, which can overfit to instantaneous states instead of capturing underlying motion dynamics. To address this, we present Mango-GS, a multi-frame, node-guided framework for high-fidelity 4D reconstruction. Mango-GS leverages a temporal Transformer to model motion dependencies within a short window of frames, producing temporally consistent deformations. For efficiency, temporal modeling is confined to a sparse set of control nodes. Each node is represented by a decoupled canonical position and a latent code, providing a stable semantic anchor for motion propagation and preventing correspondence drift under large motion. Our framework is trained end-to-end, enhanced by an input masking strategy and two multi-frame losses to improve robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Mango-GS achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality and real-time rendering speed, enabling high-fidelity reconstruction and interactive rendering of dynamic scenes.
★ ReHARK: Refined Hybrid Adaptive RBF Kernels for Robust One-Shot Vision-Language Adaptation
The adaptation of large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP to downstream tasks with extremely limited data -- specifically in the one-shot regime -- is often hindered by a significant "Stability-Plasticity" dilemma. While efficient caching mechanisms have been introduced by training-free methods such as Tip-Adapter, these approaches often function as local Nadaraya-Watson estimators. Such estimators are characterized by inherent boundary bias and a lack of global structural regularization. In this paper, ReHARK (Refined Hybrid Adaptive RBF Kernels) is proposed as a synergistic training-free framework that reinterprets few-shot adaptation through global proximal regularization in a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). A multistage refinement pipeline is introduced, consisting of: (1) Hybrid Prior Construction, where zero-shot textual knowledge from CLIP and GPT-3 is fused with visual class prototypes to form a robust semantic-visual anchor; (2) Support Set Augmentation (Bridging), where intermediate samples are generated to smooth the transition between visual and textual modalities; (3) Adaptive Distribution Rectification, where test feature statistics are aligned with the augmented support set to mitigate domain shifts; and (4) Multi-Scale RBF Kernels, where an ensemble of kernels is employed to capture complex feature geometries across diverse scales. Superior stability and accuracy are demonstrated through extensive experiments on 11 diverse benchmarks. A new state-of-the-art for one-shot adaptation is established by ReHARK, which achieves an average accuracy of 65.83%, significantly outperforming existing baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/Jahid12012021/ReHARK.
★ Risk-Controllable Multi-View Diffusion for Driving Scenario Generation
Generating safety-critical driving scenarios is crucial for evaluating and improving autonomous driving systems, but long-tail risky situations are rarely observed in real-world data and difficult to specify through manual scenario design. Existing generative approaches typically treat risk as an after-the-fact label and struggle to maintain geometric consistency in multi-view driving scenes. We present RiskMV-DPO, a general and systematic pipeline for physically-informed, risk-controllable multi-view scenario generation. By integrating target risk levels with physically-grounded risk modeling, we autonomously synthesize diverse and high-stakes dynamic trajectories that serve as explicit geometric anchors for a diffusion-based video generator. To ensure spatial-temporal coherence and geometric fidelity, we introduce a geometry-appearance alignment module and a region-aware direct preference optimization (RA-DPO) strategy with motion-aware masking to focus learning on localized dynamic regions.Experiments on the nuScenes dataset show that RiskMV-DPO can freely generate a wide spectrum of diverse long-tail scenarios while maintaining state-of-the-art visual quality, improving 3D detection mAP from 18.17 to 30.50 and reducing FID to 15.70. Our work shifts the role of world models from passive environment prediction to proactive, risk-controllable synthesis, providing a scalable toolchain for the safety-oriented development of embodied intelligence.
★ Mobile-GS: Real-time Gaussian Splatting for Mobile Devices
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful representation for high-quality rendering across a wide range of applications.However, its high computational demands and large storage costs pose significant challenges for deployment on mobile devices. In this work, we propose a mobile-tailored real-time Gaussian Splatting method, dubbed Mobile-GS, enabling efficient inference of Gaussian Splatting on edge devices. Specifically, we first identify alpha blending as the primary computational bottleneck, since it relies on the time-consuming Gaussian depth sorting process. To solve this issue, we propose a depth-aware order-independent rendering scheme that eliminates the need for sorting, thereby substantially accelerating rendering. Although this order-independent rendering improves rendering speed, it may introduce transparency artifacts in regions with overlapping geometry due to the scarcity of rendering order. To address this problem, we propose a neural view-dependent enhancement strategy, enabling more accurate modeling of view-dependent effects conditioned on viewing direction, 3D Gaussian geometry, and appearance attributes. In this way, Mobile-GS can achieve both high-quality and real-time rendering. Furthermore, to facilitate deployment on memory-constrained mobile platforms, we also introduce first-order spherical harmonics distillation, a neural vector quantization technique, and a contribution-based pruning strategy to reduce the number of Gaussian primitives and compress the 3D Gaussian representation with the assistance of neural networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed Mobile-GS achieves real-time rendering and compact model size while preserving high visual quality, making it well-suited for mobile applications.
comment: Project Page: https://xiaobiaodu.github.io/mobile-gs-project/
★ MDS-VQA: Model-Informed Data Selection for Video Quality Assessment
Learning-based video quality assessment (VQA) has advanced rapidly, yet progress is increasingly constrained by a disconnect between model design and dataset curation. Model-centric approaches often iterate on fixed benchmarks, while data-centric efforts collect new human labels without systematically targeting the weaknesses of existing VQA models. Here, we describe MDS-VQA, a model-informed data selection mechanism for curating unlabeled videos that are both difficult for the base VQA model and diverse in content. Difficulty is estimated by a failure predictor trained with a ranking objective, and diversity is measured using deep semantic video features, with a greedy procedure balancing the two under a constrained labeling budget. Experiments across multiple VQA datasets and models demonstrate that MDS-VQA identifies diverse, challenging samples that are particularly informative for active fine-tuning. With only a 5% selected subset per target domain, the fine-tuned model improves mean SRCC from 0.651 to 0.722 and achieves the top gMAD rank, indicating strong adaptation and generalization.
★ EReCu: Pseudo-label Evolution Fusion and Refinement with Multi-Cue Learning for Unsupervised Camouflage Detection CVPR 2026
Unsupervised Camouflaged Object Detection (UCOD) remains a challenging task due to the high intrinsic similarity between target objects and their surroundings, as well as the reliance on noisy pseudo-labels that hinder fine-grained texture learning. While existing refinement strategies aim to alleviate label noise, they often overlook intrinsic perceptual cues, leading to boundary overflow and structural ambiguity. In contrast, learning without pseudo-label guidance yields coarse features with significant detail loss. To address these issues, we propose a unified UCOD framework that enhances both the reliability of pseudo-labels and the fidelity of features. Our approach introduces the Multi-Cue Native Perception module, which extracts intrinsic visual priors by integrating low-level texture cues with mid-level semantics, enabling precise alignment between masks and native object information. Additionally, Pseudo-Label Evolution Fusion intelligently refines labels through teacher-student interaction and utilizes depthwise separable convolution for efficient semantic denoising. It also incorporates Spectral Tensor Attention Fusion to effectively balance semantic and structural information through compact spectral aggregation across multi-layer attention maps. Finally, Local Pseudo-Label Refinement plays a pivotal role in local detail optimization by leveraging attention diversity to restore fine textures and enhance boundary fidelity. Extensive experiments on multiple UCOD datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, characterized by superior detail perception, robust boundary alignment, and strong generalization under complex camouflage scenarios.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026
★ FBCIR: Balancing Cross-Modal Focuses in Composed Image Retrieval
Chenchen Zhao, Jianhuan Zhuo, Muxi Chen, Zhaohua Zhang, Wenyu Jiang, Tianwen Jiang, Qiuyong Xiao, Jihong Zhang, Qiang Xu
Composed image retrieval (CIR) requires multi-modal models to jointly reason over visual content and semantic modifications presented in text-image input pairs. While current CIR models achieve strong performance on common benchmark cases, their accuracies often degrades in more challenging scenarios where negative candidates are semantically aligned with the query image or text. In this paper, we attribute this degradation to focus imbalances, where models disproportionately attend to one modality while neglecting the other. To validate this claim, we propose FBCIR, a multi-modal focus interpretation method that identifies the most crucial visual and textual input components to a model's retrieval decisions. Using FBCIR, we report that focus imbalances are prevalent in existing CIR models, especially under hard negative settings. Building on the analyses, we further propose a CIR data augmentation workflow that facilitates existing CIR datasets with curated hard negatives designed to encourage balanced cross-modal reasoning. Extensive experiments across multiple CIR models demonstrate that the proposed augmentation consistently improves performance in challenging cases, while maintaining their capabilities on standard benchmarks. Together, our interpretation method and data augmentation workflow provide a new perspective on CIR model diagnosis and robustness improvements.
comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, 15 tables
★ Prediction of Grade, Gender, and Academic Performance of Children and Teenagers from Handwriting Using the Sigma-Lognormal Model
Adrian Iste, Kazuki Nishizawa, Chisa Tanaka, Andrew Vargo, Anna Scius-Bertrand, Andreas Fischer, Koichi Kise
Digital handwriting acquisition enables the capture of detailed temporal and kinematic signals reflecting the motor processes underlying writing behavior. While handwriting analysis has been extensively explored in clinical or adult populations, its potential for studying developmental and educational characteristics in children remains less investigated. In this work, we examine whether handwriting dynamics encode information related to student characteristics using a large-scale online dataset collected from Japanese students from elementary school to junior high school. We systematically compare three families of handwriting-derived features: basic statistical descriptors of kinematic signals, entropy-based measures of variability, and parameters obtained from the sigma-lognormal model. Although the dataset contains dense stroke-level recordings, features are aggregated at the student level to enable a controlled comparison between representations. These features are evaluated across three prediction tasks: grade prediction, gender classification, and academic performance classification, using Linear or Logistic Regression and Random Forest models under consistent experimental settings. The results show that handwriting dynamics contain measurable signals related to developmental stage and individual differences, especially for the grade prediction task. These findings highlight the potential of kinematic handwriting analysis and confirm that through their development, children's handwriting evolves toward a lognormal motor organization.
comment: 18 pages, 8 figures
★ From Pen Strokes to Sleep States: Detecting Low-Recovery Days Using Sigma-Lognormal Handwriting Features
While handwriting has traditionally been studied for character recognition and disease classification, its potential to reflect day-to-day physiological fluctuations in healthy individuals remains unexplored. This study examines whether daily variations in sleep-related recovery states can be inferred from online handwriting dynamics. %
We propose a personalized binary classification framework that detects low-recovery days using features derived from the Sigma-Lognormal model, which captures the neuromotor generation process of pen strokes. In a 28-day in-the-wild study involving 13 university students, handwriting was recorded three times daily, and nocturnal cardiac indicators were measured using a wearable ring. For each participant, the lowest (or highest) quartile of four sleep-related metrics -- HRV, lowest heart rate, average heart rate, and total sleep duration -- defined the positive class. Leave-One-Day-Out cross-validation showed that PR-AUC significantly exceeded the baseline (0.25) for all four variables after FDR correction, with the strongest performance observed for cardiac-related variables. Importantly, classification performance did not differ significantly across task types or recording timings, indicating that recovery-related signals are embedded in general movement dynamics. These results demonstrate that subtle within-person autonomic recovery fluctuations can be detected from everyday handwriting, opening a new direction for non-invasive, device-independent health monitoring.
comment: 16 pages, 7 figures
★ Manifold-Optimal Guidance: A Unified Riemannian Control View of Diffusion Guidance
Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) serves as the de facto control mechanism for conditional diffusion, yet high guidance scales notoriously induce oversaturation, texture artifacts, and structural collapse. We attribute this failure to a geometric mismatch: standard CFG performs Euclidean extrapolation in ambient space, inadvertently driving sampling trajectories off the high-density data manifold. To resolve this, we present Manifold-Optimal Guidance (MOG), a framework that reformulates guidance as a local optimal control problem. MOG yields a closed-form, geometry-aware Riemannian update that corrects off-manifold drift without requiring retraining. Leveraging this perspective, we further introduce Auto-MOG, a dynamic energy-balancing schedule that adaptively calibrates guidance strength, effectively eliminating the need for manual hyperparameter tuning. Extensive validation demonstrates that MOG yields superior fidelity and alignment compared to baselines, with virtually no added computational overhead.
★ EVATok: Adaptive Length Video Tokenization for Efficient Visual Autoregressive Generation CVPR 2026
Autoregressive (AR) video generative models rely on video tokenizers that compress pixels into discrete token sequences. The length of these token sequences is crucial for balancing reconstruction quality against downstream generation computational cost. Traditional video tokenizers apply a uniform token assignment across temporal blocks of different videos, often wasting tokens on simple, static, or repetitive segments while underserving dynamic or complex ones. To address this inefficiency, we introduce $\textbf{EVATok}$, a framework to produce $\textbf{E}$fficient $\textbf{V}$ideo $\textbf{A}$daptive $\textbf{Tok}$enizers. Our framework estimates optimal token assignments for each video to achieve the best quality-cost trade-off, develops lightweight routers for fast prediction of these optimal assignments, and trains adaptive tokenizers that encode videos based on the assignments predicted by routers. We demonstrate that EVATok delivers substantial improvements in efficiency and overall quality for video reconstruction and downstream AR generation. Enhanced by our advanced training recipe that integrates video semantic encoders, EVATok achieves superior reconstruction and state-of-the-art class-to-video generation on UCF-101, with at least 24.4% savings in average token usage compared to the prior state-of-the-art LARP and our fixed-length baseline.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026. Project page: https://silentview.github.io/EVATok/
★ MM-CondChain: A Programmatically Verified Benchmark for Visually Grounded Deep Compositional Reasoning
Haozhan Shen, Shilin Yan, Hongwei Xue, Shuaiqi Lu, Xiaojun Tang, Guannan Zhang, Tiancheng Zhao, Jianwei Yin
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly used to carry out visual workflows such as navigating GUIs, where the next step depends on verified visual compositional conditions (e.g., "if a permission dialog appears and the color of the interface is green, click Allow") and the process may branch or terminate early. Yet this capability remains under-evaluated: existing benchmarks focus on shallow-compositions or independent-constraints rather than deeply chained compositional conditionals. In this paper, we introduce MM-CondChain, a benchmark for visually grounded deep compositional reasoning. Each benchmark instance is organized as a multi-layer reasoning chain, where every layer contains a non-trivial compositional condition grounded in visual evidence and built from multiple objects, attributes, or relations. To answer correctly, an MLLM must perceive the image in detail, reason over multiple visual elements at each step, and follow the resulting execution path to the final outcome. To scalably construct such workflow-style data, we propose an agentic synthesis pipeline: a Planner orchestrates layer-by-layer generation of compositional conditions, while a Verifiable Programmatic Intermediate Representation (VPIR) ensures each layer's condition is mechanically verifiable. A Composer then assembles these verified layers into complete instructions. Using this pipeline, we construct benchmarks across three visual domains: natural images, data charts, and GUI trajectories. Experiments on a range of MLLMs show that even the strongest model attains only 53.33 Path F1, with sharp drops on hard negatives and as depth or predicate complexity grows, confirming that deep compositional reasoning remains a fundamental challenge.
comment: Project Page: https://accio-lab.github.io/MM-CondChain
★ OmniStream: Mastering Perception, Reconstruction and Action in Continuous Streams
Modern visual agents require representations that are general, causal, and physically structured to operate in real-time streaming environments. However, current vision foundation models remain fragmented, specializing narrowly in image semantic perception, offline temporal modeling, or spatial geometry. This paper introduces OmniStream, a unified streaming visual backbone that effectively perceives, reconstructs, and acts from diverse visual inputs. By incorporating causal spatiotemporal attention and 3D rotary positional embeddings (3D-RoPE), our model supports efficient, frame-by-frame online processing of video streams via a persistent KV-cache. We pre-train OmniStream using a synergistic multi-task framework coupling static and temporal representation learning, streaming geometric reconstruction, and vision-language alignment on 29 datasets. Extensive evaluations show that, even with a strictly frozen backbone, OmniStream achieves consistently competitive performance with specialized experts across image and video probing, streaming geometric reconstruction, complex video and spatial reasoning, as well as robotic manipulation (unseen at training). Rather than pursuing benchmark-specific dominance, our work demonstrates the viability of training a single, versatile vision backbone that generalizes across semantic, spatial, and temporal reasoning, i.e., a more meaningful step toward general-purpose visual understanding for interactive and embodied agents.
comment: Technical Report. Project Page: https://go2heart.github.io/omnistream/
★ GRADE: Benchmarking Discipline-Informed Reasoning in Image Editing
Mingxin Liu, Ziqian Fan, Zhaokai Wang, Leyao Gu, Zirun Zhu, Yiguo He, Yuchen Yang, Changyao Tian, Xiangyu Zhao, Ning Liao, Shaofeng Zhang, Qibing Ren, Zhihang Zhong, Xuanhe Zhou, Junchi Yan, Xue Yang
Unified multimodal models target joint understanding, reasoning, and generation, but current image editing benchmarks are largely confined to natural images and shallow commonsense reasoning, offering limited assessment of this capability under structured, domain-specific constraints. In this work, we introduce GRADE, the first benchmark to assess discipline-informed knowledge and reasoning in image editing. GRADE comprises 520 carefully curated samples across 10 academic domains, spanning from natural science to social science. To support rigorous evaluation, we propose a multi-dimensional evaluation protocol that jointly assesses Discipline Reasoning, Visual Consistency, and Logical Readability. Extensive experiments on 20 state-of-the-art open-source and closed-source models reveal substantial limitations in current models under implicit, knowledge-intensive editing settings, leading to large performance gaps. Beyond quantitative scores, we conduct rigorous analyses and ablations to expose model shortcomings and identify the constraints within disciplinary editing. Together, GRADE pinpoints key directions for the future development of unified multimodal models, advancing the research on discipline-informed image editing and reasoning. Our benchmark and evaluation code are publicly released.
comment: 49 pages, 23 figures, 10 tables; Project Page: https://grade-bench.github.io/, Code: https://github.com/VisionXLab/GRADE, Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/VisionXLab/GRADE
★ Video Streaming Thinking: VideoLLMs Can Watch and Think Simultaneously
Online Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) play a critical role in supporting responsive, real-time interaction. Existing methods focus on streaming perception, lacking a synchronized logical reasoning stream. However, directly applying test-time scaling methods incurs unacceptable response latency. To address this trade-off, we propose Video Streaming Thinking (VST), a novel paradigm for streaming video understanding. It supports a thinking while watching mechanism, which activates reasoning over incoming video clips during streaming. This design improves timely comprehension and coherent cognition while preserving real-time responsiveness by amortizing LLM reasoning latency over video playback. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive post-training pipeline that integrates VST-SFT, which structurally adapts the offline VideoLLM to causal streaming reasoning, and VST-RL, which provides end-to-end improvement through self-exploration in a multi-turn video interaction environment. Additionally, we devise an automated training-data synthesis pipeline that uses video knowledge graphs to generate high-quality streaming QA pairs, with an entity-relation grounded streaming Chain-of-Thought to enforce multi-evidence reasoning and sustained attention to the video stream. Extensive evaluations show that VST-7B performs strongly on online benchmarks, e.g. 79.5% on StreamingBench and 59.3% on OVO-Bench. Meanwhile, VST remains competitive on offline long-form or reasoning benchmarks. Compared with Video-R1, VST responds 15.7 times faster and achieves +5.4% improvement on VideoHolmes, demonstrating higher efficiency and strong generalization across diverse video understanding tasks. Code, data, and models will be released at https://github.com/1ranGuan/VST.
★ The Latent Color Subspace: Emergent Order in High-Dimensional Chaos
Text-to-image generation models have advanced rapidly, yet achieving fine-grained control over generated images remains difficult, largely due to limited understanding of how semantic information is encoded. We develop an interpretation of the color representation in the Variational Autoencoder latent space of FLUX.1 [Dev], revealing a structure reflecting Hue, Saturation, and Lightness. We verify our Latent Color Subspace (LCS) interpretation by demonstrating that it can both predict and explicitly control color, introducing a fully training-free method in FLUX based solely on closed-form latent-space manipulation. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/LCS.
comment: Preprint
★ DreamVideo-Omni: Omni-Motion Controlled Multi-Subject Video Customization with Latent Identity Reinforcement Learning
Yujie Wei, Xinyu Liu, Shiwei Zhang, Hangjie Yuan, Jinbo Xing, Zhekai Chen, Xiang Wang, Haonan Qiu, Rui Zhao, Yutong Feng, Ruihang Chu, Yingya Zhang, Yike Guo, Xihui Liu, Hongming Shan
While large-scale diffusion models have revolutionized video synthesis, achieving precise control over both multi-subject identity and multi-granularity motion remains a significant challenge. Recent attempts to bridge this gap often suffer from limited motion granularity, control ambiguity, and identity degradation, leading to suboptimal performance on identity preservation and motion control. In this work, we present DreamVideo-Omni, a unified framework enabling harmonious multi-subject customization with omni-motion control via a progressive two-stage training paradigm. In the first stage, we integrate comprehensive control signals for joint training, encompassing subject appearances, global motion, local dynamics, and camera movements. To ensure robust and precise controllability, we introduce a condition-aware 3D rotary positional embedding to coordinate heterogeneous inputs and a hierarchical motion injection strategy to enhance global motion guidance. Furthermore, to resolve multi-subject ambiguity, we introduce group and role embeddings to explicitly anchor motion signals to specific identities, effectively disentangling complex scenes into independent controllable instances. In the second stage, to mitigate identity degradation, we design a latent identity reward feedback learning paradigm by training a latent identity reward model upon a pretrained video diffusion backbone. This provides motion-aware identity rewards in the latent space, prioritizing identity preservation aligned with human preferences. Supported by our curated large-scale dataset and the comprehensive DreamOmni Bench for multi-subject and omni-motion control evaluation, DreamVideo-Omni demonstrates superior performance in generating high-quality videos with precise controllability.
comment: Project Page: https://dreamvideo-omni.github.io
★ Spatial-TTT: Streaming Visual-based Spatial Intelligence with Test-Time Training
Fangfu Liu, Diankun Wu, Jiawei Chi, Yimo Cai, Yi-Hsin Hung, Xumin Yu, Hao Li, Han Hu, Yongming Rao, Yueqi Duan
Humans perceive and understand real-world spaces through a stream of visual observations. Therefore, the ability to streamingly maintain and update spatial evidence from potentially unbounded video streams is essential for spatial intelligence. The core challenge is not simply longer context windows but how spatial information is selected, organized, and retained over time. In this paper, we propose Spatial-TTT towards streaming visual-based spatial intelligence with test-time training (TTT), which adapts a subset of parameters (fast weights) to capture and organize spatial evidence over long-horizon scene videos. Specifically, we design a hybrid architecture and adopt large-chunk updates parallel with sliding-window attention for efficient spatial video processing. To further promote spatial awareness, we introduce a spatial-predictive mechanism applied to TTT layers with 3D spatiotemporal convolution, which encourages the model to capture geometric correspondence and temporal continuity across frames. Beyond architecture design, we construct a dataset with dense 3D spatial descriptions, which guides the model to update its fast weights to memorize and organize global 3D spatial signals in a structured manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Spatial-TTT improves long-horizon spatial understanding and achieves state-of-the-art performance on video spatial benchmarks. Project page: https://liuff19.github.io/Spatial-TTT.
comment: Project Page: https://liuff19.github.io/Spatial-TTT
★ Attend Before Attention: Efficient and Scalable Video Understanding via Autoregressive Gazing CVPR 2026
Baifeng Shi, Stephanie Fu, Long Lian, Hanrong Ye, David Eigen, Aaron Reite, Boyi Li, Jan Kautz, Song Han, David M. Chan, Pavlo Molchanov, Trevor Darrell, Hongxu Yin
Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced general-purpose video understanding but struggle with long, high-resolution videos -- they process every pixel equally in their vision transformers (ViTs) or LLMs despite significant spatiotemporal redundancy. We introduce AutoGaze, a lightweight module that removes redundant patches before processed by a ViT or an MLLM. Trained with next-token prediction and reinforcement learning, AutoGaze autoregressively selects a minimal set of multi-scale patches that can reconstruct the video within a user-specified error threshold, eliminating redundancy while preserving information. Empirically, AutoGaze reduces visual tokens by 4x-100x and accelerates ViTs and MLLMs by up to 19x, enabling scaling MLLMs to 1K-frame 4K-resolution videos and achieving superior results on video benchmarks (e.g., 67.0% on VideoMME). Furthermore, we introduce HLVid: the first high-resolution, long-form video QA benchmark with 5-minute 4K-resolution videos, where an MLLM scaled with AutoGaze improves over the baseline by 10.1% and outperforms the previous best MLLM by 4.5%. Project page: https://autogaze.github.io/.
comment: CVPR 2026. Project page: https://autogaze.github.io/
★ EndoCoT: Scaling Endogenous Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Diffusion Models
Xuanlang Dai, Yujie Zhou, Long Xing, Jiazi Bu, Xilin Wei, Yuhong Liu, Beichen Zhang, Kai Chen, Yuhang Zang
Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been widely integrated into diffusion frameworks primarily as text encoders to tackle complex tasks such as spatial reasoning. However, this paradigm suffers from two critical limitations: (i) MLLMs text encoder exhibits insufficient reasoning depth. Single-step encoding fails to activate the Chain-of-Thought process, which is essential for MLLMs to provide accurate guidance for complex tasks. (ii) The guidance remains invariant during the decoding process. Invariant guidance during decoding prevents DiT from progressively decomposing complex instructions into actionable denoising steps, even with correct MLLM encodings. To this end, we propose Endogenous Chain-of-Thought (EndoCoT), a novel framework that first activates MLLMs' reasoning potential by iteratively refining latent thought states through an iterative thought guidance module, and then bridges these states to the DiT's denoising process. Second, a terminal thought grounding module is applied to ensure the reasoning trajectory remains grounded in textual supervision by aligning the final state with ground-truth answers. With these two components, the MLLM text encoder delivers meticulously reasoned guidance, enabling the DiT to execute it progressively and ultimately solve complex tasks in a step-by-step manner. Extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks (e.g., Maze, TSP, VSP, and Sudoku) achieve an average accuracy of 92.1%, outperforming the strongest baseline by 8.3 percentage points.
comment: 23 pages, 18 figures
★ DVD: Deterministic Video Depth Estimation with Generative Priors
Hongfei Zhang, Harold Haodong Chen, Chenfei Liao, Jing He, Zixin Zhang, Haodong Li, Yihao Liang, Kanghao Chen, Bin Ren, Xu Zheng, Shuai Yang, Kun Zhou, Yinchuan Li, Nicu Sebe, Ying-Cong Chen
Existing video depth estimation faces a fundamental trade-off: generative models suffer from stochastic geometric hallucinations and scale drift, while discriminative models demand massive labeled datasets to resolve semantic ambiguities. To break this impasse, we present DVD, the first framework to deterministically adapt pre-trained video diffusion models into single-pass depth regressors. Specifically, DVD features three core designs: (i) repurposing the diffusion timestep as a structural anchor to balance global stability with high-frequency details; (ii) latent manifold rectification (LMR) to mitigate regression-induced over-smoothing, enforcing differential constraints to restore sharp boundaries and coherent motion; and (iii) global affine coherence, an inherent property bounding inter-window divergence, which enables seamless long-video inference without requiring complex temporal alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVD achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across benchmarks. Furthermore, DVD successfully unlocks the profound geometric priors implicit in video foundation models using 163x less task-specific data than leading baselines. Notably, we fully release our pipeline, providing the whole training suite for SOTA video depth estimation to benefit the open-source community.
comment: Project: https://dvd-project.github.io/
★ SciMDR: Benchmarking and Advancing Scientific Multimodal Document Reasoning
Constructing scientific multimodal document reasoning datasets for foundation model training involves an inherent trade-off among scale, faithfulness, and realism. To address this challenge, we introduce the synthesize-and-reground framework, a two-stage pipeline comprising: (1) Claim-Centric QA Synthesis, which generates faithful, isolated QA pairs and reasoning on focused segments, and (2) Document-Scale Regrounding, which programmatically re-embeds these pairs into full-document tasks to ensure realistic complexity. Using this framework, we construct SciMDR, a large-scale training dataset for cross-modal comprehension, comprising 300K QA pairs with explicit reasoning chains across 20K scientific papers. We further construct SciMDR-Eval, an expert-annotated benchmark to evaluate multimodal comprehension within full-length scientific workflows. Experiments demonstrate that models fine-tuned on SciMDR achieve significant improvements across multiple scientific QA benchmarks, particularly in those tasks requiring complex document-level reasoning.
★ Trust Your Critic: Robust Reward Modeling and Reinforcement Learning for Faithful Image Editing and Generation
Xiangyu Zhao, Peiyuan Zhang, Junming Lin, Tianhao Liang, Yuchen Duan, Shengyuan Ding, Changyao Tian, Yuhang Zang, Junchi Yan, Xue Yang
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enhancing image editing and text-to-image (T2I) generation. However, current reward models, which act as critics during RL, often suffer from hallucinations and assign noisy scores, inherently misguiding the optimization process. In this paper, we present FIRM (Faithful Image Reward Modeling), a comprehensive framework that develops robust reward models to provide accurate and reliable guidance for faithful image generation and editing. First, we design tailored data curation pipelines to construct high-quality scoring datasets. Specifically, we evaluate editing using both execution and consistency, while generation is primarily assessed via instruction following. Using these pipelines, we collect the FIRM-Edit-370K and FIRM-Gen-293K datasets, and train specialized reward models (FIRM-Edit-8B and FIRM-Gen-8B) that accurately reflect these criteria. Second, we introduce FIRM-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for editing and generation critics. Evaluations demonstrate that our models achieve superior alignment with human judgment compared to existing metrics. Furthermore, to seamlessly integrate these critics into the RL pipeline, we formulate a novel "Base-and-Bonus" reward strategy that balances competing objectives: Consistency-Modulated Execution (CME) for editing and Quality-Modulated Alignment (QMA) for generation. Empowered by this framework, our resulting models FIRM-Qwen-Edit and FIRM-SD3.5 achieve substantial performance breakthroughs. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that FIRM mitigates hallucinations, establishing a new standard for fidelity and instruction adherence over existing general models. All of our datasets, models, and code have been publicly available at https://firm-reward.github.io.
★ One Model, Many Budgets: Elastic Latent Interfaces for Diffusion Transformers
Moayed Haji-Ali, Willi Menapace, Ivan Skorokhodov, Dogyun Park, Anil Kag, Michael Vasilkovsky, Sergey Tulyakov, Vicente Ordonez, Aliaksandr Siarohin
Diffusion transformers (DiTs) achieve high generative quality but lock FLOPs to image resolution, limiting principled latency-quality trade-offs, and allocate computation uniformly across input spatial tokens, wasting resource allocation to unimportant regions. We introduce Elastic Latent Interface Transformer (ELIT), a drop-in, DiT-compatible mechanism that decouples input image size from compute. Our approach inserts a latent interface, a learnable variable-length token sequence on which standard transformer blocks can operate. Lightweight Read and Write cross-attention layers move information between spatial tokens and latents and prioritize important input regions. By training with random dropping of tail latents, ELIT learns to produce importance-ordered representations with earlier latents capturing global structure while later ones contain information to refine details. At inference, the number of latents can be dynamically adjusted to match compute constraints. ELIT is deliberately minimal, adding two cross-attention layers while leaving the rectified flow objective and the DiT stack unchanged. Across datasets and architectures (DiT, U-ViT, HDiT, MM-DiT), ELIT delivers consistent gains. On ImageNet-1K 512px, ELIT delivers an average gain of $35.3\%$ and $39.6\%$ in FID and FDD scores. Project page: https://snap-research.github.io/elit/
comment: Project page: https://snap-research.github.io/elit/
★ BiGain: Unified Token Compression for Joint Generation and Classification CVPR 2026
Acceleration methods for diffusion models (e.g., token merging or downsampling) typically optimize synthesis quality under reduced compute, yet often ignore discriminative capacity. We revisit token compression with a joint objective and present BiGain, a training-free, plug-and-play framework that preserves generation quality while improving classification in accelerated diffusion models. Our key insight is frequency separation: mapping feature-space signals into a frequency-aware representation disentangles fine detail from global semantics, enabling compression that respects both generative fidelity and discriminative utility. BiGain reflects this principle with two frequency-aware operators: (1) Laplacian-gated token merging, which encourages merges among spectrally smooth tokens while discouraging merges of high-contrast tokens, thereby retaining edges and textures; and (2) Interpolate-Extrapolate KV Downsampling, which downsamples keys/values via a controllable interextrapolation between nearest and average pooling while keeping queries intact, thereby conserving attention precision. Across DiT- and U-Net-based backbones and ImageNet-1K, ImageNet-100, Oxford-IIIT Pets, and COCO-2017, our operators consistently improve the speed-accuracy trade-off for diffusion-based classification, while maintaining or enhancing generation quality under comparable acceleration. For instance, on ImageNet-1K, with 70% token merging on Stable Diffusion 2.0, BiGain increases classification accuracy by 7.15% while improving FID by 0.34 (1.85%). Our analyses indicate that balanced spectral retention, preserving high-frequency detail and low/mid-frequency semantics, is a reliable design rule for token compression in diffusion models. To our knowledge, BiGain is the first framework to jointly study and advance both generation and classification under accelerated diffusion, supporting lower-cost deployment.
comment: CVPR 2026. Code: https://github.com/Greenoso/BiGain
★ SceneAssistant: A Visual Feedback Agent for Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Generation
Text-to-3D scene generation from natural language is highly desirable for digital content creation. However, existing methods are largely domain-restricted or reliant on predefined spatial relationships, limiting their capacity for unconstrained, open-vocabulary 3D scene synthesis. In this paper, we introduce SceneAssistant, a visual-feedback-driven agent designed for open-vocabulary 3D scene generation. Our framework leverages modern 3D object generation model along with the spatial reasoning and planning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). To enable open-vocabulary scene composition, we provide the VLMs with a comprehensive set of atomic operations (e.g., Scale, Rotate, FocusOn). At each interaction step, the VLM receives rendered visual feedback and takes actions accordingly, iteratively refining the scene to achieve more coherent spatial arrangements and better alignment with the input text. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can generate diverse, open-vocabulary, and high-quality 3D scenes. Both qualitative analysis and quantitative human evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing methods. Furthermore, our method allows users to instruct the agent to edit existing scenes based on natural language commands. Our code is available at https://github.com/ROUJINN/SceneAssistant
comment: Code: https://github.com/ROUJINN/SceneAssistant
★ HiAP: A Multi-Granular Stochastic Auto-Pruning Framework for Vision Transformers
Vision Transformers require significant computational resources and memory bandwidth, severely limiting their deployment on edge devices. While recent structured pruning methods successfully reduce theoretical FLOPs, they typically operate at a single structural granularity and rely on complex, multi-stage pipelines with post-hoc thresholding to satisfy sparsity budgets. In this paper, we propose Hierarchical Auto-Pruning (HiAP), a continuous relaxation framework that discovers optimal sub-networks in a single end-to-end training phase without requiring manual importance heuristics or predefined per-layer sparsity targets. HiAP introduces stochastic Gumbel-Sigmoid gates at multiple granularities: macro-gates to prune entire attention heads and FFN blocks, and micro-gates to selectively prune intra-head dimensions and FFN neurons. By optimizing both levels simultaneously, HiAP addresses both the memory-bound overhead of loading large matrices and the compute-bound mathematical operations. HiAP naturally converges to stable sub-networks using a loss function that incorporates both structural feasibility penalties and analytical FLOPs. Extensive experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that HiAP organically discovers highly efficient architectures, and achieves a competitive accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontier for models like DeiT-Small, matching the performance of sophisticated multi-stage methods while significantly simplifying the deployment pipeline.
comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, 3 Tables
★ A Two-Stage Dual-Modality Model for Facial Emotional Expression Recognition
This paper addresses the expression (EXPR) recognition challenge in the 10th Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-Wild (ABAW) workshop and competition, which requires frame-level classification of eight facial emotional expressions from unconstrained videos. This task is challenging due to inaccurate face localization, large pose and scale variations, motion blur, temporal instability, and other confounding factors across adjacent frames. We propose a two-stage dual-modal (audio-visual) model to address these difficulties. Stage I focuses on robust visual feature extraction with a pretrained DINOv2-based encoder. Specifically, DINOv2 ViT-L/14 is used as the backbone, a padding-aware augmentation (PadAug) strategy is employed for image padding and data preprocessing from raw videos, and a mixture-of-experts (MoE) training head is introduced to enhance classifier diversity. Stage II addresses modality fusion and temporal consistency. For the visual modality, faces are re-cropped from raw videos at multiple scales, and the extracted visual features are averaged to form a robust frame-level representation. Concurrently, frame-aligned Wav2Vec 2.0 audio features are derived from short audio windows to provide complementary acoustic cues. These dual-modal features are integrated via a lightweight gated fusion module, followed by inference-time temporal smoothing. Experiments on the ABAW dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The two-stage model achieves a Macro-F1 score of 0.5368 on the official validation set and 0.5122 +/- 0.0277 under 5-fold cross-validation, outperforming the official baselines.
comment: 10 pages, 4 figures
★ Real-World Point Tracking with Verifier-Guided Pseudo-Labeling CVPR 2026
Models for long-term point tracking are typically trained on large synthetic datasets. The performance of these models degrades in real-world videos due to different characteristics and the absence of dense ground-truth annotations. Self-training on unlabeled videos has been explored as a practical solution, but the quality of pseudo-labels strongly depends on the reliability of teacher models, which vary across frames and scenes. In this paper, we address the problem of real-world fine-tuning and introduce verifier, a meta-model that learns to assess the reliability of tracker predictions and guide pseudo-label generation. Given candidate trajectories from multiple pretrained trackers, the verifier evaluates them per frame and selects the most trustworthy predictions, resulting in high-quality pseudo-label trajectories. When applied for fine-tuning, verifier-guided pseudo-labeling substantially improves the quality of supervision and enables data-efficient adaptation to unlabeled videos. Extensive experiments on four real-world benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results while requiring less data than prior self-training methods. Project page: https://kuis-ai.github.io/track_on_r
comment: CVPR 2026
★ RDNet: Region Proportion-Aware Dynamic Adaptive Salient Object Detection Network in Optical Remote Sensing Images
Salient object detection (SOD) in remote sensing images faces significant challenges due to large variations in object sizes, the computational cost of self-attention mechanisms, and the limitations of CNN-based extractors in capturing global context and long-range dependencies. Existing methods that rely on fixed convolution kernels often struggle to adapt to diverse object scales, leading to detail loss or irrelevant feature aggregation. To address these issues, this work aims to enhance robustness to scale variations and achieve precise object localization. We propose the Region Proportion-Aware Dynamic Adaptive Salient Object Detection Network (RDNet), which replaces the CNN backbone with the SwinTransformer for global context modeling and introduces three key modules: (1) the Dynamic Adaptive Detail-aware (DAD) module, which applies varied convolution kernels guided by object region proportions; (2) the Frequency-matching Context Enhancement (FCE) module, which enriches contextual information through wavelet interactions and attention; and (3) the Region Proportion-aware Localization (RPL) module, which employs cross-attention to highlight semantic details and integrates a Proportion Guidance (PG) block to assist the DAD module. By combining these modules, RDNet achieves robustness against scale variations and accurate localization, delivering superior detection performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.
★ ForensicZip: More Tokens are Better but Not Necessary in Forensic Vision-Language Models
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) enable interpretable multimedia forensics by generating textual rationales for forgery detection. However, processing dense visual sequences incurs high computational costs, particularly for high-resolution images and videos. Visual token pruning is a practical acceleration strategy, yet existing methods are largely semantic-driven, retaining salient objects while discarding background regions where manipulation traces such as high-frequency anomalies and temporal jitters often reside. To address this issue, we introduce ForensicZip, a training-free framework that reformulates token compression from a forgery-driven perspective. ForensicZip models temporal token evolution as a Birth-Death Optimal Transport problem with a slack dummy node, quantifying physical discontinuities indicating transient generative artifacts. The forensic scoring further integrates transport-based novelty with high-frequency priors to separate forensic evidence from semantic content under large-ratio compression. Experiments on deepfake and AIGC benchmarks show that at 10\% token retention, ForensicZip achieves $2.97\times$ speedup and over 90\% FLOPs reduction while maintaining state-of-the-art detection performance.
★ SaPaVe: Towards Active Perception and Manipulation in Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotics CVPR 2026
Mengzhen Liu, Enshen Zhou, Cheng Chi, Yi Han, Shanyu Rong, Liming Chen, Pengwei Wang, Zhongyuan Wang, Shanghang Zhang
Active perception and manipulation are crucial for robots to interact with complex scenes. Existing methods struggle to unify semantic-driven active perception with robust, viewpoint-invariant execution. We propose SaPaVe, an end-to-end framework that jointly learns these capabilities in a data-efficient manner. Our approach decouples camera and manipulation actions rather than placing them in a shared action space, and follows a bottom-up training strategy: we first train semantic camera control on a large-scale dataset, then jointly optimize both action types using hybrid data. To support this framework, we introduce ActiveViewPose-200K, a dataset of 200k image-language-camera movement pairs for semantic camera movement learning, and a 3D geometry-aware module that improves execution robustness under dynamic viewpoints. We also present ActiveManip-Bench, the first benchmark for evaluating active manipulation beyond fixed-view settings. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments show that SaPaVe outperforms recent vision-language-action models such as GR00T N1 and \(π_0\), achieving up to 31.25\% higher success rates in real-world tasks. These results show that tightly coupled perception and execution, when trained with decoupled yet coordinated strategies, enable efficient and generalizable active manipulation. Project page: https://lmzpai.github.io/SaPaVe
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026. See project page at https://lmzpai.github.io/SaPaVe
★ BehaviorVLM: Unified Finetuning-Free Behavioral Understanding with Vision-Language Reasoning
Understanding freely moving animal behavior is central to neuroscience, where pose estimation and behavioral understanding form the foundation for linking neural activity to natural actions. Yet both tasks still depend heavily on human annotation or unstable unsupervised pipelines, limiting scalability and reproducibility. We present BehaviorVLM, a unified vision-language framework for pose estimation and behavioral understanding that requires no task-specific finetuning and minimal human labeling by guiding pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) through detailed, explicit, and verifiable reasoning steps. For pose estimation, we leverage quantum-dot-grounded behavioral data and propose a multi-stage pipeline that integrates temporal, spatial, and cross-view reasoning. This design greatly reduces human annotation effort, exposes low-confidence labels through geometric checks such as reprojection error, and produces labels that can later be filtered, corrected, or used to fine-tune downstream pose models. For behavioral understanding, we propose a pipeline that integrates deep embedded clustering for over-segmented behavior discovery, VLM-based per-clip video captioning, and LLM-based reasoning to merge and semantically label behavioral segments. The behavioral pipeline can operate directly from visual information and does not require keypoints to segment behavior. Together, these components enable scalable, interpretable, and label-light analysis of multi-animal behavior.
★ LatentGeo: Learnable Auxiliary Constructions in Latent Space for Multimodal Geometric Reasoning
Despite recent advances in multimodal reasoning, representing auxiliary geometric constructions remains a fundamental challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Such constructions are absent from the original diagram and must be introduced before theorems apply. Existing approaches predominantly rely on explicit construction paradigms, including text-based geometric specification, visual-token interleaving during reasoning, and tool-augmented geometric execution. However, these methods either fail to faithfully represent complex spatial relationships, incur representation mismatch between discrete symbols and continuous geometric structures, or rely on external capabilities that hinder end-to-end optimization. To address these limitations, we propose LatentGeo, a framework that learns continuous latent visual representations to internalize auxiliary geometric constructions without pixel-level rendering or external executors. We design a three-stage curriculum that progressively aligns and internalizes these latent representations through auxiliary visual supervision, followed by LaGDPO, a latent-aware reinforcement learning procedure that stabilizes latent representations during policy optimization while improving end-task correctness. To systematically evaluate construction-centric representation quality, we introduce GeoAux, a new benchmark targeting visually dependent geometry problems, and conduct experiments on GeoAux and MathVerse. Results show that LatentGeo achieves substantial gains on geometric reasoning tasks, particularly those requiring auxiliary constructions. Extensive analyses and ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each component in our framework.
★ GlyphBanana: Advancing Precise Text Rendering Through Agentic Workflows
Despite recent advances in generative models driving significant progress in text rendering, accurately generating complex text and mathematical formulas remains a formidable challenge. This difficulty primarily stems from the limited instruction-following capabilities of current models when encountering out-of-distribution prompts. To address this, we introduce GlyphBanana, alongside a corresponding benchmark specifically designed for rendering complex characters and formulas. GlyphBanana employs an agentic workflow that integrates auxiliary tools to inject glyph templates into both the latent space and attention maps, facilitating the iterative refinement of generated images. Notably, our training-free approach can be seamlessly applied to various Text-to-Image (T2I) models, achieving superior precision compared to existing baselines. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed workflow. Associated code is publicly available at https://github.com/yuriYanZeXuan/GlyphBanana.
★ Linking Perception, Confidence and Accuracy in MLLMs CVPR2026
Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have predominantly focused on enhancing visual perception to improve accuracy. However, a critical question remains unexplored: Do models know when they do not know? Through a probing experiment, we reveal a severe confidence miscalibration problem in MLLMs. To address this, we propose Confidence-Driven Reinforcement Learning (CDRL), which uses original-noise image pairs and a novel confidence-based reward to enhance perceptual sensitivity and robustly calibrate the model's confidence. Beyond training benefits, calibrated confidence enables more effective test-time scaling as a free lunch. We further propose Confidence-Aware Test-Time Scaling (CA-TTS), which dynamically coordinates Self-Consistency, Self-Reflection, and Visual Self-Check modules guided by confidence signals. An Expert Model acts in multiple roles (e.g., Planner, Critic, Voter) to schedule these modules and provide external verification. Our integrated framework establishes new state-of-the-art results with consistent 8.8% gains across four benchmarks. More ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each module and scaling superiority.
comment: Accepted by CVPR2026
★ EgoIntent: An Egocentric Step-level Benchmark for Understanding What, Why, and Next
Ye Pan, Chi Kit Wong, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Hanqian Li, Jiahao Huo, Jiacheng Chen, Lutao Jiang, Xu Zheng, Xuming Hu
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable video reasoning capabilities across diverse tasks. However, their ability to understand human intent at a fine-grained level in egocentric videos remains largely unexplored. Existing benchmarks focus primarily on episode-level intent reasoning, overlooking the finer granularity of step-level intent understanding. Yet applications such as intelligent assistants, robotic imitation learning, and augmented reality guidance require understanding not only what a person is doing at each step, but also why and what comes next, in order to provide timely and context-aware support. To this end, we introduce EgoIntent, a step-level intent understanding benchmark for egocentric videos. It comprises 3,014 steps spanning 15 diverse indoor and outdoor daily-life scenarios, and evaluates models on three complementary dimensions: local intent (What), global intent (Why), and next-step plan (Next). Crucially, each clip is truncated immediately before the key outcome of the queried step (e.g., contact or grasp) occurs and contains no frames from subsequent steps, preventing future-frame leakage and enabling a clean evaluation of anticipatory step understanding and next-step planning. We evaluate 15 MLLMs, including both state-of-the-art closed-source and open-source models. Even the best-performing model achieves an average score of only 33.31 across the three intent dimensions, underscoring that step-level intent understanding in egocentric videos remains a highly challenging problem that calls for further investigation.
★ FlashMotion: Few-Step Controllable Video Generation with Trajectory Guidance CVPR2026
Recent advances in trajectory-controllable video generation have achieved remarkable progress. Previous methods mainly use adapter-based architectures for precise motion control along predefined trajectories. However, all these methods rely on a multi-step denoising process, leading to substantial time redundancy and computational overhead. While existing video distillation methods successfully distill multi-step generators into few-step, directly applying these approaches to trajectory-controllable video generation results in noticeable degradation in both video quality and trajectory accuracy. To bridge this gap, we introduce FlashMotion, a novel training framework designed for few-step trajectory-controllable video generation. We first train a trajectory adapter on a multi-step video generator for precise trajectory control. Then, we distill the generator into a few-step version to accelerate video generation. Finally, we finetune the adapter using a hybrid strategy that combines diffusion and adversarial objectives, aligning it with the few-step generator to produce high-quality, trajectory-accurate videos. For evaluation, we introduce FlashBench, a benchmark for long-sequence trajectory-controllable video generation that measures both video quality and trajectory accuracy across varying numbers of foreground objects. Experiments on two adapter architectures show that FlashMotion surpasses existing video distillation methods and previous multi-step models in both visual quality and trajectory consistency.
comment: Accepted by CVPR2026
★ O3N: Omnidirectional Open-Vocabulary Occupancy Prediction
Understanding and reconstructing the 3D world through omnidirectional perception is an inevitable trend in the development of autonomous agents and embodied intelligence. However, existing 3D occupancy prediction methods are constrained by limited perspective inputs and predefined training distribution, making them difficult to apply to embodied agents that require comprehensive and safe perception of scenes in open world exploration. To address this, we present O3N, the first purely visual, end-to-end Omnidirectional Open-vocabulary Occupancy predictioN framework. O3N embeds omnidirectional voxels in a polar-spiral topology via the Polar-spiral Mamba (PsM) module, enabling continuous spatial representation and long-range context modeling across 360°. The Occupancy Cost Aggregation (OCA) module introduces a principled mechanism for unifying geometric and semantic supervision within the voxel space, ensuring consistency between the reconstructed geometry and the underlying semantic structure. Moreover, Natural Modality Alignment (NMA) establishes a gradient-free alignment pathway that harmonizes visual features, voxel embeddings, and text semantics, forming a consistent "pixel-voxel-text" representation triad. Extensive experiments on multiple models demonstrate that our method not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on QuadOcc and Human360Occ benchmarks but also exhibits remarkable cross-scene generalization and semantic scalability, paving the way toward universal 3D world modeling. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/MengfeiD/O3N.
comment: The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/MengfeiD/O3N
★ HATS: Hardness-Aware Trajectory Synthesis for GUI Agents CVPR 2026
Graphical user interface (GUI) agents powered by large vision-language models (VLMs) have shown remarkable potential in automating digital tasks, highlighting the need for high-quality trajectory data to support effective agent training. Yet existing trajectory synthesis pipelines often yield agents that fail to generalize beyond simple interactions. We identify this limitation as stemming from the neglect of semantically ambiguous actions, whose meanings are context-dependent, sequentially dependent, or visually ambiguous. Such actions are crucial for real-world robustness but are under-represented and poorly processed in current datasets, leading to semantic misalignment between task instructions and execution. To address these issues, we propose HATS, a Hardness-Aware Trajectory Synthesis framework designed to mitigate the impact of semantic ambiguity. We define hardness as the degree of semantic ambiguity associated with an action and develop two complementary modules: (1) hardness-driven exploration, which guides data collection toward ambiguous yet informative interactions, and (2) alignment-guided refinement, which iteratively validates and repairs instruction-execution alignment. The two modules operate in a closed loop: exploration supplies refinement with challenging trajectories, while refinement feedback updates the hardness signal to guide future exploration. Extensive experiments show that agents trained with HATS consistently outperform state-of-the-art baselines across benchmark GUI environments.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026
♻ ★ RefTr: Recurrent Refinement of Confluent Trajectories for 3D Vascular Tree Centerlines
Tubular tree structures such as blood vessels and lung airways are central to many clinical tasks, including diagnosis, treatment planning, and surgical navigation. Accurate centerline extraction with correct topology is essential, as missing small branches can lead to incomplete assessments or overlooked abnormalities. We propose RefTr, a 3D image-to-graph framework that generates vascular centerlines via recurrent refinement of confluent trajectories. RefTr adopts a Transformer-based Producer-Refiner architecture in which the Producer predicts candidate trajectories and a shared Refiner iteratively refines them toward the target branches. The confluent trajectory representation enables whole-branch refinement while explicitly enforcing valid topology. This recurrent scheme improves precision and reduces decoder parameters by 2.4x compared to the state-of-the-art. We further introduce an efficient non-maximum suppression algorithm for spatial tree graphs to merge duplicate branches and extend evaluation metrics to be radius-aware for robust comparison. Experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate stronger overall performance, faster inference, and substantially fewer parameters, highlighting the effectiveness of RefTr for 3D vascular tree analysis.
♻ ★ On the Reliability of Cue Conflict and Beyond
Understanding how neural networks rely on visual cues offers a human-interpretable view of their internal decision processes. The cue-conflict benchmark has been influential in probing shape-texture preference and in motivating the insight that stronger, human-like shape bias is often associated with improved in-domain performance. However, we find that the current stylization-based instantiation can yield unstable and ambiguous bias estimates. Specifically, stylization may not reliably instantiate perceptually valid and separable cues nor control their relative informativeness, ratio-based bias can obscure absolute cue sensitivity, and restricting evaluation to preselected classes can distort model predictions by ignoring the full decision space. Together, these factors can confound preference with cue validity, cue balance, and recognizability artifacts. We introduce REFINED-BIAS, an integrated dataset and evaluation framework for reliable and interpretable shape-texture bias diagnosis. REFINED-BIAS constructs balanced, human- and model- recognizable cue pairs using explicit definitions of shape and texture, and measures cue-specific sensitivity over the full label space via a ranking-based metric, enabling fairer cross-model comparisons. Across diverse training regimes and architectures, REFINED-BIAS enables fairer cross-model comparison, more faithful diagnosis of shape and texture biases, and clearer empirical conclusions, resolving inconsistencies that prior cue-conflict evaluations could not reliably disambiguate.
comment: Shape-Texture Bias, Cue Conflict Benchmark
♻ ★ Preserving Full Degradation Details for Blind Image Super-Resolution
The performance of image super-resolution relies heavily on the accuracy of degradation information, especially under blind settings. Due to the absence of true degradation models in real-world scenarios, previous methods learn distinct representations by distinguishing different degradations in a batch. However, the most significant degradation differences may provide shortcuts for the learning of representations such that subtle difference may be discarded. In this paper, we propose an alternative to learn degradation representations through reproducing degraded low-resolution (LR) images. By guiding the degrader to reconstruct input LR images, full degradation information can be encoded into the representations. In addition, we develop a distribution alignment loss to facilitate the learning of the degradation representations by introducing a bounded constraint. Moreover, to achieve larger receptive fields to capture information from a wider region for better restoration results, we introduce a degradation-aware Mamba module to efficiently model long-range dependency between the anchor pixel and the surrounding informative pixels. And the module strikes a flexible adaption to various degradations based on the learned representations. Experiments show that our representations can extract accurate and highly robust degradation information. Evaluations on both synthetic and real images demonstrate that our ReDSR achieves state-of-the-art performance for the blind SR tasks.
comment: 16 pages, 14 figures, 5 tables
♻ ★ VolSplat: Rethinking Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting with Voxel-Aligned Prediction
Weijie Wang, Yeqing Chen, Zeyu Zhang, Hengyu Liu, Haoxiao Wang, Zhiyuan Feng, Wenkang Qin, Feng Chen, Zheng Zhu, Donny Y. Chen, Bohan Zhuang
Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a highly effective solution for novel view synthesis. Existing methods predominantly rely on a \emph{pixel-aligned} Gaussian prediction paradigm, where each 2D pixel is mapped to a 3D Gaussian. We rethink this widely adopted formulation and identify several inherent limitations: it renders the reconstructed 3D models heavily dependent on the number of input views, leads to view-biased density distributions, and introduces alignment errors, particularly when source views contain occlusions or low texture. To address these challenges, we introduce VolSplat, a new multi-view feed-forward paradigm that replaces pixel alignment with voxel-aligned Gaussians. By directly predicting Gaussians from a predicted 3D voxel grid, it overcomes pixel alignment's reliance on error-prone 2D feature matching, ensuring robust multi-view consistency. Furthermore, it enables adaptive control over density based on 3D scene complexity, yielding more faithful Gaussians, improved geometric consistency, and enhanced novel-view rendering quality. Experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate that VolSplat achieves state-of-the-art performance, while producing more plausible and view-consistent results. The video results, code and trained models are available on our project page: https://lhmd.top/volsplat.
comment: Project Page: https://lhmd.top/volsplat, Code: https://github.com/ziplab/VolSplat
♻ ★ Contact-Aware Refinement of Human Pose Pseudo-Ground Truth via Bioimpedance Sensing ICCV 2025
Maria-Paola Forte, Nikos Athanasiou, Giulia Ballardini, Jan Ulrich Bartels, Katherine J. Kuchenbecker, Michael J. Black
Capturing accurate 3D human pose in the wild would provide valuable data for training pose estimation and motion generation methods. While video-based estimation approaches have become increasingly accurate, they often fail in common scenarios involving self-contact, such as a hand touching the face. In contrast, wearable bioimpedance sensing can cheaply and unobtrusively measure ground-truth skin-to-skin contact. Consequently, we propose a novel framework that combines visual pose estimators with bioimpedance sensing to capture the 3D pose of people by taking self-contact into account. Our method, BioTUCH, initializes the pose using an off-the-shelf estimator and introduces contact-aware pose optimization during measured self-contact: reprojection error and deviations from the input estimate are minimized while enforcing vertex proximity constraints. We validate our approach using a new dataset of synchronized RGB video, bioimpedance measurements, and 3D motion capture. Testing with three input pose estimators, we demonstrate an average of 11.7% improvement in reconstruction accuracy. We also present a miniature wearable bioimpedance sensor that enables efficient large-scale collection of contact-aware training data for improving pose estimation and generation using BioTUCH. Code and data are available at biotuch.is.tue.mpg.de
comment: * Equal contribution. Minor figure corrections compared to the ICCV 2025 version
♻ ★ Conditional Unbalanced Optimal Transport Maps: An Outlier-Robust Framework for Conditional Generative Modeling
Conditional Optimal Transport (COT) problem aims to find a transport map between conditional source and target distributions while minimizing the transport cost. Recently, these transport maps have been utilized in conditional generative modeling tasks to establish efficient mappings between the distributions. However, classical COT inherits a fundamental limitation of optimal transport, i.e., sensitivity to outliers, which arises from the hard distribution matching constraints. This limitation becomes more pronounced in a conditional setting, where each conditional distribution is estimated from a limited subset of data. To address this, we introduce the Conditional Unbalanced Optimal Transport (CUOT) framework, which relaxes conditional distribution-matching constraints through Csiszár divergence penalties while strictly preserving the conditioning marginals. We establish a rigorous formulation of the CUOT problem and derive its dual and semi-dual formulations. Based on the semi-dual form, we propose Conditional Unbalanced Optimal Transport Maps (CUOTM), an outlier-robust conditional generative model built upon a triangular $c$-transform parameterization. We theoretically justify the validity of this parameterization by proving that the optimal triangular map satisfies the $c$-transform relationships. Our experiments on 2D synthetic and image-scale datasets demonstrate that CUOTM achieves superior outlier robustness and competitive distribution-matching performance compared to existing COT-based baselines, while maintaining high sampling efficiency.
comment: 15 pages, 6 figures
♻ ★ SIMSPINE: A Biomechanics-Aware Simulation Framework for 3D Spine Motion Annotation and Benchmarking
Modeling spinal motion is fundamental to understanding human biomechanics, yet remains underexplored in computer vision due to the spine's complex multi-joint kinematics and the lack of large-scale 3D annotations. We present a biomechanics-aware keypoint simulation framework that augments existing human pose datasets with anatomically consistent 3D spinal keypoints derived from musculoskeletal modeling. Using this framework, we create the first open dataset, named SIMSPINE, which provides sparse vertebra-level 3D spinal annotations for natural full-body motions in indoor multi-camera capture without external restraints. With 2.14 million frames, this enables data-driven learning of vertebral kinematics from subtle posture variations and bridges the gap between musculoskeletal simulation and computer vision. In addition, we release pretrained baselines covering fine-tuned 2D detectors, monocular 3D pose lifting models, and multi-view reconstruction pipelines, establishing a unified benchmark for biomechanically valid spine motion estimation. Specifically, our 2D spine baselines improve the state-of-the-art from 0.63 to 0.80 AUC in controlled environments, and from 0.91 to 0.93 AP for in-the-wild spine tracking. Together, the simulation framework and SIMSPINE dataset advance research in vision-based biomechanics, motion analysis, and digital human modeling by enabling reproducible, anatomically grounded 3D spine estimation under natural conditions.
comment: Camera-ready version
♻ ★ Weakly Supervised Teacher-Student Framework with Progressive Pseudo-mask Refinement for Gland Segmentation
Background and objectives: Colorectal cancer histopathological grading depends on accurate segmentation of glandular structures. Current deep learning approaches rely on large scale pixel level annotations that are labor intensive and difficult to obtain in routine clinical practice. Weakly supervised semantic segmentation offers a promising alternative. However, class activation map based methods often produce incomplete pseudo masks that emphasize highly discriminative regions and fail to supervise unannotated glandular structures. We propose a weakly supervised teacher student framework that leverages sparse pathologist annotations and an Exponential Moving Average stabilized teacher network to generate refined pseudo masks.
Methods: The framework integrates confidence based filtering, adaptive fusion of teacher predictions with limited ground truth, and curriculum guided refinement to progressively segment unannotated glandular regions. The method was evaluated on an institutional colorectal cancer cohort from The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center consisting of 60 hematoxylin and eosin stained whole slide images and on public datasets including the Gland Segmentation dataset, TCGA COAD, TCGA READ, and SPIDER.
Results: On the Gland Segmentation dataset the framework achieved a mean Intersection over Union of 80.10 and a mean Dice coefficient of 89.10. Cross cohort evaluation demonstrated robust generalization on TCGA COAD and TCGA READ without additional annotations, while reduced performance on SPIDER reflected domain shift.
Conclusions: The proposed framework provides an annotation efficient and generalizable approach for gland segmentation in colorectal histopathology.
♻ ★ ReasonMap: Towards Fine-Grained Visual Reasoning from Transit Maps CVPR 2026
Sicheng Feng, Song Wang, Shuyi Ouyang, Lingdong Kong, Zikai Song, Jianke Zhu, Huan Wang, Xinchao Wang
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in semantic scene understanding and text-image alignment, with reasoning variants enhancing performance on more complex tasks involving mathematics and logic. To bridge this gap, we introduce ReasonMap, a novel benchmark specifically designed to evaluate these capabilities. ReasonMap encompasses high-resolution transit maps from 30 cities and includes 1,008 question-answer pairs spanning two question types and three templates. Furthermore, we design a two-level evaluation pipeline that properly assesses answer correctness and quality. Our comprehensive evaluation of 16 popular MLLMs reveals a counterintuitive pattern: among open-source models, base variants outperform their reasoning-tuned counterparts, whereas the opposite trend is observed in closed-source models. Further analysis under the visual-masking setting confirms that strong performance necessitates direct visual grounding, rather than relying solely on language priors. We further establish a training baseline with reinforcement fine-tuning, providing a reference for future exploration. We hope this benchmark study offers new insights into visual reasoning and helps investigate the gap between open- and closed-source models.
comment: CVPR 2026, website: https://fscdc.github.io/ReasonMap/
♻ ★ Embed-RL: Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning-Driven Multimodal Embeddings
Leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has become pivotal for advancing Universal Multimodal Embeddings (UME) in addressing diverse cross-modal tasks. Recent studies demonstrate that incorporating generative Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning can substantially enhance task-specific representations compared to discriminative methods. However, the generated reasoning CoTs of existing generative embedding methods are limited to the textual analysis of queries and are irrelevant to the retrieval of the targets. To address these limitations, we propose a reasoning-driven UME framework that integrates Embedder-Guided Reinforcement Learning (EG-RL) to optimize the Reasoner to produce evidential Traceability CoT (T-CoT). Our key contributions are threefold: (1) We design an EG-RL framework where the Embedder provides explicit supervision to the Reasoner, ensuring the generated CoT traces are aligned with embedding tasks. (2) We introduce T-CoT, which extracts critical multimodal cues to focus on retrieval-relevant elements and provides multimodal inputs for the Embedder. (3) With limited computational resources, our framework outperforms the pioneering embedding model on both MMEB-V2 and UVRB benchmarks. The integration of multimodal evidence in structured reasoning, paired with retrieval-oriented alignment, effectively strengthens cross-modal semantic consistency and boosts the fine-grained matching capability of the model as well as the generalization across complex scenarios. Our work demonstrates that targeted reasoning optimization can significantly improve multimodal embedding quality, providing a practical and efficient solution for reasoning-driven UME development.
comment: Correcting errors and improving organizational logic
♻ ★ JOPP-3D: Joint Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation on Point Clouds and Panoramas
Sandeep Inuganti, Hideaki Kanayama, Kanta Shimizu, Mahdi Chamseddine, Soichiro Yokota, Didier Stricker, Jason Rambach
Semantic segmentation across visual modalities such as 3D point clouds and panoramic images remains a challenging task, primarily due to the scarcity of annotated data and the limited adaptability of fixed-label models. In this paper, we present JOPP-3D, an open-vocabulary semantic segmentation framework that jointly leverages panoramic and point cloud data to enable language-driven scene understanding. We convert RGB-D panoramic images into their corresponding tangential perspective images and 3D point clouds, then use these modalities to extract and align foundational vision-language features. This allows natural language querying to generate semantic masks on both input modalities. Experimental evaluation on the Stanford-2D-3D-s and ToF-360 datasets demonstrates the capability of JOPP-3D to produce coherent and semantically meaningful segmentations across panoramic and 3D domains. Our proposed method achieves a significant improvement compared to the SOTA in open and closed vocabulary 2D and 3D semantic segmentation.
♻ ★ High-Fidelity Medical Shape Generation via Skeletal Latent Diffusion
Anatomy shape modeling is a fundamental problem in medical data analysis. However, the geometric complexity and topological variability of anatomical structures pose significant challenges to accurate anatomical shape generation. In this work, we propose a skeletal latent diffusion framework that explicitly incorporates structural priors for efficient and high-fidelity medical shape generation. We introduce a shape auto-encoder in which the encoder captures global geometric information through a differentiable skeletonization module and aggregates local surface features into shape latents, while the decoder predicts the corresponding implicit fields over sparsely sampled coordinates. New shapes are generated via a latent-space diffusion model, followed by neural implicit decoding and mesh extraction. To address the limited availability of medical shape data, we construct a large-scale dataset, \textit{MedSDF}, comprising surface point clouds and corresponding signed distance fields across multiple anatomical categories. Extensive experiments on MedSDF and vessel datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior reconstruction and generation quality while maintaining a higher computational efficiency compared with existing approaches. Code is available at: https://github.com/wlsdzyzl/meshage.
comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, journal
♻ ★ Adaptive Dual-Constrained Line Aggregation for Robust Generic and Wireframe Line Segment Detection
Line segment detection in images has been studied for several decades. Existing methods can be roughly divided into two categories: generic line segment detectors and wireframe line segment detectors. Generic detectors aim to detect all meaningful line segments in images and traditional approaches usually fall into this category. Recent deep learning based approaches are mostly wireframe detectors. They detect only line segments that are geometrically meaningful and have large spatial support. Due to the difference in the aim of design, methods designed for one paradigm often perform poorly on the other, and few approaches demonstrate robust performance across both tasks. In this work, we propose a robust framework that is efficient for both tasks based on an Adaptive Dual-Constrained Line Aggregation (ADLA) algorithm. ADLA aggregates pixels into candidate line segments only if they satisfy dual geometric constraints: (1) orientation coherence and (2) bounded orthogonal distance to an adaptively estimated line model. Crucially, the parameters of the candidate line (its orientation and centroid) are dynamically updated as new pixels are incorporated. This progressive model refinement improves geometric accuracy. Moreover, by leveraging edge strength maps in orientation estimation and line segment validation, ADLA requires little parameter tuning. Extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets demonstrate that ADLA achieves competitive or superior performance than previous methods, highlighting its robustness, versatility, and practical usability.
♻ ★ PuzLM: Solving Jigsaw Puzzles with Sequence-to-Sequence Language Models
Square jigsaw puzzles are typically solved by visually matching piece images to recover the original layout. This work introduces PuzLM, an alternative perspective that recasts jigsaw reassembly as a discrete sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) problem, inspired by natural language representations. We design an efficient puzzle quantization procedure that transforms each piece into a short sequence of discrete tokens, enabling the direct application of standard Seq2Seq language models as powerful jigsaw solvers. Our approach demonstrates that accurate puzzle reconstruction can be achieved through purely symbolic reasoning over discrete representations, improving state-of-the-art performance even on puzzles with eroded boundaries or missing pieces.
♻ ★ SkeletonAgent: An Agentic Interaction Framework for Skeleton-based Action Recognition
Recent advances in skeleton-based action recognition increasingly leverage semantic priors from Large Language Models (LLMs) to enrich skeletal representations. However, the LLM is typically queried in isolation from the recognition model and receives no performance feedback. As a result, it often fails to deliver the targeted discriminative cues critical to distinguish similar actions. To overcome these limitations, we propose SkeletonAgent, a novel framework that bridges the recognition model and the LLM through two cooperative agents, i.e., Questioner and Selector. Specifically, the Questioner identifies the most frequently confused classes and supplies them to the LLM as context for more targeted guidance. Conversely, the Selector parses the LLM's response to extract precise joint-level constraints and feeds them back to the recognizer, enabling finer-grained cross-modal alignment. Comprehensive evaluations on five benchmarks, including NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120, Kinetics-Skeleton, FineGYM, and UAV-Human, demonstrate that SkeletonAgent consistently outperforms state-of-the-art benchmark methods. The code is available at https://github.com/firework8/SkeletonAgent.
♻ ★ Unlearning the Unpromptable: Prompt-free Instance Unlearning in Diffusion Models
Machine unlearning aims to remove specific outputs from trained models, often at the concept level, such as forgetting all occurrences of a particular celebrity or filtering content via text prompts. However, many undesired outputs, such as an individual's face or generations culturally or factually misinterpreted, cannot often be specified by text prompts. We address this underexplored setting of instance unlearning for outputs that are undesired but unpromptable, where the goal is to forget target outputs selectively while preserving the rest. To this end, we introduce an effective surrogate-based unlearning method that leverages image editing, timestep-aware weighting, and gradient surgery to guide trained diffusion models toward forgetting specific outputs. Experiments on conditional (Stable Diffusion 3) and unconditional (DDPM-CelebA) diffusion models demonstrate that our prompt-free method uniquely unlearns unpromptable outputs, such as faces and culturally inaccurate depictions, with preserved integrity, unlike prompt-based and prompt-free baselines. Our proposed method would serve as a practical hotfix for diffusion model providers to ensure privacy protection and ethical compliance.
comment: 12 pages
♻ ★ See4D: Pose-Free 4D Generation via Auto-Regressive Video Inpainting
Dongyue Lu, Ao Liang, Tianxin Huang, Xiao Fu, Yuyang Zhao, Baorui Ma, Liang Pan, Wei Yin, Lingdong Kong, Wei Tsang Ooi, Ziwei Liu
Immersive applications call for synthesizing spatiotemporal 4D content from casual videos without costly 3D supervision. Existing video-to-4D methods typically rely on manually annotated camera poses, which are labor-intensive and brittle for in-the-wild footage. Recent warp-then-inpaint approaches mitigate the need for pose labels by warping input frames along a novel camera trajectory and using an inpainting model to fill missing regions, thereby depicting the 4D scene from diverse viewpoints. However, this trajectory-to-trajectory formulation often entangles camera motion with scene dynamics and complicates both modeling and inference. We introduce See4D, a pose-free, trajectory-to-camera framework that replaces explicit trajectory prediction with rendering to a bank of fixed virtual cameras, thereby separating camera control from scene modeling. A view-conditional video inpainting model is trained to learn a robust geometry prior by denoising realistically synthesized warped images and to inpaint occluded or missing regions across virtual viewpoints, eliminating the need for explicit 3D annotations. Building on this inpainting core, we design a spatiotemporal autoregressive inference pipeline that traverses virtual-camera splines and extends videos with overlapping windows, enabling coherent generation at bounded per-step complexity. We validate See4D on cross-view video generation and sparse reconstruction benchmarks. Across quantitative metrics and qualitative assessments, our method achieves superior generalization and improved performance relative to pose- or trajectory-conditioned baselines, advancing practical 4D world modeling from casual videos.
comment: Eurographics2026; 26 pages; 21 figures; 3 tables; project page: https://see-4d.github.io/
♻ ★ TextFlux: An OCR-Free DiT Model for High-Fidelity Multilingual Scene Text Synthesis
Diffusion-based scene text synthesis has progressed rapidly, yet existing methods commonly rely on additional visual conditioning modules and require large-scale annotated data to support multilingual generation. In this work, we revisit the necessity of complex auxiliary modules and further explore an approach that simultaneously ensures glyph accuracy and achieves high-fidelity scene integration, by leveraging diffusion models' inherent capabilities for contextual reasoning. To this end, we introduce TextFlux, a DiT-based framework that enables multilingual scene text synthesis. The advantages of TextFlux can be summarized as follows: (1) OCR-free model architecture. TextFlux eliminates the need for OCR encoders (additional visual conditioning modules) that are specifically used to extract visual text-related features. (2) Strong multilingual scalability. TextFlux is effective in low-resource multilingual settings, and achieves strong performance in newly added languages with fewer than 1,000 samples. (3) Streamlined training setup. TextFlux is trained with only 1% of the training data required by competing methods. (4) Controllable multi-line text generation. TextFlux offers flexible multi-line synthesis with precise line-level control, outperforming methods restricted to single-line or rigid layouts. Extensive experiments and visualizations demonstrate that TextFlux outperforms previous methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.
comment: Accepted to Eurographics 2026 (Computer Graphics Forum)
♻ ★ EXPLORE-Bench: Egocentric Scene Prediction with Long-Horizon Reasoning
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly considered as a foundation for embodied agents, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably reason about the long-term physical consequences of actions from an egocentric viewpoint. We study this gap through a new task, Egocentric Scene Prediction with LOng-horizon REasoning: given an initial-scene image and a sequence of atomic action descriptions, a model is asked to predict the final scene after all actions are executed. To enable systematic evaluation, we introduce EXPLORE-Bench, a benchmark curated from real first-person videos spanning diverse scenarios. Each instance pairs long action sequences with structured final-scene annotations, including object categories, visual attributes, and inter-object relations, which supports fine-grained, quantitative assessment. Experiments on a range of proprietary and open-source MLLMs reveal a significant performance gap to humans, indicating that long-horizon egocentric reasoning remains a major challenge. We further analyze test-time scaling via stepwise reasoning and show that decomposing long action sequences can improve performance to some extent, while incurring non-trivial computational overhead. Overall, EXPLORE-Bench provides a principled testbed for measuring and advancing long-horizon reasoning for egocentric embodied perception.
♻ ★ SOTA: Self-adaptive Optimal Transport for Zero-Shot Classification with Multiple Foundation Models
Foundation models have attracted widespread attention across domains due to their powerful zero-shot classification capabilities. This work is motivated by two key observations: (1) \textit{Vision-Language Models} (VLMs), such as CLIP, often over-rely on class-level textual priors and struggle to capture fine-grained visual cues, whereas \textit{Vision-only Foundation Models} (VFMs), such as DINO, provide rich and discriminative visual features but lack semantic alignment; (2) the performance of different VLMs varies considerably across datasets owing to differences in pre-training. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{SOTA} (\textit{Self-adaptive Optimal TrAnsport}), a \textit{training-free} ensemble framework that integrates the outputs of multiple foundation models~(VFMs or VLMs) by learning a self-adaptive transport plan. Notably, \textbf{SOTA} is prior-free and automatically balances model contributions. Extensive experiments across diverse domains, including natural images, medical pathology, and remote sensing, validate the generalizability of \textbf{SOTA}. The results consistently show that it effectively leverages the complementary strengths of different foundation models and achieves substantial improvements over individual models. The implementation code is available at: https://github.com/Afleve/self-adaptive-Optimal-Transport.
♻ ★ The Coherence Trap: When MLLM-Crafted Narratives Exploit Manipulated Visual Contexts CVPR 2026
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.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026 main track
♻ ★ Geometric Autoencoder for Diffusion Models
Latent diffusion models have established a new state-of-the-art in high-resolution visual generation. Integrating Vision Foundation Model priors improves generative efficiency, yet existing latent designs remain largely heuristic. These approaches often struggle to unify semantic discriminability, reconstruction fidelity, and latent compactness. In this paper, we propose Geometric Autoencoder (GAE), a principled framework that systematically addresses these challenges. By analyzing various alignment paradigms, GAE constructs an optimized low-dimensional semantic supervision target from VFMs to provide guidance for the autoencoder. Furthermore, we leverage latent normalization that replaces the restrictive KL-divergence of standard VAEs, enabling a more stable latent manifold specifically optimized for diffusion learning. To ensure robust reconstruction under high-intensity noise, GAE incorporates a dynamic noise sampling mechanism. Empirically, GAE achieves compelling performance on the ImageNet-1K $256 \times 256$ benchmark, reaching a gFID of 1.82 at only 80 epochs and 1.31 at 800 epochs without Classifier-Free Guidance, significantly surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods. Beyond generative quality, GAE establishes a superior equilibrium between compression, semantic depth and robust reconstruction stability. These results validate our design considerations, offering a promising paradigm for latent diffusion modeling. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/sii-research/GAE.
comment: Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/sii-research/GAE
♻ ★ Decoupling Perception from Reasoning for Hallucination-Resistant Video Understanding
Video Large Language Models improve reasoning over complex videos by generating intermediate reasoning text. However, reliable reasoning depends on accurate video perception. In existing approaches, perception evidence is intertwined with reasoning text, making it difficult to directly supervise the perception process. We argue that reliable supervision requires explicitly separating perception evidence from reasoning so that perception can be verified independently. To supervise perception directly, we propose Decoupled Perception and Logic (DPL), which represents perception as fixed-format evidence units containing timestamps and visual descriptions. This structured representation enables direct extraction of perception content and simplifies alignment between video segments and reward evaluation. Building on DPL, we introduce a perception reward that encourages both hallucination resistance and perception-based reasoning. An Factual-Aware Evaluator (FAE) provides anti-hallucination scores and achieves hallucination evaluation performance comparable to GPT-4o. In addition, we validate reasoning consistency by feeding perception results and questions into a reference model. Experiments show that, by providing reliable process rewards, Video-DPL consistently improves post-training performance at both 3B and 7B scales, while delivering higher data efficiency.
comment: 17 pages, 8 figures
♻ ★ MedEyes: Learning Dynamic Visual Focus for Medical Progressive Diagnosis AAAI 2026
Accurate medical diagnosis often involves progressive visual focusing and iterative reasoning, characteristics commonly observed in clinical workflows. While recent vision-language models demonstrate promising chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning capabilities via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), their purely on-policy learning paradigm tends to reinforce superficially coherent but clinically inaccurate reasoning paths. We propose MedEyes, a novel reinforcement learning framework that dynamically models clinician-style diagnostic reasoning by progressively attending to and interpreting relevant medical image regions. By incorporating off-policy expert guidance, MedEyes converts expert visual search trajectories into structured external behavioral signals, guiding the model toward clinically aligned visual reasoning. We design the Gaze-guided Reasoning Navigator (GRN) to emulate the diagnostic process through a dual-mode exploration strategy, scanning for systematic abnormality localization and drilling for detailed regional analysis. To balance expert imitation and autonomous discovery, we introduce the Confidence Value Sampler (CVS), which employs nucleus sampling and adaptive termination to create diverse yet credible exploration paths. Finally, the dual-stream GRPO optimization framework decouples on-policy and off-policy learning signals, mitigating reward assimilation and entropy collapse. Experiments demonstrate that MedEyes achieves an average performance improvement of +8.5pp across multiple medical VQA benchmarks, validating MedEyes's potential in building trustworthy medical AI systems. Code is available at https://github.com/zhcz328/MedEyes.
comment: AAAI 2026, Medical Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), Multimodal Grounded Reasoning
♻ ★ Agentic Design Review System
Evaluating graphic designs involves assessing it from multiple facets like alignment, composition, aesthetics and color choices. Evaluating designs in a holistic way involves aggregating feedback from individual expert reviewers. Towards this, we propose an Agentic Design Review System (AgenticDRS), where multiple agents collaboratively analyze a design, orchestrated by a meta-agent. A novel in-context exemplar selection approach based on graph matching and a unique prompt expansion method plays central role towards making each agent design aware. Towards evaluating this framework, we propose DRS-BENCH benchmark. Thorough experimental evaluation against state-of-the-art baselines adapted to the problem setup, backed-up with critical ablation experiments brings out the efficacy of Agentic-DRS in evaluating graphic designs and generating actionable feedback. We hope that this work will attract attention to this pragmatic, yet under-explored research direction.
comment: Project Page: https://sayannag.github.io/AgenticDRS
♻ ★ Semantic-Aware Reconstruction Error for Detecting AI-Generated Images
Recently, AI-generated image detection has gained increasing attention, as the rapid advancement of image generation technologies has raised serious concerns about their potential misuse. While existing detection methods have achieved promising results, their performance often degrades significantly when facing fake images from unseen, out-of-distribution (OOD) generative models, since they primarily rely on model-specific artifacts and thus overfit to the models used for training. To address this limitation, we propose a novel representation, namely Semantic-Aware Reconstruction Error (SARE), that measures the semantic difference between an image and its caption-guided reconstruction. The key hypothesis behind SARE is that real images, whose captions often fail to fully capture their complex visual content, may undergo noticeable semantic shifts during the caption-guided reconstruction process. In contrast, fake images, which closely align with their captions, show minimal semantic changes. By quantifying these semantic shifts, SARE provides a robust and discriminative feature for detecting fake images across diverse generative models. Additionally, we introduce a fusion module that integrates SARE into the backbone detector via a cross-attention mechanism. Image features attend to semantic representations extracted from SARE, enabling the model to adaptively leverage semantic information. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves strong generalization, outperforming existing baselines on benchmarks including GenImage and ForenSynths. We further validate the effectiveness of caption guidance through a detailed analysis of semantic shifts, confirming its ability to enhance detection robustness.
♻ ★ Evaluating Generative Models via One-Dimensional Code Distributions
Most evaluations of generative models rely on feature-distribution metrics such as FID, which operate on continuous recognition features that are explicitly trained to be invariant to appearance variations, and thus discard cues critical for perceptual quality. We instead evaluate models in the space of discrete visual tokens, where modern 1D image tokenizers compactly encode both semantic and perceptual information and quality manifests as predictable token statistics. We introduce Codebook Histogram Distance (CHD), a training-free distribution metric in token space, and Code Mixture Model Score (CMMS), a no-reference quality metric learned from synthetic degradations of token sequences. To stress-test metrics under broad distribution shifts, we further propose VisForm, a benchmark of 210K images spanning 62 visual forms and 12 generative models with expert annotations. Across AGIQA, HPDv2/3, and VisForm, our token-based metrics achieve state-of-the-art correlation with human judgments. We will release all code and datasets to facilitate future research, with the code publicly available at https://github.com/zexiJia/1d-Distance.
♻ ★ Head-wise Adaptive Rotary Positional Encoding for Fine-Grained Image Generation
Transformers rely on explicit positional encoding to model structure in data. While Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) excels in 1D domains, its application to image generation reveals significant limitations such as fine-grained spatial relation modeling, color cues, and object counting. This paper identifies key limitations of standard multi-dimensional RoPE-rigid frequency allocation, axis-wise independence, and uniform head treatment-in capturing the complex structural biases required for fine-grained image generation. We propose HARoPE, a head-wise adaptive extension that inserts a learnable linear transformation parameterized via singular value decomposition (SVD) before the rotary mapping. This lightweight modification enables dynamic frequency reallocation, semantic alignment of rotary planes, and head-specific positional receptive fields while rigorously preserving RoPE's relative-position property. Extensive experiments on class-conditional ImageNet and text-to-image generation (Flux and MMDiT) demonstrate that HARoPE consistently improves performance over strong RoPE baselines and other extensions. The method serves as an effective drop-in replacement, offering a principled and adaptable solution for enhancing positional awareness in transformer-based image generative models.
♻ ★ FastLightGen: Fast and Light Video Generation with Fewer Steps and Parameters CVPR 2026
The recent advent of powerful video generation models, such as Hunyuan, WanX, Veo3, and Kling, has inaugurated a new era in the field. However, the practical deployment of these models is severely impeded by their substantial computational overhead, which stems from enormous parameter counts and the iterative, multi-step sampling process required during inference. Prior research on accelerating generative models has predominantly followed two distinct trajectories: reducing the number of sampling steps (e.g., LCM, DMD, and MagicDistillation) or compressing the model size for more efficient inference (e.g., ICMD). The potential of simultaneously compressing both to create a fast and lightweight model remains an unexplored avenue. In this paper, we propose FastLightGen, an algorithm that transforms large, computationally expensive models into fast, lightweight counterparts. The core idea is to construct an optimal teacher model, one engineered to maximize student performance, within a synergistic framework for distilling both model size and inference steps. Our extensive experiments on HunyuanVideo-ATI2V and WanX-TI2V reveal that a generator using 4-step sampling and 30\% parameter pruning achieves optimal visual quality under a constrained inference budget. Furthermore, FastLightGen consistently outperforms all competing methods, establishing a new state-of-the-art in efficient video generation.
comment: Accepted by CVPR 2026
♻ ★ Think with 3D: Geometric Imagination Grounded Spatial Reasoning from Limited Views
Zhangquan Chen, Manyuan Zhang, Xinlei Yu, Xufang Luo, Mingze Sun, Zihao Pan, Xiang An, Yan Feng, Peng Pei, Xunliang Cai, Ruqi Huang
Though recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across a wide range of multimodal tasks, understanding 3D spatial relationships from limited views remains a significant challenge. Previous reasoning methods typically rely on pure text (e.g., topological cognitive maps) or on 2D visual cues. However, their limited representational capacity hinders performance in specific tasks that require 3D spatial imagination. To address this limitation, we propose 3DThinker, a framework that can effectively exploits the rich geometric information embedded within images while reasoning, like humans do. Our framework is the first to enable 3D mentaling during reasoning without any 3D prior input, and it does not rely on explicitly labeled 3D data for training. Specifically, our training consists of two stages. First, we perform supervised training to align the 3D latent generated by VLM while reasoning with that of a 3D foundation model (e.g., VGGT). Then, we optimize the entire reasoning trajectory solely based on outcome signals, thereby refining the underlying 3D mentaling. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that 3DThinker consistently outperforms strong baselines and offers a new perspective toward unifying 3D representations into multimodal reasoning. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhangquanchen/3DThinker.
comment: 25 pages, 17 figures
♻ ★ Capturing Temporal Dynamics in Large-Scale Canopy Tree Height Estimation ICML
Jan Pauls, Max Zimmer, Berkant Turan, Sassan Saatchi, Philippe Ciais, Sebastian Pokutta, Fabian Gieseke
With the rise in global greenhouse gas emissions, accurate large-scale tree canopy height maps are essential for understanding forest structure, estimating above-ground biomass, and monitoring ecological disruptions. To this end, we present a novel approach to generate large-scale, high-resolution canopy height maps over time. Our model accurately predicts canopy height over multiple years given Sentinel-1 composite and Sentinel~2 time series satellite data. Using GEDI LiDAR data as the ground truth for training the model, we present the first 10m resolution temporal canopy height map of the European continent for the period 2019-2022. As part of this product, we also offer a detailed canopy height map for 2020, providing more precise estimates than previous studies. Our pipeline and the resulting temporal height map are publicly available, enabling comprehensive large-scale monitoring of forests and, hence, facilitating future research and ecological analyses.
comment: ICML Camera-Ready, 9 pages main paper, 8 pages references and appendix, 9 figures, 8 tables
♻ ★ Defending Unauthorized Model Merging via Dual-Stage Weight Protection CVPR 2026
The rapid proliferation of pretrained models and open repositories has made model merging a convenient yet risky practice, allowing free-riders to combine fine-tuned models into a new multi-capability model without authorization. Such unauthorized model merging not only violates intellectual property rights but also undermines model ownership and accountability. To address this issue, we present MergeGuard, a proactive dual-stage weight protection framework that disrupts merging compatibility while maintaining task fidelity. In the first stage, we redistribute task-relevant information across layers via L2-regularized optimization, ensuring that important gradients are evenly dispersed. In the second stage, we inject structured perturbations to misalign task subspaces, breaking curvature compatibility in the loss landscape. Together, these stages reshape the model's parameter geometry such that merged models collapse into destructive interference while the protected model remains fully functional. Extensive experiments on both vision (ViT-L-14) and language (Llama2, Gemma2, Mistral) models demonstrate that MergeGuard reduces merged model accuracy by up to 90% with less than 1.5% performance loss on the protected model.
comment: Accepted at CVPR 2026, updated
♻ ★ MIMIC: Multimodal Inversion for Model Interpretation and Conceptualization
Vision Language Models (VLMs) encode multimodal inputs over large, complex, and difficult-to-interpret architectures, which limit transparency and trust. We propose a Multimodal Inversion for Model Interpretation and Conceptualization (MIMIC) framework that inverts the internal encodings of VLMs. MIMIC uses a joint VLM-based inversion and a feature alignment objective to account for VLM's autoregressive processing. It additionally includes a triplet of regularizers for spatial alignment, natural image smoothness, and semantic realism. We evaluate MIMIC both quantitatively and qualitatively by inverting visual concepts across a range of free-form VLM outputs of varying length. Reported results include both standard visual quality metrics and semantic text-based metrics. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first model inversion approach addressing visual interpretations of VLM concepts.
comment: Project page: https://anaekin.github.io/MIMIC
♻ ★ ECHOSAT: Estimating Canopy Height Over Space And Time
Jan Pauls, Karsten Schrödter, Sven Ligensa, Martin Schwartz, Berkant Turan, Max Zimmer, Sassan Saatchi, Sebastian Pokutta, Philippe Ciais, Fabian Gieseke
Forest monitoring is critical for climate change mitigation. However, existing global tree height maps provide only static snapshots and do not capture temporal forest dynamics, which are essential for accurate carbon accounting. We introduce ECHOSAT, a global and temporally consistent tree height map at 10 m resolution spanning multiple years. To this end, we resort to multi-sensor satellite data to train a specialized vision transformer model, which performs pixel-level temporal regression. A self-supervised growth loss regularizes the predictions to follow growth curves that are in line with natural tree development, including gradual height increases over time, but also abrupt declines due to forest loss events such as fires. Our experimental evaluation shows that our model improves state-of-the-art accuracies in the context of single-year predictions. We also provide the first global-scale height map that accurately quantifies tree growth and disturbances over time. We expect ECHOSAT to advance global efforts in carbon monitoring and disturbance assessment. The maps can be accessed at https://github.com/ai4forest/echosat.
comment: 19 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables
♻ ★ Don't Mind the Gaps: Implicit Neural Representations for Resolution-Agnostic Retinal OCT Analysis
Routine clinical imaging of the retina using optical coherence tomography (OCT) is performed with large slice spacing, resulting in highly anisotropic images and a sparsely scanned retina. Most learning-based methods circumvent the problems arising from the anisotropy by using 2D approaches rather than performing volumetric analyses. These approaches inherently bear the risk of generating inconsistent results for neighboring B-scans. For example, 2D retinal layer segmentations can have irregular surfaces in 3D. Furthermore, the typically used convolutional neural networks are bound to the resolution of the training data, which prevents their usage for images acquired with a different imaging protocol. Implicit neural representations (INRs) have recently emerged as a tool to store voxelized data as a continuous representation. Using coordinates as input, INRs are resolution-agnostic, which allows them to be applied to anisotropic data. In this paper, we propose two frameworks that make use of this characteristic of INRs for dense 3D analyses of retinal OCT volumes. 1) We perform inter-B-scan interpolation by incorporating additional information from en-face modalities, that help retain relevant structures between B-scans. 2) We create a resolution-agnostic retinal atlas that enables general analysis without strict requirements for the data. Both methods leverage generalizable INRs, improving retinal shape representation through population-based training and allowing predictions for unseen cases. Our resolution-independent frameworks facilitate the analysis of OCT images with large B-scan distances, opening up possibilities for the volumetric evaluation of retinal structures and pathologies.
comment: Accepted for publication at the Journal of Machine Learning for Biomedical Imaging (MELBA) https://melba-journal.org/2026:004
♻ ★ ShinyNeRF: Digitizing Anisotropic Appearance in Neural Radiance Fields
Recent advances in digitization technologies have transformed the preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage. In this vein, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have emerged as a leading technology for 3D digitization, delivering representations with exceptional realism. However, existing methods struggle to accurately model anisotropic specular surfaces, typically observed, for example, on brushed metals. In this work, we introduce ShinyNeRF, a novel framework capable of handling both isotropic and anisotropic reflections. Our method is capable of jointly estimating surface normals, tangents, specular concentration, and anisotropy magnitudes of an Anisotropic Spherical Gaussian (ASG) distribution, by learning an approximation of the outgoing radiance as an encoded mixture of isotropic von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distributions. Experimental results show that ShinyNeRF not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on digitizing anisotropic specular reflections, but also offers plausible physical interpretations and editing of material properties compared to existing methods.
♻ ★ Image Segmentation via Variational Model Based Tailored UNet: A Deep Variational Framework
Traditional image segmentation methods, such as variational models based on partial differential equations (PDEs), offer strong mathematical interpretability and precise boundary modeling, but often suffer from sensitivity to parameter settings and high computational costs. In contrast, deep learning models such as UNet, which are relatively lightweight in parameters, excel in automatic feature extraction but lack theoretical interpretability and require extensive labeled data. To harness the complementary strengths of both paradigms, we propose Variational Model Based Tailored UNet (VM_TUNet), a novel hybrid framework that integrates the fourth-order modified Cahn-Hilliard equation with the deep learning backbone of UNet, which combines the interpretability and edge-preserving properties of variational methods with the adaptive feature learning of neural networks. Specifically, a data-driven operator is introduced to replace manual parameter tuning, and we incorporate the tailored finite point method (TFPM) to enforce high-precision boundary preservation. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that VM_TUNet achieves superior segmentation performance compared to existing approaches, especially for fine boundary delineation.
♻ ★ Towards Highly Transferable Vision-Language Attack via Semantic-Augmented Dynamic Contrastive Interaction CVPR2026
With the rapid advancement and widespread application of vision-language pre-training (VLP) models, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks has become a critical concern. In general, the adversarial examples can typically be designed to exhibit transferable power, attacking not only different models but also across diverse tasks. However, existing attacks on language-vision models mainly rely on static cross-modal interactions and focus solely on disrupting positive image-text pairs, resulting in limited cross-modal disruption and poor transferability. To address this issue, we propose a Semantic-Augmented Dynamic Contrastive Attack (SADCA) that enhances adversarial transferability through progressive and semantically guided perturbation. SADCA progressively disrupts cross-modal alignment through dynamic interactions between adversarial images and texts. This is accomplished by SADCA establishing a contrastive learning mechanism involving adversarial, positive and negative samples, to reinforce the semantic inconsistency of the obtained perturbations. Moreover, we empirically find that input transformations commonly used in traditional transfer-based attacks also benefit VLPs, which motivates a semantic augmentation module that increases the diversity and generalization of adversarial examples. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and models demonstrate that SADCA significantly improves adversarial transferability and consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods. The code is released at https://github.com/LiYuanBoJNU/SADCA.
comment: Accepted by CVPR2026
♻ ★ Multi-Paradigm Collaborative Adversarial Attack Against Multi-Modal Large Language Models CVPR2026
The rapid progress of Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has significantly advanced downstream applications. However, this progress also exposes serious transferable adversarial vulnerabilities. In general, existing adversarial attacks against MLLMs typically rely on surrogate models trained within a single learning paradigm and perform independent optimisation in their respective feature spaces. This straightforward setting naturally restricts the richness of feature representations, delivering limits on the search space and thus impeding the diversity of adversarial perturbations. To address this, we propose a novel Multi-Paradigm Collaborative Attack (MPCAttack) framework to boost the transferability of adversarial examples against MLLMs. In principle, MPCAttack aggregates semantic representations, from both visual images and language texts, to facilitate joint adversarial optimisation on the aggregated features through a Multi-Paradigm Collaborative Optimisation (MPCO) strategy. By performing contrastive matching on multi-paradigm features, MPCO adaptively balances the importance of different paradigm representations and guides the global perturbation optimisation, effectively alleviating the representation bias. Extensive experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of MPCAttack, indicating that our solution consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both targeted and untargeted attacks on open-source and closed-source MLLMs. The code is released at https://github.com/LiYuanBoJNU/MPCAttack.
comment: Accepted by CVPR2026
♻ ★ LaST-VLA: Thinking in Latent Spatio-Temporal Space for Vision-Language-Action in Autonomous Driving
Yuechen Luo, Fang Li, Shaoqing Xu, Yang Ji, Zehan Zhang, Bing Wang, Yuannan Shen, Jianwei Cui, Long Chen, Guang Chen, Hangjun Ye, Zhi-Xin Yang, Fuxi Wen
While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have revolutionized autonomous driving by unifying perception and planning, their reliance on explicit textual Chain-of-Thought (CoT) leads to semantic-perceptual decoupling and perceptual-symbolic conflicts. Recent shifts toward latent reasoning attempt to bypass these bottlenecks by thinking in continuous hidden space. However, without explicit intermediate constraints, standard latent CoT often operates as a physics-agnostic representation. To address this, we propose the Latent Spatio-Temporal VLA (LaST-VLA), a framework shifting the reasoning paradigm from discrete symbolic processing into a physically grounded Latent Spatio-Temporal CoT. By implementing a dual-feature alignment mechanism, we distill geometric constraints from 3D foundation models and dynamic foresight from world models directly into the latent space. Coupled with a progressive SFT training strategy that transitions from feature alignment to trajectory generation, and refined via Reinforcement Learning with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to ensure safety and rule compliance. \method~setting a new record on NAVSIM v1 (91.3 PDMS) and NAVSIM v2 (87.1 EPDMS), while excelling in spatial-temporal reasoning on SURDS and NuDynamics benchmarks.
♻ ★ Generating a Paracosm for Training-Free Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is the task of retrieving a target image from a database using a multimodal query, which consists of a reference image and a modification text. The text specifies how to alter the reference image to form a ''mental image'', based on which CIR should find the target image in the database. The fundamental challenge of CIR is that this ''mental image'' is not physically available and is only implicitly defined by the query. The contemporary literature pursues zero-shot methods and uses a Large Multimodal Model (LMM) to generate a textual description for a given multimodal query, and then employs a Vision-Language Model (VLM) for textual-visual matching to search for the target image. In contrast, we address CIR from first principles by directly generating the ''mental image'' for more accurate matching. Particularly, we prompt an LMM to generate a ''mental image'' for a given multimodal query and propose to use this ''mental image'' to search for the target image. As the ''mental image'' has a synthetic-to-real domain gap with real images, we also generate a synthetic counterpart for each real image in the database to facilitate matching. In this sense, our method uses LMM to construct a ``paracosm'', where it matches the multimodal query and database images. Hence, we call this method Paracosm. Notably, Paracosm is a training-free zero-shot CIR method. It significantly outperforms existing zero-shot methods on challenging benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art performance for zero-shot CIR.
♻ ★ Topologically Stable Hough Transform
We propose an alternative formulation of the well-known Hough transform to detect lines in point clouds. Replacing the discretized voting scheme of the classical Hough transform by a continuous score function, its persistent features in the sense of persistent homology give a set of candidate lines. We also devise and implement an algorithm to efficiently compute these candidate lines.
comment: Extended abstract will be presented at EuroCG'26; 11 pages, 7 figures
♻ ★ GTR-Bench: Evaluating Geo-Temporal Reasoning in Vision-Language Models ICLR 2026
Recently spatial-temporal intelligence of Visual-Language Models (VLMs) has attracted much attention due to its importance for autonomous driving, embodied AI and general AI. Existing spatial-temporal benchmarks mainly focus on egocentric (first-person) perspective reasoning using images/video contexts, or geographic reasoning with graphical context (e.g., maps), thus fail to assess VLMs' geographic spatial-temporal intelligence that requires integrating both images/video and graphical context, which is crucial for real-world scenarios such as traffic management and emergency response. To address the gaps, we introduce Geo-Temporal Reasoning benchmark (GTR-Bench), a novel challenge for geographic temporal reasoning of moving targets in a large-scale camera network. GTR-Bench is more challenging as it requires multiple perspective switches between maps and videos, joint reasoning across multiple videos with non-overlapping fields of view, and inference over spatial-temporal regions that are unobserved by any video context. Evaluations of more than 10 popular VLMs on GTR-Bench show that even the best proprietary model, Gemini-2.5-Pro (34.9\%), significantly lags behind human performance (78.61\%) on geo-temporal reasoning. Moreover, our comprehensive analysis on GTR-Bench reveals three major deficiencies of current models for geo-temporal reasoning. (1) VLMs exhibit imbalanced utilization of spatial and temporal context during reasoning. (2) they show weak temporal forecasting ability, leading to poorer performance on temporally focused tasks. (3) they lack the capability to effectively align and integrate map data with multi-view video inputs. We believe GTR-Bench offers valuable insights and opens up new opportunities for research and applications in spatial-temporal intelligence. Benchmark and code will be released at https://github.com/X-Luffy/GTR-Bench.
comment: ICLR 2026, 31 pages, 20 figures
♻ ★ Generalizing Vision-Language Models with Dedicated Prompt Guidance AAAI26
Fine-tuning large pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) has emerged as a prevalent paradigm for downstream adaptation, yet it faces a critical trade-off between domain specificity and domain generalization (DG) ability. Current methods typically fine-tune a universal model on the entire dataset, which potentially compromises the ability to generalize to unseen domains. To fill this gap, we provide a theoretical understanding of the generalization ability for VLM fine-tuning, which reveals that training multiple parameter-efficient expert models on partitioned source domains leads to better generalization than fine-tuning a universal model. Inspired by this finding, we propose a two-step domain-expert-Guided DG (GuiDG) framework. GuiDG first employs prompt tuning to obtain source domain experts, then introduces a Cross-Modal Attention module to guide the fine-tuning of the vision encoder via adaptive expert integration. To better evaluate few-shot DG, we construct ImageNet-DG from ImageNet and its variants. Extensive experiments on standard DG benchmarks and ImageNet-DG demonstrate that GuiDG improves upon state-of-the-art fine-tuning methods while maintaining efficiency.
comment: Accepted to AAAI26
♻ ★ SegAnyPET: Universal Promptable Segmentation from Positron Emission Tomography Images ICCV 2025
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a powerful molecular imaging tool that plays a crucial role in modern medical diagnostics by visualizing radio-tracer distribution to reveal physiological processes. Accurate organ segmentation from PET images is essential for comprehensive multi-systemic analysis of interactions between different organs and pathologies. Existing segmentation methods are limited by insufficient annotation data and varying levels of annotation, resulting in weak generalization ability and difficulty in clinical application. Recent developments in segmentation foundation models have shown superior versatility across diverse segmentation tasks. Despite the efforts of medical adaptations, these works primarily focus on structural medical images with detailed physiological structural information and exhibit limited generalization performance on molecular PET imaging. In this paper, we collect and construct PETS-5k, the largest PET segmentation dataset to date, comprising 5,731 three-dimensional whole-body PET images and encompassing over 1.3M 2D images. Based on the established dataset, we develop SegAnyPET, a modality-specific 3D foundation model for universal promptable segmentation from PET images. To issue the challenge of discrepant annotation quality, we adopt a cross prompting confident learning (CPCL) strategy with an uncertainty-guided self-rectification process to robustly learn segmentation from high-quality labeled data and low-quality noisy labeled data for promptable segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that SegAnyPET can segment seen and unseen target organs using only one or a few prompt points, outperforming state-of-the-art foundation models and task-specific fully supervised models with higher accuracy and strong generalization ability for universal segmentation.
comment: Accept for ICCV 2025
♻ ★ Pyramidal Patchification Flow for Visual Generation ICLR 2026
Diffusion transformers (DiTs) adopt Patchify, mapping patch representations to token representations through linear projections, to adjust the number of tokens input to DiT blocks and thus the computation cost. Instead of a single patch size for all the timesteps, we introduce a Pyramidal Patchification Flow (PPFlow) approach: Large patch sizes are used for high noise timesteps and small patch sizes for low noise timesteps; Linear projections are learned for each patch size; and Unpatchify is accordingly modified. Unlike Pyramidal Flow, our approach operates over full latent representations other than pyramid representations, and adopts the normal denoising process without requiring the renoising trick. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through two training manners. Training from scratch achieves a $1.6\times$ ($2.0\times$) inference speed over SiT-B/2 for 2-level (3-level) pyramid patchification with slightly lower training FLOPs and similar image generation performance. Training from pretrained normal DiTs achieves even better performance with small training time. The code and checkpoint are at https://github.com/fudan-generative-vision/PPFlow.
comment: ICLR 2026
♻ ★ StyleGallery: Training-free and Semantic-aware Personalized Style Transfer from Arbitrary Image References
Despite the advancements in diffusion-based image style transfer, existing methods are commonly limited by 1) semantic gap: the style reference could miss proper content semantics, causing uncontrollable stylization; 2) reliance on extra constraints (e.g., semantic masks) restricting applicability; 3) rigid feature associations lacking adaptive global-local alignment, failing to balance fine-grained stylization and global content preservation. These limitations, particularly the inability to flexibly leverage style inputs, fundamentally restrict style transfer in terms of personalization, accuracy, and adaptability. To address these, we propose StyleGallery, a training-free and semantic-aware framework that supports arbitrary reference images as input and enables effective personalized customization. It comprises three core stages: semantic region segmentation (adaptive clustering on latent diffusion features to divide regions without extra inputs); clustered region matching (block filtering on extracted features for precise alignment); and style transfer optimization (energy function-guided diffusion sampling with regional style loss to optimize stylization). Experiments on our introduced benchmark demonstrate that StyleGallery outperforms state-of-the-art methods in content structure preservation, regional stylization, interpretability, and personalized customization, particularly when leveraging multiple style references.
comment: 18 pages, 23 figures, Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026
♻ ★ Contrastive Diffusion Guidance for Spatial Inverse Problems
Sattwik Basu, Chaitanya Amballa, Zhongweiyang Xu, Jorge Vančo Sampedro, Srihari Nelakuditi, Romit Roy Choudhury
We consider a class of inverse problems characterized by forward operators that are partially specified, non-smooth, and non-differentiable. Although generative inverse solvers have made significant progress, we find that these forward operators introduce a distinct set of challenges. As a concrete instance, we consider the problem of reconstructing spatial layouts, such as floorplans, from human movement trajectories, where the underlying path-generation process is inherently non-differentiable and only partially known. In such problems, direct likelihood-based guidance becomes unstable, since the underlying path-planning process does not provide reliable gradients. We break-away from existing diffusion-based posterior samplers and reformulate likelihood-based guidance in a smoother embedding space. This embedding space is learned using a contrastive objective to bring compatible trajectory-floorplan pairs close together while pushing mismatched pairs apart. We show that this surrogate likelihood score in the embedding space provides a valid approximation to the true likelihood score, making it possible to steer the denoising process towards the posterior. Across extensive experiments, our model CoGuide produces more consistent reconstructions and is more robust than existing inverse-solvers and guided diffusion. Beyond spatial mapping, we show that our method can be applied more broadly, suggesting a route toward solving generalized blind inverse problems using diffusion models.
♻ ★ SGG-R$^{\rm 3}$: From Next-Token Prediction to End-to-End Unbiased Scene Graph Generation
Scene Graph Generation (SGG) structures visual scenes as graphs of objects and their relations. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced end-to-end SGG, current methods are hindered by both a lack of task-specific structured reasoning and the challenges of sparse, long-tailed relation distributions, resulting in incomplete scene graphs characterized by low recall and biased predictions. To address these issues, we introduce SGG-R$^{\rm 3}$, a structured reasoning framework that integrates task-specific chain-of-thought (CoT)-guided supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) with group sequence policy optimization (GSPO), designed to engage in three sequential stages to achieve end-to-end unbiased scene graph generation. During the SFT phase, we propose a relation augmentation strategy by leveraging an MLLM and refined via embedding similarity filtering to alleviate relation sparsity. Subsequently, a stage-aligned reward scheme optimizes the procedural reasoning during RL. Specifically, we propose a novel dual-granularity reward which integrates fine-grained and coarse-grained relation rewards, simultaneously mitigating the long-tail issue via frequency-based adaptive weighting of predicates and improving relation coverage through semantic clustering. Experiments on two benchmarks show that SGG-R$^{\rm 3}$ achieves superior performance compared to existing methods, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalization of the framework.
♻ ★ ManiVID-3D: Generalizable View-Invariant Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Manipulation via Disentangled 3D Representations
Deploying visual reinforcement learning (RL) policies in real-world manipulation is often hindered by camera viewpoint changes. A policy trained from a fixed front-facing camera may fail when the camera is shifted -- an unavoidable situation in real-world settings where sensor placement is hard to manage appropriately. Existing methods often rely on precise camera calibration or struggle with large perspective changes. To address these limitations, we propose ManiVID-3D, a novel 3D RL architecture designed for robotic manipulation, which learns view-invariant representations through self-supervised disentangled feature learning. The framework incorporates ViewNet, a lightweight yet effective module that automatically aligns point cloud observations from arbitrary viewpoints into a unified spatial coordinate system without the need for extrinsic calibration. Additionally, we develop an efficient GPU-accelerated batch rendering module capable of processing over 5000 frames per second, enabling large-scale training for 3D visual RL at unprecedented speeds. Extensive evaluation across 10 simulated and 5 real-world tasks demonstrates that our approach achieves a 40.6% higher success rate than state-of-the-art methods under viewpoint variations while using 80% fewer parameters. The system's robustness to severe perspective changes and strong sim-to-real performance highlight the effectiveness of learning geometrically consistent representations for scalable robotic manipulation in unstructured environments.
comment: Accepted to RA-L. Project website: https://zheng-joe-lee.github.io/manivid3d/
♻ ★ X-GS: An Extensible Open Framework for Perceiving and Thinking via 3D Gaussian Splatting
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful technique for novel view synthesis, subsequently extending into numerous spatial AI applications. However, most existing 3DGS methods operate in isolation, focusing on specific domains such as pose-free 3DGS, online SLAM, and semantic enrichment. In this paper, we introduce X-GS, an extensible open framework consisting of two major components: the X-GS-Perceiver, which unifies a broad range of 3DGS techniques to enable real-time online SLAM and distill semantic features; and the X-GS-Thinker, which interfaces with downstream multimodal models. In our implementation of the Perceiver, we integrate various 3DGS methods through three novel mechanisms: an online Vector Quantization (VQ) module, a GPU-accelerated grid-sampling scheme, and a highly parallelized pipeline design. The Thinker accommodates vision-language models and utilizes the resulting 3D semantic Gaussians, enabling downstream applications such as object detection, caption generation, and potentially embodied tasks. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the efficiency and newly unlocked multimodal capabilities of the X-GS framework.
♻ ★ RF4D:Neural Radar Fields for Novel View Synthesis in Outdoor Dynamic Scenes
Neural fields (NFs) have achieved remarkable success in scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis. However, existing NF approaches that rely on RGB or LiDAR inputs often struggle under adverse weather conditions, limiting their robustness in real-world outdoor environments such as autonomous driving. In contrast, millimeter-wave radar is inherently resilient to environmental variations, yet its integration with NFs remains largely underexplored. Moreover, outdoor driving scenes frequently involve dynamic objects, making spatiotemporal modeling crucial for temporally consistent novel view synthesis. To address these challenges, we present RF4D, a radar-based neural field framework tailored for novel view synthesis in outdoor dynamic scenes. RF4D explicitly incorporates temporal information into its representation, enabling more accurate modeling of object motion. A dedicated scene flow module further predicts temporal offsets between adjacent frames, enforcing temporal occupancy coherence during dynamic scene reconstruction. Moreover, we propose a radar-specific power rendering formulation grounded in radar sensing physics, improving both synthesis accuracy and interpretability. Extensive experiments on public radar datasets demonstrate that RF4D substantially outperforms existing methods in radar measurement synthesis and occupancy estimation accuracy, with particularly strong gains in dynamic outdoor environments.
♻ ★ CreatiDesign: A Unified Multi-Conditional Diffusion Transformer for Creative Graphic Design
Hui Zhang, Dexiang Hong, Maoke Yang, Yutao Cheng, Zhao Zhang, Jie Shao, Xinglong Wu, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
Graphic design plays a vital role in visual communication across advertising, marketing, and multimedia entertainment. Prior work has explored automated graphic design generation using diffusion models, aiming to streamline creative workflows and democratize design capabilities. However, complex graphic design scenarios require accurately adhering to design intent specified by multiple heterogeneous user-provided elements (\eg images, layouts, and texts), which pose multi-condition control challenges for existing methods. Specifically, previous single-condition control models demonstrate effectiveness only within their specialized domains but fail to generalize to other conditions, while existing multi-condition methods often lack fine-grained control over each sub-condition and compromise overall compositional harmony. To address these limitations, we introduce CreatiDesign, a systematic solution for automated graphic design covering both model architecture and dataset construction. First, we design a unified multi-condition driven architecture that enables flexible and precise integration of heterogeneous design elements with minimal architectural modifications to the base diffusion model. Furthermore, to ensure that each condition precisely controls its designated image region and to avoid interference between conditions, we propose a multimodal attention mask mechanism. Additionally, we develop a fully automated pipeline for constructing graphic design datasets, and introduce a new dataset with 400K samples featuring multi-condition annotations, along with a comprehensive benchmark. Experimental results show that CreatiDesign outperforms existing models by a clear margin in faithfully adhering to user intent.
♻ ★ InvAD: Inversion-based Reconstruction-Free Anomaly Detection with Diffusion Models CVPR2026
Despite the remarkable success, recent reconstruction-based anomaly detection (AD) methods via diffusion modeling still involve fine-grained noise-strength tuning and computationally expensive multi-step denoising, leading to a fundamental tension between fidelity and efficiency. In this paper, we propose InvAD, a novel inversion-based anomaly detection approach ("detection via noising in latent space") that circumvents explicit reconstruction. Importantly, we contend that the limitations in prior reconstruction-based methods originate from the prevailing "detection via denoising in RGB space" paradigm. To address this, we model AD under a reconstruction-free formulation, which directly infers the final latent variable corresponding to the input image via DDIM inversion, and then measures the deviation based on the known prior distribution for anomaly scoring. Specifically, in approximating the original probability flow ODE using the Euler method, we enforce only a few inversion steps to noise the clean image to pursue inference efficiency. As the added noise is adaptively derived with the learned diffusion model, the original features for the clean testing image can still be leveraged to yield high detection accuracy. We perform extensive experiments and detailed analyses across four widely used industrial and medical AD benchmarks under the unsupervised unified setting to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, achieving state-of-the-art AD performance and approximately 2x inference-time speedup without diffusion distillation.
comment: Accepted to CVPR2026. Project page: https://invad-project.com
♻ ★ The Orthogonal Vulnerabilities of Generative AI Watermarks: A Comparative Empirical Benchmark of Spatial and Latent Provenance
As open-weights generative AI rapidly proliferates, the ability to synthesize hyper-realistic media has introduced profound challenges to digital trust. Automated disinformation and AI-generated imagery have made robust digital provenance a critical cybersecurity imperative. Currently, state-of-the-art invisible watermarks operate within one of two primary mathematical manifolds: the spatial domain (post-generation pixel embedding) or the latent domain (pre-generation frequency embedding). While existing literature frequently evaluates these models against isolated, classical distortions, there is a critical lack of rigorous, comparative benchmarking against modern generative AI editing tools. In this study, we empirically evaluate two leading representative paradigms, RivaGAN (Spatial) and Tree-Ring (Latent), utilizing an automated Attack Simulation Engine across 30 intensity intervals of geometric and generative perturbations. We formalize an "Adversarial Evasion Region" (AER) framework to measure cryptographic degradation against semantic visual retention (OpenCLIP > 75.0). Our statistical analysis ($n=100$ per interval, $MOE = \pm 3.92\%$) reveals that these domains possess mutually exclusive, mathematically orthogonal vulnerabilities. Spatial watermarks experience severe cryptographic degradation under algorithmic pixel-rewriting (exhibiting a 67.47% AER evasion rate under Img2Img translation), whereas latent watermarks exhibit profound fragility against geometric misalignment (yielding a 43.20% AER evasion rate under static cropping). By proving that single-domain watermarking is fundamentally insufficient against modern adversarial toolsets, this research exposes a systemic vulnerability in current digital provenance standards and establishes the foundational exigence for future multi-domain cryptographic architectures.
comment: 10 pages, 4 figures
♻ ★ Diffusion Blend: Inference-Time Multi-Preference Alignment for Diffusion Models ICLR 2026
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been used recently to align diffusion models with downstream objectives such as aesthetic quality and text-image consistency by fine-tuning them to maximize a single reward function under a fixed KL regularization. However, this approach is inherently restrictive in practice, where alignment must balance multiple, often conflicting objectives. Moreover, user preferences vary across prompts, individuals, and deployment contexts, with varying tolerances for deviation from a pre-trained base model. We address the problem of inference-time multi-preference alignment: given a set of basis reward functions and a reference KL regularization strength, can we design a fine-tuning procedure so that, at inference time, it can generate images aligned with any user-specified linear combination of rewards and regularization, without requiring additional fine-tuning? We propose Diffusion Blend, a novel approach to solve inference-time multi-preference alignment by blending backward diffusion processes associated with fine-tuned models, and we instantiate this approach with two algorithms: DB-MPA for multi-reward alignment and DB-KLA for KL regularization control. Extensive experiments show that Diffusion Blend algorithms consistently outperform relevant baselines and closely match or exceed the performance of individually fine-tuned models, enabling efficient, user-driven alignment at inference-time. The code is available at https://github.com/bluewoods127/DB-2025.
comment: Accepted at ICLR 2026
♻ ★ DRIFT: Dual-Representation Inter-Fusion Transformer for Automated Driving Perception with 4D Radar Point Clouds
4D radars, which provide 3D point cloud data along with Doppler velocity, are attractive components of modern automated driving systems due to their low cost and robustness under adverse weather conditions. However, they provide a significantly lower point cloud density than LiDAR sensors. This makes it important to exploit not only local but also global contextual scene information. This paper proposes DRIFT, a model that effectively captures and fuses both local and global contexts through a dual-path architecture. The model incorporates a point path to aggregate fine-grained local features and a pillar path to encode coarse-grained global features. These two parallel paths are intertwined via novel feature-sharing layers at multiple stages, enabling full utilization of both representations. DRIFT is evaluated on the widely used View-of-Delft (VoD) dataset and a proprietary internal dataset. It outperforms the baselines on the tasks of object detection and/or free road estimation. For example, DRIFT achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 52.6% (compared to, say, 45.4% of CenterPoint) on the VoD dataset.
♻ ★ GeoDiff4D: Geometry-Aware Diffusion for 4D Head Avatar Reconstruction
Reconstructing photorealistic and animatable 4D head avatars from a single portrait image remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. While diffusion models have enabled remarkable progress in image and video generation for avatar reconstruction, existing methods primarily rely on 2D priors and struggle to achieve consistent 3D geometry. We propose a novel framework that leverages geometry-aware diffusion to learn strong geometry priors for high-fidelity head avatar reconstruction. Our approach jointly synthesizes portrait images and corresponding surface normals, while a pose-free expression encoder captures implicit expression representations. Both synthesized images and expression latents are incorporated into 3D Gaussian-based avatars, enabling photorealistic rendering with accurate geometry. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in visual quality, expression fidelity, and cross-identity generalization, while supporting real-time rendering.
comment: 17 pages
♻ ★ Beyond Description: Cognitively Benchmarking Fine-Grained Action for Embodied Agents
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show promising results as decision-making engines for embodied agents operating in complex, physical environments. However, existing benchmarks often prioritize high-level planning or spatial reasoning, leaving the fine-grained action intelligence required for embodied physical interaction underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce CFG-Bench, a new benchmark designed to systematically evaluate this crucial capability. CFG-Bench consists of 1,368 curated videos paired with 19,562 question-answer pairs spanning three evaluation paradigms targeting four cognitive abilities: 1) Physical Interaction, 2) Temporal-Causal Relation, 3) Intentional Understanding, and 4) Evaluative Judgment. Together, these dimensions provide a systematic framework for assessing a model's ability to translate visual observations into actionable knowledge, moving beyond mere surface-level recognition. Our comprehensive evaluation on CFG-Bench reveals that leading MLLMs struggle to produce detailed instructions for physical interactions and exhibit profound limitations in the higher-order reasoning of intention and evaluation. Moreover, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on our data demonstrates that teaching an MLLMs to articulate fine-grained actions directly translates to significant performance gains on established embodied benchmarks. Our analysis highlights these limitations and offers insights for developing more capable and grounded embodied agents. Project page: https://cfg-bench.github.io/
♻ ★ AceVFI: A Comprehensive Survey of Advances in Video Frame Interpolation
Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) is a core low-level vision task that synthesizes intermediate frames between existing ones while ensuring spatial and temporal coherence. Over the past decades, VFI methodologies have evolved from classical motion compensation-based approach to a wide spectrum of deep learning-based approaches, including kernel-, flow-, hybrid-, phase-, GAN-, Transformer-, Mamba-, and most recently, diffusion-based models. We introduce AceVFI, a comprehensive and up-to-date review of the VFI field, covering over 250 representative papers. We systematically categorize VFI methods based on their core design principles and architectural characteristics. Further, we classify them into two major learning paradigms: Center-Time Frame Interpolation (CTFI) and Arbitrary-Time Frame Interpolation (ATFI). We analyze key challenges in VFI, including large motion, occlusion, lighting variation, and non-linear motion. In addition, we review standard datasets, loss functions, evaluation metrics. We also explore VFI applications in other domains and highlight future research directions. This survey aims to serve as a valuable reference for researchers and practitioners seeking a thorough understanding of the modern VFI landscape.
comment: Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT). Please visit our project page at https://github.com/CMLab-Korea/Awesome-Video-Frame-Interpolation
♻ ★ Historical Consensus: Preventing Posterior Collapse via Iterative Selection of Gaussian Mixture Priors
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) frequently suffer from posterior collapse, where latent variables become uninformative and the approximate posterior degenerates to the prior. Recent work has characterized this phenomenon as a phase transition governed by the spectral properties of the data covariance matrix. In this paper, we propose a fundamentally different approach: instead of avoiding collapse through architectural constraints or hyperparameter tuning, we eliminate the possibility of collapse altogether by leveraging the multiplicity of Gaussian mixture model (GMM) clusterings. We introduce Historical Consensus Training, an iterative selection procedure that progressively refines a set of candidate GMM priors through alternating optimization and selection. The key insight is that models trained to satisfy multiple distinct clustering constraints develop a historical barrier -- a region in parameter space that remains stable even when subsequently trained with a single objective. We prove that this barrier excludes the collapsed solution, and demonstrate through extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets that our method achieves non-collapsed representations regardless of decoder variance or regularization strength. Our approach requires no explicit stability conditions (e.g., $σ^{\prime 2} < λ_{\max}$) and works with arbitrary neural architectures. The code is available at https://github.com/tsegoochang/historical-consensus-vae.
comment: 15 pages, 6 figures
♻ ★ IDSelect: A RL-Based Cost-Aware Selection Agent for Video-based Multi-Modal Person Recognition
Video-based person recognition achieves robust identification by integrating face, body, and gait. However, current systems waste computational resources by processing all modalities with fixed heavyweight ensembles regardless of input complexity. To address these limitations, we propose IDSelect, a reinforcement learning-based cost-aware selector that chooses one pre-trained model per modality per-sequence to optimize the accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Our key insight is that an input-conditioned selector can discover complementary model choices that surpass fixed ensembles while using substantially fewer resources. IDSelect trains a lightweight agent end-to-end using actor-critic reinforcement learning with budget-aware optimization. The reward balances recognition accuracy with computational cost, while entropy regularization prevents premature convergence. At inference, the policy selects the most probable model per modality and fuses modality-specific similarities for the final score. Extensive experiments on challenging video-based datasets demonstrate IDSelect's superior efficiency: on CCVID, it achieves 95.9% Rank-1 accuracy with 92.4% less computation than strong baselines while improving accuracy by 1.8%; on MEVID, it reduces computation by 41.3% while maintaining competitive performance.
♻ ★ KnowVal: A Knowledge-Augmented and Value-Guided Autonomous Driving System CVPR 2026
Visual-language reasoning, driving knowledge, and value alignment are essential for advanced autonomous driving systems. However, existing approaches largely rely on data-driven learning, making it difficult to capture the complex logic underlying decision-making through imitation or limited reinforcement rewards. To address this, we propose KnowVal, a new autonomous driving system that enables visual-language reasoning through the synergistic integration of open-world perception and knowledge retrieval. Specifically, we construct a comprehensive driving knowledge graph that encodes traffic laws, defensive driving principles, and ethical norms, complemented by an efficient LLM-based retrieval mechanism tailored for driving scenarios. Furthermore, we develop a human-preference dataset and train a Value Model to guide interpretable, value-aligned trajectory assessment. Experimental results show that our method substantially improves planning performance while remaining compatible with existing architectures. Notably, KnowVal achieves the lowest collision rate on nuScenes and state-of-the-art results on Bench2Drive and NVISIM.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026
♻ ★ 3DGEER: 3D Gaussian Rendering Made Exact and Efficient for Generic Cameras ICLR 2026
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieves an appealing balance between rendering quality and efficiency, but relies on approximating 3D Gaussians as 2D projections--an assumption that degrades accuracy, especially under generic large field-of-view (FoV) cameras. Despite recent extensions, no prior work has simultaneously achieved both projective exactness and real-time efficiency for general cameras. We introduce 3DGEER, a geometrically exact and efficient Gaussian rendering framework. From first principles, we derive a closed-form expression for integrating Gaussian density along a ray, enabling precise forward rendering and differentiable optimization under arbitrary camera models. To retain efficiency, we propose the Particle Bounding Frustum (PBF), which provides tight ray-Gaussian association without BVH traversal, and the Bipolar Equiangular Projection (BEAP), which unifies FoV representations, accelerates association, and improves reconstruction quality. Experiments on both pinhole and fisheye datasets show that 3DGEER outperforms prior methods across all metrics, runs 5x faster than existing projective exact ray-based baselines, and generalizes to wider FoVs unseen during training--establishing a new state of the art in real-time radiance field rendering.
comment: Published at ICLR 2026. Code is available at: https://github.com/boschresearch/3dgeer
♻ ★ Less is More: Decoder-Free Masked Modeling for Efficient Skeleton Representation Learning
The landscape of skeleton-based action representation learning has evolved from Contrastive Learning (CL) to Masked Auto-Encoder (MAE) architectures. However, each paradigm faces inherent limitations: CL often overlooks fine-grained local details, while MAE is burdened by computationally heavy decoders. Moreover, MAE suffers from severe computational asymmetry -- benefiting from efficient masking during pre-training but requiring exhaustive full-sequence processing for downstream tasks. To resolve these bottlenecks, we propose SLiM (Skeleton Less is More), a novel unified framework that harmonizes masked modeling with contrastive learning via a shared encoder. By eschewing the reconstruction decoder, SLiM not only eliminates computational redundancy but also compels the encoder to capture discriminative features directly. SLiM is the first framework with decoder-free masked modeling of representative learning. Crucially, to prevent trivial reconstruction arising from high skeletal-temporal correlation, we introduce semantic tube masking, alongside skeletal-aware augmentations designed to ensure anatomical consistency across diverse temporal granularities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SLiM consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across all downstream protocols. Notably, our method delivers this superior accuracy with exceptional efficiency, reducing inference computational cost by 7.89x compared to existing MAE methods.
comment: Please visit our project page at https://kaist-viclab.github.io/SLiM_site/
♻ ★ BLOCK: An Open-Source Bi-Stage MLLM Character-to-Skin Pipeline for Minecraft
We present \textbf{BLOCK}, an open-source bi-stage character-to-skin pipeline that generates pixel-perfect Minecraft skins from arbitrary character concepts. BLOCK decomposes the problem into (i) a \textbf{3D preview synthesis stage} driven by a large multimodal model (MLLM) with a carefully designed prompt-and-reference template, producing a consistent dual-panel (front/back) oblique-view Minecraft-style preview; and (ii) a \textbf{skin decoding stage} based on a fine-tuned FLUX.2 model that translates the preview into a skin atlas image. We further propose \textbf{EvolveLoRA}, a progressive LoRA curriculum (text-to-image $\rightarrow$ image-to-image $\rightarrow$ preview-to-skin) that initializes each phase from the previous adapter to improve stability and efficiency. BLOCK is released with all prompt templates and fine-tuned weights to support reproducible character-to-skin generation.
♻ ★ Efficient Construction of Implicit Surface Models From a Single Image for Motion Generation ICRA
Implicit representations have been widely applied in robotics for obstacle avoidance and path planning. In this paper, we explore the problem of constructing an implicit distance representation from a single image. Past methods for implicit surface reconstruction, such as NeuS and its variants generally require a large set of multi-view images as input, and require long training times. In this work, we propose Fast Image-to-Neural Surface (FINS), a lightweight framework that can reconstruct high-fidelity surfaces and SDF fields based on a single or a small set of images. FINS integrates a multi-resolution hash grid encoder with lightweight geometry and color heads, making the training via an approximate second-order optimizer highly efficient and capable of converging within a few seconds. Additionally, we achieve the construction of a neural surface requiring only a single RGB image, by leveraging pre-trained foundation models to estimate the geometry inherent in the image. Our experiments demonstrate that under the same conditions, our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both convergence speed and accuracy on surface reconstruction and SDF field estimation. Moreover, we demonstrate the applicability of FINS for robot surface following tasks and show its scalability to a variety of benchmark datasets. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/waynechu1109/FINS.
comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
♻ ★ NeuralOS: Towards Simulating Operating Systems via Neural Generative Models ICLR 2026
We introduce NeuralOS, a neural framework that simulates graphical user interfaces (GUIs) of operating systems by directly predicting screen frames in response to user inputs such as mouse movements, clicks, and keyboard events. NeuralOS combines a recurrent neural network (RNN), which tracks computer state, with a diffusion-based neural renderer that generates screen images. The model is trained on a dataset of Ubuntu XFCE recordings, which include both randomly generated interactions and realistic interactions produced by AI agents. Experiments show that NeuralOS successfully renders realistic GUI sequences, accurately captures mouse interactions, and reliably predicts state transitions like application launches. Beyond reproducing existing systems, NeuralOS shows that synthesized training data can teach the model to simulate applications that were never installed, as illustrated by a Doom application, and suggests a path toward learning user interfaces purely from synthetic demonstrations.
comment: ICLR 2026
♻ ★ LoC-Path: Learning to Compress for Pathology Multimodal Large Language Models
Whole Slide Image (WSI) MLLMs are difficult to build and deploy because gigapixel slides induce thousands of visual tokens, while only a small fraction of regions is diagnostically relevant. Existing slide-level pathology MLLMs typically combine heavy slide-level encoders with long visual prefixes, making end-to-end slide-level development and deployment expensive under limited computational resources. We revisit this regime and show that WSI tile features are highly redundant at both global and local scales, while task-relevant evidence is sparse and query-dependent. We therefore introduce LoC-Path, a resource-efficient slide-level MLLM that compresses before fusion. LoC-Path uses a Sparse Token Merger (STM) and an MAE-pretrained resampler to replace expensive slide-level encoding with a compact latent interface, then uses a Token Importance Scorer (TIS) to select the most relevant latents and a Cross-Attention Routing Adapter (CARA) to fuse them into a few LLM decoder layers. This design lowers both multimodal tuning cost and inference-time latency/memory by avoiding heavy slide-level encoding and long visual prefixes. Extensive experiments show that LoC-Path remains competitive with prior slide-level MLLMs while making end-to-end development and deployment more practical under limited computational resources.
comment: Code will be released soon
♻ ★ LLMTrack: Semantic Multi-Object Tracking with Multi-modal Large Language Models
Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) is evolving from geometric localization to Semantic MOT (SMOT) to answer complex relational queries, yet progress is hindered by semantic data scarcity and a structural disconnect between tracking architectures and Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). To address this, we introduce Grand-SMOT, a large-scale, open-world benchmark providing high-density, dual-stream narratives that comprehensively decouple individual behaviors from environmental contexts. Furthermore, we propose LLMTrack, the first framework to seamlessly integrate MLLMs into the SMOT task. LLMTrack establishes a Macro-Understanding-First paradigm, utilizing a novel Spatio-Temporal Fusion Module to align discrete geometric trajectories with continuous semantic features, effectively suppressing temporal hallucinations during online processing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LLMTrack achieves state-of-the-art geometric tracking performance while delivering a qualitative leap in dynamic semantic reasoning. Notably, our analysis reveals that high-quality semantic narratives empower the language model to deduce complex social interactions naturally, demonstrating that direct cognitive reasoning is more effective than cumbersome explicit visual modeling. Ultimately, our contributions bridge the gap between perceptual tracking and cognitive reasoning, establishing a robust new foundation for comprehensive video understanding and intelligent narrative generation.
♻ ★ ReSplat: Learning Recurrent Gaussian Splatting
While existing feed-forward Gaussian splatting models offer computational efficiency and can generalize to sparse view settings, their performance is fundamentally constrained by relying on a single forward pass for inference. We propose ReSplat, a feed-forward recurrent Gaussian splatting model that iteratively refines 3D Gaussians without explicitly computing gradients. Our key insight is that the Gaussian splatting rendering error serves as a rich feedback signal, guiding the recurrent network to learn effective Gaussian updates. This feedback signal naturally adapts to unseen data distributions at test time, enabling robust generalization across datasets, view counts, and image resolutions. To initialize the recurrent process, we introduce a compact reconstruction model that operates in a $16 \times$ subsampled space, producing $16 \times$ fewer Gaussians than previous per-pixel Gaussian models. This substantially reduces computational overhead and allows for efficient Gaussian updates. Extensive experiments across varying number of input views (2, 8, 16, 32), resolutions ($256 \times 256$ to $540 \times 960$), and datasets (DL3DV, RealEstate10K, and ACID) demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance while significantly reducing the number of Gaussians and improving the rendering speed. Our project page is at https://haofeixu.github.io/resplat/.
comment: Project page: https://haofeixu.github.io/resplat/ Code: https://github.com/cvg/resplat
♻ ★ Personalized Feature Translation for Expression Recognition: An Efficient Source-Free Domain Adaptation Method
Masoumeh Sharafi, Soufiane Belharbi, Muhammad Osama Zeeshan, Houssem Ben Salem, Ali Etemad, Alessandro Lameiras Koerich, Marco Pedersoli, Simon Bacon, Eric Granger
Facial expression recognition (FER) models are widely used in video-based affective computing applications, such as human-computer interaction and healthcare monitoring. However, deep FER models often struggle with subtle expressions and high inter-subject variability, limiting performance in real-world settings. Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) has been proposed to personalize a pretrained source model using only unlabeled target data, avoiding privacy, storage, and transmission constraints. We address a particularly challenging setting where source data is unavailable and the target data contains only neutral expressions. Existing SFDA methods are not designed for adaptation from a single target class, while generating non-neutral facial images is often unstable and expensive. To address this, we propose Source-Free Domain Adaptation with Personalized Feature Translation (SFDA-PFT), a lightweight latent-space approach. A translator is first pretrained on source data to map subject-specific style features between subjects while preserving expression information through expression-consistency and style-aware objectives. It is then adapted to neutral target data without source data or image synthesis. By operating in the latent space, SFDA-PFT avoids noisy facial image generation, reduces computation, and learns discriminative embeddings for classification. Experiments on BioVid, StressID, BAH, and Aff-Wild2 show that SFDA-PFT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art SFDA methods in privacy-sensitive FER scenarios. Our code is publicly available at: \href{https://github.com/MasoumehSharafi/SFDA-PFT}{GitHub}.
♻ ★ Estimating Canopy Height at Scale ICML
Jan Pauls, Max Zimmer, Una M. Kelly, Martin Schwartz, Sassan Saatchi, Philippe Ciais, Sebastian Pokutta, Martin Brandt, Fabian Gieseke
We propose a framework for global-scale canopy height estimation based on satellite data. Our model leverages advanced data preprocessing techniques, resorts to a novel loss function designed to counter geolocation inaccuracies inherent in the ground-truth height measurements, and employs data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission to effectively filter out erroneous labels in mountainous regions, enhancing the reliability of our predictions in those areas. A comparison between predictions and ground-truth labels yields an MAE / RMSE of 2.43 / 4.73 (meters) overall and 4.45 / 6.72 (meters) for trees taller than five meters, which depicts a substantial improvement compared to existing global-scale maps. The resulting height map as well as the underlying framework will facilitate and enhance ecological analyses at a global scale, including, but not limited to, large-scale forest and biomass monitoring.
comment: ICML Camera-Ready, 17 pages, 14 figures, 7 tables
♻ ★ Lifelong Imitation Learning with Multimodal Latent Replay and Incremental Adjustment CVPR 2026
We introduce a lifelong imitation learning framework that enables continual policy refinement across sequential tasks under realistic memory and data constraints. Our approach departs from conventional experience replay by operating entirely in a multimodal latent space, where compact representations of visual, linguistic, and robot's state information are stored and reused to support future learning. To further stabilize adaptation, we introduce an incremental feature adjustment mechanism that regularizes the evolution of task embeddings through an angular margin constraint, preserving inter-task distinctiveness. Our method establishes a new state of the art in the LIBERO benchmarks, achieving 10-17 point gains in AUC and up to 65% less forgetting compared to previous leading methods. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of each component, showing consistent gains over alternative strategies. The code is available at: https://github.com/yfqi/lifelong_mlr_ifa.
comment: Accepted to CVPR 2026