arXiv:2609.12771v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cross-vehicle federated learning enables vehicles to collaboratively improve perception models while keeping locally collected driving data private. However, vehicle participation is transient, and a vehicle may depart before training converges while permanently taking its local data. When this departing vehicle holds most samples of a target class, the class becomes rare in the remaining FL network, and its recognition can silently degrade as the shared backbone continues to evolve. Recovering the class is difficult since the few remaining samples provide a noisy prototype estimate, while FL privacy constraints prevent centralized access to raw data or per-sample features. This paper presents MPT, a cross-vehicle FL framework that maintains rare-class recognition by reconstructing its prototype at every round from privacy-preserving class-level statistics. MPT combines a barycentric decomposition that tracks drift shared with remaining-class prototypes, a covariance-based residual prediction that estimates out-of-span drift, and an adaptive calibration that weighs the remaining rare-class samples according to their reliability. We evaluate MPT on three vehicle classification tasks and four backbones against representative calibration and drift-compensation baselines. MPT outperforms all baselines in rare class F1, reaching 0.516 on the nuImages dataset with only 1\% of rare-class samples remaining, without raw data, per-sample features, or retraining.

arXiv:2609.12168v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems, jointly interpreting images and natural language queries, hold significant promise across many domains, yet the privacy-sensitive nature of user data creates a fundamental barrier. Centralized training requires access to all data, while federated learning requires each client to host the full model. We propose USPLIT-VQA, a U-shaped split learning framework for privacy-preserving VQA in which each client retains the initial layers and the classification head while the server hosts the computationally heavy intermediate layers, keeping raw inputs and labels on the client device. We further introduce Contribution-Aware Weighted Aggregation (CAWA), a gradientsimilarity-based client scoring mechanism designed to reduce the influence of malicious updates. Experiments on four VQA datasets (VQA-RAD, SLAKE, PathVQA, and VizWiz) with two backbones show accuracy gains over Federated Learning for the Custom model and reduced accuracy for BiomedCLIP under the evaluated fixed split, alongside client memory reductions of up to 5.8X and communication reductions of up to 10.8X. With one malicious client, CAWA reduces the attacker's influence by over 98%, while experiments at higher corruption levels identify its limitations. Reconstruction experiments further show lower inversion quality under the evaluated attacks.

arXiv:2609.12202v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Characterizing two-dimensional (2D) quantum materials by optical microscopy requires localizing exfoliated flakes and determining their layer thickness from subtle optical contrast and interference color to select suitable flakes for device fabrication. However, models face synthetic-to-real domain shifts and variation across materials, substrates, laboratories, and imaging conditions. We present QuPAINT, a physics-aware multimodal framework for transferable quantum flake characterization. The Synthetic Materials Framework (Synthia) generates diverse synthetic microscopy images while preserving layer-dependent optical behavior. Using these images, we construct QMat-Instruct, a multimodal instruction dataset with image-specific reasoning traces generated from verified annotations and constrained to observable optical cues. QuPAINT integrates these signals through Physics-Informed Attention (PIA), which injects substrate-relative optical priors into the visual representation to support grounded multimodal reasoning. For evaluation, we introduce QF-Bench, to our knowledge, the largest real-world benchmark for this problem, spanning diverse microscopy and substrate conditions. Using its verified annotations, we study counting, visual grounding, reasoning quality, confidence calibration, and transfer to an unseen material. QuPAINT-8B substantially outperforms prior methods and establishes state-of-the-art performance for both general and monolayer flake detection. Additional experiments show that image-grounded supervision improves strict spatial grounding and confidence calibration while preserving robust general flake detection on the unseen material.

arXiv:2609.12397v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-modal image generation, particularly subject-driven customization, has garnered growing attention in recent years. Despite the rapid advancement of generative models, their evaluation remains largely lagging. Existing methods, whether embedding-based or Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based, evaluate alignment with each modal condition in isolation, which contradicts the simultaneous condition alignment objective of multi-modal image generation, leading to poor consistency with human judgments. To address this challenge, we propose UFO, the first unified framework for omni-condition alignment simultaneous evaluation. Specifically, UFO introduces a novel Atomized Chain-of-Evaluation paradigm, \emph{i.e.}, it first decomposes omni-condition alignment into a sequential chain of fine-grained, disentangled Atomic Evaluation Units (AEUs), categorizes them into distinct modality-relevance classes, and then employs general or dedicated functional calls for accurate verification of different AEU types. Experimental results demonstrate that UFO achieves the highest correlation with human evaluation preferences, delivering an average improvement of 15.25\%. Furthermore, we present UFO-Bench, a dedicated benchmark designed to holistically evaluate the performance of existing customization models under the diverse mutual interactions of textual and visual conditions.

arXiv:2609.12441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A world model asked what happens if an object is pushed at several speeds produces several futures. If the model has the object in mind, those futures agree about it: each implies the same mass and friction. The consistency checks now used to vet world-action models ask whether a model's futures agree with each other, and none of them knows any physics. We show that this is not enough, and what to do instead. IMPLY reads the physics each rollout implies by inverting a simulator and scores a set of rollouts by how well one object explains all of them, anchored to two calibration pushes the model has observed. In a controlled setting, self-consistency gives a perfect score to a model that ignores the object and always predicts a typical push; anchoring exposes it (AUROC 0.70 versus 1.00). On a real model, V-JEPA 2-AC adapted to the scene, the same thing happens. Given its own calibration pushes the model tracks the object (per-object correlation with the truth 0.91); given another object's, it does not (0.05). Self-consistency cannot tell these apart, preferring the right evidence on 52% of objects, chance level, while anchored disagreement prefers it on 73% and correlates 0.92-0.99 with the rollouts' error. Used to choose among candidate rollout sets, it comes within 0.003 of an oracle that sees the truth. A model that has internalised the wrong object is exactly as self-consistent as one that has internalised the right one; consistency has to be anchored to evidence.

arXiv:2609.12454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models such as CLIP enable effective few-shot medical anomaly detection (AD) via strong image-text semantic alignment. However, their globally contrastive pretraining lacks explicit spatial supervision, limiting precise lesion localization. In contrast, Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) such as DINO learn spatially coherent patch representations via self-distillation and local-to-global consistency, better capturing fine-grained anatomical structures. Leveraging this complementarity, we propose Spatial-FAD, a spatial-aware few-shot medical AD framework that improves lesion localization by combining VFM spatial priors with CLIP semantics. Specifically, we introduce a VFM-enhanced adapter that injects a structural affinity prior derived from DINO into CLIP features. This structure-guided refinement encourages visual embeddings to better adhere to lesion boundaries while maintaining semantic alignment. To address the loss of spatial detail from patchification and the limited input resolution of CLIP, we adopt a sliding-window aggregation strategy. This generates high-resolution, spatially dense embeddings to further enhance localization granularity. Moreover, we introduce a prototype-enhanced support memory scheme to efficiently exploit the few-shot support set. This module stores compact prototypes for normal and abnormal patterns, reducing memory costs while boosting performance by fusing patch-to-prototype and image-text similarities. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, including Liver CT, Retinal OCT, and Brain MRI, demonstrate that Spatial-FAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially in lesion segmentation. Notably, in the 4-shot scenario, our method achieves an average improvement of over 11.4% in Dice score and 1.8% in AUC. Code is available at: https://github.com/JuzhengMiao/Spatial-FAD.

arXiv:2609.12505v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-based reinforcement learning holds strong potential for decision-making in controlled environment agriculture (CEA). However, its development is hindered by the scarcity of labelled crop images. To address this gap, LettuceVisSim, a lettuce growth simulator that generates labelled time series of crop images, was developed and validated. The simulator contains a process-based model (PBM) for shoot dry weight dynamics, a canopy layout algorithm for deriving canopy layout representations from shoot dry weight, and a Unity rendering engine for image generation. Five findings support the simulator. First, the PBM reproduced shoot dry weight under dynamic plant-density management with $\mathrm{R}^{2}=0.84$. Second, a piecewise cubic regression mapped shoot dry weight to potential projected area with $\mathrm{R}^{2}=0.94$. Third, the canopy layout representation was validated using 12 experimental datasets each having different dynamic environmental and spacing conditions. It reproduced the ground coverage ratio dynamics observed in measured images, achieving $\mathrm{R}^{2}=0.84$ when driven by measured shoot dry weight and $\mathrm{R}^{2}=0.40$ (0.76 excluding one outlier) when driven by PBM-simulated values. Fourth, the Unity rendering engine converted canopy layout representations into RGB and segmentation images at less than 10~ms. Fifth, a demonstration showed that a lighting-control policy can be learned and applied by observing only crop images that were generated with LettuceVisSim, providing a proof of concept of vision-based reinforcement learning in CEA using LettuceVisSim.

arXiv:2609.12533v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world Earth observation (EO) agents must translate high-level scientific questions into executable workflows to acquire observations, prepare data, perform domain computations, and derive conclusions from runtime evidence. Existing EO agents typically start from supplied observations, while benchmarks typically provide prepared inputs or candidate answers, leaving full-chain open-world EO execution largely untested. We present Earth-Agent-Pro, an execution-adaptive Plan-and-Execute framework using expert-authored skills to constrain planning and runtime tool use. Workflow-centered structured memory records planned steps, accepted evidence, and their dependencies, enabling repair of only the affected workflow suffix when runtime evidence invalidates a step. Separate large language model adapters use sequence-level supervised fine-tuning for planner workflow composition and node-level group relative policy optimization with locally verifiable rewards for executor tool-argument grounding. Earth-Bench-Pro instantiates 248 expert-curated task cores as 744 questions under three matched regimes. Its 248 Open-World Execution questions span RGB imagery, spectral observations, and remote sensing products, pairing high-level requests with runtime data requirements, executable trajectories, and open-ended answers grounded in execution evidence. With a shared GPT-5 backbone, Earth-Agent-Pro achieves 66.13% LLM-as-Judge accuracy, exceeding ReAct by 20.95 points in this metric and 24.44 points in Tools-In-Order. Joint adapter tuning raises Qwen3.5-9B LLM-as-Judge accuracy from 38.31% to 50.00%, an 11.69-point gain over the untuned configuration. Planning-only evaluation and execution with the reference workflow show that the adapters improve workflow composition and argument grounding, respectively. Code and datasets will be released soon.

arXiv:2609.12818v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long video understanding often behaves like a visual needle-in-a-haystack problem: query-relevant evidence is sparsely distributed across long temporal spans, while packing dense frames into a single VLM context incurs \textit{context rot} and high cost. Existing video agents often rely on query-agnostic offline preprocessing or ad hoc tool sets, which can miss query-specific details and waste computation. In this work, we present VideoXAgent, a purely online video-agent harness for long video understanding that starts from the given video file and user query, plans and decomposes the task, invokes specialized expert tools on demand, and aggregates multimodal evidence to produce a final answer while resolving conflicts among observations. To support this on-demand invocation, we design a suite of heterogeneous expert tools guided by a data-driven taxonomy of atomic capabilities, spanning scripts, VLMs, and domain models (e.g., detection, OCR, ASR, face recognition). The harness further enforces objective evidence prompting and budget-aware control to curb hallucination and non-termination. Across Video-MME-Long, LongVideoBench-Long, LVBench, and MINERVA, VideoXAgent is competitive with frontier LMMs and video agents under a smaller context footprint---about 50k tokens of agent context per sample, even on hour-long videos. In particular, on complex video-reasoning benchmarks such as MINERVA, it matches this level while using only about 15\% of the context of a 1,024-frame dense-packing baseline. Notably, the harness remains effective with a visually weak or even text-only orchestrator, suggesting that strong long-video understanding can emerge from progressive agentic evidence seeking rather than from packing the full video into a single context. Project page: https://go-agent-x.github.io/video_agent_harness/

arXiv:2609.12860v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Computed tomography (CT) and positron emission tomography (PET) provide complementary anatomical and functional information for cancer diagnosis and treatment planning. However, the widespread use of PET is limited by high radiation exposure, elevated costs, and restricted availability. To address these limitations, deep learning-based CT-to-PET translation has emerged as a promising approach for synthesizing PET-like information directly from CT images, although accurately modeling the large cross-modal gap remains challenging. In this work, we propose a 3D CT-to-PET translation framework based on latent Brownian Bridge Diffusion (BBDM). The method consists of two stages. First, a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is trained on paired CT-PET patches, integrating contrastive learning to improve latent alignment between anatomical and metabolic representations. Second, a BBDM is trained in the latent space to translate CT latent representations into their corresponding PET counterparts. The translated PET latents are then decoded and stitched to reconstruct the final 3D PET volume. We evaluate the proposed approach on two publicly available datasets. Quantitative results based on image fidelity and lesion-level PET-specific metrics demonstrate improved performance compared with competing methods. In particular, the proposed approach improves PET signal fidelity, better preserves clinically relevant uptake patterns, and shows improved performance in preserving small-lesion metabolic activation, paving the way for virtual imaging applications.

arXiv:2609.12871v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Datasets are a crucial element in the development of perception algorithms. They relate sensor measurement data to annotated reference information and allow for the deduction of sensor and object characteristics. In autonomous driving, the reference data commonly consist of semantic image segmentation, point-wise associations, or bounding box annotations. The dataset proposed in this work, however, aims to dig deeper into the evaluation of measurement principles and provides scanned 3D models of all vehicles together with a pose and continuous kinematics reference obtained by RTK-GNSS. Combined, the state of the complete dynamic surrounding of the sensor vehicle is known for any point in time. Subsequent reference formats can be easily computed in user-defined granularity. This dataset involves single-object and multi-object recordings with seven target vehicles. In particular, measurement effects such as occlusion, as well as reflections, can be evaluated, as the normals of the shape of the target vehicles are known. We describe the dataset, discuss the technical background of its development, and briefly present exemplary evaluations.

arXiv:2609.12898v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-grained robotic manipulation depends on understanding parts, not only whole objects. Existing 3D foundation models tend to be either generalized but object-aware, or part-aware but limited to closed-set taxonomies, which weakens zero-shot transfer. We study text-conditioned 3D part segmentation, where a free-form phrase selects a functional part on point cloud. We introduce UniPart, a feed-forward cross-modal 3D Transformer that conditions CLIP text embedding. To scale supervision, we build LangPart-1M with 160K+ Objaverse assets and 8M text to part pairs using multi-view consistent part generation. We further manually label a high-quality subset, LangPart-4K, for fine-tuning and evaluation. UniPart achieves strong zero-shot results on open-vocabulary part benchmarks and transfers to language-conditioned part grasping in real world.

arXiv:2609.12965v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-based person search (TBPS) aims to retrieve images of a target person from a large image gallery based on a given natural language description. Most existing methods rely on supervised learning with manually annotated image-text pairs. In this paper, we explore unsupervised TBPS, with only unlabeled images. We propose GTR+, a two-stage generation-then-retrieval framework. In the generation stage, we introduce a tiered description generation framework designed to produce fine-grained and stylistically diverse textual descriptions through a three-tier sequential process. The base tier leverages an automated question-and-answer mechanism to generate basic visual attribute descriptions; the intermediate tier enhances fine-grained detail using an inter-sample contrastive mechanism; the advanced tier further enriches textual diversity via a stylized expansion mechanism. In the retrieval stage, to mitigate the impact of noisy pseudo texts, we develop an adaptive confidence-weighted retrieval learning framework. We model image-text pairs as clean or noisy using a Gaussian Mixture Model, calibrated by real-time image-text similarity and static text generation probability from the prior stage, yielding adaptive sample weights during training. Beyond that, we also contribute LargeFine-Person, a large-scale TBPS dataset with high-quality, fine-grained, and diverse textual annotations, enabling a practical and generalizable TBPS pre-training benchmark under unsupervised setting. Experiments on multiple TBPS benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of both GTR+ and LargeFine-Person. Code is available at: https://github.com/Flame-Chasers/GTR.

arXiv:2609.13013v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flat roofs are among the most influential components of the building envelope, governing both structural performance and thermal efficiency, and thereby contributing directly to household energy consumption, carbon emissions, and long-term environmental sustainability. Timely detection of roof defects is essential for reducing heating and cooling losses, preventing moisture-driven degradation such as mold growth, and supporting national climate-change mitigation goals. This paper presents a real-time, Unmanned Aerial System (UAS)-based deep learning framework that autonomously detects defects using live imagery captured during dual-altitude aerial passes. The multi-resolution flight strategy is designed to aid the identification of both small, fine-scale defects and larger structural issues, enabling more comprehensive assessments. To meet the strict computational and power constraints of embedded UAS hardware, the proposed framework integrates a tile-based architecture with a lightweight Convolution Neural Network-Support Vector Machine (CNN-SVM) classifier designed for low-latency onboard inference. The final model-comprising five convolutional layers and four dense layers, the last a linear SVM head, achieved a mean test accuracy of $94.4\%$ ($95\%$ confidence interval $\pm0.4\%$ over three seeds) on a photo-level split ($43,383$ training, $3,869$ validation, and $2,540$ test tiled and augmented images), outperforming GoogLeNet ($89.2\%$) and AlexNet ($79.8\%$). Experimental evaluations using real UAS imagery collected by onsite visits with DJI Matrice 350 RTK drone demonstrate that the system supports rapid, repeatable, and safe roof inspections while reducing human risk, lowering operational costs, and enabling more sustainable building maintenance.

arXiv:2609.13024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As a key model compression technique, knowledge distillation aims to transfer knowledge from a high-capacity teacher model to a lightweight student model for enhancing the latter's performance. In this work, we reviewed the feature knowledge distillation for 3D-CNNs and observed that most feature distillation methods in video analysis are simple adaptations of those used in image analysis, often neglecting the differences of video features in the temporal dimension. To address this issue, we proposed Label-Guided Knowledge Distillation (LGKD) to guide the distillation of student model features using ground truth labels. Our method entails two components: sample-wise distillation and class-wise distillation, enabling the student model to learn feature representation of the teacher model at two levels. Sample-wise distillation utilizes label information and the teacher's probability distribution to guide the learning of features that significantly impact temporal accuracy while mitigating noise. Meanwhile, class-wise feature distillation employs a prototype network to further capture the relational knowledge among samples within the same category, enhancing the student's ability to learn higher-dimensional semantic information and improving model generalization. To demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method, we conducted comprehensive experiments on two benchmark action recognition datasets, UCF101 and HMDB51, achieving competitive results.

arXiv:2609.13043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robust medical image segmentation across imaging modalities is challenging because of large differences in appearance and intensity distributions. Models trained on a single modality often show substantial performance drops when applied to unseen domains. In this work, we develop a unified 3D pancreas segmentation framework that applies domain-adversarial learning to 4,604 heterogeneous CT and MRI scans to learn anatomical representations. A shared nnU-Net encoder-decoder is trained for whole-pancreas segmentation, with a latent domain discriminator encouraging CT-MRI feature alignment. The learned encoder is subsequently transferred to pancreatic head-body-tail segmentation using limited MRI-only subregion annotations. An average Dice score of 87.31% on the in-distribution test set and Dice scores ranging from 84.20% to 88.09% across external OOD datasets were achieved in whole pancreas segmentation. Dice scores of 80.53% on MRI and 83.05% on CT were achieved for downstream subregion segmentation, without using CT subregion annotations. These results demonstrate that a unified anatomical representation can support both cross-modality pancreas segmentation and label-efficient downstream transfer.

arXiv:2609.06746v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Latent visual reasoning aims to perform multimodal reasoning through hidden-state computation rather than explicit textual chains of thought. However, visual information being present in a latent state does not imply that the model actually relies on that state when producing its answer, especially when alternative image-conditioned paths remain available. We introduce Causal Visual Recurrent Reasoning (CVRR), which preserves pretrained visual competence while making recurrent computation the required image-conditioned path to prediction. CVRR initializes recurrence from the question hidden state after the pretrained vision-language model has incorporated the image, then repeatedly updates this state while re-reading the same fixed visual evidence. Before decoding, visual states and the original multimodal KV cache are removed so that only the final recurrent state carries image-conditioned information to the answer. Across the $V^*$, MMVP, BLINK, and MME-RealWorld-Lite benchmarks, CVRR retains strong performance under this strict interface, while compatible latent reasoners fail to recover comparable visual competence even when retrained under the same constraint. Causal interventions further show that predictions remain sensitive to recurrent content when the question is held fixed, and that persistent visual evidence causally revises the recurrent trajectory. These results distinguish latent informativeness from latent computation that is actually used for prediction.

arXiv:2504.04903v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Lunima-OmniLV (abbreviated as OmniLV), a universal multimodal multi-task framework for low-level vision that addresses over 100 sub-tasks across four major categories: image restoration, image enhancement, weak-semantic dense prediction, and stylization. OmniLV leverages both textual and visual prompts to offer flexible and user-friendly interactions. Built on Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based generative priors, our framework supports arbitrary resolutions -- achieving optimal performance at 1K resolution -- while preserving fine-grained details and high fidelity. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that separately encoding text and visual instructions, combined with co-training using shallow feature control, is essential to mitigate task ambiguity and enhance multi-task generalization. Our findings also reveal that integrating high-level generative tasks into low-level vision models can compromise detail-sensitive restoration. These insights pave the way for more robust and generalizable low-level vision systems.

arXiv:2504.04981v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies continual test-time adaptation (CTTA), the task of adapting a model to constantly changing unseen domains in testing while preserving previously learned knowledge. Existing CTTA methods mostly focus on adaptation to the current test domain only, overlooking generalization to arbitrary test domains a model may face in the future. To tackle this limitation, we present a novel online test-time domain generalization framework for CTTA, dubbed TestDG. TestDG aims to learn features invariant to both current and previous test domains on the fly during testing, improving the potential for effective generalization to future domains. To this end, we propose a new model architecture and a test-time adaptation strategy dedicated to learning domain-invariant features, along with prototype selection and update mechanisms for effectively managing information from previous test domains. TestDG achieved state of the art on four public CTTA benchmarks. Moreover, it showed superior generalization to unseen test domains.

arXiv:2601.04339v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unified multimodal generation architectures that jointly produce text and images have recently emerged as a promising direction for text-to-image (T2I) synthesis. However, many existing systems rely on explicit modality switching, generating reasoning text before switching manually to image generation. This separate, sequential inference process limits cross-modal coupling and prohibits automatic multimodal generation. This work explores post-training to achieve fully unified text-image generation, where a model autonomously transitions from textual reasoning to visual synthesis within a single inference process. We study this on BAGEL, a 14B mixture-of-transformers model that pairs autoregressive text generation with flow-matching image synthesis. We examine the impact of joint text-image generation on T2I performance and the relative importance of each modality during post-training. We additionally explore different post-training data strategies, showing that a targeted dataset addressing specific limitations achieves superior results compared to broad image-caption corpora or benchmark-aligned data. Using offline, reward-weighted post-training with fully self-generated synthetic data, our approach enables improvements in multimodal image generation across four diverse, independent T2I benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of reward-weighting both modalities and strategically designed post-training data.