Papers

Collaborative generation, which coordinates multiple diffusion trajectories to extend the capabilities of pretrained priors, has emerged as a powerful paradigm for extending the applicability of diffusion models. Among existing approaches, diffusion synchronization provides a scenario-agnostic solution by introducing general guidance mechanisms. However, current synchronization approaches rely heavily on heuristics and still require task-specific tailoring, which limits their generalizability and performance. In this work, we mathematically derive a synchronization framework based on optimal control, providing a principled explanation of diffusion synchronization. During sampling, we optimize control variables to guide multiple trajectories toward coherent solutions while remaining close to the underlying diffusion prior. Our method operates entirely at test-time without additional training, thereby enabling broad applicability across diverse generation scenarios when combined with strong pretrained priors. We demonstrate consistent improvements over baselines on three representative collaborative generation tasks, covering a wide range of modalities and applications. Beyond performance gains, our work establishes a novel foundation for collaborative generation, opening a principled path toward extending pretrained generative models to new collaborative generation settings.

Organ segmentation from PET/CT is critical for quantitative analysis and radiotherapy planning in oncology. To ease the high annotation cost of PET/CT segmentation, semi-supervised learning (SSL) provides a practical and effective solution for developing deep models with limited labeled data. Recent developments in visual foundation models have demonstrated remarkable adaptability with improved efficiency. In this work, we propose a mutual distillation framework that seamlessly exploits both structural and functional foundation models, which act as modality-specific generalists for distilling knowledge from structural CT and metabolic PET imaging. By bridging the gap between the task-specific precision of student models and the segmentation priors of generalist foundation models, we propose MuDuo, a mutual distillation framework that synergistically leverages SAM-Med3D for CT and SegAnyPET for PET to distill their knowledge into a lightweight student network. Our approach eliminates the need for manual prompts while maximizing the utility of unlabeled data for automatic segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the AutoPET dataset with only 5 labeled cases. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Wu-beining/MuDuo.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly used as automated judges, e.g., for image quality and safety assessment. However, their adversarial robustness remains largely unexplored, threatening the fairness and reliability of automated judging. To bridge this gap, we introduce RobustMLLMJudge, the first general framework for evaluating the adversarial robustness of general-purpose MLLMs when functioning as judges. It covers diverse attacks against popular judge approaches across quality and safety evaluation scenarios. Using RobustMLLMJudge, we reveal that i) different MLLM judges are highly vulnerable to score-inflating adversarial attacks; and ii) although effective, these attack methods face a critical challenge due to unique constraints in the evaluation protocols of MLLM judges. We further propose MGSIA, namely Manifold-Guided Semantic Induction Attack, a novel method that bypasses these constraints to enable more effective and transferable attacks on MLLM judges. The core idea of MGSIA is to combine affirmative semantic induction with high-score manifold alignment: it maximizes the probability that judges yield affirmative responses (e.g., "Yes") to binary semantic queries, while regularizing adversarial representations toward high-score centers estimated from proxy protocols. Together, these objectives yield transferable score-inflating perturbations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and generalizability of MGSIA in deceiving advanced MLLM judges under different evaluation scenarios, highlighting the need for robust MLLM judges. Code and data will be made available at https://github.com/mala-lab/RobustMLLMJudge.

Four-dimensional computed tomography (4DCT) captures the full respiratory cycle of thoracic anatomy, yet current Internal Target Volume contouring workflows process each phase in isolation, discarding temporal coherence and leaving contours vulnerable to phase-specific artifacts. We present a lightweight framework that applies parameter-efficient fine-tuning to the Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) via low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to align its text-prompted segmentation with the medical domain using only seven annotated 3D CT volumes. Furthermore, the framework incorporates a hard negative mining strategy to improve boundary discrimination in low-contrast thoracic regions. At inference, phase-wise predictions are refined through phase-coherent temporal filtering and spatial connectivity analysis. Since respiratory motion is continuous and periodic, genuine anatomy appears in contiguous blocks of phases, whereas transient artifacts appear sporadically and are thus effectively suppressed. Experiments on pulmonary and cardiac structures yield median Dice scores of 0.968 and 0.910 with 95th-percentile Hausdorff distances of 0.998 mm and 2.931 mm, respectively. The proposed framework effectively eliminates the severe false-positive predictions inherent in the zero-shot inference of the unadapted SAM 3. With only seven annotated volumes, the framework retains over 95% of full-data accuracy, and the entire pipeline is trainable on a single consumer-grade GPU, demonstrating a scalable, data-efficient solution for adaptive radiotherapy.

Non-contact pulse wave reconstruction hinges on the precise recovery of waveform morphology, including the dicrotic notch. Conventional Red-Green-Blue (RGB)-based methods, which extract physiological signals from recorded facial videos, are constrained by the integral imaging mechanism of standard cameras, where the exposure process induces a smoothing effect that attenuates subtle vascular pulsation details. Conversely, neuromorphic event cameras, while offering exceptional sensitivity to intensity fluctuations, are inherently susceptible to noise and artifacts induced by minor motion. To exploit the synergy between frame-based integration and event-based differential sensing, we propose a novel multimodal network named Fusion-E2Pulse. This framework utilizes filtered RGB signals as structural priors to suppress motion artifacts, while leveraging the high-sensitivity of event streams to recover fine-grained morphological details. Experimental results demonstrate that Fusion-E2Pulse achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively balancing noise suppression and morphological fidelity, achieving a mean absolute error of 0.78 bpm for heart rate estimation, a waveform correlation of 0.89, and a systolic phase duration error of 16.74 ms, validating its efficacy in reconstructing fine-grained pathological features.

We present SLS^2, a framework for safe feedback motion planning from pixels using robust model predictive control (MPC) in learned latent world models. Our approach trains an action-conditioned joint-embedding world model with compact Markovian latent states, enabling efficient gradient-based trajectory optimization through learned latent dynamics. To enforce safety for the true system despite imperfect latent predictions, we inform a GPU-accelerated system level synthesis (SLS) robust MPC scheme with conformal prediction to obtain calibrated latent error bounds and robust latent-space constraint sets. We further learn and conformalize a latent constraint checker, allowing the SLS planner to impose probabilistic safety constraints during closed-loop execution. We evaluate our method on vision-based control tasks, where it improves both goal-reaching performance and safety over latent world-model and safe-planning baselines.

In this paper, we introduce DenseControl, a novel pipeline for generating dense crowd images. Specifically, DenseControl meticulously positions and sizes each generated instance to align precisely with the predefined coordinates and scales. Based on this, we further allow for control over the background, style, and attributes of instances. The motivation behind DenseControl stems from the observation of two main challenges in synthesizing crowd images: controlling signal embedding and maintaining topological integrity when imparting instance scale guidance. To address these, we first introduce the Isolated Object Embedding (IOE) map, a novel representation that facilitates spatial location control while mitigating the difficulties associated with learning projections for model. Secondly, we propose an Implicit Scale Embedding (ISE) strategy that seamlessly integrates with the IOE map to encode precise scale information. To further enhance the efficacy of combining ISE with the IOE map, we incorporate a Position Shortcut mechanism that enhances cross-attention to alleviate projection challenges. We evaluate DenseControl through two lenses: synthesis quality and applicability in latent applications. Experiments across different control conditions demonstrate DenseControl achieves state-of-the-art results in dense crowd image synthesis. Furthermore, we showcase applications in augmenting crowd analysis under data scarcity, transfer learning, and weather generalization scenes, to highlight the practical utility of DenseControl. The codebase will be released.

Zero-shot segmentation has recently shown notable improvement by leveraging the rich visual priors in large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion. However, current diffusion-based methods often face limitations due to the trade-off between spatial resolution and contextual information, as well as their reliance on a single static timestep for feature extraction. To overcome these challenges, our work introduces two key advancements. First, our Contextual Similarity Maps fuse high-resolution attention maps with rich U-Net encoder features, providing both fine-grained and robust per-pixel representations. Second, we identify an emergent hierarchical semantic progression within the denoising process of various diffusion models: representations transition from part-level abstractions at earlier timesteps to object-level abstractions at later stages. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a mechanism to adaptively select the optimal timestep for each pixel. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing zero-shot segmentation baselines, validating the efficacy of combining contextual features with dynamic, hierarchical timestep selection.

Small-area fingerprint sensing on mobile devices creates a fundamental mismatch between acquisition and recognition: each touch captures only a tiny, pose-varying local patch, while reliable biometric matching ultimately requires a stable and sufficiently complete fingerprint representation. Existing pipelines largely cope with this mismatch by treating repeated touches as independent partial templates, which leads to repeated registration, repeated matching, and no guarantee of adequate global coverage. In this paper, we advocate a different formulation, namely accumulative fingerprint mapping and reconstruction for small-area mobile sensing. Rather than matching every partial patch separately, the proposed perspective converts a sequence of local observations into a unified fingerprint state that is progressively refined as new touches arrive and can be matched only once after consolidation. As a concrete baseline, we present a classical pipeline that performs patch-wise structural feature extraction, feature-level registration and fusion, fingerprint map construction, and phase-based ridge reconstruction. More importantly, we position this baseline within a broader mobile fingerprint framework that integrates structured token learning, two-stage pose reasoning, and diffusion-based generative reconstruction. This viewpoint reframes mobile fingerprint recognition from multi-capture multi-match processing to accumulative map building, state refinement, and one-shot matching, offering a principled route toward efficient, pose-robust, and deployment-friendly biometrics for small-area mobile platforms. The baseline implementation has been publicly released at https://github.com/XiongjunGuan/FpReconstruction.

In recent years, there have been notable advancements in the area of instruction-based image editing (IIE), which focuses on the automatic alteration of input images using a model. Nevertheless, assessing the effectiveness of these editing models poses a considerable challenge due to the intricate nature of instructions and the wide variety of edits. To tackle this problem, one urgent task in this domain is the development of a robust evaluation framework that can precisely gauge the quality of editing outcomes and offer valuable benchmarks to guide future improvements. To address this challenge, we present a comprehensive evaluation benchmark named I2EBench2.0, designed for single-round and multi-round assessment of IIE models. I2EBench2.0 has four key features: 1) Evaluation Across Single and Multi-rounds: I2EBench2.0 simultaneously evaluates both single-round and multi-round instruction-based edits, assessing the precision and consistency of the edits. 2) Extensive Evaluation Criteria: I2EBench2.0 encompasses a broad range of criteria, evaluating both high-level and low-level aspects of each IIE model. Specifically, it incorporates 16 dimensions for single-round evaluations and 7 for multi-round evaluations. 3) Alignment with Human Judgment: To ensure our benchmark aligns with human evaluation, we conducted a comprehensive user study for each criterion. 4) Research-driven Insights: By analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of current IIE models across all 16 single-round and 7 multi-round dimensions, we provide critical insights aimed at directing future research in this area. We tested eight recently developed IIE models using I2EBench2.0 and derived academic insights through meticulous comparison and analysis. The related code, dataset, and images generated by all IIE models are available on GitHub: https://github.com/cocoshe/I2EBench.

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is a standard paradigm for Whole-Slide Image (WSI) analysis and has achieved strong results in computational pathology. However, most MIL pipelines assume a single "gold" label per slide, which conflicts with clinical practice where substantial inter-pathologist variability is common. Existing multi-annotator learning and label-refinement methods typically estimate global annotator reliability or rely on single-instance assumptions, making them poorly suited to MIL and to localized diagnostic contexts where experts disagree. We propose RaLMPH (Reliability-aware Learning for Multi-Pathologist Harmonization), a MIL-based label reconciliation framework for WSIs annotated by multiple pathologists. RaLMPH introduces a reliability field that jointly models (i) local neighborhood structure in WSI feature space and (ii) expert uncertainty (entropy), enabling per-sample identification of trustworthy reference neighborhoods. Leveraging this field, RaLMPH performs sample-wise local annotator ranking to select reliable opinions per slide and applies an adaptive gating mechanism to fuse labels conditioned on local reliability. Experiments on a clinical WSI dataset with labels from six pathologists, as well as controlled simulated benchmarks, show that RaLMPH consistently outperforms existing approaches. Further analyses clarify how our reliability-aware mechanism improves label reconciliation and downstream MIL performance.

Waste classification models have become highly accurate at sorting waste, often exceeding 95% on benchmark datasets. However, these models fail to account for contamination in recyclable waste. We present EcoBin, a two-stage deep convolutional neural network that classifies household waste by its disposal pathway and that explicitly accounts for contamination. The first stage is a base waste classifier built on an EfficientNetV2-S backbone that assigns each of the thirty waste categories in our dataset to one of four disposal pathways. The second stage is a contamination classifier that inspects any item routed toward recycling and overrides the decision to garbage when contamination is detected. Because no public dataset of contaminated recyclables exists, we synthesize one by segmenting images of clean recyclable objects with a U2-Net model and compositing realistic contamination textures onto their surfaces. The first stage achieves 87.42% test accuracy and a 96.13% pathway-adjusted accuracy. Meanwhile, the contamination stage distinguishes clean from contaminated items with a 0.99 ROC-AUC. On a test set of contaminated recyclables, the complete pipeline routes 24 of 25 items correctly, compared with only 1 of 25 for the base classifier alone. A McNemar's test confirms that the improvement contributed by the contamination stage is statistically significant (p < 0.001).

Re-rendering an existing video from a novel camera viewpoint requires the output to follow the prescribed camera trajectory while preserving the appearance and dynamics of the original scene across every frame. Existing methods rely on per-frame pose embeddings, noisy point-cloud renderings, or implicit learned correspondences, none of which provides an explicit, temporally continuous link between source and target pixels. We propose Track2View, which conditions a video diffusion transformer on paired 3D point tracks: sparse trajectories of scene points projected into both the source and target camera views. These tracks provide explicit spatiotemporal correspondences that are temporally continuous by construction, encoding what content should appear where and when. At the core of Track2View is a dual-view track conditioner that transfers visual context from source to target view through parameter-free geometric operations and learned temporal aggregation, ensuring generalization to arbitrary camera trajectories without memorizing specific motions. We further introduce a data curation pipeline that extracts one-to-one track correspondences by running a 3D point tracker on temporally concatenated multi-camera view pairs. On a 400-video benchmark spanning static and dynamic scenes, Track2View achieves state-of-the-art results across visual quality, view synchronization, and camera accuracy, reducing rotation error by 30-65% and translation error by 61-72% relative to leading baselines. Project page is available at this https URL: https://qjizhi.github.io/track2view

Typical video object-centric learning (VOCL) approaches employ slot-based frameworks that rely on reconstruction-driven encoder-decoder architectures, where learning is mediated by two spatial maps: attention maps from the encoder and object maps from the decoder. As these two distinct maps exhibit different properties, a recent dense alignment strategy attempted to reconcile this discrepancy by enforcing agreement across all spatio-temporal patches via contrastive learning. However, this indiscriminate alignment inadvertently propagates the inherent weaknesses of each module, such as noisy encoder predictions and blurred decoder boundaries. Moreover, computing dense similarities across all pairs incurs a computational cost quadratic in the total number of spatio-temporal patches, severely limiting scalability. Motivated by this, we propose Selective Synergistic Learning (SSync). Instead of exhaustive patch-to-patch alignment, SSync prevents error propagation by selectively distilling only the most reliable cues: leveraging the encoder strictly for boundary refinement and the decoder for interior denoising. This is realized via a pseudo-labeling with linear complexity, eliminating the need for quadratic spatial comparisons. Also, to prevent the reinforcement of architectural biases like slot redundancy, we introduce a transitive pseudo-label merging that consolidates overlapping slots based on spatio-temporal activation consistency. Extensive studies demonstrate that SSync improves decomposition quality and serves as a versatile, plug-and-play module while also exhibiting exceptional robustness to slot configurations. Code is available at github.com/wjun0830/SSync.

Deep learning models achieve state-of-the-art image classification but face deployment challenges due to computational costs and energy demands. We propose a lightweight training strategy that adapts normalization layers of the model to the new domain and decouples feature extraction from classifier optimization, reducing overhead by precomputing features only once. A redesigned classifier head with margin-based weighted loss further minimizes ambiguity without end-to-end backpropagation. Evaluated across four CNN architectures (ResNet18, ResNet50, MobileNet, DenseNet121), three Transformer models (ViT, Swin and DeiT) and three medical datasets (Brain Cancer MRI, BreakHis and PatchCamelyon), our approach significantly reduces the required training time with only a marginal accuracy trade-off, often matching or surpassing baseline performance. This efficiency translates to reducing CO2 by orders of magnitude, offering a practical and environmentally sustainable solution for resource-constrained clinical or prototyping environments.

Slope hazards constitute a major safety threat to expressway infrastructure, and their evolution is typically manifested as slow surface deformation. Conventional manual inspection suffers from low efficiency and inadequate operational safety, especially on severely deteriorated slopes. Accordingly, there is an urgent need for an automated, high-precision solution capable of large-area slope observation and analysis. This study aims to develop a highly automated workflow for slope hazard detection using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-borne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR). The proposed workflow consists of a shared data-acquisition and ground-surface extraction stage, a single-observation hazard-screening branch based on RandLA-Net, and a multi-epoch deformation-monitoring branch based on grid-wise elevation differencing. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed system, we conducted multiple UAV-borne LiDAR data-acquisition flights in real expressway slope environments. The results show that the workflow can extract usable ground-surface point clouds under vegetation cover, identify potential hazard zones from single-observation point clouds, and quantify centimeter-level elevation changes using multi-epoch grid differencing. This study establishes an end-to-end UAV-borne LiDAR-based workflow for slope inspection and demonstrates its feasibility through controlled experiments, field tests, and simulation-based validation, thereby providing an implementable solution for automated slope-hazard monitoring and intelligent early warning.

A biometric verifier is often deployed with a strict false match budget, so only a narrow, low false match rate (FMR) slice of the score range is used. A reporting standard for this setting already exists. ISO/IEC 19795-1 asks for error rates at stated operating points, for the detection error tradeoff (DET) curve as the view of the trade-off between FMR and the false non-match rate (FNMR), and for an interval of uncertainty on every value. In practice, a single area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC-AUC), the equal error rate (EER), or a verification accuracy is still reported as the resolution, which is a threshold-independent summary that the standard does not endorse. The full ROC-AUC averages the true match rate (TMR) with equal weight over the whole FMR range from 0 to 1, so almost all of its weight is placed where the system is never operated; low-FMR behavior can then be hidden, and the order of two systems can even be reversed. The guideline is revisited in this paper and tested against seven pretrained matchers across four modalities, face, voice, iris, and fingerprint, each reported with bootstrap confidence intervals and paired bootstrap tests. A system that looks stronger on full ROC-AUC is shown to be significantly worse at FMR = 10^-3. For face, a higher full AUC was obtained by FaceNet, whereas a higher TMR at FMR = 10^-3 was obtained by ArcFace, and both gaps were significant with non-overlapping intervals. Hence, the DET curve and the FNMR at a fixed FMR are re-iterated in this paper as the primary report, with ROC-AUC and EER retained as supplementary context.

Video-world-model policies learn action-relevant representations by predicting future observations. However, they condition on only a short observation window, which renders long-horizon manipulation non-Markovian when the correct action depends on earlier events that are no longer visible. We present MemoryVAM, an episodic memory mechanism for video-world-model policies. We employ a Recap-Cue (RC) module, in which a Perceiver-based Recap Compressor maps per-frame CLIP embeddings into compact memory tokens, and a lightweight Cue Gate estimates task completion from memory and language. These tokens are injected into both the video backbone and the action decoder, aligning policy imagination with episode progress and conditioning actions on history. Our model trains the memory module with video prediction, a delta-reconstruction auxiliary loss, and episode-boundary supervision, requiring no per-frame progress labels. The same mechanism applies to UNet and Diffusion Transformer (DiT) backbones by changing only the cross-attention injection interface. On LIBERO-Mem, our model improves average success from 5% to 42.5%. On real robots, it achieves 78.3% success on counting tasks, 80.0% on spatial recall, and 75.0% on sequential tracking. Project page: https://MemoryVAM.github.io/

We study the problem of human gaze modeling, which aims to generate the gaze patterns a viewer produces while observing a visual stimulus. Gaze is primarily captured through two modalities: continuous eye-tracking trajectories, which describe fine-grained motion dynamics, and discrete scanpaths, which describe high-level fixation structure. Because gaze varies substantially across viewers and trials, we treat this variability as a defining property rather than noise and model gaze as a stochastic generative process. Existing generative gaze models supervise on only one of these two representations in isolation. We hypothesize that trajectories and scanpaths describe gaze at complementary scales and are jointly informative during training, and test this hypothesis through ST-DiffEye, a joint trajectory-scanpath diffusion framework that couples both modalities by concatenating them as an additional raw input channel, requiring no architectural overhead beyond an input and output channel expansion. We further introduce a principled evaluation framework based on the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), which generalizes any existing sequence similarity metric into a proper scoring rule that jointly assesses the accuracy and diversity of generated gaze. Experiments on task-driven visual search, covering both target-present and target-absent scenarios, and on free-viewing benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. These results, along with detailed ablations, confirm the benefit of joint modeling and the value of distribution-aware evaluation in capturing the intrinsic variability of human gaze. Project webpage: https://st-diffeye.github.io/

Vision models can achieve strong performance on classification tasks, but the internal representations supporting their predictions are often difficult to interpret. This work investigates whether sparse autoencoders can decompose intermediate representations of a vision model into interpretable features. We train a ConvNeXt classifier on the FGVC-Aircraft dataset, extract spatial activations from its final feature stage, and train a sparse autoencoder on these activations. The learned sparse features are analyzed using top-activating image patches, activation strength, and class selectivity. Qualitative visual inspection reveals that several features correspond to recognizable aircraft structures and visual patterns. We evaluate a subset of selected features using input-space and feature-space ablations, measuring how blurring image patches and suppressing sparse features affect class logits, classification margins, and prediction confidence. The results suggest that sparse autoencoders can reveal partially interpretable, class-relevant visual features associated with aircraft recognition, while also exposing limitations such as polysemanticity and coarse spatial localization.

3D FLAIR MRI is widely recommended as one of the standard MRI sequences for brain imaging in multiple sclerosis (MS), but publicly available MS datasets remain relatively small and vary across scanners, acquisition protocols, and lesion patterns. This scarcity and variability hinder the development of robust neuroimaging machine learning models and are particularly challenging for generative models that aim to synthesize images while preserving small, sparse lesions. We propose Lesion-DDPM, a 3D conditional diffusion framework for lesion-aware FLAIR synthesis that incorporates multi-level anatomical mask injection together with a lesion-weighted reconstruction loss to emphasize lesion voxels while maintaining global brain structure. Using a curated subset of the MSLesSeg dataset, we compare Lesion-DDPM with representative state-of-the-art GAN- and diffusion-based models, assessing both image-generation metrics and downstream 3D U-Net segmentation. In our experiments, Lesion-DDPM achieved the lowest lesion-region reconstruction error among all methods. In a downstream 3D U-Net lesion segmentation task, a model trained only on Lesion-DDPM-generated scans and evaluated on real MRIs reached a Dice score of 0.616 compared with 0.569 for the best competing synthetic dataset. When Lesion-DDPM images were added to the real training set, the Dice score further increased to 0.685.

Spaceborne inspection systems often deploy perception models prior to launch, after which updating model weights or expanding fixed label sets becomes operationally impractical. While supervised models can be integrated pre-flight, adding new semantic capabilities in orbit requires retraining and re-uploading parameters. We investigate whether prompt-driven vision–language models can enable post-launch semantic expansion, allowing new spacecraft components to be specified via natural-language prompts without modifying onboard weights. We evaluate zero-shot instance segmentation of spacecraft components under a strictly frozen, single-pass inference protocol on a test set of $129$ images of previously unseen satellites. Under fixed global thresholds and no post-processing, SAM3 achieves $0.385$ mAP@$0.5$ and $0.267$ mAP@$0.5{:}0.95$. Performance is strongly scale-dependent: large structural elements like spacecraft bodies ($0.639$ AP@$0.50$) and solar arrays ($0.598$ AP@$0.5$) localize reliably, while relatively small appendages like antennas ($0.221$ AP@$0.5$) and thrusters ($0.081$ AP@$0.5$) remain difficult. Prompt formulation influences performance, with structured prompts incorporating spatial and geometric descriptors yielding up to $82%$ improvement over short category-name prompts. The model operates within the memory and compute envelope of contemporary embedded GPUs, suggesting prompt-driven grounding can provide a practical mechanism for post-launch semantic extension of dominant spacecraft structures while highlighting limitations of zero-shot localization for fine-scale components under orbital domain shift.

Action reasoning in egocentric video requires capturing fine-grained transitions of hand-object interactions, a task where general-purpose Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle when operating directly on raw pixels. We propose to decouple visual perception from symbolic reasoning by converting videos into Temporal Action Graphs. In a multi-stage prompting pipeline, we first generate dense natural language narratives over short temporal windows as a semantic bottleneck, then formalize them into structured, open-vocabulary graph representations. On the EGTEA and Epic-Kitchens-100 datasets, the symbolic representation unlocks efficient in-context learning: few-shot graph demonstrations yield substantial accuracy gains over zero-shot frame-based inference. Even in the zero-shot setting, graph-based reasoning remains competitive with pixel-based inference despite potential pretraining contamination favoring the latter. Across 11 open-weight VLMs from 6 model families ranging from 2B to 235B parameters, our findings indicate that current VLMs are more effective as symbolic reasoners than as direct visual observers. By projecting video into the language domain, we provide a scalable, fine-tuning-free alternative to end-to-end approaches that better leverages these models' latent reasoning strengths. The code will be made public.

Vision-based perception is fundamental to Space Situational Awareness and autonomous on-orbit operations such as rendezvous, docking, servicing, and navigation. However, progress in this area is limited by the scarcity of annotated space imagery and by challenging visual-domain characteristics including severe illumination changes, low signal-to-noise ratio, and high contrast. We address Stream 1 of the SPARK 2026 Challenge, which requires a single model for spacecraft classification, detection, and fine-grained component segmentation across multiple target types. We propose a compact architecture that integrates a MobileNetV3 encoder with a U-Net-style decoder, combining computational efficiency with accurate dense prediction. Detection is derived analytically from the union of predicted component masks, avoiding a separate bounding-box regression head in the single-spacecraft setting. Our method achieved an overall leaderboard score of 0.9482, with task-specific scores of 1.0000 in classification, 0.9788 in detection, and 0.8917 in segmentation. The proposed approach ranked second overall in the SPARK 2026 Challenge, demonstrating that lightweight encoder-decoder architectures can deliver strong multi-task performance for practical onboard space vision systems.

Diffusion inversion, which maps images back to the Gaussian latent space of a diffusion model, is a critical task for image reconstruction and editing. While DDIM enables fast deterministic inversion, it inherently introduces deviations that accumulate into noticeable inversion errors. Existing methods often address this by solving a fixed-point problem but largely overlook how the selection of the diffusion timestep in the noise scheduler influences inversion fidelity. In this work, we reveal that the deviation scale in diffusion inversion is strongly dependent on the timestep size, and exhibits a parabolic trend, with larger errors concentrated at both small and large timesteps. Based on this finding, we propose a simple yet effective nonuniform timestep scheduler that integrates a global rescaling with a local dynamic programming based rescheduling, enabling a strategic allocation of computational effort that minimizes the overall inversion error and preserves higher inversion accuracy. Our method serves as an off-the-shelf enhancement for existing inversion techniques and requires no extra parameters or computational overhead. Through extensive experiments, we verify that integrating our scheduler consistently boosts the performance of existing inversion methods, achieving superior results in image reconstruction and editing.

This work demonstrates a full reproduction and extension of MNet, a hybrid 2D/3D convolutional network designed for anisotropic medical image segmentation. The original architecture was re-implemented within the nnU-Net framework to verify its reported performance and robustness to variable voxel spacing, known as anisotropy. Experiments were conducted on PROMISE prostate MRI and a controlled subset of LiTS liver CT under matched preprocessing and compute constraints. The reproduced MNet achieved a Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 89.0 +/- 0.9% on PROMISE, within 0.8% of the published result, and 94.3 +/- 1.9% / 54.6 +/- 3.1% for liver and tumor segmentation on LiTS, respectively. Two lightweight extensions were further introduced: (1) a learned Fusion Gating mechanism enabling adaptive 2D-3D feature blending, and (2) a VMamba state-space module for efficient long-range depth modelling. The Spatial Gating variant improved DSC by +0.8% with less than 3% inference overhead, while VMamba improved performance consistency, reducing PROMISE Dice variation to +/- 0.7% and achieving the strongest LiTS liver performance at 95.8% Dice. Both extensions preserved MNet robustness to anisotropy, with delta Dice = 1.5% across 1-4 mm voxel spacing. Overall, the study confirms MNet reproducibility and demonstrates that adaptive fusion and state-space modelling have the potential to further strengthen segmentation reliability under anisotropic conditions. However, further tests are required to provide definitive conclusions.

Face recognition has become a cornerstone of modern AI applications, yet conventional approaches often rely on computationally intensive models deployed in cloud environments, leading to increased network traffic, high energy consumption, and a heavy carbon footprint. This work introduces a sustainable, edge-deployable face recognition framework based on Vector-Quantized Variational Autoencoders (VQ-VAE), which generates compact and semantically rich latent representations of facial images. By leveraging the compression capacity and reconstruction quality of VQ-VAE embeddings on the edge and combining them with the power of pre-trained face embeddings in a knowledge distillation setup, our system achieves comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art face embedding models while significantly reducing memory and computation requirements on the edge, making it suitable for low-power edge devices. The integration of VQ-VAE compression minimizes network overhead while keeping the matching accuracy high by retaining only the most informative facial features in the latent space. As a result, the reconstructed images preserve the key identity characteristics, improving the robustness and overall performance of the face embeddings.

OKLCH – the cylindrical (lightness, chroma, hue) form of Ottosson's Oklab color space – is the interpolation space recommended by CSS Color 4 for gradients and color-mix(), and it is now broadly deployed. Its polar parameterization, however, casts color near the neutral axis in two ways: (1) an inter-hue detour between two chromatic endpoints that sweeps through an unintended hue (blue to yellow visibly passing through green), and (2) an off-line bow when one endpoint is achromatic. Existing remedies are uniformly two-valued – a threshold switch that fires only at an achromatic endpoint – so they address only (2); on chromatic pairs every one of them reduces to raw OKLCH, leaving the (1) inter-hue cast untreated. We introduce Continuous Oklab fallback (COFb), a one-parameter, differentiable chroma gate $w(C)=C^n/(C^n+\sigma^n)$ that continuously blends the OKLCH path toward the linear Oklab path as chroma falls. A single gate reduces the (1) cast that the two-valued family leaves untreated and unifies the handling of (1) and (2) without any endpoint test. We characterize a cast-hue trade-off frontier, adopt a default ($n=1$, the rational Michaelis-Menten form; $\sigma\approx0.19$ for a typical sRGB palette, from a normalization-independent cast-half criterion), and verify the gate's properties symbolically. At the default, COFb halves the inter-hue path detour (mean lateral deviation -49.5%, chroma-weighted hue excursion -35.5%). We also state the method's limits: on (2) alone the two-valued switch remains better, and like any Cartesian blend COFb does not preserve chroma. In deployment, COFb runs entirely in plain Oklab (a,b) to sRGB, so it serves as a fallback that delivers the same cast-reduced gradients where modern CSS color interpolation (color-mix(in oklch) and the like) is unavailable – older engines, image and video pipelines, or GPU shaders.

Facial Affect Analysis (FAA) is evolving from a stand-alone recognition task into a reusable perception capability for Service-Oriented Software Ecosystems (SoSE). This paper preserves the FAA methodological core while reframing recent advances through systems-engineering requirements for composable and dependable services. We review representative progress in static and dynamic expression analysis, action-unit and micro-expression modeling, and modern CNN, Transformer, graph, and hybrid architectures, then interpret these advances by their operational fit in edge, cloud, and hybrid service pipelines. The synthesis emphasizes SoSE concerns that determine deployability: service contracts for uncertainty-aware outputs, latency and availability envelopes, lifecycle monitoring and recalibration, governance-aware integration, and interoperability across independently evolving components. Our analysis shows that benchmark gains alone are insufficient for SoSE readiness; robustness under shift, intervention stability, fairness, privacy posture, and runtime guarantees are equally critical. We conclude with a roadmap for treating FAA as an operational service component with explicit interfaces, measurable quality attributes, and accountable lifecycle management.

Spatio-temporal prediction supports radar/satellite nowcasting and city-scale traffic monitoring, but modern models are often too expensive for real-time deployment. This stems from a mismatch between dense computation and strong input-dependent redundancy (e.g., calm seas or clear skies). To enable automated, resource-aware architecture optimization in scalable media analysis, we propose Dyna-Pruner, an end-to-end framework for input-dependent co-pruning of data and model structure. A shared-importance synchronization mechanism generates coupled masks that prune redundant regions and their corresponding computational units (e.g., convolutional filters), yielding per-sample sparse sub-networks at inference time. Experiments on WeatherBench, SEVIR, and TaxiBJ show seamless integration with CNN, RNN, and Transformer backbones, reducing FLOPs by up to $70\%$ and achieving a $2.5\times$ speedup on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin with negligible accuracy loss ($<1\%$).