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Thursday 10 September

Computer Vision

TailProp: content-adaptive light- and heavy-tailed propagation for vision

Jiahao Kong and Zihan Li

Science-inspired vision models show that explicit propagation dynamics can provide structured and interpretable alternatives to conventional token mixing. Existing formulations, however, typically construct and adapt visual propagation within a particular dynamical family, while visual representations can require substantially different spatial interactions across samples, channels, and network stages. We explore cross-regime adaptive propagation and introduce TailProp, a hierarchical vision backbone built upon the Tail Propagation Operator (TPO). TPO uses Gaussian and Cauchy stable-process propagators as complementary bases with rapidly decaying and heavy-tailed spatial influence, and predicts a content-conditioned channel-wise coefficient to adaptively combine them. Because this coefficient is spatially shared, the two responses are fused directly in the DCT domain with a single DCT/IDCT pair, yielding $O(N^{1.5})$ spatial mixing for square feature maps with $N=HW$ and fixed channel width. Across image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, robustness, and cross-backbone restoration, TailProp consistently outperforms matched propagation baselines; TailProp-B reaches 84.4% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, 50.3/44.8 box/mask AP under the 3x Mask R-CNN schedule, and 50.8% mIoU on ADE20K. Controlled ablations further show that these gains are not explained by single-basis propagation, an additional same-family branch, or within-family adaptive order alone, supporting complementary two-basis propagation as an effective design principle for visual representation learning.
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Computer Vision

Meta-Learning for Classifier Selection in Image Datasets: A Feature-Driven Framework for Accuracy Prediction

Zahra Nabizadeh_Shahre_Babak, Farzaneh Koohestani, Nader Karimi et al. (+2 more)

No Free Lunch theorem implies that any performance gains achieved by a classifier on a particular image distribution are necessarily offset by a loss of performance over the set of all possible problems; thus, no single model is universally optimal. Selecting the most suitable classifier for image datasets is a critical yet challenging task due to the intrinsic complexity and diversity of images. This paper proposes a meta-learning framework that leverages a comprehensive set of meta-features capturing dataset complexity to predict classifier performance without exhaustive training. By extracting and selecting features using methods such as autoencoders, pre-trained networks, and dimensionality reduction techniques, we train regression models to efficiently estimate classifier accuracies. Additionally, clustering techniques are employed to group classifiers with similar performance patterns, simplifying the recommendation process. The datasets used span a wide range of concepts, including nature, animals, numbers, motorcycles, medical images, and human bodies, to ensure broad generalization. Evaluated on 56 diverse image datasets, our approach achieves an average ranking prediction accuracy exceeding 86%, demonstrating its effectiveness in guiding model selection. This scalable and interpretable framework provides a practical solution to improve classification performance while reducing computational costs.
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All authors Zahra Nabizadeh_Shahre_Babak, Farzaneh Koohestani, Nader Karimi, Shahram Shirani, Shadrokh Samavi

Computer Vision

Toward Interpretable Multimodal Fusion: Heat Conduction Modeling for Hyperspectral and LiDAR Joint Classification

Kan Wei, Jiahui Cui, Jing Yao et al. (+3 more)

The fusion of hyperspectral (HS) and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data plays a crucial role in enhancing land-cover classification by jointly exploiting spectral, spatial, and structural cues. However, existing multimodal fusion methods still struggle to model long-range dependencies and complex anisotropic interactions while maintaining computational efficiency. This paper introduces M2Heat, a physics-inspired framework that investigates multimodal fusion through the lens of heat conduction. At its core, a physics-driven visual heat conduction module (vHeat) and enhanced Frequency Value Embeddings (FVEs) simulate anisotropic information flow, enabling the capture of global dependencies with sub-quadratic complexity and physical interpretability. This mechanism, combined with a hybrid spatial-frequency fusion strategy named Cross-Frequency Fusion (CFF) module, produces highly discriminative and robust feature representations. M2Heat achieves competitive overall performance on three benchmarks, i.e., Trento, Houston2013, and Augsburg, while providing an interpretable heat-conduction-guided perspective for multimodal feature fusion. These results indicate the potential of heat-conduction-guided neural operators for efficient and interpretable RS multimodal fusion. The source code is publicly available at https: /github.com/Weikan0425/M2Heat_HSI_LiDAR.
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All authors Kan Wei, Jiahui Cui, Jing Yao, Xinyu Zhao, Lei Wang, Pedram Ghamisi

Computer Vision

New Evidence, Same Choice: Testing Physical Experiment Selection in Vision Language Models

Sourajit Saha, Shubhashis Roy Dipta, Nobin Sarwar et al. (+4 more)

A model first sees an image from one physical measurement experiment, such as how far a block coasted, and must answer a question about a new trial, such as whether the block will pass a target after a fixed push. The initial experiment may provide enough information to answer, or the model may need another measurement, such as the object's mass, friction, restitution, or spring stiffness. We study whether vision language models can decide when to answer immediately and, when more evidence is needed, which experiment to perform. Current physical reasoning benchmarks usually evaluate only the final answer, so they do not directly measure this decision-making ability. We introduce a controlled evaluation where each problem provides one measurement image and four possible physical worlds created by combining two possible masses and two possible values of another relevant property. The model must either stop and answer or select the cheapest additional experiment that can resolve the question. We construct matched problem pairs where changing either the observed measurement or the question changes the optimal action. Since all possible worlds and experiment costs are known, we can explicitly determine the optimal choice. Across six open models and 144 physical parameter sets, direct responses repeat the same action for 95.1% to 100% of image pairs even when the correct action changes. Brief reasoning improves action switching, but the best model makes both decisions correctly for only 5.9% of image pairs. Additional analysis reveals failures in measurement interpretation, physical reasoning, and response formatting. By evaluating evidence selection separately from final answers, our benchmark reveals limitations in physical reasoning that conventional answer accuracy can overlook.
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All authors Sourajit Saha, Shubhashis Roy Dipta, Nobin Sarwar, Shaswati Saha, Yuxuan Jiang, Siyuan Li, Qiheng Wang

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from eess.IV

Exponential Pixelating Integral transform with dual fractal features for enhanced chest X-ray abnormality detection

Naveenraj Kamalakannan, Sri Ram Macharla, M Kanimozhi et al. (+1 more)

The heightened prevalence of respiratory disorders, particularly exacerbated by a significant upswing in fatalities due to the novel coronavirus, underscores the critical need for early detection and timely intervention. This imperative is paramount, possessing the potential to profoundly impact and safeguard numerous lives. Medically, chest radiography stands out as an essential and economically viable medical imaging approach for diagnosing and assessing the severity of diverse Respiratory Disorders. However, their detection in Chest X-Rays is a cumbersome task even for well-trained radiologists owing to low contrast issues, overlapping of the tissue structures, subjective variability, and the presence of noise. To address these issues, a novel analytical model termed Exponential Pixelating Integral is introduced for the automatic detection of infections in Chest X-Rays in this work. Initially, the presented Exponential Pixelating Integral enhances the pixel intensities to overcome the low-contrast issues that are then polar-transformed followed by their representation using the locally invariant Mandelbrot and Julia fractal geometries for effective distinction of structural features. The collated features labeled Exponential Pixelating Integral with dually characterized fractal features are then classified by the non-parametric multivariate adaptive regression splines to establish an ensemble model between each pair of classes for effective diagnosis of diverse diseases. Rigorous analysis of the proposed classification framework on large medical benchmarked datasets showcases its superiority over its peers by registering a higher classification accuracy and F1 scores ranging from 98.46 to 99.45% and 96.53-98.10% respectively, making it a precise and interpretable automated system for diagnosing respiratory disorders.
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All authors Naveenraj Kamalakannan, Sri Ram Macharla, M Kanimozhi, M S Sudhakar

Computer Vision

CamPilot: A Multi-Agent Cinematic Assistant for Camera-Controlled Movie Generation

Yang Wu, Stefano Petrangeli, Ishita Dasgupta et al. (+1 more)

The integration of large language models (LLMs) into video generation has enabled rapid text-to-video creation and improved visual quality. However, it still falls short of professional filmmaking, where cinematographic language is less refined than human-crafted camera work and multi-shot continuity remains challenging. To address these limitations, we introduce CamPilot, a multi-agent framework that integrates cinematographic planning and camera-work control to produce more coherent, logically structured, and human-aesthetic movies. CamPilot adopts a GRPO-based learning paradigm to learn camera work planning from 14K real-world professional movies, internalizing motion patterns and composition principles that support reasoning over shooting techniques (e.g., camera angle, motion, and focal behavior) and cross-shot relationships for controllable camera-viewpoint generation. Multiple agents further collaborate and evolve to improve overall output quality. To support this work and further studies in this domain, we establish CamEval, a benchmark for evaluating camera work quality and cinematic engagement. Empirical results show that CamPilot outperforms state-of-the-art text-to-movie generation methods on cinematographic control and quality, highlighting the impact of professional camera design on movie generation.
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All authors Yang Wu, Stefano Petrangeli, Ishita Dasgupta, Yu Shen

Computer Vision

HiPerViT: A Hierarchical Perceiver-Vision Transformer Architecture for Multi-Scale Texture Recognition

João Pedro C. A. de Sá and Odemir Martinez Bruno

Texture recognition remains challenging for modern vision models because discriminative evidence is often carried by higher-order spatial statistics rather than by object shape alone. While Vision Transformers provide strong long-range modeling capacity, their standard object-centric representations do not explicitly expose such statistical structure, which limits texture sensitivity in fine-grained recognition settings. We present HiPerViT, a compact vision-only architecture that injects an explicit second-order statistical prior into a transformer-based recognition pipeline. The method combines global and local image views with a compact bilinear descriptor encoded as a statistical token, and integrates this token with first-order spatial representations through Perceiver-style latent distillation. This design enables direct interaction between spatial tokens and second-order feature co-occurrence statistics, providing the model with explicit access to texture-relevant information without requiring multimodal pretraining or ensemble construction. Across six texture recognition benchmarks, HiPerViT achieves consistent improvements over strong vision-only baselines under the reported evaluation protocols, including gains of +3.05 percentage points on DTD, +10.48 on GTOS-Mobile, and +10.10 on 1200Tex. Beyond benchmark performance, our analyses show that these gains are largely invariant to the backbone depth used to extract second-order statistics and to the ordering of interaction and distillation stages. This pattern suggests that the primary source of improvement is not a specific fusion topology, but the explicit availability of second-order statistical information as a first-class representational signal. These results support explicit statistical tokenization as an effective and robust design principle for texture-centric visual recognition.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.RO

IMLE-VLA: Fast Single-Step Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Policies

Kian Hosseinkhani, Qinhe Peng, George Shramko et al. (+6 more)

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies leverage pretrained vision-language backbones to achieve strong cross-task generalization. A leading design couples this backbone with a dedicated continuous action head trained via diffusion or flow matching. However, such heads rely on iterative multi-step sampling, for example 10 Euler steps in $\pi_{0.5}$. This creates an inference bottleneck that produces stop-and-go movement in the robot and slower task completion. We introduce IMLE-VLA, which replaces the iterative action head with a single-step conditional generator trained via conditional Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (cIMLE). The cIMLE objective promotes multimodal action coverage, avoiding the mode collapse of naive regression heads while eliminating multi-step sampling entirely. When IMLE-VLA is applied to $\pi_{0.5}$, it increases inference frequency 3.67x (55 Hz vs. 15 Hz), enabling up to 11x higher action throughput. On the 40-task LIBERO benchmark, IMLE-VLA achieves the highest average success rate (98.0%) among all baselines while leading in inference frequency. Under the test-time perturbations of LIBERO-plus, IMLE-VLA retains $\pi_{0.5}$'s robustness while other baselines degrade sharply, confirming that the cIMLE head preserves generalization. Real-world experiments on a Franka Emika Panda across four tasks demonstrate smoother motion (2.2x to 3.0x lower jerk) and faster task completion, with IMLE-VLA outperforming $\pi_{0.5}$ on every task and reducing average VLA inference time per episode by 3.9x to 6.6x. Videos and code are available at https://kianhk6.github.io/IMLE-VLA/
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All authors Kian Hosseinkhani, Qinhe Peng, George Shramko, Mehran Aghabozorgi, Jianing Qian, Tristan Engst, Alireza Moazeni, Dinesh Jayaraman, Ke Li

Wednesday 9 September

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.CR

A Comprehensive Review of One-Pixel Attack: Research Status, Taxonomy, Applications, Regulation Policy and Future Directions

Mirza Niaz Morshed, Md. Masudul Islam, Galib Muhammad Shahriar Himel et al. (+3 more)

One-Pixel Attacks (OPAs) represent one of the most extreme demonstrations of adversarial fragility in deep learning, where modifying a single pixel can reliably induce high-confidence misclassification across domains such as medical diagnosis, autonomous driving, biometrics, and quantum communication. Despite their conceptual simplicity, OPAs remain underexamined in existing adversarial-attack surveys, which provide only fragmented or cursory coverage. This PRISMA-guided review synthesizes high-quality studies from 2017 to 2026 and delivers a unified, multi-axis taxonomy of OPA research spanning algorithmic foundations, black-box evolutionary optimization, emerging hybrid and program-synthesis attacks, defence mechanisms, interpretability tools, and domain-specific vulnerabilities. Our analysis reveals the dominance of Differential Evolution-based strategies, the rise of efficiency-optimized and saliency-guided methods, and persistent gaps in dataset diversity, transferability, and standardized evaluation. We summarized and assess defence paradigms including pixel restoration, anomaly detection, input-space transformations, and robust training highlighting their trade-offs in robustness, imperceptibility, and computational overhead. Building on these insights, we outline future research priorities involving selective pixel recovery, transformer-specific vulnerability analysis, saliency-driven optimization, and real-world domain-adaptive defences. We further propose a regulatory framework emphasizing robustness testing, incident disclosure, and AI security governance. This review establishes a comprehensive foundation for understanding, evaluating, and mitigating ultra-sparse adversarial threats in contemporary AI systems.
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All authors Mirza Niaz Morshed, Md. Masudul Islam, Galib Muhammad Shahriar Himel, Md. Aslam Uddin, Hui Liu, Md. Shafiqul Islam

Computer Vision

A Low Grounding Score Is Not an Ungrounded Judge: Identifying the Perceptibility Confound in Multimodal Oversight

Rasul Khanbayov and Hasan Kurban

Model judges now supervise multimodal systems at scale, filtering training data, selecting outputs, and supplying the reward that shapes multimodal reasoning models. Trusting one means first checking that it uses its evidence, and that check is itself worth scrutinizing, so we ask whether a counterfactual probe of visual grounding measures what it claims to. The probe edits the image so the ground truth flips, holds the reasoning trace fixed, and asks whether the verdict follows. We formalize it as the Verdict Grounding Score and show it cannot be read the way such scores are read. A verdict responds only to an edit that reaches the judge's decision-relevant reading, so the score is capped by how perceptible the edit is, and unless editing makes the attribute easier to read, the error is one-sided: the score can only make a judge look less grounded than it is. The practical failure is therefore a false alarm, an auditor discarding a usable overseer. Under assumptions we state, we show this missing quantity is not merely bounded but identified from three quantities the same audit protocol already collects, which makes the false-alarm rate directly measurable rather than merely a concern. Auditing nine judges, we find the predicted ordering holds strictly across our entire primary pool, and the typical judge there acts on only about half of the edits whose attribute it can otherwise resolve. Applying a conservative rejection threshold certifies several cells as false alarms outright, the clearest being a judge that detects the injected error essentially every time while still scoring as if it had not used the image at all. The rule that follows is that an image-side counterfactual score should never be reported alone: a detection probe on the unedited image upper-bounds it, certifies its false alarms, and costs nothing extra to run.
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Computer Vision

Harnessing Image Question Dependence for Better VLM Test-time Reinforcement Learning

Xinrui He, Ting-Wei Li, Junting Wang et al. (+4 more)

Test-time reinforcement learning can adapt vision-language models (VLMs) to unlabeled target data, but its effectiveness is fundamentally limited by the reliability of self-generated learning signals. To assess the reliability of consensus-based learning signals, we analyze VLM test-time reinforcement learning across diverse VQA datasets and model sizes, revealing two limitations. First, gains from consensus-based test-time training largely come from answer normalization rather than content correction. Second, many initial VLM responses are incorrect due to the model's limited ability to jointly use the image and the question; consensus rewards derived from these outputs may preserve the resulting grounding errors rather than correct them. Motivated by these, we propose TTIQ, a test-time reinforcement learning framework that harnesses image-question dependence for better vlm adaptation. TTIQ teacher-forces each sampled response under the original image-question pair and its image- and question-ablated variants, using the resulting token-level likelihood changes to estimate dependence on each input. It combines image and question dependence with calibrated confidence to construct a response-level reward that favors jointly grounded responses, and uses the token-level signals to assign greater positive policy credit to tokens supported by both inputs. This design favors responses that are jointly grounded in the image and the question and sufficiently confident, rather than merely popular. Experiments across eight VQA datasets and multiple VLM sizes show that TTIQ achieves the best average performance at every model scale. It further generalizes across VLM families, while models trained on one dataset improve performance on unseen datasets without further training.
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All authors Xinrui He, Ting-Wei Li, Junting Wang, Mengting Ai, Xinyu He, Hanghang Tong, Jingrui He

Computer Vision

VectorHarness: Recovering Editable, Relation-Preserving Structure from Scientific Graphics

Jiahao Tang, Yiren Song and Alex Jinpeng Wang

Converting scientific graphics into editable representations remains a challenging problem for image-to-code generation because of their heterogeneous elements and complex layouts. Recent multi-agent reconstruction systems have advanced this line of work, but often follow a copy-paste paradigm: the reconstructed image closely resembles the original, while complex regions remain effectively uneditable. We instead formulate a different objective, raster-to-authoring reconstruction, which aims to recover an authoring representation that supports native, customized editing rather than mere visual replication. To this end, we present VectorHarness, a multi-agent framework for raster-to-authoring reconstruction that recovers heterogeneous components using type-appropriate native representations. Text, formulas, shapes, connectors, icons, charts, and tables are reconstructed as natively editable objects, while intrinsically image-based regions remain raster content. To systematically evaluate reconstruction quality, we introduce VectorHarness-Bench, which jointly assesses rendering fidelity, raster fallback coverage, executable object edits, and relation-preserving edits. Experiments show that VectorHarness improves executable edit success and relation preservation, reduces avoidable raster fallback, and maintains high visual fidelity across heterogeneous graphics.
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Computer Vision

Reliable Egocentric Action Anticipation via Temporal Reliability Suppression and Compositional Graph Decoding

Mahsa Mohammadi and Sareh Rowlands

Wearable action anticipation systems must remain reliable despite missing frames, masking, and sensor noise, yet existing egocentric anticipation methods largely assume clean observations. We identify two complementary failure modes under temporal corruption: unreliable temporal evidence during encoding and implausible, low-support verb-noun compositions during decoding. We address them with a lightweight framework combining Temporal Reliability Suppression (TRS) and Robust Verb-Noun Graph (RVG) decoding. TRS predicts a per-frame suppression score from the projected input embedding and uses it as a learned key-side attention penalty at every encoder block and to derive reliability-weighted temporal pooling. RVG re-ranks verb-noun pairs using a PMI-based compatibility graph constructed from training labels. Under corruption-augmented training, TRS+CA+RVG reaches 29.1% average corrupted accuracy and 88.2% relative robustness across six corruptions, including three mechanisms absent during training, while reducing rare verb-noun predictions from 15.4% to 1.1%. Multi-seed and diagnostic experiments show that TRS responds to synthetic masking; shuffled-graph and frequency-only controls further indicate that RVG gains depend on genuine pairwise compatibility rather than marginal-frequency effects alone.
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Computer Vision

Target-Checked Reliability Score Refinement for Video Question Answering

Guoxiang Ren and Rohitash Chandra

Video-language models can answer multiple-choice questions with high confidence yet be wrong. We study whether answer-level reliability scores can be improved under target shift without retraining the models or changing their answers. We collect option-probability lists from three fixed video-language models under four deterministic video samplings and represent cross-view changes and cross-model agreement as a response graph. Using a labeled target pilot, we compare the original score, defined as the probability assigned to the chosen answer, with a histogram-based gradient-boosting (HGB) score trained on the development datasets and a regularized logistic-regression score trained on the target pilot. A candidate replaces the original score only when repeated video-level checks indicate a positive, stable improvement. We develop this rule on public VideoQA benchmarks and Video Hallucination Diagnosis (VHD), a controlled diagnostic dataset for shared high-confidence errors. Ranking quality is measured by the area under the risk-coverage curve (AURC), where lower is better. On a held-out 963-question HERBench split, the method reduces mean AURC across the three models by 16.64% (95% confidence interval (CI), 12.12 to 22.61%); the smallest model-level gain is 11.39%. On a separate held-out 911-question Perception Test split, the mean reduction is 18.87% (95% CI, 15.43 to 22.14%). For InternVL3.5, the target check retains the original scores. Using the same outputs, the method outperforms seven training-free baselines in mean AURC on both datasets. It also improves AUROC, reduces calibration error, and lowers the error rate at 50% coverage by 6.50 and 6.58 percentage points.
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Computer Vision

LLaDA-UI: Bringing Block-wise Diffusion to Vision-Language GUI Agents

Zhangxuan Gu, Haoxing Chen, Qi Qin et al. (+17 more)

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) achieve high decoding efficiency through block-parallel, arbitrary-order generation, making them attractive for latency-sensitive applications. GUI agents represent a natural testbed for this paradigm, as they must repeatedly perceive screen states and emit structured, spatially grounded actions in real time. However, whether dLLMs can be extended into capable multimodal GUI agents while preserving their parallel decoding advantage remains an open question. We present LLaDA-UI, a 16.7B-parameter MoE-based, block-wise diffusion vision-language GUI agent. LLaDA-UI follows a two-stage training pipeline: general multimodal pre-training aligns a native-resolution vision encoder with the LLaDA2.0-mini-base diffusion language backbone, followed by GUI-agent supervised fine-tuning on diverse mobile, desktop, web, and grounding data. Across widely adopted grounding benchmarks and navigation benchmarks spanning multiple platforms, LLaDA-UI substantially outperforms Qwen2.5-VL-7B and surpasses Qwen3-VL-8B on four of six reported GUI benchmarks. These results establish block-wise diffusion as a practical generative paradigm for multimodal GUI agents.
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All authors Zhangxuan Gu, Haoxing Chen, Qi Qin, Yi Xin, Kai Gan, Lin Liu, Long Cui, Xiaomei Wang, Beitong Zhou, Yunzhu Zhang, Zhengwen Zeng, Changlong Gao, Weizhi Chen, Rongchao Zhang, Haoyuan Wu, Shuheng Shen, Changhua Meng, Weiqiang Wang, Jianguo Li, Zhenzhong Lan

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from eess.IV

Seamless Whole Slide Label-Free Virtual Staining

Dou Hoon Kwark, Kianoush Falahkheirkhah, Ji-hun Oh et al. (+3 more)

Label-free virtual staining offers a compelling, non-destructive alternative to standard histopathology; however, its clinical adoption is hindered by the computational bottlenecks inherent to processing gigapixel Whole Slide Images (WSIs). Current deep learning approaches require patch-based inference to avoid memory constraints, which disrupts global tissue continuity and introduces tiling artifacts–displaying visible seams and color shifts. To address this, we introduce the Consistency Memory Bank (COMB), a novel label-free virtual staining framework that enforces spatial and channel consistency across tiles without memory bottlenecks. COMB decouples context storage from computation, utilizing a dynamic retrieval mechanism to fetch feature representations from adjacent tiles. This enables a retrieval-based context integration strategy that adopts local padding to resolve spatial discontinuities and neighbor-aware channel attention to stabilize statistical drift. Further optimized with a sliding window schedule to ensure minimal memory overhead, our method demonstrates superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines, achieving significant improvements in both perceptual fidelity and tiling consistency, while suggesting its downstream utility in tumor segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/dou0000/COMB.
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All authors Dou Hoon Kwark, Kianoush Falahkheirkhah, Ji-hun Oh, Shirui Luo, Volodymyr Kindratenko, Rohit Bhargava

Computer Vision

Symmetry-aware super-resolution of crystal orientation maps via invariant latent-space learning

Umang Garg, Warren Zamudio, McLean P. Echlin et al. (+3 more)

Crystal-orientation maps are physical fields defined only up to crystal symmetry; electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) resolves them experimentally, but acquisition-time constraints limit spatial resolution. Unlike conventional images, EBSD data lie on the quotient space $\mathrm{SO}(3)/G$, where $G$ is the crystal-symmetry group. Standard Euclidean interpolation can therefore mix symmetry-equivalent representations and blur grain boundaries. We introduce the Symmetry-Group-Aware Super-Resolution Attention Network (SG-SRAN), which incorporates crystal symmetry and boundary preservation by design. A frozen, locally isometric encoder maps equivalent orientations to a common latent representation in which Euclidean distance approximates misorientation. Super-resolution is performed in this space, with each high-resolution token restricted to a feature-consistent local support to prevent cross-boundary mixing. A dictionary-based decoder then recovers valid orientations. Across FCC and HCP benchmarks, SG-SRAN matches 15-16 million parameter backbones using only 27-49k trainable parameters, while achieving the lowest p68 errors, highest inverse-pole-figure fidelity, and zero-shot transfer to unseen alloys.
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All authors Umang Garg, Warren Zamudio, McLean P. Echlin, Samantha H. Daly, Tresa M. Pollock, B.S. Manjunath

Computer Vision

Evaluation of Vision-Language Models Across Diverse Coastal Environments

Seth Knoop, Chad R. Samuelson, Gabriel R. Slade et al. (+2 more)

Vision-language models (VLMs) enable robotic per- ception by associating visual observations with natural-language concepts. Yet their performance in coastal environments remains largely unexplored. We introduce a densely labeled coastal dataset containing more than 1,000 images collected across seven missions in three regions of Oahu, Hawaii, with 18 semantic classes and over 7,400 annotated instances. We evaluate seven modern VLMs through three complementary experiments mea- suring text-to-mask, mask-to-mask, and mask-to-text alignment. Broad landscape classes are generally recognized more accurately than conventional object and coastal classes, with coastal con- cepts presenting the greatest challenge. However, comparisons of shared conventional classes across coastal and terrestrial datasets reveal no consistent performance difference attributable solely to environmental context. Mask-to-mask matching also remains similar across conventional and coastal classes, while alternative textual labels substantially improve recognition of several coastal concepts. These results suggest that lower performance on coastal classes (at least on the objects/query categories evaluated) is heavily influenced by segmentation and linguistic representation.
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All authors Seth Knoop, Chad R. Samuelson, Gabriel R. Slade, Brady Moon, Joshua G. Mangelson

Computer Vision

Are We Really Doing Few-Shot Learning? A Critical Examination of Pre-Training Assumptions

Alejandro Galan-Cuenca, Marcelo Saval-Calvo and Antonio Javier Gallego

Few-shot learning is commonly evaluated under protocols that pre-train a model on a large auxiliary set whose classes are disjoint from the target episodes yet drawn from the same visual domain. This paper examines whether such protocols truly reflect low-data learning. We systematically compare no pre-training, class-disjoint in-domain pre-training, supervised out-of-domain pre-training, and label-free out-of-domain pre-training across eight datasets, three few-shot architectures, and multiple way-shot settings. Our results show that class disjointness alone is insufficient to remove the influence of target-domain data. In-domain pre-training improves over no pre-training by 33.41 percentage points on average, whereas supervised out-of-domain pre-training yields 23.75 percentage points, revealing a 9.66-point optimistic bias associated with domain overlap. Although out-of-domain pre-training is more realistic in applications where target-domain data are scarce, its effectiveness depends strongly on the compatibility between source and target domains. We further show that labeled source data are not strictly required, with an augmentation-based label-free strategy reaching an average gain of 27.71 percentage points and closely matching supervised out-of-domain pre-training at 27.97 percentage points. Finally, we introduce a descriptor-based source-selection strategy that estimates source-domain suitability before pre-training, reaching a median gap of only 1.37 percentage points to oracle selection. These findings highlight the need to move beyond in-domain pre-training as the default few-shot evaluation protocol, since it can overestimate performance in realistic scenarios where target-domain data are scarce.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from eess.IV

Scale-Aware 3D Deep Learning for Robust Brain Metastasis Detection in Multimodal MRI

Sylvain Jaume, Hongming Wang and Simon K. Warfield

Detecting brain metastases in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) remains challenging because lesions vary widely in size and appearance, with very small metastases occupying only a minute fraction of a three-dimensional input. We investigate whether combining different spatial fields of view (FOVs) improves lesion detection in multimodal MRI and present a scale-aware 3D deep-learning framework. The method uses independently trained $96^3$ and $64^3$ 3D U-Nets whose whole-volume probability maps are combined by weighted late fusion. This design allows us to study the effect of spatial context separately from image resolution and modality choice. On a 97-patient development cohort, cross-FOV fusion improved lesion-level precision and F1 while substantially reducing false positives relative to the individual models. A same-FOV ensemble control showed that these gains were not explained solely by averaging independently trained networks, supporting a contribution from complementary spatial context. An exploratory cross-FOV agreement filter reduced false positives but did not improve overall F1. These results support cross-FOV probability fusion as a simple and computationally practical strategy for improving the precision-false-positive trade-off in 3D brain-metastasis detection.
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Computer Vision

BodyCam-VQA: Enhanced Body-Worn Camera Video Captioning via Multimodal Reasoning and Probe Question Generation

Karish Gupta, Matthew Alex, Alex Li et al. (+6 more)

Police body-worn camera (BWC) footage has emerged as a critical aspect of law enforcement that ensures legal transparency, officer accountability, and the protection of civil rights. However, effectively processing this data remains a significant challenge due to its multimodal video format. BWC videos, in many cases, comprise chaotic scenes with low visual quality, rapid movement/interactions, and high-noise audio that make visual understanding a challenge for even SOTA multimodal models. Current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) frequently overlook critical forensic details, such as the presence of valuable evidence or the latent nuances of suspect-officer interactions, which are vital for fair legal outcomes and civilian/officer safety. To address these limitations, we propose an Adaptive Visual Question Answering (VQA) framework engineered for high-stakes law enforcement. Our framework employs a structured reasoning approach to extract fine-grained visual evidence that traditional captioning systems fail to capture. We experiment with multiple question generation models, including foundation models and fine-tuned open-weight models, to observe performance variation among question generation model implementations. Our results demonstrate that this VQA-driven architecture provides a more reliable, objective, and detailed record of enforcement events, ultimately serving as a powerful tool to protect both law enforcement officers and the public through AI-assisted forensic clarity.
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All authors Karish Gupta, Matthew Alex, Alex Li, Yang Wu, Yun-Wei Chu, Kashif Munir, Xiaotian Zhou, Zhengping Ji, Xiaozhong Liu

Computer Vision

Overpainting: Localized Context-aware Diffusion Image Editing

Sam Sartor, Iliyan Georgiev, Michael Fischer et al. (+2 more)

We present "overpainting", an image editing operation which offers both control over the location of the edit and awareness of the previous content in that location. The overpainted area is given by a trimap, where white-annotated pixels must be edited, gray-annotated pixels may be edited, and black-annotated pixels must not be edited. This enables both precise and loose control, depending on user intent. We implement overpainting by adapting a pretrained image editing diffusion model using a combination of joint attention and low-rank adaption across input images with attention-dropout to balance the information flow between noise, source and mask images. We present a novel, automated, training data generation pipeline that (1) generates a set of candidate image pairs leveraging existing language-based editing models, (2) carefully curates those pairs, and (3) extracts a trimap from each usable pair. We demonstrate the versatility of our overpainting model on a wide range of editing tasks.
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All authors Sam Sartor, Iliyan Georgiev, Michael Fischer, Valentin Deschaintre, Pieter Peers

Computer Vision

TrajFusionNet+: Transformer-Based Prediction of Pedestrian Crossing Intention via Fusion of Trajectory Representations and Scene Graphs

François G. Landry and Moulay A. Akhloufi

The pedestrian crossing intention task involves predicting whether pedestrians are likely to cross the road from the point of view of an autonomous vehicle. We introduce TrajFusionNet+, a novel transformer-based model for pedestrian crossing intention prediction. TrajFusionNet+ combines sequential and visual representations of pedestrian trajectory with a graph-based representation of the scene context in order to predict pedestrian crossing intention. The proposed architecture builds upon our previous model, TrajFusionNet, and comprises three branches: a Sequence Attention Module (SAM), which processes a sequential representation of past and predicted pedestrian trajectories; a Visual Attention Module (VAM), which utilizes a visual representation of the pedestrian trajectories by overlaying observed and predicted bounding boxes onto scene images; and a Graph Attention Module (GAM), which extracts pedestrian-centric graphs from segmented scene images and captures the relational dependencies between pedestrians and traffic elements. TrajFusionNet+ achieves improved state-of-the-art performance on the two most widely used pedestrian crossing intention datasets, PIE and JAAD. Furthermore, we introduce a new evaluation protocol in which models are trained jointly on the PIE and JAAD datasets but evaluated separately on each. Under this setting, TrajFusionNet+ demonstrates superior generalization compared to existing approaches.
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Computer Vision

How Much Velocity Does Off-Ball Space Value Need? A Broadcast-Viewport Benchmark

Seongjin Choi

Velocity-aware pitch control is standard, but under a broadcast viewport half the players are off screen and on-screen velocities come from a drifting calibration. We ask at which layer of broadcast off-ball analysis velocity changes the answer. Inheriting our off-screen imputation protocol (three Metrica matches, 44 m viewport, block-bootstrap CIs), we score four velocity regimes – none, viewport-legal observed, true-for-visible, true-for-all – against a velocity-aware ground truth at three layers: imputation, the control surface, and team verdicts. Velocity is nearly useless for imputation (-0.2 pp against a 12–14 pp velocity-free surface MAE), first-order for the surface (-1.5 to -1.8 pp, 11–15% of that MAE), and ten times smaller for verdicts (-0.12 to -0.19 pp). The velocity that matters is the visible channel: perfect occluded-player velocity adds 2–6% of the visible gain, and no last-seen decay policy we tested exceeds that. Omitting velocity blurs the surface (per-frame |e| 2.2–2.6 pp) with small time-averaged bias (per cell <=0.4 pp), whereas imputation error is a structured bias against the defending team's deep zone (5–9 pp). At a fixed velocity window, a noise ladder of eleven jitter settings, including sigma_v-matched pairs, is ordered to first order by one velocity-noise axis sigma_v with break-even ~1 m/s; eleven SoccerNet-GSR clips from one match through our pipeline measure sigma_v=1.65 m/s yet recover 24–36% of the benefit: 43% of the variance is frame-common, which the surface tolerates, and the residual is heavy-tailed and clustered, which Gaussian controls matched on component RMS do not reproduce (+0.03 vs. +0.36). The share of velocity-free error that velocity removes grows with viewport width (7% at 36 m, 21% at 60 m): fix imputation on tight shots, velocity on wide ones. Code and logs are released.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.LG

RiVaT-Fuse: Reliability-Calibrated Variational Tensor Fusion with Matrix-Valued Trust for Multimodal Prediction under Modality Uncertainty

Yingfan Xu, Tieming Liu and Ye Liang

Multimodal prediction from images and structured metadata requires integrating complementary evidence whose reliability can vary across samples and latent directions. A single confidence weight per modality cannot capture this directional variation. We propose RiVaT-Fuse, a reliability-calibrated variational tensor fusion framework that formulates fusion as sample-wise latent-state estimation. For each image-metadata pair, the fused representation minimizes a quadratic objective combining agreement with modality embeddings, structured cross-modal interactions, and regularization. Positive-definite, low-rank-plus-diagonal trust matrices are conditioned on learned state descriptors and metadata completeness, allowing modality contributions to vary across latent directions. Additive, multiplicative, and relational interactions model cross-modal dependencies within the latent estimation objective. The resulting system admits a unique solution computed through a differentiable linear solve. A first-order analysis with fixed trust operators relates latent sensitivity to system conditioning and perturbations in modality embeddings and interactions. The framework further incorporates a state-binned entropic surrogate for conditional distributionally robust learning and task-coupled quadratic prediction heads. We instantiate RiVaT-Fuse on mBRSET, pairing retinal images with clinical and demographic metadata for diabetic retinopathy grading, diabetic macular edema detection, and referable-status prediction. Comparisons with unimodal and representation-level fusion baselines assess the predictive utility of the complete framework across these related clinical tasks.
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Computer Vision

Two-Parameter Flow Map Learning for Continuous-Time Diffeomorphic Image Registration

Mohammadjavad Matinkia and Nilanjan Ray

Diffeomorphic image registration is central to medical image analysis, enabling anatomically consistent alignment across subjects. Most learning-based diffeomorphic methods model autonomous ODEs(ordinary differential equations) by parameterizing a stationary velocity field and recovering deformations via scaling-and-squaring. While non-autonomous ODEs with time-dependent velocities increase expressiveness, existing approaches rely on numerical integration to implicitly enforce flow structure that entangles model expressiveness with discretization accuracy. We propose a framework to directly learn the continuous-time solution of a non-autonomous ODE formulated as a two-parameterflow map. By enforcing cocycle consistency, a fundamental structural property of time-varying flows, we learn the flow maps without time discretization and velocity integration during training. The framework recovers diffeomorphic mappings at inference using a small number of compositions. Our proposed framework seamlessly incorporates standard registration backbones and improves alignment accuracy consistently across nine datasets while preserving diffeomorphic structure. Notably, the proposed method achieves an average Dice improvement of 2.1% on brain MRI benchmarks, a 12% TRE reduction on lung CT, and a 2.6% Dice gain on cardiac MRI and ultrasound datasets.
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Computer Vision

Shedding Light: A Benchmark for Evaluating Lighting Understanding in Generative Image Models

Justine Giroux, Jack Oliver Hilliard, Yannick Hold-Geoffroy et al. (+2 more)

Accurate modelling of illumination is central to realistic image synthesis and scene understanding. Yet, there is little exploration into whether image generative models are good at this task or whether physical plausibility remains a key challenge for them. Clearly, significant progress has been made in realistic image synthesis, but do models truly understand lighting in a physically accurate manner? To answer this question, this work proposes a benchmark to assess the lighting understanding and harmonisation capabilities of generative models. Our key insight is that evaluating lighting understanding for such models only requires testing how well they insert novel objects into real photographs whilst maintaining consistent illumination. To do so, we use a multi-illumination dataset with images containing simple objects serving as “light probes”, and prompt models to inpaint the same object onto the original image, then compare the generated results against the ground-truth light probes. We then estimate the lighting direction, colour and radiance distribution from the inpainted probes, providing a quantitative measure of illumination accuracy and photometric realism. Our work establishes a scalable evaluation protocol to systematically assess how well generative models capture and reproduce real-world lighting, offering a foundation for benchmarking the photometric accuracy of any future models. All code and data are available at https://lvsn.github.io/SheddingLight/ .
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All authors Justine Giroux, Jack Oliver Hilliard, Yannick Hold-Geoffroy, Javier Vazquez-Corral, Jean-François Lalonde

Computer Vision

GRADE: Single-Frame Generative Radar Depth Estimation Under Visual Degradation

Bin Zhao, Patrick Chiou and Nakul Garg

Dense 3D depth perception fails under smoke, fog, and darkness because optical sensors cannot penetrate airborne particulates. mmWave radar remains usable and measures range accurately under these conditions, but its small aperture limits angular resolution. We present GRADE, which grounds a pretrained generative prior in single-frame radar geometry to estimate high-fidelity metric depth. GRADE first maps raw 4D radar spectra to coarse metric depth. A latent diffusion backbone then recovers structural detail while conditioning every denoising step on this estimate. A pixel-space adapter uses residual camera cues when available and is trained across clear, smoke-degraded, and occluded inputs so the full output approaches the radar-conditioned path as visibility degrades. Trained and evaluated on ~95K frames across 12 buildings with real smoke, GRADE achieves an MAE of 0.303 m in clear scenes and 0.313 m under smoke, outperforming existing baselines. Code and datasets are available at https://phi-lab-rice.github.io/GRADE.
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Computer Vision

Meta-Learning for Data-Efficient Plant Growth Estimation via Vision Transformers and Fuzzy Clustering

Sheikh Hasan Elahi, Rusith Chamara Hathurusinghe Dewage, Habib Ullah et al. (+3 more)

Accurate plant growth estimation is essential for greenhouse monitoring, yet obtaining labeled data remains costly and time-consuming. To address this, we propose a few-shot regression framework that combines Vision Transformer (ViT) feature embeddings, clustering-based task construction, and gradient-based meta-learning, and show that task construction in embedding space is a primary driver of performance. The approach leverages an unlabeled image pool to organize data into structured tasks using fuzzy c-means clustering, enabling efficient learning from a small number of labeled samples. We systematically evaluate meta-learning methods and show that second-order methods (e.g., Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning variants such as MAML++) outperform classical baselines in the few-shot regime. Furthermore, intra-cluster support selection has a limited and dataset-dependent impact. Experiments on two plant datasets show that structured task design combined with meta-learning enables reliable plant growth estimation under severe label scarcity.
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All authors Sheikh Hasan Elahi, Rusith Chamara Hathurusinghe Dewage, Habib Ullah, Muhammad Salman Siddiqui, Rakibul Islam, Fadi Al Machot

Computer Vision

MHE-Former: Multi-Hypothesis Transformers via Entropy Maximization for 3D Mesh Recovery

Boshu Jia, Rongyu Chen, Linlin Yang et al. (+9 more)

Monocular 3D hand and body mesh recovery often suffers from severe occlusion and ambiguity. Traditional deterministic methods typically regress a single optimal solution, leading to overconfident predictions. In this paper, we introduce an exploration–exploitation paradigm for ambiguous mesh recovery with multi-hypothesis learning and selection. Specifically, during exploration, based on our probabilistic formulation and entropy maximization, we propose a novel multi-hypothesis method referred to as MHE-Former. It is a Transformer-based multi-hypothesis framework, ensuring high training efficiency and label friendliness while generating plausible and diverse hypotheses. During exploitation, we propose Hypothesis Selection, a context-aware process for multiple predictions. Especially leveraging VLM's powerful visual understanding and reasoning capabilities, it allows users to choose the most plausible and desired estimate with additional evidence and natural language intent. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in accuracy and diversity across multiple datasets. The user preference study further shows the practicality of our hypothesis selection process.
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All authors Boshu Jia, Rongyu Chen, Linlin Yang, Zihao Liu, Yingjie Chen, Zhongqun Zhang, Zhulin Tao, Shaohui Lin, Xiaoyu Wu, Libiao Jin, Baochang Zhang, Angela Yao