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Aug 6

Talk2Move: Reinforcement Learning for Text-Instructed Object-Level Geometric Transformation in Scenes

We introduce Talk2Move, a reinforcement learning (RL) based diffusion framework for text-instructed spatial transformation of objects within scenes. Spatially manipulating objects in a scene through natural language poses a challenge for multimodal generation systems. While existing text-based manipulation methods can adjust appearance or style, they struggle to perform object-level geometric transformations-such as translating, rotating, or resizing objects-due to scarce paired supervision and pixel-level optimization limits. Talk2Move employs Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to explore geometric actions through diverse rollouts generated from input images and lightweight textual variations, removing the need for costly paired data. A spatial reward guided model aligns geometric transformations with linguistic description, while off-policy step evaluation and active step sampling improve learning efficiency by focusing on informative transformation stages. Furthermore, we design object-centric spatial rewards that evaluate displacement, rotation, and scaling behaviors directly, enabling interpretable and coherent transformations. Experiments on curated benchmarks demonstrate that Talk2Move achieves precise, consistent, and semantically faithful object transformations, outperforming existing text-guided editing approaches in both spatial accuracy and scene coherence.

  • 9 authors
·
Jan 5 5

BiCLIP: Domain Canonicalization via Structured Geometric Transformation

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capabilities, yet adapting these models to specialized domains remains a significant challenge. Building on recent theoretical insights suggesting that independently trained VLMs are related by a canonical transformation, we extend this understanding to the concept of domains. We hypothesize that image features across disparate domains are related by a canonicalized geometric transformation that can be recovered using a small set of anchors. Few-shot classification provides a natural setting for this alignment, as the limited labeled samples serve as the anchors required to estimate this transformation. Motivated by this hypothesis, we introduce BiCLIP, a framework that applies a targeted transformation to multimodal features to enhance cross-modal alignment. Our approach is characterized by its extreme simplicity and low parameter footprint. Extensive evaluations across 11 standard benchmarks, including EuroSAT, DTD, and FGVCAircraft, demonstrate that BiCLIP consistently achieves state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, we provide empirical verification of existing geometric findings by analyzing the orthogonality and angular distribution of the learned transformations, confirming that structured alignment is the key to robust domain adaptation. Code is available at https://github.com/QuantitativeImagingLaboratory/BilinearCLIP

The Geometric Price of Discrete Logic: Context-driven Manifold Dynamics of Number Representations

Large language models (LLMs) generalize smoothly across continuous semantic spaces, yet strict logical reasoning demands the formation of discrete decision boundaries. Prevailing theories relying on linear isometric projections fail to resolve this fundamental tension. In this work, we argue that task context operates as a non-isometric dynamical operator that enforces a necessary "topological distortion." By applying Gram-Schmidt decomposition to residual-stream activations , we reveal a dual-modulation mechanism driving this process: a class-agnostic topological preservation that anchors global structure to prevent semantic collapse, and a specific algebraic divergence that directionally tears apart cross-class concepts to forge logical boundaries. We validate this geometric evolution across a gradient of tasks, from simple mapping to complex primality testing. Crucially, targeted specific vector ablation establishes a strict causal binding between this topology and model function: algebraically erasing the divergence component collapses parity classification accuracy from 100% to chance levels (38.57%). Furthermore, we uncover a three-phase layer-wise geometric dynamic and demonstrate that under social pressure prompts, models fail to generate sufficient divergence. This results in a "manifold entanglement" that geometrically explains sycophancy and hallucination. Ultimately, our findings revise the linear-isometric presumption, demonstrating that the emergence of discrete logic in LLMs is purchased at an irreducible cost of topological deformation.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 23

Unifying UAV Cross-View Geo-Localization via 3D Geometric Perception

Cross-view geo-localization for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operating in GNSS-denied environments remains challenging due to the severe geometric discrepancy between oblique UAV imagery and orthogonal satellite maps. Most existing methods address this problem through a decoupled pipeline of place retrieval and pose estimation, implicitly treating perspective distortion as appearance noise rather than an explicit geometric transformation. In this work, we propose a geometry-aware UAV geo-localization framework that explicitly models the 3D scene geometry to unify coarse place recognition and fine-grained pose estimation within a single inference pipeline. Our approach reconstructs a local 3D scene from multi-view UAV image sequences using a Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT), and renders a virtual Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation that orthorectifies the UAV perspective to align with satellite imagery. This BEV serves as a geometric intermediary that enables robust cross-view retrieval and provides spatial priors for accurate 3 Degrees of Freedom (3-DoF) pose regression. To efficiently handle multiple location hypotheses, we introduce a Satellite-wise Attention Block that isolates the interaction between each satellite candidate and the reconstructed UAV scene, preventing inter-candidate interference while maintaining linear computational complexity. In addition, we release a recalibrated version of the University-1652 dataset with precise coordinate annotations and spatial overlap analysis, enabling rigorous evaluation of end-to-end localization accuracy. Extensive experiments on the refined University-1652 benchmark and SUES-200 demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving robust meter-level localization accuracy and improved generalization in complex urban environments.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 1

RAR: Region-Aware Point Cloud Registration

This paper concerns the research problem of point cloud registration to find the rigid transformation to optimally align the source point set with the target one. Learning robust point cloud registration models with deep neural networks has emerged as a powerful paradigm, offering promising performance in predicting the global geometric transformation for a pair of point sets. Existing methods firstly leverage an encoder to regress a latent shape embedding, which is then decoded into a shape-conditioned transformation via concatenation-based conditioning. However, different regions of a 3D shape vary in their geometric structures which makes it more sense that we have a region-conditioned transformation instead of the shape-conditioned one. In this paper we present a Region-Aware point cloud Registration, denoted as RAR, to predict transformation for pairwise point sets in the self-supervised learning fashion. More specifically, we develop a novel region-aware decoder (RAD) module that is formed with an implicit neural region representation parameterized by neural networks. The implicit neural region representation is learned with a self-supervised 3D shape reconstruction loss without the need for region labels. Consequently, the region-aware decoder (RAD) module guides the training of the region-aware transformation (RAT) module and region-aware weight (RAW) module, which predict the transforms and weights for different regions respectively. The global geometric transformation from source point set to target one is then formed by the weighted fusion of region-aware transforms. Compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, our experiments show that our RAR achieves superior registration performance over various benchmark datasets (e.g. ModelNet40).

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 7, 2021

pyMEAL: A Multi-Encoder Augmentation-Aware Learning for Robust and Generalizable Medical Image Translation

Medical imaging is critical for diagnostics, but clinical adoption of advanced AI-driven imaging faces challenges due to patient variability, image artifacts, and limited model generalization. While deep learning has transformed image analysis, 3D medical imaging still suffers from data scarcity and inconsistencies due to acquisition protocols, scanner differences, and patient motion. Traditional augmentation uses a single pipeline for all transformations, disregarding the unique traits of each augmentation and struggling with large data volumes. To address these challenges, we propose a Multi-encoder Augmentation-Aware Learning (MEAL) framework that leverages four distinct augmentation variants processed through dedicated encoders. Three fusion strategies such as concatenation (CC), fusion layer (FL), and adaptive controller block (BD) are integrated to build multi-encoder models that combine augmentation-specific features before decoding. MEAL-BD uniquely preserves augmentation-aware representations, enabling robust, protocol-invariant feature learning. As demonstrated in a Computed Tomography (CT)-to-T1-weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) translation study, MEAL-BD consistently achieved the best performance on both unseen- and predefined-test data. On both geometric transformations (like rotations and flips) and non-augmented inputs, MEAL-BD outperformed other competing methods, achieving higher mean peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM) scores. These results establish MEAL as a reliable framework for preserving structural fidelity and generalizing across clinically relevant variability. By reframing augmentation as a source of diverse, generalizable features, MEAL supports robust, protocol-invariant learning, advancing clinically reliable medical imaging solutions.

  • 6 authors
·
May 30, 2025

PaintBench: Deterministic Evaluation of Precise Visual Editing

While current multimodal models are proficient at open-ended visual editing, executing precise single-answer edits remains an important obstacle. To probe this challenge, we introduce PaintBench, a dynamically scalable benchmark targeting 20 fundamental precise visual editing operations across four categories: geometric transformation, structural manipulation, color change, and symbolic reasoning. Procedural generation with configurable complexity enables an effectively infinite, contamination-resistant evaluation suite, and deterministic pixel-level evaluation eliminates reliance on bias-prone judge models. Across 11 image editing models, we find overall low performance, with the current highest-performing industry leader scoring only 17.1% (mIoU). Task decomposition reveals especially challenging operation types (geometric transformation, most structural manipulation, formula-based color change) and model-specific specializations. Fine-grained benchmark diagnostics further show performance degradations induced by scene variations in object count, background complexity, color scheme, and edit-region size. To test generalization of PaintBench scores to applied task performance, we create a procedural, deterministic evaluation for data visualization editing (TinyGrafixBench) and find strong linear correlation with PaintBench scores (R^2 = 0.91, p < 0.001). Altogether, PaintBench provides a rigorous foundation for measuring and driving progress in precise multimodal visual editing.

nyu-visionx VISIONx @ NYU
·
May 28 3

Unfolding Spatial Cognition: Evaluating Multimodal Models on Visual Simulations

Spatial cognition is essential for human intelligence, enabling problem-solving through visual simulations rather than solely relying on verbal reasoning. However, existing AI benchmarks primarily assess verbal reasoning, neglecting the complexities of non-verbal, multi-step visual simulation. We introduce STARE(Spatial Transformations and Reasoning Evaluation), a benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate multimodal large language models on tasks better solved through multi-step visual simulation. STARE features 4K tasks spanning foundational geometric transformations (2D and 3D), integrated spatial reasoning (cube net folding and tangram puzzles), and real-world spatial reasoning (perspective and temporal reasoning), reflecting practical cognitive challenges like object assembly, mechanical diagram interpretation, and everyday spatial navigation. Our evaluations show that models excel at reasoning over simpler 2D transformations, but perform close to random chance on more complex tasks like 3D cube net folding and tangram puzzles that require multi-step visual simulations. Humans achieve near-perfect accuracy but take considerable time (up to 28.9s) on complex tasks, significantly speeding up (down by 7.5 seconds on average) with intermediate visual simulations. In contrast, models exhibit inconsistent performance gains from visual simulations, improving on most tasks but declining in specific cases like tangram puzzles (GPT-4o, o1) and cube net folding (Claude-3.5, Gemini-2.0 Flash), indicating that models may not know how to effectively leverage intermediate visual information.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 5, 2025 1

AGVBench: A Reliability-Oriented Benchmark of Data Augmentation for Vein Recognition

Vein recognition is a secure biometric technology often constrained by limited annotated data and imaging variations. While data augmentation mitigates this, strategies designed for natural images may disrupt the fine-grained topology and textures essential for identity discrimination. We present AGVBench, which evaluates 30 representative augmentation strategies on five public palm- and finger-vein datasets with seven backbone architectures, covering classic CNNs, vision transformers, and vein-specific recognition models. Our results show that multi-image mixing methods (e.g., MixUp, PuzzleMix, StarMixup) generally provide the strongest recognition performance. However, they are often poorly calibrated and vulnerable to adversarial perturbations, revealing a clear inconsistency between clean accuracy and adversarial security. We also find that severe geometric transformations frequently degrade recognition, which is potentially due to feature misalignment or spatial cropping, and that augmentation effectiveness varies across palm and finger vein datasets. These findings prove that accuracy-centric evaluation is insufficient for biometric augmentation. AGVBench provides standardized protocols to support reproducible research and guide the design of reliable, secure, and robust vein recognition systems. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/Advance-VeinTech-Innovators/AGVBench.

Learning Invariant Representations for Equivariant Neural Networks Using Orthogonal Moments

The convolutional layers of standard convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are equivariant to translation. However, the convolution and fully-connected layers are not equivariant or invariant to other affine geometric transformations. Recently, a new class of CNNs is proposed in which the conventional layers of CNNs are replaced with equivariant convolution, pooling, and batch-normalization layers. The final classification layer in equivariant neural networks is invariant to different affine geometric transformations such as rotation, reflection and translation, and the scalar value is obtained by either eliminating the spatial dimensions of filter responses using convolution and down-sampling throughout the network or average is taken over the filter responses. In this work, we propose to integrate the orthogonal moments which gives the high-order statistics of the function as an effective means for encoding global invariance with respect to rotation, reflection and translation in fully-connected layers. As a result, the intermediate layers of the network become equivariant while the classification layer becomes invariant. The most widely used Zernike, pseudo-Zernike and orthogonal Fourier-Mellin moments are considered for this purpose. The effectiveness of the proposed work is evaluated by integrating the invariant transition and fully-connected layer in the architecture of group-equivariant CNNs (G-CNNs) on rotated MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 22, 2022

Geometry-Editable and Appearance-Preserving Object Compositon

General object composition (GOC) aims to seamlessly integrate a target object into a background scene with desired geometric properties, while simultaneously preserving its fine-grained appearance details. Recent approaches derive semantic embeddings and integrate them into advanced diffusion models to enable geometry-editable generation. However, these highly compact embeddings encode only high-level semantic cues and inevitably discard fine-grained appearance details. We introduce a Disentangled Geometry-editable and Appearance-preserving Diffusion (DGAD) model that first leverages semantic embeddings to implicitly capture the desired geometric transformations and then employs a cross-attention retrieval mechanism to align fine-grained appearance features with the geometry-edited representation, facilitating both precise geometry editing and faithful appearance preservation in object composition. Specifically, DGAD builds on CLIP/DINO-derived and reference networks to extract semantic embeddings and appearance-preserving representations, which are then seamlessly integrated into the encoding and decoding pipelines in a disentangled manner. We first integrate the semantic embeddings into pre-trained diffusion models that exhibit strong spatial reasoning capabilities to implicitly capture object geometry, thereby facilitating flexible object manipulation and ensuring effective editability. Then, we design a dense cross-attention mechanism that leverages the implicitly learned object geometry to retrieve and spatially align appearance features with their corresponding regions, ensuring faithful appearance consistency. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DGAD framework.

  • 6 authors
·
May 27, 2025 2

EquiCaps: Predictor-Free Pose-Aware Pre-Trained Capsule Networks

Learning self-supervised representations that are invariant and equivariant to transformations is crucial for advancing beyond traditional visual classification tasks. However, many methods rely on predictor architectures to encode equivariance, despite evidence that architectural choices, such as capsule networks, inherently excel at learning interpretable pose-aware representations. To explore this, we introduce EquiCaps (Equivariant Capsule Network), a capsule-based approach to pose-aware self-supervision that eliminates the need for a specialised predictor for enforcing equivariance. Instead, we leverage the intrinsic pose-awareness capabilities of capsules to improve performance in pose estimation tasks. To further challenge our assumptions, we increase task complexity via multi-geometric transformations to enable a more thorough evaluation of invariance and equivariance by introducing 3DIEBench-T, an extension of a 3D object-rendering benchmark dataset. Empirical results demonstrate that EquiCaps outperforms prior state-of-the-art equivariant methods on rotation prediction, achieving a supervised-level R^2 of 0.78 on the 3DIEBench rotation prediction benchmark and improving upon SIE and CapsIE by 0.05 and 0.04 R^2, respectively. Moreover, in contrast to non-capsule-based equivariant approaches, EquiCaps maintains robust equivariant performance under combined geometric transformations, underscoring its generalisation capabilities and the promise of predictor-free capsule architectures.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 11, 2025

GaussianFusion: Gaussian-Based Multi-Sensor Fusion for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Multi-sensor fusion is crucial for improving the performance and robustness of end-to-end autonomous driving systems. Existing methods predominantly adopt either attention-based flatten fusion or bird's eye view fusion through geometric transformations. However, these approaches often suffer from limited interpretability or dense computational overhead. In this paper, we introduce GaussianFusion, a Gaussian-based multi-sensor fusion framework for end-to-end autonomous driving. Our method employs intuitive and compact Gaussian representations as intermediate carriers to aggregate information from diverse sensors. Specifically, we initialize a set of 2D Gaussians uniformly across the driving scene, where each Gaussian is parameterized by physical attributes and equipped with explicit and implicit features. These Gaussians are progressively refined by integrating multi-modal features. The explicit features capture rich semantic and spatial information about the traffic scene, while the implicit features provide complementary cues beneficial for trajectory planning. To fully exploit rich spatial and semantic information in Gaussians, we design a cascade planning head that iteratively refines trajectory predictions through interactions with Gaussians. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM and Bench2Drive benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed GaussianFusion framework. The source code will be released at https://github.com/Say2L/GaussianFusion.

  • 5 authors
·
May 26, 2025

AugUndo: Scaling Up Augmentations for Monocular Depth Completion and Estimation

Unsupervised depth completion and estimation methods are trained by minimizing reconstruction error. Block artifacts from resampling, intensity saturation, and occlusions are amongst the many undesirable by-products of common data augmentation schemes that affect image reconstruction quality, and thus the training signal. Hence, typical augmentations on images viewed as essential to training pipelines in other vision tasks have seen limited use beyond small image intensity changes and flipping. The sparse depth modality in depth completion have seen even less use as intensity transformations alter the scale of the 3D scene, and geometric transformations may decimate the sparse points during resampling. We propose a method that unlocks a wide range of previously-infeasible geometric augmentations for unsupervised depth completion and estimation. This is achieved by reversing, or ``undo''-ing, geometric transformations to the coordinates of the output depth, warping the depth map back to the original reference frame. This enables computing the reconstruction losses using the original images and sparse depth maps, eliminating the pitfalls of naive loss computation on the augmented inputs and allowing us to scale up augmentations to boost performance. We demonstrate our method on indoor (VOID) and outdoor (KITTI) datasets, where we consistently improve upon recent methods across both datasets as well as generalization to four other datasets. Code available at: https://github.com/alexklwong/augundo.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 15, 2023

EqMotion: Equivariant Multi-agent Motion Prediction with Invariant Interaction Reasoning

Learning to predict agent motions with relationship reasoning is important for many applications. In motion prediction tasks, maintaining motion equivariance under Euclidean geometric transformations and invariance of agent interaction is a critical and fundamental principle. However, such equivariance and invariance properties are overlooked by most existing methods. To fill this gap, we propose EqMotion, an efficient equivariant motion prediction model with invariant interaction reasoning. To achieve motion equivariance, we propose an equivariant geometric feature learning module to learn a Euclidean transformable feature through dedicated designs of equivariant operations. To reason agent's interactions, we propose an invariant interaction reasoning module to achieve a more stable interaction modeling. To further promote more comprehensive motion features, we propose an invariant pattern feature learning module to learn an invariant pattern feature, which cooperates with the equivariant geometric feature to enhance network expressiveness. We conduct experiments for the proposed model on four distinct scenarios: particle dynamics, molecule dynamics, human skeleton motion prediction and pedestrian trajectory prediction. Experimental results show that our method is not only generally applicable, but also achieves state-of-the-art prediction performances on all the four tasks, improving by 24.0/30.1/8.6/9.2%. Code is available at https://github.com/MediaBrain-SJTU/EqMotion.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 20, 2023

ElasticFace: Elastic Margin Loss for Deep Face Recognition

Learning discriminative face features plays a major role in building high-performing face recognition models. The recent state-of-the-art face recognition solutions proposed to incorporate a fixed penalty margin on commonly used classification loss function, softmax loss, in the normalized hypersphere to increase the discriminative power of face recognition models, by minimizing the intra-class variation and maximizing the inter-class variation. Marginal penalty softmax losses, such as ArcFace and CosFace, assume that the geodesic distance between and within the different identities can be equally learned using a fixed penalty margin. However, such a learning objective is not realistic for real data with inconsistent inter-and intra-class variation, which might limit the discriminative and generalizability of the face recognition model. In this paper, we relax the fixed penalty margin constrain by proposing elastic penalty margin loss (ElasticFace) that allows flexibility in the push for class separability. The main idea is to utilize random margin values drawn from a normal distribution in each training iteration. This aims at giving the decision boundary chances to extract and retract to allow space for flexible class separability learning. We demonstrate the superiority of our ElasticFace loss over ArcFace and CosFace losses, using the same geometric transformation, on a large set of mainstream benchmarks. From a wider perspective, our ElasticFace has advanced the state-of-the-art face recognition performance on seven out of nine mainstream benchmarks.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 20, 2021

Interactive3D: Create What You Want by Interactive 3D Generation

3D object generation has undergone significant advancements, yielding high-quality results. However, fall short of achieving precise user control, often yielding results that do not align with user expectations, thus limiting their applicability. User-envisioning 3D object generation faces significant challenges in realizing its concepts using current generative models due to limited interaction capabilities. Existing methods mainly offer two approaches: (i) interpreting textual instructions with constrained controllability, or (ii) reconstructing 3D objects from 2D images. Both of them limit customization to the confines of the 2D reference and potentially introduce undesirable artifacts during the 3D lifting process, restricting the scope for direct and versatile 3D modifications. In this work, we introduce Interactive3D, an innovative framework for interactive 3D generation that grants users precise control over the generative process through extensive 3D interaction capabilities. Interactive3D is constructed in two cascading stages, utilizing distinct 3D representations. The first stage employs Gaussian Splatting for direct user interaction, allowing modifications and guidance of the generative direction at any intermediate step through (i) Adding and Removing components, (ii) Deformable and Rigid Dragging, (iii) Geometric Transformations, and (iv) Semantic Editing. Subsequently, the Gaussian splats are transformed into InstantNGP. We introduce a novel (v) Interactive Hash Refinement module to further add details and extract the geometry in the second stage. Our experiments demonstrate that Interactive3D markedly improves the controllability and quality of 3D generation. Our project webpage is available at https://interactive-3d.github.io/.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 25, 2024 1

Questioning the Stability of Visual Question Answering

Visual Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, yet their reliability under small, meaning-preserving input changes remains poorly understood. We present the first large-scale, systematic study of VLM robustness to benign visual and textual perturbations: pixel-level shifts, light geometric transformations, padded rescaling, paraphrasing, and multilingual rewrites that do not alter the underlying semantics of an image-question pair. Across a broad set of models and datasets, we find that modern VLMs are highly sensitive to such minor perturbations: a substantial fraction of samples change their predicted answer under at least one visual or textual modification. We characterize how this instability varies across perturbation types, question categories, and models, revealing that even state-of-the-art systems (e.g., GPT-4o, Gemini 2.0 Flash) frequently fail under shifts as small as a few pixels or harmless rephrasings. We further show that sample-level stability serves as a strong indicator of correctness: stable samples are consistently far more likely to be answered correctly. Leveraging this, we demonstrate that the stability patterns of small, accessible open-source models can be used to predict the correctness of much larger closed-source models with high precision. Our findings expose a fundamental fragility in current VLMs and highlight the need for robustness evaluations that go beyond adversarial perturbations, focusing instead on invariances that models should reliably uphold.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 14, 2025

A Comprehensive Study of Multimodal Large Language Models for Image Quality Assessment

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have experienced significant advancement in visual understanding and reasoning, their potential to serve as powerful, flexible, interpretable, and text-driven models for Image Quality Assessment (IQA) remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic study of prompting MLLMs for IQA. We first investigate nine prompting systems for MLLMs as the combinations of three standardized testing procedures in psychophysics (i.e., the single-stimulus, double-stimulus, and multiple-stimulus methods) and three popular prompting strategies in natural language processing (i.e., the standard, in-context, and chain-of-thought prompting). We then present a difficult sample selection procedure, taking into account sample diversity and uncertainty, to further challenge MLLMs equipped with the respective optimal prompting systems. We assess three open-source and one closed-source MLLMs on several visual attributes of image quality (e.g., structural and textural distortions, geometric transformations, and color differences) in both full-reference and no-reference scenarios. Experimental results show that only the closed-source GPT-4V provides a reasonable account for human perception of image quality, but is weak at discriminating fine-grained quality variations (e.g., color differences) and at comparing visual quality of multiple images, tasks humans can perform effortlessly.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 16, 2024

Compositional Adversarial Training for Robust Visual Watermarking

Robust watermarking is typically trained with random post-processing augmentation, but random sampling under-covers the combinatorial space of realistic attack pipelines and rarely encounters the rare compositions that actually break detection. This leads to unstable training and poor sample efficiency. We instead formulate watermark robustness as a min-max problem over a structured space of compositional transformations. We propose Compositional Adversarial Training (CAT), a plug-in framework that learns a sequential differentiable adversary that observes the current watermarked image and selects an attack family at each step to maximally disrupt message recovery. CAT combines a straight-through Gumbel-Softmax attack selection with entropy regularization, allowing the backward pass to be end-to-end differentiable and aggregate gradient information across attack families, yielding faster, smoother convergence without collapsing to a single attack mode. We evaluate CAT on post-generation watermarks VideoSeal 0.0, VideoSeal 1.0, and PixelSeal and in-generation WMAR under both single-step and two-step attack suites, on in-distribution and multiple out-of-distribution image and video benchmarks. CAT consistently outperforms random-augmentation baselines trained with the same augmentation budget, with the largest gains on hard composed attacks and OOD evaluations; improving overall watermark capacity by up to 63.5% in the single-step attack setting and 13.0% in the compositional setting. In the autoregressive setting, CAT improves the TPR@FPR=1% by 12% on average on difficult geometric transformations. These results show that robust visual watermarking benefits from training against adaptive compositional adversaries rather than independent random corruptions.

  • 7 authors
·
May 15

SAiW: Source-Attributable Invisible Watermarking for Proactive Deepfake Defense

Deepfakes generated by modern generative models pose a serious threat to information integrity, digital identity, and public trust. Existing detection methods are largely reactive, attempting to identify manipulations after they occur and often failing to generalize across evolving generation techniques. This motivates the need for proactive mechanisms that secure media authenticity at the time of creation. In this work, we introduce SAiW, a Source-Attributed Invisible watermarking Framework for proactive deepfake defense and media provenance verification. Unlike conventional watermarking methods that treat watermark payloads as generic signals, SAiW formulates watermark embedding as a source-conditioned representation learning problem, where watermark identity encodes the originating source and modulates the embedding process to produce discriminative and traceable signatures. The framework integrates feature-wise linear modulation to inject source identity into the embedding network, enabling scalable multi-source watermark generation. A perceptual guidance module derived from human visual system priors ensures that watermark perturbations remain visually imperceptible while maintaining robustness. In addition, a dual-purpose forensic decoder simultaneously reconstructs the embedded watermark and performs source attribution, providing both automated verification and interpretable forensic evidence. Extensive experiments across multiple deepfake datasets demonstrate that SAiW achieves high perceptual quality while maintaining strong robustness against compression, filtering, noise, geometric transformations, and adversarial perturbations. By binding digital media to its origin through invisible yet verifiable markers, SAiW enables reliable authentication and source attribution, providing a scalable foundation for proactive deepfake defense and trustworthy media provenance.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 23

Compositional-ARC: Assessing Systematic Generalization in Abstract Spatial Reasoning

Systematic generalization refers to the capacity to understand and generate novel combinations from known components. Despite recent progress by large language models (LLMs) across various domains, these models often fail to extend their knowledge to novel compositional scenarios, revealing notable limitations in systematic generalization. There has been an ongoing debate about whether neural networks possess the capacity for systematic generalization, with recent studies suggesting that meta-learning approaches designed for compositionality can significantly enhance this ability. However, these insights have largely been confined to linguistic problems, leaving their applicability to other tasks an open question. In this study, we extend meta-learning for compositionality to the domain of abstract spatial reasoning. To this end, we introduce Compositional-ARC-a dataset designed to evaluate the capacity of models to systematically generalize from known geometric transformations (e.g., translation, rotation) of abstract two-dimensional objects to novel combinations of these transformations (e.g., translation+rotation). Our results show that a small transformer-based encoder-decoder model, trained via meta-learning for compositionality, can systematically generalize to previously unseen transformation compositions. Notably, despite having only 5.7M parameters, this model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs-including o3-mini, GPT-4o, and Gemini 2.0 Flash, which fail to exhibit similar systematic behavior-and performs on par with the winning model of the ARC prize 2024, an 8B-parameter LLM trained via test-time training. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of meta-learning in promoting systematicity beyond linguistic tasks, suggesting a promising direction toward more robust and generalizable models.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 2, 2025

RF-ULM: Deep Learning for Radio-Frequency Ultrasound Localization Microscopy

In Ultrasound Localization Microscopy (ULM),achieving high-resolution images relies on the precise localization of contrast agent particles across consecutive beam-formed frames. However, our study uncovers an enormous potential: The process of delay-and-sum beamforming leads to an irreversible reduction of Radio-Frequency (RF) data, while its implications for localization remain largely unexplored. The rich contextual information embedded within RF wavefronts, including their hyperbolic shape and phase, offers great promise for guiding Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in challenging localization scenarios. To fully exploit this data, we propose to directly localize scatterers in RF signals. Our approach involves a custom super-resolution DNN using learned feature channel shuffling and a novel semi-global convolutional sampling block tailored for reliable and accurate wavefront localization. Additionally, we introduce a geometric point transformation that facilitates seamless mapping between RF and B-mode coordinate space. To understand the impact of beamforming on ULM, we validate the effectiveness of our method by conducting an extensive comparison with State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) techniques. We present the inaugural in vivo results from an RF-trained DNN, highlighting its real-world practicality. Our findings show that RF-ULM bridges the domain gap between synthetic and real datasets, offering a considerable advantage in terms of precision and complexity. To enable the broader research community to benefit from our findings, our code and the associated SOTA methods are made available at https://github.com/hahnec/rf-ulm.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 2, 2023

Revisiting Transformation Invariant Geometric Deep Learning: Are Initial Representations All You Need?

Geometric deep learning, i.e., designing neural networks to handle the ubiquitous geometric data such as point clouds and graphs, have achieved great successes in the last decade. One critical inductive bias is that the model can maintain invariance towards various transformations such as translation, rotation, and scaling. The existing graph neural network (GNN) approaches can only maintain permutation-invariance, failing to guarantee invariance with respect to other transformations. Besides GNNs, other works design sophisticated transformation-invariant layers, which are computationally expensive and difficult to be extended. To solve this problem, we revisit why the existing neural networks cannot maintain transformation invariance when handling geometric data. Our findings show that transformation-invariant and distance-preserving initial representations are sufficient to achieve transformation invariance rather than needing sophisticated neural layer designs. Motivated by these findings, we propose Transformation Invariant Neural Networks (TinvNN), a straightforward and general framework for geometric data. Specifically, we realize transformation-invariant and distance-preserving initial point representations by modifying multi-dimensional scaling before feeding the representations into neural networks. We prove that TinvNN can strictly guarantee transformation invariance, being general and flexible enough to be combined with the existing neural networks. Extensive experimental results on point cloud analysis and combinatorial optimization demonstrate the effectiveness and general applicability of our proposed method. Based on the experimental results, we advocate that TinvNN should be considered a new starting point and an essential baseline for further studies of transformation-invariant geometric deep learning.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 22, 2021

REAP: A Large-Scale Realistic Adversarial Patch Benchmark

Machine learning models are known to be susceptible to adversarial perturbation. One famous attack is the adversarial patch, a sticker with a particularly crafted pattern that makes the model incorrectly predict the object it is placed on. This attack presents a critical threat to cyber-physical systems that rely on cameras such as autonomous cars. Despite the significance of the problem, conducting research in this setting has been difficult; evaluating attacks and defenses in the real world is exceptionally costly while synthetic data are unrealistic. In this work, we propose the REAP (REalistic Adversarial Patch) benchmark, a digital benchmark that allows the user to evaluate patch attacks on real images, and under real-world conditions. Built on top of the Mapillary Vistas dataset, our benchmark contains over 14,000 traffic signs. Each sign is augmented with a pair of geometric and lighting transformations, which can be used to apply a digitally generated patch realistically onto the sign. Using our benchmark, we perform the first large-scale assessments of adversarial patch attacks under realistic conditions. Our experiments suggest that adversarial patch attacks may present a smaller threat than previously believed and that the success rate of an attack on simpler digital simulations is not predictive of its actual effectiveness in practice. We release our benchmark publicly at https://github.com/wagner-group/reap-benchmark.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 11, 2022

SemAug: Semantically Meaningful Image Augmentations for Object Detection Through Language Grounding

Data augmentation is an essential technique in improving the generalization of deep neural networks. The majority of existing image-domain augmentations either rely on geometric and structural transformations, or apply different kinds of photometric distortions. In this paper, we propose an effective technique for image augmentation by injecting contextually meaningful knowledge into the scenes. Our method of semantically meaningful image augmentation for object detection via language grounding, SemAug, starts by calculating semantically appropriate new objects that can be placed into relevant locations in the image (the what and where problems). Then it embeds these objects into their relevant target locations, thereby promoting diversity of object instance distribution. Our method allows for introducing new object instances and categories that may not even exist in the training set. Furthermore, it does not require the additional overhead of training a context network, so it can be easily added to existing architectures. Our comprehensive set of evaluations showed that the proposed method is very effective in improving the generalization, while the overhead is negligible. In particular, for a wide range of model architectures, our method achieved ~2-4% and ~1-2% mAP improvements for the task of object detection on the Pascal VOC and COCO datasets, respectively.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 15, 2022

GeoSketch: A Neural-Symbolic Approach to Geometric Multimodal Reasoning with Auxiliary Line Construction and Affine Transformation

Geometric Problem Solving (GPS) poses a unique challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), requiring not only the joint interpretation of text and diagrams but also iterative visuospatial reasoning. While existing approaches process diagrams as static images, they lack the capacity for dynamic manipulation - a core aspect of human geometric reasoning involving auxiliary line construction and affine transformations. We present GeoSketch, a neural-symbolic framework that recasts geometric reasoning as an interactive perception-reasoning-action loop. GeoSketch integrates: (1) a Perception module that abstracts diagrams into structured logic forms, (2) a Symbolic Reasoning module that applies geometric theorems to decide the next deductive step, and (3) a Sketch Action module that executes operations such as drawing auxiliary lines or applying transformations, thereby updating the diagram in a closed loop. To train this agent, we develop a two-stage pipeline: supervised fine-tuning on 2,000 symbolic-curated trajectories followed by reinforcement learning with dense, symbolic rewards to enhance robustness and strategic exploration. To evaluate this paradigm, we introduce the GeoSketch Benchmark, a high-quality set of 390 geometry problems requiring auxiliary construction or affine transformations. Experiments on strong MLLM baselines demonstrate that GeoSketch significantly improves stepwise reasoning accuracy and problem-solving success over static perception methods. By unifying hierarchical decision-making, executable visual actions, and symbolic verification, GeoSketch advances multimodal reasoning from static interpretation to dynamic, verifiable interaction, establishing a new foundation for solving complex visuospatial problems.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 26, 2025

Geometric-aware Pretraining for Vision-centric 3D Object Detection

Multi-camera 3D object detection for autonomous driving is a challenging problem that has garnered notable attention from both academia and industry. An obstacle encountered in vision-based techniques involves the precise extraction of geometry-conscious features from RGB images. Recent approaches have utilized geometric-aware image backbones pretrained on depth-relevant tasks to acquire spatial information. However, these approaches overlook the critical aspect of view transformation, resulting in inadequate performance due to the misalignment of spatial knowledge between the image backbone and view transformation. To address this issue, we propose a novel geometric-aware pretraining framework called GAPretrain. Our approach incorporates spatial and structural cues to camera networks by employing the geometric-rich modality as guidance during the pretraining phase. The transference of modal-specific attributes across different modalities is non-trivial, but we bridge this gap by using a unified bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation and structural hints derived from LiDAR point clouds to facilitate the pretraining process. GAPretrain serves as a plug-and-play solution that can be flexibly applied to multiple state-of-the-art detectors. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed method. We achieve 46.2 mAP and 55.5 NDS on the nuScenes val set using the BEVFormer method, with a gain of 2.7 and 2.1 points, respectively. We also conduct experiments on various image backbones and view transformations to validate the efficacy of our approach. Code will be released at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/BEVPerception-Survey-Recipe.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 6, 2023

Graph Neural Networks Uncover Geometric Neural Representations in Reinforcement-Based Motor Learning

Graph Neural Networks (GNN) can capture the geometric properties of neural representations in EEG data. Here we utilise those to study how reinforcement-based motor learning affects neural activity patterns during motor planning, leveraging the inherent graph structure of EEG channels to capture the spatial relationships in brain activity. By exploiting task-specific symmetries, we define different pretraining strategies that not only improve model performance across all participant groups but also validate the robustness of the geometric representations. Explainability analysis based on the graph structures reveals consistent group-specific neural signatures that persist across pretraining conditions, suggesting stable geometric structures in the neural representations associated with motor learning and feedback processing. These geometric patterns exhibit partial invariance to certain task space transformations, indicating symmetries that enable generalisation across conditions while maintaining specificity to individual learning strategies. This work demonstrates how GNNs can uncover the effects of previous outcomes on motor planning, in a complex real-world task, providing insights into the geometric principles governing neural representations. Our experimental design bridges the gap between controlled experiments and ecologically valid scenarios, offering new insights into the organisation of neural representations during naturalistic motor learning, which may open avenues for exploring fundamental principles governing brain activity in complex tasks.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 31, 2024

Metric3D v2: A Versatile Monocular Geometric Foundation Model for Zero-shot Metric Depth and Surface Normal Estimation

We introduce Metric3D v2, a geometric foundation model for zero-shot metric depth and surface normal estimation from a single image, which is crucial for metric 3D recovery. While depth and normal are geometrically related and highly complimentary, they present distinct challenges. SoTA monocular depth methods achieve zero-shot generalization by learning affine-invariant depths, which cannot recover real-world metrics. Meanwhile, SoTA normal estimation methods have limited zero-shot performance due to the lack of large-scale labeled data. To tackle these issues, we propose solutions for both metric depth estimation and surface normal estimation. For metric depth estimation, we show that the key to a zero-shot single-view model lies in resolving the metric ambiguity from various camera models and large-scale data training. We propose a canonical camera space transformation module, which explicitly addresses the ambiguity problem and can be effortlessly plugged into existing monocular models. For surface normal estimation, we propose a joint depth-normal optimization module to distill diverse data knowledge from metric depth, enabling normal estimators to learn beyond normal labels. Equipped with these modules, our depth-normal models can be stably trained with over 16 million of images from thousands of camera models with different-type annotations, resulting in zero-shot generalization to in-the-wild images with unseen camera settings. Our method enables the accurate recovery of metric 3D structures on randomly collected internet images, paving the way for plausible single-image metrology. Our project page is at https://JUGGHM.github.io/Metric3Dv2.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 21, 2024

Feedforward 3D Editing Learns from Semantic-Part Transformation

3D editing is a fundamental capability for scalable 3D content creation. While image editing has rapidly evolved toward large-scale feedforward generative paradigms, 3D AI generation remains dominated by training-free editing pipelines. A central challenge of feedforward 3D editing lies in the lack of high-quality paired supervision. Editable 3D assets require simultaneous preservation of geometry, multi-view consistency, structural coherence, and localized edit controllability. Existing 3D editing datasets often rely on independently generated assets, image-mediated reconstruction or narrow edit taxonomies, leading to inaccurate localization, weak preservation, blurred edit boundaries, and limited semantic consistency. In this work, we introduce a new perspective: scalable feedforward 3D editing should be learned from semantic-part transformations. Based on this insight, we propose Pxform, a high-quality 3D editing dataset with over 100K consistent before/after editing pairs across seven edit types. Instead of treating objects as unstructured shapes, our pipeline grounds edits directly in semantic 3D parts. Built upon Pxform, we further propose PartFlow, a feedforward 3D editing network that injects source-aware latent control into pretrained 3D generative priors. PartFlow introduces mask-aware velocity preservation and render-space consistency supervision to jointly improve edit fidelity and source preservation, while requiring no 3D edit mask during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that high-quality semantic-part supervision substantially improves scalable 3D editing, enabling PartFlow to achieve state-of-the-art performance on both geometric and appearance editing benchmarks.

  • 7 authors
·
May 26

On the Geometric Structure of Layer Updates in Deep Language Models

We study the geometric structure of layer updates in deep language models. Rather than analyzing what information is encoded in intermediate representations, we ask how representations change from one layer to the next. We show that layerwise updates admit a decomposition into a dominant tokenwise component and a residual that is not captured by restricted tokenwise function classes. Across multiple architectures, including Transformers and state-space models, we find that the full layer update is almost perfectly aligned with the tokenwise component, while the residual exhibits substantially weaker alignment, larger angular deviation, and significantly lower projection onto the dominant tokenwise subspace. This indicates that the residual is not merely a small correction, but a geometrically distinct component of the transformation. This geometric separation has functional consequences: approximation error under the restricted tokenwise model is strongly associated with output perturbation, with Spearman correlations often exceeding 0.7 and reaching up to 0.95 in larger models. Together, these results suggest that most layerwise updates behave like structured reparameterizations along a dominant direction, while functionally significant computation is concentrated in a geometrically distinct residual component. Our framework provides a simple, architecture-agnostic method for probing the geometric and functional structure of layer updates in modern language models.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 1

TIGeR: Tool-Integrated Geometric Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Robotics

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in spatial reasoning, yet they remain fundamentally limited to qualitative precision and lack the computational precision required for real-world robotics. Current approaches fail to leverage metric cues from depth sensors and camera calibration, instead reducing geometric problems to pattern recognition tasks that cannot deliver the centimeter-level accuracy essential for robotic manipulation. We present TIGeR (Tool-Integrated Geometric Reasoning), a novel framework that transforms VLMs from perceptual estimators to geometric computers by enabling them to generate and execute precise geometric computations through external tools. Rather than attempting to internalize complex geometric operations within neural networks, TIGeR empowers models to recognize geometric reasoning requirements, synthesize appropriate computational code, and invoke specialized libraries for exact calculations. To support this paradigm, we introduce TIGeR-300K, a comprehensive tool-invocation-oriented dataset covering point transformations, pose estimation, and spatial compatibility verification, complete with tool invocation sequences and intermediate computations. Through a two-stage training pipeline combining supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) with our proposed hierarchical reward design, TIGeR achieves SOTA performance on geometric reasoning benchmarks while demonstrating centimeter-level precision in real-world robotic manipulation tasks.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 8, 2025

One Scene, Two Depths: Probing Geometric Ambiguity in Monocular Foundation Models

A faithful 3D world representation should account for layered geometry, where a single camera ray may contain multiple visible and geometrically valid surfaces. Monocular depth estimation, however, reduces this structure to one scalar depth per pixel. Transparent scenes make this ambiguity measurable: the same ray can pass through foreground glass and observe the background, turning the supervised target into a convention of annotation, data, and training rather than a scene-intrinsic truth. A learned predictor exposes this convention as its depth-layer preference. We introduce MultiDepth-3k (MD-3k), a sparse two-layer ordinal benchmark for measuring depth-layer preference and multi-layer spatial relationship accuracy (ML-SRA). On MD-3k, leading depth foundation models exhibit diverse layer preferences under standard RGB input, showing that the same layered geometry can be resolved differently across models. We further find that Laplacian Visual Prompting (LVP), a training-free spectral input transformation, can substantially change the reported layer for certain frozen models. The strongest RGB/LVP pair, DAv2-L, reaches 75.5% ML-SRA. These results suggest that depth foundation models may express complementary geometric hypotheses that standard RGB inference leaves unexpressed. We invite the community to rethink depth supervision and evaluation through an ambiguity-aware lens, where multiple valid 3D interpretations are treated as geometric structure to be measured, preserved, and expressed.

AirZoo: A Unified Large-Scale Dataset for Grounding Aerial Geometric 3D Vision

Despite the rapid progress in data-driven 3D vision, aerial geometric 3D vision remains a formidable challenge due to the severe scarcity of large-scale, high-fidelity training data. Existing benchmarks, predominantly biased toward ground-level or object-centric views, do not account for complex viewpoint transformations and diverse environmental conditions in UAV-based sensing. To bridge this critical gap, we propose AirZoo, a unified large-scale dataset and benchmark for grounding aerial geometric 3D vision. AirZoo possesses three appealing properties: 1) Scalable Generation Pipeline: Leveraging freely available, world-scale photogrammetric 3D meshes, it renders vast outdoor environments with customizable UAV flight trajectories and configurable weather/illumination. 2) Comprehensive Scene Diversity: It provides the most extensive coverage of region types to date (spanning 378 regions across 22 countries), systematically encompassing both highly structured urban landscapes and complex unstructured natural environments. 3) Rich Geometric Annotations: Each frame provides synchronized, pixel-level metric depth and precise 6-DoF geo-referenced poses, essential for geometry-aware learning. Through three rigorous evaluation tracks -- aerial image retrieval, cross-view matching, and multi-view 3D reconstruction -- we demonstrate that AirZoo serves as a powerful pre-training engine. Extensive experiments on both public and newly collected real-world benchmarks reveal that fine-tuning on AirZoo yields substantial performance gains for SoTA models (e.g., MegaLoc, RoMa, VGGT, and Depth Anything 3), establishing a new performance upper bound for aerial spatial intelligence.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 28

Canonicalizing Multimodal Contrastive Representation Learning

As models and data scale, independently trained networks often induce analogous notions of similarity. But, matching similarities is weaker than establishing an explicit correspondence between the representation spaces, especially for multimodal models, where consistency must hold not only within each modality, but also for the learned image-text coupling. We therefore ask: given two independently trained multimodal contrastive models (with encoders (f, g) and (f,g)) -- trained on different distributions and with different architectures -- does a systematic geometric relationship exist between their embedding spaces? If so, what form does it take, and does it hold uniformly across modalities? In this work, we show that across model families such as CLIP, SigLIP, and FLAVA, this geometric relationship is well approximated by an orthogonal map (up to a global mean shift), i.e., there exists an orthogonal map Q where Q^top Q = I such that f(x)approx Q f(x) for paired images x. Strikingly, the same Q simultaneously aligns the text encoders i.e., g(y)approx Q g(y) for texts y. Theoretically, we prove that if the multimodal kernel agrees across models on a small anchor set i.e. langle f(x), g(y)rangle approx langle f(x), g(y)rangle, then the two models must be related by a single orthogonal map Q and the same Q maps images and text across models. More broadly, this finding enables backward-compatible model upgrades, avoiding costly re-embedding, and has implications for the privacy of learned representations. Our project page: https://canonical-multimodal.github.io/

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 19

Dense 3D Displacement Estimation for Landslide Monitoring via Fusion of TLS Point Clouds and Embedded RGB Images

Landslide monitoring is essential for understanding geohazards and mitigating associated risks. However, existing point cloud-based methods typically rely on either geometric or radiometric information and often yield sparse or non-3D displacement estimates. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical partition-based coarse-to-fine approach that fuses 3D point clouds and co-registered RGB images to estimate dense 3D displacement vector fields. We construct patch-level matches using both 3D geometry and 2D image features. These matches are refined via geometric consistency checks, followed by rigid transformation estimation per match. Experimental results on two real-world landslide datasets demonstrate that our method produces 3D displacement estimates with high spatial coverage (79% and 97%) and high accuracy. Deviations in displacement magnitude with respect to external measurements (total station or GNSS observations) are 0.15 m and 0.25 m on the two datasets, respectively, and only 0.07 m and 0.20 m compared to manually derived references. These values are below the average scan resolutions (0.08 m and 0.30 m). Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method F2S3 in spatial coverage while maintaining comparable accuracy. Our approach offers a practical and adaptable solution for TLS-based landslide monitoring and is extensible to other types of point clouds and monitoring tasks. Our example data and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/zhaoyiww/fusion4landslide.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 19, 2025

VGGT-Edit: Feed-forward Native 3D Scene Editing with Residual Field Prediction

High-quality 3D scene reconstruction has recently advanced toward generalizable feed-forward architectures, enabling the generation of complex environments in a single forward pass. However, despite their strong performance in static scene perception, these models remain limited in responding to dynamic human instructions, which restricts their use in interactive applications. Existing editing methods typically rely on a 2D-lifting strategy, where individual views are edited independently and then lifted back into 3D space. This indirect pipeline often leads to blurry textures and inconsistent geometry, as 2D editors lack the spatial awareness required to preserve structure across viewpoints. To address these limitations, we propose VGGT-Edit, a feed-forward framework for text-conditioned native 3D scene editing. VGGT-Edit introduces depth-synchronized text injection to align semantic guidance with the backbone's spatial poses, ensuring stable instruction grounding. This semantic signal is then processed by a residual transformation head, which directly predicts 3D geometric displacements to deform the scene while preserving background stability. To ensure high-fidelity results, we supervise the framework with a multi-term objective function that enforces geometric accuracy and cross-view consistency. We also construct the DeltaScene Dataset, a large-scale dataset generated through an automated pipeline with 3D agreement filtering to ensure ground-truth quality. Experiments show that VGGT-Edit substantially outperforms 2D-lifting baselines, producing sharper object details, stronger multi-view consistency, and near-instant inference speed.

Cascaded Robust Rectification for Arbitrary Document Images

Document rectification in real-world scenarios poses significant challenges due to extreme variations in camera perspectives and physical distortions. Driven by the insight that complex transformations can be decomposed and resolved progressively, we introduce a novel multi-stage framework that progressively reverses distinct distortion types in a coarse-to-fine manner. Specifically, our framework first performs a global affine transformation to correct perspective distortions arising from the camera's viewpoint, then rectifies geometric deformations resulting from physical paper curling and folding, and finally employs a content-aware iterative process to eliminate fine-grained content distortions. To address limitations in existing evaluation protocols, we also propose two enhanced metrics: layout-aligned OCR metrics (AED/ACER) for a stable assessment that decouples geometric rectification quality from the layout analysis errors of OCR engines, and masked AD/AAD (AD-M/AAD-M) tailored for accurately evaluating geometric distortions in documents with incomplete boundaries. Extensive experiments show that our method establishes new state-of-the-art performance on multiple challenging benchmarks, yielding a substantial reduction of 14.1\%--34.7\% in the AAD metric and demonstrating superior efficacy in real-world applications. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/chaoyunwang/ArbDR.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 27, 2025

An Exterior Method for Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) seeks a low-rank approximation X approx UV^T with nonnegative factors and is commonly solved using interior methods that enforce feasibility throughout optimization. We show that such constraint-driven approaches can impede progress in the nonconvex landscape, leading to slow convergence or convergence to suboptimal stationary points. We propose an exterior framework for NMF (eNMF) that separates low-rank approximation from nonnegativity enforcement. Our method initializes from the optimal unconstrained factorization and introduces a rotation procedure that maps unconstrained factors to an exterior point closest to the nonnegative orthant. This viewpoint yields an algorithmic framework in which simple iterative updates converge to KKT-satisfying stationary points on the boundary of the positive orthant. The exterior formulation also enables a geometric interpretation of NMF solutions, clarifying equivalence classes of factorizations under permutation and orthogonal transformations. An intriguing numerical result, involving 400 NMF experiments across both real and synthetic datasets, show that in 99% of the cases, different algorithms tend to converge towards equivalent factor matrices. We benchmark eNMF against 9 state-of-the-art NMF algorithms with 9 initialization schemes across 3 real-world and 2 synthetic datasets. eNMF consistently outperforms all 81 competitors, achieving up to 30% lower reconstruction error under equal-time settings and up to 150% speedup under equal-error settings. The downstream experiments further demonstrate substantial performance gains in audio processing and recommendation tasks, corroborating the practical benefits of the proposed exterior optimization framework. Code is available at https://github.com/roychowdhuryresearch/eNMF

  • 5 authors
·
May 18

DreamMesh4D: Video-to-4D Generation with Sparse-Controlled Gaussian-Mesh Hybrid Representation

Recent advancements in 2D/3D generative techniques have facilitated the generation of dynamic 3D objects from monocular videos. Previous methods mainly rely on the implicit neural radiance fields (NeRF) or explicit Gaussian Splatting as the underlying representation, and struggle to achieve satisfactory spatial-temporal consistency and surface appearance. Drawing inspiration from modern 3D animation pipelines, we introduce DreamMesh4D, a novel framework combining mesh representation with geometric skinning technique to generate high-quality 4D object from a monocular video. Instead of utilizing classical texture map for appearance, we bind Gaussian splats to triangle face of mesh for differentiable optimization of both the texture and mesh vertices. In particular, DreamMesh4D begins with a coarse mesh obtained through an image-to-3D generation procedure. Sparse points are then uniformly sampled across the mesh surface, and are used to build a deformation graph to drive the motion of the 3D object for the sake of computational efficiency and providing additional constraint. For each step, transformations of sparse control points are predicted using a deformation network, and the mesh vertices as well as the surface Gaussians are deformed via a novel geometric skinning algorithm, which is a hybrid approach combining LBS (linear blending skinning) and DQS (dual-quaternion skinning), mitigating drawbacks associated with both approaches. The static surface Gaussians and mesh vertices as well as the deformation network are learned via reference view photometric loss, score distillation loss as well as other regularizers in a two-stage manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance of our method. Furthermore, our method is compatible with modern graphic pipelines, showcasing its potential in the 3D gaming and film industry.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 9, 2024

Equivariant Spatio-Temporal Self-Supervision for LiDAR Object Detection

Popular representation learning methods encourage feature invariance under transformations applied at the input. However, in 3D perception tasks like object localization and segmentation, outputs are naturally equivariant to some transformations, such as rotation. Using pre-training loss functions that encourage equivariance of features under certain transformations provides a strong self-supervision signal while also retaining information of geometric relationships between transformed feature representations. This can enable improved performance in downstream tasks that are equivariant to such transformations. In this paper, we propose a spatio-temporal equivariant learning framework by considering both spatial and temporal augmentations jointly. Our experiments show that the best performance arises with a pre-training approach that encourages equivariance to translation, scaling, and flip, rotation and scene flow. For spatial augmentations, we find that depending on the transformation, either a contrastive objective or an equivariance-by-classification objective yields best results. To leverage real-world object deformations and motion, we consider sequential LiDAR scene pairs and develop a novel 3D scene flow-based equivariance objective that leads to improved performance overall. We show our pre-training method for 3D object detection which outperforms existing equivariant and invariant approaches in many settings.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 17, 2024

Anisotropic Modality Align

Training multimodal large language models has long been limited by the scarcity of high-quality paired multimodal data. Recent studies show that the shared representation space of pretrained multimodal contrastive models can serve as a bridge, enabling models to perform multimodal training with unimodal data. However, the key premise of this paradigm remains insufficiently understood: can representations from different modalities be reliably interchanged? The core obstacle lies in the persistent Modality Gap in the shared space. In this work, we revisit the geometric nature of the modality gap. We find that modality representations already share compatible dominant semantic geometry. What truly hinders modality interchangeability is not a simple global shift, but an anisotropic residual structure concentrated along a small number of dominant directions. Based on this finding, we further propose the principle of anisotropic modality gap alignment: effective modality alignment should align with the target-modality distribution while preserving the semantic structure of the source modality. Guided by this principle, we propose an anisotropic geometric correction framework, AnisoAlign, for unpaired modality alignment. This framework leverages the internal geometric prior of the target modality and performs bounded correction on source-modality representations, thereby constructing substitute representations in the target modality. Experiments confirm its benefits in both geometric diagnostics and text-only MLLM training. Overall, this work recasts the modality gap from an empirical observation into a correctable, structured geometric phenomenon and provides a new representation alignment perspective for training multimodal models with unimodal data.

  • 11 authors
·
May 7 2

The Condition Number as a Scale-Invariant Proxy for Information Encoding in Neural Units

This paper explores the relationship between the condition number of a neural network's weight tensor and the extent of information encoded by the associated processing unit, viewed through the lens of information theory. It argues that a high condition number, though not sufficient for effective knowledge encoding, may indicate that the unit has learned to selectively amplify and compress information. This intuition is formalized for linear units with Gaussian inputs, linking the condition number and the transformation's log-volume scaling factor to the characteristics of the output entropy and the geometric properties of the learned transformation. The analysis demonstrates that for a fixed weight norm, a concentrated distribution of singular values (high condition number) corresponds to reduced overall information transfer, indicating a specialized and efficient encoding strategy. Furthermore, the linear stage entropy bound provides an upper limit on post-activation information for contractive, element-wise nonlinearities, supporting the condition number as a scale-invariant proxy for encoding capacity in practical neural networks. An empirical case study applies these principles to guide selective fine-tuning of Large Language Models for both a new task and a new input modality. The experiments show that the proposed method, named KappaTune, effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting. Unlike many existing catastrophic forgetting mitigation methods that rely on access to pre-training statistics, which are often unavailable, this selective fine-tuning approach offers a way to bypass this common requirement.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 19, 2025 1

Ctrl&Shift: High-Quality Geometry-Aware Object Manipulation in Visual Generation

Object-level manipulation, relocating or reorienting objects in images or videos while preserving scene realism, is central to film post-production, AR, and creative editing. Yet existing methods struggle to jointly achieve three core goals: background preservation, geometric consistency under viewpoint shifts, and user-controllable transformations. Geometry-based approaches offer precise control but require explicit 3D reconstruction and generalize poorly; diffusion-based methods generalize better but lack fine-grained geometric control. We present Ctrl&Shift, an end-to-end diffusion framework to achieve geometry-consistent object manipulation without explicit 3D representations. Our key insight is to decompose manipulation into two stages, object removal and reference-guided inpainting under explicit camera pose control, and encode both within a unified diffusion process. To enable precise, disentangled control, we design a multi-task, multi-stage training strategy that separates background, identity, and pose signals across tasks. To improve generalization, we introduce a scalable real-world dataset construction pipeline that generates paired image and video samples with estimated relative camera poses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ctrl&Shift achieves state-of-the-art results in fidelity, viewpoint consistency, and controllability. To our knowledge, this is the first framework to unify fine-grained geometric control and real-world generalization for object manipulation, without relying on any explicit 3D modeling.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 11

Drawing2CAD: Sequence-to-Sequence Learning for CAD Generation from Vector Drawings

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) generative modeling is driving significant innovations across industrial applications. Recent works have shown remarkable progress in creating solid models from various inputs such as point clouds, meshes, and text descriptions. However, these methods fundamentally diverge from traditional industrial workflows that begin with 2D engineering drawings. The automatic generation of parametric CAD models from these 2D vector drawings remains underexplored despite being a critical step in engineering design. To address this gap, our key insight is to reframe CAD generation as a sequence-to-sequence learning problem where vector drawing primitives directly inform the generation of parametric CAD operations, preserving geometric precision and design intent throughout the transformation process. We propose Drawing2CAD, a framework with three key technical components: a network-friendly vector primitive representation that preserves precise geometric information, a dual-decoder transformer architecture that decouples command type and parameter generation while maintaining precise correspondence, and a soft target distribution loss function accommodating inherent flexibility in CAD parameters. To train and evaluate Drawing2CAD, we create CAD-VGDrawing, a dataset of paired engineering drawings and parametric CAD models, and conduct thorough experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/lllssc/Drawing2CAD.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 26, 2025 3

CV-Arena: An Open Benchmark for Instructional Computer Vision Problem Solving with Human-AI Collaborative Preferences

Instruction-guided image editing is becoming a general interface for visual work, yet existing benchmarks still focus largely on narrow appearance edits and do not fully capture the diversity of real-image tasks in professional workflows. Here, we define instructional computer vision problem solving as a broader formulation of image editing: given a real input image and a natural-language instruction, a system must produce an edited output that realizes the requested transformation while satisfying explicit preservation, geometric, physical, and usability constraints. We introduce CV-Arena, an open benchmark designed to evaluate this capability at professional scales. CV-Arena contains 12K high-resolution real-image instruction pairs spanning 16 instruction-based visual task types, constructed using CogRetriever, a dual-track retrieval-and-curation pipeline that combines targeted web search, agentic query refinement, verification, and traceability. To evaluate models at scale while preserving human fidelity, we propose Active Elo, a human-AI collaborative preference protocol that leverages CV-Judge, a logic-gated, multi-dimensional VLM evaluator, to reject clear failures and resolve high-confidence comparisons; and to route close, high-quality comparisons to expert raters. Mixed human and AI supervision is then aggregated through reliability-weighted Elo updates. Our comprehensive evaluation of 21 systems, including proprietary, open-source, and agentic models, on CV-Arena reveals persistent gaps in instruction adherence, physical reasoning, structural control, and fine-grained detail preservation. We further develop CV-Agent, a lightweight agentic model that combines planning, editing, and verification, and demonstrate that closed-loop reasoning is a promising direction for professional-grade instruction-following visual editing.

  • 15 authors
·
May 29

Hierarchical Spatial Algorithms for High-Resolution Image Quantization and Feature Extraction

This study introduces a modular framework for spatial image processing, integrating grayscale quantization, color and brightness enhancement, image sharpening, bidirectional transformation pipelines, and geometric feature extraction. A stepwise intensity transformation quantizes grayscale images into eight discrete levels, producing a posterization effect that simplifies representation while preserving structural detail. Color enhancement is achieved via histogram equalization in both RGB and YCrCb color spaces, with the latter improving contrast while maintaining chrominance fidelity. Brightness adjustment is implemented through HSV value-channel manipulation, and image sharpening is performed using a 3 * 3 convolution kernel to enhance high-frequency details. A bidirectional transformation pipeline that integrates unsharp masking, gamma correction, and noise amplification achieved accuracy levels of 76.10% and 74.80% for the forward and reverse processes, respectively. Geometric feature extraction employed Canny edge detection, Hough-based line estimation (e.g., 51.50{\deg} for billiard cue alignment), Harris corner detection, and morphological window localization. Cue isolation further yielded 81.87\% similarity against ground truth images. Experimental evaluation across diverse datasets demonstrates robust and deterministic performance, highlighting its potential for real-time image analysis and computer vision.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 9, 2025

SymmGrid: Super-Scaling On-Robot Learning with Parallelized Symmetries and Egocentric-Exocentric Visual Perception

Deep reinforcement policy learning directly in physical robots (on-robot learning) remains bottlenecked by slow wall-clock training times. We present SymmGrid, a trajectory level augmentation framework inspired by parallelized symmetries that super-scales group transformations to significantly accelerate on-robot learning in both egocentric and exocentric visual setups. We model a Markov Decision Process (MDP) under a symmetry tree, in which state-action pairs have admissible parallelized invariant transformations that yield a geometric grid structure. The state is modelled with ego- or exocentric images and proprioception information. The latter require special treatment, in the form of homographies, to warp visual scenes in line with their corresponding spatial transformations. These parallelized transformations produce a large set of unique symmetric equivalences that populate the replay buffer with diverse and consistent experiences that speed up learning and improve performance. We present extensive training and evaluations performed directly on real robot manipulation contact tasks including peg-insertions, cable routing, and object relocations. Relative to SOTA, SymmGrid achieved wall-clock training convergence speed-ups of 1.37-2.17x, evaluation success rate improvements of 1.09x-1.27x, fastest training convergence times of 16.6, 10.9, and 79.3 minutes respectively. For trajectory wide assessments, we used normalized area under the curve (nAUC) ratios. SymmGrid achieved improvements of up to 2.59x. These results confirm that simple branch symmetries can have an outsized result due to super-scaling and bring us closer to sub-10 minute on-robot learning training in manipulation tasks suitable for arms and humanoids. The project page is available at symmgrid-robot.github.io

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 28

Paying More Attention to Visual Tokens in Self-Evolving Large Multimodal Models

Recently, self-evolving large multimodal models (LMMs) have received attention for improving visual reasoning in a purely unsupervised setting. However, multi-role self-play and self-consistency reward schemes in existing self-evolving LMMs optimize answer agreement without ensuring the decoder attends to visual content, relying instead on statistical language priors to produce self consistent outputs. This leads to a persistent failure mode we term visual under-conditioning, where the decoder relies on language priors rather than the image during generation, manifesting as insufficient attention to visual tokens. As a result, current self-evolving LMMs struggle on vision--language understanding tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering. To address this, we propose VISE (Visual Invariance Self-Evolution), a purely unsupervised self-evolving framework that directly regularizes the model's visual conditioning policy through two complementary invariance-based rewards: a geometric invariance reward that enforces spatial consistency under known transformations, and a semantic invariance reward that penalizes evidence-agnostic generation by requiring the model to recognize the absence of evidence when predicted regions are perturbed. VISE operates within a single model without specialist roles, external reward models, or annotations, and is trained on raw unlabeled images. Experiments on 18 benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. Using Qwen3-VL-2B as the base model, VISE achieves gains of +16.85 CIDEr on COCO and +19.66 CIDEr on TextCaps, reduces object hallucination by 5.0 Chair-I points, and generalizes across four model families and scales. Our code and models are available at https://mbzuai-oryx.github.io/VISE

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 24

$\boldsymbolλ$-Orthogonality Regularization for Compatible Representation Learning

Retrieval systems rely on representations learned by increasingly powerful models. However, due to the high training cost and inconsistencies in learned representations, there is significant interest in facilitating communication between representations and ensuring compatibility across independently trained neural networks. In the literature, two primary approaches are commonly used to adapt different learned representations: affine transformations, which adapt well to specific distributions but can significantly alter the original representation, and orthogonal transformations, which preserve the original structure with strict geometric constraints but limit adaptability. A key challenge is adapting the latent spaces of updated models to align with those of previous models on downstream distributions while preserving the newly learned representation spaces. In this paper, we impose a relaxed orthogonality constraint, namely λ-Orthogonality regularization, while learning an affine transformation, to obtain distribution-specific adaptation while retaining the original learned representations. Extensive experiments across various architectures and datasets validate our approach, demonstrating that it preserves the model's zero-shot performance and ensures compatibility across model updates. Code available at: https://github.com/miccunifi/lambda_orthogonality.git{https://github.com/miccunifi/lambda\_orthogonality}.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 20, 2025

UniGeo: Unifying Geometry Logical Reasoning via Reformulating Mathematical Expression

Geometry problem solving is a well-recognized testbed for evaluating the high-level multi-modal reasoning capability of deep models. In most existing works, two main geometry problems: calculation and proving, are usually treated as two specific tasks, hindering a deep model to unify its reasoning capability on multiple math tasks. However, in essence, these two tasks have similar problem representations and overlapped math knowledge which can improve the understanding and reasoning ability of a deep model on both two tasks. Therefore, we construct a large-scale Unified Geometry problem benchmark, UniGeo, which contains 4,998 calculation problems and 9,543 proving problems. Each proving problem is annotated with a multi-step proof with reasons and mathematical expressions. The proof can be easily reformulated as a proving sequence that shares the same formats with the annotated program sequence for calculation problems. Naturally, we also present a unified multi-task Geometric Transformer framework, Geoformer, to tackle calculation and proving problems simultaneously in the form of sequence generation, which finally shows the reasoning ability can be improved on both two tasks by unifying formulation. Furthermore, we propose a Mathematical Expression Pretraining (MEP) method that aims to predict the mathematical expressions in the problem solution, thus improving the Geoformer model. Experiments on the UniGeo demonstrate that our proposed Geoformer obtains state-of-the-art performance by outperforming task-specific model NGS with over 5.6% and 3.2% accuracies on calculation and proving problems, respectively.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 5, 2022