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Wednesday 31 December

Computer Vision

EchoFoley: Event-Centric Hierarchical Control for Video Grounded Creative Sound Generation

Bingxuan Li, Yiming Cui, Yicheng He et al. (+4 more)

Sound effects build an essential layer of multimodal storytelling, shaping the emotional atmosphere and the narrative semantics of videos. Despite recent advancement in video-text-to-audio (VT2A), the current formulation faces three key limitations: First, an imbalance between visual and textual conditioning that leads to visual dominance; Second, the absence of a concrete definition for fine-grained controllable generation; Third, weak instruction understanding and following, as existing datasets rely on brief categorical tags. To address these limitations, we introduce EchoFoley, a new task designed for video-grounded sound generation with both event level local control and hierarchical semantic control. Our symbolic representation for sounding events specifies when, what, and how each sound is produced within a video or instruction, enabling fine-grained controls like sound generation, insertion, and editing. To support this task, we construct EchoFoley-6k, a large-scale, expert-curated benchmark containing over 6,000 video-instruction-annotation triplets. Building upon this foundation, we propose EchoVidia a sounding-event-centric agentic generation framework with slow-fast thinking strategy. Experiments show that EchoVidia surpasses recent VT2A models by 40.7% in controllability and 12.5% in perceptual quality.
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All authors Bingxuan Li, Yiming Cui, Yicheng He, Yiwei Wang, Shu Zhang, Longyin Wen, Yulei Niu

Computer Vision

FlowBlending: Stage-Aware Multi-Model Sampling for Fast and High-Fidelity Video Generation

Jibin Song, Mingi Kwon, Jaeseok Jeong et al. (+1 more)

In this work, we show that the impact of model capacity varies across timesteps: it is crucial for the early and late stages but largely negligible during the intermediate stage. Accordingly, we propose FlowBlending, a stage-aware multi-model sampling strategy that employs a large model and a small model at capacity-sensitive stages and intermediate stages, respectively. We further introduce simple criteria to choose stage boundaries and provide a velocity-divergence analysis as an effective proxy for identifying capacity-sensitive regions. Across LTX-Video (2B/13B) and WAN 2.1 (1.3B/14B), FlowBlending achieves up to 1.65x faster inference with 57.35% fewer FLOPs, while maintaining the visual fidelity, temporal coherence, and semantic alignment of the large models. FlowBlending is also compatible with existing sampling-acceleration techniques, enabling up to 2x additional speedup. Project page is available at: https://jibin86.github.io/flowblending_project_page.
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All authors Jibin Song, Mingi Kwon, Jaeseok Jeong, Youngjung Uh

Computer Vision

Evolving, Not Training: Zero-Shot Reasoning Segmentation via Evolutionary Prompting

Kai Ye, Xiaotong You, Jianghang Lin et al. (+3 more)

Reasoning Segmentation requires models to interpret complex, context-dependent linguistic queries to achieve pixel-level localization. Current dominant approaches rely heavily on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, SFT suffers from catastrophic forgetting and domain dependency, while RL is often hindered by training instability and rigid reliance on predefined reward functions. Although recent training-free methods circumvent these training burdens, they are fundamentally limited by a static inference paradigm. These methods typically rely on a single-pass "generate-then-segment" chain, which suffers from insufficient reasoning depth and lacks the capability to self-correct linguistic hallucinations or spatial misinterpretations. In this paper, we challenge these limitations and propose EVOL-SAM3, a novel zero-shot framework that reformulates reasoning segmentation as an inference-time evolutionary search process. Instead of relying on a fixed prompt, EVOL-SAM3 maintains a population of prompt hypotheses and iteratively refines them through a "Generate-Evaluate-Evolve" loop. We introduce a Visual Arena to assess prompt fitness via reference-free pairwise tournaments, and a Semantic Mutation operator to inject diversity and correct semantic errors. Furthermore, a Heterogeneous Arena module integrates geometric priors with semantic reasoning to ensure robust final selection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EVOL-SAM3 not only substantially outperforms static baselines but also significantly surpasses fully supervised state-of-the-art methods on the challenging ReasonSeg benchmark in a zero-shot setting. The code is available at https://github.com/AHideoKuzeA/Evol-SAM3.
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All authors Kai Ye, Xiaotong You, Jianghang Lin, Jiayi Ji, Pingyang Dai, Liujuan Cao

Computer Vision

Renormalization Group Guided Tensor Network Structure Search

Maolin Wang, Bowen Yu, Sheng Zhang et al. (+8 more)

Tensor network structure search (TN-SS) aims to automatically discover optimal network topologies and rank configurations for efficient tensor decomposition in high-dimensional data representation. Despite recent advances, existing TN-SS methods face significant limitations in computational tractability, structure adaptivity, and optimization robustness across diverse tensor characteristics. They struggle with three key challenges: single-scale optimization missing multi-scale structures, discrete search spaces hindering smooth structure evolution, and separated structure-parameter optimization causing computational inefficiency. We propose RGTN (Renormalization Group guided Tensor Network search), a physics-inspired framework transforming TN-SS via multi-scale renormalization group flows. Unlike fixed-scale discrete search methods, RGTN uses dynamic scale-transformation for continuous structure evolution across resolutions. Its core innovation includes learnable edge gates for optimization-stage topology modification and intelligent proposals based on physical quantities like node tension measuring local stress and edge information flow quantifying connectivity importance. Starting from low-complexity coarse scales and refining to finer ones, RGTN finds compact structures while escaping local minima via scale-induced perturbations. Extensive experiments on light field data, high-order synthetic tensors, and video completion tasks show RGTN achieves state-of-the-art compression ratios and runs 4-600$\times$ faster than existing methods, validating the effectiveness of our physics-inspired approach.
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All authors Maolin Wang, Bowen Yu, Sheng Zhang, Linjie Mi, Wanyu Wang, Yiqi Wang, Pengyue Jia, Xuetao Wei, Zenglin Xu, Ruocheng Guo, Xiangyu Zhao

Computer Vision

From Sequential to Spatial: Reordering Autoregression for Efficient Visual Generation

Siyang Wang, Hanting Li, Wei Li et al. (+3 more)

Inspired by the remarkable success of autoregressive models in language modeling, this paradigm has been widely adopted in visual generation. However, the sequential token-by-token decoding mechanism inherent in traditional autoregressive models leads to low inference efficiency.In this paper, we propose RadAR, an efficient and parallelizable framework designed to accelerate autoregressive visual generation while preserving its representational capacity. Our approach is motivated by the observation that visual tokens exhibit strong local dependencies and spatial correlations with their neighbors–a property not fully exploited in standard raster-scan decoding orders. Specifically, we organize the generation process around a radial topology: an initial token is selected as the starting point, and all other tokens are systematically grouped into multiple concentric rings according to their spatial distances from this center. Generation then proceeds in a ring-wise manner, from inner to outer regions, enabling the parallel prediction of all tokens within the same ring. This design not only preserves the structural locality and spatial coherence of visual scenes but also substantially increases parallelization. Furthermore, to address the risk of inconsistent predictions arising from simultaneous token generation with limited context, we introduce a nested attention mechanism. This mechanism dynamically refines implausible outputs during the forward pass, thereby mitigating error accumulation and preventing model collapse. By integrating radial parallel prediction with dynamic output correction, RadAR significantly improves generation efficiency.
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All authors Siyang Wang, Hanting Li, Wei Li, Jie Hu, Xinghao Chen, Feng Zhao

Computer Vision

FireRescue: A UAV-Based Dataset and Enhanced YOLO Model for Object Detection in Fire Rescue Scenes

Qingyu Xu, Runtong Zhang, Zihuan Qiu et al. (+1 more)

Object detection in fire rescue scenarios is importance for command and decision-making in firefighting operations. However, existing research still suffers from two main limitations. First, current work predominantly focuses on environments such as mountainous or forest areas, while paying insufficient attention to urban rescue scenes, which are more frequent and structurally complex. Second, existing detection systems include a limited number of classes, such as flames and smoke, and lack a comprehensive system covering key targets crucial for command decisions, such as fire trucks and firefighters. To address the above issues, this paper first constructs a new dataset named "FireRescue" for rescue command, which covers multiple rescue scenarios, including urban, mountainous, forest, and water areas, and contains eight key categories such as fire trucks and firefighters, with a total of 15,980 images and 32,000 bounding boxes. Secondly, to tackle the problems of inter-class confusion and missed detection of small targets caused by chaotic scenes, diverse targets, and long-distance shooting, this paper proposes an improved model named FRS-YOLO. On the one hand, the model introduces a plug-and-play multidi-mensional collaborative enhancement attention module, which enhances the discriminative representation of easily confused categories (e.g., fire trucks vs. ordinary trucks) through cross-dimensional feature interaction. On the other hand, it integrates a dynamic feature sampler to strengthen high-response foreground features, thereby mitigating the effects of smoke occlusion and background interference. Experimental results demonstrate that object detection in fire rescue scenarios is highly challenging, and the proposed method effectively improves the detection performance of YOLO series models in this context.
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All authors Qingyu Xu, Runtong Zhang, Zihuan Qiu, Fanman Meng

Computer Vision

LLHA-Net: A Hierarchical Attention Network for Two-View Correspondence Learning

Shuyuan Lin, Yu Guo, Xiao Chen et al. (+3 more)

Establishing the correct correspondence of feature points is a fundamental task in computer vision. However, the presence of numerous outliers among the feature points can significantly affect the matching results, reducing the accuracy and robustness of the process. Furthermore, a challenge arises when dealing with a large proportion of outliers: how to ensure the extraction of high-quality information while reducing errors caused by negative samples. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel method called Layer-by-Layer Hierarchical Attention Network, which enhances the precision of feature point matching in computer vision by addressing the issue of outliers. Our method incorporates stage fusion, hierarchical extraction, and an attention mechanism to improve the network's representation capability by emphasizing the rich semantic information of feature points. Specifically, we introduce a layer-by-layer channel fusion module, which preserves the feature semantic information from each stage and achieves overall fusion, thereby enhancing the representation capability of the feature points. Additionally, we design a hierarchical attention module that adaptively captures and fuses global perception and structural semantic information using an attention mechanism. Finally, we propose two architectures to extract and integrate features, thereby improving the adaptability of our network. We conduct experiments on two public datasets, namely YFCC100M and SUN3D, and the results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art techniques in both outlier removal and camera pose estimation. Source code is available at http://www.linshuyuan.com.
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All authors Shuyuan Lin, Yu Guo, Xiao Chen, Yanjie Liang, Guobao Xiao, Feiran Huang

Computer Vision

MoniRefer: A Real-world Large-scale Multi-modal Dataset based on Roadside Infrastructure for 3D Visual Grounding

Panquan Yang, Junfei Huang, Zongzhangbao Yin et al. (+9 more)

3D visual grounding aims to localize the object in 3D point cloud scenes that semantically corresponds to given natural language sentences. It is very critical for roadside infrastructure system to interpret natural languages and localize relevant target objects in complex traffic environments. However, most existing datasets and approaches for 3D visual grounding focus on the indoor and outdoor driving scenes, outdoor monitoring scenarios remain unexplored due to scarcity of paired point cloud-text data captured by roadside infrastructure sensors. In this paper, we introduce a novel task of 3D Visual Grounding for Outdoor Monitoring Scenarios, which enables infrastructure-level understanding of traffic scenes beyond the ego-vehicle perspective. To support this task, we construct MoniRefer, the first real-world large-scale multi-modal dataset for roadside-level 3D visual grounding. The dataset consists of about 136,018 objects with 411,128 natural language expressions collected from multiple complex traffic intersections in the real-world environments. To ensure the quality and accuracy of the dataset, we manually verified all linguistic descriptions and 3D labels for objects. Additionally, we also propose a new end-to-end method, named Moni3DVG, which utilizes the rich appearance information provided by images and geometry and optical information from point cloud for multi-modal feature learning and 3D object localization. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on the proposed benchmarks demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our method. Our dataset and code will be released.
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All authors Panquan Yang, Junfei Huang, Zongzhangbao Yin, Yingsong Hu, Anni Xu, Xinyi Luo, Xueqi Sun, Hai Wu, Sheng Ao, Zhaoxing Zhu, Chenglu Wen, Cheng Wang

Computer Vision

Collaborative Low-Rank Adaptation for Pre-Trained Vision Transformers

Zheng Liu, Jinchao Zhu and Gao Huang

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has achieved remarkable success in fine-tuning pre-trained vision transformers for various downstream tasks. Existing studies mainly focus on exploring more parameter-efficient strategies or more effective representation learning schemes. However, these methods either sacrifice fine-tuning performance or introduce excessive trainable parameters, failing to strike a balance between learning performance and parameter efficiency. To address this problem, we propose a novel tuning method named collaborative low-rank adaptation (CLoRA) in this paper. CLoRA consists of base-space sharing and sample-agnostic diversity enhancement (SADE) components. To maintain parameter efficiency while expanding the learning capacity of low-rank modules (LRMs), base-space sharing allows all LRMs to share a set of down/up-projection spaces. In CLoRA, the low-rank matrices obtained from the shared spaces collaboratively construct each LRM. Since the representations extracted by these matrices may contain redundant information, SADE is employed to regularize the similarities among them to encourage diverse representations in the training process. We conduct extensive experiments on widely used image and point cloud datasets to evaluate the performance of CLoRA. Experimental results demonstrate that CLoRA strikes a better balance between learning performance and parameter efficiency, while requiring the fewest GFLOPs for point cloud analysis, compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
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Computer Vision

3D Semantic Segmentation for Post-Disaster Assessment

Nhut Le and Maryam Rahnemoonfar

The increasing frequency of natural disasters poses severe threats to human lives and leads to substantial economic losses. While 3D semantic segmentation is crucial for post-disaster assessment, existing deep learning models lack datasets specifically designed for post-disaster environments. To address this gap, we constructed a specialized 3D dataset using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-captured aerial footage of Hurricane Ian (2022) over affected areas, employing Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and Multi-View Stereo (MVS) techniques to reconstruct 3D point clouds. We evaluated the state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3D semantic segmentation models, Fast Point Transformer (FPT), Point Transformer v3 (PTv3), and OA-CNNs on this dataset, exposing significant limitations in existing methods for disaster-stricken regions. These findings underscore the urgent need for advancements in 3D segmentation techniques and the development of specialized 3D benchmark datasets to improve post-disaster scene understanding and response.
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Computer Vision

GH-ESD: Grounded Hypothesis-Driven Error Slice Discovery for Instance-Level Vision Tasks

Wei Zhang, Chaoqun Wang, Zixuan Guan et al. (+4 more)

Systematic failures of vision models on semantically coherent subsets, known as error slices, reveal limitations in robustness and evaluation. Existing slice discovery approaches largely model slices as clusters in representation space or combinations of predefined attributes. While effective for image-level classification, such formulations are insufficient for instance-level tasks such as object detection and segmentation, where failures often arise from contextual relational and spatially grounded visual patterns. We propose GH-ESD (Grounded Hypothesis-Driven Error Slice Discovery), a generate and verify framework that reformulates slice discovery as grounded hypothesis generation and statistical verification. GH-ESD constructs relational failure hypotheses using LLM priors and grounded visual evidence, discovers hypothesis slices at the instance level via Vision Language Models, and verifies them through statistical trend analysis over instance-level errors. We also introduce GESD (Grounded Error Slice Dataset), a new benchmark for instance-level error slice discovery, providing expert-defined and spatially grounded slices derived from detection and segmentation failures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GH-ESD consistently outperforms baselines, improving Precision@10 by 0.10 (0.73 vs. 0.63) on the GESD benchmark for detection tasks, while also supporting segmentation scenarios. GH-ESD identifies interpretable slices that facilitate actionable model improvements.GESD is publicly available at https://github.com/apple/ml-fine-grained-error-slice-discovery-dataset.
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All authors Wei Zhang, Chaoqun Wang, Zixuan Guan, Ping Sheng Kao, Pengfei Zhao, Peng Wu, Sifeng He

Computer Vision

Improving Few-Shot Change Detection Visual Question Answering via Decision-Ambiguity-guided Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

Fuyu Dong, Ke Li, Di Wang et al. (+5 more)

Change detection visual question answering (CDVQA) requires answering text queries by reasoning about semantic changes in bi-temporal remote sensing images. A straightforward approach is to boost CDVQA performance with generic vision-language models via supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Despite recent progress, we observe that a significant portion of failures do not stem from clearly incorrect predictions, but from decision ambiguity, where the model assigns similar confidence to the correct answer and strong distractors. To formalize this challenge, we define Decision-Ambiguous Samples (DAS) as instances with a small probability margin between the ground-truth answer and the most competitive alternative. We argue that explicitly optimizing DAS is crucial for improving the discriminability and robustness of CDVQA models. To this end, we propose DARFT, a Decision-Ambiguity-guided Reinforcement Fine-Tuning framework that first mines DAS using an SFT-trained reference policy and then applies group-relative policy optimization on the mined subset. By leveraging multi-sample decoding and intra-group relative advantages, DARFT suppresses strong distractors and sharpens decision boundaries without additional supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent gains over SFT baselines, particularly under few-shot settings.
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All authors Fuyu Dong, Ke Li, Di Wang, Nan Luo, Yiming Zhang, Kaiyu Li, Jianfei Yang, Quan Wang

Computer Vision

RGBT-GroundBench: Visual Grounding Beyond RGB in Complex Real-World Scenarios

Tianyi Zhao, Jiawen Xi, Linhui Xiao et al. (+4 more)

Visual grounding (VG) localizes target objects in an image from natural-language expressions. In real-world perception, RGB cues often degrade under low illumination and adverse weather, making visual grounding substantially more challenging. However, existing VG benchmarks are largely RGB-only and provide limited, structured coverage of such conditions, hindering systematic robustness evaluation and cross-spectral comparison. We present RGBT-GroundBench, the first large-scale benchmark for RGB-Thermal (TIR) visual grounding in complex environments. It contains over 40K images (21,535 RGB-TIR pairs) and 38,760 object instances with referring expressions, bounding boxes, and fine-grained annotations at three levels: scene types, environmental conditions (illumination and weather), and object properties (size and occlusion). As a benchmark suite, RGBT-GroundBench provides not only curated RGB-TIR grounding annotations but also a unified evaluation protocol supporting RGB-only, TIR-only, and RGB+TIR inputs. Under this protocol, we benchmark 11 representative VG models across diverse scenes and environmental conditions. Our results show that grounding accuracy is strongly correlated with scene complexity, LoRA-based models are more robust in complex scenes, and low-illumination conditions cause significant performance degradation that has been rarely explored. Guided by these observations, we introduce RGBT-VGNet, a simple and reproducible reference baseline under the unified protocol, featuring Asymmetric Modality Adaptation, Language-Aware Visual Synergy, and Tri-Prior Fusion for reliability-aware RGB-TIR integration. Resources, annotations, code, checkpoints, and evaluation scripts have been publicly released.
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All authors Tianyi Zhao, Jiawen Xi, Linhui Xiao, Junnan Li, Xue Yang, Maoxun Yuan, Xingxing Wei

Computer Vision

OCP-GN: A Scalable Second-order Optimizer for Stochastic Optimization

Jindi Zhong, Congyaohui Yin, Zhaorong Zhang et al. (+1 more)

This paper proposes a novel second-order optimization algorithm based on the Optimal Control Principle (OCP), applicable to large-scale optimization problems in neural network training. The algorithm has a computational complexity of O(d) and strong robustness. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the significant superiority of the proposed method.
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All authors Jindi Zhong, Congyaohui Yin, Zhaorong Zhang, Huanshui Zhang

Computer Vision

PhyGDPO: Physics-Aware Groupwise Direct Preference Optimization for Physically Consistent Text-to-Video Generation

Yuanhao Cai, Kunpeng Li, Menglin Jia et al. (+11 more)

Recent advances in text-to-video (T2V) generation have achieved good visual quality, yet synthesizing videos that faithfully follow physical laws remains an open challenge. Existing methods mainly based on graphics or prompt extension struggle to generalize beyond simple simulated environments or learn implicit physical reasoning. The scarcity of training data with rich physics interactions and phenomena is also a problem. In this paper, we first introduce a Physics-Augmented video data construction Pipeline, PhyAugPipe, that leverages a vision-language model (VLM) with chain-of-thought reasoning to collect a large-scale training dataset, PhyVidGen-135K. Then we formulate a principled Physics-aware Groupwise Direct Preference Optimization, PhyGDPO, framework that uses real-world video as winning case to guarantee correct physics learning and builds upon the groupwise Plackett-Luce probabilistic model to capture holistic preferences beyond pairwise comparisons. In PhyGDPO, we design a Physics-Guided Rewarding (PGR) scheme that leverages VLM-based physical rewards to direct the optimization to focus on challenging physics cases. In addition, we propose a LoRA-Switch Reference (LoRA-SR) scheme that avoids full-model duplication as reference for efficient DPO training. Experiments show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art open-source methods on PhyGenBench and VideoPhy2. Please check our project page at https://caiyuanhao1998.github.io/project/PhyGDPO for more video results. Our code, data, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/Open-PhyGDPO
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All authors Yuanhao Cai, Kunpeng Li, Menglin Jia, Jialiang Wang, Junzhe Sun, Feng Liang, Weifeng Chen, Felix Juefei-Xu, Chu Wang, Ali Thabet, Xiaoliang Dai, Xuan Ju, Alan Yuille, Ji Hou

Computer Vision

Hierarchical Vector-Quantized Latents for Perceptual Low-Resolution Video Compression

Manikanta Kotthapalli and Banafsheh Rekabdar

The exponential growth of video traffic has placed increasing demands on bandwidth and storage infrastructure, particularly for content delivery networks (CDNs) and edge devices. While traditional video codecs like H.264 and HEVC achieve high compression ratios, they are designed primarily for pixel-domain reconstruction and lack native support for machine learning-centric latent representations, limiting their integration into deep learning pipelines. In this work, we present a Multi-Scale Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (MS-VQ-VAE) designed to generate compact, high-fidelity latent representations of low-resolution video, suitable for efficient storage, transmission, and client-side decoding. Our architecture extends the VQ-VAE-2 framework to a spatiotemporal setting, introducing a two-level hierarchical latent structure built with 3D residual convolutions. The model is lightweight (approximately 18.5M parameters) and optimized for 64x64 resolution video clips, making it appropriate for deployment on edge devices with constrained compute and memory resources. To improve perceptual reconstruction quality, we incorporate a perceptual loss derived from a pre-trained VGG16 network. Trained on the UCF101 dataset using 2-second video clips (32 frames at 16 FPS), on the test set we achieve 25.96 dB PSNR and 0.8375 SSIM. On validation, our model improves over the single-scale baseline by 1.41 dB PSNR and 0.0248 SSIM. The proposed framework is well-suited for scalable video compression in bandwidth-sensitive scenarios, including real-time streaming, mobile video analytics, and CDN-level storage optimization.
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Tuesday 30 December

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.RO

Learning to Anchor Visual Odometry: KAN-Based Pose Regression for Planetary Landing

Xubo Luo, Zhaojin Li, Xue Wan et al. (+2 more)

Accurate and real-time 6-DoF localization is mission-critical for autonomous lunar landing, yet existing approaches remain limited: visual odometry (VO) drifts unboundedly, while map-based absolute localization fails in texture-sparse or low-light terrain. We introduce KANLoc, a monocular localization framework that tightly couples VO with a lightweight but robust absolute pose regressor. At its core is a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) that learns the complex mapping from image features to map coordinates, producing sparse but highly reliable global pose anchors. These anchors are fused into a bundle adjustment framework, effectively canceling drift while retaining local motion precision. KANLoc delivers three key advances: (i) a KAN-based pose regressor that achieves high accuracy with remarkable parameter efficiency, (ii) a hybrid VO-absolute localization scheme that yields globally consistent real-time trajectories (>=15 FPS), and (iii) a tailored data augmentation strategy that improves robustness to sensor occlusion. On both realistic synthetic and real lunar landing datasets, KANLoc reduces average translation and rotation error by 32% and 45%, respectively, with per-trajectory gains of up to 45%/48%, outperforming strong baselines.
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All authors Xubo Luo, Zhaojin Li, Xue Wan, Wei Zhang, Leizheng Shu

Computer Vision

Using Large Language Models To Translate Machine Results To Human Results

Trishna Niraula and Jonathan Stubblefield

Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed medical imaging, with computer vision (CV) systems achieving state-of-the-art performance in classification and detection tasks. However, these systems typically output structured predictions, leaving radiologists responsible for translating results into full narrative reports. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, offer new opportunities to bridge this gap by generating diagnostic narratives from structured findings. This study introduces a pipeline that integrates YOLOv5 and YOLOv8 for anomaly detection in chest X-ray images with a large language model (LLM) to generate natural-language radiology reports. The YOLO models produce bounding-box predictions and class labels, which are then passed to the LLM to generate descriptive findings and clinical summaries. YOLOv5 and YOLOv8 are compared in terms of detection accuracy, inference latency, and the quality of generated text, as measured by cosine similarity to ground-truth reports. Results show strong semantic similarity between AI and human reports, while human evaluation reveals GPT-4 excels in clarity (4.88/5) but exhibits lower scores for natural writing flow (2.81/5), indicating that current systems achieve clinical accuracy but remain stylistically distinguishable from radiologist-authored text.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.CR

Training-Free Color-Aware Adversarial Diffusion Sanitization for Diffusion Stegomalware Defense at Security Gateways

Vladimir Frants and Sos Agaian

The rapid expansion of generative AI has normalized large-scale synthetic media creation, enabling new forms of covert communication. Recent generative steganography methods, particularly those based on diffusion models, can embed high-capacity payloads without fine-tuning or auxiliary decoders, creating significant challenges for detection and remediation. Coverless diffusion-based techniques are difficult to counter because they generate image carriers directly from secret data, enabling attackers to deliver stegomalware for command-and-control, payload staging, and data exfiltration while bypassing detectors that rely on cover-stego discrepancies. This work introduces Adversarial Diffusion Sanitization (ADS), a training-free defense for security gateways that neutralizes hidden payloads rather than detecting them. ADS employs an off-the-shelf pretrained denoiser as a differentiable proxy for diffusion-based decoders and incorporates a color-aware, quaternion-coupled update rule to reduce artifacts under strict distortion limits. Under a practical threat model and in evaluation against the state-of-the-art diffusion steganography method Pulsar, ADS drives decoder success rates to near zero with minimal perceptual impact. Results demonstrate that ADS provides a favorable security-utility trade-off compared to standard content transformations, offering an effective mitigation strategy against diffusion-driven steganography.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from eess.IV

Automated Classification of First-Trimester Fetal Heart Views Using Ultrasound-Specific Self-Supervised Learning

Youssef Megahed, Aylin Erman, Robin Ducharme et al. (+3 more)

Congenital heart disease remains the most common congenital anomaly and a leading cause of neonatal morbidity and mortality. Although first-trimester fetal echocardiography offers an opportunity for earlier detection, automated analysis at this stage is challenging due to small cardiac structures, low signal-to-noise ratio, and substantial inter-operator variability. In this work, we evaluate a self-supervised ultrasound foundation model, USF-MAE, for first-trimester fetal heart view classification. USF-MAE is pretrained using masked autoencoding modelling on more than 370,000 unlabelled ultrasound images spanning over 40 anatomical regions and is subsequently fine-tuned for downstream classification. As a proof of concept, the pretrained Vision Transformer encoder was fine-tuned on an open-source dataset of 6,720 first-trimester fetal echocardiography images to classify five categories: aorta, atrioventricular flows, V sign, X sign, and Other. Model performance was benchmarked against supervised convolutional neural network baselines (ResNet-18 and ResNet-50) and a Vision Transformer (ViT-B/16) model pretrained on natural images (ImageNet-1k). All models were trained and evaluated using identical preprocessing, data splits, and optimization protocols. On an independent test set, USF-MAE achieved the highest performance across all evaluation metrics, with 90.57% accuracy, 91.15% precision, 90.57% recall, and 90.71% F1-score. This represents an improvement of +2.03% in accuracy and +1.98% in F1-score compared with the strongest baseline, ResNet-18. The proposed approach demonstrated robust performance without reliance on aggressive image preprocessing or region-of-interest cropping and showed improved discrimination of non-diagnostic frames.
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All authors Youssef Megahed, Aylin Erman, Robin Ducharme, Mark C. Walker, Steven Hawken, Adrian D. C. Chan

Computer Vision

F2IDiff: Real-world Image Super-resolution using Feature to Image Diffusion Foundation Model

Devendra K. Jangid, Ripon K. Saha, Dilshan Godaliyadda et al. (+3 more)

With the advent of Generative AI, Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) quality has seen substantial improvement, as the strong priors learned by Text-2-Image Diffusion (T2IDiff) Foundation Models (FM) can bridge the gap between High-Resolution (HR) and Low-Resolution (LR) images. However, flagship smartphone cameras have been slow to adopt generative models because strong generation can lead to undesirable hallucinations. For substantially degraded LR images, as seen in academia, strong generation is required and hallucinations are more tolerable because of the wide gap between LR and HR images. In contrast, in consumer photography, the LR image has substantially higher fidelity, requiring only minimal hallucination-free generation. We hypothesize that generation in SISR is controlled by the stringency and richness of the FM's conditioning feature. First, text features are high level features, which often cannot describe subtle textures in an image. Additionally, Smartphone LR images are at least $12MP$, whereas SISR networks built on T2IDiff FM are designed to perform inference on much smaller images ($<1MP$). As a result, SISR inference has to be performed on small patches, which often cannot be accurately described by text feature. To address these shortcomings, we introduce an SISR network built on a FM with lower-level feature conditioning, specifically DINOv2 features, which we call a Feature-to-Image Diffusion (F2IDiff) Foundation Model (FM). Lower level features provide stricter conditioning while being rich descriptors of even small patches.
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All authors Devendra K. Jangid, Ripon K. Saha, Dilshan Godaliyadda, Jing Li, Seok-Jun Lee, Hamid R. Sheikh

Computer Vision

Spectral and Spatial Graph Learning for Multispectral Solar Image Compression

Prasiddha Siwakoti, Atefeh Khoshkhahtinat, Piyush M. Mehta et al. (+3 more)

High-fidelity compression of multispectral solar imagery remains challenging for space missions, where limited bandwidth must be balanced against preserving fine spectral and spatial details. We present a learned image compression framework tailored to solar observations, leveraging two complementary modules: (1) the Inter-Spectral Windowed Graph Embedding (iSWGE), which explicitly models inter-band relationships by representing spectral channels as graph nodes with learned edge features; and (2) the Windowed Spatial Graph Attention and Convolutional Block Attention (WSGA-C), which combines sparse graph attention with convolutional attention to reduce spatial redundancy and emphasize fine-scale structures. Evaluations on the SDOML dataset across six extreme ultraviolet (EUV) channels show that our approach achieves a 20.15%reduction in Mean Spectral Information Divergence (MSID), up to 1.09% PSNR improvement, and a 1.62% log transformed MS-SSIM gain over strong learned baselines, delivering sharper and spectrally faithful reconstructions at comparable bits-per-pixel rates. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/agyat4/sgraph .
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All authors Prasiddha Siwakoti, Atefeh Khoshkhahtinat, Piyush M. Mehta, Barbara J. Thompson, Michael S. F. Kirk, Daniel da Silva

Computer Vision

Exploring Compositionality in Vision Transformers using Wavelet Representations

Akshad Shyam Purushottamdas, Pranav K Nayak, Divya Mehul Rajparia et al. (+4 more)

While insights into the workings of the transformer model have largely emerged by analysing their behaviour on language tasks, this work investigates the representations learnt by the Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder through the lens of compositionality. We introduce a framework, analogous to prior work on measuring compositionality in representation learning, to test for compositionality in the ViT encoder. Crucial to drawing this analogy is the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), which is a simple yet effective tool for obtaining input-dependent primitives in the vision setting. By examining the ability of composed representations to reproduce original image representations, we empirically test the extent to which compositionality is respected in the representation space. Our findings show that primitives from a one-level DWT decomposition produce encoder representations that approximately compose in latent space, offering a new perspective on how ViTs structure information.
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All authors Akshad Shyam Purushottamdas, Pranav K Nayak, Divya Mehul Rajparia, Deekshith Patel, Yashmitha Gogineni, Konda Reddy Mopuri, Sumohana S. Channappayya

Computer Vision

AI-Driven Evaluation of Surgical Skill via Action Recognition

Yan Meng, Daniel A. Donoho, Marcelle Altshuler et al. (+1 more)

The development of effective training and evaluation strategies is critical. Conventional methods for assessing surgical proficiency typically rely on expert supervision, either through onsite observation or retrospective analysis of recorded procedures. However, these approaches are inherently subjective, susceptible to inter-rater variability, and require substantial time and effort from expert surgeons. These demands are often impractical in low- and middle-income countries, thereby limiting the scalability and consistency of such methods across training programs. To address these limitations, we propose a novel AI-driven framework for the automated assessment of microanastomosis performance. The system integrates a video transformer architecture based on TimeSformer, improved with hierarchical temporal attention and weighted spatial attention mechanisms, to achieve accurate action recognition within surgical videos. Fine-grained motion features are then extracted using a YOLO-based object detection and tracking method, allowing for detailed analysis of instrument kinematics. Performance is evaluated along five aspects of microanastomosis skill, including overall action execution, motion quality during procedure-critical actions, and general instrument handling. Experimental validation using a dataset of 58 expert-annotated videos demonstrates the effectiveness of the system, achieving 87.7% frame-level accuracy in action segmentation that increased to 93.62% with post-processing, and an average classification accuracy of 76% in replicating expert assessments across all skill aspects. These findings highlight the system's potential to provide objective, consistent, and interpretable feedback, thereby enabling more standardized, data-driven training and evaluation in surgical education.
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All authors Yan Meng, Daniel A. Donoho, Marcelle Altshuler, Omar Arnaout

Computer Vision

DyStream: Streaming Dyadic Talking Heads Generation via Flow Matching-based Autoregressive Model

Bohong Chen and Haiyang Liu

Generating realistic, dyadic talking head video requires ultra-low latency. Existing chunk-based methods require full non-causal context windows, introducing significant delays. This high latency critically prevents the immediate, non-verbal feedback required for a realistic listener. To address this, we present DyStream, a flow matching-based autoregressive model that could generate video in real-time from both speaker and listener audio. Our method contains two key designs: (1) we adopt a stream-friendly autoregressive framework with flow-matching heads for probabilistic modeling, and (2) We propose a causal encoder enhanced by a lookahead module to incorporate short future context (e.g., 60 ms) to improve quality while maintaining low latency. Our analysis shows this simple-and-effective method significantly surpass alternative causal strategies, including distillation and generative encoder. Extensive experiments show that DyStream could generate video within 34 ms per frame, guaranteeing the entire system latency remains under 100 ms. Besides, it achieves state-of-the-art lip-sync quality, with offline and online LipSync Confidence scores of 8.13 and 7.61 on HDTF, respectively. The model, weights and codes are available.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Lifting Vision: Ground to Aerial Localization with Reasoning Guided Planning

Soham Pahari and M. Srinivas

Multimodal intelligence development recently show strong progress in visual understanding and high level reasoning. Though, most reasoning system still reply on textual information as the main medium for inference. This limit their effectiveness in spatial tasks such as visual navigation and geo-localization. This work discuss about the potential scope of this field and eventually propose an idea visual reasoning paradigm Geo-Consistent Visual Planning, our introduced framework called Visual Reasoning for Localization, or ViReLoc, which performs planning and localization using only visual representations. The proposed framework learns spatial dependencies and geometric relations that text based reasoning often suffer to understand. By encoding step by step inference in the visual domain and optimizing with reinforcement based objectives, ViReLoc plans routes between two given ground images. The system also integrates contrastive learning and adaptive feature interaction to align cross view perspectives and reduce viewpoint differences. Experiments across diverse navigation and localization scenarios show consistent improvements in spatial reasoning accuracy and cross view retrieval performance. These results establish visual reasoning as a strong complementary approach for navigation and localization, and show that such tasks can be performed without real time global positioning system data, leading to more secure navigation solutions.
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Computer Vision

RedunCut: Measurement-Driven Sampling and Accuracy Performance Modeling for Low-Cost Live Video Analytics

Gur-Eyal Sela, Kumar Krishna Agrawal, Bharathan Balaji et al. (+2 more)

Live video analytics (LVA) runs continuously across massive camera fleets, but inference cost with modern vision models remains high. To address this, dynamic model size selection (DMSS) is an attractive approach: it is content-aware but treats models as black boxes, and could potentially reduce cost by up to 10x without model retraining or modification. Without ground truth labels at runtime, we observe that DMSS methods use two stages per segment: (i) sampling a few models to calculate prediction statistics (e.g., confidences), then (ii) selection of the model size from those statistics. Prior systems fail to generalize to diverse workloads, particularly to mobile videos and lower accuracy targets. We identify that the failure modes stem from inefficient sampling whose cost exceeds its benefit, and inaccurate per-segment accuracy prediction. In this work, we present RedunCut, a new DMSS system that addresses both: It uses a measurement-driven planner that estimates the cost-benefit tradeoff of sampling, and a lightweight, data-driven performance model to improve accuracy prediction. Across road-vehicle, drone, and surveillance videos and multiple model families and tasks, RedunCut reduces compute cost by 14-62% at fixed accuracy and remains robust to limited historical data and to drift.
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All authors Gur-Eyal Sela, Kumar Krishna Agrawal, Bharathan Balaji, Joseph Gonzalez, Ion Stoica

Computer Vision

Forging Spatial Intelligence: A Roadmap of Multi-Modal Data Pre-Training for Autonomous Systems

Song Wang, Lingdong Kong, Xiaolu Liu et al. (+4 more)

The rapid advancement of autonomous systems, including self-driving vehicles and drones, has intensified the need to forge true Spatial Intelligence from multi-modal onboard sensor data. While foundation models excel in single-modal contexts, integrating their capabilities across diverse sensors like cameras and LiDAR to create a unified understanding remains a formidable challenge. This paper presents a comprehensive framework for multi-modal pre-training, identifying the core set of techniques driving progress toward this goal. We dissect the interplay between foundational sensor characteristics and learning strategies, evaluating the role of platform-specific datasets in enabling these advancements. Our central contribution is the formulation of a unified taxonomy for pre-training paradigms: ranging from single-modality baselines to sophisticated unified frameworks that learn holistic representations for advanced tasks like 3D object detection and semantic occupancy prediction. Furthermore, we investigate the integration of textual inputs and occupancy representations to facilitate open-world perception and planning. Finally, we identify critical bottlenecks, such as computational efficiency and model scalability, and propose a roadmap toward general-purpose multi-modal foundation models capable of achieving robust Spatial Intelligence for real-world deployment.
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All authors Song Wang, Lingdong Kong, Xiaolu Liu, Hao Shi, Wentong Li, Jianke Zhu, Steven C. H. Hoi

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.RO

Geometric Multi-Session Map Merging with Learned Local Descriptors

Yanlong Ma, Nakul S. Joshi, Christa S. Robison et al. (+2 more)

Multi-session map merging is crucial for extended autonomous operations in large-scale environments. In this paper, we present GMLD, a learning-based local descriptor framework for large-scale multi-session point cloud map merging that systematically aligns maps collected across different sessions with overlapping regions. The proposed framework employs a keypoint-aware encoder and a plane-based geometric transformer to extract discriminative features for loop closure detection and relative pose estimation. To further improve global consistency, we include inter-session scan matching cost factors in the factor-graph optimization stage. We evaluate our framework on the public datasets, as well as self-collected data from diverse environments. The results show accurate and robust map merging with low error, and the learned features deliver strong performance in both loop closure detection and relative pose estimation.
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All authors Yanlong Ma, Nakul S. Joshi, Christa S. Robison, Philip R. Osteen, Brett T. Lopez

Computer Vision

DermaVQA-DAS: Dermatology Assessment Schema (DAS) & Datasets for Closed-Ended Question Answering & Segmentation in Patient-Generated Dermatology Images

Wen-wai Yim, Yujuan Fu, Asma Ben Abacha et al. (+4 more)

Recent advances in dermatological image analysis have been driven by large-scale annotated datasets; however, most existing benchmarks focus on dermatoscopic images and lack patient-authored queries and clinical context, limiting their applicability to patient-centered care. To address this gap, we introduce DermaVQA-DAS, an extension of the DermaVQA dataset that supports two complementary tasks: closed-ended question answering (QA) and dermatological lesion segmentation. Central to this work is the Dermatology Assessment Schema (DAS), a novel expert-developed framework that systematically captures clinically meaningful dermatological features in a structured and standardized form. DAS comprises 36 high-level and 27 fine-grained assessment questions, with multiple-choice options in English and Chinese. Leveraging DAS, we provide expert-annotated datasets for both closed QA and segmentation and benchmark state-of-the-art multimodal models. For segmentation, we evaluate multiple prompting strategies and show that prompt design impacts performance: the default prompt achieves the best results under Mean-of-Max and Mean-of-Mean evaluation aggregation schemes, while an augmented prompt incorporating both patient query title and content yields the highest performance under majority-vote-based microscore evaluation, achieving a Jaccard index of 0.395 and a Dice score of 0.566 with BiomedParse. For closed-ended QA, overall performance is strong across models, with average accuracies ranging from 0.729 to 0.798; o3 achieves the best overall accuracy (0.798), closely followed by GPT-4.1 (0.796), while Gemini-1.5-Pro shows competitive performance within the Gemini family (0.783). We publicly release DermaVQA-DAS, the DAS schema, and evaluation protocols to support and accelerate future research in patient-centered dermatological vision-language modeling (https://osf.io/72rp3).
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All authors Wen-wai Yim, Yujuan Fu, Asma Ben Abacha, Meliha Yetisgen, Noel Codella, Roberto Andres Novoa, Josep Malvehy