Papers

Video technology is advancing toward Ultra High Definition (UHD) and High Dynamic Range (HDR), which intensifies the need for higher compression efficiency for these high-specification videos. Beyond advances in traditional codecs, neural video codecs (NVCs) have attracted significant research attention and have evolved rapidly over the past few years. The coding artifacts of NVCs often exhibit content-varying and generative characteristics, which differ from those of conventional codecs and are challenging for traditional video quality assessment (VQA) methods to capture. Therefore, VQA metrics are required to generalize across different codecs, content types, and dynamic ranges to better support video codec research and evaluation. In this paper, we propose FDIM, a feature-distance-based generic video quality metric for both traditional and neural video codecs across SDR and HDR formats. FDIM employs a hybrid architecture that integrates deep and hand-crafted features. The deep feature component learns multi-scale representations to capture distortions ranging from structural and textural fidelity degradation to high-level semantic deviations, while the hand-crafted feature component provides stable complementary cues to improve overall generalization. We trained FDIM on a large-scale subjective quality assessment dataset (DCVQA) consisting of over 16k video sequences encoded by traditional block-based hybrid video codecs and end-to-end perceptually optimized neural video codecs. Extensive experiments on ten SDR/HDR VQA datasets containing diverse, previously unseen codecs demonstrate that FDIM achieves strong generalization and high correlation with subjective assessment. The source code for FDIM and the DCVQA validation set will be released at https://github.com/MCL-ZJU/FDIM.

Topology reasoning is crucial for autonomous driving. Current methods primarily focus on instance-level learning for centerline detection, followed by a sequential module for topology reasoning that relies on simplified MLP layers. Moreover, they often neglect the importance of point-to-instance (P2I) relationships in topology reasoning. To address these limitations, we present TopoHR (Topological Hierarchical Representation), a novel end-to-end framework that establishes cyclic interaction between centerline detection and topology reasoning, allowing them to iteratively enhance each other. Specifically, we introduce a hierarchical centerline representation including point queries, instance queries, and semantic representations. These multi-level features are seamlessly integrated and fused within a hierarchical centerline decoder. Furthermore, we design a hierarchical topology reasoning module that captures both fine-grained P2I relationships and global instance-to-instance (I2I) connections within a unified architecture. With these novel components, TopoHR ensures accurate and robust topology reasoning. On the OpenLane-V2 benchmark, TopoHR refreshes state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements. Notably, compared with previous best results, TopoHR achieves +3.8 in $\mathrm{DET}_{\text{l}}$, +5.4 in $\mathrm{TOP}_{\text{ll}}$ on $\text{subset_A}$ and +11.0 in $\mathrm{DET}_{\text{l}}$, +7.9 in $\mathrm{TOP}_{\text{ll}}$ on $\text{subset_B}$, validating the effectiveness of the proposed components. The code will be shared publicly at https://github.com/Yifeng-Bai/TopoHR.git.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has become a promising solution to alleviate the annotation burden of deep learning-based medical image segmentation models. While recent advances in foundation model-driven SSL have pushed the boundary to extremely limited annotation scenarios, they fail to maintain robust competitive performance in complex imaging modalities. In this paper, we propose SemiSAM-O1, an annotation-efficient framework using only one annotated template case for segmentation. SemiSAM-O1 extends the specialist-generalist collaborative learning framework to the extreme one-label setting by fully exploiting the foundation model's feature representation capability beyond its prompting interface. SemiSAM-O1 operates in two stages. In the first stage, the foundation model's encoder extracts dense features from all volumes, and class prototypes derived from the single annotated template are propagated to the unlabeled pool via feature similarity to produce coarse initial pseudo-labels. In the second stage, an iterative training-and-refinement loop progressively improves both the segmentation model and the pseudo-labels over multiple rounds, where each round trains the model from scratch on current pseudo-labels and generates updated predictions with voxel-wise uncertainty estimates. An uncertainty-guided refinement step further leverages the foundation model's global feature space to correct high-uncertainty regions by aggregating labels from their most similar confident neighbors, establishing a virtuous cycle of mutual improvement. Extensive experiments on a wide range of segmentation tasks across different modalities and anatomical targets demonstrate that SemiSAM-O1 significantly narrows the performance gap between one-label semi-supervised learning and full supervision, while significantly reducing the computational overhead of online foundation model inference.

Full 360$^\circ$ novel view synthesis under low-light conditions remains challenging. Insufficient illumination, noise amplification, and view-dependent photometric inconsistencies prevent existing methods from jointly preserving geometric consistency and photorealism. Unsupervised approaches often exhibit color drift under large viewpoint variations, while supervised low-light enhancement models, though effective for 2D tasks, struggle to generalize to new scenes and typically require retraining. To address this issue, we propose MERID-GS, a Multi-Scale Explicit Retinex Illumination-Decoupled Gaussian framework for low-light 360$^\circ$ synthesis. Based on Retinex theory, the method explicitly separates illumination and reflectance, and suppresses noise propagation while enhancing dark-region structures via a learnable gain and Illumination-State-Guided Frequency Gating. Combined with lightweight Reflection Head and 3D Gaussian Splatting, MERID-GS adapts to new scenes with only a few shots and enables stable low-light novel view synthesis from sparse-view observations. In addition, we construct a low-light multi-view dataset covering full 360$^\circ$ scenes for joint evaluation. Thorough experiments across multiple datasets in this area demonstrate that MERID-GS achieves SOTA performance, exhibiting superior cross-scene generalization and view consistency. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/YhuoyuH/MERID-GS..

Video-to-text summarization remains underexplored in terms of comprehensive evaluation methods. Traditional n-gram overlap-based metrics and recent large language model (LLM)-based approaches depend heavily on human-written reference summaries, limiting their practicality and sensitivity to nuanced semantic aspects. In this paper, we propose QEVA, a reference-free metric evaluating candidate summaries directly against source videos through multimodal question answering. QEVA assesses summaries along three clear dimensions: Coverage, Factuality, and Chronology. We also introduce MLVU(VS)-Eval, a new annotated benchmark derived from the MLVU dataset, comprising 800 summaries generated from 200 videos using state-of-the-art video-language multimodal models. This dataset establishes a transparent and consistent framework for evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that QEVA shows higher correlation with human judgments compared to existing approaches, as measured by Kendall's $\tau_b$, $\tau_c$, and Spearman's $\rho$. We hope that our benchmark and metric will facilitate meaningful progress in video-to-text summarization research and provide valuable insights for the development of future evaluation methods.

Bregman divergences play a pivotal role in statistics, machine learning and computational information geometry. Particularly in the context of machine learning, they are central to clustering, exponential families, parameter estimation and optimisation, among other things. Despite this, the full toolkit of Hilbert spaces and in particular reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces have not been systematically developed and applied to functional Bregman divergences, where points are functions rather than finite-dimensional parameter vectors. While other types of functional Bregman divergences have been studied, these are typically in a Banach space rather than more directly aligned with kernel methods and Hilbert-space geometry commonly used in machine learning. We consider functional Bregman divergences on a Hilbert space, where the self-dual pairing and Riesz representer afford us particularly convenient calculus. Further specialising Bregman generators as a composition involving a kernel mean embedding makes such divergences easy to estimate. We discuss applications in clustering, universal estimation, robust estimation and generative modelling, and contrast our approach with other types of Bregman divergences.

Accurate 3D object detection is critical for autonomous driving, necessitating reliable, cost-effective sensors capable of operating in adverse weather conditions. Camera and millimeter-wave radar fusion has emerged as a promising solution; however, these methods often rely on finely annotated radar data, which is scarce and labor-intensive to produce. To address this challenge, we present CLLAP, a Contrastive Learning-based LiDAR-Augmented Pretraining framework that enhances the performance of existing radar-camera fusion methods for 3D object detection. CLLAP leverages abundant LiDAR data to generate pseudo-radar data using the proposed L2R (LiDAR-to-Radar) Sampling method. Then, it incorporates this data into a novel dual-stage, dual-modality contrastive learning strategy, enabling effective self-supervised learning from paired pseudo-radar and image data. This approach facilitates effective pretraining of existing radar-camera fusion models in a plug-and-play manner, enhancing their feature extraction capabilities and improving detection accuracy and robustness. Experimental results using NuScenes and Lyft Level 5 datasets demonstrate significant performance improvements across three baseline models, highlighting CLLAP's effectiveness in advancing radar-camera fusion for autonomous driving applications.

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enhanced grounding capabilities in general scenes, their robustness in crowded scenes remains underexplored. Crowded scenes entail visual challenges (i.e., occlusion and small objects), which impair object semantics and degrade grounding performance. In contrast, language expressions are immune to such degradation and preserve object semantics. In light of these observations, we propose a novel method that overcomes such constraints by leveraging Language-Guided Semantic Cues (LGSCs). Specifically, our approach introduces a Semantic Cue Extractor (SCE) to derive semantic cues of objects from the visual pipeline of an MLLM. We then guide these cues using corresponding text embeddings to produce LGSCs as linguistic semantic priors. Subsequently, they are reintegrated into the original visual pipeline to refine object semantics. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate that incorporating LGSCs into an MLLM effectively improves grounding accuracy in crowded scenes.

The encoder-decoder framework has become widely popular nowadays. In this model, the encoder extracts informative visual features from an input image, and the decoder employs a sequence-to-sequence formulation to generate the corresponding textual description from these features. The existing models focus more on the decision part. However, extracting meaningful information from the image can help the decoder generate an accurate caption by providing information about the objects and their relationship. Remote sensing images are highly complex. One major challenge is detecting objects that extend beyond their visible boundaries due to occlusion, overlapping structures, and unclear edges. Hence, there is a need to design an approach that can effectively capture both high-level semantics and low-level spatial details for accurate caption generation. In this work, we have proposed an edge-aware fusion method by incorporating the original image and its edge-aware version into the encoder to enhance feature representation and boundary awareness. We used a comparison-based beam search (CBBS) to generate captions to achieve a balanced trade-off between quantitative metrics and qualitative caption relevance through fairness-based comparison of candidate captions. Experimental results demonstrate our model's superiority over several baseline models in quantitative and qualitative perspectives.

Identifying species in biology among tens of thousands of visually similar taxa while discovering unknown species in open-world environments remains a fundamental challenge in biodiversity research. Current methods treat identification and discovery as separate problems, with classification models assuming closed sets and discovery relying on threshold-based rejection. Here we present DeepTaxon, a retrieval-augmented multimodal framework that unifies species identification and discovery through interpretable reasoning over retrieved visual evidence. Given a query image, DeepTaxon retrieves the top-$k$ candidate species with $n$ exemplar images each from a retrieval index and performs chain-of-thought comparative reasoning. Critically, we redefine discovery as an explicit, retrieval-based decision problem rather than an implicit parametric memory problem. A sample is novel if and only if the retrieval index lacks sufficient evidence for identification, so each retrieval naturally yields a classification or discovery label without manual annotation, thereby providing automatic supervision for both tasks. We train the framework via supervised fine-tuning on synthetic retrieval-augmented data, followed by reinforcement learning on hard samples, converting high-recall retrieval into high-precision decisions that scale to massive taxonomic vocabularies. Extensive experiments on a large-scale in-distribution benchmark and six out-of-distribution datasets demonstrate consistent improvements in both identification and discovery. Ablation studies further reveal effective test-time scaling with candidate count $k$ and exemplar count $n$, strong zero-shot transfer to unseen domains, and consistent performance across retrieval encoders, establishing an interpretable solution for biodiversity research.

Conventional multi-projector calibration requires projecting and capturing structured light patterns for each projector sequentially, causing calibration time and effort to increase linearly with the number of projectors. This scalability bottleneck has long limited the deployment of large-scale projection mapping systems. We present a new calibration framework that breaks this limitation by embedding cameras into the surface of the calibration target. The embedded cameras directly capture the incoming projection light, enabling the separation of simultaneously projected structured light patterns from multiple projectors according to their incident directions. Our method establishes correspondences between the optical centers of the embedded cameras and the projector pixels, allowing the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of all projectors to be simultaneously estimated. We further introduce a correction technique for small misalignments between the calibration board and camera optical centers. As a result, our system achieves calibration accuracy comparable to conventional methods while reducing the required number of projection-capture cycles from linear to nearly constant with respect to the number of projectors, dramatically improving scalability for dense multi-projector systems with overlapping projection regions, such as high-brightness stacking, super-resolution, light-field, and shadow-suppression displays.

Recent image generation and editing models demonstrate robust adherence to instructions and high visual quality on academic benchmarks. However, their performance on paid, real-world design projects remains uncertain. We introduce ServImage, a benchmark that explicitly correlates model outputs with economic value in commercial design projects. ServImage consists of (i) \textbf{ServImageBench}: a dataset of 1.07k paid commercial design tasks and 2.05k designer deliverables totaling over \$295k, covering portrait, product, and digital content, along with 33k candidate images and 33k human annotations. (ii) \textbf{ServImageScore}: an integrated scoring system that combines three quality dimensions: baseline requirements fulfilment, visual execution quality, and commercial necessity satisfaction. These three dimensions are designed to characterize the factors that drive human payment decisions and indicate whether an image is commercially acceptable. (iii) \textbf{ServImageModel}: under this scoring system, we propose a payment prediction model trained on the human-annotated candidate images, achieving 82.00% accuracy in predicting human payment decisions and producing calibrated payment probabilities. ServImage provides a comprehensive foundation for assessing the commercial viability of image generation models and offers a scalable resource for future research on economically grounded vision systems \href{https://github.com/FengxianJi/ServImage}{Github.}

The rapid growth in the size of large language models has necessitated the partitioning of computational workloads across accelerators such as GPUs, TPUs, and NPUs. However, these parallelization strategies incur substantial data communication overhead significantly hindering computational efficiency. While communication-computation overlap presents a promising direction, existing data slicing based solutions suffer from tail latency. To overcome this limitation, this research introduces a novel communication-computation overlap technique to eliminate this tail latency in state of the art overlap methods for distributed LLM training. The aim of this technique is to effectively mitigate communication bottleneck of tensor parallelism and data parallelism for distributed training and inference. In particular, we propose a novel method termed CommFuse that replaces conventional collective operations of reduce-scatter and all-gather with decomposed peer-to-peer (P2P) communication and schedules partitioned computations to enable fine-grained overlap. Our method provides an exact algorithm for reducing communication overhead that eliminates tail latency. Moreover, it presents a versatile solution compatible with data-parallel training and various tensor-level parallelism strategies, including TPSP and UP. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our technique consistently achieves lower latency, superior Model FLOPS Utilization (MFU), and high throughput.

The Laplacian operator transforms the image into its Laplacian field, which usually is sparse and satisfies a stable distribution. On the other hand, an image can be uniquely reconstructed from its Laplacian field via solving a Poisson equation with a proper boundary condition. Such uniqueness is mathematically guaranteed. Thanks to these properties, we propose to use the sparse Laplacian field to present the image. We first show that the Laplacian field is sparse and satisfies a stable distribution on hundreds images. Then, we show that the image can be accurately reconstruct from its Laplacian field. For the reconstruction task, we propose a shared-kernel wavelet neural network, which solves the Poisson equation and has three advantages. First, it has less than 0.0002M parameters, which is compact enough for most of devices. Second, it has linear computation complexity, leading to a real-time reconstruction. Third, it achieves higher accuracy than previous methods. Several numerical experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness and efficiency of the sparse Laplacian field and the proposed Poisson solver. The proposed method can be applied in a large range of applications such as image compression, low light enhancement, object tracking, etc.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become a prevalent backbone for large vision-language models (VLMs), yet how modality-specific signals should guide expert routing remains under-explored. Existing routing strategies are either hand-crafted or modality-agnostic, relying on idealized priors that ignore the layer-dependent modality fusion patterns in MoE-VLMs and provide little guidance for expert specialization. We propose Soft Modality-guided Expert Specialization (SMoES), which consists of dynamic soft modality scores that capture layer-dependent fusion patterns, an expert binning mechanism aligned with expert-parallel deployment, and an inter-bin mutual information regularization that encourages coherent modality specialization. Our method leverages attention-based or Gaussian-statistics modality scores to optimize mutual information regularization. Experiments across four MoE-based VLMs and 16 benchmarks demonstrate improvement on both effectiveness and efficiency: 0.9% and 4.2% average gain on multimodal and language-only tasks, 56.1% reduction in EP communication overhead, and 12.3% throughput improvement under realistic deployment. These results validate that aligning routing with modality-aware expert specialization unlocks MoE-VLM capacity and efficiency.

Digital pathology has fundamentally altered diagnostic workflows by enabling the computational analysis of gigapixel Whole Slide Images (WSIs), yet effectively deciphering their complex tumor microenvironments remains a formidable challenge. Existing Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) frameworks typically treat Whole Slide Images as unstructured bags of patches, discarding critical morphological semantics and spatial geometry. This lack of inductive bias often leads to overfitting on background noise and fails to align visual features with high-level diagnostic knowledge. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Hierarchical Prototype-based Domain Priors (HPDP) framework, a unified multimodal approach for joint histopathology diagnosis and prognosis. HPDP mitigates the data-driven "black box" issue by introducing a Morphologically Anchored Prototype System (MAPS), which anchors learning to interpretable morphological clusters, and a Sinusoidal Positional Encoder (SPE) to explicitly model tissue architecture. Furthermore, we bridge the semantic gap via a Hierarchical Cross-Modal Alignment (HCMA) module, using Large Language Model (LLM)-generated descriptions to contextually refine visual representations. Extensive experiments across seven cancer cohorts demonstrate that HPDP consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance with superior robustness and interpretability.

Accurate biomedical image classification under low-resource conditions remains challenging due to limited annotations, subtle inter-class visual differences, and complex disease semantics. While vision–language models offer a promising foundation for mitigating data scarcity, their effective adaptation in biomedical settings is constrained by the need for parameter-efficient tuning alongside fine-grained and semantically consistent representation learning. In this work, we propose Multi-View Synergistic Learning (MVSL), a unified framework that addresses these challenges by jointly considering adaptation paradigms, representation granularity, and disease semantic relationships. MVSL decouples the adaptation of visual and textual encoders to respect their distinct representational characteristics, enabling more stable and effective parameter-efficient fine-tuning. It further introduces multi-granularity contrastive learning to explicitly model both global image semantics and localized lesion-level evidence, improving fine-grained discrimination for visually similar disease categories. In addition, MVSL preserves disease-level semantic structure by incorporating structured supervision derived from large language models, which constrains textual representations at the class level and indirectly regularizes visual embeddings through cross-modal alignment. Together, these components enable more stable cross-modal alignment and improved discrimination under limited supervision. Extensive experiments on $11$ public biomedical datasets spanning $9$ imaging modalities and $10$ anatomical regions demonstrate that MVSL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in few-shot and zero-shot classification settings.

Indoor navigation remains a critical accessibility challenge for the blind and low-vision (BLV) individuals, as existing solutions rely on costly per-building infrastructure. We present an agentic framework that converts a single floor plan image into a structured, retrievable knowledge base to generate safe, accessible navigation instructions with lightweight infrastructure. The system has two phases: a multi-agent module that parses the floor plan into a spatial knowledge graph through a self-correcting pipeline with iterative retry loops and corrective feedback; and a Path Planner that generates accessible navigation instructions, with a Safety Evaluator agent assessing potential hazards along each route. We evaluate the system on the real-world UMBC Math and Psychology building (floors MP-1 and MP-3) and on the CVC-FP benchmark. On MP-1, we achieve success rates of 92.31%, 76.92%, and 61.54% for short, medium, and long routes, outperforming the strongest single-call baseline (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) at 84.62%, 69.23%, and 53.85%. On MP-3, we reach 76.92%, 61.54%, and 38.46%, compared to the best baseline at 61.54%, 46.15%, and 23.08%. These results show consistent gains over single-call LLM baselines and demonstrate that our workflow is a scalable solution for accessible indoor navigation for BLV individuals.

Proactive watermarking offers a promising approach for deepfake tamper detection and localization in short-form videos. However, existing methods often decouple audio and visual evidence and assume that watermark signals remain reliable under real-world degradations, making tamper localization vulnerable to multimodal misalignment and compression distortions. Moreover, existing semi-fragile visual watermarking methods often degrade significantly under codec compression because their embedding bands overlap with compression-sensitive frequency regions. To address these limitations, we propose Layered Audio-Visual Anti-tampering Watermarking (LAVA), a calibration-aware audio-visual watermark fusion framework for deepfake tamper detection and localization. LAVA leverages cross-modal watermark fusion and calibration-aware alignment to preserve consistent and reliable tamper evidence under compression and audio-visual asynchrony, enabling robust tamper localization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LAVA achieves near-perfect detection performance (AP = 0.999), remains robust to compression and multimodal misalignment, and significantly improves tamper localization reliability over existing audio-visual fusion baselines.

Blind omnidirectional image quality assessment (BOIQA) presents a great challenge to the visual quality assessment community, due to different storage formats and diverse user viewing behaviors. The main paradigm of BOIQA models includes two steps, ie, viewport generation, and quality prediction, which brings an extra computational burden and is hard to generalize to other visual contents (eg, 2D planar image). Thus, in this paper, we make an attempt to solve these issues. First, we experimentally find that BOIQA can be formulated as a blind (2D planar) image quality assessment (BIQA) problem, ie, the first step - viewport generation - is no longer needed, which narrows the natural gap between BOIQA and BIQA. Then, we present a new BOIQA approach, which has three merits: ie, viewport-unaware - it accepts an omnidirectional image in the widely used equirectangular projection format as input without any transformation; unified - it can also be applied to BIQA; and generalized - it shows better generalizability against other competitors. Finally, we validate its promise by held-out test, cross-database validation, and the well-established gMAD competition.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visual understanding and reasoning, but they also impose significant computational burdens due to long visual sequence inputs. Recent works address this issue by pruning unimportant visual tokens, achieving substantial computational reduction while maintaining model performance. The core of token pruning lies in determining token importance, with current approaches primarily relying on attention scores from vision encoders or Large Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, we analyze the effectiveness of attention mechanisms in both vision encoders and LLMs. We find that vision encoders suffer from attention sink, leading to poor focus on informative foreground regions, while in LLMs, although prior studies have identified attention bias toward token positions, text-to-vision attention demonstrates resistance to this bias and enables effective pruning guidance in middle layers. Based on these observations, we propose LearnPruner, a two-stage token pruning framework that first removes redundant vision tokens via a learnable pruning module after the vision encoder, then retains only task-relevant tokens in the LLM's middle layer. Experimental results show that our LearnPruner can preserve approximately 95% of the original performance while using only 5.5% of vision tokens, and achieve 3.2$\times$ inference acceleration, demonstrating a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) element grounding (precisely locating elements on screenshots based on natural language instructions) is fundamental for agents interacting with GUIs. Deploying this capability directly on resource-constrained devices like mobile phones is increasingly critical for GUI agents requiring low latency. However, this goal faces a significant challenge, as current visual grounding methods typically employ large vision-language model (VLM) (more than 2.5B parameters), making them impractical for on-device execution due to memory and computational constraints. To address this, this paper introduces GoClick, a lightweight GUI element grounding VLM with only 230M parameters that achieves excellent visual grounding accuracy, even on par with significantly larger models. Simply downsizing existing decoder-only VLMs is a straightforward way to design a lightweight model, but our experiments reveal that this approach yields suboptimal results. Instead, we select an encoder-decoder architecture, which outperforms decoder-only alternatives at small parameter scales for GUI grounding tasks. Additionally, the limited capacity of small VLMs encourages us to develop a Progressive Data Refinement pipeline that utilizes task type filtering and data ratio adjustment to extract a high-quality 3.8M-sample core set from a 10.8M raw dataset. Training GoClick using this core set brings notable grounding accuracy gains. Our experiments show that GoClick excels on multiple GUI element grounding benchmarks while maintaining a small size and high inference speed. GoClick also enhances GUI agent performance when integrated into a device-cloud collaboration framework, where GoClick helps cloud-based task planners perform precise element localization and achieve higher success rates. We hope our method serves as a meaningful exploration within the GUI agent community.

Audio-based video object segmentation aims to locate and segment objects in videos conditioned on audio cues, requiring precise understanding of both appearance and motion. Recent audio-driven video segmentation methods extend MLLMs by fusing audio and visual features for end-to-end localization. Despite their promise, these approaches are computationally intensive, struggle with aligning temporal audio cues to dynamic video content, and depend on large paired audio-video datasets. To address these challenges, we present ASR-SaSaSa2VA, a resource-efficient framework for audio-guided video segmentation. The key idea is to convert audio inputs into textual motion descriptions via automatic speech recognition (ASR) models and then leverage pre-trained text-based referring video segmentation models (e.g., SaSaSa2VA) for pixel-level predictions. To further enhance robustness, we incorporate a no-target expression detection module, implemented by a fine-tuned audio-based MLLM, which filters out audio clips that do not refer to any target object. This design allows the system to exploit strong pre-trained models while effectively handling ambiguous or irrelevant audio inputs. Our approach achieves a final score of 80.7 in the 5th PVUW Challenge (MeViS-v2-Audio track), earning the second-place ranking.

Mass gathering events are associated with critical safety incidents caused by insufficient crowd monitoring and inadequate emergency response coordination. Traditional surveillance systems lack intelligent analytics, resulting in delayed threat identification, poor resource deployment, and weak support for vulnerable individuals during dense public assemblies. This paper presents Drishti AI-Event Guardian, an intelligent crowd management framework using deep learning for public safety enhancement. The architecture combines multimodal data from CCTV networks and UAV platforms, processed by models on Google Vertex AI infrastructure. Core methods include real-time crowd density estimation using YOLOv8, spatiotemporal anomaly detection, and predictive crowd-flow modeling through gradient-boosted regression. Drishti also integrates four modules: (i) facial recognition for missing person identification with crowd-wide notification; (ii) medical emergency reporting with automated dispatch; (iii) a conversational AI chatbot for reports and complaints; and (iv) an intelligent guard reallocation engine that dynamically reassigns personnel in response to crowd density changes. The system is evaluated on two scenarios: the Kumbh Mela gathering and the RCB Victory Parade event, achieving crowd density estimation MAE of 3.2 persons/m2, anomaly detection F1-score of 0.91, facial recognition precision of 0.93, and median alert latency of 111 ms. Predictive congestion modeling provides five-minute forecasts with MAPE of 8.3%, enabling preemptive intervention. The chatbot resolved 89% of incident filings without human operators, while guard reallocation reduced responder deployment latency by 34% versus manual reassignment. Results demonstrate a shift from passive surveillance toward active crowd intelligence and scalable foundation for events from local gatherings to mega festivals.

Remote Photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables convenient non-contact physiological measurement. Existing Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods commonly fall into a correlation trap: they tend to learn the most dominant periodic signals in the data, such as high-energy motion or illumination noise, rather than the faint, true rPPG signal, leading to poor model generalization. To address this, we propose a new SSL paradigm, Physiological Causal Probing (PCP), which treats the latent rPPG signal as the underlying physical source and the resulting pixel chrominance variations as its visual manifestation. Its core idea is to shift from passive correlation learning to active, precise intervention: it intervenes on the video based on a proposed rPPG hypothesis, and verifies whether the post-intervention changes match physical expectations. We propose the Interv-rPPG framework to implement PCP: an rPPG extractor named PhysMambaFormer hypothesizes the rPPG signal, while a Controllable Physiological Signal Editor conducts precise chrominance-domain interventions on videos based on this hypothesis. Interv-rPPG validates the physical realism of the hypothesis through `Falsifiability via Nulling' and `Axiomatic Equivariance'. Our editor achieves precise editing of the rPPG signal by intervening in the low-frequency chrominance components of the video. Our method improves both in-domain and cross-domain performance on challenging datasets such as VIPL-HR and MMPD. Furthermore, it surpasses the supervised baseline in complex cross-dataset settings, while remaining competitive on clean datasets where the intervention mechanism may introduce slight residual chrominance noise. Extensive experiments, including diagnostic analysis of nuisance sensitivity, demonstrate that the PCP paradigm effectively resists motion and illumination artifacts.

Speckle noise severely limits the quality of images acquired from coherent imaging systems such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and medical ultrasound. Traditional second-order PDE-based despeckling approaches, although popular, often introduce staircase artifacts and blur fine details. To overcome these limitations, we present a nonlinear, fourth-order coupled hyperbolic-parabolic PDE model that effectively reduces noise while preserving the structure. The framework consists of two evolution equations: one governing fourth-order diffusion for effective speckle reduction and smooth intensity transitions, and another refining an edge indicator to protect textures and structural features. The diffusion coefficient is adaptively constructed using both the image intensity variable u and a grayscale-based indicator function, ensuring structure-aware denoising while avoiding blocky artifacts and preserving fine details. We also prove the existence of a weak solution to the proposed model by applying Schauder fixed-point theorem. A finite-difference scheme with Gauss Seidel iteration is employed for efficient implementation. We compare the proposed model with the existing coupled second-order PDE model (HPCPDE) and the fourth-order telegraph diffusion model (TDFM). The results show that our model consistently outperforms these approaches. Experiments on standard grayscale images, real SAR and ultrasound data, as well as speckle-corrupted color images, demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance over conventional PDE-based techniques in terms of PSNR, MSSIM, and Speckle Index.

Autonomous driving (AD) is evolving towards end-to-end (E2E) frameworks through two primary paradigms: monolithic models exemplified by Vision-Language-Action (VLA), and specialized modular architectures. Despite their divergent designs, both paradigms increasingly rely on Transformer backbones for complex reasoning, potentially causing a shared vulnerability: visually imperceptible perturbations can manipulate E2E AD models into hazardous maneuvers by targeting the Transformer module. Most existing adversarial attack approaches against AD systems operate under white-box or black-box settings; yet, they typically necessitate full model transparency, or suffer from either prohibitive query latency or limited attack transferability. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Flow Matching (AFM), a novel gray-box attack framework that exploits Transformer structural vulnerabilities in E2E AD models. AFM enables efficient one-step generation of adversarial examples via a neural average velocity field. Additionally, the proposed technique yields effective and visually imperceptible attacks by synergistically perturbing the generative latent space and the neural average velocity field. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AFM achieves a superior trade-off between attack effectiveness and imperceptibility: it substantially degrades the performance of both VLA and modular AD agents across various scenarios compared to baselines, while maintaining state-of-the-art visual imperceptibility. Furthermore, adversarial examples generated by AFM exhibit robust cross-model transferability, indicating that AFM closely approximates a black-box attack setting while requiring only the prior knowledge that the target AD model incorporates a Transformer-based module.

In real-world scenarios, image defogging is an inverse problem due to unknown scene depth, atmospheric scattering, and the common absence of ground truth . To resolve the issue, we propose a hybrid defogging model that integrates a fourth-order nonlinear PDE with a physical haze formation model. We used Dark Channel Prior to estimate atmospheric parameters and to generate a guidance image, while the final restoration is performed via a fourth-order PDE-based evolution. A fourth-order PDE of the type telegraph is then evolved, incorporating an edge-adaptive diffusion coefficient and a fidelity term weighted by the transmission map. Fourth-order diffusion effectively suppresses haze while preserving structural details, and the hyperbolic formulation improves numerical stability and convergence behavior. We use relative error norm criteria for the convergence of our PDE. The proposed method is compared with Dark Channel prior, modified Dark Channel prior, and variational-based single-image defogging techniques. When we have ground truth available, we use MSE and SSIM for quantitative evaluation, whereas no-reference metrics, including FADE, Contrast Restoration Index, Average Gradient, and Entropy, are applied to real-world foggy images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid PDE-based method provides comparable visual quality and maintains structural details.

Navigational aids for blind and low vision individuals struggle conveying dynamic real-world environments, leading to cognitive overload from continuous, undifferentiated feedback. We present AMAVA, a novel real-time video-to-audio framework that converts mobile device video into contextually relevant sound effects or text-to-speech descriptions. We propose a motion-aware pipeline using a lightweight AI classification model to distinguish between low and high-movement scenes followed by a real-time text-to-audio synthesis pipeline to enhance environmental perception more efficiently. In static environments, AMAVA generates spoken audio scene descriptions for situational awareness. In high-movement situations, it prioritizes safety by delivering sound cues, such as spoken hazard alerts and environmental sound effects. These audio outputs are produced by a decoder-only transformer-based vision-language model with mixture-of-experts and cross-modal attention for visual understanding, in conjunction with neural text-to-speech and natural sound synthesis networks. The proposed framework uses prompt-based caching and category-specific throttling to avoid auditory clutter and minimize latency. We present a comprehensive evaluation of the system, including a real-time navigation study comparing a white cane alone versus with AMAVA, that shows a significant increase in user confidence and perceived safety.

Breast cancer is a leading cause of cancer-related mortality among women worldwide, with mammography as the primary screening tool. While deep learning models have shown strong performance in lesion segmentation, most rely on computationally intensive architectures that limit their use in resource-constrained environments. This study evaluates the performance and efficiency of lightweight models for mammographic lesion segmentation. Architectures including MobileNetV2, EfficientNet Lite, FPN, and Fast-SCNN were compared against a U-Net baseline using the INbreast dataset with 5-fold cross-validation. Performance was assessed using Dice score, Intersection over Union (IoU), and Recall, alongside model complexity. MobileNetV2 with Squeeze-and-Excitation (SCSE) achieved the best performance, with a Dice score of 0.5766 while using approximately 75% fewer parameters than U-Net. Cross-dataset evaluation on the DMID dataset showed reduced accuracy due to domain shift but preserved recall. These results demonstrate that lightweight architectures offer a practical balance between performance and efficiency for deployable CAD systems.