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Saturday 2 May

Computer Vision

Rethinking Model Selection in VLM Through the Lens of Gromov-Wasserstein Distance

Muyang Li, Yucheng Liu, Jianbo Ma et al. (+3 more)

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enhanced traditional LLMs with visual capabilities through the integration of vision encoders. While recent works have explored various combinations of vision encoders and LLMs, there still lacks a principled understanding of what makes a vision encoder suitable for VLM alignment. In this paper, we systematically investigate this question via comprehensive experiments on a curated collection of 19 pre-trained vision encoders from diverse sources. We first demonstrate that common practices, such as choosing encoders with the largest size or highest zero-shot accuracy, consistently fail to identify optimal models. In fact, these metrics show only weak to moderate correlation with VLM performance. This intriguing finding begs a fundamental question: What factors of vision-encoders matter in VLM? Through comprehensive analysis, we identify that the structural similarity across modalities plays a crucial but previously overlooked role in vision-encoder selection, which we measure using the Gromov-Wasserstein distance as a proxy. From a theoretical perspective, we show that the learnability of cross-modality mapping can be provably associated with the Gromov-Wasserstein distance. Empirical verification on 60+ full VLM training runs shows that our proposed inference-only metric performs significantly better than alternative model selection strategies and exhibits a much stronger correlation with final VLM performance, thereby enabling efficient and effective prediction of VLM performance before full training.
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All authors Muyang Li, Yucheng Liu, Jianbo Ma, Elliot Osborne, Bo Han, Tongliang Liu

Computer Vision

Beyond Perceptual Shortcuts: Causal-Inspired Debiasing Optimization for Generalizable Video Reasoning in Lightweight MLLMs

Jingze Wu, Quan Zhang, Hongfei Suo et al. (+2 more)

Although reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly advanced reasoning capabilities in large multimodal language models (MLLMs), its efficacy remains limited for lightweight models essential for edge deployments. To address this issue, we leverage causal analysis and experiment to reveal the underlying phenomenon of perceptual bias, demonstrating that RL-based fine-tuning compels lightweight models to preferentially adopt perceptual shortcuts induced by data biases, rather than developing genuine reasoning abilities. Motivated by this insight, we propose VideoThinker, a causal-inspired framework that cultivates robust reasoning in lightweight models through a two-stage debiasing process. First, the Bias Aware Training stage forges a dedicated "bias model" to embody these shortcut behaviors. Then, the Causal Debiasing Policy Optimization (CDPO) algorithm fine-tunes the primary model, employing an innovative repulsive objective to actively push it away from the bias model's flawed logic while simultaneously pulling it toward correct, generalizable solutions. Our model, VideoThinker-R1, establishes a new state-of-the-art in video reasoning efficiency. For same-scale comparison, requiring no Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and using only 1 of the training data for RL, it surpasses VideoRFT-3B with a 3.2% average gain on widely-used benchmarks and a 7% lead on VideoMME. For cross-scale comparison, it outperforms the larger Video-UTR-7B model on multiple benchmarks, including a 2.1% gain on MVBench and a 3.8% gain on TempCompass. Code is available at https://github.com/falonss703/VideoThinker.
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All authors Jingze Wu, Quan Zhang, Hongfei Suo, Zeqiang Cai, Hongbo Chen

Computer Vision

PACE: Post-Causal Entropy Modeling for Learned LiDAR Point Cloud Compression

Jiahao Zhu, Kang You, Dandan Ding et al. (+1 more)

LiDAR point cloud compression is vital for autonomous systems to handle massive data from high-resolution sensors. While learned entropy modeling built upon octree structures yields high compression gains, it faces two critical bottlenecks: 1) prohibitive latency, particularly during decoding, caused by causal, multi-stage context modeling; and 2) a rigid performance-latency trade-off, preventing a single model from adapting to varying constraints. These limitations stem from the tight coupling between the context aggregation backbone and probability prediction. To address this, we propose PACE, a new framework that reformulates ancestral context aggregation as a non-causal backbone and confines causality to a lightweight, stage-scalable predictor, eliminating repetitive backbone executions and reducing computational overhead. The predictor supports an arbitrary number of prediction stages, enabling seamless adaptation across diverse performance-latency trade-offs without reloading parameters. Experiments demonstrate that PACE sets a new state-of-the-art in compression efficiency, achieving notable BD-BR savings and reducing decoding latency by over 90% in autoregressive mode, making it attractive for practical applications.
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All authors Jiahao Zhu, Kang You, Dandan Ding, Zhan Ma

Computer Vision

CUE: Concept-Aware Multi-Label Expansion to Mitigate Concept Confusion in Long-Tailed Learning

Ruichi Zhang, Chikai Shang, Jiacheng Yang et al. (+4 more)

Long-tailed distributions are common in real-world recognition tasks, where a few head classes have many samples while most tail classes have very few. Recently, fine-tuning foundation models for long-tailed learning has gained attention due to their excellent performance. However, most existing methods focus solely on mitigating long-tailed distribution bias while overlooking concept confusion caused by the long-tailed distribution. In this paper, we study this problem and attribute it to the mutual exclusivity of single-label supervision under long-tailed distributions, which suppresses feature sharing among related classes and amplifies the dominance of head classes, leading to disrupted inter-class discriminability. To address this, we propose CUE, Concept-aware mUlti-label Expansion, which introduces multi-label concept signals to preserve disrupted inter-class relationships. Specifically, CUE constructs concept sets by (i) extracting instance-level visual cues from zero-shot CLIP and (ii) generating class-level semantic cues with LLM; the two cues are incorporated via separately weighted Binary Logit-Adjustment (BLA) auxiliary losses and jointly optimized with the baseline Logit-Adjustment (LA) loss. Experiments on several long-tailed benchmarks, CUE achieves balanced and strong performance, surpassing recent state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/zhangruichi/CUE.
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All authors Ruichi Zhang, Chikai Shang, Jiacheng Yang, Mengke Li, Yang Zhou, Junlong Gao, Yang Lu

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.CR

Checkerboard: Closed-Form and Data-Independent Trigger Design for Clean-Label Backdoor Attacks

Yi Yang, Jinyang Huang, Binbin Liu et al. (+6 more)

Backdoor attacks threaten the deep-learning supply chain by poisoning a small fraction of the training data so that a model behaves normally on clean inputs but maps triggered inputs to an attacker-chosen class. Clean-label backdoor attacks are especially difficult to audit because poisoned examples preserve their semantic labels. Yet existing clean-label attacks often require surrogate model training, auxiliary data access, or iterative optimization. In this paper, we present Checkerboard, a clean-label backdoor attack with closed-form, data-independent trigger design. We formulate trigger design through an input-space Fisher-separability objective and, under a ridge four-neighbor local-smoothness prior for natural images, obtain the pixel-wise checkerboard as a closed-form maximizer of the resulting design proxy without data access, model training, or optimization. Across four benchmark datasets, Checkerboard outperforms the evaluated norm-bounded clean-label attacks and achieves state-of-the-art performance under low global poisoning rates. For example, on CIFAR-10, under a trigger perturbation of $10/255$, poisoning 20 training samples achieves $95.72\%$ Attack Success Rate (ASR). On IN-100, a global poisoning rate of only $0.4\%$ yields over $83\%$ ASR without degrading clean accuracy. The proposed attack also remains effective against state-of-the-art backdoor defenses and shows resistance to adaptive defenses under simple modification.
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All authors Yi Yang, Jinyang Huang, Binbin Liu, Feng-Qi Cui, Xiaokang Zhou, Haiming Jin, Zhi Liu, Jie Zhang, Meng Li

Computer Vision

SIFT-VTON: Geometric Correspondence Supervision on Cross-Attention for Virtual Try-On

Kosuke Takemoto and Takafumi Koshinaka

Diffusion-based virtual try-on methods achieve photorealistic synthesis through cross-attention mechanisms that transfer garment features to target body regions. However, these approaches rely on implicit learning of spatial correspondences, struggling to preserve fine details such as text and illustrations. We propose a novel approach, which we call SIFT-VTON, that utilizes SIFT keypoint matching to provide explicit geometric guidance for diffusion-based virtual try-on. Our method applies domain-specific filtering to SIFT keypoint matches between garment and person images, then converts these correspondences into spatial probability distributions that supervise cross-attention layers during training. This explicit supervision guides the model to learn precise spatial alignment, concentrating attention on geometrically consistent garment regions. Experiments on the VITON-HD dataset demonstrate significant improvements on unpaired metrics while maintaining competitive paired reconstruction metrics. Qualitative comparisons show superior preservation of text clarity and pattern alignment. Attention visualizations confirm that our method produces sharply focused attention on relevant garment details. This work demonstrates that classical geometric correspondence methods can effectively enhance modern diffusion models for conditional synthesis tasks. The source code will be available at https://github.com/takesukeDS/SIFT-VTON.
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Computer Vision

Chain of Evidence: Pixel-Level Visual Attribution for Iterative Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Peiyang Liu, Ziqiang Cui, Xi Wang et al. (+2 more)

Iterative Retrieval-Augmented Generation (iRAG) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for answering complex multi-hop questions by progressively retrieving and reasoning over external documents. However, current systems predominantly operate on parsed text, which creates two critical bottlenecks: (1) Coarse-grained attribution, where users are burdened with manually locating evidence within lengthy documents based on vague text-level citations; and (2) Visual semantic loss, where the conversion of visually rich documents (e.g., slides, PDFs with charts) into text discards spatial logic and layout cues essential for reasoning. To bridge this gap, we present Chain of Evidence (CoE), a retriever-agnostic visual attribution framework that leverages Vision-Language Models to reason directly over screenshots of retrieved document candidates. CoE eliminates format-specific parsing and outputs precise bounding boxes, visualizing the complete reasoning chain within the retrieved candidate set. We evaluate CoE on two distinct benchmarks: Wiki-CoE, a large-scale dataset of structured web pages derived from 2WikiMultiHopQA, and SlideVQA, a challenging dataset of presentation slides featuring complex diagrams and free-form layouts. Experiments demonstrate that fine-tuned Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct achieves robust performance, significantly outperforming text-based baselines in scenarios requiring visual layout understanding, while establishing a retriever-agnostic solution for pixel-level interpretable iRAG. Our code is available at https://github.com/PeiYangLiu/CoE.git.
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All authors Peiyang Liu, Ziqiang Cui, Xi Wang, Di Liang, Wei Ye

Computer Vision

Developing a Strong Pre-Trained Base Model for Plant Leaf Disease Classification

David J. Richter

Plants, crops and their yields are essential to our very existence, but diseases and pests cause large losses every year. As such it is vital to ensure that diseases can be spotted early and treated accordingly and stopping the spread while still possible. Manual and traditional methods require personal to walk through the field and check for symptoms 'by hand'. This is very laborious and very time consuming, so ML methods have been applied as a result and they have garnered promising results. CNN models are especially efficient as they can automatically extract features from images without any manual feature construction before then feeding the features to a classifier. Datasets are largely influential to the final performance of the model. Despite the importance that datasets pose to the field, there still seems to be somewhat of a discrepancy between what is publicly available for use and what would be required to sufficiently train fully capable models. To overcome these shortcomings, as part of this thesis open datasets for the field of plant leaf disease classification have been identified as well as models that can be trained on them and extensive benchmarks have been carried out to identify their suitability. Then a new dataset was constructed based on those findings as well as on the findings of a augmentation applicability study, which will be used to train a new Base Model based on the DenseNet201 architecture, which managed to outperform the baseline model on said new dataset as well as outperforming it on plant leaf disease classification domain specific Transfer-Learning experiments on another new dataset. This new model manages to train models through Transfer-Learning (TL) faster, more robust, more stable, and with less data than general model would, overcoming a large number of issues that the field still suffers from.
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Computer Vision

CNN-based Multi-In-Multi-Out Model for Efficient Spatiotemporal Prediction

Hyeonseok Jin

Recently, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) or Transformer architecture based models have been proposed to overcome the limitations of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based models in spatiotemporal prediction. These models prevent the inefficiency of parallelization limitation due to the sequential properties and stacked error due to the recursive method, and show high performance. Novertheless, there are still some challengies. First, CNN based models have difficulty considering global information due to the local properties of the kernel, and their performance is limited. In addition, information is mixed because the time axis is combined with the channel axis of the image for processing. Models based on Transformer architecture have high complexity due to the self-attention calcuation and take a long training time. In this paper, we propose a new structure model called CNN-based Multi-In-Multi-Out model for Efficient Spatiotemporal Prediction (MIMO-ESP) to overcome these limitations. MIMO-ESP considers global information and significantly improves complexity by configuring a Transformer architecture based on CNN. In addition, it treats the time axis as an independent axis without combining it, and effectively considers spatiotemporal information together by applying dilation. This structure makes MIMO-ESP efficient and high performance. Extensive experiment results on three promising benchmark datasets which including video, traffic, and precipitation prediction tasks demonstrate that the usefulness of MIMO-ESP due to the achieved competitive efficiency while outperforming existing models. Furthermore, the ablation study results demonstrate the usefulness of the components of MIMO-ESP, emphasizing the potential of the proposed approaches.
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Computer Vision

GameScope: A Multi-Attribute, Multi-Codec Benchmark Dataset for Gaming Video Quality Assessment

Rajesh Sureddi, Shreshth Saini, Avinab Saha et al. (+1 more)

The development of video game streaming has grown rapidly, with major platforms such as YouTube and Twitch using different codecs. To support quality assessment models that work consistently across any codec, it is necessary to have access to large, diverse subjective gaming quality datasets. Currently, there are only a few available, each having limitations. To address this gap, we present the largest gaming video quality dataset to date, incorporating both user-generated content (UGC) and professional-generated content (PGC) with extensive visual diversity. Our dataset covers the most widely used codecs - H.264, H.265, and AV1 - and consists of 4,048 video samples, each annotated by an average of 37 mean opinion score (MOS) ratings. In addition to overall quality scores, we collect coarse-grained quality attributes, enabling a better understanding of perceptual factors. We study the performance of leading video quality assessment methods on this dataset, including a vision language model that outperforms all the benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset that comprehensively addresses gaming video quality assessment across multiple codecs and content types with quality attributes. Our dataset is publicly available at https://rajeshsureddi.github.io/GameScope/.
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All authors Rajesh Sureddi, Shreshth Saini, Avinab Saha, Alan C. Bovik

Computer Vision

Exploring Prompt Alignment with Clinical Factors in Zero-Shot Segmentation VLMs for NSCLC Tumor Segmentation

Suraj Pai, Thibault Heintz, Cosmin Ciausu et al. (+3 more)

Zero-shot vision-language models (VLMs) offer a promptable alternative to task-specific training for gross tumor volume (GTV) delineation in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), but the prompt dimensions that govern their spatial behavior remain poorly understood. We study this question by probing alignment directions in VoxTell on a held-out internal NSCLC tumor dataset through sub-prompt decomposition into diagnosis, demographic, staging, anatomical, generic, and irrelevant controls; attribute-wise perturbation robustness; specificity ladders; and cross-case prompt swaps, while benchmarking against fine-tuned and zero-shot baselines using the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) with Wilcoxon signed-rank tests and Benjamini-Hochberg correction. Alignment analyses revealed that anatomical location is the dominant driver of VoxTell's spatial attention: 63.4 percent of location perturbations caused catastrophic drops, prompt specificity improved from generic to full descriptions except for diagnosis-only prompts, irrelevant prompts correctly yielded zero segmentation, and cross-case prompt swaps confirmed patient-specific conditioning (matched DSC 0.906 vs. mismatched 0.406). Histology and stage substitutions had minimal effect, indicating that the model prioritizes "where to look" over "what to look for." In this context, VoxTell, operating fully zero-shot, achieved a mean DSC of 0.613, statistically indistinguishable from nnUNet (0.690, adjusted p = 0.156) and Ahmed et al. (0.675, adjusted p = 0.679), while significantly outperforming all other zero-shot models. Together, these findings argue that segmentation VLMs should be evaluated not only by Dice, but also by the prompt dimensions to which they align.
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All authors Suraj Pai, Thibault Heintz, Cosmin Ciausu, Marion Tonneau, Hugo Aerts, Raymond Mak

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.HC

EduGage: A Multimodal Dataset and Benchmark for Sensor-Based Momentary Assessment of Engagement in Self-Guided Video Learning

Zikang Leng, Edan Eyal, Yingtian Shi et al. (+3 more)

Engagement, which links to attentional, emotional, and cognitive dimensions, plays an important role in learning. In online and video-based learning environments, learners often need to regulate their own interactions with instructional materials. Measuring and reflecting on engagement can therefore support both learners and adaptive learning systems. In this study, we use wearable and camera-based sensing devices to collect physiological and motion signals, including PPG, ECG, EDA, EEG, IMU, heart rate, temperature, and eye-tracking data, to estimate learner engagement. We conducted a user study with 16 participants in a video-based learning scenario, where participants completed learning tasks and provided repeated in-situ engagement-probe ratings on a 1-5 scale, reporting how difficult it was to pay attention during the preceding minute. We establish a benchmark for engagement estimation, compare different sensing modalities, and further analyze the feasibility and effectiveness of multimodal modeling for characterizing learner engagement. Across participant-based cross-validation, the modality-aware reference model achieves an MAE of 0.80, 83.18% within-1 accuracy, 70.96% binary accuracy, and 62.90% binary Macro-F1, outperforming sensor-free, statistical, deep temporal, foundation-model, and LLM-based baselines. Our results suggest that fine-grained engagement estimation is feasible but inherently noisy, and that the preferred sensing configuration depends on the target metric and practical sensing burden. We release the EduGage dataset as the primary contribution of this work, including synchronized multimodal sensor signals, probe-aligned engagement-probe ratings, video metadata, quizzes, and study materials, to support reproducible research on fine-grained sensor-based engagement modeling in self-guided learning.
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All authors Zikang Leng, Edan Eyal, Yingtian Shi, Jiaman He, Yaqi Liu, Thomas Plötz

Computer Vision

Degradation-Aware Adaptive Context Gating for Unified Image Restoration

Lei He, Jielei Chu, Fengmao Lv et al. (+4 more)

Unified image restoration using a single model often faces task interference due to diverse degradations. To address this, we propose DACG-IR (Degradation-Aware Adaptive Context Gating), which enables explicit perception of degradation characteristics to dynamically modulate feature representations. Our method constructs degradation-aware contextual representations from the input to modulate attention distribution, frequency-domain features, and feature aggregation. Specifically, a lightweight multi-scale degradation-aware module extracts coarse degradation information and generates layer-wise prompts. These prompts guide attention temperature and output gating in encoder and decoder blocks for adaptive feature extraction. Additionally, a spatial-channel dual-gated adaptive fusion mechanism refines encoder features, suppressing noise propagation from shallow to deep layers. This design effectively suppresses degradation-induced noise while preserving informative structures. Experiments show DACG-IR outperforms state-of-the-art methods in single-task, all-in-one, adverse weather removal, and composite degradation settings. Code: https://github.com/HlHomes/DACG-IR-code
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All authors Lei He, Jielei Chu, Fengmao Lv, Weide Liu, Tianrui Li, Jun Cheng, Yuming Fang

Computer Vision

TT4D: A Pipeline and Dataset for Table Tennis 4D Reconstruction From Monocular Videos

Nima Rahmanian, Daniel Kienzle, Thomas Gossard et al. (+3 more)

We present TT4D, a large-scale, high-fidelity table tennis dataset. It provides $140+$ hours of reconstructed singles and doubles gameplay from monocular broadcast videos, featuring multimodal annotations like high-quality camera calibrations, precise 3D ball positions, ball spin, time segmentation, and 3D human meshes over time. This rich data provides a new foundation for virtual replay, in-depth player analysis, and robot learning. The dataset's combination of scale and precision is achieved through a novel reconstruction pipeline. Prior methods first partition a game sequence into individual shot segments based on the 2D ball track, and only then attempt reconstruction. However, 2D-based time segmentation collapses under occlusion and varied camera viewpoints, preventing reliable reconstruction. We invert this paradigm by first lifting the entire unsegmented 2D ball track to 3D through a learned lifting network. This 3D trajectory then allows us to reliably perform time segmentation. The learned lifting network also infers the ball's spin, handles unreliable ball detections, and successfully reconstructs the ball trajectory in cases of high occlusion. This lift-first design is necessary, as our pipeline is the only method capable of reconstructing table tennis gameplay from general-view broadcast monocular videos. We demonstrate the dataset's fidelity through two downstream tasks: estimating the racket's pose & velocity at impact, and training a generative model of competitive rallies.
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All authors Nima Rahmanian, Daniel Kienzle, Thomas Gossard, Dvij Kalaria, Rainer Lienhart, Shankar Sastry

Computer Vision

Visual Implicit Autoregressive Modeling

Pengfei Jiang, Jixiang Luo, Luxi Lin et al. (+2 more)

Visual Autoregressive Modeling (VAR) based on next-scale prediction achieves strong generation quality, but their explicit deep stacks fix the amount of computation per scale and inflate memory at high resolutions. We introduce Visual Implicit Autoregressive Modeling (VIAR), a next-scale autoregressive generator that embeds an implicit equilibrium layer between shallow pre/post blocks. The implicit layer is trained with Jacobian-Free Backpropagation, yielding constant training memory, while inference exposes a per-scale iteration knob that enables compute control. On ImageNet 256x256 benchmark, VIAR attains FID 2.16, and sFID 8.07 with only 38.4% parameters of VAR, matching or surpassing strong AR baselines and remaining competitive with large diffusion models. By controlling the per-scale knob, VIAR can reduce peak memory from 19.24 GB to 8.53 GB and doubles throughput from 15.16 to 32.08 images/s on a single RTX 4090, without retraining. Ablations show that fewer steps are sufficient for fixed-point iterations to converge and that VIAR consistently dominates VAR across quality efficiency operating points. In zero shot in-painting and class-conditional editing, VIAR produces sharper details and smoother boundaries while preserving global structure, validating the benefits of implicit equilibria and per-scale compute control for practical, deployable visual generation.
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All authors Pengfei Jiang, Jixiang Luo, Luxi Lin, Zhaohong Huang, Xuelong Li

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.MM

Multimodal Confidence Modeling in Audio-Visual Quality Assessment

Mayesha Maliha R. Mithila and Mylene C.Q. Farias

Audio-visual quality assessment (AVQA) is essential for streaming, teleconferencing, and immersive media. In realistic streaming scenarios, distortions are often asymmetric, where one modality may be severely degraded while the other remains clean. Still, most contemporary AVQA metrics treat audio and video as equally reliable, causing confidence-unaware fusion to emphasize unreliable signals. This paper proposes MCM-AVQA, a multimodal confidence-aware AVQA framework that explicitly estimates modality-specific confidence and injects it into a dedicated audio-visual mixer for cross-modal attention. The Audio-Visual Mixer utilizes frame-level, confidence-guided channel attention to gate fusion, modulating feature interaction between modalities so that high-confidence streams dominate while unreliable inputs are suppressed, preserving temporal degradation patterns. A multi-head visual confidence estimator turns frame-level artifact probabilities into temporally smoothed, clip-level visual confidence scores, while an audio confidence module derives confidence from speech-quality cues without requiring a clean reference. Experiments on multiple AVQA benchmarks show that MCM-AVQA, and specifically its confidence-guided Audio-Visual Mixer, improve correlation with human mean opinion scores and yield more interpretable behavior under real-world asymmetric audio-visual distortions.
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Computer Vision

Asymmetric Invertible Threat: Learning Reversible Privacy Defense for Face Recognition

Jiabei Zhang, Ziyuan Yang, Andrew Beng Jin Teoh et al. (+1 more)

Face Recognition systems are widely deployed in real-world applications, but they also raise privacy concerns due to unauthorized collection and misuse of facial data. Existing adversarial privacy protection methods rely on input-space perturbations to obfuscate identity information, yet their protection can degrade when adversaries learn restoration or purification mappings that partially invert the transformation. We study this setting as an asymmetric adversarial attack, in which reverse manipulation becomes feasible because existing defense paradigms do not control reversibility. To address this problem, we propose Asymmetric Reversible Face Protection (ARFP), a restoration-aware extension of personalized face cloaking that integrates privacy protection, keyed recovery, and tamper indication in a single framework. ARFP consists of three components: Key-Conditioned Manifold Binding, which ties the protection transformation to a user-provided key; Adversarial Restoration-Aware Training, which introduces a surrogate restoration adversary during training to improve robustness against evaluated inverse purification attacks; and Authorized Reversible Restoration, which supports recovery with the correct key while providing nonce-based tamper indication. Extensive experiments under the threat models considered in this work show that ARFP improves resistance to the evaluated restoration attacks while preserving authorized recovery utility. These results provide empirical evidence of key-sensitive recovery behavior and tamper awareness in the tested settings.
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All authors Jiabei Zhang, Ziyuan Yang, Andrew Beng Jin Teoh, Yi Zhang

Computer Vision

Phase-map synthesis from magnitude-only MR images using conditional score-based diffusion models with application in training of accelerated MRI reconstruction models

M. Berk Sahin, Dilek Yalcinkaya, Abolfazl Hashemi et al. (+1 more)

Accelerated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) enabled by the training of deep learning (DL)-based image recon. models requires large and diverse raw k-space datasets. In most clinical MRI applications, due to storage and patient privacy concerns, raw k-space data is discarded and magnitude-only images are the only component saved. Consequently, a large portion of the DL-based MRI recon. literature has either relied on small training datasets or has used one of the few available open-source k-space datasets. At the same time, the growing number of anonymized magnitude-only image registries/databases motivates the development of techniques that can use them as training datasets for generalizable DL-based recon. models. Here we propose to address this challenge by employing a generative approach based on conditional score-based diffusion models (SBDMs): given a magnitude-only MR image, it synthesizes a phase map (in the image domain) that realistically corresponds to the magnitude-only image. We evaluate its generative capabilities in a downstream DL-based recon. task whereby a large k-space dataset is generated by combining the SBDM-synthesized phase-maps and the corresponding magnitude-only images, and this k-space dataset is then used to train a DL model for accelerated MRI recon. We compare the performance of the resulting DL model versus those trained according to (a) a naive approach that uses smooth phase, (b) a k-space training dataset generated using synthesized phase maps derived from a generative adversarial network, and (c) the ground truth k-space data. Our results suggest that the DL model trained from SBDM-synthesized k-space data outperforms the other approaches in terms of quantitative metrics as well as qualitatively observed recon. fidelity, i.e., whether the reconstructed images include erroneous or hallucinated features that could adversely impact diagnostic accuracy.
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All authors M. Berk Sahin, Dilek Yalcinkaya, Abolfazl Hashemi, Behzad Sharif

Computer Vision

CADFit: Precise Mesh-to-CAD Program Generation with Hybrid Optimization

Ghadi Nehme, Eamon Whalen and Faez Ahmed

Despite recent progress, recovering parametric CAD construction sequences from geometric input, such as meshes or point clouds, is a key challenge for design and manufacturing, as existing CAD reconstruction and generation methods are largely restricted to difficult-to-edit formats like meshes or Breps or editable simple sketch-and-extrude pipelines and low-complexity datasets. We introduce CADFit, a hybrid optimization-based CAD reconstruction framework that recovers complex, editable CAD construction sequences from meshes by incrementally fitting and validating parametric operations using geometric feedback. Our approach is distinguished by formulating reconstruction as an IoU-driven optimization over structured CAD programs and supporting a rich set of operations, including extrusions, revolutions, fillets, and chamfers. Experiments on multiple CAD benchmarks show that CADFit outperforms state-of-the-art mesh-to-CAD methods in volumetric Intersection-over-Union and Chamfer Distance, while substantially reducing the Invalid Ratio of reconstructed CAD programs, particularly for complex designs. We further present a multimodal pipeline that enables end-to-end reconstruction of CAD construction sequences from images by combining image-based geometry reconstruction with CADFit. By enabling accurate reconstruction of higher-complexity CAD models, CADFit provides a practical foundation for generating richer datasets and advancing future learning-based approaches to CAD reverse engineering. The code is available at: https://github.com/ghadinehme/CADFit.
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Friday 1 May

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Just Keep Prompting: Evaluating Repetitive Socratic Prompting in VLMs

Shayda Moezzi, Bishoy Galoaa, Lorena Genua et al. (+2 more)

Deploying Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in real-world settings requires not only strong visual reasoning but also stability under sustained conversational pressure. We introduce Just Keep Prompting (JKP), a multi-turn evaluation framework that measures VLM epistemic stability when users repeatedly challenge, question, or contradict a model's answer. JKP probes models for up to 10 follow-up turns using three strategies: Adversarial Negation (repeated rejection), Pure Socratic Interrogation (repeated calls to reassess certainty), and Context-Aware Socratic Summarization (reflecting the model's prior rationale back before asking for reconsideration). We evaluate GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Qwen3-VL-30B on a subset of the STAR benchmark across 720 multi-turn runs. Aggregate accuracy changes modestly from Turn 0 to Turn 10, but trajectory-level analysis reveals substantial instability: correct answers regress, wrong answers recover, and many runs exhibit repeated answer flipping. Repeated prompting has bounded upside and often acts as a destabilizer rather than a reasoning aid. The effect is strongly model-dependent: Qwen3-VL-30B achieves the highest final accuracy but becomes confidently wrong under direct contradiction; Gemini 2.5 Pro is comparatively stable but token-expensive; GPT-4o is the most brittle and oscillatory. These findings reveal that multi-turn VLM evaluation captures not just additional reasoning but pressure-response profiles: how models trade off visual grounding, calibration, and conversational compliance under repeated challenge.
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All authors Shayda Moezzi, Bishoy Galoaa, Lorena Genua, Taskin Padir, Sarah Ostadabbas

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.AI

From ML Predictions to Informed Diagnostic Assistance Using the Toulmin Model of Argumentation

Anca Marginean and Adrian Groza

To provide a structured and interpretable assessment, we decompose the image-based diagnosis into components following the Toulmin model of argumentation. This model consists of a claim, grounds, warrant, qualifier, rebuttal, and backing. Consider a claim generated by a machine learning (ML) model for retinal diagnosis. Rather than accepting this claim at face value, one could either apply explainable AI (XAI) methods or adopt an argumentation-based approach. In our framework, a model specialized in biomarker extraction from images provides the grounds. The warrant-linking the grounds to the claim - is analyzed by an agent equipped with medical knowledge; in our architecture, this role is fulfilled by a MedGemma agent. The qualifier is determined based on the overall quantitative evaluation of both the warrant and grounds models. Finally, a rebuttal is constructed using image similarity measures computed with MedSigLip. All these components are presented to the human expert, enabling a more informed and critical assessment of the ML-generated diagnosis.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.HC

Sketch-to-Layout: A Human-Centric Computational Agent for Constraint-Aware Synthesis of Modular Photobioreactors

Xiujin Liu, Shuqi Li and Yuxin Lin

Building-integrated photobioreactors (PBRs) offer a pathway for carbon-neutral architecture, yet deployment is hindered by configuration complexity and biological maintenance. This paper presents a modular PBR facade system powered by a computational framework reconciling design intent with physical validity. We introduce 'carbon-neutralization bricks' featuring integrated vessel-and-conduit geometry; monolithic fluid channels enable 'plug-and-play' assembly. To navigate the combinatorial complexity of 14 modular geometries, we develop a Computational Sketch-to-Layout Agent that formulates layout synthesis as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). Using the CP-SAT engine, the agent treats sparse user sketches as soft priors while enforcing hard constraints like port alignment and global connectivity. This allows non-experts to synthesize fabrication-ready configurations in near real-time. Furthermore, to facilitate autonomous maintenance, we propose a weakly supervised algae health monitoring pipeline. By employing a hybrid CNN-attention backbone and a temporal ranking loss, the system quantifies biological vitality from photographs without absolute ground-truth labels. Experiments demonstrate the CSP solver achieves a 95.5% success rate on grid scales up to 15 x 15. Qualitative evaluations confirm the framework preserves design semantics while ensuring operational integrity. Long-term tests show the vision module produces health trajectories aligned with 14-day biological cycles, suggesting that integrating interactive synthesis with low-cost computer vision can democratize scalable carbon capture systems.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.HC

Multimodal Large Language Models as Synthetic Participants in Video-Based Studies: An Evaluation

Prabal Shrestha, Bohan Jiang, Haoning Xue et al. (+2 more)

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance on objective tasks such as video understanding and reasoning. However, it remains unclear whether they can approximate subjective human responses, which depend not only on content comprehension but also on individuals' social contexts. To address this gap, we evaluate MLLMs as synthetic participants in an emerging task: assessing perceived sensory engagement with short videos. Grounded in the Perceived Message Sensation Value (PMSV) framework, we compare ratings from recruited human participants and profile-conditioned MLLM simulations (n=673) using a 17-item scale measuring emotional arousal, dramatic impact, and novelty. We find that even leading MLLMs (Gemini 3 Flash and Qwen 3 Omni) show limited agreement with human participants. The models exhibit distinct downward mean-shift and central-tendency biases in their rating distributions. They both introduce and flatten subgroup differences, while showing inconsistent sensitivity to participant profiles. Prompting strategies affect these metrics differently, modestly improving some aspects while worsening others. These results highlight both the challenges and opportunities of developing MLLMs as synthetic participants in video-based research. Data and code: https://github.com/MINDLab25/mllm-human-simulation-eval
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All authors Prabal Shrestha, Bohan Jiang, Haoning Xue, Huan Liu, Xinyi Zhou

Computer Vision

Benchmarking ResNet Backbones in RT-DETR: Impact of Depth and Regularization under environmental conditions

Pamela Barboza, Víctor Castelli, Belén Pereira et al. (+3 more)

Visual perception plays a central role in competitive robotics, where environmental variations can directly affect real-time detection performance. The related literature on transformer-based detectors lack information regarding the impact of backbone scale and environmental settings on model performance. This work presents a comparative evaluation of RT-DETR for detecting round objects under environmental and hyperparameter variations relevant to competitive robotics. Four ResNet backbones (ResNet18, ResNet34, ResNet50, and ResNet101) were compared using dropout rates, analyzing their effect on confidence and accuracy. All models were trained under the same configuration and evaluated under changes in lighting and background contrast. Environmental conditions primarily impact prediction confidence, while inference latency remains largely unaffected and classification accuracy stays consistently high, approaching or above 1.00 in most cases. Two distinct behaviors were observed. Under illumination variation, ResNet50 achieves the best trade-off, combining near-perfect accuracy, confidence values up to approximately 0.869 and latency around 0.058-0.059 ms. Under background variation, ResNet34 provides the most balanced performance, reaching near-perfect accuracy and higher confidence values up to approximately 0.887. These results indicate that the optimal architecture depends on the type of environmental variation, with intermediate-depth models offering the best balance between performance and efficiency.
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All authors Pamela Barboza, Víctor Castelli, Belén Pereira, Ricardo Grando, Bruna de Vargas, Augusto Calfani

Computer Vision

VLADriver-RAG: Retrieval-Augmented Vision-Language-Action Models for Autonomous Driving

Rui Zhao, Haofeng Hu, Zhenhai Gao et al. (+2 more)

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving, yet their reliance on implicit parametric knowledge limits generalization in long-tail scenarios. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers a solution by accessing external expert priors, standard visual retrieval suffers from high latency and semantic ambiguity. To address these challenges, we propose VLADriver-RAG, a framework that grounds planning in explicit, structure-aware historical knowledge. Specifically, we abstract sensory inputs into spatiotemporal semantic graphs via a Visual-to-Scenario mechanism, effectively filtering visual noise. To ensure retrieval relevance, we employ a Scenario-Aligned Embedding Model that utilizes Graph-DTW metric alignment to prioritize intrinsic topological consistency over superficial visual similarity. These retrieved priors are then fused within a query-based VLA backbone to synthesize precise, disentangled trajectories. Extensive experiments on the Bench2Drive benchmark establish a new state-of-the-art, achieving a Driving Score of 89.12.
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All authors Rui Zhao, Haofeng Hu, Zhenhai Gao, Jiaqiao Liu, Gao Fei

Computer Vision

Are Multimodal LLMs Ready for Clinical Dermatology? A Real-World Evaluation in Dermatology

Roy Jiang, Hyunjae Kim, Zhenyue Qin et al. (+8 more)

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promise on publicly available dermatology benchmarks. However, benchmark performance may not generalize to real-world dermatologic decision-making. To quantify this benchmark-to-bedside gap, we evaluated four open-weight MLLMs (InternVL-Chat v1.5, LLaVA-Med v1.5, SkinGPT4 and MedGemma-4B-Instruct) and one commercial MLLM (GPT-4.1) across three publicly available dermatology datasets and a retrospective multi-site hospital-based dermatology consultation cohort comprising 5,811 cases and 46,405 clinical images. Models were evaluated on two clinically relevant tasks: differential diagnosis generation and severity-based triage. Diagnostic performance was modest on public datasets and declined substantially in the real-world cohort. On public benchmarks, top-3 diagnostic accuracy reached 26.55% for the best open-weight model and 42.25% for GPT-4.1. On real-world consultation cases using images alone, top-3 diagnostic accuracy fell to 1.50%-13.35% among open-weight models and 24.65% for GPT-4.1. Incorporating clinical context improved performance across all models, increasing top-3 diagnostic accuracy up to 28.75% among open-weight models and 38.93% for GPT-4.1. However, model outputs were highly sensitive to incomplete or erroneous consultation context. For severity-based triage, models achieved moderate sensitivity (above 60%), suggesting potential utility for screening but insufficient reliability for clinical deployment. These findings demonstrate that benchmark performance substantially overestimates the real-world clinical capability of current dermatology MLLMs.
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All authors Roy Jiang, Hyunjae Kim, Zhenyue Qin, Morten Lee, Margaret MacGibeny, Ailish Hanly, Angela Sadlowski, Shanin Chowdhury, Xuguang Ai, Jeffrey Gehlhausen, Qingyu Chen

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Intersectional Disentangling of Temporal and Acquisition Bias in Fetal Ultrasound

Aya Elgebaly, Joris Fournel, Benjamin Laine Jønch Jurgensen et al. (+5 more)

Fairness studies of medical imaging AI often explain subgroup performance gaps through under-representation in the training data. We show that intersectional analysis can disentangle fairness and performance gaps arising from clinical and acquisition confounders that co-vary with the target. As a case, we study scan-time fetal weight estimation from obstetric ultrasound, analyzing two models: a state-of-the-art deep learning (DL) model and the clinical gold-standard Hadlock formula. Using unsupervised slice discovery, we find that high-error subgroups share extreme in the image-acquisition pixel spacing (PS) and in the scan-to-delivery (STD) interval. Of these, PS is an acquisition parameter that can be optimized, while STD is a potential confounder for both PS and our bias diagnostics. Subgroup inspection alone cannot separate them. We disentangle the factors using a model-agnostic analysis with identical metadata partitions and partial regression. Holding STD fixed, the apparent PS effect collapses to a small residual (standardized coefficient $\beta=-0.17$), whereas holding PS fixed, STD dominates error ($\beta=+0.56$). Both models degrade with increasing STD, including the biometric formula, indicating much of the error is intrinsic to the prediction target rather than imaging. The DL model is $\sim$1.5$\times$ more sensitive to STD than Hadlock, though it remains more accurate in every subgroup. We conclude that fairness analyses need to carefully analyze potential confounds, or risk attributing an effect such as temporal or acquisition-related dependency to demographics.
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All authors Aya Elgebaly, Joris Fournel, Benjamin Laine Jønch Jurgensen, Kamil Mikolaj, Anders Christensen, Martin Tolsgaard, Claes Ladefoged, Aasa Feragen

Computer Vision

CEZSAR: A Contrastive Embedding Method for Zero-Shot Action Recognition

Valter Estevam, Rayson Laroca, Helio Pedrini et al. (+1 more)

This paper proposes a novel Zero-Shot Action Recognition~(ZSAR) method based on contrastive learning. In ZSAR, we aim to classify examples from classes that were missing during training. Two well-known problems remain in ZSAR: the semantic gap and the domain shift. A semantic gap occurs because label representations come from the textual domain (i.e., language models) and must be associated with visual representations (i.e., CNNs, RNNs, transformer-based). This multimodal nature implies that the semantic properties of the two spaces are not identical. On the other hand, the domain shift arises from differences between the training and test sets and is inherent to ZSAR once the test set is unknown. One of the most promising methods to address both issues is learning joint embedding spaces. Therefore, we propose a new model that encodes videos and sentences in a joint embedding space, trained by aligning videos with their natural-language descriptions. We design an automatic negative sampling procedure to augment the training dataset and generate unpaired data, i.e., visual appearance and unrelated descriptions. Our results are state-of-the-art on the UCF-101 and Kinetics-400 datasets under several split configurations. Our code is available at https://github.com/valterlej/cezsar.
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All authors Valter Estevam, Rayson Laroca, Helio Pedrini, David Menotti

Computer Vision

Semantic Context-aware mOdality fUsion Transformer (SCOUT): A Context-Aware Multimodal Transformer for Concept-Grounded Pathology Report Generation

Suryakant Singh, Saarthak Kapse, Joel Saltz et al. (+1 more)

Whole-slide pathology report generation requires models to integrate localized histomorphology, global tissue context, and diagnostically relevant semantic information, yet existing approaches typically rely on fixed pretrained visual representations and may fail to represent key diagnostic concepts. Here we present SCOUT: Semantic Context-aware mOdality fUsion Transformer, a concept-grounded multimodal framework that integrates local histological patterns, whole-slide context, and expert-curated diagnostic concepts. SCOUT maintains an evolving visual representation together with recursively updated slide- and concept-conditioned representations, allowing visual and contextual information to iteratively co-evolve across encoder depth. During decoding, separate attention pathways attend to these complementary streams before an adaptive multimodal fusion module combines them for each generated token. We evaluated SCOUT on TCGA-BRCA, HistAI, and REG-2025, comprising more than 20,900 WSI-report pairs across more than seven cancer types. Using common CONCHv1.5 features and evaluation protocols, SCOUT outperformed WSI-Caption, HistGen, and Bi-Gen, improving BLEU scores by 9.6% on average, METEOR by 11.0%, and ROUGE-L by 3.6% relative to the strongest competing method. On REG-2025, SCOUT additionally improved the Clinical Report Quality Score by 5.6%, indicating better preservation of clinically relevant report attributes beyond lexical similarity. Ablations showed complementary contributions from iterative context refinement and adaptive fusion, while learned gates provided inspectable token-level estimates of modality use. Our results suggest that progressive contextual conditioning is effective across heterogeneous pathology report generation settings and provides a flexible framework for integrating domain knowledge into vision-language models for computational pathology.
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All authors Suryakant Singh, Saarthak Kapse, Joel Saltz, Prateek Prasanna

Computer Vision

ScribbleEdit: Synthetic Data for Image Editing with Scribbles and Text

Anya Ji, George Ma, Téa Wright et al. (+4 more)

Recent progress in generative models has significantly advanced image editing capabilities, yet precise and intuitive user control remains difficult. Specifically, users often struggle to communicate both exact spatial layouts and specific semantic details simultaneously. While natural language instructions effectively convey high-level semantics like texture and color, they lack spatial specificity. Conversely, freehand scribbles provide rough spatial boundaries but cannot express detailed visual attributes. Consequently, achieving precise control requires combining both modalities. However, existing models struggle to jointly interpret abstract scribbles alongside text due to a lack of specialized training data. In this work, we introduce ScribbleEdit, a large-scale synthetic dataset designed to bridge this gap by combining natural language instructions with freehand scribble inputs for more accurate, controllable edits. We construct this dataset through a synthetic pipeline that automatically generates source-target image pairs via inpainting, which are then paired with human-drawn scribbles and VLM-generated text instructions. Using ScribbleEdit, we evaluate and finetune both diffusion-based and autoregressive unified multimodal image editing models. Our experiments reveal that while off-the-shelf models struggle with abstract scribble inputs, finetuning on our synthetic dataset significantly improves their ability to generate spatially aligned and semantically consistent edits.
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All authors Anya Ji, George Ma, Téa Wright, Yiming Zhang, David M. Chan, Alane Suhr, Somayeh Sojoudi