Computer Vision
Papers
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Tuesday 1 September
Across three vision-language model architectures (LLaVA-1.5-7B, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, InternVL3-8B), we report a universal negative finding for mid-layer interpretability. On POPE – the benchmark common to all three – the mid layers encode the ground-truth answer in 68-91% of errors, yet this signal is not causally active for the final prediction: residual-stream patching yields 0% non-trivial flip at the layer level on all three architectures, and on two of three at the per-head level (Qwen: 0/12,600 patched forwards). The lone exception, InternVL3 layer-20 head-2, is a non-vocab, self-attending head whose effect is localized to that specific head (p < 1e-4). Despite the null, the errors separate operationally into three failure modes – Perception Failure, Encoded-but-Disconnected, Prior-Override – learnable above 60% on all three architectures, and the architecture's prior direction predicts which of two interventions elicits a category-specific response. We report these mitigation effects under oracle labels as evidence the categories are mechanistically real, not as a deployable method.
Computer Vision
QINA: Quantum-Inspired Nonlinear Adapters for Pretrained Vision Models
Adapting large pretrained vision models under limited data and frozen-backbone constraints remains a central challenge in transfer learning. While lightweight adapters and parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods are widely adopted, most rely on generic multilayer perceptrons or low-rank linear updates, offering limited control over the spectral and geometric structure of feature transformations. We investigate whether structured nonlinear feature lifting can improve representational alignment in frozen regimes. We introduce Quantum-Inspired Nonlinear Adapters (QINA), compact modules that perform learnable trigonometric feature lifting followed by bounded nonlinear aggregation. The design induces structured oscillatory basis functions with an explicit norm-dependent Lipschitz bound, enabling spectral reshaping of pretrained representations without increasing the receptive field or significantly expanding parameter count. Importantly, the method operates entirely within standard deep learning frameworks and does not require quantum hardware. Through systematic experiments across natural and medical imaging datasets, classification and segmentation tasks, multiple adapters and placements, and varying training budgets, we show that performance in frozen regimes is primarily representation-limited. Nonlinear lifting improves adaptation, and the proposed structured trigonometric formulation consistently outperforms identity baselines, fixed Fourier feature mappings, and parameter-matched baseline adapters. Within the evaluated frozen-backbone settings, structured spectral parameterization provides a more effective inductive bias than generic nonlinear adapters. This work highlights the importance of geometry- and spectrum-aware adaptation mechanisms for large pretrained vision models.
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Computer Vision
CATCH: Counterfactual Anatomical Tissue Inpainting with Conditional Haar Diffusion
BraTS local synthesis replaces masked regions in T1-weighted brain MRI with plausible tumor-free tissue while preserving observed anatomy. We present CATCH, conditional 3D diffusion in an invertible Haar-wavelet domain. Its denoiser receives noisy target coefficients, voided-image coefficients, and a signed mask; tumor-excluded wavelet reconstruction and a hole-focused loss guide training, and hard compositing preserves observed voxels. We compare fixed masks, tumor-component augmentation, and a weighted mixture of tumor-derived, irregular-blob, and ellipsoidal masks. Of 25 development cases, five prespecified cases select each arm's checkpoint and all 25 of their trajectory aggregations; a separate 75-case internal set compares the frozen pipelines and selects a weighted mixture for organizer evaluation. Five-trajectory averaging yielded internal SSIM/PSNR/MSE (mean$\pm$SD) of $0.80\pm0.13$, $19.18\pm1.80$dB, and $0.010\pm0.005$. As the sole officially evaluated pipeline, weighted mixture yielded $0.772\pm0.119$, $20.89\pm3.27$dB, and $0.0098\pm0.0054$ on the 219-case BraTS 2026 validation set. Against compute-matched random augmentation internally, it improved SSIM by 0.019 (95% bootstrap CI: 0.013-0.025), PSNR by 0.95dB, and MSE by 0.003; all three paired comparisons remained significant after Holm correction. Results favor the complete weighted-mixture policy within CATCH; absent official fixed- and random-pipeline scores and a directly comparable external baseline limit broader conclusions.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.GR
ToCo-Mesh: Topology-Consistent Dynamic Mesh Reconstruction via Adaptive Tessellation and Surface-Aligned 2DGS
Reconstructing dynamic meshes with consistent topology from multi-view temporal images remains a challenge. Existing approaches typically face a dilemma between fine-scale shape recovery and topological stability. Frame-by-frame extraction methods capture fine details but break vertex correspondence, leading to flickering meshes. Conversely, template-based deformation ensures consistency but struggles to adapt its surface resolution during optimization, missing local surface details. To address these limitations, we propose ToCo-Mesh, a dynamic reconstruction framework that maintains topology consistency over time while achieving high-fidelity geometry. Specifically, we introduce a dual-mesh representation, where a canonical template mesh is tightly bound to time-varying coarse guide meshes via barycentric parameterization. While keeping guide meshes fixed to condition the deformation, we perform error-driven split-and-merge on the template mesh to progressively increase reconstruction fidelity. Furthermore, to suppress surface irregularities and achieve photorealistic rendering, we incorporate a Surface-Aligned 2DGS module. By anchoring flattened Gaussians to mesh faces, we utilize their rendered normals to guide inverse geometric fine-tuning. To our knowledge, ToCo-Mesh is the first framework to enable adaptive mesh refinement while maintaining strict topological consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves SOTA geometric accuracy while maintaining competitive rendering quality.
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Computer Vision
Don't Just Look, Intervene: Perturbation Based Region Labeling for VQA Images
Vision Language Models (VLMs) should rely on visual evidence that directly determines the correct answer, but supervision for grounding visual reasoning is often expensive to obtain manually or tied to dataset-specific annotation primitives. We instead introduce model-causal visual evidence as an annotation target, defined as the set of image regions whose counterfactual intervention changes a model's answer distribution for a given image-question pair. Based on this principle, we introduce Counterfactual Search for Grounding Regions (CSGR). CSGR is a scalable pipeline that proposes candidate regions, perturbs them, measures their effect on answer sensitivity, and aggregates this evidence across multiple judges to approximate answer-critical regions in VQA data. To assess whether CSGR annotations contain a useful supervision signal, we plug them into three existing grounding-aware training routines: attention steering, Visual CoTfinetuning, and latent visual reasoning. These experiments test whether the proposed annotation scheme can provide a useful supervision signal across multiple ways of consuming region labels, rather than introducing a new way of using them. Across competing automatic region-labeling mechanisms, CSGR annotations provide the most consistent gains over Cross Entropy-only finetuning in both in-domain and out-of-domain evaluations, indicating that the proposed labeling scheme captures useful region-level information.
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Computer Vision
Synthetic Leprosy Image Generation Using Mask-Conditioned Latent Diffusion and Transfer Learning from Large Chronic Wound Datasets
Machine learning for neglected tropical diseases is limited by data, not algorithms: public annotated image sets for leprosy (Hansen's disease) number in the hundreds, orders of magnitude below what generative models require. We ask whether a model trained on abundant chronic wound photography transfers to this low-data regime. We build a three-stage pipeline. First, a DeepLabV3-ResNet50 segmentation network (validation Dice 0.876, IoU 0.799) supplies lesion masks for two wound datasets that ship without them. Second, we assemble a mask-conditioned latent diffusion model from Stable Diffusion 1.5 components and train it on 3,280 region-of-interest wound crops, widening the UNet input convolution from 4 to 11 channels to admit three mask feature maps and a blurred low-frequency context latent. Third, we fine-tune this model on 708 leprosy image-mask pairs drawn from 764 images of approximately 150 patients. We evaluate with LPIPS perceptual distance, anchored by a real-versus-real baseline computed on the same 242 anchor images as the cross-set comparisons; without that reference the cross-set distances cannot be interpreted. The generated set shows no mode collapse: its internal perceptual diversity (0.662) is statistically indistinguishable from that of the real leprosy set (0.672, 95% CI [0.664, 0.680]). Generated images sit 0.044 LPIPS outside the real distribution - measurably apart, but under half of one standard deviation. Fine-tuning shifted the output distribution only marginally, which we trace to lesion geometry reaching the network through input concatenation alone. Chronic wound photography is therefore a viable donor domain for leprosy lesion synthesis: low-level appearance transfers well, and the remaining barrier is semantic control rather than image quality.
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Computer Vision
Part Grounding, Not Action Knowledge: Locating the Bottleneck in VLM Affordance Prediction
Benchmarks agree that vision-language models reason poorly about low-level manipulation, but an aggregate accuracy score does not say which step fails. We separate two steps that affordance questions conflate: identifying which part of an object to act on, and knowing what action that part requires. Across 19 articulated objects we asked eight models, spanning three developers, what motion a robot should apply. Under an open prompt, push was produced once in 64 evaluations where it was correct, despite being correct for 8 of 19 objects and appearing in the offered label set every time. Inspecting the outputs showed why: models described a different part than the one being scored, e.g. explaining how to pick up a camera rather than press its button. Naming the target part raises action accuracy by 0.32 to 0.63 for every model, from 0.158-0.474 to 0.684-0.947, and push recall from 0-1/8 to 7-8/8. No model beats a constant answer that ignores the image under the open prompt; once the part is named, all eight do. Asked to describe the same part in free prose with no label set, models produce pressing language for 6 to 8 of 8. These results are hard to reconcile with missing action knowledge, and instead point to part grounding as the dominant bottleneck, a pattern that holds across all three model families and does not diminish with capability. Naming the part supplies the grounding variable, so this bounds what a perfect part detector would offer rather than demonstrating a general model of mechanics. Two supporting results agree: on real photographs only three of eight models localize grasp points better than a constant baseline, and on rendered objects none do. We also document two measurement errors of our own, a threshold that let a constant baseline score 0.929 and a labelling rule wrong on 4 of 19 objects, both caught only by testing our numbers against trivial alternatives.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from eess.IV
Reliability-Aware Hybrid-K Ensemble Selection for Cervical Cytology Classification: Integrating Discrimination, Calibration, and Selective Prediction
High classification accuracy alone is insufficient for clinical image analysis, where calibrated confidence and reliable uncertainty estimates are essential. This study proposes a reliability-aware Hybrid-K ensemble selection framework for multiclass cervical cytology classification using the SIPaKMeD dataset. Nine deep learning architectures were evaluated using a fixed stratified five-fold partition and three training seeds. After post-hoc temperature scaling, models were assessed using macro-F1, accuracy, AUROC, expected calibration error (ECE), worst-class ECE (WC-ECE), area under the risk-coverage curve (AURC), Brier score, and negative log-likelihood (NLL). Models were ranked using an equal-weight composite score, and Hybrid-K ensembles were formed from the top-ranked models using soft voting. Robustness was examined using 5,000 Dirichlet-sampled metric-weight vectors, leave-one-metric-out analysis, and corrected paired testing across 15 fold-by-seed evaluations. The final Hybrid-2 ensemble, comprising Swin-Tiny and TinyViT-5M, reduced AURC by 43%, NLL by 17%, and WC-ECE by 36% relative to the best individual model. It was selected in 96.8% of random weighting scenarios, remained unchanged across all leave-one-metric-out analyses, and improved the full composite score. However, per-metric gains were not statistically significant after Holm-Bonferroni correction (all adjusted p >= 0.168). Because post-hoc calibration did not use a fully independent calibration set, calibration-dependent results should be interpreted as exploratory internal estimates. Overall, the framework identified a compact ensemble robust to alternative metric weightings and improved reliability point estimates under internal validation on a single dataset.
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Computer Vision
DIVA: Exploiting Cross-Step Conditional Propagation for Visual Jailbreaks in Discrete Diffusion Vision-Language Models
Large vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in safety-critical settings, yet existing visual jailbreak research has focused almost exclusively on autoregressive architectures, leaving an important emerging family unstudied: multimodal discrete diffusion vision-language models (dVLMs). We identify a vulnerability specific to diffusion generation: because the visual embedding conditions every reverse denoising step rather than acting as a one-time prefix, adversarial visual semantics are repeatedly propagated and amplified across the generation trajectory, a phenomenon we term cross-step conditional propagation. We provide empirical evidence through stage-sensitivity analysis, prompt-level switch rates, and pairwise denoising-bin disagreement metrics, confirmed by bootstrap resampling. We propose DIVA (Discrete-diffusion Vision-language model Attack), a white-box visual jailbreak framework using cross-modal intent obfuscation and diffusion-aware multi-timestep adversarial optimization. Across three dVLMs, DIVA reaches 58.8%, 67.7%, and 69.1% HADES ASR under the Beaver reward-model metric, outperforming visual jailbreak baselines designed for autoregressive models. Code: https://github.com/loststars2002/DIVA
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Computer Vision
Infrastructure-based Monocular 3D Vehicle Localization Framework with Experimental Validation
This paper presents a one-stage learning framework that maps monocular roadside-camera images directly to vehicle states in a ground-fixed coordinate frame. Unlike conventional approaches that first detect vehicles in the image plane and subsequently apply geometric post-processing, the proposed method leverages features from a pretrained object detector to jointly estimate each vehicle's ground-plane position, dimensions, and yaw angle. The framework therefore uses visual features not only for vehicle detection but also for direct spatial and orientation estimation. To support model training and evaluation, we develop a data-collection and label-generation pipeline based on synchronized video from a roadside camera and an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Acting as a temporary top-view sensing platform, the UAV provides vehicle trajectories, dimensions, and orientations, which are transformed into the ground-fixed coordinate frame and temporally aligned with the roadside-camera images to generate ground-truth labels. The framework is evaluated using data collected during multiple experiments at the Mcity Test Facility. Results show that the proposed method can recover vehicle trajectories and orientations from monocular roadside imagery without a separate geometric post-processing stage, demonstrating its potential as a scalable approach to infrastructure-based perception at urban intersections.
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Computer Vision
Diffusion models for eye-gaze trajectory generation using position and velocity representations
Eye-tracking data are expensive to collect, requiring specialized hardware and controlled laboratory conditions, and difficult to share because of privacy constraints. We address this using two complementary denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) for unconditional generation of eye-gaze dynamics from visual-search data. Both use an identical FiLM-conditioned one-dimensional U-Net with self-attention (19.35,M parameters), trained on 8,s sliding-window sequences from 28 participants. One model generates raw two-dimensional gaze-position sequences, while the other generates two-component velocity sequences; each uses representation-specific preprocessing, training settings, data partitions, and evaluation protocols. Both are evaluated across three independent training seeds, with aggregated metrics reported as mean,$\pm$,SD. The position-space model achieves a mean Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence of $0.016\pm0.004$ across nine kinematic features, with the highest feature-wise mean below $0.030$, fixation duration within 2% of real data, and a Fr'echet Gaze Distance more than an order of magnitude below statistical and Markovian baselines. Under a Train-on-Synthetic-Test-on-Real protocol, synthetic-only training achieves $R^2=0.66\pm0.02$, or 82.7% of the real-data $R^2$ point estimate. The velocity-space model achieves a mean JS divergence of $0.0065$ across velocity components, speed, log-speed, and turning angle, with a maximum of $0.015\pm0.005$. Reconstructed path length is less accurate ($0.21\pm0.02$ versus $0.03\pm0.01$ in position space), although the protocols differ. Overall, unconditional diffusion captures local gaze kinematics and short-range temporal and directional structure, while long-range properties such as saccade counts and cumulative path geometry remain targets for future conditioned models.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.RO
Situation Awareness for Intelligent Data Distribution in Connected Vehicles
The limitations of on-board sensors and blind spots caused by occlusion cause the reduction of perception quality in autonomous vehicles. In such cases, cooperative perception provides additional data via Vehicle-to-Everything communication to enhance local perception, causing a large volume of data transmission. The vehicle can focus on acquiring and utilizing relevant data according to the prevailing road context by identifying the current traffic situation. To achieve this, we propose a concept for the situation identification of the vehicle using Bird's-Eye-View images. Firstly, the situation around the vehicle is identified using object detection with semantic segmentation, followed by understanding the context of the traffic using a situation identification module consisting of an open-source projective transformation network Cam2BEV and a situation identification neural network. The concept was evaluated and validated by running the software on the CARLA simulator using the in-built RGB camera and the semantic segmentation camera. Additionally, the portability of the situation identification module for real-world applications was verified on Cityscapes and nuScenes urban driving datasets. Overall, the proposed situation identification approach enables efficient sensor data management by prioritizing relevant data to the current traffic situation. The source code is available in the following link: https://github.com/akshaynarla/DySi_Select
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Computer Vision
Contrastive Knowledge Distillation for Anomaly Detection in Multi-Illumination/Focus Display Images
In this paper, we tackle automatic anomaly detection in multi-illumination and multi-focus display images. The minute defects on the display surface are hard to spot out in RGB images and by a model trained with only normal data. To address this, we propose a novel contrastive learning scheme for knowledge distillation-based anomaly detection. In our framework, Multiresolution Knowledge Distillation (MKD) is adopted as a baseline, which operates by measuring feature similarities between the teacher and student networks. Based on MKD, we propose a novel contrastive learning method, namely Multiresolution Contrastive Distillation (MCD), which does not require positive/negative pairs with an anchor but operates by pulling/pushing the distance between the teacher and student features. Furthermore, we propose the blending module that transforms and aggregate multi-channel information to the three-channel input layer of MCD. Our proposed method significantly outperforms competitive state-of-the-art methods in both AUROC and accuracy metrics on the collected Multi-illumination and Multi-focus display image dataset for Anomaly Detection (MMdAD).
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Computer Vision
Physics-Driven Independent Pair Generation for Iterative Self-Supervised Low-Dose CT Denoising
Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) measurements contain mixed Poisson-Gaussian noise. However, most self-supervised methods rely on generic image statistics and do not explicitly model this noise, which may limit their ability to effectively suppress realistic LDCT noise. To address this issue, we propose a physics-driven framework with cross-domain iteration for self-supervised LDCT denoising. The proposed framework proceeds in three main steps. First, a learned sinogram prior and the LDCT noise model guide posterior inference of photon counts, enabling separation of the Poisson and Gaussian components. Second, the separated Poisson and Gaussian components are respectively processed by binomial thinning and Gaussian data thinning to construct two branches, and residual scaling matches each branch's noise level to that of the observation, yielding a training pair with approximately independent noise realizations from one low-dose measurement. Finally, the pair is used to train an image-domain network whose forward-projected outputs update the prior. Through cross-domain iteration, the prior and the training pair are progressively refined while maintaining consistency with CT acquisition physics. Experiments on simulated data from AAPM, LIDC-IDRI, and LoDoPaB-CT and on real LDCT data show consistent gains over the evaluated self-supervised baselines across dose levels, with performance comparable to the evaluated supervised baseline.
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Computer Vision
Learning with Volterra Neural Networks: A System Theoretic Perspective
Higher-order interaction components are important for signal, image, and video modeling, but explicit high-order operators often suffer from rapidly increasing parameter and computational costs. This paper presents kVNN, a learnable kernelized Volterra Neural operator for compact higher-order filtering. The motivation is to use kernelization to improve the efficiency of Volterra-type neural operators while providing a structured interpretation of their higher-order components. The proposed formulation combines the order-wise structure of Volterra filtering with learnable polynomial-kernel atoms, allowing different interaction orders to be represented by separate learnable centers and coefficients. This order-decoupled representation avoids explicit high-order tensor parameterization and can be implemented as a CNN-compatible layer. Experiments on representative vision tasks show that kVNN achieves a favorable accuracy–efficiency trade-off.
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Computer Vision
Automated Maize Ear Phenotyping Using 3D Reconstructions
Maize kernel traits such as row number, kernels per row, and kernel size vary largely for genetic reasons and are consistently associated with regions of the genome that influence yield. Manual measurement of these traits, however, cannot keep pace with the volume of maize generated in a breeding program. To address this, we developed and validated a fully automated pipeline for extracting these traits from 3D point clouds of corn ears, built on a recently developed video-to-point-cloud platform. Raw video frames are processed through COLMAP and NeRF, the ear is isolated via density-based separation, and the point cloud is distance-calibrated to physical units. The calibrated ear point cloud was Z-axis aligned via PCA and cylindrically unwrapped to a 2D image. We enhanced contrast and performed zero-fine-tuning instance segmentation using Cellpose-SAM. A triple-juxtaposed unwrap strategy was used to prevent double-counting at the seam. The pipeline achieved kernel count R^2 = 0.921 (MAPE = 10.33%) and kernel row number within +-2 rows for 95.2% of ears (MAE = 0.75 rows) on a 168-ear held-out set from the 268-ear labeled dataset. The resulting multi-trait dataset has known genotype identity for each ear, positioning it for phenotype-to-genotype association analyses.
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Computer Vision
TAPVid-MV: A Benchmark for Tracking Any Point in 3D Across Multiple Views
Multi-camera systems are increasingly practical for robotics, AR/VR, and autonomous driving because complementary views reduce depth ambiguity and preserve visibility under occlusion. Existing point-tracking benchmarks, however, focus on a single video or static multi-camera rigs. None test long-term 3D point tracking across several synchronized views under camera motion. We introduce TAPVid-MV (Tracking Any Point in Video across Multiple Views), the first benchmark for this setting. It contains a curated set of 238 sequences, 1,004 calibrated camera streams, and 74,147 point tracks across seven subsets spanning indoor and outdoor domains, from robotics and human activity to driving and synthetic procedural scenes. We obtain these trajectories using dataset-specific auxiliary modalities: sensor depth, LiDAR, SLAM and SfM points, human meshes, posed object meshes, and simulation. Every sequence and trajectory is visually verified by human annotators. Across more than 30 baselines, no method comes close to solving the task. Surprisingly, existing multi-view point trackers do not consistently outperform monocular point trackers. By evaluating reconstruction and point tracking on the same datasets, TAPVid-MV helps distinguish errors in recovered geometry from errors in point correspondence. Through this joint analysis, we identify geometry recovery as a major bottleneck for accurate 3D point tracking. Beyond multi-view 3D point tracking, our released annotations support monocular 2D and 3D point tracking, future-trajectory prediction, and 4D reconstruction. Project page: https://tapvidmv.github.io/
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Computer Vision
Does Playing it Safe Count as Faithfulness? Reassessing LVLM Hallucination Mitigation Methods
Recent inference-time hallucination mitigation methods for large vision-language models (LVLMs) report strong gains on hallucination benchmarks. However, it remains unclear whether lower hallucination scores reflect improved multimodal grounding or more conservative generation. We evaluate six mitigation methods across three LVLMs and four benchmarks, including hallucination-focused evaluation and the diverse capability benchmark MMStar. Our analysis reveals two consistent patterns. First, hallucination reduction is often coupled with reduced informativeness: methods that lower hallucination rates also reduce object recall, visual coverage, or response detailedness. Second, improvements on hallucination benchmarks do not reliably transfer to broader multimodal capabilities, with methods showing inconsistent or degraded performance on fine-grained perception and reasoning tasks. Our findings suggest that current evaluation protocols may overestimate progress by rewarding conservative generation. We argue that hallucination mitigation should be evaluated as a faithfulness–informativeness–capability trade-off rather than through hallucination scores alone.
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Computer Vision
SignMatch: Matching Dictionary Signs to Continuous Sign Language Video
The objective of this paper is to match dictionary sign videos to corresponding signs in continuous signing videos, where a match is defined by the visual similarity alone - the handshape and motion relative to the body. To achieve this, we learn a prototype-structured sign embedding space from continuous video annotated with signs, where each learnable prototype corresponds to a sign class. Isolated dictionary videos are then mapped into this sign space, enabling the matching between dictionary exemplars and continuous sign instances. This design supports direct dictionary-guided sign matching through embedding similarity and naturally extends to unseen signs using only dictionary exemplars. Experiments on ASL-Citizen dictionary retrieval, ChaLearn OSLWL dictionary-to-continuous sign matching, and using BOBSL's CSLR2 evaluation for automatic sign annotation demonstrate strong generalisation across datasets, tasks and sign languages. Without benchmark-specific supervision, the learned representation transfers effectively across American, British, and Spanish Sign Languages, outperforming prior methods on all three benchmarks. Project page: https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/signmatch/
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Computer Vision
RAFT-DVC: Resolution-Aware Machine Learning-Based Digital Volume Correlation
Digital volume correlation (DVC) provides three-dimensional full-field displacement measurements from volumetric images, but how the internal resolution of a machine-learning-based DVC model affects accuracy and operating range remains poorly understood. Here, we present RAFT-DVC, a resolution-aware family of recurrent all-pairs field transforms (RAFT)-based DVC solvers with encoder downsampling factors s = 2, 4, and 8. Using a matched design, we find that the three solvers localize displacement to approximately 0.017 feature-grid voxel, giving an empirical raw-volume error scaling of approximately 0.017s voxel. The solvers exhibit complementary operating regimes governed jointly by displacement reach and volumetric-texture compatibility. Synthetic benchmarks show that RAFT-DVC achieves errors of the same order as tuned classical DVC under fine-texture, small-to-moderate-displacement conditions and becomes competitive or advantageous under coarse-texture, large-displacement conditions. Frequency-swept tests quantify deformation spatial resolution, while tiled inference enables dense estimation on large volumes. Evaluation on confocal volumetric images acquired during indentation illustrates the importance of matching solver operating regime to deformation magnitude and image texture. Tests on micro-CT images of elastomeric foam, despite training only on particle-labeled synthetic data, provide evidence of cross-texture transfer. We also identify coordinate-order inconsistencies in three-dimensional RAFT correlation sampling and introduce a non-cubic impulse test to verify sampler geometry independently of network training. Correcting the sampler improves native-input accuracy and generalization to unseen volume dimensions. Together, these results establish RAFT-DVC as a fast, resolution-aware framework for dense DVC with characterized accuracy and operating regimes.
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Computer Vision
Cross-Model Distillation of a Human-Pose Foundation Model from Unannotated Infant Video for Markerless 3D Pose Estimation
Spontaneous movement is one of the earliest windows onto an infant's neuromotor health, and structured clinical instruments that score it are validated early predictors of cerebral-palsy risk. However, they require specially trained raters, are time-consuming, and carry inter-rater variability. This motivates automated, video-based markerless assessment, especially as marker-based motion capture is impractical in infants. Yet the foundation models that make markerless capture possible are trained almost entirely on adults: our recent multi-view infant study found that no single model is jointly best, with strong 2D keypoint accuracy and direct 3D body recovery split across different models. While that study identifies this trade-off, it does not resolve it. Here, we perform cross-model distillation from the Sapiens 2 pose model into the SAM 3D Body model, using unannotated infant video alone. A frozen teacher supplies dense pseudo-labels, and a differentiable renderer aligns the predicted mesh to them in the training loop. On eleven held-out infants (18 sessions, 173 recordings) under our prior study's multi-view protocol, fine-tuning improves same-view 2D keypoint agreement with the Sapiens reference (median body percentage of correct keypoints @ 10px 0.22 -> 0.42, face 0.22 -> 0.42) and Procrustes-aligned mean per joint 3D position error (25.5 -> 22.2 mm). This demonstrates how cross-model distillation improves SAM 3D Body model performance on infants.
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Computer Vision
SliceBridge: Context-Consistent Repair of Corrupted Slice Intervals in T1-Weighted MRI
Structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images are sometimes corrupted over a contiguous set of slices, where acquisition, motion, hardware, or reconstruction effects leave a single slice or short interval inconsistent with its neighbors while the rest of the image remains usable. Such localized corruption can bias downstream morphometric analysis, yet discarding or reacquiring an otherwise usable image is costly. We formulate this as an image restoration problem: given the location of the affected interval, reconstruct those slices from the surrounding anatomical and imaging context. We propose SliceBridge, a framework for restoring corrupted slice intervals in T1-weighted MRI using rectified flow matching conditioned on the surrounding intact slices and their relative slice positions. Through-plane consistency is encouraged by coupling the slices within the interval through interval-correlated initial noise, a shared flow time, and synchronized sampling. The restored interval is then inserted back, leaving all other slices unchanged. We trained and validated the model on 9,877 T1-weighted brain MRI volumes from four datasets and evaluated it on 581 external subjects using clean interval withholding and controlled corruptions. Compared with a matched model that reconstructed target slices independently, SliceBridge reduced error in slice-to-slice changes within repaired intervals by 32.9%-41.3% across interval lengths and achieved higher SSIM at every interval length. In controlled-corruption cases, SliceBridge reduced the median error in regional brain volume estimates produced by a downstream segmentation model from 1.95% in corrupted volumes to 1.05%.
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Computer Vision
Kirin: Animal Motion Generation from In-the-Wild Video
Understanding animal motion is fundamental to modeling animal behavior and biomechanics, yet progress in this area lags far behind human motion research due to the scarcity of high-quality motion data. While human motion can be captured in controlled environments, it is impractical for most animal species, resulting in small, domain-limited datasets that restrict downstream applications such as animation. To address this challenge, we introduce Kirin, a framework that reconstructs motion from video, learns motion priors at scale, and generates realistic motion that can be directly applied to animated assets. Using large collections of in-the-wild animal videos, we reconstruct 3D motion sequences and pair them with captions to create AiM3D, the first large-scale dataset offering aligned video-text-motion tuples for quadruped animals. Building on this dataset, we develop a visual-guided motion generation model that conditions on both text and image to guide the generation of realistic motion across diverse animal species. Finally, by leveraging an off-the-shelf image-to-3D model, we automatically rig and animate 3D meshes using generated motion, producing ready-to-render animated animals. Together, our dataset and framework establish a new foundation for large-scale, text and image conditioned animal motion generation and animation. Project page: https://kirin-ani.github.io/.
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Computer Vision
Video2Reaction: Training Foundation Video Models to Predict Audience Reaction
We introduce Video2Reaction, a multimodal dataset that maps short movie segments to the induced emotional reactions of viewers in the wild, as expressed through social media comments. Video2Reaction captures the natural diversity of emotional responses by aggregating reactions from online comments at scale, modeling labels as distributions over categorical emotions to better reflect the subjective and ambiguous nature of emotional perception. We benchmark two vision-language models (VLMs) finetuned with LoRA, showing that VLMs learn effectively from Video2Reaction and outperform specialized baselines on dominant reaction prediction. We further demonstrate that VLMs pre-finetuned on Video2Reaction transfer effectively to VCE, another induced emotion dataset with a different taxonomy and video domain. Notably, LLaVA-NeXT-Video-7B pre-finetuned on Video2Reaction and adapted on only 1% of VCE training data achieves a top-3 accuracy of 0.682, on par with the best reported VCE performance trained on the full dataset. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/infofusionlab/Video2Reaction
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Computer Vision
Integrated Laser Scanning and Image-Based Topology Optimization Techniques for Detection and Quantification of Visible and Subsurface Structural Defects
Reliable characterization of structural defects requires methods capable of resolving both directly observable surface damage and damage that is not visible from the inspected surface. This study presents two complementary non-contact, vision-based approaches for the detection and quantitative characterization of defects in structural components. The first approach employs high-resolution laser scanning to generate three-dimensional (3D) point clouds of damaged steel specimens. Comparative processing of measured and reference point clouds is used to localize damaged regions, quantify geometric loss, and transfer the measured defect geometry to a finite element representation. The second approach combines full-field surface deformation measurements obtained using three-dimensional digital image correlation (3D-DIC) with finite element model updating and topology optimization. In this inverse framework, measured surface response is used to infer subsurface abnormalities through their influence on the spatial distribution of structural response. Experimental steel-beam specimens containing controlled smooth defects and randomly distributed defects are used to evaluate the approaches. Comparisons with milling-based ground-truth measurements demonstrate that both methods can identify and quantify defect geometry, while providing complementary information for visible and subsurface damage assessment. The combined framework establishes a pathway toward high-fidelity, non-contact structural condition assessment and model updating for components with complex and irregular damage.
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Computer Vision
Consistency as Regularization for Unsupervised Shadow Removal
Shadow removal is an important preprocessing step for many vision tasks, yet existing supervised methods require paired shadow and shadow-free images, while unsupervised approaches often still rely on shadow masks or shadow-free references. We propose ShadowCLR, an unsupervised framework that learns shadow removal directly from shadow images. Our key observation is that shadows vary across observations while the underlying scene content remains largely consistent. We therefore use consistency across shadow observations as regularization, encouraging the model to recover scene-consistent appearance while suppressing shadow-specific variations. Global and local consistency further enable us to explore visually related images, learn from imperfectly aligned observations, and focus the representation on shared scene information. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that ShadowCLR achieves competitive and often superior performance over state-of-the-art unsupervised methods, demonstrating that consistency can provide regularization for shadow removal without shadow masks or shadow-free images.
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Computer Vision
Improved Automatic Target Recognition in Synthetic Aperture Sonar Imagery Using Large Deep Neural Networks
Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) in Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) is a task largely dominated by deep neural networks (DNNs). Most SAS-ATR models use convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures whereas transformer-based architectures have had much less representation in the literature despite being state of the art in general computer vision (CV) research. Additionally, researchers have had mixed results in attempting to overcome challenges presented by a scarcity of labeled training data by using methods such as data augmentation and the use of pretrained weights from a variety of imaging modalities. In this work, we compare the performance of modern CNN and transformer-based DNNs to determine which architecture and training configurations elicit the highest performance in SAS-ATR. We investigate how network size, architecture, pretraining method, data augmentation and other forms of regularization affect SAS-ATR performance with a focus on producing the highest-performing model and providing a roadmap for training state-of-the-art SAS-ATR models.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.RO
Designing Versatile Samples for Learned Trajectory Scoring
Many current end-to-end driving policies emit a pool of candidate trajectories and select one, which makes selection a separable component: a scorer can be retrained while the planner, its backbone, and its trajectory generator all stay frozen. However, many strong planners concentrate their proposals around safe mode, providing limited supervision near decision boundaries. In this work, we design a training dataset that provides more informative supervision for the scorer. In particular, we construct two generators that perturb the logged human trajectory along the two axes a vehicle can be displaced: laterally toward the drivable boundary and longitudinally toward a leading vehicle. The designed dataset produces more informative positive and negative samples than the base planner's proposal pool. We attach a transformer-based scorer to two frozen generative planners, DiffusionDrive and MeanFuser, and train it on the NAVSIM navtrain dataset. The results of the experiments show that we achieve 90.1 EPDMS on DiffusionDrive and 90.4 EPDMS on MeanFuser when using ResNet-34, with 0.4 and 0.3 EPDMS respectively, from the designed training dataset.
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Computer Vision
DESA-TTA: Dynamic EMA and Source Anchoring for Test-Time Adaptation
Vision-language object detectors (VLODs) achieve strong zero-shot performance but remain vulnerable to distribution shifts during deployment. Mean-teacher methods for test-time adaptation (TTA) can improve robustness by updating a student model using teacher-generated pseudo-labels. However, mean-teacher TTA is highly sensitive to the choice of a fixed exponential moving average (EMA) coefficient for teacher updates, and repeated optimization with noisy pseudo-labels can cause cumulative student drift. We propose Dynamic EMA and Source Anchoring for TTA (DESA-TTA), a low-overhead method that jointly regulates teacher updates and student drift through dynamic temporal averaging and source anchoring. Dynamic temporal averaging estimates teacher uncertainty from pseudo-label confidence and box density and uses it to select a sample-wise EMA coefficient within bounds determined by teacher parameter drift. Source anchoring partially restores the updated student parameters toward their pretrained values, with the anchoring strength increasing according to student drift. Experiments across diverse distribution shifts and two VLOD architectures show consistent improvements over existing TTA methods. On VOC-C, DESA-TTA improves AP$_{50}$ by 14.5 points over zero-shot inference while achieving 55% higher inference throughput than the previous state-of-the-art TTA method for YOLO-World. Our code: https://github.com/imatif17/DESA-TTA
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.SD
Efficient Passive Acoustic Monitoring of Killer Whales Using a Two-Stage Detection and Ecotype Classification Cascade
Passive acoustic monitoring of killer whales is particularly important for conservation of the endangered Southern Resident killer whale population, but requires accurate models that can operate in real time under severe class imbalance and deployment shift. We propose a lightweight ResNet-based two-stage cascade that first detects killer whale vocalizations and then classifies confident detections into five eastern North Pacific ecotypes, abstaining on ambiguous calls. We train and evaluate the pipeline on the DCLDE 2027 dataset, where the detector achieves 0.960 macro-F1 and the classifier 0.958, outperforming frozen Perch 2.0 embeddings on the five-ecotype benchmark. By separating detection from ecotype recognition, the end-to-end cascade improves seven-class macro-F1 from 0.919 for a single-stage model to 0.933, with the largest gain on the rare OKW ecotype. To assess transfer beyond the benchmark, we use active learning to adapt the Stage 1 to the acoustic environment of Puget Sound, WA, increasing killer whale detection F1 from 0.405 to 0.755 on manually verified detection windows. Finally, each stage processes a 3 s window in approximately 1.4 ms on an NVIDIA H100, enabling faster than real time inference. These results demonstrate that the proposed two-stage cascade pipeline enables reliable killer whale detection and classification, adaptation to new acoustic domains, and real-time monitoring for conservation applications.