Computer Vision
Papers
Fresh from arXiv, typeset properly. Highlighted words trade on the market.
Wednesday 11 February
Background: Automated podocyte foot process quantification is vital for kidney research, but the established "Automatic Morphological Analysis of Podocytes" (AMAP) method is hindered by high computational demands, a lack of a user interface, and Linux dependency. We developed AMAP-APP, a cross-platform desktop application designed to overcome these barriers. Methods: AMAP-APP optimizes efficiency by replacing intensive instance segmentation with classic image processing while retaining the original semantic segmentation model. It introduces a refined Region of Interest (ROI) algorithm to improve precision. Validation involved 365 mouse and human images (STED and confocal), benchmarking performance against the original AMAP via Pearson correlation and Two One-Sided T-tests (TOST). Results: AMAP-APP achieved a 147-fold increase in processing speed on consumer hardware. Morphometric outputs (area, perimeter, circularity, and slit diaphragm density) showed high correlation (r>0.90) and statistical equivalence (TOST P<0.05) to the original method. Additionally, the new ROI algorithm demonstrated superior accuracy compared to the original, showing reduced deviation from manual delineations. Conclusion: AMAP-APP democratizes deep learning-based podocyte morphometry. By eliminating the need for high-performance computing clusters and providing a user-friendly interface for Windows, macOS, and Linux, it enables widespread adoption in nephrology research and potential clinical diagnostics.
Computer Vision
Dynamic Frequency Modulation for Controllable Text-driven Image Generation
The success of text-guided diffusion models has established a new image generation paradigm driven by the iterative refinement of text prompts. However, modifying the original text prompt to achieve the expected semantic adjustments often results in unintended global structure changes that disrupt user intent. Existing methods rely on empirical feature map selection for intervention, whose performance heavily depends on appropriate selection, leading to suboptimal stability. This paper tries to solve the aforementioned problem from a frequency perspective and analyzes the impact of the frequency spectrum of noisy latent variables on the hierarchical emergence of the structure framework and fine-grained textures during the generation process. We find that lower-frequency components are primarily responsible for establishing the structure framework in the early generation stage. Their influence diminishes over time, giving way to higher-frequency components that synthesize fine-grained textures. In light of this, we propose a training-free frequency modulation method utilizing a frequency-dependent weighting function with dynamic decay. This method maintains the structure framework consistency while permitting targeted semantic modifications. By directly manipulating the noisy latent variable, the proposed method avoids the empirical selection of internal feature maps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, achieving an effective balance between preserving structure and enabling semantic updates.
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Computer Vision
AurigaNet: A Real-Time Multi-Task Network for Enhanced Urban Driving Perception
Self-driving cars hold significant potential to reduce traffic accidents, alleviate congestion, and enhance urban mobility. However, developing reliable AI systems for autonomous vehicles remains a substantial challenge. Over the past decade, multi-task learning has emerged as a powerful approach to address complex problems in driving perception. Multi-task networks offer several advantages, including increased computational efficiency, real-time processing capabilities, optimized resource utilization, and improved generalization. In this study, we present AurigaNet, an advanced multi-task network architecture designed to push the boundaries of autonomous driving perception. AurigaNet integrates three critical tasks: object detection, lane detection, and drivable area instance segmentation. The system is trained and evaluated using the BDD100K dataset, renowned for its diversity in driving conditions. Key innovations of AurigaNet include its end-to-end instance segmentation capability, which significantly enhances both accuracy and efficiency in path estimation for autonomous vehicles. Experimental results demonstrate that AurigaNet achieves an 85.2% IoU in drivable area segmentation, outperforming its closest competitor by 0.7%. In lane detection, AurigaNet achieves a remarkable 60.8% IoU, surpassing other models by more than 30%. Furthermore, the network achieves an mAP@0.5:0.95 of 47.6% in traffic object detection, exceeding the next leading model by 2.9%. Additionally, we validate the practical feasibility of AurigaNet by deploying it on embedded devices such as the Jetson Orin NX, where it demonstrates competitive real-time performance. These results underscore AurigaNet's potential as a robust and efficient solution for autonomous driving perception systems. The code can be found here https://github.com/KiaRational/AurigaNet.
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Computer Vision
Multimodal Priors-Augmented Text-Driven 3D Human-Object Interaction Generation
We address the challenging task of text-driven 3D human-object interaction (HOI) motion generation. Existing methods primarily rely on a direct text-to-HOI mapping, which suffers from three key limitations due to the significant cross-modality gap: (Q1) sub-optimal human motion, (Q2) unnatural object motion, and (Q3) weak interaction between humans and objects. To address these challenges, we propose MP-HOI, a novel framework grounded in four core insights: (1) Multimodal Data Priors: We leverage multimodal data (text, image, pose/object) from large multimodal models as priors to guide HOI generation, which tackles Q1 and Q2 in data modeling. (2) Enhanced Object Representation: We improve existing object representations by incorporating geometric keypoints, contact features, and dynamic properties, enabling expressive object representations, which tackles Q2 in data representation. (3) Multimodal-Aware Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Model: We propose a modality-aware MoE model for effective multimodal feature fusion paradigm, which tackles Q1 and Q2 in feature fusion. (4) Cascaded Diffusion with Interaction Supervision: We design a cascaded diffusion framework that progressively refines human-object interaction features under dedicated supervision, which tackles Q3 in interaction refinement. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MP-HOI outperforms existing approaches in generating high-fidelity and fine-grained HOI motions.
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Computer Vision
VideoSTF: Stress-Testing Output Repetition in Video Large Language Models
Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) have achieved strong performance on video understanding tasks, yet existing benchmarks evaluate only what models predict, leaving the stability of how they generate largely unexamined. We surface a previously underexplored generation failure of VideoLLMs, defined as output repetition, in which the decoder collapses into self-reinforcing loops of repeated phrases or sentences, and present VideoSTF, a benchmarking framework for systematically measuring, stress-testing, and exploiting this failure mode. VideoSTF formalizes repetition with three complementary $n$-gram-based metrics, ships a standardized testbed of 10,000 diverse videos, and provides a library of controlled temporal stressors. Across 10 advanced VideoLLMs, VideoSTF reveals four key findings: (i) repetition is pervasive on unperturbed videos and stable across commonly used frame counts, with repetition rates up to 91%; (ii) it spans a severity spectrum from mild redundancy to token-cap loops, and is highly amplified by temporal perturbations; (iii) temporal stressors form a practical black-box attack surface, flipping benign videos into repetitive ones with tens of queries and high attack success rates (up to 98%), and (iv) repetition is not explained by visual redundancy, its amplification tracks local temporal disruption, and only repetition penalties reduce it among common mitigations such as top-$k$ sampling, input filtering, and prompt variation, but increasing the penalty weakens visual grounding. VideoSTF reframes generation stability as a useful and complementary evaluation axis for VideoLLMs and provides the tools to study it. The project page is available at https://videostf.github.io/.
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Computer Vision
Eliminating VAE for Fast and High-Resolution Generative Detail Restoration
Diffusion models have attained remarkable breakthroughs in the real-world super-resolution (SR) task, albeit at slow inference and high demand on devices. To accelerate inference, recent works like GenDR adopt step distillation to minimize the step number to one. However, the memory boundary still restricts the maximum processing size, necessitating tile-by-tile restoration of high-resolution images. Through profiling the pipeline, we pinpoint that the variational auto-encoder (VAE) is the bottleneck of latency and memory. To completely solve the problem, we leverage pixel-(un)shuffle operations to eliminate the VAE, reversing the latent-based GenDR to pixel-space GenDR-Pix. However, upscale with x8 pixelshuffle may induce artifacts of repeated patterns. To alleviate the distortion, we propose a multi-stage adversarial distillation to progressively remove the encoder and decoder. Specifically, we utilize generative features from the previous stage models to guide adversarial discrimination. Moreover, we propose random padding to augment generative features and avoid discriminator collapse. We also introduce a masked Fourier space loss to penalize the outliers of amplitude. To improve inference performance, we empirically integrate a padding-based self-ensemble with classifier-free guidance to improve inference scaling. Experimental results show that GenDR-Pix performs 2.8x acceleration and 60% memory-saving compared to GenDR with negligible visual degradation, surpassing other one-step diffusion SR. Against all odds, GenDR-Pix can restore 4K image in only 1 second and 6GB.
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Computer Vision
A Vision-Language Foundation Model for Zero-shot Clinical Collaboration and Automated Concept Discovery in Dermatology
Medical foundation models have shown promise in controlled benchmarks, yet widespread deployment remains hindered by reliance on task-specific fine-tuning. Here, we introduce DermFM-Zero, a dermatology vision-language foundation model trained via masked latent modelling and contrastive learning on over 4 million multimodal data points. We evaluated DermFM-Zero across 20 benchmarks spanning zero-shot diagnosis and multimodal retrieval, achieving state-of-the-art performance without task-specific adaptation. We further evaluated its zero-shot capabilities in three multinational reader studies involving over 1,100 clinicians. In primary care settings, AI assistance enabled general practitioners to nearly double their differential diagnostic accuracy across 98 skin conditions. In specialist settings, the model significantly outperformed board-certified dermatologists in multimodal skin cancer assessment. In collaborative workflows, AI assistance enabled non-experts to surpass unassisted experts while improving management appropriateness. Finally, we show that DermFM-Zero's latent representations are interpretable: sparse autoencoders unsupervisedly disentangle clinically meaningful concepts that outperform predefined-vocabulary approaches and enable targeted suppression of artifact-induced biases, enhancing robustness without retraining. These findings demonstrate that a foundation model can provide effective, safe, and transparent zero-shot clinical decision support.
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Computer Vision
Improving Medical Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning via Perception and Reasoning Augmentation
While recent advances in Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) have shown that rule-based reward schemes can enable effective post-training for large language models, their extension to cross-modal, vision-centric domains remains largely underexplored. This limitation is especially pronounced in the medical imaging domain, where effective performance requires both robust visual perception and structured reasoning. In this work, we address this gap by proposing VRFT-Aug, a visual reinforcement fine-tuning framework tailored for the medical domain. VRFT-Aug introduces a series of training strategies designed to augment both perception and reasoning, including prior knowledge injection, perception-driven policy refinement, medically informed reward shaping, and behavioral imitation. Together, these methods aim to stabilize and improve the RFT process. Through extensive experiments across multiple medical datasets, we show that our approaches consistently outperform both standard supervised fine-tuning and RFT baselines. Moreover, we provide empirically grounded insights and practical training heuristics that can be generalized to other medical image tasks. We hope this work contributes actionable guidance and fresh inspiration for the ongoing effort to develop reliable, reasoning-capable models for high-stakes medical applications.
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Computer Vision
Fast Person Detection Using YOLOX With AI Accelerator For Train Station Safety
Recently, Image processing has advanced Faster and applied in many fields, including health, industry, and transportation. In the transportation sector, object detection is widely used to improve security, for example, in traffic security and passenger crossings at train stations. Some accidents occur in the train crossing area at the station, like passengers uncarefully when passing through the yellow line. So further security needs to be developed. Additional technology is required to reduce the number of accidents. This paper focuses on passenger detection applications at train stations using YOLOX and Edge AI Accelerator hardware. the performance of the AI accelerator will be compared with Jetson Orin Nano. The experimental results show that the Hailo-8 AI hardware accelerator has higher accuracy than Jetson Orin Nano (improvement of over 12%) and has lower latency than Jetson Orin Nano (reduced 20 ms).
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Computer Vision
Enhancing YOLOv11n for Reliable Child Detection in Noisy Surveillance Footage
This paper presents a practical and lightweight solution for enhancing child detection in low-quality surveillance footage, a critical component in real-world missing child alert and daycare monitoring systems. Building upon the efficient YOLOv11n architecture, we propose a deployment-ready pipeline that improves detection under challenging conditions including occlusion, small object size, low resolution, motion blur, and poor lighting commonly found in existing CCTV infrastructures. Our approach introduces a domain-specific augmentation strategy that synthesizes realistic child placements using spatial perturbations such as partial visibility, truncation, and overlaps, combined with photometric degradations including lighting variation and noise. To improve recall of small and partially occluded instances, we integrate Slicing Aided Hyper Inference (SAHI) at inference time. All components are trained and evaluated on a filtered, child-only subset of the Roboflow Daycare dataset. Compared to the baseline YOLOv11n, our enhanced system achieves a mean Average Precision at 0.5 IoU (mAP@0.5) of 0.967 and a mean Average Precision averaged over IoU thresholds from 0.5 to 0.95 (mAP@0.5:0.95) of 0.783, yielding absolute improvements of 0.7 percent and 2.3 percent, respectively, without architectural changes. Importantly, the entire pipeline maintains compatibility with low-power edge devices and supports real-time performance, making it particularly well suited for low-cost or resource-constrained industrial surveillance deployments. The example augmented dataset and the source code used to generate it are available at: https://github.com/html-ptit/Data-Augmentation-YOLOv11n-child-detection
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Computer Vision
Enhancing Underwater Images via Adaptive Semantic-aware Codebook Learning
Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) is an ill-posed problem where natural clean references are not available, and the degradation levels vary significantly across semantic regions. Existing UIE methods treat images with a single global model and ignore the inconsistent degradation of different scene components. This oversight leads to significant color distortions and loss of fine details in heterogeneous underwater scenes, especially where degradation varies significantly across different image regions. Therefore, we propose SUCode (Semantic-aware Underwater Codebook Network), which achieves adaptive UIE from semantic-aware discrete codebook representation. Compared with one-shot codebook-based methods, SUCode exploits semantic-aware, pixel-level codebook representation tailored to heterogeneous underwater degradation. A three-stage training paradigm is employed to represent raw underwater image features to avoid pseudo ground-truth contamination. Gated Channel Attention Module (GCAM) and Frequency-Aware Feature Fusion (FAFF) jointly integrate channel and frequency cues for faithful color restoration and texture recovery. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SUCode achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming recent UIE methods on both reference and no-reference metrics. The code will be made public available at https://github.com/oucailab/SUCode.
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Computer Vision
MetaphorStar: Image Metaphor Understanding and Reasoning with End-to-End Visual Reinforcement Learning
Metaphorical comprehension in images remains a critical challenge for Nowadays AI systems. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at basic Visual Question Answering (VQA), they consistently struggle to grasp the nuanced cultural, emotional, and contextual implications embedded in visual content. This difficulty stems from the task's demand for sophisticated multi-hop reasoning, cultural context, and Theory of Mind (ToM) capabilities, which current models lack. To fill this gap, we propose MetaphorStar, the first end-to-end visual reinforcement learning (RL) framework for image implication tasks. Our framework includes three core components: the fine-grained dataset TFQ-Data, the visual RL method TFQ-GRPO, and the well-structured benchmark TFQ-Bench. Our fully open-source MetaphorStar family, trained using TFQ-GRPO on TFQ-Data, significantly improves performance by an average of 82.6% on the image implication benchmarks. Compared with 20+ mainstream MLLMs, MetaphorStar-32B achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) on Multiple-Choice Question and Open-Style Question, significantly outperforms the top closed-source model Gemini-3.0-pro on True-False Question. Crucially, our experiments reveal that learning image implication tasks improves the general understanding ability, especially the complex visual reasoning ability. We further provide a systematic analysis of model parameter scaling, training data scaling, and the impact of different model architectures and training strategies, demonstrating the broad applicability of our method. We open-sourced all model weights, datasets, and method code at https://metaphorstar.github.io.
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Computer Vision
C^2ROPE: Causal Continuous Rotary Positional Encoding for 3D Large Multimodal-Models Reasoning
Recent advances in 3D Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) built on Large Language Models (LLMs) have established the alignment of 3D visual features with LLM representations as the dominant paradigm. However, the inherited Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) introduces limitations for multimodal processing. Specifically, applying 1D temporal positional indices disrupts the continuity of visual features along the column dimension, resulting in spatial locality loss. Moreover, RoPE follows the prior that temporally closer image tokens are more causally related, leading to long-term decay in attention allocation and causing the model to progressively neglect earlier visual tokens as the sequence length increases. To address these issues, we propose C^2RoPE, an improved RoPE that explicitly models local spatial Continuity and spatial Causal relationships for visual processing. C^2RoPE introduces a spatio-temporal continuous positional embedding mechanism for visual tokens. It first integrates 1D temporal positions with Cartesian-based spatial coordinates to construct a triplet hybrid positional index, and then employs a frequency allocation strategy to encode spatio-temporal positional information across the three index components. Additionally, we introduce Chebyshev Causal Masking, which determines causal dependencies by computing the Chebyshev distance of image tokens in 2D space. Evaluation results across various benchmarks, including 3D scene reasoning and 3D visual question answering, demonstrate C^2RoPE's effectiveness. The code is be available at https://github.com/ErikZ719/C2RoPE.
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Computer Vision
Enhancing Weakly Supervised Multimodal Video Anomaly Detection through Text Guidance
Weakly supervised multimodal video anomaly detection has gained significant attention, yet the potential of the text modality remains under-explored. Text provides explicit semantic information that can enhance anomaly characterization and reduce false alarms. However, extracting effective text features is challenging due to the inability of general-purpose language models to capture anomaly-specific nuances and the scarcity of relevant descriptions. Furthermore, multimodal fusion often suffers from redundancy and imbalance. To address these issues, we propose a novel text-guided framework. First, we introduce an in-context learning-based multi-stage text augmentation mechanism to generate high-quality anomaly text samples for fine-tuning the text feature extractor. Second, we design a multi-scale bottleneck Transformer fusion module that uses compressed bottleneck tokens to progressively integrate information across modalities, mitigating redundancy and imbalance. Experiments on UCF-Crime and XD-Violence demonstrate state-of-the-art performance.
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Computer Vision
RealHD: A High-Quality Dataset for Robust Detection of State-of-the-Art AI-Generated Images
The rapid advancement of generative AI has raised concerns about the authenticity of digital images, as highly realistic fake images can now be generated at low cost, potentially increasing societal risks. In response, several datasets have been established to train detection models aimed at distinguishing AI-generated images from real ones. However, existing datasets suffer from limited generalization, low image quality, overly simple prompts, and insufficient image diversity. To address these limitations, we propose a high-quality, large-scale dataset comprising over 730,000 images across multiple categories, including both real and AI-generated images. The generated images are synthesized via state-of-the-art methods, including text-to-image generation (guided by over 10,000 carefully designed prompts), image inpainting, image refinement, and face swapping. Each generated image is annotated with its generation method and category. Inpainting images further include binary masks to indicate inpainted regions, providing rich metadata for analysis. Compared to existing datasets, detection models trained on our dataset demonstrate superior generalization capabilities. Our dataset not only serves as a strong benchmark for evaluating detection methods but also contributes to advancing the robustness of AI-generated image detection techniques. Building upon this, we propose a lightweight detection method based on image noise entropy, which transforms the original image into an entropy tensor of Non-Local Means (NLM) noise before classification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models trained on our dataset achieve strong generalization, and our method delivers competitive performance, establishing a solid baseline for future research. The dataset and source code are publicly available at https://real-hd.github.io.
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Computer Vision
MapVerse: A Benchmark for Geospatial Question Answering on Diverse Real-World Maps
Maps are powerful carriers of structured and contextual knowledge, encompassing geography, demographics, infrastructure, and environmental patterns. Reasoning over such knowledge requires models to integrate spatial relationships, visual cues, real-world context, and domain-specific expertise-capabilities that current large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) still struggle to exhibit consistently. Yet, datasets used to benchmark VLMs on map-based reasoning remain narrow in scope, restricted to specific domains, and heavily reliant on artificially generated content (outputs from LLMs or pipeline-based methods), offering limited depth for evaluating genuine geospatial reasoning. To address this gap, we present MapVerse, a large-scale benchmark built on real-world maps. It comprises 11,837 human-authored question-answer pairs across 1,025 maps, spanning ten diverse map categories and multiple question categories for each. The dataset provides a rich setting for evaluating map reading, interpretation, and multimodal reasoning. We evaluate ten state-of-the-art models against our benchmark to establish baselines and quantify reasoning gaps. Beyond overall performance, we conduct fine-grained categorical analyses to assess model inference across multiple dimensions and investigate the visual factors shaping reasoning outcomes. Our findings reveal that while current VLMs perform competitively on classification-style tasks, both open- and closed-source models fall short on advanced tasks requiring complex spatial reasoning.
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Computer Vision
3DXTalker: Unifying Identity, Lip Sync, Emotion, and Spatial Dynamics in Expressive 3D Talking Avatars
Audio-driven 3D talking avatar generation is increasingly important in virtual communication, digital humans, and interactive media, where avatars must preserve identity, synchronize lip motion with speech, express emotion, and exhibit lifelike spatial dynamics, collectively defining a broader objective of expressivity. However, achieving this remains challenging due to insufficient training data with limited subject identities, narrow audio representations, and restricted explicit controllability. In this paper, we propose 3DXTalker, an expressive 3D talking avatar through data-curated identity modeling, audio-rich representations, and spatial dynamics controllability. 3DXTalker enables scalable identity modeling via 2D-to-3D data curation pipeline and disentangled representations, alleviating data scarcity and improving identity generalization. Then, we introduce frame-wise amplitude and emotional cues beyond standard speech embeddings, ensuring superior lip synchronization and nuanced expression modulation. These cues are unified by a flow-matching-based transformer for coherent facial dynamics. Moreover, 3DXTalker also enables natural head-pose motion generation while supporting stylized control via prompt-based conditioning. Extensive experiments show that 3DXTalker integrates lip synchronization, emotional expression, and head-pose dynamics within a unified framework, achieves superior performance in 3D talking avatar generation.
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Computer Vision
1%>100%: High-Efficiency Visual Adapter with Complex Linear Projection Optimization
Deploying vision foundation models typically relies on efficient adaptation strategies, whereas conventional full fine-tuning suffers from prohibitive costs and low efficiency. While delta-tuning has proven effective in boosting the performance and efficiency of LLMs during adaptation, its advantages cannot be directly transferred to the fine-tuning pipeline of vision foundation models. To push the boundaries of adaptation efficiency for vision tasks, we propose an adapter with Complex Linear Projection Optimization (CoLin). For architecture, we design a novel low-rank complex adapter that introduces only about 1% parameters to the backbone. For efficiency, we theoretically prove that low-rank composite matrices suffer from severe convergence issues during training, and address this challenge with a tailored loss. Extensive experiments on object detection, segmentation, image classification, and rotated object detection (remote sensing scenario) demonstrate that CoLin outperforms both full fine-tuning and classical delta-tuning approaches with merely 1% parameters for the first time, providing a novel and efficient solution for deployment of vision foundation models. We release the code on https://github.com/DongshuoYin/CoLin.
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Computer Vision
Med-SegLens: Latent-Level Model Diffing for Interpretable Medical Image Segmentation
Modern segmentation models achieve strong predictive performance but remain largely opaque, limiting our ability to diagnose failures, understand dataset shift, or intervene in a principled manner. We introduce Med-SegLens, a model-diffing framework that decomposes segmentation model activations into interpretable latent features using sparse autoencoders trained on SegFormer and U-Net. Through cross-architecture and cross-dataset latent alignment across healthy, adult, pediatric, and sub-Saharan African glioma cohorts, we identify a stable backbone of shared representations, while dataset shift is driven by differential reliance on population-specific latents. We show that these latents act as causal bottlenecks for segmentation failures, and that targeted latent-level interventions can correct errors and improve cross-dataset adaption without retraining, recovering performance in 70% of failure cases and improving Dice score from 39.4% to 74.2%. Our results demonstrate that latent-level model diffing provides a practical and mechanistic tool for diagnosing failures and mitigating dataset shift in segmentation models.
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Computer Vision
The Garbage Dataset (GD): A Multi-Class Image Benchmark for Automated Waste Segregation
This study introduces the Garbage Dataset (GD), a publicly available image dataset designed to advance automated waste segregation through machine learning and computer vision. It is a diverse dataset that covers 10 categories of common household waste: metal, glass, biological, paper, battery, trash, cardboard, shoes, clothes, and plastic. The dataset comprises 12,259 labeled images collected through multiple methods, including the DWaste mobile app and curated web sources. The methods included rigorous validation through checksums and outlier detection, analysis of class imbalance and visual separability through PCA/t-SNE, and assessment of background complexity using entropy and saliency measures. The dataset was benchmarked using state-of-the-art deep learning models (EfficientNetV2M, EfficientNetV2S, MobileNet, ResNet50, ResNet101) evaluated on performance metrics and operational carbon emissions. The results of the experiment indicate that EfficientNetV2S achieved the highest performance with a accuracy of 95.13% and an F1-score of 0.95 with moderate carbon cost. Analysis revealed inherent dataset characteristics including class imbalance, a skew toward high-outlier classes (plastic, cardboard, paper), and brightness variations that require consideration. The main conclusion is that GD provides a valuable real-world benchmark for waste classification research while highlighting important challenges such as class imbalance, background complexity, and environmental trade-offs in model selection that must be addressed for practical deployment. The dataset is publicly released to support further research in environmental sustainability applications.
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Computer Vision
Characterizing and Optimizing the Spatial Kernel of Multi Resolution Hash Encodings
Multi-Resolution Hash Encoding (MHE), the foundational technique behind Instant Neural Graphics Primitives, provides a powerful parameterization for neural fields. However, its spatial behavior lacks rigorous understanding from a physical systems perspective, leading to reliance on heuristics for hyperparameter selection. This work introduces a novel analytical approach that characterizes MHE by examining its Point Spread Function (PSF), which is analogous to the Green's function of the system. This methodology enables a quantification of the encoding's spatial resolution and fidelity. We derive a closed-form approximation for the collision-free PSF, uncovering inherent grid-induced anisotropy and a logarithmic spatial profile. We establish that the idealized spatial bandwidth, specifically the Full Width at Half Maximum (FWHM), is determined by the average resolution, $N_{\text{avg}}$. This leads to a counterintuitive finding: the effective resolution of the model is governed by the broadened empirical FWHM (and therefore $N_{\text{avg}}$), rather than the finest resolution $N_{\max}$, a broadening effect we demonstrate arises from optimization dynamics. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of finite hash capacity, demonstrating how collisions introduce speckle noise and degrade the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR). Leveraging these theoretical insights, we propose Rotated MHE (R-MHE), an architecture that applies distinct rotations to the input coordinates at each resolution level. R-MHE mitigates anisotropy while maintaining the efficiency and parameter count of the original MHE. This study establishes a methodology based on physical principles that moves beyond heuristics to characterize and optimize MHE.
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Computer Vision
End-to-End LiDAR optimization for 3D point cloud registration
LiDAR sensors are a key modality for 3D perception, yet they are typically designed independently of downstream tasks such as point cloud registration. Conventional registration operates on pre-acquired datasets with fixed LiDAR configurations, leading to suboptimal data collection and significant computational overhead for sampling, noise filtering, and parameter tuning. In this work, we propose an adaptive LiDAR sensing framework that dynamically adjusts sensor parameters, jointly optimizing LiDAR acquisition and registration hyperparameters. By integrating registration feedback into the sensing loop, our approach optimally balances point density, noise, and sparsity, improving registration accuracy and efficiency. Evaluations in the CARLA simulation demonstrate that our method outperforms fixed-parameter baselines while retaining generalization abilities, highlighting the potential of adaptive LiDAR for autonomous perception and robotic applications.
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Computer Vision
Towards Remote Sensing Change Detection with Neural Memory
Remote sensing change detection is essential for environmental monitoring, urban planning, and related applications. However, current methods often struggle to capture long-range dependencies while maintaining computational efficiency. Although Transformers can effectively model global context, their quadratic complexity poses scalability challenges, and existing linear attention approaches frequently fail to capture intricate spatiotemporal relationships. Drawing inspiration from the recent success of Titans in language tasks, we present ChangeTitans, the Titans-based framework for remote sensing change detection. Specifically, we propose VTitans, the first Titans-based vision backbone that integrates neural memory with segmented local attention, thereby capturing long-range dependencies while mitigating computational overhead. Next, we present a hierarchical VTitans-Adapter to refine multi-scale features across different network layers. Finally, we introduce TS-CBAM, a two-stream fusion module leveraging cross-temporal attention to suppress pseudo-changes and enhance detection accuracy. Experimental evaluations on four benchmark datasets (LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, LEVIR-CD+, and SYSU-CD) demonstrate that ChangeTitans achieves state-of-the-art results, attaining 84.36% IoU and 91.52% F1-score on LEVIR-CD, while remaining computationally competitive.
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Computer Vision
HII-DPO: Eliminate Hallucination via Accurate Hallucination-Inducing Counterfactual Images
Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse multimodal tasks but remain vulnerable to hallucinations rooted in inherent language bias. Despite recent progress, existing hallucination mitigation methods often overlook the underlying hallucination patterns driven by language bias. In this work, we design a novel pipeline to accurately synthesize Hallucination-Inducing Images (HIIs). Using synthesized HIIs, we reveal a consistent scene-conditioned hallucination pattern: models tend to mention objects that are highly typical of the scene even when visual evidence is removed. To quantify the susceptibility of VLMs to this hallucination pattern, we establish the Masked-Object-Hallucination (MOH) benchmark to rigorously evaluate existing state-of-the-art alignment frameworks. Finally, we leverage HIIs to construct high-quality preference datasets for fine-grained alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively mitigates hallucinations while preserving general model capabilities. Specifically, our method achieves up to a 38% improvement over the current state-of-the-art on standard hallucination benchmarks.
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Tuesday 10 February
Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Forecasting as Rendering: A 2D Gaussian Splatting Framework for Time Series Forecasting
Time series forecasting remains a challenging problem due to the intricate entanglement of intra-period fluctuations and inter-period trends. While recent advances have attempted to reshape 1D sequences into 2D period-phase representations, they suffer from two principal limitations. Firstly, treating reshaped tensors as static images results in a topological mismatch, as standard spatial operators sever chronological continuity at grid boundaries. Secondly, relying on uniform fixed-size representations allocates modeling capacity inefficiently and fails to provide the adaptive resolution required for compressible, non-stationary temporal patterns. To address these limitations, we introduce TimeGS, a novel framework that fundamentally shifts the forecasting paradigm from regression to 2D generative rendering. By reconceptualizing the future sequence as a latent 2D temporal surface, TimeGS utilizes the inherent anisotropy of Gaussian kernels to adaptively model complex variations with flexible geometric alignment. To realize this, we introduce a Multi-Basis Gaussian Kernel Generation (MB-GKG) block that synthesizes kernels from a fixed dictionary to stabilize optimization, and a Multi-Period Chronologically Continuous Rasterization (MP-CCR) block that enforces strict temporal continuity across periodic boundaries. Comprehensive experiments on standard benchmark datasets demonstrate that TimeGS attains state-of-the-art or competitive performance. The code is at https://github.com/yixinwang1/TimeGS.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Certainty-Validity: A Diagnostic Framework for Discrete Commitment Systems
Standard evaluation metrics for machine learning – accuracy, precision, recall, and AUROC – assume that all errors are equivalent: a confident incorrect prediction is penalized identically to an uncertain one. For discrete commitment systems (architectures that select committed states {-W, 0, +W}), this assumption is epistemologically flawed. We introduce the Certainty-Validity (CVS) Framework, a diagnostic method that decomposes model performance into a 2x2 matrix distinguishing high/low certainty from valid/invalid predictions. This framework reveals a critical failure mode hidden by standard accuracy: Confident-Incorrect (CI) behavior, where models hallucinate structure in ambiguous data. Through ablation experiments on Fashion-MNIST, EMNIST, and IMDB, we analyze the "83% Ambiguity Ceiling" – a stopping point where this specific discrete architecture consistently plateaus on noisy benchmarks. Unlike continuous models that can surpass this ceiling by memorizing texture or statistical noise, the discrete model refuses to commit to ambiguous samples. We show that this refusal is not a failure but a feature: the model stops where structural evidence ends. However, standard training on ambiguous data eventually forces Benign Overfitting, causing a pathological migration from Uncertain-Incorrect (appropriate doubt) to Confident-Incorrect (hallucination). We propose that "good training" for reasoning systems must be defined not by accuracy, but by maximizing the Certainty-Validity Score (CVS) – ensuring the model knows where to stop.
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Computer Vision
Learning Under Extreme Data Scarcity: Subject-Level Evaluation of Lightweight CNNs for fMRI-Based Prodromal Parkinsons Detection
Deep learning is often applied in settings where data are limited, correlated, and difficult to obtain, yet evaluation practices do not always reflect these constraints. Neuroimaging for prodromal Parkinsons disease is one such case, where subject numbers are small and individual scans produce many highly related samples. This work examines prodromal Parkinsons detection from resting-state fMRI as a machine learning problem centered on learning under extreme data scarcity. Using fMRI data from 40 subjects, including 20 prodromal Parkinsons cases and 20 healthy controls, ImageNet-pretrained convolutional neural networks are fine-tuned and evaluated under two different data partitioning strategies. Results show that commonly used image-level splits allow slices from the same subject to appear in both training and test sets, leading to severe information leakage and near-perfect accuracy. When a strict subject-level split is enforced, performance drops substantially, yielding test accuracies between 60 and 81 percent. Models with different capacity profiles are compared, including VGG19, Inception V3, Inception ResNet V2, and the lightweight MobileNet V1. Under subject-level evaluation, MobileNet demonstrates the most reliable generalization, outperforming deeper architectures despite having significantly fewer parameters. These results indicate that in extreme low-data regimes, evaluation strategy and model capacity have a greater impact on performance than architectural depth. Although the analysis is limited to a single cohort of 40 subjects and does not include external validation or cross-validation, it provides a concrete case study and practical recommendations for evaluating deep learning models under severe data scarcity.
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Computer Vision
Egocentric Bias in Vision-Language Models
Visual perspective taking–inferring how the world appears from another's viewpoint–is foundational to social cognition. We introduce FlipSet, a diagnostic benchmark for Level-2 visual perspective taking (L2 VPT) in vision-language models. The task requires simulating 180-degree rotations of 2D character strings from another agent's perspective, isolating spatial transformation from 3D scene complexity. Evaluating 103 VLMs reveals systematic egocentric bias: the vast majority perform below chance, with roughly three-quarters of errors reproducing the camera viewpoint. Control experiments expose a compositional deficit–models achieve high theory-of-mind accuracy and above-chance mental rotation in isolation, yet fail catastrophically when integration is required. This dissociation indicates that current VLMs lack the mechanisms needed to bind social awareness to spatial operations, suggesting fundamental limitations in model-based spatial reasoning. FlipSet provides a cognitively grounded testbed for diagnosing perspective-taking capabilities in multimodal systems.
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Computer Vision
Synthesizing the Kill Chain: A Zero-Shot Framework for Target Verification and Tactical Reasoning on the Edge
Deploying autonomous edge robotics in dynamic military environments is constrained by both scarce domain-specific training data and the computational limits of edge hardware. This paper introduces a hierarchical, zero-shot framework that cascades lightweight object detection with compact Vision-Language Models (VLMs) from the Qwen and Gemma families (4B-12B parameters). Grounding DINO serves as a high-recall, text-promptable region proposer, and frames with high detection confidence are passed to edge-class VLMs for semantic verification. We evaluate this pipeline on 55 high-fidelity synthetic videos from Battlefield 6 across three tasks: false-positive filtering (up to 100% accuracy), damage assessment (up to 97.5%), and fine-grained vehicle classification (55-90%). We further extend the pipeline into an agentic Scout-Commander workflow, achieving 100% correct asset deployment and a 9.8/10 reasoning score (graded by GPT-4o) with sub-75-second latency. A novel "Controlled Input" methodology decouples perception from reasoning, revealing distinct failure phenotypes: Gemma3-12B excels at tactical logic but fails in visual perception, while Gemma3-4B exhibits reasoning collapse even with accurate inputs. These findings validate hierarchical zero-shot architectures for edge autonomy and provide a diagnostic framework for certifying VLM suitability in safety-critical applications.
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Computer Vision
Diagnostic Benchmarks for Invariant Learning Dynamics: Empirical Validation of the Eidos Architecture
We present the PolyShapes-Ideal (PSI) dataset, a suite of diagnostic benchmarks designed to isolate topological invariance – the ability to maintain structural identity across affine transformations – from the textural correlations that dominate standard vision benchmarks. Through three diagnostic probes (polygon classification under noise, zero-shot font transfer from MNIST, and geometric collapse mapping under progressive deformation), we demonstrate that the Eidos architecture achieves >99% accuracy on PSI and 81.67% zero-shot transfer across 30 unseen typefaces without pre-training. These results validate the "Form-First" hypothesis: generalization in structurally constrained architectures is a property of geometric integrity, not statistical scale.