Segmentation
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UltraLight Luma: A Novel Edge-Deployable Perception Network for Crop-Row Segmentation in Agricultural Robotics
2026-10-08 11:47:33Dhanushka Balasingham, Shamod Ginigaddarage, Hanojhan Rajahrajasingh, Nuwan Kodagoda, Rajitha de SilvaAbstract
Reliable crop-row perception is essential for autonomous agricultural robots, but low-cost deployment is constrained by computation, memory, power, and inference time. This paper addresses crop-row detection and navigation-line extraction using UltraLight Luma, a compact encoder-decoder segmentation network with a progressive learning strategy and only 13.1k trainable parameters. The predicted crop-row masks are processed using a post-processing algorithm to estimate row alignment for downstream visual servoing. UltraLight Luma improves parameter efficiency over U-Net, YOLOv8, and YOLOv26 while maintaining reliable crop-row detection performance. The model required only 25.23 mJ per inference, demonstrating its suitability for resource-constrained agricultural robots.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11764
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DEX: Digit-Level Early Exit for Energy-Efficient MSDF Neural Network Inference
2026-10-08 11:39:01Yousef Sadegheih, Dorit Merhof, Muhammad UsmanAbstract
U-Net inference for brain-tumor segmentation requires billions of multiply-accumulate operations, motivating hardware that can reduce computation dynamically rather than relying only on fixed precision or static model compression. Most-significant-digit-first (MSDF) arithmetic exposes the leading digits of a result during computation, enabling output-dependent decisions before the full value is generated. This paper presents an MSDF accelerator for quantized U-Net segmentation with a two-stage grouped processing element supporting signed INT8 operands and in-stream bias accumulation. Four runtime mechanisms operate directly on the output digit stream: exact early negative detection (END) in ReLU layers, exact sign-only decision making in the segmentation head, calibrated low-order-digit skipping, and calibrated pruning. The two approximate mechanisms are selected offline under an accuracy constraint, while execution requires only lightweight control and does not modify the stored weights. On a residual U-Net trained with nnU-Net for BraTS, the proposed mechanisms reduce digit cycles by 38.38\% while achieving a mean Dice score of 80.58\% on 73 held-out cases, compared with 81.20\% for the floating-point model; the exact mechanisms alone reduce cycles by 18.79\% without altering the quantized output. Synthesized in 45~nm, the processing element operates at 500~MHz, occupies 0.858~mm$^2$, and consumes 0.726~mJ per $192\times192$ patch under switching-activity-annotated power analysis. A projected eight-output accelerator with shared activation delivery achieves 16.6~ms latency and 1.67~mJ per patch.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11748
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Onboard Marine Anomaly Detection on $Phi$sat-2: From Simulation-Based Development to In-Orbit Demonstration
2026-10-08 11:31:06Clotilde Szywala, Thomas Goudemant, Marjorie Bellizzi, Benjamin Francesconi, Adrien GirardAbstract
Onboard Artificial Intelligence can improve responsiveness and bandwidth efficiency of Earth Observation systems by processing data directly on the satellite. This paper presents the experience gained from the development, onboard integration, and post-launch adaptation of a lightweight marine anomaly detection pipeline deployed on the European Space Agency's $\Phi$sat-2 mission. The application combines sea segmentation, self-supervised feature encoding of marine regions, generic anomaly detection based on deviations from a normal sea state, and optional characterization of selected anomaly types. Before launch, the pipeline was trained and validated on simulated $\Phi$sat-2 imagery to assess algorithmic performance and compatibility with resource-constrained onboard hardware. After integration and functional validation in the mission environment, early experiments on real $\Phi$sat-2 acquisitions revealed a significant mismatch between simulated and in-orbit data. The pipeline was therefore retrained on real Level-1 imagery using an improved annotation strategy to better handle ambiguous marine regions, substantially enhancing performance. Beyond demonstrating the onboard feasibility of the application, the $\Phi$sat-2 experience highlights the importance of robust annotation strategies and sensor-aware design, and shows that simulation-based development is valuable for pre-flight risk reduction, while reliable scientific validation requires representative in-orbit data and should be clearly distinguished from functional validation.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11735
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Learning Language-Conditioned Traversability Representations for Adaptive Visual Navigation
2026-10-08 10:03:10Senda Chen, Changxu Cheng, Fangdi Li, Tao Wang, Wuyue ZhaoAbstract
Traversability is essential for visual navigation but varies with robot capabilities and user preferences. Conventional pipelines often rely on explicit costmaps or segmentation masks with predefined criteria, requiring hand-crafted rules and careful tuning. Moreover, viewpoint-dependent segmentation masks complicate asynchronous planning under perception latency. We present LaTraNav, a framework that learns language-conditioned traversability representations for adaptive visual navigation. Its asynchronous architecture combines a slow vision-language model that produces latent representations of traversability and navigation goals, with a fast flow-matching planner conditioned on these representations. To train the system, we develop a simulation-based data generation pipeline with controllable trajectories, producing observations paired with language instructions, traversability maps, goal locations, and diverse trajectories. Photorealistic image translation further enhances visual realism. Evaluations on datasets from multiple sources demonstrate effective language-guided traversability segmentation and goal localization by the slow VLM, alongside adaptive pixel-space path planning by the fast planner. Latent conditioning improves planning performance over explicit segmentation masks, while asynchronous scheduling increases the path-update rate by $6.05\times$ at the same semantic-update rate.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11622
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EchoDiST: Self-distillation-based joint learning for diffusion-conditioned echocardiographic myocardial motion estimation
2026-10-08 07:55:08Feiyue Qi, Xingyue Wei, Jianwen LuoAbstract
Motion estimation in echocardiography is essential for quantitative assessment of cardiac function and myocardial mechanics, but remains challenging due to image artifacts, limited image information, speckle decorrelation, and the scarcity of ground-truth displacement fields. Anatomy-guided approaches can provide structural information, yet often rely on expert-labeled myocardial segmentations. We propose EchoDiST, a framework for unsupervised echocardiographic myocardial motion estimation that integrates self-distillation-based joint learning with a diffusion-conditioned motion estimation network. Here, unsupervised motion estimation refers to learning without ground-truth displacement fields. The self-distillation strategy jointly optimizes anatomical segmentation and myocardial motion estimation under limited anatomical annotations. Diffusion-based conditioning is used during training with stochastic perturbations, while inference requires only a single deterministic forward pass without iterative reverse-diffusion sampling. EchoDiST was evaluated on three echocardiographic datasets, including two external test datasets under cross-view and cross-dataset settings. Compared with seven representative learning-based methods, EchoDiST consistently improved anatomical alignment, myocardial strain assessment, and motion-derived functional and cardiac-phase assessment. These gains were statistically significant across the evaluated tasks and datasets. Overall, EchoDiST provides an effective approach for reliable myocardial motion estimation under limited anatomical supervision and supports downstream quantitative assessment of cardiac function.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11431
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Missing Modality-Aware Calibration for Trustworthy Brain Tumor Segmentation
2026-10-08 07:46:21Sol Lee, Hyunji Kim, Sungrae Hong, Donghee Han, Mun YiAbstract
Multimodal brain tumor segmentation typically leverages multiple MRI modalities, yet incomplete modality acquisition is common in clinical practice due to protocol heterogeneity and scan failures. Although recent methods maintain segmentation accuracy under missing modality conditions, they frequently overlook prediction reliability, leading to miscalibrated confidence estimates that hinder clinical adoption. Existing calibration techniques are largely modality-agnostic or assume that prediction difficulty decreases monotonically as additional modalities become available. However, in brain tumor segmentation, prediction difficulty depends primarily on which modalities are absent rather than how many, leading to combination-specific and spatially heterogeneous calibration errors. To address this, we propose Missing Modality-Aware Local Temperature Scaling (MMA-LTS), a post-hoc voxel-wise confidence calibration method. It estimates a spatially adaptive temperature field conditioned on a modality-availability learnable token and a voxel-wise difficulty score. Experiments on BraTS 2020 and FeTS 2024 show that MMA-LTS improves calibration while preserving the segmentation accuracy of state-of-the-art models across diverse missing-modality scenarios, thereby enhancing trustworthiness toward clinical deployment.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11419
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Skeleton-Guided Progressive Test-Time Adaptation for Thin Curvilinear Structures
2026-10-08 02:19:51Boa Jang, JunGyu Lee, Gwanho Lee, Jinwook Choi, Young-Gon KimAbstract
Accurate segmentation of thin curvilinear structures is vital for various real-world applications, from vessel analysis to road extraction. Yet their intricate geometry makes even minor pixel-wise errors enough to break the global topology, and this structural fragility turns severe domain shifts into catastrophic failures. The difficulty is most acute under cross-modality gaps, where the imaging process itself differs fundamentally between source and target. While test-time adaptation (TTA) offers a practical source-free remedy, existing methods adapt feature statistics and confidence, neither of which constrains connectivity, and thus degrade under such extreme gaps. To address this, we propose Skeleton-Guided Progressive Test-Time Adaptation (SGP-TTA). Progressive Batch Normalization (ProgBN) shifts normalization from frozen source statistics toward current target estimates under a sample-count schedule, so that the source-target balance follows the stage of adaptation rather than a fixed coefficient. Consensus Skeleton Recall (CSR) then derives a structural target from geometrically aligned multi-view predictions and updates only the BN affine parameters to preserve connected structures. Extensive experiments show that SGP-TTA consistently outperforms existing TTA methods in topological connectivity, with the largest margins under cross-modality shift. The project page is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11104
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PCAsplat: Gaussian Splatting with Local PCA Regularization
2026-10-07 23:49:39Vitor Matias, Filipe Nascimento, Kiyohiro Nakayama, Jo\~ao Paulo Lima, M\'arcus Lobo, Gordon Wetzstein, Leonidas Guibas, Afonso Paiva, Tiago NovelloAbstract
Gaussian splatting has emerged as a flexible representation for 3D reconstruction from posed images. However, existing methods are optimized primarily using rasterization-based losses, which supervise a splat only when it contributes to sampled camera rays. Gaussians that are occluded or contribute little to the sampled view therefore receive weak or no geometric gradients and may drift away from the underlying surface, producing undesired floaters. We introduce PCAsplat, a geometry-aware regularization framework for Gaussian splatting based on differentiable local principal component analysis (PCA). Our PCA regularizer acts directly on neighborhoods of Gaussian centers and can therefore update Gaussians that do not contribute to the current training view. We regularize the PCA eigenvalues to encourage Gaussians to move to the underlying surface with isotropic tangent-plane coverage. We also align each Gaussian normal with the PCA-estimated neighborhood normal to enforce consistent orientation. Experiments on DTU, Tanks and Temples, and NeRF Synthetic show that the splats produced by PCAsplat better approximate samples of the reference surface while substantially reducing undesired floaters. These surface-aligned splats enable downstream geometry-processing tasks, including point cloud segmentation, and direct Poisson reconstruction. Additionally, PCAsplat remains competitive under conventional novel view synthesis and mesh extraction tasks. Code will be released.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11011
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iAm.md: Robot Skill Self-Assessment through Agentic Introspection for Unknown Open-Vocabulary Domains
2026-10-07 22:28:28Vincenzo Guarino, Emanuele Musumeci, Vincenzo Suriani, Daniele NardiAbstract
Agentic AI based on Large Language Model generalization capabilities offers a wide range of potential applications, including planning for embodied tasks. For example, embodied agents based on Foundation models can generate plausible plans in autonomous robotics scenarios. Due to limited context windows or hallucinatory phenomena in the next-token prediction formulation, behaviors may be generated without establishing whether the deployed robot and the observed environment actually support the requested operation, in what we call a "grounding failure". Thanks to the recent improvements in reasoning capabilities of foundation models, autonomous robot behavior generation problem can be formulated as a code generation problem. We present this http URL, a Markdown standard and generation framework, that allows anchoring this process in complementary forms of deployment evidence. Through open-vocabulary semantic mapping, we combine local vision-language detections and object segmentation and refer them to persistent object records in this intermediate standardized representation, allowing agentic introspection. We then study this new technique on a simulated TIAGo, on navigation-and-manipulation tasks, showing how this standardized representation jointly supports skill self-assessment and executable task generalization.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10962
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Insights from Autoresearch for Solar Panel Segmentation
2026-10-07 17:45:31Justinas Lekavicius, Kursat Komurcu, Valentas Gruzauskas, Linas PetkeviciusAbstract
This paper investigates AutoResearch, a protocol in which a coding language model edits a training program under a one-hour GPU budget and retains a change only if validation IoU improves. The protocol is applied to photovoltaic panel segmentation on a frozen real-image split, with DeepLabV3--ResNet-50 held fixed. Three campaigns of 24 experiments, using Gemma~4 12B, Qwen3-8B all improve their one-hour baselines, but retained modifications do not transfer across hardware. The Qwen3-8B configuration, trained on real images only, reaches a test IoU of 0.836 versus 0.833 for the reference GAN-augmented schedule. Research repository this https URL.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10491
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RobotWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Robot Use Across Diverse Tasks and Embodiments
2026-10-07 16:55:24Zhiqin Yang, Chenxin Li, Xiaomeng Hu, Yibin Liu, Weidong Huang, Jiankai Sun, Haitao Li, Zijian Wu, Yuzhi Huang, Fanding Huang, Hanwen Sun, Jiashun Liu, Jingqi Tong, Mingxin Huang, Shaoli Hu, Shijue Huang, Tianyi Bai, Xinyuan Wang, Yunlong Lin, Zhengyang Tang, Zhexin Zhang, Zhuo Chen, Xierui Song, Juntao Dai, Boyuan Chen, Jiaming Ji, Fangneng Zhan, Mengkang Hu, Wei Xue, Yonggang Zhang, Han Hu, Tsung-Yi Ho, Yike GuoAbstract
General-purpose agents increasingly write code, use tools, and complete complex digital tasks, raising the question of how far these capabilities carry into the physical world. To investigate this, we introduce RobotWorld, a challenging simulation testbed for robot use: turning instructions and observations into physical task execution through robot interfaces. Its 84 tasks span manipulation, mobile manipulation, locomotion, driving, and aerial control, with explicit interaction budgets and executable success checks. By analysing task outcomes alongside execution traces, we identify both the capabilities that transfer and the gaps that prevent reliable completion. Furthermore, we find that current agents can construct sophisticated perception and control workflows, including image segmentation, camera calibration, spatial estimation, and dynamics-based computation. These capabilities, however, do not consistently compose into successful behaviour: agents lose task-relevant object states despite reaching commanded poses, fail to correct ineffective actions, recover too late, or mistake unfinished tasks for completion. This uneven transfer also differs across models: Astra succeeds more often on spatial and constrained-contact goals, whereas Opus 5.5 succeeds more often on continuous-balance and timed-interaction goals. By linking these outcomes to execution behaviour, RobotWorld provides both a rigorous proving ground and an empirical account of the remaining capability gaps, thereby establishing concrete targets for training and designing more reliable physical-world agents.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10409
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EchoDino: A pediatric foundation model for transferable echocardiographic analysis across the lifespan
2026-10-07 16:40:54Sheng Cheng, Donnchadh M. O'Sullivan, Daniel J. Penny, Craig G. Rusin, Minh B. Nguyen, Devika SubramanianAbstract
Echocardiography is the most widely used cardiac imaging modality, yet interpretation demands integrating visual evidence across global anatomy, localized structures and dynamic cardiac motion. Machine-learning models have automated individual tasks, but they are typically built for a single purpose and depend on expensively labeled datasets - a barrier particularly acute in pediatric care, where data are scarce and anatomy changes with age. Here we present EchoDino, a self-supervised foundation model for echocardiography, created by adapting the DINOv3 framework to 3.7 million frames from 1.7 million unlabeled pediatric echocardiography videos. With its encoder frozen, EchoDino produces representations that capture global context, local anatomy, and dense spatial detail. We introduce Motion-biased Entropy Maximization Sampling (MEMS) to select the most informative frames for video-level analysis. Across nine pediatric and adult datasets, EchoDino outperformed strong baseline models, raising view-classification accuracy from 0.609 to 0.889 and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for structural-heart-disease detection from 0.811 to 0.872, while also cutting age-estimation error from 3.857 to 1.389 years, achieving the best segmentation accuracy and lowering ejection-fraction errors. By generalizing from label-free pediatric data to adult echocardiography, EchoDino offers a versatile foundation for cardiac image analysis across the lifespan.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05603
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MultiFly: A Real-World Multimodal Aerial Dataset with Annotation-Efficient Label Transfer and Cross-Modal Semantic Consistency
2026-10-07 16:31:00Markus Gross, Andreas Greiner, Taehyoung Kim, Sivasubiramaniam Subbiah, Toma\v{z} Coti\v{c}, Sai Bharadwaj Matha, Conrad Christoph, Oussema Dhaouadi, Simon Zieher, Surya Vijaya Kumar, Gordon Elger, Henri Mee{\ss}, Olaf Wysocki, Paul Spannaus, Daniel CremersAbstract
We introduce MultiFly, a real-world, low-altitude UAV dataset for semantic perception across RGB, thermal, LiDAR, and radar modalities. MultiFly provides 17,272 synchronized samples from four suburban scenes with frame-wise annotations for 15 semantic classes, together with calibration and GNSS-RTK/IMU measurements. To avoid costly and inconsistent modality-specific annotation, we propagate labels from only 115 manually annotated RGB images through shared geometric representations to all four modalities. This approach generates semantic labels for 17,157 additional RGB images, 17,272 thermal images, 840M LiDAR points, and 3.4M radar points. Transferred annotations achieve 89.93% average agreement with held-out manual annotations, and 90.94% average semantic consistency across all six modality pairs. We further establish semantic segmentation benchmarks for all four modalities, revealing distinct architectural behavior for dense LiDAR and sparse radar data. Taken together, MultiFly provides a scalable foundation for multimodal aerial perception and, to the best of our knowledge, the first public real-world low-altitude aerial benchmark that combines consistent frame-wise semantic annotations for RGB, thermal, LiDAR, and radar. Data at this https URL.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10359
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When to Unpair: Regulating Pairing Dependence in Medical Visual In-Context Learning
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Visual in-context learning (ICL), well suited to label-scarce medical imaging, uses support image-label pairs to demonstrate input-output mappings, while the labels collectively indicate the requested task. We diagnose dependence on individual pairings with a test-time derangement that reassigns every support label to another support image while preserving the query, support images, and label multiset. The resulting pairing gap, defined as shuffled-minus-matched performance, shows that all four released models depend on the pairing, to widely varying degrees. Further analysis of a paired-trained model reveals support-associated spurious regions and lesion-size biases even with real, unaltered supports, alongside sensitivity to mis-registered support labels. To regulate this dependence, we introduce a late unpairing curriculum (LUC), which starts with matched training and then applies random unpairing, replacing each support label with that of another support in the same episode. LUC nearly closes the pairing gap on two backbones while maintaining or improving matched-support performance across all evaluated task types, with gains extending to held-out tasks and cross-dataset episodes. It also mitigates these failure modes. On BraTS whole-tumor segmentation, matched-support DSC rises from 0.733 to 0.857 while the gap shrinks from -0.184 to -0.008. In a released model, brief fine-tuning with random unpairing reduces the gap. A reversed curriculum that places the same number of unpairing epochs at the start of training leaves a large gap. This shows that pairing dependence is shaped by the order of training and not only by the amount of unpaired training.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10335
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Performance at What Cost? A Sustainability-Aware Performance Index for Cell and Nucleus Instance Segmentation
2026-10-07 16:12:53Eiram Mahera Sheikh, Alaa Tharwat, Wolfram SchenckAbstract
Pretrained models for cell and nuclear instance segmentation differ substantially in architecture, pretraining data and objectives, parameter count, inference strategy, adaptation requirements, postprocessing pipeline, and computational demand. Large pretrained and foundation models are increasingly adopted because of their strong zero-shot capabilities, but their use also imposes greater energy consumption, memory requirements, computational demands, adaptation costs, and operational carbon emissions. Whether these additional demands are justified by meaningful gains in segmentation performance remains unclear. We address this question by introducing the Sustainability-Aware Performance Index (SAPI), a configurable metric that combines segmentation performance, energy consumption, and model size. We benchmark 19 pretrained and foundation models across six CellBinDB datasets under zero-shot inference and evaluate 16 fine-tunable models using few-shot adaptation with both frozen encoder and full-model fine-tuning. We estimate energy consumption for GPU, CPU, and RAM using software-based monitoring tools. Our results show that larger and more computationally demanding models do not consistently achieve proportionate improvements in segmentation quality. While few-shot adaptation benefits several models, the gains and resource costs vary considerably across architectures, datasets, and adaptation strategies, causing SAPI-based rankings to differ from rankings based on performance alone. This study provides a practical framework for comparing segmentation models more comprehensively and supports more computationally accessible and environmentally responsible model selection in biomedical image analysis.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10324
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One-Shot Adaptive Segmentation For Scientific Images
2026-10-07 16:02:28Tejaswi V. Panchagnula, Allison M. Davis, Fengqing ZhuAbstract
Scientific image segmentation methods rely on extensive annotation and task-specific training, limiting adaptation across imaging modalities and experimental conditions. We present a training-free, one-shot framework that specializes vision foundation models using a single annotated reference image. The framework combines DINOv3 representations with background-adaptive feature orthogonalization to suppress artifact-related feature directions, after which cosine similarity localizes candidate regions for SAM segmentation. We evaluate the framework on red-blood-cell microscopy, structured-illumination pool boiling, and chest radiography. Relative to the strongest baseline, the proposed method improves mean IoU by 5.91% and 78.62% on the microscopy and pool-boiling datasets, respectively, while achieving comparable performance on chest radiographs. These results demonstrate that one-shot reference conditioning can adapt general-purpose vision models to specialized scientific segmentation tasks.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10306
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Masked Feature Encoding for Large-Scale Whole Slide Image Representation
2026-10-07 15:17:17Haoyu He, Basile Tessier-Cloutier, Yang Wang, Mahdi S. HosseiniAbstract
Whole slide image (WSI) analysis in computational pathology follows a multiple instance learning (MIL) pipeline where patch embeddings are extracted independently and aggregated for slide-level prediction, but within-slide variance from staining, scanner, and local texture can overwhelm the discriminative signal. We propose Masked Feature Encoding for Multiple Instance Learning (MFE-MIL), a feature-space masking framework that trains a lightweight MLP adapter jointly with a window-based masked reconstruction branch and a MIL classification head. The two objectives are complementary. Classification guides the adapter to suppress within-slide patch variance, while window-based masked reconstruction provides an auxiliary regularizer for the adapted features without using patch coordinates, coordinate graphs, or segmentation preprocessing. The raster patch-extraction order is used only as a weak implicit prior. At inference, the decoder is removed, leaving only the adapter and MIL head. Across CAMELYON16/17, PANDA, and TCGA-BRCA with four diverse encoders, MFE-MIL improves ACC/F1 for nearly all tested aggregator-encoder settings and AUC in most, outperforms coordinate-based spatial methods (CAMIL), and achieves higher AUC than 2DMamba on three of four datasets (UNI). On five TCGA survival cohorts it improves the average concordance index for every aggregator tested, its most consistent gain. Code is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10225
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A Probabilistic Perspective on Wasserstein-Based Evidential Uncertainty for Out-of-Distribution Segmentation
2026-10-07 14:03:45Arnold Brosch, Abdelrahman Eldesokey, Michael Felsberg, Kira MaagAbstract
Semantic segmentation networks operate on a fixed set of classes and therefore fail when out-of-distribution (OOD) objects appear during deployment, a critical limitation for safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving. Reliably identifying OOD objects requires well-calibrated epistemic uncertainty, yet common softmax-based confidence scores remain overconfident, while Bayesian alternatives such as Monte Carlo dropout or deep ensembles require costly repeated forward passes. Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) offers an efficient alternative by modeling class probabilities as a Dirichlet distribution learned from a single deterministic forward pass. Existing EDL formulations rely on Euclidean objectives that push predictions towards the simplex vertices, encouraging overconfidence rather than preserving uncertainty for unfamiliar inputs. We instead employ Wasserstein-based objectives, which respect the geometry of the probability simplex, and study the influence of the Wasserstein order on segmentation accuracy and OOD detection within a unified evidential framework. We evaluate this framework on a convolutional (DeepLabV3+) and a transformer-based (SegFormer) architecture on the SegmentMeIfYouCan benchmark, including LostAndFound, RoadObstacle21, RoadAnomaly21, and Fishyscapes. Our results show the optimal Wasserstein order is architecture-dependent: second-order objectives dominate on the convolutional backbone, third-order objectives on the transformer backbone, and our framework surpasses comparable baselines on most metrics, with a single deterministic forward pass.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10116
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Scalable Patch-Level Self-Supervised Learning
2026-10-07 13:04:14Maximilian Seitzer, Gabriele Trivigno, Anton\'in Vobeck\'y, Seungeun Yi, Maxime Oquab, Huy V. Vo, Oriane Sim\'eoni, Piotr BojanowskiAbstract
Self-supervised learning (SSL) at scale produces powerful visual representations. However, most scalable SSL methods rely on ad hoc combinations of multiple objectives and stabilization mechanisms. Taking a step back, we ask if we can design a high-performing, yet principled SSL algorithm. Starting from the multi-view assumption, stipulating that task-relevant content is captured by the information common to different views, we construct an information-theoretic objective decomposing into interpretable terms. This derivation yields JEM, a student-teacher method that learns by aligning corresponding patch representations across views, explicitly regularized by information and structure preservation losses. JEM trains stably from 300M to 7B parameters, and, to our knowledge, is the first latent-space patch-level method demonstrated at 7B scale. Across all scales, JEM reaches strong performance on both global and dense probing tasks, on segmentation benchmarks consistently surpassing the DINOv2 algorithm, an influential foundation for today's strongest visual SSL methods. Notably, at 7B parameters, it exceeds the performance of DINOv3 on panoptic segmentation, despite being trained on $12\times$ less data without refinement stages. These results demonstrate that we can indeed design an SSL algorithm that learns strong representations, is principled and stable.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10013
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Playing with Kruskal: algorithms for flat and hierarchical watershed cuts
2026-10-07 13:03:14Jean Cousty (LIGM), Laurent Najman (KUSTAR, LIGM), Benjamin Perret (LIGM), Deise Santana Maia (CRIStAL)Abstract
In the framework of edge-weighted graphs, watersheds have proven to be linked to well-known optimization problems, as Minimum Spanning Tree, which allowed the design of efficient algorithms for computing (hierarchical) watershed segmentations. In the present article, after reviewing the literature related to watershed segmentation, we present a detailed end-to-end pipeline of algorithms to compute (hierarchical) watershed segmentations, starting from the computation of graph-based image representations, up to the computation of connected components of the final (hierarchical) segmentation. We consider the several variations of watersheds, including their supervised and unsupervised versions, and the various ways of computing seeds, to name a few. For the first time, we bring together all these watershed notions and algorithms in a compact and understandable way. We aim at providing a reference for those interested in employing and reimplementing the watershed segmentation framework for their task at hand.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10012
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