Computer Vision
Papers
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Tuesday 12 May
Zero-shot skeleton-based action recognition (ZSSAR) is typically treated as a skeleton-text alignment problem: encode joint-coordinate sequences, align them with language, and classify unseen actions. We argue that this alignment is often too late. Skeletons are not complete action observations, but compressed outputs of human pose estimation (HPE); by the time alignment begins, human-object interactions and pose-relative visual cues may no longer be explicit. We call this upstream semantic loss. To address it, we propose PoseBridge, an HPE-aware ZSSAR framework that bridges intermediate HPE representations to skeleton-text alignment. Rather than adding an RGB action branch or object detector, PoseBridge extracts pose-anchored semantic cues from the same HPE process that produces skeletons, then transfers them through skeleton-conditioned bridging and semantic prototype adaptation. Across NTU-RGB+D 60/120, PKU-MMD, and Kinetics-200/400, PoseBridge improves ZSSAR performance under the evaluated protocols. On the Kinetics-200/400 PURLS benchmark, which contains in-the-wild videos with diverse scenes and action contexts, PoseBridge shows the clearest separation, improving the strongest compared baseline by 13.3-17.4 points across all eight splits. Our code will be publicly released.
Computer Vision
STRIDE: Training-Free Diversity Guidance via PCA-Directed Feature Perturbation in Single-Step Diffusion Models
Distilled one-step (T=1) or few-step (T$\leq$4) diffusion models enable real-time image generation but often exhibit reduced sample diversity compared to their multi-step counterparts. In multi-step diffusion, diversity can be introduced through schedules, trajectories, or iterative optimization; however, these mechanisms are unavailable in the few-step or single-step setting, limiting the effectiveness of existing diversity-enhancing methods. A natural alternative is to perturb intermediate features, but naive feature perturbation is often ineffective, either yielding limited diversity gains or degrading generation quality. We argue that effective diversity injection in few-step models requires perturbations that respect the model's learned feature geometry. Based on this insight, we propose STRIDE, a training-free and optimization-free method that operates in a single forward pass. STRIDE injects spatially coherent (pink) noise into intermediate transformer features, projected onto the principal components of the model's own activations, ensuring that perturbations lie on the learned feature manifold. This design enables controlled variation along meaningful directions in the representation space. Extensive experiments on FLUX.1-schnell and SD3.5 Turbo across COCO, DrawBench, PartiPrompts, and GenEval show that STRIDE consistently improves diversity while maintaining strong text alignment. In particular, STRIDE reduces intra-batch similarity with minimal impact on CLIP score, and Pareto-dominates existing training-free baselines on the diversity-fidelity frontier. These results highlight that, in the absence of iterative refinement, improving diversity in few-step and one-step diffusion depends not on increasing perturbation strength, but on aligning perturbations with the model's internal representation structure.
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Computer Vision
A Mimetic Detector for Adversarial Image Perturbations
Adversarial attacks fool deep image classifiers by adding tiny, almost invisible noise patterns to a clean image. The standard $\ell^\infty$-bounded attacks (FGSM and PGD) produce high-frequency, near-random sign patterns at the pixel level: small in $\ell^2$, but carrying disproportionate gradient energy. We exploit this with a single-shot, training-free detector using the high-order Corbino-Castillo mimetic operators from the open-source MOLE library. No retraining, no surrogate classifier, no access to the network under attack: the verdict is a property of the input alone, computed in $O(HW)$ time. We illustrate the detector on the standard "peppers" test image: untargeted FGSM and PGD attacks at the $\ell^\infty$ budget $\varepsilon = 16/255$ flip SqueezeNet's prediction from "bell pepper" to "doormat" (FGSM) and "maraca" (PGD), and the detector separates these adversarial inputs from the clean image by $4.1\times$-$5.0\times$ (FGSM) and $1.9\times$-$2.2\times$ (PGD). The margin grows monotonically with the operator order $k$, while an equal-amplitude smooth perturbation leaves the statistic within 1% of its clean value.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.GR
3DGS$^3$: Joint Super Sampling and Frame Interpolation for Real-Time Large-Scale 3DGS Rendering
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables high-quality real-time 3D rendering but faces challenges in efficiently scaling to ultra-dense scenes and high-resolution due to computational bottlenecks that limit its use in latency-sensitive applications. Instead of optimizing the splatting pipeline itself, we propose \textbf{3DGS$^3$}, a unified post-rendering framework that jointly performs super sampling and frame interpolation through differentiable processing of low-resolution outputs to achieve both high-resolution and high-frame-rate rendering. Our Gradient\- \-Aware Super Sampling (GASS) module leverages the continuous differentiability of 3DGS to extract image gradients that guide a GRU-based refinement network to enable high-fidelity super sampling. Furthermore, a Lightweight Temporal Frame Interpolation (LTFI) module based on a compact U-Net-like backbone fuses temporal and differentiable spatial cues from consecutive frames to synthesize temporally coherent intermediate frames. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that 3DGS$^3$ achieves superior rendering efficiency and visual quality when compared with state-of-the-art methods and remains compatible with existing 3DGS acceleration techniques. The code will be publicly released upon acceptance.
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Computer Vision
LDDR: Linear-DPP Dynamic-Resolution Frame Sampling for Video MLLMs
Multimodal large language models, when used for long video understanding, require selecting an informative frame set from massive and redundant candidates. Limited by the model's visual-token budget and reasoning ability, frame selection is therefore essential to reduce input size while preserving the most relevant information for accurate video reasoning. Existing frame-sampling methods like uniform sampling or relevance/diversity-sampling often miss important events or retain redundant frames. On the other hand, agentic frame selection methods incur very high computational costs. Further, these methods allocate equal tokens to all selected frames, regardless of their importance. We therefore propose LDDR (Linear DPP Dynamic Resolution), which is a training-free and budget-aware video frame sampling framework. It is computationally efficient and allows non-uniform token budget allocation within the candidate frame set. Specifically, LDDR performs query-aware Determinantal Point Process (DPP) frame selection in a task-conditioned feature space, achieving a 3x runtime speedup over standard DPP baselines. It further introduces a Group DPP importance score to guide frame retention and dynamic resolution allocation: assigning more tokens to informative and non-redundant frames while downscaling or pruning less useful ones. We test LDDR on four popular video benchmarks spanning short, medium, and long-range videos. LDDR achieves a 2.5-point gain in low-budget settings and a 1.6-point gain in high-budget scenarios. These improvements are consistently observed across multiple MLLM families and sizes. Further manual qualitative analyses are included to prove the method's effectiveness.
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Computer Vision
Deep Probabilistic Unfolding for Quantized Compressive Sensing
We propose a deep probabilistic unfolding model to address the classical quantized compressive sensing problem that leverages an unfolding framework to enhance the reconstruction accuracy and efficiency. Unlike previous unfolding methods that apply L2 projection to measurements, we derive a closed-form, numerically stable likelihood gradient projection, which allows the model to respect the true quantization physics, turning the hard quantization constraint into a soft probabilistic guidance. Furthermore, an efficient, dual-domain Mamba module is specifically designed to dynamically capture and fuse the multi-scale local and global features, ensuring the interactions between the distant but correlated regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed method over previous works, which is capable of promoting the application of quantized compressive sensing in real life.
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Computer Vision
Encore: Conditioning Trajectory Forecasting via Biased Ego Rehearsals
Learning and representing the subjectivities of agents has become a challenging but crucial problem in the trajectory prediction task. Such subjectivities not only present specific spatial or temporal structures, but also are anisotropic for all interaction participants. Despite great efforts, it remains difficult to explicitly learn and forecast these subjectivities, let alone further modulate models' predictions through a specific ego's subjectivity. Inspired by prefactual thoughts in psychology and relevant theatrical concepts, we interpret such subjectivities in future trajectories as the continuous process from rehearsal to encore. In the rehearsal phase, the proposed ego predictor focuses on how each ego agent learns to derive and direct a set of explicitly biased rehearsal trajectories for all participants in the scene from the short-term observations. Then, these rehearsal trajectories serve as immediate controls to condition final predictions, providing direct yet distinct ego biases for the prediction network to simulate agents' various subjectivities. Experiments across datasets not only demonstrate a consistent improvement in the performance of the proposed Encore trajectory prediction model but also provide clear interpretability regarding subjectivities as biased ego rehearsals.
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Computer Vision
SpatialForge: Bootstrapping 3D-Aware Spatial Reasoning from Open-World 2D Images
Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated exceptional semantic understanding, yet these models consistently struggle with spatial reasoning, often failing at fundamental geometric tasks such as depth ordering and precise coordinate grounding. Recent efforts introduce spatial supervision from scene-centric datasets (e.g., multi-view scans or indoor video), but are constrained by the limited number of underlying scenes. As a result, the scale and diversity of such data remain significantly smaller than those of web-scale 2D image collections. To address this limitation, we propose SpatialForge, a scalable data synthesis pipeline that transforms in-the-wild 2D images into spatial reasoning supervision. Our approach decomposes spatial reasoning into perception and relation, and constructs structured supervision signals covering depth, layout, and viewpoint-dependent reasoning, with automatic verification to ensure data quality. Based on this pipeline, we build SpatialForge-10M, a large-scale dataset containing 10 million spatial QA pairs. Extensive experiments across multiple spatial reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that training on SpatialForge-10M significantly improves the spatial reasoning ability of standard VLMs, highlighting the effectiveness of scaling 2D data for 3D-aware spatial reasoning.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.RO
Overcoming Dynamics-Blindness: Training-Free Pace-and-Path Correction for VLA Models
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve remarkable flexibility and generalization beyond classical control paradigms. However, most prevailing VLAs are trained under a single-frame observation paradigm, which leaves them structurally blind to temporal dynamics. Consequently, these models degrade severely in non-stationary scenarios, even when trained or finetuned on dynamic datasets. Existing approaches either require expensive retraining or suffer from latency bottlenecks and poor temporal consistency across action chunks. We propose Pace-and-Path Correction, a training-free, closed-form inference-time operator that wraps any chunked-action VLA. From a single quadratic cost, joint minimization yields a unified solution that decomposes orthogonally into two distinct channels. The pace channel compresses execution along the planned direction, while the path channel applies an orthogonal spatial offset, jointly absorbing the perceived dynamics within the chunk window. We evaluate our approach on a comprehensive diagnostic benchmark MoveBench designed to isolate motion as the sole controlled variable. Empirical results demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art training-free wrappers and dynamic-adaptive methods and improves success rates by up to 28.8% and 25.9% in absolute terms over foundational VLA models in dynamic-only and static-dynamic mixed environments, respectively.
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Computer Vision
Leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models for All-in-One Image Restoration via a Mixture of Frequency Experts
All-in-one image restoration seeks to recover clean images from inputs affected by diverse and unknown degradations using a unified framework. Recent methods have shown strong performance by identifying degradation characteristics to guide the restoration process. However, many of them treat degradations as discrete categories, which limits their ability to model the continuous relational structure that arises in composite degradations. To address this issue, we propose a multimodal large language model (MLLM)-guided image restoration framework that exploits multimodal embeddings as guidance for low-level restoration. Specifically, MLLM-derived features are injected into an encoder-decoder architecture through an MLLM-guided fusion block (MGFB) to enhance degradation-aware representations. In addition, we incorporate a mixture-of-frequency-experts (MoFE) module that adaptively combines frequency experts using MLLM-guided contextual cues. To further improve expert routing, we design an MLLM-guided router with a relational alignment loss that encourages routing patterns consistent with the embedding-space relationships of degraded inputs. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that the proposed method achieves strong performance across diverse restoration settings and establishes a new state of the art on the challenging CDD11 dataset, outperforming previous methods by up to 1.35 dB.
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Computer Vision
Instruct-ICL: Instruction-Guided In-Context Learning for Post-Disaster Damage Assessment
Rapid and accurate situational awareness is essential for effective response during natural disasters, where delays in analysis can significantly hinder decision-making. Training task-specific models for post-disaster assessment is often time-consuming and computationally expensive, making such approaches impractical in time-critical scenarios. Consequently, pretrained multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative for post-disaster visual question answering (VQA), a task that aims to answer structured questions about visual scenes by jointly reasoning over images and text. While these models demonstrate strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, their responses can be sensitive to prompt formulation, which can limit their reliability in real-world disaster assessment scenarios. In this paper, we investigate whether structured reasoning strategies can improve the reliability of pretrained MLLMs for post-disaster VQA. Specifically, we explore multiple prompting paradigms in which one MLLM is used to generate task-specific instructions that serve as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) guidance for a second MLLM. These instructions are incorporated during answer generation with varying degrees of in-context learning (ICL), enabling the model to leverage both explicit reasoning guidance and contextual examples. We conduct our evaluation on the FloodNet dataset and compare these approaches against a zero-shot baseline. Our results demonstrate that integrating instruction-driven CoT reasoning consistently improves answer accuracy.
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Computer Vision
Beyond Masks: The Case for Medical Image Parsing
Medical imaging research has spent a decade getting very good at one thing: producing per-voxel masks. Masks tell us size, volume, and location, and a decade of clinical infrastructure rests on those outputs. Yet the report a radiologist writes contains almost nothing a mask can express. We argue that medical imaging research should adopt medical image parsing as its central output: a structured representation in which entities, attributes, and relationships are emitted together and mutually consistent. Entities are the named structures and findings, present or absent. Attributes describe those entities, capturing things like margin regularity, enhancement pattern, or severity grade. Relationships connect them, naming where one structure sits relative to another, what abuts what, and what has changed since the prior scan. A good parse satisfies three properties, in order: (1) decision (the parse names the right things in the current image), (2) reconstruction (its content is rich enough to regenerate that image), and (3) prediction (its content is rich enough to forecast how the patient state will evolve). Quantitative measurements are derived from this content; they are not predicted alongside it. To test how close the field is to producing such an output, we audit eleven representative systems against the three parsing primitives plus closure. None emits a well-formed parse. Entities are largely solved. Attributes, relationships, and closure remain near-empty. The path forward is not a new architecture. It is a commitment to a richer output, and to training signals that reward it. Segmentation taught models to measure. Parsing asks them to explain.
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Computer Vision
ZeroIDIR: Zero-Reference Illumination Degradation Image Restoration with Perturbed Consistency Diffusion Models
In this paper, we propose a zero-reference diffusion-based framework, named ZeroIDIR, for illumination degradation image restoration, which decouples the restoration process into adaptive illumination correction and diffusion-based reconstruction while being trained solely on low-quality degraded images. Specifically, we design an adaptive gamma correction module that performs spatially varying exposure correction to generate illumination-corrected only representations to mitigate exposure bias and serve as reliable inputs for subsequent diffusion processes, where a histogram-guided illumination correction loss is introduced to regularize the corrected illumination distribution toward that of natural scenes. Subsequently, the illumination-corrected image is treated as an intermediate noisy state for the proposed perturbed consistency diffusion model to reconstruct details and suppress noise. Moreover, a perturbed diffusion consistency loss is proposed to constrain the forward diffusion trajectory of the final restored image to remain consistent with the perturbed state, thus improving restoration fidelity and stability in the absence of supervision. Extensive experiments on publicly available benchmarks show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised competitors and is comparable to supervised methods while being more generalizable to various scenes. Code is available at https://github.com/JianghaiSCU/ZeroIDIR.
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Computer Vision
Diabetic Retinopathy Classification using Downscaling Algorithms and Deep Learning
Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is an art and science of recording and classifying the retinal images of a diabetic patient. DR classification deals with classifying retinal fundus image into five stages on the basis of severity of diabetes. One of the major issue faced while dealing with DR classification problem is the large and varying size of images. In this paper we propose and explore the use of several downscaling algorithms before feeding the image data to a Deep Learning Network for classification. For improving training and testing; we amalgamate two datasets: Kaggle and Indian Diabetic Retinopathy Image Dataset. Our experiments have been performed on a novel Multi Channel Inception V3 architecture with a unique self crafted preprocessing phase. We report results of proposed approach using accuracy, specificity and sensitivity, which outperform the previous state of the art methods. Index Terms: Diabetic Retinopathy, Downscaling Algorithms, Multichannel CNN Architecture, Deep Learning
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Computer Vision
PD-4DGS:Progressive Decomposition of 4D Gaussian Splatting for Bandwidth-Adaptive Dynamic Scene Streaming
4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) enables high-quality dynamic novel view synthesis, yet current models remain monolithic bitstreams that clients must download in full before any frame can be rendered, causing black-screen waits of tens to hundreds of seconds on mobile bandwidth and leaving 4DGS incompatible with modern adaptive-bitrate delivery. Progressive 3DGS compression alleviates this for static scenes, but it acts only on spatial anchors and cannot partition the temporal deformation networks that dominate dynamic-scene size. We present PD-4DGS, the first framework for progressive compression and on-demand transmission of 4DGS. Hierarchical Deformation Decomposition (HDD) externalises the coarse-to-fine motion hierarchy already latent in 4DGS into three independently transmittable layers – a static scaffold, a global deformation, and a local refinement – so that any prefix of the bitstream is already renderable, turning a single training run into a scalable, DASH/HLS-compatible bitstream. A Gaussian-entropy attribute rate-distortion loss together with a temporal mask consistency regulariser shrink the base layer while suppressing low-bitrate flicker; a capacity-weighted rollout schedule, gated online by a learnt activation rate rho, then prevents deformation-network under-training without any per-scene hyperparameter. On the Dycheck iPhone benchmark, PD-4DGS cuts the streamed bitstream by >60% at matched rendering fidelity and reduces first-frame latency from 73–930 s to ~1.7 s on a 2 Mbps link, uniquely enabling true on-demand progressive streaming for 4DGS.
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Computer Vision
VidSplat: Gaussian Splatting Reconstruction with Geometry-Guided Video Diffusion Priors
Gaussian Splatting has achieved remarkable progress in multi-view surface reconstruction, yet it exhibits notable degradation when only few views are available. Although recent efforts alleviate this issue by enhancing multi-view consistency to produce plausible surfaces, they struggle to infer unseen, occluded, or weakly constrained regions beyond the input coverage. To address this limitation, we present VidSplat, a training-free generative reconstruction framework that leverages powerful video diffusion priors to iteratively synthesize novel views that compensate for missing input coverage, and thereby recover complete 3D scenes from sparse inputs. Specifically, we tackle two key challenges that enable the effective integration of generation and reconstruction. First, for 3D consistent generation, we elaborate a training-free, stage-wise denoising strategy that adaptively guides the denoising direction toward the underlying geometry using the rendered RGB and mask images. Second, to enhance the reconstruction, we develop an iterative mechanism that samples camera trajectories, explores unobserved regions, synthesizes novel views, and supplements training through confidence weighted refinement. VidSplat performs robustly to sparse input and even a single image. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate our superior performance in sparse-view scene reconstruction.
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Computer Vision
JACoP: Joint Alignment for Compliant Multi-Agent Prediction
Stochastic Human Trajectory Prediction (HTP) using generative modeling has emerged as a significant area of research. Although state-of-the-art models excel in optimizing the accuracy of individual agents, they often struggle to generate predictions that are collectively compliant, leading to output trajectories marred by social collisions and environmental violations, thus rendering them impractical for real-world applications. To bridge this gap, we present JACoP: Joint Alignment for Compliant Multi-Agent Prediction, an innovative multi-stage framework that ensures scene-level plausibility. JACoP incorporates an Anchor-Based Agent-Centric Profiler for effective initial compliance filtering and employs a Markov Random Field (MRF) based aligner to formalize the joint selection for scene predictions. By representing inter-agent spatial and social costs as MRF energy potentials, we successfully infer and sample from the joint trajectory distribution, achieving prediction with optimal scene compliance. Comprehensive experiments show that JACoP not only achieves competitive accuracy, but also sets a new standard in reducing both environmental violations and social collisions, thereby confirming its ability to produce collectively feasible and practically applicable trajectory predictions.
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Computer Vision
HamBR: Active Decision Boundary Restoration Based on Hamiltonian Dynamics for Learning with Noisy Labels
In large-scale visual recognition and data mining tasks, the presence of noisy labels severely undermines the generalization capability of deep neural networks (DNNs). Prevalent sample selection methods rely primarily on training loss or prediction confidence for passive screening. However, within a feature space degraded by noise, decision boundaries undergo systematic boundary collapse. This phenomenon hinders the ability of the model to distinguish between hard clean samples and noisy samples at the decision margins, thereby creating a significant performance bottleneck. This study is the first to emphasize the pivotal importance of active boundary restoration for noise-robust learning. We propose HamBR, a novel paradigm based on Hamiltonian dynamics. The core approach leverages the Spherical Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (Spherical HMC) mechanism to actively probe inter-class ambiguous regions within the representation space and synthesize high-quality virtual outliers. By imposing explicit repulsion constraints via energy-based modeling, these synthesized samples establish robust energy barriers at the decision boundaries. This mechanism forces real samples to move from dispersed overlapping regions toward their respective class centers, thereby restoring the discriminative sharpness of the decision boundaries. HamBR demonstrates exceptional versatility and can be integrated as a plug-and-play defense module into existing semi-supervised noisy label learning frameworks. Empirical evaluations show that the proposed paradigm significantly enhances the discriminative accuracy of hard boundary samples, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on CIFAR-10/100 and real-world noise benchmarks. Furthermore, it exhibits superior convergence efficiency and reliable robustness, while improving significantly the capability of the model for Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection.
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Computer Vision
Dynamic Full-body Motion Agent with Object Interaction via Blending Pre-trained Modular Controllers
Generating physically plausible dynamic motions of human-object interaction (HOI) remains challenging, mainly due to existing HOI datasets limited to static interactions, and pretrained agents capable of either dynamic full-body motions without objects or static HOI motions. Recent works such as InsActor and CLoSD generate HOI motions in planning and execution stages, are yet limited to either static or short-term contacts e.g. striking. In this work, we propose a framework that fulfills dynamic and long-term interaction motions such as running while holding a table, by combining pretrained motion priors and imitation agents in planning and execution stages. In the planning stage, we augment HOI datasets with dynamic priors from a pretrained human motion diffusion model, followed by object trajectory generation. This plans dynamic HOI sequences. In the execution stage, a composer network blends actions of pretrained imitation agents specialized either for dynamic human motions or static HOI motions, enabling spatio-temporal composition of their complementary skills. Our method over relevant prior-arts consistently improves success rates while maintaining interaction for dynamic HOI tasks. Furthermore, blending pretrained experts with our composer achieves competitive performance in significantly reduced training time. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our augmentation and composer blending.
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Computer Vision
3D-Belief: Embodied Belief Inference via Generative 3D World Modeling
Recent advances in visual generative models have highlighted the promise of learning generative world models. However, most existing approaches frame world modeling as novel-view synthesis or future-frame prediction, emphasizing visual realism rather than the structured uncertainty required by embodied agents acting under partial observability. In this work, we propose a different perspective: world modeling as embodied belief inference in 3D space. From this view, a world model should not merely render what may be seen, but maintain and update an agent's belief about the unobserved 3D world as new observations are acquired. We identify several key capabilities for such models, including spatially consistent scene memory, multi-hypothesis belief sampling, sequential belief updating, and semantically informed prediction of unseen regions. We instantiate these ideas in 3D-Belief, a generative 3D world model that infers explicit, actionable 3D beliefs from partial observations and updates them online over time. Unlike prior visual prediction models, 3D-Belief represents uncertainty directly in 3D, enabling embodied agents to imagine plausible scene completions and reason over partially observed environments. We evaluate 3D-Belief on 2D visual quality for scene memory and unobserved-scene imagination, object- and scene-level 3D imagination using our proposed 3D-CORE benchmark, and challenging object navigation tasks in both simulation and the real world. Experiments show that 3D-Belief improves 2D and 3D imagination quality and downstream embodied task performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
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Computer Vision
PresentAgent-2: Towards Generalist Multimodal Presentation Agents
Presentation generation is moving beyond static slide creation toward end-to-end presentation video generation with research grounding, multimodal media, and interactive delivery. We introduce PresentAgent-2, an agentic framework for generating presentation videos from user queries. Given an open-ended user query and a selected presentation mode, PresentAgent-2 first summarizes the query into a focused topic and performs deep research over presentation-friendly sources to collect multimodal resources, including relevant text, images, GIFs, and videos. It then constructs presentation slides, generates mode-specific scripts, and composes slides, audio, and dynamic media into a complete presentation video. PresentAgent-2 supports three independent presentation modes within a unified framework: Single Presentation, which generates a single-speaker narrated presentation video; Discussion, which creates a multi-speaker presentation with structured speaker roles, such as for asking guiding questions, explaining concepts, clarifying details, and summarizing key points; and Interaction, which independently supports answering audience questions grounded in the generated slides, scripts, retrieved evidence, and presentation context. To evaluate these capabilities, we build a multimodal presentation benchmark covering single presentation, discussion, and interaction scenarios, with task-specific evaluation criteria for content quality, media relevance, dynamic media use, dialogue naturalness, and interaction grounding. Overall, PresentAgent-2 extends presentation generation from document-dependent slide creation to query-driven, research-grounded presentation video generation with multimodal media, dialogue, and interaction. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/PresentAgent-2. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/PresentAgent-2.
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Computer Vision
Lite3R: A Model-Agnostic Framework for Efficient Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction
Transformer-based 3D reconstruction has emerged as a powerful paradigm for recovering geometry and appearance from multi-view observations, offering strong performance across challenging visual conditions. As these models scale to larger backbones and higher-resolution inputs, improving their efficiency becomes increasingly important for practical deployment. However, modern 3D transformer pipelines face two coupled challenges: dense multi-view attention creates substantial token-mixing overhead, and low-precision execution can destabilize geometry-sensitive representations and degrade depth, pose, and 3D consistency. To address the first challenge, we propose Lite3R, a model-agnostic teacher-student framework that replaces dense attention with Sparse Linear Attention to preserve important geometric interactions while reducing attention cost. To address the second challenge, we introduce a parameter-efficient FP8-aware quantization-aware training (FP8-aware QAT) strategy with partial attention distillation, which freezes the vast majority of pretrained backbone parameters and trains only lightweight linear-branch projection layers, enabling stable low-precision deployment while retaining pretrained geometric priors. We further evaluate Lite3R on two representative backbones, VGGT and DA3-Large, over BlendedMVS and DTU64, showing that it substantially reduces latency (1.7-2.0x) and memory usage (1.9-2.4x) while preserving competitive reconstruction quality overall. These results demonstrate that Lite3R provides an effective algorithm-system co-design approach for practical transformer-based 3D reconstruction. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/Lite3R. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/Lite3R.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Gradient-Free Noise Optimization for Reward Alignment in Generative Models
Existing reward alignment methods for diffusion and flow models rely on multi-step stochastic trajectories, making them difficult to extend to deterministic generators. A natural alternative is noise-space optimization, but existing approaches require backpropagation through the generator and reward pipeline, limiting applicability to differentiable settings. To address this, here we present ZeNO (Zeroth-order Noise Optimization), a gradient-free framework that formulates noise optimization as a path-integral control problem, estimable from zeroth-order reward evaluations. When instantiated with an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck reference process and a one-step receding horizon, the repeated update connects to Langevin dynamics targeting a reward-tilted distribution. ZeNO enables effective inference-time scaling and demonstrates strong performance across diverse generators and reward functions, including a protein structure generation task where backpropagation is infeasible.
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Monday 11 May
Computer Vision · Cross-listed from eess.IV
SpecX: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Multi-Modal Spectroscopy and Cross-Paradigm Evaluation
Existing spectral benchmarks are limited in scale, modality alignment, and evaluation scope, and typically focus on either specialized models or multimodal language models (MLLMs). We introduce SpecX, a large-scale benchmark for multi-modal spectroscopy with cross-paradigm evaluation. SpecX contains 1.7M molecules with diverse spectral modalities, including NMR (1H, 13C, HSQC), IR, MS,UV,Raman and FL, and is organized into three tiers: a large-scale dataset for pretraining, an aligned multi-spectral subset for benchmarking, and a high-quality experimental subset for evaluation. SpecX supports a range of tasks such as molecular elucidation, spectrum simulation, and spectral understanding, and enables unified evaluation across both specialized spectral models and MLLMs. Experiments show that specialized models excel at signal-level modeling, while MLLMs exhibit strengths in high-level reasoning but lack precise spectral grounding. SpecX establishes a unified benchmark for spectral intelligence and highlights the need for spectrum-native foundation models.
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Computer Vision
VVitCutLER: Towards Unsupervised Object Detection and Segmentation in Videos
Unsupervised pixel-level video understanding remains challenging in real-world scenarios, where motion blur, occlusion, and fast object dynamics often cause temporal drift and flickering pseudo-labels.We propose VVitCutLER, an unsupervised framework for video object detection and instance segmentation, which improves the quality of pseudo-labels through temporal consistency. Our core contribution is VitCut, a temporarily stable pseudo-label generator that reduces error accumulation during field degradation through cross-frame region consistency. Meanwhile, VitCut uses a distillation decoder to achieve effective instance mask prediction. Then, based on VitCut, VVitCutLER further integrates cross-frame feature aggregation to enhance video-level robustness. Extensive experiments on standard video benchmarks demonstrate that VVitCutLER significantly improves detection and segmentation performance while reducing temporal instability. These results highlight the importance of temporally consistent supervision for robust pixel-level video understanding.
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Computer Vision
Inducing Spatial Locality in Vision Transformers through the Training Protocol
We investigate whether the training protocol can induce spatial locality in the early layers of a Vision Transformer (ViT) trained from scratch, without large-scale pretraining. Keeping the architecture and optimization procedure fixed, we compare a Baseline protocol with a Modern protocol (AutoAugment/ColorJitter, CutMix, and Label Smoothing) on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet, characterizing each attention head via Mean Attention Distance (MAD) and normalized entropy. Across all three datasets, the Modern protocol produces more local and more concentrated attention in early layers; on CIFAR-100, the minimum MAD drops from 0.316 (Baseline) to 0.008 (Modern). To identify the source of this effect, we conduct an ablation study on CIFAR-100 by adding or removing each component individually. The results identify CutMix as the determining component within our experiments: all conditions with CutMix exhibit MAD 0.024, while all conditions without CutMix remain at MAD 0.210. AutoAugment and Label Smoothing show no independent effect on locality. Taken together, these findings suggest that the pressure to classify from partial image regions, induced by CutMix, can promote the emergence of local attention in Vision Transformers.
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Computer Vision
ChronoSC: Task-Oriented Semantic Communication via Temporal-to-Color Encoding
Semantic communication (SC) aims to reduce transmission overhead by conveying task-relevant information rather than raw data. However, existing SC approaches for video largely focus on pixel-level reconstruction or rely on complex spatiotemporal pipelines, leading to excessive bandwidth usage and latency that are unsuitable for low-resource deployments. In this paper, we propose ChronoSC, a task-oriented semantic communication framework for Video Question Answering (VideoQA). ChronoSC introduces Chrono-Color Stacking, a lightweight and lossless projection scheme that encodes temporal video dynamics into a single static image, enabling extreme temporal compression before transmission. This compact semantic representation is transmitted using a lightweight Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding (DeepJSCC) transceiver and explicitly reconstructed at the receiver. Unlike latent-space methods, explicit visual reconstruction enables the direct reuse of pre-trained vision-language models; specifically, a pre-trained BLIP model is employed to infer answers from noisy, reconstructed chrono-images. Experiments on the CLEVRER dataset show that ChronoSC achieves up to 192 times bandwidth reduction compared to raw video transmission while maintaining high VideoQA accuracy.
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Computer Vision
Stabilizing Temporal Inference Dynamics for Online Surgical Phase Recognition
Online Surgical Phase Recognition (SPR) models can reach high frame-wise accuracy, yet their predictions often lack temporal stability, fragmenting workflow understanding and reducing the reliability of downstream assistance. We show that this instability is not random noise but arises from two mechanisms: early misclassifications corrupt temporal feature states and propagate forward to form error cascades, and phase transitions follow evidence-accumulation dynamics whereas most online SPR systems rely on memoryless frame-wise decisions, making them sensitive to transient confidence fluctuations. We propose a unified Train-Inference-Evaluation framework that explicitly stabilizes temporal inference dynamics using model-agnostic, plug-and-play components. For training, the Temporal Error-Cascade (TEC) loss suppresses error onset and mitigates forward error propagation by stabilizing temporal feature evolution. For inference, the Evidence-Gated Transition Predictor (EGTP) enforces evidence-driven state transitions, allowing phase changes only when accumulated evidence exceeds a confidence boundary. For evaluation, we introduce the Temporal Fragmentation Index (TFI), a reliability-aware metric that quantifies instability-induced temporal disagreement beyond conventional frame-wise and token-based measures. Experiments on Cholec80 and AutoLaparo across three representative backbones show that the proposed framework substantially improves temporal stability and reduces prediction fragmentation, while maintaining or modestly improving frame-wise performance.
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Computer Vision
Auditing Multimodal LLM Raters: Central Tendency Bias in Clinical Ordinal Scoring
Multimodal large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as automated evaluators in clinical settings, yet their scoring behavior on ordinal clinical scales remains poorly understood. We benchmark three frontier LLM families against supervised deep learning models for scoring Clock Drawing Test (CDT) images on two public datasets using the Shulman rubric. While fully fine-tuned Vision Transformers achieve the best calibration (MAE 0.52, within-1 accuracy 91%), zero-shot LLMs remain competitive on tolerance-based agreement (GPT-5 MAE 0.67, within-1 accuracy 92%) despite higher absolute error. However, per-score analysis reveals that all three LLM families exhibit a pronounced central tendency effect (systematic endpoint compression): predictions are systematically compressed toward the middle of the scale, with over-prediction at the low end (score 0 to 1) and under-prediction at the high end (score 5 to 4). This effect disproportionately affects the clinically critical extremes where accurate scoring most impacts screening decisions for cognitive impairment. Targeted ablations show that neither few-shot exemplars spanning the full score range nor removing clinical terminology from the prompt eliminates the effect. Our findings extend the LLM-as-a-judge bias literature from NLP evaluation to clinical assessment, and highlight the need for calibration-aware evaluation and post-hoc calibration before deploying LLM-based raters in high-stakes screening workflows.
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Computer Vision
Hilbert-Geo: Solving Solid Geometric Problems by Neural-Symbolic Reasoning
Geometric problem solving, as a typical multimodal reasoning problem, has attracted much attention and made great progress recently, however most of works focus on plane geometry while usually fail in solid geometry due to 3D spatial diagrams and complex reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce Hilbert-Geo, the first unified formal language framework for solid geometry, including an extensive predicate library and a dedicated theorem bank. Based on this framework, we propose a Parse2Reason method containing two steps of first parsing then reasoning. In the parsing step, we utilize conditional description language (CDL), a formalized language composed of predicates specifically designed to construct geometric conditions, to represent both problem description (natural text) and solid diagrams (visual image). In the reasoning step, we leverage those formal CDL and the theorem bank to perform relational inference and algebraic computation, generating strictly correct, verifiable, and human-readable reasoning processes. Notably, our proposed Hilbert-Geo is also applicable to plane geometry. To advance geometric reasoning, we curate two expert-annotated dataset SolidFGeo2k and PlaneFGeo3k, which are furnished with geometric formal language annotations, solutions and answers. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance 77.3% in SolidFGeo2k and 84.1% in MathVerse-Solid (one small subset in MathVerse dedicated to solid geometry), substantially outperforming leading MLLMs, such as Gemini-2.5-pro (54.2% on SolidFGeo2k) and GPT-5 (62.9% on MathVerse-Solid). In addition, our method achieves the SOTA accuracy 80.2% in PlaneFGeo3k, demonstrating the generality of the Hilbert-Geo in geometric reasoning. Our code and datasets are released at https://github.com/PremiLab-Math/Hilbert-Geo.