ALT This work presents a novel open-source toolkit designed for the evaluation of face deidentification techniques with available evaluation models. The framework provides a complete evaluation pipeline, including preprocessing, deidentification, and performance assessment, based on data utility, image quality, and identity protection metrics. It supports a variety of datasets, enabling researchers to easily benchmark new deidentification techniques. Results show the effectiveness of some techniques on maintaining privacy while preserving image utility. The toolkit is aimed at unifying future research by providing a standard evaluation framework for privacy-enhancing technologies in facial biometrics. Implementation is available at github.com/blazm/deid-toolkit.

ALT Zero-shot composed image retrieval (ZS-CIR) aims to retrieve a target image that reflects an intended textual modification while maintaining semantic consistency with a reference image. Existing training-free ZS-CIR methods typically rely on fine-grained generated target descriptions, which often overemphasize reference-specific visual details and lead to appearance-biased retrieval. Moreover, since these descriptions are generated through multimodal large language models (MLLMs), the direct influence of the original image-text query can be weakened in the final retrieval representation. In this paper, we propose DCR-TSF, a training-free ZS-CIR framework that combines Dual-level Compositional Reasoning (DCR) and Triadic Spherical Fusion (TSF). DCR generates fine- and coarse-grained descriptions from the reference image and modification text, capturing complementary target-side semantics across different granularities. To preserve the original image-text query information, TSF construct

ALT Synthetic data provides the means for more ethical and less biased facial recognition. Nonetheless, the limitations of generative models and the conditioning process they rely on pose a risk of identity leakage, resulting in synthetic samples that are overly similar to those seen in a generator's training set, mitigating privacy benefits. In this work, we show that previously proposed approaches are affected by two key limitations: high classifier dependence and a tendency to identify leakage with respect to real datasets that were not used in training. To address these shortcomings, we propose a novel metric called Scaled Overlap (SO), which adapts a non-parametric data-copying test for facial recognition and extends it to the identity level. By leveraging a multi-model setup that compensates for errors in individual classifiers, it provides insights into the true strength of identity leakage. Our analysis identifies leaking datasets (CemiFace, SFace2, IDNet) with the most acute leaka

ALT Despite achieving high visual fidelity, video models still suffer from physical hallucinations, limiting their reliability as world simulators. Existing methods leverage model-internal or external signals to improve physical plausibility, but their roles and limitations require a unified explanation. We propose a two-dimensional physical-hallucination risk framework that defines low-density sampling risk and high-density drifting risk. The first risk captures generations assigned low likelihood by the video model, for example, a ball suddenly teleporting despite the model favoring continuous motion, while the second risk captures physical inconsistencies in high-likelihood generations, for example, a ball bouncing progressively higher without additional energy. Our analysis explains how model-internal signals steer sampling toward higher-density regions of the learned distribution to address low-density sampling risk. However, higher model likelihood does not guarantee physical plausib

ALT Generalizing real-time physics-based animation across diverse 3D shapes and spatial discretizations remains challenging. In this paper, we introduce PhysSkin++, a physics-informed framework that learns continuous neural skinning fields from static geometries to construct compact deformation subspaces. Specifically, we propose a Neural Skinning Fields Autoencoder that predicts shape-dependent deformation subspaces without per-object network training. To learn these subspaces without simulation trajectories, we develop a Physics-Informed Self-Supervised Learning strategy that combines skinning-field normalization with conflict-aware gradient correction, stabilizing joint optimization under physical and orthogonality constraints. The learned representation supports efficient reduced dynamics with user control and contact interactions, together with direct animation binding to meshes, point clouds, and 3D Gaussians. For prescribed rig animation, we further introduce a self-supervised compl

ALT Automated treatment planning (ATP) aims to reduce the unwarranted inter-planner variability of manual planning, while improving treatment quality and efficiency. Most ATP pipelines rely on the prediction of the achievable three-dimensional dose distribution for a given anatomy and the subsequent optimization of machine parameters to reproduce it. Diffusion-based methods are largely slice-wise due to the high dimensionality of radiotherapy data, and assume a one-to-one mapping between anatomy and optimal dose despite the multi-objective nature of treatment planning. They are evaluated on their ability to match reference doses and rarely on their integration in ATP frameworks. We present LaDose, a latent diffusion framework for fully volumetric dose prediction. An autoencoder learned on dose distributions, trained so that perturbed latents decode to plausible doses, compresses dose maps 128-fold and enables 3D diffusion on a single GPU. Prescription values are represented as exact scalar

ALT External skills provide language-model agents with reusable procedural knowledge, yet how models use such knowledge after it is supplied remains poorly understood. We identify Procedural Exposure Bias (PEB), the tendency of language models to increasingly favor an action as its associated procedural pattern is repeatedly exposed in a skill, even when the interaction state and action relevance remain unchanged. We find that PEB strongly depends on how procedural knowledge is represented: presenting the same content visually substantially attenuates exposure-induced shifts in action preference relative to textual presentation. Further analysis shows that this attenuation primarily arises from visual encoding rather than structured layout. Although repeated procedural signals remain recoverable from Visual representations, they exert a weaker influence on downstream action prediction, distinguishing signal accessibility from its use as action evidence. This effect also extends to executab

ALT Dense temporal audio-visual captioning is important for multimodal video understanding and generation. However, prior work is constrained by three main limitations: (1) the lack of a dataset combining high temporal resolution, longer videos, and bidirectional alignment between time and events; (2) the reliance of most existing RL methods on checklists; and (3) the lack of a benchmark that bidirectionally evaluates event semantic correctness and temporal accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose: (1) AVTime-50K, a high-quality 50K-scale dataset with temporally precise, semantically accurate captions and longer videos; (2) AVTime, a state-of-the-art model optimized with a novel Bidirectional Temporal-Semantic Alignment (BiTSA) reward that imposes explicit bidirectional constraints between time and events; and (3) AVTime-Bench, a specialized benchmark that introduces a novel bidirectional evaluation of temporal accuracy and semantic correctness. Our code, models, and datasets are

ALT Once historical clients become unavailable, a federation must serve newcomers through the artifact it leaves behind. How much of its knowledge remains useful in an architecture chosen afterward? We introduce FEDNBO, a seven-dataset benchmark that separates knowledge supply, policy identification, and private-model compilation under disjoint data roles. Controlled studies expose inflated oracle gains, architecture-dependent transfer reversals, and a gap between teacher accuracy and private-model utility. Ordinary public-response distillation provides a competitive reference without public task labels or newcomer samples: gains over strengthened local training are 23.52 and 16.62 percentage points on 300 CelebA identities and 300 FedEMNIST writers, respectively. In a complete-pipeline FedEMNIST comparison, this reference reaches 97.13% accuracy with 12.4 seconds of compilation per architecture, versus 97.03% and 67.5 seconds for a HeteroFedTTA reconstruction at the same epoch budget. Equ

ALT Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) deliver high-fidelity image and video generation, but inference requires many sequential model evaluations. Two acceleration strategies are increasingly important: model compression makes each evaluation cheaper, while adaptive inference avoids selected teacher computation through reuse, forecasting, or speculative execution. Their combination, however, is brittle: directly applying the evaluated adaptive methods to a compressed student can degrade quality, an observed failure mode we call the Combination Gap. We link this gap to a mismatch between pointwise distillation and short-horizon execution: a student trained at teacher states need not remain reliable when its own predictions are chained. We propose TamedFlow, which trains a compressed DiT for this deployed role through cross-architecture feature alignment, a near-identity Velocity Alignment Head, and randomized rollout supervision. At inference, a lightweight Learnable Trajectory Estimator routes

ALT Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, particularly Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has improved video reasoning in multimodal large language models. However, standard video GRPO varies only linguistic trajectories while conditioning every rollout in a group on the same sampled frames, which can produce homogeneous rewards and weaken group-relative learning when the shared visual evidence is insufficient or distracting. We propose FrameGRPO, a simple and effective reinforcement-learning framework that requires neither auxiliary networks nor changes to the model architecture. Specifically, FrameGRPO combines two lightweight components: (1) Multi-Frame Rollouts, which use only uniform temporal subsampling of a single maximal-frame decode to construct aligned views that diversify visual evidence and reasoning trajectories; and (2) Gated Temporal Efficiency Credit, which selectively reinforces a correct lower-ratio trajectory when all rollouts in a fixed full-ratio refe

ALT Thin cylindrical objects offer little space for planar markers. We propose a dual-colour-stripe marker that uses the known curvature of an object to improve pose measurement with a single camera. The boundary between two colours provides a long centre line, while dots and printed edges supply features at different depths. We analyse how this depth separation improves the estimation of rotation about the cylinder axis, or roll. For a camera-facing marker at 15 cm, the Cramér-Rao lower bound on roll standard deviation is 2.00°for a flat marker, 0.38°for a single curved marker and 0.21°for a wrap-around marker. Monte Carlo roll RMS errors are within about 10% of the corresponding standard-deviation bounds. A first-order relation connects the sagitta of the curved marker to the roll sensitivity provided by a stereo baseline. The analytical and simulation results explain how curvature improves monocular measurement and provide a basis for designing marker geometry.

ALT We set out to reproduce a recent hallucination-mitigation result on the POPE benchmark. The LLaVA-1.5-7B baseline we measured, 82.21 F1 on the adversarial split, sat 1.21 to 8.67 points above the adversarial baselines we planned to compare against (81.00, 79.30, and 73.54). We looked at the evaluation code and found a readout choice that moves F1 on its own. A two-token logit readout decides yes versus no by comparing two vocabulary IDs, 3582 ("yes") and 1217 ("no"). Across 9,000 greedy-decode questions spanning all three splits, neither ID is generated even once. The model emits " Yes" (token 3869) and " No" (token 1939), because SentencePiece prepends a space byte after the prompt suffix "ASSISTANT:". Read with an eight-token lookup that covers the space-prefixed surface forms, LLaVA-1.5-7B scores F1 0.8221, 0.8498, and 0.8713 on the adversarial, popular, and random splits. That 6.13-point adversarial shift exceeds the adversarial gain reported by five of the six papers we surveyed.

ALT Joint 4D reconstruction of a human and object from a monocular video is essential for understanding how people interact with their environment. While recent methods have made noticeable progress, capturing such human-object interactions remains difficult due to two main challenges. First, a video typically contains composite semantic context spanning multiple interaction phases, making it difficult to track the temporal changes of the interaction in the reconstruction. Second, under human-object occlusion, a single-view observation contains incomplete visual information about the interaction, resulting in geometrically inconsistent reconstructions. To address these challenges, we introduce HORIA, built upon two core designs. First, we decompose the entire input video into temporally grounded and semantically distinct interaction phases with motion-aware captioning, obtaining a specific text description for each phase. Second, conditioned on these text descriptions of the interaction, w

ALT Omni-modal large language models can jointly understand video, audio, and text, yet they remain weak at temporal grounding, a capability essential for real-world audio-visual applications. To understand this limitation, we look beyond final predictions and examine the model's internal temporal evidence. We identify a temporal generation gap: the internal attention of the model localizes the target moment more accurately than the timestamps it generates. To close this gap, we propose TACG (Temporal Attention-Consistency Grounding), a post-training method that treats internal attention as a reliable temporal pivot and aligns it with both the model prediction and the ground-truth annotation through attention-consistency training. We further build a 580K-sample training dataset by reconstructing temporal QA from dense audio-visual annotations and organizing general omni-modal instruction data. Using TACG and this training dataset, we train OmniGround, a general-purpose omni-modal model wit

ALT Robot manipulation often depends on short-term cues - such as brief contacts, temporary occlusions, and intermediate object states - that are ambiguous in a single frame and can only be resolved by integrating observations over time. However, injecting historical information solely by enlarging the history window is computationally costly and frequently yields limited gains due to substantial redundancy and task-agnostic, inflexible sampling of observations. We propose CondenseVLA, a multi-frame VLA policy with a learnable decoder-side history condensation module for using short-term visual context in action decoding. Given a sequence of cached per-frame features from the VLM backbone, CondenseVLA distills observation history into a fixed set of slot tokens using learnable queries and multi-head cross-attention. Simple auxiliary regularization penalizes overlap among slot attention maps and decorrelates slot embeddings, encouraging complementary attention and reducing slot redundancy.

ALT Deep research agents are increasingly capable of searching the open web and synthesizing evidence, yet they remain poorly suited to controllable report generation in multimodal deep research. This task requires agents to handle interleaved textual and visual inputs, gather multimodal evidence through multi-step web search, and deliver comprehensive illustrated reports under user-specified requirements. Existing systems face two limitations. During reasoning, they often underuse images discovered along the search trajectory; during generation, they tend to produce fixed-form answers with limited control over report granularity, multimodal composition, and evidence grounding. We introduce MIRA, a Multimodal Illustrated Deep Research Agent for controllable reports. MIRA integrates textual and visual evidence throughout research and writing. At its core, MIRA-Harness translates user requirements into generation contracts and connects four stages: evidence collection, report submission, fee

ALT Video vision-language models (VLMs) have strong semantic understanding, yet remain unreliable at precise temporal grounding. Existing gains from explicitly aligning video frames with absolute time suggest that VLMs may already encode accurate temporal locations internally but lose precision when expressing them as timestamps. Our analysis across four VLMs and two grounding datasets confirms this hypothesis: attention intervals outperform predicted intervals on approximately 66% of valid examples. We term this discrepancy the temporal generation gap. Because precise temporal annotations are expensive, this finding motivates closing the gap to improve temporal grounding using only unlabeled video-query pairs. We propose Self-Supervised Attention Policy Optimization (SAPO), which uses internal temporal attention as self-supervision for Group Relative Policy Optimization and applies a ground-truth-free criterion to select high-value samples. SAPO consistently improves temporal grounding ac

ALT Diffusion models primarily rely on general-purpose ODE-based numerical methods for training-free accelerated sampling, but performance degrades with coarse time discretization. In this paper, we propose optimal linear leaps (LEAP), a specialized method grounded in theoretical and empirical investigations of sampling trajectory geometry. Built upon low-dimensionality and cross-trajectory consistency, LEAP formulates a supervised least-squares optimization problem within the local trajectory subspace, achieving a precise approximation of future states without model evaluations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LEAP outperforms previous methods across diverse modalities, including text-to-image (Stable Diffusion 3.5, FLUX.1-dev) and image-to-3D (TRELLIS.2) generation. Furthermore, LEAP can be seamlessly integrated into existing solver-based methods, offering a plug-and-play enhancement for modern diffusion models. Code is available at https://github.com/zju-pi/LEAP.

ALT Automated Gleason grading of prostate whole slide images (WSIs) enables faster and more consistent cancer risk stratification. However, it remains a challenging task due to the subtle morphological differences between grades, the severe class imbalance arising from rare patterns, and the diagnostic features that span multiple spatial scales. Pathology foundation models (FMs) extract strong patch representations but often operate at a single-scale, which limits spatial context and disproportionately affects classes that depend on broader context. The challenge of fusing multiple scales and complementary models, with minimal data and computational resources, remains unresolved. We propose a multi-scale classifier built on state-space models. Our method combines two complementary feature sources: a frozen foundation model, and a lightweight FastVim, pre-trained on ImageNet and distilled from the foundation model, that reads the raw image crops. At each scale, a Mamba model encodes the fea