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Personalized Image Generation with Reasoning and Reflection
2026-09-30 21:30:26Bo Ni, Ngoc N. Tran, Qinwen Ge, Franck Dernoncourt, Seunghyun Yoon, Samyadeep Basu, Sungchul Kim, Puneet Mathur, Nedim Lipka, Tong Yu, Yu Wang, Ryan A. Rossi, Tyler DerrAbstract
Personalized image generation has remained narrowly focused on conditional synthesis from curated visual exemplars, rather than capturing who a user is. In practice, however, a user's personal context is much richer, comprising reviews, posts, images, captions, and metadata accumulated over time. A truly personalized generator should leverage this history to produce images aligned with the user's lifestyle and aesthetic preferences. To this end, we introduce the first unified benchmark for personalized image generation from user histories. The benchmark comprises two complementary tasks and a multi-axis evaluation protocol that assesses target fidelity, visual quality, user distinguishability, semantic alignment with the user's history, and task-specific utility. Grounded in real-world e-commerce and social media settings, the benchmark includes: (1) Personalized Scene Generation, which places a given object in a scene that reflects a user's preferences and lifestyle, motivated by personalized product presentation; and (2) Personalized Creative Generation, which generates a novel image on a specified topic that is faithful to a user's aesthetic and visual identity, motivated by social media content creation. We further propose PEARL, which couples a multimodal reasoner with a frozen image generator in an interleaved reason-reflect loop optimized with differential data reward. Across both tasks, PEARL outperforms strong baselines, achieving an average improvement of 15% across personalization metrics.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00737
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VisionQ: VLM-as-a-Judge Taxonomy, Dataset and Benchmark for Qualitative Analysis in Computer Vision
2026-09-30 20:03:52Vu Dinh Xuan, Duc-Hai Nguyen, Minh-Dung Dao, Vu Quynh Giao, Quang Hong Nguyen, Binh-Son Hua, Barry O'Sullivan, David Murphy, Hoang D. NguyenAbstract
Qualitative comparison figures are central evidence in computer vision papers, and vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to judge them. Yet existing benchmarks score only scalar quality or overall preference, so a judge can be rewarded for picking the preferred image for the wrong visual reason. We introduce VisionQ, the first benchmark built from peer-reviewed CV comparison figures that grounds every judgment in a named visual criterion: each question states the criterion, and a judge is credited only when it selects the output the authors identify as best on that criterion. We call this task criterion-conditioned visual discrimination. VisionQ comprises (1) a corpus of 1,409 CVPR and ICCV papers with 1,800+ validated comparison figures and 3,911 hand-annotated data points linking method crops to author-stated visual claims; (2) a six-axis, 51-leaf taxonomy of the visual criteria behind qualitative judgment; (3) a criterion-conditioned evaluation protocol that hides method names, captions, and paper identity and reports accuracy per criterion; and (4) VisionQ-Judge, a DPO-tuned Gemma-4-E4B judge trained on symmetric evidence pairs, which reduces last-option predictions by 7.0pp and improves accuracy by 2.5pp on a held-out test set. Evaluating 20 open- and closed-source VLM judges, we find that the strongest reach only 63.1% accuracy (chance 32.2%) and that reliability varies sharply across criteria. Code: this https URL. Data: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00666
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Physis-Lang: Self-Evolving Language as a Physical Representation for Video World Model
2026-09-30 17:59:51Liming Lu, Xianzheng Ma, Wenkun He, Guanqi Zhan, Yilin Zhao, Junyu Chen, Mengyao Xu, Jiaojiao Fan, Wenhang Ge, Yuchao Gu, Yunze Liu, Boyi Li, Zhen Dong, Victor Prisacariu, Ming-Yu Liu, Song Han, Han CaiAbstract
Video world models are expected to predict how the physical world evolves, yet they often produce visually plausible videos that violate basic physical principles. Existing approaches commonly assume that natural language is insufficient to represent the physical knowledge required for reliable generation, and therefore introduce additional visual, latent, numerical, or planning-based signals. We revisit this assumption and introduce Physis-Lang, a self-evolving framework that treats physical language as a shared and optimizable representation across data curation, model training, and video generation. Physis-Lang represents physical processes through language that describes their relevant entities, causes, interactions, governing principles, temporal evolution, and effects. To improve this representation, we construct PhysCapBench, which decomposes physical processes into atomic assertions and evaluates captions using recall and precision. An agentic loop iteratively analyzes assertion-level errors and refines the instruction used to produce physical captions. Physis-Lang further converts model deficiencies into textual descriptions and uses language-guided retrieval to identify visually diverse videos that cover missing physical processes. Experiments on four widely used physical video benchmarks with Wan and Cosmos backbones demonstrate consistent improvements in physical plausibility. Notably, starting from open-source Cosmos3-Nano backbones, our Physis-Lang-enhanced models surpass the leading proprietary Veo 3.1 model.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.40358
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Frozen Scenes, Shifting Winners: Configuration Fragility in Text-to-3D Evaluation
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Can a text-to-3D leaderboard change when every generated scene stays fixed? We audit this question for rendered-image evaluation, where camera settings and caption wording become part of the measurement protocol. Across 300 frozen scenes from six generators, we vary eight render and caption factors for 19 alignment evaluators plus one perceptual-quality control, then test four targeted scene degradations. Peak configuration variance exceeds between-generator variance for 17/19 alignment evaluators, with prompt-bootstrap lower bounds above 1 for 11/19. Rankings are more stable than scores, yet 18/19 evaluators change their point-estimate winner under some configuration. Pairwise protocol margin envelopes show which comparisons keep their direction across the tested settings. Selected pairs have opposite pointwise intervals, but no reversal survives simultaneous inference over the full search. Thus the observed winner changes are descriptive, not confirmed changes in generator superiority. Sensitivity remains separate: no evaluator, even the prompt-free control, exceeds 67% tie-adjusted directional discrimination on layout scrambling, which is diagnostic rather than human-validated ground truth. The audit separates score stability, decision uncertainty, and targeted sensitivity, and recommends reporting (generator, score, card ID) with protocol-dependent comparisons and selection-aware uncertainty.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00447
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CoEvoWhen: Policy-Tool Coevolution for Ultra-Long Video Temporal Grounding
2026-09-30 16:14:14Yiduo Jia, Muzhi Zhu, Jinchuan Shi, Hao Zhong, Yuling Xi, Ke Liu, Hao ChenAbstract
Ultra-long video temporal grounding requires balancing long-range evidence search with fine-grained event understanding under a limited visual budget, yet existing agentic methods still rely largely on predefined policies and tool capabilities. Motivated by this, we propose a novel policy-tool coevolution framework that jointly evolves high-level policies and executable media tools from the agentic reasoning trajectories of a VLM, forming a reusable skill without updating model parameters. During evolution, an external skill updater distills transferable task experience in long-video temporal grounding, accordingly refining the orchestration of long-range image-based and fine-grained video-based observations. Alongside these policy updates, the updater employs its coding capabilities to upgrade existing tools or create new ones, adapting the tools to long-video evidence acquisition. Equipped with the evolved skill, the VLM autonomously orchestrates tools under the guidance of the evolved policy, coordinating image and video observations for agentic inference without relying on a separate, stronger planning model. Extensive experiments spanning five benchmarks and three VLMs show that policy-tool coevolution consistently improves temporal grounding accuracy in ultra-long videos while reducing visual token cost at inference, and that the evolved skill yields substantial performance gains on general long-video QA without additional task-specific evolution, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of our framework for long-video understanding.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.40048
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Learning to Reason with Compressed Context: Ground-Truth-Free Adaptation of OmniLLMs via Self-Distillation
2026-09-30 15:24:57Jianghao Wang, Ke Meng, Jian Li, Chi Cheng, Longyu Qi, Liyin Liang, Yifeng Qian, Chunbo Lai, Yutian Lin, Zeyu WangAbstract
Omni-modal large language models (OmniLLMs) enable unified audio-video understanding, but their long multimodal token sequences make deployment computationally expensive. Token compression reduces this cost, yet aggressive compression often lowers accuracy. Existing works predominantly focus on designing better compression mechanisms; however, adapting the underlying language model to reason effectively over the remaining compressed context remains under-explored. To address this, we propose CAFD (Compressed-Context Adaptation via Full-Context Distillation), a ground-truth-free self-distillation framework that adapts OmniLLMs to fixed compression pipelines without requiring reference answers, rationales, or correctness rewards. CAFD leverages the full-token view of the same multimodal sample as a source of privileged information: a full-context self-teacher provides soft target supervision to a compressed-context student along the student's on-policy trajectory. Evaluated on Qwen2.5-Omni-7B across five audio-video benchmarks, five compression pipelines, and five deployment budgets, CAFD demonstrates consistent gains, improving 120 out of 125 conditions with an average accuracy boost of 1.44 points and recovering 26.9% of the accuracy gap on average. These results demonstrate that the proposed ground-truth-free adaptation offers an effective and practical route to improving the accuracy-efficiency trade-off in deployed OmniLLMs.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39953
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CoVisco: Codec-Native Vision Encoder with Native Token Compression for Unified Image-Video Understanding
2026-09-30 15:12:10Yulong Liu, Xiaotian Han, Junyuan Shang, Yuchen Ding, Zhenyu Zhang, Shuohuan Wang, Guibo Zhu, Sirui Han, Dianhai YuAbstract
Vision-language models face a fundamental scaling bottleneck: the number of visual tokens grows with both temporal duration and spatial resolution, making long-video understanding expensive for the vision encoder and the language model. Existing methods often compress visual tokens after dense encoding, creating a mismatch between the representation used during training and the compact interface required at deployment. We present CoVisco, a codec-native vision encoder with native token compression for unified image-video understanding. By combining codec-native input support with segmented attention, CoVisco can encode long visual inputs in a single forward pass without forming dense patch-to-patch interactions across all frames. Each temporal segment is equipped with learnable abstract tokens that learn a compact segment-level representation, while fine-grained patch tokens remain available throughout the encoder. Alternating intra-segment and abstract-communication layers preserve video-level context through the abstract-token channel. A lightweight selector further exposes either abstract tokens alone or abstract tokens augmented with a runtime-selected subset of patch tokens, yielding a compact visual interface that reduces the visual context and prefill burden of downstream MLLMs while retaining fine-grained evidence when needed. Pretrained with contrastive objectives on 565M image--text pairs and 6.4M videos, CoVisco shows competitive performance on video-oriented embedding and multimodal understanding benchmarks. In the evaluated four-segment, 64-frame setting, abstract-only inference uses only 400 visual tokens while achieving video-understanding performance close to, and on some benchmarks exceeding, OneVision-Encoder. Selected patch tokens further improve fine-grained video reasoning. Project URL: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39924
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ShieldCLIP: Selective Safety Alignment for Harmful Content Mitigation in Multimodal Foundation Models
2026-09-30 13:14:56Tobia Poppi, Silvia Cappelletti, Samuele Poppi, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Diego Garcia-Olano, Rita CucchiaraAbstract
Multimodal encoders such as CLIP underlie many downstream systems, but their web-scale training data embed harmful associations that safety alignment must suppress without unnecessarily changing benign representations. Because ethical and practical constraints prevent collecting real unsafe content at scale, existing datasets pair safe real samples with generated counterparts, but label every generated sample unsafe, even when one modality is individually safe. To address this, we introduce ShieldCLIP, the first framework to condition safety alignment on the observed safety state of each modality rather than the origin of a sample, preserving safe content while redirecting only what is unsafe. We also introduce ViSUv2, a 195k-quadruplet dataset with independent per-modality safety labels across 578 concepts and 28 categories. Using these labels, ShieldCLIP defines a four-way conditional objective beyond pair-level supervision: safe content is anchored, unsafe modalities are redirected to their safe counterparts, mixed pairs update only the unsafe branch, and coherence is enforced when both are unsafe. We evaluate ShieldCLIP on cross-modal retrieval, text-to-image generation with Stable Diffusion v1.4 and SDXL, and image-to-text generation with LLaVA. Across these settings, ShieldCLIP consistently reduces harmful outputs over prior safety-aligned encoders and strong mitigation baselines, while preserving the utility of the original embedding space. Extensive ablation studies further show that both modality-specific supervision and the selective alignment objective contribute to these gains. Source code, trained models, and ViSUv2 (under a controlled-access protocol) will be made publicly available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39688
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From Modes to Memories: Characterizing the Scale-Space Dynamics of Diffusion Models
2026-09-30 12:52:11Cristina L\'opez Amado, Marco Fumero, Francesco LocatelloAbstract
Diffusion models are typically viewed as stochastic processes that transform noise into data. We take a complementary perspective: a diffusion model defines a family of deterministic dynamical systems indexed by noise scale. At each fixed scale $\sigma$, we treat the denoiser as a self-map and study its dynamics. For an exact denoiser, fixed points correspond to critical points of the smoothed data density, while attractors correspond to its modes; as $\sigma$ increases, sample-level modes merge into progressively coarser ones. This suggests a geometric view of memorization: examples that receive excess probability mass due to duplication or overfitting, as well as outliers, should remain distinguishable under stronger smoothing than ordinary examples. We quantify this persistence by the critical scale $\sigma_c$, the largest noise scale at which an example is retained by the fixed-scale dynamics. In conditional models, the same construction extends naturally to image--caption pairs. Experiments in controlled settings and on large-scale models show that $\sigma_c$ tracks memorization arising from duplication, overfitting, and outliers, and identifies both memorized and partially memorized examples in Stable Diffusion. Moreover, $\sigma_c$ yields interpretable measures of the image spatial distribution and caption dependence of memorization.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39648
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Comparative study of adapting pre-trained models for driving behavior video captioning
2026-09-30 11:41:16Sayak Mallick, Philipp Geiger, Augustin KelavaAbstract
This report examines and compares some of the many fine tuning and prompting methods existing, applying them within the domain of autonomous driving. The idea is to compare these methods by adapting a Large Language Model (LLM) on a video dataset. LLM's have become extremely good at achieving a good understanding of different forms of data and this study aims to induce a low dimensional understanding of driving situations into our primary test model SpaceTimeGPT. Experiments on BDD-X (Berkeley DeepDrive eXplanation) dataset demonstrate good performance of the full fine tuning framework on some automatic metrics, and in some metrics, it even surpasses the baseline. We also try Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and prompt engineering on VideoLLaVA model and discuss its limitations.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39542
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MiCo: Mutual Information Coverage Optimization through Semantic Erasure Modeling for Efficient MLLM Inference
2026-09-30 10:49:45Tinghao Wang, Yichen Guo, Qizhe Zhang, Yuan Zhang, Weimin Ouyang, Rui Huang, Jiajun Cao, Sixiang Chen, Hao Jiang, Jixian Wu, Zheng Lu, Bofan Zhu, Renyuan Li, Shanghang ZhangAbstract
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in multimodal understanding, but processing large numbers of visual tokens results in high computational costs. While many methods have been proposed to reduce the number of visual tokens, most of them rely on heuristics and are prone to discarding substantial visual information during pruning, leading to degradation in model performance. In this work, by using a semantic erasure model, we derive a general mutual information coverage objective from task log-loss and propose MiCo, a training-free two-stage pruning method. MiCo first uses visual signals to select a representative candidate pool before visual tokens enter the language model, then performs task-aware subset selection within it. At each stage, suitable observable proxies instantiate the derived objective as a monotone submodular coverage function, which MiCo greedily optimizes under the token budget. MiCo is evaluated on diverse MLLMs ranging from 7B to 13B parameters across a broad range of image and video benchmarks spanning general visual reasoning, fine-grained OCR and grounding, hallucination detection, and long-video understanding. MiCo consistently achieves the best performance across nearly all evaluated models under all pruning ratios. On LLaVA-NEXT-13B, MiCo uses only 5.6% visual tokens, retains 97.5% of baseline performance, and achieves a 3.8-fold inference speedup. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MiCo and our mutual information coverage objective for visual token pruning.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.34330
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EgoTools: Towards Tool-Centric Reasoning in Real-World Egocentric Videos
2026-09-30 09:30:23Shulin Tian, Junsu Kim, Shuai Liu, Hao Li, Yujiao Shen, Sihan Li, Zhe Yang, Yeongon Kim, Feiyu Li, Jialin Wu, Yichi Zhang, Wenhui Wang, Runmao Yao, Yuhao Dong, Zhaoxi Chen, Fangzhou Hong, Antonino Furnari, Jingkang Yang, Hongyuan Zhu, Ziwei LiuAbstract
Real-world embodied tasks, from everyday activities to professional procedures, require agents to act under physical constraints while tracking evolving object and task states. Tool use sits at the heart of such tasks, as many everyday and professional activities are tool-mediated. Understanding them requires reasoning about affordances, hand-tool-object geometry, procedural progress, and causal effects on target objects. Yet despite strong performance on perception-oriented video tasks such as captioning and general video QA, current multimodal video models remain limited in this form of tool-centric embodied reasoning. Progress in this direction has been limited by the lack of real-world egocentric data and diagnostic benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce EgoTools, the first comprehensive suite for egocentric tool-use understanding. It consists of two complementary components: EgoTools-Data, a large-scale corpus of 100 hours of tool-centric egocentric recordings with synchronized audio, dense captions, reasoning-heavy narrations, and supplementary 3D information; and EgoTools-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark of 1,000 QA pairs across four tracks that cover tool-use understanding from perception and geometry to procedure and causal reasoning. Experimental results show that current models still struggle to ground tool use in visual evidence: Gemini-3.1-Pro achieves 66.9% overall accuracy but only 51.7% on Perception & Grounding. Beyond evaluation, we validate EgoTools-Data as a training resource. On the full 1,000-question benchmark, full supervised fine-tuning improves Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct from 50.0% to 60.9%, under strict source-video separation. Together, these results establish EgoTools as a unified resource for both training and diagnostic evaluation of real-world egocentric tool-use understanding.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39378
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Rethinking Multi-Image Re-Representation in Multi-Image Understanding
2026-09-30 09:20:21Gengyuan Zhang, Xiao Han, Xinyu Xie, Tong Liu, Volker TrespAbstract
Multi-image understanding requires MLLMs not only to recognise the content of individual images, but also to organise visual evidence distributed across them. We study this problem through multi-image re-representation, viewing prompted Chain-of-Thought reasoning and agentic visual tool use as different ways of re-organising visual evidence during reasoning. We introduce Mosaic, a general-purpose multi-image visual harness that enables an MLLM to actively construct visual intermediates with ten composable image operations. We compare five re-representation settings on existing multi-image benchmarks and on MosaicBench, a new grounding-focused benchmark for fine-grained multi-image understanding. Our experiments show that the relative benefits of textual and visual re-representation are strongly task-dependent. Visual re-representation is particularly effective for tasks requiring precise visual evidence, including hypothesis testing, precision comparison, and orientation-sensitive reasoning, while tasks dominated by higher-level semantic content show smaller or less consistent gains. Building on this finding, we train MosaicAgent-8B to use Mosaic with reinforcement learning using only accuracy and format rewards. Without demonstration trajectories or rewards for specific tool-use, the agent learns to compose visual operations over multiple steps and exhibits diverse problem-solving patterns unpromptedly. Code and data will be released at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.39363
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MEMO: Multi-Level Entity-Aware Memory for Streaming Video Understanding
2026-09-30 03:47:53Yinying Li, Yuqian Fu, Yulin Dai, Jingyu Gong, Tianwen Qian, Xiaoling WangAbstract
Streaming video understanding requires models to process unbounded visual streams while preserving rich visual semantics across vast temporal horizons, posing a fundamental challenge for memory modeling. Existing approaches primarily focus on increasing memory capacity, either by compressing historical information into fixed-size representations or by extending storage beyond GPU memory. However, these methods largely rely on global or coarse-grained representations, inevitably losing fine-grained visual information. In this work, we argue that streaming video memory should explicitly encode structured and semantically meaningful representations, particularly at the entity level. To this end, we propose MEMO, a novel framework that models streaming video through multi-level, entity-aware structured memory. MEMO performs multi-level perception to jointly capture global semantics, entity dynamics, and spatial structures, partitioning streaming video into semantically coherent chunks. Each chunk is organized into a structured memory, where lightweight global and entity-level representations serve as retrieval indices, while the corresponding high-resolution visual content is retained separately for on-demand access. At inference time, MEMO performs query-specific retrieval over the structured memory and selectively recalls relevant visual evidence for downstream reasoning. Notably, MEMO is training-free and plug-and-play with existing multimodal large language models. Extensive experiments on StreamingBench and OVO-Bench demonstrate that MEMO consistently improves multiple base models and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38900
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PixelUMM: Encoder-Free Unified Image and Video Understanding and Generation
2026-09-29 21:59:07Cong Wei, Xuanchi Ren, Bryan Chu, Weiming Ren, Huan Ling, Jiahui Huang, Laura Leal-Taix\'e, Sanja Fidler, Wenhu Chen, Zian Wang, Jay Zhangjie WuAbstract
Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) often rely on separate visual representations for understanding and generation, increasing visual context length and complicating integration with established vision-language pretraining pipelines. Recent advances in pixel-space modeling offer an encoder-free alternative, but extending this paradigm from images to videos is non-trivial: video understanding and generation adopt different temporal representations, leaving the design of a unified visual interface an open question. We present PixelUMM, an encoder-free model for unified image and video understanding and generation directly in pixel space. PixelUMM represents images as spatial patches and videos as spatiotemporal tubelets, connecting raw pixels to a shared multimodal backbone through single-layer linear projections. Its Mixture-of-Transformers architecture combines shared attention with task-specific parameters and extends clean-pixel prediction to video generation, jointly supporting autoregressive text prediction and pixel-space flow matching. Experiments show that PixelUMM achieves competitive performance across image and video understanding and generation tasks. We further conduct empirical studies of key design choices, including decoder design and spatial-temporal patch size, providing insights for future pixel-space unified multimodal models.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38597
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Beyond Layers: Position-Resolved Gradient Conflict and Position-Aware Modulation for Unified Multimodal Models
2026-09-29 20:14:33Shuyang Jiang, Fucheng Deng, Yuchuan Luo, Zhenyu WuAbstract
Unified multimodal models (UMMs) train image understanding and autoregressive image generation on shared parameters, and the two objectives are known to interfere. Existing diagnoses and remedies operate at the resolution of layers or experts, measuring conflict per layer and resolving it by separating parameters. We argue that this resolution hides an orthogonal axis. Generation in a UMM is next-token prediction over a raster sequence of visual tokens whose roles vary systematically with position, so how strongly a generation gradient interferes with understanding should depend on where in the sequence it originates. We introduce a position-resolved interference map that attributes understanding-generation gradient conflict to visual-token positions within every layer, computed from a single backward pass at $1.2\times$ the cost of a standard backward pass. On Show-o and Janus-Pro, position explains a large share of conflict variance after controlling for depth (partial $\eta^2=0.31$ vs. $0.35$ for layer on Show-o; $0.15$ vs. $0.30$ on Janus-Pro): the first quarter of the sequence has a mean gradient cosine of $-0.18$ against understanding, the last quarter $-0.02$. The dependence survives per-position gradient-norm normalization, retaining $80%$ of its effect size, and conflict strength tracks semantic content (Spearman $\rho=0.64$). Building on the map, we propose position-aware modulation (PAM), which removes the anti-aligned component of generation gradients only at high-conflict positions without changing the architecture. Under a matched trainable-parameter budget, PAM improves over layer-wise separation by $+21$ MME and $+2.4$ GenEval points on Show-o while matching it on POPE and overall FID; a random-position control recovers about $31%$ of the gain. Position-based and layer-based separation are complementary degrees of freedom and can be combined.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38485
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Caption-Mediated Perceived-Safety Estimation for Pedestrian Routing
2026-09-29 20:08:10Simon Parkinson, Paloma Liu, Wei Zheng, Mohammadreza SheikhfathollahiAbstract
This paper presents an explainable approach to pedestrian routing, in which perceived safety is estimated from street-level imagery through an explicit natural-language intermediate representation. A vision--language model caption is generated and stored before any scoring is undertaken, and the perceived-risk class is derived entirely from structured features of that stored text, so that every segment score remains inspectable by the user. Nine captioning conditions across five model families are benchmarked against a direct Contrastive Language--Image Pre-training (CLIP) image-embedding baseline under an identical downstream pipeline, and the caption-mediated representation is found to reach parity with the image embedding rather than to trail it. The approach was deployed over 654,115 images covering 36 electoral wards in two locations in Northern England (Manchester and Huddersfield). Independent field validation against 3,669 locally collected ratings of 494 images across 70 participant sessions established agreement that is statistically significant but modest, at $r=0.262$, against a measured noise ceiling of 0.737 imposed by disagreement between raters. A single-use confirmatory test then found that a pipeline 44\% stronger on the supervised benchmark did not produce measurable improvement in the field ($r=0.250$, $p=0.84$), so the benchmark gains did not predict the deployment gains in this case. Routing behaviour varies systematically with journey length. There is negligible change below 1\,km, reaching a median increase of 12.78\% in low-risk route length for a median detour of 2.73\% on journeys of 3 to 6 km.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38479
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VidHarness: Evolving Agent Harnesses for Cost-Efficient Long Video Understanding
2026-09-29 19:06:54Susan Liang, Jianmin Wu, Daxiang DongAbstract
Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer questions about hour-long videos, but processing every frame is prohibitively expensive, even though the evidence for a question usually spans only a few seconds. Video agents, i.e., harness programs wrapped around a frozen VLM, address this by observing the video selectively, yet existing harnesses are hand-crafted by experts through slow build-and-test cycles. We propose VidHarness, a framework that automates harness design for cost-efficient long video understanding, in which a harness proposer iteratively evolves harnesses based on execution feedback from an evolution environment. To escape the local optima of greedy refinement, we organize the evolution as Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS), and to reduce the evaluation cost, we integrate uncertainty-aware multi-fidelity validation, which screens new harnesses on a few questions and promotes only the promising ones. Since the best harness varies with the frame budget, we further introduce a mixture-of-harness that routes each question to a harness specialized for its budget. VidHarness sets new state-of-the-art results on LongVideoBench, Video-MME, and Video-Holmes, outperforms the strongest hand-crafted video agent by up to $11.2$ points, and generalizes to the knowledge-intensive benchmarks Video-MMMU and MMVU with fewer than half of the frames of uniform sampling.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38413
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VideoLoop: Looped Working Memory Against Semantic Thrashing in Long-Form Video Agents
2026-09-29 17:50:21Jinfa Huang, Jianming Xu, Jingyang Lin, Zhengyuan Yang, Jiebo LuoAbstract
Long-form video understanding requires multimodal agents to iteratively gather evidence over many reasoning steps. However, most existing agentic methods suffer from semantic thrashing: as append-only working memory grows, attention to key evidence collapses, and the agent loses access to what it has already found. First, we provide a structural argument showing that append-only memory can incorporate newly observed target evidence, but cannot remove accumulated noise or prevent ordered context growth without a rewrite operator. Second, motivated by this analysis, we propose VideoLoop, a multimodal agent with two coupled loops. The outer loop reasons over the video and the inner loop, after each step, retrieves artifacts from an unbounded filesystem of past observations and intermediate analysis, and rewrites a bounded working memory. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of VideoLoop, which improves four popular LVLM backbones in a plug-and-play manner, with an average gain of 4.2% points over baseline on VideoMME (long). Further analysis of working memory suggests that VideoLoop mitigates semantic thrashing: on the hardest quarter of VideoMME (long) questions, a blind judge that reads only the agent's context answers 81.1% correctly, versus 60.9% for the append-only agent. With Gemini 3.1 Pro, VideoLoop reaches 88.3% on VideoMME (long), 88.8% on VideoMMMU, and 80.9% on LongVideoBench (long).
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38119
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OmniTaskonomy: When Does Visual Generation Improve Visual Understanding?
2026-09-29 17:36:53Jiaxin Ge, Yiming Qin, Ji Xie, Haozhe Jiang, Xiaochuang Han, Junyi Zhang, Andrew Dai, Yinfei Yang, Jitendra Malik, Ranjay Krishna, Sewon Min, Haiwen Feng, Le Xue, Baifeng Shi, Trevor Darrell, XuDong WangAbstract
Training a model to generate visual content can encourage it to learn rich perceptual capabilities related to geometry, spatial relationships, and objectness; yet, its benefits for visual understanding remain unclear. We ask: when and how does visual generation supervision improve visual understanding? We study controlled pairs of image-to-image (I2I) generation and image-to-text (I2T) understanding tasks that express the same underlying problem in different output modalities. We find that under the correct recipe, I2I training improves downstream I2T performance, with larger gains as the amount of I2I training data increases. We next ask which generation tasks benefit which understanding capabilities. To study transfer beyond paired tasks, we introduce OmniTaskonomy, a unified taxonomy spanning 19 I2I generation tasks and 25 I2T understanding capabilities. The resulting transfer map reveals selective, task-dependent benefits. Some follow intuitive correspondences, e.g., depth prediction improving metric 3D reasoning, object pointing improving counting, and jigsaw reconstruction improving 2D ordering. Interestingly, we also uncover surprising connections: 2.5D segmentation improving category recognition and Z-depth prediction improving localization. To probe these patterns, we analyze gradient alignment between generation and understanding tasks and find that stronger alignment is associated with larger downstream transfer gains. Together, our results highlight visual generation as a rich source of supervision for visual understanding and provide a roadmap for unlocking its benefits through the right training curriculum and task selection. Project page: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38079
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