トピック: 画像/動画生成

VAMPS: Visual-Assisted Mathematical Problem Solving Benchmark

Multimodal large language models are increasingly capable of complex reasoning, yet their performance often degrades when they must externalize a problem through a tool and then reason over the tool's output, specifically when they rely on visual aids. This gap is especially important because real engineering and scientific workflows often rely on visualization tools for analysis, validation, and decision-making. To study this discrepancy, we introduce VAMPS (Visual-Assisted Mathematical Problem Solving), a benchmark for graph-assisted mathematics. VAMPS contains 1,168 multimodal, bilingual multiple-choice question-answer pairs drawn from Iranian University Entrance Exam algebra and calculus problems and expanded with human-reviewed LLM-generated synthetic variants, all selected so that plotting provides a natural solution strategy by revealing intersections, extrema, asymptotes, etc. Designed for both benchmarking and diagnosis, VAMPS goes beyond prior multimodal benchmarks that primarily evaluate reasoning over fixed visual inputs by testing whether a model can benefit from constructing a useful graph and grounding its answer in the resulting visualization. Overall, we found that across a diverse set of models, direct analytical solving surprisingly outperforms tool-enabled visual solving, even on problems where plotting is a natural strategy.

Can Generalist Agents Automate Data Curation?

Curating training data is among the most consequential yet labor-intensive parts of modern AI development: practitioners iteratively propose, implement, evaluate, and revise data policies against noisy benchmark feedback. We ask whether generalist coding agents can automate this data-curation loop. We introduce *Curation-Bench*, an agent-centric benchmark that fixes the model, training recipe, and evaluation suite while giving agents command-line access to inspect data, implement policies, submit them to a fixed training/evaluation pipeline, and revise. In a vision-language instruction-tuning instantiation, out-of-the-box agents reach strong published data-selection baselines within ten iterations. However, trajectory analysis reveals a persistent *execution-research gap*: agents mainly tune local policy variants rather than explore new policy families, even when given strategy guides and paper references. Scaffolds requiring each iteration to cite, instantiate, and adapt a prior method shift agents toward method-guided exploration. The scaffolded agent autonomously composes -- without human design input -- a data-selection policy that outperforms strong published baselines at one-tenth their data budget. Overall, current agents can run the curation loop, but reliable data research requires scaffolded method adaptation, not open-ended prompting alone. Code and benchmark are open-sourced.

SpurAudio: A Benchmark for Studying Shortcut Learning in Few-Shot Audio Classification

Few-shot classification (FSC) is widely used for learning from limited labeled data, yet most evaluations implicitly assume that target concepts are independent of contextual cues. In real-world settings, however, examples often appear within rich contexts, allowing models to exploit spurious correlations between foreground content and background signals. While such effects have been studied in few-shot image classification, their role in few-shot audio classification remains largely unexplored, and existing audio benchmarks offer limited control over contextual structure. We introduce SpurAudio, a benchmark that leverages the natural separability of foreground events and background environments in audio to enable controlled, multi-level evaluation of contextual shifts across support and query sets. Using this benchmark, we show that many state-of-the-art few-shot methods suffer severe performance degradation when background correlations are disrupted, despite achieving similar accuracy under standard evaluation protocols. Crucially, this vulnerability persists even in large pretrained audio foundation models, ruling out limited backbone capacity as an explanation. Moreover, methods that appear comparable under conventional benchmarks can exhibit markedly different sensitivity to spurious correlations, revealing systematic algorithmic strengths and vulnerabilities tied to how feature representations interact with classifier heads at inference time. These findings provide new insight into the behavior of few-shot methods in audio and highlight the need for benchmarks that explicitly probe context dependence when evaluating FSC models.

Dive into the Scene: Breaking the Perceptual Bottleneck in Vision-Language Decision Making via Focus Plan Generation

In embodied vision-language decision making tasks such as robotic manipulation and navigation, Vision-Language and Vision-Language-Action Models (VLMs & VLAs) are powerful tools with different benefits: VLMs are better at long-term planning, while VLAs are better at reactive control. However, their performance is limited by the same perceptual bottleneck: visual hallucinations arise due to the models' inability to distinguish task-relevant objects from distractors. In principle, accurate identification and focus on critical objects while filtering out irrelevant ones is the key to break this limitation. A straightforward solution is one-step focus: directly attending to essential objects. However, this approach proves ineffective because effective focus inherently requires deep scene understanding. To this end, we propose SceneDiver, a coarse-to-fine focus plan generation method for VLMs leveraging their long-term planning abilities, that first constructs a holistic scene graph to establish initial comprehension, then progressively decomposes the task into simpler sub-problems through an iterative cycle of recognition, understanding, and analysis. To enable reactive control, we also design a lightweight adapter for distilling the deliberate focus ability into VLAs. Evaluations on standard embodied AI benchmarks confirm that our method substantially reduces visual hallucinations for both VLMs and VLAs, while preserving computational efficiency in tasks requiring fast execution. Our code and data are released at: https://future-item.github.io/SceneDiver.

SymTRELLIS: Symmetry-Enforced Voxel Latents for 3D Generation

Single-view 3D generative models have achieved impressive visual quality, yet they are not designed to satisfy structural or functional requirements, and in practice, often fall short. Symmetry is one such requirement: violations, even subtle ones, on symmetry can render a model physically unusable. We present SymTRELLIS, a method that enforces arbitrary finite point group symmetries (rotational, reflectional, and polyhedral) during the flow-based 3D generation of TRELLIS.2, without retraining the underlying VAE or flow model. Our key idea is to approximate the latent-space action of spatial transformations as a learned linear operator on voxel latents, implemented as a lightweight spatial-transform latent mapper trained on generic, non-symmetric 3D data. At generation time, we enforce symmetry by averaging predicted flow velocities across all symmetry-equivalent transformations at each ODE step, a process we call velocity symmetrization. The symmetry specification can be estimated automatically from an initial TRELLIS.2 generation or supplied by the user, enabling deliberate fold manipulation beyond what the input image suggests. On a curated benchmark of 266 strictly symmetric objects spanning 2- to 20-fold rotations and polyhedral symmetry groups, SymTRELLIS substantially reduces all symmetry error metrics compared to TRELLIS.2, Hunyuan3D-2.1, and TripoSG, while maintaining reconstruction accuracy comparable to the base model.

DetectZoo: A Unified Toolkit for AI-Generated Content Detection Across Text, Audio, and Image Modalities

The growing popularity and capacity of generative models have eroded the distinction between human and machine-generated content, motivating a growing body of work on detection across text, images, and audio. Most available detectors are either commercial software or, if open-source, come with incompatible codebases with bespoke preprocessing, evaluation protocols, and evaluation metrics, which make their adoption, fair comparison, and reproduction quite difficult. To address this critical gap, we introduce DetectZoo, a first-of-its-kind, extensible toolkit designed to provide a unified interface for AI-generated content detection across text, audio, and image modalities. DetectZoo standardizes the complete empirical pipeline, from data ingestion and preprocessing to model assessment, offering researchers a cohesive framework to benchmark state-of-the-art detectors systematically. By integrating diverse public datasets and baseline detection algorithms under a single, unified API, our toolkit facilitates rigorous and reproducible evaluation. DetectZoo provides reference implementations of 61 detectors, native loaders for 22 benchmark datasets, and a standardized evaluation pipeline that reports multiple metrics through a common interface. Each detector is self-contained yet accessible through the same interface, automatically caches pretrained weights, and reproduces the original published results. DetectZoo lowers the barrier to entry for multi-modal AI forensics, enabling researchers to identify performance gaps across domains and accelerating the development of robust, generalizable detection techniques. The open-source repository and comprehensive documentation are publicly available at https://github.com/sadjadeb/DetectZoo, and the package can be installed via pip install detectzoo.

Overview of the EReL@MIR 2025 Multimodal Document Retrieval Challenge (Track 1)

Retrieval over visually-rich documents, pages that interleave text with figures, tables, and charts, is essential for multimodal retrieval-augmented generation, yet most retrievers still discard the visual channel. The \emph{Multimodal Document Retrieval Challenge}, Track~1 of the MIR Challenge at the first EReL@MIR workshop, co-located with The Web Conference 2025, asks participants to build a \emph{single} retrieval system that handles two complementary regimes: closed-set document page retrieval within long documents from a text query (MMDocIR), and open-domain retrieval of Wikipedia-style passages from an image or image-plus-text query (M2KR). Systems are ranked by the macro-average of mean Recall@$\{1,3,5\}$ over the two tasks. The challenge drew 455 entrants and 586 submissions across 22 teams. This report describes the challenge design, datasets, and evaluation protocol; reports the final standings; and analyses the three winning teams' systems. All three build on decoder-based Multimodal-LLM embedders from the Qwen2-VL family rather than on CLIP-style encoders, and differ chiefly in whether they reach the top through fine-tuned ensembles, training-free multi-route fusion with a strong vision-language re-ranker, or zero-shot late interaction. The training-free system finished within $0.1$ point of the fine-tuned winner.

Instant-Fold: In-Context Imitation Learning for Deformable Object Manipulation

Deformable object manipulation (DOM) is challenging due to high-dimensional, partially observable states that evolve through long-horizon, topology-changing interactions with multiple valid manipulation modes. We introduce Instant-Fold, an in-context imitation learning framework for DOM. Given a single human demonstration, our policy infers and executes diverse manipulation modes directly from the demonstration, including variations in spatial execution and ordering, without requiring gradient updates. Our approach first learns deformation-aware visual representations via temporal contrastive pretraining, after which a flow-matching transformer policy conditioned on the demonstration predicts actions to execute the intended manipulation mode. Trained entirely in simulation, Instant-Fold generalizes across diverse folding modes and transfers zero-shot to real-world settings without additional data collection or finetuning. Videos are available at https://instant-fold.github.io.

StandardE2E: A Unified Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Datasets

Autonomous driving has shifted from modular perception-prediction-planning stacks toward end-to-end (E2E) models that map sensor inputs directly to vehicle control, often regularized by auxiliary tasks such as 3D detection, motion forecasting, and HD-map perception. Progress is driven by a fast-growing ecosystem of sensor-rich driving datasets, yet each ships its own file formats, APIs, coordinate conventions, and modality coverage, leaving cross-dataset experimentation and even basic per-dataset preprocessing to be re-implemented per project. We present StandardE2E, a framework that provides a single unified interface over E2E driving datasets. StandardE2E (i) standardizes per-dataset preprocessing under one shared data schema; (ii) combines multiple datasets in a single PyTorch DataLoader for cross-dataset pretraining, auxiliary-task supervision, and scenario-level filtering; and (iii) reduces adding a new dataset to a single per-dataset mapping from raw frames to the canonical schema, leaving the entire downstream pipeline unchanged. The framework supports six datasets out of the box: Waymo End-to-End, Waymo Perception, Argoverse 2 Sensor, Argoverse 2 LiDAR, NAVSIM (OpenScene-v1.1), and WayveScenes101, and is released as the open-source standard-e2e Python package, available at https://github.com/stepankonev/StandardE2E.

HYolo: An Intelligent IoT-Based Object Detection System Using Hypergraph Learning

This paper presents HYolo, an intelligent IoT-based object detection framework that integrates hypergraph learning into the YOLO architecture. Traditional YOLO-based object detection models primarily capture pairwise feature interactions and may fail to model complex high-order relationships among objects and contextual features. To address this limitation, HYolo incorporates hypergraph learning to capture richer contextual dependencies and improve object representation. Experimental evaluation on the COCO dataset demonstrates significant performance improvements over baseline YOLO models. The proposed approach achieves approximately 12% improvement in mAP@50 while enhancing overall detection accuracy and robustness. By modeling high-order feature relationships, HYolo provides improved contextual understanding and more reliable object detection performance in IoT-based environments. The results indicate that integrating hypergraph learning into object detection pipelines offers a promising direction for intelligent and context-aware IoT vision systems.

MorphoQuant: Modality-Aware Quantization for Omni-modal Large Language Models

Conventional Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) methods struggle with 4-bit Omni-modal Large Language Models (OLLMs) due to the extreme distribution heterogeneity and disparate outlier patterns across modalities. To address this, we propose MorphoQuant, a modality-aware PTQ framework engineered to preserve cross-modal morphology and mitigate outlier loss. Specifically, we introduce Distribution-Aware Bias Compensation (DABC), which selectively absorbs long-tailed outliers into channel-wise biases. This mechanism safeguards outlier magnitudes while maintaining high-precision discretization for dense inliers, thereby preserving accurate discretization across diverse modal distribution. Complementing this, we propose Morphology-Directed Quantization Function Optimization (MDQFO) to co-optimize the quantization grid with the bias mask, ensuring fine-grained alignment across modalities. Extensive evaluations on Qwen2.5-Omni across benchmarks like MMMU and Video-MME demonstrate our approach's superiority. Notably, our W4A4 model achieves 76.63% on ScienceQA, significantly outperforming SOTA W4A4 methods and surprisingly surpassing the W4A16 baseline, which fully demonstrates the exceptional accuracy-efficiency trade-off of our framework.

Multi-Granularity 3D Kidney Lesion Characterization from CT Volumes

Radiology reports describe kidney lesions by type, size, enhancement, and attenuation, yet existing 3D methods predict only at the patient or organ level. We reformulate kidney CT characterization as a per-lesion set-prediction task: one model emits a variable number of lesions per kidney, each with four clinical attributes. We curated 2,619 CT volumes from 788 patients at one academic medical center, with multi-granularity side- and per-lesion labels, and used KiTS23 (489 cases) for zero-shot external validation. We propose \textbf{LesionDETR}, a DETR-style architecture with size-distance Hungarian matching and a hierarchical loss that aggregates per-slot outputs to side-level objectives. Across four input representations and six encoder initializations, two design choices dominate: a segmentation mask as an input channel, and same-domain abdominal pretraining (SuPreM); generic large-corpus pretraining is no better than random initialization. LesionDETR reaches bilateral side-level abnormality AUC $0.799 \pm 0.009$ on UF-Health and $0.817 \pm 0.072$ on KiTS23. A count-conditioned variant reaches per-lesion mAP $0.190 \pm 0.083$ on cystic lesions; rare solid-lesion AP stays at the noise floor, pointing to targeted data collection, not architecture, as the next bottleneck. The framework yields verified per-lesion predictions for downstream structured report generation.

Selective Coupling of Decoupled Informative Regions: Masked Attention Alignment for Data-Free Quantization of Vision Transformers

Data-Free Quantization (DFQ) addresses data security concerns by synthesizing samples, without accessing real data. It has garnered increasing attention in the context of Vision Transformers (ViTs), owing to the superiority of the self-attention mechanism compared to classical convolutional operation. However, previous DFQ arts for ViTs often suffer from a distribution mismatch between synthetic samples and input distribution expected by quantized models Q, resulting in the suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Masked Attention Alignment approach for Data-Free Quantization of ViTs, named MaskAQ, revealing that: 1) the semantics in the self-attention mechanism is predominantly localized to a sparse subset of patches, called informative regions; 2) the informative regions dominate the mutual information between synthetic samples and Q's outputs. To these ends, we incorporate differential entropy maximum over patch similarity of synthetic samples, to decouple informative regions from noisy background. To couple with varied Q, the informative regions are selected to align full-precision models with Q via a masked attention alignment objective, thus yielding high-quality synthetic samples. Furthermore, a periodic sample refreshing strategy comes up to endow MaskAQ with the capacity to continually adapt to the evolving state of Q throughout the training process, to preserve desirable mutual information with synthetic samples. Extensive experiments verify the merits of MaskAQ over state-of-the-art approaches across multiple backbones and downstream tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/hfutqian/MaskAQ.

An Empirical Study of Data Scale, Model Complexity, and Input Modalities in Visual Generalization

Modern deep neural networks usually have large parameter scales and nonlinear hierarchical structures, and they have achieved strong performance in computer vision. However, the source of their generalization performance remains difficult to explain using traditional statistical learning theory. Among the factors that may affect visual generalization, data scale, model complexity, and input modalities are fundamental and controllable variables. This study empirically analyzes how these three factors influence model generalization performance. Specifically, in a preliminary experiment, we construct a one-dimensional nonlinear function and vary the number of training samples and the polynomial degree to observe the effects of data scale and model complexity on model performance. In the main experiments, we compare model performance on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 under different training data scales, model architectures, and input modalities. The experimental results show that increasing the training data scale consistently improves generalization performance, whereas changes in model complexity do not provide stable gains. In addition, removing color information degrades model performance, while explicit prior features such as gradients, edges, and wavelets have inconsistent effects across different model architectures. Overall, this study provides an empirical analysis of the relationships among data scale, model complexity, input modalities, and visual generalization performance. Code and experimental logs are available at: https://github.com/zlyd-CV/DeepLearning-Empirical-Studies.

L-TGVN: Leveraging Longitudinal Priors for Personalized Rapid MRI

MRI provides excellent soft-tissue contrast without ionizing radiation, but long acquisition times increase patient discomfort while also raising exam costs and limiting scanner throughput. A common approach to reduce scan time is to acquire fewer measurements, which yields an ill-posed linear inverse problem; recovering diagnostic-quality images therefore requires incorporating prior knowledge beyond the measured data. In follow-up exams, the most recent prior scan of a patient can provide a highly informative subject-specific context, but practical use is complicated by temporal changes (including pathology progression), misalignment between scans, and protocol drift across acquisitions. In this work, we introduce L-TGVN, a Longitudinal Trust-Guided Variational Network that leverages prior scans as side information to reconstruct the current scan from heavily undersampled measurements. Crucially, L-TGVN constrains the influence of prior scans to be consistent with the acquired measurements. Unlike many existing longitudinal reconstruction methods, it does not require explicit pre-registration between prior and current scans. It further accommodates differences in acquisition protocols across visits (e.g., changes in sequence parameters). We evaluate L-TGVN against matched-capacity baselines, including prior-guided methods and methods that do not use longitudinal priors, and observe consistent improvements in standard quantitative metrics together with better preservation of fine structures at challenging accelerations. Source code is available at github.com/sodicksonlab/L-TGVN.

Adaptive Calibration for Fair and Performant Facial Recognition

We introduce Adaptive Calibration (AC), a novel calibration strategy for facial recognition that maps cosine similarity between normalized embeddings to well-calibrated probabilities. By incorporating local context into calibration, Adaptive Calibration corrects for a fundamental mismatch in cosine similarity, whereby the same distance can correspond to different match probabilities in different embedding regions. Our approach improves both overall performance and results in a fairer calibration without requiring demographic metadata. Our approach consistently dominates existing methods both on accuracy and fairness metrics across a variety of pretrained models and standard benchmarks. AC provides a practical solution for equitable facial recognition, without requiring demographic group annotations, and while improving overall performance. Unlike existing approaches, our method provides continuous, region-specific calibration that avoids "leveling down" where fairness comes at the cost of degraded performance for some groups.

Evaluating Reasoning Fidelity in Visual Text Generation

Recent text-to-image (T2I) models can render highly legible and well-structured text within images, enabling applications including document generation and slide generation. However, it remains unclear whether such systems faithfully preserve reasoning ability when complex solutions must be expressed directly through rendered text, or whether they merely imitate surface-level patterns. We investigate this question by evaluating reasoning fidelity in visual text generation, where models must express complete reasoning processes as images. Our evaluation includes long text rendering, factual knowledge probing, context understanding, and multi-step reasoning. Across these settings, we find that current T2I models frequently produce semantic errors, logical inconsistencies, and incorrect intermediate steps, even when the rendered text appears visually clear. These failures contrast with the strong reasoning performance of text-only models on the same tasks. Our findings reveal a substantial gap between visual text generation and procedural reasoning, motivating more reliable visual text reasoning.

SFMambaNet: Spectral-Frequency Enhanced Selective State Space Model for Correspondence Pruning

Correspondence pruning aims to identify inliers from an initial set of correspondences. Most existing Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based methods rely on geometric features mapped from coarse Euclidean coordinates, which struggle to capture the subtle geometric consistencies presented by inliers. While Mamba-based methods possess global receptive fields and long sequence modeling capabilities, they tend to accumulate substantial inconsistent features within the hidden state space, making it difficult to distinguish inliers from outliers. In this paper, we integrate frequency domain perception into this task for the first time and propose SFMambaNet, a novel Spectral-Frequency enhanced Mamba-based two-view correspondence pruning network. Our method is collaboratively composed of two components: First, we design a Local Spectral-Geometric Attention (LSGA) block. LSGA incorporates spectral positional encoding into local graph interactions and introduces multi-scale Mamba processing to enhance the capture of subtle geometric consistencies and improve local feature discriminability. Building upon this, we design a Spectral-Integrated Global Mamba (SIGM) block. SIGM embeds a frequency gating mechanism within the state space, utilizing the frequency information provided by LSGA to explicitly suppress high-frequency noise accumulation within hidden states and mitigate the propagation of inconsistent features. This enhances inlier-outlier separability and achieves robust global context modeling capabilities with nearly linear complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SFMambaNet outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on several challenging tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/Kirito14IT/SFMambaNet.

Optical-Guided Neural Collapse for SAR Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning

Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) in synthetic aperture radar imagery presents unique challenges due to severe data scarcity and SAR-specific variability. In particular, strong azimuth sensitivity in SAR induces large intra-class variation and inter-class confusion, and FSCIL sequential updates further lead to catastrophic forgetting of previously learned classes. Inspired by neural collapse, we propose an optical-guided SAR FSCIL framework, which derives orthogonal feature subspaces from a data-rich optical ATR dataset and uses them as geometric priors to guide SAR feature learning. SAR features are projected onto these orthogonal subspaces via principal angle constraints, effectively transferring discriminative structure from the optical to the SAR domain. Specifically, our projection loss and the classifier loss optimized with a frozen simplex-ETF geometry jointly induce neural collapse by concentrating features around class means while maintaining large inter-class angles. We evaluate the approach on a benchmark comprising an optical ATR dataset and a SAR ATR dataset with 24 target classes, organized into a base training session and seven incremental sessions. Compared with recent FSCIL methods including NCFSCIL and so on, our method achieves the highest final accuracy and a favorable trade-off between final performance and performance degradation. Moreover, neural collapse metrics show improved intra-class compactness and inter-class separability, indicating that the learned features more closely approximate the ideal simplex-ETF geometry.

Instance-Level Post Hoc Uncertainty Quantification in Object Detection

Object detection is a safety-critical component of autonomous driving. It is essential to quantify the uncertainty in bounding-box predictions for safety assurance. Post hoc uncertainty quantification without retraining aligns with real-world deployment requirements; therefore, we employ the Laplace approximation. Because instance-level uncertainty is needed, linearized inference methods that require multiple backpropagations are not time-efficient, and sampling-based methods are not fully post hoc. We propose Monte-Carlo generalized linearized model (MC-GLM), which provides instance-level and approximately post hoc uncertainty quantification. The number of samples required in the Monte Carlo step is constant and independent of the number of output instances, so it can be parallelized. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset with the CenterPoint detector validate the effectiveness of our method, and the resulting uncertainties exhibit good quality.

Real-Time Automatic License Plate Recognition Using YOLOv8, SORT Tracking, and Temporal Data Interpolation

The real-time hardships of video processing seriously limit the usage of Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) with application in dynamic traffic monitoring settings. High-fidelity recognition of unconstrained variables, e.g. drastic variations in illumination, acute camera scans, high vehicle speeds, and harsh physical concealment, is a problem that often leads to disjointed tracking paths and poor Optical Character Recognition (OCR) rates. In order to mitigate these weaknesses, the study proposes a 5 stage, end-to-end algorithmic pipeline, encompassing a smooth transition between deep learning based object detection, multi-object tracking which is kinematic in nature, and geometry temporal data interpolation. The suggested architecture takes advantage of a very powerful YOLOv8 nano model to localize the vehicle at the first stage and then Simple Online and Realtime Tracking (SORT) algorithm is used to build spatial-temporal links between frames. Another, more specific typology of YOLOv8 object detectors the license plate area, channeling the sliced array to an EasyOCR chain under the limitations of positional syntax verification. More importantly, an offline interpolation mechanism of temporal bounding box is initiated to recast fragmented paths.

Graph-Guided Universum Learning in Generalized Eigenvalue Proximal SVMs for Alzheimer's Disease Classification

Early and accurate detection of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is important for timely intervention and disease management. Generalized Eigenvalue Proximal Support Vector Machine (GEPSVM) and its Universum-based variants have shown promising results for AD classification. However, existing methods treat Universum samples as independent points and do not consider the geometric relationships among them. This paper proposes two graph-guided Universum learning models, namely UG-GEPSVM and IUG-GEPSVM, for AD versus cognitively normal (CN) classification using structural MRI data. In the proposed framework, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) subjects are used as Universum data to provide intermediate information between AD and CN classes. A graph is constructed over the Universum samples using Gaussian similarity, Minimum Spanning Tree connectivity, and multi-hop propagation. From this graph, a Laplacian matrix is derived that captures the geometric structure of the MCI samples. This Laplacian-based regularization is incorporated into the learning process in place of the conventional independent Universum penalty term. UG-GEPSVM integrates this regularization into the generalized eigenvalue formulation, while IUG-GEPSVM extends the numerically stable improved GEPSVM framework using a standard eigenvalue formulation. Experiments on ADNI MRI dataset variants using ICA- and PCA-based features at five different noise levels show that both proposed models consistently outperform existing GEPSVM and Universum-based methods. UG-GEPSVM achieves the highest average AUC of 88.07% and maintains stable performance under increasing noise levels. Statistical tests further confirm the significance of the observed improvements.

Enhancing MedSAM with a Lightweight Box Predictor for Medical Image Segmentation

Semantic segmentation in medical imaging is a critical yet challenging task due to data scarcity and high variability across modalities. While foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) show promise, they often struggle with medical images without specific adaptation. Moreover, point prompts, despite being the most natural form of user interaction, provide insufficient spatial context for reliable segmentation, particularly when target structures are irregular or poorly contrasted. In this paper, we propose an enhanced segmentation framework that integrates a lightweight Box Predictor module into the MedSAM architecture. The Box Predictor estimates an approximate bounding box from a single user click using localized image embedding features, providing spatial guidance that reduces the ambiguity of point prompts, while introducing only 1.6M additional parameters and negligible inference overhead. We introduce a two-stage training pipeline where the Box Predictor is trained independently before being integrated into MedSAM. To validate the generalization capability of our method, we conduct extensive evaluations on four diverse datasets (FLARE22, BRISC, BUSI, LungSegDB) spanning distinct imaging modalities, including CT, MRI, and Ultrasound. Our method improves segmentation accuracy and robustness across varied anatomical structures and imaging domains, achieving Dice scores of 0.89 (BUSI), 0.93 (FLARE22), 0.88 (BRISC), and 0.98 (LungSegDB). Code is available at https://github.com/Amirhosseinmovahedi/MedSAM-BoxPredictor

Coarse-to-fine Hierarchical Architecture with Sequential Mamba for Brain Reconstruction

Understanding the relationship between deep visual representations and the human visual system is a fundamental challenge in computational neuroscience. While modern vision models achieve strong performance in image recognition, their correspondence with the hierarchical organization of the human visual cortex remains an open question. In this study, we propose CHASMBrain, a novel hierarchical two-stage framework for image-to-fMRI encoding. Our architecture leverages a dual-stream Mamba design to explicitly separate and process global semantic tokens and local spatial patches, motivated by the functional organization of the visual cortex. A coarse-to-fine strategy is employed: Stage 1 predicts denoised ROI-level activations, while Stage 2 refines these coarse responses into full voxel-level predictions using a Mamba-VAE. Experiments on the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) demonstrate that our method achieves a Pearson correlation of 0.429 and an MSE of 0.261, outperforming all evaluated baselines including ridge regression and DINOv2 linear probes. Beyond predictive performance, causal branch-ablation experiments reveal an asymmetric specialization: the patch stream is specifically locked to early visual cortex (retinotopic regions), while the CLS stream contributes broader semantic context to higher-order areas -- a correspondence that holds causally, not merely correlationally. Cross-subject transfer experiments further show that the learned backbone generalizes across individuals with minimal per-subject adaptation, suggesting the model captures a shared, subject-agnostic visual representation.

Activation Steering of Video Generation Models via Reduced-Order Linear Optimal Control

Text-to-video (T2V) models trained on large-scale web data can generate undesired content, motivating interventions that reduce harmful outputs without sacrificing visual quality. Activation steering offers an attractive mechanistic alternative to finetuning and prompt filtering, but existing T2V steering methods remain limited, typically applying coarse, non-anticipative interventions that can lead to oversteering and content degradation. To close this gap, we propose Latent Activation Linear-Quadratic Regulator (LA-LQR), a reduced-order optimal control framework for minimally invasive T2V steering. LA-LQR formulates T2V inference as a dynamical system and computes closed-loop feedback interventions that steer activations toward desired feature setpoints while penalizing unnecessary perturbations. To make optimal control feasible for high-dimensional video activations, we project activations onto a low-dimensional, task-relevant subspace derived from contrastive prompt pairs, estimate local linear dynamics in this latent space, and solve a latent LQR problem to obtain timestep- and layer-specific steering signals. We provide theoretical bounds relating latent setpoint tracking to raw activation-space feature control, and empirically validate the fidelity of the reduced latent dynamics. On concept steering and video safety benchmarks, LA-LQR reduces unsafe generations relative to baselines, while preserving prompt fidelity and visual quality.

NoRA: Evaluating Grounded Reasonableness in Visual First-person Normative Action Reasoning

LLMs and agentic systems are increasingly deployed in social environments, making normative competence critical for safe and appropriate behavior. However, existing approaches either assess normative judgment in text alone or reduce it to choosing among a fixed set of candidate actions. We argue both are insufficient. In practice, agents are never handed a menu of options; they must identify a reasonable action from scratch, grounded in visible facts and supported by inspectable reasons. We introduce NoRA, a visual first-person video benchmark that requires models to generate candidate next actions and justify each through an explicit fact-reason-action support graph. The benchmark comprises 1,420 annotated video clips, including HumanGold-190 and LLMSilver-1230 splits. Each instance is evaluated through action alignment, factual grounding, and support binding, aggregated into a single grounded reasonableness score. We benchmark 12 multimodal systems under direct, deliberate, and structured prompting regimes, finding that current VLMs frequently recover plausible actions and relevant scene facts, but consistently struggle to construct the full reasonable action space and bind selected actions to the correct local support. NoRA makes this gap measurable, shifting the evaluation question from whether a model can pick an action to whether it can justify an appropriate action for the right visible reasons.

OA-CutMix: Correcting the Label Bias of CutMix

CutMix has become the de facto standard mixing augmentation, yet its label assignment rests on a flawed assumption: The area of the pasted patch faithfully reflects its semantic contribution to the mixed image. In practice, however, patches frequently land on background regions, assigning label credit to classes whose objects are not visible. The mean discrepancy of the CutMix label and the semantic object area is $21.5\%$. In $17\%$ of samples an image contributes zero visible object pixels yet receives nonzero label weight. We propose Object-Aware CutMix (OA-CutMix), which corrects this bias by replacing the area-based CutMix weight with one derived from precomputed segmentation masks, assigning labels in proportion to the visible object area each image contributes to the mix. The image mixing procedure is left entirely unchanged. We evaluate OA-CutMix against 10+ static and dynamic mixing methods across 4 architectures and 6 datasets. OA-CutMix consistently achieves the highest accuracy over all tasks, outperforming even dynamic mixing methods, but at a fraction of the training-time cost. Improvements are largest for small objects, where the label bias from CutMix is greatest. Thus, correcting the label is sufficient to match or exceed the performance of methods modifying the image mixing algorithm.

DiverAge: Reliable Pluralistic Face Aging with Cross-Age Identity Relation Guidance

Face aging plays an important role in long-term biometric analysis, cross-age identity verification, and forensic identity analysis. Since the same subject may exhibit multiple plausible appearances at a target age due to genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors, face aging is inherently a one-to-many generation problem. However, pluralism alone is insufficient for reliable face aging: a model should provide appearance-level candidate diversity within each age group while maintaining sequence-level ordinal reliability across ordered age groups. Existing deterministic aging methods can synthesize visually plausible age-progressed faces, but usually lack stochastic diversity. In contrast, pluralistic aging methods introduce local appearance variations, but often fail to explicitly regulate the identity evolution of the full aging sequence. In this paper, we propose \textbf{DiverAge}, a hierarchical pluralistic face aging framework based on diffusion autoencoding. DiverAge preserves appearance-level diversity through stochastic diffusion decoding and age-conditioned semantic modulation. To improve sequence-level reliability, we introduce a Cross-age Identity Relation Regulator (CARR), an inference-time guidance strategy that jointly denoises multiple target age groups. CARR is guided by a Cross-age Identity Similarity (CIS) prior estimated from real same-identity cross-age pairs, and suppresses excessive cross-age identity drift through one-sided sampling-time guidance without modifying the training objective or introducing extra trainable parameters. Experiments demonstrate that DiverAge improves sequence-level ordinal reliability while maintaining identity preservation, age accuracy, image quality, and appearance-level diversity.

Geometry-Aware Distillation for Prompt Tuning Biomedical Vision-Language Models

Current prompt-based and adapter-based tuning of vision-language models (VLMs) is attractive for medical imaging, where clinical data sensitivity favors frozen backbones and annotations are limited. However, these methods typically optimize only the ground-truth class, treating all other classes as equally incorrect, ignoring clinically meaningful class relations and yielding unstable decision boundaries in limited-supervision settings. We propose Omni-Geometry Knowledge Distillation (OGKD), a new framework that injects class-relation structure into the teacher to produce directional targets that preserve the ground truth while respecting inter-class geometry. Using these targets, we develop two distillation losses: Global Geometry-Aware Distillation (GAD) operates on the global image token, and Label-Guided Geometry Distillation (LGD) applies the same geometry to attentive patch tokens to improve fine-grained alignment. Across comprehensive experiments and analyses on 11 widely-used medical datasets for base-to-novel and few-shot evaluations, our OGKD achieves substantially better performance, consistently improving accuracy by an average absolute gain of 1.7%-2.8% over all prior state-of-the-art VLM adaptation counterparts. It also robustly generalizes to unseen classes and yields more reliable predictions than other approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/tientrandinh/OGKD.

Plan, Watch, Recover: A Benchmark and Architectures for Proactive Procedural Assistance

We envision a proactive multi-modal assistant system which gives users real-time step-by-step guidance on a procedural task, autonomously deciding \textit{when} to interrupt, and \textit{how} to coach. However, progress is limited by the absence of large-scale, cross-domain benchmarks that reflect realistic conditions, particularly the common case in which users deviate from the expected step sequence. We address this gap with four contributions: \textbf{(1)}~we release \textbf{EgoProactive}, a large-scale wearable-egocentric dataset for proactive procedural assistance with explicit Out-of-Plan (OOP) annotations and recovery steps; \textbf{(2)}~we augment five established benchmarks (Ego4D, EPIC-KITCHENS, EgoExo4D, HoloAssist, HowTo100M) into \textbf{Pro\textsuperscript{2}Bench} under a unified proactive-guidance schema; \textbf{(3)}~we propose a \textbf{decoupled planner--interaction architecture} specialized for procedural state, visual cues, and recovery injection; \textbf{(4)}~we introduce a post-training recipe that transfers across model families, validated by cross-backbone replication on Llama~4 and Qwen-3.6-VL. In extensive experiments, our trained Llama-4 system substantially improves objective intervention quality over strong proprietary baselines (Claude Opus~4.6, Gemini~3.1~Pro, GPT~5.2) and open-weight baselines (Qwen3~VL~235B) baselines across all six datasets. Oracle-plan experiments further show that, when plan quality is controlled, the trained duplex model produces high-quality guidance and large gains on Out-of-Plan recovery.

M$^3$Eval: Multi-Modal Memory Evaluation through Cognitively-Grounded Video Tasks

As multi-modal models advance towards long-form video understanding, memory emerges as a critical capability. Despite substantial efforts in developing video datasets and benchmarks, existing works primarily focus on perception and reasoning, without systematically evaluating memory: what models retain, how faithfully information is preserved, and how robust memory remains under interference. To address this gap, we introduce M$^3$Eval, the first comprehensive evaluation framework and benchmark for probing different memory dimensions in multi-modal models. Grounded in cognitive psychology, our design features carefully constructed tasks that isolate key aspects of memory. Leveraging M$^3$Eval, we conduct extensive experiments across representative multi-modal models, revealing consistent weaknesses and distinctive behaviors. We find that models struggle to maintain disentangled representations when processing parallel video streams, exhibit interference patterns differing substantially from those observed in human memory, ground memory sources more reliably in the spatial domain than the temporal domain, and demonstrate limited symbolic memory. Collectively, our benchmark provides a valuable resource for future research, while our findings highlight memory as a fundamental yet underexplored capability and offer insights for designing more effective memory mechanisms in multi-modal models. Our code and dataset are available at https://pku-value-lab.github.io/m3eval-homepage.

UniCAD: A Unified Benchmark and Universal Model for Multi-Modal Multi-Task CAD

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) underpins modern engineering and manufacturing by enabling the creation of precise, editable 3D models. However, CAD research typically studies tasks in isolation, and multi-modal, multi-task learning for CAD is hindered by the absence of a unified benchmark. To address this gap, we introduce UniCAD, a comprehensive benchmark for multi-modal CAD learning that covers point-to-CAD reconstruction, text/image-to-CAD generation, and CAD question answering across diverse input modalities. Alongside the benchmark, we present UniCAD-MLLM, a universal multi-modal large language model that ingests text, images, sketches, and point clouds and performs these heterogeneous tasks in an end-to-end fashion within a single framework. Extensive experiments on the UniCAD and Fusion360 benchmarks demonstrate that UniCAD-MLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance across all tasks, outperforming existing task-specific and multi-task baselines. We will release the dataset, code, and pretrained models to accelerate future research.

Who Needs Labels? Adapting Vision Foundation Models With the Metadata You Already Have

We propose a label-free approach to adapt powerful but generic vision foundation models to specialized scientific domains. Standard supervised fine-tuning is often ill-suited to these settings: labels are scarce, and task-specific training can collapse the model's generality and hurt robustness. We instead leverage metadata to adapt representations to new domains in a self-supervised manner. Our method, FINO, combines a standard self-supervised objective with flexible metadata guidance that handles both highly granular discrete metadata and continuous metadata. It encourages the representation to preserve informative factors while suppressing spurious ones. Across subcellular fluorescence microscopy, Earth observation, wildlife monitoring, and medical imaging, FINO consistently outperforms standard unsupervised domain adaptation and fully supervised adaptation. It also exceeds highly-specialized domain-specific state of the art, while using no task labels for backbone adaptation and only lightweight probes for supervision.

Continual Visual and Verbal Learning Through a Child's Egocentric Input

Children learn the meanings of words from a continuous, temporally structured stream of egocentric experience. Recent work shows that neural networks can also learn word-referent mappings from a child's egocentric video recordings, but they cycle through the shuffled data for hundreds of epochs, contrasting with how children actually encounter their environment. We introduce BabyCL, a continual multimodal learning framework that processes the SAYCam dataset in a single chronological pass, combining streaming visual representation learning with an image-text contrastive objective. BabyCL combines a multi-stage temporal segmentation of the stream with a dual replay buffer that independently manages visual and multimodal histories, and it is jointly trained with three contrastive losses on a shared backbone. Under a matched optimization budget, BabyCL outperforms streaming learning baselines on the SAYCam Labeled-S 4AFC benchmark, substantially narrowing the gap to an upper bound of offline training. Ablations show that the gains are robust to the length of the online temporal segmentation window and the eviction rule of the replay buffer. Together, these results show that meaningful word-referent mappings can emerge under training conditions much closer to a child's actual experience.

GeM-NR: Geometry-Aware Multi-View Editing for Nonrigid Scene Changes

Recent developments in multi-view image editing with generative models have brought us a step closer toward general 3D content generation and customization. Most existing works focus on rigid or appearance-only edits by utilizing the geometry of the unedited scene. This naturally limits these methods to edits that preserve the underlying scene structure. Other approaches are trained for specific image editing tasks, such as object removal and addition. Despite this progress, general nonrigid edits, i.e., edits that substantially change the scene geometry, remain challenging for existing methods. We propose GeM-NR, a fast and flexible training-free approach for general multi-view consistent image editing, including edits that drastically change the geometry and appearance of the scene. Given an anchor image edited with a chosen backbone editor (such as FLUX, Qwen, BrushNet) and a query unedited image, GeM-NR edits the query image consistently with the anchor edit. The method incorporates multiple stages: (i) depth map estimation, where we propose a strategy to maximize the alignment between the 3D point clouds of the edited and unedited scenes, (ii) projection onto a query viewpoint, and (iii) refinement of the obtained image conditioned on the unedited query. The conditioning-based formulation scales well from two to many views of an object. We demonstrate the ability of our method to handle edits with significant changes in geometry and appearance, something that existing methods struggle with. We perform an extensive evaluation showing that our method improves consistency for a wide variety of edit tasks, including generating 3D representations of the edited scene. Both quantitative and qualitative results indicate the state-of-the-art performance of our method in terms of edit quality as well as geometric and photometric consistency across multiple views.

Belief-Aware VLM Model for Human-like Reasoning

Traditional neural network models for intent inference rely heavily on observable states and struggle to generalize across diverse tasks and dynamic environments. Recent advances in Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Vision Language Action (VLA) models introduce common-sense reasoning through large-scale multimodal pretraining, enabling zero-shot performance across tasks. However, these models still lack explicit mechanisms to represent and update belief, limiting their ability to reason like humans or capture the evolving human intent over long-horizon. To address this, we propose a belief-aware VLM framework that integrates retrieval-based memory and reinforcement learning. Instead of learning an explicit belief model, we approximate belief using a vector-based memory that retrieves relevant multimodal context, which is incorporated into the VLM for reasoning. We further refine decision-making using a reinforcement learning policy over the VLM latent space. We evaluate our approach on publicly available VQA datasets such as HD-EPIC and demonstrate consistent improvements over zero-shot baselines, highlighting the importance of belief-aware reasoning.

Bad Seeing or Bad Thinking? Rewarding Perception for Multimodal Reasoning

Achieving robust perception-reasoning synergy is a central goal for advanced Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Recent advancements have pursued this goal via architectural designs or agentic workflows. However, these approaches are often limited by static textual reasoning or complicated by the significant compute and engineering burden of external agentic complexity. Worse, this heavy investment does not yield proportional gains, often witnessing a "seesaw effect" on perception and reasoning. This motivates a fundamental rethinking of the true bottleneck. In this paper, we argue that the root cause of this trade-off is an ambiguity in modality credit assignment: when a VLM fails, is it due to flawed perception ("bad seeing") or flawed logic ("bad thinking")? To resolve this, we introduce a reinforcement learning framework that improves perception-reasoning synergy by reliably rewarding the perception fidelity. We explicitly decompose the generation process into interleaved perception and reasoning steps. This decoupling enables targeted supervision on perception. Crucially, we introduce Perception Verification (PV), leveraging a "blindfolded reasoning" proxy to reward perceptual fidelity independently of reasoning outcomes. Furthermore, to scale training across free-form VL tasks, we propose Structured Verbal Verification, which replaces high-variance LLM judging with structured algorithmic execution. These techniques are integrated into a Modality-Aware Credit Assignment (MoCA) mechanism, which routes rewards to the specific source of error -- either bad seeing or bad thinking -- enabling a single VLM to achieve simultaneous performance gains across a wide task spectrum.

Transformer-Based Autonomous Driving Models and Deployment-Oriented Compression: A Survey

Transformer-based models are becoming a central paradigm in autonomous driving because they can capture long-range spatial dependencies, multi-agent interactions, and multimodal context across perception, prediction, and planning. At the same time, their deployment in real vehicles remains difficult because high-capacity attention-based architectures impose substantial latency, memory, and energy overhead. This survey reviews representative Transformer-based autonomous driving models and organizes them by task role, sensing configuration, and architectural design. More importantly, it examines these models from a deployment-oriented perspective and analyzes how efficiency constraints reshape model design choices in practice. We further review compression and acceleration strategies relevant to Transformer-based driving systems, including quantization, pruning, knowledge distillation, low-rank approximation, and efficient attention, and discuss their benefits, limitations, and task-dependent applicability. Rather than treating compression as an isolated post-processing step, we highlight it as a system-level design consideration that directly affects deployability, robustness, and safety. Finally, we identify open challenges and future research directions toward standardized, safety-aware, and hardware-conscious evaluation of efficient autonomous driving systems.

CounterFace: A Synthetic Face Dataset for Fine-Grained Counterfactual Evaluation of Face Recognition Systems

Face recognition (FR) systems are widely deployed in critical applications, making their reliability and robustness across diverse populations and conditions essential. Standard evaluation of FR systems typically relies on datasets such as LFW to estimate average recognition accuracy. Some benchmarks also capture coarse-grained intra-identity variations such as aging, pose, and lighting. However, human faces undergo more fine-grained changes, including appearance changes such as hairstyles and makeup, that are underrepresented in existing benchmarks. Counterfactual evaluation provides a method to assess FR robustness under such fine-grained variations. Existing counterfactual face datasets synthesized with image generators, however, are limited in attribute coverage due to the use of humans for verification in the pipeline. We propose CounterFace, a new counterfactual evaluation dataset comprising 20 facial attributes and 8 demographic factors, exceeding prior synthetic face datasets by 14 attributes and 2 demographics. The dataset is generated using a fully automated pipeline based on off-the-shelf image generators with custom verifiers, removing human need for verification. CounterFace contains 11,821 counterfactual face pairs, and a post-hoc user study confirms the faithfulness of the generated counterfactuals. We evaluate two commercial and four open-source FR systems (AWS Rekognition, Face++, AdaFace, MagFace, ArcFace, FaceNet) across 160 attribute-demographic combinations. Our dataset helps in the isolation of precise failure modes for individual systems unlike standard evaluation benchmarks. Results indicate that the performance degradation varies across attributes and demographics for all six systems and occluding attributes (e.g., facemask and facial hair) universally degrade performance.

LaVIDE: Language-Prompted Satellite Change Detection via Map-Image Alignment

Remote sensing change detection based on a map reference and an up-to-date image boosts timely observation of the Earth's surface when earlier images are lacking for comparison. However, the semantic gap between high-level map categories and low-level image details hinders the extraction of homogeneous features for robust temporal association in change detection. Unlike conventional approaches that either compare pixel-level visual similarity or propagate segmentation errors, \textcolor{black}{we propose a novel framework, \underline{La}nguage-\underline{VI}sion \underline{D}iscriminator for d\underline{E}tecting changes, LaVIDE}, which bridges the semantic gap between high-level map categories and low-level image details using language as an intermediary. Specifically, we introduce {\it restricted prompt learning} to generate context-aware textual prompts that align map semantics with image content, and an {\it object-aware embedding enhancement} strategy to integrate object-level attributes (e.g., shape, boundary) into map representations. These components enable robust cross-modal alignment within a unified language-vision feature space. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks, DynamicEarthNet, HRSCD, BANDON, and SECOND, demonstrate that LaVIDE outperforms state-of-the-art methods by significant margins, achieving $18.4\%$ and $5.2\%$ improvements in IoU on multi-class and single-class change detection tasks, respectively. Our framework not only advances the accuracy of map-image change detection but also provides a practical solution for rapid map updating with minimal human intervention, promising broad impacts in urban planning, disaster assessment, and ecological conservation. Code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/ShuGuoJ/LAVIDE.git.

Can VLMs Predict Future States? Bootstrapping World Models from Inverse Dynamics

Can unified vision-language models (VLMs) perform forward dynamics prediction (FDP), i.e., predicting the future state (in image form) given the previous observation and an action (in language form)? We find that VLMs struggle to generate physically plausible transitions between frames from instructions. Nevertheless, we identify a crucial asymmetry in multimodal grounding: fine-tuning a VLM to learn inverse dynamics prediction (IDP)-effectively captioning the action between frames-is significantly easier than learning FDP. In turn, IDP can be used to bootstrap FDP through two main strategies: 1) weakly supervised learning from synthetic data and 2) inference time verification. Firstly, IDP can annotate actions for unlabelled pairs of video frame observations to expand the training data scale for FDP. Secondly, IDP can assign rewards to multiple samples of FDP to score them, effectively guiding search at inference time. We evaluate the FDP resulting from both strategies through the task of action-centric image editing on Aurora-Bench with two families of VLMs. Despite remaining general-purpose, our best model achieves a performance competitive with state-of-the-art image editing models, improving on them by a margin between 7% and 13% according to GPT4o-as-judge, and achieving the best average human evaluation across all subsets of Aurora-Bench.

VGGSounder: Audio-Visual Evaluations for Foundation Models

The emergence of audio-visual foundation models underscores the importance of reliably assessing their multi-modal understanding. The VGGSound dataset is commonly used as a benchmark for evaluation audio-visual classification. However, our analysis identifies several limitations of VGGSound, including incomplete labelling, partially overlapping classes, and misaligned modalities. These lead to distorted evaluations of auditory and visual capabilities. To address these limitations, we introduce VGGSounder, a comprehensively re-annotated, multi-label test set that extends VGGSound and is specifically designed to evaluate audio-visual foundation models. VGGSounder features detailed modality annotations, enabling precise analyses of modality-specific performance. Furthermore, we reveal model limitations by analysing performance degradation when adding another input modality with our new modality confusion metric.

Platonic Transformers: A Solid Choice For Equivariance

While widespread, Transformers lack inductive biases for geometric symmetries common in science and computer vision. Existing equivariant methods often sacrifice the efficiency and flexibility that make Transformers so effective through complex, computationally intensive designs. We introduce the Platonic Transformer to resolve this trade-off. By defining attention relative to reference frames from the Platonic solid symmetry groups, our method induces a principled weight-sharing scheme. This enables combined equivariance to continuous translations and Platonic symmetries, while preserving the exact architecture and computational cost of a standard Transformer. Furthermore, we show that this attention is formally equivalent to a dynamic group convolution, which reveals that the model learns adaptive geometric filters and enables a highly scalable, linear-time convolutional variant. Across diverse benchmarks in computer vision (CIFAR-10), 3D point clouds (ScanObjectNN), and molecular property prediction (QM9, OMol25), the Platonic Transformer achieves competitive performance by leveraging these geometric constraints at no additional cost.

SAM 3D: 3Dfy Anything in Images

We present SAM 3D, a generative model for visually grounded 3D object reconstruction, predicting geometry, texture, and layout from a single image. SAM 3D excels in natural images, where occlusion and scene clutter are common and visual recognition cues from context play a larger role. We achieve this with a human- and model-in-the-loop pipeline for annotating object shape, texture, and pose, providing visually grounded 3D reconstruction data at unprecedented scale. We learn from this data in a modern, multi-stage training framework that combines synthetic pretraining with real-world alignment, breaking the 3D "data barrier". We obtain significant gains over recent work, with at least a 5:1 win rate in human preference tests on real-world objects and scenes. We will release our code and model weights, an online demo, and a new challenging benchmark for in-the-wild 3D object reconstruction.

AttnRegDeepLab: A Two-Stage Decoupled Framework for Interpretable Embryo Fragmentation Grading

Embryo fragmentation is a morphological indicator critical for evaluating developmental potential in In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). However, manual grading is subjective and inefficient, while existing deep learning solutions often lack clinical explainability or suffer from accumulated errors in segmentation area estimation. To address these issues, this study proposes AttnRegDeepLab (Attention-Guided Regression DeepLab), a framework characterized by dual-branch Multi-Task Learning (MTL). A vanilla DeepLabV3+ decoder is modified by integrating Attention Gates into its skip connections, explicitly suppressing cytoplasmic noise to preserve contour details. Furthermore, a Multi-Scale Regression Head is introduced with a Feature Injection mechanism to propagate global grading priors into the segmentation task, rectifying systematic quantification errors. A 2-stage decoupled training strategy is proposed to address the gradient conflict in MTL. Also, a range-based loss is designed to leverage weakly labeled data. Our method achieves robust grading precision while maintaining excellent segmentation accuracy (Dice coefficient =0.729), in contrast to the end-to-end counterpart that might minimize grading error at the expense of contour integrity. This work provides a clinically interpretable solution that balances visual fidelity and quantitative precision.

Dynamic Content Moderation in Livestreams: Combining Supervised Classification with MLLM-Boosted Similarity Matching

Content moderation remains a critical yet challenging task for large-scale user-generated video platforms, especially in livestreaming environments where moderation must be timely, multimodal, and robust to evolving forms of unwanted content. We present a hybrid moderation framework deployed at production scale that combines supervised classification for known violations with reference-based similarity matching for novel or subtle cases. This hybrid design enables robust detection of both explicit violations and novel edge cases that evade traditional classifiers. Multimodal inputs (text, audio, visual) are processed through both pipelines, with a multimodal large language model (MLLM) distilling knowledge into each to boost accuracy while keeping inference lightweight. In production, the classification pipeline achieves 67% recall at 80% precision, and the similarity pipeline achieves 76% recall at 80% precision. Large-scale A/B tests show a 6-8% reduction in user views of unwanted livestreams}. These results demonstrate a scalable and adaptable approach to multimodal content governance, capable of addressing both explicit violations and emerging adversarial behaviors.

From Segments to Scenes: Temporal Understanding for Agentic Autonomous Driving via Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as the perception and reasoning backbone of autonomous agents acting in the wild, with autonomous driving (AD) being one of the most safety-critical instances. Reliable temporal understanding is essential for such agents to anticipate events, attribute causes, and act safely in dynamic environments, yet this remains a significant challenge even for state-of-the-art (SoTA) VLMs. Prior video benchmarks have emphasized other content (sports, cooking, etc.), yet no existing benchmark focuses exclusively on temporal understanding for both short- and long-form AD footage. To fill this gap, we present the Temporal Understanding in Autonomous Driving (TAD) benchmark, comprising nearly 6000 question-answer (QA) pairs across 7 tasks, and evaluate 9 closed- and open-source generalist as well as AD-specialist models. Current SoTA models perform substantially below human accuracy on TAD. To improve the temporal reasoning of VLM-based driving agents, we propose two novel training-free solutions: Scene-CoT, which uses Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, and TCogMap, which incorporates an ego-centric temporal cognitive map produced by a trajectory-analysis module that operates as an agentic tool around the VLM. Integrated with existing VLMs, our methods improve average accuracy on TAD by up to $17.72\%$ and by up to $10.35\%$ on STSBench. By introducing TAD, benchmarking SoTA models, and proposing effective enhancements, this work aims to catalyze further progress on temporal understanding for agentic AD systems operating in the wild. The benchmark and evaluation code are available at ${\href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/vbdai/TAD}{\text{Hugging Face}}}$ and ${\href{https://github.com/vbdi/tad_bench}{\text{GitHub}}}$, respectively.

DVGT: Driving Visual Geometry Transformer

Perceiving and reconstructing 3D scene geometry from visual inputs is crucial for autonomous driving. However, there still lacks a driving-targeted dense geometry perception model that can adapt to different scenarios and camera configurations. To bridge this gap, we propose a Driving Visual Geometry Transformer (DVGT), which reconstructs a global dense 3D point map from a sequence of unposed multi-view visual inputs. We first extract visual features for each image using a DINO backbone, and employ alternating intra-view local attention, cross-view spatial attention, and cross-frame temporal attention to infer geometric relations across images. We then use multiple heads to decode a global point map in the ego coordinate of the first frame and the ego poses for each frame. Unlike conventional methods that rely on precise camera parameters, DVGT is free of explicit 3D geometric priors, enabling flexible processing of arbitrary camera configurations. DVGT directly predicts metric-scaled geometry from image sequences, eliminating the need for post-alignment with external sensors. Trained on a large mixture of driving datasets including nuScenes, OpenScene, Waymo, KITTI, and DDAD, DVGT significantly outperforms existing models on various scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/wzzheng/DVGT.

R3G: A Reasoning-Retrieval-Reranking Framework for Vision-Centric Answer Generation

Vision-centric retrieval for VQA requires retrieving images to supply missing visual cues and integrating them into the reasoning process. However, selecting the right images and integrating them effectively into the model's reasoning remains challenging.To address this challenge, we propose R3G, a modular Reasoning-Retrieval-Reranking framework.It first produces a brief reasoning plan that specifies the required visual cues, then adopts a two-stage strategy, with coarse retrieval followed by fine-grained reranking, to select evidence images.On MRAG-Bench, R3G improves accuracy across six MLLM backbones and nine sub-scenarios, achieving state-of-the-art overall performance. Ablations show that sufficiency-aware reranking and reasoning steps are complementary, helping the model both choose the right images and use them well. We release code and data at https://github.com/czh24/R3G.

ShareVerse: Multi-Agent Consistent Video Generation for Shared World Modeling

This paper presents ShareVerse, a video generation framework enabling multi-agent shared world modeling, addressing the gap in existing works that lack support for unified shared world construction with multi-agent interaction. ShareVerse leverages the generation capability of large video models and integrates three key innovations: 1) A dataset for large-scale multi-agent interactive world modeling is built on the CARLA simulation platform, featuring diverse scenes, weather conditions, and interactive trajectories with paired multi-view videos (front/ rear/ left/ right views per agent) and camera data. 2) We propose a spatial concatenation strategy for four-view videos of independent agents to model a broader environment and to ensure internal multi-view geometric consistency. 3) We integrate cross-agent attention blocks into the pretrained video model, which enable interactive transmission of spatial-temporal information across agents, guaranteeing shared world consistency in overlapping regions and reasonable generation in non-overlapping regions. ShareVerse, which supports 49-frame large-scale video generation, accurately perceives the position of dynamic agents and achieves consistent shared world modeling.

Beyond Pixel Histories: World Models with Persistent 3D State

Interactive world models continually generate video by responding to a user's actions, enabling open-ended generation capabilities. However, existing models typically lack a 3D representation of the environment, meaning 3D consistency must be implicitly learned from data, and spatial memory is restricted to limited temporal context windows. This results in an unrealistic user experience and presents significant obstacles to downstream tasks such as training agents. To address this, we present PERSIST, a new paradigm of world model which simulates the evolution of a latent 3D scene: environment, camera, and renderer. This allows us to synthesise new frames with persistent spatial memory and consistent geometry. Both quantitative metrics and a qualitative user study show substantial improvements in spatial memory, 3D consistency, and long-horizon stability over existing methods, enabling coherent, evolving 3D worlds. We further demonstrate novel capabilities, including synthesising diverse 3D environments from a single image, as well as enabling fine-grained, geometry-aware control over generated experiences by supporting environment editing and specification directly in 3D space. Project page: https://francelico.github.io/persist.github.io

Learning to Evaluate: Cost-Effective Model Evaluation on Unlabeled Data with Meta-Learning

The rapid advancement of machine learning has led to an unprecedented expansion of model ecosystems, making it increasingly difficult to assess the reliability of newly released models on unseen and unlabeled data. Existing evaluation pipelines typically rely on costly annotation, repeated fine-tuning, or assumptions that do not generalize well to new models. We introduce MetaEvaluator, a cost-effective, model-agnostic framework for fast, label-free evaluation of unseen models across diverse architectures and modalities. MetaEvaluator meta-learns over a pool of reference models to acquire an effective initialization for accurate assessment of unseen models, thereby amortizing evaluation cost and eliminating the need for per-model retraining. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first model-agnostic framework that evaluates new models on unlabeled datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MetaEvaluator delivers stable and accurate performance estimates at substantially lower cost than conventional approaches, enabling scalable benchmarking on unlabeled datasets for emerging models. The code is available at: https://github.com/phkhanhtrinh23/MetaEvaluator.

Correcting Visual Blur Induced by Attention Distraction to Reduce Hallucinations: Algorithm and Theory

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) frequently suffer from object hallucinations, yet the visual perceptual mechanism underlying this failure remains poorly understood. In this work, we reveal that hallucinations are strongly associated with a human-like attention distraction phenomenon, where humans under divided focus experience degraded visual clarity and produce inaccurate descriptions, while in models the same mechanism manifests as spatial inconsistency in multi-head attention and temporal fading of attention to image tokens during decoding. We further provide theoretical insights that attention dispersion increases model complexity and degrades classification generalization. Motivated by these findings, we propose an Attention-Focused Approach for Improved Image Perception (AFIP), which corrects attention distraction via cross-head attention enrichment and reinforces visual grounding through dynamic historical attention enhancement. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and models validate the effectiveness of AFIP without additional training.

VAMPS: Visual-Assisted Mathematical Problem Solving Benchmark

Multimodal large language models are increasingly capable of complex reasoning, yet their performance often degrades when they must externalize a problem through a tool and then reason over the tool's output, specifically when they rely on visual aids. This gap is especially important because real engineering and scientific workflows often rely on visualization tools for analysis, validation, and decision-making. To study this discrepancy, we introduce VAMPS (Visual-Assisted Mathematical Problem Solving), a benchmark for graph-assisted mathematics. VAMPS contains 1,168 multimodal, bilingual multiple-choice question-answer pairs drawn from Iranian University Entrance Exam algebra and calculus problems and expanded with human-reviewed LLM-generated synthetic variants, all selected so that plotting provides a natural solution strategy by revealing intersections, extrema, asymptotes, etc. Designed for both benchmarking and diagnosis, VAMPS goes beyond prior multimodal benchmarks that primarily evaluate reasoning over fixed visual inputs by testing whether a model can benefit from constructing a useful graph and grounding its answer in the resulting visualization. Overall, we found that across a diverse set of models, direct analytical solving surprisingly outperforms tool-enabled visual solving, even on problems where plotting is a natural strategy.

Can Generalist Agents Automate Data Curation?

Curating training data is among the most consequential yet labor-intensive parts of modern AI development: practitioners iteratively propose, implement, evaluate, and revise data policies against noisy benchmark feedback. We ask whether generalist coding agents can automate this data-curation loop. We introduce *Curation-Bench*, an agent-centric benchmark that fixes the model, training recipe, and evaluation suite while giving agents command-line access to inspect data, implement policies, submit them to a fixed training/evaluation pipeline, and revise. In a vision-language instruction-tuning instantiation, out-of-the-box agents reach strong published data-selection baselines within ten iterations. However, trajectory analysis reveals a persistent *execution-research gap*: agents mainly tune local policy variants rather than explore new policy families, even when given strategy guides and paper references. Scaffolds requiring each iteration to cite, instantiate, and adapt a prior method shift agents toward method-guided exploration. The scaffolded agent autonomously composes -- without human design input -- a data-selection policy that outperforms strong published baselines at one-tenth their data budget. Overall, current agents can run the curation loop, but reliable data research requires scaffolded method adaptation, not open-ended prompting alone. Code and benchmark are open-sourced.

SpurAudio: A Benchmark for Studying Shortcut Learning in Few-Shot Audio Classification

Few-shot classification (FSC) is widely used for learning from limited labeled data, yet most evaluations implicitly assume that target concepts are independent of contextual cues. In real-world settings, however, examples often appear within rich contexts, allowing models to exploit spurious correlations between foreground content and background signals. While such effects have been studied in few-shot image classification, their role in few-shot audio classification remains largely unexplored, and existing audio benchmarks offer limited control over contextual structure. We introduce SpurAudio, a benchmark that leverages the natural separability of foreground events and background environments in audio to enable controlled, multi-level evaluation of contextual shifts across support and query sets. Using this benchmark, we show that many state-of-the-art few-shot methods suffer severe performance degradation when background correlations are disrupted, despite achieving similar accuracy under standard evaluation protocols. Crucially, this vulnerability persists even in large pretrained audio foundation models, ruling out limited backbone capacity as an explanation. Moreover, methods that appear comparable under conventional benchmarks can exhibit markedly different sensitivity to spurious correlations, revealing systematic algorithmic strengths and vulnerabilities tied to how feature representations interact with classifier heads at inference time. These findings provide new insight into the behavior of few-shot methods in audio and highlight the need for benchmarks that explicitly probe context dependence when evaluating FSC models.

Dive into the Scene: Breaking the Perceptual Bottleneck in Vision-Language Decision Making via Focus Plan Generation

In embodied vision-language decision making tasks such as robotic manipulation and navigation, Vision-Language and Vision-Language-Action Models (VLMs & VLAs) are powerful tools with different benefits: VLMs are better at long-term planning, while VLAs are better at reactive control. However, their performance is limited by the same perceptual bottleneck: visual hallucinations arise due to the models' inability to distinguish task-relevant objects from distractors. In principle, accurate identification and focus on critical objects while filtering out irrelevant ones is the key to break this limitation. A straightforward solution is one-step focus: directly attending to essential objects. However, this approach proves ineffective because effective focus inherently requires deep scene understanding. To this end, we propose SceneDiver, a coarse-to-fine focus plan generation method for VLMs leveraging their long-term planning abilities, that first constructs a holistic scene graph to establish initial comprehension, then progressively decomposes the task into simpler sub-problems through an iterative cycle of recognition, understanding, and analysis. To enable reactive control, we also design a lightweight adapter for distilling the deliberate focus ability into VLAs. Evaluations on standard embodied AI benchmarks confirm that our method substantially reduces visual hallucinations for both VLMs and VLAs, while preserving computational efficiency in tasks requiring fast execution. Our code and data are released at: https://future-item.github.io/SceneDiver.

SymTRELLIS: Symmetry-Enforced Voxel Latents for 3D Generation

Single-view 3D generative models have achieved impressive visual quality, yet they are not designed to satisfy structural or functional requirements, and in practice, often fall short. Symmetry is one such requirement: violations, even subtle ones, on symmetry can render a model physically unusable. We present SymTRELLIS, a method that enforces arbitrary finite point group symmetries (rotational, reflectional, and polyhedral) during the flow-based 3D generation of TRELLIS.2, without retraining the underlying VAE or flow model. Our key idea is to approximate the latent-space action of spatial transformations as a learned linear operator on voxel latents, implemented as a lightweight spatial-transform latent mapper trained on generic, non-symmetric 3D data. At generation time, we enforce symmetry by averaging predicted flow velocities across all symmetry-equivalent transformations at each ODE step, a process we call velocity symmetrization. The symmetry specification can be estimated automatically from an initial TRELLIS.2 generation or supplied by the user, enabling deliberate fold manipulation beyond what the input image suggests. On a curated benchmark of 266 strictly symmetric objects spanning 2- to 20-fold rotations and polyhedral symmetry groups, SymTRELLIS substantially reduces all symmetry error metrics compared to TRELLIS.2, Hunyuan3D-2.1, and TripoSG, while maintaining reconstruction accuracy comparable to the base model.

DetectZoo: A Unified Toolkit for AI-Generated Content Detection Across Text, Audio, and Image Modalities

The growing popularity and capacity of generative models have eroded the distinction between human and machine-generated content, motivating a growing body of work on detection across text, images, and audio. Most available detectors are either commercial software or, if open-source, come with incompatible codebases with bespoke preprocessing, evaluation protocols, and evaluation metrics, which make their adoption, fair comparison, and reproduction quite difficult. To address this critical gap, we introduce DetectZoo, a first-of-its-kind, extensible toolkit designed to provide a unified interface for AI-generated content detection across text, audio, and image modalities. DetectZoo standardizes the complete empirical pipeline, from data ingestion and preprocessing to model assessment, offering researchers a cohesive framework to benchmark state-of-the-art detectors systematically. By integrating diverse public datasets and baseline detection algorithms under a single, unified API, our toolkit facilitates rigorous and reproducible evaluation. DetectZoo provides reference implementations of 61 detectors, native loaders for 22 benchmark datasets, and a standardized evaluation pipeline that reports multiple metrics through a common interface. Each detector is self-contained yet accessible through the same interface, automatically caches pretrained weights, and reproduces the original published results. DetectZoo lowers the barrier to entry for multi-modal AI forensics, enabling researchers to identify performance gaps across domains and accelerating the development of robust, generalizable detection techniques. The open-source repository and comprehensive documentation are publicly available at https://github.com/sadjadeb/DetectZoo, and the package can be installed via pip install detectzoo.

Overview of the EReL@MIR 2025 Multimodal Document Retrieval Challenge (Track 1)

Retrieval over visually-rich documents, pages that interleave text with figures, tables, and charts, is essential for multimodal retrieval-augmented generation, yet most retrievers still discard the visual channel. The \emph{Multimodal Document Retrieval Challenge}, Track~1 of the MIR Challenge at the first EReL@MIR workshop, co-located with The Web Conference 2025, asks participants to build a \emph{single} retrieval system that handles two complementary regimes: closed-set document page retrieval within long documents from a text query (MMDocIR), and open-domain retrieval of Wikipedia-style passages from an image or image-plus-text query (M2KR). Systems are ranked by the macro-average of mean Recall@$\{1,3,5\}$ over the two tasks. The challenge drew 455 entrants and 586 submissions across 22 teams. This report describes the challenge design, datasets, and evaluation protocol; reports the final standings; and analyses the three winning teams' systems. All three build on decoder-based Multimodal-LLM embedders from the Qwen2-VL family rather than on CLIP-style encoders, and differ chiefly in whether they reach the top through fine-tuned ensembles, training-free multi-route fusion with a strong vision-language re-ranker, or zero-shot late interaction. The training-free system finished within $0.1$ point of the fine-tuned winner.

Instant-Fold: In-Context Imitation Learning for Deformable Object Manipulation

Deformable object manipulation (DOM) is challenging due to high-dimensional, partially observable states that evolve through long-horizon, topology-changing interactions with multiple valid manipulation modes. We introduce Instant-Fold, an in-context imitation learning framework for DOM. Given a single human demonstration, our policy infers and executes diverse manipulation modes directly from the demonstration, including variations in spatial execution and ordering, without requiring gradient updates. Our approach first learns deformation-aware visual representations via temporal contrastive pretraining, after which a flow-matching transformer policy conditioned on the demonstration predicts actions to execute the intended manipulation mode. Trained entirely in simulation, Instant-Fold generalizes across diverse folding modes and transfers zero-shot to real-world settings without additional data collection or finetuning. Videos are available at https://instant-fold.github.io.

StandardE2E: A Unified Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Datasets

Autonomous driving has shifted from modular perception-prediction-planning stacks toward end-to-end (E2E) models that map sensor inputs directly to vehicle control, often regularized by auxiliary tasks such as 3D detection, motion forecasting, and HD-map perception. Progress is driven by a fast-growing ecosystem of sensor-rich driving datasets, yet each ships its own file formats, APIs, coordinate conventions, and modality coverage, leaving cross-dataset experimentation and even basic per-dataset preprocessing to be re-implemented per project. We present StandardE2E, a framework that provides a single unified interface over E2E driving datasets. StandardE2E (i) standardizes per-dataset preprocessing under one shared data schema; (ii) combines multiple datasets in a single PyTorch DataLoader for cross-dataset pretraining, auxiliary-task supervision, and scenario-level filtering; and (iii) reduces adding a new dataset to a single per-dataset mapping from raw frames to the canonical schema, leaving the entire downstream pipeline unchanged. The framework supports six datasets out of the box: Waymo End-to-End, Waymo Perception, Argoverse 2 Sensor, Argoverse 2 LiDAR, NAVSIM (OpenScene-v1.1), and WayveScenes101, and is released as the open-source standard-e2e Python package, available at https://github.com/stepankonev/StandardE2E.

HYolo: An Intelligent IoT-Based Object Detection System Using Hypergraph Learning

This paper presents HYolo, an intelligent IoT-based object detection framework that integrates hypergraph learning into the YOLO architecture. Traditional YOLO-based object detection models primarily capture pairwise feature interactions and may fail to model complex high-order relationships among objects and contextual features. To address this limitation, HYolo incorporates hypergraph learning to capture richer contextual dependencies and improve object representation. Experimental evaluation on the COCO dataset demonstrates significant performance improvements over baseline YOLO models. The proposed approach achieves approximately 12% improvement in mAP@50 while enhancing overall detection accuracy and robustness. By modeling high-order feature relationships, HYolo provides improved contextual understanding and more reliable object detection performance in IoT-based environments. The results indicate that integrating hypergraph learning into object detection pipelines offers a promising direction for intelligent and context-aware IoT vision systems.

MorphoQuant: Modality-Aware Quantization for Omni-modal Large Language Models

Conventional Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) methods struggle with 4-bit Omni-modal Large Language Models (OLLMs) due to the extreme distribution heterogeneity and disparate outlier patterns across modalities. To address this, we propose MorphoQuant, a modality-aware PTQ framework engineered to preserve cross-modal morphology and mitigate outlier loss. Specifically, we introduce Distribution-Aware Bias Compensation (DABC), which selectively absorbs long-tailed outliers into channel-wise biases. This mechanism safeguards outlier magnitudes while maintaining high-precision discretization for dense inliers, thereby preserving accurate discretization across diverse modal distribution. Complementing this, we propose Morphology-Directed Quantization Function Optimization (MDQFO) to co-optimize the quantization grid with the bias mask, ensuring fine-grained alignment across modalities. Extensive evaluations on Qwen2.5-Omni across benchmarks like MMMU and Video-MME demonstrate our approach's superiority. Notably, our W4A4 model achieves 76.63% on ScienceQA, significantly outperforming SOTA W4A4 methods and surprisingly surpassing the W4A16 baseline, which fully demonstrates the exceptional accuracy-efficiency trade-off of our framework.

Multi-Granularity 3D Kidney Lesion Characterization from CT Volumes

Radiology reports describe kidney lesions by type, size, enhancement, and attenuation, yet existing 3D methods predict only at the patient or organ level. We reformulate kidney CT characterization as a per-lesion set-prediction task: one model emits a variable number of lesions per kidney, each with four clinical attributes. We curated 2,619 CT volumes from 788 patients at one academic medical center, with multi-granularity side- and per-lesion labels, and used KiTS23 (489 cases) for zero-shot external validation. We propose \textbf{LesionDETR}, a DETR-style architecture with size-distance Hungarian matching and a hierarchical loss that aggregates per-slot outputs to side-level objectives. Across four input representations and six encoder initializations, two design choices dominate: a segmentation mask as an input channel, and same-domain abdominal pretraining (SuPreM); generic large-corpus pretraining is no better than random initialization. LesionDETR reaches bilateral side-level abnormality AUC $0.799 \pm 0.009$ on UF-Health and $0.817 \pm 0.072$ on KiTS23. A count-conditioned variant reaches per-lesion mAP $0.190 \pm 0.083$ on cystic lesions; rare solid-lesion AP stays at the noise floor, pointing to targeted data collection, not architecture, as the next bottleneck. The framework yields verified per-lesion predictions for downstream structured report generation.

Selective Coupling of Decoupled Informative Regions: Masked Attention Alignment for Data-Free Quantization of Vision Transformers

Data-Free Quantization (DFQ) addresses data security concerns by synthesizing samples, without accessing real data. It has garnered increasing attention in the context of Vision Transformers (ViTs), owing to the superiority of the self-attention mechanism compared to classical convolutional operation. However, previous DFQ arts for ViTs often suffer from a distribution mismatch between synthetic samples and input distribution expected by quantized models Q, resulting in the suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Masked Attention Alignment approach for Data-Free Quantization of ViTs, named MaskAQ, revealing that: 1) the semantics in the self-attention mechanism is predominantly localized to a sparse subset of patches, called informative regions; 2) the informative regions dominate the mutual information between synthetic samples and Q's outputs. To these ends, we incorporate differential entropy maximum over patch similarity of synthetic samples, to decouple informative regions from noisy background. To couple with varied Q, the informative regions are selected to align full-precision models with Q via a masked attention alignment objective, thus yielding high-quality synthetic samples. Furthermore, a periodic sample refreshing strategy comes up to endow MaskAQ with the capacity to continually adapt to the evolving state of Q throughout the training process, to preserve desirable mutual information with synthetic samples. Extensive experiments verify the merits of MaskAQ over state-of-the-art approaches across multiple backbones and downstream tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/hfutqian/MaskAQ.

An Empirical Study of Data Scale, Model Complexity, and Input Modalities in Visual Generalization

Modern deep neural networks usually have large parameter scales and nonlinear hierarchical structures, and they have achieved strong performance in computer vision. However, the source of their generalization performance remains difficult to explain using traditional statistical learning theory. Among the factors that may affect visual generalization, data scale, model complexity, and input modalities are fundamental and controllable variables. This study empirically analyzes how these three factors influence model generalization performance. Specifically, in a preliminary experiment, we construct a one-dimensional nonlinear function and vary the number of training samples and the polynomial degree to observe the effects of data scale and model complexity on model performance. In the main experiments, we compare model performance on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 under different training data scales, model architectures, and input modalities. The experimental results show that increasing the training data scale consistently improves generalization performance, whereas changes in model complexity do not provide stable gains. In addition, removing color information degrades model performance, while explicit prior features such as gradients, edges, and wavelets have inconsistent effects across different model architectures. Overall, this study provides an empirical analysis of the relationships among data scale, model complexity, input modalities, and visual generalization performance. Code and experimental logs are available at: https://github.com/zlyd-CV/DeepLearning-Empirical-Studies.

L-TGVN: Leveraging Longitudinal Priors for Personalized Rapid MRI

MRI provides excellent soft-tissue contrast without ionizing radiation, but long acquisition times increase patient discomfort while also raising exam costs and limiting scanner throughput. A common approach to reduce scan time is to acquire fewer measurements, which yields an ill-posed linear inverse problem; recovering diagnostic-quality images therefore requires incorporating prior knowledge beyond the measured data. In follow-up exams, the most recent prior scan of a patient can provide a highly informative subject-specific context, but practical use is complicated by temporal changes (including pathology progression), misalignment between scans, and protocol drift across acquisitions. In this work, we introduce L-TGVN, a Longitudinal Trust-Guided Variational Network that leverages prior scans as side information to reconstruct the current scan from heavily undersampled measurements. Crucially, L-TGVN constrains the influence of prior scans to be consistent with the acquired measurements. Unlike many existing longitudinal reconstruction methods, it does not require explicit pre-registration between prior and current scans. It further accommodates differences in acquisition protocols across visits (e.g., changes in sequence parameters). We evaluate L-TGVN against matched-capacity baselines, including prior-guided methods and methods that do not use longitudinal priors, and observe consistent improvements in standard quantitative metrics together with better preservation of fine structures at challenging accelerations. Source code is available at github.com/sodicksonlab/L-TGVN.

Adaptive Calibration for Fair and Performant Facial Recognition

We introduce Adaptive Calibration (AC), a novel calibration strategy for facial recognition that maps cosine similarity between normalized embeddings to well-calibrated probabilities. By incorporating local context into calibration, Adaptive Calibration corrects for a fundamental mismatch in cosine similarity, whereby the same distance can correspond to different match probabilities in different embedding regions. Our approach improves both overall performance and results in a fairer calibration without requiring demographic metadata. Our approach consistently dominates existing methods both on accuracy and fairness metrics across a variety of pretrained models and standard benchmarks. AC provides a practical solution for equitable facial recognition, without requiring demographic group annotations, and while improving overall performance. Unlike existing approaches, our method provides continuous, region-specific calibration that avoids "leveling down" where fairness comes at the cost of degraded performance for some groups.

Evaluating Reasoning Fidelity in Visual Text Generation

Recent text-to-image (T2I) models can render highly legible and well-structured text within images, enabling applications including document generation and slide generation. However, it remains unclear whether such systems faithfully preserve reasoning ability when complex solutions must be expressed directly through rendered text, or whether they merely imitate surface-level patterns. We investigate this question by evaluating reasoning fidelity in visual text generation, where models must express complete reasoning processes as images. Our evaluation includes long text rendering, factual knowledge probing, context understanding, and multi-step reasoning. Across these settings, we find that current T2I models frequently produce semantic errors, logical inconsistencies, and incorrect intermediate steps, even when the rendered text appears visually clear. These failures contrast with the strong reasoning performance of text-only models on the same tasks. Our findings reveal a substantial gap between visual text generation and procedural reasoning, motivating more reliable visual text reasoning.

SFMambaNet: Spectral-Frequency Enhanced Selective State Space Model for Correspondence Pruning

Correspondence pruning aims to identify inliers from an initial set of correspondences. Most existing Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based methods rely on geometric features mapped from coarse Euclidean coordinates, which struggle to capture the subtle geometric consistencies presented by inliers. While Mamba-based methods possess global receptive fields and long sequence modeling capabilities, they tend to accumulate substantial inconsistent features within the hidden state space, making it difficult to distinguish inliers from outliers. In this paper, we integrate frequency domain perception into this task for the first time and propose SFMambaNet, a novel Spectral-Frequency enhanced Mamba-based two-view correspondence pruning network. Our method is collaboratively composed of two components: First, we design a Local Spectral-Geometric Attention (LSGA) block. LSGA incorporates spectral positional encoding into local graph interactions and introduces multi-scale Mamba processing to enhance the capture of subtle geometric consistencies and improve local feature discriminability. Building upon this, we design a Spectral-Integrated Global Mamba (SIGM) block. SIGM embeds a frequency gating mechanism within the state space, utilizing the frequency information provided by LSGA to explicitly suppress high-frequency noise accumulation within hidden states and mitigate the propagation of inconsistent features. This enhances inlier-outlier separability and achieves robust global context modeling capabilities with nearly linear complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SFMambaNet outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on several challenging tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/Kirito14IT/SFMambaNet.

Optical-Guided Neural Collapse for SAR Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning

Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) in synthetic aperture radar imagery presents unique challenges due to severe data scarcity and SAR-specific variability. In particular, strong azimuth sensitivity in SAR induces large intra-class variation and inter-class confusion, and FSCIL sequential updates further lead to catastrophic forgetting of previously learned classes. Inspired by neural collapse, we propose an optical-guided SAR FSCIL framework, which derives orthogonal feature subspaces from a data-rich optical ATR dataset and uses them as geometric priors to guide SAR feature learning. SAR features are projected onto these orthogonal subspaces via principal angle constraints, effectively transferring discriminative structure from the optical to the SAR domain. Specifically, our projection loss and the classifier loss optimized with a frozen simplex-ETF geometry jointly induce neural collapse by concentrating features around class means while maintaining large inter-class angles. We evaluate the approach on a benchmark comprising an optical ATR dataset and a SAR ATR dataset with 24 target classes, organized into a base training session and seven incremental sessions. Compared with recent FSCIL methods including NCFSCIL and so on, our method achieves the highest final accuracy and a favorable trade-off between final performance and performance degradation. Moreover, neural collapse metrics show improved intra-class compactness and inter-class separability, indicating that the learned features more closely approximate the ideal simplex-ETF geometry.

Instance-Level Post Hoc Uncertainty Quantification in Object Detection

Object detection is a safety-critical component of autonomous driving. It is essential to quantify the uncertainty in bounding-box predictions for safety assurance. Post hoc uncertainty quantification without retraining aligns with real-world deployment requirements; therefore, we employ the Laplace approximation. Because instance-level uncertainty is needed, linearized inference methods that require multiple backpropagations are not time-efficient, and sampling-based methods are not fully post hoc. We propose Monte-Carlo generalized linearized model (MC-GLM), which provides instance-level and approximately post hoc uncertainty quantification. The number of samples required in the Monte Carlo step is constant and independent of the number of output instances, so it can be parallelized. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset with the CenterPoint detector validate the effectiveness of our method, and the resulting uncertainties exhibit good quality.

Real-Time Automatic License Plate Recognition Using YOLOv8, SORT Tracking, and Temporal Data Interpolation

The real-time hardships of video processing seriously limit the usage of Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) with application in dynamic traffic monitoring settings. High-fidelity recognition of unconstrained variables, e.g. drastic variations in illumination, acute camera scans, high vehicle speeds, and harsh physical concealment, is a problem that often leads to disjointed tracking paths and poor Optical Character Recognition (OCR) rates. In order to mitigate these weaknesses, the study proposes a 5 stage, end-to-end algorithmic pipeline, encompassing a smooth transition between deep learning based object detection, multi-object tracking which is kinematic in nature, and geometry temporal data interpolation. The suggested architecture takes advantage of a very powerful YOLOv8 nano model to localize the vehicle at the first stage and then Simple Online and Realtime Tracking (SORT) algorithm is used to build spatial-temporal links between frames. Another, more specific typology of YOLOv8 object detectors the license plate area, channeling the sliced array to an EasyOCR chain under the limitations of positional syntax verification. More importantly, an offline interpolation mechanism of temporal bounding box is initiated to recast fragmented paths.

Graph-Guided Universum Learning in Generalized Eigenvalue Proximal SVMs for Alzheimer's Disease Classification

Early and accurate detection of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is important for timely intervention and disease management. Generalized Eigenvalue Proximal Support Vector Machine (GEPSVM) and its Universum-based variants have shown promising results for AD classification. However, existing methods treat Universum samples as independent points and do not consider the geometric relationships among them. This paper proposes two graph-guided Universum learning models, namely UG-GEPSVM and IUG-GEPSVM, for AD versus cognitively normal (CN) classification using structural MRI data. In the proposed framework, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) subjects are used as Universum data to provide intermediate information between AD and CN classes. A graph is constructed over the Universum samples using Gaussian similarity, Minimum Spanning Tree connectivity, and multi-hop propagation. From this graph, a Laplacian matrix is derived that captures the geometric structure of the MCI samples. This Laplacian-based regularization is incorporated into the learning process in place of the conventional independent Universum penalty term. UG-GEPSVM integrates this regularization into the generalized eigenvalue formulation, while IUG-GEPSVM extends the numerically stable improved GEPSVM framework using a standard eigenvalue formulation. Experiments on ADNI MRI dataset variants using ICA- and PCA-based features at five different noise levels show that both proposed models consistently outperform existing GEPSVM and Universum-based methods. UG-GEPSVM achieves the highest average AUC of 88.07% and maintains stable performance under increasing noise levels. Statistical tests further confirm the significance of the observed improvements.

Enhancing MedSAM with a Lightweight Box Predictor for Medical Image Segmentation

Semantic segmentation in medical imaging is a critical yet challenging task due to data scarcity and high variability across modalities. While foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) show promise, they often struggle with medical images without specific adaptation. Moreover, point prompts, despite being the most natural form of user interaction, provide insufficient spatial context for reliable segmentation, particularly when target structures are irregular or poorly contrasted. In this paper, we propose an enhanced segmentation framework that integrates a lightweight Box Predictor module into the MedSAM architecture. The Box Predictor estimates an approximate bounding box from a single user click using localized image embedding features, providing spatial guidance that reduces the ambiguity of point prompts, while introducing only 1.6M additional parameters and negligible inference overhead. We introduce a two-stage training pipeline where the Box Predictor is trained independently before being integrated into MedSAM. To validate the generalization capability of our method, we conduct extensive evaluations on four diverse datasets (FLARE22, BRISC, BUSI, LungSegDB) spanning distinct imaging modalities, including CT, MRI, and Ultrasound. Our method improves segmentation accuracy and robustness across varied anatomical structures and imaging domains, achieving Dice scores of 0.89 (BUSI), 0.93 (FLARE22), 0.88 (BRISC), and 0.98 (LungSegDB). Code is available at https://github.com/Amirhosseinmovahedi/MedSAM-BoxPredictor

Coarse-to-fine Hierarchical Architecture with Sequential Mamba for Brain Reconstruction

Understanding the relationship between deep visual representations and the human visual system is a fundamental challenge in computational neuroscience. While modern vision models achieve strong performance in image recognition, their correspondence with the hierarchical organization of the human visual cortex remains an open question. In this study, we propose CHASMBrain, a novel hierarchical two-stage framework for image-to-fMRI encoding. Our architecture leverages a dual-stream Mamba design to explicitly separate and process global semantic tokens and local spatial patches, motivated by the functional organization of the visual cortex. A coarse-to-fine strategy is employed: Stage 1 predicts denoised ROI-level activations, while Stage 2 refines these coarse responses into full voxel-level predictions using a Mamba-VAE. Experiments on the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) demonstrate that our method achieves a Pearson correlation of 0.429 and an MSE of 0.261, outperforming all evaluated baselines including ridge regression and DINOv2 linear probes. Beyond predictive performance, causal branch-ablation experiments reveal an asymmetric specialization: the patch stream is specifically locked to early visual cortex (retinotopic regions), while the CLS stream contributes broader semantic context to higher-order areas -- a correspondence that holds causally, not merely correlationally. Cross-subject transfer experiments further show that the learned backbone generalizes across individuals with minimal per-subject adaptation, suggesting the model captures a shared, subject-agnostic visual representation.

Activation Steering of Video Generation Models via Reduced-Order Linear Optimal Control

Text-to-video (T2V) models trained on large-scale web data can generate undesired content, motivating interventions that reduce harmful outputs without sacrificing visual quality. Activation steering offers an attractive mechanistic alternative to finetuning and prompt filtering, but existing T2V steering methods remain limited, typically applying coarse, non-anticipative interventions that can lead to oversteering and content degradation. To close this gap, we propose Latent Activation Linear-Quadratic Regulator (LA-LQR), a reduced-order optimal control framework for minimally invasive T2V steering. LA-LQR formulates T2V inference as a dynamical system and computes closed-loop feedback interventions that steer activations toward desired feature setpoints while penalizing unnecessary perturbations. To make optimal control feasible for high-dimensional video activations, we project activations onto a low-dimensional, task-relevant subspace derived from contrastive prompt pairs, estimate local linear dynamics in this latent space, and solve a latent LQR problem to obtain timestep- and layer-specific steering signals. We provide theoretical bounds relating latent setpoint tracking to raw activation-space feature control, and empirically validate the fidelity of the reduced latent dynamics. On concept steering and video safety benchmarks, LA-LQR reduces unsafe generations relative to baselines, while preserving prompt fidelity and visual quality.

NoRA: Evaluating Grounded Reasonableness in Visual First-person Normative Action Reasoning

LLMs and agentic systems are increasingly deployed in social environments, making normative competence critical for safe and appropriate behavior. However, existing approaches either assess normative judgment in text alone or reduce it to choosing among a fixed set of candidate actions. We argue both are insufficient. In practice, agents are never handed a menu of options; they must identify a reasonable action from scratch, grounded in visible facts and supported by inspectable reasons. We introduce NoRA, a visual first-person video benchmark that requires models to generate candidate next actions and justify each through an explicit fact-reason-action support graph. The benchmark comprises 1,420 annotated video clips, including HumanGold-190 and LLMSilver-1230 splits. Each instance is evaluated through action alignment, factual grounding, and support binding, aggregated into a single grounded reasonableness score. We benchmark 12 multimodal systems under direct, deliberate, and structured prompting regimes, finding that current VLMs frequently recover plausible actions and relevant scene facts, but consistently struggle to construct the full reasonable action space and bind selected actions to the correct local support. NoRA makes this gap measurable, shifting the evaluation question from whether a model can pick an action to whether it can justify an appropriate action for the right visible reasons.

OA-CutMix: Correcting the Label Bias of CutMix

CutMix has become the de facto standard mixing augmentation, yet its label assignment rests on a flawed assumption: The area of the pasted patch faithfully reflects its semantic contribution to the mixed image. In practice, however, patches frequently land on background regions, assigning label credit to classes whose objects are not visible. The mean discrepancy of the CutMix label and the semantic object area is $21.5\%$. In $17\%$ of samples an image contributes zero visible object pixels yet receives nonzero label weight. We propose Object-Aware CutMix (OA-CutMix), which corrects this bias by replacing the area-based CutMix weight with one derived from precomputed segmentation masks, assigning labels in proportion to the visible object area each image contributes to the mix. The image mixing procedure is left entirely unchanged. We evaluate OA-CutMix against 10+ static and dynamic mixing methods across 4 architectures and 6 datasets. OA-CutMix consistently achieves the highest accuracy over all tasks, outperforming even dynamic mixing methods, but at a fraction of the training-time cost. Improvements are largest for small objects, where the label bias from CutMix is greatest. Thus, correcting the label is sufficient to match or exceed the performance of methods modifying the image mixing algorithm.

DiverAge: Reliable Pluralistic Face Aging with Cross-Age Identity Relation Guidance

Face aging plays an important role in long-term biometric analysis, cross-age identity verification, and forensic identity analysis. Since the same subject may exhibit multiple plausible appearances at a target age due to genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors, face aging is inherently a one-to-many generation problem. However, pluralism alone is insufficient for reliable face aging: a model should provide appearance-level candidate diversity within each age group while maintaining sequence-level ordinal reliability across ordered age groups. Existing deterministic aging methods can synthesize visually plausible age-progressed faces, but usually lack stochastic diversity. In contrast, pluralistic aging methods introduce local appearance variations, but often fail to explicitly regulate the identity evolution of the full aging sequence. In this paper, we propose \textbf{DiverAge}, a hierarchical pluralistic face aging framework based on diffusion autoencoding. DiverAge preserves appearance-level diversity through stochastic diffusion decoding and age-conditioned semantic modulation. To improve sequence-level reliability, we introduce a Cross-age Identity Relation Regulator (CARR), an inference-time guidance strategy that jointly denoises multiple target age groups. CARR is guided by a Cross-age Identity Similarity (CIS) prior estimated from real same-identity cross-age pairs, and suppresses excessive cross-age identity drift through one-sided sampling-time guidance without modifying the training objective or introducing extra trainable parameters. Experiments demonstrate that DiverAge improves sequence-level ordinal reliability while maintaining identity preservation, age accuracy, image quality, and appearance-level diversity.

Geometry-Aware Distillation for Prompt Tuning Biomedical Vision-Language Models

Current prompt-based and adapter-based tuning of vision-language models (VLMs) is attractive for medical imaging, where clinical data sensitivity favors frozen backbones and annotations are limited. However, these methods typically optimize only the ground-truth class, treating all other classes as equally incorrect, ignoring clinically meaningful class relations and yielding unstable decision boundaries in limited-supervision settings. We propose Omni-Geometry Knowledge Distillation (OGKD), a new framework that injects class-relation structure into the teacher to produce directional targets that preserve the ground truth while respecting inter-class geometry. Using these targets, we develop two distillation losses: Global Geometry-Aware Distillation (GAD) operates on the global image token, and Label-Guided Geometry Distillation (LGD) applies the same geometry to attentive patch tokens to improve fine-grained alignment. Across comprehensive experiments and analyses on 11 widely-used medical datasets for base-to-novel and few-shot evaluations, our OGKD achieves substantially better performance, consistently improving accuracy by an average absolute gain of 1.7%-2.8% over all prior state-of-the-art VLM adaptation counterparts. It also robustly generalizes to unseen classes and yields more reliable predictions than other approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/tientrandinh/OGKD.

Plan, Watch, Recover: A Benchmark and Architectures for Proactive Procedural Assistance

We envision a proactive multi-modal assistant system which gives users real-time step-by-step guidance on a procedural task, autonomously deciding \textit{when} to interrupt, and \textit{how} to coach. However, progress is limited by the absence of large-scale, cross-domain benchmarks that reflect realistic conditions, particularly the common case in which users deviate from the expected step sequence. We address this gap with four contributions: \textbf{(1)}~we release \textbf{EgoProactive}, a large-scale wearable-egocentric dataset for proactive procedural assistance with explicit Out-of-Plan (OOP) annotations and recovery steps; \textbf{(2)}~we augment five established benchmarks (Ego4D, EPIC-KITCHENS, EgoExo4D, HoloAssist, HowTo100M) into \textbf{Pro\textsuperscript{2}Bench} under a unified proactive-guidance schema; \textbf{(3)}~we propose a \textbf{decoupled planner--interaction architecture} specialized for procedural state, visual cues, and recovery injection; \textbf{(4)}~we introduce a post-training recipe that transfers across model families, validated by cross-backbone replication on Llama~4 and Qwen-3.6-VL. In extensive experiments, our trained Llama-4 system substantially improves objective intervention quality over strong proprietary baselines (Claude Opus~4.6, Gemini~3.1~Pro, GPT~5.2) and open-weight baselines (Qwen3~VL~235B) baselines across all six datasets. Oracle-plan experiments further show that, when plan quality is controlled, the trained duplex model produces high-quality guidance and large gains on Out-of-Plan recovery.

M$^3$Eval: Multi-Modal Memory Evaluation through Cognitively-Grounded Video Tasks

As multi-modal models advance towards long-form video understanding, memory emerges as a critical capability. Despite substantial efforts in developing video datasets and benchmarks, existing works primarily focus on perception and reasoning, without systematically evaluating memory: what models retain, how faithfully information is preserved, and how robust memory remains under interference. To address this gap, we introduce M$^3$Eval, the first comprehensive evaluation framework and benchmark for probing different memory dimensions in multi-modal models. Grounded in cognitive psychology, our design features carefully constructed tasks that isolate key aspects of memory. Leveraging M$^3$Eval, we conduct extensive experiments across representative multi-modal models, revealing consistent weaknesses and distinctive behaviors. We find that models struggle to maintain disentangled representations when processing parallel video streams, exhibit interference patterns differing substantially from those observed in human memory, ground memory sources more reliably in the spatial domain than the temporal domain, and demonstrate limited symbolic memory. Collectively, our benchmark provides a valuable resource for future research, while our findings highlight memory as a fundamental yet underexplored capability and offer insights for designing more effective memory mechanisms in multi-modal models. Our code and dataset are available at https://pku-value-lab.github.io/m3eval-homepage.

UniCAD: A Unified Benchmark and Universal Model for Multi-Modal Multi-Task CAD

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) underpins modern engineering and manufacturing by enabling the creation of precise, editable 3D models. However, CAD research typically studies tasks in isolation, and multi-modal, multi-task learning for CAD is hindered by the absence of a unified benchmark. To address this gap, we introduce UniCAD, a comprehensive benchmark for multi-modal CAD learning that covers point-to-CAD reconstruction, text/image-to-CAD generation, and CAD question answering across diverse input modalities. Alongside the benchmark, we present UniCAD-MLLM, a universal multi-modal large language model that ingests text, images, sketches, and point clouds and performs these heterogeneous tasks in an end-to-end fashion within a single framework. Extensive experiments on the UniCAD and Fusion360 benchmarks demonstrate that UniCAD-MLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance across all tasks, outperforming existing task-specific and multi-task baselines. We will release the dataset, code, and pretrained models to accelerate future research.

Who Needs Labels? Adapting Vision Foundation Models With the Metadata You Already Have

We propose a label-free approach to adapt powerful but generic vision foundation models to specialized scientific domains. Standard supervised fine-tuning is often ill-suited to these settings: labels are scarce, and task-specific training can collapse the model's generality and hurt robustness. We instead leverage metadata to adapt representations to new domains in a self-supervised manner. Our method, FINO, combines a standard self-supervised objective with flexible metadata guidance that handles both highly granular discrete metadata and continuous metadata. It encourages the representation to preserve informative factors while suppressing spurious ones. Across subcellular fluorescence microscopy, Earth observation, wildlife monitoring, and medical imaging, FINO consistently outperforms standard unsupervised domain adaptation and fully supervised adaptation. It also exceeds highly-specialized domain-specific state of the art, while using no task labels for backbone adaptation and only lightweight probes for supervision.

Continual Visual and Verbal Learning Through a Child's Egocentric Input

Children learn the meanings of words from a continuous, temporally structured stream of egocentric experience. Recent work shows that neural networks can also learn word-referent mappings from a child's egocentric video recordings, but they cycle through the shuffled data for hundreds of epochs, contrasting with how children actually encounter their environment. We introduce BabyCL, a continual multimodal learning framework that processes the SAYCam dataset in a single chronological pass, combining streaming visual representation learning with an image-text contrastive objective. BabyCL combines a multi-stage temporal segmentation of the stream with a dual replay buffer that independently manages visual and multimodal histories, and it is jointly trained with three contrastive losses on a shared backbone. Under a matched optimization budget, BabyCL outperforms streaming learning baselines on the SAYCam Labeled-S 4AFC benchmark, substantially narrowing the gap to an upper bound of offline training. Ablations show that the gains are robust to the length of the online temporal segmentation window and the eviction rule of the replay buffer. Together, these results show that meaningful word-referent mappings can emerge under training conditions much closer to a child's actual experience.

GeM-NR: Geometry-Aware Multi-View Editing for Nonrigid Scene Changes

Recent developments in multi-view image editing with generative models have brought us a step closer toward general 3D content generation and customization. Most existing works focus on rigid or appearance-only edits by utilizing the geometry of the unedited scene. This naturally limits these methods to edits that preserve the underlying scene structure. Other approaches are trained for specific image editing tasks, such as object removal and addition. Despite this progress, general nonrigid edits, i.e., edits that substantially change the scene geometry, remain challenging for existing methods. We propose GeM-NR, a fast and flexible training-free approach for general multi-view consistent image editing, including edits that drastically change the geometry and appearance of the scene. Given an anchor image edited with a chosen backbone editor (such as FLUX, Qwen, BrushNet) and a query unedited image, GeM-NR edits the query image consistently with the anchor edit. The method incorporates multiple stages: (i) depth map estimation, where we propose a strategy to maximize the alignment between the 3D point clouds of the edited and unedited scenes, (ii) projection onto a query viewpoint, and (iii) refinement of the obtained image conditioned on the unedited query. The conditioning-based formulation scales well from two to many views of an object. We demonstrate the ability of our method to handle edits with significant changes in geometry and appearance, something that existing methods struggle with. We perform an extensive evaluation showing that our method improves consistency for a wide variety of edit tasks, including generating 3D representations of the edited scene. Both quantitative and qualitative results indicate the state-of-the-art performance of our method in terms of edit quality as well as geometric and photometric consistency across multiple views.

Belief-Aware VLM Model for Human-like Reasoning

Traditional neural network models for intent inference rely heavily on observable states and struggle to generalize across diverse tasks and dynamic environments. Recent advances in Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Vision Language Action (VLA) models introduce common-sense reasoning through large-scale multimodal pretraining, enabling zero-shot performance across tasks. However, these models still lack explicit mechanisms to represent and update belief, limiting their ability to reason like humans or capture the evolving human intent over long-horizon. To address this, we propose a belief-aware VLM framework that integrates retrieval-based memory and reinforcement learning. Instead of learning an explicit belief model, we approximate belief using a vector-based memory that retrieves relevant multimodal context, which is incorporated into the VLM for reasoning. We further refine decision-making using a reinforcement learning policy over the VLM latent space. We evaluate our approach on publicly available VQA datasets such as HD-EPIC and demonstrate consistent improvements over zero-shot baselines, highlighting the importance of belief-aware reasoning.

Bad Seeing or Bad Thinking? Rewarding Perception for Multimodal Reasoning

Achieving robust perception-reasoning synergy is a central goal for advanced Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Recent advancements have pursued this goal via architectural designs or agentic workflows. However, these approaches are often limited by static textual reasoning or complicated by the significant compute and engineering burden of external agentic complexity. Worse, this heavy investment does not yield proportional gains, often witnessing a "seesaw effect" on perception and reasoning. This motivates a fundamental rethinking of the true bottleneck. In this paper, we argue that the root cause of this trade-off is an ambiguity in modality credit assignment: when a VLM fails, is it due to flawed perception ("bad seeing") or flawed logic ("bad thinking")? To resolve this, we introduce a reinforcement learning framework that improves perception-reasoning synergy by reliably rewarding the perception fidelity. We explicitly decompose the generation process into interleaved perception and reasoning steps. This decoupling enables targeted supervision on perception. Crucially, we introduce Perception Verification (PV), leveraging a "blindfolded reasoning" proxy to reward perceptual fidelity independently of reasoning outcomes. Furthermore, to scale training across free-form VL tasks, we propose Structured Verbal Verification, which replaces high-variance LLM judging with structured algorithmic execution. These techniques are integrated into a Modality-Aware Credit Assignment (MoCA) mechanism, which routes rewards to the specific source of error -- either bad seeing or bad thinking -- enabling a single VLM to achieve simultaneous performance gains across a wide task spectrum.

Transformer-Based Autonomous Driving Models and Deployment-Oriented Compression: A Survey

Transformer-based models are becoming a central paradigm in autonomous driving because they can capture long-range spatial dependencies, multi-agent interactions, and multimodal context across perception, prediction, and planning. At the same time, their deployment in real vehicles remains difficult because high-capacity attention-based architectures impose substantial latency, memory, and energy overhead. This survey reviews representative Transformer-based autonomous driving models and organizes them by task role, sensing configuration, and architectural design. More importantly, it examines these models from a deployment-oriented perspective and analyzes how efficiency constraints reshape model design choices in practice. We further review compression and acceleration strategies relevant to Transformer-based driving systems, including quantization, pruning, knowledge distillation, low-rank approximation, and efficient attention, and discuss their benefits, limitations, and task-dependent applicability. Rather than treating compression as an isolated post-processing step, we highlight it as a system-level design consideration that directly affects deployability, robustness, and safety. Finally, we identify open challenges and future research directions toward standardized, safety-aware, and hardware-conscious evaluation of efficient autonomous driving systems.

CounterFace: A Synthetic Face Dataset for Fine-Grained Counterfactual Evaluation of Face Recognition Systems

Face recognition (FR) systems are widely deployed in critical applications, making their reliability and robustness across diverse populations and conditions essential. Standard evaluation of FR systems typically relies on datasets such as LFW to estimate average recognition accuracy. Some benchmarks also capture coarse-grained intra-identity variations such as aging, pose, and lighting. However, human faces undergo more fine-grained changes, including appearance changes such as hairstyles and makeup, that are underrepresented in existing benchmarks. Counterfactual evaluation provides a method to assess FR robustness under such fine-grained variations. Existing counterfactual face datasets synthesized with image generators, however, are limited in attribute coverage due to the use of humans for verification in the pipeline. We propose CounterFace, a new counterfactual evaluation dataset comprising 20 facial attributes and 8 demographic factors, exceeding prior synthetic face datasets by 14 attributes and 2 demographics. The dataset is generated using a fully automated pipeline based on off-the-shelf image generators with custom verifiers, removing human need for verification. CounterFace contains 11,821 counterfactual face pairs, and a post-hoc user study confirms the faithfulness of the generated counterfactuals. We evaluate two commercial and four open-source FR systems (AWS Rekognition, Face++, AdaFace, MagFace, ArcFace, FaceNet) across 160 attribute-demographic combinations. Our dataset helps in the isolation of precise failure modes for individual systems unlike standard evaluation benchmarks. Results indicate that the performance degradation varies across attributes and demographics for all six systems and occluding attributes (e.g., facemask and facial hair) universally degrade performance.

LaVIDE: Language-Prompted Satellite Change Detection via Map-Image Alignment

Remote sensing change detection based on a map reference and an up-to-date image boosts timely observation of the Earth's surface when earlier images are lacking for comparison. However, the semantic gap between high-level map categories and low-level image details hinders the extraction of homogeneous features for robust temporal association in change detection. Unlike conventional approaches that either compare pixel-level visual similarity or propagate segmentation errors, \textcolor{black}{we propose a novel framework, \underline{La}nguage-\underline{VI}sion \underline{D}iscriminator for d\underline{E}tecting changes, LaVIDE}, which bridges the semantic gap between high-level map categories and low-level image details using language as an intermediary. Specifically, we introduce {\it restricted prompt learning} to generate context-aware textual prompts that align map semantics with image content, and an {\it object-aware embedding enhancement} strategy to integrate object-level attributes (e.g., shape, boundary) into map representations. These components enable robust cross-modal alignment within a unified language-vision feature space. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks, DynamicEarthNet, HRSCD, BANDON, and SECOND, demonstrate that LaVIDE outperforms state-of-the-art methods by significant margins, achieving $18.4\%$ and $5.2\%$ improvements in IoU on multi-class and single-class change detection tasks, respectively. Our framework not only advances the accuracy of map-image change detection but also provides a practical solution for rapid map updating with minimal human intervention, promising broad impacts in urban planning, disaster assessment, and ecological conservation. Code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/ShuGuoJ/LAVIDE.git.

Can VLMs Predict Future States? Bootstrapping World Models from Inverse Dynamics

Can unified vision-language models (VLMs) perform forward dynamics prediction (FDP), i.e., predicting the future state (in image form) given the previous observation and an action (in language form)? We find that VLMs struggle to generate physically plausible transitions between frames from instructions. Nevertheless, we identify a crucial asymmetry in multimodal grounding: fine-tuning a VLM to learn inverse dynamics prediction (IDP)-effectively captioning the action between frames-is significantly easier than learning FDP. In turn, IDP can be used to bootstrap FDP through two main strategies: 1) weakly supervised learning from synthetic data and 2) inference time verification. Firstly, IDP can annotate actions for unlabelled pairs of video frame observations to expand the training data scale for FDP. Secondly, IDP can assign rewards to multiple samples of FDP to score them, effectively guiding search at inference time. We evaluate the FDP resulting from both strategies through the task of action-centric image editing on Aurora-Bench with two families of VLMs. Despite remaining general-purpose, our best model achieves a performance competitive with state-of-the-art image editing models, improving on them by a margin between 7% and 13% according to GPT4o-as-judge, and achieving the best average human evaluation across all subsets of Aurora-Bench.

VGGSounder: Audio-Visual Evaluations for Foundation Models

The emergence of audio-visual foundation models underscores the importance of reliably assessing their multi-modal understanding. The VGGSound dataset is commonly used as a benchmark for evaluation audio-visual classification. However, our analysis identifies several limitations of VGGSound, including incomplete labelling, partially overlapping classes, and misaligned modalities. These lead to distorted evaluations of auditory and visual capabilities. To address these limitations, we introduce VGGSounder, a comprehensively re-annotated, multi-label test set that extends VGGSound and is specifically designed to evaluate audio-visual foundation models. VGGSounder features detailed modality annotations, enabling precise analyses of modality-specific performance. Furthermore, we reveal model limitations by analysing performance degradation when adding another input modality with our new modality confusion metric.

Platonic Transformers: A Solid Choice For Equivariance

While widespread, Transformers lack inductive biases for geometric symmetries common in science and computer vision. Existing equivariant methods often sacrifice the efficiency and flexibility that make Transformers so effective through complex, computationally intensive designs. We introduce the Platonic Transformer to resolve this trade-off. By defining attention relative to reference frames from the Platonic solid symmetry groups, our method induces a principled weight-sharing scheme. This enables combined equivariance to continuous translations and Platonic symmetries, while preserving the exact architecture and computational cost of a standard Transformer. Furthermore, we show that this attention is formally equivalent to a dynamic group convolution, which reveals that the model learns adaptive geometric filters and enables a highly scalable, linear-time convolutional variant. Across diverse benchmarks in computer vision (CIFAR-10), 3D point clouds (ScanObjectNN), and molecular property prediction (QM9, OMol25), the Platonic Transformer achieves competitive performance by leveraging these geometric constraints at no additional cost.

SAM 3D: 3Dfy Anything in Images

We present SAM 3D, a generative model for visually grounded 3D object reconstruction, predicting geometry, texture, and layout from a single image. SAM 3D excels in natural images, where occlusion and scene clutter are common and visual recognition cues from context play a larger role. We achieve this with a human- and model-in-the-loop pipeline for annotating object shape, texture, and pose, providing visually grounded 3D reconstruction data at unprecedented scale. We learn from this data in a modern, multi-stage training framework that combines synthetic pretraining with real-world alignment, breaking the 3D "data barrier". We obtain significant gains over recent work, with at least a 5:1 win rate in human preference tests on real-world objects and scenes. We will release our code and model weights, an online demo, and a new challenging benchmark for in-the-wild 3D object reconstruction.

AttnRegDeepLab: A Two-Stage Decoupled Framework for Interpretable Embryo Fragmentation Grading

Embryo fragmentation is a morphological indicator critical for evaluating developmental potential in In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). However, manual grading is subjective and inefficient, while existing deep learning solutions often lack clinical explainability or suffer from accumulated errors in segmentation area estimation. To address these issues, this study proposes AttnRegDeepLab (Attention-Guided Regression DeepLab), a framework characterized by dual-branch Multi-Task Learning (MTL). A vanilla DeepLabV3+ decoder is modified by integrating Attention Gates into its skip connections, explicitly suppressing cytoplasmic noise to preserve contour details. Furthermore, a Multi-Scale Regression Head is introduced with a Feature Injection mechanism to propagate global grading priors into the segmentation task, rectifying systematic quantification errors. A 2-stage decoupled training strategy is proposed to address the gradient conflict in MTL. Also, a range-based loss is designed to leverage weakly labeled data. Our method achieves robust grading precision while maintaining excellent segmentation accuracy (Dice coefficient =0.729), in contrast to the end-to-end counterpart that might minimize grading error at the expense of contour integrity. This work provides a clinically interpretable solution that balances visual fidelity and quantitative precision.

Dynamic Content Moderation in Livestreams: Combining Supervised Classification with MLLM-Boosted Similarity Matching

Content moderation remains a critical yet challenging task for large-scale user-generated video platforms, especially in livestreaming environments where moderation must be timely, multimodal, and robust to evolving forms of unwanted content. We present a hybrid moderation framework deployed at production scale that combines supervised classification for known violations with reference-based similarity matching for novel or subtle cases. This hybrid design enables robust detection of both explicit violations and novel edge cases that evade traditional classifiers. Multimodal inputs (text, audio, visual) are processed through both pipelines, with a multimodal large language model (MLLM) distilling knowledge into each to boost accuracy while keeping inference lightweight. In production, the classification pipeline achieves 67% recall at 80% precision, and the similarity pipeline achieves 76% recall at 80% precision. Large-scale A/B tests show a 6-8% reduction in user views of unwanted livestreams}. These results demonstrate a scalable and adaptable approach to multimodal content governance, capable of addressing both explicit violations and emerging adversarial behaviors.

From Segments to Scenes: Temporal Understanding for Agentic Autonomous Driving via Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as the perception and reasoning backbone of autonomous agents acting in the wild, with autonomous driving (AD) being one of the most safety-critical instances. Reliable temporal understanding is essential for such agents to anticipate events, attribute causes, and act safely in dynamic environments, yet this remains a significant challenge even for state-of-the-art (SoTA) VLMs. Prior video benchmarks have emphasized other content (sports, cooking, etc.), yet no existing benchmark focuses exclusively on temporal understanding for both short- and long-form AD footage. To fill this gap, we present the Temporal Understanding in Autonomous Driving (TAD) benchmark, comprising nearly 6000 question-answer (QA) pairs across 7 tasks, and evaluate 9 closed- and open-source generalist as well as AD-specialist models. Current SoTA models perform substantially below human accuracy on TAD. To improve the temporal reasoning of VLM-based driving agents, we propose two novel training-free solutions: Scene-CoT, which uses Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, and TCogMap, which incorporates an ego-centric temporal cognitive map produced by a trajectory-analysis module that operates as an agentic tool around the VLM. Integrated with existing VLMs, our methods improve average accuracy on TAD by up to $17.72\%$ and by up to $10.35\%$ on STSBench. By introducing TAD, benchmarking SoTA models, and proposing effective enhancements, this work aims to catalyze further progress on temporal understanding for agentic AD systems operating in the wild. The benchmark and evaluation code are available at ${\href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/vbdai/TAD}{\text{Hugging Face}}}$ and ${\href{https://github.com/vbdi/tad_bench}{\text{GitHub}}}$, respectively.

DVGT: Driving Visual Geometry Transformer

Perceiving and reconstructing 3D scene geometry from visual inputs is crucial for autonomous driving. However, there still lacks a driving-targeted dense geometry perception model that can adapt to different scenarios and camera configurations. To bridge this gap, we propose a Driving Visual Geometry Transformer (DVGT), which reconstructs a global dense 3D point map from a sequence of unposed multi-view visual inputs. We first extract visual features for each image using a DINO backbone, and employ alternating intra-view local attention, cross-view spatial attention, and cross-frame temporal attention to infer geometric relations across images. We then use multiple heads to decode a global point map in the ego coordinate of the first frame and the ego poses for each frame. Unlike conventional methods that rely on precise camera parameters, DVGT is free of explicit 3D geometric priors, enabling flexible processing of arbitrary camera configurations. DVGT directly predicts metric-scaled geometry from image sequences, eliminating the need for post-alignment with external sensors. Trained on a large mixture of driving datasets including nuScenes, OpenScene, Waymo, KITTI, and DDAD, DVGT significantly outperforms existing models on various scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/wzzheng/DVGT.

R3G: A Reasoning-Retrieval-Reranking Framework for Vision-Centric Answer Generation

Vision-centric retrieval for VQA requires retrieving images to supply missing visual cues and integrating them into the reasoning process. However, selecting the right images and integrating them effectively into the model's reasoning remains challenging.To address this challenge, we propose R3G, a modular Reasoning-Retrieval-Reranking framework.It first produces a brief reasoning plan that specifies the required visual cues, then adopts a two-stage strategy, with coarse retrieval followed by fine-grained reranking, to select evidence images.On MRAG-Bench, R3G improves accuracy across six MLLM backbones and nine sub-scenarios, achieving state-of-the-art overall performance. Ablations show that sufficiency-aware reranking and reasoning steps are complementary, helping the model both choose the right images and use them well. We release code and data at https://github.com/czh24/R3G.

ShareVerse: Multi-Agent Consistent Video Generation for Shared World Modeling

This paper presents ShareVerse, a video generation framework enabling multi-agent shared world modeling, addressing the gap in existing works that lack support for unified shared world construction with multi-agent interaction. ShareVerse leverages the generation capability of large video models and integrates three key innovations: 1) A dataset for large-scale multi-agent interactive world modeling is built on the CARLA simulation platform, featuring diverse scenes, weather conditions, and interactive trajectories with paired multi-view videos (front/ rear/ left/ right views per agent) and camera data. 2) We propose a spatial concatenation strategy for four-view videos of independent agents to model a broader environment and to ensure internal multi-view geometric consistency. 3) We integrate cross-agent attention blocks into the pretrained video model, which enable interactive transmission of spatial-temporal information across agents, guaranteeing shared world consistency in overlapping regions and reasonable generation in non-overlapping regions. ShareVerse, which supports 49-frame large-scale video generation, accurately perceives the position of dynamic agents and achieves consistent shared world modeling.

Beyond Pixel Histories: World Models with Persistent 3D State

Interactive world models continually generate video by responding to a user's actions, enabling open-ended generation capabilities. However, existing models typically lack a 3D representation of the environment, meaning 3D consistency must be implicitly learned from data, and spatial memory is restricted to limited temporal context windows. This results in an unrealistic user experience and presents significant obstacles to downstream tasks such as training agents. To address this, we present PERSIST, a new paradigm of world model which simulates the evolution of a latent 3D scene: environment, camera, and renderer. This allows us to synthesise new frames with persistent spatial memory and consistent geometry. Both quantitative metrics and a qualitative user study show substantial improvements in spatial memory, 3D consistency, and long-horizon stability over existing methods, enabling coherent, evolving 3D worlds. We further demonstrate novel capabilities, including synthesising diverse 3D environments from a single image, as well as enabling fine-grained, geometry-aware control over generated experiences by supporting environment editing and specification directly in 3D space. Project page: https://francelico.github.io/persist.github.io

Learning to Evaluate: Cost-Effective Model Evaluation on Unlabeled Data with Meta-Learning

The rapid advancement of machine learning has led to an unprecedented expansion of model ecosystems, making it increasingly difficult to assess the reliability of newly released models on unseen and unlabeled data. Existing evaluation pipelines typically rely on costly annotation, repeated fine-tuning, or assumptions that do not generalize well to new models. We introduce MetaEvaluator, a cost-effective, model-agnostic framework for fast, label-free evaluation of unseen models across diverse architectures and modalities. MetaEvaluator meta-learns over a pool of reference models to acquire an effective initialization for accurate assessment of unseen models, thereby amortizing evaluation cost and eliminating the need for per-model retraining. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first model-agnostic framework that evaluates new models on unlabeled datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MetaEvaluator delivers stable and accurate performance estimates at substantially lower cost than conventional approaches, enabling scalable benchmarking on unlabeled datasets for emerging models. The code is available at: https://github.com/phkhanhtrinh23/MetaEvaluator.

Correcting Visual Blur Induced by Attention Distraction to Reduce Hallucinations: Algorithm and Theory

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) frequently suffer from object hallucinations, yet the visual perceptual mechanism underlying this failure remains poorly understood. In this work, we reveal that hallucinations are strongly associated with a human-like attention distraction phenomenon, where humans under divided focus experience degraded visual clarity and produce inaccurate descriptions, while in models the same mechanism manifests as spatial inconsistency in multi-head attention and temporal fading of attention to image tokens during decoding. We further provide theoretical insights that attention dispersion increases model complexity and degrades classification generalization. Motivated by these findings, we propose an Attention-Focused Approach for Improved Image Perception (AFIP), which corrects attention distraction via cross-head attention enrichment and reinforces visual grounding through dynamic historical attention enhancement. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and models validate the effectiveness of AFIP without additional training.

VAMPS: Visual-Assisted Mathematical Problem Solving Benchmark

Multimodal large language models are increasingly capable of complex reasoning, yet their performance often degrades when they must externalize a problem through a tool and then reason over the tool's output, specifically when they rely on visual aids. This gap is especially important because real engineering and scientific workflows often rely on visualization tools for analysis, validation, and decision-making. To study this discrepancy, we introduce VAMPS (Visual-Assisted Mathematical Problem Solving), a benchmark for graph-assisted mathematics. VAMPS contains 1,168 multimodal, bilingual multiple-choice question-answer pairs drawn from Iranian University Entrance Exam algebra and calculus problems and expanded with human-reviewed LLM-generated synthetic variants, all selected so that plotting provides a natural solution strategy by revealing intersections, extrema, asymptotes, etc. Designed for both benchmarking and diagnosis, VAMPS goes beyond prior multimodal benchmarks that primarily evaluate reasoning over fixed visual inputs by testing whether a model can benefit from constructing a useful graph and grounding its answer in the resulting visualization. Overall, we found that across a diverse set of models, direct analytical solving surprisingly outperforms tool-enabled visual solving, even on problems where plotting is a natural strategy.

Can Generalist Agents Automate Data Curation?

Curating training data is among the most consequential yet labor-intensive parts of modern AI development: practitioners iteratively propose, implement, evaluate, and revise data policies against noisy benchmark feedback. We ask whether generalist coding agents can automate this data-curation loop. We introduce *Curation-Bench*, an agent-centric benchmark that fixes the model, training recipe, and evaluation suite while giving agents command-line access to inspect data, implement policies, submit them to a fixed training/evaluation pipeline, and revise. In a vision-language instruction-tuning instantiation, out-of-the-box agents reach strong published data-selection baselines within ten iterations. However, trajectory analysis reveals a persistent *execution-research gap*: agents mainly tune local policy variants rather than explore new policy families, even when given strategy guides and paper references. Scaffolds requiring each iteration to cite, instantiate, and adapt a prior method shift agents toward method-guided exploration. The scaffolded agent autonomously composes -- without human design input -- a data-selection policy that outperforms strong published baselines at one-tenth their data budget. Overall, current agents can run the curation loop, but reliable data research requires scaffolded method adaptation, not open-ended prompting alone. Code and benchmark are open-sourced.

SpurAudio: A Benchmark for Studying Shortcut Learning in Few-Shot Audio Classification

Few-shot classification (FSC) is widely used for learning from limited labeled data, yet most evaluations implicitly assume that target concepts are independent of contextual cues. In real-world settings, however, examples often appear within rich contexts, allowing models to exploit spurious correlations between foreground content and background signals. While such effects have been studied in few-shot image classification, their role in few-shot audio classification remains largely unexplored, and existing audio benchmarks offer limited control over contextual structure. We introduce SpurAudio, a benchmark that leverages the natural separability of foreground events and background environments in audio to enable controlled, multi-level evaluation of contextual shifts across support and query sets. Using this benchmark, we show that many state-of-the-art few-shot methods suffer severe performance degradation when background correlations are disrupted, despite achieving similar accuracy under standard evaluation protocols. Crucially, this vulnerability persists even in large pretrained audio foundation models, ruling out limited backbone capacity as an explanation. Moreover, methods that appear comparable under conventional benchmarks can exhibit markedly different sensitivity to spurious correlations, revealing systematic algorithmic strengths and vulnerabilities tied to how feature representations interact with classifier heads at inference time. These findings provide new insight into the behavior of few-shot methods in audio and highlight the need for benchmarks that explicitly probe context dependence when evaluating FSC models.

Dive into the Scene: Breaking the Perceptual Bottleneck in Vision-Language Decision Making via Focus Plan Generation

In embodied vision-language decision making tasks such as robotic manipulation and navigation, Vision-Language and Vision-Language-Action Models (VLMs & VLAs) are powerful tools with different benefits: VLMs are better at long-term planning, while VLAs are better at reactive control. However, their performance is limited by the same perceptual bottleneck: visual hallucinations arise due to the models' inability to distinguish task-relevant objects from distractors. In principle, accurate identification and focus on critical objects while filtering out irrelevant ones is the key to break this limitation. A straightforward solution is one-step focus: directly attending to essential objects. However, this approach proves ineffective because effective focus inherently requires deep scene understanding. To this end, we propose SceneDiver, a coarse-to-fine focus plan generation method for VLMs leveraging their long-term planning abilities, that first constructs a holistic scene graph to establish initial comprehension, then progressively decomposes the task into simpler sub-problems through an iterative cycle of recognition, understanding, and analysis. To enable reactive control, we also design a lightweight adapter for distilling the deliberate focus ability into VLAs. Evaluations on standard embodied AI benchmarks confirm that our method substantially reduces visual hallucinations for both VLMs and VLAs, while preserving computational efficiency in tasks requiring fast execution. Our code and data are released at: https://future-item.github.io/SceneDiver.

SymTRELLIS: Symmetry-Enforced Voxel Latents for 3D Generation

Single-view 3D generative models have achieved impressive visual quality, yet they are not designed to satisfy structural or functional requirements, and in practice, often fall short. Symmetry is one such requirement: violations, even subtle ones, on symmetry can render a model physically unusable. We present SymTRELLIS, a method that enforces arbitrary finite point group symmetries (rotational, reflectional, and polyhedral) during the flow-based 3D generation of TRELLIS.2, without retraining the underlying VAE or flow model. Our key idea is to approximate the latent-space action of spatial transformations as a learned linear operator on voxel latents, implemented as a lightweight spatial-transform latent mapper trained on generic, non-symmetric 3D data. At generation time, we enforce symmetry by averaging predicted flow velocities across all symmetry-equivalent transformations at each ODE step, a process we call velocity symmetrization. The symmetry specification can be estimated automatically from an initial TRELLIS.2 generation or supplied by the user, enabling deliberate fold manipulation beyond what the input image suggests. On a curated benchmark of 266 strictly symmetric objects spanning 2- to 20-fold rotations and polyhedral symmetry groups, SymTRELLIS substantially reduces all symmetry error metrics compared to TRELLIS.2, Hunyuan3D-2.1, and TripoSG, while maintaining reconstruction accuracy comparable to the base model.

DetectZoo: A Unified Toolkit for AI-Generated Content Detection Across Text, Audio, and Image Modalities

The growing popularity and capacity of generative models have eroded the distinction between human and machine-generated content, motivating a growing body of work on detection across text, images, and audio. Most available detectors are either commercial software or, if open-source, come with incompatible codebases with bespoke preprocessing, evaluation protocols, and evaluation metrics, which make their adoption, fair comparison, and reproduction quite difficult. To address this critical gap, we introduce DetectZoo, a first-of-its-kind, extensible toolkit designed to provide a unified interface for AI-generated content detection across text, audio, and image modalities. DetectZoo standardizes the complete empirical pipeline, from data ingestion and preprocessing to model assessment, offering researchers a cohesive framework to benchmark state-of-the-art detectors systematically. By integrating diverse public datasets and baseline detection algorithms under a single, unified API, our toolkit facilitates rigorous and reproducible evaluation. DetectZoo provides reference implementations of 61 detectors, native loaders for 22 benchmark datasets, and a standardized evaluation pipeline that reports multiple metrics through a common interface. Each detector is self-contained yet accessible through the same interface, automatically caches pretrained weights, and reproduces the original published results. DetectZoo lowers the barrier to entry for multi-modal AI forensics, enabling researchers to identify performance gaps across domains and accelerating the development of robust, generalizable detection techniques. The open-source repository and comprehensive documentation are publicly available at https://github.com/sadjadeb/DetectZoo, and the package can be installed via pip install detectzoo.

Overview of the EReL@MIR 2025 Multimodal Document Retrieval Challenge (Track 1)

Retrieval over visually-rich documents, pages that interleave text with figures, tables, and charts, is essential for multimodal retrieval-augmented generation, yet most retrievers still discard the visual channel. The \emph{Multimodal Document Retrieval Challenge}, Track~1 of the MIR Challenge at the first EReL@MIR workshop, co-located with The Web Conference 2025, asks participants to build a \emph{single} retrieval system that handles two complementary regimes: closed-set document page retrieval within long documents from a text query (MMDocIR), and open-domain retrieval of Wikipedia-style passages from an image or image-plus-text query (M2KR). Systems are ranked by the macro-average of mean Recall@$\{1,3,5\}$ over the two tasks. The challenge drew 455 entrants and 586 submissions across 22 teams. This report describes the challenge design, datasets, and evaluation protocol; reports the final standings; and analyses the three winning teams' systems. All three build on decoder-based Multimodal-LLM embedders from the Qwen2-VL family rather than on CLIP-style encoders, and differ chiefly in whether they reach the top through fine-tuned ensembles, training-free multi-route fusion with a strong vision-language re-ranker, or zero-shot late interaction. The training-free system finished within $0.1$ point of the fine-tuned winner.

Instant-Fold: In-Context Imitation Learning for Deformable Object Manipulation

Deformable object manipulation (DOM) is challenging due to high-dimensional, partially observable states that evolve through long-horizon, topology-changing interactions with multiple valid manipulation modes. We introduce Instant-Fold, an in-context imitation learning framework for DOM. Given a single human demonstration, our policy infers and executes diverse manipulation modes directly from the demonstration, including variations in spatial execution and ordering, without requiring gradient updates. Our approach first learns deformation-aware visual representations via temporal contrastive pretraining, after which a flow-matching transformer policy conditioned on the demonstration predicts actions to execute the intended manipulation mode. Trained entirely in simulation, Instant-Fold generalizes across diverse folding modes and transfers zero-shot to real-world settings without additional data collection or finetuning. Videos are available at https://instant-fold.github.io.

StandardE2E: A Unified Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Datasets

Autonomous driving has shifted from modular perception-prediction-planning stacks toward end-to-end (E2E) models that map sensor inputs directly to vehicle control, often regularized by auxiliary tasks such as 3D detection, motion forecasting, and HD-map perception. Progress is driven by a fast-growing ecosystem of sensor-rich driving datasets, yet each ships its own file formats, APIs, coordinate conventions, and modality coverage, leaving cross-dataset experimentation and even basic per-dataset preprocessing to be re-implemented per project. We present StandardE2E, a framework that provides a single unified interface over E2E driving datasets. StandardE2E (i) standardizes per-dataset preprocessing under one shared data schema; (ii) combines multiple datasets in a single PyTorch DataLoader for cross-dataset pretraining, auxiliary-task supervision, and scenario-level filtering; and (iii) reduces adding a new dataset to a single per-dataset mapping from raw frames to the canonical schema, leaving the entire downstream pipeline unchanged. The framework supports six datasets out of the box: Waymo End-to-End, Waymo Perception, Argoverse 2 Sensor, Argoverse 2 LiDAR, NAVSIM (OpenScene-v1.1), and WayveScenes101, and is released as the open-source standard-e2e Python package, available at https://github.com/stepankonev/StandardE2E.

HYolo: An Intelligent IoT-Based Object Detection System Using Hypergraph Learning

This paper presents HYolo, an intelligent IoT-based object detection framework that integrates hypergraph learning into the YOLO architecture. Traditional YOLO-based object detection models primarily capture pairwise feature interactions and may fail to model complex high-order relationships among objects and contextual features. To address this limitation, HYolo incorporates hypergraph learning to capture richer contextual dependencies and improve object representation. Experimental evaluation on the COCO dataset demonstrates significant performance improvements over baseline YOLO models. The proposed approach achieves approximately 12% improvement in mAP@50 while enhancing overall detection accuracy and robustness. By modeling high-order feature relationships, HYolo provides improved contextual understanding and more reliable object detection performance in IoT-based environments. The results indicate that integrating hypergraph learning into object detection pipelines offers a promising direction for intelligent and context-aware IoT vision systems.

MorphoQuant: Modality-Aware Quantization for Omni-modal Large Language Models

Conventional Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) methods struggle with 4-bit Omni-modal Large Language Models (OLLMs) due to the extreme distribution heterogeneity and disparate outlier patterns across modalities. To address this, we propose MorphoQuant, a modality-aware PTQ framework engineered to preserve cross-modal morphology and mitigate outlier loss. Specifically, we introduce Distribution-Aware Bias Compensation (DABC), which selectively absorbs long-tailed outliers into channel-wise biases. This mechanism safeguards outlier magnitudes while maintaining high-precision discretization for dense inliers, thereby preserving accurate discretization across diverse modal distribution. Complementing this, we propose Morphology-Directed Quantization Function Optimization (MDQFO) to co-optimize the quantization grid with the bias mask, ensuring fine-grained alignment across modalities. Extensive evaluations on Qwen2.5-Omni across benchmarks like MMMU and Video-MME demonstrate our approach's superiority. Notably, our W4A4 model achieves 76.63% on ScienceQA, significantly outperforming SOTA W4A4 methods and surprisingly surpassing the W4A16 baseline, which fully demonstrates the exceptional accuracy-efficiency trade-off of our framework.

Multi-Granularity 3D Kidney Lesion Characterization from CT Volumes

Radiology reports describe kidney lesions by type, size, enhancement, and attenuation, yet existing 3D methods predict only at the patient or organ level. We reformulate kidney CT characterization as a per-lesion set-prediction task: one model emits a variable number of lesions per kidney, each with four clinical attributes. We curated 2,619 CT volumes from 788 patients at one academic medical center, with multi-granularity side- and per-lesion labels, and used KiTS23 (489 cases) for zero-shot external validation. We propose \textbf{LesionDETR}, a DETR-style architecture with size-distance Hungarian matching and a hierarchical loss that aggregates per-slot outputs to side-level objectives. Across four input representations and six encoder initializations, two design choices dominate: a segmentation mask as an input channel, and same-domain abdominal pretraining (SuPreM); generic large-corpus pretraining is no better than random initialization. LesionDETR reaches bilateral side-level abnormality AUC $0.799 \pm 0.009$ on UF-Health and $0.817 \pm 0.072$ on KiTS23. A count-conditioned variant reaches per-lesion mAP $0.190 \pm 0.083$ on cystic lesions; rare solid-lesion AP stays at the noise floor, pointing to targeted data collection, not architecture, as the next bottleneck. The framework yields verified per-lesion predictions for downstream structured report generation.

Selective Coupling of Decoupled Informative Regions: Masked Attention Alignment for Data-Free Quantization of Vision Transformers

Data-Free Quantization (DFQ) addresses data security concerns by synthesizing samples, without accessing real data. It has garnered increasing attention in the context of Vision Transformers (ViTs), owing to the superiority of the self-attention mechanism compared to classical convolutional operation. However, previous DFQ arts for ViTs often suffer from a distribution mismatch between synthetic samples and input distribution expected by quantized models Q, resulting in the suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Masked Attention Alignment approach for Data-Free Quantization of ViTs, named MaskAQ, revealing that: 1) the semantics in the self-attention mechanism is predominantly localized to a sparse subset of patches, called informative regions; 2) the informative regions dominate the mutual information between synthetic samples and Q's outputs. To these ends, we incorporate differential entropy maximum over patch similarity of synthetic samples, to decouple informative regions from noisy background. To couple with varied Q, the informative regions are selected to align full-precision models with Q via a masked attention alignment objective, thus yielding high-quality synthetic samples. Furthermore, a periodic sample refreshing strategy comes up to endow MaskAQ with the capacity to continually adapt to the evolving state of Q throughout the training process, to preserve desirable mutual information with synthetic samples. Extensive experiments verify the merits of MaskAQ over state-of-the-art approaches across multiple backbones and downstream tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/hfutqian/MaskAQ.

An Empirical Study of Data Scale, Model Complexity, and Input Modalities in Visual Generalization

Modern deep neural networks usually have large parameter scales and nonlinear hierarchical structures, and they have achieved strong performance in computer vision. However, the source of their generalization performance remains difficult to explain using traditional statistical learning theory. Among the factors that may affect visual generalization, data scale, model complexity, and input modalities are fundamental and controllable variables. This study empirically analyzes how these three factors influence model generalization performance. Specifically, in a preliminary experiment, we construct a one-dimensional nonlinear function and vary the number of training samples and the polynomial degree to observe the effects of data scale and model complexity on model performance. In the main experiments, we compare model performance on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 under different training data scales, model architectures, and input modalities. The experimental results show that increasing the training data scale consistently improves generalization performance, whereas changes in model complexity do not provide stable gains. In addition, removing color information degrades model performance, while explicit prior features such as gradients, edges, and wavelets have inconsistent effects across different model architectures. Overall, this study provides an empirical analysis of the relationships among data scale, model complexity, input modalities, and visual generalization performance. Code and experimental logs are available at: https://github.com/zlyd-CV/DeepLearning-Empirical-Studies.

L-TGVN: Leveraging Longitudinal Priors for Personalized Rapid MRI

MRI provides excellent soft-tissue contrast without ionizing radiation, but long acquisition times increase patient discomfort while also raising exam costs and limiting scanner throughput. A common approach to reduce scan time is to acquire fewer measurements, which yields an ill-posed linear inverse problem; recovering diagnostic-quality images therefore requires incorporating prior knowledge beyond the measured data. In follow-up exams, the most recent prior scan of a patient can provide a highly informative subject-specific context, but practical use is complicated by temporal changes (including pathology progression), misalignment between scans, and protocol drift across acquisitions. In this work, we introduce L-TGVN, a Longitudinal Trust-Guided Variational Network that leverages prior scans as side information to reconstruct the current scan from heavily undersampled measurements. Crucially, L-TGVN constrains the influence of prior scans to be consistent with the acquired measurements. Unlike many existing longitudinal reconstruction methods, it does not require explicit pre-registration between prior and current scans. It further accommodates differences in acquisition protocols across visits (e.g., changes in sequence parameters). We evaluate L-TGVN against matched-capacity baselines, including prior-guided methods and methods that do not use longitudinal priors, and observe consistent improvements in standard quantitative metrics together with better preservation of fine structures at challenging accelerations. Source code is available at github.com/sodicksonlab/L-TGVN.

Adaptive Calibration for Fair and Performant Facial Recognition

We introduce Adaptive Calibration (AC), a novel calibration strategy for facial recognition that maps cosine similarity between normalized embeddings to well-calibrated probabilities. By incorporating local context into calibration, Adaptive Calibration corrects for a fundamental mismatch in cosine similarity, whereby the same distance can correspond to different match probabilities in different embedding regions. Our approach improves both overall performance and results in a fairer calibration without requiring demographic metadata. Our approach consistently dominates existing methods both on accuracy and fairness metrics across a variety of pretrained models and standard benchmarks. AC provides a practical solution for equitable facial recognition, without requiring demographic group annotations, and while improving overall performance. Unlike existing approaches, our method provides continuous, region-specific calibration that avoids "leveling down" where fairness comes at the cost of degraded performance for some groups.

Evaluating Reasoning Fidelity in Visual Text Generation

Recent text-to-image (T2I) models can render highly legible and well-structured text within images, enabling applications including document generation and slide generation. However, it remains unclear whether such systems faithfully preserve reasoning ability when complex solutions must be expressed directly through rendered text, or whether they merely imitate surface-level patterns. We investigate this question by evaluating reasoning fidelity in visual text generation, where models must express complete reasoning processes as images. Our evaluation includes long text rendering, factual knowledge probing, context understanding, and multi-step reasoning. Across these settings, we find that current T2I models frequently produce semantic errors, logical inconsistencies, and incorrect intermediate steps, even when the rendered text appears visually clear. These failures contrast with the strong reasoning performance of text-only models on the same tasks. Our findings reveal a substantial gap between visual text generation and procedural reasoning, motivating more reliable visual text reasoning.

SFMambaNet: Spectral-Frequency Enhanced Selective State Space Model for Correspondence Pruning

Correspondence pruning aims to identify inliers from an initial set of correspondences. Most existing Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based methods rely on geometric features mapped from coarse Euclidean coordinates, which struggle to capture the subtle geometric consistencies presented by inliers. While Mamba-based methods possess global receptive fields and long sequence modeling capabilities, they tend to accumulate substantial inconsistent features within the hidden state space, making it difficult to distinguish inliers from outliers. In this paper, we integrate frequency domain perception into this task for the first time and propose SFMambaNet, a novel Spectral-Frequency enhanced Mamba-based two-view correspondence pruning network. Our method is collaboratively composed of two components: First, we design a Local Spectral-Geometric Attention (LSGA) block. LSGA incorporates spectral positional encoding into local graph interactions and introduces multi-scale Mamba processing to enhance the capture of subtle geometric consistencies and improve local feature discriminability. Building upon this, we design a Spectral-Integrated Global Mamba (SIGM) block. SIGM embeds a frequency gating mechanism within the state space, utilizing the frequency information provided by LSGA to explicitly suppress high-frequency noise accumulation within hidden states and mitigate the propagation of inconsistent features. This enhances inlier-outlier separability and achieves robust global context modeling capabilities with nearly linear complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SFMambaNet outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on several challenging tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/Kirito14IT/SFMambaNet.

Optical-Guided Neural Collapse for SAR Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning

Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) in synthetic aperture radar imagery presents unique challenges due to severe data scarcity and SAR-specific variability. In particular, strong azimuth sensitivity in SAR induces large intra-class variation and inter-class confusion, and FSCIL sequential updates further lead to catastrophic forgetting of previously learned classes. Inspired by neural collapse, we propose an optical-guided SAR FSCIL framework, which derives orthogonal feature subspaces from a data-rich optical ATR dataset and uses them as geometric priors to guide SAR feature learning. SAR features are projected onto these orthogonal subspaces via principal angle constraints, effectively transferring discriminative structure from the optical to the SAR domain. Specifically, our projection loss and the classifier loss optimized with a frozen simplex-ETF geometry jointly induce neural collapse by concentrating features around class means while maintaining large inter-class angles. We evaluate the approach on a benchmark comprising an optical ATR dataset and a SAR ATR dataset with 24 target classes, organized into a base training session and seven incremental sessions. Compared with recent FSCIL methods including NCFSCIL and so on, our method achieves the highest final accuracy and a favorable trade-off between final performance and performance degradation. Moreover, neural collapse metrics show improved intra-class compactness and inter-class separability, indicating that the learned features more closely approximate the ideal simplex-ETF geometry.

Instance-Level Post Hoc Uncertainty Quantification in Object Detection

Object detection is a safety-critical component of autonomous driving. It is essential to quantify the uncertainty in bounding-box predictions for safety assurance. Post hoc uncertainty quantification without retraining aligns with real-world deployment requirements; therefore, we employ the Laplace approximation. Because instance-level uncertainty is needed, linearized inference methods that require multiple backpropagations are not time-efficient, and sampling-based methods are not fully post hoc. We propose Monte-Carlo generalized linearized model (MC-GLM), which provides instance-level and approximately post hoc uncertainty quantification. The number of samples required in the Monte Carlo step is constant and independent of the number of output instances, so it can be parallelized. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset with the CenterPoint detector validate the effectiveness of our method, and the resulting uncertainties exhibit good quality.

Real-Time Automatic License Plate Recognition Using YOLOv8, SORT Tracking, and Temporal Data Interpolation

The real-time hardships of video processing seriously limit the usage of Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) with application in dynamic traffic monitoring settings. High-fidelity recognition of unconstrained variables, e.g. drastic variations in illumination, acute camera scans, high vehicle speeds, and harsh physical concealment, is a problem that often leads to disjointed tracking paths and poor Optical Character Recognition (OCR) rates. In order to mitigate these weaknesses, the study proposes a 5 stage, end-to-end algorithmic pipeline, encompassing a smooth transition between deep learning based object detection, multi-object tracking which is kinematic in nature, and geometry temporal data interpolation. The suggested architecture takes advantage of a very powerful YOLOv8 nano model to localize the vehicle at the first stage and then Simple Online and Realtime Tracking (SORT) algorithm is used to build spatial-temporal links between frames. Another, more specific typology of YOLOv8 object detectors the license plate area, channeling the sliced array to an EasyOCR chain under the limitations of positional syntax verification. More importantly, an offline interpolation mechanism of temporal bounding box is initiated to recast fragmented paths.

Graph-Guided Universum Learning in Generalized Eigenvalue Proximal SVMs for Alzheimer's Disease Classification

Early and accurate detection of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is important for timely intervention and disease management. Generalized Eigenvalue Proximal Support Vector Machine (GEPSVM) and its Universum-based variants have shown promising results for AD classification. However, existing methods treat Universum samples as independent points and do not consider the geometric relationships among them. This paper proposes two graph-guided Universum learning models, namely UG-GEPSVM and IUG-GEPSVM, for AD versus cognitively normal (CN) classification using structural MRI data. In the proposed framework, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) subjects are used as Universum data to provide intermediate information between AD and CN classes. A graph is constructed over the Universum samples using Gaussian similarity, Minimum Spanning Tree connectivity, and multi-hop propagation. From this graph, a Laplacian matrix is derived that captures the geometric structure of the MCI samples. This Laplacian-based regularization is incorporated into the learning process in place of the conventional independent Universum penalty term. UG-GEPSVM integrates this regularization into the generalized eigenvalue formulation, while IUG-GEPSVM extends the numerically stable improved GEPSVM framework using a standard eigenvalue formulation. Experiments on ADNI MRI dataset variants using ICA- and PCA-based features at five different noise levels show that both proposed models consistently outperform existing GEPSVM and Universum-based methods. UG-GEPSVM achieves the highest average AUC of 88.07% and maintains stable performance under increasing noise levels. Statistical tests further confirm the significance of the observed improvements.

Enhancing MedSAM with a Lightweight Box Predictor for Medical Image Segmentation

Semantic segmentation in medical imaging is a critical yet challenging task due to data scarcity and high variability across modalities. While foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) show promise, they often struggle with medical images without specific adaptation. Moreover, point prompts, despite being the most natural form of user interaction, provide insufficient spatial context for reliable segmentation, particularly when target structures are irregular or poorly contrasted. In this paper, we propose an enhanced segmentation framework that integrates a lightweight Box Predictor module into the MedSAM architecture. The Box Predictor estimates an approximate bounding box from a single user click using localized image embedding features, providing spatial guidance that reduces the ambiguity of point prompts, while introducing only 1.6M additional parameters and negligible inference overhead. We introduce a two-stage training pipeline where the Box Predictor is trained independently before being integrated into MedSAM. To validate the generalization capability of our method, we conduct extensive evaluations on four diverse datasets (FLARE22, BRISC, BUSI, LungSegDB) spanning distinct imaging modalities, including CT, MRI, and Ultrasound. Our method improves segmentation accuracy and robustness across varied anatomical structures and imaging domains, achieving Dice scores of 0.89 (BUSI), 0.93 (FLARE22), 0.88 (BRISC), and 0.98 (LungSegDB). Code is available at https://github.com/Amirhosseinmovahedi/MedSAM-BoxPredictor

Coarse-to-fine Hierarchical Architecture with Sequential Mamba for Brain Reconstruction

Understanding the relationship between deep visual representations and the human visual system is a fundamental challenge in computational neuroscience. While modern vision models achieve strong performance in image recognition, their correspondence with the hierarchical organization of the human visual cortex remains an open question. In this study, we propose CHASMBrain, a novel hierarchical two-stage framework for image-to-fMRI encoding. Our architecture leverages a dual-stream Mamba design to explicitly separate and process global semantic tokens and local spatial patches, motivated by the functional organization of the visual cortex. A coarse-to-fine strategy is employed: Stage 1 predicts denoised ROI-level activations, while Stage 2 refines these coarse responses into full voxel-level predictions using a Mamba-VAE. Experiments on the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) demonstrate that our method achieves a Pearson correlation of 0.429 and an MSE of 0.261, outperforming all evaluated baselines including ridge regression and DINOv2 linear probes. Beyond predictive performance, causal branch-ablation experiments reveal an asymmetric specialization: the patch stream is specifically locked to early visual cortex (retinotopic regions), while the CLS stream contributes broader semantic context to higher-order areas -- a correspondence that holds causally, not merely correlationally. Cross-subject transfer experiments further show that the learned backbone generalizes across individuals with minimal per-subject adaptation, suggesting the model captures a shared, subject-agnostic visual representation.

Activation Steering of Video Generation Models via Reduced-Order Linear Optimal Control

Text-to-video (T2V) models trained on large-scale web data can generate undesired content, motivating interventions that reduce harmful outputs without sacrificing visual quality. Activation steering offers an attractive mechanistic alternative to finetuning and prompt filtering, but existing T2V steering methods remain limited, typically applying coarse, non-anticipative interventions that can lead to oversteering and content degradation. To close this gap, we propose Latent Activation Linear-Quadratic Regulator (LA-LQR), a reduced-order optimal control framework for minimally invasive T2V steering. LA-LQR formulates T2V inference as a dynamical system and computes closed-loop feedback interventions that steer activations toward desired feature setpoints while penalizing unnecessary perturbations. To make optimal control feasible for high-dimensional video activations, we project activations onto a low-dimensional, task-relevant subspace derived from contrastive prompt pairs, estimate local linear dynamics in this latent space, and solve a latent LQR problem to obtain timestep- and layer-specific steering signals. We provide theoretical bounds relating latent setpoint tracking to raw activation-space feature control, and empirically validate the fidelity of the reduced latent dynamics. On concept steering and video safety benchmarks, LA-LQR reduces unsafe generations relative to baselines, while preserving prompt fidelity and visual quality.

NoRA: Evaluating Grounded Reasonableness in Visual First-person Normative Action Reasoning

LLMs and agentic systems are increasingly deployed in social environments, making normative competence critical for safe and appropriate behavior. However, existing approaches either assess normative judgment in text alone or reduce it to choosing among a fixed set of candidate actions. We argue both are insufficient. In practice, agents are never handed a menu of options; they must identify a reasonable action from scratch, grounded in visible facts and supported by inspectable reasons. We introduce NoRA, a visual first-person video benchmark that requires models to generate candidate next actions and justify each through an explicit fact-reason-action support graph. The benchmark comprises 1,420 annotated video clips, including HumanGold-190 and LLMSilver-1230 splits. Each instance is evaluated through action alignment, factual grounding, and support binding, aggregated into a single grounded reasonableness score. We benchmark 12 multimodal systems under direct, deliberate, and structured prompting regimes, finding that current VLMs frequently recover plausible actions and relevant scene facts, but consistently struggle to construct the full reasonable action space and bind selected actions to the correct local support. NoRA makes this gap measurable, shifting the evaluation question from whether a model can pick an action to whether it can justify an appropriate action for the right visible reasons.

OA-CutMix: Correcting the Label Bias of CutMix

CutMix has become the de facto standard mixing augmentation, yet its label assignment rests on a flawed assumption: The area of the pasted patch faithfully reflects its semantic contribution to the mixed image. In practice, however, patches frequently land on background regions, assigning label credit to classes whose objects are not visible. The mean discrepancy of the CutMix label and the semantic object area is $21.5\%$. In $17\%$ of samples an image contributes zero visible object pixels yet receives nonzero label weight. We propose Object-Aware CutMix (OA-CutMix), which corrects this bias by replacing the area-based CutMix weight with one derived from precomputed segmentation masks, assigning labels in proportion to the visible object area each image contributes to the mix. The image mixing procedure is left entirely unchanged. We evaluate OA-CutMix against 10+ static and dynamic mixing methods across 4 architectures and 6 datasets. OA-CutMix consistently achieves the highest accuracy over all tasks, outperforming even dynamic mixing methods, but at a fraction of the training-time cost. Improvements are largest for small objects, where the label bias from CutMix is greatest. Thus, correcting the label is sufficient to match or exceed the performance of methods modifying the image mixing algorithm.

DiverAge: Reliable Pluralistic Face Aging with Cross-Age Identity Relation Guidance

Face aging plays an important role in long-term biometric analysis, cross-age identity verification, and forensic identity analysis. Since the same subject may exhibit multiple plausible appearances at a target age due to genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors, face aging is inherently a one-to-many generation problem. However, pluralism alone is insufficient for reliable face aging: a model should provide appearance-level candidate diversity within each age group while maintaining sequence-level ordinal reliability across ordered age groups. Existing deterministic aging methods can synthesize visually plausible age-progressed faces, but usually lack stochastic diversity. In contrast, pluralistic aging methods introduce local appearance variations, but often fail to explicitly regulate the identity evolution of the full aging sequence. In this paper, we propose \textbf{DiverAge}, a hierarchical pluralistic face aging framework based on diffusion autoencoding. DiverAge preserves appearance-level diversity through stochastic diffusion decoding and age-conditioned semantic modulation. To improve sequence-level reliability, we introduce a Cross-age Identity Relation Regulator (CARR), an inference-time guidance strategy that jointly denoises multiple target age groups. CARR is guided by a Cross-age Identity Similarity (CIS) prior estimated from real same-identity cross-age pairs, and suppresses excessive cross-age identity drift through one-sided sampling-time guidance without modifying the training objective or introducing extra trainable parameters. Experiments demonstrate that DiverAge improves sequence-level ordinal reliability while maintaining identity preservation, age accuracy, image quality, and appearance-level diversity.

Geometry-Aware Distillation for Prompt Tuning Biomedical Vision-Language Models

Current prompt-based and adapter-based tuning of vision-language models (VLMs) is attractive for medical imaging, where clinical data sensitivity favors frozen backbones and annotations are limited. However, these methods typically optimize only the ground-truth class, treating all other classes as equally incorrect, ignoring clinically meaningful class relations and yielding unstable decision boundaries in limited-supervision settings. We propose Omni-Geometry Knowledge Distillation (OGKD), a new framework that injects class-relation structure into the teacher to produce directional targets that preserve the ground truth while respecting inter-class geometry. Using these targets, we develop two distillation losses: Global Geometry-Aware Distillation (GAD) operates on the global image token, and Label-Guided Geometry Distillation (LGD) applies the same geometry to attentive patch tokens to improve fine-grained alignment. Across comprehensive experiments and analyses on 11 widely-used medical datasets for base-to-novel and few-shot evaluations, our OGKD achieves substantially better performance, consistently improving accuracy by an average absolute gain of 1.7%-2.8% over all prior state-of-the-art VLM adaptation counterparts. It also robustly generalizes to unseen classes and yields more reliable predictions than other approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/tientrandinh/OGKD.

Plan, Watch, Recover: A Benchmark and Architectures for Proactive Procedural Assistance

We envision a proactive multi-modal assistant system which gives users real-time step-by-step guidance on a procedural task, autonomously deciding \textit{when} to interrupt, and \textit{how} to coach. However, progress is limited by the absence of large-scale, cross-domain benchmarks that reflect realistic conditions, particularly the common case in which users deviate from the expected step sequence. We address this gap with four contributions: \textbf{(1)}~we release \textbf{EgoProactive}, a large-scale wearable-egocentric dataset for proactive procedural assistance with explicit Out-of-Plan (OOP) annotations and recovery steps; \textbf{(2)}~we augment five established benchmarks (Ego4D, EPIC-KITCHENS, EgoExo4D, HoloAssist, HowTo100M) into \textbf{Pro\textsuperscript{2}Bench} under a unified proactive-guidance schema; \textbf{(3)}~we propose a \textbf{decoupled planner--interaction architecture} specialized for procedural state, visual cues, and recovery injection; \textbf{(4)}~we introduce a post-training recipe that transfers across model families, validated by cross-backbone replication on Llama~4 and Qwen-3.6-VL. In extensive experiments, our trained Llama-4 system substantially improves objective intervention quality over strong proprietary baselines (Claude Opus~4.6, Gemini~3.1~Pro, GPT~5.2) and open-weight baselines (Qwen3~VL~235B) baselines across all six datasets. Oracle-plan experiments further show that, when plan quality is controlled, the trained duplex model produces high-quality guidance and large gains on Out-of-Plan recovery.

M$^3$Eval: Multi-Modal Memory Evaluation through Cognitively-Grounded Video Tasks

As multi-modal models advance towards long-form video understanding, memory emerges as a critical capability. Despite substantial efforts in developing video datasets and benchmarks, existing works primarily focus on perception and reasoning, without systematically evaluating memory: what models retain, how faithfully information is preserved, and how robust memory remains under interference. To address this gap, we introduce M$^3$Eval, the first comprehensive evaluation framework and benchmark for probing different memory dimensions in multi-modal models. Grounded in cognitive psychology, our design features carefully constructed tasks that isolate key aspects of memory. Leveraging M$^3$Eval, we conduct extensive experiments across representative multi-modal models, revealing consistent weaknesses and distinctive behaviors. We find that models struggle to maintain disentangled representations when processing parallel video streams, exhibit interference patterns differing substantially from those observed in human memory, ground memory sources more reliably in the spatial domain than the temporal domain, and demonstrate limited symbolic memory. Collectively, our benchmark provides a valuable resource for future research, while our findings highlight memory as a fundamental yet underexplored capability and offer insights for designing more effective memory mechanisms in multi-modal models. Our code and dataset are available at https://pku-value-lab.github.io/m3eval-homepage.

UniCAD: A Unified Benchmark and Universal Model for Multi-Modal Multi-Task CAD

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) underpins modern engineering and manufacturing by enabling the creation of precise, editable 3D models. However, CAD research typically studies tasks in isolation, and multi-modal, multi-task learning for CAD is hindered by the absence of a unified benchmark. To address this gap, we introduce UniCAD, a comprehensive benchmark for multi-modal CAD learning that covers point-to-CAD reconstruction, text/image-to-CAD generation, and CAD question answering across diverse input modalities. Alongside the benchmark, we present UniCAD-MLLM, a universal multi-modal large language model that ingests text, images, sketches, and point clouds and performs these heterogeneous tasks in an end-to-end fashion within a single framework. Extensive experiments on the UniCAD and Fusion360 benchmarks demonstrate that UniCAD-MLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance across all tasks, outperforming existing task-specific and multi-task baselines. We will release the dataset, code, and pretrained models to accelerate future research.

Who Needs Labels? Adapting Vision Foundation Models With the Metadata You Already Have

We propose a label-free approach to adapt powerful but generic vision foundation models to specialized scientific domains. Standard supervised fine-tuning is often ill-suited to these settings: labels are scarce, and task-specific training can collapse the model's generality and hurt robustness. We instead leverage metadata to adapt representations to new domains in a self-supervised manner. Our method, FINO, combines a standard self-supervised objective with flexible metadata guidance that handles both highly granular discrete metadata and continuous metadata. It encourages the representation to preserve informative factors while suppressing spurious ones. Across subcellular fluorescence microscopy, Earth observation, wildlife monitoring, and medical imaging, FINO consistently outperforms standard unsupervised domain adaptation and fully supervised adaptation. It also exceeds highly-specialized domain-specific state of the art, while using no task labels for backbone adaptation and only lightweight probes for supervision.

Continual Visual and Verbal Learning Through a Child's Egocentric Input

Children learn the meanings of words from a continuous, temporally structured stream of egocentric experience. Recent work shows that neural networks can also learn word-referent mappings from a child's egocentric video recordings, but they cycle through the shuffled data for hundreds of epochs, contrasting with how children actually encounter their environment. We introduce BabyCL, a continual multimodal learning framework that processes the SAYCam dataset in a single chronological pass, combining streaming visual representation learning with an image-text contrastive objective. BabyCL combines a multi-stage temporal segmentation of the stream with a dual replay buffer that independently manages visual and multimodal histories, and it is jointly trained with three contrastive losses on a shared backbone. Under a matched optimization budget, BabyCL outperforms streaming learning baselines on the SAYCam Labeled-S 4AFC benchmark, substantially narrowing the gap to an upper bound of offline training. Ablations show that the gains are robust to the length of the online temporal segmentation window and the eviction rule of the replay buffer. Together, these results show that meaningful word-referent mappings can emerge under training conditions much closer to a child's actual experience.

GeM-NR: Geometry-Aware Multi-View Editing for Nonrigid Scene Changes

Recent developments in multi-view image editing with generative models have brought us a step closer toward general 3D content generation and customization. Most existing works focus on rigid or appearance-only edits by utilizing the geometry of the unedited scene. This naturally limits these methods to edits that preserve the underlying scene structure. Other approaches are trained for specific image editing tasks, such as object removal and addition. Despite this progress, general nonrigid edits, i.e., edits that substantially change the scene geometry, remain challenging for existing methods. We propose GeM-NR, a fast and flexible training-free approach for general multi-view consistent image editing, including edits that drastically change the geometry and appearance of the scene. Given an anchor image edited with a chosen backbone editor (such as FLUX, Qwen, BrushNet) and a query unedited image, GeM-NR edits the query image consistently with the anchor edit. The method incorporates multiple stages: (i) depth map estimation, where we propose a strategy to maximize the alignment between the 3D point clouds of the edited and unedited scenes, (ii) projection onto a query viewpoint, and (iii) refinement of the obtained image conditioned on the unedited query. The conditioning-based formulation scales well from two to many views of an object. We demonstrate the ability of our method to handle edits with significant changes in geometry and appearance, something that existing methods struggle with. We perform an extensive evaluation showing that our method improves consistency for a wide variety of edit tasks, including generating 3D representations of the edited scene. Both quantitative and qualitative results indicate the state-of-the-art performance of our method in terms of edit quality as well as geometric and photometric consistency across multiple views.

Belief-Aware VLM Model for Human-like Reasoning

Traditional neural network models for intent inference rely heavily on observable states and struggle to generalize across diverse tasks and dynamic environments. Recent advances in Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Vision Language Action (VLA) models introduce common-sense reasoning through large-scale multimodal pretraining, enabling zero-shot performance across tasks. However, these models still lack explicit mechanisms to represent and update belief, limiting their ability to reason like humans or capture the evolving human intent over long-horizon. To address this, we propose a belief-aware VLM framework that integrates retrieval-based memory and reinforcement learning. Instead of learning an explicit belief model, we approximate belief using a vector-based memory that retrieves relevant multimodal context, which is incorporated into the VLM for reasoning. We further refine decision-making using a reinforcement learning policy over the VLM latent space. We evaluate our approach on publicly available VQA datasets such as HD-EPIC and demonstrate consistent improvements over zero-shot baselines, highlighting the importance of belief-aware reasoning.

Bad Seeing or Bad Thinking? Rewarding Perception for Multimodal Reasoning

Achieving robust perception-reasoning synergy is a central goal for advanced Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Recent advancements have pursued this goal via architectural designs or agentic workflows. However, these approaches are often limited by static textual reasoning or complicated by the significant compute and engineering burden of external agentic complexity. Worse, this heavy investment does not yield proportional gains, often witnessing a "seesaw effect" on perception and reasoning. This motivates a fundamental rethinking of the true bottleneck. In this paper, we argue that the root cause of this trade-off is an ambiguity in modality credit assignment: when a VLM fails, is it due to flawed perception ("bad seeing") or flawed logic ("bad thinking")? To resolve this, we introduce a reinforcement learning framework that improves perception-reasoning synergy by reliably rewarding the perception fidelity. We explicitly decompose the generation process into interleaved perception and reasoning steps. This decoupling enables targeted supervision on perception. Crucially, we introduce Perception Verification (PV), leveraging a "blindfolded reasoning" proxy to reward perceptual fidelity independently of reasoning outcomes. Furthermore, to scale training across free-form VL tasks, we propose Structured Verbal Verification, which replaces high-variance LLM judging with structured algorithmic execution. These techniques are integrated into a Modality-Aware Credit Assignment (MoCA) mechanism, which routes rewards to the specific source of error -- either bad seeing or bad thinking -- enabling a single VLM to achieve simultaneous performance gains across a wide task spectrum.

Transformer-Based Autonomous Driving Models and Deployment-Oriented Compression: A Survey

Transformer-based models are becoming a central paradigm in autonomous driving because they can capture long-range spatial dependencies, multi-agent interactions, and multimodal context across perception, prediction, and planning. At the same time, their deployment in real vehicles remains difficult because high-capacity attention-based architectures impose substantial latency, memory, and energy overhead. This survey reviews representative Transformer-based autonomous driving models and organizes them by task role, sensing configuration, and architectural design. More importantly, it examines these models from a deployment-oriented perspective and analyzes how efficiency constraints reshape model design choices in practice. We further review compression and acceleration strategies relevant to Transformer-based driving systems, including quantization, pruning, knowledge distillation, low-rank approximation, and efficient attention, and discuss their benefits, limitations, and task-dependent applicability. Rather than treating compression as an isolated post-processing step, we highlight it as a system-level design consideration that directly affects deployability, robustness, and safety. Finally, we identify open challenges and future research directions toward standardized, safety-aware, and hardware-conscious evaluation of efficient autonomous driving systems.

CounterFace: A Synthetic Face Dataset for Fine-Grained Counterfactual Evaluation of Face Recognition Systems

Face recognition (FR) systems are widely deployed in critical applications, making their reliability and robustness across diverse populations and conditions essential. Standard evaluation of FR systems typically relies on datasets such as LFW to estimate average recognition accuracy. Some benchmarks also capture coarse-grained intra-identity variations such as aging, pose, and lighting. However, human faces undergo more fine-grained changes, including appearance changes such as hairstyles and makeup, that are underrepresented in existing benchmarks. Counterfactual evaluation provides a method to assess FR robustness under such fine-grained variations. Existing counterfactual face datasets synthesized with image generators, however, are limited in attribute coverage due to the use of humans for verification in the pipeline. We propose CounterFace, a new counterfactual evaluation dataset comprising 20 facial attributes and 8 demographic factors, exceeding prior synthetic face datasets by 14 attributes and 2 demographics. The dataset is generated using a fully automated pipeline based on off-the-shelf image generators with custom verifiers, removing human need for verification. CounterFace contains 11,821 counterfactual face pairs, and a post-hoc user study confirms the faithfulness of the generated counterfactuals. We evaluate two commercial and four open-source FR systems (AWS Rekognition, Face++, AdaFace, MagFace, ArcFace, FaceNet) across 160 attribute-demographic combinations. Our dataset helps in the isolation of precise failure modes for individual systems unlike standard evaluation benchmarks. Results indicate that the performance degradation varies across attributes and demographics for all six systems and occluding attributes (e.g., facemask and facial hair) universally degrade performance.

LaVIDE: Language-Prompted Satellite Change Detection via Map-Image Alignment

Remote sensing change detection based on a map reference and an up-to-date image boosts timely observation of the Earth's surface when earlier images are lacking for comparison. However, the semantic gap between high-level map categories and low-level image details hinders the extraction of homogeneous features for robust temporal association in change detection. Unlike conventional approaches that either compare pixel-level visual similarity or propagate segmentation errors, \textcolor{black}{we propose a novel framework, \underline{La}nguage-\underline{VI}sion \underline{D}iscriminator for d\underline{E}tecting changes, LaVIDE}, which bridges the semantic gap between high-level map categories and low-level image details using language as an intermediary. Specifically, we introduce {\it restricted prompt learning} to generate context-aware textual prompts that align map semantics with image content, and an {\it object-aware embedding enhancement} strategy to integrate object-level attributes (e.g., shape, boundary) into map representations. These components enable robust cross-modal alignment within a unified language-vision feature space. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks, DynamicEarthNet, HRSCD, BANDON, and SECOND, demonstrate that LaVIDE outperforms state-of-the-art methods by significant margins, achieving $18.4\%$ and $5.2\%$ improvements in IoU on multi-class and single-class change detection tasks, respectively. Our framework not only advances the accuracy of map-image change detection but also provides a practical solution for rapid map updating with minimal human intervention, promising broad impacts in urban planning, disaster assessment, and ecological conservation. Code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/ShuGuoJ/LAVIDE.git.

Can VLMs Predict Future States? Bootstrapping World Models from Inverse Dynamics

Can unified vision-language models (VLMs) perform forward dynamics prediction (FDP), i.e., predicting the future state (in image form) given the previous observation and an action (in language form)? We find that VLMs struggle to generate physically plausible transitions between frames from instructions. Nevertheless, we identify a crucial asymmetry in multimodal grounding: fine-tuning a VLM to learn inverse dynamics prediction (IDP)-effectively captioning the action between frames-is significantly easier than learning FDP. In turn, IDP can be used to bootstrap FDP through two main strategies: 1) weakly supervised learning from synthetic data and 2) inference time verification. Firstly, IDP can annotate actions for unlabelled pairs of video frame observations to expand the training data scale for FDP. Secondly, IDP can assign rewards to multiple samples of FDP to score them, effectively guiding search at inference time. We evaluate the FDP resulting from both strategies through the task of action-centric image editing on Aurora-Bench with two families of VLMs. Despite remaining general-purpose, our best model achieves a performance competitive with state-of-the-art image editing models, improving on them by a margin between 7% and 13% according to GPT4o-as-judge, and achieving the best average human evaluation across all subsets of Aurora-Bench.

VGGSounder: Audio-Visual Evaluations for Foundation Models

The emergence of audio-visual foundation models underscores the importance of reliably assessing their multi-modal understanding. The VGGSound dataset is commonly used as a benchmark for evaluation audio-visual classification. However, our analysis identifies several limitations of VGGSound, including incomplete labelling, partially overlapping classes, and misaligned modalities. These lead to distorted evaluations of auditory and visual capabilities. To address these limitations, we introduce VGGSounder, a comprehensively re-annotated, multi-label test set that extends VGGSound and is specifically designed to evaluate audio-visual foundation models. VGGSounder features detailed modality annotations, enabling precise analyses of modality-specific performance. Furthermore, we reveal model limitations by analysing performance degradation when adding another input modality with our new modality confusion metric.

Platonic Transformers: A Solid Choice For Equivariance

While widespread, Transformers lack inductive biases for geometric symmetries common in science and computer vision. Existing equivariant methods often sacrifice the efficiency and flexibility that make Transformers so effective through complex, computationally intensive designs. We introduce the Platonic Transformer to resolve this trade-off. By defining attention relative to reference frames from the Platonic solid symmetry groups, our method induces a principled weight-sharing scheme. This enables combined equivariance to continuous translations and Platonic symmetries, while preserving the exact architecture and computational cost of a standard Transformer. Furthermore, we show that this attention is formally equivalent to a dynamic group convolution, which reveals that the model learns adaptive geometric filters and enables a highly scalable, linear-time convolutional variant. Across diverse benchmarks in computer vision (CIFAR-10), 3D point clouds (ScanObjectNN), and molecular property prediction (QM9, OMol25), the Platonic Transformer achieves competitive performance by leveraging these geometric constraints at no additional cost.

SAM 3D: 3Dfy Anything in Images

We present SAM 3D, a generative model for visually grounded 3D object reconstruction, predicting geometry, texture, and layout from a single image. SAM 3D excels in natural images, where occlusion and scene clutter are common and visual recognition cues from context play a larger role. We achieve this with a human- and model-in-the-loop pipeline for annotating object shape, texture, and pose, providing visually grounded 3D reconstruction data at unprecedented scale. We learn from this data in a modern, multi-stage training framework that combines synthetic pretraining with real-world alignment, breaking the 3D "data barrier". We obtain significant gains over recent work, with at least a 5:1 win rate in human preference tests on real-world objects and scenes. We will release our code and model weights, an online demo, and a new challenging benchmark for in-the-wild 3D object reconstruction.

AttnRegDeepLab: A Two-Stage Decoupled Framework for Interpretable Embryo Fragmentation Grading

Embryo fragmentation is a morphological indicator critical for evaluating developmental potential in In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). However, manual grading is subjective and inefficient, while existing deep learning solutions often lack clinical explainability or suffer from accumulated errors in segmentation area estimation. To address these issues, this study proposes AttnRegDeepLab (Attention-Guided Regression DeepLab), a framework characterized by dual-branch Multi-Task Learning (MTL). A vanilla DeepLabV3+ decoder is modified by integrating Attention Gates into its skip connections, explicitly suppressing cytoplasmic noise to preserve contour details. Furthermore, a Multi-Scale Regression Head is introduced with a Feature Injection mechanism to propagate global grading priors into the segmentation task, rectifying systematic quantification errors. A 2-stage decoupled training strategy is proposed to address the gradient conflict in MTL. Also, a range-based loss is designed to leverage weakly labeled data. Our method achieves robust grading precision while maintaining excellent segmentation accuracy (Dice coefficient =0.729), in contrast to the end-to-end counterpart that might minimize grading error at the expense of contour integrity. This work provides a clinically interpretable solution that balances visual fidelity and quantitative precision.

Dynamic Content Moderation in Livestreams: Combining Supervised Classification with MLLM-Boosted Similarity Matching

Content moderation remains a critical yet challenging task for large-scale user-generated video platforms, especially in livestreaming environments where moderation must be timely, multimodal, and robust to evolving forms of unwanted content. We present a hybrid moderation framework deployed at production scale that combines supervised classification for known violations with reference-based similarity matching for novel or subtle cases. This hybrid design enables robust detection of both explicit violations and novel edge cases that evade traditional classifiers. Multimodal inputs (text, audio, visual) are processed through both pipelines, with a multimodal large language model (MLLM) distilling knowledge into each to boost accuracy while keeping inference lightweight. In production, the classification pipeline achieves 67% recall at 80% precision, and the similarity pipeline achieves 76% recall at 80% precision. Large-scale A/B tests show a 6-8% reduction in user views of unwanted livestreams}. These results demonstrate a scalable and adaptable approach to multimodal content governance, capable of addressing both explicit violations and emerging adversarial behaviors.

From Segments to Scenes: Temporal Understanding for Agentic Autonomous Driving via Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as the perception and reasoning backbone of autonomous agents acting in the wild, with autonomous driving (AD) being one of the most safety-critical instances. Reliable temporal understanding is essential for such agents to anticipate events, attribute causes, and act safely in dynamic environments, yet this remains a significant challenge even for state-of-the-art (SoTA) VLMs. Prior video benchmarks have emphasized other content (sports, cooking, etc.), yet no existing benchmark focuses exclusively on temporal understanding for both short- and long-form AD footage. To fill this gap, we present the Temporal Understanding in Autonomous Driving (TAD) benchmark, comprising nearly 6000 question-answer (QA) pairs across 7 tasks, and evaluate 9 closed- and open-source generalist as well as AD-specialist models. Current SoTA models perform substantially below human accuracy on TAD. To improve the temporal reasoning of VLM-based driving agents, we propose two novel training-free solutions: Scene-CoT, which uses Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, and TCogMap, which incorporates an ego-centric temporal cognitive map produced by a trajectory-analysis module that operates as an agentic tool around the VLM. Integrated with existing VLMs, our methods improve average accuracy on TAD by up to $17.72\%$ and by up to $10.35\%$ on STSBench. By introducing TAD, benchmarking SoTA models, and proposing effective enhancements, this work aims to catalyze further progress on temporal understanding for agentic AD systems operating in the wild. The benchmark and evaluation code are available at ${\href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/vbdai/TAD}{\text{Hugging Face}}}$ and ${\href{https://github.com/vbdi/tad_bench}{\text{GitHub}}}$, respectively.

DVGT: Driving Visual Geometry Transformer

Perceiving and reconstructing 3D scene geometry from visual inputs is crucial for autonomous driving. However, there still lacks a driving-targeted dense geometry perception model that can adapt to different scenarios and camera configurations. To bridge this gap, we propose a Driving Visual Geometry Transformer (DVGT), which reconstructs a global dense 3D point map from a sequence of unposed multi-view visual inputs. We first extract visual features for each image using a DINO backbone, and employ alternating intra-view local attention, cross-view spatial attention, and cross-frame temporal attention to infer geometric relations across images. We then use multiple heads to decode a global point map in the ego coordinate of the first frame and the ego poses for each frame. Unlike conventional methods that rely on precise camera parameters, DVGT is free of explicit 3D geometric priors, enabling flexible processing of arbitrary camera configurations. DVGT directly predicts metric-scaled geometry from image sequences, eliminating the need for post-alignment with external sensors. Trained on a large mixture of driving datasets including nuScenes, OpenScene, Waymo, KITTI, and DDAD, DVGT significantly outperforms existing models on various scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/wzzheng/DVGT.

R3G: A Reasoning-Retrieval-Reranking Framework for Vision-Centric Answer Generation

Vision-centric retrieval for VQA requires retrieving images to supply missing visual cues and integrating them into the reasoning process. However, selecting the right images and integrating them effectively into the model's reasoning remains challenging.To address this challenge, we propose R3G, a modular Reasoning-Retrieval-Reranking framework.It first produces a brief reasoning plan that specifies the required visual cues, then adopts a two-stage strategy, with coarse retrieval followed by fine-grained reranking, to select evidence images.On MRAG-Bench, R3G improves accuracy across six MLLM backbones and nine sub-scenarios, achieving state-of-the-art overall performance. Ablations show that sufficiency-aware reranking and reasoning steps are complementary, helping the model both choose the right images and use them well. We release code and data at https://github.com/czh24/R3G.

ShareVerse: Multi-Agent Consistent Video Generation for Shared World Modeling

This paper presents ShareVerse, a video generation framework enabling multi-agent shared world modeling, addressing the gap in existing works that lack support for unified shared world construction with multi-agent interaction. ShareVerse leverages the generation capability of large video models and integrates three key innovations: 1) A dataset for large-scale multi-agent interactive world modeling is built on the CARLA simulation platform, featuring diverse scenes, weather conditions, and interactive trajectories with paired multi-view videos (front/ rear/ left/ right views per agent) and camera data. 2) We propose a spatial concatenation strategy for four-view videos of independent agents to model a broader environment and to ensure internal multi-view geometric consistency. 3) We integrate cross-agent attention blocks into the pretrained video model, which enable interactive transmission of spatial-temporal information across agents, guaranteeing shared world consistency in overlapping regions and reasonable generation in non-overlapping regions. ShareVerse, which supports 49-frame large-scale video generation, accurately perceives the position of dynamic agents and achieves consistent shared world modeling.

Beyond Pixel Histories: World Models with Persistent 3D State

Interactive world models continually generate video by responding to a user's actions, enabling open-ended generation capabilities. However, existing models typically lack a 3D representation of the environment, meaning 3D consistency must be implicitly learned from data, and spatial memory is restricted to limited temporal context windows. This results in an unrealistic user experience and presents significant obstacles to downstream tasks such as training agents. To address this, we present PERSIST, a new paradigm of world model which simulates the evolution of a latent 3D scene: environment, camera, and renderer. This allows us to synthesise new frames with persistent spatial memory and consistent geometry. Both quantitative metrics and a qualitative user study show substantial improvements in spatial memory, 3D consistency, and long-horizon stability over existing methods, enabling coherent, evolving 3D worlds. We further demonstrate novel capabilities, including synthesising diverse 3D environments from a single image, as well as enabling fine-grained, geometry-aware control over generated experiences by supporting environment editing and specification directly in 3D space. Project page: https://francelico.github.io/persist.github.io

Learning to Evaluate: Cost-Effective Model Evaluation on Unlabeled Data with Meta-Learning

The rapid advancement of machine learning has led to an unprecedented expansion of model ecosystems, making it increasingly difficult to assess the reliability of newly released models on unseen and unlabeled data. Existing evaluation pipelines typically rely on costly annotation, repeated fine-tuning, or assumptions that do not generalize well to new models. We introduce MetaEvaluator, a cost-effective, model-agnostic framework for fast, label-free evaluation of unseen models across diverse architectures and modalities. MetaEvaluator meta-learns over a pool of reference models to acquire an effective initialization for accurate assessment of unseen models, thereby amortizing evaluation cost and eliminating the need for per-model retraining. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first model-agnostic framework that evaluates new models on unlabeled datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MetaEvaluator delivers stable and accurate performance estimates at substantially lower cost than conventional approaches, enabling scalable benchmarking on unlabeled datasets for emerging models. The code is available at: https://github.com/phkhanhtrinh23/MetaEvaluator.

Correcting Visual Blur Induced by Attention Distraction to Reduce Hallucinations: Algorithm and Theory

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) frequently suffer from object hallucinations, yet the visual perceptual mechanism underlying this failure remains poorly understood. In this work, we reveal that hallucinations are strongly associated with a human-like attention distraction phenomenon, where humans under divided focus experience degraded visual clarity and produce inaccurate descriptions, while in models the same mechanism manifests as spatial inconsistency in multi-head attention and temporal fading of attention to image tokens during decoding. We further provide theoretical insights that attention dispersion increases model complexity and degrades classification generalization. Motivated by these findings, we propose an Attention-Focused Approach for Improved Image Perception (AFIP), which corrects attention distraction via cross-head attention enrichment and reinforces visual grounding through dynamic historical attention enhancement. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and models validate the effectiveness of AFIP without additional training.

Effect of Demographic Bias on Skin Lesion Classification

In this study, we evaluate the performance of skin lesion classification using ResNet-based convolutional models, focusing on the impact of demographic bias in training data, particularly variations in patient sex and age. We use linear programming to generate datasets with controlled demographic characteristics, allowing systematic investigation of bias effects. Three learning strategies are evaluated: a single-task model, a reinforcing multi-task model, and an adversarial learning scheme. Our sex-based analysis indicates that sex-specific training datasets optimise model performance. Notably, including male patients in the training data improved performance for the male subgroup, even in female-majority cases. Reinforcing and adversarial learning schemes narrowed or eliminated bias gaps in balanced and female-majority datasets. However, these strategies proved less effective in male-majority settings, where models continued to perform better for males than females. The two learning schemes showed marginal bias reduction compared to the baseline model in predominantly male patient populations. Age-based analysis demonstrates comparable baseline performance across the three model approaches, with performance declining across age categories. Younger groups consistently achieve the highest performance, regardless of training data distribution. Although balanced training yields optimal results for the youngest age category, performance decreases in older categories. We find that sex biases arise mainly from data imbalances, while age biases consistently favour younger groups regardless of distribution. These distinct mechanisms require targeted mitigation strategies. Additionally, cross-dataset validation on two external datasets revealed that domain shifts notably affect performance and patterns of demographic bias.

Do Real-World Datasets Contain Natural Experiments? An Empirical Study Using Causal Feature Selection

In nature, events that affect some individuals or groups but not others constitute an implicit intervention and are known as natural experiments. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic was an intervention by the coronavirus on the sub-population infected with COVID. We ask, do natural experiments occur in existing real-world datasets? If yes, how should we treat them? To detect natural experiments in data, we use causal discovery to recover the underlying causal graph and perform feature selection based on causal links. If downstream performance improves by treating the data as interventional rather than observational, we argue that this suggests the dataset contains natural experiments. We first validate this hypothesis by simulating datasets with and without natural experiments using synthetic graphs. We then perform a systematic empirical evaluation on a large suite of real-world datasets. Our results indicate that real-world datasets do contain natural experiments and we can take advantage of those natural experiments to improve model performance using causal inference. Our work represents the initial foray into this area, offering a preliminary exploration within a limited scope.

Wavelet as Tokenizer: Preliminary Results on a Shared Wavelet Token Schema for Natural Signals

This paper studies whether audio, images, and video can share a common wavelet token schema rather than relying on separate modality-specific latent grids. It introduces a preliminary continuous-token model built around a one-level Haar DWT/IDWT frontend, a shared coefficient-token layout, optional structural metadata, lightweight modality value adapters, and a shared token-wise encoder-decoder trunk. On Speech Commands, EuroSAT RGB, and DAVIS 2017 data, a dense shared model reaches 39.92 dB audio, 29.37 dB image, and 23.93 dB video PSNR. A matched-rate sweep under continuous latent scalar budgets indicates that the visual gains are not explained solely by latent capacity, while also showing that additive metadata embeddings are not a universal source of improvement. Finally, fixed-rate energy selection provides a strong non-parametric baseline: energy_global improves average PSNR over uniform selection by 16.73 dB for audio, 16.90 dB for images, and 15.86 dB for video under compressed keep ratios. Masked sparse training reaches 34.45 dB video PSNR with 50% of dense tokens. The results support a unified wavelet token schema and sparse token interface, while stopping short of establishing a universal discrete vocabulary.

Task-Aligned Self-Supervised Learning for Medical Image Analysis: A Systematic Review and Practical Design Guidelines

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for addressing the annotation bottleneck in medical imaging by learning representations from unlabeled data. However, its effectiveness depends heavily on the design of the pretext task and its alignment with the downstream clinical-objectives. We present a systematic, task-oriented review of SSL in medical imaging, examining how different pretext-task formulations influence performance across classification, segmentation, detection, and other tasks. Following PRISMA guidelines, we analyze 75 studies published between 2017 and 2025 and organize them into four paradigms: contrastive, non-contrastive and predictive, generative and reconstruction-based, and hybrid learning. Rather than cataloguing methods by architecture, we map each paradigm to the downstream objectives it best supports. Our analysis shows there is no universally optimal SSL strategy; instead, performance is governed by the alignment between the pretext task, the imaging modality, and the target task. Contrastive methods learn global discriminative features and align well with classification, but may overlook subtle pathological patterns. Generative and spatial prediction-based approaches better preserve local anatomical structure, making them more suitable for segmentation and other dense prediction tasks, while hybrid methods offer the most balanced performance. We further show that modality-specific design is critical and that SSL provides its greatest benefit in low-label and few-shot regimes. Finally, we distill these findings into practical design guidelines and outline open challenges, including pathology-aware pretext task design, resource-efficient training for high-dimensional data, and standardized evaluation protocols. This work offers practical guidance for designing more effective and clinically relevant SSL frameworks in medical imaging.

CRISP -- Clustering-Based Redundancy-Reduced Instance Sampling for Pathology Case Representation and Retrieval

Digital pathology archives increasingly contain multiple whole-slide images (WSIs) per case, capturing spatially distinct tumor regions and reflecting intrinsic morphological heterogeneity. However, most existing approaches rely on a single pathologist-selected slide, thereby discarding potentially informative evidence distributed across the remaining WSIs. To date, no autonomous framework has been proposed for comprehensive multi-WSI case processing. Here, we present an unsupervised framework for case-level analysis that integrates information from all available slides within a case. Rather than relying on a single designated slide, the proposed approach constructs case-level representations by selectively distilling informative patches across WSIs. We introduce Clustering-Based Redundancy-Reduced Instance Sampling for Pathology (CRISP), a two-stage framework that first reduces redundancy within individual WSIs and subsequently applies clustering-based sampling to select a compact yet representative set of patches for the entire case. The resulting patch set captures case-level heterogeneity while avoiding exhaustive processing of gigapixel images, and directly serves as a retrieval index. Using two Mayo Clinic breast cancer datasets for diagnosis and treatment planning, we demonstrate that CRISP consistently matches or surpasses the current standard practice of combined model and pathologist slide selection for patient/case search and retrieval. By automating case-level processing and eliminating subjective WSI selection, CRISP potentially enables the exploitation of clinically relevant information distributed across multiple WSIs that is currently overlooked.

VESTA: Visual Exploration with Statistical Tool Agents

Fitting quantitative models to data is a central step in scientific workflows, yet it remains one of the least automated. Recent agent-based systems leverage language and vision-language models (VLMs) to iteratively propose and refine statistical models, but these systems struggle on more challenging modeling tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce VESTA: Visual Exploration with Statistical Tool Agents, a framework that equips VLMs with a dynamically growing exploration toolkit to guide model refinement through data transformations, hypothesis-driven visualizations, and robust statistical tests. Unlike prior systems that rely on iterative critique alone, VESTA actively explores data before and during refinement by selecting or creating diagnostic tools, which accumulate in the model's context and can be reused later. We evaluate VESTA against established baselines in three toolkit configurations: no tools, static expert-written tools, and dynamic model-written tools. To support this evaluation, we introduce DAWN (Dataset for Automated Workflows and Numerical Modeling), a benchmark targeting distribution fitting and time series modeling with varying difficulty tiers, and culminating in real-world astronomy tasks including modeling initial mass functions and gravitational-wave chirp signals. We find that VESTA's dynamic tool creation outperforms prior agentic pipelines, with the largest gains on complex and domain-specific tasks. We further show that dynamically generated tools are substantially more sophisticated than those produced by existing visual tool-creation systems, covering more diagnostic categories per function and strongly preferring visual outputs that the VLM critic can reason over directly.

From Segments to Scenes: Temporal Understanding in Autonomous Driving via Vision-Language Model

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as the perception and reasoning backbone of autonomous agents acting in the wild, with autonomous driving (AD) being one of the most safety-critical instances. Reliable temporal understanding is essential for such agents to anticipate events, attribute causes, and act safely in dynamic environments, yet this remains a significant challenge even for state-of-the-art (SoTA) VLMs. Prior video benchmarks have emphasized other content (sports, cooking, etc.), yet no existing benchmark focuses exclusively on temporal understanding for both short- and long-form AD footage. To fill this gap, we present the Temporal Understanding in Autonomous Driving (TAD) benchmark, comprising nearly 6000 question-answer (QA) pairs across 7 tasks, and evaluate 9 closed- and open-source generalist as well as AD-specialist models. Current SoTA models perform substantially below human accuracy on TAD. To improve the temporal reasoning of VLM-based driving agents, we propose two novel training-free solutions: Scene-CoT, which uses Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, and TCogMap, which incorporates an ego-centric temporal cognitive map produced by a trajectory-analysis module that operates as an agentic tool around the VLM. Integrated with existing VLMs, our methods improve average accuracy on TAD by up to $17.72\%$ and by up to $10.35\%$ on STSBench. By introducing TAD, benchmarking SoTA models, and proposing effective enhancements, this work aims to catalyze further progress on temporal understanding for agentic AD systems operating in the wild. The benchmark and evaluation code are available at ${\href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/vbdai/TAD}{\text{Hugging Face}}}$ and ${\href{https://github.com/vbdi/tad_bench}{\text{GitHub}}}$, respectively.

Task-Aligned Self-Supervised Learning for Medical Image Analysis: A Systematic Review and Practical Design Guidelines

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for addressing the annotation bottleneck in medical imaging by learning representations from unlabeled data. However, its effectiveness depends heavily on the design of the pretext task and its alignment with the downstream clinical-objectives. We present a systematic, task-oriented review of SSL in medical imaging, examining how different pretext-task formulations influence performance across classification, segmentation, detection, and other tasks. Following PRISMA guidelines, we analyze 75 studies published between 2017 and 2025 and organize them into four paradigms: contrastive, non-contrastive and predictive, generative and reconstruction-based, and hybrid learning. Rather than cataloguing methods by architecture, we map each paradigm to the downstream objectives it best supports. Our analysis shows there is no universally optimal SSL strategy; instead, performance is governed by the alignment between the pretext task, the imaging modality, and the target task. Contrastive methods learn global discriminative features and align well with classification, but may overlook subtle pathological patterns. Generative and spatial prediction-based approaches better preserve local anatomical structure, making them more suitable for segmentation and other dense prediction tasks, while hybrid methods offer the most balanced performance. We further show that modality-specific design is critical and that SSL provides its greatest benefit in low-label and few-shot regimes. Finally, we distill these findings into practical design guidelines and outline open challenges, including pathology-aware pretext task design, resource-efficient training for high-dimensional data, and standardized evaluation protocols. This work offers practical guidance for designing more effective and clinically relevant SSL frameworks in medical imaging.

CRISP -- Clustering-Based Redundancy-Reduced Instance Sampling for Pathology Case Representation and Retrieval

Digital pathology archives increasingly contain multiple whole-slide images (WSIs) per case, capturing spatially distinct tumour regions and reflecting intrinsic morphological heterogeneity. However, most existing approaches rely on a single pathologist-selected slide, thereby discarding potentially informative evidence distributed across the remaining WSIs. To date, no autonomous framework has been proposed for comprehensive multi-WSI case processing. Here, we present an unsupervised framework for case-level analysis that integrates information from all available slides within a case. Rather than relying on a single designated slide, the proposed approach constructs case-level representations by selectively distilling informative patches across WSIs. We introduce Clustering-Based Redundancy-Reduced Instance Sampling for Pathology (CRISP), a two-stage framework that first reduces redundancy within individual WSIs and subsequently applies clustering-based sampling to select a compact yet representative set of patches for the entire case. The resulting patch set captures case-level heterogeneity while avoiding exhaustive processing of gigapixel images, and directly serves as a retrieval index. Using two Mayo Clinic breast cancer datasets for diagnosis and treatment planning, we demonstrate that CRISP consistently matches or surpasses the current standard practice of combined model and pathologist slide selection for patient/case search and retrieval. By automating case-level processing and eliminating subjective WSI selection, CRISP potentially enables the exploitation of clinically relevant information distributed across multiple WSIs that is currently overlooked.

Updating the standard neuron model in artificial neural networks

From their inception in the 1950s, artificial neural networks (ANNs) started using the so-called point neuron model then prevalent in neuroscience, hoping that this analogy would allow for a better emulation of brain function. Over the years the neuroscience literature has shown that the point neuron model is too simplistic to properly represent many fundamental neural processes; however, the standard neuron model in ANNs still remains the same. Here we substitute it by a very recent model of cortical cells and demonstrate through theoretical analyses and experimental results how, simply by using a more realistic neural unit element without augmenting the number of parameters, the resulting ANNs offer a number of important advantages that include increases in expressivity, robustness and learning speed, and a reduction in memorization and the amount of training data needed.

Prior Availability in Industrial Visual Sim-to-Real: A Review of CAD-Guided and CAD-Unavailable Regimes

Industrial visual sim-to-real is often described as transferring from synthetic images to real images, but industrial deployment usually involves a broader mismatch between available evidence and required decisions. A system may be built from CAD renderings, simulated RGB-D observations, normal reference images, synthetic defects, pretrained feature spaces, or language prompts, yet deployed under different sensors, lighting, materials, fixtures, calibration, production variation, and rare defect modes. This review reframes industrial visual sim-to-real as a domain-gap problem organized by prior availability. We distinguish CAD-available settings, where explicit object geometry can support rendering, calibration, pose estimation, segmentation, and test-time geometric verification; CAD-unavailable settings, where geometry is replaced by normal-reference appearance, feature distributions, teacher-student residuals, synthetic anomaly assumptions, foundation features, or vision-language priors; and boundary-prior settings, where approximate models, templates, reference views, or semantic correspondences preserve only part of the CAD role. This framing connects CAD-based detection and 6D pose-estimation literature with industrial anomaly and surface-inspection literature that is usually reviewed separately. To make the taxonomy concrete, we use empirical anchors on T-LESS/BOP, MVTec AD, and VisA. The anchors show that CAD render count alone does not close transfer; source-distribution design, detector capacity, and small real calibration can matter more. They also show that CAD at test time creates a distinct verification channel through mask, pose, and depth consistency, whereas CAD-unavailable inspection relies on calibrated normality and feature deviation. The review therefore argues against a single cross-task leaderboard and instead asks what prior grounds the deployment decision.

PhyDrawGen: Physically Grounded Diagram Generation from Natural Language

Generating physics diagrams from text requires strict adherence to physical laws. While current generative models produce visually plausible outputs, they systematically hallucinate force vectors, ignore conservation laws, and violate geometric constraints. We present PhyDrawGen, a neuro-symbolic pipeline that decouples semantic scene understanding from physical constraint satisfaction. First, a large language model extracts a typed scene graph from the problem text. A deterministic solver then converts this graph into a Planar Straight-Line Graph (PSLG), encoding force balance, optical paths, and field topologies as exact geometric primitives. Finally, a fine-tuned Qwen-VL model implements a visually grounded propose-verify loop to iteratively correct any constraint violations. Evaluated on a benchmark of 1,449 problems spanning mechanics, optics, and electromagnetism, PhyDrawGen significantly outperforms GPT-5-image, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Gemini 3 Pro, demonstrating robust physical accuracy even on unusual-object problems.

XOResNet: Exclusive-OR Meta-Residuals Facilitate Deep Spiking Neural Networks Learning

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) hold promise for demonstrating superior learning and representation capabilities in deep models. Given the tremendous success of ResNet in deep learning, it would naturally follow to train deep SNNs with residual learning. However, existing residual structures for constructing deep SNNs still present challenges of spike redundancy or information loss, as well as redundant learning. In the present study, we first aim to address issues of relative spike redundancy in identity mapping and information loss in non-identity mapping. To this end, we propose an OR-ADD (OA) shortcut connection to merge output spikes/currents from two branches in the residual structure. Furthermore, to mitigate redundant learning in the backbone branch of the residual structure, we introduce the concept of XOR meta-residuals, i.e., selecting pre-learning residuals using the Exclusive-OR (XOR) operation for the backbone branch. Finally, by integrating the OA shortcut and XOR meta-residuals, we devise the XOR residual block and further construct XOResNet with varying depths based on this block. Extensive experiments on four datasets, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and miniImageNet, show that the proposed XOResNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art deep SNNs optimized via gradient descent. These results validate the effectiveness of our OA shortcut and XOR meta-residual components in overcoming fundamental limitations of residual learning in SNNs, providing new architectural insights for building high-performance neuromorphic systems.

Updating the standard neuron model in artificial neural networks

From their inception in the 1950s, artificial neural networks (ANNs) started using the so-called point neuron model then prevalent in neuroscience, hoping that this analogy would allow for a better emulation of brain function. Over the years the neuroscience literature has shown that the point neuron model is too simplistic to properly represent many fundamental neural processes; however, the standard neuron model in ANNs still remains the same. Here we substitute it by a very recent model of cortical cells and demonstrate through theoretical analyses and experimental results how, simply by using a more realistic neural unit element without augmenting the number of parameters, the resulting ANNs offer a number of important advantages that include increases in expressivity, robustness and learning speed, and a reduction in memorization and the amount of training data needed.

Functional MRI Time Series Generation via Wavelet-Based Image Transform and Spectral Flow Matching for Brain Disorder Identification

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) provides non-invasive access to dynamic brain activity by measuring blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals over time. However, the resource-intensive nature of fMRI acquisition limits the availability of high-fidelity samples required for data-driven brain analysis models. While modern generative models can synthesize fMRI data, they often remain challenging in replicating their inherent non-stationarity, intricate spatiotemporal dynamics, and physiological variations of raw BOLD signals. To address these challenges, we propose Dual-Spectral Flow Matching (DSFM), a novel fMRI generative framework that cascades dual frequency representation of BOLD signals with spectral flow matching. Specifically, our framework first converts BOLD signals into a wavelet decomposition map via a discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to capture globalized transient and multi-scale variations, and projects into the discrete cosine transform (DCT) space across brain regions and time to exploit localized energy compaction of low-frequency dominant BOLD coefficients. Subsequently, a spectral flow matching model is trained to generate class-conditioned cosine-frequency representation. The generated samples are reconstructed through inverse DCT and inverse DWT operations to recover physiologically plausible time-domain BOLD signals. This dual-transform approach imposes structured frequency priors and preserves key physiological brain dynamics. Ultimately, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through improved downstream fMRI-based brain network classification. The code is available at https://github.com/htew0001/DSFM.git .

SANA-Streaming: Real-time Streaming Video Editing with Hybrid Diffusion Transformer

Real-time streaming video-to-video editing (V2V) is critical for interactive applications such as live broadcasting and gaming, yet it remains a formidable challenge due to the stringent requirements for temporal consistency and inference throughput. In this paper, we present SANA-Streaming, a system-algorithm co-designed framework for high-resolution, real-time streaming video editing on consumer GPUs, with the following three core designs: (1) Hybrid Diffusion Transformer architecture introduces softmax attention in part of the blocks to improve local modeling capabilities while preserving the efficiency of linear layers. (2) Cycle-Reverse Regularization is a novel training strategy that enforces semantic consistency by predicting source frames from generated content via flow matching, improving temporal consistency without requiring paired long edited videos. (3) Efficient System Co-design combines fused GDN kernels and Mixed-Precision Quantization (MPQ) optimized for the NVIDIA Blackwell (RTX 5090) architecture. By profiling real-world throughput, our MPQ maximizes Tensor Core utilization while maintaining generation quality. The resulting system achieves real-time 1280 x 704 resolution editing at 24 end-to-end FPS on a single RTX 5090 GPU, with the DiT core running at 58 FPS. Experimental results demonstrate that our co-design approach significantly outperforms existing SOTA methods in both temporal coherence and system throughput.

A Novel Global Context-aware Deep Neural Network for Enhanced Brain Tumor Segmentation using Magnetic Resonance Images

Brain cancer's severity necessitates precise brain tumor segmentation, which is crucial for effective brain tumor diagnosis. Manual identification, burdened by high costs, labor, and error risks, highlights the need for automated methods. In this study, we introduce the Global Context-aware Squeeze and Excite Residual UNet (GCSER-UNet), which facilitates a fusion of spatial and channel-wise attention and thus enhances the model's capacity to capture intricate spatial dependencies and contextual information. GCSER-UNet efficiently extracts tumor segments from multimodal MRI slices, delivering exceptional performance. Evaluations on benchmark databases exhibit its superiority, achieving a notable 94 percent dice score on the TCGA LGG dataset, surpassing the state-of-the-art dice score of 91.8 percent. In the BraTS 2020 dataset, the proposed GCSER-UNet ensemble approach yielded dice scores of 95 percent, 92 percent, and 90 percent for the tumor regions - Whole Tumor (W), Tumor Core (T), and Enhancing Tumor (E), respectively. The current state-of-the-art dice scores were 94 percent, 93 percent, and 88 percent. These compelling outcomes highlight the efficacy of GCSER-UNet in precise brain tumor segmentation and thus can aid neurologists in effective brain cancer management and treatment planning.

Seeing Isn't Knowing: Do VLMs Know When Not to Answer Spatial Questions (and Why)?

Spatial reasoning is a fundamental capability for vision-language models (VLMs) deployed in real-world environments. However, visual observations are inherently limited representations of a 3D world: occlusion can render objects invisible, and perspective can make geometric properties misleading. Despite this, existing spatial reasoning benchmarks typically assume that observations are sufficient and reliable, focusing on whether models produce correct answers rather than whether they recognize when a question cannot be answered and what additional observations would be needed. In this work, we challenge this assumption by constructing a controlled evaluation framework, SpatialUncertain, and introducing two types of observation challenges: (1) occlusion, which hides target information, and (2) perspective ambiguity, which produces misleading visual cues. For each configuration, we design spatial questions that are answerable under clean observations but require abstention under the introduced challenges. We further evaluate whether models can identify which additional viewpoints would resolve perspective ambiguity. Our results across a diverse set of frontier open- and closed-source VLMs reveal two consistent failure modes. First, models are prone to overconfident answering, attempting to solve spatial reasoning tasks even when visual evidence is incomplete or misleading, with average accuracy around 30\% under occlusion and below 10\% under perspective ambiguity. Second, even when additional views are available, some models perform near random chance in identifying which would provide reliable evidence. Together, our findings call for moving beyond answer correctness toward evaluating whether models know when to abstain and how to seek reliable evidence.

VLM3: Vision Language Models Are Native 3D Learners

Vision Language Models (VLMs) enable a unified model to solve various vision tasks through prompting. They have shown promising performance in semantic understanding. However, 3D understanding still largely relies on expert vision models with complex task-specific designs. The key argument this work wants to make is that VLMs are native 3D learners. Our in-depth large scale study shows that 1) focal length unification, 2) text-based pixel reference and 3) data mixture and scaling, are all you need for effective 3D learning. Model architecture changes, large models, heavy data augmentations, and complex losses including the regression formulation, many of which form the foundation of expert vision models, are actually not necessary conditions. As a result, we propose VLM3, a scalable method with the simplest design that enables standard VLMs to master diverse 3D tasks. VLM3 not only advances the VLM depth estimation accuracy by a large margin (0.84 -> 0.9), but also enables diverse 3D tasks such as pixel correspondence, camera pose estimation and object-level 3D understanding, matching expert vision model accuracy while maintaining standard architectures and text-based training. We believe VLM3 opens up a new paradigm for simple and scalable 3D learning.

Prior Availability in Industrial Visual Sim-to-Real: A Review of CAD-Guided and CAD-Unavailable Regimes

Industrial visual sim-to-real is often described as transferring from synthetic images to real images, but industrial deployment usually involves a broader mismatch between available evidence and required decisions. A system may be built from CAD renderings, simulated RGB-D observations, normal reference images, synthetic defects, pretrained feature spaces, or language prompts, yet deployed under different sensors, lighting, materials, fixtures, calibration, production variation, and rare defect modes. This review reframes industrial visual sim-to-real as a domain-gap problem organized by prior availability. We distinguish CAD-available settings, where explicit object geometry can support rendering, calibration, pose estimation, segmentation, and test-time geometric verification; CAD-unavailable settings, where geometry is replaced by normal-reference appearance, feature distributions, teacher-student residuals, synthetic anomaly assumptions, foundation features, or vision-language priors; and boundary-prior settings, where approximate models, templates, reference views, or semantic correspondences preserve only part of the CAD role. This framing connects CAD-based detection and 6D pose-estimation literature with industrial anomaly and surface-inspection literature that is usually reviewed separately. To make the taxonomy concrete, we use empirical anchors on T-LESS/BOP, MVTec AD, and VisA. The anchors show that CAD render count alone does not close transfer; source-distribution design, detector capacity, and small real calibration can matter more. They also show that CAD at test time creates a distinct verification channel through mask, pose, and depth consistency, whereas CAD-unavailable inspection relies on calibrated normality and feature deviation. The review therefore argues against a single cross-task leaderboard and instead asks what prior grounds the deployment decision.

Crafter: A Multi-Agent Harness for Editable Scientific Figure Generation from Diverse Inputs

Scientific figures are among the most effective means of communicating complex research ideas, yet producing publication-quality illustrations remains one of the most labor-intensive parts of paper preparation. Existing automated systems each target a single figure type under text-only input, leaving the diversity of types and conditions researchers actually use unaddressed; their raster outputs further cannot be locally revised. Because scientific figures are structured compositions of discrete semantic components, the localized errors generators produce on such layouts demand not a stronger backbone but a harness. We instantiate this harness in two complementary systems: Crafter, a multi-agent harness for figure generation that generalizes across figure types and input conditions without architectural changes, and CraftEditor, which applies the same pattern to convert raster outputs into editable SVGs. Moreover, we introduce CraftBench, a benchmark spanning three figure types and four input conditions with human quality annotation. Experiments show that Crafter substantially outperforms both standalone generators and the agentic baseline on PaperBanana-Bench and CraftBench, with ablations confirming each component's independent contribution; CraftEditor faithfully converts outputs into editable SVGs that surpass all baselines. Our code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/HaozheZhao/Crafter.

Controllable Lung Nodule Synthesis via Histogram-Regularized Latent Diffusion Models

While automated diagnosis systems have achieved remarkable success in computed tomography (CT)-based lung cancer screening, their development remains limited by the scarcity of diverse, annotated pulmonary nodule datasets. Diffusion-based generative models offer a promising strategy for data synthesis; however, many existing conditional approaches primarily optimize spatial reconstruction losses, which encourage voxel-wise similarity but may inadequately constrain lesion-level intensity distributions. As a result, these methods may produce over-smoothed texture profiles and underrepresent the distinct attenuation characteristics of different nodule subtypes, including solid, part-solid, and ground-glass nodules. To address this challenge, we propose a controllable latent diffusion model that synthesizes pulmonary nodules within full 3D CT volumes while accurately modeling nodule-specific intensity distributions. Specifically, rather than relying solely on spatial losses, we introduce a histogram-based regularization term that constrains voxel intensity distributions during the generative process. The model combines subtype, spatial mask, and Hounsfield unit (HU) histogram conditioning with the differentiable feature-space histogram regularization term to better align lesion-level intensity distributions, improving the visual plausibility and subtype consistency of synthesized nodules. Extensive experiments on lung CT data demonstrate that our framework achieves strong visual realism, validated through both quantitative metrics and a visual Turing test. Furthermore, when used for data augmentation, the generated nodules improve performance in downstream clinical tasks, particularly for underrepresented nodule subtypes, and show a potential benefit for subtype-informed malignancy classification.

PInVerify: An Offline Embodied Benchmark for Active Instance Verification

Embodied agents have made strong progress in navigating to target objects, but reaching the goal vicinity does not guarantee that the agent has found the correct instance: subtle attribute differences (e.g., "white floral" vs. "white striped") often require close-range, multi-view inspection. We address this gap with Active Instance Verification (AIV), a task in which an agent actively selects viewpoints around a candidate object to decide whether it matches a fine-grained natural-language description. We formalize AIV as a finite-horizon decision process and introduce PInVerify, an offline embodied benchmark for AIV: 3,000 evaluation episodes across 18 object categories, delivered as multi-view captures with a 6-sector navigation topology that exposes trap views (navigable but uninformative) and unreachable sectors. As reference baselines we build a training-free pipeline and a LoRA-fine-tuned end-to-end agent around open-source multimodal large language models (MLLMs) at on-device scale ($\leq$8B parameters), with attribute decomposition, a visibility-weighted multi-view tracker, and three next-best-view (NBV) strategies. In our evaluation across Qwen3-VL (4B/8B), SenseNova-SI-1.2-InternVL3-8B, CLIP, and SigLIP2, the best MLLM-based baseline exceeds the best embedding baseline by 4.9 pp; GT-box ablations show a +3.1 pp detection gap; and we do not observe reliable gains from active viewpoint selection within the tested NBV strategies. A LoRA-fine-tuned agent (SFT+GSPO) reaches 85.6%. PInVerify aims to support further work on active, fine-grained semantic verification in embodied AI. Code: https://github.com/Avalon-S/PInVerify.

ConTrans: Learning Text-enhanced Local-global Temporal Representations for Zero-shot Temporal Action Localization

Zero-shot Temporal Action Localization (ZS-TAL) aims to detect and locate previously unseen actions in untrimmed videos. However, existing approaches primarily focus on modeling long-range contextual information, often neglecting the critical relative-offset-based local correlations between video frames. Furthermore, their performance is hindered by limited feature representation capabilities due to the shallow nature of their network architectures. In this paper, we address these limitations by introducing a novel local-global multi-scale feature representation module. We propose a novel multi-scale encoder architecture, termed ConTrans, that integrates convolutional (Conv) inductive biases with transformer Self-attention to jointly capture fine-grained local dependencies and long-range global context, leading to more comprehensive feature representations than existing methods. Experimental evaluations on the ActivityNet-1.3 and THUMOS14 datasets demonstrate that ConTrans significantly outperforms existing methods, establishing a new benchmark for ZS-TAL.

Seeing Before Agreeing: Aligning Multi-Agent Consensus with Visual Evidence

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on visual question answering (VQA). To mitigate individual hallucinations and blind spots, aggregating diverse perspectives via multi-agent collaboration has emerged as a promising paradigm. While this approach has shown great success in textual QA, its potential in the multimodal domain remains under-explored. Existing multi-agent VQA methods predominantly adapt text-centric protocols, focusing on textual discussions while ignoring the alignment of visual information. In this work, we reveal a key insight: answer-level agreement is insufficient for reliable multi-agent VQA; \textit{aligned visual evidence} -- shared support from the image regions agents rely on -- is essential for trustworthy consensus. To leverage this insight, we propose EAGLE (\textbf{E}vidence-\textbf{A}ligned \textbf{G}rounded mu\textbf{L}ti-agent r\textbf{E}asoning), a training-free evidence-centered framework for coordinating multiple VLM agents. EAGLE explicitly exposes each agent's grounding regions as visual evidence, enables mutual verification over the evidence, and uses evidence consistency to guide final decision-making. Experiments on six VQA benchmarks show that EAGLE achieves best average performance across domains while remaining lightweight, interpretable, and practical for deployment.

Robust and Generalizable Safety Steering for Text-to-Image Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers have become a powerful backbone for text-to-image generation, but their layered and cross-modal generation process makes safety control fundamentally different from prompt-level filtering or output-level detection. Harmful semantics may be weakly expressed in text representations, progressively bound to visual latents, and finally entangled with rendering dynamics. As a result, safety steering at a fixed layer can be unstable, and a steering mechanism learned from known risks may not transfer reliably to a shifted target risk domain. We propose SafeDIG, a safety steering framework that formulates DiT safety adaptation as position-aware sparse feature transfer. SafeDIG first constructs Sparse Autoencoders over functionally distinct DiT intervention positions and uses robustness-aware pre-training routing to prioritize intervention sites that are expected to remain stable under source-target risk shift. It then separates transferable safety features from domain-specific activation geometry by freezing the SAE encoder as a reusable sparse safety dictionary and adapting only the decoder to the target-domain activation manifold. During inference, SafeDIG combines Blend and Repel operations to steer unsafe activations toward transferred safety manifolds or away from harmful sparse directions. Experiments on FLUX.1 Dev and Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large show that SafeDIG consistently reduces target-domain and overall unsafe generation rates while preserving source-domain safety and image quality.

Robust and Generalizable Safety Steering for Text-to-Image Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers have become a powerful backbone for text-to-image generation, but their layered and cross-modal generation process makes safety control fundamentally different from prompt-level filtering or output-level detection. Harmful semantics may be weakly expressed in text representations, progressively bound to visual latents, and finally entangled with rendering dynamics. As a result, safety steering at a fixed layer can be unstable, and a steering mechanism learned from known risks may not transfer reliably to a shifted target risk domain. We propose SafeDIG, a safety steering framework that formulates DiT safety adaptation as position-aware sparse feature transfer. SafeDIG first constructs Sparse Autoencoders over functionally distinct DiT intervention positions and uses robustness-aware pre-training routing to prioritize intervention sites that are expected to remain stable under source-target risk shift. It then separates transferable safety features from domain-specific activation geometry by freezing the SAE encoder as a reusable sparse safety dictionary and adapting only the decoder to the target-domain activation manifold. During inference, SafeDIG combines Blend and Repel operations to steer unsafe activations toward transferred safety manifolds or away from harmful sparse directions. Experiments on FLUX.1 Dev and Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large show that SafeDIG consistently reduces target-domain and overall unsafe generation rates while preserving source-domain safety and image quality.