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Bing Han, Weiyuan Liu, Changlong Zhang, Chenxi Wang, Zhibin Zhao, Zhi Zhai

Achieving dexterous grasping remains a key challenge in robotics. Recent generative approaches enable diverse grasps through large-scale data-driven training, yet they often neglect geometric priors of objects, which leads to low data efficiency and poor physical plausibility. We propose GeoDexGrasp, a geometry-aware generation framework for dexterous grasping built upon object-centric geometric representations. We introduce a SIM(3)-equivariant network equipped with a self-supervised disentanglement strategy to extract interpretable and transferable geometric features, including shape, size, pose, and interaction direction. The overall generation process is then decomposed into two stages: first, root rotation generation conditioned on pose and interaction direction; second, hand grasp generation guided by shape and size. By leveraging geometric representations, GeoDexGrasp achieves SOTA physical plausibility (reducing 40% penetration depth) across five datasets, and exhibits improved data efficiency. Additionally, GeoDexGrasp is also lightweight (using less than 20% of the parameters of the previous SOTA method) and attains a comparable grasp success rate.

Maisha Maliha, Dean F. Hougen

Vision Transformers often rely on spurious background correlations rather than foreground object features. While prior model pruning approaches focus solely on improving accuracy, they lack interpretability and fail to verify whether predictions are actually made by focusing on the main foreground object, providing no causal validation of which components drive spurious behavior. We introduce Causal Information Gain Mechanistic Attribution (CIGMA), a general framework for explaining the internal computation of Vision Transformers. CIGMA provides a mechanistic, information theoretic explanation by quantifying the importance of each attention head and determining whether it supports the main object or routes spurious background cues. It ranks attention heads by measuring object versus context reliance with Jensen Shannon based information gain computed from the model's full predictive distributions after two complementary edits, removing the object region and removing the surrounding context, which reveals a spurious subnet that carries background signals and a complementary set of evidence aligned heads. Evaluated on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet across three VLM architectures (InternVL2-26B, LLaVA-1.6, LLaVA-1.5-13B), CIGMA improves accuracy by 7.6 to 24.8 percentage points over unmodified models while reducing background reliance by 79.5% to 88.1%, substantially outperforming all baselines, demonstrating that causal head-level interventions enable more effective spurious correlation mitigation than token pruning or retraining approaches.

Chenhui Gou, Ziyu Ma, Zicheng Duan, Haoyu He, Feng Chen, Akide Liu, Bohan Zhuang, Jianfei Cai, Hamid Rezatofighi

Taking advantage of large-scale data and pretrained language models, Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in answering video questions. However, most existing efforts focus on improving performance, with limited attention to understanding their internal mechanisms. This paper aims to bridge this gap through a systematic empirical study. To interpret existing VideoLLMs, we adopt attention knockouts as our primary analytical tool and design three variants: Video Temporal Knockout, Video Spatial Knockout, and Language-to-Video Knockout. Then, we apply these three knockouts on different numbers of layers (window of layers). By carefully controlling the window of layers and types of knockouts, we provide two settings: a global setting and a fine-grained setting. Our study reveals three key findings: (1) Global setting indicates Video information extraction primarily occurs in early layers, forming a clear two-stage process--lower layers focus on perceptual encoding, while higher layers handle abstract reasoning; (2) In the fine-grained setting, certain intermediate layers exert an outsized impact on video question answering, acting as critical outliers, whereas most other layers contribute minimally; (3) In both settings, we observe that spatial-temporal modeling relies more on language-guided retrieval than on intra- and inter-frame self-attention among video tokens, despite the latter's high computational cost. Finally, we demonstrate that these insights can be leveraged to reduce attention computation in Video-LLMs. To our knowledge, this is the first work to systematically uncover how Video-LLMs internally process and understand video content, offering interpretability and efficiency perspectives for future research.

Arman Zarei, Samyadeep Basu, Mobina Pournemat, Sayan Nag, Ryan A. Rossi, Soheil Feizi

Instruction-based image editing models have recently achieved impressive performance, enabling complex edits to an input image from a multi-instruction prompt. However, these models apply each instruction in the prompt with a fixed strength, limiting the user's ability to precisely and continuously control the intensity of individual edits. We introduce SliderEdit, a framework for continuous image editing with fine-grained, interpretable instruction control. Given a multi-part edit instruction, SliderEdit disentangles the individual instructions and exposes each as a globally trained slider, allowing smooth adjustment of its strength. Unlike prior works that introduced slider-based attribute controls in text-to-image generation, typically requiring separate training or fine-tuning for each attribute or concept, our method learns a single set of low-rank adaptation matrices that generalize across diverse edits, attributes, and compositional instructions. This enables continuous interpolation along individual edit dimensions while preserving both spatial locality and global semantic consistency. We apply SliderEdit to state-of-the-art editing models, including FLUX-Kontext and Qwen-Image-Edit, and observe substantial improvements in edit controllability, visual consistency, and user steerability. We are the first to explore and propose a framework for continuous, fine-grained instruction control in image editing models. Our results pave the way for interactive, instruction-driven image manipulation with continuous and compositional control.

Jinze Chen, Wei Zhai, Yang Cao, Bin Li, Zheng-Jun Zha

Event cameras asynchronously capture brightness changes with microsecond latency, offering exceptional temporal precision but suffering from severe noise and signal inconsistencies. Unlike conventional signals, events carry state information through polarities and process information through inter-event time intervals. However, existing event filters often ignore the latter, producing outputs that are sparser than the raw input and limiting the reconstruction of continuous irradiance dynamics. We propose the Event Density Flow Filter (EDFilter), a framework that models event generation as threshold-crossing probability fluxes arising from the stochastic diffusion of irradiance trajectories. EDFilter performs nonparametric, kernel-based estimation of probability flux and reconstructs the continuous event density flow using an O(1) recursive solver, enabling real-time processing. The Rotary Event Dataset (RED), featuring microsecond-resolution ground-truth irradiance flow under controlled illumination is also presented for event quality evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that EDFilter achieves high-fidelity, physically interpretable event denoising and motion reconstruction.

Wenyuan Gao, Yutan Wu, Xuming He

Heterogeneous reconstruction in cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) is fundamental for understanding macromolecular structural diversity, yet remains challenging due to extreme noise, continuous conformational changes, and ambiguous image-to-structure mappings. Existing neural approaches often rely on encoder--decoder pipelines or fixed codebooks, which can be computationally demanding or struggle with complex heterogeneity. We propose CryoKRAQEN, a decoder-only framework that integrates triplane implicit representations with kernel-guided latent assignment and quantized embeddings to improve stability and structural discrimination. The method avoids encoder dependencies and mitigates collapse during training, enabling accurate modeling of both conformational and compositional variations. Across diverse Cryo-EM benchmarks, CryoKRAQEN delivers competitive performance, robust reconstructions, and interpretable latent organization compared to state-of-the-art neural and classical methods.

Jungho Kim, Jiyong Oh, Seunghoon Yu, Hongjae Shin, Donghyuk Kwak, Jun Won Choi

The end-to-end (E2E) paradigm, which maps sensor inputs directly to driving decisions, has recently attracted significant attention due to its unified modeling capability and scalability. However, ensuring safety in this unified framework remains one of the most critical challenges. In this work, we propose SafeDrive, an E2E planning framework designed to perform explicit and interpretable safety reasoning through a trajectory-conditioned Sparse World Model. SafeDrive comprises two complementary networks: the Sparse World Network (SWNet) and the Fine-grained Reasoning Network (FRNet). SWNet constructs trajectory-conditioned sparse worlds that simulate the future behaviors of critical dynamic agents and road entities, providing interaction-centric representations for downstream reasoning. FRNet then evaluates agent-specific collision risks and temporal adherence to drivable regions, enabling precise identification of safety-critical events across future timesteps. SafeDrive achieves state-of-the-art performance on both open-loop and closed-loop benchmarks. On NAVSIM, it records a PDMS of 91.6 and an EPDMS of 87.5, with only 61 collisions out of 12,146 scenarios (0.5%). On Bench2Drive, SafeDrive attains a 66.8% driving score.

Zongzhao Li, Zongyang Ma, Mingze Li, Songyou Li, Yu Rong, Tingyang Xu, Ziqi Zhang, Deli Zhao, Wenbing Huang

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remain far from human-level performance in multi-view spatial reasoning, where models must establish object correspondences across view and infer coherent scene semantics. We analyze this limitation through the Transformation-Driven Visual Reasoning (TVR) task and find that Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) fails to capture cross-view consistency, whereas reinforcement learning (RL) fails to reliably identify key referential objects. To bridge this gap, we introduce multi-View Spatial TrAnsformation Reasoning (STAR-R1), a two-stage framework that combines process-supervised SFT with a referential-aware RL paradigm. STAR-R1 first learns structured spatial reasoning trajectories from high-quality CoTs and then uses fine-grained rewards on referential selection and answer correctness to encourage effective exploration and robust scene interpretation. Despite using only a small amount of high-quality training data, STAR-R1 surpasses state-of-the-art models with far more training data on the multi-view spatial understanding benchmarks TVR, MMSI-Bench, MindCube-Bench, and SPAR-Bench. Our study reveals the overlooked potential of RL in multi-view spatial understanding and points a way toward potentially achieving more human-like spatial reasoning in MLLMs.

Zizhao Chen, Ping Wei, Ziyang Ren, Huan Li, Xiangru Yin

As the harm caused by fake news grows, the task of detecting and grounding multi-modal media manipulation (DGM4) is gaining more attention. Existing multimodal methods overlook fine-grained semantic alignment between visual and textual modalities, thereby limiting their ability to detect sophisticated and subtle cross-modal manipulations. To address this challenge, we present MaLSF, a novel Mask-aware Local Semantic Fusion framework that explicitly bridges words and pixels via mask-label pairs, enabling the model to perform precise reasoning over fine-grained cross-modal correspondences. MaLSF captures cross-modal local semantics through two key innovations: 1) A Bidirectional Cross-modal Verification Module (BCV) that identifies semantic conflicts between masked regions and associated labels via a bidirectional query mechanism; 2) A Hierarchical Semantic Aggregation (HSA) Module that adaptively aggregates multi-granularity local semantics into decoupled features for task-specific verification. In addition, to extract fine-grained mask-label pairs, we introduce a set of diverse mask-label pair extraction parsers. The proposed model is evaluated on multiple datasets and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the DGM4 and multimodal fake news detection tasks. Extensive ablation studies and visualization results further verify its effectiveness and interpretability.

Changyue Shi, Minghao Chen, Yiping Mao, Chuxiao Yang, Xinyuan Hu, Jiajun Ding, Zhou Yu

Bridging the gap between complex human instructions and precise 3D object grounding remains a significant challenge in vision and robotics. Existing 3D segmentation methods often struggle to interpret ambiguous, reasoning-based instructions, while 2D vision-language models that excel at such reasoning lack intrinsic 3D spatial understanding. In this paper, we introduce REALM, an innovative MLLM-agent framework that enables open-world reasoning-based segmentation without requiring extensive 3D-specific post-training. We perform segmentation directly on 3D Gaussian Splatting representations, capitalizing on their ability to render photorealistic novel views that are highly suitable for MLLM comprehension. As directly feeding one or more rendered views to the MLLM can lead to high sensitivity to viewpoint selection, we propose a novel Global-to-Local Spatial Grounding strategy. Specifically, multiple global views are first fed into the MLLM agent in parallel for coarse-level localization, aggregating responses to robustly identify the target object. Then, several close-up novel views of the object are synthesized to perform fine-grained local segmentation, yielding accurate and consistent 3D masks. Extensive experiments show that REALM achieves remarkable performance in interpreting both explicit and implicit instructions across LERF, 3D-OVS, and our newly introduced REALM3D benchmarks. Furthermore, our agent framework seamlessly supports a range of 3D interaction tasks, including object removal, replacement, and style transfer, demonstrating its practical utility and versatility.

Aishwarya Agarwal, Srikrishna Karanam, Vineet Gandhi

Contrastive vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP achieve strong zero-shot recognition yet remain vulnerable to spurious correlations, particularly background over-reliance. We introduce Cluster-based Concept Importance (CCI), a novel interpretability method that uses CLIP's own patch embeddings to group spatial patches into semantically coherent clusters, masking them, and evaluating relative changes in model predictions. CCI sets a new state of the art on faithfulness benchmarks, surpassing prior methods by large margins; for example, it yields more than a twofold improvement on the deletion-AUC metric for MS COCO retrieval. We further propose that CCI when combined with GroundedSAM, automatically categorizes predictions as foreground or background-driven, providing a crucial diagnostic ability. Existing benchmarks such as CounterAnimals, however, rely solely on accuracy and implicitly attribute all performance degradation to background correlations. Our analysis shows this assumption to be incomplete, since many errors arise from viewpoint variation, scale shifts, and fine-grained object confusions. To disentangle these effects, we introduce COVAR, a benchmark that systematically varies object foregrounds and backgrounds. Leveraging CCI with COVAR, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of eighteen CLIP variants, providing both methodological advances and empirical evidence that chart a path toward more robust vision-language models.

Yingqi Fan, Junlong Tong, Anhao Zhao, Xiaoyu Shen

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) project visual tokens into the embedding space of language models, yet the internal structuring and processing of visual semantics remain poorly understood. In this work, we introduce a two-fold analytical framework featuring a novel probing tool, EmbedLens, to conduct a fine-grained analysis. We uncover a pronounced semantic sparsity at the input level: visual tokens consistently partition into sink, dead, and alive categories. Remarkably, only the alive tokens, comprising ~60% of the total input, carry image-specific meaning. Furthermore, using a targeted patch-compression benchmark, we demonstrate that these alive tokens already encode rich, fine-grained cues (e.g., objects, colors, and OCR) prior to entering the LLM. Internal visual computations (such as visual attention and feed-forward networks) are redundant for most standard tasks. For the small subset of highly vision-centric tasks that actually benefit from internal processing, we reveal that alive tokens naturally align with intermediate LLM layers rather than the initial embedding space, indicating that shallow-layer processing is unnecessary and that direct mid-layer injection is both sufficient. Ultimately, our findings provide a unified mechanistic view of visual token processing, paving the way for more efficient and interpretable MLLM architectures through selective token pruning, minimized visual computation, and mid-layer injection.

Fei Ni, Zhuo Chen, Yifu Yuan, Zibin Dong, Xianze Yao, Shan Luo, Jianye Hao, Jiankang Deng, Stefanos Zafeiriou

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm where pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) serve as System 2 for high-level reasoning, connected to action experts as System 1 for low-level motor control.However, current works fail to genuinely leverage VLM capabilities: VLMs produce latent embeddings that lack semantic interpretability, providing ambiguous and unstable guidance to downstream policies, while solely action supervision further causes VLMs to degenerate into parameter-heavy fusion encoders that memorize action patterns rather than perform generalized reasoning.To bridge this gap, we introduce SemanticVLA, which leverages VLM reasoning through synergistic dual-path design. Explicit trace reasoning generates interpretable spatial waypoints as textual coordinate sequences through the VLM's native language interface, directly reusing its pretrained spatial grounding to provide a thinking process for task planning. Latent action tokens complement trace reasoning by learning compact visuomotor primitives grounded in visual observations, providing more fine-grained action representations beyond pure coordinate prediction. This synergy enables trace reasoning to leverage VLM's multimodal understanding for refining latent token prediction, while latent tokens provide stable and grounded guidance that compensates for trace's numerical sensitivity.SemanticVLA achieves 97.0% average success rate on LIBERO and 65.1% on SimplerEnv WidowX, substantially outperforming strong baselines. More importantly, SemanticVLA maintains significantly more stable performance under instruction rephrasing in both simulation suites, and demonstrates strong advantages on real-world long-horizon and reasoning-intensive tasks.By bridging VLM reasoning and action expert through semantically explicit trace and visually grounded latent action tokens, our approach enables genuine reasoning rather than action memorization.

Jianzhe Gao, Churan Wang, Weiyi Zhang, Jianghua Li, Li-An Li, Wenguan Wang, Yixin Zhu, Yizhou Wang

Clinical video diagnosis, in which physicians assess dynamic tissue responses across procedural stages, is critical for detecting diseases such as cervical and colorectal cancers. Recent spatiotemporal models map visual progressions directly to diagnostic outputs, yet overlook two hallmarks of expert reasoning: clinically grounded diagnostic principles and hypothesis-driven counterfactual thinking. This gap leads existing methods to conflate causal pathological cues with non-pathological variations, thereby limiting their reliability in data-scarce settings. Here we show that explicitly modeling counterfactual tissue evolution, guided by clinical rules that encode expert diagnostic principles, substantially improves diagnostic robustness-emulating the hypothesis-driven reasoning clinicians employ in practice. We introduce MEDVCR, comprising a Counterfactual Generator (CG) that synthesizes hypothetical tissue transitions via diffusion modeling, a Counterfactual Representation Learning (CRL) module that enforces temporal consistency, pathological separability, and counterfactual alignment, and a Dual Diagnostic Prediction (DDP) strategy that combines video-level context with frame-level counterfactual contrast. On two representative tasks, MEDVCR achieves 93.0% Recall@1 on colposcopy (+10.2%) and 94.8% Average Precision (AP) on colonoscopy (+2.6%), outperforming all state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines. We anticipate that this counterfactual reasoning paradigm will open new avenues for vision-based clinical diagnostic tasks toward more transparent and interpretable decision support.

Xiaoxing You, Qiang Huang, Lingyu Li, Xiaojun Chang, Jun Yu

Multimodal Summarization (MMS) aims to generate concise textual summaries by understanding and integrating information across videos, transcripts, and images. However, existing approaches still suffer from three main challenges: (1) reliance on domain-specific supervision, (2) implicit fusion with weak cross-modal grounding, and (3) flat temporal modeling without event transitions. To address these issues, we introduce **CoE**, a training-free MMS framework that performs structured reasoning through a **Chain-of-Events** guided by a Hierarchical Event Graph (HEG). The HEG encodes textual semantics into an explicit event hierarchy that scaffolds cross-modal grounding and temporal reasoning. Guided by this structure, **CoE** localizes key visual cues, models event evolution and causal transitions, and refines outputs via lightweight style adaptation for domain alignment. Extensive experiments on eight diverse datasets demonstrate that **CoE** consistently outperforms state-of-the-art video CoT baselines, achieving average gains of **+3.04 ROUGE**, **+9.51 CIDEr**, and **+1.88 BERTScore**, highlighting its robustness, interpretability, and cross-domain generalization. Our code is available at https://github.com/youxiaoxing/CoE.

Minyoung E. Kim, Dae Hee Yun, Aditi V. Patel, Madeline Hon, Webster Guan, Taegeon Lee, Brian Nguyen

Unprecedented visual details of biological structures are being revealed by subcellular-resolution whole-brain 3D microscopy data, enabled by recent advances in intact tissue processing and light-sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM). These volumetric data offer rich morphological and spatial cellular information, however, the lack of scalable data processing and analysis methods tailored to these petabyte-scale data poses a substantial challenge for accurate interpretation. Further, existing models for visual tasks such as object detection and classification struggle to generalize to this type of data. To accelerate the development of suitable methods and foundational models, we present CANVAS, a comprehensive set of high-resolution whole mouse brain LSFM benchmark data, encompassing six neuronal and immune cell-type markers, along with cell annotations and a leaderboard. We also demonstrate challenges in generalization of baseline models built on existing architectures, especially due to the heterogeneity in cellular morphology across phenotypes and anatomical locations in the brain. To the best of our knowledge, CANVAS is the first and largest LSFM benchmark that captures intact mouse brain tissue at subcellular level, and includes extensive annotations of cells throughout the brain.

Ye Leng, Junjie Chu, Mingjie Li, Chenhao Lin, Chao Shen, Michael Backes, Yun Shen, Yang Zhang

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have emerged as a unified paradigm for language and image generation. Compared with diffusion models, MLLMs possess a much stronger capability for semantic understanding, enabling them to process more complex textual inputs and comprehend richer contextual meanings. However, this enhanced semantic ability may also introduce new and potentially greater safety risks. Taking diffusion models as a reference point, we systematically analyze and compare the safety risks of emerging MLLMs along two dimensions: unsafe content generation and fake image synthesis. Across multiple unsafe generation benchmark datasets, we observe that MLLMs tend to generate more unsafe images than diffusion models. This difference partly arises because diffusion models often fail to interpret abstract prompts, producing corrupted outputs, whereas MLLMs can comprehend these prompts and generate unsafe content. For current advanced fake image detectors, MLLM-generated images are also notably harder to identify. Even when detectors are retrained with MLLMs-specific data, they can still be bypassed by simply providing MLLMs with longer and more descriptive inputs. Our measurements indicate that the emerging safety risks of the cutting-edge generative paradigm, MLLMs, have not been sufficiently recognized, posing new challenges to real-world safety.

Meng Yuan, Dawei Lin, Hongxia Xie, Tieru Wu, Rui Ma

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) modeling underpins a wide range of industrial applications. During the conceptual design phase, designers often refine initial solutions iteratively to achieve desired results. A key goal of AI-assisted CAD is to support the full modeling workflow from initial generation to iterative refinement. However, most existing approaches treat generation and editing as separate tasks, hindering coherence and adaptability in real-world scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose CAD-Refiner, a unified framework that supports free-form multimodal inputs and enables iterative refinement over previously generated results. Specifically, we design an agent named CAD Insighter that interprets multimodal inputs into topological structure graphs, which explicitly represent the fundamental elements and their relationships within CAD objects. We then propose a carefully designed decoder architecture and a Sequence Injection Strategy (SIS) to enable multiple applications within a unified modeling framework. Furthermore, we propose CAD Checker, an error-aware feedback module that performs geometry-based reward shaping during optimization, enhancing modeling quality and geometric validity. Additionally, we introduce MMCAD, a multimodal extension of DeepCAD tailored for CAD generation and editing. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CAD-Refiner across multiple tasks.

Angela van Sprang, Laurens Samson, Ana Lucic, Erman Acar, Sennay Ghebreab, Yuki M. Asano

We introduce two new benchmarks REST and REST+ (Render-Equivalence Stress Tests) to enable systematic evaluation of cross-modal inconsistency in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). MLLMs are trained to represent vision and language in the same embedding space, yet they cannot perform the same tasks in both modalities. Our benchmarks contain samples with the same semantic information in three modalities (image, text, mixed) and we show that state-of-the-art MLLMs cannot consistently reason over these different modalities. We evaluate 15 MLLMs and find that the degree of modality inconsistency varies substantially, even when accounting for problems with text recognition (OCR). Neither rendering text as image nor rendering an image as text solves the inconsistency. Even if OCR is correct, we find that visual characteristics (text colour and resolution, but not font) and the number of vision tokens have an impact on model performance. Finally, we find that our consistency score correlates with the modality gap between text and images, highlighting a mechanistic interpretation of cross-modal inconsistent MLLMs.

Ziyi Gao, Zhipeng Wei, Jingjing Chen, Zhiyu Tan, Hao Li, Yi-Ping Phoebe Chen

Narrative image generation aims to create images featuring multiple distinct characters while capturing their interrelationships, posing significant challenges for current text-to-image diffusion models. As a result, general personalized methods often suffer from poor semantic alignment, identity blending, and aesthetic implausibility.These issues are inadequately captured by existing evaluation metrics such as CLIP, ArcFace, and conventional reward models, which fundamentally fail to align with human perceptual preferences. To align with human preferences, we first construct a fine-grained human preference dataset, NI-RLHF, by collecting both detailed human critiques and preference judgments across three core dimensions: prompt following, identity consistency, and visual quality.This comprehensive dataset facilitates the training of NIReward, a critique-based reward model capable of generating interpretable image evaluations.Building upon the interpretable reward signal from NIReward, we propose Adaptive Dominance-based Preference Optimization (ADPO) to balance learning across diverse preference dimensions while dynamically adapting to reward margins.Experimental results indicate that NIReward significantly outperforms existing evaluation models and reward models, and ADPO yields a significant improvement across the three key preference dimensions. By introducing NIReward and ADPO, our work paves the way for generating narrative images aligned with actual human preferences.