arXiv:2603.06665v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large vision-language models (VLMs) often benefit from chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting in general domains, yet its efficacy in medical vision-language tasks remains underexplored. We report a counter-intuitive trend: on medical visual question answering, CoT frequently underperforms direct answering (DirA) across general-purpose and medical-specific models. We attribute this to a \emph{medical perception bottleneck}: subtle, domain-specific cues can weaken visual grounding, and CoT may compound early perceptual uncertainty rather than correct it. To probe this hypothesis, we introduce two training-free, inference-time grounding interventions: (i) \emph{perception anchoring} via region-of-interest cues and (ii) \emph{description grounding} via high-quality textual guidance. Across multiple benchmarks and model families, these interventions improve accuracy, mitigate CoT degradation, and in several settings reverse the CoT--DirA inversion. Our findings suggest that reliable clinical VLMs require robust visual grounding and cross-modal alignment, beyond extending text-driven reasoning chains. Code is available \href{https://github.com/TianYin123/Better_Eyes_Better_Thoughts}{here}.

arXiv:2603.02816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid advancement of text-to-video (T2V) models has revolutionized content creation, yet their commercial potential remains largely untapped. We introduce, for the first time, the task of seamless brand integration in T2V: automatically embedding advertiser brands into prompt-generated videos while preserving semantic fidelity to user intent. This task confronts three core challenges: maintaining prompt fidelity, ensuring brand recognizability, and achieving contextually natural integration. To address them, we propose BrandFusion, a novel multi-agent framework comprising two synergistic phases. In the offline phase (advertiser-facing), we construct a Brand Knowledge Base by probing model priors and adapting to novel brands via lightweight fine-tuning. In the online phase (user-facing), five agents jointly refine user prompts through iterative refinement, leveraging the shared knowledge base and real-time contextual tracking to ensure brand visibility and semantic alignment. Experiments on 18 established and 2 custom brands across multiple state-of-the-art T2V models demonstrate that BrandFusion significantly outperforms baselines in semantic preservation, brand recognizability, and integration naturalness. Human evaluations further confirm higher user satisfaction, establishing a practical pathway for sustainable T2V monetization.

arXiv:2602.18740v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study presents a hierarchical, network-level traffic flow control framework for mixed traffic consisting of Human-driven Vehicles (HVs), Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs). The framework jointly optimizes vehicle-level eco-driving behaviors and intersection-level traffic signal control to enhance overall network efficiency and decrease energy consumption. A decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) approach by Value Decomposition Network (VDN) manages cycle-based traffic signal control (TSC) at intersections, while an innovative Signal Phase and Timing (SPaT) prediction method integrates a Machine Learning-based Trajectory Planning Algorithm (MLTPA) to guide CAVs in executing Eco-Approach and Departure (EAD) maneuvers. The framework is evaluated across varying CAV proportions and powertrain types to assess its effects on mobility and energy performance. Experimental results conducted in a 4*4 real-world network demonstrate that the MARL-based TSC method outperforms the baseline model (i.e., Webster method) in speed, fuel consumption, and idling time. In addition, with MLTPA, HONEST-CAV benefits the traffic system further in energy consumption and idling time. With a 60% CAV proportion, vehicle average speed, fuel consumption, and idling time can be improved/saved by 7.67%, 10.23%, and 45.83% compared with the baseline. Furthermore, discussions on CAV proportions and powertrain types are conducted to quantify the performance of the proposed method with the impact of automation and electrification.

arXiv:2602.14042v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In real-world scenarios, the performance of semantic segmentation often deteriorates when processing low-quality (LQ) images, which may lack clear semantic structures and high-frequency details. Although image restoration techniques offer a promising direction for enhancing degraded visual content, conventional real-world image restoration (Real-IR) models primarily focus on pixel-level fidelity and often fail to recover task-relevant semantic cues, limiting their effectiveness when directly applied to downstream vision tasks. Conversely, existing segmentation models trained on high-quality data lack robustness under real-world degradations. In this paper, we propose Restoration Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation (RASS), which effectively integrates semantic image restoration into the segmentation process, enabling high-quality semantic segmentation on the LQ images directly. Specifically, we first propose a Semantic-Constrained Restoration (SCR) model, which injects segmentation priors into the restoration model by aligning its cross-attention maps with segmentation masks, encouraging semantically faithful image reconstruction. Then, RASS transfers semantic restoration knowledge into segmentation through LoRA-based module merging and task-specific fine-tuning, thereby enhancing the model's robustness to LQ images. To validate the effectiveness of our framework, we construct a real-world LQ image segmentation dataset with high-quality annotations, and conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world LQ benchmarks. The results show that SCR and RASS significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods in segmentation and restoration tasks. Code, models, and datasets will be available at https://github.com/Ka1Guan/RASS.git.