Adversarial patches have emerged as a popular privacy-preserving approach for resisting AI-driven surveillance systems. However, their conspicuous appearance makes them difficult to deploy in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a thermally activated adversarial wearable designed to ensure adaptability and effectiveness in complex real-world environments. The system integrates thermochromic dyes with flexible heating units to induce visually dynamic adversarial patterns on clothing surfaces. In its default state, the clothing appears as an ordinary black T-shirt. Upon heating via an embedded thermal unit, hidden adversarial patterns on the fabric are activated, allowing the wearer to effectively evade detection across both visible and infrared modalities. Physical experiments demonstrate that the adversarial wearable achieves rapid texture activation within 50 seconds and maintains an adversarial success rate above 80% across diverse real-world surveillance environments. This work demonstrates a new pathway toward physically grounded, user-controllable anti-AI systems, highlighting the growing importance of proactive adversarial techniques for privacy protection in the age of ubiquitous AI surveillance.
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Systems such as video chatbots and navigation robots often depend on streaming image captioning to interpret visual inputs. Existing approaches typically employ large multimodal language models (MLLMs) for this purpose, but their substantial computational cost hinders practical application.This limitation motivates our development of a lightweight captioning model. Our investigation begins by replacing the large-scale language component in MLLMs with a compact 125M-parameter model.Surprisingly, this compact model, despite a 93x reduction in size, achieves comparable performance to MLLMs, suggesting that factual image captioning does not significantly require the complex reasoning abilities of LLMs. Despite this promising result, our lightweight model still lacks reliability. To address this, we draw inspiration from the human visual process: perceiving a global and coarse understanding of the scene before attending to finer details. Accordingly, we propose a multimodal self-refinement framework that guides the model to utilize features from salient regions, identified by referencing the previous coarse caption, and to produce a refined description. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our model in both single-sentence and detailed captioning, extending even to long-range video QA tasks.
SunFaded: Illumination-Aware Gaussian Splatting for Dark Scenes with Camera-Mounted Active Lighting
PDF ↗Gaussian Splatting has emerged as a popular 3D representation technique, but still struggles with appearance inconsistencies, especially in dark scenes that require active illumination (e.g., camera flashes or co-moving light sources) to capture usable images, leading to dramatic local appearance fluctuations.While existing methods mainly focus on modeling global appearance changes for in-the-wild scenes, such as those caused by different times of day or weather conditions, they fail to handle the severe variations present in dark scenes with moving light sources.In this paper, we propose a novel Gaussian Splatting-based approach for constructing scene representations in dark scenes where active light sources are rigidly attached to the camera and move together with it.Within this framework, we introduce an illumination-weighted loss function that drives the representation toward the underlying unlit scene. Furthermore, instead of adjusting the illumination of each individual Gaussian as in prior work, we employ a tile-based shading scheme that operates directly on the rendered images, greatly reducing computational cost while explicitly separating illumination from intrinsic scene appearance.Additionally, we further refine the learned Gaussian representation by combining the recovered unlit scene appearance with an advanced geometric prior model, which significantly improves geometric accuracy.Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior reconstruction quality in challenging environments compared to state-of-the-art techniques.
Physically Plausible Video Generation (PPVG) has emerged as a promising avenue for modeling real-world physical phenomena. PPVG requires an understanding of commonsense knowledge, which remains a challenge for video diffusion models. Current approaches leverage commonsense reasoning capability of large language models to embed physical concepts into prompts. However, generation models often render physical phenomena as a single moment defined by prompts, due to the lack of conditioning mechanisms for modeling causal progression. In this paper, we view PPVG as generating a sequence of causally connected and dynamically evolving events. To realize this paradigm, we design two key modules: (1) Physics-driven Event Chain Reasoning. This module decomposes the physical phenomena described in prompts into multiple elementary event units, leveraging chain-of-thought reasoning. To mitigate causal ambiguity, we embed physical formulas as constraints to impose deterministic causal dependencies during reasoning. (2) Transition-aware Cross-modal Prompting (TCP). To maintain continuity between events, this module transforms causal event units into temporally aligned vision-language prompts. It summarizes discrete event descriptions to obtain causally consistent narratives, while progressively synthesizing visual keyframes of individual events by interactive editing. Comprehensive experiments on PhyGenBench and VideoPhy benchmarks demonstrate that our framework achieves superior performance in generating physically plausible videos across diverse physical domains. Code is available at https://github.com/ZixuanWang0525/CoECT.
Recent deep unfolding networks (DUNs) have advanced Compressive Sensing (CS) by effectively integrating iterative optimization with deep learning architectures. However, most CS approaches predominantly confine their inference to a single solution space, neglecting the inherent ill-posedness of CS problems that intrinsically permits multiple plausible candidate hypotheses. In this paper, a novel Multi-Hypothesis Collaborative Deep Unfolding CS Network (MHC-DUN) is proposed, which explicitly models and leverages multiple hypotheses by jointly optimizing across diverse solution spaces. Specifically, following the Proximal Gradient Descent algorithm, MHC-DUN jointly performs gradient descent and proximal mapping within this multi-hypothesis paradigm. i) For gradient descent, a well-designed AlphaNet is introduced to dynamically predict spatially varying step sizes for all hypotheses, enabling collaborative gradient updates across multiple solutions. ii) For proximal operator, a sophisticated multi-hypothesis collaborative proximal mapping module is designed, which leverages both intra-hypothesis and inter-hypothesis correlation priors to jointly refine multiple solutions. To enable end-to-end training, a novel composite loss function is designed, which balances measurement fidelity, hypothesis diversity, and reconstruction accuracy, encouraging exploration of complementary solutions while maintaining reconstruction fidelity. Experimental results reveal that the proposed CS method outperforms existing CS networks.
We present Cross-View Splatter, a feed-forward method that predicts pixel-aligned Gaussian splats for outdoor scenes captured at ground level and by satellite. Faithful reconstructions require good camera coverage, but ground imagery is time-consuming and hard to capture at scale for large outdoor scenes. Fortunately, satellite imagery can provide a global geometric prior that is easy to access via public APIs. Cross-View Splatter fuses orthorectified satellite views with GPS-tagged ground photos to predict Gaussian splats in a unified 3D coordinate frame. By aligning ground and bird's-eye feature representations, our model improves scene coverage and novel-view synthesis, compared to ground imagery alone. We train on curated georeferenced datasets and paired satellite-terrain data, mined from open mapping services. We evaluate our method on a new benchmark for novel-view synthesis with georeferenced imagery, allowing comparison to prior state-of-the-art methods. Our code and data preparation will be available at https://nianticspatial.github.io/cross-view-splatter/.
Vision-based robotic policies often struggle with even minor viewpoint changes, underscoring the need for view-invariant visual representations. This challenge becomes more pronounced in real-world settings, where viewpoint variability is unavoidable and can significantly disrupt policy performance. Existing methods typically learn invariance from multi-view observations at the scene level, but such approaches rely on visual appearance and fail to incorporate the physical dynamics essential for robust generalization. We propose View-Invariant Latent Action (VILA), which models a latent action capturing transition patterns across trajectories to learn view-invariant representations grounded in physical dynamics. VILA aligns these latent actions across viewpoints using an action-guided objective based on ground-truth action sequences. Experiments in both simulation and the real world show that VILA-based policies generalize effectively to unseen viewpoints and transfer well to new tasks, establishing VILA as a strong pretraining framework that improves resilience to viewpoint shifts and downstream learning performance.
Scene Graph Generation (SGG) aims to structurally represent visual scenes by detecting objects and their pairwise relationships. Despite significant progress, current models encode visual knowledge with ambiguous visual context and logically inferred implicit relations due to their purely neural, pipeline-based nature. This limitation underscores the need to advance beyond identifying what relations exist to explaining why they exist and how they can be compositionally reasoned about through logical rule chaining. To address these challenges, we introduce NeuroRule, the first Neurally-Guided Rule Induction Network that integrates Mask2Former pixel-precise visual understanding with a differentiable rule induction engine. Our proposed method enables automatic learning of compositional logical rules directly from visual data while providing transparent explanations for relational predictions. NeuroRule introduces three key innovations: (1) a neural-symbolic bridge that maps visual features to probabilistic symbolic representations; (2) a differentiable rule-learning mechanism that automatically discovers interpretable first-order logic rules without manual engineering; and (3) a compositional chain rule system that enables complex inference while propagating confidence scores through an end-to-end trainable pipeline. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets, including Visual Genome (VG), Panoptic Scene Graph (PSG), and OpenPSG, demonstrate that NeuroRule achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our method significantly improves few-shot relation extraction while maintaining full interpretability in its rule-based explanations.
Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) are redefining the landscape of artificial intelligence by coupling perception and generation across language, vision, and structured reasoning. Yet, despite their growing sophistication, a critical gap persists in evaluation: existing benchmarks largely measure discriminative understanding or unconstrained generation in isolation, overlooking the integrated generative reasoning required for genuine multimodal intelligence. To address this, we introduce GGBench, the benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate geometric generative reasoning--the ability of a model to understand, reason about, and construct a solution within a unified framework. Each instance in GGBench contains precisely aligned natural-language instructions, executable GeoGebra code, and rendered diagrams, enabling deterministic and interpretable verification of a model's reasoning and constructive fidelity. The benchmark comprises 1,411 rigorously curated problems covering eight categories and multiple difficulty levels, resulting in over 7,000 aligned visualizations. We propose a comprehensive tri-modal evaluation protocol that jointly assesses textual planning quality, code executability, and geometric accuracy of generated diagrams through both automated and human-in-the-loop judging. Extensive experiments on both state-of-the-art UMMs and general Large Language Models (LLMs) reveal a large performance gap between end-to-end generation and reasoning-grounded construction. GGBench establishes a new standard for testing multimodal systems that must not only understand but also build, marking a crucial step toward grounded, verifiable generative intelligence.
ORSATR-X: A Foundation Model based on Differential-and-Excitation Networks for Optical Remote Sensing Object Recognition
PDF ↗Recent advances in Remote Sensing Foundation Models (RSFMs) have demonstrated considerable potential for Earth Observation (EO) tasks. While adopting natural image foundation models (e.g., DINO) provides a data-efficient strategy for building RSFMs, their strong generalization capability does not fully transfer to complex remote sensing (RS) scenarios due to severe background interference, notably in perceiving challenging targets like low-contrast objects. To this end, we propose ORSATR-X, a novel RSFM that effectively integrates the generalizable representations of DINOv3 with a dedicated mechanism for exciting local contrast information. ORSATR-X comprises two core components: (1) a DINOv3 encoder, which provides rich feature representation under limited RS pre-training data, and (2) a carefully designed side network incorporating a Weber Local Adapter (WLA) and a Multi-scale Aggregation Module (MSAM). The WLA enhances discriminability of low-contrast boundaries in complex scenes through center-surround contrast and directional gradient information enhancement, while the MSAM handles inherent object scale variations in RS imagery by adaptive aggregation of features across multiple scales. Furthermore, we pre-train the side network using an efficient self-supervised distillation strategy. Extensive experiments on scene classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation demonstrate that ORSATR-X achieves state-of-the-art performance among existing RSFMs, demonstrating the effectiveness of our design.
Autoregressive (AR) visual generation relies on tokenizers to map images to and from discrete sequences. However, tokenizers are trained to reconstruct clean images from ground-truth tokens, while AR generators are optimized only for token likelihood. This misalignment leads to generated token sequences that may decode into low-quality images, without direct supervision from the pixel space. We propose VA-\boldsymbol \pi , a lightweight post-training framework that directly optimizes AR models with a principled pixel-space objective. VA-\pi formulates the generator-tokenizer alignment as a variational optimization, deriving an evidence lower bound (ELBO) that unifies pixel reconstruction and autoregressive modeling. To optimize under the discrete token space, VA-\pi introduces a reinforcement-based alignment strategy that treats the AR generator as a policy, uses pixel-space reconstruction quality as its intrinsic reward. The reward is measured by how well the predicted token sequences can reconstruct the original image under teacher forcing, giving the model direct pixel-level guidance without expensive free-running sampling.The regularization term of the ELBO serves as a natural regularizer, maintaining distributional consistency. VA-\pi enables rapid adaptation of existing AR generators, without neither tokenizer retraining nor external reward models. With only 1% ImageNet-1K data and 25 minutes of tuning, it reduces FID from 14.36 to 7.65 and improves IS from 86.55 to 116.70 on LlamaGen-XXL, while also yielding notable gains in the text-to-image task on GenEval for both visual generation model (LlamaGen: from 0.306 to 0.339) and unified multi-modal model (Janus-Pro: from 0.725 to 0.744).
Residual diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in image restoration tasks. In near-domain transformations such as image deraining, however, we observe that the residuals exhibit an inherent low-rank structure. Motivated by this property, we propose the Low-Rank Residual Diffusion Model (LRDM), which performs diffusion within a compact low-rank residual subspace for efficient and structure-preserving restoration. We formalize this observation as the Low-Rank Residual Assumption and show that the variational lower bound becomes tighter when residuals lie in a low-rank space. Building on this insight, we introduce an Asymmetric Residual Diffusion Process that constrains the forward process in the low-rank domain while maintaining full-rank flexibility in the reverse process. To accommodate the varying complexity of residuals across diffusion timesteps, we further introduce an Adaptive Rank Selection mechanism that dynamically adjusts the rank during the diffusion process. Experiments on deraining, deblurring, and deshading benchmarks show that LRDM surpasses full-rank diffusion baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating the advantage of modeling diffusion in a low-rank residual space. Project Page: \urlstyle same \hypersetup allcolors=magenta https://github.com/JF-Tan/LRDM .
GM-R^2: Generative Matching Learning for Unsupervised Geometric Representation and Registration
PDF ↗This paper proposes GM-R^2, a novel Generative Matching Learning framework for unsupervised geometric descriptor learning and correspondence matching. By reformulating descriptor learning as geometry-conditioned cross-view image generation, GM-R^2 leverages the proxy supervisory signal from structurally aligned view synthesis to implicitly enforce feature consistency across correspondence, enabling robust 3D matching. To instantiate GM-R^2, we introduce Denoising-Agnostic Coupled ControlNet conditioned on depth maps as the required geometry-conditioned cross-view generator. It effectively extends the single-view generation of naive ControlNet to the cross-view via coupled depth-map input design and further remove the latent noise dependency to support geometry-only inference (expected by 3D matching). Moreover, we present Zoomable Equirectangular Projection for intrinsics-free point cloud-to-depth mapping that adaptively zooms into the angular region occupies by the narrow-FOV input for dense range-map acquisition. Extensive experiments on 3DMatch and ScanNet datasets verify the superior precision of our GM-R^2, even surpassing supervised methods.
Reading Chinese historical documents across diverse carriers is central to understanding the evolution of Chinese civilization, yet remains labor-intensive and dependent on scarce expert knowledge. Although recent large-scale models show promise on isolated historical collections, they do not systematically probe the fundamental ability to read historical documents across heterogeneous carriers. Therefore, we present MCHDoc, a comprehensive benchmark for reading multi-carrier Chinese historical documents. MCHDoc spans over 3,000 years of history and contains 15,724 high-resolution documents from six major carriers, capturing rich variations in material, layout, etc. Mimicking expert workflows, the benchmark supports page-level and character-level recognition, as well as LLM-based post-correction with and without external knowledge. We systematically evaluate a wide range of large-scale models on MCHDoc. The results show that even top-tier models struggle with multi-carrier historical documents. Furthermore, our analysis highlights several key factors for effectively adapting large models to Chinese historical texts. MCHDoc thus offers a standardized, challenging, and historically grounded benchmark for reading Chinese historical documents and provides a foundation for future research in document analysis and digital humanities.
Recent studies have demonstrated that Reinforcement Learning (RL), notably Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), can intrinsically elicit and enhance the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, despite the promise, the underlying mechanisms that drive the effectiveness of RL models as well as their limitations remain underexplored. In this paper, we highlight a fundamental behavioral distinction between RL and base models, where the former engages in deeper yet narrow reasoning, while base models, despite less refined along individual path, exhibit broader and more diverse thinking patterns. Through further analysis of training dynamics, we show that GRPO is prone to diversity collapse, causing models to prematurely converge to a limited subset of reasoning strategies while discarding the majority of potential alternatives, leading to local optima and poor scalability. To address this, we propose Multi-Group Policy Optimization (MUPO), a simple yet effective approach designed to incentivize divergent thinking across multiple solutions, and demonstrate its effectiveness on established benchmarks.
Learning to See through Illumination Extremes with Event Streaming in Multimodal Large Language Models
PDF ↗Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) perform strong vision-language reasoning under standard conditions but fail in extreme illumination, where RGB inputs lose irrevocable structure and semantics. We propose Event-MLLM, an event-enhanced model that performs all-light visual reasoning by dynamically fusing event streams with RGB frames. Two key components drive our approach: an Illumination Indicator -- a learnable signal derived from a DINOv2 branch that represents exposure degradation and adaptively modulates event-RGB fusion -- and an Illumination Correction Loss that aligns fused features with non-degraded (normal-light) semantics in the latent space, compensating for information lost in extreme lighting. We curate the first multi-illumination event-instruction corpus for MLLMs, with 2,241 event-RGB samples (around 6 QA pairs each) across diverse scenes and 17 brightness rates (0.05x - 20x), plus an instruct-following benchmark for reasoning, counting, and fine-grained recognition under extreme lighting. Experiments show that Event-MLLM markedly outperforms general-purpose, illumination-adaptive, and event-only baselines, setting a new state of the art in robust multimodal perception and reasoning under challenging illumination.
Understanding and predicting object motion from egocentric video is fundamental to embodied perception and interaction. However, generating physically consistent 6DoF trajectories remains challenging due to occlusions, fast motion, and the lack of explicit physical reasoning in existing generative models. We present EgoFlow, a flow-matching framework that synthesizes realistic and physically plausible trajectories conditioned on multimodal egocentric observations. EgoFlow employs a hybrid Mamba-Transformer-Perceiver architecture to jointly model temporal dynamics, scene geometry, and semantic intent, while a gradient-guided inference process enforces differentiable physical constraints such as collision avoidance and motion smoothness. This combination yields coherent and controllable motion generation without post-hoc filtering or additional supervision. Experiments on HD-EPIC, EgoExo4D, and HOT3D show that EgoFlow outperforms diffusion-based and transformer baselines in accuracy, generalization, and physical realism, reducing collision rates by up to 79%, and strong generalization to unseen scenes. Our results highlight the promise of flow-based generative modeling for scalable and physically grounded egocentric motion understanding. Project page: https://abhi-rf.github.io/egoflow/
Polyphony: Diffusion-based Dual-Hand Action Segmentation with Alternating Vision Transformer and Semantic Conditioning
PDF ↗Dual-hand action segmentation, densely predicting actions for both hands from untrimmed videos, is essential for understanding complex bimanual activities. However, it poses several unique challenges: complex inter-hand dependencies, visual asymmetry between hands, representation conflicts where the dominant hand monopolizes gradients, and semantic ambiguity in fine-grained actions. We propose Polyphony, a three-stage method to address these challenges through: (1) an Alternating Dual-Hand Vision Transformer that alternates training between left- and right-hand mini-batches to ensure balanced gradient contributions from both hands while sharing a spatio-temporal encoder; (2) Semantic Feature Conditioning that aligns visual features with structured, compositional action descriptions to enhance discrimination of semantically similar actions; and (3) Diffusion-Based Segmentation with cross-hand feature fusion for inter-hand coordination and adaptive loss weighting for balancing performance. Polyphony achieves state-of-the-art on both dual-hand datasets (HA-ViD, ATTACH) with improvements up to 16.8 points, and on the single-stream Breakfast dataset (82.5%), outperforming the prior best method that uses a 12x larger backbone. Notably, our unified model with a single shared backbone surpasses baselines requiring separate per-hand models. Code is at https://github.com/x-labs-xyz/Polyphony-Dual-hand-Action-Segmentation.
Reconstructing accurate 3D models of large-scale real-world scenes from unstructured, in-the-wild imagery remains a core challenge in computer vision, especially when the input views have little or no overlap. In such cases, existing reconstruction pipelines often produce multiple disconnected partial reconstructions or erroneously merge non-overlapping regions into overlapping geometry.In this work, we propose a framework that grounds each partial reconstruction to a complete reference model of the scene, enabling globally consistent alignment even in the absence of visual overlap. We obtain reference models from dense, geospatially accurate pseudo-synthetic renderings derived from Google Earth Studio. These renderings provide full scene coverage but differ substantially in appearance from real-world photographs. Our key insight is that, despite this significant domain gap, both domains share the same underlying scene semantics. We represent the reference model using 3D Gaussian Splatting, augmenting each Gaussian with semantic features, and formulate alignment as an inverse feature-based optimization scheme that estimates a global 6DoF pose and scale while keeping the reference model fixed. Furthermore, we introduce the WikiEarth dataset, which registers existing partial 3D reconstructions with pseudo-synthetic reference models. We demonstrate that our approach consistently improves global alignment when initialized with various classical and learning-based pipelines, while mitigating failure modes of state-of-the-art end-to-end models. All code, data, and trained models will be released.
Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multimodal understanding capabilities, yet the redundant visual tokens incur prohibitive computational overhead and degrade inference efficiency. Prior studies typically relies on [CLS] attention or text-vision cross-attention to identify and discard redundant visual tokens. Despite promising results, such solutions are prone to introduce positional bias and, more critically, are incompatible with efficient attention kernels such as FlashAttention, limiting their practical deployment for VLM acceleration. In this paper, we step away from attention dependencies and revisit visual token compression from an information-theoretic perspective, aiming to maximally preserve visual information without any attention involvement. We present ApET, an Approximation-Error Token compression framework. ApET first reconstructs the original visual tokens with a small set of basis tokens via linear approximation, then leverages the approximation error to identify and drop the least informative tokens. Extensive experiments across multiple VLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that ApET retains 95.2% of the original performance on image-understanding tasks and even attains 100.4% on video-understanding tasks, while compressing the token budgets by 88.9% and 87.5%, respectively. Thanks to its attention-free design, ApET seamlessly integrates with FlashAttention, enabling further inference acceleration and making VLM deployment more practical.