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Computer Science Computer Vision

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Friday 14 August

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from eess.IV

Practical Lossless Volumetric Medical Image Compression via Tri-plane Context Tree Learning

Yuanchao Bai, Yifan Zhao, Kai Wang et al. (+5 more)

Lossless compression of volumetric medical images is of paramount importance for clinical and research applications where data fidelity is essential. Traditional compression methods are often limited in efficiency due to rigid, handcrafted models. Conversely, deep neural network (DNN)-based compression methods, while effective, demand substantial computational resources, hindering deployment in resource-constrained settings. To address these challenges, we propose a novel tri-plane context tree (TCT)-based method for lossless volumetric medical image compression that delivers high performance without relying on DNNs or external training data. To exploit intra-slice and inter-slice redundancies, we introduce a compact tri-plane context representation that decomposes complex 3D context modeling into efficient 2D modeling on three orthogonal planes. By integrating this representation with a context tree framework, we develop an input-specific TCT model employing an adaptive binary tree structure. At each tree node, the model dynamically selects from a suite of tri-plane based predictors and contextual feature extractors, enabling data-adaptive context modeling tailored to local structural characteristics. Instead of offline training, we sample a subset of the input volume to learn the TCT model by optimizing the minimum description length (MDL) through iterative construction and pruning. With the learned TCT model, each pixel retrieves its corresponding context, computes the prediction residual using the predictor dictated by the context, and performs entropy encoding based on the associated histograms. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves compression performance on par with recent DNN-based methods on multiple datasets, while maintaining low computational cost and fast coding speeds, making it highly applicable in practice.
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All authors Yuanchao Bai, Yifan Zhao, Kai Wang, Yuanbo Du, Jie Cheng, Teng Fang, Xianming Liu, Wen Gao

Computer Vision

Consensus-gated Multi-Agent Neural Architecture Search for Seismic Fault Segmentation

Shehram Baig and Ahmad Mustafa

Neural networks for seismic fault segmentation are often borrowed from computer vision and medical imaging domains where they train under relatively much larger labeled data resources. Optimizing their architecture under tight labeled data budgets as are common in geophysical applications is not a trivial problem. Manually designing data-optimal architectures is time-consuming while classical neural architecture search (NAS) is restricted to hand-crafted search spaces and large compute budgets. We present an agentic NAS system in which a panel of three large language models (Claude, GPT-5.1, and Gemini~2.5~Pro) debates each candidate architecture to unanimous consensus, authors the complete PyTorch implementation, cross-reviews it, and submits it to an automated validate-train-score loop with a hard 450K parameter budget, keep-or-revert lineage, and a memory of failed mechanisms. Operating on source code rather than a predefined operation menu, the search ran on a single consumer GPU and trained only eight candidates. It discovered \ours{}: a 425K-parameter encoder-decoder with a strip-pooling bottleneck, squeeze-and-excitation gating, an asymmetric one-conv decoder, and a feature-pyramid fusion neck. Trained under a protocol identical to all baselines on sections derived from the Thebe fault dataset, it attains the highest F1 (0.578) and IoU of all models tested while being the smallest, outperforming a published-capacity U-Net (31M parameters, F1 0.484), DeepLabV3-ResNet50 (39.6M, 0.516), an Attention U-Net(1.83M, 0.502). The search cost 101 LLM calls ($\sim$1.15M input / 0.39M output tokens) and roughly one GPU-day, making consensus-gated LLM panels a practical, low-cost route to domain-specific architecture discovery.
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Computer Vision

Attention Capture Is Not Detection: A Two-Stage Account of How Humans Miss Localized AI Image Edits

Chiao-Chieh Deng

As AI-generated image edits proliferate, the platforms meant to curb the resulting disinformation treat detectability as a single, undifferentiated property: an edit either gets a warning or it does not. We show this is the wrong model. Across a controlled eye-tracking study ($N=59$, Latin-square design, four conditions crossing edit area and semantic plausibility), a mixed-effects analysis reveals that whether an edit is noticed and whether it is correctly judged as fake are dissociable stages, governed by different factors: edit area drives attention capture ($p<0.001$) while semantic plausibility drives judgment accuracy and look-but-fail-to-see (LBFS) error rates ($p<0.001$). This dissociation survives correction for multiple comparisons; a secondary interaction between the two factors does not. This two-stage account extends a long-standing distinction in visual attention research (between pre-attentive capture and effortful recognition) into the new domain of AI-edit detectability. We then test whether a generative eye-movement model can computationally operationalize the attention-capture stage: a Transformer trained to generate scanpaths tracks per-image attention with strong discriminative power (Pearson $r=0.77$–$0.82$ across held-out stimuli) and, on the harder task of predicting LBFS incidence, modestly outperforms a two-parameter linear baseline even without access to the plausibility label ($r=0.52$ vs. $r=0.48$). We report this comparison, our ablations, and our method's limitations (a single fixed train/validation split, not leave-one-subject-out) without inflation, consistent with responsibly communicating what a machine learning system can and cannot do to help curb AI-driven disinformation.
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Computer Vision

XSA-MAD: Cross-modal Semantic Alignment for Morphing Attack Detection

Jie Jin, Mahiro Tokumasu, Yu Makino et al. (+2 more)

Morphing attacks pose a serious threat to face recognition systems. However, existing image-based morphing attack detection (MAD) methods often generalize poorly to unseen generation techniques because they rely solely on visual cues. We propose XSA-MAD, a CLIP-based multimodal framework that explicitly models semantic inconsistencies between bona-fide and morphed faces. Morphing concepts are decomposed into four interpretable attributes, including identity, facial geometry, texture, and consistency, and are encoded as structured and attribute-aware textual representations. The image encoder is progressively aligned with this discriminative textual space, resulting in a unified semantic representation that captures generation-invariant and concept-level discrepancies between bona-fide and morph images. Experiments on MAD22 and MorDIFF, following training on SMDD, demonstrate strong generalization across diverse morphing principles. In particular, XSA-MAD achieves an equal error rate of 2.92% on GAN-based morphs and consistently outperforms existing methods under high-fidelity generative attacks.
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All authors Jie Jin, Mahiro Tokumasu, Yu Makino, Masakatsu Nishigaki, Tetsushi Ohki

Computer Vision

Face Re-morphing: Differential Morphing Attack Detection via Feature-Space Similarity Changes

Jie Jin, Masakatsu Nishigaki and Tetsushi Ohki

Face morphing attacks pose a serious threat to face recognition systems because a single morphed document image can be matched to multiple contributors. Differential morphing attack detection (D-MAD) addresses this threat by comparing a document image with a trusted live image, but existing methods often rely on static feature differences, constituent-face reconstruction, or multi-cue fusion. This paper proposes Face Re-morphing, a D-MAD method that uses the feature-space response to an additional morphing operation as a detection cue. Given a document image and a trusted live image, the proposed method generates a re-morphed image and uses the change between the document–live and live–re-morphed cosine similarities as the detection score. Experiments on FRLL-Morphs and FEI Morph show that the proposed cue is effective across different morphing conditions, re-morphing methods, and face recognition models. Comparisons with existing methods show favorable results on AMSL and indicate that the proposed method performs well under the Criminal condition on FEI Morph Version~1, particularly when using MorDIFF. These results indicate that re-morphing-induced similarity change provides a complementary cue for D-MAD.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from eess.IV

From crown candidates to neighborhood screening: integrating optical GeoAI and spatial modeling for urban-canopy assessment in Davis, California

Mohammadreza Narimani, Shreyan Mitra and Parastoo Farajpoor

Timely urban-canopy information is essential for linking remote sensing with heat, mobility, and neighborhood planning. We developed an optical GeoAI workflow for Davis, California, using 2022 National Agriculture Imagery Program imagery (0.6 m RGB+NIR). DeepForest generated crown candidates; an NDVI threshold, non-maximum suppression, and box-prompted Segment Anything Model (ViT-B) produced a crown-anchored canopy surface. Analyses used the 25.92 km2 Census TIGER municipal boundary and a 100 m grid. The workflow retained 11,741 candidate crowns and mapped 7.71 km2 of canopy (29.8% of the city). On the identical extent, pixel precision was 0.804, pixel recall was 0.873, and 97.4% of candidate centers agreed with the 2022 USDA/CAL FIRE LiDAR-assisted canopy product (IoU 0.719; Dice 0.837; area recovery 108.5%). Approximately 49% of candidates occurred within 15 m of a road. Canopy was inversely associated with Landsat land-surface temperature (Spearman rho = -0.477; partial rho = -0.551 controlling for built probability), and spatial-lag modeling confirmed clear neighborhood structure. Two transparent attention surfaces combined canopy need with thermal and contextual indicators. The framework provides a reproducible, updateable screening layer that complements structural canopy products and municipal inventories while retaining assumptions, data provenance, and spatial diagnostics for planning interpretation.
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Thursday 13 August

Computer Vision

PolyComp: A Polycube-based Benchmark for Compositional 3D Spatial Reasoning in Multimodal Models

Siddharth Patel

We introduce PolyComp, a procedurally generated and verified benchmark that stresses visual recognition and compositional spatial reasoning. In each problem, a model must identify which of four options shows a pair of polycube components that can be combined to form a target solid. The benchmark contains 120 problems across four geometry families, and each problem has three different presentation formats using either a single image or multiple images. The random guessing baseline is 25%. Across the three presentations (360 presented problems per model), GPT-5.6 Sol with max effort attains 50.0% accuracy (95% problem-cluster CI 43.3-56.7%) at a mean cost of \$0.951 per presented problem, Claude Fable 5 with max effort attains 39.4% (33.1-46.1%) at \$0.701, and Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview with thinking level high attains 27.5% (22.8-32.5%), near the 25% random guessing baseline, at \$0.350. The observed accuracy spread across geometry families is larger than across presentation formats. We present a problem development and evaluation protocol, cost and token accounting, and release the 120 problems.
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Computer Vision

From Dense Prediction to Visual Editing: Structured Supervision for Unified Image and Video Creation

Zhefan Rao, Bin Zou, Xuanhua He et al. (+5 more)

Unified image and video creation requires a model to follow diverse instructions while preserving identity, geometry, and temporal structure from visual context. However, semantic-only conditioning and creation-only training do not explicitly supervise the local structure needed for precise, temporally consistent editing. We therefore formulate depth and surface-normal prediction as image-form denoising targets, using these dense tasks as structured visual supervision within the same creation interface. Our framework decouples semantic interpretation from spatially aligned visual injection while sharing one multimodal diffusion transformer (MMDiT) backbone across all tasks. Mutual Context Attention (MCA), a paired-video data-construction procedure, and a progressive training curriculum then connect the learned structural cues to temporally localized editing and reference-conditioned creation. A single checkpoint obtains the highest overall score in the reported comparison of unified systems (4.15); adding dense supervision improves OpenVE Overall from 3.98 to 4.06 and Local Add from 3.92 to 4.18. These results support a deliberately bounded conclusion: perception-oriented dense supervision transfers useful structural knowledge to downstream creation, especially editing locality and preservation; we do not claim superiority as a standalone dense predictor.
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All authors Zhefan Rao, Bin Zou, Xuanhua He, Chong Hou Choi, Yanheng Li, Rui Liu, Haoxuan Che, Qifeng Chen

Computer Vision

Emergence of Transfer Learning towards Specific Identification of Alzheimer's Disease A Prospective Approach

Soumik Podder and Chandramouli Haldar

Worldwide, millions of senior citizens are suffering from Alzheimer disease abbreviated as AD, a well- versed form of dementia. AD is featured by amnesia, intellectual disability, and difficulty with consciousness. DL and ML models are undoubtedly explored to identify AD related patterns on large dimensional neuroimaging data but they need global optimization and are suffering from overfitting issue that might yield dissatisfactory result in testing data set. DL overcomes the issue by convolution of input image with kernel but any sudden change in the MRI image or human manipulation, limited pre- processing of the images can mislead CNN in achieving highly accurate detection. Transfer Learning (TL) has proved itself in AD diagnosis by utilizing pre-trained models on large data sets to guide novice model in a new neuroimaging dataset. This review provides an inclusive glimpse of TL implication in classification, identification including the conversion of AD. Keeping in view, we have assessed the strengths and limitations of TL in improvising diagnostic accuracy even with limited data. The uniqueness of the present review is the incorporation of explainable AI in TL based AD diagnosis system. Finally, it can be claimed that the review will guide the new re-searchers in the area of TL induced neurodegenerative disease detection.
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Computer Vision

IP Protection in the Era of Visual Generative AI: A Survey

Zhuan Shi, Shunchang Liu, Alireza Dehghanpour Farashah et al. (+8 more)

The rapid evolution of visual generative AI has introduced a wide range of intellectual property risks, spanning the unauthorized learning, reproduction, extraction, misuse, and redistribution of protected data and model assets. To address these risks, a growing body of technical defenses has been proposed. However, existing surveys typically organize this literature by lifecycle stage or technical mechanism, which can obscure the protective intent of different methods. This survey presents a two-dimensional taxonomy for IP protection in visual generative models. The primary axis is a Control Logic View, which classifies methods into Information Exposure Control, Generative Behavior Constraint, and Attribution & Accountability according to the risk variable they regulate. The secondary axis distinguishes Data IP from Model IP as cross-cutting asset dimensions. Under this framework, we systematically review protection methods, align evaluation protocols with protection objectives, and discuss open challenges including proactive model-level safeguards, standardized evaluation, robustness against adaptive attacks, and explainable evidence. This survey aims to offer a principled, systematic, and easy-to-follow overview for both new and experienced researchers in visual generative AI IP protection.
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All authors Zhuan Shi, Shunchang Liu, Alireza Dehghanpour Farashah, Qian Yang, Han Yu, Cao Yang, Chaochao Chen, Yuping Yan, Yaochu Jin, Golnoosh Farnadi, Lingjuan Lyu

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from physics.optics

Label-Free Deep-Tissue Peripheral Nerve Detection with a Handheld Multimodal OCT Probe and NerveDetNet

Yihan Wang, Ruilin You, Shaobai Li et al. (+4 more)

Peripheral nerves buried beneath intact tissue are difficult to visualize during surgery and remain inaccessible to white light wide-field imaging and other surface optical imaging methods. Existing OCT nerve studies have largely relied on exposed nerves or polarization contrast with limited depth penetration, restricting their value for subsurface intraoperative guidance. Here, we introduce, to our knowledge, the first label-free framework for detecting peripheral nerves beneath unopened tissue and resolving their depth using intensity-based OCT structural signatures alone. The framework combines a handheld multimodal probe, integrating swept-source OCT with co-registered white light and autofluorescence imaging, with a “confirm-then-capture” workflow designed for practical surgical use. To enable efficient analysis of sparsely sampled OCT volumes, we develop NerveDetNet, a lightweight 2.5D segmentation network that recovers weak and spatially displaced nerve signals by incorporating spatial context, frame-order information, and shift-tolerant correlations across frames through a dedicated nerve feature correlation module. In ex vivo tissue experiments, NerveDetNet consistently outperformed six representative 2D baselines across all frame spacings, achieving a Dice score of 0.725 under the sparsest sampling condition while using approximately half the model parameters. End-to-end validation demonstrated localization of nerves invisible at the surface and depth-resolved detection up to 1.3–1.4~mm below the tissue surface, with OCT derived depth maps overlaid directly onto the surgical view. Together, these results establish a practical label-free approach for subsurface nerve visualization that supports intraoperative compatibility, enables efficient sparse-volume analysis, and provides depth-resolved guidance without tissue opening, contrast agents, or nerve exposure.
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All authors Yihan Wang, Ruilin You, Shaobai Li, Jiabin Chen, Bofan Song, Anh D. Le, Rongguang Liang

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from eess.IV

VLM- and LLM-Driven Multi-Agent System for PET Image Denoising

Boxiao Yu, Savas Ozdemir, Yang Xing et al. (+8 more)

Positron emission tomography (PET) imaging suffers from limited spatial resolution and low signal-to-noise ratio, which can compromise quantitative accuracy and lesion detectability. Deep learning-based denoising methods have demonstrated strong potential for improving PET image quality. However, their practical deployment in real-world settings remains challenging, often requiring multiple specialized models and expert interventions, such as identifying motion-induced misregistration artifacts, estimating noise levels to select an appropriate denoiser, and performing lesion-focused quantitative assessment after denoising. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) for image quality understanding and large language models (LLMs) for contextual reasoning provide new opportunities for automated, decision-driven workflows. Inspired by expert workflows for PET image quality enhancement, we propose an VLM- and LLM-driven multi-agent PET denoising framework that dynamically assesses image quality and lesion status, autonomously selects optimal denoising models and parameters, and enables closed-loop feedback with rollback mechanisms. Experiments were conducted on Siemens Biograph Vision Quadra PET/CT data with 1/20 and 1/50 low-dose settings. Individual module evaluations demonstrated the reliability of the agentic components, while the complete framework achieved higher PSNR and SSIM than UNet, GAN, and DDPM baselines at both dose levels. These preliminary results demonstrate the feasibility of using a closed-loop multi-agent framework to adapt PET denoising strategies to different image conditions.
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All authors Boxiao Yu, Savas Ozdemir, Yang Xing, Fumio Hashimoto, Jiong Wu, Yizhou Chen, Axel Rominger, Ruogu Fang, Kuangyu Shi, Tinsu Pan, Kuang Gong

Computer Vision

Doomed to Re-Annotate, Forever: The ImageNet Story

Illia Volkov, Nikita Kisel, Tetiana Mishkina et al. (+2 more)

Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1k remains the most commonly reported metric in visual recognition. Quality issues with the dataset have been repeatedly reported, yet the original 2012 noisy labels are still predominantly used. The paper presents a comprehensive effort, which goes well beyond prior correction attempts, towards obtaining accurate and complete ImageNet-1k validation set annotations. The result, ReImageNet, includes multilabel correction, object localization, revised class definitions, and semantic attributes (text-recognition, rendition, reflection, crowd, dominant). The reannotation reveals that approximately 12% of the original ImageNet-1k labels are incorrect, 33.3% of images are multilabel and 3.8% contain no object from an ImageNet-1k class. With the new labels, top-1 accuracy increases by up to 1.2% for supervised models and by 5-6% for MLLMs. We argue that annotation at ImageNet scale cannot realistically be completed in one pass, as errors and definitional issues are discovered only through annotating, and we build our pipeline around repeated refinement and error checking. We observed that human and LLM collaboration with appropriate tooling represents the current quality ceiling for annotation at this scale. ImageNet-1k issues propagate into its derivative test sets, indicating that the problem is structural rather than specific to any single benchmark. All annotations, class definitions, guidelines, and analysis code have been publicly released. Project page: https://vrg.fel.cvut.cz/reimagenet Annotations: https://huggingface.co/datasets/vrg-prague/ReImageNet Code: https://github.com/klarajanouskova/ImageNet
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All authors Illia Volkov, Nikita Kisel, Tetiana Mishkina, Klara Janouskova, Jiri Matas

Computer Vision

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Spatially Independent Multispectral Land Classification

Katherine L. Bauer, Teemu Harkonen, Simo Sarkka et al. (+1 more)

Land classification from satellite imagery is important for land management, environmental monitoring, and urban planning. Machine learning methods such as random forests and multilayer perceptrons have shown strong performance on multispectral data, while the Kolmogorov-Arnold network has emerged as an alternative architecture with compact model structures. This study evaluates the Kolmogorov-Arnold network for land classification using Landsat 8 imagery and compares it with random forest and multilayer perceptron models. The models were trained and tested on data from Edmonton, Alberta and evaluated on an independent dataset from Calgary, Alberta across five land classes: agriculture, urban, water, forest, and bare ground. For the Calgary dataset, the Kolmogorov-Arnold network matched the accuracy of the random forest and outperformed the multilayer perceptron, while requiring substantially fewer trainable parameters and providing greater interpretability.
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All authors Katherine L. Bauer, Teemu Harkonen, Simo Sarkka, Arturo Sanchez-Azofeifa

Computer Vision

ChartProbe: A Diagnostic Study on Visual Reasoning through Perception, Grounding, and Simple Reasoning

Mahsa Khoshnoodi and Sarah Adel Bargal

Vision-language models (VLMs) remain unreliable on chart questions that require reasoning over visual quantities, and this weakness is usually attributed to a reasoning deficit and addressed with more reasoning supervision. We ask whether the difficulty lies in reasoning itself, or in the simpler skills that reasoning operates on: reading the plotted elements (perception), locating them and binding them to their labels (grounding), and performing single-step computations such as ranking, totals, and differences (simple reasoning). We introduce ChartProbe, a diagnostic framework whose probes are generated directly from the code that renders each chart, so every gold answer is exact by construction, needs no human annotation, and attributes each failure to a single skill. ChartProbe enables an intervention prior work does not attempt: instead of synthesizing complex-reasoning data, we withhold complex questions and reasoning traces entirely, fine-tune on one simple skill at a time, and measure transfer to held-out complex-reasoning questions. Across three open-weight VLMs, supervising the simpler skills alone produces large gains on complex-reasoning questions the model never trained on: where these skills are weak and the model can be taught to read the image, training them recovers much of complex reasoning at no reasoning-data cost. The gains hold across three out-of-distribution settings: an unseen chart type (pie charts), a human-written benchmark disjoint from our images and templates (ChartQA), and a non-chart visual domain (CLEVR). Complex visual reasoning can therefore improve without complex-reasoning supervision.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Amplified Does Not Mean Predictive: Reasoning Behaviors in Thinking Models

Jean de Dieu Nyandwi, Leena Mathur, Yonatan Bisk et al. (+2 more)

Which reasoning behaviors are associated with correct answers in reasoning models, and does reasoning-oriented training amplify those behaviors? This distinction is important because reasoning-oriented training can make traces look more deliberative without amplifying the behaviors most tied to model correctness. We quantify this mismatch with Behavioral Lift, a metric that measures how much correctness changes when a behavior is present versus absent in a model's reasoning trace. Across 15 models and 6 benchmarks spanning text-only and vision-language reasoning, we annotate 15,282 traces with a taxonomy whose core behaviors are defined for both LLM and VLM traces. We find evidence for an Amplification-Lift Gap, in which thinking models strongly amplify self-correction, hypothesis testing, and uncertainty acknowledgment, while the highest-lift behaviors are confidence calibration, knowledge alignment, and self-awareness. Confidence calibration is among the strongest positive signals of correctness in both modalities, yet is barely amplified; uncertainty acknowledgment is amplified by 3–7$\times$, yet is weakly or negatively associated with correctness. We find that reasoning-oriented training does not preferentially amplify the highest-Lift behaviors, motivating process-level objectives that reward calibrated and grounded reasoning rather than surface form alone.
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All authors Jean de Dieu Nyandwi, Leena Mathur, Yonatan Bisk, Robert Hawkins, Graham Neubig

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from physics.ins-det

An Interactive, Automated 4D-STEM data acquisition and analysis routine for Scanning Electron Nanobeam Diffraction and Ptychography experiments

Mohsen Danaie, Max England, Yiming Xu et al. (+11 more)

Modern transmission electron microscopes are versatile instruments which have become indispensable tools for understanding structure and chemical composition at the nano- and atomic scale. In the physical sciences these instruments are still largely manually controlled, requiring significant operator expertise, limiting throughput, and precluding statistical analysis of large datasets. Recent technical advances in both hardware and in control software now allow for the interaction with almost every functionality of the microscope through a programming interface. This enables better experimental design and data collection automation while also reducing operator collection bias and required expertise. In this study, we present an automated data collection routine with machine-driven decision-making to enable the collection of hundreds of 4D-STEM nanobeam diffraction and ptychography data from a large distribution of size-selectively deposited Pt nanoparticles. We present a semi-automated data analysis workflow to extract pertinent information from the large volumes of collected data. For the nanobeam diffraction data, reducing each dataset to its azimuthal variance profile and combining automated crystal orientation mapping with per-particle morphology descriptors reveals the orientation, shape and phase distributions across the ensemble, including a weak {110} texture. For the ptychographic data, an automated screening pipeline identifies on-zone-axis particles and enables atomic-resolution phase imaging and lattice-strain mapping of individual grains. Together these demonstrate how automation turns instrument throughput into statistically meaningful, atomic-scale microstructural information.
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All authors Mohsen Danaie, Max England, Yiming Xu, Ruomu Zhang, Ed Darnbrough, Josh Willem De Boer, Frederick Allars, Zaeem Najeeb, Aakash Varambhia, Jinseok Ryu, Benjamin Bradnick, Damien McGrouther, Manfred E. Schuster, Christopher S. Allen

Computer Vision

CAST: Closed-form Analytic Semantic Transfer for Zero-Shot Classifier Extension

William Heyden, Habib Ullah, Muhammad Salman Siddiqui et al. (+1 more)

Large pre-trained models have become foundational components of modern machine learning systems. Yet adapting these models to novel categories typically requires examples from the target distribution. In many domains, however, such data are unavailable. Zero-shot learning (ZSL) permits recognition under these limitations through relying on auxiliary semantic information such as textual descriptions. We introduce CAST (Closed-form Analytic Semantic Transfer), a training-free, image-free framework for extending a pre-trained classifier to previously unseen classes through weight injection. We provide a theoretical foundation for CAST and derive a finite-sample error decomposition that identifies the semantic extrapolation residual $\rho_u$. The residual is a computable, model-agnostic measure and provides a principled criterion for dataset curation and benchmark design. Experiments on standard zero-shot learning benchmarks demonstrate that CAST matches or exceeds existing image-free approaches and approaches the performance of few-shot adaptation methods, while requiring neither iterative optimization nor examples from the target distribution.
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All authors William Heyden, Habib Ullah, Muhammad Salman Siddiqui, Fadi Al Machot

Computer Vision

Limitations of Synthetic Data Generation in Specialized Data-Scarce Domains

Edward Zhang, Marcel Hussing, Tanay Tandon et al. (+12 more)

Advances in diffusion-based generative models have motivated the use of synthetic image generation to alleviate data scarcity in vision tasks. While this strategy has shown promise in natural image benchmarks such as ImageNet, its effectiveness in sparse, high-variance real-world domains remains unclear. In this work, we focus on domains where images differ substantially from common image datasets and additional data are expensive to obtain. Against non-generative data augmentation baselines, we evaluate the downstream classifier performance improvements yielded by two schools of generative sparse data extension: distribution modeling and sample perturbation. Across five trauma classification tasks using subject-wise train–validation splits, no generative approach consistently outperforms a strong non-generative baseline. Feature-space analysis reveals recurring failure modes: memorization or collapse, distributional drift, and generation of visually plausible but simplified canonical instances that are easier to classify than real data.
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All authors Edward Zhang, Marcel Hussing, Tanay Tandon, Shenbagaraj Kannapiran, Jason Hughes, Youkang Wang, Joshua Caswell, Agelos Kratimenos, Yi Fan Li, Milan Manoj, Ethan Sanchez, Sumukh Shrote, Camillo Jose Taylor, Daniel A. Hashimoto, Eric Eaton

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from eess.IV

TRUE-Colon: Exposing a Consistent Transfer Asymmetry in Real-Time Polyp Detection

Sebastian Doerrich, Andreas Franz Schwab, Francesco Di Salvo et al. (+3 more)

Computer-aided detection (CADe) systems for colonoscopy promise to reduce clinical miss rates, yet reliable real-world deployment remains elusive. This translational gap stems in part from a structural flaw in model development: the reliance on curated datasets that under-represent the long negative stretches and procedure-related artifacts characteristic of routine examinations. Training and evaluating architectures strictly on these lesion-centric benchmarks creates an illusion of success, since such benchmarks cannot capture clinically crucial metrics. To expose this gap, we establish TRUE-Colon, a standardized benchmarking protocol that measures key deployment characteristics alongside localization accuracy, and evaluate four real-time architectures (Faster R-CNN, YOLOv8, YOLOv11, RT-DETR) across curated benchmarks (SUN, PICCOLO) and 60 unedited, full-length procedures (REAL-Colon). We observe a consistent transfer asymmetry: models trained strictly on curated clips suffer a severe performance collapse when evaluated on full procedures, whereas procedure-trained models substantially improve rejection of non-polyp content on REAL-Colon, and largely retain their accuracy on curated benchmarks. Beyond transferability, we find that the Transformer detector attains the strongest sensitivity and the earliest, most persistent detections, while the convolutional detectors stay competitive at a higher throughput. Together, these results indicate that both training and benchmarking for deployable CADe should shift from curated, lesion-centric clips toward full-procedure data and deployment-relevant operating points. Source code is available at https://github.com/sdoerrich97/true-colon.
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All authors Sebastian Doerrich, Andreas Franz Schwab, Francesco Di Salvo, Shyam Nandan Rai, Hanh Huyen My Nguyen, Christian Ledig

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.LG

SAGE: Surrogate-gradient Adaptation via Attention-Guided Entropy for Spiking Transformers

Kiran Nair, Rodrigue Rizk and KC Santosh

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer an energy-efficient alternative to conventional deep neural networks by exploiting sparse event-driven computation, but their training remains challenging because the non-differentiable spike function requires surrogate gradients whose fixed shape may be suboptimal across layers and training stages. In this work, we introduce SAGE, an uncertainty-modulated surrogate-gradient mechanism for Transformer-based SNNs. SAGE estimates block-level uncertainty from normalized self-attention entropy and uses this signal to adapt the surrogate-gradient slope during training while leaving the inference model unchanged. By modulating only the training-time surrogate parameter, the proposed method preserves the original architecture and deployment cost while improving optimization flexibility. Experiments on CIFAR-10/100 demonstrate that SAGE achieves improved accuracy over fixed-surrogate baselines, with results up to 1-2% consistent gains across multiple simulation time steps. These results highlight the potential of attention-derived uncertainty as a lightweight training signal for adaptive surrogate-gradient learning in transformer-based SNNs.
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Computer Vision

MedPlex: Deep Vision-Language Co-Adaptation for Clinically Grounded Medical Segmentation

Rafi Ibn Sultan, Hui Zhu, Chengyin Li et al. (+1 more)

Medical image segmentation is still largely treated as a vision-only problem, although clinical interpretation often relies on textual knowledge of anatomy, location, appearance, and surrounding context. Existing text-guided segmentation methods within the Vision-Language Model (VLM) paradigm often use language only as a late conditioning signal, limiting its influence on visual representation learning. We introduce MedPlex (Medical Plexus of Vision and Language), an end-to-end VLM framework that makes text guidance a continuous, clinically grounded component of segmentation learning. Through Bi-Fusion (Bidirectional Fusion), visual and textual representations evolve jointly across the encoding hierarchy. MedPlex further introduces class-level and region-level concept alignment to organize the shared representation at complementary granularities. Class-level alignment anchors each anatomical target to an aggregated clinical concept profile, while region-level alignment preserves individual concepts, such as shape, location, appearance, and texture, through class-specific visual evidence. In this way, language provides structured supervision throughout the encoder rather than serving only as a late-stage cue. MedPlex achieves state-of-the-art performance across CT and MR benchmarks for multi-organ, cardiac substructure, and tumor segmentation, including settings with real free-text clinical supervision. Code: https://github.com/rafiibnsultan/MedPlex.
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All authors Rafi Ibn Sultan, Hui Zhu, Chengyin Li, Dongxiao Zhu

Computer Vision

PROVE: Training-Free Prompt Recovery using Verifiable Evidence

Rupayan Mallick, Mahsa Khoshnoodi and Sarah Adel Bargal

Modern text-to-image models can generate highly realistic images from natural-language prompts, while recent advances in prompt inversion have made it increasingly feasible to recover those prompts from generated outputs, raising new concerns for copyright protection and content ownership. As prompt marketplaces emerge, recovered prompts can enable both the unauthorized reproduction and redistribution of copyrighted creative works, and the exposure of the prompts that encode an artist's creative recipe in AI-generated content. Existing prompt inversion methods rely on gradient-based optimization, autoregressive captioning, or reinforcement learning. However, optimization-based methods often produce unreadable prompts, captioning methods hallucinate unverified details, and RL-based approaches frequently overfit to specific generators while introducing evaluation circularity. We introduce PROVE (Prompt Recovery with Verified Evidence), a training-free, black-box prompt inversion attack that reconstructs prompts by composing verifiable scene descriptions rather than optimizing token sequences, targeting both original copyrighted works and AI-generated content. The resulting prompts are fully auditable, with every recovered claim grounded in explicit image evidence, and are formalized through a precision-constrained recall maximization objective. Across MS-COCO, Flickr30K, and Lexica, using state-of-the-art text-to-image generators, PROVE consistently outperforms optimization, captioning, and RL-based baselines on image similarity (DINO, LPIPS) and text-image alignment (CLIP), without any training, generator access, or fine-tuning, demonstrating a stronger and more practical prompt inversion attack.
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Computer Vision

Multiphase-Diff: Diffusion-Based Generative Modeling for High-Contrast Multiphase Physical Systems with Sharp Interfaces

Yining Huang and Zhenyu Liang

Physics-constrained diffusion for high-contrast, sharp-interface multiphase fields faces three coupled difficulties. At coefficient jumps, expanded pointwise strong-form PDE residuals contain singular gradient terms that can penalize physical interfaces. Under extreme contrast, low-magnitude phases may fall below the diffusion noise floor and be erased, misscaled, or generated with negative coefficients, while a global likelihood scale allows high-magnitude phases to dominate supervision. We therefore propose Multiphase-Diff, which makes three corresponding contributions: (i) a conservative flux residual that avoids differentiating discontinuous coefficients and enforces discrete conservation; (ii) an analytic bijective representation that maps low-amplitude signals to order-one latent scales and guarantees coefficient positivity through exponential decoding; and (iii) a Jacobi-preconditioned likelihood that normalizes local residual scales for balanced supervision. Experiments on three complementary multiphase benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of Multiphase-Diff over seven baselines in both physical and distributional fidelity and its robustness across phase contrasts and compositions, establishing its effectiveness for scientific sample generation in this challenging regime.
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Computer Vision

What to Preserve, Where to Adapt: A Depth-Wise Analysis of Forgetting in Continual Gynecological Image Segmentation

Amal Saqib, Tausifa Jan Saleem, Numan Saeed et al. (+1 more)

The clinical management of gynecological diseases often relies on medical imaging for diagnosis, treatment planning, and follow-up. Segmentation in this setting is challenging because successive tasks may differ in imaging modality, target anatomy, pathology, and annotation structure. Continual learning allows models to adapt to new tasks without simultaneous access to previous datasets. However, when successive tasks differ substantially, learning a new task can degrade performance on earlier ones, a problem known as catastrophic forgetting. Understanding where adaptation disrupts previous knowledge can help guide the design of more targeted continual-learning strategies. We investigate how forgetting changes as different parts of an encoder–decoder network are allowed to adapt. We progressively expand the trainable region of a 3D nnU-Net backbone from the bottleneck toward input- and output-proximal blocks. Under a shared learning rate, adaptation near the bottleneck largely preserves previous-task performance but provides limited current-task learning, whereas broader adaptation improves current-task performance but sharply increases forgetting. This trade-off persists even when the average change in trainable backbone parameters is approximately comparable. Assigning different learning rates to different blocks substantially reduces forgetting when part of the backbone is trainable, although this changes both the size and location of the updates. Forgetting still increases as more blocks are trained and remains severe when the full backbone is updated. These results show that forgetting depends not only on how much the model changes, but also on which parts of the model are allowed to change.
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All authors Amal Saqib, Tausifa Jan Saleem, Numan Saeed, Mohammad Yaqub

Computer Vision

AutoDesign: Meta-Harness Optimization for Long-Horizon Agentic Design

Yaxin Luo, Haobin Jiang, Jialv Zou et al. (+11 more)

Transforming multimodal sources into condensed and structured media outputs can be fundamentally conceptualized as a long-horizon agentic process centered on a model-harness system. While an ideal harness system should align with human design priors and accumulate reusable experience through empirical exploration to drive recursive self-improvement, existing paradigms remain static and fall short of this capability. In this paper, we present AutoDesign, a framework that aligns with human design priors, where a meta-harness optimizer guides a code agent to recursively improve harness based on rollout feedback. To instantiate and evaluate this framework, we focus on the academic paper-to-poster generation task and introduce PosterBench, comprising a 100-paper Main Track spanning five disciplines and PosterBench-mini, a shared 10-paper subset for controlled evaluation. On the PosterBench Main Track, AutoDesign achieves the highest score of 78.32, surpassing the closed-source commercial system Claude Design by 7.45 points. Across seven controlled code-agent-model configurations, integrating the learned DesignHarness consistently improves performance, increasing the average PosterBench Score from 54.99 to 67.39 (+12.4%). In a fully autonomous long-horizon loop, it executes 253 tool calls and 11 editing turns within 40 minutes for under $3, reaching average conference-poster quality in human evaluation. A system-blind human study further demonstrates that AutoDesign achieves the highest human preference among evaluated systems.
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All authors Yaxin Luo, Haobin Jiang, Jialv Zou, Xu Huang, Wenhao Yan, Haodong Li, Zhengrong Yue, Jing Li, Xiaofu Chen, Xiaohan Zhao, Jiacheng Liu, Jiacheng Cui, Zhiqiang Shen, Xiaotong Li

Computer Vision

V-RAE: Rethinking Video Latent Spaces for Generation

Minghui Guo, Shengqiong Wu and Hao Fei

Latent video generation relies on autoencoders to define a compact space in which generative models operate. Although video autoencoder architectures have evolved substantially, their latent spaces are still optimized primarily for pixel-level reconstruction and provide limited high-level semantic organization. A reconstruction-optimal latent space, however, need not be well suited to generative modeling. We propose V-RAE, a video representation autoencoder that builds compact generative latents on top of frozen vision foundation model representations. A lightweight temporal pooling module removes temporal redundancy while preserving semantic structure, and a video decoder reconstructs continuous motion from the compressed features. We evaluate V-RAE with four representative frozen encoders on video reconstruction, semantic probing, and class-conditional generation. V-RAE achieves 2.13 rFVD on K600, outperforming all evaluated large-scale pretrained video VAEs. Its latents retain substantially more semantic information than conventional video tokenizer latents. Under matched generation settings, our best variant achieves gFVD scores of 117.86 and 19.16 on UCF101 and K600, respectively, while converging up to 6x faster}. We further show that reconstruction quality alone is insufficient to characterize generative utility and introduce tFVD, a temporal-coherence diagnostic that correlates more reliably with downstream generation quality. Beyond video generation, V-RAE also improves future video prediction on Cityscapes over the Wan 2.2 VAE latent space under matched prediction settings. Taken together, the experiments show that frozen semantic representations can support video reconstruction, generation, and predictive modeling. The project page: https://v-rae.github.io/.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.RO

HumanTracker: Towards Comprehensive and Human-Aligned Motion Tracking Benchmark

Dairu Liu, Zekun Qi, Jiayu Zeng et al. (+11 more)

Humanoid motion tracking is central to teleoperation and whole-body imitation, yet evaluation often disagrees with what people perceive in videos. Kinematic errors average per-frame pose differences but miss the physical artifacts that matter most, particularly unstable support and incorrect contacts such as foot skating and mistimed touch-downs. Meanwhile, widely used test suites are small and lack the diversity needed to stress contact-rich, long-horizon behaviors. We introduce HumanTracker to make humanoid tracking evaluation both perceptually aligned and scalable. The HumanTracker benchmark contains approximately 153 hours of optical motion trajectories from multiple professional performers, organized into four motion families with text labels for fine-grained diagnosis. We further propose HumanScore, a preference-aligned metric trained on 12K motion pairs containing 24K motions. Across representative state-of-the-art trackers, HumanScore better predicts human preferences and reveals contact and stability failures that kinematic metrics often miss.
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All authors Dairu Liu, Zekun Qi, Jiayu Zeng, Ruixi Yu, Yu Guan, Yintianrun Zhang, Xuchuan Chen, Sikai Liang, Zekai Li, Chenghuai Lin, Xinqiang Yu, Wenyao Zhang, He Wang, Li Yi

Computer Vision

PlayWorld: Benchmarking World Models with Agent Players over Long-Horizon Objectives

Kaixin Ding, Xi Chen, Minghong Cai et al. (+9 more)

Video world models simulate future states conditioned on current observations and user actions. Recent systems have demonstrated impressive video consistency and action controllability over long sequences. However, fairly comparing these interactive models remains challenging. In practice, a human player typically evaluates a world model by pursuing long-horizon objectives through interaction. For example, a user may turn around 360 degrees to see whether the environment remains consistent, or walk into the water and inspect whether realistic water ripples are generated. The action sequence required to achieve the same objective may vary substantially between models, making fixed action-conditioned evaluation unsuitable for cross-model comparison. To address this, we employ multi-modal Agent Players to interact with world models toward specified long-horizon objectives. Building on this paradigm, we introduce PlayWorld, a benchmark providing 171 scenarios, each with a specified objective. To evaluate performance thoroughly, we assess models along four core dimensions: geometry consistency, interaction fidelity, out-of-sight evolution, and insight evolution. In addition, we incorporate basic ability metrics for video quality and controllability. Experiments across nine state-of-the-art world models reveal that current models remain unreliable on long-horizon interactive objectives, particularly in maintaining spatial consistency and persistent state evolution. Code and data are available at https://github.com/kxding/PlayWorld.
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All authors Kaixin Ding, Xi Chen, Minghong Cai, Zhiyuan Xu, Yiyang Wang, Yuxiang Lu, Junyi Li, Shuyang Chen, Yuan Gao, Xin Tao, Pengfei Wan, Hengshuang Zhao

Computer Vision

Alaya-EVOKE: From Linear-Scaling Supervision to Endless World

Yuanyang Yin, Gongxuan Wang, Yifan Zhan et al. (+3 more)

Interactive world models must support persistent memory, responsive interaction, and long-horizon generation, yet these requirements place conflicting demands on the model. Maintaining history in the denoiser context or key-value cache incurs growing cost, forcing a trade-off between session length and retained memory, while low-latency interaction relies on few-step generation whose capabilities are bounded by its teacher. Alaya-EVOKE (Evoke) addresses both limitations by externalizing persistent world state and redesigning the teacher for long-horizon interactive generation. Scene geometry is maintained in an external, camera-indexed world state bank, from which only view-relevant information is retrieved, keeping the denoiser context bounded as the session grows. Rather than treating the teacher as a fixed generator, we design it for long-horizon supervision: its sparse attention combines chunk-wise grouping, retrieval of selected distant frames, and a linear-attention global state, yielding linear growth in memory and compute while enabling supervision over long horizons. Such supervision exposes content drift that stays locally plausible within short windows, while per-chunk conditioning enables prompt changes and event control throughout the sequence. A 30-second distribution-matching objective, applied under self-forced rollouts, transfers both capabilities to a three-step student that uses no classifier-free guidance, improving resistance to long-term drift while preserving responsive conditioning. With bounded context and recurrent external memory, Evoke supports open-ended, continuously evolving generation; on a single H200 at $384\times 640$, each $1.5\,\mathrm{s}$ chunk is generated in $2.11\,\mathrm{s}$. As a three-step world model, Evoke achieves state-of-the-art performance on WBench while remaining competitive on VBench-Long and VBench-2.0.
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All authors Yuanyang Yin, Gongxuan Wang, Yifan Zhan, Chuanhao Li, Kaipeng Zhang, Feng Zhao