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Wednesday 18 March

Computer Vision

Stereo World Model: Camera-Guided Stereo Video Generation

We present StereoWorld, a camera-conditioned stereo world model that jointly learns appearance and binocular geometry for end-to-end stereo video generation.Unlike monocular RGB or RGBD approaches, StereoWorld operates exclusively within the RGB modality, while simultaneously grounding geometry directly from disparity. To efficiently achieve consistent stereo generation, our approach introduces two key designs: (1) a unified camera-frame RoPE that augments latent tokens with camera-aware rotary positional encoding, enabling relative, view- and time-consistent conditioning while preserving pretrained video priors via a stable attention initialization; and (2) a stereo-aware attention decomposition that factors full 4D attention into 3D intra-view attention plus horizontal row attention, leveraging the epipolar prior to capture disparity-aligned correspondences with substantially lower compute. Across benchmarks, StereoWorld improves stereo consistency, disparity accuracy, and camera-motion fidelity over strong monocular-then-convert pipelines, achieving more than 3x faster generation with an additional 5% gain in viewpoint consistency. Beyond benchmarks, StereoWorld enables end-to-end binocular VR rendering without depth estimation or inpainting, enhances embodied policy learning through metric-scale depth grounding, and is compatible with long-video distillation for extended interactive stereo synthesis.
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All authors Yang-Tian Sun, Zehuan Huang, Yifan Niu, Lin Ma, Yan-Pei Cao, Yuewen Ma, Xiaojuan Qi

Computer Vision

Shot-Aware Frame Sampling for Video Understanding

Video frame sampling is essential for efficient long-video understanding with Vision-Language Models (VLMs), since dense inputs are costly and often exceed context limits. Yet when only a small number of frames can be retained, existing samplers often fail to balance broad video coverage with brief but critical events, which can lead to unreliable downstream predictions. To address this issue, we present InfoShot, a task-agnostic, shot-aware frame sampler for long-video understanding. InfoShot first partitions a video into semantically consistent shots, and then selects two complementary keyframes from each shot: one to represent the main content and one to capture unusual within-shot changes. This design is guided by an information-theoretic objective that encourages the sampled set to retain high information about both shot structure and sparse within-shot deviations. In this way, it improves the chance of preserving both overall video context and short decision-critical moments without requiring any retraining. To better evaluate such short-lived events, we further introduce SynFlash, a synthetic benchmark with controllable sub-second anomaly patterns and frame-level ground truth, and we also evaluate InfoShot on existing anomaly datasets and general video understanding tasks. Experiments show that InfoShot improves anomaly hit rate and downstream Video-QA accuracy under frame number constraints, while matching or outperforming strong baselines on standard video understanding benchmarks.
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All authors Mengyu Zhao, Di Fu, Yongyu Xie, Jiaxing Zhang, Zhigang Yuan, Shirin Jalali, Yong Cao

Computer Vision

Understanding and Defending VLM Jailbreaks via Jailbreak-Related Representation Shift

Large vision-language models (VLMs) often exhibit weakened safety alignment with the integration of the visual modality. Even when text prompts contain explicit harmful intent, adding an image can substantially increase jailbreak success rates. In this paper, we observe that VLMs can clearly distinguish benign inputs from harmful ones in their representation space. Moreover, even among harmful inputs, jailbreak samples form a distinct internal state that is separable from refusal samples. These observations suggest that jailbreaks do not arise from a failure to recognize harmful intent. Instead, the visual modality shifts representations toward a specific jailbreak state, thereby leading to a failure to trigger refusal. To quantify this transition, we identify a jailbreak direction and define the jailbreak-related shift as the component of the image-induced representation shift along this direction. Our analysis shows that the jailbreak-related shift reliably characterizes jailbreak behavior, providing a unified explanation for diverse jailbreak scenarios. Finally, we propose a defense method that enhances VLM safety by removing the jailbreak-related shift (JRS-Rem) at inference time. Experiments show that JRS-Rem provides strong defense across multiple scenarios while preserving performance on benign tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/LeeQueue513/JRS-Rem.
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All authors Zhihua Wei, Qiang Li, Jian Ruan, Zhenxin Qin, Leilei Wen, Ruiyang Qin, Qingzhuo Wang, Dongrui Liu, Wen Shen

Computer Vision

Material Magic Wand: Material-Aware Grouping of 3D Parts in Untextured Meshes

We introduce the problem of material-aware part grouping in untextured meshes. Many real-world shapes, such as scales of pinecones or windows of buildings, contain repeated structures that share the same material but exhibit geometric variations. When assigning materials to such meshes, these repeated parts often require piece-by-piece manual identification and selection, which is tedious and time-consuming. To address this, we propose Material Magic Wand, a tool that allows artists to select part groups based on their estimated material properties – when one part is selected, our algorithm automatically retrieves all other parts likely to share the same material. The key component of our approach is a part encoder that generates a material-aware embedding for each 3D part, accounting for both local geometry and global context. We train our model with a supervised contrastive loss that brings embeddings of material-consistent parts closer while separating those of different materials; therefore, part grouping can be achieved by retrieving embeddings that are close to the embedding of the selected part. To benchmark this task, we introduce a curated dataset of 100 shapes with 241 part-level queries. We verify the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments and demonstrate its practical value in an interactive material assignment application.
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All authors Umangi Jain, Vladimir Kim, Matheus Gadelha, Igor Gilitschenski, Zhiqin Chen

Computer Vision

MCoT-MVS: Multi-level Vision Selection by Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Composed Image Retrieval

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve target images based on a reference image and modified texts. However, existing methods often struggle to extract the correct semantic cues from the reference image that best reflect the user's intent under textual modification prompts, resulting in interference from irrelevant visual noise. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-level Vision Selection by Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (MCoT-MVS) for CIR, integrating attention-aware multi-level vision features guided by reasoning cues from a multi-modal large language model (MLLM). Specifically, we leverage an MLLM to perform chain-of-thought reasoning on the multimodal composed input, generating the retained, removed, and target-inferred texts. These textual cues subsequently guide two reference visual attention selection modules to selectively extract discriminative patch-level and instance-level semantics from the reference image. Finally, to effectively fuse these multi-granular visual cues with the modified text and the imagined target description, we design a weighted hierarchical combination module to align the composed query with target images in a unified embedding space. Extensive experiments on two CIR benchmarks, namely CIRR and FashionIQ, demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing methods and achieves new state-of-the-art performance. Code and trained models are publicly released.
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All authors Xuri Ge, Chunhao Wang, Xindi Wang, Zheyun Qin, Zhumin Chen, Xin Xin

Computer Vision

A 3D Reconstruction Benchmark for Asset Inspection

Asset management requires accurate 3D models to inform the maintenance, repair, and assessment of buildings, maritime vessels, and other key structures as they age. These downstream applications rely on high-fidelity models produced from aerial surveys in close proximity to the asset, enabling operators to locate and characterise deterioration or damage and plan repairs. Captured images typically have high overlap between adjacent camera poses, sufficient detail at millimetre scale, and challenging visual appearances such as reflections and transparency. However, existing 3D reconstruction datasets lack examples of these conditions, making it difficult to benchmark methods for this task. We present a new dataset with ground truth depth maps, camera poses, and mesh models of three synthetic scenes with simulated inspection trajectories and varying levels of surface condition on non-Lambertian scene content. We evaluate state-of-the-art reconstruction methods on this dataset. Our results demonstrate that current approaches struggle significantly with the dense capture trajectories and complex surface conditions inherent to this domain, exposing a critical scalability gap and pointing toward new research directions for deployable 3D reconstruction in asset inspection. Project page: https://roboticimaging.org/Projects/asset-inspection-dataset/
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All authors James L. Gray, Nikolai Goncharov, Alexandre Cardaillac, Ryan Griffiths, Jack Naylor, Donald G. Dansereau

Computer Vision

OnlineHMR: Video-based Online World-Grounded Human Mesh Recovery

Human mesh recovery (HMR) models 3D human body from monocular videos, with recent works extending it to world-coordinate human trajectory and motion reconstruction. However, most existing methods remain offline, relying on future frames or global optimization, which limits their applicability in interactive feedback and perception-action loop scenarios such as AR/VR and telepresence. To address this, we propose OnlineHMR, a fully online framework that jointly satisfies four essential criteria of online processing, including system-level causality, faithfulness, temporal consistency, and efficiency. Built upon a two-branch architecture, OnlineHMR enables streaming inference via a causal key-value cache design and a curated sliding-window learning strategy. Meanwhile, a human-centric incremental SLAM provides online world-grounded alignment under physically plausible trajectory correction. Experimental results show that our method achieves performance comparable to existing chunk-based approaches on the standard EMDB benchmark and highly dynamic custom videos, while uniquely supporting online processing. Page and code are available at https://tsukasane.github.io/Video-OnlineHMR/.
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All authors Yiwen Zhao, Ce Zheng, Yufu Wang, Hsueh-Han Daniel Yang, Liting Wen, Laszlo A. Jeni

Computer Vision

EvoGuard: An Extensible Agentic RL-based Framework for Practical and Evolving AI-Generated Image Detection

The rapid proliferation of AI-Generated Images (AIGIs) poses severe misinformation risks, making AIGI detection critical yet challenging. Traditional detection paradigms mainly rely on low-level features, whereas recent research increasingly focuses on leveraging the general understanding ability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to achieve better generalization, yet it still suffers from limited extensibility and expensive data annotations. Instead of building yet another detector, we recast AIGI detection as learned, reasoning-based evidence synthesis over a pool of heterogeneous off-the-shelf detectors, realized through EvoGuard, a novel agentic framework. A capability-aware selection mechanism profiles each detector and gathers complementary evidence per sample; a dynamic orchestration mechanism then reasons over heterogeneous outputs across multiple rounds, cross-validating conflicting or low-confidence signals before concluding. This design exploits the complementary strengths among heterogeneous detectors, transcending the limits of any single model. Furthermore, optimized by a GRPO-based Agentic Reinforcement Learning algorithm using only low-cost binary labels, it eliminates the reliance on fine-grained annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this learned reasoning paradigm outperforms single-detector and static ensembling, achieving SOTA accuracy while mitigating the bias between positive and negative samples. More importantly, it allows the plug-and-play integration of new detectors to boost overall performance in a train-free manner, offering a highly practical, long-term solution to ever-evolving AIGI threats. Source code will be publicly available upon acceptance.
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All authors Chenyang Zhu, Maorong Wang, Jun Liu, Ching-Chun Chang, Isao Echizen

Computer Vision

FineViT: Progressively Unlocking Fine-Grained Perception with Dense Recaptions

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have experienced rapid advancements, their visual encoders frequently remain a performance bottleneck. Conventional CLIP-based encoders struggle with dense spatial tasks due to the loss of visual details caused by low-resolution pretraining and the reliance on noisy, coarse web-crawled image-text pairs. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FineViT, a novel vision encoder specifically designed to unlock fine-grained perception. By replacing coarse web data with dense recaptions, we systematically mitigate information loss through a progressive training paradigm.: first, the encoder is trained from scratch at a high native resolution on billions of global recaptioned image-text pairs, establishing a robust, detail rich semantic foundation. Subsequently, we further enhance its local perception through LLM alignment, utilizing our curated FineCap-450M dataset that comprises over $450$ million high quality local captions. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the progressive strategy. FineViT achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot recognition and retrieval performance, especially in long-context retrieval, and consistently outperforms multimodal visual encoders such as SigLIP2 and Qwen-ViT when integrated into MLLMs. We hope FineViT could serve as a powerful new baseline for fine-grained visual perception.
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All authors Peisen Zhao, Xiaopeng Zhang, Mingxing Xu, Ruoyu Sun, Zewei Du, Dunzheng Wang, Guanghao Zheng, Haohang Xu, Zhibo Zhang, Yuhang Zhang, Yi Ai, Lin Liu, Qi Tian

Computer Vision

MedSAD-CLIP: Supervised CLIP with Token-Patch Cross-Attention for Medical Anomaly Detection and Segmentation

Medical anomaly detection (MAD) and segmentation play a critical role in assisting clinical diagnosis by identifying abnormal regions in medical images and localizing pathological regions. Recent CLIP-based studies are promising for anomaly detection in zero-/few-shot settings, and typically rely on global representations and weak supervision, often producing coarse localization and limited segmentation quality. In this work, we study supervised adaptation of CLIP for MAD under a realistic clinical setting where a limited yet meaningful amount of labeled abnormal data is available. Our model MedSAD-CLIP leverages fine-grained text-visual cues via the Token-Patch Cross-Attention(TPCA) to improve lesion localization while preserving the generalization capability of CLIP representations. Lightweight image adapters and learnable prompt tokens efficiently adapt the pretrained CLIP encoder to the medical domain while preserving its rich semantic alignment. Furthermore, a Margin-based image-text Contrastive Loss is designed to enhance global feature discrimination between normal and abnormal representations. Extensive experiments on four diverse benchmarks-Brain, Retina, Lung, and Breast datasets-demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving superior performance in both pixel-level segmentation and image-level classification over state-of-the-art methods. Our results highlight the potential of supervised CLIP adaptation as a unified and scalable paradigm for medical anomaly understanding. Code will be made available at https://github.com/thuy4tbn99/MedSAD-CLIP
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All authors Thuy Truong Tran, Minh Kha Do, Phuc Nguyen Duy, Min Hun Lee

Computer Vision

A Proposal-Free Query-Guided Network for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition

Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) identifies named entities, including their spans and types, in natural language text and grounds them to the corresponding regions in associated images. Most existing approaches split this task into two steps: they first detect objects using a pre-trained general-purpose detector and then match named entities to the detected objects. However, these methods face a major limitation. Because pre-trained general-purpose object detectors operate independently of textual entities, they tend to detect common objects and frequently overlook specific fine-grained regions required by named entities. This misalignment between object detectors and entities introduces imprecision and can impair overall system performance. In this paper, we propose a proposal-free Query-Guided Network (QGN) that unifies multimodal reasoning and decoding through text guidance and cross- modal interaction. QGN enables accurate grounding and robust performance in open-domain scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that QGN achieves top performance among compared GMNER models on widely used benchmarks.
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All authors Hongbing Li, Jiamin Liu, Shuo Zhang, Bo Xiao

Computer Vision

Recurrent Reasoning with Vision-Language Models for Estimating Long-Horizon Embodied Task Progress

Accurately estimating task progress is critical for embodied agents to plan and execute long-horizon, multi-step tasks. Despite promising advances, existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) based methods primarily leverage their video understanding capabilities, while neglecting their complex reasoning potential. Furthermore, processing long video trajectories with VLMs is computationally prohibitive for real-world deployment. To address these challenges, we propose the Recurrent Reasoning Vision-Language Model ($\text{R}^2$VLM). Our model features a recurrent reasoning framework that processes local video snippets iteratively, maintaining a global context through an evolving Chain of Thought (CoT). This CoT explicitly records task decomposition, key steps, and their completion status, enabling the model to reason about complex temporal dependencies. This design avoids the high cost of processing long videos while preserving essential reasoning capabilities. We train $\text{R}^2$VLM on large-scale, automatically generated datasets from ALFRED and Ego4D. Extensive experiments on progress estimation and downstream applications, including progress-enhanced policy learning, reward modeling for reinforcement learning, and proactive assistance, demonstrate that $\text{R}^2$VLM achieves strong performance and generalization, achieving a new state-of-the-art in long-horizon task progress estimation. The models and benchmarks are publicly available at \href{https://huggingface.co/collections/zhangyuelin/r2vlm}{huggingface}.
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All authors Yuelin Zhang, Sijie Cheng, Chen Li, Zongzhao Li, Yuxin Huang, Yang Liu, Wenbing Huang

Computer Vision

Symphony: A Cognitively-Inspired Multi-Agent System for Long-Video Understanding

Despite rapid developments and widespread applications of MLLM agents, they still struggle with long-form video understanding (LVU) tasks, which are characterized by high information density and extended temporal spans. Recent research on LVU agents demonstrates that simple task decomposition and collaboration mechanisms are insufficient for long-chain reasoning tasks. Moreover, directly reducing the time context through embedding-based retrieval may lose key information of complex problems. In this paper, we propose Symphony, a multi-agent system, to alleviate these limitations. By emulating human cognition patterns, Symphony decomposes LVU into fine-grained subtasks and incorporates a deep reasoning collaboration mechanism enhanced by reflection, effectively improving the reasoning capability. Additionally, Symphony provides a VLM-based grounding approach to analyze LVU tasks and assess the relevance of video segments, which significantly enhances the ability to locate complex problems with implicit intentions and large temporal spans. Experimental results show that Symphony achieves state-of-the-art performance on LVBench, LongVideoBench, VideoMME, and MLVU, with a 5.0% improvement over the prior state-of-the-art method on LVBench. Code is available at https://github.com/Haiyang0226/Symphony.
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All authors Haiyang Yan, Hongyun Zhou, Peng Xu, Xiaoxue Feng, Mengyi Liu

Computer Vision

3D MRI-Based Alzheimer's Disease Classification Using Multi-Modal 3D CNN with Leakage-Aware Subject-Level Evaluation

Deep learning has become an important tool for Alzheimer's disease (AD) classification from structural MRI. Many existing studies analyze individual 2D slices extracted from MRI volumes, while clinical neuroimaging practice typically relies on the full three dimensional structure of the brain. From this perspective, volumetric analysis may better capture spatial relationships among brain regions that are relevant to disease progression. Motivated by this idea, this work proposes a multimodal 3D convolutional neural network for AD classification using raw OASIS 1 MRI volumes. The model combines structural T1 information with gray matter, white matter, and cerebrospinal fluid probability maps obtained through FSL FAST segmentation in order to capture complementary neuroanatomical information. The proposed approach is evaluated on the clinically labelled OASIS 1 cohort using 5 fold subject level cross validation, achieving a mean accuracy of 72.34% plus or minus 4.66% and a ROC AUC of 0.7781 plus or minus 0.0365. GradCAM visualizations further indicate that the model focuses on anatomically meaningful regions, including the medial temporal lobe and ventricular areas that are known to be associated with Alzheimer's related structural changes. To better understand how data representation and evaluation strategies may influence reported performance, additional diagnostic experiments were conducted on a slice based version of the dataset under both slice level and subject level protocols. These observations help provide context for the volumetric results. Overall, the proposed multimodal 3D framework establishes a reproducible subject level benchmark and highlights the potential benefits of volumetric MRI analysis for Alzheimer's disease classification.
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All authors Md Sifat, Sania Akter, Akif Islam, Md. Ekramul Hamid, Abu Saleh Musa Miah, Najmul Hassan, Md Abdur Rahim, Jungpil Shin

Computer Vision

Directing the Narrative: A Finetuning Method for Controlling Coherence and Style in Story Generation

Story visualization requires generating sequential imagery that aligns semantically with evolving narratives while maintaining rigorous consistency in character identity and visual style. However, existing methodologies often struggle with subject inconsistency and identity drift, particularly when depicting complex interactions or extended narrative arcs. To address these challenges, we propose a cohesive two-stage framework designed for robust and consistent story generation. First, we introduce Group-Shared Attention (GSA), a mechanism that fosters intrinsic consistency by enabling lossless cross-sample information flow within attention layers. This allows the model to structurally encode identity correspondence across frames without relying on external encoders. Second, we leverage Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to align generated outputs with human aesthetic and narrative standards. Unlike conventional methods that rely on conflicting auxiliary losses, our approach simultaneously enhances visual fidelity and identity preservation by learning from holistic preference data. Extensive evaluations on the ViStoryBench benchmark demonstrate that our method establishes a new state-of-the-art, significantly outperforming strong baselines with gains of +10.0 in Character Identity (CIDS) and +18.7 in Style Consistency (CSD), all while preserving high-fidelity generation.
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All authors Jianzhang Zhang, Yijing Tian, Jiwang Qu, Chuang Liu

Computer Vision

DANCE: Dynamic 3D CNN Pruning: Joint Frame, Channel, and Feature Adaptation for Energy Efficiency on the Edge

Modern convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are workhorses for video and image processing, but fail to adapt to the computational complexity of input samples in a dynamic manner to minimize energy consumption. In this research, we propose DANCE, a fine-grained, input-aware, dynamic pruning framework for 3D CNNs to maximize power efficiency with negligible to zero impact on performance. In the proposed two-step approach, the first step is called activation variability amplification (AVA), and the 3D CNN model is retrained to increase the variance of the magnitude of neuron activations across the network in this step, facilitating pruning decisions across diverse CNN input scenarios. In the second step, called adaptive activation pruning (AAP), a lightweight activation controller network is trained to dynamically prune frames, channels, and features of 3D convolutional layers of the network (different for each layer), based on statistics of the outputs of the first layer of the network. Our method achieves substantial savings in multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations and memory accesses by introducing sparsity within convolutional layers. Hardware validation on the NVIDIA Jetson Nano GPU and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 platform demonstrates respective speedups of 1.37X and 2.22X, achieving up to 1.47X higher energy efficiency compared to the state of the art.
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Computer Vision

ConfusionBench: An Expert-Validated Benchmark for Confusion Recognition and Localization in Educational Videos

Recognizing and localizing student confusion from video is an important yet challenging problem in educational AI. Existing confusion datasets suffer from noisy labels, coarse temporal annotations, and limited expert validation, which hinder reliable fine-grained recognition and temporally grounded analysis. To address these limitations, we propose a practical multi-stage filtering pipeline that integrates two stages of model-assisted screening, researcher curation, and expert validation to build a higher-quality benchmark for confusion understanding. Based on this pipeline, we introduce ConfusionBench, a new benchmark for educational videos consisting of a balanced confusion recognition dataset and a video localization dataset. We further provide zero-shot baseline evaluations of a representative open-source model and a proprietary model on clip-level confusion recognition, long-video confusion localization tasks. Experimental results show that the proprietary model performs better overall but tends to over-predict transitional segments, while the open-source model is more conservative and more prone to missed detections. In addition, the proposed student confusion report visualization can support educational experts in making intervention decisions and adapting learning plans accordingly. All datasets and related materials will be made publicly available on our project page.
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All authors Lu Dong, Xiao Wang, Mark Frank, Srirangaraj Setlur, Venu Govindaraju, Ifeoma Nwogu

Computer Vision

LED: A Benchmark for Evaluating Layout Error Detection in Document Analysis

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have improved Document Layout Analysis (DLA), yet structural errors such as region merging, splitting, and omission remain persistent. Conventional overlap-based metrics (e.g., IoU, mAP) fail to capture such logical inconsistencies. To overcome this limitation, we propose Layout Error Detection (LED), a benchmark that evaluates structural reasoning in DLA predictions beyond surface-level accuracy. LED defines eight standardized error types (Missing, Hallucination, Size Error, Split, Merge, Overlap, Duplicate, and Misclassification) and provides quantitative rules and injection algorithms for realistic error simulation. Using these definitions, we construct LED-Dataset and design three evaluation tasks: document-level error detection, document-level error-type classification, and element-level error-type classification. Experiments with state-of-the-art multimodal models show that LED enables fine-grained and interpretable assessment of structural understanding, revealing clear weaknesses across modalities and architectures. Overall, LED establishes a unified and explainable benchmark for diagnosing the structural robustness and reasoning capability of document understanding models.
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All authors Inbum Heo, Taewook Hwang, Jeesu Jung, Sangkeun Jung

Computer Vision

GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World–Action Model

World-Action Models (WAM) initialized from pre-trained video generation backbones have demonstrated remarkable potential for robot policy learning. However, existing approaches face two critical bottlenecks that hinder performance and deployment. First, jointly reasoning over future visual dynamics and corresponding actions incurs substantial inference overhead. Second, joint modeling often entangles visual and motion representations, making motion prediction accuracy heavily dependent on the quality of future video forecasts. To address these issues, we introduce GigaWorld-Policy, an action-centered WAM that learns 2D pixel-action dynamics while enabling efficient action decoding, with optional video generation. Specifically, we formulate policy training into two coupled components: the model predicts future action sequences conditioned on the current observation, and simultaneously generates future videos conditioned on the predicted actions and the same observation. The policy is supervised by both action prediction and video generation, providing richer learning signals and encouraging physically plausible actions through visual-dynamics constraints. With a causal design that prevents future-video tokens from influencing action tokens, explicit future-video generation is optional at inference time, allowing faster action prediction during deployment. To support this paradigm, we curate a diverse, large-scale robot dataset to pre-train an action-centered video generation model, which is then adapted as the backbone for robot policy learning. Experimental results on real-world robotic platforms show that GigaWorld-Policy runs 9x faster than the leading WAM baseline, Motus, while improving task success rates by 7%. Moreover, compared with pi-0.5, GigaWorld-Policy improves performance by 95% on RoboTwin 2.0.
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All authors Angen Ye, Boyuan Wang, Chaojun Ni, Guan Huang, Guosheng Zhao, Hao Li, Hengtao Li, Jie Li, Jindi Lv, Jingyu Liu, Min Cao, Peng Li, Qiuping Deng, Wenjun Mei, Xiaofeng Wang, Xinze Chen, Xinyu Zhou, Yang Wang, Yifan Chang, Yifan Li, Yukun Zhou, Yun Ye, Zhichao Liu, Zheng Zhu

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.RO

Neural Radiance Maps for Extraterrestrial Navigation and Path Planning

Autonomous vehicles such as the Mars rovers currently lead the vanguard of surface exploration on extraterrestrial planets and moons. In order to accelerate the pace of exploration and science objectives, it is critical to plan safe and efficient paths for these vehicles. However, current rover autonomy is limited by a lack of global maps which can be easily constructed and stored for onboard re-planning. Recently, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have been introduced as a detailed 3D scene representation which can be trained from sparse 2D images and efficiently stored. We propose to use NeRFs to construct maps for online use in autonomous navigation, and present a planning framework which leverages the NeRF map to integrate local and global information. Our approach interpolates local cost observations across global regions using kernel ridge regression over terrain features extracted from the NeRF map, allowing the rover to re-route itself around untraversable areas discovered during online operation. We validate our approach in high-fidelity simulation and demonstrate lower cost and higher percentage success rate path planning compared to various baselines.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.RO

Visual SLAM with DEM Anchoring for Lunar Surface Navigation

Future lunar missions will require autonomous rovers capable of traversing tens of kilometers across challenging terrain while maintaining accurate localization and producing globally consistent maps. However, the absence of global positioning systems, extreme illumination, and low-texture regolith make long-range navigation on the Moon particularly difficult, as visual-inertial odometry pipelines accumulate drift over extended traverses. To address this challenge, we present a stereo visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system that integrates learned feature detection and matching with global constraints from digital elevation models (DEMs). Our front-end employs learning-based feature extraction and matching to achieve robustness to illumination extremes and repetitive terrain, while the back-end incorporates DEM-derived height and surface-normal factors into a pose graph, providing absolute surface constraints that mitigate long-term drift. We validate our approach using both simulated lunar traverse data generated in Unreal Engine and real Moon/Mars analog data collected from Mt. Etna. Results demonstrate that DEM anchoring consistently reduces absolute trajectory error compared to baseline SLAM methods, lowering drift in long-range navigation even in repetitive or visually aliased terrain.
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Computer Vision

From Drop-off to Recovery: A Mechanistic Analysis of Segmentation in MLLMs

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly applied to pixel-level vision tasks, yet their intrinsic capacity for spatial understanding remains poorly understood. We investigate segmentation capacity through a layerwise linear probing evaluation across the entire MLLM pipeline: vision encoder, adapter, and LLM. We further conduct an intervention based attention knockout analysis to test whether cross-token attention progressively refines visual representations, and an evaluation of bidirectional attention among image tokens on spatial consistency. Our analysis reveals that the adapter introduces a segmentation representation drop-off, but LLM layers progressively recover through attention-mediated refinement, where correctly classified tokens steer misclassified neighbors toward the correct label. At early image token positions, this recovery is bounded by causal attention, which bidirectional attention among image tokens alleviates. These findings provide a mechanistic account of how MLLMs process visual information for segmentation, informing the design of future segmentation-capable models.
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Computer Vision

Does it matter which Gaussians you pick in 4D Gaussian streaming?

Anchor-driven 4D Gaussian streaming methods such as Instant Gaussian Stream (IGS) update a dynamic scene each frame from a compact set of Gaussian anchors, chosen by default with Farthest Point Sampling (FPS) at a fixed budget of $8{,}192$. Because these anchors act as control points that drive the whole scene through linear blend skinning, the rule used to choose them ought to affect reconstruction quality. We test this by holding the IGS pipeline fixed and changing only the sampler, comparing FPS, random, uniform, an opacity-scale heuristic, and a learned policy across budgets and refinement settings on N3DV and MeetingRoom. At deployment budgets the sampler has no measurable effect: a cheap random or uniform sampler at $4{,}096$ anchors matches FPS@8192 within measurement error, the default budget is over-provisioned, and the result holds on a second backbone (3DGStream). The learned policy is mixed rather than consistently better: it can improve the N3DV validation set at tight budgets, but does not give a stable cross-dataset rule, and selection is never the bottleneck because refinement dominates runtime. We will release our full sweep and evaluation protocol as a sampler benchmark.
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Tuesday 17 March

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Caption First, VQA Second: Knowledge Density, Not Task Format, Drives Multimodal Scaling

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved rapid progress, yet their scaling behavior remains less clearly characterized and often less predictable than that of text-only LLMs. Increasing model size and task diversity often yields diminishing returns. In this work, we argue that the primary bottleneck in multimodal scaling is not task format, but knowledge density in training data. We first show that task-specific supervision such as Visual Question Answering (VQA) contributes little incremental semantic information beyond image captions: VQA signals can be reconstructed from captions with negligible performance loss. We then demonstrate that increasing knowledge density – through structured caption enrichment and cross-modal knowledge injection – leads to consistent performance improvements across multimodal and downstream benchmarks. Across controlled experiments, performance correlates more strongly with semantic coverage than with task diversity. These findings suggest that current MLLMs fail to scale primarily because training data lacks sufficient knowledge coverage. We advocate for knowledge-centric multimodal training as a principled foundation for scalable multimodal models.
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All authors Hongjian Zou, Yue Ge, Qi Ding, Yixuan Liao, Xiaoxin Chen

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from eess.SY

Deep Learning Multi-Horizon Irradiance Nowcasting: A Comparative Evaluation of Three Methods for Leveraging Sky Images

We investigate three distinct methods of incorporating all-sky imager (ASI) images into deep learning (DL) irradiance nowcasting. The first method relies on a convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract features directly from raw RGB images. The second method uses state-of-the-art algorithms to engineer 2D feature maps informed by domain knowledge, e.g., cloud segmentation, the cloud motion vector, solar position, and cloud base height. These feature maps are then passed to a CNN to extract compound features. The final method relies on aggregating the engineered 2D feature maps into time-series input. Each of the three methods were then used as part of a DL model trained on a high-frequency, 29-day dataset to generate multi-horizon forecasts of global horizontal irradiance up to 15 minutes ahead. The models were then evaluated using root mean squared error and skill score on 7 selected days of data. Aggregated engineered ASI features as model input yielded superior forecasting performance, demonstrating that integration of ASI images into DL nowcasting models is possible without complex spatially-ordered DL-architectures and inputs, underscoring opportunities for alternative image processing methods as well as the potential for improved spatial DL feature processing methods.
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All authors Erling W. Eriksen, Magnus M. Nygård, Niklas Erdmann, Heine N. Riise

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from eess.SP

EMPD: An Event-based Multimodal Physiological Dataset for Remote Pulse Wave Detection

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) based on traditional frame-based cameras often struggles with motion artifacts and limited temporal resolution. To address these limitations, we introduce EMPD (Event-based Multimodal Physiological Dataset), the first benchmark dataset specifically designed for non-contact physiological sensing via event cameras. The dataset leverages a laser-assisted acquisition system where a high-coherence laser modulates subtle skin vibrations from the radial artery into significant signals detectable by a neuromorphic sensor. The hardware platform integrates a high-resolution event camera to capture micro-motions and intensity transients, an industrial RGB camera to provide traditional rPPG benchmarks, and a clinical-grade pulse oximeter to record ground truth PPG waveforms. EMPD contains 193 valid records collected from 83 subjects, covering a wide heart rate range (40-110 BPM) under both resting and post-exercise conditions. By providing precisely synchronized multimodal data with microsecond-level temporal precision, EMPD serves as a crucial resource for developing robust algorithms in the field of neuromorphic physiological monitoring. The dataset is publicly available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18765701
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All authors Qian Feng, Pengfei Li, Rongshan Gao, Jiale Xu, Rui Gong, Yidi Li

Computer Vision

Mix-and-Match Pruning: Globally Guided Layer-Wise Sparsification of DNNs

Deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) on edge devices requires strong compression with minimal accuracy loss. This paper introduces Mix-and-Match Pruning, a globally guided, layer-wise sparsification framework that leverages sensitivity scores and simple architectural rules to generate diverse, high-quality pruning configurations. The framework addresses a key limitation that different layers and architectures respond differently to pruning, making single-strategy approaches suboptimal. Mix-and-Match derives architecture-aware sparsity ranges, e.g., preserving normalization layers while pruning classifiers more aggressively, and systematically samples these ranges to produce ten strategies per sensitivity signal (magnitude, gradient, or their combination). This eliminates repeated pruning runs while offering deployment-ready accuracy-sparsity trade-offs. Experiments on CNNs and Vision Transformers demonstrate Pareto-optimal results, with Mix-and-Match reducing accuracy degradation on Swin-Tiny by 40% relative to standard single-criterion pruning. These findings show that coordinating existing pruning signals enables more reliable and efficient compressed models than introducing new criteria.
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All authors Danial Monachan, Samira Nazari, Mahdi Taheri, Ali Azarpeyvand, Milos Krstic, Michael Huebner, Christian Herglotz

Computer Vision

Understanding Pruning Regimes in Vision-Language Models Through Domain-Aware Layer Selection

Transformer-based vision-language models (VLMs) contain substantial depth redundancy, yet the effect of removing specific decoder layers remains poorly understood, especially for domains that require tight coupling between perception and multi-step reasoning. We study structured decoder layer pruning through the lens of domain-aware activation similarity, measuring how strongly each layer transforms representations for math versus non-math inputs. This yields simple math-aware, non-math-aware, and mixed ranking criteria that identify layers whose input-output activations change least within a target domain. Across two state-of-the-art VLMs and a broad suite of math and general multimodal benchmarks, we uncover a consistent three-regime structure: at low pruning budgets, performance is highly sensitive to which layers are removed; at moderate budgets, methods converge as structural damage accumulates; and at high budgets, structural continuity dominates, favoring spacing-aware strategies. Our domain-aware rankings achieve the strongest stability in the ranking-sensitive regime, while matching or exceeding structure-aware baselines at larger budgets. These results provide a clearer picture of how depth contributes to domain-specific behavior in VLMs and offer a practical, interpretable approach to reducing model depth without sacrificing essential mathematical or general vision-language capabilities.
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Computer Vision

A Computationally Efficient Multi-Section Whole Slide Image Analysis for Capturing Prostate Cancer Multifocality in Biochemical Recurrence Prediction

Prostate cancer is among the most frequently diagnosed malignancies in men worldwide. However, precise prediction of biochemical recurrence (BCR) after radical prostatectomy remains challenging. Here, we propose a computationally efficient multi section whole slide image analysis framework designed to capture the whole gland tumor landscape. We curated a large scale dataset comprising 23,451 slides from 789 patients and systematically optimized patch and slide sub sampling to substantially reduce the computational cost of training and inference. Under this efficient configuration, the framework achieved strong predictive performance for 1- and 2-year BCR, with discrimination and clinical net benefit comparable to or exceeding those of established clinical benchmarks. In multivariable Cox proportional hazards analysis, the AI derived risk score remained an independent prognostic factor among the covariates examined, and its integration with clinical variables further improved prognostic performance. External validation in an independent cohort provided preliminary evidence of transferability. Finally, attention-dispersion analysis showed that the model drew prognostic information from multiple sections, consistent with the multifocal nature of prostate cancer. Collectively, these findings support the potential of multi section slide analysis as a scalable approach for postoperative BCR risk assessment in prostate cancer.
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All authors Yesung Cho, Dongmyung Shin, Sujeong Hong, Jooyeon Lee, Seongmin Park, Geongyu Lee, Won Young Park, Bongjin Park, Jongbae Park, Hong Koo Ha

Computer Vision

SA-CycleGAN-2.5D: Self-Attention CycleGAN with Tri-Planar Context for Multi-Site MRI Harmonization

Multi-site neuroimaging analysis is fundamentally confounded by scanner-induced covariate shifts, where the marginal distribution of voxel intensities $P(\mathbf{x})$ varies non-linearly across acquisition protocols while the conditional anatomy $P(\mathbf{y}|\mathbf{x})$ remains constant. This is particularly detrimental to radiomic reproducibility, where acquisition variance often exceeds biological pathology variance. Existing statistical harmonization methods (e.g., ComBat) operate in feature space, precluding spatial downstream tasks, while standard deep learning approaches are theoretically bounded by local effective receptive fields (ERF), failing to model the global intensity correlations characteristic of field-strength bias. We propose SA-CycleGAN-2.5D, a domain adaptation framework motivated by the $H\Delta H$-divergence bound of Ben-David et al., integrating three architectural innovations: (1) A 2.5D tri-planar manifold injection preserving through-plane gradients $\nabla_z$ at $O(HW)$ complexity; (2) A U-ResNet generator with dense voxel-to-voxel self-attention, surpassing the $O(\sqrt{L})$ receptive field limit of CNNs to model global scanner field biases; and (3) A spectrally-normalized discriminator constraining the Lipschitz constant ($K_D \le 1$) for stable adversarial optimization. Evaluated on 654 glioma patients across two institutional domains (BraTS and UPenn-GBM), our method reduces Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) by 99.1% ($1.729 \to 0.015$) and degrades domain classifier accuracy to near-chance (59.7%). Ablation confirms that global attention is statistically essential (Cohen's $d = 1.32$, $p < 0.001$) for the harder heterogeneous-to-homogeneous translation direction. By bridging 2D efficiency and 3D consistency, our framework yields voxel-level harmonized images that preserve tumor pathophysiology, enabling reproducible multi-center radiomic analysis.
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