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Tuesday 17 March

Computer Vision

Fast-HaMeR: Boosting Hand Mesh Reconstruction using Knowledge Distillation

Fast and accurate 3D hand reconstruction is essential for real-time applications in VR/AR, human-computer interaction, robotics, and healthcare. Most state-of-the-art methods rely on heavy models, limiting their use on resource-constrained devices like headsets, smartphones, and embedded systems. In this paper, we investigate how the use of lightweight neural networks, combined with Knowledge Distillation, can accelerate complex 3D hand reconstruction models by making them faster and lighter, while maintaining comparable reconstruction accuracy. While our approach is suited for various hand reconstruction frameworks, we focus primarily on boosting the HaMeR model, currently the leading method in terms of reconstruction accuracy. We replace its original ViT-H backbone with lighter alternatives, including MobileNet, MobileViT, ConvNeXt, and ResNet, and evaluate three knowledge distillation strategies: output-level, feature-level, and a hybrid of both. Our experiments show that using lightweight backbones that are only 35% the size of the original achieves 1.5x faster inference speed while preserving similar performance quality with only a minimal accuracy difference of 0.4mm. More specifically, we show how output-level distillation notably improves student performance, while feature-level distillation proves more effective for higher-capacity students. Overall, the findings pave the way for efficient real-world applications on low-power devices. The code and models are publicly available under https://github.com/hunainahmedj/Fast-HaMeR.
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All authors Hunain Ahmed Jillani, Ahmed Tawfik Aboukhadra, Ahmed Elhayek, Jameel Malik, Nadia Robertini, Didier Stricker

Computer Vision

CD-FKD: Cross-Domain Feature Knowledge Distillation for Robust Single-Domain Generalization in Object Detection

Single-domain generalization is essential for object detection, particularly when training models on a single source domain and evaluating them on unseen target domains. Domain shifts, such as changes in weather, lighting, or scene conditions, pose significant challenges to the generalization ability of existing models. To address this, we propose Cross-Domain Feature Knowledge Distillation (CD-FKD), which enhances the generalization capability of the student network by leveraging both global and instance-wise feature distillation. The proposed method uses diversified data through downscaling and corruption to train the student network, whereas the teacher network receives the original source domain data. The student network mimics the features of the teacher through both global and instance-wise distillation, enabling it to extract object-centric features effectively, even for objects that are difficult to detect owing to corruption. Extensive experiments on challenging scenes demonstrate that CD-FKD outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both target domain generalization and source domain performance, validating its effectiveness in improving object detection robustness to domain shifts. This approach is valuable in real-world applications, like autonomous driving and surveillance, where robust object detection in diverse environments is crucial.
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All authors Junseok Lee, Sungho Shin, Seongju Lee, Kyoobin Lee

Computer Vision

IRIS: A Real-World Benchmark for Inverse Recovery and Identification of Physical Dynamic Systems from Monocular Video

Unsupervised physical parameter estimation from video lacks a common benchmark: existing methods evaluate on non-overlapping synthetic data, the sole real-world dataset is restricted to single-body systems, and no established protocol addresses governing-equation identification. This work introduces IRIS, a high-fidelity benchmark comprising 240 real-world videos captured at 4K resolution and 60fps, spanning both single- and multi-body dynamics with independently measured ground-truth parameters and uncertainty estimates. Each dynamical system is recorded under controlled laboratory conditions and paired with its governing equations, enabling principled evaluation. A standardized evaluation protocol is defined encompassing parameter accuracy, identifiability, extrapolation, robustness, and governing-equation selection. Multiple baselines are evaluated, including a multi-step physics loss formulation and four complementary equation-identification strategies (VLM temporal reasoning, describe-then-classify prompting, CNN-based classification, and path-based labelling), establishing reference performance across all IRIS scenarios and exposing systematic failure modes that motivate future research. The dataset, annotations, evaluation toolkit, and all baseline implementations are publicly released.
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All authors Rasul Khanbayov, Mohamed Rayan Barhdadi, Erchin Serpedin, Hasan Kurban

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from astro-ph.IM

LenghuSky-8: An 8-Year All-Sky Cloud Dataset with Star-Aware Masks and Alt-Az Calibration for Segmentation and Nowcasting

Ground-based time-domain observatories require minute-by-minute, site-scale awareness of cloud cover, yet existing all-sky datasets are short, daylight-biased, or lack astrometric calibration. We present LenghuSky-8, an eight-year (2018-2025) all-sky imaging dataset from a premier astronomical site, comprising 429,620 $512 \times 512$ frames with 81.2% night-time coverage, star-aware cloud masks, background masks, and per-pixel altitude-azimuth (Alt-Az) calibration. For robust cloud segmentation across day, night, and lunar phases, we train a linear probe on DINOv3 local features and obtain 93.3% $\pm$ 1.1% overall accuracy on a balanced, manually labeled set of 1,111 images. Using stellar astrometry, we map each pixel to local alt-az coordinates and measure calibration uncertainties of approximately 0.37 deg at zenith and approximately 1.34 deg at 30 deg altitude, sufficient for integration with telescope schedulers. Beyond segmentation, we introduce a short-horizon nowcasting benchmark over per-pixel three-class logits (sky/cloud/contamination) with four baselines: persistence (copying the last frame), optical flow, ConvLSTM, and VideoGPT. ConvLSTM performs best but yields only limited gains over persistence, underscoring the difficulty of near-term cloud evolution. We release the dataset, calibrations, and an open-source toolkit for loading, evaluation, and scheduler-ready alt-az maps to boost research in segmentation, nowcasting, and autonomous observatory operations.
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All authors Yicheng Rui, Xiao-Wei Duan, Licai Deng, Fan Yang, Zhengming Dang, Zhengjun Du, Junhao Peng, Wenhao Chu, Umut Mahmut, Kexin Li, Yiyun Wu, Fabo Feng

Computer Vision

Cross-modal learning for plankton recognition

This paper considers self-supervised cross-modal coordination as a strategy enabling utilization of multiple modalities and large volumes of unlabeled plankton data to build models for plankton recognition. Automated imaging instruments facilitate the continuous collection of plankton image data on a large scale. Current methods for automatic plankton image recognition rely primarily on supervised approaches, which require labeled training sets that are labor-intensive to collect. On the other hand, some modern plankton imaging instruments complement image information with optical measurement data, such as scatter and fluorescence profiles, which currently are not widely utilized in plankton recognition. In this work, we explore the possibility of using such measurement data to guide the learning process without requiring manual labeling. Inspired by the concepts behind Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training, we train encoders for both modalities using only binary supervisory information indicating whether a given image and profile originate from the same particle or from different particles. For plankton recognition, we employ a small labeled gallery of known plankton species combined with a $k$-NN classifier. This approach yields a recognition model that is inherently multimodal, i.e., capable of utilizing information extracted from both image and profile data. We demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high recognition accuracy while requiring only a minimal number of labeled images. Furthermore, we show that the approach outperforms an image-only self-supervised baseline. Code available at https://github.com/Jookare/cross-modal-plankton.
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All authors Joona Kareinen, Veikka Immonen, Tuomas Eerola, Lumi Haraguchi, Lasse Lensu, Kaisa Kraft, Sanna Suikkanen, Heikki Kälviäinen

Computer Vision

3D Fourier-based Global Feature Extraction for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Hyperspectral image classification (HSIC) has been significantly advanced by deep learning methods that exploit rich spatial-spectral correlations. However, existing approaches still face fundamental limitations: transformer-based models suffer from poor scalability due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention, while recent Fourier transform-based methods typically rely on 2D spatial FFTs and largely ignore critical inter-band spectral dependencies inherent to hyperspectral data. To address these challenges, we propose Hybrid GFNet (HGFNet), a novel architecture that integrates localized 3D convolutional feature extraction with frequency-domain global filtering via GFNet-style blocks for efficient and robust spatial-spectral representation learning. HGFNet introduces three complementary frequency transforms tailored to hyperspectral imagery: Spectral Fourier Transform (a 1D FFT along the spectral axis), Spatial Fourier Transform (a 2D FFT over spatial dimensions), and Spatial-Spatial Fourier Transform (a 3D FFT jointly over spectral and spatial dimensions), enabling comprehensive and high-dimensional frequency modeling. The 3D convolutional layers capture fine-grained local spatial-spectral structures, while the Fourier-based global filtering modules efficiently model long-range dependencies and suppress noise. To further mitigate the severe class imbalance commonly observed in HSIC, HGFNet incorporates an Adaptive Focal Loss (AFL) that dynamically adjusts class-wise focusing and weighting, improving discrimination for underrepresented classes.
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Computer Vision

SF-Mamba: Rethinking State Space Model for Vision

Visual Mamba models have recently emerged as alternatives to Vision Transformers (ViTs), which suffer from quadratic complexity. While the recurrent scanning mechanism of Mamba offers computational efficiency, it inherently limits non-causal interactions between image patches. Prior works have attempted to address this limitation through various multi-scan strategies; however, these approaches suffer from inefficiencies due to suboptimal scan designs and frequent data rearrangement. Moreover, Mamba exhibits relatively slow computational speed under short token lengths, commonly used in visual tasks. In pursuit of a truly efficient vision encoder, we rethink the scan operation for vision and the computational efficiency of Mamba. To this end, we propose SF-Mamba, a novel visual Mamba with two key proposals: auxiliary patch swapping for encoding bidirectional information flow under an unidirectional scan and batch folding with periodic state reset for advanced GPU parallelism. Extensive experiments on image classification, object detection, and instance and semantic segmentation consistently demonstrate that our proposed SF-Mamba significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while improving throughput across different model sizes. The source code is available at: https://github.com/sony/SF-Mamba.
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All authors Masakazu Yoshimura, Teruaki Hayashi, Yuki Hoshino, Wei-Yao Wang, Takeshi Ohashi

Computer Vision

HGP-Mamba: Integrating Histology and Generated Protein Features for Mamba-based Multimodal Survival Risk Prediction

Recent advances in multimodal learning have significantly improved cancer survival risk prediction. However, the joint prognostic potential of protein markers and histopathology images remains underexplored, largely due to the high cost and limited availability of protein expression profiling. To address this challenge, we propose HGP-Mamba, a Mamba-based multimodal framework that efficiently integrates histological with generated protein features for survival risk prediction. Specifically, we introduce a protein feature extractor (PFE) that leverages pretrained foundation models to derive high-throughput protein embeddings directly from Whole Slide Images (WSIs), enabling data-efficient incorporation of molecular information. Together with histology embeddings that capture morphological patterns, we further introduce the Local Interaction-aware Mamba (LiAM) for fine-grained feature interaction and the Global Interaction-enhanced Mamba (GiEM) to promote holistic modality fusion at the slide level, thus capture complex cross-modal dependencies. Experiments on four public cancer datasets demonstrate that HGP-Mamba achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining superior computational efficiency compared with existing methods. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Daijing-ai/HGP-Mamba.git.
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All authors Jing Dai, Chen Wu, Ming Wu, Qibin Zhang, Zexi Wu, Jingdong Zhang, Hongming Xu

Computer Vision

Near-light Photometric Stereo with Symmetric Lights

This paper describes a linear solution method for near-light photometric stereo by exploiting symmetric light source arrangements. Unlike conventional non-convex optimization approaches, by arranging multiple sets of symmetric nearby light source pairs, our method derives a closed-form solution for surface normal and depth without requiring initialization. In addition, our method works as long as the light sources are symmetrically distributed about an arbitrary point even when the entire spatial offset is uncalibrated. Experiments showcase the accuracy of shape recovery accuracy of our method, achieving comparable results to the state-of-the-art calibrated near-light photometric stereo method while significantly reducing requirements of careful depth initialization and light calibration.
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All authors Lilika Makabe, Heng Guo, Hiroaki Santo, Fumio Okura, Yasuyuki Matsushita

Computer Vision

DermaFlux: Synthetic Skin Lesion Generation with Rectified Flows for Enhanced Image Classification

Despite recent advances in deep generative modeling, skin lesion classification systems remain constrained by the limited availability of large, diverse, and well-annotated clinical datasets, resulting in class imbalance between benign and malignant lesions and consequently reduced generalization performance. We introduce DermaFlux, a rectified flow-based text-to-image generative framework that synthesizes clinically grounded skin lesion images from natural language descriptions of dermatological attributes. Built upon Flux.1, DermaFlux is fine-tuned using parameter-efficient Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on a large curated collection of publicly available clinical image datasets. We construct image-text pairs using synthetic textual captions generated by Llama 3.2, following established dermatological criteria including lesion asymmetry, border irregularity, and color variation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DermaFlux generates diverse and clinically meaningful dermatology images that improve binary classification performance by up to 6% when augmenting small real-world datasets, and by up to 9% when classifiers are trained on DermaFlux-generated synthetic images rather than diffusion-based synthetic images. Our ImageNet-pretrained ViT fine-tuned with only 2,500 real images and 4,375 DermaFlux-generated samples achieves 78.04% binary classification accuracy and an AUC of 0.859, surpassing the next best dermatology model by 8%.
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Computer Vision

Unpaired Cross-Domain Calibration of DMSP to VIIRS Nighttime Light Data Based on CUT Network

Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP-OLS) and Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (SNPP-VIIRS) nighttime light (NTL) data are vital for monitoring urbanization, yet sensor incompatibilities hinder long-term analysis. This study proposes a cross-sensor calibration method using Contrastive Unpaired Translation (CUT) network to transform DMSP data into VIIRS-like format, correcting DMSP defects. The method employs multilayer patch-wise contrastive learning to maximize mutual information between corresponding patches, preserving content consistency while learning cross-domain similarity. Utilizing 2012-2013 overlapping data for training, the network processes 1992-2013 DMSP imagery to generate enhanced VIIRS-style raster data. Validation results demonstrate that generated VIIRS-like data exhibits high consistency with actual VIIRS observations (R-squared greater than 0.87) and socioeconomic indicators. This approach effectively resolves cross-sensor data fusion issues and calibrates DMSP defects, providing reliable attempt for extended NTL time-series.
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All authors Zhan Tong, ChenXu Zhou, Fei Tang, Yiming Tu, Tianyu Qin, Kaihao Fang

Computer Vision

Semantic One-Dimensional Tokenizer for Image Reconstruction and Generation

Visual generative models based on latent space have achieved great success, underscoring the significance of visual tokenization. Mapping images to latents boosts efficiency and enables multimodal alignment for scaling up in downstream tasks. Existing visual tokenizers primarily map images into fixed 2D spatial grids and focus on pixel-level restoration, which hinders the capture of representations with compact global semantics. To address these issues, we propose SemTok, a semantic one-dimensional tokenizer that compresses 2D images into 1D discrete tokens with high-level semantics. SemTok sets a new state-of-the-art in image reconstruction, achieving superior fidelity with a remarkably compact token representation. This is achieved via a synergistic framework with three key innovations: a 2D-to-1D tokenization scheme, a semantic alignment constraint, and a two-stage generative training strategy. Building on SemTok, we construct a masked autoregressive generation framework, which yields notable improvements in downstream image generation tasks. Experiments confirm the effectiveness of our semantic 1D tokenization. Our code will be open-sourced.
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All authors Yunpeng Qu, Kaidong Zhang, Yukang Ding, Ying Chen, Jian Wang

Computer Vision

InViC: Intent-aware Visual Cues for Medical Visual Question Answering

Medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) aims to answer clinically relevant questions grounded in medical images. However, existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often exhibit shortcut answering, producing plausible responses by exploiting language priors or dataset biases while insufficiently attending to visual evidence. This behavior undermines clinical reliability, especially when subtle imaging findings are decisive. We propose a lightweight plug-in framework, termed Intent-aware Visual Cues (InViC), to explicitly enhance image-based answer generation in medical VQA. InViC introduces a Cue Tokens Extraction (CTE) module that distills dense visual tokens into a compact set of K question-conditioned cue tokens, which serve as structured visual intermediaries injected into the LLM decoder to promote intent-aligned visual evidence. To discourage bypassing of visual information, we further design a two-stage fine-tuning strategy with a cue-bottleneck attention mask. In Stage I, we employ an attention mask to block the LLM's direct view of raw visual features, thereby funneling all visual evidence through the cue pathway. In Stage II, standard causal attention is restored to train the LLM to jointly exploit the visual and cue tokens. We evaluate InViC on three public Med-VQA benchmarks (VQA-RAD, SLAKE, and ImageCLEF VQA-Med 2019) across multiple representative MLLMs. InViC consistently improves over zero-shot inference and standard LoRA fine-tuning, demonstrating that intent-aware visual cues with bottlenecked training is a practical and effective strategy for improving trustworthy Med-VQA.
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All authors Zhisong Wang, Ziyang Chen, Zanting Ye, Hongze Zhu, Yefeng Zheng, Yong Xia

Computer Vision

Advancing Visual Reliability: Color-Accurate Underwater Image Enhancement for Real-Time Underwater Missions

Underwater image enhancement plays a crucial role in providing reliable visual information for underwater platforms, since strong absorption and scattering in water-related environments generally lead to image quality degradation. Existing high-performance methods often rely on complex architectures, which hinder deployment on underwater devices. Lightweight methods often sacrifice quality for speed and struggle to handle severely degraded underwater images. To address this limitation, we present a real-time underwater image enhancement framework with accurate color restoration. First, an Adaptive Weighted Channel Compensation module is introduced to achieve dynamic color recovery of the red and blue channels using the green channel as a reference anchor. Second, we design a Multi-branch Re-parameterized Dilated Convolution that employs multi-branch fusion during training and structural re-parameterization during inference, enabling large receptive field representation with low computational overhead. Finally, a Statistical Global Color Adjustment module is employed to optimize overall color performance based on statistical priors. Extensive experiments on eight datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance across seven evaluation metrics. The model contains only 3,880 inference parameters and achieves an inference speed of 409 FPS. Our method improves the UCIQE score by 29.7% under diverse environmental conditions, and the deployment on ROV platforms and performance gains in downstream tasks further validate its superiority for real-time underwater missions.
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All authors Yiqiang Zhou, Yifan Chen, Zhe Sun, Jijun Lu, Ye Zheng, Xuelong Li

Computer Vision

$D^3$-RSMDE: 40$\times$ Faster and High-Fidelity Remote Sensing Monocular Depth Estimation

Real-time, high-fidelity monocular depth estimation from remote sensing imagery is crucial for numerous applications, yet existing methods face a stark trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Although using Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones for dense prediction is fast, they often exhibit poor perceptual quality. Conversely, diffusion models offer high fidelity but at a prohibitive computational cost. To overcome these limitations, we propose Depth Detail Diffusion for Remote Sensing Monocular Depth Estimation ($D^3$-RSMDE), an efficient framework designed to achieve an optimal balance between speed and quality. Our framework first leverages a ViT-based module to rapidly generate a high-quality preliminary depth map construction, which serves as a structural prior, effectively replacing the time-consuming initial structure generation stage of diffusion models. Based on this prior, we propose a Progressive Linear Blending Refinement (PLBR) strategy, which uses a lightweight U-Net to refine the details in only a few iterations. The entire refinement step operates efficiently in a compact latent space supported by a Variational Autoencoder (VAE). Extensive experiments demonstrate that $D^3$-RSMDE achieves a notable 11.85% reduction in the Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) perceptual metric over leading models like Marigold, while also achieving over a 40x speedup in inference and maintaining VRAM usage comparable to lightweight ViT models.
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All authors Ruizhi Wang, Weihan Li, Zunlei Feng, Haofei Zhang, Mingli Song, Jiayu Wang, Jie Song, Li Sun

Computer Vision

Automated identification of Ichneumonoidea wasps via YOLO-based deep learning: Integrating HiresCam for Explainable AI

Accurate taxonomic identification of parasitoid wasps within the superfamily Ichneumonoidea is essential for biodiversity assessment, ecological monitoring, and biological control programs. However, morphological similarity, small body size, and fine-grained interspecific variation make manual identification labor-intensive and expertise-dependent. This study proposes a deep learning-based framework for the automated identification of Ichneumonoidea wasps using a YOLO-based architecture integrated with High-Resolution Class Activation Mapping (HiResCAM) to enhance interpretability. The proposed system simultaneously identifies wasp families from high-resolution images. The dataset comprises 3556 high-resolution images of Hymenoptera specimens. The taxonomic distribution is primarily concentrated among the families Ichneumonidae (n = 786), Braconidae (n = 648), Apidae (n = 466), and Vespidae (n = 460). Extensive experiments were conducted using a curated dataset, with model performance evaluated through precision, recall, F1 score, and accuracy. The results demonstrate high accuracy of over 96 % and robust generalization across morphological variations. HiResCAM visualizations confirm that the model focuses on taxonomically relevant anatomical regions, such as wing venation, antennae segmentation, and metasomal structures, thereby validating the biological plausibility of the learned features. The integration of explainable AI techniques improves transparency and trustworthiness, making the system suitable for entomological research to accelerate biodiversity characterization in an under-described parasitoid superfamily.
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All authors Joao Manoel Herrera Pinheiro, Gabriela Do Nascimento Herrera, Alvaro Doria Dos Santos, Luciana Bueno Dos Reis Fernandes, Ricardo V. Godoy, Eduardo A. B. Almeida, Helena Carolina Onody, Marcelo Andrade Da Costa Vieira, Angelica Maria Penteado-Dias, Marcelo Becker

Computer Vision

Learning Human-Object Interaction for 3D Human Pose Estimation from LiDAR Point Clouds

Understanding humans from LiDAR point clouds is one of the most critical tasks in autonomous driving due to its close relationships with pedestrian safety, yet it remains challenging in the presence of diverse human-object interactions and cluttered backgrounds. Nevertheless, existing methods largely overlook the potential of leveraging human-object interactions to build robust 3D human pose estimation frameworks. There are two major challenges that motivate the incorporation of human-object interaction. First, human-object interactions introduce spatial ambiguity between human and object points, which often leads to erroneous 3D human keypoint predictions in interaction regions. Second, there exists severe class imbalance in the number of points between interacting and non-interacting body parts, with the interaction-frequent regions such as hand and foot being sparsely observed in LiDAR data. To address these challenges, we propose a Human-Object Interaction Learning (HOIL) framework for robust 3D human pose estimation from LiDAR point clouds. To mitigate the spatial ambiguity issue, we present human-object interaction-aware contrastive learning (HOICL) that effectively enhances feature discrimination between human and object points, particularly in interaction regions. To alleviate the class imbalance issue, we introduce contact-aware part-guided pooling (CPPool) that adaptively reallocates representational capacity by compressing overrepresented points while preserving informative points from interacting body parts. In addition, we present an optional contact-based temporal refinement that refines erroneous per-frame keypoint estimates using contact cues over time. As a result, our HOIL effectively leverages human-object interaction to resolve spatial ambiguity and class imbalance in interaction regions. Codes will be released.
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Computer Vision

PKINet-v2: Towards Powerful and Efficient Poly-Kernel Remote Sensing Object Detection

Object detection in remote sensing images (RSIs) is challenged by the coexistence of geometric and spatial complexity: targets may appear with diverse aspect ratios, while spanning a wide range of object sizes under varied contexts. Existing RSI backbones address the two challenges separately, either by adopting anisotropic strip kernels to model slender targets or by using isotropic large kernels to capture broader context. However, such isolated treatments lead to complementary drawbacks: the strip-only design can disrupt spatial coherence for regular-shaped objects and weaken tiny details, whereas isotropic large kernels often introduce severe background noise and geometric mismatch for slender structures. In this paper, we extend PKINet, and present a powerful and efficient backbone that jointly handles both challenges within a unified paradigm named Poly Kernel Inception Network v2 (PKINet-v2). PKINet-v2 synergizes anisotropic axial-strip convolutions with isotropic square kernels and builds a multi-scope receptive field, preserving fine-grained local textures while progressively aggregating long-range context across scales. To enable efficient deployment, we further introduce a Heterogeneous Kernel Re-parameterization (HKR) Strategy that fuses all heterogeneous branches into a single depth-wise convolution for inference, eliminating fragmented kernel launches without accuracy loss. Extensive experiments on four widely-used benchmarks, including DOTA-v1.0, DOTA-v1.5, HRSC2016, and DIOR-R, demonstrate that PKINet-v2 achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while delivering a $\textbf{3.9}\times$ FPS acceleration compared to PKINet-v1, surpassing previous remote sensing backbones in both effectiveness and efficiency.
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All authors Xinhao Cai, Liulei Li, Gensheng Pei, Zeren Sun, Yazhou Yao, Wenguan Wang

Computer Vision

Iris: Bringing Real-World Priors into Diffusion Model for Monocular Depth Estimation

In this paper, we propose Iris, a deterministic framework for Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) that integrates real-world priors into the diffusion model. Conventional feed-forward methods rely on massive training data, yet still miss details. Previous diffusion-based methods leverage rich generative priors yet struggle with synthetic-to-real domain transfer. Iris, in contrast, preserves fine details, generalizes strongly from synthetic to real scenes, and remains efficient with limited training data. To this end, we introduce a two-stage Priors-to-Geometry Deterministic (PGD) schedule: the prior stage uses Spectral-Gated Distillation (SGD) to transfer low-frequency real priors while leaving high-frequency details unconstrained, and the geometry stage applies Spectral-Gated Consistency (SGC) to enforce high-frequency fidelity while refining with synthetic ground truth. The two stages share weights and are executed with a high-to-low timestep schedule. Extensive experimental results confirm that Iris achieves significant improvements in MDE performance with strong in-the-wild generalization.
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All authors Xinhao Cai, Gensheng Pei, Zeren Sun, Yazhou Yao, Fumin Shen, Wenguan Wang

Computer Vision

SpikeCLR: Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning for Few-Shot Event-Based Vision using Spiking Neural Networks

Event-based vision sensors provide significant advantages for high-speed perception, including microsecond temporal resolution, high dynamic range, and low power consumption. When combined with Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), they can be deployed on neuromorphic hardware, enabling energy-efficient applications on embedded systems. However, this potential is severely limited by the scarcity of large-scale labeled datasets required to effectively train such models. In this work, we introduce SpikeCLR, a contrastive self-supervised learning framework that enables SNNs to learn robust visual representations from unlabeled event data. We adapt prior frame-based methods to the spiking domain using surrogate gradient training and introduce a suite of event-specific augmentations that leverage spatial, temporal, and polarity transformations. Through extensive experiments on CIFAR10-DVS, N-Caltech101, N-MNIST, and DVS-Gesture benchmarks, we demonstrate that self-supervised pretraining with subsequent fine-tuning outperforms supervised learning in low-data regimes, achieving consistent gains in few-shot and semi-supervised settings. Our ablation studies reveal that combining spatial and temporal augmentations is critical for learning effective spatio-temporal invariances in event data. We further show that learned representations transfer across datasets, contributing to efforts for powerful event-based models in label-scarce settings.
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All authors Maxime Vaillant, Axel Carlier, Lai Xing Ng, Christophe Hurter, Benoit R. Cottereau

Computer Vision

An Interpretable Machine Learning Framework for Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Drug Response Analysis

Lung cancer is a condition where there is abnormal growth of malignant cells that spread in an uncontrollable fashion in the lungs. Some common treatment strategies are surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation which aren't the best options due to the heterogeneous nature of cancer. In personalized medicine, treatments are tailored according to the individual's genetic information along with lifestyle aspects. In addition, AI-based deep learning methods can analyze large sets of data to find early signs of cancer, types of tumor, and prospects of treatment. The paper focuses on the development of personalized treatment plans using specific patient data focusing primarily on the genetic profile. Multi-Omics data from Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer have been used to build a predictive model along with machine learning techniques. The value of the target variable, LN-IC50, determines how sensitive or resistive a drug is. An XGBoost regressor is utilized to predict the drug response focusing on molecular and cellular features extracted from cancer datasets. Cross-validation and Randomized Search are performed for hyperparameter tuning to further optimize the model's predictive performance. For explanation purposes, SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) was used. SHAP values measure each feature's impact on an individual prediction. Furthermore, interpreting feature relationships was performed using DeepSeek, a large language model trained to verify the biological validity of the features. Contextual explanations regarding the most important genes or pathways were provided by DeepSeek alongside the top SHAP value constituents, supporting the predictability of the model.
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All authors Ann Rachel, Pranav M Pawar, Mithun Mukharjee, Raja M, Tojo Mathew

Computer Vision

DriveFix: Spatio-Temporally Coherent Driving Scene Restoration

Recent advancements in 4D scene reconstruction, particularly those leveraging diffusion priors, have shown promise for novel view synthesis in autonomous driving. However, these methods often process frames independently or in a view-by-view manner, leading to a critical lack of spatio-temporal synergy. This results in spatial misalignment across cameras and temporal drift in sequences. We propose DriveFix, a novel multi-view restoration framework that ensures spatio-temporal coherence for driving scenes. Our approach employs an interleaved diffusion transformer architecture with specialized blocks to explicitly model both temporal dependencies and cross-camera spatial consistency. By conditioning the generation on historical context and integrating geometry-aware training losses, DriveFix enforces that the restored views adhere to a unified 3D geometry. This enables the consistent propagation of high-fidelity textures and significantly reduces artifacts. Extensive evaluations on the Waymo, nuScenes, and PandaSet datasets demonstrate that DriveFix achieves state-of-the-art performance in both reconstruction and novel view synthesis, marking a substantial step toward robust 4D world modeling for real-world deployment.
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All authors Heyu Si, Brandon James Denis, Muyang Sun, Dragos Datcu, Yaoru Li, Xin Jin, Ruiju Fu, Yuliia Tatarinova, Federico Landi, Jie Song, Mingli Song, Qi Guo

Computer Vision

Micro-AU CLIP: Fine-Grained Contrastive Learning from Local Independence to Global Dependency for Micro-Expression Action Unit Detection

Micro-expression (ME) action units (Micro-AUs) provide objective clues for fine-grained genuine emotion analysis. Most existing Micro-AU detection methods learn AU features from the whole facial image/video, which conflicts with the inherent locality of AU, resulting in insufficient perception of AU regions. In fact, each AU independently corresponds to specific localized facial muscle movements (local independence), while there is an inherent dependency between some AUs under specific emotional states (global dependency). Thus, this paper explores the effectiveness of the independence-to-dependency pattern and proposes a novel micro-AU detection framework, micro-AU CLIP, that uniquely decomposes the AU detection process into local semantic independence modeling (LSI) and global semantic dependency (GSD) modeling. In LSI, Patch Token Attention (PTA) is designed, mapping several local features within the AU region to the same feature space; In GSD, Global Dependency Attention (GDA) and Global Dependency Loss (GDLoss) are presented to model the global dependency relationships between different AUs, thereby enhancing each AU feature. Furthermore, considering CLIP's native limitations in micro-semantic alignment, a microAU contrastive loss (MiAUCL) is designed to learn AU features by a fine-grained alignment of visual and text features. Also, Micro-AU CLIP is effectively applied to ME recognition in an emotion-label-free way. The experimental results demonstrate that Micro-AU CLIP can fully learn fine-grained micro-AU features, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
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All authors Jinsheng Wei, Fengzhou Guo, Yante Li, Haoyu Chen, Guanming Lu, Guoying Zhao

Computer Vision

VisBrowse-Bench: Benchmarking Visual-Native Search for Multimodal Browsing Agents

The rapid advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has enabled browsing agents to acquire and reason over multimodal information in the real world. But existing benchmarks suffer from two limitations: insufficient evaluation of visual reasoning ability and the neglect of native visual information of web pages in the reasoning chains. To address these challenges, we introduce a new benchmark for visual-native search, VisBrowse-Bench. It contains 169 VQA instances covering multiple domains and evaluates the models' visual reasoning capabilities during the search process through multimodal evidence cross-validation via text-image retrieval and joint reasoning. These data were constructed by human experts using a multi-stage pipeline and underwent rigorous manual verification. We additionally propose an agent workflow that can effectively drive the browsing agent to actively collect and reason over visual information during the search process. We comprehensively evaluated both open-source and closed-source models in this workflow. Experimental results show that even the best-performing model, Claude-4.6-Opus only achieves an accuracy of 47.6%, while the proprietary Deep Research model, o3-deep-research only achieves an accuracy of 41.1%. The code and data can be accessed at: https://github.com/ZhengboZhang/VisBrowse-Bench
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All authors Zhengbo Zhang, Jinbo Su, Zhaowen Zhou, Changtao Miao, Yuhan Hong, Qimeng Wu, Yumeng Liu, Feier Wu, Yihe Tian, Yuhao Liang, Zitong Shan, Wanke Xia, Yi-Fan Zhang, Bo Zhang, Zhe Li, Shiming Xiang, Ying Yan

Computer Vision

EvoTale: Continual Character Customization for Expanding Story Worlds

Character-centric story visualization aims to synthesize coherent image sequences that depict narrative events and interactions while preserving recurring character identities. In expanding story worlds, new user-specified characters must be continually incorporated despite varying customization difficulty and identity conflicts in multi-character scenes, without disrupting previously learned identities. In this paper, we propose EvoTale, a continual character customization framework for expanding stylized story worlds. We first introduce an All-in-One-World Character Integrator, which accumulates character-specific residual components within a unified LoRA branch using sparsely overlapping subspaces spanned by a shared orthonormal basis, while freezing previously learned components to limit cross-character coupling. We then develop a Character Quality Gate that uses rubric-guided MLLM feedback as a bounded controller to adapt the optimization budget based on the assessed customization quality. Finally, we propose Character-Aware Region-Focus Sampling, which combines bounding-box-guided regional denoising with identity-aware global denoising to preserve character identities within their designated regions while maintaining global narrative coherence. Experimental results show that EvoTale achieves a favorable balance across character fidelity, continual identity retention, multi-character generation quality, and story-text alignment compared with representative story visualization and customization methods.
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All authors Jinlu Zhang, Qiyun Wang, Baoxiang Du, Jiayi Ji, Jing He, Rongsheng Zhang, Tangjie Lv, Xiaoshuai Sun, Rongrong Ji

Computer Vision

Locate-then-Sparsify: Attribution Guided Sparse Strategy for Visual Hallucination Mitigation

Despite the significant advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), their tendency to generate hallucinations undermines reliability and restricts broader practical deployment. Among the hallucination mitigation methods, feature steering emerges as a promising approach that reduces erroneous outputs in LVLMs without increasing inference costs. However, current methods apply uniform feature steering across all layers. This heuristic strategy ignores inter-layer differences, potentially disrupting layers unrelated to hallucinations and ultimately leading to performance degradation on general tasks. In this paper, we propose Locate-Then-Sparsify for Feature Steering (LTS-FS), a plug-and-play framework which controls the steering intensity according to the hallucination relevance of each layer. We first construct a dataset comprising token-level and sentence-level hallucination cases. Based on this dataset, we introduce an attribution method based on causal interventions to quantify the hallucination relevance of each layer. With the attribution scores across layers, we propose a layerwise strategy that converts these scores into feature steering intensities for individual layers, enabling more precise adjustments specifically on hallucination-relevant layers. Extensive experiments across multiple LVLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that LTS-FS effectively mitigates hallucination while preserving strong performance. Codes are available at https://github.com/huttersadan/LTS-FS.
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All authors Tiantian Dang, Chao Bi, Shufan Shen, Jinzhe Liu, Qingming Huang, Shuhui Wang

Computer Vision

VIGOR: VIdeo Geometry-Oriented Reward for Temporal Generative Alignment

Video diffusion models lack explicit geometric supervision during training, leading to inconsistency artifacts such as object deformation, spatial drift, and depth violations in generated videos. To address this limitation, we propose a geometry-based reward model that leverages pretrained geometric foundation models to evaluate multi-view consistency through cross-frame reprojection error. Unlike previous geometric metrics that measure inconsistency in pixel space, where pixel intensity may introduce additional noise, our approach conducts error computation in a pointwise fashion, yielding a more physically grounded and robust error metric. Furthermore, we introduce a geometry-aware sampling strategy that filters out low-texture and non-semantic regions, focusing evaluation on geometrically meaningful areas with reliable correspondences to improve robustness. We apply this reward model to align video diffusion models through two complementary pathways: post-training of a bidirectional model via SFT or Reinforcement Learning and inference-time optimization of a Causal Video Model (e.g., Streaming video generator) via test-time scaling with our reward as a path verifier. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our design, demonstrating that our geometry-based reward provides superior robustness compared to other variants. By enabling efficient inference-time scaling, our method offers a practical solution for enhancing open-source video models without requiring extensive computational resources for retraining.
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All authors Tengjiao Yin, Jinglei Shi, Heng Guo, Xi Wang

Computer Vision

FG-SGL: Fine-Grained Semantic Guidance Learning via Motion Process Decomposition for Micro-Gesture Recognition

Micro-gesture recognition (MGR) is challenging due to subtle inter-class variations. Existing methods rely on category-level supervision, which is insufficient for capturing subtle and localized motion differences. Thus, this paper proposes a Fine-Grained Semantic Guidance Learning (FG-SGL) framework that jointly integrates fine-grained and category-level semantics to guide vision–language models in perceiving local MG motions. FG-SA adopts fine-grained semantic cues to guide the learning of local motion features, while CP-A enhances the separability of MG features through category-level semantic guidance. To support fine-grained semantic guidance, this work constructs a fine-grained textual dataset with human annotations that describes the dynamic process of MGs in four refined semantic dimensions. Furthermore, a Multi-Level Contrastive Optimization strategy is designed to jointly optimize both modules in a coarse-to-fine pattern. Experiments show that FG-SGL achieves competitive performance, validating the effectiveness of fine-grained semantic guidance for MGR.
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All authors Jinsheng Wei, Zhaodi Xu, Guanming Lu, Haoyu Chen, Jingjie Yan

Computer Vision

AW-MoE: All-Weather Mixture of Experts for Robust Multi-Modal 3D Object Detection

Robust 3D object detection under adverse weather conditions is crucial for autonomous driving. However, most existing methods simply combine all weather samples for training while overlooking data distribution discrepancies across different weather scenarios, leading to performance conflicts. To address this issue, we introduce AW-MoE, the framework that innovatively integrates Mixture of Experts (MoE) into weather-robust multi-modal 3D object detection approaches. AW-MoE incorporates Image-guided Weather-aware Routing (IWR), which leverages the superior discriminability of image features across weather conditions and their invariance to scene variations for precise weather classification. Based on this accurate classification, IWR selects the top-K most relevant Weather-Specific Experts (WSE) that handle data discrepancies, ensuring optimal detection under all weather conditions. Additionally, we propose a Unified Dual-Modal Augmentation (UDMA) for synchronous LiDAR and 4D Radar dual-modal data augmentation while preserving the realism of scenes. Extensive experiments on the real-world dataset demonstrate that AW-MoE achieves ~ 15% improvement in adverse-weather performance over state-of-the-art methods, while incurring negligible inference overhead. Moreover, integrating AW-MoE into established baseline detectors yields performance improvements surpassing current state-of-the-art methods. These results show the effectiveness and strong scalability of our AW-MoE. We will release the code publicly at https://github.com/windlinsherlock/AW-MoE.
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All authors Hongwei Lin, Xun Huang, Chenglu Wen, Cheng Wang

Computer Vision

Point-to-Mask: From Arbitrary Point Annotations to Mask-Level Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) methods predominantly formulate the task as pixel-level segmentation, which requires costly dense annotations and is not well suited to tiny targets with weak texture and ambiguous boundaries. To address this issue, we propose Point-to-Mask, a framework that bridges low-cost point supervision and mask-level detection through two components: a Physics-driven Adaptive Mask Generation (PAMG) module that converts point annotations into compact target masks and geometric cues, and a lightweight Radius-aware Point Regression Network (RPR-Net) that reformulates IRSTD as target center localization and effective radius regression using spatiotemporal motion cues. The two modules form a closed loop: PAMG generates pseudo masks and geometric supervision during training, while the geometric predictions of RPR-Net are fed back to PAMG for pixel-level mask recovery during inference. To facilitate systematic evaluation, we further construct SIRSTD-Pixel, a sequential dataset with refined pixel-level annotations. Experiments show that the proposed framework achieves strong pseudo-label quality, high detection accuracy, and efficient inference, approaching full-supervision performance under point-supervised settings with substantially lower annotation cost. Code and datasets will be available at: https://github.com/GaoScience/point-to-mask.
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All authors Weihua Gao, Wenlong Niu, Jie Tang, Man Yang, Jiafeng Zhang, Xiaodong Peng