Complex image editing requires faithful task interpretation and accurate execution, but a failed edit does not reveal which responsibility failed. We present DuplexBridge, which uses a unified model's own understanding capability to enhance prompts for its own generation capability, without an external understanding module. A source-grounded bridge specifies targets, final-state changes, and preservation constraints. Understanding is supervised on fidelity to the original request without observing the generated image; generation is supervised on execution of the condition it actually receives. Reciprocal trust checks selectively admit global task feedback to each role while retaining independently valid local supervision. We introduce CE-Bench, a 1,200-task benchmark measuring joint satisfaction of task-derived change and preservation requirements. Across three model configurations, the full system improves complete compliance over direct editors by 21.75-25.75 percentage points, with gains also observed on KRIS-Bench, RISEBench, ImgEdit, and GEdit-Bench. From a common supervised Wan-Image initialization, gated joint training reaches 77.08% complete compliance, compared with 70.92% without gates and 75.00% when generation-local supervision instead checks the original task with both gates retained. These results support distinct local responsibilities and selective shared feedback for joint understanding-generation adaptation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18819
Arrested retinal development can cause childhood visual impairment, but grading optical coherence tomography scans is difficult to standardise across devices and centres. We developed and evaluated an unsupervised domain adaptation model to classify normal and abnormal retinal development across different OCT systems. This retrospective multicentre study used OCT scans from five centres in four countries and the UK Biobank. Data covered four OCT devices, including table mounted and handheld systems. A ResNet50 based Domain Adversarial Neural Network was trained using labelled images from a source device and unlabelled images from a target device. We evaluated six source to target pairings and compared model performance with seven clinician graders. A separate Heidelberg Spectralis dataset was reserved for external evaluation. Across validation sets, accuracy ranged from 87.75% to 96.06%, sensitivity from 88.68% to 98.38%, and specificity from 78.00% to 98.02%. The best performing model, adapted from TM OCT1 to HH OCT1, achieved 96.06% accuracy and an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.994, with a 95% confidence interval from 0.981 to 0.999. Several models also maintained discrimination on the unseen Heidelberg device. Unsupervised domain adaptation enabled OCT classification across devices without labelled target device data. The approach may support more consistent assessment of retinal development and large scale analysis of existing imaging datasets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21719
Contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (CE-MRI) is crucial for accurately diagnosing and segmenting brain tumors. However, the acquisition of CE-MRI requires injecting contrast agents, which poses potential health risks and increases scan costs. Here, we propose a CE-MRI synthesis method from non-contrast sequences, reducing both risk and cost. Unlike existing methods that rely on channel-wise concatenation to fuse multi-sequence information for synthesis, we introduce a Mixture of Feature Difference (MoFD) module. The proposed module uses a dynamic weighting strategy to adaptively select and aggregate informative features from both individual source sequences and explicit differences among them. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms baselines in terms of image fidelity and perceptual quality on the UCSF-PDGM and UPenn-GBM datasets. Our method successfully reconstructs tumor regions and achieves segmentation performance comparable to that obtained with real CE-MRI. Our ablation studies show that although adversarial learning improves perceptual quality, a regression-based variant of our method achieves higher structural fidelity.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21703
Markerless intraoperative tracking of spinal anatomy via RGB-D sensors is a promising alternative to invasive bone-anchored fiducials, yet no existing clinical dataset provides independent subsurface ground truth for validating these methods. We address this gap with a clinically viable pipeline that derives per-vertebra 6-DoF pose from routine intraoperative C-arm fluoroscopy, co-registered to the RGB-D camera frame through a multimodal fiducial array detectable in both imaging modalities. Critically, the pipeline requires no additional radiation, instrumentation, or deviation from standard surgical workflows, relying solely on the fluoroscopic images already acquired during routine level checks. A calibrated transform chain links the vertebral pose recovered via multi-view 2D-3D CT-to-fluoroscopy registration to the RGB-D coordinate frame, enabling direct comparison of any markerless registration estimate against a subsurface reference. Ex vivo validation against optically tracked ovine vertebrae confirms end-to-end accuracy of 2.06 +- 0.29 mm and 3.35 +- 0.93 degrees, sufficient to serve as independent ground truth for methods with substantially larger errors. We demonstrate the pipeline's utility by evaluating two markerless registration strategies on clinical data spanning 11 vertebrae across 1,500 frames from three surgical sequences: the first such evaluation against an independent subsurface reference in a clinical setting. The proposed framework provides reusable infrastructure for benchmarking emerging markerless tracking methods on real surgical data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21696
We propose a unified spatial-density signal to score token importance for both inference phases: bipartite merge for prefill and KV eviction for decode, yielding measurable gains in each stage. To isolate the two phases, we split benchmarks by scoring logic. Prefill probes (MMBench, POPE, ScienceQA) evaluate only the first decoded token; their accuracy reflects prefill logits argmax before any decode KV eviction. Full-pipeline probes (TextVQA, DocVQA, MM-Vet) assess the complete generated sequence and capture both phases. We identify a critical evaluation pitfall: decode pruning claims validated solely on prefill probes measure prefill quality, not decode performance. Experiments show discarding all visual KV during decode barely affects prefill-probe accuracy but degrades TextVQA and MM-Vet drastically; this insensitivity stems from the scoring rule, not compression intensity. Evaluated on seven model variants (InternVL-3.5, Qwen3-VL, LLaVA-1.5) and three full-pipeline benchmarks, our method achieves a three-way Pareto frontier across compute, memory and accuracy. Density-based prefill compression maintains strong accuracy, scales linearly with visual token count, and delivers 100x faster token selection at high resolution. For decode, density top-k KV eviction consistently outperforms strong baselines H2O, SnapKV and StreamingLLM on TextVQA and MM-Vet across three retention ratios. At 0.125 keep ratio on TextVQA, it surpasses H2O by 9.6 points; InternVL-3.5 models (2B to 38B) maintain a 7 to 10 point advantage. Compression scales favorably with model size: every measured 8B to 38B model transition reduces accuracy loss instead of worsening it. We suggest MM-Vet or DocVQA as mandatory full-pipeline validation for any decode-phase claims. Our code is available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17530
We introduce Edit4D, an editable text-to-4D scene generation framework that constructs 4D scenes from separate background and dynamic character representations. Recent advances in generative models have enabled text-driven dynamic scene synthesis, but editable 4D scene generation remains challenging due to the need to preserve spatial geometry and temporal dynamics. Existing approaches typically generate holistic scene videos, where the background and dynamic characters are coupled, making object-level editing and flexible camera control difficult. Edit4D addresses these limitations through a stage-specific generation pipeline. Given a user instruction, Edit4D first decomposes it into stage-specific prompts for background, dynamic character, and scene-character composition. Using these prompts, we synthesize multi-view scene images with text-to-image and camera-conditioned generative priors and reconstruct a background 3D Gaussian splatting representation. We then generate a character image, animate it with an image-conditioned video prior, reconstruct a 4D mesh, and bind Gaussian primitives to obtain a character representation. Finally, both components are composed through text-guided segmentation and contact-aware optimization. A global scene refinement is then performed to improve harmonization and rendering consistency. By integrating stage-specific components, Edit4D enables controllable camera motion, flexible object-level editing, and the practical construction of editable 4D scenes. Project page: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21668
As vision-language models (VLMs) transition from frozen-encoder pipelines to native multimodal architectures, the visual channel increasingly serves as both a perceptual input and a carrier of rendered text that competes with user prompts. Current single-attack, pixel-centric evaluations fail to capture this complexity: they collapse distinct visual attack surfaces into a single scalar and ignore how architectural shifts alter vulnerability. We introduce PaRMA, an evidence-based auditing framework that defines pathway-conditioned risk over two primary image-level interventions: pixel perturbation and rendered-text insertion. Instead of arbitrary attack enumeration, PaRMA uses pathway-specific diagnostics to expose architecture-specific blind spots. Notably, we uncover a see-but-not-deceived signature where native VLMs attend heavily to typographic overlays but visually reject them, and we identify an objective mismatch between encoder-level and answer-level attacks in deep-fusion models. To exploit these findings, we instantiate FusionAudit, introducing two diagnostic-motivated attacks: MANTIS (margin-aware pixel perturbation) and Nat-Evid (host-congruent semantic insertion). Evaluating 18 open-weight VLMs across a novel nativeness taxonomy, we demonstrate that legacy single-attack rankings (e.g., PGD) are unstable for native models. Our diagnostic-driven attacks substantially raise the estimated residual risk, showing that PaRMA provides a falsifiable, evidence-driven auditing methodology for uncovering vulnerabilities missed by standard benchmarks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21667
This paper presents the Digital Typhoon Dataset V3, a new version of the longest typhoon satellite image dataset spanning nearly 50 years, designed to benchmark machine learning models on long-term spatio-temporal data. The latest addition to Dataset V3 is multispectral satellite data, enabling multi-channel models. We investigate data-splitting strategies and present benchmarking results for the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Experimental results show that, under the current dataset construction and experimental setting, multi-channel inputs do not clearly outperform single-channel inputs for pressure regression. Among the evaluated model architectures, image types, and spectral channels, ResNet-18, full-resolution images, and Channel 1 generally provide the best single-channel performance for pressure regression. Performance also differs between the WP and AU datasets by regression target, with lower RMSE on WP for pressure regression and on AU for wind regression. These results highlight the importance of considering dataset-specific and task-specific characteristics when interpreting benchmark performance. Additionally, we analyzed systematic bias in intensity regression, which leads to underestimation of intensity for strong typhoons. We tested imbalance-aware weighting strategies, including inverse-density weighting inspired by BalancedMSE, and showed that these approaches are not sufficient to remove the bias. The dataset is publicly available at this http URL and this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21654
Vision Transformer architectures have showcased impressive performance on semantic segmentation, yet their quadratic attention complexity hinders practical applications. Recent works have focused on merging tokens to reduce sequence length and thus improve transformer efficiency. However, existing token merging methods primarily rely on feature similarity to identify similar tokens, overlooking spatial consistency, which may introduce segmentation errors in semantic segmentation. In this work, we propose SCMerge, a training-free token merging method that jointly considers feature similarity and spatial consistency in pairing similar tokens. The pairwise tokens are then merged within the encoder, and the resulting token sequences are reconstructed onto the original patch grid after decoding. The proposed method is flexible and can be plugged into existing vision Transformer-based semantic segmentation pipelines. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets ADE20K, Pascal Context, and Cityscapes show that SCMerge consistently achieves a better trade-off between segmentation accuracy and efficiency than baseline methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21642
Ensemble weather forecasts can look reliable in global averages while hiding too little spread in some cases and too much in others. These errors vary across variables, spatial scales, lead times, and weather states. Adapting randomness during forecasting can correct these errors, but training fixes stochastic behavior beforehand and output calibration acts afterward. Inference guidance also acts during forecasting, but typically scores ensemble members separately rather than the ensemble as a whole. Reliability feedback arrives at the end, and tracing it backward through many chaotic forecast steps is expensive and unstable. We therefore introduce Dynamic and Informed Adjustment of the Native Stochastic Law (DIAL), which controls a frozen model's native stochasticity. DIAL learns from past forecasts to predict whether each variable and scale needs more or less spread. As a forecast develops, it estimates how possible noise changes will affect later forecast accuracy and reliability. It combines these predictions to make small noise updates at each step. This loop avoids retraining the weather model and full backpropagation through the forecast. We evaluate DIAL on FourCastNet 3 (FCN3) using later ERA5 years unseen during training. DIAL provides better scale-resolved reliability than learned postprocessing and reward-based control baselines. Relative to the unmodified Native FCN3 reference, DIAL achieves an 8.27% improvement in the primary multiscale continuous ranked probability score (CRPS).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21639
Vision Transformers deployed in medical imaging exploit spurious correlations, yet the internal mechanisms remain unidentified and impossible to fix. We apply mechanistic interpretability to locate one such mechanism in ViT-Base 16: a single attention head (L8H10) that functions as a dedicated annotation-reader on chest X-rays, attending to corner text rather than lung pathology in 62% of 200 COVID-19 images. Causal validation via inpainting confirms annotation content rather than luminance or edge density drives the behaviour, increasing lung attention 1.52 times upon removal in affected images ($p{<}0.0001$). The finding replicates across NIH ChestX-ray14 (79%), DeiT-Base (88%), and ViT-Large 16 (80%), establishing spurious annotation-attending heads as a consistent property of ViT-family architectures across two datasets and three architectures. Full fine-tuning does not suppress the behaviour and may entrench it: 98.4% of spurious images remain spurious and the spurious rate rises marginally, as the shortcut is reinforced rather than removed. Critically, single-head ablation produces $p{=}0.340$ and multi-head ablation of all three identified carriers produces $p{=}0.532$, meaning a causally verified annotation-reading circuit is completely invisible to output-level evaluation. Mechanistic auditing finds what behavioural testing cannot.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21638
Recent feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods have enabled effective multi-view 3D reconstruction by predicting Gaussian primitives in a single forward pass. However, existing approaches predominantly adopt a pixel-aligned paradigm that predicts one Gaussian per input pixel, coupling the Gaussian count to the input resolution and number of views. This also leads to redundant primitives in textureless regions and insufficient coverage in geometrically complex areas. We present Anchor3DGS, a pose-free feed-forward 3DGS framework that replaces pixel-aligned prediction with a compact anchor-based representation. Guided by information entropy, our method places a set of 3D anchors in the scene, concentrating them in regions of higher visual complexity while maintaining broad spatial coverage. Each anchor performs occlusion-aware aggregation of multi-view image features, exchanges information with other anchors, and is decoded into a set of local Gaussians. A lightweight feature enhancement module further refines the coarse RGB output from Gaussian splatting and improves rendering fidelity. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that our Anchor3DGS achieves state-of-the-art novel view synthesis quality while only using an order of magnitude fewer Gaussian primitives.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21634
Fine-grained motion understanding requires knowing not only which poses occur, but also when they occur. Existing motion-language models either compress motion clips or concatenate pose features without retaining the timing of each pose, making action duration and temporal scale ambiguous under temporal subsampling. We introduce FiGMo, an LLM-based model that represents motion as timestamp-grounded skeletal poses, supporting reasoning over action order and duration. A unified pose encoder applies this representation to both 2D and 3D skeletons, including poses detected from real videos, while RGB can optionally provide contextual information. To reason over timestamped pose sequences, the model must understand both individual body configurations and how they change over time. As existing data provides limited pose-level grounding, we construct the required pose-to-motion supervision. Controlled experiments show that timestamps improve temporal localization and preserve physical timing under subsampling, while the constructed supervision drives the main performance gains. FiGMo achieves state-of-the-art results across motion question answering, dense motion captioning, and action recognition with detected poses. Our code is available at: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20888
Distilling vision-language features into 3D Gaussian Splatting yields a language map that can be queried with arbitrary text. In deployment, however, a small set of user-specified targets must be reliably located, which current distilled maps often miss, while open-vocabulary queryability for other words must remain intact. We propose a training-free, target-aware refinement of an already-distilled language map. Guided by a text-promptable segmenter, the visual embedding inside each detected target region is blended with the target text embedding, a convex combination whose coefficient sets the amount of injected prior, while non-target regions are left untouched. Injecting too much overwrites appearance cues and general queryability, so we seek, for each target, the smallest coefficient that still lets it win, and we obtain every coefficient in closed form, leaving no hyperparameters to tune. We further identify a failure mode of injection in language-goal localization. Text embeddings share a common component, and injecting them makes the standard cosine read-out query-agnostic, which a centering step in the read-out removes. Across three benchmarks, the refinement consistently improves open-vocabulary segmentation, roughly doubling the base mIoU on Replica, and localizes language goals more reliably than the base map. It also transfers as a plug-in to off-the-shelf field-based and object-level language maps and supports a real-world demonstration in which a legged robot navigates to natural-language goals. Project page and code: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21619
Medical segmentation uncertainty is often evaluated with calibration error or pixel-level error-detection scores, but these metrics do not show whether uncertainty improves downstream review decisions. We propose a decision-aware evaluation protocol that separates uncertainty estimation from deferral policy and evaluates their combination under fixed review budgets: which pixels, regions, or images should be accepted, and which should be reviewed. The protocol reports fixed-budget error reduction, risk-coverage behaviour, region-level review proxies, structural failure modes, probability-derived baselines, and sensitivity to review assumptions. We instantiate it across retinal vessel, skin lesion, and polyp segmentation with multiple backbones and uncertainty estimators. Under matched inference budgets and canonical multi-layer MC Dropout, test-time augmentation (TTA) gives a stronger error-detection signal across matched MC--TTA comparisons, including architecture and dropout-placement checks. However, estimator rankings are not universal. For example, probability-derived scores remain competitive, deep ensembles can outperform TTA, learned deferral helps mainly when the base estimator is weak, and rankings can change with review unit, uncertainty target, correction assumptions, and cost model. Structural and second-observer analyses further show that boundary and thin-structure failures are partly tied to annotation ambiguity. These findings support evaluating uncertainty as an estimator-policy-review configuration, not as a standalone score map. Code: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21616
Audio-visual large language models (AV-LLMs) have made strong progress in multimodal understanding, yet most treat audio as monaural semantic content, limiting their ability to reason about where sounds originate and how they relate to the visual scene. Recent spatial audio-visual studies address parts of this problem, but often focus on specific abilities, such as spatial correspondence or direction and distance reasoning. In this work, we introduce HLR-AVSceneQA, a comprehensive benchmark with a hear-localize-reason hierarchy that evaluates whether models can recognize what is heard, localize sound sources in egocentric and allocentric views, and use these localized sources to reason about how they relate to the visual scene. We further introduce HLR-LLM, which augments a strong audio-visual foundation model with a binaural spatial audio branch alongside its monaural semantic audio pathway. We train HLR-LLM with a curriculum that incorporates final-stage chain-of-thought supervision for multi-step spatial reasoning. Experiments show that existing AV-LLMs remain limited in spatial grounding and relational reasoning, while HLR-LLM substantially improves spatial audio-visual scene understanding without compromising semantic audio-visual perception.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21588
Decision trees can make vision-language model (VLM) classification interpretable by replacing a single prediction with a sequence of root-to-leaf questions. However, the accuracy cost of this greedy, non-backtracking procedure remains unclear. We introduce \textbf{MYOPIA}, a benchmark comprising four LLM-generated, human-refined decision trees for GTSRB, MNIST, CIFAR-10, and MSCOCO, together with matched prompts, diagnostic protocols, and an evaluation harness. Across GPT-4o, Qwen-VL Max, and LLaMA-3.2 11B Vision, tree traversal underperforms zero-shot prompting in all 12 dataset--model pairs; paired bootstrap analyses consistently favor zero-shot. Our diagnostics characterize interacting failure modes associated with this gap. Models often recall tree-encoded class attributes more accurately than they ground the same attributes in images: the mean label--image accuracy gaps are 9.5, 13.8, and 12.6 points for GPT-4o, Qwen-VL Max, and LLaMA, respectively. Incorrect local decisions then irreversibly exclude the correct class, while answer extraction introduces additional model-dependent loss. A node-level audit of the four trees finds that split entropy is weakly but consistently associated with lower node accuracy, whereas depth, branching factor, and within-node grounding differences are less stable. \textbf{MYOPIA} therefore provides a framework for diagnosing hierarchical visual classification and motivates testing tree designs that prioritize perceptual answerability and recovery from early errors. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21573
Diffusion models achieve strong performance in text-to-image generation, but they can still produce unsafe content. Training-free safety guidance offers a practical inference-time alternative that intervenes during sampling without modifying model weights. However, many existing safeguards still rely on a coupled safety-control chain. In this chain, the same unsafe condition simultaneously specifies what should be avoided, indicates the current unsafe signal, constructs the intervention, and determines when that intervention remains active. This coupling can work when unsafe factors are explicit, but becomes less reliable once harmful and benign semantics are entangled in the current generation state, often leaving residual unsafe content or unnecessarily degrading benign-generation quality or prompt fidelity. We address this problem with Decoupled Safety Control (DSC), a plug-in safety-control algorithm for training-free safety guidance. DSC reformulates training-free safety guidance as an explicit state-dependent control process, so the executed intervention is determined from the current generation state rather than inherited directly from a single unsafe condition. Experiments on standard safety benchmarks show that DSC improves representative latent- and text-space safeguards, achieving stronger unsafe-content suppression while preserving benign-generation quality and maintaining efficient inference.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21569
We study Text-and-Image-to-Image (TI2I) flow matching methods for controllable image editing. In a broader generative modeling context, Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) is established as a key component responsible for high quality outputs. However, we argue that its role in TI2I modeling is poorly understood. Specifically, we make the surprising observation that the CFG mechanism is implicitly harmful for editing in the noisy phase of flow modeling, hindering instruction following and controllability. We propose a simple correction in the early flow steps, enabling a richer alignment-preservation tradeoff at no extra cost. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated on both pixel-space and latent TI2I flows.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21550
Real-world video denoising for communication systems must handle mixed degradations such as sensor noise, compression artifacts, and motion-induced inconsistency while remaining deployable under tight latency budgets. Purely deep models often achieve high accuracy but come with significant computational cost, whereas classical filters are robust and efficient but insufficiently adaptive. We present FilterFusion, a prior-guided multi-frame denoising framework that combines temporally-aware learned features with an interpretable bank of denoising branches. The model predicts a low-cost guidance signal and uses it to adaptively mix a compact set of denoising responses at the original resolution. The lightweight design uses only 109K parameters and explicitly injects temporal variance and spatial variance cues into the low-resolution controller. On CRVD (real sensor noise), it reaches 34.72 dB PSNR and 0.9330 SSIM with only 0.18 GFLOPs (network-only). Because the filter-bank operations are simple and regular (Gaussian blur, median, weighted sum), a straightforward compiled C implementation of the synthesis path achieves 17.9ms per frame (55.9 FPS) on a single CPU thread at 1080p---exceeding real-time and 122--252 times faster than lightweight CNN baselines that require over 2 seconds per frame. The results demonstrate a strong quality-efficiency-speed trade-off and a practical route to real-time denoising through low-resolution control and explicit filter-based synthesis.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21505