AI Research Papers

AllLarge Language Models (LLMs)Computer Vision & Image GenerationAudio & Speech SynthesisPrompt Engineering & InferenceAI Agents & ReasoningModel Optimization & QuantizationOther
Computer Vision & Image Generation7/10/2026

Adaptive Latent Trajectory Anchoring for Action Segmentation Dataset Condensation

Dataset condensation for action segmentation synthesizes compact, informative representations of long, untrimmed video datasets. The existing approach relies on Variational Autoencoders and an iterative latent optimization; it is computationally expensive and suffers from over-smoothed reconstructions and rigid temporal constraints. This paper proposes to shift the condensation paradigm from optimization-based inversion to deterministic latent mapping. By leveraging Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models, we represent action segments as continuous trajectories anchored by sparse latent points in the noise manifold. To maximize representational efficiency, we introduce an adaptive allocation mechanism that dynamically redistributes the anchoring budget based on segment-wise reconstruction difficulty. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in segmentation performance across common datasets. Notably, our approach achieves performance parity with real data training while maintaining a condensation ratio of 2.4\% on Breakfast dataset.

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Computer Vision & Image Generation7/10/2026

Toward Active Object Detection for UAVs in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset, Benchmark and Method

Object detection is a fundamental component in numerous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) applications, yet it has long been plagued by hindrances like occlusion or target pixel scarcity. Active Object Detection (AOD) provides a novel paradigm to address these challenges via active vision, while UAV-based AOD research remains scarce due to the lack of high-quality datasets and benchmarks for algorithm development and evaluation. To fill this gap, this paper presents ATRNet-LUDO, the first large-scale real-world dataset for UAV-Ground Active Object Detection (UGAOD). It contains 121,000 multi-view panoramic multi-target aerial images and 1.21 million local single-target slices, covering 10 vehicle targets across 40 scenarios. It enables the construction of diverse training and testing environments for UAV agent interaction and active observation policy learning. Based on this dataset, we establish a comprehensive evaluation benchmark for AOD policy learning methods. Most existing AOD policies rely on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) but suffer from poor generalization. Evaluations on our benchmark reveal a significant generalization gap between training and testing performance, highlighting an urgent need for solutions. To this end, we leverage the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) to construct a world model that enhances state representation learning, and propose AOD-JEPA by incorporating AOD-specific prior knowledge. Extensive experiments validate its effectiveness and superiority. We hope ATRNet-LUDO and the benchmark will advance research in the UGAOD field. The dataset and code are soon available at https://github.com/Leo000ooo/LUDO_dataset.

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Computer Vision & Image Generation7/10/2026

OmniMapBench: Benchmarking Visual-Centric Reasoning on Diverse Map Documents

Recent advancements in LVLMs necessitate robust benchmarks for complex, visually grounded reasoning. A critical limitation is identified in many document understanding benchmarks: visual content is often reducible to text, enabling high performance without genuine visual grounding. To address this limitation, OmniMapBench is introduced to foster visual-centric reasoning for map documents. The benchmark comprises 2,096 manually annotated question-answer pairs across 1,603 map documents from nine categories. It is designed to probe a hierarchy of skills, ranging from perception to multi-step visual reasoning. To quantify benchmark properties, a simple yet effective benchmark-level metric is proposed: the Visual Dependency Index (VDI), defined as the accuracy drop when images are replaced with question-agnostic descriptions. OmniMapBench exhibits higher VDI than established benchmarks, which quantitatively validates its focus on irreducible visual reasoning. Comprehensive evaluations of 25 leading LVLMs are conducted on OmniMapBench. A significant performance gap is observed, with the top-performing model achieving only 75.03\% accuracy. This result underscores the challenges posed by OmniMapBench to current LVLMs. This work aims to catalyze progress in visual-centric reasoning for document understanding of LVLMs. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/SIGMME/OmniMapBench.

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Computer Vision & Image Generation7/10/2026

Probing Diffusion Denoising Dynamics for Contrastive Representation Learning

Text-to-image diffusion models exhibit unprecedented generative capability and contain rich intermediate representations that can be useful for discriminative vision tasks. Motivated by this observation, we study a focused question: how can the denoising dynamics of a pretrained diffusion model be adapted to support discriminative representation learning while preserving its generative behavior under parameter-efficient updates? We present D$^3$CL as an investigation of this question. Our key observation is that noisy latents at different diffusion timesteps can be interpreted as stochastic views of the same underlying image, enabling a contrastive objective to be coupled with the standard denoising reconstruction loss. This formulation provides a simple way to probe the interaction between generative denoising and discriminative representation learning without training from scratch. To keep the adaptation lightweight, we apply LoRA updates to a pretrained Stable Diffusion backbone while freezing the original model parameters. D$^3$CL provides strong empirical evidence that reconstruction and noise-level contrastive objectives can be complementary: on ImageNet-1K, it obtains 80.1% linear-probing accuracy and an FID of 5.56 for $256 \times 256$ unconditional generation. Additional ablations on the design space suggest that the usefulness of diffusion features depends on where and how denoising states are sampled. These results establish D$^3$CL as a parameter-efficient adaptation framework for pretrained diffusion models, showing that noise-level contrastive learning can structure denoising representations for discriminative tasks while maintaining generative performance.

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Computer Vision & Image Generation7/10/2026

On Locality and Length Generalization in Visual Reasoning

A striking feature of the human visual system is that it ingests visual information through a series of local foveated glimpses, rather than a single global computation. This makes human vision distinctly different from most popular computer vision models in use today, which input images globally and in a single shot. A natural question therefore is whether local, sequential vision models may provide any fundamental computational benefits in addition to being biologically more plausible than global models. In this work, we investigate this question from the perspective of visual state tracking and length generalization. Inspired by recent studies of length generalization in language models, we study the behavior of vision models trained on simple vision tasks that require the aggregation of local information across an image. Our experiments reveal that, similar to language models, vision models can learn to exploit global shortcuts and thereby fail to generalize over task length or complexity. We also show that recurrent vision policies based on strictly local perception can mitigate these failures, thereby allowing models to generalize on these tasks. Our results show that local attention may be an essential overlooked requirement for robust compositional generalization.

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Computer Vision & Image Generation7/10/2026

STEAM: Stable Self-Training with Elastic Matching and Adaptive Purification

Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) aims to achieve GPS-free localization by matching drone-view images with corresponding satellite-view images. Existing supervised methods rely on large-scale manually annotated cross-view image pairs, making them costly and difficult to scale. In contrast, existing unsupervised approaches typically depend on generative models or clustering-based stage-wise optimization, which are prone to distribution bias and the accumulation of noisy pseudo-labels. To address these limitations, we propose STEAM (Stable Self-Training with Elastic Matching and Adaptive Purification), an end-to-end unsupervised cross-view geo-localization framework that performs self-training directly on real drone and satellite images. Specifically, the proposed Stable Spatial-Aware Module enhances the stability of feature representations, Elastic Matching discovers high-quality cross-view pseudo-labels, and Adaptive Purification dynamically maintains a reliable pseudo-label repository throughout the self-training process. Extensive experiments on the University-1652 and SUES-200 benchmarks demonstrate that STEAM achieves state-of-the-art performance among all existing unsupervised methods and delivers performance comparable to supervised approaches, validating the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework. The source code is available at https://github.com/wsx-heu/STEAM.git.

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Computer Vision & Image Generation7/10/2026

Video Generation Models are General-Purpose Vision Learners

Driven by next-token prediction, NLP shifted from task-specific models into powerful generalist foundation models. What, then, is the equivalent catalyst needed to achieve a general-purpose model in computer vision? In this paper, we contend that large-scale text-to-video generation serves as a strong pre-training paradigm for computer vision, providing the necessary spatiotemporal priors, vision-language alignment, and scalability required for general visual intelligence. We introduce GenCeption, which leverages a pre-trained video generative diffusion backbone to define a feed-forward perception model, capable of performing various vision tasks steered by text instructions. Empirical results demonstrate that GenCeption achieves state-of-the-art performance across a diverse suite of tasks, including depth, surface normal, and camera pose estimation, expression-referring segmentation, and 3D keypoint prediction, often matching or surpassing specialized models (e.g. DepthAnything3, SAM3, D4RT, VGGT-Omega, Sapiens, David, Genmo, and Lotus-2). Furthermore, the video generative pretrained backbone outperforms alternative pretraining paradigms (e.g., V-JEPA, and Video MAE) under comparable settings. Importantly, GenCeption exhibits preliminary data and model scaling properties along with exceptional data efficiency, where it achieves comparable performance with leading models like D4RT and VGGT-Omega with 7 to 500 less training data. Finally, GenCeption also exhibits intriguing emergent behaviors: a model trained exclusively on synthetic human videos generalizes to real-world footage and out-of-distribution object categories (e.g., animals and robots). These findings suggest that video generation is not merely a synthesis tool, but a foundational path toward generalist vision intelligence for the physical world. Project page: https://genception.github.io

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Computer Vision & Image Generation7/10/2026

C-GAP: Class-Aware and Online Prompting Improves Vision-Language Models on Imbalanced Classes

Safety-critical perception systems must reliably detect rare object classes within small label spaces, a setting that long-tailed detection methods, designed for hundreds of classes with dense annotation, fundamentally do not address. Open-vocabulary detectors offer a promising alternative, as they use natural language queries at inference time, making prompt quality a first-class lever for detection performance. We exploit this property to address class imbalance: rather than retraining models or collecting additional annotations, we ask whether iteratively refining the language prompts, fed to frozen detectors, can improve minority class detection. We introduce C-GAP Caption-Guided Augmentation and Prompting), a detector-agnostic, annotation-free framework that operates in two phases. First, we establish a composite caption baseline combining per-image scene descriptions with class-quantity context, which we show outperforms scene-description only or class-quantity-only prompts across multiple open-vocabulary architectures and benchmarks. Second, an LLM iteratively refines each image's caption individually, with trials triaged into accept, tentative, or regenerate buckets based on minority-class AP@0.5 against a dynamic threshold derived from the composite baseline. Refinement terminates early once sufficient AP@0.5 gain is achieved. No detector weights are updated at any stage. Our experiments shows that C-GAP improves minority-class average precision up to 53% over the baselines. On COCO, C-GAP improves minority-class AP@0.5 by ~81% relative over the composite baseline (17.69 -> 32.09). Experiments confirm that composite captions provide the critical foundation for effective refinement: using scene-description-only or class-quantity-only prompts as the refinement starting point yields diminishing returns, supporting both stages of C-GAP as necessary contributions.

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Computer Vision & Image Generation7/9/2026

Is sub-metre resolution necessary for cocoa mapping? A landscape-stratified evaluation of very high resolution imagery, decametric Earth Observation inputs, and operational products in Cote d'Ivoire

Accurate cocoa mapping is increasingly important for deforestation monitoring, supply-chain transparency, and regulatory applications. Spatial aggregation in conventional medium-resolution Earth observation (EO) imagery may limit cocoa detection in heterogeneous smallholder landscapes. In Cote d'Ivoire, we therefore evaluated how mapping performance varies across landscape conditions, whether very high resolution (VHR) imagery provides a meaningful advantage, and whether foundation-model embeddings improve decametric cocoa mapping. We developed models using 0.5 m Pleiades VHR imagery, a 10 m Sentinel-2 annual composite, and embeddings from TESSERA and AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF), and additionally assessed four publicly available cocoa mapping products. Performance was evaluated through a landscape-stratified accuracy assessment using 2,821 independently interpreted reference points distributed across gradients of tree cover density and landscape fragmentation. The VHR model achieved the highest performance (F1 = 0.92) and maintained F1-scores above 0.90 across all strata. Among the decametric inputs, TESSERA performed best (F1 = 0.86), followed by AEF (F1 = 0.82) and Sentinel-2 (F1 = 0.76). Of the existing cocoa products, the Kalischek product performed best (F1 = 0.83), comparable to the internally trained AEF model. Performance differences between VHR and decametric approaches increased with fragmentation and under low and high tree cover density conditions. Targeted VHR acquisition may therefore be particularly beneficial in complex cocoa landscapes, while foundation-model embeddings offer a scalable alternative for large-area mapping.

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Computer Vision & Image Generation7/9/2026

Vision Transformers Learn Gestalt-Like Figure-Ground Cues from Natural Images

Figure-ground organization in the human visual system relies on several shape-based cues, including surroundedness, convexity, and symmetry. While these cues have been extensively studied using abstract stimuli, little is known about how they operate under natural conditions or how they arise from the statistics of natural scenes. Deep neural networks offer a promising path forward: a model that relies on the same figure-ground cues as humans would provide tractable experimental access to the underlying mechanisms. In this study, we evaluate shape-based figure-ground organization in Vision Transformers (ViTs), for which prior work has demonstrated the emergence of object-based grouping. We test 25 ViTs spanning supervised and self-supervised training objectives, by fitting linear probes to predict figure-ground assignment from intermediate patch representations using both natural images and controlled artificial stimuli that isolate individual cues. Our results show that ViTs robustly encode surroundedness and convexity, and that probes trained on natural images generalize zero-shot to artificial stimuli across several models. For symmetry we observe mixed results: the cue is encoded for uniformly colored but not for textured regions. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that Gestalt-like figure-ground cues can be learned from natural scene statistics and position ViTs as a compelling model system for studying the computational mechanisms of perceptual organization. Code and data is available at https://github.com/mtangemann/mlvbench

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Computer Vision & Image Generation7/9/2026

A Novel Parallel QCNN Architecture with Efficient Classical Simulability

This work presents a study of an implementation of a novel Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) for binary classification of images from the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) dataset. Using a novel architecture inspired by previous QCNN and classical convolutional neural network (CNN) implementations, we use a hierarchical partitioning approach to implement a QCNN circuit that can be approximated and simulated efficiently on a classical machine for a large problem. First, the original image is partitioned such that each process handles a smaller portion of the image, which is encoded into independent states. Then, these partitions merge and combine, resulting in states that contain information from both partitions while halving the number of processes. After repeating this until one process remains, we reduce the dimensionality of the state until a single qubit remains for measurement. Using this approach, we can use multiple processes in parallel to simulate a large QCNN program without the need for exponentially growing hardware requirements as the number of qubits increases. In our work, we use this scheme to train a 128-qubit model, which is impossible to run on any classical supercomputer without the novel architecture. We also explore the impact of this new model architecture on prediction accuracy by training it to perform binary classification on the MNIST dataset with a small number of qubits, and comparing it to a model without partitioning. Our initial findings show that partitioning images into smaller sub-images with this architecture does not degrade the model's performance and sometimes even improves it, likely because it reduces the Barren plateaus issue in the partitioning process.

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Computer Vision & Image Generation7/9/2026

HAT Super-Resolution and a PARSeq+CLIP4STR Voting Ensemble for Extreme In-the-Wild License Plate Recognition

We describe our entry to the ICIP 2026 Grand Challenge on Extreme In-the-Wild License Plate Super-Resolution (XLPSR), which scored 9.73 wECR on the public validation leaderboard. The system pairs a Hybrid Attention Transformer super-resolution (HAT) front-end with an ensemble of two scene-text recognisers (PARSeq-S and CLIP4STR-B) and a confidence-weighted character-voting scheme that abstains on uncertain positions. We treat XLPSR as a recognition task gated by image legibility: the SR step exists to lift characters out of sub-pixel territory, and the asymmetric scoring rule (+2 / -1 / 0) is exploited explicitly through abstention. Our pipeline runs in 1.7 s per sequence on RTX 3090 (max 2.7 s, p99 2.4 s), well under the 60 s/sequence Docker budget.

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