arXiv:2603.07909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate intraoperative navigation is essential for robot-assisted endoluminal intervention, but remains difficult because of limited endoscopic field of view and dynamic artifacts. Existing navigation platforms often rely on external localization technologies, such as electromagnetic tracking or shape sensing, which increase hardware complexity and remain vulnerable to intraoperative anatomical mismatch. We present a vision-only autonomy framework that performs long-horizon bronchoscopic navigation using preoperative CT-derived virtual targets and live endoscopic video, without external tracking during navigation. The framework uses hierarchical long-short agents: a short-term reactive agent for continuous low-latency motion control, and a long-term strategic agent for decision support at anatomically ambiguous points. When their recommendations conflict, a world-model critic predicts future visual states for candidate actions and selects the action whose predicted state best matches the target view. We evaluated the system in a high-fidelity airway phantom, three ex vivo porcine lungs, and a live porcine model. The system reached all planned segmental targets in the phantom, maintained 80\% success to the eighth generation ex vivo, and achieved in vivo navigation performance comparable to the expert bronchoscopist. These results support the preclinical feasibility of sensor-free autonomous bronchoscopic navigation.

arXiv:2603.08324v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robot-assisted endoluminal procedures are increasingly used for early cancer intervention. However, the intricate, narrow and tortuous pathways within the luminal anatomy pose substantial difficulties for robot navigation. Vision-based navigation offers a promising solution, but existing localization approaches are error-prone due to tissue deformation, in vivo artifacts and a lack of distinctive landmarks for consistent localization. This paper presents a novel EndoSERV localization method to address these challenges. It includes two main parts, \textit{i.e.}, \textbf{SE}gment-to-structure and \textbf{R}eal-to-\textbf{V}irtual mapping, and hence the name. For long-range and complex luminal structures, we divide them into smaller sub-segments and estimate the odometry independently. To cater for label insufficiency, an efficient transfer technique maps real image features to the virtual domain to use virtual pose ground truth. The training phases of EndoSERV include an offline pretraining to extract texture-agnostic features, and an online phase that adapts to real-world conditions. Extensive experiments based on both public and clinical datasets have been performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method even without any real pose labels.

arXiv:2601.23232v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made rapid progress in information retrieval, yet existing research has mainly focused on text or static multimodal settings. Open-domain video shot retrieval, which involves richer temporal structure and more complex semantics, still lacks systematic benchmarks and analysis. To fill this gap, we introduce ShotFinder, a benchmark that formalizes editing requirements as keyframe-oriented shot descriptions and introduces five types of controllable single-factor constraints: Temporal order, Color, Visual style, Audio, and Resolution. We curate 1,210 high-quality samples from YouTube across 20 thematic categories, using large models for generation with human verification. Based on the benchmark, we propose ShotFinder, a text-driven three-stage retrieval and localization pipeline: (1) query expansion via video imagination, (2) candidate video retrieval with a search engine, and (3) description-guided temporal localization. Experiments on multiple closed-source and open-source models reveal a significant gap to human performance, with clear imbalance across constraints: temporal localization is relatively tractable, while color and visual style remain major challenges. These results reveal that open-domain video shot retrieval is still a critical capability that multimodal large models have yet to overcome.