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arXiv

SCD4VPR: Multi-modal Scene Change Detection for Long-term Visual Place Recognition Database Update

Diwei Sheng, Vijayraj Gohil, Satyam Gaba, Zihan Liu, Giles Hamilton-Fletcher, John-Ross Rizzo, Yongqing Liang, Chen Feng

Long-term autonomy in mobile robotics requires maps that remain accurate as environments change over time. Visual Place Recognition (VPR), a core localization capability, degrades sharply as the temporal gap between query and database images grows, particularly across seasonal transitions. Scene Change Detection (SCD) offers a principled mechanism for database maintenance, but existing methods rely on binary, uni-modal visual features that cannot distinguish structural changes from viewpoint-induced differences - a distinction essential for correct update decisions. We propose SCD4VPR, a scene change detection that jointly reasons about what has changed and distinguishes genuine change from viewpoint-induced difference in a unified vision-language framework. SCD4VPR fuses VLM-generated semantic descriptions with visual features via cross-modal attention and refines predictions with geometric-semantic matching, producing multi-class change masks that separately identify object changes, appearance changes, and viewpoint-induced changes. We introduce NYC-CD, the first real-world street-view SCD benchmark with pixel-level multi-class annotations across 8,122 image pairs. Experiments across four SCD benchmarks show that SCD4VPR consistently improves three architecturally distinct backbones. In a controlled VPR database maintenance experiment on NYU-VPR spanning summer through late winter, we confirm that retrieval performance deteriorates substantially when the database is left unchanged, and show that SCD4VPR-guided updates recover most of this loss (+30.1 R@1 at the largest time gap) while keeping the database far more compact than naive append.

arXiv

Are Pretrained Image Matchers Good Enough for SAR-Optical Satellite Registration?

Isaac Corley, Alex Stoken, Gabriele Berton

Cross-modal optical--SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) registration is a bottleneck in remote-sensing disaster response. Modern image matchers are developed and benchmarked almost exclusively on natural-image domains. We evaluate twenty-four pretrained matcher configurations in a zero-shot setting, with no fine-tuning or domain adaptation on satellite or SAR data. The evaluation spans SpaceNet9 and two additional cross-modal benchmarks under a deterministic protocol that uses tiled large-image inference, robust geometric filtering, and tie-point-grounded metrics. Our results show uneven transfer: matchers with explicit cross-modal training do not uniformly outperform those without it. XoFTR (trained for visible--thermal matching) and RoMa achieve the lowest reported mean tie-point error at $3.0$ px on the labeled SpaceNet9 training scenes. RoMa achieves this result \emph{without any cross-modal training}. MatchAnything-ELoFTR ($3.4$ px), trained on synthetic cross-modal pairs, is close behind. XoFTR also runs roughly an order of magnitude faster than the RoMa family ($0.4$ s vs. $5.0$ s per pair). RoMa's performance is consistent with the hypothesis that frozen DINOv2 features confer robustness to large appearance shifts. Deployment protocol choices (geometry model, tile size, inlier gating) change mean error by up to $33\times$ for a single matcher. This shift can exceed the effect of swapping matchers within our evaluated protocol ablations. Affine geometry alone reduces mean error from $12.3$ to $9.7$ px.

arXiv

Ge$^\text{2}$mS-T: Multi-Dimensional Grouping for Ultra-High Energy Efficiency in Spiking Transformer

Zecheng Hao, Shenghao Xie, kang chen, Wenxuan Liu, Zhaofei Yu, Tiejun Huang

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer superior energy efficiency over Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). However, they encounter significant deficiencies in training and inference metrics when applied to Spiking Vision Transformers (S-ViTs). Existing paradigms including ANN-SNN Conversion and Spatial-Temporal Backpropagation (STBP) suffer from inherent limitations, precluding concurrent optimization of memory, accuracy and energy consumption. To address these issues, we propose Ge$^\text{2}$mS-T, a novel architecture implementing grouped computation across temporal, spatial and network structure dimensions. Specifically, we introduce the Grouped-Exponential-Coding-based IF (ExpG-IF) model, enabling lossless conversion with constant training overhead and precise regulation for spike patterns. Additionally, we develop Group-wise Spiking Self-Attention (GW-SSA) to reduce computational complexity via multi-scale token grouping and multiplication-free operations within a hybrid attention-convolution framework. Experiments confirm that our method can achieve superior performance with ultra-high energy efficiency on challenging benchmarks. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to systematically establish multi-dimensional grouped computation for resolving the triad of memory overhead, learning capability and energy budget in S-ViTs. Code is available at https://github.com/hzc1208/Ge2mST.

arXiv

Parameter-Efficient Semantic Augmentation for Enhancing Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Weihao Cao, Runqi Wang, Xiaoyue Duan, Jinchao Zhang, Ang Yang, Liping Jing

Open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) enables models to detect any object category, including unseen ones. Benefiting from large-scale pre-training, existing OVOD methods achieve strong detection performance on general scenarios (e.g., OV-COCO) but suffer severe performance drops when transferred to downstream tasks with substantial domain shifts. This degradation stems from the scarcity and weak semantics of category labels in domain-specific task, as well as the inability of existing models to capture auxiliary semantics beyond coarse-grained category label. To address these issues, we propose HSA-DINO, a parameter-efficient semantic augmentation framework for enhancing open-vocabulary object detection. Specifically, we propose a multi-scale prompt bank that leverages image feature pyramids to capture hierarchical semantics and select domain-specific local semantic prompts, progressively enriching textual representations from coarse to fine-grained levels. Furthermore, we introduce a semantic-aware router that dynamically selects the appropriate semantic augmentation strategy during inference, thereby preventing parameter updates from degrading the generalization ability of the pre-trained OVOD model. We evaluate HSA-DINO on OV-COCO, several vertical domain datasets, and modified benchmark settings. The results show that HSA-DINO performs favorably against previous state-of-the-art methods, achieving a superior trade-off between domain adaptability and open-vocabulary generalization.

arXiv

DFM-VLA: Iterative Action Refinement for Robot Manipulation via Discrete Flow Matching

Jiayi Chen, Wenxuan Song, Jiaxin Fang, Ruiqing Yin, Jingbo Wang, Shuai Chen, Jieyuan Pei, Yikai Qin, Feifan Chen, Haodong Yan, Zhide Zhong, Wen Chen, Yan Wang, Yuxiang Gao, Haoang Li

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models that encode actions using a discrete tokenization scheme have been widely adopted for robotic manipulation, but existing decoding paradigms remain fundamentally limited. Whether actions are decoded sequentially by autoregressive VLAs or in parallel by discrete diffusion VLAs, once a token is generated, it is typically fixed and cannot be revised in subsequent iterations. Consequently, early token errors cannot be effectively corrected later. We propose DFM-VLA, a discrete flow matching VLA that iteratively refines action tokens. DFM-VLA models a token-level probability velocity field that dynamically updates the full action sequence across refinement iterations. We investigate two approaches to constructing the velocity field: an auxiliary velocity-head formulation and an embedding-guided formulation. To further improve prediction accuracy, we introduce a metric-aligned action tokenizer (MAAT) tailored to the coarse-to-fine nature of DFM, together with a two-stage decoding strategy. Extensive experiments on CALVIN, LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our project is available at https://chris1220313648.github.io/DFM-VLA/.

arXiv

λSplit: Self-Supervised Content-Aware Spectral Unmixing for Fluorescence Microscopy

Federico Carrara, Talley Lambert, Mehdi Seifi, Florian Jug

In fluorescence microscopy, spectral unmixing aims to recover individual fluorophore concentrations from spectral images that capture mixed fluorophore emissions. Since classical methods operate pixel-wise and rely on least-squares fitting, their performance degrades with increasingly overlapping emission spectra and higher levels of noise, suggesting that a data-driven approach that can learn and utilize a structural prior might lead to improved results. Learning-based approaches for spectral imaging do exist, but they are either not optimized for microscopy data or are developed for very specific cases that are not applicable to fluorescence microscopy settings. To address this, we propose λSplit, a physics-informed deep generative model that learns a conditional distribution over concentration maps using a hierarchical Variational Autoencoder. A fully differentiable Spectral Mixer enforces consistency with the image formation process, while the learned structural priors enable state-of-the-art unmixing and implicit noise removal. We demonstrate λSplit on 3 real-world datasets that we synthetically cast into a total of 66 challenging spectral unmixing benchmarks. We compare our results against a total of 10 baseline methods, including classical methods and a range of learning-based methods. Our results consistently show competitive performance and improved robustness in high noise regimes, when spectra overlap considerably, or when the spectral dimensionality is lowered, making λSplit a new state-of-the-art for spectral unmixing of fluorescent microscopy data. Importantly, λSplit is compatible with spectral data produced by standard confocal microscopes, enabling immediate adoption without specialized hardware modifications.

arXiv

MM-ISTS: Cooperating Irregularly Sampled Time Series Forecasting with Multimodal Vision-Text LLMs

Zhi Lei, Chenxi Liu, Hao Miao, Wanghui Qiu, Bin Yang, Chenjuan Guo

Irregularly sampled time series (ISTS) are widespread in real-world scenarios, exhibiting asynchronous observations on uneven time intervals across diverse variables. Existing ISTS forecasting methods often solely utilize historical observations to predict future ones while falling short in learning contextual semantics and fine-grained temporal patterns. To address these problems, we propose MM-ISTS, a multimodal ISTS forecasting framework augmented by vision-text large language models, which bridges temporal, visual, and textual modalities. MM-ISTS encompasses a two-stage encoding mechanism. In particular, a Cross-Modal Vision-Text Encoding module is proposed to automatically generate informative visual images and textual data, enabling the capture of intricate temporal patterns and comprehensive contextual understanding, in collaboration with multimodal LLMs (MLLMs). In parallel, ISTS encoding extracts complementary yet enriched temporal features from historical ISTS observations, including multi-view embedding fusion and a Temporal-Variable Encoder. Further, we propose an Adaptive Query-Based Feature Extractor to compress MLLM token embeddings while preserving useful knowledge, which in turn reduces computational costs. In addition, a Multimodal Alignment module with Modality-Aware Gating is designed to alleviate the modality gaps. Extensive experiments on real data offer insight into the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.

arXiv

IDperturb: Enhancing Variation in Synthetic Face Generation via Angular Perturbation

Fadi Boutros, Eduarda Caldeira, Tahar Chettaoui, Naser Damer

Synthetic data has emerged as a practical alternative to authentic face datasets for training face recognition (FR) systems, especially as privacy and legal concerns increasingly restrict the use of real biometric data. Recent advances in identity-conditional diffusion models have enabled the generation of photorealistic and identity-consistent face images. However, many of these models suffer from limited intra-class variation, an essential property for training robust and generalizable FR models. In this work, we propose IDPERTURB, a simple yet effective geometric-driven sampling strategy to enhance diversity in synthetic face generation. IDPERTURB perturbs identity embeddings within a constrained angular region of the unit hyper-sphere, producing a diverse set of embeddings without modifying the underlying generative model. Each perturbed embedding serves as a conditioning vector for a pre-trained diffusion model, enabling the synthesis of visually varied yet identity-coherent face images suitable for training generalizable FR systems. Empirical results demonstrate that training FR on datasets generated using IDPERTURB yields improved performance across multiple FR benchmarks, compared to existing synthetic data generation approaches.

arXiv

Faster and Better Alignment for Flow Matching Models via Step-aware Advantages

Zhixiong Yue, Feiyang Ye, Zixuan Ni, Sheng Shen, Yu Zhang

Recent advances in flow matching models, particularly with reinforcement learning (RL), have significantly enhanced human preference alignment in few-step text-to-image generators. However, existing RL-based approaches for flow matching models typically rely on numerous denoising steps, while suffering from sparse and imprecise reward signals that often lead to suboptimal alignment. To address these limitations, we propose Temperature-Annealed Few-step Sampling with Group Relative Policy Optimization (TAFS-GRPO), a novel framework for training flow matching text-to-image models into efficient few-step generators well aligned with human preferences. Our method iteratively injects adaptive time-dependent noise into one-step clean predictions. By repeatedly annealing the model's sampled outputs, it introduces stochasticity into the sampling process while preserving the semantic integrity of each generated image. Moreover, its step-aware advantage integration mechanism combines GRPO with temperature-annealed sampling to eliminate the need for a differentiable reward function and provide dense, step-specific rewards for stable policy optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TAFS-GRPO achieves strong performance in few-step text-to-image generation and significantly improves the alignment of generated images with human preferences. The code and models of this work will be available to facilitate further research.

arXiv

Deterministic World Models for Closed-loop Reachability Analysis of End-to-End Vision-based Control

Yuang Geng, Zhongzheng Zhang, Chengzhen Jiang, Yanru Li, Xinyang Wang, Zhuoyang Zhou, Hoang-Dung Tran, Ivan Ruchkin

End-to-end image controllers that map raw camera frames directly to control actions are increasingly deployed in safety-critical systems. However, formally verifying their closed-loop behavior remains an open challenge because cameras produce high-dimensional images whose generation cannot easily be described in a closed mathematical form. We propose a Deterministic World Model (DWM), a latent-free neural decoder that maps physical states (e.g., position and velocity) directly to synthetic camera images, enabling closed-loop reachability analysis without the overapproximation caused by stochastic latent variables. The DWM is trained with a novel dual loss combining saliency-map reconstruction and a control-consistent term that preserves behavioral consistency with the real controller. We integrate the DWM into closed-loop reachability analysis and apply conformal prediction to inflate the reachable sets by a distribution-free trajectory-tube deviation bound, transferring the surrogate guarantee to the real system with high probability. Experiments on a CARLA braking system and three Gym benchmarks (CartPole, MountainCar, Pendulum) show that the DWM produces substantially tighter reachable tubes than a cGAN and trajectory predictor baselines while meeting the target coverage after conformal inflation.

arXiv

DeepForgeSeal: Latent Space-Driven Semi-Fragile Watermarking for Deepfake Detection Using Adversarial Reinforcement Learning

Tharindu Fernando, Clinton Fookes, Sridha Sridharan

Rapid advances in generative AI have led to increasingly realistic deepfakes, posing growing challenges for law enforcement and public trust. Existing passive deepfake detectors struggle to keep pace, largely due to their dependence on specific forgery artifacts, which limits their ability to generalize to new deepfake types. Proactive deepfake detection using watermarks has emerged to address the challenge of identifying high-quality synthetic media. However, these methods often struggle to balance robustness against benign distortions with sensitivity to malicious tampering. This paper introduces a novel deep learning framework that harnesses high-dimensional latent space representations and the Adversarial Reinforcement Learning (ARL) paradigm to develop a robust and adaptive watermarking approach. Specifically, we develop a learnable watermark embedder that operates in the latent space, capturing high-level image semantics, while offering precise control over message encoding and extraction. The ARL paradigm empowers the learnable watermarking module to pursue an optimal balance between robustness and fragility. This is achieved through interaction with a dynamic curriculum of benign and malicious image manipulations simulated by an adversarial attacker agent. Comprehensive evaluations on the CelebA and CelebA-HQ benchmarks reveal that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving improvements of over 4.5% on CelebA and more than 5.3% on CelebA-HQ under challenging manipulation scenarios.

arXiv

A Bridge from Audio to Video: Phoneme-Viseme Alignment Allows Every Face to Speak Multiple Languages

Zibo Su, Kun Wei, Jiahua Li, Jing Kong, Xu Yang, Cheng Deng

Speech-driven talking face synthesis (TFS) focuses on generating lifelike facial animations from speech input. Current TFS models perform well in English but struggle with non-English languages, producing inaccurate mouth shapes and rigid facial expressions. These limitations are mainly caused by English-dominated training datasets and the lack of cross-language generalization ability.To address these challenges, we propose Multilingual Experts (MuEx), a novel framework featuring a Phoneme-Guided Mixture-of-Experts (PG-MoE) architecture that employs phonemes and visemes as universal intermediaries to bridge the gap between audio and visual modalities, enabling lifelike multilingual TFS. We extract speech and visual features as phonemes and visemes, respectively, which represent the basic units of speech sounds and mouth movements, to alleviate linguistic differences and dataset bias.Furthermore, we introduce the Phoneme-Viseme Alignment Mechanism (PV-Align), which establishes robust cross-modal correspondences between phonemes and visemes to improve audiovisual synchronization. In addition, we construct a Multilingual Talking Face Dataset (MTFD) comprising 12 diverse languages with 95.04 hours of high-quality videos for training and evaluating multilingual TFS performance.Extensive experiments demonstrate that MuEx achieves superior performance across all languages in MTFD and exhibits effective zero-shot generalization to unseen languages without additional training.

arXiv

Active View Selection for Scene-level Multi-view Crowd Counting and Localization with Limited Labeling Budget

Qi Zhang, Bin Li, Antoni B. Chan, Hui Huang

Multi-view crowd counting and localization fuse the input multi-views for estimating the crowd number or locations on the ground. Existing methods mainly focus on accurately predicting on the crowd shown in the input views, which neglects the problem of choosing the `best' camera views to perceive all crowds well in the scene. Besides, existing view selection methods require massive labeled views and images, and lack the ability for cross-scene settings, reducing their application scenarios. Thus, in this paper, we study the view selection issue for better scene-level multi-view crowd counting and localization results with cross-scene ability and limited label demand, instead of input-view-level results. We first propose an independent view selection method (IVS) that considers view and scene geometries in the view selection strategy and conducts the view selection, labeling, and downstream tasks independently. Based on IVS, we also put forward an active view selection method (AVS) that jointly conducts the view selection, labeling, and downstream tasks. In AVS, we actively select the labeled views and consider both the view/scene geometries and the predictions of the downstream task models in the view selection process. Experiments on multi-view counting and localization tasks demonstrate the cross-scene and the limited label demand advantages of the proposed active view selection method (AVS), outperforming existing methods and with wider application scenarios.

arXiv

Ultrasound Tomography of Musculoskeletal Tissues with Generative Neural Physics

Zhijun Zeng, Youjia Zheng, Chang Su, Qianhang Wu, Hao Hu, Zeyuan Dong, Yang Lv, Ligang Cui, Zhiyong Hou, Weijun Lin, Zuoqiang Shi, Yubing Li, He Sun

Ultrasound Tomography (UT) is a radiation-free, high-resolution modality, but remains limited for musculoskeletal imaging due to the high computational cost and instability of full-waveform inversion in strongly scattering media. We propose a generative neural physics framework that couples generative networks with physics-informed neural simulation for fast, high-fidelity 3D UT. By learning a compact surrogate of ultrasonic wave propagation from a limited set of cross-modality images, our method merges the accuracy of wave modeling with the efficiency and stability of deep learning. This enables accurate quantitative imaging of in vivo musculoskeletal tissues, producing spatial maps of acoustic properties beyond reflection-mode images. On synthetic and in vivo data of breasts, arms, and legs, we reconstruct 3D maps of tissue parameters in under ten minutes, with sensitivity to acoustic variations in musculoskeletal tissues and resolution comparable to MRI. By overcoming computational bottlenecks in strongly scattering regimes, this approach demonstrates the feasibility of quantitative UT for musculoskeletal imaging and advances its development toward future routine clinical use.

arXiv

Versatile Video Representation via Feed-Forward 2D Gaussian Splatting Tokenization

Zhenghao Chen, Zicong Chen, Lei Liu, Yiming Wu, Dong Xu

Recent video representation methods that rely on fixed-grid, patch-wise tokenization often exhibit limited versatility.Spatially, uniformly allocating a fixed number of tokens often leads to over-encoding in low-information regions. Temporally, reducing redundancy remains challenging without explicitly distinguishing between static and dynamic content. In this work, we introduce the Gaussian Video Transformer (GVT), a versatile video representation framework built on a feed-forward 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) tokenization scheme. We first extract latent rigid features from a video clip and represent them with a set of 2D Gaussians generated by our proposed Spatio-Temporal Gaussian Embedding (STGE) mechanism in a feed-forward manner. Such 2D Gaussians not only enhance spatial adaptability by assigning higher (resp., lower) rendering weights to regions with higher (resp., lower) information content during rasterization, but also improve generalization by avoiding per-video optimization. To enhance the temporal versatility, we introduce a Gaussian Set Partitioning (GSP) strategy that separates the 2D Gaussians into static and dynamic sets, which explicitly model static content shared across different time-steps and dynamic content specific to each time-step, enabling a compact representation. We evaluate GVT across four tasks: video reconstruction, video action recognition, video compression, and video generation, on the UCF101, Kinetics, and DAVIS datasets. The results demonstrate state-of-the-art reconstruction and compression performance, improved action recognition, and video generation performance comparable to the baseline MAGVIT-v2.

arXiv

FashionPose: Unified Text-Driven Fashion Synthesis with Joint Geometric and Photometric Control

Chuancheng Shi, Shaotian Li, Zhenlong Yuan, Zifeng Cheng, Fei Shen

Realistic and controllable garment synthesis is essential for fashion e-commerce, yet it demands precise coordination between human pose geometry and environmental photometry. Conventional pose-guided frameworks suffer from two fundamental limitations: they rely heavily on predefined skeletons from off-the-shelf estimators, restricting semantic flexibility; and they predominantly focus on studio-like generation under neutral lighting, failing to reconcile geometric configurations with complex, scene-specific illumination described in natural language. To bridge this gap, we propose FashionPose, a cascaded architecture that reconciles geometric and photometric control within a unified language-driven interface. Unlike conventional frameworks, our framework employs a decoupled yet synergistic strategy: (1) a bidirectional contrastive alignment mechanism that grounds textual semantics into an explicit geometric manifold, enabling template-free pose generation; (2) an identity-anchored synthesis module that translates these geometric priors into high-fidelity imagery while preserving fine-grained appearance; and (3) a prompt-conditioned relighting module that leverages the generated pose as a spatial anchor to achieve environment-aware shading. This hierarchical design effectively transforms high-level instructions into consistent visual representations, ensuring both structural precision and atmospheric harmony. To facilitate this paradigm, we construct PoseCap, a dataset with over 40,000 caption-keypoint pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FashionPose outperforms existing benchmarks in pose accuracy and physical realism, providing a robust solution for personalized, scene-aware virtual fashion displays.

arXiv

PromptForSegCXR: Prompt-Driven Multi-Organ and Multi-Disease Segmentation in Chest X-rays using a Multi-stage Fusion Mechanism

Abduz Zami, Shadman Sobhan, Rounaq Hossain, Md. Sawran Sorker, Mohiuddin Ahmed, Md. Redwan Hossain, Md Palash Uddin

Image segmentation is central to automated medical image analysis, enabling precise identification of anatomical structures and pathological regions. Conventional segmentation models typically target a single organ or disease, limiting their adaptability across clinical scenarios. While multi-organ and multi-disease segmentation has been explored, building such datasets requires extensive manual annotation by medical experts. Prompt-driven segmentation offers a flexible, user-guided alternative that speeds up annotation, yet no prior work has addressed prompt-based interactive segmentation across multiple organs and diseases in chest X-rays. This study makes two main contributions. First, we introduce a novel dataset of expert-designed doodle prompts spanning 23 classes (six organs and seventeen diseases), curated from multiple public chest X-ray datasets for prompt-driven segmentation. Second, we propose PromptForSegCXR, a lightweight dual-input segmentation framework that combines the chest X-ray with user-provided doodle prompts to accurately segment diverse anatomical and pathological regions. The model uses a multi-stage feature fusion strategy to integrate spatial and semantic representations, along with a depthwise-pointwise-residual convolution block with squeeze-and-excitation attention for efficient hierarchical feature extraction and adaptive recalibration. Experimental results show the model achieves a Dice score of 81.62 percent on the full dataset, outperforming SAM-based prompt segmentation models by up to 10 percent and conventional segmentation architectures by up to 23 percent, while remaining lightweight. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for accurate, flexible, prompt-driven chest X-ray segmentation.

arXiv

Multi-Representation Geometric Hierarchy Fusion: An Implicit-Submap Driven Framework for Resilient 3D Place Recognition

Xiaohui Jiang, Haijiang Zhu, Chade Li, Ning An

LiDAR-based place recognition is critical for long-term autonomous driving without GPS. Existing handcrafted feature methods face dual limitations. First, descriptor instability occurs due to inconsistent point cloud density from motion and environmental changes during repeated traversals. Second, representation fragility arises from reliance on single-level geometric abstractions in complex scenes. To overcome these, we propose a novel framework for 3D place recognition. We introduce an implicit 3D representation using elastic neural points. This representation is designed to reduce the influence of input-density variations and to provide more regular geometric evidence for descriptor construction. From this, we derive occupancy grids and normal vectors. These enable the construction of fused descriptors that integrate complementary perspectives: macro-level spatial layouts from a bird's-eye view and micro-scale surface geometries from 3D clusters. Extensive evaluations on diverse datasets, including KITTI, KITTI-360, MulRan, and NCLT, demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive and robust performance compared with representative handcrafted and learning-based baselines. The results suggest that the proposed framework provides a favorable trade-off among recognition accuracy, runtime efficiency, and map memory footprint. It also shows improved robustness under density variations and viewpoint changes in the evaluated scenarios. The code will be released soon.

arXiv

Visual Intention Grounding for Egocentric Assistants

Pengzhan Sun, Junbin Xiao, Tze Ho Elden Tse, Yicong Li, Arjun Akula, Angela Yao

Visual grounding associates textual descriptions with objects in an image. Conventional methods target third-person image inputs and named object queries. In applications such as AI assistants, the perspective shifts -- inputs are egocentric, and objects may be referred to implicitly through needs and intentions. To bridge this gap, we introduce EgoIntention, the first dataset for egocentric visual intention grounding. EgoIntention challenges multimodal LLMs to 1) understand and ignore unintended contextual objects and 2) reason about uncommon object functionalities. Benchmark results show that current models misidentify context objects and lack affordance understanding in egocentric views. We also propose Reason-to-Ground (RoG) instruction tuning; it enables hybrid training with normal descriptions and egocentric intentions with a chained intention reasoning and object grounding mechanism. RoG significantly outperforms naive finetuning and hybrid training on EgoIntention, while maintaining or slightly improving naive description grounding. This advancement enables unified visual grounding for egocentric and exocentric visual inputs while handling explicit object queries and implicit human intentions.

arXiv

Afford-X: Generalizable and Slim Affordance Reasoning for Task-oriented Manipulation

Xiaomeng Zhu, Yuyang Li, Leiyao Cui, Pengfei Li, Huan-ang Gao, Yixin Zhu, Hao Zhao

Object affordance reasoning, the ability to infer object functionalities based on physical properties, is fundamental for task-oriented planning and activities in both humans and Artificial Intelligence (AI). This capability, required for planning and executing daily activities in a task-oriented manner, relies on commonsense knowledge of object physics and functionalities, extending beyond simple object recognition. Current computational models for affordance reasoning from perception lack generalizability, limiting their applicability in novel scenarios. Meanwhile, comprehensive Large Language Models (LLMs) with emerging reasoning capabilities are challenging to deploy on local devices for task-oriented manipulations. Here, we introduce LVIS-Aff, a large-scale dataset comprising 1,496 tasks and 119k images, designed to enhance the generalizability of affordance reasoning from perception. Utilizing this dataset, we develop Afford-X, an end-to-end trainable affordance reasoning model that incorporates Verb Attention and Bi-Fusion modules to improve multi-modal understanding. This model achieves up to a 12.1% performance improvement over the best-reported results from non-LLM methods, while also demonstrating a 1.2% enhancement compared to our previous conference paper. Additionally, it maintains a compact 187M parameter size and infers nearly 50 times faster than the GPT-4V API. Our work demonstrates the potential for efficient, generalizable affordance reasoning models that can be deployed on local devices for task-oriented manipulations. We showcase Afford-X's effectiveness in enabling task-oriented manipulations for robots across various tasks and environments, underscoring its efficiency and broad implications for advancing robotics and AI systems in real-world applications.

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