Papers for

augmented reality engineers

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.

Video world models struggle with long camera exploration over time

WorldProbe: When Video World Models Fall Apart under Long-Horizon Spatial Exploration

Abstract: Video world models generate future visual observations from camera or action inputs, with the goal of synthesizing persistent 3D worlds that can be explored across time and space. Existing benchmarks typically evaluate short interactions or rely on camera trajectories fixed before generation. The performance of video world models under long-horizon exploration with extensive camera motion remains under-explored. We introduce WorldProbe, a diagnostic benchmark that uses a goal-conditioned multimodal agent to adapt camera actions online during generation. WorldProbe comprises 164 test cases across four probing families. Across 10 state-of-the-art models, we generate more than 1,600 rollouts totaling approximately 800 minutes, with horizons up to 180 seconds. Our evaluation across four dimensions reveals both the degradation of local measures and the emergence of long-range inconsistencies. We find that recent models sustain visual and content quality for longer, while long-range memory and evolution remain weak. These results expose a gap between locally stable generation and persistent world consistency that is largely missed by existing benchmarks. Code and benchmark resources are available at https://github.com/Untitled-W/WorldProbe.

Thu 29 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Video world models try to predict what a scene will look like in the future as a camera moves around. The authors found that these models work well for short movements but have trouble when the camera explores a large area for a longer time. They created WorldProbe, a test system that checks if the models can handle long and complex camera actions. Their tests show that while recent models keep images clear, they often lose track of the bigger, long-term scene details and consistency.
Open → 2610.39721v1

WorldFlow predicts future video and 3D motion jointly with transformers

WorldFlow: Joint Video and 3D Motion Prediction via Large-Scale Pretraining

Abstract: Predicting future physical states stands as a central challenge in embodied intelligence. Existing video world models leave 3D dynamics implicit, action-based formulations remain tied to specific robot configurations, and 3D motion prediction models use flow-only supervision, providing a limited learning signal for physical dynamics. To circumvent these limitations, we introduce \method{}, a generative world model that jointly predicts future video and query-based 3D trajectories. By parameterizing 3D motion as continuous displacement tokens aligned with the video grid, a unified Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) backbone jointly denoises both modalities under a rectified-flow objective. This formulation couples explicit geometric dynamics with visual evolution, effectively unlocking the physical commonsense embedded within pretrained video models. To empirically scale and validate this unified architecture, we train \method{} on a heterogeneous mixture of 1.44 million object-level samples spanning simulated and real-world domains. We further introduce WorldFlowBench, comprising 1,678 evaluation samples from 11 data sources across simulated and real-world interactions, including spatial reasoning tasks. Across all three evaluation sets, WorldFlow achieves the lowest average displacement error (ADE) and final displacement error (FDE) among the evaluated learning-based methods. Notably, on the challenging SpatialCog set, WorldFlow achieves an ADE of 0.060 m, a 54.2\% reduction compared with the strongest external baseline. It also reduces ADE and FDE by 55.9\% and 68.5\%, respectively, compared with its flow-only variant. Project page: https://worldflow-rbs.github.io/.

Thu 29 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial IntelligenceRobotics
The gist
Predicting how objects move in the future is important for robots and AI to understand the physical world. The authors designed WorldFlow, a model that learns from both videos and 3D motion data simultaneously, using a large dataset of real and simulated examples. This approach helps the model better guess where objects will be and how they will move next by combining visual and geometric information. They tested it on various tasks and found it predicts object motions more accurately than other methods.
Open → 2610.39278v1

SpaceAct evaluates 3D reasoning and actions in complex puzzles

SpaceAct: Benchmarking 3D Spatial and Temporal Reasoning via Closed-Loop Action and Active Perception

Abstract: To solve problems in 3D space rather than merely describe images, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) need 3D spatiotemporal reasoning: reconstructing 3D geometry from occluded 2D views, anticipating physical dynamics, and executing precise, closed-loop actions. Prior studies test passive VQA on static images or symbolic planning, requiring no execution or supplying privileged coordinates while ignoring collision, statics, and timing. We introduce SpaceAct, an interactive benchmark evaluating 3D spatiotemporal reasoning via closed-loop physical action and active perception, with SAPA, a Spatiotemporal Active-Probing Agent framework. Built on interlocking bricks and mechanical puzzles, it has 108 verified instances across 36 task families in six categories, without privileged coordinates, and diagnostic modes (+plan, +state, no-camera, blind, L7 levers). In brick-bridging or aperture-threading, models rotate the camera to resolve occlusion, read in-scene rulers, output 6-DoF poses under swept-collision and statics checks, and self-correct via split-screen rollback feedback (dynamic tasks freeze time during deliberation and give five strobe frames). Across 10 frontier MLLMs on the 44 hardest instances, scores span 4.8-79.1 (seven solve at most 27.3% of 6-DoF tasks); for the top three, a reference plan (+plan) closes 44% of the gap while leaving collisions at 5.2 per episode, whereas adding exact 3D state (+state) closes 90% and cuts collisions to 0.5; for four others, +plan lifts the mean score from 10.9 to 35.3 and +state to 81.8; and 46% of failures are collision or observation loops. SpaceAct and SAPA advance evaluation to closed-loop physical interaction, showing that even with a valid plan, MLLMs remain bottlenecked by 3D visual grounding and action refinement, while offering a testbed for active multi-view exploration and explicit 3D grounding.

Wed 28 OctRoboticsArtificial Intelligence
The gist
To do tasks in 3D spaces, computers need to understand shapes, movements, and how to act based on what they see. The authors created SpaceAct, a test that uses puzzles made of bricks and mechanical parts to see how well models can look around, plan, and perform actions while avoiding mistakes like collisions. They found that even the best models struggle with understanding 3D scenes and refining actions, especially when they can't see everything clearly or have to adjust plans on the fly. This benchmark helps show where improvements are needed in teaching AI to interact with the physical world.
Open → 2610.38405v1

BudSplat improves 3D view rendering under a limited budget

BudSplat: Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting under a Rendering Budget

Abstract: Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting has recently emerged as a promising alternative to per-scene optimization, enabling fast novel view synthesis by predicting Gaussian primitives directly from input images. However, it quickly faces a bottleneck of rendering efficiency while scaling from sparse to dense multi-view inputs, which offer more geometric constraints but produce a rapidly growing set of candidate Gaussians. Existing solutions cannot reliably distinguish redundant primitives, leading to many redundant primitives from repeatedly observed regions and increased rendering cost without much gain in visual quality. We propose BudSplat, a compact feed-forward 3DGS framework that learns to keep the most valuable Gaussians under a limited primitive count. BudSplat has two novel designs. The first is a detail-aware importance score that is extracted from multi-level visual tokens, providing an explicit cue for regions where pruning is likely to harm perceptual quality. The score can be injected into voxel fusion to preserve high-value local contributors during multi-view aggregation. The second is quality-aware Gaussian pruning that selects a compact set of primitives by jointly considering rendering contribution and detail importance. The quality-aware pruning enables local quota redistribution that helps avoid over-allocating primitives to large redundant regions. Experiments on RE10K, DL3DV, and ACID show that BudSplat achieves a favorable trade-off among rendering quality and efficiency.

Wed 28 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Creating 3D images from lots of photos can get slow because computers have to handle many little pieces called Gaussians. The authors found that many pieces are often repetitive and wasteful, making rendering inefficient. They developed BudSplat, a method that smartly picks the most important pieces to keep the 3D image detailed while staying fast. This approach balances good picture quality with quicker rendering times.
Open → 2610.38278v1

Video diffusion transformers improve object matching across views and time

Repurposing Video Diffusion Transformers for Cross-View Temporal Object Correspondence

Abstract: Cross-view object correspondence identifies the same object across views. However, existing methods often rely on frame-wise matching or sequential tracking, which can propagate correspondence errors under appearance changes or occlusions. Therefore, we introduce cross-view temporal object correspondence, which requires preserving object identity across both views and time from a query mask. To address this, we propose XTrack, a unified framework which repurposes a pretrained video DiT with semantic and spatiotemporal priors for RGB-to-mask latent transport, jointly modeling cross-view matching and temporal tracking. However, naive video DiTs do not guarantee accurate cross-view grounding and often attend to semantically similar yet incorrect objects across views. Thus, we introduce focal cross-view attention alignment, hard negative conditioning, and local context crop strategies to ensure reliable grounding. Finally, beyond these architectural enhancements, we also tackle the lack of dense annotation by introducing a pseudo-label curation pipeline that converts sparse Ego-Exo4D annotations into dense supervision to enable effective video-level training. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of XTrack as a unified framework, ensuring robust temporal consistency and identity preservation.

Tue 27 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Tracking the same object in videos from different cameras and moments is tricky because objects can look different or be hidden. The authors propose a system called XTrack that uses a special type of video model to keep track of objects both across camera views and over time. They improved the model to avoid mixing up similar objects and created a way to expand limited labeled data for better training. This approach helps keep identities consistent even when objects change appearance or get partially hidden.
Open → 2610.37633v1

New method improves 3d gaussian splatting for better real-time view synthesis

Birth-Death Structural Learning for 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become a standard representation for real-time novel-view synthesis. Yet, its quality-efficiency trade-off still relies heavily on adaptive density control. Existing cloning, splitting, and pruning rules use proxy signals, such as position gradients, opacity, and image-space error. Although effective in practice, these signals do not directly answer the structural question behind density control: where should new Gaussians be allocated to reduce the multi-view reconstruction loss, and which existing primitives can be pruned with minimal penalty. To address this, we propose first-variation birth-death control for 3DGS, a principled approach that replaces heuristic structural decisions with a variational score derived from the reconstruction loss. At each structural update, we freeze the current Gaussian population, attach auxiliary mass coordinates to each primitive, and differentiate the multiview loss with respect to these coordinates. We demonstrate that this score is a coordinate of the first variation of the Splat Regression Model, giving a rigorous local descent surrogate for birth-death moves: high-score Gaussians are selected as birth sites, while low-score, low-opacity Gaussians are selected for removal. Across standard 3DGS benchmarks, integrating this score into 3DGS-MCMC yields state-of-the-art reconstruction quality and outperforms existing methods, delivering the most significant gains under tight Gaussian budgets. Ultimately, our work provides compelling evidence that gradient-based variational metrics offer a principled alternative to proxy heuristics in 3DGS.

Sun 25 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
3D Gaussian Splatting is a way to create new views of a scene quickly by using many small 3D blobs called Gaussians. The challenge is deciding where to add or remove these blobs to make the scene look good without using too many. The authors introduce a new method that uses math to directly measure how each blob affects the overall picture quality, helping to add or remove blobs more smartly. This results in better image quality, especially when the number of blobs is limited.
Open → 2610.34344v1

Memory efficient training method cuts 3D scene rendering costs

BoundedGS: Memory-Efficient High-Resolution Training for 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract: High-resolution 3D Gaussian Splatting training increases pixel and Gaussian-tile intersection counts, expanding rasterization caches that coexist with projection and gradient state at peak memory. A complete-view update aggregates gradients across the view; each region's forward and backward caches can be released after its contribution is collected. BoundedGS separates rasterization and projection backward passes and bounds the active local rasterization working set according to its measured load. Candidate-indexed projection and compact gradient storage address the view-level peaks exposed by this change, while CPU-assisted structure rebuilding and bounded image supply manage resources outside rendering. In a resolution sweep at a fixed count of about 6M Gaussians, the measured rendering working set stays within 1.073-1.077 GiB from 1K to 16K; at 11K, a warm pass takes 19.79 seconds versus 21.76 for full-frame execution. Across five native 5K outdoor scenes, full training reduces the mean rendering working set from 9.97 to 1.76 GiB (82.3%), retains similar reconstruction quality, and shortens training time from 36.7 to 33.9 minutes. Project page: https://xiaobin2001.github.io/BoundedGS-Web/

Sun 25 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Training detailed 3D scenes usually needs a lot of computer memory, especially as the images get higher resolution. The authors propose a new way to organize memory use during training, which keeps the memory demand stable even as image resolution grows. This results in much less memory needed overall, faster training times, and similar quality in the final 3D scene. Their approach cleverly breaks tasks apart and stores data more compactly to avoid big memory spikes.
Open → 2610.34233v1

Fovea-JEPA improves camera motion recognition by fixing geometric blind spots

Fovea-JEPA: Overcoming Geometric Blind Spots in V-JEPA for Camera Motion Recognition

Abstract: Camera motion recognition requires separating viewpoint changes caused by camera translation, rotation, or zoom from object motion and scene dynamics. Video-language models often rely on semantic cues and struggle with the geometric evidence needed for this task. Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures such as V-JEPA offer strong spatio-temporal representations, but our experiments suggest that they underrepresent geometric cues in some regions. Under temporal-reversal supervision, V-JEPA improves overall but degrades on several motion families, whereas a weaker geometry-oriented VGGT predictor improves across all families. We refer to these geometrically underrepresented regions as geometric blind spots and propose Fovea-JEPA to identify and address them. Using V-JEPA as the base model and VGGT as a geometry expert, we construct intervention pseudo-labels from their prediction errors to weakly supervise a blind-spot predictor. The predictor produces token-wise response maps, which are aggregated into a clip-level intervention score to guide adaptive fusion of visual and geometric features. This selective intervention introduces complementary geometric information while preserving reliable visual predictions. Experiments on CameraMotionDataset, CameraBench, and ShotBench demonstrate the effectiveness of Fovea-JEPA, with gains of 9.67, 8.67, and 24.38 percentage points over previously reported state-of-the-art baselines, respectively. Code and models will be released upon acceptance.

Sun 25 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Recognizing how a camera moves—whether it turns, zooms, or shifts—is tricky because the changes in what the camera sees can be confused with things moving in the scene. The paper shows that current AI models struggle to use geometric clues well in some parts of the images. To fix this, the authors created Fovea-JEPA, which finds these weak spots and adds geometric information from another specialized model. This combination helps better tell how the camera moves, and tests show it works much better than previous methods.
Open → 2610.34033v1

Compression-aware restoration improves 3d reconstruction from multi-view images

CompMVR: Compression-Aware Multi-View Restoration Using Diffusion Models for Geometrically Consistent 3D Reconstruction

Abstract: Real-world 3D reconstruction pipelines often rely on multi-view images degraded by lossy compression. While compression artifacts have been extensively studied in single-image or video restoration, their impact on multi-view geometry remains largely overlooked. In this work, we identify compression-induced cross-view geometric inconsistency as a critical failure mode, where view-dependent artifacts disrupt feature matching, dense correspondence, camera parameter estimation, and downstream 3D reconstruction tasks such as novel view synthesis. To address this problem, we propose CompMVR, a compression-aware multi-view diffusion restoration framework that jointly refines compressed views while preserving cross-view consistency, and construct compressed datasets for systematic evaluation. Unlike conventional restoration methods that optimize each image independently for 2D perceptual quality, CompMVR leverages learned compression priors and cross-view correspondence to recover visual details while improving geometric reliability across views. Experiments across diverse datasets, codecs, and compression levels demonstrate gains in restoration quality and downstream 3D tasks, including novel-view synthesis, camera pose estimation, and view matching. These results establish compressed multi-view restoration as a distinct problem and highlight its importance for 3D reconstruction under lossy compression. Code and data for this paper are available at https://mchaewon.github.io/CompMVR-project-page/.

Fri 23 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
3D models often rely on photos taken from many angles, but when these photos are compressed to save space, they get blurry and inconsistent across views, making 3D reconstruction harder. The authors found that common compression can cause mismatched features between photos, messing up the 3D modeling process. They created CompMVR, a method that fixes these compressed photos together by considering all views at once to keep them consistent. This improves both the image quality and the accuracy of 3D reconstructions built from those photos.
Open → 2610.32800v1

Hierarchical pose graphs improve 3D reconstruction from long videos

HiP3R: Hierarchical Pose Graphs for Long-Horizon 3D Reconstruction

Abstract: Feed-forward models accurately estimate camera motion and 3D geometry from short video windows. However, computational and memory costs prevent direct inference on sequences containing thousands of frames. Long videos must therefore be processed as overlapping chunks. This division produces independent local reconstructions with inconsistent coordinate frames and duplicate estimates of shared cameras. Achieving global consistency requires propagating constraints from adjacent overlaps and distant revisits across the sequence. This requirement naturally motivates pose graph optimization. However, the choice of graph level creates a trade-off. Chunk-level graphs efficiently resolve scale drift and close large loops. Yet, their rigid transformations cannot correct internal errors or conflicting frame predictions. Conversely, frame-level optimization offers local flexibility, but scaling it globally is computationally expensive and can break metric scale. HiP3R resolves this trade-off using a hierarchical pose graph. HiP3R first optimizes a robust chunk-level $\mathrm{Sim}(3)$ graph to establish the global layout and scale. It then holds this layout fixed and estimates one shared $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ camera per frame, turning overlapping window predictions into a single trajectory. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of HiP3R in improving camera trajectories and 3D reconstruction. Our method applies to both chunk-based and streaming backends without additional training or fine-tuning. The codes are available at https://kkakkkka.github.io/HiP3R.

Thu 22 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
It is hard to accurately stitch together thousands of frames from a long video into a single 3D scene because of inconsistent local maps and duplicated camera positions. The authors created HiP3R, which solves this by first arranging video chunks to fix overall scale and layout, then refining each camera frame within this global map. This approach balances efficiency and detail, improving camera paths and 3D models without needing extra training. It works for different video processing methods and has been tested on multiple benchmarks.
Open → 2610.31635v1

Geometry regularization improves depth accuracy in neural radiance fields

Geometry Regularization for Vanilla NeRF via Self-Supervised Cross-Ray Consistency

Abstract: Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) achieve high-quality novel-view synthesis by representing a scene as a continuous volumetric radiance field. However, the geometry encoded by the density field of vanilla NeRF can be noisy and inaccurate, since different combinations of shape and radiance may explain the same input images. To reduce this ambiguity, we augment vanilla NeRF with a geometry-optimization branch based on self-supervised cross-ray consistency. Specifically, this branch samples candidate surface points from the density field, generates virtual rays that intersect at each point from different directions, and renders their appearance using the NeRF network. Based on the visibility-weighted color consistency across these rays, we constrain the implicit geometry. We further regularize the implicit geometry by penalizing opacity at candidates with inconsistent appearance predictions and encouraging local normal smoothness. These geometric constraints are derived from the NeRF predictions and require no ground-truth depth or surface-normal supervision. Experiments on eight Replica scenes show that the proposed method reduces the mean Chamfer distance by 30.8% compared with vanilla NeRF.

Tue 20 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionGraphics
The gist
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) create 3D scenes from images but often have noisy or unclear depth details. The authors introduce a way to make the 3D shapes clearer by checking color consistency from different viewpoints without needing extra depth data. They do this by creating virtual rays that meet at guessed surface points and making sure the colors match well, which helps refine the shape. This method made the 3D shapes more accurate by over 30% in their tests.
Open → 2610.27776v1

TriFold encodes and generates complex 3D scenes from partial views

TriFold: Folding irregular 3D Gaussians into structured latents for 3D Scene Generation

Abstract: Recent progress in 3D generation has motivated growing interest in compact generative representations of complex 3D scenes. For native 3D Gaussian scenes, however, learning such representations remains challenging due to widely varying primitive counts, nonuniform spatial density, and differences in geometry and appearance even among spatially neighboring primitives. In this work, we introduce TriFold, a native 3D Gaussian VAE that encodes Gaussian scenes into a fixed-layout triplane latent and jointly reconstructs their geometry and appearance. The key insight is to impose structural regularity on the latent space while preserving the spatial adaptivity of the underlying Gaussians. During encoding, we use cell-wise learned queries to aggregate projected Gaussians into multiple slots per cell, reducing the information loss caused by single-feature pooling. During decoding, occupancy prediction identifies active regions, where query-based set prediction and candidate selection reconstruct local Gaussian sets with spatially varying primitive counts. Building on this representation, we train a latent flow-matching model for conditional scene-level 3DGS generation, enabling point-cloud-conditioned synthesis and single-image-conditioned amodal generation. Experiments demonstrate that TriFold achieves high-fidelity reconstruction and generation from a single image that provides only a partial observation of the scene, validating its effectiveness for native 3D Gaussian representation learning. https://fantasy-amap.github.io/TriFold

Fri 16 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Generating detailed 3D scenes is hard because the parts that make up the scene can vary a lot in number and appearance. The authors created TriFold, a method that organizes 3D scenes represented by many little Gaussian shapes into a more regular structure that still keeps important details. This helps to reconstruct complete 3D scenes from incomplete inputs like a single photo or a point cloud. Their experiments show this method can create accurate 3D scenes even when given only partial information.
Open → 2610.23050v1

Feed-forward 3D view synthesis improved by fixing frame and scale errors

Frame-Consistent Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Unposed Images

Abstract: Feed-forward Gaussian models have made novel view synthesis almost instantaneous. Feed-forward methods predict Gaussians directly, either in two stages or in a single merged pass. Using two separately trained models is attractive because each can specialize in its own objective: one for accurate pose estimation and the other for high-quality reconstruction, rather than forcing a single jointly trained network to compromise between the two. A natural instantiation pairs a frozen pose estimator, VGGT, with a frozen reconstruction backbone, TokenGS. Prior work, such as VGGT-X and 3R-GS, also adopts a two-stage design, but attributes the resulting quality degradation to noisy pose estimates and introduces learned refinement. We show that this is not the primary source of the problem. Through per-camera analysis across 107 scenes from two datasets, DL3DV and MipNeRF360, using COLMAP poses as the reference, we find that the rotation error after alignment is small (median 1.6 degrees), whereas the translation scale is offset by a large, dataset-consistent factor. Controlled ablations over 140 DL3DV scenes show that the primary obstacles are two integration failures rather than pose error: a coordinate-frame inconsistency and a translation-scale mismatch, both of which can be corrected deterministically. With these fixes, a frozen VGGT driving a frozen TokenGS achieves 22.47 PSNR, within 0.51 dB of the COLMAP reference, with no additional training, when poses are estimated from all scene views. In the sparse setting, where reconstruction uses only four context images under the standard pose-free protocol, the same pipeline matches this all-view quality, yielding a fully COLMAP-free pipeline without any refinement step.

Fri 16 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Creating new views of a 3D scene from a few pictures is usually slow or needs lots of tweaking. The authors show that using two separate models—one for figuring out camera positions and another for making the 3D image—works well if you fix two specific problems: mixing up coordinate frames and mismatched distance scales. These fixes let the two models work together without extra training and match quality obtained by more complex methods. This means it's possible to quickly create 3D views without needing precise camera info or additional refinement.
Open → 2610.23039v1

GeoState improves 3D world prediction by separating scene and view effects

GeoState: Learning View-Decoupled Geometry States for 3D World Modeling

Abstract: Recent 3D world models increasingly use features from geometry foundation models (GFMs) as predictive world states, benefiting from their rich geometric priors. However, the view dependence of these features entangles scene dynamics with camera-induced variation, making the resulting state evolution harder to predict. We propose GeoState, a view-decoupled geometry representation for predictive 3D world modeling that separates scene-state evolution from camera-dependent observation. Specifically, a scene tokenizer aggregates multi-view GFM features into a view-decoupled scene state, which a geometry decoder queries using camera rays. An autoregressive world model then predicts future scene states, while camera motion is modeled separately. The predicted states can therefore be decoded under either predicted or externally specified cameras, while retaining a single context-derived scale throughout the rollout without per-frame scale alignment. Experiments show that GeoState outperforms prior 3D world models on Waymo, supports geometrically consistent cross-view querying, and generalizes zero-shot to KITTI and nuScenes. Project page: https://hongchang-liu.github.io/GeoState-project-page/

Thu 15 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learning
The gist
Predicting how a 3D scene changes over time is difficult because camera views change what we see, mixing scene updates with viewpoint changes. The authors propose GeoState, a new way to represent 3D scenes that keeps the scene’s true changes separate from camera perspectives. This makes it easier to predict how the scene evolves and to visualize it from different angles consistently. Their method works better than previous approaches on common datasets and can be applied to new scenes without extra training.
Open → 2610.22343v1

Image token compression preserves details by focusing on semantics

Just Respect the Semantics: Image-Token Compression via Pre-LLM Semantic Variable-Resolution Tokenization and In-LLM Relevance Pruning

Abstract: Image-token compression must reduce computation without hurting the semantics. We introduce Varest, guided by semantic fungibility: tokens within a coherent semantic region can be summarized coarsely, while object boundaries and literal text require finer distinctions. Object and text localizers guide variable-resolution merging, preserving spatial coverage and finer detail at boundaries and text. Learned [REL] registers then prune visual tokens after early decoder processing. Training across budgets enables one checkpoint per backbone. Across three backbones and 13 benchmarks, Varest outperforms 15 baselines in mean performance retention at every evaluated budget, retaining 86.10-92.33% of full-token performance with only 5.56% of the original layer-averaged image-token count.

Tue 13 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learning
The gist
Compressing images for AI systems often reduces detail, which can hurt understanding of important parts. The authors found a way to keep key details like object edges and text while compressing less important regions more aggressively. They use specialized tools to identify objects and text, then smartly combine image pieces and remove unnecessary tokens. Their method keeps most of the image's meaning while greatly lowering the number of tokens AI models must process.
Open → 2610.18690v1

3D scene graph comparison improves spatial scene generation accuracy

A Differentiable 3D Scene Graph Metric via Contextual Hellinger Triplet Geometry

Abstract: 3D scene graph prediction is commonly supervised with local object and predicate classification losses. Although effective for slot-wise label prediction, this formulation does not provide a graph-level semantic distance between a predicted scene graph and its ground truth: semantically mild label errors and structurally disruptive relational errors can be treated similarly, and subject-predicate-object facts are not compared as scene-level units. We propose Contextual Hellinger Triplet Geometry, a graph-level supervision objective that measures the semantic and structural discrepancy between 3D scene graphs. Our key idea is to reinterpret the conventional classifier outputs of a 3D scene graph predictor as an aligned probabilistic scene graph field, where object and predicate predictions jointly define contextual subject-predicate-object facts. This formulation yields a differentiable metric-based training objective with an efficient factorized implementation and can be applied to existing 3D scene graph prediction architectures without modifying their network design. Experiments on 3DSSG demonstrate that our supervision improves downstream graph-conditioned 3D scene generation, while ablation studies confirm the complementary roles of the proposed graph-level terms and user studies show better graph descriptiveness, relation plausibility, and structural preservation.

Tue 13 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionMachine Learning
The gist
Comparing 3D scene graphs, which show objects and their relationships in a space, is usually done by checking each label individually but this method misses how well the whole scene fits together. The authors introduced a new way to measure how close a predicted 3D scene graph is to the real one by considering groups of related objects and their connections together. This method can be used with existing prediction systems and helps generate more accurate 3D scenes that reflect the intended relationships between objects. Tests show it improves scene reconstruction and makes the predicted scenes more meaningful and structurally sound.
Open → 2610.17705v1

Contrastive learning improves 3D visual features for complex objects

Self-Supervised Learning of Semantically Consistent Visual Features via a Simple 3D Prior

Abstract: Visual features extracted from vision models like DINOv2 or Stable Diffusion enable high quality semantic correspondence between images. However, such features exhibit documented limitations that hinder accurate correspondence estimation such as the inability to disambiguate the left from right for categories exhibiting symmetries or repeated parts. Previous attempts to improve these features rely on using supervised data such as annotated keypoint pairs or camera pose information, or make restrictive topological assumptions, such as modelling the object of interest as a 3D sphere. We introduce a new self-supervised approach that allows us to learn features for topologically complex object categories using a simple prior. Instead of relying on an expensive instance-level analysis by synthesis pipeline, our approach makes use of contrastive learning and distribution matching at the global dataset-level to learn the coarse shape and appearance of a category. Combined with additional geometric losses, this enables us to replicate the global and local statistics of visual features which match those that are extracted from real images. Quantitative results are presented across several challenging object categories, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

Mon 12 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Matching parts between images of objects can be hard when the objects have symmetrical shapes or repeated parts, like the left and right sides. The authors developed a new way to teach computers to recognize these tricky visual details without needing labeled examples or special assumptions about the shape. They use a method that compares many images together to learn common shapes and appearances across a whole group of objects. This helps the computer create visual features that work well for both overall shape and fine details, making it easier to identify corresponding parts accurately.
Open → 2610.16988v1

EgoAlign improves 3D scene understanding without text descriptions

EgoAlign: Situated 3D Understanding without Situation Descriptions

Abstract: Situated 3D Question Answering requires models to interpret a 3D scene relative to an agent's pose. Existing methods commonly convey that pose through a natural-language situation description, which may be unavailable or costly to obtain in real-world deployments. While some methods additionally incorporate numerical pose, we find that randomly shuffling the agent pose causes little performance degradation, indicating limited functional dependence on the numerical pose. To address this gap, we introduce EgoAlign, a simple 3D language model that represents a scene in an agent-centric coordinate frame, together with a dedicated egocentric alignment stage comprising four complementary tasks: object category recognition, egocentric direction prediction, metric distance estimation, and spatial relation prediction. This stage teaches the model to consistently interpret scene geometry relative to the agent's pose before task-specific fine-tuning. EgoAlign achieves the strongest performance on SQA3D, Real-3DQA, and MSQA among compared methods while remaining highly efficient. More importantly, removing textual situation descriptions yields comparable or better downstream performance, whereas shuffling EgoAlign's numerical pose causes substantial degradation. These results show that EgoAlign establishes agent-centric spatial context directly from numerical pose without requiring textual situation descriptions.

Mon 12 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Understanding a 3D scene from a first-person point of view often needs descriptions of where the person is looking or standing. The authors found that models relying on text descriptions aren't always practical and that simply using numbers for the person's position hasn't worked well. They created EgoAlign, a new method that teaches machines to understand 3D scenes based on the person's location and direction alone. This method does better at answering questions about 3D scenes without needing any text describing the situation.
Open → 2610.16176v1

Viewpoint coverage matters more than sharp images for 3d indoor scans

Sharper Frames, Worse Rooms: Viewpoint Coverage Dominates Image Quality in Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction

Abstract: Grounded spatial reasoning about indoor scenes rests on a geometric reconstruction that the multimodal system does not itself produce. Feed-forward multi-view reconstruction models operate under a fixed view budget, making frame selection a critical upstream decision. We show that under this setting the conventional preference for sharp frames can be actively harmful. Across nine handheld room scans, selecting the sharpest 16 of 200 candidate frames is the worst strategy we test, reaching 48\% room dimension error where uniform temporal sampling reaches 3\%. We trace this failure to a coupling between image quality and camera motion: sharp frames tend to occur during slow motion and therefore concentrate the selection in a narrow angular region, leaving $192^\circ$ of the room unobserved in the case we illustrate and over $300^\circ$ in the worst cells. A $2\times2$ factorial experiment that independently manipulates viewpoint spread and per-frame sharpness shows that spread has roughly three times the main effect of quality, and that blurry but well spread selections outperform sharp but clustered selections in 8 of 9 captures. The advantage also diminishes as the frame budget increases and angular coverage saturates, consistent with this mechanism. Finally, we ask whether the failure is detectable at inference: the reconstruction model's multi-view consistency score increases with reconstruction error, while a vision-language model given the same frames reports confidence unrelated to its own spatial estimation error. Under small view budgets, viewpoint coverage is a more important constraint than per-frame image quality, and neither uncertainty signal available at inference reveals this upstream failure.

Sun 11 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
When creating 3D models of indoor spaces using multiple images, it might seem best to use the sharpest photos. However, the authors found that picking sharp images often results in poor coverage of the room, causing big errors in 3D reconstruction. They showed that having photos from more varied angles, even if blurry, leads to better overall reconstruction than many sharp but similar views. This means the variety of viewpoints is more important than how clear each photo is when limited to a small number of images.
Open → 2610.15854v1

Totem builds stable 3D object memory for consistent video scenes

Totem: Object-Centric 3D Memory for World-Consistent Video Generation

Abstract: Generating coherent videos grounded in a unified underlying world remains a major challenge, particularly under large viewpoint changes, where existing methods often struggle to maintain stable representations of individual objects. To this end, we introduce Totem, an object-centric 3D memory framework for world-consistent video generation. Totem first represents each selected object as a persistent 3D memory aligned to a shared world frame, assigning it a dedicated state. Based on these memories, we design a dual-stream 3D conditioning architecture that combines object memories with scene geometry for target-view synthesis. Moreover, these object memories constrain the model's attention with 3D structural information, thereby preserving object surfaces and relative spatial layouts. Extensive experiments on world-generation and object-centric benchmarks demonstrate that Totem generates videos depicting a more object-consistent 3D world under challenging camera trajectories, while supporting versatile applications.

Sun 11 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Creating videos where objects look stable and consistent despite big camera movements is very hard. The authors present Totem, a system that remembers each object’s 3D shape and position in a shared space. Using this memory, Totem can generate videos that keep objects looking the same and in the right place even when the viewpoint changes a lot. This approach helps make more realistic and consistent synthetic videos.
Open → 2610.15807v1

Jag improves visual grounding with fast direct box prediction

Jag: Direct Box Prediction for Efficient Visual Grounding

Abstract: Visual grounding combines image--language understanding with geometric prediction, yet autoregressive multimodal models often express a box as a coordinate sequence. Sequential decoding adds computation to the multimodal processing needed for localization. Adapting these representations to box geometry offers a route to direct prediction. We present Jag, which adapts a compact pretrained multimodal model for direct continuous box prediction. A lightweight regression head reads the last valid input-token state, conditioned on the image and referring expression, and predicts all four box coordinates together. Geometric supervision jointly adapts the language backbone, visual merger, and regression head, allowing localization losses to shape both the multimodal representations and the coordinate mapping. Inference retains image--language processing and returns the box in one forward pass, without coordinate generation or text parsing. Across benchmarks, Jag consistently improves grounding accuracy over its base model across the observed target sizes and expression groups. Component ablation show that jointly adapting the representations and head substantially improves accuracy over training the head alone. Against existing specialized grounding models, it achieves competitive accuracy with lower single-request latency and GPU memory use. These results show how supervision tailored to the geometric answer can specialize a compact pretrained multimodal model for accurate grounding and efficient direct prediction. Project page: https://xyzzzh.github.io/Jag/

Fri 9 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Finding a specific object in a picture based on a description can be slow if computers guess box corners one by one. The authors show how their method, called Jag, predicts all box corners at once using a trained model, making the process faster and more accurate. Jag improves the model’s understanding of both the language and the image by training them together with the box prediction. This lets systems find objects precisely in one step, saving time and computing power.
Open → 2610.13239v1

Vision models adaptively pick layers for better visual reasoning

Mixture of Layers: Dynamic Layer Routing for Visual Reasoning

Abstract: Pre-trained vision encoders contain layer-wise visual representations that differ in spatial granularity, semantic abstraction, and sensitivity to local details. However, most Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) rely on only the final or penultimate vision encoder representations or fixed aggregation rules, making visual abstraction largely query-agnostic and limiting access to fine-grained cues such as small objects, spatial details, text, and subtle visual attributes. In this work, we propose Mixture of Layers (MoL), an instruction-conditioned layer routing approach at the visual patch level that dynamically aggregates query-relevant latent representations from intermediate vision encoder layers. Given a text query, MoL predicts routing probabilities over vision encoder layers and performs a top-k sparse aggregation over selected hidden states at either the image level, patch level, or through a hybrid routing mechanism. In doing so, MoL enables query-adaptive access to layer-specific visual features for fine-grained visual reasoning. Our experiments across 7 fine-grained visual reasoning tasks demonstrate substantial performance improvements, especially across fine-grained visual grounding and understanding tasks such as +18.9% improvement on V* in overall accuracy, +4.5% on HRBench4K, and +16.3% on CharXiv compared to the baseline MLLMs, without resorting to multi-resolution inputs, simple interleaving of multiple vision encoders, or increasing the number of patch tokens. We study vision encoders' receptive field scales across different layers and their sampling behaviors to provide an in-depth analysis of why layer-wise sampling is helpful, demonstrating that conditional visual representations are a key step towards better visual perception and reasoning in MLLMs. Our project page is available at https://wjdghks950.github.io/mol.github.io/.

Wed 7 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Many AI systems for understanding images rely on only the last parts of their visual processing, missing details like small objects or text. The authors created a method called Mixture of Layers (MoL) that lets these systems pick which parts of the visual processing to use depending on the question asked. This approach helps the AI focus on the right details to answer visual questions more accurately. Tests showed MoL improved performance a lot on tasks needing fine visual details without extra inputs or larger data. The work suggests smartly choosing visual information inside AI systems is key to better seeing and reasoning.
Open → 2610.09440v1

Vision language models struggle to measure object rotation accurately

Rotated, but How Far? Diagnosing and Improving Object-Rotation Reasoning in VLMs

Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) can detect that an object has rotated across views, but cannot reliably tell by how much. We introduce OR-Bench, a fine-grained benchmark for object-rotation reasoning with eight tasks covering rotation detection, rotation magnitude estimation, and multi-view rotation reasoning. Across 12 VLMs, the gap is stark: the strongest models approach 100% accuracy on detection, yet even coarse magnitude estimation is near chance. When asked for exact angles, models place 91.8--100% of their predictions on just $0^\circ$, $90^\circ$, and $180^\circ$, a failure we term canonical-angle collapse. This collapse persists even without visual input. Representation probing shows that missing information is only part of the explanation. Although rotation information becomes less recoverable at finer granularity, substantial coarse-grained information remains, and a simple linear probe outperforms the models' generated answers. This suggests that VLMs underuse rotation information they already encode. We therefore propose RotationCue, a lightweight decoder that recovers coarse rotation information from the VLM's own frozen representations and feeds it back to the model as intermediate textual context. Across three VLMs, RotationCue improves every model--task combination on OR-Bench, raising macro-average accuracy by 7.9--12.6 points while preserving general capabilities.

Mon 5 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Some AI models that look at pictures and understand descriptions can tell if an object has been rotated but can't say by how much. The authors created tests that check how well these models understand different angles of rotation. They found that models often guess only a few common angles like 0°, 90°, or 180°, missing fine details. The researchers also discovered that the needed rotation information is present in the models but not used well. They designed a new method called RotationCue that helps models better use this information and improves their rotation angle guesses.
Open → 2610.05715v1

Lollypop verifies camera and motion capture alignment with high precision

Lollypop: Camera-to-Motion-Capture Calibration Verification with a Reference Target

Abstract: Camera-to-motion-capture (mocap) calibration is essential for using mocap as ground truth in robotics, AR/VR, and other computer vision tasks. However, the calibration can drift after deployment, while calibration residuals and visual inspection provide limited independent verification. We present Lollypop, a fiducial-mocap reference target for independent calibration verification. The target couples an ArUco fiducial with a mocap marker constellation so the visual center and tracked centroid represent the same physical point. Given a candidate calibration, verification projects the mocap point into the image and measures its disagreement with the detected fiducial center. Experiments show sub-pixel nominal error, sensitivity to controlled extrinsic perturbations, and increasing error during an illustrative mixed-handling sequence.

Sat 3 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
When using motion capture cameras and regular cameras together, it's important to make sure they stay perfectly aligned. The authors created Lollypop, a special marker that can be seen both by motion capture sensors and regular cameras at the same physical point. This helps check whether the two systems are still properly calibrated by comparing where the motion capture system says the point is versus where the camera sees it. Their tests show very small errors and can detect when the systems become misaligned over time.
Open → 2610.04785v1

PhysMamba simulates articulated bodies faster with learned models

PhysMamba: Selective State Space Models as Learned Articulated Body Simulators

Abstract: We introduce the first learned articulated body simulator based on a selective state space model (SSM), called PhysMamba. PhysMamba predicts next-frame full-body state from position, rotation, and joint-action history, without velocity inputs. We compare four architectures under partial- and full-observation inputs and three training protocols. The from-scratch rollout training protocol gives Mamba2 strong short- and mid-horizon accuracy under partial observation (s10 = 43 mm, 2/50 diverged), while the two-stage teacher-based rollout protocol stabilizes GRU but fails for Mamba2. With CUDA graph compilation, Mamba2 reaches 0.107 ms per frame (9,334 FPS) on an H100 GPU, within 1.1$\times$ of GRU's un-compiled throughput, adding under 1% latency to a 30 Hz HMR pipeline and enabling integration as a differentiable physics module for video-based mesh recovery.

Fri 2 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Simulating how articulated bodies move is important but can be slow or require complex inputs. The authors developed PhysMamba, a system that predicts full-body movements from positions and joint actions without needing velocity data. They tested different training methods and found one that gives good accuracy while running very fast on powerful GPUs. This could help improve video-based body tracking by providing a fast, differentiable physics model.
Open → 2610.04014v1

TerraVis measures real-world visual errors in AI image generation

TerraVis: Towards Evaluation of World-Grounded Visual Consistency in Text-to-Image Generation via MLLM Workflows

Abstract: Recent text-to-image models have made substantial progress in photorealism, aesthetics, and text-image alignment. Yet visually appealing images can still violate real-world plausibility, exhibiting malformed object structures, impossible anatomy, physically implausible interactions, or inconsistent spatial relationships. Such failures are not well captured by existing fidelity, aesthetics, preference, or alignment metrics. To address this gap, we introduce TerraVis, a framework for evaluating world-grounded visual consistency in generated images. TerraVis defines a structured taxonomy of world-consistency violations spanning object-, interaction-, and scene-level failures, and employs a multi-stage evaluation framework to identify and quantify them. Given an image, TerraVis first uses an MLLM to assess its eligibility for evaluation, then detects violations across 18 taxonomy-defined types and classifies them as minor or major to derive an overall world-consistency score. Across diverse open-source and proprietary text-to-image models on two widely used benchmarks, TerraVis achieves the strongest correlation with human judgments of world consistency among existing metrics. Our benchmark results further show that models that achieve strong performance on conventional metrics can still exhibit substantial world-consistency failures. These findings highlight world consistency as a complementary evaluation dimension and demonstrate that TerraVis enables systematic quantification, diagnosis, and comparison of such failures. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ShyFoo/TerraVis.

Fri 2 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Text-to-image AI can create beautiful pictures, but sometimes these pictures include impossible scenes or objects that don’t make sense in the real world. The authors developed TerraVis, a new way to check if AI-generated images follow real-world rules about how objects look and interact. TerraVis uses a detailed checklist and a large AI model to find and score these errors, helping to understand which image generators create more realistic scenes. They showed that TerraVis matches human opinions better than older methods and exposes problems that other scores miss.
Open → 2610.02959v1

Uncertainty improves sparse-view 3D Gaussian rendering quality and compactness

UGOD: Uncertainty-Guided Opacity and Dropout for Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract: Sparse-view 3D Gaussian Splatting is prone to overfitting because limited observations leave many Gaussian primitives weakly constrained, yet their contributions are still accumulated through alpha blending. Without uncertainty estimation, the renderer cannot distinguish unreliable primitives from well-constrained ones, allowing their erroneous contributions to corrupt novel-view synthesis. We introduce UGOD, an uncertainty-guided framework that estimates a view-dependent uncertainty score for each Gaussian and uses it to regulate its rendering contribution. A lightweight uncertainty head conditioned on Gaussian attributes and viewing direction predicts this score, which then drives a differentiable opacity-modulation mechanism that attenuates high-uncertainty primitives before compositing. During training, a detached soft-dropout branch applies an uncertainty-controlled continuous keep mask to discourage the model from relying on poorly constrained Gaussians and thereby reduce overfitting. Crucially, detaching the uncertainty score prevents gradients from this stochastic regulariser from biasing or collapsing the uncertainty prediction. Experiments on Mip-NeRF~360 and LLFF show that UGOD improves sparse-view novel-view synthesis while producing more compact Gaussian representations than the compared methods. These results demonstrate that Gaussian uncertainty provides an effective rendering-time control for sparse-view reconstruction.

Wed 30 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Creating 3D images from few pictures can lead to mistakes because some parts are not well-defined but still contribute to the final image. The authors show a new way to estimate how confident the system is about each part, then reduce the influence of uncertain parts so they don’t mess up the picture. They also use a dropout technique that teaches the system to rely less on unclear parts during training. This approach leads to clearer 3D images and fewer, more meaningful parts in the model.
Open → 2609.39089v1

Future-informed method improves vision-language navigation success rates

FINE: Future-Informed Navigation Encoding for Data-Efficient Vision-Language Navigation

Abstract: Adapting vision-language navigation (VLN) policies to new environments is expensive because every additional route and instruction requires an embodied demonstration. Yet standard observation-to-action training uses only a small fraction of the information already contained in each trajectory. In particular, future observations reveal the instruction-relevant landmarks that the agent will encounter, including what they look like and how they are arranged in 3D. We introduce FINE, a Future-Informed Navigation Encoding framework that extracts this latent supervision from existing demonstrations. FINE equips a VLN backbone with two complementary auxiliary representations. First, explicit landmark tokens follow the ordered landmarks specified by the instruction and are trained to predict future landmark regions in both semantic 2D patch-feature space and viewpoint-dependent 3D geometric feature space. Second, an implicit future token learns to distinguish the landmark state that is actually reached from plausible same-scene counterfactual futures generated by a video world model. On R2R-CE and RxR-CE val-unseen, FINE improves InternVLA-N1 by 2.6 and 4.5 success-rate points, respectively, at full training data. More importantly, as demonstrations become limited, the benefit grows: at a 70% demonstration budget, FINE improves success rate by 6.8 points, recovering roughly one-third of the performance lost by reducing the training demonstrations. Project page is available at https://finevln.github.io/.

Sat 26 SeptRoboticsComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Teaching robots to follow spoken directions in new places is expensive because they need many examples to learn well. The authors created a method called FINE that helps the robot understand which landmarks it will see ahead in the route by using information about the future from existing training data. This approach improves navigation accuracy, especially when there are fewer training examples available. As a result, the robot can learn to follow instructions more efficiently, encountering less performance loss when fewer demonstrations are provided.
Open → 2609.32855v1

WorldFlow improves visual reasoning about hidden scene parts

Seeing Parts, Reasoning about Worlds: Visual Inference under Partial Observation

Abstract: World modeling under partial observation requires reasoning about the complete worlds that remain compatible with limited visual evidence. Occluded objects and unseen regions can leave several world states possible; additional views can exclude alternatives and strengthen the conclusions supported by the observations. We introduce WorldScope to study this process through possible-world semantics, evidence-grounded data, and learned visual representations. WorldScope-1.2M provides 1.2 million English question-answer pairs spanning eight world properties, ten task interfaces, and three observation protocols. Its answers encode confirmed facts, supported bounds, and unresolved possibilities. Complementary supervision comprises 4,800 certified counterworld groups with equivalent base observations and different hidden object configurations and query answers. These groups provide physical witnesses of ambiguity and training-only labels for world compatibility and view-induced exclusions. We propose WorldFlow, which composes cross-view entity evidence and support-surface coverage into an image-subset evidence lattice. Counterworld compatibility and transition objectives train subset representations to reflect how new observations constrain possible worlds. A shared answer generator uses these representations to predict the strongest supported conclusion. WorldScope-Bench evaluates claim judgments and evidence-dependent conclusions as views are selected, combined, removed, or ordered. On its 5,000-question test set, WorldFlow reaches 64.34% exact accuracy, improving over the same backbone trained on QA alone by 24.88 percentage points. It retains 50.43% accuracy on the 3,000 questions from structure-disjoint scenes.

Sat 26 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Sometimes when we look at a scene, many things are hidden behind other objects, so we don't know the full picture. This paper helps computers guess what could be hidden based on partial views and helps confirm which guesses are likely or unlikely as new views come in. The authors made a large dataset called WorldScope to train and test this kind of reasoning. They also created a system called WorldFlow to combine evidence from several images and better decide what is actually there. Their system is much more accurate at answering questions about the hidden parts than previous methods.
Open → 2609.32456v1

Gaussian splatting adjusts model size to improve 3D scene quality

Gauss What You Need: Compact Gaussian Splatting Across Scene Scales

Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstructs a scene as a collection of Gaussian primitives from a set of posed photographs called the capture. The number of primitives used to represent the scene affects reconstruction quality, storage, and rendering cost. How to select this number automatically across capture scales remains unresolved: configurations effective on standard benchmarks can leave larger captures with too few Gaussians to reconstruct fine details. We observe that the surface to represent, given by the capture's extent and resolution, is known before training, whereas its content complexity becomes apparent during training, through the reconstruction quality on the training views. We introduce TangoGS, which combines capture-derived model sizing with training-based adaptation: the capture determines the scale of the model, and training feedback determines its final size within that scale. Before training, TangoGS derives a learning allowance for model growth from the capture's total pixels after discounting views that re-observe the same scene points. During training, reconstruction quality guides how many Gaussians to add and remove. On 13 standard benchmark scenes, TangoGS matches the mean PSNR of the best-performing evaluated baseline, LeGS, with $48\%$ fewer Gaussians. On eight large captures, the same configuration automatically scales to larger models when necessary, achieving the highest mean PSNR among evaluated methods: $0.54$ dB above the runner-up with $2.3\times$ as many Gaussians. Together, capture-derived learning allowances and training-quality guided density control enable a state-of-the-art quality--size compromise across scene scales without retuning.

Fri 25 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
3D Gaussian Splatting rebuilds a scene using many small shapes called Gaussians, but deciding how many to use is tricky and affects detail and speed. The authors found that the size of the area to capture a scene is known before training, while the detail level shows up only during training. They created TangoGS, a method that starts with a size guess based on the scene and then adjusts the number of Gaussians during training by checking image quality. This approach works well on both small and large scenes without needing to change settings a lot.
Open → 2609.31248v1

Adaptive texture allocation cuts storage for 4d gaussian splatting

ADATEX4D: adaptive texture capacity allocation for 4D gaussian splatting

Abstract: Textured Gaussians improve local appearance capacity, but assigning the same texture resolution to every primitive wastes storage on low-detail or weakly visible regions. We introduce AdaTex4D, an adaptive texture-capacity module for deformation-based 4D Gaussian Splatting. Each Gaussian carries packed RGBA triplanes whose two axes grow independently according to visibility normalized screen-space gradients and deformed local scales. Experiments on N3DV and PanopticSports show that AdaTex4D reduces texture storage by more than half while preserving reconstruction quality. Under fixed memory budgets, adaptive allocation also improves quality over uniform texture assignment and reduces overall model and peak memory. These results show that dynamic, anisotropic texture allocation provides a more efficient way to distribute local appearance capacity in 4D Gaussian representations.

Thu 24 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
When creating 3D scenes that change over time, some parts of the scene need detailed textures while others do not. The authors introduce a way to assign texture details unevenly, giving more detail where it matters and less where it doesn't. This method, AdaTex4D, saves a lot of memory without losing image quality. It works by looking at how visible and detailed different parts of the scene are and adjusting texture sizes accordingly.
Open → 2609.29963v1

Perception prior improves 3D scene segmentation and shape reconstruction

PePESeg3D: Perception Prior Enhances Multi-Scale Segmentation for 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract: Recent advancements in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have extended its capabilities to multi-scale segmentation. Existing methods reconstruct a scene with Gaussian primitives and learn multi-scale segmentation features separately, which leaves the geometry unaware of semantic structure and the feature learning dependent on incomplete mask supervision. To address these limitations, we present PePESeg3D, a novel framework that injects perception priors into a multi-scale 3D Gaussian segmentation pipeline. To fully exploit perception priors, we integrate them not only into contrastive feature learning but also into the upstream geometry reconstruction. Specifically, PePE Reconstruction incorporates monocular depth and mask constraints to ensure semantically coherent object structures. Building on this aligned geometry, PePE Contrastive Learning leverages dense depth-color cues and view-consistent centroid supervision to compensate for the incompleteness of multi-scale masks obtained from a 2D foundation model. Extensive experiments on the SPIn-NeRF, LERF-Mask, and NVOS benchmarks demonstrate that PePESeg3D achieves state-of-the-art performance in both multi-scale segmentation and scene reconstruction, highlighting the importance of integrating perception priors into both geometry optimization and feature learning for accurate multi-scale 3D segmentation. Our code is available at https://github.com/BeCow5X5/PePESeg3D.

Wed 23 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Segmenting 3D scenes into meaningful parts usually treats geometry and semantics separately, which limits accuracy. The authors present PePESeg3D, a new approach that uses perception knowledge like depth and object masks early in both shape reconstruction and feature learning. This leads to better alignment of 3D shapes with their semantic parts, improving segmentation at multiple scales. Their tests show PePESeg3D works better than previous methods on several benchmarks for both segmentation and 3D reconstruction.
Open → 2609.28645v1

Real to simulation framework improves policy evaluation accuracy

ReVeal: A Reconstruction-Aware Real-to-Sim Framework for VLA Policy Evaluation

Abstract: Simulation-based evaluation provides a scalable and repeatable alternative to real-world evaluation of vision-language-action (VLA) policies. However, reconstruction errors can cause simulated policy performance to diverge from real-world performance, motivating the need to assess reconstructed environments for downstream VLA policy evaluation. We present ReVeal, a real-to-sim assessment framework combining workspace reconstruction, reconstruction-level assessment, and matched closed-loop policy evaluation. Novel-View Mesh Fidelity (NVMF) and Annotated Planar Geometry Fidelity (APGF) assess observation and planar geometric fidelity, respectively. We also develop PGSR-D, a reconstruction pipeline incorporating monocular depth supervision to improve geometry where multi-view visual cues are limited. Across 8 assessment scenes, NVMF and APGF consistently distinguish the fidelity of 2DGS, PGSR, and PGSR-D. Matched evaluations of GR00T, SmolVLA, and pi0.5 across 8 humanoid manipulation tasks show consistent ordering between reconstruction fidelity and real-sim performance agreement across pipelines. Further analysis of the evaluation workspaces shows that higher fidelity is associated with stronger real-sim agreement.

Sun 20 SeptRoboticsArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Testing robots or AI systems in the real world can be tricky and expensive, so people often test them in simulations instead. But if the simulated environment doesn't closely match the real world, the test results can be misleading. The authors created a system called ReVeal that helps check how well reconstructed environments for simulation match the real workspace. They introduce new ways to measure this match and improve the accuracy of these reconstructions. This makes simulated testing more reliable for vision and action tasks.
Open → 2609.23910v1

Depth and diffusion improve 3D reconstruction from sparse images

D3GS: Depth, DINO, and RGB Diffusion Co-Guided 3D Gaussian Splatting for Sparse-View Reconstruction

Abstract: Novel view synthesis from sparse inputs remains challenging for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) due to ambiguous geometry, cross-view inconsistency, and missing details in under-constrained regions, resulting in degraded reconstruction and unstable rendering. To tackle these issues, we propose D$^{3}$GS, a Depth-DINO-Diffusion guided sparse-view Gaussian reconstruction framework that jointly enhances geometry and appearance. D$^{3}$GS first recovers a high-resolution, metric depth map via diffusion-based completion and DPT (Dense Prediction Transformer) refinement, providing robust Gaussian initialization and geometric constraints. Then, a DINO-guided view-consistent learning is introduced to augment Gaussian attributes with structural features, improving multi-view consistency. Finally, a diffusion-based Gaussian refinement module injects generative priors into an iterative optimization strategy, enhancing high-frequency geometric and appearance details within the Gaussian representation. Experiments on DTU, LLFF, and Mip-NeRF 360 show that D$^{3}$GS achieves consistent and substantial improvements over strong baselines, with ablation studies validating the effectiveness and complementary roles of each component.

Sat 19 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Creating 3D views from a small number of pictures is hard because it's tough to guess the shape and details of objects from limited information. The authors present a method called D3GS that uses depth maps, a special feature extractor called DINO, and generative diffusion models to better guess the 3D shapes and textures. Their approach helps improve consistency between different views and adds fine details to the 3D model. Tests show it works better than earlier methods for making 3D scenes from few images.
Open → 2609.22941v1

Visual SLAM improves tracking and mapping with linear HDR images

RawSLAM: Online HDR Gaussian SLAM from Linear Radiance

Abstract: Current dense visual SLAM systems rely almost exclusively on 8-bit tonemapped Low Dynamic Range (LDR) inputs, limiting their robustness in extreme lighting where shadows and highlights trigger tracking drift and mapping collapse. Conversely, existing raw and High Dynamic Range (HDR) reconstruction pipelines operate strictly offline. They depend on Structure-from-Motion preprocessing and are not suited for large inter-frame motion. We present, to the best of our knowledge, the first online Gaussian SLAM framework that tracks and maps directly on single-exposure 16-bit linear HDR imagery. Our method rests on three core components: an architecture-agnostic HDR Gaussian Splatting module featuring an MLP-free logarithmic parameterization of Gaussian color features; a Reinhard range-compressed photometric objective; and structure-guided spatial gradient weighting. Combined, these components allow our approach to outperform a direct HDR adaptation of MonoGS in both trajectory and reconstruction accuracy, while rendering natively in linear scene radiance for post-rendering processing. The same formulation runs unchanged on standard 8-bit inputs, roughly halving the MonoGS baseline error. Furthermore, our HDR Gaussian module transfers seamlessly to SplaTAM, Gaussian SLAM, and DROID-W, eliminating all tracking failures these systems suffer on challenging illumination sequences. To enable this research, we introduce RawSLAM: a dataset of 10 real-world indoor sequences featuring 16-bit RAW imagery, aligned depth, IMU measurements, and external OptiTrack poses. Code and dataset will be made publicly available soon.

Thu 17 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Many current systems for mapping and tracking in visual environments struggle under very dark or very bright lighting because they use images with limited brightness information. The authors present a system that can work directly with very detailed, high dynamic range (HDR) images that capture a wider range of brightness, making the tracking and mapping more accurate in tough lighting. Their approach uses special mathematical methods to handle color and brightness efficiently, and it can also work on regular lower-bit images. They back up their method with a new dataset of indoor scenes and show improvements over previous methods.
Open → 2609.20589v1

Real-time particle streaming enables collaborative VR fluid interaction

DELUGE: Decomposed Entropy-coded Live Unstructured Geometry Exchange for Real-time Particle Streaming

Abstract: Particle-based physics simulations, including fluids, smoke, and granular media, are fundamental to visual realism in immersive VR and AR. With the growing adoption of social VR and digital twins, demand is increasing for shared experiences in which multiple users interact with the same simulation in real time. Realizing such experiences requires low-latency streaming of large-scale particle data from a server to each client, yet existing point cloud compression methods such as G-PCC (TMC13) and Draco assume static geometric structures; when applied to dynamic particle streaming, their encoding latency exceeds the frame period, failing to meet real-time delivery requirements. We propose DELUGE, a streaming compression architecture that exploits the temporal coherence and velocity predictability inherent in physics simulation particles, achieving sub-frame-latency encoding and decoding through three complementary techniques. Evaluation on dynamic point cloud datasets demonstrates that DELUGE achieves approximately $20\times$ faster decoding than G-PCC (TMC13) and $6\times$ faster encoding than Draco. We further build end-to-end client implementations for both web browsers and Apple Vision Pro, and confirm through a within-participants perceptual quality evaluation and a two-person collaborative task study on Vision Pro that the proposed method supports real-time collaborative experiences with hand-tracked fluid interaction.

Thu 17 SeptGraphicsHuman-Computer InteractionInformation Theory
The gist
Sharing detailed simulations of fluids, smoke, or sand in virtual reality is hard because these simulations send lots of moving points that take too long to compress and share. The authors created DELUGE, a way to quickly compress and send these moving points by predicting how they move over time, speeding up both encoding and decoding. This lets multiple people interact with the same fluid-like simulation in real time, even on devices like the Apple Vision Pro. Their tests showed DELUGE is much faster than previous methods and works well for collaborative VR experiences.
Open → 2609.19750v1

Physically grounded models improve wind motion prediction on trees

Wind on Trees: Testing Physical Grounding in Dynamic 4D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract: Monocular reconstruction of wind-driven vegetation is severely underconstrained: motion along the viewing direction is largely unobservable, a moving canopy offers few reliable correspondences, and nearly the entire scene is dynamic, providing little static reference. Directly-learned deformation fields in 4D Gaussian Splatting therefore optimize photometric consistency rather than recover the motion that produced it. We replace that field with a physically parameterized deformation prior: one damped harmonic oscillator per rigid part, driven by the observed wind and integrated by differentiable RK4, supervised photometrically alone. To test whether such a prior is physically grounded rather than merely well fit, we build a controlled synthetic testbed of three procedurally generated trees spanning an order of magnitude in skeleton complexity, whose per-part natural frequency follows from its own geometry and whose damping ratio is a fixed constant, both held out of training. On it, we measure held-out views, temporal extrapolation, zero-shot transfer to unseen wind speeds, and recovery of the physical parameters themselves. The prior costs appearance fidelity on in-distribution views and extrapolates markedly better outside the training window and the training wind, while parameter recovery is far weaker than it first appears: frequency recovery survives an untrained null control on only the sparsest of the three trees, and damping is not recovered at all.

Tue 15 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Reconstructing how trees move in the wind from a single camera view is very hard because the exact motion can’t be seen clearly and the trees are always moving. The authors tested a new way to model tree motion, using physics-based rules like springs and damping to represent how parts of a tree vibrate in the wind. They showed this model predicts tree motion better when facing new wind conditions but doesn’t perfectly recover the exact physical parameters. This means the approach captures some real physical effects but is not yet fully accurate in learning all physical details.
Open → 2609.17810v1

Voxel selective splatting improves 3d object reconstruction from few images

VS-Splat: Voxel-Selective feed-forward Gaussian Splatting for end-to-end 3D object reconstruction from sparse-views

Abstract: Feed-forward Gaussian splatting models have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in reconstructing three-dimensional (3D) objects from a few two-dimensional (2D) images, even if they are unseen. As existing methods typically predict Gaussian primitives uniformly across the 3D space, most primitives are placed in non-object regions. This may hinder the representation of fine object details. This paper proposes a Voxel-Selective Gaussian Splatting model (VS-Splat), a new end-to-endfeed-forward Gaussian splatting framework that predicts many primitives only within selected voxels that are likely to belong to an object, without 3D structural supervision. To achieve this, we propose a new learnable voxel selection approach that identifies object-centric voxels only with 2D rendering supervision. Our sparse-view rendering experiments with three benchmark datasets show that proposed VS-Splat outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. We further demonstrate its effectiveness as a backbone for an existing densification method and show that anoptional extension improves its robustness to inaccurate camera pose estimates.

Fri 11 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Reconstructing 3D objects from just a few photos is hard because many 3D models waste effort representing empty space instead of the object. The authors came up with a new method called VS-Splat that focuses on likely parts of the 3D space where the object is, using only 2D images to guide the process. This approach places fewer points outside the object and captures finer details better. Their tests show VS-Splat works better than previous methods, and it can also improve other 3D reconstruction techniques and handle camera errors better.
Open → 2609.12343v1

Person centered detection improves two hand and object interaction parsing

Single-Query Person-Centric Bimanual Hand-Object Interaction Detection

Abstract: Understanding person-level bi-manual interactions requires not only detecting hands, but also identifying which two hands belong to the same person and what each hand interacts with. Existing hand--object interaction methods are mostly hand-centric: they treat each hand as an independent instance, which can lead to ambiguous ownership in multi-person scenes. We propose a person-centric formulation in which a single query predicts a structured output for one person, including the human box, body pose, hand boxes and states, and interaction targets. We introduce part-aware deformable attention to allocate attention across human, hand, and pose-specific reference regions, enabling one query to capture the full person structure. We further unify detection and interaction reasoning with a hand-to-query relationship matrix, where each hand selects its interaction target from the detected query set plus a learnable off token, directly recovering the target's box and class without separate object regression. We build a COCO-based dataset with person-centric bi-manual interaction annotations and define structured metrics for evaluating hand states and complete hand--object tuples. Experiments with a transformer-based detector show that our formulation improves person-level bi-manual interaction parsing and provides an effective unified framework for joint detection, pose estimation, and hand reasoning.

Thu 10 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Understanding how people use both their hands to interact with objects is hard because it's tricky to know which hand belongs to which person and what each hand is doing. The authors created a new approach that looks at the whole person at once, including their body, hands, and what they might be holding or touching. Their method uses a special attention system to focus on important body parts and figures out hand interactions in one step. They also made a new dataset to test this and showed their method works better for recognizing these two-handed interactions.
Open → 2609.12155v1

Model improves 3d object separation from sparse multiple images

SAMV-DUSt3R: Instance-Centric 3D Scene Decoupling from Sparse Multi-Views

Abstract: With the rising demand to decouple objects from 3D scenes, we propose SAMV-DUSt3R, an end-to-end model that injects SAM2 2D masks into MV-DUSt3R reconstruction. A Cross Flow Mask Block uses these masks to steer the network toward the target instance, jointly improving shape accuracy and achieving object-level disentanglement without multi-stage pipelines. To ensure reconstruction stability, a lightweight Spatial RankGNN selects the optimal reference view with a selection accuracy of 73.5\%. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method boosts average reconstruction precision by 11\% across various metrics compared to state-of-the-art baselines. These results reveal a strong instance-disentanglement capability and clear benefits for driving, robotics, AR/VR, and heritage digitisation.

Thu 10 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Separating objects from 3D scenes is challenging, especially when working with a few pictures taken from different angles. This paper presents a new method that uses object masks from a 2D segmentation model to guide 3D reconstruction, helping to focus on one object at a time. Their approach improves the accuracy of 3D shapes and makes it easier to distinguish individual objects in a scene. They also developed a lightweight network to pick the best viewpoint for reconstruction, leading to more stable and reliable results.
Open → 2609.11279v1

Improved 3D scene recovery from hazy images with new Gaussian splatting method

Tri-DehazeGS: Scene--Medium Decoupled Gaussian Splatting with Transmittance-Aware Optimization

Abstract: Recovering clean 3D scenes from hazy multi-view images is challenging because haze attenuates scene radiance and introduces atmospheric scattering. Recent scattering-aware Gaussian Splatting methods introduce physical haze models into reconstruction, but they often apply degradation in image space or bind medium-related variables to Gaussian primitives, which can entangle clean scene radiance with atmospheric effects. Moreover, low-transmittance regions provide weakened supervision for Gaussian optimization, causing distant or dense-haze areas to be under-reconstructed. We argue that clean reconstruction under haze requires both scene--medium disentanglement and transmittance-aware optimization rebalancing. To this end, we propose Tri-DehazeGS, a scene--medium decoupled Gaussian Splatting framework. It represents the clean scene with Gaussian primitives, models the participating medium using an independent view-shared tri-plane field, and composes hazy observations through a physical scattering model. We further introduce Medium-Decoupled Transmittance Gradient Compensation (MD-TGC), which compensates haze-suppressed gradients after medium freezing without altering forward rendering. Experiments on real and synthetic haze benchmarks show that Tri-DehazeGS improves clean novel-view reconstruction. Code is available at https://github.com/aptx46/Tri-DehazeGS.

Thu 10 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Haze in photos can make it hard to see what’s really in a 3D scene, because it blurs and dims objects. The authors developed a new technique called Tri-DehazeGS that separates the clean objects in a scene from the haze effects when reconstructing the scene in 3D. Their method models the haze separately and adjusts how the computer learns from hazy areas, helping it build clearer 3D views from multiple hazy images. Tests with real and simulated hazy pictures showed that their approach produces better clean images from new viewpoints.
Open → 2609.11223v1

Densepol dataset boosts accuracy of polarization from rgb images

DensePol: Dense-Angle Polarization Dataset for Learning-Based Polarimetric Vision

Abstract: Polarimetric vision is gaining increasing attention because it provides physical cues about scene shape, material, and reflection that are difficult to recover from RGB alone. Recent work has therefore explored predicting polarization directly from conventional RGB images; however, the fidelity of these methods strongly depends on the polarization supervision used for training. Most existing datasets rely on Division-of-Focal-Plane (DoFP) cameras with four spatially interleaved analyzer orientations, which provide limited angular redundancy and introduce interpolation and instantaneous-field-of-view errors. We introduce DensePol, a high-redundancy RGB--polarization dataset based on Division-of-Time (DoT) acquisition, capturing 180 full-resolution analyzer orientations at $1^\circ$ intervals. DensePol contains 2,018 paired RGB--polarization images with the angular measurements and fitting residuals retained. Dense angular sampling substantially improves polarization stability, reducing AoLP deviation from $13.36^\circ$ to $2.21^\circ$. We further introduce a deterministic diffusion-based RGB-to-polarization framework with cyclic AoLP representation and a local DoLP refiner. Experiments demonstrate improved polarization prediction and downstream surface-normal estimation. The dataset and code will be publicly available.

Tue 8 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Polarization in vision helps reveal shapes and materials that regular color images cannot easily show. The authors created a new dataset called DensePol that captures detailed polarization information by measuring many angles carefully. This dataset reduces errors in polarization data, helping computer programs learn to predict polarization more accurately from ordinary RGB images. They also developed a new method that uses this dataset to improve predictions and estimate surface shapes better.
Open → 2609.09359v1

Functional scene graph improves robot mapping and pose accuracy

Functional-SLAM: Interaction-Aware Mapping with Online Functional Scene Graphs

Abstract: Existing SLAM systems lack modeling of the functional relations required for fine-grained robotic interaction. Functional 3D scene graphs can represent relations between objects and interaction elements, but existing methods rely on offline reconstruction, making them inadequate for real-time interaction in real-world exploration. To address this limitation, we propose Functional-SLAM, the first framework that continuously and recursively maintains a functional scene graph as an online SLAM state. The framework combines anchor-keyframe geometry with functional-context constraints for persistent node maintenance, accumulates multi-frame evidence through temporal relations to commit stable functional edges, and supplements visual loop-closure candidates with functional topology in scenes with repetitive appearance or degraded texture. Experiments show that Functional-SLAM efficiently constructs stable functional maps online, substantially improving runtime over offline methods while maintaining highly competitive accuracy. Compared with peer SLAM systems, it further improves pose estimation accuracy through functional-topology-assisted loop closure. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Hbelief1998/Functional-SLAM-CoRL_2026.

Mon 7 SeptRobotics
The gist
Robots need to understand not just where things are but how they relate to each other to interact better. The authors developed Functional-SLAM, a system that builds and updates maps showing these functional relationships as the robot explores in real time. This helps the robot make more accurate guesses about its own location, especially in tricky environments where places look similar or textures are poor. Their approach runs faster than older methods that work only after exploring is done.
Open → 2609.07497v1