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Tuesday 15 September

Computer Vision

FRPSS: Feature Rearrangement in Pre-Shape Space for Single-Image Generation

Generative models trained on a single image often struggle to balance global structural integrity and local diversity. Existing single-image generation methods commonly rely on random noise to drive the generation process and lack explicit global structural constraints, making the generated results prone to spatial structural misalignment when structural variations occur. To address the issue, Feature Rearrangement in Pre-Shape Space for Single-Image Generation (FRPSS) is proposed in this paper. The core of FRPSS is the Manifold Structural Rearrangement with Feature Augmentation on Geodesic Surface (MSR-FAGS) module. MSR-FAGS replaces the randomly initialized features of the low-scale generator with rearranged Pre-Shape features and uses the features to guide image generation at subsequent scales, thereby reducing the risk of structural misalignment. To support downstream tasks such as stylization, a Scale-adaptive Sliding-window Patch Extraction (SSPE) strategy is further designed, and a directional Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training supervision module with SSPE (CLIP-SSPE) is constructed. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that FRPSS achieves the best Single Image Fréchet Inception Distance (SIFID) scores on all three datasets while maintaining competitive Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS). Further qualitative experiments verify the effectiveness of FRPSS across multiple downstream tasks with the CLIP-SSPE module.
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Computer Vision

FLAT: Resampling Image and Text into 1D Flexible-Length Aligned Transmodal Tokens for Retrieval and Generation

Traditional multimodal representation learning and generation are two stages: a contrastive or self-supervised visual encoder is trained first, followed by a separate downstream generative model. This setup bottlenecks generative performance behind frozen embeddings. To bridge this gap, we revisit joint multimodal representation learning and generation to produce linearly interpolatable embeddings that are directly consumable by generative decoders. We present FLAT (Flexible-Length Aligned Transmodal representations), a representation pre-training framework that jointly optimizes a shared multimodal encoder alongside downstream text-to-image (T2I) and image-to-text (I2T) decoders. By combining contrastive alignment with bidirectional cross-modal generative objectives, FLAT ensures its representations function as both discriminative semantic descriptors and generative conditions. Architecturally, FLAT maps visual and textual inputs into a unified continuous 1D sequence space, applying nested dropout over prefix-K tokens to enable dynamic output lengths. A single pre-training stage allows FLAT to perform cross-modal retrieval and generation across variable prefix K, achieving a T2I GenEval score of 71.1. Task-specific fine-tuning aligns model performance with state-of-the-art baselines: 83.1 GenEval on T2I generation; 40.5 BLEU-4 and 138.6 CIDEr on MS-COCO image captioning; and Recall@5 scores of 86.8 (I2T) / 75.8 (T2I) on MS-COCO alongside 98.3 (I2T) / 93.6 (T2I) on Flickr30K. Finally, qualitative evaluations demonstrate that FLAT representations natively support linear interpolation, latent space arithmetic, and zero-shot composed retrieval.
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All authors Guangyu Sun, Shlok Kumar Mishra, Wentao Bao, Robert Zhenheng Yang, Xiao Wang, Xiyuan Wang, Yujunrong Ma, Chen Yuan, Max Xiangjun Fan, Jun Xiao, Jianpeng Cheng

Computer Vision

GraLoD: Graphics-Inspired Continuous Level-of-Detail Learning for Image Restoration

The spatial support required for image restoration varies across degradation types, image regions, and reconstruction stages. However, most existing methods rely on predefined multi-scale hierarchies and aggregate features through fixed fusion or attention, leaving the representation scale itself largely determined by the network architecture. This limitation becomes more pronounced when a task-specific backbone is extended to heterogeneous degradations in all-in-one restoration. Inspired by level-of-detail (LOD) rendering in computer graphics, we propose GraLoD, a plug-and-play framework that treats restoration scale as a spatially varying and stage-dependent continuous variable. GraLoD reuses the native encoder hierarchy, aligns its multi-scale features into a shared LOD representation space, and predicts a stage-conditioned LOD field at each decoder stage. Each spatial location then continuously queries only two neighboring representation levels, enabling the effective restoration scale to adapt to both local image content and reconstruction progress. To prevent degenerate or arbitrary scale selection, we further introduce minimal-sufficient footprint calibration (MSFC) together with structure-aware regularization (SAR) to encourage restoration-effective and spatially coherent LOD assignments. GraLoD can be directly integrated into existing restoration backbones without redesigning their fundamental feature-processing blocks. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in task-specific and all-in-one restoration.
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Computer Vision

Efficient Text-to-Image Generation: An Adaptive Step Schedule Controller for Diffusion Models

Text-to-image diffusion models often use a fixed number of denoising steps, balancing time costs and image quality. However, the optimal number of steps depends on the complexity of the input text prompt. We propose an adaptive diffusion controller that dynamically adjusts the number of steps to generate high-quality images efficiently, without additional model training. By leveraging a mixture of step schedules with varying step sizes and evaluating the error term discrepancy at each timestep, our method transitions between schedules to optimize performance. Experiments on COCO and DiffusionDB show that our approach reduces inference time while maintaining visual fidelity, offering a more efficient alternative for text-to-image diffusion models.
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All authors Kuluhan Binici, Cihan Acar, Shivam Aggarwal, Siying Liu, Tulika Mitra

Computer Vision

Counterfactual Reasoning for Robust Visual Question Answering

Modern Visual Question Answering (VQA) models often exploit spurious correlations in training data, leading to poor out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization due to language bias. Although counterfactual learning has shown promise, existing methods can be improved to better guide attention toward causal evidence and strengthen feature discrimination. To address this, we propose a novel training framework that enhances counterfactual contrastive learning for VQA. Our framework introduces three key contributions: (1) a three-stage curriculum for stable multi-objective optimization, (2) an enhanced Batch-Contrastive loss for more discriminative feature learning, and (3) two novel regularizers, Answer-Contrastive (AC) loss to refine the prediction space and Gradient-Discrepancy (GD) loss to enforce causal visual grounding. Our model achieves a competitive accuracy of 61.64% on the bias-sensitive VQA-CP v2 benchmark while maintaining 62.80% on the standard VQA v2 dataset, yielding a small generalization gap of 1.16%. This demonstrates a strong balance between OOD robustness and in-distribution performance.
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All authors Truong-Binh Duong, Thanh-Ngan Tran, Ngoc-Thao Nguyen, Bac Le

Computer Vision

Vision And Text Transformer For Predicting Answerability On Visual Question Answering

Answerability on Visual Question Answering is a novel and attractive task to predict answerable scores between images and questions in multi-modal data. Existing works often utilize a binary mapping from visual question answering systems into Answerability. It does not reflect the essence of this problem. Together with our consideration of Answerability in a regression task, we propose VT-Transformer, which exploits visual and textual features through Transformer architecture. Experimental results on VizWiz 2020 dataset show the effectiveness and robustness of VT-Transformer for Answerability on Visual Question Answering when comparing with competitive baselines.
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Computer Vision

Which Pretext Task Transfers? Self-Supervised Pretraining Objectives for Lung Ultrasound

Self-supervised learning (SSL) can reduce the need for labelled medical images, but the choice of pretext objective remains unclear for lung ultrasound (LUS). Contrastive learning, masked reconstruction, and joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPA) differ in the space in which their targets are defined, yet existing ultrasound studies compare them under different corpora, backbones, and evaluation protocols. We compare these three objective families using the same encoder backbone, pretraining corpus, optimisation schedule, and frozen-evaluation protocol. Encoders are pretrained on COVID-BLUeS LUS videos and evaluated with linear, $k$NN, and attentive probes at 5%, 10%, 50%, and 100% label budgets. Evaluation is performed on POCUS using patient-level five-fold cross-validation and on the independently acquired Mendeley-Uganda dataset, which is excluded from both pretraining and probe fitting. At the full label budget under linear probing, VideoMAE and V-JEPA achieve $66.5 \pm 13.1$ and $65.4 \pm 11.7$ balanced accuracy on POCUS, while MoCo achieves $42.1 \pm 1.2$. On Mendeley-Uganda, the ranking reverses: MoCo performs best at $62.7 \pm 1.0$, followed by VideoMAE at $53.8 \pm 2.8$, while V-JEPA falls near chance at $35.1 \pm 4.9$. These results show that POCUS probe accuracy alone does not identify the objective that transfers best across datasets. We also outline planned representation-level analyses to examine this reversal. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/moeinheidari7829/LUSVideoSSL.
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All authors Moein Heidari, Junbo Rao, Jai Choraria, Wenjin Chen, David J. Foran, Ilker Hacihaliloglu

Computer Vision

VPRef: A Cross-Domain Benchmark for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation

Rapid advancements in vision-language models have propelled Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation (RRSIS) to the forefront of Earth observation. However, practical deployments suffer severe performance degradation under a coupled dual-drift paradigm: visual domain drift from cross-spatial-resolution mismatches and spectral variations, alongside textual logic drift from unconstrained, variable user-input granularities. To mitigate these bottlenecks, this paper establishes the first cross-domain RRSIS benchmark, designated as the Vaihingen-Potsdam Referring (VPRef) dataset, comprising 46,972 language-image-annotation triplets organized into a three-tier linguistic hierarchy. Building upon this benchmark, we develop a tailored parameter-efficient domain adaptation baseline anchored on the Segment Anything Model (SAM3) via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Our framework counteracts visual distribution discrepancies through pseudo-label-driven self-training and addresses textual logic drift via random multi-granularity text prompt mixing. Crucially, the distribution of empirical metrics across ablative variants suggests a potential decoupling between cross-modal semantic robustification and visual domain alignment, demonstrating that linguistic variance drives fine-grained semantic invariance while pseudo-label propagation governs macro-scale spatial grid alignment. Extensive benchmarks demonstrate the proposed framework achieves superior cross-domain segmentation boundaries while modifying merely 1.08% of the foundational parameter footprint, establishing a robust baseline for future multi-modal remote sensing domain adaptation research. The dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/quanweiliu/VPRef.
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All authors Quanwei Liu, Tao Huang, Jiaqi Yang, Wei Xiang

Computer Vision

MDN-Control: Mask-Depth-Noise Guided Region Control for Multi-Subject Video Editing

Multi subject video editing modifies designated subjects while preserving non target content, but faces cross subject attribute leakage, and occlusion ambiguity. Existing approaches rely on masks and struggle to distinguish overlapping subjects or ensure consistent generation. To address these limitations, we propose MDN-Control, a training free framework jointly controlling target localization, occlusion geometry, and appearance initialization. Specifically, mask-guided localization provides consistent target localization, while depth-aware occlusion control resolves ambiguous boundaries between overlapping subjects. We further introduce noise latent prompting, which retrieves Gaussian initializations from a noise library for prompt relevant priors. Experiments on MSVBench show that MDN-Control achieves the lowest CM-Err and the highest Q-Edit, while maintaining competitive text alignment and temporal consistency, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining spatial, geometric, and latent priors for multi subject video editing.
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All authors Jiayi Yu, Xi Ye, Lina Wang, Yunkun Xia

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.GR

HairCS: Reconstructing Strand-Based Hair from Hair Cards

We present an automated pipeline that converts hair-card models into high-quality strand-based hairstyles. Given a collection of textured triangular or quad strips as input, our method produces a strand-based representation that preserves the original hairstyle while enriching it with fine-scale geometric detail and adhering to standard production requirements: strands originate from the scalp, roots are uniformly distributed, and the hair volume is plausibly filled. The resulting assets are directly compatible with strand-based rendering, physics-based simulation, and common grooming modifiers (e.g., clumping, curling, noise) for enhanced realism and artistic control. We validate our approach on a large and diverse set of hairstyles, including short and long hair, curly styles, and complex styles such as buns and ponytails.
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All authors Zixuan Lu, Tongtong Wang, Yuefan Shen, Zhongtian Zheng, Chenfanfu Jiang, Yin Yang, Kui Wu

Computer Vision

A multimodal large language model for evidence-based autism spectrum disorder screening

The clinical management of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) faces a bottleneck in early screening, mainly because trained specialists are scarce and conventional assessment tools are subjective. Here, we introduce ASDchat, a multimodal large language model designed for evidence-based ASD screening, which takes video, audio, and dialogue as input. ASDchat adopts a dual-branch architecture, where the decision branch generates screening probabilities and the evidence branch generates traceable, timestamped behavioral evidence aligned with the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS-2). The model was trained and evaluated on a dataset of 1,035 participants from 27 sites in China, which covered typically developing (TD) children, children with ASD, and children with other developmental disorders. For ASD versus TD, ASDchat reached an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.953 $\pm$ 0.021. On 6 held-out sites that were not used for training, the mean AUC was 0.961. Furthermore, unsupervised clustering of the behavioral dimensions split the ASD cases into six subtypes with different phenotypic profiles, and ASDchat suggests an intervention for each subtype. ASDchat provides a feasible path for large-scale, evidence-based ASD screening in clinical practice.
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All authors Jun Chen, Qi Zhao, Yunliang Jiang, Shuqin Cao, Yunqiang Lin, Chenglong Jia, Qiang Guo, Guang Dai, Xiongtao Zhang, Mengmeng Wang, Xiaoyue Ma, Hui Wang, Wenguan Wang

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.LG

OPD-Aha: From Linguistic Momentum to Visual Reflection in Multimodal On-Policy Distillation

Privileged on-policy distillation improves multimodal reasoning by allowing a teacher to evaluate student trajectories using rich, training-only visual evidence. Both models score these trajectories while conditioning on the same student-generated prefix. When a student misinterprets an image early in a response, this accumulating erroneous rationale eventually pulls the teacher away from its visual evidence. The teacher and student converge on the same hallucination, causing standard cross-model supervision to collapse precisely where correction is most needed. We find that the teacher's visual corrective preference is not lost under this misleading agreement. Comparing the predictions of the identical teacher given the real image and a visual null reveals that the privileged evidence still pushes the model toward the correct interpretation. We introduce OPD-Aha, which reconstructs the distillation target directly from this isolated visual preference rather than relying on the fragile teacher-student discrepancy. This reconstructed target aggressively suppresses continuations that contradict the image. Trained with this objective, students learn to naturally interrupt their own flawed reasoning with reflection tokens such as wait and actually. After reflection, subsequent generation relies less on the accumulated erroneous text and more on the visual evidence. Correcting these trajectories mid-generation fundamentally alters the reasoning process, yielding broad and consistent improvements across diverse fine-grained perception and complex multimodal reasoning benchmarks. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/Echochef/OPD-Aha.
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All authors Chenhao Qiu, Dawei Li, Yechao Zhang, Lei Gong, Zhen Tan

Computer Vision

Decentralized Gossip Learning and Federated Averaging for Histopathology Image Classification

Breast histopathology analysis increasingly relies on distributed learning because direct data pooling across institutions is often restricted by privacy, governance, and communication constraints. This study compares server-based Federated Averaging (FedAvg), fully decentralized gossip learning, and Hybrid Gossip-FedAvg for invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) patch classification. Experiments used 277,524 color image patches with patient-disjoint training, validation, and test partitions and a workload-balanced, Dirichlet-guided allocation across six nodes. Ring, random degree-3, and fully connected gossip topologies were evaluated together with sensitivity analyses for statistical heterogeneity, mixing coefficient, learning rate, model drift, prediction disagreement, calibration, clinically motivated operating points, communication payload, and patient-level IDC burden, together with auxiliary backbone robustness analyses. In the principal alpha=0.3 experiment, Hybrid Gossip-FedAvg achieved a test area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC-AUC) of 0.8811, closely followed by FedAvg at 0.8801 and fully connected gossip at 0.8751. Across three independent patient-level repetitions, FedAvg and Hybrid Gossip-FedAvg obtained the same mean ROC-AUC of 0.9082, with standard deviations of 0.0037 and 0.0043, respectively. Hybrid achieved the highest mean area under the precision-recall curve of 0.8240, whereas FedAvg produced the lowest mean Brier score of 0.1335. Denser gossip graphs improved discrimination but increased theoretical model payload, while ring gossip remained sensitive to learning rate and mixing strength. Overall, FedAvg provided the most consistently reliable server-based baseline, topology-aware gossip offered a viable decentralized alternative, and Hybrid Gossip-FedAvg provided a balanced compromise between peer-to-peer diffusion and periodic global coordination.
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All authors Yusuf Ozturk, Bengisu Atli, Enes Goktekin, Akin Ozturk, Ulas Bagci

Monday 14 September

Computer Vision

Temporal-Attention Head Specialization During Video Diffusion Training

Video diffusion transformers depend on temporal attention to coordinate information across frames, yet nearly everything known about this mechanism comes from analyzing trained models, so when and where temporal-attention structure forms during training remains poorly characterized. Population averages can also hide it, since a few specializing heads and a diffusing majority cancel in the mean. We therefore conduct a checkpoint-resolved census of every temporal-attention head across nine Open-Sora STDiT training runs spanning three model scales (306M to 1.03B parameters), scoring each head with an entropy-normalized measure of cross-frame attention concentration (CFAC) under a preregistered change-point and effect-size selection rule. The census reveals the sparse picture that averages obscure. Aggregate CFAC is flat or decreasing in every run, while a small minority of heads, roughly 4–13% in full-grid runs, develops pronounced concentration. Across seeds, the reproducible signal is positional but block-level. Selected heads repeatedly arise in the first temporal block, whereas individual head coordinates do not reproduce once block membership is accounted for. Among the analyzed 760M selected heads, attention maps converge to a small repertoire of local frame-routing motifs, self-frame diagonals and adjacent-frame bands, even when the responsible coordinates differ across runs. Correlation and ablation analyses do not establish a causal link to generated video quality, and we bound our claims accordingly. Beyond this STDiT family, the study contributes a transferable methodology. Checkpoint-resolved, per-head analysis under fixed selection rules can expose sparse temporal organization in other factorized video diffusion transformers and, with adapted routing metrics, in joint spatio-temporal architectures.
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All authors Taewoo Ha, Shafayat Mowla Anik, Dae Yeol Lee, Byeong Kil Lee, Jeeho Ryoo

Computer Vision

PalmLeaf-VQA: A Multi-Script Visual Question Answering Benchmark for Historical Palm-Leaf Manuscript Understanding Across Diverse Regions

Historical manuscripts remain largely absent from modern vision-language benchmarks, leaving open how well multimodal large language models (MLLMs) handle culturally diverse, degraded, and non-Latin document images. We introduce PalmLeaf-VQA, a multi-script visual question answering benchmark for historical palm-leaf manuscript understanding across South and Southeast Asian traditions. PalmLeaf-VQA contains 923 curated manuscript images and 7,384 question–answer pairs from eight collection groups: Balinese, Grantha, Jathakam, Kambaramayanam, Kannada, Khmer, Sundanese, and Tamil. Unlike recognition-oriented resources, the benchmark targets manuscript-aware visual reasoning over preservation-relevant cues, including physical condition, line structure, material and coating, binding holes, margins, symbols, drawings, and localized visual artifacts. We evaluate recent proprietary and open-weight MLLMs under open-answer and constrained-answer prompting and provide fine-grained analysis across collections, question categories, and task types. The strongest evaluated model reaches only 58.00% exact-match accuracy on the held-out test split, revealing substantial limitations in current MLLMs for rare-script, degraded-layout, and preservation-oriented document understanding. PalmLeaf-VQA provides a standardized benchmark for advancing culturally grounded and layout-aware multimodal document analysis.
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Computer Vision

Long-Tail Adaptive Flow Matching with Explicit Conditional Consistency Guidance for Precise Multimodal Face Synthesis

Although diffusion-based methods have substantially improved the controllability of multimodal face synthesis, their semantic alignment remains suboptimal because most existing approaches rely on implicit latent-space objectives to model the relationship between denoising variables and multimodal conditions. Such implicit modeling is often insufficient to enforce precise correspondence between synthesized faces and conditional inputs, especially under long-tailed semantic mask distributions where rare attributes receive weak optimization signals. To address these limitations, we propose EC\textsuperscript{2}Face, a multimodal face synthesis framework that improves semantic alignment through explicit semantic supervision and distribution-aware optimization. First, we introduce Explicit Conditional Consistency Guidance (ECCG), which imposes direct consistency supervision in pixel space by decoding an approximate reverse estimate of the clean latent and explicitly aligning the synthesized image with textual descriptions and semantic masks. A temporal dynamic modulation function is further designed to adapt the supervision strength according to the timestep-dependent reliability of reverse estimation. Second, we propose Long-Tail Adaptive Flow Matching (LAFM), which reweights spatial optimization signals based on semantic attribute frequency, with normalized weights to maintain numerical stability during training. Importantly, all additional modules are used only during training and introduce no extra inference overhead. Extensive experiments show that EC\textsuperscript{2}Face consistently outperforms competitive baselines in both generation quality and semantic alignment, achieving a 29.38% improvement in mask accuracy on rare attributes.
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All authors Yushe Cao, Xuechao Zou, Xing Xi, Dianxi Shi, Chun Yu, Junliang Xing

Computer Vision

Authority-Preserving Evaluation of Medical Vision-Language Assistants

Medical vision-language models can propose how urgently a skin lesion should be reviewed, but the local service retains authority to accept or replace that proposal under referral policy, capacity, and locally held patient context. Proposal quality and selected-action quality are therefore distinct evaluation targets, and benchmark evidence transfers between them only when local review preserves the expected action score. We introduce AuthEval, a logging and evaluation framework that records both actions, scores the selected action under declared local criteria, and, where feasible, scores the declined proposal under the same rule. It reports the resulting authority gap only when the record supports it. Because the gap is the product of the proposal-change rate and the mean score change on changed cases, that rate alone determines neither its magnitude nor its sign. On ISIC 2019, with MedGemma and simulated local review, two constraint regimes with similar change rates produced an optimistic image-equal gap under capacity ($+0.744$ simulator units) but no detectable gap under safety. The declared evaluation unit also mattered: under mixed constraints the gap reversed from $+0.374$ to $-0.206$ when weighting shifted from image to lesion-aware cluster. AuthEval thus clarifies whether a study's records support claims about the model, the workflow, or both.
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All authors Flint Xiaofeng Fan, Cheston Tan, Yew-Soon Ong, Roger Wattenhofer

Computer Vision

On The Robustness-Resolution Tradeoff In Temporal Quantization Of Event Streams

Event pipelines often discretize asynchronous timestamps before learning. This step looks harmless, but its stability depends directly on temporal resolution. We study this dependence at the representation level. We first show that hard temporal binning is discontinuous: an arbitrarily small timestamp shift near a boundary can move unit event mass between bins. We then define a class of nonnegative, mass-preserving, resolution-faithful continuous encoders and prove that every encoder in this class has global L1 sensitivity at least 2/Delta, where Delta denotes bin width. Linear two-bin interpolation attains this limit. Local support and first-moment preservation also make it unique. Experiments on SHD, N-MNIST, and DVS128 Gesture support the analysis. Across uniform timestamp budgets, linear interpolation lowers mean representation drift by 47-72% while keeping clean accuracy nearly unchanged. On DVS Gesture, it produces zero prediction flips across all tested budgets and three seeds. On SHD, measured drift follows 1/Delta with R^2 = 0.992.
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Computer Vision

Validating, Not Sampling: Region-Level Robustness of Vision-Language and Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) and vision-language-action models (VLAs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. There, a small perturbation to the recorded camera image may change a decision significantly. However, existing benchmarks for these models only sample perturbations, which does not guarantee the absence of a failure in the untested region. We present the first robustness validation of six VLMs (drawn from the Gemma, InternVL, LLaVA, and Qwen families) and five VLAs (drawn from the GR00T, OpenVLA, and $\pi$ families) over entire continuous regions of photometric and geometric image perturbation: brightness shifts, camera rotations, and their composition. To this end, we build on the validation framework H$^2$V and introduce H$^2$V-M, a margin-aware convergence rule that makes validation affordable at the 32B parameter scale. We demonstrate that H$^2$V-M outperforms H$^2$V by an order of magnitude in model queries and that it finds counterexamples faster than random sampling while providing soundness guarantees. Our VLM and VLA robustness validation shows that robustness is mostly dependent on the perturbation type, rather than the model, and that VLMs are more robust to large camera rotations than VLAs. For VLAs, even perturbations as small as $\pm1^\circ$ can change the commanded action in many cases. We also show that robustness depends more on model family than on model size.
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All authors Bogdan Aron, Christopher Brix, Benedikt Brückner, Yanghao Zhang, Panagiotis Kouvaros, Alessio Lomuscio

Computer Vision

Beyond the Survey: A Systematic Empirical Study of Detection and Association in Visual MOT

This paper presents a comprehensive experimental evaluation and detailed analysis of state-of-the-art multi-object tracking algorithms, with an emphasis on quantifying the individual contributions of detection and association components to overall tracking performance. Unlike existing surveys that primarily offer theoretical categorizations or taxonomies of tracking methods, our work adopts a rigorous experimental perspective grounded in publicly available implementations, providing practical guidance for researchers and practitioners in method selection and system design. We introduce a unified pipeline diagram that consolidates the core components across the two main branches of visual multi-object tracking: tracking-by-detection and end-to-end deep learning paradigms, and systematically analyze the object detection, feature extraction, and data association modules. Through extensive empirical studies on standard benchmarks, including MOT16, MOT17, MOT20, SportsMOT, DanceTrack, and CrowdTrack datasets, we reveal critical insights: (1) detection quality dominates association strategy performance, with detector improvements yielding more than 10% gains compared to less than 5% from refined association strategies; (2) modern deep learning detectors paired with specialized re-identification models significantly outperform joint detection and embedding approaches; and (3) transformer-based end-to-end methods exhibit greater robustness to detection quality variations but at a substantial computational cost. Our findings from extensive experiments provide key insights into component-level effects in MOT, particularly the dominant influence of detection quality relative to association, while offering practical insights for designing and optimizing MOT systems under varying performance and robustness requirements. Code and experimental setups are available at github.com/linh-gist/VisualMOT.
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All authors Linh Van Ma, Juhua Hu, Wei Cheng, Unse Fatima, Moongu Jeon

Computer Vision

DualCount: Structurally Consistent Density and Point Modeling for Zero-Shot Object Counting

Zero-shot object counting aims to estimate the number of objects specified by a text query without category-specific training. Recent approaches primarily rely on density regression or detection-style instance prediction. While effective, density-based models often suffer from spatial ambiguity and background leakage due to weakly regulated mass allocation, leading to fragmented or part-biased representations that increase counting error in complex scenes. In this work, we propose an instance-aware dual-decoder framework that structurally couples density and point representations for zero-shot object counting. Instead of treating density estimation as independent pixel-wise regression, we interpret it as a structured mass allocation problem over a latent set of object instances. Predicted instance centers induce a soft instance-wise decomposition of the density map, upon which we enforce two geometric constraints: (1) per-instance mass conservation, ensuring each object contributes approximately one unit of density mass, and (2) center-of-mass alignment, encouraging each density component to concentrate around its corresponding predicted center. These constraints introduce instance-level geometric consistency and lead to more accurate mass allocation, thereby reducing counting error. Extensive experiments on FSC-147, PUCPR+, and CARPK show that our approach consistently reduces counting error and establishes new state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot object counting.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.RO

The Neverwhere Visual Parkour Benchmark Suite

State-of-the-art visual locomotion controllers are increasingly capable at handling complex visual environments, making evaluating their real-world performance before deployment increasingly difficult. This work intends to narrow this train/evaluation gap by developing a collection of hyper-photo-realistic, closed-loop evaluation environments - The Neverwhere Benchmark Suite - comprised of over sixty 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstructions of urban indoor and outdoor scenes. Our goal is to encourage large-scale and reproducible robot evaluation by making it easier to create and integrate Gaussian splats-based reconstructions into simulated continuous testing setups. We also underscore the potential pitfalls of relying exclusively on 3D Gaussian-generated data for training, by providing policy checkpoints trained over multiple Neverwhere scenes and their performance when evaluated in novel scenes. Our analysis illustrates the necessity of sourcing diverse data to ensure performance. Code and data are available on the project page: https://ziyc.github.io/neverwhere-bench/.
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All authors Ziyu Chen, Henghui Bao, Haoran Chang, Alan Yu, Ran Choi, Kai McClennen, Gio Huh, Kevin Yang, Ri-Zhao Qiu, Yajvan Ravan, John J. Leonard, Xiaolong Wang, Phillip Isola, Ge Yang, Yue Wang

Computer Vision

Reasoning with Image Generation

Chain-of-thought reasoning has revolutionized natural language processing by enabling large language models (LLMs) to decompose problems into intermediate steps before answering. Yet confining reasoning to the textual domain presents limitations for tasks requiring direct manipulation of visual representations. Recent efforts augment multimodal LLMs with external visual expert tools such as depth estimation or object detection modules, but these remain fundamentally limited by their reliance on narrow, rigid operations that cannot flexibly generate or transform visual content. We propose ReImaGin, which leverages image generation models as a flexible visual reasoning mechanism for multimodal LLMs: unlike fixed-function tools, they accept natural language commands and can perform open-ended visual operations, like removing an occlusion or generating a floorplan from multiple disjoint views of a room. Across six diverse visual reasoning tasks including multi-view spatial reasoning and collision prediction, ReImaGin consistently outperforms both text-only reasoning and specialist vision-tool baselines, with gains of up to 25%, demonstrating the advantage of flexible, generative visual reasoning.
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All authors Nishad Singhi, Hector Garcia Rodriguez, Aditya Arora, Marcus Rohrbach, Anna Rohrbach

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.RO

Geometry vs Structure: Graph-Based Diagnostics for LiDAR Point-Cloud Simulation Fidelity

Digital twins provide a scalable and cost-effective complement to real-world testing for validating autonomous-driving and advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) sensor pipelines. However, quantifying their fidelity remains challenging, particularly for 3D LiDAR point clouds, where conventional geometric metrics may overlook important structural discrepancies. We present a graph-based framework for evaluating the structural fidelity of simulated LiDAR point clouds against real-world scans. While scan-level metrics such as Chamfer distance capture point-wise geometric similarity, they do not explicitly represent connectivity, topology, or object-level organization. Our framework constructs graphs from real and simulated point clouds, applies Louvain community detection to identify spatially coherent subgraphs, and matches corresponding communities using centroid proximity. For each matched pair, we compute $r_\lambda$, a bounded graph-spectral metric motivated by Weyl's inequality, and compare it with density-aware Chamfer distance (CDC) as a geometric baseline. Controlled perturbation experiments demonstrate that $r_\lambda$ is invariant to rigid transformations and robust to sensor noise while remaining sensitive to structural deformation. We evaluate the framework on 50 paired real and simulated LiDAR scans acquired using a Velodyne VLP-32C sensor and CARLA, respectively. The dataset contains more than 1,000 matched communities across four representative classes: vehicles, vegetation, trees, and building walls. The results show that geometric and structural measures capture complementary aspects of simulation fidelity, supporting graph-spectral analysis as an additional diagnostic layer for validating digital twins in ADAS and autonomous-driving applications.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from stat.ML

Mini-batch Sampling Strategies for Long-Tailed Image Classification: An Empirical Study on CIFAR-100-LT

Real-world datasets often exhibit long-tailed class distributions, where a few head classes contain a large number of training samples while a large number of tail classes have only a few. The composition of each mini-batch, determined by the sampling strategy, governs which classes contribute to the stochastic gradient estimate, and therefore affects convergence behaviour and generalisation across the whole class spectrum. We provide a systematic theoretical and empirical comparison of four mini-batch sampling strategies for long-tailed image classification: uniform instance sampling, class-balanced sampling, square-root sampling, and progressively balanced sampling. We place all four in a unified bias-variance framework describing their effect on gradient estimation, which exposes the tension between unbiased optimisation of the empirical loss and fair representation of rare classes. We then evaluate them under controlled conditions using ResNet-32 on CIFAR-100-LT at three imbalance ratios (rho = 10, 50, 100), with every strategy sharing the same long-tailed subsets and initialisation within a seed. Progressive sampling improves tail-class accuracy by 25% relative to the uniform baseline at rho = 100 (13.5% versus 10.8%), consistently across all three seeds, while its overall accuracy is not distinguishable from that of uniform sampling given the seed-to-seed variation (40.0% versus 39.7%); the tail-class gain, not the overall gain, is the robust effect. At rho = 100, class-balanced sampling degrades accuracy on every class group, including the tail classes it is designed to help, which we attribute to overfitting caused by extreme oversampling of scarce data; at rho = 50 this failure is confined to head and medium classes. These results indicate that when rebalancing is applied during training matters as much as how much rebalancing is applied.
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Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.RO

ConGraspXL: Controllable Constraint-Conditioned Dexterous Grasping Motion Synthesis

Dexterous grasping is usually conducted for specific tasks, leading to heterogeneous constraints such as specific approach directions, desired contact regions, specified wrist trajectories, and functional hand poses. Our previous work, GraspXL, achieves scalable grasping motion synthesis for diverse objects and hand morphologies, while lacking controllability for synthesis under such various task-driven constraints. In this paper, we propose ConGraspXL, which extends GraspXL with controllable constraint-conditioned grasp motion synthesis that accommodates diverse task-driven constraints and their combinations. We introduce a hierarchical constraint formulation, enable flexible constraint composition with a masked residual interface, and improve control precision with dynamic hand centers and feed-forward wrist guidance. Without losing the strong generalization capabilities of GraspXL, ConGraspXL enables precise and flexible controllability for various individual constraints and their combinations, providing a plug-and-play low-level grasp controller for downstream applications such as whole-body grasp completion, functional grasping, and human-motion imitation.
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Computer Vision

Racing in Volume with Flow Ensembles

Streaming 4D reconstruction has been demonstrated only indoors, on dense camera rigs surrounding subjects that move at human pace. Outdoor 4D reconstruction exists but relies either on cameras mounted on the moving vehicle itself, or on limited-coverage arrays observing quasi-static subjects offline. The case that actually matters for spectators is a fast-moving subject, watched from a sparse ring of allocentric cameras, streaming. No method targets this, and no benchmark exists to evaluate one. To this end, we introduce FastFlowGS, a streaming 4D Gaussian Splatting method for reconstructing fast-moving subjects from a small set of fixed external cameras, and Monaco4D, a photorealistic Unreal Engine 5 benchmark for high-speed outdoor reconstruction. FastFlowGS fuses sparse matches, semi-dense tracks, and dense optical flow by lifting each signal to 3D with geometric uncertainty and combining them through a Kalman-style temporal update. Monaco4D provides Formula 1 sequences under varied illumination from trackside, onboard, and drone viewpoints with dense ground truth. On CMU-Panoptic, FastFlowGS exceeds the strongest baseline by 12.6% VMAF at 35% greater efficiency. On Monaco4D, where existing streaming methods degrade severely, it improves dynamic-region PSNR by up to 18.6% with 28.3% lower per-frame optimization time. Dataset and additional details can be found at https://humansensinglab.github.io/monaco4d/.
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All authors Saswat Subhajyoti Mallick, Riu Cherdchusakulchai, Marc Ruiz Olle, Albert Mosella-Montoro, Jose Ribeiro-Gomes, Francisco Vicente Carrasco, Fernando De la Torre

Computer Vision

Sequence Recognition in Bharatnatyam dance

Bharatanatyam is the oldest Indian Classical Dance (ICD) which is learned and practiced across India and the world. Adavu is the core of this dance form. There exist 15 Adavus and 58 variations. Each Adavu variation comprises a well-defined set of motions and postures (called dance steps) that occur in a particular order. So, while learning Adavus, students not only learn the dance steps but also take care of its sequence of occurrences. This paper proposed a method to recognize these sequences. In this work, firstly, we recognize the involved Key Postures (KPs) and motions in the Adavu using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM), respectively. In this, CNN achieves 99% and SVM's recognition accuracy becomes 84%. Next, we compare these KP and motion sequences with the ground truth to find the best match using the Edit Distance algorithm with an accuracy of 98%. The paper contributes hugely to the state-of-the-art in the form of digital heritage, dance tutoring system, and many more. The paper addresses three novelties; (a) Recognizing the sequences based on the KPs and motions rather than only KPs as reported in the earlier works. (b) The performance of the proposed work is measured by analyzing the prediction time per sequence. We also compare our proposed approach with the previous works that deal with the same problem statement. (c) It tests the scalability of the proposed approach by including all the Adavu variations, unlike the earlier literature, which uses only one/two variations.
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Computer Vision

ProtoLIP: From Sentence-Level to Object-Level Evidence Disentanglement

Query-conditioned vision-language models enable fine-grained interpretation by revealing which visual content supports a given textual query and how this evidence changes across queries. However, semantically, sentence-level evidence does not necessarily decompose into object-specific contributions, while spatially, object-level evidence can remain entangled with co-occurring objects and surrounding scene context. Across multiple VLM architectures and independent benchmarks, we observe persistent object-level evidence entanglement. Moreover, exposed evidence maps do not necessarily correspond to the evidence that directly constitutes the model's prediction. To disentangle visual evidence at both semantic and spatial levels, we introduce ProtoLIP, a lightweight prototype-mediated evidence layer that organizes reusable visual prototypes into text-derived semantic families and uses coarse-to-fine evidence routing, where semantic families constrain prototype eligibility and the complete query determines fine-grained prototype contributions. Our studies show that ProtoLIP improves evidence localization and separation across query granularities, achieving average relative gains of 29% in Pointing and 43% in Energy across four object- and phrase-level OOD benchmarks. Its localization gains also transfer to independently pretrained VLMs, with larger improvements observed in several transfer settings. On the primary backbone, ProtoLIP also improves image-text matching discrimination while remaining competitive with a spatially supervised grounding model in object-level localization. Crucially, ProtoLIP constructs its image-text matching score directly from localized prototype evidence, enabling exact decomposition across prototypes, semantic families, and spatial evidence without spatial annotations or backbone retraining.
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All authors Yan Zhu, Yongbo Chen, Zhengming Ding, Rebecca Faust

Computer Vision · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Efficient Reasoning Distillation: Small Video-Language Models via Synthetic CoT and Difficulty-Aware Fine-Tuning

We present an efficient method to distill reasoning capabilities into compact video-language models (VLMs) for video question answering (VideoQA). Our approach fine-tunes a 2B-parameter model using only $\sim$900 uncertainty-selected examples, each augmented with synthetic chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales generated by a 4B teacher. Despite its minimal compute cost - under two hours on a single A100 GPU - our method enables the 2B model to outperform VLMs up to 4$\times$ larger, and generalize across CinePile, ActivityNet-QA, and MLVU, approaching the performance of its own 4B teacher. A key finding is that placing CoT rationales after the answer - contrary to standard prompting - substantially improves reasoning in compact models. This insight challenges prevailing CoT conventions and reveals new alignment strategies under limited model capacity. Our findings offer a practical blueprint for training deployable, reasoning-rich VLMs suited for mobile and edge applications.
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All authors Mantek Singh, Jeshwanth Challagundla, Siddharth Raina, Jasmin Jarsania