Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Papers
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Tuesday 26 May
Generative models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for solving physics systems and modeling complex spatiotemporal dynamics. However, achieving high physical accuracy without incurring high computational cost remains a fundamental challenge, as existing approaches face a critical speed-fidelity trade-off. In this work, we introduce Recursive Flow Matching (RecFM), a generative framework for forecasting complex spatiotemporal dynamics. RecFM enforces self-consistency to align trajectories across discretization scales, reducing discretization errors and improving performance across metrics for physics-based tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first method to achieve high-fidelity one- and few-step (2-4 step) dynamic generation for scientific systems with performance comparable to state-of-the-art multi-step solvers. Across challenging scientific benchmarks, RecFM achieves up to a 20$\times$ speedup over leading diffusion-based emulators while improving predictive accuracy. Furthermore, RecFM reduces mean squared error by over 15% compared to vanilla flow matching, offering a scalable and efficient solution for real-time scientific emulation.
Computer Vision
A Hybrid Vision-Language Architecture for Automated Defect Reasoning and Report Generation in Industrial Inspection
Automated industrial inspection requires both precise defect localization and structured maintenance report generation; in current practice these tasks are handled separately, with linguistic interpretation left to human experts. This paper describes a decoupled, edge-deployable pipeline for wind turbine blade inspection built from three components that each handle a distinct sub-task. The Eyes a YOLO26-x-obb oriented bounding-box detector localizes defects at dataset-native resolution. The Bridge a deterministic, parameter-free encoding module maps each detected bounding box to grid-referenced spatial tokens embedded in a structured prompt. The Brain a 4-bit quantized Qwen-2.5-1.5B model adapted with Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) on 947 synthetically generated maintenance reports generates a structured JSON report from that prompt. Retrieval-Augmented Fine-Tuning (RAFT) further grounds each recommendation in indexed maintenance procedures. Five ablation experiments, scored by BLEU-4, ROUGE-L, Hallucination Rate (HR), and an LLM-as-a-Judge rubric, compare the pipeline against a monolithic vision-language model (VLM) baseline and against partial configurations in which one component is removed. The complete system achieves BLEU-4 0.41, HR=4%, and Expert Score = 8.6/10 compared with 0.07, 65%, and 3.3/10 for the zero-shot VLM baseline. The QLoRA-adapted 1.5B model generates higher-quality reports than a 671B-parameter generalist API model given identical detection evidence, at 47 tokens per second on a single T4-class GPU. The results show that purpose-built decoupled architecture with a small domain-specific training corpus outperforms a generalist end-to-end model on this structured generation task.
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Computer Vision
ReCA: Multi-Shot Long Video Extrapolation via Recursive Context Allocation
Minute-scale cinematic video generation is a central challenge for generative video models. Existing paradigms address only fragments of this challenge: single-shot extrapolation preserves an anchor but lacks cinematic structure, while multi-shot storytelling imposes structure yet remains free to invent its visual states rather than continue an observed one. We define Multi-Shot Video Extrapolation (MSVE), a task that extends an observed frame or clip into a sequence of cinematically structured shots while preserving anchor state and advancing narrative intent. This setting operates under the finite per-call generation budget of short-video models. We identify three coupled bottlenecks: (1) global planners over-specify unsupported details from full screenplays; (2) shot-level prompts dilute task-relevant state when carrying the complete story; and (3) temporal chaining turns generated frames into a lossy memory in which identity, scene, object, and action state decay. MSVE reveals that long-video failure is not merely a limitation of context length, but a failure of context allocation. We propose Recursive Context Allocation (ReCA), an inference-time framework that allocates context hierarchically across planning and generation. ReCA recursively decomposes MSVE into context-bounded subproblems, invokes frozen generators at leaf nodes, and propagates structured state updates across time. To evaluate this setting, we further propose MSVE-Bench and NB-Q, a source-grounded protocol with prompts purpose-built for 3 to 5 minute long-video generation, a regime not addressed by existing short-clip benchmarks. Compared to previous methods, ReCA improves average normalized score by 8 to 16 percent over the strongest competing controller and improves multi-shot consistency metrics by 28 to 43 percent. View the project page at https://reca.vmv.re.
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Computer Vision
CmIVTP: Cross-modal Interaction-based Vessel Trajectory Prediction for Maritime Intelligence
Maritime intelligent transportation systems (MITS) are essential for ensuring navigation safety and efficiency in busy waterways. However, accurate vessel trajectory prediction remains challenging due to the limitations of single-source data. Automatic identification system (AIS) data is often sparse or unavailable for small vessels, while closed-circuit television (CCTV) data alone cannot fully capture dynamic vessel behavior. To mitigate these challenges, we propose a cross-modal interaction-based vessel trajectory prediction (named CmIVTP) framework to model the intricate interactions between vessel dynamics and environmental constraints. Specifically, we introduce a target-aware scene encoder to extract scene semantic features, effectively capturing vessel-environment interactions and enhancing trajectory prediction accuracy. In addition, we propose a cross-modal interaction transformer, which integrates AIS-derived motion features, CCTV-based environmental features, and scene representations. It leverages cross-modal attention mechanisms to simultaneously capture intra-modal semantics and inter-modal interactions, ensuring dynamically consistent and environmentally feasible predictions. Furthermore, we construct a vessel group trajectory bank by clustering historical AIS trajectories into representative motion patterns, providing an efficient and scalable approach for candidate trajectory generation. Additionally, we introduce the maritime multimodal dataset plus (named Maritime-MmD$^+$), a large-scale dataset that synchronizes AIS data and CCTV video data, providing robust support for multimodal trajectory prediction research. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CmIVTP achieves better performance on multimodal-driven vessel trajectory prediction benchmarks. The code resources for this work can be available at https://github.com/LouisYxLu/CmIVTP.
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Computer Vision
InterSketch: An Interleaved Reasoning Model with Self-correcting Visual Sketch and Stepwise Reward
While vision-language models (VLMs) have exhibited multi-turn visual reasoning capabilities, their reasoning trajectories remain relatively shallow and are dominated by a text-centric paradigm, limiting their applicability to complex visual challenges. In contrast, human-like thought typically involves long-horizon reasoning with an interleaved visual-textual chain-of-thought (VT-CoT). To bridge this gap, we introduce InterSketch, an interleaved reasoning model to enhance the VT-CoT capability via self-correcting and stepwise reward mechanisms. InterSketch dynamically generates intermediate visual sketches using external tools and interleaves them with textual reasoning, enabling effective perception and logical reasoning over long-horizon visual understanding tasks. Specifically, in the first cold-start stage, we propose a synthesized high-quality interleaved VT-CoT dataset and include a reflection mechanism to enable the model's capability in multi-turn interleaved reasoning and self-correction. In the subsequent reinforcement learning (RL) stage, we design a stepwise reward mechanism to mitigate the sparsity of reward signals inherent in end-only supervision over long-horizon reasoning. Extensive experiments on visual reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of InterSketch, even outperforming proprietary models such as Gemini-3-Pro.
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Computer Vision
$R^3$: 3D Reconstruction via Relative Regression
Recent feed-forward geometry foundation models have demonstrated impressive generalization by recovering depth and poses in a single forward pass. However, these models are typically constrained by a global coordinate frame assumption. This dependency becomes a significant bottleneck for long-context and streaming reconstruction, as it forces the network to maintain an arbitrary temporal origin and handle translation magnitudes that grow unbounded over time. Our solution, which we call $R^3$, employs relative regression. We employ a lightweight MLP to predict confidence-weighted relative constraints. These confidences serve as a unified anchor: weighting losses during training and guiding pose aggregation during inference. $R^3$ supports both full-context offline reconstruction and causal, bounded-memory streaming. Our evaluation in both offline and streaming settings validates the effectiveness of our relative mechanism. Project page: https://kevinxu02.github.io/r3-site
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Computer Vision
vSV-ViT: Variable-size SuperVertex Vision Transformer for Cortical Surface Learning in Alzheimer's Disease
Learning from 3D meshes is challenging because the data reside on non-Euclidean surfaces embedded in 3D space. This is particularly evident in domains such as brain cortical surface analysis, where existing models typically rely on ROI-agnostic, face-based, or fixed-size patches. Such patches can duplicate boundary vertices, conflate anatomically distinct regions, or incorporate non-cortical vertices such as those of the medial wall. We develop variable-size supervertex (vSV) partitioning, which groups cortical surface vertices into vSV patches similar to superpixels in images. Building on these vSVs, we design Variable-size SuperVertex Vision Transformer (vSV-ViT), a Vision Transformer that processes vSVs through padding, mask-aware patch embedding, and vertex position embedding. We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed framework through a quantitative analysis of vertex assignment in surface partitioning and downstream tasks using Alzheimer's disease brain image datasets. For downstream tasks, we use meshes of cortical thickness and cortical curvature as input to various encoder models and evaluate classification performance. The superior predictive accuracy of vSV-ViT over recent surface-based models supports its effectiveness for cortical surface learning, with AD-related and sex prediction serving as downstream validation. Extending the framework to other cortical surface applications and broader 3D mesh domains remains future work. Code is available at https://github.com/labhai/vSV-ViT.
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Computer Vision
Rethinking Gradient Modulation in Multimodal Regression
Even balanced multimodal learning methods do not consistently translate additional modalities into better regression performance. To understand this limitation, we revisit the optimization mechanism of balanced multimodal learning, using MMPareto as a representative case. We reveal a previously overlooked issue: MMPareto uses a fixed gradient modulation strength throughout training, while different training stages favor different strengths; an inappropriate modulation strength can instead hinder subsequent optimization. To address this issue, we propose SGM, which adapts the modulation strength according to the current training behavior. We provide theoretical and empirical analyses to characterize and validate the modulation decisions made by SGM. We further build a two-stage multimodal regression framework that integrates AM for unimodal regression representation learning and SGM for adaptive multimodal optimization. Extensive experiments under the same total training budget demonstrate consistent improvements over strong unimodal and multimodal baselines. Our code is provided in the supplementary material.
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Computer Vision
Uncertainty-Aware Gaussian Map for Vision-Language Navigation
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to navigate 3D environments following natural language instructions. During navigation, existing agents commonly encounter perceptual uncertainty, such as insufficient evidence for reliable grounding or ambiguity in interpreting spatial cues, yet they typically ignore such information when predicting actions. In this work, we explicitly model three forms of perceptual uncertainty (i.e., geometric, semantic, and appearance uncertainty) and integrate them into the agent's observation space to enable informed decision-making. Concretely, our agent first constructs a Semantic Gaussian Map (SGM), composed of differentiable 3D Gaussian primitives initialized from panoramic observations, that encodes both the geometric structure and semantic content of the environment. On top of SGM, geometric uncertainty is estimated through variational perturbations of Gaussian position and scale to assess structural reliability; semantic uncertainty is captured by perturbing Gaussian semantic attributes to reveal ambiguous interpretations; and appearance uncertainty is characterized by Fisher Information, which measures the sensitivity of rendered observations to Gaussian-level variations. These uncertainties are incorporated into SGM, extending it into a unified 3D Value Map, which grounds them as affordances and constraints that support reliable navigation. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple VLN benchmarks show the effectiveness of our agent.
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Computer Vision
Unveiling the Fragility of Vision-Language Models: Multi-Modal Adversarial Synergy via Texture-Constrained Perturbations and Cross-Modal Optimization
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have transformed multi-modal understanding, excelling in tasks like image captioning and visual question answering by integrating visual and textual inputs. However, their robustness against adversarial attacks, particularly those exploiting both modalities, remains underexplored, posing risks to critical applications like autonomous driving and content moderation. Existing attacks focus on single modalities or require impractical white-box access, limiting their real-world relevance. In this paper, we introduce Multi-Modal Adversarial Synergy, a groundbreaking framework that crafts universal, black-box multi-modal attacks against LVLMs. MMAS simultaneously generates a texture scale-constrained universal adversarial perturbation for images and a learnable prompt perturbation for text, optimized jointly using only model queries. The image perturbation leverages wavelet-based texture constraints to ensure imperceptibility and robustness across diverse visual inputs. The text perturbation, constrained by an L-norm in the embedding space, maintains semantic coherence while steering outputs toward a target. A novel cross-modal regularization term aligns the perturbations' gradient directions, enhancing their synergistic impact and transferability across tasks and models. Extensive experiments show the strong universal adversarial capabilities of our proposed attack with prevalent LVLMs.
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Computer Vision
3D Gaussian Map with Open-Set Semantic Grouping for Vision-Language Navigation
Vision-language navigation (VLN) requires an agent to traverse complex 3D environments based on natural language instructions, necessitating a thorough scene understanding. While existing works equip agents with various scene representations to enhance spatial awareness, they often neglect the complex 3D geometry and rich semantics in VLN scenarios, limiting the ability to generalize across diverse and unseen environments. To address these challenges, this work proposes a 3D Gaussian Map that represents the environment as a set of differentiable 3D Gaussians and accordingly develops a navigation strategy for VLN. Specifically, Egocentric Scene Map is constructed online by initializing 3D Gaussians from sparse pseudo-lidar point clouds, providing informative geometric priors for scene understanding. Each Gaussian primitive is further enriched through Open-Set Semantic Grouping operation, which groups 3D Gaussians based on their membership in object instances or stuff categories within the open world, resulting in a unified 3D Gaussian Map. Building on this map, Multi-Level Action Prediction strategy, which combines spatial-semantic cues at multiple granularities, is designed to assist agents in decision-making. Extensive experiments conducted on three public benchmarks (i.e., R2R, R4R, and REVERIE) validate the effectiveness of our method.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Beyond Pairwise Preferences: Listwise Reward-Aware Alignment for Diffusion Models
Preference optimization has emerged as an efficient alternative to online reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for aligning text-to-image diffusion models. However, existing methods largely reduce supervision to binary pairwise comparisons. This pairwise reduction is limiting when training data naturally contains multiple candidate images for the same prompt, and when continuous reward scores can provide richer information than a single winner-loser label. To address these limitations, we propose Diffusion LAIR, a reward-aware listwise preference optimization method for diffusion models. For each prompt, LAIR converts reward scores across a group of candidate images into centered advantage weights, then optimizes an advantage-weighted regression objective on the implicit reward, defined as the denoising-loss improvement of the current model over a fixed reference model, with a quadratic penalty that regularizes the magnitude of the implicit reward. The resulting objective uses all candidates simultaneously rather than selecting pairs, and remains conservative by explicitly controlling the magnitude of the implicit reward. The LAIR objective admits a bounded closed-form optimum in implicit-reward space, clarifying how the regularization strength controls the magnitude of the preference update. Experiments show that Diffusion LAIR outperforms strong preference optimization baselines on SD1.5 and SDXL across text-to-image generation, compositional generation, and image editing benchmarks.
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Computer Vision
LongCat-Video-Avatar 1.5 Technical Report
Despite advances in audio-driven video generation, achieving commercial-grade stability remains challenging. We present LongCat-Video-Avatar 1.5, an upgraded open-source framework prioritizing systematic engineering and production-readiness over architectural novelty. By upgrading the audio encoder to Whisper Large and meticulously scaling our training recipes, v1.5 achieves accurate lip-synchronization, full-body temporal stability, and robust long-video generation with strict identity consistency. Through rigorous data curation and RLHF Training, the model readily generalizes to stylized domains such as anime and animals, and natively handles complex real-world conditions, such as multi-person interactions and object handling. Furthermore, addressing the practical demands of industrial deployment, we employ advanced step distillation to accelerate inference to an optimal 8 NFE, achieving a favorable trade-off between serving efficiency and visual fidelity. The superiority of our approach is validated through extensive quantitative metrics and a rigorous human evaluation conducted on a comprehensive benchmark of over 500 diverse test cases. Results show that v1.5 achieves competitive or superior performance compared to leading closed-source systems (e.g., HeyGen, OmniHuman 1.5, Kling Avatar 2.0) across human-likeness ratings and expert-level quality assessments on our benchmark. With its open-source release, LongCat-Video-Avatar 1.5 narrows the gap between academic research prototypes and commercial-grade deployment.
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Computer Vision
OmniInteract: Benchmarking Real-World Streaming Interaction for Real-Time Omnimodal Assistants
We introduce OmniInteract, a streaming benchmark for real-time omnimodal large language models evaluated through native online inference over audio-visual streams. Unlike offline video understanding or text-prompted streaming QA, OmniInteract preserves the original audio-visual stream and requires models to process it online, without access to future content. User queries and ambient sounds are embedded in the audio track, requiring models to detect multimodal triggers, decide when to respond, and answer while the stream unfolds. OmniInteract contains 250 videos with 1,430 temporally grounded response slots: 1,062 1Q1A slots across real-time, proactive, and nested scenarios, and 368 1QnA slots for continuous task monitoring and step guidance. Each slot includes a trigger, response window, and target answer. We evaluate response correctness, timing, invalid outputs, interruption handling, and context continuity using Interaction-Aware Quality-Timeliness F1, Interruption Diagnostic Suite, and Nested Chain Completion Score. Experiments show that current models remain weak in streaming interaction, with the best overall IA-QTF1 reaching only 0.368 and the best 1QnA IA-QTF1 only 0.052. Further study on mathematical reasoning in full-duplex settings shows that offline capability does not necessarily transfer to online interaction. Code and datasets will be made publicly accessible at https://github.com/Lucky-Lance/OmniInteract.
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Computer Vision
Clinically-Grounded Counterfactual Reasoning for Medical Video Diagnosis
Medical video diagnosis involves inferring clinical decisions from dynamic tissue responses throughout examination processes. Existing methods rely on an end-to-end learning paradigm that i) focuses on appearance rather than pathology, ii) lacks clinical priors, and iii) reasons solely from observations without counterfactual comparison. This work introduces MedVCR, a counterfactual reasoning framework that mimics clinical diagnostic thinking. MedVCR comprises three components: a Counterfactual Generator that synthesizes tissue evolution under specified pathological states via a diffusion-based manner; a Counterfactual Representation Learning module that encodes diagnostic knowledge through clinical rules (i.e., temporal consistency, pathological separability, and counterfactual alignment); and a Dual Diagnostic Prediction strategy that integrates video-level assessment with frame-level counterfactual analysis. MedVCR is evaluated under both fully supervised (e.g., colposcopy) and weakly supervised (e.g., colonoscopy) video diagnosis settings, yielding 2.6%-10.2% performance gains compared with leading baselines. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each component. The code will be released.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.RO
Efficient On-policy Visual-RL via Stochastic Decoupled Policy Gradient
We present the stochastic decoupled policy gradient (SDPG), a lightweight visual reinforcement learning (RL) method that trains diverse visuomotor control policies end-to-end within a few hours on a single NVIDIA RTX 4080 GPU. SDPG estimates policy gradients via random perturbations of trajectory rollouts, requiring orders of magnitude fewer batch-rendered environments and substantially reducing compute and memory overhead. On visual MuJoCo benchmarks, SDPG consistently outperforms baseline methods in training time, memory usage, and rewards. Finally, to support future research, we introduce a suite of realistic visual robotics benchmarks spanning dexterous manipulation, challenging locomotion, and demonstrate effective sim-to-real transfer on physical hardware.
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Computer Vision
Comparative Study of Vision-Based Metric Measurement for Large-Scale Planar Scenes
Vision-based metric distance and area measurement remains challenging in large-scale outdoor environments due to long-range sensing, camera zoom, and unstable imaging conditions. This work studies planar metric measurement in a real-world reservoir monitoring scenario using PTZ cameras and compares three representative approaches: geometry-based monocular ranging, image stitching with birds-eye-view transformation, and stereo-based ranging using two jointly calibrated monocular cameras. For monocular ranging, planar localization models are derived from camera geometry and the effect of camera pitch angle is analyzed. Image stitching is investigated for large-area mapping, while a stereo-based scheme is developed for long-range measurement without dedicated stereo hardware. Experiments show clear trade-offs: monocular ranging achieves meter-level accuracy under sufficiently large pitch angles, stereo-based ranging achieves decimeter-level accuracy with reduced sensitivity to pitch variations, and image stitching is effective for small-scale scenes but degrades in stability and scalability as scene size increases.
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Computer Vision
Triadic Dynamics Aware Diffusion Posterior Sampling for Inverse Problems: Optimizing Guidance and Stochasticity Schedules
Generative posterior sampling using diffusion models has emerged as a dominant paradigm for solving inverse problems in imaging, which usually consists of three main components: data consistency (DC) guidance, classifier-free guidance (CFG) and stochasticity. While prior arts have focused on how to develop each or all components, less attention has given to how to schedule them, leading to heuristically fixed or partially adjusted suboptimal schedules. In this work, we argue that the interactions among all three components in terms of scheduling are crucial for significantly improved performance in solving inverse problems in imaging. Our analysis shows that aggressive CFG early in sampling conflict with DC guidance, while stochasticity brings the trajectory back to higher-probability regions. Based on these findings, we propose Triadic Dynamics Aware Posterior Sampling (TriPS), which reformulates posterior sampling as a time-varying control problem and optimizes schedules following a triadic trend of decreasing DC and stochasticity scales alongside increasing CFG scale. TriPS achieves this through two strategies: template-based search over functional priors for reliable baseline schedules, and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO)-based reinforcement learning for more flexible temporal curves. Experiments demonstrate TriPS outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in data fidelity and perceptual realism.
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Computer Vision
AnchorDiff: Training-Free Concept Grounding for MM-DiTs via Anchor-Based Graph Propagation
Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformers (MM-DiTs) encode rich representations for training-free concept grounding, but existing attention-based methods often produce overlapping activations on visually confusable concepts, a failure mode we call concept leakage, where target responses spill over to non-target objects. To address this issue, we propose AnchorDiff, a training-free grounding method that decouples semantic localization from structural refinement. AnchorDiff selects a high-confidence anchor from concept-to-image attention map and propagates it as a one-hot seed over a hybrid graph derived from image-to-image self-attention. The graph uses output-space similarity for dense within-object propagation and a row-wise attention gate to suppress cross-object connections. Additionally, we introduce the Multi-Concept Confusion Dataset, which contains images with multiple visually similar concepts and separate masks, enabling explicit evaluation of concept leakage. Experiments show that AnchorDiff achieves strong grounding performance on ImageNet-Segmentation and PascalVOC, while substantially reducing concept leakage on our Multi-Concept Confusion Dataset.
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Computer Vision
Sparse-LiDAR Prompting of Monocular Geometry Foundations: An Empirical Study Toward Long-Range Driving Depth
Sparse-LiDAR-prompted depth foundation models (PromptDA, Prior Depth Anything, DMD3C) have shown strong results on indoor scenes or within KITTI's standard 80-meter evaluation cap. However, two limitations remain: (i) systematic distance-stratified evaluation in long-range driving regimes (50-150 m) is largely absent; (ii) prior approaches built on disparity-based foundations rely on pre-interpolated dense priors, leaving truly sparse LiDAR injection on point-map foundations (e.g., MoGe-2, NeurIPS 2025) unexplored. We present SLIM (Sparse-LiDAR Injected Monocular geometry), the first adaptation of MoGe-2 to accept truly sparse LiDAR input. SLIM integrates a partial-convolution sparse encoder with a multi-scale fusion neck that fuses LiDAR features into the point-map decoder at five scales. We adopt density-agnostic training (random injection ratio in [0.005, 0.30]) so a single model serves diverse input densities. On Virtual KITTI and CARLA, SLIM reduces the absolute relative error of the MoGe-2 baseline by approximately 39-51% at 100-150 m. Ablation across six injection ratios shows partial-convolution injection improves both AbsRel and RMSE on Virtual KITTI in all six settings; on CARLA, AbsRel improves in five of six settings (one near-tie at 0.015 differs by 0.0013), and RMSE is comparable across encoders, with partial-convolution improving in three settings (by up to 0.31 unit) and losing by at most 0.11 unit in the other three.
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Computer Vision
Cross-scale Aligned Supervision for Training GANs
Modern GANs often introduce adversarial supervision on intermediate generator outputs and interpret the resulting multi-stage synthesis as coarse-to-fine hierarchical generation. In this work, we challenge this interpretation. We argue that standard scale-wise adversarial supervision does not construct a proper coarse-to-fine hierarchy: each intermediate image is independently pushed toward the real distribution at its own resolution, but this scale-wise realism does not ensure that outputs across stages represent the identical generated sample. Moreover, the scale-specific image produced at each stage is not used as an explicit refinement target for the subsequent stage. Therefore, its adversarial loss can improve a scale-specific output without constraining later stages to preserve the same sample trajectory, allowing them to move toward a different sample rather than refine the previous output. We refer to this problem as a cross-scale trajectory misalignment problem. To resolve it, we propose CAT, a Cross-scale Aligned Transformer for multi-scale adversarial generation. CAT keeps the discriminator scale-wise, so each intermediate output is evaluated at its own resolution, while adding a simple generator-side consistency regularization that aligns intermediate outputs with the final output. On class-conditional ImageNet-256, CAT-H/2 achieves an FID-50K of 1.56 with one-step inference after only 60 training epochs, outperforming strong one-step GAN and diffusion/flow baselines.
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Computer Vision
Underwater360: Reconstructing Underwater Scenes from Panoramic Images with Omnidirectional Gaussian Splatting
Underwater scene reconstruction is essential for immersive exploration of aquatic environments, yet remains challenging due to complex participating-media effects such as absorption and scattering, as well as the limited field of view (FoV) of conventional cameras. Although combining panoramic imaging with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) offers a promising direction for photorealistic underwater rendering, traditional 3DGS struggles with both spherical projection distortion and underwater medium degradation. In this paper, we propose Underwater360, a physics-informed omnidirectional 3DGS framework for underwater panoramic scene reconstruction. First, we introduce an Omnidirectional Gaussian Splatting module that performs ray casting directly in spherical camera space instead of relying on 2D projection approximations, thereby reducing geometric distortions under 360$^\circ$ FoV. Second, we design a physics-based appearance-medium modeling architecture with pose-conditioned appearance embeddings to explicitly decouple intrinsic scene radiance from depth-dependent backscatter and attenuation, enabling physically grounded scene appearance restoration. Finally, we establish a new panoramic underwater benchmark dataset containing both synthetic and real-world scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Underwater360 achieves superior performance in underwater novel view synthesis and scene appearance restoration, delivering improved rendering quality and cross-view consistency in complex underwater environments. The code and datasets are released at https://github.com/SwcK423/Underwater360
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Computer Vision
Rethinking Weakly-supervised Video Temporal Grounding From a Game Perspective
This paper addresses the challenging task of weakly-supervised video temporal grounding. Existing approaches are generally based on the moment proposal selection framework that utilizes contrastive learning and reconstruction paradigm for scoring the pre-defined moment proposals. Although they have achieved significant progress, we argue that their current frameworks have overlooked two indispensable issues: 1) Coarse-grained cross-modal learning: previous methods solely capture the global video-level alignment with the query, failing to model the detailed consistency between video frames and query words for accurately grounding the moment boundaries. 2) Complex moment proposals: their performance severely relies on the quality of proposals, which are also time-consuming and complicated for selection. To this end, in this paper, we make the first attempt to tackle this task from a novel game perspective, which effectively learns the uncertain relationship between each vision-language pair with diverse granularity and flexible combination for multi-level cross-modal interaction.Specifically, we creatively model each video frame and query word as game players with multivariate cooperative game theory to learn their contribution to the cross-modal similarity score. By quantifying the trend of frame-word cooperation within a coalition via the game-theoretic interaction, we are able to value all uncertain but possible correspondence between frames and words. Finally, instead of using moment proposals, we utilize the learned query-guided frame-wise scores for better moment localization.Experiments show that our method achieves superior performance on both Charades-STA and ActivityNet Caption datasets.
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Computer Vision
HydraPrompt: An Adaptive and Asymmetric Framework of Vision-Language Models for Synthetic Image Detection
The rapid evolution of generative models has precipitated a proliferation of fabricated content, posing significant challenges to existing Synthetic Image Detection (SID) methods. Capitalizing on advancements in vision-language models (e.g., CLIP), recent attempts have leveraged learnable textual prompts to identify synthetic images. However, they still leverage static prompt as a fixed boundary for real and fake images, failing to adapt to the varying types of forgery that emerge during inference. To overcome this issue, we propose **HydraPrompt**, an asymmetric prompting framework that dynamically adjusts the category centers by aligning with fine-grained image cues. Specifically, we propose an Asymmetric Prompt Adapter (**APA**): (1) for authentic category, we introduce a single set of prompts to capture the consistent representative patterns, which serves as a unified anchor for real content. While (2) for fake category, we construct sample-adaptive prompts that specialize in capturing diverse cues from different samples, enabling adaptive modeling of forgery image variations. To increase pronounced discriminability within different synthetic images, we further introduce a Conditional Supervised Contrastive (**CSC**) objective, which compacts the authentic representations while capturing fine-grained forgery clues. Extensive experiments on popular SID benchmarks demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our framework.
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Computer Vision
The Rescue Effect: Spatio-Semantic Early Exit Bypasses Quantization Collapse in CLIP
Deploying Vision-Language Models on resource-constrained hardware typically requires INT8 quantization, but in joint-embedding architectures such as CLIP this introduces a failure mode distinct from quantized CNN classifiers: activation noise accumulated across transformer blocks perturbs the direction of the multimodal embedding, eroding the cosine alignment on which zero-shot retrieval depends. We characterize this as Quantization-Induced Representation Collapse (QIRC) and quantify it on INT8 CLIP ViT-B/32, where the layer-wise noise-to-signal ratio grows from below 10% in shallow blocks to 52% at Layer 11. We propose LRA-EE (Layer-wise Representation-Aware Early Exit), which bypasses noise-saturated deep layers via Spatio-Semantic Aggregation (replacing the immature shallow [CLS] with a global patch-token average), a learned multi-feature gate (confidence, top-2 margin, spatial-activation variance), and Layer-adaptive Confidence Thresholding calibrated to each layer's Information-to-Noise Ratio. On ImageNet-1K zero-shot classification, LRA-EE reduces FLOPs by 13.4% and improves Top-1 accuracy by +2.44%p (58.72% -> 61.16%) over the INT8 baseline. A four-quadrant decomposition isolates the Rescue Effect: 9.5% of samples are correctly classified at shallow exits but lost to noise at full depth, against only 7.1% suffering the inverse.
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Computer Vision
OmniGF: A Dual-Branch Vision-Language Framework for Unified Gaze Following
Understanding human gaze behavior is essential for complex scene comprehension and human-computer interaction. Traditional gaze following models are typically restricted to pure spatial localization, lacking the high-level capacity to reason about semantic targets or complex social contexts. Furthermore, these models often process individuals sequentially, requiring redundant computations over the same scene image for multi-person inference. While recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer the exceptional semantic reasoning needed to address gaze-related semantic tasks, their reliance on discrete text generation inherently limits precision in continuous spatial tasks like gaze localization. To bridge this gap, we propose OmniGF, a unified vision-language framework that adapts foundational VLMs for highly scalable multi-person gaze reasoning. The model adopts a dual-branch decoding strategy: a structured language branch generates discrete reasoning states, while a continuous spatial branch directly taps into the VLM's dense hidden states. Supervising these extracted representations with high-resolution gaze target heatmaps effectively overcomes the spatial bottleneck of text-only coordinate generation. Furthermore, to explicitly ground the model in multi-person scenes, we augment the input with head embeddings encoded from cropped head images, providing fine-grained appearance and orientation cues for all individuals simultaneously. By modeling all individuals and leveraging the strong semantic capability of VLMs, OmniGF seamlessly integrates precise spatial gaze target estimation, semantic gaze prediction, and complex social gaze reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework establishes new state-of-the-art performance across multiple standard benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/cvlab-stonybrook/omnigf.
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Monday 25 May
Computer Vision
Page image classifier fine-tuned on century-spanning archives of scanned documents for further content-specific processing
Purpose: Digitization projects in the humanities produce vast, heterogeneous archives of historical documents, making manual sorting impractical at scale. This work addresses the need for an automated system to classify scanned page images based on visual content type - text, tables, and graphics - enabling content-specific downstream processing such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or structured data extraction. Methods: An image classification system was developed and evaluated on a dataset of over 48,000 annotated historical page images from century-old Czech archaeological archives, refined through four successive annotation stages with domain-expert review. A Random Forest Classifier baseline was established using hand-crafted image features. Subsequently, deep learning architectures were fine-tuned and compared: Convolutional Neural Networks (EfficientNetV2, RegNetY), Vision and Document Image Transformers (ViT, DiT), and multimodal CLIP models. An 11-category label scheme was designed collaboratively with domain experts and evaluated via five-fold cross-validation. Results: The feature-based baseline achieved approximately 75% accuracy. Fine-tuned CNNs and Transformers substantially outperformed it, with RegNetY-16GF achieving 99.16% and ViT-large 99.12% Top-1 accuracy on the held-out test set. CLIP ViT-B/16 reached 99.14% with optimized text descriptions. Conclusion: Image-only models, particularly RegNetY-16GF, deliver near-perfect classification accuracy and produce consistent labels across 649,508 unlabeled archival pages with over 90% inter-model agreement. Fine-tuned CLIP, despite competitive test-set accuracy, showed under 65% agreement with image-only models on unlabeled data, making it less suitable for deployment. The final models, annotated dataset, and software are publicly available under open-source licenses.
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Computer Vision
Segmentation-Guided Spatial Indexing for Generalizable and Explainable Deepfake Detection
We introduce segmentation-guided spatial indexing for generalizable and explainable deepfake detection. The key idea reverses the standard design order: rather than pooling all facial tokens and classifying afterward, we first select semantically meaningful patch tokens, then pool only those. A frozen FaRL parser assigns each DINOv3 ViT-L/16 patch token a semantic label; non-target tokens are discarded; a linear probe classifies the retained region. This spatial indexing exploits DINOv3's patch-level spatial consistency, the same property that enables emergent segmentation, to present the probe with a purer regional subspace where manipulation-relevant evidence is less diluted by whole-face cues. Region attribution is structural: when the mouth model predicts fake, the decision used only mouth tokens, not an overlaid saliency map. On Celeb-DF v2, the mouth-indexed probe achieves AUC 0.905, outperforming LipForensics (+8.1 pp) and Xception (+16.9 pp), with no DINOv3 or FaRL fine-tuning and no target-domain data. Ablations isolate the mechanism: replacing regional selection with DINOv3's CLS token drops Celeb-DF v2 AUC by 26.4 pp; replacing DINOv3 with FaRL features drops it by 20.9 pp. Both DINOv3 representation and the spatial index are independently necessary; neither alone approaches the full system.
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Computer Vision
Diversity Over Frequency: Rethinking Tool Use in Visual Chain-of-Thought Agents
Visual agents employ external visual tools within visual chains of thought to incorporate fine-grained evidence. While prior work has mainly studied these tools in visual search tasks, their role in more complex visual reasoning remains underexplored. In this paper, we move beyond simple visual search tasks to investigate more challenging tasks, including 3D spatial reasoning and medical visual question answering, where agents must integrate tool-acquired local evidence with the global context. We identify a {tool-use collapse phenomenon: models progressively stop using tools while still achieving higher task accuracy. Moreover, we observe a clear asymmetry: (i) completely eliminating tool use degrades performance, whereas (ii) incentivizing tool use yields only marginal gains despite substantially increasing usage. We find that vanilla training and tool-use encouragement both reduce rollout diversity, explaining why higher tool use does not yield stronger reasoning performance. Motivated by these findings, we add an entropy regularization term to encourage diverse rollout exploration, achieving the best performance despite gradually declining tool usage. Overall, our findings suggest a training-time view of tools as scaffolding, where broader exploration over language generation and visual tool invocation improves reasoning despite tool-use collapse. Project page: https://scaffolded-exploration.github.io
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Computer Vision
Bridging the 2D-3D Gap: A Hierarchical Semantic-Geometric Map for Vision Language Navigation
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables embodied agents to reach target locations in unseen environments by following language instructions. Despite recent progress with vision-language models (VLMs), a critical semantic-geometric gap remains: while VLMs excel at language and 2D visual understanding, they struggle with 3D spatial reasoning and fail to capture the causal dynamics between actions and spatial transitions, resulting in unreliable navigation, particularly in zero-shot settings. To bridge this gap, we propose a Hierarchical Semantic-Geometric Map (HSGM) that transforms 3D geometric information into a structured representation compatible with VLMs, effectively linking them to the physical world. Specifically, HSGM is represented as a multi-channel top-down map organized into three levels: (1) geometric level that records navigable regions and obstacles, (2) semantic level that represents objects and their relations, and (3) decision level that supports high-level task reasoning and goal selection. During navigation, the VLM acts as a high-level semantic planner, interpreting the spatial layout encoded in the HSGM to select geometrically valid waypoints, while low-level, collision-free movements between waypoints are executed by a classical path-planning algorithm, fully decoupling semantic reasoning from action execution. Additionally, complex instructions are decomposed into subtasks to alleviate the problem of progress forgetting or hallucinating in long-horizon navigation. Extensive experiments on R2R-CE and RxR-CE benchmarks demonstrate that our zero-shot framework achieves state-of-the-art performance and even outperforms several supervised methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Teacher-Tom/HSGM_public.