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Memory as Weights: Internalizing Long-Term History for Streaming Videos
2026-10-15 15:29:57Zhuoming Liu, Jinhong Lin, Lin Zhang, Yiwu Zhong, Yin LiAbstract
Streaming vision-language models (VLMs) must continuously integrate information from the past while remaining responsive to current observations and user queries. Existing memory mechanisms typically compress, retrieve, or cache historical observations and reintroduce them into the input context, forcing historical memory and current observations to compete for limited context. We propose MaLoW, a streaming memory framework that instead internalizes historical context into evolving lightweight parameter updates. MaLoW uses a recurrent HyperNetwork to incrementally consolidate incoming video observations into fixed-size LoRA weights, allowing historical information to be carried forward without revisiting the full video stream. In doing so, MaLoW represents history as weights, while keeping the current observation as input. To support training, we further construct MaLoW-Instruct, a large-scale streaming video dataset containing 381K question-answer pairs over 56K videos. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that MaLoW achieves strong performance on OVO-Bench, StreamingBench, and StreamArena. On the backward split of OVO-Bench, MaLoW outperforms prior memory approaches by 3.9% to 11.8% across different video backbones while incurring only modest latency overhead. Beyond streaming video understanding, MaLoW also generalizes to vision-language-action models, improving the action success rate on Simpler WidowX by 9.3%.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22070
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Where, How, and When: Query-Guided Grounding for Video Understanding
2026-10-15 07:32:57Yogesh KumarAbstract
Understanding video content requires reasoning at multiple levels of granularity, from identifying objects to interpreting their interactions and localizing when specific actions occur. This thesis studies three query-guided grounding tasks that answer where key objects are (object-level grounding), how they interact (relationship-level grounding), and when specific moments occur (moment-level grounding). For object-level grounding, we present QDETRv, a query-guided extension of the Detection Transformer for one-shot localization of unseen objects in videos, which combines query-context fusion, a memory module for temporal consistency, and unsupervised pretraining on synthetic object trajectories. We further propose the Temporal Object-Aware Vision Transformer (TOViT) for few-shot video object detection, which builds on a language-aligned open-set vision encoder and propagates high-confidence object features across frames. For relationship-level grounding, we introduce few-shot referring relationships in videos: given a (subject, predicate, object) query and a few support videos sharing the predicate, the entities are localized by optimizing a T-partite random field using a meta-learned relation network with query-conditioned translational embeddings, Global Semantic Aggregation, Local Localization Aggregation, and belief-propagation-based message passing. For moment-level grounding, we propose the Moment Alignment Transformer (MATR) for video-to-video moment retrieval, which uses dual-stage Dynamic Time Warping for pre- and post-fusion alignment, learnable queries for boundary prediction, and self-supervised pretraining with temporal augmentations; MATR also extends to text-to-video moment retrieval with performance comparable to, or better than, the state of the art. These contributions advance query-guided video understanding across spatial, relational, and temporal grounding.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21422
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ReasonUni: Reasoning-Augmented Reconstruction Advances Unified Multimodal Models
2026-10-14 18:27:53Feize Wu, Zhiyuan Yan, Yuhuan Hong, Yuwei Niu, Zongjian Li, Zheyuan Liu, Bin Lin, Jinbo Yan, Jie Qin, Xudong Mao, Limeng Qiao, Guanglu Wan, Li YuanAbstract
Image-to-text (I2T) understanding and text-to-image (T2I) generation are dual tasks in unified multimodal models (UMMs). Reconstructive post-training couples these tasks, but existing reconstruction-based methods remain perception-centric and provide limited supervision for reasoning about structure, intent, and transformation. We propose ReasonUni, a reasoning-augmented reconstructive post-training framework that extends this coupling beyond perception. Given an original image and an editing instruction, the UMM first reasons about what and how to edit and describes the target state, then generates the corresponding target image conditioned on this understanding output. To jointly optimize both modules, we introduce TreeGRPO, a tree-structured reinforcement learning method that samples multiple reasoning paths and candidate images per path, then aggregates visual rewards to update both modules under a unified objective. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate consistent gains in both understanding and generation, showing that reasoning-augmented reconstruction yields genuine mutual gains for UMMs.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20781
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CommerceGen-Studio: An End-to-End Framework for Commercial-Grade Main-Image Generation
2026-10-14 17:59:48Xiaoli Xu, Zhengtao Wu, Zhengze Xu, Tao Liu, Yongchao Du, Zuan Gao, Xingjian Wang, Hao Yan, Mengting Chen, Wei Li, Bo ZhengAbstract
We present CommerceGen-Studio, an end-to-end framework for generating commercial-grade main images for e-commerce Stock Keeping Units (SKUs). Our framework is organized along a three-stage pipeline of information extraction, semantic rewriting, and multi-condition generation: Prompt-Eval-Refine-Loop Agent (PERL-Agent) distills heterogeneous SKU metadata into concise selling-point text lists through an iterative closed loop of VLM and LLM roles scored by a reference-free rubric. Layout Thinker Optimization (LTO) aligns the rewriter with both caption and rendered-image quality via alternating domain-specific policy optimization. SKU-DiT, trained under Reinforce-Distill-Reinforce (RDR) progressive training, conditions jointly on the white-background product image, the trademark crop, and the structured layout to hold subject fidelity, trademark integrity, and character-level text accuracy together. The framework runs in production at a scale of millions of main images per day with a latency of a few seconds per image, which we believe makes it among the first systems of this kind to operate at commercial scale. We also release CommerceGen-Bench, a benchmark of hard cases collected from live traffic across all product categories. On it, our framework achieves the highest overall scores among the evaluated open-source baselines on both editing tracks, with and without prompt enhancement. It also matches much larger closed-source models, and beats several of them at Instruction Following and Product Integration - the two properties that determine whether an image can be published.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20603
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Read, Parse, Describe: Unified Document Parsing with Visual Element Description Generation
2026-10-14 15:17:28Yuheng Chen, Yufan Chen, Zhuojun Cai, Ruiping Liu, Junwei Zheng, Jiale Wei, Di Wen, Weijia Fan, Kunyu Peng, Jiaming Zhang, Rainer StiefelhagenAbstract
Document understanding systems are typically evaluated as separate components via layout analysis, optical text recognition, reading-order prediction, and image captioning. This separation leaves scientific figures, captions, and visual semantics weakly connected, and fails to measure whether a model can produce a single page-level parse that is both structurally faithful and semantically accessible. We introduce Read-Parse-Describe, a unified dataset for document parsing with visual element description generation. Given a page image, models are required to output an ordered list of layout elements containing bounding boxes, semantic labels, reading-order indices, recognized textual content, and alternative text descriptions for visual elements. The benchmark is built from 2,402 documents, comprising 18,163 continuous pages, 125,218 layout elements, and 11,338 visual instances. Besides, we further propose a plug-and-play space-awareness enhancer that reuses multi-layer visual features and injects grid-aware spatial guidance into vision-language tokens for layout-aware generation. Experiments across end-to-end VLMs and pipeline parsers show that existing systems still struggle to jointly recover reading order and visual semantics, while our enhanced model achieves strong joint performance. These results highlight the need to move beyond isolated document parsing modules toward unified models that jointly read, parse, and describe complex documents. The new dataset and code will be made publicly available at this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20335
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MiniDog: Dog-Breed Text-to-image Flow Matching from Pretraining to Fine-Tuning on 4 Consumer GPUs
2026-10-14 14:59:31Reyhaneh Esmailizadeh, Xingjian Leng, Zhanhao Liang, Liang ZhengAbstract
We generally perceive that training text-to-image diffusion models requires heavy compute: it is true if we aim at a comprehensive frontier model. This understanding prevents people from training their own models when getting started in the field. We develop MiniDog, a framework that enables pretraining diffusion transformers in 55 minutes and fine-tuning in another 15 minutes on four 3090 GPUs. For data, we use 26k dog images from ImageNet and caption them for pretraining and use 2k images generated by FLUX.1-schnell for fine-tuning. We precompute the image and text features and cache them for efficiency. For architecture, we use E2E-INVAE for its semantic latent space, a small transformer with 22M parameters, a small Qwen model for text encoding, and in-context conditioning. For training, we use iREPA and an EUPE perception encoder for acceleration. For evaluation, our repository supports FID, HPSv2 score, PickScore, and various VAE reconstruction metrics. The project is open-sourced at this https URL. We do not claim technical novelty.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18870
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Designing Textual Interfaces To Enhance Llm Reasoning On Audio-Visual Question Answering
2026-10-14 12:23:59Yi Wang, Tianzi Wang, Tong Lei, Dahan Wang, Peter BellAbstract
Automatic prompt optimization (APO) has shown strong effectiveness for text-based LLMs and LLM systems, but its application to audio-visual understanding systems requires suitable textual interfaces through which multimodal reasoning can be exposed to text-based optimizers. We investigate how the design of textual interfaces affects prompt optimization for multimodal reasoning, on the audio-visual question answering task. We compare three interface designs, including a direct inference system consisting of a single omni-modal large language model (OmniLLM), a captioner-reasoner system, and an agentic architecture in which a primary agent orchestrates subagent OmniLLMs. Experiments with Qwen3-Omni and Gemini show that direct prompt optimization provides model-dependent gains; the captioner-reasoner system and the agentic system expose more interpretable optimization interfaces but are harder to optimize, where error analysis of cases affected by optimization is conducted. Our study highlights textual interface design as an important factor in making prompt optimization effective for omni-modal reasoning systems. Our implementation details are specified in GitHub repo.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20085
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DeltaStreamer: Towards Human-Like Agentic Streaming Video Understanding
2026-10-14 09:19:15Boyuan Sun, Deshui Miao, Wenzhao Gao, Shaoyong Jia, Shaohui Jiao, Chi Liu, Yan Shu, Derek Li, Bryan Dai, Shengsheng Qian, Qibin HouAbstract
We propose DeltaStreamer, a novel agentic framework for streaming video understanding inspired by how humans observe, remember, and investigate. Streaming video understanding requires a system to retain evidence before knowing which details future queries will need. Existing approaches often obscure event transitions and omit relevant details when compressing video history, and cannot recover missing visual evidence. DeltaStreamer addresses these limitations by combining change-aware memory with query-driven planning and targeted evidence gathering with replay. Before a query arrives, it continuously observes the stream and explicitly records visual changes in structured memory, preserving how events unfold rather than only what is present. When a query arrives, a query-driven planner identifies the required evidence and guides memory retrieval and targeted replay. By revisiting historical frames, the agent can recover visual details omitted during observation and ground its answer in evidence beyond the retained descriptions. This connects continuous observation with active investigation tailored to each question. Experiments on OVO-Bench and StreamingBench demonstrate improvements over representative streaming video understanding methods, with overall scores of 66.07% and 59.53%, respectively. Project page: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19849
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FPV-CRASH: A Dataset for Offline Crash Moment Localization in Drone First-Person-View Videos
2026-10-14 08:32:57Jifan Zhang, Tingyu Wang, Qian Liu, Zhedong ZhengAbstract
Crash Moment Localization aims to localize the major physical impact that interrupts controlled flight in an onboard first-person-view (FPV) video recorded by a drone, thereby providing a temporal reference for retrospective crash analysis in aerial robotics. However, existing crash-video datasets predominantly target surveillance or dash-camera footage, and their annotation schemes and task formulations are not designed for temporal localization of the major physical impact in UAV onboard FPV videos. To address this gap, we present FPV-CRASH, a dataset and fixed-protocol reference evaluation for offline Crash Moment Localization in drone FPV videos. FPV-CRASH contains 1,052 drone FPV clips (526 Crash and 526 Normal); each Crash clip has a single-frame reference annotation for the Crash Moment, and every clip is paired with four English captions automatically generated from sampled frames and the known Crash/Normal label. Normal clips carry no timestamp target and provide training-time background supervision. The captions support an auxiliary Text-to-Video Retrieval task, whereas localization inference remains video-only. We further provide a heatmap-based reference model that estimates a continuous Crash Moment timestamp from sparsely sampled frames. Under the fixed, non-source-disjoint clip-level protocol, the reference model reduces MAE from 1.12 s for the strongest fixed timing-prior baseline to 0.56 s (a 50% relative reduction) and achieves a median absolute error (MedAE) of 0.33 s; the fraction of clips localized within 0.5 s rises from 37.14% to 65.71%. The release includes annotations, available source video identifiers and URLs, clipping metadata, fixed split lists, and preprocessing code so that the reportable portion can be reconstructed without redistributing source footage. At submission time, all source-compilation URLs remained accessible.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19785
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One-shot Human Video-Guided Adaptation for Vision-Language-Action Models
2026-10-14 08:05:44Qi Chen, Yuwei Wu, Quan Chen, Kunpeng Gao, Jin Chen, Che Sun, Zhi Gao, Yunde JiaAbstract
Vision-language-action (VLA) models have recently achieved remarkable progress by leveraging large-scale robot datasets and foundation models for general-purpose robot manipulation. However, their ability to rapidly adapt to novel manipulation tasks beyond the training distribution remains limited. Existing approaches often require task-specific robot demonstrations and additional training, which are labor- and compute-intensive, limiting the scalability of VLA adaptation to open-world scenarios. To reduce this dependence on target-task robot data, we propose CapPro, a framework that enables a VLA policy to adapt to previously unseen manipulation tasks using only a single human demonstration video. CapPro consists of two components. First, a phase-aware human video representation module constructs a compact video representation through learned visual token selection and learns task-relevant query representations under phase-caption supervision. Second, a video-conditioned adaptation module jointly incorporates the compact video and query-derived representations into the action-conditioning context of the pretrained VLA policy. % This design introduces task-specific guidance while largely preserving the original VLA action-generation backbone. In this way, the human demonstration provides task-specific execution guidance rather than an embodiment-aligned trajectory to imitate, without requiring target-task robot demonstrations or target-task fine-tuning. Experiments across source and unseen target tasks show that CapPro improves average performance across unseen target groups while maintaining comparable performance on the source tasks. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of human-video guidance for cross-task VLA adaptation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19746
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Mitigating Video Hallucinations via Attention-Guided Representation Perturbation
2026-10-14 07:50:08Zhixin Cai, Ruoqi Yuan, Xinchen Yang, Zhuofan Chen, Jun Bai, Chuantao Yin, Wenge RongAbstract
Video large language models (Video LLMs) often generate responses unsupported by the input video. Contrastive decoding (CD) can mitigate these hallucinations, but its effectiveness depends on how the negative branch weakens visual evidence. Existing methods rely on predefined perturbations or masking guided by question reconstruction, offering limited control over the model's visual reliance during answer generation. We introduce Attention-guided Representation Perturbation for Contrastive Decoding (ARP-CD), a training-free framework for constructing contrastive negatives directly in representation space. ARP-CD uses the attention mass assigned to visual tokens at the answer-prediction position to guide bounded gradient updates of the language model's input visual hidden states. These updates reduce visual attention and produce a negative input, whose predictions are contrasted with those of the original branch throughout generation. Experiments across four Video LLMs and four benchmarks show that ARP-CD outperforms representative training-free baselines in most model--benchmark settings, reducing hallucinations while improving general video understanding. Further analyses show that attention-guided perturbation directions improve negative quality and that the resulting negatives provide effective contrastive references for correcting the original predictions.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19728
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TVPara: Paralinguistic Captioning of Expressive TV-Series Speech in Complex Acoustic Environments
2026-10-14 06:59:02Ziyang Zhang, Wenyi Yu, Wen Wu, Xuenan Xu, Chao ZhangAbstract
Large audio-language models (LALMs) struggle to parse paralinguistics (e.g., emotion, pace, pitch) in speech that combines intense emotion with complex acoustic environments. Strengthening this ability calls for training data that reflects such conditions. However, existing corpora rely heavily on studio-recorded speech, offering limited emotional and acoustic diversity. To address this gap, we introduce TVPara, a paralinguistic captioning dataset built from TV series. Speech in TV series often carries diverse emotional expression and co-occurs with scene-specific background sound, providing expressive emotion and complex acoustic environments at scale. Constructed via LALM pre-annotation and human correction, TVPara includes two tasks: Single-Utterance (~492h) and Multi-Utterance (~213h) Paralinguistic Captioning. Fine-tuning open-source LALMs on TVPara yields an average relative improvement of 31.26% in paralinguistic understanding under complex acoustic environments. The gains further generalize to an unseen TV series and to cleaner, cross-domain speech.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19678
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HyrCap: Hybrid Rank-Calibration of Action Proposals for Temporal Event Understanding
2026-10-14 03:44:40Rui Chen, Xingyu Chen, Pengxin Xu, Kai Chen, Junzhi YuAbstract
Temporal action detection in long untrimmed videos suffers from inaccurate localization and low-quality proposals, especially with sparse annotations and ambiguous boundaries. For open-ended video understanding and LLM-driven event analysis, reliable proposals connect temporal localization, event annotation, and semantic understanding. However, conventional temporal action detection (TAD) pipelines lack explicit modeling of proposal localization quality, cross-representation support, and inter-proposal relations. We propose Hybrid Rank-Calibration of Action Proposals (HyrCap), a proposal-centric query-based TAD framework for temporal event understanding. Hybrid combines complementary video features with different localization cues, while Rank-Calibration adjusts proposal ranking confidence to reflect localization reliability and candidate competition. HyrCap treats dense query-based predictions as an over-complete temporal event hypothesis space. Cross-Representation Consensus Calibration, Localization Quality Estimation, and Proposal Redundancy Suppression improve proposal ranking reliability, localization quality, and candidate discrimination. Inspired by LLMs' capabilities in fine-grained semantic recognition, event description, and reasoning, we introduce HyrCap for Semantic Action Understanding, using calibrated proposals for standard TAD and as inputs to LLM-based semantic understanding. We define a staged evaluation protocol to separately measure event localization, segment-level semantic understanding, and combined event understanding performance. Experiments on public benchmarks show that HyrCap achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple metrics and provides a finer-grained paradigm and evaluation protocol for query-based event segmentation and annotation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19526
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VideoHarness-SRSI: Structured Recursive Self-Improvement for Video Understanding Harness
2026-10-14 02:17:07Zihao Lin, Haoyu Dong, Haobo Xu, Chi-Chih Chang, Xuying Ning, Yinglong Xia, Shuang Yang, Zhuokai Zhao, Xinying Song, Dongfang Liu, Lifu Huang, Yang Song, Qifan WangAbstract
LLM system capabilities depend not only on model parameters but also on the executable harnesses that organize information acquisition, tool use, reasoning, and memory. Recursive harness evolution can automate their design, but how it can reliably discover generalizable systems from limited, noisy, and repeatedly reused feedback remains unclear. We study this question in agentic video understanding, where rich multimodal evidence and coupled mechanisms make harness optimization challenging. We first introduce VideoHarness-BRSI, a recursive self-improvement framework that evolves video harnesses around a frozen vision-language model. Analyzing over 4,000 evolved candidates, we find it competitive with hand-engineered systems but identify three interconnected failure modes: validation overfitting, search-budget dilution, and the early-experience trap. We trace all three to a common root: the same imperfect validation evidence drives both harness revisions and the proposer's search strategy. We therefore propose VideoHarness-SRSI, an evidence-governed framework in which every search decision rests on evidence that is transferable, sufficient, and gathered before the search commits. It restricts the proposer to content-free feedback, informs exploration with instrumented warm-up experiments, and develops mechanisms in isolated probe-race branches before factorial composition and joint refinement. Across four video understanding benchmarks, VideoHarness-SRSI improves the equally weighted mean held-out score by 6.2% relative to VideoHarness-BRSI and reduces the mean validation-test gap by 37.9%. Reliable harness evolution thus depends on how search is organized and informed, not only on how well it optimizes validation performance.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19424
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Kandinsky S2V 1.0: Audio-Driven Avatar Video Generation
2026-10-13 23:11:39Nikolay Semenov, Artem Riabinin, Sergey Bassenko, Anna Averchenkova, Julia Agafonova, Anastasia Aliaskina, Kirill Kozlov, Lev Novitskiy, Nikita Samsonov, Nikolai Gerasimenko, Denis DimitrovAbstract
We present Kandinsky S2V 1.0, an open family of speech-to-video models for controllable audio-driven human animation, comprising Kandinsky S2V 1.0 Lite (2B parameters) and Kandinsky S2V 1.0 Pro (21B parameters). From a single reference image, a speech waveform, and a text prompt, the models generate long-form 25 FPS video in which lip motion, expression, pose, and gesture follow the speech. The architecture draws text and audio conditioning from one Qwen2.5-Omni model and adds a reference-aware three-scale visual memory. Training starts from the Kandinsky 5.0 Video foundation models [1] and combines mixed reference-memory layouts with an area-adaptive face loss. The training corpus contains 1.17M single-speaker clips selected by active-speaker detection, with captions generated directly in English and Russian. A side-by-side human evaluation against the strongest open-source baseline and two proprietary commercial models shows that Kandinsky S2V 1.0 Pro performs comparably to or better than these models on average and is also preferred for lip synchronization. On common speech to video benchmarks, Kandinsky S2V 1.0 Lite and Kandinsky S2V 1.0 Pro rank among the top performing models according to mean rank over five reported metrics. Beyond the base models, we provide {\pi}-Flow distilled variants of both Kandinsky S2V 1.0 Lite and Kandinsky S2V 1.0 Pro. The distilled Kandinsky S2V 1.0 Pro model generates video in 16 sampling steps without classifier-free guidance, achieving a 5.4 times end-to-end speedup over the base model, while matching or exceeding it on nearly all reported benchmark metrics. To accelerate open research and deployment in speech-to-video generation, we release the code, model checkpoints, and diffusers integration under the MIT license.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19290
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The Gap Is in the Geometry: A Convergent Meta-Analysis of Multi-Facet Aerial and Remote Sensing Video Understanding
2026-10-13 19:39:34Georgios Angelidis, Aggelos Psiris, Maria Vakalopoulou, Georgios Th. Papadopoulos, Giorgos Sfikas, Iraklis VarlamisAbstract
Aerial and remote sensing video is increasingly evaluated like web video, by posing multiple-choice questions to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) over sampled frames and reporting accuracy. This paper argues that this recipe measures the wrong aspect, and supports the claim with a convergent meta-analysis of a broad set of published results, organized in four evidence tiers, in which a claim becomes a position only when collected evidence agrees. Parameter scale exhibits a median of +3.4 accuracy points per tenfold increase on aerial benchmarks, far below a human gap of at least 19 points, whereas acquisition conditions control perception, as 315 of 318 evaluations in 19 within-paper contrasts lose accuracy when conditions such as altitude, view, object size or time horizon become harder. No aerial benchmark in the corpus combines video input with per-task human and random baselines, competence collapses from answering to acting in closed-loop navigation, and the same MLLMs score higher on the aerial benchmark than on ground spatial ones, but lower on studies that test cross-view geometry. From these findings the current study derives five falsifiable principles and proposes the AVU-Card, a reporting card for aerial video benchmarks
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19102
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Rethinking Projector Training in Multimodal LLMs
2026-10-13 15:53:53Fabian Gr\"oger, Na\"el Ouerghemi, Shuo Wen, Maria Brbi\'cAbstract
Multimodal LLMs are typically trained by first aligning a vision encoder with a language model via projector training on large image-caption datasets, followed by joint training of the full multimodal model. Despite its widespread use, the role of the projector training stage remains poorly understood. We find that (i) using only $10$ to $20\%$ of the data for training the projector already recovers most downstream performance gains, and (ii) projectors trained on different datasets can be linearly interpolated while largely preserving performance. These results suggest that projector training mainly performs a coarse alignment, which many different projectors achieve equally well. Motivated by these findings, we propose PORTAL, a training-free projector initialization that requires neither paired image-caption data nor gradient-based optimization, but only per-modality summary statistics. PORTAL computes an optimal-transport-based map between Gaussian approximations of the vision and language feature distributions on a shared principal subspace, so that the projector training stage can be skipped entirely. Without any paired data, PORTAL matches the standard pipeline trained on 558k image-caption pairs across six LLM backbones, two vision encoders, and 16 benchmarks. It outperforms that pipeline in $3$ of $7$ (vision encoder, LLM) settings and reaches an average $98\%$ of its score across the other four.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18598
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PhysicsSliders: Learning Physical Controls for Audio Foley Generation
2026-10-13 15:53:45Peiwei Chang, Yongqiang Chen, Yuelan Cheng, Liting Gao, Yishun Lu, Li Zhang, Mark D. Plumbley, Philip J. B. Jackson, Wenwu WangAbstract
Physical properties provide intuitive controls for sounds made by interacting objects. The challenge is to make a generative model respond predictably to these controls, both individually and in combination. We present \method\ (PXS), trained on simulated contact sounds with 15 material, geometry and contact parameters. Two separately trained variants accept direct parameter inputs or numerical captions. PXS controls hardness, size, speed and damping, supports room descriptions and produces spectrally distinct outputs at fixed targets. When controlling damping and size together, specifying thickness improves frequency accuracy and joint target delivery. Measurements from real recordings define effective-damping targets, which simulator inversion maps to generation inputs without real-audio fine-tuning. Across 18 impact classes from five real-audio datasets, PXS-Physical follows these targets with mean grouped Spearman correlation $\rho=0.976$ and class-median error 0.094 dex (a factor of 1.24).
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18597
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EgoOmniWorld: Unifying Egocentric Understanding via Ego-Action-World Interactions
2026-10-13 14:53:16Songruo Chen, Yuqian Fu, Yu Li, Mingkang Dong, Sifan Zhou, Bin Ren, Xu Zheng, Tianwen Qian, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Yanwei FuAbstract
Egocentric video understanding spans diverse capabilities, modalities, and evaluation formats, yet these are often studied in isolation despite their tight coupling in real-world interaction. We propose the Ego-Action-World interaction loop as a unifying principle: the wearer perceives the world, forms goals, acts, changes the world, and uses feedback to guide subsequent behavior. Based on this view, we introduce EgoOmniWorld, a benchmark organized around four complementary interaction structures: Node captures ego, action, and world states; Edge captures directed relations among them; Chain captures linked dependencies; and Loop captures feedback-closed interactions. We develop an interaction-first, evidence-grounded data pipeline that extracts structured interactions from egocentric videos, grounds them in visual and auditory evidence, and generates questions according to their interaction structure. Required modalities and single- or multi-turn formats follow naturally from the supporting evidence and dependencies. EgoOmniWorld contains 24,166 QA groups, including 20,284 training and 3,882 test samples. Experiments on representative open- and closed-source multimodal large language models reveal substantial and uneven limitations across interaction structures. Models trained on EgoOmniWorld improve in-domain interaction understanding and generalize to existing egocentric benchmarks. EgoOmniWorld provides a unified foundation for evaluating and advancing egocentric video understanding. Data, code, and models will be released.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18499
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MERIT: Multimodal Evidence Reasoning over Image Tables
2026-10-13 08:21:53Haoyang Jiang, Zhuotong Fan, Mingyang Yi, Ju Fan, Lanqing Hu, Xiao ZanAbstract
Table reasoning with language models typically assumes access to clean textual tables. In practice, tables are often serialized into text, which can corrupt cell contents, distort structural relationships, and discard visual cues, leaving the model to reason over incomplete evidence. In contrast, table images retain this information, but using it requires both accurate perception and reasoning grounded in the relevant cells. To address this, we propose MERIT (Multimodal Evidence Reasoning over Image Tables), a three-stage framework for learning to reason over table images, with serialized tables serving as optional auxiliary inputs (if provided). Our analysis identifies visual evidence acquisition as a bottleneck, motivating table-specific encoder adaptation through reconstruction, localization, and color-conditioned supervision. Building on the adapted representations, supervised fine-tuning teaches explicit evidence selection and reasoning using verified trajectories. Finally, reinforcement learning refines the policy with separate rewards for evidence correctness, calculation, final answers, and output format. By providing feedback on intermediate steps, the framework targets retrieval and computational errors that final-answer supervision alone does not distinguish. We evaluate the approach on table question answering and fact verification, analyze the contributions of visual inputs and training components, and assess generalization to additional datasets with different table structures and visual presentations.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17937
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