AI Research Papers

Computer Vision & Image Generation7/9/2026

StereoSplat+: Feed-Forward Stereo Gaussian Splatting with Diffusion-Assisted Progressive Inference

Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have enabled high-quality, render-ready scene representations for novel-view synthesis. However, most existing 3DGS pipelines rely on multi-view observations (or non-causal access to future frames) to achieve sufficient coverage, which is often unavailable in on-device robotics and AR settings where sensing is restricted to a single stereo rig. Recovering a high-quality 3DGS scene from one stereo observation, therefore, remains challenging due to occlusions, limited field of view, and missing geometry. We present StereoSplat+, a diffusion-enhanced feed-forward framework that enables causal reconstruction from a single stereo pair. Our method builds on two key components. First, we propose StereoSplat, an input-invariant feed-forward 3D Gaussian estimator that takes a variable number of posed stereo pairs as input and predicts high-quality 3D Gaussians. StereoSplat fuses complementary geometry cues via a cost-volume branch and a triplane-based 3D volume branch and leverages continuous pose encoding to generalize across view counts and camera configurations. Second, since multiple posed stereo pairs are typically unavailable at inference time, we introduce a diffusion-enhanced one-shot progressive inference scheme called StereoSplat+: starting from one stereo pair, we render novel stereo views from the predicted 3DGS, refine them with a one-step diffusion enhancer, and feed them back as additional inputs to update the 3DGS. Experiments on the KITTI-360 dataset show that StereoSplat+ improves novel-view rendering quality and geometry accuracy, especially in occluded regions and under strong view extrapolation, outperforming recent feed-forward 3DGS baselines.

Computer Vision & Image Generation7/9/2026

VocaDet: Sample-Driven Open-Vocabulary Object Detection and Segmentation via Visual Tokenization and Vector Database Retrieval

Open-vocabulary object detection and segmentation aim to recognize arbitrary objects beyond predefined categories. Although recent vision-language and reference-based approaches have significantly advanced this field, they often rely on text prompts, limited visual examples, or expensive feature matching procedures, making them difficult to scale to large and continuously expanding object repositories. In this work, we propose VocaDet, a sample-driven open-vocabulary object detection and segmentation framework that learns object concepts directly from user-provided positive and negative sample collections without model retraining. The key idea is to transform continuous visual representations into discrete visual vocabularies and perform efficient retrieval-based recognition through a scalable vector database. Specifically, we employ DINOv3 as the visual feature extractor and apply agglomerative clustering with adaptive clustering sensitivity to generate multi-granularity visual tokens. These visual tokens, together with position-debiased representations and spatial topology information, are stored as expandable object memories in a vector database. During inference, query images are converted into visual tokens and efficiently matched against the stored object memories for object localization and segmentation. Furthermore, a background filtering mechanism is introduced to remove frequently occurring background patterns and reduce redundant retrieval operations in practical fixed-camera scenarios. Experiments on the UA-DETRAC dataset demonstrate that VocaDet achieves effective open-vocabulary detection performance without conventional detector training, while supporting continuously expandable recognition capability as additional positive and negative samples are accumulated.

Computer Vision & Image Generation7/9/2026

VocaDet: Sample-Driven Open-Vocabulary Object Detection and Segmentation via Visual Tokenization and Vector Database Retrieval

Open-vocabulary object detection and segmentation aim to recognize arbitrary objects beyond predefined categories. Although recent vision-language and reference-based approaches have significantly advanced this field, they often rely on text prompts, limited visual examples, or expensive feature matching procedures, making them difficult to scale to large and continuously expanding object repositories. In this work, we propose VocaDet, a sample-driven open-vocabulary object detection and segmentation framework that learns object concepts directly from user-provided positive and negative sample collections without model retraining. The key idea is to transform continuous visual representations into discrete visual vocabularies and perform efficient retrieval-based recognition through a scalable vector database. Specifically, we employ DINOv3 as the visual feature extractor and apply agglomerative clustering with adaptive clustering sensitivity to generate multi-granularity visual tokens. These visual tokens, together with position-debiased representations and spatial topology information, are stored as expandable object memories in a vector database. During inference, query images are converted into visual tokens and efficiently matched against the stored object memories for object localization and segmentation. Furthermore, a background filtering mechanism is introduced to remove frequently occurring background patterns and reduce redundant retrieval operations in practical fixed-camera scenarios. Experiments on the UA-DETRAC dataset demonstrate that VocaDet achieves effective open-vocabulary detection performance without conventional detector training, while supporting continuously expandable recognition capability as additional positive and negative samples are accumulated.

Computer Vision & Image Generation7/9/2026

AI-guided stimuli discovery and generation to optimize facial emotion perception studies in autism

Understanding perceptual differences between autistic and neurotypical adults requires behavioral assays that are sensitive, reliable, and mechanistically informative. Facial emotion perception is a useful test case because group differences have been reported, but findings vary across studies. Here we show that this variability may reflect image-level sparsity: autistic-neurotypical differences in emotion judgments were concentrated in a small subset of diagnostic facial expressions rather than spread uniformly across stimuli. We trained population-specific artificial neural network models to predict image-level judgments for autistic and neurotypical participants, then used these models to select novel faces predicted to maximize group separation. In an independent cohort, model-selected images produced larger behavioral differences than matched random images. We then used the same models with a generative adversarial network to transform diagnostic images toward greater predicted group agreement. In phenotype-matched validation, synthesized images reduced behavioral separation relative to their matched originals. These results establish a model-guided framework for discovering and transforming stimuli that reveal population-specific perceptual differences. More broadly, they show how behavioral phenotyping can move beyond averaging across fixed stimulus sets toward optimized assays that identify the conditions under which neurodivergent perception diverges or converges.

Computer Vision & Image Generation7/9/2026

AI-guided stimuli discovery and generation to optimize facial emotion perception studies in autism

Understanding perceptual differences between autistic and neurotypical adults requires behavioral assays that are sensitive, reliable, and mechanistically informative. Facial emotion perception is a useful test case because group differences have been reported, but findings vary across studies. Here we show that this variability may reflect image-level sparsity: autistic-neurotypical differences in emotion judgments were concentrated in a small subset of diagnostic facial expressions rather than spread uniformly across stimuli. We trained population-specific artificial neural network models to predict image-level judgments for autistic and neurotypical participants, then used these models to select novel faces predicted to maximize group separation. In an independent cohort, model-selected images produced larger behavioral differences than matched random images. We then used the same models with a generative adversarial network to transform diagnostic images toward greater predicted group agreement. In phenotype-matched validation, synthesized images reduced behavioral separation relative to their matched originals. These results establish a model-guided framework for discovering and transforming stimuli that reveal population-specific perceptual differences. More broadly, they show how behavioral phenotyping can move beyond averaging across fixed stimulus sets toward optimized assays that identify the conditions under which neurodivergent perception diverges or converges.