Papers for

augmented reality developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

UniPart enables language-based 3D part recognition for robot manipulation

UniPart: Towards Zero-shot Language-Grounded 3D Part Segmentation for Embodied Interaction

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.

Fri 11 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial IntelligenceRobotics
The gist
Robots need to understand parts of objects to handle them well, but current 3D models either only recognize whole objects or have limited knowledge of parts. The authors created UniPart, a system that links phrases in everyday language to specific parts of 3D objects, helping robots find and use those parts without prior training on every possible object. They gathered a huge dataset pairing text descriptions with object parts to teach UniPart and tested it successfully on new objects and real robot grasping tasks.
Open 2609.12898v1

Vision language models assist spatial navigation for visually impaired users

Assisted Spatial Cognition Through Vision-Language Models

Abstract: Multimodal AI, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), is transforming assistive technologies by enabling simultaneous processing of visual and textual data. This advancement holds significant promise for over 43 million visually impaired and neuro-divergent individuals worldwide who face persistent challenges in navigating indoor and outdoor environments due to limited spatial awareness and insufficient environmental cues. Existing navigation aids often lack comprehensive 3D scene understanding, relying on constrained route-based strategies that hinder user autonomy. In this paper, we introduce a novel end-to-end framework that integrates LLMs, VLMs and digital twin technologies to deliver a spatially cognitive navigation support for visually impaired and neuro-divergent users. Our system captures video input via standard mobile phone cameras, and employs SLAM3R to generate dense 3D point clouds from monocular RGB sequences in real-time. Our custom post-processing algorithm ensures accurate point cloud alignment across multiple viewpoints without requiring predefined reference points. This enhances the capabilities of SpatialLM to produce structured 3D representations, including architectural elements and oriented object bounding boxes. The enriched spatial data is then processed by a locally deployed LLM, which interprets 3D contexts to generate detailed scene descriptions and precise distance measurements between users and surrounding objects. We evaluated our approach across diverse video scenarios featuring various perspectives, looped walking views and captured in multiple environments. The evaluation results demonstrate consistent accuracy in 3D scene interpretation and object localisation, underscoring the potential of our system as a transformative assistive navigation solution that combines advanced visual perception with spatial reasoning

Fri 11 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Many people who are visually impaired or have different cognitive needs find it hard to understand and navigate their surroundings. This paper presents a new system that uses phone cameras to create detailed 3D maps of places in real time. The system combines smart language and vision AI models to describe spaces clearly and accurately, helping users understand where things are around them. The authors tested their system in many settings and showed it works well for giving detailed directions and object locations.
Open 2609.12747v1

Low-light 3D scene capture improved with noise-aware gaussian splatting

NOVA-GS: Noise-Aware View-Consistent Gaussian Splatting for Low-Light Novel View Synthesis

Abstract: Reconstructing 3D scenes under real-world low-light conditions remains challenging due to severe sensor noise, low signal-to-noise ratios, and degraded photometric consistency, which destabilize geometry estimation and novel view synthesis. Existing approaches often rely on well-lit reference data for reliable Structure-from-Motion (SfM) initialization under degraded inputs or apply per-view enhancement methods that introduce cross-view inconsistencies. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{NOVA-GS}, a unified noise-aware framework for low-light 3D Gaussian Splatting that subsumes enhancement, denoising, and geometry optimization within a single process. Our method leverages VGGT-based feed-forward estimation to obtain robust camera poses and geometry directly from degraded inputs, eliminating the need for SfM. Building on this initialization, NOVA-GS integrates three coupled components: a structure-aware enhancement module for exposure correction, a self-supervised denoising module with blind-spot masking for pseudo-supervision, and a consistency-driven Gaussian Splatting optimization enforcing cross-view geometric coherence. We further introduce a noise-guided spherical harmonic regularization to suppress view-dependent artifacts in noisy regions. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world low-light datasets demonstrate improved geometric fidelity, color consistency, and robustness without requiring paired supervision or well-lit references. https://shaurya2524.github.io/nova-gs/

Fri 11 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Capturing 3D scenes in very dark places is hard because camera images have a lot of noise and inconsistent lighting, which makes 3D reconstruction unstable. The authors created NOVA-GS, a method that fixes lighting and removes noise all at once while building a 3D scene from the dark images without needing a clear reference. Their approach uses smart steps to estimate camera positions, improve image quality, and ensure consistency between different views, resulting in better and more reliable 3D models in low light conditions.
Open 2609.12682v1

Room boundaries and object locations from monocular video improve 3D scene graphs

ProClosure: Hierarchical Room-Object Assignment using Progressive Boundary Closure from Monocular Video

Abstract: A 3D scene graph groups objects into rooms. When a robot is asked to fetch an object from the kitchen, that grouping is what tells it where to look. An object recorded in the wrong room is not retrievable by a query naming the correct room. We introduce Progressive Boundary Closure, which recovers room layer from a monocular RGB video. A SLAM front end and an open-vocabulary segmenter supply a structural point cloud, camera trajectory and object tracks. The cloud is rasterised into a top-down map, rooms are recovered from it, and each object takes the room holding most of its extent. The difficulty lies in the map itself. Walls are recorded only where the camera looked, so a gap in the boundary may be a doorway or a stretch of wall that was never observed; nothing distinguishes the two. Prior methods treat both as passages, merging rooms that should remain separate. We observe that both require the same treatment: a room should not extend across either, so both are closed and need not be distinguished. Such an opening closes under a small amount of boundary growth, and few sightlines cross it, so points in different rooms rarely see one another. We use the first to recover rooms and the second to assign objects to them. Rooms are obtained by Progressively thickening the boundary inward and freezing each free-space region once it becomes enclosed, so every opening seals at its own scale rather than at a radius fixed in advance. Camera poses are used as seeds, which removes the sampling heuristic and makes the segmentation deterministic. Over 10 floors of 6 HM3D-Semantics scenes, scored against HOV-SG on identical top-down maps, we recover 74 rooms for 72 annotated regions (HOV-SG: 44), raising room F_1 from 0.741 to 0.890 at IoU 0.25 at some cost in precision, and object-to-room ARI from 0.488 to 0.696 (p=0.002, ahead on every floor).

Fri 11 SeptRobotics
The gist
Robots need to know which room an object belongs to in order to find it. The authors present a method that looks at video from a single camera to figure out room boundaries and assign objects to the correct rooms. They handle tricky gaps in the map that could either be doorways or unseen walls by gradually closing boundaries until rooms are enclosed. This method works better than previous ones, identifying more rooms accurately and placing objects in the right rooms more reliably.
Open 2609.12614v1

Real-time model predicts any relations from images and text inputs

RelateAnything: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Relation Prediction From Any Inputs

Abstract: Open-vocabulary detection accepts any class list at inference, and promptable segmentation returns regions without class names: the taxonomy has left the model and become an input. Relation prediction has not. Scene-graph models are still trained and evaluated on the 50 or 56 predicates of one annotation style, their relation head conditioned on object labels and so tied to one detector. Three obstacles explain this, none primarily modelling: no relation corpus is both free-text and verified, a label-conditioned architecture cannot accept a vocabulary it was not trained on, and the standard metric rewards agreement with the training corpus, so a larger vocabulary scores as a regression. We present RelateAnything, a 53M-parameter model taking an image and regions from any source and returning scored relations over a predicate vocabulary supplied at inference as strings. Object labels are never an input, so the region source can change without retraining, and the vocabulary is a bank of text embeddings, not a learned classifier. It runs at 20 ms/frame. Training over 19,103 predicates requires positive-unlabeled supervision and a text encoder that separates antonyms, which contrastive encoders embed at cosine 0.95. To supply the supervision we build RA-4M, 474k images and 4.3M relations over 10,102 free-text predicates, generated against numbered box markers and geometrically verified. To measure it we build OV-SGG-Bench, six axes scored across datasets that the priors standard recall rewards cannot satisfy. On three cross-dataset benchmarks and a fourth zero-shot, RelateAnything has 2.3-3.5x the mean recall of the strongest open-vocabulary method of comparable scale, margins that survive a real detector, and leads a 3B-VLM scene-graph model on both metrics at under 2% of its parameters. In-domain measurement overstates transfer gains ~5x. Model, corpus and benchmark are public.

Fri 11 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Most current AI models that understand relationships in images rely on a fixed set of relationship words they were trained with, limiting their ability to work with new or different vocabularies. The authors created RelateAnything, a model that can predict relationships between objects in images using any list of relationship words given at runtime, without needing retraining. It works fast and on regions of an image from any detection method. To train and evaluate it, the authors also built a large dataset of varied relationships expressed in free text and a new benchmark that tests how well these models transfer to different kinds of data. This approach improves accuracy and flexibility in detecting relationships.
Open 2609.12552v1

Efficient tuning method improves 3D scene understanding in point clouds

Partition-Invariant Tuning for 3D Scene Understanding

Abstract: Scene-level point cloud understanding remains challenging due to diverse geometries and spatial layouts. While pre-trained 3D point cloud foundation models (PFMs) offer strong transferability, full fine-tuning (FFT) incurs substantial computational and storage costs. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) provides a promising alternative, but existing PEFT methods largely focus on object-level point clouds and overlook serialization-induced partition variations in large-scale scenes. To address this issue, we propose PointPiT, a partition-invariant tuning framework for scene-level point clouds. Specifically, a Scene-aware Structural Adapter (SSA) integrates local geometric patterns with global scene context to mitigate partition-induced representation shifts. Moreover, Gradient Subspace Optimization (GSO) selects informative and partition-stable update directions, suppressing partition-dependent variations during optimization. Extensive experiments across multiple scene-level benchmarks demonstrate that PointPiT achieves competitive or even superior performance to full fine-tuning with less than 1% of backbone's parameters, while achieving consistent state-of-the-art performance among representative PEFT methods.

Fri 11 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Understanding 3D scenes from point clouds is hard because scenes can be big and complex. The usual way to adjust models for new scenes takes a lot of computer power and memory. The authors designed a new method called PointPiT that makes this adjustment smarter and more efficient by focusing on stable parts of the scene and ignoring confusing differences caused by how the data is split up. This lets models learn well from big scenes using very few changes, matching or beating more costly methods.
Open 2609.12473v1

Frozen model combination improves 3D segmentation by keeping multiple labels

Beyond Argmax: A Mechanistic Study of Semantic Retention in Frozen Foundation-Model Composition for Generalized Few-Shot 3D Segmentation

Abstract: Classical classifier-combination work distinguishes score-level fusion from hard decision-level voting. We revisit this distinction where independently pretrained, frozen foundation models are composed at inference time for generalized few-shot 3D segmentation. We ask: how much useful semantic information is lost when heterogeneous sources are collapsed to a single class before they can interact? We answer with a same-input semantic-retention intervention. Dense RegionPLC and sparse cross-view SAM3 evidence, model weights, masks, geometry, vocabularies, and fusion rules are frozen; only the number of semantic alternatives retained before interaction is varied via a matched top-k ladder. On 156 held-out ScanNet200 scenes, top-1 reaches 28.47 harmonic-mean (HM) IoU while full distribution fusion reaches 34.87 HM (+6.40, 95% CI [+5.24,+7.64]). The pattern replicates on 50 ScanNet++ scenes: 23.02 vs. 26.50 HM (+3.48, 95% CI [+1.64,+5.93]). The conclusion is robust: full-distribution HM is stable across sparse-source weights 0.3--0.7; alternative operators (max, geometric pooling) also outperform top-1; and a GroundingDINO--SAM2.1 source-replacement diagnostic shows monotonic HM increase from 14.77 to 18.75 with full retention. Calibration diagnostics reveal opposite miscalibration of the two sources, yet correcting calibration does not eliminate the retention advantage. Across datasets and source stacks, most information is recovered by retaining a compact set of plausible alternatives. The contribution is a controlled diagnosis of premature semantic collapse as a repeatable information bottleneck in heterogeneous frozen-model composition.

Thu 10 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
This paper looks at how combining different pre-trained AI models at once, without changing them, can help computers better recognize objects in 3D scenes even with very few examples. The authors show that keeping multiple possible guesses (instead of just picking the single best guess) from different models preserves more useful information. By testing on 3D indoor scene datasets, they found this approach gives more accurate segmentations than just using the top guess from each model. Their results suggest that combining detailed semantic information before making decisions avoids losing important clues.
Open 2609.12099v1

Recursive code world models build complex 3d scenes from images

Recursive Code World Models: Building Complex Worlds through Recursive Scene Programs

Abstract: Code world models represent worlds as executable programs, but this representation alone does not determine how to construct a complex world. We introduce Recursive Code World Models (RCWM), a framework for reconstructing complex 3D worlds in code from a single reference image. RCWM couples a Recursive Scene Program (RSP) representation with a construction solver that recursively calls itself. An RSP represents the executable world as compositional scene code, while each solver call follows the same complete process: establish the whole, recursively reconstruct unresolved parts, and revisit the whole to refine their composition. This global-local-global recursion gives fine-scale structures their own perception-and-editing loops while preserving scene-wide geometry and relationships. Reference-aligned views propagate a shared camera projection across levels, while parent revisitation addresses boundaries, spatial relations, and shared errors that emerge after local refinement. A vision-language coding agent directly compares reference images with scene renders to guide refinement, recursive descent, and return. Across complex scenes, RCWM outperforms prior code-based image-to-scene reconstruction methods. Ablation studies further support the benefits of recursive construction and suggest that deeper calls can improve finer-scale reconstruction. RCWM provides a recursive construction principle for building complex executable worlds from visual evidence.

Thu 10 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Making detailed 3D worlds from a single picture is hard because scenes have many parts connected in complex ways. The authors introduce Recursive Code World Models, a method that breaks down a scene into smaller parts using a program that calls itself to build and refine the scene step by step. This approach helps create more accurate 3D worlds by repeatedly checking and fixing details while keeping the whole scene consistent. Their method improves over previous ones that turn images into 3D scenes using code.
Open 2609.11499v1

FreeFlow transformer improves optical flow accuracy without bias

FreeFlow: A Bias-free Hierarchical Transformer for Optical Flow Estimation

Abstract: Optical flow methods typically rely on task-specific inductive biases, such as correlation volumes, feature warping, and iterative refinement, among others, to reach high accuracy. While effective, such biases constrain the model to predefined heuristics, which can limit its expressivity and lead to more complex pipelines and additional computational cost. We present FreeFlow, a hierarchical transformer built without any flow-specific components, using instead a single feed-forward encoder--decoder. FreeFlow combines three attention variants: window attention for local processing, shifted-window attention for cross-window information exchange, and a global attention operating at a reduced resolution. The resulting architecture scales naturally with model capacity, enabling a consistent accuracy gain from small to large variants. Despite the absence of standard inductive biases, FreeFlow achieves state-of-the-art results on major benchmarks, including Sintel (0.68/1.48 EPE on Clean/Final), KITTI-2015 (3.23 Fl-all), and Spring (3.192 1px), while remaining memory efficient at 1080p inference.

Thu 10 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Optical flow measures how things move between two images, useful for things like video editing or self-driving cars. Most methods use specific rules to do this accurately, which can make them complicated and limited. The authors created FreeFlow, a model that doesn't rely on these rules but uses a special kind of neural network called a transformer to learn movement directly. Despite ignoring traditional methods, FreeFlow matches or beats top results on popular tests and works efficiently on high-resolution images.
Open 2609.11486v1

Hologram quality improved by new wavefront shaped gaussian method

Hologram Representation via Quadratic Phase Gaussian Splatting

Abstract: We introduce Complex-Valued Quadratic Phase Gaussian (CVQPG), a novel hologram representation method that replaces standard 2D Gaussian representations used in 2D Gaussian Splatting with 2D quadratic phase functions. CVQPG incorporates additional learnable parameters to control the curvature of these bases. We evaluate our approach against state-of-the-art methods, exceeding the visual quality by +0.19 dB (RGB) and +0.33 dB (grayscale) on average in holographic reconstructions. Specifically, our equal parameter count evaluations show that modulating the primitive's wavefront is an effective and lightweight enhancement for hologram representations. In addition, our frequency domain analysis illustrates that CVQPG has successfully preserved the mid-to-high frequency band of natural images.

Thu 10 SeptGraphicsComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionMachine Learning
The gist
Holograms create 3D-like images by manipulating light, but making them clear and detailed is tricky. The authors developed a new way to represent holograms using special curved waves instead of flat ones, which helps keep more fine details in the image. This method, called CVQPG, improves how holograms look compared to older ways that only used flat wave shapes. Their tests show sharper and more natural hologram images while keeping the number of parameters the same. This technique keeps the middle and high image details better, which is important for clearer holography.
Open 2609.11434v1

Visual generators struggle with physical consistency during ego motion

Beyond Visual Quality: Evaluating Physical Consistency under Ego-Motion with EgoGenEval

Abstract: Recent visual generators produce high-fidelity images yet often violate physical consistency under ego-motion, limiting their use for spatial reasoning and embodied planning. Existing benchmarks largely focus on isolated images or single-step quality, leaving this challenge underexplored. We introduce EgoGenEval, a geometry-grounded, pose-free benchmark designed to evaluate the physical consistency of visual generators under ego-motion, and organize our study into two parts. (1) EgoGenEval contains 1,400 cases and 2,360 target views spanning single-step and multi-step ego-motion. It separately measures Camera Motion Grounding (CMG) and Scene State Preservation (SSP), with both metrics validated against blinded human judgments. Evaluating 16 pose-free generators together with two pose-conditioned references reveals that current models struggle to execute camera motion while maintaining scene state, and that no system performs well on both axes at once. (2) To examine whether benchmark-derived data can improve these capabilities, we build EgoGen-Train from the same geometry-grounded pipeline and run controlled SFT studies. These show that pairwise supervision does not reliably improve camera-motion grounding and scene-state preservation together: even at the full training pool and the longest budget, scene preservation gains a fraction of what camera motion does. This points to the pairwise teacher-forced objective itself as the binding constraint, motivating a trajectory-centric paradigm that couples self-conditioned rollouts with explicit pose and visibility supervision.

Thu 10 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Generating clear images that stay realistic when the viewpoint changes is a tough problem. The authors created a new benchmark called EgoGenEval to test if image generators can keep scenes physically consistent when the camera moves. Their tests show most current models fail to match camera movements and keep the scene unchanged at the same time. They also explored training methods to improve this but found current approaches only help a little, pointing to the need for new techniques.
Open 2609.11172v1

Camera pose helps improve robot depth estimation from video

RIDE: Relocalization-Informed Depth Estimation with 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract: Render--match--PnP relocalization establishes correspondences between query image pixels and 3D map points for camera pose recovery, but their potential to support dense depth estimation is often overlooked. To exploit this geometric information, we present RIDE, which estimates dense metric depth from a robot's RGB stream. Given a metrically scaled 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) model, RIDE combines sparse metric depth observations derived from PnP-RANSAC inlier correspondences with the geometric prior of a pretrained video-depth model. To handle uneven and intermittent observations, it integrates global and local depth correction with temporal memory, supporting depth estimation through short observation gaps after metric scale initialization. Trained on public RGB-D videos, RIDE is evaluated on robot sequences without fine tuning. Experiments show improved depth accuracy and temporal consistency over scale-only calibration, demonstrating how localization geometry can support both pose recovery and dense robot perception.

Thu 10 SeptRobotics
The gist
Estimating how far away things are in a video is important for robots but can be tricky. The authors created a method called RIDE that uses the robot’s known camera position to help measure distances more accurately in videos. It combines information about where the camera is with clues from a trained model to guess depth, even when data is incomplete or noisy. This makes the robot’s depth perception more precise and consistent over time.
Open 2609.11079v1

Generative models judged on how well they match photo lighting

Shedding Light: A Benchmark for Evaluating Lighting Understanding in Generative Image Models

Abstract: Accurate modelling of illumination is central to realistic image synthesis and scene understanding. Yet, there is little exploration into whether image generative models are good at this task or whether physical plausibility remains a key challenge for them. Clearly, significant progress has been made in realistic image synthesis, but do models truly understand lighting in a physically accurate manner? To answer this question, this work proposes a benchmark to assess the lighting understanding and harmonisation capabilities of generative models. Our key insight is that evaluating lighting understanding for such models only requires testing how well they insert novel objects into real photographs whilst maintaining consistent illumination. To do so, we use a multi-illumination dataset with images containing simple objects serving as ``light probes'', and prompt models to inpaint the same object onto the original image, then compare the generated results against the ground-truth light probes. We then estimate the lighting direction, colour and radiance distribution from the inpainted probes, providing a quantitative measure of illumination accuracy and photometric realism. Our work establishes a scalable evaluation protocol to systematically assess how well generative models capture and reproduce real-world lighting, offering a foundation for benchmarking the photometric accuracy of any future models. All code and data are available at https://lvsn.github.io/SheddingLight/ .

Wed 9 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Realistic pictures depend a lot on correct lighting, but it’s unclear if AI models that create images really understand lighting properly. The authors developed a test to see how well these models can insert objects into photos while matching the scene’s light correctly. They used special photos with objects that show the light’s direction and color, then compared the AI’s added objects to the real ones. This lets them measure how accurately the AI models understand and reproduce real-world lighting.
Open 2609.10787v1

Transformer model generates diverse 3D hand and body shapes

MHE-Former: Multi-Hypothesis Transformers via Entropy Maximization for 3D Mesh Recovery

Abstract: Monocular 3D hand and body mesh recovery often suffers from severe occlusion and ambiguity. Traditional deterministic methods typically regress a single optimal solution, leading to overconfident predictions. In this paper, we introduce an exploration--exploitation paradigm for ambiguous mesh recovery with multi-hypothesis learning and selection. Specifically, during exploration, based on our probabilistic formulation and entropy maximization, we propose a novel multi-hypothesis method referred to as MHE-Former. It is a Transformer-based multi-hypothesis framework, ensuring high training efficiency and label friendliness while generating plausible and diverse hypotheses. During exploitation, we propose Hypothesis Selection, a context-aware process for multiple predictions. Especially leveraging VLM's powerful visual understanding and reasoning capabilities, it allows users to choose the most plausible and desired estimate with additional evidence and natural language intent. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in accuracy and diversity across multiple datasets. The user preference study further shows the practicality of our hypothesis selection process.

Wed 9 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
3D hand and body shapes are hard to guess from a single photo because of hidden parts and unclear views. The authors present a new model that creates many possible shapes instead of one, helping to cover uncertainty. They also added a way to pick the best shape based on extra information or user questions, improving accuracy and usefulness. Their model works well on several tests and lets users choose the best guess more easily.
Open 2609.10743v1

Automatic camera calibration improves image selection and parameter choice

Automatic Reproducible Camera Intrinsic Calibration

Abstract: Accurate camera intrinsic calibration is fundamental to robot perception, and the accuracy depends on the quality of the collected images. However, existing target-based calibration methods often require the practitioner to manually filter out high-quality images and to specify an appropriate radial distortion order. This paper presents a fully automatic intrinsic calibration pipeline that determines both from the collected data. We adopt an iterative rejection scheme that estimates parameters on a candidate image set and removes views whose mean residual exceeds a multiple of the median. Crucially, this process runs independently under each candidate distortion order, so that the retained image set is consistent with the residual scale of that order. Further, the distortion order is selected on held-out images, with the intrinsics and distortion fixed and only the board pose re-estimated, ensuring that an added coefficient is supported by independent observations. Finally, we integrate both steps into an interactive calibration tool that supports full-pipeline data inspection and parameter estimation. Experiments on our own camera data and five public real-world datasets show that image filtering reduces the held-out reprojection error by 25\%, the order selection further by 5\%, achieving the lowest held-out mean among four compared configurations without manual image selection. We will release the code and data to facilitate future research.

Wed 9 SeptRoboticsComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Camera calibration helps robots understand what they see by figuring out how the camera lens changes the image. Usually, people must pick good photos and guess how complex the lens distortion is. This paper presents a method that does both steps automatically by testing and rejecting bad photos and choosing the right complexity for distortion based on new data. The authors also made an interactive tool and showed that their method lowers errors significantly compared to not filtering images or choosing distortion by hand.
Open 2609.10082v1

Latent bridge matching improves albedo estimation with shading conditioning

Albedo Estimation via Latent Bridge Matching

Abstract: Recent advances in Intrinsic Image Decomposition (IID) have increasingly relied on generative models. However, progress remains limited by three key challenges: (a) insufficient physical consistency, (b) high computational cost at inference time, and (c) limited generalization capabilities. In this work, we show that latent bridge matching (LBM) effectively addresses these limitations for albedo estimation. We introduce a novel LBM-based architecture that enforces physical consistency through a pixel reconstruction loss, benefits from the inherent efficiency of LBM low-cost inference, and improves generalization across diverse datasets by incorporating a shading conditioning. In this extended version, we additionally show that conditioning the shading estimator itself on the predicted albedo further improves reconstruction fidelity, and we benchmark our best model against stateof-the-art IID methods across five real and synthetic datasets.

Wed 9 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Albedo estimation is about figuring out the true color of objects in images, separate from lighting effects. The authors propose a new method called latent bridge matching (LBM) to improve this estimation by making the results more physically consistent, faster to compute, and better at handling different types of images. They enhance their method by conditioning on shading information and making shading prediction depend on estimated albedo, which helps create more accurate image reconstructions. Their approach performs well compared to other state-of-the-art methods on several datasets.
Open 2609.09884v1

Feed-forward 3D models improve image matching with new training approach

RoMa-$Ω$: What Feed-Forward 3D Models Know About Image Matching

Abstract: Learned image matching has experienced significant progress in recent years, culminating in robust and accurate matchers such as RoMa, whose robustness is often attributed to its use of frozen DINO features. In a parallel development, feed-forward reconstruction models, such as VGGT, have been trained on ever-growing datasets to accurately regress dense 3D point maps and camera poses. The distinction between matchers and feed-forward reconstruction models has become increasingly blurred with the introduction of matching losses in models such as MASt3R and VGGT-$Ω$. This raises a natural question: what do feed-forward 3D models know about image matching? In this work, we answer this question by analyzing three scenarios: (i) zero-shot matching of patch features, (ii) direct matching of 3D point predictions, and (iii) training a full matcher on top of the learned representations. We find that, despite performing poorly in zero-shot matching, especially in later layers, feed-forward reconstruction models provide strong representations for linear probing and full matching pipelines. We further show that, even without any training, their raw predictions alone enable competitive matching, albeit only under moderate viewpoint changes and modality gaps. Based on these insights, we retrain RoMa v2 by replacing its DINO backbone with VGGT-$Ω$. Our resulting model, \ours, outperforms state-of-the-art matchers on a wide range of benchmarks, e.g. +8.1 mAA compared to RoMa v2 on WxBS.

Tue 8 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Matching points between different images is important for many computer vision tasks. The authors studied whether models trained to directly predict 3D shapes and camera positions also understand how to match image details. They found that although these 3D models don't perform well at matching without extra help, their learned features are very useful when combined with additional training. Using this insight, they built a better image matcher that works well across various challenges.
Open 2609.09507v1

Deep learning improves camera location estimates for 3D reconstruction

Learning Global Camera Poses from Noisy View-Graphs for Structure from Motion

Abstract: Camera pose estimation is a key step in 3D reconstruction and view-synthesis pipelines. We present a deep, global Structure-from-Motion framework based on learned view-graph aggregation. Our method employs a permutation-equivariant, edge-conditioned graph neural network that takes noisy pairwise relative poses as input and outputs globally consistent camera extrinsics. The network is trained without ground-truth supervision, relying solely on a relative-pose consistency objective. This is followed by 3D point triangulation and robust bundle adjustment. Our approach is efficient, scalable to more than a thousand images, and robust to graph density. We evaluate our method on MegaDepth, 1DSfM, Strecha, and BlendedMVS. These experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior rotation and translation accuracy compared to deep track-centric methods while registering more images across many scenes, and competitive results compared to state-of-the-art classical pipelines, while being much faster.

Tue 8 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Estimating camera positions is vital for making 3D models from photos, but noisy data makes this tricky. The authors use a special deep learning method that looks at the relationships between many camera pairs and figures out consistent camera positions globally. They train their method without needing exact camera positions beforehand, only by checking how consistent the relative camera positions are. Their system works well even with lots of images and outperforms some existing methods in accuracy and speed.
Open 2609.09491v1

Point4D reconstructs long-term 3D motion tracks from videos

Point4D: Long-range 4D Motion Reconstruction

Abstract: We introduce Point4D, a feed-forward model for 4D reconstruction of long-range video sequences. Point4D is able to reliably infer dense per-point 3D trajectories across multi-hundred-frame videos, unlike existing 4D methods that are limited to short input windows of at most a few dozen frames. A key innovation that enables this is our flexible 3D query-based motion decoder that decouples trajectory prediction from image-plane visibility. The predicted 3D endpoints are then directly re-queried in the next chunk without re-projection or matching. Furthermore, we show that extracting and reusing a visual descriptor from an arbitrary frame where the point is visible leads to better performance than relying solely on the source patch. Overall, Point4D achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse long-video tracking benchmarks spanning over 200 frames and largely outperforms previous feed-forward 4D method. Project page: https://point-4d.github.io

Tue 8 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Tracking how points move in 3D over a long video is hard because existing methods only handle short clips well. The authors created Point4D, a model that predicts where each point goes through hundreds of video frames without needing to check the image repeatedly. By cleverly reusing information from frames where points are visible, Point4D builds detailed 3D paths more reliably. This lets it keep track of motion across long videos better than previous quick methods.
Open 2609.09145v1

Dyad dataset links human help steps in gearbox assembly tasks

DYAD: A Multimodal Dataset of Co-Located Human Assistance

Abstract: An embodied assistant working beside a person must track task state, recognize help seeking, choose how to intervene, and produce an appropriate response. Existing procedural datasets richly describe individual execution, while interactive datasets capture remote verbal instruction or undifferentiated co-working. They do not jointly link a co-located helper's verbal and physical interventions to performer requests, task state, assistance triggers, and outcomes. We introduce DYAD (DYadic Assistance Dataset), a synchronized multimodal record of human-human assistance during gearbox assembly. Across 20 sessions, one trained helper follows a guidance-first policy while assisting HoloLens 2 wearers. DYAD links 528 task-step intervals and 611 performer requests with 851 valid assistance records spanning verbal and physical help. DYAD's annotations span the assistance process; three reference tasks evaluate selected components rather than an end-to-end system: causal step understanding, pre-onset mode anticipation, and instructor response generation. On 829 eligible mode events, the strongest four-seed RGB mean is 0.548 +/- 0.007 macro-F1; causal metadata reaches 0.624 and a privileged trigger mapping 0.915, revealing information not recovered from pre-onset RGB. DYAD's contribution is not scale, but a linked interaction structure spanning help seeking, intervention choice, execution, and outcome under egocentric and workspace sensing.

Tue 8 SeptRobotics
The gist
Helping robots or assistants need to understand when and how to help humans during tasks. The authors created DYAD, a detailed collection of videos and data from people working together on gearbox assembly, showing when a helper gave verbal or physical assistance. This dataset connects helpers' actions to what the task requires and requests from the person assembling. It can help improve future assistants by showing which help is needed and how people respond during real-time teamwork.
Open 2609.09023v1

Language guided robots retrieve objects by multiple attributes

FRAME: Factored Retrieval via Attribute Readouts for Object-Centric Scene Memory

Abstract: Language-guided robots need persistent scene memories to follow instructions, revisit objects, and resolve references to objects encountered over time. While much of language-guided scene-memory retrieval has emphasized spatial or relational references, many everyday object references specify objects by multiple persistent attributes, such as category, material, size, or surface appearance. We formalize this problem as attribute-compositional retrieval, where a fixed object-centric scene memory is queried with natural language to retrieve the object satisfying the requested attributes. To investigate this capability directly, we introduce a controlled evaluation protocol with fixed scene memories and attribute-defined targets, separating retrieval from perception and annotation ambiguities. We then propose FRAME, which turns language into query-relevant attribute weights, uses learned readouts to estimate per-attribute evidence from object embeddings, and ranks objects by aggregating this evidence according to the query. Across held-out scenes and object assets, FRAME outperforms representative scene-memory retrieval baselines while reducing post-decomposition object scoring to lightweight matrix-vector computation. These results position attribute-compositional retrieval as a complementary scene-memory capability for language-guided robots, showing that persistent object attributes can be exposed as composable evidence for accurate and efficient multi-attribute retrieval.

Tue 8 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionRobotics
The gist
Robots that understand language need ways to remember and find objects in a scene, even after some time passes. The authors identify that objects are often described by several lasting features like size, color, or material. They introduce FRAME, a method that reads out these features from stored object information and ranks objects by how well they match a spoken description. FRAME improves upon earlier methods by efficiently combining multiple attributes to find the right object.
Open 2609.08886v1

Segmentation model separates meaning and location for better masks

SeGDeP: Semantic- and Geometric-Aware Decoupled Prompts for Reasoning Segmentation

Abstract: Reasoning segmentation converts an implicit linguistic conclusion into a precise mask, requiring both semantic identification and spatial grounding. Existing MLLM-segmenter interfaces either use a special trigger or compress both signals into one context, although they receive different supervision and fail differently. This coupling obscures whether a failure arises from target interpretation or from localization. We present SeGDeP, an explicit what-where interface. A semantic prompt branch and an independent geometric projection path transform resolved MLLM states into semantic features and a DETR-predicted box, which jointly condition a SAM 3 mask decoder. Training first aligns this executable interface, then uses group reward-decoupled policy optimization (GDPO) to balance format, box-IoU, and mask-IoU feedback. SeGDeP-4B reaches 82.7 average cIoU over eight RefCOCO-family splits and 66.0/59.6 gIoU on ReasonSeg val/test while adapting only 0.38% of Qwen3-VL parameters through LoRA. Controlled stage-wise ablations, gradient diagnostics, and prompt interventions further show that the two paths develop complementary semantic and geometric specialization rather than duplicating the same evidence.

Tue 8 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Identifying the exact area that a language description refers to in images is hard because it needs understanding what something is and where it is separately. The authors created a method that handles the meaning and the location parts independently before combining them, making it easier to pinpoint the right area. Their approach improves accuracy by using separate paths for semantic meaning and geometric location to guide the image mask creation. This helps machines better interpret instructions to highlight image regions precisely.
Open 2609.08867v1

Fire3D creates interactive 3D scenes from images fast

FIRE3D: Feed-forward Interactive 3D Scene Reconstruction Within A Minute

Abstract: We present FIRE3D, a unified framework that takes a single RGB image or casual RGB video and transforms it into simulation-ready 3D scene assets for games and interactive applications in under a minute. At the core of FIRE3D is a feed-forward, end-to-end network that predicts a compositional scene representation from posed RGB-D observations estimated from the RGB capture, including the 6-DoF pose, bounding box, mesh, and texture for every object. By modeling the scene as a collection of discrete entities, FIRE3D produces amodally complete and simulation-ready environments where objects are physically decoupled and ready for interaction. Our framework requires no test-time optimization, runs orders of magnitude faster than prior interaction-ready methods, and provides object-level completeness beyond existing feed-forward 3D approaches. We demonstrate competitive or state-of-the-art results across pose accuracy, geometry completeness, and texture quality across various datasets while being orders of magnitudes faster. Project page: https://xiahongchi.github.io/Fire3D/

Tue 8 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionRobotics
The gist
Turning pictures or casual videos into 3D scenes that can be used in games and apps usually takes a long time and a lot of work. The researchers developed Fire3D, a system that quickly makes 3D models of scenes and separates objects for interaction, all in under a minute. It estimates object positions, sizes, shapes, and textures directly from images without slow adjustments afterward. This method is much faster than previous ones and produces detailed, ready-to-use 3D scenes.
Open 2609.08848v1

Egocentric video predicts where and how people will interact in 3D

From Where to How: Continuous 4D Interaction Forecasting from Egocentric Video

Abstract: Egocentric 4D interaction forecasting aims to anticipate both where future interactions will occur in 3D and how the human body will move to realize them, providing an important capability for assistive robotics and human-computer interaction. Existing methods struggle to translate semantic understanding into precise continuous 3D localization and to balance motion diversity with structural consistency in pose forecasting. More fundamentally, these tasks are often modeled separately, leaving the continuous geometric and temporal correspondence between interaction locations and body motion insufficiently captured. To address these challenges, we introduce Coherent4D, a large-scale egocentric dataset for continuous 4D interaction forecasting, comprising approximately 233K samples across three domains. Each sample pairs a sequence of future 3D interaction locations with corresponding full-body poses, aligned in time and expressed in a shared coordinate system. We also provide evaluation metrics in continuous space. Building on this formulation, we propose HIGFlow, a Hand Interaction Guided Residual Flow framework that models forecasting as a cascaded where-to-how process. HIGFlow first forecasts continuous future interaction locations by combining semantic grounding with short-horizon visual dynamics, and then uses the predicted location sequence to condition a deterministic motion anchor and residual Flow Matching for diverse yet structurally consistent full-body motion forecasting. Extensive experiments across all three domains demonstrate consistent improvements over representative baselines on both location and pose forecasting, while ablations validate the contributions of the proposed components. The project page is available at https://corrineqiu.github.io/from-where-to-how/.

Tue 8 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Predicting both where future interactions happen in 3D space and how a person's body moves to make them is a tough problem for assistive robots and smart systems. The authors created a large dataset combining future interaction locations and corresponding full-body poses from a first-person view to better study this problem together. They designed a new method that first guesses where interactions will occur and then predicts motion to match those locations, improving accuracy and naturalness. Their approach works well across different interaction types, as shown in various tests.
Open 2609.08636v1

Multiple fisheye cameras improve visual inertial pose tracking accuracy

MFVINS: Multiple Fisheye Camera-Based Visual Inertial System

Abstract: A simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) method using a monocular camera and a low-cost inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor is an effective way to fulfill a low-cost sensor configuration. Using this sensor configuration, visual-inertial system (VINS) focuses on fusing data from a camera and an IMU sensor to estimate the six degrees-of-freedom (DOF) of the sensor pose. Typically, VINS uses only a single camera as visual input, which lead to problems such as error accumulation due to occlusion, various illumination, and textureless environments. In this paper, we propose a new multiple fisheye camera-based visual-inertial system called MFVINS. We present an IMU-aided FAST feature tracker for multiple cameras that enables efficient extraction and robust matching of local features. Then, the proposed method filters out outliers caused by fisheye distortion on the normalized image plane. Subsequently, a new reprojection error with physical validity constraints is proposed for bundle adjustment using learning-based depth estimation. The proposed method is applied to various scenarios, and its effectiveness is demonstrated by comparing previous VINS methods. In particular, MFVINS is implemented in real-time process to leverage the advantages of using multiple cameras -- robustness against occlusion and textureless regions -- while reducing the computational burden.

Tue 8 SeptRoboticsComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Position tracking with one camera and an inertial sensor can struggle when things block the view or there’s little detail to see. The authors created a system called MFVINS that uses several fisheye cameras working together with an inertial sensor to track movement more accurately. They developed a special way to find matching points in the images from multiple fisheye cameras and fix distortions from the curved lenses. This helps keep track of position better even when parts of the view are blocked or look plain. They tested their method to show it runs in real-time and works better than methods using just one camera.
Open 2609.08626v1

GOLF achieves first place in hand object interaction estimation challenge

GOLF: Global Observation with Local Focus for Calibration-Aware Stereo Interaction Field Estimation

Abstract: We present GOLF, the first-place solution to the SHOW3D Interaction Field Estimation Challenge at HANDS@ECCV 2026. Given synchronized egocentric stereo views, the task is to predict a 3D vector from each of 21 hand joints to the closest point on the manipulated object. GOLF combines dense global context, locally sampled hand/object evidence, and common-frame Plücker-ray geometry. We adapt DINOv3 ViT-H+/16 with LoRA and trainable LayerNorm parameters, then jointly decode both interaction fields. Our primary model achieves an official score of 27.61 and a mean ADE of 27.96 mm on the hidden test set. An equal-weight ensemble with a complementary directly fine-tuned variant improves these results to an official score of 27.47 and a mean ADE of 27.82 mm, securing first place.

Tue 8 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Estimating how hands interact with objects in 3D space is tricky, especially when using stereo camera views from a wearable device. The authors present GOLF, a new method that combines global and local information along with special geometry to predict the closest points on objects to various hand joints. This method outperforms others in a challenge, achieving the best accuracy in locating these interaction points. The approach uses advanced vision models and geometric reasoning to improve predictions.
Open 2609.08607v1

Gaussian splat completion improves 3D object restoration from images

GSComplete: Gaussian Splat Completion with 2D Diffusion Priors

Abstract: Gaussian splats provide a fast, high-fidelity representation for 3D objects but are often constructed from incomplete input data in practice, leaving missing regions. Existing completion methods either do not preserve the original splats or require scarcely available 3D training data. We propose GSComplete, which combines 3D generation based on Score Distillation Sampling with a novel preservation loss that encourages the original splats to be preserved where they should be visible. This effectively completes the Gaussian splat object using only 2D diffusion priors while fully preserving existing splats and generating new splats only in missing regions, without occluding the input. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a new dataset of partial Gaussian splat objects and show that GSComplete achieves significantly more accurate preservation of the input than existing methods with comparable plausibility of the completed result. Our code and dataset will be made available upon acceptance.

Tue 8 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
3D objects made from tiny Gaussian shapes often have gaps when their data is incomplete. The authors introduce a way to fill in these missing parts while keeping the original visible pieces intact. They use existing 2D image knowledge to guide this process instead of needing 3D training data. Their method is tested on a new dataset and preserves the original object's details more accurately than previous ways.
Open 2609.08449v1

Event-driven method reconstructs 3D scenes from low-frame video

EdMCGS: Event-Driven Markov Chain Gaussian Splatting for Extreme-Low-Frame-Rate Dynamic Scene Reconstruction

Abstract: We present EdMCGS (Event-driven Markov chain Gaussian Splatting), an end-to-end method for reconstructing dynamic 3D scenes from extreme-low-frame-rate RGB together with an event stream, which can then be rendered at any intermediate timestamp. Methods relying solely on RGB images generate numerous artifacts due to the lack of evidence from between consecutive frames. To supply this missing evidence, we model the scene motion as an event-driven Markov chain, in which the sparse RGB frames anchor the state at their own timestamps while the events recorded within an interval drive the transition across it. Since the transition reads the events of the current interval, it remains active at inference and produces the in-between motion of the 3D Gaussians directly from the events rather than by interpolation, which sets our method apart from prior work that uses events only as training-time supervision. The state is carried by a compact set of control points, each driven by the events sampled in the neighborhood of its own image projection, and a temporal local isometry term keeps the propagated motion locally rigid. Experiments on synthetic and real-world scenes show that EdMCGS outperforms both RGB-based and event-based baselines, while rendering in real time with far fewer Gaussians than the strongest event-based baseline. We release our source code and a new dataset at https://github.com/joseclipse/EdMCGS.

Tue 8 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Capturing smooth 3D motion from just a few video frames is hard for computers because they miss what happens in between. This paper presents a new way to fill in those gaps by combining sparse video with special camera events that record quick changes. The authors use a mathematical model that directly moves 3D points using these events, creating more accurate and realistic 3D scenes at any point in time. Their method works better and faster than previous ones that only used video or events separately.
Open 2609.08332v1

LightSplat enables fast accurate 3D mapping with loop closure

LightSplat: Real-Time High-Fidelity 3D Gaussian SLAM with Loop Closure

Abstract: SLAM systems based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have recently demonstrated promising reconstruction accuracy for dense 3D scene representations. However, current 3DGS systems struggle to meet the strict demands of real-world deployments due to severe limitations in operational performance and map adaptability. To this end, we propose LightSplat, a hybrid-representation RGB-D SLAM framework. It synergizes local sparse features for robust and fast tracking with a dual-thread backend that progressively constructs dense Gaussian submaps. Crucially, we enable online loop closure through feature-accelerated 3DGS registration, refining overall map consistency through pose graph optimization. Ultimately, LightSplat achieves the online reconstruction of high-fidelity Gaussian map. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and real-world robotic platform demonstrate that our method achieves near state-of-the-art reconstruction quality and the capability to accommodate practical camera motions, maintaining an average framerate of 8 FPS. Overall, LightSplat provides an efficient and robust foundation for deploying high-fidelity 3DGS in real-world environments.

Mon 7 SeptRoboticsComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Mapping and tracking environments in 3D accurately and quickly is challenging for robots and cameras. The authors present LightSplat, a system that combines fast feature tracking with detailed 3D Gaussian representations for building maps. It can correct itself when revisiting places, making the maps more accurate overall. Tested on real robots and datasets, it balances detailed reconstruction with enough speed for real-time use.
Open 2609.07274v1

Multimodal models improve 3D spatial reasoning with hierarchical data

MV-STRIDE: Enabling MLLMs to Master Multi-View Spatial Reasoning via Hierarchical Capability Modeling

Abstract: Despite the rapid progress of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in 2D vision-language tasks, robust multi-view spatial reasoning remains a fundamental bottleneck due to the lack of structured 3D cognitive pathways in existing datasets. To address this, we introduce MV-STRIDE, a Multi-View hierarchical SpaTial Reasoning dataset with Interdependent and DEcomposed capabilitiEs. Moving beyond flat data structures, MV-STRIDE explicitly models the dependency relationships between foundational perception, scene understanding, and complex contextual reasoning, providing a coherent learning pathway aligned with human spatial cognition. We develop a systematic QA generation pipeline leveraging diverse 3D scene sources that enforces cross-view dependency constraints to prevent single-view solvability, generating multi-level spatial reasoning tasks supported by cognitively grounded chain-of-thought supervision for complex inference. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our multi-stage training framework based on our hierarchical dataset achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple spatial reasoning benchmarks, notably the multi-view oriented MMSI-Bench. Our approach enables MLLMs to maintain robust, 3D-consistent spatial reasoning across diverse viewpoints. The code and dataset are available at https://co1dspring.github.io/MV-STRIDE/.

Mon 7 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Understanding how objects relate in three dimensions from many viewpoints is hard for current AI models that combine images and language. The authors created a new dataset called MV-STRIDE that organizes spatial reasoning tasks in a step-by-step way, similar to how humans think about space. They also developed a method to train models using this dataset that helps the models solve 3D reasoning problems more reliably. Their approach outperforms previous methods at tasks requiring understanding scenes from multiple views.
Open 2609.07258v1

Text spotter combines two training methods for better reading and locating

SupGRPO: Enhancing GRPO with Matching-based Online SFT for Text Spotting

Abstract: Text spotting requires both accurate text recognition and precise spatial localization. Current specialised spotters excel at predicting tight bounding boxes in natural scenes, but falter on complex or artistic text, whereas multimodal large language models (MLLMs) possess strong recognition capabilities yet remain weak at localisation. To equip the text spotter with general and powerful recognition capabilities and to maximize its localization ability, we explore two MLLM-based fine-tuning methods: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning fine-tuning based on Group Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO). An interesting finding is that SFT is less effective than GRPO at enhancing recognition, while GRPO is less effective than SFT at enhancing detection. To compensate for each other's shortcomings, we introduce a joint training strategy, SupGRPO, which simultaneously optimizes the model using both SFT and GRPO. SupGRPO employs the specially designed reward functions and develops a matching-based online SFT applied solely to coordinate tokens. It both mitigates the reward sparsity problem of GRPO and avoids the instance order dependency problem of SFT. To evaluate particularly challenging cases, we curate ATS, a dataset for artistic text spotting. Experiments demonstrate that SupGRPO improves both text recognition and detection, and attains superior performance. Our code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/Psycho-9/SupGRPO.

Mon 7 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Reading text in pictures requires knowing what the letters are and exactly where they appear. The authors found that two popular computer training methods each help only part of the problem: one is better at recognizing characters, the other better at locating them. They invented a way to combine these two methods that improves both skills at the same time. They tested this on a set of tricky artistic text images and showed their combined method works better. Their code and new dataset will be shared online for others to use.
Open 2609.07081v1

Joint-conditioned method improves hand object interaction surface detection

Joint-Conditioned Stereo Surface Reasoning for Interaction Field Estimation

Abstract: Predicting hand--object interaction fields requires locating the nearest object-surface point for each hand joint, often from small and partially occluded image regions. We view this task as joint-conditioned surface-endpoint estimation: each joint has its own nearest endpoint, while endpoints from the same hand can draw on shared local surface evidence. This structure motivates Joint-Conditioned Stereo Surface Reasoning (JSSR). A temporal-stereo network jointly predicts 3D joints, a direct interaction field, and per-view endpoint evidence. Calibrated candidate search evaluates endpoint hypotheses using joint-specific image compatibility and cross-view correspondence. A hand-shared candidate support lets joints draw on common surface evidence, and a learned residual gate controls the geometric correction when observations are ambiguous. Our system built on this method ranked third on the SHOW3D Interaction Field Challenge leaderboard.

Mon 7 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionRobotics
The gist
Finding exactly where a hand touches an object in 3D images is hard, especially when parts are hidden. The authors treat this as guessing the exact spot on the object closest to each finger joint, while using clues shared among all fingers. They create a system called JSSR that looks at images from multiple views over time to better guess these contact points. This system also balances how much to trust the images or the geometry when things aren’t clear. Their method performed well in a competition measuring hand-object interaction estimation.
Open 2609.06955v1

Vision language models struggle with viewpoint based spatial reasoning

Contextual Observer Grounding: Evaluating Situated Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Abstract: Reasoning over language instructions in embodied tasks such as robotics often requires understanding spatial relations from a speaker's situated perspective. Humans infer such perspectives from shared environmental knowledge, activity context, and commonsense. Recent vision-language models (VLMs) appear capable of spatial reasoning, but their ability to infer a speaker's viewpoint from contextual cues and interpret situated spatial relations from that viewpoint remains unclear. We call this capability contextual observer grounding. To study this capability, we construct the Point-of-View Benchmark (POVBench), a dataset of 3D scenes and queries that disentangles Inferred, Stated, and Given forms of observer grounding in natural embodied communication. Given multi-view observations and a natural-language sentence, models must localize unseen or underspecified targets from situated spatial and contextual cues. Across state-of-the-art VLMs, localizing targets from directional language remains challenging, even when observer grounding is made explicit. We find that explicit breakdowns of observer-relative spatial reasoning improve target localization. Our project page is available at https://mimo-owl.github.io/POVBench/.

Mon 7 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputation and LanguageMachine Learning
The gist
Understanding instructions about space from another person's viewpoint is difficult for computer systems that combine images and language. The authors created a new test called POVBench to see how well these systems understand directions when the speaker's perspective is important. They found that current models still have trouble locating objects based on directional language, even when told exactly how to consider the speaker's viewpoint. Breaking down the task into smaller parts related to the observer's perspective helps improve performance.
Open 2609.06880v1