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Search papers from 30+ top conferences, including NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ACL and AAAI. Filter by keyword, then open any paper for its abstract, authors and links.

arXiv

CHM-Net: Center Heatmap-driven Macro-Micro Modeling Network for MRI-based Microbial Density Stratification

Jiaming Liang, Haolin Chen, Tingting Li, Bowen Yu, Qianyan Long, Tinghe Zhang, Xi Zhong, Xiaowei Hu, Xiaoqi Sheng, Hongmin Cai

Microbial density is clinically important for tumor assessment and treatment decision-making, and recent advances in deep learning suggest that it can be non-invasively inferred from multimodal MRI. In this work, MRI-based Microbial Density Stratification (MRI-MDS) is first investigated as a patient-level representation learning task, and Center Heatmap-driven Macro-micro modeling Network (CHM-Net) is introduced for this task. CHM-Net first establishes the link between imaging phenotypes and microbial states through center heatmap-guided small-lesion response localization. Building upon this, it constructs patient-level macro-micro evidence from localized heatmap responses for microbial density prediction. Experiments on the novel GBNPC 2026 dataset constructed for MRI-MDS demonstrate the effectiveness of CHM-Net, achieving superior performance over representative baselines with a 12.06% absolute ACC gain over the strongest competing result. Additionally, auxiliary validation on two 3D medical image datasets further verifies its robustness across volumetric medical image classification scenarios. The project is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CHM-Net-942E/.

arXiv

Seeing is Free, Speaking is Not: Uncovering the True Energy Bottleneck in Edge VLM Inference

Junfei Zhan, Haoxun Shen, Mingang Guo, Zixuan Huang, Tengjiao He

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are the perceptual backbone of embodied AI, but their energy footprint on edge hardware remains poorly understood. Existing efficiency efforts focus predominantly on reducing visual tokens, implicitly treating visual processing as the dominant energy cost. We overturn this implicit assumption through the first systematic energy profiling of on-device VLM inference, spanning five models across three architecture families, four input resolutions, and two hardware platforms (NVIDIA RTX 3070 and Jetson Orin NX). Our analysis yields three findings. First, average inference power is a model-intrinsic constant, invariant to input resolution, image complexity, and prompt type, with less than 5% variation across all conditions. This means that all energy variation across inputs must arise from variation in inference time, not from variation in power draw. Second, each output token costs 11 to 39x more wall-clock time than each input token due to the compute-bound and memory-bound asymmetry between prefill and decode, making output token count the dominant driver of both latency and energy. Third, image complexity, measured by the number of objects in an image, induces up to 4.1x energy differences at identical resolution. This variation arises not from increased visual processing cost, but from differences in output length. These findings expose a fundamental limitation of visual token pruning: even removing all visual tokens saves at most 10% of total energy for fixed-token models. Across models spanning 1 billion to 8 billion parameters, controlling output length saves up to 97% of total energy, with the energy dominance of decoding growing stronger at larger model scale. In short, the true energy bottleneck in edge VLM inference is not what the model sees, but how much it says. Code is available at https://github.com/Junfei-Z/seeing-is-free.

arXiv

EmbodiedGen V2: An Agentic, Simulation-Ready 3D World Engine for Embodied AI

Xinjie wang, Liu Liu, Taojun Ding, Andrew Choi, Chaodong Huang, Mengao Zhao, Ziang Li, Jackson Jiang, Chunlei Yu, Shengxiang Liu, Wei Xu, Zhizhong Su

We present EmbodiedGen V2, a generative 3D world engine for building executable policy-ready environments for embodied intelligence. Sim-ready 3D asset generation has advanced rapidly, yet assembling such assets into policy-ready task environments remains largely manual, limiting scalable closed-loop learning. EmbodiedGen V2 addresses this gap through a unified sim-ready representation that connects cross-simulator assets, interaction affordances, task-driven worlds, large-scale multi-room scenes, and stateful Vibe Coding into a generative, editable, and reusable simulation pipeline. The generated environments support manipulation, navigation, mobile manipulation, cross-simulator deployment, and embodied policy training. In evaluation, the asset pipeline achieves 96.5% human acceptance and 98.6% collision success, and 83.3% of task-driven worlds are directly usable for downstream simulation without manual modification. Online reinforcement learning with generated environments further improves simulation success from 9.7% to 79.8%, and transfers to real robots with task success increasing from 21.7% to 75.0%. These results establish EmbodiedGen V2 as scalable simulation infrastructure for training, evaluating, and deploying embodied policies.

arXiv

BRo-JEPA: Learning Modular Transformations in Latent Space

Divyansh Jha, Yuanfang Xie, Brennen Yu, Varan Mehra

Can neural networks learn algebraic rules from visual inputs, or do they merely fit observed patterns? We study this question using MNIST (or EMNIST letters) as states and modular arithmetic operations as actions in a JEPA-style world model. Standard supervised and JEPA baselines with operation embeddings achieve high accuracy on seen operations but fail to extrapolate reliably to unseen operations. We propose BRo-JEPA, a world model with a block-rotation predictor that represents arithmetic operations as rotations, resulting in the cyclic structure of modular arithmetic in latent space. By applying actions as rotations, the BRo-JEPA predictor learns the rotation angles to align the latent representations with the underlying modular structure which enables strict zero-shot operation generalization. While our best block-rotation supervised baseline reaches only 54.54% zero-shot accuracy on MNIST and 25.13% on EMNIST, BRo-JEPA with a ResNet-18 encoder achieves 99.44% and 94.35% respectively, despite being trained only on the primitive operations $\pm$1. Our results suggest that world models can learn algebraic rules when the latent transformations encode the underlying modular structure. Code is available \href{https://github.com/DL-World-Models/brojepa}{here}.

arXiv

SurgicalMamba: Dual-Path SSD with State Regramming for Online Surgical Phase Recognition

Sukju Oh, Sukkyu Sun

Online surgical phase recognition must commit to a prediction at every frame of a procedure that runs for hours, from past frames alone and at a per-frame cost that does not grow with elapsed length. Structured state-space duality (SSD) meets that constraint, but only by having the scan see a per-head scalar transition, which fixes both where the state puts a frame and how fast it decays. The same views recur through an operation, so repeated content is written over itself and can afterwards be told apart only by age. How fast to decay is left to the step, and when the past stops being useful has to be inferred from a loss that never marks the moment. Procedures run long and change little visually from frame to frame, leaving the step with little to select on. Phases also vary widely in length, so no fixed rate serves as a fallback. We address the two with two mechanisms. State regramming rotates the carried state at each chunk boundary, by an amount the chunk's content decides, so where a frame is written also depends on what has passed since: two occurrences of the same view are held apart when different phases intervene, which no decay rate can achieve once both have aged. Intensity-modulated stepping increases the decay at the annotated phase transitions, so the state empties quickly where a phase ends and slowly in between and the decay itself can be set for the longest phase. Both leave SSD's N-semiseparable structure and O(d) per-frame cost intact. Across seven public benchmarks SurgicalMamba reaches state-of-the-art online accuracy and phase-level Jaccard (94.6%/82.7% on Cholec80, 89.5%/68.9% on AutoLaparo) at 312.88 fps on a single GPU. Adding the rotation alone to a plain Mamba2 improves multi-query associative recall (MQAR) wherever the recurrent state is the binding constraint, indicating that the mechanism is not specific to surgical video.

arXiv

LoopVLA: Learning Sufficiency in Recurrent Refinement for Vision-Language-Action Models

Boyang Shen, Kaixiang Yang, Hao Wang, Qiuyu Yu, Qiang Xie, Qiang Li, Zhiwei Wang

Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models typically treat the deepest representation of a vision-language backbone as universally optimal for action prediction. However, robotic manipulation is composed of many frequent closed-loop spatial adjustments, for which excessive abstraction may waste computation and weaken low-level geometric cues essential for precise control. Existing early-exit strategies attempt to reduce computation by stopping at predefined layers or applying heuristic rules such as action consistency, but they do not directly answer when a representation is actually sufficient for action. In this paper, we present LoopVLA, a recurrent VLA architecture that jointly learns representation refinement, action prediction, and sufficiency estimation. LoopVLA iteratively applies a shared Transformer block to refine multimodal tokens, and at each iteration produces both a candidate action and a sufficiency score that estimates whether further refinement is necessary. By sharing parameters across iterations, LoopVLA decouples refinement from absolute layer indices and grounds sufficiency estimation in the evolving representation itself. Since sufficiency has no direct supervision, we introduce a self-supervised distribution alignment objective, where intermediate confidence scores are trained to match the relative action quality across refinement steps, thereby linking sufficiency learning to policy optimization signals. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and VLA-Arena show that LoopVLA pushes the efficiency-performance frontier of VLA policies, reducing parameters by 45% and improving inference throughput by up to 1.7 times while matching or outperforming strong baselines in task success.

arXiv

VL-UniTrack: A Unified Framework with Visual-Language Prompts for UAV-Ground Visual Tracking

Boyue Xu, Ruichao Hou, Tongwei Ren, Gangshan Wu

UAV-ground visual tracking (UGVT) aims to simultaneously track the same object from both the UAV and the ground view. However, existing two-stream methods suffer from isolated feature extraction and rely heavily on implicit appearance matching, which struggles to establish reliable correspondence under drastic view differences, leading to tracking unreliability. To address these limitations, we propose VL-UniTrack, a fully unified framework enhanced by visual-language prompts. By encoding features from both views within a single shared encoder, our method breaks the barrier of feature isolation to facilitate sufficient cross-view interaction. To overcome the ambiguity caused by relying solely on appearance matching, we design visual-language geometric prompting module, which fuses language descriptions with visual features to generate learnable prompts. These prompts are then fed into our prompt-guided cross-view adapter module to enable sufficient cross-view feature interaction and to guide the learning of view-specific feature representations. Furthermore, a confidence-modulated mutual distillation loss is proposed to regularize the training by mitigating noise propagation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the latest benchmark. The code can be downloaded in https://github.com/xuboyue1999/VL-UniTrack.git

arXiv

GeoRect4D: Geometry-Compatible Generative Rectification for Dynamic Sparse-View 3D Reconstruction

Zhenlong Wu, Zihan Zheng, Xuanxuan Wang, Lei Huang, Hongwei Hu, Xiaoyun Zhang, Qiang Hu, Wenjun Zhang

Reconstructing dynamic 3D scenes from sparse multi-view videos is highly ill-posed, often leading to geometric collapse, trajectory drift, and floating artifacts. Recent attempts introduce generative priors to hallucinate missing content, yet naive integration frequently causes structural drift and temporal inconsistency due to the mismatch between stochastic 2D generation and deterministic 3D geometry. In this paper, we propose GeoRect4D, a novel unified framework for sparse-view dynamic reconstruction that couples explicit 3D consistency with generative refinement via a closed-loop optimization process. Specifically, GeoRect4D introduces a degradation-aware feedback mechanism that incorporates a robust anchor-based dynamic 3DGS substrate with a single-step diffusion rectifier to hallucinate high-fidelity details. This rectifier utilizes a structural locking mechanism and spatiotemporal coordinated attention, effectively preserving physical plausibility while restoring missing content. Furthermore, we present a progressive optimization strategy that employs stochastic geometric purification to eliminate floaters and generative distillation to infuse texture details into the explicit representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GeoRect4D achieves state-of-the-art performance in reconstruction fidelity, perceptual quality, and spatiotemporal consistency across multiple datasets. Project Page: https://mediax-sjtu.github.io/GeoRect4D

arXiv

Toward Universal Skeleton-Based Action Recognition across Heterogeneous Skeletons and Open Vocabularies

Jidong Kuang, Hongsong Wang, Jie Gui, Yuan Yan Tang, James Tin-Yau Kwok

Skeleton data used for action recognition are acquired from a wide range of sources, including depth sensors, marker-based motion capture systems, and 2D/3D pose estimators. These sources yield skeletons that differ in joint number, skeletal topology, and coordinate dimensionality, making skeleton data inherently heterogeneous. However, previous works overlook the data heterogeneity of skeletons and solely construct models using homogeneous skeletons. Moreover, open-vocabulary action recognition is also essential for real-world applications. To this end, this work studies the challenging problem of heterogeneous skeleton-based action recognition with open vocabularies. We construct a large-scale Heterogeneous Open-Vocabulary (HOV) Skeleton dataset by integrating and refining multiple representative large-scale skeleton-based action datasets. To address universal skeleton-based action recognition, we propose a Transformer-based model that standardizes heterogeneous skeletons into a unified representation, encodes multi-modal skeleton embeddings with a two-stream motion encoder to learn spatio-temporal action representations, and maps them to a semantic space through multi-grained motion-text alignment. The alignment incorporates contrastive learning at three levels: global instance alignment, stream-specific alignment, and fine-grained alignment. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks with heterogeneous skeleton data demonstrate both the effectiveness and the generalization ability of the proposed method. Code is available at https://github.com/jidongkuang/Universal-Skeleton.

arXiv

Repurposing 3D Generative Model for Autoregressive Layout Generation

Haoran Feng, Yifan Niu, Zehuan Huang, Yang-Tian Sun, Yuxin Peng, Lu Sheng

We introduce LaviGen, a framework that repurposes 3D generative models for 3D layout generation. Unlike previous methods that infer object layouts from textual descriptions, LaviGen operates directly in the native 3D space, formulating layout generation as an autoregressive process that explicitly models geometric relations and physical constraints among objects, producing coherent and physically plausible 3D scenes. To further enhance this process, we propose an adapted 3D diffusion model that integrates scene, object, and instruction information and employs a dual-guidance self-rollout distillation mechanism to improve efficiency and spatial accuracy. Extensive experiments on the LayoutVLM benchmark show LaviGen achieves superior 3D layout generation performance, with 19% higher physical plausibility than the state of the art and 65% faster computation. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/fenghora/LaviGen.

arXiv

SegWithU: Uncertainty as Perturbation Energy for Single-Forward-Pass Risk-Aware Medical Image Segmentation

Tianhao Fu, Austin Wang, Charles Chen, Roby Aldave-Garza, Yucheng Chen

Reliable uncertainty estimation is critical for medical image segmentation, where automated contours feed downstream quantification and clinical decision support. Many strong uncertainty methods require repeated inference, while efficient single-forward-pass alternatives often provide weaker failure ranking or rely on restrictive feature-space assumptions. We present $\textbf{SegWithU}$, a post-hoc framework that augments a frozen pretrained segmentation backbone with a lightweight uncertainty head. SegWithU taps intermediate backbone features and models uncertainty as perturbation energy in a compact probe space using rank-1 posterior probes. It produces two voxel-wise uncertainty maps: a calibration-oriented map for probability tempering and a ranking-oriented map for error detection and selective prediction. Across ACDC, BraTS2024, and LiTS, SegWithU is the strongest and most consistent single-forward-pass baseline, achieving AUROC/AURC of $0.9838/2.4885$, $0.9946/0.2660$, and $0.9925/0.8193$, respectively, while preserving segmentation quality. These results suggest that perturbation-based uncertainty modeling is an effective and practical route to reliability-aware medical segmentation. Source code is available at https://github.com/ProjectNeura/SegWithU.

arXiv

VISOR: Agentic Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Iterative Search and Over-horizon Reasoning

Yucheng Shen, Jiulong Wu, Jizhou Huang, Dawei Yin, Lingyong Yan, Min Cao

Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (VRAG) empowers Vision-Language Models to retrieve and reason over visually rich documents. To tackle complex queries requiring multi-step reasoning, agentic VRAG systems interleave reasoning with iterative retrieval. However, existing agentic VRAG faces two critical bottlenecks. (1) Visual Evidence Sparsity: key evidence is scattered across pages yet processed in isolation, hindering cross-page reasoning; moreover, fine-grained intra-image evidence often requires precise visual actions, whose misuse degrades retrieval quality; (2) Search Drift in Long Horizons: the accumulation of visual tokens across retrieved pages dilutes context and causes cognitive overload, leading agents to deviate from their search objective. To address these challenges, we propose VISOR (Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Iterative Search and Over-horizon Reasoning), a unified single-agent framework. VISOR features a structured Evidence Space for progressive cross-page reasoning, coupled with a Visual Action Evaluation and Correction mechanism to manage visual actions. Additionally, we introduce a Dynamic Trajectory with Sliding Window and Intent Injection to mitigate search drift. They anchor the evidence space while discarding earlier raw interactions, preventing context from being overwhelmed by visual tokens. We train VISOR using a Group Relative Policy Optimization-based Reinforcement Learning (GRPO-based RL) pipeline with state masking and credit assignment tailored for dynamic context reconstruction. Extensive experiments on ViDoSeek, SlideVQA, and MMLongBench demonstrate that VISOR achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining reasonable and controllable computational costs for long-horizon visual reasoning tasks. The source code is available at https://github.com/syc1336/VISOR.

arXiv

Reinforcing Consistency in Video MLLMs with Structured Rewards

Yihao Quan, Zeru Shi, Jinman Zhao, Ruixiang Tang

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in video understanding. However, seemingly plausible outputs often suffer from poor visual and temporal grounding: a model may fabricate object existence, assign incorrect attributes, or collapse repeated events while still producing a globally reasonable caption or answer. We study this failure mode through a compositional consistency audit that decomposes a caption into supporting factual and temporal claims, investigating whether a correct high-level prediction is actually backed by valid lower-level evidence. Our top-down audit reveals that even correct root relational claims often lack reliable attribute and existence support. This indicates that standard sentence-level supervision is a weak proxy for faithful video understanding. Furthermore, when turning to reinforcement learning (RL) for better alignment, standard sentence-level rewards often prove too coarse to accurately localize specific grounding failures. To address this, we replace generic sentence-level rewards with a structured reward built from factual and temporal units. Our training objective integrates three complementary components: (1) an instance-aware scene-graph reward for factual objects, attributes, and relations; (2) a temporal reward for event ordering and repetition; and (3) a video-grounded VQA reward for hierarchical self-verification. Across temporal, general video understanding, and hallucination-oriented benchmarks, this objective yields consistent gains on open-source backbones. These results suggest that structured reward shaping is a practical route to more faithful video understanding.

arXiv

Live Interactive Training for Video Segmentation

Xinyu Yang, Haozheng Yu, Yihong Sun, Bharath Hariharan, Jennifer J. Sun

Interactive video segmentation often requires many user interventions for robust performance in challenging scenarios (e.g., occlusions, object separations, camouflage, etc.). Yet, even state-of-the-art models like SAM2 use corrections only for immediate fixes without learning from this feedback, leading to inefficient, repetitive user effort. To address this, we introduce Live Interactive Training (LIT), a novel framework for prompt-based visual systems where models also learn online from human corrections at inference time. Our primary instantiation, LIT-LoRA, implements this by continually updating a lightweight LoRA module on-the-fly. When a user provides a correction, this module is rapidly trained on that feedback, allowing the vision system to improve performance on subsequent frames of the same video. Leveraging the core principles of LIT, our LIT-LoRA implementation achieves an average 18-34% reduction in total corrections on challenging video segmentation benchmarks, with a negligible training overhead of ~0.5s per correction. We further demonstrate its generality by successfully adapting it to other segmentation models and extending it to CLIP-based fine-grained image classification. Our work highlights the promise of live adaptation to transform interactive tools and significantly reduce redundant human effort in complex visual tasks. Project: https://youngxinyu1802.github.io/projects/LIT/.

arXiv

Low-Dose CT for Stroke Diagnosis: A Dual-Pipeline Deep Learning Framework for Portable Neuroimaging

Rhea Ghosal, Ronok Ghosal, Eileen Lou

Portable CT scanners may support earlier stroke assessment, but reduced photon counts introduce noise that affects image quality and may alter automated classification. We compared direct classification of simulated low-dose slices with residual U-Net denoising followed by the same fixed classifier. Poisson noise was generated at photon-count scaling factors of 1, 5, 10, 20, and 40 using three deterministic seeds. The held-out set contained 809 slices, including 242 positive and 567 negative slices. Direct classification reached its highest mean ROC-AUC at a scaling factor of 20 (0.937 +/- 0.002). Denoising followed by classification reached 0.842 +/- 0.005 at a scaling factor of 1 and declined to 0.655 +/- 0.002 at a scaling factor of 40. Meanwhile, reconstruction quality rose steadily from 21.92 to 40.91 dB PSNR and from 0.761 to 0.987 SSIM. Both pathways had poor sensitivity at a fixed 0.5 cutoff because their classification scores were concentrated near zero. Patient-level analysis was limited by the test-set composition: all 10 patients were positive under the mask-derived patient label, preventing estimation of patient-level AUC and specificity. Overall, higher reconstruction fidelity did not translate into better discrimination by the fixed classifier except at the lowest photon-count setting.

arXiv

From Diffusion to Flow: Efficient Motion Generation in MotionGPT3

Jaymin Bhan, JiHong Jeon, SangYeop Jeong

Recent text-driven motion generation methods span both discrete token-based approaches and continuous-latent formulations. MotionGPT3 exemplifies the latter paradigm, combining a learned continuous motion latent space with a diffusion-based prior for text-conditioned synthesis. While rectified flow objectives have recently demonstrated favorable convergence and inference-time properties relative to diffusion in image and audio generation, it remains unclear whether these advantages transfer cleanly to the motion generation setting. In this work, we conduct a controlled empirical study comparing diffusion and rectified flow objectives within the MotionGPT3 framework. By holding the model architecture, training protocol, and evaluation setup fixed, we isolate the effect of the generative objective on training dynamics, final performance, and inference efficiency. Experiments on the HumanML3D dataset show that rectified flow converges in fewer training epochs, reaches strong test performance earlier, and matches or exceeds diffusion-based motion quality under identical conditions. Moreover, flow-based priors exhibit stable behavior across a wide range of inference step counts and achieve competitive quality with fewer sampling steps, yielding improved efficiency-quality trade-offs. Overall, our results suggest that several known benefits of rectified flow objectives do extend to continuous-latent text-to-motion generation, highlighting the importance of the training objective choice in motion priors.

arXiv

Know3D: Prompting 3D Generation with Knowledge from Vision-Language Models

Wenyue Chen, Wenjue Chen, Peng Li, Qinghe Wang, Xu Jia, Heliang Zheng, Rongfei Jia, Yuan Liu, Ronggang Wang

Recent advances in 3D generation have improved the fidelity and geometric details of synthesized 3D assets. However, due to the inherent ambiguity of single-view observations and the lack of robust global structural priors caused by limited 3D training data, the unseen regions generated by existing models are often stochastic and difficult to control, which may sometimes fail to align with user intentions or produce implausible geometries. In this paper, we propose Know3D, a novel framework that incorporates rich knowledge from multimodal large language models into 3D generative processes via latent hidden-state injection, enabling language-controllable generation of the back-view for 3D assets. We utilize a VLM-diffusion-based model, where the VLM is responsible for semantic understanding and guidance. The diffusion model acts as a bridge that transfers semantic knowledge from the VLM to the 3D generation model. In this way, we successfully bridge the gap between abstract textual instructions and the geometric reconstruction of unobserved regions, transforming the traditionally stochastic back-view hallucination into a semantically controllable process, demonstrating a promising direction for future 3D generation models.

arXiv

Risk-Controllable Multi-View Diffusion for Driving Scenario Generation

Hongyi Lin, Wenxiu Shi, Heye Huang, Dingyi Zhuang, Song Zhang, Yang Liu, Xiaobo Qu, Jinhua Zhao

Generating safety-critical driving scenarios is crucial for evaluating and improving autonomous driving systems, but long-tail risky situations are rarely observed in real-world data and difficult to specify through manual scenario design. Existing generative approaches typically treat risk as an after-the-fact label and struggle to maintain geometric consistency in multi-view driving scenes. We present RiskMV-DPO, a general and systematic pipeline for physically-informed, risk-controllable multi-view scenario generation. By integrating target risk levels with physically-grounded risk modeling, we synthesize diverse and high-stakes dynamic trajectories that serve as explicit geometric anchors for a diffusion-based video generator. To ensure spatial-temporal coherence and geometric fidelity, we introduce a geometry-appearance alignment module and a region-aware direct preference optimization (RA-DPO) strategy with motion-aware masking to focus learning on localized dynamic regions. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset show that RiskMV-DPO can freely generate a wide spectrum of diverse scenarios while maintaining visual quality, improving 3D detection mAP from 18.17 to 30.50 and reducing FID to 15.70. Our work shifts the role of world models from passive environment prediction to proactive, risk-controllable synthesis, providing a scalable toolchain for the development of embodied intelligence.

arXiv

Cytoarchitecture in Words: Weakly Supervised Vision-Language Modeling for Human Brain Microscopy

Matthew Sutton, Katrin Amunts, Timo Dickscheid, Christian Schiffer

Vision foundation models increasingly support interactive scientific workflows, but natural-language interaction requires coupling visual representations to language. Curated image-text pairs for this coupling are scarce in many biomedical domains. This is the case for cell-body-stained histological sections of the human brain, where microscopic image patches encode cytoarchitecture: cellular density, morphology, laminar structure, and areal organization. We propose retrieve-and-enrich supervision, a weakly supervised scheme for training image-conditioned language models without curated image-text pairs. The method retrieves label-level text from the literature via a shared anatomical label, then enriches it with image-specific properties such as cortical layer thickness and cell density. Labels provide training targets only, not model inputs. We use this scheme to couple CytoNet, a cytoarchitectonic vision foundation model, to an open-weight large language model via a lightweight Flamingo-style adapter. Across 57 brain areas, the resulting model produces plausible cytoarchitectonic descriptions, supports open-set use by rejecting out-of-scope areas, and predicts the correct area for in-scope patches with 90.6% accuracy. Removing explicit area names from generated text still leaves descriptions sufficient for a language model to recover the area in an 8-way test with 68.6% accuracy. A second instruction-tuned model trained with image-specific targets recovers cortical layer thickness and cell-densities from individual patches, allowing the model to read out information beyond canonical area descriptions. Our results show that retrieve-and-enrich supervision offers a practical route to vision-language training in specialized imaging domains where labels and expert text exist but image-level captions do not.

arXiv

KAN We Flow? Advancing Robotic Manipulation with 3D Flow Matching via KAN & RWKV

Zhihao Chen, Yiyuan Ge, Ziyang Wang, Youwei Zhang

Diffusion-based visuomotor policies excel at modeling action distributions but are inference-inefficient, since recursively denoising from noise to policy requires many steps and heavy UNet backbones, which hinders deployment on resource-constrained robots. Flow matching alleviates the sampling burden by learning a one-step vector field, yet prior implementations still inherit large UNet-style architectures. In this work, we present KAN-We-Flow, a flow-matching policy that draws on recent advances in Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) and Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN) from vision to build a lightweight and highly expressive backbone for 3D manipulation. Concretely, we introduce an RWKV-KAN block: an RWKV first performs efficient time/channel mixing to propagate task context, and a subsequent GroupKAN layer applies learnable spline-based, groupwise functional mappings to perform feature-wise nonlinear calibration of the action mapping on RWKV outputs. Moreover, we introduce an Action Consistency Regularization (ACR), a lightweight auxiliary loss that enforces alignment between predicted action trajectories and expert demonstrations via Euler extrapolation, providing additional supervision to stabilize training and improve policy precision. Without resorting to large UNets, our design reduces parameters by 86.8\%, maintains fast runtime, and achieves state-of-the-art success rates on Adroit, Meta-World, and DexArt benchmarks. Our project page can be viewed in \href{https://zhihaochen-2003.github.io/KAN-We-Flow.github.io/}{\textcolor{red}{link}}

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