A 3D asset admits multiple valid part decompositions, while semantics-aware segmentation should reflect both the desired granularity and the parts a user wants to extract. Ideally, a practical segmentation model should strive for a simple principle: what you ask for is what you get. However, realizing this goal is hindered by two core obstacles: the lack of multi-granularity training data and the absence of a holistic control mechanism. We propose FLEXPART, a unified framework for text-controlled 3D mesh segmentation. To establish flexible control, we introduce a holistic control prompt comprising semantic part names with location and shape clauses. To support this mechanism, we utilize an automated Vision-Language Model (VLM) pipeline to construct a large-scale dataset of multi-granularity partitions and their corresponding prompts. Driven by this data, FLEXPART generates a view-independent part-identity field in native 3D space, directly assigning discrete part IDs to mesh faces. To compel the model to respect semantic conditions rather than rely on geometric priors, we train the model using randomized background dropping. Furthermore, an inference-time VLM planner can automatically complete descriptive clauses from 2D renderings, allowing users to simply name the desired parts in ordinary words. FLEXPART with planner-completed prompts outperforms the strongest evaluated baseline by 15% in mIoU, even when that baseline receives ground-truth guidance. On our held-out FLEXPARTBENCH, FLEXPART leads at each granularity and improves average mIoU by 22% over the strongest baseline. With only the requested part names supplied by the user, it also improves IoU by 35% over the strongest click-driven baseline on selective segmentation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23659
While data collection for model training is relatively easy, curating high-quality datasets from large collections is inherently challenging. Coreset estimation methods address this problem by identifying the best data subsets to train models on. However, existing approaches often require proxy model training, extensive annotations, or task-specific tailoring. Unsupervised alternatives typically exploit geometric properties in foundation model feature spaces, but are limited to pairwise image-to-image comparisons or comparisons against a fixed subset. We introduce CoreDNA, an unsupervised, task-agnostic coreset estimation approach that pools neuron activations from vision foundation models into per-image and per-dataset distributions. By comparing each image's distribution to the dataset-level distribution, CoreDNA can capture both low-level visual structure and high-level semantic information across layers. We find that high-quality samples concentrate in the tails of the last layer's activation statistics, which we validate by relating them to training-based coreset methods. Building on these findings, we develop a computationally efficient selection mechanism to construct task-agnostic, high-quality coresets for selective annotation and model training. Across image classification, semantic segmentation, depth estimation, and imitation learning for end-to-end driving and mobile manipulation, CoreDNA matches or outperforms the state of the art, demonstrating unprecedented generalization across perception and action tasks. These results highlight the effectiveness of compact activation-based representations for data selection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23642
Deep learning segmentation models for pediatric oncology are often trained on small, single-center cohorts, whereas much larger datasets exist for adult diseases, such as kidney cancer. Whether models trained on adult renal lesions generalize to pediatric Wilms tumors remains unclear. We trained a segmentation model on single-sequence T1- or T2-weighted adult kidney MRI and evaluated it on a held-out adult test set and a pediatric Wilms tumor cohort, where it was compared with a pediatric-specific nnU-Net. Segmentation performance was quantified using the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and 95th-percentile Hausdorff distance. On the adult test set, the model achieved a median DSC of 0.86 for renal lesions. On the pediatric cohort, the adult-trained model achieved a median DSC of 0.85 compared with 0.90 for the pediatric-specific model. Despite differences in age, anatomy, and tumor type, the adult-trained model showed promising performance on pediatric Wilms tumors, with only a modest difference in median DSC compared with the pediatric-specific model. However, non-inferiority could not be shown, highlighting the value of pediatric training data. In future work, a fine-tuning strategy could be explored.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23568
Recent image generators exhibit rich visual priors that can support dense visual perception. However, existing approaches typically encode multiple perception tasks into a shared parameterization, making joint training sensitive to the mixture and weighting of heterogeneous data and prone to cross-task interference. To address this issue, we introduce ReVision, an instruction-conditioned parameter generation framework built on a frozen multimodal understanding model and a frozen image generator. Given an image and a free-form instruction, the understanding model jointly encodes them into a multimodal image--instruction representation, which a trainable parameter generator maps to transient low-rank updates for the generator. Each image--instruction pair induces a distinct set of transient prediction parameters, enabling instance-specific adaptation while both pretrained backbones remain unchanged. ReVision requires no task-specific heads, explicit task identifiers, or stored adapters. A shared RGB output interface unifies segmentation, depth estimation, and surface-normal prediction. Across diverse dense prediction benchmarks, ReVision achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods while supporting flexible task specification through natural-language instructions. Our analysis further reveals substantial gradient disagreement across tasks, highlighting the conflict introduced when heterogeneous objectives share a single parameterization. Meanwhile, the generated updates exhibit structured task- and input-dependent organization in weight space, further validating instance-level parameter generation for multi-task perception.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23533
Shadows cast by elevated objects alter the spectral appearance and obscure the boundaries of objects in remote sensing images, thereby degrading semantic segmentation performance. Most existing approaches handle shadows as degradations to be detected and removed, requiring additional costs from dedicated networks and shadow-specific annotations. We propose ShadowCast, which takes the opposite approach: it synthesizes shadows and injects them during training for remote sensing segmentation. It extracts masks of elevated objects, such as buildings and trees, directly from the segmentation labels and estimates an image-specific cast-shadow direction cue by probing the brightness around them. It then projects synthetic shadows along the inferred cast-shadow direction, requiring no learned network and no acquisition metadata. Experiments on three widely used remote sensing benchmarks, Vaihingen, Potsdam, and LoveDA, show that ShadowCast consistently outperforms the baseline across diverse state-of-the-art segmentation architectures. Moreover, it brings additional performance gains when combined with standard augmentation and regularization techniques, indicating that stochastic shadow injection serves as a simple and complementary augmentation strategy for remote sensing segmentation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23440
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly advanced instruction-driven perception through the "Embedding-as-Mask" paradigm. However, extending this capability to Remote Sensing (RS) reasoning segmentation remains exceptionally challenging under cluttered geographical contexts and extreme scale variations, often leading to Spatial Fidelity Degradation and Target Misidentification. We identify a critical yet underexplored bottleneck: the sequential alienation of the segmentation token [SEG] from its initial visual grounding within the autoregressive generation paradigm. Produced only at the end of long reasoning chains, [SEG] relies on visual evidence that has been progressively diluted by linguistic abstraction and autoregressive noise. This information decay is particularly catastrophic for RS targets with minuscule pixel footprints, where even marginal fidelity loss leads to localization failure. To address these bottlenecks, we propose GeoReason, a novel framework designed to fortify logical deduction and preserve spatial integrity. First, we introduce an Anticipatory Prior mechanism that injects the [SEG] token directly into the initial user query, shifting it from a terminal output to a primary condition. This paradigm shift transforms the token into a persistent spatial anchor, preventing information decay during long-form linguistic inference. Second, we enhance visual reasoning via a Location-aware Chain-of-Thought (CoT) that enforces coarse-to-fine localization using bounding boxes, coupled with a Latent Patch-to-Token Alignment (PTA) Loss that explicitly aligns the latent segmentation token with physical RS textures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GeoReason consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the Earthreason and RRSIS-D benchmarks. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23416
As climate change intensifies, floods are becoming more frequent and destructive, making accurate flood understanding an urgent priority. However, existing vision-language models perform poorly on flood-related tasks, suffering from attentional bias and inaccurate descriptions of flood magnitude. To bridge this gap, we construct the first large-scale remote sensing flood multi-modal benchmark that supports language-level flood understanding and pixel-level flood segmentation. The benchmark contains 131,200 flood image patches and corresponding 443,100 textual descriptions for flood severity and evolution. Based on this benchmark, we propose FloodVLM-Pix, a language-guided pixel-level flood understanding model that includes a flood prior module and a multi-temporal flood pixel decoder to achieve accurate flood understanding. The flood prior module automatically distills sub-region flood spatial priors and inputs priors into FloodVLM-Pix, solving the attentional bias problem in flood language understanding. The flood pixel decoder introduces a novel general-specific feature fusion mechanism to address performance degradation caused by interference (e.g., clouds or mountain shadows) during flood segmentation. Experiments on FloodVL-Pix demonstrate that FloodVLM-Pix improves both flood description quality and pixel-level flood segmentation performance compared with state-of-the-art VLMs and flood segmentation models. Our code and data will be released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23377
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) answer questions about whole images well, yet they still struggle with fine-grained region understanding. A key reason is that text-only supervision never specifies which regions support an answer. To close this gap, we present Xiaomi-Lens-0, a 4B MLLM built on Qwen3.5 that predicts masks from its own visual representations. Specifically, a lightweight decoder combines vision-encoder patch features with visual latents, the language model's mask-token states, so mask supervision reaches the shared backbone without an additional segmentation encoder. Because each latent decodes to a mask, the model can interleave reasoning with region-specific latents and thus think with visual latents, while grounded reasoning traces supervise the regions it visits during chain-of-thought. As a result, across all eight RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg splits, Xiaomi-Lens-0 gains 5.6 points on average over Qwen3.5 in referring comprehension and achieves the highest segmentation cIoU among compared models. Moreover, it surpasses Qwen3.5 across all perception benchmarks. Homepage: \href{this https URL}{this https URL}
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23279
Dysarthric audio-visual speech recognition (DAVSR) enhances performance by integrating complementary visual cues. However, existing research is largely confined to word-level tasks with limited vocabularies, which severely restricts real-world communication for dysarthric speakers. Furthermore, performance remains heavily dependent on supervised fine-tuning with speaker-specific data; significant variations in age, etiology, and severity cause traditional methods to struggle with unseen speakers. To address these domain shifts and the scarcity of continuous multimodal resources, we first introduce a "source speech search-segmentation" pipeline to construct a structured sentence-level corpus from raw CDSD videos. We then propose the use of unsupervised Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) for sentence-level DAVSR using Sequential-level Generalized Entropy Minimization (SGEM). Our evaluations across the state-of-the-art AV-SUPERB and ViSpeR frameworks demonstrate that TTA consistently alleviates Character Error Rate (CER) degradation for unseen pathological speakers. Paired t-tests verify that these improvements are statistically significant (p < 0.05), highlighting TTA as a promising paradigm for advancing speaker-adaptive assistive speech interfaces.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23117
On neuromorphic chips, spiking neural networks (SNNs) consume far less energy than artificial neural networks (ANNs), but the limited memory of these chips requires low-bit synaptic weights and membrane potentials. Existing post-training quantization (PTQ) methods provide them without retraining and, like those for ANNs, minimize numerical errors such as the mean squared error (MSE). In an SNN, however, a quantization error reaches later layers only through the spikes it flips. We find that errors of equal MSE can cause very different accuracy losses, whereas errors that flip the same fraction of spikes cause the same loss. We therefore propose SpikeQ, a spike-guided PTQ framework. For weights, we select the level of each weight by simulating the downstream neurons and minimizing their spike errors. For membrane potentials, most existing methods quantize the state after the reset, whereas neuromorphic chips compare the threshold with the membrane potential stored at a fixed bit width. We target this pre-fire quantization and build a reset-aware grid that places the threshold on a rounding boundary, so rounding never flips the spike at the current time step. We evaluate SpikeQ on seven benchmarks of image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. With 2-bit pre-fire membrane potentials, every existing grid collapses, whereas SpikeQ retains most of the full-precision accuracy. With both at 4 bits, the models stay within 2.59 points of full precision, shrink their memory footprint 7.8--7.9 times, and use 6.4--6.9 times less energy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23046
MRI field-strength enhancement seeks to combine the accessibility of low-field scanners with the image quality of high-field scanners. Yet, existing methods remain prone to anatomical hallucinations, as uniform processing leaves difficult brain regions insufficiently examined and scarce paired data limit their learning of how tissue contrast and anatomical visibility change across field strengths. To address these challenges, we propose UniField++, a two-agent framework that unifies enhancement tasks across multiple field-strength transitions, including 64mT-to-3T and 3T-to-7T. Unified learning allows both the VLM-based planner and the flow-matching-based enhancer to draw on field-dependent image characteristics observed across tasks, rather than relying on a single transition. Trained with radiologists' annotations of hallucination-prone regions and corresponding correction plans, the planner predicts regional risk and formulates targeted restoration strategies. Guided by these plans, the enhancer performs loop reasoning along the flow-matching trajectory, repeatedly processing high-risk regions for additional refinement. Together, cross-transition learning and risk-guided refinement support anatomically faithful enhancement across field strengths. Across the evaluated tasks, UniField++ improves PSNR by an average of 2.74 dB and SSIM by 14.05 percentage points over comparison methods, with corresponding gains of 3.97 dB and 13.92 percentage points over the ablation baseline. It also maintains enhancement quality on an external cohort with an unseen field strength and improves downstream whole-brain segmentation Macro Dice by an average of 0.1457 over the original low-field images. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22982
Token merging improves the efficiency of Vision Transformers by combining redundant tokens, but existing methods largely rely on feature similarity to determine which tokens to merge. This criterion is effective for semantic segmentation, yet can fail in instance segmentation, where adjacent objects of the same class often have highly similar features. We identify this failure mode as cross-instance token fusion. We introduce MaskMerge, an instance-aware token merging method that uses coarse intermediate mask predictions to constrain feature-based merging and preserve instance boundaries. We evaluate MaskMerge on two diverse instance segmentation domains characterized by high inter-instance visual similarity: PanNuke and iSAID. Against the SOTA token merging method ALGM, MaskMerge improves mAP from 30.1 to 32.1 on PanNuke while reducing computation from 229 to 153 GFLOPs and running 1.18x faster, and from 33.1 to 36.2 on iSAID while reducing computation from 198 to 182 GFLOPs and running 1.23x faster. Additionally, we also test it on Cityscapes and match ALGM's performance while using fewer FLOPs. The gains also transfer to an MAE pretrained backbone, demonstrating that instance-aware merging enables more aggressive compression when appearance similarity alone cannot reliably preserve object identity.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22921
Mixture-of-experts (MoE) models have become an important approach for scaling model parameters. Modern MoE architectures increasingly combine two design choices: fine-grained expert segmentation and shared experts. The former increases expressiveness by enabling more expert combinations at a fixed activation ratio, and the latter introduces experts that are active for every token. We identify an exploration dilemma between these designs: shared experts can make routing less exploratory by reducing the variability of token representations. This conflicts with the greater need for exploration induced by fine-grained expert segmentation due to the combinatorially enlarged routing space. Consequently, the additional expressiveness offered by fine-grained segmentation may not be fully realized in practice. MirrorMoE is proposed to reconcile this exploration dilemma by shrinking the exploration space through token-adaptive suppression of unnecessary experts. MirrorMoE consistently improves performance across model scales.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22353
State-of-the art approaches to retinal vessel segmentation typically require extensive annotations, a highly time-consuming process, reliant on clinical expertise. We present FPG-Seg, an annotation-free pipeline for retinal vessel segmentation combining classical vesselness filtering, Bayesian deep learning and topology-aware graph reconstruction to segment retinal vessel topology without manual labels. Tested across four widely used benchmark datasets for retinal vessel segmentation, FPG-Seg attains a clDice of $0.74{-}0.78$, representing $86{-}98\%$ of the performance of an equivalent fully-supervised baseline, despite using no manual annotations for training or hyperparameter tuning. As part of this work, we also provide, to our knowledge, the first performance benchmark of an annotation-free vessel segmentation method on FIVES.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22259
Propulsive drones are a promising new technology for generating high-resolution terrain models of the Moon. In future lunar missions, propulsive drones will complete a series of hops across the lunar surface while capturing images with downward-facing cameras. We present an autonomous motion planning framework that uses a vision-guided optimal control strategy for performing safe, efficient hops between specified waypoints. The drone plans parabolic hops between waypoints generated by a global-level planner; if a nominal waypoint is unsafe or unreachable, the drone then completes a diversion maneuver to safely land. To evaluate the validity of potential landing sites, we develop a custom semantic segmentation model for identifying obstacles from aerial images, and we introduce an approach for rapidly calculating reachable terrain. We then use model predictive control (MPC) to robustly track hop trajectories that guide the drone towards safe landing sites. We test the optimal hop planner in a high-fidelity lunar simulation environment. Our results demonstrate that our unified motion planning framework yields safe, fuel-efficient hop trajectories which can be tracked rapidly and with low error via MPC.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22225
Thin, elongated structures are particularly sensitive to connectivity errors, as even a few local segmentation mistakes can disrupt otherwise continuous paths. Existing skeleton-based objectives typically supervise fixed centerline locations and do not account for alternative local routes that may restore connectivity. We propose TRACE, a topology-aware, prediction-adaptive objective that uses a target skeleton to define required local connections. For each connection, TRACE identifies the easiest valid reconnection under the current prediction and jointly supervises its bottleneck with the corresponding skeleton point. The supervision thus adapts to the evolving prediction rather than remaining fixed to the centerline. We further introduce a topology-aware skeleton carrier that preserves both foreground and class-specific topology, enabling reliable definition of these connections. Extensive experiments across six 2D and 3D benchmarks show that TRACE improves connectivity and topology while maintaining strong segmentation accuracy with low training overhead. Code will be released upon acceptance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22210
Aerial robots operating near people must treat a pedestrian, a parked car, and a wall differently, yet conventional perception--planning stacks reduce all of them to occupied geometry---a \emph{human-aware safety gap} in which category-specific clearance is unavailable to the planner and temporary occlusions remove pedestrian-specific constraints from its map. We present a modular, fully onboard pipeline that closes this gap by turning visual observations into context-dependent safety constraints for real-time UAV navigation. A shared BLIP encoder drives scene captioning and text-conditioned segmentation, which is fused with depth to localize obstacles in 3D. Obstacle-specific risk is inferred by a lightweight LLM (Qwen-2.5-0.5B) stabilized with retrieval-augmented generation and grammar-constrained decoding that restricts its output to a planner-compatible JSON schema. The LLM reasons once per object category rather than per frame: its verdicts are cached per class, so previously seen categories are resolved without inference and new ones trigger a fresh retrieval-grounded query; detections are additionally given persistent identities and held in the map across occlusions. The perception pipeline runs at 10\,Hz on a Jetson Orin NX, while fallback LLM queries take approximately 0.8\,s and remain off the control-critical path. In Gazebo, low-altitude urban navigation among pedestrians and vehicles shows a roughly $3\times$ reduction in collision events over a geometric planner, and semantics-aware landing among moving actors raises success from 34\% to 96\%. The 224-pixel encoder input limits reliable small-object perception at range; conservative pedestrian margins and short-term persistence mitigate this limitation during navigation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22092
Multi-view panoptic segmentation assigns a semantic class and a scene-level instance ID to every pixel of an unordered set of images, and recent feed-forward 3D models predict these labels for the input views in a single forward pass. Their predictions, however, have been evaluated with the scene-level PQ (PQ^scene) borrowed from per-scene optimization methods, typically on rendered held-out views. PQ^scene tiles all views of a scene into a single image, so that a missed appearance or a change of ID lowers the score of the matched pair only in proportion to its area. We propose View-Consistent Panoptic Quality (VC-PQ), which extends PQ from a single image to a set of input views, counts equally every view in which an instance is visible, and penalizes a prediction that is not visible in the same views as its ground truth. A decomposition of VC-PQ attributes the score a method loses to mask accuracy, view consistency, and the matching threshold. A single additional parameter recovers the area weighting of tiling for comparison. Under a fixed evaluation protocol on ScanNet++ and ScanNetv2, recent feed-forward methods are evaluated with VC-PQ and PQ^scene, and the decomposition shows where each of them loses its score. Controlled perturbations of the ground truth show that VC-PQ responds to the number of views in which an instance is missed or changes ID, whereas PQ^scene responds to their area. The aim of this work is to make view consistency part of the evaluation of multi-view panoptic segmentation, with VC-PQ reported alongside PQ^scene. The evaluation code and the input sets of the protocol are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05911
Semantic segmentation is critical for the reliable navigation and scene understanding of autonomous systems, yet its performance degrades severely in low-light environments due to noise, artifacts, colour distortion, and the loss of structural details. To address this challenge, this work introduces VesperMUSE, a unified multi-modal framework designed to achieve robust image semantic segmentation across diverse illumination conditions. The architecture addresses the light deficiency problem on multiple levels: proposing a novel physics-informed synthetic low-light adaptation algorithm, approaching Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) through a thermal-guided paradigm, and finally aiming to recover the intrinsic scene details for semantic segmentation through a multi-modal fusion approach. Following enhancement, the framework dynamically integrates the primary RGB features with auxiliary thermal representations and surface normal maps highlighting geometric discontinuities and material boundaries. At the core of this integration is a highly scalable, modality-agnostic self-attention mechanism that extracts both global context and fine local features from an arbitrary number of auxiliary inputs. By combining and projecting these hierarchical multi-modal representations into a unified component, the attention module allows the network to selectively attend to relevant cross-modal cues without requiring any architectural modifications when different sensor configurations are used. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that VesperMUSE successfully recovers missing visual cues, providing a flexible, state-of-the-art (SOTA) solution for machine perception in extreme and unstructured real-world environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21990
Generating 3D assets with explicit parts requires two properties at once: geometric detail inside each part and structural coherence across the whole object. Recent image-conditioned 3D generation models adopt a structured 3D representation that anchors tokens to explicit spatial positions, capturing both properties, but their output remains a single fused mesh. We ask how a part-decomposed generation model can inherit both properties of these holistic priors, and answer with STRUCTPARTS, a framework whose core technical contribution is a dual-frame coordinate interleaving mechanism: each shape latent is interpreted under both a part-local and an object-global reference frame, and processed through a global-local inter-leaved transformer that simultaneously reuses the prior's geometric detail at the part scale and its structural coherence at the whole-object scale. As its structural input, STRUCTPARTS uses a segmented mesh scaffold, a coarse mesh paired with a face-level segmentation mask kept entirely within the prior's native 3D representation. With only lightweight finetuning, both intra-part detail and inter-part coherence emerge from the same pretrained weights. On PartObjaverse-Tiny, STRUCTPARTS matches or surpasses prior part-decomposed models at a fraction of their training cost, while naturally supporting part-mesh refinement and part-level editing.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21850